Links 7/18: URL Mountains

British soldier James Brooke was wounded in the Anglo-Burmese War and the military wouldn’t let him continue serving with his injury. He decided to go adventuring, got a ship, one thing led to another, and he ended up as king of the northern third of Borneo, founding a dynasty which lasted a hundred years.

You shall not make an image of the LORD your God. You definitely shall not get a bunch of people to make images of the LORD your God and average them together in order to prove something about how different demographic groups visualize the LORD your God. And yet here we are.

A study on vegetarian activism estimates its effectiveness at one pig saved per $150 devoted to activist charities (=$300/pig-year, since factory-farmed pigs live 6 months). The numbers come out to about $6 or so per chicken (=$50/chicken-year). Effective altruist Peter Hurford comments that this compares poorly to charities that work with humans under a wide range of assumptions about relative human-animal value. But it remains compatible with meat offsets; by my calculations donating $100 to the charity involved could offset eating pork one meal per day for a year.

Quanta explains the criticality theory of brain function.

Studies on fish oil in depression have been very inconsistent. A new meta-analysis claims to have figure it all out: fish oil supplements only help against depression if they have greater than 60% EPA (one of the two main fats in fish oil; different supplements have them at different ratios). Biologically plausible as the two kinds of fats may compete for transporters. Some good comments on r/nootropics, including someone pointing out that actual oily fish do not generally meet this criterion, which seems damning although I can’t really explain why.

In 1899, four reporters from the four major Denver newspapers randomly decided to fake a news story for fun. They wrote that China wanted to tear down the Great Wall and was seeking bids from US demolition companies, and each “swore they would stick to this story as fact as long as any of the others were still alive.” Eventually “the story spread to newspapers all across the country and then into Europe”. The hoax continued for decades, and in the 1940s somehow people got it into their heads that the Great Wall demolition plan had incited the Boxer Rebellion.

Related: not worth its own Reverse Voxsplaining article, but still worth calling out: Vox continues to push that terrible air rage study.

Related: The Great Tom Collins Hoax Of 1874 was some sort of weird meme where people would ask “Have you seen Tom Collins?”, and then embellish this with details like that “Tom Collins is looking for you” or “Tom Collins has been talking about you”. Apparently this was what passed for fun in 1874 and went down in history and song and a bunch of newspaper articles were published about it. This may be the source of the name of the Tom Collins cocktail.

A new study confirms my survey’s finding that women in science suffer less sexual harassment than in other fields, with female scientists reporting generally nonsignificantly lower rates of harassment than female non-scientists and engineers, and significantly lower rates than female medical students.

The Royal Game of Ur is the oldest board game in the world, popular throughout the Near East since about 2500 BC, and surviving in isolated communities all the way until the 1950s AD. They seem to have taken it very seriously: “The tablet of Itti-Marduk-balalu provides vague predictions for the players’ futures if they land on certain spaces, such as ‘You will find a friend’, ‘You will become powerful like a lion’ or ‘You will draw fine beer’.” The rules are similar to backgammon, which may be its distant descendant.

A website and forum on post-serotonin sexual dysfunction.

The ACLU, the NAACP, the nootropics community, the kratom community, and the anti-drug-war movement are all concerned about the SITSA Act, a bill which gives the Attorney General (Jeff Sessions, in case you forgot) the power to unilaterally decree any chemical that shares a mechanism with a controlled substance to itself be a controlled substance. This is a well-intentioned attempt to deal with the avalanche of fentanyl derivates (ie changing one atom on the fentanyl molecule and then saying “It’s not fentanyl! It’s not illegal! You can’t ban us until you pass a whole new law saying this molecule is illegal!), but as written it gives the government kind of arbitrary and complete drug-war-expanding power. If you’re worried, r/nootropics explains how best to contact your Senator.

From Less Wrong: A review of Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons, about how societies solve coordination problems in real life.

SCOTUS links: Slate thinks it’s been “ensured” that Roe vs. Wade will be overturned. I think my previous 99% certainty that it wouldn’t was inexcusably far too high, but still expect the court to avoid doing it openly. Other fields to watch include affirmative action, criminal punishment, gerrymandering. 538 on how Kennedy was not really a moderate, but rather a conservative who occasionally voted with liberals on a few high-profile issues. And Snopes discusses rumors that Anthony Kennedy’s son is connected to the Russia investigations – mostly true, but I would treat conspiracy theories based on this as yet another example of how easy it is to construct a plausible-sounding-but-false conspiracy theory.

Related: Democrats discuss packing the Supreme Court if they win in 2020. Some would say that arguing that if you ever take power again you should win forever by breaking all rules and abandoning all honor – when your opponents are actually currently in power and can also do this – and making this argument in the national public media which your opponents also read – is at the very least a strategic error, if not more fundamentally erroneous. This is a metaphor for everything about the Democrats right now.

Enopoletus has done some good work making Angus Maddison’s GDP data more accessible (1, 2)

Katja Grace on Meteuphoric: Are ethical asymmetries from property rights?

Therapists do not seem to achieve better results when they follow the rules of the school of therapy they are practicing than when they don’t. Some similar results in adolescents and a review.

A “proof” of Trump “dog-whistling” white supremacy recently went viral in the blogosphere and media: a DHS document had a headline reminiscent of a white supremacist slogan. If this sounds kind of weak, the clue-hunters buttressed it with undeniable proof: a statistic in the article said 13 of every 88 immigrants making a “credible fear” claim were accepted in the US. Using 88 as the denominator of a fraction is inexplicable except that 88 is a Known Secret White Supremacist Code Number (88 = HH = Heil Hitler). Somehow we reached the point where only Free Beacon did any investigative reporting; they immediately found that the document used 88 as a reference to another statistic where 88 out of every 100 immigrants made the “credible fear” claim in the first place. Then another tweet went viral noting that the DHS document had fourteen bullet points and fourteen was definitely a Known Secret White Supremacist Code Number; high-powered investigative reporting revealed the document only had thirteen bullet points. The original tweeter then argued that this was proof the DHS was in league with the Devil an unbulleted paragraph was written in bold, which was sort of like a bullet point. I continue to believe this kind of thing is the modern version of looking for pyramid shapes to prove politicians are part of the Illuminati.

I don’t know if everyone is getting constant ads for ELYSIUM BASIS on Facebook, or if they just have me pegged as an anti-aging supplement kind of guy. But here’s a review of the legal and business irregularities of Elysium and how they’ve failed to fulfill their promise. Most people I read seem to think if you want nicotinamide riboside (Elysium’s star supplement) you should get it directly from the manufacturer under the brand name Niagen instead of taking a branded combination nootropic.

Gwern reviews On The Historicity Of Jesus. Short version: the prose is annoying, but the case that Jesus was completely mythical (as opposed to a real teacher whose deeds were exaggerated) is more plausible than generally supposed. Please read the review before commenting about this topic.

If you’re interested in AI alignment, you should be reading Rohin Shah’s AI Alignment Newsletter; future editions available on Less Wrong.

I wrote a while ago about Luna, a planned dating site that would involve a cryptocurrency-subsidized market in message-reading. There was some debate about whether they would ever make a product, but there is now a sort of use-able poorly advertised beta.

California has banned local communities from instituting soda taxes. The state claims it was driven to this extreme by the soda industry’s threats to start a ballot proposition to ban local communities from instituting any new taxes at all without a two-thirds majority. Experts predicted such a proposition would be pass and devastate local finances, so the state gave into blackmail and banned soda taxes, prompting the soda companies to back down on their ballot initiative. This makes no sense to me for several reasons, most notably that if a proposition to ban local taxes would so obviously pass, then you’d expect someone other than soda companies to propose it eventually. What about Republicans? Isn’t this the sort of thing they’re usually into?

Psychology’s gender problem gets worse: 90% of people entering the field are women, and research on female-specific issues outweighs male-specific issues four-to-one.

Tolkien started working on his fictional world after a semi-mystical experience he had when reading an Anglo-Saxon poem containing the line “Hail Earendel, brightest of angels / sent over Middle-Earth to mankind”

Colombian study finds that, among criminals “on the margin of incarceration” (ie whether or not they get imprisoned depends on whether they get a strict vs. lenient judge), their children do better (as measured in years of education) when they are imprisoned, presumably because they were bad parents who had a negative effect on their children’s lives. This one probably isn’t going to end up in any Chicken Soup For The Soul books.

A neat way of representing city street orientations.

There’s been a shift among some of my YIMBY friends to being more willing to acknowledge that building more housing may not decrease housing costs very quickly, effectively, or at all (short of implausibly massive amounts of new housing). Devon Zuegel presents one of the arguments.

This answers a lot of the questions I had about Piketty and straight-line growth: Steady-State Growth: Some New Evidence About An Old Stylized Fact. Confirms that some countries not only recovered from WWII but seemed to get a permanent boost from it. I want to see more on this theme.

“Campaign spending doesn’t help candidates get elected” is one of the most-replicated and least-believable findings in political science, so I guess it’s nice to have a new list of 49 experiments confirming it.

Ozy on three ways of dealing with sexual harassment and assault. Even though both Ozy and I are somewhat against callout culture, I find Ozy’s criticisms of it weak; I think the reasons it is bad are illegible and hard to communicate rationally. Their third method, which they call “expulsion”, is better described as “centralized authority” and (contra the post) can easily work even without a specific space to expel people from; if the authority is powerful enough, it can implement authority-backed public callouts and ostracization. I am disappointed the communities I’m in haven’t gotten more formal institutions for this.

The FDA mulls making current prescription-only drugs non-prescription. I admit I am really shocked by this development and had no idea it was even in the Overton Window. I am vaguely emotionally in favor of it but don’t know enough about statins to have strong views on that class in particular.

Anisha on Less Wrong offers A Step-By-Step Guide To Finding A Good Therapist.

This is exactly the kind of thing that doesn’t replicate, but it rings true to me: Performing Meaningless Rituals Boost Our Self-Control Through Making Us Feel More Self-Disciplined.

Zvi talks about his troubles hiring a nanny, how incompetent most job-seekers are. Two important lessons I take from this: first, if you hear that a hundred other people have applied for the job you want, this isn’t as much reason for despair as it sounds. Second, if you (like me) have heard the advice “show interest in the job/company you’re applying for”, you don’t necessarily need to agonize about exactly how best to express your enthusiasm – the advice is probably aimed at morons who apply for places without even caring what industry they’re in.

@atroyn on Twitter: Things That Happen In Silicon Valley And Also The Soviet Union. Good fun; less culture-war than it sounds.

Two San Francisco supervisors move to ban free workplace cafeterias, obviously directed at tech firms. They argue free cafeterias are denying business to local restaurants and (as per Supervisor Peskin) “depriving [techies] the pleasure of mingling with the rest of The City”, which is impossible for me to read in anything other than a cloying sarcastic bully voice. @theunitofcaring has a typically thoughtful and compassionate take on this. I am less thoughtful and compassionate and my take is wanting to start a petition to ban San Francisco City Supervisors from having kitchens in their house. It’s literally stealing from the restaurant industry! [EDIT: Commenter “Jeltz” has made the petition].

Did you know: even though phrenology is notorious as an example of a debunked scientific field, nobody had actually bothered formally checking whether or not it was true until this year. Now neurologists armed with modern MRI data have looked into it and – yeah, turns out to be totally debunked.

Your regular reminder that the IRS could easily calculate how much each American owes in taxes and send them the bill without any tax preparation required, but tax preparation companies like Intuit and H&R Block keep successfully lobbying against this to “stop depriving citizens of the pleasure of mingling with the tax preparation community” preserve their business model.

States consider banning fast food companies from banning employee poaching. No-poach agreements were created to prevent people with trade secrets from disclosing them to competitors, but has expanded to the point where companies use them to prevent McJob workers from going to other McJobs that will pay more. The new government initiative seems to be in the ordoliberal spirit of government regulation that strengthens market principles and makes them work more smoothly.

Blogger who wrote “there is no crisis in the humanities” article in 2013 now writes Mea Culpa: There Is A Crisis In The Humanities. Humanities degrees as percent of college degrees have dropped from 7.5% ten years ago to only 5% today. Time course and major distribution don’t seem to support hypothesis that it’s related to culture-war-type issues; does support a narrative where after the 2008 recession people switched to majors they thought were better for getting jobs. But for some reason the exodus continues even now that the economy is improving.

Marginal Revolution has been especially good this past week. See eg their posts on how household income explains only 7% of variance in educational attainment, changing migration patterns to Europe and a Cowen-Smith immigration debate, non-replicating happiness research, and the history of abortion – which was mostly accepted in the US even in very religious places like Puritan New England until doctors started campaigning against it around the Civil War era.

Related: the “clown vs. chessmaster” debate around Trump still hasn’t died down. “I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by his skill as a strategist and tactician.” But consider in the context of the Chinese government having every incentive to flatter him, and to encourage Americans to unite around him especially if he’s a clown.

Glenn Greenwald says Ecuador is planning to hand Julian Assange over to the UK. Proximal cause is “to stop depriving Assange of the pleasure of mingling with the international law enforcement community” Assange’s protests against Spanish human rights abuses in Catalonia; apparently Ecuador and Spain are pretty close. Whatever you think of Assange, this is a stupid way for him to finally get caught and Ecuador has lost whatever goodwill it might have gained in my mind from holding out this long.

Newest big Head Start study finds significant negative effects from free preschool, which it is unable to easily explain. Hasn’t yet looked into the supposed positive non-academic findings that only surface decades down the line.

no_bear_so_low on how to quantify the economic costs of not redistributing money.

Historians during the Classical Age would sometimes speculate that certain old structures must have been built by gods or giants, so inconceivable was it to them that mere mortals could ever do such a thing. I feel the same way about some Minecraft projects sometimes; it boggles my mind to to imagine them being made by ordinary humans. The latest in this line is ArdaCraft, an attempt to simulate the entirety of Middle-Earth at 1:58 scale. Slightly complicated to make it work, but if you do, make sure not to miss Mithlond or Thorin’s Halls.

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1,144 Responses to Links 7/18: URL Mountains

  1. gwern says:

    Therapists do not seem to achieve better results when they follow the rules of the school of therapy they are practicing than when they don’t. Some similar results in adolescents and a review.

    The Dodo bird verdict strikes again.

    • Edge of Gravity says:

      Anecdotally, EMDR therapy seems to work quite well for PTSD and C-PTSD. Not sure about studies on the topic.

    • alcoraiden says:

      It seems like therapists really should be using empathy and social skills more than adhering to a flow chart, so this makes sense. Each patient is very unique. Mental illness is not like, say, getting a weak bacterial infection, where you chuck penicillin at it and it goes away no matter who has it. It’s very nuanced and tied in with non-disease factors like lifestyle and past experiences. Everyone gets the flu at some point; not everyone gets depression, and certainly not for the same reasons.

  2. Erusian says:

    SCOTUS links: Slate thinks it’s been “ensured” that Roe vs. Wade will be overturned. I think my previous 99% certainty that it wouldn’t was far too high, but still expect the court to avoid doing it openly. Other fields to watch include affirmative action, criminal punishment, gerrymandering. 538 on how Kennedy was not really a moderate, but rather a conservative who voted with liberals very occasionally on a few very-high-profile issues. And Snopes discusses rumors that Anthony Kennedy’s son is connected to the Russia investigations – mostly true, but I would treat conspiracy theories based on this as yet another example of how easy it is to construct a plausible-sounding-but-false conspiracy theory.

    The conservative position I’ve seen is basically to return it to the states, which wouldn’t require overturning Roe v. Wade. In effect, they want to remove it as a constitutional right and then let specific states (or national legislation) decide. Naturally, this will lead to something like two-thirds of states banning abortion and a large culture war fight, with the Democrats on the defensive.

    Related: Democrats discuss packing the Supreme Court if they win in 2020. Some would say that arguing that if you ever take power again you should win forever by breaking all rules and abandoning all honor – when your opponents are actually currently in power and can also do this – and making this argument in the national public media which your opponents also read – is at the very least a strategic error, if not more fundamentally erroneous. This is a metaphor for everything about the Democrats right now.

    The last time a president tried to pack the Supreme Court, Congresspeople and Senators in both parties smacked him down. Partisanship makes me think that might not happen this time around. If it doesn’t, we’ll see the Supreme Court reduced from the position it took in 1803 as an equal branch of government to just being an adjunct of the Legislative-Executive branches. Whether that’s good or bad, I suppose, depends on how much you believe legal scholars should steward the law against popular will. (I will say, Republicans seem to be more on the ‘legal scholars’ side and Democrats more on the ‘popular will’ side. But that makes sense: conservatives, by definition, are favored by a system that is less concerned with producing legal innovation.)

    Then again, the belief that Republicans aren’t impeaching Trump due to partisanship seems a relatively weak claim to me. Trump isn’t really threatening the independence of the other two branches or the Constitution and the legislature appears to be accepting or rejecting his policies based on their own political opinions. The leader of the Freedom Caucus famously killed healthcare reform by saying, “The last person who said I had to do something was my pa. And I didn’t listen to him either!” Not exactly a submissive pose.

    Cynically, I have a hard time seeing Democratic calls that the Republicans impeach Trump as anything more than wishfully hoping the Republicans will have a civil war at a time when the Democrats are very weak. Perhaps court packing, a blatant power grab, will result in the Legislative branch uniting. Or the Supreme Court making a stand. But we’ll see. It would certainly be a constitutional crisis.

    I’m curious what other people think.

    • Guy in TN says:

      The conservative position I’ve seen is basically to return it to the states, which wouldn’t require overturning Roe v. Wade. In effect, they want to remove it as a constitutional right and then let specific states (or national legislation) decide.

      Roe v Wade established abortion as a constitutional right. So if you want to remove abortion as a constitutional right, you’ve got to first overturn Roe v. Wade. The constitutional right business is what the Roe v. Wade question was about, “abortion is determined by the states” is the pre-Roe v. Wade system.

      If it doesn’t, we’ll see the Supreme Court reduced from the position it took in 1803 as an equal branch of government to just being an adjunct of the Legislative-Executive branches.

      I’m not a legal historian, but my understanding is that the Supreme Court has gradually taken on a more active role in our legal system over the past 200 years, starting from a point of extremely high deference to the legislature, to the modern day where Supreme Court rulings are scarcely distinguishable from lawmaking. A smack-down of judicial power in the form of looming appointments would make it more subservient and in-line with the legislature, like it was in its early days.

      Strategically, I think advocating for court-packing is a better move than Scott gives it credit for. It’s not like the Democrats gain nothing from saying it: one lesson from the whole post 2016 what-went-wrong analysis, is that people want to vote for politicians who actually fight for what they believe in. Clinton’s problem was that she promised nothing, believed in nothing, and would deliver nothing more than the status quo. Saying “we’re going to give you X, whether the Supreme Court lets us or not!” is a winning line. People generally don’t care about the Supreme Court, but they definitely care about X, and they like politicians who are willing to fight for it.

      And packing the court is not “winning forever”, as Scott says. Its winning until you lose control of the legislature. I mean, the Constitution is still in effect, so we would still have elections, and when the next party gets in power, they would pack the court in the manner that suited them. As for the premptive backfire threat- I don’t think its serious. The Republican coalition is too fragmented. Remember, there was some question as to whether Trump even had the votes to get boring old Kavanaugh through. (Not that I think the Democrats have any better of chance of getting a court-packing measure through if they gain power- but it does help excite voters for the 2018 election, and that’s what matters)

      • Walter says:

        How you gonna lose control of the legislature if you pack the court? If the other side wins just throw their ballots out. Or disqualify their candidates as pedophiles or foreign operatives. Or turn the screws on the social media companies until they don’t allow people to advocate for the other side. Or suggest to the media folks that maybe they ought to not give airtime to bigots and extremists like the other party.

        If anybody sues to stop you your tame court rules in your favor. It isn’t like the constitution is gonna jump up and scream that they are wrong. It says whatever the Court says it does.

        • Guy in TN says:

          How you gonna lose control of the legislature if you pack the court? If the other side wins just throw their ballots out.

          Right now, the conservatives control the supreme court. Yet they don’t appear to threatening to throw the ballots out if the Democrats win in 2018, despite having the power to do so. Why is that?

          The reason for this, is “pack the court” doesn’t mean “appoint random crazy people, so long as they are on my side”. Obviously, if the president and congress wanted to they could appoint judges who are intent on overthrowing the whole social order. But they could also appoint people to do that now, and yet they decline to.

          • Walter says:

            *Blink*

            You assert that packing a court doesn’t guarantee victory.
            I point out that you are wrong, it totally should.
            You respond by saying…that nobody is packing the court now? That packing the court might mean appointing moderates instead of partisans?

            Like, I guess those are true statements, but I feel like you are not so much arguing definitions as straight up being disingenuous.

            I mean, technically I could ‘pack’ a court with moderates equally likely to agree with me or my enemies, but that isn’t, you know, the traditional thing that people mean when they talk about court packing. The general understanding, and I think how OP is using it, is that the judges I appoint are more likely to rule in my favor than otherwise.

            So, as OP said, it is stupid to talk about how you will pack the court once you take power. If you intend to use your tame judges to win elections, then why warn anyone? Coups work better when they are quiet. If you DON’T intend to use your brand new court, then why incur the massive electoral costs of stealing it?

          • zzzzort says:

            There’s a weird definitional issue due to the fact that by court packing everyone seems to mean ‘something like what FDR tried to do’. The way I would interpret it, and I think most other people, is that you expand the number of seats on the court and appoint the same sort of people you would normally appoint to vacancies. In FDR’s time that meant ideologically friendly judges, today it probably means partisan-but-pretending-otherwise. I wouldn’t assume it means totally subservient.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Why would packing the court lead to ballots being thrown out, elections overturned, ect? I’m missing the casual chain here.

            The answer can’t be “because one side would be in power, and they would have an incentive to do so”, because one side has always been in power (at least when the court has an odd number of justices), and they have always had some incentives to do so. Yet they don’t.

            So what changes when we start court-packing?

            If you intend to use your tame judges to win elections, then why warn anyone?

            This is not the purpose of the court-packing plan. The goal is to change the laws, not the fundamental democratic nature of government.

          • dick says:

            Walter, it seems like you’re using some other definition of “pack the court” than the one in the article you’re ostensibly discussing. The tactic being proposed is to expand the number of seats on the Supreme Court so as to retake the majority without waiting for right-wingers to retire. That has nothing to do with the practice of appointing judges who are ideological enough to help their party steal elections, which has always been an option. (Though whether you think that option has not been taken historically, as Guy in TN suggests, would depend on your interpretation of Bush v Gore)

          • Jack says:

            All the plausible candidates for high court positions have been thoroughly indoctrinated from birth through law school and bar exams (which they had to understand and pass) to a career working as part of the legal system. There are no* plausible candidates who would be willing to toss the rule of law out the window.

          • Vosmyorka says:

            All the plausible candidates for high court positions have been thoroughly indoctrinated from birth through law school and bar exams (which they had to understand and pass) to a career working as part of the legal system. There are no* plausible candidates who would be willing to toss the rule of law out the window.

            There is no requirement to appoint plausible candidates, though. There are no formal requirements to be appointed to SCOTUS at all (theoretically not even something very basic like citizenship or age of majority); the President and the Senate can confirm anyone they want, and there is 19th-century precedent for appointing people who were not lawyers.

            If we’re talking about such a radical collapse in the social order that “the Supreme Court throws out ballots” is plausible, “non-lawyers appointed to the Supreme Court” is far more plausible. The latter is perfectly legal and constitutional and would require only a change to norms rather than laws.

          • John Schilling says:

            Right now, and for basically all of US history, the idea of a “conservative majority” in the Supreme Court is a wishy-washy sort of thing tempered by the fact that you are averaging over thirty or so years of drift in what “conservative” meant as justices were appointed, and drift in individual human judges’ opinions over time, and a consistent norm of not nominating or confirming obvious and blatant partisan hacks who will dispense with rule of law in favor of raw tribal power. Same goes for liberal majority, when we’ve had those.

            If we go wit full-on court-packing, we get a partisan majority built around people who were appointed last month based on their being willing (and trustworthy) to be part of a plan to blatantly and obviously elevate partisan politics above rule of law, and confirmed by a senate whose majority has jus indicated its own enthusiasm for such a power grab.

            Such a Court would very likely enable maneuvers well beyond what we’re possible under the weaker ideological balances of SCOTUS’s history.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Such a Court would very likely enable maneuvers well beyond what we’re possible under the weaker ideological balances of SCOTUS’s history.

            True, but the maneuvers would still have to be 1. something the newly appointed justices want to do and 2. something they think they can do without starting a civil war/being assassinated.

            “Suspending democracy” not only doesn’t appear to be part of the Democrats agenda, its highly questionable as to whether they could even physically accomplish it if they wanted to, with the ensuring pushback of physical threats that would be imposed.

            One reason that the court packing measure has any traction at all, is that it appears to be perfectly legal in the framework of the constitution, in the most technical of senses. Suspending democracy- not so much. People care about what is legal, it influences their sense of the rightness or wrongness of an action..

            Another reason, is that the legislature doing the court packing would be empowered by democratic legitimacy. People are not likely to revolt against the very people they just voted for. Elections are security in this sense, and abolishing them would undermine the whole effort.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            One reason that the court packing measure has any traction at all, is that it appears to be perfectly legal in the framework of the constitution, in the most technical of senses. Suspending democracy- not so much. People care about what is legal, it influences their sense of the rightness or wrongness of an action..

            Of course they wouldn’t “suspend democracy.” They’d do what Walter said and tilt the system in their favor such that loss of power is near impossible. You don’t jail your political opponents for having the wrong politics, obviously. You accuse them of being foreign agents, investigate everything ever done by anyone they’ve ever known and prosecute them for 10 year old tax crimes or process crimes or uncover their legal-but-sordid sex scandals and then leak them to a compliant press. This sends the very clear message to political opponents “Do Not Fuck With Us Or We Will Ruin Your Life.” It’s all perfectly legal, and the packed court just ensures the “legal” system will continue to play ball and swat down any challenges to your perfectly legal system.

          • Deiseach says:

            You don’t jail your political opponents for having the wrong politics, obviously. You accuse them of being foreign agents

            See Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Walsingham, and the change of emphasis in policy. We’re not burning these recusants/Jesuits for being Catholics, no no no we don’t make windows into men’s souls, we’re drawing and quartering them for being traitors!

          • Deiseach says:

            There are no plausible candidates who would be willing to toss the rule of law out the window.

            So what then is the threat of packing the court, save that it would appoint judges to rule in our favour? Make decisions in line with our policies? Have no dogmas opposed to ours living loudly within them?

            If the whole point is “well we’ll appoint Republicrat judges but once there they will rule according to the law and not according to their political affiliation/repaying their patrons”, then it’s not a threat, and it’s no use to the Demolicans to have neutral judges on the bench.

            So either the threat is an empty one and the politicians are talking through their backsides, or the threat is not empty and ambitious judges who want to advance their career who are willing to indicate they will deliver verdicts of the ‘right’ kind exist, allied with a ferocious confirmation process where ‘unsuitable’ candidates will have no hope. Which is it?

          • johansenindustries says:

            To be fair, if Putin was calling for resistance against the US government while powerful Republicans were harboring and hiding Russian agents, then there’d probably be a different conversation going on in America.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @ConradHoncho

            They’d do what Walter said and tilt the system in their favor such that loss of power is near impossible.

            Still, makes you wonder why they don’t do that now. You are talking as if court-packing unleashes new powers. But it shouldn’t be any different than the powers that exist when the legislature+judiciary are controlled by the same party, as they are now. Court-packing would just ensure that this was always more often the case.

            @Deiseach
            The role of the judiciary is to tell us what the law means. If the Supreme Court “changes its mind” in the form of vote packing, then the interpretation of the law changes, thus the law changes. There’s no “free-floating law” independent of what the judiciary and legislature want it to be.

            If court-packing is legal, then the decisions rendered from court packing are the law.

            Its true that, under court-packing, judges would be more likely to toss out precedent, and much more likely to defer to the legislature, but none of this has anything to do with the loss of “rule of law”. They can, and do, toss precedent and defer to the legislate already.

          • Jack says:

            So either the threat is an empty one and the politicians are talking through their backsides, or the threat is not empty and ambitious judges who want to advance their career who are willing to indicate they will deliver verdicts of the ‘right’ kind exist, allied with a ferocious confirmation process where ‘unsuitable’ candidates will have no hope. Which is it?

            This question is ill-posed. There is a lot of room between judges who are somewhat more likely to rule the way the appointer prefers on the less constrained parts of constitutional interpretation and judges who will “toss out the rule of law”. The first kind of judge is who gets appointed in the USA these days.

            You can also see this a different way, and think that appointing “neutral” judges will be in party X’s favour because the “correct” interpretation of the constitution is the neutral one. It is party Y’s judges that are ideologically bent. Court packing is to outnumber the existing bad judges with good neutral judges. The fact that there are both Democrats and Republicans who think this of their and the other party’s appointees on issues like that in Citizens United and yet they all agree we shouldn’t toss out the rule of law is evidence of my claim.

          • Dan L says:

            @Conrad Honcho:

            You don’t jail your political opponents for having the wrong politics, obviously. You accuse them of being foreign agents, investigate everything ever done by anyone they’ve ever known and prosecute them for 10 year old tax crimes or process crimes or uncover their legal-but-sordid sex scandals and then leak them to a compliant press. This sends the very clear message to political opponents “Do Not Fuck With Us Or We Will Ruin Your Life.” It’s all perfectly legal, and the packed court just ensures the “legal” system will continue to play ball and swat down any challenges to your perfectly legal system.

            This is pretty clearly formulated as a shot at the Mueller investigation, but are you really posing this as a realistic description of current events? Never mind the evidence against for now – as a starter, it would seem to argue against the theory you yourself articulated a few open threads ago where the investigation was just a intelligence community fishing expedition seeking to cover its own ass with unenforceable indictments. I suppose I can come up with a few explanations to square that circle and encompass both, but then you’d be left pretty explicitly arguing for the existence of a bipartisan criminal conspiracy.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            it would seem to argue against the theory you yourself articulated a few open threads ago where the investigation was just a intelligence community fishing expedition seeking to cover its own ass with unenforceable indictments.

            The pretext for the Mueller probe was the investigation of Russian interference in the election [1], including the possibility the Russians colluded with the Trump campaign. The product of this was

            1) The indictment of Paul Manafort for 10 year old tax crimes that had nothing to do with Russia, with this election, or with Trump, for whom he was campaign manager for a whopping 3 months. The media however gets to run with “Mueller indicts Trump’s campaign manager in Trump-Russia probe.”

            2) The “confessions” of General Flynn and George Papadopolous on shaky process crimes that wouldn’t exist without the Mueller probe.

            3) Pre-dawn raids on the President’s lawyer’s office to snag that sweet evidence of sordid-but-legal sex scandals and maybe something to do with taxi cab medallions?

            Since none of this has anything to do with Russia or Russian interference in the election or Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, Mueller indicts a bunch of random Russians for buying FaceBook ads and some GRU agents for phishing passwords from the DNC. These people will never see the inside of a courtroom much less a jail cell, but now Mueller can pretend he found the Russians hiding under the bed and the media can count meaningless indictments to keep Democrats in a frothing rage that Trump and Putin conspired to steal the election. “Democrats and the media aren’t so clueless and inept to lose to Donald Freaking Trump, it was stolen by evil foreigners!”

            I suppose I can come up with a few explanations to square that circle and encompass both, but then you’d be left pretty explicitly arguing for the existence of a bipartisan criminal conspiracy.

            More like a Uniparty culture. The Democrats and about 50% of Republicans are two sides of the same coin who play fight over social issues but are lock step when it comes to the important stuff: foreign wars to benefit the MIC, cheap labor, financial interests and the consolidation of power in Washington. Call it what you want: the Uniparty, the swamp, the Cathedral. It’s former Clinton official turned ABC commentator Democrat George Stephanopoulos throwing a softball interview to former Republican FBI chief James Comey about this new book about how Trump is a bad, bad man before taking a job teaching ethics (haha!) at William & Mary. R, D, it doesn’t matter, these people are all on the same team, flitting between politics, government, media, higher ed, finance, K Street, etc, and Trump’s populist revolt is an existential threat to them. There is nothing they will not do to stop him because there are trillions of dollars at stake.

            [1] Also, the “Russia investigation” didn’t start with Mueller. It started with Hillary, Obama and the swamp creatures wanting to use the super scary government panopticon to spy on their political opponents. They needed some veneer of legality for using the tyranny machine that’s only supposed to be used on foreigners against their political opposition, so they accused FBI star counterintelligence witness Carter Page of being a knowing Russian agent and cooked up the phoney dossier to get the FISA warrant. No one was ever supposed to know about any of this. Hillary was supposed to win, the surveillance warrant would quietly expire and everybody was supposed to get a discrete pat on the back for a job well done. But then Trump won, the “Russia investigation” morphed into Peter Strzok’s “insurance policy” and Mueller’s gotta find him some Russians and here we are.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Let’s try this again because this is a long-ass post I wrote and it keeps getting eaten by the filter?

            it would seem to argue against the theory you yourself articulated a few open threads ago where the investigation was just a intelligence community fishing expedition seeking to cover its own ass with unenforceable indictments.

            The pretext for the Mueller probe was the investigation of Russian interference in the election [1], including the possibility the Russians colluded with the Trump campaign. The product of this was

            1) The indictment of Paul Manafort for 10 year old tax crimes that had nothing to do with Russia, with this election, or with Trump, for whom he was campaign manager for a whopping 3 months. The media however gets to run with “Mueller indicts Trump’s campaign manager in Trump-Russia probe.”

            2) The “confessions” of General Flynn and George Papadopolous on shaky process crimes that wouldn’t exist without the Mueller probe.

            3) Pre-dawn raids on the President’s lawyer’s office to snag that sweet evidence of sordid-but-legal sex scandals and maybe something to do with taxi cab medallions?

            Since none of this has anything to do with Russia or Russian interference in the election or Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, Mueller indicts a bunch of random Russians for buying FaceBook ads and some GRU agents for phishing passwords from the DNC. These people will never see the inside of a courtroom much less a jail cell, but now Mueller can pretend he found the Russians hiding under the bed and the media can count meaningless indictments to keep Democrats in a frothing rage that Trump and Putin conspired to steal the election. “Democrats and the media aren’t so clueless and inept to lose to Donald Freaking Trump, it was stolen by evil foreigners!”

            I suppose I can come up with a few explanations to square that circle and encompass both, but then you’d be left pretty explicitly arguing for the existence of a bipartisan criminal conspiracy.

            More like a Uniparty culture. The Democrats and about 50% of Republicans are two sides of the same coin who play fight over social issues but are lock step when it comes to the important stuff: foreign wars to benefit the MIC, cheap labor, financial interests and the consolidation of power in Washington. Call it what you want: the Uniparty, the swamp, the [word for a big church that’s maybe banned because death eaters?]. It’s former Clinton official turned ABC commentator Democrat George Stephanopoulos throwing a softball interview to former Republican FBI chief James Comey about this new book about how Trump is a bad, bad man before taking a job teaching ethics (haha!) at William & Mary. R, D, it doesn’t matter, these people are all on the same team, flitting between politics, government, media, higher ed, finance, K Street, etc, and Trump’s populist revolt is an existential threat to them. There is nothing they will not do to stop him because there are trillions of dollars at stake.

            [1] Also, the “Russia investigation” didn’t start with Mueller. It started with Hillary, Obama and the swamp creatures wanting to use the super scary government panopticon to spy on their political opponents. They needed some veneer of legality for using the tyranny machine that’s only supposed to be used on foreigners against their political opposition, so they accused FBI star counterintelligence witness Carter Page of being a knowing Russian agent and cooked up the phoney dossier to get the FISA warrant. No one was ever supposed to know about any of this. Hillary was supposed to win, the surveillance warrant would quietly expire and everybody was supposed to get a discrete pat on the back for a job well done. But then Trump won, the “Russia investigation” morphed into Peter Strzok’s “insurance policy” and Mueller’s gotta find him some Russians and here we are.

          • Dan L says:

            @Conrad Honcho:

            Let’s try this again because this is a long-ass post I wrote and it keeps getting eaten by the filter?

            I know I saw it appear as ~new at two different times, so something odd happened? In any case, I appreciate your persistence in battling WordPress, the reply is appreciated.

            I apologize in advance for rearranging your comment’s structure, but I think it allows for more value in my response:

            More like a Uniparty culture. The Democrats and about 50% of Republicans are two sides of the same coin who play fight over social issues but are lock step when it comes to the important stuff: foreign wars to benefit the MIC, cheap labor, financial interests and the consolidation of power in Washington. Call it what you want: the Uniparty, the swamp, the [word for a big church that’s maybe banned because death eaters?]. It’s former Clinton official turned ABC commentator Democrat George Stephanopoulos throwing a softball interview to former Republican FBI chief James Comey about this new book about how Trump is a bad, bad man before taking a job teaching ethics (haha!) at William & Mary. R, D, it doesn’t matter, these people are all on the same team, flitting between politics, government, media, higher ed, finance, K Street, etc, and Trump’s populist revolt is an existential threat to them. There is nothing they will not do to stop him because there are trillions of dollars at stake.

            It sounds like you’re evaluating Mueller’s investigation as part of a larger political narrative. I hate dealing with Grand Narratives – too many free variables, too many ways for evidence to be recontextualized to protect pet theories. It becomes difficult to deal with things on a scale smaller than full-on Culture War without a great deal of precision… but I think that effort is usually well-spent.

            The first point I’d like to make is the Democrats are very much divided on this axis as well, and I’m saying that as a professional swamp-dweller. Clinton won the 2016 Democratic primary convincingly, but not without more of a fight that one might have expected. I don’t give Sanders too much of that credit; not much effort is required to see broadly similar fractures between Hillary and then-candidate Obama in 2008.

            The second is that depending on exactly which of those industries one is in, “Trump’s populist revolt” has been great for business. Cable continues its long, unlamented death, but have you seen Maddow’s numbers? They’re outright disgusting. The financial markets certainly aren’t feeling what one might have expected from a “populist revolt”. And lobbying as an industry doesn’t seem to be feeling the restrictions any more than it did under Obama, which is to say that the restrictions exist but barely affect the already-successful.

            That’s not to extend the conspiracy, far from it. But I think there’s a definite Toxoplasma here, and Grand Narratives simply don’t have the finesse to escape the dynamic.

            More specific points about the investigation now.

            The pretext for the Mueller probe was the investigation of Russian interference in the election [1], including the possibility the Russians colluded with the Trump campaign. The product of this was

            […]

            [1] Also, the “Russia investigation” didn’t start with Mueller.

            (emphasis mine)

            There are definitely indications that Mueller’s investigation is leveraging some existing counterintelligence operations. To name one example, apparently Maria Butina has been on the FBI’s radar since 2015 or so*. But in any case it’s clear that the investigation includes resources that are still not privy to the public, and is still proceeding apace. I’m willing to wait for the inevitable Congressional report before describing it in the past tense.

            (*It is definitely worth noting that the Burtina case is not an offshoot of Mueller’s investigation in any formal sense, but the timing’s downright providential. I doubt Mueller’s team was unaware of it, or any other similar cases that might be ongoing.)

            I’ll also question your use of the word “pretext”. Mueller served as FBI director after being appointed by Bush and continued under Obama. He was picked for this position by Rod Rosenstein, after Jeff Sessions recused himself from the matter. The latter two are both Trump appointees. Of Mueller, Rosenstein, Sessions, and Trump, exactly which of them are “swamp creatures”? When did they earn this status? When did you realize they earned that status? If “swamp creature” just means “currently opposed to Trump’s goals” it’s an odious piece of pure rhetoric.

            It started with Hillary, Obama and the swamp creatures wanting to use the super scary government panopticon to spy on their political opponents. They needed some veneer of legality for using the tyranny machine that’s only supposed to be used on foreigners against their political opposition, so they accused FBI star counterintelligence witness Carter Page of being a knowing Russian agent and cooked up the phoney dossier to get the FISA warrant. No one was ever supposed to know about any of this. Hillary was supposed to win, the surveillance warrant would quietly expire and everybody was supposed to get a discrete pat on the back for a job well done. But then Trump won, the “Russia investigation” morphed into Peter Strzok’s “insurance policy” and Mueller’s gotta find him some Russians and here we are.

            Be careful not to confuse your arguments for your evidence. I’m not as well versed in Page’s case as others, but for now these conclusions are far enough down the inferential chain I wouldn’t put much weight on them. I’m content to wait to see what comes of Page.

            Glad Strzok’s out, though. Even before rendering moral judgement, he’s clearly fallen below a necessary level of professionalism.

            1) The indictment of Paul Manafort for 10 year old tax crimes that had nothing to do with Russia, with this election, or with Trump, for whom he was campaign manager for a whopping 3 months. The media however gets to run with “Mueller indicts Trump’s campaign manager in Trump-Russia probe.”

            Come on, you have to know that “10 year old tax crimes” is a massively disingenuous framing. The charges he’s currently facing allege a money laundering operation that started in 2006 but continued through till 2015. The freshest charge on the list is a point of bank fraud predating the investigation itself by a month.

            I’m honestly surprised to read you minimizing things, to be honest – surely Manafort is as swampy as they come? Or is the fact that he’s refused to turn state’s evidence enough to save him from that label?

            Because if he is a compromised “swamp creature”, it raises serious questions about how exactly he got on that campaign and the integrity of those he in turn recruited. Swamps spread on contact.

            2) The “confessions” of General Flynn and George Papadopolous on shaky process crimes that wouldn’t exist without the Mueller probe.

            Apply Pressure -> Catch Mistakes -> Flip Witness is pretty standard tactics for this sort of investigation. That’s not morally unimpeachable, but it is typical and I’m not seeing many unselfish calls to change that. It is a topic worth considering, but it’s certainly not an excuse.

            3) Pre-dawn raids on the President’s lawyer’s office to snag that sweet evidence of sordid-but-legal sex scandals and maybe something to do with taxi cab medallions?

            That raid was pretty extraordinary, which says interesting things about everyone involved. It looks now like Cohen is going to also turn state’s evidence. Does that make him a “swamp creature”? Were his former employers “swamp creatures”?

            Notably, Cohen’s case was referred from Mueller to the Southern District of New York – the implications being that Mueller acknowledges limits to his mandate and that there was no obvious link from Cohen to any Russian affairs. Very interesting, and worth watching as that case develops.

            Since none of this has anything to do with Russia or Russian interference in the election or Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, Mueller indicts a bunch of random Russians for buying FaceBook ads and some GRU agents for phishing passwords from the DNC. These people will never see the inside of a courtroom much less a jail cell, but now Mueller can pretend he found the Russians hiding under the bed and the media can count meaningless indictments to keep Democrats in a frothing rage that Trump and Putin conspired to steal the election. “Democrats and the media aren’t so clueless and inept to lose to Donald Freaking Trump, it was stolen by evil foreigners!”

            You put scare quotes around “confession” for Flynn and Papadopoulos, but they’re still involved. That’s not nothing. Manafort is on trial this very day. That’s not nothing. The GRU agents likely won’t see a courtroom, yes, but the evidence leading to their indictments isn’t nothing.

            I don’t subscribe to your frothing-rage narrative, everything about that screams more heat than light. If anyone wants to re-litigate the 2016 election but only has one bullet point on their list, they’re a colossal idiot.

            And now it’s time to open your model up for falsification:

            1) What outcomes from the Mueller probe would serve as evidence that it is in fact a professional investigation of legitimate concerns? Would it help if he started implicating some Democratic “swamp creatures”?

            2) What would it take to convince you personally that there was collusion between Russian officials and “the Trump campaign”? Are you holding out for convictions, or is the the refutation of alibis enough?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Of Mueller, Rosenstein, Sessions, and Trump, exactly which of them are “swamp creatures”? When did they earn this status? When did you realize they earned that status?

            Mueller. Rosenstein and Sessions I believe have just made mistakes.

            I’m honestly surprised to read you minimizing things, to be honest – surely Manafort is as swampy as they come? Or is the fact that he’s refused to turn state’s evidence enough to save him from that label?

            Manafort is basically a hired gun. I don’t think he really shares the culture of entrenched interests that comprise the swamp. My point is that he wouldn’t be being prosecuted if it weren’t for his having worked for Trump.

            And “turn state’s evidence?” For what? When one “turn’s state’s evidence” they’re being charged with the conspiracy they’re part of. You and your buddy knock over a liquor store. You both get charged with knocking over the liquor store. You plead guilty to the knocking over of the liquor store, and in exchange for leniency for the knocking over of the liquor store you testify against your accomplice in the knocking over of the liquor store. The cops don’t get to pick somebody up for shoplifting bubble gum and then give them the screws for the shoplifting until they finger somebody for double murder.

            So are you suggesting Trump was involved in Manafort’s tax schemes? I have not heard this before. What crime did Trump and Manafort commit together such that Manafort could turn state’s evidence against Trump? If it is not the tax schemes, what was it, and why hasn’t Manafort been charged with it yet?

            Apply Pressure -> Catch Mistakes -> Flip Witness is pretty standard tactics for this sort of investigation. That’s not morally unimpeachable, but it is typical and I’m not seeing many unselfish calls to change that. It is a topic worth considering, but it’s certainly not an excuse.

            Again, that’s not how turning state’s evidence works. You have to finger your co-conspirators, for the crime you’re pleading guilty to. Was Trump part of Flynn and Papadopolous’s lies? And they’re going to implicate Trump in lying with them…?

            What they did to Flynn and Papadopolous was the same plea bargaining scam they do all through the criminal justice system where they threaten you with piles of charges and financial ruin unless you take a plea, even though you didn’t commit the crime or don’t think you did. Their real crime was supporting Trump.

            RE: Frothing rage. Have you not seen the unhinged leftists screaming “F**K TRUMP” at the awards shows, holding up his bloody severed head, etc? Just go read /r/politics. The fact you don’t see the frothing rage makes me question your perceptions.

            And now it’s time to open your model up for falsification:

            1) What outcomes from the Mueller probe would serve as evidence that it is in fact a professional investigation of legitimate concerns?

            If he were to investigate other foreign interference in the election and foreign lobbying, particularly from China, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. I don’t doubt Russia interfered in our election, but it seems like pissing in the ocean. There is so much interference, from so many actors, that singling out Russia seems like ulterior motive to me. They’re small potatoes.

            Would it help if he started implicating some Democratic “swamp creatures”?

            Perhaps, so long as it had something to do with specifically Russian interference in the 2016 election. Not “find some Democrat and charge him with old tax crimes and process crimes.” For instance, the only US campaign we know colluded with Russians to influence the election was when Hillary and the DNC paid the law firm to pay Fusion GPS to pay British national Steele to pay Russian intelligence agents to make up stuff about Trump and Russian prostitutes. And yet there’s no investigation of that. If you really want to talk about “Russian attacks on our democracy,” the results of that one have been enormous, with large swaths of the country believing the President is illegitimate or blackmailed and demanding his impeachment.

            So, Mr. Mueller, please investigate the one of piece of Russian collusion we’re absolutely sure happened. The fact you don’t do that and instead are going after Trump associates for tax and process crimes really makes it seem like the goal is “find some way to punish people who work with Trump” and not “discover the extent to which Russians meddled in our election.”

            2) What would it take to convince you personally that there was collusion between Russian officials and “the Trump campaign”? Are you holding out for convictions, or is the the refutation of alibis enough?

            First off I would need someone to make a falsifiable claim as to what the “collusion” is. Does this require a quid pro quo? Coordination? Something. And I need specific actions taken by both the Russians and the Trump campaign. “Someone with a Russian-sounding name tried to talk to someone in Trump’s campaign once” doesn’t cut it as that sort of thing happens all the time. Also it would need to be with agents of the Russian government and not merely with someone from Russia.

            So I would need to know

            1) What exactly is the collusion?

            2) Why is it bad, and is it bad in a way that all the other politicking done with foreign nationals is not?

            Really for all of this I need some specifics. People keep talking about targets of Mueller’s investigation “flipping,” but never what the specific crime is that they’re going to flip on. They keep talking about “collusion” but don’t define what that is, what the specific actions were, and why they’re uniquely bad.

            Likewise, what would it take to convince you that Trump did not collude with the Russians? If Mueller is not able to charge Trump or Trump associates as co-conspirators with Russians in election-related crimes, will that just mean Trump was too clever a criminal to get caught?

          • Matt M says:

            How bout this one?

            SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – New details emerged Wednesday about how a mole for the government of communist China managed to stay by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s side for nearly 20 years.

            It happened five years ago, but additional information is just surfacing about how the Bay Area senator’s office was infiltrated by a Chinese spy.

            The Bay Area is a hotbed for Russian and Chinese espionage. Late last year, the feds shut down the Russian consulate in San Francisco.

            It’s nice of them to make sure to assert RUSSIA IS ALSO EVIL AND DANGEROUS into an article entirely about a Chinese spy working for a Democrat tho

          • Doctor Mist says:

            When one “turn’s state’s evidence” they’re being charged with the conspiracy they’re part of.

            Huh. Today I learned.

            Still, it strikes me that Dan L is just being sloppy about the terminology (in a way I would have been before seeing your wikipedia link). My understanding is that cops threaten somebody with prosecution for minor crimes All The Time, if they think the threatenee can give them useful information about some more major crime, whether they were explicitly a part of it or not. OK, that’s not “turning state’s evidence”, but it’s a perfectly plausible interpretation of what went on with General Flynn.

            (Not that I approve of what went on with General Flynn. I’m mainly on your side regarding the Mueller investigation.)

          • Dan L says:

            @Conrad Honcho:

            Of Mueller, Rosenstein, Sessions, and Trump, exactly which of them are “swamp creatures”? When did they earn this status? When did you realize they earned that status?

            Mueller. Rosenstein and Sessions I believe have just made mistakes.

            Thank you for the clarification, but I still want something like an operating definition of “swamp creature” that isn’t just a rhetorical slur.

            Manafort is basically a hired gun. I don’t think he really shares the culture of entrenched interests that comprise the swamp. My point is that he wouldn’t be being prosecuted if it weren’t for his having worked for Trump.

            “Hired gun” sounds pretty swampy, we are both talking about the international influence peddler, yes? But I guess I can’t confirm that correspondence without a more precise definition. Ball’s in your court.

            And “turn state’s evidence?” For what? When one “turn’s state’s evidence” they’re being charged with the conspiracy they’re part of. […] The cops don’t get to pick somebody up for shoplifting bubble gum and then give them the screws for the shoplifting until they finger somebody for double murder.

            Again, that’s not how turning state’s evidence works. You have to finger your co-conspirators, for the crime you’re pleading guilty to. Was Trump part of Flynn and Papadopolous’s lies? And they’re going to implicate Trump in lying with them…?

            I suppose you’re envisioning a narrower range of tactics than I. In some sense, yes, state’s evidence only applies narrowly to a specified charge. But we’ve already seen Mueller take advantage of some unorthodox types of immunity “deals”, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if a case was being built with Flynn and Papadopolous’ testimony that had yet to be released publicly. “Give us a bigger fish and we’ll stop looking, otherwise I guess you’re as good as we get and we might as well drop the hammer” isn’t the most kosher tactic, but it’s not unusual. Also, pretty effective.

            What they did to Flynn and Papadopolous was the same plea bargaining scam they do all through the criminal justice system where they threaten you with piles of charges and financial ruin unless you take a plea, even though you didn’t commit the crime or don’t think you did. Their real crime was supporting Trump.

            Again, I can’t help but see this as an isolated plea for leniency. Ken White gets to claim he’s been against this practice all along but it’s less credible when it’s coming from the prosecuted’s allies. Same deal as with FISA Court – if the Republicans want to reform it I’m all in favor, but until then I can’t condone one-off leniency.

            RE: Frothing rage. Have you not seen the unhinged leftists screaming “F**K TRUMP” at the awards shows, holding up his bloody severed head, etc? Just go read /r/politics. The fact you don’t see the frothing rage makes me question your perceptions.

            I browse /r/all enough to be aware of what passes for political sophistication on that sub. I repeat: colossal idiots. If you want to argue on their level, be my guest.

            (Standard complaint about the term “leftists” being thrown around too often and too broadly on SSC, but that’s a digression.)

            If he were to investigate other foreign interference in the election and foreign lobbying, particularly from China, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. I don’t doubt Russia interfered in our election, but it seems like pissing in the ocean. There is so much interference, from so many actors, that singling out Russia seems like ulterior motive to me. They’re small potatoes.

            That’s your prior, anyway. Neither of us can prove it one way to the other.

            But Mueller’s mandate is what singles out Russia, and if you take exception to that blame Rosenstein. Or are you saying you want Mueller to dramatically expand the scope of his investigation?

            Perhaps, so long as it had something to do with specifically Russian interference in the 2016 election.

            Wait, but you just said… but… oh, nevermind.

            Not “find some Democrat and charge him with old tax crimes and process crimes.” For instance, the only US campaign we know colluded with Russians to influence the election was when Hillary and the DNC paid the law firm to pay Fusion GPS to pay British national Steele to pay Russian intelligence agents to make up stuff about Trump and Russian prostitutes. And yet there’s no investigation of that. If you really want to talk about “Russian attacks on our democracy,” the results of that one have been enormous, with large swaths of the country believing the President is illegitimate or blackmailed and demanding his impeachment.

            First off, this is classic whataboutism.

            Secondly, glancing downcomment this looks like a massive double standard. You can’t both be sure that this happened and it’s definitely collusion and later pretend that you don’t know what people mean by collusion.

            Third, noted. If the Mueller investigation does implicate Democrats, I’m glad you have committed to updating on the evidence. I honestly don’t think it’ll come up, but it’s something and it’s real.

            First off I would need someone to make a falsifiable claim as to what the “collusion” is. Does this require a quid pro quo? Coordination? Something. And I need specific actions taken by both the Russians and the Trump campaign. “Someone with a Russian-sounding name tried to talk to someone in Trump’s campaign once” doesn’t cut it as that sort of thing happens all the time. Also it would need to be with agents of the Russian government and not merely with someone from Russia.

            Offering my own sketch of a definition, I would call collusion something like “the offering or solicitation of illegal services (i.e. campaign support) by one party, and acceptance by the other”. But you are correct in that this is not a legal definition, and the gap between an assessed probability of “collusion” and legal proof of a crime is significant. Still, evidence of malfeasance can be gathered without knowing the specific target.

            2) Why is it bad, and is it bad in a way that all the other politicking done with foreign nationals is not?

            Oh, I’m no fan of politicking with foreign nationals. But the legal line has to be drawn somewhere, and I tend to argue for the enforcement of laws.

            Really for all of this I need some specifics. People keep talking about targets of Mueller’s investigation “flipping,” but never what the specific crime is that they’re going to flip on. They keep talking about “collusion” but don’t define what that is, what the specific actions were, and why they’re uniquely bad.

            Don’t give much credence to “people” who aren’t being filtered for competence. No, the outrage industry that masquerades as the media is not such a filter. And I mean “media” much more broadly than is typical.

            Likewise, what would it take to convince you that Trump did not collude with the Russians? If Mueller is not able to charge Trump or Trump associates as co-conspirators with Russians in election-related crimes, will that just mean Trump was too clever a criminal to get caught?

            I’m glad you asked! No, seriously – I look forward to opportunities to expose my beliefs for falsification. But to answer your question, you’ll notice I specified “the Trump campaign” earlier. That’s because I have always realistically entertained the notion that people within Trump’s campaign are guilty of “collusion” but that the rot doesn’t extend to Trump personally*. Every uneventful day that passes is weak evidence of innocence not-guilt, and if Mueller presents a report exonerating Trump I’m prepared to accept it. But even at a break-neck speed, we have a long way to go. Buckle up.

            *Worst case scenario – Trump himself is innocent but Trump Jr. is implicated and convicted. 45 pardons, and we get a full-blown Constitutional crisis.

          • Dan L says:

            @ Matt M

            Why did you choose to link that tumor of a website when the original reporting is far superior? Please don’t feed in to the outrage industry.

          • Dan L says:

            Please forgive me if I’m somewhat terse here, this is my third attempt at a response. Every time I try to meaningfully engage on this website, the technical implementation of the comments section reminds me why I usually don’t bother.

            @Conrad Honcho:

            Of Mueller, Rosenstein, Sessions, and Trump, exactly which of them are “swamp creatures”? When did they earn this status? When did you realize they earned that status?

            Mueller. Rosenstein and Sessions I believe have just made mistakes.

            You forgot Trump. That’s not glib – he’s been in and around politics for quite a while now, surely he has a noteworthy record.

            The clarification is appreciated, but I’m still holding out for an operating definition of “swamp creature” that’s more than a rhetorical slur.

            Manafort is basically a hired gun. I don’t think he really shares the culture of entrenched interests that comprise the swamp. My point is that he wouldn’t be being prosecuted if it weren’t for his having worked for Trump.

            “Hired gun” sounds pretty swampy – we’re both talking about the international influence peddler, right? This is one of those points where a definition would be helpful.

            And “turn state’s evidence?” For what? When one “turn’s state’s evidence” they’re being charged with the conspiracy they’re part of. […] The cops don’t get to pick somebody up for shoplifting bubble gum and then give them the screws for the shoplifting until they finger somebody for double murder.

            You have to finger your co-conspirators, for the crime you’re pleading guilty to. Was Trump part of Flynn and Papadopolous’s lies?

            I suppose you’re assuming a narrower tactical range than I. Sure, state’s evidence is technically a narrow technique, but we’ve already seen Mueller take advantage of some unconventional immunity “deals” to further his cases. There’s nothing to prevent a prosecutor from inviting a target to divert their attention to a bigger target, and I would be surprised if Flynn and Papadopolous don’t end up contributing to another case down the line. (Count that as a falsifiable prediction.) By the same logic, Manafort might be expected to know more dirt than Mueller can necessarily pin on him in a court of law. That could be worth pursuing.

            What they did to Flynn and Papadopolous was the same plea bargaining scam they do all through the criminal justice system where they threaten you with piles of charges and financial ruin unless you take a plea, even though you didn’t commit the crime or don’t think you did. Their real crime was supporting Trump.

            Ken White gets to argue he’s been against this practice all along, but in partisan matters I’m going to doubt just about everyone else. Same deal as FISA court – as soon as the Republicans want to push legitimate reform I’ll back them, but one-off leniency is suspect.

            RE: Frothing rage. Have you not seen the unhinged leftists screaming “F**K TRUMP” at the awards shows, holding up his bloody severed head, etc? Just go read /r/politics. The fact you don’t see the frothing rage makes me question your perceptions.

            I browse /r/all often enough to get a sense of the place, but I repeat: colossal idiots. I don’t recommend using that as a benchmark for the quality of your arguments.

            (Insert typical complaint about SCC comment section’s overuse of the term “leftist”, but that’s really a digression here.)

            If he were to investigate other foreign interference in the election and foreign lobbying, particularly from China, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. I don’t doubt Russia interfered in our election, but it seems like pissing in the ocean. There is so much interference, from so many actors, that singling out Russia seems like ulterior motive to me. They’re small potatoes.

            That “ulterior motive” flows from the mandate written by Rosenstein. Are you arguing that Mueller should dramatically increase the scope of his investigation?

            Perhaps, so long as it had something to do with specifically Russian interference in the 2016 election.

            Wait, but you just said… but… oh, nevermind.

            Not “find some Democrat and charge him with old tax crimes and process crimes.” For instance, the only US campaign we know colluded with Russians to influence the election was when Hillary and the DNC paid the law firm to pay Fusion GPS to pay British national Steele to pay Russian intelligence agents to make up stuff about Trump and Russian prostitutes. And yet there’s no investigation of that. If you really want to talk about “Russian attacks on our democracy,” the results of that one have been enormous, with large swaths of the country believing the President is illegitimate or blackmailed and demanding his impeachment.

            First, this is classic whataboutism.

            Second, glancing downcomment reveals a massive double standard. You can’t both declare this to be collusion and claim not to know what collusion refers to.

            Third, noted. I don’t expect a Democrat to be implicated, but if it does I’ll hold you to that update.

            First off I would need someone to make a falsifiable claim as to what the “collusion” is. Does this require a quid pro quo? Coordination? Something. And I need specific actions taken by both the Russians and the Trump campaign. “Someone with a Russian-sounding name tried to talk to someone in Trump’s campaign once” doesn’t cut it as that sort of thing happens all the time. Also it would need to be with agents of the Russian government and not merely with someone from Russia.

            If I were to sketch out a definition of “collusion”, it would be something like “the offering or solicitation of illegal services (i.e. campaign contribution) by one party, and acceptance by the other”. You’d be right that that’s not a legal standard, but it’s still something worth talking about.

            Keep in mind that plausible deniability is a useful thing though, and as such is actively used – no points are awarded for pointing out that Natalia Veselnitskaya isn’t officially a government agent.

            1) What exactly is the collusion?

            TBD. This investigation really is moving quite quickly, but that’s a relative thing.

            2) Why is it bad, and is it bad in a way that all the other politicking done with foreign nationals is not?

            Oh, I’m not a fan of other politicking either. But the legal line has to be drawn at some place, and I generally argue in favor of enforcing the law.

            Really for all of this I need some specifics. People keep talking about targets of Mueller’s investigation “flipping,” but never what the specific crime is that they’re going to flip on. They keep talking about “collusion” but don’t define what that is, what the specific actions were, and why they’re uniquely bad.

            I wouldn’t put much stock on what “people” keep saying when “people” isn’t a group that’s being filtered for competence. No, the outrage industry posing as informative media. And that group is a hell of a lot broader than merely “the media”.

            Likewise, what would it take to convince you that Trump did not collude with the Russians? If Mueller is not able to charge Trump or Trump associates as co-conspirators with Russians in election-related crimes, will that just mean Trump was too clever a criminal to get caught?

            I’ll call your attention to the fact that I specified “the Trump campaign”. I think there is a non-negligible chance that the rot reached pretty high, but Trump himself isn’t criminally liable*. I count every passing day as weak evidence in favor of everyone not currently indicted, but the significant piece is going to be Mueller’s report. If he finds nothing on Trump personally, I’m prepared to accept that.

            And if he gets in front of a camera to publicly berate Trump for being “extremely careless” but without accompanying charges, I’m going to have a fucking aeurysm.

            *Worst case scenario – Mueller exonerates Trump, but gets a conviction of Trump Jr. 45 uses the pardon. All hell breaks loose.

        • engleberg says:

          Re: What outcomes from the Mueller probe would convince you that it is in fact a professional investigation of legitimate concerns?

          If Mueller went back to the Clintons taking a half-billion dollar bribe from Microsoft’s competitors, and appointing the lawyers who covered for them to high office in the FBI and Justice Department, now investigating Hillary’s opponent, I would see Mueller as a legitimate prosecutor. Otherwise never.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            engleberg,

            I get where you’re coming from, but surely that would be completely and unambiguously outside Mueller’s mandate. I mean, he’s already strayed a ways from his mandate, but there’s a narrative you can tell to try and justify it. But there are limits.

          • Dan L says:

            I said “serve as evidence”, you responded to “would convince you”. This is why I don’t like Grand Narratives – an interdependent inferential web quickly falls into a few predicable failure modes.

          • engleberg says:

            Re: that would be clearly and unambiguously outside Mueller’s mandate-

            It’s an adversarial process. Mueller has a clear and unambiguous duty to respond to his adversary Trump saying ‘this whole thing is fake’.

            Re: I said ‘serve as evidence’, you responded to ‘would convince you’-

            It would serve as evidence that would convince me. Whoa, that was tough.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            It’s an adversarial process. Mueller has a clear and unambiguous duty to respond to his adversary Trump saying ‘this whole thing is fake’.

            Ah, I guess I misunderstood your point. You’re not merely saying that the alleged Clinton crimes are worse and therefore much more worth investigating, but rather that those pursuing the alleged Trump crimes are doing so as part of a quid pro quo, or at least a cozy relationship, stemming from their alleged coverup of the alleged Clinton crimes.

            I don’t disagree. I’d love to see somebody wipe that smirk off Strzok’s face and force him to at least get honest work somewhere.

            But I do share Dan L’s worries about the Grand Narrative, despite my history of worries about the Deep State. Mueller was appointed to the FBI by Bush, and Rosenstein was appointed to his current job by Trump himself, and was instrumental in the case to fire Comey. If your model is that they are toadies of the Clinton Crime Family, they seem like unlikely candidates. If the final outcome of their investigation is that nobody on Trump’s team did anything particularly wrong, their background means that they’ll be excoriated as toadies of the Trump Crime Family instead.

          • engleberg says:

            Re: those pursuing Trump are part of the Clinton Crime Family-

            Some are. All are D party or Never Trump R like Bush.

            Re: If the final outcome of their investigation is that Trump did nothing wrong-

            There’s a big gap between ‘nothing wrong’ and ‘demands investigating and impeachment’. If a special prosecutor had investigated Obama’s real estate deal when he moved to Washington, they’d have found a lot more than Mueller’s found on Trump. And they’d have been wildly overreaching into politicized persecution, like D and Never Trump are now.

            Trump has no obvious smoking gun. Like a 1.5 billion dollar slush fundation started with half a billion from Microsoft’s competitors for sending the Justice Department after Microsoft. I liked the dot-com boom. Really can’t believe the Clintons are acceptably honest, they just accept billion-dollar donations to their favorite charity from people they do favors for.

          • Dan L says:

            @engleberg:

            It’s an adversarial process. Mueller has a clear and unambiguous duty to respond to his adversary Trump saying ‘this whole thing is fake’.

            That doesn’t even slightly resemble how this works. You can’t expect to have an accurate impression of politics if you don’t understand standard procedure.

            It would serve as evidence that would convince me. Whoa, that was tough.

            You are committing a pretty serious epistemological error. I could go into detail, or you could read the previously posted link.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            engleberg,

            You and I are mostly on the same side, I promise. I agree that “Trump has no obvious smoking gun”: in contrast to Watergate, nobody has even pointed to any clearly defined crime, which would surely be a prerequisite to pinning such a crime on Trump or his associates. I also agree that there is a lot that looks shady about the Clinton Foundation, and even Snopes is willing to agree that Obama’s net worth was multiplied by 7 during his time in office.

            What I’m trying to get you to see is that your argument regarding Trump is stronger if you don’t keep dragging in the other matters. It makes you look unnecessarily partisan yourself, exactly what you are decrying in others. (It’s too late for this thread, of course.)

          • engleberg says:

            Re: it makes you look excessively partisan, exactly what you are decrying in others-

            No, I’m exactly decrying taking 1.5 billion in bribes, appointing the lawyers who cover for me to the FBI and Justice department, then sending them after my annoying political opponent who beat me. Partisanship is fine by me.

            Re: you are committing a pretty serious epistemological error.

            When did you start thinking epistemology meant the above?

          • Doctor Mist says:

            OK, my mistake. I thought the subject was Mueller.

      • Erusian says:

        I’m not a legal historian, but my understanding is that the Supreme Court has gradually taken on a more active role in our legal system over the past 200 years, starting from a point of extremely high deference to the legislature, to the modern day where Supreme Court rulings are scarcely distinguishable from lawmaking. A smack-down of judicial power in the form of looming appointments would make it more subservient and in-line with the legislature, like it was in its early days.

        The Supreme Court has not been slowly getting more powerful, it declared it had significant powers in 1803. Prior to that, it had no ability to declare legislation unconstitutional, for example. After that, it operated in a fashion recognizable to us today. For example, it ruled on a slavery case and tried to basically declare the slavery debate over. Jackson fought mightily with it over the legality of his policies. So, it would be returning to the early days before Thomas Jefferson was President.

        Strategically, I think advocating for court-packing is a better move than Scott gives it credit for. It’s not like the Democrats gain nothing from saying it: one lesson from the whole post 2016 what-went-wrong analysis, is that people want to vote for politicians who actually fight for what they believe in. Clinton’s problem was that she promised nothing, believed in nothing, and would deliver nothing more than the status quo. Saying “we’re going to give you X, whether the Supreme Court lets us or not!” is a winning line. People generally don’t care about the Supreme Court, but they definitely care about X, and they like politicians who are willing to fight for it.

        And packing the court is not “winning forever”, as Scott says. Its winning until you lose control of the legislature. I mean, the Constitution is still in effect, so we would still have elections, and when the next party gets in power, they would pack the court in the manner that suited them. As for the premptive backfire threat- I don’t think its serious. The Republican coalition is too fragmented. Remember, there was some question as to whether Trump even had the votes to get boring old Kavanaugh through. (Not that I think the Democrats have any better of chance of getting a court-packing measure through if they gain power- but it does help excite voters for the 2018 election, and that’s what matters)

        True. I agree it’s strategically sound. But norms and rhetoric are important. It was strategically sound to be highly partisan and obstructionist to the unpopular President Bush II towards the end of his term. To throw away bipartisan norms. Then the Democrats screamed when the Republicans used their same tactics against Obama. And now that’s the norm.

        It’s important not to throw away norms to win because otherwise it becomes a race to the bottom.

        • Guy in TN says:

          It’s important not to throw away norms to win because otherwise it becomes a race to the bottom.

          Its not that the norms are in-of-themselves good, they are a detente, a truce based on fear of mutual harm. They only makes sense, from a strategic pov, if the two parties are of relatively equal power. It’s the reason why the Libertarian and Green Parties don’t have the same norms applied to them during elections. The math changes when one party can no longer harm the other in equal proportions.

          The Democrats are likely banking on the prospects of long-term electoral domination, based on demographics, and are wanting to start laying the groundwork to be able to re-shape things when that times comes, unencumbered by these norms. So, ratcheting up the rhetoric for things like statehood for territories, court-packing, ect, is a good plan for them to get started now, since it will likely be a decade or more before these come into fruition.

          • Erusian says:

            Fair point. It’s one hell of a gamble, though. I feel like Democrats have been about to dominate everything for decades. Still hasn’t happened yet.

          • Simon_Jester says:

            The general sentiment among the… feistier Democrats is that the Republicans have already broken detente on a variety of issues. And that continuing to follow pre-2010 norms is equivalent repeatedly choosing “cooperate” in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma where the opposition is repeatedly choosing “defect” and has signaled its willingness to continue doing so whenever convenient.

            Thus, for instance, the Republicans in the Senate punting the vote on a replacement for Antonin Scalia until after the election when Gorsuch could be appointed feels, to Democrats, like a betrayal of the overall principle that the sitting president gets to appoint Supreme Court justices.

            If Red Tribe feels entitled to ignore the principle that when it’s Blue Tribe’s turn to sit in the big chair, Blue Tribe gets to nominate Council Elders even if Red Tribe retains veto power… Well, Blue Tribe is going to start viewing the rules around appointing Council Elders with considerably more cynicism.

            Similar cynicism is emerging among feisty Democrats on other issues, at both the federal and state levels. Basically, the more parliamentary shenanigans, rule-bending, and violation of unspoken norms you engage in, the more blatantly your opponent starts talking about violating the same norms. And this is an iterative process that is perfectly capable of spiraling out of control if either side fails to exercise self-control about not grabbing for literally everything it can get.

          • Erusian says:

            And the general sentiment among the feistier Republicans is that the Democrats have broken detente too. It’s never very hard to pile up evidence there. We’re already stuck in something resembling the bad state of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

            There are (imo) basically two ways to solve it. The first is an outside party (preferably the American people) starts punishing defectors on both sides. The big trouble here is that few people actually care about democracy as such: they care about policy victories. Do the Democrats care about all the parliamentary BS and strained legal logic that was pulled to get the ACA through? Do you think Republicans care about why they have Gorsuch or more conservative judges?

            If anything, it seems like both parties’ bases are increasingly embracing charismatic, national leaders who lead by force of personality. Both sides seem like they’re becoming parties of people and not laws, to appropriate a term.

            The second is some sort of independent monitoring, but that’s difficult in the American system because it’s baked in that the administrative state is under the thumb of elected officials. And on top of that, one of the party’s is ideologically anti-administrative state.

      • Alex Zavoluk says:

        My understanding of SCOTUS history is the reverse of yours. They had for a long time been willing to declare mundane laws unconstitutional, under a strict interpretation of the 9th and 10th amendments. Anything that wasn’t explicitly called out as a federal government power in the Constitution, the US government couldn’t do. This changed during the 30s, when the Court was prepared to rule against many of FDR’s recovery programs, and so he threatened to pack the court, and SCOTUS gave in.

      • Anonymous` says:

        The Constitution is still in effect

        We’re only one more activist justice away from this ceasing to be true.

    • Vosmyorka says:

      Well, you would have to strike down Roe v. Wade in order to return abortion to the states; it was the Roe decision that took the matter out of the purview of the states in the first place, so as long as it is not explicitly overturned, the matter has not been returned to the states.

      Roberts generally likes to make the narrowest decisions possible (from a legal standpoint; ones changing the status quo as little as possible), and is strongly averse to explicitly overturning precedent, especially in ways that are very public; I cannot off the top of my head think of non-unanimous cases where he’s joined a majority that overruled a precedent other than Citizens United, Trump v. Hawaii, and Janus. Unless Trump gets to replace a liberal Justice, or replaces Roberts himself, I would stick with the 99% probability that Roe won’t be overturned. I do think it’s likely that Roberts steadily reduces the law’s scope, but I don’t imagine Roe getting overturned except in the aftermath of a more explicitly religious-right President than GWB being elected.

      Court-packing is, right now, a proposal at the very left end of the Democratic Party; I think it existed on the right end of the Republican Party during the Obama years. It would essentially serve to make the Court subservient to the political moment, since every incoming President nowadays comes in with a congressional majority built up over the preceding President’s midterms, and make whoever is in office at a given moment more powerful, which I think is something neither party seriously wants in such a polarized moment. Likelier departures of norms by a near-future Democratic majority are abolition or serious curtailing of the filibuster; SMLs of both parties have been reducing its scope since 2013 and it seems both parties agree it should eventually be done away with, if not right now; and Puerto Rican statehood, since it seems right now that both enthusiasm for statehood and enthusiasm for the Democratic Party on the island are at historic highs.

      • Mercrono says:

        Trump v. Hawaii didn’t involve overruling precedent; the majority and dissent disagreed on the proper way to construe the relevant precedent, but that happens all the time).

        But Roberts did join the plurality in McDonald v. City of Chicago, which incorporated the Second Amendment against the states, and in effect overruled three nineteenth-century cases (Cruikshank, Presser, Miller) that had held that the Second Amendment was only a limit on Congress. Of course, these cases preceded — and were sharply out of step with — all of the Court’s twentieth century “incorporation” cases, so this practical overruling of precedent was hardly surprising or significant.

        Citizens United, McDonald, and Janus were also all cases in which the Court overturned precedent that was (in the Court’s view) erroneously permitting ongoing constitutional violations. The Court is much more likely to overturn precedent in that direction (in favor of greater constitutional protections) than the converse (in favor of lesser constitutional protections). To my knowledge, the last time the Court formally did the latter was in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, in 1937. In large part for this reason, I think it’s fairly unlikely — maybe around a 25% chance — that the Roberts Court (with Kavanaugh) will formally overturn Roe (as modified by Casey).

        • Vosmyorka says:

          I was referring to Trump v. Hawaii non-unanimously overruling Korematsu, which was a minor part of the decision but received a lot of press in the popular media. You are correct that I shamefully forgot McDonald, which was a significant case.

          The point that the Court has not overruled precedent that protects constitutional rights since the 1930s is an interesting one, though it seems like if a liberal majority were to come on to the court anytime in the near future overturning Citizens United would be likely to be among the first acts of business, which would end that streak.

          • Mercrono says:

            Oh, good call on Korematsu — I hadn’t been thinking about that side of Trump v. Hawaii, because obviously that case isn’t really operable precedent today, but you’re right that it purports to overrule the decision (though to be fair, that point would certainly get unanimous support in a case where it was clearly presented).

      • Iain says:

        I cannot off the top of my head think of non-unanimous cases where he’s joined a majority that overruled a precedent other than Citizens United, Trump v. Hawaii, and Janus.

        Shelby County v. Holder?

        • Mercrono says:

          Shelby County is a relatively aggressive, non-deferential decision (as is basically any case holding unconstitutional an act of Congress), but it doesn’t really involve overturning precedent. Katzenbach upheld Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (the pre-clearance requirement) on the ground that “exceptional conditions can justify legislative measures not otherwise appropriate.” But Shelby County didn’t overrule Katzenbach. It simply held that while the coverage formula for states subject to Section 4 may once have been permissible, it no longer was, in light of dramatically changed circumstances.

          I’m not saying the decision is necessarily correct, but it’s a different sort of issue than the flat reconsideration of (purportedly) erroneous precedent, like in Citizens United and Janus, and kind of McDonald.

          • Thomas Jørgensen says:

            Shelby is also egregiously wrong. Congress is explicitly allowed to act to secure voting rights – That is very explict in the reconstruction amendments, the voting rights act was duly legislated and renewed.. and a as a question of fact, as soon as Shelby vent into effect, states set about fucking people out of their voting rights.

    • S_J says:

      Does anyone who is looking at this mention that Planned Parenthood vs. Casey has already superceded most of the findings and logic of Roe vs. Wade?

      Conversely, does anyone think that the Supreme Court should revisit Doe vs. Bolton first? That is where the “right to privacy” was first mentioned, if I recall correctly.

      It seems like the public discussion is so fixed on the most-famous Supreme Court case that commentators have lost the ability to study the history of the decisions, and see how well (or poorly) the decisions fit into the history of Constitutional Law.

      • Erusian says:

        For those of you mentioning any changes to abortion being a constitutional right involve overturning Roe v Wade, this. Roe v Wade is famous so it gets 90% of the attention but it’s not the only case about abortion.

        • S_J says:

          As I look back at it, I may have mis-identified Doe vs. Bolton…I was likely thinking of Griswold vs. Connecticut, as identified by @EugeneDawn below.

          A judicial finding that States could limit abortions based on scientific/medical advances since the 1970s (detection of fetal heartbeat, detection of fetal brain-waves, advances in premature-birth survival rates, something similar) would be called “repeal of Roe vs. Wade” by many partisans.

    • Deiseach says:

      My opinion, which is worthless:

      (a) Roe vs Wade is terrible law. Emanations belong in a Blake poem, not a court of law.
      (b) Nevertheless, for social reasons, nobody wants to touch this. The whole “keep your rosaries off my ovaries” narrative is too entrenched, there will be screaming blue murder if it was attempted.

      I also think packing a court is a horrible notion, it’s taking away from the interpretation and rule of law and making the court a political arm of the government in power. The legislative power is already established, if they want to make laws they have the avenue to do so. Deciding cases not on the established law and precedent but on “am I Team Green or Team Purple?” is as bad as going back to the days of Titus Oates. Anyone who cares about justice should be appalled.

      • Eugene Dawn says:

        The “emanations” are actually from Griswold v. Connecticut, not Roe.

        • Eric Rall says:

          The majority opinion in Roe cited Griswold and explicitly referenced its “penumbras and emanations” logic (search the text of the decision for “penumbras”) as one of several precedents for a constitutionally-protected “right of privacy” that could be protected under a 14th Amendment substantive due process doctrine. My read is that Roe did rely in part on Griswold, but was part of a process of backing away from the “penumbras and emanation” doctrine in favor of less-dubious arguments.

          • Vosmyorka says:

            I’ve always found the justification of the right to privacy based on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to be very strange, since it is nearly explicitly written in the 4th:

            “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

            Hard to read “the right to be secure in their persons and effects” as not meaning a right to privacy, to be honest. It seems to me that Founding Fathers using modern phrasing would have written in a right to privacy here.

          • Eric Rall says:

            Yes, the 4th Amendment does enumerate a right to privacy, but it’s a different sort of privacy than the one the Justices talk about in Roe and Griswold. The 4th protects very specifically against the feds rifling through your stuff, seizing it as evidence, holding you for questioning, etc without jumping through the appropriate procedural hoops to establish the violation of your privacy as “reasonable”.

            The “right to privacy” in the context of Roe and Griswold is different and broader than the 4th Amendment right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. According to what I remember of the constitutional law lecture series I listened to a while back (Mary Cheh’s “Sum and Substance: Constitutional Law”), the Roe/Griswold right to privacy is more appropriately thought of as a right to bodily autonomy and intimate association. The “bodily autonomy” part does have some adjacency to the 4th Amendment , but it’s a lot broader than just a right “to be secure in their persons … against unreasonable searches and seizures”.

            Griswold’s “penumbras and emanations” argument is a confession that the text of 4th Amendment and other constitutionally enumerated provisions don’t stretch to cover the issues at hand, but they do show the framers caring about privacy in general (this is historically dubious: the 4th amendment in particular was a reaction against specific procedural abuses in anti-smuggling law enforcement in the pre-revolutionary period), so the court will apply a broadly-defined general right to privacy anyway.

          • SamChevre says:

            But I’d note that in Griswold, the “penumbras” were from the very-well-established rules of privacy in marriage (for example, spouses can’t be required to testify against one another). “Penumbras and emanations” of the 4th Amendment’s “secure in their persons and effects” seems a bit more of a reach.

          • Deiseach says:

            the “penumbras” were from the very-well-established rules of privacy in marriage

            So how does that apply to the unmarried, as in the Roe case where an unmarried woman was seeking an abortion? If there’s no marriage, then there can be no privacy expectations. And if being married has nothing to do with having sex and getting pregnant, then the other marital privacy (e.g. not compelled to testify against a spouse) is out of place here also.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Also, keep in mind abortion laws restrict providers, not the women. The power of the government to regulate the medical profession, banning medical providers from performing abortions doesn’t have anything to do with the right of a woman to be secure in her person.

          • Adam Kadmon says:

            The power of the government to regulate the medical profession, banning medical providers from performing abortions doesn’t have anything to do with the right of a woman to be secure in her person.

            Granting that this is a distinction, is it a difference? Consider:

            “The power of the government to regulate interstate commerce, by banning the import, manufacture and sale of any and all firearms, doesn’t have anything to do with the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”

            My intuition is that medical care is rather intimately tied to being secure in one’s person. If President McCarthy made the DTaP vaccine a Schedule 1 drug I’d certainly consider my bodily autonomy to be in jeopardy.

    • zzzzort says:

      The most generous explanation I’ve heard about the court packing strategy is that discussing it is a warning shot to the supreme court. Talking about turning the court into a partisan institution focuses people’s attention on the partisan nature of the current court, and the ways in which it does not reflect popular will. It is a threat to the legitimacy of the court, and justices care about the legitimacy of the court (which is very reasonable for an institution without the direct democratic legitimacy and which the other branches can, and have!, ignore).

      • Erusian says:

        Is that really better? That’s only a step removed from court packing. It’s basically ‘the court derives legitimacy from agreeing with our policy preferences’. More directly, “agree with us or else get packed.”

        And the things Democrats want to pack the court to protect (abortions, unions, the ACA, etc) are opposed by one of two major political parties. The popular will isn’t unified about them. You could argue that the court shouldn’t decide winners and losers between them. But that’s not the Democratic argument at all.

        • zzzzort says:

          the court derives legitimacy from agreeing with our policy preferences

          I’m confused about who’s doing the action and holding the opinions in this line of reasoning. In my mental model, the public will have a sense of court legitimacy based on, for instance, how much deference it receives from the political establishment, how non-partisan it is, and how reasonable the rulings seem to be.

          For the institutional party, the question is whether it is worth spending political capital to hurt the legitimacy of the court. This strategy doesn’t make sense if the court is only ‘calling balls and strikes’; they can’t become more fair. But if the court wants to use novel doctrines (right of privacy, free speech of corporations) in service to consistent partisan program (always ruling against supporters of one party), then the loss of deference from one of the two parties may be constraining. Obviously a party will only spend capital if the court is ruling against them, but to the extent that attacking the court is a costly action the equilibrium is still a fairly independent court.

          tl;dr checks and balances, somewhat extra-constitutional, but not in a game-breaking way.

          • Garrett says:

            > how non-partisan it is, and how reasonable the rulings seem to be

            I’m not sure that matters. I’m not a lawyer, though I do read Supreme Court and appellate-court decisions on a regular basis. They are usually well thought out and well-written, even when I disagree with the conclusions.

            But most people don’t, and get their summary from the media. And frequently the presentation of the case and issues at hand are done so poorly that the impression that someone would be left with would be vastly different from the thoughtful and nuanced work in the opinion. The most obvious recent example was the Citizens United case.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            +1

            Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia, also. The media does a terrible job reporting on everything, and decisions of the Supreme Court are no exception.

      • Deiseach says:

        the ways in which it does not reflect popular will

        The job of a court is not to reflect the popular will (that’s why we have trials, not lynching parties), it’s to administer and uphold the law. Whether the popular will is all in favour of pink pussycat hats or red trucker caps is irrelevant.

        Politicians are there to serve the popular will. Judges should not be deciding to hang a man based on the latest tabloid headline.

      • Vosmyorka says:

        The Supreme Court is not incredibly popular, but it seems to have much more legitimacy than Congress in most polling:

        Cool but kind of misleading infographic: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/06/29/the-institutions-americans-trust-most-and-least-in-2018-infographic/#439407372fc8
        Data it came from: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx

        Note that the statistic that 37% of people trust the Supreme Court and the presidency is rather misleading: that poll found that only 18% distrust the Court, with the rest undecided, while 44% of Americans distrust the Presidency. The Court is presently the branch of government with the most legitimacy, which I highly doubt was the case the last time court-packing was discussed (in the 1930s).

        • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

          I suspect this popularity is exactly because it is not perceived as controlled by everyday politicians and their populist everyday needs, but has a more elevated position. But if the Congress succeeds in dragging it down from the pedestal – either by packing, or by threat of packing, or by any other means – the result would be not elevating the popularity of Congress but the popularity and trust in the court dropping down to that of the Congress.

          • Matt M says:

            Agreed. Also, the court has ruled with overall popular opinion on the major issues of the day in the last few recent years.

            Show me that poll again if Kavanaugh goes through and Roe v Wade is repealed by the end of 2018.

      • notpeerreviewed says:

        The most justified strategy I can see here is “threaten to pack the court, as leverage to implement 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices.” This lowers the stakes for each Supreme Court nomination, which helps reintroduce the possibility of respecting norms regarding the nomination process. Also, I suspect that this is the actual strategy planned by many Democrats.

        • Matt M says:

          implement 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices

          There is zero chance of this happening.

          • Iain says:

            You present a compelling case.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I can see both parties agreeing to the 18-year terms. You could transition by declaring the terms now, assigning each Justice to that term, but grandfathering the current Justices.

            Because, really, the elephant in the room is that this latest shitstorm was caused by Scalia dying off schedule.

          • John Schilling says:

            You’re not going to get three-quarters of the state legilslatures to agree to this, which is the standard that matters. Not when, A: everybody is wondering whether they are being sold a bill of goods by an unholy cabal of party insiders whose political stock is none too high right now, and B: there’s a competing amendment in the works saying that SCOTUS is nine life-tenured justices, amen hallelujah, and appealing to the status quo bias.

            Changing the U.S. Constutution is really really hard, by design, and this won’t be one of the easy amendments. “I can see both parties agreeing…”, is not the standard you are looking for.

    • fluorocarbon says:

      The way I interpret it, is that the Democrats are implying that there’s a game-theoretic equilibrium of keeping the court less politicized than the other branches. Talking about court packing is a threat, essentially saying, “if you appoint an explicitly political justice, then we’ll no longer be in this equilibrium, meaning we’ll punish you when we’re in power. We’ll also all be worse off.”

      I think that the reason this is even being talked about at all is because one equilibrium already fell apart when congress refused to confirm Merrick Garland (and it could be argued that happened because Democrats broke the equilibrium of filibusters for non-Supreme Court nominees). This is also why it’s important to have politicians in office that respect norms.

      • Erusian says:

        The way I interpret it, is that the Democrats are implying that there’s a game-theoretic equilibrium of keeping the court less politicized than the other branches. Talking about court packing is a threat, essentially saying, “if you appoint an explicitly political justice, then we’ll no longer be in this equilibrium, meaning we’ll punish you when we’re in power. We’ll also all be worse off.”

        That requires believing that a Republican president appointing conservative judges is unusually political.

        If the Democrats really wanted a less politicized court, they had a perfect opportunity with Merrick Garland. The Republicans weren’t going to confirm him, so they could have withdrawn the nomination and tried to nominate someone both parties would approve. Or at least someone conservative enough several Republicans would have broken ranks to vote for them. Instead, they decided to wait until election time, using the exact same strategy McConnell was using and betting on the exact same thing he was (that they would win). The only difference is McConnell was right and they were wrong.

        The left doesn’t want a depoliticized court, it wants a leftist court. And the right wants a rightist court. And this was the pre-Trump state of affairs.

        I think that the reason this is even being talked about at all is because one equilibrium already fell apart when congress refused to confirm Merrick Garland (and it could be argued that happened because Democrats broke the equilibrium of filibusters for non-Supreme Court nominees). This is also why it’s important to have politicians in office that respect norms.

        I agree it’s important to respect norms, but what norm did Republicans break by refusing to confirm Merrick Garland? The Senate has every right to not confirm any appointee they wish. The President is not owed approval. What’s the point of having a confirmation process if the Senate has to confirm the candidate? Merrick Garland is not the first Justice to not get confirmation.

        The norm that was broken was waiting until a new President was in office, which had happened before with Congressional elections but not Presidential ones. And I agree that is probably going to be problematic and increasingly politicize the court. But that distinction is important. Demanding the Republicans confirm Garland over their own wishes is demanding the Senate give up its right to refuse consent to the President.

        • ana53294 says:

          IIRC, the rule that was broken was not that the candidate wasn’t approved by the Senate; it was that the Senate didn’t have a vote.

          • Erusian says:

            That’s what the Democrats claimed. But that seems like a relatively weak smokescreen to me. The Republicans controlled the Senate. Is Democrats’ objection really that the Republicans refused to reject their nominee? At any rate, the norm was invented. As I said, the Senate has delayed confirmations before.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            There have been plenty of times the Senate just didn’t have a vote. Bush whined about it a lot, insisting his candidates should get “up-or-down” votes in his public speeches.

            You can draw a line between the different kinds of things the Senate refuses to vote on. Fine. But the problem with norm breaking is that it’s laughable to say “okay, we broke the old norm, and so the new norm is right here where we are, and no further.” There is no guarantee or even a moral requirement that the other side interpret just what norm was actually broken the same way you wanted. They are capable of line-drawing, too.

          • Iain says:

            There have been plenty of times the Senate just didn’t have a vote. Bush whined about it a lot, insisting his candidates should get “up-or-down” votes in his public speeches.

            Are you talking about Alito? Because a) that was about a threat to use the already-common filibuster, not a refusal to even start the confirmation process, and b) you may notice that Alito is sitting on the Supreme Court, because enough Democrats were willing to take the procedural complaint seriously.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            No, I was not talking about Alito. Bush whined that his appeals court judges weren’t getting up-or-down votes. linky

            This is where you draw the line between appeals court judges and the SCOTUS justices, and I repeat my point about line drawing.

            There is no parliamentary or Constitutional requirement to vote. Up to the time of Elena Kagan, the Senate had rejected 36 candidates for SCOTUS, and 25 of those has no up-or-down-vote. Congressional Research Service, written 4 months before Scalia’s death

            As a reminder of my position: I think the Senate should have voted, because they should have the guts to explain themselves instead of hiding in the corner. But our Congress loves dodges responsibility for anything it can.

          • Iain says:

            @Edward Scizorhands:

            No, I was not talking about Alito. Bush whined that his appeals court judges weren’t getting up-or-down votes. linky

            During Bush’s first term, Senate Democrats used filibusters to block 10 of his 218 court nominees.

            Man, I didn’t realize the number was so low. I was about to happily concede that the Democrats have also violated norms, but honestly 10 out of 218 seems very reasonable.

            In any case: I don’t think the line is between the Supreme Court and lower courts. I think it’s about willingness to compromise. Democrats didn’t have a blanket policy of filibustering all of Bush’s nominees; they blocked less than 5% of them. Bush still got to confirm plenty of Republican judges.

            Garland, in contrast, was not opposed on the basis of being too extreme. As you agreed below, he was an obvious compromise candidate. Refusing to even consider Garland means refusing to confirm anybody. (And McConnell was clear about this! He never pretended it was about Garland himself.)

            The difference between “we won’t confirm this candidate” and “we won’t consider any candidate” seems pretty meaningful to me.

        • Iain says:

          If the Democrats really wanted a less politicized court, they had a perfect opportunity with Merrick Garland. The Republicans weren’t going to confirm him, so they could have withdrawn the nomination and tried to nominate someone both parties would approve. Or at least someone conservative enough several Republicans would have broken ranks to vote for them.

          Merrick Garland was that candidate.

          Days before Garland was nominated, this is what Orrin Hatch had to say about him:

          “The President told me several times he’s going to name a moderate [to fill the court vacancy], but I don’t believe him,” Hatch told us.

          “[Obama] could easily name Merrick Garland, who is a fine man,” he told us, referring to the more centrist chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia who was considered and passed over for the two previous high court vacancies.

          But, Hatch quickly added, “He probably won’t do that because this appointment is about the election. So I’m pretty sure he’ll name someone the [liberal Democratic base] wants.”

          Obama tried to call his bluff. McConnell bailed Hatch out.

          I agree it’s important to respect norms, but what norm did Republicans break by refusing to confirm Merrick Garland?

          Refusing to confirm Merrick Garland is one thing. McConnell refused to even schedule hearings (let alone a vote).

          It’s obviously impossible to tell, but there’s a pretty good chance that Garland would have been confirmed if the Senate had a chance to vote. Hatch, obviously, had painted himself into a bit of a corner. Susan Collins was showing signs of supporting him until McConnell clamped down. Mark Kirk was in a similar situation. Only four Republican senators would have had to break ranks — and remember, this was prior to the election, when it looked like the alternative might be a less moderate Clinton nominee.

          Merrick Garland was an olive branch: the kind of moderate nominee that the GOP claimed to want. If Garland couldn’t get confirmed, nobody could. McConnell calculated — correctly, as it turned out — that without the drama of actually holding hearings, nobody would care about the boring procedural matter of indefinitely stonewalling the nomination process, and he could avoid having to hold a genuinely difficult vote.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Agree that Garland was the compromise candidate. The poor guy was sacrificed as a pawn between the other power brokers. (It’s unlikely he’ll ever be re-nominated for the position that is the dream of his entire career.)

          • Erusian says:

            Merrick Garland was that candidate.

            He wasn’t. And I can prove it. You see, the Republicans didn’t confirm him.

            Garland was a moderate, sure. But you don’t get to decide what your opponents want. Compromising does not mean ‘coming up with a reason my opponents should support me and then complaining when they prove to have free will’. The Democrats tautologically didn’t give the Republicans what they wanted because they didn’t accept it. Nor did the Republicans give the Democrats what they wanted, mind. But that is not in dispute.

            Refusing to confirm Merrick Garland is one thing. McConnell refused to even schedule hearings (let alone a vote).

            As I said, that was just a slight extension of something very normal. The Democrats used the tactic extensively against Bush, for example. See the comment chain above for more.

            It’s obviously impossible to tell, but there’s a pretty good chance that Garland would have been confirmed if the Senate had a chance to vote. Hatch, obviously, had painted himself into a bit of a corner. Susan Collins was showing signs of supporting him until McConnell clamped down. Mark Kirk was in a similar situation. Only four Republican senators would have had to break ranks — and remember, this was prior to the election, when it looked like the alternative might be a less moderate Clinton nominee.

            Merrick Garland was an olive branch: the kind of moderate nominee that the GOP claimed to want. If Garland couldn’t get confirmed, nobody could. McConnell calculated — correctly, as it turned out — that without the drama of actually holding hearings, nobody would care about the boring procedural matter of indefinitely stonewalling the nomination process, and he could avoid having to hold a genuinely difficult vote.

            I’d argue it was less an olive branch than a pragmatic move. Obama appointed far more liberal judges when he didn’t have to get Republican votes to win. Appointing a moderate is the only way to have even a chance of getting through a GOP controlled senate without appointing a Republican.

            But regardless, McConnell refused to let the vote happen because he didn’t like the candidate. And then Obama calculated that Hillary would win and possibly get a majority in the Senate, so he let the matter rest. This was not subtle, by the way. Several liberals at the time said basically that openly. There was even a comedy show that did a bit about it. But McConnell’s party won, so there it is.

          • Iain says:

            @Erusian:

            In your previous post, you said:

            The Republicans weren’t going to confirm him, so they could have withdrawn the nomination and tried to nominate someone both parties would approve.

            This implies that you believe such a person exists. I claim that, if there was such a person, he looked an awful lot like Merrick Garland. If not Garland, then who? You keep claiming that an alternative candidate could have grabbed Republican votes, but you’re ignoring the significant likelihood that Garland himself could have grabbed Republican votes, if he’d been given the chance. McConnell denied him that chance.

            But regardless, McConnell refused to let the vote happen because he didn’t like the candidate. And then Obama calculated that Hillary would win and possibly get a majority in the Senate, so he let the matter rest.

            McConnell didn’t shut down the nomination because he “didn’t like the candidate”. He didn’t care who the candidate was. He’d decided not to confirm Obama’s nominee before Garland was ever selected. Look, for example, at the context for Hatch’s comments in the link I posted above (“Orrin Hatch Says GOP Scotus Refusal Just ‘The Chickens Coming Home to Roost’). McConnell invented a fig leaf about election years (which he’s already discarded for Kavanaugh, obviously) and went for the partisan advantage, norms be damned. It was, pragmatically, a very effective move. But you’re fooling yourself if you don’t see any norm-breaking there.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            “Slight extension of something normal” is exactly how norms get weakened, piece by piece.

            I can write a convincing, Turing-Test-passing essay from one side explaining how “well, their side did X, and we did X’, and those are really the same,” and another equivalent essay of “we did X, sure, but they are doing X’ which is totally different” each time these norms get slowly worn away.

            I don’t like arguments of “I have the power to achieve a result through the typically followed path, but that has costs, so I’ll just skip right to the result.” Those costs are part of the system. If you want to filibuster, then stand up there and filibuster, you big baby. If you want to not approve someone, have the guts to vote, and if there is a political cost to your vote, gee, maybe that part of the system is there by design?

          • beleester says:

            @Erusian: “Compromise” does not mean “demand your opponents accept anything where they have a reason to support you,” but it also doesn’t mean “give your opponents everything they want, and if they reject it anyway, I guess you weren’t submissive enough.” The Democrats definitely tried to compromise – they listened to what Republicans said would be an acceptable Democratic candidate, and gave them that. What more should they have done? Should they perhaps have recruited a telepath or precog, to tell them what the Republicans actually would vote for?

            (Also, I’m finding it increasingly hilarious how the go-to defense of Republicans is now “You shouldn’t actually believe anything they say.”)

            I don’t disagree that the Republicans actually wanted a conservative judge despite claiming to like Garland, but that undermines your claim that the Republicans were just doing the same thing that the Democrats were. The Republicans signaled that they wanted a moderate but actually would only accept a conservative, the Democrats actually put a moderate up for consideration.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Perhaps the preemptive behaviour of Republicans when they thought Hillary would win provides some evidence here. Does this sound like a party waiting for a moderate to be approved?

          • Erusian says:

            This implies that you believe such a person exists. I claim that, if there was such a person, he looked an awful lot like Merrick Garland. If not Garland, then who? You keep claiming that an alternative candidate could have grabbed Republican votes, but you’re ignoring the significant likelihood that Garland himself could have grabbed Republican votes, if he’d been given the chance. McConnell denied him that chance.

            Of course a person exists the Republicans would have confirmed. It just wouldn’t have been anyone Obama would have nominated.

            I think you’re reading my point as a criticism of Democrats. It wasn’t. My point is that when the Democrats had the presidency and couldn’t get a nominee through, they chose to have a political fight instead of trying to disarm. This is exactly what the Republicans were doing too. And it’s what both parties will do in the future. Calling for the Republicans to disarm when the Democrats have no power is completely transparent. And I remember the Republicans howling over the same thing with Sotomayor (when it was also totally transparent). It would be nice, of course.

            And I’ve already said there was an expansion of an existing norm. Which, as Edward says, is how you get death by a thousand cuts.

            “Slight extension of something normal” is exactly how norms get weakened, piece by piece.

            I can write a convincing, Turing-Test-passing essay from one side explaining how “well, their side did X, and we did X’, and those are really the same,” and another equivalent essay of “we did X, sure, but they are doing X’ which is totally different” each time these norms get slowly worn away.

            Totally agree. What bothers me is when people pretend it’s only the other side. The good Democrats never done anything like those mean old Republicans or vice versa. Or that the tactic they’ve been using for years is suddenly a novel, democracy-threatening thing when the other party gets their hands on it.

            I don’t like arguments of “I have the power to achieve a result through the typically followed path, but that has costs, so I’ll just skip right to the result.” Those costs are part of the system. If you want to filibuster, then stand up there and filibuster, you big baby. If you want to not approve someone, have the guts to vote, and if there is a political cost to your vote, gee, maybe that part of the system is there by design?

            This seems too vague a heuristic to be effectively applied. Everyone is always going to seek the least painful way to do everything. What is the difference between skipping and taking the easiest version of the typically followed path?

            “Compromise” does not mean “demand your opponents accept anything where they have a reason to support you,” but it also doesn’t mean “give your opponents everything they want, and if they reject it anyway, I guess you weren’t submissive enough.” The Democrats definitely tried to compromise – they listened to what Republicans said would be an acceptable Democratic candidate, and gave them that. What more should they have done? Should they perhaps have recruited a telepath or precog, to tell them what the Republicans actually would vote for?

            They did? McConnell was consulted on who they should nominate? If he wasn’t, then what do you mean by ‘listened and gave them what they said would be acceptable’?

            There is a very strong claim in this thread that the Democrats were reaching across the aisle but no one seems to be actually able to provide evidence for that, beyond pointing out Garland was a moderate. So I’m going to repeat myself: you do not get to make deals the other person didn’t actually agree to then get upset when they don’t honor the contract you made up.

            And I’m not saying the Republicans reached across the aisle either. Or that they were being reasonable. Or that they aren’t changing norms and exploiting rules to get their way. I’m just saying that both sides do that and pretending that only one does, or that one side is worse, contributes to the problem.

            I don’t disagree that the Republicans actually wanted a conservative judge despite claiming to like Garland, but that undermines your claim that the Republicans were just doing the same thing that the Democrats were. The Republicans signaled that they wanted a moderate but actually would only accept a conservative, the Democrats actually put a moderate up for consideration.

            That depends on what ‘the same thing’ is. Maneuvering to beat the other side, norms be damned? It absolutely does. Trying to get a nominee through? You’re right, it doesn’t.

          • Erusian says:

            This implies that you believe such a person exists. I claim that, if there was such a person, he looked an awful lot like Merrick Garland. If not Garland, then who? You keep claiming that an alternative candidate could have grabbed Republican votes, but you’re ignoring the significant likelihood that Garland himself could have grabbed Republican votes, if he’d been given the chance. McConnell denied him that chance.

            Then I dispute your claim that he would look like Garland and that no such person exists. We can argue about that, if you want, and about McConnell’s intentions.

            But I think you’re taking this as some kind of criticism of the Democrats. It’s not, or at least not specifically. My point is both sides have been, and continue, to use these nominations for political ends. That the last time we tried to get a nominee through a Congress and President of different parties, both sides played politics for partisan advantage. Neither side really tried to work with the other.

            “Slight extension of something normal” is exactly how norms get weakened, piece by piece.

            I can write a convincing, Turing-Test-passing essay from one side explaining how “well, their side did X, and we did X’, and those are really the same,” and another equivalent essay of “we did X, sure, but they are doing X’ which is totally different” each time these norms get slowly worn away.

            Totally agreed. What bothers me is when people pretend it’s all on one side, or that something they’ve done is democracy-destroying when the other party does it or a slightly bigger version of it.

            I don’t like arguments of “I have the power to achieve a result through the typically followed path, but that has costs, so I’ll just skip right to the result.” Those costs are part of the system. If you want to filibuster, then stand up there and filibuster, you big baby. If you want to not approve someone, have the guts to vote, and if there is a political cost to your vote, gee, maybe that part of the system is there by design?

            While good in theory, this seems too vague a heuristic to apply. Everyone is always going to try and take an easy path. What distinguishes someone taking an easy but acceptable path from a skipper?

            @Erusian: “Compromise” does not mean “demand your opponents accept anything where they have a reason to support you,” but it also doesn’t mean “give your opponents everything they want, and if they reject it anyway, I guess you weren’t submissive enough.” The Democrats definitely tried to compromise – they listened to what Republicans said would be an acceptable Democratic candidate, and gave them that. What more should they have done? Should they perhaps have recruited a telepath or precog, to tell them what the Republicans actually would vote for?

            Did they try to compromise? Or did they try to do an end run around McConnell by nominating a candidate that was appealing to a few Republicans so that McConnell couldn’t keep party discipline? And then get outmaneuvered by McConnell in turn. Was McConnell consulted as to who the candidate would be? If he wasn’t, how does that qualify as listening to what the Republicans wanted?

            There’s an awful lot of claims here that the Democrats reached across the aisle. Other than Garland being a moderate, I don’t see any evidence of that. And being a moderate serves Democratic purposes too. So I’m going to say again: you don’t get to make a deal that the other side didn’t agree to then act outraged when they don’t honor your made up contract.

            And I’m not saying the Republicans were being good or reasonable. I’m not saying that norms weren’t changed somewhat by this, probably for the worse. What I’m saying is both sides do this, break norms and stretch things to gain partisan advantage. By pretending that your side doesn’t or that the other side is worse, you’re part of the problem. If you want rules and norms you need to enforce them even handedly. And you can’t invent them to suit your political purpose, as both sides did during the Garland debate (the made up ‘McConnell Rule’ and the idea that Garland was owed a hearing).

          • beleester says:

            Did they try to compromise? Or did they try to do an end run around McConnell by nominating a candidate that was appealing to a few Republicans so that McConnell couldn’t keep party discipline?

            I fail to see how a candidate that some Republicans would vote for is not a compromise, simply because one specific Republican doesn’t like it. I’m pretty sure that “The majority leader’s personal approval is required for all nominees” is not one of the traditional norms we’re trying to protect.

            And once again, what should Democrats have done? If Garland wasn’t an acceptable compromise, who would have been? And how could the Democrats have found that out, since apparently what the Republicans say is not evidence of anything? Are you sure that this ideal compromise candidate that you’re holding out for actually exists?

          • ashlael says:

            “And once again, what should Democrats have done?”

            Depends what their goals were.

            If their goal was to get a reliably strong leftist onto the court, they should have aimed to win the Senate and Presidency in 2016.

            If their goal was to get someone to the left of Scalia to take Scalia’s seat before November 2016, they should have nominated someone to the left of Scalia but to the right of Kennedy, who would not change the balance of power on the court.

            If their goal was to shift the balance of power on the court to the left before November 2016, I don’t think that there was actually a way to successfully do that, but nominating Garland was a good attempt.

            If the goal was to get someone, anyone, nominated by Obama confirmed, they should have nominated Neil Gorsuch.

            I think the revealed preference is that they tried initially to move the court to the left with a moderate pick, and when that failed decided instead to just try and win big in the election and get someone they really wanted instead.

          • Matt M says:

            And once again, what should Democrats have done?

            campaigned in Wisconsin

          • Erusian says:

            I fail to see how a candidate that some Republicans would vote for is not a compromise, simply because one specific Republican doesn’t like it. I’m pretty sure that “The majority leader’s personal approval is required for all nominees” is not one of the traditional norms we’re trying to protect.

            Calling McConnell ‘one specific Republican’ is disingenuous. McConnell was the chosen leader of the Senate Republicans and the Majority/Minority leaders have routinely represented their parties in Congressional negotiations for about two centuries. This is like claiming Obama’s opinion in trade matters was unimportant because he was just one Democrat…

            And by your standards, both of Trump’s nominees are compromise candidates. Both his nominees are meant to cause some Democratic votes to defect and the one that’s been voted on had some Democratic support. Therefore, the Republicans have been compromising with the Democrats in appointing Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. But I suspect you understand getting a few Democratic votes doesn’t make them a compromise when the other side does it.

            And once again, what should Democrats have done? If Garland wasn’t an acceptable compromise, who would have been? And how could the Democrats have found that out, since apparently what the Republicans say is not evidence of anything? Are you sure that this ideal compromise candidate that you’re holding out for actually exists?

            What did they say? You mean the quote from Hatch? You’re taking a single statement from before the confirmation hearing and pretending it is a binding promise. I get that it’s a thing in politics to pretend to listen to your opponents so that you can pretend to compromise without really doing so, and then paint them as unreasonable. But that doesn’t make it reality.

            And yes, I’m sure there could have been more compromise. Prior to roughly the past two decades, it was common for the President to bring in the other party’s leadership for decisions like this. That would have been a good start.

          • Garrett says:

            How do you think the Democrats would react if Trump nominated Merrick Garland to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, should she retire? Would that be viewed as an olive branch, or as re-shaping the ideology of the court?

          • Matt M says:

            How do you think the Democrats would react if Trump nominated Merrick Garland to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, should she retire?

            With righteous anger.

            Because that is the only emotion allowed in response to any Trumpian policy (with the possible exception of foreign warmongering)

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            How do you think Republicans would react to that?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            How do you think Republicans would react to that?

            To be honest I would laugh my ass off.

            I mean, I would prefer the reincarnation of Antonin Scalia, but appointing Garland to replace RBG would be worth it just for the troll factor.

          • Matt M says:

            How do you think Republicans would react to that?

            The same way they react to every Trump decision as well.

            The Trumpians would celebrate it as brilliant 4D chess, the Never Trumpers would howl about how pointless and idiotic and “not really conservative” it is.

          • Iain says:

            What did they say? You mean the quote from Hatch? You’re taking a single statement from before the confirmation hearing and pretending it is a binding promise. I get that it’s a thing in politics to pretend to listen to your opponents so that you can pretend to compromise without really doing so, and then paint them as unreasonable. But that doesn’t make it reality.

            Here’s a bunch of other quotes from Republicans praising Merrick Garland. The Hatch one is the most blatant example, because it happened in such close proximity to Garland’s nomination, but he was far from the only Republican who liked Garland.

            Did they try to compromise? Or did they try to do an end run around McConnell by nominating a candidate that was appealing to a few Republicans so that McConnell couldn’t keep party discipline? And then get outmaneuvered by McConnell in turn. Was McConnell consulted as to who the candidate would be? If he wasn’t, how does that qualify as listening to what the Republicans wanted?

            McConnell made it clear from day one that he was not going to confirm anybody Obama nominated: literally, about an hour after Scalia’s death was confirmed. How precisely do you think that consultation would have gone?

            From start to finish, McConnell openly refused to negotiate. The number of people in this discussion who nevertheless claim that the Garland nomination demonstrates Obama‘s failure to negotiate is a sign that McConnell’s calculation was successful: nobody on his side of the fence was going to stand up to him on principle, and nobody on the other side could do anything.

            (Compare this to the much-bemoaned filibustering of Bush’s appointees. Despite the much more targeted nature of the Democratic obstruction, you still saw a bunch of Democratic senators willing to buck their party and stand up for procedure.)

          • johansenindustries says:

            @Iain

            Do you think that if Obama had nominated Gorusch then there wouldn’t have been a vote. Are you sincere in your stance that the statement was some sort of cast-iron promise, that nothing Obama could do could make budge?

            You also seem to be agitating for a society where nobody can say anything nice about one’s opponent. I think society is better when a politician can call somebody ‘a fine man’ without being obliged to put his anti-2nd amendment butt on Scalia’s seat.

            Why should Obama been able to put Garland on the seat simply due to an unfortunate death and a couple of lily-rinos. The answer seems to be a sense of Democrat entitlement. There was an election going on whose main issue was precisely that sense of Democrat entitlement. And you lost.

            Imagine if Ginsburg dies in 2020 and Trump tries to fill the seat with a pro-border candidate, what you complain if the Democrats went ‘wait till the election is over’.

            (I object to Garland being called a moderate too. A moderate is someone like Kennedy or Roberts. What 5-4 would Garland have ever been on the opposite side of the liberals?)

          • Erusian says:

            @Iain
            I’m frankly getting frustrated with the failure to address my point. Please go reread and address it, because it was not ‘Republicans never said anything nice about Garland’ or ‘McConnell was acting in good faith and being reasonable’. You are trying to refute that, but that is not my point or even a pillar supporting one of my points. So you’re strawmanning.

            If you want to refute my point, no amount of talking about Republican’s actions is going to do it. You need to show that Democrat’s actions were not primarily intended to produce a partisan advantage. Because otherwise, my point that both parties act to maximize partisan advantage is still valid.

            In fact, you’re supporting it by piling up evidence about the Republicans acting in that manner (which is half of the necessary argument). You’re also kind of supporting it by pointing out that the Democrats were taking actions to win a fight that, in your mind as a Democrat (I’m guessing), they had to fight and could not negotiate over. But this is not a refutation of what I said in any way.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            @Conrad Honcho
            How did you feel about Merrick Garland’s appointment when it was an Obama move?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Also slightly trollish. The point of the politicization of the court isn’t who gets a seat but the overall ideological balance of the court. Replacing Scalia with Garland moves the court left (win for the Dems). Replacing RBG with Garland moves the court right (win for the Reps).

            Ultimately though it all came down to gamesmanship. Obama thought he couldn’t lose. Either he gets Garland and the court moves left, or McConnell refuses the vote, Hillary wins and appoints a genetically-modified-to-live-to-150 RBG clone and the court moves further left. McConnell rolled the dice and won.

          • CatCube says:

            @Matt M

            the Never Trumpers would howl about how pointless and idiotic and “not really conservative” it is.

            Because of course that would be the final insult of having Trump. The only reason to vote for Trump against Hillary is the judicial picks (seriously, everything I hated about Hillary–the shameless lying, the complete disregard of norms, the shady, grasping business practices, the sexual immorality and covering it up for political gain–Trump was as guilty of). The judicial picks are actually a reason to vote for Trump that I can respect. I didn’t vote for him because of it, since I’m in a deep-blue state that was going for Hillary even if she shot somebody in the head on live TV, but I’d have been really conflicted if I’d have been in a swing state.

            However, If we’re going to get the exact same ones, that even that rationalization disappears.

          • Matt M says:

            CatCube,

            I’ve heard that sort of opinion expressed before (my father takes the same position as you, only on the D side)… but I think it’s an extreme minority. I don’t think most voters know or care much about judicial picks. I don’t believe that’s a primary reason people voted for Trump.

            To the extent that anyone voted for Trump because of, say, his ability to “make deals,” picking a “moderate” justice, or even one that leans Democrat, could be easily excused so long as it was accompanied by some sort of supposed compromise from the left on some other issue.

            Anything Trump does that bucks convention looks good to the people who voted for him because he would buck convention. Notice how even his statements openly calling for gun control aren’t getting much pushback from his base – even though guns are one of the most solidly partisan issues that ever existed…

          • CatCube says:

            @Matt M

            The fact that his base isn’t pushing back against his gun control proposals is the most damning thing about his base yet. To be fair to them (and him), he’s as incoherent on this as he is on most other issues, so his worst statements on this don’t seem to have been translated into any actual policy.

            The lack of flaming indignation from the NRA when he floats this stuff has been one of the most disappointing things, as a card-carrying NRA member. They’re transitioning from a solid gun-rights group to just another right-wing pressure group slobbering all over the President’s knob. I can’t help but wonder if the NRA is getting fat and lazy after the victories in Heller, where they seem to think they can just coast on the Supreme Court–the same thing you see for the pro-choice crowd, and how’s that looking for them these days?

            If we can’t even police the alleged right-wing candidate, that doesn’t bode well when the inevitable Democrat takes office.

          • Matt M says:

            I don’t disagree necessarily, but I’m not sure you got my point.

            A whole lot of his base didn’t elect him because he was perfectly in-line with their preferred policy positions.

            They elected him specifically because he was a wild card. Specifically because he would turn over the tables, drain the swamp, whatever you want to call it.

            These people expect that, most of the time, his “burn it all down” strategy will work in their favor, but are willing to accept that it won’t always.

            If you voted for him hoping that he would cause chaos but generally in a way that favors you, well, a Republican President allowing for some trivial amount of gun control in exchange for (insert right-wing consideration X) might be acceptable. Because that’s a chaotic thing that no “normal” politician would do.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            The fact that his base isn’t pushing back against his gun control proposals is the most damning thing about his base yet.

            I think nobody cares that much about bump stocks.

          • Nornagest says:

            As far as I can tell, no one cares about bump stocks, but there was that one time that Diane Feinstein talked him into advocating an assault weapons ban.

            He walked that back pretty quick, though.

          • Matt M says:

            I think nobody cares that much about bump stocks.

            Right. And while I personally do still favor the “From my cold, dead, hands” approach, I do think Trump gains some political capital by being seen as willing to compromise on issues such as this.

            It seems indisputable that no other Republican President would have been willing to ban bump stocks. This makes it harder for the left to portray him as some sort of crazy right-wing extremist. Whether it’s “worth it” and whether he actually uses that political capital on anything benefiting the average conservative voter remains to be seen…

          • Iain says:

            It seems indisputable that no other Republican President would have been willing to ban bump stocks.

            Either I’m miscounting your negatives, or that word doesn’t mean what you think it means.

            Mitt Romney came out against bump stocks. (I recognize that he was never president, but I couldn’t find statements one way or the other from any other presidents / presidential candidates.) When even the NRA is calling for increased regulation of bump stocks, it hardly takes a bold maverick to agree with them.

          • cassander says:

            Refusing to confirm Merrick Garland is one thing. McConnell refused to even schedule hearings (let alone a vote).

            This is a distinction without difference. Not holding hearings is refusing to confirm, period. Getting upset at the particular parliamentary method used seems, at best, concern trolling.

          • Iain says:

            Not holding hearings is refusing to confirm, period. Getting upset at the particular parliamentary method used is, at best, concern trolling.

            I assume that you are completely supportive of the Democratic filibustering of Bush’s nominees, then? If the particular method used doesn’t matter, then I suppose all the complaints were just concern trolling, too. It is very big of you to admit that.

            Alternatively, we can admit that procedure matters.

          • J Mann says:

            Merrick Garland was a pretty reasonable consensus candidate, and McConnell calculated (IMHO riskily but ultimately correctly) that he could get a more conservative candidate by waiting.

            The process has generally seen an erosion of norms on both sides, at least since Bork and Biden’s slowdowns of the George H W Bush lower court nominees and probably before, but as the latest erosion, this did take the level of comity even lower, as will the next, I assume.

          • cassander says:

            @ian

            I assume that you are completely supportive of the Democratic filibustering of Bush’s nominees, then?

            Depends what you mean by supportive. I don’t agree with that decision, I don’t think that the rules should permit it, but the rules unquestionably did permit it, and their action was perfectly legitimate at the time.

            Alternatively, we can admit that procedure matters..

            Procedure does matter. Specifically, the letter of the procedure has to be followed. As long as it is, I’m not going to call shenanigans even if I disagree with the outcome, though I will cast aspersions on those who attempt to change the procedural rules in order to win a particular contest while said contest is ongoing.

        • Vosmyorka says:

          Should be noted that several leading Republican Senators indicated their support for a certain name on Obama’s list, that name being Brian Sandoval. Obama went with Garland instead, and refused to withdraw the nomination when the Senate refused to vote on it; the norms would’ve called for Garland being withdrawn and an alternate choice acceptable to the Senate found.

          • Iain says:

            You mean the guy who withdrew his name from contention less than 24 hours after it was publicly announced that he was being considered, after being soundly rejected by the only “leading Republican Senator” who mattered?

            After The Washington Post published news of Sandoval’s consideration Wednesday, GOP leaders insisted that Obama nominating a Republican would make no difference.

            Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who on Tuesday pledged “no action” on any Supreme Court nomination before the election, said in a statement that the nominee “will be determined by whoever wins the presidency in the fall.”

            The No. 2 Senate Republican leader, Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, said likewise: “This is not about the personality.”

            When your suggestion is “hey, why didn’t Obama just nominate the Republican governor of Nevada”, and the answer is “because the Republicans said they wouldn’t confirm him”, I think it’s safe to say that Obama’s choice of nominee wasn’t the problem here.

          • ashlael says:

            “When your suggestion is “hey, why didn’t Obama just nominate the Republican governor of Nevada”, and the answer is “because the Republicans said they wouldn’t confirm him”, I think it’s safe to say that Obama’s choice of nominee wasn’t the problem here.”

            No, I don’t think that’s at all safe to say. Obama could have nominated Neil Gorsuch. Neil Gorsuch would have been confirmed easily by the Republican controlled Senate.

            Obviously he was never going to nominate Neil Gorsuch. Obama doesn’t want Neil Gorsuch on the court. He wants someone a long way to the left of Neil Gorsuch.

            But the point is that the purpose of blocking Garland was to hold the seat open for a candidate they liked better. There would be no point if there was no one they liked better.

            It was absolutely about the nominee.

          • Deiseach says:

            When your suggestion is “hey, why didn’t Obama just nominate the Republican governor of Nevada”, and the answer is “because the Republicans said they wouldn’t confirm him”, I think it’s safe to say that Obama’s choice of nominee wasn’t the problem here.

            The problem is a lack of trust, but I don’t think it’s confined to one side only.

            If a Republican president said he’d nominate a Democrat, would the Democrats automatically confirm them, or would they think “If he wants that guy, then we don’t”? Because it’s natural to think if the opposition are willing to do a deal with someone on your side, it’s because they anticipate they can get gains from that person.

            Isn’t that the whole reasoning behind the Trump/Russia thing – Putin acted to put someone in the White House he felt would be sympathetic to Russian interests, or at least could be manipulated to Russia’s benefit?

          • Iain says:

            @ashlael:

            See my post above. There is a meaningful difference between “this nominee is too far left, and will not be confirmed” and “we preemptively reject the possibility that there is any overlap between your nominees and the set of candidates who are acceptable to us”.

            In a world where the president can’t even get a vote on his Supreme Court nominee unless he ignores his own party and nominates the other side’s ideal candidate, something has gone badly wrong.

      • EchoChaos says:

        They’re only implying that because they’re losing.

        Merrick Garland was substantially to the left of Scalia, so replacing Scalia with anyone short of Gorsuch was making the court more politicized (to the left).

        Note that Hillary Clinton never promised to appoint Garland to the seat that was supposedly stolen from him? That’s because she expected to have a Democratic Senate and to be able to appoint a far left Justice to move the balance of the Court left.

        Nobody had any issue with replacing Byron White (who actually for real voted against Roe v. Wade) with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which shifted the Court sharply to the left.

        In a world where Hillary Clinton and a Democratic Senate hold the reins, she’s appointed two Ginsburgs to replace Scalia and Kennedy (and probably Ginsburg), and the media is just going to say “shoulda won the election”.

    • cassander says:

      Naturally, this will lead to something like two-thirds of states banning abortion and a large culture war fight, with the Democrats on the defensive.

      This is what the democrats believe will happen, but I think it’s wildly implausible. States will impose some restrictions on abortion timelines, but I would be shocked if there was any more than that.

      • Iain says:

        Prepare to be shocked, then. As HBC points out below, four states have already passed laws to ban abortion that will trigger the moment Roe v. Wade is overturned, and a number of others still have unenforceable abortion bans on the books that would presumably swing back into effect.

        • cassander says:

          Legislatures love passing meaningless symbolic legislation when there are no consequences for doing so. Taking such statements at face value is not a good way of predicting actual policy outcomes.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            So you think these same legislatures, filled with representatives who have pledged to a platform of outlawing abortion*, will now pass legislation repealing that which they enacted?

            *Not hyperbole:

            Faithful to the “self-evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.

          • albatross11 says:

            Just because it was meaningless symbolic legisliation when it was passed doesn’t mean they’ll pay the political cost to repeal it when it becomes actually effective. What might happen, though, is that re-legalization of abortion becomes a political issue in some of those states, and that leads to different people getting elected who will repeal those laws.

            On the other hand, as long as transportation within the US is relatively cheap, there’s a pretty obvious pressure-release valve–if there’s an abortion ban in Missouri and Indiana but not in Illinois, then there will be a bunch of abortion clinics and associated hotels on the borders of Illinois with those states. Gambling is illegal in Utah, which is great for the economy of Wendover, NV. Something similar could easily happen w.r.t. Belleville, IL.

          • cassander says:

            @HeelBearCub says:

            So you think these same legislatures, filled with representatives who have pledged to a platform of outlawing abortion*, will now pass legislation repealing that which they enacted?

            You mean the same way they ran on repealing the ACA for 6 years, then didn’t repeal it? Yeah, I think that’s a pretty safe bet.

            In the unlikely event that roe falls, those laws will suddenly have consequences, and their popularity will dramatically fall. Compromise bills amending them will be rushed through legislatures, likely before the first subsequent election but certainly after it.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @cassander:
            That is an asinine answer.

            The corralary would be something like SCOTUS invalidating the ACA as written. Do you think Republicans would have passed legislation to fix whatever SCOTUS had undone? No agreement on legislation would be required to let it fail, it would just fail. And they would celebrate it.

            Assuming SCOTUS invalidates Roe, that’s what they’ll do in those 4 states. Celebrate (at the very least in public regardless of how they feel in private).

            The sea change required for them to come to consensus on repealing that which they have explicitly promised for year upon year would do even more irreparable damage to the party than the Trump/never Trump split has. They can’t afford to lose the evangelicals too.

          • cassander says:

            @HeelBearCub:

            The corralary would be something like SCOTUS invalidating the ACA as written. Do you think Republicans would have passed legislation to fix whatever SCOTUS had undone?

            Had there been a huge political movement passionately devoted to defending an ACA that had been around for 40 years, yes absolutely. Of course, Had there been a huge political movement passionately devoted to defending an ACA that had been around for 40 years, then SCOTUS never would have repealed it, just like SCOTUS is ever going to flat out strike down Roe.

            Assuming SCOTUS invalidates Roe, that’s what they’ll do in those 4 states. Celebrate (at the very least in public regardless of how they feel in private).

            Some people will. And others will condemn it, they’ll be backed by the enormous power of blue tribe, and a compromise will emerge.

            The sea change required for them to come to consensus on repealing that which they have explicitly promised for year upon year would do even more irreparable damage to the party than the Trump/never Trump split has. They can’t afford to lose the evangelicals too.

            They’ve been failing to deliver what the evangelicals want for decades, and they haven’t gone anywhere. They failed to deliver on the ACA and they didn’t go anywhere. You’re massively exaggerating the power of the anti-abortion lobby, and ignoring completely the power of the pro-choice lobby.

          • Iain says:

            They’ve been failing to deliver what the evangelicals want for decades, and they haven’t gone anywhere. They failed to deliver on the ACA and they didn’t go anywhere. You’re massively exaggerating the power of the anti-abortion lobby, and ignoring completely the power of the pro-choice lobby.

            Yes, fear the mighty power of the pro-choice lobby in … Mississippi, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Louisiana.

            The system is biased towards the legal status quo. Republicans failed to repeal the ACA because it required actively doing something and they couldn’t come to a consensus on what to do. Thus, the ACA stayed on the books.

            If Roe v Wade is overturned, then the laws on the books will trigger, and it will be a felony in four states to perform or prescribe an abortion. This will continue to be true until Republicans agree to overturn those laws.

            You seem to think that the Republican failure to pass base-pleasing legislation is a sign they would succeed in passing base-enraging legislation. That’s nuts. If the Republicans can’t get the votes together to abolish a law they spent seven years demonizing, how in the world do you expect them to reverse a policy they’ve been promising for decades?

            Passing legislation is harder than not passing legislation. Passing legislation your base likes is harder than passing legislation your base hates. This is not rocket science.

          • Matt M says:

            I’m with Iain and HBC on this.

            In the (in my opinion very unlikely) event that Roe v Wade is overturned, I would, in fact, expect some of the deep red states, with little to no blue opposition, to make abortion outright illegal – or at least to do everything within their power to do so (I’m sure some random federal judge in Hawaii will block it somehow – because that seems to be how things work these days)

            I see no reason to suspect that Alabama or Mississippi would sit around and wait on this, out of fear of the feminist movement striking out against them or something.

      • Erusian says:

        My guess is that swing state Republicans won’t do it. But if you add swing states and Democratic strongholds, there’s, very generously, 20. The other 30 states are red strongholds.

        Two thirds might be too many, since I know they’re not uniform. But I find it hard to believe that places run by Republicans who are largely anti-abortion won’t ban abortion. Or at least heavily restrict it. A lot of them already pass what are basically bad faith laws to try and de facto ban it. (Obligatory mention the Dems do this too on other issues.)

  3. fahertym says:

    From the Air Rage article –

    “Researcher Keith Payne has found something surprising: When people flying coach are forced to walk past the pampered first-class flyers in the front of the plane, the likelihood of some sort of air rage incident rises sharply.

    In his 2017 book The Broken Ladder, Payne, a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina, argues that humans are hardwired to notice relative differences. When we’re reminded that we’re poorer or less powerful than others, we become less healthy, more angry, and more politically polarized.”

    So the problem is that under conditions of inequality, the less well off people get angry/annoyed/disturbed/depressed/jealous at being less well off. The proposed solution is to make the more well off people less well off.

    Why isn’t the solution to convince the less well off people to not be as angry/annoyed/disturbed/depressed/jealous at their predicament?

    Maybe that very question sounds evil and privileged (maybe it is), but it seems easier to adjust some individuals’ psychological state and outlook than to restructure the entire economy and society at large.

    If you take the problem away from society and down to an individual level, it seems clearer. If I had a friend who had an ok job, made ok money, had a girlfriend he generally liked, and basically had all the trappings of an ordinary middle class Western lifestyle… but who was completely miserable and constantly rambled about how much he hates his life because there are other people in the country who have cooler jobs, higher incomes, hotter girlfriends, and what he perceives to be better lives… I would suggest that my friend seek therapy and reexamine his outlook on life. I would not suggest that he join a political campaign to advocate for heavy taxes on the rich.

    • Baeraad says:

      If you take the problem away from society and down to an individual level, it seems clearer.

      I think the situation is very different on those two levels. When you’re operating on a social level, you deal with laws and rules. Those can force people to do one thing and and not another, give them things or take them away, but they aren’t particularly effective at changing hearts and minds. When you’re operating on an individual level, you frequently have extremely little ability to actually change the environment you live in, but you do have the ability to have the sort of in-depth conversations and emotional connections that can actually change someone’s attitude over time.

      • Berna says:

        On an intermediate level, air lines could put the best seats in the back instead, so economy passengers don’t have to pass through the first class.

        • Matt M says:

          Unless you also board and exit from the rear, the “best seats” can’t be in the back. Quick boarding/departing process is a significant part of what makes them “best”

          • Radu Floricica says:

            Well yes, but from a strictly logistical point of view, fastest overall boarding process is the one that boards passengers from rear to front. This way you never have to pass someone stowing their baggage – you always walk an empty hallway.

            Never really understood why they don’t even try to do that.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            I can think of at least one reason. Some people who sit toward the back stow their overhead in the front, presumably so they don’t have to carry it as far. If you load back to front, you might see front passengers with no place for their overhead baggage, despite plenty of room in the back.

        • poignardazur says:

          Some airports use two entry points: the one that starts at the first class seats, and the one that starts at the economy seats.

    • j r says:

      My understanding is that the price of an economy class ticket is pretty heavily subsidized by business/first class fares (as well as by last-minute bookers). From the perspective of pure rationality, sharing that information with the folks who got discounted seats should assuage some of those angry feelings. But in the real world, there are lots of people who would get even angrier at the suggestion that they were being made better off by someone else getting premium service. That is, some people get positive utility from the belief that those in better material situations are somehow undeserving. Likewise, there a plenty of people in relatively well-off situations who get positive utility from the belief that those who are less well-off do deserve their situations.

      All of that tells me that there are real, material reasons for a certain level of distribution (e.g. making sure that people are fed, housed and educated to a certain objective level), but that redistribution with the goal of making people better off in terms of their subjective feelings about themselves or about the fairness of society is a pipe dream. It’s a Red Queen situation, no matter how much you equalize, you’ll just have to redistribute more to get the same utility fix.

      • fahertym says:

        “Likewise, there a plenty of people in relatively well-off situations who get positive utility from the belief that those who are less well-off do deserve their situations.”

        Maybe the best solution to this problem is to invite hordes of dirt-poor third world immigrants to set up shanty towns in America. Then poor-by-American-standards Americans will have their own creepy, unhealthy psychological fix to get them through the day.

    • Guy in TN says:

      Why isn’t the solution to convince the less well off people to not be as angry/annoyed/disturbed/depressed/jealous at their predicament?

      Why doesn’t the fox just convince the rabbit that it should enjoy being eaten? Turn it into a win-win scenario. Easy-peasy.

      • j r says:

        In what sense is the person sitting in the discounted economy class seat being “eaten” by the person in the business class seat?

        That’s the important question. All the rest is pablum.

        • Guy in TN says:

          The thing about property ownership, is if you own it, that means someone else doesn’t.

          At the most basic level, if you have resources that would make my life better, and you don’t share those with me, then you are making my life worse. Like, my life would be better if you didn’t exist, and I was able to access those resources without you in the way.

          Property ownership doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

          • Baron von Neuron says:

            Except most of the time, if the resource owner didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be any resource for you to take in the first place.

          • Guy in TN says:

            What’s the correlation between ownership and creation of a resource? We don’t live in a system that distributes property on that basis. Inheritance, rent, interest, passive income from capital ownership, welfare…what’s left after you subtract all that?

            There’s also the whole naturally-existing resource issue, which can’t just be brushed under the rug.

          • Baron von Neuron says:

            The correlation is very simple: the original owner of a resource is whoever created it.

            Then it can be exchanged or granted to someone, which is why the resource creator and current owner aren’t always the same person.

          • j r says:

            I’m not sure what that has to do with how business class ticket holders are eating the folks in economy, so I guess that we’re going for the pablum.

            That’s fine. In my experience, if you are really the kind of person who feels harmed by interactions with someone who has something that you don’t or has more of something, then there’s not much I can say to change your mind.

            Personally, I’ve found that to be an unproductive mode of being. The world is not zero sum and it doesn’t become zero sum just because we believe that it is.

          • Murphy says:

            @Baron von Neuron

            Apart from the gigantic portion of material wealth that’s not actually created by someone.

            or as geolibertarians put it “you have the right to the fruits of your labor but your labor didn’t make the land”

            The “get what you grab” style libertarianism though loves the “mixing” precept.

            You have to do some crazy mental gymnastics to shoehorn the wealth creation narrative in to cover the huge fraction of wealth that boils down to “my grandpappy hammered some stakes into the corners of these fields…. hence the hundred million dollars worth of oil underneath them is the ‘fruits of my labor'”

            Kinda punches a hole through a large fraction of the philosophical system if you don’t glue the “mixing” hack on the side though.

            Plus it sort of grandfathers in conquest such that old money families who got their wealth from being drinking buddies with the king and murdering peasants get a philosophical free pass once it’s been laundered through at least one individual who didn’t get the wealth through violence… leaving another gaping hole in the otherwise very pretty philosophy.

          • gbdub says:

            TFW you realize your antisocial reaction is so old they named a Deadly Sin for it.

          • 10240 says:

            @Murphy In a modern economy the value of agricultural land is a small fraction of assets. (US agricultural land value is ~2 trillion vs. a total asset value of ~270 trillion and a net worth of ~124 trillion). I don’t think mineral assets are that big of a fraction either. (In most countries those are separate from land ownership and often come with royalty payments to the government, or they were sold by the government at some point, though the US may be different.)

            I’m sympathetic to geolibertarianism, and I don’t agree with the homestead principle. I just think that this question makes little difference to a modern economy. And that large-scale land confiscation or redistribution would have a major disruptive effect on investor confidence for comparatively little benefit, so it’s not worth it at this point.

          • Guy in TN says:

            The correlation is very simple: the original owner of a resource is whoever created it.

            1. All resources are originally sourced from the natural world. Not created by people.

            2. Our legal property system isn’t based on the theories of the homestead principle, anyway. You’re defending the system based on claiming it upholds values that it never purported to uphold.

          • 10240 says:

            All resources are originally sourced from the natural world. Not created by people.

            Only a tiny fraction of the value of a building, machine etc. comes from the natural resources that were used to create it.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            How much comes from the labour?

          • Guy in TN says:

            Only a tiny fraction of the value of a building, machine etc. comes from the natural resources that were used to create it.

            Its true that they have both improved and unimproved aspects. I don’t know why the logical conclusion is “therefore this resource should be owned by me, because I improved on aspects of it”, anymore than “therefore, this resource should not be claimed as my own, because there remains unimproved aspects to it”.

            My take, is that this moral system of determining property ownership via “homesteading” is a dead end, and utilitarian arguments are far more persuasive (e.g., “property rights incentivize production”, ect)

        • beleester says:

          The issue isn’t the exact thing the fox is doing to the rabbit. The issue is that “just convince people to want X” is not a trivial or even achievable action for most X. You can’t just hack a utility function to say whatever you want, and if you could, our society would look very weird.

          “Convince people to not envy people with more stuff” seems about as achievable as “convince a rabbit not to run from a fox,” “convince corporations to not maximize profits,” “convince Republicans to vote for abortion rights,” or “convince a depressed person not to be depressed.” Just because it’s simple to describe doesn’t make it easy or possible.

          EDIT: Especially since you need to implement a solution on a societal level. Given enough time and patience, you could probably train a rabbit to not be scared of foxes. But training all rabbits not to be scared of foxes would be the world’s largest ecological engineering program.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          “In what sense is the person sitting in the discounted economy class seat being “eaten” by the person in the business class seat?”

          In the sense that being in too small a space for hours is bad for people.

          • j r says:

            How is that being caused by the person in business class? The airline could eliminate premium seats, but the result isn’t going to be more space for economy. It’s going to be more small economy seats.

            You could make the whole plane some version of premium economy, but that would mean that everyone would have to pay more and some people would be priced out of flying. How is that a more just outcome?

          • Guy in TN says:

            Given a society with vast wealth disparities, I support a tiered airline seating system. It’s like a value menu at a restaurant. I think it would be better to live in a society where a tiered system isn’t necessary, and I intend on fighting to achieve that equality, but banning the tiered system doesn’t get you there.

            My objections were regarding fahertym’s mid-post arguing that we should condition people to be more accepting of their subservient position in life.

          • j r says:

            @Guy in Tn

            What is it about sitting in economy class that makes someone subservient to the person sitting in business class? I fly a good deal, mostly in business class for work and economy for personal trips. My company pays for business class because they expect me to fly long distances across multiple time zones and be ready to represent them competently when I arrive. I mostly fly economy on my personal trips because the extra expense is not worth it. While certainly less comfortable, there is nothing about my flights in economy that strike me as subservient.

            fahertym is right. If you perceive every situation in which someone has more of something than you do as exploitation, lefty politics isn’t going to save you. For one thing, the revolution ain’t coming. And if it does, it will just be an excuse for some group to take power and impose some other hierarchy. Even if your dreams came true and you ended up in a society that actively redistributed the means of production and all of their outputs, there would still be people who are taller, people who are smarter, more charming, more politically favored. And those same feelings of inadequacy and resentment will start to creep back in.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Even if your dreams came true and you ended up in a society that actively redistributed the means of production and all of their outputs, there would still be people who are taller, people who are smarter, more charming, more politically favored

            Intrinsic traits vs. actions that effect others.

            And those same feelings of inadequacy and resentment will start to creep back in.

            Just to be perfectly clear: If you think the left’s opposition to income inequality is about envy, jealousy, inadequacy, or even “feelings”, you are crashing and burning the ideological Turning Test.

          • j r says:

            Just to be perfectly clear: If you think the left’s opposition to income inequality is about envy, jealousy, inadequacy, or even “feelings”, you are crashing and burning the ideological Turning Test.

            Agree to disagree. I happen to think that ressentiment is the most powerful political force that there is. And I think that applies across the political spectrum. The same feelings that lead some on the left to blame the rich for most of their problems leads some on the right to scapegoat immigrants.

          • Aapje says:

            @Guy in TN

            Do you think that people on the left are übermenschen/Gods who are not subject to human feelings? That would be remarkable.

            Or perhaps not really, because there truly seems to be a decent subset on the left who think only the right appeal to emotions with populism, while everything that the left calls for comes from cold rational thinking.

            However, such a belief is quite irrational and presumably caused at least in part by human feelings…

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Aapje

            Saying that the objection to income inequality is because of “feelings”, implies that the harm is primarily non-physical. (Not really wanting to wade into mind/body debate here, that’s just how the term is normally used).

            Now its true, that people on the left have strong feelings about income inequality, but these feelings are not the stated rationale for their objection.

            For example, a slave has strong feelings about slavery. He is very mad about it! But to say “the slave is opposed to slavery, because it hurts his feelings, as evidenced by him feeling sad and angry” is confusing the cause and the effect.

          • Matt M says:

            Are you seriously comparing the physical circumstances of a slave being whipped by his master with those of someone sitting in coach being relatively more uncomfortable than someone sitting in first class?

          • Aapje says:

            @Guy in TN

            I think that most people’s stated rationale is a rationalization. It’s often possible to get them to change their stated rationale to a different one or demonstrate a strong inconsistency in what evidence they will accept or such, by pointing out logical conclusions of their rationale that don’t fit their revealed preferences*. Somehow they nearly always shift to a different rationale that results in the same conclusions or only accept the evidence as valid that results in those conclusions and/or benefits the same group. This is quite telling and strongly suggests that you merely made them alter their stated rationale or made them come up with rationalizations for cherry picking, to justify their feelings-based beliefs in a different way.

            Your slavery example doesn’t actually have a stated rationale. You merely explain that the slave has angry feelings. This is fully consistent with my claims and doesn’t seem to make your claims more plausible.

            The human mind responds with anger at perceived unfairness and mistreatment. What is considered fair or not heavily depends on enculturation, where a lot of that actually works on quite short time scales, with people adopting the social norms of their group rather rapidly. If everyone would truly reason their way to their political positions, you wouldn’t see societies going through these rapid mood swings.

            * Because most people are not that competent at rationalizing. We are better at it, which is why we are called rationalists 😛

          • Guy in TN says:

            [1850’s Alabama, a slave is tied to a whipping post]

            Slaveowner: [whipping] I will make you pay, dumb slave!
            Slave: Please stop, this is awful
            Slaveower: [sarcastically] Oh, I’m sorry, did I hurt your feelings?
            Slave: You are actually hurting a lot more than that. I will probably die
            Slaveowner: YOUR STATED RATIONALE IS A RATIONALIZATION
            Slave: What you say is true, of course. I have arrived at the conclusion that whipping me is a bad thing, not from a prioiri reasoning, but working backwards from the sense I have that dying is bad. If counter factually, I was in the position of doing the whipping, I would probably find ways to rationalize my position, just as you have.
            Slaveowner: Exactly!
            Slave: But, even if we admit that both positions are based on feelings, that doesn’t mean we have to abandon all language that describes the physical portions of reality.
            Slaveowner: [still whipping] But how can I trust that you are describing reality accurately? You just admitted that you would change sides, if given the chance. Why can’t I just dismiss all your complaints as “feelings”?
            Slave That’s it- right there! It’s an isolated demand for rigor. You are dismissing my complaints as “feelings”, while only tacitly admitting that everyone’s is, once intellectually cornered about it. You never normally say “I want to keep my slave plantation, because to do otherwise would be to hurt my feelings”. You talk about the high production of cotton, how you stimulate the local economy, the social problems with granting slaves legal equality. It’s only when I start voicing my concerns that they get described as “feelings”.
            Slaveowner: You know what? You’re just envious of my position. Don’t you know jealousy is a sin? [keeps whipping]

            (Your comment is good Aapje, and I basically agree with it. I’m just teasing out the implications of applying this reasoning too broadly)

          • Aapje says:

            @Guy in TN

            Or:

            Slave owner: [whipping and lynching]
            Slave: You are killing me, pal (and not figuratively)
            Lincoln: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. So stop with the whipping and lynching, yo!
            Slave: Listen to the man. I am equal and deserve to have my inalienable Right of Life respected, dude
            Slave owner: Your solid argument and the fact that I lost the civil war and thus have no choice convinced me to free you
            Ex-slave: Thanks, I’ll go back to beating my wife half to death
            Slave owner: Wait, what about the inalienable Right of Life?
            Ex-slave: It’s ‘all men are created equal,’ buddy, not men and women, duh
            Slave owner: Nice rationalization, which is almost the same as the one I used in the past to justify abusing blacks. We seem to be more alike than I thought. Wanna get some cornbread and gumbo?

        • vV_Vv says:

          In what sense is the person sitting in the discounted economy class seat being “eaten” by the person in the business class seat?

          Status awareness is a major component of the value system of most people.

          Trying to convince people not to be annoyed when they are publicly humbled is similar to trying to convince them not to be annoyed when they are punched in the face.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’ve never found walking past business class to be particularly humbling. It’s just bigger seats. It’s not like it comes with a knighthood.

            Usually the people in them don’t even look very high-status. Probably because they’re recipients of an upgrade, or people traveling for business on the company’s dime.

          • bean says:

            I’ve actually flown business class. And it was international business, not the crummy imitation that we have on domestic airlines. It was great, but I never had any inclination to lord it over those in the back. (Admittedly, traveling internationally for the first time may have meant I had other things on my mind.)

            On the other hand, going through the pre-check line at airport security always makes me want to cackle and lord it over those stuck in the regular line. I wonder if the regular line contributes to air rage. (On the other hand, you’d have to control for experience with travel very well, because all the frequent fliers are in the pre-check line.)

          • Nornagest says:

            Oh yeah. Going through the TSA is definitely humbling. Line up for getting ritually groped by The System, boys and girls.

            But if I felt so inclined, pre-check or global pass or whatever they call it is a lot cheaper than flying business class. I just don’t fly enough for it to be a good investment.

          • Matt M says:

            I feel like people who don’t have pre-check don’t appreciate the advantages of it. They see shorter lines (sometimes, although this advantage is becoming less pronounced!) and think “I can live without that.”

            What they don’t necessarily see is the dramatic improvement in experience in terms of not having to remove shoes, laptops, 311 liquids, etc.

            Also the fact that shorter lines = less stressed TSA employees = friendlier TSA employees

            Pre-check is worth it’s weight in gold. I’d happily pay 10 times what it cost.

          • Nornagest says:

            You don’t need to remove shoes, belts, etc. in Canadian security, either. Not initially. But when I went through their metal detector, it lit up like a Christmas tree, and then I had to take off everything I was wearing with metal on it, one piece at a time between sweeps with a wand. It ended up taking like five minutes and would have been a lot less of a pain just to do it in line. I expect pre-check would be similar.

            (I’ve never paid attention to the liquids thing, and not paying attention to it has never gotten me in trouble.)

          • vV_Vv says:

            Security checks seem very inconsistent between countries, airports, or even at different times at the same airport.

            Sometimes you have to take the shoes and belt off, sometimes you don’t, laptop must be out of the bag on its own tray, or not, the machines are different, at minimum x-ray for the bags and metal detector for the person, but sometimes there are body scanners, explosive checks on the bags or on the hands, groping may or may not occur, sometimes there is a second security checkpoint right before the gate whose only apparent function is to take away the overpriced water bottle you purchased after the main security checkpoint.

            The list of items allowed in the cabin also makes little sense: a sealed coca cola can is banned, but a cigarette lighter or medication inhaler, containing pressurized flammable gas, is allowed.

            It’s security theater at it’s finest.

          • bean says:

            Oh yeah. Going through the TSA is definitely humbling. Line up for getting ritually groped by The System, boys and girls.

            It’s not even seeing other people humbled, as it is seeing airport security become a non-issue. You walk up, put your cell phone somewhere where it will go through the X-ray machine, take off anything with lots of metal (my glasses and watch have never given any trouble) and go through. The line usually isn’t bad, and it moves faster than the regular one, too. It’s wonderful. Last time I flew, I was through security in about 5 minutes, and didn’t have to laboriously reassemble my person afterwards.

          • disposablecat says:

            @nornagest: They’ve started requesting people in line at pre-check to do this, at least the last time I was in SEA. As a relatively frequent flyer, my strategy for pre-check is:

            -check everything you possibly can
            -for the things you actually need on the flight (Kindle, laptop + brick, headphones, USB battery, maybe a charger), small single-strap backpack as a carry-on (this lets you very easily swing it around the front of your body to access it, while moving, without taking it off); I think my current one is from some random Amazon 3P merchant called Arcenciel
            -wear gym shorts, sneakers, and a light t-shirt to the airport and on the flight
            -while in line at pre-check, place everything you have on you, which should basically just be cell/wallet/watch, in your backpack
            -send backpack through x-ray, breeze through metal detector with your shoes on
            -recover items from backpack while walking to gate

            Agreed with Matt M that pre-check’s actual screening experience is worth its weight in gold, even aside from the shorter lines. It feels almost pre-9/11.

      • Baron von Neuron says:

        But the fox isn’t going to eat the rabbit. It is the rabbits who are plotting to eat the fox, because they are unable to provide for themselves. The fox, on the other hand, offers the rabbits to work for it in exchange for food.

        • Guy in TN says:

          The fox, on the other hand, offers the rabbits to work for it in exchange for food.

          Why would the rabbits take that offer? There’s apparently enough of them to take the food the fox has, deal or no deal. Go for it, little guys.

          • Baron von Neuron says:

            (moral reason) It was the fox who has produced the food, either by working himself or organising other workers via voluntary exchange.

            (factual reason) The fox is smarter and has sharper teeth, and that is also why it’s a fox to begin with.

          • Guy in TN says:

            If the fox can just kill the rabbits anyway, why isn’t it making them its slaves? Seems like the rabbits must have some power here, whether the fox wants to admit it or not.

          • Baron von Neuron says:

            Why would the fox want to kill the rabbits, though? The fox wants to have voluntary, mutually beneficial exchanges with the rabbits — which means beneficial for both the rabbits *and* the fox.

            Most of the rabbits also understand that. While they may not possess the prowess of the fox, which means they can’t get as prosperous as the fox, they still are better off with it than without: after all, the fox only ever proposes voluntary exchange. If the rabbits don’t want to do it, they can simply decline, and proceed to get along peacefully. Some of these rabbits are jealous of the fox. They believe that, if they try hard enough, one day they will be able to outcompete the fox.

            Some other rabbits, on the other hand, are jealous of the fox too.
            But they don’t really think they can out-produce or out-smart the fox, so they simply want to rob it. Will they succeed in that? Sometimes they do, but usually not for a long time — after all, they didn’t learn how to grow carrots; only how to rob foxes.

    • Guy in TN says:

      Or alternatively:

      “Why isn’t the solution to convince the wealthy people to not be as angry/annoyed/disturbed/depressed/jealous when their property is mass-appropriated?”

      If I had a friend who had an ok job, made ok money, had a girlfriend he generally liked, and basically had all the trappings of an ordinary middle class Western lifestyle… but who was completely miserable and constantly rambled about how much he hates his life because there are other people in the country who have cooler jobs, higher incomes, hotter girlfriends, and what he perceives to be better lives… I would suggest that my friend seek therapy and reexamine his outlook on life. I would not suggest that he join a political campaign to advocate for heavy taxes on the rich.

      If the rich ramble on too much about how they think this is unfair, I would suggest therapy rather than joining conservative or libertarian political movements.

      Just some simple, good-faith advice, ya’ know

      • EchoChaos says:

        Because the problem isn’t whether or not the rich are mad about it, but if the rich will stop producing if it happens.

        Most rich people produce an amount of wealth that MASSIVELY exceeds their ability to consume it. Bill Gates will never in his entire lifetime spend the billions he has created.

        The fact that we can buy off his creation with mere private jets and yachts, the cost of which pales in comparison to the wealth created, is staggering.

        If evenly distributed communist countries could produce that much wealth, you’d have an argument. But they can’t.

        • dick says:

          Most rich people produce an amount of wealth that MASSIVELY exceeds their ability to consume it.

          Boy oh boy do I not believe this. Got a citation?

          • EchoChaos says:

            I don’t, but I can’t understand how you wouldn’t believe this.

            There are essentially three types of people in the world. Those who are net producers of wealth, those who are net neutral and those who are net consumers.

            To become wealthy, you are by definition creating large amounts of wealth. If you have wealth remaining at the end of your life, as virtually all rich people do, then you are a net producer, often on the order of millions more than you consumed.

            Unless you think that the majority of the wealthy in the world are heirs who are just in the temporary state of burning down familial wealth (probably false, given Scott’s post about rentiers previously), then you must concede that most of the currently living wealthy are producing more than they consume.

          • Lambert says:

            I feel like we’re not defining ‘creating wealth’ properly.

            Is it value created or value going to you?
            The winner of a zero-sum game creates wealth for themselves, at the expense of someone else. (As do thieves and rent seekers)

            A philanthropist will often create wealth for the world at large, but not themselves.

            Normal people do both. They create a certain amount of wealth and receive a certain proportion of that wealth, depending on market forces.

            By introducing entirely new products, entrepreneurs are capable of generating far more consumer surplus than what they earn.
            Though the value doesn’t look like dollars. It looks like the utility to them of buying Windows, or whatever.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            To become wealthy, you are by definition creating large amounts of wealth.

            “By definition” overstates the case. Say instead that, in the usual case where someone becomes wealthy by doing business with a lot of people who have the option not to deal with him, denying that he’s created a lot of wealth involves multiplying stupid people beyond necessity.

          • dick says:

            To become wealthy, you are by definition creating large amounts of wealth.

            Warren Buffett is really wealthy. What did he create?

          • EchoChaos says:

            Warren Buffett created investment capital, which is what we call it when someone provides his own wealth (at the risk of losing it) to someone else to do business in exchange for a return.

            Had he been bad at this, he would instead be poor and unheralded.

            Investment capital allows someone with a great idea and the drive of hard work to massively multiply his force while giving a return to the capitalist. It’s one of the great achievements of our time.

          • dick says:

            Warren Buffett created investment capital… Had he been bad at this, he would instead be poor and unheralded.

            …and other than him and his kids, the world would be poorer how exactly? How (in terms of creating wealth) is he different from a very successful poker player?

            You’re conflating “wealth” in the sense of value and “wealth” in the sense of money. They’re not the same thing; the world is improved when the former is created, but not when the latter is. Sometimes they get created at the same time by the same person, but certainly not always*; lots of rich people get that way by betting for/against the people who produce value or extracting rent from them. I suspect that’s the more common way, but I don’t know how one would realistically try to measure that.

            Edit: to be clear, I agree that lending money to entrepreneurs is indeed a useful and wealth-producing (in both senses of “wealth”) activity; but I don’t think that’s how Buffett made his money.

          • Nornagest says:

            …and other than him and his kids, the world would be poorer how exactly? How (in terms of creating wealth) is he different from a very successful poker player?

            A lot of other people wouldn’t have had the money to make their own successful products and services, so some of those products and services now wouldn’t exist. Like the rest of the comment you’re replying to said. Investment capital is not gambling on a company in the sense of gambling on a horse; it’s an exchange where you give the company money and they give you an ownership stake (that you hope will be worth something later). If they didn’t need that money in order to create value, they wouldn’t be selling stock; they’d just be creating value and pocketing the proceeds themselves.

            This is not a conflation of wealth and value. There’s a layer of indirection between wealth-provision and value-creation, but the value-creation is still happening.

          • ana53294 says:

            …and other than him and his kids, the world would be poorer how exactly? How (in terms of creating wealth) is he different from a very successful poker player?

            Didn’t Warren Buffet step in to save the Bank of America?

            His incredible skills in investing and shareholders trust in him meant that he was able to step into a company that was in deep trouble, may have needed federal money and support, and make out like a bandit.

            Sure, he made money. But was anybody else in a position as comfortable as he was to go there, offer them cash, and extort the preferred shares at the huge interest? If the Fed had to step in, the government would have had to pay up, and I am pretty sure the government wouldn’t have gotten as good a deal, while taking the same risk.

            Besides, he’s going to give and has given a huge amount to charity. That has helped make the world a better place.

          • dick says:

            Investment capital is not gambling on a company in the sense of gambling on a horse; it’s an exchange where you give the company money and they give you an ownership stake (that you hope will be worth something later). If they didn’t need that money in order to create value, they wouldn’t be selling stock; they’d just be creating value and pocketing the proceeds themselves.

            When you lend a couple of broke software engineers money to start a company, sure; when you buy a share of stock on the NYSE, no. And when you LBO a public company to extract money that the previous owners generated, very much no. I will concede that some* of Buffett’s investments more closely resemble the former than the latter; does anyone besides EchoChaos think that all of them do, definitionally, as in, “To become wealthy, you are by definition creating large amounts of wealth”?

            * When I said “what has he created?” I was being too pithy and not using my “how could someone misinterpret this” filter. I only meant to argue that a lot of his wealth was acquired without creating real value, not that every single dollar of it was.

          • EchoChaos says:

            I am not sure why buying a share of a stock on the NYSE is any different (other than perhaps the degree of risk) than buying part of a business in a garage.

            In what way are you thinking it is?

            Both are purchasing a partial ownership stake (varying in size) of a company in order to reap a future benefit and increase the operating capital of the company.

            An LBO is the exact same thing as a mortgage or any other sale where future value is expected to pay off current value plus some interest.

          • Nornagest says:

            When you lend a couple of broke software engineers money to start a company, sure; when you buy a share of stock on the NYSE, no.

            The differences between lending broke software engineers money in exchange for a share of their profits, and buying a share on the NYSE, are scale and the possibility of resale. I assume it’s the possibility of resale you’re objecting to? That adds more layers of indirection, but even indirect sale is socially useful in that, first, it reduces the risk incurred by direct investors (if you no longer have faith in a company, you can sell your share to someone that does have faith in it and recoup some of your losses; that makes it a lot easier for risky or speculative things to get funded); and second, it allows for ongoing accurate valuation (very handy the next time the company needs to sell stock on the NYSE; buying stuff without a recent open-market valuation is a shitshow, as anyone with an early stake in Bitcoin Cash can tell you).

          • Guy in TN says:

            To become wealthy, you are by definition creating large amounts of wealth.

            No, that is not the “definition” of wealthy. To be wealthy is to own wealth. Whether you created it or not plays no essential role.

            Unless you think that the majority of the wealthy in the world are heirs who are just in the temporary state of burning down familial wealth

            Inheritance isn’t the only form of non-labor income. It isn’t even the most important, income via capital ownership is. When you combine inheritance+capital ownership+rent+interest+welfare, I doubt the wealth they own is even correlated to wealth-production, much less a proxy for it.

          • Guy in TN says:

            I mail my landlord a check, and he drives to the bank to cash it.

            Now, you could say that because I’m willing to pay him a hundreds of dollars, and all he appears to do is drive to the bank, that his bank-driving time must be creating huge amounts of wealth. Ten minutes, for hundred of dollars! His labor output must be spectacular!

            Or more accurately, you could reason that “money you receive” and “value you created” are not necessarily correlated.

            The argument isn’t that billionaires produce zero wealth. It’s that the wealth they produce is far, far less than the compensation they receive. The fact that our system doesn’t have a clean and tidy way of measuring wealth-creation doesn’t make this less so.

            Warren Buffet pushing money around and signing checks is socially useful. So is a king who gives orders to the peasants. The question is, why does the king get all the gold, while the peasants live in rags? Just World Mode has never been turned on, just because we no longer live in feudalism.

          • Another Throw says:

            Now, you could say that because I’m willing to pay him a hundreds of dollars, and all he appears to do is drive to the bank, that his bank-driving time must be creating huge amounts of wealth. Ten minutes, for hundred of dollars! His labor output must be spectacular!

            No you may absolutely NOT say that, and the very suggestion is laughable.

            The overwhelming majority of those hundreds of dollars go towards paying him back for the enormous upfront cost of building the building in the first place. Most of the rest goes towards the expenses involved in keeping it from falling down or having the State seize it for back taxes. Maybe, if there happens to be any left this month, he’ll have a few dollars left over to cover his time driving to the bank.

            You’re completing skipping over the part where the only reason there is something to rent in the first place is because he put it there.

          • dick says:

            I am not sure why buying a share of a stock on the NYSE is any different (other than perhaps the degree of risk) than buying part of a business in a garage. In what way are you thinking it is?

            If you were to buy a share of my privately held company (Ineptech, a Very Large and Serious Software Company), you would send the money to me. If you were to buy a share of MSFT, to whom would the money go?

          • dick says:

            Or more accurately, you could reason that “money you receive” and “value you created” are not necessarily correlated.

            Possibly better examples of this would be Doyle Brunson’s poker earnings (lots of money received with negligible value created) and Linus Torvalds writing the linux kernel (lots of value created with negligible money received).

          • Guy in TN says:

            The overwhelming majority of those hundreds of dollars go towards paying him back for the enormous upfront cost of building the fucking building in the first place. Most of the rest goes towards the expenses involved in keeping it from falling down or having the State seize it for back taxes. Maybe, if there happens to be any left this month, he’ll have a few dollars left over to cover his time driving to the bank.

            You still admit that economic rent is a thing, though. So the question is, how much is he getting from labor, and how much is he getting from capital ownership. You seem to assume his portion from capital ownership must be very small, for reasons I am unclear.

            You’re completing skipping over the part where the only reason there is something to rent in the first place is because he put it there.

            Incorrect, this building was built in the 1930s. If my landlord had never existed, this building would be right here waiting for me.

          • CatCube says:

            @Guy in TN

            I mail my landlord a check, and he drives to the bank to cash it.
            Now, you could say that because I’m willing to pay him a hundreds of dollars, and all he appears to do is drive to the bank, that his bank-driving time must be creating huge amounts of wealth. Ten minutes, for hundred of dollars! His labor output must be spectacular!

            You…do understand that renting property to people involves a whole lot more than cashing the check, right? Owning residential property is expensive. PITI is a cost whether you’re living in the property or renting it to others. The recommendation for owning your own home is to budget 1% of the purchase price per year for maintenance.

            I don’t know what the rule of thumb is for renting, but it’s likely to be higher, since you have to cover the risk of a tenant who will destroy your property*, not pay the rent, or do both.

            * Remember that a person can do tens of thousands of dollars in damage to a piece of property in less than an hour, and they can do it inadvertently as well as deliberately

          • Another Throw says:

            If you were to buy a share of my privately held company (Ineptech, a Very Large and Serious Software Company), you would send the money to me. If you were to buy a share of MSFT, to whom would the money go?

            I would be paying someone back for the investment they made by paying someone back for their investment they made by paying someone back for the investment they made by giving money directly to MSFT to fund operations.

            Because stocks are fungible they aren’t tracked individually enough to actually reconstruct the exact chain, but the fact of the matter is that every share of MSFT was issued by MSFT in exchange for cash used to fund operations. The people that paid that cash occasionally prefer to convert that stock back into cash by selling it, for which they are being repaid for their initial investment, plus or minus appreciation.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @dick

            Possibly better examples of this would be Doyle Brunson’s poker earnings (lots of money received with negligible value created) and Linus Torvalds writing the linux kernel (lots of value created with negligible money received).

            There’s really too many examples of non-labor income to know where to start. Gambling and inheritance are easy to visualize. I like talking about land rent since it affects so many people directly, and people generally hate their landlords. Capital income is the biggest of the all, but its harder for people to conceptualize because its often mixed in with a small amount of labor-income in the form of pushing money around/sitting in an executive office, which throws people for a loop.

            However, my go-to counter-arg for people who want to link wealth ownership and wealth creation really ought to be government welfare, that would finally get the gears turning, maybe.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @CatCube

            You…do understand that renting property to people involves a whole lot more than cashing the check, right?

            Alright, so he cashes checks…

            Owning residential property is expensive.

            …and he, uh, writes checks too. Presumably of lesser amounts than those he is cashing. So much wealth creation!

            It seems like you all are just measuring wealth creation by whatever our economic/political system churns out, distribution-wise. Like, if my landlords wealth = his wealth creation, then we can measure his wealth creation as my rent minus repairs, mortgage, and property taxes. So if my landlord’s property taxes went up, and he ended up with less money than the year before…I guess that must mean he has created less wealth? Since that’s what the system churned out this time? Pretty suspect.

          • Another Throw says:

            Incorrect, this building was built in the 1930s. If my landlord had never existed, this building would be right here waiting for me.

            No. It probably wouldn’t. It would probably have a hole in the roof with a tree growing through it. Unable to find a buyer to recoup their investment or to pay the upkeep, the previous owner abandoned it, for example. Or, knowing that they would never be able to recoup their investment, 1930s-guy never built it in the first place. Arguing counterfactuals isn’t the point.

            To clarify: “put it there [on the rental market].”

            Nor do I really care to argue about how morally abhorrent rents are. That would be a fruitless exercise. You say potato, I say reasonable compensation that encourages the assumption of long term economic risks that create positive sum value. (Or maybe that is a “tuberless exercise”….)

            The point is that that claim about your landlord was incorrect.

          • Another Throw says:

            And, not to belabor the point, but you are also missing one of the principle sources of value that a landlord provides: liquidity in the housing stock.

            Real estate is an illiquid market, with transaction costs running into the several percent, and transaction times sometimes measuring into the years. This illiquidity is an incredible risk to market participants. This risk is unacceptable to the housing market. In fact, a substantial number of housing consumers are prepared to pay a premium for housing to be insulated from this risk. Landlords assume the risks arising from the illiquidity of their assets, and provide a liquid derivative to these customers. The premium that these customers are willing to pay is the incentive that entices landlords to assume these risks.

            This is positive sum.

            For the customer, the expected value of paying the rental premium for their housing needs is higher than that for buying real estate for those needs. The customer receives value from transaction in the form of liquidity in addition to the value of the housing. The landlord, meanwhile, also receives value from the transaction in the form of cash in excess of expected expenses (including those arising from the illiquidity of the real estate).

            Whenever you find yourself perplexed about where the value is when you’re not seeing factories or tanks or pumpernickel being created… the answer is probably liquidity. It is an incredibly valuable intangible.

            Okay, maybe not as valuable as the Star Wars IP, but close. 😉

          • Guy in TN says:

            To clarify: “put it there [on the rental market].”

            Its true that the landlord is the gatekeeper I have to go through to access this building, but I don’t see what this has to do with wealth creation. As least your “but he built it” argument made sense along that line of thought, I don’t even see what you are going for here.

            If I put a gate over a river, and started charging boats a toll to cross that point, would also you say that I have created wealth? Building the toll gate and hiring 24 hour guards was expensive, mind you.

            EDIT: I have read the liquidity argument. Once again, my argument has never been the landlords produce no wealth. Its that wealth creation and wealth ownership are not correlated.

            If you keep pointing out the ways that landlords sweat over a hard days labor, and all the amazing value they add to society, then you’ll just convince me that landlords are under-compensated for their wealth creation. Which still leaves us with the same ol’ disconnect.

          • Another Throw says:

            If I put a gate over a river, and started charging boats a toll to cross that point, would also you say that I have created wealth? Building the toll gate and hiring 24 hour guards was expensive, mind you.

            No. And I don’t know of any states that will allow you to do that with a natural water way for exactly that reason. Now, if you build a bunch of locks and dredge navigation channels, that’s a totally different game.

            EDIT: Maybe I’m just slow from jumping in late, but I haven’t really seen an arguments to that effect. But, briefly, I would just note that you need to own real estate to provide a liquid derivative of it, so at least in this instance ownership and creation are clearly correlated. And in the river example, building an illegal tollbooth is banditry, not value creation*. If, however, you build a bunch of locks, you would both own the locks and be creating positive sum value for your customers. In which case, again, the relationship would hold.

            ETA: It seems intuitive to me that any value created requires inputs, and that those inputs will necessarily require the expenditure of some kind of wealth. In order to formally address the general case, however, you would probably need to talk to an Real Economist.

            [*] Are there any states were you can do this? Navigable rivers are a federal thing, and everywhere I am familiar with other natural waterways are public rights-of-way.

          • cryptoshill says:

            So to clear up some misconceptions because people like to use poker players as equivalent to stock investors – this is just not the case. If you want to talk about “gambling” and the stock market you should be talking about stock and derivatives traders, who make up a small portion of the overall population that owns stock. (Institutional investors being a big one, but those players are usually investing for other, large groups of people that gave the money to the institution to simplify their own investing decisionmaking).

            To make the analogy, if I were to make a poker game that reflected how investors think using a standard 52 – card deck (also this would never, *ever* be offered at a casino) –
            The various poker hands have a listed value, which will increase if a random card drawn from a seperate 52-card deck shows a card that shares a suit or a card value with a card in the hand. Every player is dealt 2 cards which are unknown to the other participants. Nine cards are dealt face-up to the board. Each participant may (in turn) elect to “buy” a card from the community (which adds equally to the value of all completed hands, to simplify) or elect to propose a “trade” for a card they want from another player, if they do not see it on the board – that player is unbound by price restrictions and can charge whatever they like. At the end of a round if a player has completed a poker hand, he is paid the value of that hand and it is removed from play. At the end of three rounds, the game is over and new cards are dealt.

            Some players will elect to just sell off their starting hand and save resources for later rounds (particularly if they have a bad hand). Others will elect to try to assemble a large quantity of smaller hands, and still others will try to assemble the big hands. However, each one is doing so with the expectation that they will get some *return* on the cash that they anted to get the cards needed to be paid, They expect the business venture (hand) to *succeed*.

            A trader on the other hand , who we like to hate on in movies a fair bit – is someone who in fact generates no value, his game is zero sum. A trader, just like in poker – is trying to profit from being slightly better at understanding the many market inputs than the next guy. This allows him to buy securities at prices that are “too low” and profit when they rise to fair valuations, or buy fairly valued securities and profit when they rise to a “bubble”. None of that behavior represents any real faith in the company or desire to fund their business operations.

            That said, and as Another Throw alluded to – when the products being traded by traders are real and not fictional as in the versions poker I didn’t make up to illustrate the point, they do provide a service to the rest of the market. That service is liquidity. Having lots of traders competing with each other in a quasi zero-sum poker game with way fuzzier math and lots more money makes it easier for actual investors to buy and sell securities. It might affect the amplitude of given parts of the business boom/bust cycle, but I’m willing to bet it keeps the individual pain suffered from investment losses lower than it would be otherwise.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Lets talk about the river thing:

            It’s true, that in my specific example, boat travel would make it a “navigable river” and thus the gate would be illegal in the US. However, foot travel down a stream does not render it “navigable”, and property owners can and do charge for access.

            And in the river example, building an illegal tollbooth is banditry, not value creation

            So, you are suggesting that it is value creation to build a toll gate for foot travel, but not value creation to build a toll gate for boat travel? Because the state has declared it such?

            Really, the argument applies to all access of unimproved natural resources. Land, most critically.

            This is what rent (rent-seeking) is, at it’s most basic. These terms come up a lot on SSC primarily in relation to government action, but rent is in is in no way restricted to the public sphere.

          • dick says:

            So to clear up some misconceptions because people like to use poker players as equivalent to stock investors – this is just not the case.

            I don’t think anyone holds the misconception you’re clearing up. I said they’re similar in one and only one way: they both make wealth (in the sense of acquiring money) without making wealth (in the sense of creating some value).

            …they do provide a service to the rest of the market. That service is liquidity. Having lots of traders competing with each other in a quasi zero-sum poker game with way fuzzier math and lots more money makes it easier for actual investors to buy and sell securities.

            Ri-i-ight, just like playing poker creates value by making it easier for other poker players to find a game, but if we’re using a definition of “create value” that loose then we should applaud people who take a shit on the floor of the public library for contributing to GDP growth via creating jobs in the janitorial industry.

            Remember, the matter under contention was, “To become wealthy, you are by definition creating large amounts of wealth,” and my position is that that’s false, and my example was stock trading. I think that arguments of the form, “Actually, the value created by stock trading is not literally zero, it’s just very small and indirect” are more agreeing with me than disagreeing.

          • John Schilling says:

            A trader on the other hand , who we like to hate on in movies a fair bit – is someone who in fact generates no value, his game is zero sum

            Thing X, being the product of substantial labor and capital and natural resources and capable of potentially useful functions, but in the possession of someone indifferent to it and who neither has use nor knows anyone who has use for its functionality, is a thing of little value. Thing X’, identical to Thing X but in the possession of an enthusiastic owner in great need of its functionality, is a thing of substantial value. Value is not an absolute, and the delta between value(X) and value(X’) is itself real value, created by the trader, engaged in a positive-sum transaction. This is Economics 101, and it is very important and it is absolutely true.

          • cryptoshill says:

            @dick –
            This is where the analogy between a gambling game and a poker game breaks down – in a poker game the amount of value produced by the whole system (“game”) is fixed, and the only way to increase your output value is to take some from someone else.

            I think I misphrased here. My claim is more along the lines of “An individual stock trader produces almost no value, but the presence of stock traders is a net benefit to the free flow of capital which benefits everyone.”

            However, in the stock market (or any economy, really) the presence of speculators and traders (who are all in some sense engaged in a series of zero sum games) serve to move these objects around between people who don’t want them and people who do. A real estate speculator – for example, may buy a foreclosure at a bargain basement price (thus winning at the expense of the previous homeowner and the bank) and put some repairs into it for later resale – this is mostly value created by “cutting checks”. However, the speculators presence allowed the bank to offload a toxic asset and for the housing market to (eventually) normalize.

            This process provides more net benefit than it does loss, because in order to trade you need to trade things, trading is by nature zero sum – and for every trader that makes a killing selling overpriced dotcom stocks, there’s someone who “took the other side”. The people who are truly benefiting are the people who are looking for these opportunities as true investors and would be unable to find them if that group of people wasn’t there.

          • CatCube says:

            @Guy in TN

            …people generally hate their landlords.

            This is common enough, but I admit to being puzzled why it’s true. What specifically are the reasons for this? Maybe I’ve been fortunate, but all of the 7 landlords I’ve had have been fine. Repairs get made quickly, and in the places that included landscaping and outdoor work it happens on time, etc. Do yours just not repair things on time or something?

            The biggest hassle I had was I had to move to a new place for 6 months before moving to a new city, because I was due to move in December but the landlord was coming back to live in the place I was renting in July. It’s hard for me to get irate over somebody y’know, using the house they own to live in. The property manager helped find a place that they were managing to move to, so my point of contact didn’t even change. I did have the hassle of moving, but luckily there wasn’t much in the way of additional expenses since it was only about a mile (not like moving to a new city where I need to figure out a new commute, and the lease was short so the apartment-specific stuff I’d normally have to get I just did without for the half a year, etc.)

            …and he, uh, writes checks too. Presumably of lesser amounts than those he is cashing. So much wealth creation!

            It seems like you all are just measuring wealth creation by whatever our economic/political system churns out, distribution-wise. Like, if my landlords wealth = his wealth creation, then we can measure his wealth creation as my rent minus repairs, mortgage, and property taxes. So if my landlord’s property taxes went up, and he ended up with less money than the year before…I guess that must mean he has created less wealth? Since that’s what the system churned out this time?

            First off, the important part of managing a rental property isn’t writing the checks. The two most important things are: 1) knowing what checks to write (what needs to be done now vs. what can be deferred) and the even more important 2) having enough money to write the checks. These are actually pretty difficult, and a landlord who’s bad at them will find his wealth rapidly disappearing. Maintenance costs on a property are extremely streaky. You’ll have nothing for a long time, then $15,000 for roof repairs, and if you don’t want to destroy the property, you’d better be able to get $15,000.

            One of the properties I was renting (the one I had to move out of early, actually) had an air conditioner go out, which IIRC was about $6,000. Another time while I was packing to leave town for a week, I noticed a bubble in the drywall in the bedroom ceiling. The next morning on the way to the airport, I called the property manager and told them the roof was leaking, that rain was on the way according to the forecast, and they probably want to fix that leak before it does thousands of dollars in damage. Then I got on a plane and flew away. When I came back, I could see brand new shingles in place, and I estimate that was probably high hundreds to low thousand dollars.

            If they didn’t have the ability to fix that very rapidly, the property would have become unlivable in relatively short order. That is destruction of wealth in both the value of stuff they owned and (I think?) your definition of destroying the property. It doesn’t take long for a building with no maintenance investment to have trees growing out of it.

          • Matt M says:

            I have also never hated my landlords.

          • vV_Vv says:

            Thing X’, identical to Thing X but in the possession of an enthusiastic owner in great need of its functionality, is a thing of substantial value. Value is not an absolute, and the delta between value(X) and value(X’) is itself real value, created by the trader, engaged in a positive-sum transaction. This is Economics 101, and it is very important and it is absolutely true.

            And Economics 102 says that a stock has approximately the same value to most people who trade stocks.

            The only way to “use” a stock is to collect dividends, so the value of a stock is uniquely determined by the amount and timing of the dividends that it pays.

            In general it is possible for different people to have different risk aversion and time discounting factor w.r.t. money in their utility functions, but the type of people who professionally trade stocks probably have similar utility functions, which makes most of the trades in the stock market negative-sum: if a stock is traded for $X , it means that the buyer thinks that it will pay more than $X (time-discounted, risk-adjusted), while the seller thinks it will pay less than $X. They can’t be both right, so the gain of one is the loss of the other (minus the transaction cost).

          • vV_Vv says:

            @Another Throw

            The overwhelming majority of those hundreds of dollars go towards paying him back for the enormous upfront cost of building the building in the first place.

            Say he inherited it from his grandfather who bought it for peanuts during the Great Depression when housing prices where low. Decades later, for reasons unforeseeable at the time of the purchase, a bunch of tech companies set up shop in the area and started hiring lots of non-local people and paying them high salaries while the local government banned the creation of more housing, driving prices up.

            Now the current landlord regularly cashes a huge check, much bigger than the maintenance expenses and taxes he pays. How much value is he creating for that money, exactly?

          • johansenindustries says:

            Most trades being negative sum does not rule out trades in aggregate being positive sum. The trade I make when I need liquidity – or whenever the statement ‘probably have similar utility functions, which makes most of the trades in the stock market negative-sum’ isn’t accurte; but liquidity is the one that comes to mind – is positive sum, so is the one where I try to diversify my portfolio.

            And I think we would probably expect that as the transaction fees go up and the negative-sum is more negative that the percentage of those trades would go down.

          • dick says:

            This is where the analogy between a gambling game and a poker game breaks down…

            Could you lay off the poker? It was an analogy, not an argument. I said that stock trading is a way to acquire money without creating anything of value, like playing poker. If it didn’t help illustrate my point, ignore it, it wasn’t load bearing. Pointing out all the myriad ways in which poker and stock trading are dissimilar does not refute me or contribute anything to this discussion.

            More generally, I understand what you’re saying, but not why you’re saying it. I don’t even know if you’re on my side or not. Are you agreeing with EchoChaos (“To become wealthy, you are by definition creating large amounts of wealth,”) or with me (It’s possible to acquire money without creating wealth, e.g. by wagering on stocks)?

            I agree that the existence of a healthy stock market is valuable, but don’t really think it’s relevant, since any individual trader’s contribution to it is negligible. Besides, if making money via stock trading is “creating wealth” just due to helping to make the market exist, it would follow that losing money does too, which directly contradicts the EchoChaos claim that I’m arguing against.

          • John Schilling says:

            The only way to “use” a stock is to collect dividends, so the value of a stock is uniquely determined by the amount and timing of the dividends that it pays.

            And yet stocks that have never paid a dividend and are not expected to do so in this decade or the next, are widely held as being really valuable.

            The value of stocks and stock markets is that they allow people to participate in profitable, genuinely wealth-creating ventures, even if their personal financial timeline doesn’t allow them to put money in at the beginning and wait until ultimate profitability to pull it out. John Smith has a plan to turn a billion dollars in 2010 into twenty billion dollars in real wealth in 2030, You think this is a good plan, but you don’t come into a spare $20k until now, and you absolutely need the profits in 2025 to send your kids to college.

            The stock market means you can still make a meaningful contribution. Smith’s venture does get off the ground in 2010 and does create gigabucks of real wealth in 2030, only because of the high confidence that people like you would exist today, and would be allowed to make short or mid-term investment and claim the profits thereof. There wasn’t a billion dollars of capital in 2010 that believed in Smith’s plan and could afford to wait to 2030 for the profit. There was only faith in people like you, and in the market’s ability to stitch together bits and pieces of capital over twenty years to come and turn it into a single profitable venture from now to then.

            Your buying $20k of stock in the market today, and selling it in 2025, creates real wealth. Your impugning the legitimacy of stock markets, to the extent anyone cares what you say, destroys it. Choose wisely.

            Thus Enders the lesson in Econ 102

          • vV_Vv says:

            The value of stocks and stock markets is that they allow people to participate in profitable, genuinely wealth-creating ventures

            Only when they buy the stock when it’s created during an IPO or recapitalization. If they buy an existing stock from another trader, the most common type of transaction, they are merely betting that they can predict the value of the stock better than the other guy. It’s like betting on a horse.

            even if their personal financial timeline doesn’t allow them to put money in at the beginning and wait until ultimate profitability to pull it out.

            If you don’t plan to personally cash the dividends, then you are betting that by the time you will sell the stock other traders will assign to it a long-term expected value higher than they do now. It’s a second-order bet: you are betting now (in 2018) on the average belief of others at some point in the future (say 2025) about the expected value of the stock at an even further point in time (e.g. 2030).

          • dick says:

            John Smith has a plan to turn a billion dollars in 2010 into twenty billion dollars in real wealth in 2030…

            Boy, that narrative is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting. Another narrative fitting the same facts is: John Smith had a plan to do great things requiring a billion dollars, and he got his billion on day 1 from Goldman or whoever underwrote his IPO, and ten years later, Joe Johnson bought a hundred shares of JSCO at some price and sold it at some other price without affecting John Smith or John Smith’s company in the slightest.

            I don’t know where “impugning the legitimacy of the stock market” came from. I’ve got nothing against stock speculating, or gambling for that matter. All I’m saying is that the wealth it creates is negligible compared to things that we generally talk about when we discuss creating wealth, like Bill Gates founding Microsoft or a carpenter building a chair. Remember the context: this all started with someone arguing that the dollar amount a person dies with is equivalent, by definition, to the wealth they created during their life minus the wealth they consumed. The only way that’s true is if $1000 earned at a job and $1000 realized from a lucky stock trade created roughly the same wealth in the world. To support that, you need more than a nebulous, indirect effect like “contributing infinitesimally to the stock market’s existence”.

          • Nornagest says:

            The wealth the average trader creates by moving stocks around is pretty low (though nonzero; Joe Johnson is doing something for JSCO by buying JSCO stock from some random trader, viz. establishing demand for it at a certain price). But most traders lose money, so that’s just what we’d expect from a naive analysis. The wealth that traders as a whole create by moving stocks around is large, but that large value is only a fairly small fraction of the fantastically huge amount of wealth tracked by the global stock market. Don’t fall for scope insensitivity here. Small gains add up when there are millions of trades happening a day.

            Anyway, this started as a discussion of Warren Buffett, and he’s primarily an investor, not a trader. It’s important not to get those confused; they have very different economic roles, even if their jobs both boil down to buying and selling stocks.

          • dick says:

            I already said I chose Buffett unwisely. He’s also an activist investor, which to me seems a lot more like management than investing (in that he’s persuading or forcing companies he invests in to do something different than they would’ve otherwise done).

          • Guy in TN says:

            Lots of confusion in this thread over the value added by labor vs. the value added by the capital.

            A though experiment: Let’s say in 2020 you own $100 in cash that you keep in a drawer. In 2021, the US economy goes though a period of severe deflation, and now your cash is worth $110 (in 2020 dollars). Would you say that you just created $10 worth of wealth? (in 2020 dollars, of course)

          • Guy in TN says:

            The reason this argument is devastating, is that he could have died/fallen into a coma immediately after putting the money in the drawer. And it would still be worth…10$ more.

            So is he creating wealth from beyond the grave?

          • johansenindustries says:

            Its vulgar to call your own argument devastating. Particularly when its obviously a red herring (example: a man plants an apple tree, immediately falls in a coma, when he wakes up he has delicious apples. Checkmate atheists.)

            The question is what wealth has a man created when the money he has can suddenly buy more than it could before. And I did find that a little tricky. I think the answer is none. Just like Apple fanbois hadn’t created wealth when they could suddenly buy the iPhone Mini and became richer in that way.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Only when they buy the stock when it’s created during an IPO or recapitalization. If they buy an existing stock from another trader, the most common type of transaction, they are merely betting that they can predict the value of the stock better than the other guy. It’s like betting on a horse

            There are a couple of mistakes here. Decisions on raising secondary capital are often based on stock prices, they could offer debt or equity and will base those decisions on the relative merits, a person who helps set the stock price prior to that is giving the company information to guide its decisions. The process goes much deeper than that though, changes in a companies stock can give them an awareness that they otherwise might not have had. A falling stock price can cause executives to reevaluate a strategy (wisely or unwisely), but there is a lot more going on in markets than just horse betting.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Only when they buy the stock when it’s created during an IPO or recapitalization. If they buy an existing stock from another trader, the most common type of transaction, they are merely betting that they can predict the value of the stock better than the other guy. It’s like betting on a horse

            There are a couple of mistakes here. Decisions on raising secondary capital are often based on stock prices, they could offer debt or equity and will base those decisions on the relative merits, a person who helps set the stock price prior to that is giving the company information to guide its decisions. The process goes much deeper than that though, changes in a companies stock can give them an awareness that they otherwise might not have had. A falling stock price can cause executives to reevaluate a strategy (wisely or unwisely), but there is a lot more going on in markets than just horse betting.

          • cryptoshill says:

            @dick – People seem to clearly hold this misconception because they will put “investors” and “traders” in the same bucket when the best investors in the world (Buffett et al) create large amounts of wealth with good investing decisions, whereas traders do not. You say the amount of value they create is negligible – which is probably true, but the amount of actual “traders” in the market is also fairly low when compared to the market of “investors”.

            As to the claim – I suggest an inverse thesis, which I would need to quantify, if I were going to write it out semi formally it would be something in the ballpark of “It is impossible to increase your wealth without creating value in the process, however it is possible to decrease your wealth while producing value”.

            To give you an example – I start a company that makes chairs. I am actually extremely good at making chairs. They are the best chairs available on the market at any price. However – for some reason unrelated to the popularity of the chairs or their cost I am *completely* incompetent at actually running a business. Orders don’t get filled, nobody actually knows whether theirs is going to show up or not, my labor is far too expensive, etc etc.

            The chairs were still created even though my company is bankrupt in six months.

          • baconbits9 says:

            A though experiment: Let’s say in 2020 you own $100 in cash that you keep in a drawer. In 2021, the US economy goes though a period of severe deflation, and now your cash is worth $110 (in 2020 dollars). Would you say that you just created $10 worth of wealth? (in 2020 dollars, of course)

            Using a fragment of the economy won’t get you any reasonable conclusions. If the economy grew in real terms during the deflation then it is possible that the cumulative actions of savers vs spenders did create wealth, and this particular saver would be a part of that action. If the shift came during a recession it could well be redistribution of wealth, but your critique is only devastating to the claim that every gain in wealth for an individual must be a net gain in wealth for the whole, which I haven’t seen anyone make. All the other statements can be reasonably interpreted within current circumstances, and might not apply to say Zimbabwe and their stock market during hyper inflation.

          • dick says:

            A though experiment: Let’s say in 2020 you own $100 in cash that you keep in a drawer. In 2021, the US economy goes though a period of severe deflation, and now your cash is worth $110 (in 2020 dollars). Would you say that you just created $10 worth of wealth? (in 2020 dollars, of course)

            Inflation changes dollar amounts without affecting intrinsic value. In a conversation like this, where we’re discussing how value changes from one year to another but not explicitly discussing inflation, I think the charitable thing to do is assume everyone means constant dollars.

          • dick says:

            People seem to clearly hold this misconception because they will put “investors” and “traders” in the same bucket when the best investors in the world (Buffett et al) create large amounts of wealth with good investing decisions, whereas traders do not.

            These seem like arbitrary definitions you just made up, but sure, let’s go with them.

            It is impossible to increase your wealth without creating value in the process…

            What about traders? 😉

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            If they buy an existing stock from another trader, the most common type of transaction, they are merely betting that they can predict the value of the stock better than the other guy. It’s like betting on a horse.

            Sometimes, but not always. John had covered this above:

            John Smith has a plan to turn a billion dollars in 2010 into twenty billion dollars in real wealth in 2030, You think this is a good plan, but you don’t come into a spare $20k until now, and you absolutely need the profits in 2025 to send your kids to college.

            If Winthrop needs profits in 2025 on a venture whose returns won’t be realized until 2030, the market still allows Winthrop to sell. If Valentine buys those shares, he’s not betting the value will be greater; Winthrop knows they’re valuable too. But he needs the liquidity.

            Winthrop and Valentine are both creating value, by permitting their seller to use the money received on something they value more.

            Transactions might enable liquidity even more often than over speculation. To know for sure, we’d need to measure how many people sell shares and then immediately put down a payment on a mortgage or tuition or car or another venture. AFAIK, this is practically impossible to know in general, but specific instances appear frequently.

          • John Schilling says:

            Only when they buy the stock when it’s created during an IPO or recapitalization. If they buy an existing stock from another trader, the most common type of transaction, they are merely betting that they can predict the value of the stock better than the other guy. It’s like betting on a horse.

            No. If they buy existing stock from another trader, they are fulfilling the promise made to the very first trader, the one who did buy at the IPO, that he wouldn’t have to wait twenty years before realizing a dime of profit. Mos investors can’t wait that long, and need the promise of a market in which they can sell their shares before full profitability if they are to invest in an IPO.

            If you agree that the investor who does buy at the IPO has participated in creating real wealth, then you must agree that the promise that enabled him to do so, creates real wealth, and that the fulfillment of that promise (even by a mere trader, no better than a common gambler) creates real wealth.

            Alternately, the project requires a billion dollars committed for twenty years. A bunch of IPO investors commit a billion dollars for five years. Then three bunches of traders commit a billion dollars for five years. Why are the IPO investors the only ones you credit with having created wealth?

            Paul Brinkley has also had a stab at explaining this, and I hope between us we’ve maybe clarified things

          • dick says:

            If you agree that the investor who does buy at the IPO has participated in creating real wealth, then you must agree that the promise that enabled him to do so, creates real wealth, and that the fulfillment of that promise (even by a mere trader, no better than a common gambler) creates real wealth.

            I already agreed that the market has value, and since some of that value is network effects, that each additional trader increases the value of the NYSE to all the other traders by some small amount, so participating in it certainly does create some wealth, however tiny.

            (Just for shits and giggles though, how tiny? Let’s get an envelope to scribble on the back of:

            Alice the trader decides to buy 100 shares of MSFT. The average daily trading value on the NYSE, per wikipedia, was approximately $169 billion in 2013. MSFT was about $50 back then, so Alice’s trade might be said to make up 169,000,000,000/5,000 or one thirty-three-millionth of the market for that day.

            Meanwhile, Bob the hobo decides to take a shit on the floor of the public library. Cleaning it up requires one hour of work by one of the 2.4 million janitors in America. Assuming they all work eight hours a day, that means Bob’s personal brand of economic stimulus is responsible for one nineteen-millionth of that janitorial market for that day.

            Since these are rough numbers I am happy to round up and concede that a stock trader creates every bit as much value as an incontinent hobo. But returning to the original point under contention – the idea that making money and creating wealth are equivalent, that $1000 in a checking account represents more or less the same wealth-creation no matter how that money was acquired – I still feel pretty solidly against.

            Also, if anyone decides to nitpick these obviously 100% serious calculations, please remember that EchoChaos’ position was not merely that trading creates more wealth than the least valuable activity I can think of, it was that trading creates wealth similar to the wealth created by some other method of acquiring money, e.g. a job. It is assumed that gainful employment creates substantially more wealth than shitting on the floors of libraries, though the proof is left as an exercise for the student.)

            Er, where was I? Ah yes. So, I will concede that the mere act of trading does produce some small value by contributing to the existence of the stock market. What I don’t buy is that it also gets credit for some of the value created by the company whose stock is being traded, i.e. that buying MSFT in 2018 creates wealth by retroactively funding the development of Windows 95. I guess I just don’t think value can be created in a trade.

            One more hypothetical. Suppose a certain pig is (from some omniscient point of view) worth $400. Suppose you sell me that pig for $500. I have lost wealth (I had $500 of USD and now have $400 of pig) and you’ve gained wealth, but no wealth has been created. Now suppose I feed that pig nutritious slop for a year, and at the end of that time the pig is (again, from some omniscient POV) worth $800. Suppose I sell the pig to you for $1000. Again, you lost some wealth in the trade, and I gained some, but nothing was created or destroyed in the trade. The only wealth creation that occurred was me increasing the pig’s value by $400 by feeding it.

            Well, what is a share of stock, but a pig that someone else feeds? You’ve got 100 pigs and you have an ambitious plan to turn them into 1000 pigs, and all you need capital. But your plan will take twenty years, and no one wants to lend money that far in the future. So, you decide to hold an IPOrk. You create a hundred slips of paper reading “IOU one 1/100th of John Schilling’s pigs”, you pocket 20 of them, and Goldman Sachs pays you $32,000 for the rest, which it then puts on the open market. Ten years later, you’re up to 400 pigs, and I buy one of the IOUs for $1600. A couple years after that, you’re up to 500 pigs, so I sell that IOU for $2000. I made $400 on the deal, but I didn’t feed any pigs. You did. You created wealth, but you sold the right for others to profit from the wealth you create. I’m fine with saying that Goldman Sachs contributed to that wealth creation in some way, since access to capital has value, and I’m fine with saying that I created value by contributing to the existence of a thriving pig market, but it’s an abuse of language to say that I created a pig.

          • rlms says:

            It is impossible to increase your wealth without creating value in the process…

            What about traders? 😉

            Or literal gamblers? What value is created when I buy a lottery ticket?

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            @dick

            Your example of Alice and the incontinent hobo is already covered by the broken window fallacy, introduced in 1850. The two acts depicted do not create the same amount of wealth.

            What I don’t buy is that it also gets credit for some of the value created by the company whose stock is being traded, i.e. that buying MSFT in 2018 creates wealth by retroactively funding the development of Windows 95.

            An explanation of this was given. An even shorter version (it’s worth it to me to practice these): if you convince me you could create a business that makes $1M in five years from $100K, I might still not be able to act on it, because I don’t have $100K right now, but I know I can get more later. Suppose Bob has $100K, but he’s not convinced. But I can convince Bob that he can make $200K in one year, in return for $100K now. So he pays you (or me, and I pass it immediately to you). In return, he gets a document saying “the bearer of this is entitled to the proceeds of dick’s…” I dunno, sporting goods, perhaps. You get started. One year later, I acquire $200K by other means (e.g. my own business). I pay Bob. In return, I get that document. Bob is satisfied. Four years later, I get $1M from you; I’m satisfied. You’re left with a business that keeps making $1M every five years, let’s say; you’re satisfied.

            This is essentially share trading in a nutshell, except that that document is split into thousands of pieces so that anyone can afford a piece of it, and the earnings it promises don’t stop after five years. Also, Bob doesn’t know I’m there to give him $2 for every $1 he spent a year ago, but he’s sure enough that someone will be there. And I don’t know Bob is there, but I know someone is, etc.

            Suppose a certain pig is (from some omniscient point of view) worth $400.

            That isn’t really going to happen as stated. There is no omniscient POV of the value of anything. The whole point of trade is that every party puts its own value on any one thing, and each values the thing it’s getting higher than the thing it’s trading away.

            Since there’s no such thing as objective value, the pig example falls apart. Here’s the usual model:

            I have a pig. It’s worth less to me than $400, because I have no way of caring for it until it’s mature without great expense, and more to you than $400, because you do have a way of caring for it until you can sell it for more. So you pay me $400 for the pig, and we’re both better off.

            You feed the pig. After a while, it’s worth more to me than $1000, because I can turn it into over $1000 worth of bacon if I sell it to a bacon merchant I know, and less to you than $1000 because you don’t eat bacon and don’t know anyone who does. So I pay you $1000, and we’re both better off.

          • dick says:

            Suppose a certain pig is (from some omniscient point of view) worth $400.

            That isn’t really going to happen as stated. There is no omniscient POV of the value of anything. The whole point of trade is that every party puts its own value on any one thing, and each values the thing it’s getting higher than the thing it’s trading away.

            Boy, this is what I hate about this forum, in a nutshell. “Suppose” doesn’t mean “I assert that.” Everyone knows there is no such thing as omniscience. “Suppose” means “Pretend that some reasonable people, who are interested in the subject being discussed and not just drive-by-nitpicking for the sheer fun of it while ignoring the context, came to some agreement on a reasonable way to define ‘value’. For example, they could ask five farmers to rate the pig’s value, and take the mean. Or they could go to a grocery store, check the price of bacon, and multiply by the pig’s weight. Or some other method that seems sensible to them. It doesn’t matter what method they choose, just suppose they came up with some system that’s agreeable to them. The reason I’m asking you this is because what I’m about to say doesn’t depend on the actual value, just the change in value. We all agree value can increase, right? And even though we can’t actually measure it, in a reasonable good market with reasonable good information reasonable smart farmers could make a reasonable approximation of it, right? Suppose that happened so I can make a point about what people do when their investment changes in value, and let’s not actually spell out in tedious detail how they do that because it would be irrelevant to the larger argument.”

            That’s what “suppose” means. It seems like no one here honors it. And the reason is because, no one cares about the larger argument. This is one of the longest max-depth threads here, and literally zero people other than me have weighed in on whether they agree or disagree with the thing I started it over (EchoChaos’ idea that the wealth created in one’s life can be measured by the money they die with minus the money they spent).

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            “Suppose” doesn’t mean “I assert that.”

            Of course not; we agree on that. We also agree that there’s no such thing as omniscience. What I’m disagreeing with is the claim that there’s an objective value of a thing. You can ask me to suppose it’s true, but that’s logically equivalent to you asking me to suppose something is true that will never be true.

            It’s not drive-by nitpicking, either; it matters critically to whether your argument (that trades do not create wealth) holds. If it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t have pointed it out. And since trades create wealth, EchoChaos’ claim that most rich people greatly out-generate their consumption continues to carry weight (or at least, it isn’t disproven by an argument that trades do not create wealth).

            Every example you deliver for how such a value could be established – an agreement among farmers, a calculation from a byproduct – still necessarily admits the reality that different people value that pig differently. That difference in value is what drives trade.

            We all agree value can increase, right?

            In some sense, yes, but not in the sense you need in order to show that trades do not create wealth. The value of a thing can change over time for an individual, and it can change over time for multiple individuals, but it won’t necessarily change by the same amount for everyone, and it can often increase for some and decrease for others. This is precisely why and how trades create wealth, or utility – by moving real assets (and to some extent, currency) from people who value it less at the time, to people who value it more at the time.

            Likewise, everyone in a market can make a reasonable approximation of value, but everyone (hopefully) understands that that value is still going to vary by person. There might be a price set on pigs, but everyone’s value will almost certainly differ; if it didn’t, no trading would happen. And then no one would get rich that way. But it is readily apparent that people do.

            Like, I’m sorry if this and the broken window analogy all seemed sensible to you. But the fact that this argument had the flaws that it did, isn’t really up to me. All I can do is point out the flaws I see, and hope that you either understand them, or show how they aren’t flaws. You won’t be able to get the latter by making a supposition I know can never hold, and then getting upset when I point that out.

        • beleester says:

          Simple: Just convince the rich to keep producing anyway, out of the goodness of their hearts! 😛

          The thrust of his argument isn’t that we should go full communism, it’s that “just tell poor people to not be jealous” is exactly as useful an argument as “just tell rich people to be charitable.” Which is to say, not very.

          Anything that you want to “just tell people” has been told thousands of times already, and if your solution is “Tell them again!” then you have a good future in beating dead horses.

        • Guy in TN says:

          @baconbits9

          If the economy grew in real terms during the deflation then it is possible that the cumulative actions of savers vs spenders did create wealth, and this particular saver would be a part of that action.

          When he put the money in the drawer, it initially created no wealth. That action, in of itself, accomplished nothing in terms of wealth-creation. It wasn’t until later, when the larger economy changed, that the cash was worth more.

          Now, you could say that by waking up and actively doing the action of “saving”, a person is creating wealth. Highly dubious, of course, but I’ve heard such things uttered. That’s why its important for the guy to be dead. He’s literally incapable of being part of an action! So is the dead creating the wealth?

          your critique is only devastating to the claim that every gain in wealth for an individual must be a net gain in wealth for the whole, which I haven’t seen anyone make. All the other statements can be reasonably interpreted within current circumstances, and might not apply to say Zimbabwe and their stock market during hyper inflation.

          It’s sounds like you are getting tripped up on the macroeconomic aspect of my example involving inflation, and not seeing how this applies to all capital. Fortunately, johansenindustries provided an excellent second example in the form of someone planting an apple tree:

          Every year, this apple tree produces fruits with lots of utility. The thing is, it produces fruits whether the original planter does anything or not. In fact, the original planter could die, and it would still produce fruits. So is the dead guy producing wealth, or not?

          • Matt M says:

            Now, you could say that by waking up and actively doing the action of “saving”, a person is creating wealth.

            He’s not “creating wealth” but he is preserving resources. Cash, generally speaking, is a claim to various resources. By putting it in a drawer rather than spending it, he is preserving his capital. He is sacrificing current consumption in order to obtain future consumption.

            At the time, he has no way of knowing, for sure, whether this sacrifice will result in greater future consumption (would happen if the currency deflates) or lesser future consumption (would happen if the currency inflates). But the issue of whether this “creates wealth” is completely beside the point.

            I also feel like this is another double standard. Nobody would suggest that someone who saves cash, then has their purchasing power reduced through inflation, has somehow personally destroyed wealth. That by choosing to hold cash as an asset rather than immediately spend it, future inflation somehow makes them responsible for a “reduction of wealth” in the world.

            Deflation when prices fall due to gains in production efficiency that outpace gains in the money supply. The “wealth created” when this occurs is created by the various actors who increase production. The guy with cash in his drawer derives a benefit from this tangentially, but this is not “undeserved wealth” in any meaningful sense. His claim to that wealth is his savings – essentially a form of investment or currency speculation or whatever you want to call it.

          • baconbits9 says:

            He’s literally incapable of being part of an action! So is the dead creating the wealth?

            Are you suggesting the the second you die all of your previous actions no longer have repercussions on the world?

            That is the logical inference of this claim, and it is clearly false.

            When he put the money in the drawer, it initially created no wealth. That action, in of itself, accomplished nothing in terms of wealth-creation. It wasn’t until later, when the larger economy changed, that the cash was worth more.

            This is the same mistake as above, the results of an action do not have to happen immediately for them to be caused by such an action.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @baconbits9

            If we are treating “has repercussions” and “creating wealth” as the same thing, then you would have to say that the carpenter who made the drawer also created the $10. And the person who build the house he kept the drawer in, the guy needs shelter to live after all. And what about this guy’s parents?

            Its true that the actions of all these people led to the scenario of $10 being created. So how can we say the the owner is even the creator of the wealth? He certainly didn’t act alone in setting these events in motion.

            @Matt M

            The guy with cash in his drawer derives a benefit from this tangentially, but this is not “undeserved wealth” in any meaningful sense.

            The question isn’t whether he “deserves” it in the normative sense, but whether he created it. The essential question is this thread is whether wealth owned=wealth created. It seem like you would agree with me, as evidenced by your inflation example, that you don’t believe this to be so.

          • baconbits9 says:

            If we are treating “has repercussions” and “creating wealth” as the same thing, then you would have to say that the carpenter who made the drawer also created the $10.

            No, no, no, no, no. Unless you are arguing that the cause of the deflation was the physical act of putting the $100 in the drawer… you might be able to argue that the creator of the bill created this new wealth by producing and maintaining a stable currency, but the carpenter? Nope.

            Where the $100 bill was stored (in this example) has no bearing on if the deflation happens. The bill could have been left in a wallet, under a mattress or on the floor, and would have increased in value by the same amount due to a deflation, and so the place the bill was put is clearly not part of the value gained.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @baconbits9

            The bill could have been left in a wallet, under a mattress or on the floor, and would have increased in value by the same amount due to a deflation, and so the place the bill was put is clearly not part of the value gained.

            This is true! You recognize that the place the bill is stored has no effect on its gain in value. Could it also be that who it is owned by, or if it is even owned at all, is also having no effect?

            (Which is to say, the owner is not the one “creating” any of this wealth-increase?)

            Previously, I thought you were going for something along the lines of causality, i.e. “well, if he hadn’t decided to save it in the first place”, which leads to ridiculous butterfly-effect conclusions like “well, if his parents hadn’t decided to have children” or “if no one had built boxes to keep money from getting wet”. All of which, of course, were equally necessary events that put our situation into motion. But none of which, individually, can be said to be the sole cause of the money’s increase in value.

            (that x is a necessary condition for y to happen, does not mean that y is being caused by x)

    • peterispaikens says:

      The obvious answer to “Why isn’t the solution to convince the less well off people to not be as angry/annoyed/disturbed/depressed/jealous at their predicament?” is that, as the book you quoted states, “humans are hardwired to notice relative differences. When we’re reminded that we’re poorer or less powerful than others, we become less healthy, more angry, and more politically polarized.” That’s it – this property is an innate, inherent part of how homo sapiens behave.

      It might be very hard to change all kinds of other things but about the situation, but changing how people feel in situation X isn’t just hard, it’s impossible and laughable to consider. If you don’t want to reduce inequality, then the remaining solution is to change the circumstances and choreograph the interactions that they don’t notice the inequality as much (e.g. even if they rationally understand that it’s there, they don’t get put in situations where it’s immediate and obvious and triggers their instinctive responses), but “simply” changing how they feel about a particular class of real life situations isn’t an option barring substantial mind-alteration with chemicals, genetic engineering, brain implants or something like that which may be possible (though IMHO not desirable) in the future.

      • fahertym says:

        Would it be harder to change poor people’s feelings towards rich people than say, reducing homophobia or racism?

        • Guy in TN says:

          Would it be harder to change poor people’s feelings towards rich people than say, reducing homophobia or racism?

          Yes, definitely. Unlike the existence of other sexual orientations and races, a person can only be wealthy at the expense of another person being poor. This is because ownership is defined by exclusion. To own a resource, is to say that I can not longer access that resource.

          When you (and others) say that the poor dislike the rich because of “jealously” or “envy of their good fortune”, it is a massive fail the ideological Turing test.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            I am not sure I follow you. We live in a world full of complicated stuff where most of the value is locked up in the knowledge and skills involved in making it, rather than the raw materials (and the raw materials are generally bought from willing sellers rather than stolen from them) – that is, the surplus value has been created by the people making the finished item; it’s not a resource that the original owners of the raw materials can no longer access, but instead a resource which never existed in the first place until someone did something economically valuable with the raw materials.

            This, of course, isn’t to say that wealth doesn’t often come from plunder; it can and does; but you seem to be arguing that the fact that someone is rich is proof that they have deprived other people of that value, rather than helped to create that value.

            … Unless you meant that wealth and poverty can only be defined relatively; that in a world populated entirely by peasants who own almost nothing, you can’t call anyone poor because no one is rich, and if someone then becomes wealthy in that world, then even if they have created all that wealth through their own work and none of it from depriving others, it is still rational to regard them with suspicion because their wealth gives them great potential power over everyone else? In which case, fair enough, but that’s still not a case of the wealthy depriving the poor of stuff they used to have.

          • Guy in TN says:

            you seem to be arguing that the fact that someone is rich is proof that they have deprived other people of that value, rather than helped to create that value.

            It’s not an either-or scenario. Its true that the utility of resource comes from both improved and unimproved aspects. But something cannot emerge from nothing. You may have taken the marble and sculpted it into the statue, you may have melted the silicon to form electronics, but the unimproved aspect is necessarily always there. Although you may have created value, you necessarily deprive others of value in the process.

            Which isn’t necessarily bad. I support the existence of property. On net, this system produces good results. It hurts people in a small sense, yes, but it can pays-off in the long term if society manages it correctly.

            The difference is, I acknowledge that property ownership isn’t something that exists in a vacuum. If Person A owns a thing, that means Person B does not own that thing. The rhetoric of “but how does me being wealthy affect you, can’t you just let me be wealthy in peace?” doesn’t hold.

            This differs from race and sexual orientation, in the sense that those are feature inherent to your body. They don’t require claiming any of the outside world. Property does require this, even if that bit out the outside world only amounts to 1% of the value of the final product. Its 1% that must necessarily be excluded from others.

          • Baron von Neuron says:

            Perhaps I do fail the ideological Turing test here. But I often encounter precisely that sentiment in the leftist media — i.e. not only the absolute poverty has to be eliminated, but also relative wealth disparity.

            Here is a quote from the original article:

            In particular, people often experience stress and dissatisfaction in an environment where many people are much richer than them, and the very structure of social institutions starts to warp.

            Is this not about envy of the rich?

          • baconbits9 says:

            Unlike the existence of other sexual orientations and races, a person can only be wealthy at the expense of another person being poor.

            No, this is not necessarily true. You can take any resource that is in abundance greater than the demand of all humans, no matter how vital, without making anyone else poorer. I just breathed in oxygen and converted it to a poison, and then exhaled it back into the atmosphere. Yet you cannot say that my actions have made anyone poorer. Even those people who are currently suffering from an acute oxygen shortage right now are not suffering because of me breathing. As a matter of fact if I am productive while breathing that air I can make you richer while doing so. Isn’t that weird?

            . You may have taken the marble and sculpted it into the statue, you may have melted the silicon to form electronics, but the unimproved aspect is necessarily always there. Although you may have created value, you necessarily deprive others of value in the process.

            The difference is, I acknowledge that property ownership isn’t something that exists in a vacuum. If Person A owns a thing, that means Person B does not own that thing. The rhetoric of “but how does me being wealthy affect you, can’t you just let me be wealthy in peace?” doesn’t hold.

            You are taking a fragment as the whole. If you measure wealth by total tons of iron ore owned then yes, me owning a ton of iron ore prevents you from owning that ton and makes you poorer than you could hypothetically be (but not necessarily poor, which was an inaccurate choice of words that you used earlier). We don’t use tons of iron ore as a measure of wealth though, we use the market price of tons of iron ore, and because we use the market price of tons of iron ore and not the raw amount me owning some iron ore can make the people who don’t own it wealthier and not poorer in some circumstances. If I can turn iron ore into iron more efficiently than anyone else my owning a ton of iron ore can increase the market price of people who own things that use iron, and making all their customers richer, and all the customers of those customers richer and so on down the line.

            You have only taken what is seen, and not the net sum of ownership.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            Unlike the existence of other sexual orientations and races, a person can only be wealthy at the expense of another person being poor.

            This is totally untrue, and in fact the opposite is mostly true. In a free market economy, a person cannot become rich without also making other people richer. That’s the whole point of voluntary transactions — they only happen because they benefit both sides. That’s also why everyone has become richer in the developed world over the last 200 years. The quoted comment is obviously untrue when looked at on a temporal basis, and is untrue in our time period for the same reason.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Baron von Neuron

            Perhaps I do fail the ideological Turing test here. But I often encounter precisely that sentiment in the leftist media — i.e. not only the absolute poverty has to be eliminated, but also relative wealth disparity.

            That’s pretty typical leftist sentiment, and not what I’m talking about when I suggested you’d fail the ideological Turing Test. You don’t understand the reason the left advocates for reduction in wealth disparity. It’s not “envy”, at least in the typical sense one uses that word. If you are robbed, are you mad because you “envy” the robbers? Is a slave angry because he “envies” his master? The word implies at least two untrue elements: 1. That the left believes being wealthy is merely akin to a positive personal trait, e.g. being good at sports, and not a position of social authority 2. That the left simply wishes that it was in this position of power, rather than the elimination of this position of power

          • Guy in TN says:

            @baconbits9

            You can take any resource that is in abundance greater than the demand of all humans, no matter how vital, without making anyone else poorer.

            It’s true, things that are in near-infinite supply can be used without making anyone else worse off.

            So you’ve got…air. Maybe seawater. I’m running out of other examples here. Does this ruin my point in any way?

            me owning some iron ore can make the people who don’t own it wealthier and not poorer in some circumstances. If I can turn iron ore into iron more efficiently than anyone else my owning a ton of iron ore can increase the market price of people who own things that use iron, and making all their customers richer, and all the customers of those customers richer and so on down the line.

            Of course, after you initially deprive someone of access to a resource, you might compensate them in a way that makes up for it later. If you want to, or happen to act in a way that incidentally does. I don’t see any reason to think it would happen often, and would definitely not presume this always happens, for each individual who was deprived access.

            A better argument, is that on the net-sum system-level, depriving people of access to resources in the form of creating legal property has many benefits for society. The orderliness and stability of driving the same car every day, or sleeping in the same bed, this is important. Property can also be used as a reward to incentive production. The argument is that depriving people of access to resources is a Sacrifice Worth Making, quite the opposite of “this doesn’t affect you, mind you own business and stop being jealous that I’m rich” rhetoric.

          • Aapje says:

            @Guy in TN

            Imagine an undiscovered tribe living near high grade iron ore. However, they have no idea that it is there and no means of mining it, smelting it, nor do they have the skills to manufacture advanced things from it. If left to their own devices, the ore is as useless to them as any other rock.

            Now they are discovered by the rest of humanity, who notice the ore and start mining it. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that there are no externalities for the tribe. Now the rest of humanity got richer, but the tribe didn’t get any poorer.

            Now imagine that the tribe members get a choice to either keep doing what they were doing or to get a job in the mining industry and in return they get products that are way better than what the tribe can make themselves, increasing their material well-being.

            You seem to imply that the tribe was better off having the ore in the ground that they cannot use and that no more than ordinary rock to them, rather than to have greater material well-being.

            This can generalize to the more general case, especially if we incorporate human diversity. If Steve Jobs wouldn’t have offered up his garage to Steve Wozniak, it wouldn’t have been used to create computers by someone else. It would just have had junk sitting in there.

            If the garage had been public property and random people could just come in to pee in it, take or destroy whatever they wanted & such, Wozniak could not have realistically used it to create Apple computers.

            Of course, you can argue that the person who wants to pee in the garage has just as much right to use it for that, than that Jobs & Wozniak had a right to use it, but I think that some ways to use resources are far superior to other ways.

            Some people, like Steve Wozniak or Elon Musk, are way more capable at turning resources into useful things, so society is better off if these people have more access to resources than other people. Not to consume themselves, but to produce things for others (although we presumably have to incentivize them to do the latter by also giving them more to consume).

            Capitalism with private ownership is especially good at incentivizing capable people to gather resources to create things for others, because doing that will result in other people giving them things that the capable people want in return. In the end, this makes everyone much better off than if you give people with different ability the same access to productive resources.

          • baconbits9 says:

            It’s true, things that are in near-infinite supply can be used without making anyone else worse off.

            Oxygen isn’t in near infinite supply, it is perpetually renewed by plant behavior. A tree might be blocking you from easily extracting the minerals underneath it, making you “poorer”, but it is also is releasing O2 from CO2 which makes you “richer”. All of your discussion has only focused on the first costs and ignores the benefits of the second.

            So yes, it directly applies to your claim that ownership must come at a net cost to someone else, and breaks your argument entirely.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Of course, after you initially deprive someone of access to a resource, you might compensate them in a way that makes up for it later. If you want to, or happen to act in a way that incidentally does. I don’t see any reason to think it would happen often, and would definitely not presume this always happens, for each individual who was deprived access.

            This is not your original argument, you stated that

            a person can only be wealthy at the expense of another person being poor.

            And this is flatly false. Furthermore

            I don’t see any reason to think it would happen often, and would definitely not presume this always happens, for each individual who was deprived access

            This is actually econ 101, gains from specialization and trade, which can (and regularly do) make all parties who participate better off and is the entire basis for the world average steadily getting richer despite increasing population (which under your assumptions must make people on average poorer).

          • cryptoshill says:

            I think Guy in TN has actually reached an *extremely critical* conclusion that is important for understanding marketist vs redistributionist lines of thinking:

            Real wealth in terms of the products people can consume, the number of tools available to them, the luxuries they are afforded is not a part of a zero-sum calculuation (you can make yourself richer without forcing someone else to be poorer). However, ,relative wealth, or to be more completely honest – the status afforded by wealth is entirely zero sum.

            To use the iron ore example – if a capitalist buys the mining rights from that tribe with beads or guns or blankets or some resource the tribe values – then uses the ore to make steam locomotives for the new railroad project, and compensating the tribe members *again* for working in the mine – then selling them ever more expensive luxuries. The tribe members are much richer in terms of their overall quality of life (unless this mine is *particularly* environmentally destructive) but even with that being the case – the owner of the mine is the one who gains the social status afforded him by being the owner of this particular mine.

            The marketist will argue “Who cares what the tribe thinks of this situation, they were trying to hunt deer with spears before we showed up!

            The redistributionist will argue Who cares that everyone is better off, these rotten capitalists are running away with our rightfully owned labor! We are being robbed

            I tend to want to agree with the marketists here, mostly on account of the world poverty graph – but I will admit that reidstributionism is the only way to address this particular problem. My issue is (putting on my Western-centric hat) we already do *a lot* of wealth redistribution. I’m not sure that the answer to feelings of inequality will be “more redistribution” because if *every time* someone has this feeling we go raise some absurd new taxes (see: Seattle’s Soda Tax) we will eventually tax ourselves into poverty.

            There has to be a natural limiting factor on how much redistribution we want, but when I hear people who support these policies arguing for it the answer always seems to be “what do you mean you don’t want more, more is always better!” or something along those lines.
            So I ask you to explain “what is a good heuristic for how much wealth you would want to see redistributed?”

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Aapje @baconbits9

            Perhaps I was being flippant, in my initial statement, when I said that it makes “being wealthy makes another person poor“. To clarify, what the initial acquisition of property requires, is to make another person worse off (excluding rare scenarios where the abundance is greater than human demand).

            What happens next, down the line, could be anything. It could include making the people initially deprived far better off (such as the “give Wozniak a workroom” scenario), or you could just leave the people worse off than they were before (the classic toll gate over a river scenario).

            My point, is that unlike the intrinsic physical traits of race or sexual orientation, ownership directly affects others. In fact, ownership is defined by its relationship to other people (the legal ability to exclude).

            When people say that they are opposed to a particular distribution of property, or opposed to a power that comes with ownership, this can’t just be brushed aside with “this doesn’t effect you”, or “why are you upset at other people’s success”-style rhetoric. Property does affect everyone, and the net-sum harm vs. net-sum good is something that has to be investigated, not assumed.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @cryptoshill

            I think you are correct to point out that both sides can simultaneously be true. In your mining scenario, you could probably find at least one guy who was made net-worse off by the property acquisition of the mine (say, he used to have a [non-property] farm there and was forced off with no compensation). And yet, at the same time, the mine might make society at large better off. These are all trade-offs we have to consider.

            Recognizing that the acquisition of property makes people initially worse off, isn’t presented to decry the concept of property itself. Its presented to draw attention to the way in which property affects others. Once you understand this, you understand that complains about a particular “injustice” of ownership are not necessarily about “envy” or “inadequacy”, but the material ways in which someone was made worse-off than they would be otherwise.

            There has to be a natural limiting factor on how much redistribution we want, but when I hear people who support these policies arguing for it the answer always seems to be “what do you mean you don’t want more, more is always better!” or something along those lines.
            So I ask you to explain “what is a good heuristic for how much wealth you would want to see redistributed?”

            I want to increase utility, and progressive taxation+social programs, at least from my personal experience, seem like a pretty good way of doing it.

            When I was poor, I was on food stamps. Now that I am wealthier, I pay thousands of dollars in taxes. I can, from my lived physical experience, tell you that I received more utility from the ~$300 a month in food stamps I received when I was poor, than I now lose when I pay an equivalent amount in taxes.

            Is there a tipping point? Sure. But I worry that this is a question we aren’t even asking, with too many economists falsely assuming that “market value=utility” or something along those lines. Most people haven’t even done the mental economic de-programming needed to address the question.

            Human wants are vast, of course, but at a certain level they are satisfied to the point where “more redistribution” is no longer a politically viable option. Like, why aren’t millionaires rallying to try to get money from billionaires? Why is it that they have put their lot in with the “I’m economically satisfied” political faction?

            My heuristic is: is people are rallying for it, then there’s a need. It’s not perfect, and the wonks will have to figure out if its even realistic. I don’t know what other option we have, so we’ve got to trust that people are smart enough not to shoot themselves in the foot.

          • cryptoshill says:

            @Guy in TN

            I actually want to bring up something that you reminded me of – the *tribe* as a “collective” sold the mining rights to Capital. This is one of the dangers of collective property. The Tribe received a lot of benefits, but in this case, the concentrated harm of the new mine was borne only by this one individual who was clearly outvoted at the tribal meetings. If property wasn’t collectivized, he could’ve set a higher price to capital. Which (because apparently we’re using an economic model that assumes the capitalist is wildly successful and knew he would be so whne making these decisions) the capitalist would probably gladly pay to get rid of one slightly recalcitrant farm owner.

            Acquisition of property here wasn’t the part that was making people worse off, it was *involuntary* acquisition of property. Voluntarism is basically the core of all libertarian market-fetishist thinking (if I strawman myself here) and I could see a weird argument for redistributions of wealth based on provable property theft (See: Native Americans, The , etc) coming from that mindset/- At its core, even completely accepting that property can be acquired in ways that make someone worse off (theft), it doesn’t *automatically* follow that every time property changed hands someone was made better and someone worse. We haven’t had widespread property theft essentially since the early 1900s. Even then – when “civilization level conflict over natural resources” starts becoming involved, economic arguments start to seem a little silly.

            Back to (what I consider to be) the main thread of your argument:

            Your increasing utility point is nice and all – but you actually have no good way of measuring amounts of utility than in dollar values. That’s precisely why utilitarians place dollar values on everything. Consider your food stamps providing you $300 dollars in positive utility (to you) free of any charge whatsoever. In doing so however – it cost Uncle Sam (source here: i used a general metric, because all of the specifics I looked at for food stamps were focused on how many “errors” there were, when I was unconcerned about errors and more concerned with administrative costs) about $1000 to provide you with that utility.

            That utility didn’t come from nowhere – someone had to produce it *and* someone had to produce 5 timesmore than you actually wound up consuming (this is one of the better arguments for UBI).

            On top of all of that , every person will game their taxes to pay the least (as that is a normal thing to want to do). People who own houses and laugh about how large their tax returns are are the *exact* same people as the ones who get raked over the coals for some perfectly-legal corporate tax-avoidance maneuver. This adds to the deadweight loss of redistribution (the amount of money that is just hiding from taxes vice being actively engaged in doing something in the world).

            I want to buy your exponential utility of money argument (money becomes worth less as it is more concentrated) but it doesn’t seem to justify redistribution because the number of perverse incentives to navigate seems absolutely vast. The US has the most progressive taxes in the world, although in this article it does point out that we redistribute a lot less. That might have to do with the US having a standing order for “lots of giant nuclear missiles and big ships to carry them around on”..

            One of the things I like to bring up here is that if you have a “regressive” (although percentile taxes are inherently somewhat progressive) taxation based model that taxes based on *consumption* you have no incentives to avoid taxes (consumption tax is difficult to avoid) and it creates less dead weight loss than progressive income taxation. The problem is that you usually can’t fund the amounts of “redistribution” that is acceptable with such little revenue (Last I calculated a national sales tax would have to be 18% using some back-of-the-napkin calculations). So on top of a flat (percentile) national sales tax something I would propose is a flat, annual “standing money” tax that is assessed whether or not your money is held in the country and applies to corporations. My idea there would be “penalize all investors for not investing” to fuel growth.

            At its core I think I’m not alone when I present the marketist argument that the problems caused by “wealth inequality” are best solved with economic growth. People now say we can’t “grow our way out” of our current problems, but we “grew our way out” of every other major economic problem known to man.

            To me, “helping the poor” is probably better achieved by militant hard-YIMBYism than supporting *any* amount of redistribution at this point.

            I’m not sure what you meant by “people are clamoring for it, therefore people need it”, given that people clamor and line up for all sorts of things including Donald J Trump (who I am sure you do not like or think is necessary), iPhones (I am pretty sure no one needs those and the apple factories could reroute straight to the garbage at no real loss), casino games (pretty sure these aren’t just dead-weight, they are actively negative with the exception of the zero-sum competitive games). “What people are clamoring for” seems like a bad heuristic (to me) for judging how much (if any) redistribution needs to be modified.

          • Guy in TN says:

            The Tribe received a lot of benefits, but in this case, the concentrated harm of the new mine was borne only by this one individual who was clearly outvoted at the tribal meetings. If property wasn’t collectivized, he could’ve set a higher price to capital.

            This concentrated harm happens in three scenarios:
            1. Person who uses the mine, who is a collective owner of a mine, gets outvoted
            2. Person who uses the mine, which is owned by someone else, gets told to leave by property owner
            3. Person who uses the mine, which is previously unowned, gets told to leave after legal initial property acquisition

            So this problem is definitely not unique to collective ownership, and it happens all the time under normal private ownership conditions.

            Acquisition of property here wasn’t the part that was making people worse off, it was *involuntary* acquisition of property[…]it doesn’t *automatically* follow that every time property changed hands someone was made better and someone worse.

            The trading of property, “the market”, is not what I’m talking about when talking about property acquisition.

            Of course, within the context of the voluntary transaction, the two parties are made better off. Instead, what I’m talking about is both the initial acquisition of previously unwoned property, and the maintenance of previously existing property. This is involuntary. No one consulted everyone who previously had access, and had that access taken away, to see whether they consented. And no one was consulted in regards to the property maintenance either (e.g., I was never asked whether a coal company should own a mountain). There’s a lot of people in the world, and I doubt they are going to all agree. Nothing about these aspects are voluntary.

            Your increasing utility point is nice and all – but you actually have no good way of measuring amounts of utility than in dollar values. That’s precisely why utilitarians place dollar values on everything.

            Then these utilitarians are doing it wrong. Is there any reason to think that market value is a good proxy for utility? I can think of many reason why it is not (penniless starving man, children with no income, ect.)

          • Aapje says:

            @Guy in TN

            To clarify, what the initial acquisition of property requires, is to make another person worse off (excluding rare scenarios where the abundance is greater than human demand).

            I actually just explained that this is not necessarily the case. In many cases, the initial acquisition makes everyone better off. For example, when the native Americans established themselves in North-America, they took advantage of resources that no human was using yet. Only after more humans showed up/were born and the demand outstripped the supply, did you get competition over the use of the resources.

            Once you have competing demands on resources, you are forced to make a choice which demand will be fulfilled.

            In fact, ownership is defined by its relationship to other people (the legal ability to exclude). […] Property does affect everyone, and the net-sum harm vs. net-sum good is something that has to be investigated, not assumed.

            What you are doing is something that I quite frequently see on the (extreme) left end of the spectrum, which is to take an issue that is caused by nature, and then describe it as if it was caused by man, with Utopia as the default state.

            The fact that there is more demand than supply for many resources & thus that not everyone can have their demands (entirely) satisfied is a fact of nature, not an injustice created by man.

            Without ownership, we still couldn’t have all Silicon Valley employees live in a huge villa with a swimming pool within 1 mile of their job. We still couldn’t have everyone own a Van Gogh.

            Exclusion from resources is inevitable, because of how nature works.

            The only debate we can have is over what system we choose to manage the exclusion from resources.

            A big advantage of owned resources is that if other people can use the resources more effectively, they will have to convince & compensate the existing owners to give up their claim. So capitalism is actually a very kind way to transfer resources to those who can use them more effectively, compared to the alternatives, as it uses incentives and effectively works as a redistribution scheme.

            Colonizing nations often just took the resources, without compensation. The Apache would commonly raid other tribes to get their resources. China often just takes things from one group and hands it to the other, with poor compensation. In other cases, people genocided the old owners, to get what they wanted.

            Modern capitalism seems more kind to me than the alternatives.

            Is there any reason to think that market value is a good proxy for utility?

            In a society where trade (of goods and services) is a huge source of utility, market value is strongly determined by how useful the resource is as ‘capital.’ Or in other words, a major factor in the price of many resources is how useful they are to produce goods and services for others.

            For example, shop owners are willing to pay more for a shop in Time Square than in a suburb. That’s presumably not because Time Square is such a nice place to routinely stay, but because a shop owner can provide a lot of value for others in that place, as evidenced by the willingness of others to give them money.

            Similarly, a major reason why land prices are high in Silicon Valley is because a high density of tech companies makes it much easier to provide value for others. Google & Apple are able to get more income thanks to this, from people all over the globe, which they then in part use to pay a premium to locate their company in Silicon Valley (including by passing it on to SV employees, who in turn pay a premium for housing there).

            So it seems to me that market value is partly a proxy for direct utility and partly a proxy for indirect utility.

            Of course, people who themselves have more ability to fulfill the needs of others get to have more power to demand that others fulfill their needs (aka they have more money to spend), which is partially unfair, which is why we have added socialist elements to the system.

          • cryptoshill says:

            @Guy in TN

            Now I see your point about unowned property specifically. IE: At some point prior to today, property was owned by no one, even though I will posit that it had to have been pretty early in human history (even ancient tribal societies had some concept of territory). Alternately (although similarly rare), property is unowned because it hadn’t been previously discovered.

            I would argue that the problems of unowned property mirror those of collectivized property. With unowned property as with collectivized property – your use of the property is determined by whether or not someone else shows up with more guns to take it or makes an arbitrary decision to vote you off the island (in terms of access). Personally I like the “first use/first discovery” hack – which would still have problems in the early colonization days because Native Americans et al weren’t considered people (not in the sense that they weren’t considered humans, but they were not considered to have full agency under the law).

            The only scenario that it seems can’t fit into that framework is Scenario 2, which I still don’t feel like is creating a harm to the user. To further flesh it out: Person A has access to the land a mine sits on, he uses it to go hunting (this is not particularly good hunting land, it’s fungible with any other hunting land and there’s no critical shortage of hunting land, to make this simple) for his food. This is either before the mid-20th century or the person in question is some kind of anarchoprimitivist, take your pick. Person A has access to the land through a mutual agreement with the owner (positive-sum benefit), the owner decides unilaterally (which he can do) to sell the land to a development company for a bizarrely massive sum of money. This is positive for the dev company and the owner (pretty obviously). When the Dev company decides to do blasting to build the mine, it scares away *all* of the game from the area (not affecting other areas, just to make it incredibly simple again) – the hunter seems to be negatively affected. However, I would argue that in the scenario described above the hunter was receiving an unearned economic benefit , or at least a benefit that the hunter was underpaying for. By your definition of harm it seems, at least to me that the hunter was engaging in harming the original property owner by underpaying the owner for land access.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Aapje

            Exclusion from resources is inevitable, because of how nature works.

            The only debate we can have is over what system we choose to manage the exclusion from resources.

            It looks like we’re fundamentally in agreement here. This inevitable exclusion of resources is why questions regarding distribution affect other people directly (except, as you and others point out, when supply is so large that it outstrips human demand). This is in contrast to questions over intrinsic physical traits such as race and sexual orientation. (fahertym’s original question)

            Of course, people who themselves have more ability to fulfill the needs of others get to have more power to demand that others fulfill their needs (aka they have more money to spend), which is partially unfair, which is why we have added socialist elements to the system.

            Once again, generally in agreement. Market value can give you some idea of utility under certain circumstances, but it tends to get out of skew when some people have more money to spend than others. In cases where people have essentially no money (the penniless, children), trusting the market might mistakenly guide you into thinking that fulfilling their needs serves no utility. Which is why we set up programs to distribute resources to people who create no market value, such as the elderly, children, students, the disabled, ect.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @cryptoshill

            However, I would argue that in the scenario described above the hunter was receiving an unearned economic benefit , or at least a benefit that the hunter was underpaying for.

            Why would you say the the person hunting on land he doesn’t own is experiencing an “unearned benefit”, in contrast to if he was hunting as a collective owner of the property, in which he necessarily “earned” his benefit?

            Since we’re talking about an unimproved natural resource here, “hometeading” concepts don’t apply. This ownership is nothing more than a legal construct, created by the state (or society at large, or whatever).

          • Guy in TN says:

            @cryptoshill

            Personally I like the “first use/first discovery” hack

            Little tangential, but worth bringing up:
            “Property ownership is justified by the exertion of labor, therefore people can only own what they earn”
            and
            “Property should be owned by whoever labors first

            are non-congruent concepts. If property is justified by labor, then its justified by all labor, not just the initial. To get around this outcome, you can certainly say that property is only justified by first labor, but then you’ve undermined any claims to “people can only own what they earned/worked for”. This is because further increases in the value of the property, that are the result of post-initial labor, are now going to someone else besides the laborer.

        • vV_Vv says:

          Would it be harder to change poor people’s feelings towards rich people than say, reducing homophobia or racism?

          Yes, status is more fundamental. Borrowing Jordan Peterson’s example from Twelve Rules, even lobsters, of all things, track their status relative to other lobsters, and the neurotransmitters in their brain associated with status tracking are the same as in humans, indicating that the mechanism is very ancestral and conserved.

      • gbdub says:

        Humans are also seemingly hardwired to go into a murderous rage when someone else has sex with their mate, or to be all sorts of nasty and violent to people who look different. Doesn’t mean we should encourage that sort of thing.

        There are any number of innate human reactions that all social structures ought to be considerate of, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that appeasement is the right response.

        • Joseph Greenwood says:

          I don’t support murderous rages, but I strongly support people not having sex with other peope’s mates.

        • baconbits9 says:

          Humans are clearly not hardwired to do this. Almost no women murder, despite many men cheating. Even among men it is rare to go so far as to murder in these scenarios.

    • Sebastian_H says:

      The problem with the article isn’t just his solutions. The problem is that his statistics didn’t actually find any such thing. It involves 3 major statistical errors not to mention weird hyping of the conclusions. See here for example (with many supporting links)

      • Jiro says:

        Too bad we had like 40 posts here discussing it before you posted the link revealing it doesn’t exist.

        It’s like a replication crisis without the replication.

        • Robert Jones says:

          It seems to say something worrying about the reading comprehension of the SSC commentariat (and see also the people arguing about restrictive covenants in response to the link about anti-poaching agreements). In fact, I suspect that in general reading comprehension is just much lower than we expect.

    • bean says:

      This also assumes that the paper even makes sense. Even leaving aside their near-inexcusable division of seats into only “first” and “economy” (domestic first is a slightly bigger seat, international first isn’t offered by most North American airlines, and is something amazing) they don’t seem to control for number of people on the plane, and the only all-economy planes are usually really small. Their conclusions on middle boarding make even less sense. I’m not even sure what planes that’s on (probably widebodies, which means international, which means a significantly different population), and their odds ratios seem really big for that. Or it’s just noise.

      Here’s the way to do this study right. Compare Spirit and Frontier airlines. I pick those two very deliberately. They have very similar business models and serve similar markets. Frontier operates their planes in all-economy configuration. Spirit has what they call Big Front Seats, which are basically business-class seats without the service that normally goes along with them. Even better would be to only look at the routes both airlines fly, or maybe bundles of similar routes (to/from Florida, for instance). This seems like a natural control to me.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      It sounds like there’s an even easier solution: arranging things so that people with a great enough difference in wealth to feel violent envy rarely encounter one another.

      My lab is in a hospital where several Arab royal families occasionally come for treatment. Judging by the donor list, a lot of American super-rich families do the same. Do you know how often I’ve seen a Jordanian Prince or a Rockefeller? Not once, and I don’t expect to. They keep a very low profile for security reasons, because their wealth paints a target on their backs.

      First class fliers aren’t that much better off than economy fliers, so they can’t afford that much more in terms of security or privacy, but if this was a serious issue maybe something like drawing privacy curtains during the later stages of boarding or even a separate first class entrance would help.

      • Aapje says:

        The truly rich fly on private planes anyway and the truly poor don’t fly. So realistically, any (possible) friction is going to be between the well-off and the more well-off, not between the poor and the rich.

        • Matt M says:

          Yup. IME a pretty decent amount of the first-class cabin are frequent business travelers who earn status and get free upgrades. Meaning they’re well off, but not like, fantastically rich.

          • bean says:

            Not nearly as much as it was a few years ago. Paid seats in Delta’s first class have risen from 30% to 70% over the last 5 or so years, and the other carriers have also been a lot more aggressive about monetizing those seats.

          • keranih says:

            Not to mention that most of the people in first/business are flying *a lot* – I have a great deal more sympathy for the guy whose job/life means traveling on a weekly basis getting a comfortable seat.

            Yeah, it sucks to fly cattle car, but if it’s a once-a-quarter happening…I’m not feeling the pain so much.

          • Matt M says:

            I wonder what percentage of “air rage” incidents involve frequent vs infrequent fliers.

            My perception is that most business travelers are typically pretty well behaved, and handle complications well, as they understand “these things happen”, etc. while it’s the infrequent travelers who flip out over the slightest delay or inconvenience. But that’s just my anecdotal experience.

          • Garrett says:

            When travelling personally, I usually have a tight schedule and if things go badly, I’m the one who’s out extra time hiking/diving/whatever.

            If I’m travelling for business and things go sideways, I just pull out the corporate card and book an extra hotel room, meal, rental car, whatever.

            In short, the inconveniences are less likely to ultimately land on the business traveler than the personal traveler.

    • IrishDude says:

      Why isn’t the solution to convince the less well off people to not be angry/annoyed/disturbed/depressed/jealous at their predicament?

      Another solution if for people to choose a different comparison point. You can make a choice about whether to watch Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or a documentary on poverty in the third world. If you make $10,000 a year, your income is higher than 85% of the global population (in PPP adjusted terms). That income is less than what a full-time minimum wage worker makes in the U.S..

      I choose to anchor my own thoughts on appreciating what I have when so many others have so little, rather than thinking about what I don’t have when others have more than me. I also anchor myself on my own progress, like comparing present me to 10 years ago me. This gratitude, which I cultivate, contributes greatly to more positive well-being for myself and therefore for those around me. Bitterness, resentment, and envy are destructive emotions. I am a flawed human and do feel these negative emotions from time to time but I consider them emotions to be overcome and not indulged.

  4. Well... says:

    Scott, could you please number each item in the Links posts from now on so they’re easier to refer to in the comments?

  5. cvxxcvcxbxvcbx says:

    Here’s a very good music video about Tom Collins the cocktail that has less than 7000 views.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFTNuP018sw

  6. Matt M says:

    Over this last month, my wife and I searched for and hired a new nanny, as ours had decided to learn programming and move to The Bay.

    Pfft, and you all casually dismiss “learn to code” as legitimate advice for unskilled laborers looking to improve their lot in life!

    • poignardazur says:

      Ha! Paris looks awful 😀

      (also London and Berlin)

      • johansenindustries says:

        Huh, I think London looks lovely. Its Chicago, New york and LA that look grotesque. (Paris is pretty bad though with that purplish-line running up the middle.) Tokyo’s not quite as good as London.

  7. Jack says:

    Regarding non-competitition clauses in employment agreements, it’s a bit ridiculous to call these anti-poaching clauses because we’re talking about secondary labour markets where poaching is unlikely to be worth it. Regardless of enforceability, these clauses scare some people from changing jobs of their own accord. They’re just designed to make the labour markets less liquid so that employers can extract rents in the form of less competitive wages.

  8. Tenacious D says:

    Thanks for the link to the Ostrom review. That was an interesting read.

  9. Douglas Knight says:

    Most states have already banned non-compete clauses (except in narrow situations). What’s going on here is not the creation of regulations, but the enforcement of existing laws. As Jack alludes, these clauses exist to scare workers (and to a lesser extent hiring managers), not to be enforced in court.

    • zzzzort says:

      I believe the relevant difference is non-compete clauses restricting worker movement between companies, e.g. Wendy’s and McDonalds (which is illegal) and non-compete clauses between different franchises of the same chain, e.g. two different McDonald’s with different franchise owners, which exist in a gray area currently being litigated.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Thanks! I totally misread this, both the internal nature and that it’s really about poaching. And non-poaching agreements are easier to hide, so this is mainly about the governments noticing that they exist.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Most states have already banned non-compete clauses

      Citation needed. States are fitfully sputtering towards this position, sporadically, but non-competes are still very much a thing outside of California.

  10. Antistotle says:

    even though phrenology…yeah, turns out to be totally debunked.

    Retro-phrenology though, totally a thing.

    • perlhaqr says:

      Give me 5 minutes and an 8 ounce ball-peen hammer, and I guarantee I can make alterations to someone’s personality.

  11. yodelyak says:

    Re: The Face of God link… it seems more likely the study is simply detecting what participants’ “average” or “central” face is.

    If I read it right, their method was:
    1. Generate an “average” face generated from 50 American faces, selected to be age/gender/race representative of the whole of the U.S.
    2. Show people two versions of this “average” face, each with some randomly added statistical noise, and let them pick the one that is more “like god.”
    3. Create an “average” face-of-God by summing all the picked faces together as compared with the un-picked faces, and likewise create “average” faces for liberals and conservatives.

    When conservatives pick faces that are more white and old and male, they say “ahah!” and conclude they’ve learned something about how the face of god as visualized by Americans…

    What they should have done, is said “ahah” and concluded they’d learned something about how when people are shown a face and asked to pick one, people pick the one that is more like the people they see every day (e.g. coastal liberals are going to favor a more diverse average face…)

    Also, when people tend to pick faces that are “egocentric” (that is, that look like themselves) that shouldn’t say something about people’s “image of god” so much as about whether their “average” face is significantly affected by their own face.

    To make this really interesting, get people whose faces are significantly asymmetric, and see if their image for God more closely resembles themselves as seen in photographs (and which look a little strange), or their mirror-image selves (which they see and examine closely daily, and which look like “me”).

  12. Brett says:

    What Democrats need to do is make a credible threat once they’re back in power to pack the Supreme Court unless there’s an agreement to pass a constitutional amendment setting up fixed terms and staggered retirement for Justices both on the Court and on the lower branches of the federal court system.

    Vox is really hit or miss on quality, probably because their business model seems to be “rush out as many takes in a day as possible on a single topic that’s generating traffic, and maybe toss in some contributor pieces”.

  13. Nornagest says:

    James Brooke is one of those batshit insane colonial figures that I always assume to be fictional the first two or three times I see references to them. There were lots of people like that. See for example Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, an Austrian officer who fought on the White side in the Russian Civil War before striking out for Mongolia, where he converted to esoteric Buddhism, raised an army, kicked the Chinese out, married a princess, got himself declared khan, perpetrated several massacres, and carved out a short-lived and bloody empire with fire and sword before being caught and killed by the Bolsheviks. I swear I’m not making a word of this up. He’s like an evil fantasy protagonist.

    If you read the Flashman books, they’re roughly 1/3 Flashman hanging out with those people. (The other two-thirds are Flashman running from insane 19th-century military disasters, and Flashman womanizing.)

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      I swear I’m not making a word of this up. He’s like an evil fantasy protagonist.

      The Russian Civil War is the master key to 20th century history, and yet it gets so little attention. Maybe it used to when the USSR existed and I’m just young?
      There should be a film about Roman von Ungern-Sternberg. Audiences would think it was a superhero period piece and be confused that the supervillain isn’t manifesting esoteric Buddhist powers.

      • Nornagest says:

        I think part of it is that, from a Western perspective, it was a war without good guys to root for. Brutal autocrats only a generation or so from flogging serfs on one side, guys like Stalin on the other, shooting each other in the snow between bouts of torturing civilian sympathizers. The Romanovs are romantic, so they get their share of media, but the war? No one wants to watch that, except maybe Cormac McCarthy, and he hasn’t written anything set there yet.

        The Chinese Civil War is a similar situation. My martial arts sensei knew the head of Chiang Kai-shek’s guard after the war, and he says that by the middle of the war, the KMT had taken to chaining recruits to their bunks so they didn’t run away in the middle of the night.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          My understanding is that the Chinese situation is worse, because you had a civil war between the megacidal Communists and the utterly unlikable KMT, then Mao marched off and the KMT fell into infighting (Jewish cowboy adventurer “Two-Gun” Cohen was barely acquainted with Chiang because he worked for southern KMT leaders who opposed him, frex), the Japanese came in and raped Nanking et al, and after the Americans made them surrender the Commies came back for a final civil war.
          Like a great Chinese novel, you have to follow like 108 characters. But here they’re all horrible.

    • Utility Monster says:

      It also seems familiar for readers of the Vorkosigan Saga.

      Brooke’s story is pretty close to the plot of The Warrior’s Apprentice, except that Miles is a touch less colonial.

    • Lillian says:

      The Baron wasn’t Austrian. While he was born in Austria, the Ungern-Sternbergs had lived in Estonia since the Middle Ages, and the family moved back to Tallin when he was two, so he was a Baltic German. This is why he joined the Whites during the Russian Civil War, he was a Russian national and a noble, so of course he did.

      People forget that a huge proportion of the Russian nobility was ethnically German. Aside form all the ones from the Baltics, there were also the Volga Deutsch, while the old Boyars were descended from Norsemen. Many of them had also intermarried the Tatar nobility, which is why Roman von Ungern-Sternberg could somewhat credibly claim descent from Ghenghis Khan, which may be part of what inspired him to go to Mongolia and try to revive the Mongol Empire.

      The Russian nobility in general was something else, a fair number of them barely even spoke Russian, as even the ethnically Russian nobles mostly talked to each other in French. It was a consistent problem every time Russia got invaded by foreigners, in that their leaders were themselves pretty foreign, which lead to friction with the very people they were supposed to lead.

  14. Aapje says:

    I’ve been on the weird part of YouTube again* and found this channel with walkthroughs of tanks. Their strengths, weaknesses and how nice they are from the perspective of the crew.

    *Wait, is there even a non-weird part?

    • Kestrellius says:

      Oh, the Chieftain. I’ve heard of him via Lindybeige.

    • WashedOut says:

      That’s pretty low-level weird. When I get down a serious YT rabbit-hole I end up watching mini clips of Peppa Pig where the hero’s dialogue is replaced with pitch-shifted spoken word verses from nihilist poetry.

  15. educationrealist says:

    I am absolutely completely ok with cities banning–if not cafeterias, at least employer subsidized cafeterias. I am pretty fed up with companies coming into a town, having their own private buses, their own private restaurants, the employees driving up housing prices. They can spend their fricking money in local restaurants or they can pay for crappy grilled cheese. Fine with me.

    • ana53294 says:

      Would you also ban companies offering an on-site kitchen and grocery store, so employees can make sandwiches on site?

      This option may actually be more expensive, but they could do it just to annoy regulators.

      • phil says:

        fwiw, employer provided meals get different tax treatment than straight compensation.

        —-

        “Meals
        Offering meals is a particularly positive benefit. It allows team members to bond organically and with a wide range of people. Having people go out to get their own food usually causes them to stick with the same small subgroup each day.
        Offering lunch thus creates a more bonded overall team. Offering breakfast and dinner allows people to easefully extend their work day. Thus, there are benefits to offering meals beyond simply the pre-tax calculus.
        (The pre-tax calculus is that meals are a commodity. If you provide the meals company-wide, then you can deduct the expense as a business expense. If you do not, your teammates must use post-tax dollars to buy those meals. Thus, providing meals is a way of providing benefits to your team on a pre-tax basis.)
        Encourage team members to be “present” at meals so that they interact with each other. This means no electronics (phones or laptops) at the meal table.”

        https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZJZbv4J6FZ8Dnb0JuMhJxTnwl-dwqx5xl0s65DE3wO8/mobilebasic#heading=h.pdmqf3646hgt

    • Lambert says:

      Just don’t complain when those employees start driving up the cost of restaurants.

    • James C says:

      From the employee’s perspective, though, you’re just going after one of the few nearly guaranteed perks a job offers. I have little hope that employers would raise the salaries of their workers enough to compensate, so all you’re doing is reducing the employee’s practical spending cash. That doesn’t encourage them to spend money on restaurants, it encourages them to bring food from home.

      • Matt M says:

        That doesn’t encourage them to spend money on restaurants, it encourages them to bring food from home.

        So… you’re saying the bill needs an amendment to also make it illegal to bring food from home?

        • Deiseach says:

          Part of the attraction of an on-site canteen is the convenience (never mind the cheaper food if the employer is subsidising it). You only have to leave your workplace and go a little distance to the eating place and you’re assured of a place being free, not having to wait too long, etc.

          If you have an hour for a lunch break, it may be inconvenient to go out into The City and park your car/get off public transport/lock your bike safely, then find a restaurant and see if they have a free table etc. and eat and get back to work all in that hour.

          So I agree that it’s more likely people will either skip lunch and keep working at their desk, or bring a packed lunch from home. Unless there are restaurants literally on the doorstep, it’s too much hassle. Now, if there are restaurants literally on the doorstep, then this is about the doh-re-mi, not about “the opportunity to mix and mingle with the rest of the city” and we all know the politicians are keeping their constituents sweet.

          Honestly, I’d resent being forced to go out to someone’s café rather than it being my free choice, and I’d bring a lunch or skip it instead.

          • Lambert says:

            And then some entrepreneurial type would buy up buildings next to the big tech HQs and turn them into cafes, or set up burger vans outside of them.
            Perhaps these would even wind up getting bought and subtly subsidised by the holding company of whichever business they more or less exclusively serve.
            Precedent will be established as to what counts as subsidising cafeterias, and Tech will throw money as getting as close to that as possible.

            The cost of inconvenience doesn’t even go to anyone, like redistribution would. It’s just burning away the time of some of the most productive workers.

    • AG says:

      I’m sure the now-jobless former drivers of those private buses and staff of those private restaurants will thank you. But hey, if they go homeless, then I’m sure the housing market will get better!

    • S_J says:

      Consider these two scenarios:

      1. Company builds a cafeteria-space in their building, and rents out the space to a foodservice business at a cost slightly below the cost of equivalent square-footage in a nearby shopping plaza

      2. Company builds a cafeteria-space in their building, and funds a “foodservice department” which buys food, employs cafeteria workers, and provides meals to company employees at a very-low cost.

      Which one is “company subsidizing employee cafeteria” ?

    • dick says:

      My employer provides catered lunches from local restaurants. Is that good or bad by this logic?

    • Squirrel of Doom says:

      It sounds like you just don’t like outsiders moving into your town?

    • phisheep says:

      I worked briefly on an industrial/tech campus that had a truly marvellous solution to this. None of the businesses had staff canteens, instead they gave meal vouchers to employees. In the middle of the campus was a big canteen/restaurant place, staffed entirely by chefs who worked their own restaurants in town in the evenings. There would be 5-6 different chefs offering different menus at any time, and the competition for custom was fierce, which drove up the quality of the food on offer.

      The businesses did not have to set aside canteen space, the workers did not need to go off-campus, the local chefs got paid and attracted people to their restaurants, and the meals were magnificent.

      It was, of course, in France.

    • vV_Vv says:

      I am pretty fed up with companies coming into a town, having their own private buses, their own private restaurants, the employees driving up housing prices.

      Why don’t let them also have their own private dorms? Companies would become self-contained citadels and stop driving housing prices up.

  16. eliza says:

    @ Trump “clown or stable genius” debate: “I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by his skill as a strategist and tactician.” And it is even confirmed that Chinese politicians from highest levels of power are not clowns themselves? Lenin once said that it is enough to be a cleaner to rule whole nation, and by comparison clown has so many advantages over cleaner on that field.

    @ Jesus Nazarene Best blog site about historicity of Lord and Savior that I know is vridar.org. I recommend series of posts about Paul and Ignatius. Beginnings of christianity are at least as interesting as life of moths of central Europe or anatomy of battle tanks, or even history of knots, by with I mean they are very interesting. And maybe even important.

  17. As a political practitioner, I’ve been saying for years that money doesn’t buy election outcomes, or more precisely, that the independent role of money in electoral politics is enormously overrated.

    Campaign donors don’t cause candidates to be successful, rather, they bestow campaign money on candidates expected to do well. This is not necessarily cynical behavior: winning candidates generate attractive buzz and fire up partisans.

    But the authors of the paper Scott linked to goes a bit further than I did:

    We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero.

    Certainly television commercials, billboards, campaign flyers and the like do not convert Democrats to Republicans or vice versa.

    And I have argued in this space before that (specifically) presidential campaign organizations are almost powerless once the election is well under way.

    For example, there is probably nothing that Hillary Clinton’s campaign could have done in October 2016 to avoid losing Michigan. At that stage, the incremental effect of another campaign speech or another mailing or another commercial is, I agree, zero.

    That said, in my experience, below the presidential level, candidates of the same political party often get widely varying vote totals from the same constituencies in a general election. Voters, starting from ignorance about a given race, respond to something beyond naked partisanship to distinguish between candidates. If it’s not campaigning, then what is it?

    • Aapje says:

      It seems likely to me that there is a level of spending above which there is no effect and that all candidates with a reasonable chance to win already spend at least this much. Then the value of the marginal campaign dollar is zero, but that doesn’t mean that you can just stop campaigning altogether.

    • Thomas Jørgensen says:

      However, large campaign donations do affect how politicians act. The US political system is amazingly non-responsive to the concerns of anyone not a member of the donor class, to the extent that their concerns are effectively only addressed when they happen to be identical to those of the donor class.

      Money in politics does not have to be decisive or even work at all to be a massively corrupting influence on politics – There are hilarious examples of politicians coming under the sway of people who could fairly be called “Complete and utter charlatans” because the politicians believed they owed success to crystal energy or horoscopes. … and “large amounts of money spent on add campaigns” are the sort of thing which it is really, really easy to believe works.

      TLDR: You can collect favors as long as the person you are collecting from believes you helped them. This works even if what you are doing is complete hokum, as long as it is credible hokum.

      • Matt M says:

        Eh, this doesn’t really pass muster with me.

        Most political issues are conflicts between two rich and well financed sides. The amount of issues that are really “large influential fat cats vs poor lower class masses with no representation” are few and far between.

        As an example, AT&T wants to merge with Time Warner. AT&T and Time Warner spend millions of dollars in political lobbying, including donations to both sides. But who doesn’t want this merger to happen? Maybe the consumer doesn’t, I don’t really know. But I *do* know that Verizon and Sprint don’t want it to happen, and that they spend millions of dollars in political lobbying, including donations to both sides.

        So how can we say that campaign donations logically affect this issue?

        When both sides of every dispute are lavishing gifts among both sides of potential adjudicators, it’s hard to say that the gifts are having a meaningful impact…

        • Freddie deBoer says:

          The spending that matters is lobbying spending, not campaign contributions.

          • Matt M says:

            And? I think my point still stands.

            Unless you believe that either AT&T or Verizon is significantly “out-lobbying” the other?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            The marginal utility of buying an existing politician is orders of magnitude higher than giving ad money to a candidate?
            Makes perfect sense to me, but why does so much money get wasted on presidential and statewide campaigns?

          • Mark Atwood says:

            Um, what is “lobby spending” in your world?

            I’m a member of 3 different PACs, and track their Slacks, mailing lists, agendas, and budgets.

            In my world, “lobby spending” is travel costs for the lobbyist leads and staffers, paying their salaries, paying the office costs of their offices, paying the salaries of white and pink collar staff to do the office stuff, and paying small armies of researchers and writers to write research reports and white papers.

            Campaign contributions are a different set of line items, and in your own post you say they are not “lobby spending”.

            Despite the dark fever dreams of the uninformed, legislation is not up for auction, and PACs and lobbyists do not drop bags of money on State Rep Smith’s desk for a vote.

            Unless they live in Illinois or in Maryland, of course.

          • Robert Jones says:

            I think the basic issue here is that people who don’t like political outcomes but are ideologically committed to the political system are predisposed towards suggestions that the outcomes are the results of the system malfunctioning. The king is wise and virtuous, but his advisors are corrupt. If only my complaint could be brought to the attention of Comrade Stalin. If only we could get the money out of politics.

        • Tarpitz says:

          At least one prospective counterexample is the case where all existing major players in a sector benefit from regulation that suppresses potential new competitors, or otherwise increases the pot for all of them at the expense of consumers and/or smaller businesses.

          One might also consider cases where an entire industry exploits a lack of co-ordination between state governments, to the detriment of taxpayers – film subsidies or NFL stadia, perhaps.

    • Sciolist321 says:

      Is there anything that we know does work? Asides from depressing stuff like height or attractiveness of candidate.

      Does this effect work in other countries too? It’d be interesting if the effect was zero in two-party systems but non-zero in proportional representation systems for example.

      Surely it doesn’t hold true if you’re an unknown independent and your two opponents don’t spend anything? If that’s the case, perhaps we’re just talking about very big elections that everyone already knows about and many people already have their tribal preferences.

      • yodelyak says:

        Some things we know work…

        I have my own intuitions, which seem to be mostly borne out by some studies I’ve read. Recapping one I read just now…

        In low-information elections (especially municipal-type elections) simple face-to-face reminders, especially if they include bonus phrases like “this election will be close” seem to work to boost turnout by ~10% and there’s controlled random sample studies that back that up. https://isps.yale.edu/sites/default/files/publication/2012/12/ISPS00-001.pdf

        Phone calls (for either persuasion or GOTV) seem not to work.

        Mailers work, but it’s a small effect.

        (My intuition is mail is usually cost-effective only if you are in a media market where digital and/or television are either cost-prohibitive (e.g. if you’re running in Manchester, NH, the TV market includes Boston, and is priced with that in mind) or already saturated with your message.)

    • Matt M says:

      If it’s not campaigning, then what is it?

      A general sense of how well things are going that answers the following question: “Should we continue to trust the party in power, or give someone else a chance?”

      My take on 2016 is that any Republican would have won (and that any Democrat would have won in 2008). Obama had 8 years to deliver on his promises and largely failed. People noticed. The 5% or so of the electorate that actually matters (the people who aren’t consistently partisan R or D) said “Eh, we tried this hope and change stuff and it didn’t do much – time to give the other guys a chance!”

      It’s somewhat plausible that campaign ads might influence people’s perception of how things are going, but it seems to me that their own individual lives and circumstances would have a greater impact. This, notably, would explain why the biggest shifts from D to R took place in locations like rural PA, MI, WI, etc. While lots of the country did mostly recover from 2008 during the Obama years, those places, notably, did not.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        My take on 2016 is that any Republican would have won

        The counter-argument is how very close the actual election was.

        (Unless your position is that Trump was actually the least electable of the Republican field. I can sort of see an argument for that, but it requires that the people of voted for Trump on the theory “Burn It Down” are outnumbered by the Republicans who in the end didn’t vote, or even voted for Hillary, and I’m not sure I buy that — I read too many people who said, “Hillary is a disaster: hold your nose and vote for Trump,” to believe that very many Republicans sat on their hands. But I haven’t studied the detailed results and my face-to-face anecdata is hampered by my living in a very blue state; I don’t know many Trump voters personally.)

        • Nornagest says:

          I think Hillary was an extremely weak candidate. But I also think Jeb! was an extremely weak candidate, for most of the same reasons — they both stood essentially for the status quo in a race where most people wanted a shakeup, they both have toxic associations, and neither one has any personal charisma to speak of. That match would have been a toss-up. Most of the rest of the Republican field would probably have won against Hillary: they’d have had a harder time pitching themselves as the candidate for change, but on the other hand there wouldn’t have been a civil war in the Republican base. And the incumbent party’s always at a disadvantage after eight years.

          (Sanders would have been a strong option if he’d won the primary, I think. He’d have picked up old-school labor and a share of the “burn it down” vote, and that’s essentially what sunk Hillary. And he seems to have an actual personality and actual convictions. Calling himself a socialist might have been a challenge but I don’t think that label has the sting it used to.)

          • cassander says:

            During the election I often said that Jeb was the one republican that Hillary could definitely beat, largely for that reason, though also because he wasn’t from the midwest which is where republicans most needed to pick up ground.

        • John Schilling says:

          Most of the people who voted for Trump on “burn it down” grounds, would have held their noses and voted for Ted Cruz. Or almost any other republican save maybe Jen Bush.

          Not all of them, but the few who didn’t would merely have stayed home. And you’re matching them against moderates and #NeverTrumps who actually crossed the line to vote for Hillary.

    • Sebastian_H says:

      I have trouble with this kind of analysis because when you have two well funded campaigns the NET effect may be zero even if campaign commercials work really well.

      • Robert Jones says:

        There are plenty of examples of campaigns where funding was unequal, and it doesn’t affect the outcome. It’s true that there are no examples of significant campaigns where one side spent zero, and I imagine that a candidate who did spend zero would be at a disadvantage.

        • Sebastian_H says:

          Yes, but again that could mean there are threshold effects (minimum necessary spending levels, or minimum differentials)

          On the one hand I’m very open to the idea that campaigning spending is WAY less useful than we act like it is. But in a lot of cases the researchers are looking at cases where a lot of energy is spent on both sides. I’ve yet to see studies that really take that into account.

    • S_J says:

      I agree: funding for candidates is often less-impactful than the behavior of the candidates themselves.

      However, I suspect that funding for/against ballot proposals can be very effective.

    • engleberg says:

      re: Certainly television commercials, billboards, campaign fliers and the like do not convert D to R or vice versa-

      Heinlein said the purpose of ads was to raise campaign worker morale, and it worked a little. The purpose of campaign workers being to locate supporters and get them to the polls. Have cars to drive them. Remind them to vote. Be a nice person they are proud and happy to be on the same team with.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      That said, in my experience, below the presidential level, candidates of the same political party often get widely varying vote totals from the same constituencies in a general election. Voters, starting from ignorance about a given race, respond to something beyond naked partisanship to distinguish between candidates. If it’s not campaigning, then what is it?

      I’ve had a very weakly held hypothesis for several years now, that roughly 80-90% of the value of all advertising is nothing more than awareness. Reminding people that your product or service exists. That’s all. Few people care to compare brands; all they want to know is that there’s this type of beans here or that financial planning class there.

      When it comes to politics, my hypothesis says that all people want to know is that there’s someone running for some office on their ballot that takes their position on their issue. Or that belongs to their party. Past that, again, few people compare brands; if you see two Democrats running for the primary for city council place 4, you’re either one of the relatively few insiders that digs into past voting records or corruption charges, or you’re going to flip a coin.

      If that’s true, then it suggests campaign spending is extremely valuable for reminding people the candidate exists, and is from party X, and is pro-this or that, and then only if they’re the only choice with aforesaid features. If more than one person is from your party or takes your position, your value obtained per dollar spent drops fast.

      What do you think?

    • Davide S. says:

      As a political practitioner, I’ve been saying for years that money doesn’t buy election outcomes, or more precisely, that the independent role of money in electoral politics is enormously overrated.

      Tangentially related: I often wonder about how influential political satire really is when it comes to eletions & actual policy.

      Does satirizing candidates actually significantly undermine their support? Or does it just merely them slightly annoyed while entertaining people who already dislike them anyway (and so aren’t going to vote differently)?

      I suspect the actual political effect, if there is one, is relatively small, but I don’t have any data on this.
      Or perhaps satire does work really well – but only when it’s slanderous and you’re actually convincing voters that candidate X is something they are not.

      Do you have a professional opinion on this?

      • Aapje says:

        I think that it is likely that the more cutting and over the top satire almost exclusively preaches to the converted. The more subtle and accurate kind may shift people’s opinions slightly, but it’s not like people tend to simply abandon a candidate when coming to believe something bad about them. They compare the overall package to the package of the other candidate.

        So any effects are going to be on the margin.

      • Davide S. says:

        It sounds like you’re claiming that well-made satire can swing undecided voters and people on the fence.
        If that is true, wouldn’t the effect be quite strong, assuming
        1)the ‘common wisdom’ that undecide voters are extremely influential to election results (I don’t have any issue believing this)
        2)artists DO produce significant amounts well-made, subtle, accurate satire (I am less confident about this)

      • AG says:

        Direct satire has no effect because people consume it with their guards up already.

        Glee pretty brutally satirised the stereotypical high school life, as well as the equal opportunity un-PC cheerleader coach that refers to everyone by slurs. However, this was paired with a sincere portrayal of gay people. Sometimes their issues were satirised, sometimes they were given loving closeups to show just how VALID their feelings were.
        Moderate-to-slightly conservative people tuned in to laugh at the whaaaacky high school shenanigans, and many ended up becoming more sympathetic to LGBT people, even as the actual LGBT people thought Glee was hackneyed and disrespectful to them a lot.

        So satire is effective if it’s a decoy — getting someone on board by taking potshots at their outgroup, while changing their mind on a third party.

  18. shakeddown says:

    Some would say that arguing that if you ever take power again you should win forever by breaking all rules and abandoning all honor – when your opponents are actually currently in power and can also do this – and making this argument in the national public media which your opponents also read – is at the very least a strategic error, if not more fundamentally erroneous.

    It can be worth signalling that you’re capable and potentially willing to defect once in power, to stop the person currently in position to defect from doing so.

    • gbdub says:

      But the person currently in position to defect isn’t – Kavanaugh is a bog standard judicial conservative, and frankly replacing Kennedy with him is no more (and maybe less) balance altering than replacing Scalia with Garland would have been. There has never been a rule to replace like with like on the Supreme Court.

      Be pissed off about Garland if you want, that was something of a defection (but more in form than in outcome).

      And anyway, responding to a defection with the threat of a much bigger one might discourage further defection – or it might take someone who was planning to cooperate and make them start contemplating the next escalation of defection.

    • John Schilling says:

      How does this work, exactly? Say I’m a Republican in an at least moderate trust, rule of law society. Someone offers me a shady, norm-breaking, only-technically-legal way to ensure that the Republican Party will rule for ever and ever. I might take them up on it. Or, valuing the rule of law and at least moderately trusting the Democrats to do the same, I might accept the risk of losing an election and letting them have power for a few years, knowing they will hand it back in due course. Maybe. And I can understand how a not-Republican would like something more certain than that.

      But how does the Democratic Party signaling that if they ever take power they might break trust and rule of law and rule for ever and ever, do anything but guarantee that I preemptively do the sieze-power-forever thing? That’s like doing nuclear deterrence by saying, “These here industrial facilities could start cranking out nuclear missiles by the thousand in about two years, so you all better not even think about using the thousands of nuclear missiles you’ve already got, or you’ll be sorry!”

      • secondcityscientist says:

        The audience for this particular threat isn’t random Republican voters, or Senate Republicans, or Donald Trump. It’s conservative Supreme Court justices. It’s telling them that if they start to make rulings wildly outside of what the public wants – especially given the fact that many Democrats view McConnell’s actions on the Scalia/Garland/Gorsuch seat to be outside the realm of acceptable behavior – then the Democratic party is prepared to use their Constitutionally granted leverage to bring them back into line. The hope is that the threat tempers some of the more extreme judgements that could be rendered. John Roberts, in particular, seems smart enough to get his preferred policies enacted through relatively narrow rulings and has enough power as Chief Justice that he can make those sorts of rulings.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Sounds like a failure to model, then. The “conservatives” on the court don’t think they’re partisan or conservative. They think they’re reading the text in the Constitution and applying it as written. They think the liberal judges are the activists making stuff up to suit left-wing politics.

          So you may think the message you’re sending is “stop being political or we’ll get more political” but the message they’re hearing is “start being left-wing or we’ll get more left-wing.” I doubt they’re going to acquiesce. They don’t think they’re “out of line,” they think the left is already out of line and is just hearing them threaten they’ll get even more out of line.

  19. Alkatyn says:

    Re Trump and China, in my anecdotal experience living in Beijing it seems that public opinion and state media are pretty heavily on the “idiot” side of the equation. (Though the people I talk to are generally the educated upper middle class, so may not be representative.)

    The state media has also been using him repeatedly to bolster its existing themes about the dangers of too much unfettered democracy (e.g. people will vote for incompetent demagogues rather than benevolent technocrats).

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      Makes sense from the perspective of the Chinese Government, however it doesn’t make much sense for us sitting here to imagine that those things the PRC tells its citizens necessarily represents the genuine opinion of PRC officials.

  20. Evan Þ says:

    Regarding Gwern’s review of Carrier’s book On The Historicity Of Jesus, there was some good further discussion on the subreddit. The consensus seemed to be against Carrier, though I’m admittedly strongly biased in that direction already.

    • Jaskologist says:

      From gwern’s review:

      On a side note, after reading On the Historicity of Jesus, I began wondering a little about Islam & Muhammed too. After some checking, apparently there is only 1 known probable contemporary reference to Muhammed, and there are otherwise a lot of red flags: the Koran talks very little about Muhammed or his life, …

      Isn’t it remarkable how the founders of major religions seem uniquely unlikely to exist?

      • dndnrsn says:

        There are non-religious historical figures whose lives are poorly-attested.

        • helloo says:

          Shakespeare is the biggest known “thought to be conspiracy” that I’m aware of even more than Jesus but his life is comparable if not better known than his peers.

          There’s also a lot of “legendary leaders” like King Arthur which people generally consider possibly once based on historic real people but has since become mythology. In which the question is more like “was there an actual King Arthur” than the reverse.

      • Winter Shaker says:

        Also, uniquely unlikely compared to who? If the reference class is ‘all founders of religions’, then I’d say that Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard are a lot more likely to have existed than John Frum, despite Mormonism and Scientology being much bigger religions than a Vanuatuan cargo cult.

        Or if the reference class is ‘legendary figures to whom superhuman feats are attributed’ generally, the Robin Hood mythicist position, or the Paul Bunyan mythicist position, are both far more popular than the Jesus mythicist position as far as I can tell.

    • theredsheep says:

      Is all that’s contested here the statement “Christianity is based on the life, however distorted, of a guy named Yeshua who started an NRM in Palestine, took it too far, and died at the hands of the authorities”? Given that broadly similar things have happened multiple times in the modern era, I don’t see why this merits doubt. It’s not like Yeshua was a rare name. Could it be all made up? Sure. But all the NRMs I can think of were started by single, charismatic figures–I vaguely recall hearing that Wicca had two–and most of them spoke on their own authority. So, arguing that Christ was made up by either some other figure who disappeared from the record, or else that the religion emerged organically by some kind of crowd consensus … that would seem to be overcomplicating the narrative. Parsimony, guys, parsimony.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Parsimony, guys, parsimony.

        Exactly. “Jesus never existed!” is an extreme edgelord claim. Even the most wild attempts to undermine Christianity still need a charismatic Jew to found an NRM before Paul wrote his earliest letter, and Yeshua was possibly the most common male name before that date, so the truth claim basically boils down to “Christianity was invented by a different Jew who convinced others to worship a fictional character by a name culturally equivalent to ‘John Smith’, and by the 70s AD they became erroneously convinced that John Smith was executed by a very specific colonial governor less than 40 years ago”, which carries a low Bayesian probability.

    • xXxanonxXx says:

      I’d hate to see what bad discussion looks like. For people who supposedly have no skin in the game the talk around this subject always gets personal real fast. I attribute most of this to Carrier who, when he isn’t calling his critics liars or douches, will drop lines like not having time to respond because he’s too busy having orgies with his harem. He drags everyone down with him and is the main reason I now avoid the subject despite having followed it with interest years ago.

  21. j r says:

    A dollar is worth a lot more to someone with an income of 10,000 a year than to someone with an income of 100,000 a year, and it is worth even less to someone on one million dollars a year. Thus there’s a certain inefficiency in giving a dollar to someone who already has many dollars, equally then there is a certain inefficiency to some having many dollars while others have few- those dollars could be more effectively contributing to the happiness of humanity if they were given to those who had less. Using certain mathematical techniques it is possible to quantify how much better a society would be in which everyone had an equal portion of income, yet the total pool of income was the same.

    Maybe I am missing something, but this premise seems deeply flawed or at the very least investigating the wrong thing. As I understand it, the premise here is that we can make an objective determination to what a dollar is worth to people at different levels of income (why income and not wealth by the way?) and then backsolve our way into quantifying the misallocation created by everybody not having the same income.

    There is a lot wrong with that conception. For one thing, it assumes that income level is the only variable that matters for determine the utility of an extra dollar. You can model it that way if you want and the output of that model will tell us something about how the marginal utility of income works, but it’s not going to give us the sum total of human happiness in regards to income.

    The other big problem is that it assumes that the value of a dollar in terms of social welfare can be derived by summing up everyone’s subjective marginal utilities. And that only makes sense if you think of wealth as something that rich people keep in their vaults to swan dive into and swim around in like Scrooge McDuck. The overwhelming amount of assets held by the rich are most likely in the form of working capital for some business, either through direct ownership or through investment in some security. Even if you were to only redistribute income and leave wealth alone, you would be impacting future investment decisions.

    The Atkinson index is a popular normative measure of inequality which gives the proportion of income in a society which could be sacrificed, without reducing ‘social welfare’ — if inequality was also reduced to zero.

    Maybe it’s just my capitalist priors, but I find this way of thinking quite scary (scary in the sense that I feel bad that there are people who actually think this way). I’m not really worried that anything like this is going to come to fruition, but as @fahertym states above, if there is something in our hind-brains that wants to see value destroyed to spare us feeling resentment at what other people have, we’re probably better off updating our operating systems. We no longer live in the zero-sum world of small bands roaming the savanna.

    • Said Achmiz says:

      if there is something in our hind-brains that wants to see value destroyed to spare us feeling resentment at what other people have, we’re probably better off updating our operating systems

      Suppose I were of a suspicious mind-set. How would I distinguish the quoted claim from “people quite understandably dislike being wronged, or suffering injustices; instead of rectifying the injustice, let’s convince people to come to like injustice, such that we—the ones currently benefiting from said injustice—may continue to benefit from it”?

      (Corollary question, which may assist in formulating a satisfying answer to the above: what, exactly, is this “value” that the quoted line refers to? Who is doing the valuing, for instance?)

      • j r says:

        I don’t know. Suppose I were of a suspicious mind and I saw someone from the other tribe willfully exchanging goods with someone from my tribe. How could I distinguish a distinguish a mutually beneficial exchange from a precursor to invasion and conquest?

        Or let’s get even more basic. Suppose I were naturally afraid of the dark, because nocturnal predators are dangerous How would I ever get to the point where I could sleep peacefully without a nightlight? Tough stuff, I know.

        By the way, I just want to point out the bait and switch that’s happening in this comment and in a bunch of other comments in the thread above about inequality. The link that I quoted from has nothing to do with any claims of injustice or any action to right wrongs. Likewise, there’s nothing about the bogus air rage claim that implies that the people at the front of the plane have done any injustice to the people in the back of the plane. This is explicitly about redistributing income to maximize some random conception of marginal utility. That’s it. That model explicitly involves sacrificing societal income for no corresponding increase in social welfare.

        • Said Achmiz says:

          By the way, I just want to point out the bait and switch that’s happening in this comment and in a bunch of other comments in the thread above about inequality. The link that I quoted from has nothing to do with any claims of injustice or any action to right wrongs. Likewise, there’s nothing about the bogus air rage claim that implies that the people at the front of the plane have done any injustice to the people in the back of the plane. This is explicitly about redistributing income to maximize some random conception of marginal utility. That’s it. That model explicitly involves sacrificing societal income for no corresponding increase in social welfare.

          What you seem to be missing is that some people consider unequal distribution of wealth to be injustice. (And, by extension, to such people, an equalizing redistribution is an “action to right wrongs”.) So there’s no bait-and-switch here—just a failure, on your part, to pass your opponents’ intellectual Turing Test.

          (I am not exactly such a person, myself. But I do share their deep suspicion of any claim that involves reasoning from abstract, vague “value” to conclusions about how I supposedly should stop preferring what I prefer, and instead start having other preferences, which will, coincidentally, be more convenient for people who are better off than I am. That this suspicion doesn’t actually require me to accuse those better-off folks of any misdeeds, or to tar their gains as ill-gotten, doesn’t ameliorate said suspicion one bit.)

          As for your replies to my question, they are unsatisfactory. Feel free to provide answers to the counter-questions that you listed, if you want. But do please also answer the question I asked.

          • j r says:

            @said achmiz

            No, I’m not missing anything. And I don’t have any “opponents” here. I made a specific comment on a link that was about a specific thing. Lots of people consider lots of things to be injustice. There are no ends to the ways that human beings can feel aggrieved in this world. So what?

            As for your replies to my question, they are unsatisfactory. Feel free to provide answers to the counter-questions that you listed, if you want. But do please also answer the question I asked.

            And… huh? What world are you living in? Lucky for me that I am living in the real world where you have no power to re-appropriate my comments to the topic that you want to talk about.

  22. tailcalled says:

    A new study confirms my survey’s finding that women in science suffer less sexual harassment than in other fields, with female scientists reporting generally nonsignificantly lower rates of harassment than female non-scientists and engineers, and significantly lower rates than female medical students.

    But the female engineers reported higher rates of sexist hostility, which seems like the form of harrassment that feminists usually talk about in tech?

    • gbdub says:

      For all the worry about awkward advances by nerds being misinterpreted as creepy harassment, I’m actually much more comfortable taking self-reported sexual harassment at face value than I am self-reported sexist hostility.

      As an engineer, while I haven’t heard first hand about much sexual harassment, when I have it’s been pretty unambiguously sexual, and whether it’s “really” harassment just a question of degree.

      On the other hand, I’ve heard more complaints about sexist hostility, and while it’s usually unambiguously hostile (or at least reasonable to interpret as such), it often sounds suspiciously exactly like the sort of hostility I get as a male, just run through a filter primed to detect hostility as evidence of sexism.

      • bean says:

        On the other hand, I’ve heard more complaints about sexist hostility, and while it’s usually unambiguously hostile (or at least reasonable to interpret as such), it often sounds suspiciously exactly like the sort of hostility I get as a male, just run through a filter primed to detect hostility as evidence of sexism.

        Seconded. I once asked a female engineer about this, and the example she gave was nearly word-for-word something that had happened to me a couple of months prior.

      • tailcalled says:

        Perhaps, but is this supported by evidence? Scott’s entire point was that there was no evidence on tech being associated with sexist harassment, but now he managed to dig up something that found a connection, so that seems like it requires withdrawing some points.

        • gbdub says:

          Certainly my anecdote doesn’t discredit the study, I just think that self reported “sexist hostility” is harder to trust than “sexual harassment”, without a really compelling reason why those two would apparently not be correlated. Probably need to look at the base level of hostility in the target environments too.

        • bean says:

          Can we not equivocate between sexist harassment and sexual harassment? Because those are two very different things, and accurately measuring the former is almost impossible, certainly not with the methodology used in these kind of surveys. Example based on my current job:
          Stuff gets sent out for peer review by the rest of the group. Usually, this is fairly straightforward, but a particular batch of work gets torn apart, even though the author feels it was no worse than other stuff they’ve seen/done in the past. In fact, let’s assume it isn’t. A woman primed with stories of sexism in engineering might well assume it was because she’s a woman. A man isn’t going to assume that, and he might chalk it up to the guy who does really harsh reviews not being busy that day or people being cranky because the cafeteria replaced tacos with some vegan thing unexpectedly. I’m not ruling out that some of it is sexism, and that women see a higher rate than men do, but when you hand me a study that says “x% of women see sexist harassment!” and a set of anecdotes that look a lot like my day-to-day life, I’m going to want more data to prove it.

          • tailcalled says:

            But the usual complaint is about sexist harassment, Scott was the one who brought up sexual harassment.

          • bean says:

            No, the usual complaint involves no distinction between the two at all. The word “brogrammer” does not make me think of someone who is polite to women except when it’s about professional matters.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Sure, he shouldn’t have cherry-picked the insignificant difference between stem and non-stem and he shouldn’t have reported the sign. He should have said that science and engineering were both insignificantly different from non-stem. And, as he did say, both science and engineering were significantly better than medicine. (Although I worry that there’s an apples-to-oranges problem of mixing undergrad and grad.)

      Even if it were true that engineering were statistically significantly worse than humanities, it is important to keep effect sizes in mind. That gap is much smaller than the engineering-medicine gap.

  23. nameless1 says:

    > Eventually “the story spread to newspapers all across the country and then into Europe”. The hoax continued for decades, and in the 1940s somehow people got it into their heads that the Great Wall demolition plan had incited the Boxer Rebellion.

    How to understand society. Whenever it is about something that matters personally for people, use game theory. Whenever it is not, assume it is a game of telephone. Scott Atran demonstrated the evolutionary psychology of religion by giving people one of the Ten Commandments, and asked them to explain it to someone else without telling them what it is. And in turn the other person would explain to another etc. And after 4-5 turns “honor thy father and mother” turned into “I should spend more time with my kids”. But this isn’t just religion, it is really everything.

  24. b_jonas says:

    > The FDA mulls making current prescription-only drugs non-prescription. […] I am vaguely emotionally in favor of it

    Are you in favor mostly because the current rules were made with the assumption that anyone will be able to afford to visit a doctor whenever they or their dependent relative is sick, and non-prescription drugs help work around the cases when this assumption is false?

    • Doctor’s appointments also have costs not measured in money. Example of someone with ADHD having a hard time getting medicated because she has ADHD.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Lots of drugs have dropped from prescription-only to OTC. The example I’m most familiar with is Claritin because I can get a 60 day supply for $15 and this is such an amazing development in quality-of-life that it should have been announced with fireworks.

    • Robert Jones says:

      People should be able to buy such drugs as they wish (and can afford), with the benefit of such advice as they choose to obtain.

  25. Hackworth says:

    Related to the OpenAI newsletter: OpenAI is going to stream the next DOTA 5v5 exhibition match on their Twitch.tv channel on August 5th.

    • C_B says:

      This is really cool, and they’ve been making very impressive progress.

      A couple months ago, when this showmatch was announced, they were thinking they would have to restrict it to a mirror match where both teams picked the same 5 heroes (out of >100 available in the game), because the bot didn’t know how to handle the others. Now it’s been changed to a draft from a pool of 18 heroes, much closer to the way the game is actually played.

      They also were originally going to include a whole bunch of “you can’t use this very important game mechanic because our bot doesn’t know how to handle it yet” restrictions, but they’ve removed the vast majority of them in time for the showmatch. You can see all the limitations they’ve overcome in the strikethrough bits of this page.

      I’m expecting them to be better than the best human teams by the time The International rolls around (mid-late August).

      The one thing I wish they’d include is a no-holds-barred round without the remaining restrictions, so we can get a chuckle (and possibly some insight) out of watching how the bot fails when faced with the stuff it doesn’t know how to handle yet.

      • Hackworth says:

        The one thing I wish they’d include is a no-holds-barred round without the remaining restrictions, so we can get a chuckle (and possibly some insight) out of watching how the bot fails when faced with the stuff it doesn’t know how to handle yet.

        One last chuckle at the bots’ expense before they solve Dota forever.

  26. Deej says:

    Maybe the threat of dems doing it later, will encourage republicans not to do it so much now…. (I guess probably not)

    • Matt M says:

      Or maybe the opposite. If the media succeeds in normalizing “court packing is an acceptable thing for the party in-power to do,” the Republicans won’t politely wait for the next election to start that ball rolling…

      • Eugene Dawn says:

        I suspect most Democrats will consider that to have already begun with Garland.

        • gbdub says:

          Failing to hold hearings for Garland was something of a defection from norms, but do you think the Dems would be griping less if the GOP had simply held votes on as many nominees as Obama could reasonably put forward in 2016, rejecting each one with their majority? Same result but much harder to argue a defection from norms.

          It’s very hard to call that “court packing”, especially when the net result was replacing Scalia with someone more like Scalia than Garland. It’s the Dems who were trying for an opportunity to adjust the status quo on the court.

          Blowing up the structure of the court to get your preferred ideological balance is on another level entirely to “refusing to approve a particular nominee for several months”.

          • broblawsky says:

            Yes, I believe we would be griping less if McConnell had just agreed to give Garland a hearing. It’s the violation of norms that people are angry about.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Some Democrats would still be just as angry, but some Democrats would be just as angry even if it was Garland and not a clone of RBG.

            The moderates Democrats and the Independents would be more accepting. There are rules to this shit.

            (I also agree that refusing to vote, while bad, is not Court Packing in a very obvious way, so obvious that I cannot engage with people who think they are the same.)

          • gbdub says:

            I’m skeptical. I think it’s “Trump got to put a conservative on the court (and now gets to put another one)” that people are upset about, and they’d continue to be upset regardless of how that came to pass.

            The Dems care about the norms now because they are the party out of power, and the norms are supposed to protect the out-of-power party to some degree.

            But they didn’t care much when they blew up the filibuster, or when they Borked Bork, or when Biden proposed the Biden rule.

            Likewise the GOP didn’t care much about the norms when they escalated those defections as soon as they became the majority.

            Now I think the norms are a good thing, and I’d prefer they come back to some degree, and I think the best way to do that is to de-escalate, rather than signal willingness to make a pretty severe escalation of your own as soon as possible.

          • Iain says:

            Now I think the norms are a good thing, and I’d prefer they come back to some degree, and I think the best way to do that is to de-escalate, rather than signal willingness to make a pretty severe escalation of your own as soon as possible.

            It sort of depends, doesn’t it? This is basically the Prisoner’s Dilemma: the worst possible outcome is being the only side that’s respecting norms. Not only did McConnell just play Defect, but he did it in response to the nomination of Merrick Garland, which was a pretty clear attempt at Cooperate on Obama’s part.

            I think it’s best to see talk of court packing as an attempt to signal a willingness to eventually play Defect, if no Cooperate is forthcoming from the other side, rather than a serious proposal. (Unfortunately, it’s not a credible threat unless it looks like you’re serious, which has the potential to end quite badly.)

            I agree with you on the broader point of supporting more norm-following.

          • Matt M says:

            Merrick Garland, which was a pretty clear attempt at Cooperate on Obama’s part.

            I don’t think this is true.

            I concede the fact that Garland was “about as good of a justice, by Republican standards, as a Democrat is likely to nominate.”

            That said, Republicans don’t want “as good of a justice as they can get from a Democrat. What they actually want is a Republican-appointed conservative justice.

            So, that being said, Obama was not “cooperating.” He too was making a calculated political ploy designed to damage his enemies. He thought that Republicans refusal to confirm Garland would damage them politically, AND that Hillary would eventually win, and the left would get an even better justice anyway. This was specifically engineered to entrap and harm McConnel and the Republicans.

            And he would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling rust belt voters!

          • gbdub says:

            I don’t know how much weight you can put on Garland as a signal to “Cooperate”, since the GOP had (stupidly, in my opinion) already made a commitment to not hold hearings. That gave Obama a free shot to nominate Garland with zero consequences – by picking a moderate, he maximized the degree to which the GOP would look bad.

            The GOP would have been tactically better off to provide a list of candidates they’d hold hearings for (and maybe approve), with a couple of juuuuust moderate enough candidates to make Obama plausibly the bad guy for not picking one. Rather than say “we’re not going to hear anyone” say “we’re not going to approve some super lib to replace Scalia in a Presidential election year” and then it looks more like a genuine stalemate than a unilateral Defect.

            Of course the outcome is probably still the same.

            Anyway regardless of all that, I think court packing talk (and impeachment talk) is stupid tactically because it’s going to turn off moderates and maybe get GOPers actually interested enough to get off their ass and vote in the midterm, which should be the last thing the Dems want. They naturally have a base enthusiasm gap in their favor this midterm, but seem intent on blowing it.

          • Iain says:

            That gave Obama a free shot to nominate Garland with zero consequences – by picking a moderate, he maximized the degree to which the GOP would look bad.

            No, see, this is McConnell’s dark genius. He correctly calculated that his obstruction would be lauded by the right, opposed by the left, and ignored completely by swing voters. The GOP did not “look bad” to anybody who mattered, because complaints about procedural obstruction don’t make good campaign ads.

            If your only goal is to maximize conservative influence on the Supreme Court, McConnell’s move was clearly correct. In the same way, if your only goal is to maximize liberal influence on the Supreme Court, packing the court with leftist judges is correct — if you can get away with it. They’re both cases of playing Defect: using the powers that are technically granted to you by the constitution in ways that have historically been out of bounds.

            (Preemptively: I agree that court packing would be a larger defection than McConnell’s gambit. I will note, however, that only one of these defections has actually happened.)

          • johansenindustries says:

            ‘McConnell’s move’

            What was McConnell’s move? If it was to declare that he wouldn’t have a hearing for any of Obama’s candidates, can you give a citation for this norm before McConnell declared he wouldn’t have any hearings for any of Obama’s candidates?

          • Iain says:

            Yes, in fact.

            Edward Scizorhands posted this link above. It’s from four months before Scalia’s death, and it examines the Supreme Court nomination process. The entire document is written under the assumption that Supreme Court nominations will be brought to the floor. In particular, see pages 1-3, “Bringing the Nomination to the Floor”. There’s nothing in there about the Majority Leader choosing not to consider a nominee.

          • johansenindustries says:

            From the summary:

            “Of the 36 nominations which were not confirmed, 11 were rejected outright in roll-call votes by the Senate,
            while nearly all of the rest, in the face of substantial committee or Senate opposition to the
            nominee or the President, were withdrawn by the President, or were postponed, tabled, or never
            voted on by the Senate.”

            Oh, what a guarantee that the president will have his candidate voted on.

            The section you pointed out, while you are correct that it doesn’t say the House Majority Leader specifically has veto rights, I have never seen a document stress unamity more and the House Majority Leader definitely is needed for unanimity.

            And it also goes on further to say ‘When unanimous consent to call up a nomination has not been secured, the majority leader may make a motion that the Senate proceed to consider the nomination.’ ‘may’ unambigiously implies ‘may not’ or ‘at the House Majority Leader’s discretion’.

          • Iain says:

            If it was to declare that he wouldn’t have a hearing for any of Obama’s candidates, can you give a citation for this norm before McConnell declared he wouldn’t have any hearings for any of Obama’s candidates?

            Oh, what a guarantee that the president will have his candidate voted on.

            “Whooosh! Whoooosh!” said the goalposts.

            Nobody said that there was a rule against what McConnell did. The argument is that there was a norm against it. The evidence for this is that A) it had never happened before, and B) the congressional report documenting the obstacles facing a Supreme Court nomination never mentions the idea.

            If you want further evidence, you can look at this document, from the same set of reports, discussing the Senate Judiciary Committee’s role. Take this bit, for example:

            Upon the President’s announcement of a nominee, the Judiciary Committee typically initiates an intensive investigation into the nominee’s background.

            Again, not even the faintest hint that the Majority Leader might just refuse to hold any hearings.

          • johansenindustries says:

            That a section detailing what the Senate Judiciary Comittee does in response not mentioning the fact that the Senate Majority Leader may choose not to have a hearing means utterly nothing. It doesn’t mention the possibility of withdrawal, of the nominee dying, or a host of other obviousities that aren’t the focus of the report.

            The treport reads: ‘When unanimous consent to call up a nomination has not been secured, the majority leader may
            make a motion that the Senate proceed to consider the nomination.’

            The ‘may’ unambigiously implies a ‘may not’ and the report never makes any suggestion that this would be violating any norm.

            Something not having happened before does not mean it violates a norm. Can you give an example where a President in his eighth year with the other party holding the other branches went to replace a beloved Justice of the other ideological bent with a moderate partisan supporter of his ideology without bothering to discuss his choice with the House Majority leader, and a hearing was still held.

            If you can show that then that would be a good argument for the House Majority Leader to have broken a norm. If you can’t then it wasn’t really him who acted in an unprecedented fashion*.

            * And he’s not the first US politician to use rhetoric stronger than he actually felt either.

          • Iain says:

            If you continue to put arbitrary restrictions on the situation, you can certainly make it seem unprecedented.

            My claimed norm is that nominees get hearings. There have been over a hundred Supreme Court nominations; to the best of my knowledge, Garland is the only not to get a hearing.

            Your claimed norm is a bunch of ad-hoc nonsense designed to narrow the circumstances down to this case in particular. To the best of my knowledge, those circumstances have never before occurred, which makes the lack of precedent completely unsurprising.

            Some precedents are clearer than others.

          • johansenindustries says:

            Did Oliver Ellsworth get a hearing? As far am I am aware most justices did not get a judicial commitee hearing.

            If no other president had ever been in such a position where he ought to have felt obliged to listen closely to what the House Majority leader wanted and yet refused not to, preferring to try to smugly do an unprecedented run-around poaching attempt then that would make the lack of precedent for the House Majority Leader’s actions entirely unsurprising.

          • Iain says:

            Yeah, okay, we’re done here.

          • johansenindustries says:

            Can you confirm that you stand by ” There have been over a hundred Supreme Court nominations; to the best of my knowledge, Garland is the only not to get a hearing.”? (For future reference.)

            [To clarify for anyone who happens to come across this. Of the ‘over a hundred Supreme Court nominations’ only around a third (probably less) of them got hearings.]

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Something not having happened before does not mean it violates a norm.

            I think the better response to this line of reasoning is that by this standard, court-packing isn’t norm-violating either, so it’s no biggie if Democrats do it.

          • johansenindustries says:

            X does not imply Y =/= X implies not Y.

            We know that court packing violates norms not because it has yet to happen, but because when it was threatened it was declared from all walks of the arena to be against norms.

            We can also see the court packing proposals ‘this isn’t really court packing so Republicans aren’t allowed to court pack in return or they’d be breaking the no court-packing norm’ . In contrast, nobody objects to Democrats delaying a hearing to the next election if they have the power to do so and will take the consequences, it is just Democrats crying when Republicans do it; which doesn’t sound much like a universal norm to me.

          • Iain says:

            For everybody following along at home: Oliver Ellsworth did not get a hearing from the Senate Judiciary Committee because that committee didn’t exist yet. He was confirmed in the Senate on a 21-1 vote; presumably this involved some sort of hearing.

            I leave any conclusions about the good faith of the participants in this discussion up to the judgment of the reader.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            FDR failed in part because he rejected lesser compromise positions: quoting from the article, “There were indications early in the struggle that members of Congress might have been prepared to accept a bill providing for two or three additional justices, even if they opposed expanding the Court’s membership to fifteen. Democratic Senator Key Pittman wrote to Attorney General Homer Cummings proposing an eleven-member Court just three days after the President surprised the congressional leadership with his own proposal.” On February 20 a delegation of congressional leaders headed by Vice-President John Nance Garner, Senate Majority Leader Joe Robinson, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Fountain Ashurst urged the President to agree to a compromise providing for the addition of two or three additional justices. Roosevelt responded by “laugh[ing] in their faces”. The Senate Majority Leader later said “[I]f the president wants to compromise, I can get him a couple of extra justices tomorrow.”

            So what was opposed from all sides wasn’t the court-packing per se, but only the amount. Two justices was regarded as a compromise position, and there is precedent for it as a compromise position. So, I contend appointing two more justices isn’t norm-violating.

            EDIT to add that in fact, the number of SC justices has been increased, so what was objected to was FDR’s reasoning–since the reasoning now would be different, the previous court-packing attempt isn’t necessarily relevant.

          • johansenindustries says:

            @I
            ‘presumably this involved some sort of hearing.’

            Some kind of hearing, OK then sure. House Majority Leader heard Obama say ‘Garland’ and said ‘no deal to Garland’. Which is no less of a hearing than the snap votes in Senate that the majority of nominees have faced.

            It is dishonest to talk about hudreds of nominees getting hearings when hearings as we know them have only been around for the last seventy years and not nearly hundred of nominees.

            @E
            Everybody but you recognises two more nominees as court-packing. The arguments being made aren’t that it isn’t court-packing are because of Garland. If the Republicans followed through with there own court packing for their own reason then the Democrats would complain of norm-violting. In contrast, nobody objects to Democrats trying to pull what the House Majority Leader pulled because that is not a norm.

            They want two justices for this court-packing because they need two justices to court pack (to unilaterally change the weight of the court on its head). FDR could not make do with two justices. Although a bit skeesy, FDR getting two more justices would not have been court packing so accepting two more justices as a compromise is not accepting court-packing.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            And everyone but you can see that comparing a justice who actually served on the Supreme Court to Merrick Garland is tendentious in the extreme; I at least am doing it deliberately to mock your reasoning. It’s’ easy to declare that something is not a norm if you get to dismiss all the reasons it’s a norm, which can be done for court packing as well as anything else.

          • johansenindustries says:

            OK, then did Robert H Harrison have a hearing? (And Iain didn’t say ‘of the hundreds of Suprenme Court nominations who did not get on the bench all of them got a hearing but Garland’.

            What are the reasons why holding a hearing for the President’s nominee should be considered a norm rather than something that has happened because the President has compromised so as to get the hearing that he wanted?

            On the court-packing side we have: the last time it was discussed it was objected to by both sides as breaking a norm, its proponents now give it a euphamism and try to explain that it is not really court-packing (since court-packing is norm-ciolating), if Trump responded to their threads of adding two new justices to get a DEmocrat balance by preemptively adding two new justices to keep a Republican balance the Democrats would complain of it being norm-breaking.

            Everybody is OK with the Democrats doing what McConnell did, and nobody has never not been OK with the Democrats doing what McConnel did (beyond the fact that they might be punished come election-time). It isn’t a norm if only the Republicans are supposed to be bound to it.

          • Dan L says:

            Everybody is OK with the Democrats doing what McConnell did, and nobody has never not been OK with the Democrats doing what McConnel did (beyond the fact that they might be punished come election-time).

            Ok, that one is blatantly false. Let’s keep the hyperbole to a minimum, people. Especially when we’re speaking for others.

          • johansenindustries says:

            @DanL

            If it is ‘blatantly false’ then it will not be difficult for you to provide evidence of that. Its not an ambivalent claim. I’ll wait.

          • Dan L says:

            You want evidence that it isn’t “everybody”? Uh, ok: I personally wouldn’t approve.

            If you don’t want to be proven wrong by one individual’s subjective opinion, I really recommend dialing back the hyperbole.

          • johansenindustries says:

            You wouldn’t approve of what? Speak in full sentences.

            If Democrats do great in the midterms, they win the house by a vote. Its 2018, Ginsburg dies and Trump nominates a Kennedy-type. The House Majority Leader refuses to hold hearing. Are you sincerely saying that you would consider that House Majority Leader as norm-breaking? Or are you just trying to be smart?

            If you’re saying that you are sincere and you do think that a Democratic House Majority leader would be norm-breaking then I guess I was wrong.

            (And yes by ‘nobody’ I assumed it was a given that I was not including psychiatric schitzopherincs, five year olds and other groups not mentally competent enough. I don’t think the discussion is enriched by always having to phrase ‘everyone’ or ‘no one’ as ‘everyone (or no none) save for five year olds, mental delusionals and the like’ lest be attacked for hyperbole.)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            You wouldn’t approve of what? Speak in full sentences.

            Reading comprehension seems to have eluded you. Because ..

            (And yes by ‘nobody’ I assumed it was a given that I was not including

            Oh wait, you are just being a jerk. You actually did understand the sentence.

            See the thing is you need to specify the scope of your actual set. Because if Trump were to nominate someone in 2019, and they did not get a hearing or a vote, I would say that would be norm breaking. Many people would.

            I might consider it justified, but I would acknowledge that it is another broken norm. Just like McCain threatening to never give anyone nominated by Hillary a vote was a broken norm. Each norm violation being justified by the previous one.

            Republicans like to trace this sequence back to the hearings and vote on Bork. I’d say nominating Bork, who carried out the Saturday Night Massacre, was the first in the sequence.

          • Dan L says:

            @johansenindustries:

            You wouldn’t approve of what? Speak in full sentences.

            The use of a pronoun does not seem to have exceeded your grasp of the English language. Quit being gratuitously insufferable.

            If Democrats do great in the midterms, they win the house by a vote. Its 2018, Ginsburg dies and Trump nominates a Kennedy-type. The House Majority Leader refuses to hold hearing. Are you sincerely saying that you would consider that House Majority Leader as norm-breaking? Or are you just trying to be smart?

            The House doesn’t confirm SCOTUS nominees. That’s the Senate’s responsibility, with the Senate Judiciary Committee holding the hearings.

            But if we end up in a situation where the Democrats control the SJC and they refuse hearings, I would indeed consider that a violation of the same norm that was violated in 2016. Coming after that one however, it may be inevitable – it isn’t a norm if only the Democrats are supposed to be bound to it. Nonetheless I would prefer the SJC not be used as a veto point, by either side. Better for each nominee to go to a floor vote.

            (Note that that a committee veto is only necessary if the nominee is enough of a compromise that they would pass the floor vote. I am not a fan of the Hastert rule, and this seems analagous.)

            If you offered me a deal right now, not knowing what is going to happen in November or in 2020, to swap RBJ and Clarence Thomas with two 50-something centrists I’d take it in a heartbeat. Political polarization of the court is a bad thing.

            (And yes by ‘nobody’ I assumed it was a given that I was not including psychiatric schitzopherincs, five year olds and other groups not mentally competent enough. I don’t think the discussion is enriched by always having to phrase ‘everyone’ or ‘no one’ as ‘everyone (or no none) save for five year olds, mental delusionals and the like’ lest be attacked for hyperbole.)

            I find it disturbing that you might let “people with consistent principles” fall into the same category of non-consideration. One more time – less hyperbole, please.

          • johansenindustries says:

            @HBC

            Not letting you get away with ‘the norm that was violated in 2016’, ‘the norm violated by McDonnell’ or ‘it’ is not being a jerk. You should ask yourself why you are unwilling to actully name the norm. And you act with such vitriol when asked to do so.

            @the other one

            You wouldn’t approve of what? Speak in full sentences.

            The use of a pronoun does not seem to have exceeded your grasp of the English language. Quit being gratuitously insufferable.

            If Democrats do great in the midterms, they win the house by a vote. Its 2018, Ginsburg dies and Trump nominates a Kennedy-type. The House Majority Leader refuses to hold hearing. Are you sincerely saying that you would consider that House Majority Leader as norm-breaking? Or are you just trying to be smart?

            The House doesn’t confirm SCOTUS nominees. That’s the Senate’s responsibility, with the Senate Judiciary Committee holding the hearings.

            But if we end up in a situation where the Democrats control the SJC and they refuse hearings, I would indeed consider that a violation of the same norm that was violated in 2016. Coming after that one however, it may be inevitable – it isn’t a norm if only the Democrats are supposed to be bound to it. Nonetheless I would prefer the SJC not be used as a veto point, by either side. Better for each nominee to go to a floor vote.

            (Note that that a committee veto is only necessary if the nominee is enough of a compromise that they would pass the floor vote. I am not a fan of the Hastert rule, and this seems analagous.)

            If you offered me a deal right now, not knowing what is going to happen in November or in 2020, to swap RBJ and Clarence Thomas with two 50-something centrists I’d take it in a heartbeat. Political polarization of the court is a bad thing.

            (And yes by ‘nobody’ I assumed it was a given that I was not including psychiatric schitzopherincs, five year olds and other groups not mentally competent enough. I don’t think the discussion is enriched by always having to phrase ‘everyone’ or ‘no one’ as ‘everyone (or no none) save for five year olds, mental delusionals and the like’ lest be attacked for hyperbole.)

            I find it disturbing that you might let “people with consistent principles” fall into the same category of non-consideration. One more time – less hyperbole, please.

            So stripping out the insults and irrelevancis to what was a simple yes or no question: Were you being sincere?

            We are left with

            *Crickets*

            I guess you werre unable to find a counter-example after all.

            (A non-political court would be nine Thomases anyway.)

          • Doctor Mist says:

            I’d say nominating Bork, who carried out the Saturday Night Massacre, was the first in the sequence.

            Wow. Fifteen years before nomination, he fired one guy, when it was completely clear that the guy was going to get fired if Nixon had to go through a dozen top-ranked Justice officials, and when that firing had almost no long-term consequences to the country — Cox was replaced eleven days later, and Nixon’s whole criminal hierarchy was taken down anyway. Except for that one arguable misstep, Bork was a supremely qualified legal scholar, who had served as an appeals judge for five years and had never been overturned. But that one action fifteen years earlier made nominating him to the Supreme Court a casus belli and the ultimate source of today’s vicious polarization.

            Well, just, wow.

          • Dan L says:

            @johansenindustries:

            So stripping out the insults and irrelevancis to what was a simple yes or no question: Were you being sincere?

            We are left with

            *Crickets*

            I guess you werre unable to find a counter-example after all.

            Either I overestimate your grasp of the English language after all, or I’m disappointed that you were unwilling to spend the effort to parse my entire comment. Ah well, I tried. One point I want to press on though:

            (A non-political court would be nine Thomases anyway.)

            You have a metric for evaluating ideology that places Thomas around the median? What is it, it sounds fascinating!

            Or is this more of that poisonous hyperbole thing that you definitely don’t do?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Doctor Mist:

            Fifteen years before nomination, he fired one guy, when it was completely clear that the guy was going to get fired

            If I didn’t murder that guy, someone was going to.

            This is not a defense that applies when deciding whether he is fit for the Supreme Court. Yes, the action is irredeemable from the point of view of norms. You can get away with this (from the stand point of not violating norms) if he is a consensus bi-partisan pick, but not otherwise.

          • johansenindustries says:

            You have a metric for evaluating ideology that places Thomas around the median? What is it, it sounds fascinating!

            No the median ideology is “mostly apolitical but if very important we’ll come up with dignity”. And I never said anything otherwise.

            If the right believe in the written consititution and the left beleive in the written constitution plus current politics (aka a living constitution) then the further you get from the left then the more non-political you will get*.

            It is a betrays of the language to suggest that in the range of political to non-political that the median or compromise is the definitional non-political position.

            *Obviously, if the Republicans start appointing right-wing living consitutionalists, or any other ideology that holds that cultural norms can change the constitionality of an action outside the ‘cruel and unusual’ clause, then that rule will no longer hold true. (Clarence ‘Precedent. Schmecedent’ will still be the paragon of a perfectly non-political judge, though.)

          • Doctor Mist says:

            If I didn’t murder that guy, someone was going to.

            Oh, well, if we’re talking murder! I had no idea.

            The Watergate debacle was so far out on the edge that I’m not sure norms apply. I can well imagine being in that situation myself and deciding that the whole thing could fall apart in a messy and dangerous way, and that “taking the bullet” by firing Cox myself would both protect the people under me and, more important, provide enough breathing space for the process to stabilize. As it did.

            Ford’s pardon of Nixon violated a few norms as well, but it strikes me as exactly the right thing for the body politic. For similar reasons, I don’t advocate criminal charges against Hillary for the email fiasco, and have bet against there being any on predictit.

            Bork had an exemplary judicial career. The one questionable action with which you are trying to tar him might have broken some norms (though I see on wikipedia that both Grant and Truman fired special prosecutors), but refusing to carry out the orders of your boss, the President of the United States, surely breaks some norms in its own right. You call Bork a bad guy because you can tell a prima facie story that puts him on the side of bad guy Nixon, and I think that’s an unfair assessment.

          • Dan L says:

            @johansenindustries:

            If the right believe in the written consititution and the left beleive in the written constitution plus current politics (aka a living constitution) then the further you get from the left then the more non-political you will get*.

            It is a betrays of the language to suggest that in the range of political to non-political that the median or compromise is the definitional non-political position.

            Of course, you’re assuming that the conservative approach to textualism is for some reason apolitical. Circular reasoning really is quite elegant in its simplicity.

            But your “current politics” also happens to includes stuff like a consistent rule of law. I’m not a fan of Originalism when it caches out as an individual valuing their personal interpretation over centuries of precedent.

            *Obviously, if the Republicans start appointing right-wing living consitutionalists, or any other ideology that holds that cultural norms can change the constitionality of an action outside the ‘cruel and unusual’ clause, then that rule will no longer hold true. (Clarence ‘Precedent. Schmecedent’ will still be the paragon of a perfectly non-political judge, though.)

            In an earlier Open Thread I quipped “I have no idea what is supposed to be distinguishing a non-textual originalist ruling that builds on a previously unestablished general principle and straight-up Emanations except a pretense of colonial roleplaying.” There are several clauses that current self-professed Originalists cite to expand the scope of relevant laws. How many of those do you object to?

  27. Aapje says:

    Your regular reminder that the IRS could easily calculate how much each American owes in taxes and send them the bill without any tax preparation required, but tax preparation companies like Intuit and H&R Block keep successfully lobbying against this

    The Dutch IRS does this already (you do need to check it and change it if something is missing).

    States consider banning fast food companies from banning employee poaching.

    This is not legal in Europe.

    Thanks for making me feel good, America!

    Seriously though. Why do Americans put up with this?

    • Matt M says:

      Well, as a libertarian, I would suggest the state has no moral authority to stand in the way of voluntary contracts between employers and employees.

      An employee who desires not to have such an agreement is free to not sign a contract that includes it, or attempt to negotiate around it.

      Alternatively, it’s possible for competitors to “buy out” such agreements. I saw this happen in business school, where employees of Corporation X were “sponsored” to go get their MBAs on the company dime. While in school, Corporation Y approached the employee with a better offer post-graduation. On more than one occasion, Y contacted X and said “How much would we need to pay you for you to give this person to us” and a number was negotiated, agreed, and paid, with the employee then going to Y.

      • The Pachyderminator says:

        An employee who desires not to have such an agreement is free to not sign a contract that includes it, or attempt to negotiate around it.

        In a universe of libertarian spherical cows, sure. In real life, non-compete agreements signed by fast-food workers are “voluntary” only in the narrowest, most legalistic sense. A person applying for a fast food job has zero real negotiating power.

        • Matt M says:

          A person applying for a fast food job has zero real negotiating power.

          Evidently not, or the fast food employers would have little concern about their employees being “poached” by competitors, no?

          • James C says:

            No no, you miss-understand the purpose of the the non-compete clauses. It’s there to restrict the employee’s seeking and asking for better salaries, not as a response to the behavior.

            For someone living marginally on a McJob taking a contractually enforced leave of absence from paying work is a non-option. This means they can’t use the threat of walking to negotiate better pay.

          • Matt M says:

            I think we’re arguing in circles here.

            My point is that the existence of these agreements is itself evidence that McDonalds is concerned that it’s employees do in fact have enough negotiating power to either demand higher salaries, or to receive them by leaving for a competitor.

            Which itself disproves the notion of “these people have no bargaining power.” If they had no bargaining power… if their literal only options was go-nowhere minimum wage employment, then you would have no concern of them leaving, or of them demanding higher salaries (because you could just refuse their clearly unwarranted demands).

          • gbdub says:

            Well, so they have bargaining power, but the employers are trying to artificially suppress that power. I do think the marginal McEmployee is much more desperate for a McJob than McDonalds is for the employee.

            And I think that asymmetry has enough possibility for abuse that I’m okay with some legal restriction on the noncompetes.

            Noncompetes make sense when the employee gets real value (i.e. you’re locked into a job here, but here’s a $25k signing bonus for your trouble) and there’s a real threat of “poaching” for competitive knowledge.

            But Burger King isn’t poaching fry cooks to learn how long McD’s fries their nuggets. They might be trying to poach the slightly better fry cooks by offering them 10% more, but that’s bargaining power that the employees ought to have in a free market.

        • Freddie deBoer says:

          ding ding ding

      • Given that the state is refusing to enforce this agreement rather than just allow it to take place I think maybe negative rights is the wrong framework to look at this through. Nobody is going to stop you from signing a document saying you won’t compete, it’s just that no armed men will show up if you break your word.

      • Sebastian_H says:

        As someone who agrees that libertarian critiques have a lot of appeal, this particular one is one of the least convincing. Assuming that everyone has high levels of bargaining power (or even remotely equal levels of bargaining power) suggests unfamiliarity with the real world.

        • Matt M says:

          I make no such claim. Only that the bargaining power of low-wage workers is clearly non-zero, or companies wouldn’t bother to implement such clauses in the first place.

          I’ve never worked in fast food, but from what I’ve heard, one of its biggest struggles is high employee turnover. They take in people with no skills, train them up for a few weeks where they are adding little to no actual value, then huge percentages of them get bored and quit, or leave for a competitor to make 10 cents an hour more.

          Many other types of employers have long used various methods to try and ensure that their “training” efforts are fully recouped. This general phenomenon is hardly new, and the motivation behind it is the same. McDonalds is hardly unique in preferring employees who will stick around for a long time, and who will work for a relatively low wage. Why shouldn’t they endeavor to attract employees who are willing to commit to doing that?

          • Sebastian_H says:

            I don’t think McDonalds actually uses those clauses by the way. It was most recently a big deal at one of the sandwich shops.

            Anyway. ‘Non-zero’ isn’t ‘sufficiently high to bother arguing about’. In my experience, very few people have enough bargaining power to ask for large businesses to change their “terms and conditions” to use software much less for lowest rung employees to change form employment ‘contracts’.

            You’re positing a world where minimum wage workers regularly get changes to form contracts while still getting hired instead of potential employers using the request to decide not to hire them. I don’t believe that is a world we live in.

          • Deiseach says:

            leave for a competitor to make 10 cents an hour more

            Gosh, how very awful and how ungrateful of low-paid employees to leave for a better job! I’m so glad everyone here who is in work signed a loyalty oath in their own blood and steadfastly refuses to leave their current and only employer.

            I have read some things online such as people saying “I’m only in this job for a couple of years to get experience then I’ll leave for somewhere better” or “As soon as I can cash in my stock options, I’m gone” but I’m sure those are only false stories made up by trolls because nobody would ever, ever put their own career interests first above those of their employers, surely not!

            10 cents an hour more for forty hours a week is an extra four dollars. If you’ve ever been in a situation where an extra four dollars a week makes a difference to your budget, then you won’t grouse about people leaving for it.

          • Matt M says:

            I’m so glad everyone here who is in work signed a loyalty oath in their own blood and steadfastly refuses to leave their current and only employer.

            You misunderstand me. I’m not against anyone doing what is in their best interest, within the terms of their employment.

            In the absence of some sort of contract, employees have any right to leave at any time for any reason. Which is exactly why some employees require contracts of determinate length, and/or include things like no-compete clauses.

            Employees who dislike or are uncomfortable with these terms are free to not accept them and continue providing for their existence by whichever means they were utilizing prior to receiving such an offer.

          • Sebastian_H says:

            The problem with the libertarian critique in these situations is that it erases the tacit/norm side of employer/employee relations and reduces it to the formal contract.

            A stylized history of worker relations since 1945 or so would be something like: workers and companies invested in each other long term, companies found if they invested less without telling the employees, the employees would act like the old system was still in place and the company could make more money, finally employees caught on and started investing less in the companies, but now companies needed to keep employees and had abandoned the investment tools which incentivized staying, so had to rely more and more on coercive contract mechanisms.

          • John Schilling says:

            The problem with the libertarian critique in these situations is that it erases the tacit/norm side of employer/employee relations and reduces it to the formal contract.

            That “tacit norm” was erased decades ago, and I’m pretty sure libertarians he’d nothing to do with it. If there’s some concerted effort going on where we all pretend it isn’t so and hope this will make the norm come back, then yes, you can accuse libertarians of defecting. Otherwise, there’s explicit contracts or there’s nothing.

      • Picador says:

        “Alternatively, it’s possible for competitors to “buy out” such agreements.”

        It’s nice to see a self-described libertarian just coming out and endorsing indentured servitude contracts. Most of you guys try really hard to pretend that you care about human autonomy.

        A+ for honesty!

        • ec429 says:

          Picador: I think most “doctrinaire” libertarians will endorse such things. Freedom of contract necessarily includes the freedom to make any contract, no matter how bad/disadvantageous it looks to someone else from their armchair.
          Some of us even say that you should have the right to sell yourself into slavery perpetual uncompensated indenture, because if you want to be a bloody moron that’s your own lookout and it’s not contract law’s place to rescue you.
          Moreover, in the past (when the price of capital was higher), no-one even batted an eyelid at, say, apprenticeships to pay for vocational training, or even indentured service as a way to pay one’s crossing to the New World. That most people, today, find the idea abhorrent is not because we are more moral than our ancestors; it is simply that increases in the general level of wealth mean that most people can fund investments in their own human capital without having to go to the extreme lengths of binding their own person as collateral.

          Indentured servitude also sometimes comes up when considering how to handle judgement-proof tortfeasors: if you aren’t willing to use ‘criminal’ penalties like imprisonment for civil cases (and besides, they’re (in the economist’s sense) ‘inefficient punishments’ because unlike damages there’s nothing for the victim to receive as restitution), one of the main options is to make any tortfeasor who can’t afford to pay damages indentured to the court who can then sell off that indenture to extract the money to award to the victim. Libertarians tend to be a little less comfortable with this idea, but it’s mainly because efficient punishments create a dangerous incentive to perjury, rather than a particular distaste for indentures (and remembering that in the hard-libertarian an-cap model, you’re only subject to that court because you signed a contract with a particular protection agency, making it morally OK for the court to have that kind of power).

          pretend that you care about human autonomy.

          As sci-fi-nanofic-writer Alistair Young put it when describing the contract law of his libertarian protagonists:

          The unalienable part is that only your consent can enable actions on you/yours, and you can’t alienate that. You can bind your future self or alienate parts of you/yours just fine if you consent so to do, and it’s your (self-)ownership that lets you do that, but there’s no way for you or anybody else to bind you or alienate parts of you without your consenting to it.

          (The ‘you/yours’ comes from a principle in their law that property is part of the self; that your mind, your body, your personal property and your real property are all equally part of you.)

          So, y’know, we do care about human autonomy, we’re just willing to follow through on the logic and actually endorse its consequences rather than pretending that it’s possible to be both autonomous and circumscribed-for-your-own-protection.

          I’d like to finish with a quote (of disputed attribution) from the seemingly-unrelated domain of computer science:

          UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.

      • Robert Jones says:

        I think you are confused. The proposal is to prohibit anti-poaching agreements between employers. It doesn’t have anything to do with agreements between employers and employees.

        The question then is, should the state intervene to restrict employers freedom to contract in such a way inter se? On a purist view, one might say no, but we certainly do have various laws to prevent cartels.

        • Guy in TN says:

          It is the state that would be expected to enforce the rules of the contract, I presume. So the state doesn’t have to intervene to stop the contract. It just has to do, quite literally nothing.

          The state could just be like: “good luck enforcing that without our police and court system!”

      • Radu Floricica says:

        Just a thought. Why do libertarians distinguish so hard between government and corporate power? On a “free market” axis, it’s better to not have blanket no-compete clauses. I’m not talking here about a negotiated contract, but about a standard, industry-wide, non-removable clause. How is that in any way different from a law? And “you can work in a different industry” is about as useful argument here is “you can move in a different country if you don’t like this law”.

        And to give a counter-example, to better define my point. UK government has a very nice program where it pays for your studies and gets a small percentage of your income for 10 years, only if the income is above a cutoff. Including for immigrants, which makes it uniquely useful. This kind of thing is rare (maybe illegal? maybe just unenforceable?) in the private world, and I really regret that. This is a type of private contract that’s voluntary, negotiated, and useful – even if at a first glance is pretty heavy-handed.

        So this case – good. Blanket non-negotiable industry-wide clauses – pretty much law. Why would a libertarian approve?

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          On a “free market” axis, it’s better to not have blanket no-compete clauses.

          It’s better to have no-complete clauses if everyone agrees to honor such clauses. In reality, various incentives drive parties to defect from such clauses. For any one party to the clause, the benefit of defecting will eventually outweigh the cost of honoring it.

          A law enforcing such a clause isn’t absolute; it’s a declaration from an outside party that if any party defects, the outside party will bring a progression of penalties to the defector, culminating in big guys with sticks.

          I’m not talking here about a negotiated contract, but about a standard, industry-wide, non-removable clause.

          Industries are naturally open; the set of parties isn’t fixed. If a new party enters the industry, there might be insufficient incentive for them to sign on to the clause. This is especially the case if the market was clearing before they arrived, since any market share they’re going to get will necessarily be at the expense of one or more of the original parties.

          Such a clause also weakens the incentive to make the industry more efficient, except for the increased profit margin a party will get within its own market share. This is generally bad news for consumers of that industry’s product. Therefore, anyone who consumes a product they believe can be made more inexpensive has an incentive to oppose such non-complete clauses.

    • Anonymous says:

      The Dutch IRS does this already (you do need to check it and change it if something is missing).

      As does Norway. Unfortunately, Poland does not. It’s ridiculous.

      • ana53294 says:

        I find the argument that if the IRS pre-fills a form in which you pay less tax than you would if you filled it yourself, especially compelling. This at least means that the maximum tax you will pay is what the IRS form says, and any changes you make (deductions, etc.) will just reduce your payments. I highly doubt that anybody would correct the IRS’ mistakes to pay more, so I see this as a way to equal the huge power disparity.

        • dick says:

          This at least means that the maximum tax you will pay is what the IRS form says

          That is very much not what’s being discussed here. The IRS isn’t psychic, you’d still be required to tell them about income you made that they don’t know about; what’s being discussed is that they would start by telling you what they do know about, to save everyone time and to minimize mistakes and so forth.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I’m not really sold on this, but one argument for the IRS saying “no, you tell us everything you made” while knowing some stuff for sure is that they want you to self-report the stuff they don’t know about.

          • Matt M says:

            Edward Scizorhands,

            Indeed. I also think it helps them in potential audits and prosecutions that the process makes it clear that the entire burden of accurate reporting lies on you, the individual.

            If they “get you started” by saying “we think you owe $10,000” and someone pays 10,000 (but secretly owes more), that doesn’t quite look as criminal to a potential jury. This method eliminates any potential defense of “I paid what they told me to pay!”

          • dick says:

            but one argument for the IRS saying “no, you tell us everything you made” while knowing some stuff for sure is that they want you to self-report the stuff they don’t know about.

            The point of this is to minimize mistakes and their cost, not to catch frauds. If you make $4000 in interest and accidentally write down $400, the process for correcting that isn’t enormously costly, but it does have some cost, and fixing it would be very cheap, and in the best interests of everyone except Intuit.

        • Eric Rall says:

          It depends on what the policy is on if they later discover the pre-fill was erroneous in your favor.

          If the policy is “It’s the IRS’s fault for getting it wrong”, then that’s an invitation for legal tax evasion by obfuscating your finances in not-technically-fraudulent ways in hopes of the IRS missing taxable income or overcounting deductions and credits.

          It the policy is “You signed a thing certifying that you reviewed the form and found it to be correct, so that’s tax fraud”, then the cost of reviewing the form like you’re supposed to is going to be about the same as filling out the form yourself, and at least a few people are going to go to jail for being lazy.

          Somewhere in-between, along the lines of “Pay back-taxes with interest and penalty fees, but no criminal liability” might be workable, especially if you limit the pre-fill program to people who have less than $X in non-W2 taxable income and require a separate certification (with steeper penalties) that you’re eligible for pre-fill.

          • poignardazur says:

            In practice, the policy could be “If we underestimate your revenue from a specific company by, say, 20% (eg because we failed to account for a specific type of bonus that your company gives you), it’s our fault. If we realize you get 300’000$ “gifts” every month on an offshore account and you don’t tell us about it, then you’re in trouble.”

            E.g. the taxpayer’s responsibility would be to look at the tax bill and make sure all income sources are listed and within the right order of magnitude, not double-check the exact accountancy.

            I think most people have fairly straightforward sources of income. It’s only the people who don’t who’d still need to hire accountants to review their tax forms.

        • Aapje says:

          @ana53294

          The way it works is that the government knows your salary if you are (normally) employed, because employers report to the government. If you are on welfare, they know. Banks report to the government how much you have in stock or bank accounts, your debts and loans, what your mortgage is, etc. Insurance companies report if you have a life insurance, pension or such. The local government knows your house value (for local tax) and reports it to the central government. If you win more than a certain amount in a Dutch lottery, this is reported to the government (for the gambling tax).

          If a Dutch person earns money informally (like selling goods on Ebay), the government might not know about it. If there are assets or debts with non-Dutch banks, the Dutch IRS might be notified too late to prefill it or not be notified at all. If you win the mega ultra jumbo super amazatron jackpot in a US casino and keep the winnings in cash, the Dutch IRS doesn’t know. If you have bullion buried in your garden or bitcoins, they don’t know. If you gave to a charity that is eligible for a tax deduction, they don’t know.

          So in those cases you have to add the missing information.

          PS. Note that not only are you responsible for fixing any errors, if you call the Dutch IRS and they give you bad advice, they take no responsibility for that. The Dutch Consumers Union regularly checks the IRS’s advice for quality and consistently finds that they often give bad advice.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            Note that not only are you responsible for fixing any errors, if you call the Dutch IRS and they give you bad advice, they take no responsibility for that. The Dutch Consumers Union regularly checks the IRS’s advice for quality and consistently finds that they often give bad advice.

            Ha! This is exactly like the American IRS. It’s nice to hear that the US isn’t worse on ALL tax issues.

          • Aapje says:

            The issue with providing good advice is that it requires a level of talent and expertise that is normally provided by the private sector. So doing that effectively means that you collectivize the tax adviser sector, as you will need to hire people who are that capable and people will choose the free service over the paid one. You will then also grow demand, since the price for the users will go down to zero.

            So the crappy advice is a logical consequence of a desire to keep up appearances, where the government claims to help citizens with their tax returns, while not actually being willing to accept the level of government spending that is required to do so.

  28. BPC says:

    Related: the “clown vs. chessmaster” debate around Trump still hasn’t died down.

    Related: the “clown vs. chessmaster” debate around the pigeon who just shat on the chessboard still hasn’t died down.

    Seriously, if your assumption here isn’t “China really wants to flatter Trump”, I’m not sure you’ve been paying attention. Absolutely nothing this administration has done has in any way resembled a rational actor, let alone a chessmaster. He makes “deals” with people that lack specifics and which are immediately reneged by all parties (side note, North Korea is making missiles again) just for the headlines, his trade war appears completely nonsensical, and if you have to dig that hard to find anything that even remotely makes sense about a person’s actions, you’re probably engaged in motivated reasoning if you think he’s a chessmaster. Chessmasters do not open with F3 G4.

    If there’s one thing in that article that sounds remarkably telling to me, it’s this:

    He is systematically destroying the existing institutions — from the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement to Nato and the Iran nuclear deal — as a first step towards renegotiating the world order on terms more favourable to Washington.

    There’s one lesson that really stuck with me through your writing on Communism, Scott. It was something along the lines of “if you seek to destroy the system and replace it, the part where you replace it is 99% of the work“. Maybe Trump is trying to destroy the current world order and renegotiate it in ways that are better for the US, but if so, he’s doing about as well as the Marxists, and he doesn’t even have the excuse of a world-spirit to go off of. In reality, there hasn’t been a time since the end of World War 2 where America has been weaker, more isolated, or less well-liked on the world stage. And that’s mostly because of Trump. There is no worse time to renegotiate deals made from a position of strength than when the rest of the world thinks you are weak, easily manipulated, stupid, and disliked. He’s blowing up trade deals, and threatening to blow up NATO and the WTO, without any real plan on how to replace them – let alone a plan that anyone but the US would ratify! (“Who knew international diplomacy was this complicated?”) His insistence on bilateral trade agreements makes this even harder for him.

    So yeah. I’m not going to take those scholars particularly seriously. Taken charitably, their take makes about as much sense as someone on /r/The_Donald talking about how Trump’s Helsinki performance was an impressive display of 13th-dimensional chess. Realistically, they’re not being honest.

    • MartMart says:

      Wait, does that make Trump a definitional liberal?

      • BPC says:

        I mean, if you want to define “liberal” in the most pejorative, negative sense, sure. That was kind of the thrust of Scott’s article against Trump – that between Trump and Clinton, Trump was acting like a millenarian:

        Many conservatives make the argument against utopianism. The millenarian longing for a world where all systems are destroyed, all problems are solved, and everything is permissible – that’s dangerous whether it comes from Puritans or Communists. These same conservatives have traced this longing through leftist history from Lenin through social justice.

        Which of the candidates in this election are millennarian? If Sanders were still in, I’d say fine, he qualifies. If Stein were in, same, no contest. But Hillary? The left and right both critique Hillary the same way. She’s too in bed with the system. Corporations love her. Politicians love her. All she wants to do is make little tweaks – a better tax policy here, a new foreign policy doctrine there. The critiques are right. Hillary represents complete safety from millennialism.

        I don’t think liberalism is first and foremost defined by a desire to blindly tear down all systems and replace them with a world spirit; I think that’s grossly uncharitable to modern liberalism and even misses the mark with regards to modern mainstream leftism and modern marxism (although man, you do not wanna hang out in the Contrapoints facebook group, talk about evaporative cooling of group ideals). But if you insist on defining liberalism in that very bad way… yeah, I’d agree, Trump is a liberal, in the sense that he’s clearly all about tearing down systems without any realistic sense of how to replace them in the hopes that it’ll all work itself out. (This is assuming the “he’s a russian plant tearing down systems because they don’t like those systems” theory is false. I still find that theory silly, but I’ll include it for completeness’s sake.)

        • MartMart says:

          I meant that in the Jonathat Heidt way that he went over here
          https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind#t-68956
          I don’t think its the most pejorative, negative sense. Although I agree, it’s not entirely useful. By those definitions, pro institution liberals are in fact conservative.

          I suppose the interesting point there is that the leader of a movement can be the definitional opposite of the movement he/she leads.

          • BPC says:

            I suppose the interesting point there is that the leader of a movement can be the definitional opposite of the movement he/she leads.

            Eh, “conservative” and “liberal” in US politics haven’t made a lick of sense since at least the 90s. These are tribal identities and sports teams, not serious political disagreements on philosophy and correct governance.

      • Joseph Greenwood says:

        I don’t think “conservative” and “liberal” are symmetric terms. A conservative (lower case c) defends existing institutions and tradition and the status quo. A liberal (lower case l) is someone in the intellectual tradition of ie Locke or Rousseau who believes for instance in inalienable (negative) rights, like freedom of association and speech, and that the government is accountable to the people for providing such rights.

        • Jayson Virissimo says:

          Exactly right. In a liberal society, conservatives generally uphold the liberal order, so are properly called liberals themselves.

          Nitpick: Locke certainly is, but I don’t consider Rousseau to be a liberal at all: submission to the authority of the “general will” goes against all other liberal tenets.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I just wish I were as stupid as Donald Trump and could just stumble my way into skyscrapers and private jets with my name on them, supermodel wives and the Presidency of the United States.

      • BPC says:

        Hey, I wish I could take out a small personal loan of a million dollars from immediate family members and continue getting credit from foreign banks after filing for bankruptcy so often that domestic banks wouldn’t touch me too. Nobody’s perfect.

        I personally hope that one consequence of the Trump presidency is the destruction of the illusion that the USA is in any way meritocratic. But even ignoring the numerous reports that point to Trump as a less-than-stellar businessman, and ignoring that an apt word to describe him is “rentier” (and another is “celebrity” in the sense of someone who is famous for being famous), and ignoring the possibility that he may have been brighter before his 70s, even assuming that Trump is every bit the amazing businessman and campaigner… It turns out that international diplomacy is a very different skill set. One he really seems to suck at, for all the reasons detailed above and more. And in international diplomacy, appearances matter. Our allies know they can’t trust Trump; our enemies know he’ll go into personal meetings with them completely unprepared.

        If your whole argument in favor of Trump secretly playing 13D Chess is “look how successful he is”, you’re making things entirely too easy on yourself. Hell, even if your argument is just “he’s not stupid”, things like Alzheimer’s and Dementia mean you’re still probably making things too easy on yourself – especially given reports out of the white house that Trump doesn’t have the attention span for security briefings, and is easily manipulated.

        • Matt M says:

          1. Trump became much richer and more successful than his father ever was.

          2. Tons of people had at least a million dollars in liquid capital and did not become nearly as successful as Trump.

          • BPC says:

            Tons of people make nonsensical philosophy; most of them don’t make 80k a month on Patreon. Plenty of kids make vapid pop songs; most of them don’t become international superstars.

            You don’t get to argue that someone isn’t really bad at certain things based on the fact that they’re successful. Trump is obviously incredibly bad at international diplomacy. Full stop.

          • Matt M says:

            Conrad didn’t claim he was good at international diplomacy. He claimed he was smart enough to build a giant business empire and win the most highly contested elected political position in the world.

            Your response was, essentially, “I could have done that too if I had access to a million dollars.”

            But the existence of hundreds of thousands of people across the globe who have access to a million dollars and don’t accomplish those things would seem to suggest otherwise.

            How do you define someone being “good at something” without reference to their actual demonstrated success? That would seem to be, by far, the most objective criteria one could possibly use. A good businessman is one who starts with a million dollar loan and creates a billion dollar empire spanning multiple industries to the point where his very name is synonymous with “successful businessman” in the popular lexicon. A good politician is someone who, with zero experience in the field, wins the most highly contentious election there is to win. A good pop singer is one who, despite intense competition in a highly crowded and desirable field, emerges from the pack to become an international superstar.

            How else would you define it?

          • johansenindustries says:

            @BPC

            Are the rest of NATO stumping up to pay their obligations? Have the North Korean bodies been returned? Last I heard Syria was on the road to peace, has that changed?

            as far as i can tell the narrative always seems to go ‘That can never happen, Trump’s so stupid’ to ‘Despite Trump it happened, thanks Obama’.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Matt M:

            Conrad didn’t claim he was good at international diplomacy.

            Actually, if you look at what Honcho was replying to, his argument by implication was that Trump is good at international diplomacy. That or his answer is essentially irrelevant.

            Ex: You say, “Michael Jordan is horrible General Manager”. I respond, “I wish I were as untalented as MJ so I could be a 6 time champion and multi-millionaire.”

            There are three possibilities here 1) I think talented basketball players can’t be bad GMs, 2) I think you are attacking MJs “talent” by attacking his GM ability (but this boils down to 1), 3) I’m trying to change the subject.

          • Matt M says:

            HBC,

            Fair enough. Based on the tone, I do think that BPC is making a very generalized argument to Trump being wholly incompetent and having essentially “lucked” his way into any and all successes he has experienced. That is what I dispute.

            If he is only claiming that Trump is bad at international diplomacy… well… as johan suggests, I think there’s plenty of argument to be had there… but I’ll stipulate to “the jury is still out on that one.”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Matt M:
            Let me put a different spin on BPC than you are, and I think you might agree.

            Claims that Trump is playing some long, secret game are nonsense. Trump makes quick decisions based on what he thinks will be best for him almost immediately. Call it intuition or call it “gut feel” or something else, it doesn’t really matter.

            He doesn’t care too much about the details of situations when making these decisions, nor does he care about propriety or diplomacy. He does care about personal relationships. He cares about projection of personal power. He makes decisions based encounter by encounter, looking for a way to count a personal win of some sort in each one. The appearance of a win is more important than whether underlying long term value has been gained.

            All of those things make him very good at promoting a personal brand. He gets paid for attaching his name to this “Trump” venture or another, and if when they open they are splashy enough he wins, regardless of whether they go under months or years later.

            But all of those things make him extraordinarily bad at diplomacy and governance.

            ETA: As soon as Trump responded to criticism of “They are rapists”, without any hint of apology or back pedaling that he could be formidable as a candidate. His ability to project absolute certitude without appearing arch or over the top bellicose, when saying all manner of things, is quite valuable to a politician

          • Matt M says:

            I essentially agree with your first three paragraphs.

            That said, I think it’s unclear whether that sort of approach is necessarily bad when it comes to international diplomacy. So far, none of the predicted disasters of his behavior have happened. For the most part, he seems to be doing a decent enough job of advancing my preferred international diplomacy goals (i.e. more peace deals, less entanglement with foreign allies, etc.)

            His tariff and trade policies are pretty awful, if we’re counting that as “international diplomacy” I guess. But even in that realm, it’s his policies I disagree with, I don’t really care about his approach or tactics.

            I suppose my overall verdict is something like “get back to me when his boorish behavior causes him to fail at advancing a policy goal I agree with.” So far, that has yet to happen.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Matt M:

            more peace deals

            Huh?

            If you think NK is either “peace” or “deal”, I’m surprised.

            Ratcheting tensions with NATO makes conflict outbreaks more likely not less.

            We are more likely to have conflict break out vs. Russia right now, not less.

          • AliceToBob says:

            @ HBC

            Trump makes quick decisions based on what he thinks will be best for him almost immediately.

            He makes decisions based encounter by encounter, looking for a way to count a personal win of some sort in each one.

            Reading this description reminds me of a greedy strategy, where at each decision point, the Trump Algorithm selects the option that seems most favorable while disregarding whether this leads to getting stuck in any local optimum.

            It’s simplistic, but when faced with a large search space, sometimes such a heuristic does well relative to a global optimum (i.e., the successful outcome of pursuing a “long, secret game”).

            It’s a very rough analogy (what exactly are we minimizing or maximizing at each step?), and I’m sure some CS people here can tear it apart. But I’m trying to point out that parts of governance might lend themselves to such a simple approach.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @AliceToBob:
            Except that we have manifest examples of how crappy an approach this is.

            For example: Separating children from parents of immigrants (without knowing their legal status) at the border. There was no thought to things that might happen after, so now we have children that cannot be reunited with their parents. We are treating them worse than if they were property.

            This is monstrous. I do not mean this as hyperbole. It is morally unconscionable, made no better by everyone down the line simply claiming to have followed their orders and procedures.

          • BPC says:

            Your response was, essentially, “I could have done that too if I had access to a million dollars.”

            Even if you expand “access to a million dollars” to “all the advantages Trump personally had” I’m not sure I believe that.

            Yeah, okay. It’s pretty clearly a cop-out to call Trump an idiot. Idiots don’t become multibillionaires or presidents. But let me explain my problem.

            The thing I personally struggle to wrap my head around is the distinction between “Trump, the guy who made a multibillion dollar empire and won a presidential election” and “Trump, the guy who calls himself a ‘stable genius’, won’t read his security briefings unless they’re full of pictures and constantly mention him, and who doesn’t seem to get that international diplomacy is difficult until Xi spends 10 minutes explaining it to him.” It’s like if Ben Carson Mehmet Oz Patrick Star was an impossibly successful brain surgeon – something doesn’t make sense here.

            Trump supporters split the difference with the “4D chess” meme. Trump opponents split the difference by either assuming that he’s ridiculously lucky in some aspects of his life, or that the skills that made him successful in business and as a campaigner don’t transfer to the presidency (for example, it’s pretty easy to rip off subcontractors if you have many times as much money as them; you cannot pull stunts like that in international diplomacy), or, increasingly, that the Russians have something to do with it. But there is a gap there that needs to be resolved somehow. And I don’t think talking about 4D chess works.

            Are the rest of NATO stumping up to pay their obligations? Have the North Korean bodies been returned? Last I heard Syria was on the road to peace, has that changed?

            as far as i can tell the narrative always seems to go ‘That can never happen, Trump’s so stupid’ to ‘Despite Trump it happened, thanks Obama’.

            I didn’t see anything about the rest of NATO paying their obligations. I did see Trump talking about how he wouldn’t defend Montenegro if it were attacked, though, which is like… HOLY FUCKING SHIT WHAT THE HELL MAN YOU DON’T DO THAT. I saw that North Korea gave us some ashes; we don’t know what they are, and even if they’re exactly what NK claims, that’s a truly paltry thing in return for the legitimization that Trump gave away at the summit. I haven’t been following Syria too closely, so I have no comment on that.

            FWIW I agree pretty much completely with @HeelBearClub.

          • Matt M says:

            The thing I personally struggle to wrap my head around is the distinction between “Trump, the guy who made a multibillion dollar empire and won a presidential election” and “Trump, the guy who calls himself a ‘stable genius’, won’t read his security briefings unless they’re full of pictures and constantly mention him, and who doesn’t seem to get that international diplomacy is difficult until Xi spends 10 minutes explaining it to him.”

            The problem I have with this is that the first half – his empire building and election winning, are proven, undisputed, verifiable facts. While the second half a mixture of unproven allegations and baked-in assumptions that are not necessarily correct.

            The stuff about him not reading briefings is sourced entirely from internal leaks from people presumably hostile to him. His behavior in various “diplomatic” situations certainly flies in the face of conventional wisdom, yes. But my whole point here is that it’s possible, and maybe even likely, that “conventional wisdom is wrong”.

            My demand is that Trump be judged by his outcomes, not by his process. You can say “oh all he got from North Korea was some empty promises and some ashes.” Okay fine. But it seems to me that’s more than anyone else has gotten in decades. So at the very least, we can say that his norm-violating behavior hasn’t made anything worse, and it might have made things better (certainly we have to wait and see what happens from here).

            What we were told by Trump critics is that his sheer incompetence would create all sorts of disasters. So far, no such disasters have materialized. And what progress has been made, seems to be positive, at least as far as my policy preferences are concerned (I don’t want Americans dying to defend Montenegro. If you do, perhaps you disagree).

          • johansenindustries says:

            @BPC

            On the NATO issue: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_156624.htm if you would like to be informed.

            THe legitimisation is such a nothing of a point. What are the consequences of the supposed legitimisation? And how do you expect progress to me made without dealing with the 70 years old dynasty? Also, the same people crying about Trump meeting with Un were the same people crying about Pence not hanging about with Un’s sis.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Matt M:

            I’ll note that while he most certainly won the presidency, the idea that he has an “empire” is disputed. By his own admission most of his value is in the brand. Most things that bear Trump’s name aren’t owned or run by Trump or a corporation he owns or runs.

            more than anyone else has gotten in decades [form North Korea].

            Do you actually believe this? What has made you believe this? North Korea signed an agreement that is almost identical to agreements it has signed multiple times in the last several decades. It has also returned “service men” multiple times over the last several decades. What do you think we have actually gotten from them that is new or unique?

          • Matt M says:

            I’ll note that while he most certainly won the presidency, the idea that he has an “empire” is disputed. By his own admission most of his value is in the brand.

            and?

            Building a brand is HARD. Successfully building one of the biggest and most lucrative luxury brands on Earth is a majorly impressive achievement.

            I feel like you’re really getting nitpicky here and trying to split hairs over exactly what kind of skills he utilized to accomplish something that is really hard to do (make billions of dollars). I don’t really care whether he did it mainly through marketing skill or management skill. Either way, it’s impressive, and cannot be solely attributed to “got a million dollar loan early in life”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Matt M:
            We are talking about how applicable his skill set is to the requirements for successful governance of an international superpower. You using the word “empire” isn’t correct in that context.

          • John Schilling says:

            You can say “oh all he got from North Korea was some empty promises and some ashes.” Okay fine. But it seems to me that’s more than anyone else has gotten in decades.

            In 1994, Bill Clinton got a freeze on North Korea’s nuclear and missile development programs that lasted eight years aside from some cheating at the margins (on both sides) that was of no great significance and could probably have been settled with a second round of negotiations if Bush II had been so inclined. And he didn’t have to damage our relations with South Korea, Japan, and China to do it, nor cancel the military exercises that are crucial to maintaining confidence in the allied ability to defend against a North Korean attack.

            Trump has obtained only a de facto freeze in the testing aspects of Noth Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Uranium enrichment continues unabated, there are at least two more ICBMs and a ballistic-missile submarine under construction, and the sorts of things that North Korea had to do secretly and in the margins from 1994-2002 are now conducted full speed ahead because they aren’t covered under any agreement Trump has negotiated and KJU knows that DJT isn’t going to complain anyway.

            Meanwhile, public opinion of North Korea’s regime in the South is higher than it has been in generations, while the US’s stock is low. But, hey, now that North Korea has successfully tested road-mobile ICBMs, SLBMs, and a thermonuclear warhead, Kim has said he won’t test those things any more. Only build them. For now, because there isn’t actually a commitment to maintain the moratorium into the future.

            As deals go, this is better than Literally Nothing, but if you are saying it is “better than anyone else has gotten in decades”, you are speaking from ignorance.

          • BPC says:

            The stuff about him not reading briefings is sourced entirely from internal leaks from people presumably hostile to him.

            So… what, we should discount it? Keep in mind these leaks are coming from within his white house – from people he picked to do those jobs. If even they are eager to throw him under the bus, what’s going on here? I find these reports entirely believable.

            His behavior in various “diplomatic” situations certainly flies in the face of conventional wisdom, yes. But my whole point here is that it’s possible, and maybe even likely, that “conventional wisdom is wrong”.

            Okay. Why? Because Trump got so much from his recent forays into international diplomacy? johansenindustries brings up the NATO agreement that seems to point to NATO reaffirming their defense requirements… But Trump never actually signed that agreement. He walked away in a huff because he felt insulted. Who does that help?

            And yeah, a lot of the criticism of Trump’s actions is based on extrapolations. I’ll freely admit that. But many of those actions aren’t going to have immediate consequences, and by the time those consequences become fully apparent, it’s too late to prevent bad things from happening. How do you know that Trump’s comments on Montenegro were a horrifying misstep in international diplomacy? One of two ways: either you spend time reading history and learning about similar cases and realize, to quote Eliezer, “HOLY SHIT, YOU DON’T DO THAT” and immediately go out and fix things… Or you wait until the tanks are rolling into Podgorica and Europe realizes that America is no longer a part of NATO. One of these things has the advantage of avoiding a massive escalation in tensions between multiple nuclear powers. You may not care about that… But keep in mind that just the promise of American troops in Montenegro is a far greater defense of that country than the entire Montenegran military. And that promise of MAD helps ensure that we know where our boundaries are. And if you really think this is about Montenegro I really don’t think you know even high-school level history surrounding the eastern bloc.

            You know what the main message the Trump Doctrine is sending to the entire rest of the world? “You’re on your own, you cannot rely on the USA either to maintain its current stance or to uphold its bargains or to even act in rational self-interest.” Various world leaders have said things to that effect. And there really is no immediate apparent consequence for a world power when its closest alliances crumble. Those consequences come later, when you cannot rely on your former allies to share the cost of a defensive war, or when your former allies decide to encourage trade deals with other countries instead of yours.

            If you truly insist on making this your philosophy:

            I suppose my overall verdict is something like “get back to me when his boorish behavior causes him to fail at advancing a policy goal I agree with.” So far, that has yet to happen.

            …Then at some point down the line, when the rust starts to show and shit falls apart, you’re going to be left there wondering, “Huh, how did that happen? If only we could have done something to prevent this economic crash caused by everything getting way more expensive!” Do you react to the news that your house is infested with termites by saying that the walls aren’t collapsing so clearly nothing is wrong?

            So when foreign policy experts across the political spectrum are freaking out at what Trump is doing, and Historians are almost universally freaking out at what Trump is doing, and basically all of Academia is so up in arms about this presidency that people will resign rather than share space with members of this administration… Why should we assume that Trump’s… let’s say “unconventional” diplomacy is going to work? Is it really just because “he’s really rich and became President”?

            My demand is that Trump be judged by his outcomes, not by his process.

            Outcome: our former allies in East Asia think we’re gigantic fucking tools.
            Outcome: our former allies in Europe think we’re gigantic fucking tools.
            Outcome: needing to spend billions of dollars bailing out farmers due to the insistence on raising tariffs and doing so stupidly
            Outcome: No shift on the North Korean nuclear arsenal.
            Outcome: Iran is building more centrifuges again
            Outcome: companies from allied countries that invested in Iran after the Iran nuclear deal got completely fucking shafted – except ZTE. For some reason.
            Outcome: John Bolton is the National Security Advisor. John Bolton. National Security Advisor. If alarm bells aren’t ringing right now, then I’m concerned literally nothing short of a war with Iran that makes Iraq look like Panama are going to make them start ringing in your head, at which point it will be probably half a decade too late to have done anything to prevent it!
            Outcome: Russia encouraged to continue its efforts to interfere with American elections. I hesitated to include this one, because for all I know you endorse those efforts.

            Judged on outcomes, Trump’s foreign policy is a huge mess that has alienated the USA from our allies, ruined any possibility of trust other nations might have for us (who’s going to go in on a deal like the 2015 Iran nuclear deal with the US now?), emboldened our enemies, and opened up a power vacuum that China fucking loves.

            But apparently, this is fine. You’re okay with the events that are unfolding. That’s okay, things are going to be okay.

            Slurps coffee

          • johansenindustries says:

            @Schilling

            1994 was over two decades ago.

            @BPC

            Keep in mind these leaks are coming from within his white house – from people he picked to do those jobs.

            The leaks were coming from within the White House. They seemed to have stopped around about the time Obama’s appointments were flushed out. Getting rid of Comey solved one gusher just by itself.

            The US’s allies in the Eastern theatre are South Korea and Japan can you prove any public statement suggesting anything like ‘think we’re gigantic fucking tools’? I’m pretty sure the South Korea government at least are very big fans of Trump’s Korean policy.

            You also say academics and foreign policy experts. Why are they trustworthy, where is there track record of success?

  29. Machine Interface says:

    “Gwern reviews On The Historicity Of Jesus. Short version: the prose is annoying, but the case that Jesus was completely mythical (as opposed to a real teacher whose deeds were exaggerated) is more plausible than generally supposed.”

    As far as I know the “mythical Jesus” theory in general and Richard Carrier in particular have been widely discredited among professional historians.

    Here’s a discussion/refutation of the most common mythicist arguments:
    https://historyforatheists.com/2017/09/jesus-mythicism-1-the-tacitus-reference-to-jesus/
    https://historyforatheists.com/2018/02/jesus-mythicism-2-james-the-brother-of-the-lord/
    https://historyforatheists.com/2018/05/jesus-mythicism-3-no-contemporary-references-to-jesus/

    • Murphy says:

      Myself I kinda take the view that while extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence… the corollary is that mundane claims require very little.

      The claim that there was some kind of generic faith healer around roughly that time and that the faith healer had followers and came into conflict with the existing priests is so mundane that the existence of a faith claiming to be descended from those followers is pretty much sufficient as long as the argument isn’t about strong claims re: details.

      • Walter says:

        Yup. The conspiracy necessary to invent Jesus would’ve been complicated. Complicated stuff is less likely than the organic account of the church’s growth that the historical record gives us.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Bingo. “Jesus was a local faith healer/charismatic preacher/apocalyptic preacher/some kinda sage guy/some combination of these who ended up thought of as the Son of God, etc etc” is fairly basic secular scholarship. “Jesus didn’t exist” is edgy and a little sophomoric.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Jesus didn’t exist, you say? Uh, thanks. You’re my edgelord and nonsavior.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Who will know what I ever actually said, underneath all the layers of interpretation?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Gasp! Everything I knew is unknowable!

          • Picador says:

            Well, okay, but what we’re really talking about is a continuous spectrum between “The Jesus story happened exactly as written down in each of the four gospels, somehow” and “Nothing recounted in any Jesus story happened: the Roman Empire, Judaism, and male humans are all fictional constructs”.

            If there were some preachers and faith healers hanging around Palestine in 0 AD, and a bunch of guys in the history of Judaism were said to be the son of God, and the Roman governor of Palestine executed some guys, and all of this was inspiration for the story of Jesus, does that make him mythical or historical? This is a rhetorical question.

            I suppose you could get all critical-theory about it and say that the subject of a biography is also a mythical/fictional character insofar as he or she is a creation of the biographer, not a miraculous translation of the subject’s body into words on a page. But let’s maybe not. Enough, perhaps, to say that the mythical / historical split is by no means a clean one.

          • Davide S. says:

            If there were some preachers and faith healers hanging around Palestine in 0 AD, and a bunch of guys in the history of Judaism were said to be the son of God, and the Roman governor of Palestine executed some guys, and all of this was inspiration for the story of Jesus, does that make him mythical or historical? This is a rhetorical question.

            It’s actually a really good question; consider Euhemerism (EDIT: the review itself mentions it after all!), the theory that myths may have originated from actual historical events & people;
            Legends of ruling deities such as Odin and Zeus might be seen as originating in the deification of mortal kings and chiefs by their subjects and descendants.

            I don’t think this is silly, by itself; in fact it sounds quite reasonable. However considering who most people think of when these characters are discussed using it to justify claims that Odin and Zeus “really” existed and were not merely myths seems disingenuous.

          • timoneill007 says:

            Picador says:

            “If there were some preachers and faith healers hanging around Palestine in 0 AD, and a bunch of guys in the history of Judaism were said to be the son of God, and the Roman governor of Palestine executed some guys, and all of this was inspiration for the story of Jesus, does that make him mythical or historical? This is a rhetorical question.”

            It’s also not a very good question, in that it is based on the assumption that the figure of Jesus IS based on some amalgam of these various people and not just … one of them. Which is what the evidence actually seems to indicate.

  30. RalMirrorAd says:

    The phrenology thing. What exactly was being tested here? (having trouble with the links)
    Were they testing specific claims made by phrenologists, or the general idea that facial structure and personality my be linked.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Specific claims, although not a serious attempt to match what the phrenologists predicted. For example, they interpreted cunning as predicting being a scientist.

      If you had trouble with the blog post, try this.

    • Davide S. says:

      Were they testing specific claims made by phrenologists, or the general idea that facial structure and personality my be linked.

      The former:” The theory was that the brain contained different ‘organs’ which determined different traits. Larger organs exerted a more dominant influence on personality, and organ size could be inferred from head shape because larger organs would push out the skull (early in life) forming “bumps” on the scalp.”

      I haven’t looked too deeply at the actual science yet but I suspect trying to debunk any relationship between facial stucture & personality would go against the evidence that some hormones (thinking mainly about testosterone) can influence both.

  31. Jack V says:

    My take on the clown vs chessmaster debate is that Trump is clowns (or some specific sorts of clowns) are better at politics than chess-masters. But everyone doesn’t want to admit that humanity can be that broken.

    Compare to, cults — con men who believe their own lies can often be more effective than con men who are good liars. Or demagogues — some demagogues cynically appeal to mob emotions. Others are good speakers who say what they believe, but it finds a ready audience.

    Whether or not you think Trump is *as bad* as Hitler, Hitler was far down that road — he and his cronies were often cynical, but he hungered for his own greatness, and the ‘greatness’ of germany, and was spewing hatred long before he found desperate people listening to it, and I think a lot of his horrible success was due to that. I don’t think he sat down with pencil and paper and asked “how can I be emperor of a third of the world? step 1, manipulate people” even though he was happy to manipulate people when it happened. [1]

    [1] Yes, Mike Godwin officially suspended Godwin’s law for the duration.

    • Matt M says:

      My take on the clown vs chessmaster debate is that Trump is clowns (or some specific sorts of clowns) are better at politics than chess-masters.

      But this creates something of a loop, yes?

      If being a clown is the best way to succeed at politics, an effective chessmaster, when drafting his plan to become President, would include as step 1: “be a really good clown.”

      And if that were in fact true, the line between clown and chessmaster would shrink, maybe even to the point of not existing. At which point the entire question becomes irrelevant.

      • JPNunez says:

        There’s probably a lot of results that well behaved politicians cannot achieve while every politician, both working with and against each other, is well behaved (see: Trump gaining a lot of free publicity due to his clownish persona). Which means well behaved politicians are probably leaving a lot of votes on the table by conforming to “well behaved” unspoken rules of engagement.

        As for political results (read: actual legislation and actual foreign policy), this has depended on the congress being on the GOP power so it is hard to evaluate. So far the right wing has been disciplined behing Trump, mostly ignoring the clown part.

        There’s also the part where MAD rewards the countries that can act the most as willing to engage in nuclear war without actually triggering it.

        • Matt M says:

          Which means well behaved politicians are probably leaving a lot of votes on the table by conforming to “well behaved” unspoken rules of engagement.

          Well, my personal opinion on this is that people who lost to Trump did so not because they heroically respected traditional norms of political behavior, but because they miscalculated.

          They didn’t think his act was “dishonorable” or whatever, they thought it was ineffective. If they believed it would have worked, every single one of them would have done the exact same thing. The “unspoken rules of conduct” were not based on some sort of commitment to an ethical code – they were based on what people believed to be the most effective means of winning office. And it turns out that what most people believed was wrong.

          And naturally, after the fact, it is in their interest to act like they were upholding a strong moral principle, rather than committing a severe tactical blunder.

          • JPNunez says:

            I don’t think that we will see a Trumpian style democrat for a while, and not another Trumpian republican candidate to presidency -tho many on the primaries- at least in 2020 and 2024.

            However, I don’t think they are sticking to their “well behaved” code of conduct due to moral principles, but just to plain old not knowing any other way of doing things. Well behaved style of politics worked well because there were few people willing to take the clown style as far as Trump did.

            Just need a generation of politicians to die out before we see this to popularize. We will probably see it on lower offices earlier, tho.

          • Matt M says:

            However, I don’t think they are sticking to their “well behaved” code of conduct due to moral principles, but just to plain old not knowing any other way of doing things.

            I agree that Democrats will not act in a Trumpian manner anytime soon, but for a different reason. I think Democrats are working under the assumption that Trump, and Trump’s behavior and mannerisms specifically, is very unpopular and that they will best succeed by providing a clear alternative to him. (I don’t think this will work).

            I expect that most Republicans will begin to act increasingly Trumpian, due to the succeeds Trump enjoyed.

            The “Never Trump” Republicans will stick to being “well behaved” as a code of ethics, as they think that dying on their sword over this sort of thing is more important than actual electoral success (paging Jeff Flake)

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Matt M

            You don’t think there’d be a big market for a Democratic politician who reliably “triggered the Repubs” or whatever?

          • Matt M says:

            Hmm, when you put it that way, it’s maybe a little more likely. Maybe a well known Trump antagonist, someone like Adam Schiff, would run as one of the 10 Dems initially running to oppose Trump in 2020.

            But ultimately, no, I think the Dem establishment and voter base is absolutely convinced that the average person is horrified by Trump’s boorish behavior, and that the path to success is to behave in the exact opposite manner as him.

          • dndnrsn says:

            The establishment, as in, the politicians and the fixers and so on, the leadership, yeah. The base? Not so confident that they are believers in being genteel and so on.

            By way of comparison: following the 2012 election, a lot of the Republican establishment thought that the way forward was Jeb!: find someone who can attract 50% or better of Hispanic voters, and work towards not being a party dependent on white men and married white women, especially without university degrees. In other words, embrace demographic change and the predicted political changes.

            Did the Republican base like this idea? Evidently not. At least, the primary voters didn’t like this.

          • Aapje says:

            @Matt M

            I think that it’s a mistake to claim that there is a universally successful strategy. Different kinds of behavior and policies attract different groups. Both Democrats and Republicans have certain group in their camp. Those people are unlikely to defect, but their willingness to turn up to vote can depend greatly on being catered to enough. This limits the ability of Democrats and Republicans to tailor their strategy to attract people in the center who could go either way.

            So Democrats can’t necessarily use the strategy that works for Republicans or vice versa.

      • Walter says:

        I think we are conflating 2 things. Winning elections and governing the nation.

        “Being a giant clown”, as a strategy, seems to be really good for the first part, but less so for the second.

        • JPNunez says:

          Depends on what you define as governing the nation.

          Staying on power? We will see.

          Actually making the nation prosperous? Probably not.

          • idontknow131647093 says:

            Assuming the clown style does not make the nation prosperous, what style does? We have recently seen the wholesome, compassionate, religious style fail, as well as the intellectual, inspirational style.

      • Jack V says:

        “If being a clown is the best way to succeed at politics, an effective chessmaster, when drafting his plan to become President, would include as step 1: be a really good clown.”

        He’s called Boris Johnson.

        OK, more seriously, yes, plenty of people DO do that. It’s quite common for politicians to trumpet rhetoric which sounds good to large segments of the population but is basically meaningless, and mostly uncoupled from whatever it is they actually legislate.

        Trump seems to take it several notches further. I’m not sure why that happened here. My guesses are, maybe as people got more desperate they were more willing to vote for someone vehement over someone competent. Or that most politicians need SOME level of competence or conforming to current political consensuses to rise through the middle ranks, which is somewhat incompatible with saying what people want to hear with as thorough and continuous disregard for reality as Trump does.

        And as I said in the original post, con-men who believe their lies are often more convincing than skilled actors: pretending to be Trump is quite hard, even if it’s easy for someone who just happened to end up that way.

        • Tarpitz says:

          It’s just… it’s such a pro wrestling schtick (specifically, it’s Trump’s buddy Vince McMahon’s pro wrestling schtick). And it’s so unlike Trump’s presentation in public appearances from much longer ago (like the time he did the FA Cup draw in the early or mid-90s). It’s very hard for me to believe there isn’t at least a strong element of calculated character-creation (drawing, like all successful character creation, on real aspects of the underlying personality).

    • Tim van Beek says:

      My take on the clown vs chessmaster debate is that Trump is clowns (or some specific sorts of clowns) are better at politics than chess-masters. But everyone doesn’t want to admit that humanity can be that broken.

      It is a false dichotomy. (And, BTW, it is not all of humanity that is broken, thankfully.)

      First a concrete example:

      https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2015/nov/13/trump-compares-ben-carsons-pathological-temper-to-child-molesting-video

      Trump is on video, saying:

      So he said he has pathological disease. If you are pathological, t here is no cure for that, folks.

      The rational headline for this should have been: “Trump does not know what pathological means, drivels nonsense as a result”. You can see for yourself what the media chose to run with instead.

      So, based on that example, here is my analogy: Trump is like a shipwrecked epileptic who happend to end up with an indigenous tribe that mistakes his seizures for godly inspirations and elects him as chieftain. Some of the high priests know better, but decide to sell that narrative anyway for various reasons, while our epileptic figures out how to also fake seizures when he needs it.

      IMHO it is pretty straight forward to expand this analogy, like how our epileptic doesn’t know what epilepsy is or that he has it, is nevertheless deeply insecure about those moments that he cannot remember and that people keep telling him that there is something seriously wrong with him (“I am not sick!” you will hear him shout every now and then). Or that some tribe members actually do know what epilepsy is, but chose to elect an incompetend idiot instead of what they regarded as a deeply corrupt but capable competitor.

      Or that tribe members marvel at the deep strategic genius of getting shipwrecked with the right illness (or the right godly inspirations or truly convincing acting abilities) at the right time at the right place.

      Etc.

      Oddly enough, no one took the time to question the high priests why they chose to sell a sensational narrative that traded the truth for the secret fuel of their power: the attention of the masses.

      Gee, I think George Orwell could have done something interesting here…

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        I have a much more simple explanation: working class voters were tired of lopsided trade deals that sent their jobs overseas while the government refused to enforce the immigration laws, causing their poor communities to be overrun with sometimes surly foreigners who drove down their wages, so they voted for the guy who said he would stop doing those things rather than the people who said those things were great. And then he’s been consistently attempting to and sometimes succeeding in doing those things.

        • Sebastian_H says:

          I agree but with a darker take. He is the first in a long time to even pretend to care about the issue, but he has neither the ability nor the inclination to do much about it in reality.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            “Ability” is debatable, and the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. “Inclination,” though…you think he’s not even trying? I mean, on immigration he built the wall prototypes, has got some money, is trying for more, is increasing the number of border patrol and ICE agents, is working on a new system for hearing asylum claims in Mexico so we can dispense with this whole “separating of families” thing, is supporting the RAISE act and instituted the Muslim travel ban. On trade he’s basically tearing up NAFTA and is putting tariffs against the Chinese, Canada, the EU, etc, to force them to the table. Also, he’s currently back on the campaign trail doing rallies for Republicans (did one in Florida yesterday, has one in Pennsylvania tomorrow) so he can get more people in Congress who will support his legislative agenda.

            Whether or not these things will work is debatable, but I’m curious why you think he doesn’t have even the inclination to do anything about immigration or trade.

    • John Schilling says:

      My take on the clown vs chessmaster debate is that Trump is clowns (or some specific sorts of clowns) are better at politics than chess-masters. But everyone doesn’t want to admit that humanity can be that broken

      The clown only won because he slipped though the gap left by two nearly equal an opposite groups of chessmasters who overestimated their ability to force the American people to accept the rule of a dynastic political insider with one of the most toxic names in recent political history, because We Say So.

      And, to the extent that the clown was playing any sort of chess, it very much looks like he was playing to lose , expecting to cash in as the Anti-Hillary media celebrity of 2017-2025.

      Humanity, for its part, decided to kick over the table rather than be payed by the worst sort of chessmasters. I’d have preferred a different means to the same end, but I can’t bring myself to call humanity the broken part of this game.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        I agree with part of this, but the idea that Trump was playing to lose is not likely. His entire identity is wrapped up in being a winner, and shitting on “losers.” He would never in a million years embark to lose anything. Not a game of Go Fish, definitely not the biggest prize in the world, the Presidency of the United States.

        Had he lost, he would not be some sort of anti-Hillary celebrity. He would be universally mocked for being a loser who hates losers and for playing the game so ineptly that he thought he could win by calling sweet lovable Mexican Pre-Documented Citizens rapists and disparaging universally beloved war hero John McCain.

        ETA: Also, what would he possible get out of being a losing and extremely controversial candidate for president? It can’t be “book sales.” The couple of million he’d get out of a book no one would read is worth the hundreds of millions he left on the table by running instead of doing another season of The Apprentice?

        I feel like this is another one of those “Trump supporters take Trump seriously but not literally and his opponents take him literally but not seriously” things.

        • Iain says:

          The pre-election theory was Trump TV. Trump would not have been a universally popular celebrity, but it’s not like his base would have abandoned him.

          • Matt M says:

            but it’s not like his base would have abandoned him.

            Given how many prominent conservative voices were explicitly anti-Trump, I think they might very well have abandoned him actually.

            Remember, for years, the establishment Republicans were insisting to the base that we had to support the likes of Mitt Romney and John McCain. We had to “compromise” (which typically meant surrendering) on issues like immigration, gay rights, etc. “Extremists” who opposed these things were unelectable. And hey, milquetoast RINOs are the only people who can actually defeat Obama and Hillary!

            A whole large part of that base felt that this was explicitly wrong – but had never really been given the opportunity to test the theory. The mainstream consensus won out primary after primary. Until 2016 – we finally had a legitimate test-case. Could someone win without bowing to the God of political correctness? Could someone explicitly anti-immigration defeat an establishment Democrat?

            It turned out that the answer was yes. Which was devastating news to the Bill Kristols of the world. But had the election gone the other way, all those people would be lining up and saying “We told you so, you stupid rubes.” The devastated parties would have been Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter. The NeverTrump GOP would have gained a lot of prestige at the expense of the right-wing bombthrowers.

          • Iain says:

            A whole large part of that base felt that this was explicitly wrong – but had never really been given the opportunity to test the theory.

            And you believe that every one of these people would have abandoned Trump if he’d lost? Even if he had some sort of story about how the election was rigged against him? (He was setting that story up well in advance.)

            Some of Trump’s supporters would have given up. Many or most would have stuck with him. You’re telling us that these people never listened to or trusted the establishment before, but somehow one electoral loss would have instantly changed their minds?

          • Matt M says:

            And you believe that every one of these people would have abandoned Trump if he’d lost?

            Not every one but a decent amount, sure.

            I think you underestimate how tough this election was, not just on Dems, but on the GOP base as well. A whole lot of people had to “pick sides.” I think a lot of the people who picked the Pro-Trump side would have been fairly upset and disillusioned following a loss, and Trump TV would have had a tough time competing with more-moderate Fox News or whoever else out there was espousing the “moderate-right” view.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Iain, are you agreeing with John that he set out planning to lose, or that he just had a contingency plan?

            I find it hard to believe that he planned to lose the presidency, so he could have a small but loyal following of nutjobs while being absolutely reviled by half the country, and this is somehow more profitable than being a relatively well-liked celebrity/investor. I’m not saying everyone loved Trump before he ran, but he had a popular TV show watched by people who were not Republicans only and nobody despised him and called him Hitler. So, his plan was to do something that would almost certainly make him less popular on net, but the plan to fail failed because he lucked into the Presidency of the United States. I dunno. This seems far-fetched.

            Isn’t it just a little more likely that he thinks illegal immigration is bad, the trade rules are bad, he said so, lots of working class people agreed and they voted for him?

          • engleberg says:

            Re: Had the election gone the other way, all those people would line up to say, ‘we told you so-‘

            Never Trumpers who voted for Hillary and support Russia Russia Russia theories will probably vote D against R in the upcoming election too.

          • Iain says:

            Iain, are you agreeing with John that he set out planning to lose, or that he just had a contingency plan?

            Depends on what you mean by planning.

            If you mean that he preferred to lose, then no.

            If you mean that he thought losing was more likely than winning and spent more time thinking about what he would do after he lost, then I obviously don’t know for certain, but I think it’s at least plausible. Maybe even likely.

            Isn’t it just a little more likely that he thinks illegal immigration is bad, the trade rules are bad, he said so, lots of working class people agreed and they voted for him?

            I think Trump is a top-notch salesman. I think he identified a product that a lot of people wanted to buy — a politician who would say certain things about immigrants and trade — and sold himself to them on that basis. I think the correlation between his personal beliefs and his political positions varies. For example, the employment practices at places like Mar-A-Lago make it pretty clear that he isn’t personally invested in immigrants undercutting American wages. On the other hand, I’m totally willing to believe that his views on trade are genuine, because he’s been saying similar things for decades.

          • CatCube says:

            @engleberg

            What about Never Trumpers who don’t vote D or R? I think they’re far more prevalent than those who switched parties.

          • John Schilling says:

            Given how many prominent conservative voices were explicitly anti-Trump, I think they might very well have abandoned him actually.

            Trump’s base consists of people who invent terms like “RINO” and “cuckservative” to describe your “prominent conservative voices. They were not going to abandon him, whether he was defeated by Bush/Rubio/whomever in the primaries or Hillary in November.

            And if he’d been planning to win the presidential election, he wouldn’t have e.g. waited to the last minute to recruit an unvetted liability like Manafort to manage delegate loyalty at the convention. That, among many other Trump “gaffes”, is Politics 101 for someone trying to actually become POTUS. So either Trump really is a lucky fool, or he was playing to win a different game.

            With his one unambiguous talent being self-promotion, it seems most likely he was using the election as a promotional exercise, and by the end he had tens of millions of loyal followers win or lose so long as he continued to promote him as the One True Anti-Hillary.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Losing a presidential race to gain fame seems like a poor approach. Who was the last presidential loser to be able to use that as a springboard for more? Maybe Al Gore, but not McCain, Romney, Kerry or Dole. Trump was already a celebrity. I don’t see what he gains here that he didn’t already have.

            Of course, we’ll never know what in Trump’s heart, but I am reminded that back during the primary there was a theory being passed around that he was just doing this for notoriety and would soon get bored and drop out. And then he won that and they said he would do the same for the election. And some even claimed he would get bored and quit after being sworn in. This seems like a less falsifiable variant of the same theory.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Jaskologist:
            Ron Paul? Pat Buchanan? Pat Roberts?

            They all used presidential runs as means of brand building, while the presidential runs were also based on their existing brand.

            I’m not sure what Huckabee has going before (and he was already a governor), but it didn’t hurt.

            But Sarah Palin is the model you really want.

          • Jaskologist says:

            @HBC,

            You got me, Palin is very good counter-example.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @John

            How did hiring Manafort help him with his plan to lose but be popular? This “gaffe” was part of his plan?

            @HBC

            What does Sarah Palin have, though? A handful of books, occasional appearances on Fox News, and some speaking gigs at conservative events? Trump already had all of that, plus the TV show, the skyscrapers, the golf courses. I find it very hard to believe he decided to risk all of that and spend all the time and money as part of a plan to intentionally lose because he wants to be Sarah Palin? And then he failed at his plan to fail and wound up lucking into the Presidency of the United States?! I think Palpatine had a more coherent plan in Phantom Menace.

            The simplest explanation is that Trump and lots of voters thought America’s policies on trade and immigration were bad, Trump ran for President to change those policies and the people voted for him. What exactly is wrong with that explanation that requires all these convoluted plots?

            ETA: Keep in mind the opportunity cost Trump paid for running for President, also. NBC hasn’t disclosed what it was paying him for The Apprentice, but Trump claims it was ~$213M over 14 seasons or about $15M/season which sounds pretty reasonable. But that’s amortized over the entire season. You’d expect him to be making less per season early in the show and more later. He stopped doing The Apprentice to run for President. If he wanted Sarah Palin’s sweet, sweet book moolah, you’ve got to sell a lot of books to make $15M.

          • Matt M says:

            It’s a fair point – although Palin didn’t really “run” as much as she was “selected.”

            I mean, I’m sure there’s some sort of behind the scenes maneuvering to be considered for a VP slot, but it’s not quite the same as launching your own campaign, etc.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            You don’t plan to intentionally lose.

            You plan to spend as little (of your money) as possible while running and getting great brand building exposure. It’s not that you plan to lose, simply that winning wasn’t the carrot for running.

            And if Palin, who is really not all that good at the “celebrity” game, managed to make it profitable for herself, what are the odds that Trump could, when he already shown he was very good at brand building in multiple other arenas. You can see other attempts at this in people like Herman Cain and Ben Carson.

            As I already have shown, other politicians successfully used this model to build brand. But Palin showed that you didn’t need an existing political brand to pull it off. And of course, Trump was already dallying with this, make brief stabs at runs in previous years. He already had enough political pull to get Romney to genuflect in 2012.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            You plan to spend as little (of your money) as possible while running and getting great brand building exposure. It’s not that you plan to lose, simply that winning wasn’t the carrot for running.

            Keep in mind he already had a very successful brand. He was already extremely famous and had been for more than 30 years. His brand before running was “kind of nutty but generally liked billionaire playboy tycoon TV star American capitalist icon” which is a pretty good brand. If he ran and lost he would be “Literally Hitler we barely kept out of power” to the Democrats and “giant loser we hung all our hopes on and let us down massively” to the Republicans. How is this possibly a step up?

            Also, if you say he didn’t really try to win…what does that say about Hillary? And towards the end of the campaign he was doing 6-7 rallies a week, sometimes even three in one day! If this is “not trying” what does “trying” look like? I mean, who knew you could win the Presidency of the United States without even trying? Is Trump just that lucky or just that good?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Conrad Honcho:
            I didn’t say he did not try to win, I said that wasn’t his goal coming in. Do you think Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Pat Roberts, Bernie Sanders (to name just a few) started out their presidential campaigns with the idea that there goal was to win it?

            One of the keys to that goal would have been not gaining the nomination, while representing a certain view of aggrieved xenophobic nationalism. You keep swinging, hitting out at the establishment and the international cabal of shadowy forces keeping the good American people down. You peak polling at 25%, leading for a few weeks, and then tail off, retaining some rumor of followers. Your parlay that into a new Red State or Breitbart. It becomes another tidy little revenue stream.

            Remember, he spent the bulk of the Obama presidency pushing “birtherism”. It’s not off brand for him.

            But, if you never tail off, well now you are playing a different ball game. You didn’t go intending to win, but you aren’t going to refuse the nomination, are you?

          • albatross11 says:

            It also wouldn’t be totally out-of-character for Trump to be convinced by his ego/various boosters/fans/crowds to run for president, always thinking of it as a long shot, but still making an honest attempt. I’d say that’s how it worked for, say, Bernie Sanders or Rand Paul, too–they genuinely wanted to win, but surely accepted that their chances were pretty dismal.

          • Tarpitz says:

            We had to “compromise” (which typically meant surrendering) on issues like immigration, gay rights, etc.

            I put it to you that gay rights are overall popular and immigration is overall unpopular.

            Which is not to say that an anti-gay rights, pro-immigration candidate could never possibly win, but their positions on both issues would be reducing their chances.

          • John Schilling says:

            How did hiring Manafort help him with his plan to lose but be popular? This “gaffe” was part of his plan?

            By making him not look like a complete idiot.

            Hiring someone like Manafort is necessary if you seriously hope to become POTUS. It is also necessary if you are going to show up at the Republican National Convention with ~50% of the pledged delegates and don’t want to look like a complete idiot (or worse) for you failure to put in a halfway-competent job in the floor fight. Even if Trump is going to lose, he needs it to look like that happened because the RNC is crooked, not because DJT is incompetent. And throughout Manafort’s tenure, the smart money was on Trump not making it to the White House but looking like he’d put up a good fight. He needed Manafort for the second part of that.

            If you are actually planning to win , the need to hire someone like Manafort is obvious from day one. As is the need to vet him well enough to make sure he e.g won’t be credibly accused of being a Russian agent at an awkward time. Yet in this among many things Trump was caught behind the curve because things that were obviously going to be necessary in a winning campaign, weren’t done until the last possible moment after what everybody else considered surprisingly good results.

            The most parsimonious explanation is that those good results caught Trump by surprise as well.

      • albatross11 says:

        +1

        You didn’t have to be a Trump supporter to be less than thrilled with the idea that you were either going to get Hillary or Jeb in the white house, because the Powers That Be had decreed it so.

      • Deiseach says:

        I still can’t work out how the election ended the way it did, but the mention of Romney makes me think: here’s someone who tried to do the “appealing to feminism” thing and ended up being mocked everywhere as “he keeps women in binders!” I thought that was unfair, whatever else you thought of his candidacy (and it was about as appealing as a bowl of congealed porridge to me): he was trying (genuinely or not) to say “hey, there are so many qualified women out there, I was expecting only a list and I got ring binders full of names!” I also thought the mockery was disingenuous, because nobody could think he was trying to confine women by that remark, but the narrative was that he’s Mormon and a Republican so plainly he has to be (or has to be presented as being) a misogynist anti-feminist Handmaid’s Tale type religious zealot.

        So now the same people who jeered at Romney got “grab ’em by the pussy” instead. I dislike that type of talk intensely, but I can’t help but feel that it’s no real surprise; when you try meeting the other side halfway you still get hammered, so there’s no real loss in going “to hell with you, in fact I am every bit as horrible as you claim I am!”

        • cassander says:

          A similar case can be made for the poor reception that the tea partiers got (from both republicans and democrats), despite being rather impeccably bourgeois, leading lending fire to the trumpists when they came around a few years later.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Back at the time I always said the Tea Party and Occupy were two sides of the same coin: the Tea Party was mad at the government for bailing out the banks and Occupy was mad at the banks for getting bailed out by the government. Of course neither was doing this in a vacuum; many backs were scratched.

            Of course CNN would find the one guy at the Tea Party rally with a “UBAMA IS A SOCIALIST MUSLIM” sign and say “that’s the Tea Party!” and Fox News would find the most drug-addled hippy and “that’s Occupy!” I tried to explain this to my hyper-Republican friend and she brought up some story she heard about there maybe having been a rape somewhere near the Occupy camp in NY and said “well at least the Tea Party isn’t raping people!” Sigh. Yeah, that’s it Steph. 100,000 people camped out because they love rape.

          • Matt M says:

            Sigh. Yeah, that’s it Steph. 100,000 people camped out because they love rape.

            Eh, saying “they love rape” is taking it too far, but I do think there’s a certain truth to this.

            Left-wing protests tend to erect semi-permanent encampments, wherein they either explicitly reach out to or implicitly tolerate the absolute dregs of society, including the homeless and criminal populations.

            I lived in Eugene, OR during the occupy movement. They were dirty, stinking, drug addled hippies. They did take over a nice public park and turn it into a biohazard disaster area for the better part of a year. The cops did publicly state that they could not guarantee anyone’s safety within that encampment. People were committing assault, using drugs, defacating, and having sex in the open.

            I didn’t get that information from Fox News. I got it from the local (largely sympathetic) newspaper. And from my own eyes.

            This is not at all comparable to a few people at tea party marches carrying politically incorrect signs. It’s very much a false equivalence. I’m not aware of any right-wing equivalent to this. Maybe the Bundy ranch situation comes close, at least in terms of a private group seizing public property for the purposes of political protest. But I don’t recall any reports of drug use or sexual assault going on there either. And they eventually were not politely evicted by cops with riot shields – they were shot at with automatic weapons by the FBI. And once removed, they weren’t just allowed to go on their merry way, they were prosecuted with multiple federal crimes. So yeah.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I stand corrected then. My outgroup is in fact as bad as they are made out to be 😀

          • dick says:

            You guys are comparing a group of left-wing college kids to a group of right-wing retirees, noting that the former has a lot more crime and drugs than the latter, and concluding that the reason is ideology? Do I have this right?

          • Matt M says:

            If one ideology attracts mainly people with high propensity to crime, and the other attracts mainly people with low propensity to crime, that might be relevant and might be related to the ideologies themselves, no?

          • cassander says:

            @Matt M

            If one ideology attracts mainly people with high propensity to crime, and the other attracts mainly people with low propensity to crime, that might be relevant and might be related to the ideologies themselves, no?

            Even if it says absolutely nothing about the nature of the ideology itself, it certainly does say something about how much you want to trust someone espousing the ideology. As I often say to people who say that communism has never been properly implemented, “The world is full of seeming committed communists who came to power. If none of them properly implemented communism and communism works fine if properly implemented, then communist ideology appears to attract only people who are too incompetent to implement it or too evil to resist setting up a tyranny once in power. Whichever is correct, the next time someone espousing communism comes around, I’m not going to want them in charge.”

          • dick says:

            If one ideology attracts mainly people with high propensity to crime, and the other attracts mainly people with low propensity to crime, that might be relevant and might be related to the ideologies themselves, no?

            This seems like overt trolling and I’m going to try to avoid responding to you in the future.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Matt M: If one ideology attracts mainly people with high propensity to crime, and the other attracts mainly people with low propensity to crime, that might be relevant and might be related to the ideologies themselves, no?

            dick: This seems like overt trolling and I’m going to try to avoid responding to you in the future.

            I think you’re being unfair. Suppose you knew nothing about two sides of an issue, other than that one of them tended to attract dropouts, and the other tended to attract college grads. Which side are you more likely to take?

            Matt might be trolling, but if so, it’s not overt.

            The best case I can think of for “yep, trolling” is that both sides are overwhelmingly unlikely to be criminals, but if that or any other defense is the case, the thing to do here is to go ahead and make that point.

          • albatross11 says:

            Matt M:

            Maybe, but it could also be related to the demographics they appeal to. A movement that attracts overwhelmingly young men is going to have a much higher rate of violent crime than one that attracts overwhelmingly older women, regardless of the teachings or beliefs of the movement in question.

          • dick says:

            I think you’re being unfair. Suppose you knew nothing about two sides of an issue…

            Would I believe that a random person doesn’t know what a confounding variable is, or is genuinely unaware that poor young people commit more crime than retirees? Sure. Someone who posts on SSC forums 20x/day? No.

          • Matt M says:

            Maybe, but it could also be related to the demographics they appeal to. A movement that attracts overwhelmingly young men is going to have a much higher rate of violent crime than one that attracts overwhelmingly older women, regardless of the teachings or beliefs of the movement in question.

            And if “violence is bad” is one of your core values, it would seem reasonable to reject, or at least be suspicious of, such a movement, would it not?

            Saying that such an ideology isn’t inherently violent, it only attracts violent people seems a bit off to me. I mean, it’s technically possible, but uh, let’s just say “further research is required” and leave it at that.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Yes, there’s a confounding variable here. My guess is it’s Moral Foundations Theory. Leftists tend to have lower values for Sanctity, Authority, and Loyalty, and rightists higher values for those same attributes.

            If you put together a bunch of people pre-selected for Sanctity, Authority, and Loyalty, what do you get? An orderly meet-up properly permitted where everyone follows the rules, no one litters and the venue is left pretty much as it was found.

            If you put together a bunch of people pre-selected against Sanctity, Authority and Loyalty, you get the camp Matt described.

            The moral foundations explain both the ideology of the participants and the behavior of their respective gatherers.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            Haidt refers to “liberals”, not “leftists” – the questions that get used for the Moral Foundations stuff tend to be very 90s-culture-war, back when there wasn’t a chunk of people who sneered at liberals as centrists, etc.

            However, there’s plenty of things that leftists and pseudo-leftists now hold, that would seem to indicate a value being placed on loyalty, sanctity, etc. Haidt’s system is kind of out of date.

            EDIT: I think there are ideas/concepts/tendencies on parts of the left right now that feel like “conservative” impulses justified on a care/harm intellectual basis.

          • Plumber says:

            “@Conrad Honcho,

            Haidt refers to “liberals”, not “leftists” – the questions that get used for the Moral Foundations stuff tend to be very 90s-culture-war, back when there wasn’t a chunk of people who sneered at liberals as centrists, etc.

            However, there’s plenty of things that leftists and pseudo-leftists now hold, that would seem to indicate a value being placed on loyalty, sanctity, etc. Haidt’s system is kind of out of date.

            EDIT: I think there are ideas/concepts/tendencies on parts of the left right now that feel like “conservative” impulses justified on a care/harm intellectual basis.”

             @dndnrsn,

            I’m old enough to remember that “liberal” was also used as a term of derision by “leftist” in the 1970’s as well (at least among some of my parents circle in Berkeley and Oakland back then), and apparently it was in the mid 1960’s as well , with “liberal” being regarded as much the same as “centrist” is now. 

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          I think that’s just the vulture nature of opposition media. Find anything you can pick out and crow over it. The mainstream media opposes Republicans so it sounds a lot louder, but conservative media laughed at Obama for “thinking we had 57 states” Reality: Obama was tired after a massive campaign stretch and slipped up saying “57” instead of “47.” Orrrrrrr just like the DHS is sending secret messages to white supremacists by using 14 words in their slogan Obama is seekrit mooselimb and was dog whistling by references the 57 states of Islam.

          Now they’re haranguing Trump for saying you need an ID to buy groceries while stalking about how silly it is you don’t need an ID to vote. Who cares? There’s lots of reasons you’d show an ID at the grocery store (booze, cigarettes, lottery tickets, cold medicine, paying with a check or sometimes credit cards). But they take an hour long speech, pick that out and it’s apparently news. Who the hell cares?

  32. Hackworth says:

    Regarding phrenology debunking – in the spirit of THE CONTROL GROUP IS OUT OF CONTROL, would it not make sense to try to replicate that negative result with someone who is more sympathetic towards phrenology, if such a scientist actually existed?

    • Walter says:

      Who’s gonna admit that they are the bad guy from Django Unchained? Like, presumably anyone who believes this sort of thing and is reputable enough to be trusted to replicate isn’t talking about their beliefs a lot.

      • Hackworth says:

        Well, apparently they found a reputable scientist to do the parapsychology meta-experiment, so why not this one? If the study linked here that investigated phrenology with MRI found a positive result and were sure of their methodolgy and the study’s replicability, why not publish it?

  33. phil says:

    re: Humanities degrees

    to me, that seems like a function of price of tuition more than the overall state of the economy.

    When college is affordable, people can get degrees that are loosely tied to their ROI, when its not, those degrees become rich kid’s degrees

    • Matt M says:

      Yup. I wonder if all of these “crisis of humanities” professors have spent any significant amount of time debating one critical question: “What can we do to increase the ROI of a humanities degree?”

      Because you can bet your ass the business schools are doing that. The engineering and science ones probably are as well.

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        I am more of the mind that they are thinking ‘what can we do to increase the number of X degree students’ — which necessarily conflicts with the goal of increasing the roi of the degree.

        • Irein says:

          As far as I’ve seen (PhD student in Classics), the discussion tends to be a mixture of those two questions. The usual pitch to undergraduates tends to be along the lines “HR people really love hiring Classicists” and “ancient languages help with modern languages”. The first of these statements is not true, and the second is largely irrelevant. My opinion is that whatever ROI there is from the traditional humanities tends to be non-tangible: the pursuit of knowledge is its own reward, the literature is beautiful, etc. However, there’s understandably a real reluctance to embrace that kind of message in attracting undergraduates.

          • Matt M says:

            Right. And while I think that message can work, it’s understandable that it would become less effective over time.

            Given that other fields of study aren’t simply standing pat, but are actively pursuing ways to increase their ROI, the gap between Humanities and other fields will only increase.

            There probably isn’t much a humanities department can do to catch up to business in terms of ROI. But barring a willingness to engage on the topic and look to actively improve, they will do nothing but continue to fall further and further behind each year.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            I recall one person referring to this whole thing as ‘the circle of why-bother’ — Academics luring impressionable young people into fields of study with no practical application who then are partially reliant on teaching to make ends meet which requires luring even more young people etc.

            I say this as someone who took some classics stuff in college and finds ancient history interesting. It’s something society should patronize as a matter of values but people should know going into it that they almost certainly can’t make a career out of it.

            I’m much less sympathetic though to other humanities fields that are outright contemptuous to the mainstream society that ultimately supports them.

          • Lasagna says:

            I’m thinking back to my undergraduate days as an English major. “Pitching” the study of literature to me by telling me that HR Departments love it would have failed miserably; I didn’t give too much of a fuck about corporate whatever back then, so, as with most humanities majors, explaining that my degree will help me get an office job would have been Bad Idea.

            The modern languages thing: OK fine, but I’m taking the classes because I love to read, and want to study the topic under great minds. That’s what you need to pitch to me – our professors are amazing, and are going to deepen your love and understanding of the material. Once you’ve started to talk about returns on investment for a degree that just isn’t about that, you’ve lost.

            Of course, one cynical caveat renders that all moot: you HAVE to talk about returns on investment, because your university is now a five star resort run as and/or by a hedge fund. If tuition is $40,000 a year, I’m fully capable – and more importantly at this point, my sons are fully capable – of deepening our love and understanding of Shakespeare on our own. We’ll keep the $120K.

            I’m surprised the drop in humanities enrollment isn’t more pronounced, frankly. Back when I went to college it still wasn’t obvious that these degrees were worthless – that if you paid a lot for them, you were in deep trouble (I didn’t). The “go to college, doesn’t matter for what” attitude was universal.

            But I graduated during a thriving job market from a good school and worked in a mail room for three years before law school. There have been two generations now where this has been the universal experience. Is there anyone left who doesn’t understand this dynamic?

          • Matt M says:

            Is there anyone left who doesn’t understand this dynamic?

            Yes, and, unfortunately, it’s typically the most vulnerable people. The “first generation” college students who don’t really know that the system is rigged. The people who grew up in families who for generations have dreamed of “sending their kids to college” without having had the opportunity to develop any specifics beyond that.

            AFAIK, it’s the kids who need the money most that are most likely to be sold an education in “study this for the pursuit of pure knowledge because that’s what college is all about!” type of program.

            People whose families have been through this scam at least once are aware of it and can avoid it. But people who haven’t seen it first-hand still absorb the greater cultural meme of “college = comfortable upper-middle class life, no other specifics necessary”

          • phil says:

            @ Lasagna

            “Of course, one cynical caveat renders that all moot: you HAVE to talk about returns on investment, because your university is now a five star resort run as and/or by a hedge fund. If tuition is $40,000 a year, I’m fully capable – and more importantly at this point, my sons are fully capable – of deepening our love and understanding of Shakespeare on our own. We’ll keep the $120K.”

            Yeah, exactly

            at really anything more than what a summer job can pay for, spending money on a humanities degree is an irresponsible life decision

            the weird irony of it, is that the inputs that go into humanities degrees should be one of the cheapest degrees for society to produce

          • Lasagna says:

            Yes, and, unfortunately, it’s typically the most vulnerable people. The “first generation” college students who don’t really know that the system is rigged. The people who grew up in families who for generations have dreamed of “sending their kids to college” without having had the opportunity to develop any specifics beyond that.

            This is reminding me of a conversation I had recently with a distant cousin. She was asking me to speak with her daughter about going to law school, which obviously I was happy to do. But when she discovered that my advice wasn’t going to be “going to law school is always an amazing idea and you should do it,” she actually asked me NOT to talk to her – my cousin was very invested in this.

            But it… I know it’s been discussed at SSC before, so I’m not going to going into again, but law school can be life-ruining right now if you don’t do it exactly right. It’s hard to convey if you aren’t part of the field, but I’m choosing my words carefully: you can ruin your entire life. And even if you don’t ruin it, even if something less happens, you can find yourself nowhere near where you wanted to be, financially, geographically, relation..shippy, pretty much every metric is likely to be much worse than if you just WORKED for those three years rather than drag yourself into insane debt.

          • LesHapablap says:

            Lasagna,

            What did you do? Did you talk to the daughter?

          • Lasagna says:

            @LesHapablap

            I didn’t – I don’t know either of them all that well, so it would have been weird to go against mom’s express wishes. But I did tell her (the mom) that I’m pretty informed on schools and the state of the legal industry, so if she wanted to chat I’m available.

            But it IS bothering me (obviously, or I’d never have brought it up). I say “cousin” to be convenient, but they’re more distant than that – related to me through my sister’s husband. I don’t know them that well, but I DO see them an awful lot (weddings, birthdays, holidays), and I’m not sure I could let them walk into something that I know is a mistake. So if I hear through the grapevine that she’s going to a middling school with no financial help, I’ll say something.

      • idontknow131647093 says:

        That is fundamentally not possible because of the sheepskin effect. The value of any degree is its scarcity. The only way to increase ROI for degrees is to reduce the price or reduce the number of degrees granted.

  34. melboiko says:

    I’m in a Tolkien mood these days; I moved from the Silmarillion to things that interest me in The History of Middle-Earth and now I’ve ordered my first few issues of the Vinyar tengwar. (I’m also practising tengwar calligraphy; my idea is to order a nice quality Silmarillion from Folio Books and annotate all etymologies in the margins, in tengwar). I still find it amazing how incredibly important the languages are, and how little attention people pay them—Tolkien has stated more than once that the languages are the central thing in the whole project, that the rest of it was added just to provide a context for the languages, that LotR boils down to an essay on linguistic æsthetics, and yet most fans and, more annoyingly, imitators simply do not engage with linguistics at all. (Meanwhile most linguists scoff at the notion of linguistic æsthetics). D&D, for example, mimicked Tolkien unabashedly but appears to not have added any conlangs at all after all these years. It’s depressing. People don’t realize how language creation is the fundamental stone of worldbuilding because worldbuilding is done through language; it is told. (That is, language creation is a meta activity, a strange loop in Hofstadter’s sense; as your language grows useable, you alter the medium through which you describe it in the first place. A magical orchestra where playing the music remakes the instruments, which can then play a very different kind of music.)

    (Shout-out to Empire of the Petal Throne, the D&D Who Did It Right & nobody cared.)

    Anyway! I’m finishing The Notion Club Papers and the farther I went into it, the clearer it got that the mysticism was real. It feels like actual belief; one can tell. Tolkien apparently didn’t like to claim that he was “creating” e.g. the phonetic history of a Quenya word; he set out to “find out” what it was at a given point. I’m more and more convinced that he was only half-joking.

    Of course, most creators (or, in Tolkien’s terminology, sub-creators, reflexes of the one Creator) have had the experience of “seeing” or “finding out” the imagined things; they seem to “come” out of their own accord, as if one were a medium. Prosaically, all this means is that the process of creation is based on unconscious operations. But the events described in the Notion go beyond the materialistic, individual unconscious mind; and I really wonder to what extent is it fiction, and to what extent is it a quite frank exposition about Tolkien’s mystical tendencies.

    (This is of course not to say that Tolkien believed that e.g. the fall of Nūmenōr/Atalantë/Atlantis was a historical fact; but, maybe, that it could be some kind of truth “at another stage of imagination”.)

    • Said Achmiz says:

      D&D, for example, mimicked Tolkien unabashedly

      This is not an accurate description, as anyone who knows enough to mention Tekumel ought to know. D&D was largely inspired by Golden Age pulps (sword-and-sorcery, planetary romances, etc.), older “weird tales”, and so on. Consider the famous “Appendix N”—yes, Tolkien is on there… but as just one item among a list of very different source materials. To say that D&D “mimicked Tolkien unabashedly” is to deny the influence of all of these other authors. To compensate for this insult, I’ll quote Appendix N in full:

      APPENDIX N: INSPIRATIONAL AND EDUCATIONAL READING

      Inspiration for all of the fantasy work I have done stems directly from the love my father showed when I was a tad, for he spent many hours telling me stories he made up as he went along, tales of cloaked old men who could grant wishes, of magic rings and enchanted swords, or wicked sorcerors and dauntless swordsmen. Then too, countless hundreds of comic books went down, and the long-gone EC ones certainly had their effect. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies were a big influence. In fact, all of us tend to get ample helpings of fantasy when we are very young, from fairy tales such as those written by the Brothers Grimm and Andrew Long. This often leads to reading books of mythology, paging through bestiaries, and consultation of compilations of the myths of various lands and peoples. Upon such a base I built my interest in fantasy, being an avid reader of all science fiction and fantasy literature since 1950. The follow- ing authors were of particular inspiration to me. In some cases I cite specific works, in others, I simply recommend all their fantasy writing to you. From such sources, as well as just about any other imaginative writing or screenplay you will be able to pluck kernels from which grow the fruits of exciting campaigns. Good reading!

      Inspirational Reading:

      Anderson, Poul. THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS; THE HIGH CRUSADE; THE BROKEN SWORD
      Bellairs, John. THE FACE IN THE FROST
      Brackett, Leigh.
      Brown, Fredric.
      Burroughs, Edgar Rice. “Pellucidar” Series; Mars Series;Venus Series
      Carter, Lin. “World’s End” Series
      de Camp, L. Sprague. LEST DARKNESS FALL; FALLIBLE FIEND; et al.
      de Camp & Pratt. “Harold Shea” Series; CARNELIAN CUBE
      Derleth, August.
      Dunsany, Lord.
      Farmer, P. J. “The World of the Tiers” Series; et al.
      Fox, Gardner. “Kothar” Series; “Kyrik” Series; et al.
      Howard, R. E. “Conan” Series
      Lanier, Sterling. HIERO’S JOURNEY
      Leiber, Fritz. “Fafhrd & GrayMouser” Series; et al.
      Lovecraft, H. P.
      Merritt, A. CREEP, SHADOW, CREEP; MOON POOL; DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE; et al.
      Moorcock, Michael. STORMBRINGER; STEALER OF SOULS; “Hawkmoon” Series (esp. the first three books)
      Norton, Andre.
      Offutt, Andrew J., editor SWORDS AGAINST DARKNESS III.
      Pratt, Fletcher, BLUE STAR; et al.
      Saberhagen, Fred. CHANGELING EARTH; et al.
      St. Clair, Margaret. THE SHADOW PEOPLE; SIGN OF THE LABRYS
      Tolkien, J. R. R. THE HOBBIT; “Ring Trilogy”
      Vance, Jack. THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD; THE DYING EARTH; et al.
      Weinbaum, Stanley.
      Wellman, Manly Wade.
      Williamson, Jack.
      Zelazny, Roger. JACK OF SHADOWS; “Amber” Series; et al.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I don’t think anything on Appendix N has “men, elves and dwarves go on a quest together” except Tolkien and arguably Three Hearts and Three Lions. Yet that’s exactly the story that every edition steers players into.

        • dndnrsn says:

          “Standard D&D fantasy” is, by now, a mashup of swords and sorcery stuff plus Tolkein and a few other elements, then strained back through fantasy novels that ripped off Tolkein more squarely and/or adventures and campaigns written by authors of those fantasy novels, or wannabe authors.

          The “default” D&D game 70s-early 80s, judging by modules, kinda ends up as morally-dubious ruffians (swords and sorcery staple) but with law-and-chaos-as-good-and-evil swiped from Anderson primarily, and with the Tolkein adventuring party instead of a single protagonist or a duo. Incentives are frequently to behave the opposite of a heroic adventuring party with a singular quest, though.

          Then in the middle-to-later-80s you’ve got modules that are meant to produce a heroic quest with a set backstory, and that to be honest are often pretty railroad-y. These are influenced by fantasy novels that take Tolkein as the ur-fantasy.

        • Tamar says:

          Yeah, so D&D borrows some of the setting trappings that a lot of so-called high fantasy borrows from Tolkien and typically does worse … so what? D&D is an entirely different medium with different goals and different methods of achieving those goals. I enjoy Tolkien’s works and understand the primacy of the conlang development in them, but I’ve also played a modest amount of D&D (one game of 3.5 and 2 games plus oneshots of 5e) and honestly don’t see how adding fuller conlangs to the base game or primary settings with official material would serve to make a much better game. I suppose a skilled DM could do some cool things with conlangs but I don’t think they would tend to work well in group storytelling and roleplaying scenarios. Making sure different races, nationalities, regions, what-have-you have some distinction in terms of culture and naming conventions, even ways of talking, yeah, those can all be used to good effect. But I’ve never played a game and felt like I was missing something because the game featured no extensive conlangs. In the written medium, distinct languages really do help make “men, elves and dwarves go on a quest together” feel real, engaging, and rich. In the tabletop roleplaying medium, it’s not only less practical but frankly there are plenty of other, typically better, ways of achieving the same effect. If the group wants to go in that direction, by all means, but it’s far from necessary.

        • pontifex says:

          Jimmy Maher wrote about this:

          The question of just how much influence Tolkien had on Dungeons & Dragons has been long obscured by this specter of legal action, which gave everyone on the TSR side ample reason to be less than entirely forthcoming. That said, certain elements of Dungeons & Dragons — most obviously the “hobbit” character class found in the original game — undeniably walked straight off the pages of Tolkien and into those of Gary Gygax’s rule books. At the same time, though, the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons had, as Gygax always strenuously asserted, much more to do with the pulpier fantasy stories of Jack Vance and Robert E. Howard than they did with Tolkien. Ditto the game’s default personality, which hewed more to the “a group of adventurers meet in a bar and head out to bash monsters and collect treasure” modus operandi of the pulps than they did to Tolkien’s deeply serious, deeply moralistic, deeply tragic universe. You could play a more “serious” game of Dungeons & Dragons even in the early days, and some presumably did, but you had to bend the mechanics to make them fit. The more light-hearted tone of The Hobbit might seem better suited, but wound up being a bit too light-hearted, almost as much fairy tale as red-blooded adventure fiction. Some of the book’s episodes, like Bilbo and the dwarves’ antics with the trolls near the beginning of the story, verge on cartoon slapstick, with none of the swashbuckling swagger of Dungeons & Dragons. I love it dearly — far more, truth be told, than I love The Lord of the Rings — but not for nothing was The Hobbit conceived and marketed as a children’s novel.

          Gygax’s most detailed description of the influence of Tolkien on Dungeons & Dragons appeared in the March 1985 issue of Dragon magazine. There he explicated the dirty little secret of adapting Tolkien to gaming: that the former just wasn’t all that well-suited for the latter without lots of sweeping changes.

          Considered in the light of fantasy action adventure, Tolkien is not dynamic. Gandalf is quite ineffectual, plying a sword at times and casting spells which are quite low-powered (in terms of the D&D game). Obviously, neither he nor his magic had any influence on the games. The Professor drops Tom Bombadil, my personal favorite, like the proverbial hot potato; had he been allowed to enter the action of the books, no fuzzy-footed manling would have needed to undergo the trials and tribulations of the quest to destroy the Ring. Unfortunately, no character of Bombadil’s power can enter the games either — for the selfsame reasons! The wicked Sauron is poorly developed, virtually depersonalized, and at the end blows away in a cloud of evil smoke… poof! Nothing usable there. The mighty Ring is nothing more than a standard ring of invisibility, found in the myths and legends of most cultures (albeit with a nasty curse upon it). No influence here, either…

      • John Schilling says:

        But consider the need for Gygax and Arneson to avoid being sued by the Tolkien estate.

        The chain of events is clear and well-documented. G&A developed a set of wargaming rules for medieval tactical combat. Fans asked, “can we use this to do the Battle of Five Armies?”, and lo, it was written. Specifically to fit Tolkien’s mythology, and not anything out of e.g. R.E. Howard. Then the fans asked, “can you scale this down so I can play Aragorn and not a regiment of anonymous Rangers?”, and this too was done. These people were not asking to play Fahfrd and/or the Gray Mouser.

        Only when they had mimicked basically every thing that could be mined from Tolkien, d Gygax and Arneson start digging into other sources. In search of additional bits of market share, a magic system with workable mechanics, and protection from copyright.

        • dndnrsn says:

          There are a lot of different accounts of D&D’s early days, though – which one to believe? There’s about equal testimonial and contextual evidence. The version where Tolkein was a huge influence and Gygax lied and said he wasn’t involves Gygax benefiting by avoiding lawsuits. The version where there was minimal influence, the names in the fantasy wargame expansion were there to appeal to Tolkein fans, and the versions where someone says Tolkein was a big influence were to appeal to Tolkein fans once the lawsuit threat had blown over.

          If the attempt was to make something Tolkeinesque, they kinda failed. The combination of the early rules and the sorts of modules being published both by TSR and by third parties (presumably as models they influenced homemade stuff, and that third parties did the same thing also would seem to indicate it wasn’t just a TSR thing) is not Tolkeinesque fantasy. There’s an adventuring party, but the actual stuff they’re likely to do is solidly a sort of dungeon-crawling picaresque.

          Of course, it could just have been a bad attempt at imitating Tolkein.

          • John Schilling says:

            Where can I find these alleged contemporary accounts in whic there was minimal Tolkien influence and that was added only later to appeal to Tolkien fans?

          • Lasagna says:

            This is a really interesting conversation – thanks, it’s been fun to read!

            I haven’t played in a long time, but I was big into D&D as a kid, and even after reading your posts, I’m having trouble seeing how it isn’t a direct homage to Tolkien. The main races were Human, Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings (suspiciously like Hobbits). The classes in the original D&D were fighter, thief, cleric and magic-user, with AD&D adding rangers, druids, paladins, and bards*. The main enemies at early levels were goblins and orcs.

            So every playable race corresponds exactly with the main party in The Lord of the Rings, and none are left out. The classes available went beyond Tolkien, but still: fighters, mages, thieves and rangers are all from the books. The main enemies were lifted directly from Tolkien (OK, other entry-level enemies included low-level undead and kobolds, but still).

            This is no criticism of the game – I always assumed it was done on purpose, since Tolkien was the alpha and the omega of fantasy, and you want the players to instinctively understand some of the world. I’m sure they pulled stuff for the Monster Manual from a million different sources, but the main thrust of the game still seems very LoTR to me. Unless Tolkien isn’t really the originator of this stuff?

            Thanks for all of this. It’s fun to geek out. 🙂

            *Bards need an asterisk for First Edition. Becoming a bard was such a ludicrously byzantine process that anyone who managed to actually do it almost certainly had the DM putting his thumb on the scale.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @John Schilling

            Exactly how much Tolkien really influenced D&D is a different question. In The Dragon #13 (April 1978) Rob Kuntz wrote, “Tolkien’s does not fit well within the D&D game style.” More famously in Dragon #95 (March 1985) Gygax himself wrote, “The seeming parallels and inspirations are actually the results of a studied effort to capitalize on the then-current ‘craze’ for Tolkien’s literature.” He claimed that Tolkien wasn’t a major influence on D&D. He further said that if it looked like Tolkien was an influence, it was because they both used the same folklore as sources, and then if that still looked like Tolkien was an influence, that’s because he was trying to fool people into buying the game.

            “As anyone familiar with both D&D games and Tolkien works can affirm, there is no resemblance between the two, and it is well-nigh impossible to recreate any Tolkien-based fantasy while remaining within the boundaries of the game system.”
            — Gary Gygax, “The influence of J. R. R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D games,” Dragon #95 (March 1985)

            Readers can decide for themselves how much they think Tolkien influenced D&D, particularly in its TSR-based iterations. However they should know that by 1978 TSR had reasons to try to minimize the game’s connection to Middle-earth— because by then there been legal threats over the issue.

            The problems probably started with those three Middle-earth wargames that TSR began selling in 1975. By the next year they’d acquired rights to at least Battle of the Five Armies. As a result they reprinted it themselves, first in a bagged edition (1976), then in a box (1977).

            Meanwhile, Saul Zaentz had purchased the non-literary rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s works, which he would use to produce Ralph Bakshi’s animated The Lord of the Rings (1978). It was Zaentz — through his Elan Merchandising division — that delivered a cease & desist letter to TSR late in 1977 for their use of material copyrighted by Tolkien.

            It’s just as likely that the cease & desist letter came about due to TSR’s nice new Five Armies game as from the Tolkien references in D&D. In any case, TSR was forced to retire the Five Armies game and also scrub Tolkien references out of future releases of Dungeons & Dragons. Around the same time, Fact and Fantasy’s games disappeared, as did Minifigs UK’s unlicensed “Mythical Earth” line —
            probably all as a result of Elan’s new legal rights.

            Before closing out the topic of Tolkien entirely, it’s worth considering who Gygax attributed as D&D’s “real” influences in Dragon #95. There he said that the game’s major influences were “Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, A. Merritt, and H. P. Lovecraft.” Of course J.R.R. Tolkien is right alongside those luminaries in “Appendix N” for AD&D … a topic that we’re just now approaching.

            (Appelcline, Shannon, Designers & Dragons: The 70s, Silver Spring, MD: Evil Hat Productions, 2014. p27, 29)

            So, the situation is confused. There were legal reasons – to do with other games TSR was involved in, as well as Chainmail and D&D – to distance TSR and D&D from Tolkein. There were also PR reasons to move TSR and D&D closer to Tolkein. In 1979’s 1st ed AD&D DMG, Tolkein is there in Appendix N. In 1985, Gygax says that putting Tolkein in was a superficial thing (not a later thing; LotR-derived monsters were in Chainmail and in the first D&D booklets) intended to snooker Tolkein fans into buying the game.

            There isn’t really an unbiased history, whether primary-source (eg, do you believe the people whose account is of Gygax kinda ripping Arneson off, and then definitely ripping him off, or do you believe the people whose account is that Arneson handed a bunch of useless notes to Gygax, and then Gygax did all the heavy lifting?) or secondary-source (Designers & Dragons is relatively friendly to Gygax and thinks he was a business-naive designer screwed by unfriendly suits who didn’t understand gaming; there’s less friendly portrayals of the man).

            I, myself, think it’s pretty obvious that Tolkein was an influence, but that there’s clearly a ton of other influences in there at the earliest stage. Further, if Tolkein was the major or only influence, then D&D (especially early iterations) does a pretty piss-poor job of emulating LotR. My point is not that I think Tolkein was or wasn’t an influence, but rather that it is extremely hard to establish facts about the history of D&D by reading accounts from the people involved, because they tend to disagree with each other.

            @Lasagna

            The earliest form of D&D has clerics (whose nature is taken, I think, heavily from Poul Anderson), fighting-men, and magic-users. Thieves (whose abilities make a lot of sense in light of a book by, uh, Zelazny?) are added in the first or second supplement. The races are all Tolkein. So, it’s a mishmash of Tolkein’s high fantasy, swords and sorcery stuff, etc.

            However, when the Tolkeinesque-kinda party sets out using one of the rulessets of 70s-early 80s D&D, how do they behave? The game isn’t built to incentivize going on big epic heroic quests. Characters tend to be weaker than later editions. I’m running a retroclone, and despite being considerably more generous than the rules as written (eg, I’m not making them roll 3d6 down the line and roll for HP at first level) the PCs are still considerably weaker (in terms of stats, powers, HP) than they would be in 5th ed with the same classes, races, and XP totals. Combat tends to be deadlier – even though monsters tend also to have weaker powers and lower HP, in general lower HP totals across the board benefit monsters over PCs, since the monsters are greater in number and so are rolling more attacks; higher HP is insulation against freak criticals and the like).

            The default behaviour of D&D players following the incentives of such a system is to work really hard to avoid fair fights, only do the right thing when it’s the profitable thing, etc. If in such a system they behave like a party of heroes on a big ol’ quest, it’s because either the players have decided to do this despite it being disincentivized, or because the GM is adjusting the incentives or railroading or whatever to get them to behave heroically.

            Tolkein was definitely an influence, but the way that PCs behave is not the way Tolkein heroes behave, and the incentives are for being grubby ruffians rolling goblins for their treasure horde, not heroes trying to save the world. If it was meant as a direct homage to Tolkein, it failed.

        • Said Achmiz says:

          @John Schilling:

          This sounds interesting; do you have a citation handy? (I haven’t heard this, but I certainly haven’t deliberately delved into the history—only picked it up in bits here and there.)

          • John Schilling says:

            Playingattheworld.blogspot.com is quite good for the early history of D&D, with an emphasis on primary sources.

      • engleberg says:

        Re: To say that D&D mimicked Tolkein unabashedly is to minimize other authors-

        Not if D&D mimicked everyone else unabashedly too. You can play Conan! You can play Elric! You can play Jack of Shadows! Corwin! If Fafherd and the Grey Mouser fought Sigfried and Loge who would win! Gygax was cool with doing what customers said. That’s why D&D caught on- it responded to its customer base. That’s why Traveller never caught on- they blew off everyone who wanted to play Louis Wu or the Grey Lensman or anyone besides Earl Dumarest and an abstract space war game.

  35. onyomi says:

    An objection to the ahistoricity of Jesus and/or Mohammed: we have seen new religions form much more recently than this (Mormonism, Scientology) and they seem to follow a pattern: charismatic leader claims secret access to God/revelations, attracts a bunch of followers who buy into it enough to fall into a weird suggestible state, and, after he dies, continue to tell stories of the great charismatic master at the same time as they gloss over and rationalize the weirder stuff. And one can imagine how much better things would take off in an age without, well, the ATF.

    But the point is, there’s always some charismatic guy at the center of such movements. He claims access to secret knowledge, but he himself is a real person people are drawn to. I can’t think of any examples (though maybe they are out there) of a group of people spreading stories of a charismatic guy who didn’t exist.

    • JPNunez says:

      Depends on your definition of “existing”.

      Moses as depicted in Exodus probably did not exist at all. Yet he is a central figure in Judaism, wrote the main books of it, etc, etc. Did an early jewish leader conduct an exodus from another country at some point? probably? Was he interpolated into Moses? I doubt Moses was made whole cloth, but I find it hard believing in its historicity.

      Buddha probably existed, but did he really create a religion around him? Or was his story just appropiated by later Buddhists?

      A ton of legendary figures were worshipped in the old helenistic religions. People claimed to descend from Hercules, diverse figures from the Iliad, etc, etc, but maybe these are not really charismatic central figures. And on the subject of the Iliad, maybe Homer did not exist? And while he is not worshipped himself, we still attribute works to him.

      Honestly my opinion is that Jesus existed, but I’d say there’s a good chance he was made up, gonna go with 90% on Jesus existing and 80% on him having met Paul at all.

      • Jaskologist says:

        Given the timeline, that’s about an 80% chance of Christ having indeed resurrected.

      • Deiseach says:

        80% on him having met Paul at all

        You can go 0% on him having met St Paul; that’s the big part of the conversion story. Paul started off as Saul, very zealous persecutor. Acts first mentions him in association with the martyrdom of St Stephen:

        58 Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.

        Saul/Paul’s account of himself in Acts 22 doesn’t mention any meeting with Jesus before the conversion on the road to Damascus:

        3 “I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city, educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous for God as all of you are this day. 4 I persecuted this Way to the death, binding and delivering to prison both men and women, 5 as the high priest and the whole council of elders can bear me witness. From them I received letters to the brothers, and I journeyed toward Damascus to take those also who were there and bring them in bonds to Jerusalem to be punished.

        6 “As I was on my way and drew near to Damascus, about noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone around me. 7 And I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ 8 And I answered, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said to me, ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting.’ 9 Now those who were with me saw the light but did not understand the voice of the one who was speaking to me. 10 And I said, ‘What shall I do, Lord?’ And the Lord said to me, ‘Rise, and go into Damascus, and there you will be told all that is appointed for you to do.’ 11 And since I could not see because of the brightness of that light, I was led by the hand by those who were with me, and came into Damascus.

        12 “And one Ananias, a devout man according to the law, well spoken of by all the Jews who lived there, 13 came to me, and standing by me said to me, ‘Brother Saul, receive your sight.’ And at that very hour I received my sight and saw him. 14 And he said, ‘The God of our fathers appointed you to know his will, to see the Righteous One and to hear a voice from his mouth; 15 for you will be a witness for him to everyone of what you have seen and heard. 16 And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name.’

        17 “When I had returned to Jerusalem and was praying in the temple, I fell into a trance 18 and saw him saying to me, ‘Make haste and get out of Jerusalem quickly, because they will not accept your testimony about me.’ 19 And I said, ‘Lord, they themselves know that in one synagogue after another I imprisoned and beat those who believed in you. 20 And when the blood of Stephen your witness was being shed, I myself was standing by and approving and watching over the garments of those who killed him.’ 21 And he said to me, ‘Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’”

        • JPNunez says:

          Bah, I fucked up then.

          Somehow got my christianity wrong.

          This should lower my estimate of Jesus existing too.

          • manwhoisthursday says:

            Bah, I fucked up then.

            Hey, it’s someone who doesn’t know or apparently even care about the most basic facts in this area.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            When someone has conceded that they are wrong, it is poor form to kick them while down.

        • John Schilling says:

          You can go 0% on him having met St Paul;

          You can never go to zero percent. In this case, there is a small probability that Historical Jesus fled into what he hoped would be a quiet anonymous retirement, was traced down by Saul of Tarsus, and offered up “please don’t kill me, or turn me over to the Romans! Look, I can set you up as a cult leader, which is way cooler than being a Roman bureaucrat, and you’ve got the connections to make it work big time…”

          • Matt M says:

            I’d read this fanfiction…

          • Deiseach says:

            Didn’t Nikos Kazantzakis already write this?

            Also Michael Moorcock in Behold The Man, which has a time traveller going back to find the historical Jesus, being intensely disappointed by who he finds (spoiler: turns out that Jesus is mentally retarded,and Moorcock going on the pop anthropology view that ancient and/or primitive peoples believed insanity etc. were signs of being marked out by the divine that is why he was considered special by those in his little village but he plainly could never be the Jesus of history) takes over the role himself, even up to being crucified.

          • Tarpitz says:

            Sounds like this time traveller was a very naughty boy.

        • Robert Jones says:

          I’m confused by this (Deiseach’s) comment, because you say there is a 0% chance of Jesus having met Paul and then quote Paul describing meeting Jesus. I understand that we may find Paul’s account unlikely, because (at least according to the standard timeline), Jesus was dead at the time, but it still seems like an odd way of showing that Paul didn’t meet Jesus.

          • CatCube says:

            Paul heard Jesus as a voice after he was struck blind on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3-9), which was well after His crucifixion. If you’re already discounting supernatural phenomena, then Paul can’t be said to have “met” Jesus. Even as a believer, I don’t know that I’d call it “meeting” Jesus in the way that the Apostles did, though there can be argument on that.

            I think Deiseach is pointing out that assuming JPNunez’s disbelief is correct for the sake of argument, then the terms of the Biblical account mean that Paul definitely never met Jesus, and admits so in his own words. Even if you don’t exclude supernatural phenomena, he may or may not have “met” Paul depending on how you define that, since this was after the Ascension.

          • Deiseach says:

            What CatCube said. If the whole argument is that all the supernatural stuff was phooey, then Jesus can only have been a human man, and to say that Paul met him requires the sense of meeting to be the same as the way Nicodemus met Jesus:

            3 Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 2 He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”

            There is no description that Paul had ever met Jesus in the flesh; he is first introduced as being in attendance at the stoning of Stephen, when the witnesses (those doing the stoning) laid their cloaks at his feet. The encounter with Jesus was a supernatural one (or a hallucination during an epileptic episode, if we go for the secular explanation).

    • AG says:

      Well, there is Doctor Who. (Even though the guy should be calling him The Doctor, fake geek smh)

      More seriously, folkloric heroes have had much more recent examples than that. King Arthur, Robin Hood, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill. Scott even talks about a modern example in the OP with Tom Collins. Even marketing shills can do it fairly easily, what with The Most Interesting Man In The World.
      Also, Florida Man.

  36. Anon. says:

    We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

    re: city street orientations and cows, from Against the Day:

    As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality—like the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction they had flown here, as appeared increasingly likely, to help promote. Somewhere down there was the White City promised in the Columbian Exposition brochures, somewhere among the tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black greasesmoke, the effluvia of butchery unremitting, into which the buildings of the leagues of city lying downwind retreated, like children into sleep which bringeth not reprieve from the day. In the Stockyards, workers coming off shift, overwhelmingly of the Roman faith, able to detach from earth and blood for a few precious seconds, looked up at the airship in wonder, imagining a detachment of not necessarily helpful angels.

    Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. “The Great Bovine City of the World,” breathed Lindsay in wonder. Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in everchanging cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killingfloor.

  37. HeirOfDivineThings says:

    A “proof” of Trump “dog-whistling” white supremacy recently went viral in the blogosphere and media…

    How is this anything other than an attempt by the media and these bloggers at secular Gematria?

    • Lambert says:

      I see a Sokal-esque Kabbalistic dog whistle ‘Le Roi Trump = 666’ hoax coming along.

      Go full Poe’s law and see what they’ll buy.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Don’t forget nominative determinism, though. The name Donald means “world leader,” and “trump” means “to outdo or surpass,” so “Donald Trump” could mean “the world leader to surpass all others.”

        Of course, “trumped up” also means “to devise fraudulently” and there is the “final trump” which sounds the end of the world and raises the dead on judgement day. So “Donald Trump” could also mean the “fraudulent ruler who ends the world.”

  38. eqdw says:

    So regarding that soda tax saga:

    Beverage companies spent at least $7 million to get an initiative on the ballot this November that would have prevented local communities from raising taxes without approval from two-thirds of voters or an elected body, rather than a simple majority. Such a change would have made it much more difficult for localities to pay for police, fire, transit and other public services.

    Am I reading this right? Lobbyists spent ONLY seven million dollars and this was enough to get a ballot initiative banning ALL new local taxes? This seems like an absurdly small amount of money to achieve a massive political goal supported by a large swath of the electorate. There’s no way this could possibly be real.

  39. Deiseach says:

    (1) That face of God study is terrible. “Goodness me, however is it that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel depicts God as Bearded Old Guy while modern Americans think of him as Less Bearded Young Guy?”

    Uh – how about Michaelangelo was painting Old Testament scenes and thus GOD THE FATHER; modern Americans who are Christian (of however vague a sort) will think more about Jesus, GOD THE SON? As for the “we mooshed up a ton of faces of vaguely different ages and etnicities, showed them to different groups, and guess what – black people tended to pick black (or close enough) faces, young people picked young faces? Who’da thunk?”, well I suppose “black people pick black faces, white people pick white faces” may actually help shore up those Implicit Bias tests after all and that’s about all you can say for it.

    (2) While we’re on the topic of God – oh boy, Richard Carrier? Yes, and I can conclusively prove George Washington never existed because there is a blatant admission that ‘events’ in the ‘life’ of this figure were invented by his disciple for the explicit purpose of making him a model of virtue for others to copy, checkmate Republicans And Democracy!

    I’ll stick with “images of Isis and Horus prove the Catholic Church is pagan because they copied these for Mary and Jesus” and Catholicism was really founded by Nimrod and Semiramis for my religious conspiracy needs, thanks.

    (3) This seems to be the time for debunking the health benefits of fish oil – I’ve recently read stories all about how it is in fact no good at all for heart health. Next week in nutrition studies – load up on salt, sugar and cholesterol after all, keep away from leafy green vegetables!

    (4) I’ve thought the San Francisco Board of Supervisors were away in their own little world ever since their various resolutions and open letters from 2010 onwards calling on various high-ranking members of the hierarchy to throw off the shackles of the Church and instead teach doctrines the Board likes. I’m not surprised they’ve started dictating to people where they should eat.

  40. knockknock says:

    Marginal Revolution is very good a lot of weeks — but banning comments has been not so good.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      The comments tended to be low quality.

      Perhaps we can do more here to discuss MR material.

      • knockknock says:

        There’s so much logrolling and mutual back-scratching between these two excellent sites that I’ve suggested they simply merge into one.

    • Urstoff says:

      MR hasn’t had a good comments section for 10 years. It’s just been 8-10 people with the same immovable ideologies making the same types of comments on every MR post.

      • knockknock says:

        You clearly fail to include my unfailingly witty and insightful comments there (under a different pen name).

        But the point is, why not have a comment section? Sites that shut them down seem to be saying, “Our readers are idiots and we can’t be bothered to patrol them.”

        • Nornagest says:

          To be fair, readers are generally idiots and I probably couldn’t be bothered to patrol them if I maintained a popular blog.

        • Urstoff says:

          It’s more saying “the remaining commenters that haven’t been driven out by other commenters are idiots”.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          An unmaintained comment section on a site attached to you professionally can be worse than nothing.

          Scott is doing yeoman’s work by maintaining the comment section at SSC, but I can see why the GMU guys don’t want to do the same. Although they may be able to hire someone, or otherwise offload the work.

  41. j1000000 says:

    The comments on that nanny article cover everything pretty well, but he doesn’t really describe much about the application pool. Were these illegal immigrants, who make up a good portion of the nanny market? If so, of course they can’t write a page in flawless English, and it makes sense that they sound stand off-ish on the phone in their non-native language.

    Were they college students? If so, of course they only put down a couple months — they’re looking for a summer job.

    None of this has any impact on how employable I think I am. Seems more like the sort of thing the right holds up as evidence that high-IQ people don’t understand what it’s like at the low end of the bell curve. (I mean, I’ve never read Zvi before, but judging by the exploits detailed on his Wikipedia page and his recent blog posts, he’s got a laughably high IQ.)

    • Deiseach says:

      I started off with a certain modicum of sympathy for his plight, but having read more posts on that blog, I’ve swung round sharply to the “yet another employer who wants a highly-qualified caretaker to look after the kids 24/7 all week, taking little Sequoia and Tarquin on enrichment trips, doing extra tutoring on top of the homework correction, being a nutritionist and lifestyle coach and in whole charge of the kids while mother and father work Real Jobs and is stumped why they can’t get that when they’re offering your very own shoebox to sleep in and a whole half an hour’s free time every week on top of sixpence pocket money”.

      For someone who worked in companies hiring on people, he seems to have no notion that (a) any vacancy will attract a lot of speculative, desperate and ‘apply for everything’ replies (b) yes there are a lot of people out there who have dreadful CVs (c) yes there are a lot of people out there who won’t bother to turn up for interview and won’t bother to notify you beforehand (d) you have to sift through a lot of rocks before you turn up a diamond.

      I don’t know what the terms of the job offer were: if he was offering good wages and conditions as would be expected by qualified candidates, or was it as above – we’ll throw you a few bob well under professional wage levels while you act as nanny, housemaid, laundry maid, chef and taxi driver for the kids and don’t bother us unless the house goes on fire. If the job offer reads like “hiring an illegal immigrant”, it’ll attract illegal immigrants.

      • knockknock says:

        A few years ago I saw a teen working in a drugstore who actually had Sequoia on her nametag

    • pontifex says:

      Yeah, I thought that post was weird. What does writing a page of flawless English have to do with being a nanny? That has more to do with being a white-collar professional.

      Also this:

      Many others wouldn’t work with multiple children, or had higher salary requirements than we listed.

      So he wants someone who writes flawless English, is willing to work with multiple children, and will “enthusiastically” accept a low salary. And when it’s difficult to find this unicorn, he says ZOMG there is a talent shortage.

      This reminds me of how there used to be constant talk about a huge shortage of software developers. Microsoft used to talk about this a lot, and I think IBM did too. In every case the “shortage” was just code for “we don’t want to pay the current market rate”.

      • Matt M says:

        I wonder if the problem here is a mismatch between expectations and reality.

        Having a nanny, at all, is something that would typically be associated with the upper class of society. An extreme luxury good. Anyone who is thinking about hiring a nanny, at all, likely thinks of themselves as… the upper class of society, and therefore deserving of the very best.

        And there are a ton of portrayals of “the very best” in terms of nannies. The guy basically wants Mary Poppins. That’s his vision of what a nanny IS. So he googles “average salary for a nanny” and sticks that on his job description and is just shocked, shocked, that Mary Poppins isn’t applying. But of course, Mary Poppins isn’t an average nanny at all. She’s the best nanny. You have to pay more to get her.

        • Radu Floricica says:

          But he got Mary Poppins in the end. If anything, this line of thought should be: he wanted Mary Poppins, he got her, so clearly he was prepared to pay at least average wages, and likely above average. And even so most applicants didn’t even make it to the interview. They didn’t fail at being good nannies – they failed at being even passable applicants.

          This matches my experience hiring people btw, in a different corner of the world and different profession. So many don’t even proof-read their CVs – it’s so obviously a half-hour’s chore, and not a defining document for their career.

      • Deiseach says:

        had higher salary requirements than we listed

        Yeah, that was the part that had me going “oh for crying out loud”. A qualified professional nanny can command and would expect the going rate, just like any other qualified professional. If you think you can get childcare on the cheap, and it’s not “my mother in law will mind the kids three mornings a week” or hiring a babysitter for two hours on a weekday night, then you will get cheap childcare applicants.

        Who won’t have perfect English, a highly literate prose style, a polished telephone manner, or maybe not even that great at turning up (because they already got a job elsewhere).

        You pay peanuts, you get monkeys, as the saying goes.

        • ec429 says:

          My interpretation of the word listed there is the following:
          * Zvi posts job offer with the salary-on-offer included in the listing
          * Zvi receives many applications demanding a higher salary than in the listing
          Now, from a ‘negotiations’ perspective that may be fine. But if the offer Zvi is making is truly Zvi’s reserve price / marginal value, then any higher demand isn’t going to be accepted and therefore applying in that case is just wasting Zvi’s time.
          Obviously I don’t know how credible the listing was in this regard, so I don’t know whether the applicants were behaving reasonably or unreasonably.
          But there’s a difference between complaining you can’t find an employee matching a given set of requirements, and complaining that you get deluged with applicants who don’t match your requirements despite having clearly stated those requirements. From author’s comment under TFA:

          When I say these things did not fit, I refer only to things we explicitly mentioned in the job post.

          • Matt M says:

            I’ve often received advice, in the white collar world, to go ahead and apply for jobs that seemed interesting, even if the listed salary was lower than I would accept.

            The gambit is that once you get in and interview, and if they decide to select you, they’ve already been impressed and they’re emotionally invested in having you. At which point, you have some power to turn the tables and say “Actually, I demand more money” and have a shot at it.

          • ec429 says:

            Matt M: If I were an employer, you tried that on me, and I didn’t hire you because that really was my reserve price, I don’t think it would be wrong of me to whine on the Internet about you wasting my time. Thus I don’t censure Zvi for doing the same (and AFAICT Zvi was only complaining about the presence of bad applicants, not the absence of good ones; the criticisms of him for demanding too much and paying too little implicitly suggest the latter, which is unfair to Zvi).
            Of course, in the white collar world (or at least in tech, which is where I work), the reserve price varies a lot more from one potential hire to another; the interview is deciding both “do we want this guy working for us at all” and “how much can we offer him (should he demand it) and still be getting our money’s worth?”. So in that case the pre-commitment to the listed salary is a lot less credible, which is (a) why the ‘gambit’ sometimes works and (b) why it’s not ‘wasting my time’ to try it. (Indeed, the two are linked: if the gambit works, I have benefited too, because I (revealed-)prefer hiring you at the higher salary to not hiring you at all, which is what happens if you don’t try the gambit and thus don’t apply. So the chance that I might accept the gambit is exactly what makes me OK with people trying it.)
            For something like childcare, I think the two questions are a lot more decoupled in that most possible hires fall into either the bucket of “do not want” or a bucket of hires all worth about the same; it doesn’t sound like Zvi would have been willing to pay more if a really amazing candidate applied.

            This is the sort of thing I was trying to wave at when I said “from a ‘negotiations’ perspective that may be fine.”

          • Matt M says:

            For something like childcare, I think the two questions are a lot more decoupled in that most possible hires fall into either the bucket of “do not want” or a bucket of hires all worth about the same; it doesn’t sound like Zvi would have been willing to pay more if a really amazing candidate applied.

            Ah, but perhaps this betrays a lack of understanding about the childcare sector. I’m just speculating here, I personally know nothing about the childcare sector.

            But it feels like you (and also Zvi potentially) are simply assuming the variance among workers is low, and therefore having a simple and consistent salary requirement works well. But perhaps this is not the case. Perhaps variability is quite high, and he would have been better off having a far more flexible salary?

          • ec429 says:

            Matt M:

            But it feels like you (and also Zvi potentially) are simply assuming the variance among workers is low

            It’s not just about the workers; it’s also about what Zvi wants. There may be an applicant who is, on some objective measure, twice as good. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Zvi would be willing to pay more to employ them rather than someone merely adequate; Zvi’s objective function could be flat past the ‘merely adequate’ point.

            And I still think the question of whether a flexible-salary strategy would be better is irrelevant, if in fact Zvi made it sufficiently clear in the listing that Zvi was following a fixed-salary strategy; if applicants know that the salary is not negotiable, and they try to negotiate it anyway, they are wasting Zvi’s time, whether Zvi ‘should’ have made it negotiable or not.

            To take an analogy outside of hiring (where people have a lot of messed-up intuitions): the price of apples in the supermarket is not negotiable; it’s whatever’s on the shelf ticket. Everyone knows the price is not negotiable. If you try to haggle with the cashier, you are wasting the cashier’s time, and the cashier is justified in being annoyed with you, and arguments that being willing to negotiate would be better for the supermarket are irrelevant to the specific case of you right now with a long queue behind you at the checkout.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Most people do not advertise their reserve prices. For obvious reasons. Regardless of whether some individual advertises their actual reserve price, expecting the market to believe this is foolish.

          • ec429 says:

            @HeelBearCub:
            In practice, the price a supermarket advertises for apples is its reserve price, because it considers the foregone profit from sales at a slightly lower price to be less than the cost of allowing haggling.
            I may be using the term “reserve price” slightly differently to you here.

            When we’ve agreed on the apples, then we can see whether the analogy applies to hiring.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            You have made two rather important alterations, one is that you are talking about commodities, the other is that you are talking about selling.

            But yes, when people advertise commodities for sale, they will publish a current price. Whether you want to call it their reserve price depends slightly on what you consider a reserve price (and you may actually have meant reservation price, as reserve prices usually only apply to sales). A reserve price is the one below which they will choose to keep the item rather than make a sale. If we are talking about actual reserve prices, then the advertised price is frequently not the reserve price, as they may happily sell the item for less if the item does not sell at the current one.

          • ec429 says:

            @HeelBearCub

            You have made two rather important alterations, one is that you are talking about commodities, the other is that you are talking about selling.

            One of the premises in my Zvi-hypothetical was essentially equivalent to the assumption that good nannies are a commodity (and I noted that white-collar workers often aren’t).

            But yes, when people advertise commodities for sale, they will publish a current price. Whether you want to call it their reserve price depends slightly on what you consider a reserve price (and you may actually have meant reservation price, as reserve prices usually only apply to sales).

            I’m not sure what distinction(s) you’re making here; Wikipedia states that both terms apply to both the seller’s reserve price and the buyer’s reserve price.

            A reserve price is the one below which they will choose to keep the item rather than make a sale. If we are talking about actual reserve prices, then the advertised price is frequently not the reserve price, as they may happily sell the item for less if the item does not sell at the current one.

            But only at a later time, and only by advertising a new price; not by negotiation with a specific potential buyer, which is the relevant case here. (I would argue that the ‘later time’ part means that the advertised price is the reserve price but that the reserve price can change over time; however, that would be arguing over definitions and lead to lost purposes.)

            The fact that I might reduce the price of the apples tomorrow if they haven’t sold doesn’t mean that I might reduce the price now if you asked me to (even if you mentioned that fact in support of your request), therefore by asking me you are wasting my time. Negotiation is only productive if there is a possibility of agreement, and if the costs of negotiation would predictably outweigh the gains produced by that agreement then it is efficient for me to credibly pre-commit not to negotiate. That is why supermarkets don’t haggle at the till. Market stalls are presumably operating under a different set of cost curves, because they sometimes do haggle.

            The net gain produced by preventing haggling, however, requires that the buyer responds to that unwillingness to negotiate by not attempting to negotiate. If enough buyers try it anyway, then too few negotiation-attempts (and their costs) are avoided by the policy, their costs no longer outweigh the benefits of selling apples to the hagglers, and the supermarket may abandon the policy. This outcome is worse than the outcome where no-one haggles, since now everyone is stuck in long queues just so that a few people can get their apples slightly cheaper. Quite possibly the long queues make even the hagglers worse off on net.

            So if someone says they are advertising their reserve price because they don’t want the hassle of having to negotiate, respect that — the alternative is often defecting on the PD.

          • Aapje says:

            If there is sufficient competition among suppliers and you have a fixed budget & simply want to have the best offering for that budget, it makes sense to state a specific salary. However, it doesn’t make much sense to then complain that all offerings are too poor in quality, because clearly you then offered too little money to entice Mary Poppins, if she doesn’t show up even during a lengthy search.

            If you then actually really want Mary Poppins, you have to increase the budget. If you are unwilling to do so and demand that Mary Poppins works for you for a below market salary, you are being entitled.

            If only people apply who accept the stated salary, you never learn how much it actually costs to hire Mary Poppins, because no Mary Poppins will then ever show up to tell you her salary demands. So there is a some benefit to people showing up with higher demands.

            Another option is to state a salary range, if you are willing to pay more for a better candidate, but are also willing to accept a poorer one for less money. This also gives a negotiation benefit, as it gives you more flexibility to negotiate and ‘play’ the other person.

            In this case, another interesting question is whether the transaction costs and risks of the site he was using were higher for both parties than a search among friends and family. If so, it makes sense that good workers demand a premium when applying through that website.

            This could explain why Zvi thinks that he was offering an appropriate salary, as he could find his Mary Poppins by a direct search, while his mistake may have been to not realize that doing the same search through the website requires a higher salary to compensate for the transaction costs and risks.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @ec249:
            Who goes out to the market and advertises their reserve price to buy a singleton of a commodity? Can you give me any examples of situations similar to taking out an ad “Want to buy: one apple, Granny Smith, unblemished, grown on the eastern slope of a hill, $0.25”? I think the times when you see an advertised price to buy a commodity, it is a commodities market, where the goods are being traded in bulk and the prices are part of a system of immediate negotiation.

            As to whether you can treat nannies as commodities, I think here we need to decide what we mean by commodity. I would say “a mass-produced unspecialized product”, “a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price”

            Do we agree that this is the definition of commodity we are working with?

          • ec429 says:

            @Aapje:

            However, it doesn’t make much sense to then complain that all offerings are too poor in quality

            Which, as I keep stressing, Zvi did not do. Rather, Zvi complained that the applicants did not fulfil objective conditions of the offer. And moreover, was not complaining about the absence of applicants who fulfilled the conditions, but about the presence of applicants who didn’t fulfil them but applied anyway, in (what Zvi presumably thought to be) full knowledge that they wouldn’t be accepted.

            This could explain why Zvi thinks that he was offering an appropriate salary

            I have not argued that Zvi thinks anything of the sort; only that he was upfront about what salary he was offering.

            I really don’t know how much clearer I can make this: the position you are attacking is not the one I am proposing.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I have applied for jobs where I didn’t meet the stated qualifications. Sometimes I’ve even gotten the job. There is no way to tell which qualifications are really must-haves and which just got inflated into that without the messy search.

          • Matt M says:

            Indeed.

            And I don’t think it’s fair to claim, without evidence, something like “Well we all know that happens in tech, but certainly it doesn’t happen in the perfectly-commoditized field of nannies.”

          • John Schilling says:

            Almost nobody in the real world advertises a job opening with only non-negotiable minimum requirements and their absolute maximum salary offer. The ones that do, mostly fail Negotiation 101, and the exceptions mostly make it explicit that this is really a no-negotiation offer.

            And, explicit disclaimers or otherwise, if there is a gross mismatch between requirements and salary, e.g. Mary Poppins for the price of a generic nanny, the only applicants you will get are ones that don’t meet your requirements and ones that will demand more money. If your whining about dishonesty and the difficulty of getting good help were at all effective at screening out these “nonresponsive” applicants, then you’d have no applicants at all, and either way it would be your fault for not understanding the market.

          • Aapje says:

            Indeed, what Zvi is doing is a typical mistake that many highly systematizing and low EQ people make: typical minding other people and assuming that they are extremely conscientious, make hard commitments, don’t copy often very successful dark triad strategies from others (while having no clue what they actually are doing, except that it works), apply serious thought to achieve what they want, etc.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            if there is a gross mismatch between requirements and salary

            I don’t think that is what happened here, since he did wind up hiring someone and there’s no indication that he had to change either requirements or salary from those indicated in the job listing.

            (If this had happened in New Zealand my guess would have been that most of the applicants were just going through the motions, with no actual desire to actually obtain this particular job, simply in order to remain eligible for the unemployment benefit. That would explain the carelessness, the grumpiness, and the disregard for the advertised conditions, all at once. Whether that’s a plausible explanation in this case I have no idea.)

          • ec429 says:

            Indeed, what Zvi is doing is a typical mistake that many highly systematizing and low EQ people make

            Now that I can agree with. Logical thinker expects other people to behave logically, film at 11.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Even a rationalist job-seeker will quickly realize that he needs to adopt the mindset of employers, who are not just submitting a bid to a computer to be filled.

          • Aapje says:

            Sure, but Zvi may not be an atypical employer (for that avenue).

  42. Aapje says:

    I found this rather old, but very interesting series on the failure of racial policies in the US, from a liberal, but non-partisan perspective (he blames everyone, essentially):

    How the left’s embrace of busing hurt the cause of integration.
    Affirmative action doesn’t work. It never did. It’s time for a new solution.
    The Civil Rights movement ignored one very important, very difficult question. It’s time to answer it.

    Some interesting claims:
    – That school busing threatened to force (mostly white, but also some black) people into schools below their ‘class’, which white people fiercely resisted by self-segregating to suburbs and private schools, since very few will sacrifice their kids’ future for an ideal.
    – Busing was opposed by by 77% of whites and 47% of blacks.
    – That Nixon had given up on 65% of black people and wanted to keep them in line by tough policing, while he wanted to pacify the black elite by affirmative action. Then when the left adopted affirmative action as the right abandoned it, they also copied this dichotomy, where the black elite gets a big leg up, while for lower class blacks the focus is on how law enforcement should treat them.
    – That civil rights activists never decided whether they wanted actual integration or ‘separate but equal’ (achieving things in a pillarized manner, having their own institutions with a separate culture). As a result, they did a little of both, failing at both due to never making a choice.

    I consider this last part especially interesting. The US still engages in affirmative action, yet there are separate black studies courses where it is expected that only black students take them, calls for separate black dorms, Black Culture Centers, etc. The demand for safe spaces also seems to partly boil down to a demand to not be asked to adapt to others, which is antithetical to integration. You get these kinds of articles that discuss whether segregation is harmful/beneficial to learning or unfair to one group or the other, yet completely sidesteps the question of racial integration. Is the goal to create universities and by extension a society where racial groups have their own culture and are thus segregated or where they mix?

    In general, I think that there is a large misunderstanding among most of the proponents of multiculturalism, who don’t seem to recognize that culture and segregation are linked. You can’t have separate cultures without some segregation and people can’t mix if their cultures are too different. So an integrated society (rather than a collection of separate communities) can only exist by limiting cultural diversity. The more multicultural a society is, the more people will live past each other in their own enclaves with different behaviors and thus different outcomes.

    • Matt M says:

      Is the goal to create universities and by extension a society where racial groups have their own culture and are thus segregated or where they mix?

      The problem, as you hint at above, is that the answer is both. Demands are made simultaneously for the existence of “black” spaces where whites are allowed to enter, AND for the elimination of any remaining “white” spaces where blacks aren’t fully embraced. It’s a “have your cake and eat it too” situation. They want to be able to exclude whites at their leisure, but will not tolerate being excluded by whites in any situation.

      Many white people, understandably, are not too enthused with adopting this obvious double-standard.

      • mdet says:

        Aapje’s / the third article’s whole point is that the black community doesn’t have a consensus on “Fully integrate” vs “Separate but actually-equal-this-time”. It’s less a deliberate double-standard than it is “different people saying different things, and some individuals who are genuinely unsure”

        • Matt M says:

          different people saying different things, and some individuals who are genuinely unsure

          And my argument is that no, that is not correct. That in large, it is NOT two different groups with different ideas, or people who can’t decide which is best. That it is, mainly, people who want both things, but at their own discretion with zero input from other effected groups.

          • Skivverus says:

            That it is, mainly, people who want both things, but at their own discretion with zero input from other effected groups.

            Dunno, it seems to me that mdet’s probably got a better firsthand perspective here; even aside from that, I doubt that it’s any more “people want both things” than on any other issue with unpleasant tradeoffs.
            Also, the why-not-both people could probably point to, say, Chinatown, and go “we’re aiming for something like that.”

          • Aapje says:

            @Matt M

            I think that a major issue is that the debate is so unsophisticated that people are often not aware that they are making incompatible demands.

            I can understand that it is hard to believe, because it seems rather obvious that if you demand segregation, you cannot simultaneously expect to take equal advantage of mainstream social networks, get jobs at mainstream companies, get awarded a proportional number of mainstream Oscars for your movies, etc. Instead, you then have to build up an entire pillar yourself and make it equally successful under mostly your own power.

            However, the consequences of an unsophisticated debate is that people end up with very unsophisticated beliefs, with enormous blind spots and unexamined assumptions. They then honestly don’t see why they can’t have their cake and eat it too; nor that it is unfair to blame other groups for supposedly holding back the ‘just and proper’ outcome.

            PS. Also, regularly morality is confused for truth, where people succumb to a just world fallacy. This can help maintain the unsophisticated debate when the kid who says that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes is forced to sell matches on the street and dies of hypothermia. The heterodox opinion is then a priori disregarded as being offensive and considered so obviously wrong, that no effort is made to check whether it is actually wrong.

          • Matt M says:

            I don’t understand your point.

            They can have their cake and eat it too. It’s technically possible. They advocate for it, and a non-trivial amount of people who aren’t in their ingroup believe it is perfectly just and proper for them to do so.

            You might say that such a demand is unfair. Or that it is logically inconsistent. But it’s not truly incompatible. We can, in fact, live in a society where white males are not allowed to have any exclusive spaces, but every participant in the oppression olympics is, in fact, allowed to have such things. Where blacks can exclude whites, but whites are not allowed to exclude blacks.

            Not only can such a society exist, it already does. Any college campus in the US essentially already operates under such a construct.

          • onyomi says:

            Re. MDet’s feeling like there is no consensus and Matt M’s sense that there are a lot of influential people out there demanding genuinely contradictory things, I feel like it may be a product of a broader phenomenon that causes problems in many different areas:

            Most people don’t start out with a carefully articulated, principled worldview or ideal future vision and then, upon encountering a particular issue, figure out how they should feel about it. Instead, most people have a vaguely articulated sense of “being a good person” and “what’s good for me and the people/issues I care about” and then make up their minds about each individual issue based on how they perceive it will affect them and/or the issues/people they care about.

            So if you’re the type of person, black or not, inclined to think about issues in terms of what’s good for the black community it could be that Tuesday you’re telling a pollster “yes, I think it’s important for black people to patronize black-owned businesses when possible” and Wednesday you’re telling a pollster “yes, I think it’s important there be no obstacles to black people advancing in majority-white companies” because both of these seem “good” for the issues/people you care about, even if fully supporting one or the other might be self-defeating/impossible.

            And as for political leaders who advocate clearly contradictory positions, I really think they’re just playing the same game at a higher level: if you ask them Tuesday if they think it’s good to support black people building their own institutions they’ll think “my constituents would like that” and say yes. Ask them Wednesday if they think black people should have more opportunities to advance in white-owned businesses and they’ll think “my constituents would like that” and answer yes again.

          • mdet says:

            It’s just like the debate a few threads ago over “What’s better for Christianity? That the US remain a majority Christian nation, even if that means diluting the faith? Or that Christianity become a niche countercultural movement full of truly devout believers?”

            If you’d ask most Christians, I bet they’d try to say that they both want America to be broadly Christian AND that the faith should emphasize true devotion with a countercultural mentality.

            That might be less of an inherent contradiction than the racial one, but I think every subculture (heck, every person) faces the dilemma of “Do you want to be popular or do you want to keep your current identity?”, and everyone wants to say “Why can’t I be both?”

          • Aapje says:

            @Matt M

            Double standards can indeed give a group a bit of both, but not all of both. It’s simply not possible to replicate the incentives that result from actually having compatible cultures by forcing it. The tools to do so are too crude.

            Furthermore, at a certain point the burdens become too large and nearly everyone will revolt, if only by acting in their own self-interest. Schooling is a good example here. Very, very few people will sacrifice their children for an ideal.

          • j r says:

            I can understand that it is hard to believe, because it seems rather obvious that if you demand segregation, you cannot simultaneously expect to take equal advantage of mainstream social network…

            Having a Black Student Union on campus is no more an example of segregation than having a Hindu Student Union would be like instituting the caste system. That’s not how segregation works, either historically or in practice. The Amish segregate themselves, so to for ultra-religious Jews. Being an African American Studies major is not segregation (thought it may have some impact on your job prospects).

            I am trying to have a better understanding of the other side of this conversation, but it is proving difficult. What’s the steal man here? What are you guys worried about? Is it just a reaction to the worst excesses of post-structural/SJW activists? Because despite what the internets say, it’s pretty easy to have nothing to do with those people in the real world. I just don’t see what’s driving this resentment.

            For example, I am a straight man. If a gay person came up to me and said, “It’s important for me to have explicitly gay spaces where I am around other people like me, but I would also like to have the freedom to fully participate in the wider society,” my reaction wouldn’t be “how dare you try to have it both ways!.” My reaction would be something like, “sure, I get it.”

            What’s the threat to me if queer people can have a gay bars and an LGBT Student Union and can still go to regular bars or join other student groups? That doesn’t deprive me of anything.

          • Matt M says:

            For example, I am a straight man. If a gay person came up to me and said, “It’s important for me to have explicitly gay spaces where I am around other people like me, but I would also like to have the freedom to fully participate in the wider society,” my reaction wouldn’t be “how dare you try to have it both ways!.” My reaction would be something like, “sure, I get it.”

            And if you asked him to tolerate the existence of explicitly straight spaces where you could be around other people like yourself, do you think he would be as accommodating?

            I feel like such a demand would likely get you arrested in many western countries…

          • Aapje says:

            @j r

            Perhaps (part of) our disagreement on segregation is about what definition we use? For this discussion, I am focusing on the effects of people interacting more and much more intensely with their own race than with other races, because of social forces.

            If people organize and attend things specifically by and for a certain race, then that is segregation according to me. It causes culture to align itself with race, for people to build up a (more) racially homogeneous social networks, racial stereotypes, etc, etc. There are various severities of segregation. It’s not black/white, there is a lot of grey.

            Is it just a reaction to the worst excesses of post-structural/SJW activists? Because despite what the internets say, it’s pretty easy to have nothing to do with those people in the real world. I just don’t see what’s driving this resentment.

            You seem to desire a simple, clear narrative, but this doesn’t exist. There are different concerns, objections, grievances, etc. ‘My’ side is not homogenous, just like ‘your’ side. Giving you what you want requires a very large essay or perhaps even a book, which I’m not going to write here.

            So instead, I’ll specifically debate your claim that the only thing I could worry about is easily avoidable excesses. Someone very close to me was not considered when applying for a job because he is a man. The Dutch government created various jobs for women only. Despite this discrimination by gender not being legal according to the constitution, apparently this right doesn’t exist for men (the same is true in the US, despite it also being clearly unconstitutional). The rhetoric used to defend this is equally applicable to non-whites, so the risk is that this discrimination is extended to race as well. so it is a threat both from the perspective of gender as of race.

            I read two of the top center-left newspapers in my country and they have increasingly featured racist and sexist content aimed at me.

            I used to visit various websites that adopted SJ as a core value and as a result, changed their content to include SJ bias in many places, driving me off. These sites were part of my life before they changed.

            In none of these cases, did I or the person I know go out of their way to seek out SJ. Instead, it started encroaching on my life.

            What’s the threat to me if queer people can have a gay bars and an LGBT Student Union and can still go to regular bars or join other student groups?

            There is no threat if they organize around having sex with men or other stuff that doesn’t effect me. However, if they start organizing around a false narrative of being oppressed by straights much more than is the case and out of ressentiment, develop an ideology where harming, silencing, taking jobs away from innocent straight people is justified, then there is a threat.

            You can compare it with some white people who come together to celebrate St Patrick’s Day vs a KKK rally. The former is not a threat to others, the latter is. I don’t mind the former, I do mind the latter.

            Also, there is the specific issue that black Americans most likely perpetuate their problems if they self-segregate, which, combined with an ideology that blames whites for the problems of blacks and demands racist treatment of whites to solve the issue, results in perpetual racist treatment of whites.

          • j r says:

            And if you asked him to tolerate the existence of explicitly straight spaces where you could be around other people like yourself, do you think he would be as accommodating?

            Why would I do that? Most of the world is accommodating to straight identity. I don’t get anything by excluding a gay person from the spaces where I am. And I don’t lose anything when the gay person spends time at the gay bar or at the LGBT Student Union.

            Where’s the harm? Because this mostly seems to be about you having sore feelings or being hung up about some supposed double-standard.

          • albatross11 says:

            A fair number of explicitly religious communities exclude gays, at least in the sense of being clear that gays aren’t welcome. There’s not some magic gaydar-scan someone can use to tell for sure, so if a straight guy goes to the gay safe-space or a gay guy goes to the straight safe-space, probably they get away with it.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            Why would I do that? Most of the world is accommodating to straight identity.

            What does accomodation to gay identity mean in this example? If I let two gay guys kiss my bar, is that insufficient accomodation that still demands we create specific gay bars for gays? Can these gay bars ban women or transsexuals for being insufficiently gay?

          • j r says:

            is that insufficient accomodation that still demands we create specific gay bars for gays? Can these gay bars ban women or transsexuals for being insufficiently gay?

            That’s not how gay bars work.

          • Tarpitz says:

            Based on conversations with gay friends, the impression I get is that the main value of gay bars is that they concentrate the dating pool. When only a small proportion of the population is a prospective partner before you even start to consider the questions of singleness and specific mutual attraction, that’s a pretty valuable service.

            Regarding attitude to outsiders, my experience of going (as a straight man) to gay pubs with my femme lesbian friend who hoped to meet women but didn’t want to be alone until she did so was that the response of bar staff and other customers to me was generally frosty verging on rude or even hostile. After a while, I started doing a fruity-old-queen schtick on such occasions (I would literally call people “ducky”), which immediately made everyone extremely friendly. I highly doubt many (or any) of the people concerned had hostile feelings towards straight people in every day life; given what I take to be the purpose of gay pubs in 21st Century southern England, I think being a little put out at the presence of a straight guy is understandable.

          • onyomi says:

            Why would I do that? Most of the world is accommodating to straight identity.

            The Western world is no longer accommodating to the continued existence of explicitly male-only spaces. Nor white-only spaces.

            The more general problem with SJ-type thought is that it is based on a false premise that because a group has historically or does now enjoy certain advantages over other groups therefore it does not face any disadvantages or challenges.

            For example, let’s just accept for the sake of argument the (in my view quite debatable) premise that, in most societies, historically, you were better off, on average, being born a man than a woman. Even accepting that, it would not mean that being a man was in every way better than being a woman, nor that there exist no unique or particular challenges or pitfalls for men.

            Thus, double standards are harmful because even if, from some bird’s eye view discounting individual variation, men, white people, and straight people have it better in life than women, non-white people, and non-straight people on average, it wouldn’t imply that all men, white people, and straight people have it better than others in every way, or that they couldn’t also benefit from exclusive spaces of their own, assuming such a thing is beneficial to others. It’s like saying “breast cancer is more deadly than prostate cancer; therefore, until breast cancer is fully cured, no resources whatsoever should be devoted to prostate cancer.”

          • Aapje says:

            @onyomi

            For example, let’s just accept for the sake of argument the (in my view quite debatable) premise that, in most societies, historically, you were better off, on average, being born a man than a woman. Even accepting that, it would not mean that being a man was in every way better than being a woman, nor that there exist no unique or particular challenges or pitfalls for men.

            Given the premise that men are better off on average, it is even possible that a majority of men have it worse than the average woman or even worse than any woman.

            By their nature, averages tend to not reflect the median experience, but instead, weigh outlier experiences far more heavily. If you have a small group of men who live like kings and many men and women who live in the muck, then the great advantage of the small group can distort the perception of the entire group, if you only look at the average.

            It is even worse if one doesn’t even look at the average of all men, but falsely attributes the average well-being of the small group of elite men to all men. This mistake is easily made, given that people logically have a far greater interest in the powerful, successful and fortunate, than in the downtrodden. So analysis of historical sources tends to paint a false picture unless one actively corrects for this bias.

          • onyomi says:

            @Aapje

            Yes, among a number of reasons I think the premise is debatable is that, overall, men seem to be the “high risk-high reward” sex. Their life outcomes have “fatter tails.” More male billionaires, but also more male homeless. And there are a lot more homeless people in the world than billionaires. Plus, I guess the positive personal utility of being a billionaire is probably not so high, relative to being merely comfortably well off as the negative utility of being homeless, relative to being merely poor-ish, is low.

            Related, one of the things that most annoys me about diversity initiatives: when the old, white men who run the company decide they need to increase representation of women and minorities at the company, they don’t hire old, black women to replace themselves; instead, they hire more young, black women than young, white men in the entry-level positions. So, while the group who previously enjoyed an advantage (“white men”) is now relatively less advantaged compared to the group who once suffered a disadvantage (“black women”), such attempts to redress supposed historical inequities rarely involve disadvantaging the individuals who enjoyed advantage, nor advantaging the individuals who actually suffered disadvantage.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            Related, one of the things that most annoys me about diversity initiatives: when the old, white men who run the company decide they need to increase representation of women and minorities at the company, they don’t hire old, black women to replace themselves; instead, they hire more young, black women than young, white men in the entry-level positions.

            That’s because they are using “diversity” as an excuse to build a harem.

      • Susanne Mesoy says:

        How similar is this to the entry of women into higher education. Several universities simultaneously had women-only colleges and demands for all male-only colleges to be opened to women, and now have no men-only spaces but retain a few women-only colleges. (Eg Cambridge, UK, where Magdalen college was heavily pressured into being the last college to stop excluding women in the eighties, but more than one college currently does not accept any men).

        • Simon_Jester says:

          Perhaps this is because the men-only colleges were more prestigious than the women-only colleges? Thus, women had an incentive to seek the right to compete to enter the (prestigious) colleges once open only to men, but men had no incentive to do the reverse.

          In the US, for example, Radcliffe College (women only) was founded as the distaff side as Harvard College (men only). However, a Harvard degree was at all times more prestigious than a Radcliffe degree. Eventually, Harvard went co-ed. Radcliffe didn’t. Radcliffe was in effect absorbed into Harvard, and the Radcliffe students became Harvard students, because the ‘separate’ was very much ‘unequal.’

          At no point were there men protesting that they wanted to be Radcliffe graduates, at least not men who were serious and present in meaningful numbers.

          I predict that in the long run, women’s-only colleges will cease to exist, or be absorbed into co-ed institutions, or exist only as tiny niche institutions that survive by being so inconsequential that nobody cares. Men’s-only colleges fail to survive in this way because they tend to be prestigious institutions.

          • Tarpitz says:

            Seconded – for a more recent example consider St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, which finally started admitting men in 2008 and is now roughly 50/50. The demand for women-only colleges is dwindling to almost nothing.

    • Eugene Dawn says:

      In general, I think that there is a large misunderstanding among most of the proponents of multiculturalism, who don’t seem to recognize that culture and segregation are linked. You can’t have separate cultures without some segregation and people can’t mix if their cultures are too different. So an integrated society (rather than a collection of separate communities) can only exist by limiting cultural diversity. The more multicultural a society is, the more people will live past each other in their own enclaves with different behaviors and thus different outcomes.

      Is this true? Or I guess, more precisely, how true is this? Consider so-called “ethnic white” cultures–the Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, etc. who certainly tend to live in neighbourhoods with members of their own culture, and who are segregated to some extent–but who still attend public schools with one another, share public accommodations, and go to the same colleges, etc.

      I can’t speak to anyone else, but I think a reasonable model of integration is something like what Jews have achieved: Jews have their own private Jewish schools and universities, Jewish Studies programs that are presumably mostly of interest to Jews, Hillel Organizations on campus, and they tend to live together. With the exception of the call for black-only dorms, I think everything you say above applies just as well to Jews–and it’s certainly true that there is some tension in American Jewish life between maintaining a distinct Jewish identity and assimilating into American culture–but I would guess that even so, most people would regard American Jews as “integrated” into American culture (with exceptions like the inhabitants of Kiryas Joel) while still maintaining their own distinct culture. I don’t see why roughly the same couldn’t obtain for African Americans.

      • Urstoff says:

        Do Irish-, Italian-, Polish- Americans still live in cultural enclaves in the 21st century? Maybe somewhat among the lower classes, but this seems definitely not the case among middle- and upper-class populations where white people are just white people and ethnic heritage is nothing more than an idle curiosity.

      • EchoChaos says:

        The fact that “Old Americans”/WASPs/Scots-Irish can’t have their own private American schools and universities, American Studies programs and cetera is the exact same problem that Matt M refered to up above.

        In addition, blacks have social/behavioral problems that make them being your neighbors especially irksome, which is why despite starting in a similar place to the Chinese in the 1880s, the Chinese aren’t viewed as negatively by any but the most devoted Racists.

        • Nornagest says:

          American Studies is absolutely a thing. Berkeley’s got a department for it. It’s ambivalent at best about American culture, though.

          And I don’t think there are any American schools or universities in the modern day which accept only black students — the gray area that enables affirmative action doesn’t extend that far. Historically black schools, per Wikipedia, now range from 8% to 84% black and average around sixty. You would have had a better argument if you’d said “scholarships” — those are still common.

        • mdet says:

          How many Chinese Americans are descended from the 1880s Chinese vs immigrants who arrived in the past 50 years?

        • mtl1882 says:

          Schools can’t bar any race from attending. A historically black college is not set up to exclude whites. It was set up because whites excluded blacks! Now everyone has to admit everyone. There may be some influence due to affirmative action, legacies, etc., but there are no limits. No one has their own private school. If you want schools that are historically Irish, you have options. Boston College comes to mind.

          Catholic schools have strict rules on rejecting students because of the fear they’d discriminate against Protestants. They also take everyone. No one is being left out, as a group, here.

          Check out Senate debates from the 1880s, when the Chinese were widely considered “obviously stupid/inferior” and many other things. More effort was made to exclude them than had ever been made before with any other group. I’m not an expert on exactly how that perception changed, but I get the sense that it was the observers who changed more than the immigrants. Perception of them must not be self-evident if we went from the horrific comments made at that time to now, when some people believe them superior.

          American studies exists, and I imagine that at certain places you can study things like Irish American history (I know BC has some stuff on that). You could almost major in Abraham Lincoln studies until recently. If you feel like you are looking for WASP male history studies, the Revolutionary period might be a good place to start, or early American literature.

          While some of the modern studies admittedly sound kind of trivial at first glance, I’ve realized they are not. I read a lot of history, and it is quite interesting to view the primary sources and see all the “minority” players (mainly women, but people of all backgrounds) who are right there, playing a part, and are simply not mentioned. These studies, done rightly (I know some people make things ridiculous, but that’s true of all areas of study), are restoring huge parts of history that we cut out to talk about white males only. It is real history and not a PC invention. Historians only recently figured out that you can get good information from a naval officer’s wife’s diary. They hadn’t thought to look there – only at his.

        • j r says:

          The fact that “Old Americans”/WASPs/Scots-Irish can’t have their own private American schools and universities, American Studies programs and cetera is the exact same problem that Matt M refered to up above.

          In addition, blacks have social/behavioral problems that make them being your neighbors especially irksome…

          I am going to go ahead and say that I’ve seen nothing in this thread to make me believe that my race pride v. ethnic pride heuristic needs to be updated.

          Also, I’ll just point out that your “old Americans” excludes the people of color who were here before the first European settlers and the people of color who got here at the same time as the European settlers.

          • Matt M says:

            Also, I’ll just point out that your “old Americans” excludes the people of color who were here before the first European settlers and the people of color who got here at the same time as the European settlers.

            No it doesn’t.

            Native Americans already have their own private organizations that outsiders are not allowed to join – complete with literal genetic requirements for entry.

            The only request is for Irish or Italians or whoever to be allowed to do the things that blacks and natives and Jews are already doing.

          • j r says:

            The only request is for Irish or Italians or whoever to be allowed to do the things that blacks and natives and Jews are already doing.

            Serious question: what are you talking about? What things can blacks and Jews do that the Irish or the Italians can’t?

            As for Native Americans, you do realize that the things that they have are essentially booby prizes for a long history of confiscated land and broken treaties? Times must be real tough for some people if there are white people coveting what Native Americans have.

          • Matt M says:

            Serious question: what are you talking about? What things can blacks and Jews do that the Irish or the Italians can’t?

            Set up scholarships that are open to only people within their own groups. Designate physical spaces on college campuses that are only open to their own groups. Publicly declare pride in and allegiance to their own groups without being accused of murderous racism.

            As for Native Americans, you do realize that the things that they have are essentially booby prizes for a long history of confiscated land and broken treaties? Times must be real tough for some people if there are white people coveting what Native Americans have.

            I absolutely realize that, and I absolutely would not trade my present circumstances for those of the Native Americans, who are administered and ruled by one of the worst kinds of socialism.

            But that’s beside the point. That isn’t a necessary trade-off. Being allowed to discriminate in favor of people in your genetic tribe doesn’t have to include all the horrible shit that also accompanies current conditions in most native reservations.

            It’s also a logically inconsistent policy. If “diversity is our strength” then allowing native tribes to legally protect their homogeneous culture is, necessarily, a punishment, not a prize. If we truly wanted to better their lives and living conditions, why not force the clear and obvious benefits of diversity upon them, like we do to our white citizens?

          • j r says:

            Set up scholarships that are open to only people within their own groups. Designate physical spaces on college campuses that are only open to their own groups. Publicly declare pride in and allegiance to their own groups without being accused of murderous racism.

            https://www.top10onlinecolleges.org/scholarships-for/italian-students/

            Congratulations! At long last white people finally have parity. More seriously, I found that in 20 seconds. Is it possible that your model of the world needs some factual updating? For instance, being forced onto reservations and being given token privileges is in fact a form of punishment. This should be clear to anyone with modicum of knowledge about American history.

            Also, “murderous.” Who talks like that?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            What things can blacks and Jews do that the Irish or the Italians can’t?

            I think it’s more like “whatever the pseudo-ethnicity that is the mix of broadly European-descended people occupying America commonly called ‘White'” rather than a specific European ethnicity. I just see myself as an American, and don’t really identify with a specific ethnic heritage. My 23 and Me results have me spread all over Europe: eastern, southern, northern, western.

            Incidentally, I’m also 1% African, so I demand my .4 acres and small piece of mule. And 2% Ashkenazi Jew, so shalom to my Jewish friends on SSC! We’re practically brothers!

            (I kid, I kid…)

          • Nornagest says:

            1/100 of a mule would be, what, about an eight-pound steak? That’s not nothing.

      • Aapje says:

        @Eugene Dawn

        When those white groups had a truly significantly different culture, there was a lot of dislike between them and the groups that were in America longer and whose culture was (very close to) default American culture. Just like blacks now, many members of those groups felt discriminated against and felt a lack of opportunity.

        I would argue that those groups eventually mostly integrated in the ways that matter. The Irish-Americans still celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and the Italian-Americans still…make mafia movies, but this is not a meaningful difference. The issue is friction and not all cultural differences generate (substantial) friction.

        As for American Jews, my perception is that they accept that they either integrate or depend on their own pillar. You have many American Jews like John Stewart, who gave up nearly everything of their background. He even gave up his name. On the other hand, you have the orthodox who strongly reject integration, but also don’t demand the benefits of integration.

        The Chinese typically strongly focus on building up a pillar, based on an extreme work ethic. They don’t seem to care that they have to work twice as hard for half the reward in the short term. They do it. When the Chinese came to my country, they sold peanuts in the streets. When one of them opened a Chinese restaurant and make it work after adapting to Dutch tastes, very many copied that. They didn’t demand CEO jobs or banking jobs or whatever. They min-max the shit out of whatever works for their community. Their culture is very sensitive to shame, so if there is friction between them and others, they tend to give way (and just exit the situation if they can, retreating into their community). Supposedly, there is an issue with the Dutch-Chinese mafia extorting Dutch-Chinese businesses. The mafia don’t go after Dutch businesses, so few Dutch people even know, let alone feel the pain. It’s really easy to be tolerant of people who behave like that.

        Anyway, my strong perception is that there a sort of uncanny valley of culture/integration, where groups can consider themselves sufficiently integrated and demand equal outcomes, but the cultural elements that they believe should not prohibit them from being accepted are nevertheless not accepted by the mainstream.

        An example is the Turkish-German soccer player Mesut Özil, who got into hot water for posing with Erdogan. Very many Turkish-Europeans seem to rather strongly support Erdogan and feel that Erdogan is their leader, rather than (just) the leader of the country they live in. Erdogan has in the past told Turkish-Europeans not to assimilate and said that they are part of Turkey. Turkey also controls European Mosques (by way of the Directorate of Religious Affairs aka Diyanet). Of course, Erdogan is rather illiberal as well.

        This level of meddling is seen as a threat by many native Europeans and is not accepted by them, while Özil believed that his soccer-playing prowess should be enough for him to be fully accepted. So this is a conflict over how much migrants and their offspring should adapt to mainstream culture.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          When those white groups had a truly significantly different culture, there was a lot of dislike between them and the groups that were in America longer and whose culture was (very close to) default American culture. Just like blacks now, many members of those groups felt discriminated against and felt a lack of opportunity.

          I would argue that those groups eventually mostly integrated in the ways that matter. The Irish-Americans still celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and the Italian-Americans still…make mafia movies, but this is not a meaningful difference. The issue is friction and not all cultural differences generate (substantial) friction.

          Right, but the question is what cultural differences generate friction, and why? Why can’t black communities split on integration vs. segregation aim for a model like Italians, where you keep plenty of the important stuff about your culture and have it contribute to overall cultural diversity, but still integrate in many important ways?

          Also, I think you’re understating the extent to which the assimilation happened the other way: that Irish and Italian customs became regarded as “normal American”, rather than Irish and Italians adapting the customs of “normal Americans”.

          This is most obvious in the matter of religion: Lyman Beecher worried that Catholic immigration was incompatible with republicanism because Catholics would always support the Pope and Metternich, and such beliefs even briefly led to the creation of an anti-Catholic political party. There was an attempt to add an anti-Catholic school amendment to the Constitution. When Al Smith ran for president in 1928, he was opposed on the basis that he would take secret orders from the Pope.

          Now of course, Catholicism is completely unremarkable as a religious belief, and no one worries about the “influence of the Pope” on American politics just because Catholics tend to be pro-life and anti-death penalty.

          As for American Jews, my perception is that they accept that they either integrate or depend on their own pillar.

          This sets up a dichotomy that is way too strong–there are certainly Jews who are completely integrated into America, and there are the Kiryas Joel Jews who have absolutely not, but most Jews are very much in between. Combining Pew data and Wiki I calculate that 14% or so of American Jewish children attend Jewish day schools, for example, and Jews tend to live in the same places as one another.
          Most American Jews still keep at least some religious observances: 70% observed Passover Seder; over half fasted on Yom Kippur; and nearly a quarter light Shabbat candles and keep kosher in the home.
          This is a far cry from “giving up nearly everything of their background”.

          And, again, the assimilation has been very much both ways.

          So I still think the Irish/Jewish/Italian model is something that splits the difference between assimilation and segregation.

          It’s a side note to the main discussion, but your Ozil example has parallels among other groups: there is an American politician who used to support the IRA quite vocally, calling the British government a “murder machine”, and saying “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the IRA for it”.
          And Jews castigating others for not supporting Israel is a very much a real thing.

          • Matt M says:

            Why can’t black communities split on integration vs. segregation aim for a model like Italians, where you keep plenty of the important stuff about your culture and have it contribute to overall cultural diversity, but still integrate in many important ways?

            They can, but they don’t want to. Their goals are much more ambitious.

            The Italians never demanded the Irish cease having their own cultural traditions. They never demanded entry into Irish-only spaces. And the Irish did the same as it regards the Italians.

            American blacks are aiming much higher than this. They want their own spaces and their own culture and traditions preserved. And they also want the destruction, or forcible integration (on exclusively their own terms) of white culture and traditions.

          • Aapje says:

            Part of the issue is the assumption of good faith vs bad faith. Historically, it’s quite understandable why protestants would fear a coordinated effort by Catholics to suppress other religions. So it took getting experience with American Catholics to realize that they weren’t going to do that.

            However, it can also go the other way, with people assuming compatibility between groups and then getting burned. Frankly, I think that a lot of progressive claims of cultural compatibility are exaggerated and cause people to feel betrayed when they have bad experiences.

            Ultimately, what generates lots of friction and to what extent people are willing to change depends on the specific cultures. However, there are some obvious sources of friction, like criminal behavior.

            Anger at these sources of friction can then result in basic outgroup rejection behavior, where everything that is associated with the outgroup is rejected and vilified.

            Anyway, it is true that my argument is essentially unfalsifiable, because I can just declare that any differences that don’t result in incriminations are insignificant cultural differences, while those that make people upset are (or are outgroup vilification).

            My personal opinion is that the established culture mostly gets to decide to what extent the newcomers have to adapt and to what extent they themselves are obligated to adapt. A complicating factor is that this is a multi-generation process, so people like Özil understandably feel that as they were born and raised inside the country, others have to accept them how they are. However, as they are raised in a culture that hasn’t sufficiently adapted itself yet, that cannot work.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            American blacks are aiming much higher than this. They want their own spaces and their own culture and traditions preserved. And they also want the destruction, or forcible integration (on exclusively their own terms) of white culture and traditions.

            Ummm…cite please?

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            @Aapje

            There are two issues here. First, your original link and your comments on it suggested black Americans, by preferring historically black colleges and asking for African American studies departments, were going down a path of segregation, not integration. I think we have established that this is not necessarily the case: many ethnicities that are widely agreed to have integrated into American life still have their own schools and colleges, neighbourhoods, studies programs, etc.
            So, it is presumably at least not impossible for black Americans to pursue this model as well, in which case asking for those amenities isn’t necessarily backing away from integration.

            Second is the question of why these other groups seem to have struck the right balance between integration and cultural separation in a way that has mostly eluded black Americans, which is what I take you to be addressing in the most recent comment.

            Whatever the answer though, it can’t just be because black Americans are striving for some sort of cultural diversity–there must be something about the brand of diversity that they bring that functions differently from Polish-, Irish-, Jewish-, or Italian-Americans all of whom have managed to balance diversity and integration.

          • AG says:

            They want reparations on top of integration.
            They also want other minority groups to follow their model, instead of the existing model. Anyone who doesn’t clearly can only do so because they have privilege.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            They want reparations on top of integration.
            They also want other minority groups to follow their model, instead of the existing model. Anyone who doesn’t clearly can only do so because they have privilege.

            The Japanese were granted reparations for internment, so there are other minority groups who have asked for reparations; since slavery was worse and more pervasive than Japanese internment, I don’t think this is obviously unreasonable. Note also that Germany has paid reparations to Jews for the Holocaust and Jews are not widely regarded to be pursuing a separate model of integration there.

            What are the differences between the black model and the existing model? The only one you’ve mentioned is a desire for reparations: is that it?

          • Aapje says:

            @Eugene Dawn

            I disagree that Jews (and Amish) who have their own schools are integrated (when it comes to schooling). They are partially segregated in a way that is acceptable to themselves and most of the rest of society.

            Of course, Jews do immensely well materially and don’t commit more crime than the average, so aside from envy, there is generally not too much reason to be upset at them. This is similar to how the Chinese are generally perceived (worldwide).

            The Amish are probably a better example. They have their own segregated culture which they and society accept, even though it results in materially (relatively) poor outcomes, despite a strong work ethic.

            However, I’ve never seen a Social Justice advocate call the Amish discriminated against or oppressed. In general, the consensus seems to be that their life outcomes are a result of a choice for a certain culture.

            Similarly, the consensus in society seems to be that men have a criminal culture and/or biology, so the bad things that happen to them as a result, is something that is not done to them, but things they do.

            From my perspective, the progressive view on black people is very inconsistent with how other groups are treated. This was more defensible in the past, when one could point to very strong discrimination, limiting the ability of black people to make choices. Yet as this is receding in the past and black people are not taking advantage as much as they can and one would hope for, the narrative that a lack of achievement and/or significant upward mobility is entirely or even mostly due to a lack of opportunity becomes rather absurd.

            Whatever the answer though, it can’t just be because black Americans are striving for some sort of cultural diversity–there must be something about the brand of diversity that they bring that functions differently from Polish-, Irish-, Jewish-, or Italian-Americans all of whom have managed to balance diversity and integration.

            It’s common for (sub)cultures to define themselves in part by being different from other cultures. So then people gain status in the culture by acting more like the self-defined stereotype of their own culture and less like the stereotype of the other culture(s). Some of these traits are purely decorative, while others have more serious consequences.

            It seems to me that some cultures pick traits to define themselves by that work out very positively, while others pick traits that work out poorly. Jews tend to value education very highly, which obviously works out very well in modern society. Asians tend to really value a strong work ethic and not being a nuisance to others, which are also very successful traits. Both groups do better than white Americans.

            It seems to me that black Americans tend to value traits that result in poor outcomes. In a way this makes a lot of sense when looking at history, where black Americans would be punished for being uppity or such & where working hard would give benefits to the slave owner, not to the slave. Black Americans may have chosen to engage in policing their own, to keep themselves safe in an environment where having ambitions and believing that you have agency will just get one punished and where one slave working harder, would result in the demands on all slaves increasing, where the vigilantism works better than to trust authority to punish crime, etc.

            However, this then resulted in a culture that, when the oppression was reduced/lifted, keeps acting like it hasn’t.

            So then to achieve success, these parts of black culture need to change. Without that, I don’t see how reparations will make a significant change.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I disagree that Jews (and Amish) who have their own schools are integrated (when it comes to schooling). They are partially segregated in a way that is acceptable to themselves and most of the rest of society.

            Ok, but this was originally a response to

            As for American Jews, my perception is that they accept that they either integrate or depend on their own pillar. You have many American Jews like John Stewart, who gave up nearly everything of their background. He even gave up his name. On the other hand, you have the orthodox who strongly reject integration, but also don’t demand the benefits of integration.

            I think the two quotes above are in tension: to what extent does the existence of Jewish schools (and Jewish camps, etc) mean that Jews have failed to integrate and “depend on their pillar”?
            My point with the example was to show that a large number of Jews “split the difference”–they segregate to some extent, but still do things like attend universities with everyone else, join the Army, and otherwise participate in American culture and mix with other Americans. I still contend that this is in fact the case.

            Of course, Jews do immensely well materially and don’t commit more crime than the average, so aside from envy, there is generally not too much reason to be upset at them. This is similar to how the Chinese are generally perceived (worldwide).

            In fact, people have managed to find reasons to be upset at Jews despite this, sometimes quite violently so. This is sometimes even justified in terms of crime. The same is very much true for the Chinese.

            The Amish are probably a better example. They have their own segregated culture which they and society accept, even though it results in materially (relatively) poor outcomes, despite a strong work ethic.
            However, I’ve never seen a Social Justice advocate call the Amish discriminated against or oppressed. In general, the consensus seems to be that their life outcomes are a result of a choice for a certain culture.

            Right…because they very explicitly are a choice. There has never been an “Amish Jim Crow” that forced Amish people to live Amish lifestyles.

            From my perspective, the progressive view on black people is very inconsistent with how other groups are treated. This was more defensible in the past, when one could point to very strong discrimination, limiting the ability of black people to make choices. Yet as this is receding in the past and black people are not taking advantage as much as they can and one would hope for, the narrative that a lack of achievement and/or significant upward mobility is entirely or even mostly due to a lack of opportunity becomes rather absurd.

            I suspect it will be too much to argue directly for or against the proposition that Jim Crow and the black experience in America more generally are plausible causes of the social and economic situation of African Americans, but can we at least agree that if you concede that the legacy of that discrimination hasn’t gone away, that completely explains the distinction in how progressives talk about African Americans vs. the Amish?
            That believing that the distinction is that the poverty of the Amish lifestyle is self-chosen for religious reasons dating back 400 years, whereas black poverty until at least 50 years ago was state policy enforced by violence is at least a consistent point of view?

            It seems to me that some cultures pick traits to define themselves by that work out very positively, while others pick traits that work out poorly. Jews tend to value education very highly, which obviously works out very well in modern society. Asians tend to really value a strong work ethic and not being a nuisance to others, which are also very successful traits. Both groups do better than white Americans.

            What about the Irish? Poles? Italians? Are they famous for their good stereotypes?

            Anyway, as I allude to above, this is very much cherry-picking. Jews and Chinese are not uniformly highly educated and polite, nor have they always been seen to be so (if they even are now)–both groups have, in the recent past, been regarded as carriers of disease, crime, social dysfunction, and alien cultural values.
            My guess is that, at least for Jews, it is the aftermath of the Holocaust more than anything else that has changed how Americans regard Jews, and Wikipedia seems to agree, though ideally I’d like more information. It’s perhaps interesting that I can find people arguing for WWII as a turning point in acceptance of the Italian community in America as well, although again it’d be useful to find more detail.

            It seems to me that black Americans tend to value traits that result in poor outcomes. In a way this makes a lot of sense when looking at history, where black Americans would be punished for being uppity or such & where working hard would give benefits to the slave owner, not to the slave. Black Americans may have chosen to engage in policing their own, to keep themselves safe in an environment where having ambitions and believing that you have agency will just get one punished and where one slave working harder, would result in the demands on all slaves increasing, where the vigilantism works better than to trust authority to punish crime, etc.

            However, this then resulted in a culture that, when the oppression was reduced/lifted, keeps acting like it hasn’t.

            So then to achieve success, these parts of black culture need to change. Without that, I don’t see how reparations will make a significant change.

            So…you think that the main difference between African Americans and other hyphenated Americans isn’t actually that other Americans have given themselves over to complete integration, but rather integration for blacks is less successful because of elements of their culture resulting from the history of oppression they suffered?

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I’m going to add another response because I think to some extent we’ve gone off-track here, and the details of Jewish or Chinese assimilation are red herrings.

            To my mind, the discussion so far has been over to what extent demand for African American Studies and HBCUs shows that black Americans are pursuing a different model of integration to other, more successful American minorities.

            As far as I can see, everyone seems to agree now that it’s not the demand for those semi-segregated institutions per se that makes the black pursuit of integration different, since other minorities have those sorts of institutions as well.

            Now, the claim as best I can tell is the difference is either in some more extreme demands like reparations, or more generally, in a different attitude towards mainstream American society–possibly resulting from a difference in culture.

            I think that, since Japanese-Americans have received reparations, and no one seems too worked up about, I suspect that even reparations can be subsumed under the second possibility: reparations is an extreme demand for blacks but not Japanese because the Japanese held a different attitude towards integration–the idea is that blacks are demanding reparations as a “fast-track” to parity, whereas Japanese-Americans integrated the right way, and so “earned” reparations.

            Is this an accurate-ish summary of the argument so far, and a fair statement of where we now stand? Because I’m worried that everyone is talking very much past each other at this point, and I’ve been responding as if the discussion is still where it started–whether or not demands for -studies programs and separate colleges shows a distinction between the African American strategy and other -American strategies.

          • ana53294 says:

            I think that, since Japanese-Americans have received reparations, and no one seems too worked up about, I suspect that even reparations can be subsumed under the second possibility: reparations is an extreme demand for blacks but not Japanese because the Japanese held a different attitude towards integration–the idea is that blacks are demanding reparations as a “fast-track” to parity, whereas Japanese-Americans integrated the right way, and so “earned” reparations.

            I would assume that reparations to Japanese-Americans are more acceptable because they are a fait accompli, and because they are much, much cheaper than reparations to African-Americans would be. I couldn’t find the exact number of Japanese Americans, but Asian-Americans are less than 6 %, and a lot of Asians are Chinese and Indians.

            African-Americans are 12 % of the populations. Also, there weren’t as many interned Japanese Americans as there are descendants of citizens who were slaves and people who suffered Jim Crow laws. There is better documentation of who was interned, too. Proving you are a descendant of a slave would be hard, because nobody kept records of that for very good reasons. How would you distinguish more recent African-American inmigrants from slaves’ descendants?

          • Jaskologist says:

            Simpler explanations:
            * There are far fewer Japanese-Americans-who-were-interned than there are African-Americans. The much lower cost matters.
            * Reparations in the Japanese case did not go to Japanese-Americans, it went to the people who were actually interned, or very close descendants. The much more direct connection between the wrong-doing and the persons impacted matters.

          • Matt M says:

            reparations is an extreme demand for blacks but not Japanese because the Japanese held a different attitude towards integration–the idea is that blacks are demanding reparations as a “fast-track” to parity, whereas Japanese-Americans integrated the right way, and so “earned” reparations.

            I would say the two cases are extremely different in terms of simple logistics.

            I’m not familiar with the details of Japanese reparations, but I’m assuming that they were paid within the lifetimes of the victims, and that documentation of precisely who was in interned, for how long, etc. were easily available.

            With black reparations, I’m just not sure how it would work logistically. We’re multiple generations removed from the crime. Documentation of who was enslaved and when they were freed, etc. is sparse and limited. Proving that any particular black person is descended from a particular slave is likely difficult.

            I wouldn’t necessarily be against black reparations in principle, but the time to do that was in the immediate aftermath of slavery, not 150 years later. The way to do it was to compensate recently freed slaves immediately, not wait and pay some large benefit to their great-great-grandchildren. Part of me also feels like the whole “40 acres and a mule” thing was intended to be just that. That the government at the time did make some efforts to “compensate” freedmen.

            Edit: What Jask said also. Japanese reparations involve a settlement between the specific people who perpetrated a wrong (the federal government) and the specific people who were victimized by the wrong (the interred), whereas black reparations demand a settlement between all current US taxpayers (none of whom practiced slavery) and all current blacks residing in America (many of whom are not descended from slaves)

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            @ana53294 and Jaskologist
            The post I’m referring to says “They want reparations on top of integration”, in response to a question asking what is different between the model of integration pursued by African Americans vs other minorities.

            From context, it sounds to me like an objection to reparations for the black community per se, not just based on practicality. although of course AG can clarify.

            EDIT to point out that my remarks can be directed at Matt M as well.

          • Aapje says:

            @Eugene Dawn

            My country has a history of groups developing their own pillar, learning to stand on their own feet, etc. The Dutch government tried to encourage the Maroccan and Turkish immigrants to do the same, by subsidizing migrant organizations, sports, culture and such, but it didn’t work, because they didn’t have the cultural background that made it work. I remember a letter in my newspaper by a frustrated volunteer who put in his own money for a while to organize a sports event and who had kids with expensive clothes and iPhones attend who seemed to enjoy it, but as soon as he asked a small fee, they bailed. So they wouldn’t take steps towards adopting it for their own and taking responsibility for taking on a little burden to keep the nice things goings. Similarly, as soon as the Dutch leaders try to hand over the reigns, it tends to go wrong. This is especially true for Maroccans, as most are Berber mountain people, who are unused to working together in larger groups. They were also selected for being poorly educated, resulting in a lack of good leaders.

            Jewish Americans very much do have the ability to create a solid pillar. If anything, if they partly have their own pillar, they gain more opportunity than they miss out on, because so many Jews are well-educated and have good jobs. AFAIK, the ability for Jews to prosper in the face of even fairly severe oppression has vexed many an antisemite government/populace.

            The Chinese and Amish are substantially less capable to make their pillar work in a way that we typically consider successful and they are in some ways quite marginalized, but they accept it and they don’t have much friction with others. Italian Americans did have traits that made it hard for them to integrate and it took 150 years after the first Italians came and 60 years after the largest migration surge for them to achieve a national average income, with a lot of pain.

            So my point is that the culture and/or background of the group determines in large part how well certain strategies work. Segregation doesn’t seem to work well for black Americans, or do you think that they are making decent progress? I mean, median hispanic household income seems to already be above black household incomes and a ton of hispanics came to America fairly recently with generally poor education and wealth.

            I suspect it will be too much to argue directly for or against the proposition that Jim Crow and the black experience in America more generally are plausible causes of the social and economic situation of African Americans, but can we at least agree that if you concede that the legacy of that discrimination hasn’t gone away, that completely explains the distinction in how progressives talk about African Americans vs. the Amish?

            I agree that feelings of guilt are a major factor in why this distinction is made. I just think that these feelings cause people to act irrationally. Ultimately, the cause is irrelevant if the goal is not assign blame (which seems rather unhelpful, since the most severe perpetrators are mostly dead and the beneficiaries are unclear), but to figure out the best path to prosperity in the future. We can’t undo the past and I don’t think it is healthy to be obsessed with trying to do so. One result of wanting to do this is that some have a strong need to believe that discrimination is still happening that actually isn’t, so the modern white man has full agency to undo the consequences of the wrongs in the past. A sort of white men’s burden.

            This is just not how life works. The Germans can’t undo the consequences of the Holocaust either.

            Ultimately, it’s also a bit of a weird situation that is reminiscent of a trolley problem, where Jack feels obligated to compensate the family of Bob who was pushed in front of the train by Jack’s parents, but not to Frank who was already bound to the railroad tracks. However, both Frank’s and Bob’s family suffered the exact same hardship in their lives, by losing someone. I understand that a conservative person would make this distinction, but I can’t see how this is consistent with progressivism, where I understand the main goal to be equal opportunity, regardless of whether a lack of opportunity resulted from harm from a person or harm from nature.

            PS. Of course there is diversity in any group, but that is always going to be the case. It’s about the general trends.

            PS2. I just don’t think that reparations that give a one-time boost to wealth result in a significant increase in education levels, the quality of the jobs that people can obtain or other factors that result in long term boost, rather than temporarily increased consumption. Of course, if you just care about making people’s lives better off temporarily, then you can favor it, but I see a long term boost as the important issue (teach a man to fish…).

            PS. Japanese Americans who were interned were compensated with $20k in 1988, which is about $40k in today’s money. The compensation was only to a surviving victim.

          • John Schilling says:

            The Japanese were granted reparations for internment, so there are other minority groups who have asked for reparations; since slavery was worse and more pervasive than Japanese internment, I don’t think this is obviously unreasonable.

            The only Japanese-Americans who ever recieved reparations, were the ones who had actually, personally been interned. And then not until nearly half a century had passed and most of them were conveniently dead so that paying reparations was a cheap token gesture.

            I am fairly certain that if someone were to propose reparations for Americans who had been personally enslaved, this would pass without controversy. And I wonder if it would have been possible in, say 1908. But, as you say, slavery is worse than internment. Probably we could swing reparations to the actual children of slaves.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            And I wonder if it would have been possible in, say 1908.

            Really doubt it. Really, really. When those same former slaves are still officially “others” and unofficially barely second class citizens…

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            So my point is that the culture and/or background of the group determines in large part how well certain strategies work. Segregation doesn’t seem to work well for black Americans, or do you think that they are making decent progress? I mean, median hispanic household income seems to already be above black household incomes and a ton of hispanics came to America fairly recently with generally poor education and wealth.

            Ok. So, to be clear, the argument is that asking for -studies programs and tailored universities works for Jews and Italians, but not for blacks, because blacks have a different culture that makes this strategy less successful?

            I guess my next question is: why are you sure that an integrationist strategy would be more successful for blacks?

            Your comment has a lot of comparisons to other minority groups that have integrated more successfully. I think to a large extent you are projecting the present onto the past.

            In particular, while it’s obvious to you now that all those ethnic white cultures were perfectly compatible with mainstream American culture, that’s not how people felt at the time: as I mentioned, the Catholicism of some immigrants was seen as incompatible with the very idea of Republicanism. Meanwhile, Italians were seen as mafiosi and banditti, while Jews were Bolsheviks, criminals, and anarchists.
            The hyphenated status of these groups was very much suspicious.

            So a simple culture-based explanation needs to explain why Italians and Jews were able to overcome these cultural shortcomings–it’s all well and good to note that Jews do fine now because they stay out of trouble and act like good Americans except for their religious schools and funny holidays, but it requires an explanation as to how this state of affairs came to be.

            I think this discussion would be a lot clearer if you explained exactly which minority groups you consider to have adopted successful assimilation strategies, and what those strategies are.

            For example, at the beginning you argued that black attempts to self-segregate would hurt their attempt to integrate; but now you say that Jews can be successful relying on their own community, and perhaps even have greater opportunities doing so. Can blacks not do that? Why or why not?

            If the big difference is one of culture, how do you reconcile this with the fact that more successful immigrant communities also did not have “good” cultural habits when they arrived–in particular, how did they develop those cultural habits?

            As to the rest:
            I am not arguing for reparations! I am responding to a comment that the difference between black attempts at assimilation and other minorities’ attempts is that blacks ask for reparation. Since in fact other minorities have asked for reparations (and even received them!), this difference is imaginary. Perhaps the difference is that blacks made an unreasonable demand for reparations, whereas other minorities have made reasonable demands, but that’s not what the comment I am responding to said.

            You are also misunderstanding my comparison with the Amish–I am responding to your claim that you have “never seen a Social Justice advocate call the Amish discriminated against or oppressed”, even though they have “(relatively) poor outcomes”.
            I am pointing it that you are misunderstanding the SJ claim–it’s not that “poor outcomes can only be explained by oppression”.
            Rather, the reason SJs believe African Americans are discriminated against and oppressed is because of stuff like slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining.
            You may dispute whether it is correct to believe that African Americans today are oppressed by these and their legacy, but granting this premise it explains the difference between how SJs talk about Amish- vs. African-Americans.

          • johansenindustries says:

            THe Italins and Mafia points can have the simple explanation of the federal government cracking down on Mafiosos.

            When the consensus was that African Americn culture was sufficiently wrong as to be worth denying them civil rights over then they acted in a more stereotypiclly ‘white’ way too, I beleive.

          • Aapje says:

            @Eugene Dawn

            So, to be clear, the argument is that asking for -studies programs and tailored universities works for Jews and Italians, but not for blacks, because blacks have a different culture that makes this strategy less successful?

            I’m not arguing that it doesn’t work at all, I’m arguing that it doesn’t work very well where black culture is a major reason for that. However, I think that the current mainstream culture encourages ressentiment by blacks (resulting in demands that others change to resolve friction and an unwillingness to compromise and change themselves). Ironically, the desire to treat blacks better due to guilt, then actually keeps the black man down.

            why are you sure that an integrationist strategy would be more successful for blacks?

            Because if your culture has traits that make you less successful, adopting the traits that make you more successful results in the obvious. Of course, one doesn’t have to integrate to do so. It’s also possible to adopt the traits while remaining separate (see the Meiji Restoration, for example). However, this is more difficult, because integration forces you to adapt.

            In particular, while it’s obvious to you now that all those ethnic white cultures were perfectly compatible with mainstream American culture

            That’s not what I claimed. I pointed out that the Italians had a really tough time. That is not ‘perfectly compatible.’ Ultimately, it’s also not all in the hands of the ethnic group, what groups can get away with depends on mainstream culture as well. For example, today’s mainstream culture accepts non-white skin color, different religions and such a lot more than in the past, but is probably less accepting of criminality.

            I think this discussion would be a lot clearer if you explained exactly which minority groups you consider to have adopted successful assimilation strategies, and what those strategies are.

            For modern mainstream culture: Chinese, Jews, Indians.

            Some strategies:
            – speak/learn the language
            – study hard
            – work hard
            – interact with/date/etc the successful groups
            – don’t complain too easily if a cultural mismatch results in difficulty getting good jobs or such, but adapt to others
            – Date boring partners that help raise children and help create two-income households, rather than exciting partners that don’t
            – trust the police
            – Don’t have too many children and invest in the few you have
            – Be willing to rebel against your parents/family if they hold you back
            – Don’t strongly enforce (unsuccessful) cultural elements that strongly mismatch with mainstream society

            Can blacks not [be successful by relying on their own community]?

            Theoretically they can, sure. That’s what they mostly seem to be trying to do. As far as I can tell, no one thinks that it is going well (including most black Americans).

            It is quite plausible that the current path results in black Americans eventually getting on par with white America. My guess would be at least another 100 years at this pace. Is that acceptable to you? To black Americans?

            If the big difference is one of culture, how do you reconcile this with the fact that more successful immigrant communities also did not have “good” cultural habits when they arrived–in particular, how did they develop those cultural habits?

            Just about every immigrant community does better than Black Americans, even those with bad habits (and those with various skin colors). But the general answer is step by step and with inter-group conflict:

            “It was well understood that the first generation of Italians that immigrated to America did not want to forgo a part of their ancestry and assimilate into the American culture. It was the second
            and third generations that felt in order to best succeed in America they needed to become more “American.” Alba touches on this in length and examines why both sides struggled so badly in their attempt to persuade their family members who thought otherwise.”

            In part, people slowly change and in part, the old conservative people die and make place for newer generations who hopefully are more open to change. Ultimately, people have to be willing to make the changes to be successful.

          • AG says:

            Some of the responses here have better clarified my comment. Yes, I mean how the reparations demanded in the SJ context are much more abstract than the existing reparations that have been paid. When non-black minorities have acquiesced to the non-integrating diversity model, they, too, begin to demand that, e.g., Asian studies be prioritized, or speak of the damages of colonialism as like a debt to be repaid.

            As a new hypothesis, it may be about the thorough severing of heritage. Most Asians or integrated Europeans can point to a home country in which their own ethnicity retains dignity and a significant level of global dominance. Black Americans, however, do not hold a connection to Africa, and even then, they cannot view the African nations as having overcome colonialism to gain global dignity. (Hence why they love Afrofuturist fantasy of Wakanda, whereas other cultures’ scifi imagines a melting pot Earth culture.) So they seek to establish the equivalent of the Golden Age Kingdom that other cultures have, here at home.
            This theory doesn’t jive well with Central and South America, admittedly, but you could argue that those people still have that connection to Europe, and have historical ethnic agency/dominance in their own countries, like white Americans do.

            There are jokes about “Elite Asians” vs. “Jungle Asians,” and it somewhat bears out, that Asian Americans from a cultural heritage without a historical dominance (Southeast Asians, Vietnamese) have not been so consistently model minorities as the ones who were able to engage in cultural imperialism (China, Japan, Korea).

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            @Aapje

            I’m not arguing that it doesn’t work at all, I’m arguing that it doesn’t work very well where black culture is a major reason for that. However, I think that the current mainstream culture encourages ressentiment by blacks (resulting in demands that others change to resolve friction and an unwillingness to compromise and change themselves). Ironically, the desire to treat blacks better due to guilt, then actually keeps the black man down.

            What sorts of mainstream attitudes do you think are at fault? I’m assuming you’re referring to things like support for affirmative action (which only has 22% support among whites—and support for “merit-based” admissions only is at 50% in the black community) or indulging a belief that blacks are unable to get good jobs (70% of white Americans disagreed in 2016—a 23-year low), educations (75% of whites disagree, an all-time low as far back as Gallup has polling), housing (75% o f white Americans disagree—a 25-year low). But, as my parenthetical statistics illustrate, this view is not particularly mainstream among white Americans—79% of Americans think are not treated less fairly at work, and 72% of all Americans believe the same. Only 51% of Americans (and 55% of whites) think that blacks are treated less fairly by the police, and 61% of Americans (56% of whites) think that “racism is widespread”, but those are the only issues where the “non-indulgent” attitude drops below 70%; majorities, and in most case supermajorities of Americans seem to think that blacks are treated more or less equally, and this belief was even stronger in the recent past.
            So, why do you think this attitude is mainstream? To me, it looks like the mainstream position is “blacks are treated mostly fairly, except by the police”. I would also be curious to know for how long you think this cluster of attitudes has been mainstream—as I say, looking back, the mainstream view by public polling over the last few decades would have been even more in favour of the position that “blacks are treated mostly fairly”, so how long has this attitude warped the ability of blacks to integrate?
            I’d also be curious if you characterize the desire for Jewish-studies programs for example as “encouraging ressentiment” among Jews—if not, what’s different about demands for African American studies programs and black spaces at universities from the Jewish demand for Hillel Houses?

            For modern mainstream culture: Chinese, Jews, Indians.

            Even though the Chinese “are substantially less capable to make their pillar work in a way that we typically consider successful and they are in some ways quite marginalized”?

            Some strategies:
            – speak/learn the language
            – study hard
            – work hard
            – interact with/date/etc the successful groups
            – don’t complain too easily if a cultural mismatch results in difficulty getting good jobs or such, but adapt to others
            – Date boring partners that help raise children and help create two-income households, rather than exciting partners that don’t
            – trust the police
            – Don’t have too many children and invest in the few you have
            – Be willing to rebel against your parents/family if they hold you back
            – Don’t strongly enforce (unsuccessful) cultural elements that strongly mismatch with mainstream society

            I think these are all good ideas, but some of them depend on the mainstream society: “interact/date” the mainstream groups was…not an option for black Americans by force of law until 50 years ago and by public attitude until sometime around the ‘90s (and note that it was white attitudes much more so than black attitudes that were responsible for this: in 1985 71% of blacks approved of intermarriage, while only 38% of whites did). Also, it is at least possible that blacks might have good reason not to “trust the police”.
            However, I think it makes more sense to hear your response to my first points before digging too much into this; I think in the abstract, most of the above make sense, though I note they are not at all incompatible with demands for black studies and black cultural centres.

          • Aapje says:

            @Eugene Dawn

            By mainstream I don’t mean what you find in polls, but rather what is written in WaPo, The NY Times, etc & what message is sent in many cultural sources, like Hollywood movies. African Americans vote 90% Democrat and when it comes to adopting a narrative on race relations, a major influence seems to be the narrative of a substantial subset of the blue tribe.

            Note that mainstream is not the same as majority. My point is that ressentiment is fed from outside of the community, which increases it beyond what the community would generate on its own.

            I’d also be curious if you characterize the desire for Jewish-studies programs for example as “encouraging ressentiment” among Jews—if not, what’s different about demands for African American studies programs and black spaces at universities from the Jewish demand for Hillel Houses?

            I don’t think that Jewish-studies tends to create the specific type of ressentiment that African American studies tend to.

            It is true that Zionism has its roots in ressentiment against gentiles, because the very claim is that Jews cannot be accepted by gentiles and must have their own state for safety. However, the solution proposed is emigration. Of course one can always ‘fix’ the perceived problems of multicultural society by leaving and going to a more or less monocultural society*.

            The thesis that started this discussion was that paths that can work are:
            – to not accept major compromises to be more like majority culture as to gain acceptance, but then also not to expect the benefits that come from that acceptance
            – to adapt significantly to majority culture and then to seek the the benefits that come from acceptance

            What doesn’t work is to refuse to make sufficient compromise, yet then to demand acceptance.

            * Of course, Black Americans also have their Israel, in Liberia, but this is a very sad country (less than half the GDP per capita as Zimbabwe).

            Even though the Chinese “are substantially less capable to make their pillar work in a way that we typically consider successful and they are in some ways quite marginalized”?

            If you choose the path of the pillar, then this is a rejection of the values of others & their status hierarchy, which means that you can also decide to define success differently from how they define it. A very good way to prevent self-destructive feelings of ressentiment is to redefine ‘success’ as something that is compatible with the (cultural) choices that you make.

            For example, the Amish don’t seem to care that they don’t have political representation in the senate. The chinese don’t seem to be angry because very few CEOs are chinese.

            I think these are all good ideas, but some of them depend on the mainstream society

            Of course. What works doesn’t just depend on you, but also on the rest of society.

            I note they are not at all incompatible with demands for black studies and black cultural centres.

            I’m not saying that this is the case. I’m just saying that if black studies consists of a claim that since the beginning of time, white people set up a system of ‘whiteness’ that oppresses others and that this is the natural tendency of white people, requiring constant painful self-monitoring on their end for white and black people to be able to live together; then that this is not a basis for pleasant coexistence.

            If it’s: look at these people in history, black people can also achieve things if they study and work real hard, then that can be helpful.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            By mainstream I don’t mean what you find in polls, but rather what is written in WaPo, The NY Times

            Why do you think the black community bases its standards on what the Washington Post says? And can you provide some evidence that what you are referring to is actually found in those sources? Here are the first three WaPo articles I found searching for “Washington post black success”. I do not think they fit your characterization of the message that black America is receiving.

            African Americans vote 90% Democrat and when it comes to adopting a narrative on race relations, a major influence seems to be the narrative of a substantial subset of the blue tribe.

            Democrats like Barack Obama?

            I don’t think that Jewish-studies tends to create the specific type of ressentiment that African American studies tend to.

            Jews have a whole field called Holocaust studies; the idea among Jews that anti-Semitism is an implacable ancient hatred that is literally universal is not at all uncommon, nor is a sense that all of Jewish history is a series of
            near-death experiences at the hands of gentiles.
            There’s an interesting movie from 2009 called Defamation about the ADL in which you see Jewish community leaders indulging in what I think is basically paranoia about the odds of their gentile neighbours turning on them in another Holocaust.
            If I only had access to the way that ADL members talk, and the more extreme things my relatives say about Jews and anti-Semitism, I would think that Jews are ruled by an insane paranoia that gentile society is out to get us at every turn. And truly, there are people like this, and you can genuinely find this message pushed by Jewish advocacy groups. But I think most Jews, though they will indulge this attitude jokingly, and maybe won’t dismiss it completely, understand that this is dramatically overhyped. Unless you have some evidence to the contrary, I’m assuming that you should take talk about white supremacy the same way: an overheated response to genuine persecution that some ideologues genuinely believe and some advocates will absolutely push, but that most people understand is hyperbolic.

            You have so far given no evidence whatsoever that blacks in America even hold the views you attribute, much less that they get these views from Hollywood, much less that these views shape the black sociological experience: I think the timing is wrong, since blacks have struggled to assimilate for literally centuries, whereas social justice is two decades-ish old; I think it sounds completely implausible (imagine suggesting that those paranoid Jews I mentioned above got their paranoia from watching too many Holocaust movies); and I think you yourself provided a better explanation earlier when you said that black America picked up many cultural habits from an earlier era of oppression and explanation.

          • Aapje says:

            @Eugene Dawn

            It seems rather obvious to me that BLM is derived from Social Justice. Similarly, you very often see black women demand that feminism caters to their needs more. Those women are clearly not rejecting the thrust of the ideology, but instead want an adapted version.

            It is true that I’m speculating about the role that WaPo, the NY Times, etc play in shaping the beliefs of the ‘influencers.’

            Democrats like Barack Obama?

            Your link is broken, so I don’t know what your point is exactly, although I’m guessing that you intended to point me to Bill Cosby-like statements by Obama. If so, it seems relevant to note that many Democrats seemed rather disenchanted with his race policies and that the Democrats radicalized on this topic during his term.

            Of course, Obama is not of slave descent, he was raised by white and Indonesian parents for most of his life and did not grow up in America, so culturally he can’t really be called African-American.

            If I only had access to the way that ADL members talk, and the more extreme things my relatives say about Jews and anti-Semitism, I would think that Jews are ruled by an insane paranoia that gentile society is out to get us at every turn.

            Yet the Jews who feel this way don’t seem to reject politics, the police, etc. As I said, I think that Israel works as a safety valve, where extremist Jews who reject American society leave instead of agitate.

            You have so far given no evidence whatsoever that blacks in America even hold the views you attribute, much less that they get these views from Hollywood, much less that these views shape the black sociological experience: I think the timing is wrong, since blacks have struggled to assimilate for literally centuries, whereas social justice is two decades-ish old; I think it sounds completely implausible (imagine suggesting that those paranoid Jews I mentioned above got their paranoia from watching too many Holocaust movies); and I think you yourself provided a better explanation earlier when you said that black America picked up many cultural habits from an earlier era of oppression and explanation.

            My claim is not that problematic assimilation was caused by Social Justice, but rather, that SJ provides an attractive narrative that allows black Americans to cling to their culture, which is more comfortable than assimilating, and yet believe in the possibility of positive change merely by demanding things (and then having others do things for them).

            White American attitudes towards black Americans are better than ever, with many racism measurements having reached lizardman status. The main resistance is to have black people be given preferential treatment, which tends to be considered racist by progressives, although I don’t think it is. Progressives tend to agree that the preferential treatment is in itself undesirable, but merely intended to be used temporarily to achieve a breakthrough. I don’t think that it works that way, because preferential treatment destroys the development of the ingroup feelings that one needs to take the final step. At a certain point, the last step can only be taken by having people leave their ingroup comfort zone. White Americans have little incentive to leave their ingroup comfort zone, because doing so risks their future prospects and that of their children. So black Americans are going to mostly have to do it.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I think I’ve misunderstood your argument: does this characterize your position:
            “Until recently (last two or three decades or so), the failure of black Americans to achieve parity with white Americans was in fact driven largely by white racism, but finally there is a window for black Americans to rise to success, only they risk wasting their opportunity if they focus on past grievances instead? And that the rise of Social Justice risks focusing the black community’s attention on grievances rather than taking advantage of opportunities”?
            In other words, you don’t think that Social Justice has been a problem for assimilation, but will be going forward? If so, I’m curious what you think the mechanism behind this will be? Will a focus on Social Justice inflame white American attitudes and narrow the window of opportunity? Does the mechanism depend on how justified the grievances presented are?
            Depending on the exact argument you’re making, I actually think you might agree with a lot of SJ-people.
            Even so, I still think you are dramatically overstating the influence of the Social Justice narrative in black communities, misstating where it comes from, and improperly conflating it with things like African American studies and then acting like this presents black Americans with a dichotomy that I think is false.
            First of all: that according to Gallup, while there is a large gap in black and white attitudes, still a majority of blacks think that “black children have as good a chance as white children in [their] community” to get good educations, and housing they can afford, and 60% of blacks blame “mostly something else” for “blacks’ inferior jobs, income and housing situation” (compare with 83% of whites). For confidence in the police, blacks are 37% likely to have a great deal of confidence, 37% some, and 25% very little or none; the numbers for whites are 59%, 29% and 12%. So, a gap, but I’m not sure it’s evidence that the black community has committed itself to the most extreme version of the SJ ideology.
            I also think your focus on the Washington Post and the Democrats as vectors for this is, frankly, silly. The WaPo articles I linked, and the Obama thing (correct link here) seem to me pretty solid evidence that the mainline view in opinion pages and among mainstream Democrats is that parental involvement, better education, and more stable families are a key component of black success. I sincerely doubt you can find many mainstream publications arguing that black Americans don’t need to study hard, or invest more in their children in order to achieve success, and I really wish you provide any evidence at all that this view exists, much less is mainstream among either the “opinion set”, or among African Americans.
            As an analogy, consider where the grievance-based attitudes I mentioned in the Jewish community come from: the Holocaust ended 20 years earlier than Jim Crow did, and my family more or less completely escaped the Holocaust—none of my grandparents were born in Europe, and even a few of my great-grandparents were born in North America; the closest relatives I have who personally suffered in the Holocaust are some cousins of my grandparents. And yet, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism were topics I was raised with, passed down through my family and community; I didn’t learn about them from newspapers or advocacy groups or academics. I imagine, insofar as black Americans believe in “white supremacy”, it is much more a cultural memory passed down by grandparents who lived under Jim Crow, and parents who spent their childhoods under it, than something learned by reading academic books white supremacy.

            I also do not think the demand for African American studies programs and Black Culture Centres, and so forth, are good examples of the rise of grievance-based SJ ideas: You keep saying that African Americans want “preferential treatment”, and are “demanding things” and that “others do things for them”—but as I keep pointing out, having your own student centres and studies programs is not “preferential”: Chinese students, Jewish students, Italian students, and many more have these as well.
            You seem to think that African American studies is particularly grievance based, but have literally not presented any evidence at all; you seem to think that Jewish studies for example are not particularly grievance-based, and when presented with evidence to the contrary assert that the most resentful Jews just go to Israel—again with no evidence. I promise you that the view that anti-Semitism is widespread, universal, and a constant threat is not confined to Israeli Jews, and can absolutely be found in mainstream Jewish advocacy groups in North America as well as promoted by Jewish Studies and Holocaust Studies professors. How the ressentiment compares to black studies I have no idea, but in order for me to be convinced there is a real difference, I am going to want to see some evidence.
            So, I don’t see any evidence that the dichotomy you present is anything other than a false one: “segregation” via AA studies programs vs. integration strikes me as mostly separate from the question of whether black Americans will take advantage of a historic improvement in white racism.

          • Aapje says:

            @Eugene Dawn

            I think I’ve misunderstood your argument: does this characterize your position:
            “Until recently (last two or three decades or so), the failure of black Americans to achieve parity with white Americans was in fact driven largely by white racism, but finally there is a window for black Americans to rise to success, only they risk wasting their opportunity if they focus on past grievances instead? And that the rise of Social Justice risks focusing the black community’s attention on grievances rather than taking advantage of opportunities”?

            That is a major part of my argument, but I think that reality is too complex to just reduce to a single narrative. So I refuse to state that only one thing is the problem.

            SJ has only fairly recently gained the prominence among the left that it has now. The way I see it, SJ is designed around a sentiment of grievance and entitlement without a willingness to sacrifice (instead, it demands maximum sacrifice from the ‘other’). That is not a successful strategy unless you can get society to accept an unfair deal in favor of the group, which works (to some extent) for women, but not so much for black people.

            In other words, you don’t think that Social Justice has been a problem for assimilation, but will be going forward?

            I think that it always was a bit of a problem, but that it is and is going to be a bigger problem.

            Will a focus on Social Justice inflame white American attitudes and narrow the window of opportunity?

            I think that quite a few white Americans will logically feel threatened and resentful by racial discrimination against them.

            I also think that the narrative that lack of success is solely due to white American attitudes reduces the willingness to make the sacrifices that are necessary for successful integration with white America.

            Does the mechanism depend on how justified the grievances presented are?

            Yes.

            according to Gallup, while there is a large gap in black and white attitudes, still a majority of blacks think that “black children have as good a chance as white children in [their] community” to get good educations, and housing they can afford

            The lesser belief by black Americans that their kids have as good a chance for a good education probably reflects reality to some extent. The real issue is how to improve this, presumably. The second statement is true if black people tend to live in cheap and unpleasant housing, in neighborhoods with lots of crime and such. That seem like a problem to me.

            Only the police statistics really address attitudes towards outsiders versus the ingroup.

            So, a gap, but I’m not sure it’s evidence that the black community has committed itself to the most extreme version of the SJ ideology.

            This is not my claim. I believe that certain cultural behaviors involve tipping points. A bad influence that only affects a sizable minority group can prevent a tipping point from being reached.

            PS. You seem to do something weird for your links. In this post you also have a superfluous ” at the end of the links, which sometimes breaks them.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        @Eugene Dawn

        That’s just it, though, Eugene. They manifestly do not. New York City’s Little Italy is only 5% Italian-American as of 2011! Staten Island has the highest Italian-American concentration of any county in the US at over half the population, and yet walking into the borough is nothing like walking into a “Little Italy” neighborhood circa 1950, much less 1900. There are three million “German-Texans” today that identify as such and trace their lineage back to 19th century immigration to Texas, and yet only something like 6,000 have retained any vestiges of Texasdeutsch.

        As far as integration being a two-way street, I agree that it is, but I disagree with your characterization that the end result was one where “you keep plenty of the important stuff about your culture and have it contribute to overall cultural diversity”. In terms of long-term permanent changes to what constitutes “American Culture”, I am hard-pressed to think of a lot of distinctly Italian-originated customs and traditions other than the popularity of certain foods. Our Irish immigrant population was large enough that they got St. Patrick’s Day added to the national culture, but even there my understanding is that even the “commercialized” post-80s variant in Ireland (paging Deiseach!) still retains far more cultural markers that have been pretty much stripped out of the American version. There are some neighborhoods that have marketed themselves as the source of authentic imported culture and they continue to do so because it’s good for business, but the reality behind that is that outside of a few lingering relict families and businesses those neighborhoods are not in fact coherent communities with a shared cultural heritage and haven’t been for decades.

        The image of the vibrant, bustling Irish/Italian/Polish/German/etc immigrant neighborhood is one that was probably still pretty true in living memory (that 5% in NYC’s Little Italy was 50% in the 50s), but is now mostly a function of a few relict families and/or businesses combined with commercial marketing, and does not actually reflect a distinct cultural identity for the vast majority of [Insert Western Euro Nationality Here]-Americans.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          Almost certainly the biggest counterexample to your argument is the religion of many of those immigrants: Catholicism was very much not a part of mainstream ProtestantAmerican culture.

          But now Catholicism is more or less completely unremarkable as a religious identity in the United States, and this owes mostly to Irish, Italian, and Polish immigration.

          More generally, the culture and politics of New York City are basically unimaginable without Jewish and Italian immigrants having shaped them, and something similar is true for Chicago w.r.t. Poles and Boston w.r.t. Irish.

          In literature, you have Saul Bellow, I.B. Singer (who even wrote in Yiddish!), and Philip Roth. In cinema you have Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen. These creators are not just Italian- or Jewish-American, but their work deals with distinctly Italian or Jewish themes, while also being very distinctively American.

          Yiddish, Italian, and Irish-derived words have entered the American lexicon.

          Jews are still fairly concentrated geographically in America and it looks to me as if the same is true of Irish Americans. I also believe that neighbourhoods like Howard Beach in New York are still distinctively Italian, though I can’t find precise numbers.

          You’ve already dismissed food, but still: pizza, spaghetti, bagels, pierogis, etc. have all become normalized as “American food”.

          As to a “coherent community” with a “shared cultural heritage”, I can only speak to Jews, but that is very much still a real thing. I am Canadian, so my experience is slightly different, but I have American family whose friends are primarily Jewish, who are involved in their local synagogues, who celebrate important holidays together, who volunteer for Jewish volunteer organizations, etc., etc. Obviously the religious component plays an important role here, but you can see the more general cultural cohesion in things like pro-Israel politics, Jewish schools, etc.

          • Aapje says:

            You’ve already dismissed food, but still: pizza, spaghetti, bagels, pierogis, etc. have all become normalized as “American food”.

            Note that Italian-American food is no longer the same as Italian food. American pizza is different from Italian pizza.

            American spaghetti and meat balls is not an Italian dish.

            You could not get New York bagels in Israel until they were brought over from America.

            As for pierogi: “Many of these grocery-brand pierogi contain non-traditional ingredients to appeal to American tastes, including spinach, jalapeño and chicken.”

            Take a Chinese citizen to a Chinese restaurant in the US or EU and they will generally call the dishes Americanized.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I think the fact that “ethnic” food Americanizes proves my point that these foods have been assimilated into American culture, rather than the opposite.

          • Aapje says:

            Italian-americans no longer eat the same foods as Italians, though, so each side adapted a bit to the other, with Italians adapting more than vice versa.

          • Matt M says:

            I’m not sure who’s argument it supports at this point, but it’s definitely true that eating General Tso’s Chicken and Pepperoni Pizza are part of white American culture, and not part of Chinese or Italian culture.

          • albatross11 says:

            Matt M:

            This is, in fact, one of my favorite parts of white American culture[1]. We beg, borrow, and steal stuff from other cultures and adapt them to work in our own.

            [1] This is also why I think the concept of cultural appropriation, as I’ve generally seen it used, is nuts. Cultural appropriation is a force for good in the world, and throwing a temper-tantrum when nice things from one culture get adopted into another is just making the world a worse place.

          • Matt M says:

            Cultural appropriation is a force for good in the world, and throwing a temper-tantrum when nice things from one culture get adopted into another is just making the world a worse place.

            It’s even worse than that. The double standard has created a situation wherein white Americans literally cannot do anything as it regards culture without causing offense.

            Attempting to spread our own culture to minorities is considered some mixture of colonialism and bigotry. While any white person who attempts to adopt the culture of a different race/ethnicity/nationality is denounced as an evil cultural appropriator.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I’m not sure who’s argument it supports at this point, but it’s definitely true that eating General Tso’s Chicken and Pepperoni Pizza are part of white American culture, and not part of Chinese or Italian culture.

            I’m pretty sure that supports mine.
            Hilariously, in reading up on Italian-American immigration, I found a profile of Joe DiMaggio from 1939, that, attempting to show how integrated an American he was, says of him “Although he learned Italian first, Joe now speaks English without an accent. … Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease, he keeps his hair slicked with water. He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti.”

            I love the idea that he doesn’t eat un-American spaghetti–he eats true-blue chicken chow mein.

          • ana53294 says:

            In regards to cultural appropriation:

            I find the definition confusing, so I want to ask, is this an example of cultural appropriation or not?

            Cordoba’s cathedral-mosque. When Cordoba was conquered, their mosque was consacrated as a cathedral. Muslims in Spain have demanded the right to use the cathedral as a mosque for a very long time, but they are denied.

            Turkey has converted St. Sophia’s Church in Constantinople into a museum, although it had been a mosque for a long time.

          • albatross11 says:

            ana:

            That sounds more like literal appropriation–we kick you out and take over your mosque to use as a church. I think cultural appropriation would be more like if some Christian denomination decided to build some churches that looked very much like mosques or something. And it’s pretty-much guaranteed that any time two cultures are in close contact, lots of that will happen.

          • albatross11 says:

            The best article I’ve seen discussing cultural appropriation from something close to my perspective on the issue is this article by Claire Lehmann.

          • ana53294 says:

            Understandably, indigenous communities have been protective of their sacred objects and cultural artifacts, not wishing the experience of exploitation to be repeated generation after generation.

            There was this case recently where an Inuit shaman’s ritual costume was copied into a high end jacket. I do understand the complaints about that, and I do think that we should respect other people’s religious symbols (we would probably completely desacrate them because we don’t understand them). But the complaints about a girl wearing a qipao still sound silly to me. I wouldn’t call the Chinese culture a minority culture, either. They are one of the biggest cultures in the world, and they are going to become even more important. Why should we protect them?

            Personally, I love it when people appropriate my culture. So if people get inspired by traditional Basque cuisine and make these weird ungodly creations, great. I only get slightly annoyed when they use stuff incorrectly. For example, the world for parents in Spanish is fathers. We have a specific world for parents in Spanish, but some Spanish people say fathers in Basque. Unless it happens to be a child of a gay couple, this is incorrect. I do like that they try to make an effort, though.

            Learning another culture’s language is a sign of respect. Why is wearing that culture’s clothing a sign of lack of respect, though?

          • hls2003 says:

            @albatross11:

            Pretty good article, thanks. However, from the article, I think I would draw the line somewhat differently. I would think improper “appropriation” would involve the actual artifacts, not a certain aesthetic. If there is an original relic or item, taken by a member of another culture (even if not for sale) and used improperly, that is likely a moral problem (though even there there are line-drawing issues; what looks like looting to one may look like preservation to another if the local environment is sufficiently chaotic).

            However, this only extends to actual cultural artifacts. The appropriation of the aesthetic, to my mind, only becomes a problem when there is fraud or unfair competition. For example, if a Native American makes traditional jewelry in a traditional style (and perhaps with traditional handcraft) and offers it for sale as “authentic Indian jewelry,” and then a non-native entrepreneur sets up a stand next door offering the same design and also claiming to be “authentic,” that’s improper. But Woolworth’s selling the same line in New York City without appellation should be non-problematic (outside of certain design patent / IP issues that are too specialized to be applicable in most situations).

          • albatross11 says:

            Yeah, I think the world is massively better off because, say, blacks appropriated a bunch of western musical ideas and traditions and then invented or helped invent a bunch of modern musical styles–regae, rap, Motown, jazz, blues, etc.. Or because peppers and potatoes from the Americas got incorporated into some Indian cuisine. Or because Mexican and Italian and Chinese food all got incorporated into American cuisine, changing some in the process.

            The most important thing to remember about most kinds of outrage/callout stuff is that there are two statements:

            a. This (pretty white girl wearing a Chinese dress, Japanese partygoer wearing a nun’s habit as a costume, American of Scots-Irish descent making tacos) offends me because they’re using some of my culture.

            b. You should support my being offended and join in, rather than saying “Hmmm, that fellow sure seems worked up over that girl in the pretty dress.”

            There’s no point trying to argue about (a)–we’re in “no accounting for tastes” territory. But with this and most other outrage/callout culture instances, the point is (b)–getting others to go along with my outrage. The place to break the chain here is at (b). Accept that some people will be offended at *anything*–some idiot somewhere is probably offended that the Japanese appropriated joint-stock corporations and car manufacturing. But also be clear that nobody else is obliged to go along with their outrage.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            I would think improper “appropriation” would involve the actual artifacts, not a certain aesthetic.

            Are you saying that if someone made their own replica of a sacred artifact, it would be okay for them to then depict that artifact in any way they please? Because that sounds to me exactly like the type of act that drives the honest offense at cultural appropriation.

            It’s especially bad if it’s overtly negative, such as flag burning or putting a crucifix in a container of urine. It’s less bad, but still considered bad, if it’s not negative, but merely banal – imagine taking a crucifix and surrounding it in marquee lights and using that as the figurehead of a casino.

            (Contrast this with a young girl using a cheongsam as a prom dress – if we assume this is an important night for her, then it’s not at all clear that this depiction is banal. And using one culture’s flavors in another culture’s dish sounds more like a tribute – the opposite of appropriation.)

          • disposablecat says:

            I’m offended on behalf of the Romans by the gauche monstrosity that is Caesar’s Palace!

            (I joke, but I did actually know someone who got offended by jokes about the destruction of Pompeii, 2000 odd years ago).

          • hls2003 says:

            @Paul Brinkley:

            The situations you’re describing that I consider improper (again, from the perspective of “having some moral weight” or “being ill-mannered”, not legally actionable) all involve deliberate disrespect. Your examples of flag burning or crucifix in urine are on point. They are using specific knowledge of an object or shape’s status with a group, and intentionally using that knowledge to show disrespect to the group by proxy. It’s no different from burning an effigy. This can, certainly, be offensive – in fact it has been deliberately designed to be so. I consider it part of free speech, but generally uncivil. It’s offensive not because you’re using the object, but because you’re (figuratively) shouting insults. Insults are offensive, basically a tautology.

            Banal usages are, to my mind, not a problem unless there is evidence of the mens rea described above. If, however, we take your crucifix-on-casino example and postulate instead that it is the marquee of a BDSM group called “The Hellfire Club” – that is clearly intended to signal the group’s disrespect for the original tradition, and fits neatly into the “deliberate insult” category. (Of course, that is the whole point – a pressure campaign by any offended Christians would presumably be ignored or celebrated because it shows the insult has been heard and hit home). If we take truly “banal” examples – eating unleavened bread with wine, stitching cross-shaped patterns onto fabric, selling jewelry in the shape of a Chinese or Arabic symbol – then no, I don’t think there’s a problem at all.

            The simpler way of describing the situation is that “deliberate cultural disrespect” can be a problem (insofar as it is deliberately insulting), but “cultural appropriation” is not. To the extent “appropriation” is being expanded by partisans in discourse to encompass both concepts, it is an incorrect use of language designed to allow a motte and bailey of offense.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            @Eugene Dawn

            Again, to be clear, my central objection to your argument is the claim that Italian-Americans, German-Americans, British-Americans, Irish-Americans, and other caucasian/european immigrant communities:

            A)

            tend to live in neighbourhoods with members of their own culture, and who are segregated to some extent

            I think this claim is empirically testable in the form of the claim: “more than 50% of X-Americans live in neighborhoods that are culturally, linguistically, and demographically closer to a comparable neighborhood in Country X than a matching neighborhood that is not majority X-American. These neighborhoods and their associated cultures are at least partially segregated from mainstream American culture.”

            I think I have provided at least a few data points that show that this is not an accurate characterization of the Italian-American and German-American communities. If you are unconvinced, I am happy to do my best to repeat the exercise with Americans of Irish, Polish, and English ancestry, assuming you don’t mind waiting because I do this in my limited free time. Better yet, if you have convincing empirical evidence to the contrary, point us to it.

            and

            B) That these segregated, separate, and culturally homogenous X-American cultures

            keep plenty of important aspects of their own culture.

            I will admit that I am annoyed by the fuzziness of this claim, but this is a fuzzy area, so let’s look at your points of evidence one by one.

            Religion: On the one hand, I will concede that this is an important part of family life for many people, and I should have thought of it. On the other hand, which Italian-American communities shut down their major businesses and civil services and offices for Santo Stefano? The Feast of the Immaculate Conception? The Assumption of the Virgin? Does even Staten Island? I checked, and as far as I can tell the answer is “no, but you can maybe find an isolated individual who will close their family owned store on those days, but even then not really”. So again, I’d say that tends more towards “Assimilated with American Mainstream” than “Maintained Cultural Identity”.

            X-American Individuals had great influence on the current landscape of cities like Chicago, Boston, and NYC: I agree, but I don’t think this in any way counts as evidence for your claim that these individuals tend to live somewhat segregated lives in parallel cultural traditions separate from mainstream American life! Rather the opposite!

            Literature: See above, and note your concession about the voice still being “Distinctly American”.

            Food: See Above, and Aapje’s comment below. Ask an Italian what they think of Domino’s, or a Czech or German what they think of Budweiser and Coors (both founded by european immigrants).

            I think you are absolutely correct about Jewish-Americans, but I think that you’re making the mistake of thinking your observation about Jewish-Americans and Jewish-Canadians applies to Italian-, German-, Irish-, etc Americans.

            Now, to be clear, I am talking about American as it stands right now. As I said, if you go back as recently as 1950, I think you would be at least partly right, if not mostly right. But as of the 90s through to the early 21st century, that sort cultural cohesiveness is pretty unique to Jewish-Americans in terms of European-descended populations in America.

            My hope is that in 100 more years it will be similarly impossible to stake out much in the way of a coherent “Iranian-American”, “Cuban-American”, “Mexican-American”, or “Chinese-American” community outside of a few relicts and neighborhoods that still have the trappings of the days when they USED to be ethnic enclaves but are now mostly called such out of a combination of tradition and commercial marketing.

            And that’s not because I dislike or disdain what various immigrants have to offer. I’m with those in this thread who think that cultural appropriation is awesome.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I think this claim is empirically testable in the form of the claim: “more than 50% of X-Americans live in neighborhoods that are culturally, linguistically, and demographically closer to a comparable neighborhood in Country X than a matching neighborhood that is not majority X-American. These neighborhoods and their associated cultures are at least partially segregated from mainstream American culture.”

            Why “closer to a comparable neighborhood in Country X”? The immigrants we’re talking about are populations that would have left their original countries in many cases over a century ago—we should expect some drift to have happened from the original country. As long as they maintain distinctive neighbourhoods, that should count, even if the neighbourhoods don’t bear much resemblance to neighbourhoods in the originating countries.

            I think I have provided at least a few data points that show that this is not an accurate characterization of the Italian-American and German-American communities. If you are unconvinced, I am happy to do my best to repeat the exercise with Americans of Irish, Polish, and English ancestry, assuming you don’t mind waiting because I do this in my limited free time. Better yet, if you have convincing empirical evidence to the contrary, point us to it.

            60% of the Jewish population of America lives in one of New York, New Jersey, Maryland, or Massachusetts. The same report notes that within New Jersey, “the Jewish population of Middlesex is very highly concentrated geographically. The 66 percent of Jewish households who live in the three zip code areas containing the highest percentages of Jewish households is the second highest of about 50 comparison Jewish communities“.
            If you check Wikipedia you will observe that the urban areas in America with the highest Jewish populations include at least some neighbourhoods that are essentially completely Jewish, but even within New York City, Jews are nine times more populous than they are in the country at large.

            You can also look at similar data for Irish Americans, and discover places like Havertown, Pennsylvania: “Havertown is also known for its large Irish-American population. Many Irish-Americans still live there today. According to the 2000 US Census, Haverford Twp. ranks in the top 60 of census-recognized municipalities nationwide in percentage of population with Irish ancestry.[1] The neighborhood takes pride in its distinct Irish heritage and is home to many Irish pubs and shops.[2] Many locals still reverentially (and only half-jokingly) refer to Havertown as the “33rd county” (of Ireland). For these reasons the neighborhood remains a very popular destination for Irish immigrants” and Sciutate, Massachusetts, “the most Irish town in America”, in which 47.5 residents listed their primary ancestry as Irish—I think 10.5% of Americans have Irish ancestry, so this is a concentration four times as high as in the general population. The Washington Post has a nice map where you can clearly see the density of people of Irish descent, and its clustering in the northeast. This is not a neighbourhood-level view, of course, but the same link has another map for Massachusetts, and you can see some neighbourhood-level clustering there as well. According to the same article, new Irish immigrants “tend to settle in places that already have large Irish populations, like Boston” and “people from Ireland tend to search more for homes in places where more Irish-Americans live”.
            For Italians, check this list of Italian-American neighbourhoods; I won’t check the details, but I think this is plenty of evidence that these minority groups do still tend to live with one another in neighbourhoods where they are the majority, or, if that’s not possible (they are minorities, after all), strong pluralities.
            I think this is good evidence of “segregation to some extent”.

            Religion: On the one hand, I will concede that this is an important part of family life for many people, and I should have thought of it. On the other hand, which Italian-American communities shut down their major businesses and civil services and offices for Santo Stefano? The Feast of the Immaculate Conception? The Assumption of the Virgin? Does even Staten Island? I checked, and as far as I can tell the answer is “no, but you can maybe find an isolated individual who will close their family owned store on those days, but even then not really”. So again, I’d say that tends more towards “Assimilated with American Mainstream” than “Maintained Cultural Identity”.

            This seems like moving the goalposts: as recently as 1960 being Catholic was alien enough that people worried about a Catholic President. Now, there are millions of Catholics who practice freely and openly, and the role of Catholics in politics and culture is completely mainstream—but as long as businesses don’t close down for their holidays, that doesn’t count? I don’t see why this is a reasonable standard. Catholocism has gone from “Popish plot to subvert republicanism” to “meh”; I think that is a major change in American culture. For contrast, if in fifty years there are tens of millions of Muslims in America, and no one gives them a second thought, would you count that as a change in American culture, or would you demand to know how religiously observant those Muslims are?
            Anyway, Jews do absolutely close stuff down for Yom Kippur and Rosh HaShanah, so even with your stricter criteria, you can see that there are groups of immigrants who keep their own culture strongly.
            I’ll also mention that Italian-Americans have in fact gotten a holiday onto the American calendar, and the Irish-Americans have one that is informal, but even more strongly celebrated.

            Ask an Italian what they think of Domino’s, or a Czech or German what they think of Budweiser and Coors (both founded by european immigrants).

            I’m sure they would say something like “that’s not truly pizza—it’s pizza that’s been Americanized!” i.e., pizza that has been taken up by American culture, i.e., assimilated into American culture. This proves my point, not yours.

            I agree, but I don’t think this in any way counts as evidence for your claim that these individuals tend to live somewhat segregated lives in parallel cultural traditions separate from mainstream American life! Rather the opposite!

            No, these are two separate trends—the cultures have been taken up by the mainstream, even though people still tend to cluster with others from the same culture.

            See above, and note your concession about the voice still being “Distinctly American”.

            It’s not a concession, it’s my point! The fact that a book about an angsty New York Jew is seen as “American literature”, and a movie about a Sicilian mobster is “American cinema” shows the influence that that those cultures have had on mainstream American culture.

            Perhaps some clarification is in order: I am not arguing that hyphenated-Americans live isolated lives shut off from mainstream American society. They clearly do not. However, they are still often distinct within American society, and there is at least some kind of semi-impermeable membrane, if not a full wall, between many of these groups and the mainstream. They have not fully assimilated: they preserve their religion, their food, their literature, and their culture—not in “pure” form, whatever that is, but distinct. The stereotype New Yorker is a Jew or an Italian—not a Jew from Vilnius, nor an Italian from Sicily—but also not just “an American”, with no other qualifications. Jewish-Americans and Italian-Americans are distinct from Jews and Italians, but also distinct from Americans. Does that clarify what I am trying to say?

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            As long as they maintain distinctive neighbourhoods, that should count,

            But distinctive how? Most neighborhoods in large cities distinctive by one measure or another. And I think it’s a cheat to count neighborhoods that put on a surface veneer of distinction that is not borne out by demographics and day-to-day life, such as the various supposedly ‘ethnic’ neighborhoods that in fact haven’t been majority-minority for decades and retain that status mostly as a matter of tourist appeal. If you feel my initial definition is overly narrow, how would you word it so as to also exclude cases like NYC’s Little Italy and similar neighborhoods that have the outer guise of separate X-American communities but lack the substance?

            Regarding the Brandeis report (the link is broken, BTW), I’d note that even though I actually agree that Jewish Americans tends to be more culturally separate and more culturally cohesive than your average German-American or Italian-American, I don’t think this report actually provides strong evidence for your original claim. The segment you quoted is the only one which directly addresses concentration in separate neighborhoods, and I couldn’t find any other information in the report indicating to what degree the 52,000 Jewish residents of Middlesex county are representative of the 6 million Jewish-Americans. The fact that the report made a point of calling out the degree to which Middlesex county’s Jewish population is densely clustered leads me to believe that they are not. The rest of the data gives figures at the city, county, and state level, too coarse to help us.

            Regarding areas like Haverford township and lists of neighborhoods claiming ethnic status or that “everyone knows” have an immigrant history, I think you’re missing my point, which is that when you start digging in and actually go and visit these areas, that doesn’t reflect reality. If you click through to the “top Irish ancestry” locations, you’ll note that they top out at just under 40%. In other words, something like 2/3rds of the people in Haverford Township “taking pride in the neighborhood’s Irish Heritage” aren’t in fact of Irish extraction! When your “Little Italy” is only 5% Italian-American and “The most Irish town in America” can’t top 40%, it’s time to start being more skeptical and requiring higher levels of proof that these neighborhoods are in fact at least partially segregated.

            Now, you said there was a Massachusetts map that showed neighborhood-level clustering of Irish-American descent. Do you have a direct link to that map, because it would be very helpful. Your links are broken, and I couldn’t find it with a google search. To give us a baseline to compare to, here is the diversity map from the Washington Post that shows racial distribution based on the US Census. My claim is that if we could break down those “white” regions into Italian-American, Irish-American, German-American, Polish-American, and German-American, you would see a distribution like the racial distribution of Clarksville, TN . I think that your claim is that you would see a distribution more like Nashville, TN (esp. the way the black and white populations have a very sharp gradient around the NW quadrant of the city).

            Regarding religion, I would absolutely demand to know how religiously observant those hypothetical Muslims are, and the degree to which American Imams’ teachings diverged from those of Imams in Saudia Arabia, Iran, and so on. My prediction is that if in 50 years’ time we have a large Muslim minority and everyone is as “meh” about it as we generally are about Catholics, it will be precisely because of the distinct ways in which American Muslims are integrated into mainstream American culture and seen as distinct and different from their co-religionists abroad. In fact, it’s my contention that to the degree we already see this (Hey, I go to school with Zia and Anwar, and my buddy Joe invited me to join him for Iftar last Ramadan, they’re cool!) it is precisely because this is already increasingly true.

            To try and clarify my point in turn, I am not saying that Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans are so thoroughly assimilated that they have ceased to exist. Rather, I am saying that they are so thoroughly assimilated that when you go to [Name Of City]’s Little Italy, the majority of the residents in most cases will not be Italian-American. Finding a household of Italian-Americans or German-Americans where Italian or German is the language at home is going to be incredibly difficult (<10% of the relevant population, probably <5%). When you look at ancestry (especially Irish-American) via genetic testing you will find out that the %-age of Irish heritage is lower and more intermixed than claimed by the family, if it is present at all. That, in short, the central example of [Euro Country]-American is the midwestern native who not only can't tell you where in the old country his family's from but mangles his last name by old country standards, not the multi-generational family that's lived in an ethnic enclave in a large city and marrying within that enclave's community. Those people -exist-, but they are a vanishing minority and have been for decades.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Distinctive by virtue of the types of restaurants and grocery stores, the holidays they observe communally, the cultural institutions, and the demographics of the people.
            I agree that many of these neighbourhoods are less distinctive than they once were, by all of the criteria above, but that’s why I said “to some extent”–with different extents for different groups.

            I agree that it can be hard to distinguish relics from former eras of stronger distinction from actual currently existing distinction, but if the demographics and the culture of a neighbourhood roughly match, I think that should count. Note though, I think “majority-minority” is not necessarily the most reasonable criterion: for small enough immigrant groups, making up a majority in all but a small handful of areas might not be possible–I think plurality-minority should count, and even disproportionately-minority should fall under consideration.
            I’m also not sure what it means to only put on a “surface veneer”–if a neighbourhood has Italian stores, restaurants, groceries, an Italian cultural centre, and puts on a Columbus Day parade and an Italian film festival, what could it mean for that not to be “borne out” by day-to-day life? For most people, that kind of stuff is basically what culture is about.

            [..] it’s time to start being more skeptical and requiring higher levels of proof that these neighborhoods are in fact at least partially segregated.

            Irish Americans make up about 10.5% of the American population. A neighbourhood that is 40% Irish is a neighbourhood that has 4 times the concentration of Irish-descended Americans as the population at large. Obviously you’d want to know a lot more about the distributions, but that is certainly compatible with “segregated to some extent”.
            You dismissed my evidence about Jews, but recall that Jews are only 1.75% of the American population–a neighbourhood that is only 10% Jewish is still 6 times more clustered than you’d expect if Jews were evenly distributed.
            I agree though, that it would be better to have data on the probability of living in a neighbourhood with other members of one’s minority group, rather than the probability of being in given minority group given residence in a certain neighbourhood.

            Sorry about the quality of my links in the last post, don’t know what happened. Here is the WaPo piece on Irish neighbourhoods; you can see that neighbourhoods with >30% Irish ancestry are clustered in the NE, and specifically clustered in certain areas of Massachusetts. You will say, 30% isn’t majority minority, but some of those neighbourhoods are >50% Irish (follow the link to the HuffPo piece which has more data), and 30% might still be plurality-Irish, and is certainly disproportionately-Irish. The fact that new Irish immigrants move to those areas shows that there is still some affinity between the culture of current Irish immigrants and these Irish-American enclaves.

            Again, let me reiterate: I am not claiming that these areas represent undigested “lumps” of Ireland inside the United States. I am claiming that these areas are disproportionately Irish-American–a culture somewhat distinct from mainstream American culture, with some affinities to traditional Irish culture.

            that if in 50 years’ time we have a large Muslim minority and everyone is as “meh” about it as we generally are about Catholics, it will be precisely because of the distinct ways in which American Muslims are integrated into mainstream American culture and seen as distinct and different from their co-religionists abroad.

            Yes, of course they will be distinct from their co-religionists abroad–but they will still be distinct from their non-co-religionists in America! And any American culture that encompasses large groups of people whose culture is primarily Islamic-derived will be distinct from current-day American culture!
            If in fifty years, a Mawlid-al Nabi parade is a major feature of multiple large American cities, that tons of non-Muslims participate it, this would be almost a paradigmatic example of the influence of Islamic culture on American life–even if the Muslims who celebrate it have Americanized in many ways.
            As an analogy, consider Christmas: Christmas celebrations in America are obviously very heavily “Americanized”–but it is absurd to suggest that the widespread celebration of Christmas doesn’t count as “Christian cultural influence on America”.

            In summation: I think we broadly agree on the extent of assimilation by Irish-, Italian-, etc. Americans, we just disagree on how to characterize it. We both think that there is still some geographical affinity of these groups for one another, and that neighbourhoods in which they live bear some traces of their cultures–you want to regard this as incidental unless the affinity is strong enough for the groups to be majorities in their neighbourhoods and their culture is still essentially the culture of the homeland.

            Finally, recall that the point of this was to contrast hyphenated-Americans of European descent to African Americans. I think it is beyond dispute that African Americans do not have a completely separate culture either; even neighbourhoods that are “black neighbourhoods” are often only 25% African American; Ferguson is 53% black, not out of line with the Irish numbers. By the standards you set, it’s not clear to me that you would be able to count African Americans as unassimilated.

        • Tarpitz says:

          It’s an interesting timeline to think about. All the Right Moves (1983) portrays racial abuse against Americans of Eastern European extraction as current and commonplace (in small town Pennsylvania) and as far as I can tell no-one found this implausible. My impression is that that would now be surprising. Am I wrong? And if so, when did it change?

          • John Schilling says:

            I believe it had significantly changed by 1983, and that this plot point was a deliberate jibe at the small-mindedness of at least one small town. It was probably not an accurate critique of small towns generally, though you wouldn’t have had to look too hard to find living examples.

  43. Deiseach says:

    (a) Anytime I read vegan/animal rights activism material, even the sane not shrieking moral denunciation at you rapist torturer bloodmouth carnists stuff, I come away with a craving for a nice juicy meat meal. I have no idea why this is, but if there are any others like me, perhaps the vegan case is not really helping itself? 🙂

    (b) Re: the California soda tax (or not), has anyone got any figures to back this claim up?

    The state has passed more soda taxes than any other, shepherded by progressive lawmakers who see them as a source of revenue for schools and public services

    I see a lot of that used as a rationale for such taxes, but I have no idea if it’s true: does it raise extra revenue (probably) and where does that go – I have a suspicion it doesn’t go to the schools/nice things but goes into the general pot for running the place. Are there places where there is enough extra revenue that is ring-fenced that they were able to hire sixty more teachers and build ten new schools?

    Also, it probably is down to the clout and experience of the industry and its lobbyists, but I do wonder – could there be a Machiavellian reason lurking behind all this? If local towns can’t impose soda taxes of their own but then a state tax comes in, and the revenue goes right to the state coffers – I can’t see the Californian state government refusing extra money, though they do seem to have finally balanced the books after their crisis decade.

    • MartMart says:

      Some years ago, a close friends became plant eating, for health reasons. Sometime after that (a year or two) they started broadcasting the ethical case of veganism, rather loudly.
      I was rather opposed to the whole thing, mainly because it sounded like something people from other tribes did, and I wanted my friend to remain ideologically close to me. This was around the time I started reading SSC. My first impression is that this was nothing more than virtue signalling. After all, if some people respect the decision to go ethically vegan (according to my friends, you aren’t vegan unless you are doing so for ethical reasons) and you are already plant eating for unrelated reasons, then the cost of claiming ethical superiority is essentially zero. That made me feel smug and satisfied.
      And that made me feel suspicious. Here is an explanation that proves I was right about everything all along, and that people who disagree with me are stupid. And I’m talking about good friends, people whom I generally respect, and so I felt I owe it to them and myself to try to seek an alternative explanation that doesn’t appeal to my priors, and then trying to somehow see which one fits better. I was at a loss as to what that explanation would be, so finally I came up with “maybe people actually believe that meat is murder, and I can’t bring myself to seriously consider this argument, because my very next meal depends on my not understanding it”. It can be very difficult to explain concept to people whose income depends on not understanding it.
      My first encounter with healthy eating people was with the anti gmo movement. I felt there were 2 strong arguments against them 1. It’s a bunch of non scientific quackery. 2. Organic food has lower yields/is more expensive. So adopting this idea wasn’t something that everyone could practically do. At first I just assume that vegans belonged to the same camp.
      In the interest of trying to think about this clearly (well, to no small part for that reason), I stopped being a meat eater (I wanted to see if the meat is murder still sounds as ridiculous to me 6 months later).
      First thing I noticed that is that unlike anti-gmo veganism scales just fine. In fact, it scales better. The environment and economical arguments for everyone being plant eating are pretty strong. My own food costs dropped noticeably.
      The health arguments appear to be conflicted, in a way that isn’t likely to ever be untangled. Maybe eating just plants is the healthiest thing ever. Maybe it isn’t the ultimate healthy thing. But there isn’t a very credible argument that going 98% plant eating is actually unhealthy. If there is some kind of deficiency that comes from not eating meat, its very small and hard to detect.
      A year later, I don’t entirely buy the ethical argument. It seems to rely on a lot of assumptions, and it has the flaws that many utilitarian arguments have. But I don’t find it ridiculous. It may not be virtuous to eat plants. But I can’t construct an argument that says that people are somehow morally bound to eat meat.
      So, this is how I see that vegan opposition: “Be more like me, or I’m going to be mean to you”

  44. boboddy says:

    14, 88, and 1488 are in fact “known white supremacist code numbers”.

    If you took a person who’s generically highly aware of internet culture, showed them the list of all two-digit numbers from 00 to 99, and asked them to pick which two are the white supremacist code numbers, they would reliably pick 14 and 88. You would get the same result if you did this one year ago, before this DHS thing made these numbers more well known. You could also ask them to pick out the white supremacist code number from a list of all four-digit numbers, and they would reliably pick 1488.

    (Does anyone even dispute the above?)

    Of course, this doesn’t prove that it wasn’t a coincidence that 14 and 88 showed up in the article.

    As for the headline, here’s the “14 words”, a well-known white supremacist slogan:

    We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children

    (This slogan is what the number 14 comes from. Again, it was well-known before any of this DHS stuff came up. If you asked a generically highly culturally aware person to name five different white supremacist slogans, the 14 words would reliably be included in the reply.)

    And here’s the headline of that DHL document:

    We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again

    (The headline also has fourteen words.)

    This doesn’t prove anything. But I think you distorted the issue here by

    1) Not quoting the 14 words and the headline, which would have made it obvious that they are in fact very similar
    2) Implying that 14, 88 and the fourteen words weren’t already well-known white supremacist memes long before the DHS document came out, and implying that people who claimed that they were, were making stuff up after the fact.

    Personally, I think it’s perfectly realistic that someone at DHS deliberately chose that headline because it resembled the 14 words. Maybe it was a /pol/ poster that wanted to cause drama and, yes, send a plausibly-deniable message that there are white supremacist sympathizers at DHS. It could also have been an apolitical troll that only wanted only to cause drama. Or it could even have been an anti-racist who did it as a false flag.

    • Jaskologist says:

      I think you overestimate how many people are actually aware of /pol/ and 1488. The average person is more likely to say “wait, how are frogs racist now?”

      • boboddy says:

        Yes, if the message was indeed deliberate, then the person who snuck in the message was non-average, and the initial target audience consisted of non-average people. But it was predictable that the initial target audience would spread it around and it would eventually blow up, with lots of fun, juicy drama.

      • C_B says:

        Anecdatum: I am modestly internet-literate, but have never visited /pol/ and don’t really pay any attention to internet Nazis. I am vaguely aware that Pepe is linked via *mumbles incoherently* to white supremacism, but don’t really understand it and think it’s kind of silly; I mostly associate Pepe with Twitch chat.

        I wasn’t aware of the 14 words, but was aware of 88 = Heil Hitler, due to the neo-Nazi supervillain organization Empire Eighty-Eight from Worm.

        boboddy’s post has substantially lowered my confidence that Scott is right about it being a coincidence; the document’s title is particularly questionable. I’m now leaning toward “guy in charge of compiling the document was a /pol/ troll, got shit past his bosses’ radar” as my leading hypothesis.

        • WashedOut says:

          /pol/ has been a cesspool for about 10 years and should not be visited with any intent other than a stealth reconnaissance mission into neckbeard meme culture.

          Pepe was appropriated by a group of people some of whom will identify as having National Socialist sympathies. Around the same time the fictional republic of Kekistan was formed (“lol” -> “lel” -> “kek” -> realisation that Kek was coincidentally an Egyptian frog-god -> meme ratified) as an experimental online space for ‘alt-right’ views. This is all a fairly small subset of usage of Pepe; most of it is totally benign.

          • Matt M says:

            “lol” -> “lel” -> “kek”

            Doesn’t “kek” originate from World of Warcraft’s clumsy attempts at ensuring Alliance and Horde couldn’t communicate with each other?

            (i.e. when a Horde player says “lol” near an alliance player, it is translated as “kek”)

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        The only thing I know about /pol/ is it’s an insult even on 4chan, and 4chan has people who are either openly racist or think racist jokes are the last edgy humor (and given how un-offended Hollywood and the mainstream media seem by James Gunn’s thousands of pederasty jokes with no punchlines, I can’t say they’re wrong).
        Neo-nazis are a media boogeyman.

      • Tenacious D says:

        Like C_B, I was aware that 88 was used as a code for HH (though my top mental associations would be the year or Eric Lindros), but 14 is a new one for me.

      • A1987dM says:

        FWIW, I can remember goalkeeper Gigi Buffon being criticized for picking 88 as his jersey number, like, at least one and a half decade ago.

    • S_J says:

      I think that “14” and “88” are less well-known (as racist flags) than “420” is (as a code-word for marijuana).

      Amusingly, I’ve seen a few comment threads on Book of Faces where someone asks what do you mean, the guy offered you a ‘420’? What is ‘420’?

      More on-point, this is the first time I’ve seen anyone attempt to explain “14” and “88” as racist flags, and I would not have known about them (or picked them out a list of two-digit numbers) before this point.

      • Eugene Dawn says:

        I know someone whose dad chose “88” as a license plate a little while ago (I think about 10 years)–he obviously didn’t know (he liked the symmetry), but my friend apparently got questioned about it. This was in South Africa, by the way, which I assume is at least somewhat insulated from American neo-Nazism.

        Personally, I have known about both the fourteen words and 88 for years; they have also been in the news somewhat recently as there are pictures of Dylann Roof using 1488 iconography. It’s still niche, but it’s definitely something that has made the news in recent years.

        • Matt M says:

          Hall of fame Wide Receiver and current broadcaster Michael Irvin of the Dallas Cowboys famously wore the number 88.

          Cowboys owner Jerry Jones recently came out against national anthem protests and said the players would be required to stand for the anthem.

          COINCIDENCE I THINK NOT!!!

    • rlms says:

      I think 18 (Adolf Hitler) is similarly well-known. People who have read the web serial Worm should be aware of the significance of 88: Empire Eighty-Eight are a white supremacist gang in it.

    • helloo says:

      Another confounding factor – the Chinese considers the number 8 to be good fortune. Bigger chains of 8 are generally luckier.

      So if you see a custom license plate with lots of 8s, it’s probably more likely to be a Chinese person than a supremacist.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I was probably too snarky by putting those words in Scare Capitals. I agree these are all known white supremacist code numbers.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again
      Personally, I think it’s perfectly realistic that someone at DHS deliberately chose that headline because it resembled the 14 words

      The DHS was using the phrase “we must secure our borders” under Obama. Clever girl, /pol/, clever girl.

      “We must guard against terrorism; we must secure our borders; we must enforce our immigration laws; we must improve our readiness for, response to, and recovery from disasters; and we must unify the Department so that we can even more effectively carry out our mission,”

      link

    • FLWAB says:

      (Does anyone even dispute the above?)

      I do. I was vaguely familiar with 88 (though I couldn’t remember what the number was, just that there was a number that was code for Hiel Hitler) but I have never heard of 14, nor heard of the slogan it is associated with. If you asked me to pick which two numbers were associated with white supremacists, I would say “Beats me, I don’t know.”

      Similarly if you asked me to “name five different white supremacist slogans” I would draw a complete blank. Maybe something about there being countries for black people but no countries for white people? I think I saw that once. But slogans? Beats me. Why should I know such things? Why should anyone? Most people are not white supremacists, and most people don’t spend time with them, online or off.

      Maybe I’m alone here, but your post seems to have a lot of typical minding going on. Am I wrong? Is there anyone else here who would have no idea how to answer the two questions he posed that supposedly generic people can answer?

      • Nornagest says:

        I knew about 14 and 88 and the fourteen words, but only as trivia that I know about because I spend too much time reading about random shit (in this case, prison gangs) on Wikipedia. I would definitely not expect an average person who’s reasonably familiar with Internet culture to know them.

        I probably couldn’t get to five slogans.

      • keranih says:

        Same-same, and some of the circles I run in are *highly* Confederate sympathetic. (I think this says more about how “confederate sympathetic” =/= “white supremacist” than anything else.)

        I think that people who are Highly Concerned About White Supremacists ™ know and recognize this sort of thing. Overlapping with people who see patterns and Signs in *everything*.

        (I also can’t see anything *overtly* wrong with “we must secure a future…etc” – I mean, seriously, change “white” to “black” and you’ve got the *intent* of the Negro College Fund right there. People should be able to promote and assist the people they are related to and that they care about, yes? The *context* of the slogan being related to forcing inequality under the law/of opportunity based on race is bad…but in that case so is overt affirmative action.)

        • Matt M says:

          I think that people who are Highly Concerned About White Supremacists ™

          A group that includes about 1% of society, but about 90% of professional journalists.

        • mtl1882 says:

          The “problem” with it is that when the Negro College Fund was formed, there was a very real uncertainty about the future of black Americans. White leaders had been exhorting them since 1862 to “lift up their race” and often spoke of the future of black people as a “race.” Yes, they could have just said, “let’s secure a future for all Americans,” which would have included them, but it’s quite understandable why they viewed things that way, and why they still do. It wasn’t about the perpetuation of their physical characteristics (though I’m sure many did want that and that’s fine), but of their fulfillment as people.

          There has never been a concern about the future of “white America” specifically, unless one means recent fears about voluntary intermarriage destroying the white race at some future point. It’s really not a pressing issue, and the focus is on perpetuating physical characteristics, which is fine in itself, but I don’t think it’s interchangeable as people are arguing. If you believe it is a crucial concern, which is at least more questionable, it still is not something that’s going to happen soon or involuntarily. And rightly or wrongly, it makes people think of eugenics or other negative social movements. Because being concerned about white Americans specifically doesn’t make sense in the way it does for black Americans. I realize this is a subjective point, but I also think people play dumb on it. A friend who seemed thoughtful and intelligent asked me why we couldn’t have white pride day. Are we really going to act like things like gay pride day are a enviable, restricted privilege instead of an understandable reaction to a belief that they should not have pride? There is no need for a white pride day, because there has never been a serious threat to straight white Americans’ pride. There’s nothing to assert. She’s also Irish, so I suggested St. Patrick’s Day as an option. Celebrating cultures is great, but there is no “white American culture” to celebrate. There is an Irish culture to celebrate, or a local culture to celebrate, or a religious tradition to celebrate, and many other options for Americans who may be white.

          I put problem in quotes because you are right that, taken in a vacuum, there is no problem, and we’re just arguing about words. But we’re not in a vacuum. I’m not someone who gets worked up about slogans or wording or social media scandals/the latest outrage, but all that aside, I do think getting these concepts straight is important, because I think we get distracted by what I consider false equivocation and a very unproductive argument. I think most people are capable of being more big picture about this.

          Also, to comment on the thread itself, I’d never heard of any of this number stuff. And I like to look up weird things, though, thankfully, I don’t feel drawn to white supremacist circles. Obviously it is a real thing and many people here are familiar with it, but I don’t find it hard to believe that many people have never heard of it.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Celebrating cultures is great, but there is no “white American culture” to celebrate.

            I DESPISE this, it is both inaccurate and dismissive.

            I’m a Son of the Revolution, and my family has lived in the Americas since the 1600s. There is absolutely a “white American culture”, starting with Jamestown and Plymouth, including people like George Washington, John Adams, Daniel Boone, Jim Bowie, Teddy Roosevelt, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Calvin Coolidge, etc.

            The fact that our culture has welcomed people from across the world to our home and shared it with them doesn’t make our culture not exist, and acting like it does is infuriating.

          • j r says:

            @EchoChaos

            It’s funny that you mention Jamestown. Here’s John Rolf writing in 1619:

            About the latter end of August, a Dutch man of Warr of the burden of a 160 tunes arrived at Point-Comfort, the Comandors name Capt Jope, his Pilott for the West Indies one Mr Marmaduke an Englishman. … He brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes…

            So yeah, there is a “white American” culture; unfortunately that culture has a habit of systematically erasing non-whites from the picture.

            It’s not an axiom or anything, but I find it a useful heuristic that people who express pride in being Irish/Italian/Scottish/English-American mean something quite different than those expressing pride in being “white,” and that the latter tend to be some form of bigot. Like I said, it’s not a hard and fast rule, but definitely a useful heuristic.

          • EchoChaos says:

            I’m not sure what point you’re making there. That white American culture has included enslaving blacks?

            It sure has. Every culture has good and bad points. That doesn’t make it not exist.

            You edited after I posted, but here goes.

            “White American” is the general name for Americans whose descent is so far in the past that they don’t have a clear idea of where they’re from, especially Scots-Irish Americans.

            We have a very distinctive culture that we are justifiably proud of. It is unique to us, even though other races shared the country when it was forged, and it’s uniquely both “white” and “American”.

            The idea that saying “I am proud of my Revolutionary heritage and the Protestant culture that is the core of modern America and was brought by English settlers” is somehow less evil than “I am proud of my white heritage” is silly.

            My sister-in-law, as I’ve mentioned, is black, and she is proud of her black heritage. But it’s not the same, and my heritage doesn’t include hers, and it would be disingenuous to pretend it does.

          • mtl1882 says:

            @EchoChaos

            I certainly did not intend to be dismissive, and I apologize if it came across that way.

            Where we disagree is that I don’t see those men as sharing a culture that can be identified as “white American.” They are representative of some pretty different cultures, John Adams in particular sticking out in comparison to some others. To the extent that you could fit them into an American culture based on living in the new world and the associated “conquer the frontier”/freedom mindset of new possibilities, I would include free blacks in that, and some other small groups that may not be white. In the revolutionary war and the Civil War, blacks fought in not insignificant numbers.

            There’s a pretty good argument that culturally, white Northerners and Southerners were more different from each other than from the black Americans that lived among them. And the New England culture was a very distinct thing, as was the Southern gentlemen culture, as was the frontier culture, and they did not like being lumped together. Abraham Lincoln would never have claimed he was of the same culture as a New Englander. Frederick Douglass later said he and Lincoln connected because of their similar experiences starting at the “bottom rung of the ladder.” But had Douglass been a field slave, he would never have said that, because the west considered plantation slave culture very alien.

            For that reason, I find state-based pride more reasonable – Texas has its cultural lore, so does Massachusetts, etc. Quite often the historical leaders were white, but I don’t consider it an exclusively white culture. There were usually others participating. The regional cultures were American, responding to the unique political and geographical situations we were in, but were not necessarily white.

            Once you get to Teddy Roosevelt’s time, we’re at a point where we have an actual non-regional American culture, but at that point I definitely don’t consider it a separate white culture. It included blacks and others. They may not have had full rights everywhere, but they felt like Americans, acted like Americans, and significantly influenced and participated in American culture.

            It’s not that “our culture” existed and then brought in others, who erased it. It’s that at first, there was no “our culture,” just various people of European cultures. It was more or less English culture, and remained so for some time. The culture that began developing into ours was influenced by people who were not white who were there from the beginning. Someone might be proud of their English history, as many great things came to America from England (basis of the legal system, etc.) It’s hard for me to see it as a “white American culture” instead of an “English culture,” though. And then the west basically dropped most of the English culture, so there was no “white American culture” to speak of.

            To boil it down, I maintain there is no discernible white American culture. There is eventually an American culture, which is not defined by being white, and various subsets of it based mainly on country of origin, geography, class, or time, and sometimes race or ethnicity or religion. Those men were the faces of American culture, but it included women and people of other backgrounds, all working together to develop a culture that started out regional and became more broadly American over time.

          • keranih says:

            Celebrating cultures is great, but there is no “white American culture” to celebrate.

            …I completely, utterly, and wholeheartedly disagree with this. More over, I am infuriated by your attempt to erase the unique perspectives and values of Euro-descent Americans in this manner. Please stop doing this.

            I don’t insist that you value that culture. I do insist that you not pretend that it doesn’t exist.

          • j r says:

            @EchoChaos

            I’m not sure what point you’re making there. That white American culture has included enslaving blacks?

            No. The point is the culture that you’re calling “white American” is actually just American and has been taking contributions from non-whites since before there even was an America.

            And just to be clear, this is not just a white thing. There are black people who express pride in the African-American contribution to the United States or who are proud to be of the Nigerian diaspora or whatever and those people tend to be different than the explicit black nationalists who talk about having melanin as a superpower and believe that Napolean shot the nose off of the Sphinx to hide the fact that the ancient Egyptians were black.

            So yes, in my experience the person who says, “as someone of Scottish descent, I am proud of the contributions of the Scottish Enlightenment and its role in shaping American culture” is markedly different than the person going on about “white culture” or white pride or whatever.

          • EchoChaos says:

            I don’t see how “your culture doesn’t exist” can’t be seen as dismissive towards white Americans, and although I don’t think you meant it maliciously, I think it’s a good reminder to avoid cultural erasure of any kind.

            What you’re doing is I think pretty classic motte and bailey. The argument “white American culture doesn’t exist” becomes “some minorities contributed in some ways to white American culture, therefore it’s not exclusively white”.

            There are of course cultural differences between American states, even in the same region, and Michiganders can be proud of being Michiganders and Americans at the same time.

            Similarly, although there are differences between regions, within regions and within America, there are also similarities large enough to be a white American culture, which is clearly not European, and from which minorities were broadly excluded.

            So broadly as to form their own cultures, and while the minority cultures certainly influenced the majority (and vice versa) they were distinct. Blacks have had a very different American experience, and saying that they’re both part of the same culture still isn’t true.

            Ask any black whether they identify with Abraham Lincoln or Harriet Tubman and I don’t doubt you’ll get a pretty clear answer.

            Additionally, you see a lot of what happened to me in this thread, where the positives of American culture are given to another cultural group (the English! Multiracial groups!) and the negatives are happily assigned to “white Americans” (Slavery! Segregation! Stealing Land!).

            American was distinct enough and cohesive enough that De Tocqueville was able to write a treatise on it in the 1830s, so I also don’t buy your argument that it was a post Civil War invention. Certainly there was a great push in the aftermath of Reconstruction to try to heal some of those wounds, but the rhetoric is always “brothers who fought who now come together”. And even post civil war, the law was very clear that white was “default American” and everyone else was excluded. Witness the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1920.

          • rlms says:

            @keranih

            I am infuriated by your attempt to erase the unique perspectives and values of Euro-descent Americans in this manner.

            Name three.

          • keranih says:

            (this was originally posted in error further up and on a different subthread. My apologies.)

            @rlms –

            I’ll give you four – industriousness, faithful marriages, honesty, and religiousity.

            A fifth and sixth are appreciation for independence over security, and improvisation over following established rules in order to meet the goal.

            Before anyone jumps to claim that I am trying to say that all Caucasian Americans exhibit all these traits all the time, or that no non-Caucasians exhibit any of these traits ever – *no*, not what I’m saying.

            Might be good to recall this culture model.

          • LesHapablap says:

            Can you describe what “white American culture” is? What foods it eats? Accent and vocabulary? Clothing? Values and attitudes? Recreation? Religion?

            America is a massive place. Do white Portlanders count as white American culture, or is it white Texans? or white New Yorkers? Red or blue tribe?

          • Matt M says:

            Can you describe what “white American culture” is?

            A comprehensive effort at cataloging such things already exists!

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Does it include raisins in the potato salad?

          • rlms says:

            @keranih
            Firstly, I think you’re wrong that white Americans disproportionately embody those traits. Some actually seem like non-white American culture — I think Asian Americans would be widely regarded as more industrious and black Americans are factually more religious — and I don’t see any evidence that the others are significantly more prevalent among white Americans than e.g. white Europeans.

            But secondly, I don’t think those traits (or many of the other things in the hidden part of the iceberg) are commonly regarded as part of culture. Specific instances of them might be, say if all white Americans go to a particular kind of church. That’s the kind of thing I was looking for examples of.

          • RobJ says:

            I’ll give you four – industriousness, faithful marriages, honesty, and religiousity.

            That just seems like a statement of conservatives values to me. I have a hard time seeing those as “white American” cultural values. I’d be interested to hear from outside America if they see a distinct “white American” culture, because being a white American it is much easier for me to see the dramatic differences than what is similar.

            I guess I don’t see why “white” is a necessary part of the cultural identification. If you relate to conservative American cultural values, then there is your culture, it’s already there and mostly white. Why exclude people with shared values of other races? If you take pride in the institutions constructed by our founding fathers, how about just “American”? The only reasons I see for choosing “white” are either bigotry or an unjustifiably cohesive idea of what being white in America means.

            I also have some problem with invoking the founding fathers / colonial Americans. There has been so much white immigration to America since it’s founding that it’s hard to imagine a strong through-line that is common to any majority of the white population aside from what draws people of all races to come here (so again why the need for “white”).

          • johansenindustries says:

            Do all African-Americans have to go to the same sort of church or listen to the same music for them to have a culture?

          • AG says:

            Does it include raisins in the potato salad?

            Do you mean the unsatisfying middle ground of a rehydrated dehydrated grape? Is that actually a white people thing? I thought that was an asian fusion abomination.

          • rlms says:

            @johansenindustries
            No, don’t be obtuse.

          • johansenindustries says:

            I’m not being obstuse. You’re making an isolated demand for rigour.

          • mdet says:

            (“Raisins in the potato salad” was a joke from SNL, and something of a meme among black people generally, about white people poorly adapting soul food recipes. Although it’s not really unique to that context — I’ve seen Red Tribe make similar jokes about Blue Tribe obsession with kale / arugula)

          • Nornagest says:

            Huh, TIL. It sounded to me like a joke about Midwestern food.

            Kale’s pretty good. Arugula tastes like rotten eggs, though. I mistakenly bought a thing of arugula pesto once and it made the whole dish inedible.

            I’ve heard plenty of jokes about avocados — about half directed at Californians and the other half at millennials. Mea culpa on that one, although they go bad so quickly that they’re hard to actually cook with.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Nornagest:
            I was referencing SNL (specifically this Black Jeopardy skit), but I think they are cribbing off of an older joke/meme that IS about Midwestern food (for instance, church social potluck fare).

          • rlms says:

            @johansenindustries
            sufficient \neq necessary; git logic, scrub

          • johansenindustries says:

            If hugely core values like the one’s keranih don’t count and you flat out reject them if they don’t include or are more like ‘Specific instances of them might be, say if all white Americans go to a particular kind of church.’ then it suggests that you need some surface-fetish like Tacos, Mega-Churches, or ‘fish n chips, guvnor’ to have a culture. Which is completely backwards.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Everyone who is against “White American culture” says one of two things:

            “American culture belongs to everyone, therefore it isn’t just white”. Which is generous, but I’d put it differently: “White American culture is very accommodating of others mimicking it and lets them join”. The idea that a small minority joining a larger culture makes it not the larger culture is as silly as claiming there is no black urban culture because wiggers exist.

            Or “There are smaller cultures but no bigger one”, which is fairly obviously wrong, since white Americans are more similar to each other (whether from Montana or Florida) than they are to Europeans.

            Take gun rights as a simple example. White Americans are WAY crazier about guns than any other whites (or any other race) in the world. It’s very unique, but it spans the entire country, from New Hampshire, in the heart of Yankeedom, to the South, to the Mountain West and even the Left Coast.

            And the idea that minority Americans think of themselves more as Americans than their race is obviously silly. Take Black Panther. In that movie, the villain is a black American and the hero a black African, who is specifically NOT American. Yet black Americans identify with him more than they ever did with Captain America, who is the embodiment of “America”.

            White American is a real culture with a real heritage different than Europeans, Latin Americans, Black Americans or any other.

          • Matt M says:

            It might also be worth pointing out that the formation of the United States of America happened before the unification of Germany and Italy, as we know of them today.

            The notion that “German” or “Italian” culture gains its legitimacy due to having a long and lengthy tradition, but “American” culture is no such thing because it’s so new is a little strange in that regard.

            Prior to the 19th century, a “German” was simple a resident of Europe who happened to speak the German language. This granted some cultural commonalities, but certainly not all of them.

          • j r says:

            White American is a real culture with a real heritage different than Europeans, Latin Americans, Black Americans or any other.

            This is kind of true, but only in the sense that the very idea of “white” identity was specifically constructed to delineate who did and did not get the full slate of rights promised under the constitution and common law and the full protection of the law.

            I don’t want to get into a “is race a social construct” debate and I do believe that there is a biological/genetic basis for splitting people into different population groups. That said, the racial taxonomy of “white, black, asian, whatever else” is way more about social and political distinctions than about biology.

            There is certainly an “American culture,” but almost everything associated with that culture either derives directly from people of color or have people of color as significant contributors to the history and development of that thing. Look at the things that are most identifiable with America: jazz, rock and roll, cowboys, baseball. I guess apple pie is one thing that has solely European roots. But heck, even country music wouldn’t exist as it does now if it weren’t for the blues.

            I’m not being obstuse. You’re making an isolated demand for rigour.

            I don’t think that’s what happened at all. @Keranih mad the claim that religiosity is something that is distinctly identifiable as white American culture. In fact, black Americans have much higher rates of religiosity by almost any measure. See for yourself: http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/racial-and-ethnic-composition/. That’s not a selective demand for rigour; that’s just a factual correction.

            … I’d put it differently: “White American culture is very accommodating of others mimicking it and lets them join”.

            Yeah, I guess you could put it that way, but that’s a very… (please pardon the pun) whitewashed view of American history.

          • johansenindustries says:

            I don’t think that’s what happened at all. @Keranih mad the claim that religiosity is something that is distinctly identifiable as white American culture. In fact, black Americans have much higher rates of religiosity by almost any measure. See for yourself: http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/racial-and-ethnic-composition/. That’s not a selective demand for rigour; that’s just a factual correction.

            He gave six elements and they were all dismissed.

            Would we say to somebody describing the family-orientated culture of Mexicans: ‘what, look at Mormons’.

            Or somebody discussing the wordplay-loving of African Americans, ‘actually look at all these punning white people’.

            Somebody mentioned Country music taking from the blues, do we say that RnB is not part of African American culture since it is descended from western tradition?

          • j r says:

            Somebody mentioned Country music taking from the blues, do we say that RnB is not part of African American culture since it is descended from western tradition?

            The point is not that white people don’t exist or don’t have any group characteristics. The point is that all of these efforts to define American culture as white are built around erasing other people from the historical record.

            Just to be clear, I think that Northeastern WASP culture is a thing, I think that Appalachian Hillbilly culture is a thing, you can probably talk of the culture of the Bible Belt, and maybe I could think of a few more, but the idea of a singular “white American” culture is mostly a chimera.

            And when people talk about the culture of African Americans, they’re almost always talking about it as an ethnicity akin to Italian Americans or Polish Americans and not as the opposite of white. I say almost, because yes, there are black nationalists, but they represent a pretty small and marginalized part of the whole.

          • johansenindustries says:

            Nobody is saying that American culture is white, people are suggesting that there exists a white american culture which makes up part of that broader american culture.

            Just to be clear, I think that Northeastern WASP culture is a thing, I think that Appalachian Hillbilly culture is a thing, you can probably talk of the culture of the Bible Belt, and maybe I could think of a few more, but the idea of a singular “white American” culture is mostly a chimera.

            Would you agree that in terms of culture and shared touchstones that hillbillies and WASPs are more similar to each other than they are to English or Indians. That if you were to ask, for example, for a typical member to give the best author from their culture that they are both pretty likely to say something like ‘Mark Twain’. If you were to ask about the importance of free speech that they’d both be very strong in their support for it? Do they cook with the same sort of spice amount and vegetable-to-meat ratio. Do either group eat horse or haggis? What about pork or beef?

            And when people talk about the culture of African Americans, they’re almost always talking about it as an ethnicity akin to Italian Americans or Polish Americans and not as the opposite of white. I say almost, because yes, there are black nationalists, but they represent a pretty small and marginalized part of the whole.

            When mocking people objecting to Black History* Month, the response is that the other eleven are white history month not that the other eleven months are Polish or Italian history month. The backlash against George Michael popularity as a soul singer was not that he was Italian or Polish but because he was white. Nobody says that White is the opposite of Black in this case, just that they are recognized as being distinct.

            * History – who you support, take as an icon etc. – obviously is a major part of a shared culture.

          • j r says:

            Nobody is saying that American culture is white, people are suggesting that there exists a white american culture which makes up part of that broader american culture.

            The problem is that, in practice, these two things tend to look an awful lot alike.

            Go back to my original exchange with @EchoChaos. He cited Jamestown as part of “white American culture.” I pointed out that there were blacks in Jamestown, which he took to mean that I was bringing up slavery. I wasn’t. I was pointing out that a good deal of the things that get wrapped up into white American culture are just American culture, as they involve significant contributions from people of color. They become “white American” culture when you erase other people.

            Also, I’m really just not sure how I am supposed to interpret this:

            I don’t want a “White Homeland”. I want a white American homeland.

            If that’s not an explicit call for white nationalism, then I don’t know what is.

            When mocking people objecting to Black History* Month, the response is that the other eleven are white history month not that the other eleven months are Polish or Italian history month. The backlash against George Michael popularity as a soul singer was not that he was Italian or Polish but because he was white.

            That’s right and that fits exactly with the idea that, in this case, black is not the opposite of white, but the equivalent of Polish or Italian.

            And I don’t really get the point of the George Michael example. Sure, someone somewhere probably objected to George Michael or other white people singing something that sounds like soul music. So what?

            That didn’t stop George Michael from having a tremendously successful career with millions of fans (many of them black). And it didn’t stop Justin Timberlake or Teena Marie or Michael McDonald from having their own successful careers. Nor does it stop Kylie Jenner from making millions of dollars on having artificially plumped lips.

            Some of the complaints coming from the white resentment side of these conversations are really really trite.

          • johansenindustries says:

            I am not complaining about how George Michael was treated, I am saying that your world view that has a place for particular Italian, Irish cultures but not the general white is wrong. The backlash against George Michael is not reasonably described as ‘someone somewhere probably objected’ but the point is that he wasn’t objected to because of him being a particular white sub-ethnicity but because he was white.

            I don’t want a “White Homeland”. I want a white American homeland.

            If that’s not an explicit call for white nationalism, then I don’t know what is.

            That is somebody responding with the same language as his interlocutor to get to the nub of the disagreement (White American culture is not Swedish culture) in the interest of disinterested debate rather than getting on his outrage horse or throwing insults.

            It is in fact the more White Nationalist positions to think that a ‘white homeland’ is enough and that differences are racial not cultural.

            The problem is that, in practice, these two things tend to look an awful lot alike.

            As an Englishman I’m aware of this. (If I were a Scotsman, then I might be even more aware of it.) There is a British culture, an English culture, a Scottish culture etc. The English dominates because we are many, you’re more likely to hear about Shakespeare than Burns etc. But that doesn’t deny a difference. And sometimes people will mistake something that is from Scotland as being from England – people make mistakes. Film at 11 – that does not demonstrate the lack of a real distinction.

            To a certain extent I wonder how much is semantics. (I believe in an incomplete (for the individual)American culture which is made complete by the addition of the unique black American culture (which is itself incomplete because Crompton blacks are not Detroit blacks etc.) or white American culture (which is itself incomplete) whereas you believe in an American culture which black or Poles or Italian etc.deviate (in part) from.

            I am interested in the question ‘is there such a thing as a distinct white American culture’. Are you interested in a different question?

          • keranih says:

            To hit a few high (and low) points of the replies –

            – All cultures share common points with *some* other cultures, just as all human groups share genes with other human groups (or for that matter, with other species, be they ape or banana). It is a fundamental error to say “other groups are also X so being X can’t be a distinguishing characteristic of *this* group”.

            – I deliberately use ‘Caucasian’ instead of ‘white’ (and African-American instead of black) to highlight the shared ancestry part of the cultural transmission. Another term is ‘Euro-descent’ – and so is ‘Anglo-American’. None of these terms is perfect – but neither is ‘African-American’ which fails to convey the limited selection of individuals who were funneled through the slave trade to the Americas. (It wasn’t a representative selection of all of Africa, or even sub-Sahara Africa.)

            – For the SSC commentators here – consider that you yourself might not be a typical member of the culture under consideration. ‘Caucasian American culture’ – aka ‘stuff white people like’ – is *not* the same as ‘urban globalist culture subset United States’. There is overlap, yes, but its not the same.

            — those who point out that WASP is a thing, and so is the Appalachian culture, and Portandia (although that’s more globalist than many) and so is the West…*yes*. You’re getting it. You see a difference between the average majority expression of preferences by the people in one group vs the people of another group. There are like differences between Euro-descent Americans and all those not Euro-descent Americans.

            —those who say that ‘the majority of those differences in preferences originated in, and can not be distinguished from, the influences of [non-Euro-descent Americans but mostly African Americans]’ – no, not correct in my opinion. There are strong influences, yes, and ‘American South’ culture is a mix of the African American culture and the Euro-descent culture that is now (and for some time) its own thing, (much to the surprise of non-South people who only encountered dark-skinned people who ate greens & watermelon) But Euro-descent culture has habits and expressed preferences quite distinct from African-American.

            —-African-American culture isn’t African, either.

            – Yes, there are groups that are more religious than Euro-descent Americans. Yes, there are groups that are more industrious (Germans, for a notorious example). There are groups with a higher average honesty (English would be my go-to here, but I am willing to accept other suggestions.) The grouping of the distinct traits is what makes Euro-Americans distinguishable from others.

            – As previously indicated – another trait that is both distinct and fairly unique is the tolerance for mimicry and incursions – that is, Euro-descent Americans take up new habits with ease and are not jealous of others taking up their own. For comparison – the French and the Japanese (each in different ways.)

            – As for ‘pop culture’ preferences – there is science fiction, which is popular across American culture and to a depth into the hinterlands in a way that is unique, and there is what Tai-Nelson Coates called “white people guitars” – the emphasis on strings vs on drums/horns/other rhythm devices in music. Salad is served before a meal (ask the Australians about this) and is generally served instead of soup. Bread is wheat-based and sliced. Cold milk and cereal is a typical breakfast. these are things that can be seen in any household across the planet. But they appear commonly and typically ‘mongst mine own kind.

            As I said in the beginning – one doesn’t have to be part of this culture. One doesn’t have see it as all that valuable. But it is *there*. Stop saying that it isn’t.

            annnddd as a final point – it’s “she” – as in, when keranih said that, I think SHE meant… Not because I’m cranky at anyone, but just as a point of fact.

          • Matt M says:

            That’s right and that fits exactly with the idea that, in this case, black is not the opposite of white, but the equivalent of Polish or Italian.

            Does this even make sense though?

            “Black” is, also, a very generic term to describe a very large group of people with wildly different genetic histories and ethnic traditions. The “culture” of African-Americans is very different from the culture of Jamaicans, which is very different from the culture of West Africa, which is very different from the culture of South Africa, etc.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I don’t identify with any specific European ethnicity. My father’s line comes from Poland and I’ve got their religion (Catholic) and we make grandma’s khruchiki recipe at Christmas, but that’s about it. My mother’s father descends from Italian immigrants and my mother’s mother’s family predates the Revolution. My 23 & Me results are a map of Europe.

            One can say my culture is “American,” as I like guns, the flag, freedom, self-reliance, burgers, the Constitution, free speech, driving my own car, capitalism, stadium sports that aren’t soccer, and the awesome power of the US military. But my culture is clearly distinct from black American (or African-American) culture because if I tried to do stuff commonly associated with black people like rap or sway and clap in church people would make fun of me.

            What subset of American culture is my specific culture, then, if not “white American?”

          • j r says:

            Does this even make sense though?

            Yes, if you put it in the context in which it was mentioned, which is in regards to Black History Month. Black History Month equals African American History month. It doesn’t equal History of the Black Race Month.

            As I mentioned above, there are in fact black nationalists, where the black refers to a racial category and not the specific ethnic category of African Americans. And black nationalists tend to be pretty similar to white nationalists. That is, both groups have an agenda beyond simple appreciation of a shared culture.

            I’m not sure why this is such a controversial topic for some people. This is how these categories are used in the real world. If you were on a college campus and you saw a flyer for the Greek Student Union sponsored Greek Cultural Appreciation Day, you’d probably expect to find a party with people serving souvlaki and musaka Maybe there’d be some folk dancing and someone playing the bouzouki. If you saw a flyer for the Black Student Union having an African American Cultural Appreciation Day, maybe you’d find some kind of politically charged grievance fest, but you’d just as likely find soul food and jazz music and lessons in hip hop dance. That is, in those situations, there’s a good chance that you’re going to find people with no political motive, but who really just want to celebrate that culture.

            If, however, you’re on a college campus and you see a flyer for White Appreciate Day, you can be pretty sure that you’re not just going to find a bunch of people playing the banjo or talking about the history of Mainline Protestantism. No, you’re going to find one of two things: a gathering of actual white nationalists or some kind of protest/publicity stunt meant to harp on the supposed double-standard of not being able to openly celebrate white culture.

            Again, there are factual claims. Go investigate them for yourself. Here’s a Wikipedia article on White Student Unions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Student_Unions. Almost all the cases mention fall into one of the above two categories.

          • albatross11 says:

            Fuzzy categories are fuzzy; If I say Mexican culture includes a love of fireworks, that’s not invalidated by pointing out that many other people also love fireworks, nor by pointing out that some Mexicans can’t stand fireworks.

          • Matt M says:

            Black History Month equals African American History month.

            Does it?

            I recall plenty of celebration of “African-American” and Caribbean history included within the overall purview of “black history month.”

            And even if I concede your point, there are still numerous different African tribes. In that case, the equivalent would NOT be “Irish History Month” but rather “European History Month”

          • johansenindustries says:

            Again, there are factual claims

            Sure it is a factual claim, but it isn’t a factual claim that favours ‘there is no such thing as white american culture’ over white american culture it does not need a designated space.

            For example, in the UK there are ‘American-style’ restaurants/diners we can go to. I would assume that is not the case in the US. (You might have 50s style diners, but that’s a bit different).

          • Nornagest says:

            It might also be worth pointing out that the formation of the United States of America happened before the unification of Germany and Italy, as we know of them today.

            This is true, but it’s also true that nationalism — viz. the idea that ethnic/cultural/linguistic nations should coincide with political borders — is a fairly new thing. That idea won so thoroughly that most of us don’t really think about it anymore (though ethnic nationalism is very much still an active issue in various places), but it wasn’t well established at all as late as the 17th century; Germany and Italy were relative latecomers as far as Europe goes, but only relative ones. Generally, the further back you go, the less well the political borders match the cultural ones.

            That doesn’t mean that German culture, f’rex, doesn’t have a long history. It just means that most of it was the history of the German-speaking peoples, not the history of the German nation-state.

          • LesHapablap says:

            Conrad Honcho,

            You’re red tribe

            Remember how Scott has 150 facebook friends and none of them are creationists, yet half of Americans are creationists? That’s because it is a different culture

          • Matt M says:

            That doesn’t mean that German culture, f’rex, doesn’t have a long history.

            My suggestion is that it means that “German culture” as we understand it is actually a “melting pot” (if you will) of Prussian culture and Bavarian culture and other Germanic cultures that started combining together in a national form in the 19th century.

            Which is remarkably similar to “American culture” in that sense. The claim here seems to be that American culture has a categorically different built-in demand for diversity and multi-ethnicity that does not exist in any other culture. I dispute this claim.

          • RobJ says:

            I think part of the issue I have is the disproportionality of it. It’s certainly possible that you can come up with things that are more common among white Americans than other groups. And sure, there are black people who don’t identify with black culture, which doesn’t completely invalidate the existence of black culture. But when a huge percentage of the people that are in the culture you claim (white Americans) reject it, that should tell you something. And I think part of the reason so many people reject it is that it is too big. As mentioned previously, a lot of the things being claimed as white American culture are just red tribe culture. That’s a big chunk of white Americans, no doubt, but I don’t think it’s even a majority. Can you really claim to be part of a culture that more than half the people in it don’t identify with?

          • EchoChaos says:

            I think the “culture” thing has been beaten to death, but I’ll say that I stand by my statement that motte and baileying is going on a lot here.

            But I do want to address the “White nationalist” part, because I think it’s a fairly interesting point. I want an America that is dominated by white American culture. I identify that with baseball, apple pie, guns, God, family, patriotism, etc.

            There is basically only one people in the world that has that, and it’s white Americans. This isn’t because other people are bad, but it isn’t their culture.

            To maintain that, you have to maintain the demography of the country, which means maintaining majority white. In places that are majority-minority, the culture I love is gone.

            So I am “white nationalist” in the sense that I want my culture maintained and my culture is white American. But I’d be just as against a mass movement of white Frenchmen that were turning my country French (and anti-Irish/Italian/German sentiment in the past shows this is a pretty traditional American view).

            But this view is also held by my Grandfather, who literally fought Hitler. If you want to call that white nationalism, go ahead. But I’m explicitly not white supremacist and I don’t want the internal laws of the US to oppress the minorities here.

          • dick says:

            Thank you for typing this up, this is a clear and earnest description of a position that I’ve had little exposure to. Which is what I’m here for! And I’m sympathetic to loving and wanting to preserve your culture. What I don’t really buy is the idea that the culture you’re trying to preserve is “white American culture.” After reading this thread, it seems fairer to say that there are a bunch of different overlapping and intermingled American cultures, and you love the subset you grew up with or identify with. Nothing wrong with that, but “I’m concerned that my favorite subset of American culture is being subsumed by competing American cultures” does not quite have the same heft.

            Anyway, one question:

            To maintain that, you have to maintain the demography of the country, which means maintaining majority white.

            Why? America has a lot of non-white people who love baseball and guns and Jesus, and a lot of white people who don’t. Is it the culture you want to keep, or the skin tone?

            (NB: Texas isn’t majority white, and they have two baseball teams. California isn’t either, and they have four. Five, if you count the Padres.)

          • EchoChaos says:

            @dick

            You continue to take a reductive “Thing X is your culture and there are non-white people who like Thing X, therefore you should be okay importing millions of them” approach.

            A culture is far too large to distill to a series of points, and there are substantial differences even when people like the same things.

            There is a reason that a constant refrain among white Americans on the right is that there is a feeling of loss, that the American communities that their parents and grandparents belonged to is under siege and perhaps vanishing entirely.

            Making reductive statements like “but there are still baseball teams in California” doesn’t reassure those people.

            Especially when they are gleefully saying that the culture people are worried about losing doesn’t exist.

          • dick says:

            I didn’t mean your culture was only baseball and Jesus and guns. I accept that there is a hard-to-define thing that called “your culture” and I’m not demanding that you be able to define it precisely. But whatever it is, aren’t there non-white Americans who share it with you, and white Americans who don’t? And if so, doesn’t it follow that the way to preserve your culture is to spread it to people who don’t share it (regardless of their race), not to maximize the number of white people (regardless of their culture)?

          • EchoChaos says:

            But whatever it is, aren’t there non-white Americans who share it with you, and white Americans who don’t?

            Absolutely there are. You can probably think of examples off the top of your head. They are the minorities of both groups (i.e. the majority of white Americans share my culture and the majority of non-white Americans don’t).

            And if so, doesn’t it follow that the way to preserve your culture is to spread it to people who don’t share it (regardless of their race), not to maximize the number of white people (regardless of their culture)?

            Culture is something you’re born into. Humans really don’t change culture much during life, and those few people who do generally find it a traumatic and uncomfortable experience. Most minorities who share white American culture have either had an usual life story or have consciously changed culture.

            Let’s say I was the most amazing cultural changer in the world and could convince a full third of people to share my culture. That would still mean I would become more outnumbered the more people came.

            And the rejoined “Italians and Irishmen joined your culture”, well, that’s mostly false. They had very different cultures, and it was only intermarriage with the white American community and generations that made them “white Americans”.

            I don’t care about “more white people” in the abstract, although as their sort-of cousin I do wish them well. I DO care about more white Americans, because that’s who I am. And I believe that the only way to make more is the old fashioned way, which is why I am expecting my fourth child within the week.

          • Matt M says:

            And if so, doesn’t it follow that the way to preserve your culture is to spread it to people who don’t share it (regardless of their race)

            Well the British definitely tried that.

            A lot of people seem to have not appreciated the attempt.

          • Dan L says:

            @EchoChaos

            They are the minorities of both groups (i.e. the majority of white Americans share my culture and the majority of non-white Americans don’t).

            This isn’t obvious to me. I would like you to make an empirical case that the culture you’re indicating is better described by ethnicity than by, say, time period and socio-economic status. (Or by the words “red tribe”.) “The majority of white Americans share my culture” is a tough case to make about anyone who predates the current identifiable trappings.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            @EchoChaos

            I am sympathetic for the most part to your stance about what you’re calling “White American Culture”, but I have to push back on something because I think it is a fundamental tactical error. When you say “there is basically only one people in the world that has that, and it’s White Americans”, that basically is doing too much work. Are the majority of the people who have that culture Caucasian? I’m almost positive that the answer is yes. But it’s an exaggeration and a serious mistake to ignore the degree to which that culture HAS successfully assimilated non-white individuals and families from the 1800s to today.

            I won’t even object to a claim like “Irish, Italian, and English immigrants can be assimilated faster than Hispanics, who can be assimilated faster than Asians, who can be assimilated faster than Arabs, who can be assimilated faster than African-Americans”, at least not for the purposes of our current conversation (I think it has less to do with racial makeup and a lot to do with a combination of individual attitudes and parent culture, but we’ll set that aside for now). The fact remains that we DO have fully assimilated and integrated Hispanics, Asians, Blacks, Arabs, and so forth who ARE part of your “White American Culture”. And that means that you’re wrong in your assumption that the only way to preserve that culture is to maintain majority-white demographics. You dismiss this as “intermarriage and generations”, but what is intermarriage if not a marker of cultural assimilation, and multi-generational assimilation is still assimilation.

            Now, that potentially long timescale DOES indicate that there are levels and more importantly rates of demographic change beyond which the integrity of your culture is threatened. But that’s something that can be addressed with tweaks to immigration policy and to culture well short of framing it as a matter of “We have to make sure there are more whites than blacks in this neighborhood/state/country or else our culture will be destroyed”. And I think we want to avoid that sort of framing and thinking because it is precisely that approach that not only slows the rate of assimilation of new immigrants (which we are going to have) but it puts everyone who isn’t already well-integrated even more on the defensive and makes it more of an explicit culture war.

            I will freely admit that it’s not as simple at this point as the sorts of strategies employed by politicians like Mitt Romney. I’m talking more long term and not primarily focused on granting of political favors to specific minority interests (in part because that would simply reinforce the coherence of a ‘minority interest’, when I want to decohere and assimilate that group into the whole as much as possible).

          • Aapje says:

            @j r

            If you saw a flyer for the Black Student Union having an African American Cultural Appreciation Day, maybe you’d find some kind of politically charged grievance fest, but you’d just as likely find soul food and jazz music and lessons in hip hop dance. That is, in those situations, there’s a good chance that you’re going to find people with no political motive, but who really just want to celebrate that culture.

            If, however, you’re on a college campus and you see a flyer for White Appreciate Day, you can be pretty sure that you’re not just going to find a bunch of people playing the banjo or talking about the history of Mainline Protestantism.

            Sure, but that is because specifically appreciating White American culture is associated with racism, so non-racist people don’t do it.

            So if you want to play the Banjo in a group, you call it Banjo Appreciation Day or if you want to have both Banjo playing and talking about the history of Mainline Protestantism, you find another pretext, like Southern Culture Appreciation Day.

            Black Americans have more leeway to explicitly celebrate their culture.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @LesHapablap

            You’re red tribe

            Remember how Scott has 150 facebook friends and none of them are creationists, yet half of Americans are creationists? That’s because it is a different culture

            In that same essay, Scott repeatedly called out liberal publications using “white” and “America” as synonyms for what he called “Red Tribe.”

            If I say “Red Tribe” everyone here nods and understands what I mean. If I say “White American,” well, that just doesn’t exist. This does not follow. What SSC refers to as “red tribe” everyone else, supporters and critics alike, refers to as “white America.”

            Regardless of what actions one thinks are acceptable to preserve or destroy this culture, I don’t understand the claim it doesn’t exist.

            Is there anyone else in the world, besides white Americans who do not identify with a European ethnicity, who also do not have a culture?

          • RobJ says:

            What SSC refers to as “red tribe” everyone else, supporters and critics alike, refers to as “white America.”

            That’s definitely not true. Sometimes, sure, but it more often gets referred to as “rural America”, or maybe sometimes the “white working class” or more pejoratively “rednecks”. “White America” mostly gets invoked in relation to minority issues. Things like “What white America doesn’t understand about [insert minority culture here]” or “privilege” talk, etc…

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @RobJ

            So “white American culture” does exist, and it’s broader than merely the Red Tribe, encompassing the things white Red/Blue/Grey tribe Americans have in common?

            Or does it only exist when one wants to criticize it, but not when one wants to defend it? Like you can indict “white America” for racism, but one can’t defend “white America” for valuing individual liberty, self-reliance or adherence to the rule of law without being told that “white America” doesn’t exist?

          • AG says:

            I want an America that is dominated by white American culture. I identify that with baseball, apple pie, guns, God, family, patriotism, etc.

            As was pointed out above, most of the signifiers chosen here were historically developed with ample participation or origination in minority groups. They only became red tribe territory recently, because red tribers systematically excluded minorities until said minorities, tired of fighting the gatekeeping, abandoned those aspects to make new ones. And then some historical erasure was gleefully had to finish staking their claim to that culture.

            This isn’t just a red tribe thing. I side-eye the “white people stole jazz from black people” narrative a bit because it does the same erasure of how much Jews shaped jazz. To claim jazz as inherently white or black culture is just factually wrong.

            The most American thing I’ve ever seen was a South Bay 4th of July parade. A troupe of Sikh Boy Scouts marched with American flags, wearing both Eagle Scout uniforms and turbans. People celebrated baseball, apple pie, guns, God, family, patriotism, and fish tacos and tikki masala and Panda Express Fried Rice, and even masala pizza. Utopia, honestly. I support the Melting Pot/And Culture/Culture Plus Culture.

            (People mock the implications of melting pot via Brazilian fusion food, but honestly, goals)

          • rlms says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            Is there anyone else in the world, besides white Americans who do not identify with a European ethnicity, who also do not have a culture?

            Yes, loads! Ethnic Asians in Asia, and ditto for Europe and Africa. Of course, Japanese Japanese, white French and black Nigerians all have cultures, but so do white South Dakotans. It’s true that the US is more or less unique in not having a majority ethnic group culture, but that’s because it’s unique in various other ways: it has a pretty short history; no unique language; and a relatively small ethnic majority containing people who are very culturally influential on a national and global level.

          • albatross11 says:

            AG:

            That scene kind-of catches a big part of what I think of as white American culture, to be honest.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Got it. So the next time someone brings up white privilege, or how the legacy of slavery benefits white people today, or writes a “What White People Need to Understand About X” post you’ll be sure to inform them that their premise is incoherent because there is no group of “white people.” They’ll need to specifically address “white South Dakotan privilege,” how the legacy of slavery benefits white South Dakotans today, and reframe their article to address “What White South Dakotans Need to Understand About X.”

          • RobJ says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            So “white American culture” does exist, and it’s broader than merely the Red Tribe, encompassing the things white Red/Blue/Grey tribe Americans have in common?

            What white Americans have in common is white skin, which in America could approximate to not visibly belonging to a minority group. Things that relate to this particular feature are generally what is being discussed in those types of articles (sure, not always). If you want to hang a culture on that, ok, but it doesn’t seem like much to me. Maybe you could come up with a few other things in common between blue/grey/red but I just have a hard time coming up with a coherent culture from that.

            Is there anyone else in the world, besides white Americans who do not identify with a European ethnicity, who also do not have a culture?

            Everyone is part of some culture. I just object one named “white Americans”. Can’t you pick something a little smaller and more coherent? It feels like the motivation not to do that is to somehow win identity politics by gathering white people under the same cultural banner. I’d prefer to just push back on the foregrounding of identity politics altogether.

          • rlms says:

            “White culture doesn’t exist” \neq “white people doesn’t exist”, pls logic moar.

            Although of course “what white people need to understand” would be an incoherent headline anyway.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            It feels like the motivation not to do that is to somehow win identity politics by gathering white people under the same cultural banner. I’d prefer to just push back on the foregrounding of identity politics altogether.

            But I’m not trying to gather white people under the same cultural banner. I’ve always been trying to do the color blind thing, and judge someone by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Deal with people as individuals.

            But then we got all the white privilege and “smash white supremacy” rhetoric and lots and lots of criticisms of “white people” and it feels like some of the non-white identity politics people are really trying to gather up all the white people into one group to excoriate them.

            It all seems extremely muddy and ill-defined and the rules of what you can say without pushback vary wildly depending on who you are and whether the statements are positive or negative. You can say white people are racist, responsible for slavery and all sorts of other injustices, should defer to and/or compensate other races, but also white people don’t exist so anything nice about them is incoherent but also white privilege is real and white supremacy should be smashed.

            It’s all very confusing. I’m just going to stick with liking the things I like in whatever it is I have that approximates a culture and being against people trying to change them.

          • rlms says:

            You can say white people are racist, responsible for slavery and all sorts of other injustices, should defer to and/or compensate other races

            Well, I don’t actually think you should say those things (where “white people” means “all” not “some”) but regardless only the first one could be a claim about culture.

          • Dan L says:

            I retract my earlier post in this thread in favor of +1’ing Trofim_Lysenko… though more empiricism is always good.

            @Conrad Honcho:

            But I’m not trying to gather white people under the same cultural banner. I’ve always been trying to do the color blind thing, and judge someone by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Deal with people as individuals.

            But then we got all the white privilege and “smash white supremacy” rhetoric and lots and lots of criticisms of “white people” and it feels like some of the non-white identity politics people are really trying to gather up all the white people into one group to excoriate them.

            It all seems extremely muddy and ill-defined and the rules of what you can say without pushback vary wildly depending on who you are and whether the statements are positive or negative. You can say white people are racist, responsible for slavery and all sorts of other injustices, should defer to and/or compensate other races, but also white people don’t exist so anything nice about them is incoherent but also white privilege is real and white supremacy should be smashed.

            It’s all very confusing. I’m just going to stick with liking the things I like in whatever it is I have that approximates a culture and being against people trying to change them.

            I actually agree with all of this. I’ll probably always resent Social Justice for taking the color blinders I had in childhood away from me.

            But I still object to the object-level argument that “White” is a useful description of the cultural group (I think) you are gesturing toward.

      • Joseph Greenwood says:

        I move in some confederate but no white supremacist circles, and I never knew anything edgy or cultural about 14 or 88 until this thread (but did you know that neither one can be written as a sum of two squares? 😉 ).

    • EchoChaos says:

      The Fourteen Words, like “It’s okay to be white”, always struck me as a powerful bit of trolling rhetoric by the white supremacists.

      Because the Fourteen Words are so clearly unobjectionable when said by anyone else about their own homeland.

      If the Prime Minister of Japan said “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for Japanese children”, he would be basically in line with all his rhetoric since forever.

      Same with Israel, Nigeria, Egypt, etc. The fact that people flip out when it says “white” is clearly meant to make leftists appear anti-white. Given that it is considered hate speech, it seems to be working.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Complicating factor: why the heck would a good person reject the possibility of marrying someone of a different race, in a country where citizens of different races are a fait accompli, so long as they’re the right religion?

        • EchoChaos says:

          I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask here, because I’m not actually a white supremacist and have mixed race marriages in my own family, but I’d say that the most common reason is that you want your kids to look like you.

          My black sister-in-law has commented that it is lamentable to her that all her kids can pass for Mediterranean or lighter because they don’t look as much like her, and she’s been asked if they’re adopted.

          • Tarpitz says:

            My mixed-race half-brothers look a lot like my Dad (and like me, and like my full brothers). There’s a lot more to visual similarity than skin tone.

            Though in fairness, I do occasionally suspect that Dad actually reproduces by cloning, not sexually…

        • hls2003 says:

          I suppose if race is a useful proxy for culture, then that could explain it. It would be the same phenomenon you’re gesturing at with “the right religion” – compatibility on cultural values and likelihood of inter-family harmony.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I suppose if race is a useful proxy for culture, then that could explain it. It would be the same phenomenon you’re gesturing at with “the right religion”

            Sure, and in some countries I think that’d be a pretty valid proxy.
            Meanwhile the point EchoChaos brought up about their sister-in-law doesn’t fit my moral intuitions. Their point doesn’t seem outright evil, but I wouldn’t feel right about having a racial bias toward redheads for the sake of my future children.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Really? I have heard many redheads concerned about a future without redheads, even hypothetically, and commenting about how amazing something like Redhead Days are.

            When you have a racial gap large enough that your kids’ resemblance is faint enough that you are mistaken for a non-relative, I can see how that would hurt a lot, especially when it’s relentless.

            When added to other proxies like culture and class, it can certainly form a pretty substantial barrier.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            When you have a racial gap large enough that your kids’ resemblance is faint enough that you are mistaken for a non-relative, I can see how that would hurt a lot, especially when it’s relentless.

            Oh, I sympathize with where she’s coming from. It’s just not something that had previously even been in my thought-world as a redhead American mutt.

        • RalMirrorAd says:

          You said would and not should so I will list reasons without justifying them. I’m not prepared to litigate these at length.

          1. Outbreeding depression
          2. Higher rates of inter-partner abuse
          3. Identity issues for the offspring
          4. “Unfair competition” for members of one sex of a particular ethnic group. [In the case where these couples are asymmetrically weighted in favor of one gender, the opposite gender has fewer partner options in relative and absolute terms]
          5. “Colorism” [this might be the wrong term] But I mean it as a situation where theoretically everyone could identify in part as being one race but class distinctions are still very real along the lines of skin tone.
          6. Chesterton’s fence (I’d say this is the weakest argument)

      • mdet says:

        The difference is that ethnic Japanese and nationality Japanese are pretty much the same thing. But part of the premise of America for most people is that we’re supposed to stand apart from other nations who define themselves by ethnicity, and simply welcome the best of everyone. The Fourteen Words deliberately imply that America should prioritize white people.

        But I do have some sympathy for what you’re saying — I recently had a conversation with family about some little cousins who are light enough that they could easily pass for white. As they grow up, should they identify as “mixed”? “White”? Neither? If they choose “white”, does that affect their relationship to our side of the family? Should we care?

        • EchoChaos says:

          I think that’s the exact point that they’re making.

          They’re angry that as Americans they don’t get a country that “ethnic” and “nationality” are the same.

          • perlhaqr says:

            They’re angry that as Americans they don’t get a country that “ethnic” and “nationality” are the same.

            Which, given that America is explicitly multicultural in origin, seems foolish. If they want a White Homeland, they should move to Sweden and agitate for one there. It’s a perfectly nice, historically “White” country.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            America is explicitly multicultural in origin

            Hmm. What? Certainly before 1800 the citizenry was overwhelmingly British Isles and even more overwhelmingly Northern European.

            Granted that the founders generally did not espouse an ethnic foundation to their new nation — but ethnic nationalism is a rather later invention. In any case, in a world of considerably lower geographic mobility, one could argue that it went without saying.

          • Matt M says:

            Granted that the founders generally did not espouse an ethnic foundation to their new nation

            The founders also didn’t espouse a hugely centralized national government. The complete and total erosion and subjugation of states rights came much later, and with it, the sublimation of localized culture.

            Do we really need to go back into our Albion’s Seed here?

          • EchoChaos says:

            Which, given that America is explicitly multicultural in origin, seems foolish.

            What? The Founders wrote “For us and our Posterity” into the Constitution. That’s about as explicitly racial as you get.

            Then they passed a naturalization law that restricted citizenship to only “whites”.

            It was pretty clear that they thought in starkly racial terms.

            If they want a White Homeland, they should move to Sweden and agitate for one there. It’s a perfectly nice, historically “White” country.

            I don’t want a “White Homeland”. I want a white American homeland. I’m not Swedish, Polish, English, Norwegian or French.

            I’m American.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            The founders also didn’t espouse a hugely centralized national government.

            True enough, but I don’t see the relevance: perlhaqr asserted that America is explicitly multicultural in origin, and I countered that the originators were thoroughly unicultural, so where did that assertion come from?

            I have no objection to the claim that America is currently multicultural, both in its population and in its consensus ideals (to the extent that it actually has those). It was the assertion that it was always thus that struck me as mistaken.

          • perlhaqr says:

            True enough, but I don’t see the relevance: perlhaqr asserted that America is explicitly multicultural in origin, and I countered that the originators were thoroughly unicultural, so where did that assertion come from?

            “Catholic” and “Protestant” are cultures. Those two things getting along without killing each other was a new thing at the time, and still not something we’ve precisely mastered all over the world.

            Likewise, as other people have mentioned, Scots, Irish, Welsh, English, etc, are not all the same culture. And there were Germans here at the time of the Founding.

            It wasn’t broadly multicultural, but it was multicultural.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Wikipedia says that in 1785, Catholics were 0.6% of the population.

            But I’ll still grudgingly concede your point. The motivation for “freedom of religion” does seem explicitly multicultural, though at the time it was mainly about keeping the various Protestant sects from being at each other’s throats.

            Regarding the various flavors of Brits, I’m not that convinced. Yes, there were cultural differences, but they had been British subjects for a hundred years, and the rationale for independence was related to how the British government ought to be treating its American subjects. I’ve certainly never seen anything suggesting the line of thought that America was a haven where Scots and Welsh and English could come and live together happily as they could not in Britain.

            Germans I’ll sort of grant you: wikipedia says they were about 9% of the white population shortly after the founding. Still, Franklin said:

            Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

            That’s just Franklin, of course, a generation older than most of the founders, but it doesn’t sound like someone with a particularly multicultural vision.

        • Matt M says:

          But part of the premise of America for most people is that we’re supposed to

          One might also argue that another part of the premise of America is that the citizenry can change its mind and decide to have a different premise, if they so choose.

          The requirement to embrace diversity may have found its way into our founding mythos via a large statue from France, but I might suggest that if it was as critical of a component of our nation as everyone today seems to insist it is, they might have written it into the constitution?

          • mdet says:

            It’s definitely true that the Founders didn’t hold ethnic diversity as any kind of ideal. (They DID hold religious tolerance and pluralism as an ideal though) But it wasn’t too long after America was founded that the country went from “A bunch of British immigrants” to “A bunch of British, French, German, Spanish, etc immigrants”. We’ve been ethnically pluralistic as a country for much longer than not.

            I think there’s a difference between “We should not champion diversity at the cost of other ideals” (fine with me), “Here are ways that the progressive left is hostile to white people in the name of ‘diversity’” (fine with me) and “America should prioritize white people” (We tried that. My grandparents were not fans)

          • albatross11 says:

            +1

          • baconbits9 says:

            It is also worth noting that “British” then was more fragmented of an identity than British is now, and that the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish really didn’t consider themselves culturally homogeneous to any extent (heck, they still don’t).

          • Iain says:

            “E pluribus unum” was a founding motto of the United States. The scope of “pluribus” has indisputably changed since then; on the other hand, so has the scope of “all men” in “all men are created equal”.

        • RalMirrorAd says:

          1. The ambiguity about who is and isn’t in a particular group is no greater or less than that concerning the laws governing protected classes as well as policies like affirmative action.
          2. There’s an enormous amount of revisionism that goes on about the intent of the founders as well as US immigration history. And I mean revisionism in the very negative sense.
          a. The first naturalization act of the united states, which IIRC the 9th law passed by the same congress that ratified the constitution [and this law was passed before the bill of rights] was explicitly racial. Later on exceptions were made for freemen
          b. IIRC a court case determined that Indians did not meet naturalization criteria and Chinese were explicitly discriminated against (I will need to double check this fact myself)
          c. The criteria ostsensibly did not exclude eastern Europeans, but the shift in the ethnic composition of the US during the turn of the century prompted congress to make an even stricter criteria by instituting a national origins quotas.

          This is also a point people get wrong. If Irish and Italians were legally not thought of as white they would have been subject to expatriation. (retroactively rescinding citizenship on these grounds had been done before) However the large influx of them likely prompted a tightening of the rules so as to keep the US more NW European.
          d. The law was changed in 1965 and from then on the bulk of US immigration comes from Latin America and Asia. This is also why some people refer to new generations of immigrants derogatorily as ‘Hart-Celler Americans’ i.e. referencing the law that made it possible.
          e. A large number of people are convinced, or have convinced others that the 1965 criteria had always been the criteria and that this criteria was the intent of the founders. And they’ll do this by mentioning the title of a play written by a British playwright as the poem written on a French statue celebrating French-American cooperation in the war of independence which has no relevance to independence. It’s fair to say, both of these people in question were projecting their own feelings on what they saw the united States as and were hardly representative of mainstream US opinion both at the time and at the founding.

        • perlhaqr says:

          any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

          Heh. Still more evidence as to how what constitutes “white” is ever changing. Honestly, if we just wait another 200 years, sub-saharan Africans will be considered “white”. *laughing headshake*

          Anyway. Yes, it’s not very strong evidence, and I’m kind of cheating anyway, since America was the first country (as far as I’m aware) on something other than “I’m the King and this is now my country.” But the Founders made a point of laying the groundwork for some remarkably different people to work together, even if the pool of “differentness” was smaller at the time they were doing it.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            But the Founders made a point of laying the groundwork for some remarkably different people to work together

            Granted. But to me a huge part of “multicultural” is the connotation that it’s intentional, a critical part of the design, and I just believe there was nothing like that in the minds of most of the founders, and that the evidence suggests that most of them would have denied it. They knew who they were and what they were doing, and “multiculturalism” had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

            As Daniel Hannan writes in Inventing Freedom, the genius of the Anglo-American liberal project is that it depends not on race or ethnicity but rather on a shared intellectual heritage, and its correctness is validated by the places where British colonialism managed to imbue that intellectual heritage even in places with other races and ethnicities. (I’m paraphrasing a much longer argument.) But the intellectual heritage is the foundation while the multiculturalism is nice fallout; don’t put the cart before the horse.

      • Sniffnoy says:

        Because the Fourteen Words are so clearly unobjectionable when said by anyone else about their own homeland.

        I have to strongly disagree with you there. I mean — well, first of all, what do you mean, “about their own homeland”? The fourteen words mention no homeland.

        Fundamentally they’re not unobjectionable at all because they only make sense from a point of view where races or other collectives are considered morally important — from an individualist point of view it’s nonsense. Who on earth is “our people”? Why do we care about the future of this group?

        I think there’s a bit of sleight of hand going on here. See, when you speak of securing your existence, that suggests that one is worried about being killed. But a group can be diminished in number, or eventually cease to exist, not only by deaths, but also by people leaving. I think language that implicitly groups together people leaving with people dying is, um, not good. I mean I’ll grant you that from a collectivist perspective, where groups of people have moral relevance beyond that of the individuals composing them, it makes perfect sense. I just object strongly to such a perspective.

        (I mean, in this particular case, you can’t really leave the group that is “white people” — although you can have non-white children, which from the point of view of the fourteen words is much the same. But we can replace “white” with, say, a religion or something.)

        I do agree that a lot of why it’s considered objectionable is a matter of context. As you say, if the PM of Japan were to say “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for Japanese children”, I don’t think I’d read it so objectionably. But that’s for two reasons:
        1. What does context suggest he’s talking about? He’s the leader of a government so he’s probably talking about war or something, i.e., he’s worried about people getting killed — not about conversion or intermarriage!
        2. Or maybe he’s not talking about war, but he’s almost certainly talking about Japan as a sovereign country, not Japan as a race. In which case the alternative, I suppose, is that he’d be talking about emigration or possibly low birth rates. Which, OK, might not make sense from an individualist perspective, but, well, he’s the leader of the government, we expect him to consider his country-as-a-group important, you know? (Country, not race.)

        Similar readings can perhaps be applied, to a lesser or greater extent depending on their individual contexts, to the other countries you mention, though I wouldn’t say always.

        But the context of the actual fourteen words is neither that they’re worried about killings nor that they’re being said by the PM of Whiteland. It’s very clear that they’re meant in the collectivist apostasy-is-equivalent-to-death sense. Not unobjectionable at all.

        (Of course, this is from a liberal perspective, not from a leftist/SJer perspective. I’d agree that the latter are being hypocritical. Sort of. I mean it makes sense given their whole wacky view of the world, but I would object to that view, etc., I don’t need to go on about this.)

        • EchoChaos says:

          I’m conservative but not white supremacist, but the idea that you want white children to be protected seems pretty non controversial.

          I agree that there are all those contexts, just like “It’s okay to be white” or “Black Lives Matter”. The whole point of the statements are to be obvious statements that everyone agrees with that people with an agenda back their agenda.

          That’s why they’re powerful rhetoric. Everyone but the most monstrous believes that Black Lives Matter. And they should. That doesn’t mean they agree with the people who are spewing the rhetoric.

          Similarly, anyone who doesn’t believe white children deserve a future is a monster unworthy of engaging with.

          Also, the idea the genocide by breeding whites out of existence makes it better is a terrible meme and liberals should please stop using it. I’m not a white genocide believer. There are too many whites in the world (more than ever in history) for that to be plausible. But if liberals keep responding to “white children need a future” with “its okay to have a future without white children”, they’re going to make a lot of enemies among moderate whites.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            I’m not sure you’ve really replied to the substance of my comment.

            I’m conservative but not white supremacist, but the idea that you want white children to be protected seems pretty non controversial.

            This seems like the same rhetorical sleight-of-hand as above. Conflating protection of the existence of the group (as a group), with protection of the existence of its members (actual individual people). As such I’ll skip responding to it in further detail.

            That’s why they’re powerful rhetoric. Everyone but the most monstrous believes that Black Lives Matter. And they should. That doesn’t mean they agree with the people who are spewing the rhetoric.

            Completely agreed!

            Similarly, anyone who doesn’t believe white children deserve a future is a monster unworthy of engaging with.

            Same conflation as above.

            But if liberals keep responding to “white children need a future” with “its okay to have a future without white children”, they’re going to make a lot of enemies among moderate whites.

            I mean, I agree it’s never going to be a popular sentiment, but — again, taking an individualist viewpoint — “its okay to have a future without white children” sounds completely correct to me. (Which is obviously not to say that one should push for such a thing, that’s just stupid.) I don’t see how one can object to that without once again taking the collectivist view that the group “white people” has some moral relevance beyond that of the individual white people composing it. Which you might well be taking, but I want to show why all this is not, in fact, clearly unobjectionable.

            (Though I do have to admit that people making my objection are probably in the minority of objectors… :-/ )

          • EchoChaos says:

            Right, that’s what I’m pointing out. It’s fine for blacks to argue for the existence of blacks as a group and nobody minds it. It’s fine for Jews to argue for the existence of Jews as a group and nobody minds it. Nobody thinks that it is a problem when people say there shouldn’t be another Holocaust because they’re conflating Jews as a group with individual Jews.

            You immediately say “Completely agreed” on BLM, but don’t agree with the following statement, which in my morality should be just as uncontroversial.

            Understand that “It’s okay to have a future without white children” is a passively genocidal statement about me and my specific children. I have children, they are all white. There is, to me, no future that does not contain them.

            Now, I don’t doubt you don’t have the ability to enforce that, and I think white genocide is a bad meme, but I will do everything humanly possible to prevent you and people who think like you from getting into power because white people are real and saying the elimination of a group is acceptable is a bad thing to say. Even if you are just acquiescing to it and not actively encouraging it.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            Right, that’s what I’m pointing out. It’s fine for blacks to argue for the existence of blacks as a group and nobody minds it. It’s fine for Jews to argue for the existence of Jews as a group and nobody minds it. Nobody thinks that it is a problem when people say there shouldn’t be another Holocaust because they’re conflating Jews as a group with individual Jews.

            Um, the Holocaust was a policy of actually actual Jews, not just about ending the existence of the group while allowing the people composing that group to live. You could not, for instance, escape it by conversion. (I mean, of course not, seeing as the Nazis were targeting the racial rather than religious group, but imagine for the sake of the example they were instead targeting the religion.) Saying that there should not be another Holocaust is, in fact, about the protection of the existence of individual Jews, not merely protection of the group identity.

            (Which is not to say, that, forcible conversion is OK, but I would say that “It is not OK if in the future there are no longer any Jews (because everyone has converted away from Judaism, of their own free choice)” is, at least, not an obviously true statement.)

            I do agree with your more general point that most people are not very consistent on this, but it’s not sounding like you’ve quite the whole group/individual thing down, you know?

            Understand that “It’s okay to have a future without white children” is a passively genocidal statement about me and my specific children. I have children, they are all white. There is, to me, no future that does not contain them.

            Unfortunately, people have a finite lifespan, so, there almost certainly is, sad to say. I mean, sure, we could postulate that radical life extension technologies are developed soon in which case, great! But if we’re postulating that sort of thing, we may as well postulate all sorts of other advanced technology, at which point your children may continue to live while choosing to live as, say, bodiless uploads or spider-shaped beings or, yes, humans of non-white appearance. And at that point the group/individual distinction once again becomes relevant; we once again have the possibility of leaving the group by a means other than death.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Nobody thinks that it is a problem when people say there shouldn’t be another Holocaust because they’re conflating Jews as a group with individual Jews.

            The problem with the Holocaust is what it did to individual Jews.

            Understand that “It’s okay to have a future without white children” is a passively genocidal statement about me and my specific children.

            No, not unless one specifies why there are no white children–if there are no white children because everyone has voluntarily and of their own accord married in such a way that no children three or four generations down look white, this is unobjectionable; if there are no white children because voluntarily people stop identifying as “white”, this is unobjectionable.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            Blargh, my comment above is supposed to say “actually killing actual Jews”, not “actually actual Jews”. Oops.

          • Matt M says:

            if there are no white children because everyone has voluntarily and of their own accord married in such a way that no children three or four generations down look white, this is unobjectionable

            I posit that there are large amounts of black and Jewish people who would, in fact, consider this very objectionable for their group – and that nobody in the mainstream would dare denounce them for saying or believing such a thing.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Black Americans have consistently approved of intermarriage at higher rates than whites have since at least 1969, by Gallup; not until 1997 did white support for intermarriage match the level of black support for intermarriage in 1969. As of 2013, 96% of blacks approve of intermarriage. So, it’s not clear that there are large numbers of black Americans who think having black babies is of primary importance.

            Jews are a little trickier because Judaism is of course a religion as well. I know of no denomination of Jew that is concerned that Judaism as an ethnicity survives: all denominations accept interfaith marriages as long as there is a conversion.

            And, to the extent that Jews do make scaremongering demographic arguments, for example with respect to Israel, they very much are opposed: the idea that Israel needs to worry about its “demographic time bomb” is widely perceived to be racist, and more generally Jewish nationalism is absolutely seen as racism.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            I posit that there are large amounts of black and Jewish people who would, in fact, consider this very objectionable for their group – and that nobody in the mainstream would dare denounce them for saying or believing such a thing.

            Let’s be careful about what’s being argued here. Eugene and I both argued that there’s nothing morally wrong with this happening. Your reply is, people will object to it. Those aren’t the same thing! I don’t deny that most people would have a problem with it happening. I’m just saying those people are wrong, that actually it’s OK.

          • albatross11 says:

            When you’re talking about a culture, there’s the possibility of outsiders assimilating into your culture. For example, I have a goddaughter whose dad is black and whose mom is white, who grew up in an overwhelmingly white community. She’s culturally white, but racially black. Similarly, it’s common for hispanics to intermarry with whites, and their grandkids are usually culturally white, even if their last name is Garcia or Ramirez or something. This is, in fact, how white culture has grown over the years, ultimately incorporating Irish and Italian people whose grandparents were definitely not thought of as being part of the main line of American white culture. Where I live, plenty of people of East Asian descent have apparently assimilated into American white culture.[1]

            When you’re talking about a race, you’ve kind-of got to think about whether you’re talking about genes or about appearance.

            Suppose Alice and Bob are black, and Carol and Dave are white.

            In world #1, Alice marries Bob, Carol marries Dave, and each couple has two kids–there are two black kids and two white kids. Genetically, the white and black peoples’ genes have both made it to the next generation; in terms of what you can observe, you see two black kids and two white kids.

            In world #2, Alice marries Dave and Bob marries Carol, and each couple has two kids. We end up with four mixed-race kids. In terms of what you can observe, there is nobody clearly black or clearly white in the second generation. In terms of genes, though, the white peoples’ genes and the black peoples’ genes have spread equally into the next generation.

            My understanding is that a white supremacist / white nationalist/ whatever thinks world #1 is much better than world #2. It looks to me like that’s one of the defining features of that worldview.

            [1] IMO, the best future for America is one in which most people from every ethnic group assimilate into one big shared culture that has the positive features of current American white culture.

          • Matt M says:

            My understanding is that a white supremacist / white nationalist/ whatever thinks world #1 is much better than world #2. It looks to me like that’s one of the defining features of that worldview.

            Of course, the black/asian/whatever nationalist/supremacist/whatever would agree with this as well.

          • albatross11 says:

            Matt M:

            Definitely. This is just a place where I can clearly demarcate the beliefs–I think world #1 and world #2 are both fine, and what matters is Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave having happy marriages and raising healthy kids. I don’t object to communities holding on to being white or black, I just don’t think that goal should trump individual choice/freedom. But then, that’s American white culture for you.

            If you want to see people who really strongly take the opposite view, look at the Indian caste system. They’ve mostly managed to keep hundreds of endogamous groups from intermarrying for centuries.

      • Eugene Dawn says:

        Given that it is considered hate speech, it seems to be working.

        The reason it is considered hate speech is because it was coined by a white supremacist in jail for participating in the murder of a Jew as a member of a white supremacist organization, not because the left has been successfully “trolled”.

        • Matt M says:

          So, the classification of “hate speech” is determined based on the behavior of the originator of the phrase, not the content of the phrase itself?

          What are your thoughts on Earth Day?

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            The classification of hate speech is determined by how the phrase is used. This is in part because the content of speech is determined by usage as well, so in part I’d say you’re making a false distinction.

            If it were literally only originated by a white supremacist, that might not be enough to make it “hate speech” if it were also widely used by others. Since that’s not the case, and the fourteen words are only used by white supremacists, that doesn’t matter.

            But either way, the origination of the phrase is evidence that it wasn’t a “troll”, it was a sincere statement of belief by a man willing to murder for those beliefs.

          • Matt M says:

            it was a sincere statement of belief by a man willing to murder for those beliefs

            I also sincerely believe that it’s okay to be white. And that it is important for white children to have a future.

            And I would also engage in lethal force against anyone who posed a credible threat to those ideals (i.e., someone who was killing white people or engaging in genocide against the white race)

            Do those facts make me a white supremacist?

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Would you engage in lethal force against someone who threatened those ideals by trying to make intermarriage more common through non-coercive means? Would you even consider that an example of threatening those ideals?

            EDIT: My questions don’t get at the heart of the matter, actually. I should really ask: do you think it’s important to have a future with white children simply because it’s important to you that white people exist into the future?

    • CatCube says:

      Personally, I think it’s perfectly realistic that someone at DHS deliberately chose that headline because it resembled the 14 words.

      This is “realistic” in the sense that it’s physically possible, as opposed to, I dunno, wizards in charge of the border or something. However, it’s far more likely that somebody wrote that by coincidence, because who the fuck counts the words of their sentences? Seriously, do you do that? I’ll believe you if you say you do, because it’s a weird world, but it would never occur to me to make sure that there are a specific number of words (or rather, that there are not a specific number of words) when I’m writing document headings.

      I think there’s a good case that the most likely explanation is simple conspiratorial thinking–latching onto unrelated coincidences and reading meaning into them.

    • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

      Not quoting the 14 words and the headline, which would have made it obvious that they are in fact very similar

      … well, the first three words are the same. Apart from that, I’m not seeing it.

    • Deiseach says:

      14, 88, and 1488 are in fact “known white supremacist code numbers”.

      If you took a person who’s generically highly aware of internet culture, showed them the list of all two-digit numbers from 00 to 99, and asked them to pick which two are the white supremacist code numbers, they would reliably pick 14 and 88.

      Really? I had no idea about “the fourteen words” and “eighty-eight” and I think your “generically highly aware” person in reality means “someone already politicised and worried about white supremacy movements who makes sure to keep up on the news about them”.

      (Does anyone even dispute the above?)

      I mean, would you know what I meant if I started talking about “of course, So-and-So is one of the Blueshirts”? Is Eoin O’Duffy a name you have on the tip of your tongue? Could you identify which Irish political party has historic links with same?

      This is the kind of thing that is well known to those who know about this type of thing but is not known in general, yet is assumed to be more widely known than it is because it’s Nazis, for crying out loud, everyone knows all about the Nazis!

    • Deiseach says:

      If you asked a generically highly culturally aware person to name five different white supremacist slogans, the 14 words would reliably be included in the reply.

      Then I am definitely not generically highly culturally aware, because I never heard of the 14 words until all this blew up recently, and I couldn’t tell you one let alone five white supremacist slogans. I’ve heard of Combat 18, mainly because of the 1995 riot at Lansdowne Road at a friendly match between Ireland and England, and I couldn’t tell you what slogans they have!

      Again, someone who’s genned up on white supremacism will probably know all this but for most people who don’t worry about skinheads under the beds, it’s “who? what?” territory.

    • Spookykou says:

      As someone born in 88 just learning about this I am deeply distressed by all my web identities where I slapped an 88 to the end because my name was taken…

      • Matt M says:

        Boy did Taylor Swift narrowly dodge a bullet…

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          Conspiracy theory: Django Unchained was Tarantino’s apology for making the Crazy 88s…

        • Controls Freak says:

          Boy did Taylor Swift narrowly dodge a bullet…

          Narrowly. I remember this being big on reddit for a time.

          • Matt M says:

            I vaguely remember a Twitter thing where someone was accusing her of making a “T” symbol with her arms out that was actually supposed to represent a cross, and presumably a burning one, as a gesture of white supremacy.

            Can’t be sure if that was legit or just parody though…

      • FLWAB says:

        A while back I got interested in Nordic and old English runes. I was going to change my profile pick to the Tiwaz rune because I liked it and wanted people to ask me about runes. Then I found out that apparently runes, and particularly the Tiwaz, make people think you’re a white supremacist. Because they’re used a lot by white supremacists.

        White supremacists! Why you gotta ruin innocuous numbers and symbols!

        • ec429 says:

          White supremacists! Why you gotta ruin innocuous numbers and symbols!

          Now you know how the Jains felt.

      • ec429 says:

        I’m just wondering whether this means Doc Emmett Brown is a white supremacist now…

  45. zzzzort says:

    States consider banning fast food companies from banning employee poaching.

    *epistemic status: seems reasonable?*
    I’m interested to see how this interacts with the ongoing case before the NLRB that seeks to label McDonald’s a joint employer and essentially allow franchise wide unionization and collective bargaining.

    Franchises exist in the liminal space where they aren’t really the same company, but they aren’t really different either. Currently, most head offices require franchisees not to poach from their fellow franchisees. This would be totally illegal if they were separate companies, but maybe ok if they are all one company.

    At the same time, the same workers can’t collectively bargain with the head office about pay and
    conditions. This would be totally illegal if it was all one company, but maybe ok if franchises are separate.

    Both of these arguments I can really see going either way, but I can’t see how McDonald’s can coordinate hiring among franchise owners but not allow coordination among franchise employees. Part of me thinks they will beat a strategic retreat on the poaching issue to strengthen their argument on the unionization issue.

  46. bbeck310 says:

    I’m seeing some confusion on the no-poach article, so time for a lawsplainer comment:

    There are three types of restrictions on employee mobility in the fast food world; two of them are already generally illegal, but this is about the third.

    The first is an employee non-compete. This is a contract between the employee and the employer that prohibits the employee from working for a competing restaurant for some period of time after the termination of employment. Non-competes were “created to prevent people with trade secrets from disclosing them to competitors” as Scott says, but are generally unenforceable for unskilled or low-skill employees. This hasn’t stopped employers from putting them in contracts because (1) most low-level employees don’t think about those restrictions when they’re hired, and (2) there’s no harm to the employer from putting in an unenforceable contract provision. Since just making the provisions unenforceable hasn’t stopped the practice, some states have passed laws more clearly restricting low-wage employee non-compete agreements. For example, the Illinois Freedom to Work Act explicitly declares non-compete agreements void if applied to an employee making under $13/hr or the applicable minimum wage, whichever is larger. But this isn’t what the linked article is about.

    No-poach agreements are not between the employee and employer, but between different employers. They are contracts in which multiple employers agree that they will not hire away the others’ employees. These are not about protecting trade secrets, but about avoiding losing money by spending the money to train employees only to see them take the training and go elsewhere. When they are between different companies, they are generally unenforceable as antitrust violations. The US Department of Justice has gone after businesses that do this. These are closer to what Scott’s linked article is about, but not quite.

    What the linked article discusses are no-poach agreements between different franchises of the same fast food company: “Now 11 U.S. states want to restrict chains’ ability to bar employees from jumping to another franchisee across town.” These are agreements between franchisers and franchisees saying that, e.g., a Burger King franchise owner won’t hire away employees from another Burger King. Since the franchises are under the same corporate umbrella, these are generally enforceable under the common law as a way of preventing franchisees from destructively competing with each other to everyone’s benefit (except maybe the employees’)–again, they have nothing to do with protecting trade secrets. Because these agreements only restrict mobility between the same chain, they are far less restrictive and generally lawful, absent these new state actions.

    (associated bleg: If you have any personal legal needs related to non-competes, trade secrets, intellectual property, etc., please contact me at brian dot beck at spencepc dot com).

  47. dndnrsn says:

    On the Jesus thing, this is something I actually know a bit about; studied it back in school. The standard Carrier applies to Jesus is a standard that would lead us to conclude a lot of historical figures didn’t exist. Further, the Jesus story doesn’t seem made up; if it were made up, a lot of inconvenient things would have been left out. Consider the three possibilities:

    1. Jewish religious movement leader causes a kerfuffle, is quickly executed by colonial authorities in a particularly awful and humiliating fashion. He may or may not have claimed to be the Messiah (on the one hand, Messianic Secret in Mark, on the other hand, there’s been enough Jewish Messiah claimants over the years that it’s hardly implausible). His followers produce the ad-hoc hypothesis that this was all part of the plan.
    2. As 1, but it was all part of the plan. Some degree of Christology is factual.
    3. A religious group makes up 2.

    The general conclusion I reached after several years studying this was that 3 is far less plausible than 1, and honestly, in some ways it’s less plausible than 2 (and I’m an atheist). It doesn’t make sense for all these different accounts – some of deeds, some of words, quite diverse in form and content – to suddenly appear in the second half of the first century. If the story had been made up, presumably there would have been one canonical beginning story that then diverged; the textual sources and the oral traditions presumably behind them have instead the character of different testimonies combined in various permutations (which then diverged a little later on).

    Further, a Jewish sect making up a Messiah would have been relatively unlikely to make up one whose life pattern follows Jesus’. The tendencies among Jews of the time expecting the Messiah were different. Similarly, a story of a son of a god intended to attract Hellenistic gentiles (pagans) would be quite different. There are wonder workers, both Jewish and Hellenistic gentile, whose life stories resemble Jesus’ in some ways, but there is enough evidence even now of charismatic people who are understood by their followers to have special abilities (to, say, cure illness) that it is not implausible for such a person to have existed in a particular place and time.

    The level of skepticism required to show Jesus didn’t exist is a level of skepticism rarely applied to non-religious figures.

    • Davide S. says:

      The standard Carrier applies to Jesus is a standard that would lead us to conclude a lot of historical figures didn’t exist.
      […]
      The level of skepticism required to show Jesus didn’t exist is a level of skepticism rarely applied to non-religious figures.

      But non-religious historical figures are rarely described as having miracolous powers or being involved in ‘supernatural’ events; and when they are, this is often not presented as central to the narrative.

      IF we assume these miracles and events simply never happened, why is that not a good reason to assume that Jesus was mostly mythical or, at least, that the writers were extremely unreliable (or willing to simply make things up)?

      Believing that Julius Caesar, Alexander and other historical characters were never involved in ‘miracolous’ events described by some historians but still existed is one thing; believing that all the miracles described in the Gospels didn’t but Jesus was still real it’s another.

      • rahien.din says:

        Believing that Julius Caesar, Alexander and other historical characters were never involved in ‘miracolous’ events described by some historians but still existed is one thing; believing that all the miracles described in the Gospels didn’t but Jesus was still real it’s another.

        You’re not applying a consistent standard.

        For some persons, you’re allowing that inaccurate descriptions do not provide evidence of nonexistence. For other persons, you’re claiming that inaccurate descriptions provide evidence of nonexistence. That doesn’t cohere.

        You apply the latter standard mainly to Christ. Do you also apply it to his disciples? They were also described as performing miracles. Do you similarly dispute their existence?

        • Davide S. says:

          Why is it inconsistent to believe that a few peripheral, secondary inaccuracies don’t give significant evidence for non-existance, but many central ones do?

          For an actual example, consider Pyrrhus, King of Epirus. I don’t think many would dispute his existence.
          I’m going to quote Plutarch’s parallel lives (from http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/lives/pyrrhus*.html)
          “People of a splenetic habit believed that he cured their ailment; he would sacrifice a white cock, and, while the patient lay flat upon his back, would press gently with his right foot against the spleen. Nor was any one so obscure or poor as not to get this healing service from him if he asked it. The king would also accept the cock after he had sacrificed it, and this honorarium was most pleasing to him. It is said, further, that the great toe of his right foot had a divine virtue, so that after the rest of his body had been consumed, this was found to be untouched and unharmed by the fire. These things, however, belong to a later period.”

          It’s an amusing story, but that’s it; it’s not as if Pyrrhus’ whole biography is built on claims like these, and the text itself can be read as implying they are legends, not facts. It would not be reasonable at all to believe that because these legends must be false Pyrrhus must not have existed.

          In Jesus’ case his supernatural powers & nature are a huge part of the Gospels.
          I don’t think it’s reasonable to see them as the kind of claim that can simply be dismissed without damaging the credibility of the sources.

          It’s not as if the Gospels claim that Jesus was a ‘normal’ preacher that may or may not have done a few really weird things.

          As for his disciples, I’m not as familiar with the relevant stories, but I understand that
          1)the miracles attributed to them were generally not as impressive
          2)Some people DO dispute the existence of at least a few of them.

          • rahien.din says:

            Some people

            Oh dear.

            We weren’t talking about “some people.” Those people might be applying consistent standards.

            Whereas you, seemingly, are not.

            That’s why I asked you about Davide S, and why I didn’t ask you about “some people.”

          • Davide S. says:

            My claim is simply that sources involving supernatural claims should be considered less reliable than those who don’t.
            It does not imply that people who were attribuited supernatural powers or involvement in supernatural events did not exist; or that any such claim at all completely invalidates of the source.

            This is hardly inconsistent.

            As for the disciples themselves, can you consider the claims that at least one of them didn’t actually exist absurd, when there are not especially controversial theories that some later saints didn’t?

            Consider Saint Brigid of Ireland, often argued as being a Christianized pagan goddess rather than a real person.

          • rahien.din says:

            My claim is simply that sources involving supernatural claims should be considered less reliable than those who don’t.

            No, it’s not. Your claim is that we can apply a sort of discounting function to these accounts, whereby the more numerous and more central/essential are the supernatural claims, the less veracity we assign to the account. Or, if these claims to the supernatural are merely embellishments, they may prevent us from accessing the actual historical details.

            EG : Beowulf might have been an actual Dane, but we will never know because his story is so heavily embellished with the supernatural. If someone told me that Hannibal Barca was described as having some minor uncanny abilities unrelated to his military service, I would not doubt what he accomplished on the battlefield.

            It’s a fair claim. I just don’t think you’re applying that discounting function consistently.

      • dndnrsn says:

        The miraculous powers he’d be assigned in the most trimmed-back versions (remember, none of the Gospels was an original eyewitness document) are miraculous powers that some people believe exist right now (faith healers are still a thing, regardless of whether they’re for real or not). The reason miraculous powers are attributed among religious figures far more often than historical figures in general is that wonder-workers are very often associated with religion. There are historical figures who existed who people at the time claimed were wizards – is it a strike against their existence too?

        • Davide S. says:

          We generally don’t consider sources describing miracolous powers especially reliable though (at least, I don’t think we would-should on a rationalist site).

          As for

          There are historical figures who existed who people at the time claimed were wizards – is it a strike against their existence too?

          If the main sources about them are so focused on the supernatural and we don’t really have other, more credible descriptions of their life and deeds, then yes. It’s not proof, but it’s certainly evidence.

          I don’t understand what’s so controversial about what I’m trying to say – credibility matters when judging historical claims and getting things wrong – such as by claiming that supernatural events that couldn’t have happened DID happen- damages credibility.

          Could it be that the biblical Jesus was inspired by one (or more) historical preachers? Sure.
          But that’s still a mythical character; the false supernatural claims aren’t details that can be dismissed while leaving the credibility of the source mostly intact, unlike with the biographies of historical characters who contain only a small number of minor supernatural events (who might even be described as non-supernatural by the sources themselves).

          • CatCube says:

            We generally don’t consider sources describing miracolous powers especially reliable though (at least, I don’t think we would-should on a rationalist site).

            Scott might be rationalist (including the atheism), but the “we” on this site does include us believing Christians who take the Gospel accounts as, well, gospel.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Yes, some of us are an older kind of rationalist. 😀

          • dndnrsn says:

            There are a significant number of Biblical scholars who do, in fact, think that it is possible to disentangle the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth from later Christian notions of Christ, that it is possible to disentangle miracles for which there is no possible natural explanation from those for which there is (eg, that casting out demons is really just his ability to calm down someone having a psychotic break, or whatever), etc.

            Further, you are applying modern understandings of supernatural vs natural that draw lines that likely would not have been drawn by someone in the first century Hellenistic world. They didn’t believe that so-and-so was able to do xyz, they knew that these things happened, and their worldview didn’t really draw a line between natural/supernatural and secular/religious the way we enlightened moderns do.

          • Davide S. says:

            casting out demons is really just his ability to calm down someone having a psychotic break, or whatever

            How does that fit with the demons going into pigs, then?
            And if the people writing the account couldn’t distinguish between a ‘proper’ exorcism and simply calming down someone that also makes their credibility suspect.

            you are applying modern understandings of supernatural vs natural that draw lines that likely would not have been drawn by someone in the first century Hellenistic world.

            There are 3 issues with this:
            1)Even they did not generally make such a distinction most people today do; so it makes sense to distinguish between the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ when discussing these sources.

            2)Even then people could believe that some things were possible but that some ‘miracle workers’ were simply frauds and charlatans at worst, and honestly mistaken at best.
            People do that today – surely the people defending Biblical miracles as factual (that’s how I interpreted CatCube’s ‘taking the Gospel accounts as gospel’) don’t also believe that all the claimed miracles of OTHER religions also happened?

            3)Related to 1, but if they ‘knew’ things that today we have really good reasons to believe are simply false that’s another reason to consider them unreliable.

          • Deiseach says:

            that casting out demons is really just his ability to calm down someone having a psychotic break

            33 And in the synagogue there was a man who had the spirit of an unclean demon, and he cried out with a loud voice, 34 “Ha! What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are — the Holy One of God.” 35 But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent and come out of him!” And when the demon had thrown him down in their midst, he came out of him, having done him no harm. 36 And they were all amazed and said to one another”

            … “Wow, he has a really good bedside manner, such a calm therapeutic presence” 😉

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Davide S

            That there are well-attested people throughout history who are understood by those around them as doing supernatural things ranging from “there’s a natural explanation for this, but it gets understood as supernatural” to “OK, these people are describing something as impossible” is a strike against the notion that supernatural acts attributed to a figure are a reason to think that figure might not have existed.

            Further, there’s a whole strand of non-supernatural, non-miraculous teachings attributed to Jesus. The Synoptics aren’t just the story of a guy who goes around being a rural faith healer.

        • Aron Wall says:

          @dndnrsn

          remember, none of the Gospels was an original eyewitness document

          Speaking as someone who thinks (in accordance with the virtually unanimous external evidence) that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were most probably written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John respectively*; the first and last of whom were in the group of Jesus’ Twelve disciples and would therefore have been eyewitnesses to many of the events in the Gospels:

          I don’t think my opinion is so crazy that you can appeal to its negation as if it were an uncontroversial and indisputable fact.

          But feel free to save this argument until you get to the NT in your effortpost series.

          *In saying this I am not at all denying that Matthew and Luke incorporated material from Mark, and likely from other written sources as well. Some people think this makes Matthew unlikely to be also an eyewitness, but I think that argument imports modern assumptions about authorship into a very different social context that cared much less than we do about originality.

          • dndnrsn says:

            It’s not a crazy opinion, but the generic scholarly view – that the different gospels were cobbled together from sources we no longer have (textual sources that have been lost, traditions preserved orally perhaps) by different authors from different communities – seems to me to explain the documents we have now the best. The Synoptics are all at least one degree of separation from what Jesus actually said and did, and I don’t know how you can have the Synoptics and John as eyewitness testimony from people who were there.

            I will indeed expand on this when I get to the NT. Especially because that will give me a chance to refresh my memory on what exactly Raymond Brown’s arguments for John’s historicity (or, elements of John) were.

          • Aron Wall says:

            @dndnrsn

            I think you may be underestimating just how radically eyewitness-based biographies of the same person can diverge from each other, while still being rooted in factual events. John is unique, but a good part of why this uniqueness seems like such an anomaly, is that the synoptics are so similar to each other. And the best explanation for that is well known—their similarities are largely due to incorporating common source material. If they had not done so, perhaps all 4 gospels would be nearly as different from each other as John is from Mark.

            Not denying that membership in particular Christian communities may have shaped the authors’ pictures of Jesus (whether they were eyewitnesses or not). The whole point of having four Gospels, instead of one, is to get different perspectives on the same individual.

            I think it would be very difficult to write a short biography of almost any active individual that didn’t leave out key aspects of what that person was like. Imagine a biography of Scott that focused on his blogging vs. one that focused on his medical career. They clearly contradict, right? Nobody has time to do all that!

          • dndnrsn says:

            The canonical gospels all incorporate teaching (blogging) and faith healing/wonder-working (medical career). If we had 3 accounts of Scott which painted roughly similar pictures of his blogging + day job, and then a fourth which painted a very different picture of both, that would at least raise some questions.

            Matthew and Luke definitely show different eyewitness testimonies, or at least different traditions, in the Q stuff and in their special sources.

  48. fluorocarbon says:

    I’ve always been a little frustrated with the rationalist and the atheist movements’ tendency towards Jesus Mythicism (being an atheist and a semi-reationalist myself). I’m not an expert, and actual experts should correct me if I’m wrong about something, but I did study the New Testament as an undergraduate and graduate (before dropping out of grad school). There are two reasons that mythicism annoys me:

    1 – It mirrors the global warming debate: 99% of the experts are on one side but, for entirely ideological reasons, a certain group of people gives a lot of prominence to the 1%. There’s approximately the same amount of evidence for Socrates existing as there is for Jesus, but I’ve yet to meet a Socrates mythicist.

    2 – People don’t really have an understanding of how bat-shit insane ancient histories are. They’re full of magic, prophecies, dragons etc. Wikipedia and history books often won’t mention these things in summaries, so people assume histories didn’t have miracles and magic fish or whatever. Then when they read a primary source for the first time, like Luke/Acts, it seems made up. We also don’t have census records or birth certificates in the ancient world. The best evidence we have about any pre-modern era are weird books full of miracles and later interpolations.

    Overall, the main reason I think it very likely Jesus existed is similar to the main reason I think evolution is real: it provides a framework for understanding other things. I couldn’t debate a creationist about the individual facts about genetics, mutation rates, speciation, or whatever. However, just looking at tetrapod skeletons or mollusk eyes through the lens evolution makes it all make sense. In the same way, there’s not a huge amount of direct evidence for Jesus, but looking at the texts and the early Christian movement through the lens of Jesus having existed makes it make sense. That later sources make excuses for John baptizing Jesus, that Jesus “born of a virgin” has a father, and the fights in the early church about sex and marriage all make sense when viewed through a lens of some guy named Jesus existing, saying the world was going to end, then dying before it happened. I really don’t see how the gospels and the evolution of early Christianity make sense if we assume Jesus didn’t exist.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Yep. At least some of the biographical material being accurate is the most parsimonious solution.

      (I’m pretty sure Luke is not technically a primary source as a biography, though)

      • fluorocarbon says:

        You’re completely right, it was likely written several decades after Jesus’ death. I’m using the term “primary source” in a sloppy way.

        I only mean that it’s an early source, close to and in the same cultural context as the events that it’s about, and written before modern historiography was invented. I’m blanking on what the word for that is.

        • dndnrsn says:

          On the one hand, it’s not an original source. Luke used Mark, Q, and L. Q and L are entirely hypothetical as sources (Q is by definition all stuff in Luke and Matthew not in Mark, L is by definition all stuff in Luke that isn’t found elsewhere). Mark probably was not a primary source (in the sense that the author was almost certainly working from older sources/traditions, not writing from experience). I wouldn’t call it a primary source; I imagine that standards differ? In comparison, Paul is definitely a primary source.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Generally agree with you, but did you read the review?

      • fluorocarbon says:

        I read his review when it was posted subreddit a while ago. Jesus mythicism has been floating around in my head since then, which is probably why I left a comment though I normally lurk. I should’ve refreshed the page first. I didn’t realize half the comments would be about that article…

        Anyway, I do think Gwern is largely correct, but I disagree with him on a few points.

        I still can’t believe that Christian scholars seriously try to argue that “yes, the passage is partially forged by early Christians but underneath the forgery is still a real passage discussing Jesus”

        There are two mentions of Jesus by Josephus. I’m assuming that Gwern is referring to the one called “Testimonium Flavianum,” which is certainly partially forged and possibly completely forged. But this is an example where I think unfamiliarity with ancient documents is the issue. In the ancient world, scribes would often write things in the margins of documents that would later get included in the main text. (They sometimes also just made things up). If you look at a modern critical edition of an ancient document, each page will have a big section at the bottom explaining how they decided what text to include based on all the sources. It’s not super common for entire sections to get interpolated, but it definitely happens. I don’t think someone needs to be a Christian or a bad scholar to argue that the passage is partially authentic.

        I read some of the criticisms listed by Carrier and there don’t seem to be any major flaws in Carrier’s claims

        This is what I had in my head about when I thought up my evolution analogy. I agree with Gwern that there aren’t any flaws in Carrier’s argument and I think a lot of the criticisms are weak, but that’s because they mostly address specific factual points. To me, the more convincing argument is that Jesus historicism provides a framework that makes sense of everything else we know about the texts and the early Jesus movement better.

        On a side note, after reading On the Historicity of Jesus, I began wondering a little about Islam & Muhammed too.

        I didn’t think of this before, but I think the mythicist argument is actually largely correct if we phrase it as “it’s possible, but unlikely, that Jesus didn’t exist. It’s also about as possible that Socrates, Buddha, and Muhammed didn’t exist. We really only have a handful of texts and we’re doing our best to figure out what really happened.” The mythicist position I’m arguing against (and I’ve heard in person) is “every historical figure in antiquity existed for sure except Jesus who definitely didn’t exist.” Maybe this is just people talking past each other? Maybe Carrier is making the first argument but is being misunderstood as making the second argument?

      • Robert Jones says:

        I have read the review, and I’m not sure I understand what you think it adds. It just seems like a cavalcade of the usual mythicist arguments.

        As to Josephus, Wikipedia saith, “The general scholarly view is that while the Testimonium Flavianum is most likely not authentic in its entirety, it is broadly agreed upon that it originally consisted of an authentic nucleus, which was then subject to Christian interpolation and/or alteration.[5][6][7][8][9][10]” It’s fine to argue with the scholarly consensus, but just dismissing it out of hand is a bad look. As fluorocarbon suggests, it suggests a lack of familiarity with classical documents.

        It seems highly probable to me that the mythic elements of the Jesus story owe a great deal to mythic tropes in circulation at the time, but I don’t think that affects our assessment of Jesus’ historicity. Haven’t we been having this conversation for 128 years now?

    • Nornagest says:

      There’s approximately the same amount of evidence for Socrates existing as there is for Jesus, but I’ve yet to meet a Socrates mythicist.

      That’s not thinking big enough. Let’s get a George Washington mythicist theory going.

      • EchoChaos says:

        “I won’t be in the history books anyway, only you. Franklin did this and Franklin did that and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington, fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them – Franklin, Washington, and the horse – conducted the entire revolution by themselves. “

      • Eric Rall says:

        That’s not thinking big enough. Let’s get a George Washington mythicist theory going.

        That’s not thinking big enough, either. There’s a theory going that a roughly 300 year time span of the Early Middle Ages (from 614 AD to 911 AD) didn’t exist. Basically, the idea is that around 1000 AD, the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the Byzantine Emperor cooperated to propagate a politically-convenient mythical history of an era between the fall of the immediate post-Roman world and the rise of the medieval successor states.

    • Davide S. says:

      2 – People don’t really have an understanding of how bat-shit insane ancient histories are. They’re full of magic, prophecies, dragons etc. Wikipedia and history books often won’t mention these things in summaries, so people assume histories didn’t have miracles and magic fish or whatever. Then when they read a primary source for the first time, like Luke/Acts, it seems made up. We also don’t have census records or birth certificates in the ancient world. The best evidence we have about any pre-modern era are weird books full of miracles and later interpolations.

      How often are the “bat-shit insane ancient histories” considered reliable, though? Especially when the writers treats the miracles as facts rather than hearsay.

      Also, as I wrote in another comment above – compare and contrast the role of the supernatural in the Gospels to its role in the biographies of non-religious historical characters.

      Disbelieving the supernatural is a much bigger strike against Jesus’ real existence than, say, Caesar’s or Alexander’s.

      • mtl1882 says:

        There are some really strange things that have crept into history that simply don’t check out when you look at primary sources. Often when you stop to think about them, you realize how bizarre it was that no one questioned it. Literal miracles we’ve gotten away from quoting unquestioningly, although sometimes that is worse because other parts of the work are authoritatively quoted when the whole thing should be scrutinized in light of the credulity of the author. Things just take on a life of their own.

        Of course my brain isn’t providing me with a good example right now, but it’s something I’ve noticed a lot. A related issue is that many modern historical books unquestioningly accept the medical diagnosis/cause of death given at the time. Very often health conditions were diagnosed as fevers brought on by various emotional issues or foods. Historians quite often go along with this, when they should immediately realize that fevers are almost always caused by some sort of infection. They should state that it was blamed on X cause, but that the person had obviously caught a virus or bacterial infection. But it sounds more dramatic to say it was because his wife cheated on him or he stayed outside too long or something.

      • dndnrsn says:

        There are ancient histories that are considered reliable in some aspects but not in others. There are historical events we know happened, but the speeches associated with them were all written later by historians. Given the time and place, making up a speech that seemed like it had the right vibe was OK for a historian to do.

        You can see this in the Synoptic Gospels, where short sayings (the sort of thing that would actually get remembered and passed on) are embedded in narratives and discourses. The authors preserved at least a few real sayings and a few traditions that were for real, and embedded it in other stuff that felt right.

        • Eric Rall says:

          There are ancient histories that are considered reliable in some aspects but not in others.

          My favorite example of this is Procopius: he’s one of the best primary sources for the reign of Justinian I, but he was also (particularly in his later work Secret Histories) prone to rather nasty and implausible gossip: for instance, historians are pretty sure that Justinian’s head didn’t mysteriously leave his body late at night.

      • Deiseach says:

        Disbelieving the supernatural is a much bigger strike against Jesus’ real existence than, say, Caesar’s or Alexander’s.

        What. you don’t believe Alexander was the son of Zeus? If it wasn’t for that inconvenient historical reality of battles fought and lands conquered, we could do a neat little article about the mythical Alexander – plainly the whole ‘son of Zeus’ thing means we can’t take any of it seriously and come on, a twenty year old kid from a nowhere Greek state takes out the Middle Eastern superpower of the day, then goes on a run of implausible victories and conquests? Pure fantasy! 🙂

        • Davide S. says:

          Well, how many sources on Alexander describe his divine parentage as a fact rather than rumour or propaganda?

          I do wonder what his tutor Aristotle’s opinion on this was – I don’t think he was the type to believe such things were possible.

          Anyway, my favorite Alexander romance anecdote is Onesicritus (a famously unreliable ‘historian’) making up a tryst between Alexander and Thalestis, a mythical amazon queen – and being mocked for it by Lysimachus, who having been one of Alexander’s bodyguards & generals quipped “I wonder where I was at the time”.

      • fluorocarbon says:

        Also, as I wrote in another comment above – compare and contrast the role of the supernatural in the Gospels to its role in the biographies of non-religious historical characters. … Disbelieving the supernatural is a much bigger strike against Jesus’ real existence than, say, Caesar’s or Alexander’s.

        I don’t think this is entirely accurate. If you read through the gospel of Mark, the earliest narrative source we have, there’s not that much that’s supernatural. There’s no virgin birth and there’s barely a resurrection (someone mentions Jesus got resurrected, then the book immediately ends). Most of the supernatural stuff is faith healing, which still exists today, and a few underwhelming miracles. Casting out demons also meant something different at the time: illnesses, especially mental illnesses, were thought to be caused by spirits entering your body, making casting them out another type of faith healing.

        The later gospels add more supernatural, but they almost always contradict each other when they do. For example, Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives are incompatible. This would fit the pattern of a historical core that later got embellished.

        How often are the “bat-shit insane ancient histories” considered reliable, though? Especially when the writers treats the miracles as facts rather than hearsay.

        Every ancient historian believed, at a minimum, in divination, astrology, omens, magicians, and spirits. They vary in their credulity but if we limit ourselves to sources that don’t attribute anything to the supernatural, we wouldn’t have any sources at all.

        I don’t have time to find quotes for all of that, but I’d like to mention two sources in particular. First, “The Romance of Alexander” written in the 2nd or 3rd century. This is a good source to bring up because it’s pretty similar to the gospels. It’s a biography of Alexander the Great, but very much mythologized. From 1.10 (Source: http://www.attalus.org/translate/alexander1a.html)

        Such was the situation in the palace. Now Nectanebos, by spying, heard Philip say to Olympias: “You have deceived me, Lady. For you have not conceived by a god, but by a human being.” So, when there was a great banquet, he changed himself by magic into a serpent much larger than the first one and came through the middle of the dining-room with a strange and terrible hissing sound so that fear and confusion fell on all on the couches. But Olympias, seeing her own lover, sitting up stretched out from her couch her right hand. He, rearing up, placed his chin in her hand, and coiled his whole body in her bosom. Then, darting out his cloven tongue, he kissed her, giving a proof of friendship and love to the spectators and to Philip himself. And having produced this evidence, he disappeared. o

        Even though this source is “bat-shit insane,” all of the people mentioned above actually existed. Nectanebus was the last pharaoh of Egypt, Philip was Alexander the Great’s father, and Olympias was his mother. We can also learn a lot from sources like this: first, it was widely known that Alexander’s father and mother were Philip and Olympias. Second, there was probably a legend that Alexander was the son of Nectanebus; this would be a way for Egyptians to feel better about being conquered: they weren’t actually conquered by a Greek, Alexander was son of the pharaoh! Joke’s on you, Macedon! Last, there must have also been a legend that Alexander was the son of a god. The author of The Romance clumsily combined them into this weird mix.

        This is somewhat similar to the virgin birth narrative in the gospels. The sources are using combinations of different myths floating around, sometimes in contradictory ways. They also have to do all sorts of contortions to explain how the apparent father (Philip, Joseph) isn’t the actual father (Nectanebus, God).

        The other source I want to mention is The City of God by Augustine of Hippo (4th century), specifically Book 10. He rambles a lot, but he’s essentially arguing in this book against non-Christians who didn’t deny the miracles in the Bible happened, but rather claimed that miracles were just regular magic. An educated Greek or Roman would have probably thought Jesus was a magician or divine man. They might have disbelieved the resurrection, but (to them) the other miracles could have plausibly been regular old magic and spirits. From 10.9 (Penguin Classics edition):

        Those miracles and many other of the same kind – it would take too long to mention them all – were intended to support the worship of the one true God, and to prevent the cult of many false deities. They were achieved by simple faith and devout confidence, not by spells and charms composed according to the rules of criminal superstition, the craft of which is called magic, or sorcery – name of detestation – or by the more honourable title of ‘theurgy’.

        The early Jesus followers lived in a world where people really honestly believed there were magicians who could turn into snakes and that you could tell the future by looking at birds. We have to look at the gospels through that lens.

        • dndnrsn says:

          This is all correct; in fact, I’d go further and question the use of the word “believed” – they didn’t hold that gods were real, magic was real, etc etc as a matter of faith or of opinion. It was something that they knew existed.

          It’s hard to understand Jesus and his context, early Christianity and its context, etc, without getting that their world was one that included a lot of magic. Instead of a division between natural and supernatural, there was a shading: you’re unlikely to meet Zeus (although attractive women had a higher-than-normal chance), and maybe there’s some ineffable philosophical-monotheistic deity behind everything or whatever, but praying at the temple of Aesclepius might heal you, and if you went into those deep woods you might run into a faun, and you might pay a magician to work up a curse or a love charm for you, and…

          Likewise, the miracles attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Mark don’t contain a lot that would seem off to a Jew of the time. Their God was less accessible than pagan deities, but still acted in the world, if perhaps less directly than some pagan deities.

          For Judaism and the Hellenistic paganism or whatever you want to call it of the time, there wasn’t a secular-religious division either. You obey God’s rules/sacrifice to the local god(s) because that’s how you get good fortune. Worshipping foreign gods pisses off God if you’re a Jew, and if you’re a pagan of whatever sort, spurning your traditional local observances are like not standing during the national anthem, but moreso.

          Either they were wrong, or magic and so on somehow left the world. The former is obviously the most likely hypothesis; the latter is more fun.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Either they were wrong, or magic and so on somehow left the world. The former is obviously the most likely hypothesis; the latter is more fun.

            Much more fun, and it’s an idea with an ancient lineage. I collected some ancient sources on the idea a while back, which is put forth by a number of the church fathers (and Plutarch* as well) in first 400 years AD.

            * Working out what it would mean for ancient history if we applied the “disregard histories written by people who believed in the supernatural” rule to Plutarch is left as an exercise for the reader.

          • Davide S. says:

            We know there were also people who were effectively non-religious, though they might not state that openly; the Epicureans claimed that the gods existed but did not interfere in human affairs, which presumably was more acceptable than claiming the gods didn’t exist at all.

            I’m not claiming people like these were a majority, but they certainly existed, and in some times and places Epicureism was relatively popular.

            Interestingly, Epicureans were actually singled out by Judaism as people who ‘would not have a share in the world to come’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epikoros

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          The early Jesus followers lived in a world where people really honestly believed there were magicians who could turn into snakes and that you could tell the future by looking at birds.

          Appealing to the criterion of embarrassment you’d think if they were making it all up whole cloth they’d have had Jesus conjure up some dragons and shoot lightening out of his eyes or something instead of just magicking up booze at a wedding and taking a stroll on the sea.

          • Davide S. says:

            I knew about this logic and have seen apologists use it in the past, but didn’t know it had a proper name so thanks for mentioning it.

            I can see why it sounds reasonable, though as the wikipedia article notes it’s easy to abuse this to make a story appear credible.

          • Protagoras says:

            Anybody who takes the criterion of embarrassment seriously either hasn’t studied the texts of very many religions, or must believe a huge number of incompatible religious narratives.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I don’t take it seriously as far as religion goes, but it’s a useful name for types of heuristics we apply in every day life. If your buddy tells you about this awesome party he was at with supermodels hanging all over him and then they gave him a Ferrari for being such a swell guy you can assume he’s probably lying. If he tells you about this awesome party he was at with beautiful women and then he crapped his pants and everyone laughed at him he’s probably telling the truth because why the hell would anyone make up a story like that?

        • Davide S. says:

          If you read through the gospel of Mark, the earliest narrative source we have, there’s not that much that’s supernatural
          […]The later gospels add more supernatural, but they almost always contradict each other when they do.

          Matthew is the worst, isn’t it? (of the synoptics) He writes about the dead rising from their tombs and walking around Jerusalem ‘wher many people saw them’.

          They vary in their credulity but if we limit ourselves to sources that don’t attribute anything to the supernatural, we wouldn’t have any sources at all

          My perhaps poorly-phrased argument is that the more numerous and central to the account the supernatural (according to the modern understanding of the term) elements are, the less reliable the account should be considered.

          For Alexander, we also have less fantastical sources (and of course, the fact that fabricating his conquests would be simply be impossible); and I mentioned elsewhere that someone making up a story about Alexander and an amazon queen was actually called on it by one of his former bodyguards (implying some people DID care about actual factual accuracy).

          On magic in the bible: believing ‘magic’ and ‘miracles’ are real does not contradict believing fakes (fradulent or in good faith). This should be really obvious to modern believers.
          An educated man of the time could believe Jesus had real power, but I see no reason he couldn’t instead believe that he was a charlatan.

          I’m pretty sure both Romans & Greeks believed that omens & prophecies could be real, but could also be fabricated for political convenience.

          You also had at least a few early pseudo-rationalists who did go out of their own way to criticize some of these beliefs;
          Consider Lucretius, who wrote about why centaurs could never have existed.
          I don’t believe his argument (something about horses & humans growing at different ratesIIRC) was especially good, but it’s an example of educated people openly disbelieving & criticizing myths.

          As an aside, Biblical ‘sorcery’ has interesting implications for modern believers who believe only God has ‘supernatural’ power – consider Moses turning his staff into a snake and having it eat the snakes conjured by the Pharaoh’s court sorcerers. There is no implication that the sorcerers were fakes – only that their sorcery was obviously inferior to the power of God.

          Claiming they were charlatans or were performing ‘Satanic miracles’ could be an explanation, but the story doesnt’ seem to suggest that at all.

          EDIT: For a later example (apocryphal though IIRC) writings on Simon Magus also seem relevant. There’s one story where he is using his magic to fly, and Peter prays to God to make him fall (and he does).

          We have to look at the gospels through that lens.

          But why is it wrong to point out that if ‘miracles’ and ‘magic’ didn’t really exist this lens is really flawed and unreliable, perhaps even when it comes to mundane events?

          • dndnrsn says:

            There are, however, things that have natural explanations but that are experienced as miracles or magic. Faith healing is the best example – some psychosomatic thing is going on. There were also tricksters – that some “psychic” is using psychological tricks, rather than actual mind-reading powers, doesn’t mean that the cold-reading some people are fooled into believing is mind-reading isn’t happening. Etc.

    • Robert Jones says:

      I think people do occasionally suggest that Socrates may not have been a real person, it’s just that it doesn’t generate as much controversy.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      There’s approximately the same amount of evidence for Socrates existing as there is for Jesus, but I’ve yet to meet a Socrates mythicist.

      Really? I’ve definitely heard people suggest that it’s entirely possible that Plato either invented Socrates as a teaching device, or at least mythologised him and attributed a lot of his own work to him.

      • johansenindustries says:

        That Plato is not quoting Socrates verbatin is pretty much obvious. The extent of which and how deliberately Plato uses Socrates to bolster his argument is in question. But as long as you accept there is a Socrates to be used, then that’s completely far from being a Socrates mythicist.

  49. drunkfish says:

    Anybody know of an algae oil that has the right (according to the study above) EPA/DHA ratio? All the ones on Amazon seem to be 1:2 in favor of DHA

  50. Freddie deBoer says:

    Per usual, there are a lot of claims about relative merits of majors re: eventual economic outcomes that are based on no empirical evidence and which are almost 100% the product of selection bias.

    Edit: I was unclear; I don’t mean in the blog post in particular but in the general conversation about the humanities.

    • Lasagna says:

      Hi Freddie! Genuinely good to see you again. I’ve been really enjoying your writing on movies, and looking forward to reading your thoughts on Dune. Not a good movie, but there IS something about it that keeps your attention.

      EDIT: Deleted the rest because I’m not interested in arguing. It’s a nice day. 🙂

      Anyway, really glad to see you writing on your blog again. Always one of the first places I stop each day.

    • idontknow131647093 says:

      All that is true of the relative merit of the college degree. It is also largely a product of selection bias. Same with graduating high school.

      So…uhh…why does it matter?

  51. Wrong Species says:

    The abortion thing doesn’t surprise me because infanticide itself was routinely practiced all the way up to the 19th century.

    Often, societies treat neonaticide as not-quite-murder. In many legal systems, the killing of a neonate by its mother is a crime distinct from homicide, and punished less harshly, while the murder of a baby by its father is not. In the late Middle Ages, when official attempts were made to stamp out infanticide by punishing its perpetrators, they were met by the public with stonewalling. People were often reluctant to report their neighbours for this crime; even maids who shared the same bed would claim not to have noticed that one among them had been pregnant. In 1624, England introduced a draconian law that tried to stop mothers passing off murdered newborns as stillbirths by punishing any woman who gave birth without a witness and couldn’t produce a living child. This law remained on the books for 180 years, but relatively few women were prosecuted under it, and even fewer were convicted; between 1730 and 1774, for instance, only 61 cases of infanticide were tried at the Old Bailey in London. Of the 12 infanticide cases from 1680-88, nine ended in not-guilty verdicts, and three were dismissed for insufficient evidence.

    It would be comforting to attribute these low numbers to the rarity of the crime. But this was not the case. Thomas Coram, who helped to found the London Foundling Hospital in the 1730s, was motivated by seeing, on his daily walk to work, the large number of infants thrown on dunghills or on the sides of the road, ‘sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes dying’.

    • mtl1882 says:

      Yeah, people should pull up some 1800s newspapers – they’re free at Chronicling America, and some are available at newspapers.com. The ads for (early chemical) abortion are everywhere.

      Here are some: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/08/06/history_of_contraception_19th_century_classified_ads_for_abortifacients.html

      The Wikipedia article “History of Abortion” is a pretty interesting narrative.

      Many people who had to actually deal with reality, particularly in that time period, would understandably be forgiving towards mothers who made these decisions, as the article points out. Women were constantly pregnant and nursing, and if they had a baby out of wedlock, they were ruined. Childbirth was extremely dangerous. Sometimes they simply could not afford one more. Many times they were in a coercive position. It was a lot less easy to judge. And infant mortality was so high that it was a lot easier to argue the baby just didn’t make it.

  52. Jiro says:

    Scott’s attitude towards murder offsets was not anywhere near as accepting as his attitude towards meat offsets here, even though it seems like most of the same objections apply to both.

  53. Nabil ad Dajjal says:

    But for some reason the exodus continues even now that the economy is improving.

    For some mysterious unknown reason people on the ground are behaving as though the economy sucks. We know that can’t possibly be the case, since the experts and prestige media all loudly agree that the five year plan was completed in four years the economy is recovering. Such a mystery. /s

    Seriously though, job prospects for nearly any degree suck right now. When even the classic standbys are taking a haircut who is going to sign on for a major in underwater basket weaving?

    • pontifex says:

      That’s strange. Around here the media are constantly trumpeting that we are on the verge of doom! DOOM! and an economic crash is right around the corner. Meanwhile, the stock market seems to be doing pretty well, and employment numbers as well.

      There also seem to be a huge amount of news stories about how everything is terrible for younger people. They have to take McJobs, can’t afford houses, etc. etc.

      Perhaps we are reading different media sources?

  54. ksvanhorn says:

    None of the images of God in that study look right to me. Where are the noodly appendages?

  55. honoredb says:

    The Democrats could (if they got the ability in 2020) make a case for appointing two extra judges to cancel out the “theft” of Obama’s seat (minus one Dem-appointed judge, plus one Rep-appointed judge due to violating a norm). This has some advantages–it’s not exactly retribution, just “restorative justice”, like rolling back an executive order, and it keeps the court small and odd-numbered. But actions like that still erode norms, if only slightly, since clearly it’s not universally agreed that publicly refusing to consider any Obama nominee was a defection.

    Tit-for-tat would be appointing four extra judges, for a kabbalistically appropriate court size that future generations will assume came from the 13 founding colonies. But then the Republicans would definitely retaliate.

  56. Loriot says:

    Regarding the ballot proposition: The reason is because the soda industry is willing to spend massive amounts of money on it, since it directly impacts their bottom line. The Republican party has better things to do with their money, like promote their actual candidates.

  57. Gregor Sansa says:

    I’d like to point out that “win forever by breaking all rules and abandoning all honor” is extremely biased language. I understand that Scott’s using hyperbole to make a point, but in a domain like politics which is already extremely prone to tribalism and halo/horns effects, using a word like “honor” here goes beyond mere hyperbole into bias. At the very least, replace “honor” with “historic norms”.

    A Democratic response to the resulting characterization might be: “we are in a kind of iterated prisoners’ dilemma, with historic norms that have pushed things towards an equilibrium that was cooperative in at least certain sub-contexts. Through both circumstance and enemy action, those norms have now been uniformly broken on the other side; refusing to break them on our side, through such means as court-packing, would mean allowing ourselves to be exploited. If we’re going to accomplish or even credibly threaten court-packing when we get power, we have to start openly discussing it now.”

    …While I’m here, I’ll also point out that the “marginal prisoners are bad parents” study shows only *average* parenting quality. “Half of them are horrible, the other half are OK” is probably closer to the truth than “they’re all worse than nothing”.

    • Wrong Species says:

      Let’s say we have a norm against hitting each other. The Republicans pushed a Democrat. Some of the Democrats are proposing breaking his legs and stabbing him in the gut. It’s wildly disproportionate.

      • idontknow131647093 says:

        Not only that, but it misunderstands the precedent. The tat was Gorsuch. The tit was ending the filibuster for judicial nominees by Reid. Or, more broadly, the first Tit was Bork.

        • 10240 says:

          Off-topic: these references to tit and tat are hard to follow. Often tit is used to refer to the first action and tat to the revenge, but literally “tit for tat” means tat is the first action and tit is the revenge.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            And if I pressed my tits into someone who gave me a tat, I don’t think it would turn out like the game theory phrase…

      • dick says:

        Isn’t threatening a disproportionate response a pretty common way to maintain norms?

        • Wrong Species says:

          Republicans decide to do whatever it is they are supposed to do to get Democrats to agree not to court pack. Do you think that would be the end of it?

          • EchoChaos says:

            Also, what is it? Impeach Trump? Nominate Merrick Garland? Agree that the Supreme Court be ruled by an embalmed Anthony Kennedy in perpetuity?

  58. AISec says:

    Katja Grace’s point on ethical asymmetries implies a lot more about the difficulty of AI Alignment and Bayesian reasoning than is immediately obvious. The difference between an AI utility function that doesn’t have to include ethical asymmetries and one that does is precisely the mathematical difference between the complexity of a simple linear regression and a deep neural net. Deep Neural Nets have to use asymmetric activations in order to encode arbitrary amounts of complexity. You can plot out KG’s ethical asymmetry as an upside-down RELU activation function.

    Consequently, ethical AI systems that have to include asymmetries like those implied by property rights in their utility calculations should be expected to be just as hard to train, and just as imperfect and susceptible to adversarial manipulation, as Deep Neural Nets are today. This probably implies that ethical AGI will have to be trained using supervised learning – i.e. by lots of examples rather than encoded principles – because this is the only semi-reliable way we know to fit a utility function in high-dimensional spaces like real-world ethics.

    Of course, Stochastic Gradient Descent is probably the logical way to approach this sort of ethics training in AI systems today, but it’s interesting to think about how the brain has evolved to do the same thing using Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity. It’s not hard to imagine that deontological norms might have derived over time from this process.

  59. Whatever you think of Assange, this is a stupid way for him to finally get caught and Ecuador has lost whatever goodwill it might have gained in my mind from holding out this long.

    Julian Assange is apparently a really abrasive guy. It could all be rumors started by people who don’t like him, but he does seem to do a good job of making sure no one likes him. This may be a function of the fact that he’s used up all his goodwill from Ecuador, just as he has with a lot of other people over the last decade.

    I’m not saying his politics are right or wrong, or that the world doesn’t need an anonymous publication where sources know they can drop off very embarrassing intel, it just might not be a political call.

    For sources on his personality, I would just Google “Julian Assange personality”. There have been a lot of profiles of him over the years. The most positive ones acknowledge he has strong personality traits, and the most negative ones indicate he is impossible to deal with.

    • Matt M says:

      Julian Assange is apparently a really abrasive guy.

      I tried to watch a sympathetic documentary on him once. It was one of those styles of documentary that has next to zero narration, and is mostly just a camera following him around as he talks.

      I lasted about 15 minutes. Something about the guy was just so goddamn irritating I didn’t want to listen to him for one more second. And I say this as someone largely sympathetic to his policies…

    • Alexander Turok says:

      Another possibility is that, after the Swedish charges for “rape” were dropped and he still insisted on staying in the embassy, they finally got wise to his act, realizing it was always about his personal legal issues rather than his political activities. Granted, I’d have probably done the same if I were in his shoes, and must praise him for the brilliance of his charade. It almost worked.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Why would Scott think Ecuador is giving him shelter based on priciple? Unless I have missed something, there is no reason to believe that.

      • Matt M says:

        Agreed. I’ve never really thought about what they might be – but I’ve always just assumed Ecudaor had its own selfish reasons for harboring him.

  60. rlms says:

    Are there any studies on whether ideology correlates with criminality (of various kinds) in politicians? Brought to mind by this.

    • C_B says:

      He told the call handler: “I’ve er…just killed my wife.”

      The call handler replied: “Is it just the two of you in the house?”

      Searle replied: “Er…well just the one of us now.”

      Top 10 Most British Murderers 2k18

    • Tarpitz says:

      How did I not hear that at the time? That’s brilliant.

  61. ana53294 says:

    The FDA mulls making current prescription-only drugs non-prescription

    So, hypothetically, if the SC does roll back Roe v. Wade, and some states ban abortion, could the next Democratic President pressure the FDA into making abortifacients non-prescription medicines?

    This would mean that a lot of women would be able to just drive to the next state, go to the pharmacy and buy the drugs, without having to go through bullshit waiting periods or stuff like that. Or she could ask a friend to buy her some. Would carrying non-prescription abortifacients across state lines break the law?

    • mtl1882 says:

      I think it is unlikely that Roe v. Wade would be “rolled back” to the point of preventing abortions that early, but if it was, the states could presumably just ban sales of it. So the status of it probably wouldn’t matter. Women could drive to see a doctor out of state, although I guess insurance might be an issue there. Also, I think those drugs have some risks, so it would be hard to make them OTC. Not impossible, but probably not desirable. I think Plan B is OTC some places? But Plan B is probably safer than a drug taken a few weeks later. Very unlikely transport would violate state law – that is usually a federal offense. Possession could be an offense, but that would be a very invasive law that I don’t think would be passed/upheld. If a woman fills a prescription and then visits her family in a state where it is banned, going after her for possessing her prescribed medication is extreme. And laws usually target doctors, not the women themselves. Which may have been your point regarding OTC – if they went after doctors, OTC would make sense, but I’m doubtful we’d get anywhere near this point even if Roe v. Wade was overturned/modified. Once people tried to make effective laws, they’d run into so many complications that they’d be looking for an out. And I think even most people sympathetic to the pro-life cause are wary of depriving doctors of their medical judgment, once they realize that it’s hard to legislate all their individual beliefs of which abortions are okay and which are not.

      • ana53294 says:

        Driving over the state lines, and going to the first pharmacy you can find to buy the drug and drinking it right there is much easier than driving over state lines, paying for an out-of-network doctor (no insurance there), getting an ultrasound, waiting the time you are expected, and them getting the pill. You may need to pay for a hotel while you are getting the prescription. In fact, making it over the counter also makes it easier, for example, for teenage girls who have abusive or very religious families.

        In Spain, the 24 h pill (the pill that is not technically an abortifacient, because it prevents implantation instead of flushing an implanted embryo), became over-the-counter, and this was hugely controversial. But it did make it easier for rape victims, for teenage girls and other women to make sure they didn’t get pregnant after unsafe sex.

        I don’t think anybody would be taking abortifacients for fun (they are not opioids, or addictive), so making them over-the-counter would actually be a huge help for easier abortion.

        You can’t use the pill at later stages, anyway (that has to be done surgically).

        • mtl1882 says:

          Yes, I didn’t mean to imply I thought anyone would use them for fun! That’s one of my pet peeves in this debate – that women just enjoy having abortions or that it’s no big deal to them, when it invariably involves some level of physical and mental suffering, quite often significant.

          I don’t know enough to know if the pill has enough risks to make an ultrasound wise. As in, if you take it when you don’t need it, is there an issue? Do you need certain assessments and follow up? If there isn’t any issue, I’d support OTC, definitely, but I suspect there might be. I totally agree that avoiding the doctor is a huge benefit that would make life much easier, but I don’t know how safe it is to cut the doctor out of the process. If it is, then it should be done.

          • ana53294 says:

            The ultrasound is a completely medically unnecessary procedure made to show pregnant women “Look, it has a heartbeat, so it is a human”.

            There are risks attached to abortifacients, but I don’t think that having a doctor will help that much avoid those risks. The way most doctors test whether you get secondary effects from something, is to give it to you and then change the dosage/chemical. As this is something you only take once, why do you need a doctor?

          • Matt M says:

            Yes, I didn’t mean to imply I thought anyone would use them for fun! That’s one of my pet peeves in this debate – that women just enjoy having abortions or that it’s no big deal to them, when it invariably involves some level of physical and mental suffering, quite often significant.

            And yet…

          • rlms says:

            @Matt M
            Is a commanding officer no big deal as well?

        • INH5 says:

          Driving over the state lines, and going to the first pharmacy you can find to buy the drug and drinking it right there is much easier than driving over state lines, paying for an out-of-network doctor (no insurance there), getting an ultrasound, waiting the time you are expected, and them getting the pill.

          That, and making abortion pills available over-the-counter anywhere in the mainland US would likely make it at least as widely available on the black market as marijuana is even in states where it is illegal. Probably even easier, since far less would have to be smuggled across state lines to turn a profit.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @mtl:

        Once people tried to make effective laws, they’d run into so many complications that they’d be looking for an out.

        Abortion would be immediately illegal in 4 states which have passed laws with triggers in them that take effect if Roe v. Wade.

        Louisiana’s law, for instance, would punish anyone who performs or aides in an abortion with up to 10 years in prison and a maximum $100,000 fine.

        • mtl1882 says:

          Sounds like only one would be immediate. The rest may go into effect, but they’ve left themselves some time to deal with it. I believe they would probably modify the laws pretty quickly to be less extreme.

          Additionally, the issue isn’t exactly Roe v. Wade getting overturned. The issue is the constitutional right to an abortion, as established in Roe v. Wade, getting effectively overturned. The court could overrule part or all of the doctrines in Roe v. Wade, but it’s unlikely to just overrule it. It could possibly preserve the right but change the standard from viability to something else. It could preserve the right but make the decision on other grounds to make it more solid. It could find there is no right and leave it up to the states, and I have a feeling if it did so, later suits would force the strictest states to modify a little. It is important to realize there is almost no chance of the court recognizing fetuses of having full rights, even if it overturned the right to an abortion. So it would be hard to avoid some exceptions. I’m having trouble finding the actual text of the laws (pet peeve of mind – it should be in the article). Are they defining abortion as including early chemical abortions/Plan B? I can’t imagine they include tossing IVF embryos. Abortions of severely deformed/nonfunctional fetuses? (Apparently Louisiana’s law does ban this, but I don’t think the court would uphold it, and I think doctors would fight it hard. Once the public was educated about some of the extreme cases, they’d start to feel uncomfortable. People picture Down Syndrome as the reason people get abortions – it is a reason, but there are far more horrifying genetic disorders).

          Once the states had some bad cases that showed the consequences of a ban, I think there would be changes. At the very least, rape and incest. Once they realize how difficult, painful and possibly dangerous it is to make someone prove these things, most people may start to question their pro-life beliefs. Most of them think too abstractly to get it, though some are true believers. I believe it would change quickly, but it is terrible that some women would have to be sacrificed along the way. I also think the medical community would probably get up in arms about this, but I don’t know how effective that would be.

          Louisiana’s law also contains:

          – a proposal that requires women and their doctors to cremate or bury remains of a fetus after an abortion.

          – a proposal that would impose a prison term of hard labor for receiving reimbursements for covering expenses for a woman who wants to donate fetal tissue after an abortion. The law specifically excludes those who help women who want to donate fetal tissue after a miscarriage.

          The first one could go into effect now if they wanted to pass it. It’s not related to abortion rights. The court would almost certainly not consider fetuses equivalent to born humans and therefore burial would not be required even if the right to an abortion was overturned. But states can make that decision. I think people who sued over it would have a good chance of winning, though.

          The second one sounds pretty ridiculous. It seems to be trying to avoid women being bribed to have abortions by medical researchers. But the way it is written is bizarre, if that’s an accurate summary. It almost certainly would not hold up in court. It also seems unrelated to Roe v. Wade and could be implemented now if it was written in a way that wasn’t so broad and unclear.

  62. Alexander Turok says:

    “Proximal cause is Assange’s protests against Spanish human rights abuses in Catalonia; apparently Ecuador and Spain are pretty close.”

    Shouldn’t that be “alleged human rights abuses?” I’m not aware of a human right to insurrection.

    • Matt M says:

      I believe the principle of self-determination was well articulated here.

      • 10240 says:

        How is that relevant to Spain/Catalonia?

        • johansenindustries says:

          The people who wrote it and founded Matt M’s country clearly believed in a right to self-determination so at least some consider it a natural right.

          And I would have thought the right to say – or anonymously vote – that you would like to be a free country would have near-unanimity as a natural right.

          (It is important to remember that whether the referendum was a misuse of public funds or not, the grandmothers who the Spanish set the police on were not the ones spending the funds.)

          • tomogorman says:

            The Declaration of Independence clearly does not stand for some sort of absolute right of self determination.
            Hence the opening, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
            This clearly implies that a justified separation requires sufficient cause(s).
            This is further bolstered by the history of the founding generation putting down Shay’s and the Whiskey Rebellion, not all causes justify rebellion.
            Whether or not Catalan has such a cause is not much illuminated by the U.S. DOI.

          • johansenindustries says:

            @tomogorman

            What it states is that the one people dissolving the political bonds to another was entitled to them by ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’.

            The Spanish government position is that Catalonia cannot leave. Ever. Nothing Spain can do to them could permit Catalonia to leave. That is obviously different from the DoI position.

          • tomogorman says:

            yes, people have a natural right to dissolve political bonds given sufficient cause. You are ignoring the second part. The argument here is that Catalan has not yet established that predicate.

            Citation needed for Spain’s position that there is no cause for which it would agree Catalan would be justified in seceding. And, further, even if that is Spain’s position (which would be wrong), why would it be relevant to this – as the position of people in this thread is skepticism that Catalan has sufficient cause not that there are no such causes.

          • johansenindustries says:

            https://www.ft.com/content/7c05e890-8c16-11e8-b18d-0181731a0340

            That Catalonia may never leave is not anything of a secret.

            as the position of people in this thread is skepticism that Catalan has sufficient cause not that there are no such causes.

            Citation needed for that.

            Alaxender Turok called grandmothers wanting to have their say whether to leave by putting a slip of paper into a box to be counted as ‘insurrection’.

            Surely if you beleive a people have a right to leave when the circumstances are necessary then they must have a right to discuss whether the circumstances are necessary even when you don’t agree the cirumstances are necessary?

          • ec429 says:

            tomogorman: The passage you quote from the DoI doesn’t say the causes have to be sufficient (according to what standard? to be judged by whom?), merely that “decent respect” means they should be “declare[d]”.

            I.e. ‘if you choose to secede, it’s only polite to say why‘.

            This is further bolstered by the history of the founding generation putting down Shay’s and the Whiskey Rebellion, not all causes justify rebellion.

            All that proves is that the Founders, like approximately everyone else who attains political power, were hypocrites. (Then again, if the U.S. had accepted self-determination as a principle, that whole ‘Civil War’ thing wouldn’t have happened, the Confederacy would just have quietly seceded and that would have been it. Governments aren’t good at living up to their ideals about not being autocratic.)

            TBH, though, the DoI is a really vague and problematic exposition of the ideas of self-determination anyway, if we quote a different (arguably more relevant) part:

            That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

            Questions this raises include:
            * How many of the governed need to consent?
            * How are the People defined, and how may they be subdivided?
            * To whom, exactly, does the new Form of Government have to “seem” good?
            Really the ultimate problem here is, under what circumstances is it acceptable for some individuals to be governed without their consent? The DoI seems to be coming from a position of ‘more of the inhabitants of this rough geographic region consent to the new government than to the old’ (AIUI there’s some historical controversy over whether this was even true).
            I don’t understand how someone can simultaneously believe there exists some sort of right of self-determination and yet not believe that it’s an absolute and individual right. But that’s just me being a rabid libertarian who wonders how statists sleep at night.

      • Aapje says:

        @Matt M

        And then it was further clarified during the civil war.

        The idea that the principle of self-determination means that a group can just split off from a larger polity is not supported by international law; nor is it workable in practice.

        • keranih says:

          It seems to be doing okay for the (American) Protestants.

        • Matt M says:

          Might does not make right.

          I thought the moral justification for the civil war was “because slavery.”

          Are you alleging that an independent Catalonia would reinstitute slavery?

          • ana53294 says:

            I thought the moral justification for the civil war was “because slavery.”

            The moral justification the Spanish state uses against Catalonia is that their desire for independence does not come from the desire to preserve their own language, culture and to advocate for their best interestests (which frequently does not align with Spain’s), but from their selfish desire not to contribute to redistribution funds for evening economic outcomes accross Spain. So they say that Catalonia wants to make Extremaduran pensioners poor (because Catalonia contributes more to pension funds), and is thus evil.

            This is not equal to slavery, of course, but neither is the Spanish boots on Catalan grannies equal to the US Civil War.

            I personally support Catalan independence; these are just the justifications the Spanish government uses. I also think that, although redistribution is fine to help regions that are economically disadvantaged, this should be limited in time. The balance of who is a contributer/receiver of funds has not changed in Spain, unlike reunified Germany.

          • Aapje says:

            @Matt M

            If that was how it worked, Texas could secede tomorrow, because they won’t bring back slavery. Of course, they cannot.

            It works the other way. The general rule is that secession is only allowed when the government is extremely abusive towards a subgroup. This is simply not the case in Spain.

            The Dutch Act of Abjuration, where we declared our independence from Spain, consists of an explanation of the generally accepted rights of citizens and a claim that Philip II of Spain failed in his obligations by violating these rights. This was later also made part of the national anthem, where the Dutch founding father explains that he was loyal to Philip II, but that Philip did not fulfill the quid-pro-quo.

            Note that the American Declaration of Independence is very similar to the Dutch Act of Abjuration, also explaining that people have unalienable and equal rights and blaming the British for violating those rights.

          • johansenindustries says:

            I for one find the notion that violently suppressing a referendum as not being ‘extremely abusive towards a subgroup’ as very wrong. What did King Phillip do to the Dutch that was so much worse than that? And certainly what did the British ever do the colonies (pre-rebellion) that can be described as extremely abusive?

            I think the ‘The general rule is that secession is only allowed when the government is extremely abusive towards a subgroup.’ is false and if you are even coming close to suggesting that Parliment treats Sotland worse that Spain treats Catalonia then that’s suitable absurd to only provoke guffaws.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            The general rule is that secession is only allowed when the government is extremely abusive towards a subgroup.

            That’s the general rule the nationalists (of all stripes) would prefer, certainly. But many people would prefer a more just approach, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t promote that viewpoint by whatever reasonable means may seem appropriate. That doesn’t include violence, but it certainly includes rhetoric such as talking about it as a human right, “freedom is not a crime”, and so on.

          • Aapje says:

            @johansenindustries

            Clearly we have very different sensibilities, as I don’t see it as extremely abusive to disallow the referendum, which asked for something that violated the constitution*. This did require a certain level of violence, as some refused to follow the law willingly. This is no different from the police using violence to stop other violations of the law and not inherently illegitimate. The police seems to have used excessive violence in some cases, but I don’t believe that this was to the extent that justifies secession. To have that justification, you really need a long term pattern of serious abuse.

            * It’s part of the constitution that Catalonia cannot unilaterally secede, and this constitution was accepted by a majority of Catalan voters, not too long ago.

            The main Dutch reasons for secession were religious persecution of Protestants, centralization of government and heavy taxation to fund wars against trading partners of The Netherlands (with whom the Dutch had no grievance).

            The persecution of Protestants involved banning all preaching or practice, also in private dwellings. The Inquisition also was a separate legal system, without the normal judicial safeguards. For example, there was no right to appeal and an unlimited ability to arrest, torture and execute at will.

            I’ve not heard any grievances by Catalan secessionists that are anywhere near as serious as that. In fact, a lot of secessionists seem to do the same as you: define opposition to secession by the central government as being grounds for secession, which seems like circular reasoning to me.

          • johansenindustries says:

            If California decided to hold a referendum on whether private gun ownership ought to be banned would you consider Trump sending in the National Guard to rip out the ballot boxes as just reasonble. If yes, then I guess we do have different sensibilities.

            The main Dutch reasons for secession were religious persecution of Protestants, centralization of government and heavy taxation to fund wars against trading partners of The Netherlands (with whom the Dutch had no grievance).

            The persecution of Protestants involved banning all preaching or practice, also in private dwellings. The Inquisition also was a separate legal system, without the normal judicial safeguards. For example, there was no right to appeal and an unlimited ability to arrest, torture and execute at will.

            Heavy taxation – and the general view of seeing the posession as a piggy bank – and the centralised government is undoubtedly true in the Catalan case.

            The violence against the Catalonian people trying to express their opinion. A person who the Catalonian government wanted to appoint as leader was imprissoned to prevent it. You might say that this is justified because Catalonians are enemies of Spain. But would not have Spain said the same about Dutch Protestants?

            It is true that unlike the Dutch case there is not a Catalonian legal system but also a seperate inquisition that answrrs to Spain rather than the Dutch. But that is because there isn’t a Catalonian legal system, it is all just under Spain answering to a Spanish Supreme Court (fourty years loyal Francoists and now loyal to the succesor party).

            The idea that the Franco consituton has any legitmacy is farce. They accepted a little democracy over continued absolute tyranny. I reject your implied claim that that means they have no right to desire further improvements.

            I’ve not heard any grievances by Catalan secessionists that are anywhere near as serious as that. In fact, a lot of secessionists seem to do the same as you: define opposition to secession by the central government as being grounds for secession, which seems like circular reasoning to me.

            It is dishonest to describe the violent attacks on the Catalonians spech as ‘ opposition to secession by the central government as being grounds for secession’. It is not that they oppose it, it is the way that the oppose it.

          • Tarpitz says:

            Whatever the current laws or norms in any given case are, it seems very clear to me that the UK government’s approach to the Scottish independence movement is far preferable to that of Spain’s to the Catalan one. I don’t really understand how anyone could think otherwise.

          • ana53294 says:

            @Aapje

            If your claim on the legitimacy of the Spanish constitution’s ability to prohibit referendums for historical territories is that those historical territories voted for the constitution, then the Spanish Constitution does not have legitimacy in the Basque Country. For complicated reasons, the Basques chose to abstain and protest the referendum, so if we take just the percentage of voters who voted yes on the Constitution (don’t look in the English version, it doesn’t show the details; just look at the table):

            For the Basques: Alava (42.3 %), Guipuzcoa (27.2 %), Vizcaya (30.4%). Alava has a population of ~ 300,000, Gipuzkoa has a population of ~700,000, and Bizkaia has a population of ~ 1,100,000.

            The vast majority of Basques did not vote for the Constitution, but boycotted it because they did not accept the legitimacy of the Spanish rule.

            Now, the majority of Catalans did vote yes during the referendum for the constitution. But if you say, well, they voted for the constitution, then it is legitimate for them, then you also have to say, the Basques did not vote for it, so it’s not legitimate for them.

            I think that the referendum for the Constitution of 1978 was done at gunpoint and thus lacks legitimacy. I want a second referendum, where we take a lot of the issues that were given as a package separately. For example, some people in Spain vulgarly refer to the King as suppository, because he was introduced by Franco quietly and from behind.

            centralization of government and heavy taxation to fund wars against trading partners of The Netherlands

            Catalans do not support NATO, and view the occupation of Afghanistan negatively. The heavy taxation is one of the main reasons for Catalan independence.

            Decision-making is also very centralized. Historical territories do want to have more control over a lot of these issues.

            The main Dutch reasons for secession were religious persecution of Protestants

            Well, we don’t have the Inquisition anymore, but the Spaniards do try to suppress linguistic minority rights whenever they can. Thankfully, we are in a quasy-democracy, so they cannot get away with as much stuff as they did in the past.

            An example of how the government prosecutes linguistic minorities:

            The Basques are fairly spread, and Basque speakers go beyond Basque historical territories. This means that only Basque territories have Basque schools that are financed by public money. In Navarre, only a small part is considered Basque, so parts that do not have public Basque schools have private schools. Now, due to government support, they need money, as the parents who send their kids there are not that rich. So every year, we organize a festival in support of our schools, and money is collected for the schools. One of the years I went to the festival, in a bus, every passenger of the bus was asked to step out of the bus, and we were all searched. We were suspicious because we were attending a festival. Now, I consider this harassment and prosecution.

          • Aapje says:

            @johansenindustries

            If California decided to hold a referendum on whether private gun ownership ought to be banned would you consider Trump sending in the National Guard to rip out the ballot boxes as just reasonble.

            If it seemed fairly obvious that the referendum was part of a plan to get support for a unilateral declaration of independence, then I wouldn’t necessarily see it as unreasonable to send in the National Guard to prevent the referendum, with the caveat that the US is theoretically a federation, which implies a greater right for a state to self-govern than for a province.

            Heavy taxation – and the general view of seeing the possession as a piggy bank – and the centralised government is undoubtedly true in the Catalan case.

            I think you are missing my point. Heavy taxation for the benefit of the populace is perfectly legitimate, as is practiced in Sweden or such. Both Sweden and Spain are democracies where the populace can decide together how much taxation is valid.

            What is far less legitimate is a more colonial arrangement, where riches are extracted from one population to enrich another population, in an extremely excessive manner. This is especially the case if a money is transferred from a relatively poorer region to a relatively richer region. I don’t think that this is happening in Spain right now. Catalonia is one of the richest regions and taxation & wealth transfers don’t seem that excessive.

            @Tarpitz

            I agree that they handled it very badly, greatly increasing resentment. However, it also seems clear to me that the intent of the Catalonian secessionists was to provoke a conflict.

            @ana53294

            We are discussing Catalonia, so I don’t see how the legitimacy of the constitution in Basque Country is relevant here.

            Anyway, my point is that secession is a nuclear option, which requires severe abuses. I can understand why you have a complaint about a lack of teaching in the Basque language in regions with fewer Basque speakers, but this seems like a ‘normal’ political conflict to me, not an example of severe abuse.

            IMO, the proper response to relatively minor abuses is political activism and such, not secession.

          • johansenindustries says:

            @Aapje

            I think you are missing my point. Heavy taxation for the benefit of the populace is perfectly legitimate, as is practiced in Sweden or such. Both Sweden and Spain are democracies where the populace can decide together how much taxation is valid.

            Although, presumbly, if Catalonians decided to have a referendum on whether they did want to pay so high taxes you would support their getting beaten and attack them for just trying to cause trouble. I do not see how ‘the populace can decide together’when you think that putting a marked piece of paper in a ballot box (other than at times determined by the Spanish state) is considered by you to be a gross provocation.

            If the Catalonian government had only polled a sample of the Catalonian people rather than the whole Catalonian population would that also have justified violence on the part of the Spnish state against the poll-takers (in your opinion)?

            What is far less legitimate is a more colonial arrangement, where riches are extracted from one population to enrich another population, in an extremely excessive manner. This is especially the case if a money is transferred from a relatively poorer region to a relatively richer region. I don’t think that this is happening in Spain right now. Catalonia is one of the richest regions and taxation & wealth transfers don’t seem that excessive.

            Were the Dutch people much poorer than the Spanish? Since, obviously, one cannot deny that Catalonia is a piggybank for the greater Spanish government.

            Aapje – who is not Catalonian, doesn’t care much about Catalonia, probably doesn’t know much about Catalonia – thinks that Catalonian granmothers are over reacting as they get thrown down stairs by the Spanish state.

          • albatross11 says:

            A interesting aside, looking at this from the US, is that I’m convinced that an actual attempt by a US state to secede[1] would be met by as much force as needed to stop it–all using the letter of the law and legal mechanisms as much as possible. It would look very much like Spain’s handling of Catalonia in the last year or so.

            [1] As opposed to some kind of referendum where nobody really took it seriously.

          • ana53294 says:

            @Aapje

            We are discussing Catalonia, so I don’t see how the legitimacy of the constitution in Basque Country is relevant here.

            I am using the example of the Basque Country to discuss the legitimacy of the Spanish Constitution’s clause on seccession. Do you agree or disagree whether the lack of support for the constitution in the Basque country means that the secession clause does not apply there?

            Frankly, my ideal in the matters of seccession is Liechnstein: every smally village has a right to seccede after a referendum.

            I don’t think they ever would, but the fact that they could do it at any moment means that if things go bad, they can do so within an established legal framework. This means that, if a small town in Liechnstein thinks that they are better off outside of Liechnstein, then they can at anytime choose to do so. I don’t view seccession as a nuclear option, but as a perfectly normal form of democratic activity.

            Nobody has to be attached to anybody in perpetuity, not anymore. Perpetual contracts are illegal; we have divorce; children can renege their parents and refuse to help them if they choose to; parents can do the same, after kids turn 18. Why do we deny groups of people to not interact with other groups of people, though? Why should we not have collective rights of association? Why should our collective be bound in perpetuity by a contract signed 40 years ago, at gunpoint, and not by all members (some of the ones who signed it are dead, while everybody under the age of 58 did not vote for it)?

            If we don’t count those who are not of voting age, there are 24,2 million Spanish people who did not participate in the constitutional referendum (which, again, was done at gunpoint). There are 8,2 million minors, also. The total population of Spain is 46,5 million. This means that less than half of the population voted for the constitution.

            Out of those 22,3 million who had the opportunity to vote, only 59 % did, 90 % for yes (I am adjusting upward). This means that 22,4*0.59*0.9=11.84 voted yes. So, out of the Spanish population alive today, only 25.4 % voted for the constitution. Why should we still be bound by it? If we assume a similar trend for Catalonia, only 25.4 % of Catalans voted for the Constitution, too.

            I don’t think I should be bound by contracts made by my parents, to be honest. And I especially don’t think I should be bound by that contract, if the other choice my parents got offered was being killed in a Civil War.

          • albatross11 says:

            ana:

            I am not convinced that a right to secession upon a majority vote of the inhabitants is a great policy. I can see times it’s a good policy, but others when secession just makes it easier for an outside power to divide-and-conquer an enemy, or makes it harder for the nation to do anything as a nation for fear of losing the secession referendum.

            One issue here is that while you have every right to seek a different political arrangement than your parents did, you don’t really have the right to impose that different political arrangement on all your neighbors.

            This isn’t about the situation w.r.t. Spain and its regional governments (particularly the Basque region and Catalunya), because I don’t really know enough to have strong opinions on those disputes. But as a general principle, I don’t think the world would be a better place with a 51% secession vote rule for every state and province and region and town. I’m not sure what the right rule would be, but I don’t think that’s the right one.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            @albatross11, a simple majority would be a bad rule, IMO. See Brexit.

            How about a rule that requires an affirmative vote for independence from at least 62.5% of eligible voters? That’s not going to happen unless people are seriously unhappy with the status quo.

            … and then you still need negotiations over the placement of the new border, compensation for people on the wrong side of it, oh, lots of stuff. And another vote once there’s a specific proposal, though perhaps that one should be by simple majority.

            But, well, the Catalan separatists would freak out at this proposal because they know they’d never get that level of support, and I’m inclined to think they’d freak out at the idea of the border changing too. Meanwhile Spain would still be singing the “indissoluble unity” tune. So, well, whatever, I guess. A plague on both their houses.

          • Aapje says:

            @johansenindustries

            You are aware that if you refuse to pay the taxes you owe in the US, you go to prison? See Wesley Snipes.

            This is rather normal everywhere.

            @ana53294

            I think that the Basque people have a slightly better claim than the Catalonian people, but not such a good one that secession seems warranted.

            I don’t think that there is severe oppression. Furthermore, the Basque country is neither linguistically nor culturally homogeneous. Also, part is in France. A standardized form of the Basque language was only created in 1960, so it’s not like there has been a common language for ages.

            Frankly, my ideal in the matters of seccession is Liechtenstein

            A tax haven, leeching off other countries, rather than creating value. Nice model you have there.

            Why do we deny groups of people to not interact with other groups of people, though?

            Part of the reason is that it doesn’t actually work, since Spanish people will still be living in Basque Country. Will you deport them from their homes? Will you deny them Spanish schools?

            I think that most secessionists are hopelessly naive about the consequences, seeing secession as a miracle cure that will solve their issues.

            I don’t object to it in all cases, but I think that most secessionists need some serious push back.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            I am not convinced that a right to secession upon a majority vote of the inhabitants is a great policy.

            I’ve always thought that subgroups should have the right of succession, but only with a super-majority (2/3’s sounds about right to me). A major change like that should not occur if just a slight majority agrees. It could then easily switch back to a majority wanting to stay the next year. And such a change to the status quo is a severe imposition to the slight minority that disagrees. But this does give an option for succession if there is strong approval by the people.

            I think Brexit is a good example of a bare majority making a very big decision, which might well swing to the other side the next year. Brexit should not have been a thing based on the tiny majority that agreed.

            Edit: Harry, you beat me to it. Nice to see someone else thinking the same way.

          • johansenindustries says:

            @Aapje

            You are aware that if you refuse to pay the taxes you owe in the US, you go to prison? See Wesley Snipes.

            This is rather normal everywhere.

            Non-responsive? Nobody is talking about not paying taxes, we are talking about expressing a wish to see taxes lower. I’m sure in America that doesn’t get you imprissoned.

            When the Lib-Dems (in the UK) hold their (party) referendums on how they would like the tax system to change. We do not steal the votes regardless of how it will bolster position or ho like the lib-dems are to effect them.

          • ana53294 says:

            I would be happy if we introduced an Article into our constitution that said any territory has the right to seccession, if 66% of voters vote for it. Basically, a credible club that means that the Spanish state doesn’t get too tempted to trumple our rights, but at the same time a hard enough hoop to jump through that it is only practical for really serious stuff.

            I actually don’t really want independence, to be honest. I would be happy with the American model of federalism, where we get as much autonomy as US states have, and that includes control over our education system. I just want to safeguard my culture and my nation so that we don’t get assimilation by (internal) migration. Part of Franco’s strategy to eliminate Basque and Catalan cultures, which were in industrialized, rich parts of Spain, was to purposefully foment internal migration to those areas, and not to spend money on developing the areas those migrants came from.

            So yes, I favor a strong policy of culturally assimilating Spanish economic migrants into the Basque Country, by making it much more necessary than it is now to learn our language.

            In Switzerland, for example, you can’t really move from the French speaking area to the German speaking area and expect to be hired. But Spaniards always complain when they come to the Basque Country and they find that yes, for some professions Basque is required or is a big plus. Would they do it if it was a different country? If Spaniards were not Spaniards, we may have less desire for independence.

            So I do favor policies that would contribute to evening economic outcomes to other regions of Spain, because I don’t want people unwilling to learn Basque to be forced to move to the Basque country. But those contributions should be effective and pay off by growing their economies, instead of putting people on the dole.

          • Obelix says:

            ana53294:

            I actually don’t really want independence, to be honest. I would be happy with the American model of federalism, where we get as much autonomy as US states have, and that includes control over our education system. I just want to safeguard my culture and my nation so that we don’t get assimilation by (internal) migration.

            As a Quebecer I understand your viewpoint very well. Canada is a federation, and Canadian provinces do have control over their education systems, but there are some limits imposed by the Canadian constitution. Quebec made French its only official language in 1977, and made it the official language of primary and secondary public schooling, while maintaining the right to English-language public schooling for Quebec’s English-speaking minority (English speakers are a minority in Quebec but a majority in Canada as a whole). At first, this right was reserved to anglophones actually from Quebec (defined as having a family member who studied in English in Quebec), for the reason you give: to protect anglophones as a national minority of Quebec while avoiding francophones being stamped out by a possible influx of English-speakers from the rest of Canada. However, the Supreme Court of Canada then ruled that this right would have to be expanded to any Canadian anglophone who moved to Quebec. I don’t think this has had too much of an impact, though, since there hasn’t been too much of an influx of English-speakers from the rest of Canada to Quebec since then. Some regions (such as Montreal) do hold some attraction for other Canadians though.

            Quebec has also negotiated with the Canadian federal government control over part of its immigration policy, for the same reason, to focus on prospective immigrants who speak French or are willing to learn.

            Your comment about Spaniards moving to the Basque country and complaining about the fact that Basque is spoken and is required for some jobs rings very true. Some Canadians seem to think of any way in which Quebec might differ in culture from wherever in Canada they’re from as a personal insult, as if we’re doing it only to be difficult to them. Language, and the fact that many Quebecers actually do not speak English at all or only very little, features prominently in these complaints, as well as the fact that some positions in the federal public service require both English and French since both are official at the federal level.

        • mtl1882 says:

          The main issue about secession for me is how many people want to secede. I feel like the number should have to be really high. I don’t think the U.S. government would be as quick to shut down a secession movement with force as we think. It’s ugly and doesn’t look good. I think they’d try to negotiate for a while. The problem is that there are always dissenters who live in that area. I support the right to self-determination, and I don’t think a strong reason is necessary, though probably wise. The declaration of independence in my opinion is not saying a good cause is necessary at all, but wants to make clear that it had one. It’s clearly saying it is a natural right. The later part that is described as confusing shows how strongly they believed this – if the people are unhappy, change the situation. Go ahead and rebel. For all the worship of what the Founders wanted and intended, they were pretty clear they did not intend this stuff to be set in stone. But it is also very vague, and that is the issue I have. One of the real problems in the Civil War was that the US government couldn’t just abandon its loyal citizens who lived in the South. It was understandable that they felt a responsibility to those U.S. citizens who were essentially being conquered. Lincoln believed there were way more loyal or borderline loyal people who were being mislead than was probably the case in reality, and made rather misdirected efforts based on that belief. But it was a dilemma – do you let the Confederacy seize their property? Those types of issues are the real problem. If even 10% of people want to remain Americans, I feel like the U.S. government has a duty to shut down the secession if it’s possible to do so with minimal violence. If they would have to kill 90% of the people, I think they’d let them secede. The American public would prefer it, I think. One state is not as much of an issue as it has been in past conflicts, where significant territory and economic value were involved. In the Civil War, a lot of what probably motivated the North was that they knew secession would result in them having a powerful and problematic neighbor and there would be constant conflict that would threaten the North’s future. The South seemed oddly unworried about this, seeming to think the relations would not be much different than before and we’d negotiate it out. But the whole point was those relations weren’t working and negotiation had failed. Secession was unlikely to change that longterm.

          If California passes a referendum, particularly a non-binding one, it baffles me that anyone thinks we should interfere. They have a right to consider anything they want. The Constitution can be changed. If they acted on it and violated the Constitution, the courts would correct that. Preventing them from proposing the issue would backfire badly.

    • J Mann says:

      To clarify, the alleged abuses in question are that after the Catalonians voted to secede from Spain, Spain dissolved the local government, put in a caretaker government of its own, and has now ceded power back to representatives with apparently less immediate separatist intentions?

      I confess, when I heard human rights abuses, I assumed at least beatings or imprisonments without due process.

      • ana53294 says:

        has now ceded power back to representatives with apparently less immediate separatist intentions?

        They pulled all kinds of grey-level stuff to avoid the winning party to name the representatives of their choice, though. For example, one of the candidates, who was out on bail, was temporarily jailed the day he was going to be nominated.

        I confess, when I heard human rights abuses, I assumed at least beatings or imprisonments without due process.

        Beatings: Video showing police shoving people down the stairs and kicking them with military boots.

        As for the imprisonments: there are politicians in jail for sedition, rebellion and misuse of public funds. Now, I think that rebellion and sedition are bogus charges (the violence during the referendum came from the Spanish police, not the voters; besides, I don’t think calling for a referendum qualifies as inciting rebellion). Germany agrees with this, as they refused to extradite the leader of the Catalan government on sedition and rebellion charges. As for the misuse of public funds, the Spanish government says there were none, although the prosecutor and judges insist.

        And we haven’t even started to talk about the torture of Basque activists by Spanish police (they haven’t tried this shit on Catalans yet).

        • J Mann says:

          No question that that sounds like human rights abuses. Sorry for not being better informed, but I appreciate the education.

  63. jstr says:

    Re: The Royal Game of Ur: this WONDERFUL video:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I

    Video by: The British Museum

    From the description: Tom Scott vs Irving Finkel: The Royal Game of Ur | PLAYTHROUGH | International Tabletop Day 2017

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Scott_(entertainer)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Finkel

    Enjoy 🙂 !

  64. Tenacious D says:

    After reading a tangent above about homesteading, I looked up some land prices near my home to get a relevant data point. I found a woodlot for $340/acre and a building lot on a main street for $280,000/acre (which would be on the upper end of the range in my city). The enormous premium for the latter* comes from things like infrastructure (roads, water/wastewater, etc.), being cleared and graded, and nearby schools, grocery stores, offices, and parks. Some of these factors are labour inputs into the land, but others are a general sort of civilizational negentropy.

    *Even the woodlot is more expensive than land in a complete state of nature due to factors like road access (or at least a path an ATV could travel on), being surveyed, and having pulp or lumber mills nearby.

  65. John Schilling says:

    Regarding Gwern’s review of Carrier: he talks about “more documented cases of religions emerging and historicizing their [implicitly mythical] founders”. Any idea what Gwern and/or Carrier is talking about here? I am unaware of any religion or cult of significance claiming descent from a founder who allegedly preached within living memory of his ‘historicization” but whom we know to have not existed. This implausibility is central to Jesus-as-myth, and needs to not be simply asserted in passing as if it were common knowledge.

    • J Mann says:

      Joseph Smith was actually a community of squirrels wearing a trenchcoat.

      ETA: I suppose if that were true, then at least the squirrels existed. Are there any good examples of historicization of anyone who we later learned didn’t exist?

      • cassander says:

        Prestor John? Pope Joan? Homer?

        • John Schilling says:

          Historicization within what should have been living memory, such that someone in the audience could stand up and say “…but I was IN Jerusalem thirty-five years(*) ago, and I didn’t see any of that.” Claiming a chain of obscure or secret teaching from the distant past, is not at all comparable.

          * Crucifixion to composition of Mark, approximate.

          • Eric Rall says:

            William Tell and Robin Hood approach but don’t quite fit that criterion: both start showing up in ballads and chronicles about a century after the time period when their major exploits supposedly existed, about as far back as Kaiser William II or Theodore Roosevelt is for us.

            The Pied Piper of Hamelin may fit: the story takes place in 1284, and the oldest know record of the story (a stained glass window showing the piper leading the children away, destroyed in the 1660 but described in multiple contemporary sources) dates from about 1300. Although the oldest written record that unambiguously references the story as a real historical event (an entry in the Hamelin town chronicle commemorating the 100th anniversary) isn’t until 1384, a century after the Piper.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Thirded. Anybody know what they’re referring to?

  66. Douglas Knight says:

    SF wants to ban tech cafeterias. But Mountain View has already done it (for new companies). How did that work out? What does Facebook actually do?

    • albatross11 says:

      Is there any good argument for this, or is it just pure envy and corruption?

      • Nornagest says:

        The standard argument is that it’s to encourage patronizing local restaurants, but that sounds pretty weak to me. I think it’s 80% just trying to get a dig in at tech workers.

        • Matt M says:

          When I first heard of this idea, I has always assumed they were going to go with the “worker’s rights” argument.

          As in, most white collar workers understand that various on-site company “perks” are not really free gifts to you. They are specifically designed to keep you on campus so that you work more.

          I was expecting the progressive argument to be “Tech companies have no right to do things that, in a practical sense, force their workers to work through their well deserved lunch break!” or some such thing. Kinda surprised they went with “stimulates the local economy” instead!

          • Deiseach says:

            They are specifically designed to keep you on campus so that you work more.

            Certainly if they’re providing breakfast and dinner as well; that’s heavily hinting “don’t bother going home at night, just stay here day and night and work work work”. Maybe we will see the re-introduction of the model village? It sounds as if it would be easier all round if Google simply bought Mountain View lock, stock and barrel!

            But as a general rule, I don’t think you can really ban works canteens, especially if it’s for the purpose of simply moving people from point A to point B to eat, for the benefit of the livelihood of local restaurants and cafés. It’s one thing if I decide that I want to eat out at Joe’s Bistro during my lunch hour rather than in the company cafeteria; it’s another thing if I have no choice about going to Joe’s (or rather the choice is “go to Joe’s or bring your own lunch or go hungry”).

            I think people will be more inclined to bring their own lunches, rather than patronise the local restaurant scene during the working day, particularly if the restaurants start charging “tourist prices*” to take advantage of “all these big salaries, they can afford to pay the marked-up price”.

            *A complaint I heard in one workplace; people who usually went out for lunch noticed that during the tourist season, a meal that cost (say) a tenner last week was now mysteriously fifteen or twenty quid for the same food, same service, etc. If local food services start bumping up their prices in anticipation of a windfall, I think they’ll be disappointed.

          • Matt M says:

            if the restaurants start charging “tourist prices*” to take advantage of “all these big salaries, they can afford to pay the marked-up price”.

            This already happens. I used to work in a big office building in downtown Houston with a nearby food court. Wasn’t at all uncommon to see people buying a $12 salad for lunch.

            My position was that this was actually quite generous from the salad folks. They probably could have charged $20 and not seen a significant drop in sales.

          • veeloxtrox says:

            Certainly if they’re providing breakfast and dinner as well; that’s heavily hinting “don’t bother going home at night, just stay here day and night and work work work”.

            I work in tech and get breakfast and lunch almost every day at the office. A big benefit that it provides for me is that I am able to come into work early, have a good breakfast, and go home early. This shifted commute time saves me over an hour commuting each day. Additionally, the good food at breakfast and lunch helps me think straight throughout the day, and saves me time because I don’t have to prepare the food. So, I see it as a win win. I get to spend less time commuting and making food. The company gets to have a happier more productive worker.

            Does this enable some people to put in longer hours? Yes. Should the city get involved in the process? Hell no!

          • Nornagest says:

            When I first heard of this idea, I has always assumed they were going to go with the “worker’s rights” argument.

            Labor leftism doesn’t have much of a hold in the Bay Area. It leans far left, but its flavor of that is all identity politics, plus a vague cultural affinity for the 1960s counterculture (even though most of the original hippies got priced out by 1980 or so, and grew up, sold out, or migrated to various small towns).

          • herculesorion says:

            ” They are specifically designed to keep you on campus so that you work more.”

            This is also the motivation for “dog-friendly” workplaces.

            Cats shit in a box. Birds and lizards shit on the floor. Fish shit in the water. But your dog can’t really shit anywhere but outside. So if your dog is at home, then you have a definite upper limit on the amount of time you can stay at work before your dog has to shit. However, if your dog is right there next to your desk, then you can take a five minute shit break for the dog and then get riiiiight back to work…

        • pontifex says:

          I think it’s 80% just trying to get a dig in at tech workers.

          That’s probably part of the motivation in SF. In Mountain View, the tech workers are the electorate, and have been for a long time.

          The issue is more that Mountain View has been gradually turning into a private Google campus for a long time. They keep buying more and more buildings there. The local restaurants probably are really threatened by the free food. Other companies feel like they have to also offer free food to compete for talent with Google.

          Google has clashed with the town many times. For example, they wanted to build a bunch of housing, and the town said no. The town tried to diversify away from Google by selling a bunch of land to LinkedIn, but then Google did a land swap with LinkedIn to grab the MTV land anyway.

          Now Google is going to build a big campus in downtown San Jose, which presumably has a more pliant city government.

      • ana53294 says:

        Would the policy apply to factories too?

        In factories, people work in shifts. For example, they can have shifts 6 am to 2 pm, 2 pm to 10 pm, and 10 pm to 6 am. Now, do you think there is any chance of finding an open restaurant at 2 am in the morning?

        There are good reasons why some employers need to provide a work canteen, or even subsidize the workers’ meals. If there is only one canteen, they could unfairly increase the price a lot; it makes a lot of sense for the company to provide cheap or free meals to their workers.

        Hospitals also need to provide meals to people at anytime of day and night. Doctors and nurses works shifts; patients and their families come to the hospital day and night; some of them have to eat at 2 am. Thus, it may make sense for the hospital to heavily subsidize the food for their workers, especially those who work night shifts (because those working day shifts can go to some other restaurant). I don’t know if they do it, but it would be perfectly logical.

        I am pretty sure they did not ban hospital canteens. But the principle is kind of similar, and the only difference is emotional (hospitals are not perceived as disruptive and evil).

        • herculesorion says:

          I think the issue is less that they’re providing these benefits, than it is that they’re providing these benefits without paying taxes on them.

          Like, if you’re going to tell me that free lunches represent an effective salary bump for employees, well, payroll taxes are based on salary, so why shouldn’t Google be paying taxes on that free lunch?

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            Huh. Don’t you have fringe benefit tax?

            And is there some reason the relevant authorities *couldn’t* have taxed the cafeterias rather than banning them, if that was really what they cared about?

          • herculesorion says:

            Oh, I think this is absolutely about local governments trying to look like populist heroes by taking on those damn kids and their damn money that’ve been driving out the Good People.

            I think there is a problem here–employees quite clearly consider these things to be part of their compensation, not just simple side benefits like “nice modern office” or “close to the BART station”, which means that they ought to be considered part of their salary, which means A) taking them into account when calculating the typical salary of an area’s workers (and that matters for people who aren’t employed by Google) and B) paying taxes on them.

            Which, maybe that last is what this is all about; a way to mousetrap Google into claiming that these things are important parts of how it compensates its employees, with the response being “well maybe you should pay some taxes on it then”

          • Douglas Knight says:

            I could imagine someone from another state wanting to tax fringe benefits so that google employees would send more money to the federal government. But why would a California politician want to send more money to the feds? Why would an SF or MV politician even want to send more money to the state?

  67. perlhaqr says:

    Related: Democrats discuss packing the Supreme Court if they win in 2020.

    Being one of the people brought in specifically to pack the Supreme Court and judicially neuter the Second Amendment in a country with 400M+ privately owned firearms seems like a poor decision for personal longevity.

  68. Squirrel of Doom says:

    I have three things to say about the “agglomeration effect”. That is, the idea that when you add more housing to an expensive city like San Francisco, normal rules of supply and demand may not apply, since the increased density itself makes the city more attractive and drives up demand and prices even more.

    1. This is a question in the science of Economics. Economists have studied it and already know the answer. Economists love weird market quirks like this more than life itself, and would study the hell out of this effect, if it existed. I could do a rant about how people have strong uninformed opinions about things Economics long ago has established the facts for, much more than any other sciences, but not here. Anyway, the actual answer is that there is a minor such effect, but it’s far below “break even”. Or at least I saw an authority in the field say that when asked.

    2. If this effect worked full out to where you could keep adding more and more building and prices would just keep rising, you would have invented an economic Perpetuum Mobile! Each new building not only gives profit to it’s owners, but also showers surrounding building with increased value. I can understand the squeamishness for tenants, but come on, this way we could generate infinite wealth and make all dreams come true!

    3. Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t this arguments smell of Motivated Reasoning? That absolutely doesn’t mean it has to be wrong, but it’s just so attractive to people who don’t want to build!

    • Sniffnoy says:

      2. If this effect worked full out to where you could keep adding more and more building and prices would just keep rising, you would have invented an economic Perpetuum Mobile! Each new building not only gives profit to it’s owners, but also showers surrounding building with increased value. I can understand the squeamishness for tenants, but come on, this way we could generate infinite wealth and make all dreams come true!

      To be fair to the people who argue that the agglomeration effect will causes prices to go up, the more detailed form of the argument I’ve seen them advance is that yes, in the limit prices will go down, but that the amount of housing required for this is more than will realistically be built.

      Of course, if the agglomeration effect isn’t enough to get prices to up at all, then this argument falls apart. And, as you say, this is at least partly an empirical question; it’s not something that can be solved without numbers.

      3. Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t this arguments smell of Motivated Reasoning? That absolutely doesn’t mean it has to be wrong, but it’s just so attractive to people who don’t want to build!

      Eh, this reads like an argument from my opponent believes something. “My opponent makes arguments, which support their conclusion, which means they might have reasoned backwards from their conclusion to their argument, which is not a valid form of argument.”

      EDIT: Expanded with additional paragraph

      • Squirrel of Doom says:

        I didn’t mean my “motivated reasoning” as a real counter argument. Like I said, that it “smells” like this doesn’t at all mean it’s wrong.

        It’s more of a mental hygiene note.

    • Wrong Species says:

      My general rule of thumb is that when someone makes a weird counterintuitive argument that just happens to align with their political views, 90% of the time they are full of it. The more confident they sound the more likely they don’t know what they are talking about. The only problem is determining that ten percent.

    • sohois says:

      I’d say the biggest issue with the agglomeration effect is that I can’t imagine it functioning linearly. Given scope insensitivity, people are generally going to be ignorant of small changes in capacity of large cities. Imagine San Francisco added 500’000 extra homes above average next year. How would potential movers even become aware of this news? Sure, there would be some articles about the sudden increase, but would they really find a mass audience? I posit that the only signal that would cause a rush of extra interest would be a price signal, in other words the extra homes driving down prices and the supply/demand curve finding a new equilibrium.

      For most potential movers, I’d imagine that there is a distinction in their minds between a few categories, for example [village/small town/large town/city/mega city], but they won’t really notice movements within category. And I think the same is probably true for business network effects, such that London does not attract significantly more business, or more mover interest, than Sydney despite having a few million more people. To people and businesses, they are both just in the [city] category.

    • sourcreamus says:

      Even if true, doesn’t the agglomeration effect mean that on balance more housing would be good, since even if prices don’t go down other good things are happening such as increased productivity?

    • Aapje says:

      @Squirrel of Doom

      If this effect worked full out to where you could keep adding more and more building and prices would just keep rising, you would have invented an economic Perpetuum Mobile!

      Only if the costs of building houses/apartments don’t rise as well, which is very unlikely.

    • J Mann says:

      1. This is a question in the science of Economics. Economists have studied it and already know the answer. Economists love weird market quirks like this more than life itself, and would study the hell out of this effect, if it existed.

      I’m a pretty econ 101 thinker myself, and my understanding is that it is currently pretty much consensus that this effect typically exists for highway congestion in the medium to long term when viewed at the city level. If you add more highway capacity, then in the short term, congestion will typically ease somewhat, but in the long term, commuters and businesses will shift location until congestion was just about where it was before.

      1) An econ 101 model for this might be that popular cities are price takers when it comes to congestion and property values. People are willing to pay a certain amount in terms of wait time to commute to work, and a certain amount to live in San Francisco. If you build a feasible amount of new roads and new housing, price won’t shift much because demand is essentially inelastic at the scope of supply changes that individual cities are considering. If this is the case, then San Francisco can’t reasonably cause rental values to fall by a substantial amount by introducing the amount of new housing that it thinks is feasible.

      2) On the other hand, somebody (Boudreaux?) said that it’s a weird problem to say “people want more roads and housing so much that they’re lining up to use any new entrants, so let’s not create any” – theoretically if people are willing to pay almost the same price for new housing as for existing housing, that means there is a lot of potential new residents who would be better off if there were more housing available at existing prices, even if that wouldn’t substantially help low income renters.

      • ec429 says:

        If you add more highway capacity, then in the short term, congestion will typically ease somewhat, but in the long term, commuters and businesses will shift location until congestion was just about where it was before.

        Doesn’t that just imply that people take the gains produced by the extra highways in other forms than reduced congestion? It doesn’t mean the gains were zero. This is analogous to the Tullock’s spike counterargument to (naïve conclusions drawn from) the Peltzman effect.

        TFA also seems not to notice that if more people can move to $big_city, then even if house prices in $big_city don’t fall, prices in the small towns those people moved from will, creating affordable housing there. So this is only a problem if you believe that everyone, regardless of wealth, somehow has a right to (be able to afford to) live in $big_city.

        • J Mann says:

          Yes, absolutely. However:

          1) If someone is trying to convince a San Franciscan to loosen construction regulations on the argument that it will help working class San Franciscans, then it would be relevant if all the new housing is going to rent at just about the price of existing housing.

          2) You are absolutely correct that both the property owners and the new residents will benefit overall from the new housing, even if the prices don’t drop appreciably. On the other hand, many existing residents may be made worse off, due to congestion or changes in the city’s character or just obstructed views. Consider whether San Francisco government owes a higher duty to existing San Franciscans than to Texans who might want to move there, and compare to national immigration policy if that would amuse you.

          Note: IMHO and I am not an economist!

          • ec429 says:

            1) The working class San Franciscans might move to Texas now that the housing there is cheaper than before. So it’s helped them, just indirectly (and possibly less) than the middle-class Texans who moved to San Fran.

            2) If the existing residents are now worse off, then either the prices of their housing go down, or they previously had some form of monopsony power or (more likely) market obstruction (probably rent control) which was making their housing artificially cheap. In the former case, some housing prices have gone down which was the point of the exercise; in the latter case, the existing residents were collecting quasi-rents that they presumably had paid non-monetary costs to acquire (cf. queues at petrol stations due to price caps) and anything that reduces the incentives for this kind of rent-seeking is a net gain. (And yes, it’s confusing that tenants are receiving economic rents, but that’s just because ‘rent’ is a really broad term in economics.) Though it would be more straightforward just to abolish the rent controls / reduce the conveyancing costs / etc. so that the market price of the housing accurately reflected its value, rather than to destroy that value until it matched the price.

            Note: I am not an economist either, I’ve just read a few books and most of David Friedman’s website.

  69. Nicholas Weininger says:

    Re: the SF supes trying to ban free employee lunches thing, the fact that the sponsor is Peskin will surprise approximately nobody. Peskin is notoriously reactionary, arrogant, and controlling even by the standards of SF self-identified “progressive” politicians; he is a reliable opponent of anyone trying anything new anywhere and ESPECIALLY of anyone trying to build any new housing, double-especially if it might block his or his cronies’ view of the water. If someone would like to start a recall drive against him I’d be more than happy to chip in for it; please link here if you know of one.

    Re: nannies, this is why it is often worth employers paying specialized search firms a good deal of money to find them better-than-random-applicant shortlists of candidates. For those who want search tips for nannies in particular, I can vouch for the effectiveness of the author of this book:

    https://www.tiffan.org/the-nanny-manual/

    at finding very highly qualified, though concomitantly expensive, candidates.

  70. Bill Murdock says:

    RE: no_bear_so_low on the “cost of redistribution.”

    tl;dr
    An additional dollar to a non-materialistic hippie or monk or vagabond or whatever may not be worth as much as an additional dollar to a millionaire. How do I know? Because people with a million dollars sometimes keep working to get more money. And people with only a dollar sometimes pass up the opportunity to earn a second dollar.

    So everything that follows in the article is wrong.

    longer version:
    “A dollar is worth a lot more to someone with an income of 10,000 a year than to someone with an income of 100,000 a year, and it is worth even less to someone on one million dollars a year.” No, this is not true.

    Imagine two people equivalent in skills and appearance, both working the same job side-by-side, both with an identical wage and net worth. Then imagine the opportunity comes up to work an extra hour a week at the end of Friday’s shift (at the normal wage). If you can imagine one of the employees deciding to do it, and the other deciding against, then you’ve proven that this simple formulation doesn’t work. The additional dollars should be valued the same, and thus both should work or not work. If you can imagine them making different choices because, say, one of them enjoys the movie theater (one hour’s wage) and one enjoys walks in the park at dusk (free, but you must be there after work to enjoy dusk), then you’ve seen that the marginal value of a dollar does not depend solely on how many dollars you already have. It might even have an inverse relationship if, e.g., you feel guilty over your wealth.

    “Thus there’s a certain inefficiency …” No, there’s not. Since you can’t actually know, it’s a purely normative conclusion.

    “Using certain mathematical techniques …” Let the madness begin. Read instead: Hayek’s “The Pretense of Knowledge.”

    • Lambert says:

      These are averages and correlations, not strict physical laws.

      The richer you are, the more the ‘low hanging fruit’ has been picked.

      • Bill Murdock says:

        How and why do some become richer than others? Because they value a marginal dollar more. So you can’t do the kind of thing the author is attempting, no matter how much he tries to dress it up. It’s just normative feelings dressed up with equations.

        As to your second line: The richer I AM, the more low hanging fruit HAS BEEN picked? And by whom? ugh

        • honoredb says:

          It’s a fair point that in some cases, differences in how much money you have reflect a revealed preference about money. But it should really be obvious that there’s also a diminishing effect for the marginal dollar–almost anybody who’s seen their net worth change has noticed this anecdotally.

          Suppose you asked two people “what is the cheapest thing you really want, but can’t afford?”. Alice names something that costs $20, Bob names something that costs $200,000. I think it’s reasonable to conclude that giving Alice $20 would make a bigger difference than giving Bob $20, all else being equal. Bob’s already picked his low-hanging $20 fruit, so that $20 wouldn’t have an immediate benefit to his happiness. This is a really strong effect, and I’d expect it to swamp all other effects statistically.

          The article, of course, doesn’t go into theory, it just cites a paper that checks this empirically (https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/8260) by reviewing studies that ask people questions like that.

          • Matt M says:

            I think it’s reasonable to conclude that giving Alice $20 would make a bigger difference than giving Bob $20, all else being equal.

            All else is rarely equal in real life.

          • honoredb says:

            All else is rarely equal in real life.

            Not sure how facetious you’re being, but identifying a problem is often valuable even if you don’t yet know how to solve it without side effects.

          • Matt M says:

            Not at all, actually.

            The problem is that all of your conclusions about what to do stem from an assumption of ceteris paribus that rarely exists in real life.

            This is exactly why most mainstream economics fails. There are no equal “control groups.” Human desires and preferences are not easily measurable. You cannot do any meaningful math with them.

            Yes, it’s true that IF Alice and Bob were exactly equal in every way except Alice was really rich and Bob was really poor, Bob would derive more marginal utility from $20 than Alice would.

            But that tells us nothing about the marginal utility between real life John who makes 500k a year, and real life Bill who makes 20k. It’s entirely possible that John is an incredibly greedy person who is obsessed with monetary gain, whereas Bill is some sort of hippie who makes his living from odd jobs and spends his time camping in the wilderness. You simply don’t know.

          • honoredb says:

            You don’t know unless you look! But you can look. You can track down John and Bill, and then do my “what’s the cheapest thing you want but can’t afford” experiment, or any of the experiments listed in the linked paper (asking people about what gambles they’d prefer to take, examining different behaviors in real-life negotiations, and so on), and learn a lot about your subjects’ preferences. Then you can learn what correlates with a given metric for differences in preferences, and discover that usually, on average, your metric correlates with wealth.

            This discovery doesn’t constitute in itself a “conclusion about what to do”, since I can’t actually redirect $20 from one person to another without side effects and ethical problems, but it informs the scope of the problem.

            Throwing up your hands and saying “The real world is messy! No conclusions are possible!” is only really useful if you think people are doing empiricism so badly, with so much misplaced confidence, that you need to stake out the extreme opposite position. More often, I think people do it when they know what the ground reality is, but don’t want to accept it because they want their policy debate to feel more one-sided–if you’re against wealth redistribution on practical or ethical grounds, it sure would be nice if we didn’t know that wealth was sub-optimally distributed.

          • ec429 says:

            But it should really be obvious that there’s also a diminishing effect for the marginal dollar–almost anybody who’s seen their net worth change has noticed this anecdotally.

            That’s an intrapersonal measurement, so doesn’t help with the fundamental problem here, which is interpersonal utility comparisons. I assert that there is not any principled way to make the latter, and therefore any argument for redistribution/expropriation based on interpersonal comparisons of the marginal value of the unit of exchange value is ethically unjustifiable.

            what is the cheapest thing you really want, but can’t afford?

            Quite apart from Matt M’s (entirely correct) John/Bill objection, there is another problem with this. Suppose I buy one bag of sweets a week. (Well, suppose I do? Why shouldn’t I? That’s my own business.) Since I don’t buy a second bag, from an economist’s perspective I ‘can’t afford’ to do so (because all the phrase ‘can’t afford’ means is ‘am not willing to pay the market price for’). Now if I suddenly get an increase to my income, I might move to buying two bags a week. But the third bag, which I don’t buy, I still ‘can’t afford’.
            So your whole method depends on how each person defines “really want” (how many bags of sweets does it take before I decide I don’t “really want” one more?).
            Another problem: maybe Bob’s big-ticket item (a house, say) really is worth more than 10,000 times as much to him as the low-hanging $20 fruit he’s already got, but because there aren’t 10,000 low-hanging fruits all picked, he can’t trade them away for the house. For all you know, the $20 you give Bob could push him ‘over the line’ allowing him to cut back on his small-ticket items in order to finally buy the house (that’s worth more per dollar to him). And after he gets across that line, he now has the house, but doesn’t have some of the $20 fruit, so those become the ‘cheapest thing he really wants’, meaning that an increase in his wealth makes your metric go down.

            Basically it seems like your metric is trying to take advantage of discretisation of purchases while still pretending that they’re continuous enough for spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum reasoning. If trades were as perfectly marginal as you need to justify your metric, then Alice and Bob would both name “an infinitesimal increment of (some good or service)”, or at best you’d get an answer of 1¢ for everyone.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @ec42

            I assert that there is not any principled way to make the latter, and therefore any argument for redistribution/expropriation based on interpersonal comparisons of the marginal value of the unit of exchange value is ethically unjustifiable.

            Trying to follow this. Since you believe there’s no way to compare interpersonal utility, you say we cannot know whether taking a dollar from Person A and giving to Person B actually increases net utility or not. Therefore, wealth redistribution can never be justified on utilitarian grounds.

            It seems to me, there is another conclusion you are missing. Since we cannot say whether the dollar provides more utility to one person or another, Person A cannot object to getting his dollar taken away on utilitarian grounds, either. Therefore, wealth redistribution can never be objected to on utilitarian grounds.

            Disagree? What am I missing?

          • ec429 says:

            @Guy in TN:

            It seems to me, there is another conclusion you are missing. Since we cannot say whether the dollar provides more utility to one person or another, Person A cannot object to getting his dollar taken away on utilitarian grounds, either. Therefore, wealth redistribution can never be objected to on utilitarian grounds.

            If utilitarianism is based on a single aggregate utility measure of everyone in society, sure. But that really means (and what I’m saying is) that any such aggregate is bogus, and such a ‘utilitarianism’ is either ethically monstrous or just incoherent.
            Which is why I instead take the view that an act’s goodness depends on how it affects each individual and that, basically, a change is good iff it is a Marshall improvement.
            We’d like to say that it’s never OK to make anyone worse off (i.e. Pareto improvements only; everyone who doesn’t want the change has to be paid off by everyone who does want it), but in practice it’s very hard to compensate nearly everyone in the world for the tiny externalities of some action. So instead we say that if some set of payments exists such that (action + payments) is a Pareto improvement, then the action alone is a Marshall improvement. The assumption, or at least the hope, is that in the long run the missing payments will cancel out. Now we get to use dollars as a unit for interpersonal comparisons, because they’re measuring Coasian payments rather than trying to measure utilities directly.

            Then, when we apply the same reasoning that turns act utilitarianism into rule utilitarianism, this Marshall-improvement standard basically turns into libertarianism/propertarianism, which most definitely does object to wealth redistribution!

            Is it a rigorous argument? No, because of that assumption in the middle about the payments cancelling out. But you’d need to have evidence that they don’t if you want to make the case for redistribution; since we know that there are nonzero costs (e.g. deadweight losses) to weakening property rights, the burden of proof lies on those who claim utilitarian benefits outweighing those costs.

          • Matt M says:

            Disagree? What am I missing?

            That the act of redistribution is not free or costless. You have to hire a bureaucracy to administer the program.

            You aren’t simply taking $100 from A and giving $100 to B. You’re taking $100 from A and giving $90 to B. If the utility per marginal dollar is (on average) equal between the As and Bs, this is clearly a net loss.

          • Guy in TN says:

            ec429

            Now we get to use dollars as a unit for interpersonal comparisons, because they’re measuring Coasian payments rather than trying to measure utilities directly.

            I don’t understand this. Are you saying you are using Coasian payments to compare interpersonal utility? Isn’t that just what you said you can’t do?

            Matt M

            If the utility per marginal dollar is (on average) equal between the As and Bs, this is clearly a net loss.

            Yeah, but to figure out if the utility per marginal dollar between Person A and Person B was equal, you’d have to…make an interpersonal utility comparison. Which according to ec429 can’t be done!

          • ec429 says:

            I don’t understand this. Are you saying you are using Coasian payments to compare interpersonal utility? Isn’t that just what you said you can’t do?

            It’s quite subtle, but no. I’m using the possibility of Coasian payments to show that a Marshall improvement could be turned into a Pareto improvement. (A Pareto improvement does not require interpersonal comparisons to justify, since no individual loses utility.) Then I’m using my assumption about the payments (that in the long run they approximately cancel out) to argue that to within an acceptable margin of error, a policy of making Marshall improvements will in the long run aggregate (over many such changes) to a Pareto improvement; that while an individual may lose out in any particular Marshall improvement, the sum effect on that individual of many such improvements is overwhelmingly likely to be an individual gain, and that therefore such a policy is in each individual’s interest. (This gets easier when you consider that for externality cases where the rights aren’t initially held by the highest-value user, the Coasian payments actually get made.) No interpersonal utility comparisons needed — the comparisons used in the definition of the Marshall improvement look kinda like them, but aren’t. They are, explicitly, interpersonal dollar-value comparisons (which, by the principle of revealed preference, we can do), and while we are using each individual’s dollar valuations intrapersonally as a proxy for his utility, we aren’t using the dollar-value comparisons as a proxy for interpersonal utility comparisons. Like I say: subtle.

          • Guy in TN says:

            They are, explicitly, interpersonal dollar-value comparisons (which, by the principle of revealed preference, we can do), and while we are using each individual’s dollar valuations intrapersonally as a proxy for his utility, we aren’t using the dollar-value comparisons as a proxy for interpersonal utility comparisons..

            So if you explicitly aren’t using dollar-values to make interpersonal utility comparisons, how do we know that Marshall improvements are resulting in net utility gains?

            For example, even if we were to agree that on an intrapersonal level, dollars=utility, in order to determine if something is a Marshall improvement you have to add two different people’s dollar values together, and see if it is a net gain. Which is to say, you have to compare the dollar values as if they were a proxy of interpersonal utility (otherwise such a comparison wouldn’t make sense). Doesn’t this undercut the claim that Marshall efficiency produces net utility, since this sort of interpersonal comparison of the utility of a dollar can’t be done?

          • ec429 says:

            So if you explicitly aren’t using dollar-values to make interpersonal utility comparisons, how do we know that Marshall improvements are resulting in net utility gains?

            We don’t. I haven’t claimed that Marshall improvements are net utility gains. Indeed, I don’t believe that there is a social welfare function (i.e. aggregate utility function) at all, so the question “is X a net utility gain” is invalid.

            For example, even if we were to agree that on an intrapersonal level, dollars=utility, in order to determine if something is a Marshall improvement you have to add two different people’s dollar values together, and see if it is a net gain.

            Yes — a net gain in dollar-values. I am not claiming that a Marshall improvement is necessarily a net gain in total utility; it would be most odd for me to claim such a thing given that I do not believe the concept of total utility is coherent.

            Which is to say, you have to compare the dollar values as if they were a proxy of interpersonal utility (otherwise such a comparison wouldn’t make sense). Doesn’t this undercut the claim that Marshall efficiency produces net utility, since this sort of interpersonal comparison of the utility of a dollar can’t be done?

            It would indeed undercut that claim, had I ever made it. Utilities cannot be summed over people.

            But I am justifying Marshall efficiency not on the basis of any claim about net utility, but rather on the basis that when we sum, not over people, but over actions/decisions, that in the long run the results of a societal policy of making Marshall-improving decisions will be, for (almost) any individual member of the society, an improvement in his individual utility.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Okay, I understand that you aren’t using Marshall improvements to sum utilities.

            So if Marshall improvement is just the question as to whether net sums in dollar values cancel each other out, then what is the reason to think that aggregated Marshall improvements, for a given individual, result in utility gains more often than utility declines (for that individual)?

            Meaning, why should aggregated Marshall improvements lead to a Pareto improvement more often than lead to Pareto decline?

          • Guy in TN says:

            Can’t post my response for some reason:

            https://pastebin.com/5WJQGyNV

          • Guy in TN says:

            To step back now to what you said earlier:

            Which is why I instead take the view that an act’s goodness depends on how it affects each individual and that, basically, a change is good iff it is a Marshall improvement.

            Since by “goodness” I assume you are referring to an increase in an individual’s utility, and a Marshall improvement isn’t determined on whether it increases utility for an individual (and could instead decrease that individual’s utility), why do you consider a change “good” if it is a Marshall improvement? Aggregating a potential utility loss over many times doesn’t make it “cancel out”, it compounds it.

            Is the assumption that the harms/benefits or Marshall improvements will be evenly distributed across individuals?

          • ec429 says:

            Can’t post my response for some reason:

            https://pastebin.com/5WJQGyNV

            In a Marshall improvement, the +ve dollar-values more than cancel out the -ve. So if we assume (without proof) that the pluses and minuses “will be evenly distributed across individuals”, then the vast majority of individuals will have a positive total.

            As a simple model, imagine that every change gives half the population $2 and takes $1 from the other half — and that which half a given person is in is determined by an independent random shuffle for each change. Now each individual sees a Binomial distribution (individuals’ results aren’t independent, but that doesn’t matter) with p=½. As n→∞, P(x < ⅓n) → 0, so 'almost all' (in the mathematical sense) individuals end up with more dollar-value than they started with.

            Now, certainly there are ways in which this can fail. There might be something structural about society that makes a certain kind of person extra-likely to be the loser in Marshall improvements. Or, people might tend to get gains in dollar-value at points in their life when they have a low marginal utility of money and get the losses at points when they have a high marginal utility of money (note that this is an intrapersonal, although across-time, utility comparison), which could mean that their utility account could be in the red even though their dollar-value account is in the black.

            But I'm not aware of any evidence or argument that suggests those failure-modes do occur, and economics has this minor miracle that there is this system (i.e. the whole competitive free market thing) that gives individuals the incentive and the ability to implement Marshall improvements. Again it’s not perfect and takes some approximations (e.g., per Coase, the minimum size of externalities that get properly accounted for depends on transaction costs), but it gets far closer than any other system we have, since the alternatives (e.g. democratic socialism) suffer from principal-agent problems (i.e. misaligned incentives, as per public choice theory).

            So until someone comes along with the major miracle of a solution to distribution and allocation problems that doesn’t rely on these approximations and probabilistic arguments, I think the minor miracle of the ‘invisible hand’ is quite good enough for now, and we should avoid justifying interventions against the market by appeals to interpersonal utility comparisons as TFA did.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Now, certainly there are ways in which this can fail. There might be something structural about society that makes a certain kind of person extra-likely to be the loser in Marshall improvements.[…]But I’m not aware of any evidence or argument that suggests those failure-modes do occur

            If you don’t know the distribution of winner/losers in aggregated Marshall improvements, then that distribution is unknown. You can’t assume it distribution is equal, or even random, and proceed onward to make your case. An unknown ratio is an unknown ratio. If you are trying to make the positive argument that taking money from person A to give to person B causes utility loss, this is a critical factor in your logic.

            If the distribution can’t be shown to be equal, or if the distribution is impossible to know, then all you can say is “on the chance that winner/losers of Marshall improvements are equally distributed, then taking money from Person A and giving it to Person B causes utility loss”. And I would agree!

            But then, I would counter by saying that on the chance that taking a dollar from Person A and giving it to Person B increases Person B’s intrapersonal utility more than it decreases Person A’s intrapersonal utility (and since there’s no mathematical way to compare utility person-to-person, this is also an unknown, and possibly unknowable factor, just like the distribution of Marshall improvements in your case), then surely you must agree that, on the chance this is true, this wealth transfer causes utility gains.

            Rather ridiculous, but if you get to fill-in-the-blank on an unknown x, then don’t I get to also?

            But seriously. There is a pretty obvious reason to suspect that aggregated Marshall improvements would result in lopsided winners and losers. The thing about Marshall improvements are, since they are based on revealed preferences, its easy for a rich person to “win” and a easy for poor person to “lose”. If the wealth disparity is extreme enough, its essentially impossible for a poor person to win a Marshall improvement. (A:”I would like to set fire to your house, and am willing to pay $5,000 to do so”, B:”Hmm, that’s more money than is even in my bank account, so even though this is absolutely devastating to me, this action is a Marshall improvement and must proceed”)

      • helloo says:

        I thought the “meme” was the richer get richer while the poor get poorer.

        That is, those who are rich have more and better opportunities to earn more money, not less. Whether this is the cause or effect or both doesn’t matter in this case.
        Didn’t we have the whole article with Pinkett and such mentioning this?

        That said, this isn’t the same as gaining more utility for having that dollar. (So we’re assuming utilitarianism then?)

        However, if you think economic growth will eventually raise overall living standards, long term planning will still cause you to favor the one that will prompt growth that rather than an immediate increase.

        This also changes the argument Bill Murdock mentioned – perhaps people choose not to work to earn that dollar because it’s too difficult and not worth the effort for them, but it’s better of to uh… specialize the role of earning to those who can more easily do so and then redistribute it to those that need it more.

    • 10240 says:

      people with a million dollars sometimes keep working to get more money. And people with only a dollar sometimes pass up the opportunity to earn a second dollar.

      The millionaire typically makes more dollars per hour. A millionaire usually doesn’t work a second job for $15 an hour.

    • herculesorion says:

      Because people with a million dollars sometimes keep working to get more money. And people with only a dollar sometimes pass up the opportunity to earn a second dollar.

      I’m not sure what point you think you’re making here. There’s always going to be a point where the cost of chasing a marginal dollar outweighs its utility. The proposal–which you haven’t actually argued against–is that low-wealth, low-income persons will derive more utility from a marginal dollar than high-wealth, high-income persons.

  71. lfstevens says:

    “Psychology’s gender problem gets worse: 90% of people entering the field are women, and research on female-specific issues outweighs male-specific issues four-to-one.”

    Somehow the comment on this writes itself. Actually, both of them do.

  72. P. George Stewart says:

    Richard Carrier is a weird and irritating person, but his Jesus book is extremely interesting, and it’s not the only intelligent investigation that comes to the same or a similar conclusion.

    It’s actually quite possible that most of the “great religious founders” are similarly mythical. Certainly there have been doubts about Laozi, Buddha and Mohammed as well as Jesus. It may be the case that although religions are indeed founded by remarkable people, they prefer to attribute the founding of their religion to someone God-touched and mythical from a past that’s not too close but at the same time not too distant from them. In the case of Christianity, the actual founder may have been St. Paul and/or a small group of Jewish mystics who mixed the Jewish Messiah concept (which was more of a God-connected but rather kingly and military figure who would biff the Romans and put the Jews on top) with the personal saviour concept then-prevalent in the ferment of what was the then-equivalent of our modern pullulating “New Age” philosophies: the so-called Mystery Religions.

    Basically Christianity started off as the Jewish equivalent of the other Mystery Religions, which had taken local deities, etc., and transmogrified them into personal saviour deities. But then the myth got concretized and historicized not too long after the origin of the cult.

    What this does neatly explain is the somewhat etherial nature of Christ in Paul, the lack of the story tropes we’re familiar with from the gospel, etc. To go counter to the mythicist idea as a straightforward explanation of that strange “silence” one has to indulge in special pleading that one has an inside understanding of Paul’s psychology.

    • dndnrsn says:

      First, Paul’s letters are incidental. He’s dealing with running several churches by correspondence, more or less. There’s various crises. Imagine you’re a business executive firing off emails to subsidiaries all over the world, trying to put fires out. If someone grabs a bunch of these emails, looks at them, and notes that you never include the business’ statement of purpose, org chart, whatever, that they didn’t exist?

      Second, Christ was more important to Paul than Jesus. He leaves out the stuff that a lot of scholars think is most characteristic of the historical figure of Jesus – but then again, so does the Gospel of John. Paul is primarily interested in the role of Christ in human salvation, not in the often-cryptic sayings of a charismatic religious leader.

      The most plausible explanation for the facts we have is:

      1. Charismatic religious leader achieves local following. He has a message about the coming rule of God that will change the world, right wrongs, and turn everything upside down (I think that Jesus as apocalypticist is the most convincing message, but there are plenty more learned in this than I who think otherwise). He expresses it in parables and short discourses.
      2. He is involved in some sort of Temple-related kerfuffle. The local Roman administrator has him crucified, as one does with rabble-rousers who might threaten the emipre.
      3. His followers reinterpret this as all part of the plan. His death gets interpreted as having a role in human salvation, etc.

      Paul is extremely important in shaping Christianity, but he didn’t just sit down and make it up. There was a preexisting movement.

      • P. George Stewart says:

        I’m laughing at the comparison to emails 🙂 Come on man, yes the letters had practical purposes, but they’re chock full of teaching, and yet they don’t mention a word of the actual teachings of the human figure who (by the later gospel accounts) gave out quite a lot of them.

        Your second paragraph is precisely an example of the question begging and psychologization that goes on with commentary about Paul. “Christ was more important to Paul than Jesus” is possibly a plausible psychologization if you take it for granted that Jesus existed (e.g. if you have independent evidence of that fact, for example), but that’s just what you can’t do when you’re trying to look at possible earliest evidence for Jesus in Paul. It’s circular.

        I think part of the problem is that our understanding of the Judaism of the pre-Diaspora period isn’t very clear – it probably wasn’t like the Javneh Judaism that we are familiar with (the Dead Sea Scrolls are pretty weird after all), and probably much more polytheistic and variegated than we think (and actually part of the problem is that the gospels colour our understanding of the earlier period in an obfuscatory way – which is explainable on the hypothesis that these are Roman Jews looking back on a past they had no experience of, so they’re backfilling what they know into that past).

        That’s why I don’t think Paul necessarily made it up himself, I think it was probably more like a Jewish proto-Gnostic school of mystical thought with roots in its own relative past, that Paul perhaps first scorned then later came to think had the truth.

        • dndnrsn says:

          They’re full of teaching, but the teaching is generally directed to a specific purpose. The usual pattern is “community problem – teaching that deals with problem and preserves Paul’s authority” in most of the letters, isn’t it?

          I don’t think it assumes that Jesus existed to say Paul thought Christ was more important than Jesus. It’s shown in what he appeals to. If Jesus didn’t exist, and the sayings were concocted at some point, it would still be accurate to say that the different Gospels, the Pauline letters, etc, have different ratios of Jesus to Christ. I don’t think I’m psychologizing… the biggest problem with the approach I’m taking is that it’s arguing from silence; Paul may simply have been assuming stuff that he figured everyone knew, or whatever.

          It is definitely problematic that the possibly-earliest written source we have has what it has and omits what it omits. Trying to find an explanation where the parables are later also doesn’t seem to work, though. There’s a lot of stuff in the sayings tradition that come off a lot more apocalyptic than gnostic, the (proto?) gnostic stuff in Thomas doesn’t gibe with the stuff in Thomas that shows up elsewhere… If I had the answer to this, though, the international cabal of New Testament studies profs would have me killed before I could put them out of a job, though.

          With regard to the Judaism of the period, there was already a decent chunk of the Jewish population living throughout the Mediterranean, wasn’t there? Already kind of a diaspora. Enough to support a Greek translation, at least. I don’t know how much we can take from the Dead Sea Scrolls – after all, this was a community that set themselves off from the mainstream. Regarding the picture of the Judaism of the time in the Gospels, I don’t see anything wrong with the usual explanation – that the authors are reading issues at the time of writing back several decades. You’re right that we ourselves may be reading things back in time in a similar fashion.

          EDIT: I think the scholarly-standard explanation, in its broad outline, fits the facts we have/think we have the best.

          • P. George Stewart says:

            “There’s a lot of stuff in the sayings tradition that come off a lot more apocalyptic than gnostic, the (proto?) gnostic stuff in Thomas doesn’t gibe with the stuff in Thomas that shows up elsewhere”

            This is partly why I think we just don’t know enough about the period to say, and having the large number of orthodox Christian texts dominating our textual evidence of the period is like viewing the 20th century through the lens of the many surviving Superman comics in the 30th century (I exaggerate for effect, ofc 🙂 ).

            Look at the Nag Hammadi texts – a whole passel of weirdness (in relation to anything orthodox) that nobody would have suspected had they not accidentally been dug up. I know they’re later than the period under question, but, again, it just shows you how little we really know, especially since our view is distorted as I said, by the relative abundance of orthodox Christian materials (and even that isn’t much in absolute terms, just in relative terms).

            But that’s why I think the overall picture that Carrier presents – of a Graeco-Roman equivalent of our contemporary “New Age”, with the various mystery religions being syncretisms transforming local deities into personal saviour deities, and Jesus Christ simply being the Jewish cultural equivalent of that) – just makes most sense overall.

            I may be biased also in that even though I’m a rationalist, I’ve had mystical experiences and the like, so I know how powerful that sort of thing can be. That experience makes it quite plausible to me that a religion could start with them.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Certainly, what survives makes a difference. Your point concerning Nag Hammadi is well taken (and a relevant sidenote – by some accounts, a chunk of the find got burned as firestarter before they figured out what they’d got).

            That said, while the adoption by gentiles of Christianity occurred in the context of mystery cults (and it’s relevant that Hellenistic gentiles often discussed Christianity in the same tone as mystery cults), I don’t know if we can extend that to Judaism. Judaism was already pretty monotheistic by then – the understanding I have, at least, is that monotheism got a shot in the arm due in part to the influence of Hellenistic philosophical monotheism, or something along those lines.

            If we, really broadly and roughly, divide the early traditions into a “Kingdom of God” tradition (Jesus’ preaching in the Synoptics, let’s say; this is either apocalyptic – I think it’s apocalyptic – or maybe some sorta sage-like deal), a more Christ-focused salvation tradition (John, etc) and a gnostic or maybe mystery-cult tradition (I think Thomas shows gnostic influences, but they’re not super developed) there’s a clearer path for the first to get turned into the second and third, than the other way around, and we see a Christ-focused salvation tradition before we see really developed Christian gnosticism (at least, as far as I know, you only see stuff where it’s really obvious that it’s gnosticism by the beginning of the second century).

        • engleberg says:

          Re: If you take it for granted that Jesus existed-

          If Paul met the members of Jesus’s family in the early church, say?

          • Deiseach says:

            While we’re at it, why do we assume Paul existed? Have we any independent sources mentioning Paul? If this alleged trial of his as a Roman citizen took place, where are the court records?

            It’s all very fishy – this change from zealous persecutor of the community to a believer and moreover a leader in that same community is bad enough (imagine Stalin converting to classical capitalism) but all accomplished by “divine intervention” – as any fule kno, the divine doesn’t exist!

            And the string of miracles associated with him – for instance, he is supposed to have restored to life a young man who fell out a window and was killed by the fall – are surely too incredible for the educated reader to swallow.

            But the biggest giveaway of all is the direct comparison to Greek gods:

            Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker.

            Can the adaptation of pre-existing myths in the geo-political area be any more blatant? No, I’m sorry: if “Paul” is the inventor of Christianity, I have to ask – in the best Dawkins fashion – who invented Paul, this character out of a story book and certainly not history? Checkmate, theists!

            (Really, if you’re going to blink at Jesus existing as a historical person because of miracles and lack of corroboration, you have to do the same for Paul, so the mythical founder of Christianity problem is pushed back another step – who invented Paul the writer of these epistles which codified Christianity?)

          • Deiseach says:

            If Paul met the members of Jesus’s family in the early church, say?

            James the brother (whether we take that as brother or first cousin) of the Lord was the leader of the Church in Jerusalem, and Paul met him along with Peter and other noted members:

            Acts 15
            12 And all the assembly fell silent, and they listened to Barnabas and Paul as they related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles. 13 After they finished speaking, James replied, “Brothers, listen to me. 14 Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take from them a people for his name.

            Acts 21
            17 When we had come to Jerusalem, the brothers received us gladly. 18 On the following day Paul went in with us to James, and all the elders were present. 19 After greeting them, he related one by one the things that God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. 20 And when they heard it, they glorified God.

            So if Jesus never existed, then how likely is it his brother existed? And if Paul is claiming to have met a mythical non-existing person, as James’ and the elders approval provide credentials for his mission to the Gentiles being part of the Way and not an offshoot of his own independent invention, then how likely is it that Paul existed? And so on down the line!

          • P. George Stewart says:

            “If Paul met the members of Jesus’s family in the early church, say?”

            The thread that hangs on is the thin one of “James, brother of the Lord.” But we already know that “brother of the Lord” is, elsewhere in Paul, a term of art denoting some kind of initiatic status, nothing to do with blood relation.

            Again, if you had good reason from independent sources to think that Jesus had existed, then that would certainly go in favour of resolving the ambiguity between cultic term and blood relation in the direction of blood relation, but again, without that independent evidence, the James reference alone is too ambiguous to stand as textual evidence of a human Jesus.

            Furthermore, the term “disciple” is nowhere used in Paul in reference to the Jerusalem people he met, which in itself is another curious silence – since they were supposedly people who had been personal students and disciples of the putative human Jesus.

          • engleberg says:

            Re: (if Paul met members of Jesus’s family in the early church) hangs on the thin thread of ‘James, brother of the Lord’-

            And a bunch of other thin threads in early Church history saying members of the family of Jesus did blah in the Church. I expect in Roman law (if Roman law cared, which I doubt) the Jerusalem church was familia to the domus Jesse until Anno Domini 70 and splat.

            Re: if we had good reason from independent sources-

            That’s the crux. Every early source we have is from a devout religious believer, except Josephus, who didn’t give a damn and didn’t know anything but rumors.

          • Aron Wall says:

            @P. George Stewart

            But we already know that “brother of the Lord” is, elsewhere in Paul, a term of art denoting some kind of initiatic status, nothing to do with blood relation.

            False. There is no use of this phrase in the New Testament that anywhere implies that it is a special cultic status, and every use is consistent (I would say, more consistent) with it referring to James and/or Jude, Jesus’ literal family relations who are also mentioned in the Gospels as such.

            (Paul does use the phrase “brothers” (by itself) in a spiritual way to refer to all Christians, but this does not fit the context of the phrase “brother of the Lord”, which refers to specific Christians.)

            @Deiseach
            Apostolic succession of nonexistence! Taken to its logical conclusion, a proof by induction that Pope Francis is a myth. 🙂

          • Jaskologist says:

            Furthermore, the term “disciple” is nowhere used in Paul in reference to the Jerusalem people he met, which in itself is another curious silence – since they were supposedly people who had been personal students and disciples of the putative human Jesus.

            “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.”

            Not using a specific term you’re looking for isn’t a curious silence. He talks about “The Twelve,” ie: the disciples, to an audience that would have known exactly who that was. Just like he talks about meeting Cephas without further elaboration, because everybody knows who that is.

  73. mr_capybara says:

    Aren’t the “campaign finance doesn’t work” and “taxes are complicated because of Intuit” points at odds with each other?

    • j r says:

      Not really. Campaign contributions can be a Red Queen’s race where donors vie for “access” with very little real payoff. And lobbying can be an incredibly effective way for people with specific, concentrated interests to have those interests reflected in legislation.

      Campaign fundraising and lobbying are two different things.

      • pontifex says:

        Exactly. If you’re wealthy and you want something done, you donate money to both parties.

        Donating to just one party puts a “kick me” sign on your back. The only reason to do it is if you’re just incredibly committed to either Red Team or Blue Team, like George Soros or the Kochs.

    • Robert Jones says:

      The linked article doesn’t actually say “taxes are complicated because of Intuit”. It says, “Filing Taxes Could Be Free and Simple. But H&R Block and Intuit Are Still Lobbying Against It.” Those two statements are likely both true, but by juxtaposing them the article invites the reader to infer a causal link which does not exist (and I fear that Scott may have fallen into that trap).

      It’s pretty clear that H&R Block and Intuit are not super-successful lobbyists, just from the article, as their bill failed to make it out of committee. The article also notes that Intuit did not lobby against Senator Warren’s bill.

  74. Gazeboist says:

    “New study confirms”

    This should presumably be “…(in)exactly replicates” or “…supports the conclusions of”. Confirmation, after all, is a rare and special thing.

  75. arancaytar says:

    The Metaculus community average currently assigns 25% to Roe vs Wade being formally overturned within 10 years: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/1011/will-roe-v-wade-be-formally-overturned-within-10-years-of-justice-kennedys-retirement/.

    Caveat: The community average is not well calibrated, and out of previous questions predicted at about 25%, only one – about 10% – has resolved true. https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/ (The better-calibrated Metaculus prediction itself will remain secret until the question closes in 2023, unfortunately.)

  76. deciusbrutus says:

    The YIMBY crowd is not interested in what a priori would seem to be an absurd number of housing units.

    The YIMBY crowd wants there to be no artificial barriers to the creation of new housing. If adding new housing increases demand more, keep adding units. Eventually people will no longer be happy to pay a billion dollars per month to hot-bunk in a sleeping tube, and the costs of leasing a sleeping tube will start to decline.

  77. tim says:

    The fish oil meta-analysis is not actually particularly new, coming from 2011 with a few more since then; the most recent one I could quickly find is this Meta-analysis and meta-regression of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplementation for major depressive disorder from 2016. That analysis is more narrowly targeted to major depression, finds an effect of EPA level but not EPA/(EPA+DHA), questions the 60% cutoff, and finds increased effect of o-3s with concurrent antidepressants. They also find no evidence of publication bias, interestingly, but do find a decreasing effect size with increasing year, despite that not being correlated with study quality.

  78. Forge the Sky says:

    The fish oil study corresponds well with my anecdotal experience; I’ve had a few brief bouts of strong depression that were blunted wonderfully with the fish oil supplement I happened to have on hand, which was nearly entirely EPA (660mg EPA/60mg DHA x2). One time, all I had on hand was a fish oil that was about 80% DHA, and it did precisely nothing, so I went out and got the EPA-heavy one and it worked again.

    I figured the explanation was that the EPA was the active component, but was a bit confused about the DHA-heavy one doing nothing.

    Also, this objection seems weak to me: “actual oily fish do not generally meet this criterion, which seems damning although I can’t really explain why.

    Maybe I’m missing a comment that goes into more detail, but the one I’m seeing only really says that salmon doesn’t meet this criteria.

    I understand that fish species differ quite a bit in their oil composition. They actually found that some dolphins in captivity were becoming obese/diabetic in spite of being fed a reasonably-sized diet of fish, and it turned out that they were generally being fed only one or two kinds of fish – which varied between aquariums. The fat composition of the fish was the culprit.

    People, like dolphins, would have been eating a wide variety of fish species if they were a fish-eating people. Seeing a correlation between eating fish and feeling better mentally could still happen, even if only (say) 30% of the fish species worked.

  79. Guy in TN says:

    The system seems to be eating my responses, and it makes me sad.

    • Deiseach says:

      Probably the spam filter, which is very susceptible to the Scunthorpe Problem, so if you have anything like a Banned Term or anything with the same letters as a Banned Term it will gobble up the response. It also doesn’t like a lot of links.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      You have had an enormous number of comments on this thread, so it is quite amazing that you wrote a bunch more.

      • Guy in TN says:

        Heh, I guess I did have quite a few…possibly an unhealthy amount.

        I rationalize it to myself by saying its good to stretch the brain muscles every now and then. But perhaps I should take a bit of a small break.

  80. rlms says:

    RE: Things That Happen In Silicon Valley And Also The Soviet Union — Glorious Leader accuses workers of wrecking.

  81. herculesorion says:

    “theunitofcaring” provides a lovely sad story about how free lunch is actually a mental-health benefit, which suggests to me that companies could start giving out free lunches and use that to justify cutting other healthcare services.

  82. Plumber says:

    “There’s been a shift among some of my YIMBY friends to being more willing to acknowledge that building more housing may not decrease housing costs very quickly, effectively, or at all (short of implausibly massive amounts of new housing). Devon Zuegel presents one of the arguments.”

    link text

    Amusing article.

    People really didn’t understand why people want to live in The City, and that demand compounds?

    Besides, I’ve spent a couple of years working for The Port and The Department of Public Works for The City and County of San Francisco, and note something that the “Just build more” types don’t explain away is the real physical infrastructure limits as well as the political ones to housing more people in San Francisco.

    First, in an already crowded city, people don’t want to lose their parks, so you can’t build there.

    Second, Treasure Island, and by the old Hunters Point Shipyards are toxic places to build, cleanup will be extremely expensive, that’s why there isn’t more new housing already!

    Third, during heavy rains the sewage treatment plants are overloaded already and Federal limits on high much untreated sewage can go into the Bay are exceeded.

    Hope for more droughts if you want to pack more people in here!

    Expand the sewage treatment plants?

    On what land, and with what money?

    Plus the pipes under the streets are already way past due for replacement (many are more than a century old).

  83. alcoraiden says:

    If I had to throw out a wild-assed guess, I’d say pre-k is detrimental because it’s keeping kids shut up in a school with a program. Little kids need to experience the world and learn on their own, take risks, be curious. They want to explore and have fun, not sit in daycare all day. Pre-k really is just a daycare.

    I don’t know how to fix that, since this is probably due to two-working-parent families, and I can’t condemn that structure at all.

  84. Hitfoav says:

    About company cafeterias : whether free or not, only in a post-scarcity industry like silicon valley tech would someone propose “employees eating at restaurants” as an alternative to the company cafeteria without concern for the personal economics involved.

    I used to work for a company cafeteria that provided reasonable quality and nutritious meals for $6. That would limit one’s restaurant choices to “one of the basic 6″ subs at Subway”, plus its an extra 10 minutes of walking. Minimum $10 for something comparable.

    Restaurant vs free cafeteria is hundreds or thousands of dollars a month.