This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server.
Seattle Anxiety Specialists are a therapy practice helping people overcome anxiety and related mental health issues (eg GAD, OCD, PTSD) through evidence based interventions and self-exploration. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here
.
Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene.
Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmention tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so you can keep resolutions. They've also got a blog about what they're doing here
Support Slate Star Codex on Patreon. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. We're always hiring talented programmers, traders, and researchers and have internships and fulltime positions in New York, London, and Hong Kong. No background in finance required.
B4X is a free and open source developer tool that allows users to write apps for Android, iOS, and more.
Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page
80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.
Substack is a blogging site that helps writers earn money and readers discover articles they'll like.
Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid.
Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent.
Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. Currently offering travel medical insurance for nomads, and global health insurance for remote teams.
MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone.
AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere.
The COVID-19 Forecasting Project at the University of Oxford is making advanced pandemic simulations of 150+ countries available to the public, and also offer pro-bono forecasting services to decision-makers.
The Effective Altruism newsletter provides monthly updates on the highest-impact ways to do good and help others.
A very interesting development over at the New York Times is that they are now seriously addressing possible racial IQ differences. When my own Dutch (center-left) newspaper discussed this topic a while back, the ‘debate’ was cringe worthy, with almost exclusively idiotic arguments from the anti side and no one (daring to) take the other side to keep them honest. In contrast, the NYT piece actually mostly sticks to scientific fact:
– Race is not wholly socially constructed, but ethnic groups share genes
– Geneticists do distinguish between ‘geographic ancestry groupings’, although not the ones that many lay people/organizations use and call ‘race’
– Genes strongly influence various traits, including intelligence (or at least, educational attainment)
In general, the article appeals mostly to uncertainty and doubt to provide a counter-argument to white supremacists, which is a big improvement over telling falsehoods. I was a bit amazed to not see the argument made that outcomes are usually determined by an interplay of genes and circumstance, perhaps coupled with an exaggeration of the evidence for the importance of circumstance. After all, the easiest way to resolve the dissonance resulting from the facts not matching an absolute claim is weaken the claim slightly to accommodate a biased reading of the facts, rather than requiring total denial. A claim that the reasons for disparities between ethnic groups is mostly circumstance can then be used to defend the idea that the gap in outcomes is mostly due to racism, that it can be resolved by fighting racism; and other popular beliefs among the left. Furthermore, appealing to the importance of circumstance can also be used (even without exaggerating the facts) to reject white supremacy and such (for example, by arguing that the gap in genetic ability between ethnic groups is so small that the idea that the groups cannot coexist in society is silly, that black people are not destined to be far more criminal, etc).
—
The same author also wrote an interesting companion piece about scientists shying away from the public debate. I like this piece for arguing that the result is that white supremacists are left without educated push back, both from scientists themselves, but also from lay people who want to debate white supremacists. However, I would personally go much further: by refusing to engage when the facts aren’t clear, the scientists are contribution to a radicalization of society, where people on both sides are more likely to adopt extremist positions and to believe that science supports these extremist conclusions.
Furthermore, I would argue that this is likely to be an issue especially because of blue tribe taboos, where anything but total denial is often considered to be (extremely) morally wrong. The result is then that even merely expressing uncertainty is considered racist and condemned. Moderate & reasonable people, who generally have a tendency to not want to get hauled in front of a firing squad, but who often don’t want to lie either, then usually avoid speaking out at all. Ironically, white supremacists might get more substantive push back if academia had more Charles Murray’s or Murray-lite’s and people would be more tolerant of such opinions. Right now, many people who want answers are prone to turn to radical sources, as the moderate sources are lacking. The black high school student from the article is an example of a person who had trouble finding moderate sources.
PS. Interestingly, the person who set off the debate about racial IQ differences in my country, that I referred to at the beginning of the comment, is a black person as well.
Has anyone tried to study IQ or income or some other outcome measure, distinguishing among different sub-Saharan groups? Africa seems to have a lot of racial diversity–Ethiopians and Somali don’t look much like West Africans. It wouldn’t give you a perfect nature vs nurture test, since different sub population would have cultural as well as genetic differences, but they should all be about as much affected by prejudice in America or Europe.
Do you mean the IQ or outcomes of sub-Saharan groups that live in the West? Your comment is a bit unclear.
If so, a major issue is that the selection effect may be far different.
I believe there has been some study of outcomes for the Igbo and that they do well.
The funny thing is that there are regions in the US where the African american population is disproportionately of Igbo extraction. Many of the slave ships that landed in the tidewater regions of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina came from the bight of Biafra. The descendants of those slaves make up much of population of the mid Atlantic region, and I don’t see any evidence that Baltimore’s black community has any special history of achievement in comparison to the mostly Yoruba descended people of the deep south.
There was also heavy selection pressure on those populations, the mortality rates in the slave ships was high and slave owners purchased and bred slaves (to varying extents) based on physical characteristics.
The Yoruba immigrants in the UK do almost as well as the Igbo.
I think what is badly needed is some kind of decent IQ testing of several African nations (continent-wide would be ideal but I don’t think we’re going to get ideal) for a basis of what modern and even semi-reliable levels actually are.
I think Lynn’s estimate of 70 IQ is bobbins, for reasons I’ve banged on about before, and I think the estimates of 80 IQ aren’t much better. Since Africa has been exposed to pernicious Europeans and their education systems, there should be some better way of getting reliable test results today, rather than “we took illiterate nomadic herders who hadn’t even seen a pencil before in their lives, gave them a Western-style pen-and-paper test, and got results that any fool could have predicted would be bottom of the barrel low, then we took those to mean Africans really were that stupid”.
I’m not expecting miracles. Maybe the results would come out that, when averaged over however many nations participated, the mean IQ was 90 (then again, considering Lynn thought the Irish mean IQ was around 95, let me welcome my African brothers and sisters into the “they think we’re even dumber than we actually are” club). But at least we’d have something more than guesstimates, seat of the pants extrapolation, and ‘the last test of this kind was done on sixteen eight years olds in 1957 in Lesotho’.
And then finally we could start to have something approaching a reasonable debate on the topic, rather than “so you want us to agree black people are inferior, you racists!/you are a bunch of science-denying nincompoops, you bleeding-hearts!”.
If you estimate African IQ by the genetic admixture in South and Middle American Countries, you’ll get a best fit for something slightly below 70. And of course the African numbers are not based on “sixteen eight years olds in 1957 in Lesotho”.
On the other hand there is a strong Flynn effect for example in Kenya, so who knows what the real numbers are right now. And who knows where they will end up.
There are reports that Ethiopian and Somlia refugees in America get better scores on standardized tests than African Americans.
However, in terms of income, West African immigrants do even better, with Nigerian Americans, for example, having median family incomes roughly equal to whites.
Of course, most West African immigrants are not refugees. But, at least in America, the evidence for them being highly selected isn’t very strong either. If you look at the Visa Office’s annual reports, you’ll find that from 2000 to 2014, 40% of Nigerian immigrants came via the diversity visa lottery, 57% via family-related visas, and just 3% via employer-sponsored visas or any other kind of immigrant visa. Presumably most of the family visas went to relatives (and relatives of relatives, and so on) of Nigerians who won the diversity lottery.
Starting in 2015, Nigeria was removed from the list of countries that were eligible for the diversity lottery, and since then most Nigerian immigrants have come on family visas.
For reference, here are the requirements for the diversity visa lottery:
If 1) the US native black/white income gap was primarily caused by IQ differences, and 2) those IQ differences existed because native blacks have ~75% West African ancestry, I would not at all expect this level of selection to be able to close a by extrapolation even larger gap between native US whites and people with 100% West African ancestry. So I think this is evidence that at least one of those two premises is false.
The obvious solution is that 2) is false, Africans as a whole have roughly average homo sapiens sapiens intelligence, and the lowered intelligence of US native blacks is a result of centuries of perverse selection for traits that made them better slaves.
Note the many ways in which this explanation would be inconvenient to absolutely fucking everyone with a stake in this argument.
Immigrants tend to be the winners of their source population regardless (excluding exile-ish cases like the Scotch-Irish).
For example, Australian-Americans have a median income of $91,452 despite Australia’s median income being very close to America’s.
The exceptions tend to be places we take a lot of refugees from (Iraq) and Central America due to illegal immigration.
Just like Australian-Americans aren’t evidence that Australia is higher IQ than Taiwan, Nigerian-American’s aren’t particularly powerful evidence for Nigeria’s IQ.
Australia has a similar standard of living to the US, so Australians don’t have a lot of incentives to immigrate unless they could get a very above-average job by doing so. It’s a very different story for a country as poor as Nigeria, where a very large portion of the population would see a substantial increase in their standard of living if they moved to a developed country.
I used Australians because they’re white, and hence racism of any kind (reverse or otherwise) can’t affect it, but there are other examples on that page every bit as strong.
Nigeria is very wealthy for a third world country, with a per capita income close to India. Indian-Americans are literally the most successful immigrant group on the page you listed.
Obviously both countries have SEVERE income disparity problems and structural problems at home. But my core point is that immigrants are a bad population for comparison because they tend to exhibit a baseline level of motivation, intelligence and hard work that doesn’t necessarily exist in their home country.
Indian-Americans are, in fact. highly selected. This is clear just from looking at the number of H (temporary worker) visas granted to Indians (approaching 200,000 in some years) compared to say, Nigerians (600-800 in most years). Furthermore, India has never been eligible for the diversity lottery, and the fact that Nigerian-Americans seem to have mostly come through that program either directly or indirectly is the primary basis of my argument.
I am not disagreeing with that.
I am pointing out that all immigration is a selecting event, even the diversity lottery and family reunification, although they are less selecting.
First, you have to be wealthy and forward looking enough to apply, instantly cutting out the bottom third+.
Second, you have to be non-criminal, which is a solid selector for IQ and hardworkingness, especially in a tinpot third world country.
And finally, you have to be able to succeed in America enough to not boil off and go home or commit a deportable crime before you get citizenship.
Adding those together and my point is that ALL immigrants are selected. Refugees are not, but pretty much all immigrants are, even the diversity lottery winners.
The degree of selection is certainly different (e.g. India v. Nigeria), but the fact of selection isn’t.
Refugees are typically also self-selected. Usually only part of the population flees. Only part of them tries to go to the West. Etc.
I read that piece a while ago. It is fairly mediocre.
That simply reflects on the writer’s constraints, as you mentioned. The fact is that Murray and company are actually the center of the debate when you boil it down, and there are white (and asian) supremacists to the X of him and deniers to the Y of him.
Its clear that genes are important to intelligence difference in humans, so far as any social science study can be clear (in other words if you deny this you also deny all other studies from psychology and sociology, etc). It is also clear that these are not evenly distributed among all populations (again see above; if you think rape or war can cause PTSD, you believe something with less evidence than what I just said).
I think this discussion is important, but only because other people insist that it is not. I would prefer to judge other factors than race, but Harvard obviously disagrees, many others obviously disagree. The problem is that people like me are asked by forces to align myself with Harvard or Hitler, and I cannot in good conscience do that.
For whatever reason, my reply keeps getting eaten. I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong (maybe there are some bad no-no words, ironic considering the focus of this discussion). I’ll try to sum up as succinctly as possible and avoid any bad-speak.
Could you go into more detail about why you “think this discussion is important, but only because other people insist that it is not”? From my perspective there are many topics that are taboo in most circles, and this field changes constantly (no one was talking about communism 5 years ago, and it was still basically taboo even on the left). What makes this specific topic so important?
Who do you think is forcing you to choose between “Hitler or Harvard”, and why? Is this choice presented to most people, or only you and people like you, specifically?
I think the topic is important because it helps us understand our world better. The attempts at suppressing discussion and spreading noble lies were also spreading incorrect models of the world that led to wrong predictions and dumb policies, and they made the world a much worse place.
In nearly all cases, we’re better off knowing how the world works, rather than having our social order preserved by some noble lies that must then be protected by an ever-expanding bodyguard of lies and suppression of facts. “If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy.”
@False
I think that it is very important for people to realize that any grouping will have different outcomes, especially if traits are shared within the group.
For example, if you randomly split a group of Americans in two and put each group on a different island for 100 years, they will end up with different genetics and different culture.
This means that claiming that there is necessarily discrimination because of differences in outcomes is a mistake.
In itself, the above is true regardless of humane bio diversity, yet many people seem to ignore all the other evidence against the dumb belief that differences in outcomes are all due to discrimination. Humane bio diversity is a topic that forces things to a head. Rejecting it categorically requires disbelieving your eyes (as differences in human skin color is humane biodiversity) and is thus even less defensible than believing in a flat earth.
It’s less important to believe in the IQ part of humane bio diversity, although believing that IQ is independent of genetics is rather absurd. Believing in (possible) IQ differences between ethnic groups due to genetics does weaken the case for affirmative action-style discrimination against groups that do better in education and the workplace. Spreading this belief can thus result in fewer cases of more capable people being replaced by less capable people, which logically results in worse outcomes for humanity.
Also, regardless of the cause of IQ differences across racial groups, knowing about those differences leads you to be able to predict certain things about how affirmative action programs are going to work out. And as best I can tell, those predictions are all accurate–Asians getting their own version of the Jewish quota, black affirmative-action admits being overmatched and ending up in the least rigorous majors on campus, etc.
@albatross11: anyone of average IQ who isn’t mindkilled could tell you AA would lead to Asian Jewish quotas and black students being overmatched, but as Deiseach was gesturing to, we don’t know how much g is genetic. “Race realists” have Just So Stories about Jews breeding for literati and Confucian civil service exams, but the supporting evidence that evolution works like that in less than 100 generations is weak.
Culture could be what really matters.
Evolution can be very fast. For example, if you shoot everyone taller than 5 feet, the next generation will be much shorter. Similarly, humans have bred plants and animals to have desired characteristics in much less than 100 generations.
@pontifex
Under highly selective conditions, yes. Someone please reassure me that the bene gesserit haven’t been operating since the 1800s.
Yeah, the evidence is weak and contradictory for highly selective conditions in civilized areas in the last 2000 years. The most dramatic results should be coming from events like a supermajority of Europeans descending from three Bronze Age males, not “the highest IQ male Ashkenazim were the most desirable husbands in a monogamous culture.” Or look at the evidence upthread for Nigerian-Americans who arrive by “diversity lottery” or family chain migration doing better on life outcomes correlated to IQ than African-Americans who descend in significant part from Nigerian slave girls being bred to their European-descended masters.
Firstly, human races are older than 2000 years. Secondly, there have been lots of population replacement events in the last 2000 years.
Modern medicine is less than 100 years old. The welfare state is even younger. Even up to the 1800s or so, you had “highly selective conditions” operating in nearly all of the world. Mutations like lactose tolerance or better alcohol tolerance could and did go to fixation through natural selection.
By the way, I am not arguing for any particular position in the nature / nurture debate. I am just commenting that the “X years is too short for evolution to happen” argument is invalid. Thousands of years is quite long enough to get significant divergences between populations.
Evolution can go very fast under the right conditions. For example, some crazy Russians domesticated foxes in just 50 years or so.
At the risk of strawmanning, this argument reminds me of the “natural selection could never make something as complex as Y” argument that gets trotted out by creationists.
Regarding recent evolution, it occurs to me that lack of pressure can have just as big an impact as increased pressure. A world where 50% of children die from contagious diseases has very different evolutionary pressure than one where the figure is under 1%.
Eh, you, and some people down this thread are comparing plant/animals generations with humans in ways that don’t make sense.
Yes, humans have domesticated plants by strongly selecting for them in -haven’t really checked- ~100 generations.
But a generation for a plant is like…a year. Two or three maybe. Same with most domestic animals. For people, the figure is like 13x, and that number has been growing lately.
So comparing plants with humans and saying “100 generations” means 1300 years of super strong selective pressure at full reproductive speed, very best case.
Even the worst of chattel slavery in america lasted for ~300 years.
There are on the order of 10,000 years of separation between many human populations. 400 generations is plenty of time for selection to occur as well as mutation in a high mutation rate species like humans.
I’d hazard a guess based upon what scientists have found so far and what we know about other animals that the strongest selection has been for disease resistances, diet, things like that.
IQ has significant variance in most populations, so I expect that the selection pressure for it was not as strong as for drinking milk or resisting disease. If we fully confirmed some number of across population genetic differences tomorrow it could be due to a relationship between IQ and other traits. My understanding is that this is in some sense more likely than direct selection for IQ.
I’m not saying evolution could never make a 30-point IQ difference between races, but comparing it to 50 years of fox breeding is erroneous. When can you first breed your tame foxes? When the females are 12 months old? That’s 50 generations, which is close to the 99-tops we’re looking at for something like “Ashkenazi intelligence” to be genetic rather than just culture. And selectively breeding domestic animals involves extreme conditions like neutering most of the males, breeding only the extreme tail of a bell curve for a desirable trait to most of the females.
There have been prehistoric events like that effecting a “broad” race like “Europeans”, but the documented history of individual ethnic groups rarely looks like the extremes we imply by invoking selective breeding.
There were certainly populations that were probably reproductively isolated for 10k+ years, and there are cases of inbreeding with effects easily demonstrable by modern science, but that doesn’t explain everything some people would like to (and others are terrified of) explaining as human genetic differences.
Thanks to mitochondrial DNA analysis, we’re actually learning a lot about the ancestry of various populations. For example, Europeans derive from three separate ancestral populations. We also know that some populations have been isolated for a very long time. For example, the Khoisan (also known as the Bushmen) split off more than 50,000 years ago.
Humans are a high mutation rate species. I think the estimate I read was that each individual person has about a dozen de novo mutations — i.e. mutations that have never been seen before. A lot of divergence can happen in several hundred generations.
Selection pressure isn’t a knob that’s turned to either low or high. It is different for different traits. A mutation that always kills you during childhood will be under the highest possible selection pressure — it will never be passed on. A mutation that makes you slightly less good at something may or may not be passed on in the short term, but will not be favored in the long term.
I think it’s difficult for people to really imagine the pre-modern environment. It was a very harsh one for people with mental or physical disabilities. People lived in constant fear of disease or famine. When those things happened there wasn’t much they could really do to stop it.
We don’t need to speculate about whether civilization could shape human genetics, because we know it could. We have examples of favorable traits spreading, like lactose tolerance and the alcohol dehydrogenase gene.
“IQ has significant variance in most populations, so I expect that the selection pressure for it was not as strong as for drinking milk or resisting disease.”
Selection pressure doesn’t necessarily reduce variance in polygenic traits. In fact if the selection pressure leads to assortative mating (because a valuable trait becomes more relevant in mate choice), than it actually increases variance.
I’m not @idontknow131647093 but I agree with their point and I’ll try to explain my reasoning:
In a meritocratic system (or at least a system that strives towards meritocracy), individuals are judged only based on their individual outcomes. Group level differences in outcome distributions have no policy relevance, therefore the question of whether such differences come from is a low-stakes scientific question.
But we don’t live in such system, we live in an affirmative action system, championed by Harvard among others, where individuals are judged based on their membership to large groups, and differences in outcome distributions between groups are by default assumed to be evidence of “systemic” discrimination to be corrected by individual discrimination in enrollment, hiring and career progression. Therefore, the question of whether group differences are really due to discrimination becomes high-stakes distribution of paramount policy relevance.
“In a meritocratic system (or at least a system that strives towards meritocracy), individuals are judged only based on their individual outcomes. Group level differences in outcome distributions have no policy relevance, therefore the question of whether such differences come from is a low-stakes scientific question.”
Group level differences tell you to which mean somebody regresses. That can be extremely relevant for example in job interviews.
Because I personally don’t make my choices based on race, but there are vast swaths of fairly important institutions that do. And they do so in a way that ignores genetics and just assumes that all racial differences are due to discrimination. Thus they counter this perceived discrimination with discrimination of their own, while calling it a meritocracy. Then they attack anyone who doesn’t also buy into their racial balancing schemes.
To be specific, Harvard is forcing people to pick between Hitler and Harvard. And its a problem because any white/asian person who sides with Harvard is doing the equivalent of wearing the weighted clothing and distorting glasses from Harrison Bergeron.
By Harvard’s own internal reckoning, if they only considered academics, it would mean fewer white students, and a plurality-Asian student body.
Sure. And if the NBA only picked the best players that apply, they would have about 75% black players. Wait…they actually have that, because they select people by merit. And no one cares that these guys earn millions, but that Asians, Jews, white people, etc don’t get a piece of that pie that matches how many of them live in the US.
Yet we can’t have Asians being the best at something and having a bigger share of the pie that they earned through hard work and perhaps also being born with good genes. You belong in the kitchen of a Panda Express, you slanty….
Instead, let’s give those spots to mostly rich white and black people, because people who are born to wealth deserve a little help. Being born into wealth is only the luckiest you can get anyway and the least meritocratic luck of birth that exists. If you are born to a diligent culture, you merely get taught what to do, so you do better when starting on the same level as others because you perform better. Same for being born with better genes. Being born into money, you get better opportunities handed to you, without having to perform better.
Why is that kind of racism acceptable? What did the Asians do to the American elite? Still grumpy over Pearl Harbor and blaming all Asians because they look the same? Did discriminating against Jews go out of fashion at Harvard, but they just can’t help themselves so they went looking for the next best thing?
Harvard delenda est.
/rant
I don’t think so. Having loving and competent parents with an average income is, on average, better luck than being born to a billionaire’s third (trophy) wife.
My guess is that the difference between being born in the US vs Haiti is much bigger than the difference between being born rich vs poor in the US.
If one considers the fact that a higher percentage of white students than other students benefit from legacy admission, it could mean that being a white person without connections is as much, if not more, of a handicap than being an Asian. Or, even if it isn’t, either way it happens to work out rather conveniently to the benefit of the (mostly white) Ivy League legacy families: non-elite whites (outgroup) are kept out, as fraternizing with them, even in small numbers, confers no socio-economic benefit to elite whites. Fargroup (Asians and other minorities) are maintained at a level where their presence confers the benefit of a “multi-cultural experience” (having black friends, like travel, is high-status; living in a black neighborhood is not) but does not dominate the culture, which is still a WASPy New England, crew-rowing, a cappella-singing, elite networking/hobnobbing affair.
I’m not saying this is intentional, just pointing out that policies supposedly intended to remedy historical inequity have a way of working out so the costs don’t actually fall on the historically privileged (as, for example, old, white, male professors and bosses rarely step down themselves, despite their willingness to discriminate against young, white, male job candidates), in some cases even conveniently falling on their outgroup, to the benefit of themselves and possibly one or more fargroups.
I think the idea that the powerful are not at least being somewhat intentional on average in who they give the shaft and in what ways is very unlikely.
If you’re on top, dividing the bottom and/or the middle is just good strategy. And it’s a very common strategy.
@Quanta
When I say “not intentional” I mean I don’t think it’s likely some people sat around in a room and literally said “if we make it easier for black and hispanic people to get in (but fill as many of those slots as possible with the wealthy elite among those groups, including the wealthy elite abroad), harder for Asians to get in, and fill most of our ‘white people’ slots with the children and grandchildren of alumni and donors, we can achieve the perfect balance of the appearance of multiculturalism, pleasing our donors, and maintaining the culture and environment they remember plus the added bonus to their scion of hobnobbing and networking with foreign elites, in addition to each other,” but rather that all incentives aligned for them to act as if they had explicitly planned it that way once it became apparent people cared about this diversity thing.
@onyomi
I agree that you wouldn’t find evidence that anyone deciding policy would summarize it so punchily. But I bet you would find lots of discussions about subpoints if you were a fly on the wall. The lawsuit against Harvard managed to pull some juicy details about what admissions officers said about Asians. And a huge chunk of the admissions office just happened to undergo sudden amnesia on the stand about reports they themselves told subordinates to make.
Laying it all out at once even in private would be a mistake, but that doesn’t mean that people can’t communicate strategy in polite or veiled terms.
“I don’t think so. Having loving and competent parents with an average income is, on average, better luck than being born to a billionaire’s third (trophy) wife.”
I thought shared environment doesn’t matter?
Having rich parents and having loving parents are both features of the environment.
And I don’t know of anyone who claims that environment doesn’t matter. The claim I’m familiar with is that family environment has little effect on adult personality. IQ is in part heritable but not entirely, and some of the rest is presumably environment of some sort.
The article seemed to spend all its time talking about how the public couldn’t be expected to understand these results in all their subtlety, but not much time explaining what those results were, or what can be stated clearly. It’s like if you had some article in a newspaper in 1880 which discussed how biologists and theologians were very concerned that Darwinism was emboldening those horrible atheist gadflies out there, and quoting some working biologists at the time who complained that the atheist gadflies were misinterpreting some of their research, but without ever talking about the age of the Earth or the fossil record or anything.
Here’s a simple suggestion: The job of a journalist and a scientist is actually pretty similar–we’re supposed to try to get as good an understanding of the truth as we can, and then write to explain that understanding to the world. Omitting facts because we are worried it will strengthen the arguments of people we don’t like (or even people who are unambiguously pretty awful) is a terrible idea–it’s a betrayal of the trust that people put in us when they let us stand between them and reality and tell them what we see.
If I lie to you about my area of expertise, I probably can’t know where that lie will go–decisionmakers decades in the future facing problems I haven’t even imagined will be remembering that lie of mine that they learned to believe, and they’ll make worse decisions because of it. The more my area of research has a social impact, the bigger that effect will be. At the extreme end, the experts in some area converging on a socially useful lie about (say) how much your kids’ school impacts their future may lead to our society spending billions of dollars on boondoggle programs that don’t do any good, or wrecking schools that work okay but have low-quality students because we don’t want to acknowledge that some students are smarter than others.
There are ambiguities in the research. There are places where the right answer is “nobody really knows.” You can report those. It’s entirely possible to report the best picture of the world straight, even when some people will think that justifies their existing prejudices.
At a considerable tangent, I’ve mentioned a couple of times that William Nordhaus, who just got a Nobel for his work on population economics, produces results that don’t fit very well with the popular narrative on the subject.
Something I don’t think I’ve mentioned here, although I discussed it on my blog some years back, is that his results are highly speculative. He adds to his estimate of the costs of climate effects we can be reasonably sure will happen a very speculative estimate for low probability high cost outcomes, gotten some time back by polling people in various fields on how likely they thought something was that would lower world GNP by 25%. Some years later, having concluded that risks were looking higher than before, he and his coauthor doubled all the probabilities and shifted it to a loss of 30% of GNP.
I don’t know that there is a better way of figuring out what the expected cost of a bunch of very unlikely outcomes is, but given that this represents about two thirds of the estimate of total cost that he uses in deriving his estimates of the optimal carbon tax and the optimal pattern of future warming, I think a more accurate report of his conclusions would have been “If everything goes as expected, global warming will impose only minor costs. The outcome may turn out to be much worse than that, but we don’t know how likely that is.”
this out also https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/science/skin-color-race.html#click=https://t.co/jZ3M9g4DMV
whats your take on that?
The author seem to think that this is some kind of slam dunk against believing that races exist, even though their explanation of why some Africans have one of the genes that makes Europeans lighter skinned is that some Europeans migrated to African and spread their genes.
People who believe that races are not just social constructs are quite aware that all humans share genes, which is quite evident because we all have a nose and two eyes. Furthermore, they also believe that humans can breed with each other and are thus one specie. In fact, the racists among them tend to fear interbreeding to keep the white race ‘pure’. Jim Crow laws banned interracial marriages.
Ultimately, the article shows rather unremarkable things, which are not going to phase the ‘race realists’, but presents them as remarkable, and seems to think that they undermine both ‘race’ as a scientifically valid concept, as well as racism. This tells me that the author doesn’t understand how many people define ‘race’ and doesn’t understand race realist theories.
like, am i just dum on this topic, or do they just give a bunch of factoids that dont really support any conclusion?
It does support some conclusions, but they are mostly pretty boring ones that the writer isn’t interested in (and that are consistent with narratives that the writer doesn’t want them to be consistent with).
Not Europeans, but Near Eastern farmers:
Making the topic absolutely taboo and ruining the careers of anyone who dares broach it was, frankly, the most effective way to preserve the status quo. It’s only in the internet age that this tactic has its limits.
If knock-out-blow out arguments for why divergent evolution in humans stopped at the neck existed, they would have been deployed by now and made standard reading in elementary biology/psychology textbooks. You don’t have this kind of intellectual climate around things like bigfoot or flat-earth, etc. Even in the fairly contentious climate debate there are people who make a hobby out of arguing against AGW skepticism; because those arguments exist. The only way to preserve the status quo is through obscurantism, fraud, and if necessary, intimidation.
Those kinds of tactics *might* end up emboldening and strengthening the convictions of the baddies, but it’s far more likely that making any concessions on the issue will completely undermine the justification for several decades of social policy.
I don’t think that really proves anything. We don’t have an intellectual debate around flat earthism because while it’s infamous, a minuscule percent of the population believes it. With Bigfoot, it’s not even clear what the policy implications would be. That’s why people feel the need to push back on AGW skepticism so strongly, because the stakes are so high. You see a similar intellectual climate with evolution and I hope no one here doubts that. So genetic, group IQ differences are a high stakes issue and you would see debate whether they existed or not.
But there are lot’s of people that provide compelling arguments for AGW and evolution, and are willing to engage the AGW denialists and creationists on polite debates about technical points.
With the race-IQ issue, on the other hand, the mainstream reaction is to shut down the debate and call everyone who disagrees with the full-environmental theory a Nazi. This is evidence that there are no good arguments against the genetic theory.
But group differences in IQ is not a high stakes issue. Its an input.
+1
I think this is a very general phenomenon. Thirty years ago, a few media organs could basically decide that some ideas were simply not going to be heard, and it was almost impossible to do an end-run around them. (You could have a few fringy books or newsletters, but they would be rarely discussed and the taboo idea was seldom really considered.) The internet (online publications, blogs, podcasts, youtube channels) basically broke that system.
I know you’re not the first to make this argument, and it seems intuitively plausible, but there’s a part of me that’s skeptical: it seems to rely quite strongly on some very strong “every knows”-type intuitions.
In particular, I’m curious what evidence you have that the handful of media organs really were coordinated to keep certain ideas from being heard; and what evidence you have that fringe books and publications were significantly less popular than the analogous blogs or podcasts. Is there a topic that you think was not discussed thirty years ago, that is mainstream now, where you can attribute it to the rise of the internet confidently?
I don’t know if albatross has a stronger claim in mind, but a weaker claim is almost certainly true. With very few outlets for information, any information that falls outside of the norm is very unlikely to be aired in public. A 30-minute evening news report will not spend time on fringe theories of genetics. 24 hour news was the first big change in that dynamic, further expanded by the Internet making publication costs low enough for your average citizen to participate.
The companion piece basically admits that innate white superiority isn’t disproven:
If you take this seriously, you have to brace for the possibility that innate ability gaps will be found.
It would be incredibly shocking if any group were better at everything. We all evolved in somewhat different environments, with different rolls of the dice.
What’s pretty likely, IMO, is that there are some differences between racial/subracial groups, and they’re usually not all that big a deal in daily life, but sometimes they may lead to visible differences in outcomes.
This tracks, and dovetails very neatly with the observed results of letting companies ask job applicants about criminal histories directly, i.e.
Generalizations will be made, they will be made at the lowest permissible level of aggregation, who could possibly have known that setting that level really high would have weird undesirable follow-on effects?
@albatross11
People from some places do extremely well in running competitions. However, there almost certainly a cultural component there, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that genes explain it.
However, ultimately I think that the basic facts that:
– genes determine traits to a large extent
– genes differ between groups, because people don’t choose their mates randomly
means that genetic variation in traits is a given. The only question in my mind is how big that variation is. It can be very small or pretty big.
Also, fairly small differences can matter a lot way out in the tails. I doubt West Africans are, on average, all that much better than Southern Europeans at sprinting. But winning Olympic sprinters are almost always of West African descent. That small average difference turns out to mean that way out on the right tail of the bell curve, nearly everyone is West African.
@albatross
This is a really important point in arguing against both intersectionality and white nationalism. We might find out that there is “disparate impact” at the tails, but if the absolute differences are small, then a society of any particular mix of races or ethnicites won’t feel that different on a day to day level, and will be pretty much exactly as functional as a “homogenous” society. Therefore white nationalists are wrong to believe that mixed race societies are inevitably headed to disaster due to the criminal tendencies of certain races.
Even if it turns out to be a true fact that when you group people into something corresponding to the social idea of a race, you find that “blacks” on average commit more crimes than “whites” due to tail effects, if the level of crime is overall low in absolute terms, generally that society will still be perfectly functional and a great place to live. Why then should we give a fact like that more weight than equal rights? If I have a 1 in 100,000 chance of being killed by a white person (let’s say), why should I particularly care if I have a 4 in 100,000 chance of being killed by a black person?
“Better” doesn’t really mean anything. There is still a well known mental attribute which psychologists are reasonably confident they can measure and which predicts a fairly large number of life out comes that regular individuals and civil rights activists alike care about: life expectancy, income, educational attainment, etc.
If there exists a significant between-group heritability of that trait, in the absence of a medical miracle or genetic engineering revolution, the acceptance of that fact is going to cause a lot of problems. The legal system is built on the idea that the equality of opportunity/outcome tradeoff can be eliminated once all the players have eliminated their own subconscious prejudices and past injustices have been properly expensed for.
It’s not going to be much of a salve to say that these differences are offset by contra-differences in athletic ability, musical ability, or resistance to certain pathogens/illnesses.
Remember that whole premise of Murray’s book was that we’re increasingly living in a kind of RPG meta (this might be a bad analogy) where “INT”/”Charisma” Builds are dominating over STR/Stamina Builds because the “int/Charisma” people can craft potions and summon minions (i.e. modern medicine/robotics/computing) that can do everything the warriors and rangers.
So basically, _The Bell Curve_ should properly have been arguing for less powerful spell casters, to maintain game balance?
Seriously, a lot of Herrenstein and Murray’s point was that US society had changed over the 20th century into a giant IQ-selecting-and-sorting mechanism, where the smartest people get sent to good colleges and live lives entirely separate from everyone else. And that, plus the increasing returns to intelligence, gives you increasing income/wealth gaps. Add in increasing centralization of power and rule-making, and you get rules increasingly made by smart people who don’t really understand most of the people who will have to live by those rules.
you’re not wrong, most of the book was focused on individuals and stratification. But if you understand why this one trait can drive so much individual inequality in a modern society it shouldn’t take too much thought to see why the whole idea of cognitive ability not being an equally endowed trait world-wide becomes dangerous.
I see why it has serious implications, and why lots of people don’t want to discuss it. But I don’t think pretending true things aren’t true is usually a very good way to make good decisions or end up where we want to be.
> The legal system is built on the idea that the equality of opportunity/outcome tradeoff can be eliminated once all the players have eliminated their own subconscious prejudices and past injustices have been properly expensed for.
Is it though? I think that Anglo legal systems acknowledge inequality of opportunity, e.g. Common Law versus Noble Law, and that they have very little stake in equality of outcome. That legal systems may attempt to address inequality of outcome seems to be a VERY modern take.
I doubt David Friedman, legal historian and analyst, would agree with your assertion.
As a side note, what does it even mean to say that race is a social construct? All categories and the words used to identify them are social constructs.
I think that “race is a social construct” is one of those strategically ambiguous phrases.
But anyway, I agree with the overall point that it’s encouraging to see a prominent writing which is not 100% orthodox.
There’s a couple of issues around this debate that confuse me, and which hopefully people can help with. They come from a quasi-libertarian viewpoint with a strong belief that group identity is a mechanism for elite control and of no benefit to the non-elite individual.
Firstly, I’m confused about the applicability of findings that there is an average IQ for particular races. Is the differential between races significant enough to overcome individual variation within that race? If there is a difference in racial average IQ but this is far less than the average variation of IQ amongst each racial population is this finding actually giving us anything useful? My black neighbour may statistically be more likely to have a lower IQ than me, but is this chance significant enough to actually justify any sort of assumptions about our suitability for education or anything else? Indeed, considering my neighbour (six doors down) is a real person, is the fact she’s female a greater determinator of likely IQ than race? Or the fact she is about twenty years or so older than me? Ultimately is this a statistical feature with no real power to tell us anything about individuals or is there some use to this finding?
Also, is there not a danger that focus on the average IQ of a race justifies the treatment of that race, for good (affirmative action) or ill (presumably we should call this negative action…} at the expense of the individual? A headline that can be dumbed down to black people are more stupid than whites will be read that way be those not engaging with the content. An alternative headline with proper statistical qualifiers is unlikely to exist outside the actual research papers. So what is this debate trying to achieve?
There’s nothing wrong with investigating the effects of genetics on intelligence, although I worry about the application of race here since we can assume quite diverse genetic populations comprise a race (the British, and even more so the early American colonists are an excellent case in point). And I would fight against attempts to silence this research because that’s what you do, regardless of your own political views: if the research is done properly it should be discussed. But I can’t see how this research helps us learn anything beyond what we know: different populations have different genetic traits. Proving this applies to IQ (so probably to intelligence – I’d note IQ is only a proxy here) is great; making this a public debate just seems weird. Is this really any more interesting or useful than a finding that Melanisians’ big toes are on average 4.78% larger than the global average (this may be a made up statistic…)? Perhaps it’s my prioritisation of the individual over the collective making me miss something but I’m not sure why so many pixels have been dedicated to this issue.
The null hypothesis — that there is no racial difference in intelligence — gets used all the time. Over and over again we see that the very under-representation of “under-represented minorities” is used as proof that members of those minorities are being discriminated against or otherwise badly served. This is used to justify everything from expensive programs to help them to out-and-out discrimination against people who are not “under-represented minorities”. So yes, this finding is quite useful.
@Watchman
There is more variation in physical strength within genders than between them. For most of his life, Stephen Hawking was much weaker than the strongest or even average man, than women are weaker compared to men on average.
Yet no female Olympic swimmer will ever be faster than the best male swimmer. So when determining whether to separate the sexes into separate swimming competitions, it is very important to know the differential.
If men and women fight with their bare hands without holding back, it is drastically more likely that the woman gets seriously hurt. This is why boys/men get taught to not fight with women. You can’t understand the reason behind this gender norm without recognizing the differential between genders.
Law and policy is usually made for groups, so it is very relevant whether there are group differences. To wit:
We already have discrimination by American colleges against certain ethnic groups and in favor of others, based on the idea that
– these people have the same inherent ability, but are being advantaged or disadvantaged
– that affirmative action is helpful to remedy this
The people who support this don’t believe in differences in IQ between ethnic groups. So your worry is rather strange, because it’s clear that support for affirmative action doesn’t require this belief.
Ultimately, I think that a belief in differences in IQ between ethnic groups is orthogonal to support for affirmative action. Supporting that merely requires one to believe that certain races are unfairly underrepresented and that affirmative action is a good remedy.
“There is more variation in physical strength within genders than between them.”
Sure about that?
It’s a pretty vague statement, but there are plenty of ways of quantifying it where it’s true. An untrained man of average weight probably deadlifts about 155 pounds; an untrained woman of average weight probably deadlifts about 90. Elite-level athletes of the same weight might do 565 and 320 respectively. (Numbers from Google, but they tally well with what I’ve seen in the gym.)
There’s absolutely a big difference between the sexes. Women’s world records for most strength sports are in the ballpark of what you’d expect from the top of a decent high-school boys’ team. But on the other hand, that also means that the Olympic women’s weightlifting team could beat you up and stuff you into a locker.
I would assume that for most acts of physical strength, the difference between men and women is larger than a stddev, but I don’t really know.
That’s plausible, but it’s not clear how it should be interpreted; strength probably isn’t normally distributed, and it might end up being better correlated with level of training than with sex.
@BlindKungFuMaster
If you compare the averages of each gender vs the outliers within a gender, then surely my claim is correct. Especially if you include all variation, no matter what the cause. So the guy who lifts weights all day and uses steroids vs Stephen Hawking.
@Nornagest
One of the differences in strength between men and women is that women are less trained. Whether that is relevant depends on the question you want answered. If you want to figure out whether to have a women’s competition in sports, it’s not relevant, since female athletes (can) exercise just as much as men.
However, if the issue is the strength of people who are not selected for being trained, then it matters.
“If you compare the averages of each gender vs the outliers within a gender, then surely my claim is correct.”
I don’t want to belabour the point, but that is not a good way to look at group differences. The outliers depend on population size, but the nature of group differences is independent of population size.
If you want to compare variation within vs variation between, it makes more sense to compare the diff between two randomly picked persons in the same group, with the diff between two randomly picked persons in different groups.
“Is the differential between races significant enough to overcome individual variation within that race?”
The difference in average IQ between Blacks and Jews in the US is appr. 25 points. If you have a jewish neighbour and a black neighbour and you have a difficult problem, that requires an IQ of >130 to solve, your jewish neighbour is more than 100 times more likely to be able to solve it for you. (Of course if they are both really your neighbours their statistically expected IQ difference will probably be much smaller, but you know what I mean.)
Reading ancient philosophy, many of their debates seem fundamentally confused to me. They debate things that are based on premises that don’t seem to actually mean anything and never notice it(for example, their physics centered around the essence of things, whereas scientists today for the most part don’t really think in that way). Obviously it’s hard to know what exactly it is that we don’t know, but what are some concepts that we use in our premises that people in the future might see as nonsensical?
This is how Daniel Dennett sees many debates about the mind.
While I see objective vs subjective as important concepts, it’s often not well defined and I could see our conception as being wrong.
If Virtual Reality becomes prominent, they might see our conception of real vs fake as inherently dismissive.
> If Virtual Reality becomes prominent, they might see our conception of real vs fake as inherently dismissive.
In a more extreme version, I recall a Yudkowski piece about a cryonics patient being revived and asking if he had been uploaded and the revivers considering that an ill-founded question.
Right. I’m not thinking about what they will think of as wrong, I’m asking about what premises we use that our descendants will think of us as being ill defined and/or not even wrong.
Psychiatry seems have a rather strange premise in the sense that they primarily judge mental illness by the ability to function in society. This means not only that what is seen as a mental illness changes over time, as society changes, but it also means that mismatches between people’s behavior and what is expected of them is blamed on people, even when it seems more reasonable to blame society.
An example is how nowadays a lot of people are diagnosed with and treated for ADHD. The fact that the youngest children in a class get diagnosed substantially more suggests that even merely children who mature slower or seem to mature slower than others get diagnosed. In general, it seems to me that people just differ where they are on the lethargy-energetic spectrum. Then because modern education and jobs require more lethargy, people who are somewhat further on one side of that spectrum are called mentally ill.
Another example is that being gay was for a long time considered a mental illness for clashing with was considered normal behavior in the past.
I… don’t think that’s an accident? We don’t care about physical variation if it doesn’t impede function; this is why the random genetic mutations that make red hair are fine and the ones that cause cancer have billions of dollars thrown at them, or why overweight/obesity used to be a marker for ‘successful guy’ and is now… you know, not. Why should psychological variation be different?
The amount of money spent worldwide on hair dyes is also of the order of billions of dollars.
Actually, there’s been a lot of prejudice against red-haired people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair#Prejudice_and_discrimination_against_redheads
Historically yes, definitely. Modern day I think it comes more down to picking people in the same way that people with glasses get picked on, or blondes get picked on for being dumb, or any other number of normal physical traits that get made fun of because that’s what people do. Most of the examples listed are from a long, long time ago and/or come from cultures that would never have red hair (where having read hair is mocked more because it means you are European).
The one more modern bit about the sperm bank actually makes sense…red hair is a less common trait than other colors, and most people are probably selecting from sperm banks for kids that will look like them, so most people want more typical hair colors (there are also some skin-related health risks for red-headed people that parents may be trying to avoid.
Of course, there are a lot of people that find red hair to be a highly desirable trait in a partner from an attraction standpoint, so it isn’t all bad. I would guess a lot more of that hair dye money is spent making non-red hair into red-hair than the reverse.
Flashman worried his wife would pup something with red hair and a pug nose and everyone would know he was a cuckold. Anti-Irish prejudice had a long run in England.
acymetric, in other words, we do care about some physical variation that doesn’t impede function– malice is just too much fun.
So, bombings. Out of curiosity, does anyone here think that the probability of “false flag” is greater than 1%? I don’t.
On another CW topic, caravans. The asylum caravan our of Honduras is coming up through Mexico, and I fully expect a few families who present convincing-enough evidence of persecution to be allowed across and most of the rest to get off the train (often literally) in Mexico and either stay there or go home. This is what happens every time a caravan goes through. As far as I can tell, nobody who is willing to admit that this is generally the case is getting much airtime. This seems to me to be an especially egregious case of politics being a mind-killer; very little effort is being made to understand exactly what happens when these caravans set out or what they accomplish. This fact makes me strongly doubt the accuracy of political reporting generally, and is one of the reasons I harbor a LOT of doubt over the “no-go-zone” stories that have come out of Europe in response to the [migrant/refugee] crisis, and “political movement reporting” generally.
If it happened six months ago, I think the probability of false flag would be very low. The fact that it is just before an election, combined with the fact that none of the bombs seem to have gone off, raises it–I think above 1%, although still less likely than the straightforward interpretation.
If it turns out that they were not supposed to go off, that would raise it a good deal more.
This Navy bomb disposal officer thinks the bombs seem designed to be useless while looking theatrically bomb-like.
https://twitter.com/thomasbsauer/status/1055145782200987648
The caravans are disturbing to me because they obviously engage in photo ops then get on buses/trains. There are no humans on Earth that can keep the pace they are keeping. Indeed, 1000 Aragorns could not do this; 1000 Legolases could not do this; even with fresh horses for all the people and supplies this caravan would be proceeding at a breakneck pace.
I haven’t been following this; what photo ops are you thinking of and why do you think the apparent pace is impossible? Not saying it isn’t, as mentioned I have basically no background information here.
The photo ops are just what the media is showing. They stop in towns etc.
My evidence for a breakneck pace is that they have women/children and the max rate for military units on foot is about 20 mile/day. They started on October 17 and have already progressed about 500 miles.
https://www.cnn.com/…-map/index.html
https://www.google.c…d15.4329682!3e2
779 Kilometers
They left October 17
That is 97 Kilometers a day.
Even the CNN article states they are walking 20-30 miles a day. This would be a feat for a team of Navy Seals to keep up for 8 days.
On paved, level ground 30 miles/day is easy for adults. Military standards take into more difficult tasks. Your links are broken, so I’m not sure what your numbers mean. 30 miles as the crow flies is usually a lot more than 30 miles on foot. Putting the places on the Vox map into google maps gives road distances a lot more than 30 miles/day. If you tell it you want to walk, it will even describe elevation.
30 Miles a day without gear is easy for adults. These people are all shown with kids and fairly large packs. There are some people saying that they are not carrying all that much and are resupplying every town they stop in. Even that means you are carrying 3+ liters of water with you unless you have a deathwish.
When backpacking with ~25 pound backpacks in the mountains, the standard my scouting crew used was 2 mph plus one hour per thousand feet of elevation change. This was an estimate for reasonably fit teenage boys, and it worked well.
A sincere question: who benefits from the optics of the caravan? I have been on a media diet, so am aware of the existence of this caravan, but haven’t seen any pictures or video. My presumption is that it plays well to republican candidates as a get-out-the-vote stimulus.
It seems uncertain. This is a weird scenario where the motivation and the beneficiaries are not superficially obvious. I’ve heard about an equal amount of shouting that this is all funded by George Soros and is a leftist attempt to smear Trump, as well as shouting that this is clearly a made up story hyped by Republicans in order to scare their racist voters into showing up for the midterms.
I haven’t been following it too closely, but I would guess that it’s being organized by an ultra-left American organization which thinks that it will be great anti-Trump anti-Republican optics for these downtrodden people to be turned away at the border. Which it might very well be, I don’t know.
What’s interesting in modern American politics is that each side has their own echo-chambers. So the Left will think that the caravan was very effective in embarrassing Trump; and the Right will think that the caravan completely backfired.
I don’t think anyone on the left thinks the caravan embarrasses Trump. Matt M has it right above: the view on the left is that it helps Trump, and that Republicans are hyping it to motivate their base for the midterms.
I also don’t think there’s any evidence of it being organized by anyone at all other than the marchers themselves and maybe some Honduran politicians. Previous caravans were organized by this group but apparently they are only offering “logistical support” to the current caravan.
Up to now, it’s all Trump. It’s made the national media cover his pet issue; lent a sheen of plausibility to the fanciful notion of illegal immigrants as an invading army; and played up the tendency of his opponents to blow hot and cold on the question of whether our immigration laws should be enforced at all.
All of this could change in an instant depending on what happens when they reach the border.
Steve Sailer referred to the caravan as “The Committee to Re-Elect the President,” which sounds about right to me. Trump benefits, and as long as Trump and company keep making outrageous comments that can be attacked on Twitter or on cable news, the caravan stays in the news.
Why, it’s almost like somehow Trump is *really good* at playing the media in a way that benefits him successfully.
I’m not sure I want to put a number on it, but there’s some things about this that don’t quite add up for me.
– The targets are all right-wing boogeymen, but there’s nothing tying them together except that they’re right-wing boogeymen. I’d expect anyone who was pissed off enough to send letter bombs to have something specific they were pissed off about, in which case we might see bombs being sent to Clinton campaign figures or Obama administration staffers or media offices or George Soros. All at once is a stretch. (On the other hand, there might be a conspiracy theory I don’t know about that implicates all these people.)
– The devices look like time bombs: the one good image I’ve seen shows a digital clock strapped to a capped pipe with electrical tape. Why would you send time bombs in the mail? If the target opened the package before the timer hit zero, they’d call the cops and evacuate. If they didn’t get around to it, chances are they aren’t even there. It’s only dangerous to the intended target (or, more likely, their staff) within a span of a minute or two, and there’s days’ worth of uncertainty in when they get there. (Another option is that the image is a press mockup, and these were conventional letter bombs.)
– The bombs arrived at their destinations, yet none of them went off. Amateur bomb-making is notoriously unreliable, but that’s a pretty low hit rate. And it helps tip the scales of cui bono. (But the bomb-maker could just be spectacularly incompetent, and the time-bombs-in-the-mail thing makes that more likely.)
– And of course the timing’s awfully convenient. (No getting around that, but it’s far from conclusive.)
That all being said, I still think a lone nut is probably our best bet here, knowing only what we do now. If the perpetrator meant for these to kill people, though, he really doesn’t know what he’s doing, which means he’s probably covered his tracks badly. We’ll probably know all about who and why in a week or two; if the perpetrator hasn’t been found by then, my probability of this being a false flag goes up.
It might also be worth mentioning that “false flag” doesn’t necessarily mean a DNC psyop. There are lots of other people out there who’d like to stir shit, and we already know about attempts to forment partisan tension from some of them.
Has anyone ever used “double false flags”? In this case, could a right-wing group send conspicuously inept bombs to “right-wing boogeymen” as you call them, in order to claim it was a false flag operation by whiny democrats who want to play the victim card?
How far does this rabbit hole go? What’s to stop a radical leftist group from creating a false false false flag just to make it seem like its a right-wing group trying to claim its a false flag operation by whiny democrats who want to play the victim card? In this case, the leftist group kills two birds with one stone, delegitimizing the concerns of the democratic party (their true enemy) and also casts the right-wing as exceptionally evil.
Good question. And I’m glad I don’t work in a secret service, where this kind of rabbit hole can supposedly go really deep, and even the ones who dig the hole are never quite sure what level they’re at.
In the absence of good solid facts, the most plausible options are to throw up your hand and refuse to pass judgment on anything that happens, or to become paranoid and choose the narrative that best fits your preconceptions.
So, please, someone reliable find the sender of these bombs (?), and get to the bottom of the affair!
Didn’t Yudowdky say we’re only capable of three layers of recursion?
Isn’t that exactly what a fourth-level operative would say?
That thought occurred to me. To make it work, however, you need someone loyal to your side who has done a really convincing job of appearing to be a partisan of the other side and is willing to get caught and spend a very long time in jail–or to commit suicide or be assassinated by his own side to make sure he never slips.
I can see doing it in a thriller, but not in the real world.
This particular aspect stood out to me as well, in part for the actual timing issue, but also because I can’t imagine who would build a bomb that way. The whole construction seems odd from the image, but the digital readout is the most bizarre aspect. I can think of reasons to have that, but they are weak ones that seem at odds with the rest of the scenario.
On the other hand, I think it’s reasonably likely that I’m not very good at modeling the thought process of a would-be bomber.
was probably just a science project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident
Maybe a digital alarm clock is the easiest timing system they could find and buy anonymously in a physical shop with cash.
Suggests general incompetence on the part of the bombmakers. The least they could do is smash the lcd display.
Or maybe it’s just a dumb fake.
I’d say 70% it’s not designed to explode, 30% the designer is a bit thick.
They weren’t designed to go off. They were designed to scare people. Like letters of white powder that turn out to be harmless powder.
This logic applies whether you think it was a false flag or not.
Okay, but a lot of media is reporting this as an “attempted assassination attempt” or something.
Attempting scaring is also dangerous and wrong and should be condemned, but it ain’t that.
I think the most common description I noted is “political violence” and “terrorism”. I’d say both apply.
Agree with all of this.
I’d also add that we have, in recent years, observed plenty of cases of faked hate crimes (although mostly mere threats, not actual violence) originating from the left that have been exposed as frauds.
I’d definitely go higher than 1%. Put me at 10% for now, and I’d probably be more likely to go higher than lower…
The news stories haven’t said much about what the bombs actually are. But according to one I saw, there was gunpowder but no detonator, which the person being interviewed thought meant they wouldn’t go off. And they were supposedly on timers, which again sounds as though they were not intended to actually kill the people they were sent to.
That suggests three alternatives:
1. A very incompetent right wing would-be assassin
2. A right winger who didn’t want to kill people, just scare them–again incompetent, this time in not realizing the effect would be to strengthen the side he was attacking.
3. False flag. Someone on the left who doesn’t want to kill anyone, does want to help the Democrats in the midterms.
Pizzagate ties together a bunch of right-wing boogeymen, and it’s focused on Clinton and Obama associates rather than Democrats who currently hold office. It fits pretty well.
Also on bombings: the UK Guardian is saying (sometimes in a ‘authorities have stated…’ context but without quote marks) that the people targetted are ‘prominent Trump critics’.
Is this something that’s been said by a source and used in other media? Because to me it looks like a fairly heavy-handed attempt to insinuate that the bomber must be a pro-Trump fanatic. Which feels inappropriate at this stage. Presumably there are people who hate both Trump AND Democrats
Purely factually ‘Trump critic’ might be a key identifier for some (Brennan?) but I’m not sure that I’d ‘Trump critic’ would be the go-to term I’d use to describe Obama.
That ship has long sailed. #MAGABomber was the top trend all day on Twitter. Promoted mainly by “journalists”
Maybe it’s better if we don’t try to replicate the dumpster fire that is Twitter on CW / current politics issues, here at SSC.
It might be worth distinguishing between a few different scenarios.
(1) Independently-motivated bomber(s) intent on doing harm; i.e. conventional explanation
(2) “Mock” bomber(s) intending to deceive the public in some way; i.e. false flag
(3) Externally-motivated bomber(s) intent on doing harm; i.e. undercover FBI agents encourage people under investigation to engage in criminal behavior
I don’t know if item 3 qualifies as a “false flag” or not, but it is something that various federal law enforcement agencies do.
You mean, as in, FBI FOILS FBI TERROR PLOT?
Just a few days after Liberty Memes was banned from Facebook?
It all adds up!
(3) is called an agent provacateur. The difference from a false flag attack is pretty subtle.
If the FBI did this, they really fucked up the operation. You arrest the guy at the moment they place the explosive outside of their own control, not after the Secret Service finds the bomb.
Agreed. Things like Operation Fast and Furious serve as precedent that Federal law enforcement can indeed fuck up this badly, and that’s a very disturbing possibility in this case, but it’s far from the most probable explanation,
Fast and Furious wasn’t trying to get the low man on the totem pole though. The goal wasn’t to roll up the straw buyers, AFAIK. So it’s not really analogous.
Unless we are positing an operation trying to catch someone who is trying to purchase pre-assembled bombs, which seems completely into the astronomically unlikely.
The FBI could hypothetically be trying to catch imaginary Russian agents recruiting hapless American dupes as mail-bombers, or something like that. Not at all likely, but once we’re past the obvious we’re talking about a whole lot of not-at-all-likely theories.
Too close together to be copy-cats, so assume a lone nut.
Speculating about the motivations of an unknown person is a fool’s errand. We know nothing, and America has more than enough absolute crazies around that the motivations could be anywhere from political beliefs to beliefs that Dan Rather is beaming messages into his head.
I’m 99% sure that the bomb posted by CNN is a complete hoax.
First off, there’s the bomb itself, which is laughably, obviously fake (wires on both ends, a timer on a mail bomb, a timer with a clock display). This is not even in contention. Law enforcement agencies and everyone who’s ever worked in EOD agree that it’s fake.
(It could have been a clever real explosive dressed up to look like a fake, but since it didn’t explode, we can pretty much rule that out.)
Second, there’s the way in which it was delivered. The original claim was that it was mailed, which obviously doesn’t pass muster; no canceled stamps, no USPS markings, and those stamps would not have been sufficient to get something that large through the mail anyway.
It was then claimed to have been sent by courier, which has many of the same problems, in addition to the fact that we now have USPS stamps on a courier package, which is already hitting the entire piano’s worth of notes of “this package looks suspicious”. What courier service does not mark its packages? What courier service is going to accept a package that looks like this, and not contact authorities? The only way this would make sense if is the “courier” was the “bomber” himself or someone working with him. (Surely such a person would have been caught on security cameras?)
The third and most telling thing is the fact that this picture exists at all. Somebody:
– Took the bomb all the way out of the package
– Artfully laid it down next to the package
– Made sure the lighting was good and that everything was visible in frame
– Stood around taking pictures of it.
Law enforcement is not going to take a picture like this, nor would they release it to the public that quickly if they did. When’s the last time you ever saw law enforcement do that? They blow up suspected explosives or take them apart with robots, they don’t take pictures of them.
Whoever stood around taking pictures of something that could have been a live bomb is either incredibly, breathtakingly stupid (and with no one around to say “stop messing with the bomb, you idiot!”) or knew that it was not a bomb at all.
Nothing about this makes sense in any context other than a very badly planned hoax. I genuinely cannot wait for the full investigation of this one, as the FBI and police departments take bomb hoaxes very seriously.
In addition to the points you mentioned, there are photos of the package delivered to Debbie Whatshername’s office, supposedly having been returned to sender. The packages have identical spelling errors in her name, and address. With the same lack of postmarks or any other markings. Not even a “return to sender” so the courier service knows which way to ship it. Both packages have misspellings in the addressee’s name.
In order to deliver 6 (?) packages to different locations throughout the US, on the same day, without having gone through the mail or any other delivery service more or less excludes “lone nut” and runs very quickly into conspiracy territory.
I’ve heard but have not seen that X-Rays of the CNN device have surfaced. My impression of the consensus of those claiming to have seen them is that it is an obviously non-functional device, missing most of the components that would be required to make it actually functional.
But even MORE interesting is that, according to the Secret Service statement, the devices sent to persons under their protection were intercepted during routine screening and not delivered to the intended location. Not person. Location.
How the hell does someone, that can’t even spell a single name right (including “Florids”), manage to find out where the Secret Service does their screening, and manage to inject a package at that point without being detected. Assuming, of course, that the method of delivery was the same as the two we have seen pictures of.
The whole thing smacks of blatantly obvious attempt to make a textbook “suspicious package” with misspellings, incorrect postage, weird lumpy shape, etc. Hell, looking at the crappy pictures of the CNN device, it damn near looks like a bag of oregano taped on the ends of the tube, so it very well could have “weird smell or fluids leaking” as well. And the device itself is specifically intended to look unmistakably like a bomb, but so much so that not even a Steven Seagal movie would use such a shitty prop.
Almost as if it was tailor made for a media circus.
I can basically think of two reasonable and a few crazy reasons to do a hoax like this:
1. Wait for the media circus to eventually get around to “obvious fake is obvious,” and then send a real device to your real target to maximize the chance they trigger it.
2. Have your friendly media run a 24-7 media circus accusing the other side right before the election. This could in principle be either side.
3. Some kind of elaborate attempt to control the narrative by sending real bombs through the mail to the Clintons or Obamas, while hand delivering ridiculous fakes to everyone else so that the “obvious fake is obvious” narrative drowns out the investigation of the real bombs by the secret service, who are professional and will run a tight ship?
4. The Illuminati is beaming instructions into your brain with ultrasonic tooth filings.
I am leaning more towards (2). And since there is at least a little bit that leans towards “inside job,” and a hell of a lot of why the heck would the (R)’s do this! They would know they would be vilified 24-7, and they are already pretty fucking sure they are going to win the election anyway. Would godly reason would they have to make such an enormously risky move? Even if they hold Congress, because of the antagonism of the “deep state,” how in the heck would they figure they could get away with it? Any attempts by the administration to quash the investigation would result in an immediate leak of everything to the media hostile to the administration. It doesn’t even pass the laugh test.
(By the same token, why the hell would the (D)’s do this! is a legitimate counterargument, but I think they have a lot more to gain. And I feel like they have been making a lot of unforced errors lately. And I have been a lot less sympathetic to them in general lately.)
Like, I want to keep an open mind on this, but damn is it hard.
Yes, the whole postage thing is bizarre. At first I heard they were delivered by USPS, but then you see the package and the stamps aren’t canceled. And that’s not enough postage to send something that size. So then we hear they were couriered. But they were couriered on the same day to New York and Delaware and Florida? Without anyone seeing the courier?
None of this makes any sense. I would very much like the FBI and the Secret Service to find whoever did this, and quickly, and get an explanation.
Why on Earth should I trust the explanation that either of those organizations would provide?
This whole thing seems tailor made for controversy. I feel like it may be too early to speculate what actually happened. But it’s not too early to speculate that we’ll never know for sure, and at least 50% of the population is going to reject whatever the official narrative ends up being. I’m comfortable calling that now.
Eh, I still mostly trust the Secret Service to not be part of some Deep State conspiracy. They have an incentive to accurately identify threats because they’re the ones left holding the bag if someone under their charge is actually murdered.
But I agree the entire thing is a shit-show and the vast majority of people are going to believe whatever fits with their priors regardless of any report that comes out.
None of those things are dispositive. The package is obviously non-machineable, so not being canceled just means a postal worker didn’t bother to hand-cancel it. Or count the number of stamps.
The Ds (more specifically, the arm of the D’s known as “journalists”) have been loudly insisting for two years that Trump’s “dangerous rhetoric” is going to inspire the nascent white-supremacist movement in the US to start committing acts of mass murder upon anyone they don’t like.
(All while, in actuality, most of the violent street mob style behavior has been coming from the antifa types, who outnumber the actual Nazis by at least 10:1)
Their credibility is already near-zero and they can only keep loudly shouting a narrative that goes against what people actually observe with their own eyes for so long. They need something like this desperately. If you’re CNN, these events are manna from heaven.
Please don’t do this, and I say this as someone broadly in agreement that major media outlets lean left. The signal-to-partisan-rant ratio of this post is basically nil.
While the first paragraph is good and makes perfect sense to me, this:
needs to have some sources cited.
My one quibble is I think you overestimate the motivation for the NYPD to piss off the mayor, governor, and entire state legislature during an election year.
ETA: Actually, I think the state senate is (barely) republican controlled but they are hoping to flip it this year. So… same difference.
I don’t think that the mayor, governor, or even the state Democratic party have anything to do with this, and I’m fairly sure that they don’t want this slime on them. Theoretically, they could tell law enforcement not to release their findings until after the election, or law enforcement could do this of their own accord.
Realistically, though? This is a terrorism hoax in New York City. How many local politicians do you think are going to potentially get caught interfering with an investigation into it? How many law enforcement officials won’t immediately want to punish the perpetrator in any way possible, no matter who it is?
They almost certainly don’t have anything to do with it. There is a significant distance between “don’t fuck this opportunity up for us” and “don’t do your job (at all) after the political moment passes.”
And, you know, maybe if it turns out to be someone we don’t necessarily want taking the blame on this… you know… discretion or whatever.
But I have an extremely low opinion of NYS politics, and the city especially.
Timer with a clock display doesn’t necessarily make it a hoax. If I wanted to make a time bomb… well, I’d probably use a Raspberry Pi or a microcontroller, but if I didn’t know anything about hardware and wanted to make a time bomb, a reasonable way to do it would be to get a cheap battery-powered digital clock from the store and rewire the alarm to whatever I was using as a detonator. Set the alarm and that’s when it goes off. It would cost about five bucks and be as reliable as my wiring was, assuming the detonator could get enough juice.
Wires on both ends is a tell, though, yes, and I addressed the problems with mailing a time bomb above. But, like I also alluded to above, the simplest explanation for all these problems is probably that CNN told their prop department to mock up a bomb for the article they’re writing about their bomb scare.
This is apparently the clock used in the “bomb” shown in the photo from CNN. It does not have an alarm function.
Okay, never mind, then. If it doesn’t have an alarm function, converting it to a timing device would be as hard as rolling your own.
I remember when the media was wringing their hands about the climate of hate Trump had created leading to right-wing hate groups calling in bomb threats to Jewish community centers and desecrating Jewish cemeteries. And then it turned out the threats were made by an Israeli teenager and the cemeteries desecrated by a muslim anti-Trump journalist.
I remember when a black church in the south was burned just before the election with “VOTE TRUMP” scrawled on it. And my FaceBook feed was full of “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!” posts. And then it turned out the arsonist was an anti-Trump member of the church.
I remember when CNN reported about “Trump violence” after the election, including an anti-Trump protestor at a university student union who was tackled. And it turns out he was tackled by a (literally) mentally handicapped anti-Trump person who confused the speaker for someone pro-Trump.
I remember when left-wingers rioted across the country after the election and Barbara Walters had the audacity to ask Trump to tell his supporters to knock it off.
All the other times it’s been a false flag or media lies won’t prevent the Democrats, the media, my FaceBook feed, or apparently SSC posters from immediately laying this at the feet of Trump. But when they catch the perpetrator and prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law (as they should) and it turns out it was a deranged Democrat sending hoax bombs to prominent Dems to whip up sympathy before the election, I’m sure no one will ever apologize for falsely blaming Republicans/Trumpers and this will all go right down the memory hole.
Deranged Democrat: 50%
Deranged Trumper: 20%
Deranged Other (mentally ill person, disgruntled former government employee, etc): 30%
this one got in the memory hole
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1080189/Young-Republican-claimed-Obama-supporter-carved-letter-B-face-robbery-story-police-say.html
I know there were hoax hate crimes, but were there real hate crimes?
There’s some background level of real hate crimes all the time. Though as the Toxoplasma of Rage article would lead you to expect, I don’t think any of the most-publicized ones were confirmed real.
There were also a lot of hate crimes, especially vandalism, whether publicized or not, which were not determined one way or another.
There are hate crimes that get prosecuted every year. Over 6000 hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2016.
As with everything else, the media are a distorting filter. One interesting sideline, if you dig down a bit, is that, of the hate crimes motivated by racial hatred, 50% were anti-black, 20% were anti-white, 10% were anti-hispanic, and the other 20% was everyone else. This is quite different from the picture of the world you get from media coverage–I don’t recall *ever* seeing media coverage of an anti-white hate crime. Note, though, that blacks are a much smaller percent of the population and are getting a much larger number of hate crimes–the actual rate of hate crimes against blacks is way, way higher.
I suppose the guy at the Unite the Right rally who drove his car into the crowd?
I’m not saying there are no hate crimes. I’m just saying there are enough highly publicized hoaxes that when something like this occurs, it is not unreasonable to say “this might be a hoax, let’s investigate and find out.”
The hoax hate crimes tend to fit a pattern. The action is committed in a highly public way, no one is actually hurt, and the “message” made fairly explicit. The real hate crimes tend to have an easily identifiable assailant, a victim who is actually injured, and the hate/messaging portion of the crime is auxiliary to the crime itself. That is, committing a crime against someone because they’re a foreigner as opposed to committing a crime for the purpose of sending a message to foreigners.
So when someone graffitis “FOREIGNERS GET OUT, SIGNED, TOTALLY REAL NAZIS” that says to me “hoax hate crime by someone who wants people to be scared of nazis.” But when nazis actually beat up a foreigner, that says to me “nazi who doesn’t like foreigners.”
This thing, where what appear to be fake bombs that do not explode are anonymously sent to Democrats says “hoax.” But CNN “debunks” that theory as “despicable.” When they catch the guy and it turns out it was a hoax, I doubt they’re going to apologize for that.
ETA: I would also like to add that none of this really matters or should matter in terms of politics or the culture war. Whoever did this, either real or fake is deranged. What one deranged Republican or one deranged Democrat or one deranged whatever does in a nation of 330 million people is irrelevant. I’m just mad at the media and Democrats for pretending it’s extremely relevant and Trump’s fault with no evidence.
Be careful of selection bias in the “no one gets hurt” limb of that heuristic. Graffiti is likely to only get a quick police report, cleanup by the affected group, and local media attention only. You’ve pointed out above the fake hate crime that included graffiti, but most instances of graffiti in Jewish cemeteries is real, not fake, but probably only appears on the local news.
That could be my mistake then. I only ever seem to hear about the graffiti when it turns out to be fake. Or I hear about it and it turns out to be fake later.
Is there any way to get numbers on “times a hate crime vandal is caught and it’s real vs hoax?”
Yeah, that’s the toxoplasma of rage thing–the modal hate crime is probably some pretty unambiguous situation where a couple drunken thugs beat some black guy senseless while screaming racial epithets at him. Everyone agrees that the thugs need to go to jail, and if the cops catch them, they will indeed be taking those thugs to jail, and the prosecutor will probably try to arrange for them to stay there awhile.
OTOH, the hate crime where some messed up kid has racial epithets spray painted on her locker, a lot of the time that’s a hoax. And nearly every non-hoax case is a personal beef–she had a bad breakup and her ex-boyfriend spray painted that stuff on her locker because it was the most hurtful thing he could think of. It looks to me like those stories get massively amplified by media outlets looking for outrage-stoking stories, and by administrators and other students who want to show how virtuous they are by very visibly responding. In an ideal world, the first situation would end up with the girl in counseling, and the second would end up with the boy spending a few weekends cleaning up grafitti as part of his community-service sentence from the judge. Amplifying those stories never makes anything better except the ratings of the media types who do the amplification.
It’s hard to say. I’ve only got vague memories of some stuff in St. Louis–near where I was stationed at the time–but I don’t know that any of them got caught.
I mean, the cops aren’t generally known for rabidly pursuing every lead in cases of property crime. If there’s no security camera video or bragging online–and low-level drunken Nazi-adjacents may not have either–it’s likely that it gets reported to the cops, rolled up in the FBI stats, and generally gets paid off by the insurer, and the owner cleans up. For a one-off event, I don’t know that the cops going to do much more than they would for any other graffiti.
Now, if there’s a spate of it in one place, with multiple instances pointing to either copycats or an organized effort, I think there’ll be more effort on the part of law enforcement, as well as national media attention. But I think the modal hate crime is as I said in the previous paragraph–a one-off small event by drunken late teens/early twenties roughs.
This isn’t to minimize this–I’d be pretty upset if somebody desecrated my grandfather’s grave, even if it was just “Kilroy was here.” It’d be even more terrible for a family that had a member die in the Holocaust to have the desecration be “Hitler was right!” It’s just a caution that there’s a continuum of behavior rolled up in “hate crime,” most of which is “low-level,” and you’re probably not going to hear about it because it doesn’t get picked up nationally.
I’ve referred to an incident that happened when I was at Fort Leonard Wood where a guy blew through security at the west gate, led the MPs on a high-speed chase out the north gate, led the state police on a high-speed chase down an interstate while shooting at them with an AK-47, then ran into a college and back out, robbed a homeowner nearby of his keys and car, then got stuck on a back road where he was finally apprehended. As far as I could tell at the time, there was very little national coverage despite there being some possible hooks in there to natter about on camera. Some other thing made the media at the time go “squirrel!” and this incident never got mentioned more than once. Don’t confuse what you see in the media with what is actually happening.
I’d guess about 15%.
(1) There’s an obvious motive for a false flag.
(2) None of the bombs seems to have exploded.
(3) There are a number of historical examples, particularly around threats.
The deciding factor for me would be the probability that one of these bombs would explode? If they were almost certain not to explode, that would increase my probability of false flag, while if there were a reasonable possibility of them injuring someone (particularly their target), that would lower it. I haven’t seen clear coverage of that but would be very interested.
I’m planning to observe the 3-day rule whether it’s intended to apply to a case like this or not. Playing Internet Detective is a mug’s game.
You are the wisest person on this thread.
+1
I did jokingly propose that the 3-day rule be extended to a 1-week rule and to all CW topics, and this thread is just proving that maybe I shouldn’t have joked.
The apparently odd design (though that’s based only on pictures) and zero success rate of the bombs suggests that they might not have been intended to go off, but I question the step where so many here seem to conclude that means it’s obviously a false flag. It’s hardly unheard of for people to engage in threats with the intent of sending a message without actually hurting anyone.
Any sort of confidence that it is a false flag is rather unwarranted. But the whole thing seems awfully suspicious. Coupled with a culture warriors drive it is very compelling. (Robert DeNiro, seriously? On what planet is he even remotely noticeable other than a left wing bubble?? Screaming obscenities at Hollywood shindigs does not an enemy make. A Larry the Cable Guy sticker. You have got to be freaking kidding me.)
Disguising the real target amidst a flurry of fakes using the political charged atmosphere as cover is a very, very real possibility. It is just hard to know how much political bias to subtract from the assessment.
Also, having pictures of the envelopes and devices and X-Rays of the devices plastered all over the news is just screaming out for copy cats. Maybe even politically motivated false flags from dummies. If CNN didn’t know that is exactly what was going to happen and make the investigation that much harder, fucking shame on them.
I think “obviously a false flag” is too strong, but it’s evidence in favor of it being a false flag. The obvious alternative is someone on the right who is incompetent.
People who through a rock through a window with a note on it that says “Boom” clearly are just incompetent bombers.
This is a snarky response almost identical in form and purpose to one you (rightfully) complained about in another thread.
You obviously have a more thought out point, but you went with snark that doesn’t really explain your position well, and leaves people to interpret it, with the strong potential for a mistake. I don’t mind snark, but with your recent strong attempts at removing it, this comes across as highly hypocritical.
Sure, it’s hypocritical. I admit it.
But damn, the ping ponging of stupid arguments here make me irate.
The obvious alternative is not someone on the right who is incompetent. The obviously alternative is someone who sees value in threatening people with death. If I am an incompetent bomber I create something that I think will actually explode. I don’t know if these bombs are plausibly actually explosive, but the conversation her is occurring in the framework of “clearly, can’t possibly, just looks like it will, a “movie bomb”. People who create movie bombs and think they will explode are themselves movie creations (unless they are literally mentally incompetent).
And the entire conversation is taking place under the faux umbrella of “clearly highly unlikely to be a false flag” while continually tacitly assuming that it it is highly likely to be one.
The fact that no one is considering the idea that “I want to terrorize my enemies” is a likely answer seems bizarre to me.
Thanks for taking the same to write out your more complete thoughts.
I agree that “false flag” seems to be considered a more likely solution than being said explicitly. I happen to think that’s because “false flag” is a more interesting scenario, and because we honestly have no idea who it would be otherwise. We’re at the speculation stage of all this, waiting for the FBI or whoever to give us enough information to actually form an opinion.
“Incompetent right winger” also goes beyond the poorly made bombs, in that anyone who thinks two weeks before the election is a good time to threaten the D leadership really is incompetent. I think a right winger trying to make it look like a false flag is significantly more plausible than a competent right winger trying to actually scare someone. If the bombs are real (as in, real explosive material), then I think it’s much more likely that it’s an incompetent bomb maker trying to hurt someone. This whole last paragraph speaks more to my internal biases than noted fact, though, because we really don’t know much yet.
I believe I did list that as a possible answer quite recently, although it might have been after you posted your comment. It doesn’t seem likely to me, perhaps because I am attributing too much rationality to the actor.
The obvious result of the bombs is to help the Democrats in the midterms. I can see someone who really wants to kill his enemies ignoring that, or thinking that the benefit of establishing the pattern “if you are a prominent leftist you will get killed” is worth the short-run political cost. But I find it hard to imagine someone accepting the political cost merely in order to pretend to try to kill his enemies.
@Mr. Doolittle:
That is probably correct.
But there is also a particular slant to the “interesting scenarios” that people want to explore here.
As a random for example, do people want to explore the “interesting scenario” of secret back channel communications between Trump and Russia? Not particularly, other than to reject it out of hand.
@HeelBearCub
I am having trouble following your points. The explanation you gave in response to Mr. Doolittle makes some sense to me – it is plausible that the threat of severe attack is a successful lesser attack – but other parts do not.
How is it you determined this faux umbrella? I have read some responses over the course of the thread that have what I regard to be unreasonably confident estimates of very high false flag probability, but those people were forthright and named a percentage or said “near certainty” or the like. I have also seen low estimates, or people noting that they think others’ are too high, and explaining evidence for or against. You seem to be interpreting the second groups’ comments as something other than what the plain text suggests.
What reason, especially given the relative abundance of high estimates, would people have to dissemble?
@DavidFriedman:
How rational would it be to have the bomb actually explode, for the same reason?
How rational was it for the 9-11 bombers to expect that the US would take troops out of Saudi Arabia, or whatever the fuck was in their head as their goal?
How rational is it to threaten to dismember and rape people you get into an internet flame war with?
Really, the idea that people are “rational” is entirely ridiculous, especially when we are talking one individual in a population of half a billion. Even economists dispensed with this idea of rationality and went with “revealed preference”.
So, it’s the revealed preference of the median terrorist to themselves be dead or in prison having made martyrs (alive or dead) of their enemies.
Okay, let’s run with the message theory. What we have here is a half-dozen bomb-like devices sent two weeks before a midterm election to a seemingly random assortment of prominent left-wingers (most of whom are not in power), and which didn’t work and possibly couldn’t work.
Now, first of all, there are easier ways to send a death threat, starting with literally mailing someone a brick with “boom” written on it. But maybe our faux bomber’s got a lot of time on his hands. So let’s say you’re one of the targets. You find a package in your office, or your intern does, or the Secret Service does. Whoever finds it opens it up and gets the dickens scared out of them. Once.
What happens then? In a few days the bomb squad’s going to look at the devices and tell you that they could never have worked. That doesn’t send a scary message; that sends the message that you’ve got a hopeless incompetent gunning for you. You probably start having the police screen your mail, just in case, but the brick would be scarier. And in the meantime, the press is talking you up as the photogenic victim of an assassination attempt.
Maybe the bomber didn’t think about all this, but then we’re right back to “incompetent”.
@sentientbeings:
I do not think this is the right framing for this kind of question. The kinds of people who attempt assassinations are often mentally ill, or otherwise not particularly rational, and also often quite incompetent. So the fact that the bombs didn’t detonate isn’t really very good evidence that they weren’t meant seriously.
And serious assassins don’t usually think in terms like “establishing the pattern that if you are a prominent enemy, you get killed”–they are just angry and acting out. Whether the modal would-be assassin even considers the likely political outcome, much less whether they are capable of accurately assessing such, is pretty dubious. One of the plots against Obama came right before the 2012 elections; while it’s obvious to you or I that a successful or near-successful attempt on Obama’s life would only have helped Democrats, the would-be assassin, who was mentally ill, presumably just felt the stakes getting higher and higher as the election approached.
Finally, the best way to evaluate something like this is to just go to the record and see how often fake-flag assassination attempts are carried out, vs. how often incompetent failed assassinations are carried out. I haven’t done this, but my impression is that the latter far outweigh the former, and so should be considered the most likely scenario until more information emerges.
@HBC —
And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids.
Seriously, dude. OP’s question was “does anyone assign >1% probability to this being a false flag?”. That’s what the quotes you cite were responding to. I hedged my answer because I really do think that a spectacularly incompetent assassin (or a moderately incompetent assassin plus a few of the usual presentation mistakes that happen early in a breaking story) is the way to bet here, but it’s kinda disingenuous to get all bent out of shape about people answering the question as it was asked.
@Nornagest:
And the people who sent talcum powder or the like to people? Were they simply “incompetent”? Do you think everyone who got those letters simply brushed them off once they knew they weren’t reallly anthrax?
I mean, Scott just spent an entire post about how the things we manage to be concerned about can be altered.
John Hinckley was “incompetent”, Jodie Foster wasn’t ever going to put with him, but that didn’t stop those bullets from entering Reagan’s body.
It takes a lot less effort to shake some talcum powder into an envelope than to mock up a half-dozen bombs (allegedly complete with gunpowder), and it’s implausible that you thought the talcum powder was anthrax. It’s not perfectly comparable, but it’s closer to the brick example we’ve both brought up: the message is “I want you dead, and here’s how I could do it”, not “I want you dead, and I’m such a fucking idiot that I can’t figure out how to build a letter bomb”.
@Nornagest:
We crossed replies.
I’m just pointing out that “X is unlikely, but here are all the reasons it could be true” is the kind of argument pattern that shows the moon landing was faked. If you are not presenting the reasons why the likely thing is likely, you are talking yourself into why the unlikely thing is actually what happened. This can be just be the genuine fault mode of contrarianism or more intentional.
@Nornagest:
You surely don’t think it’s plausible that some who has talcum can get a hold of anthrax? Because that’s how your reply scans.
It’s not very likely, but as long as the victim doesn’t know anything about the perpetrator, it’s plausible enough to be scary. There have been successful anthrax attacks, and I don’t think the average politician knows anything about how hard anthrax spores are to get ahold of. But sending a broken bomb does tell the victim something about the perpetrator: it tells them they don’t know how to make a bomb.
The bottom line is there’s a big difference in messaging between a mock attack and a botched attack. When a Mafia boss wants to intimidate his debtors, he doesn’t go around and pound on their knees with a whiffle bat.
Did you miss the part where I gave plausible alternative explanations for each of my points? I was very specifically trying not to do the moon landing thing, and I don’t appreciate being called out as some kind of conspiracy-monger.
That’s one way to phrase it. Another is to say that it’s an assortment of right-wing bogeymen; with the exception of DeNiro, I think all the targets are pretty standard lightning rods for right-wing ire of late: just about a week ago, a Minnesota House candidate blamed an assault on Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, the media, and Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, I used that exact phrase in my first post of this thread. At the risk of repeating myself, I don’t think it makes sense that they’d all be targeted just for that: they’re boogeymen, but they’re boogeymen in different ways and for different reasons, and attacks like this usually have more specific motives than “they’re people my side hates”. Not necessarily rational ones, but still. It’d be like a left-wing bomber targeting Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, Brett Kavanaugh, Peter Thiel, Rush Limbaugh, Oliver North, and Mel Gibson.
But, again as I said above, there might be some kind of theory pointing to all these people that I just don’t know about. The Pizzagate thing, back when that was current, named a pretty weird grab-bag of left-wing personalities too.
The most recent prominence of DeNiro in the media is many rounds of contemplating what it meant, and how uncivil it was, that he said “Fuck Trump!” when accepting an award.
Plenty of right wing, left wing and mainstream ink spilled contemplating that.
Sorry, didn’t notice you’d said the exact same thing up above. I guess to my mind, the fact that they are objectively a random collection just shows that it’s not likely a well-orchestrated terrorist plot; but it’s pretty consistent with “guy with mental issues wants to kill all the people he’s been mad about because of what he’s read on the internet”, which I think is the vastly most likely perpetrator here.
I guess I don’t view it as at all implausible that a left wing maniac would target Fox News, the Koch Brothers, Trump, Dick Cheney and Steve Bannon, conspiracy theory or not.
ETA: many of the people targeted are one specifically named by Trump in various stump rants.
There are a lot of comments along these lines, and while I guess I can understand that the situation could be parsed this way, isn’t it more likely that this comes off as “you can be got” kind of message? As in, I just sent out a bunch of bombs with all the necessary components to be deadly, but they were not wired to explode. Next time, they will be.
Of course everyone is just speculating (my suggestion above is barely even speculation, just a plausible interpretation of the intent), but I think we have moved pretty far past that since people are not just offering speculation, but aggressively pushing their wild speculation as somehow the only plausible interpretation of events (which conveniently aligns with the narrative that would be best for their preferred political group).
See everything I said to HBC above. That’s a plausible message but this isn’t an effective way to send it. Largely because the devices don’t include the parts needed to be deadly, and might not include the parts needed to work at all.
As to preferred political groups, I’ve never voted for a Republican for federal office in my life. (I have for state and local, though.)
If you hated those people and wanted them dead, sending them bombs that would actually explode when the target was nearby would be a rational way of achieving that goal.
Interesting question. Ex post, they imposed very large costs on the U.S., mainly due to our reaction to what they did. If they view the world as a conflict between Islam and the west, with the U.S. the leading western state, it was a low cost/high payoff move in that conflict.
Alternatively, the people who organized it may have been aiming at leadership within the anti-west parts of the Islamic world, and seen a successful blow as a way of getting it.
About as rational as yelling at people you get in an argument with. It doesn’t achieve anything, and may have costs in its effect on the opinion third parties have of you. But you may not care, may even want people to be deterred from publicly disagreeing with you by the thread of unpleasantness. So likely a low cost activity enjoyed by those who do it–like cheering for a football team.
???
Revealed preference isn’t an alternative to rationality, it’s evidence of the actor’s utility function.
Enemies who have survived your attack uninjured are not martyrs.
My original response to the question was:
I do not think that is consistent with either half of what I just quoted from you.
Thanks for this whole discussion; I learned a lot from it – both from @DavidFriedman’s points about how it’d be totally irrational for a right-winger to send bombs like this, and from @Eugene Dawn’s point about how the sort of right-winger who’d send bombs like this is statistically likely to be insane and therefore liable to act irrationally.
Initially, my estimate was ~1% that this was a false flag; since reading this thread and learning how unfit the bombs were for their ostensible purpose, I’ve raised it to ~20%. What I’m left with is weighing what marginal fringe group is more likely to be doing something so outlandish as this – and I don’t think I’m really in a position for my guess there to be at all educated.
Fortunately, unlike the questions about Kavanaugh, this has no larger implications for national politics. Its effects on the midterm will depend on how it’s perceived in the public mindset, which is almost totally independent of who actually sent the bombs.
It’s worth noting that if it is a false flag operation, it’s unlikely to be the work of any prominent individual or organization in the left, given the risk that if detected it would have precisely the opposite of the desired effect. But it could be a single individual or a small group.
Not to the sort of person who already has guards and/or minions to open their mail for them anyway. Such a person can’t be “got” by this method, and choosing a fundamentally unworkable attack to signal a threat is usually counterproductive.
It is, however, quite possible that the attacker is so deeply stupid as to believe that e.g. George Soros opens his own mail.
HBC, can you put some numbers on your predictions?
I said above:
Deranged Democrat looking for sympathy: 50%
Deranged Republican/Trumper making threats: 20%
Deranged Other (mentally ill, wants Jodi Foster to date him, Islamic threat, Russians, etc): 30%
Didn’t this recently work against Trump Jr? More specifically, that his wife opened the package and got powdered?
“Haha, you didn’t kill me, you only got my wife instead” seems like it would be of little comfort had the powder been real.
I just read a story that had a diagram of the “bomb” with dimensions. Assuming it is right, it was a six inch long PVC tube–maybe an inch in diameter from the picture–stuffed with broken glass and flash powder. I gather flash powder is used in fireworks, which are freely sold in many states, so it wouldn’t be hard to get. No explanation of what was supposed to set it off.
The size explains why it could be sent through the mail with six stamps on it, but the whole thing looks more like a fake bomb, whether by someone trying to scare people, someone trying to make Trump look bad, or someone too crazy to distinguish fantasy from reality, than an attempt by anyone close to sane to actually kill the recipients.
They have arrested a suspect, so we may soon know more.
One reason that I don’t think a three day delay on this kind of conversation is a good idea is that the immediate comments get us a chance to calibrate our own views of reality, and do it in public. If it turns out that the person responsible is an enthusiastic Trump supporter, anyone who was sure it was a false flag operation now has reason to revise his view of reality. Similarly if it turns out to be someone hostile to Trump for anyone who was sure it couldn’t be a false flag.
The only hint I’ve seen so far in the stories suggests a Trump supporter, but I expect we will know more shortly.
We have another situation which has resulted in deep mistrust and mud-flinging all over America in a very politically charged time.
Are there any actors that more than anything else are seeking more distrust and political instability? Perhaps ones that have recently demonstrated an ability to carry out a sophisticated (albeit ultimately failed) attack?
Seeing as how the entire internet is quick to blame even the existence of an opinion they disagree with on those pesky Russians, I’m surprised I’ve heard no one floating the R word in connection with this event yet.
Presumably some poor innocent tourists, having heard how wonderful the Sawgrass Nature Sanctuary in Sunrise FL is, decided to take a quick 48hr jaunt over from Moscow, only to be caught up and implicated in this whole sorry state of affairs.
I don’t think Russia did it, especially now that a not-Russian suspect has been arrested, but good point that the perpetrator could be a false flag by a third party who just wants to make the MAGA crowd and the liberal media tear each other apart. Doesn’t always have to be a binary Left vs Right
No, I don’t think Russia did it now. I was floating it as an option given the (wrong) assumption that the packages hadn’t actually been through the postal system but had appeared simultaneously at different parts of the country. That implied more coordination than a random crazy, which is what I would have (correctly) assumed if only one bomb had appeared, or if the rumors flying around hadn’t implied that they weren’t sent in the mail.
Truthfully I should have stuck with Paul Zrimsek’s assessment – that’s what I try to do most of the time, but the apparent facts were so weird in this case I couldn’t help speculating.
The migrant caravan is going to be an unholy mess whatever happens. I read one sympathetic article where they mentioned one of the Hondurans, Maria. Who is a seventeen year old mother of two children under two, which means she got pregnant around fourteen/fifteen, and I’m guessing didn’t complete her education.
So if she gets to America, what is she going to do? There was mention of a husband, but no details about him (which sounds incredibly sketchy; if you’re going to tell me how old Maria and her two kids are, why not mention her husband’s name and age?) Does she speak any English? Is she going to be a stay-at-home mother and if so, what is her husband going to work at? If she is going to go out and get a job, what kind of job can a teenage highschool dropout get? And who will look after her kids, given that her family support network would all be back in Honduras? In other words, what are the options for Maria as a productive member of American society?
Also another young man, aged sixteen and a (former) coffee plantation worker. Again, what is he going to do? His options seem to be farm labour or unskilled manual labour of some kind, which is not going to be very high-paying, and probably hired on as a known illegal which leaves him open to all kinds of exploitation.
This is not the 19th century anymore, and even if America is still seen as the Land of Opportunity, you can’t arrive as a farm labourer and hope to make it by getting a farm of your own anymore. I don’t know. Maybe Honduras is so shitty that even working as manual labour for very low wages and living in ghettos is better, but then that requires acknowledgement that hey, some countries are horrible places that their inhabitants can’t wait to get out of, and that didn’t go down any too well when it was mooted.
I’m feeling very cynical about this caravan because it seems a bit too well-organised, rather than real desperate individuals all trying to make it to the Land of Opportunity. I’m sure there are real desperate individuals there, but I don’t see how arriving in the US with no money, skills, education or family support is going to make your situation better (apart from “my country is a dungheap and even living on the bottom rung of the ladder here is miles better”).
I’m not sure you are allowing for how large the wage gap is between Honduras and the U.S. If a former coffee plantation worker can get hired as unskilled labor in the U.S., he can probably support himself and a wife and kids if there is one better than he could at home, even if much worse than the American norm.
Cost of living is also higher in the US, so you can’t just equate the wage gap to an increase in well being.
Furthermore, there is often an expectation on the migrants to support family back home. That expectation may be so large, that the migrant is actually worse off than if they had stayed in their home country.
I assume most hotel maids in the US are better off than they were in their home country. I’m not sure sure if that’s what Maria will do, but if she does, yeah, I’m guessing she’ll be better off.
Hanlon’s Razor still applies, and this is probably still an idiot Republican and/or Trumpist striking a blow against what he sees as the most hated enemies of his tribe. But I’d put straight-up false flag at 10%, and something inexplicably weirder at 20%, and both of those rising with time.
Because if this was a Trumpist, it was a particularly idiotic one – for multiple reasons other have already mentioned. It is extremely unlikely that someone that idiotic, would have successfully scrubbed every forensic trace of their plotting, or that someone who couldn’t resist carrying out such an idiotic plot would have resisted bragging about it. If we’re still wondering whodunnit a month from now, I’m going to be saying it was probably anyone but the obvious suspects.
More likely, we’ll just be able to ask the guy. Well, the FBI will be able to, and they’ll probably be straight with the rest of us.
But not before a week has passed with the name being leaked and the nation scouring the perp’s social media for ways to toss him into the enemy camp.
Heaven help us all if he’s a registered Democrat who gave $20 to the Trump campaign (or vice versa).
One of the inherent problems in the question is what you mean by “false flag”. If you mean something planned and orchestrated by the DNC or senior Democratic officials, then I’d have to go with pretty close to zero on that. If you mean a US voter who thought that they would be “helping” the Democrats with this action, then that’s a bit more plausible. If you mean a non-US voter (say, a foreign government) who’s working to stir the pot, slightly favoring the Democrats this time, also a bit more plausible.
Yeah, my estimate of this literally being a DNC plot is close to zero. Besides all the usual problems with conspiracy theories, cost/benefit doesn’t work out.
Higher than HBC and a few other seem to think is reasonable, but still low. Mostly I think it’s best to wait and see what turns up. See the other comments about playing Internet Detective.
I actually don’t think we have much to go on in terms of evidence here. Based on priors, odds are high that it is someone who hates someone or something.
What I was objecting to was a conversation primarily centered around showing all the ways that it was reasonable to conclude it was a ”false flag”, without discussing all of the reasons to conclude it was someone attempting a “true flag”.
Assuming it’s not the RNC or DNC mailing those bombs, it’s not even clear what a “true flag” would be. Some nutcase who thinks Trump’s enemies are all secret lizard people who need to be blown up doesn’t really *have* a flag.
Isn’t that flag just the movie poster for They Live?
It appears the flag on the CNN bomb was a “Get ‘Er Done” parody ISIS flag. I’ve been assuming that was a false flag, but…
Eh, I think you might be reading a bit too much into it. The question was posed, “what are the chances this was a false flag” and the reasons it could have been a “true flag” are boring and obvious: They basically consist of “a nut who doesn’t like Democrats wants to kill Democrats but apparently isn’t very good at it (or wants to scare them a lot while putting in more effort than necessary)”, which… what more do you say? Talking about why it might be a false flag lets people nerd out about piddly details like whether the stamps were canceled.
Overall, I think “sending lots of bombs to people” is sufficiently nutty that even if it’s “guy who hates Democrats”, they probably shouldn’t map to “representative Republican or Trumpist”, so trying to turn it partisan either way at this early stage is dumb. Who knows though. Loughner was a nut. Hinckley was a nut. The guy who shot Steve Scalise seemed a bit more straight partisan political with a side of nut?
Surprised no one here is talking about the targeting, which seems like just general “high profile Democrats” (most of whom are now out of power). That seems a little odd. For what it’s worth I think that makes it seem more likely to be either a false flag and/or someone with only superficial involvement in politics. Or I suppose maybe someone who picked their targets in 2016 and didn’t bother to check the news in the interim? (Compare to the Scalise shooting, which was a bit more inside-ball, bad pun shamefully intended).
I mean, what would you call the Comet Ping Pong shooting?
As to the targets, I believe they are all people Trump has spoken out against during his “rallies”.
This has come up already, but Obama, the Clintons, Soros, Maxine Waters, and Eric Holder are current bogeymen for the right: as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, a Republican candidate for Minnesota State House who was assaulted blamed his assault on Clinton, Waters, Holder, and the media. It’s not someone who hasn’t paid attention to the news in two years, it’s someone who pays attention to certain kinds of right-wing media who have been elevating these figures as “leaders of the Democratic party”, or particularly unhinged and prone to stirring up mob violence.
I had honestly forgotten that the Pizzagate restaurant was shot up, and I don’t know much about the shooter. How mainstream partisan you think that was is going to depend almost 100% on how fringey you think that particular element of the all trite is. Obviously less nutty than Hinckley or Loughner, slightly fringier than the Scalise shooter is probably fair?
Anyway not trying to draw a partisan distinction at all. Political assassination attempts are almost tautologically fringe in the USA (knock on wood). So all I was driving at is that there is a pretty good chance that the perpetrator’s motivations won’t really be comprehensible if you try to map it to standard partisan politics.
Actually, thinking about it more, I actually was aware that the Pizzagate restaurant got shot up, but I don’t remember ever really knowing the name of the place (so I had to look it up when you mentioned it by name).
The post the conversation is under opened with “does anyone think the odds of a false flag are over 1%?” Of course there are gonna be a lot of people explaing why their answe is yes.
So we’ve allegedly seen the theatrically fake looking CNN bomb, which was apparently nonfunctional. Have we actually seen the other bombs? Are they all the same design? Are they all nonfunctional? They seem to have been intercepted in different ways too.
Probably too early to draw any broad conclusions that rely on all the (possibly fake) bombs being the same.
1% is a very low number. How do you justify it?
What do you put at the base rate of terrorism being false flag? As low as 1%?
Are you aware that the 2001 anthrax attacks were false flags (p>90%)?
Study the bombings in Italy in the 70s. It’s pretty murky, but it’s plausible (>10%) that it was all false flags.
(I include agents provacateurs in false flags.)
The 2001 anthrax attacks weren’t really “false flag operations” in the sense discussed here. Yes, the perpetrator attributed them to another group, but this doesn’t seem to have been with the intention of turning people against that group. Probably it was just done to throw off the trail.
Sure, pretending to be a Muslim was incidental, but pretending not to be an employee of the Army was the point. The flag of both those attacks and the recent attacks was judged mainly by the choice of victims, not on the cheap talk included with the packages. The purpose was not to make any particular group appear more evil, but to make terrorists in general appear more competent.
Maybe. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to think the bomber[1] was working on behalf of the US government in mailing the anthrax letters.
The weird thing about the anthrax letters is that they were optimized for telling people they’d been exposed to anthrax. If he hadn’t included warnings in the letters, I wonder if we would ever have heard about the attacks. A few people working in media company newsrooms would have died of some kind of weird respiratory thing, and years later, the CDC is still trying to figure out how on Earth inhalation anthrax turned up in the middle of NYC.
[1] It’s not 100% clear to me how certain I should be that they identified the right guy, or got everyone involved. He was announced as the anthrax bomber after he’d poisoned himself. This means that if he had any co-conspirators who realized the feds were closing in on him, they had the best motive imaginable to poison him and make it look like a suicide. It also leaves open the possibility that his suicide was a good chance to close a case that nobody had ever quite managed to close, after many years of searching.
The evidence is pretty strong that the anthrax came from Fort Detrick. That probably narrows it to 20 people. The evidence that Bruce Ivins was the right 1/20 is not so hot. Presumably the terrorist wanted more funding for Fort Detrick. “Working on behalf” of his employer, is your phrase, not mine, so I don’t know what it means. Some people would say that counts.
“We’re certain it was a researcher at Ft. Detrick, and we’re certain it was this one specific researcher. Mind you, we don’t have enough evidence to convict or even arrest him, but we’re going to name him and shame him and hound him in private and public until he, er, wait one…”
[Multi-million dollar lawsuit]
“We’re certain it was a researcher at Ft. Detrick, and we’re certain it was this one specific researcher, not the other guy, silly mistake, could happen to anyone. Mind you, we don’t have enough evidence to convict or even arrest this guy, but we’re going to name him and shame him and hound him in private and public until he, yes!, this one committed suicide so there’s no one to challenge our story in court. Case closed!”
So what are the Bayesian odds on the FBI having got the right guy, when they are 0 for 1 in correctly identifying bioterrorists when the results can be verified?
Douglas Knight: Huh, interesting. I wasn’t aware of that. Yes if the goal was more funding for Fort Detrick — which I guess is the present best understanding of the situation — then yes that does indeed count.
My take on the bombs, just trying to work through the question from psychology:
A completely, top-to-bottom fake bomb is slightly more likely to be from someone genuinely angry at the recipient, like the envelopes of white powder. But it could also be used as a false flag to generate sympathy.
An object with real explosives in it is different. But for a false flag with real explosives, why bother without putting some effort into making the rest of the device at least plausible? And to just scare someone, what do the real explosives add once it’s clear there was no detonator?
An object with real explosives that is very unlikely to explode seems intended to look dangerous or not dangerous depending on who is looking. In my mind that points most strongly to some “outside” actor wanting to increase U.S. polarization and dysfunction. But “most strongly” is far from “definitively”.
A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets its pants on.
Is Cuomo stretching the truth … I don’t know, but I don’t know of a reason to suspect that he is other than that people like to make incidents they are investigating seem consequential.
Nonetheless, the bombs did have a detonator or some kind.
… and apparently along with the bomb in at least one instance was an envelope with white powder.
I assume that’s just to ramp up the fear factor, and isn’t actually anything lethal, but who knows.
In that case, a more plausible seeming bomb with actual explosives.
A couple thoughts that I think are reasonable on that premise:
1) The more actually dangerous the devices are, the less likely it’s a false flag short of “very likely to explode”. The planner of a false flag operation is going to decide up front whether or not they’re killing someone on their own side and plan accordingly, if only because a killing operation entirely different from a scaring one. One can imagine someone on a different side caring less about such consequences.
2) A plausible but not actual bomb is consistent with a false flag operation.
3) It’s hard to imagine this being initiated by party figures of any significance on either side, because anyone with decent political instincts would anticipate that a) it will become clear and publicized that the bombs were not designed to explode and b) once that’s clear, the rest doesn’t “read” any particular way.
4) Which points to either: i) individual disgruntled with liberal politics, ii) individual cooking up unilateral false flag operation in basement iii) arsonist analogue doing it for the media firestorm or iv) outside polarity-increasing agent.
I don’t have strong views about those sub-options. With i and ii i would guess it’s more likely the evidence will lead back to the culprit.
“Has all the parts needed to make a functional bomb” is not necessarily “an actual functional bomb”. “An actual functional bomb” is not necessarily “a bomb armed to explode”.
A functional pipe bomb is dangerous but it’s not going to “just go off” from normal handling. So it’s not necessarily the case that the bombs were intended to explode.
I guess if you deliver an intentionally nonfunctional bomb they can’t charge you with attempted murder?
Could also be a probing of defenses? See how far a realistic bomb gets? The point of including real gunpowder would then be to see where in the process explosive detectors would be employed.
Sorry, I meant “plausible seeming” on initial analysis. Something it takes more than a glance to determine wasn’t intended to actually explode.
@gdub
Probing defenses is possible, but I think it is more likely (I mentioned this in a thread further up and got nothing but pushback) that it would be a message of “I can get this bomb to you”. Showing that you can deliver “all the parts needed to make a functional bomb” means that even if they aren’t rigged to explode this time they could be next time. Loosely similar to the people who post online about what they were able to sneak through TSA screening, but with more animosity.
Right, scare tactic or bungled genuine attempt are still your leading candidates. This whole thread is in the context of “things that are plausible but still unlikely”.
I posted this idea downthread but it bears repeating here:
Cargo cult mail bomber.
Strictly speaking, a car is capable of detonation (I understand having a near empty tank is better for this than a full one).
The interesting question is – given that none of the bombs exploded – what would it have taken for the bomb to detonate and what was the probability, based on the established method of construction/operation that such a bomb would explode?
Essentially, we are either living in a universe where we just got extremely lucky that nobody got hurt, or in one where there was no great danger at all, because the bomber was either incapable of making a working explosive, or did not intend to make one at all.
The other thing I find a bit surprising is that we know so much about the bombs. I’m only marginally familiar with bomb disposal, but my understanding has always been that if you have something you suspect to be a working bomb, you probably won’t bother to try to disarm and disassemble it (risking an accidental detonation), but instead destroy it under controlled circumstances.
The fact that these bombs were examined in such detail would seem to suggest that those in charge of disposing them had them classified as “not an immediate danger” pretty early on.
I don’t think that this is correct. My impression is that the disposal method(s) are tailored to the device and the environment. For example, a WW 2 bomb that had an impact on the fuse may be very unsafe for transport, so the fuse is generally removed first (although some bombs have anti-defusing devices, requiring specific fuse removal techniques).
In general, moving explosives is in itself risky, yet many explosives cannot just be detonated where they are found. Disarming the device in situ may then be safer.
Disposal units seem to commonly X-ray improved explosives, which can often allow for pretty safe disarming/disassembly. Note that this is nowadays very often done with robots, so no one gets hurt even if the bomb goes off.
One defusing technique is to use a shaped charge to destroy the detonation circuit. This was attempted on the most impressive bomb ever planted in the US. However, the bomb had more countermeasures than the X-ray revealed, so it went boom.
If you can’t detonate the bomb where it is found, then you almost certainly can’t defuse it where it is found, because you can’t be confident that defusing it won’t detonate it. Hence the robots. The exceptions are mostly military ordnance where we have detailed technical information about what sort of fuzes it does and does not have.
And for a bomb of this size, you can just transport the thing safely in a container designed specifically for that purpose. That would almost certainly be the preferred solution, whether moving the bomb from the mail desk to the container was done by hand or by robot. From there, you either defuse or destroy it at a safe, remote location.
The pictures we are seeing of bombs next to their open packaging seem a bit off and I would like to know more of their provenance. But most likely it is something boringly uninformative like a mail-room clerk opening the package without knowing any better and then leaving “bomb” plus package next to each other while running off to get a phone and/or camera.
@John Schilling
I don’t think it works that way. During the disposal process, people are typically evacuated from the area, but that doesn’t mean that the disposal team can just blow up the property that is in the blast zone.
We treat accidents differently from intentional actions. It’s like how if I drive into a house by accident, my insurance pays out and I get to go home. If I do it intentionally, I go to jail and will probably be sentenced to paying the cost myself. The outcome is the same, but the difference in intent makes me personally liable.
—
The container does seem like a likely solution to use in a case like this. However, I still think that they may typically want to try to defuse the bombs rather than blow them up, to preserve the evidence.
—
I would not be surprised at all if a clerk took a picture to send to his or her mom or something idiotic like that. There was a story in my paper recently how many people die a year while making ‘exciting’ selfies.
They can have a robot pick up the bomb and move to a truck with a reinforced container, which takes it to the sort of place where the Mythbusters used to play (literally), and then they can either blow it up or see if their robot can defuse it. That’s pretty standard.
If you can’t do that because you think the bomb has an antitamper fuze, then you’re almost certainly not trying to defuse it either, because same reason. At that point, they’re basically going to evacuate the area and have the robot plant small shaped charges one-shot water cannon in what they think are the best spots, and see if that results in a little bang or an Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
There are exceptions, but I believe they are fairly rare. The bit where someone dikes the red no green no red you fool wire, in any location, is very 20th century.
Given that ’round these parts (Warsaw, Poland), WWII bombs are still dug up on a fairly regular basis, you’ve now got me wondering. Having done a bit of googling, the only information I was able to determine was that each piece of unexploded ordnance was removed by the bomb disposal unit – no information whether any disarming took place.
That said, I’m inclined to agree with John Schilling that one would expect bombs of this size to be removed from the scene prior to doing anything else with them.
Also, since you’ve brought up the X-ray, that would offer a good reason why the bombs may have been classified as safe to tamper with and you are – of course – correct that preserving evidence is a good goal to have, if you think you can do so without the object going boom.
Cuomo isn’t investigating anything; he’s a politician. And this is the sort of information that is in almost every other case either withheld to protect the investigation, or released by a law enforcement official directly to the press. If the only source of this factoid is a game of telephone run through a politician, I’m not considering anything to have thus been “established”.
The New York Times is still saying that they don’t know whether the bombs were real. Nobody I can find is citing any law enforcement source as saying the bombs were real, or that they were not real. The assessments by various outside experts that the bombs appear to be hoaxes, stand as the most credible thing we have, which should not be the case but for the moment still is.
Didn’t Cuomo already exaggerate a claim of a suspicious package sent to his office? I think he’s grandstanding and trying to insert himself into this and his comments should be taken with a grain of salt for that reason.
Note that I pulled a quote from a law enforcement official that the device had an initiator that would cause the bomb to explode. It’s not merely Cuomo, and Cuomo seems to be merely echoing what that law enforcement statement says. I think the article I found post-dates the one John found, as his is from yesterday morning and mine was from yesterday evening.
Cuomo also, garbledly, indicates that it’s unclear if the the fact that none of the bombs actually exploded is intentional or not.
You didn’t actually pull a quote, only a reporter’s paraphrase, and a fairly ambiguous one at that. The law enforcement source almost certainly said that the device had an “initiator”, but “cause the bomb to explode” was a separate clause as likely as not added by the reporter in a failed attempt at clarification.
And “digital clock as a timer and an initiator” suggests that “initiator” is not being used in the sense of “blasting cap” or any such thing, unless the reporter e.g. left out a really important comma. So we’ve unambiguously got a timer, which is itself very out of place for a mail bomb, and some other stuff that vaguely looks pyrotechnic but nobody is willing to commit to and which didn’t ever actually pyro. And we’ve got sloppy reporting, because that’s par for the course.
If the quote ultimately came from the investigators, “initiator” is usually a technical term for a device used to set off an explosive process that is not itself necessarily an explosive. Note that this was gunpowder based so it wouldn’t require a “detonator” or “blasting cap” to set it off. Something like an electronic match would count but they wouldn’t refer to the clock as an “initiator”.
Re: The device not being operational.
I’ve never looked myself… but is it possible that the internet is filled with fake “how to build a bomb” pages?
I feel like the FBI, etc. would have a strong motivation to either directly create, or at least, to allow such pages to exist. And the major search engines might presumably be complicit in moving those results to the top of any relevant searches.
And as much as I generally oppose big tech being in the pocket of the USG, uh, in this case, I think that would be a just and proper outcome.
@Matt M:
This would certainly seem like the wrong time to start looking 😉
I run across how-to-make-a-bomb pages fairly frequently when googling possible rocket propellant combinations. Most of them are unlikely to result in a working bomb in that they presume more skill and tacit knowledge than an internet wannabe mad bomber would likely possess, and/or assume Murphy is on vacation for the duration, and it’s possible some have subtle defects deliberately incorporated in the recipe by FBI/BATF authors, but I’ve never seen an outright recipe-for-failure like these appear to have been. And I have seen sufficient technical knowledge in the commentariat that I expect anyone who did put up blatant recipes for unworkable bombs would be called out on it in a way that undermines the goals of any such scheme.
It seems most likely that this guy came by his ineptitude the old-fashioned way, and/or sincerely didn’t want to do more than send a warning to his targets. It has been reported that he is claiming the latter, and while that is obviously self-serving at this point, it is also plausible.
I’ve seen the claim, long ago, that the Anarchist Cookbook contained deliberately bad instructions. The implication was not that the bombs wouldn’t work but that they would work too well, be likely to kill the people making them.
I have no idea if it’s true or just the sort of rumor that spreads because it makes a good story.
@DavidFriedman
Having read The Anarchist’s Cookbook, I can confirm there’s definitely fake instructions in there. However, I’m not sure if it was deliberate, or just the result of someone accumulating every halfway believable set of instructions they could into one volume.
I’m reminded of one of the early episodes of Burn Notice where the protagonist is frustrated by his inability to get any information on why he’s been burned. So he sends a fake bomb to his handler to get his attention. In that case, it’s shown being built deliberately to trip all of the bomb detection equipment without there being any possibility of detonation (eg. using a sprinkling of fertilizer instead of real explosives) with the goal of actually being able to get someone to return his calls.
But that’s spies playing office politics, not strange political motivations. It’s unlikely that this is eg. a Democratic donor who’s upset that their donations aren’t leading to the policies they want having been enacted.
Personally I suspect whoever is doing this is going to exhibit clearly disordered thinking, so trying to reason about it is bound to fail.
Well, points for you it seems.
One theory that (IMO oddly) has been coming out on the left is that this was possibly a foreign power (aka Russia the current target). This was floated by Chuck Todd.
This is clearly the most insane theory of all for a left winger to float. If you don’t think so you have some sort of malfunction in your system.
1. If it was a Russian (or Chinese, etc) op why was it so incompetent? The Russians would easily had bombs that actually explode. Even the Somalian government would have done better.
2. If it was Russian (etc) what would they gain from these bombs (even if 100% functional and killed all targets) other than them acting as a false flag? No sane person thinks these things benefit Trump. The standard Left line is that Russia loves Trump. If Russia loved Trump they would have sent these bombs to Kushner.
Like I said above:
Facebook ad evidence from the 2016 election points to Russia (which I’m using as an example, not to suggest they’re behind this) pushing to increase polarization from both sides. Their interest seems to be less in putting a thumb on the scale for favorable candidates than trying to reduce the extent that the U.S can function. What a foreign power would gain is both sides accusing the other of manipulating public opinion with fake bombs containing real explosives.
Yes. I agree. But that is considered by many on the left to be a right wing conspiracy theory regarding Russia-2016.
So I am saying this idea is incompatible with the previous position in the extreme.
So maybe Chuck Todd isn’t a left wing figure?
Maybe he isn’t a left winger, but he is an adamant proponent of the Russia conspired with Trump to win Trump 2016 via social media and wikileaks theory.
Which is the exact theory I’m saying is incompatible with his current theory.
The only fact pattern that supports both positions would be something like, “Trump and Russia are in cahoots, both are incompetent, indeed they would be outsmarted by squirrles, but they got super lucky in 2016. Also they are lucky again because they aren’t caught for this devious plan.”
There are versions of the Russia-pushed-Trump story that aren’t compatible and versions that are.
If the theory is that Russia colluded with Trump in order to get Trump to do a specific thing for them, then the generic polarization goal is at least a different story and perhaps an incompatible one.
If the theory is that Russia colluded with Trump to help him win because he is polarization personified, that’s compatible. A variation on this theory: They colluded with Trump so that they would have evidence of colluding with Trump, to use either as leverage for specific goals or to promote further polarization as future needs required.
Real bombs would create a lot more polarization.
That’s true, but there are lots of reasons why foreign powers might want to increase U.S. dysfunction while staying below levels that tempt civil war.
Added: Another factor of all this that I think points in the direction of low-level individuals rather than party or state-level actors is that nothing exploded (yet?). You’re using real explosives; is it that hard to arrange for at least one mailbox to blow up when no one is around? It is if you actually are just some rando sending them in the mail. So in that sense yes, you would expect Russia or whatever to blow up a mailbox.
You don’t need the word “civil” in there. Per generally accepted international law and custom, a Russian agent killing a Russian citizen in a foreign country is an act of espionage that justifies a murder conviction for anyone responsible if you can catch them and if they aren’t protected by diplomatic immunity. A Russian agent deliberately killing a foreign citizen in their own country is an act of war, strictly worse(*) than having a Russian bomber fly over the US and drop a JDAMski on George Soros’ bedroom, and if we catch them at it justifies anything up to and including ICBM strikes on every Russian military asset capable of attacking the United States. And it would invoke Article 5.
What the US and NATO would actually do if they caught Russia outright murdering US citizens on US soil would probably stop short of ICBMs, but it would still be very very bad for Russia. So it’s quite plausible that they (or China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, take your pick) would stick to a level where they sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt without killing anyone.
* Strictly worse because it’s the same thing except done without the insignia of a lawful combatant.
I don’t really think “you must be crazy if you disagree with my analysis” is an approach I would condone here.
If Russia loved Trump and wanted the Republicans to (on the margin) win more of the midterm elections and Russia was reasonably sure their efforts could be blamed on a Democrat-ish person, or at least not attributed until after the election, then they would have targeted the Republican establishment with the attacks.
In contrast, some people (see, e.g. dodrian, upthread) believe Russia intends to stoke partisan mistrust and bickering, and a mail-bombing campaign where people can argue about how many levels of false-flag it is plausibly fits that goal as long as they’re reasonably confident the culprit can’t be clearly established before doubt takes hold.
I’m not in a hurry to attribute these crimes to anyone, but it’s not “insane” to propose an explanation you think fits even if it doesn’t work with (what idontknow131647093 thinks is) the party line.
But the Democratic party line is that Russia has an extremely complex and good handle over us culture and uses ads and targeting to influence the elections in particular to benefit Trump. I personally find this to be an overstatement, but this is 100% incompatible with the idea of Russia sending prominent Democrats bombs or even fake bombs.
The only theories compatible with Russians sending these are: 1) They are chaos agents on all sides (which I think); 2) They are Democratic sympathizers; or 3) They are totally incompetent (IMO least plausible).
Accepting arguendo your characterization of the party line, people speak out against message all the time, and I don’t think these people are insane (usually). It just so happens that sometimes an individual sees things differently from the party bigwigs, or sees some personal advantage to pretending they disagree.
I dont understand what your argument is. Its not like Chuck Todd, who is the main guy I recall floating this idea, doesn’t toe the line at almost all times. Its not like Todd doesn’t still hold up the idea of Trump-Russia collusion being central to 2016.
Its true that there are sometimes deviations. But the only deviation that makes sense in this case is a Dershowitz style deviation where you declare, “It looks like Russia might be involved, thus its obvious Democratic Party line has been disproven.”
I guess what I’m saying is that a) people in the Republican and Democratic parties are not 100% party robots, b) parties do not always have one “line” they get whip everyone onto (though they try for many things, with varying degrees of effort), and c) the positions “Russia did the mail bombs” and “Trump colluded with Russia to get elected” are not inherently contradictory.
Imagine for a second Chuck Todd really thinks it was the Russians. It is possible he would feel obliged to publicize this information. It is possible he wants to sound smart and in control during a “crisis” and expects to be vindicated by future evidence. It is possible he thinks voters aren’t buying the current “party line” and is unilaterally trying to produce an alternate narrative for people to latch onto. It is possible he wants a more russophobic US and thinks blaming everything on russia will accomplish this goal. Or many of these, or other things I can’t think of.
Moreover, you can still hold the idea that Russia is now playing agitator and that in 2016 they colluded with Trump simultaneously – for example, one might think that, having seen a number of hostile actions from the current congress, Russia decided to change strategies. Or that they specifically prefer Trump, but are indifferent about who’s in congress. Or that they were only agitating all along, but colluded with Trump because they thought that’s what it would take to make the election maximally divisive.
Mont. I think you are being eminently reasonable. But that is because you are defending the “weak” version of Trump-Russia, and by weak I mean more plausible and harder to disprove because it simply says Russia is acting in Russia’s self interest.
That position is the fallback to the fallback to the fallback position that I see most commonly articulated which is along the lines of, “Trump and Russia colluded in the election. Putin and Trump are hand in hand on most political matters and are secretly international allies attempting to uproot the current world order, and Trump is therefore treasonous.”
All these are plausible, but none of them are honest unless he recants his previous positions.
These are all fine ideas. Like I said, they are fallback positions from the current stance. They do not fallback to my position (the chaos idea) which I think is most supported.
But I will go one step further. The implication of the Russia-Mailbomb stories is that this is Russia attacking the Democratic party and attempting to help Trump. Which again, I think is laughable.
To be honest, this is one of the few instances where I think “it’s the Russians” is not totally insane.
Russia does have a goal of disrupting US politics and US elections. A bizarre and incompetent hoax right before midterms that has everyone pointing fingers at each other accomplishes that goal nicely.
Yeah, for anyone whose goal is “sow division within the US” (a group that includes, but is hardly limited to Russia), this seems like a low-risk high reward play. A lot cheaper than taking out a ton of Facebook ads, and far more effective. Pretty much the only way it doesn’t work is if the devices somehow fail to attract any attention and simply get thrown away without comment (and the safeguard against that is sending out 10 of them rather than 1)
Can’t believe there are this many posts in this thread and there isn’t any serious attempt at figuring out the base rate.
I made some attempts, but it’s really hard. First of all, some sites only list successful terrorist attacks, but we want foiled ones as well, since that’s what happened here. Second, most sites don’t give enough information to be sure about what is a false flag or not, and it’s tedious to check the details by hand. And finally, it’s hard to decide what is in the reference class: are all ‘politically motivated’ acts of violence? Only ones targeting high-profile political figures? Only assassination attempts? Inside the US only?
I think no matter what the percentage is quite low: the only really clean example I can find of a false flag of this sort is this one; Douglas Knight mentions the Anthrax scare of 2001 which sort of fits, though it doesn’t seem Ivins was trying to frame his political enemies; there are also a few lower-level examples like Ashley Todd and the other ones listed here; and there are government-backed false flags in wartime. Putting all the examples I can find together gives me on the order of 20-30 examples of false flags and hoaxes; using one of these lists, there are plausibly ~200 or so events in the reference class. However, some of my false flag examples suggest a wider reference class (including events outside of America, for example) so the 10% is likely an overestimate.
I think you could probably justify a number between 1-10% but being precise is going to take more work than I care to do, and the methodology will be highly contestable.
Thanks for doing that legwork.
Thanks for at least putting in the effort and writing up your observations!
As others have said, I would put it higher than 1% mainly b/c not a single one went off and it lines up with mid-terms pretty well. But I’d also put the DOUBLE false flag that others have mentioned greater than 0% because we live in a strange time currently.
Also as you and others have said, I still think the likeliest possibility by far is that this was a Trump supporter/far-right person of some sort of who actually hates those people.
Well looks like they got him. What a deranged moron. Hope he never sees the outside of a prison cell.
(blah blah blah caveats about due process)
And about e.g. Steven Haftill, but odds are pretty good they got the right guy or that we’ll know fairly quickly that this was a mistake.
Well, I’ve just had my priors updated about just how much people are willing to go along with obvious insanity.
This guy is basically the poster boy for batshit insanity. He got fixated on Trump but could have easily been fixated on something else.
He walked into at least at least one courier service telling them to deliver one of the world’s most obviously suspicious packages (one of which reached the CNN mail room) with USPS stamps on it, containing one of the world’s most obviously fake and ridiculous-looking bombs, and they just went along and delivered it.
Then somebody (with either no concept of danger or a serious death wish) in the CNN mail room stood around taking pictures of a cartoonish-looking fake bomb from a madman, presumably thinking it’s a real one. (And if the mail room employee knew it was fake, then… isn’t that just turning a threat into a hoax?)
Everything about this is just so laughably on-the-nose. Absolute wacko, mislabeled packages that might as well have been labeled “BOMB”, schizo-looking fake bombs inside, world’s most obvious and well-protected targets, clueless (presumably small?) courier services that don’t put any markings on the packages, suicidal mail room employees.
I don’t know what to think. I’m completely confused. “Who behaves this way? Why?” And that’s not just the nutjob himself.
Oh, and he was from Florida, because of course he was, right? My priors are confirmed in that regard, at least.
Sure, but
1) Some things are easier to get fixated on than others
2) Different things, when fixated on, promote different actions. If he had gotten fixated on Christianity or Buddhism, would we have had the same result?
Christianity has lost its mojo as a source of terrorist acts (although it has been, historically), and Buddhist terrorists actually exist right now, although that’s in Myanmar and not the US.
I don’t think someone like this would get fixated on something that he saw as harmless. It wouldn’t appeal to him.
Nobody believed Trump’s common media portrayal harder than this guy. He just ran with it.
Just to be clear, this is slam-dunk evidence that it wasn’t a false flag, right? Or is there any credible basis to still think it was?
I also just want to point out that I checked the prediction markets for the midterms quite frequently, and there was no significant movement due to any of this. It seems like, as long as the bombs don’t go off, this kind of story isn’t enough to sway anyone’s vote.
It is good enough evidence to reduce the probability of a false flag operation below one percent, probably well below. One could still imagine some scenario where the person sending them was either someone pretending to be a Trump admirer or a real Trump admirer manipulated by someone else, but the straightforward explanation seems much more likely.
@Hoopyfreud
I haven’t read anywhere near all of the posts in this exceedingly long thread so apologies if this has already been posted, but it appears that they have made an arrest and they have a suspect who seems to identify as a Trump supporter, but it wouldn’t have suprised me if it had been some other flavor of nutcase.
This guy seems pretty wack. Peak “Florida Man”. Seems to have latched onto pro-Trump, but honestly seems like someone that was going to latch onto something violent eventually and happened to pick Trump rather than a political activist that went off the deep end.
Agreed.
He seems like one of Eric Offers “True Believers” and if it was the 1970’s I could imagine him becoming a leftist extremist.
It does seem to me that after the 1980’s more of these types identify with the “Right” in the U.S.A., if you don’t include Muslim extremists (where do you place them?), and I’m reminded of the non-American Horst Mahler who went from a leftist extremist to the far right but still claimed to be “Fighting for the same cause”, which in a way he was, the cause of violence.
What violent extremist latch unto seems to be a matter of fashion.
I definitely think there’s a lot of mobility between the fringes, but it seems this guy was quite the racist, anti-Semite, and homophobe, who loved Hitler, and who told his lesbian supervisor that because she was lesbian she should be “put on an island with all the other gay people and burned”. I don’t think it’s accidental or arbitrary that he became a right-wing nutcase and not a left-wing one.
@Eugene Dawn
I didn’t know those details about his madness, so yes I imagine that would lean him towards one side.
This morning I found myself in the dentist’s office, being subjected to a television presenting a bunch of talking heads discussing some celebrity having worn “blackface” as a Hallowe’en costume, or something like that. It irritated me so much that I asked them to turn off the TV. The dental work was far less unpleasant 🙁
I’m not black. I don’t have personal experience of being black in the USA – or anywhere else. I’m pretty much allied with the blue tribe, and culturally closer to that bubble than the red one. If someone black wants to tell me why they are annoyed by that particular costume choice, I’ll certainly listen politely, on the grounds that I simply can’t know their experience. And there are very few venues where I’ll publically express disgust with blue tribe shibboleths – but this happens to be one of them, and I feel like venting.
I find myself comparing Black Lives Matter with this exhibition of what basically looks like whining to me. And not just whining, but whining on the part of an unusually privileged middle class black guy at that. Black people have a lot of far more significant problems in the USA. Being reminded that – at some time in the past – white performers were hired to pretend to be black, rather than hiring black performers to actually be black – just doesn’t strike me as especially important. (That seemed to be the essence of the offence, according to the rather angry-sounding black talking head.)
One of the worst things about the culture wars, IMO, is that it’s next to impossible to tell one’s supposed allies that they appear to have lost all sense of proportion.
OTOH, damned if I know how the whole thing really feels to someone more directly affected. Maybe it really *is* bad enough to be worth this giant fuss, and I just can’t see it.
But oh dear I’m sick of offended whiners, especially ones combining this with self righteous anger.
And just to head off culture wars at the pass – I’m sure we can all list more self righteous whiners from the other team than we can from our own. That’s human nature, and says precious little about how many actually exist. But maybe it would be better for us all if we thought more about our own team’s absurdities, and less about the other’s.
I cannot comment on how black people feel about white people costuming as black. But I feel that something important is lost if every aspect of culture is subjected to political correctness. I see Halloween as an example of a “transgressive” holiday – like carnival, the bacchanalia etc., where the normal standards of social decorum are loosened (rather than raised, as in many religious holidays), and you’re allowed to do stuff you normally can’t. In this case, be shocking, be threatening, be offensive. So “yes, by all means, dress up as undead and go around threatening people with tricks if they don’t give you candy, but don’t pretend to be a black person, someone might be offended” sets off my cognitive dissonance sensors.
It’s not “don’t pretend to be a black person”, it’s “don’t use blackface to pretend to be a black person”. For example, I’m not aware of any controversy when Miley Cyrus dressed as Lil Kim nor when Ellen DeGeneres dressed as Nicki Minaj.
An analogy might be: you can dress up as an Asian person, but not by wearing exaggerated buck-teeth and taping your eyes slanty; or you can dress up as a Jew but you probably shouldn’t wear an exaggerated fake hooked nose.
Wrong. There are plenty of articles out right now debating whether or not it’s “appropriate” for white children to dress as popular superhero Black Panther for Halloween.
Note that Black Panther, although he happens to be black, mostly wears a full body suit in superhero form, so no “pretending to be black” would actually be required in order to dress as him.
Still, there is absolutely no shortage of people who think it is entirely unacceptable for any non-black child to dress as him.
Also wrong. See: “My culture is not your prom dress.” Not only can you not dress up as an Asian person you can’t even wear a single garment of Asian character while engaging in an activity completely and wholly unrelated to Asians or costumes.
It would be great if you could cite some of the people saying these things.
@Eugene Dawn
Here
Most if not all of the links I see are people asking if it’s ok. The answer seems to be “yes, but there’s an important caveat: there can be absolutely no Blackface.”
Well, you can’t dress up as black panther/wear a Chinese dress without *some* rando somewhere on the internet taking offense. But the only reason to pay attention to those folks is that lots of real-world institutions give them more attention and deference than they deserve.
I would say the answer is a mix of:
1) Yes, your kids can wear the costume
2) But maybe it would offend someone, so maybe you’d be safer not doing it, and
3) Maybe only if you give your kids a lesson in racism and why T’Challa is so awesome, and
4) Definitely no blackface or attempts at the accent from the movie, though.
I think that’s a fair summary; I don’t think that’s incompatible with my statement that
given the context, but it’s worth noting that there will always be at least some people who think you shouldn’t dress up in anything that can plausibly be construed as being from another culture, and depending on your circumstances (Hallowe’en on a very liberal college campus), you should keep that in mind.
But, it was a fake and artificially designed accent that the actors themselves are also attempting….
So, what would have been the big deal with putting on dark makeup in the instances you cited? From what I understand, the problem with blackface was that white performers put on blackface to then perform mean-spirited imitations of stereotypical black behavior. So the issue was the intention.
If you dress up as some specific, recognizable black person in order to make fun of them without putting on blackface, would that be okay? If so, why?
If you dress up as some specific, recognizable black person you admire as an homage, that’s apparently okay. But if you did put on blackface to increase the semblance, that would apparently not be okay – why? Is there anything wrong with dark skin?
What’s the issue with putting on a fake hooknose to dress up as a Jew? Even if the Jewish person you’re dressing up as has a large nose? Does suggesting that this is tasteless and offensive imply that there is anything wrong with big noses?
The issue is not exactly intention, since even minstrel show performers might not have intended for their performances to be mean-spirited. Rather, it’s that the portrayal of black people in minstrel shows, intentional or not, was propagandistic and dehumanizing, based on cruel stereotypes. Dressing in a way that draws attention to a cruel and dehumanizing stereotype is itself cruel; it’s the same reason you wouldn’t dress up as a Jew by trying to make yourself look like an illustration in Der Sturmer.
Obviously, there are other ways to be cruel and mocking without putting on blackface, and you shouldn’t do those either.
The firing offense was not wearing blackface, but asking questions, specifically the questions that Fluffy Buffalo is asking.
From People Magazine:
From the Washington Post:
These controversies are highly publicized and were all over mainstream media, but congratulations, you just wasted 5 minutes of my time “proving” to you something obvious and non-controversial.
The “white people can’t dress up as BP” side of the argument is being held up by Twitter randos in that People magazine article; the guy who says white people can only dress up as Martin Freeman’s character has fewer than 5000 followers. So, yes, there are people saying it, but it’s not clear that they are mainstream or influential.
When I googled “black panther costume” the first controversy results showed up only on page 2 or 3, and most of the results were stores selling the costumes. And I genuinely had not heard any controversy about this beforehand.
The prom dress is a better example, and genuinely was a mainstream controversy. I still think in most cases you can dress up as an Asian character for Hallowe’en without attracting much trouble except from the most outrageous Twitter warriors.
The prom dress incident is obviously completely different, because the criticism was that someone was wearing a specific traditional dress, not pretending to be a fictional character of a certain race. Congratulations on stupidly conflating things.
namely, exploring the idea of whether a white child dressing up as any of the film’s black characters would be considered cultural appropriation
Given that Wakanda does not exist, is totally fictional, and is a made-up fantasy nation in a comic book, not a real culture of a real society in a real country, I think the answer there is “no”. Unless you are going to make the argument that dressing up as Glinda the Good Witch of the West is culturally appropriating the Land of Oz, this is not even a reasonable comparison to make. “Maybe don’t dress up as Martin Luther King if you’re white, go right ahead and dress up as T’Challa though”.
@Deiseach, given that Oz is an “American Fairyland,” would dressing up as Glinda be culturally appropriating American culture? Worse, given that she’s the ruler of the Quaddling country which Baum describes as “red,” would it be culturally appropriating Native American culture?
@rlms
How traditional are you talking here? Because the modern versions of the dress have noticeable western influence. Wikipedia’s got a citation to a Chinese author who goes further and claims the style since the early 1900s is a hybrid of Chinese and Western styles. Not just western influences modifying a Chinese dress.
Wearing a qipao is not like wearing a war bonnet.
@quanta413
Irrelevant. I’m not defending “my culture is not your prom dress” (and if you’ve been round here a while your prior probability that someone would do that should be pretty low); I’m pointing out that that controversy is not what was asked for.
@rlms
Then don’t bring it up. The thing being discussed is not necessarily that different. It depends on what arguments are being made. So if you would like to make a case about how it is different then you should give more accurate descriptions of how traditional some clothing is.
And I’ve been around long enough to be aware of how you post. I’m not going to pretend you are near the median here.
@quanta413
Again, the merits of the case against qipao are not relevant. Maybe it was invented by white people in 2013, I couldn’t care less, and I don’t know why you would think otherwise. Perhaps I am the nearest thing this comment section has to a raging SJW but that doesn’t mean I’m inclined to defend every cry of cultural appropriation Matt M can find.
The point is that the original question was whether there is widespread opposition to white people dressing up as non-white characters for Halloween. A prom is not Halloween and a dress is not a fictional character, so examples of widespread opposition to things involving those do not answer the original question. If you want to claim that they are similar enough, the onus is on you to justify that.
I don’t think the prom dress thing would have been anywhere near as big an issue if they hadn’t taken the group photo with everyone making peace signs. It was pretty clearly mocking Asians and quite tacky. Without that I suspect it never would have made twitter, even though that part of it didn’t seem to get mentioned much.
This is pointlessly narrow. The opposition to the dress was also on twitter and I’d venture a guess that most Americans would have found it stupid so you shouldn’t accept that as real either if you don’t accept random people on twitter saying stuff about Black Panther costumes. Not splitting hairs about how it’s so different because one thing is a prom and the other is Halloween. Matt provided a bunch of people on twitter saying you shouldn’t and an article about it after a source was requested.
Which was followed by a swift retreat from “source please” to “well these people and their answers don’t count”.
The idea that I should pretend when people talk about cultural appropriation they don’t include Halloween costumes in that bucket and only mean wearing the clothes of another culture but not dressing as a specific character is daft. Yale had a controversy over an e-mail about Halloween costumes just a few years ago. Inappropriate Halloween costumes is literally a central example of cultural appropriation. I’m sure if I gave a shit I could find concrete examples of how it was supposedly wrong to dress as a certain character but for every 3 people I asked, I’d get 4 answers.
The whole idea is so ill-defined though that you could play these games endlessly of “that example is different because it didn’t occur during the gibbous waxing phase of the moon accompanied by latin chanting.” Magazine articles and dumb tweets are most of what we get with any public cases of cultural appropriation anyways.
If nothing else, I agree with you completely here. I think this is a weird pseudo-academic dance people do in order to present an object-level target for their opponents to attack that they aren’t personally invested in. Saying “I am hurt and saddened by you dressing up as a black person” only works if the person you’re talking to gives a fuck, and it really hurts to get run over on, so [cultural anthropology] presents a framework to explain why people are right to be hurt by it.
It’s often safe to transgress the norms of the ingroup in ways that aren’t hurtful, and it’s always safe to transgress the norms of the outgroup. If you transgress a group’s norms hurtfully, you are framing them as the outgroup, and effectively saying, “I am your strategic ally, but I will not make an effort to respect or understand your norms. Fuck off, it’s fun for me.”
There is a norm against dressing as black among black people. I don’t really understand why the violation of this norm is so distressing, and I assume that it’s not enforced for purely rational reasons (and that demanding a rational justification for its perpetuation will be counterproductive). That said, I don’t see a compelling reason to refuse to observe it. If I had a good reason for violating it, I’d endeavor to understand what I’d be doing better, but as of now I have never felt compelled to do so.
On the receiving end, it’s like seeing your best friend show up to a Halloween party dressed as the man your wife cheated on you with and left you for. Is it objectively funny to some people? Maybe. But goddamn, it’s a tasteless kick in the teeth to you, and you thought you were both here to have a good time.
*sigh* You are probably right. and at a micro level, I’d have very little issue with it, perhaps because it would in fact be person-I-actually-know explaining that/why they find some particular behaviour unpleasant.
It’s the macro level that bugs me – and talking heads on TV certainly count as macro. I don’t know any of these pundits, or the celebrity they were talking about. I don’t even want to know any of them – all I know about them is their participation in this not-so-attractive activity. And being visibly angry is good for threatening people into co-operating with you, not for getting them to like you, or even cooperate with you willingly – however natural and satisfying it may feel.
My impression is that a lot of people feel exactly this way, even if it’s not quite articulated as clearly.
@arlie
What I’d like is some recognition that scapegoating (falsely blaming people for creating problems that they didn’t cause) is:
– often a mistake where people are looking for the cause of a problem they have and want solved, not malice where they want to hurt someone else
– something that humans are prone to in general, not just extremists and certainly not just people on the other side
Secondly, I’d like people to accept that being offended to some extent is necessary to have a functioning and tolerant society. The transgressive holidays that Fluffy Buffalo points to are an example of ways to let people express transgressive feelings and beliefs they do have, or push up against taboos to experiment, while keeping this behavior contained. It’s wrong to treat this as a threat to civilized society outside of this context.
Re. scapegoating, what you’re describing in your first bullet point is a real thing but it isn’t scapegoating. Scapegoating inherently means pinning guilt on some thing, person, or group for the sake of distancing oneself from that guilt. You lay your hands on the goat and then kill it to symbolically pass your sins onto it and then, by killing the goat, absolve yourself of those sins. So, while scapegoating is indeed not necessarily malicious, I don’t think you can say it’s often a well-intentioned mistake either. For well-intentioned but mistaken blame-finding, find another term.
But I do agree with your second bullet point, that scapegoating is something humans are prone to do in general, and I would also add that it can even serve a useful purpose in the right context (the religious context is the one I have in mind but there could be others).
I heartily accept that being offended is to some extent necessary to a functioning and tolerant society, provided “to some extent” is italicized. Taking offense is basically a cultural immune response; obviously, societies need that. The issue is limiting it so it doesn’t get out of hand and become a chronic cultural autoimmune disorder like allergies or lupus, which I think are fine analogies to overzealous political correctness.
@Aapje You’re right on both counts, though maybe Well… is more right on terminology.
People want answers badly enough to jump to conclusions, and ignore evidence that their conclusion was hasty and their results probably wrong. Other people get hurt because of this, fairly routinely, so it’s not a trait to be encouraged. But it’s very human.
@Well… I love your analogy between being offended and the body’s immune system, particularly the part about auto-immune disorders. Taking this a bit farther – I wonder if there’s anything analagous to the hygiene hypothesis – if people don’t routinely live with a certain amount of offensive behaviour, they become hypervigilant, aka overzealously politically correct, or worse.
Upper class whites being offended on behalf of oppressed minorities is the single most annoying thing about the culture wars.
If something offends your own sensibilities, fine, but we seem to have embraced a societal norm where someone can call something offensive, not because they themselves are offended by it, but because they simply assume other people might be.
It’s hard to know for sure since we can’t actually see into people’s minds, but maybe this is really people wanting to show they are offended on others’ behalfs, for ultimately self-interested reasons.
I liken it to the painting of lamb’s blood on doorposts to ward off the plague of the firstborn, where the lamb’s blood is the statement of being offended and the plague of the firstborn is some subconscious fear about (e.g.) minorities rising up in mob violence or something.
That’s plausible, but I also think it’s a result of not actually knowing too many people in the minority group. If only 10% of black people actually think X is offensively racist, but it just so happens that many of the black people you know personally are in that 10%, then you can get a skewed picture where you think all black people are offended by X.
I don’t think this applies to blackface. In general I would not recommend walking into a black neighborhood with your face painted dark, even on Halloween. But a Black Panther costume? I wouldn’t expect any real pushback.
AFAICT, there are two parallel issues:
1) Blackface is offensive because it references, intentionally or not, a history of very offensive stereotyping in the US, and because it often leads to more stereotyping.
2) However strongly you feel about #1, if someone goes ahead and does it anyway, then it’s offensive that the person either didn’t educate themselves that it was offensive or didn’t care.
The OK symbol is a little earlier in this process – yes, it was all a 4-chan prank, but some people do it with the intention of offending others, and if you do it notwithstanding knowing that other people are offended, you’re a jerk too. I’m not sure which way it will tip, but my guess is that in a year or two it will either be totally rehabilitated or basically taboo.
Some of this is also determining who we are going to recognize as important. If you’re offended by tweets about “stupid white people,” or you don’t like Gina Gershon playing a Mexican national in Z-Nation*, whether we recognize your concern says something about whether we think you’re oppressed and deserve some relief.
* I’ve never seen anyone actually be offended by that, so maybe Gershon is latina, but her performance was quite broad.
There’s a much less strong norm against people playing Mexican (or other South American) nationals in general – I think because there’s less of a history of perceived (and very arguably actual) exclusion and caricature within those communties than among (for example) Asians, Jews, or Blacks.
There’s a question that’s worth asking, about how much we should be willing to change our behavior in response to people who are, in large part, being offended as a strategy to get power/attention. A lot of the panics about alt-right symbols now resemble the panics about Satanic symbols/meanings in everything I recall from my youth. Taking them seriously probably just makes the world a worse place.
Eh, all I can comment about is traditional Hallowe’en where people used to blacken their faces with burnt cork, not to pass as black people but in the same way of wearing masks and cross-dressing (the origin of the costumes for Hallowe’en thing, where women would wear trousers and men’s caps and put their hair up and men might wear skirts and aprons) – to change your identity, disguise and protect yourself from the spirits and fairies who were out and about on that particular night.
Nowadays of course, it’s all Americanised Hallowe’en (you kids get off my lawn!) 🙂
Any discussion of the significance of blackface in the United States that the rules are a form of *etiquette* is going to quickly go off the rails.
Why shouldn’t it be fine to burn this or that piece of cloth? People burn cloth for all sorts of reasons. What’s the big deal? Who does it hurt? None of these questions are going to change anyone’s mind about flag burning. Not only are people not supposed to burn flags, but they’re supposed to be aware enough of their culture to know that you’re not supposed to burn flags.
Similarly, because of its past connotations, as an American who is white you’re supposed to know enough about your culture to know that putting on blackface has a particular symbolic significance and is going to piss a lot of people off. It is, in effect, one of the symbolic acts “reserved” for pissing those people off.
All of the “it doesn’t make sense” commentary in this thread works just as well against any other form of etiquette. We could have that conversation, but it’s probably easier to just do it in internally: Think of the symbolic acts that would piss you off and the case you would make for doing them, and generalize.
Now, is it silly and irrational that this particular rule can bleed over into a more general prohibition that includes things like white kids dressing up as Black Panther? I think it probably is. But “tending to bleed over” is all that is happening — there is no wide agreement on the subject. The analogy would be someone wearing a swimsuit with a flag pattern. Should “the flag” really be treated that way, without even underwear between it and some guy’s ass? Go out that way and someone may well yell “that’s disrespectful!” at you. But there will be no wide agreement.
Interesting. Perhaps this one of the bits of US cultural information I missed by growing up in Canada.
Minstrel shows were super-offensive, full stop, and obviously anything carrying on that legacy is also offensive. It doesn’t take over-the-top political correctness to be sensitive to that. But there does seem to be a lot of collateral damage -a few years ago there was a spat over someone dressing as a shadow version of Link (from the Zelda games) which consisted of all-black clothing and accessories and all over black body paint. That (and anything else that is just “portraying something black that is not a person of African racial extraction”) should be obviously not “blackface”. That starts to veer into “niggardly is a racist word” territory – a fundamental misunderstanding of etymology.
On the other hand it does seem a bit backwards to no-exceptions discourage children from dressing up as characters or real people from another race. If a little white kid looks up to T’Challa, isn’t that a good thing? At what point do we say the good of encouraging kids to see heroes in all shapes and colors outweighs the negative of increasingly distant connections to old minstrel shows.
I know that nobody does “subtle” any more when it comes to Culture War, but most individual people ought to be able to distinguish between “indulging in stereotypes” and “attempting to faithfully and positively portray a character”.
I think the Zelda thing is not offensive per se, but is the sort of thing that is easily confused: a person with black paint on their face as part of a costume is easy to misconstrue. The same way that “niggardly” isn’t a racist word, but you still don’t want to have anyone mishear you when you say it.
We’ve discussed elsewhere in the thread Black Panther costumes, and the consensus (which I agree with) seems to be that they’re fine so long as you don’t do blackface, though as always there will be those who disagree, or people who are too scared to do it just in case.
I think it’s a pattern matching failure from having only a superficial grasp of the issue.
Okay, fair enough for now, but how do you ever get out of that rut? In an ideal, non-racist society, a white person dressing up as a black person would be just as inoffensive as vice versa, but I don’t see a realistic way to get there. Ironically, if you’re whipping up outrage over obviously non-malicious use of blackface, it’s you who is perpetuating the legacy of the minstrel show by reminding everyone that blacks were thought of as inferior and implying that they’re too weak to tolerate a Halloween costume. If everyone treated dark makeup as just another option for a costume and judged the performance by the intent of its wearer, minstrel shows might eventually become one of the many barbaric traditions we’ve thankfully left behind and don’t worry about anymore, like burning witches or flogging whipping boys.
BTW, a roommate of mine once did a “negative” version of a stereotypical Goth kid for Halloween – blackface, white lips and eyeliner, all white clothes. It looked hilarious, and since this was in Germany, no one even thought of being offended.
One way would be to stop being so sensitive about things that are in the past and only condemn things that are actually serious problems right now.
If (practically) no one does or wants to do offensive blackface impersonations right now, then what is the taboo protection against?
This idea works best if you think it’s intent that matters for how offensive something is. If on the other hand you think almost all blackface impersonations currently are offensive, whether or not anyone wants them to be so, the taboo is protection against blackface impersonations–which are offensive.
@Eugene Dawn
The very nature of a taboo is that it results in things being considered offensive, so I think that you are engaging in circular reasoning: we should taboo offensive things, where the taboo makes people regard it as offensive.
That logic ignores that being offended is a means to an end and should not become an end in itself.
You can also never get rid of a taboo unless you question whether the perceived offensiveness is justified by something more real than hurt feelings.
If you hold hurt feelings as sacred, then this results in noxious conclusions, like that certain countries are justified in oppressing gay people, because many are truly offended by gays.
Note that I never said that ill intent should be used to distinguish between behavior that should remain a taboo and behavior that should no longer be a taboo. It is one factor that can be considered, but I personally think that the kind of harms that result are a very important consideration, where merely seeing something that offends a person should not hold too much weight.
People think things are offensive for reasons other than that they are taboos; supposing that the taboo arises first is not always accurate.
And all ‘offensiveness’ is determined by hurt human feelings, but I don’t think that’s sufficient to declare it a result of ‘oversensitivity’–compare “no one wants to tell offensive Holocaust jokes”. Obviously, to some extent it’s true that Holocaust jokes are only offensive because people find them offensive, but it’s also pretty clear that it’s not just an arbitrary sensitivity. The same is true of blackface–if tomorrow everyone woke up un-offended by blackface, blackface would cease being offensive. But the reasons why it’s offensive are not arbitrary, and can’t be easily made to go away by trying to change peoples’ responses.
When you say “(practically) no one does or wants to do offensive blackface impersonations right now”, what determines whether a blackface impersonation is offensive?
That was a sloppy statement, where I followed your lead and used ‘offense’ instead of the more correct ‘unacceptably harmful.’ Please don’t hold me to that phrasing.
I really wish you’d address my example of tabooing gayness. Many people are genuinely offended by gays. Do you think that they are oversensitive? If so, what makes that a case of oversensitivity and other cases not? The disapproval of gayness is not arbitrary either, as no society disapproves of heteros…
Whether or not their feelings can be changed is a very different question as to whether their feelings are justified. I want to discuss the ‘ought,’ not the ‘is’ or the ‘can.’
Imagine a man who was raped by a woman and now feels a deep hatred for all women. Regardless of whether this person can change this feeling, I think that it is meaningful to discuss whether this is a justified feeling. This is especially true because that person is not alone in the world. People around him interact with him in various ways. For example, if the man demands that all women are removed from his vicinity, others can respond by:
– “Your feelings are understandable, but wrong and your demand is excessive and punishing for people who are not to blame for what you experienced”
– “Yeah, fuck these women that harm you by existing. Let’s go and pelt rocks at them.”
I hope that the answer is more like the former. Of course, I chose an example here where the right answer is fairly obvious, but as a society we also need an answer for the situations where the right solution is not so clear (at the time). This is especially true as societal progress depends in part on getting rid of obsolete taboos, like the aforementioned taboo on gays.
Ultimately, many taboos that we now consider absurd, once had lots of support. Having a functioning and somewhat rational process to dismantle these taboos is important.
@Aapje
There are clear negative impacts resulting from a taboo on homosexuality, and gay people are, right now, making the decision to transgress the taboos of the anti-gays and expose themselves to backlash. The public sentiment is that the distress resulting from the transgression is overcome by the benefits, so people support it. If you make the argument that the blacks should get over their blackface taboo so that you can dress up as Robert Downey Jr. in Topic Thunder, you probably won’t get most people to agree that that’s worth it; in a hundred years, they might. Taboos can decay over time, and they’re pushed towards dissolution by people like you, so I don’t begrudge you your opinion; you just haven’t convinced me that now is the time.
@Hoopyfreud
Sure, but we live in a globalized world where people come in contact with and migrate to other cultures, including those where blackface is part of their cultural celebrations with no intent to mock black people (Iran, The Netherlands, Panama, UK). Then people try to import this taboo from the US into those cultures, which tends to cause friction along globalist/localist lines, destabilizing society.
Similarly, you have people who bring their foreign culture and thus their foreign taboos into the US, including a taboo on being gay. They can also resist conforming to the taboos of the US.
Since many people now reject nationalism and monoculturalism, those people no longer have that defense against people who import or transgress against taboos. So then you need some other way to decide what and what not to allow. Currently, you see that a lot of people fall back on tribalism instead, but that is a society-destroying solution, as well as not being very moral or rational.
Anyway, my interest is in a generic solution for this.
@Aapje
The loss of metic awareness is a much bigger problem, though, and probably not one that a rational approach is well-suited to dealing with. I don’t see why a reasonable response isn’t for the majority culture to just… be upset. Let the traditions and taboos fight and die in the world of today. There’s no need for a “solution” – the metic roots have all gone up in smoke anyway.
I do my best not to enforce the taboos I don’t have a personal stake in, but I do usually observe them. I only sometimes observe traditions (let’s define a “tradition” as “a customary violation of an internal or external taboo”) that I don’t have a stake in, so I suppose I passively support taboos over traditions. I suspect this kind of behavior will favor meaningless taboos over meaningless traditions in the long run, but I think I’m ok with that.
@Aapje
I wrote a response a few hours ago that seems not to have posted, so sorry for taking so long, here’s more or less what I tried to say:
No problem; I think that clarifies things for me. Would you say then, that the issue is not that blackface isn’t or shouldn’t be offensive, but rather that it isn’t very harmful, and insofar as it is harmful it’s by means of offending people. So if we want to reduce harm, we have two options: stop doing blackface, or stop being offended by it?
I think that’s basically right, and don’t really object to that.
As the most malign aspects of the history of blackface fade maybe there’s some room here to try and take less offense, but a) I think people doing blackface while feelings are still raw aren’t likely to convince people that the malign era is over and b) there’s still a limit to how successful this will be: I find it pretty hard to imagine that e.g. wearing a fake nose to pretend to be Jewish or pulling your eyes horizontally to look Japanese will ever not be offensive to those groups–being singled out on the basis of physical features seems to be a deep-rooted thing that people react to, and having this done in a caricaturish way that also targets you not just at a personal level only exacerbates it.
I guess this is a long way to say that taking offense at blackface is comparably justifiable to taking offense at being mocked for any set of physical features, maybe a little moreso because of the specific history involved.
As to people being offended by homosexuality: I think the big difference here is the reason underlying the offense taken. I genuinely don’t get what there is to be offended about. I can see disgusted, or morally opposed, but not offended. Whereas, as I say, caricaturish exaggerations of physical features is something that seems pretty close to universal at striking chords in people.
Finally, I’ll note that this doesn’t address the issue of what bar we should set (if any) for how offensive something has to be before we decide that it’s over the line.
@Eugene Dawn
I don’t think that blackface is inherently harmful. Take the Panamanian blackface that I linked to, where people remember the slavery of the past by using blackface to play their ancestors or masks to play (devilish) Spanish colonizers. The festival is like a play that tells a story, where the blackface accurately reflects that the escaped slaves were black. The people with blackface are the heroes in the narrative of the festival.
Blackface has other reasons in other traditions. For example, Morris dancing may have preserved or adopted blackface (in part) to have it function like a balaclava, where they could transgress a bit, without this being held against them later.
So…
From my perspective, not all blackface is a caricature (just like whiteface that some clowns wear isn’t either) & not all caricatures are hostile. Yet this understanding seems to be missing in the (blue tribe of the) US (and globalists in other countries who adopted parts of US culture). They can only imagine blackface as a hostile caricatures. You treat it as a given that we ought to see it that way, appearing to not realize that your perception is heavily influenced by your (sub)culture.
Proponents of the Dutch Black Pete don’t see the character as a stereotype of black people and certainly not as caricature of a slave, as the detractors tend to claim (despite there being no credible evidence in favor of that claim and strong evidence against it, like the originator of Black Pete being an abolitionist).
As far as I know, the Morris dancers don’t mock or disparage anyone. It may be that the name ‘Morris’ comes from Moorish and that the dancing initially presented as a dance coming from the Maghreb. However, I don’t see how that is disparaging. If I eat ‘French toast’, am I disparaging the French or just giving a description that includes the origins? Furthermore, as we see with many traditions, they gradually change where certain parts, like the name ‘Morris’ lose their meaning.
There is such a thing as oversensitivity, where people see things that go way beyond reason.
Many taboos are strange to outsiders, who don’t get it. If your understanding doesn’t go beyond the emotions that you feel due to enculturation, then your analysis has no validity outside of your culture. So that is only feasible if you either have a mono-culture or if you apply Foucaultian solutions, for example by resolving conflict with a power struggle with no understanding of what the other wants and why.
If you want to go beyond that and rationally decide what to taboo and what to allow, you need escape the bonds of your own (sub)culture and adopt an outside view.
PS. One why people reject homosexuality is because they don’t distinguish between men having sex with underage boys and men having sex with men, so in their eyes pedophilia and homosexuality are the same category, where immoral people try to get others to also engage in immoral behavior that harms people and society. This is a bit like many opponents of blackface who fail to distinguish between hostile caricatures and blackface that is used to play a specific person or character, where they see both as people harming others by showing harmful caricatures of black people.
Yes, I agree that blackface in other cultures can have different meaning and valence; I didn’t respond to that aspect of your argument since I was trying to reconstruct a comment I had made before you posted that. Everything I said before is meant in the context of American culture.
Yeah, white kids wanting to be Black Panther is the kind of thing a sane person wants *more* of.
In regards to blackface, I think the most important point is one that I don’t see having been been brought up.
Imagine a kid, any kid, wearing a hulk costume. You wouldn’t find anything strange about them having green face or body paint.
I imagine someone in an X-Men Mystique costume or an Avatar Na’vi costume. Blue face and or body paint certainly wouldn’t be unexpected as part of the costume.
Now imagine a Black kid, wearing a Captain America, Wolverine, Black Widow, or Wonder Woman costume.
Does white face paint come into this costume in any sort of expected way, or would it strike you as strange? I submit that it would seem very odd for someone who does not have normally white skin to paint it white for this costume.
And that’s the essential difference.
I think it would be odd but not offensive.
But you wouldn’t find the white kid putting black face on odd, correct?
I mean, I guess it would depend on the context.
In the case of superheroes that have masks or weapons or other identifying information, I probably would.
If he was trying to dress up as Django or something, I probably wouldn’t. White kid playing Black Panther is still recognizeable as Black Panther because he wears a Black Panther mask. But if you’re trying to emulate a black character who mainly looks like a regular black person, some sort of paint may be necessary (and the same would be true reverse, for a black person trying to be a normal white character)
@Matt M:
I think you are shading your answer here. I think you would find it much less unusual than the other way around.
But either way, the idea that black face paint is somehow as integral to a Black Panther costume as Green or Blue skin is to some other costume shows the underlying foreign and alien nature ascribed to the skin color (and the people) at, at least, an unconscious level.
I must have misstated. This is NOT what I am claiming. I think black face paint is incidental to a Black Panther costume because you can easily make it obvious you are emulating Black Panther through other means (such as a mask/suit).
But black face paint would be integral for a costume of any black character that doesn’t have other obvious physical characteristics that you can emulate.
A costume needs to be detailed enough to make it obvious who the person is attempting to emulate. Whether this will require face/body paint will vary on a case by case basis.
@Matt M:
I know you aren’t claiming it. But the conversation is taking place under a rubric where that is the underlying assumption, that wearing black skin paint (for Black Panther) is no different than wearing green skin paint.
As to Django, I’d like you to again imagine a black kid going as any Clint Eastwood movie character and think about how odd it would be for them to wear white face paint.
@Matt M:
I don’t think face paint really makes the Django costume much clearer, that one is going to require explanation (or some obvious prop/partner) to pull off. In the same way, a black kid going as Billy the Kid is going to require explanation (or some obvious prop/partner) but painting his face to look like a white person isn’t going to help at all.
I don’t think people should be raked over the coals if they make an innocent mistake on this (if it is intentionally offensive provocative that is another story), but they should be informed that it was a mistake and adjust their future behavior accordingly.
@acymetric:
Yeah, I’m trying to get at the underlying reasons, not chastise some kids or their parents. This is a discussion about societal level assumptions.
acymetric:
I dunno. If you start lecturing my nine year old on how her halloween costume is problematic, I’m probably going to vigorously invite you to autoreproduce.
@albatross11
Sure, but I wouldn’t be lecturing your 9 year old (or anybody). I almost certainly wouldn’t say anything to a stranger. If I were close to you I might suggest (hopefully in advance of putting on the costume) that the blackface were unnecessary to your daughter’s costume and why maybe you shouldn’t use it, but I certainly wouldn’t make a big deal about it and you could ultimately do whatever you wanted (the social repercussions that may or may not happen would come from other people, not from me).
@Heelbearcub
Isn’t that partially a problem of pigments?
By way of analogy, my brother wanted to make a green drink for Halloween, but the drink had Grenadine in it so he ended with sewer water color. Not saying it is impossible, but its much harder to lighten than to darken with facepaint.
Not that I even care. I was just reading through and this struck me as an important note.
Interesting question. I guess I’d find the whiteface very odd and the blackface somewhat odd; in both cases I wouldn’t take personal offense but would wonder what the hell the parents were thinking just the same. The general idea is that Captain America could just as well be black as white, while a non-green Hulk wouldn’t really be Hulk. Black Panther (to the extent I know about him; I don’t do superhero movies) is an intermediate case– to have a white Black Panther you’d need to change a number of other things about the story. Still probably closer to Captain America than to Hulk.
I mean… Black Panther is literally called… Black Panther, and was created at the time when the Black Panthers were a real organization. It’s hard for me to see how his skin colour could be more integral than it is.
This is a good point and reminds me of this amusing exchange from a Halloween episode of Community.
I think I’d find both kids odd for a couple reasons:
1) The current cultural sensitivity around dressing as another (real) race
2) There are noticeable differences in facial structure that tend to correlate with skin color, and this throws my pattern matching for a loop when I see someone in X face unless it’s done really really well. E.g. the Wayans brothers in White Girls look like black dudes with oddly toned skin, not like White Girls.
The first difference is the main reason it would seem “odd”, and for the purposes of this discussion that’s circular reasoning.
I think you’re right that part of the key is how much skin color is “essential” to the character being portrayed. This collides with the cultural standard “white is default”. There are very few characters whose whiteness would be considered essential (at least not in a positive way that you’d want to emulate). On the other hand there are a lot of black characters (and black historical figures) whose blackness is definitely essential. Can’t exactly be “white MLK”. Of course the reason their blackness is unusual and essential has more than a little to do with the reason blackface became offensive in the first place. So it’s tough.
I’ll flip one around on you: in the current climate, there is a new Spiderman movie coming out where the teenage boy Spiderman is black (although it also features a white Peter Parker). This is seen as not only not offensive, but something to celebrate.
What would the reaction be if, in Black Panther II, Black Panther was a white guy? In both cases, the “hero” is a suit and a title .But consider why the race of one hero is critical, and the other is ancillary.
Black Panther is very special in the Black community, especially the Black comic book geek community. My understanding is that it is hard to overstate how special he is. TNC was effusively overjoyed to be able to right a story arc for the character, so I think Blackness is particular to that character in a way that whiteness is not particular to Spiderman. Make Peter Parker a rich jock from a very happy home and see how it hits people, although that’s not even really analogous.
That doesn’t mean you couldn’t write a “White Panther” arc, but you would need to be damnnnnnn good about it and definitely not just fit it into the standard white savior trope. You couldn’t simply swap the race and pretend it had no import (especially not when the entire origin story of the character is rooted specifically in sub-Saharan Africa). You would have to have a very good, in universe, reason for doing so and it would need to be concordant with the history of the hero. Especially because the standard reason these things have been done is “let’s appeal more to whites”.
The other is simply the dearth of black super heroes, and the relative abundance of white ones. Changing out one white super hero leaves you with … essentially an unchanged number of white super heroes. Change out any black super hero and you are left with a fairly significant diminishing. This is especially true for major, tent-pole, type super heroes, of which there are vanishingly few.
It also seems really hard to spin out a story that explains how he ends up being white, given his backstory. I mean, a geeky kid in New York getting bitten by a radioactive spider doesn’t really exclude having a black (or Asian, or hispanic) spider-man. But while you can spin out some kind of story of adopting a white kid into the royal family of Wakanda, it’s a pretty big stretch. It would be more like casting a black guy as Thor.
To do a White!Black Panther, you’d pretty much have to sub out the whole history of Wakanda. I suppose you could almost do that with a Poland-expy, but even then it’d be a huge stretch. It’d probably need to be in an entirely different world, which would destroy a lot of the Wakandan feel.
Now a Native American Panther…
Bitten by a radioactive white person?
EDIT: That really actually sounds like one of those weird and tasteless one-issue-gimmicks Batman and Superman had back in the day.
Issues of appopriation and so forth aside, it just seems like a dick move… I mean, now nerdy black kids have a superhero who’s theirs. That’s a good thing. Why try to take that away from them?
Didn’t they try a Mexican Spiderman once?
I don’t really follow comics but I remember hearing something about that.
They cast a black guy as one of Thor’s gatekeepers or guardians or whatever, and nobody seemed to have a problem with that.
You could easily re-write Wakanda as a white colonial expedition that discovered vibranium and went “off the grid” to protect their secret. There’s no particular reason it has to be ancient. There are (or at least were, until the last few decades) plenty of white people in sub-saharan Africa.
White Panther would need to get the tech/magic from Wakanda, but s/he wouldn’t be Wakandan and he wouldn’t supplant Black Panther. S/he’d be someone Wakanda recruited to do their larger work of spreading the Wakandan way to the globe as a whole. The origin might involve them doing the work, mortally wounded, saved by Wakandan magic out of necessity.
But … man that starts to look a lot like the “white savior” trope, so you’d really need to keep them far away from Wakanda for the most part. Make them dependent on frequent aid from Black Panther. If you want do something that has an actual White Panther leading the Wakandans, it would need to be something like spirit transfer where an a Wakanda elder spirit/former Black Panther needs to ride the body of the White Panther to accomplish something broader.
Maybe. Seems like it could hokey and clunky in a hurry.
Or perhaps more to the point, make Peter Parker a Too Cool For School skaterboy, perhaps played by Andrew Garfield, rather than a proper nerd, and see how THAT hits people…
There were a LOT of people who had a problem with black Heimdall, on the grounds that Heimdall is an actual figure from Norse mythology, and so presumably he should look at least something like the myths describe him. It was a fairly fringe minority, because in the context of the movie they’re also aliens who just happened to have had some contact with ancient Norsemen in the past, and only served as loose inspirations for the myths, plus pretty much nobody plays a better Stoic Guardian figure than Idris Elba, but they definitely existed.
You’re probably thinking of Miles Morales, the same one they’re using in that Enter the Spider-Verse animated movie mentioned above. He’s only half black.
As to “Black Thor”, we are operating in an era where no one cares about Norse mythology as personally sacred, so you can do mythological stories that diverge radically from the source material and it’s just interesting. If we had a group of indigenous Norse who still worshipped that pantheon, Thor as character would be under immense pressure already and likely no longer utilized, or at least completely changed.
And it’s not like black skin isn’t contemplated in Norse mythology. It’s attributed to various figures, especially the dwarves, which is rather ironic, considering.
ETA: The Garfield Spider-Man was still an outsider though, but still a valid point.
Also Heimdall is not a very well-known figure (at least not in the US). Everyone’s heard of Thor and Odin and Loki and maybe Baldur, also Freya and Hel and Brunhilde. But the Norse had all sorts of mythical figures who didn’t look much like them (e.g. frost giants, trolls, and dwarfs), so while a black Heimdall doesn’t fit with the myths, most Americans wouldn’t know.
Yeah, that would be almost as weird as making Thor a woman. Oh, wait…
Plus, these discussions generally ignore that the understanding of “race” differs over place and time. If Wakanda was a real place, there would definitely be Wakandans upset that non-Wakandans were being cast in roles that should go to Wakandans. People from the “Old Country” (wherever that might be) are able to spot differences that Canadians or Americans or whatever are completely unaware of, and that’s without even going into differences across time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81satr%C3%BAarf%C3%A9lagi%C3%B0
@Jon Gunnarsson:
Not particularly relevant? I think you were just posting it as a point of interest, but perhaps with the name Gunnarson I shouldn’t be so cavalier.
Given that the organization started in 1972 and performed, according to them, the first religious ritual of it’s kind in 1000 years, I don’t think it qualifies for what I am talking about. As a pantheistic religion without any particular dogma, it seems more in line with something like Wicca, which wasn’t what I was trying to reference.
Interesting discussion – I agree that Black Panther is an essentially Black character, in a way that Spider Man is not essentially White. So if you wanted to tell a White Panther story, you’d need to do a damn good job setting up a backstory to justify that. While for Spider Man, a simple skin swap is sufficient (at least that’s what it looks like for the new animated movie – from the previews he seems like the standard “teenage nerd outsider” but African American).
Are there any originally black superheroes that don’t have Blackness essential to their character? Are there any white superheroes with essential Whiteness? Thor seems to be the best answer so far.
Back to the original question, given that it’s essential that Black Panther be Black, wouldn’t a faithful, positive portrayal of Black Panther by a white costumer need to include something to indicate that to not be offensive? But blackface is offensive. So that does seem to create the scenario where somebody is going to find “white kid dressed as Black Panther” as offensive either way.
Bruce Wayne was essentially white when originally written; a vigilante avenger like Batman isn’t, but a scion of wealthy industrialists in 1940 would have been, so a black Batman would have needed a different origin story, alter identity, and source of toys (though I don’t know when all that came about in the Batman comics)
@gbdub:
I don’t think there is really any significant feeling that white kids/people can’t dress as Black Panther, or that it is offensive. I’m quite sure you can find some people saying it, but …
As to mythical characters that are essentially “white”, I’m not sure there are. I think you probably can find mythical heroes that are essentially “some specific sub-culture” especially if they are excluded from, or highlighted as different from, a larger sub-culture.
An American re-boot of Dr. Who would probably have gone very poorly, and lots of people would have been pretty angry? He doesn’t need to be White, but he probably needs to be from the UK in some way. But an American going in costume as Dr. Who is absolutely not an issue.
@The Nybbler:
I mean, there were certainly wealthy, Black owners of large scale businesses in the 1940s. And anger and disillusionment with society is an essential part of Batman. Not sure that really holds. Plus, any re-boot doesn’t need to be in the 1940s (and they haven’t been recently, AFAIK).
Why is it so hard to market a new big-name superhero? Is there just a certain amount of “space” in the canon of mainstream comics? There seems to be far more possibility for retconning a given superhero as a different race or ethnicity, changing up their story slightly, whatever, than for creating a new superhero so you have, say, a black superhero where that’s just incidental to the character.
@dndnrsn:
I’m not sure what exactly you mean. Marvel is leveraging their existing IP, and very successfully, so you see lots of movies made from existing IP.
But overall, I think their are many stories being created for new super heroes, anime and manga being notable here. Big tent pole movies tend to draw more on existing content, but not exclusively. The accounting projections involved just make it look more attractive to make an expensive movie that has a certain built in baseline of demand.
But again, there are lots of new characters, why but why would you expect new characters to be in anything close to a majority of the stories?
I think dndnrsn’s question to be more like:
Why, in response to a perceived need for more black superheroes, does Marvel say “Spidey is black now!” rather than creating a new character to fill the role? Race and gender swapping of tent pole characters seems to be fairly common recently in the books (less so on screen).
You note they are mostly going off old IP in the shows and movies – has Marvel or DC created any memorable main characters in the movies or tv series that didn’t come from the books?
@gbdub:
Ah, yeah, that does make sense.
I do not believe they are making any new character IP for the movies or shows.
Again, leveraging existing IP is highly profitable. Attach Spider-Man to a new hero has a guaranteed base. Hell, re-telling the same story is sort of what humans do, anyway. I don’t think it really needs explaining?
@gbdub
That’s not exactly what I mean; I’m more wondering why exactly it’s so much harder to market a new superhero than a new spin on an old one. Maybe they’ve run out of quasi-mythic archetypes?
Spidey’s archetype is “dweeb who has great powers, but also is still dweeb” – being able to swing around and fight evil can’t make being a nerdy teenager not suck.
@dndnrsn:
Have you read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods?
My point is that re-using archetypes, or even actual characters, is in no way inimical to creating original stories. That doesn’t mean that retellings don’t run a significant risk of being reductive or hacky, but completely “original” stories run this risk as well.
Each new generation wants to put their spin on stories and archetypes and I don’t begrudge them.
@HeelBearCub
I have, and I’m not saying it’s inimical to telling original or creative stories. More that, it’s unlikely that there will be originally-black big-name superheroes whose blackness is incidental in the same way that Peter Parker being originally white is incidental, because we’ve passed the point where it’s easy to introduce a new big-name superhero.
And, at least, rebooting Peter Parker so that kids from a given ethnic group get to see a nerdy kid who saves the day who looks like them, is better than the ol’ “quick, make some money by restarting the comic so we can sell a first issue special!”
Phil Coulson (the lead of “SHIELD”) is probably the best example: he debuted in the Avengers films. Aside from that, they’ve been more inclined to revive old or obscure superheroes (Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Falcon, the entire cast of Guardians of the Galaxy) than to create new ones, which makes sense given how huge the Marvel Comics universe is.
For whatever reason, though, cartoons often introduced original characters that then migrated to the comics: Harley Quinn’s probably the most famous example.
It’s largely a matter of incentives. Marvel and DC have thousands of already existing characters lying around, so reusing them or slightly modifying them is a better use of their IP than trying to create something completely new. And a writer with a great idea for a brand new character doesn’t really want to publish it under Marvel / DC if there’s any chance of going with an independent publisher and keeping the rights for themselves.
Magneto is a character whose Jewishness is pretty important to his story — the reason why he’s so militant in defending mutants is because he’s already witnessed his entire family and community be genocided once before (although he’s getting a little old to personally be a Holocaust survivor at this point). I don’t know if Jews are “white” but he’s another example of a character whose ethnicity is directly relevant. Superman is traditionally from rural Kansas. This isn’t absolutely crucial, and doesn’t necessarily specify any ethnicity, but strongly implies white.
Kamalah Khan and Squirrel Girl are examples of brand new Marvel heroes who are not white men and seem to be popular. I think the hard part is that most superhero comic buyers are people who’ve been following their favorite characters for years like a soap opera, and aren’t really looking to pick up a new storyline.
By the time Thor was recast as a woman in the comics, there had long been a story arc where a horse-faced alien named Beta Ray Bill picks up Mjolnir and gains the power and title of Thor. Marvel’s Thor is both the individual person Thor Odinson and a title that anyone can earn by wielding the hammer. If fans can handle “Thor, the horse-faced alien”, I think they should’ve been able to handle “Thor, the woman”.
…huh, I was about to point out that Squirrel Girl is not new, having been around nearly 30 years, but apparently she only appeared sporadically for most of that time, so I guess she is mostly new after all.
@HeelBearCub
You said there weren’t any “indigenous Norse who still worshipped that pantheon,” so I the link I posted is obviously relevant. These are people who are indigenous Norse who worship the Norse gods. There may not be very many of them, but they do exist.
(And just to clarify, I’m not a pagan and not associated with Ásatrú in any way.)
I don’t agree that it’s better, but it’s definitely what the creativity-averse blockbuster movie industry of the 21st century is going to do if it can, and the depth of the Marvel and DC stables mean it can do that for a very long time to come.
Television would have a bit more latitude for original characters, but again, there’s plenty to steal. Netflix’s version of Jessica Jones might as well be an original character, but there was a C-list Marvel superhero available that would only have to have ~75% of her backstory excised to fit, and I guess that sort of thing makes it easier to get buy-in for a new show.
About the only time you’ll see original superheroes is when somebody wants to do an outright parody of the genre, e.g. The Incredibles, or something along those lines that might be seen as damaging to any non-parody IP adapted for that role.
Possibly relevant to the question of new/old superheroes …
Eric Burns-White writes quite good online fiction, much of it involving superheroes and supervillains–his best known piece is probably “Interviewing Leather.” As best I can tell, most of his characters are his versions of specific characters from the existing literature. Different names, and no doubt different details, but a pretty recognizable one for one linkage.
He doesn’t have the same incentives to reuse old characters as the copyright holders do–if anything the opposite. But he apparently thinks that tying in with what his readers are already used to makes his stories work better.
@John Schilling:
That might be the case for movies, but manga and anime seem to be creating new heroes at a pretty good clip. My Hero Academia is roughly a full Marvel universe of heroes all on its own…
@Jon Gunnarson:
Yeah, that org is just not at all the kind of thing I’m talking about. That org is to the Thor comic as Wiccans are to Harry Potter.
Not for American cinema they aren’t, and not often for American television. And that’s really what we are talking about, because the number of people who care about what happens between the pages of a literal comic book (no matter which direction it is supposed to be read) is tiny.
If the Social Justice Brigade were to notice that anime and manga exist and demand representation for oppressed minorities therein, they could probably signal-boost the issue to a level where that genre’s ability to generate new characters might give it options other than trying to figure out which member of Tenchi Muyo’s harem was really black all along.
But, for the moment, we’re mostly dealing in this context with genres that have a large mainstream presence in the United States, and that does put the DC-Marvel superhero movies front and center.
I assume you’re aware of Alias the Marvel MAX comic series which was the basis for Jessica Jone’s first season.
Characters at that level of prominence get their backstories altered all the time, and I think it even makes sense from a reader perspective: It’s interesting to have the option of having the character interact with other Marvel characters, the existing backstory allows some economy of storytelling, provides plot hooks. Creating a new character in the MU is not obviously superior.
Concerning the general topic: Marvel and DC try to reboot/launch/promote new of less famous characters all the time, e.g. by putting creators with good track records onto the book. However, frequently, these efforts fail (I’d say something like 1 in 20 succeeds) for various reasons, whereas Batman and Spiderman essentially always sell and even B-list characters attract larger audiences on average than the experiments. It would be great if there were a strong market for new characters, but empircally, there isn’t.
Sure, but that’s more of an issue of DC and Marvel being entrenched IP machines, not having anything to do with the possibility of new characters. Live action super hero films are expensive, and the studios that produce them want a built in audience. But perhaps I misunderstood, and that was really your original point?
It’s also probably relevant that we might not even have all the super hero movies right now if it weren’t for the fact that Marvel was looking to publish their own stuff. No surprise Marvel is making movies with Marvel heroes.
@John Schilling:
Manga and anime are different because they have a vast amount of turnover, whereas American superhero comics are enslaved to continuity and shared universes. In that American TV has also become less and less reliant on long-running shows, with many not getting past 3 seasons, you see similar rates of character creation.
Also, Anime Feminist exists (as do a number of other SJ-centered anime blogs). No sign of them ruining anime or whatever yet. On the other side, Beyond the Tangle also exists, as a case of a Christianity-centered anime blog. Other happily degenerate aniblogs have both AF and ByT in their own blogrolls, because they recognize that, surprise surprise, you don’t have to outgroup people if you don’t want to.
Someone mentioned Harley Quinn further up in the thread, but Chloe Sullivan is a case that came from Smallville. Meanwhile, the DCTV slate of shows are both continually making comic book character adaptations that are basically remakes from the ground up (most notably the Batmanning of Oliver Queen), and creating new ones wholesale, many of whom are even primary protagonists.
@Evan
Very far down in the thread, but isn’t this basically the “good” interpretation of Dr. Doom, but with magic instead of metal?
@Hoopyfreud, maybe? I don’t follow comic books, so I don’t know Dr. Doom.
Nice point.
Imagine, for a moment, tasteful blackface.
Does it look like blackface, imagined without that word prefixing it?
The answer is going to vary, which is basically the problem here. The supporters, I’d wager, are more likely to think of makeup, well-applied, to darken your skin tone to match some specific thing. The opponents are more likely to think of black greasepaint.
In order to have a meaningful conversation, somebody needs to put up a specific picture, and ask it that specific instance is okay. Because I am going to guess that our intuitions about a white guy who manages to look exactly like Steve Harvey aren’t going to be the same as blackface, pictured in an ambiguous and generic way. I suspect the conversation will be a little more… useful.
I just read this article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/why-black-men-relate-brett-kavanaugh/572776/
The article basically argues that black men are sympathizing with Brett Kavanaugh because they see him as a man who was accused and almost punished without justice. That they are accustomed to being accused and, while perhaps it doesn’t go through the courts, punished for things with no chance to defend themselves. And this leads them to sympathize with Kavanaugh.
The journalist argues this is wrong. These black men miss that blocking Kavanaugh dismantles systemic oppression and that it’s unfair that Kavanaugh might not suffer the way they have. It laments that black men instead see it as a situation as analogous to their own.
But their perspective makes perfect sense to me. The article’s argument seems to be that the system that protects men like Kavanaugh also persecutes black men, so by opposing Kavanaugh we hurt that system and thus protect black men. But I think there’s a more direct link: A society primed to believe and act on accusations against men will be a society primed to believe and act on accusations against men at all levels. And for most black men, who are less powerful and important than Kavanaugh, there will not be a powerful community or party invested in their success. Nor is it a realistic goal to create such a community, since there will always be an elite and a non-elite, and most people will always be non-elite. So it’s more useful to demand fair hearings for all. This is both less obviously selfish and makes common cause with the powerful.
Basically, there was never a right that was denied to the elite and simultaneously available to the less powerful. If the powerful do not have free speech, the average worker definitely won’t. So it makes sense to defend any rights the elites have in common with you. It bolsters your own case and encourages certain elites to defend you for the same reasons.
I’m curious on thoughts. Less on Kavanaugh specifically than on which analysis is more correct.
I’d argue the initial thought is the most correct: Seeing that even someone like Kavanaugh can be almost destroyed by an allegation should mobilize you.
However, I don’t know what party that would mobilize you to. Currently both parties are not good on criminal procedure. If you are in college you would obviously select Republicans because Democratic Title IX policies are so hard on the accused, but in a federal court I’m not sure I’d like to be a black man facing a drug crime with Sessions as prosecutor as opposed to Holder/Lynch (not that they actually conduct trials).
I have a friend who was hyper-Republican (for reference, I am only mega-Republican), pro-police all the way. And then he got a DUI, blew .085. Thought he was safe but he wasn’t. Sucks, but not that huge a deal. And then they found his safely holstered, legal firearm in his glove box and charged him with a felony that’s really for someone brandishing a weapon while drunk. They held him over the weekend in the urine-soaked felony jail and spent the next ~9 months trying their hardest to convict him of this felony and lock him away for 2 years, largely because the DA wanted to be governor and said “be tough on drunk driving and guns.”
I said to him, “look what they tried to do to you, and you’re rich and white!“
What are his current political beliefs?
Went from hyper-Republican to…hyper-Republican who maybe thinks we need some criminal justice reform.
Oops, I accidentally pressed the “report” button instead of “reply.” Well, I guess the “report” button may not work anyhow?
A tangential issue that’s small but stupid beyond belief: in many places, you can receive a DUI for sleeping in the driver’s seat of a parked car with the engine on to run the heater. (In Canada, an especially forward thinking judge convicted someone of DUI for sleeping in the *back* seat, because of the risk he might move to the front seat later.) Who gets cited for this? Mostly people who made the correct decision not to drive or at least realized they needed to stop. But they didn’t know they could be cited for driving under the influence without actually driving, so they didn’t know they had to switch seats. Giving people criminal convictions for doing nothing wrong, just in case they might later stop doing the right thing and start making the wrong one, is not the way to make the world better. I have no personal connection to this problem — it just offends me.
@Erusian
This is basically a clash between Social Justice ideology and those who have a different belief.
Those who believe that there is no systemic ill-treatment of men, but who do believe in a system of oppression where white men keep the black man down, don’t believe that black men and white men have a shared & legitimate complaint. From their perspective, black men speaking up for a white man is like chickens speaking in support of a fox.
From that perspective, if there is any ill-treatment of Kavanaugh, it has to be something that is generic to all people, not just men. So black men should then demand to be treated more like Kavanaugh (and thus like everyone else), rather than defending due process for everyone.
The evidence actually suggests that black men will actually be disproportionately be accused and disbelieved. For example, those dragged in front of Title IX courts and convicted seem to be be black far more often than you’d expect based on the number of students who are black.
The article also provides evidence of how false accusations may be far more common for black men.
Black people are 90% Democrat and the Kavanaugh confirmation was notoriously partisan. I doubt this story is based on anything other than a few anecdotes, rather than a meaningful trend.
For now. But man is the left trying its best to lose them!
I can’t imagine a defensible version of this claim.
Could you have imagined a defensible argument for “The left is trying its best to lose the rust belt” during the last election?
It is hard to articulate the argument, which ultimately boils down to “Perception that a group is feeling ignored, used, and taken for granted”, which isn’t exactly a logical construct.
But, lack of a strong logical construction for the argument aside, I do think there is something to it. And like the rust belt, I think everything will look the same, until abruptly it doesn’t.
But that is a prediction, not an argument.
The defensible version is that Democrats are taking black votes for granted to a point where their actions will cause them to lose some.
Yeah, that’s why Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum are highly celebrated Democratic gubernatorial candidates, and Corey Booker and Kamala Harris are early likely presidential candidates, because we take the Black vote for granted.
In fact, Stacey Abrams is a picture perfect example of how the broad Democratic Party is not taking Black votes for granted, but rather leaning into effectively mobilizing that vote.
Actually yes, mobilizing a group to vote is taking their voting pattern for granted.
HBC –
This feels a little bit like “But the Democrats have lots of black friends, they can’t be racist”.
Which isn’t to say the Democrats are racist, but rather to wave in the direction of the issue. To a lot of Democrats, it seems having black politicians is the same as representing black people. And it is progress in one direction, but it is also emblematic of exactly the schism I see starting to form in the Democratic party.
Namely, that the Democrats cater to upper-middle class values. And in a very real way, an upper middle class black person has far more in common with upper middle class white people than they have in common with, well, most black people.
And I think most Democrats will scoff at the idea that the Republicans might do something like, say, run Kanye West as Trump’s successor, and shatter one of their core constituencies. Much as they scoffed at the idea that a Republican could win in the Midwest.
It is all scrying, of course, and guesswork, and a sense that there is mounting frustration. I could be entirely off base.
But… well, we won’t know until we know. If I am right, I will seem prophetic, and if I am wrong, nobody will remember. We will see.
Isn’t conventional wisdom that a huge factor in Proposition 8 having passed in California was that an inordinate amount of blacks showed up to vote for Obama, and then were also asked what they thought about gay marriage, which was not at all what Democrats expected them to think about it…
No, Stacey Abrams is not “my Black friend”. Nor is she “asking Black people to vote and just assuming they will vote for the Democrat”.
Rather, she has been pretty clear that the Democratic Party in Georgia has not done enough to motivate Black voters to vote in the past and making that one part of her overall campaign. Responding to the hopes, fears, needs, concerns and values of a specific constituency and then asking them to vote for you is the opposite of “taking the votes for granted”.
If we took that claim literally, then it would be obviously false. But the defensible version of that claim is that the left scared working class voters enough with their rhetoric and policy ideas that they voted for Trump. The essence of Matt’s claim is that Democrats are doing something to make black people defect to the Republicans, of which there is no justification for thinking that’s true.
Trump:
– Talks tough and politically incorrectly. Tell it like “it is”
– Hates “those people” from shithole countries who are taking our jobs.
– Hates trade agreements.
– Likes protectionist tarrifs
– Claimed not to like foreign military entanglements.
– Claimed he was for universal American healthcare and jobs for everyone, and there was plenty of money for it and we ours actually save money “on the back side”
– Claimed rich guys didn’t need a tax cut and that corporations were screwing the American people.
That working class guy who always wanted a union job who wants to send his kid to private Catholic schools in Cleveland because of all the Blacks in the public school? Trump appeals to him in a way Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney could never do. That and ten or a hundred other factors put Trump over in the Midwest.
And lest you think I’m making things up, I know about ten guys my age who all grew up in Cleveland, and have pretty deep connections to people in Illinois unions.
@ HBC
Georgia had a democratic governor from 1872 to 2003, followed by 2 republican governors, followed by a candidate who is attractive to the large black minority in the state, and Florida went to Trump in a relatively close race with some of the lowest minority turnout in the last 5 elections (at one point it was called that, but revisions do happen and I might not be aware) This is hardly evidence that the Democrats have been and will continue to take a proactive stance in working the black vote.
You can view it as a cynical take, but responding with examples that can readily be taken as reactions to bad results shows you don’t understand the take.
And I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, have 10 nieces/nephews there, and I suspect that 100% of their parents voted for Obama/Clinton in each of the last 3 elections (unless they didn’t vote at all). Strangely not one of them is sending their kids to predominantly black schools, nor lives in a predominantly black neighborhood.
‘Black’ schools in the Cleveland area have been bad schools for decades, the wealthier white liberals pay for public schools in expensive areas, the poorer white populations pay for cheap private schools. Hell, it isn’t even just whites, Shaker Heights had multiple years, perhaps even every year for significant stretches, where the total black student body as freshman in high school outnumbered the total black student body the the 8th grade class from the year before. This was such an issue that there was a federal investigation into the black/white split between CP/H/AP classes when I was there.
@baconbits9:
I’m sorry, what is your point about the “Democratic governor from 1872 to 2003”?
I guarantee you the Democrats weren’t taking Black votes for granted in 1872.
As to the rest, I guess I’ll just say that you can’t think that Democrats are too quick to pay attention to BLM and also simultaneously think that we aren’t paying attention to Black concerns.
The standard argument here is things like BLM are “how you got Trump” (in part, by taking those ex-union working class “blue wall” votes for granted, which might actually be true.)
But, at the end of the day, we are talking about marginal votes as to why Trump was elected. You don’t need everyone to be persuaded, just enough.
Its difficult to take your replies charitably when the rest of the post makes it clear that it is about the shift in 2003, not the fact that a democrat was governor in 1872.
Absolutely you can, as the original argument is that the Ds treat black votes as inevitable and non divisible which will end up cracking the voting block.
It is not at all the “standard argument”, it is one argument that has some popularity.
@baconbits9:
From the tail end of reconstruction until 2002 Georgia was one party rule at the state level. The Democrats were taking everyone’s votes for granted when it came to the general election for state offices until very late in that process. They were not at all that hospitable to the policy preferences of Black Georgians until quite late in that run, nor did they particularly want their votes.
Since that time the state has been one party Republican rule, with voters switching party label preferences without particularly changing their policy preferences, having long before changed their party preference at the federal level. The Democrats of yesterday are not the Democrats of today. They are a different, changed coalition, one that has found itself in the extreme minority in almost every former Southern state.
The Democratic coalition of Georgia, like the national coalition, is more and more respondent to the concerns of its members who are Black as they make up a more and more important segment of the coalition. Correspondingly, the concerns of unions are given less weight as the number of union members shrink in the US, especially in the Mid-Western states which once formed the base of union power.
The idea that the ascendancy of Black Democrats to ever greater representation in various positions of power within the party is somehow a marker that Democrats tale their votes “for granted”, is odd. There are tensions within the current national Democratic coalition, just as there within the Republican coalition, but the existence of the tension does not mean that coalition doesn’t serve the overall interest of its members.
I said they were trying, not that they were succeeding…
@ HBC
Everything fact that you have cited can be interpreted through the lens of “Dems* didn’t care about blacks when they were in power, and only care about them now to the extent of returning to power. Nothing you wrote makes it clear that the Democratic Party is particularly interested in Black voters beyond their tendency to vote 80%+ for Dems when they do.
Again this all started with you stating that
*As in the broader Democratic party/leadership not the individual Democrats running for those individual elections.
@baconbits9:
I didn’t say that.
The claim is “Democrats are trying their best to lose black votes”, which your claim doesn’t seem to be.
If you are saying the defensible version is “after passage of the CRA and the resulting politically realignments, Democrats were forced into a situation of attempting to hold as many of their previously solid, but fairly conservative voters along with their liberal base, while Republicans left blacks with no choices of who to vote for, therefore Democrats could count on the black vote to swing their way without specifically serving their distinct interests”, I would agree with that as historical fact.
But that isn’t the state of play today, because the Democratic party of today is continually moving towards a majority-minority coalition. The white vote is less and less important to that coalition, and it becomes more and more important to motivate, energize and serve the entirety of the coalition. Bill Clinton’s triangulation of the past doesn’t work anymore.
This isn’t a particular novel observation on my part and represents a fairly common view on the part of the party.
Well, mostly the Democrats seem to be trying to lose men, not black men in particular. I wish them success at this endeavor 🙂
I can’t help but think that there might be a cost to having one political party represent the men, and another the women…..
I think a lot of the basic concepts of SJW thought are less popular among blacks than they are among whites.
And I know SJW =/ Democrat, but they’re certainly shifting in that direction…
Do you wish them success? Would you count it a net positive if the Republicans won every election for the next twenty years and got to.pass whatever they wanted, confident in their public support and claiming popular mandate for their policies, a chain that can only end when they piss the voters off enough for everyone to forget how angry they were with the Democrats?
@Thegnskald
At the moment, there is as far as I can tell the Democrats have nothing for me. I’m not particularly fond of the Republican’s drug policies, but I didn’t see Obama fixing them on a Federal level and my state Democrats are so busy trying to divide the spoils over legalized pot that they’ve failed to actually legalize it. (Also I wouldn’t use it even if it was legal). I don’t like the Republican pro-police law-n-order policies, but the Democrats haven’t shown any real objection to that either.
On immigration, I don’t like loose borders with a welfare state and immigrants legally catered to (as Democrats seem to favor), and I don’t like very strict Trumpian borders either; I’d prefer something like the points system (with higher numbers of immigrants than Trump’s plan), but that’s not in the cards. Or nearly-open borders, no welfare state, and strong incentives to assimilate, but that’s even less likely.
On culture war issues… well, I’m a cis white male. Gotta go with my identity there; I don’t need to be self-hating, enough people hate me already.
Heck no, they’d probably restart the drug war in earnest and probably we’d get the religious groups pushing all sorts of objectionable things. I would hope that after driving away a bunch more men (without attracting a bunch more women) and thereby losing a bunch of elections, the Democrats would re-align in a way that was less inimical to my interests.
I’ve been arguing for a long time that the Democrats should try to pull the libertarians, broadly defined, out of the Republican coalition. I had some hopes that Obama would do it, given some of his Chicago associates and their associates, but it didn’t happen.
I don’t see how Dems can ever peel off libertarians. My sample may be biased, but I know a large number of libertarians from my college days, early online internet days, family, current friends, neighbors, etc.
They hate Social Justice, and they see modern Dems as being in bed with it. I cannot possibly describe the level of hatred they have for SJWs. It makes the SSC commentariat look like docile fellow SJW travelers. If you gave these guys the options of pressing the button to erase all SJWs, they would slam that thing like a gambling addict at a free slot machine, until their hands bled and they lost all feeling in their bony little fingers. And then they would cut off their hand, slam it against that button, and smack a brick on top just so it stayed there, and then they would wander the streets just to make sure all the SJWs are really gone, and then they would party for a fortnight.
The only thing that comes close is how much my Scottish labor friend hated Thatcher.
@davidfriedman
Liberaltarianism is doomed, I think, by the structure of the democratic party. Too much of it is based on interest groups that benefit directly from the state’s largest to ever bring libertarians into the fold. If it were possible, I think you’d see it somewhere like school vouchers, with democrats pushing for an increase in school funding and bringing libertarians on by voucherizing that funding. But you don’t see that, because the democratic party’s priorities on schools are ultimately determined largely by the interests of teachers unions. If democrats can’t even bring themselves to do vouchers, there’s no hope for almost anything else libertarians want.
Black people are 90% Democrat
Which is what seems to be annoying the writer of this article; they’re supposed to be opposed to the tribal enemy and gloating over any chance to do him down, not recognising that dumping due process to go after someone is unfair and foolish and that the accused have rights and need protection too! Who cares about your “lived experience” this time, when you know all too well how a hanging judge model works, you are supposed to go along with the party line!
A CNBC report from Oct 1 (a few days after the hearings) confirms that black Americans opposed Kavanaugh 81-11 (I suppose the rest must be no opinion, but the article doesn’t say).
It’s of course possible that black people oppose Kavanaugh for reasons unrelated to the allegations against him, but I think the default position here should be to assume that the stories of black men worried about Kavanaugh’s due process are not-necessarily-representative anecdotes, and not some trend.
At one point, the black approval rating for Obama was 100%
If the Democrats are pushing any particular thing hard and only getting 80% black approval, that’s newsworthy.
Quinnipiac, the same pollster, asked in 2010 if people approved of nominating Elena Kagan to SCOTUS. Black approval was 79% approve, 10% disapprove, 11% not sure.
Sotomayor fared a little better: 85% approval among blacks and only 2% disapproval, but this still seems pretty normal.
That black voters oppose a Republican nominee in exactly the same proportion they supported one of Obama’s nominee and a little less strongly than the other, does not strike me as very newsworthy.
I don’t have anything other than “a few more anecdotes”, but there were definitely black men defending Bill Cosby, a line in a recent Kanye song along the lines of “Damn, what if I got Me Too’d?”, a joke I saw someone make on social media that a white woman accusing a black man is the exception to “Believe Women”. There’s definitely a segment of black men who are partisan Dems yet skeptical of zero tolerance for those accused of sexual assault. It’s possible that they recognized this in Kavanaugh, even if they still came down on partisan lines.
It’s unfortunately hard to find anything that isn’t anecdotal. How even would you phrase polling questions in a way that would get people to answer honestly?
On the other hand, it was a Black comedian (Hannibal Buress) who basically brought the hammer down on Cosby.
And I think both things, general recognition that sexual assault is too easily dismissed as unprovable, and that Black individuals are too easily presumed guilty of criminal behavior, co-exist within the Democratic party currently.
Yes, there will be pains when trying to fully work out solutions to some of the contradictions therein, but it’s not the case that Democrats aren’t aware of both issues simultaneously.
At a guess: How plausible is it that some kind of baseless accusation from a crazy woman could destroy your life? Probably that depends on your experiences and the stories you’ve heard from people close to you. It would not be the least bit surprising if black men had experiences and lore from other black men that made them think this was a pretty plausible thing to happen–something that could happen to them, and everyone might believe the crazy woman and her made-up story, and they’d lose their job or be hounded from their social circle.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Joseph_Spell
Chris Rock video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHhKIyAk69g&feature=youtu.be&t=186
It’s Chris Rock so I can’t tell how many onion layers of irony are here.
In Social Justice To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch is the bad guy.
This is not a connection I’d made before, and is more than a little disconcerting.
I agree with this comment: I also think it exemplifies an unhelpful approach to culture-war topics, and would like to see less like this on SSC.
Genuinely curious: how so? It wasn’t snarky, or mean, and I thought it was somewhat insightful. I would also be genuinely curious to hear how a person who was very into social justice would summarize that novel.
One-liners on CW topics are very very easy to interpret as snark. This happens on both sides.
(Not that I’ve never been guilty of it but) In general if it’s less than a paragraph it’s a driveby quip.
Not Sam, obviously, but I agree with him. I hate statements like
This is often at least moderately true, but when deployed as a drive-by comment, it doesn’t really mean anything or offer any surface for engagement. It doesn’t convey what [the outgroup]’s criticism is or explicitly respond to it, instead putting the burden of understanding the argument on the reader; if you offer your best interpretation of the argument, it can be dismissed by “that’s not what [the outgroup] says, they’re much more unreasonable than that.” If you claim to be an [outgroup member], you’re immediately put on the defensive, and rather than try to build an argument from common understanding, you have to build one while under the fire of someone who is free to argue against your conclusion rather than your premise, which is often easier. The net effect is to depress the likelihood of a response while successfully making fun of [the outgroup] for reaching a particular conclusion.
The anti-pattern to this is,
“In light of this, what would an SJW reading of To Kill a Mockingbird look like? Would they conclude that Atticus Finch is the bad guy?”
Or, if the argument has actually been seen before,
“I saw an SJW claiming that Attocus Finch is the bad guy in To Kill a Mockingbird. I think [the above] is the reason why.”
In both cases, the statement is focused on the premise rather than the conclusion and invites debate. It doesn’t treat the conclusion as a pin to knock down, but as the inspiration for a discussion.
Fine, comment withdrawn. Apologies to all.
It’s a white savior story, and therefore #problematic without even going into any further details of the plot.
I was just reading about this book being banned, I think in the r/SSC forum.
Of course it’s mean, and also dishonest – you’re accusing your outgroup of believing something obviously absurd and evil, when five minutes with google would show you that they believe nothing of the sort.
@Randy M, I take it you’re referring to the discussion of how one school took the book off its required reading list? AFAIK, they didn’t even remove it from the school library.
No longer requiring people to read a book is very different from banning it.
To me, it’s a good example of a place where the rallying flag is not the tribe. Slogans are slogans; arguing as if they were the entirety of the ideology isn’t generally helpful. If your argument is “that’s a bad slogan,” that’s one thing; but arguing “your slogan gives obviously-terrible results in this one case, so you must think that’s the right outcome” doesn’t make sense.
In other words, it reminds me of the kind of people who can’t get through a discussion of homosexuality without bringing up shellfish.
Whoops, I was sloppy, you’re very much right.
Bullshit.
I see we have another rip roaring SSC OT.
ETA:
I’m not sure you could have custom designed a better OT to make me not particularly inclined to engage with the “better” arguments.
When I read this article, I thought it was bizarre.
There’s two quotes I found really interesting.
Presumably, black men know that they will get treated much worse if accused than Brett Kavanaugh. What if these black men are worried that if the Brett Kavanaughs start getting treated like the Britan Bankses, the Brian Bankses will get treated even worse? Or, what if they would like for the Brian Bankses to get treated better, like the Brett Kavanaughs are?
Consider that college tribunals seem to hit guys who aren’t white way harder than guys who are. The black men who sympathize with Kavanaugh presumably are worried about a trickle-down effect, and the (admittedly anecdotal) evidence is that, on campuses at least, they do have something to worry about.
I think it’s slightly weird to say, “Gosh, what if Kavanaugh were black??”
I mean, we sorta know, right? His name would be Clarence Thomas. Of course, the parallels aren’t perfect, and Thomas was confirmed quite a while ago, but it seems weird not to comment on it at all if you’re drawing that counterfactual.
There’s enough differences I don’t think you can draw a straight counterfactual. What would happen if Clarence Thomas were nominated today? What would happen if Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual assault, rather than harassment? What if Clarence Thomas’ alleged victim was white? Etc.
I agree it’s not a straight parallel, but I think you have to reckon with it as well.
I mean if your argument is that Thomas wouldn’t have been confirmed today, are you suggesting that black men were better liked 30 years ago than today? That goes against a lot of SJ theory.
More plausibly, you could say that the competing status of women versus blacks has a different balance today than 30 years ago, though again I’m not sure that’s something that’s super flattering to the modern left.
I’m not saying you can’t address this parallel, just that it requires addressing if your case is staked on “what if Kavanaugh were black?”
@sandoratthezoo
Whose case? I didn’t actually speculate anything about what might have happened were Kavanaugh black or stake anything on it. I’m pointing out why the author’s reasoning seems a bit faulty to me.
If you want me to reckon with the Thomas case, well, I don’t think Thomas would have been confirmed today. We take complaints of sexual harassment and assault more seriously from women today; I think the lot of women alleging sexual misdeeds has improved more than the lot of black men accused of sexual misdeeds in the last 30 years. The lot of black men accused of sexual misdeeds may have gotten worse in some contexts (universities, where the lot of men in general accused of sexual misdeeds has gotten worse). Further, weren’t there more people willing to corroborate Hill’s claims?
I was just using your quote of
As a jumping off point.
Ah, from the article.
I think that in an identical case, where a black prep school guy up for the Supreme Court as a Republican was accused of having assaulted a black prep school girl (black guy accused of assaulting white girl opens a different can of worms; what happens there for the mainstream left-wing zeitgeist probably comes down to a coinflip whether it’s hashtag believe women or hashtag Party Patricia or whatever they’d call her, though I’m guessing everyone whose opinion counted would side against him because gotta keep the court from bringing in the Handmaid’s Tale or whatever; Republicans would probably have swallowed their fear of scary black guys menacing white womanhood in order to get that supreme court pick in, with the bonus of being able to scream that it’s the Dems who are the real racists), it would have gone similarly in terms of whether he’d have been confirmed or not. I don’t think the accusations against Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh’s behaviour, whatever, really changed the vote that much. Most everyone picked their side based on what they thought going in; it might have shifted the vote by 2 or 3?
That is some…really telling rhetoric. It is true that if one is thought likely to be a serial gang rapist they should not be appointed to the highest court in the land. But they should also not retain their position on the second highest court in the land, or be welcome anywhere in the legal profession or society at large.
Keep in mind this sort of rhetorical trick is also often used to dismiss the seriousness of false accusations in college environments.
“Oh no, spoiled white boy might get kicked out of Harvard and have to go to Yale instead, who cares if he receives due process or not?”
In both cases, there’s some truth to the claim–having your reputation dragged through the mud and losing out on your dream job, or getting booted from Harvard and finishing up your degree at State, isn’t *as* bad as getting sent to prison. But it’s still pretty awful, and people will still very reliably fight against having those things done to them, and most won’t be swayed by arguments that somehow, you should let your own life be screwed up because there are a lot of other people who look like you that have gotten away with screwing other peoples’ lives up.
Also, keep in mind Kavanaugh knows the truth. We’re all guessing and inferring and reasoning and employing probabilities, but he knows whether or not he did this or whether or not something like this is even in his character, drunk or not.
@Conrad
I think that’s an overly strong statement. Plenty of people lie to themselves about what’s “in their character,” and Kavanaugh may have been blackout drunk, or he may have just altered or invented memories in the 30+ years since this (may have) happened.
If Ford’s memory is fallible, so is Kavanaugh’s.
Remember that in this case it was the Democrats who were arguing for due process – that is, a full and thorough investigation – and the Republicans who insisted on rushing Kavanaugh through with the most cursory investigation imaginable of some of the accusations, and none whatsoever of others.
And even that is granting the assumption that there is such a thing as “due process” for a Supreme court nomination, which of course their isn’t – post-Garland, it’s absurdly hypocritical to argue that “we don’t like the look of him” isn’t a good and sufficient reason for turning down a SCOTUS nomination without further inquiry, let alone “he’s probably an attempted rapist and a perjurer, and these accusations haven’t been properly investigated yet”.
Tatterdemalion:
The principle, post-Garland, seems to be that whichever party has the Senate majority will decide who gets on the SC, and to hell with other principles. You can make arguments either direction for Kavenaugh, but what actually happened doesn’t seem to call that principle into question.
However, that kind-of misses the point. The stakes for Kavenaugh were not just not getting a job–he was accused in public of terrible crimes–in front of his friends and family and the whole country. The Democrats got behind these accusations and pushed, for partisan reasons[1]. From his perspective, the stakes were not “Does he get a promotion,” but rather “Is he vindicated before the world?”
[1] I’m pretty sure the Republicans would have done the same. Sociopathy is almost a requirement for high political office, and the folks at the top don’t have *principles* or *morals* so much as they have *interests*.
[2] And I can’t see any realistic way that a longer FBI investigation would have resolved the actually credible accusation against him.
I don’t agree with this. I’m sure partisanship was a motivating factor for some Democrats, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that the fact that Kavanaugh is very likely to be guilty wasn’t one too, and almost certainly a more major one, especially given that they’ve shown that they care more about sexual assault than partisanship by e.g. pushing out Al Franken.
By contrast, I don’t think there is any possibility that there was anything other that naked partisanship and motivated reasoning behind most of those claiming Kavanaugh is probably innocent.
If we’re talking about outright vindication rather than merely avoiding consequences, we need to abandon all the principles that give the benefit of the doubt to the accused – vindicating one party is branding the other a liar, and vice versa. And given the likelihood that they’re the ones telling the truth, it’s much more likely that Kavanaugh’s accusers deserved vindication than he did.
@Tatterdemalion says:
I don’t think this is very likely at all. it’s very possible that he’s guilty, but not very likely.
There was no partisan cost to doing that. And there are plenty of democrats that haven’t been pushed out with far more credible evidence against them.
He was accused by a woman that he claims he never met, that no one else seems to claim to have seen him in a room with. Do you truly think that partisanship is the only possible reason to doubt her story?
Tatterdemalion:
I suspect we’re never going to agree on the probability that Kavenaugh was really guilty. And there appears to be no way to determine the answer to that.
I will make a falsifiable prediction: If we see the balance of the supreme court turn on a credible accusation of sexual assault with no actual evidence behind it, where the Democratic nominee is the one accused, I predict that we will see the Democrats and Republicans mostly swap sides on questions of burden of proof vs believing women. The closest situation to that I can remember in somewhat recent memory was the accusations against Bill Clinton. In that case, Republicans were about believing women and Democrats were about due process and worrying about accusations with political motives.
Absolutely not – I doubt her story myself. But I think that partisanship, or being mislead by the partisanship of others is, while not the only possible, much the most likely reason that someone might go from “this might possibly be false, but is very likely to be true” to “this is probably false.
The best summary of why I’ve seen is by Kelsey Piper, at https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/178821571726/is-there-actually-any-evidence-for-the-kavanaugh
@Tatterdemalion says:
And you don’t think it’s possible, or at least common, that partisanship is leading people from
“this might possibly be true” to “he’s definitely a rapist”?
If I saw anyone asserting that he was definitely a rapist, I would indeed assume that that was motivated reasoning due to partisanship. But I have literally never seen anyone claiming that – not even one – and I read a fair number of left-wing sources, albeit mostly from the top half of the internet.
I’m sure there are some out there, especially on comments pages, but they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the “he’s probably guilty, and even though it’s not certain beyond reasonable doubt, that’s sufficient reason not to put him on the SCOTUS”.
@Tatterdemalion
How on earth is tens of thousands of protestors waving signs that say “I believe ford” or some equivalent not meeting your standard of saying he’s guilty?
I think this is special pleading, but let’s run with it. If I grant you that most people on the left are saying “he’s probably guilty”, how is that different from people on the right saying “he’s probably not guilty”? Why is the one partisan and the other not?
Because the evidence clearly supports one conclusion and not the other; I’ve linked elsewhere in this thread to a summary of it by Kelsey Piper.
I think that people making up their minds on partisan grounds will split approximately 50/50, whereas people making up their minds based on bayesianism will/have overwhelmingly come to the conclusion that Ford’s accusation is very likely to be true, Ramirez’s probably is, and Selnick’s may or may not be.
(Among those, the split on whether or not that standard of probability disbars him will probably mostly be on partisan grounds, but my quarrel here is with people who say “he’s probably innocent”, not with those say “he’s probably guilty, but it’s not proven so go ahead”).
Tatter –
You realize, of course, that “The evidence clearly supports my side” is what partisanship is going to feel like from the inside?
My counterprediction, in the literal situation of the hypothetical you describe, would be that the Republicans would homogenously swap sides, whereas about half the Democrats (possibly slightly less) would, and there would be a horrible, acrimonious schism in the party; I have no idea how it would end. If there were other accusations that didn’t hit a specific point of tribal division – a candidate accused of taking bribes, say – I think you’d be more likely to see the Democrats close ranks.
But I don’t think that’s quite the mirror image situation. The balance of the Supreme Court didn’t hang on Kavanaugh’s nomination; the Republicans could have pulled his nomination and gotten someone else through in time. Doing that would have made them look weak, and involved an inaesthetic rush to get the other candidate through in time, but it wouldn’t have cost them the court, just some votes. And in that situation, I think that even unprincipled partisan Democrats would see the cost of the schism and change horses.
(I also think that 20 years ago, in Clinton’s era, your prediction would have been more likely – I think that things have changed a lot since social justice activism replaced liberalism as the dominant ideology on the list)
Feinstein sat on the accusation for weeks that could have been spent thoroughly investigating. Even charitably interpreting that action, it seems pretty clear that she didn’t want to use the accusation initially (whether to avoid dragging Ford through a hearing or because Feinstein thought it was weak or both) and only sprang it as a last second Hail Mary when it was clear confirmation was otherwise imminent.
That makes the call for a “thorough investigation” out of care for due process ring hollow. More likely, it was a partisan delaying tactic to push confirmation past the midterms.
It’s also not really clear what a longer investigation would have accomplished. Lack of time wasn’t really the problem, it was lack of leads. All the key named players got talked to, all that could come of more investigation was more weak circumstantial evidence and hearsay rather than anything definitive.
Yeah, the typical “due process” for a claim made for an incident that happened 30 years ago with no exact time or no exact place named and absolutely no evidence in existence is a prompt “go away lady, we have better things to do” which is exactly what she would have gotten if she went into any police office rather than a secret letter to a politically motivated ally.
Ford got significantly more opportunity to prove her allegations than anyone else in a similar situation would have, and still didn’t even come close.
@Tatterdemalion
Respectfully, it doesn’t. The “evidence” assembled by piper is almost entirely circumstantial (seriously, she sites the fact that Kavanaugh drank in high school as a meaningful corroboration), ignores the fact that ford has said a number of things that have been contradicted, ignores the many problems with her story, and completely ignores the fact that no one seems to be willing to attest that they ever so much as saw the two in the same room. Her summary of ford’s case adds up to nothing more than “this is not demonstrably false”. And this is coming from someone who thinks that the rape gang accusations are not just plausible, but more than likely true.
One must love emotive conjugation.
You mean exactly the sort of split that didn’t occur over Hillary Clinton tweeting believe all women during her campaign? Or that isn’t splitting the party now over Keith Ellison?
And let us not forget, the Kavanaugh accusations concern events that were contemporaneous with the worst accusations against Bill Clinton. If the new standard is condemnation for people accused of assaults in the late 70s and early 80s, he should be up on the docket.
“due process” means having procedures in place to protect the rights of those accused of wrongdoing. One such procedure is the concept that stale accusations will not be entertained, depending on the nature of the wrongdoing. The reason for this concept is the recognition that memories fade; documents get destroyed; and it is unfairly difficult to defend oneself against a stale accusation.
Another concept of due process is that an accused has a right to advance notice of accusations against him; if the accusation is sprung at the 11th hour, it will not be entertained.
Note that both of these ideas concern themselves with the rights of the accused — an accuser has no due process rights. It’s all about protecting the accused.
So due process does NOT mean “all accusations are carefully investigated and entertained.” It’s actually more likely to mean the opposite — that some accusations are disregarded regardless of their merits. Because due process is about protecting the rights of those accused of wrongdoing.
I think you’re missing two absolutely fundamental point here.
Most black men know that they would be likely to be treated worse than Kavanaugh in the same circumstances. But very few innocent men end up being the target of multiple independent credible accusations of sexual assault with circumstantial evidence supporting them, so it’s not something they worry about much.
Plus, the proposed consequence to Kavanaugh – that he should be denied a political office (which post Garland it’s impossible to deny the SCOTUS is) – is one which we already accept can be visited on anyone for any reason whatever, and is not relevant to most people.
The article was written in response to some black men who evidently do feel sympathy for Kavanaugh. I imagine that those men are not worried about the chance of not getting to be on the Supreme Court, either.
Nor was Kavanaugh. He was the target of one credible accusation–meaning that there was no reason why it couldn’t have been true–with no circumstantial evidence supporting it, and two less credible accusations with no circumstantial evidence supporting them.
I wouldn’t say no circumstantial evidence. There was very little, but there was some.
I think the only evidence was Ford’s husband’s account of what she had told him and her psychiatrist’s account of what Ford told her. That is consistent with a false story invented when Kavanaugh was earlier discussed as a possible candidate for the court, a false memory that appeared at that point, or with her husband, who is the only one who says she mentioned Kavanaugh, lying in her support.
You could consider that weak circumstantial evidence. But at that level of weak, the fact that the friend she said was present did not remember the party happening and the other man involved denied that the assault had happened is circumstantial evidence on the other side.
Have I missed something more substantial?
I think you’ve missed a couple of details, and your analysis of the ones you haven’t missed is off.
I think that the most significant corroborating detail is the therapists’s notes. They prove that Ford was saying that she was sexually attacked years ago, long before she accused Kavanaugh. So either
1) She is telling the truth throughout.
2) She was not assaulted, and talking to the therapist was just a way of establishing corroborating detail for an accusation that she then didn’t make for years.
3) She was genuinely assaulted, by someone else, in circumstances in which it could plausibly have been Kavanaugh, and is lying about the identity of the assailant. 3) She was genuinely assaulted, by someone else, in circumstances in which it could plausibly have been Kavanaugh, and is lying about the identity of the assailant.
4) She was genuinely assaulted, by someone else, in circumstances in which it could plausibly have been Kavanaugh, and is mistaken about the identity of the assailant.
1) is totally plausible. The vast majority of rape accusations are genuine; there’s no good reason to believe this one isn’t.
2) requires her to have been following the news closely, spotted that one of the potential supreme court nominees was someone who had grown up near her, decided that if that man got the nomination then she would make a spurious accusation of sexual assault to keep him off the court, but if anyone else did she wouldn’t, set about laying some, but not very much groundwork, for it, researched obscure details of his and his friend’s behaviour (see https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/178830918691/i-found-your-analysis-of-the-ford-accusation-a-bit), and then not gone through with it. Neither personal motivation nor political motivation fit here, and her actions don’t make sense if that was her motive – why tell her therapist, but not anyone else, and why not give a name?
3) has all the problems of 2, plus it also involves a woman who was a victim of attempted rape willingly exploiting that, and hence giving up all chance of naming her real attacker. Totally possible, but unlikely, and what we’re talking here is odds.
4) requires her to have gotten the behavioural details right by accident in a way that’s hard to imagine, especially if we accept Kavanaugh’s testimony that he didn’t know her.
There are also Ramirez’s and Swetnick’s accusation. Contrary to your assertion, I think these are both perfectly plausible, although unlike Ford’s their not being true also wouldn’t particularly surprise me. Of particular note is the fact that Ramirez has a classmate who says she told him about Kavanaugh long before Ford went public (by contrast, I think it’s totally plausible that Swetnick is just jumping on a bandwagon). It’s possible that he’s lying, and it’s much less unlikely than with Ford that Ramirez misidentified Kavanaugh, but unless one of those two things happened then Kavanaugh is guilty there too, and given Ford’s testimony I think the odds of either are significantly less than 50%.
The vast majority of rape accusations aren’t made 30+ years later in a letter to a senator, and there is a gap (of unknown size) between “genuine rape accusation” and “correct identification of the rapist in the accusation”.
Starting from the general case to the specific only works when the specific is representative of the general.
Which were never made available to the Senate Judiciary Committee or the FBI.
Which is possible, if she was trying to establish corroborating detail to derail President Romney’s likely Supreme Court pick.
You also left out
5a) She was not genuinely assaulted, but believed she was assaulted by Kavanaugh.
5b) She was not genuinely assaulted, but believed she was (but not necessarily by Kavanaugh)
6) She was not genuinely assaulted (and knew so) but claimed she was for reasons unrelated to Kavanaugh; Kavanaugh being the attacker was a later addition.
That she was telling the truth throughout is possible, but contradicted by the testimony of those who were supposedly at this event — Judge, PJ Smyth, and Leland Ingham Keyser. While Judge has a motive to lie, the other two do not. So, as the Republican attorney pointed out, we have less than a he-said/she-said here. We have evidence which should be present, but is absent.
As for the behavioral details, there weren’t any. TUOC refers to something about Judge jumping on Kavanaugh’s shoulders, and claims witnesses said Judge did this only to Kavanaugh. But Ford’s actual testimony is this
No jumping on the shoulders. The initial letter is slightly different but doesn’t mention shoulders either, just Judge jumping on top of Kavanaugh and the bed. As for those witnesses who say Judge did this… TUOC doesn’t cite them anyway. Ford mentions seeing Judge later at the Safeway… but that’s not an obscure detail of Judge’s life, it was in his memoir.
How is this different from p-hacking?
If I do a correlation between IQ and income on 25-year-old Americans, is it safe to assume the results hold when applied to 60-year-olds?
“Supporting the confirmation of Kavanaugh” and “being troubled by Kavanaugh and other men facing old unsupported claims of sexual assault” are not at all synonymous, so I don’t see the relevance of polling data here.
A lot of the racist stereotypes against Black men portrayed them as insatiable sexual predators, so it’s hardly a big leap for Black men to be uneasy with rhetoric about “toxic masculinity”, “rape culture” and otherwise assuming that all or most men are likely either sexual predators or sexual predator enablers (to the extent that all it takes is an accusation to move the presumption to guilt).
It’s ridiculous to say that Democrats don’t care about the Black vote, but I do think this is one case where the Dems are particularly likely to get bit by intersectional schisms as identity politics get higher profile. Then again African Americans are still voting 90% for Democrats despite a seeming mismatch on a lot of social issues where they tend to be more conservatives. Then again again maybe there’s a lag and the vote will seem solid toward the Dems until it isn’t.
They’re not synonymous, but they are presumably correlated. Anyway, I finally found some actual direct data: a Reuters/Ipsos poll that asks “do you believe the allegations against Kavanaugh” and breaks respondents down by race and gender. Black men believe the allegations Yes 57.6 No 12.4 Not Sure 29.9, this is virtually identical to Black women, who are 58-10.8-31.1, so there is no gap between black men and black women.
Both of these are lower than the Democratic totals of 70.5-9.1-20.4, but interestingly are higher than single women, 18-29, of whom only 51% believe the allegations.
I’m not sure what other groups we should compare against to get a sense of whether this is a real thing–on the one hand, the comparison to Democrats suggests that black men believe the allegations less than you’d predict based on partisanship, but the same is even truer for single women, 18-29 for whom I’d expect the opposite effect.
I’m open to suggestions as to how else we could test this.
What would pure partisanship predict for single women 18-29? What if you restrict it to college educated women? Or break it down by socioeconomic class? One argument could be that pop-feminism as portrayed in the major media is somewhat out of touch with women outside the upper middle class college set. Another could be that Kavanaugh v. Ford was a spat between elite rich people, and was relatively uninteresting/unsympathetic outset that group.
Maybe another check is to track black male opinion about Kavanaugh over time and see if there are changes after the allegations came out?
There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of mainstream-left recognition (at least, I don’t see it in the various mainstream-left publications I read) that a movement towards assuming truth of accusations by women, lowering standards of proof and due process where possible (not in actual legal contexts, but in pseudolegal contexts like university discipline proceedings), etc, dovetails really uncomfortably with societal tendencies to assume guilt of black men, stereotypes of black men as dangerous (especially sexually speaking), etc.
Black people who vote will probably continue to vote heavy Democrat, because white anti-black racists who vote are heavily likely to vote Republican, but that doesn’t guarantee that they will turn out in the same numbers, does it? If the US had a remotely functioning electoral system, the black people currently voting Democrat would by and large not be voting for the same party as the degree-holding white women currently voting Democrat.
More generally, there’s this sort of tendency to assume that prejudice, discrimination, and oppression are a single-source thing. Here in Ontario, there was some surprise among the educated centre-left that it’s not just white social conservatives opposed to the previous provincial government’s proposed sex-education changes. The Star (a centre-left paper that’s taken on increasing SJ flavour in recent years) ran an incredibly softball interview with a Muslim woman (Middle Eastern or perhaps South Asian; I can’t recall) who’d written a guide for Muslim parents to the new curriculum – she was anti-gay and anti-trans, and the paper just sort of let her say whatever without challenging it; I do not for a second believe it would have gone like that were she a white Christian. The paper (or at least the interviewer) just didn’t seem to recognize that sentiments along the lines of “Boys like girls and girls like boys; anything else is sin; boys are boys and girls are girls; God doesn’t make mistakes” means the exact same thing regardless of who’s saying it and what language’s word they use for God.
@gbdub
The Democratic Party, even the “left” of it, is a coalition and African-Americans are usually considered an integral part of the Democratic Party coalition just as church going Christians are usually considered part of the Republican coalition, but “….Nearly half (47%) of black Democrats say they attend church at least weekly….” compared to “…Republicans overall (44%)…”, and you’ll find that black Democrats are less supportive of legal abortion and gay marriage on average than other Democrats, but they’re other issues that they on average mostly agree with Democrats, among which are economic issues (which is also true of most Americans, in general voters are left of the Republican Party on economics, and to the right of the Democratic Party on cultural/social issues), also let’s face it, the Democratic Party is mostly urbanites, and most black Americans grandparents or great-grandparants moved to Cities in the 1940’s and ’50’s, just as Catholics who live in the suburbs are now mostly Republicans (unlike their grandparents), but a lot of the reason is history.
I’m old enough to remember “pro-choice” Republicans and “pro-life” Democrats, as well as conservative “boll weevil” Democrats, and I know that the current coalitions used to be quite different, it wasn’t too long ago that the college educated were more likely to vote for Republicans for example) and if we look at the 1896 election it’s the reverse of today with the cities voting Republican and the south voting for Democrats.
Much of the following will be old news to Americans my age and older but let’s look at the coalitions of the 1940’s: Republican voters tended to be Business owners, and northern Protestants, especially New England rural Protestants. Democrats tended to be southern whites, Catholics, Jews, and the urban working class (especially union members), and blacks (where they could vote, as southern blacks usually couldn’t vote) and they were a new part of the Democratic coalition, as before FDR, and especially before Truman and his desegregation of the military, blacks were more likely to be Republicans.
Some parts of those coalitions still exist, but there has been many changes in the last 70 years!
First off with the mass post war movement to the suburbs many Democrats started to become Republicans when they became property tax paying homeowners (we can see this in reverse today with the movement back to cities), from it’s mid 1950’s high the number of union jobs has been decimated despite government employees being more likely to be unionized (a typical 1948 union member would be an assembly line auto worker, today it would be a school teacher), I know in my area the shipyards and two automobile factories during my lifetime with only building trades and the longshoreman at the Port of Oakland hanging on and without that lingering gratitude to FDR for their union paychecks men, especially white men, turn Republican, but the big switch was southern whites (the “solid south”) becoming Republican.
Democrats and Republicans, even in my lifetime, were hardly as ideological bound as they are today, often what Democrats and Republicans stood for was different State to State, and the real big switch came after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and especially the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Black Americans had already moved north in the 1940’s and ’50’s (for example the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco was mostly black in my lifetime with it’s residents being those who’s parents and grandparents had been shipyard workers), and along with white men they became union members and a convergence of black men’s wages towards white wages happened in the 1940’s as well as after 1964, which was because the wartime government favored labor unions who continued to gain members after the war, and F.D.R. issued executive order 8802 that banned discrimination in defense industries.
In tandem with the decline of unionized jobs the median hourly wage for men’s has fallen from it’s adjusted for inflation 1973 peak, and those wages have fallen further for black men….
I don’t see why hourly wages are a relevant figure. I’d think compensation is the appropriate one to look at.
????
I’m unclear of the difference
Suppose you get a pension. That’s part of your compensation but it isn’t part of your hourly wage. Health care is an especially relevant part of this story. I’m pretty sure Scott has a post on that if you check the archives.
@Brad
You mean the “Considerations On Cost Disease” post?
Yes, that was an excellent one of Scott’s, and he hasn’t been the only one to notice the problem, even I noticed that for over a decade (when I worked union construction for the private sector) that while we’d negotiated more from the contractors, our take home pay shrank as more was going towards health benefits, the bitterest union meeting I every attended was one over what allocation should go towards the health plan, in particular I remember one man I knew shouting to another “Well quit having so many kids then!”, the vote was so close that “divide the room” was called instead of the usual voice vote, which meant that each side had to stand on one side of the room and glare at each other, and it was clear to me that those of us who were mostly older and had families were on one side, and mostly younger single men (and one women) were on the other side, still the vote was very close and I could see guys I was at my current jobsite on both sides, and if you voted one way you were taking money out of every mans pocket (as well as the few ladies in our local) and if you voted the other way you’d make having a sick kid very much more costly.
Not a good night!
….Remember, lately the most loyal voters for the Democratic Party aren’t black men, but instead are black women both in 2016, and in 2017.
In common with white men, while some black men have achieved heights that just weren’t available to them before, the fortunes of the median black man has declined in the last 45 years, besides lower wages more are imprisoned, in contrast black women’s wages have risen, just as have white women’s.
Just as 1973 marks the peak in men’s adjusted for inflation hourly wages (and the end of the draft, and the first oil embargo…) 1973 also marks the Roe v. Wade decision which I believe caused a political re-alignment similar to the one’s caused by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65.
In 1967 conservative Republican Governor Ronald Reagan signed a bill which allowed abortions in California which he was urged to do by Republican legislators in California, but by 1981 when he was President he was vocally anti-abortion as increasingly the Republican Party, and in response religious conservatives leaned Republican.
By the late 1970’s unions could see that they were in decline and started advocating for “card check” which would make it easier to unionize workplaces, President Carter and a majority Democratic congress could have done passed that legislation but didn’t, in 2009 and 2010 unions urged Obama and a Democratic congress to pass what was now called “The Employee Free Choice Act” (card check) but that “wasn’t a priority”, but what was a priority for Democrats was keeping Roe v. Wade the law of the land.
After 1935’s National Labor Relations Act made it easier to unionize workplaces, and the “weaponized Keynesianism” of the second world war a great broad based middle class come about, and while some “leftist” unions such as the I.L.W.U. made what later became called “affirmative action” their policy many times (especially in the older A.F. of L. “craft” unions such my own U.A. Plumber and Steamfitters) unions kept things “in the family” guild style and nepotism made membership for black men difficult, but growing industries such as automobile manufacturing led to many black men into C.I.O. unions such as the U.A.W. in the 1950’s and they started to become middle class, a process that accelerated after 1964 and black men’s wages were converging with white men’s until about 1975, but then that convergence stopped.
When I was a little boy in the 1970’s I lived in majority black neighborhoods that had lots of black homeowners, but in time they moved or passed away and far fewer blacks live in the neighborhood and those that do are mostly tenants in apartments and are women with children.
I may be extrapolating too much from my childhood next door neighbor too much, but a remember a black man who had a military pension, a steady job, a Buick in the driveway, and many grandchildren who visited, and maybe it was because of all those grandchildren, that upon his death none of his kids inherited the house (which ones would it be?) and the house was sold to a white couple with college educations (still there last I checked, the husband works for the University, the wife is a massage therapist who once ran for the school board), the same thing happened with most of the houses on the block, which I suppose is normal, I’m told that the neighborhood was mostly “Portuguese” before (as was the now defunct Oakland, CA Plumbers local 444), but where are the blacks in the Bay Area now?
Asians, Latinos, and Whites have been replacing blacks in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco (except in County Jail #4, which is still majority black despite blacks now being less than 7% of the population of San Francisco), though I’m told that there’s a growing black community in the far suburb of Antioch which is nominally still the Bay Area.
Starting in the 1970’s without union cards white men ceased to vote for Democrats, and is it any wonder? In most men’s lifetime the gains of the past are stories of the fathers or grandfathers with the Democratic Party mostly appearing to stand for (largely female) public school teachers and “the right to choose”, meanwhile Republicans have told them “We’ll fight for you to keep your guns and pay less taxes”.
In terms of “What have you done for me lately” black men can look back at the 1960’s for something a Democratic President did for them (which was also with the support of many Republicans in Congress, but that was before the re-alignment), but for many black men that was in their grandparents lifetimes and memories fade.
In 2009 there was the “stimulus” package, and there was talk of 1930’s style public works, of the kind that employ many men, instead the fund went to tax cuts and to keeping school teachers employed, so jobs for college graduate women, not working class men.
In my writing this out and thinking about it who votes for whom makes much more sense to me, and I can imagine the Democrats losing the votes of black men the way the have white men if they don’t do more actual deeds to benefit them, I don’t forsee them voting Republican yet, just not voting.
So far recent Republican efforts to “fight voter fraud” (make it harder to vote) have backfired and black voter participation is up which has benefited Democrats, but if Democrats keep chasing “suburban women voters” I don’t know how long that will continue.
From my perspective the Democrats pay lip service towards “protecting the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society” but are far more successful at keeping abortion legal, while the Republicans pay lip service to “traditional values” but mostly they deliver tax cuts for the wealthy.
Donor class vs. “the base” in both parties, but as time goes on more of the base abandons the Parties, and I can imagine a future Democratic Party that is only college graduate women, and while Trump spoke populist and got enough of the “Rust Belt” to switch their votes giving him the Presidency, since the major thing he’s accomplished is massive tax cuts (and deficits) for the wealthy the Republicans could lose their “base” as well.
Right now Democrats are campaigning on health care which makes sense since “Obamacare” (ironically modelled on Romneycare) is their biggest accomplishment, while Republicans have stopped campaigning on tax cuts after finding them unpopular.
For a long time black poverty was blamed on “social pathologies” (drug addiction, fatherless families, et cetera) but I’m pretty certain that the jobs left first, and I point to as more jobs paying a “family wage” to those without a college diploma disappeared those same “pathologies” have grown among whites (and I really don’t think that it’s coincidental that both union jobs and the male labor force participation rate peaked in the 1950’s).
Looking at a piece on competing canidates in very white West Virginia a supporter of the Democrat ““says he and his wife don’t have health insurance. He’s hoping Ojeda’s support for a public insurance option will lower health care prices…” while a supporter of the Republican candidate said of the Democrats “They left me. They left me, my morals. I think they’re getting very weak on the Second Amendment. I’m pro-life 100 percent“, and I see some parallels with the black men I know, and while anecdote isn’t scientific polling, in 2012 the strongest voice against the courts repealing California’s Proposition 8 that made gay marriage illegal in California that I heard was a black male co-worker who was quite angry about the possibility (“disgusting!”), yet he approvingly spoke of Obamacare with vintage 1930’s CPUSA lingo (“I like it because I’m for the masses!”), would you characterize him as an “SJW”? Is he Left or Right (I’ll add that another co-worker, a 40 year-old white man was extremely anti-immigrant, pro-gun, and pro-Trump, but was very anti-Wall Street, and ask the same question)?
Given the Trump family history I very much doubt that a Republican party headed by him could win many black voters, but could the Democrats lose them?
Sure, by failing to deliver anything that could be spun as improving their lives and be emphasis on social issues to capture “suburban women”.
How could Republicans win their votes without drastically changing their platform (though they kind of did that already, I remember when Republicans were more “free trade”, and Reagan giving amnesty for illegal immigrants!)?
Easy, have the majority of black Americans have high enough incomes that they chaff from paying taxes.
I think that will do the trick.
Your welcome!
The piece you seem to be missing is that the only way to ever go back to Americans being as rich as they were in the 50s and 60s is for the entire rest of the industrialized world to be destroyed again, with the US being unscathed. That seems unlikely to put it mildly.
Private sector unions have declined because they there isn’t enough margin left in manufacturing to pay them off anymore. They remain in the public sector, public sector contractors, and sectors strongly protected from competition by the public sector and that’s about it. Any kind of federal law about check off cards isn’t going to change that.
Sure we could spend enormous amounts of money–either directly in the taxes or indirectly in the form of trade barriers–to create fake make-work jobs, but frankly there aren’t enough “working class” men to make us and the rest of us don’t want to. Certainly none of those “just cut taxes” people are going to stay in a coalition with people that want either massively increased taxes or a cessation of international trade. You’ll even start to lose the war hawks as the general impoverishment caused by bad economic policies starts impacting the ability to buy military toys. Even if this fake jobs coalition managed to pull in significant number of black men I still don’t see how it would be competitive.
I’m curious about the economic theory that underlies that. The rest of the industrialized world being destroyed makes us relatively richer. Why do you think it makes us absolutely richer?
Also, is it your view that average real income at present is lower than it was in the 50’s and 60’s? Median real income?
Relatively richer is what I meant. Obviously we are absolutely richer now.
As I understand it there was a confluence of events, of which the destruction of the European industrial base was a large part, that lead to outsize bargaining power for unskilled American workers in the post war years. Unions took advantage of this circumstance but they didn’t create high wages out of thin air. Is that an unorthodox view?
@Brad
What makes the jobs “fake”?
The public library branch closest to me has a “WPA 1936″ plaque on it, the bridge I drive over most days was a massive PWA project (the WPA did smaller scale public works, the PWA larger ones), when I take my sons to Tilden Park I walk on trails cut by the CCC, I drive on Eisenhower’ s Interstate Highway System, most of the High School I went to was built by the WPA, my current job is mostly repairing the San Francisco “New Hall of Justice” built from 1958 to 1960, and I see a lot of the grand works of that generation badly in need of rebuilding, plus the population of this Republic has more than doubled since then, doesn’t this and future generations want libraries and schools?
At the very least solar panels could be put on top of roofs, new nuclear power plants could be built to replace coal, and lots of good could be done by taxing and spending (or even borrowing and spending), and I believe that while median wealth and income is down from their peaks, average and total wealth is up, so I think it’s time for some of that wealth to go for public purposes.
If I can build a library for $4 million dollars but I decide to instead to spend $12 million dollars because I want more people to have good jobs, are those real jobs? I’d argue no. I have a real project–building a library–and a welfare program and I’m deliberately mixing the two together so it is hard to tell who exactly is getting a handout. But that slight of hand doesn’t mean that people aren’t getting handouts.
The same analysis applies whether I’m hiring 3x the necessary workers or hiring the necessary amount and paying them 3x market rate.
A little more indirect, but still boiling down to the same thing, if someone works in a factory making a widgets and that factory only exists because the government it illegal for people to buy the cheaper, better widgets made in Mexico, I’d argue that’s a fake job too.
BTW, I think if one were to propose to revive the WPA today some of the fiercest objections would come from public sector and construction unions. Oh sure they’d love to have the increased spending but not a giant labor pool outside their purview, job rules, and wage scales.
Pseudoerasmus is skeptical of the idea that the destruction of Europe had much to do with America’s postwar success, based on the fact that the postwar boom was global, and that the ‘destroyed’ countries were back on their feet pretty quickly–too quickly to account for effects that persist into the 60s. I’m not remotely enough of an economic historian to debate this, but those sound like pretty important points to address.
@Plumber
I don’t know about plumbing, but for the structure of buildings there are substantial differences in how buildings are built compared to the ’30s, ’60s, and today. Some of them are due to structural behavior that would be absolutely unacceptable in a modern structure (that survives only through grandfathering). Some of them are due to the fact that when they were originally designed people were cheap and materials were expensive. The reverse is true today, and some design details that were done then would never be considered in a modern design because of the labor required to construct them.
I’m thinking specifically right now of features such as cover plates, used to increase the bending strength of rolled steel members. Basically, the bending capacity of a steel member needs to be higher at the middle than at the ends*, so a common detail up to the late ’50s and early ’60s was to weld, bolt, or rivet plates to the top and bottom of the rolled section in the middle, and step the capacity down as you worked to the outside. Another possibility is to use different sections in the middle than on the outside and weld them together end-to-end, or use cover plates to connect them. At work, we had several gates on dams from the ’50s that used this kind of structural detail. This was done not only to reduce the use of steel, but to reduce pick weights to economize on hoisting equipment.
But the critical thing to realize about these is the “weld[ed], bolt[ed], or rivet[ed]” part of that. These are all very labor intensive processes. Nowadays, it’s far cheaper to just use more steel by using a bigger section for the whole way, and to just use a bigger hoist. The old WPA projects just threw a bunch of people at a project–not quite “strong backs and weak minds,” but they definitely used a lot more “general labor” that consisted of picking up heavy things, moving them to another place, and putting them down, that we’d use heavy equipment to do today.
I don’t know what kind of access you have to your billing records for your job, but food for thought: as an design engineer employed by the federal government, I get paid $35.67 per hour. The total cost to the government (that is, what it costs to my organization to have me as a worker) is about $95 per hour (the exact number is on my computer at work). That is, almost two-thirds of my compensation comes in forms that I cannot fold up and put in my pocket–annual leave, health insurance, sick leave, retirement, the other half of social security, etc. Check to see what the difference between what the City bills for your services–and make no mistake, somebody is doing this calculation before sending you out to fix something–compared to what shows up in your paycheck. Whatever might be happening with wages, people are still very expensive to employers.
@CatCube: oooof. You’re a structural engineer with a postgraduate degree and about a decade of experience, right? And that’s all they’re paying you, base?
Point of comparison: I am a very junior product manager (read: requirements gatherer and progress driver with a side of coding) at a large tech company, having come up through operational IT support. Two years ago I was in tech support. Five years ago I was a $10 an hour call center wage slave. I’m about 8 years out of college.
I make just a few cents per hour less than you, salary. If you count stock compensation at value when awarded (not accounting for growth since, which is substantial), it’s actually a couple bucks more, assuming I stay long enough to vest all of it (4 years). And this is at a satellite operation in a VERY rural area where that income easily goes 30 plus percent further than it does in any city (50 plus over SF or NYC). I know guys in operations shift work with more time in grade making the same, and operations managers making way more. And of course in the cities you have software guys younger than me with more straightforward careers making 200k plus.
I’m not saying this to be a dick, and if it comes off that way I apologize. It seems like you enjoy your job, and that’s worth lower comp in many cases. But yeah, based on the impression of what you do I have from your effortposts, compared to what I and my coworkers do, you are being drastically underpaid, and I’d recommend doing some interviewing in the tech sector if it’s at all feasible for you, just to see what they put on the table even if you aren’t interested in switching jobs (we do hire mech and structural engineers – we aren’t building dams, but we absolutely do build large industrial buildings with complex internal structural systems, for several purposes. There’s also project management in those areas, that you’re likely very qualified for).
If this isn’t totally out of line (and if it is, again, I apologize), happy to discuss more specifically in private – drop me a good avenue of contact in a reply. I’m being deliberately vague here for the usual reasons.
Interesting piece–a different perspective than most of us have, based on a different life.
One minor point that struck me:
The point about deficits is correct, but why do you view the tax cut as for the wealthy? A sizable part was reducing the corporate tax, but corporations aren’t people. The burden of a corporation tax is divided among customers, employees, and stockholders, and there is no particular reason to expect it to be more of a benefit for the wealthy than for other people.
One of the most objected to features was the capping of the deduction for state and local property taxes (at $10,000) and for mortgage interest (at the interest on a $750,000 mortgage). Even in California, people who pay more than $10,000 in property tax or have a mortgage of more than $750,000 aren’t poor, and in much of the country they are rich.
The Democrats claim the tax cut was for the rich, but why do you see it as such?
@DavidFriedman
Mostly because of how the press has reported them and because they cut income taxes but not “payroll” taxes, if the Earned Income Tax Credit was expanded instead than that would be something I would regard as for the working poor.
Could briefly lay out the economic reasoning for this view? I have heard this expressed about that cut in a number of contexts. The idea seems to be that economic considerations mean that no one of those parties is more likely to have a claim (or “leverage”) on the taxed money than any other.
I at least some of the logic of that view for a tax on gross revenue. But the tax in question is definitely not that, it’s a tax on profit. So employee wages and other compensation are already mostly out of the picture.
Now, there is general economic argument from competition that if you change one variable (like taxation level) across the whole market, competition will tend to even things out. Having more money available might let wages rise through competition for employees, for example.
But you can also use that model for arguing that profits will be modest — they’ll settle at the lowest level that still makes it worthwhile for investors. In that case you might think the corporate tax rate shouldn’t matter that much either way. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. There are many companies making impressive profits, and even stashing the money overseas for periods of time in the hope of avoiding the tax.
Profits are, almost by definition, the money you manage to get out of the market after dealing with employees and customers. According to the theory in question, even if the tax is only on profit one has no reason to think lowering it is more likely to benefit shareholders than employees or customers. But if customers have leverage, why are the profits there in the first place? And if employees have leverage, why hasn’t the foreign money come back to pay them higher wages, in which case the companies would not pay the corporate tax on that money at all?
Corporate tax cuts are a tax on corporate profits. Corporate profits ultimately benefit shareholders. Shares aren’t held by anything like an even distribution of the population.
On the margin, they reduce some incentive to engage in economic activity, but how are corporate taxes a burden on the employee or customer? Corporations don’t make a profit and then distribute it to the employees in wages or customers in lower prices. Their duty is to is the shareholder. The latest corporate tax cuts produced mostly stock buybacks, not wage growth.
I believe the standard Econ argument against corporate taxation is that it is subsequently taxed again as income when distributed to the shareholder, thus the same profit is double taxed.
ETA: Skef beat me to it.
Profits, in equilibrium, are the market return on capital. Anything above that is “economic profit,” which in a market with open entry averages zero.
There is a world capital market, so to first approximation the market return on capital isn’t affected by the U.S. corporation tax. In order for U.S. firms to attract capital they have to offer the same return as everyone else, so the tax comes out of wages and/or prices.
Of course, the U.S. is a large part of the world economy. So the second approximation allows for the effect of the corporate tax on interest rates in the world market. In addition, there are going to be short term effects as everything adjusts.
A different way of making the point … . Suppose you are Honda, deciding whether to invest your stockholders’ money in producing goods to be sold in the U.S. or somewhere else with a lower corporate tax rate. You only do it in the U.S. if the return is enough higher than the return in (say) Canada to make up for the fact that you will be paying higher taxes on that return. That return depends on how much you have to pay your U.S. employees and how much your U.S. customers pay you.
The U.S. had unusually high corporate tax rates, which gave corporations an incentive to either actually earn their money outside the U.S. or use creative accounting to pretend to. The former is my Honda case, the latter a problem for enforcing the U.S. tax.
David –
I read most of that as reasons for lowering the U.S. corporate tax rate in light of global conditions. Can you connect it a bit more directly to the question?
I take it the idea is something like: Even profitable U.S. businesses face disproportionate obstacles to obtaining capital. By evening things out the U.S. business climate should improve, leading to more jobs and therefore more wages payed to employees. (How the customer benefits is still unclear.)
So would it be fair to say:
1) Any potential benefits to employees are much longer term than the benefits to shareholders.
2) The adjustment from holding money overseas to not doing so is likely to benefit shareholders almost exclusively
?
for U.S. firms to attract capital they have to offer the same return as everyone else, so the tax comes out of wages and/or prices
or equity prices, i.e. from the owners’ pockets.
Complications: the buyers of US corporations’ goods are fairly likely to be international (30% of the S&P500’s revenue comes from abroad), so to the extent that consumers benefit, 30% of it is foreign consumers to a very crude first order approximation.
I have no idea what the equivalent figure is for workers. Probably lower than 30%? And for wages, probably lower still… Goldman Sachs has a very big Bangalore office by headcount but hardly anyone there is earning the million dollar bonuses.
I was under the impression that people who did thorough research on the topic concluded that the effect would be pretty regressive. Note that if you find half goes to “workers and consumers” and half goes to “owners” you’d expect that the “workers and consumers” benefit approximately proportionately to their income. You could call that a flat tax cut if you’re talking about percentages, or a regressive tax cut if you’re talking who gets the most dollars. The half that goes to “owners” is quite regressive by any standard.
An American company wants to raise money by selling stock—in the simplest case, imagine it’s a brand new company. It has to offer the purchasers, on average, the same return they would get if they invested their capital somewhere else.
Suppose the U.S. has a corporate income tax of 50%, everyone else of zero. To pay the same return as a foreign company, the U.S. company has to make twice as much accounting profit, revenue minus costs, per dollar of invested capital as a foreign company. The price of the goods it sells has to be enough above the cost of producing them (not counting the cost of capital) to give it that.
Now the U.S. abolishes its corporate income tax. The U.S. company can now reduce its prices and still give the same return to investors. Of course, the investors would rather keep the price high and convert into profit what was before taxes, and if the company was a monopoly they could do that. But now a new competitor can undercut that price and take business away from it, since it too can raise capital with a lower return than before. So when everything finishes adjusting, companies are getting their capital more cheaply and competing the benefit away in lower prices.
Since they are selling at a lower price they are selling more, which means they want to produce more, which means they have to hire more workers, which bids up the price of labor. They also have to use more capital, which bids up its price.
If the supply of capital is very elastic, meaning that the total amount used by companies can increase without the cost of capital increasing by much, then the return to capital stays almost the same. If the supply of labor is very elastic, meaning that the number of workers employed can be increased by a very small increase in wages, then wages stay almost the same. If the demand for the products is very elastic, so the companies can sell more without dropping prices much, then price stays almost the same. The relative elasticities ultimately determine how the reduction in corporate taxes is divided among providers of capital, providers of labor, and consumers.
Obviously it is a much more complicated system than this sketch can show, but that’s the basic logic of it.
Note that this doesn’t depend on starting with U.S. corporate tax higher than that of other countries. The logic would be the same if they all had a 50% corporate income tax to start with, and abolishing the U.S. corporate income tax meant U.S. companies could get capital at a lower cost than foreign countries.
The important effect of the U.S. having much higher rates than most other companies was that it gave companies an incentive to do the accounting that made it look as though as much profit as possible came from overseas operations, and it’s hard to entirely prevent that, since there isn’t a simple way by which the IRS can judge what the prices should be for transactions between parts of what is really the same company.
I should probably add that the sensible way of handling tax on corporate profits is to recognize that the corporation is only a middleman. Abolish the corporate income tax and tax stockholders on their share of corporate income, whether it is paid out as dividends or retained by the corporation. That eliminates a bunch of distortions due to the present system.
I should probably add that the point about elasticities applies much more generally. People routinely assume that you can judge who is bearing the burden of taxes by who hands over the money, but that isn’t in general true.
Consider the simple case of a tax on transactions, such as a sales tax. It could be collected from the seller, it could be collected from the buyer, but in terms of the actual burden that doesn’t matter. The buyer hands the seller a dollar. Ten cents goes to the government. It doesn’t matter whether the ten cents is taken out just before the money is handed over or just after.
For a real world example, Social Security is nominally paid for partly by the employer, partly by the employee, but that’s irrelevant to who really bears the burden—that depends on the relative elasticities of demand and supply for labor.
One more piece of anecdota. The Minnesota Department of Revenue periodically publishes what they call a tax incidence report, which calculates Minnesota state and local taxes by income (divided into 10 deciles). Here.
This study indicates that business tax (mostly corporate I believe) is highly regressive. There is a table on page 16 that in 2014 indicates the lowest income decile indirectly paid 14.5% tax on its income, and the highest decile indirectly paid 2.3% tax on its income. I tried to take a screen shot, but I guess I can’t do that.
It is kind of humorous (but annoying) that anti-business politicians in Minnesota very much do not understand this point. One often hears them complaining that our corporate taxes aren’t high enough, and in the next breath that the poor pay too much in tax (based on this report of the DOR), not realizing that they are contradicting themselves.
A couple of questions / points:
If we take the corporate income tax to land on employees, shareholders, and customers — can we take, at least as a first approximation– the distribution within those categories as: proportional to pre-tax change compensation, proportional to ownership percentage, proportional to pre-tax change consumption? If so wouldn’t it still make sense to characterize it as a tax cut for the rich, given that all three sub-components would dollar wise, disproportionately benefit the rich?
How would the retained earnings part work? Wouldn’t that look an awful lot like an income tax?
That’s an odd way of describing a cut as disproportionately favoring the rich. If you simply reduced everyone’s taxes by one percent, people who paid a lot of taxes would save more dollars than people who paid few taxes. I don’t think that’s what Plumber, and other people who claim the recent cut favored the rich, mean.
What I am suggesting is including corporate earnings, retained or paid out, as income to the stockholder, taxed as such.
I frequently see in the newspapers claims of the sort “$60B of the $80B in tax cuts will go to households making more than $500k/year” (numbers made up). So clearly at least some people think that’s a relevant way in which tax cuts can favor the rich.
—
Ah, I see. But what do you do about owners that live outside the jurisdiction?
I don’t particularly object to this in spirit, but in practice we currently have a system that is particularly lenient in how it taxes capital gains, and the move towards stock buybacks artificially shifts corporate distributions into that category.
There has been a long tradition in the U.S. of selectively applying libertarian arguments against “imbalances” when they work against the wealthy and then leaving imbalances in place when they don’t. Any changes should be judged against the actual political landscape rather than an abstract ideal people pretend to be motivated by*.
* I do not mean to imply that David is one of these people.
The main problem with current capital gains taxation is that it is based on nominal rather than real values, so if there is inflation you end up being taxed on fictitious gains.
With my system, if the company reinvests the money the stockholder is taxed on it as ordinary income. He has a capital gain only if the increase in the value of the stock he sells is more than the amount of reinvested corporate income that he has already paid income tax on–and a capital loss if it is less.
One of the advantages of that is that it eliminates the tax incentive to reinvest rather than paying out dividends, in order to convert the money into capital gain rather than income.
Isn’t reinvesting something we want to incentivize?
Is “reinvestment” distinct from other expenses (e.g. is paying salaries a form of reinvestment), and if so how are they distinguished?
In a free market presumably not: whether you should reinvest should depend on the chances of the investment paying off. Eliminate the bias and companies would reinvest to the extent that makes sense and distribute the remaining profits as dividends.
Part of the obsession with the “growth” of public companies comes from the tax advantages of stock price increases versus dividends. More recently that has led to a focus on stock buybacks, which have similar advantages at the price of further divorcing the relation of price, price changes, and earnings ratios to intuitive attitude towards those.
Skef’s basic point is correct.
A dollar invested internally in the company earns a rate of return of X%. A dollar invested by the stockholder wherever he thinks it most useful earns a rate of return of Y%. If X>Y, the stockholder will prefer to have the company reinvest its profits. If Y>X, the stockholder will prefer to have the company give him the money to invest as he wishes. In both cases that’s the right answer–but under current circumstances the stockholder may prefer the company to reinvest even if Y>X, because that way the money eventually comes to him as capital gains instead of income.
Yes. It’s using profits to acquire additional capital assets, not just spending on inputs to production.
That’s very quick. Too quick.
What about new intellectual property? What about the distinction between an employee working on an “existing investment” versus a “new project”? Are they tracking their hours based on what kind of intellectual property they produce? Is there any kind of intellectual property that is not a “new investment” in some sense?
If new intellectual property is not reinvestment, and Apple contracts all of its factory work to third parties, how would such a tax apply to Apple?
In terms of manufacturing: If an existing machine is repaired with a module that contains a new option, where does that fall on the line?
Once you attach a large monetary significance to the line between “expenses” and “reinvestment”, it transforms from a mere conceptual question to one that many parties have great interest in seeing answered a certain way. It would reach into every aspect of business.
The distinction between expenses and reinvestment is already there in the definition of corporate profits. If not, then any firm that failed to pay dividends would count as having zero profits.
Are you suggesting that reinvestment that consists of buying land or another firm or paying off bondholders counts as a use of profit, while reinvestment that consists of building a factory counts as an expense to be subtracted from revenue in calculating profit?
There are more than one mechanisms for distributing profits back to shareholders. Stock buybacks are another.
I’m suggesting that there is no straightforward way of distinguishing between business expenses and reinvestment. Say that every year corporation X tends to distribute 5% of its gross receipts as a dividend. Then after the proposed law gets passed, it distributes a 1% dividend. Based on past patterns, you might think that the company is now reinvesting at least 4% of its gross. But the company can also claim that the business environment has changed and profits have decreased.
To tax reinvestment as distinct from expenses there needs to be a standard for what constitutes reinvestment. The standard “what would have been a dividend” is counterfactual and accordingly not very useful. If there is no standard, every business will claim that whatever isn’t returned by a dividend or by a buyback isn’t reinvestment.
This sounds as though you think that isn’t already the case under the present tax law. Do you?
So is reinvesting the profits, since it, like a stock buyback, raises the value of the stock.
If I’m being asked to clarify my understanding, the first issue is to distinguish two uses of “reinvestment”.
On the shareholder side, that term can be used to refer to a policy in which any dividends are automatically directed towards new purchases of the stock. This is just an investment policy and does have clear tax implications (although they don’t much differ from a different policy of investing dividends of stock A in stock B).
On the business side, reinvestment refers to directing money that could be used to pay dividends to increase the business opportunities of the company. This can be a useful way of thinking about a corporate balance sheet. How “real” the category is depends on the type of business and the way it is managed. There is not a line in the books next to each debit indicating what percentage of it is an expense and what is a reinvestment. Ask a manager how many hours one employee worked on maintaining existing business and how many (trying to) open up a new market, and the manager might not know.
Still, a typical business probably has a reasonable idea of the split. But (I would say) this reasonable idea depends in part on reinvestment not being a measure of much legal significance. At the end of the year, the tax man is interested in what does and does not count as profit, not in a tripartite categorization into profit, standard expenses, and reinvestment. If you spend all of your “spare money” on attempting to set up new business this year, you haven’t made any profit and you won’t pay any tax.
Any proposal to 1) tax corporate reinvestment while 2) considering “normal expenses” to not count as reinvestment faces the usual Goodhart’s Law problem. What was a measure is now a target.
Anyway, as I’ve said my understanding is that there is no current accounting standard for that tripartite distinction. A record of every corporate credit and debit can tell you the difference between the numbers, but not the ratio between standard expense and reinvestment.
Is that wrong?
That’s what I was referring to.
Yes. But the issue you raised of distinguishing expenditure on reinvesting profit from expenditure on producing goods is crucial to what counts as profit.
A company pays an employee $50,000 in wages. If he is producing goods to be sold for revenue, that expenditure is a cost and so gets subtracted from revenue in calculating profit. If he is building them a new factory, that expenditure is coming out of profit, so they don’t get to subtract the cost of his labor from their revenue in calculating the profit they are taxed on.
On the contrary. If your revenue is a million dollars greater than the cost of producing that revenue and you spend that million dollars increasing the firm’s assets or decreasing its liabilities, it was a million dollars of profit and is taxed as such.
Other than dividends, what are you imagining happens to profits? On your model they don’t seem to exist. Building a new factory, buying stock in another company, paying off loans, are all ways of spending the money but they are not expenses of earning it so don’t get subtracted from revenue in calculating profit.
Yes.
In your view, if a company makes a profit and doesn’t pay it out as dividends, what happens to it?
In my proposal, the information the corporation has to provide to the IRS is the same as at present–how much profit it made. The difference is that the profit is then attributed to the stockholders as income, whether the corporation pays it to them as dividends or invests it.
The subject you are raising here is capital expenditures. Conflating this subject with taxation of “reinvestment” is dubious for (at least) two reasons.
1. Capital expenditures are not fully expensed in the year of purchase because they are treated as assets. The company pays for the factory but then also owns the factory. If a company could treat the purchase as a single expense, they would look less- or un-profitable in the first year and unrealistically profitable in later years. Partly to avoid that, tax law spreads the tax advantage of the asset purchase out over a period of years via depreciation, which is not an actual measure of the changing value of the asset but a mechanical way to make the tax advantage gradual.
2. One of the ongoing sources of amusement about crude versions of contemporary Marxism is the tendency to look at economics through the lens of a 19th century factory, when things have become rather more complicated. To take capital expenditures and relabel them “reinvestment” makes just that mistake.
This is why I asked about Apple as the example of an intellectual-property driven company (a question you never answered). If corporate taxation is to be based on “reinvestment”, and Apple’s hard assets mostly amount to some real estate*, would they pay any taxes under that scheme? And speaking conceptually, do they reinvest in other important ways?
* I know that Apple owns some chip firms; I don’t know if any of those actually own fabs. It wouldn’t be unusual if they didn’t, there are lots of chip design firms that farm out all the fabrication to the few huge companies in that market.
The manner of the question suggests that I’m missing something obvious, and if that’s the case I’m still missing it. Setting aside issues like capital expenditures that get special treatment, profit can be more or less the money that is left over.
Now, you raise some significant points about the games a corporation can play with that simple notion. If they don’t want there to be a profit some year, or want to limit what is considered profit to be whatever is returned via dividend, they could for example move the money into a shell company. But as far as taxes go that doesn’t just magically solve the problem, because the shell company would itself be a corporation and would have this money go onto its books and not off. Given the premise, that money would be profit for that company and be taxed.
In practice, companies will arrive at dubious ways of shuffling money around, and the government will have to intervene to identify and, if necessary, shut down those patterns. Enron famously did a lot of that sort of thing, although mostly as a means of debt hiding and profit-faking.
But those problems don’t make the basic idea stupid on its face. If the goal is to tax profits you can tax them where they wind up. A company that moves assets to third parties and then back would under ordinary circumstances wind up being taxed more, as the assets are taxed as the profits of the off-book company and then taxed again when moved on-book. The “control” is the need to provide some value to the shareholder and (at least in our system) the significance of profitability measurements to shareholders.
At least one of us is.
A company makes a profit. It uses the profit to buy assets. It’s still a profit and taxed as such.
In my proposal, the company calculates its profit the same way it currently does for corporate income tax, then attributes it to the stockholders as income instead of paying corporate income tax on it.
How does that require the company to make any distinction it isn’t already making?
You do realize that the corporate income tax is on profit, not revenue?
This is what we’ve been talking about the whole time, so I don’t see how you can be asking this question is good faith. Don’t be an asshole.
Why don’t you explain how:
1) My description of capital expenditure taxation versus expensing is inaccurate
or
2) How the capital expenditure system is equivalent to a tax on reinvestment in your eyes
(That is, explain specifically, if at a high level, how in practice the current system distinguishes between normal expenses, reinvestment, and profit, whether it be by capital expenditures or some other mechanism, rather than simply asserting once again that it does. That way everyone reading, including me, can know why what you say is true is true.) And:
3) Roughly speaking, how your tax would apply to Apple.
I have been patiently offering answers, right or wrong, to a number of your questions and you have left almost all of the questions I have raised unanswered.
Apple would calculate its profit in the same way it does now. Instead of paying corporate income tax on that profit, as it now does, it would attribute all of it to its stockholders, each of them would report his share of it as income and pay income tax on it.
Do you see some problem with that?
I haven’t been responding to all of your points because I have not been able to understand what your model of the system is. In particular, why do you think my proposal raises any accounting questions that the present tax system does not raise, given that the calculation of corporate income (i.e. profit) is the same in both?
The question I have been asking from the start is whether that process would count as having taxed “reinvestment” separately from routine expenses.
Setting aside whether capital expenditure rules count as taxing reinvestment in the first place, suppose person A says there is a tax on food. Person B buys a loaf of bread and notices it isn’t taxed and asks A about that. A responds that the tax is specifically on chocolate, and given that chocolate is a food there is a tax on food. This is a valid applications of the term “tax on food”, but that does not mean that in this system there is what would normally be understood as a tax on food.
Now, exceptions do not of course generally invalidate rules. A system in which all but three foods are taxed can be a system with a food tax as normally understood. Somewhere between three exceptions and a chocolate-specific tax is a fuzzy line, and it is not necessary to determine what that line is to have the discussion about whether a particular system is a food tax — you can just discuss that system and consider if it is near enough to the line so that vagueness intrudes.
What I am doubting is whether given the information currently collected in the process of corporate accounting one can introduce what would be commonly understood as a “reinvestment tax”. I don’t doubt that one could introduce a tax on particular forms of reinvestment. I am doubting whether, in the contemporary economy, the forms you can straightforwardly tax cover enough of what would commonly be considered “reinvestment” to constitute a reinvestment tax. Hence the analogy above.
I have discussed a couple features of the actual tax system at a high level, and also offered an explanation of how profits can be classified and taxed based on simple balance sheet accounting. You have said little about concrete issues and said that you can’t understand my model of the tax system. Would it be accurate to say that you have strong a priori reasons to believe that the corporate tax system must work the way you say it does, but don’t actually know any of the details of the accounting? If you do know how the accounting level works, can you say a few words about that? Are the capital expenditure rules what you have in mind, or something else? Nothing about confusion in my model prevents anyone from explaining how the current system allows what you say it allows.
It isn’t a “reinvestment tax.” It’s a tax on corporate profits. Reinvestment is one of the things the corporation can do with the profits. Paying dividends is another thing. Piling up dollars in a safe is another thing.
I don’t understand the question. Expenses are not taxed–they are what is subtracted from revenue to calculate profit. Reinvestment is one of the things that can be done with profit. Profit is taxed–under present law and under my proposed change.
You asked how, under my scheme, Apple would be taxed. I replied that profit would be calculated just as it now is. Given that answer, which I had already given for the general case, I don’t understand why you asked the question. You seem to think that what I am describing raises accounting problems that don’t already exist, and keep ignoring the fact that it uses precisely the same accounting as the present system. The only sense I can make of that is that you are somehow misunderstanding what I said, and I can’t figure out how.
David, this discussion started with you saying
and my asking
and you saying
I’ve been asking how one could implement the system you describe as one where “if the company reinvests the money the stockholder is taxed on it as ordinary income.” That is the topic of discussion.
And as I thought I had explained several times over, the stockholder is taxed on it not because it is reinvested but because what was available to be reinvested was profit.
Suppose the company earns a profit and puts it in the safe. Some of the money is on the top shelf of the safe and some on the bottom. If I wrote “the stockholder is taxed on the profit in the safe, whether it is on the top shelf or the bottom,” would your response be to ask how the tax authorities could know which shelf it was on? That’s exactly the same as my saying “the stockholder is taxed on the profit the corporation makes, whether it is reinvested, paid as dividends, or used in some other way.”
And, not for the first time, why, in your view, does my proposal raise any accounting problem not raised by the present law, given that both are defining profit in the same way and taxing it? You keep ignoring that.
No, I have not been ignoring it. I have been trying to communicate the accounting issue the whole time.
To use your metaphor, what will be in the safe is the money left over after spending of whatever kind the company engages in. An accountant can tally that up; it will be a combination of normal currency-denominated accounts and assets that are legally considered investments.
Any funds that are spent by the company will not be in the safe, although assets purchased with those funds may be.
What current tax law considers treats as an asset is, roughly:
1) Currency denominated accounts and other standard investments (e.g. if the company buys some other company’s stock).
2) Assets with a clear book value (which in almost all cases have a clear book value because they were bought by the company from some other company or individual). This includes things like concrete assets (computers, factories), rights to use someone else’s intellectual property, and so forth. Many of these will have a depreciation schedule, such that the book value decreases with time and the company gets to expense the difference.
What is definitely not in the safe is any money spent by the company. If the company spent money on an asset with a book value, that will be in the safe and therefore that spending will be “counted” in that sense.
What this means is that any reinvestment on the part of the company that is not in an asset with a clear book value is not differentiated from a standard expense under current tax law.
So, to give a clear example: suppose the company pays workers to develop a new device that it then patents. In doing this the company has spent money on an asset. The money spent is treated as an expense — the company does not pay any tax those funds because the corporate tax is a tax on profit. Is the patent treated as an asset? No, because it does not have a clear book value. It was not purchased from another company, and it is difficult to determine what it will be worth. Current tax law currently shrugs and says “well, if it winds up being worth something later, it will probably be profitable and we will tax those profits.”
This is the sense, which I have repeatedly tried to explain, that current tax law cannot provide a general reinvestment tax. Companies can reinvest by developing their own new things (by paying employees to do that), or by buying them from outside sources. Only the latter kind of reinvestment is distinguished by the current accounting laws so that it could be taxed separately.
To claim that only purchases that fall under the capital expenditure rules should count as “reinvestment” is to make the same mistake as some Marxists are prone to, which is to model the modern economy as a 19th century factory. Paying employees to develop new intellectual property is a form of reinvestment. If the payroll is treated as an expense, and the new intellectual property is not treated as an asset, the reinvestment is not being taxed.
Reading the back-and-forth, I think the issue is that skef and DavidFriedman are using slightly different definitions of “profit”. Making up terms, for David “profit” is synonymous with “taxable profit”, whereas skef is using a more inclusive definition that I’ll call “accounting profit”.
In the current system, each company fills out a form, and at the bottom is a number which gets multiplied by a corporate tax rate to calculate the amount the company owes. David is saying the company does everything the same up to this point, but instead of paying this tax to the government, allocates a portion of the “taxable profit” to each shareholder, who then pays it at their personal rate. Everything taxable remains taxable, everything nontaxable remains nontaxable, the only differences are who pays and the rate that individual pays.
I think skef is confused by this because his “accounting profit” includes items that have already been excluded from “taxable profit”. I think he’s using “profits” to mean something closer to the amount of money the company has left over at the end of the year, and some expenditures that are considered investments or assets are deducted from “accounting profit” before “taxable profit” is determined.
As for how David’s system accounts for these exclusions, I think the answer is “it doesn’t”. The company calculates a number using the same methodology it currently does, but instead of paying taxes based on this number, it assigns others to be responsible for amounts adding up to the same total.
Now is this is a good idea? I don’t really see the advantages. How does the company fairly allocate the “taxable profit” between different classes of stock? Does an employee with unexercised restricted stock option immediately owe taxes? Does it benefit the US government to forgo collecting taxes from non-US shareholders? Is compliance better when collecting from a few corporations rather than lots of individuals?
My guess is that many of the largest owners of the stock (college endowments, trust funds, offshore shell companies, the really-really-rich with teams of lawyers and creative accountants) are going to figure out ways to pay lower than the current corporate rates, and thus if one wanted to make the change revenue neutral, the overall rates for the rest who pay they tax at personal rates would have to go up.
Fair question that hadn’t occurred to me. Probably the same way it allocates dividends, since that’s how the money eventually gets through to a shareholder, whether the current one or the one he sells his shares to.
First, it eliminates the illusion of a tax that the government collects but no person pays, corporations not really being people.
Second, it eliminates the double taxation of income that comes through a corporation.
Third, it eliminates the incentive for corporations to reinvest rather than paying dividends in order to convert the income that reaches the stockholder into capital gains.
So, modafinil is finally starting to become affordable in generic form. $40 per month for the 200mg tablets (max normal dose) at many pharmacies with a GoodRx coupon. The prices seem to be still bouncing around at most pharmacies, but there’s been a generic at Costco for around $40 for at least two years. (I’m not clear whether their online pharmacy has it, but the brick-and-mortar stores definitely do.)
I want to propose that patients and doctors should now consider off-label modafinil as a first line treatment for ADHD.
More recent studies tend to show that modafinil’s effect is stronger in people who are starting off from a lower baseline (e.g., lower IQ groups do better), which starts to make modafinil sound as much like a treatment for cognitive handicaps as anything else.
As gwern has pointed out, there was an ADHD trial in children that looked promising, but it was pulled because of a single subject that might have gotten Stevens Johnson Syndrome.
Current ADHD meds aren’t really that good, with widespread concern about “zombification” and growth stunting in kids, tolerance, effects regressing to the mean over years, habit-forming potential when not used as directed, etc. Modafinil studies have not shown much evidence for any of these problems, although there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence for tolerance, and I don’t think there have been a lot of long-term studies yet.
The tiny risk of SJS seems massively outweighed by the benefits of a better treatment for ADHD. SJS is so rare that there’s a case to be made that by making a better ADHD drug an option, even the reduction in accidental deaths from poor focus and impulsive behavior would offset SJS on its own.
Even if modafinil only works roughly as well as the other stimulants (or less!) on average, in the spirit of personalized medicine, it would be really good to have another stimulant on offer, just for those for whom the current meds don’t work well. Modafinil works on totally different systems of the brain than the current ADHD drugs. Anecdotally, 50mg of modafinil once a day works way better for my ADHD than any of the normal stimulants I’ve tried. I also had no problem getting an off-label script from my doctor. Since the drug has a very long half life, sleep deprivation is obviously a concern. But I’ve been able to manage it by sticking to a low dose, skipping days occasionally, and very good sleep hygiene (sleep mask, f.lux, low screen time in the evenings, melatonin every night, etc.) Even with all of that I will occasionally wake up at night and have trouble getting back to bed, but I make sure to make up the sleep debt quickly, and the life-changing improvement to my ADHD is worth it.
Yes, the Costco online pharmacy has it, too. I’ve been getting it from there for the last 6 months because the nearest store is 2 hours away. I switched because of insurance and because i could get a 90-day supply under Oklahoma’s ludicrous drug laws, which limit you to 30 days of schedule II stimulants. I’m a firm convert.
Was that a PCP or a psychologist? I don’t know if there’s been some legal change but it seems like PCP have been more reluctant to prescribe on their own in the last decade or so. Now it feels like they do check ups and refer to specialists. At that point I’m not sure they need to even be a doctor …
He’s a PCP internist. I don’t know if it’s a representative sample, because we have a good relationship, and I know in general he doesn’t go out of his way to send people to specialists.
I did once have a psychiatrist for prescribing my ADHD meds, who declined to try modafinil because he’d “tried it with three patients and it didn’t work.” (Airtight reasoning there, huh?) More often, though, the reaction of medical people seems to range from “haven’t heard of it” to “that’s that newer stimulant, right? Schedule 4? Eh, I don’t see why not.”
No mission this time. Instead, a question.
What is the biggest historical mystery? I’m looking for something we sure wish we knew, and might possibly know, but just don’t know right now.
What would Alexander the Great have done if he didn’t get sick and how might it have affected the rise of the Roman Empire?
This might not be the same kind of mystery as you’re referring to, but I think it counts as a pretty big one.
I think that falls in the category of things we couldn’t possibly know.
And for the answer, see …
Was Jesus actually divine?
The question is how we could possibly know that at this remove. What evidence would you accept as proof or near proof of such a claim?
our standard for evidence is single eyewitness testimony, no?
The best proof of Jesus’ divinity would be hard evidence that he rose from the dead after being crucified.
What’s the best we might hope for? Perhaps a document containing eyewitness testimony of the resurrection by someone from that time who is already a known figure not known for bullshitting.
Such a document could possibly exist. It almost certainly doesn’t, because if it did, early Christians would have been very eager to show it to the world.
Somewhat likelier would be a document containing eyewitness testimony of the resurrection by some unknown person or merely eyewitness testimony of seeing Jesus alive days after being taken down from the cross. Still pretty darn unlikely, for the same reason.
@johan_larson
Unfortunately, authors from that time known for not bullshitting are pretty thin on the ground. If they didn’t bullshit, well, those who copied and recopied and re-recopied what they wrote might have.
The gospels include claims of several of the disciples having seen Jesus after he rose from the dead. I’m not sure whether any of the apostles wrote the gospels themselves[1], but if not, they gave their testimony to the writers of the gospels. Paul wrote a ton of the content of the New Testament, and reports a firsthand interaction with Jesus after his death in a kind of vision on the road to Damascus.
[1] I think the tradition is that John and Matthew were written by Jesus’ apostles, and Mark was written by a follower who wasn’t in Jesus’ inner circle, but I don’t know how well that holds up under modern scholarship. Luke is pretty clear about being written by a later convert who was trying to get the story written down in a coherent form. I think the original apostles were mostly not very educated or literate men, whereas Paul and Luke were highly educated and literate.
@albatross11
Doesn’t hold up well at all.
Elaborate?
@The original Mr. X
For anything where I delve into my library, gonna have to wait for the appropriate effortpost, but:
No gospel is presented as a first-person narrative, a memoir of the form “the Jesus I knew”, etc. These are traditional ascriptions from the early Church.
Mark is traditionally ascribed to a companion of Peter. However, it shows evidence of being stitched together from other written accounts to serve a purpose (the “Markan Sandwich,” in which a story is interrupted to insert another story, is often seen as evidence, for example). Why would someone who had first or second hand personal experience be working from other written sources?
Matthew is traditionally ascribed to Matthew, one of the disciples. However, Matthew uses Mark as a source, and shares Q* with Luke. This raises the same issue, but moreso.
Luke and Acts are traditionally ascribed to Luke, Paul’s companion (scholars tend to agree that Luke and Acts were produced by the same author/community). Luke shares Mark and Q as sources with Matthew, and does explicitly state that other sources were used in composing the gospel. The problem here becomes identifying Luke a companion of Paul: the Paul one gets from Acts is different from the Paul one gets from the authentic epistles of Paul, in some ways that are kind of inconsistent (eg, Paul sees his authority as independent and indicates he has not always gotten along with the estalbished authority figures in the early movement; Acts disagrees with that).
John is traditionally ascribed to John, Zebedee’s son, one of the disciples. It’s probably got the best Greek of any of the gospels: not super-highfalutin’ Greek by any standard, but better than the others (I think; I’m working from memory here). By Acts 4:13, John is identified as uneducated (and thus almost certainly illiterate); Mark identifies him as a peasant fisherman. How did this peasant fisherman end up with solid Greek? John is also really different from the synoptic gospels.
All of the gospels also reflect historical context at the time they were written rather than the immediate historical context of Jesus’ ministry. For example, the Pharisees figure heavily as opponents of Jesus in Mark, but at the time Jesus lived and died, the Pharisees were neither numerous nor an especially big deal. They gained in stature in the middle and late 1st century, especially after the destruction of the Temple; they would have been the opponents of the Jesus movement/early Church/whatever.
The gospels were all put together from sources (some mix of oral-only and written, probably) which we no longer have. Jesus said something, someone remembered it – the stuff that’s most likely to get remembered is the shortest, pithiest stuff (you can look at the parables, for example, and try to separate the earliest forms that read like stories spoken aloud from the ones that read as “written,” you can try to separate the earliest forms from interpretations supplied by the early Church, etc).
*Q, or quelle, meaning “source” in German (calling it the Q source is common, but that’s kind of like saying ATM machine or PIN number) is, by definition, the stuff that Matthew and Luke share that’s not in Mark. Some scholars see strong parallels between Q and Thomas. Some scholars seem very confident in their ability to reconstruct an entirely hypothetical document. Both Matthew and Luke also have exclusive stuff; again, some scholars get very confident in their ability to identify different documents.
The Gospel according to John was IIRC written about sixty years after the brief period when Peasant Fisherman John was serving as a disciple of Jesus. That’s plenty of time to acquire a high level of literacy, and since most traditions have him serving in a vaguely priestly role somewhere in the Hellenic world, plenty of reason.
That said, I believe the usual interpretation is that my namesake dictated his gospel to one of his followers, who presumably would have been a literate Greek scribe or cleric.
It’s possible he could have gone and done that, but the far more plausible explanation is the standard scholarly one: the gospel of John was produced by a community which saw itself as linked to the “beloved disciple” and which also produced the Johannine epistles. Like the Synoptics, John appears to have been stitched together from multiple sources. In all these cases, that would argue against it being written down or dictated by one person – it appears to be the work of multiple authors, with one final editor. Most scholars think the gospel is fairly ahistorical, but I know that Raymond Brown defended elements of its historicity.
@ dndnrsn:
The vast majority of ancient authors aren’t identified in-text. As for the lack of first-person narrative, it wasn’t unusual for eyewitnesses to describe events in the third person; both Caesar and Xenophon, for example, wrote in this way, and nobody doubts the authorship of their works. (And presumably the early Church was aware of this convention, since we have no records of anybody saying “Hang on a minute, how can this be written by one of the disciples, when it talks about everything in the third person?”)
I’m afraid I don’t understand your example: why is it that someone would interrupt a story to insert another story if he had the stories written down, but not if he’d heard the stories and was writing them up from memory?
I’m not convinced that the various elaborate source arguments New Testament scholars have come up with are necessary, nor that they’re in accordance with Occam’s Razor. If you have multiple people passing on what somebody said, of course they’re going to report the same things, particularly if that person phrased himself in a pithy, easy-to-remember way. Assuming that verbal similarities mean that one witness is cribbing from another, or that they’re both cribbing from a third person, seems overcomplicated.
I’m not sure Acts does disagree; it reports Paul’s disagreements with other disciples over the circumcision of gentiles, for example. And I’m not sure that the point is that decisive, anyway. To take an example from a slightly different context, Cicero in a lot of his letters and speeches comes across as a conceited, self-satisfied jerk, but his contemporaries seem generally to have respected him as a noble and patriotic man. Does this mean that his contemporaries didn’t really know him, or that Cicero’s works aren’t genuine? No, it just means that assessments of someone can vary, and that people often come across differently in person than they do in their writings.
(As an aside, the insistence on ascribing works to vaguely-defined “communities” is one of the aspects of modern Biblical scholarship which aggravates me the most. Indeed, I’m not even sure what it would mean for a “community” to write a book — each person contributes one paragraph and then they all put them together to make a full-length work?)
As John Schilling says, John had a long life and therefore plenty of time to pick up a good knowledge of Greek, particularly if (as tradition holds) he spent most of his later career in the Greek-speaking cities of Asia. And of course, there’s also the possibility that “agrammatos” in 4.13 is meant to mean “Unable to write the high-faultin’ Attic Greek used by the literati” rather than “Unable to write, full stop”.
The Pharisees became the dominant strand of Judaism after the destruction of the Temple, but I’ve never seen any source suggesting that they were unimportant before that, so citation definitely needed.
Also, speaking of conditions in Jesus’ time, it’s worth noting that the naming practices indicated by the Gospels match those of first-century Palestine, which were different to those of the Jewish Diaspora. If the Gospel stories had originated or been heavily reworked by the Diaspora Christian community, it’s unlikely that this would be the case.
Don’t forget that, from the beginning, the Church had people tasked specifically with remembering and passing on Jesus’ teachings, and that the Evangelists could presumably have consulted such people when writing their Gospels (if indeed they weren’t such people themselves). So I think the situation was a bit less chaotic than “Jesus said something, someone remembered it” implies.
@ John Schilling:
It was the common practice for even literate people to dictate their words to a scribe, who would be able to write quicker and more clearly. (That’s why, incidentally, several of the Epistles end with statements such as “I, Paul, write this with my own hand” — this was added as a sort of autograph, so that people could see his handwriting and be sure that the letter as a whole was a genuine dictation.)
As a historian, I can’t think of any field of history where books are attributed to “communities”. Books are written by individuals, even if they synthesise previous works, reflect the preoccupations of their communities, etc.
The early church ascribed the documents to individual authors but it didn’t do this until some time in the second century, after most of the gospels were written. The identifications made by the early Church don’t make sense in light of the way that Matthew and Luke use Mark as a source and share a hypothetical source.
As I understand it – to go deeper, I would have to do more reading than the books I have immediately at hand – the argument is that, orally, stories circulate as individual units. The Markan “sandwiching” is, supposedly, meant to accomplish an objective.
There are places where the text matches Mark, to the point of including crummy Greek. It’s not verbal similarities, it’s textual similarities. When Mark and Luke repeat stories in Mark, they do so in the same sequence; this makes far more sense if they’re both working from Mark as a textual source than if they’re repeating the same orally-circulated stories as appeared in Mark.
You can’t say “Occam’s Razor” when the simpler explanation is not as good as the more complicated explanation. The four-source hypothesis explains the patterns of agreement and disagreement within the synoptics better than the traditional Church assignment of authorship.
It’s not decisive, but lots of little things pile up. The construction of Paul’s authority in Acts is quite different from Paul’s construction of his authority in Galatians (maybe the Pauline epistle where he most fiercely defends his authority, and almost unanimously considered by scholars to be authentic Paul).
No. It more or less means that, lacking information about the individual authors, we can try to figure out details about the community that the authors existed in.
John had a long life according to church traditions which are kind of hard to verify; what we have to go on is a document which traditionally was ascribed to John. The Greek in John is better than, say, Mark, and the level of Greek in Mark still indicates some level of education.
Not unimportant, but not as important as they are presented.
The gospel stories originate within first-century Palestine, or at least, the synoptics definitely do.
There wasn’t a church from the beginning, though. Jesus accumulated a following, sure, but there’s a reason that scholars talk about the “Jesus movement” and so on.
Attributing the book to a community is basically shorthand for that, in the same way that I would say “Mark writes” even though the exact authorship is unclear.
@The original Mr. X
We can go through it piece by piece, although I’d prefer to wait until my effortpost series reaches the gospels, when I’ll
take books off the shelf and move them to a different place, never to be reshelveddo research.However: on a slightly higher level, there’s more incentive to preserve traditional views of the provenance of the Bible than there was incentive to tear them down (atheists mostly have other avenues of attack, after all). If, say, the four-source hypothesis was easily debunked, it probably would have been. It’s not open-and-shut, but I doubt we ever will have anything open-and-shut, because papyrus, etc, rots. A lot of scholars get really fanciful (Q reconstructions, attempts to figure out what Jesus “really said” a la the Jesus Seminar, etc) but the core stuff like the four-source hypothesis, conservative looks at the provenance of some of the Pauline epistles, etc, seems like the most likely possibility out of those available.
@ dndnrsn:
“Some time in the second century” is only a few decades after the Gospels were written, and AFAIK there’s no evidence of either any variant ascriptions of authorship or of any stage where the Gospels were circulated as anonymous accounts. Even if you want to doubt the traditional ascription of authorship, there seems no good reason to doubt that the ascriptions are original, rather than something which happened at a later stage of circulation.
But Mark wasn’t circulating individual oral stories, he was writing a complete literary account of Jesus’ life. So why shouldn’t he have adopted some literary, as opposed to oral, conventions for his writing?
I presume you mean “Matthew and Luke”, rather than Mark and Luke. But I don’t think the structural similarities between Mark and Matthew are as big as you suggest: some of the stories are told in the same order, to be sure, but other aren’t. As for the texts matching, again, if people are reporting what somebody said, you’d expect their reports to agree in many respects, especially if, as was the case in the early Church, you had a relatively small body of people tasked with ensuring that the “standard version” of the teaching was preserved and passed on. And crummy Greek is also what you’d expect from people who probably only spoke Greek as their second or third language.
Paul’s Epistles are mostly written in response to things going wrong, so of course he’s going to emphasise his authority in them.
“Church traditions” which date from a few decades after his death, and which make a claim (“This person had a long life”) that’s not at all improbable. If John had been a secular author and a source a few decades after his death had reported that he was very old when he died, no modern classicist would doubt such a report, so this seems to be a case of New Testament scholars creating difficulties where none actually exist.
Again, citation needed.
Literally every early Christian text, both within the Bible and without, indicates that the apostles were seen as authoritative teachers of Jesus’ life and teachings. Nor is there any reason to doubt this, save for some Whiggish prejudice that the early Church “must have been” primitive and disorganised.
As an ancient historian, New Testament scholars seem far more likely to indulge in wild flights of theoretical fancy than their ancient history counterparts, so empirically speaking, this claim seems dubious. And modern academia generally rewards people who tear down traditional views — “Received wisdom is wrong, here’s what really happened” is much easier to turn into a paper than “Everything happened like we always thought it did, nothing new to say here.”
If you want to claim that accounts of Jesus’ resurrection are later accretions, then the more stages you can squeeze in between the original events and the time the accounts were written down, the better.
AFAIK, the kinds of textual similarities we are talking about are the kinds that get college students into honor court on charges of plagiarism. It’s word for word transcription of a previous source. IIRC, it’s not merely “they are telling the same story and the same things happen”.
Define “original.” They are not original to the earliest recognizable written version of the documents. At some point in the early-but-not-super-early Church, people start to get curious as to who wrote these, and they come up with stories about it.
Yes. He was stitching together various accounts, not sitting down and taking dictation in memoir form, or writing down his own recollections, it would appear. Matthew and Luke then use his account.
See what HBC posted. There are places where Matthew and Luke just straight-up took Mark and copied it over. Sometimes they correct grammar, but sometimes they don’t. In some places they smooth off rough edges and make what’s going on more theologically suitable to evolving Christology: compare the baptism accounts in the Synoptics (eg, in Mark, Jesus just comes and gets baptized, in Matthew John objects to baptizing Jesus but Jesus insists it needs to happen, in Luke the language is shifted slightly to obfuscate a little who exactly baptized Jesus).
No, I mean: in Galatians, Paul defends the independence of his message, his independence from other human authority, etc – he’s not just learning something from other people and passing it on. This is because he is in a crisis, competing with a different message. Acts, meanwhile, written later, has a Paul who exists within a hierarchy and being influened by others.
Imagine if there were powerful hierarchies (now, let alone in the 19th century, let alone before that) depending, at least in part, on the provenance of those texts. I imagine that it would be an area of greater contention.
Do you want the most serious book I can go dig out, or will something more basic do?
There’s no reason to doubt the church’s buttressing of its own authority except “Whiggish prejudice”? Seriously?
First: I’ve acknowledged that they can get a bit overconfident. However, I have more reason to trust secular scholars operating within a system of academic ethics who have to show their work, than a bunch of highly motivated institution-builders a couple millenia ago (And, remember, the picture we’ve got is from the people who won – what of Arius, what of Marcion?)
Second: someone who could tear down received wisdom in critical Biblical scholarship could turn that into well more than a paper, no? The objections you’re making aren’t stuff that over a century of Biblical scholars have just been too dumb/foolish to notice. It’s not just some cult where any old garbage gets published; as far as I know nobody’s pulled a Sokal hoax in the field.
There are still plenty of theological conservatives who would love to see all the German-derived critical scholarship torn down and thrown into the fire. I have a study bible of, uh, I think it’s the ESV without going up to my bookshelf: its notes cast (fairly weak) aspersions at critical scholarship (the early church assignations of authorship must be correct because, well, they were closer to the point in time than we were, right? A pseudo-Pauline letter that says it was written by Paul must be written by Paul because, hey, it says it was written by Paul, what kind of evidence do these stinkin’ Germans need?)
Someone who could convincingly refute the most basic planks of modern Biblical criticism would stand to win a great deal of fame and money – far more than an average academic in a similar field could ever expect, because the general population cares vastly more about the Bible than they do about just about any other humanities-related topic. The series of papers proving that the four-source hypothesis is bunk would be gangbusters, and then that same scholar could write a popular book about it that would shoot to the top of the NYT best-seller list.
The opportunity is there to become the most famous Biblical scholar ever to live or exist, more famous than some of the men responsible for the creation of the Church perhaps! You can’t say the incentives aren’t there. They wouldn’t just be rewarded by academia – though they would be; the incentives to make as big a splash as possible are probably what cause those flights of fancy (“I’ve reconstructed Q perfectly and it’s different from what you thought!” is a big splash, “Jesus was not an apocalypticist!” is a big splash) but also by the ordinary people whom academics are usually annoyed don’t care about academic stuff.
(Also, were the earliest critics really following the incentives? Spinoza was hardly rewarded, Reimarus seems to have kept his work a secret only published posthumously… These men were not covered in laurels for their work)
I have not claimed that. Most secular Biblical scholars (plenty of whom are believers) acknowledge that accounts of the resurrection, or at least the missing body, were there from the beginning. The earliest version of Mark has the empty tomb, stabs at reconstructing proto-gospels frequently include stuff about the resurrection, it was clearly important in the earliest moments. I am not claiming that the resurrection is a later idea, and in my experience, few scholars are. I am pointing out that few scholars think that the early church’s explanations for whom exactly wrote the gospels are reliable or correct.
@dndnrsn:
Just because it didn’t jibe with something I remembered, I briefly hunted around. Bart Ehrman maintains that we don’t have good evidence that Jesus was actually buried. His full answer is behind a paywall, but I seem to recall from one of his books, maybe Misquoting Jesus, that he maintains that the tomb and missing bodies are later additions.
He does indicate his view is a minority view in scholarship, though.
Ehrman’s commonly-used intro textbook (which I really like; he’s an engaging writer* and is fairly even-handed, at least in the intro text) doesn’t have anything like that which I remember, but I haven’t read it cover-to-cover in quite a while.
My feeling is that the original ending of Mark doesn’t “smell” like something which was made up to argue a certain point. If someone just wanted to show that the guy had come back to life, they would have produced something like the later stuff from the get-go.
*the fact that ordinary people care about the Bible in a big way means that you have academics who can write and popular writers who can get their facts straight; they’re often the same people.
My feeling is that guesswork about how somebody making up the story would have made it up is incredibly unreliable, especially when dealing with unknown individuals from very different cultures and times.
@Protagoras
Sure; I’m not going to turn my own gut hunch into a scholarly theory (I’d need a PhD to do that, and I drank too much in undergrad to have the marks to get a PhD back when I was young and foolish enough to think that was a good life plan). Still – that a more “satisfactory” ending got tacked onto Mark, that the other synoptics added better endings… That’s gotta mean something.
@ HBC:
Suppose you and I both have to memorise a speech, and then repeat it at some later date. Does the fact that our reports are substantially the same indicate that one of us is copying the other?
“Original” = “the earliest copies were attributed to a named author”. There are internal textual reasons to suppose that at least two of the Gospels were originally attributed to definite individuals. Luke begins with a dedication to Theophilus, who presumably would have known the identity of the person dedicating the work to him. John indicates that the Beloved of Disciple, ostensibly at least the author of the text (21.24), was an identifiable figure about whom rumours could circulate (21.23). And of course, the fact that, AFAIK, nobody in the ancient world disputed the attribution of the Gospels is easier to explain if they had always been associated with these individuals than if the association was a later guess.
But why does that mean that Mark had to be using written sources? We could easily imagine Mark hanging around Peter (he was his interpreter, according to Papias) enough to memorise Peter’s anecdotes about the time he spent with Jesus, and then deciding to stitch these together into a literary biography.
Depending one’s independence and allowing oneself to be influenced by others aren’t mutually exclusive, or even incongruous.
Yes, but that would be because there would be more ulterior motive to question the provenance, not because the evidence would be any weaker.
Well, it had better be quite strong, to overcome the evidence of four sources all written within living memory of the events in question.
All the early Church Fathers appeal to chains of authority to buttress their claims – “I learned this from Luke, who learned it from Peter, who was a disciple of Jesus himself.” In other words, certain people – those who were closer to the events in question – were viewed as authoritative sources on what had happened. The notion that people closer to the events are more reliable sources is an obvious and intuitive one, so there’s no reason to suppose that, in the first few decades, Peter’s (or whoever’s) account of what happened wouldn’t have been preferred to some random guy’s. On the other hand, there’s no evidence for a stage of anonymous community tradition passed around without any named sources attributed to it. So yes, I think the anonymous tradition view does depend a lot on Whiggish prejudice, along with a losing sight of just how short the period was between Jesus’ death and the Gospels being written down and of how comparatively small the early Church was.
(Actually, come to think of it, I suppose there could also be the Protestant prejudice that the Primitive Church must have consisted of an egalitarian Priesthood of All Believers, and anything that so much as hints at hierarchy is a later Romish corruption of pure Bible-based Christianity.)
There are plenty of examples of academic disciplines going down the wrong track, falling prey to group-think, adopting consensuses which were later proved wrong, etc., including in areas like the hard sciences where disproving false hypotheses ought theoretically to be relatively easy. So I think the view that we can trust the academic consensus to be free from major error is congruent with the empirical evidence.
We actually know quite a lot about Arius and Marcion, and the other major heresiarchs, because later generations tended to preserve their teachings (for the purpose of refuting them, granted, but they still preserved them). We also know that the authorship of several New Testament books was the subject of controversy in antiquity (including, interestingly, the disputed Pauline Epistles and the Johannine authorship of Revelation – an example of ancient and modern scholarship agreeing, it would seem), and that the authorship of the four Gospels wasn’t the subject of serious doubt.
@The original Mr. X
If your report of the speech includes similar grammatical errors, that might offer a clue, no? (Also, FYI, I don’t think HeelBearCub searches for HBC; you gotta use the full name or he might miss this.)
Nobody in the early church disputed the attributions of the early church because disputing those attributions might have undermined the authority of the early church, no? Scholars differ over who “Theophilus” was (one school of thought has it as a personification of all believers), and the argument that “it is dedicated to someone, who must have known who the author was, therefore it was this particular identified person” seems pretty weak to me.
Sure, it could have been oral transmission, no doubt about that. Let’s say this is right, and it was written by Mark, Peter’s associate. This doesn’t line up with Matthew being one of the disciples – why is he using the written work of another disciple’s associate? What’s with the stuff that Matthew has that Mark doesn’t – did Peter just happen to miss the Sermon on the Mount, for some reason think it wasn’t important, ? If Luke got his material from Paul (as he presumably would have were he Paul’s companion) why does he include stuff that Paul doesn’t include in his letters, even when it might be relevant? John’s picture of Jesus is really, really different from that in the synoptics – not in the sense of “different people who know one person would describe them from different angles” but in the sense that a radically different person is being described (his teachings are different, his miracles are different).
The way he describes his own authority in Galatians and the way his authority is described in Acts are very, very different. In Galatians, he emphasizes lack of contact and reliance on others; Acts emphasizes contact and reliance. They are factually, mutually exclusive at least in some details: for example, in Galatians 1:15-20, Paul insists that after his conversion experience he “did not confer with any human being” and did not go to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before him, instead going into Arabia and after that to Damascus; rather, he went to Jerusalem only three years later, but only saw Peter and James. In comparison, in Acts 9 and 10, he immediately spends time with disciples in Damascus, and visits Jerusalem “after some time had passed” – while in Jerusalem, he interacts with “the apostles” in general. These aren’t differences of emphasis, or different perspectives on the same thing, they’re incompatible. If Acts was written by an associate of Paul, why does he describe such a factually different account?
I am saying that you are giving fairly weak evidence more credence than I think it merits, despite reasons to suspect motivated reasoning on the part of those who originally came up with the accreditations. I think that, given the sort of thing I describe above (especially the radically different nature of John’s Jesus versus the Jesus of the synoptics, since this doesn’t rely on the notion that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, but is a simple reality visible to anyone who reads the books) the sort of contortions required to have all four traditional accounts of authorship be accurate are more complicated than the speculative models and vague, no-longer-extant sources of modern scholarship.
The gospel authors, whoever they were, are not reliable witnesses to the reality on the ground in that geographical area at the time Jesus lived and died. Especially when these witnesses differ between themselves on some important points – when that happens, which witness is reliable and which isn’t?
1. You’re assuming that broken-telephone situations relying on hand-copying preserve messages accurately.
2. You’re ignoring the incentives to not preserve messages accurately. “Their authority was based on appeals to chains of authority” seems like exactly the sort of situation that would lead to incentives to be less than 100% honest.
3. The shortest gap is, what, about 40 years? That’s not very short.
Protestant prejudice among 19th century German Biblical scholars is probably stronger than atheist or Whig prejudice, yeah. Their take on the Hebrew Bible is “the prophets were cool and original and raw, and then the legalists took over and ruined everything” while their take on early Christianity is “Jesus was cool and original and raw and then the early church took over and ruined everything.” I think both of these are unfair, and there’s a lot of particularly unfair Paul-hate one can find, but I don’t think this is particularly relevant to whether the answers to the question “so, who wrote these” that the church came up with in the second century were correct.
I think you mean incongruent here? In any case, sure, it is possible for fields to have big, major errors. But in the case of Biblical scholarship, there are strong incentives in all directions. I notice you’ve left out a big chunk of what I said. If it would be so easy to blow away all this overcomplicated, flight-of-fancy Biblical scholarship, how come nobody is doing it? There’d be laurels and dollar signs for whoever did, and the eternal gratitude of theological conservatives. It’s not impossible that $20 dollar bills are lying around on the ground, but one doesn’t regularly come across them lying on the ground – someone usually picks them up pretty quickly. And there’s a lot more at stake here than twenty bucks. If Biblical scholarship went down the wrong track, there should be more than enough pressure to make the cart skip over to the right track; real-deal believers outnumber everyone who took Intro to Early Christian Writings courses in undergrad by a significant margin. As much as I’d like to live in the world where dusty old academics have significant power, I don’t.
Why are scholars from the 18th century to now untrustworthy and potentially acting according to bad incentives, but church leaders the best part of two millennia ago trustworthy, reliable, etc? Why are traditional accreditations in the ancient world more trustworthy than modern scholars, with the “showing their work” of the latter far more available to us than the former? What incentives were Spinoza and Reimarus following?
That something was not seriously doubted does not mean that it is not worth doubting. Again, why should I trust people almost two thousand years ago more than people today?
Additional thoughts (I’m enjoying this!)
1. It’s not an either-or. The traditional explanations of authorship might be wrong and the speculative theories as to sources and so forth the result of an academic environment in which you gotta stake a claim.
2. I don’t think that undermining the provenance of the Gospels diminishes religious faith; my experience is that Biblical scholars are more religious than the norm, and includes people who have devoted themselves to Christianity (eg, I know Jesuits who accept all these theories; a guy doesn’t become a Jesuit, with all that entails, for something he doesn’t believe).
3. My personal feeling is that Mark as an anonymous document is more convincing as to the importance and truth of what it describes than a document produced by someone who had some place within a hierarchy. Mark the collection of stories with a weird ending by someone anonymous with wonky Greek is one of a handful of things I’ve come across where I think, maybe there is something there.
That depends; if we’re all from a region where people generally learn English imperfectly as a second or third language, making similar errors would in fact be pretty unremarkable.
Members of the early Church were quite happy to dispute the attributions of other scriptural texts, and indeed to dispute pretty much everything else. Even if mainstream Churchmen just wanted to shore up their power, it would be surprising if other groups (Gnostics, Marcionites, and so on) didn’t raise any complaints.
I know about that school of thought; it is, indeed, a good example of New Testament scholars coming up with more complicated theses instead of simple, obvious ones.
That’s because you’re not keeping the arguments straight: “This is dedicated to someone who would have known who the author was” was an argument against the idea that the Gospel was originally presented as an anonymous work, not in favour of the idea that it was written by Luke specifically.
Maybe he did – I mean, Luke and John don’t mention it, either (unless you subscribe to the theory that the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain are actually the same, of course).
Luke’s prologue seems pretty clear that his material came from multiple sources.
It’s long been recognised that John’s portrayal of Jesus is different from that of the Synoptics (indeed, that’s why they’re called “Synoptic” in the first place). But plenty of people have read the Gospels without getting the sense that John is describing a “radically different person”, so this just seems to be a subjective impression. Which is fine – we all base some of our beliefs on subjective impressions – but there seems no real reason to prefer one person’s subjective impression to another’s.
I presume “did not confer with any human being” is meant to be a translation of “ou prosanathemen sarki kai haimati”. Now, even assuming that “sarx kai haima” here is supposed to refer to “human beings”, and doesn’t have any of the metaphorical meanings used in the NT, this isn’t “factually, mutually exclusive” with the account in Acts. Acts says that Paul started preaching “immediately” after he got his sight back, which certainly seems compatible with the idea that he didn’t bother asking anyone’s permission before doing so. As for whether “some time” can refer to three years or has to be a shorter period, or whether “the apostles” can refer to two or has to refer to all of them, these objections are just quibbling.
What ulterior motives do you think people would have had for claiming that John survived to an old age? People of the time were perfectly happy to assign other prominent Churchmen much shorter lifespans.
On the contrary, where we can check the Gospel accounts of the topography, geography, flora, fauna, political structures, nomenclature, etc., of early first-century Palestine (and, in Luke’s case, of the eastern Mediterranean more generally), it’s clear that they do reliably record the situation there. Ancient historians can and do happily use the NT as a source for first-century social conditions.
Really now, lots of ancient authors differ with each other. If this is enough to make us chuck out everything an author says, we’re going to have to junk almost all ancient and medieval history.
Again, you aren’t keeping the arguments straight. I was arguing against the idea that early Christianity consisted of an amorphous “Jesus movement” without any sense of leadership; quibbling over whether or not that leadership was reliable has nothing to do with that.
Though, since you bring up the topic, it is worth pointing out that anthropologists have found plenty of societies with (reasonably effective, it would seem) methods for making sure that oral tradition doesn’t get corrupted, so generalisations about “This sort of thing can’t be reliable” are difficult to sustain. As for hand-copying, that’s an extremely silly objection to bring up: most ancient texts survive from manuscripts written centuries or millennia after the original was composed, and yet nobody throws their hands up and says “Well, I guess we’ll never have any idea what this text was about!”
The idea was that claims could be checked against those of other people who could also claim authority. Ancient people weren’t stupid, and the idea that people might distort the truth for their own ends did, in fact, occur to them.
Well, there is the view that the synoptics, at least, were written before the Jewish War, which if true would put the gap at anything between zero and forty years. But even if we discount that, forty years is still within living memory. In other words, the Evangelists wouldn’t have had to rely on oral tradition passed through however many stages of named or unnamed intermediaries; they could have gone and interviewed the sources of those traditions.
Yes, because I’m busy, so I have to focus on salient points instead of trying to go through everything.
I’m not sure what your point is here; there are lots of books, webpages, and so on, purporting to show that the Gospels are accurate. And of course, it’s not like the pressure outside academia is all in one direction: there are after all plenty of non-religious people who’d be happy to see someone prove that the Bible is all a load of rubbish.
This is just whataboutery. The incentives facing Spinoza and Reimarus have nothing to do with the incentives facing modern scholars. (And, don’t forget, you were the one who started all this talk of incentives and trustworthiness, when you made the claim that false beliefs would have been rooted out by now because of academic incentives.)
So, apparently, we’re starting to bump up against the maximum comment length, and unlike some other situations it doesn’t preserve the comment if you try to post it or whatever. Which is rather annoying for me because it just ate my comment. I’ll try to get it in under the comment limit when I’m back from the gym.
Until then: one doesn’t have to accept the speculative and sometimes vague claims of modern scholarship to recognize all the problems with the traditional account, which I think are fairly clear; a lot of little things chip away at it. The biggest problems in modern scholarship, further, all date from a period where the incentives have changed: the best and most solid work was all done when conservatives were more prominent, and the scholarship as a whole is based on work done at a time when the incentives were really different (I don’t think bringing up Spinoza is whataboutery – he didn’t lay the groundwork for so much more recent stuff because it made him popular.)
I’m going to be numbering my replies and snipping yours due to the word count limit; hopefully it will be clear what’s what. If you’d like to continue this over email or on the Discord let me know; it’s better for this sort of back-and-forth than a comments section.
1. Let’s say you’re teaching a course with a bunch of ESL students, and several of them turn in an essay assignment which has similar, in some cases the same, points, ordering, grammatical errors, etc. Surely this would at least raise suspicion?
2. If the early church didn’t dispute supposed authorship then, and the general scholarly consensus (which is, we don’t know which individual wrote each individual gospel) isn’t disputed by most scholars now, then we’re left on the one hand with the argument that they were closer to the event itself in time, and on the other hand there are all sorts of problems that can be raised with the traditional accounts of authorship.
3. How is positing that “Lover of God” might be an address to a generic believer, instead of an individual, more complicated than the various different guesses at whom an individual “Theophilus” might be? What is the “simple, obvious” explanation of who Theophilus is?
4. I haven’t argued that the Gospel of Luke, or any other of the canonical gospels, was originally circulated as an anonymous work; at a minimum, the immediate community acquaintances of the original authors presumably knew who they were. However, the authors are anonymous to us now; we don’t know who they were, and the traditional explanations have all sorts of problems that add up.
“What’s with the stuff that Matthew has that Mark doesn’t – did Peter just happen to miss the Sermon on the Mount, for some reason think it wasn’t important, ?”
Maybe he did – I mean, Luke and John don’t mention it, either (unless you subscribe to the theory that the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain are actually the same, of course).
5. The Beatitudes occur in both Matthew and Luke. The Beatitudes seem like they would fit Mark’s viewpoint pretty well. “Mark didn’t know the Beatitudes” seems like a simpler explanation than “Mark knew them but left them out.”
6. Luke’s prologue indicates he has multiple sources. Presumably, he came across these However, if Luke was the companion of Paul, it becomes weird and hard to explain when Luke-Acts clashes with Paul. “The author of Luke wasn’t Luke, Paul’s associate” seems like a simpler explanation “The author of Luke was Luke, Paul’s associate, and he clashes with Paul’s account on occasion a because of reason x, etc.”
7. The identification of the synoptic gospels, or at least the term, comes from modern scholarship, doesn’t it? With regard to the differences between John and the Synoptics, they’re pretty dramatic: John’s Jesus has different teachings (no parables, for starters), his miracles are different and performed for different reasons… If four reporters followed a politician on the campaign trail, and three turned in somewhat different but still recognizably similar reports of speeches and platform and so on, and the fourth had different speeches and positions, that would raise questions. The synoptics and John are different enough that when you take a gospel parallel book and flip through it, the difference is noticeable: you’ll have plenty of places where there’s Mark, Matthew, and Luke sharing something quite similar, and the column for John is sparese or blank, and plenty of places where John has a block of text with no synoptic parallel.
8. I don’t think these objections are just quibbling; if Luke was an associate of Paul’s, why does his account of Paul’s life – in this detail; there are others – at a minimum seem to differ?
“I am saying that you are giving fairly weak evidence more credence than I think it merits, despite reasons to suspect motivated reasoning on the part of those who originally came up with the accreditations.”
What ulterior motives do you think people would have had for claiming that John survived to an old age? People of the time were perfectly happy to assign other prominent Churchmen much shorter lifespans.
9. John living to an old age makes it possible that he was around at the same time the gospel was written, but “it’s not impossible” is weak evidence. Further, anyone who had an interest in saying the gospel was from John would have an interest in saying John lived long enough to write it. There’s still the problem that if John and Matthew are both the products of people who knew Jesus, they came up with such different portrayals.
10. The gospels, or at least the synoptics, contain material relevant to the lifetime of Jesus mixed with stuff relevant to the time the gospels were composed. Consider John’s “the Jews.”
Really now, lots of ancient authors differ with each other. If this is enough to make us chuck out everything an author says, we’re going to have to junk almost all ancient and medieval history.
11. Sources have to be taken with a grain of salt, or a shaker. A lot of ancient and medieval history is kinda shaky; even stuff that’s more recent can be pretty shaky.
12. Concerning the “Jesus movement” I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it used generically as a way of avoiding the problems of talking about a “church” very early on. I haven’t made the claim that early Christianity or whatever one wants to call it was leaderless and amorphous; I find the idea rather silly (and uncharitably speculate that it appeals to the political and personal biases of some scholars). Get a group of people together and almost inevitably you’ll at least get an informal leader.
13. Some societies are good at oral transmission, but was the relevant society one of those? I’m not sure how we’d test that. Further, nobody is saying that we have no idea what the text is about; that’s a straw man.
14. People back then weren’t dumber than we were; people in our time have been snookered, made mistakes, etc. With regard to the timeline of the gospels, that area in the late 1st century was pretty chaotic, and travel was slow and dangerous at the best of times – how easy would it have been to go around checking people’s accounts and notes?
15. My point regarding incentives is:
15a. The earliest modern critical scholars were acting in the face, and sometimes the teeth, of very powerful incentives. While a scholar today might be tempted to make a splash with sloppy work that they can’t really support, why would someone go through what Spinoza did without a really good reason?
15b. The incentives have changed over time; the weakest Biblical scholarship is usually the recent stuff, where you have some scholars bravely standing up to conservatives whose power is not what it was. The most solid stuff was done in a less friendly climate.
15c. The received wisdom in Biblical scholarship is basically “something something four-source hypothesis we don’t know who wrote these” and so on. You said that “modern academia generally rewards people who tear down traditional views” – why then is it not rewarding people for tearing down the traditional (I think something dating back centuries can be counted as “traditional”) views in Biblical scholarship?
15d. I brought up incentives because I think that academia does usually self-correct, and the experts usually do know what they’re talking about – there has to be a good reason to think otherwise, at least. Cases where really bogus stuff survives seems either to be in fields with relatively low standards (especially when they’re politically charged), fields where doing research is expensive and difficult (especially where research ethics have changed: there’s some shoddy psychological experiments where you couldn’t redo them today), or both.
16. I don’t think there’s Biblical scholars who think the Bible is rubbish, and people who think the Bible is rubbish and want weapons against it go elsewhere than this sort of scholarship. Arguing over the date of Mark and whether Thomas is linked to Q and so on doesn’t provide good gotchas.
17. Overall, what evidence do we have for the traditional explanations of who wrote the gospels? How much weight should we assign to tradition? What % chance would you assign to each traditional ascription of authorship?
Theophilus is an attested Greek name (including from before Luke’s time, so it’s not just people taking it from his prologue), and addressing works to named dedicatees is also an attested practice. So, the simple, obvious explanation is that Theophilus is a friend or patron of Luke’s, to whom he wished to dedicate his work.
You said, “At some point in the early-but-not-super-early Church, people start to get curious as to who wrote these [Gospels], and they come up with stories about it.” That seems to imply that they were not attributed to anybody before “some point in the early-but-not-super-early Church”, since otherwise there would be no reason to come up with stories about who wrote them.
Well, I don’t think the example you quoted actually clashes, at least not to any degree greater than what you’d expect from two people reporting an incident with different emphases.
John was writing his Gospel to supplement the others, and therefore didn’t bother recapitulating things which had already been described by others.
To me, at least, “three years” and “some time” don’t even seem to differ.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s anything in the text of John itself that requires it to have been written at the end of the first century, right? So I’m not sure why anybody in the ancient world would have been motivated to claim a long life for John on the basis of his Gospel.
John was writing for a primarily Gentile audience, so he sometimes tells them about Jewish customs of which they’d probably be unaware. So what? BTW, I note you still haven’t provided any evidence that the Gospels overstate the importance of the Pharisees.
Then I must confess I have no idea what you meant when you said that “There wasn’t a church from the beginning, though. Jesus accumulated a following, sure, but there’s a reason that scholars talk about the “Jesus movement” and so on.” What is the difference between a “following” or “movement” and a “church”, if not in one being more organised than the other?
I’m not sure, I’d have to do more research. But, assuming we don’t have any way of testing that, then it follows that we can’t dismiss the idea of accurate transmission of information out of hand.
Not at easy as it is nowadays, to be sure, but the Roman Empire had a high level of mobility compared to probably anywhere before the invention of modern transport, and the NT and early Church Fathers make it clear that people could and did travel around on Church business. So, if the Gospel writers were associates of the apostles or of other senior churchmen, it’s quite likely that they’d have got to meet other senior churchmen and/or their associates and compare notes.
I have never claimed that everybody who disputed the authorship of the Gospels was doing so because of ulterior motives. I simply think that “Academic incentives mean that any unsound arguments would have been rooted out by now” isn’t a very good argument.
My point was more that there isn’t much in the way of pressure from society at large trying to push academics into one position, because society at large is itself divided on the question.
Well, I suppose the biggest argument is that the attributions all seem to date back very early – at least by the time of Papias (fl. early 1st century, who discusses the authorship of Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and Justin Martyr (c. 150, who calls them “the memoirs of the apostles”, in a way that implies that this was the general opinion of his time) – and also that there’s no trace of any alternative ascriptions, suggesting that the traditional names had always been attached to them and weren’t some later guess. Of course, this isn’t 100% conclusive, but I think it’s strong enough to put the burden of proof on those who would dispute the traditional explanations.
@The original Mr. X
103.25 is now off the front page – are you on the Discord? I’d be interested in discussing this further – it’s an interesting topic. I might even – at some vague point in the future – be interested in doing some kind of adversarial-collaboration type thing, if you were.
OK, sure. I don’t think Luke was originally an anonymous document, so this works well.
I think the most likely explanation is that the gospel of Luke in particular was not written anonymously – but a name wasn’t attached; Theophilus knows who the author is, after all (if I wrote something for a friend, I wouldn’t necessarily sign my name to it – they know who I am). The lack of a name and other identifying information in the document itself suggests that after an initial period, it was circulated by people who didn’t know who wrote it (or, perhaps that information was circulated orally along with the text?). Then, when it becomes important to figure out who wrote it, attempts were made to establish who wrote it – maybe going by the oral traditions handed along with the text, who knows. The problem here is that “missing link” guesswork is going on, and so whether you’re going with the traditional view or the mainstream scholarly view, you have to posit information we no longer have access to.
In the case of the events immediately after Paul’s conversion, and in the medium-term after it, why would they be reporting it with different emphases? Assuming the author of Luke-Acts is the same person (my understanding is that both the traditional church explanation and the modern scholarly explanation agree on this), Luke’s multiple sources could fit the four-source model – and Luke appears to, in some places at least, copy Mark directly. If Luke was Paul’s associate, why would he alter Paul in ways that, beyond serving a different emphasis, at a minimum seem to undercut what Paul is saying in his letters?
But John describes things that conflict with the other gospels, and the other gospels don’t report things that John reports.
Considering the above, though – if Luke used Paul as a source, why wouldn’t he just say “three years”? It’s not the only place there’s differences, either. Given that the only hard evidence we have to support Luke as the author is a first-century identification, these differences are at least suggestive. (I don’t know whether “some time” has particular connotations in the original context)
Within the text itself? Nothing explicit that I can recall. Stuff that scholars think is evidence it’s later, but that requires some guesswork and so forth. I believe there’s also a hypothesis in which multiple Johns got confused, but again that’s quite speculative, and stuff about the identification of the Beloved Disciple, but that’s outside my wheelhouse, insofar as I even have one. In any case, “the right John probably lived until the point the gospel was written” is pretty weak evidence, and it still runs into the significant problem that (if Matthew and John were both eyewitnesses, let’s say) you’ve got eyewitnesses reporting rather clashing accounts.
I’m not talking about explaning Jewish customs (which isn’t unique to John). John seems more hostile towards Jews as a group than the synoptics are; scholars usually posit this is because the Johannine community had experienced greater conflict with mainstream Jews. The synoptics report hostility from elites or relative elites; John talks about “the Jews.”
Well, what evidence is acceptable? Can I just grab something fairly introductory that states that, or am I going to have to go and do a bit of research? I can provide the latter fairly easily; I don’t know when I’m going to be able to provide the former – I’d have to rustle up some library access, probably.
More organized, more “developed” theology (especially in its view of Jesus’ role as the anointed), increasingly separate from mainstream Judaism, etc. Some scholars, you are correct, do want to imagine this leaderless to the point of being principled anarchist movement. I don’t know how plausible that is (and it usually coincides with other scholarly tendencies that I find kinda dubious, like claiming that it is eminently feasible to divide Q into multiple strata, claiming that apocalypticism is not a part of the original package, etc.)
Sure. But I think that some things are more likely to have been transmitted accurately than others: for example, the simple core of parables is far more likely to be accurately remembered than involved discourses.
This is all true, but it’s still a big question mark, and just as speculative as the common scholarly positions. If a traditionalist viewpoint on the composition of the gospels involves enough speculation and so on, it starts to lose the pros it has over the standard scholarly position, without shedding the cons.
Not that unsound arguments would have been rooted out – as I noted earlier, I think there’s some unsound arguments – but fairly basic objections would seem to have been dealt with.
Society at large doesn’t really care about the origin of the gospels; neither believers nor unbelievers in Christianity are particularly informed about early Christianity, and who wrote these documents are not going to be swayed one way or the other. Aggressive atheists are not going to change their mind because it’s determined that Mark actually was Peter’s associate, and most nonbelievers in the developed world are just soft agnostics who have drifted away from whatever religion they were raised in, or their grandparents raised in, etc. Among people who hold the scholarly views, I’d wager there’s a higher % of believers than in the general population – you have to care about the Bible to study it, and caring about the Bible is strongly correlated with being a believer.
My understanding is that Papias only exists in fragments in later authors, and these fragments are pretty vague about what’s being discussed. Justin Martyr, likewise, is a bit vague for the purposes of identifying the gospels in their final canonical form with individual authors. There’s more solid identification by Irenaeus, but that’s late 2nd century, and he doesn’t really show his work. Again, the arguments of supposed stuff going on in the background that we don’t have access to as a reason to trust the traditional credits seems to run into the same “missing link” sort of problem that the scholarly explanations have.
If the burden of proof is on those arguing against the traditional ascriptions, I think there are enough problems that add up to undermine the situation to the point that the most reasonable reaction is to sort of throw one’s hands up in the air and say “who knows?” I have extremely low doubt that some of the material goes back to people with direct personal knowledge of Jesus’ life, teachings, and death – Mark’s general narrative (which is, in its core, very plausible – I really disagree with the scholars who present Mark as being more or less fiction put together to hang sayings on) and at least some of the teachings, at least some of the stuff that Matthew and Luke preserves that’s not in Mark, maybe even some of the narrative stuff in John. I would estimate my confidence here at high 90s % (it’s only really plausible if there wasn’t a historical Jesus). But that’s very different from identifying the finished or close-to-finished form of the gospels to the figures they’re traditionally ascribed to.
If a human figure identifying himself as Jesus of Nazareth descends from Heaven above the Mount of Olives, surrounded by divine light, followed by a host of angels – would you accept that as proof or near proof?
(Remember that the claim in question is not merely a claim about historical events.)
Seems like something Satan could pull off without too much trouble.
That happening would be good evidence of a great supernatural power. But any such power might try to interact with humans as Jesus for strategic reasons.
Yes, I would.
I don’t know, man, not after they brought Tupac back to life via hologram.
(Tongue firmly planted in cheek)
Isn’t this basically what happened at Fatima in 1917? I mean, it wasn’t Jesus, it was his mom, but close enough?
Not quite as flashy as the Second Coming, but would consecrated hosts bleeding blood of the same blood type count as evidence?
Any one time, very odd, non repeatable event without enduring evidence has to be treated with epistemic skepticism.
That’s true for sighting Jesus, Bigfoot, aliens, etc.
If a human figure identifying himself as Jesus of Nazareth descends from Heaven above the Mount of Olives, surrounded by divine light, followed by a host of angels – would you accept that as proof or near proof?
How would we be able to tell the difference between this Jesus you describe and a shapeshifting alien with advanced technology who had also memorized the Bible?
I don’t think we could. But in any case, if such a being came to Earth in the manner you describe, it would be wise for us to show it great respect.
Hit it with a couple megatons. Actual Jesus won’t be scratched, alien Jesus is gonna be a cinder.
@A Definite Beta Guy says:
This reminds me of a supposed old viking tradition. When encountering a creature a viking had never seen before, he would immediately hit it with his sword to make sure it was something that could be killed with iron.
This always struck me as a lose-lose proposition. If the creature died, then the viking had just killed it to no purpose, had gotten blood on his sword, and had scared any non-vikings watching. If it didn’t die, then the viking had just had just pissed off something that couldn’t be killed with his sword….
Whats the proof for he isnt? There is no proof for that to? Which way is there more proof for?
1) Who were the Sea Peoples?
2) What happened at Roanoke?
I like this one.
Really? Pardon my asking, but what exactly is it that’s supposedly mysterious about Roanoke?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony
115 people disappear. No signs of struggle or battle. It’s a mystery that intrigues me and will never be solved.
I thought the theory was ‘disappeared peacefully into local tribes?’
I’ve read that theory, but all of them? To a man? With nothing left behind to tell others what happened?
@Statismagician
That is the theory, but only because there aren’t many good explanations. My (limited) understanding is that there isn’t actually any real evidence pointing to this being the case other than lack of other alternatives.
Pardon, @Hoopyfreud and @Conrad Honcho, but you don’t seem to have taken my question seriously: it wasn’t “what’s Roanoke?” or “what happened at Roanoke?”, it was “What’s so supposedly mysterious about Roanoke?”
Specifically, is there any reason to suppose that the fate of Roanoke was not the same as the fate of La Salle’s Texas colony, or the Spanish Ajacan mission, or what almost happened [but didn’t] with Fort Caroline in Florida? We happen to have testimony of witnesses to those cases, but I don’t see any reason to assume it was measurably different with Roanoke. If you have 4 dead bodies with bullets in them, and only 3 were seen to be shot, you don’t assume the 4th was killed by aliens.
It’s plausible that a small number of people were adopted rather than killed (as happened with the Talon brothers in Texas), few enough that word never really got out. Or it’s plausible that, faced with military pressure, some people took a run for it and disappeared “into the bush” and probably died there. But none of these known-unknowns seem to me very “mysterious”– certainly not to the extent that would justify the mystique that Roanoke has around it.
Ah. Well, then, the spooky bit would be the total lack of signs of violence and literal zero survivors; they COULD have been wiped out, but if they were they left no sign of it. None at all.
Presumably we know the fate of those instances because there was either observed evidence that those groups were wiped out by Native Americans or a direct account from a survivor/witness/etc. As far as I know none of those things are the case for Roanoke. No bodies (well, I think there was one found maybe?), no signs of battle/struggle.
It isn’t that people forgot that this could happen, it is that in this case there is no evidence that it did happen.
Edit: Looks like Hoopyfreud beat me to it
The lack of bodies is not that strange. There were 20-25 people at La Salle’s colony when the Karankawa attacked it, according to the testimony of Jean-Baptiste Talon. But when the Spaniards came upon it just a few months later, they only found 3 dead bodies.
It also required a very extensive search on the part of the Spanish to find what survivors there were, involving multiple well-funded expeditions. As far as I’m aware (and correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t remember it well!), the English performed no such extensive search of the surrounding regions which might have turned up any Roanokean captive survivors.
They carved the word CROATOAN on a fence post. Then for more than a century afterwards there were reports of fair skinned, grey-eyed Indians in the general vicinity, particularly among the Croatan tribe of Hatteras Island. Gee i wonder what could possibly explain the disappearance of the colonists, their leaving behind the word Croatoan, and the subsequent presence of grey-eyed Croatans on a nearby island. Truly it’s a mystery.
1) is really interesting, because they were multi-ethnic coalitions where most of the ethnonyms (all but Sherden and Lukka) occur for the first time during the Sea Peoples attacks.
“Where are y’all coming from?!”
Shouldn’t we instead say the ethnonyms appear then for the first time in surviving sources? Though it’s still at least a curious coincidence.
Well, yes. The Egyptians or another literate culture probably wrote down the demonyms of these illiterate tribes prior, based on what we know about the amount writing was used vs size of the surviving corpus. It’s still very curious, especially if some of the Sea Peoples were coming from the Aegean, which surviving hieroglyphic and Hittite cuneiform sources knew about earlier using different names.
What happened to the “Sea People” in the Mediterranean Sea? Also, not far behind that question, Who were the “Sea People”?
Edit: Hah! Beaten by one minute.
Ha! Great minds.
What, exactly, went on in Mithraism?
Why did the Bronze Age Collapse?
Why didn’t every other age collapse?
I’m not the biggest history buff, but high on my list would be:
– what really happened to the Minoan culture?
– is there anything to the Atlantis myth?
– to what extent is Old Testament mythology (the Egyptian slavery etc.) based on actual events?
– did Jesus actually exist? (and not just another bloke with the same name 🙂 )
I think the evidence for a “no” answer on your second question is pretty overwhelming. The first appearance of the story is in Plato, and Plato’s presentation of the story positively screams “this is all made up.” There’s an obvious motive for the character who tells the story to want to tell a story of that kind, and the way the story is introduced is obviously intended to make it clear that we shouldn’t consider it trustworthy.
Who were the Sea People?
Edit: Wow, not even second.
I’m not entirely convinced that we really know the whole story behind just how the pyramids of Giza were built. By “how” I don’t just mean what kinds of ramps or pulleys they used– I mean the entire bureaucratic, financial, political, and workforce apparatus. The standard explanation apparently has it that one block of the Great Pyramid had to be put in place, on average, every 2 minutes of daylight, every single day, for over 20 years. How you get that many blocks from the quarry, cut, hauled, and put in place so quickly and for so long, using the technology of the time (26th century B.C. is absurdly ancient. The Epic of Gilgamesh isn’t even that old.), simply doesn’t make sense to me. People who try to explain it all by showing a clever new design for how the ramps were laid out, in my opinion, are missing the point.
I don’t think it was aliens or advanced alien technology or anything else Graham Hancock would tell you. But I do think there’s something important that we’re missing.
My assumption (as someone who doesn’t know much of the history) is that the smartest people working on the pyramids were very, very smart, and they managed to come up with a bunch of clever techniques and workarounds that we’re not thinking about now, because the equivalent intellects today are working on making the next generation of Intel chip run faster or working on space ship design for SpaceX or something.
the point is that there’s a limitless to how much cleverness gets you. The Pyramid is just a pile of 2.3 million stone blocks. Piling them up isn’t the hard part, it’s getting them cut, shaped, and delivered during the reign of a single monarch. That’s an enormously difficult and expensive task consuming an enormous number of man hours in a society that is desperately, unimaginably poor by modern standards.
Well ancient Egypt had a) An awful lot of bureaucracy relative to everyone else at the time and b) a farming system where the Nile floods for a few months of every year, so you have loads of farmers hanging around with nothing better to do.
Not just farmers, soldiers. Never get in a slap fight with a stone mason. You train your stone age army by having them pound on rocks, and later when they collect taxes nobody gives them lip.
I’m intrigued by this – given the size of the project and lower populations, I think I wouldn’t be surprised if this managed to leave population-level evidence. Does anybody who knows about very early history recall depictions of Egyptian soldiers or persons generally as being unusually strong?
Yes, checking for calluses on mummy hands would be a great project for someone. Embedded limestone granules in your callused palms in a limestone pyramid, say. I don’t know if stonemasons were much more muscled up generally than average charioteers or peasant-floggers.
Were common people mummified at that point in Egyptian history? I seem to recall only the Pharaoh and his family were early on, and only them and high-ranking noblemen later on?
The Royal Ontario Museum has a mummy of a woman who, it would appear, was a singer in a religious choir and not a noble or anything. They also had on display for a while a labourer who was mummified – but by natural processes (they had basically chucked him in a hole in the desert, and that dried him out). It also appears that the singer had a less-fancy mummification, and the hieroglpyhs on her coffin were kind of sloppy.
The Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza evolved from step pyramids like Mesoamerican civilizations built with stone tools, and Egyptian step pyramids evolved in turn from single-layer rectangular brick tombs called mastaba. Any technology missing from our understanding would have simply been an advance on whatever materially primitive state-level societies generally invented for constructing step pyramids.
(If I recall aright, Edgar Allen Poe proposed they used a railroad to get all those blocks from the quarry, but as a fiction author it’s hard to tell how much he was being silly vs. opposing the Whig belief in progress.)
I’m fond of Charles Addams explanation of how the pyramids were built.
Yeah, I hope that guy had a good retirement plan
Ones we might know one day:
* Who was Jack the Ripper?
* What was Greek fire?
* To what extent was King Arthur real?
Ones we’ll never know:
* What came before Indo-European?
* What are the Muqatta’at?
* Who built Stonehenge, and why?
Let’s turn it around – what popular historical “mysteries” are not at all mysterious? They’re mostly ones where the answer is very clear, but people don’t like it.
* Who killed the Princes in the Tower? (Richard III)
* What happened to Louis XVII? (Died in captivity)
* Was Jesus a real historical figure? (Yes)
* Did Mohammed give down something very like the Qu’ran we know? (Yes)
AFAIK, Indo-European is fundamentally neolithic.
The closest we have to Mesolithic culture today are languages like Finnish and Estonian.
What I meant was, all our languages are presumably part of one huge family tree. We can reconstruct parts of PIE, but there must have been something before, whether that be Nostratic or something else. But i don’t think we can ever know.
I was under the impression that the princes in the tower was still an open question, and that the idea that blaming it on Richard III was a posthumous slander still had a lot of support.
Nope, he did it.
I did some research on this as an undergrad, and while he was slandered posthumously, there is little doubt he was ultimately responsible for their murder.
Just to expand on brmic’s answer:
* Richard obviously had means, motive and opportunity, and no-one else could have murdered the children pre-Bosworth without his approval.
* By 1484, everyone thought the boys had been murdered and was blaming Richard. They presumably had access to all kinds of information now lost to us. In particular, the boys’ mother was convinced they were dead, and acted accordingly, and it’s very unlikely she would have done that lightly.
* Being thought guilty of the boys’ murder caused many of Richard’s former allies to desert him, and caused his enemies to unite against him. If the children were alive, Richard could have split his enemies and restored his reputation by producing them. He didn’t.
So the children were killed in 1483-4, and on Richard’s orders. Now, that’s not 100% proof, because maybe a stray beam fell on their heads, or they were killed while trying to escape, but it’s as close to a definite fact as any other knowledge of that period. It’s as certain as the murder of Henry VI, for instance, and no-one thinks that’s a mystery.
The reason it’s considered a “mystery” is that a few years later, a pretender named Perkin Warbeck convinced some people (including the princes’ aunt) that he was Richard, Duke of York – the younger of the two princes. Everyone knows he was a liar, but his claim raises the tantalising possibility that something strange may have happened, which is far more exciting than the boring reality that they were murdered by the obvious guilty party. As a result, people demand unreasonable standards of proof that they never ask of other historical events. We will never find Richard’s signed confession, so people who want to believe it’s a “mystery” will keep believing what they like.
@Salem
Why do you think we might one day know who Jack the Ripper is?
With regard to the Qu’ran, my understanding is that there is nowhere near the degree of critical scholarship that’s been applied to Jewish and Christian texts. Why do you think something very much like the current Quran originated with Mohammed? (I don’t know anything about this and don’t have an opinion on it)
The Ripper: because it’s recent enough, and in a time sufficiently well documented, that interesting new evidence could yet come to light. It’s not likely, but it’s conceivable.
Qu’ran: Because the Sana’a palimpset, while potentially inconvenient for a completely unchanged Qu’ran, proves that any major change was incredibly early.
Interesting. I only covered Islam briefly when I was in school; I don’t really know much about the textual history.
I looked into the King Arthur question a few months ago.
The Riothamus theory is absolute bunk, IMO– nearly every datum of evidence in support of it is devastatingly flawed. The L. Artorius Castus theory is more plausible, but probably only insofar as he introduced “Artorius” into the Britons’ onomastic repertoire. The “Sarmatian connection” looks very compelling at first, until you learn that the best evidence all comes from stories written nearly a thousand years after when Arthur supposedly lived.
In my opinion, Arthur was probably a mythological figure from Celtic mythology who was later interpreted as a Brythonic folk hero and given a Roman nickname. He then was re-interpreted as a “real” person when Nennius rewrote Gildas and scratched out the name of the real Ambrosius Aurelianus and replaced it with “Arthur”.
But that’s just my opinion. 🙂
I looked into the Arthur question somewhat several years ago, but not the Riothamus theory; would you mind sharing what makes you think it absolute bunk?
The most obvious problem is that nobody before Geoffrey of Monmouth even hints at Arthur leading expeditions into Gaul, suggesting that this is unlikely to have a basis in history. Take away Arthur’s continental exploits, however, and you also take away any similarities between Arthur’s and Riothamus’ recorded careers (beyond the extremely general “they were both British warleaders in the late 5th century”, of course).
On the contrary, the “mythological” references to Arthur all postdate the historical ones by centuries, and it seems clear that Arthur was grafted into them at a relatively late stage of the development. (Indeed, there’s at least one instance where we can see this happening: Nennius gives a story about the settlement of Ireland whereby a group of ships under the command of “a soldier of Spain” attack a glass fortress in the sea and all but one get sunk. The medieval poem “Spoils of the Otherworld” recounts the exact same story, except here the attackers are being led by Arthur.)
And Nennius was actually less influential than most people realise — he’s a major source for us today because so few writers from that period have survived, but there aren’t that many surviving manuscripts, and (e.g.) the Welsh Annals, which are one of our other major Arthurian sources, don’t seem to have any knowledge of him.
Regarding Gildas, he names Ambrosius as the leader of the initial counter-attack, but doesn’t necessarily say that he commanded all the way down to Mt. Badon. Nor is it accurate to say that Nennius “rewrote Gildas”: indeed, apart from the very broad outline of events (the Britons fight the Saxons, culminating in a great victory at Mt. Badon), Nennius’ account has virtually nothing in common with Gildas’. (Just compare his treatment of Ambroius, the fatherless boy who makes prophecies based on fighting dragons, with Gildas’ portrayal of him as an anti-Saxon war-leader.)
I agree, however, that the Sarmatian theory is bunk, as are any other theories which depend on Arthur being a famous cavalry leader or the like. Actual dark age sources give no indication of this, and it should be obvious that later romances gave Arthur a band of famous knights because that’s how contemporary 12th-century courts operated, not because they access to any sort of genuine historical tradition on this point.
The theory also conveniently ignores that Geoffrey of Monmouth has Arthur conquering half of Europe, not just Gaul! They focus on the one, because it’s the only one that looks historically plausible in their theory.
He surely must have been an influence on Geoffrey of Monmouth, though. Where else could Geoffrey have gotten the story of the boy prophet and the unbuildable tower?
My understanding is that this position is based on earlier editions of the text, which introduced paragraph breaks where the manuscript didn’t have any [or something like that], and that recent analyses of the manuscript do make it seem that Ambrosius commanded at Badon.
Also, of course Gildas’ portrayal of Ambrosius would differ from Nennius’ portrayal, if Nennius decided he was going to shift the “anti-Saxon war-leader” role onto Arthur. 🙂
I can’t say I agree with this statement. The earliest “historical” reference to Arthur is Nennius, but the “mythological” stuff must be at least as old as that because Nennius also makes a reference to Arthur’s fight with the mythical boar Twrch Trwyth. The Welsh poems that predate Nennius make Arthur seem like a legendary folk-hero, in my opinion.
(I’ve heard that the dating of the Annales Cambriae is problematic, and the Arthur entry in it isn’t as old as it’s sometimes said. I can try to find the reference for this if you want.)
True, true; Geoffrey, as I recall, has Arthur conquering Scandinavia, an idea which obviously postdates the Viking invasions of the ninth century.
He wasn’t influential on the Welsh Annals, though, which as mentioned above show no knowledge of his works. Even if Nennius decided for some reason to credit this obscure Welsh folk hero with victories over the Saxons, that still doesn’t explain why the Welsh Annalist would do the same.
The actual text of Gildas (sans paragraph breaks) is as follows:
“After some length of time, the cruel robbers returned to their home. Then a remnant, fortified by God, and to whom wretched citizens flock from every side, as eagerly as bees to their hive when a storm is threatening, praying at the same time with their whole heart and, as it is said, ‘Burdening heaven with their unnumbered prayers,’ that they might not be utterly destroyed, under the leadership of Ambrosius Aurelianus, a man of unassuming character [or ‘of ordinary status’], who alone of the Roman race chanced to survive in the shock of such a storm, in which his parents, people undoubtedly clad in the purple, had been killed, and whose progeny in our days have greatly degenerated from their grandfather’s virtue, take strength and challenge the victors to battle. To these men, by the Lord’s favour, came victory. From that time, victory went now to the citizens, now to their enemies, so that God might according to his accustomed manner make trial in this nation of his present-day Israel, whether it loved him or not; and this lasted right up until the year of the siege of Mount Badon, and of almost the last, and by no means the least, slaughter of those villains. And this commences—a fact I know—as the forty-fourth year, with one month now elapsed; it is also the year of my birth” (De Excidio Britanniae 25 f.).
(“Tempore igitur interveniente aliquanto, cum recessissent domum crudelissimi praedones, roborante Deo reliquiae, quibus confugiunt undique de diversis locis miserrimi cives, tam avide quam apes alvearii procella imminente, simul deprecantes eum toto corde et, ut dicitur, ‘Innumeris onerantes aethera votis,’ ne ad internicionem usque delerentur, duce Ambrosio Aureliano, viro modesto, qui solus forte Romanae gentis tantae tempestatis collisione, occisis in eadem parentibus purpura nimirum indutis, superfuerat, cujus nunc temporibus nostris suboles magnopere avita bonitate degeneravit, vires capessunt, victores provocantes ad proelium; quis victoria, Domino annuente, cessit. Ex eo tempore, nunc cives, nunc hostes, vincebant, ut in ista gente experiretur Dominus solito more praesentem Israelem, utrum diligat eum an non, usque ad annum obsessionis Badonici Montis, novissimaeque ferme de furciferis non minimae stragis, quique quadragesimus quartus, ut novi, orditur annus, mense jam uno emenso, qui et meae nativitatis est.”)
So even without the paragraph break, Ambrosius is only explicitly credited with the initial rally and counterattack. Gildas’ text doesn’t rule out the idea that Ambrosius was the commander at Mt. Badon, but it doesn’t rule it in, either.
AFAIK the only surviving pre-Nennius poem is Y Gododdin, which I think is more compatible with the historical Arthur theory than the mythological one. After all, what would be the point of saying “He was no Arthur” if Arthur was some sort of folk hero? Such a comparison would surely undercut the pathos which the author was trying to create.
Good catch re: the boar-hunting thing; I’d forgotten about that. Still, Nennius description of the event (Arthur’s dog left a pawprint in a stone when Arthur was hunting a boar) is pretty small beer compared to the stuff he’s prepared to report about the undoubtedly historical figures Ambrosius Aurelianus (a fatherless boy who made prophecies based on a pair of dragons discovered under Vortigern’s fortress) and Germanus of Auxerre (a man who was able to call down heavenly fire to destroy enemy fortresses).
But why would Nennius decide to do such a thing, and why would everybody else follow him in this? I think this is the fundamental problem with the mythical Arthur theory. That Mt. Badon was a real battle and a turning-point in the war against the Saxons is placed beyond reasonable doubt by Gildas’ reference in De Excidio, and its survival in Welsh historical memory is indicated by the prominence give it by both Nennius and the Welsh Annals. None of these sources, nor even the heavily fictionalised Welsh poetic accounts, give any indication that the battle was commanded by someone other than Arthur. So for the mythological Arthur theory to be true, we’d have to conclude that, whilst the battle itself was remembered, the name of the actual commander was completely forgotten in favour of some obscure folk-hero with no original connection to the events in question. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any parallel examples of such a process occurring; conversely, there are plenty of examples of famous historical figures being incorporated into fictional tales which originally had nothing to do with them, or with their historical exploits becoming heavily fictionalised over the course of centuries of retelling. We also have examples of this process happening with Arthur himself. So, I think the probability that Arthur was a fictional character who was later grafted into real history is much lower than the reverse: that Arthur was a historical character whom later story-tellers incorporated into their tales.
Caitlin [formerly Thomas] Green has an interesting article about how later writers claimed that Arthur also conquered Greenland, America, and the freaking North Pole! And Culhwch ac Olwen says that he conquered Greece as well. It sure is a shame that Riothamus never gets any credit for this in the history books, isn’t it? 🙂
But first though, lemme say I’m not an expert in any of this stuff and don’t want to claim that I am, so all I can really do is make an argument from authority here and say who my sources of information have been. The most credible-seeming (to me) authors I found on the topic were N.J. Higham, O.J. Padel, and the aforementioned Caitlin Green. Padel is the one that says Gildas likely did intend to say that Ambrosius commanded at Badon, and he’s also the one who argues that Arthur is being referenced in Y Gododdin as “the impossible comparison”– not as a real person.
Caitlin Green (whose excellent book is available in pdf on her website) says that the Arthur entries in the Welsh Annals only date to the 10th century and are not pre-Nennian, and that the Arthur reference in Y Gododdin might be post-Nennian too, because it’s conspicuously absent in one of the two recensions we have.
N.J. Higham says that the reason Nennius would tamper with the evidence is nationalistic. Nennius is the first person who wrote about Mt Badon who had an implicitly pro-Welsh bias. Gildas wanted to portray the Britons as bad Christians whose sins had brought their own destruction upon them, and Bede was decidedly pro-Anglo-Saxon. Nennius was writing for his patron, some king somewhere in Wales, and wanted to puff up the Welsh as a mighty warrior race.
You’re right about Nennius’ treatment of Ambrosius and Germanus, but what makes Arthur different in my opinion is that what he does in Nennius account—the very first specific, seemingly-historical thing that Arthur is claimed to have done in all of literature—is the exact same thing that someone else does in an earlier, much more credible source. This is because I do think that Gildas implies Ambrosius was the commander at Badon; I suppose we just have to disagree on this point.
Whichever take you go with, Gildas either says that Ambrosius commanded at Badon or he conspicuously fails to say who it was. The latter would be odd if it were Arthur, since Arthur quite obviously made an impression on people, whoever/whatever he was. So if we have to throw either Gildas or Nennius under the bus here, in my opinion it should be Nennius, because it’s he who’s been caught red-handed meddling with the story of Ambrosius.
You’re right, though, that it is far from obvious why everyone else would be okay with going along with Nennius’ re-writing of history. I’m not sure that the Mythical Arthur Theory requires him to have all that great an influence, though. It’s not as though Nennius invented Arthur, and the Welsh storytellers who came after him mostly didn’t base their depictions on the Historia Brittonum. Nennius’ re-writing mostly consisted of putting Arthur at Mt Badon, but Badon was never really the centerpiece of the Welsh Arthurian canon… at least, not that I’m aware of… IIRC Badon is briefly alluded to in The Dream of Rhonabwy, but is not mentioned at all in Culhwch ac Olwen, The Spoils of Annwn, or What Name is the Porter. I could be wrong about this.
I also can’t say I agree with your statement that the Welsh Annals show no knowledge of Nennius—I think they do. Or at least they show knowledge of Nennian material. The Annals say that at Badon “Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders,” and Nennius says that at the battle of Guinnion “Arthur bore the image of the Holy Virgin, mother of God, upon his shoulders”. Not exactly the same, but peculiar and similar enough that it’s probably the same story passing imperfectly from one source to the next (possibly via some now-lost intermediates). If the Annals postdate Nennius as Caitlin Green says, that means the influence went: Nennius -> Annals.
It’s not inconceivable. The sack of Troy was a real historical event. So was the Battle of Mons. Caitlin Green [citing someone else, I think] points out that the entirely mythical Fionn mac Cumhaill became the centerpiece of a cycle of Irish legends in which he repelled the Vikings from Ireland– another thing that really happened. There’s also Cornish legend that says that Arthur defeated the Danes and drove them out of Cornwall.
You might be right, though. I think Arthur was most likely mythical but I’m not going to bet the farm on it. My confidence level is maybe about 75%?
By the way, N.J. Higham has a new book coming out about Arthur in just a few weeks. I for one really look forward to it.
Thanks, I’ll try and check those out if I remember. For my part, I’m going mostly on Christopher Gidlow’s The Reign of Arthur, which comes down very much on the historical Arthur side of the spectrum, but (unlike most such works) is actually very careful to determine just what the evidence actually says and to avoid wild flights of fancy of the John Morris variety.
The 10th century is the usual date for the Welsh Annals, I believe, so it stands to reason that the Arthurian references are from that period as well. But, aside from putting Arthur at Badon, Nennius and the Annals have nothing in common about the battle. The Annals contain no mention of Arthur killing 960 men in a single charge, and Nennius contains no mention of Arthur’s death at Camlann.
As for Y Gododdin, all four lines of the relevant stanza rhyme in Welsh, IIRC, making it unlikely that Arthur’s name is a later interpolation. The stanza itself is also written in a very old form of Welsh, whereas if it were a later addition we’d expect it to be in more modern language.
But if the Annals were really drawing from Nennius, why ignore what Nennius actually says about the Battle of Badon (that Arthur slew 960 men in a single charge), and instead include a slightly changed version of Nennius’ description of an entirely different battle? And where did the Annals get its information about Arthur’s death at Camlann, a battle which isn’t even mentioned in Nennius?
As for the similarities between Guinnion and Badon, I think it more likely that there was a tradition about Arthur carrying around a relic before battle and winning a famous victory, and that Nennius relates the tradition to one battle and the Annals to another. So, the similarities are due to both texts drawing on a common source, not to a direct dependence of one text on the other.
But why would that require attributing the (undoubtedly historical, as we know from Gildas) British victories to a minor folk hero? Why couldn’t he just ascribe the victories to Ambrosius, if he was indeed the historical British commander?
It’s not surprising at all that Gildas would fail to mention Arthur’s name; the De Excidio is chock full of characters who undoubtedly existed but who are left anonymous (the proud tyrant who let the Saxons in, Ambrosius’ children and parents, Maglocunus’ uncle, tutor, and wives, the royal youths murdered by Constantine…). If Arthur’s name was left out of a work otherwise full of onomastic information, that would indeed be cause for suspicion; as it is, however, not being named by Gildas is hardly proof of non-existence. Gildas’ main purpose is to look at the overall pattern of history to try and deduce what is likely to happen in the future, not to record the names of individuals.
(As for why Ambrosius himself is named, I suspect it’s because “his descendants have greatly degenerated from their grandfather’s virtue”. IOW, Ambrosius is singled out to provide another opportunity for Gildas to castigate contemporary wickedness.)
Of course, the relative unimportance of Badon is also consistent with Arthur being a historical character who was grafted onto originally unrelated mythical tales. It’s not really surprising, given this, that his real-life exploits would play a minor role at best in the myths involving him.
Thanks—I’ll try to check that one out!
The Annals’ entries are pretty terse, so they’re not going to have everything Nennius says. As for Nennius not mentioning Arthur’s death at Camlann, I might point out that Gildas doesn’t say where or how Ambrosius dies either.
Might be a hare-brained theory, but speaking just for myself, I kind of suspect that Camlann was associated with Arthur before Badon was. This, whether he was a legendary folk hero or a real historical person. In my opinion, the best theory of a Historical Arthur is this: Camlann was a real battle, and Arthur and Mordred both fought and maybe died there—probably on the same side, since the Welsh tradition holds [apud C. Green] that Mordred was a noble man and not a traitor. It has been said that “Camlann” derives from Camboglanna, a fort on Hadrian’s Wall (the name is apparently a perfect match according to Welsh historical linguistics). If true, then it’s interesting in light of a character study of Arthur in the Welsh and Breton stories, wherein he’s depicted as a kind of “guardian of the borders” [apud Green again].
(Supposedly, Camboglanna is kind of close to where L. Artorius Castus was stationed, and there was also a Pictish invasion during his time there, but ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh……)
Wherever Badon was, it would have been much farther to the south for it to be relevant in the Saxon wars. This makes it a priori unlikely that the same man would have commanded the British forces at both battles. It also explains why Nennius would omit mentioning Camlann: its northerly location means that it likely wasn’t relevant to the Saxon invasion (..maybe to a Pictish invasion..), and so Nennius might not have seen any reason for mentioning it. For all his excesses, he was writing a work of history, not of Arthurian stories per se—there were probably by then many stories connected to Arthur which Nennius fails to mention. The Twrch Trwyth passage implies exactly this.
By the 10th century, the compiler of the Welsh Annals probably saw the two somewhat-distinct-but-not-exactly-contradictory stories of Arthur as a warrior, and just used them both: Arthur at Badon (with some half-remembered story of him carrying an icon), and Arthur-&-Mordred dying at Camlann. In my view, a historical Arthur would have either been at Badon and later falsely-credited with also being at Camlann, or vice-versa. I can explain why I think Nennius might have put Arthur at Badon and not mentioned Camlann, if Camlann came first. But I am at a loss to explain why, if Badon came first, the Annalist thought he needed to also put Arthur at Camlann with Mordred—why not just be happy with the two stories of Mordred at Camlann and of Arthur at Badon?
In this view, even if Arthur was a real person, he still probably was not at Mt Badon. And that is still more likely to me: it’s less that Gildas doesn’t name Arthur (that would mean nothing on its own; you’re absolutely right that Gildas is very stingy with names), and more of how much it looks like Nennius deliberately performs a switcheroo of the names. After all, Nennius could have said that Ambrosius *and* Arthur were leaders in the Saxon wars, but he doesn’t. That’s still the smoking gun, for me.
Our two best pieces of evidence—Nennius and the Annals—are so very sparse, though, so who knows? Trying to reconcile them in any way inevitably requires doing a bit of midrash.
Re this, btw: there is also the Marwnad Cynddylan from the 7th century. It doesn’t really say much about Arthur, but Caitlin Green [again.. like I said, her book is really good] interprets it as another example of Arthur the “impossible comparison”, like in the Y Gododdin.
By the way, an interesting and probably-relevant bit of trivia about all this [from Green, again] is that the Welsh seem to have had a taboo against naming their children “Arthur”. There are a number of early Arthurs known from the 5th-7th centuries in Britain, but they all conspicuously were born to Gaelic houses, not Brythonic ones. The first known Welsh Arthur doesn’t show up until the late-1500’s! (The first Breton Arthur is from some time before then, but still late enough to suggest a longstanding taboo among the Bretons as well.) It seems like there would probably be more Welsh Arthurs—at least in the earlier period—if “Arthur” was just a regular name people had and if the Arthur was just Some Guy.
Well, Nennius’ account of Badon is pretty terse itself. But my question was more one of why the Annalist would ignore what Nennius actually said about Badon itself, and instead copy down a garbled version of something Nennius said about an entirely different battle.
Yes, but I’m not sure how that’s relevant? My point was that the Annalist couldn’t have been copying Nennius in the Camlann entry, since there was nothing to copy in the first place. So he must have had at least one other source for Arthur – as a historical character active at a particular historical time, not as a folk hero fighting monsters off in never-never land.
Firstly, the association of Cambloglanna with Camlann isn’t certain – it’s etymologically possible, but there are other etymologically possible candidates (there’s even a River Camlan in North Wales, IIRC*), not to mention the possibility that Camlann happened in what is now England, and its original British name is now lost beneath an English one. Secondly, it’s not actually that unlikely, even if Camlann is in the north. Gildas seems quite clearly to describe the Saxon wars as taking place over the whole of the island, which implies that a successful British defence would have required the co-operation of kingdoms from a similarly widespread area. There’s also archaeological evidence suggesting at least some form of super-kingdom organisation during this period – Hadrian’s Wall seems to have been refortified against invaders from the north in the late 5th/early 6th centuries, and since the wall seems to have gone through the territory of at least two kingdoms, this suggests a level of long-term co-operation against a common enemy. And of course, if multiple kingdoms were co-operating in this way, it’s likely that their commanders would have fought away from home when helping their allies.
* Incidentally, the notion that Camlann was in Wales and Badon in modern-day England would go some way towards explaining why the former battle is more prominent in mediaeval Welsh poetry than the latter.
But nobody’s ever demonstrated any motive for Nennius to do this. Attributing historical British victories to a minor character from folklore would do nothing to boost the Britons’ image as a fierce warrior race (if anything, it would do the opposite, by casting doubt upon the notion of a successful British counter-attack as well), and no dark age Welsh kingdoms seem to have used Arthur to bolster dynastic or territorial claims, so that seems out as well.
Greek fire: You can get something resembling napalm by mixing tar and olive oil to a nice hair-gelly substance. It won’t quite burn under water but it will make this cool explosion effect if you try to put it out with a garden hose and once burning it will soak into timber like lighter fluid (and still do the explosion thingy). I suspect the greeks had it more fine-tuned than my backyard experiments at age 12.
Dunno if they count as the biggest historical mysteries, but things like: where exactly was Punt and why can’t we reliably work out where it must have been; what exactly was silphium (there are proposals as to what plant it was, but again nobody really knows because it was so over-exploited it was driven to extinction); Atlantis – actual place or completely made-up for the sake of the philosophical point, and if real, where the heck?; the Princes in the Tower – what exactly happened – murdered, died of natural causes, disappeared but left alive in obscurity? Given that Richard’s body was found under a council car park, are their corpses out there waiting to be discovered too?
Mostly all the good old chestnuts that get debated but can’t be settled 🙂
Atlantis- I like The Flood From Heaven– a geomorphologist claims Atlantis was Egyptian priests playing Chinese Whispers with the Iliad. But then, I’d like to think there was some sort of pre-Ice Age high stone age human civilization. A city state somewhere around Indochina, or just maybe around Florida.
This assumes Egyptian priests said anything at all. When Critias says that when he was a little boy he heard a story from old Critias (his grandfather), who had heard the story when he was a little boy from Solon, I don’t see why you trust the part where Solon is supposed to have heard it from Egyptians. Given the context and the obvious agenda Critias had, I already don’t believe we’re supposed to think that it was even based on anything his grandfather said rather than being something he made up himself.
Good chance you are right.
Florida Man is the last Atlantean. That’s why he’s so angry.
I don’t understand why this is a controversy. Hatshepsut left behind pictorial and textual evidence of Punt’s people and trade goods; they were obviously Black Africans (ruling out the Asian side of the Red Sea), reachable by boat, living in a climate with ebony, frankincense and myrrh plants (probably ruling out Sudan)… which leaves modern Eritrea.
What plant was silphium?
What disease was cocoliztli?
I’d like Bill Gates to offer a billion-dollar prize for any plausible silphium.
What greek fire was made out of and when exactly the secret of making it was lost. It’s a genuine mystery, something that definitely existed for hundreds of years, for which we have multiple (if sometimes maddeningly vague and contradictory) descriptions, of huge military and geo-political importance.
Haldane’s Callinicus convinced me it was some combination of incendiary, poison gas, and sort of explosive based on sulfur. So look at Byzantine sources of sulfur and find a big one that went away or fell into enemy hands (so you destroy all knowledge of how to make weapons based on sulfur).
I did a bit of research on this and there does appear to be disagreement among relevant scholars over the exact chemical composition of Greek Fire. However, there seems to be a rough consensus that the real “secret” wasn’t so much the composition of the chemical itself, but the weapon system used to deploy it – basically a primitive kind of flamethrower. It was the ability to shoot a stream of sticky flames from an attack ship that made Greek Fire such a devastating weapon against the invading Arab fleets. Notably, there is one instance (in 812 AD) where the Bulgars managed to capture some Greek Fire and the siphons used to deploy it, but apparently never used it because they didn’t have the necessary technical expertise to operate the system. (It seems to have required skilled technical personnel aboard the ships to operate the pressure pumps and siphons.)
No one knows exactly when the secret was lost, except that it was almost certainly before 1203 (since the Byzantines didn’t even attempt to use it to defend against the Fourth Crusade). Alex Roland wrote an article in 1992 which described how the secrecy itself was the problem – it ensured that repeated Byzantine coups and upheavals would cause the technology to be lost, since so few understood it.
The chemical composition was also important. Even if you understand how to make siphons, if your incendiary substance is too thick, it will do you no good. Note that the Rhomaioi also deployed the incendiary from handleheld sprayers called cheirosiphons. These were not particularly complicated and did not require much in the way of technical expertise to make or use. Nonetheless the Arabs did not use them, because their naphta composition was too viscous, and so they had to rely on catapults and grenades.
What greek fire was made out of and when exactly the secret of making it was lost. It’s a genuine mystery, something that definitely existed for hundreds of years, for which we have multiple (if sometimes maddeningly vague and contradictory) descriptions, of huge military and geo-political importance.
Whatever Greek Fire was made of, I doubt it is better than incendiary weapons we’ve created with modern technology, like napalm.
I’ve long considered the mystery to be very easily solved, but I’ve never investigated the matter in enough detail to see if my theory has ever been proposed by a professional historian.
As JDG1980 rightly points out, despite the long historical obsession with finding some hidden formula it is obvious that the secret of Greek is in the siphon, the flamethrower like mechanism the projected the incendiary mixture at enemy ships. As for the construction of the weapon below are two descriptions from Wikipedia.
From a ninth century Latin text:
And from an 11nth century viking saga:
Based on descriptions such as these historians Maurice Byrne and John Haldon
proposed a kind of pressurized flame thrower. In their design a large vessel full of a naphtha based compound was heated by a brazier or furnace like apparatus below the deck of the ship. A simple hand pump is used to pressurize the vessel with compressed air, the pressurized fluid is then contained by a valve that connects to an aimable spout with an affixed pilot light.
Anybody with even a passing knowledge of engineering will see that this device is much more likely to be a bomb than a flame thrower. Filling a vessel with petroleum heated near it’s flash point, pressurizing it with air, and then releasing that pressure is a recipe for an explosion.
I suspect instead that the real device was an early example of the military application of steam power by means of the same principle that makes pouring water on an oil fire such a bad idea. The heated vessel was likely attached to a cistern filled with sea water, to fire the weapon the crew opened a valve connecting the two, and the water flashed to steam propelling the incendiary on to an enemy ship.
This explains why foreigners who captured the siphons could not figure out how to use them. While the principle of their operation was extremely simple, it was also completely counterintuitive.
John Haldon actually reconstructed a working Greek Fire siphon on TV about a decade ago. The first attempts involved pre-pressurizing the container as described in Haldon and Byrne’s 1977 paper. However, when this was tested, it turned out that the bronze was too porous. Haldon and his team then switched to a simpler design in which a large hand pump was directly used to propel the incendiary through the siphon, and the fire served only to gently heat the cauldron and thus lower the liquid’s viscosity. With this, they came up with a device that largely matches what the sources describe both in the appearance/operation of the device itself and in the effect generated. It was able to successfully set a sailboat on fire.
I would be interested to see what Haldon thought of the hypothesis you propose above. It sounds like it might work, but I haven’t got a background in mechanical engineering. It’s possible that the Byzantines used multiple different designs over the years, sometimes refining the system, other times losing the refinements due to civil unrest. Alex Roland (1992) suggested that the system available to Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the 900s may not have been as sophisticated as the original system developed by Kallinikos to fight the Arab invasion fleets. Perhaps Kallinikos developed a binary system like the one you describe, which could release the fluid at high pressure, and that technology was lost sometime in the 9th century (per Roland’s suggestion), and when later emperors wanted “Greek Fire”, their engineers developed the simpler pump-based system demonstrated by Haldon.
Edward Luttwak (2009), as part of a larger work on Byzantine grand strategy, includes a section on Greek Fire. He makes some interesting points: apparently Liutprand of Cremona, writing around 833-4, says that God “quieted the winds and calmed the sea” for a Byzantine victory, and that it would have been “difficult for the Greeks to shoot their fire” otherwise. This indicates the likely use of the pump device built by Haldon, which as Luttwak points out is “the technology of a child’s water pistol” (analogy presumably per the Latin text you cite above) and probably had a range of no more than 20 yards or so. This would have made Greek Fire very effective for defense of Constantinople against flammable wooden ships on the calm Sea of Marmara, but not any kind of universal trump card. Luttwak also notes that there’s good literary evidence that the Arabs did eventually obtain working siphons, which were used in the Arab conquest of Crete (824-6) and the assault on Thessalonica by Leo of Tripoli in 904.
If we assume Greek Fire was more or less the device re-created by Haldon, then it’s interesting to speculate where else in medieval history such a thing might have been useful had it been known. Castellans would probably have found it effective to scare besiegers and destroy siege engines and towers. I wonder if it could potentially have been useful as late as the Battle of Lepanto?
I’ve got another one. Who wrote the Voynich manuscript, and what does it contain?
What did PIE sound like?
There will be an SSC meetup at 7pm this Saturday, October 26, at 616 E St NW. For more information, check the DC meetup’s Google group. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/dc-slatestarcodex
Next month may have an irregular meetup schedule due to Thanksgiving but we’ll still have a couple of events.
After repeatedly being rejected/left without answer by Cracked.com and/or Listverse, I abandoned hope to publish elsewhere and started a blog for my historical list articles:
Listicl.blogspot.com
For now there are only 3 articles. One of them you probably know – the one about royal parricides that SSC readers and especially skef helped me correct (if you see language mistakes in the other ones, I’ll be grateful if you tell me). If there are interested readers, I intend to transform my other pitches for Cracked and drafts in articles (the next one will probably be about some dark aspects of Buddhism). Of course, if there are no interested readers, I will take it as one more sign to abandon writing, at least in English.
I skimmed it, looks good. Maybe you could post your work here also as you’re writing it, in serialized form like some of the other effort posts? Then you could get feedback on each list item individually.
What lineage of Buddhism are you intending to look into?
@Incurian: thank you for suggestion, I think I’ll try it.
@lazydragonboy: many things were from Tibetan Buddhism, from the time when Tibet was a theocracy, but the worst things (like spectacular forms of suicide or auto-mutilations) weren’t from Tibet (but from Japan, China or Vietnam), don’t remember to what lineage of Buddhism they belong.
Naval Gazing looks at the last days of the war for the High Seas Fleet, and the part the naval mutinies played in bringing down Imperial Germany.
Also, today marks the anniversary of the Battle off Samar, the most glorious day in the history of the US Navy.
Fixed that for you.
Bean: is there any chance you could begin including slightly longer synopses in your SSC cross-posts? I always mean to go back and read your blog when I see your post, but then I forget about it while scrolling down to the bottom of SSC. It might stick in my mind better if I get a little preview. Presumably this applies to other people as well. NBD if not.
Probably not. I think I’m going to end regular link-posting here very soon for calendar reasons, although I’ll keep that in mind if I continue/do special link posts.
Naval Gazing: Turret and Barbette
About 18 months ago, I first wrote on the ironclad/pre-dreadnought era, and questions from readers lead me to investigate the issues of gun mountings. I came to the conclusion that the traditional account of the difference between turrets and barbettes was incorrect, and have been slowly working on a more through investigation over the past year. It’s finally up, with a look at all of the wacky gun mountings that went on warships in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries.
Today is Navy Day! Take a moment to remember the men and women of the USN, and the benefits of international trade we enjoy due to their efforts.
Today also marks the first anniversary of Naval Gazing as an independent blog. It’s been a great year, and thanks to everyone for reading.
Anyone here following the TV series “SEAL Team”? I faithfully followed the whole first season, and the second just started. But I’m finding the home-front problems the team members have to deal with increasingly tedious. I don’t necessarily need more outright violence, but seeing the team members trying to negotiate home-front challenges just isn’t that interesting.
I understand the show can’t be all shooting all the time; that would get boring. But if they have to do something else, perhaps they could dig more into the intel side of things, showing what goes into preparing the operations that the team goes on.
Sounds like the Unit, which I watched way back when.
What are some commonly held beliefs that, via content widely circulated on the internet, you’ve learned are wrong — but then later discovered that the internet is actually wrong and that either the commonly held belief was right all along, or that neither one is right and some third contrary thing is actually the truth?
It’s early and I just chugged a breakfast beer so I can’t think of an example right this second, but I know that within a few days I’ll be able to think of several.
The closest thing that comes to mind is the trope of drawing a sword from your back. A lot of people on the internet explained why that was impossible/impractical, then a few years later some people start making scabbards where drawing from the back becomes possible.
ISTR someone (Lindybeige?) pointing out that there are some artworks from the Celts that seemed to show scabbards on the back. Though his demonstration didn’t look like it would be very workable day-to-day.
It’s not the scabbards on backs, it’s drawing from them. I remember in the early 00s seeing in a replicas catalogue explaining that the baldric for giant two-hander swords would be entirely removed at the beginning of a battle, and the sword drawn then, not drawn from the back.
There’s a coin of Alexander the Great where he wears a sword on his back like Kane. Elephant Medallions.
And two-handed swords were dull for the first foot, and swung by guys wearing armored gloves. Pull it half out, grab the blade partway down, draw fully. Awkward? Sure. Dumb? Probably. Historically inaccurate? Doubtful.
Wait, really? I saw a youtube video of someone with sword expertise earnestly trying to draw from the back and could not. This is in fact possible and The Witcher confirmed real?!
I’d assume it’s based on the length of the blade (vs. the length of the drawer’s arm), and that past a certain ratio it becomes undoable.
The video I saw involved a scabbard which was much shorter than the sword, so that it was workable to draw it from behind. But it was not clear to me that the short scabard on your back would be a secure way to carry your sword, and nothing at all good happens when you drop your sword on or near your feet/a rock/a mud puddle at some random time once a week.
Why couldn’t you draw from the back? I assume the scabbard couldn’t be held tightly against the back at the bottom (at least not when you were about to draw), so you’d rotate the blade backwards and pull forwards to draw.
This does solve the problem, as do half-scabbards or similar – the issue is that either solution causes so many more problems that it’s not really viable.
A scabbard loose enough to let you draw a longsword* or larger weapon over the shoulder is not doing a good job of securing your weapon, and you will probably get it caught on your armor/legs/random debris/furniture, and possibly damage the weapon. A half-scabbard simply doesn’t do most of the jobs you want a scabbard to do. As mentioned, the historical solution is to carry large swords* on the back, but draw them after taking the harness off.
This is true for one-handed swords in some time periods as well, interestingly – if you really expect to need to draw your sword quickly in e.g. Renaissance France, you carry the sword and scabbard in your off hand, which lets you use the scabbard as a supplementary tool in all sorts of ways.
*A hand-and-a-half or two-handed sword, not the one-handed arming sword every fantasy everything feels is a longsword. These are by definition short enough that there’s no reason not to wear them at the side, as was done everywhere by everyone across all of time and space (with the usual ‘there’s this one weird guy in Scotland’ caveats).
**It is important to remember that swords are very nearly always sidearms, and that this term refers to their being worn at the side. Swords long enough to be primary weapons are very uncommon across history, and I believe only approaching relative normality in the late Renaissance as a reaction to push-of-pike and vastly better armoring techniques.
As I understand things, swords-as-primary-weapons are basically only a thing in judicial duels and some bodyguarding scenarios.
Also personal self-defence. If you’re going about your daily business in town, you don’t want to be lugging around a halberd, it’s too inconvenient. A sword though, you can just wear it on your side and carry on as normal. This is also why bucklers were popular, not because they’re particularly good shields, but because you can simply hang one off your belt. For a modern equivalent, consider the pistol. You don’t particularly want to be using it in the battlefield, a rifle is much better in every way, but it’s great as a carry piece because it can be worn on your person.
Judicial duels, private duels, bodyguarding, highway robbery, self-defense, storming castles, boarding ships, sacking cities, plenty of scenarios where your go-to weapon will be a sword, if you can afford one.
Just not battles between armies in the field.
The travel distance to pull the sword from the scabbard is the length of the sword. Put your hand over your shoulder and then extend it up. That travel distance is the maximum length of your sword, which is not at all long. Scabbards on the back might be useful for transporting a sword, but not for fighting. Also got to be much more difficult to re-sheath. Having your scabbard at your waist makes much more sense, and the only reason to have it on your back is because The Witcher looks awesome.
Also because Duncan and/or Connor MacLeod spend most of their time facing the camera at an angle that makes it bloody obvious that they aren’t carrying a sword at their side but leaves the barest fig-leaf of deniability about what they might have behind their back.
I’ll give Wonder Woman points for trying, and showing their work with the “maybe it will pass as a really really big brooch” technique, but I’m not really buying it.
I once designed a rig for wearing a great sword on my back. The scabbard goes about half way up the blade. The other end of the strap is a leather ring. You slide the ring all the way up the blade, then slide the bottom half of the blade into the scabbard, put the strap over your shoulder.
To draw it, you grab the scabbard with your left hand, pull the sword out with your right. Once it comes clear of the scabbard the rig is no longer attached to you. Let go of the scabbard. One swing of the sword and the ring slides down the blade and off. You now have both hands free to use the sword. Retrieve the rig from wherever it landed after the fight is over–or don’t if you lost.
I have no historical evidence that such a thing ever existed, but it does work, if not as well as a belt scabbard, which the great sword is too long for.
It’s part of what I traditionally wear at Halloween to meet trick or treaters at the door, along with a mail hauberk and a metal cap with a spike and mail attached. Meanwhile my daughter is on the balcony over the front door dressed in white with a uv light shining on her, playing mournful music on her harp as the house ghost.
You can diminish the travel distance problem with clever scabbard design. An example is this one from Shadow of Mordor. It fully protects the sword’s edges but leaves much of the middle exposed such that, since the sword tapers, you only need to withdraw it partway through before you can easily bring it out and forward. It would be a lot harder to put it back in, but the guy wielding it is a professional warrior, so he has presumably practised it thousands of times.
Shadiversity came up with a much more beginner friendly design. He finds that carrying a sword on your back is in significantly more comfortable than carrying it on your side. It’s also less awkward, getting in the way less when walking, running, jumping, crawling, or doing any number of other activities an adventurer or action hero might get up to. So it looking awesome is not the only reason why you might carry it that way.
That said, wearing a sword on your back does make the draw of the blade slower, particularly indoors. Back draw scabbards also give considerably less protection from the elements. These concerns are probably the reason why, historically speaking, nearly everyone carried their swords on the side.
“Christmas is based on Saturnalia“
I know that it isa commonly-argued position that “abstinence-only sex education is worse than any other form of sex education”.
I was surprised to find an argument (from Megan Mcardle) that abstinence-only sex ed has about the same results as any other form of sex ed.
That link is to an article written a decade ago.
My take is that the data was interpreted in a cultural consensus which already assumed that abstinence-only sex ed was wrong, so people missed that it performed equally as bad as all other forms of sex ed.
Not sure if it’s quite what you’re asking, but I used to believe that a vanishingly small fraction of the UK population were vegan. I later learned from several articles in mainstream newspapers that the figure was between 5% and 7%, which is much higher than you’d think!
It wasn’t until I quoted this figure to a friend, they didn’t believe me and I looked up my sources that I discovered that there was a single study, carried out by comparethemarket.com, which found 7% of the adult population being vegan. It did not give its methodology, nor any other information other than that 7%. It turns out that all the online newspapers had quoted this number (with a few converting it to 5% via a very questionable decision to include non-adults, assuming that none of these are vegan) without checking up on it, despite the fact that the Vegan Society carries out studies like this every couple of years, finds much smaller numbers (just over 1% if you’re wondering) and does publish the studies.
Some may recall, a few months back I asked the commentariat’s opinion on whether or not Star Trek: Voyager was worth watching. The verdict: Mostly no, with a few people suggesting “If you feel you must, just start in Season 4 when it gets better.”
Naturally, I ignored all of your advice and started from the beginning. I just finished Season 3 and I have to say, I’m finding it… surprisingly decent? Like, sure, there are flaws. Logistical inconsistencies regarding the # of photon torpedoes remaining, a stunningly profound lack of urgency in terms of keeping the ship moving towards home instead of stopping on every bumfuck alien planet encountered, the Doctor being a gigantic mess that destroys everything you thought you knew about holograms, the incredibly poor handling of the Neelix/Kes relationship (this one is just inexplicably awful), among others.
But overall, it’s just not that bad. It’s not that great, but I might go as far as to say that it has less cringe-inducing moments than the first 3 seasons of TNG or DS9 did. The characters are built fairly well, and there aren’t too many of them (a problem DS9 had in late seasons). Some of the character relationships are actually quite compelling (I’ve enjoyed almost every Neelix/Tuvok episode). I’m a little surprised that the overall plot of “let’s get home” is often completely ignored for random “anomaly of the week” style episodes, but, well, that’s kind of what Trek is at its core.
I think the arc with Siska and the Kazon was executed reasonably well. And there are a few episodes scattered in there that really hit you. I think Tuvix stands up as making the shortlist of great episodes that address high-level philosophical questions (and unlike in, say, Measure of a Man, this one ends with what I would classify as the wrong ethical decision being made). The Vidians are usually pretty good for episodes that will make you stop and think (mainly thoughts like: B’Elanna can cure this entire race of a destructive plague, but chooses not to because they… were jerks to her once?)
Perhaps this is all an expectations thing. I’ve found that in general, when my expectations for something are low I almost always end up enjoying it, while if my expectations are high I’m almost always disappointed. Since everyone told me this would be awful, the mere fact that it’s less awful than I expected makes me think it’s actually good.
ETA: Also worth noting, around midway through S3 my girlfriend (who has never watched any Trek before) started watching with me, and she seems to enjoy it as well, although she’s mainly focused on the characters. She once made a comment to me that she thought the episode plots were “very creative” which was kind of surprising, as I was more keen to dismiss most of them as “These are all just drawn from the standard bucket of the 5 basic Star Trek plots that exist.” Also, despite having never actually watched Trek, it’s surprising how much general background knowledge she’s picked up through overall cultural osmosis (most of which I assume came from the Big Bang Theory)
(Please no spoilers for anything beyond S3, thanks!)
It gets both better and worse. But mainly better. I liked the show.
There is a lot to like and a lot to dislike. I started really liking it, thinking it had a really strong start, much better than DS9 or TNG.
One thing you are gracefully missing out on is how desperate UPN was to promote the show, by overselling it. I got so angry with them selling a storyline with “AND A MAJOR CHARACTER WILL DIE AT THE END” that I quit for a half-season. I tried again and quit again.
By S4 it had found what trade-offs it would make and if I lived with them I was happy.
It was stuck at the border when TV was moving from episodic to serial. DS9 really shows its age from this, too.
Definitely. Although I’m still not sold on the notion that “Serial > episodic” which seems to be the general consensus these days. I kind of like shows that make a strong attempt to “do both” (which DS9 and this seem to be doing)
I’m not sure that serial is better, but it’s certainly how people are consuming media these days. And to be fair the screenwriters have more freedom when they don’t have to write for an audience that only catches a random fraction of the actual episodes aired.
Eh, in some ways they have more freedom, but in some ways they have less.
Audiences of serial programs expect progress of the arc to advance in pretty much every episode. The writer of a serial show doesn’t have nearly as much freedom to throw in a random “everyone goes to the holodeck and plays baseball” episode. The audience would be greatly annoyed by that sort of thing.
But with serial the authors can actually do…things. Otherwise every episode has to end with “and after that wacky week when the father became a radio disc jockey for no reason everything is back to normal!”
I’d be pretty annoyed by any show that decided to do a plot line where nothing that happened in the episode mattered. Self contained stories are one thing, but no impact episodes are just bad writing.
Doesn’t that basically describe nearly every show that ever existed prior to 1990?
I definitely prefer episodic over serial. But this is more on the condition that it’s currently way too easy to fuck up serial longform.
The biggest sin that serialized storytellers are committing is ignore episodic structure entirely, and treating the entire season like one long movie. This results in individual episodes not even covering a single act, meaning that you spend entire hours where there are no payoffs. Pacing is shot. See: all of the Netflix Marvel shows.
Someone once noted that Breaking Bad succeeds so well at serialized because it still honors the episode, recognizes that storytelling is fractal. The entire show is 5-act, but each season is 5-act, each episode is 5-act, each act is 3-5 scene-act, each scene is 3-act, each conversation has a conflict and goal rise and ebb of tension, etc.
What people fail to recognize with a lot of supposedly episodic shows is that they are only episodic in the plots, but maintain serialized character and relationship development. (which is my preferred mode of media) “The baseball episode” is meant to highlight where the various personalities and dynamics of a people involved stand, and so are often a distilled form of what appeals to most of the fandom. A good deal of transformative works, fanart and fanfiction, often depict baseball-episode type situations instead of major plot events.
Mine as well.
I think House, MD did a pretty good job of it. It maintained an episodic structure insofar as it was dealing with a unique “Medical Mystery of the Week” but had a lot going on in terms of character and relationship and larger hospital issues that were serial in nature.
+1
The trouble is that the premise of Voyager really demands a serial show to pay itself off. If any individual series could benefit from a remake, it’s probably V’ger, for that reason. It’s the Trek show that most failed to live up to its premise. (Oddly, DS9 is more serial even though its premise screams episodic)
In a certain light, it makes sense for DS9 to be more serial and Voyager more episodic: DS9’s premise ties the protagonists more-or-less to one spot, so they’re going to be mixed up in the same stuff over time and they’re still going to be there to experience the after-effects. While Voyager is on a very long one-way journey that they’re taking as quickly as possible, so they’re going to be constantly encountering new situations while literally leaving long-term consequences far behind.
I seem to recall reading at the time that the premise of Voyager was deliberately constructed to facilitate an episodic format (and to leave behind most of the accumulated world-building of TNG and the early seasons of DS9) in an attempt to go back to the feel of TOS.
I’m not really convinced. Voyager, the ship itself, was supposed to be on an urgent journey, a journey with a defined beginning and endpoint. To me that sets the expectation for a well defined arc, and mucking about with weekly monsters and side trips detracts from that. Compare to BSG, which was hardly perfect, but still did a better job of tying the weekly conflicts to waypoints on a journey with some momentum (and notably, the parts of the series fans complained about most were the parts that strained this logic and momentum).
If they really wanted TOS, why not just “more TOS but even deeper in space and with a lady captain this time”? That’s what they delivered, there’d be less complaints if that had been the premise up front.
Whereas DS9, being literally “stationary”, could certainly be serial, but an entirely episodic “these are their stories” approach would have been forgivable.
Voyager regularly ignored continuity anyway. That was one of the trade-offs I meant, that once you accepted it, you could enjoy it more.
Even in the start, they kept on running into Seska and the exact same Kazon over and over again. They should be moving through Kazon space. It doesn’t make sense. But if you decide not to care about this, you can enjoy it.
Well that part makes some sense when you consider that Seska was almost entirely motivated by getting revenge on Voyager, and that she seemed to be able to manipulate said Kazon well enough.
They weren’t running into her by coincidence, she was placing herself in their way.
It’s always interesting to me to see how people evaluate various Doctor Who episodes, depending on how long they’ve been in fandom, and their priorities on execution. Some people bemoan the return of the nth base-under-siege (I once laughed my ass off when I realized a Who-esque American show I was watching did basically a beat-for-beat version of the structure), while others love how consistently they facilitate certain character traits to come to the fore, or are satisfied with the unique execution. There’s the whole “the Xth Doctor is My Doctor,” most usually the first one they watched.
And there are kind of a list of Obligatory Episode Plots that every genre show will tackle sooner or later. Body-swap, evil doppelganger/s, Rashomon, time loop, music/al episode, Seven Samurai, talking to Hannibal, etc. These episodes are consistently fan favorites, and their success is not because of the originality of the core plot, but because the un-originality forces the writers to tightly customize the details to the show’s particular characters and unique traits. It’s become another kind of interesting to recognize when a show’s writers are or aren’t genre-savvy about the classics, which also influences how well they execute or find a new twist on the premises.
A certain Buffy-esque show had writers unintentionally doing worse takes on certain mythological creatures because they clearly hadn’t been fans supernatural shows, and so didn’t know about historical better portrayals. But at the same time, the outsider perspective let them avoid certain genre tropes without realzing it. The same showrunner did a “Firefly but even more space corporatism” show next, and even had a Fury Road-esque episode, but clearly had more familiarity with the genre, to better find the good subversions.
I’m love hate with Who because it’s sometimes the worst of both worlds: Too episodic for most installments to have real stakes or a meaty arc, but so full of in-jokes, self-reference, and convoluted backstory that it’s impossible to jump in the middle without missing an awful lot.
the Doctor being a gigantic mess that destroys everything you thought you knew about holograms, the incredibly poor handling of the Neelix/Kes relationship (this one is just inexplicably awful)
Yes and triple-yes.
The problem with the Doctor (and you’ll see it later with Seven of Nine) is that the show latched on to certain characters that seemed popular with the fans and pretty much wrote episodes centred on them, leaving the rest of the ensemble cast neglected.
Kes and Neelix is just flat-out wrong but I’ve ranted about that on Tumblr so not going to rehash it here.
Unlike you, I didn’t think the Kazon were handled well, and Seska was pretty much wasted, but again that was part of the problem with the show: they started off trying to be honest about the “it’ll take sixty years to get back to the Alpha Quadrant, no short cuts, no cheats” and show the problems of “yeah cut off from everything so no popping in to a starbase to refuel and get supplies, if anything breaks you either cobble some repair together or learn to do without, power has to be rationed” – but that turned out too boring for people looking for the general Star Trek adventures in space show, so they did things like “yeah the holodeck runs on different power system than the replicators, so we have to ration things like meals and even go back to cooking actual grown and harvested food like cavemen but you can create elaborate fantasy games and immerse yourself in them, shhh don’t ask how that works” and have the “stop off at every planet for adventure of the week” model (the Year of Hell was their attempt at a season with an overall arc and it worked pretty okay, much better than Enterprise‘s war season, but not my cup of tea).
I’m particularly salty about the mistreatment of Harry Kim and Janeway’s blatant favoritism towards Paris, all because she had/has the crush on his dad 🙂
My problem with the Doctor is less “he gets too much attention” and more “why does this hologram have such an advanced personality as opposed to, say, Data, who struggled mightily for 7 years to do so much as laugh in a non-creepy manner?” It’s as if there’s some missing deleted scene where Tinkerbell turned him into “a real boy” and I just missed it or something.
I actually don’t feel like the other characters are being neglected. I think Harry, B’Elanna, Neelix, Kes, Chakotay all have been reasonably developed, they’ve all had episodes where their own character development was the primary focus of the episode, etc. Paris seems to be getting a little left behind as of late, but he did have a multi-episode arc of him slacking off on the job (even if it turned out to be a false flag to trick the Kazon).
What? Harry is favored plenty! He’s part of the senior staff for some reason. Despite this being his first assignment after the academy. I always laugh when he responds to a call for the “senior officers” to assemble. How is he a senior officer? There cannot possibly be any officer more junior than him!!!
@Matt M,
Star Trek holograms are designed to emulate human behavior convincingly. Every time Picard loaded up a Dixon Hill story the characters were capable of interacting with him in a convincingly human way. And those weren’t even sentient holograms like Moriarty or Vic Fontaine.
Of course that raises the question of why Data in particular struggles so much with e.g. using contractions while other AIs (including other Soong-type androids like Lore and Lal) don’t seem to have that problem. Maybe the crystalline entity messed him up way more than anyone realized?
That said, I don’t think it’s fair to lay that on the EMH. The inconsistency is between Data and nearly every other form of artificial intelligence in the TNG era, not just between Data and the EMH. It would be like complaining that Tuvok was inconsistent because he didn’t have daddy issues like Spock. That’s something particular to Spock’s character, not a common trait shared by all Vulcans.
I guess the real question is what makes Data an interesting technological achievement at all, given that the holodeck is able to run scads of AIs.
Heck, they made Moriarty by mistake…
Maybe it’s because Data is a general intelligence that can learn and is fully contained in a small body, while holodeck AIs are specialized and run by a massive ship computer? I find this whole conversation very distressing.
I never understood how Moriarty happened. I thought all it took was Data asking the holodeck for a true opponent, but was it something more? Was there some kind of one in a million fluke too?
This is probably the kind of thing you shouldn’t think about too hard.
The Doctor also learns. He doesn’t just learn either, he innovates. He comes up with new medical procedures that were previously unknown. He is able to construct a weapon more advanced than what the Borg could do.
This was what made me kick-the-cat angry about the movie Star Trek reboot, where Kirk became a starship commander over the span of the first movie. He doesn’t even know where the shitters are yet! How do you have an entire starship full of personnel between O-1 and O-7 and nobody is able to outperform this choad who got pinned last week?!
Maybe someone at Starfleet noticed how frequently the fate of the universe seems to hinge on the captain of the Enterprise winning a fistfight, and that’s the only criterion they look at anymore.
@dick, I saw a hypothesis on Tumblr about how the reboot universe ends up being, effectively, the mirror universe. Think of it – they’re already, in effect, deciding promotions by personal combat.
This may just be me getting bitter and snarky in my old age, but the Star Trek reboots seem utterly soulless and schlocky to me, without even a minimal attempt at coherent plots. Most of the new Star Wars movies (other than maybe Rogue One) seem the same way. Promoting a new ensign to captain is goofy; so is basically everything else they do. None of it makes any sense.
Modern Star Trek and Star Wars are more properly analyzed as fan-fiction.
Ensign promoted to captain makes perfect sense as fan-fiction; you need to quickly establish your character in the universe to get to the stuff you want to comment about, in the universe. Since the universe already exists – this being fan-fiction – you aren’t going to want to spend any time establishing the universe, just establishing that the character is part of it.
It isn’t exploration; you can’t learn anything new about the universe, because the author didn’t create the universe and doesn’t know how to expand it. So you stay in familiar locations with familiar mechanics.
Yeah, the Star Trek reboot isn’t even intended to stand on its own. It can only function with the explicit understanding of the audience that it exists solely to be a re-imagining of an existing universe, and as such, it is allowed to get away with ridiculous shenanigans that would never be permissible for new IP.
Promoting a new ensign to captain is goofy
Yup, in the original series Kirk is the youngest officer to make captain of a starship but he works his way up the traditional way by serving in junior roles on other vessels and getting promoted. The reboot crowd, especially Abrams, neither knew nor cared about Trek so went for the caricature pop-culture version; they wanted to start off with ALL-NEW YOUNG VERSIONS OF BELOVED CHARACTERS! but they also knew that Kirk had to be captain, so instead of “Kirk: The Academy Years” which a genuine reboot would have needed, or “Kirk: Youngest Captain in Starfleet” which would have obviated the need to account for him being captain, they chose the worst of both worlds, gave us a battlefield promotion (which made little sense even in the context and required Spock to have a toddler-style tantrum in order to be replaced on grounds of “emotionally compromised”) and then let him retain the captaincy once the emergency was over.
Which was ridiculous given they also made Starfleet explicitly more military as well!
The reboot could have been a good idea but it was worked out dreadfully.
how the reboot universe ends up being, effectively, the mirror universe
Absolutely! I’ve argued this myself 🙂
So in the next reboot movie, will the Federation introduce the agonizer as a disciplinary tool?
Only for the audience. Man, what writer or director hasn’t wished for a nice remote agonizer to deploy against the critics, which group includes nitpicky fans of whatever it is they are trying to reboot this week?
I don’t think the plots of the original Star Wars were ever all that good. That is, if you were to read the original trilogy in wikipedia summary “just give me the basic story” form, then they’re not all that special. I don’t think you’d come away with “Yes, this storyline is so great, it’s plot so coherent, it will become a worldwide phenomenon”. What made the original trilogy great was the artistically rich world that Lucas painted (combining the look & feel of sci-fi, WWII, Westerns, and samurai movies into a singular style), the emotional resonance of the basic hero’s journey, and the realization that the Big Bad is actually family, that he could easily be you and vice versa. To be honest, I think the prequels had the best stories *on paper*. Watching the Republic fall apart into authoritarianism, watching the Jedi Order fail as peacekeepers and realize they are obsolete, watching two close friends take very different paths and see Anakin’s emotional turmoil as the Jedi Order never teach a traumatized little boy to deal with his emotions — all of that is WAAAAY more interesting than anything that happens in the originals, it just got executed terribly.
The two new main-line Star Wars definitely have very muddled stories in that the first wanted to hew as close to the formula as possible, and the second wanted to toss off the formula as much as possible, but even without that, their source material was never A+ writing to begin with. (I actually really liked the Rey-Kylo-Luke parts of TLJ though)
@mdet
Don’t Wikipedia plot summaries make everything sound kinda bad?
I’ve definitely read some Wikipedia summaries of movies and thought “Ooh, that sounds really good”. But I was really just using it to say “Looking at the basic plot points, character arcs, and story structure”.
As I said, I think that if you outline the basic plot of the prequels, they’re way more interesting stories than the originals. The prequels attempt to dive into what the Republic is, what the Jedi Order is, and how Palpatine exploits their flaws to become an authoritarian leader, while also having character drama in Anakin’s relationships with Obi-Wan and Padme.
The Originals don’t really care much about the nature and relationship of the Empire or Rebel Alliance, except for “Empire is vaguely fascist”. Luke’s character dynamics with Obi-wan, Han, Yoda, and Vader are good, but I don’t think they’re quite as interesting as watching the inevitability of Anakin’s fall. (Maybe I’m making the mistake of comparing the originals as they are to the prequels as they could’ve been if the dialogue and performances were better.)
@mdet:
My take is that the prequels on paper require an acting exhibition in execution to pull it off, and Lucas is not the actors’ director. The acting in even the original trilogy wasn’t that great.
Also, the prequels as “Space GoT” kind of horrifyingly fits the more I think about it…
Star Trek’s always been what TVTropes calls “mildly military”, even through they throw around what’ve got to be megaton-range weapons on the regular. Letting Kim sit at the big boys’ table probably isn’t even in the top ten most irresponsible things they’ve done.
Well, he’s more qualified than Wesley Crusher, I’ll give him that…
But he has less experience in space that Wesley Crusher when he’s promoted to captain. And he’s almost as insufferable. (Though admittedly, everyone in that crew is pretty insufferable.)
OK, now I want the fanfiction where Wesley Crusher is made Acting Captain, and Ensign Kirk has to take orders from him.
How is he a senior officer? There cannot possibly be any officer more junior than him!!!
Starting off he is, but he is consistently denied the promotions he should get, while Paris starts off as dishonorably discharged from Starfleet after causing the death of three fellow officers, he then becomes a failed rebel, gets put in prison for treason, is willing to turn on his Maquis colleagues in order to get out of prison, is then taken on board by Janeway purely as an informant ot locate the renegade Maquis ship and after the whole ‘stranded in the Delta Quadrant thing’ happens, he gets promoted to bridge officer and his old rank of lieutenant reinstated! And Janeway is pretty blatant about this favourable treatment being down to her admiration for his father, under whom he served. He still manages, in the first couple of years, to cock things up – for example, when he gets too close to the wife of an alien scientist and is framed for the murder of the husband. There’s nothing said to him by Janeway about “so if you’re going to commit adultery, there’s this regulation that you have to notify the captain and the doctor about any prospective sexual encounters with aliens you intend to have” and he gets forgiven for a lot of screw-ups (Paris does eventually get some genuine character growth and maturity, but in the start he is the ‘rebel without a clue’ type). Even when he is busted back down to ensign for disciplinary reasons, a year later he gets his rank back and a motivational speech from the captain about how proud she is of him.
By contrast, Harry Kim is straight out of Starfleet with an unblemished record, he does his best not to screw up, and he starts and ends as an Ensign with Janeway not giving him the field promotion she gave Paris, even after seven years. And the whole “oh you broke protocol by your romance” in the episode “The Disease” is out of nowhere, since we never hear before or after about that, and Paris doesn’t get any reprimand entered onto his service file for carrying on with the scientist’s wife.
The character really was left with nothing much to do and nothing really changing for him, unlike Paris.
Hah, I’m only three seasons in and I’m pretty sure Tom Paris has already been falsely accused of murder at least three times, possibly four.
It seems like quite a common occurrence in space when dealing with aliens!
(Chief O’Brien had at least two similar such incidents back on DS9, too)
One of the reasons the incident O’Brien suffered was so similar to the one Paris suffered is that, well, apparently Daniel Keys Moran pitched a story idea to Paramount for the O’Brien-falsely-accused story, one which Paramount at the time turned down. DKM was, uh, rather startled to see essentially the same story, under the byline of one of the Paramount staffers he talked to, surface as a Voyager episode a couple years later, with Paris taking the place of O’Brien. Eventually the DKM story was bought (and DKM paid for it) and filmed as a DS9 episode. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Daniel_Keys_Moran has links to articles on DKM’s web site telling the story.
They distinguished the EMH from Data because the EMH wasn’t trying to “become human.” He just “exceeded his original programming.” The holograms aren’t meant to be left on forever, and weird things started to accumulate as he went out of warranty.
But unlike real life technology, all the “weird things” that happen when he was used improperly and well beyond the bounds of what the technology was supposed to be capable of were positive.
Imagine finding out that your truck runs better if you drive it 10 hours a day at 80mph over rough terrain and never bother changing the oil!
@Matt M,
This is just me being pedantic, not really disagreeing, but this can and does sometimes happen.
One example that immediately comes to mind is pre-absorbing antibodies. Depending on the specific antibody, you can actually get a much cleaner signal the second time you use the same primary antibody solution. There’s still a limit on how many times you can use the same solution before your signal starts getting worse again but that doesn’t mean that you should use them fresh every time.
I doubt that sentient holograms are very similar to antibodies but while it’s a safe bet it’s not a given that more use will necessarily lead to worse performance.
Possible spoilers below?
the Year of Hell was their attempt at a season with an overall arc
That was just two episodes, not a season. They presaged it a year or two earlier by having Kes time-skip all throughout her life. By that time Kes was gone, and Seven did her parts line for line, which was either really clever or really dumb, years later I am still not sure.
There were those who wanted it to be a whole season, Brannon Bragga pushed for it, but the studio and Rick Berman scuppered the idea. And that, to me, really sums up the entire history of Voyager, a lot of great ideas that weren’t developed well because the desire to hit the reset button was just too strong.
Wait, wait, hold up just a minute here. You don’t think Data has a right to refuse to have his brain disassembled and then put back together by a man who does not entirely know what he’s doing? Because i gotta tell you, i feel like that one was a no-brainer. It’s blatantly obvious that Data is a person, and as such nobody has any right to make use of his body without his consent.
You misunderstand. I’m saying Measure of a Man had the morally right ending, but Tuvix had the morally wrong one where Janeway basically just goes “Who cares about this sentiment being’s right to exist – we want our friends back!” and basically murders him in cold blood (after the doctor refuses to do so because it would violate his programming)
Ohhh! Okay this makes much more sense, my apologies. Yes murdering Tuvix was morally dubious. While i can see an argument for it being the right thing (two lives versus one life), i am also sympathetic to the argument that it was wrong (existent person versus potential persons).
IIRC, Janeway explicitly entertained, but rejected this argument. She herself said that would not be sufficient rationale. In the end, her rationale was basically “we liked those two more than we like you.”
IMO the best argument would have been something like “We’re in a desperate situation here on this ship and two bodies are significantly more useful than one, morality be damned,” but they definitely didn’t go that way…
Has anyone seen a technical analysis of what we know about the recent explosive devices sent to the Clintons, Obamas, etc? I’ve seen some photos and x-rays, but would love to see a tech blogger explaining what we know about the devices so far.
Melatonin
I finally got some 0.3 mg melatonin doses. As Scott’s overview https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ suggested, I am taking one around 3 or 4pm.
It doesn’t seem to have any effect. I used to take a 1.5 mg dose around 8pm, and it would have me wanting to sleep by 10-11pm. Now I toss and turn for a while.
I have two questions from this, personal and scientific.
1. What should I do next? Should I just go back to what I know worked? Am I breaking something with using such a high dose? Should I try taking a double-dose around 4pm? Take it even earlier?
2. Why is my experience scientifically “wrong”?
To the crowd: I’m also looking for responses to this question, as I just starting taking melatonin again and plan to replace with 0.3 mg once my 3 mg bottle is empty.
@Edward Scizorhands: My recollection is that the acute drowsiness effect starts sooner than the 7 hour window you describe. Maybe that’s the problem?
Thanks for bringing this back up. I followed the idea of dropping to 0.3mg (approximately) and taking it around 4:30 or 5PM. Incidentally, planning that far ahead in my day is kind of inconvenient. Well, it seemed to work for a couple months and I might even have felt more alert in the mornings, but in the last few weeks, the effect wore off completely. I started waking up around 2 or 3AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. I tried taking the 0.3 mg later: 7pm, 8pm – no help. Now I’m doing 1.5mg around 6:30pm and going to bed by 10pm and the benefits have returned.
I set an alarm around 3:30 that is supposed to remind me. It usually does.
Now that it’s mentioned, I am getting up easier, but I think this is entirely due to weather changes requiring the heat come on, and making my bedroom get hot around waking time, making staying in bed uncomfortable. But the two events were close in time so I can’t completely discount one from the other.
I’ll try monitoring my drowsiness levels in the evening.
Apparently, you should open your windows and install more succulent plants in the room.
I think in this case the answer to 2) is probably that we don’t really know what is scientifically right when it comes to melatonin for sleep yet? I mean sure, the evidence suggests that 0.3 is perhaps as/more effective as higher doses in reducing sleep latency and increasing total time slept but it’s not hugely well studied.
With respect to both 1 and 2 i’d just shrug and say in light of the above do whatever works for you. It may be that your previous use falls more into the use of melatonin as a hypnotic rather than the more nebulous sense of a ‘sleep aid’ that your current use is intending, I think that was one of the main points of Scott’s post – that it can be used either way. Your previous use isn’t ‘wrong’ in any way – it’s achieving exactly what you are using it to achieve in the way that you are using it.
I tried to take it in the morning in order to delay my sleeping cycle and promised to report back. I didn’t so thanks for the reminder. Short story is it didn’t work but I was quite sleepy until noon-ish and abandoned the project after a couple weeks.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to be an Effective Action Hero.
The action hero part is given to you: no weapons can harm you, no trap can hold
you, and you can best any foe you face in direct combat. However, you
cannot pump any physics violations involved in this for economic purposes–
your special abilities are pretty much only good for beating people up.
How, then, do you make the world a better place?
trick question! anything i did would have economic effects
Become a simultaneous superstar in every combat sport and use the resulting soapbox to promote good causes, then parlay that into a political career, and do same.
Yeah, I’m kinda wondering if the answer isn’t something like “make a gazillion dollars as the world boxing/MMA champion, and use it to buy DDT-soaked bednets and ship them to regions with a lot of malaria.”
I could do regime change anywhere with a normal functioning government. Even the USG would have a tough time operating if I could walk anywhere and destroy what I find.
North Korea is seems to be the place that I would most likely to help and least likely to harm. There are all sorts of civil wars and proxy wars being fought in Africa and the Middle East in which I honestly do not know which side is better, but I would start researching that.
In theory I could force first-world governments to modify their policies, too. In terms of maximizing my impact this is how I operate, but there is too much chances of seriously wrecking things I do not understand.
(I assume that I cannot be economically bought off, given the constraints of the problem.)
As soon as North Korea becomes aware of your existence, can’t they say “If you lay one hand against us, we immediately launch our entire arsenal at Seoul/Tokyo”? Would that not deter you?
What if I decide to fight the missiles?
You’re an action hero – sneak into the missile launching facility and punch everyone before they can turn their key.
Extorting payments is allowed. I just didn’t want someone figuring out how indestructibility implies free energy or something.
Find an Effective Machiavel to pair up with.
http://okayophelia.tumblr.com/post/88319841310/hi-can-you-explain-to-me-the-king-and-lionheart
In effective global change, there isn’t much that a single person can do. Even Superman (physics-breaking that he is) can’t just solve tons of problems at once. Mostly it’s a logistics problem. He can save one little old lady from being run over by a car, or a different one at the same time. There are literally billions of things happening every day. Even breaking physics there are attention and time issues. Also, try to imagine killing a dictator who knows you are coming. How do you find them, how do you catch them? They are going to adapt to you very quickly, as everyone in their employ gets redirected into identifying you and slowing you down. Plane takes off late, or goes to the wrong destination, people give you bad directions, people warn the dictator that you are coming. You don’t even need a majority of the people on the dictators side to make this work.
Despite being invulnerable and able to beat anyone, no plan to make a meaningful difference would be effective without support from a wide array of supporters or at least underlings. You could go with an old-fashioned fear system, where the possibility of you destroying something (or someone) is enough to get some of your goals met. That only works as far as you can trust others to carry out your desires when you aren’t looking and aren’t physically present. Once you get beyond a small number of supporters, then the realistic options for you to monitor their support is pretty much gone.
Tying yourself to a powerful government doesn’t work either, as you give up a significant amount of freedom to choose your own path (they have goals too) and also give up a lot of means to achieve goals. You can’t just go and assassinate your enemies if you are linked to the US government, for the same reason they can’t.
I think the already-mentioned option of getting famous specifically as an MMA fighter or something and leveraging that for further wealth and fame, and then maybe politics, is a solid option. That said, all you’re really doing is bootstrapping your way into something that hundreds of other people all around the world already can do – get into politics at a high level. Bad charisma or some fatal flaw (you killed a kid while fighting evil!) are not well balanced in a politician by being immune to assassination.
I do think that the most effective use of such a person would be in the employ of a small nation that’s under threat from larger ones. In that regard, the super hero could operate in a similar fashion to a flexible nuclear weapon – as a deterrent. With the logistical support available from a nation state (even a small poor one), they could get into position, with the right knowledge, to be able to act. That would only operate on that level defensively, as an active attack posture would get bigger nations to coordinate a response to destroy the support structure.
I broadly agree that this is hard, but I think you’re selling it a little too short here.
First, you can’t necessarily find and beat up a dictator, but you can force them into hiding, which makes it harder to rule. You can also storm any military base, which makes it effectively impossible for them to have tanks or planes, or even any serious concentration of infantry.
Second, you’re underestimating the value of the weapon you’d be in the hands of a government (large or small). You eliminate the two big disadvantages of nuclear weapons: First, not only do you not have any collateral damage, you don’t even have to kill any enemy combatants! Second, since you’re unique, there’s no risk of proliferation or escalation. Your use would be more, not less, acceptable than conventional military force, and at drastically reduced cost to the nation you work for. The main limiting factor would be your trust in your host nation’s judgment.
I’ll agree with your additions, but also point back to the logistics problem. I’ll also note that the US took quite a few years to find Bin Laden, despite a very strong intelligence network highly dedicated to doing so. He was apparently able to lead his followers throughout that time.
Let’s say you want to destroy all military bases of a fairly powerful dictator. Maybe he has 20 bases and 500 tanks. How long would it take you to travel from base to base and destroy the tanks? How long would it take them to drive away from the bases while you did that? What if you increased the number to 6,000, spread out over all of China? You could literally spend years walking around the country punching tanks, while they pretty much dodged you and tried to avoid you. Then they could put up dummy bases and false reports and waste your time.
(All of this assuming that they had no means to actually slow you down or capture you, which is a pretty high level of power, even for superheroes. Downing an international flight over the ocean would put you out of commission for a long time, and even in PR terms is cheap compared to someone destroying all your heavy equipment.)
“no trap can hold you” means that attempts to down international flights will result in you heroically managing miraculous manual landings.
No, the real risk is that the perfect action film always includes a good number of ally/civilian casualties and a good amount of property damage. If enemies leverage that aspect enough, your guaranteed victory aspect will be a bad tradeoff against the costs of the aftermath.
Start a religion around yourself as some kind of demigod/messiah. Perhaps even claim to be Jesus or something. Take over the world. Tell everybody to be nice to each other.
First, you need to overcome the boredom due to lack of challenge. Just how many monsters can you slay with one punch before it gets old and sends you into depression? Can make you lose your hair.
This study which claims to show that personality differences are larger in more developed countries has been passed around for a while now. Last year, I made a post about some issues that I had with it, including possible signs of p-hacking and potential regional confounds.
I took another look at the paper again a few days ago, and I think I may have found another serious problem.
The introduction discusses three hypothesis, the third of which is that the cross-cultural patterns may be driven by methodological artifacts. The last paragraph is particularly interesting (page 170):
This is something that I’ve been wondering for a while: whether results like this could simply be because measurement tools like the Big Five personality tests were “calibrated” for WEIRD subjects, and they don’t capture as many relevant variables as well in different cultures. If I understand it right, Cronbach’s alpha is supposed to measure the reliability of a scale, so it seems like a decent starting point for testing this.
A side note: I did some digging a while back, and it turns out that almost all of the “cross cultural” data used in this study came from college students (pages 180-181). That means that access to education, specifically, probably won’t be much of an issue but it raises other questions about whether these samples are representative and whether a student sample in one country might be unrepresentative in different ways than a student sample in another country. But let’s leave that aside.
The results section (page 177) discusses an attempt to test the measurement artifacts hypothesis:
Forgive me if I’m missing something, but isn’t this the exact opposite of what you would want to do? The hypothesis would be: country-level variables that happen to correlate with HDI -> the personality tests are less reliable in low HDI countries -> sex differences in the test results are smaller in those countries. Presumably, then, you would control for Cronbach’s alpha and see if the HDI correlation was still significant, right?
I might actually be able to do that myself in Excel (a Google search tells me that Excel can do multiple regressions), since the paper provides the Cronbach’s alpha data for each country and I’ve already copied the personality data. But I wanted to run it by people here first, to make sure that I wasn’t missing anything.
My default assumption is that for a given thing there will be more variations in bigger and richer countries where people can spend more time worrying about those things.
I swear, when I am Dictator of the World I will force all new social science PhDs to write ‘Data derived from college student are not generalizeable’ ten thousand times on the blackboard before giving them their diploma.
The statistical issue is actually much worse than you mention, because HDI and sexual disparities are negatively autocorrelated, mediated through life expectancy and education off the top of my head. They should have used a more discrete level of aggregation and non-composite variables, at the very, very least.
In US politics, there’s a common callout towards the lack of fervor for nuclear energy from the left shows how they are not really caring about reducing carbon-emissions.
However, why is there so little attention towards the inconsistency for another source of energy that probably has been responsible for much of the reduction in carbon-emissions so far – natural gas. Or more specifically, one of the biggest sources of the increasing natural gas production – fracking.
To be “fair”, I feel that the pro-nuclear side is not all that honest either due to things like thorium reactors being only a side front of being a main one indicating that it is still being propped up by the military.
I don’t “get” politics, especially US politics. So damned if I know why someone isn’t pushing a given thing regardless of whether or not it’s actually a good idea.
But natural gas is a self-limiting solution. It’s less bad than coal. But even if we assume unlimited supplies – replacing all coal with natural gas seems like it would still produce ‘too much’ carbon dioxide, if energy consumption rates stayed the same or kept on growing. It’s kind of like switching from a 20 year old gas guzzler car, to a modern, more efficient but still internal consumption car – better than nothing, but still polluting.
If it’s expensive to switch to gas – and gas will be better, but not good enough, so will just have to switch again, why bother.
And that’s before we start talking about externalities caused by various means of natural gas producion/collection. (I know nothing about this, but that seems to be the commonly cited problem with fracking in particular.)
And how is this different from nuclear?
Nuclear IS “good enough” from a carbon perspective.
Natural gas is “good enough” as it’s a crucial part of how many places reduced their carbon emissions already.
In fact, for most people natural gas is probably “better” than nuclear even if only as an intermediary.
@helloo
Numbers? What is the current amount of energy used in the whole world (BTUs or equivalent units). How much is that projected to increase with population and improvements in 3rd world living standards?
How much carbon dioxide is released per BTU from natural gas?
When you multiply these numbers, how does this compare with the level of cabon dioxide production from before the industrial revolution? From 1950? With the level your favourite scientific commitee suggests would be needed to avoid dangerous levels of climate change? Tthere’s quite a range of those estimates, of course.)
I haven’t done the research (which is somewhat difficult) or the arithmetic (which is easy), but my intuition says that the amount of carbon dioxide produced would still be too much. Natural gas might be *part* of a solution, but only with a good effective way of re-sequestering (sp?) the excess carbon dioxide – and if that method itself requires energy (as it probably would) you can’t be getting *that* energy from natural gas, because that will just raise the amount you need to re-sequester.
Put another way – slowing this thing down is unlikely to be good enough, and certainly won’t be good enough if the problem is then seen as being solved – and all switching to natural gas can do, if my intuition is correct, is slow it down a bit.
My (limited) understanding is that natural gas plays well with solar and wind power, because it’s pretty easy to start when you need it. Nuclear and coal plants need a lot more time to come online from a cold start. So if we move heavily to renewables, I think we end up with a lot of gas turbines used to keep the lights on when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
Either that or we need a way to store electric energy that is cost effective. That can mean improved storage techniques or improved solar that is so good that fairly high losses aren’t very costly.
Nuclear releases zero CO2.
There is CO2 released from mining uranium, but it is close enough to zero for most purposes.
Okay, since I previously spoke up against a similar liberal “gotcha” argument (the one about how conservatives supposedly don’t really care about reducing abortions since they’re against sex education), I feel I’ve earned the right to point out that this is just more of the same.
Listen, there is no contradiction here. Us liberals, we are against polluting the air and we are against irradiating ourselves and we are against blowing up the countryside. We’re against those things due to some pretty closely related principles, actually. We don’t want to avoid doing one of them by doing another. We want to avoid doing all of them. If we end up having to do any of them, that’s a fail state for us.
Now, you can say with some justification, “but those are the only reasonable options!” But that’s exactly what liberals say about the whole abortion vs sex education thing. And in much the same way as the religious right, we are reluctant to give up hope of finding some additional option that we don’t actually hate.
For me (and I imagine for many others), a fail state is shivering in the dark without transportation. Which, if you veto all large-scale production of energy because of the side effects, is the only option.
This actually is meant more for the political opponents of liberals.
As in, why haven’t they tried to point towards the environmental benefits of fracking.
I feel that issues people have with nuclear are similar to that of fracking, but only one seems to get singled out despite both having good reasons to be beneficial for their end goals.
And no, I do not see many complaints about switching to natural gas to reduce it’s carbon emissions. Even if they probably should.
This is perfectly fine, except for the part where irradiating people is a vanishingly unlikely consequence of more nuclear power and a very likely consequence of burning coal for 20 years while we wait for solar power to catch up, which is the only real alternative.
As best I can tell, there is no way to get enough energy to run our civilization that won’t have significant downsides, given our current technology. So when we talk about alternative energy sources, I imagine we’re talking in terms of accepting some set of downsides, and trying to decide what the best available set of tradeoffs are.
That’s if we are actually trying to solve problems. There seem to be a lot of political disputes where one or both sides are simply pretending to be interested in solving some problem when in reality they are virtue-signalling, empire-building, or otherwise jockeying for social status, wealth, power, etc.
@fortaleza84
I think that in most cases like that, people do convince themselves that they are fighting to solve the problem and that their selfish biases makes them believe that the thing that benefits them, also solves the problem.
I agree. Although there may be a few people with enough insight to realize that they go to protest rallies to meet girls. Or that supporting the local historical preservation society is a good way to make connections.
Could it be that both “gotcha” arguments are in fact correct? What if deep down neither conservatives nor liberals really care about reducing the number of abortions/solving global warming? Could both sides be simply using these topics to prove their own moral superiority?
If liberals truly believe that without an immediate massive reduction of greenhouse emissions an environmental catastrophe is inevitable then should not they be ready to get at least a little out of their ideological comfort zone?
I would guess yes, assuming that sex education and birth control really are effective at reducing the demand for abortions. When it comes down to it, most people are hypocrites and most people don’t seriously believe in the principles they pretend to espouse.
They are – Going of the data, not so much any form of sex education widely deployed in the us (They are all pretty ineffective, because nobody puts enough effort/hours in) but adopting the Dutch sex-ed curricula would more or less eliminate the demand for non-medically required abortions.
What are the Dutch doing about sex ed that the rest of us aren’t?
1: Starting very, very early, – because you are not going to be very effective at reducing teen pregnancy if you only start teaching in the mid teens for obvious reasons.
2: keeping it up consistently every year, strong focus on consent and the emotional side of things.
3: A very practical doctrine that the way to avoid getting knocked up is to use two compatible forms of birth control – such as the pill and condoms, because that requires a lot more things to go wrong before you get pregnant.
Mostly, the biggest thing is that they just spend a whole lot more classroom hours on it than more or less anyone in the US does, which means it sticks. Teen pregnancy rate one eight of the US one, pretty much no adult unwanted pregnancies.
I imagine it also indicates that knowledge of sex non-taboo, which is not the case in the US. The cultural norm on sex in the US has been, roughly, “There is a very dangerous thing that you will very much want to do and you must never speak of it. It’s shameful to talk about it. Also, everyone does it, but only when they are older and married. Don’t ask adults questions about that.”
Predictable failure is then predictable.
What’s your evidence for this? Did the Netherlands randomly assign some regions to have sex-ed and other regions not to? Did the Netherlands observe a massive drop in abortion demand starting a few years after sex ed was implemented? Or is it simply that the Netherlands has low demand for abortions and you assume this is due to sex education?
I ask because sex education seems to be a matter of religious fervor for a lot of people so I am quite skeptical of any claims regarding sex education.
The general European pattern is that sex ed and abortion were part of the same political settlement – That is, abortion was legalized, and schools started being fairly aggressive about teaching kids how to not get knocked up at the same time, explicitly in order to keep the number of actual abortions as low as practical.
I cannot find any english-language histories of dutch sex ed, but the abortion stats exhibit the usual pattern of “high abortion for three-four years, then drop”, except the drop is far bigger than usual, which fits with dutch sexual education being best known practice.
@Thomas Jørgensen
This is false. Health problems are part of the decision in 16-25% of the cases. The most common reason for Dutch women to get an abortion is financial problems.
I appreciate your response for helping me think about the issue in a different way. I think the issue in making progress comes as much from the nature of politics as it does from people’s views.
I’ve known environmentalists who have been pro-nuclear, and environmentalists who have been begrudgingly pro-nuclear (“we don’t like it, but it’s better than the alternative”), but they have to form a environmentalist coalition with the no-mining environmentalists, the no-irradiating-the-countryside environmentalists, and the no-nuclear-weapons environmentalists. It’s easier for the pro or pro-ish nuclear environmentalists to align with other groups with similar environmentalist goals than it is to appear to ‘defect’ to the environmentalist cause and join Big Energy, even if it might help their goals more.
Similarly I’ve known pro-lifers who are practically begging for better sex education in schools, and others who begrudgingly admit that moving away from abstinence-only might help reduce abortions. But to be pro-life they have to join under a banner with the no-contraceptives Catholics, and the sex-is-a-private-matter evangelicals, and the don’t-trust-the-government-to-set-a-sensible-curriculum conservatives.
This Politico article makes the case that Obama set a goal to “reduce the need for abortion”, but the difficulty associating with Obama appearing to defect to pro-lifers, or pro-lifers appearing to defect to the Democratic President stalled efforts to make progress on policy.
How much do pro-lifers need to coalition with each other, as opposed to coalition under the GOP?
I’ve argued before that Obama could have told the anti-nuke environmentalists to GTFO, and he had the smarts and charisma to do it. Where else would they go, the GOP?
I’m less confident about my prior assertion now, reading what is probably the closest parallel I would get about that from the reverse angle. Thank you for the link.
Pro-life groups have a common goal, but a fair number of them won’t even attend the same demonstrations as “the others”. The important split is between conservative Protestants (who are often quite committed to the view that the Catholic church isn’t Christian) and conservative Catholics (who think the Protestants are heretics.)
(I’ve known active pro-lifers on both sides, and they wouldn’t protest at the same time and place as the protesters on the other side.)
I’m not sure that is an accurate description of the stance of most Protestants, at least modern day. Heck, at least some (maybe a lot of) Protestants place some value on things said by the Pope. Maybe certain denominations that I am not as exposed to are more like what you describe (I was mostly around Presbyterians and Lutherans I think, although with a lot of Catholic extended family).
I can’t speak as well to the mindset of Catholics generally, but do feel like I know enough to be confident that the general Catholic population doesn’t care in the slightest if someone is a Protestant.
I think you are describing perhaps the most devout/hard-line parts of the Protestant and Catholic groups, but I’m not sure that approaches anything close to a majority or even significant minority.
@acymetric
Oh–definitely agreed; I should have said that differently on second reading. The hardliners on both sides aren’t the mainstream at all–but the hardliners are over-represented among the people who routinely participate in protests.
Are the pro-lifers you know Irish?
SamChevre already clarified (and I agree with the point being made), but this made me chuckle.
Not Irish, Scots: KJV-only Bible-churchers, Covenanters* and the “Vatican II was a bad idea” sort of Catholics are all somewhat over-represented among my acquaintances.
(Covenanters: “who read the Scriptures carefully, determined that God was crazy, and attempted to imitate Him.”)
Your point reminds me of the old libertarian/conservative alliance. Conservatives were aggressively anti-communist and willing to be pro-free market to please the libertarians. Libertarians were aggressively pro-free market and willing to be aggressively anti-communist to please the conservatives.
In both cases, I think, with some hardline members less willing to go along.
And going back to nuclear/AGW, I note that James Hansen is pro-nuclear.
Steve Pinker has also made a lot of public statements in favor of nuclear power as a way to address AGW.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/james-lovelock-nuclear-power-is-the-only-green-solution-564446.html
James Lovelock (the Gaia hypothesis) is strongly in favor of nuclear power.
+1
I think there are tons of issues where:
a. The extremists become the main face of the movement because they care the most, show up at the protests, join the anti-X organizations, etc.
b. There are moderate positions that most of the people in the movement would favor, but they can’t be reached because they’d alienate the extremists.
c. There are also moderate positions that most of the people in the movement would favor, but they don’t dare show that willingness lest they be salami-sliced into giving up their whole issue.
That’s part of what I was getting at, though I think I unintentionally undermined Baeraad’s point a bit.
For any issue there are a wide variety of opinions. Baeraad expressed that they legitimately disagree with nuclear power as an option to reduce carbon emissions – I wouldn’t label that extremist at all, there are definitely concerns to be had about widespread nuclear power! I was trying to make the point that attempting to seek a compromise is going to be a politically difficult task.
I think the Obama article showed that – even with a sympathetic executive and so much potential for good compromise, efforts to put an abortion reduction bill into motion were floundered by political reasons because there were so many different factions all representing different things.
What’s your opinion on causing massive disruptions to industrial civilization by forcing a rapid shift from concentrated power on demand to diffuse and erratic energy sources?
Because the bit with “irradiating ourselves and we are against blowing up the countryside”, as a result of nuclear power generation disconnected from nuclear warfare(*), is a paranoid fantasy. The risk of radiation release is very small and localized, and “blowing up the countryside” is right out. And this is a far more certain consensus than anything involving global warming.
So one might uncharitably wonder, given the choices actually on the table, whether some liberals are secretly harboring the agenda of disrupting industrial civilization for their own reasons. More charitably, of course, you sincerely believe that stuff about irradiating the countryside and don’t know that paranoid fantasy should have been put to rest about the same time as the one where burning coal was going to bring about the next ice age.
Why don’t you know that? Why does the partisan ideology that paints itself as the champions of science and reason and “fact-based politics”, remain so stubbornly ignorant when the science in question is nuclear engineering?
* The Chernobyl plant was designed specifically to produce nuclear weapons as well as nuclear power, and it was the plutonium-breeding mission that drove the design decisions that made it flammable. Seriously, don’t build your nuclear reactors out of glorified coal.
The anti-nuclear movement is the unholy spawn of the anti-nuclear weapons movement, fossil fuel cash, and the early environmental movement.
During the sixties, early 70s, there was a big movement opposing nuclear weapons.
They got their teeth kicked in – Near and total utter defeat in the arena of politics.
A whole lot those activists drifted over to the environmental movement which was scoring a lot of wins because, well, people do not much like it when rivers catch fire.
These people were firebrands, and they hated all things nuclear, because of the bomb. So they started campaigning against nuclear power plants.
This mysteriously helped their funding a whole bunch – No, really, you can find material from back then where coal mining orgs proudly trumpet that they are supporting the anti-nuclear movement, and they still get money from that corner, though the current sources are a lot more quiet about it, and most of their current funding is from people who have been persuaded that this is a vital issue by decades of propaganda.
They perfected a set of techniques for making building nuclear reactors very difficult and expensive through legal and pr harassment, and also a whole lot of out-right lying about the dangers of nuclear power, which successfully stopped the logical transition to nuclear in most countries.
This was all an unmitigated disaster for the environment. But most of those people and their disciples are still active, and they cannot change course and maintain their self-respect – if they admit error, they admit personal responsibility for most deaths from air-pollution between 1980 and 2018. That is a fairly sizable pyramid of skulls. People do not stand up and go “I am a villain out of a horror story” very often, even if they are.
While we’re at it, what’s the pro-nuclear side’s take on safely storing nuclear waste?
I’m asking because from my POV this is an unholy shitstorm of NIMBYism, politicans kicking the can down the road and wrong financial incentives. I believe -possibly wrongly – that were waste producers actually required to build reserves for the secure storage of their waste, nuclear would no longer be cost competitive.
Safely storing nuclear waste is a difficult political problem, but it’s not as much of a technical issue as it’s been billed. It’s nasty stuff, but the volumes involved are comparatively low (per Wikipedia, about 27 tons of high-level waste per gigawatt per year) and could be made a lot lower with breeder reactors and reprocessing. By comparison, the WIPP — which was an expensive pilot project — cost about 19 billion dollars and is good for about 72,500 cubic meters of waste. Even at current levels of waste generation, if a cubic meter’s about a ton, then those 19 billion dollars would serve the needs of 134 gigawatt reactors for twenty years. I don’t think that works out to a substantial fraction of their lifetime cost.
And once again, the alternative here is the waste and environmental degradation coming from fossil fuel power generation. Which is substantial. And which has a pretty strong NIMBY argument against it as well: not many people want the view from their retirement home to be ruined because the next mountain over happens to be full of coal.
The worry about nuclear waste always struck me as a little weird. We got the radioactives out of the ground, what’s wrong with putting them back in the ground?
To be fair, some of the stuff that conventional nuclear fuel cycles spit out is very much more radioactive than U-235.
@Lilian
Does that apply to petroleum and it’s derivatives as well? Lead?
@Nornagest: The stuff that is more radioactive stops being radioactive fairly quickly. The stuff that’s radioactive for a long time, which is what everyone panics about, is usually about as radioactive as naturally occurring substances.
@brmic: Putting petroleum byproducs in the ground seems much better than dumping them into the air we breathe, yes. It is my understanding that we already dispose of lead by either recycling it or burying it.
Much more radioactive, but much shorter lived and much better contained – and since much of the expressed concern is over the effect of buried radioactives on our umpty-hundred-generations-removed descendents, I'm pretty sure a rational assessment would favor running the stuff through a reactor and then welding it into a steel container before burying it back where you found it (or someplace even deeper).
But you'd have to define an explicit utility function for future vs. present lives to make that calculation, and you'd need a range of estimates for future human population and industrialization over coming millenia.
The hottest stuff we deal with from the nuclear fuel cycle has a half-life of years to decades, true, and it’ll be more or less inert by the time our weird Morlock descendants crack open the WIPP, ignore all the “this is not a place of honor” inscriptions, and start worshipping the fuel casks. But on the other side of the spectrum, U-235 fission also puts out a bunch of fission products with half-lives in the range of 150K to 15M years (for comparison, U-235 itself has a half-life of 703M years). Those are hot enough to cause problems that uranium doesn’t, but long-lived enough to still stay more or less intact over the 10,000 year design lifetime of deep geological containment. They’re not crazy dangerous like, say, cesium-137, but you probably wouldn’t want to have a cask of them in your living room.
I’m still in favor of nuclear power in general and deep geological containment in particular, for reasons given above, but it doesn’t make sense to say that these are just like the original fuel.
@Lilian
Yes, and if you go one step further, you’ll find that among other things, the concentration of the stuff is a crucial factor, as is the safety and security of the storage. Whether it’s ‘from the ground’ and ‘returns to the ground’ doesn’t matter.
Apart from that, who is the ‘everybody’ that panics?
@Nornagest
The WIPP page leads me to the pages for Morsleben and Asse. Asse suffers from water influx, so presumably (a) the pumps needs to be maintained and (b) there’s a bit of finger crossing involved. Morsleben has to be pumped full of concrete to stave off collapse. In both cases, the ‘unexpected’ happened, and WIPP had problems in 2014. Which is all well and good, these things happen. But at the same time, if I’m expected to trust these solutions will hold for 10000 years, my confidence is low, given the track record and the simple fact that no one who argues for that solution will be around to face consequences for errors.
At the very least, it would seem that permanent storage is a feasible solution for countries like the US, with large land mass and low population density. However, for Europe and Japan this is more difficult.
On the cost side https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
I expect, (though haven’t bothered to search) that even now proponents declare the funds sufficient and that 10 years ago concern of insufficient funds was branded as paranoid conspiracy theory by advocates of nuclear power.
Most high level nuclear waste is otherwise known as nuclear fuel. What’s left after fully burning up all that can be reasonably burned up needs to be stored for a few centuries before it’s about as radioactive as high grade uranium ore.
Solar/wind energy requies us to set aside vast tracks of land.
Meanwhile all high level nuclear waste in existence would fit in a large building (and and all the transuranics in there are valuable fuel). Nuclear waste is a political problem, not any other kind.
Do you think it makes any sense at all to base present decisions on our guess about the situation in 10,000 years? Try to imagine people 10,000 years ago doing it–or even 500 years ago.
This whole line of argument has long struck me as crazy. The world is changing much too rapidly for us to have any reasonable guess about the circumstances of our descendants that far in the future. The human race may have wiped itself out by then. It may have gone to the stars. We may have all been uploaded to hardware.
About the least likely projection is that things will be about like they are now, plus a few details such as flying cars.
General solve: If you have a public policy problem, look up what the Swedes are doing. And, gosh, yes, they do have a good solve for this one, too.
http://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repository/our-methodology/
This seems extremely reliable and easy to copy, too.
I think the contradiction comes from the argument that mankind’s CO2 emissions, if unchecked, will lead to total disaster — hundreds of millions of deaths due to starvation and flooding; entire countries submerged; etc.
If such a catastrophe were truly a significant possibility, a Chernobyl or two every few years would be a price well worth paying to avoid it. So I do think there’s a contradiction.
One possible way out of it is to admit that these global warming doomsday scenarios are wildly exaggerated for the sake of effect, but even that is something I’m skeptical about. I myself am a conservative and I think CAGW is bunk but I would get on board with strict CO2 emissions caps if they were combined with policies that I want, such as a drastic reduction of third-world immigration to the United States; national concealed carry; total bans on affirmative action; etc. But you almost never see environmentalists proposing these sorts of compromises in order to attract conservative support.
I guess the bottom line question is what sacrifices the Left is willing to make in order to achieve reductions in CO2 emissions. If they aren’t willing to make painful sacrifices, it’s reasonable to conclude that they are hypocrites who don’t actually care about CO2.
By that logic, anyone going la-la-can’t-hear-you when you tell them of a problem can then extract arbitrary sacrifices from you for their vote for your solution to the problem. In strictly tribal terms, sure, that’s true, but in a democracy it’s hopefully eventually limited by non-mindkilled voters.
You appear to be modelling CO2 emissions caps as a slightly eccentric preference (of pretty much every major political party in the western world except for US Republicans) whereas from the other side it’s more like the opiod epidemic: A new-ish problem which both sides try to solve albeit with partisan preferences for particular solutions.
Imagine, if you can, a political party approach the evidence for the opiod epidemic in the same way the cigarette industry approached science linking smoking to cancer. After having stonewalled you for a decade, they then say ok, we agree to do something about it, but only for abortion-on-demand up to birth. If you’re not willing to give that up, you’re abviously a hypocrite not really concerned about opioid overdoses.
The republicans might talk about global warming differently from other major western parties, but they don’t act any differently. No where is any political party rushing to embrace serious reductions in carbon emissions. the closest you get is somewhere like Germany, where they could shut down their own plants confident that they could import power from abroad
Natural gas via fracking had a fair effort to go at it with lobbying, but it was an existing industry that could fight back and employ people and provide energy right now. Not building nuclear plants maintains the status quo. Banning natural gas wrecks the status quo.
After Fukushima environmentalists around the world are successfully shutting down existing nuclear plants, rapidly shifting the status quo away from nuclear energy.
This is despite the fact that zero people died from radiation exposure (~20,000 died due to the earthquake/tsunami), and modern plants are pretty meltdown proof (Fukushima was not one, it was built in 1971).
People who care about climate change are almost entirely part of the anti-nuclear coalition because it’s associated with the wrong tribal affiliation. While the other tribe is largely enough pro nuclear. You can therefore blame people who care about climate change almost entirely for whatever doom ensues.
On the other hand if we can ever manage to successfully switch to a nuclear energy based economy we will be good on energy until the heat death of the universe.
Luckily China doesn’t seem to care about the anti nuclear frenzy that gripped most of the world and is building nuclear plants at a cost of about 1/5th of an identical plant in the west.
There isn’t that much uranium out there. It’d last longer than fossil fuels would, but only by a couple orders of magnitude, and that’s with widespread use of breeder reactors — with the once-through cycles that most current reactors use, known reserves don’t even have the total energy that fossil fuel does.
Thorium’s much more abundant, but we need to figure out how to make thorium reactors before we can use it. Same goes for fusion.
Well technically it may be true that uranium itself may not be as viable of a energy source deep into the heat death as fusion or the penrose process (U 238 has a half life of only 4.5 billion years after all, and there are stars that will last for 10 trillion years).
However, uranium is a more than viable energy source for 100% of the world’s energy supply at present consumption rates until the sun expands to it’s red giant stage (when it may or may not swallow the earth). This is because, especially when taking breeder reactors into account, the contribution of the cost of uranium to the cost of nuclear energy is almost nothing. That makes extremely expensive uranium viable.
I do agree with you about thorium; we can use that a lot longer than uranium, mostly because it’s half life is 14 billion years. So we can get a few more earth lifetimes of energy usage if we also use thorium. Sometime in this 25 billion year time-frame it would be helpful to work out fusion which gets us well into the heat death. Considering that net energy was generated from fusion in 2013 I’d say we are on track to achieve economic viability in this time frame.
I’m going by Wikipedia’s page on world energy reserves. All bets are off if we get into asteroid mining, of course.
Speculation about the deep future is speculative, but we have to get there first.
The primary source there is the IAEA which seems to say that easy uranium is available to meet demand for at least the next 2500 to 20,000 years (depending which grade ore you count). After that it becomes harder to get, but not that much harder. At a cost of only $660 per kilogram uranium can be directly extracted from seawater right now (which is about 10 times the present spot price). Ultimately the earth’s continental crust is about ~1.5 parts per million uranium, and most granite’s are around 5 ppm. To put things in perspective gold is presently economic to extract from as little as 0.25 grams per ton (250 ppb) of ore if certain conditions are met (1 gram per ton is almost always economic, which is 1 ppm).
There is a lot of slight of hand by anti nuclear groups because they don’t want to have nuclear classed with renewable energy and they make assumptions like we will throw away 99.5% of the fuel (by not using breeder reactors), and they ignore 99.9% of the uranium that we can extract even today (at higher costs) etc. In any case I’d say we have more than enough time to develop fusion or build a Dyson sphere. Uranium or thorium are not going to run out in a time scale that is relevant.
In the long term energy is practically free and limitless.
Unfortunately, China probably doesn’t care about nuclear safety either, so we’re likely to see a meltdown which will make continuing use of nuclear power even less likely in the West.
Luckily most of China’s reactors under construction are pretty modern. China didn’t really get into the nuclear energy game until the 90s. So whether or not they put as large an emphasis on safety, they benefit from more modern safe designs (in contrast most US nuclear reactors in operation today were built in the 70s and early 80s, and those are still amazingly safe in comparison to fossil fuels)
I won’t speak to the political angle (because right now I just don’t really care) but you should know that different energy sources are not identical/interchangeable: nuclear energy doesn’t produce a lot of carbon emissions, but it produces nuclear waste which is its own can of worms. Natural gas is very inefficient compared to coal or nuclear. Fracking is a way to get at energy-dense fossil fuels that conventional mining can’t, but it’s environmentally hazardous and causes earthquakes. Etc.
(BTW, there was a lot of furor about fracking. IIRC there was even a pretty high-profile documentary made about it about around 2009 or so.)
Everyone knowledgeable on energy seems to agree it makes the most sense to keep a portfolio of different energy resources (including coal and nuclear) and gradually — as the technology and market permits — shift towards renewable/greener sources.
Nitpick: “produces nuclear waste which is its own can of worms”
It’s a very small can of very small worms compared to most of the others on offer.
People seem to be misreading what I am trying to describe.
Some things I am inferring
* Just as there is rhetoric against the use of nuclear, why isn’t there any against the left for trying to stop/shut down fracking despite the fact it probably is a significant factor in the reduction of carbon-emissions in the US.
* Shouldn’t there be more pressure from the left against the trend of moving to natural gas to reduce emissions as this is counter productive to their efforts to reduce/stop fracking.
* I AM NOT DIRECTLY CALLING OUT AGAINST THE LEFT FOR NOT SUPPORTING FRACKING. I can understand why they would be against both nuclear and fracking- just that this inconsistency doesn’t seem to be really noted on.
Some things that could be argued is that the proponents of fracking REALLY do not want to feel they are helping with the efforts of carbon-emissions as this belies the fact its a real problem or something.
Or that nuclear proponents are not opponents of the left and rather a minority ingroup and these arguments are from them and noone really cares enough about natural gas as it’s not being hindered much.
I think the main reason conservatives don’t make the same argument about natural gas as nuclear is that the argument for natural gas has a really easy answer for a liberal:
“That still produces too much carbon!”
That may or may not be factually true, but it pulls the discussion into an academic debate about the relative levels of carbon production that the world can sustain and how well natural gas fits into a long term plan.
Since nuclear doesn’t produce CO2, then it’s a much easier fight for conservatives on a rhetorical level. Imagine the following argument:
1: We need to eliminate CO2 production!
2: How about natural gas?
1: That’s still CO2!
2: Yes, but not as much.
1: Any is too much! and the world is going to die if we don’t get rid of CO2!*
2: (On the defensive in an academic debate about CO2).
verses
1: We need to eliminate CO2 production!
2: How about nuclear?
1: Well, that’s not a particularly good option [lists downsides].
2: But you said any CO2 is too much, and this option avoids world-death. If the world is on the line, then clearly we must select this option if it will save us.
1: (On the defensive in an academic debate about nuclear).
*-This is a weakman argument, but it’s generally the level of argument you are talking about in the OP.
why isn’t there any against the left for trying to stop/shut down fracking
Because they aren’t successful at it. Hollywood can make all the anti-fracking movies it wants, but fracking happens and will continue to happen. I am sometimes amazed at how brazen the frackers are, but that’s because they are incredibly secure.
It is hard to build up a head of steam about dem liberalz wanting to stop the natural gas when they are ineffective at it.
I mean, it helps that most of the fields worth fracking are located in places like West Texas, northern Alberta, Wyoming, rural Pennsylvania, etc.
If all the prime deposits were located in Northern California, this would probably play out much differently…
California’s switched almost entirely from coal to nat gas over the last fifteen years or so, and while I don’t know for sure if there’s environmental reasons behind that it seems like a safe bet. So at least one place seems to be acting consistently (somewhat to my surprise, given what I usually think of California politics).
Not really – how does it treat fracking which probably produces much of the natural gas it consumes?
I think there is general agreement that -isms and -ists are being used too hyperbolically and frequently to silence dissent and leading to loss of meaning.
Let’s take racism – under politically correct constructions, it’s quite obvious that *everyone* is a racist, but I’ll speak for myself.
I am east-Asian, grew up in very white neighborhoods, occasionally did charity work in poorer areas, and also have friends who hail from Africa (parents grew up in Africa or are still there, came here for education). So I’ll addrss three “races” if you will.
All else equal, I think East Asian households place a much larger emphasis on education than the other two groups, though this is rivaled by Africans. East Asians, with that emphasis, tend not to have participated in athletics as much as whites (mainly to be used as a “diversity” and “well-rounded” component for college applications). They still largely be first generation or second generation, where parents work hard in jobs more menial than they would have had back in their home countries and stress education as the way children get to have a better life.
Whites are less homogeneous and that’s where the family background step is introduced. Is this blue collar? How well are the parents educated? What is family size and profession? Still, The New York Times says median white wealth is about 20 times that of black wealth.
As for Black Americans, sure they are less homogenized now, but there are still broad swathes that are not – google says 77% of black births are to single moms. And yet look at any sport and you see that despite the historical barriers, 65% of NFL and 75% of NBA players are black vs 12% of overall population.
So were I to have kids, I would not hold him back from picking a black kid over a white kid, and much less an asian for pick-up basketball if everyone is a stranger. That’s just common sense. I’d just tell him that you have to be very ready to change initial opinions based on observation. If the asian turns out to be Jeremy Lin-like, then obviously you update your assumptions. On the other hand, I don’t think it would be controversial for people to think picking the asian kids for a school project over the other two races is any different. And I’d always emphasize to know the background of the kid, who the parents are, what the values are, and make friends with honest and diligent kids who share the same interests as you. As a side note, if that black school kid were from Africa, my personal bias would be to potentially choose the African over the Asian because Asians may be less ethical.
To me, that’s not being racist, I’m just being Bayesian. It’s logical to hold generalizations for various ethnicities. If I were not to update my assumptions in light of new information, then it’s arguable I’m racist.
Yet in NYC, I of course can’t express any of this. I tried playing Puerto Rico for the first time, and someone refused to play, saying it was racist.
Why? I asked.
The colonists are clearly slaves!
Why would you think that?
They are brown and coming in on ships!
Oh come on, mechanically they don’t function like slaves at all, you can’t buy them, sell them, trade them, and if they were white, you wouldn’t think this at all. Maybe brown was a cheaper paint color. Just think of them as roombas or something.
You calling my little sister a roomba??! (Apparently her family adopted a girl from Africa).
Needless to say I was not able to play Puerto Rico that day and have gone out of my way to avoid this person (childhood friend of a good friend of mine who moved to NYC without a job). But she’s not the only one. How can anyone work to tackle serious issues of single motherhood, terrible public school systems, gang dynamics, and black-on-black gun violence if games of Puerto Rico can’t even be played without insisting brown circles must be slaves?
Damned if I know. My instincts are to avoid making any comments or conclusions about race-based groupings. Don’t talk about single motherhood as a “black” problem – if it’s a problem, it’s a problem for everyone. Don’t talk about black-on-black gun violence – figure out what else it is (neighbours? friends? relatives? poor people victimizing other poor people?) and talk about that.
It’s a frustrating but easily understandable taboo. Far too many people move from “statistically higher likelihood of x being y”, to “all x are y” and/or “this not-x cannot possibly be y”. If I’m looking for a potential NBA player, I’m going to want someone tall who already plays the game fairly well – not some random person of the statistically more common race. If I’m looking for a software engineer, I’m going to want someone with the appropriate skills, and preferably a track record – not any random member of the group that provides a statistically larger proportion of software engineers (probably Indian males, but I’m not really sure).
Unless the correlation is incredibly strong, favoring people in the statistically right group is likely to lead to bad choices. You’ll miss some good people, and select others who merely “look right”, but are in fact not so good. (As an example of incredibly strong correlations, if I want someone to act as a gestational surrogate [aka ‘surrogate mother’], they need to have a uterus, and be willing to use it – something not likely to include males, however defined. But that’s a very unusual case.)
On the precise problem of Puerto Rico, the controversy around that game (and other similar games which are themed about colonialism) is not new among board-gamers. While it was probably not the designer’s intent, and while mechanically there is indeed nothing that really explicitely references slavery, the history of the actual settlement of Puerto Rico makes it hard to pretend that the board game can’t possibly have any unfortunate connotation, and so quite a number of people are not confortable with playing that game — it’s fine, there are thousands of board games outhere, including many with similar mechanics as but different themes from Puerto Rico.
There’s definitely a difference of culture here: Puerto Rico and many other games about colonialism are originally games designed in Germany, where these topics do not carry the degree of controversy that they do in the US (at least among some people — Puerto Rico is still a best-seller in the US and one of the highest ranked games on Board Game Geek). I don’t think it’s a big deal if some people in the US or elsewhere are unconfortable with playing games with even thin themes of colonialism like Puerto Rico, Mombasa or Santa Maria — again, there are thousands of other games to chose from.
Sure, don’t buy it, don’t suggest it, quietly sit out if it bothers you so much. But it’s awfully thin grounds to veto the game for the whole group. There are thousands of games to choose from: don’t be the asshole who makes us spend another 15 minutes choosing a different game because you can’t resist injecting politics into game night.
So i actually *finally* got to complete a game of Puerto Rico with a subset of that game night two weekends ago, which was also about two years after the initial incident.
My friend (who brought the outraged person) actually recommended it to my now-fiancee as a board game I’d like, and I got that for my birthday over two years ago.
I would agree to disagree with anyone who needs to read into implications of the color of circles, and would not mind that person sitting out. My issue is with derailing normal social interactions to make a political point when you are tangentially invited over for board games. No one even thought of it as we tried learning the game until she decided to take a stand of, “those have to be slaves!” I would have thought she’d be ok with sitting out or playing another game as many choose to do, but she decided to make it a good vs. evil drama that resulted in ruining everyone’s night.
Well that seems more of a problem with this person in particular and their understanding of social etiquette. I’ve heard many anecdotes of players who sit out of one particular game because they’re unconfortable with the theme, but it’s the first time I’ve heard of a player making a scene in such circumstances — even if negative reaction to the theme of Puerto Rico is frequent enough that it’s hard to deny that it rubs a large segment of American/Western culture the wrong way — but usually people are courteous about their distate, in my experience.
Alas, things like this make me think, “yeah, NYC is no place to express real opinions that may be remotely controversial.”
By the way, if she were black, I would have been far more sympathetic/open to her concerns. Since she was white, I was entirely irritated and dismissive.
Perhaps that proves that I’m a racist!
@DragonMilk
As a blue tribe white* person, I endorse your evaluation of this blue tribe white person. Although it may be unfair of me.
After many years, I eventually realized that on average** I felt safer discussing these sorts of things or even talking about topics that might skirt these sorts of issues with non-white people in my social circles than with white people.
*mostly. mixed but look white which pretty much is white outside of a Klan meeting
**obviously it varies from person to person
There’s probably room for some game theory to be applied here, but it seems likely that it’s better to make assumptions that violate weak predictions at least some of the time. The problem with these weak predictions is that it’s very easy to ride them indefinitely, without ever having to resort to giving a marginally-lower-expected-value minority a chance; this seems like a bad end-effect, especially where an individual’s violation of those predictions is invisible. If a black student is both academically gifted and quiet about it, why would anyone pick them for a group project anything other than last?
After you’ve interacted with someone for awhile, you’ve got a much better idea of how smart they are than you could get from the average IQ of their racial group. After you’ve worked on a couple projects together, you’ll know a lot about their intelligence, work ethic, ability to communicate, organizational skills, etc.
Right, but why would you ever work with them in the first place in order to find that out if you acted based on your weak predictions 100% of the time?
@Hoopyfreud
Because kids talk and know who the smart kids are – who’s getting better grades, who knows all the answers in class, etc. If that were to actually happen, that would work in great favor of an instance of *breaking* stereotypes and why it’s crucial to update assumptions.
In your hypothetical, I’d ask, “how are his grades? What does he like to do?” A lot of my college friends whose families recently (generation-wise) immigrated from places like Ghana had no problem finding groups to work with.
@DragonMilk
I spent two years at the top of my classes before I noticed people wanting to work with me; it got a lot better after that, but only as long as I kept going to classes with the same set of people (luckily, this was most of the next two years). It’s very possible that this was down to me seeming unfriendly and not some sort of racial animus, but nobody who I ever actually worked with seemed to mind.
Whatever the actual reason for my experience, the diffusion of knowledge about competence doesn’t work when you interact with strangers, so being overly discriminating based on demographics can screw people over pretty badly. Again, I’m not suggesting that affirmative-actioning your way to proportional preferences is correct, just that the strategy you’ve described, followed strictly, probably isn’t optimal.
My contention is that people implicitly are doing this anyway, and disguise it as something else to avoid being called racist.
Willful blindness regarding biases and self-proclaimed unbiased people policing others is a worse outcome for everyone.
Race/ethnicity is an attribute for every individual, and the culture and upbringing leads to assumption forming. Being unable to address those assumptions and speak to when and when it’s not appropriate to apply them and instead say, “NEVER! DON’T BE A RACIST BIGOT!” just preserves the status quo since some things seem too obvious.
I think it’s more helpful to say, “well, if grouped as a subset, their ancestors were brought here involuntarily, oppressed brutally, could not form stable families, and to this day has a 77% single mother birth rate, so a person drawn from that subset is drawn from a severely disadvantaged pool. In contrast, look at recent African immigrants; they’re more like Asians when it comes to education. Now given all that, let’s talk about the individual in question…”
IIRC it was much less, and roughly on par with whites, prior to the creation of the welfare state.
IIRC….
Not quite: the black illegitimacy rate was far higher than that of whites prior to the creation of the welfare state. HOWEVER, the black illegitimacy rate pre-Great Society was lower than that of whites today.
Found a brief overview of the subject. The really short version is this chart. Interestingly, it looks like black illegitimacy rates were already rising in the late 40s. What the Great Society seems to have done is make the slope much steeper. The white pattern is different, their illegitimacy rates start going up in the late 50s but less sharply, and don’t seem affected by welfare programs at all. The end result is that while blacks start and end having much higher illegitimacy rates than whites, the gap gets considerably wider.
@Lillian
Christ, that chart is depressing.
It’s not as bad as the chart makes it look. There are plenty of couples who are, for all intents and purposes, married and raising children together, but for whatever reason haven’t bothered to make it official. This is actually an old time complaint from government and church officials. Absent a tremendous amount of outside social pressure, commoners just don’t seem all that interested in getting officially married, even if they otherwise live and act exactly like a married couple.
From the Telegraph:
“When the state started taxing marriage in the 1690s, the vicar of Tetbury in Gloucestershire carried out a survey of his parishioners to find out how many had been married in church. He was covering his back – clergymen who failed to ensure that their parishioners were officially married were penalised. He discovered that half of them had not been married in church, but clandestinely, making private vows to each other, or married in a private dwelling by some roving clergyman. They were living in stable, but irregular unions.
Given the choice, those unencumbered by property preferred to avoid the expense and rigmarole of an official church wedding and spend their money on drinking to celebrate the new partnership. Dodging the newly imposed tax and resentment at the state’s interference in their private business provided further incentives to live in “common law unions” that had no basis in law and did not carry property rights. As long as a couple considered themselves “married in the sight of God” and was “reputed lawful man and wife amongst their neighbours” the forms of ceremony mattered little to them.”
So over 300 years ago, Gloucestershire in England probably had an official illegitimacy rate somewhere around 50%. Actually higher than that of modern white Americans. Granted their effective illegitimacy rate was very likely lower than ours, but nonetheless, the rate of people who are officially married is not the same as the rate of people who are raising children together as couples.
Do read the whole article, it’s very interesting. Apparently the rates of informal marriage, bigamy, adultery, and premarital sex used to be considerably higher than we commonly imagine.
The article is interesting, and I’m glad you recommended it. I’m less hopeful than you. I think the difference you point out in the effective vs actual illegitimacy rates is important. And the Telegraph article seems to indicate that the Church accepted private vows as binding for quite a while.
The single parenthood rates from the first post you linked are still about two-thirds the out-of-wedlock birth rates, so I don’t think that people living together unofficially is the primary shift here.
I’m not promoting willful blindness. I’m suggesting that it’s probably a more optimal strategy to introduce an element of randomness inversely proportional to the strength of the correlation.
Consider: there are two groups of candidates for a job – 50 from group A and 10 from group B. The average A is about 10% better than the average B, and the in-population variances are similar. You will be hiring 5 people, and can do a short evaluation with 10 candidates. The other 50 will be screened out.
How many people from group B do you screen out?
If the answer is “all of them,” this introduces structural problems, and my intuition suggests that you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot some fraction of the time.
Whether or not you’re shooting yourself in the foot depends a lot on the magnitude of both population means and the variance.
For an extreme but normal example, think about recruiting for an American high school football team. You get one hundred applicants: fifty men and fifty women. Spending any time at all looking at the women’s applications is a waste of resources; the differences in body composition and strength are so huge that there is likely not a single woman alive capable of competing with men at a varsity level.
Heuristics, including stereotypes, are useful because they allow us to quickly and accurately make decisions like this in conditions of uncertainty. Your proposal would replace those heuristics with expensive statistics for small or no gains.
@Nabil
As you said, that’s an extreme example. There are a lot of cases where the distributions overlap substantially enough (especially among self-selected sub-populations) that you’re probably not actually better off. For example, if someone who knows little about basketball is drafting a fantasy team based only on headshots, they probably don’t have a good reason to pick Jeremy Lin last.
E: and, in the more likely case that you have one or two women trying out for a men’s sport, I’d argue that they’ve clearly self-selected enough that there’s a decent chance they’re at the extreme tail; unless they’re REALLY freakily built they’ll never be linebackers, but you might have found a Becca Longo.
Yeah, the way to handle applications to a team is… to have them try-out. Put them on a field and watch them run around for 30 minutes and pick the most athletic seeming ones.
You can procure them by a mechanistic process, and you can assign them to labor in the fields for your benefit with no possibility of their choosing otherwise. And the name of the game explicitly calls out that they are fictional representations for people who historically were often slaves. And they aren’t white.
It’s not an unreasonable interpretation, and it was a bit tone-deaf of the game’s creator to do this. Of course, he’s German, and they have a completely different set of tonal questions re historic mistreatment of different ethnic groups, so I’m chalking this one up to bad luck and putting Puerto Rico on the list of games to play only with people I know well enough to trust that this will not be an issue.
OTOH, Sid Meier is American or Can-Am, and Colonization explicitly had the players trading in slaves or indentured servants to their perceived advantage. That one was interesting enough at the time, but seems to have been memory-holed.
Also every Worker Placement game ever.
It also explicitly calls them “colonists”.
They’re tiny wooden discs. I’ll have to doublecheck my set when I get home but IIRC it’s not even brown paint, it’s just a dark wood or woodstain. Hanlon’s Razor implies “cheap components” not “let’s make them brown people”.
Nitpick, but there was no explicit slavery in Colonization. This is actually a pretty frequent criticism of the game. In-game you have Indentured Servants (white), Petty Criminals (also white), and Indian [Religious] Converts [of questionable consent].
Despite Meier’s name on the box, Colonization was designed primarily by Brian Reynolds. I heard an interview with Reynolds from earlier this year, where he joked about Colonization and that the theme would be harder to pull off now.. “back then we were just selling to 30-year-old white guys”.
https://www.eater.com/2018/10/19/17991578/zingermans-ari-weinzweig-interview
(podcast and transcript)
It’s a complex of businesses– mostly food-related– based on the idea that everyone knows things worth sharing, and that hierarchy doesn’t work.
It works really well, and I’m surprised there isn’t more of it. It’s possible that this kind of thing only happens if it’s led initially by very rare, inspired people.
One bit I liked was that trying to focus on only the five most important whatever is destructive because the system is an ecology, and neglecting parts of it doesn’t work.
Zingerman’s is awesome. Everyone wants to talk about the anarchy when the real key to success is the pastrami. Seriously, no one would give a damn if the food sucked (and no one would pay their prices if it was mediocre).
It probably doesn’t scale all that well, but that’s okay because uniqueness and scarcity is part of the selling point.
They also found a niche where expertise is pretty easy for employees to obtain, and the whole thing is very customer facing, so it makes a lot of sense to give your low level employees autonomy – I suspect that’s actually pretty common with other luxury goods (which is what a Zingerman’s sandwich is ultimately), even at shops run more traditionally.
Your strategy for enduring mind-numbing work?
Right now I am reconciling an entire week’s worth of punch cards and scheduling for one of our lines (54 people per day for 6 days with substantial overlaps between days). It’s something we supposedly audit every single day, but our sampling indicates a lot of errors in the past. So I’m stuck doing a full recon to find all the errors and the dollars lost.
Unfortunately this bores the hell out of me.
Right now I am posting this comment to SSC, and listening to random history videos on Youtube.
How do you deal with this?
It’s often helpful to me to break it up into smaller chunks that I can count off as I work. If the work is quick enough that you can count it off in fives or tens as you work, that’s great. If it’s not so quick but very methodical you can create a little song or mental checklist to work through as you do each one. Setting goals for yourself (most I can do in the next half hour), or racing against other people helps if you can trust yourself to still do the job properly when you are trying to work fast.
Setting yourself little rewards for making it through chunks also helps (five more and I can take a break to argue with someone on SSC!)
Put on music or podcast – if something requires more attention, use music, if less, go podcast
1. Break the work down into the smallest possible steps.
2. Complete the first step, even the first cycle of the first step.
3. Cue inner drill sergeant: “See? Not so bad. Now complete the next step/cycle. You’ll get a break when I feel like you’ve really accomplished something!”
Music and sunflower seeds.
Audiobooks. I once had a job buffing CDs where when I got the job my boss said I would need headphones to either listen to audiobooks or music while I worked. I finished all of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and learned a good deal about the history of New York.
Podcasts. You’ll never ask for a transcript again!
Chunk up my work into fifteen minute intervals. Take a break, remove my laptop from wherever it is moored, take my power cable, and relocate every hour. If that fails, drink coffee until every single thing is interesting.
Take a vacation when you get above two french presses worth of productivity.
After reconciling the time cards, I discovered:
25 hours for people who actually worked at different lines
30 hours for people training
120 hours for people on “light work”
25 hours of overclocking (your shift lasts 8 hours, and you clock out at 8 hours and 5 minutes)
We budget at $60/hour, so this is over $10,000 of problems. All issues I would expect to be found and tracked and if 4 people are supposedly auditing this every single day.
Unbelievable. I particularly do not understand the people on light work. The line is fully staffed without the additional workers. If you’re going to inflate your labor by 6%, you better have a damn good reason, and actually use that labor for something useful. Something tells me they aren’t the ones cleaning the lines, since they are not trained to do the deep cleaning, and…you can’t actually do deep cleaning while the machines are running.
Are they on light work because of Worker’s Comp claims? It’s quite common to have people who would otherwise be collecting at home to come to work and do some kind of work, even if it would be considered wasteful otherwise. 6% of the workforce does sound pretty high for that, though.
Overclocking could also be related to line management policies regarding what you should be doing at your “start time”.
When I was working on a shop floor, there were some managers that wanted you to punch in/out at your exact scheduled 8-hour start/stop times, but others that said “start work at 6 a.m. means you are at your station starting to work at 6 a.m.” which of course means you will be clocking in a few minutes early and punching out a few late each day. Granted, overtime was more or less assumed here so nobody was really concerned about this either way, but something to think about when assessing the cause for the overclocking.
Training could possibly be a time-dumping ground for “overhead” or non-productive time that is necessary but not easily classified or charged to a production task. In my place we had “organizational time” (although we were constantly told to reduce the amount of it).
For people that worked different lines, is there any interaction between lines? If someone takes 15 minutes to go to the other line and say “hey guys, we need this” and have a discussion about it, I could see it being charged that way and possibly the time being rounded up which would inflate it a bit. This could either be that they think this is the correct way to charge the time, or as a “dammit if I have to go tell them to do what they’re supposed to do I’m charging the labor to their department” screw them type of move.
Overclocking: not really our concern. It averages out to something like 2-3 minutes per day per employee. Our policy says we do not investigate anything under 10 minutes in a shift. However, we do have one employee who seems to be hitting 10 minutes, every shift. That will be reported and correct.
The bigger problem is that we do not budget for overclocking, so overclocking is a loss.
Training actually is training. Our policy says a line can assign someone to a training cost center for 2 weeks, but after that, it falls on the line’s budget. This line trains people between 6 and 8 weeks. Honestly, the whole training budget here is totally messed up from start to end, but the bottom line is that “training” employees are entered as actual labor, despite not actually doing anything. So it will be overuse of labor at the end of the week.
For different lines: this movement between lines can happen, but my understanding is that it is usually rare. Either way, the actual employees are not responsible for correctly assinging their costs. The supervisors are responsible for assiging labor to the correct line, and are supposed to review the costs every single day. There’s also not much “turf war” between the lines, because the same supervisors oversee both lines in this particular case.
Subcontract someone on the spectrum.
This post is quite self-serving (or hopefully it will serve a close relative). There is a theory out there that treatment of young patients with antidepressants can bring on bipolar disorder. Can anyone point me to any guidance on this?
I’ve read the following abstract:
In 51 reports of patients diagnosed with MDD and treated with an AD, the overall risk of mood-switching was 8.18% (7837/95,786) within 2.39±2.99 years of treatment, or 3.42 (95% CI: 3.34–3.50) %/year. Risk was 2.6 (CI: 2.5–2.8) times greater with/without AD-treatment by meta-analysis of 10 controlled trials. Risk increased with time up to 24 months of treatment, with no secular change (1968–2012). Incidence rates were 4.5 (CI: 4.1–4.8)-times greater among juveniles than adults (5.62/1.26 %/year; p<0.0001). In 12 studies the overall rate of new BPD-diagnoses was 3.29% (1928/56,754) within 5.38 years (0.61 [0.58–0.64] %/year), or 5.6-times lower (3.42/0.61) than annualized rates of mood-switching.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032712007306
There is an obvious confounding factor — I assume that juveniles diagnosed with depression and being treated with antidepressants have more severe symptoms than juveniles diagnosed with depression but not being treated with antidepressants. But, my brother was bipolar, and eventually committed suicide, while my relative has been diagnosed with depression and is being treated with antidepressants (and lithium) following a suicide attempt. So this theory is a concern.
Relatedly, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder seem quite similar at the severe end, where my brother was.
Megan McArdle column on immigration.
This seemed broadly correct to me. It seems to me that immigration policy is debated as a culture war/symbolism kind of policy. (Build The Wall and No Human is Illegal are both about symbols. Hell, separating kids from parents is symbolic, but with some people liking the symbolism while most (I think) don’t like it.)
If our immigration policy really mattes to our country’s future, then it should be debated as a kind of technocratic issue–which immigrants will add the most to the country’s future, what are the costs, what criteria should we use to grant visas, etc. But that essentially never happens in any mainstream venue I’ve seen. In many ways, Trump has been successful in raising the immigration issue because he’s very effective at making the symbolic arguments. (Universal e-verify plus fining the hell out of employers of illegal immigrants would probably do more than building a big, beautiful wall, but it’s not much of a symbol.)
Eh, I think it happens plenty in right-wing circles. I go pretty far right and I know nobody whose position is “No immigrants, ever, period.” There’s a whole lot of discussion about criteria, costs, benefits, etc.
“Build the wall” notably applies to illegal immigrants only, and even then, is largely used as a symbol (as you say) meant to drive a hard bargain against the other side.
There are many people who’s position is no non white immigrants, and many more who’s position is no immigration that would have a net effect of reducing the white share of the electorate.
Heck, there were enough voters who wanted lower immigration and higher wages to elect Trump.
“Lower immigration” is quite different from “no immigration.”
I’ve never heard of any. Can you name one. Freaking Chris Cantwell has conceded that minorities would be technically allowed to immigrate into his imagined utopian ethnostate (under certain conditions, of course).
While I’m sure there are some who would make such an argument, can you support “many” and “many more” in some way? Preferably sources not about actual KKK or Stormfront types, which are by no means “many.”
I’ve seen some praise around here for Japan’s immigration policy, which isn’t quite “no immigrants allowed” but close enough. In particular, that they’ve chosen automation over importing cheap foreign workers, and although their economy is declining it’s still doing well on a per capita basis because the population is declining too.
They’re more open to immigration than they used to be.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Cover-Story/Famous-for-its-resistance-to-immigration-Japan-opens-its-doors
1.2 million foreign workers in 2017, up from 0.3 million ten years earlier.
Yep. There is no coherent policy proposal, or even [publicly-available] conceptualization of the issue, on either side. There certainly hasn’t been in decades and very probably never was.
Trump made a coherent policy proposal months ago. It was rejected for being clearly a racist and white supremacist policy because it instituted a sort of points system.
Actually, as I pointed out to you not long ago, the fact that it instituted a points system was not objectionable, as evidenced by the fact that Democrats and moderate Republicans tried to pass their own version of a points system proposal five years ago; an attempt that was rejected by conservative House Republicans.
That does nothing to address the claim at issue – which is that “no coherent policy proposals have been made.”
You seem to not only confirm my counter of “yes they have” but to further validate it by adding “more than once.”
It counters the claim that
I agree this doesn’t affect the broader point you’re making; I’m only interjecting because this is the second time in recent days I have seen you making the exact same claim, even after having already given you evidence that your claim is wrong and a mischaracterization.
This is not even remotely logical. The Senate plan was a result of political compromise. You might as well argue that the GOP doesn’t object to tax increases on rich people because the 2012 tax act let the Bush tax cuts on upper income earners lapse.
I can’t tell who you’re responding to or which Senate bill you’re referring to, but if you’re talking to me:
obviously the 2013 Gang of Eight bill was a result of political compromise–but it was a compromise that was accepted by Democrats; this even though it had a points system. So, clearly, the presence of a points system is not enough for people on the left to dismiss a bill as racist and reject it since we know of at least one bill containing a points system that they did not reject on those grounds.
The passage of the 2012 Tax Cut extension is at least evidence that, if a bill fails to gain GOP support, it can’t be because they will never accept any compromise with a tax increase.
Also, the Tax Relief Act failed among House Republicans 85-151; it’s clear that Republicans were not totally happy with its provisions. In the case of the Senate immigration bill, all Democrats voted for it in the Senate, while Republicans opposed it 14-32; it’s clear that disapproval of the provisions was stronger among Republicans than Democrats. There’s no evidence here that a points system was toxic to Democrats even if it wasn’t their preference.
So you’re adding details now, but you’re selectively adding points. The 2013 bill did not create a points system, it created a points system for one subset of visas that was being offered in addition to the existing immigration system. A replacement of the current immigration system with a points-based system would be entirely opposed, and the preference for left-wing groups is the expansion of stuff like refugee programs and legalization of current illegal immigrants.
The points based system is not objected to, the points based system is objected to because it was intended as a replacement for the current family system. Democrats make disingenuous arguments that large numbers of current Americans would not be able to enter America under the current standards, but that of course is the POINT: we expect immigrants to be BETTER than us, unless you strongly support increased immigration or open borders entirely.
Democrats will never accept a points-based immigration system, they will accept some visas that are issued on a points-basis. These are different things. And even then, they will still make aggressive attacks if they are in the minority, because that is how politics works. The more political points they score, the more they can meet their other priorities.
So, yes, on net, people were objecting to Trump’s immigration policy because it was racist, though this was just one of their objections.
Yes, this is what’s at issue: it’s not a points-based system that’s the problem, it’s the removal of the family reunification stuff, the diversity lottery, and the reduction in refugees. Not because it “instituted a sort of points system” which is what the comment I responded to said.
It’s also worth noting that often Canada is held up as an exemplar of the points system, including by Matt M the last time this came up, and Canada also does not have a points system for all of its visas, has family reunification visas (about a third to a fifth of all immigrants), and lets in 50 000 refugees (the same number as the RAISE act allows, despite Canada being 1/10 as populous).
So, Matt M’s usage of the term “points system” is consistent with how I have used it, meaning prioritizing a points-based visa but allowing for other visas to coexistence at a meaningful level.
Didn’t it also cut legal immigration significantly?
Let’s say that the proposal is this: border enforcement that just works because magic, plus Canada’s immigration system, plus the same per-capita rate of legal immigration as Canada has (over double the US’, I think).
Would that proposal go over well with Republicans?
If we also deport the >12 million illegal immigrants currently here, it would almost certainly go over well.
Assuming that the deportations and border enforcement actually seemed likely to happen that is. Not just an insincere promise.
That depends on the subset of Republicans, but it would be very popular with almost all of the Republicans I know.
Business Republicans and Libertarians would approve of the increase in legal immigration, and the primary problem for most of the blue collar group would be handled.
Doubling the US’s legal immigration might be a harder pill to swallow for those who think the total ratio of 1st generation immigrants is too high, and may ask for a lower amount until current levels subside over time. That, or deport as Nabil says, but that sounds politically and logistically implausible.
It has the effect of cutting immigration because it cuts family immigration and refugee classes without offsetting increases in work-based immigration.
The GOP as a whole will not pass a bill like this because it would involve higher family based immigration. A quarter of Canadian immigration is still chain migration.
Plus, 3 million immigrants a year is not something most GOPers will stomach. You might get it if you have Dem Senate and House again, though, because you could convince enough moderate GOPers to go along with it.
Even employment based immigration in the US is largerly family based immigration. Every primary applicant can bring along his immidate family. Less than half the employment visa quotas, which is only about 15% of the total number of greencards issued every year, go to people actually selected on an employment basis.
How do point system countries deal with families? Adding the the family points together and then dividing by the number of people, and making that average pass the threshold seems to make some sense. Maybe with some exception for children under five.
Although I’m far from a Trump supporter, I do think there are things to like about his immigration proposal. The DV and F4 *should* go away and parents of USC need a lot more scrutiny to show that they aren’t going to be public burdens. Probably they should be required to buy into medicare (with ten years of premiums due up front.)
But cutting refugee numbers and moving none of the cut quota allotments to employment based made the “deal” a non-starter as far as I was concerned.
@Brad
Why children under 5? All children seem likely to tally up to whopping zero points.
Also, insofar as intact families are desirable, this seems likely to create bad incentives.
Also, demanding a $22,000 per-person fee for each immigrant is not likely to go over well, IMO. Immigration costing a family an additional $100,000, all of which they’ll never see again, shuts the door to a lot of qualified/qualifying people from poor countries.
Fair enough, I wasn’t aware of that. I think I still stand by no side having a concrete, internally-consistent position, or at least being unwilling to publicly say what it is.
Eh, I do not want a “symbolic wall.” I want a wall that stops/slows illegal border crossings*.
Also, e-verify** has been part of Trump’s immigration proposal from the beginning, and raids on illegal employers have increased markedly, and the owners are being prosecuted to the extent they can be.
None of this has anything to do with cultural symbolism. What I want is as close to zero illegal border crossings as possible.
* I understand many people do not believe a wall will work. I file these arguments in the “arguments from thing I don’t want won’t work anyway” bin. No one is convinced by such arguments.
** I understand there are problems with e-verify, which should probably be addressed in a technocratic manner.
How do you expect to ever find out that the thing you want, won’t work if you do it the way you are currently trying to do it but might work if you did it a different way?
Which I am fairly certain, is the case here, but you’ve just pretty much announced that you are going to put your fingers in your ears and hum real loud if anyone tries to tell you that.
I would take such arguments from someone who I believed legitimately wanted zero illegal immigration and had a workable solution. Instead I get the same tired responses about ladders and tunnels (both of which can be defeated with sensors) and “walls don’t work” even though the one in Israel sure does. Nobody’s saying you don’t also patrol the wall.
Arguments against cost seem motivated to me, particularly when coming from people who are okay with multi-trillion dollar proposals like UBI or universal healthcare. $20B over 5-10 years for a wall is peanuts. The fierce opposition to the wall does not make much sense.
So what I would like to do is build the wall and patrol it, and see what happens to illegal immigration. I predict it would go down considerably.
Politics being the art of compromise, you almost certainly can’t have both. And your champion is proposing the one that is least likely to function on its own, least likely to endure his inevitable departure from office, and two years in still hasn’t even broken ground.
You’ll never know. Instead, you’ll get to see what de facto open borders looks like. Unless the wall actually is completed, in which case for a few years it will be “open except the immigrants have to bring a ladder”, which I do not see making a big difference.
I’m not a proponent of open borders, but I can see that’s where we are headed. And I’m also not a proponent of zero tolerance anything, which lack of fanaticism I expect disqualifies me from your list of advisors. Have fun defending the castle.
Half of illegal immigrants are Visa overstays, so the absolute upper ceiling on a wall’s effect on illegal immigration is cutting it in half. In practical terms, it’s probably going to be much less than that. As such it’s not unlikely that there may be other more cost effective methods like cracking down on employers who hire illegals.
Personally my position is that we should crack down on illegal immigration, and then massively expand legal immigration. Basically i want people coming over, but i want the US government to be able to control the rate. It would make me much happier if the bitchfights in Congress were about how many immigrants to allow, rather than about what to do about all the illegals. Unfortunately decades of indifference about actual illegal immigration has made this position politically orphaned.
Most illegal immigrants come here for economic reasons–they need work, and there’s work here. If we make it uneconomical for American employers to hire a lot of illegal immigrants, then a whole lot fewer will come/stay here. To the extent that your goal is seriously decreasing the number of illegal immigrants, making it uneconomical to hire illegal immigrants probably accomplishes that goal.
I haven’t tries to work out the economics in detail, but a wall has always seemed to me to be more of a symbol than a real thing that stops illegal immigrants. But mainly, my assumption is that illegal immigration is overwhelmingly about economics. According to the best statistics I’ve seen (the Pew Center), we actually had zero net illegal immigration during the post-crash recession. That’s exactly what you’d expect from economically-motivated migration.
I agree, but “let’s crash the economy so no one wants to come here” is not a viable solution to illegal immigration. I want both a functioning economy, and little to no illegal immigration. I believe this is possible and a primary duty of the government and can be accomplished through multiple coordinated efforts including a physical barrier, sensors, patrols, economic incentives, and law enforcement action.
ETA: Legal immigration is a completely different debate.
I don’t think legal and illegal immigration can really be separated. One of the primary reason we have so much illegal immigration is that people aren’t willing to come to grips with legal immigration. Much like drug prohibition, this is what you get, but it’s like drug prohibition where you never go after the sellers.
I seem to recall some right wing radio chatter during the Obama years that illegal immigration was down because the economy was so shitty, Mexicans no longer saw any value in coming here. Not really sure if the statistics bear that out or not…
I agree this is part of it. Many times illegal immigrant are hired partly because they have a weak bargaining position. Employers can pay them less, threaten to call the authorities on them if they get in a dispute etc.
If illegal immigrants had to be hired following all relevant law that applied to hiring people here legally, that would discourage illegal immigration.
But if what I say is true, then legal immigration and illegal immigration aren’t perfectly exchangeable. Even if you raise the number of legal immigrants, there are real benefits to an employer to hiring illegal immigrants instead unless you increase the number of legal immigrants so drastically that you manage to push the cost of employing a legal worker down to that of employing an illegal worker.
I would definitely like legal immigration reform so we can streamline the process for both people we may want to move here permanently (doctors, engineers, etc) and people we may want to be able to work here temporarily (migrant farm workers).
But at that point yes we will still have the problem of how to handle illegals because as long as we’re not doing open borders (which I believe HBC you have said previously you are not in favor of) there are going to exist people to whom we say “no, you do not meet the criteria for legal immigration, you may not come” and they respond “screw you gringo I’m coming anyway” and we have to deal with that. That is the thing I would like handled in a comprehensive way, including physical barriers and law enforcement action.
For once I agree with HBC. Most obviously, if you have open borders you have lots of legal immigration and no illegal immigration–the situation of the U.S. for a large part of its history.
Short of open borders, anything that makes legal immigration easier for the sorts of people who might otherwise come illegally reduces illegal immigration.
This doesn’t strike me as obviously true.
It seems to assume that every illegal immigrant would rather be a legal one – but we can certainly imagine scenarios in which this would not be the case – someone who is fleeing the law, someone who intends to work exclusively off the books and not pay taxes, etc.
My strong hunch is that if there was an immigration bill e-verify would end up with the same fate as eliminating the carried interest loophole.
As for the second part, I do have the impression that splashy workplace raids are up but not that indictments of owners/executives are. Do you happen to have stats?
Then you have already presumed an answer to the most important question in the debate, and it is an answer at odds to the one held by half the debaters. That question is, “should we make this decision based on what is best for our country’s future, or on what is best for the set of people including our countrymen and all prospective immigrants?”
Or, more cynically, everybody cares mostly about our country’s future, but the most important question regardng that issue is the one you (and McArdle) are still not asking: “Will these immigrants likely vote for Democrats or for Republicans”?
My guess is that most people haven’t thought it through carefully, but among those who have, I would be quite surprised to see a large fraction arguing for the approach of summing up the utilities of the people inside the country plus the immigrants. That’s mostly libertarian economists, I think.
The second question is more plausible for political actors to be thinking about, but it requires thinking a lot further ahead than most politicians seem to think. A big wave of immigration today will probably start changing electoral outcomes in a decade or two.
It’s mostly not a think-it-through-carefully sort of position, but more “look at those poor suffering telegenic children on television; what sort of Scroogian monster would leave them to starve outside a locked gate?” position.
Not that the alternate position is usually thought through very carefully either; they just have a different set of telegenic victims to look at.
The argument is somewhat technocratic at the political level, but there are a few sticky issues that you just cannot reason your way out of. Specifically, how to handle already present illegal immigrants is a touchy issue akin to abortion: there’s not a right or wrong, there’s just a values question.
To what extent you want to accept refugees or chain migration vs. economic migration is also a values question, not just a technocratic question.
Interesting. I’m Canadian, and one of the odd things about living in the US is the combination of hearing lots of routine anti-immigrant rhetoric (via media), while working with lots and lots of my fellow immigrants. Another and sadder aspect is that I don’t personally get any flack, with my white face and obviously Canadian accent, whereas other immigrants I know who lack those advantages clearly do.
In Canada, one clearly articulated political position is that those immigrants are going to save our country from the demographic time bomb of below replacement level birthrates and baby boom retirement. The immigrants we welcome today (and have been welcoming for decades), and their children, will be paying into [our equivalents to] social security – not to mention some of them working in health and elder care, when we’re no longer able to care for ourselves.
Not everyone agrees with this, and even if it did that wouldn’t stop us from arguing about how many immigrants are enough, and which ones we prefer. But it’s a normal, respectable position, which I routinely hear on (podcasts of) boring radio talk shows, or from family members still in Canada. Whereas I can’t recall hearing anything of the sort in the US, where on the one hand “social security is going broke; you’ll be left with nothing” and on the other hand “immigrants are taking all our jobs”.
The other thing I notice is that while some folks in the Canadian debate happily conflate legal and illegal, skills-based and family based, and wind up talking as if all immigrants are illegals with 3rd grade educations – that’s kind of rare, and interviewers mostly challenge them to explain which they really mean – something I would be (pleasantly) surprised to see in US discourse. (And conflating things the other way isn’t especially helpful either – though as a legal, skills based immigrant myself, I tend to resent that less.)
I think Canada has a different method of immigration than the USA. On Canada’s southern border, you are not really likely to get streams of USAians trying to cross over into the Great White North (despite all those who swear that they’re going to pack up and leave if the Wrong Side win the next election) and seems to have a reasonably tough requirement for legal immigration from other countries (though recently that does seem to have eased, it looks to be a lot easier to emigrate from Ireland to Canada now than even as recently as 2014).
According to Wikipedia, there are over 300,000 American-Canadians living in Canada, and up to 2 million American-Americans living/working/studying there as part or full time residents.
By contrast, there are 11 million Mexicans living in the USA, out of 44 million immigrants. I do have to wonder if the Canadian immigration policy would change in the face of something equivalent to the Honduran caravan?
One elephant in the room which is not mentioned in the article is the expected voting patterns of prospective immigrants.
Here is a thought experiment: the compromise is that the Right will go along with a loose borders policy so long as 60% of the newcomers are Christian or Jewish and from either Eastern Europe or Israel. Would the Left go along with that so they can get the warm fuzzies of helping people — white, brown, or black — to live better lives? I highly highly doubt it.
I think it’s pretty clear the Left wants to open the doors wide to enhance their political power. And why there is very little room for a technocratic compromise.
I strongly believe they would in a vacuum, but because it’s impossible to wave a magic wand and arrange people’s preferences in this way, it seems more likely that you’ll be instituting open borders for Europe and quotas for everywhere else, which is the exact opposite of what I think of when I think of “loose border controls.” Also, a demographic breakdown of immigration suggests that the absolute number of non-white-christian-European immigrants is likely to fall, not rise, as a result. So no, the lefties wouldn’t agree because that’s a system that helps fewer people live better lives.
You’re fighting the hypothetical a bit here I think.
I don’t see why, as there are plenty of people all over the world who would like to move to the United States. So the total number from Latin America; Asia; and Africa could be increased a bit while the total number from Eastern Europe and Israel is increased a lot. The net result is more warm fuzzies for the Left, especially if they like the idea of improving the lives of people from Eastern Europe and Israel.
There is an interesting new book out about parasites that strongly affect the behavior of their hosts for their own benefit, such as fungi and wasps. The book is “Plight of the Living Dead” by Matt Simon. You can read a review and discussion with the author here:
https://gizmodo.com/real-life-zombie-animals-walk-the-earth-thanks-to-thous-1829657886
In an academic context, the questions are essential. It’s not exaggeration to say that I often learn a lot more from a single good question than from ten minutes of a presentation. If I can’t think of anything worth asking after hearing someone speak for a half an hour it’s clear that I didn’t understand it.
For a pop science or entertainment talk, skipping the Q&A might help speed things along but to the extent that anyone is there to actually learn it’s totally invaluable.
I agree with Nabil about the importance of questions in academic talks.
I almost never wish the speaker had more time. I not rarely wish that somebody would interrupt the speaker to question them. Too many interruptions can be a problem. Questions at the end is an acceptable compromise with a big audience.
The ideal academic version, in my opinion, is the Chicago style workshop, which is almost entirely questions. The base rule is that everyone attending is supposed to have read the paper. The presenter gets to talk about it for fifteen minutes or so, after which it is open season.
When it works, it is the nearest thing to thinking in multiple brains that I have observed.
That just sounds like a normal journal club, and runs into the issue that it’s impossible to present unpublished findings this way without sending out dozens of copies of the manuscript.
Board game thread:
Twilight Imperium is a very odd board game, because it’s the first game I’ve ever played which seems to be actively trying to distract the players from their own ultimate goal.
The core of the game is actually dirt simple. Fulfill objectives to gain victory points, first one to ten points wins. There are a few extra rules to cover corner cases like the turn order in the status phase to prevent multiple people from getting to ten at the same time. But that isn’t too complex in itself.
Layered over that, though, are about a half-dozen board games worth of rules for trade, exploring and colonizing planets, warfare, researching technology, and eventually passing laws in the galactic senate. The game even comes with a full booklet of backstory for the fictional universe of the games and each of the eighteen different species.
Over the course of a 6-12 hour game keeping track of all of that stuff gets really distracting and it’s easy to lose sight of your ultimate goal of collecting ten victory points. You need to maintain a clear head to keep from getting sucked into the minutiae.
Have other people had the same experience, either with TI or another game?
The board game Dominion consists of treasure, victory, and action cards. Victory cards are all that matter for winning (usually) but slow you down before the end of the game; treasure cards are used to buy more cards of all types, and action cards are used to accelerate by breaking the rules in various ways (removing cards from your deck, drawing extra cards, attacking opponents, etc.). The action cards used in the game vary according to player choice at set-up, with many being introduced in expansions.
With some set-ups, a competitive strategy is to simply buy treasure cards, ignoring the more interesting but niche action cards (partially because usually only 1 action card is playable in a turn and your had size is limited). Even apart from that, you are probably better off focusing on a strategy and not being distracted by the variety of action cards.
It’s a flaw in game design if the fun sub-systems actually detract from winning, but if all of them are useful at certain times but not others, that adds depth. I think this is the case with TI, but it’s also true a lot of it is there for immersion. A lot of the politics cards that I’ve seen, for instance, often don’t do much, but it emphasizes the “deteriorating galactic empire” aspect of the setting.
Never played TI, but re: Dominion a lot of the action cards do things like giving you more actions, and I don’t think it would ever be a winning strategy to not get them. But usually of the ten action cards available, there might be 2-3 that you don’t get any of. Good game by the way.
You mean get them along with other (“terminal”) action cards. While you are setting up this engine, someone else just buying silvers, then golds, then provinces may be able to out pace you.
Usually not, thankfully; it’s almost always better to mix in some action cards for card draw or filtering, which is why I said competitive and not dominant, which is close enough to a pun that you can be sure I would have gone for it if applicable.
Dominion sounds interesting, I’ll check it out.
Some of the agenda phase cards are boring, but in the games I’ve played there’s always one potential game-changer card per agenda phase. Usually because an obscure card plays into one or more races strategies.
I don’t think that TI does immersion very well though. It doesn’t feel like you’re barbarians fighting over the corpse of a dying empire so much as explorers populating an empty galaxy. If I wanted to get that feeling I would either add a seventh player to play the Lazax remnants or at least put some kind of tokens on empty planets to make them seem inhabited.
For a while “Is it better than Always Buying Silver?” was the first hurdle a potential strategy had to clear. Seems like the expansions have since lowered that bar considerably.
Edit: Ack, ninja’d!
Can’t say I’ve experienced that. The heaviest game I’ve played is Scythe, which is a 4X-ish game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate — “-ish” because there’s no real extermination, in a battle the defeated units are just sent back to their starting base), and while there are many different things you can do during the course of a session — acquire ressources, explore the map, build buildings, build mechs, fight other players, develop your technology, develop your administration, develop your worker population, gain reputation, etc, pretty much all of them are conductive to gaining victory points.
I don’t want it to sound like building fleets or researching technology is completely useless to winning in Twilight Imperium. It’s more that you can easily go overboard.
If you’re playing Hacan, it’s to your benefit to build up a huge pile of trade goods because you can spend them on achieving objectives. But being the richest player takes work and is rewarding in itself, which means that they can end up focusing more on getting rich than thinking about what to spend their money on.
I mean, over the 12-18 hour marathons of Axis and Allies, occasionally someone gets obsessed with one particular territory that ends up blinding them to everything else. Not exactly the same though…
12-18 hours?! Is this the 1940 edition, where you buy the European and Pacific boards separately to have twice as many territories and units?
1984 edition. It was….a slog. Our shortest game was 12 hours because I accidenally under-defended Japan and America got really lucky with an amphibious invasion. We just forfeited after losing Japan.
Here’s another example–Magic the Gathering. Magic has 5 colors with different strengths, and in each set the relative strengths of the colors fluctuates a bit. Sometimes the colors that look to control and win in the end game excel, but sometimes the aggressive colors are stronger, even to the point that the special mechanics of the set are basically traps.
I think this was the case with the Amonkhet expansion, at least in limited (draft) format–expecting to play cards with cost more than 4 or so meant death to Boros Exert aggro.
Players encountering a strong red-white deck will mutter “Oh great, looks like the fun police are out again.”
Part of the problem with Magic is that the designers only ever seem to design mechanics that are friendly to out-of-block cards by accident. The result is that you can’t make a $mechanic deck in an eternal format unless $mechanic has enough support over 1-3 sets to build a deck competitive with 20-30 years of cards, or $mechanic sort of accidentally fits with an older mechanic.
Many games where expansion needed to gain power isn’t the same as winning –
ie. Dominion or Splendor, where some people concentrate/distracted by getting power rather than points.
Sometimes people concentrate on one victory condition and completely forget about others.
Games where you can sacrifice battles/pieces to win wars – Go, Chess, etc.
I haven’t seen much of games where it’s simply too complicated and the goal is lost – generally just when the end goal was distracted by a more immediate success.
I’ve always told new TI players this:
“Remember that your goal is to claim the Imperial Throne, not to hold the Imperial Throne for more than twelve minutes.”
I find that it works well to flavor the game.
Your Halloween costume is “sexy” + the last thing you searched for on Google
For me, that is “sexy Goldman Sachs interns”.
I’ll just stay home.
Mine is even worse. Sexy G3 battlecruiser.
I don’t know if they’ve gotten to the G3 battlecruisers yet, but sexy warship girls are unfortunately very popular in some parts of the Internet right now.
some of us like big gunsDear Japan, stop making cartoons. (/Mystery Science Theater 3000)
I know about Kantai Collection, but no, they haven’t gotten to the G3 and probably never will. Currently they have one American and two British battleships. (They did display excellent judgement in selecting Iowa for that, which confused me for a while. I would have expected Missouri, until I realized that Might Mo probably had a very different connotation among Japanese who play warship games than it does here.)
Azur lane has some from the Benson class. Not sure if that could be considered G3s. No idea about WSG (the other OTHER ship girl game).
One thing about those two is that their developers are Chinese/Taiwan based rather than Japan based which could have allowed their more lenient approach to add US ships.
I’ve been getting FB ads for Azur Lane quite frequently for some time now.
I sort of got why I might be getting targeted ads for sexy anime girls, but was confused as to why they thought I might be interested in battleships.
But it all makes sense now. bean is to blame.
I did not know of Azur Lane, but the only Benson-class I know of is the US destroyer class, which is entirely unlike the G3 battlecruisers. (Those are British, cancelled in 1921.) I have no idea what WSG is.
Sorry I meant to say Nelson. Not sure why I confused it with Benson considering I just looked at the wiki for G3 to find Nelson.
And apparently, Kantai also just added Nelson though not Rodney.
WSG is short for Warship Girls.
How the heck does one dress like a Goldman Sachs intern, anyway? I’m picturing a young man in a short haircut, khaki pants, glasses and an understated sport shirt.
What you described is a bit too casual, at least for the main NYC office. Dress pants and a dress shirt is typical. Suit and/or tie or female equivalent is overkill unless they’re in a client-facing role, in which case it might be mandatory.
Sexy twilight imperium. So I guess I’m going to as a shirtless guy with a lion head?
There are Stone Age sculptures like that. Topless lioness women too.
Sexy defenstration of Prague.
Going to require some interesting reinterpretation.
Assuming you mean the second one, isn’t it just ‘sexy clergyman’ but you have to keep jumping out of windows?
‘List of measures of auto-correlation.’
This is going to be a weird Halloween for me.
But I’m using Bing nowadays!
Then it’s not “sexy”, it’s “kawaii”.
“Kawaii NetHack checking item prices”. I guess being a cute dungeon shopkeeper wouldn’t be so bad.
Her name is Recette.
What’s the adjective for startpage?
Sexy motivational interviewing
Sexy Chinese Chicken
Definitely going to fall, ahem, afowl of the culture police that one…
Are you sure it’s not just a cat?
Sexy find recent google searches
Before that, sexy list of political false flag
Sexy SR-71.
Endorsed.
Sexy SR-71
AKA: SR-71
Sexy costumes often come in matched pairs, male/female. So I assume there will also be Sexy XB-70, aka Valkyrie.
“Sexy how to retrieve ring from air duct.”
Sexy Governor of either Florida or Georgia.
sexy excel vba csv extra commas
uh
YKINOK
I mean, I searching for a way to avoid/remove the extra commas, so
“control eff me, daddy”
I don’t know about the sexy, but work-related I too recently had reason to look up about removing extra commas after converting Excel files to CSV format!
So you’re not alone, AG 🙂
It’s fucking stupid.
Apparently Excel automatically adds a comma on the end no matter what because something something Oracle needs it for uploads something, and they used to have the ability to toggle that off in pre-2007 versions of Excel, but because Microsoft Office’s creed is now “our users are BABIES and can’t think for themselves” you can’t customize that anymore.
And then, on top of that, it uses the UsedRange aspect every 16 rows to determine how many columns you have, so you get commas to fill out the max number of columns even on empty rows, even if you do a full clear of the empty cells.
The only viable solutions I’ve seen are to run a non-Excel VBscript afterwards to read and edit all generated csvs to remove the commas, or to have the macro write the csvs fresh instead of using the export function.
“Sexy House Document 531”
…
That would be both weird and culture-warry in a bunch of different directions.
“Sexy Calvin and Hobbes snowmen”.
“Sexy Bulls Hornets”
Hmmmm…….
sexy ‘stumbling on happiness’ ?! I guess I’m dressing as a book.
Sexy fast multipole method
Mmm, computational physics algorithms. Great for the many-body problem.
Sexy natural gas vs coal
I’ve been reading the thread chronologically, so sexy axis and allies.
You folks can pick the power, I suppose.
Sexy dual n-back.
Hmm…
This is harder for me to come up with a good design than I expected. Something with simultaneous auditory and visual “stimuli” seems like it’s a gimme.
I can sort of imagine some kind of demonic enemy that can only be hurt when it repeats an action and some weird two-faced or multi-armed boss hybrid that attacks separately using its multiple faces/arms or with a ranged/melee mix.
No idea on how to make it visually representative though.
An interesting analysis of the causes of Trump’s electoral victory. Personally I’m not wholly convinced, but food for thought nevertheless.
How droll.
How very American 🙂
Though it’s fun to compare this with the Wiccan/pagan spell-casting both immediately post-election and the one during and after the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings/investigation. If we take this
seriouslyoh who am I kidding, if we take it in the sports sense of “who will win the league”, then in Christian prayer versus witchcraft spells, the prayer wins!I mean this is basically how Elijah settled matters with Baal, isn’t it?
LET’S GET READY TO RUUUUUUMMMMBBBLLLLEEEE
Rumble is a game I propose to play starting next comment thread. Or rather, we’ll play by email and I’ll post each round as it occurs. In brief (if you don’t wanna click the thing) Rumble is
This post is just to gauge
a) if there’s any interest at all in playing.
b) if anyone has played before and what they’re experience was like.
c) if you have any suggestions on how to make it go smoothly.
For my part a) Yes, obviously.
b) I played this on another forum oh….9 years ago? And found it pretty dang fun so maybe you all will to. As I recall the winner wound up bidding very low amounts for a wide swath of powers while almost everyone else focused on just a few. Maybe 2/3rds of players were knocked out by round 4. So uh keep that in mind.
c) My plan is to collect players and powers via a google sheet that I’ll share with everyone who signs up. Every player can select two powers, either from the classic list or of their own creation (subject to my editing and approval) to submit for bids, probably within 1 week of kickoff. After powers are assigned, I’ll post what everyone selected and their current power then it’s off to the races.
Rounds will take place over a couple days (3?) and anyone who hasn’t emailed me in that time will assign all their energy to defense. Whoever is left standing at the end will be crowned king of the ring, the sultan of smash etc etc.
YALL READY FOR THIS?!?
Like I reported last thread, I just read worm, so I don’t think I can turn this down.
Hurray! Maybe I should read that too one of these days.
Can the non-participating audience suggest powers for the auction?
Sample powers:
Aura of Vague Familiarity:
Everybody thinks they have met you, but can’t remember how or why.
Coveted Covetous Ring of Power:
Everybody who sees it wants to wear this ring. Whoever is wearing this ring wants to collect more rings.
Sagan’s Garage Door Opener:
This device, when pressed, causes the user to become invisible, intangible, unaware, and unable to move under one’s own power for ten minutes at a time.
All great pitches and yes, I think opening up powers to anyone who wants to submit one would be fine. You’d still need to be a player to nominate one of them though.
Also for anyone else with power ideas here’s the basic format they should fall under. First they should be given a name (good job with that) and a type:
Offense - Powers that mainly deal with adding damage to Attacks or damaging opponents.
Defense - Powers that mainly deal with modifying your own Defense or mitigating others' Attacks.
Mixed - Powers that have a combination of Attack and Defense bonuses or effects.
Support - Powers that restore Energy, target other players with non-Attack effects, or modify the way you Attack or Defend without directly fudging your Attack or Defense numbers.
Special - Powers with abilities that deal with things like the bidding, allocation, and resolution phases, as well as any other meta-game elements.
And then for the power description you’d want to think in terms of how they’ll affect the combat, or the bidding process or whatnot. So for example I’d make your powers something like this:
I like this power, I think it could get pretty wacky if a lot of people are vying to be the ringmaster. Edit: On reconsideration why would anyone take the power? Maybe there should be a secondary effect like every ring in your possession gives you 1 energy or something.
Sagan’s Garage Door Opener is left as an exercise for the reader.
As for why someone would want that power…
If I start with 30 rings, would -you- want to attack me, knowing you are stuck with them afterwards?
Sounds fun!
Count me in. How specifically would you like us to register?
I was thinking a Google Form for both signups and power submissions.
I’m up for it.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/ovulation-research-women-replication-crisis.html
There were a lot of bad studies about how ovulation affects women.
Yeah, Andrew Gellman had a lot of fun with various studies of this type awhile back.
Does anyone have a good metric for evaluating judges that are up for election? I feel like I’m generally a fairly informed voter, but I haven’t developed a good system for evaluating judges other than read a bunch of their opinions, which is largely an amount of research that I (and probably the vast majority of voters) don’t have time to do. Anyone have any good strategies? I’m in Los Angeles if you just want to tell me who to vote for and why. 🙂
One factor to consider is that for CA Supreme and Appeals court judges, losing a retention election will create a vacancy that will be filled by an appointment by the incoming Governor. That will almost certainly by Gavin Newsom. So you could use a heuristic of your opinion to Newsom relative to your opinion of whichever Governor initially appointed to judges up for retention. Brown appointed Kruger and Schwarzenegger appointed Corrigan to the state Supreme Court, and I’m not sure who appointed the various appeals court judges who are up for retention in your district.
This probably won’t be applicable to you, because NY state election law is its own special kind of screwed up, but I never vote for any judge that is cross listed on the Republican and Democratic lines. Then I look to see if the remaining ones are affiliated with the local machine. Yep, we still have machine politics in NYC though thankfully it is finally weakening. I may not like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s politics but at least she isn’t part of the machine. If there are any judges left after those steps, I try to find their campaign literature to see if they are kooks.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-45971416?ns_source=facebook&ocid=socialflow_facebook&ns_campaign=bbcnews&ns_mchannel=social
A man’s liver was wrecked by the green tea supplements he was taking. He was very lucky to be able to get a liver transplant in time, but he still has serious health problems.
Tentative advice: It’s probably safe to take extracts if you limit it to the quantities that would be normally be eaten. On the other hand, the article doesn’t mention how much he was taking.
I think it’s likely that the amount of liver damage from green tea extract is being underestimated. Would it be identified in people who are heavy drinkers or who are taking prescription drugs which are hard on the liver? Or in people who are suffering moderate rather than severe damage?
Link without all the tracking stuff: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-45971416
(note that in general you can remove all parts of URLs after ‘?’ and still have them go to the same page)
Anyway, this is another example of “the dose makes the poison.”
The article didn’t mention how much green tea extract he was taking, though he doesn’t sound to me like the kind of person who’d be trying megadoses.
It could be that a normal dose for the vast majority is poison for a few people.
SSC won’t let me post a comment, so I’m trying this without the link, which is a Consumer Reports article about 15 supplements they say you shouldn’t take.
I suppose supplements should be approached with the same caution one gives to prescription drugs rather than completely avoided.
Pennyroyal can be used to cause abortions. I’m surprised there’s no mention that you shouldn’t take it if you want to continue a pregnancy.
It’s interesting that red yeast rice, which is taken to lower cholesterol, has some of the same bad side effects of statins where are taken for the same purpose.
1) Pennyroyal is seriously toxic (due to containing pulegone) and taking it is a bad idea in general.
2) Red yeast rice apparently contains some of the fungi from which the first statin (lovastatin) was originally isolated. Therefore it’s not surprising if red yeast rice contains low levels of statins.
Theism in psychology:
“That conversation between you was to become the first link in the chain of events that led to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous”. Wilson specifies further: “My recollection of his account of that conversation is this: First of all, you frankly told him of his hopelessness, so far as any further medical or psychiatric treatment might be concerned. … When he then asked you if there was any other hope, you told him that there might be, provided he could become the subject of a spiritual or religious experience – in short, a genuine conversion. You pointed out how such an experience, if brought about, might remotivate him when nothing else could.” — AA founder Bill Wilson to Carl Jung
William James, psychologist and founder of Pragmatism when moonlighting as a philosopher, also famously wrote on the utility of religious experience.
Evidence that genuine religious experience or conversion can solve psychological problems presents a paradox for materialists in the field. In the example of alcoholism, expert consensus is that it’s about 50% genetic. Everything about the mind being reducible to biology is commonly understood as evidence against idealism/God/et al. (I would perhaps be unfairly simplifying Pragmatism to say it attempted to solve such issues by telling us to only care about “practical consequences” of truth claims rather than truth qua truth.)
Discuss?
James himself admits that the behavioral changes supposedly resulting from religious experiences were very frequently not lasting. I’m not hugely familiar with the literature as a whole, but what I’ve seen from the research into alcoholism suggests that whether religion is involved or not does not affect the likelyhood of recovery.
I put the odds that Republican operatives have intentionally coded electronic voting machines to change straight party Democratic ballots to vote for Republican candidates as 1% or less.
Anybody disagree and think it is more likely?
I’d put it less than 1% as well. Its a terribly stupid way to cheat and easy to discover. There is a reason almost all voter fraud we have discovered is through absentee/mail ballots: Its freaking easy to do and hard to detect.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, man.
a) a theory was proffered (not by me) of which this is a test.
b) If this is indeed a second wrong, then the first is wrong. And it would be excellent if people recognized what is wrong about them both.
c) The specifics here are pretty weird, as this isn’t even a touchscreen system.
a) Your intention of formatting things precisely this way was pretty clearly to prove some point about how we’re all a bunch of right wingers, a fact which you would then pull out against posters you have a beef with, with an end goal of I don’t know what but “good faith effort to improve dialogue” is almost certainly not it.
b) I don’t think either is wrong in isolation, but the fact that you believe the first to be wrong makes this straight hypocrisy. Again, not exactly a good faith effort to improve dialogue.
I’ve been trying to give you the benefit of charity that you really are concerned about the quality of dialogue here, but stuff like this makes it a lot harder because it looks like bad faith ego stroking that is justified because “he started it”
c) if you honestly are interested in the specifics I’ll post some thoughts in direct reply to your original post.
People have been openly policing norms here on the basis of what’s “fun” for a long time. Who are the people acting in good faith you wish to contrast HeelBearCub with?
I’m not attempting to contrast HeelBearCub to anyone other than my earlier more positive impression of his intentions.
@gbdub:
I’m deferring my reply at this time, but I will respond later.
Honestly at this point I’m spent. This was all originally intended as good faith constructive criticism, but now I’m just frustrated and probably going to be repeating myself so I don’t see a lot of good coming from carrying this on longer than the thread and a half it’s already gone on.
Much as I share your annoyance, gbdub, it’s unfortunate that you could only express it by adopting the usual HBC role: deflecting the object-level discussion into Question The Motive. Propriety debates are inherently bad in much the same way that bravery debates are.
Paul –
My impression is that this isn’t gbdub saying “This is another case of the left also behaving badly”, but rather a more personal “I thought you were better than this, and now I am rethinking that”.
Which is to say, this isn’t a metacommentary about how debate is conducted here, so much as a statement of dismay as gbdub updates his view of HBC in a negative direction.
That is, this conversation is -personal-.
—
It is the issue I have with HBC and (certain other people here), which I don’t have with, say, Matt M or Conrad. Matt and Conrad say the same sort of shitty things as HBC and (others), but they say them because they don’t really realize they’ll be perceived as shitty; they are saying what they think, and aren’t deliberately violating norms. And will apologize and/or retract their comments if they are convinced they were being shitty. HBC just insists being shitty is justified by other people being shitty.
I get all that; I just hate the Meta Turn no matter which particular form it takes. (Not least because there’s no way to complain without making yourself part of the problem, so I’ll leave it at that.)
Fair.
There is a certain… brinkmanship, to it.
Flip side, even discussing the issues it provokes is part of it. We are all aware of the problem, but can’t discuss it, or identify solutions to it, without making it worse.
My own advocation is that people start viewing argument as a spectator sport, and have confidence that the spectators understand what is going on; skip over the worst arguments and address the best, not out of some sense of community norm, but out of an understanding that the spectators aren’t convinced of your side by engaging in endless cattiness, and indeed are put off by it.
This has the trap, of course, of getting more annoyed with your own side behaving badly. Which only works if there is a sense of comraderie about it – an inclination to listen to your own side when they say “Woah, man, that isn’t cool”, which is itself it’s own trap, a kind of metapartisanship/conflict view of debate.
It is a hard problem.
Meanwhile y’all are having a meta-meta-commentary about an argument HBC and I had, that I have explicitly bowed out of and HBC seems to have quietly exited. Which seems a little rude itself, no?
Changing all the straight Democrat ballots would probably be too obvious. A better plan would be to change only a certain percentage, but I’m not sure what the optimal ratio would be.
Another option is that it is really a glitch, but the republicans conspire not to fix it.
Not enough information. If it is an ongoing glitch as the officials claim, it ought to be reproducible and probably ought to affect other straight party votes (not just Dem), thus easy to test and investigate.
The specifics are pretty weird though, and it’s problematic whether it was intentional or not. The photos on the Twitter thread would be trivially easy to fake, but the election officials acknowledge a known glitch so we should probably assume it’s real.
I think the probability of intentional partisan is still low though, because if you’ve got the access and ability to plant a hack like this, why on Earth would you make it easily detectable by an attentive voter? Seems too risky. Make the changes on the back end somewhere.
I’ve been involved in enough software and testing to know that this kind of bug, and a failure to test for it, is sadly quite plausible, which is why I advocate for paper ballots.
What might be meaningfully higher than 1% is the chance that this bug was noticed and somebody found it convenient to ignore it. That at least has plausible deniability.
I’m also involved in software, and I agree the Texas Secretary of State’s explanation sounds very plausible. This is the sort of bug that should be caught in testing, but too often is not. Even so, it’s a very serious bug that should be fixed promptly – and we should go back to paper ballots before one of these bugs happens to swing an election without our knowing.
If I wanted to manipulate voting software to push results towards one outcome, my target wouldn’t be changing the vote to a different value than the one the selected and was displayed to the user. That kind of fraud has the advantage of being virtually impossible for the voter to detect, but the disadvantage of being hard to disguise, in code inspection and especially in independent testing. And there’s a tradeoff there: if I try to do something different in production than testing, that’s all the more difficult to hide from inspection.
Better, then, to concentrate on UI features that will change the outcomes and can be blamed on the voter.
I’m not arguing that’s what happened here. But how does a UI explanation like that of the Sec State account for these results. Why, in any design, if a user selected neither “Republican Ticket” or “Ted Cruz” would it be acceptable to present “Ted Cruz” on the last screen? Or is the idea that because of “screen refreshes” the user actually did select “Ted Cruz”?
The creepy part is that this sort of problem opens the door for manipulation at the municipality level. Say that the vendor is entirely innocent and this is just a bug. If the behavior is consistent and the local elections folks notice, they might influence the outcomes by how they load the slates.
I’m not sure at what point the actual names get input into the software before being deployed to the polls, or how the software is set up to handle straight party voting. But I would guess the base code is set up to be agnostic so it’s not that “Cruz” overwrote “O’Rourke” despite “Democrats” being selected, it’s something more like one object with a meaningless numerical designator getting a pointer to the wrong second object with a meaningless numerical designator.
It probably doesn’t help that the software is expected to handle stuff like randomly reordering the list of candidates and to support picking additional not straight ticket candidates individual after selecting straight ticket (as the Twitter voter did).
I agree someone discovering the bug elsewhere and maybe manipulating the bug to give a desired result is the more likely path of nefariousness.
Incidentally I really wish the straight party single checkbox option would be banned. I think it really skews down-ballot races in a negative way.
This. According to the Secretary of State’s explanation, what happens is that the machine starts displaying the new screen, but it’s delayed for some reason; and then before it finishes displaying, the user hits “Enter” or uses the selection wheel. The machine registers that as selecting the next candidate, who happens to be Cruz. It’s a bug; it should’ve been caught in testing; it wasn’t.
It doesn’t seem to match with the evidence that the selection you are most likely to be sure of is the top line contest. The “slow” loading screen has to be really slow, so slow that it already shows you Beto selected, then registers some input as a change, then goes on to the next screen without showing you your new selection.
Frankly, on a dedicated voting system, that seems slightly implausible.
Yeah, if you were going to tamper with a DRE (no paper trail to check against), you’d just tamper with the back-end totals.
Tampering with a VVPAT or an optical scan system (hand-marked ballots scanned when they go into the ballot box) depends on the auditing procedures. If nobody ever looks at the paper (some systems are badly-enough designed that checking paper vs electronic records is needlessly painful), then you tamper with the electronic totals. The more you’re worried about an audit catching your tampering, the more you need to make this look like an error instead of an attack, but that’s not so hard if you’re willing to settle for a small advantage. (Mess up the template so votes for the other party’s candidate for governor or senate tend to get more undervotes than your candidate.)
I don’t understand the driver is for electronic voting and that makes me suspicious. What was the problem that needed solving? The lever machines seem to me to be strictly superior to the electronic machines that are replacing them. Were they just too expensive to manufacture / maintain?
Dangling Chad. Seriously. That was a crisis that, depending on the degree of hysteria attendant on certain inconvenient truths, doomed the human race to extinction because we left the counting and interpretation of votes even partially to human beings rather than precise, dispassionate machines. Since it’s maybe still possible to avoid the Apocalypse, it was deemed necessary that we mandate all-electronic vote-counting and that was often easiest to do with all-electronic vote-recording
And the electronic vote-tabulating systems mostly replaced paper ballots of various sorts, not “lever machines”. Those were I believe only ever used in a minority of states and were mostly retired by the 1990s, before all-electronic systems and with paper ballots (chad optional) as the interim technology. I think only New York went directly from mechanical lever machines to electronic voting machines.
The mechanical machines were heavy, cumbersome to move into and out of polling places that were used for other purposes most of the year, difficult to maintain, tedious to “reprogram” for each new election whether legitimately or by nefarious hacking, and strictly superior to electronic voting machines in roughly the same way a mechanical calculator is superior to an electronic one.
Yes, HAVA (the Help America Vote Act) drove the adoption of all electronic voting machines, but not as a replacement of optical scan ballots. Optical scan machines were fine under HAVA.
It’s imortant to remember that the adoption of punch ballot counters was driven by the increasing need to actually be able to count ballots in a reasonable time frame, especially a problem when you may have 40 or more separate contests in a single election. My recollection is that the manufacturers of these systems stated that their intended use was as a way of establishing whether a hand count was necessary. They weren’t certified to be accurate to determine the result of a close election (but hand counting them is obviously also an issue).
In the state I worked in, hand recounts of optical scanned ballots could be (I assume still can be) requested by a candidate if the totals fell within a defined margin, that I think was 0.5%. Non-document electronic machines are not hand re-counted, but I think their internal logs are re-processed.
Lever machines have many of the issues that other non-document systems have, but aren’t subject to easily replicable tampering in the same way software based solutions do.
Right, optical scan ballots and all-electronic voting machines were both competing technologies to replace (mostly) punched-card ballots.
They both have their issues, but the one most commonly attributed to the all-electronic system – the one where an adversary can send agents into the field to individually hack each voting machine in the field – is IMO the least significant.
@HBC
The lever machines produce a pinched ballot that can be counted. It isn’t totally reliant on an internal counter. And I don’t think counting speed is a serious concern. People may want to know within three hours of the polls closing but they have zero need to know that quickly. Inauguration is at least weeks away and often months.
@Brad:
I was unaware of that, thank you.
As to speed of counting, I think you are discounting the problems that come with a vacuum of knowledge. Absent relatively quick ballot counting, exit polls will be seen as the de facto results. This leads to some pretty severe consequences if ballot counts don’t line up with the exit polls. The confidence of the electorate in the validity of the results will fall, and quite a bit more than they have already, I believe.
I’d love a public hand count, like they are able to do, IIRC, in the U.K., but I just don’t think it’s possible in our system with the population totals we are dealing with.
@HBC
I don’t think the population is the issue – in the UK the tallies are made locally by volunteers and party representatives then the result called in – that process can scale just fine. The problem is the number of positions being voted for.
In the UK I think I recall one election where I had two ballot papers – one for my MP and another for my local counselor. In the US, even if we limit elected offices to ones important enough that they shouldn’t be appointed by an executive (as mentioned upthread there are a lot of those!), every two years will at least require the election of a Representative, plus one or more of [Senator, President], plus State-level one or more of [Senator, Representative, Governor]. That’s 3-6 important races, and before we get to ballot propositions and local elections.
If confidence in voting starts to wain, it might be a good idea to do a hand count or statistical count of the most important race (Senator or President), which could serve to affirm that the less-important races were probably not interfered with.
@dodrian:
I mentioned the UK system in a different comment. That’s why I specified “in our system”, as a means of distinguishing from “one vote, Party only” voting systems.
The dramatic benefit of an electronic calculator over a mechanical one isn’t the size or weight it’s that it enables entirely new workflows like, say, division not to mention graphing arbitrary functions and doing symbolic algebra. Whereas no one wants or needs entirely new workflows from voting machines, just the same exact things we have always wanted from them.
A major driver for electronic voting machines is accessibility. With old-style voting machines, a blind voter had to ask someone to help him vote; with a modern touchscreen system plus a headphone jack, he can vote by himself. That matters a lot to a fair number of blind voters.
As I mentioned, having alternate voting methods for specific special needs is a valid reason to have these machines available. It does not seem to me to be a good reason to make the vast majority of votes follow this path…
Yeah, I think this is pretty common–you have a polling place with one accessible voting machine plus PCOS for everyone else. I know some people have build ballot-marking devices, too–you get the touch-screen interface (with a headphone jack, language selection, screen magnification, etc.), and then the computer fills in your optical-scan ballot.
David Graeber has a satisfying section in the introductions to one of his books (more than one, I think*) comparing voting machines to ATMs. All sorts of brands and form-factors of ATMs and varieties of ATM software — when was the last time you personally witnessed or even heard of one spitting out anything other than the selected amount? And part of that design involves dealing with individual pieces of paper!
Other than the verification aspect, is voting really that much harder a problem? Why can’t we manage to move it out of the crap-designed-by-cranks column?
* Since he got a faculty job he has had to piss on some of his older writing to make it smell more academic and publish it in “respectable” form.
How buggy a piece of software is, is only very loosely correlated with how hard the problem it’s solving is. And ATMs get a lot more hands and eyes on them. If the average person votes every two years (probably an overestimate), and is 100% likely to use voting machine when they vote (definitely an overestimate), and gets cash out of the ATM once a week (no idea, but probably in the right ballpark), then that means their ATM’s getting about a hundred times as much exercise as their voting machine is. The number of voting machine vs. ATM designs probably isn’t anywhere near that divergent.
It’s also likely that the ATM is getting stricter scrutiny during development, for both legal reasons (more regulation of financial software) and practical ones (the bank cares more, and it’s less vulnerable to the principal-agent issues that often arise with government contractors), but that’s an issue that could theoretically be fixed. This can’t.
Stricter scrutiny could also lead to fewer players, which would arguably make the malfeasance problem a bit worse, but could dramatically improve the eyes and hands ratio. This was part of Graeber’s point, that you can slap some half-baked bits on top of Windows and sell that as a voting machine, but you can’t make an ATM that way. Our voting machines say “We don’t take this even remotely seriously.”
Diebold (who makes ATMs) was also in the voting machine business until (I think) 2009 or so.
One problem here is ballot secrecy. An ATM is supposed to log every transaction, so if someone hacks the machine/duplicates my card and PIN and pulls money from my account, that shows up on my bank statement, and I can complain and get my money back. With a voting machine, once I’ve cast my ballot, the machine might do *anything* with that ballot, and there is no way for me or anyone else to know what happened. If tomorrow you go vote on a touchscreen machine with no paper trail, and then it changes all your votes to the opposite party in its electronic records, how would you tell?
There are clever ways to get around this problem, but they’re not widely used anywhere that I know of[1]. The best widely-used voting technology in the US is precinct-count optical scan–hand-marked paper ballots that get counted electronically at the polling place. To keep that system honest, you need to recount a random sample of the ballot boxes and compare them to the electronic totals from the corresponding scanner.
[1] The best schemes I know of give the voter a receipt when he casts his vote. The receipt doesn’t let him prove to anyone how he votes, but he can check a public bulletin board for a copy of his receipt, and it proves to *him* that his vote was counted correctly.
A lot of these schemes get into fairly gnarly crypto pretty quickly. If you want to understand the idea of what people are working on, ThreeBallot is a nice place to start. That scheme has some flaws, but it’s very easy to get your head around, and it is trying to accomplish the same goals as other end-to-end voting systems built on crypto that may be hard to understand without having a bit of background in the area.
I don’t think this is true (or even possible.) Unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by this.
If I can check the receipt for accurately counting my intended votes, I can do it with someone else watching.
It’s surprising that this can work, but it really does. A good first cut is ThreeBallot or VAV.
A sketch of ThreeBallot: (But read the paper I linked–it’s not super complicated!)
For simplicity, assume we have one two-choice race: you either vote for Alice or Bob. Also, each ballot has a unique serial number.
Each voter gets three ballots. If she wants to cast a vote for Bob, she marks two ballots for Bob and one for Alice. If she wants to vote for Alice, she marks two for Alice and one for Bob. When she’s ready to cast his ballots, she gets to make a copy of one of them–whichever one she likes. The rest of the system has no idea which one she copied. She casts all three ballots, and they’re only accepted if they follow the rules (two votes for one candidate, one for the other). Once she has cast her votes correctly, she’s given the copy of one of her ballots.
The voting system posts all the ballots to a public bulletin board. The winner of the election is just done by counting what’s on the bulletin board.
A voter can check that her ballot was included in the total by checking that her copy of one of her ballots was included on the bulletin board. If the voting system changed her ballot or omitted it, then she will have a receipt that doesn’t agree with the stuff on the bulletin board, and she will know something bad has happened. Since the voting system doesn’t know which ballot she copied, it can alter or replace a ballot with 2/3 probability of success–with probability 1/3, she will catch the tampering. (Ballot-box stuffing is a different attack, and has to be dealt with by checking the number of voters against the number of ballots.)
Now, imagine I’m trying to pay the voter to vote for Alice. Or maybe I’m telling her she’s fired unless she votes for Alice. She can always vote for Bob, but come back to me with a receipt marked for Alice.
This scheme isn’t perfect–there are clever and somewhat subtle ways to enforce a vote-buying contract. But it’s pretty easy to understand.
There are better schemes which are higher security, but they’re usually harder to understand. So understanding ThreeBallot is probably the right way to start.
All these schemes have this step where the voter interacts with the voting system in such a way that:
a. She walks away with a receipt.
b. The receipt is convincing to her, given her knowledge of what happened in the voting booth in what order, that it incorporates her choice.
c. The receipt can’t be used to prove how she voted to anyone else, at least not without some kind of massive subversion of the whole election system.
Then, there’s a later stage where those receipts are posted to a public bulletin board and everyone can look at them. (Nowadays, you’d probably incorporate the hash of the bulletin board into a Bitcoin transaction to make it really unchangeable.) And there is a vote counting process that uses what’s published on the bulletin board to determine the election outcome in public. [ETA] The voter can check that her receipt is included on the bulletin board, and if it’s not included or not correct, she has evidence of fraud she can show to the world.
@albatross11
I’m not sure the solution to this problem is to make voting wildly overcomplicated, it would certainly introduce new problems and kind of eliminates the benefits of electronic voting to begin with.
Well, the existing schemes are actually moderately complicated, too, its just that most people don’t pay a lot of attention to it. (By contrast, some alternative voting methods–ranked choice voting, say–are actually quite complex for the voters.) All-electronic voting machines rely for their security and privacy on the reliability of their software, and it’s not like many voters have any idea how to evaluate that. (And securing software against an adversary who may be one of your programmers is really hard to do. Getting software without critical security bugs is very hard even when nobody but Murphy and human error is against you.)
In the end-to-end schemes, the voter’s actions are pretty simple–vote, and then check the bulletin board for their receipt. The mechanisms that protect the votes from tampering are more complex, and it’s not at all easy to explain them to nontechnical people.
@albatross11
I mean over-complicated for the voter (who doesn’t actually care or need to know about the complicated security involved). I was mostly saying “that seems so highly impractical as to be useless” but I said that before reading the abstract (where they admit this is much more academic than practical) and skimming the paper so my post was maybe unnecessary (for those who followed the link).
On the other hand, as a developer I am quite familiar with bugs, both security related and otherwise 😉
So, at most they can know that one of their ballots was counted, and in this case the ballot for the person they did not want to cast a vote for, yes? It seems they have literally no idea whether there vote ended up with a net vote increase for the person they wanted to vote for…
Maybe I should read the paper, but the end results of this seems strictly worse than what we have now (in terms of voter confidence)?
This will relatively disenfranchise the sort of people who can’t or don’t read directions and think they are showing maximal support by casting all three ballots for their preferred candidate. And trying to explain that these people have nominated themselves for the short end of a tradeoff, is the kind of thing liable to get the politically clever a bit shortened themselves.
There seem to be two different issues here. One is how to prevent vote buying, the other is how to make sure the count of votes is accurate.
Preventing vote buying at a technical level is a lost cause at this point, because absentee voting is common. If I want to pay you to vote for my candidate, all I have to do is look at your ballot before it is mailed. It’s still possible to try to catch people who are offering to buy votes, but that’s not what fancy voting schemes are doing.
To prevent miscounting, ideally without letting third parties know how I voted unless I want to let them, all you need do is have a random long number associated with each ballot, give the voter his number, and post all of the ballots by number not by name.
That still has the problem of fake accusations of fraud. A supporter of candidate X deliberately votes for Y then claims he voted for X. To prevent that you need to provide the voter with a digitally signed copy of his own ballot that he can use to prove how he voted if necessary.
It’s fairly easy to do it in principle; this sort of thing is well-trodden ground in crypto. A simple approach would be to make the exact encoding of the ballot public, then choose a hash function, make that public too, and publicize a hash of the ballot and a secret credential that’s unique to each voter. Then they can go home and verify that their votes hash to the public value, without those votes being derivable from public information.
Distributing those credentials is the hard part. If the US had a national ID card, you could use a private key on that, but we don’t. SSNs aren’t secret enough or high-entropy enough to work. Biometrics aren’t consistent enough between scans to use as cryptographic keys, and storing templates centrally would defeat the whole purpose. One solution might be to send a token to each voter with their voter guide for the year.
Another issue is that the math is pretty hairy. This system is good enough to make the results auditable, which might be all we need, but if you wanted to make votes verifiable to your average voter, then you have a harder problem. It’s more an interface problem than a mathematical one, though.
HeelBearCub:
The voting system, and thus the attacker, don’t know which ballot the voter copied. So if they want to tamper with your vote, they’ve got a 1/3 chance of tampering with a ballot for which you have a receipt, and thus being detected. To change a very close statewide election, they might need to change 100,000 votes. If everyone checks their receipts, that means >30,000 people complaining that their receipts don’t appear on the bulletin board or are wrong somehow. Even if only one person in ten checks, you’ve got 3,000 people complaining, with some physical evidence, that their votes were changed.
Current voting systems have no way to check statistically whether your vote was included in the final tally.
A DRE system (computer voting machine with no paper) asks for your vote, says thank-you, and then reports some numbers to the central tally. There’s nothing keeping that system from changing your vote, and no way you could find out if that had happened.
A precinct-count optical scan system has you hand-mark a ballot and scan it at the polling place, and they keep the ballot. Once you leave the polling place, you also can’t verify that your vote has been included in the final total. An attacker might change the electronic totals and arrange for any auditing of paper ballots not to check that ballot box, or they might tamper with both the electronic totals and the contents of the ballot box. There is no way for you to find out this has happened. (Though in the paper case, the attack requires a lot of people and is hard to get away with if the other party is paying attention.)
ThreeBallot is more of a thought experiment than a real system, and has some security problems, but it demonstrates that it’s possible to do a lot better than current systems in terms of making it hard for corrupt people running your elections to get away with cooking the results.
Probably the most well-developed end-to-end voting system I’ve seen described is Scantegrity, which has been used in some local elections. (But I haven’t been keeping up with this area of crypto for the last few years, so maybe there’s something way better out there.)
David:
Yeah, if you don’t care about ballot secrecy, the problem is a lot easier to solve. It’s somewhat similar to the difference between building an electronic payment system with vs without anonymity.
@albatross11:
I see what you are saying, it makes it more statistically unlikely that ballot tabulation fraud can swing an election. However, I think that’s a good deal weaker than proving to the individual voter that their vote was tabulated correctly (while keeping it secret from 3rd parties).
@Nornagest:
Yes, I agree there are ways to allow a voter to check their tally while choosing to keep it secret. What I was objecting to was the claim that you could do this while also guaranteeing that a 3rd party could not know the information. Indeed, in the scheme mentioned, if you wish to keep the information secret from the the 3rd party, you also lose the ability to check that the vote that you wished to cast was recorded, nor do you ever know that your net vote total was recorded accurately.
“Ballot secrecy” is two different issues. One is my ability to conceal how I voted if I want to. The other is my ability to reveal how I voted if I want to.
Mail in ballots mean that I can reveal how I voted if I want to by showing someone my ballot before I mail it. But it doesn’t let anyone discover how I voted without my assistance.
Most of the time, the thing people are worried about wrt ballot secrecy is vote buying or vote coercion. If you publish every ballot with the name of the voter, then both are easy, along with more subtle social pressure to vote the way your friends vote. If you publish every ballot in some scrambled order, but don’t link them to the voters, then it’s still pretty easy to sell/coerce votes when the ballot has a reasonable number of questions on it (I tell you to vote Smith for governor and then give you a precise unlikely list of how to vote on the remaining questions, and then look for that sequence of votes in the published ballots.) But at least the social pressure from boss, coworkers, family, and friends doesn’t work anymore, because nobody can tell who you voted for.
Nornagest:
Just a nitpick, but the scheme you described doesn’t work for resisting vote buying attacks. If I give you my secret credential, I can prove to you I voted the right way. Even if I just verify my own vote in your presence using the secret credential, I can prove it to you.
Here’s a notion: paper ballots (however generated) are carried away from the voting place while being video monitored. They are posted on walls, still video monitored, and anyone can count the votes on the walls.
A hard part would be making sure the paper ballots have their order randomized (while being monitored) is some way which makes it impossible to connect a ballot to a particular person.
How often does an ATM need to reformat its options and menus? Basically never. A voting machine needs to be reconfigured for every election, i.e. multiple times a year, and only gets a few days of live-fire testing for each of those reconfigurations. EDIT: and it’s even worse than that since each municipality has a unique configuration.
Code designed to allow reconfiguration by end users is going to be a lot more prone to bugs.
On top of that banks own all the info that gets punched into the ATM. There aren’t partisans at each other’s throats over how and how long the data gets retained, or over its distribution. So I’m guessing banks can more efficiently and effectively audit their transaction history and catch any errors.
The difference is in how much hot water the people involved get in if the ATM puts out the wrong amount of money. If the amount is too low, loud complaints will come immediately. If it’s too high, it will take a while, but those loud complaints will come eventually. Either way, heads will roll at the bank somewhere, and probably at the company that made the ATM. Most votes don’t matter, so counting them wrong (unless the error is on a huge scale) is quite likely to ever be notice, and if it is, the people who bought and installed the machines almost certainly won’t suffer for it.
In sum, incentives matter. From a purely technical perspective, an electronic voting system every bit as good as the banking system could exist, but none ever will.
Hmmm.
It occurs to me that there are private elections of significant consequence that do exist in society. Namely, elections for board of directors members at major corporations.
Now granted, the overwhelming majority of such elections are uncontested. But some are contested quite fiercely and with a whole lot at stake. How do they count/secure votes? Is it significantly different than the process governments use?
Shareholders send in sworn proxy statements to some lawyers and they are counted up. As a practical matter it’d be really hard to commit fraud because there are typically less than 100 entities whose votes matter and they tend to announce public positions.
There’s probably a better target than ATMs.
Easier to hit the backend, or hack/phis (phise?) users. Doesn’t require a physical presence like an atm does.
But for manipulating elections, there are not as many options. (though there is plenty of attack surface to go round: central vote totalling, dissemination of data to voting machines etc.)
An ATM shorted me by $200 once. Fortunately, there was evidence in the records, and I got a refund. I think it took a couple of weeks.
There’s an episode of Frasier where an ATM gives Marty extra money by mistake, and he keeps trying to get it corrected.
Looks like a false flag operation to me, probably by Russian agents in the Ukrainian outsourcing firm the software was written by; apparently Ukrainian software developers have gotten cheaper than Indian or Pakistani developers for outsourcing purposes, among other East European nations.
If this were intentional tampering with the election results, it’d be a lot less obvious.
Probably a typical bug. There’s a <1% chance that this is intentionally planted and meant to look like a bug, in order to sow maximum discord and distrust in the electoral system. Hail Eris.
I think XKCD tackled how to handle electronic/software based voting the best (at least for the next decade or so):
https://xkcd.com/2030/
When it starts changing from “straight democrat” to “bent paperclip” that’s when you know to worry.
If it were possible for any random hacker to do this, the odds would be >>1% for both Republican-aligned hackers trying to do it “right” and Democrat-aligned hackers trying to do it just badly enough that it would be caught and blamed on Republicans. But because of the obvious “chance the electronic cash dispenser to dispense free cash whenever I use the backdoor code” threat, people who develop this sort of systems have developed pretty good defenses that limit the real threat to a handful of insiders and a short list of Advanced Persistent Threats. At that point, the odds for the “Republican operative” threat go to 1% or less.
The most likely explanation is poor UI design with no actual malice.
And the odds of this being an innocent, independent question on your part, I’m estimating at maybe 10%.
As someone in the software field, my most likely guesses would be:
1) Stupid user error. Pressed the wrong “select all” button, didn’t notice until the end.
2) Odd hardware/software behavior. Eg. pressed the right physical part of the screen but the touch registered elsewhere. This happens on my cellphone a fair bit if my hands are cold/wet/whatever.
3) Bug, not otherwise specified. Eg. you press one of the buttons 256 times an overflow error causes an unexpected state transition.
If done intentionally (low probability):
1) Bug designed to “shake up” specified states in certain areas went from one state to another that happened to be noticeable. If you can selectively cause votes to be randomly-distributed in precincts in which your opponents predominantly live you can change the outcome of the election without having to do something which is obviously supporting your side.
2) Bug designed to switch from straight (D) to straight (R). If done only rarely, it has the advantage of looking like a user error.
In either case, why show the outcome to the voter instead of simply showing one result and counting another? If there are paper ballots issued/deposited it allows for the recount to be identical.
Am I the only one disgusted that a “straight ticket” shortcut exists at all?
Frankly, I think we would probably be better off if we had a strictly party based system. That is by and large how things actually shake out anyway, and it results in a much greater alignment of voter intent to policy outcome. The choice on the voter end is very simply, cast a single vote for your desired party. The idea of the “independent” political statesman is something of a fiction.
It’s also how a great deal of the rest of the world does it and I believe ballots frequently can be counted by hand within the precincts on election night with representatives of all parties as observers.
But, all that said, we aren’t getting that system in the US any time soon.
Hmm, it might be better than the current state but still far from ideal. The more entrenched parties are the more the platform is a tool to serve the organization* than the reverse.
The biggest issue, IMHO, is lack of choice. Two-party systems almost inevitably devolve to the proverbial Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich. It shoves any real influence from the base into the primaries, which, being private organizations, are open to all sorts of undemocratic fuckery (ranging from needing the local party boss’s approval to get on the primary ballot all the way up to superdelegates). Reducing your ballot to straight-tickets-only removes what meager choice is left. [hyperbole]If it were up to me the first step would be to get rid of primaries altogether.[/hyperbole]
If we can reliably get 6+ relevant parties running then maybe. But I’m still skeptical of measures that transfer power to unelected party bigwigs.
*Edit: I’m not referring to literally supporting laws (or things like the Presidential Debate Committee that I could call “para-laws” and probably be technically wrong but hope y’all know what I mean) that benefit the party at the expense of the voters, though that does happen. I mean how you get nonsense coalitions like Big Business + Evangelicals because the Party figures out it can carefully mold its platform to appeal to both, or at least piss them off less than the other Party, rather than the platform deriving from any sort of coherent philosophy.
How does Bernie Sanders fit into this theory? Or Joe Lieberman?
@Gobbobobble:
I think you will find that representative parliamentary systems have their own issues, which is that the overall machinery is particularly beholden to the fringe elements when a major party can’t easily form a majority coalition. Perhaps this is your desire, but it tends not to be the desire of 95% of the population. The general trend is still towards two fairly large parties, with long periods of fractious nothing and frequent called elections when neither is particularly dominant.
What you don’t get is amorphous ever changing coalitions that let these 60% of people who agree on policy X and those other 60% set of people who want policy Y both getting their preferred policies. At the end of the day, their is only one head to the executive branch, which tends to mean either solidarity in coalition, or breakup.
And if the G Party has 10% of the vote, it may mean you feel that you are represented, but in the end you tend to still get what you would get out of a coalition that formed before the election, where a party platform and particular policy positions are hammered out as compromises.
But, YMMV and I don’t think FPTP Presidential elections are in any intrinsically better. I just think politics will always be messy and frustrating.
Man, check out what’s been going on in New Mexico, where former Republican Governor and former Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson is running for Senate as a libertarian, started gaining some pretty good traction in the polls, and then New Mexico immediately re-introduced straight party line voting, which they had eliminated a few years prior.
But no, it’s “Russian” interference that we need to be worried about…
It probably cuts down on wait times, particularly if the ballot is rather long. There’s a trade-off against the button vs. funding more polling stations.
I agree with you in principle, but while I took the time to decide who I wanted to vote for as Senator, Representative, and Governor, and at least checked to make sure there weren’t any crazies running for the other big positions (Lt Governor, Railroad Commissioner, Ag Commissioner, etc), by the time I’m voting for the n-teenth judicial appointment I honestly have no idea who these people are and don’t really care – it’s going to the party that I think is more likely to represent my interests.
At least at the local level this time everyone was running uncontested – they tend to sort things out during the primaries.
Well I also think voting for judges at all is ridiculous. The various Commissioners too, why the hell is railroads something we have campaigns for? Just appoint people.
This arguably shakes out to a straight ticket depending on when appointments get updated, but it’s still saner. I suppose the commissions could be used for patronage but it’s not meaningfully different when they’re running under a Party.
So, why I did I make this post?
– I happen to think that electronic voting machines are really bad, on many levels, although not because I think they are particularly prone to being hacked or tampered with. If hacking of a machine occurs, it is far more likely to come from “inside” and optical scanners (my preferred method) are just as vulnerable to this, at least initially, as purely electronic machines. Strictly electronic voting is more hackable by outside actors, as voters get to interact with the machines more directly, but it is less vulnerable to this because the tabulation is more diffuse.
My objections mostly lie along two axes: one being that they increase overall election expense (as buying (and programming) many election machines per precinct is costly) and on net make wait times in highly populated precincts quite long, especially if budget has constrained the number of machines in the precinct.
The second is perhaps more pernicious, in that they reduce confidence in voting results. Once a vote has been cast, they are essentially unauditable with regards to the voter intent. This is a poor situation and will lead partisans on either side to suspect those on the other if they are in charge of the voting machinery. Given that they also reduce the availability of the franchise via point one, this is untenable. Having some electronic machines available for special needs voters is not objectionable, but this is not the same as having all or the vast majority of machines be electronic only.
As a point of reference, I worked for a Board of Election creating and maintaining a statewide voter registration system for 5 years. I am not unfamiliar with the territory (albeit in only one state).
– It also served as a very small scale test of the proposition that asking people to take the contrarian side and argue for a highly unlikely event will naturally lead people to argue for it in ways that the would not otherwise. There were very few attempts to argue for the ways in which someone could do these things, no quoting of sources about how vulnerable the machines are to external manipulation, no real contemplation of the idea that a lone election’s employee might undertake to make it possible or likely to vote incorrectly for a Republican candidate, no searching for conspiracy minded theories on the left, etc.
What we got instead was a fisking of the idea that this was intentional, divergence into arcane voting constructs and the perennial favorite meta debate about what is fair in the waging of culture war. In other words SSC proceeded to talk about what are among the favorite things SSC talks about, much as it likes to talk about how people on the left are particularly prone to making up fake stories (but aren’t interested at all in the converse).
Or perhaps it’s because I brought it up, no one wanted to give me satisfaction and forward an argument that would help “my” side. Although, you would think that given that the parallels to the previous were obvious, you could have proven me “wrong” and thus this would have been an incentive to argue for the intentional hacking.
Regardless, it seems to me that there just isn’t all that much reckoning with the idea of motivated reasoning and biasing of priors, at least not for the in-group.
Why not? They are.
1% or less is rather large range.
The excitement over the big lottery has gotten me thinking a fair bit recently about how terrible we humans are at distinguishing low probability events. Introspecting I think I have an intuitive feel for odds down to about in 1 in 10. But beyond that things just get mentally bucketed into a giant “unlikely” category.
It seems to me that colleges’ policy of legacy preference generally hands an advantage to those who are already amply advantaged. I mean, if daddy went to Stanford, your family is probably doing pretty well, and they’re had ample means to give you a good start in life.
I’m thinking it might be useful for the government to ban legacy preferences because they are detrimental to social mobility (and meritocracy, really.) Is there some second-order negative effect of doing this that I’m missing?
Here is my argument FOR legacy preferences (I went to a selective college, neither of my parents graduated from college.)
One centrally-important thing a good college offers is a network–not just your classmates, but graduates from 20 years ago who can talk to you, parents of classmates, and so on. For that network-building function to work well, people need to have the college as a significant piece of their identity. Legacies are especially-likely to have the college as a significant part of their identity, and so are their parents or other relatives. This provides a significant advantage to the students who need the college to provide them a network that is already built, because the networks they have are not the ones they need. The legacy students already have valuable networks in general; having a significant number of them make the college network much more valuable to the non-legacy students.
To look at it from another perspective, if your father went to Stanford, and you will go to some school that’s roughly as good as Stanford, you will have your father’s network to draw on; if you go to Stanford, though, your classmates ALSO get your father’s network, while they won’t get as much of it if you go to Columbia.
In general, though, I’d like to see a heavy tax on endowments that aren’t being spent (targeting a 50-year life for an endowment that is not getting new donations) and then let colleges use whatever admission criteria they think good.
The idea of network is probably a good one, but I’m not sure legacy gets you that right off. Does being a “Penobscot man” really get you access to any other Penobscot graduate’s network? I suppose for the very rich it may, but it seems more of a holdover from a certain aristocratic notion of higher status. I don’t know that it sustains simply under the notion of legacy admissions.
My guess–and it’s a guess–is that “being a Penobscot man” opens doors most effectively with other people who strongly identify as “Penobscot men”–and the the parents of legacies are disproportionately likely to be in that category.
What’s this Penobscot you are referring to, Sam? There is a bunch of things named Penobscot, but none of them seem relevant. I was expecting a prep school or something.
I referred to “Penobscot” as a fictional well-heeled college for the elite in the phrase “Penobscot man”. It’s a stand in for something like “Harvard man”.
The evocation leans on the trope that the Northeast is/was the home of the elite old money who looked down on the rest of the country.
I’m not sure how much “the network helps the students” plays into it. What almost certainly does play into it is that multigenerational alumni families are more likely to be donors. And probably would start taking their donations elsewhere if their latest progeny gets rejected.
Well in a practical sense, sucking up to large donors is absolutely why legacy admissions exist.
Although in a societal sense, I personally think we’d all be a lot better off if donations to large, already well-endowed universities were reduced by a couple orders of magnitude and shifted to more urgent causes.
I suppose there’s a conservative argument to be made that the US elite universities are really very good as places of scholarship, whatever their other flaws. And we should be wary of messing with what is working. Something like 18 of the top 20 universities are in the US.
@johan_larson
Actually 11 by my count. I’m not sure that the US has particularly many elite universities in proportion to its population (compared to other developed countries).
If you go by that list, the UK (66MM people, 16 of the top 100 including 3 of the top 10), Singapore, and Switzerland punch well above their weight and Germany is a big disappointment (82MM people, 3 of the top 100 all in the 60s).
The US looks lower top. It would need 78 of the top 100 spots to match the UK’s ratio, but to match Germany’s it would only need 12. It has 31, including 5 of the top 10.
There are other rankings. This one has the US at 16/20:
https://cwur.org/2018-19.php
This one has the US at 15/20:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats
And this one is 17/20:
https://thebestschools.org/rankings/best-universities-world-today/
It seems to me the US is clearly in the lead over the rest of the first world in creating tip-top universities. Going by population, a list like that should have a roughly even mix of US and EU schools, a smattering of Asian institutions (mostly Japanese), and the odd entry from elsewhere. But instead they have mostly US schools, a handful from the EU, and the odd entry from elsewhere.
Having looked into the issue slightly more, it appears that Germany is possibly underestimated by these rankings because a lot of research there is done in separate institutes rather than universities. They might also favour Anglosphere universities in other ways, for instance by overvaluing larger universities because they don’t do per capita adjustment.
State schools pretty much don’t do legacies (AFAIK).
The second order negative effect on private schools probably involves funding streams, although the more popular state schools tend to have large endowments anyway.
Then there is the idea of tradition and culture, of which legacy admissions are certainly a part. Whether that tradition is a net good could be argued.
Back when U of Michigan had an explicit point system, I’m pretty sure there were bonus points for having a parent or grandparent who had attended U of M. But they are unusually selective and are unusually well-endowed for a state school, so that might be a factor.
I can see the Ivy League deciding to stop taking federal funding entirely. Harvard has $37 billion, so they can manage.
I don’t know how incentives might change. But right now, Harvard has a strong incentive to admit smart kids, because it makes the rich kids look smarter. Don’t let Harvard admit so many rich kids, and it changes the incentive to admit the smart kids.
I’m not sure how this plays out in the undergrad world, but in business schools, the perceived “quality” of your school correlates almost 100% with the outcomes your students achieve (primarily measured by job placement rates, average starting salary, and longer term variables like “number of alumni who are now CEOs”)
To the extent that real life outcomes largely favor the rich and well connected (and who is going to deny that they do?) the school therefore has every motivation to attract and admit the rich and well connected. And, as you imply, this will benefit the non-rich (but smart) students as well, as they will be exposed and have the opportunity to network and socialize with the rich and well connected (and might be mistaken for them themselves).
Admitting the rich, connected kids is good for the smart kids who get in, and vice versa.
The genius from a poor immigrant family gets access to connections and wealth, and the rich kids get to meet the most talented people around.
Absolutely. I’m always struck by how much more hostile attention and opposition affirmative action on racial grounds (which I’m also tentatively against, but seems much less unambiguously inexcusable) generates compared to legacy admissions.
I suspect that the reason they persist is that they’re a good way of encouraging alumni to donate, but I don’t think that excuses them.
I think for various cultural reasons, people grudgingly accept that sometimes they will be treated unfairly as opposed to richer people from a higher social class with more connections. We accept that one of the benefits to being a highly connected CEO is that you can pull strings to get your son admitted to Harvard, even if he wouldn’t otherwise qualify. (And, notably, that’s part of the reason we want to become a CEO ourselves, we would fully expect to utilize those benefits personally if only we had them).
Affirmative action turns this completely around. Suddenly, people are being told that they have to be treated unfairly as opposed to significantly lower-status people. It’s one thing for your son to lose his spot to the heir of an oil tycoon (a tradition of the aristocracy pushing the little guy around that humanity has been dealing with since before the Pyramids). It’s a completely different thing for your son to lose his spot to a poor kid from the ghetto whose only parent is a single mom that drives the city bus. There’s no dignity in that, and it turns every human instinct of power and status completely on its head.
Some people, of course, see that as a good thing. Some might even venture to declare that’s the entire point of affirmative action. But you can’t expect the victims of it to be happy about it.
Also, not infrequently, I think the beneficiaries of the affirmative action Harvard admission are children of wealthy American or foreign black parents. Your example is the best case (in terms of making some moral argument for affirmative action).
I would also suggest that a part of it is surely recency bias.
Why are so many people right now outraged that Trump is placing new tariffs on steel, when existing tariffs on sugar are also bad for the exact same economic reasons?
Because one is something that happened/is happening right now, and another is something that happened before many of us were even born, (and that notably managed to not destroy society or make it prohibitively expensive for Americans to eat sugar.)
Bias in favor of the powerful has existed literally forever. Bias in favor of the officially designated victim classes (which, by sheer coincidence im sure, happens to include groups that are all politically aligned with each other) is relatively new, was introduced recently by fiat, and can be just as easily undone without disaster (whereas, most attempts to undo the power advantages enjoyed by high status people tend to involve guillotines and mountains of skulls).
Tatterdemalion:
One part of that is probably that we spent several decades hammering home the idea that racial discrimination was wrong, and then decided that actually it’s virtuous when done on behalf of some races, but wicked when done on behalf of others.
Interestingly, right now, the Harvard AA battle seems to be basically the same principle, but in favor of both whites and blacks vs Asians. As I understand it, the practical implication of getting rid of the de facto discrimination against Asians, while keeping affirmative action for blacks, will be decreasing the number of whites on campus by quite a bit. Eliminating AA would get rid of most of the blacks on campus, and I think would slightly lower the number of whites–all those spots being taken by Asians.
As is discussed in a Slate article I referenced in an earlier OT, based on research by the Harvard Office of Institutional Research, the highest representation of Asians in the models they studied was 43%, for the model where only academics are considered. Considering other factors such as legacy, athletics, extracurriculars, and personal interviews all push down the portion of Asians admitted, while increasing the number of whites and modestly increasing the number of blacks. Model 3, including all these factors, has this distribution: Asians 25.99%, African-Americans 2.36%, Whites 50.63%.
Model 4, which adds demographics into the mix (AA, essentially) shifts the ground dramatically for African-Americans, to the detriment of both Asians and Whites: Asians 17.93%, African-Americans 11.12%, Whites 44.08%.
I’d like to see governments less involved with higher education, not more.
Yes, it’s obviously evil from a non-US perspective.
Can anyone link me to some sources (articles, experts talking, etc.) that provide sound, proven guidelines about how kids should comport themselves around strangers in order to be safe?
The conventional wisdom (e.g. contained in materials sent home from my kids’ school) seems to be to teach your kids not to talk to strangers and I’ve even seen advice to teach your kids to ignore them, but this strikes me as obviously bad advice. I figure the types of people who prey on kids probably look for kids who they think will likely stay quiet and freeze up. Teaching kids to basically do exactly that can’t be the right way to go.
But to make the case, I’d want some substantial research or experts backing me up. Are there any?
I think in general the chance that children become the victim of a crime perpetrated by a stranger are very low, and have been sinking for at least 30 years. The only reason why people are paranoid about strangers is that very very rarely a shocking crime happens that the media then obsesses about for months.
A much more substantial threat (and still it’s not that likely) is that a child is sexually abused by a person they know, like a relative, a priest, a teacher or a coach. We know this because there have been sexual abuse scandals that dwarf the victim counts of all American serial killers combined. Just think about the recent abuse scandal in the Catholic church that goes back decades. But don’t think that just because you’re not Catholic, this is not your problem. Abuse happens in all organizations whose members have power and an access to potential victims.
To protect your children from that, teach them a healthy gut feeling. If a person does not respect their boundaries, this person is not their friend. If they encounter such a person, they should tell their parents, or any other person they trust. See that they get good sex ed so shame can not be used against them. And if they have a bad feeling about a situation, they are right and should get out of it.
Yes, I agree with all that, and hopefully it becomes more widely understood and accepted. But it’s separate from the matter of how we teach our kids to act around strangers, which I think is a legitimate topic in its own right, and that’s what I’m asking about.
In many ways it should be the same as for people they know: be critical and check with their parents if they are unsure.
Teaching them that strangers are massive more dangerous than strangers creates excessive mistrust of strangers and excessive trust of people they know.
My impression is that stranger danger is massively overhyped. There’s nothing wrong with kids being willing to interact with strangers, as long as they know not to, say, get in a car with them or something. (And that kind of crime is extremely rare.) Teaching kids to be afraid of everyone and treat everyone like a potential predator seems like an amazingly bad way to raise your kids[1].
[1] I have three kids, and I’ve tried to raise them to not be afraid of strangers, while still recognizing that crime can happen.
I’ve always thought the key distinction here (for strangers) was who approaches who. If you’re lost in a crowd, approaching a random stranger and asking for help is a fairly safe action, because you are sampling a random population, the overwhelming majority of which are decent people who want to help you and not abduct you or whatever.
But if you’re in the park minding your own business and a stranger approaches you for something, it’s worth updating your priors and considering that this person wants something from you, and what they want is somewhat likely to not be in your own best interest. I think this is true for children as well as adults. If I’m walking down the street and someone tries to stop me and talk to me, it’s about 10x more likely they are asking for money or wanting to sell me something than it is that they’re asking for directions or something otherwise harmless.
*rofl* I like my neighbourhood better 😉
At least 50% of the time, what they want is directions, which cost me nothing. Next most common are compliments on the dog I’m walking. Beggars do exist, and folks wanting me to support their politics etc., but mostly in places like the entrances to grocery stores. And the most recent grocery store parking lot encounter I’ve had involved a perhaps overly chatty store employee, who wanted to collect my shopping cart once I finished unloading it into my car.
Of course I’m a middle aged adult, but I recall similar encounters in childhood – requests for directions, and at least once a disabled person needing assistance with something a non-disabled 10 year old could easily do.
Yeah, this is true of almost all victim-based crimes. There are a lot of people who are overly afraid of being robbed, mugged, etc. where the likelihood of it happening are incredibly small. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful, and avoid making yourself a target, but I know people (friends and family) that are basically consumed with these fears either for themselves and their children, and it doesn’t seem particularly healthy to live that way.
How would that substantial research look like?
Are you looking for interviews of unknown-kids-raping perpetrators about their strategies? Statistics on victims of stranger-danger and the circumstances of their victimization?
I’m kind of curious about the matter as well, but OTOH: The important thing to know is that stranger danger is low and getting lower. So, unless the advice is counterproductive, it probably doesn’t matter much either way. Given that, I think some general anti-bullying advice along the lines of don’t look like a victim + some general advice about boundaries + some specific advice like ‘don’t get into a stranger’s car, ever’ probably works almost as well as an optimal strategy and has the advantage of being applicable to a much wider range of cases.
I guess I’m mainly looking for links to trustworthy, possibly-well-known experts giving their views on this matter.
Yes, but how would they come by their views? People confidently asserting this or that are a dime a dozen, but their competence is likely illusionary. Initially, you were looking for ‘sound, proven guidelines’ and so I’m spinning that along, asking how those might come about. And the best I can come up with is identifying ‘predator behaviour’ or ‘victim behaviour’ from, well, actual predators and victims and then checking whether any of these are sufficiently specific that a general rule can be derived from them. (In some ways this is similar to breast cancer screening: For certain women the base rate is so low that even a very good test necessarily produces lots of false alarms.)
When we’re talking stranger danger, I think our database of ‘victim behaviour’ and ‘predator behaviour’ is necessarily limited, plus we know predators can adapt (e.g. spin the whole no-candy-from-strangers thing first as something they’d never offer, then a private joke, then a shared secret (but we’re no longer strangers, so it doesn’t count) when grooming their next victim) so I doubt there are any rules beyond the obvious that don’t produce lots of false alarms.
There could be some qualitative research, maybe?
(1) Our presidential election is happening today, with six candidates going for the job including the incumbent, Michael D. Higgins. Voting turnout so far has been very low, primarily because everyone expects Michael D. to get the nod and the selection of alternative candidates are not very appealing; three of them are businessmen whose most notorious accomplishment was being on the Irish version of Dragon’s Den, the two women are a Sinn Féin politician who is not unpopular but not particularly popular either and the other a member of our upper house (so misleadingly in American terms is a Senator, a much less powerful and prestigious position than the American office) who is well-regarded for her mental health work but – seemingly – is also considered too socially conservative.
So Miggedly for the second term seems the obvious outcome! Everyone (including myself) is fairly happy with him and while there are minor quibbles, no alternative candidate is really inspiring enough. The most interesting thing that happened in our campaign, unlike the American versions, is a genuinely awful ‘attack ad’ put out by one of the would-be presidents attacking Michael D. about the terrible scandal of his – dog grooming bills? Link to it here, I would recommend you view it to see how dreadful and aimless it is!
(2) We are also having a referendum (that’s how we make constitutional changes over here) on removing the word “blasphemous” from the Constitution in order to strike down the law making blasphemy a criminal offence. This one will probably pass as well, which I find ironic since we’ll remove the religious offence of blasphemy but are fast adding in the secular version of it under the guise of hate speech laws etc.
(3) Brexit is still stumbling onwards with no resolution in immediate view. Why the Irish border really does matter, from the point of view of the Northern Irish – you know, the people that are as British as Finchley, the ones Boris Johnston seems to think live the same way as if living in London – “there’s no border between Camden and Westminster” – which rather seems to give away the whole point of “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” if Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are the same thing as different postal codes in London, thus making the entire island one state. Thanks for your support on a United Ireland, BoJo!
These aren’t the Paddies down South being troublemakers, these are your fellow subjects of the Queen trying to explain why if the English don’t get their heads out of their arses, there will be trouble.
(4) And why the Border is a big deal, explained as the late Seamus Heaney would say – phrases make history here. The Good Friday Agreement was something unprecedented, something we never thought we would see. To be so cavalier about it now is appalling. A song explaining why it was so special:
Unfounded accusations of abusing the expenses system? Ha! You’ll never out-duckhouse us Brits.
And yeah, I’d hate to see the Irish Question re-opened.
So, the Ontario Cannabis Store is struggling to fill orders due to unexpected volume. They say they are working on it, 24/7.
https://twitter.com/ONCannabisStore/status/1054856978852429824
If that’s true, some dudes in small-town Ontario are picking, packing and shipping dope at four in the morning.
Hah, I’d love to be the fly on the wall that got to hear this conversation:
“Soo they’re aboot to legalize pwot fer recreational use.”
“Dont’cha think we oughta get our order-filling process* ready fer a huge influx of folks tryin’ ta buy pwot from us?”
“Nah, it probably won’t be too bad, eh.”
*rhymes with “no mess”
In fairness I could easily see even the sharpest retail analysts being off by a hefty factor when asked to estimate the first-month sales of a previously illegal product.
Hah, I know, I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek.
I’m sore-y boss, but it looks like our order system is down agayne…
Is this really what the Canadian accent sounds like to you vultures?
It’s what an imitation of imitation Bob and Doug McKenzie sounds like. It’s the same phenomenon that led to the Seth Meyers’ Boston Accent bit.
IME they’re good if the questions dive deeper into the points discussed in the lecture/debate/panel (henceforth, “lecture”), or explore the same topic from angles not covered in the lecture — provided they’re interesting questions, as you implied.
They are a useless waste of time when the lecture is on topic X but the lecturer/debater/panelist is also known for statements about topic(s) Y, and then the questions are about Y.
You are a member of an alien anthropological expedition, secretly studying the peculiarities of [old-school BSG voice] the life-form known as ‘Man’ [/old-school BSG voice]. The time has come to submit your final report. What do you think are particularly odd/noteworthy/interesting characteristics of humans, especially things they themselves don’t realize are unusual?
The speed of the changes they’re causing to their planetary ecosystem at the moment. I think it’s likely that most of the time most planets are changing much less rapidly most of the time.
Mostly harmless.
The fact that they have somehow missed the marsupial solution, continue to produce offspring far enough developed to survive outside the mother’s body. The triple constraint, female pelvis/infant head/infant development, means that their brains can never get much bigger than they now are. It follows that they are unlikely to ever become smart enough to join the galactic civilization as equal partners.
C-sections in lieu of vaginal births are becoming increasingly routine in some parts of the industrialized world. Perhaps those areas are inadvertently preparing a beachhead for a new cognitive elite.
I didn’t assume that the aliens had observed humanity that carefully. Perhaps also not that recently.
The C-section rate has actually been slightly decreasing recently, at least in the United States, with doctors hoping to bring it down even farther.
Their striking ability to live in harmony with other species. Areas of dense habitation are shared with mobile species, aerial and terrestrial, ranging in size from within an order of magnitude of their own down, and with immobile species some of which are more than order of magnitude larger than an individual human.
Their uniqueness in alone possessing, of all the creatures of earth, the ability to learn from the mistakes of others. And their striking disinclination to do so…..
Their stubborn adherence to antiquated political and moral ideas, as opposed to adopting the obviously superior ideas of the author in whose story I appear as an incredibly advanced alien.
Indeed, but there is hope: among their number are a few brilliant sparks, an ember that may be nurtured into a flame among the stars, made of hopeful young humans who share the authors politics.
There’s a nice subversion in Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, where uhznaf ner gur barf jub yrnearq gur yrffba nyernql, gur uneq jnl bs pbhefr.
And I was so looking forward to Erikson’s Rejoice, too…
With the recent turbulence in the market, I was inspired to go back and read the Lehman Brothers page on Wikipedia. By all indications, Lehman’s final and longtime CEO Richard Fuld is still extremely rich. Am I economically misguided for thinking that is perverse?
I’m not even saying he needs to go to prison, but shouldn’t he feel enough shame to give away his fortune?
I’m pretty sure that empathy is strongly selected against in the upper levels of any modern business, not to mention compassion or a sense of shame, and the financial industry is worse than many others. I wouldn’t go so far as saying that every CEO is a high functioning sociopath, but if I wanted to recruit subjects for a study of socipathy without severe impulse control issues, I’d certainly recruit from executive suites 🙁
You need people who can throw the fat man in front of the train to save five. Business leaders need to make hard decisions that cut sometimes tens of thousands of people, and affect the lives of hundreds of thousands. Otherwise the entire business may be in jeopardy and many more people could lose out.
In selecting for those people, you will inevitably get many others who are willing to not only make hard decisions for the benefit of the overall, but also make decisions for their personal benefit, or the benefit of shareholders/owners, or whatever. It’s exceedingly hard to get people in the first group without getting people in the second group.
A business wants people who will make decisions to benefit the shareholders (mainly by selecting leaders who want to benefit themselves (i.e. most people) and then trying to align the interests of the leaders with the interests of the shareholders), and that’s perfectly obvious and natural.
Yes, agreed. One common failure mode for “most people” who might be able to make those decisions is to hold off on making hard decisions. That is, decisions that require a significant amount of pain for other people. That’s the layoff situation you responded to.
I happen to think that this is one of the most common failure modes in huge corporations that seem to slowly sink. GM, Microsoft, Blackberry, a whole list of companies that sat on slowly degrading situations until new leadership came in and made some hard decisions. Those decisions saved the company, at the expense of many individuals who got the boot.
You need a certain type of person who is able to consistently make those decisions, and not let emotions block an otherwise good/needed decision. (There is an opposing failure mode of someone who slashes early and often for personal gain, but that’s a different conversation).
I would disagree. Understanding the motivations of others is critical to getting them to advance your agenda, and thus getting ahead. Some sociopaths can figure it out without having feelings themselves, but most cant, and they’ll be outmaneuvered by the people who can build those connections.
I don’t think selection is relevant, I think very few people would voluntarily give away their fortune in his situation because their company went bankrupt. Some people would give away a significant part of their fortune if they were rich, and many wouldn’t because they normally follow their interests, but the latter category wouldn’t even if their company went bankrupt (because, again, they follow their interests).
More generally, why do you think that empathy is strongly selected against in business leadership?
Strongly agree with the first point. It reminds me of the hypocritical complaints about how rich people use loopholes to evade taxes, usually describing them as morally corrupt, when the reality is that most middle class people use at least some loopholes to bring down their tax burden. “But those rich people have so much more money than me, they don’t need three yachts, so they are able to afford those taxes!” In reality, however, this middle class person is usually also able to pay the full tax bill, and is living in luxury from the perspective of people from third world countries.
Or in other words: Greed is universal
However, I do think it is reasonable to assume that heartfelt compassion and the capacity to feel shame is not something that will drive you to the top of an investment firm, given the well known importance of office politics in these kind of organisations.
I think the issue is that the richer you get, the better the loopholes scale.
I can’t afford one of those fancy panamanian bank accounts, not a personal tax-avoidance adviser telling me how to exploit the loopholes. But the super-rich can, making it regressive.
yes. it is amazing how many mid to lower middle class people will cheer when someone rich goes to prison for white collar crime, yet brag about how they commit insurance fraud.
@Lambert If you don’t do it because you can’t afford it, that’s irrelevant to a question of morality. Someone who would do it if he could do it, and someone who can do it and does it should be considered morally equivalent. For the purposes of questions like “should the government do more to prevent tax avoidance through loopholes by the rich”, that’s a different question.
Eh, I dunno. Assuming he did his job as best he could (which I’m sure is what he believes) he shouldn’t have to give back much of anything. It seems unlikely the blame for the financial crisis can fall solely on any one man (or any 100 men, for that matter).
And even though he’s still extremely rich, he’s presumably less rich than he would have been if Lehman didn’t go bankrupt, which is what really matters as far as incentives go.
I guess I find it hard to believe that only walking away with $100,000,000 or so for running a company that, while obviously not solely to blame, is partially to blame for a ruinous financial crisis means the incentives are working.
Whether incentives are working is mostly equivalent to whether business leaders attempt to avoid their business going bankrupt most of the time as much as possible, and to maximize their profits. I don’t think Lehman Brothers is evidence that this is not the case.
In order to evaluate this claim, we’d have to estimate how much he would have made had Lehman stayed solvent and rebounded from the crisis.
Let’s say (total speculation here, I have no idea) it was $200M.
In that case, the man essentially was penalized $100M for his mismanagement of the company. You don’t consider that proper incentive?
There’s a reason that most CEOs are mainly compensated via stock options. It’s for this exact purpose.
It seems like you could easily use that same reasoning to find that he was rewarded $100M for his mismanagement, with that compensation providing incentive for the mismanagement. Had he behaved/run the company in a way that was…more responsible, he might well have received less compensation (because prior to the crash the company likely would have shown lower results and he may have been shown the door). I would argue he was heavily incentivized to run things exactly the way he did. Maybe running Lehman Bros responsibly would only have rewarded him $50M.
I also think it shows a skewed logic to suggest that not getting the hypothetical $100M is a “penalty”. There is a huge difference between being penalized and not receiving additional compensation.
Tabletop RPG discussion, CW edition: so I just heard that there’s a new edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, and it includes trigger warnings and orange and red circles players are supposed to hold up to make the Storyteller change their story whenever it makes them uncomfortable? But a Google search for this also turns up accusations that this edition panders to the Alt-Right? What the heck?
Wouldn’t be the first time White Wolf is in the middle of topical controversies. I remember back in 1997, the critical backlash over “Charnel Houses of Europe: the Shoah”, a supplement for Wraith that detailed how the Holocaust happened in the WoD.
There was also the infamous “Black Dog” label, which they used to publish WoD material for an 18+ audience, notably the classic “Montreal By Night” and its occasionally pornographic illustrations.
Speaking of 18+ erotic RPG suppliments, anyone else remember that time Book of Erotic Fantasy inexplicably contained one of the most flavorful, evocative, and distinctly nonsexual high level spells in 3.x D&D?
(It was a resurrection-class effect with a duration as a top level bard spell.)
I haven’t been paying close attention, but the accusation that it panders to the Alt-Right strikes me as truly and thoroughly unlikely. Onyx Path Publishing is far more in line with the Social Justice crowd than the Alt-Right and the only “pandering” to the Alt-Right that might exist is an updated characterization of certain clans, like Gangrel and Brujah.
Is this just the God Machine rules update or an entire new edition?
Having a mechanic for letting the Storyteller know that you’ve been triggered is silly and redundant when you’re sitting right across the table, but since Vampire has a huge LARP community they may well have asked for it.
On a practical level, anyone trying to write GM advice should include suggestions for what to do when players get uncomfortable. It’s really not always easy to anticipate: for example, one of the players in my D&D game has a fear of whales and giant squid so I’ve had to think about how I want to handle ocean encounters with her. Sensitivity is important but that means actually listening to your players and not just banning a laundry list of politically inconvenient topics.
Couldn’t be the God Machine, because that is Vampire the Requiem and not Vampire the Masquerade. Otherwise, I think you’re entirely right about you need to be sensitive to your players, although I think that Onyx Path Publishing is overly heavy handed in their suggested approaches (from what I’ve seen in the new edition of Scion).
About three years ago CCP Games sold its White Wolf IPs to Paradox Interactive. Except for Exalted, Scion, and Trinity, which are now owned by Onyx Path. Paradox constituted a new White Wolf Publishing to handle them. To reduce confusion between the old World of Darkness and the new World of Darkness, they had the nWoD renamed to Chronicles of Darkness.
Onyx Path continues to write and publish all CofD material, as well as the 20th Anniverasy Editions of oWoD. nuWW for its part has been writing, and recently published, a 5th Edition of Vampire the Masquerade. Presumably to be followed by new editions of other classic White Wolf properties.
It is nuWW’s Masquerade 5th Edition that has been attracting controversy. In a post below i try to explain why.
The mechanic in question was invented for convention games. It makes sense in that context, since the people playing don’t know each other, and a lot of nerdy types have difficulty speaking up and asserting boundaries. Efforts to shoehorn it into games between normal groups is, however, pretty much just virtue signalling.
Haven’t heard of it, but I’m out of the loop on Storyteller system games. This wouldn’t be the first, or even the fifth, time that White Wolf or its successors tried to shoehorn in some ham-fisted social commentary, though.
There have even been entire gamelines about it. The difference, of course, is that playing Angry Furry Captain Planet is fun.
I think the Golden Rule of World of Darkness was always “Don’t be pretentious; insteAd use the rules and fluff as a toolbox to have fun.”
Violent Green furries are fun. Mage leveraged postmodernist dogma to do something fun. (I was never attracted to any of the other lines.)
Wait, you’re supposed to play White Wolf games unpretentiously???
Everything I thought I knew is wrong and makes less sense.
Depends on the game. It takes some work to make Vampire or Mage unpretentious, but Exalted is pure weeaboo power fantasy and totally unapologetic about it.
It’s kind of charming, really. Over the course of your average campaign, you’re actually expected to power up to the point where you can kick the (local equivalents of the) Devil in the nuts so hard he explodes.
Someone once recommended Exalted to me as doing mythical heroes better than D&D. I bounced off the “exalt” mechanic/fluff as too specifically a weeaboo power fantasy. Mythic heroes do not work that way.
Mythic heroes usually have divine lineages. The difference in Exalted is that rather of screwing your mom, an Olympian instead chose you as their champion. Either way, the power of a god makes you mightier than other men. Seems pretty mythic and heroic to me.
Here’s the basis for the accusations of alt-right pandering, in no particular order. Apologies if I get minor details wrong, this has been a long standing problem with VtM5e and some of it happened over a year ago
One of the developers answered an interview comment saying that [Far-right people, such as nationalists, nazis and the alt-right] (I can’t remember the exact term used, but they were pretty clear that it was in reference to the recent right wing movements in Europe and USA) are part of their target demographic, and they want to make a game these people can enjoy
One of the playtest materials includes 1,4,8,8 in an example die roll
A LARP organized by the new owners contained very strong anit-consent language, stating that people who planned to say no shouldn’t bother showing up
Vampire: the Masquerade media (I don’t remember if it was explicitly associated with 5e, but it definitely happened around the time 5e was in development) was written by a person known for harassing trans people, and included a villain based on one of his victims
A playtest document released very near the anniversary of the pulse nightclub shootings was set during/after a gay nightclub massacre, and included rules and language that felt like it was reveling in the suffering to an extent beyond normal “playing as monsters” stuff
The updated setting contains a lot of traditionally anti-semitic imagery and terms, and reframes the position of vampires in a way that reflects certain alt-right conspiracy theories in a way that’s hard to explain.
The weakness of the Brujah clan was “Triggered” and they included an alt-right neo-nazi as one of the example concepts. The Brujah have often been portrayed as heroic underdogs in V:tM, and listing a neo-nazi as one of their examples gives the appearance of supporting the narrative that the alt-right are heroic underdogs as well.
The trigger warnings and circles thing appears to be a later addition that is a response to the criticism they received over their previous issues. In response to the comment below regarding Onyx Path, Vampire: the Masquerade 5th edition is not being developed by Onyx Path. It is being developed by White Wolf under the direction of Martin Ericsson. Onyx Path is more Social-Justice friendly, while recent White Wolf publications have been more explicitly anti Social-Justice apart from the nod to trigger warnings. Additionally, later press statements by White Wolf have explicitly condemned far-right and nazi groups. Not everyone believes them.
Okay so let me explain. First off, the original White Wolf Publishing has been dead dead for years now. CCP Games, the owner of its properties, had been hiring a third party called Onyx Path to handle the publishing of the materials. Then Paradox bought the White Wolf IP’s (except Exalted, Scion, and Trinity, which are now owned by Onyx Path), and constituted a new White Wolf to handle them. The guy they put in charge on nuWW is a Swede by the name of Martin Ericsson. He’s an oldtime White Wolf player and superfan, and is sometimes called “Dracula” because he was the character model for the full page illustration of Dracula in Vampire the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition.
Now Dracula’s goal is to bring back the glory days of 90s era White Wolf. He was frankly never going to succeed in this, but nonetheless that’s what he was aiming for. He is himself very much still of a very 90s sort of mindset, and as such was totally unprepared to handle the new cultural zeitgeist. The thing is, the original White Wolf was both very leftwing and very transgressive. A lot of their themes and writing pushed on the boundaries of taste and acceptability. While in many ways they hit a lot of left-wing shibboleths about inclusiveness in that they tried to have women, minorities, homosexuals, and transsexuals among their characters, they were also never particularly concerned with political correctness or propriety. Their games have always dealt with a lot of themes like sex, rape, bestiality, abuse, torture, slavery, wanton violence, and other such dark and edgy things. Nor did they always handle these things in a sensitive fashion, much of the time it would outright glory in the transgressive nature of it all.
Basically back in the 90s you could totally be a leftwing edgelord, and that’s fundamentally what Dracula is, a leftwinger who is also a total edgelord. His problem is that things have changed, the modern left wing is extremely concerned with propriety. In fact the whole transgressive edgelord schtick seems to have been taken up by the alt-right. They are the ones pushing on the boundaries of taste and acceptability. So this leaves Dracula in an unhappy position that when he tries to be edgy and cool 90s style by saying, “I don’t care about propriety!” the modern leftists interpret that as “I’m an alt-right sympathizer!” He is not at all an alt-right sympathizer, if one actually reads the material nuWW has put out, it’s evident that it is still very much on board with the progressive agenda. To my understanding, as far as the actual alt-right is concerned Martin Ericcson is a cuck. But when it comes to signalling, tone matters much more than content, and to the modern social justice crowd, vintage 90s edgelordism looks more like the alt-right than it does like themselves.
Once the idea set-in that Dracula was secretly pandering to the alt-right, pattern matching set-in, and every single misstep is seen in the worst possible light. Not helping things is that not only is Dracula’s cultural context 20 years out of date, so is his PR handbook. He is so used to criticism about White Wolf’s lack of propriety coming from the right, particularly the religious right, that when the promotion for his new edition of Vampire got similar such criticisms, he reacted with indifference and contempt. This worked fine when the complainants were his outgroup, people who would never buy his products anyway, but it’s not been working out quite so well now that it’s coming from the extreme side of his in-group. The very people he used to be part of.
The thing with the trigger warnings and the circles were last minutes additions, a desperate attempt to signal, “Hey guys, I’m still on your side.” Needless to say, a lot of people are not convinced. He’s pretty much stuck at this point. He’s too out of touch with the modern left to send the right signals, and since he’s already suspected of being a member of the outgroup so he gets no benefit of the doubt.
Thank you; framing it as IP sale and personal psychology I was unaware of makes a lot of sense.
White Wolf circa 2002, when I first became aware of it, was obviously Leftist… by way of ’90s Seattle, if that makes sense? Green, espresso-drinking, hip to Derrida, BDSM edgelord post-Marxist New Left, which hilariously is no longer New enough.
He is so used to criticism about White Wolf’s lack of propriety coming from the right, particularly the religious right, that when the promotion for his new edition of Vampire got similar such criticisms, he reacted with indifference and contempt. This worked fine when the complainants were his outgroup, people who would never buy his products anyway, but it’s not been working out quite so well now that it’s coming from the extreme side of his in-group. The very people he used to be part of.
Which, for stodgy old right-wing religious and social conservatives stuck in a mindset preceding the 90s such as myself, is totally hilarious to watch as all the hipsters (not that this was the term en vogue when they were at the height of their flourishing) get eaten by their own side for being stodgy stick-in-the-muds who are probably secretly right-wing. Nothing gets dated as fast as something that was cutting-edge cool in its day.
For a parochial example where I am particularly indulging in Schadenfreude, there’s the recent case of Graham Linehan (who is an example of 90s leftwing edgelord, or rather typical Dublin southside liberal raised Catholic-now atheist headed off to London to be cool in the media scene there type) a co-creator of amongst other shows Father Ted (which in amongst the comedy was indeed intended to be a barbed attack on Irish Catholicism in particular and Catholicism and religious belief in general). He’s been accustomed to getting praised for the bold brave resistance to the power of the Church and the forces of Irish social conservatism during the 90s and after, but recently he got a visit from the police in England and a warning due to getting on the wrong side of the trans rights movement due to a row on Twitter with a trans person. Progress has marched on, and now he’s insufficiently leftist/progressive to fit in with the new orthodoxy, which has much more power to actively punish him than the dying stages of the old orthodoxy.
It’s darkly amusing to see the people who pilloried you for certain offences in certain terms (and who got plaudits and applause and praise for same) having the same terms used against them in accusations of the same offences, i.e. being insufficiently zealous for the cause of rainbows and the bending arc of the right side of history 🙂
It’s like the Liberal Bishop in Lewis’ The Great Divorce, who maintained he fearlessly faced all kinds of danger in publicising his heterodox opinions, but is reminded that his heterodoxy was perfectly in tune with the new orthodoxy of the time. Well, now the heterodoxy is old-fashioned and out of tune, and the purveyors of same are facing real opposition, not the toothless tigers of the old foes.
The FBI has made an arrest in the mail bomb case. One Cesar Sayoc Jr, 56, of Plantation Florida has been taken into custody. A self described native American Trump supporter, he apparently drives a van covered in MAGA imagery, and paranoid ranting. So in other words obvious thing is obvious.
Except for the native American part, that’s just odd.
Everybody who engaged in a lot of motivated reasoning about false flags should think over their line of reasoning. Wasn’t it always far more likely that somebody sending pipe bombs, functional or otherwise, to prominent liberals
was going to be an unstable wight winger?
If the opposite had happened and bombs had showen up at Trump tower, Fox news, and the private residences of the Koch brothers what conclusion would you have drawn?
Does native american here mean from a tribe like Cherokee, or someone born here? If the former, isn’t that usually capitalized?
I believe most people here who speculated about odds had already agreed that it was far more likely to be malice, a threat, or craziness than a false flag.
Somebody giving it a 10 or even 20 or 30 percent odds of “false flag” does not necessarily need to update when it turns out that it was genuine; odds can’t be proven one way or the other by a single instance, but they in fact were betting the right way.
Unless they already have an extremely large sample size of comparable incidents to generate their base rate, they should update one way or another. How much they should update, though, is up for debate. Updating too much and too little are both problems.
That’s why HBC made his snarky thread, though. “> 1% odds of the outgroup being [potshot at outgroup]” is such a squirrelly veneer for making the potshot at the outgroup.
“Oh, I didn’t actually believe they were doing it, look I only said > 1%!” and then writing paragraphs of how ridiculous the situation is for the ingroup to have done it is not good faith, no matter the numbers.
They should be forced to turn it around with a statement more like “I am >90% confident that the outgroup is NOT being [bad thing]” to get any sort of benefit of the doubt.
Right, the problem with that whole comment thread was that a lot of the sub-comments came off more as “this is what I think happened” than “there is an incredibly small chance that this happened” regardless of the 1% threshold presented in the original comment (which I think got lost deeper into the subsequent comments), to the point that some of the commenters were actively arguing against other [more] likely scenarios (which you would do in a discussion of what you thought was true, not one where you were presenting an argument with a 2% likelihood). Some people really were discussing what they thought highly unlikely but possible scenarios, but the majority read like a bunch of people happy to have an outlet for the conspiracy theory based scenario they actually sincerely believed.
The problem with that subthread was a bunch of people speculating about something with no data at all, mostly based on their tribal affiliations.
My priors were:
“Nobody remotely sane actually working on behalf of his tribe is going to send his enemies political ammunition” (this turned out to be true)
“Couriers do not deliver obviously suspicious packages” (false)
“Mailroom employees do not open obviously suspicious packages” (false)
“Mailroom employees do not stand around taking pictures of things they think are bombs” (false)
This is why a hoax seemed much more likely, and I’m still gobsmacked that nobody twigged to “hey maybe we should take a look at the suspicious package checklist at some point”.
Man, imagine if these things were real and at least one of them actually went off in close proximity to its target.
How incredibly screwed would the courier industry about to be?
The outsider problem is how often do couriers get asked to deliver weird packages and how often do mail room employees see weird packages. If someone has worked in a mail room for 2 years and opened (random semi large number) 1,000 packages and had 10-20 odd looking ones and had none of them actually dangerous then why would they look at these packages with anything other than detached boredom?
“How incredibly screwed would the courier industry about to be?”
Trending tag: #BennyDidNothingWrong (for people who get the joke, New California is out)
“If someone has worked in a mail room for 2 years and opened (random semi large number) 1,000 packages and had 10-20 odd looking ones”
While it’s obvious that failure to recognize an unusual situation was a big part of this, I find it doubtful that even 1% of its packages are anywhere near this weird. A couriered package with a Florida return address and stamps on it, to someone who doesn’t even work there?
I do believe that CNN receives crank letters every day, which probably share many (but not nearly all) of the same characteristics, but that’s only compounding my confusion – if you know that cranks are sending you weird and threatening letters, why would you ever open a package from a super-crank? What if it was full of fentanyl powder or something?
I know, obvious in hindsight, and you can definitely bet that nobody’s opening such packages anymore (until everybody forgets about this).
I don’t know what weird stuff the mail room workers open, but I do believe that in general you get desensitized to stuff quite quickly. Something that looks totally crazy to us might well just look on a far end of “normal”. I believe they probably open up letters from the crazies to make sure they say “you are lizard men following the orders of the Illuminati” and not “I’m waiting for you in the parking lot to do to you what I did to this cat (see enclosed cat)”.
The reason they don’t worry about fentanyl powder is the fact that they get untold numbers of letters and packages and this type of thing almost never happens (even this thing wasn’t an actual bomb by the current account). Implementing effective protocols that get followed for really rare events is difficult, and generally expensive.
My wife recently ordered a toilet plunger from Amazon. It looked exceedingly odd when it arrived.
It’s not exactly clear to me why people think they, as a mail room employee, get to decide that Bob’s tube of ash from Mount Kīlauea doesn’t get opened.
Hindsight is always 20/20 is a truism for a reason.
A package from Amazon is from Amazon. It’s got a standard shipping label on it. It’s actually addressed to your wife. Its shape looks weird but the markings on it make total sense. Whatever misgivings that a reasonable person would have about a weird shape would naturally be blown away by the very large piece of evidence that is the shipping label.
Bob’s tube of ash would presumably be from somebody he knows, or a recognizable company, and would be addressed to Bob, who’d probably be expecting it.
Now I’m really curious if any amount of suspiciousness would have caused an average worker to stop and think, “hey, something is wrong here, should I talk to somebody before opening this one?” I’d like to go back before this happened and test if something with letters made from clipped-out magazine bits (in the traditional movie ransom note fashion) ostensibly from Amway and addressed to Donald Duck would get couriered, delivered, and opened. Should probably stick an old UPS label on there too.
I once worked in a mailroom in the US Navy.
We were given some token training on finding and reporting suspicious packages. In practice though, the job was basically “sort through these 500 pieces of mail every day (450 of which are just junk), and as soon as you’re done, you can either do something more interesting or go back to browsing the internet on your computer”
In three years I think I found one piece of mail suspicious enough to show to my supervisor. Lord only knows what he did with it. Most likely just threw it away, or handed it to the Admiral and hoped for the best!
Then, Matt, to truly punctuate this, I have just one final question:
Would you have reported the particular package couriered to CNN as suspicious?
I agree with this criticism, and have seen at least one other thread that turned out a similar way for similar reasons (though they are quite rare, afaik). My prior on people being malicious here is low, so I don’t think such things are intentional, but it’s emergent behavior I’d rather avoid if possible.
In the future, I think if I post such hypotheticals I’ll try to phrase them in a way resembling “Who do you think is responsible for X?” and then give a few broad classes as an example response. The harder version is when you’re considering a fringe theory, as in “Chance lizard people rule Latvia? I put it at 0.05%” – replace lizard people with something contentious, and it looks a lot like someone hiding their power level.
I apologize; I sincerely didn’t mean it as a shot, and I can only ascribe my phrasing to inattentiveness. I’ll do my best to follow Montfort’s example.
Had nothing to do with you. Your phrasing didn’t matter in the least, IMO.
I’m not sure I agree; a more neutral phrasing probably wouldn’t have had people overjustifying the improbabilities quite so much. Besides, I made a similar point about one of Honcho’s posts elsewhere, and I feel a bit like I’m in a glass house right now.
I’m pretty sure he meant Native with a capital N, as he apparently owns a business called Native American catering. If you’re going to point out the typographic errors in my posts there are plenty of bigger nits to pick.
I’m not sure about the tribal question, the name Cesar, not to mention the obvious fact that the man is from south Florida, says Hispanic to me. Perhaps he is just a Latino who strongly identifies with his indigenous ancestry.
False flag terrorist attacks are incredibly rare, and other than things like the Lavon Affair planned by state intelligence services the only one I can think of are the 2001 anthrax attacks. A lone person sending mail bombs is putting themselves at enormous personal risk, anybody with enough rational foresight to game out the political consequences of a hoax is very likely to be able to find something better to do with their time.
A ten percent probability seems like it might be a reasonable accounting for uncertainty in cases like this, but if you put it much higher than that then I suspect working from an incredibly strong prior that people on the right are so innately honest and law abiding that there isn’t likely to be one in the whole country wiling to do this.
Without the capitalization, I assumed he was a self-professed native who was anglo and taking the identity in an anti-immigrant statement. With the capitalization, it is clear he traces his identity to a pre-Columbian tribe. Not trying to make you look dumb, just clarify.
(Congratulations, political correctness, you managed to replace an ambiguous label with an equally ambiguous one.)
Honest and law abiding ain’t got nothing to do with it. Everyone here instantly knew that this did not in any way help the side that did it. No one was intimidated, and if there had been deaths, it would have done nothing to set back the movement of those targeted. If anything, people putting low odds on it being a Trump supporter or the like were failing in modeling low intelligence people’s thought processes.
And note that the 2001 anthrax attacks weren’t even really “false flag operations” in the sense discussed here; while the perpetrator attributed them to another group, this doesn’t seem to have been with the intention of turning people against that group. Probably it was just done to throw off the trail.
Correction: The above comment is probably wrong, see discussion above with Douglas Knight about the motive.
It doesn’t take a lot of rational foresight to conclude that a bunch of apparent bombs sent to opponents of Trump will hurt Trump’s party in the election. That’s consistent with not enough sense to realize that he is likely to be caught, at which point the effect reverses.
It didn’t strike me as the most likely explanation, but not a wildly unlikely one.
It doesn’t take a lot of logic, but it also doesn’t seem to happen very often. The closest I can recall are fake hate/over interpreted crimes.
In the suspect’s bizarre, Time Cube-esque rantings on social media he describes himself as “UNCONQUERED SEMINOLE.”
Oh man, there’s a blast from the past.
Or a prior that people who are crazy enough to do this sort of thing are very uncommon and usually not great at actually getting crazy stuff done.
Or Elizabeth Warren looking to eliminate her potential primary rivals?
This thread is obnoxious, but you aren’t helping.
Matt M is banned for six months. If you disagree with this decision, I dare you to tell me which two of “true, kind, necessary” this comment satisfies.
Can we disagree about the length of the ban? It’s true he has been a dick lately, and that comment doesn’t even hit one of the “true, kind, necessary” criteria, so he definitely deserves a time out. But surely a couple of months ought to be enough for him to get the message, no? This is his first offence, unless you’ve warned him previously and i missed it, and when he’s not being a dick he does add value to the open threads. His commentary on Star Trek Voyager on this very OT, for example.
Seconded. Even if the post itself wasn’t true, kind, or necessary, I don’t think it’s egregious enough to merit a six-month ban.
Thirded; this seems like a duration that would discourage Matt from coming back, not encourage him to moderate himself. I’ve been at least tangent to some of the less-good discussion he’s been involved in recently, and I’d say he’s been a bit obnoxious with comments like this, but not that he’s fundamentally unpleasant. I fear that if he decides to live on Twitter instead of here, that may change.
If warnings have been previously issued, ignore this post.
I think a comment I made was eaten, perhaps because I may have named a banned commenter exactly, which I think is verbotten by the system.
Initially I though the ban was too long and abnormal, especially given that we have seen other comments like this not be banned, but looking back at the register, we have two recent precedents that seem relevant.
Ancient Geek was banned for a full year for a one line comment directed at Matt. Sailer was banned for two months for redirecting unrelated threads to favored CW topics. The fact that Geek was banned specifically because of Matt also seems relevant.
We only have one Scott and he is busy. The reign of terror continues. Frankly I just wish Matt had kept a leash on himself, it’s not like he wasn’t aware of what he was doing.
Yeah, I’d be happier with two months. I don’t think TAG is a very good parallel; he got his ban, as I recall, for repeatedly attacking other commenters. Matt clearly broke the rules here, but the post was at least directed at a public figure, and we’ve historically cut that a little more slack.
Thoughts:
A) Scott: that you’re asking people to comment on this ban hints that you’re not completely comfortable with issuing it.
B) You’ve explicitly been lenient with left-ish commenters, choosing not to ban in cases when you normally would [1]. Presumably, this is to improve the thread quality: even if such an individual oversteps, their comments provide a net good. Perhaps the same leniency is appropriate here, and for the same reasons.
C) I find HBC’s comment incomplete. There are also instances where left-ish commenters should have been banned and were not. For example, HBC’s short comment of “Fuck off” to Bugmaster [2], for which no ban was issued.
D) I find BBA’s comment disingenuous. The remark “…just call Warren a c*nt and be done with it” implies a misogyny that Matt has (to my knowledge) not displayed, but which BBA is insinuating nonetheless.
I’m arguing for no ban at all. I’m also in favor of an apologetic statement from Matt M., as I believe that such things can be useful.
[1] “You may have noticed some leftists saying things that should have gotten them banned. After some thought, I’ve decided to keep them around anyway with warnings instead (this means you, Brad and Freddie). I will still ban leftists for more serious issues. This doesn’t mean other people will be able to get away with this kind of behavior, so consider yourself warned.” from OT112: OPENTAGON THREAD.
[2] DIFFERENT WORLDS, Oct 2, 2017.
I meant that to accuse Matt of engaging in content-free insults rather than specifically of misogyny.
@Nornagest:
I don’t think his comment was directed at Warren. I believe he indicated several times in the past that he likes to provoke other (liberal) commenters, as sport. It wasn’t a sarcastic reply that was on topic.
But like I said, it struck me as over the top, but maybe we are all supposed to take something out of that.
So if six months is so long as to have too discouraging an effect, and two months is more likely to have the appropriate effect, what is the effect of two months plus twelve people begging for two months because after all Matt M is just a delightful misunderstood scamp?
Using data on the ban list, the durations are roughly [1]:
indefinitely = 61
order of days = 3
order of weeks = 10
1 to 3 months = 25
1 year = 1
So, unless you’re AncientGeek, prior bans tend to send one of two clear messages: (a) go away and never come back, or (b) go away, reform, and then you’re welcome back.
It makes sense to have these two types, and I’m not convinced that longer, intermediate bans have value. What degree of reform do you expect for a 6-month-to-1-year ban that you won’t obtain via a 3-month ban?
[1] There are a handful of cases where the ban length is not explicitly listed, and I didn’t count the ban duration.
It’s hard to read this as anything other than gloating over the banishment of a ideological opponent. Your attack on Conrad Honcho [1] was more personal and vitriolic than most comments I’ve read on SSC, and for that, you received a ban of 1 month.
[1] OPEN THREAD 104.25
I think you should consider making the ban longer, six months seems too short
While it may not have been true, kind or necessary, neither was it meant as anything more than a joke. A bad joke, but a joke. If we’re going to apply that standard to comedy, there will be a drastic reduction in the number of comedians down to about three, one of whom would be the late Tommy Cooper.
Six months is a lot, can’t you reduce it down a bit and grant him clemency?
A month or two seems like enough to send an effective “stop being a dick” message; six months seems like “go away and never come back.” I think “stop being a dick” is a better message here than “go away and never come back.”
Alternatively, have you considered banning people only from the CW-allowed thread and CW-allowed topics, or is that too hard to keep track of?
The comment seemed like kind of a joke and sometimes levity is neccesary
I like to add “true, kind, necessary, and funny” to the “pick two” list.
Terrible idea.
“x group was just attacked? They probably did it to themselves, being the scum that they are…
…haha jk guys! Funny joke!”
I don’t think the “true, kind, or necessary” criterion works very well. A large fraction of our posts are neither true nor false, since they are not statements of fact. Most are not kind, although only a minority are unkind. Almost nothing we say is necessary.
Consider the string of Russian jokes we had a while back. Almost certainly none were true. I don’t remember any that were kind–and one might view anything poking fun at a society as at least mildly unkind. And telling jokes isn’t necessary. Zero out of three.
They were, however, funny.
Counterpoint: Extremely toxic “jokes” that are essentially just smears against the outgroup (and in response to the outgroup receiving an assassination attempt, of all things!) is how you turn into /pol/.
You make a strong point.
To me the idea that Warren would do something like that is so ridiculous that it could only be a joke, but I suppose they are madmen who believe the ridiculous i.e. the D.C. pizza place “scandal”.
I think the criterion makes more sense if we read “kind” as “not actively hostile.”
I’m no fan of Matt’s (to put it lightly), but I didn’t think it was that much worse than his usual. I still think it’d be more honest and less of a waste of anyone’s time to just call Warren a c*nt and be done with it.
Speaking for myself, I have no idea whether Warren is a bad person, which your epithet implies. As best I can tell she did one mildly wicked thing once (claiming to be a minority when she wasn’t) and one mildly dishonest thing repeatedly (claiming a closer connection to Amerind culture than she really had). She also holds political views I disagree with.
That’s consistent with her being, on net, a better than average person.
I support the reign of terror. Bans are good, and cluttering up comment threads arguing about them is bad. Apologies for contributing to the latter myself.
Matt has been more toxic than usual lately, and I don’t disagree that a ban is probably warranted. But as many others have pointed out, offenses of his kind have traditionally drawn a month or two, not six.
So this was done by Florida Man? Not much of a surprise there.
I’m going to guess wildly that someone with a name like “Cesar” is of Hispanic in some degree ancestry, so the “native American” part I take to mean “born here in the good old USA unlike them illegals!”
(Quick Googling says the surname “Sayoc” is from the Philippines, so yeah I’m going to go with “Hispanic ancestry”).
Probably an Evertonian.
That made me laugh, Matt M 🙂
And further news reveals that Mr Sayoc is indeed claiming to be Native American (and not just native American), as in “Seminole”, so do we have the DNA test results on that yet?
Taking bets now, is he over or under 1/1024 native?
You can snicker all you want about Warren (or just call her the c-word, I won’t judge) but the Seminoles are a mixed-race tribe that postdates European colonization, having substantial African descent as well as Native American. DNA won’t tell you much about someone’s connection to their community. (A more extreme example is the entirely synthetic Lumbee, who have lived as an “Indian tribe” for centuries despite negligible Native ancestry.)
That said, the Seminole Tribe has stated that Sayoc is not and has never been an enrolled member, so that should be the end of it.
Thanks, I believe I will!
It should, but it wasn’t the last time we dealt with this sort of thing, so let’s have some fun, first!
You can snicker all you want about Warren
The coincidence is irresistible, especially as it’s the one funny element in this unfortunate mess of someone who seems as if he should definitely have been receiving professional help (and maybe some involuntary committal) instead being free to send fake? so badly made they might as well have been fake? (it’s hard to tell if he genuinely wanted to blow people up but was so staggeringly incompetent he failed at this) bombs through the post/courier services.
Lizzie got to bang on about how proud she was of her native heritage via family tradition and any questioning of “yeah, exactly how much if any native heritage, blonde white woman?” was presented by her supporters as nothing more than a mean-spirited rabid hater, so let’s let this guy have his NATIVE PRIDE as well!
Yep. Did anyone around here actually say otherwise?
Conrad Honcho had it at a 50 percent chance of being a deranged liberal, I’d like him to explain his reasoning.
How do you explain when your 50 percent predictions are wrong??? That happens half the time.
I’m not Conrad, but my reasoning was based primarily on numerous publicly visible threats in recent years that did, in fact, turn out to be left-wingers threatening themselves in order to garner sympathy for their cause, combined with the fact that the bombs seemed to be shoddily made almost to the point of being intentionally non-operational.
That and open calls for revolution! I’m checking the scoreboard.. its getting close to a tie game!
https://www.nbcnews.com/card/pence-revolution-rally-goer-dont-say-n664776
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1080189/Young-Republican-claimed-Obama-supporter-carved-letter-B-face
The people who self-threaten for attention are low-level wannabes. They usually succeed in getting a bunch of positive attention in the short-term, followed by legal or administrative punishments delivered out of sight.
I an going to guess that Conrad still places pretty high odds on that possibility, albeit probably not as high as this morning, and is waiting to see if another shoe drops.
And, honestly, I can sort of see why someone might put such high odds. The set of “Matters of concern” and the set of “Matters of concern that the media focuses on” don’t have nearly as much overlap as one might expect. Indeed, if something makes the national news, it lowers my own odds that the most obvious political angle is correct, because it takes a certain degree of salaciousness to achieve that, and ordinary crazy is boring. You need something exceptional, and crazy and dysfunctional are both boring and not conducive to exceptionality.
Which is to say – there is a difference, to take an example from upthread, between the probability that graffiti that says “Jews are bad” was written by a Nazi, and the probability that graffiti that says “Jews are super terrible bad in these ten specific and super stereotype-of-a-Nazi ways, signed genuine Nazi” was created by a Nazi.
This case feels a little bit more like the latter than the former. Not a lot, but enough to cause people to update in erroneous directions.
ETA:
TLDR: Things that make the national news tend to be weird and unusual. Weird and unusual implies less reliable base rates. Conrad’s estimate probably reflects an unconscious reaction to this, and indeed may generally be accurate, with regard to the things that make national news. Unfortunately, this implies Conrad’s predictions of more common occurrences, and indeed his perception of base rates, may be substantially skewed.
I’d say that if it were a deranged liberal, which was unlikely, it’s at least an order of magnitude more likely that it was someone who thought the people in question were selling out the cause by being too right wing than that it was a false flag operation.
A valid point, and it would be a potential motive if the Clintons, or for that matter John Brennan, were the only targets. But Maxine Waters? I don’t see a left wing crazy going after a women of color who once blamed the CIA for the crack epidemic.
Yeah, the list of victims really reads like a whos who of “prominent Trump critics” as defined by Fox News.
“Far left person mad that the party isn’t left enough” is way way way down on my list of possibilities, well below “legit right wing guy.”
@Matt M
I agree completely.
It occurred to me that if this was a thriller/detective story plot instead of the real world, one of the bombs would have been real, aimed at someone who is both a Trump enemy and hated by the person who sent the bombs. That simultaneously conceals the real motive, which might be non-political, and makes the false flag more believable by having one bomb actually blow up.
Has any author used a version of this for a murder mystery? You arrange for apparent attacks on a bunch of people who all share a characteristic that implies an obvious motive for the attacks. The one attack that succeeds is against the one of those people who, for some unrelated reason, you really want to kill–perhaps you are his heir, or rival in business or politics, or something.
The closest I can think of is a Father Brown story where an officer gets a lot of his people killed somewhere in order to hide the body that he killed, but that isn’t very close.
[Added later as an edit]
My wife points at Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, where the third victim is the one the murderer wants to kill, the first two designed to imply a pattern of alphabetic murders by a nut. Not quite as elegant as my version, but in the same ballpark.
@David
Similarly, Borges’ Death and the Compass.
@DavidFriedman
It was speculated that the Beltway snipers did what you said; that the older one wanted to kill his ex-wife, and believed that police attention would not focus on him if her death seemed to be a random part of a larger killing spree.
Undergoing random spree killings in public for several weeks seems like a poor plan to achieve the goal of less police attention on you…
The Lee Child novel “One Shot”, and later Tom Cruise movie “Jack Reacher”, had a single targeted assassination concealed as one of five deaths in a sniper’s spree killing. Neither the real assassination nor the spree killing were presented as political, though.
The mastermind behind the assassination also framed a plausible third party for the killings, which seems almost necessary for this to work. Nutjob-style murders, political or otherwise, rarely go unsolved. If you give people one of the exceptional mass murders that isn’t quickly solved, that will attract more investigative resources and a greater willingness to consider oddball theories than the much simpler “make it look like a robbery gone wrong”.
@Matt M
I wonder if a tradeoff between generalized suspicion/attention “there’s a crime going on, who did it” and specific evidence “John’s been acting weird, what’s going on?”/”We know it was John, can we prove it?” would make an interesting mechanic for games where the player commits a lot of crimes.
But yeah, I think he underestimated just how intense the investigation would be.
Not quite the same, but there’s also the book/movie Shooter, in which a plausible threat is made against the US President, but the real assassination target ends up being a visiting African dignitary he was meeting (much deeper and overly complex conspiracy follows)
Some decades ago, I read a story, possibly by Robert Bloch, which included “Where do you hide a tree? In a forest”, and a murder which (from very faint memory) was concealed among what looked like random poisonings.
“Where do you hide a tree–in a forest” sounds like the Father Brown story I mentioned, but the deaths were not by poisoning.
Even fainter memory: “Where do you hide a murder? In a war.”
I posted my reasoning when I made my 50% prediction. It was because there have been several high-profile “hate crimes” that the media flogged heavily and that turned out to be hoaxes, like the black church burned before the election with “VOTE TRUMP” scrawled on it. Turns out it was committed by a black member of the church.
This “bombing” effort looked so comically bizarre, with the misspelled names and the catalog of boogeymen and the TV prop looking “bomb” that it looked like someone impersonating a caricature of a “Trump supporting rural retard.”
But it turns out that comic figure actually did exist. I saw somebody on twitter describe his van as “what Steve Bannon would turn into if he were a transformer.” Truth is stranger than fiction.
Not trying to be a dick, but did you make any effort to find a denominator to divide your examples by?
I did try googling “high profile threats against democrats” but that’s all dominated by stories about the bomb threats. Off the top of my head I couldn’t think of any highly-publicized threats / hate crimes in the Trump era that turned out to be real except for that one early in the election where some Trump supporters beat up some guy in New York. But that’s the simple kind of hate crime and not the “massive media attention” type of “hate crime” that I think is more likely to be a hoax.
When I saw this, I thought of the church fire, I thought of the Jewish center bomb threats and the Jewish cemetery defacement that were done by an Israeli teen and an anti-Trump muslim respectively but were immediately blamed on Trump and Trump supporters by the media.
This pattern matches. The media being right about this one is broken clock territory.
I did say there was a 20% chance it was a deranged Trumper. I’m batting about as well on that as Nate Silver did on the 2016 presidential election.
ETA: I am NOT saying “hate crimes are likely to be hoaxes.” I am saying highly publicized anonymous attention grabbing hate crimes are likely to be hoaxes. Another example is the “social experiment” one where a black activist posted “whites only” signs on campus bathrooms or water fountains.
Heh, I was just thinking about how, after the election, plenty of people were right here delivering hot takes of “Just because a 95% probability event didn’t happen, doesn’t necessarily mean the estimation was somehow flawed, we’re just living in the 5% scenario!”
If Nate Silver can be off by that much and still considered respectable, surely Conrad can get by with losing a coin flip!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#2010%E2%80%93present
Matt:
I think Nate Silver was predicting about a 1/3 chance of a Trump victory. Sam Wang was the guy making a 99% sort of prediction–he promised to eat a bug on TV if Trump won, and he *did*. (Skin, or at least stomach, in the game!)
IIRC, 538 – Nate Silver’s outlet – gave 30% chance of Trump winning in 2016. It was places like NYTimes that gave 5% or lower chance.
I guess 20% isn’t that much lower than 30%, though I’d still say that being lower by 33% is actually fairly significant.
meh, those are not the type of crimes I’m talking about. Those are all things that actually harmed people or attempted to harm people. I’m talking about the “sending a message” type of “hate crime” that is designed to be as salacious as possible and garner media attention while maintaining anonymity and not hurting anyone.
Church fire hoax.
Jewish Community Centers bomb hoaxes.
Jewish Cemetery desecration hoaxes.
University at Buffalo “whites only” bathroom hoaxes.
Trump supporters attack muslim girl and rip off her hijab hoax.
You’ve got a bunch of “make america white again” graffiti with swastikas and stuff where we never find the perpetrator, but where are the anonymous, salacious “sending a message” hate crimes where we find the perp and sure enough, yup an actual nazi?
Given all of this, is it that unreasonable to think this comically bizarre crime was not yet another hoax?
The impression I get is that violent crimes where people get seriously hurt – beatings, stabbings, murders – are almost exclusively the real deal. Property damage could go either way. Someone on a university campus gets a threatening note? That’s what’s to be most skeptical of.
However, “false flag” is the wrong categorization for most hate crime hoaxes. It’s usually someone looking for sympathy, or someone trying to avoid consequences for something else and they try to throw up a smokescreen.
It’s at least conceivable that we don’t see those because it’s newsworthy when swastika graffiti is found on a synagogue, and it’s newsworthy if said swastika graffiti turns out to have been written by a dude named Avi Goldstein, but it’s not so newsworthy if it turns out to have been written by a dude named Bubba Wallace with an ugly haircut and a garage full of tiki torches. I mean, that’s what everyone, or at least everyone in news, assumes anyway; it’s a dog-bites-man story.
Oh, and there’s a mechanism for this. We know that
1) extremists are likely to have poor models of their political opponents.
2) Left-wingers have worse models of right-wingers than right-wingers have of left-wingers.
3) Anyone who engages in either hate crimes or hate crime hoaxes is an extremist.
Now I know lots of Trump supporters and don’t know any who like nazis or swastikas* or frightening foreigners in their neighborhoods. But left-wing extremists are very likely to think that we’re all really nazis, and so when modeling us would think “oh man, you know what those nazis would do? They’d send nazi hate messages with frequently backwards swastikas!” So that’s what they do when they make the hoaxes. They incorrectly model right-wingers as hating blacks and loving nazis so that’s what the hoaxes look like.
* internet edgelords not withstanding
I don’t think I’m super-confident in the ability of actual Nazis to do the swastika the right way around, honestly.
@Conrad
What a coincidence, I don’t know any leftists who spray paint swastikas to make it look like trumpists did it…
When the leftist extremists fake the actions of rightist extremists, they look to the internet edgelords because they’re visible; it’s probably not actually that unreasonable to look at /pol/ going “gas the bikes, war race now” and assume that that’s what right-wing extremists think, just like it’s not that unreasonable for right-wingers to look at Tumblr and see “castrate all men for the glory of Trotsky” and assume that that’s what left-wing extremists are like.
My point is that your point 2 is probably not actually that relevant, especially given that there have been several times that I’ve seen you extrapolate the views of idiots on the internet onto the larger left wing. It’s true that typical left-wingers are worse at modeling typical right-wingers, but I don’t necessarily think that’s true of violent extremists modeling violent extremists.
But still, you get the idea, right? High profile. Salacious. Media-flogged. No one getting hurt or in any real danger.
Given the many other hoaxes that match that pattern, and the lack of proven non-hoaxes that match that pattern, was I unreasonable to consider this a hoax?
ETA: And more importantly, was the media reasonable to immediately declare it legitimate and Trump’s fault with no error bars?
@Conrad
Eh. I think 50% is probably much too high, but I made my OP at a time when I knew very little about the capability of the bombs. I think my presumed P(false flag) never got higher than like… 10%, maybe? It would have gone higher, but the details that made me suspect the bombs were fake (as in, made by a democrat partisan to aid the party) also made me suspect that the person responsible was mind-bogglingly stupid. I have a lot of trust in the sincerity of the stupid, and this whole thing was baldly stupid to the core.
Also, the false flags you’re talking about are malicious, but they’re basically petty and all designed to produce outrage; I think all the actual acts of political violence I’ve seen recently (Rand Paul getting shot, that guy who shot up a pizza parlor) have been sincere, and I put fake bombing (which I’d call borderline terrorism – it’s certainly a direct threat) closer to violence than outrage-bait.
As for the media, they definitely had some people who said unreasonably inflammatory things, but avoiding that shit is why I read (not watch) my news.
But why? What pattern are you matching to?
If right-wing nuts want to do terror, they tend to do terror. If the bombs had been real I’d be right with you.
To my knowledge, there does not exist a pattern of right-wing nuts faking terror attacks.
There does exist a pattern of left-wing nuts faking right-wing (fake) terror attacks.
What did you pattern match this event to? Who else has done anything like this? To me this looks like a black swan. The one time a right-wing nut faked a right-wing terror attack.
@Conrad
I think, and have always thought, that this is a very stupid “real” right-wing terror attack, not a real “fake” right-wing terror attack. And I think most of the examples you bring up are not “fake” terror attacks so much as… something like “rabbling?” They’re meant to look like they’re to make people feel hated, not threatened, IMO.
@Conrad,
So I don’t think this reinforces the probability you assigned though.
Your mental model contains crimes that are only left-wing hoaxes. You can defend your prediction percentage against this model, but you need to consider you are using the wrong model.
If Nate Silver got 10 elections wrong in a row where he predicted an 80% winner, he would look silly claiming ‘But my model predicted 80% each time, and considered these things… therefore it is a correct prediction!’
I think one area (but not the only) that can be considered is the scope of the security threat of the hoax. If I was personally tasked w/ a hoax, I would consider how likely a large scale follow up would be, and my chance of being caught, and the repercussions if caught. Graffiti or false report is on one level. Sending bombs (even if designed not to go off) through the mail is another level.
I think this is an almost impossible topic to think straight about, without digging into actual hard data. Media bias plus availability heuristic plus confirmation bias means it’s hard to even have confidence about any assertions about the differences between right and left wing terrorists.
@meh
But then it still just looks like “bigger version of the same hoax.”
Remember from the beginning, no matter who did this it was definitely someone deranged. No sane, normal right-winger does this. We know that because there’s 60+ million people who voted for Trump and all but one of them didn’t do this. There’s 60+ million people who voted for Hillary and none of them did this.
Right-wing nutjobs don’t threaten to bomb abortion clinics. They bomb abortion clinics.
Left-wing nutjobs don’t beat minorities, pretending to be right-wing nutjobs. They do, however, “threaten” minorities, pretending to be right-wing nutjobs.
Speaking for myself, I’ll say that the one thing about this that should have caused me to re-consider my priors were the fact that there were multiple victims.
Most of the fake hate crimes are ones where there is one victim, and its the alleged victim who turns out to be the perpetrator. They send the fake Nazi letter to themselves, not to some other random black student. So long as we can rule out Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Robert Deniro as likely suspects, this one has less in common with the typical fake hate crime than I originally mapped it to.
What pattern are you matching to
it matches *incompetent* attack, of which there are very many. You probably encountered the occasional forgettable news story about some sad-sack loser who wanted to do something like assassinate Obama but who was under FBI surveillance the whole time and was arrested the moment he started to put his plan into motion. Or there was a guy a few towns over from me who drove a truck into a Planned Parenthood earlier this year, hurting nobody; I doubt anyone outside the region ever heard of it.
This guy just happened to hit on a way for his incompetent attack to make national news.
Right-wing nutjobs don’t threaten to bomb abortion clinics. They bomb abortion clinics.
getting kind of far afield, but this is just availability bias. Threats aren’t newsworthy but that doesn’t mean they don’t occur.
The fake JCC bomb threats had multiple victims (and multiple perpetrators with different motives)
I think I’m missing the relevance and conclusion for b oth parts here…
1. I agree it was high probability they were deranged, but I don’t follow the argument here. There are 120 million people who didn’t hit a home run in the world series today. How does that make the ones who did deranged?
2. you’re saying right-wing nut jobs bomb people, and left-wing nut jobs threaten people? I don’t think that is true; and also this was a bomb…? You’ve imposed a classification on the event so that it only matches to left wing hoaxes, which looks to be incorrect.
For what it may be worth, I agree with Honcho’s reasoning; what I found persuasive was the New York Times report that the bombs appeared somewhat fake.
I wouldn’t have put the odds of a hoax at 50%, but I think 20-30% was pretty reasonable.
Actually, having mulled over this for a while, I want to say something about the words “fake” and “hoax” here.
We say “fake” and “hoax” because the one we saw is fake, really fake, laughably fake.
But I have a sneaking suspicion, and I’m not sure what percentage to give it, that the perpetrator did not intend to send fakes. I suspect that he actually believed that these devices would explode and that he did wire an alarmless clock and a silver-painted PVC pipe (possibly full of black powder) together in the belief that it would blow up when someone opened the package. Because it’s a bomb, and that’s how you make bombs, right? By wiring things together the way you see them on TV?
In other words, I suspect that the perpetrator is a cargo cult mail bomber. (The world’s very first?)
https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politics/court-filing-unsealed-michael-kadar/index.html
It’s hard to tell what the motives behind that bunch of JCC bomb threats were, but it was being run as a business. Some it it may have been kids wanting to get out of class.
And there I was, thinking it was an Israeli with poor judgement trying to scare American Jews into moving to Israel. Silly me.
Hoopyfreud, Rand Paul wasn’t shot.
He was assaulted and injured by a neighbor.
He was present at a shooting attack on politicians.
https://thehill.com/news/337721-rand-paul-shooting-would-have-been-much-worse-if-capitol-police-werent
Registered D party member and MAGA supporter- a twofer!
Youre still motivated in your reasoning. Wait for the facts to come out… what are chances he acted alone??? Did someone pay him off to do this? If so, who?
Unstable wight winger? Does he fly around clumsily and dive at people he hates to drain a level?
Another one of my patented typos, I have a medical condition that makes it difficult for me to type sometimes. I’ve mentioned it here before.
I assumed it was deliberate, a Bugs Bunny cartoon reference.
I just can’t spell. I’ve always found it sort of cheap to attack people for typos, so I feel your pain.
Although, I never mind funny little bits about my malapropisms, which I think this was intended to be?
Yes, it was. I missed any previous statement by hyperboloid about it being sensitive.
In that thread my comments were limited to criticism of the “Russia sent the fake bombs” conspiracy theory floated by Chuck Todd and other prominent MSNBC media person and other “Russia Truthers”.
I suppose I am now vindicated? I don’t know. Pointing out that one stupid conspiracy theory is beyond stupid doesn’t mean my theory of the case was correct. This guy lives much further from DC than I would have expected, for instance.
The phenomenon is more general than this. What tends to happen in these discussions of probability estimates is that a higher estimate serves as a magical thinking contaminant on the side of the actor for that estimate. “Because the evidence shows a 20% probability that side X did this, rather than 1% as you argued, side X is worse than you’re admitting!” This kind of thinking (or really rhetoric) doesn’t follow and mostly functions as a boo light.
I would say that the primary lesson here is that much of the discussion focused on tracing back implications of reasonable motivations for doing this, and that only applies to the extent the agent responsible is sensitive to reasons.
My trouble with panels is that while I like the idea, they seem to be one of two types, excessively cordial groupings of people in the same industry/discipline/etc. where they fall over each other to agree, or shouting matches between partisan hacks on television. The latter can be dismissed as unreformable, the questions is how to fix the former. I think you can do it with very good selection of participants and moderators, but it’s not easy and it’s rarely done.
Your mission is to choose a real volcano, dormant or active, as a gameable/cinematic lair. Explain your choice: setting can be contemporary, ancient-supernatural, or whatever.
Highest points for underground chambers with visible flowing magma.
High points for a permanent ice cap with a level carved out of it.
Bonus points for anything that makes economic sense, like a geothermal power plant or exploitation of volcanic soil for farming.
Mount Erebus, Ross Island, Antarctica. It’s got a permanent lava lake (one of only a few in the world), nearby glaciers, dramatic fumaroles, and a really cool name. (It’s also very close to Mount Terror, with an even cooler name. They’re both named after the British Navy bomb vessels that supplied the Ross expedition.)
My second choice is Erta Ale, Ethiopia. No glaciers, but it’s got another very rare lava lake, and it lies in the Afar Depression, which is about as close as the real world gets to Mordor. The nearest inhabitants are hostile rebel factions prone to kidnapping and murder. Tourists are advised to hire mercenaries.
Mount Erebus is a fantastic idea. The triple threat: ice, lava lake, and a cool name.
Well I like your Mt. Rainier idea too. Either way, the fumaroles are too awesome to pass up for volcano without glaciers. If you had a system to direct the steam, you’d be a steampunk volcano villain.
What would the people in Mt. Erebus be doing, though? Building warm facilities from which to launch studies of the Mountains of Madness? And where would the volcano lair’s food come from?
If logistics was a major problem, I wouldn’t be building it in a volcano. I could be blackmailing McMurdo Station for supplies, though; it’s only a few miles away.
What I’d be doing there is a tougher question. Could be a control station for an orbital superweapon in polar orbit: the extreme southern latitude means I’ll have line-of-sight more often than a more temperate location would. Could be anything that benefits from being really remote and inhospitable, like bioweapons research. I could be tracking down the remnants of the rumored Nazi South Polar base (which will, naturally, turn out to have been zombified). Or I could be breeding an army of killer albino penguins (tekeli-li!).
It also has the advantage of protecting you from people who don’t test their software properly.
Mt. Rainier. At the top, around the remnants of a crater from the last time it erupted, there are multiple steam vents that carve their way through the thick layer of ice. I would build my lair in the summit glacier. According to the National Park Service the summit contains:
My ice labyrinth lair would be hidden from the outside world, and defended by a maze of ice tunnels filled with poison gas traps. From there I would develop a fleet of ice tunnelers who would expand my network among all the other 25 glaciers on Mt. Rainier, allowing multiple escape routes to take after activating a self destruct sequence. It would be a simple matter to drill down into the volcano and build geothermal generators. It would be the perfect lair: and the perfect place to perfect a device that would threaten to bring about an eruption, at which point I could hold Seattle, Tacoma, Puyallup, Orting, and several dozen other communities ransom! They will meet my demands or face the wrath of my devestating Lahar Engine! Bwahahaha!
Mount Barbaro, home of Carney Park, a US navy recreational facility built into the caldera of an extinct volcano, that at the time we were deployed there growing up was under the control of Commander James Bond, and the home of scout troop 007. It served as the home to many thriller based “spy operations” as soon as we could sneak out of adult supervision.
How fast can a (double action) revolver fire? I’m having trouble searching this up, because the results are all about how fast people can shoot with them in contests, whereas I’m interested in the mechanical limit of this kind of weapon. In theory, if you had some kind of mechanical linkage to the trigger and you pulled it as fast as possible repetitively until it was empty, how fast could you do that until the mechanism screwed up? As fast as a fully automatic weapon?
The return of the trigger to its catch position, plus the time it takes the hammer to fall, both done by spring action, would likely be the limiting factor? I’m thinking the length of travel of both won’t let you reach full auto speeds, no matter how fast you pull the trigger from catch to release.
It’s also not the way actual people get the fastest fire rate from the weapon, which seems relevant, regardless of the hypothetical.
Ed McGivern used to do his trick-shooting with double-action revolvers because he didn’t feel that automatic pistols(*) were fast enough for him. He repeatedly demonstrated cyclic firing rates in excess of 650 rounds per minute, while maintaining 2.5 milliradian precision.
What the actual mechanical limit is, I’m not sure has been rigorously measured or studied. The lock time should be in the 2-10 ms range, which would correspond to 6000-30000 rounds per minute, but long before that you’ll start literally bending metal as you try to accelerate the relatively heavy cylinder through sixty degrees of rotation and bring it to a dead stop in milliseconds, using mechanisms designed for much slower operation.
* Which are actually semiautomatic weapons, but the action cycles about as fast as it would for a fully automatic weapon.
But did he actually use the double-action of the revolver? Or did he prepare the striker with his other hand?
Edit: looking at YouTube videos of Jerry Miculek who broke some of McGivern’s records, I’m simply wrong here. He is utilizing the double action.
And isn’t the travel distance of the striker significantly longer in a revolver than a typical semi-auto?
I don’t think the difference is significant between revolvers and hammer-fired semiautomatics. Striker-fired semiautomatics like the Glock may be a bit faster, but unless McGivern were a big fan of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Cavalry, there weren’t many of those in his day.
OK, now I want to see someone run an IPSC three-gun match with a Roth-Steyr ’07, a Federov Avtomat, and a Browning Auto-5.
650 rounds per minute… That’s pretty impressive.
Almost 11 rounds a second, or 1 round per 0.091 seconds…wow!
Outside of a professional context, I agree they are usually bad. The best solution I’ve seen is to have questions written down and handed to some sort of moderator to read through and ask the good ones.
I have an hour to give a talk. The basic point I am trying to explain takes forty-five minutes. One possibility is to pad the talk with additional arguments, examples, etc.
But I think it usually works better to spend the last fifteen minutes responding to particular points raised by the audience, the subset of the ideas related to the basic point that people in the audience are particularly interested in, which I don’t know in advance.
It also reduces the problem of people in the audience thinking that there is an obvious hole in my argument which would have collapsed it if I had been forced to face it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/10/crime-runs-family/573394/
There are families with very high proportions of criminals, and it seems that the family culture makes a difference.
Not good journalism there. They stated several times that “there is no such thing as a crime gene,” even as the article seemed to indicate differently. Based on research that indicates personality is highly inheritable through genes, and almost none is passed down through parental behavior, it seems likely that the criminal behavior appearing in families is biological, not environmental. IF the article talked about adopted kids being as criminal as those not adopted, then they’d have some evidence. As it is, the article is bunk.
Did you miss the part where they dramatically lowered recidivism simply by incentivizing the ex-cons to not move back to their old location?
I think your overall point about some significant fraction of criminal behavior being environmental or environmental x genetic is correct. Pretty sure heritability of criminal behavior isn’t close to 1. Even if you assumed the impossible like heritability of desire to commit criminal behavior was 1, it seems clear you could affect the actual incidence rate of criminal behavior by making committing crime harder. Someone far away from anyone else has a much more limited range of crimes they can commit.
Minor nitpick though in that moving someone to a new location where the police don’t know who they are may also affect the odds they get caught. I assume whoever ran the study did correct for any obvious confounds like how likely someone is to be caught in different jurisdictions overall. But if the local cops have your entire family down as troublemakers, that’s rather different and hard to control for.
Somehow I did miss that part, oops. Okay it wasn’t total bunk.
But digging a little deeper, that could still be related to personality research indicating that little behavior comes from parental behavior.
1) What quanta said — it was just easier to hide.
2) Even more, I suspect the reason might be the environment does make a difference to criminals. just not the parental environment. At least that is what the research seems to indicate — that direct parental influence has little effect, and yet environment is still 50%, which implies it is other things. So removing them from those other things could well be effective, and still consistent with the latest research.
Certainly, I’m not saying it is a slam dunk that the parents’ behavior hasn’t effected the crime. For one thing, I think that research occurred in middle class environments; perhaps a different result would occur in criminal environments. Also, I don’t know that criminal behavior was one of those things that have been part of the research. My point was that the article didn’t get us any closer to the truth. The piece I missed initially was somewhat useful, but only somewhat.
*sigh*
If there were “a crime gene”, it would be flamingly obvious, kind of like Mendel’s famous peas – single gene inheritance, nice Mendelian pattern, etc. etc. And most importantly, a lot of the offspring would not inherit, unless no one ever bred with someone lacking 2 matching copies of the gene, which would be hard to arrange.
OTOH, if there were a large number of genes each of which had some variants that statistically raise the probability of criminal behaviour, it would be a compex tangle at least as complicated as intelligence, with raging net.arguments to match. There’s certainly room for that, without there being “a crime gene”.
Damned if I know what the authors meant, but given the overall level of clue defecit disorder in the average person’s understanding of genetics, I’m betting that the journalists were thinking of wrinked and smooth peas, or sickle cell anemia, not e.g. something like intelligence.
Actually, there is a kind of “crime gene” with “single gene inheritance, nice Mendelian pattern” :
X-linked borderline mental retardation with prominent behavioral disturbance: phenotype, genetic localization, and evidence for disturbed monoamine metabolism.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14018970-600-does-the-aggressive-gene-lurk-in-a-dutch-family/
Fortunately, this gene variant, with inactive MAOA gene, is present only in that one Dutch family. What exist in population at large are variants like 2R and 3R, with reduced MAOA gene activity (if I understand it correctly) that make those individuals more predisposed of crime, especially if they were abused in childhood, but not always inevitably criminal.
Update on the SSC Old School D&D campaign:
In the days of King Minos, before he had a great navy, the north-central coast of Crete was plagued by pirates who dropped their oarsmen off to become land bandits. A Follower of the king named Eumedes hired a wandering Cleric of Apollo (Protus), a witch named Kirke, a foreign Fighter (Outis) and a local Satyr (Talaos) to flush them out of their hideouts for him and his javelin-men.
Between clearing out two hideouts (a coastal cave and a captured villa), they attended a procession honoring Rhea at the Labyrinth of Knossos, where they picked up a female Thief named Theano and Alek the Explorer (Ranger). They all found amber beads and a gold figurine of a lion-goat monster with a snake for a tail, raising the question of where the pirates had stolen loot before landing here.
These heroic deeds have impressed the authorities of the Labyrinth, and Kirke in particular is seeking employment there, hoping to learn new spells in the archive. Meanwhile, there is a mission for them that requires borrowing a ship, where they might meet new PCs…
We play Saturdays on Discord starting at 3/6 Pacific/Eastern.
Not cool, dude.
3-day rule.
I keep seeing ads that talk about how “addictive” various online games are and how people playing them are totally “hooked”. It’s strange that advertisers are resorting to these words when trying to attract users. Addition is a bad thing, right? People get hooked on dope of various kinds, and their lives gradually spiral downwards until they end up homeless or in jail. That’s the story of addiction. Yet ad-men are using these words to sell things to people. Did I miss another damn culture shift?
There was an article in the German Vice about a women who made the shitty porn ads you see in the grey area of the internet. She said that it was in fact intended that those ads have spelling mistakes, bad German and are generally stupid. This is because they are targeted at people stupid enough to buy the porn subscription service they offer. I could imagine that the same is true for the video game ads, as they surely are for some kind of browser game or MMO.
I think “addictive” has been used as a positive for video games since at least Pac-Man. The positive implication is that it’s something that you will enjoy indefinitely and be able to fill your time with; it’s aimed at people who are bored, either because they’ve got nothing to do or because the productive things they could fill their time with are tedious.
I think some of this is euphemism treadmill.
Compare this to how people self-describe the experience of playing a great immersive game or watching a TV series on Netflix. Words like “binge”, “hooked”, and phrases like “I can’t stop” and “I’m completely addicted” seem common.
To the extent we are dealing with kind of game that is extremely repetitious, like Candy Crush, etc. people may simply be looking for that experience (which might actually be described as addiction, I think?) It’s the next new high.
I had noticed something like that in a different context. “Spoiling” a child used to mean ruining him or her; now it means indulging him or her.
I’ve always taken it to mean ruining the child through over-indulgence. A random website (always reliable sources of knowledge!) suggests it had this meaning as far back as the 17th century. A slightly less random website seems to agree.
In a dating context, spoiling someone is an euphemism for giving them objects of value other than actual money. Such as buying clothes, jewellery, shoes, accessories, fancy dinners, spa getaways, etc. It’s a popular way to have transactional sex while pretending it’s not.
I live a couple blocks from a store called “Spoiled Baby”. They sell baby clothes and toys. If spoiling a child retained its original negative meaning, I think they would have called it something else.
If watering down terms is the new thing, perhaps it is time for an abortion clinic named “Ruined Daughters” and a tough-love tutoring service named “Worthless Sons”.
I don’t know, I think some folks are okay, consciously or not, with describing their habits like they are out of their control. I know I fall victim to this all the time. (Irony fully intended.)
I played on addictinggames.com in middle school. It’s not a recent cultural shift.
It’s not the only case of negative words being a good thing in an advertising context, either. How often have you seen “decadent” or “sinful” chocolate cake on a menu?
Oh, right. “If you’re a jaded second-generation trust fund scion, we suggest you try our deliciously decadent chocolate cake. It’s a welcome distraction from getting high and buggering the servants.”
You must also try the creme caramel. It’s positively dissolute.
https://www.facebook.com/brad.hicks.982/posts/2378846485478034
Quoted in full because I know an ssc reader who doesn’t have facebook account. Are they the only one?
******
So the first round of forensics are in on the malfunctioning Texas voting machines. There’s pretty convincing evidence that it’s incompetent design, not fraud: some voters for both parties are having their votes distributed at random rather than to the candidates they thought they voted for. Due to a really crappy design, you can follow the instructions on the screen to the letter, watch it register your vote the way you meant it, and then have the machine totally record it wrong. (I’ll link articles and discussion threads in the comments.)
This comes right on the heels of an extraordinary article on election digital security by Vox. As a retired computer scientist, I have to say that this is the first article I’ve ever read, about the subject of computer science, by a non-scientist reporter, that didn’t have anything cringe-worthy in it. It details all of the things that have gone wrong or certainly will go wrong, sooner or later, with the way that we run our elections in America, and how much attention we’re putting in the wrong places. I can’t recommend it highly enough. (I’ll also link it in the comments.)
But this Texas fiasco is a perfect, timely example of something I’ve been thinking about ever since reading the Vox article, something we’re going to have to learn and accept, even though nobody’s going to like it:
No voting system is ever going to be 100% error proof. Not even old fashioned paper ones. It’s going to take heroic effort to make one that’s 99.9% accurate; getting to better than 99.5% accurate is going to be a financial and technical challenge. Which means …
If the margin of the vote is less than 0.5% (or even more than that, no better than we’re doing now), it will never be possible to say who actually won the election. If the margin of the vote is less than that, we’re going to have to accept that the office was handed out more or less at random.
Which, in this case, means that if Beto O’Rourke wins the Texas senate seat and the Democrats would only control the Senate with his vote? or, the other way around, if the Republicans hold the Senate by a single vote and that has to include Ted Cruz’s “win” in that seat? And no fraud can be eliminated, and the result survives a recount, and it’s really close? Then we’re just going to have to accept that who gets to chair the Senate committees next year, and whether or not Vice President Pence gets to cast deciding votes, was decided at random, because we’ll never be able to know which side benefited more from the voting machine errors.
It’s not like it’s never happened before! The negotiations that brought Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency were pretty dubious, enough that some journalists spent his career calling him “Your Fraudulency,” but there was no more definitive way to decide who won the 1876 election, so we had to let him surrender to the Confederate revanchists in 1877. Richard Nixon felt that he had pretty good reasons to believe that the Illinois electoral votes were fraudulently assigned to JFK in 1960 via back-office ballot-box stuffing. It took decades to prove, even tentatively, that he was probably wrong. We certainly weren’t going to wait that long! So he accepted the results with as much grace as he could, ran again in ’68, and won.
I think it’s pretty clear that both of George W. Bush’s presidential elections were marred by fraud — fraudulent vote counting in Florida 2000, and fraudulent turning away of voters in Ohio in 2004. But neither one could be proved in time. It took the Miami Herald two years to prove the real result of the Florida presidential election of 2000, and we’re still arguing about the polling place problems in Ohio 2004. So, for lack of any better way to decide who won, nobody complained when the Republican majority on the Supreme Court broke every prior election law ruling and every subsequent election law ruling to award the presidency to their party. Or, more to the point, we complained, but we accepted it as settled.
If the election is close enough to steal, if ANY election is close enough to have been stolen or awarded by mistake, we’ll never ever be able to prove whether it was stolen, mistaken, or not. That’s probably something we’re going to have to live with. Just like our ancestors lived with it before electronic voting was even a thing.
Also: God doesn’t actually care whether Prince Charles succeeds Elizabeth II as the King of England, and wouldn’t even if the post still held real power.
We’re seeing the difference between democracy as a practical method of selecting leaders, and democracy as a legitimizing myth. In practice, if one candidate gets 50.5% of the vote and another 49.5%, either one is probably good enough as a leader (or, alternately, neither is but you’re stuck). In practice, if your party’s candidate only gets 50.5% popular support against an opponent you’re not willing to admit will be good enough for the next term, then you should be ashamed for not having run a better candidate, understand that luck is going to play a potentially decisive role in translating popular support to electoral victory even if every vote is perfectly counted, and accept that all you’ve earned at 50.5% is a bigger slot on the roulette wheel that’s about to be spun.
But if you need democracy as a legitimizing myth, if people are going to go around sending pipe bombs through the mail unless they are convinced their government is anchored in free and fair elections, then you need to either count the votes perfectly or get everybody to agree not to look too closely at the flaws in vote-counting. And counting the votes perfectly is only slightly more plausible than arranging for a deity to anoint your next king.
I think we’re actually already seeing the breakdown of democracy as a legitimating myth, particularly in the USA. I’m not 100% certain – what civics I learned was in Canada, and many aspects of the US system are very different, in ways that are fairly subtle, but nonetheless important – and more often than not completely unstated. In particular, the US system is more adversarial, probably from its initial design. Thus various things which would look like – and be – irretrievable system breakdown in Canada, may well be business as usual in the US.
Three small data points, in chronological order as I observed them:
– Attempts to impose “democracy” on other countries by force. Imposing “capitalism” by force can make sense. So can ousting dictators who have little popular support, and letting local people then rearrange their government to their satisfaction. But forcing democracy? When the voters don’t want it. Huh?
– Media productions that portray a monarchy, mostly from the view of the royals, with no politics in sight – and call it a “democracy” – as if the name was a magic label giving it legitimacy and approval.
– What appear to me to be increasing numbers of irreconcilable defeated voters – people who basically don’t concede that their opponents will do an adequate job in power, or even that they were legitimately elected. Birthers and people who went from voting against Trump to immediately demanding his impeachment. Nutters with guns and bombs.
In the 1960s, there was a lot of conflict, and probably a lot of people who didn’t accept/respect either political party. But those that weren’t rioting, or “turned on … dropped out” seem to have accepted the legitimacy of the other major party.
This looks to me more like earlier periods that culminated in the US civil war than like anything recent. Not like immediately before, but perhaps the presidency of Andrew Jackson.
OTOH, I’m not American, and didn’t follow US news at all closely until relatively recently. Maybe all the current controversy really is just business as usual.
Could you explain what you’re referring to in your second point about the media presenting a monarchy as a democracy?
The current political animosity doesn’t feel like business as usual, but honestly I don’t think it’s too different from how it’s been in the past. A few months ago Matt Yglesias of Vox wrote an article pointing out that swing voters still matter in elections. In terms of distrust of politics, back just before Trump’s election Bill Maher apologized for some of the rhetoric he had used to decry Bush and Romney, but insisted that this time with Trump he really meant it. There was definitely a lot of polarization under Bush.
What has appeared to change is how much social media can amplify this. It does look like people are increasingly angry – but it’s unclear how much of this is just the 1% of active social media users being loud, with 99% staying silent (I think this was discussed on the subreddit recently?). I don’t think that people are losing trust in the system en masse just yet.
Star Wars prequels, maybe? That’s the closest thing I can think of, but I wouldn’t read too much into those tea leaves.
Yep, I think it was one of the Star Wars movies.
It seemed like a prize case of “US media expects viewers not to know what ‘democracy’ means” – just to think of it as something vaguely positive.
The Queen of Naboo is explicitly established to be elected for a four year term, and may not serve more than two terms. That’s not a monarchy presented as a democracy, it’s a democracy pretending to be a monarchy.
If we’re going to take that as an indicator of what US media expects of its viewers. Then the reasonable conclusion is that they expect viewers do know what democracy means, and will not accept a non-democratic government as the good guys.
Personally, i take it more as an indicator that George Lucas himself sees democratic governments as default good guys, but thought it would be cool to have a country country that only elected young women as President and called them Queens.
Where in recent years has the US forced democracy against the will of the voters?
It seems like Gulf War II would be the most recent prominent example.
@Arlie
Your contention is that the Iraqis preferred Saddam?
I think the Iraqis preferred theocratic government. They kept trying to put Sharia laws in their constitution and the US envoys kept having to nix it (epistemic status: thing I remember hearing somewhere). They may not have liked Saddam, but they didn’t like (or understand) democracy, either.
@cassander – what Conrad Honcho said
@Conrad Honcho & Arlie
It’s been most of a decade since the US lost the ability to veto Iraqi constitutional changes. They haven’t established a theocracy. They’re obviously not a particularly liberal society, but they’re no worse than what you’d expect for a democratic arab country.
This is, ironically, because the US system was designed to be non-adversarial. The government the Framers of the Constitution were envisioning wasn’t even supposed to have political parties. Originally the Vice-Precident was supposed to be whoever got the second most votes in a Presidential election. This didn’t work and was amended less than two decades later, but it illustrates the cooperative mindset. As such the system has few mechanisms to handle or channel actual adversarial competition between parties, with the result that said competition winds up being much more antagonistic.
The US system was designed to be adversarial in the sense that power is divided into different roles. Each role should be fighting to protect its own power in a way that is intended to ensure no one person can get too powerful.
Contrast with Canada where the executive Prime Minister is also the head of the legislature, and the cabinet is also mostly drawn from the legislature (in the US if a congressperson is appointed to a cabinet post they are expected to step down from their congregational seat).
In a parliamentary style democracy the party that holds the legislature wields considerable power, and the parties tend to be more tightly controlled by their leadership. In the US, even when the same party holds the Presidency and both houses (Barack Obama’s first 2 years, Trump’s too), because they were elected in different way, on different terms, it’s much harder for them to enact legislation.
Yes in that sense it is designed to be more adversarial. Ironically one of the most fundamental failures bedevilling the United States is one that the Framers could not have envisioned: Congress has been systematically and voluntarily divesting itself of its powers, either by explicitly assigning them to the Presidency, or by simply refusing to legislate on contentious issues, leaving them instead to be resolved by the courts. The end result is that whichever party doesn’t hold the Presidency feels disenfranchised , while the Courts have become increasingly politicized.
The thing I noticed first was (some) Americans having no concept of a loyal opposition.
I saw this in a small volunteer organization, where the whole idea of disagreeing over means – but not ends – appeared inconceivable. It was basically a case of “be loyal to The Leader, or get out”. Now that could be merely one corrupt organization – except the basic concepts didn’t seem to exist in any of the members’ minds, not even as things to be given lip service while contracdicting with all your actions.
Of course I realize that the phrase “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition” is a British/Commonwealth soundbite, and so wouldn’t be recognized by many graduates of American “social studies”. But even the concept didn’t seem to ring a bell.
Other things I later saw in real world US politics merely seemed to add more detail to that first obervation.
As I understand it, the “loyal” in “loyal opposition” points to the Crown, not to the party in government? I don’t see how that would make sense in an American presidential context, where the head of state and the head of government are the same guy, or in the context of a small volunteer organization, where it’s not clear what being head of state would even mean.
Americans have at least historically been willing to impute patriotism to (at least some) people across the aisle, although that does seem to be getting rarer.
@Nornagest
Loyal to the country, or to the mission of the organization, without being loyal to/partisans of the person currently in charge.
I think Americans very much believe in the concept of loyal opposition. How many coups of elected officials have you seen in the US? It is true that the losing side always predicts doom for the country when then other side is elected. But I’ve never seen anyone trying to reverse an election because it was so terrible. The rhetoric each time a Republican president is elected gets worse every time, but I didn’t see any kind of revolution to prevent Trump from taking office. To me that is what a loyal opposition is — when you lose the election you let the other side assume the office and get working on the next election. So far at least the American culture is that the elected winner takes the office, no matter how bad he is. Maybe this will change at some point, but it is still a very strong ethic now.
What’s more, in pretty much every concession speech the loser promises to support the person they’ve spent the last several months telling us will bring the polity to ruin.
I agree that these days “democracy” 90% of the times is just an applause light, but how is it incompatible with monarchy? Isn’t there a real meaningful sense in which the Kingdom of Norway is more democratic than the People’s Republic of China?
Not incompatible with a constitutional monarchy.
But my memory of the movie has none of that explained. Which is why the out-of-the-blue “democracy” claim in a very monarchical presentation seemed so jarring when i watched it.
Your memory of the movie is faulty. In the Phantom Menace it’s stated by both Queen Amidala and Senator Palpatine that the Queen of Naboo is an elected official, which fits with Governor Sio Bibble’s earlier declaration that Naboo is a democracy. It was probably that first statement that jarred you, since yes up until that point Naboo does appear to be a hereditary monarchy, but as i said it’s later clarified that the monarch is an elected official. The next movie further establishes that the election is for a four year term, and there’s a two term limit. Also that the 14 year old Amidala wasn’t the youngest queen ever elected, which is certainly a rather unique feature of that society.
+1, with appended quibble: “we” includes the Miami Herald.
I don’t know about American elections, but over here it’s common to have recounts (and more than one in the same centre) because candidates refuse to accept that they’ve missed the quota, or they’re convinced their share of the vote should be bigger.
When it’s a close election, people will fight for a single vote to go their way. If we didn’t have paper ballots to be recounted, I imagine we’d have a lot more accusations of stolen/cheating/fraudulent results.
Basically, election results have an error distribution. If the difference between the winner and loser is small enough, then there’s a reasonable probability that the actual majority of voters wanted the other guy. As John said, this doesn’t cause big problems for democracy as a way of choosing an acceptable leader and giving the public some meaningful feedback.
Recounts are uncommon in American elections; with the first-past-the-post system that we have, the only reason to do one is if the margin of victory in a decisive precinct is smaller than the error bars for vote counting. (Or if there’s clear evidence that the tally was corrupted somehow.) That happened for Bush vs. Gore in 2000, but that was basically unprecedented at its scale.
There’s only one major election that applies to. Almost every other election is at-large within a certain district–whether that’s a state, congressional district, city, city council district or what have you. So most of the time when election machines are being used every vote counts. It’s only in Presidential elections that most votes don’t matter.
Yeah, recounts occur very frequently, simply because there are so many contests. At least a few of them every cycle will be within the legal margin providing the right to ask for a recount. Each state does have different rules on this, but usually it’s on the candidate to ask for a recount. The procedure for this varies from state to state as well, I’m fairly certain.
States that have of a Board of Elections, rather than running the process via the elected Secretary of State, seem to handle this stuff more professionally, but I can’t really back that observation up.
Rambling on about Bush stealing the ’04 election has always been a sure signal to me that the person writing is a crank. Bush won Ohio by 100k votes, in a state where he had a 53% approval rating, by almost exactly his percentage of the exit polls, and from which bush raised almost twice as much money as kerry. to claim that there was clear fraud is dubious, and it’s an especially rich claim when made a mere paragraph after totally dismissing the claims of kennedy’s fraud in 1960, for which there is considerably more evidence than the nothingburger of ’04.
The number of elections that are close enough that fraud is possible is pretty small. the number where it’s close enough and of national import is smaller still. this post reeks to me of concern trolling (Not you Nancy, I think it’s a post worth discussing here, I mean that the author was concern trolling). They’re not worried about the legitimacy of democracy, they feel that they’ve gotten (or are about to get) cheated out of some wins for their team and are trying to wrap that feeling up in some higher minded concerns.
Yes, electronic voting machines are a bad idea and yes, we should have paper ballots, and yes we should have voter ID laws and more rigorous monitoring of voter rolls. But ultimately, the number of elections that are close enough to be within that .5% margin of error is tiny, and the number of national import smaller still. There are far larger threats to democracy than the occasional close election.
Several years of participation on this and other fora have demonstrated pretty conclusively to me that Nancy is not a crank. She may be wrong, but her brain works fine.
I said specifically that I was talking about the author of the piece, not nancy herself.
@Nancy Lebovitz
As someone without a Facebook account I thank you!
No facebook account here either.
I don’t know what to think about this: potato gin? Isn’t that, you know, vodka? 😀
(Honestly, recently it’s like everyone and his dog is doing craft beers, craft ciders, and new gins).
I was under the impression that to be legally considered gin, a liquor had to be distilled from a mash that was at least 50 percent rain clouds and pine cones.
Nah, from my understanding, gin is a drink redistilled to include juniper (plus other herbal flavors if you like).
Vodka specifically is neutral tasting spirit. You can distill vodka from a potato base(or any base really), then redistill it with junipers to turn it into gin.
I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong.
As gin is an abomination I don’t frankly care what it’s made of. The only thing that’s worse than gin is a gin & tonic: hey, let’s take this awful-tasting medicine and mix it with the most awful-tasting spirit. That’ll make it more palatable!
I think gin’s defined more by the botanicals you add (juniper, mainly) than by what it’s distilled from. And on the other side of things, you can get wheat or rye vodkas pretty easily; I’m told grain vodka is more traditional than potato vodka in some countries, although I forget which.
Speaking of hoax threats, remember those bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers that turned out to originate from an Israeli teenager? And maybe he had a brain tumor? For all I know, he really does have a brain tumor.
I want you to guess what was going on before you click the link. This explanation never would have occurred to me.
The link
Wow. *That* was not at all on the list of things I expected to see!
Pffft. Kids these days! In my day, hoax bomb threats to get the school day disrupted were done for free! (As for framing someone else, that was what the IRA was for – phone in and say this bomb was left by the Ra) 🙂
Oh, so it may have been a hoax hoax and the threats were really requested by a malicious actor? Perhaps if this CNN article turns out to be wrong it will be a hoax hoax hoax? Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
I’d say everything just keeps getting weirder but I probably just wasn’t paying enough attention before.
Amusing kerfuffle on Romanian Tumblr (English-language version): seemingly the new Romanian Minister of Research and Innovation is/was a dean in a university (that’s not the kerfuffle); he doesn’t believe in evolution because it’s not interesting, he thinks humans came from the future and a parallel universe (hey, I’m only going on what they’re saying) and he writes/wrote Harry Potter fanfic to explore this (because of course he would) on his Facebook page which has now all been scrubbed and memoryholed. Sample translation here 🙂
OMG. I never imagined I would find from SSC what happens in my country.
Yes, the part with evolution and paralel worlds is no hoax, the future minister Nicolae Hurduc really said it in an interview:
See the automatic translation by Google:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ro&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ziaruldeiasi.ro%2Fstiri%2Fprof-nicolae-hurduc-a-mie-imi-este-foarte-greu-sa-cred-ca-omul-se-trage-din-maimutaa–199206.html&edit-text=&act=url
And the man has published research:
https://scholar.google.ro/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Nicolae+Hurduc&oq=
I’m not very surprised. Our current government is very much despised by most of the intelligent/educated Romanians – being very corrupt and trying to decriminalize some acts of corruption and amnistiate white collar criminals – so it would have been quite difficult to find a real scientist willing to join them (and besides, most Romanian scientists left the country in college).
I would say that considered as a mechanism, a monkey is pretty impressive. I’m not sure what his beef is.
I think he is really confused. He justifies himself in the next phrase saying: “because people have some characteristics, consciousness and soul” although he just said before that man is “a mechanism, a machine so complex“.
We have a three day rule about discussing any tragedy in any even vaguely culture war context. Not that your comment is very culture war, but it could easily go that way.
Thanks, I was unaware of that rule, I’ll delete the post.
Yeah, Scott’s deleted several threads about this already, though both of them were shit-stirring, rather than honestly seeking answers like this one.