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Question about the rising cost of public works:
I was driving along the GW Parkway the other day, and Memorial Bridge was getting worked on. This is a major bridge connecting Northern VA with DC. It’s got six lanes (three in each direction) and supports about 70,000 crossings per day. They’re doing work on it currently, but they haven’t shut the bridge down. Instead, they’ve built a temporary station on the side of the Potomac River, and they’re literally disassembling portions of the bridge, floating it over to the work station (dock?) via barge, and doing the work there. As a result, only three lanes will be operating at any given time. These repairs will take at least two years to complete.
To me, this is a curious approach. Surely they could do this repair much more quickly and cheaply if they just shut the whole thing down and repaired both sides at the same time (presumably being able to use more workers simultaneously). But I imagine shutting down the whole bridge would cause massive disruption for people. The additional traffic from going from three lanes in each direction to one plus a flex lane (direction depends on time of day) is bad enough for some folks, but a complete closure would probably be much more disruptive. So I conclude that the planners opted for a more expensive, longer option in order to avoid worst-case disruptions for commuters.
I walk through this anecdote because it illustrates a scenario whereby costs for things like big public-interest construction could rationally grow with no directly observable reason; hold the price of labor, the price of materials, the regulatory environment, and the risk-acceptance behavior constant. Instead, the most important factor for the rationally-acting public planner may be the cost born by the public who are negatively effected by the construction. The cost of these disruptions are unrelated to the direct costs of building the bridge. If there aren’t many people using the bridge and their time isn’t worth very much, then forcing them to take an alternate route that increases their commute by half an hour and worsens traffic conditions in the surrounding areas isn’t such a big deal. If there are lots of people who use the bridge and their time is worth a lot of money, then inconveniencing them less by taking a longer, more expensive route to building the bridge makes sense.
So, if these costs are growing at a high rate (because, for example, bridge crossings are increasingly common or the value of the time of the commuters is growing*), a planner in one time period may opt for a cheaper-on-paper option that’s more disruptive while a later planner may choose the option that is more expensive-looking but reduces the costs to commuters. When we go back and try to study the cost of things like bridges, all we see are the on-paper costs and conclude that something called “cost growth” is happening.
I looked back on the cost disease posts and didn’t see anything that spoke directly to this argument (though I may have just missed it). I’m not sure what portion the observed cost growth could be accounted for via a mechanism like this, but my prior is there are many additive causes, and this could be one.
*In the particular case of commuting, I could see an exponential growth in terms of cost where, because the overall transport system has increasingly little slack, the hit from a bridge shut down is costly in a way that is disproportionate to the raw number of people who use the bridge: if Bridge A shuts down, then everyone goes to Bridge B or C, but then those are way over capacity, so everyone’s commute is doubled, not just those folks who’d have been crossing bridge A.
Its one answer, but that answer opens up a different question, why isn’t there a second bridge? Wouldn’t that cut down on commuting time and benefit the average commuter, and if so why aren’t their preferences being pushed in that direction?
NIMBYism? A new bridge means a lot more noisy stinky vehicles running by someone’s house, and with the middle class already struggling [citation needed], that is hard to stomach. Also, and relatedly, zoning ordinances.
I can’t speak for DC, but my old neighborhood had a brand new bridge built and the threat of eminent domain tanked house prices near the proposed area for years.
Joseph Greenwood is right that it’s about home value, but in my experience it’s more about the fact that a new bridge or highway can mean that you lose your home or get shafted on selling it because other people don’t want to risk buying a home only to immediately lose it.
They usually try to twin bridges on major freeways these days to provide the flexibility we’re discussing, but traditionally bridges were the most expensive and difficult part of a road project and minimizing bridge construction was a substantial portion of the route selection.
I apparently ran myself out of NYtimes articles, but the one regarding subway construction costs posted in some of the cost disease posts here touched on this: in many places, when fixing the subway/light rail, the authorities just shut the line down for a couple months, whereas in New York they basically keep it open and do the work on nights and weekends but take a year of work overall. Aside from the extra money for wages on odd shifts like that, the hoops you jump through to make sure you’ve got the line reopened at the start of the next workday can be very costly, since it provides extreme constraints on how you do the work.
One other example is the Olmsted Lock and Dam, which was authorized in 1988 for about $800 million dollars, and was finally completed this year at a cost of about $3 billion. There were a number of problems feeding into the cost and schedule overrun, but one worth discussing here was the decision to build the dam in the wet. Normally, you’d construct a facility like this in the dry, where you divert the river, build cofferdams, pump out the water over where you want to build the dam, then crews can just drive around on the riverbed to place concrete with dump trucks or conveyors. However, that would have severely disrupted river traffic.
There are a couple of ways to sequence in-the-dry construction, but a common one is to cofferdam one-half of the river (1st Stage Cofferdam) and build half the dam, leaving low sections. During the 1st stage, the open half of the river functions as the diversion. After the first half is complete, you pull out the 1st stage cofferdam, and build the 2nd stage cofferdam around the other half of the river, and the low bays function as the river diversion. Once the 2nd stage construction is complete, you do a smaller 3rd stage cofferdam around the low bays and build them up to their final ogee height. You can have an interruption to river traffic of 18 months to 2 years with this during 2nd stage construction* (they can just go through the open half of the river during the first stage), which could smash the shipping businesses that are using the navigable channel. How many businesses can ride out two years with no revenue? It used to be that we handled this the same way we handled people who didn’t like where we located freeways: by telling them to suck a dick. To be fair, before the original navigation structures were built, the shipping business was a lot less lucrative so there was far less opportunity cost lost. However, this method of efficient construction is no longer available.
There are a lot of things in civil works that are much more difficult when you’re working with existing infrastructure that people rely on and you can’t shut down. The major project I’m working on right now is much more difficult because we have to shape it around a bunch of stuff that already exists, and a sister project is *really* struggling because not only do they have to work around a bunch of already-existing stuff, they’re limited further by not being able to shut some things down during construction. The cost increases are mind-blowing, especially the difference between my and the other project due to the construction constraints.
Like all discussion of cost disease, I don’t think that this explains it on its own. If there really was a “magic bullet” that was responsible, I think it would jump out from analyses. I think that the hoops we jump through to avoid shutting down what has become critical infrastructure is a component of it, along with safety, environmental reviews, and a bunch of other stuff. I do think that you’ve identified something that could be in the 10% range for responsibility, though.
* I don’t know enough details about Olmsted to know exactly how long the interruption would have been. There are ways to minimize it, such as temporary locks, but generally you still have to shut down navigation for a period to build the temporary lock up to its final sill height.
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Are they working on it 24×7 using multiple shifts? Or do they work from 6-3 M-F?
When they can’t re-open the road project area for rush hour, that’s the method for minimizing road work inconvenience I wish they’d contract for more. It’s usually also cheaper, not just faster, because while you have about the same amount of total labor, you can spend less on capital equipment because the machines don’t care as much as people do about working longer hours.
I know there are interactions with the total amount of work available for contractors, etc… but still…
This could explain the Chinese being able to build for really cheap, but would not explain europeans being able to build cheaper than Americans, particularly as there is a non zero chance of finding some archeological site every time you build in Europe.
I just want to hop in on this thread to mea culpa, because on an earlier thread I complained that Chicago was denying Elon Musk his tunnel stuff, and Elon Musk’s tunnels turn out to leave a lot to be desired. CatCube pointed out the problems at the time.
For highway overpasses, there’s a general movement towards accelerated construction, where the work is done offsite as much as possible, then the entire replacement is done in one or two nights.
Decent article on the topic, including estimates of how much it impacts costs (+20% or thereabouts), and pretty much your exact reasoning on why it’s worth it:
Has anybody ever tried to map out a unified conspiracy theory, and figure out how e.g. the Antichrist and reptillian humanoids would fit together? Both fictional and purportedly non-fictional works qualify for these purposes.
A lot of conspiracy theories already draw on previous generations of conspiracy theories and urban legends, so there’s a ton of overlap to exploit. For example, I’ve heard premillennial dispensationalists say that UFO abductions and ‘coverups’ are being staged by satanic forces to lay the groundwork for the future world government to claim that the Rapture is an alien attack. I’m interested in how far you could push this sort of thing to create a single unified conspiracy theory.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, ever since an RPG discussion we had a few OTs back, but I didn’t want to ask this on the visible thread because conspiracy theories are pretty controversial these days. I’d like to clarify that this isn’t meant seriously but rather a world-building exercise.
Sort of? Not me, though.
Fiction tries it, sometimes. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy (1975, now generally sold as an omnibus) is a pretty good early example; 2000 shooter/RPG Deus Ex is a more recent one. (Just the first game, though; later ones are straight cyberpunk with some conspiracy sprinkles.)
Yeah, Deus Ex was a good example of the sort of thing I’m looking for just with a much more restricted scope.
I’ve heard a lot about the Illuminatus! trilogy but never actually read it. Something about Discordianism puts me off, it just sounds like aphasia half of the time. Maybe I should pick it up anyway.
Off topic:
I loved the original Deus Ex, and it’s kind of sad how few recent games can match the feeling of size and choice that game offered. I can play a sandbox game with photorealistic maps literally hundreds or thousands of times larger, fully open world, but still not get that feeling. Supposedly the prequels were good though, although I haven’t played them.
I also loved the original, haven’t played the sequel, but I did play Human Revolution and would pretty unreservedly recommend it.
Good to know, I’ll check them out.
I have played the sequel and it’s absolutely awful. Pretty much the only positive things to come out of it were memes about the Omar appreciating your business. It’s not worth playing.
It’s called Deus Ex and it’s fantastic.
I’ve seen it, I think he’s overly critical on the themes, judging the game too much by what came after and with a rose colored look at what the actual 90s were like. But he does nail what was fun about the gameplay. also, this.
You should probably start by thinking what you want us to exclude. I could come up with one where the Antichrist who’s going to call the Rapture a UFO attack is Mabus from the Centuries of Nostradamus and among his enemies are the Learned Elders of Zion, but maybe Nostradamus is too discredited so many years after 1999 and you also want to exclude anti-Semitic conspiracy theories?
I like Nostradamus actually, he feels very retro since I feel like I haven’t heard anyone mention him since the early aughts.
Probably smarter to exclude anti-semitic conspiracy theories if only just because this is Scott’s site and things can get linked out of context. They’re a big chunk of the conspiracy theory landscape, but there’s no way to include them without creating a ton of flame.
In the beginning there were the Lizardmen. One of the lizardmen approached the woman, tried to find out what the new race of men was like, and in return was smote by her God, striped of his limbs and turned into a serpent. The Lizardmen learned there that they would never treat with man peacefully, but nor could they ignore them. Instead they would adopt the mask and cloak, take to shadows and watch. Wait for the time they could strike back at the favored race of God, the visitor of the far-off star, and have vengeance for their maimed father.
Fortunately patience was the chief virtue of the lizardmen. They infiltrated Babylon, setting up a cult to the dragon god, almost destroying the kingdom of Israel, but ultimately that empire fell when they were discovered, and the lizardmen dispersed. They likewise infiltrated Rome, this time setting up their gods in human visage, attempting to enslave the world of men again, and succeeding for some years, until Julius Ceasar discovered their catspaws in the Senate and made himself an Emperor. For years the Emperors warred covertly against the Lizardmen, ultimately turning to the Jewish God in order to root them out. Again the lizardmen were dispersed, but not before hiding their existence and worming their way into the tribes at the edge of the empire.
A few men, though, were able to retain knowledge of this foe of humanity. They formed a secret society, which later became the Knights Templar, wrapping the truth of their ancient battle with fictions of humble pilgrims. The secret wars waged for years across Europe, until the European powers struck out at the Templars, unwittingly serving the Lizard agenda in their greed and power lust. The few surviving Templars realized they would have to hide themselves to continue their fight, taking the guise of humble masons, passing on the secret knowledge even as they sought out an uncorrupted land to found a pure nation in–America.
Then the Antichrist will be in league with the serpentmen, because Caesar turned the Republic into an Empire to defang their agents in the Senate, and as St. Paul said, you know who (the Emperor in Christian oral tradition) is restraining the coming of the Antichrist. When the last Caesar/Kaiser abdicated in 1918, the absence of the Restrainer led to the Second Antichrist taking over the German nation, Austria-Hungary et al… but this was not to be the time of the Rapture and seven-year Tribulation. We would have to wait for Mabus the Third Antichrist, a Muslim who wears a cerulean turban. When he is elected leader of a United Nations that achieves it’s goal of transitioning to One World Government, the Rapture will happen and he’ll blame a mass UFO attack. Anyone who misses the Rapture and becomes a practicing Christian instead of accepting his story will be rounded up by Men in Black, who have the Black Helicopter fleet.
Someone actually did make a map (as in a diagram). Here it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/aewe38/conspiracy_theory_grand_unified_chart_linked_in/
Surprised no one’s mentioned Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles yet. It’s weird as hell but that pretty much goes with the territory.
How about a consensus reality system where conspiracy theories come into being from enough people believing in them? That way even the contradictory conspiracy theories can co-exist.
Wait, now I’m just describing the Technocracy from Mage.
The lizardmen came first…until they discovered time travel.
Non-American Americans are seeing their bank accounts being frozen
America has a history of being hostile to emigrants with its taxes. The first income tax was instituted (temporarily) during the Civil War. There was concern and/or outrage over people moving abroad to avoid paying this taxes and thus failing to contribute to the cost of the war. So not only did the first income tax apply to Americans living abroad, but they were taxed at a higher rate than those residing in the US & could not benefit from exemptions.
When the tax was reintroduced in 1894 and 1912, emigrants were again taxed. The US is now one of only two countries who tax citizens living abroad, next to Eritrea.
In 2010, FATCA became law, which requires foreign financial institutions and foreign governments to report possible foreign Americans to the IRS. This includes many people who have no idea that they are American and/or who have never lived in the US or only very briefly as a baby.
European companies and governments have increasingly been implementing this law. The result is that banks have been freezing bank accounts and denying mortgages, unless the person can supply a Social Security number. However, the amnesty process to become compliant with the IRS often takes 6 months or more.
The high costs of complying have resulted in refusal of service to people with US tax obligations, for example when making investments. Even my brother, who works in the US on a green card, was refused service by a Dutch bank a while ago.
Trump has signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act which taxes foreign earnings of foreign corporations owned by US shareholders. This seems to also impact Non-American Americans who have a company outside of the US.
These Non-American Americans can’t simply give up their nationality, but first have to get their tax situation cleared up and then may have to pay an
hostageexit fee.Some Dutch people have started an organization to help Americans overseas with their US tax burden.
PS. Apparently FATCA and taxing emigrants in general, has very high bureaucratic costs for the IRS, the people being taxed and now foreign finance companies, while bringing in relative little in taxes. Because people cannot be taxed twice, lots of these people end up not having to pay anything, but figuring that out is quite costly. So this seems like a very suitable place to cut bureaucracy and to make America a more civilized place that doesn’t put huge burdens on people to whom it provides very few services. In a globalizing world, trying to exert this kind of control over people abroad is going to impact an increasing number of people and create an increasing amount of resentment.
Overseas Americans are an unsympathetic target — one side sees them as tax-evading fatcats, the other side as disloyal — so I doubt we’ll see anything other than increasing crackdowns here.
I’m no great fan of Edward Snowden, but I’m pretty sure he’s not getting his bank account frozen in all of this.
From the US government’s perspective, and to the extent they have the power to do so, it makes sense that they should not favor the existence of a class of people who can call on the privileges of United States citizenship but not share in the responsibilities. By which I mean “taxes”, and exploring new frontiers of transparency as the IRS makes sure you aren’t using using your offshore quasi-American status to evade one penny of those taxes. Because if there’s any chance that you’re going to someday call a US consulate and demanding that some combination of the State Department and the USMC spring you from a Kreplachistani prison, they do want you paid up in advance.
From everyone else’s point of view, American citizenship is serious business – not quite at the level of Roman citizenship back in the day, but close. If you are plausibly a US citizen, you really need to A: own it and be unambiguously American, or B: jump through whatever hoops it takes to make it clear that you are not an American and won’t ever make that phone call from a Kreplachistani prison. Or C: live in a Real Country(tm) that’s willing to make its own big-boy financial and legal decisions rather than kowtow to Washington and New York because they’re America’s bitches. Even as an American citizen, I am somewhat disappointed that the EU hasn’t given its member states enough cover that they feel safe standing up to Uncle Sam on this one.
I also feel greatly dissapointed that the EU hasn’t stood up to Uncle Sam. They should give cover to banks who give service to Americans, and fuck the IRS. And they should also cover companies that give services to Iran, out of the principle of the thing.
Even if I was anti-Iran, which I’m not, I would support the EU trading with any country that the Americans imposed sanctions against, such as Cuba or North Korea.
Sadly, our dependence of Americans prevents us from doing this.
This seems to be anti-Americanism taken to the point of contrarianism. I can understand “We don’t want to be dragged along on whatever stupidity is coming out of Washington this month”, but North Korea is a pretty obvious case of someone who we should be encouraging to stop their current behavior.
It’s not anti-Americanism. I just object to any country using their economic might to punish extraterritorial activities they don’t like.
If China ever starts punishing those who do stuff they don’t like outside of China, I would say fuck China too. It’s just that at the moment the US is the only country that does so (presumably because they are the only ones who can).
And now that North Korea has nuclear weapons, I don’t see sanctions achieving anything that would trump the principle of not having countries dictate what can happen outside their borders.
This seems like an incredibly dangerous principle to have, or at least dangerously naive. If we hadn’t used our economic might on the Soviets, they might well be menacing Europe today. There are lots of things that people do which neither you nor we like, and in many cases, we take care of it so you don’t have to.
Maybe the bit where they only have a few nuclear weapons instead of a lot of nuclear weapons?
There is currently no trade with North Korea. Offering them to remove sanctions in exchange of them not producing more nuclear weapons should be an option the EU has, even if the US is against it.
I am willing to not hold that principle if there is some significant achievement that could be achieved, but I don’t think there is.
I also don’t think the Soviet Union fall had much to do with the Americans. I think it was mostly a matter of the USSR being a giant with clay feet, and it fell entirely due to internal matters.
But this is precisely what you objected to earlier. Yes, you’re framing it with the carrot instead of the stick, but in principle, you’re using your economic muscle to incentivize the activities you like, and make the ones you don’t more painful.
The bit where they spent themselves into the ground trying to keep up with us? Yeah, I think it’s fair to claim credit for that.
North Korea also got to this place with lots of countries not trading with them. It is odd to think that sanctions etc are a disincentive to their behavior.
That wasn’t the only reason, but anyway, it had nothing to do with American sanctions.
I don’t object to sanctions as such, but to Americans forcing us to have those sanctions.
The EU should have its own policy, and they should be able to trade with North Korea even if the Americans are against it. I didn’t say this should be done for free; EU treaties demand quite a lot of things from countries they are signed with. I didn’t clearly state that the EU should trade with North Korea in exchange for some concessions, even if the US thinks they are not enough. My mistake.
There is a difference between e.g. EU countries using their economic power to incentivize activities they like, and EU countries using their economic power to incentivize activities Washington likes because Washington says Do As We Say Or Else. Even if there is some overlap between what the EU likes and what Washington likes(*), it is not unreasonable for citizens of EU nations to A: not like this and B: place a higher priority on stopping this unlikable behavior from Washington over the less consequential (to the EU) unliked behavior of Pyongyang.
Also, when it comes to “using economic might to punish extraterritorial activities they don’t like”, hypothetical European trade with North Korea is wholly extraterritorial to the United States but not to Europe, so there is a difference in principle between European nations deciding to do this and Washington demanding that they do so.
In practice, it doesn’t matter. The EU has delegated to Team America the job of Policing the World while they stand off being smug about their moral superiority, so we’re the butch, they’re the bitch, North Korea is going to be policed the way Washington wants and I don’t see that changing any time soon. But there’s nothing hypocritical or unprincipled about Europeans like ana53294 wishing it were otherwise.
* And they aren’t the same, at least in this case, because ana’s proposal for a strategic arms limitation treaty is not the same thing as Washington’s demand for unilateral disarmament. The EU using its economic might to secure an arms control agreement with the DPRK might actually amount to something, in the alternate reality where the EU were willing to stand up for it.
@John Schilling
Yes, that’s what I was trying to say.
I don’t want the EU to be America’s bitch. Which we are.
The symmetry is in the fact that both involve one party using its economic power to tell another party what to do. In the first instance the EU is doing it to some other country, in the second the US is doing it to the EU. If you don’t like nations pushing each other around with their big bucks, both are objectionable. If you find one of those cases fine, you probably just want to be the one holding the stick.
I don’t object the EU telling their citizens and their companies not to trade with whomever the EU doesn’t want to, nor America doing the same.
But the US doesn’t just do that. The US also bans their own banks from offering services in Europe to companies that trade with Iran. And because so much of the banking is attached to America, and there are insurers and re-insurers and whatnot, and some of them are American, this means that the US is indirectly denying EU companies who trade with Iran access to banks, and I strongly object to that. And if an European company, such as SWISH, offers services to Iran, they can’t offer their services in the US, so no banks will evade US sanctions. The US shouldn’t be able to punish European companies for trades that are based in Europe. In fact, they shouldn’t be able to punish Europe based subsidiaries* of American companies, either.
As I said, I object to the extraterritoriality of the sanctions, not the sanctions themselves.
*Subsidiaries being, presumably, separate companies.
I don’t disagree with your general premise at least in principle, but what other ways does the US have to prevent money being funneled through US banks to Iran through [any foreign body that trades with Iran] if the US doesn’t block the banks from doing business with them?
@baconbits
Sanctions have multiple purposes. The fact that Kim has to get hard currency from the Chinese (I think) instead of being able to get it by using political prisoners to make T-shirts for Walmart constrains his options massively.
@ana
No, we were using other forms of economic warfare. And while it wasn’t the only reason, it was a major one.
I don’t have a philosophical problem with that position. So long as it’s coupled to an actually independent foreign policy, and not an attempt to get the best of both worlds by departing from the US when it seems like fun, and then coming running for help next time Putin starts growling.
I may have misread your initial comments on this, and if you’re in favor of a genuinely independent European foreign policy, backed by a strong European military, then I’ll agree with you. Our interests are in close enough alignment that I think that benefits everyone. But if you want to stop being our bitch, then you’ll need to be able to take care of yourselves.
(I also don’t have a problem, philosophical or practical, with Washington using all the means to hand to do things like enforce sanctions on Iran. If we admit the legitimacy of doing that, it’s hard to see why doing it through Europe is illegitimate.)
I also believe the EU should get a European Army, Germany should spend more on its army, and Trump is right when he criticizes Germany for buying gas from Russia.
The EU should get a unified logistics train for the different armies, and countries like Spain shouldn’t spend billions in adapting perfectly functional German Leopard tanks to local conditions.
And the EU should also build enough gas pipelines from Algiers and Azerbaijan to stop buying gas from Russia completely. What’s the point of all those sanctions if we keep buying their main export?
The US can do whatever it wants; it’s a sovereign country, and they have the right to do whatever they can get away with. But the EU should not let the US get away with imposing sanctions to companies that do what we want them to do on our soil. It’s our soil, dammit.
@ bean
People with fewer options are generally more dangerous that people with more options. Reducing his options to just a few is generally the worst strategy, worse than trade and probably worse than attempting to reduce his options to zero.
What? This makes no sense at all. He has options, like “give up your nuclear weapons, and get trade” or “have a few nuclear weapons, but no trade”. Saying that we should offer “nuclear weapons and trade”, particularly when that’s likely to mean more nuclear weapons, is just nonsensical.
My personal stance on the Gas issue is that whenever Putin does something vexing, we should really just respond by building x number of EPRs, with x being proportional to just how annoyed we are.
Because that permanently displaces gas imports, which should get Putin domestic pressure to stop being such a dick. In the event we want to send a positive message, close some coal plants.
I mean, it’s all well and good to argue for a EU that is strong and united, but that’s not the EU you actually have. The EU you actually have is pretty spineless and weak-willed when it comes to these kinds of issues, which means you occasionally get stuck with situations like the US sanctioning companies that trade with Iran, which requires you go through more hoops.
Also, without the US, the Iran situation plays out much differently, probably with a nuclear-armed Iran with lots of ICBMs pointed at European capitals, and Europe doesn’t have a defense system even remotely capable of defending itself until 2040, which still doesn’t work because internal EU strife keeps them from putting missiles and radar stations where they need to be even though they have the tech for it.
The EU can’t be strong and united unless they become much more dictatorial, because the cultural values differ too much and there is very limited willingness to sacrifice for the other.
The EU has had four multinational military “battle groups” since 2007, but those have never been deployed because countries couldn’t agree. If you turn that into a bigger EU army, it will almost never be deployed too, unless the Russkies send their tanks.
And if you aren’t drilling them constantly, if they don’t have supplies, if they aren’t actually integrated, if there isn’t a clear, consistent command strcuture, they are going to get crushed by Russian tanks.
Not to mention that if you want to be GLOBAL, you need to have global military bases and relationships with all sorts of different nations. Like, you better get buddy-buddy with Thailand and Malaysia, because that’s a globally important strait. You better have a permanent carrier presence in both the Indian and Pacific oceans, and the 90,000 ton kind, not these little helicopter launchers.
You also need a lot more AWACS, transport aircraft, and refueling tankers.
There’s basically no value to replicating this infrastructure in the EU, it all already exists through NATO.
In the absence of the US, Iran will start by bombing the Saudis and Israel.
Why would they bother with sending ICBMs to Europe? They have plenty of enemies in their backyard. Besides, they don’t seem to hate Europeans like they hate the USA.
And I’m not sure I particularly care about the Saudis or Israel either way, and I don’t see why Europe should or would interfere in an Iran-Saudi war, if it ever happens.
Why would the EU need to be a global military power? Being able to protect ourselves from Russia would be enough for me. It’s not like there are many countries that have a particular beef with the EU. Nobody is likely to attack us on our soil, other than Russia. And I don’t think going to war on foreign soil against a country that hasn’t directly attacked us is justified, anyway.
@Thomas Jorgensen
What does EPR stand for?
EPR probably stands for Evolutionary Power Reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
??????
I can see Cuba (and I think the EU still does trade with Cuba) but why on earth North Korea? Keep in mind that sanctions on North Korea have also gone through the UN Security Council, so France and the UK already had the ability to veto if they so choose.
How do you feel about nations like Japan imposing only limited sanctions on Russia despite their actions in Ukraine?
What will sanctions against North Korea achieve now that they have nuclear weapons? If the EU wants to impose its own sanctions against North Korea, that’s fine.
The sanctions on Russia didn’t work, so I would be completely OK with Japan not introducing sanctions against Russia. In fact, I think the sanctions were counter-productive, as it made ordinary Russians start thinking even more in us-vs-them mentality.
Crimeaisours is a common meme in Russia for a reason, and the sanctions just made ordinary Russians feel like they were at war, which makes them more likely to vote for authoritarian leaders (Putin stood up to those European gay muslim lovers!).
> I’m no great fan of Edward Snowden, but I’m pretty sure he’s not getting his bank account frozen in all of this.
Why not? Maybe I’ve misunderstood the point of your comment 😕
More and more “100%” respectable banks in non tax-haven, high rule of law, western countries are deciding that they can make enough money serving their own citizens, and the extra 0.01% customer base they get by taking America citizens as customers comes at such a cost and business-threating risk that there’s no point. They now almost all have laws (thanks to US pressure, and perhaps not unreasonably) requiring banks to ask if any new customer has US citizenship or residency, and the response to a positive answer is increasingly not to file the forms up-stream, but more and more “please go elsewhere”. (Rightly so: you are crazy to take U.S. legal obligations and penalties upon yourself if it’s a trivial increase to your customer base.)
On the other side of things, US financial institutions will increasingly close all investment(*) accounts for ex-pats (I’ve not got a good answer why – “the Patriot Act” is sometimes cited). This has massively accelerated since about 2016 and I can’t see any causative agent for this change. But it’s definitely real. ((*) Checking or otherwise plain- bank accounts domiciled in the US seem considerably less affected – for the moment.)
In short, it’s getting more challenging every year for a U.S. citizen “I absolutely want to pay every dime in taxes owed to the US” (and to the country of residence, and yes that often does lead to double taxation) to be effectively banked. Why wouldn’t that apply to Snowden?
My point is, Edward Snowden doesn’t live in one of those countries and almost certainly doesn’t have his bank account in one of those countries.
Facebook is going to ban white nationalist/separatist groups next week. Anybody’s guess how exactly that’ll be enforced or who will be affected.
I think of myself as a free speech maximalist or close to it, and this does not bother me. Conversely, I am bothered by the same sorts of behavior by registrars and CDNs and hosting companies, because those are infrastructure, and FB isn’t; it’s akin to the difference between the world’s largest bulletin board and a manufacturer or bulletin boards.
The only part about this that bothers me is the double standard that they won’t ban any other racist/separatist groups, because the hegemonic ideology taught in universities says only the white version is evil, because reasons.
I wonder how they deal with Antifa groups.
More less impactful than not evil by my understanding.
But that logic train has obviously proven false on a per capita basis, and as a result of the White Nationalist movement gaining steam largely in reaction to the other movements.
It’s Facebook’s platform, so they can ban who they will. And I understand the desire not to give a helping hand to people with really bad ideas.
OTOH, I worry that Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al have a lot of power to decide what groups/ideas may and may not be spoken in public. That’s not a power I’m super comfortable having in any small group of hands. And I worry a bit about slippery slopes (this year it’s white supremacists, next year will it be gun enthusiasts or immigration restrictionists?) and movable goalposts (do we see the definition of “white supremacist” used expand until it covers anyone to the right of Trump?).
In the runup to the Iraq war, a smallish set of major media outlets more-or-less closed ranks and decided that opposition to the war wasn’t going to get much of a hearing in public. That didn’t work out so well for the world or the US. The power to coordinate and exclude some ideas from widespread view seems like the sort of thing that is really easy to misuse.
+1
I agree. The current emphasis on “free speech” is a mistake because it will push the left to ignore it as a value. The problem is that many are trying to both tar the unpopular white nationalists and conflate them with the rest of the right, while insisting that the latter have nothing to worry about. We already see Trump being called a Nazi even those he has a Jewish son-in-law and whose policies are probably more Israel-friendly than any other President.
First they came for Alex Jones, and I did not speak out because Alex Jones is a crazy conspiracy theorist and I am not.
Then the came for the anti-vaxxers, and I did not speak out because they talk pseudo-scientific nonsense and I fucking love science, or something.
Then they came for the white nationalists and white separatists, and I am starting to feel a little concerned, because even though I am neither, the ground is starting to feel slippery and sloped towards banning any sort of disagreement with the mainstream narratives.
How long before the claim that open borders mass immigration from third world countries might not be a good idea is considered hate speech?
Also:
“But over the past three months our conversations with members of civil society and academics who are experts in race relations around the world have confirmed that white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups. ”
Rember when they said that the SJWs were just a bunch of kids on Tumblr and some crazy academics in X-studies departments with no impact on the real world?
It’s Facebook.
Yes, one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the entire world, devoted completely to communications between people
I expect that within a week Google, Twitter, and Paypal will follow suit, that was the case with Alex Jones.
I spoke out for Alex Jones. I guess I am a crazy conspiracy theorist, though.
I already found the original poem ridiculously sappy and insignificant. When I see people quoting/parodying it as a serious argument for the defense of their pet cause, this feeling augments exponentially.
Is that because you don’t find slippery slope arguments convincing in general, or you just really hate the sappiness?
I’m not sure sappy is the right term to use, and insignificant? It might come off a bit too easy, but it’s what happened: a lot of people favoured suppressing the communists, and it didn’t stop there.
Well, a lot of people agreed with suppressing the Communists, and that turned into a useful tool to bash a whole very wide range of people, some with some kind of ties to Communism, some with vague ideological associations in that direction, many with little connection with Communism. That gave us blacklists and loyalty oaths for some jobs and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The thing is, there really were Soviet spies and Communist sympathizers who were very susceptible to being turned by them, attempting to weaken the US government. That was a real danger. It’s just that a lot of the response that was justified by that danger turned out to be not all that effective at finding Soviet spies, but really effective and getting rid of troublesome rivals in local political battles.
I was referring to Nazi Germany – Niemoeller’s poem was riffed on.
Salami tactics is a pithier, less sappy way of capturing the same idea as the poem.
Does Niemoller getting killed make it seem less sappy?
You are thinking of someone else – Niemoeller lived for a few decades after the war. I would guess you have him mistaken with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Thanks. I actually had them confused.
Though Niemöller did spend seven years in concentration camps, so they did actually come for him.
(If not to the same degree as the Nazis’ murder targets, or presumably he wouldn’t have survived seven years.)
There were a whole bunch of “special prisoners” who, in some cases, you would have expected to get executed early on (eg, Georg Elser, who tried to assassinate Hitler) but were only executed right at the very end of the war (Elser wasn’t until April ’45).
My thinking is that the slippery slope is only an issue because of the double standard, which they get from those academics they’re wrongfully having conversations with.
Of course they’re going to come for Trump supporters next, but if this evil ideology wasn’t hegemonic in the universities, that wouldn’t be the inevitable outcome of this.
It’s worth remembering that one man’s slippery slope is another man’s modus ponens.
@vV_Vv
Remember? I still say that!
But I’ve never logged onto Facebook, so I would.
If SSC, Baen Books, Tor Publishing, SMBC, XKCD, DM of the Ring, or The Order of the Stick gets banned I’ll be sad, but from what I’ve read about them banning all and everything on Facebook and Twitter sounds like a good start!
Please also ban Airbnb, and especially Uber and Lyft as well, and a giant tax on Amazon sales so that my local “brick and mortar” shops exist and keep things in-stock again would be nice.
Actually come to think of it, as much as I enjoy some of it, just go ahead and repeal the 21st century, stop things sometime around 1995 to 1999 (though good cases could be made for even earlier), I like “Obamacare” but on balance I say too much is worse for the last 20 years (maybe longer!) to be worth it.
Too much change for the little progress we’ve had (defining “progress” as ‘changes that are better’)!
You’ve got my vote.
I am a white nationalist, as I’ve mentioned, in the sense that I think the United States should remain a majority white country in which whites have cultural advantages in that the legal system is based on our culture and moral systems..
I’m not a white supremacist except in the historical sense (whites have been pretty supreme in the annals of history). I certainly don’t consider white lives more morally valuable than any other, and I have black and mixed-race family who I treat no differently than my white family.
Am I past the line of what they want? Almost certainly.
But there are people who hate whites far more than I hate Asians/blacks/etc. (I don’t hate them at all, I just don’t want them to make whites a minority in our own country) who are being allowed to stay, while people like me are banned, despite not preaching any hate or violence towards anyone.
I disagree with you but I’m glad to see you’re able to talk about your beliefs on the internet. Is there any particular reason you feel you ought to be able to argue for your worldview on Facebook? Keeping in mind that it’s a terrible place to discuss politics to begin with?
I don’t use Facebook, so I genuinely don’t care about the specifics here. I care about the precedent of “this legal speech is bad and banned, this far worse (sometimes actively illegal) speech is good and acceptable”.
It sounds like your beef is with society not liking your beliefs, not Facebook. If your message is so unpopular that people are bending to rules to avoid you, the solution isn’t to pin them to the ground and force them to listen.
Come to think of it, if you genuinely believe white nationalism is a good and noble cause, it seems like FB kicking out the worst and most unpopular proponents of it would be a good thing, in the same sense that less publicity for Westoboro Baptist is good for religious people generally.
That’s a bit of a leap of logic. My problem is with a major tech company saying “this ideology is so vile even peaceful adherents should be banned”. I also believe society is more in favor of it than you think. If you polled the question “Should the policy of the US government be to make whites a minority?” my position would win easily.
Note that Facebook’s concern is not that nobody will listen to me, but that lots of people WILL.
Sure. Let’s also ban all socialist speech. That would be great for socialists, right?
Nobody believes that. Extremists suck, on all sides, but everyone knows they’re the camel’s nose for banning effective speech.
You’re not being banned. You’re losing the ability to push a particular meme on a particular website. If your position were strong you wouldn’t need to resort to that sort of exaggeration.
I think that’s about as egregious a motte-and-bailey as I’ve ever seen. If that’s the most offensive position held by any of the people who get kicked off of FB, I’ll offer you a heartfelt apology. I think we both know it won’t be, and again, if your position were stronger you wouldn’t need to bowdlerize it.
I think that the majority of Americans would oppose both “Should the policy of the US government (explicitly) make whites a minority?” and “Should the policy of the US government (explicitly) make whites a majority?”, but I could be wrong (I hope not).
@mdet
Our immigration quotas will explicitly decide that question. Currently their policy is “explicitly make whites a minority”. Regular articles are written about what this country will be like when that happens, so it isn’t exactly a surprising effect. Immigration is a government policy, therefore the current government policy is “explicitly make whites a minority”.
Do you oppose it?
@dick
That certainly depends on who they ban. For example, the United Daughters of the Confederacy is identified as a white supremacist group by the SPLC. I would find their banning very objectionable.
I don’t think US immigration policy should differentiate prospective immigrants based on ethnicity, except maybe for refugees — make it an explicit goal to take in Jewish and Romani refugees during the Holocaust, for example. Differentiating by nationality can be useful for security checks (Chinese spies, Taliban from Afghanistan, etc.), but assuming they pass the security checks I wouldn’t differentiate Afghani from British. So yes, I oppose the immigration diversity lottery, but I don’t have a problem if our immigration policy incidentally lets in more Indians than Norwegians.
Explicit means “stated clearly and in detail, leaving no room for confusion or doubt.” Making whites a minority is not even an implicit (implied but not stated outright) policy of the US, it is a (possible) effect of US policy.
By way of illustration, I recently repaired the roof of my garage. “Keep my tools dry when it rains” was my explicit policy – that was the stated goal. “Buy shingles and nail them to plywood” was an implicit policy – it’s not something I wanted to do in itself, but you can infer that I was going to do it from my explicit goal. “Take several trips to the dump” was one of the effects of my policies.
Anyone asking why I enjoy nailing shingles has misunderstood my intentions; to then ask why I love the dump so much that I would make it an explicit policy goal to visit regularly is well off the mark.
@dick
“stated clearly and in detail, leaving no room for confusion or doubt”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/01/flashback-joe-biden-want-unrelenting-immigration-non-stop-whites-will-absolute-minority-america-thats-source-strength-video/
I mean, the Vice President of the United States stating it is good enough for me, but hey, I’m just a guy.
But my point isn’t really to argue my positions here. It is to make the point that there are a variety of white nationalist positions that are neither hateful nor evil, unless all positions that preserve white majority nations are hateful and evil to you.
And Facebook taking a side against those political views is pretty serious, when they are such an important news outlet that foreigners buying $100,000 in ads on it is a national emergency that Congress needs to investigate.
Oh, so it’s one of those official US policies that get announced in one sentence buried in the middle of an unscripted diatribe in a roundtable discussion on an unrelated topic and then never mentioned again. Considering that (I assume) you’re against America getting less white regardless of the reasoning behind it, in the future you might ditch this rather embarassing part and stick to the parts you can support.
I, for one, entirely fail to see a deep ontological or whatever difference between the world’s largest bulletin board owner and manufacturer. The question is, how big fraction of the world’s bulletin board capacity do they control – can you just give them one-finger salute and go post on some other board with comparable audience. In the case of Facebook alone it’s pretty hard to say the least. In the case of all social media giants – well, good luck with that.
Posting something on your blog makes it available to any internet user; posting something on FB makes it available to maybe half of them.
There’s a lot of daylight between “available” and “actually going to visit”. I’ve met people who don’t understand that Facebook is part of the Internet. And I’ve met a lot more people who’re active on Facebook but don’t have a blog habit and are never going to pick one up.
It’s hard to judge relative audiences for any particular post when Facebook’s involved, because it’s so internally siloed, but in terms of raw numbers I feel confident saying that Facebook’s serving a way bigger slice of the population than all traditional blogging services combined.
Yeah, that’s the point: if you’re able to speak but no one is interested in listening, that’s a very different problem from having your speech curtailed.
At some point, making it inconvenient for people to hear you is tantamount to curtailing your speech. Would you be happy if a town issued protest permits on demand, but they were only valid for five miles away in the middle of a swamp?
There aren’t any bright lines here, but a service the size of Facebook has a lot more leverage than a random personal blog, and ISTM that our ethics, if not our laws, should take this into account. Compare the proprietor of a bookstore kicking political canvassers off his property, to a major university doing the same.
Inconvenient! You can make your manifesto available to almost everyone on Earth, instantly, for pocket change. That’s not enough? You also demand the right to foist it off on a bunch of people trying to see pictures of cousin’s kids’ soccer games?
It seems like the crux of the matter is that very, very few people actually want to hear what white nationalists want to say. The situation is akin to a preacher who, noticing that no one attends church anymore, goes to a football game and tries to preach the gospel between plays.
dick:
On Facebook, you don’t *have* to friend any white nationalist groups. Indeed, most people don’t. So my guess is that white nationalist groups are not being seen all that often by people who don’t want to see them. The same is true on Twitter, right? You can just not read white nationalists, SJWs, or any other group.
It seems like the point of banning a group from FB/Twitter is not to avoid having other people be subjected to their speech unintentionally (that would be a good reason to ban them from advertising), but rather to avoid helping a bunch of people with evil ideas to communicate. I assume this was fallout from the Christchurch mosque mass-shooter.
By contrast, on a given forum, banning some viewpoints or speakers is often a way to help the people on the forum avoid seeing something they don’t want to see, whether that’s spam, porn, or people with bad politics.
Have you been reading much news recently? The narrative ever since Trump’s election has been that white nationalism is on the up and America/the world in general is getting ever closer to becoming a white supremacist apartheid state. IOW, it’s not a case of “Oh, nobody cares what white nationalists think, let’s stop them posting so they don’t clutter up people’s newsfeeds” but of “Yikes, these white nationalists are worryingly popular, we’d better stop them posting before they seduce even more people to their evil ways.”
I don’t think white nationalists are seen all that often on Facebook at all, except maybe under very liberal uses of the term.
But in terms of seeing content you don’t want to, you might at times see items liked or shared by friends of friends.
Lately it seems like Facebook as an algorithm to show you less of the sort that you don’t interact with. I’m not sure if angry reactions and comments will therefore encourage it to show you what offends you or if it is smarter than that, but if your social circle is wider or your comfort level narrow you will probably see the occasional post you don’t like.
But if you say Facebook is doing this in order to be seen to fight back against the forces bringing you mosque shootings, you’re probably right.
albatross11:
That could well be right; I was thinking of the “250-reply-long argument thread that you only saw because one of your friends’ friends is participating in it” thing, which is the only time I ever saw politics when I was on FB. In any event, I think the main driving cause of Twitter/FB/etc banning anything is because they get complaints about it, and when they get a lot of complaints that seems like evidence that people are seeing it who don’t want to.
The original Mr. X:
I’m not arguing that the stuff Twitter/FB/etc ban is unpopular, I’m assuming it from them banning it; it is unpopular in the sense that FB feels like their service is better without it than with it. If there’s some other website/publisher/etc that does want it, well, that’s probably where they ought to go.
That only proves that it’s unpopular with the executive board of Facebook, not that it’s unpopular in general. Indeed, the fact that the executive board of Facebook apparently thinks it important enough to specifically ban would rather tend to suggest that it’s *not* unpopular in general (or at least that the executives don’t perceive it as being unpopular in general).
Maybe this is just markets at work! Facebook feels they will make more money by banning white nationalists than they would by hosting them. This is why left wingers love free markets, they always solve problems efficiently and without bias.
First of all, I’m not demanding to foist anything off on anyone — I’m not any kind of white nationalist.
Second, as concerns anything that could fairly be described as “foisting”, I’m fine with Facebook rejecting it. Ads for Stormfront or wherever those guys hang out these days? Sure, drop those if you want to. Exclude WN groups from whatever algorithm recommends groups to people? Maybe very slightly sketchy, but it’s not something I’d get worked up over. But WNs personally sharing legal, worksafe, but politically embarrassing content with randos they knew from high school, who’re perfectly free to unfriend them? That’s not something I’m comfortable banning. Facebook’s whole selling point is that you get to define your own social graph, and it makes me very very nervous when it unilaterally decides that yours can’t contain political viewpoints that Facebook’s ethics commissars consider unacceptable.
And I know perfectly well that this has a cached answer saying “well, they should go somewhere else then”, but — all the snarky remarks I could make about this aside, and believe me, there’s a lot — it’s not practical to find or found another Facebook, and there are a lot of people that use it as their main communication platform. That gives it a degree of political power that more than justifies a commensurate amount of political restraint.
This. It’s scary how many people immediately hide behind the “1st Amendment doesn’t apply!” argument which is specious. The issue is the principle of free speech writ large, not what is legally permitted. If you believe in free speech, that is open debate and the airing of ideas, then you should oppose efforts by anyone to restrict speech in most circumstances.
And yet, we probably all agree that individual site owners have the right to decide what will and won’t be said on their site. Everyone is allowed to remove spam posts, for example, even though I’m sure the spammers would argue that this is suppressing their free speech. Any unmoderated internet forum eventually becomes horrible, because it doesn’t take more than a couple obsessive crazies to make real discussions very difficult, and there are a lot of obsessive crazies in the world.
Further, bad faith changes everything–a discussion on hard topics is maybe possible, even with deep disagreements, if everyone seems to be arguing in good faith. But a little trolling to stir up shit, a little impersonation of the other side to make them look bad, etc., and the good faith needed for the discussion can fall apart quickly. Making a norm that not arguing in good faith or obsessive crazyposting gets you banned from the forum seems necessary in order to have any meaningful discussions.
Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al are in a kind of special situation because they’re so big that together, they determine a lot of what discussions can happen in public. Also, when they’re (for example) openly facilitating some kinds of political organization, but forbidding others, based on whether they like the politics of the different groups, that seems like something that could go really badly in a lot of ways.
I don’t.
Does telephone companies have the right to decide what will and won’t be said on their lines? Do electric power companies have the right to decide what will and won’t be said on with devices powered by their energy?
Does a forum about fly fishing have the right to remove posts that aren’t about fly fishing? If so, explain to me how that’s different from what FB is doing?
Does the Vatican City State have the right to be a Christian theocracy? If so, explain to me how that’s different from the US becoming a Christian theocracy?
@vV_Vv
Well, for one, every single person living in vatican city wants it to be a christian theocracy.
Because those who don’t like the idea aren’t allowed to live there.
It isn’t specious. The first amendment is well defined, “free speech writ large” is incoherent.* It makes sense to use a phrase like “free speech” for something that has actual content rather than for something that doesn’t.
* See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/is-it-possible-to-have-coherent-principles-around-free-speech-norms/
Atlas +1
If you’d like to great, but as far as I can tell you haven’t actually disagreed. No where in your post do you claim that “the broader philosophical concept of freedom of speech” is coherent, much less try to explain what it would look like.
You’re equivocating on the meaning of “allowed”. Only the government can decide something isn’t allowed. What the rest of us can do is decide how we wish to dispose of our private property, who we wish to associate with, and counter speech with speech. Including Facebook and the like.
This “broader philosophical concept of freedom of speech” seems to be little more than the doctrine of the preferred edgiest speaker. It seems to have no ethical teachings for the guy that says “put the Jews in ovens” but heaps high more opprobrium on the guy that says “fire that first guy from his job”.
Brad, your mom would like a word with you.
@Paul Zrimsek
Don’t you have anything better to do than shitpost?
There is a difference between countering speech with speech and trying to prevent speech you disagree with from being heard. People who object to things Facebook (or others) are doing as violating free speech broadly defined are generally objecting to the latter, not the former.
The decision to republish or not, is as fundamental a part of freedom of speech as anything else. Not to mention in the case of digital platforms, the right to private property, which I had understood you to be strongly in favor.
Further, it seems extremely odd to condemn speech that calls for say firing someone for having called for Jews to be killed but not condemn the latter. Both of those are speech.
I’m in favor of the right to private property, including the right of FB to refuse to let me post things they disagree with. But I can, and do, condemn some choices that people or organizations are entitled to make.
Someone can oppose ideas he disagrees with either by offering arguments against them or by trying to keep the arguments for them from being heard. They are different tactics and have different implications as to how I should view the person or organization in question.
Provo, Utah and Frederick, Maryland both have exactly the same protections for freedom of religion under the law. And yet, non-Mormons in Provo commonly are going to feel a lot less actual freedom to dissent from the majority religion than people in Fredrick. If you talk to non-Mormons who live in Utah[1], you will hear a lot of examples of how that works.
Both towns have many good things going for them, and both are fully covered under the first amendment. And yet, the actual experience of people living in those places w.r.t how free they feel to express their religious beliefs or lack thereof is quite different. Is that difference incoherent? Or might there be some notion of a culture of tolerating religious differences that one could talk about, and that maybe differs between the two towns?
[1] I have family in Utah.
[ETA: I changed one “Rockville” to a “Frederick”, to avoid encouraging a culture of getting stuck on I-270 for an hour….]
I-270 has gotten a WHOLE lot faster since I was commuting on it. Frederick to Rockville used to take the length of an entire thread, minimum.
I’m calling two years tops before IDW becomes a software over TOR. I’d already be a (paying) user if it happened now.
I never understood how this was a logical move. The IDW, alt-right, whatever-the-new-term-is already hates Facebook and Twitter and claims that they’re instruments of the Cathedral/Globalist elites.
So not only do they get to play the ‘suppressed minority’ card, the entry-level isolationist-nationalist will move on to Gab, voat, 4chan and 8chan (assuming it’s still up) and be further radicalized. Obviously, there are parallels with Islamism here and there may be a suppression of newcomers. A counter-example might be the piss-weak suppression of Hitler and the Nazi party after their coup attempt.
Still, banned ideologies usually become more popular. I would’ve imagined that an anti-fascist would want people to be white-supremacist/nationalist on a named forum, where they can potentially be tarred and feathered IRL. Possibly some kind of targeted advertising would’ve been more effective, given that Facebook ads supposedly have the power to sway elections. The ethics are, of course questionable.
I don’t think that broadly-similar holocaust-denial laws have helped reduce holocaust denial in France, anti-semites merely move underground. How are the Facebook bans different?
IDK; legally speaking the suppression might have been weak, but you did get gangs of communist thugs beating up Nazi thugs, and vice versa. The end result was that people thought “Well, looks like we’re going to get ruled by either communist thugs or Nazi thugs, and the Nazis are less likely to try and liquidate me, so I guess I’ll vote Nazi.” This is one of the reasons why I think modern Antifa’s punch-a-Nazi ideology is likely to prove counterproductive.
The IDW and the alt-right are quite distinct groups. The IDW is largely made up of liberals who are upset with the extreme end of identity politics and related activism on the left. Quite a few were Sanders supporters in the 2016 election, and of the prominent IDW people I can think of, almost none are pro-Trump.
A bunch of prominent IDW people are on Twitter *all the time*. Claire Lehman, Eric Weinstein, Bret Weinstein, Sam Harris, Gad Saad, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Stephen Molynioux–they all have Twitter handles and are quite active. Many/most of them also extensively use YouTube to put out lectures, and often earn considerable money from these. (Thus, they’re extra concerned with being demonitized–when YouTube pulls ads from a video so you don’t get paid for it.)
The defining feature of the IDW is, as best I can tell, the fact that:
a. They’ve used new internet tools (Twitter, YouTube, podcasts) to do an end-run around traditional media, and they’ve gotten a substantial following by doing so. Many of them have also managed to pull in large crowds with live events that are just 2-hour intellectual conversations between people–say, Bret Weinstein and Richard Dawkins discussing the details and implications of evolutionary theory for a couple hours[1].
b. They mostly seem to be trying to engage with real ideas in good faith. One thing this has demonstrated is that there’s a large audience out there who actually wants to see real discussions about serious issues in good faith, rather than Crossfire-style own-the-libs/checkmate, fundies type debate, or talking-heads show style interviews where the person gets like five minutes to say anything.
There’s a sort of hysterical reaction among some people about the IDW–I think mostly that’s a reaction to the realization by a lot of people who used to be gatekeepers for what could be discussed in public that they can’t decide those things anymore, and by people who were used to applying political/social/financial pressure to shut down some discussions finding that this is a lot harder to do now. Some subset of those folks like to claim that, say, Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson is a Nazi or a white supremacist or some such thing, purely as a tactic to try to shut them up.
There are also plenty of people who just disagree with ideas common among the IDW, and make critiques in traditional venues. That seems entirely healthy and reasonable to me.
[1] I’ll admit, that sounds quite appealing to me, so I’m probably the target market.
You’re right about the distinction, but I don’t think big tech is going to make it when they don’t want to.
What do you call those of us that it does bother?
Eh, I mean, they already banned hate speech/threatening speech forever ago, right? I expect this will work just about that well.
Until a couple of weeks ago I would have guessed that anyone who disagrees with Morris Dees about politics would be affected unless they managed to escape notice. Now, who knows?
While I believe Facebook has both a legal and a moral right to do this, I also believe it’s a dangerous move for them. The more they identify with the role of a publisher exercising editorial discretion, as opposed to a non-selective transmission line, the more pressure is going to be placed on them to use it.
+1
“We never police ideas, only specific violations of rules involving [porn,spam,threats,calls for violence, etc]” leaves you in a much better position to resist pressure to suppress some viewpoint than “We police only really bad ideas like white-supremacism.” You’ve already got the category and mechanism for suppressing some bad ideas, so why not add this other bad idea we want banned, too?
I used to be a free speech maximalist, then I
took an arrow in the kneegot a Twitter account.I now see heavy-handed censorship as absolutely necessary to prevent every website from turning into an 8chan-style hellscape. This move by Facebook is well overdue.
Learned elders, the Great Work is going well. Nearly every week our data archaeologists uncover more information from before the Cataclysm. Our semantic mapping efforts then use this information to build increasingly sophisticated models of the lost society of the Ancients, so we may recover the heights of civilization They once enjoyed.
Unfortunately we sometimes encounter material we are not fully equipped to evaluate. This is why we have convened you, the Advisory Council on Morals, Governance, and the Law to advise us. The material at hand is a short passage, perhaps from a treatise of theology or an instructional manual on practical morality. What is its significance, and what can it tell us about right living?
Something to do with the Ancients’ well-documented love of whales, possibly?
Our lives are just like the sperm: we are tiny and insignificant, flailing aimlessly in the dark, but we stick close together in the hope that one out of the millions of us may accomplish something truly meaningful.
Hah, bravo on this one.
So instead of the Simulation Hypothesis, we have to deal with the Masturbation Hypothesis?
I vaguely remember a passage I read a long time ago that mentioned something like this. I think it was an instruction manual on reproduction, or maybe meal manners. Definite religious overtones – everything was very ritualized and there were frequent incantations. The Ancients had very complex social lives.
So this first thing you need to keep in mind is that this is almost certainly disparate documents stitched together. The Every Sperm source likes to start all his sentences with that phrase, no doubt as part of a chant. You can also see this in the popular “tweet” form of literature that was in use at the time, where the author would simply repeat the same sentence multiple times. Repetition was seen as establishing the truth of the statement.
The Deus Vult source (who we have seen in other period documents) is mostly concerned with God’s will. Doubtless this came from a much longer ES document enumerating the qualities of sperm, and was later redacted by the DV camp to bring it into line with their concerns.
You can even see the seams in this short passage; we know from the grammatical texts that ‘eat’ gives a long ‘e’ sound, while ‘ate’ gives a long ‘a’; poets of the time much preferred full rhymes, but were willing to settle for a partial rhyme if that’s what it took to harmonize disparate theological schools.
Were that but true!
Obviously “sperm” is being used as a metonym for the products of conception, i.e., a human being. Hence the passage is discoursing on human dignity and our obligation not to waste our lives.
Did anyone else see the movie “The Signal”? What were your thoughts?
I thought it was really well made and started out very strong, but took too many turns, missed some great opportunities, and instead ended up jumping the shark more than once, leaving me frustrated and disappointed. The ending was downright silly.
Definitely supports my theory that bad movies tend to fail because they can’t decide what kind of movie they want to be.
I wanted to see it, but the theater was too noisy.
Just got it. Clever.
So, I watched The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina for reasons I don’t want to get into. What struck me about it was how it presumed a strong degree of doublethink in its viewers. The premise is basically that there are witches (which may be quasi-genetic or may not) who worship Satan in a Church of Night. They are no holds barred evil Satanists: they kidnap people, murder them, torture them, have real magical powers and use them to do terrible things by our morality. They consider good things like giving a lawyer supernatural powers so he can get pedophiles, rapists, and murders off. They can commit further crimes in Satan’s name then.
We also have our protagonist, Sabrina. Sabrina, in empowered woman fashion, is an intersectional feminist and even founds an organization called WICCA (the Women’s Intersectional Cultural and Creative Association).
The thing is, in this universe, every conservative slander is correct. The head of the intersectional feminist club is a demon who repeatedly corrupts and murders people. Notably, she has conflicts with the principal, who is suspicious of her. We are supposed to consider him wrong because he’s a conservative white male who doesn’t do what the club wants. We are supposed to consider his dislike of the progressive club small-minded prejudice. And then the advisor of the club kidnaps, murders, and eats him. Because again, in this universe, everything a crazy conservative has said is true. At one point a group of students murder a man and four innocent unrelated men because he went hunting. They then destroyed his immortal soul so he couldn’t even go to heaven or hell.
Yet the show is shot and written as if our sympathy is supposed to be entirely with at least the main characters who oppose these conservative fuddy-duddies. Who, mind you, the show (intentionally or otherwise) makes completely right.
And this a perfect example of Doublethink. In order to enjoy the show, you must simultaneously hold two directly contradictory ideas in mind. A person must simultaneously hold the premise of the show, (for example) that Native Americans were actually secretly murderous demon worshippers with immense power, and that they were victims of an unjust genocide/discriminatory power structure as they were in the real world. The former is necessary for the literal show to make sense. The latter is necessary for the moral lessons and perspective the show takes to make sense. So both ideas must be held simultaneously to produce the correct effect of the show.
I don’t have any particular conclusion. It just bothered me that a reasonably successful show thought it could have a significant audience while taking advantage of progressive doublethink. And for those who accuse me of partisanship, I had a similar feeling about the Left Behind series a while back.
My girlfriend, who watched the show (I kinda saw parts of some episodes) largely agrees, and she’s a feminist. However, her conclusion is that it largely stems from a writing failure in combining a typical teen drama with feminist overtones with the devil plot.
I thought about that. I decided I was being too charitable to what was a corporate product that undoubtedly went through workshopping and focus groups. That said, I wouldn’t draw any sort of society-wide, feminists are all indoctrinated lesson. I suspect if I pressed feminists who liked the show, half would fall into two camps: a, it’s stupid but I love it anyway or b, I didn’t really think about it and you’re right. Most of the rest would defend it on basically defensive, reactive grounds and only a few would make some kind of crazy, ‘But they’re white men!’ case. Maybe 10%.
But I have this inkling the remaining 10% are overrepresented in the TV industry. I’m more disturbed by the fact they thought it would work than that it did. Because the show is not that popular and I suspect my criticisms would be reasonably well received by all but the most extremist social justice types.
But. It speaks very poorly of the culture of the writer’s room if no one pointed out that the conservative white men in this universe are completely right. That they are the only ones (aside from Sabrina herself) who tries to combat what are evil, horrific acts. That they felt comfortable using ‘evil conservative white men’ as a trope so strongly they entirely missed the fact their universe proves them entirely right.
This is a very common problem with fantastical allegories for discrimination. The X-Men movies and True Blood both have the same problem.
If we lived in a world with mutants, mutant registration and research into power-suppressing drugs would be the absolute minimum sane course of action. Professor X, with a device the size of a college auditorium, is capable of wiping out the entire human race single-handedly and he’s not even the strongest mutant we see!
Similarly, in a world of vampires every single vampire sired before the development of artificial blood is provably a murderer (and quite likely a mass murderer at that). Even those who have fed solely on artificial blood still have intense murderous urges and superhuman powers to carry them out. Wanting to stake them isn’t a case of religious zealotry, it’s common sense. When murderers “come out of the coffin,” sane people don’t celebrate their identities as murderers.
Vampires in True Blood can feed without killing their victims or even rendering them anemic, and since being fed on is an orgasmically blissful experience, their volunteer pool isn’t limited to particularly selfless individuals. Indeed “fang bangers” are a thing in the show, people who like being fed upon so much they volunteer to do so even at risk to their health. Therefore no vampire is proveably a murderer simply for being a vampire, since the mechanics of feeding do leave some room for reasonable doubt. That said, vampire society is pretty much an ancient criminal conspiracy, so any vampire who has been around the block is almost certainly a right bastard. It’s kind of like how any given member of a biker gang isn’t necessarily a violent criminal, but you’re still justified in strongly suspecting that is the case.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
I think it rings false as an allegory for discrimination because it seems implausible that superpowerful people who can do superpowerful things would be looked down upon as if they were deviant failures of society, which is the attitude real oppressed minorities are faced with. Super civil rights is ridiculous.
Registration and laws work because they can actually be enforced. The second X-men film ends with them in a position where they demonstrate they could easily kill the President at pretty much any time.
In the real world, X-men would become instant celebrities, and quickly become integrated into the power structure, including the job of policing other mutants. The existence of supers would upend all existing belief systems and probably cause God-King structures of political faith to return. Society would be governed by mutant elites battling other mutant elites to gain the favor of the norms.
I agree with your intuitions and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I entirely agree, and in fact it’s a pet peeve of mine. It doesn’t matter which direction you come at it from, whether it’s outcasts of whatever stripe whining that society hates them for being superior or snide conformists trying to paint the outcasts they’re persecuting as some sort of looming threat to society – either way, it flies directly in the face of how the world clearly works. And speaking as an outcast who is definitely not superior in any way, I find it deeply annoying.
This reminds me of how in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, the dragon riders are inexplicably social outcasts who are largely looked down upon and only tolerated because they’re useful. It’s completely impossible to take this seriously. Pretty much the entire basis of the European aristocracy going back to Roman times is that they’re the guys who ride horses into battle. It seems blindly obvious that anyone riding into battle atop a giant flying lizard that can bite horses in half is going to be the highest of nobility pretty much by default. Since the only people who could possibly argue against it would be other guys riding giant flying lizards.
Seems like this is something Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones gets right.
Plus, let’s not undersell that someone riding into battle atop a giant flying lizard is awesome, and the only other notable reaction is probably going to be indifference. In our own society this is how people who can kick a ball really far are treated – as amazing by people who recognize this as amazing, as “who?” by people who aren’t into sportsball – so the greatest dragon knight of the realm would very clearly be a celebrity figure. Celebrities can be hated too, but that’s on an individual level involving this scandal and that drama, and generally not as a class, otherwise they wouldn’t have popular status to begin with.
But yeah, more importantly they would have the power to be nobles. Even if they were disliked by those they oppressed, they’d still largely be held in awe at the same time, and for all the difference it makes to their actual position, have little grounds to claim oppressed status.
I’d just like to add that the Temeraire series was very fun. Dragons in the Napoleonic Wars, what’s not to love? They’re fast, easy reads great for a plane trip.
Novik’s more recent book, Spinning Silver, was even better. And entirely different.
Oh yes, they’re definitely fun, they’re just not serious. A friend of mine once ran a roleplaying game which advanced the timeline to WW2. He had to have the development of aircraft lag a lot behind real life for it to make any sense, since otherwise dragons would be as much of a relic as cavalry. He also changed it such that dragon-riders were in fact, traditionally members of the nobility, though modernity had opened their ranks to commoners much as it did the cavalry and officer corps.
He also introduced a bunch of fun breeds. Like a special breed royal to the Russian royal family, which winds up saving the two youngest Romanov children from the Bolsheviks and giving the Whites a victory during the Russia Civil War. The British finally developed a firebreathing dragon of their own called the Spitfire. While the German Stuka is an arrogant new breed of dragon created by the Nazis, which considers itself the uberdrakon and somehow has the Divine Wind. Over in the United States Hughes Hatcheries is busy breeding a new blue dragon with gull wings which will come to be known as the Corsair.
Though my favourite is a type of an ancient type of poison-spitting dragon called the Sicilian Nemesis which is basically cruelty, spite, and betrayal given draconic form. Everyone is terrified of them, their friends, their enemies, their riders, especially their riders. When a Nemesis showed up in the game, it deliberately let its captain be killed in order to trigger a berserker rage. Yeah. Fucking Sicilians, man.
Hell the Italian Air Force in general has a lot of great breeds, some of the best in Europe, but it’s still a dysfunctional mess because it’s the Italian Air Force.
@Forward Synthesis
‘They hate and oppress me/us because I/we are better’ is a classic narcissist narrative. It inverts the standard ego-affirmation where success is seen as evidence for being good. In the slave morality, failure is evidence of being good and just.
I agree with this so hard it was a primary inspiration for my web serial. If some people are magic then what follows isn’t a setup where the civilian govs oppress the magic people, it is a wizard-ocracy.
Do you have a link?
I think Walter writes The Fifth Defiance.
Thanks Nick, yeah, that’s the one.
In my almost finished third novel, you get a different pattern in one of the societies. Future mages are spotted young, and a magical geas is put on each one that makes him loyal to either the ruler of the polity or one of the local rulers. As far as I can see, it’s a self-consistent pattern–once established it can be maintained. The problem is the first step.
The Dorayan League built an empire on the advantage of being the first polity to figure out how to use magic. It eventually started to fall apart because after a century or two the knowledge had spread to the peoples they were ruling. To keep it from entirely collapsing they had to make sure that their mages were loyal to the League and so not willing to participated in more regional secession movements. Hence the system of binding them young. The mages who did the first generation were not binding themselves, only their successors.
Beta copy available if anyone is interested. The original idea for the book was the industrial organization of the mage industry, with three different models in three different polities: High status slaves, a guild system, and the traditional decentralized mage/apprentice system. Each with advantages and disadvantages.
I’ve only read a little of it, but Jemisen’s Broken Earth trilogy apparently has extremely powerful earthquake controlling mages (on a tectonically active continent) who are subject to vicious control because they’re really dangerous.
In the Wheel of Time books, female channelers are potentially dangerous to themselves and others until trained, but once trained end up with a very high position in society (albeit also one where lots of people hate and fear them). Male channelers are doomed to go insane (at which point they will be madmen with middling-superhero-level destructive capabilities), and since all male channelers go insane, there’s nobody to train them so they can learn to control their powers until the inevitable madness sets in. So they are hated and feared by everyone, hunted by all kinds of authorities. The best they can hope for is to be caught by female channelers and “gentled” (aka have their abilities magically removed)–anyone else will just kill them. Of course, killing someone who can maybe fry you with lightning or tear you to bloody shreds with their mind is a pretty high-risk endeavor, so a lot of the people lynched for being “false dragons” are just harmless crazy people who’ve had a couple weird coincidences happen in their presence.
@albatross11 on channelers:
There is also the Aiel (Proud Warrior Race/steppe nomads/thneqvnaf bs n uhtr napvrag zntvgrpu pnpur) method of dealing with male channelers- they send them into the Blight (think Mordor) to “go kill the Dark One”. None of them ever come back, and the Dark One remains very much alive, but it’s more honourable than execution or being gentled.
Of course, guvf gheaf bhg gb or n onq vqrn nf gurl graq gb or pncgherq naq zntvpnyyl ghearq gb gur qnex fvqr.
Then, of course, there is the position of female Channelers in Seanchan- enslaved using magic items that allow certain non-Channelers to control them.
@DavidFriedman
I’d love a beta copy, always on the the prowl for fiction! Send to thefifthdefiance@gmail.com if you are willing.
@Nancy Lebovitz Jemison’s orogenes are highly reminiscent of the mages in the Dragon Age video game series, which have a similar “can’t live without them, can’t shoot them” dynamic. There’s likewise a similar control mechanism of forcing them to live in restricted circumstances under the watchful eye of an order (the Templars) that’s overall less powerful, but whose abilities specificially counter the mages.
The first game (which I’d be surprised if it weren’t an inspiration for Jemison, who’s on record as having played it) did a pretty good job of sketching a no win situation: mages really are One Bad Day away from becoming uncontrolled WMDs. (Demons are pretty much constantly standing by offering to help with any problem they might have by possessing them and giving UNLIMITED POWER; a good mage’s life is about saying “no thanks” all day every day no matter how bad things may get. One village is nearly destroyed because a boy is desperate to save his father’s life.)
They can’t be dispensed with (not least because the neighboring kingdoms will have mages in their armies even if yours doesn’t), aren’t safe to live next to, and even with the imperfect containment regime regularly produce horrors. (And the empire that dispenses with those measures is a magocracy in which non-mages are slaves.)
On the other hand, there’s no question that they’re being enrolled into a painfully repressive situation for an accident of birth that they can’t do anything about: they’re imprisoned, regimented, magically tracked, subjected to a coming of age test for which death is the penalty for failure, and generally downtrodden to the point that that One Bad Day is much more likely. This is especially clear if the player character goes through the mage origin story. (Though weakened because there’s no game mechanism for the constant temptation the backstory says you’re subject to.)
Much of the fandom seems content to pick one side as good guys and one side bad guys, with pro-mage/anti-Templar sentiments being more common. That strikes me as missing the point– though later games have the option of emancipated, self-governing mages without making especially clear why this doesn’t lead to one of the previously established failure modes.
In her books, Jemison keeps the frequently horrific consequences of an accident of birth bestowing murderous and difficult to restrain power in a crapsack world. But the sympathetic focus seems to stay closely on the (unquestionably oppressed) orogenes despite it being repeatedly made obvious why everyone else is terrified of them. (But still inescapably dependent, which naturally breeds bitter resentments.)
@Walter but you have very powerful magic people. People who can take a nuclear bomb to the face, shake it off, and then go smash a city single-handed.
If have people who, like, can’t reasonably be taken down by the police, but also can’t win a stand-up fight with an entire army, the dynamic is somewhat different. If you have magic people who are at danger from a well-organized SWAT team, the dynamic is different again.
@LHN:
This is basically what the Tevinter Imperium (magocracy) would look like at the start, right? Eventually someone’s going to decide “hey, we need resources, and those peasants look like they’ll give us resources rather than spontaneously ignite”, but right now they’ve got a pretty strong negative association with slavery since they were just on the other side of it, and staying ahead of the templars is a bigger concern.
Once you have a group of experienced mages with a history of resisting demonic temptation, they can keep the system going: they’ll outclass novice mages and their demons (it’s not really INFINITE POWER since the main character takes down every type of demon at some point), and should be able to take down any one of their number that slips. The hard part is getting to that level in the first place, and staving off the inevitable “hey why aren’t we just ruling?”
Also, seconded on the lack of temptation, that was a big miss. When you go into the Fade as part of the main storyline, there were books lying around that gave you permanent +stat boosts, which were a huge deal in terms of character power. I made a backup save as soon as I took the first one because I was convinced they were going to lead to something bad, but nope, just no-strings-attached buffs.
@sandoratthezoo
That’s a very good point. I was shooting for a super person world much like DC, Marvel or Worm/Ward.
A ‘street level super person’ kind of world wouldn’t have provoked the same response from me, I could see that kind of place not devolving into a Kylo Ren-esque choke-ocracy.
@moonfirestorm It would be easier to be optimistic if the inciting incident of the war that (potentially) ends with mage emancipation hadn’t involved an experienced mage who’d outwardly appeared to have a history of successfully resisting demonic temptation suddenly turning out to have gone all in for blood magic in alliance with a serial killer, before turning himself into a corpse monster. (Though I guess that technically didn’t involve demonic possession.)
Uldred in the first game was likewise a senior mage noted for his service rooting out blood mages, right up until the day he decided to summon a Pride demon and became an abomination. That’s the sort of thing that might shake one’s confidence in the long term viability of mage self-governance.
(The Elves seemed to have a stable system worked out somehow, but in Inquisition we learn that’s because they strictly limit numbers, and abandon excess mage children to whatever fate might take them. And even so in the second game the Keeper winds up possessed by a pride demon, and there’s a decent chance that her First and friends will kill everyone in the clan in the aftermath.)
@Walter I actually got about halfway through The Fifth Defiance and was like, “Okay, I’m writing my own superhero novel because I want something that’s not post-apocalyptic.” I was aiming for something that replicated the feel of the Marvel/DC comics of my youth, but with a significantly more coherent world.
I ended up with a situation where the highest-powered supers could, at any given instant, do more damage than say a squadron of modern air force fighters, and also where it would be difficult-shading-to-impossible for an army to effectively concentrate enough force to outfight them before they ran away. Longer term, they could create plans that could plausibly do major nation-scale damage, but it wouldn’t be “a fit of pique,” it would be, “Months or years of careful build-up.” Which then, I think, let me create a plausible if fragile situation where the society has kind of created a truce which allows supers enough freedom that most of them don’t want to tear down the world, and the ones who don’t want to tear down the world have the time and incentive necessary to police the ones who do want to tear down the world.
Every time I’ve thought about this, I’ve ended up concluding that it’s pretty hard to come up with a more coherent version of the Marvel/DC milieu without it turning at least locally post-apocalyptic. You can do it at Daredevil’s power level, maybe even at Spiderman’s, but someone on the level of a Superman villain is a serious threat, and you can’t believably tell the kinds of stories they’re traditionally used for unless nobody except Superman can effectively concentrate force against them. That implies that government doesn’t have a monopoly on effective use of force, which then kicks the legs out from all the other functions of government, especially once you start dealing with the collateral damage from high-powered super fights.
And then, of course, you can’t throw a rock in either setting without hitting a kaiju-scale monster or an alien invasion or something, which just makes things worse.
I doubt that we materially disagree about anything other than what constitutes “the feel of Marvel/DC comics of my youth.”
My setting’s most powerful super (in a straight up fight) is a person who can fly at about 3x the speed of sound in the atmosphere, significantly faster out of the atmosphere, could survive but would not enjoy a hit from an air-to-air missile, but is extremely maneuverable and could almost certainly not actually be hit by a conventional air-to-air missile, and who can shoot energy blasts that could destroy a… building or so. And do a lot of that.
So that’s not what I’d call “street level,” and indeed I think it’s significantly higher powered than what we usually see Spiderman deal with, but it’s also definitely fairly major tiers down from the kind of stuff you tend to see at the high end of the major comics universes.
(I also dropped aliens, other dimensions, time travel, and other things that felt like they’d change society in a major way. Super inventors exist, but they have problems commodifying their technology. No generalized super-intelligence.)
A fun way to deal with super-inventors is to have bending the laws of physics while building something be an actual part of their powers, so their designs just flat out do not work if anyone else tries to build them. This limits their ability to mass produce world changing tech, because nothing they invent works unless they build it themselves.
@Lillian I thought that was fine for Wild Cards, but don’t really like it as a general solution. It basically writes “supergenius inventor” out of the stories as a concept in favor of “super with a weird delusion that he’s a scientist”. Outside of a deliberate satire, why bother having superscientists just to have them be not only fakes, but effectively dumber than the other supers (since they’re the ones who understand the nature of their powers the least)?
But it’s true that superscientists are among the most strongly bound by genre limits in superhero stories, and the ones most likely to make the largest changes to the world in unbounded deconstructions. Even in Watchmen, while in the medium term Dr. Manhattan’s geopolitical role is key, in the long term his tech innovations will probably have the strongest impact. (And are certainly the things that make the world look the most different, with airships and charging hydrants all over 1985.)
@Lillian
That sounds like the Sparks in Girl Genius–people without the Spark cannot build or even understand mechanisms designed by those with it. Technically-inclined normal people are able develop a very basic understanding that allow them to function as repairmen and minions, though. Sparks can understand other sparks’ work (and one of the leading political characters is powerful because he’s very good at this, and is good at making use of other sparks as underlings).
I specifically wanted to avoid super-inventors being “actually it’s just magic masquerading as science,” but I also wanted the ability of my super-hero-world not to be a generic sci-fi world.
So my solution was this: “technologist” is actually two different abilities, packaged together. The first is, you get an intuition for how an invention might work (that is, it’s not generic intelligence, your super-brain only works on generating new technology — maybe subsets of technology (super-geneticist! Forcefields guy!). Second, your manufacturing processes are weirdly perfect. So like you’re the guy who does some CRISPR-like process and there aren’t any unintended genetic effects out of your one target site. Or you do some kind of circuitry etching at a nanoscale, and you get 100% perfect etching rather than “some ordinary amount of errors.” When you make machine parts, they fit together perfect, and have lower friction than usual because even on the finest of scales, all your pieces are nearly perfectly regular. The crystals that you use to focus your energy beams/form your super-capacitor have no imperfections. Etc.
So, the end result is science. It’s not magical bullshit, and if you take apart the machines of technologists, you can learn how they work, which are along real principles and you could even hope to replicate them. But without the uncanny perfection that technologists themselves get when they make the technology, normal people copies tend to be much less efficient, and that’s with painstaking, extremely expensive work.
@LHN: There’s no need for them to have delusions of being a scientist or not understand how their powers work. If they bend reality in consistent ways then it’s still science and they can be perfectly aware of what they’re doing. So for example the Amazing Chemist could explain how her presence functions as a hyperefficient reaction catalyst that lets her do things that other people can’t. She could even measure the exact magnitude of the effect, and determine how involved she has to be in a given process to trigger it.
@CatCube: Yes i was thinking of Girl Genius when writing that post. They even thought through the geo-political consequences. Strong sparks tend to wind up in charge of things because it’s hard to argue with the guy who can build death rays (In a cave! With a box of scraps!), but since few of them can truly scale up their efforts, most of them only wind up ruling city-states. The exceptions tend to be those who are good at understanding and incorporating other Spark’s inventions.
Though one interesting thing is that it’s strongly implied that Sparks don’t so much bend the laws of physics as are tapping into some sort of deeper mystery of the world. Like a Spark can come up with a theory of something, explain it to another Spark, have that Spark understanding it and develop practical applications of the theory, then a third Spark can build something based on those applications. Thus the principles at play are consistent aspects of reality, it’s just that non-Sparks lack whatever it is that makes it all work, and even the smartest Sparks can’t seem to grasp what that thing is. Though it’s possible Albia does have some idea of it, and Wulfenbach was definitely working towards trying to understand it.
@sandoratthezoo: That’s just a specific example of the same principle.
This is correct, and even at their best (X-Men First Class) the movies don’t address that Charles and Magneto are the rightful chiefs of mankind by virtue of all their Mana, mortal demigods like Gilgamesh of Uruk or Perseus of Mycenae.
Apparently the comics did an AU called “House of M” that dealt with this. Magneto is King of the World (I guess Charles was still in denial about what he is) and his daughter Wanda betrays him by using her reality-warping Mutant power to Harrison Bergeron all the Mutants away.
While I broadly agree, some of the attitudes of normals in the X-Men universe were plausible: yes, I would be freaked the hell out and terrified if my toddler (or worse, the toddler next door) could lift my car with one hand, or shoot killer laser beams out of his eyes.
And those are pretty weak powers by X-Men standards. We’ve seen Mystique in position to kill the POTUS twice in the movies, and she’s small potatoes compared to Magneto, Charles, or Jean at full power.
One issue with the idea that the mutants (or magic users, etc.) “ruling the world” is that it assumes they are cooperating with each other. If you are a small subgroup of the overall population, and your subgroup has several warring factions (which makes it beneficial to remain fully or semi-hidden), taking over the world might become difficult as you fight a battle on two fronts (one evenly matched in power, the other you have the upper hand in power but a significant disadvantage in numbers and infrastructure).
I think the idea that any of these superhuman types (mutants, witches, whatever else) would rule the world is only true if one of two things is true*:
1) The “specials” are all unified together
2) The “specials” are a non-negligible portion of the overall population
*It is also worth remembering that there are almost always countermeasures available to humans to combat the abilities of the special populations, so regular humans especially given their numbers and control over resources/infrastructure are not usually completely defenseless.
Knights and Nobility were a small fraction of the population of medieval Europe, and frequently warred with one another, but the result was not an egalitarian Democracy of the Proletariat. Laugh all you want at the watery tart dispensing swords, but she’s dispensing swords. Until someone invents the musket, her mandate stands even if her favorites squabble.
But the immensely powerful toddler who hasn’t yet developed an understanding or right and wrong or his own strength is going to kill me. That Mystique might kill the President is no skin off my back, since I’m not the President.
I’d imagine the immensely powerful toddler is not a persecuted minority but a treasured asset of the government, who will be taken out of the mother’s hands and placed into some Mutant Jugend training program, so she wouldn’t have to worry too much about it.
What forward synthesis said. Actually, given how much of a threat mutant powers can often be to the mutants themselves and everyone around them, a sane handling policy would probably look really, really weird.
You get scanned for the x gene at birth, and then positives are raised in… what, a nice cottages that just happens to be at the bottom of a 20 meter deep blast pit to absorb the inevitable eventual manifestation?
While going to school in a institution with nigh-draconian anti-bullying rules?
Heck, could see a whole tiered system of social status based on how well you demonstrably control your powers, where you are raised in an isolated hothouse of education and eventually graduate to getting unrestricted access to society (and likely an absurdly paying job exploiting your powers..)
Does it change your analysis if we consider that a number of the early influential comic book creators were Jewish?
The mutants are powerful, and they have a lot of potential to contribute or harm, but they’re not institutionally powerful (except for a few), and they’re at constant risk of the formal power structure acting against them as something they can’t control.
The animated series Justice League Unlimited did a lot with this, although IMHO it was more of a libertarian allegory than one for the Jewish experience. When you have the power to flatten cities and you think the government is unjust, what do you do? What does the government do?
That JLU arc is awesome.
I also appreciated that the creators (we still miss you, Dwayne McDuffie!) freely admitted that it was a problem without a clear solution, which is why the conflict isn’t so much resolved as tabled due to the appearance of an out of context problem.
It was sort of resolved, it seems to me. Waller learns firsthand that the JL is more benevolent than she perhaps thought and Luthor is the out-of-context problem that gets, uh, resolved. And those two were the ones driving the conflict with the government, so without them pushing things the wound can begin to heal.
Indeed there is an explicit reference to this, as the backstory of Magneto is that he is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned at Auschwitz, and he mentions this fact as a motivation for his ideology.
Still, the analogy is poor in my opinion, because early 20th century European Jews might have had intellectual and financial power, but they didn’t have military power, while some of the mutants of X-Men are one-man weapons of mass destruction.
@Nick
That was one of my favorite arcs in all of television. “You have a laser superweapon pointing down!“
@vV_Vv
That’s the important point. Military power can ensure safety, but institutional power isn’t secure without it. Controversially, the analogy to Jews there would be that taking that to heart in consideration of their long history of persecution was a major practical impetus behind the push for Israel.
Waller’s reasons for concern are entirely legit, and don’t really go away. (That a third force was stirring up trouble for its own reasons notwithstanding, it remains true that the League, a bunch of private citizens with no state sanction: 1) did have a WMD, 2) didn’t tell anyone about it until it came time to use it, and 3) even if they were trustworthy as such were unable to secure it sufficiently to prevent its misuse.) But it happens she lives in a universe in which unaccountable concentrations of personal physical power are unavoidable and necessary, and also generally (albeit not without exception) worthy of trust.
(A superhero world will not evolve in a direction in which superheroes are either reliably placed under orders or establish themselves as a ruling class, except as a temporary or closed-ended genre subversion, or an alternate future/world to contrast with their current “proper” role. Stories can inquire “Must there be a Superman?”, but in the end the answer will always ultimately be: “Yes.”)
The space gun per se is kind of a red herring, because it doesn’t really represent a threat that, e.g., Superman or Green Lantern doesn’t. And at the time of the story Superman in particular has been mind-controlled and used against Earth in recent memory.
(Which of course is the concern that underlies the next season’s plotline.)
That was what made JLU so awesome. The US Government basically operates at Superman’s sufferance, and Superman’s position is that that’s the least bad scenario, but of course, the government’s not going to see it that way. (It also explains TDKR Superman, and makes him IMHO one of the most heroic characters in fiction.)
Compare Alan Moore’s Miracleman, or his Swamp Thing Gotham City run where Batman basically convinces the government to surrender to Swamp Thing based on the argument that he could easily destroy everyone in the city but so far just wants to bang hippies.
@vV_Vv:
In X-Men First Class, you get to see Erik (Magneto) evolve from a powerless Jewish child to an exemplar of Israeli macho self-sufficiency to a living WMD, which is pretty excellent.
@CatCube:
The cool thing, narratively, is that Superman and USG had both been in crisis mode continuously since the series finale of Superman: The Animated Series.
SPOILERS:
STAS finale: Granny Goodness brainwashed an unconscious Superman with memories of his Kryptonian rocket landing on Apokalips instead of Earth, and Daddy Darkseid offers him Earth as a present. USG tries to kill Superman and Supergirl with kryptonite weapons, but they break out of military prison and Superman uses a boom tube to beat up Granny Goodness and Darkseid. Importantly, he accomplishes nothing (Darkseid’s subjects tenderly help him when Superman throws him down to the crowd) and USG learns that their monopoly on force exists at Superman’s pleasure.
Justice League premiere: Superman gets a UN vote for nuclear disarmament. Turns out the US ambassador to the UN was a White Martian (extra-solar aliens who genocided Martian Manhunter’s species) spy. Oops. He’s met Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern (sort of) and MM by the time the invasion starts, and Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl show up to form a Justice League.
“A Better World”: parallel universe crossover where the League meets counterparts who became the rulers of the world after Superman killed President Lex Luthor. While in each other’s universes, the Justice Lords armor the League’s space station and alt-Superman saves civilians from Doomsday with a heat vision lobotomy.
JL finale: an alien spaceship crashes very publicly on Earth. Hawkgirl’s race arrives and tells the UN it’s from the vanguard of another alien invasion, and we Thanagarians will help you. Turns out Hawkgirl was a spy all along. Also turns out her fiance/commander is under orders to destroy Earth to create a wormhole behind enemy lines. Batman uses the League’s orbital HQ as a suicide bomb to take out the Thanagarian power plant.
Justice League Unlimited premiere: the League tries to recruit every independent superhero on Earth, and the new orbital HQ has a McGuffiwatt fusion plant-powered laser to save us from future attacks like the White Martians or Thanagarians.
At this point, the UN fades into the background and we start to learn what USG has been doing to save us from another conquest by Superman & friends…
The whole fight between Superman and Darkseid is pretty good, but that final moment where Darkseid is helped by his subjects is simply glorious. He is the best space tyrant.
You know i once came up with a fun theory that Darkseid actually treats his subjects extremely well, we just don’t realize it due to cultural misunderstandings. For example those rags they’re wearing? Well they only look like rags to us because we’re not in tune with fashion trends in Apokolips, to the natives they are the finest garments!
Also the mud huts they live in? You have to understand, Apokolips is a giant weapons factory, it’s all stone and metal, there is no dirt. Dirt is a scarce and precious resource, and since you need it to grow crops, it would be considered utterly luxurious to live in houses made of it. Yet wise and generous Darkseid has ensured that all of his subjects have more than enough dirt to live in! Truly, he is a mighty and benevolent leader, no wonder his subjects love him!
@Lillian: I like that take! OTOH, it’s important to remember that Jack Kirby created Darkseid as the god of tyranny… making those two perspectives dovetail would be interesting.
I don’t have a strong opinion on how the society would treat superpowered mutants or vampires if they walked the Earth but I think some people here have a mistaken idea about how oppression and genocide has actually worked in history.
If you think that people won’t hate a minority who are physically, intellectually, culturally superior, hate to the point of genocide – history says otherwise. In fact it seems that the greatest hatred and most events of genocide were against groups seen as superior. Of course the perpetrators would always find excuses and paint their victims as subhuman in some way but the killing impulse came from the victims being superior not inferior.
Nazis demonized Jews because the Jews were seen as rich and educated and powerful and therefore a threat. Slavs on the other hand were seen as actually inferior, so not a threat and spared the brunt of the genocidal hatred. Nazis of course disregarded the lives of ‘subhuman’ races but didn’t go out of their way to exterminate entire nations – because they didn’t feel as strongly about them as they did about the Jews.
Similar story with Armenian genocide. The minority being murdered was more economically successful than their neighbors and seen as a threat.
Tutsis – victims of the Rwandan genocide were the elite of the country, richer, better educated than Hutus. Being taller and with fairer skin they were regarded as more physically attractive. They were mythologized as a superior race that brought civilization to the country.
Compare this with the treatment of African slaves by white owners. The owners did believe without a shadow of doubt in their own inherent superiority. It never caused the kind of hatred that Jews or Armenians or Tutsis inspired. There was never anything remotely like the Nazi effort to exterminate the race. Slaves were treated like objects or like animals not like enemies. To be an enemy you need to be a person and you need to be a threat.
Being richer, smarter and better looking doesn’t imply having military power. Mutants and vampires are always depicted as having super-human fighting abilities.
For most of human history, groups that were better than average at fighting tended to become the ruling nobility.
The thing is, most of these peoples had economic and political power, but nothing else. This opens them up to accusations of unfairness. The Nazis didn’t think Jews were superior, except in that they (supposedly) managed to trick their way into the top echelons of power by preying on Aryan individualism. It’s a kind of superiority I suppose, but a very narrow one, and not really comparable to a case where, say, God like beings appeared and started demonstrating that they had innate abilities that were vastly powerful and nothing like anything any other human could accomplish. The Pharaohs had claims to divinity purely from their origins, but imagine if they’d had a “divine light” to back that up!
@nadbor
This is not entirely true. The Jews were the target of immediate genocide, because to the Nazis wiping the Jews out wherever they could was a war goal; they also believed that if they didn’t, the Jews would undermine them as they believed the war effort had been undermined in WWI. However, the long-term plan for Slavs was one of massive ethnic cleansing and starvation on a vast scale – hard not to consider genocide. They certainly would have destroyed entire nations in a cultural sense – witness their attempted destruction of the Polish ruling class and intelligentsia.
See also: Overseas Chinese in Asia, Indians in Africa
I’d say the US stereotype is that black men are unusually violent and dangerous (and this has significant consequences when it comes to who gets the cops called on them and how the cops respond when they show up). This has not resulted in black men being immune to mistreatment.
I think our ingroup/outgroup tribal wiring is deeply embedded in our minds, and is quite capable of overriding our moral sense and driving us to do horrible things. That’s one reason I think identity politics is a really bad thing to encourage, even when it helps win today’s political battles or accomplish locally valuable goals.
Also, didn’t the Nazis murder a lot of Gypsies? I don’t think anyone thought the Gypsies were superior or a grave threat, but I don’t suppose that helped them out much.
There were lots of Nazi targets. Religious minorities, including Jehovah’s Witnesses I think. Homosexuals. I think children born with certain birth defects were euthanized as well?
Yes, and people with some disabilities were killed as well.
I don’t disagree with any of the above comments. I was just trying to register the point that a hatred against a successful, ‘superior’ (intellectually, culturally) minority is definitely a thing and not something completely made up by Hollywood.
Of course the way it is portrayed in movies it always seems far-fetched but that is just the typical movie failure mode. You need your oppressed mutants be maximally sympathetic to a 21st century western audience and at the same time show that a 21st century western society would hate and mistreat them. Something’s gotta give, you can’t have both. Most directors would rather have the villains’ motivations be not credible than have unsympathetic protagonists so that’s what we get. But that has nothing to do with the protagonists being superior beings with superpowers.
People used to think witches had superpowers and see how much good it did them.
Yeah, but it’s the same thing as with the Jews. Witches were supposed to have wussy superpowers that were only good for petty acts of malice and stealing from hard-working neighbours. They obviously didn’t have the sort of cool superpowers that would protect them from being arrested, tortured and executed. Just like the Nazis thought that the Jews were really good at cheating, stealing and manipulating while being helpless in the face of honest violence from a manly Aryan.
People are perfectly capable of feeling oppressed by those they regard as being weaker than them. They just say that the weaklings are cheating. Someone actually stronger who stomps around telling them what to do, though? People tend to be weirdly okay with that.
The Holocaust actually started with the killing of the very disabled, with a very strong bias to considering lesser defects sufficient for euthanasia if the person was a Jew. Then after a while the existence of an actual disability was no longer necessary if the person was Jewish.
Then they scaled this practice up a lot.
Are you talking mutants with superpowers or normal humans with superior weapons and organisation? Because the mutants thing never really happened so I wouldn’t make any confident statements about how it would end if it did happen.
The ‘minority with superior weapons and organisation stomping on people telling them what to do’ thing happened only all the freaking time and frequently led to rebellion.
Especially if the ones stomping around are:
– foreign or not integrated with the majority population
– only recently at the top of the hierarchy (as opposed to being an ancient aristocracy)
– only strong in relative terms but numerically so inferior that they can be overwhelmed
then rebellion is very likely.
See: middle east, every colonial empire.
Please don’t be offended but I think you may be projecting with the ‘people are OK with big strong men bossing them around’ thing.
People definitely like it when their own allies and leaders are big and strong and don’t take shit from nobody but that doesn’t mean that anyone who is big and strong can automatically take over with no resistance.
Forward Synthesis, you’re right about most prejudice, but anti-Semitism frames Jews as extremely capable and extremely dangerous.
Now that I think about it, I don’t know how prejudice against other middleman minorities looks.
I’m not sure that this was necessarily true of historical anti-Semitism in Europe (pre-Holocaust). The man-on-the-street was a lot more likely to encounter lower-class Jews, who – to the best of my knowledge – did not inspire much in the way of envy (extremely capable) or fear (extremely dangerous), but rather distaste and contempt.
It seems to me that anti-Semitism in the time of the rise of Hitler was not uni-modal. One could equally well hate successful Jews for being successful and despise unsuccessful Jews for being unsuccessful. Post-war, the modality seems to have collapsed towards the successful end because upper-class (successful) Jews were better positioned to escape persecution, coupled with mass emigration of survivours to Israel, meaning that there were few lower-class Jews left in Europe.
Overall, I think anti-Semitism is easiest to explain along pure tribal lines.
Was pre-holocaust anti-Semitism (i.e. pogroms) bottom-up or top-down? Or both? Baeraad above mentioned witch hunts, and there’s a common misconception that the Catholic Church was running around burning witches. No, for the most part, the Church was ending witch hunts started by superstitious yokels who thought their cow died because the neighbor woman gave them the Evil Eye. Witch scares were bottom-up, started by the man-on-the-street and spread until the authority figures (the Church) stepped in to stop it (usually when the witch hunting fever spread and it started effecting people who actually mattered). They were not top-down, where the Bishop went around looking for weirdos to burn at the stake.
If pogroms were more top-down, like the holocaust, then the man-on-the-street’s encounter with average Jews is irrelevant.
Pogroms and similar acts against other minorities (e.g. the recent anti-Muslim mob attacks in Myanmar) are usually bottom-up, although often instigated or supported by the local clergy (local priests or monks). Secular authorities and high religious authorities usually try to defuse the situations, when they are ineffectual the attacks happen.
Top-down ethnic cleansing does happen (e.g. the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Palestinian Nakba, etc.), but it seems less frequent and more historically confined to the 20th century.
@Faza (TCM)
Depends where in Europe you were. German Jews in the early 20th century were among the most assimilated, and were disproportionately professional/mercantile class and made up a disproportionate % of the German professional/mercantile class. In Eastern Europe, they were far less assimilated and far poorer – German soldiers and the like generally regarded Polish Jews with disgust and contempt, and Nazi propaganda made much of this – promoting the idea that the assimilated, often well-off German Jews were just a “mask” of sorts. In general, much was made of the generally lower standard of living in Poland and further east, among the population in general.
@Conrad Honcho
My – rather limited – understanding is that pogroms and similar types of mob violence, communal violence, etc tend to be bottom-up, but a big question is how the authorities respond. A lot of pogroms started with blood libel stories – kid goes missing, or turns up dead, and the story forms that the local Jews did it.
Interestingly, the Nazis tried to make it seem that violence which was top-down was bottom-up. The best examples are the November Pogroms (the term “Kristallnacht” is mostly used in English-language sources nowadays), where various tricks were used by Hitler, Goebbels, etc to make it seem like it was a spontaneous public thing and the state was merely standing aside, but they had in fact done a bit of organization, and the Einsatzgruppen death squads, which in some places during the invasion of the USSR tried (with success in some places) to whip the local gentiles up against the local Jews, so they could claim it was what the locals wanted.
One thing about mutants in the Marvel Universe is that they are not all super powerful. It’s always fairly well established that the members of the X-Men get to be on the team because they have particularly useful mutations, but there are many mutants that have useless powers, or are just weird looking, and the X-Men work to protect those mutants.
I don’t think it’s that uncommon in fiction for vampires to be able to survive on donor blood, either (in a modern setting) from the same blood transfusion system used for other people with medical conditions requiring regular transfusions or simply by not draining their victims completely.
Sergei Lukyanenko has a particularly interesting treatment of vampires in his Night Watch series.
Great series, although the power creep towards the end got pretty extreme.
In Anne Rice’s books, I recall that vampires could survive on nonhuman blood, but didn’t like to. And I think Marius had managed to do that for many centuries, being an ethical vampire who mainly wanted to enjoy high culture and art and literature and philosophy.
@albatross11
That feels like a cop-out and a sanitization to me. A better idea would be an ethical vampire who couldn’t help but feed on human blood and then had to pick his victims carefully in order to fulfill his moral code.
Maybe it works in practice. I know the Anne Rice books are well regarded.
In modern times, he could get a job in a blood bank and drink the blood when it was ready to expire, or skim a little off the top.
@albatross11 – that’s part of the set-up of (at least the US-I haven’t seen the British original) series Being Human.
In Anne Rice, you’re got one vampire who fed on murderers (the vampires are telepathic, as I recall) and another who fed on people who were about to commit suicide.
I think of some vampire stories as being about the transition from hunting to domesticated animals.
The dilemma is nodded towards; certainly the X-Men themselves often try to contain evil or just dangerous mutants. But the human response is not usually portrayed sympathetically; any movement towards identifying or controlling mutants is viewed as a prelude to unjust genocide, and conveniently, it almost always ends up that way.
Governments may be given a pass if they secretly fund and organize group of mutants and then pretty much leave them alone. Beware, though, it will end in betrayal.
Note that my X-Men knowledge is twenty years out of date, and they have a lot of plotlines over the years so there will certainly be exceptions.
In a world of super powerful mutants, genocide is not only a rational choice, but probably a reasonable one.
Genocide of mutants is generally set up to be highly impractical. The X-gene is widespread (and is almost guaranteed to eventually crop up in the people spearheading the genocide program or their close family or loved ones), and tends to empower people who can genocide you right back single-handed if you try it. Never mind that the mechanism for genocide, be it giant hunter-killer robots or bioweapons, will almost certainly eventually be redirected at H. sapiens either by the aforementioned angry mutants or by their own emerging and inimical sapience.
A more straightforwardly sfnal mutant strain might not have those sorts of problems, but realistic sf doesn’t tend to dovetail well with superpowers in the first place. If your mutants just have higher-than-normal strength, speed, or intelligence in a range that’s mechanically and biochemically possible, they’re probably not much of a Mutant Menace.
Wrong Species:
If the super powerful mutants believe that this is the conclusion the normals will come to, they will agree and act accordingly.
@LHN
That’s a fair point. I would say that if you had a decent chance at eliminating them, then it’s reasonable. Otherwise, you have to kiss up to them and pray they themselves don’t get genocidal. Basically the same way ancient people treated their gods, except the threat is much more credible.
The one thing about the X-Men is that they live in a universe where there are hundreds of super powered beings that are universally admired and loved. Think Captain America, Iron Man, or the Fantastic Four.
The thing that is different about the mutants is that they have less control of their powers (especially when they first present themselves), and they often look very strange (i.e. Nightcrawler, Beast). So, it’s not that they are super powered beings in world of normal people, it’s that they are _weird_ superpowered beings in a world that has superpowered beings.
Though the MU has non-mutants like the Thing who, while he has his problems, isn’t automatically hated and feared by those he protects. Puny humans won’t leave Hulk alone, but Bruce Banner generally doesn’t suffer social consequences beyond people being afraid of the Hulk or wanting to control it. Conversely all the original X-Men but Hank McCoy can walk the streets without getting a second glance that’s other than appreciative. (Except maybe for Scott’s hipster shades.)
There have been handwaves to explain it. (I liked the story where Reed admits that he created “the Fantastic Four” as an idea so that his friends would be seen as celebrity heroes rather than freaks.) But the mutant/nonmutant distinction has always been somewhat arbitrary in a way that doesn’t quite pattern match historical forms of bigotry.
(And probably stems from the fact that it was developed when “the Marvel universe” was a device to facilitate crossovers rather than an aim at overall tonal consistency.)
Sure, you’re never going to have a completely consistent universe when you are looking at 60 years worth of stories written by thousands of different people. I’m just pointing out that is the general idea behind the X-Men, and what makes them different.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
Well you’ve convinced me that witch burnings are rational, but I read Howard’s Conan (stab that sorcerer, stab ’em good!) stories, very seldome have Magic-User PC’s in D&D, and wonder why Moorcock’s Elric was never shived in his sleep.
This trope is somewhat subverted in the Black Company series, where the first thing all powerful mages seem to do is weave an enormous number of protective spells around themselves to make it difficult to one shot them, and the principle common feature between powerful mages is their consequently enormous hit point pools.
@cassander
I’m not sure I like that unless the magicians meet their comeuppance anyway.
Speaking of fantasy-fiction, I just finished reading The Tangled Lands collection by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell, which has four ‘shared world’ novellettes titled:
“The Alchemist”
“The Executioness”
“The Children of Khaim”
and
“The Blacksmith’s Daughter”
The setting uses a sort of mash-up of D&D’s
Dark Sun setting with Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away, and the Sleeping Beauty/Brian Rose fairy tale, and it’s an obvious parable, but it’s AWESOME!!!
It’s got seel against magic, and low born against high born, formerly high-born brought low, struggles amongst the high, struggles among the low to survive, attempts to maintain a ‘monopoly on magic’, I found the stories suspenseful and ‘page-turning’, and I really liked the world-building!
I thought that it was really good, and if another book is described as like it, I’m gonna get it!
Recommended.
I’ve been meaning to get to the Black Company series for a while.
@Plumber
#NotAllMages
@plumber
Most of them definitely end badly.
Funny you mention The Tangled Lands, though, I just finished it myself and thought it was ok, though no where near as good as I remembered Windup Girl being, which I’m now re-reading.
It definitely stands up on re-read. The underlying science is still inconsistent with reality (everyone appears to have completely forgotten that nuclear power is a thing) but it’s consistent enough internally that I’m ok with it. If you like worldbuilding. you should really like it.
IIRC CS Lewis said a similar thing about people who said things like “We don’t burn witches any more, so we’re morally superior to our ancestors.” He pointed out that the reason we don’t burn witches is because we no longer believe in them, not because our moral systems have changed such that forming pacts with the Devil to curse your neighbours is now considered OK behaviour.
There is an element of moral progress in that we no longer use torture to extract confessions*, and we no longer use burning alive as a method of execution. Even if we believed in witches we’d be prosecuting them by supoenaing records of their texts with Satan, and we’d be punishing them with lethal poison that doesn’t make nearly so much a spectacle of their deaths.
*officially, of our own citizens within our borders, at least. we still have some moral progress to make.
The Witchcraft Act of 1735 was the tipping point in the UK- it meant that it was no longer illegal to be a witch, only to claim that you were one.
I read an excerpt from a book about the European witch hunt written by a man who had personally witnessed some of them. He had basically the modern attitude toward them; they’re not real witches, so the whole thing is monstrous. (I don’t remember if he believed witchcraft was possible, but he didn’t believe the witch hunts ever got real witches.)
It would start with somebody going to the local authorities and accusing someone of witchcraft. The authorities would dismiss the accusation for lack of evidence. Then the accuser would go around telling everybody about the witchcraft and how the authorities weren’t doing anything about it. Then the authorities would cave in from fear of mob violence against them. Confessions would be coerced through torture (with the torture hidden from the people in charge). Torture also brought forth the names of other “witches”, who would always eventually include the original accusers.
To address C. S. Lewis’ point, I think increasing skepticism of witchcraft is part of it. But there’s also the rise of stronger states. A judge doesn’t have to worry about a mob murdering him in the street because they don’t like his decision.
This reminds me of how the Spanish Inquisition for the entire duration of its existence insisted in the strongest possible terms that witches were not real, but still wound up burning eleven of them.
What happened is there was a great big witch hunt in the French Basque country, with the authorities reporting that they were finding great heaping piles of witches. They suspected that the infestation spread across the border into the Spanish Basque country, but couldn’t go across to root it out themselves. They kept bugging the Spanish Inquisition to look into it, until finally the Inquisition went, “Fine you crazy Frenchmen, we’ll look into it.” So they send a guy to go do just that, but since none of the sceptics wanted to waste their time, the guy they sent was one of the few actual believers.
Now the Spanish Inquisition doesn’t do anything by halves, so with its full resources at his disposal, the guy they sent proceeds to conduct the largest witch hunt in European history. Tens of thousands of people are interviewed, and two thousand confessions are obtained implicating another five thousand people, for a total of some seven thousand cases. The guy reports great success back to the Inquistion headquarters, but the head Inquisitors are all like, “Well hold on now, let’s not be hasty, we should review the evidence.” So they do in fact review the evidence, and they come to the conclusion that it’s all bullshit, every last bit of it. To quote one of them:
“The real question is: are we to believe that witchcraft occurred in a given situation simply because of what the witches claim? No: it is clear that the witches are not to be believed, and the judges should not pass sentence on anyone unless the case can be proven with external and objective evidence sufficient to convince everyone who hears it. And who can accept the following: that a person can frequently fly through the air and travel a hundred leagues in an hour; that a woman can get through a space not big enough for a fly; that a person can make himself invisible; that he can be in a river or the open sea and not get wet; or that he can be in bed at the sabbath at the same time;… and that a witch can turn herself into any shape she fancies, be it housefly or raven? Indeed, these claims go beyond all human reason and may even pass the limits permitted by the Devil.”
However this leaves them with a problem. Having been subject to the largest witchhunt in European history, the people of the Basque country are riled up, panicky, and real tense If the Inquisition doesn’t burn somebody there’s going to be mass riots and lynchings. So they pick out eleven people who they’re pretty sure are guilty of something, burn them as witches, and let everyone else go. The Spanish Inquisition vows to never again listen to anything the French have to say, and goes back to its true calling of rooting out Secret Jews, which unlike witches were actually real.
Hot take: it’s just a bad show.
You haven’t identified the only reason that it’s weird and self-contradictory about it. The core conflict is supposed to be that Sabrina is conflicted between the power that magic ideas her and the control that she must give up if she wants magic.
Except that magic offers you nothing in this world, except to subject yourself to the constant attention of a small group of miserable, shitty cannibals who will try to distract themselves from how terrible their lives are by fucking you over. Everything about the magical society is right there out in the open and it’s all completely awful. Sabrina would transparently have lived a richer, more empowered life if she took the first bus away from that terrible town and got a job in a call center in Peoria.
A while back there was a comment in the culture war thread on Reddit, where a self-identified SJW tried to explain her subculture. What struck me how harmful to her, her self-described motivations and actions were.
For example, she explained how her co-tenant was a very violent person (including to her), but also that when he got into a conflict with the landlord, she picked the side of the co-tenant because he had more power than the tenants. The actions by the landlord seemed extremely reasonable and the choice to side with the abusive co-tenant both harmful to the individual herself, as well as society in general, but this was nevertheless seen as an imperative.
I think that a person with such a mindset would not regard this show to be bad or immoral, but would see enduring the awfulness as a necessary sacrifice to upend oppressive structures.
Fleeing that situation would then be ‘selling out.’
Aapje:
That seems like a classic case of taking a sensible rule-of-thumb (when there’s a conflict between powerful and powerless people, usually the powerless people aren’t going to get a fair shake) and running it into the ground by not having any judgment. See also: positive thinking, avoiding stereotypes, trusting authority figures to know what they’re doing.
Its not a good rule of thumb unless you think that children are constantly being abused by their parents.
Children are very obviously a special case?
Parents are obviously a special case. In a conflict between a child and an adult with no relation to them, I think our sympathies rightly default to the child. But parents are special in being assumed to have their kids’ best interest in mind.
So, a question.
What’s the biggest win for Team White Conservative Male in Sabrina? Do we get to see Witch Trials 2.0? Covens burnt with molotov cocktails and torn apart by angry mobs as they flee? Distant death dealt by hunting rifle on an unsuspecting witch, or witch-adjacent person?
I’m going to bet we don’t. Because if not, this leads into my own Perhaps Unreasonably Uncharitable explanation. It’s not double-think, it’s just an absence of default values. The primary value is Team White Conservative Male Is Antagonized. The witchery exists not for its own sake, but because it something that TWCM decries. The evil acts performed aren’t evil, because good and evil aren’t real considerations. All that matters is whether you’re on TWCM or opposing them, and no one really cares about bad things happening to their enemies, right?
And we don’t get TWCM as convincing antagonists because the point isn’t to tell a story which tests the protagonists and explores interesting ideas, it’s to present things that TWCM is opposed to. Not things that any one team that opposes TWCM supports; just things the enemy hates. And, because there are no higher values than that, we get cheerful murder and blackest magic, for funsies.
I cheerfully admit that I could be wrong, since this is 100% Uncharitable Assumption based on what I’ve heard of the show, but I’d be really interested to know what people have seen the show think. Could you tell Sabrina in a positive rather than negative space, where TWCM had zero presence in the show at all?
The witches in Sabrina are super evil, and various witches and demons are the primary antagonists in Sabrina. Bigotry from the mortal side of her shitty little town is definitely present, but it’s a side story.
Like, in terms of mostly-sympathetic portrayals of witches, you have Sabrina herself, her cousin I forget his name, her nice aunt, and her less-nice aunt. Her less-nice aunt is like the fourth-most-sympathetically presented witch, and she actually eats children. (You could quibble: there are some tertiary characters who may be more sympathetically presented than her less-nice aunt. But my point is, less-nice aunt is genuinely someone who eats children, and she is very far from the least sympathetic witch).
The show does not think that the evil acts performed aren’t evil.
The show does think that Sabrina might plausibly be tempted to condone the evil acts because… something something something?
EDIT: Like, this show is super weird. I’m not picking up some minor detail when I mention cannibalism. There is a fucking lot of cannibalism in this show. It’s endemic throughout witch society. There are several different major cannibalism plots. Less-nice aunt is always going on about eating people, and particularly children. And Sabrina is horrified by this, and is always like, “Guys, no. Let’s not eat people. It’s not cool, guys.”
(And, like, that’s not an isolated thing. Witch society is super cool with all kinds of horrible behavior, which Sabrina recognizes as horrible.)
But she never, like, goes that extra step and says, “Wait, maybe witch society is awful and I shouldn’t participate in it at all.”
Thanks for the update. It sounds like my Least Charitable assumptions were lost in the sea of Actual WTF.
I don’t suppose any ongoing pseudo-sympathetic characters ever get murdered or eaten by the forces of evil?
Depends on how ongoing you mean. Sabrina’s mortal boyfriend’s brother is a pretty minor character, but he’s portrayed deeply sympathetically and then he’s killed by some kind of witch shenanigans, I don’t honestly remember whether it was the devil directly or what, and then Sabrina tries to use witch magic to raise him from the dead and surprise that doesn’t go well.
The real Ms. Wardwell seems nice and she is brutally murdered by the demon who then takes her place for the rest of the season, though that’s right at the beginning of the show.
EDIT: Gender non-conforming friend’s uncle gets eaten by a demon, and I think he was okay before he got eaten. Sabrina’s mortal boyfriend is not killed or anything, but he gets a raw deal courtesy witches a bunch of times.
The show is definitely not on the side of the present power holders Church of Night or Satan or any of Satan’s demons. They are the big bads.
Exactly! People who haven’t watched the show but have overactive SJW detectors assume the whole thing is an SJW persecution fantasy. True, there are a some eye-rolling leftist shibboleths thrown here and there but that’s all it is.
The true conflict of the show is between Sabrina’s run-of-the-mill 21st century western values and attitudes vs the absurdly evil and alien world of witches. To make it at least somewhat believable that this perfectly normal and likable teenager doesn’t instantly reject the entire witch society, we’re shown that:
– her aunts, who are at first her only sources of information on the witch society are loyal and loving (both) and nice (one of them)
– her aunts have been indoctrinating her to believe that witches and wizards are the good guys since they adopted her
– her aunts apparently didn’t tell Sabrina about the most horrific stuff that goes on in the witching world and she only discovers it gradually as the show progresses
– senior Church of the Night witches and wizards are actively plotting to get Sabrina to pledge herself to Satan by lying to her about the consequences, trying to convince her that it’s not a big deal, promising great power and promising that she could continue her normal life. One witch keeps manufacturing situations where Sabrina will be tempted to reach for more power, in particular to save her friends from danger. Eventually this strategy succeeds.
People are talking about the show as if the writers made the witches evil by accident. BUT THAT’S THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE SHOW.
I don’t think they made the witches evil by accident. I do think they vastly under-justified Sabrina’s ambivalence to them. It’s just not plausible to me that Sabrina can’t see how completely awful witch society is. The fact that she’s not inured to its over the top craziness should be more reason for her to nope out of there.
The show is also pretty inconsistent with hope they expect the audience to react to witch society. This is why I say it’s just not that good a show. It’s trying to do interesting things, but it’s craft is poor.
The show is also pretty inconsistent with hope they expect the audience to react to witch society.
I think part of that is the perennial problem: you write your bad guys to be powerful and glamorous but also terribly evil; you intend and expect the readers/audience to go “Oh how terribly awful they are, I am not taken in by the glamour one bit!” and then the audience goes “Hell yeah, bad-ass cool dudes!” and loves the bad guys the best and cheers them on as they use their powers to be extravagantly wicked.
It’s the Draco in Leather Pants trope (warning: link to TV Tropes).
Like, I hate The Punisher. I extremely disliked the character when the original comics came out, I didn’t like the movies, and I’m not one bit happy about the TV show. But a lot of people love the guy (both the actor and the character) and yep, the woobifying effect strikes again.
What I see of the Sabrina characters on Tumblr is, for example, fans of the character Michelle Gomez plays – sure she’s an evil, murderous demon but she’s so hot and cool and look how she puts the men in their place! (Because, y’know, Men: The White Male Straight Conservative Patriarchy, boo hiss).
Not just Tumblr, here’s an extract from a HuffPo article about her:
I have long been of the Dr Abraham van Helsing School of Vampire Diplomacy: stake, garlic, decapitation is how you deal with the forces of darkness, no sympathy for the devil 🙂
So I can’t get behind the modern reboots where sure it’s cool to kill and torture because it’s all done in a fun, campy way (be that American Horror Story or Sabrina) and besides, the witches, demons and evil spirits are all on the right side of history when it comes to feminism, gay rights, and gender non-conformity (e.g. “Ambrose Spellman: Sabrina’s pansexual warlock cousin from England”). Yeah, that’s nice that they’ve all got the requisite 21st century attitudes, but even if the mortals opposing them are bullying jocks, coal miners, and puritanical headmasters, it’s still not right to torture, murder and eat them!
@Deiseach: The witches are not glamorous — certainly not the way that True Blood vampires are — and while I have not followed any Sabrina fandom, I’d be a little surprise if anyone thinks that the witches are particularly awesome. Probably someone likes the Weird Sisters, but they’re also pretty clearly marginalized in witch society.
The problem is the opposite, actually, at least for me. Witch society is just clearly awful. I am being 100% serious when I say that Sabrina would clearly live a fuller, more self-empowered life if she went to a third-tier city and got a shitty job in a call center. I do not say that because I imagine that call center jobs are a lot of fun. All witches seem like they live awful lives. Everyone in their society are backstabbing assholes. They do not appear to live lives of material wealth. They aren’t in general pretty, sexy people (though there is some of that). They have yearly lotteries to see who gets consumed by the rest of the witches. They aren’t allowed to develop big coteries of mortal hangers-on like the vampires of True Blood. They don’t seem like they travel much. Their mandatory religious services — even when they don’t include like a 1% chance of the attendee dying — do not look fun. All they seem to be able to use their magic for is either pointlessly dicking over someone else in their society, or else defending themselves from the pointless dicking over that is definitely coming their way from their bored, psychopathic co-religionists.
But the big character arc for Sabrina is “will she or won’t she embrace witch society?” Even if it were plausible for Sabrina to be agonized over that difference (and I don’t think it’s well-justified), they seem to expect the audience to be similarly compelled by the good side of witch society — but that good side is fucking nonexistent.
Again: It’s just not a good show. Not at the level of the overall storycraft, at least. The actors do a good job, and the ambience is neat. You could imagine a show that deftly wove together a compelling magical society that has a major dark side, but this is not that show.
(EDIT: And is Michelle Gomez a “regulation hot person”? I mean… look, she’s 52. She’s certainly an attractive woman, but she doesn’t look like the mid-20’s to early-30’s actresses who are staples on the CW and define the cultural expectation of television female hotness. Tati Gabrielle plays (one of very few) traditionally hot witches, and her role is actually a lot like Draco’s — she’s a bully, but actually she’s kind of a screwed-over pawn. I expect that, like Draco, she gets a lot more charity than her character entirely deserves due to her hotness. But Michelle Gomez is playing one of the major antagonists on the show. Any hints of her power are undercut by her subservience to Satan and her elaborate self-deception that her loyalty will be rewarded. I think the actress does a fine job with the character, full of nervous energy and awkward menace, but I think you’re imagining a lot of dimensions to the show that aren’t there.)
@Deiseach,
This is a bit of a tangent, but characters like the Punisher or (more recently) John Wick are written from and only make sense in a certain American cultural context.
For over three decades, from the late sixties through the late nineties, drugs and violent crime were omnipresent in American cities. A whole generation of the urban middle class were uprooted by unprecedented and rising crime rates. And all the while local and federal governments seemingly stood by: there wasn’t a meaningful push for tougher policing and sentencing until the height of the crime wave in the nineties.
(And reality is intent on reminding us that the decline in crime since isn’t a given. We recently got a small taste of the late 20th century thanks to the nation-wide police pull-back following the riots in Ferguson and elsewhere.)
There was, and still is, a very real sense among many Americans that the criminal justice system is more interested in playing politics than protecting the lives and property of ordinary citizens. The fantasy of someone like the Punisher who can inspire fear in criminals the same way that they terrify the citizenry fills a very real need.
I’m sure that Ireland has media trends which wouldn’t make sense without a cultural memory of e.g. the Troubles. This is roughly analogous.
Michelle Gomez comes in with a pre-existing “I want Michelle Gomez to step on me” fandom because she recently played The Master as a pretty sexual being on Doctor Who.
Nabil, the Punisher makes no sense as anything other than violent revenge fantasy. Because he can’t wipe out the entire Mafia single-handed, and even if he did manage to pull that off, some other criminal enterprise would step in to fill the vacuum.
So he’s just blowing away dons and foot-soldiers because for the comics readers it was good gory fun and hey it’s the Mafia, they’re bad guys, who cares if they get splattered? And the writers could flatter themselves that they were taking comics to the ‘adult’ route, now they weren’t kids’ stuff anymore, now they were graphic novels (my eye the matter was treated in an adult fashion, swearing and ultra-violence does not equate to ‘mature grown-up consideration of the problem of evil’).
But y’know, that’s fine, there’s a market for that kind of thing and everyone to their own taste. What I do object to is glorifying Frank Castle as anything other than a murderous thug. He doesn’t have any depth, his backstory is only a contrivance to give him an excuse to go blowing up criminals, and it’s all about “whee, big guns, explosions, and giblets!”
So it does annoy me when I see young women going “So Tragique, so handsome and sexay, so deep and brooding and realistic” – the guy who plays him on TV isn’t the kind of looks that appeals to me so there you go, I do understand sex appeal but c’mon girls, there isn’t anything more there other than “I fancy this big tough hunk”.
Also, before The Punisher and John Wick there was Charles Bronson and the Death Wish movies, I’m old enough to remember those, so it’s no new fad!
I am being 100% serious when I say that Sabrina would clearly live a fuller, more self-empowered life if she went to a third-tier city and got a shitty job in a call center.
sandoratthezoo, I absolutely agree! It’s horrible all round! Which is why I really, really don’t get the oohing and aahing over it that I’ve seen other than that there is some adolescent/young adult glamorisation of that kind of “outsider chic” story.
But that’s because I’m not twenty anymore and I worked out all my teenage angst a long time ago (well, to a degree) and I’m one of the boring conservative ‘puritanical’ no-fun mortals who have these totally unreasonable objections to non-binary persons setting up witchcraft clubs in school, because we’re living in a town where witchcraft is real and the humans have family histories of curses and demons afflicting them so no, children, it’s not big, it’s not clever and I’m the headmaster so I’m banning it.
That is very weird. Are they going for a ‘dark and edgy is cool’ theme, where you root for the evil guys ’cause they have better fashion or whatever? Or a ‘you called us evil so you deserve the evil we do to you?’ theme, which is accidentally undermined?
There’s a a Quillette piece about it. Been a while since I’ve read it, but I think the intended message of the show was “bad old wrong feminism” vs. “good new right feminism”, but perhaps the writing muddied that, or the writers’ conceptions of those concepts disagreed with viewers’.
For what it’s worth, I think if the show went with ‘The Church of Night is actually good and the Catholic Church is evil’ it would have been trite and cliche. But much better and cohesive than it actually was.
Wait. That part is strange in its own right. Aren’t they Satanists? I’m assuming they sacrifice goats, so why do they have a problem with hunting?
They shoot and kill a deer that has magical properties (which they don’t know). And apparently the man’s ancestors killed some witches several centuries ago. Killing these witches (who were some sort of Native Americans tormenting the colonists) was rewarded by the community with their land. Which they opened a mine on and became privileged white men. Except in aspect they look more like a stereotypical Trump voter from West Virginia than oligarchs. They live in a house that looks smaller than the protagonist’s.
Really. Oh, and we see other witches doing the same (such as killing magical deer) but… err… hunters bad!
It’s very forced and meant to drive a wedge between Sabrina and her boyfriend because the hunter is his brother.
I haven’t seen it, but at some level, does Sabrina work as a simple power fantasy? If you identify with the intersectional feminists at the core of the story, then maybe it’s liberating that not only are they freed from material constraints by their superpowers, they’re also freed from moral constraints. Not only can your audience-identified characters do whatever they want, they also may do so. It’s like identifying with Donald Westlake’s Parker or with Dexter or something.
I always thought that was some of the appeal of True Blood. It’s exciting to imagine being a beautiful, nigh-immortal leather-clad ironically drawling badass who reduces his enemies to literal piles of meat and organs or chains them up for life in a basement to teach them a lesson, and the fact that your enemies are bigots who look down on you for chaining people up or ripping them apart lets you feel like the good guy in the story.
Alternately, the writers might be going for the tension of a character trapped between two evil worlds, and missing the mark.
FYI, and since you mention True Blood too, folks who want that should just watch Shiki. I haven’t even finished the series, but the conflict’s more interesting and better handled than this apparent “white men get their comeuppance from literal Satanists.”
ETA: I’ll bet there are better examples, of course. Shiki‘s just the first that came to my mind.
Thanks for the recommendation, and speaking of Japanese horror, have you checked out Franken Fran? There’s not really a tension, but it does a nice job with an innocent character living in a fundamentally amoral world.
I haven’t, but I might check it out, thanks.
That’s not what I got out of True Blood. There is a tension between vampires as oppressed minority and the sorts of horrifying shit that some of the vampires in the show actually get up to, but it’s easily resolved by pointing out that the thousand-year-old vampire is a thousand-year-old vampire and therefore has a Viking’s morals. The modern vampires we see generally act like moderns, albeit ones with a medical condition that gives them intrusive urges and the occasional unstoppable rage.
The challenge to that viewpoint is that Eric and Pam are the fan favorites, and most of the Fandom seemed to see Eric’s lifetime of torture on what’s her name as a f-yeah moment instead of a horror moment. Also, Jessica’s sad about it, but she mind controls and or eats more people than she probably should.
So, fans overlook all sorts of moral lapses from a character who’s pretty and badass? That puts it on par with… every other vampire series ever written, along with Hannibal and Game of Thrones and any number of others. I don’t think fan behavior’s a very good barometer of intent here.
Besides, Alexander Skarsgård’s just inherently cool. I liked him better in Generation Kill, though.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s St. Germaine would be an exception to the popular evil vampire.
He only needs a little blood, but he also needs intense emotion along with the blood, which he gets by giving orgasm to the women he’s getting blood from. This might be a slightly unsavory female fantasy, considering that vampires are impotent.
In any case, there’s no attractively evil vampire in the series to draw attention from him, or at least there wasn’t in the first half dozen or so that I read.
There was an amusing short story about St. Germaine tracking down and killing a murderous vampire who for whatever reason was making up being a vampire as he went along. He was not just murderous, but as I recall, also pretentious and stupid.
I haven’t watched the show, is it possible that it is the sort of Villain Protagonist show like Death Note, Breaking Bad or Dexter?
No, because the protagonist (Sabrina) follows something akin to modern progressive morality. And this morality is explicitly set up in opposition to both the Church of Night and Conservative White Males.
No. Sabrina herself is pretty nice — certainly well-intentioned, sometimes she gets in over her head and makes morally compromised choices because she doesn’t see better options. But nothing that you wouldn’t expect from a kind of standard show about someone struggling with difficult choices. Sabrina certainly wants to, whatever, smash the patriarchy, but she doesn’t want to murder the principal or the douchey football players or the other people who stand in for the patriarchy. The awful stuff gets perpetrated by other characters who are themselves antagonists or at best complicated side characters.
I think their main problem was that they were rebooting an original show which was premised on yes, magic and witches are real, but they’re not dark gloomy evil old bats, they’re cool aunts and blonde teenagers living in brightly-lit pastel surburban homes!
Well, this just won’t do for modern times, so they kept the magic and witches are real, but swapped out the bright colours and fun for yes they’re also evil (because American Horror Show was so successful, I guess?)
Wrapping all that around “the white conservative religious guys are totally asking to be tortured and murdered because c’mon, we all know white conservative religious guys are real world racists and bigots and homophobes so it’s not like anybody worthwhile is getting killed by the evil witches who get to be cool and powerful and fabulous as they use magic” means they can eat their cake and have it. Yes, Satan gives them their power, but Satan is also part of the mean ol’ Patriarchy (yet another male that wants to control women) so they can have the trendy darkness but also fight against it without being the conservative religious boring normies.
Though as I recall, the original comic the show was based on had the premise that witches are real, and they are pretty much all ugly old bats who go in for traditional wickedness (albeit with a very light touch), except for Sabrina who’s a Normal Teenager (with magic) saddled with an embarrassing family. Basically the same setup as Casper the Friendly Ghost or Wendy the Good Little Witch, except high school antics instead of elementary.
To what extent are conservatives actually right in the show’s universe? Is social justice as a whole shown to be a conspiracy by witches to eat people? Or is it more a matter of one particular social justice advocate being an evil witch?
I’m imagining a rough culturally-transposed equivalent (based on the little I’ve picked up on the thread) as follows: Protagonist is an elite military or intelligence operative. It turns out their elite unit does a lot of very evil things. The protagonist fights to put a stop to this–so that they can get back to fighting for their nation’s interests abroad the right way.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it doublethink to execute this plot without them questioning whether they’re on the right side overall.
Both. For example, demons support anti-Catholic anti-religious sentiment because their ceremonies actually work. And they don’t want inconvenient exorcists saving those souls. Likewise with Native Americans, etc.
However, we only meet the town’s feminists who are unaffiliated with any national organization. So it’s possible they’re the only one. But considering they’re the only representatives we see…
This isn’t what they do though. The Church of Night is completely uninterested in reforming society or fighting the patriarchy (and in fact is patriarchal itself). They are not at war with the conservatives, the conservatives are at war with them. The conservatives attack them in ways that are explicitly compared to prejudice.
However, the Church of Night performs murders, massacres, sexual assault, cannibalism, and torture both as required by their Satanic rituals and because individual members want to.
Ok, wow, that’s absurd and you’re right about the doublethink.
I did notice the discrepancy. Evil demon worshipping, murderers and cannibals but also loyal and honourable and loving elderly ladies. Be repulsed by them but also root for them.
It bothered me a bit but in hindsight that’s what made the show interesting. It’s pretty obvious to me that the creators of the show deliberately made it this way.
This seems like a good place to discuss Us, but are spoilers an issue?
General point: It’s a classic horror movie, and I recommend it to anyone who likes horror movies. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s pretty bloody, but doesn’t linger on injuries.
I haven’t seen it yet. It looked really good based on the trailer, but the review blurbs on Rotten Tomatoes all have this “for all its flaws…” caveat.
Considering the popularity of noir, I wonder if there could be a popular series where the traditional conservatives and the representatives of everyone else are equally evil.
Game of Thrones?
(The High Sparrow and the Faith Militant were probably still a better choice for rulers than Cersei, though.).
AI winter still lingers in robotics, apparently. Why is it so hard to build profitable robotics companies?
XKCD answered this question just three days ago.
I have the impression that this so called “social robotics” isn’t going anywhere.
Yann LeCun once used the terms “Cargo Cult AI” or “Potemkin AI” or “Wizard-of-Oz AI”. He was talking about the Sophia robot, but I think these characterizations (in particular the “Cargo Cult AI” which implies self-deception and wishful thinking rather than deliberate misrepresentation) apply to the social robotics field as a whole.
People think of robots as appliances, not as people or even as pets. Making robots look cute with big expressive eyes doesn’t change this fact. People want robots that do useful things, and all the Kuris, the Peppers, the Naos and the old Aibos did nothing but repeat the same basic scripted demonstration behaviors in a loop. Their only real application was as standardized research platforms for university labs and dedicated hobbyists, an extremely niche market.
It’s no coincidence that the only autonomous robots with any real consumer market presence are automated vacuum cleaners. At least they do something useful, and even there, they are still a small niche of the vacuum cleaner market.
Controlling a physical body in open space is still super hard. Strides in image recognition has helped it a lot, but it is still a hard problem where failure is rewarded with a robot or a car running over a real person.
Do note that one place where progress has been made is in flying drones, the littler the better, maybe because they can be practical without a lot of mass. But as they become more weighty, the real world constrains hit them too and things like flying taxis seem shaky to deploy on production. There’s also the problem of regulation, but surely Amazon will solve this if they feel they are ready for drone delivery. Below a certain weight, maybe it won’t worry too much about potentially flattening a person (even tho a 10 kilos drone will still kill a person from a hundred meters, and it can cause damage to real planes full of real people).
It appears that the House of Commons has now voted against every course of action that is open to it regarding Brexit, to say nothing of several that aren’t, while voting particularly hard against the thing that will happen all by itself if they don’t settle on something else.
Possibly this is a retaliatory strike on the satire industry.
It seems to me that the remaining possibilities are May’s deal passing at the third attempt, no deal, or a longer extension (complete with participation in the European Parliament elections) to allow for a general election.
I’m not an expert on U.K. parliamentary history but this seems like exactly the kind of situation where general elections are supposed to happen. Our actually back May’s deal was voted down the first time.
Not enough time for that. Plus it would just replace a deeply divided Tory Party who can’t get anything done with a deeply divided Labour Party who can’t get anything done.
Wouldn’t the general idea, again considering how parliament has mostly worked over the past century:
* dissolve parliament
* parties publish election manifestos
* the voters vote
* whoever wins has a firm mandate for the plan in the election manifesto
There’s your problem. No party wins an absolute majority. No minor party decides to sacrifice its own interests for the “greater good” by just giving up an annexing itself to one of the major parties. While they are negotiating the power-sharing agreement necessary to form a government, April 12 comes and Hard Brexit happens by default.
There’s no possible way for a general election to happen in the next fortnight. A longer extension would already have to be in place – at least till May 22nd.
There’s also the possibility that the form of Brexit most popular with the voters wouldn’t make it into the manifestoes of either major party, in which case the eventual deal would probably be perceived as lacking legitimacy by a large part of the country.
Yet another possibility is a Hung Parliament, in which the parties which could form a coalition all went into the election promising different Brexit plans.
Sure, I understand that minority governments aren’t really how the system is supposed to work, and if that’s going to be a regular thing norms need to change. But would such an outcome be a highly likely outcome?
As for timing, as I said, it probably should have happened back on January 15th. That vote was the moral equivalent of loss of supply.
It’s not just that the system isn’t supposed to work with minority governments, it’s that a minority government clearly wouldn’t have a “firm mandate” for their Brexit plan, even if they could win over enough MPs from other parties to pass it through the Commons.
What gives you the idea Labour would win? They’re certainly not ahead in the polls. With their Scottish seats permanently lost, the best they can possibly hope for seems to be a ramshackle left wing mega-coalition that would, yes, have trouble passing anything.
The only path to clarity through a general election I can see is a Tory majority strong enough to shrug off some rebels, and that doesn’t seem terribly likely either.
On the one hand some of the votes were pretty close and the whole thing was nonbinding, so there might be enough pressure to compromise when push actually comes to shove (although I said that two months ago). On the other hand these plans weren’t fully fleshed out like May’s was, which bodes super poorly for their chances once they start working out details…
Eh. Some of them were defacto fully fleshed out plans – “Join EEA and EFTA” for example, would probably sail through with the EU without a hitch, and is a fully fleshed out legal arrangement because Norway is already in that boat. But, well, that was not exactly popular. The most popular solution was “Permanent customs union” which. .. What? They want the same relationship with the EU as Turkey? O.o I mean, the EU would probably sign off on it, just to stop Ireland from having massive problems, but… That setup burns the City, pretty darn hard?
The current EFTA members seem more ambivalent about it though (since Britain would dominate economically and in population).
+1, great line: Possibly this is a retaliatory strike on the satire industry.
Isn’t this sort of situation exactly what they keep a Queen around for?
There is precedent. In 2003 the Commons voted against every one of a range of proposals for House of Lords reform, including the status quo and abolition.
Difference being, I suppose, that in that case reality defaulted to the status quo, where here it very much doesn’t. And also that there I’m pretty sure the public didn’t much care, where here many of us have strong and opposing views.
Outside-the-box solution: Parliament should hold an election. As in, Parliament are the voters and Brexit plans are the candidates.
They’d have to agree on nomination and voting methods–not easy, but surely easier than agreeing on a Brexit deal?
Might be legal issues with the legislature inventing its own new methodology, but a nonbinding thing with personal pledges to abide by the outcome should avoid that?
How is this not exactly the same as agreeing on a Brexit deal?
I think ADA is proposing some system where you have to agree on exactly one outcome – voting no on everything (including status quo) isn’t acceptable.
There are a bunch of models (Papal elections, for example), but it’s not a bad parliamentary suggestion to have a process where by some vote (majority, super-majority, whatever), the body can lock itself into a process to settle on a single choice among several.
I have a friend who says that American health care has a similar problem. A majority are unhappy with the status quo, but there is also majority opposition to every alternative, at least when the details are spelled out.
Depends how predictable the outcomes of the different methods are, right? As long as there’s at least one method that sounds reasonable on its face and isn’t easily predicted, it should improve the situation.
Deniability. Say a majority of Parliament wants a new referendum but doesn’t want to be seen to be voting for it. They institute instant-runoff voting; everyone puts referendum as second choice, and it wins, but everyone in Parliament gets to say “I told you so” when things don’t work out properly.
No because it would only require a plurality rather than a majority.
Of course, they can’t make it legally binding, so a majority of MPs would have to promise to then cast a legally binding vote for whatever outcome of the first non-binding vote came out, and they might well chicken out.
About ads.
I’m not anti-capitalist, but I think one of capitalism’s ugliest features is probably advertising. I loathe TV and radio commercials, billboards, and ads on the internet. I’ve never seen a brand logo or slogan printed anywhere where I thought it improved the thing it was printed on. For every 500 pages of junk mail delivered to my house, I’d guess maybe 3 pages contain a coupon I end up using, and only one page contains other kinds of information (a new store opening, a sale or promotion, etc.) that I eventually act on. But can the world I know and love work without advertising?
If advertising were different in such a way that I found it enjoyable and unobtrusive, and didn’t require the harvesting of lots of personal data about me to be enjoyable and unobtrusive, would it still be effective and worthwhile enough to exist?
What makes advertising distinct from its taxonomic neighbors (e.g. marketing, promotion, persuasion, etc.)?
Is advertising in most instances a form of pollution?
Is it ethical to advertise to kids? Why is it ethical to advertise to anyone?
What forms of advertising are acceptable to us, and what forms aren’t? Why?
Why are advertisers allowed to tell lies so long as a “reasonable” person would quickly be able to recognize the lie? (I think I’m summarizing the law accurately there; maybe someone who knows this better will correct me.)
What would a world without advertising look like? Could it work? Is it possible?
CONTENT WARNING: I have a single (1) microeconomics and macroeconomics course under my belt. My confidence in the accuracy of the rhetoric is like 67-75%, whereas my confidence in the end point I’m trying to make is something like 85-95%.
1) The world probably couldn’t exist the way it does today without some form of advertising. Growing the company’s market increases the amount they sell, which increases economies of scale – even ignoring actual products like Coca Cola, can you imagine how hard it would be for an industry as tightly knit as Hollywood to exist if the only way for your movie to get viewers in theaters was word of mouth?
2) No, because history shows advertisements large enough to work are large enough to annoy people. Once advertisements are scaled down, we start to wonder how we lived with them the way they were before, and then the new scaled down size becomes the new normal. There are very few exceptions to this. Even seamless algorithmic promotion requires a lot of data on the target before it becomes effective.
3) Marketing, promotion, and persuasion all have an element of personal interaction. Sometimes that personal interaction can be intolerable, but at the very least you’re talking to a real human rather than staring at an uncanny-valley style smiling face.
4) According to Econguru:
So maybe it’s not pollution in the technical sense – advertising isn’t waste. But the opportunity cost of not advertising is very high, and it’s definitely “waste” in the sense that it distorts and destroys art that it’s put in. I’d call it memetic pollution. A waste of ideas, that are forced to spread and hard to get out of the popular conscience.
5) No, just like it’s not ethical to entice a child into having sex – they’re not smart enough or clever enough on average to know what they really want, and if they don’t really want it, it carries a cost. One can argue that the cost of advertisement (29.99 for a toy in two installments) vs. the cost of molestation (probably thousands of productive working hours and money for a therapist) are different on the orders of magnitude, but you don’t see molestation occurring on a nationwide scale. In the same vein, advertising is in general exploitative, but at least with adults, there’s the implication that they’re capable decisionmakers. (no matter how many studies show awareness of advertising doesn’t affect effectiveness)
6) Advertisements that are legitimate and spontaneous endorsements of a product tend to be fun to listen to. This is why Sponsors will tell the people they are sponsoring to phrase their recommendation as genuine and spontaneous, which consequentially made this style of advertisement offensive as a matter of sheer saturation. So the answer to “what advertisement is tolerable” is typically whatever type of advertisement isn’t being done to death.
7) Advertisers aren’t allowed to tell lies. What they are allowed to do is mislead, or offer opinions. “The best celery cutter on the market!” is not easy to disprove. Similarly, my internet company can offer me 50Mbps but only provide me with 24 on average, because it doesn’t matter if the performance they advertise is only true on occasion, so long as it is true. That having been said, a lot of the leeway on this is because the industry is new, or because the company did regulatory capture, or because they’re a monopoly and you can’t vote with your wallet, or because they’re really lying but it’d be too expensive for anyone to sue them.
8) Yes, it could work. It could also increase competition because it would be very hard to get a market share that’s stupidly large. That having been said, a lot of entertainment and media is supported by advertisement. They would have to find a new business model pretty quickly in order to avoid disappearing. (I’m partial to Patreon’s patron based model, but not partial to the platform of Patreon as a whole – I imagine the market for patron-based platforms would be much more competitive if more people used them, though.)
Waaaaayyy too high. Advertisement is exploitation???
Advertisement is exploitation. If I could tap into one of the sense filters from The Golden Age and remove it from my perception I would do so. You’re exploiting my imperfect control over my own perceptions.
Of course it is. It’s not even a secret that advertisers use psychological tricks to exert influence on people. It’s designed to leverage the effects of repetition and your finite attention span to insert a preference for their product where none should exist. Additionally, an advertisement is completely detached from the actual quality of the product. If showing someone an advertisement makes them more likely to buy that product regardless of whether it actually suits their needs, and they can’t avoid advertisements, then that’s exploitation. It creates a market where companies don’t need their product to actually work in order for their product to be sold.
I don’t think that fits the meritocratic spirit of capitalism – instead of providing a landscape where companies compete on the basis of the quality (and price) of their products, it creates a landscape where companies with the most inventive marketing teams win even if the product is mediocre.
An interesting fictional answer to this is in James Tiptree Jr.’s story “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”. (I read this because it appeared in New Dimensions 3, the same science fiction anthology where “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” first appeared.) Advertising is banned, but products can be shown being “legitimately used”, so there are celebrities whose careers consist solely of various forms of product placement at parties, in soap operas, etc. (The sci-fi element is that the biggest celebrity in the story is actually a lab-grown body operated remotely via some kind of wireless nervous system technology.)
One reason I love ads on the internet is that although they exist due to capitalist motives they create the profoundly uncapitalist feeling experience of being able to access so much without having to exchange any money. You can also become part of the secret minority who use adblock, which is unavailable in real life, and apparently the average internet user has no idea what adblock is, because all of these services remain solvent.
I work for an internet advertising company. We really don’t mind if you want to block ads. There’s basically three reasons:
First, blocking ads denies the publisher money (that is, the website the ad is hosted on). We don’t bid on ads until the exchange contacts us, which is after the point at which the vast majority of ad blocking occurs.
Second, if you want to block ads, you aren’t likely to respond well to those ads in the first place. We may as well not spend money on you, and you’re happy to help.
Third, our advertising campaigns always run out of budget before we run out of people to serve ads to. Unless way more people start using adblock, we’re going to bid on the same number of requests and serve up the same number of ads. People blocking ads just reduce the number of bids we process.
As an adblock user, I probably shouldn’t say this – but a larger pool of ad viewers would likely drop the prices of advertising, which would make your services more valuable to the customer…
But it makes sense that it is mostly the publisher who is concerned with ad blocking (as evidenced by the annoying popups with “we see you are using an adblocker”. Any way to block those?)
Here is an anti-adblocker blocker.
NoScript your way to victory! Disable the thing making the anti-adblocker show up in the first place!
I’ve configured some streaming websites such that I’ve gotten rid of mid-episode ads. Haven’t managed it with YT yet, but I haven’t experimented that much to get rid of YT ads yet.
@AG I watch videos on youtube (and other websites) by passing the link to a script that extracts the url of the video file using youtube-dl, and passes it to a media player. (Actually the media player mpv has this functionality built-in, automatically calling youtube-dl if youtube-dl is available and its parameter itself doesn’t point to a video file, reminding me of this xkcd.)
@10240, is that not kind of overkill? Just installing the latest ad blocker (currently uBlock Origin) is enough to use youtube with no ads or other annoyances. I go years at a time without remembering that youtube even has ads.
Edit to add: and I’m a little mystified that they continue to allow this to work, because I feel like they could defeat this any time they liked by delivering the ads as part of the video stream.
@dick I guess it’s an overkill if the only purpose is blocking ads, if uBlock Origin works. I find that a standalone video player also tends to be better at seeking, have better performance in general, which are part of the reason I do this, and so I’ve never bothered to figure out if I can block youtube video ads with an ad blocker.
NoSript is definitely my preference and has some benefits beyond just blocking ads, but does require a bit more willingness to fiddle and maybe a bit more general understanding of browsing. I highly recommend it but a simpler adblocker is probably fine/preferable for some folks.
It just seems that anti-adblocker is enough of a stickler with some of the people here, that it’s worth mentioning a solution to anti-adblocker, that also replaces their adblocker, so your app count doesn’t go up.
@Unsaintly
That’s very interesting.
@Ketil
What especially annoys me about the ad blocker blockers is that half the time they don’t even work; even if you disable the adblocker completely they still detect it as existing so you’d have to go to the effort of uninstalling it and at that point I’d rather just give up and not use the offending website to begin with.
My least favorite thing is when I comply with their polite request, only to find I was blocking an auto-playing video. I block ads because they tend to be annoying, not because I want to deny you revenue. Stop being annoying and I’ll stop blocking.
Honestly, if most ads on the internet were merely classic banner style ads I would never use an adblocker. I even occasionally disable adblocker with the intent of giving a site some clicks but then there’s pop-ups or some other annoying crap.
Even Youtube used to just have side and banner images that were ads, but then they must have realized that video ads were more profitable.
@Incurian
That’s exactly why I don’t disable my adblocker anymore. I once had a virus get onto my computer through an ad, and I’m straight up Nope! on ads on my machine.
Now, I won’t make any effort to bypass adblocker prevention; if they don’t want me using an adblocker, that’s their right. I won’t expose myself to the nonsense that are modern web advertisements, though.
Is there an ad blocker which removes the ads from the page, but at the same time simulates a click on the ad, i.e. downloads the page the ad links to, and throws that away, too?
That way, I don’t see the ads, the web page I’m visiting get a little revenue from the advertiser, and everybody is happy.
@Robin
Not the person paying for the ads.
I also probably wouldn’t be totally comfortable with a plugin that is silently opening unknown (possibly malicious) pages in the background.
You can whitelist pages you like enough to want to give them ad revenue and that you know don’t have obnoxious/obtrusive ads which might be a simpler/more practical solution.
@acymetric
For even more overhead: run the browser in a virtual machine that can safely be infected with a virus!
Catcube: Yep. Unless it’s a site I need to get to for some reason (work, kids’ events, etc.) I’ll just hit the back button if they demand I turn off my ad blocker.
@albatross11
I just recently had to switch local news sites because the one I preferred started doing this.
I guess they won’t miss me?
I’m a professional ecommerce guy, and a fair bit of my specialization is in paid advertising. If your campaigns are running out of budget, you’re doing it wrong. Advertising should be net-margin-dollar positive after advertising spend, so turning off a campaign because it hit some arbitrary budget number is simply reducing your overall profit. If it’s NOT net-margin-dollar positive, why is the campaign running at all?
I am nowhere near in that space so I’m taking a wild guess, but could it be due to the way contracts are structured?
If they’re an agency, and not in-house, you’re likely correct. That’s the usual reason for agency budget limitation- the client set the budgets and the agency is just doing the best they can for that fixed pot of money. (So the client gave them a dumb order, and they couldn’t talk the client out of it, or didn’t try.)
If they’re in-house marketers/advertisers (as is increasingly common, if not an outright majority), then they simply misunderstand it or (more likely) have a boss that misunderstands it and gave them a dumb order, etc. Sadly quite common. Every company my company acquired was making really dumb paid advertising decisions like this.
I was forced to use an adblocker because of Yahoo/Oath/Verizon/whoever bought it in the last ten minutes desperation to monetise Tumblr, which included stuffing so many ads and sponsored content onto the page that it was literally unreadable.
Having done so, the difference is striking. Even more so when I use a device without an ad blocker, and I get a webpage that again is so choked with banner ads, sidebar ads, ads in between the paragraphs, pop-ups and the like that there is 90% advertising to 10% content, and I can’t read the article I opened the page to see in the first place.
I will never go back to not using an ad blocker, and the pity is that discreet content would work to target ads, but by the desperate stuffing of ads onto sites, the creators have forced people into the arms race of adblocker – begging letter popups guilt-tripping about ‘we depend on ad revenue to provide this service, disable or whitelist us’ – paywalls – using getarounds to get around paywalls – more ads – better adblockers and so on ad infinitum.
I always mention this when the adblock argument comes up. I’m opting out because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see it because I know myself and know I won’t find the content appealing. Which means I was never going to buy the thing, so why would the advertisers want to pay for me to see the ad?
The same argument is why I am puzzled at the hostility a lot of people express towards advertisers collecting information in order to figure out who to advertise to. The more information is out there about me, the more likely it is that advertisers will tell me about things I might want to buy, the less likely that I will get robocalls at dinner time offering to refinance my nonexistent mortgage.
@DavidFriedman
On the one hand I expect advertisers to use this information to figure out what to tell me – and what not to tell me – to get the response they want, e.g. voting for the politician of their choice – taking advantage of whatever tricks they know, which almost certainly include telling me a lot of things that aren’t true.
On the other hand, I expect this information to be available, for a fee, to anyone else who wants it.
@DavidFriedman
Or the more likely that they will succeed in manipulating me…or distracting me.
DavidFriedman:
Once they’ve collected as much information as they can from my web searches, they’ll use it to try to max out how much they can sell the ads for, but I see little reason to think they’ll refuse to sell it to other people for other uses I’ll like less. Nor do I see any reason to think they’ll refuse to sell/give it to any government agencies that would like to track people, or for that matter to any private companies that might like to do so.
There are two really useful functions of advertising. How annoying they are (for me) tends to be how much they diverge from the ideal.
First, discoverability. Suppose I wrote a thriller novel in a style somewhere between Robert Ludlum and Lee Child. There are a million people who would love to pay $5.99 for that novel so they can read it and get hours of enjoyment as a result. How do they know it even exists for them to purchase?
In an ideal world, we’d have perfectly targeted advertising, where everyone who would for sure love my book could be contacted with a recommendation they trust telling them that. They one-click and buy and we’re all happy and the advertising market is maximally efficient in it’s job of helping match-make trades.
Back in the real world, we don’t have the technology nor necessarily want the privacy invasion necessary to perfectly simulate every individual’s desires and compare them to various products in order to decide to advertise that product to them or not. Instead, we make do with “good enough”, with that bar basically being set at the point where it’s economically viable to target that audience with a particular advertisement.
So if I can target a Facebook ad at people who are both members of the Robert Ludlum Appreciation Group and the Lee Child Fan page, not 100% will want and like my book, but probably a high enough percentage will to make it worthwhile in the cost to me and also the cost to them (to glance at it and either pursue the ad or ignore it). As that targeting gets wider, the product either needs to have a wider appeal (Brand X Soda Drink, say), or else a corresponding greater profit on the smaller percentage who it does appeal to.
We get to the general demographic level, eventually. So sports fans tend to like beer. I’m a sports fan and I don’t drink. I’m still subjected to endless beer ads, unless I happen to have a technological mechanism to skip them because I don’t find them useful to me. At the extreme, many people drink Cola, Coke and Pepsi advertise everywhere, especially to groups which are just deciding which one they prefer (younger crowd). I don’t drink caffeine, so all those ads are wasted on me. At that level, at least they attempt to make the ads entertaining (which they can afford primarily because of the wide appeal of them means they’re going to spend a lot to get lots of people to see them, so the ad production budget can be higher when spread across so many impressions, see also Superbowl), so I can enjoy watching a beer or cola ad sometimes, despite having no interest in beer.
The nice thing about discoverability is that over time with improving technology, we’ve gotten better at that match making function. It’ll get better in the future as we trade more privacy/more personalization for it, or else come up with a better way to isolate the personal identification with the associated bundle of desires. The other nice thing is that as we improve our interests match making ability, both the advertiser and the viewer get more benefit from the advertising. If you just had a baby, then getting a coupon for diapers in the mail is great. If you can’t even get pregnant, not so much….
Second, branding. In the first part, I sort of hand-waved away the ability to trust a recommendation source that because the ad is targeted to you, you’ll like a particular product when you buy it. Trust in an advertising context generally comes from a few difference sources. If you’ve bought something before, especially more than once, you’ll trust that you’re going to get another something like that next time if they were all uniform results. If you share values, or culture, or interests, or whatever, with a company or with people who like that company’s products, then you’ll also have a tendency to trust that you’ll like them more than a random company you know nothing about, or worse, know bad things about. The collection of information we have about a product, a company, an author, a sports/movie star, etc… is what we call their brand identity.
At worst, if you’re a romantic horror cozy mystery reader and you already read one of my thriller books and hated it, because you hate reading about the military and spies and stuff like that and just wanted relationships with a scary element, then seeing my brand advertised to you will really annoy you. Why would you care about that ad? Even then, the brand information you have speeds up your cognitive process by giving you a shortcut to dismiss the ad.
The more a brand corresponds with what you’ll get, again, the more beneficial it is to both parties. We both know Company SJW signals really hard about certain political issues. You like them and want to work there and buy the products they recommend. I don’t and don’t. It’s ok, their branding benefits both of us in getting what we do or don’t want.
Discoverability is about prompting action. Branding is about achieving trust/alignment of interests.
So my position would be that advertising done well is ethical and beneficial, not pollution. People aren’t perfect/sometimes very good at their jobs. Advertising done poorly is a losing proposition on both sides. It also tends to get cut when it doesn’t make any money. Can it be overdone? Sure, mostly because some politicians… I mean, ad buyers don’t know when to stop because their ads are already saturating all the available spots in a market and they’re starting to damage their brand with many people as a result.
Also, I’m really annoyed by, ahem… I’m not the right audience for, ads which essentially tell you that their example customer is stupid because look at this dumb thing they did. I’m mostly offended by the idiocy of the ad-writer in that situation, rather than the target audience, though.
In a perfect world, discoverability would be handled by searches, initiated by the potential customer, and reviews, posted by other customers. At one point, I’d have learned of your novel via Amazon recommending books that people who buy the same things as I do tend to buy. A bit later, I might have learned of it via Goodreads and/or LibraryThing – and the latter does in fact still work reasonably. Likewise, there was a time when I could identify a decent service via Yelp reviews. I can still often find “which local store sells xxxx” via the manufacturers web site (though some such sites are full of errors, or otherwise unusable).
Currently, when I ask Amazon for books by a particular author, half the results are explicitly labelled as sponsored, and only half of the remaining ones come from that author. Yelp is infested with paid reviews, and there’s a whole industry providing those reviews, both pro and con. Google gives me several ads before I get down to potentially unbiased results. So what I see correlates not with the desirability or relevance of the product (for me), but with the depth of its sellers’ pocketbooks. This is not good for either the new vendor or for the potential customer.
Meanwhile, Comcast Business sends me paper spam at least weekly, phrased as if I still need to “discover” them. Ditto for ATT, but at least they have the decency to put their name on the envelope.
The experience is so aversive that I avoid many potential sources of discoverability, and now usually learn about new things late, from personal contacts. I’d prefer an effective source of information on truly innovative options, or for that matter on “me too” options for things repeatedly consumed (food, novels, etc.) but anything like that is drowned out by fake reviews, and repeated announcements of the availability of services that everyone in the city already knows about, except perhaps a few infants 🙁
If discoverability is handled by searches, then what are the algorithms that determine the order in which results are returned? Can they be gamed? And if so, wouldn’t that game become a form of advertising? Or would the algorithms themselves be a form of advertising?
I’m sure they can be gamed – and are. I’m not sure of the extent to which offers of improving one’s search results – for a fee, not given to the search engine provider – are themselves just some kind of scam.
But as an anecdatum, recent searches for low sodium meals produced a top result that was merely moderate, from a company that seems to make an artform of selling the same thig to different people, differently labelled. Either there is no supplier in that space (possible), or a very good job of search engine abuse is being done (likely), or google accepts money for placements *without* marking all such placements as sponsored (also possible).
Most people don’t really mind ads (source: Naomi Klein’s “NO LOGO”, by memory). The collection of personal info is a far worse problem.
In Germany, where I currently live, there’s no robocall problem, two major TV channels don’t show ads (and are stuffed with tax money instead, which is far worse IMO). The postmen actually respect “Please no ads” mailbox signs. Collection of personal data is heavily regulated.
Now the truly capitalist way of dealing with this is to ask: how much do you value not seeing ads vs. (for example) moving to Germany? vs. not watching TV at all? vs. not listening to radio at all?
Also, in principle you could get rid of most LCD billboards by using glasses with a polarizer film at a proper angle.
If it was up to me, I wouldn’t have cable TV in my house at all. I’d watch all my entertainment on streaming services like netflix and amazon prime which do not generally advertise to me.
My cable box’s Netflix app advertises to me all the time. Granted, it’s advertising Netflix shows, but still advertising. I’ve usually signed on to watch something in particular and it’s really irritating to have a slower menu because it’s trying to serve up video to me while I scroll around.
I mean, yes there are previews for some shows. But that’s usually the kind of advertising I can get behind. “Hey, maybe you’ll like this other similar show to what you watch”
What I absolutely abhor is sitting down to watch something and then being told that I need Bounty Paper towels and Pampers Diapers. I’m here to watch them track down this here murderer and you want me to buy paper towels?
So, in essence, it’s not advertisements in principal I object to, but the context of advertisements in the form of commercials, especially widely targeted context insensitive commercials.
This might be true, but the fact that Naomi Klein says so is decent evidence that it isn’t. She’s enormously ignorant and her books are trash, she’s, at best, a left wing glenn beck, not someone who should ever be taken seriously, or cited for any reason but mockery.
I view advertising as basically being in two forms, blind and feedback. Youtube is a good example:
I watch a video on youtube and all around it are suggestions for other videos based on my viewing experience. I will watch >0% of these videos.
On the other hand when I watch a youtube video I get a short ad at the beginning which appears to be blindly selected. There is basically no context, if I am watching a kid friendly video that appears to have no bearing on if I will get a trailer for a violent TV show/Video game/Movie (if anything it might be increasing the rate). Yesterday I watched a video on organic, high intensity, urban farming and the ad was for Scott’s turf builder plus. I would bet that very, very few people who watch that type of video are using mass produced lawn fertilizer based on an ad. Ironically it is the non specific ads that feel intrusive, not the ones using my personal information.
My interstitial (I think that’s the right word?) Youtube ads are blindly selected, but that’s because I did everything I could in my account settings to limit how much data about me Youtube/Google collects.
The advertising for those other videos is (I’m guessing) based on that very same kind of data Youtube/Google has collected about other people because they didn’t go into their settings like I did.
How would you get the feedback advertising you don’t mind, or maybe even like, without other people being tracked?
You could for example give content producers control over what their own content is associated with, but this choice would probably be valuable enough so sell, and then we’re back to advertising again.
This is a good thread. No one else has responded to the point about junk mail yet, so I’ll rant on that.
Our mailman gets upset sometimes that we don’t clear out our mailbox. The mail he brings is 70% ads, some small portion of which might be applicable but I’d actually rather not adjust our spending or dining habits in response to $0.30 off of a burger. It all goes straight to the trashcan, and our neighbors do likewise (when it isn’t strewn about the mail boxes).
The rest of the mail, by the by, is about 20% redundant paper ‘bills’ for items already paid on-line, 9.9% mail for people that don’t live there, and 0.1% jury notifications. :/
That seems like it is probably too high by several orders of magnitude 😉
Depends on whether the count by pages or packages. I’ve been two years in a row; I’m off by no more than 1 order of magnitude.
Ah, I’ve been much luckier than you on that front then. In most jurisdictions you could have gotten out of the second one with minimal effort (if you wanted to).
I wasn’t kept more than a day or two in either case; I believe CA can get you every year if they want.
Junk mail, spam, and robocalls are all examples where there’s a tragedy of the commons going on that eventually makes existing communications mechanisms much less useful. In the US, I imagine we’ll get to the point in the next couple years where it will just be really hard to get anyone to pick up their phone for a number they don’t know, because like 95% of the calls everyone gets will be some robocall spammer from a spoofed number.
We aren’t already there? “I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize” is a pretty common trope both in media and in actual real life practice.
Yep, I’m already there.
I hope it makes up for all the uneffortposting I’ve been doing.
Online ads are a force for evil in the world. They drive media sources to concentrate on clicks and be dependent on links from social media sites in a way that basically puts Moloch on their editorial boards. They also create incentives for the advertising networks/sites to do everything they can to invade your privacy, because you get paid a lot less for an ad to “someone in North America looking at the front page of the Washington Post” than you get for an ad served to “54 year old white male living in zip code 31416 with two children aged 10 and 7, making between $50k-75k/year in a white collar job, recently searched for ‘sunglasses’, ‘electric lawnmowers’, and ‘donkey porn’.” They crap up sites and make everything on the web work more slowly.
You know how Google takes page load time into account in their search engine results? If they took ad load time into account too, I’m convinced that wikia and patheos would never appear at all.
They do take “ad” load time into account, if the ads 9or trackers) loading are “synchronous” javascript, that slows down the appearance of the actual site content. It’s rumored that they also take into account some portion of the “asynchronous” load that you’re likely referring to, which is additional loading that takes place after initial content load, but Google doesn’t exactly publicize it’s exact formula for penalizing sites- they just give general (and oft-changing) guidelines.
How about a world where advertisers pay for the externalities they cause. We can start with a reasonable fee for every phone spam – let’s say 5 minutes of the fully loaded rate for the average worker. (I.e. salary + benefits + cost of their workspace etc.) on the grounds that it’ll take at least 5 minutes to restore their concentration. (Extra in areas where people pay per phone call received, or total phone usage, of course.) Paper spam should be cheaper, but include some amount of the recipient’s time, along with the full cost of disposal. Paper mail containing unrecycleable spam (plastic) should cost the sender more. Billboards should be cheaper still, but they might resonably be judged as contributing to distracted-driver accidents.
There’s somewhat of a special case for media priced low or free because they contain ads. Let’s mandate that any supplier that offers such must also offer an ad-free version that costs no more than base price plus whatever the vendor would have received for the ads in the equivalent version. (Allow some slack in this “no more” so as to avoid silly lawsuits about pennies, or about ad revenue coming in less or more than anticipated in a given period.)
This doesn’t address issues of deception, of abusing knowledge of human nature to get people to do things not in their interests, or of specifically preying on those too young to have developed defeces against such techniques. But it would certainly reduce them.
Interestingly, the proof-of-work function used in Bitcoin is based on a scheme proposed to do this–the original hashcash idea was to require a proof of work on each email, so bulk emailing became impractical.
Last time Scott linked a post on “Cultural Marxism” I disagreed with, as did others, but, in the interest of trying to keep visible OTs CW-free, I’ll post here what I was going to post in response to Conrad Honcho’s agreement with Ambi there:
Also, almost all the major thinkers associated with the movement were either self-professed Marxists or people trying to fix Marxism but fundamentally sympathetic to it. And most of them probably wouldn’t even have objected to being called “cultural Marxists” before it became a right wing sneer word, insofar as that is a workable shorthand for “Marxists who study culture,” “people who study culture from a Marxist perspective” and/or “people trying to fix/update Marxism through study of culture.” I could understand the complaint if it were the first one and most of them viewed Marxism as incidental to their study of culture, but that’s largely not the case.
I mean, I like the work of Pierre Bourdieu so I’m not going to sneer at him, but he was also a Marxist famous for studying culture from perspectives of class power. Is it wildly inaccurate to call him a “cultural Marxist”? I mean, that isn’t the first word I’d use to describe him, but that’s because it now has a negative connotation not yet attached to “critical theorist” (Related, there seems to be the idea that “cultural Marxist” can only reference the Frankfurt School specifically, but coming from the same people who insist it’s not a real thing, so I’m not sure how they decided that, though I’d agree people like Adorno seem central examples of the concept, insofar as it should exist).
Related to the idea that most people the right likes to call “cultural Marxists” the left would prefer to call “critical theorists” (a much more objective, less partisan-sounding term), it seems like a case of a rhetorical game I see in many arenas where one group resists a label assigned by outgroup on the theory that said term shouldn’t exist since it’s meaningless.
An analogy: MD says to acupuncturist “stop calling the scientific method ‘Western medicine’; it’s just ‘evidence-based medicine’ a.k.a. ‘real medicine’.” From the perspective of the MD it seems reasonable to say “‘Western’ medicine isn’t a real thing; stop saying that.” But from the perspective of someone who think acupuncture is just as, if not more valid a paradigm, and who thinks he uses evidence too, it seems a perfectly reasonable descriptor since most of the concepts and techniques he’s talking about came from the West, as opposed to the East, where his paradigm came from, even if there’s nothing inherently “Western” about the former, other than its history (so in this sense it’s already more different than the “cultural Marxism” case, since many so-described take explicit inspiration from Marx).
Is there a LW or SSC post about this phenomenon somewhere? (“Words, Words, Words” is probably relevant on an object level but I’m thinking more about the concept of pushing back against a label on the theory that it’s “not a thing” because incoherent, even though the people using it presumably see a coherence (which is not to claim it can’t also be a sneer word, misleading concept, or weaponized and applied too promiscuously)).
Agreeing with your agreement with me of Ambi.
Simon_Jester was talking about “cultural Marxism” as a culture/conspiracy of Marxists. No, “Marxism” is the noun, and “cultural” is the adjective. “Cultural Marxism” is the same basic conflict-theory ideas of Marxism, but applied to culture instead of class/economics. There exist two types of people: the oppressors and the oppressed. In regular, economic Marxism, the oppressors are the capitalists and the oppressed are the laborers. In cultural Marxism, the oppressors are the cishet white males and the oppressed are the trans gay POC females.
Yes, it’s a sneer word applied by the outgroup. But so is “the Patriarchy” and so is “American Imperialism.” None of these things posit a knowing conspiracy or formal organization, but a broad cluster of presuppositions and behaviors noticeable to outsiders.
But when a feminist talks about “the Patriarchy” those arguing in good faith do not respond, “haha, you crazy woman! What a silly conspiracy theory, like white men in hooded robes are holding secret meetings on how best to oppress women and POC!” People understand the feminist is not talking about a literal conspiracy of Patriarchs. She’s talking about a system of beliefs and behaviors, held by no one who calls themselves “a member of the Patriarchy.”
When an anti-war activist talks about “American Imperialism,” no one arguing in good faith responds, “haha, you silly nut! America is a constitutional republic, not an empire! It can’t engage in ‘imperialism!’ Read a book dummy!” People understand the anti-war activist is not talking about a literal American Empire, with an Emperor. He’s talking about a system of behaviors akin to imperialism in which American military power is used to exploit less powerful nations and peoples.
So when someone says “cultural Marxism,” they’re not talking about a conspiracy of Marxists. They’re talking about a cluster of beliefs about the power relationships present in society. Understanding that the feminist or the gay rights activist or the BLM activist hold many of these beliefs allows one to make useful predictions about their behaviors. You don’t have to agree with them or say they’re right (I don’t think the feminists talking about The Patriarchy have an accurate worldview, either), but to say they’re talking about some conspiracy of Marxists is a strawman.
In all fairness, it has been my impression that in some circles the idea of Marxists actually conspiring to destroy Western culture and the US in particular is actually entertained in all seriousness.
In all fairness, given the history of the cold war and the Soviet Union’s propaganda efforts (not that the West didn’t do the same, it’s just that it’s harder in places where freedom after speech isn’t necessarily guaranteed), it’s not such a dumb idea.
Sure, there’s the Yuri Bezmenov video (KGB defector explaining Soviet propaganda efforts to subvert the west), but that’s still not what people are talking about when they say “cultural Marxism.” Cultural Marxism and the “long march through the institutions” are not the same thing, even though there’s probably plenty of overlap between the cultural Marxists and the regular Marxists.
I get what you and I mean when we say “cultural Marxism” – and I assure you we’re on the same page here.[1]
What I meant is that there are people who actually believe in cultural Marxism being an enemy plot – and they’re not totally insane for thinking this, oddly enough.
[1] The best illustration of the concept I know (especially as applied to contemporary social media) comes from The History Man – and that book’s older than me! (Not much, but still…)
I agree that ideology which sees white cis hetero males as oppressors and everyone else as oppressed exists. However, it is grossly inaccurate to associate it with Marx, who held very different views. Why not just call it “Intersectionality” or something else which does not have word “Marxism” in it?
That ship has already sailed, I’m afraid.
The root of the problem is that the people originally spearheading the movement (decades ago) oftentimes did self-identify as Marxists (the Frankfurt School, for one). This isn’t even terribly uncommon today.
Cultural Marxism is simply an application of Marxist dialectic to a different set of problems. I suspect – though haven’t tested – that one could easily do interchangeable MAD-libs of Marx and some of the more prominent intersectional thinkers and not come up with anything terribly incongruent.
I very much doubt that.
Know any liberals who would agree with this? I don’t put a lot of faith in any assertion about what Group X believes that comes exclusively from their outgroup. FWIW I’m a bona fide bleeding-heart Liberal in the Peoples’ Republic of Portland and I don’t think I’ve ever met a Marxist in real life.
@dick "...I’m a bona fide bleeding-heart Liberal in the Peoples’ Republic of Portland and I don’t think I’ve ever met a Marxist in real life."I’m 50 years old and have lived most of my life in Oakland, California and grew up there and in Berkeley and I’ve in encountered many self-described “Marxists”, and some of the grey-haired one have been interesting to talk to, but most of the young ones have to be really cute looking to stand their smell for long (they often seem to avoid using soap almost as much as anarchists), and if you’re not a teenager with an unfulfilled appetite for romance I don’t see much call to subject yourself to that.
A point of clarification: is it commonly understood that Marx is sort of the premier theorist of conflict theory in general? I kind of just think of him as the premier theorist of conflict theory as relates to economic power, but it could be that he is also the pioneer of conflict theory in general. In which case it seems more reasonable to say that e.g. critical race theory, insofar as it is a conflict theory of race, is inherently indebted to Marx (as opposed to merely incidentally indebted by virtue of the ideological histories and leanings of its practitioners).
@onyomi
Prophet Zarathustra would be my candidate for the premier early pioneer of conflict theory. Marx had a novel approach to conflict theory in that main conflict according to him is between economic classes.
It is not grossly innacurate to associate it with Marx, since it is an ideological descendant of Marxist thought as outlined in this Tablet article. It’s not dissimilar to how Neo-Platonism is clearly descended from Platonism even though Platon himself would have probably dismissed it as a degenerate bastardization of his ideas.
Moreover the term Cultural Marxism was at one time the actual term for the movement used by its very adherents and sympathizers, as illustrated by articles like this one. It’s is clearly written by someone who is at least sympathetic to Cultural Marxism, not a wingnut attempting to smear his leftists opponents, and he uses the term in a way that makes clear that back in 1983 that was the accepted and correct label. If you don’t have time to read the whole article, here’s the part where he explains how Cultural Marxism is an extension and continuation of the Marxist project:
“For the past half century critical Marxism has had to evolve from the realization that the proletariat and the intellectuals attached to its historic role had lost the capacity for self organization which could unite the social, moral, and aesthetic aspects of collective experience into a revolutionary project. The recognition that ours is an age in which there is no single, identifiable subject of history also renews the demand that theory revive its moral and political responsibility to join self-reflection and partisanship. Theory develops the intellectual side of those movements in which the experience of domination and exploitation produces the demand for justice and the hope for social transformation. The multiple, fragmented character of these movements and the often latent character of this demand and hope in contemporary history compel theory to restore not abandon the task that Marx gave to “critical philosophy”: the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age.”
You may also find this post from over a r/TheMotte illuminating. It includes quotes from a book called Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology, written by a guy who was apparently on board with the whole thing, and who clearly also thought that Cultural Marxism was in fact the correct term to describe the movement.
Are you describing what you think it ought to mean? Simon Jester didn’t just make up “conspiracy of Marxists” thing, that’s a right-wing thing. It’s one of Pat Buchanan’s favorite talking points. For example, here is a movie called “CULTURAL MARXISM”, starring Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, whose ad describes it thus:
If you think the “feminists and gay rights activists are closet Marxists trying to destroy America” interpretation of “cultural Marxism” is silly, great, we’re in agreement, but you can’t plausibly claim it’s something that the left came up with to discredit the right.
… unless Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul are secret Marxists trying to destroy the American conservative movement! PLOT TWIST!
First, I’ve never heard of this movie.
Second, from your blurb…yeah that’s how “cultural Marxism” came to be. It started with the actual Marxists and the long march, but in the 70s it became completely obvious that communism was a failure and the Soviet Union was a horror show, so they switched from economics-based Marxism to culture-based Marxism (race, gender, sexual identity, etc). And when I say “switched” I mean as a natural outgrowth, not a cynical ploy. They’ve got the “oppressor/oppressed” worldview, and since they can no longer explain why some groups do better than others purely via economics, and the idea that “different groups of people are different in ways that matter” is unthinkable, the cause of the difference in outcomes must be racism, sexism, etc.
Yes, the feminists and gay rights activists are not closet Marxists. They’re the useful idiots produced by the now defunct economic Marxists. But they’re still running with the same basic oppressor/oppressed Marxist worldview, just with a different definitions of the oppressors and the oppressed, hence “cultural Marxist” as opposed to “economic Marxist” or simply “Marxist.” I don’t think anyone calls the Frankfurt School themselves the cultural Marxists, and from the blurb you linked it doesn’t look like that movie does either.
Uh… I don’t follow this at all. I don’t know which people any of your pronouns refer to. Like, Andrew Sullivan was an early gay rights activist, is he a Marxist? Who is the “they” in “they switched from economics-based Marxism to culture-based Marxism” if the “culture-based Marxists” are not Marxists? They abandoned Marxism for Marxism? And they’re both a natural outgrowth of Marxism and the unwitting dupes of Marxism at the same time?
It sounds like you were just genuinely unaware that this phrase had a whole different meaning that’s been in general use in right-wing circles since long before SJWs existed, and fully understand that it’s a terrible label because no one knows what you’re referring to when you use it, but intend to go on using it because you really, really, really like being able to describe your outgroup as Marxists.
Seems quite clear to me. “They” were Marxists in the 70s, who abandoned orthodox Marxism (as one might call it) for a new form of Marxism in which the oppressor/oppressed dynamic was held to operate along cultural rather than economic lines.
Feminists and gay rights activists aren’t Marxists in the sense of being economic Marxists, but their oppressor/oppressed worldview originated in Marxism. So they’re not themselves economic Marxists, but their worldview is a descendant of economic Marxism.
I don’t use this phrase because I don’t get much mileage out of boo-wording the outgroup, but I understand the gist of what people are getting at when they use it.
You agree the Frankfurt School is a thing, right? And the long march through the institutions is a thing, too? And it pretty much worked? Read section II of our host’s book review of Inventing the Future.
In the 40s through the 70s the Marxists conducted the long march through the institutions. Those who went into academia then taught their marxist ideas to their students, instilling them with the “America is bad; oppressor/oppressed” worldview, based on economic class. When those students became the academy in the 70s and 80s and the horrors of the Soviet Union were laid bare, they had to give up on economic marxism, but they didn’t let go of the general worldview, so an outgrowth of that was “maybe the real oppression was
the friends we made along the waystructural racism and sexism.”As for who “they” is, it’s anybody writing papers about “critical race theory” or “critical gender theory” or whatever. I could go dig up names of influential feminists or whatever but I don’t think that would matter to you. You seem to have an isolated demand for rigor in “vague terms that describe one’s outrgoup.”
When a feminist says “the patriarchy,” do you grill her to name names of who, exactly, “the Patriarchs” are, or do you just understand she’s talking about a general cluster of ideas? That can occasionally be used to predict the behaviors of people who espouse some of the ideas?
I don’t particularly care about describing my outgroup as Marxists. But I can’t help but notice that the SJWs and the Marxists have extremely similar worldviews, except they mix and match who the oppressors and the oppressed are.
Why is this term so bothersome to you? The term “cultural Marxism” gets so much flak any time it’s brought up on SSC. You’d expect at least a token, “I don’t agree with the worldview but I understand what they’re getting at.” When somebody starts talking about “the patriarchy” and “white supremacy,” I think they’ve got some serious blind spots and that their worldview is wrong, but I don’t pretend I can’t understand the gist of what they’re getting at.
Yeah… think about how many Marxists there were in the 70s, and how many people “cultural Marxists” refers to today. They must breed like rabbits, huh? Also, why do they (we) seem to think they were never Marxists at all? Are they lying or just really forgetful? And how did they start the civil rights movement retroactively? Do they have time machines?
From now on when people use this phrase, I’ll just assume they’re referring to time-travelling rabbits. I don’t think that’ll be any less confusing than the other definitions on offer.
Boy, this seems really tortured to me. Are you positing literal humans who at one point in their life were Marxists, and at a later point in their life stopped being Marxists and became Cultural Marxists? Or are you claiming that there was a group of people who were Marxists, and they tried to convince the next generation to be Marxists, but turned them in to Cultural Marxists instead? If the former, I’m sure that happened, but not in sufficient numbers to matter – there just weren’t enough Marxists to make up one percent of what “Cultural Marxists” means now. If the latter, that’s some weird new definition of “it worked” I’m unfamiliar with. Do you imagine those crusty old Marxists, seeing that no one agrees with them and their policy goals have zero chance of being enacted, consider it to have worked?
One way or the other, the idea of oppressors and oppressed people did not start with Marxists, and not everyone who sees the world in those terms is a Marxist unless “Marxist” is a very vague and useless label that includes a lot of people that everyone agrees are definitely not Marxists. You might as well call SJWs “cultural Christians” because they want to help feed and clothe the poor.
Even people who think the patriarchy (and the worldview or theory implied by using it) is stupid and wrong still know what it means. You can argue that it’s a bad theory, but it’s not a bad label. If someone says “the Patriarchy runs Facebook, that’s why they did X” then I will agree with you that that claim is vague and unsupportable, but I won’t say, “wait, which Patriarchy?”
I’m not sure about that. You can tell just from reading the word that it means parts of society that benefit men, but I don’t think most anti-feminists (or for that matter most rank-and-file feminists) have a good idea of how that’s actually supposed to work. I’ve certainly read enough thinkpieces which seem to assume all their readers think it means some literal smoke-filled room somewhere where the patriarchs meet to figure out how best to oppress women in the next fiscal year.
Basically this. A generation of young intellectuals were taught Marxist critical theory by Marxist professors. When those young people became the academy and had to publish their own papers, they weren’t all that interested in Marxist economics, but instead applied critical theory to stuff they did care about: race, gender, sexuality, etc.
The long march succeeded in getting Marxists and fellow travelers into the institutions. They did not succeed with Glorious Revolution because the next generation developed their own ideas of revolution.
I would absolutely say “wait, which Patriarchy?” Stating “the Patriarchy runs Facebook” implies the whole “men in hooded robes meeting to plot how to oppress women and POC” thing, which is not what I thought “the Patriarchy” was.
My first thought would be to respond “Being a ‘Patriarch’ sounds like a good gig, who do I have to sleep with to get it?”, but since I’ve never actually heard the word spoken out loud (except maybe as “The Old Testament Patriarchs”) I really don’t know (and for the record I’ve never heard the term “Cultural Marxism” out loud either), but this discussion has sparked a thought: In my local union there’s a black women, who grew up poor in Hunters Point in San Francisco, that I’ve worked with who’s a union officer (appointed not elected, so not high up), and that makes her very rare as blacks are outnumbered, and women are extremely outnumbered in the trade – and now maybe she goes on-line and posts about “intersectionality”, “oppression”, and “The Patriarchy”, but I doubt it – who do I imagine does?
Pretty much college educated women (and some men) who grew up middle-class (or “UMC”) and note and complain that CEO’s are mostly white males, so basically white-collar people who by most lights are pretty damn privileged compared to most, and who’s beef is about who’s the most privileged.
I’m reminded that Olympic bronze medal winners are happier about their win than silver medal winners, who almost got the gold.
@ Nornagest
Well, it’s an abstract concept, which is easy to do motte-and-bailey stuff with, and if someone is misusing it then by all means complain. But it’s not amorphous. AFAICT, the answer to “Do the Cultural Marxists really believe in feminism? Or are they just saying it because it will help hasten the destruction of America? Or do they have some other sinister goal?” is “Yes.”
Another way to put it: there are things the left dislikes that the left generally agrees are not part of the Patriarchy. I mean, I’m sure you can find an exception to prove the rule, but for the most part we do not blame the Patriarchy for fossil fuel pollution, the war on drugs, busting unions, blowing up the financial system, or killing the spotted owl. It’s a subset or a component of the left’s outgroup, not a pseudonym for it. Is that true of Cultural Marxism? Which part of broadly-left-of-center policy is Cultural Marxism definitely not responsible for, to the people who use that phrase?
From my experiences with people who use the term “Cultural Marxist,” I never got the sense that they used it to describe all of broad leftism. As someone who is broadly leftist, I can’t recall ever having any policy that I advocated be called “Cultural Marxism,” such as raising income taxes for the wealthy, single-payer healthcare, open borders, repealing the 2nd amendment and confiscating privately owned guns, legalizing gay marriage, etc.
In my experience with people who use the term “Cultural Marxist,” the answers would be Yes; No, but that doesn’t mean they won’t unintentionally help to hasten the destruction of America; No, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t unintentionally accomplish some other sinister goals.
@lvlln :
The thing about CM being a catch-all was not some clever argument masquerading as a question, I honestly don’t know. But I don’t see how the definition(s) of CM promoted herein obviously excludes the things you mentioned. For example, Conrad said that CM is basically applying the Marxist “oppressor/oppressed” idea to power differentials other than capital/labor. It’s not clear to me why John Q. Rightwinger would think that explains the left’s support for feminism (labor == women) but not subsidized healthcare (labor == sick people), or vice-versa.
And lest I be accused of isolated demands for rigor, I’m not saying “this theory is wrong because it’s not specific enough”, I’m saying “this label is bad because it isn’t specific enough”. For example, you just included gay rights as one of the things it doesn’t purport to explain, and upthread Conrad explicitly included gay rights activists within his definition of it.
We’re like a week in to this, and haven’t even gotten to the part where we all agree on what’s being claimed and argue about whether it’s right or not!
@ Conrad
Okay, thanks for clearing that up. I’m not ignoring this, but the follow-up (which pertains to how this managed to be responsible for things that happened from the 50s to the modern day and which look to me like they happened independent of academia) depends on the answer to “Just what parts of general left-wing-edness is it that CM is and is not responsible for” which I’ve already asked.
I’m fine with not calling that broad political movement “cultural marxism,” but I’d like to know what label would be reasonable, because there does seem to be a broad political/social movement that shares a lot of underlying model of the world. I mean, this is at least as reasonable as using a label like “the right” or “the left.” Perhaps it’s too broad to provide a lot of resolution, but it does mean *something*.
@albatross11
"...I’m fine with not calling that broad political movement “cultural marxism,” but I’d like to know what label would be reasonable, because there does seem to be a broad political/social movement that shares a lot of underlying model of the world..."As I suggested earlier, the old “The New Left” label has historic weight behind it, but “anti-traditionalists” seems a fitting descriptor that’s more neutral than “progressive”.“Collegiate agendia-ists” seems fitting, as does “schoolmarms”, which reminds me of some sorts that George Orwell complained about in The Road to Wigan Pier as
"One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England....""....as I have suggested already, it is not
strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherents; but the point is that
people invariably do so, and that the popular conception of Socialism is
coloured by the conception of a Socialist as a dull or disagreeable person.
'Socialism' is pictured as a state of affairs in which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home. This does great harm to the cause. The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the
proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight...."
so in that spirit “The Prig Dictatorship” may work.
@dick
A key part is the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, which requires relatively fixed categories. This doesn’t work for healthcare because people who are sick usually were not sick before and often become non-sick later on.
@Conrad Honcho,
Anyone who uses the terms “Cultural Marxism” or “Patriarchy” has already signalled to me that they’re probably wackadoodle and best avoided.
Saying “American Imperialism” puts then on thin ice, but I may listen if I’m feeling particularly patient (but probably not).
I’ve no problem with “elite” or “plutocracy” though.
I entirely agree. Both terms are used solely by angry zealots pretending to be dispassionate intellectuals. I can sympathise with anger and even occasionally with zealotry (though it wears out my patience pretty quickly), but I despise pretense.
I think “imperialism” is more or less defensible, though. I don’t think many people deny that America is an empire, they just disagree on whether that’s a good or a bad thing.
I don’t know if I’d go as far as “wackadoodle,” but certainly partisan. I’m fine tabooing both expressions as not conducive to rational discourse. So long as everyone understands the two concepts are about equally valid. If you go off on a tear about the “crazy conspiracy theorists” who talk about cultural Marxism but nod politely when a feminist is talking about “the Patriarchy,” that’s just your own bias at work.
Yes, there are gendered patterns of behavior in society that self-reinforce. Yes, there are people whose worldviews cause them to lump every category of people into oppressor and oppressed boxes similar to the way Marx did with economics, but with cultural categories instead. No, neither the ingroup nor outgroup are engaged in conspiracy or conspiracy theory.
@Conrad Honcho
Your right, “wackadoodle” was unfair, “lame” would’ve probably been better, and your comparison of the terms “Cultural Marxism” and “The Patriarchy” was very apt.
There actually is a term for an actually ‘movement’ that self-described itself as such, that closely matches what many seem to mean by ‘cultural marxists’ and ‘social justice types’: “ The New Left“, arising in the United States in the 1960’s that held college students as “the vanguard” and moved aware from the “old left” focus on class and labor in favor of pacifism and a host of ‘social’ issues (possibly because of how often the working class response to Marxists call for ‘revolurion’ was to beat them up until they stopped squawking about it).
The ‘old left’ (communists and fellow travelers) in the U.S.A. had mostly dissolved itself in 1956 in the wake of the tanks in Hungary and Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in which he said “You know, our man Stalin was kinda a douche-bag” (translation mine), some melted into a nebulous “progressivism”, some became anti-communists, and some switched allegiance to a new “great father” – Mao Tse Tung.
So by 1968 you had ‘liberals’ (New Deal inspired Democrats – think Hubert Humphrey), ‘conservatives’ (the Republican Party), the ‘right-wing’ (John Birch society, readers of the National Review), and “the New Left” activists, fierce street battles outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago (you also had “youth rebellions” in Mexico City, Paris, and Prague that year), inside the anti-war movement were some Maoists (a remnant of that is Bob Avakian’s smelly personality cult), the ‘cold war liberal consensus’ was destroyed (with “liberal” becoming a dirty word on both the left and the right), by 1972 some “New Leftists” became terrorists, others supported the anti-war liberal George McGovern’s presidential campaign (which lost in a landslide) and we’ve lived in the wreckage ever since.
At only a slight tangent, it seems to me that “cultural Marxist” could be read in two rather different ways:
1. A Marxist, conventional sense, who is trying to bring his desired society by working on culture rather than politics.
2. Someone whose beliefs are like Marxism, but with “culture” substituted for “mode of production.”
My guess from the discussion here is that some people use the term in the first sense. The second isn’t that close to how other people use it–theirs seems to be more “race or gender substituted for economic class,” where gender is only very slightly viewed as a culture (from the standpoint of people who claim it isn’t about genes or genitals), race somewhat more.
There’s something that’s been bugging me for a couple of weeks now that crystalized thanks to this comment: this logic equally applies to “Capitalism”. There’s no actual ideology called “Cultural Marxism” or “Capitalism”, they’re both descriptive terms used primarily by outsiders to describe related collections of theories and behaviors. Because these behaviors tend to operate in the same direction, they seem like organized ideologies, especially to outsiders. If what they describe is useful in predicting behavior, they may even be valid as descriptors.
honestly, this
I can’t really speak to anything else personally, but this is true and it makes “cultural Marxism” a good descriptor of this existing and noteworthy trend. Whether or not the cultural Marxists hated the original Marxists or whatever doesn’t change the fact that this is a good descriptor of what they were doing. Anyone who tries to declare it off-limits…I don’t know, honestly, there are definitely people who use “cultural Marxism” as an anti-semitic scare word, but it’s worth noting that a lot of these people do the same with Marxism and even communism generally. I mean, that’s what “cultural Bolshevism” was about, so do I accept the logic and not use Marxism to describe regular Marxism, or communism to describe communism?
The non-sneer word label for “cultural Marxism” is probably “social justice.” I prefer the latter term since it seems like something people actually in the movement use for themselves.
But I didn’t quite follow Scott’s critique on this point. Sure, “cultural Marxism” isn’t what Marx preached (actually Marx himself was very anti-homosexual). But then again, a left-winger isn’t someone who sits on the left wing of the National Assembly. But somehow, we all know what is meant by the term.
I’d be inclined to say the non-sneer version is “critical X theory”-where X can be race, gender, international relations, etc.
This seems like a pretty easy one from a Scott-ist perspective–taboo the toxoplasma sneer phrase. I wouldn’t think there’s any exception for “but I really like this superweapon”.
+1
I’m not claiming “cultural Marxist” is a super useful or accurate phrase, and don’t personally find myself tempted to use it much, if at all; however, tabooing it without replacing it with a more accurate single phrase roughly covering the relevant conceptual space seems a concession of the sort implied by SamChevre’s comment above: if you replace “cultural Marxism” with “critical X theory” where X can be race, gender, etc. but no one descriptor then you are conceding that critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonialism, gender studies, and intersectional versions of the above have nothing in common other than being academic disciplines or variants of the more neutral sounding “critical theory.”
But that is precisely the point of contention! The people on the right are saying these things are all related and also all related to Marxism besides (I’m not saying I’m 100% convinced of this, btw, especially the Marxism part) while the people on the left say “no, these are not related, these are all just words for ‘the critical study of race,’ ‘the critical study of gender,’ ‘the critical study of sexuality,’ ‘the critical study of the intersection of race and gender and sexuality issues’… though we concede these issues overlap (hence ‘intersectionality’) and also relate to issues of economic power (hence a lot of us study Marx and Marxian theory) stop trying to weave it into some grand conspiratorial narrative. It’s just ‘critical theory’.”
But whether or not these disciplines as practiced today are actually part of one bigger intellectual movement, how “objective” or “neutral” that movement might be (and hence deserving of a neutral-sounding descriptor like “critical theory”), and to what degree that movement, if it is, indeed, a thing, is indebted to, or logically analogous to, old-fashioned economic Marxism, is precisely the point of contention.
The Cultural Marxists themselves sure seemed to think it was a useful and accurate term back in the 80s.
Far as i can tell, “Cultural Marxism” was originally coined by a group of leftists academics to apply to themselves. Then in the 90s various prominent right-wingers found out about it and proceeded to, deservedly or not, drag its name through the mud. Ever since then, the intellectual heirs of those who once matter of factly called themselves Cultural Marxists have been desperately trying to pretend that the whole thing was a right-wing conspiracy theory all along.
@Lillian
From the link:
This would be much more believable if some actual persons were cited rather than s “type” with an alleged agenda (that they now try to keep secret).
So far, I have seen evidence of exactly one living person (an English literature professor!) that once called himself a “Cultural Marxist”.
So some who’s and what’s please for an alleged “Movement”.
I don’t deny that actual ‘Marxists’ exist (I’ve seen and smelled them), but I remain dubious about “Cultural Marxism” beyond English department academics using impenetrable jargon.
@Plumber
If there were a bunch of people who self-described as “cultural Marxists” alive and working today there’d be no controversy. The issue is precisely that some on the right are claiming there exists a more or less straight line from Marx and Engels, to Adorno and Horkheimer, to Bourdieu and Foucault, to Butler and Spivak, to the “experts on race relations” Facebook consults when deciding whether white nationalism is inherently hateful. The reaction on the left to this is generally to say that that’s kooky and conspiratorial and there’s no connection, just some people studying race and gender and imperialism, some of whom have read Marx.
The question is precisely to what extent the right is right to see this bigger thing as a “thing” and/or the left is right to see lumping together Marx, Adorno, Butler, and Facebook’s “experts in race relations” under one term as nonsensical or outright malicious.
Personally I think there is some degree of outgroup homogeneity bias at work in much use of the term, but also some degree of “ingroup heterogeneity bias” (I think this is a thing too!) at work in much of its vehement denial.
That’s a perfectly legitimate question and I don’t think anyone is saying it’s taboo to talk about, though they might disagree with it. The problem is not people on the right exploring the connection between Marxism and modern left-wing movements, it’s using the term as a generic catch-all for left-wingers generally. Any assertion about them is too vague to argue for or against; I’ve spent a whole day discussing it, and if someone said they think the cultural Marxists are responsible for such-and-such, I wouldn’t know what they mean. Feminist academics? Progressive voters? Union agitators? “I mean the people whose ideology bears structural similarities to economic Marxism, except applied to culture.” That doesn’t clear it up!
Maybe progressive politics does bear structural resemblances to etc etc. I dunno, could be! I’m about as interested in Marxism as I am in phrenology. But I do know that the phrase “cultural Marxism” leads to acrimonious discussions that derail in to semantic nitpicking; that’s my reason for vehemence.
Definitely.
Maybe.
Definitely not.
It occurs to me that there is a somewhat similar pattern with “liberal.” “Neoliberal” is a term that seems to be used to link together liberal in the modern American sense with classical liberal with current supporters of globalism. I think modern American liberals view their liberalism as an evolution out of 19th c. liberalism at the same time that modern classical liberals, aka libertarians, view it as a case of the enemies of liberalism stealing its name.
And while free trade fits well with classical liberalism and not badly with modern American liberalism, “neoliberal” seems to also include foreign policy efforts that fit poorly with either.
Do I get to decide who the intellectual heirs of the segregationist are and label them segregationists or “That’s different!”?
If you present convincing evidence that some group are ideological descendants of segregationists, then i will happily call them such. Far as i can tell though, that’s pretty much just the white supremacists, white separatists, and white nationalists, none of whom deny that they are what they are.
So where your convincing evidence? Maybe we should call Trumpists the intellectual heirs to segregationists, or just segregationists for short.
What are the pro the use of “cultural marxism” posters takes on “Against Murderism”? They must be against that too, and in favor using the term racism, right?
@brad:
“Segregation” refers to a more specific policy, which Trumpists are generally not in favor of. A better analogy would be something like calling them “Smitherians”, if Smith was someone whose views had a significant influence on segregation policies and whose influence arguably continues.
No, this is wrong too. “Racism” is a more specific claim, and objectively false in most of the cases it’s used. A better comparison term for “cultural marxism” for an analogous meaning is for example “alt-right”. It’s similarly used as a fairly general umbrella term for diverse views, and often used derogatorily.
I’d say “cultural Marxist” is pretty specific, at least once you strip away the disingenuous equivocation on “Marxist”. It’s objectively false in most of the cases it’s used. Unlike racist, which is objectively true in most cases where it is used, at least unless one accepts the humpty dumpty redefinition.
To my mind what this entire discussion is evidence for the claim that in the vast majority of cases high minded invocation of meta level principles are so much noise. It’s just a smarter person’s way of rationalizing the same object level positions that their dumber fellow tribe members hold. “Cultural Marxists” are bad people so it’s okay to fling a sneer word in their face. “Racists” are good people so it’s not okay.
If you want to talk to me about meta level principles, show me where it hurts or don’t bother.
What specific thing do you think it means, especially so strongly that it could be claimed to be “objectively false”? I see it as referring to things like focus on the supposed oppression of some groups.
If you take an older meaning of “racist” from say 1950, most accusations are rather obviously false. If you take the preferred definition of those who want to use “racist” as a slur, then they may be true (but calling not using this a “redefinition” is wrong). But this misses the point of “Against Murderism”. Even if you prefer to use a definition of racism which applies to even incredibly minor views and attitudes you don’t agree with, and thus consider almost all accusations of “racism” factually correct, this does not justify viewing racism as the source of all problems. The point of that article is not so much “‘racist’ is objectively the wrong word to describe these people, you should use some other word”. It’s “you shouldn’t attribute these actions to racism”. “Why do these things happen? Because racism! The way to fix things is to reduce racism!” is wrong, even if you use a definition of “racism” which means all white people objectively are racist.
You’re dismissing arguments you disagree with too easily, and making sloppy arguments yourself. So I think you shouldn’t take the discussion as evidence, since you yourself seem to viewing it largely through the lens of “people say things I disagree with, they must just be making noise”.
Not sure what you mean by this.
I disagree with your characterization of my arguments (obviously) but even if they are correct, I still don’t think that’s to the contrary of my underlying point.
I embrace my object level positions and the object level generally. I’m not trying to run away from them by claim that what I really care about are “free speech”, “the non-aggression principle”, and “niceness, community, and civilization” but that somehow, magically, these high minded meta level principles cash out to bog standard American right wing object level positions.
If we go to the meta-meta level would you agree that post hoc rationalizations are, in general, a danger when reasoning from the meta level to the object level? And that our prior for such rationalizations being in play ought to be especially high in situations where a complicated, nuanced argument is presented to justify an object level belief that on its face seems to contradict the presented meta level principle?
In other words, if someone says “I agree Scott-ist principles would suggest tabooing the the toxoplasma sneer phrase but …” aren’t I right to hold on to my wallet?
If you want to claim to be driven by meta level principles, show me where you take an object level position against what would be your inclination because of the high level principle. If you can’t then the high level principle is a no-op.
The obvious thing–a disciple of Marx.
But I don’t think anyone said this. You were the one who brought up “toxoplasma sneer phrase” stuff and claimed it would apply. I disagree (more below). So if you count this as an example of “bad meta-level discussion”, isn’t it just you that’s doing it badly, or do you claim the badness is that others aren’t convinced? If you wanted to give an example of bad appeals to more general principles, I would have expected you to give an example of someone else badly bringing up such principles.
If you want to claim your argument was valid, I think you need more than just call something a “sneer phrase”. I mean, there certainly isn’t a principle “you can’t use any words with negative connotations”. Maybe “cultural marxism” isn’t the most constructive phrasing to use in certain circumstances. But I don’t think the concept or phrase should be banned. It’s like “alt-right” in many ways. That’s also used in a derogatory manner of people who don’t self-identify that way. But I do not think the concept should be banned altogether. So your example of “I agree Scott-ist principles would suggest…” deviates from my view already at the “I agree” point. And I didn’t notice anyone else hold that view either. So it seems like a strawman.
So this looks less like “high-level arguments are wrong” and more like “my attempts to do this fail, so this concept is bullshit”.
Would you know what my first inclination would be?
This interpretation seems to entirely ignore the “cultural” part. And if you mean “disciple” strictly enough to be easily “objectively false” (faithfully adhering to the views of Marx), that would not be at all “obvious” even for just “Marxism”. “Keynesian” for example does not mean strict adherence to the personal beliefs of Keynes.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/27/open-thread-124-25/#comment-735963
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/27/open-thread-124-25/#comment-735945
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/27/open-thread-124-25/#comment-735784
see also
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/27/open-thread-124-25/#comment-735171
What thread are you reading?
I don’t think those support your claim. I don’t see them endorsing a view like your “I agree Scott-ist principles would suggest tabooing the the toxoplasma sneer phrase but …”. They discuss the negative connotations of the phrase. But there clearly is no principle as broad as “anything with negative connotations must be tabooed”. I see those as consistent with my view: the phrase has problems similar to “alt-right”, but that is not enough to justify banning it altogether.
And the difference to “Against Murderism” (which your brought up as a “principle”) is even bigger. It’s not only that left likes to use “racist” as a sneer phrase for anything/anyone they don’t like. It’s that people use “racism” as an underlying explanation for issues, and believe that eliminating racism is the solution to those issues. While people on the right like to blame their political opponents, they rarely hold analogous beliefs that a Marxist conspiracy is the source of society’s problems and purging the conspiracy would be the solution to those problems.
There are links are in the post of mine that you’ve been replying to continue this thread. There is also this Tablet article. Those are the things that convinced me that 1) Cultural Marxism is a real thing, 2) People used to call themselves Cultural Marxists, and 3) The things that Cultural Marxists believe appear to be the foundation of modern Social Justice thought. If they do not convince you then i don’t know what to tell you, they convinced me.
My impression is that there were are and are quite a lot of people who identify as “Marxist” in fields not closely related to the theories of Marx, such as English literature. As I interpret it, “Marxist” for them isn’t a description of a scientific theory they believe in but of which side they are on in what they see as a general conflict.
A little of this comes up in an old blog post on my interaction with Robert Wolff
@Brad
I think it’s important to distinguish two different sorts of argument I’m seeing in this thread:
1. “We should stop talking about ‘racism’ because it’s not really a serious problem, mostly just a con perpetrated against white conservatives by political mercenaries and kooks. Sure, there are a few real racists out there, but their impact is extremely minor, despite everything you hear from left-wingers about racism pervading society.”
2. “We should taboo the word ‘racism’ because, while it is a serious problem and there are logical threads linking most of its real-world usages, nevertheless it gets applied too promiscuously and destructively to allow its use in productive debate and we should all just try to be more specific if we ever want to get along.”
I see “Against Murderism” as largely a type-2 argument. I take your first post in this thread to mean “let’s taboo ‘cultural Marxism’ for the same reasons ‘Against Murderism’ proposes tabooing ‘racism’ (i.e. ‘type-2’ reasons).”
But please note that my OP was not a response to a type-2 argument, it was a response to a type-1 argument.
Much of the thread feels like you attempting to prove the type-2 case for tabooing cultural Marxism, while I, and seemingly others, are still trying to establish whether the type-1 case against it is, in fact, wrong.
Which is to say, before deciding whether to taboo the concept, and, if so, how to usefully clarify it, can we first decide whether it’s a real or serious “thing” at all?
I think this misses an essential difference from “Against Murderism”, in the same way brad seems to have missed it. Both concepts can be vague and be can be used as slurs. But the additional problem with “racist”, as discussed in “Against Murderism”, is that it’s used to explain people’s behavior contrary to their stated views. I don’t think that applies to “cultural Marxism”.
Calling someone’s beliefs “cultural Marxism” can for example be used to imply that the beliefs are as erroneous the original Marxism is now widely considered. Basically just saying that their beliefs are stupid. But it is not used to imply that they’re lying about their real beliefs, and they really want an armed workers’ revolution, and their talk about wealth inequality is really dog-whistling to indicate they want to send people to “reeducation” camps.
By contrast, “racist” is used to imply that someone’s stated beliefs are not just stupid, but they are in fact lies, that the person actually believes something different and evil that he’s not willing to publicly admit, and that in truth his actions are motivated by hatred. It’s the difference between saying that leftist views are stupid, and the McCarthyist view that leftists are in truth evil communist sleeper agents who are trying to hide their true nature.
@onyomi
This is a fair point (along with “ingroup heterogeneity bias”–narcissism of small differences?)
I’m not sure about the “before” part, if we have two alternatives either of which lead to the conclusion we should taboo I don’t know that we need to wait until we figure out which is correct to go ahead and taboo. But there’s certainly nothing wrong with debating what the intellectual pedigree of the critical studies movement was and how unitary or disunitary it should be viewed today.
Steve Bannon called himself a “Leninist” because he wants to rip out the current political system and replace it with a different political system, much like Lenin. The system he wants, though, is something like “free/fair market economic nationalism” rather than communism, like Lenin. Since Bannon is not actually a disciple of Lenin, was his claim of being a “Leninist” erroneous?
@Lillian, WRT the Tablet article, the ideas the article associates with Cultural Marxism are not new or uncommon. As a result, I don’t see a strong basis for the inference that any subsequent groups derived those ideas from Cultural Marxism, as opposed to any of countless other sources. Perhaps some even arrived at those ideas on their own, as they do seem to crop up regularly.
I’m about 50/50 on that. On the one hand, yes, tabooing words can be productive. On the other hand, people just start using workarounds and euphemisms that “everybody knows what they mean.” Ants, Death Eaters. If you can’t say “social justice warrior” and you can’t say “cultural marxism” then you say “critical X theory” and then “critical X theory” just becomes “a dog whistle for cultural marxism conspiracy theorists.”
When a feminist is talking about a bunch of gender stereotypes, ideas and behaviors and says “patriarchy,” must I insist that instead she refer to her outgroup as “those who practice traditional gender roles?” Or can I just admit to understanding the gist of what she means even though I think her worldview is wrong?
@Conrad Honcho,
Upthread I suggested that “The New Left” seems to be a good fit (an actual self-described political ‘movement’ of the 1960’s and ’70’s), but I suppose that may be confused with twenty-something Sanders supporters (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?), off the top of my head “social anti-traditionalists” who are in opposition to “social traditionalists” fits what most seem to be trying to convey.
If I use those terms does that work?
Yeah, to be honest if someone said “new left” and I didn’t know they were versed enough in political history to be referencing the New Left you describe, I would assume they were talking about AOC and pals.
On the one hand it’s true, on the other hand one would like to be able to pin down and categorize an inter-related set of ideas, at least as much as someone else should be able to pin down and categorize their own ideas.
There’s an asymmetry when one group of people can launch ad hoc critiques of certain social norms, to the point of being able to shift them in their favor, but people negatively affected by this, usually collectively designated as some other toxoplasma sneer phrase, are unable to counter a tangible set of doctrines even if the effects it has on their lives are very tangible.
It’s sort of a Motte and bailey, but as applied to labels rather than beliefs.
@RalMirrorAd
For that purpose, “intersectional feminism”, or “social justice activism”, or some label containing word “woke”, or whatever else, would serve perfectly well.
@onyomi
It occurs to me now that I should walk back my doubt, as in some sense I am a “Cultural Marxist” (and also a “Patriarch”, I’ve got two son’s and my wife is a stay at home mom, don’t tell her that though as she knows she’s the boss).
My Mom gave me comic books on Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky when I ws 12 (she later ‘forgot’ it but I remember!), and my Dad was an unrepentant self-described “enemy of the state” even just before his death (and for some strange reason a Scottish nationalist despite being born in New Jersey and living in California – I wish I was making that up).
I probably know more about old strikes and the lyrics to Wobbly hymns, and I think I can recognize more Marxist jargon than most as well, and I think I know more about the 20th century Left than the Right.
Problem is I think Marx wasn’t that hot of a prophet and think Canada or Utah are better models than Cuba or North Korea.
That doesn’t quite fit what’s described as “Cultural Marxism” in this thread though “New Left” and “anti-traditionalists” seems to fit I think
For what it’s worth, my uncle was at some point a member of the IWW, although he claimed he only joined for the fringe benefits. He ended up as a U of C law professor and an early influence on the economic analysis of law.
Jussie Smollett
The charges against Jussie Smollett (the Empire actor who faked a hate crime attack against himself) were abruptly dropped and records sealed, for context.
Yeah super bizarre development. Normally I’d reach for “Rich and famous“, but he’s truly not that rich and famous and the celebs typically still go to trial, not have their charges abruptly dropped and records sealed. Some amount of corruption seems likely (apparently the prosecutor knew his family or something?), but I’ve also heard the sealing thing implies some massive procedural fuckup on the prosecution’s part. Any legal experts wanna weigh in?
I’m hardly a legal expert, but I am going with “Rich and famous and black and gay”
I was just assuming “found the right palms to grease,” myself.
Illinois corruption. I’d say Chicago corruption, but since the Chicago chief of police and mayor are _pissed_, to the point where the Chicago Police Department actually responded to a Freedom of Information Act request as fast as possible, I’m assuming the city didn’t get its cut.
Jussie may end up wishing he arranged a more plausible deal, as the FBI is interested now.
I have some familiarity with IL politics and I’m a strong believer in the idea that the unusual thing about IL is not how corrupt its politicians are, it’s how often they get convicted of corruption.
Yeah, all depending on whether or not the FBI decide “nothing to see here”, Smollett may regret his life choices 🙂
The problem is that he and his supporters took the whole thing to the national level and they’ve made the city look bad. Well, worse than the ordinary opinion of Chicago as “machine politics and the fix is in”, and that’s saying something.
Believe he did fight off two attackers in a blizzard at two in the morning with only a tuna sandwich? Then Chicago under Rahm Emmanuel is a hellhole where bleach-flinging racist lynch mobs can wander the streets with impunity.
Believe he’s a lying liar who lied? Then Chicago under Rahm Emmanuel is a hellhole where third-rate rapper/actors can fabricate ‘hate crimes’ with plots that would be turned down by Law and Order: Special Wokeness Unit for stretching credulity too far and walk away scott-free and smirking making fools of the entire police department, and proving all the rumours about corruption and string-pulling and fixers and pals with political clout are all too true if anyone doubted them.
I can see three possible explanations:
1. He is innocent and can prove it, and the police messed up. I don’t have a very high opinion of the Chicago police but this is a very high profile case, so they will have paid attention. And if that was the case he would have insisted on their saying he was innocent, instead of paying a sizable fine. I think this explanation is very unlikely.
2. Some form of corruption of the prosecutor.
3. Ideology. The case encourages the idea that claims of hate crimes are likely to be false, and there are obvious reasons why many people would not like that to happen. Maybe one of those people was the prosecutor or someone in a position to put pressure on the prosecutor.
Why not just that the prosecutor thought prosecuting this case would be bad for their future political ambitions?
1. He doesn’t have to prove innocence exactly – he just has to make it sufficiently possible that he’s innocent that he can put the CPD (which has a terrible reputation) on trial.
IMHO, the biggest question is whether he could plausibly have mistaken the brothers for white – i.e., do they both have Nigerian accents that they can’t shake or can at least one of them do a plausible MAGA accent, and is it possible that when he told the police he could see around the eyes of the attacker and that he was white, that he was honestly mistaken?
IMHO, I can’t see him winning – he would essentially have to argue that the brothers set him up, and would have to explain texting “I might need your help on the low” shortly before the attack and the many calls and texts around the time of the attack – but maybe he can prove the brothers were trying to sell him bodyguard services or something crazy – you never know.
Fixed that for you.
There seem to be new developments in this case practically every hour.
On the “Jussie Is Innocent” side, he’s up for some award of which I have never heard – the Image awards? Seemingly run or presented or who knows what by the NAACP? Now, he’s been nominated and won twice before for ‘representation on TV/media’ or the likes, but nominating this time round seems a bit pointed, to say the least:
On the “The language I want to use to describe him would get me banned by the Reddit admins” side, the
MayorCity of Chicago wants Jussie to pay for the cost of the police investigation to the tune of $130 thousand smackeroos:This is the first time I have ever been in agreement with Rahm Emanuel about anything 🙂
Honestly, this story is more entertaining than any of the TV shows or movies Smollett may have starred in. Just sit back and watch the drama unfold (though I do realise it’s a very serious matter, given the charged racial atmosphere and the political polarisation).
The problem with the case all along was that blood libel isn’t a crime. He was charged with filing a false police report, which is a felony but also the sort of thing where you might get community service if you say you’re sorry and promise not to do it again and the prosecutor is a family friend.
The only weird thing is that he hasn’t said he’s sorry. He’s maintained his innocence. The prosecutor says he thinks he’s guilty. It seems like that sort of disagreement might be usefully resolved by a jury, you know? But instead the case has been sealed. So I imagine there’s some political fuckery going on.
Really the problem is that his attempt to stoke racial hatred was so facially absurd, and yet all the Good and Decent people rallied around him instead of asking any questions at all. We’ve got to stop believing “victims”. Blood libel isn’t a crime, and free speech means it can’t be, so the responsibility is on people to show some sense in how they interpret things.
Well, not against white MAGA guys anyway.
Blood libel against any group is not a crime in the United States, the greatest nation on Earth, which actually respects the legal right to freedom of speech that other supposedly civilized nations only give lip service to.
Blood libel by faking hate crimes is not one against MAGA guys, I should say.
I am a strong supporter of free speech. Faking a crime ain’t that.
See, one of the things that makes the United States better than every other nation in the world is that other nations will say, “oh of course we believe in free speech, it’s just that hate speech isn’t free speech, grossly offensive speech isn’t free speech, lèse-majesté isn’t free speech, counterrevolutionary propaganda isn’t free speech, but for sure we love free speech!” The United States actually takes its legal commitment to freedom of speech seriously.
Sure… but filing fake police reports is clearly illegal under U.S. law, so I’m not sure what your point is.
People are upset because he’s getting away with something quite bad, but the actual crime he’s accused of is not so serious. The thing people are mad about is not a crime.
@suntzuanime
False accusations can lead to very serious consequences. They can result in vigilante justice against innocents (either specific people or a group fingered as containing the perpetrator(s)) or persecution of innocents by the government.
There is a reason why ancient legal systems would often apply the same punishment to the false accuser as would be applied to the accused.
There are perhaps also reasons why the modern US doesn’t do that.
The United States doesn’t need to legally suppress speech, because it can just get Big Tech to do it on its behalf.
If he weren’t famous, this case would have expended very few resources (I bet the cops who took his original statement were deeply skeptical) and nobody, including Smollet, would ever have been charged.
My cynical guess is that the prosecutor in charge of Smollet’s case didn’t see a political advantage in making a big public thing out of this case, and so (perhaps with the right palms being greased) was willing to drop the matter.
OTOH, Jussie Smollet is probably responsible for getting the concept of “hate hoax” into widespread circulation, and the way things came out probably discouraged the next B-list celebrity from thinking making up a hate crime against himself will be a career-enhancing move, so the net effect of his dumbass hate hoax was probably positive.
If he weren’t famous, his claims wouldn’t have been publicized because they were so transparently false. Assuming that they were, I would hope anyone would be charged.
I don’t know if that’s true. Hate hoaxes perpetrated by/”against” nobodies get national attention. Like the Muslim girl who said MAGA guys ripped off her hijab.
Coming right off of Cavanaugh allegations, I actually thought this was plausible. You had a specific person making a specific allegation about a specific action at a specific time and place with some associated evidence.
The only thing that seemed off was the “This is MAGA country”, which I figured was mis-remembered.
But also that two white guys were hanging around the freezing cold weather who happened to have a noose and bleach handy and could tell he was gay?
Ford’s accusation was plausible, but uncorroborated. Jussie’s was implausible.
Yeah, it was fairly implausible that two white guys would (a) be out at 2 in the morning in the freezing cold, (b) recognize a supporting character from the TV show “Empire” from across the street in the middle of the night, (c) have a bottle of bleach and a noose, (d) decide to beat up Smollett, but then (e) not seriously hurt him, notwithstanding that one of them was punching him from behind, and that they had enough control over him in the fight to get a noose around his neck.
The alternative hypothesis is that there was a conspiracy of MAGA fans out to get him as a result of his anti-Trump tweets. This linked to the letter with the return address “MAGA,” and explained how two guys might be prepared for this attack, but then didn’t explain how they knew that he was going to (a) land in Chicago that night, (b) go to his friend’s condo and (c) decide to leave his friend’s condo and walk on the street to get a sandwich.
More generally, it depended on the idea that white people see “MAGA” as a way to oppress black and gay people, as opposed to the more quotidian racism of not thinking much about how black and gay people feel about your hat.
That’s not racism at all, unless wearing Obama and “I’m With Her” paraphenalia is racist and sexist, in which case we’ve stretched the terms well beyond usefulness.
Plus he was on the phone to his manager who overheard the alleged attack but never said “Jussie, get off the line, I’m calling the cops!” and he never even dropped his sandwich!
And after suffering two broken ribs he then sang in a concert (the broken ribs were downgraded to ‘just bruised’ after somebody pointed this out), he still had the noose around his neck after the hospital visit (or put it back on when the cops finally showed up to take his statement ‘to show them what happened’ or something like that).
Originally, I thought that the whole thing was a cover story for him coming back home from a club (more plausible reason for being out on the streets at two in the morning) where he’d gotten into an argument with somebody and got a few slaps, then when asked by whomever he was staying with “My gosh, Jussie, what happened you?” he made up a spur of the moment story about being jumped by two random strangers for no reason (because he didn’t want to admit the embarrassing truth) then had to stick to it.
The more details that came out, though, the more it seemed that he was inventing the entire ‘hate crime’ for publicity and to put pressure on the show where it was rumoured his character was going to be written out.
I think we don’t know the base rate–the number of hate hoaxes that don’t get reported, either because it wasn’t a slow news day or because the cop taking the initial report asked a few good questions and the whole story came apart.
OTOH, the national media tends to follow a kind of herd mentality, so once everyone’s talking about the Trump-fueled hate crime crisis, everyone’s looking for a hate crime to report. And reporters can be *remarkably* non-skeptical when they’re reporting on exactly the story their editor wants them to provide….
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/17/i-doubted-jussie-smollett-it-breaks-my-heart-that-i-might-be-right
After the story collapsed publicly, the executive assistant to the editorial board at the Washington Post wrote an essay talking about all the things that she knew were wrong about the story up-front, and should have gotten questioned at the very least, but didn’t bring up until it was too late.
There were multiple prosecutors involved. It wasn’t the police vs the prosecutors, but one prosecutor in favor against another opposed.
I agree with this. I think everyone kind of assumed he would plead this out once his accomplices turned on him, and it appears that he made it clear he was going to stick to his guns and force them to go through with the whole thing, they decided it wasn’t worth the media circus (and perhaps chance of exoneration by a sympathetic jury).
Fake hate crimes should IMHO be an additional crime over and above filing a false police report.
If your goal (or an intended consequence of achieving some other goal) is to promote racial conflict and fear, then a fake hate crime is as harmful to society as burning a cross in someone’s yard, and for the same reasons.
Presumably, the point of a “fake hate crime” is to inspire public outcry (and maybe… hate!) against some segment of the population (say, white guys in MAGA hats).[1] That seems to me like a plain old hate crime.
[1] This view is corroborated by the common narrative (right up until it fell to bits) that the problem wasn’t just the people what supposedly dun it, but the wider social climate.
I suspect the purpose of his hate hoax was to get attention for himself to enhance his career–either to make it less likely he’d be written off the show he was in, or to make it more likely he’d be able to get some other acting job. It’s possible this will still work out for him (maybe all publicity is good), but it doesn’t look like such a great strategy just now, and the fact that he could have ended up actually doing jail time probably manages to disincentivize the next B-list hate hoaxer.
My impression is that the great majority of hate hoaxes and media-amplified hate crimes are done for personal reasons–either a way for some troubled person to get attention, or a way for some jackass to be as hurtful as possible toward someone they have a personal beef with. So when a Jewish kid has a swastika painted on his locker at school, you probably don’t need to worry about neo-Nazis until you’ve talked with his recently-broken-up-with ex girlfriend and the ex-boyfriend of his new girlfriend.
The perpetrator’s state of mind and intentions are something we regularly take into account in sentencing. There’s bad (murdering your business partner over a financial dispute) and then there’s depraved (murdering a little girl because you like the smell of her blood). The first is bad and maybe you can get out of prison in 30 years with good behavior. The second is so far beyond the pale you get the death penalty. Similarly there’s different punishments or different crimes for negligent as opposed to reckless as opposed to intentional behavior.
While Smollett might have perpetrated the hoax for purely financial reasons, he did so with reckless disregard to the impact on society at large, knowing full well his lies would inflame racial and sexual hatreds and he did it anyway.
Filing a false police report is bad. Filing a false police report and then lying about it on national television knowing full well your lies will incite racial animus in an already polarized nation is depraved, and deserves extra punishment. I’m not saying lock him up and throw away the key, but having the charges dropped without so much as an admission of guilt and an apology to the police, to the victims of real crimes, to the city of Chicago and to…I dunno, “the white community” screams “corruption and special favors.” I agree with Nybbler above: they really should have crafted a more plausible deal.
@Conrad – it’s worth mentioning that Smollett also did a lot of damage to the black and gay communities.
1) Even if successful, his scheme had the intended consequence of spreading fear. While following this story on Twitter, I saw a U Chicago student(!) who claimed she was uncomfortable crossing the quad for fear of gangs of white people attacking her.(!!)
2) Since it was unsuccessful, it’s going to lead to more people discounting valid stories.
3) He got caught because the CPD put in an amazing amount of work. If not, this facially unlikely scenario would have increased partisan division in this country.
+1 to Conrad, Faza, & J Mann
As far as I can tell, this isn’t true and the two crimes you list are punished the same under the law. Maybe the judge or jury sentence differently, but aren’t the prescribed sentences the same?
The details and names of the crimes we commonly lump under “homicide” vary state to state, but generally one person can kill another person and what charge they get (if any) depends on the circumstances and the perpetrator’s state of mind. If you kill someone justifiably (self-defense) or completely on accident in a way no reasonable person could have foreseen, those are not even crimes. If a reasonable person could have foreseen the outcome of an action might be “person dies” and they do it anyway, that’s negligence, and you get something like “manslaughter.” If you behave in a completely reckless way that will obviously get someone killed, like driving the wrong way on an interstate at 80MPH causing a massive collision with fatalities, you might be looking at something like “second degree murder.” You weren’t specifically trying to kill anyone, but it was completely obvious someone has a high chance of dying from your actions. And then there’s premeditation.
This is the whole concept of “mens rea.” The “guilty mind.” I didn’t make it up. If you’re going to tell me “state of mind” isn’t a thing in crimes, you’re going to need to explain why mens rea isn’t a thing.
Similarly for sentencing the judge and jury do take into account things like motivation and sometimes whether or not the perpetrator shows remorse. The depravity of the crime absolutely matters when it comes to sentencing.
There’s nothing about “hate crimes” that are incompatible with our judicial system. It’s just going a little further into the “guilty mind.” That someone commits a crime (perhaps only against one person) for the purpose of terrorizing a population. Burning a cross on someone’s lawn for the purpose of terrifying them and their neighbors is a worse crime than trespass and setting controlled burns without a permit. Faking a crime in a way guaranteed to stir up animus against white people is worse than faking a crime to get sympathy from your employer.
Conrad, only one of your homicide examples, premeditation, is about the state of mind of the accused. The rest are about how “a reasonable person” would interpret the situation, not how the accused did interpret it.
Yes, mens rea used to be a big part of the law, but there has been a long term move against it.
Yes, there is a strong analogy, but the arguments against criminalizing hate crimes apply against criminalizing hate hoaxes. Both require establishing the state of the mind of the perpetrator. For example, Tawana Brawley was probably not trying to create a media circus, let alone a racially charged one, just to escape private personal consequences.
I think this is the usual situation in known-false rape accusations, as well. Some 15 year old girl finds out she’s pregnant and has to tell her folks, and claims her boyfriend raped her as a way of getting out of consequences.
It’s not unreasonable to have some sympathy for a kid in a bad situation panicking, but it’s also pretty important to remember that her lie could end up putting an innocent person in prison for several years.
Sure, fingering a specific person should be an aggravating factor for false accusations. (But it’s not clear to me whether Smollet should count as fingering specific people.)
There is a famous quote (page 9) that false rape accusations are a girl out past curfew. But the claim is that these are nonspecific. Also, fame does not choose quotes for being reliable.
You might get community service for filing a false report, but it’ll be after a guilty plea though possibly with delayed adjudication (so no conviction recorded if you do the community service and keep your nose clean for a while). And it’ll be more than two days. Not a dropping of all charges with no admission of guilt.
Its weird, living in the city to observe the national conversation.
Here, almost none of the local reporters believed him from the jump. That is probably because of their police sources, plus the fact that it was like -20F when he claimed people were just waiting outside for him.
People generally also expected him to get let off easy after the charges, but almost no one thought it would be THIS easy. Basically everyone in the city to the right of the wackadoos who continue to say, “he was right in spirit” is fairly convinced this was a corrupt deal with more done under the table.
Yeah, being fair to the Chicago media, they did actual investigative reporting from the start. The national media were more inclined to the chin-stroking opinion pieces on “is this the fault of Trump or really the fault of Trump?” level.
What I’m confused about is, if he isn’t being charged, why aren’t his accomplices attackers being charged with assault?Because he’s not being exonerated. The charges are being dropped because the prosecutor doesn’t want to piss off a few mega players in the region who are friends with Jussie.
The prosecution’s statement was like “We think he’s guilty, but he’s served enough and we don’t think we should press further.”
This seems pretty defensible; presuming his acting career is dead, he has already suffered the equivalent of a rather enormous fine, entirely at his own hand. In fact, it’s possible that an extended court case and the ensuing publicity circus would even help him, in the “all publicity is good publicity” sense employed by celebrities more infamous than famous.
I wouldn’t presume that. He may have enough woke points to get back on Empire, even.
I’d be astounded if that happened, or even if he got a similar role on a similarly-popular show in the next, let’s say, couple of years. Wager a dollar on it?
He just got nominated for an NAACP award, so it seems unlikely he’ll face any kind of career consequences. As other people are saying, while it is true that a first time non-violent offender is usually a good candidate to avoid jail time, doing so usually involves an admission of guilt, or at least an admission that there is sufficient evidence to convict (nolo contendere or Alford plea)-even for something relatively minor such as a first time DUI or adult indoor prostitution or personal use quantity drug possession.
This is… very disappointing. Out of all my (black) friends and family, I only know a couple people who still insisted on Smollet’s innocence, so to see the NAACP nominate him is genuinely surprising. I’m wondering if they’ll get pushback.
1. That’s specifically an acting award, not some sort of “services to the black community” award, and the article says he’s gotten several previous nominations.
2. Are we sure he just got nominated? The ceremony is tomorrow, so it’s probable that the wheels were in motion a while back. And even if they weren’t, I don’t see any particular reason to prevent his nomination for an award for his existing work, even if he did make a complete fool out of himself.
I’m not sure this tells us much one way or the other.
With respect, I think that’s a bit naïve. Lots of people are going to interpret this as a sign of support for Smollett, and the NAACP must surely realise that lots of people are going to interpret it as a sign of support. So it looks like they either support what he did or else think that fabricating hate crimes isn’t a big deal.
As for the wheels already being in motion, they could rescind the nomination if they wanted to. It’s not like there are no other black actors they could nominate.
To pin down the timeline, the nomination was announced 2/13, the day the bodybuilders were arrested.
Isn’t it so nice to follow an ethos that permits separating the quality of the art from the behavior of the artist? 😀
Though, since I’ve been deliberately living under a rock on this one (I live in Chicago and from the get-go it’s reeked of an idiot circus [about idiots, by idiots, for idiots]): is there much of a hypocritical/goose-for-gander outcry for Jussie to get memory-holed over this?
I was mistakenly under the impression that “Image Award” was the name of the category, not the ceremony. I fully rescind my disappointment. Carry on.
Edit: Also I apparently didn’t read past the picture…
Yeah, I guess it isn’t that hard to understand.
That’s a common enough material outcome, but it almost always involves a plea bargain with at least a token guilty plea and an apology. And I don’t think anyone ever expected Smollett to serve hard time over this, but the admission of guilt is kind of important to some people.
Smollett is all but shouting “You don’t have the authority to judge me!” to people whose job and self-image are based around their authority to judge people like him, and getting away with the same deal that most people get after a humbling apology. That suggests something fishy going on. Not necessarily overt corruption, it could just be that Smollett is standing his ground because he’s pretty certain that “black gay cause célèbre in Trump’s America” would be enough to hang a Chicago jury, and getting away with it because the DA is also pretty certain of that. But it might be worth looking for some overt corruption anyway.
My guess is that CPD managed to badly fuck up the chain of evidence in their rush to indict Smollett, meaning that there was a real risk of losing the court case and looking like they tried to frame him.
I assumed something like that at first as well (my guess was that Smollett’s team had evidence of Mark Furman level racism by some key officers), but it doesn’t really explain how publicly outraged the CPD and Mayor’s office are and how quiet the prosecutor’s office is being.
If this were CPD’s fault, you would think the prosecutor’s office would at least leak something along those lines, and/or tell the Mayor and Police representatives to shut up and go along if they don’t want it to hit the press.
My guess is that it’s like the Epstein plea – Smollett’s team was connected, they could make this thing a circus and a fairly expensive trial for the city, the prosecutor’s office didn’t realize how bad this would smell. (In addition to the Epstein commonalities, in this case, there was also some risk of jury nullification, and it’s possible the prosecutor’s office didn’t see this as a serious crime and/or didn’t want to promote the narrative that reported hate crimes have a substantial chance of being false).
Apparently, the State’s Attorney, Kim Foxx, who had earlier claimed that she was recusing herself from the, didn’t actually formally recuse herself from the case:
And then Foxx’s office sent out an email asking for
Early on in the investigation, Foxx had been exchanging emails with Tina Tchen (the former chief of staff for Michelle Obama while she was First Lady) on the behalf of one of Smollett’s family members.
Also, in one of the fastest responses to a Freedom of Information Act request ever, the Chicago Police Department released their entire file on the case after the charges were dropped.
References:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-jussie-smollett-kim-foxx-kass-20190327-story.html
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-jussie-smollett-kim-foxx-records-20190313-story.html
I think posting a topic without any context or content should be avoided. Some people won’t know what the topic is, so won’t know whether its worth their while to read the comments; it’s not clear whether you’re being humorous, or just saying “what are people’s thoughts on [topic]?”; and it really takes very little effort to say “Jussie Smollett is [what Jussie Smollett is]. Jussie Smollett did [what Jussie Smollett did]. I think [what you think about Jussie Smollett]. What do the rest of you think?”
Or maybe this is just a peeve of mine and you should ignore me.
One counterpoint: the person bringing up the topic may not want to set the initial boundaries of the conversation by stating their stance. They may instead be interested in how the discussion develops without their interference.
Of course, “what are people’s thoughts on [topic]?” seems like a better opener in that case, and restating the situation neutrally at least saves people unfamiliar with the situation a Google.
There was a lot of discussion about the lightbulb ban in the last thread, and I’d like to propose a system that could work in some countries.
A Pigouvian tax is said to be regressive, because it harm consumption by the poor more than the rich.
But what if we make a progressive Pigouvian tax? For salaries, usually only the income over a threshold gets taxed at a different rate.
So if the threshold is, say, 8000 euros, below that you pay no taxes and above that you pay a 15% tax, there is a problem: people have no incentive to work for a salary between 8000-9411 euros, because at that range, you get a net income below 8000 euros. So governments tax the marginal income, and if you happen to earn 8001 euros, you pay no tax on the 8000, and you pay a 1.5 cent tax on the euro.
You can make the same tax for household electricity consumption. You can calculate that the reasonable consumption for an adult is X, and it can be X or smaller amount Y per child. Then, use council records to calculate reasonable electricity consumption per household (in Spain, at least, councils have a pretty good idea of who lives where, because they need those records to collect rubbish, for schools, etc., and there is a central database of taxpayers). And then you impose a high tax on the electricity used above the threshold. And you can make exception for people who, due to health conditions, have to spend more electricity (people who need a sleep apnea machine, who need electric ramps for stairs, etc.).
Of course, such a system can’t work for car fuel, because the only way to achieve this would be to have gas stations participate in a central database of cars where they log the consumption of each license plate (and that would be very Big Brother-ish). It probably wouldn’t work in the US, because the absence of a database would mean that people would just easily lie about how many people live in their house.
But wouldn’ it work for countries that have good databases on who lives where, such as Sweden or Spain?
I just want to register in advance a bad case of motivated cognition. I hate this idea. Give me some time too decide why.
LE:
It’s a perfect case intersectionality of things I strongly dislike: price fixing (gov decides what I should pay for electricity), ableism (punished for having money), killing motivation (if I end up consuming just the same, why bother working more?), double taxation (I already pay more in taxes, now I have to buy things at higher prices too?!), perverse incentives and corruption (all these new avenues to lower cost other than simply consuming less…), slippery slope (politicians have incentives to promise cheaper electricity for the masses, and now they have a brand new tool to do that).
And I predict that in a few years consumption will raise instead of fall. Lowest prices will end up being subsidized (there is already a huge overlap between welfare and green in current politics). And the very categories that would be price-sensitive and likely to watch consumption now are less likely to do so.
Why would that happen?
Everybody would pay the same price of electricity under the quota. You just pay more over the spending limit.
So if you have two families of two adults, two kids, they both have the same exact price of electricity. Both families can choose to exceed the quota and pay extra. The rich family can choose to renovate their house and spend less money on their energy efficient heating and air-con. The poor family can choose to spend more per month instead of paying a one-time high fee for more expensive energy efficient household appliances.
EDIT: It seems like I didn’t explain my idea clearly, since 2/2 comments seem to think this is an income-based tax. My proposal is a consumption based tax, where extra consumption gets punished, regardless of the reason why. So if you are a poor person who has a crappy house with crappy windows and spends a lot on heating, you pay the same extra tax as the rich person who has good windows but chooses to have a jacuzzi.
Initially, yes. But when you have a hammer, every problem looks like welfare. It takes a very small change in legislation to smooth over the next increase in electricity prices – which can even be justified by switching to green sources. “Let’s use only wind power and have only the rich pay for the difference”. Tell me you wouldn’t vote for it 🙂
This already happens in Spain, and we don’t have this system.
Spain’s consumers already owe the energy companies a whole load of money for our policies.
When the nuclear energy moratorium was made, harmed companies were compensated, so we pay part of that compensation every month; we also pay extra in our bills for smoothing energy prices (otherwise Canary island prices would be much higher); we paid an extra tax for solar, too.
When energy prices were increasing at a 9% annual rate, the government capped that, and now we pay companies the debt incurred from that capping.
I don’t see how my proposed system would make these issues worse, at least in Spain, with our already idiotic energy policy.
And we already have a subsidy for poor families to have extra energy (as long as they have a capacity lower than 10 kW).
@ana53294
Dependencies? In the programming sense of the world. If you have a bad thing, you don’t create even more structure over it – it’s going to be that much harder to get rid of.
Also, I hate politics more and more.
The Pigouvian tax I propose would also mean eliminating all those stupid bans of incandescent bans or forcing people to buy washing machines that don’t wash, so this would increase the liberty of people to act as they want.
And, because we already have an alternate system that is used as a hammer for all those things you want to avoid, this added tax will not be used to add any of those other things. So that means that your objection is in general, an objection to another beaurocracy/added legislation, which I respect, but at the same time, I think we can add this bit and remove a lot of other legislation, for a net decrease in stupid bureauocracy/legislation.
@ana53294
Mm. Ok, without motivated cognition this time, as much as I can. The problem with this whole class of solutions is you’re interfering with market mechanisms, which always has side effects. Ask USSR how their economy went with all the manual planning. They weren’t stupid, it’s just a level of complexity that might possibly even evade really smart AIs, let alone human brains.
If you want to help poor people, give them money. They can chose how to allocate the money themselves, _and_ they’ll still be motivated to save electricity. Best of all worlds.
This way, incentives will move all the way down and up the chain. For example much of the energy consumption per capita is actually done in production. That pretty car you’re buying probably took more energy to build then you’d use for lightning in 100 years.
Not to mention other horrifying lapses: you’re taxing me for using a dimmable incandescent, while I’m heating with wood fire (I actually am, in a place I work). I have a comment in the last conversation on how incandescent ban is many orders of magnitude below any significant climate change – there are many other lower hanging fruits. And I’m not saying this as a generic conversation stopper (“starving kids in Africa”), but because I honestly think this has such low consequences to be bordering on criminal, if you think climate change is important. It’s straight up red herring, compared to real pollution/carbon sources.
The whole point is, incandescent lightbulbs will most probably increase your energy consumption over the quota, because incandescent lightbulbs don’t use that much energy.
The objective is to have people find energy hogs in their houses, and fix them, instead of banning them from using whatever appliance they want to use. As an anecdote, in my home, we had suspiciously high electricity bills, even when we were away and all appliances were off. We even thought somebody was stealing our electricity. Turns out, the doorbell was shortcircuiting.
I haven’t found an LED lightbulb I like, yet. I would rather prefer to use less heating and keep my preferred lightbulbs, for example.
There are many, many people with different preferences and different cases. Letting the free market find the choices they want to decrease their energy usage is the freedom maximising policy.
@ana53294
Freud was playing with my comment. What’s missing from it is “… and tax electricity globally, for all consumers, including industrial”.
Well, yes. Obviously, asking households to decrease electricity consumption by increasing prices and not doing the same with industry is not fair. This thing was done with California’s water, where agriculture consumes much more, and they pay less than households. Obviously, this is stupid.
There will be people who will say that this will mean that the factory will go to China, and jobs will be lost, while households will not move.
Well, yes. Still stupid to spend all this effort into fixing 10% of the problem. Like the drunk looking for the keys under the light, not where he lost them. It just means the universe is being mean, yet again, and there are no easy solutions – nothing new.
This seems like the sort of tax system that would cost more to implement than it would produce. I’d be amazed if a government bureaucracy could make a just, scaling income tax on a product. Why not just subsidize LED production?
‘We will make LEDs so cheap that only the rich will buy bulbs’ as Edison didn’t say.
However, the idea of an incandescent black market is very amusing.
I think I may have explained this badly, because this is not an income tax. It’s a consumption tax.
So if the average household energy consumption is around 3000 kWh per year, any energy use over that is fined or taxed. So the marginal cost of the kWh over the annual max is much higher. This can be done annualy or monthly, with adjustments for winter/summer.
And, because two people sharing a home spend less than two people in individual homes, we take into account the number of people living in the house to calculate how much that limit is.
I admit that I did misunderstand what you’re saying.
However, would this not create perverse incentives on the electricity front? I’d imagine that in Spain and my own country, Australia, most domestic electricity goes into air conditioning.
In the US, it’s heating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_energy_consumption
What if we end up with boiling/frozen pensioners, afraid to turn on their less-efficient electric heaters? What about people who use natural gas heating (like me) and thus have tiny electricity bills? Electricity is already really expensive in Australia and presumably Spain, so can we not conclude that it’s price inelastic?
Instead of worrying about lights, we should worry about aircon, housing design and insulation.
People shouldn’t have not energy efficient electric heaters, so preventing people from using them and making them use a more efficient use of energy is the actual goal of the tax. I still think taxing them is better than banning energy inefficient heaters.
You can add a subsidy to buy more energy efficient appliances in exchange for scrapping old ones, such as the ones we regularly have in Spain. Or a subsidy for making your home more energy efficient, by putting better insulation.
And the energy quotas would be implemented state-by-state, with seasonal variations taken into account.
The link seems to talk about energy use not electricity use (so includes gas and oil used for heating).
From the citations, I have found these US goverment statistics which say that in the US, the largest use of electricity by domestic users (excluding “other miscellaneous uses”) is air conditioning, at 15.4%. Space heating is down at 6.2%, below water heating, lighting and refrigeration.
@ana53294:
I’m not sure how you propose to have “energy efficient” electric heaters, given that the classic case of energy inefficiency in electrical appliances (and the whole thing about incandescent lightbulbs, in the first place) is “runs hot”.
Which is the whole point of electric heaters. “Waste heat” is what they’re for.
Moreover, it is not necessarily clear that energy consumption for heating purposes can be decreased in any meaningful way through such tax mechanisms, because the amount of energy required is determined by the space to be heated and the temperature gradient. Ye cannae change the laws of physics, Captain.
Technically, we could imagine an electricity tax being an incentive to switch to other heating methods (typically: burning things), but we’re trying to discourage those as well.
That’s just wrong.
There are many, many things that can be done to decrease energy use for heating.
Insulate the house better, put better windows, make sure there are no heat leaks, have a corridor, insulate doors, have window blinds, use floor heating, have a ceiling fan.
All those things cost money, and the reason they are not done is because the cost of the extra electricity is lower than the cost of those extra improvements. So the tax should increase the cost of energy so people start using those improvements.
The quota should be based on a home designed for perfect energy efficiency, with people using it reasonably.
And the more energy efficient heaters would be non-electric heaters. We burn gas at a factory to produce heat that produces electricity and then we transport electricity to produce heat, and each step means energy is wasted. Having people switch to gas heating would be the objective, clearly.
Yes, they can. Yes, they cost money. Specifically, they cost a lot of money up front.
Failing to take account of this is common enough, so please don’t take it as picking on you.
Your assumption is that if you make energy more expensive over time than the cost of investment in energy efficiency (by means such as you describe and that I am aware of), people will undertake the investment.
That hinges on them having the means to undertake such an investment. So what if I can save $30 000 over 20 years if I spend $20 000 today, if I don’t have twenty thousand dollars lying around?
In practice, this problem can be solved either by:
1. Subsidies – with all the problems associated therewith,
2. Loans – where the cost of servicing may erase the benefits,
3. Saving – where the poor sod is getting shafted by both the higher energy prices and the need to restrict other consumption.
Given that Auric was talking about “boiling/frozen pensioners” who – around my parts at least – are generally not know as a high-wealth group, I take it as more than likely that the only viable option is 1.
In which case, why not skip the tax and go straight for mandatory, subsidised efficiency modernisation? It gets you where you’re going faster.
Here’s the rub: I could go with the idea, provided I get to decide what counts as “reasonable use”.
Otherwise, I fail to see how it can be construed as anything other than a powerplay by whoever is in charge of the scheme.
ETA
Personally, my flat is heated through central heating generated at a joint electrical/heating plant. This works, because I live in the middle of a city that has the requisite infrastructure.
Back when I lived in London, the option wasn’t available, so I had a choice between burning evil, climate-destroying natural gas or heating with electricity. I was also renting (and still am), so the amount of home-improvement I could do was strictly limited. I am on the hook for the ‘leccy bills, however.
This is all intended to illustrate that reality is a lot more messy than one usually takes into account (not quite a least-convenient world, but close).
The demands of conservatives to decrease spending and the deficit is the issue. I personally don’t object to that.
As for tenants: many tenants who live in energy inefficient houses demand landlords to give them a discount on rent, so this policy would also work in a rental housing market that is not as underserved as London’s. Having an active, competitive rental market is also good for the environment!
I wholeheartedly agree. Sadly, the state of the market where I live is such that asking for a discount on rent is a laughable proposition. This is true for a lot of places.
Speaking of apartments—I have, at certain times in my life, lived in apartments that calculated my utility bill by dividing (among me and my roommates) the energy consumption of the third of the complex I lived in, by the number of apartments in that part of the complex. This was the least unfair thing they could do, given that they didn’t have the infrastructure in place to measure our energy consumption individually, but it creates a tragedy of the commons, even without artificially inflated prices. If my situation was sufficiently uncommon (I honestly don’t know how common it is), this might be a corner case we just shrug and say “Oh well” too, but at least some people would likely be affected in this way.
@Faza (TCM)
I’m glad someone brought this up…this seems like the obvious and primary problem with this strategy. It is so problematic that I’m not even sure the other problems matter that much.
@ana53294
I suspect the number of rental markets where tenants have that kind of negotiating power are few and far between. Prospective tenants may have slightly more, but of course they lose it as soon as they move in. In most cases, the landlord response to “can we negotiate” is “this is the rent, take it or leave it”.
@Joseph Greenwood
I lived in an apartment that had metered water per unit for the first couple years. Then a new management company bought the property, and I guess they didn’t want to pay for the software that interfaced with the individual meters or something, because they went to the averaging method (and my bill doubled as a result).
I worked in commercial real estate and we did the same thing at the majority of our properties. Sometimes tenants protested the unfairness, but their leases specified that they would have to pay to install their own meter, and few tenants were willing to pay this cost.
@ana53294
Faza mentioned subsidies to offset the up-front cost of investments. In the other thread I was saying that it’s better to just give money than to mess with the market. I guess there are ways of giving targeted help that mess with the market a lot less – I’d be down with things like help for investments that are obviously worth it long term, but unlikely to be affordable.
For this kind of tax, costing more to implement than it collects is not necessarily a fatal flaw. You’re seeking to change behaviour. If you gain income (or don’t lose too much) that’s a bonus.
Yes, the goal here is to have as few households as possible that consume excess electricity. With time, as more energy efficient appliances are made, we would decrease energy quotas, until some reasonable minimum is reached.
Why is this the goal, rather than having a low total electricity consumption? (In which case, the price should be high for everybody)
In other words, what’s the advantage of encouraging people with gas fired central heating to leave their lights on all the time?
I personally don’t object to a Pigouvian tax for everybody, but then I’m not poor. Many people balk at the idea of having poor people be unable to shower while rich people have their jacuzzis.
So the idea is to allow poor people to have warm showers while preventing jacuzzis, by increasing the marginal cost of electricity over a reasonable quota.
You do realize it won’t work?
By the time you get to jacuzzi levels of wealth (meaning here: the kind of ostentatious consumption people find objectionable in the rich), the proportion of discretionary spending going to energy consumption is low enough that the tax won’t affect the magnitude of consumption all that much.
The people who will be affected are those for whom the electricity bill is still a considerable cost item – in other words: the poor.
There is a middle class, you know. People who will pay the extra tax for electricity to achieve some minimal spending they need, but who will balk at higher expenses for some marginal improvements on their life quality.
The poor are not the only ones who care about their electricity prices.
Certainly.
It’s just that the poor will be hit first and harder.
I should probably add: raising the cost of energy has knock-on effects across everything else. This means decreasing welfare for everyone other than those that already have FU money.
Meaning you’ll shunt the lower strata of the middle class into the “poor” category and probably further impoverish the poor.
The rich will keep doing rich-people stuff, ‘coz they already have FU money.
If you’re serious about wanting this to be a Pigouvian tax, then your goal is to have the right number of households that consume “excess” electricity, not to have the fewest number.
The point of the Pigouvian tax is to disincentivize behaviour, not to generate revenue.
Although Sweden’s tax on alcohol generates a lot of revenue, I don’t think the Swedish government would object to Swedes becoming teetotalers. There you have, objective achieved!
Strictly speaking, a the point of a Pigouvian tax is to internalize externalities. A properly constructed PT isn’t concerned with discouraging activity, as such, only that the people choosing factor the externalities into their decision-making process.
Once the cost of externalities has been accounted for, the PT has done it’s job, regardless of who – if anyone – actually changed their behaviour.
The Incandescent Light Market
With regard to electrical appliances, I tend to prefer outright ban of energy inefiecient ones over Pigovian taxes.
Electricity is produced via at least semipublic institutions backed by governments. Access to a grid is semipublic good – it is excludable but basically nonrivalrous due to huge fixed compared to variable costs. Economics textbook definition of public good (in this case identical with wikipedia definition) is that its use is nonexcludable and nonrivalrous.
So with some simplification we might say that electricity production is partially publicly subsidised. Why?
Of course it is possible that subsidy is inefficient, but I think that it is subsidised because access to electricity has positive externalities. So, blanket reduction of something which has positive externalities via taxation is not an ideal solution, and interventions targeted on specific wasteful uses might be preferable.
Sure, having people have access to electricity, have lights, warm water, washing machines creates lots of positive externalities.
But I am not sure that energy expenditure over a certain threshold, which comes from excess consumption or energy inefficiency is good. Having bad windows and poor heat isolation will waste more energy than incandescent lightbulbs ever will. So will old appliances.
So the aim is to punish those who still don’t have energy efficient appliances, and those who consume excess energy for unnecessary stuff, such as a jacuzzi or a swimming pool.
The second part is just out-and-out authoritarianism. You don’t like that people have luxuries, so punish them for them. The first part doesn’t seem to be based on any examination of tradeoffs either, just on the idea that reducing energy use is an overriding goal. Replacing windows and appliances is not cheap; replacing every window and three of the doors in my house was about ~$22,000. Replacing the refrigerator would be another $1000-$2000. Replacing the furnace and air conditioner probably another $20,000+.
Some obvious problems:
Consumers see different marginal costs for products/services. Rich person who wants to consume more than the low-priced quota will turn to poor person who consumes less, and offer to buy the surplus for an intermediate rate. Thus you get black marketeering.
Also, government price regulation steers consumption (and resource use) towards lower utility. Consumers will tend to buy something of lower utility if the higher utility consumption would bring them over the tax threshold. In other words, it is just a more complicated form of food stamps.
And of course, this needs to be administrated.
Why not just tax income and/or wealth progressively?
Why not just have the high tax rate on consumption for all, and give poor people cash so they can afford a minimum living standard?
Why not have progressive taxes on consumption based on product class, with a higher rate on luxuries or things richer people tend to buy?
Honestly, I don’t think that the black market would be an issue in this case.
The attractiveness of such proposals will likely to be found to be directly proportional to affluence. Assuming a moderately progressive tax rate, rich people who want to use more electricity will see their bills rise, but won’t care all that much, because even at the higher rates electricity consumption won’t account for a huge part of their spending.
To get rich people to consume less, we’d neet a sharply progressive rate. This gets us right back to the “freezing granny” problem.
The whole scheme is regressive by design.
Obviously, that would depend on the good in question and the particular taxation levels. Electricity may not be the most convenient good to trade in, but with electric vehicles, it is easier than before.
I’d say that the issue is rather different. We’re not talking about offsets, we’re talking about a tax.
We can imagine a scenario where a rich person could possibly save money by paying a poor person more than the poor person would pay in terms of increased bills, but it’s not evident that transaction costs wouldn’t erase the difference.
In general, I don’t think there are enough rich heavy wasters to have a significant impact on energy usage. Almost by-definition you need to target the masses in order to achieve something useful.
Agreed. That is a whole separate issue, however.
This whole discussion seems like it’s missing the point. I completely agree with all the arguments that taxes are more efficient than bans. And maybe it would be fine to mess around with the tax structure, but ultimately it doesn’t matter.
We get policies that are palatable to the electorate. The electorate hates the word “tax,” especially in the US, and likes the word “efficiency.” So we don’t get electricity taxes and we do get efficiency mandates, even though the vast majority of decisionmakers would likely prefer the tax.
“Tax the rich” tends to be pretty popular, though.
Where the rich is defined as “not me”.
The number of people who self-identify as rich is small.
“Tax other people” has always been pretty popular.
The San Francisco water department does something like this: there is a baseline household amount of water that is provided relatively cheaply and usage above that amount is priced significantly higher. I have no idea how effective this is at encouraging conservation, but the case for it is probably much stronger for water than for electricity given the greater difficulty and environmental impact of increasing water service capacity.
Increasing water availability is trivial.
Just build desalination plants. The cost of desalination is comparable to the cost charged to residential consumers of water. So maybe the marginal cost would have to double. Given that existing system of increasing marginal price, that means only people watering their lawns get the charge. Great!
Lots of cost-effective public infrastructure doesn’t get built because the government thinks that if it times it just right, it can get someone else to pay for it. But the droughts never last quite that long.
The specific problem cali has is that it distributes the vast majority of the water to farmers, but collects almost all of the money from the cities. If the cities build desal, they no longer need the inland water infrastructure for anything, which.. well, the farmers would not be happy with their new water bill, even if they do get to use the last ten percent of the water that used to go to the cities..
Nonsense. The cities don’t pay retail rates when they buy water from the farmers. They pay the same wholesale rates that the farmers pay. They charge residential customers a lot of money to pay for distribution and metering, because that really costs a lot.
And therefore everyone who owns an electric car, or a plug-in hybrid, gets to pay a tax that you have calculated will punish them sufficiently to change their behavior. So they go sell that economic white elephant and buy a nice fuel-efficient diesel instead. Some of them will then go buy diesel generators to stick in their garage and kick in as necessary to keep their official electricity consumption below the punitive threshold.
But you’ll feel good for having taught them a lesson, and maybe someday you’ll get around to teaching them another lesson about their Persistent Wrongness. Which won’t work any better, and eventually your “teaching” will have antagonized a majority of the population and they’ll vote for someone to teach you a lesson.
Don’t worry– in the People’s Republic of California, we’ve taken care of that one too. You get a special lower electricity rate if you have an electric car.
(In fairness, electric vehicles can charge during off-peak hours, which makes this one of the few California policies that isn’t making the electric grid more dysfunctional.)
The EEA estimates the external cost of electricity as being somewhere in the range 1.8 to 5.9 cents per kilowatt-hour. I’m not sure whether a tax that size would have enough of an effect to justify the effort.
If you wanted to extend the idea to vehicle fuel you could also do it using the time-honored ration coupon: the only difference from classic rationing would be that once you run out of coupons you’re not necessarily done buying gas, you’re just done buying it at the non-surtaxed rate.
IMHO, the easiest solution to the regressivity of a Pigouvian tax is to couple it with a progressive transfer. We take some of the revenue and give it to poor people, and use the rest to buy giant space screens to cool the Earth.
It’s not a Pigouvian tax if it’s progressive that way, unless somehow the externality is progressive as well. But it’s probably not a Pigouvian tax anyway, since the value of the externality is generally pulled out of thin air. This is just social engineering through the tax system, and it will work as well as any other sort of central planning.
You know what other tax is regressive? VAT. Do you spend as much time complaining about this much larger regressive tax? Maybe you’re subject to a huge status quo bias.
The obvious thing, if you actually care about the environment and/or progressive taxes, is combine a Pigouvian tax with a tiny reduction in the VAT. But when people try to build win-win compromises, it turns out that activists don’t actually care about policy, only getting credit for defeating the opponents.
The problem of pigouvian taxes can easily be subsumed within normal tax parameters, i.e. standard deduction and brackets. We don’t need more special tax exceptions (e.g. tampons). If cost of living proves burdensome we can increase the standard deduction and let people make their own choices.
If some thrifty individual has figured out how to exist with far below your proscribed level of electricity, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be rewarded for it.
This sounds a lot like the way that phone companies price data packages — you can buy X amount of data for Y price, and if you use it all up you can buy more at a rate >Y. Or you know you’re a heavy user you can go ahead and buy unlimited data from the start.
Not sure what conclusions to draw from that, but feels worth pointing out that this proposal is more or less “What if (the government made) power companies price usage like phone companies?”
If you want to give households a lumpsum of cash, the tool is the standard deduction and the dependent deductions.
You would impose a tax at the utility level based on their CO2 emissions, which would be passed on to consumers, who would then have a higher deduction to offset their higher utility bills.
Two quick thoughts:
1. Why add the word “Pigouvian” to your proposal? It just boxes you in. And anyway, the goal of environmentalists is not to maximize economic value, and you’re never going to win over committed libertarians in the first place, so just call it a normal tax.
2. A consumption tax that phases in, is still only progressive as it relates to the relative impacts of each income group. The phase-in aspect does not necessarily make it progressive, and it could easily still be regressive.
15% of one Euro is 15 cents, not 1.5 cents.
It’s not obvious that a Pigouvian tax on CO₂ emissions is regressive. I have no idea whether producing the things rich people buy involves more or less CO₂ emissions per dollar than the production of things poor people buy.
It helps if you realize that a tax on CO₂ emissions is simply a tax on energy production.
Given that it takes energy to actually do anything, a tax on energy propagates downstream until it finally hits the consumer, either directly – via the energy bill – or indirectly – via higher prices.
Therefore, all energy taxes end up being consumption taxes and consumption taxes are regressive because poor people necessarily spend more of their income on consumption.
I’ve often seem people say that consumption taxes are regressive in general, but it’s not obvious (at least that they are regressive to a significant extent). Sure, most rich people save a bigger part of their income in a typical month. But then every once in a while, they use their savings to buy a house or a yacht or whatever, and in that month their consumption way exceeds their income, making up for it.
The regressiveness comes from the fact that a tax increases the price of whatever it is you’re consuming.
Consider a good that is being sold at a (net) price of P, plus tax T where 0 < T < P (IOW T is some percentage of P). The gross price paid by the consumer is P+T.
Next, let's consider the case of the rich and poor consumer:
1. Poor consumer has income Yp such that the net price of the good is P = Yp/10 (it costs our poor consumer one tenth of his monthly income). Let's further assume that the tax is 20% of price P, or 2% of the poor consumer's income.
2. Rich consumer has income Yr, such that the net price of the good is P = Yr/50 (they earn five times as much as the poor consumer). The tax on the good is the same as before (because real-life consumption taxes do not account for the financial situation of the buyer).
How much does the rich consumer pay in tax? Less than half-a-percent of their income (0,4% to be precise), which is considerably less than 2%.
When the rich and poor consumer match consumption (i.e. the rich consumer restricts their consumption to only what the poor consumer can afford), the poor consumer will be found to pay a much greater portion of their disposable income/assets in tax than the rich consumer. That is the "regressive" bit.
The fact that rich people tend to spend more money overall than poor people is not a particularly interesting observation.
@Faza (TCM) The fact that rich people spend more money is not an interesting observation because it’s obvious, but it makes it irrelevant that rich people could get away with paying as little consumption tax as poor people if they spent like poor people.
On *some* energy production. Nuclear plants and wind turbines have no CO2 emissions, but produce electric power.
Fundamentally, if you make people pay the full cost of their actions including externalities, well, the prices they pay for stuff often goes up. This seems inevitable.
I don’t think it’s as clear as you do that such a tax would be regressive. (By “regressive” here I think we mean that the ratio of taxes paid per capita among poor people/rich people will go up.). I also don’t see that the question is particularly important. (Note that banning incandescent light bulbs/inefficient but cheap appliances/cheap but low-MPG cars all lands harder on poor people than rich people in some sense. That doesn’t seem like an obvious reason to change our policies in those areas).
I’d expected that the difference between “all A are B” and “some B are A” didn’t require special explanation.
Implementing a progressive pigouvian tax is a terrible idea. What it does is complicate the tax and complicate the welfare system. I don’t know about Spain, but in the US, there are dozens of welfare programs, and as a result no one really knows how much welfare the government is spending. No doubt lots of folks get more welfare than would be the case if the voters and politicians really knew the whole picture, and perhaps many also get less. Welfare should be concentrated in one government agency so voters can make a rational decision as to how much welfare the poor get.
The point of a pigouvian tax is to internalize into consumers’ behavior what is otherwise an externality. Adjusting the tax based on income is just like adjusting the cost of food to everyone based on their income. If your goal is to equalize the consumption of all, it is possible to do so by having a sliding scale for all purchases based on purchasing power. But it would be stupid to do that, because just equalizing income would be a whole lot less complicated and achieve the same goal.
I’d like a thread for humorous historical anecdotes. Laconic one-liners, Churchillian witticisms, “Don’t shoot, we’re Republicans!”, that kinna thing.
My own offering to get things started is a naval anecdote that I oddly didn’t hear from bean:
The only time the USS Wisconsin was struck by enemy fire was while steaming off the North Korean coast in March 1952. A 152-mm shore defense battery managed to score a hit on one of the secondary armament shields, wounding three sailors. When this happened, the [i]Wisconsin[/i] momentarily paused in her mission, swivelled her main battery around, and proceeded to completely obliterate the offending battery. She then resumed her mission.
Witnessing the exchange, one of her escorting destroyers quickly flashed the BB a signal:
“Temper, temper!”
In 1843, General Charles Napier had been ordered to quell an insurrection in Sindh (now a province of Pakistan).
However, his use of force exceeded his mandate and he conquered the province, annexing it to the Bombay Presidency.
He telegraphed back to his superiors (or at least he wished he had), informing them of his actions with the short message “Peccavi”, latin for “I have sinned”.
Now that is a Warrior Poet.
Sadly, Wikiquote says that’s a misattribution, and that the pun was by English schoolgirl Catherine Winkworth, who submitted it to Punch, which then reported it as Napier’s quote. I haven’t googled to see if that’s true.
I had a vague recollection of a similar pun around “I have Lucknow,” but can’t remember where.
And another apocryphal one from Lord Dalhousie on annexing Oudh: “Vovi” (“I vowed””/”I’ve Oudh.”)
I think it was “Ego sum in fortuna nunc” (“I am in luck now”), when the city was recaptured by the British during the Indian Mutiny.
Found it! It’s “Nunc fortunatus sum,” and the book Queen Victoria’s Little Wars reports that “a wit” coined it for Sir Colin Campbell, but does not identify the wit in question.
That line, I believe, was actually invented by reporters.
His actual best line was what he said about the sati, when told that it was an ancient and venerable custom:
That’s the sort of multiculturalism I can get behind.
There’s a similar anecdote about when he sentenced a man to death for killing his wife. The man’s friends came to plead for mercy, telling Napier that he’d been very angry with his wife. Napier just shrugged and said, “Well, I’m angry with him.”
Same here. Sometimes I think that if someone tried to stop widow-burning today, the only outcome would be the whole internet calling them “racist”, because it is problematic to talk negatively about something that is a custom in a foreign culture.
Sometimes you think very silly things then, since organisations like Amnesty International are vocally and unequivocally opposed to dowry-related violence.
I would agree with you rlms, but then you’ve got stuff like the Iraqi migrant raping a 10 year old boy because he was having a “sexual emergency” and having his conviction overturned because he didn’t understand the boy was saying “no.”
Isn’t dowry-related violence coded Hindu, while Iraqi migrants are 99 percent Muslim? Leftists can criticize anything they want about Hinduism without being called racist.
@Conrad Honcho
That’s a pretty skewed reading of that article.
Yes, and furthermore the article itself is misleading. The reason for the rescindment was not “because the Austrian court ‘didn’t prove he realised the boy was saying no'” (unclear who the article is quoting here), but because in Austria the definition of rape requires the use of force.
Well, even in that very biased article, you can see that the man’s conviction of sexual assault still stands, and he remains in custody, and he will be retried for rape next year.
Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen that article before; the way it gets presented is “Austria is so cowbirded that they will offer up their own young to THE INVADER, by LAW” and it’s really the sort of thing that happens in court systems all the time. Having to do a retrial every now and then is the price you pay for having a system where appeals and the like function.
Apologies, withdrawn. I didn’t see the bottom parts beneath the pictures and didn’t know the guy was still in jail.
Leftists do criticize misogyny in Muslim nations (especially Saudi Arabia). The key is criticizing them for being misogynist rather than criticizing them for being Muslim. On the other hand, religious and cultural tolerance does extend to Hindus; there’s been an outcry recently over Apu (the Quickie Mart guy from the Simpsons) as an offensive stereotype.
Huh. Not sure I ever heard that one. I don’t have all that much on Wisconsin, and I don’t know how careful I was when I read through the stuff on Korea when I did her history post.
The ancient greek philosopher Diogenes is full of these anecdotes.
Supposedly Heraclitus died when he jumped into a volcano to try and prove he was a god. (Spoiler alert: he wasn’t.)
I think that’s supposed to have been Empedocles, though the Wikipedia entry on the death of Heraclitus is pretty interesting in its own right:
There’s even a meme about Diogenes. He was the basest of philosophers.
A quote attributed to him:
“I pissed on a man who called me a dog. Why was he surprised?”
The Virgin Plato vs the Chad Diogenes.
It sucks to be Aristotle. You spend the best years of your life teaching this kid to be a philosopher-king, and when he grows up he tells you he wants to be just like Diogenes.
During political struggles in fifteenth century Ireland, the eighth Earl of Kildare, Gerald Fitzgerald, marched on Cashel and set fire to the cathedral in order to get revenge on the Archbishop of the time who was one of his enemies. Those enemies managed to get the upper hand and in 1496 Fitzgerald was sent to England accused as a traitor. He managed to convince the king, Henry VII, that he was innocent of all charges, including the following exchange which appealed to the king’s (presumed) sense of humour:
There’s a story (probably apocryphal, alas) that the British in WW2 planned to try and undermine German morale by letting their soldiers find 10-inch condoms with the words “British. Size: Medium” on their packets. Supposedly Churchill commented, “That will show the Germans, if they even find any, who’s the Master Race.”
Well if you’re whipping out apocryphal Churchill quotes now then we’re going to be here all day.
That’s what Churchill said!
There are reports that in order to stop astronauts from taking the wrong size for a proper seal, the urine collection devices used by the early space program had to be labeled “large”, “gigantic”, and “humongous”.
(Snopes thinks that it may have been informal names by the astronauts rather than an official naming convention. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/spacesuit-envy/ )
John Sedgwick, commander of the Union VI Corps, was shot in the head and killed during a battle in 1864 after reassuring nearby soldiers that the enemy “couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”
Perhaps the enemy was aiming at the elephant?
During the assault on Chateau Hougemont at Waterloo, Maréchal de Camp Bauduin led the attack with his First Brigade of the Sixth Division, advancing towards a line of woods near the Chateau. Before his brigade reached the woods, however, they were peppered with round shot from English batteries that unmasked themselves upon a ridge. Calling for counter-battery fire Bauduin declaimed “Ils nous montrent leurs armes! –Alors montrons-leur nos boules!” In English, “they’ve shown us their guns, let us show them our balls!”
The version I’ve heard was that he was killed during the attempt to reassure his soldiers that the enemy “couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist-”
Not sure if true, but a far cooler last words anecdote either way.
In WWI a German ship was disguised as a British ocean liner, the RMS Carmania, but with hidden guns. After being rerouted several times for various fueling reasons, and without ever encountering an enemy ship, they ran into the actual RMS Carmania, outfitted with guns and requisitioned by the British navy, which immediately recognized their disguise and opened fire, sinking the ship within the hour.
(I wrote about this here
https://blog.jminjie.com/@Jordan/The-true-story-of-the-SMS-Cap-Trafalgar-11a7fe55f6)
Ought to put this at the bottom of the article.
I just wish there was a transcript of what the conversation was like among the officers when that happened.
I’m not sure it is humorous and it probably isn’t true, but I’m fond of the anecdote from the Albigensian crusade. The commander of the crusading army, having taken a city, asked the papal legate how he was to tell which of the inhabitants were heretic Cathars and which Catholics who happened to be in a city controlled by the Cathars.
The supposed answer:
“Kill them all. God will know his own.”
What I like about it is that, if you take the religion sufficiently seriously, it makes a kind of sense.
I just read the Bhagavad Gita and was struck when Krishna says essentially the same thing to Arjuna after Arjuna laments the imminent loss of life in the battle he is observing.
Among Oscar Wilde’s last words: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” Someone else had put it more succinctly than even Wilde: “Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.”
—
[from rec.humor.funny]
Sometime in the early 1900’s, P. T. Barnum, the owner of the Barnum & Bailey circus and originator of the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute,” offered $10,000 in cash to any person who could thoroughly dupe him.
Barnum was always looking for interesting new acts or novel creatures to exhibit, and one day he received a letter from a fellow in Maine who claimed to possess a cherry-colored cat, asking if Barnum were interested in such a thing for his circus. Barnum contacted the man and said yes, if the cat were truly cherry-colored, he’d gladly put it on display. A few days later a crate marked “live animal” arrived for him. When Barnum opened it, he found a somewhat frightened but otherwise perfectly ordinary-looking black housecat inside, along with a note which read:
Maine cherries are black.
Barnum cut him a check.
—
I had read somewhere – though I can no longer find it now, possibly because I misheard it – an account of someone pointing out to Friedrich Hayek(?) that Sweden wasn’t capitalist, and Swedes were doing fine. His response: “Indeed – and the Swedes in America are doing even better.”
—
I have more, but I’m guessing the aim here is less quotable quotes, and more historical anecdotes.
I expected a paradox where someone manages to get his $10,000 without actually duping him.
There’s a fun example of understatement from Eadmer’s biography of St. Anselm. Eadmer reports that he found the saint praying in his cell surrounded by a ball of fire, and comments that he was quite surprised by this, as it wasn’t the usual time for prayer.
“When fighting one against a hundred, be brave. Take prisoners.”
Attributed to Musashi.
Supposedly Pancho Villa’s last words were, “It can’t end like this. Tell them I said something.”
My favourite is this, though: supposedly, Sir John Cope (who was defeated by the Jacobites at the battle of Prestonpans) cleaned up by betting that his replacement would be defeated, too.
Has anyone watched The Umbrella Academy on Netflix? What do you think of it?
I watched most of it, haven’t felt interested in checking out the ending. So that more-or-less is my summary review.
The detail is: I don’t understand what they were trying to do with this show. They took a very comic-y premise (superheroes! World-ending events! Time-travel! Talking monkeys! Robot moms! Eccentric billionaires! Moon bases! Conspiracies!) and the fundamental conflict is very comic-y, and then they made a slow-moving character-driven examination of, I guess, like PTSD and family stress? But it’s all interwoven deeply with the comic-book-y stuff — like, that’s what drives all the family stress, and indeed it’s stuff that’s happening contemporaenously — but it happens mostly offscreen and on the periphery of the show. You get very little of a glimpse of what these characters were like before they were so deeply screwed up, or how their relationships began, and for me it was hard to get invested in the resolution of their personal entanglements.
So, basically, I got bored and stopped watching.
I think it’s a show that would have been enormously improved by wittier dialog. Because it’s a heavily dialog-driven show, and it’s a juxtaposition of somewhat mundane characters with a crazy set of events, and it would have just been more compelling minute-to-minute to watch if the characters were showing more zing in their talking about this.
I thought it was good, not great. It takes quite a while for some of the characters to develop, and in accordance with the No TV Show Can Ever End Act of 2017, the first season doesn’t actually conclude anything. In general it was fine but you’re not missing anything.
Since it’s not very satisfying to give that kind of review, an example of a Netflix show that was very good and that you should really watch is Maniac.
I thought Maniac was pretty good up until the last two or three episodes, where I felt it went off the rails. I’m not sure what was going on with the scientist-director’s spontaneous blindness or Jonah Hill solving the rubik’s cube with his hallucination-brother.
What’s the source material like? I’ve been hearing reports ranging from great to terrible, with the only note of agreement being that it’s pretty different from the show. I’ve been considering picking up the first volume, though, Apocalypse Suite, which I take it this season was based on.
The comic is unapologetically balls to the wall crazy. You know how in the TV show the Umbrella Academy is revealed to the world when they stop a botched bank robbery turned hostage situation? Well, in the comics they are revealed to the world when they stop Zombie Robot Gustave Eiffel from rampaging around Paris on a mecha Eiffel Tower. If that description makes you want to read it, you’ll probably love it, if it doesn’t then maybe not.
I think that character depth is necessary in visual media in a way that literature can get away with not having, because the real-time element means that you can’t go haring off on fascinating world-building elements.
And TV is even more necessarily character-focused than film, because the actors are what’s consistent week after week, so shows that prioritize plot over character either have to regularly personality-assassinate their archetypical characters for the sake of big plot twists (Glee, for example), or be mini-series (aka slightly longer films) instead.
Otherwise, shows that attempt a shallow-character aesthetic tend to get critically panned real quick, as soon as the sheen of the aesthetic wears off.
I mean, even the LotR films couldn’t stick to just character archetypes, and had to jam in to new “human element” conflicts (mostly Aragorn).
Liked the premise, liked the acting (especially Page and Raver-Lampman), liked the characters, disliked the more whimsical elements (robot mom, chimp butler etc.), disliked the usual power-disparity issues, thought the writing was bizarrely rotten – partly on the level of dialogue, but mostly in a tendency to find only tropic, Doylist reasons for many important decisions and attempt to disguise that with tangential shouting.
Overall, quite enjoyed it but found it very frustrating.
That’s about where I am. It could have been so much better than it was, so easily. Still better than most other new shows, though.
On historical inevitably, equilibrium, and the culture war
Communism is a psychologically appeal idea. Poor people generally like it when you offer to give them more money and it appeals to our inherent sense of equality. However, any time it was tried, it was met with fierce resistance, which means that it doesn’t work to just vote for it democratically, you must use authoritarian methods. But even those don’t generally work. The Russian and Chinese revolutions did fundamentally change their societies but did not march onwards towards the communist ideal. Instead, one of them was overthrown and the other became so capitalist that it bares little resemblance to the socialism of Mao. It’s like an invisible hand pushed them towards capitalism.
However, that does not mean we are moving closer to a completely free market. Libertarianism, unlike communism, doesn’t appeal to many people. There are few societies that look anything like it, and any time it does gain popularity, the rhetoric is co-opted by those who instead push for more government. When you have a government that is small, it generally is pushed towards something bigger. It’s like there’s an equilibrium that says that, for the most part, any society will generally be pushed towards a mixed economy and deviations from the trend will eventually revert back.
Now look at the culture war. Many on the left and right take it for granted that society will continually drift leftward. Is that true? Is there some kind of equilibrium that will be reached of cultural stability? Or will we continually move to the left, whatever that means? And if there is an equilibrium, does that mean that trying to fight it is pointless? And to what extent does Democracy tie in to all this?
I like to think of it as: There’s an optimal level, for generally human flourishing, of what percent of the value produced by capital the owners should receive, and its more than 0%, but less than 100%.
“Left” and “right” culture can’t be quantified in such ways, so I don’t think there is a parallel.
It’s hard to quantify but there are some aspects of culture that are definitely “better” than others, in the sense that they are more competitive. Look at religion. Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are extremely powerful. They manage to influence people of varied backgrounds. This isn’t just because strong countries impose it on the weak. The Mongols built the world’s biggest land empire but they didn’t spread their beliefs, and in fact, were much more longer to be co-opted by the cultures of the people they conquered.
Even outside of religion, there are cultural practices that don’t stick around because of the adverse effects they have. Brother/Sister marriage is in a sense appealing if you are royalty because you keep your wealth in the family but its problems keep it from being more widely practiced.
So is the current culture war just a war where the winner will impose their will on the other or is one of them more more competitive than the other and will inevitably win in the long run, regardless of the actions taken today?
I’m thinking this dichotomy of “more competitive vs. more imposing” is highly intertwined. The “winner” of the culture war can simultaneously be both 1. due to being more competitive 2. due to actions they partake in, that spreads their culture.
I’m reminded here of Scott’s recent post regarding straight lines on graphs: ideas are often “inevitable” in the sense that people will inevitably take actions that advance them- but the human action is still required.
But they aren’t necessarily intertwined. With religion, Christianity has an inherent “meme value” that makes it stronger than Mongolian shamanism, even though the Mongols were in charge. On the other hand, the fact that Indians drive on the left side of the road is simply because the British imposed it on them. So is the culture war more like the former or the latter in this manner?
I don’t think left/right is mainly about what percentage of the income from capital the owners should receive. From my perspective, it’s mainly about having decisions made via the political process vs having them made via the market process. Government regulation is usually about things that have nothing to do with the division of income between capital and labor. Even if you limit yourself to government income redistribution, a lot of high income people are skilled labor, not dividend clippers.
There are other left/right divisions, on not all of which I am on the right, but I think that’s the main economic one.
That’s a strange dichotomy, because the opposite of “market” isn’t “political”, its non-market. Where does the relative influence of non-market, non-political processes (e.g., the governance of a landowner over his property) fit in here?
Which leads the next question: How are you determining whether a process is political or non-political?
I think the right is pretty positive on non-market non-political solutions to problems, such as churches having dinners for the homeless or helping members who need help.
On the general question of political/non-political, my definition of “government” is an agency that acts in ways that violate the usual restrictions on how individuals can act with regard to other individuals without provoking the responses that normally enforce those restrictions. I explain it here.
@DavidFriedmanFrom your link:
"....One day your neighbor calls you over to the fence for conversation. He explains that he finds taking his trash down to the town dump every week to be a nuisance and has decided that it would be less trouble to simply dump it over the fence onto your property.When you recover your breath and start lecturing him on property rights, he offers you a simple cost/benefit analysis of your alternatives. Dealing with his trash will take about ten or twenty dollars worth of your time and effort every week. Persuading the city authorities that the trash is his and not yours, getting them do anything, appearing for multiple court hearings, raising a general fuss, will cost you the equivalent of considerably more than that.
But, he adds, he has an alternative proposal. For him to dump the trash and someone else to collect it is clearly inefficient. A better solution is for him to deal with his trash and you to pay for it. For a mere five dollars a week, half or less what your lowest cost solution to the problem would cost you, he will agree to refrain from dumping the trash over the fence.
I predict that you will turn down his generous offer, tell him to go to hell and, if he persists in dumping his trash on your property, spend the equivalent of considerably more than five dollars a week, or even ten or twenty, prodding the relevant authorities into doing something about the problem..."
It really depends on how effective and fair to me I judge local law enforcement, in Albany, California I call the cops, in Oakland, California I don’t bother to call the already over-burdened police – I just start regularly flattening my neighbors cars tires until he cuts it off – escalating to jimmying the lock on his gascap and pouring in a litre of cola with extra sugar dissolved in it, if necessary following him to his work to get access to his car until he stops
parking in front of my drivewaydumping garbage in my yard.A property owner would clearly fit this qualification, given that he acts in ways that violate the normal restrictions that non-property owners under a given geographical area of property have.
Your “market vs. political” dichotomy is looks like a repackaged NAP, rhetorically hiding away the authority involved in property ownership.
All solutions to conflicts over resource use necessarily have the “political” component (i.e. where one person has a power that another doesn’t). You don’t get to side-step this by transferring the authority from state to non-state entities.
To put it another way: A market is what happens when two people come to an agreement. A “political” solution is when two people aren’t. Which is to say, that all economic systems necessarily contain “political” elements, assuming more than handful of humans are in existence.
So what is left of the dichotomy:
-The right supports “political” solutions in the form of the authority private ownership, but also, when parties can come to agreement, they supports of market exchange. They also like non-market exchange (such as charity) and internal transfers (such as business operation).
-The left supports “political” solutions in the form of the authority of state ownership, but also, when parties come to agreement, they support market exchange. They also like non-market exchange (such as welfare) and internal transfers (such as government operation).
The difference, the only real dichotomy here, is whether the authority will be democratic or autocratic.
My original version, in the first edition, was that a government was an agency of legitimized coercion, but even then I tried to make it clear that I was using both “legitimized” and “coercion” in special senses. As I think you can see if you followed my link, the improved version in the 3d edition does not depend on any particular moral theory about what is or isn’t coercion.
You assume that all political systems are democracies?
A joint stock corporation uses a form of democracy for internal decisions–stockholder voting. So do some other institutions on the market. That doesn’t make them governments or political in my sense.
How would you define a government? What distinguishes a government from other forms of human organization?
From your link:
How do you know that people have “given up” what they “view as their rights”? Could the alternative not be that people use government as the commitment strategy to defend what they view as their rights?
Very few groups are advocating for explicit state-oligarchy or monarchy, so I didn’t feel the need to mention them. Though the majority of such groups, to the extent they exist, do make it clear that they associate with the right side of the political spectrum.
A government is the form of human organization that is the most powerful user of force in a given geographic area. Note the parallels to the standard Weberian definition of a state.
States are governments. In Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, property owners become governments. In your proposed system, the most powerful force-using entity at a given time (whether it be hired guns, “neighbors”, ect) becomes the government. Making this entity as fluid, chaotic, and decentralized as possible doesn’t change its state-like power.
The alternatives to capitalism don’t work. Capitalism works, but it runs contrary to human instincts. This results in an equilibrium in the sense that cultures that adopt more capitalism for whatever idiosyncratic reasons will flourish and propagate, while the cultures that don’t (and all cultures will have some anti-capitalistic elements) will stagnate or, if things get bad enough, collapse. But it’s not a stable equilibrium because cultural forces are always moving about.
Communism also runs contrary to human instincts in different ways, which is the reason it’s so hard to enforce it. E.g. the instint that if A has a foo and B has a bar, and A would be better off with a bar and B would be better off with a foo, then they should be able to trade them (as a general rule, unless there is a good reason they shouldn’t). Or if you make something, you should be able to keep and use it (but not if you have exchanged it for something else, then you get to keep and use that other thing).
I don’t dispute that communism is broken and doesn’t work. But from each to each is a compelling model of fairness in a way that market competition rarely is.
That is merely one compelling form of fairness.
That you get to keep (most of) the fruits of your labor is also quite compelling, especially if you look at it as compensation for a sacrifice.
There are very many compelling forms of fairness, many of which conflict with each other. Then disagreement over what forms of fairness should have (partial) preference makes us hate each other.
I like to describe part of the conflict as the tension between a God’s eye view and a human level view.
The God’s eye view is that people should get what they deserve. Someone who works hard and is honest should have a good life, whether or not his hard work actually produces anything of value to others. Good people shouldn’t die young in auto accidents or get cancer. God could enforce that, since he has perfect knowledge and no budget constraint. The fact that God doesn’t seem to enforce it must be explained by some combination of “moves in mysterious ways” and reward/punishment in the afterlife–but it still represents what feels right to us. It’s what we would do if we were God.
The human level view is that you are entitled to outcomes that you get through legitimate procedures. For the simplest case, if you and I bet a dollar on a coin flip, you are entitled to get the dollar if the coin falls the way you called it even if I am a better person than you are or need the money more. That makes sense given that we don’t have a neutral omniscient being to decide who deserves what–all the real players are individuals, each with his own biases. And we do have budget constraints, such that if something bad happens someone has to pay for it, even if it is nobody’s fault.
As best I can tell, all of us have both of those (inconsistent with each other) moral views.
I think this depends on your definition of left. I’d give 100% odds that some things deemed unspeakable in your grandparent’s time will be normal or even favoured in the time of your grandchildren. But that’s likely to be cultural, or involve the oppression of some particular group, such as the most recent immigrants. Is it really a leftward shift if “no Irish allowed” becomes unthinkable, but “all Mexicans are rapists” is acceptable political discourse – or just a matter of which batch of poor, undereducated, visibly different immigrants are of current concern?
On the other hand, your primary definitions appear to involve redistribution and government size/strength, in particular, redistribution from richer to poorer, mediated by government, along with central planning. My suspicion is that the perceived need for government intrusion scales with the size of the society, but as one factor among many. And preference for redistribution vs wealth concentration seems to be a pendulum that swings wildly. At the moment “greed is good” still seems to me the dominant US discourse, but it’s being challenged; I think there’s more room on the side of “duty to the less advantaged”/”Scrooge is a bastard” than on the side of even more wealth concentration being better, but that’s probably just because we’re at the highest point of wealth concentration that I personally remember.
At any rate, I think it’s more cyclical than directional, but not with high confidence. And a society that strongly encourages redistribution, but via the Church, has been tried before, and works as well or badly as anything else. (In the long term, too much wealth ended up in the hands of those doing the redistributing, but in the short term, many poor, ill, injured etc. were helped.)
You’re comparing actual, enforced segregation (privately enforced, but still enforced) of the sort which is completely illegal today to people saying “all mexicans are rapists” (ignoring the fact that no one is actually saying that) but not actually doing anything about it? And concluding that there is no meaningful shift here?
True, that was sloppy of me. My feeling is that the general picture still holds, but I can’t put numbers behind it.
There’s definitely a lot of cultural churn and random movement. but I think that if you pick a random decade and shake out all the new political asks that came out, I think you’ll find that a very disproportionate share of them ones that end up sticking are things that the left was advocating for rather than right.
It’s also worth remembering that political affiliation has more to do with the motivation behind policy. Someone in favor of the draft because he wants his country to be strong and powerful is on the right, someone who wants a draft because he thinks it will be socially leveling is on the left, even though they support the same policy. Why something changes can matter as much as what changes.
I think our economics is cyclical but I’m wondering whether our culture war is eternally directional or whether at some point it will become cyclical.
@DinoNerd
I’ve yet to find a view of yours I disagree with!
Democratic Party voters tend to be in metropolitan areas with over a million people where extremely rich and poor people are visible (my wife described San Francisco as “Two Tesla’s parked next to a homeless man with bleeding hands”), and rent is high relative to wages – when the noise of your neighbors stereo is inducing a pounding headache and preventing you from getting sleep before you have to go to work in six hours you want government to make him turn it off – or for the right to kill annoying college students who should be in a far away dorm, not in this apartment building where families live damnit!
Republicans tend to come from where rent is cheap and people live father apart, so of course they didn’t see the utility of government as much!
This parses right to me too.
My problem with Democrats is that they also insist that the folk in rural Colorado need to follow the same rules as Denver.
@EchoChaos,
If you read “left”-leaning publications (New York Times, et cetera) you’ll find stories of “Those Awful State House Republicans Rescinding City Governments Higher Minimum Wages“, just as you’ll find in The Wall Street Journal stories of “Those Awful Congressional Democrats Forcing States To Pay For Stuff They Don’t Want“.
It seems to me that making whatever government is closest to the voter preeminent could prevent these headlines, let municipalities make rules for themselves, let county governments make the rest of the rules, and…
….okay, I really don’t know what the States and Federal governments would do, maybe pollution and border control.
@Plumber
I am in no way asserting that Republicans don’t insist that the folks in urban Colorado need to follow the same rules as Yuma.
It’s our major divide right now, and every state is Red or Blue based on what percentage live in Denver versus Yuma.
@Plumber:
How small do you think a polity has to be for democracy to work? Oakland has a population of over four hundred thousand—does that do it? Each individual is still a very small part of the total, so your individual vote still doesn’t really matter. It’s a little easier for the voter to know what is happening, since more of it is under his direct observation, but still not very much of it for an individual voter.
@DavidFriedman"How small do you think a polity has to be for democracy to work?..."
Maybe a hundred freemen farmsteads?
I’d say small enough that the incumbent City Councilman from my district knocks on my door to ask for my vote and what issues are important to me, which never happened in 17 years of my living in the same apartment in Oakland, but did happen on the fifth year of living in Albany (population estimated to be 20,143 in 2017), otherwise big enough to have a police force, firefighters, municipal sewage treatment if a metropolitan area, a public library, a court, a way to exile those deemed dangerous (jail, ‘hospitals’, or Iceland).
Big enough for social welfare care for the indigent may not be needed if there’s church or kin support instead (Hello Utah!), but in our atomized, multi-faith and secular times, they’ll likely be demand.
19th century American cities often had “party machines” that provided “relief” as well, but in the wake of “Panics” and major Depressions those were overwhelmed.
I could imagine a system in which multiple faiths each had seperate welfare systems for their believers, or guilds/unions took on that role – but that only works when there’s enough members to support those in need, if a faith or trade only has the elderly left then it wouldn’t work.
I’d find this theory more convincing if it seemed to hold true in other countries, but I don’t think it does. Yes, there’s a stereotype of rural conservatives, but I don’t think that the big cities are as universally left wing in other countries as in the US. I could be wrong.
U.S. big cities aren’t all that left wing–blacks and Hispanics tend to be socially conservative. They just happen to be political allies of the left wing, as a matter of historical accident.
@DavidFriedman,
While I’ve spent far more time in the urban areas in and near Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, what I’ve seen of rural California near Hollister and Sacramento looked far more Hispanic (and far less Asian and black) than did metropolitan California, and if they’re Democrats they don’t come to the polls much.
David Brooks described the Blue/Red divide as the “Rich White Civil War”, because those who most regarded either Democrats or Republicans (but not both) as a “menance” tend to be more educated, richer, and whiter than most Americans.
It occurs to me that Asian-Americans skew more educated and wealthier than average, but they don’t seem to have as strong of a partisan identity, maybe their families haven’t been voters long enough?
The University of Virginia’s got a nice visualization for this. The Central and Salinas Valleys do happen to be some of the relatively few rural areas that’re mostly Hispanic (others are in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and for some reason southeastern Washington), but even in CA, most of the Hispanic population is urban. Hispanic communities in the Bay Area are relatively small — central Richmond, Oakland around Fruitvale Station, East and South San Jose — but if you mouse over to LA, you can find them in most of the city.
Elsewhere in the US, rural communities are mainly white. (Except parts of the South, where they’re white and black.)
I don’t see how your economic model works. What specific mechanism exists to create mixed markets? Why doesn’t it work prior to 1900? Does it work prior to 1900, and which metric do you use to define it? What is the equilibrium point, because the US has much smaller government than other nations, and Canada decided to massively shrink its government from levels that apparently other OECD nations are comfortable with. Can we make falsifiable predictions about what nations will have what size of government in 5,10,15 years?
Social democracy is a post-WWII and post-modern political consensus of Western European nations, that exists in a very specific time period that could have turned out quite differently had the US just gone home and let the Soviet Union give the Prague treatment to all the Western European capitals. There was also a very specific neoliberal consensus, but it did not affect all nations equally: Greece basically reformed not at all, France reformed minimally, the UK had major reforms, Germany had some labor market reforms in the 2000s…
And, most importantly, the neoliberal consensus is basically spent, and we are in a major realignment to whatever the next political consensus will be.
When I say “equilibrium”, I’m not saying that there is a point that all countries are converging to. I’m saying that there is a point, where if you deviate too far from it, forces will push it back closer. That’s why the US can have a smaller government than most western European countries and I can’t predict to where in that range any country will be in the near future.
I’m not sure about the mechanism but I have some guesses. I started thinking about this after seeing what happened in France and Greece after they elected socialists to their government and folded rapidly. In those cases, it was Germany and financial institutions. The bond market is pretty powerful. There’s also the people in democracy who want more government than libertarians like but will eventually punish politicians if the government gets so big as to be unwieldy, like the US and the UK in the 70’s. And there’s also an evolutionary mechanism where the strong survive and socialism is weaker than capitalism. China saw this and adapted, making capitalism work for them so they could once again become a powerful country.
The reason I think it didn’t work until recently was because the old guard was too powerful and capitalism was able to disrupt that. You need enough wealth to disrupt the oligarchy. That’s why I think this model works better in first world countries than third world ones.
I also think the “end of neoliberalism” is overplayed. We may get more government but it’s not going to look anything like what Bernie Sanders wants.
I don’t want to oversell this idea. It, I believe, helps me understand the world better but it’s certainly not rigorous. Maybe it could be. And maybe it is dead wrong, one of those things that will mark me as not being able to see past my time, but I don’t think so.
I think the answer is basically class struggle. The working class and the owning class have contrary interests and are in conflict to bring their own interests to the fore at the expense of the other’s. In most places at most times the owning class is more powerful, so we get something that looks more like capitalism than socialism. But the working class doesn’t have zero power, so you don’t see absolute capitalism anywhere.
An additional complication is that bureaucracy has its own interests, and its own power. Whenever you have a bureaucracy it will, in the absence of checking forces, grow. This is one of the many reasons why the socialist attempts of the 20th century failed, and it also explains why libertarianish countries tend away from that. But I think this is a secondary factor to the class struggle.
That’s a popular view, but when you project that on socialism vs capitalism you have to deal with the fact that, where we had a clear contrast between similar societies one of which was more socialist than the other (Taiwan/China, West Germany/East Germany, South Korea/North Korea), the condition of workers was much worse in the less capitalist society.
There are specific government policies where the interests of those whose income comes from labor are in conflict with the interests of those whose income comes from renting out capital, or those whose income comes from renting out land. But on the central issue of private property and markets vs government ownership and control, the evidence seems clear that all three groups end up better off with the first.
And left/right doesn’t map very clearly into support for policies that benefit one group over the other. Consider restrictions on land use, such as the fact that housing cannot be built in the areas surrounding London or the restrictions on construction in the SF Bay Area. Those benefit current land owners at the expense of everyone else–and tend to be supported more by the left than the right, although probably not always.
Insofar as immigration has a distributional effect, one would expect it to benefit owners of land and, to a lesser degree, of capital (capital being mobile than land) at the expense of owners of labor. But at the moment, restrictions on immigration tend to be supported by the right, opposed by the left, although I think the opposite pattern has existed at times in the past. And, in poor countries that are labor rich and capital poor, restrictions on foreign investment, which tends to benefit local labor at the expense of local capital for the same reason, tend to be favored by the left and opposed by the right.
To be clear, I don’t think the logical conclusion of “the working class successfully fighting for its interests” is something that looks like China, East Germany or North Korea. Unlike many people sympathetic to Marxism, I believe in reform rather than revolution. Without looking up numbers, so I might be wrong, I have the impression that the working class in, say, France, is more powerful than that in the USA. As a result I would expect France to be more socialist* and less capitalist than the USA, with more redistributive taxes, higher minimum wage, shorter working hours etc.
I think you’re right, though, that left/right doesn’t map very clearly onto workers’ interests/owners’ interests. I think in more cases than not, the policies favoured by the right will benefit the interests of the capitalists and landowners, and those favoured by the left will benefit the interests of workers, but It’s certainly not always true, or even nearly always true.
I’m not sure how internationally true this is, but I think the trades unions in the UK are an interesting example. I think they almost always support policies that are in the interests of their members, which are often policies in the interests of the working class more generally, but there are plenty of cases where they don’t match up with the preferred policies of the Labour Party. I believe trades unions are more likely to be resistant to high immigration, less enthusiastic about environmental regulations, more in favour of nuclear weapons etc.
*I don’t mean ‘socialist’ in the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ sense that Marx or Lenin might have used, but more the ‘high taxes and strong welfare’ sense that is more common today.
How often do you think it is clear what policies favor whose interests?
Consider the minimum wage. My guess, and that of a fair number of economists, is that a high minimum wage harms the interest of poor workers, benefits well paid skilled workers who compete with unskilled workers. A lot of other people believe it has roughly the opposite effects.
This comes back to the conflict vs mistake issue. You seem to be viewing most political questions as conflict issues, while I suspect a large fraction are mistake issues–one side or the other of the large division is mistaken about the effect of the policies, and the mistake is pushed by special interests, who may correctly perceive what benefits them, but who don’t have enough votes to matter on their own.
Consider the issue of free trade. How many people in that debate realize that restrictions on imports result in reduced exports, hence injure American farmers and other people in rural areas based on farming?
“Redistributive taxes” is pretty subtle. Most of Europe has massive VAT, which is regressive. Most of Europe has income taxes which are more progressive than America, so that, say, doctors have a higher tax rate (on a lower salary). But in much of Europe capitalists have lower tax rates than in America. (That’s not true in France today, but I’m not sure about 20 years ago.)
@DavidFriedman
Clear to whom? It seems to me as if the “average voter” has the attention span of a gnat, and their ability to evaluate arguments approximates “what do my friends think?,” except that they include (some) celebrities/talking heads/social superiors in their circle of “friends”.
At best, they rise to “I don’t like my life, must be the government’s fault, let’s throw the current rascals out”.
Those who attempt to evaluate arguments a bit more rationally have to contend with misinformation, missing information, suppresed information, and the complex interactions of multiple factors. So getting it right is hard. Which may be why “what do my friends think” is such a common heuristic 🙁
Personally, I’m pretty clear what the ‘right’ favours in practice, though I’d summarize it as a sloppy soundbite that would draw deserved corrections. It’s in my short term financial interests, except when they raised effective taxes on well off people in blue states. I doubt it’s in my long term interests. And I’m glad they are much less insistent than they were in my youth about using the government to enforce their religious values. On the other hand, I strongly suspect the established wing of their opponents’ party favours much the same economic policies, in practice if not in rhetoric.
Slogan from my youth: “If voting could change the system, it would be illegal.”
@fion
My experience as a trade union member in California is that it depends on which union and which members.
Teachers unions (predominantly female, and exclusively college educated) skew left-liberal, building trades (predominantly male and not college educated) far less so – still generally supporting Democratic Party candidates for contract, workplace safety, and previaling wage law reasons, but more protectionist, anti-immigration (except the Laborers Union which is mostly immigrants in this area), and less environmentalists than the median for the Democratic Party.
Whether individual members in my union vote Democratic or Republican Party correlates very strongly with how many miles they drive to work.
@DavidFriedman
Certainly not always. I, too, believe in mistake theory to some extent. It’s difficult, though, because as you say, special interests might push the “mistaken” side because it benefits them at the expense of everybody else (conflict). Mrs Thatcher told us that the wealth would trickle down to all of us and therefore her privatisations and tax cuts were in the interests of the poor as well, but it didn’t happen. For me as a non-economist it’s hard to be sure that “lowering/abolishing the minimum wage will actually help poor workers – trust us!” isn’t a similar situation.
@Douglas Knight
Fair point. I’m not sure about how to use the words progressive and regressive properly, but is VAT necessarily regressive? It tends to be only on ‘luxury’ goods (at least in the UK) and it can be spent on things that disproportionately help the poor.
When you say that capitalists have lower tax rates, would you mind explaining what you mean? Is this corporation tax? Capital gains tax? Something else?
@Plumber
Good point. Teachers’ unions will indeed be a big exception to what I said. I expect so will university unions, and I’m sure there are a few other exceptions. I still think what I said is true of most unions, though. (At least if you weight by number of members.)
I meant capital gains taxes.
Who is affected by corporate taxes is subtle. Also, very basic questions of what the corporate taxes are are murky.
Why do you believe this? Did someone trick you? Or did you confabulate it because you believe that Europe is relatively socialist and this is what you think that should mean?
@Douglas Knight
I think that’s an unnecessarily unkind tone. More importantly, I think you’re mistaken. I just looked up VAT in the UK and a long list of basics are exempt.
To pick a few examples, there is no VAT on:
Food and drink (with the exception of some luxury foods)
Books
Children’s clothing
Insurance
VAT is set at the reduced rate (5%) for:
Electricity and gas for domestic use
Heating appliances
I suppose an argument could be made that some of the reduced goods and services should be exempt altogether, and perhaps even an argument that some fully-VAT’d goods and services should be reduced or exempt, but by and large it sounds mostly reasonable. Is there some big thing I’ve missed?
Chocolate cakes are exempt, but chocolate biscuits are not.
This culminated in a court case between McVitties and HMRC, where it was decided on the basis that they go dry rather than soggy when stale, that Jaffa Cakes are, in fact, cakes.
And let’s not get into the ontological quagmire surrounding Pastygate.
Can we not get into Bulverism, please?
helicopters!If you define “necessity” as those things necessary to enter the middle class, you will find that the poor spend all their money on luxuries. Which is very convenient if you want to blame their poverty on their actions, and/or righteously tax them, but quite the opposite of what is what is usually meant by “progressive tax.”
But, in fact, the exemptions make very little difference. Both the poor and the rich spend half of their consumption on items with VAT and half without. So it amounts to a flat consumption tax, which is regressive compared to a flat income tax.
How do you know?
I’m not saying you are wrong–I don’t know much about U.K. economic history. But the question is not “did the poor get richer over the time Thatcher was in power.” It’s “did the poor get richer than they would have if the policies in question hadn’t happened.” Looking at the Wikipedia article on the U.K., it looks as though things were pretty bleak in the period leading up to Thatcher.
Did the poor get poorer, or at least not get any richer, over that period? Do you have figures on mean and median real income over time? If mean was increasing and median wasn’t, that suggests that the gains went to the upper half of the income distribution.
I don’t think that’s true at all. There’s a pendulum that swings. The left peaked in Current Year (2015) and the pendulum is swinging back to the right.
Social conservatives have the same problem that libertarians and marxists have. Even when someone they like gets elected, the changes enacted are marginal at best and they hardly ever get what they really want.
@Conrad Honcho,
I would peg 1944 as the “peak left year” of the United States – excluding Dixieland, including Dixie probably 1964.
Is environmentalism being associated with the left just a historical accident or is there something more to it? I can easily imagine a conservative party that believes that preserving the environment is part of its traditional values. But I’m not aware of any conservative parties around the world that are more environmentalist than their counterparts on the left.
Teddy Roosevelt was an important early figure in conservationism in the US and a Republican, but I don’t know how similar early-1900s-conservationism was to modern environmentalism, and ditto for early-1900s-Republican-Party and the modern GOP.
I agree that this is kind of confusing; there’s nothing inherently liberal about environmentalism, and it’s not hard to imagine a world in which the conservative party is the one that likes conservation of resources, and the liberals have a “every dollar spent on wildlife and mountains could be spent on poor people” sort of perspective. I don’t know why it seems like that is never the case anywhere. It could be because empathy is a core liberal value which transfers easily between poor people and oppressed people and nature. It could also be that there’s a natural opposition between environmentalism and corporate-friendly policies, so whichever party is more corporate-friendly will always end up being the one that’s less environmentalist. Or something else…
Both major parties at the time were built primarily around political machines and were only weakly ideologically sorted. Think of them as rival consulting firms competing for the next four-year contract to operate the federal government.
TR was broadly identified with the Progressive movement. That’s not really the same thing as the modern “Progressive” label (although there is some historical connection), but it’s fair to think of him as being towards the left by the standards of his day. Both parties had progressive and conservative factions, and there were also various attempt to organize progressive third parties.
Probably some of this and some of hippie-style spiritualism, which the Right was less into since they preferred Christian-style spiritualism. I mean, environmentalism can easily start from being against pollution / logging, all done by corporations looking to make bank.
Back on Scott’s What Happened to 90s Environmentalism? post, I remember a conversation that went something like
“Environmentalists think there’s going to be a crisis when we run out of [resource]. But the non-environmentalists know that as supply dwindles, the price will rise, incentivizing people to cut back on consumption and/or look for substitutes.”
“Enviros might not disagree with that. They just think that the problem is so urgent that government action is necessary to kickstart the ‘cut back and/or look for substitutes’ step.”
I can imagine a conservative movement that agreed with personal environmentalism, that people should live cleanly and cut back on resource use of their own accord. But often the hallmark of being an environmentalist is arguing that the government needs to mandate or incentivize that action, which limited-government types can’t get behind.
Related / Overlapping: Should animal welfare activism be associated with the left? Everyone but anarchists seems to agree that protecting people from violence is a valid use of government power, so being a limited government enthusiast isn’t as much of a barrier to being an animal welfare activist as it is to being an environmentalist. But I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that vegans probably skew left.
I assume it was this
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-environmentalism/#comment-704668
But this doesn’t necessarily hold; animals hunted for their supposed medicinal properties just see their price raise, which only makes them more attractive for hunters.
As the price goes up, you get two different things happening:
Supply: Price goes up so more is supplied.
More people want to hunt rhinos because they can get more money per rhino horn.
Demand: Price goes up so less is demanded.
Fewer people want the herbal-medicine ED cure because it costs too much–maybe they go find some online pharmacy and order some viagra instead.
The issue is that the supply is fairly fixed. Rhinos don’t have more young to sell them off to Chinese medicine men, because rhinos oppose capitalism and/or cannibalism.
You can harvest faster, but that merely results in more short term harvesting, at the expense of the long term supply.
Except that traditional medicine may have a substantial Veblen effect where price is seen as a marker for efficacy.
In general, Chinese gift giving/bribery seems to have a large Veblen effect.
Historical accident. Modern environmentalism basically grew out of the anti-nuclear movement in the Sixties and Seventies, which was a straight left-wing cause.
It is probably also helpful (as alluded to upthread) to separate “environmentalism” from “[nature/wildlife] conservation”. The latter almost certainly has more support on the right than the former.
The anti-nuclear movement being a “straight left-wing cause” involves a few historical accidents of its own.
I think it’s a product of environmentalism’s adversarial relationship (at least on the margins) with industry. If industry is on the right, then environmentalism will tend to be on the left.
A second factor is that environmentalism tends to argue for government intervention in the economy to produce “good for the environment” outcomes, which puts it at odds with those who incline towards laissez-faire capitalism. And the latter tends to be on the right. An important caveat here is that there are environmentalist policies that work within a relatively unregulated capitalist framework, such as Pigouvian taxes for pollution, or “enclosing the commons” for resource depletion; but these policies are usually not embraced by the mainstream of the environmentalist movement.
Where we have seen “environmentalism” on the right is historically in times and places where “right” was still primarily associated with landed aristocrats in the countryside, leaving urban commercial and industrial interests on the “left”.
The relationship with industry is probably key. In left-wing regimes where the state owned/controlled industry, the environmental record is generally pretty terrible, generally as a result of rather than despite heavy government involvement in running and regulating the economy. (E.g., the USSR.)
Modern enviromentalism requires governamental action. I don’t think there’s a lot of mystery here. One side is pro regulation, the other is anti regulation.
Sure, but this is also a historical accident, basically.
Is it really? If we go back to who sat where in the National Assembly, sure, I have no reason to believe that the revolutionaries or the king supporters will be more on the side of regulating incandescent lightbulbs two hundred years later, but surely as the right wing became the party of the industrialists, these stand to lose with enviromental regulations, and thus the enviromentalists will tend to the left.
On the other hand, there’s a lot support for individual responsability in enviromentalism, which sounds a lot like something libertarians (who skew right wing) would support, but again, it’s hard to say which side of the national assembly would support this. But in the end any guy who recicles 100% of their stuff, is a vegetarian, composts, etc, etc, will probably _also_ be for regulations that forces industries to do their own part. Which means they will skew left wing.
Worth pointing out that incumbent businesses tend to favour regulation because it keeps out competitors and drives up profit
Thus, the reason I saw this story today (about McDonalds deciding no long to fight minimum wage hikes) and suspected they’d worked out the numbers and concluded that they could respond more effectively to minimum wage hikes than their competitors, and so would either benefit or at worse suffer no loss in profitability.
My theory is that it is something of a historical accident that environmentalism is associated with “progressive” left. Conservatives on social issues are allied (at least in the US) with libertarianish right. Environmentalism is by its, um, nature, sceptical of unregulated market, thus they are on left economically, and when cultural conservatives are on the right economically, you get progressive environmentalism.
Cultural influence of US is so dominant that it pulled European Green movement on the progressive side of a political spectrum, although association of cultural conservatism with libertarianish views in Europe is much milder.
Political Conservatism only means preserving the status quo, ie, letting the existing hierarchies preserved, not promoting new laws, etc.
This does not extend to environmental conservatism, which will run head-on against political conservatism because the industries the former protects will want to _keep_ exploiting the environment as they were doing before people discovered it was damaging said environment.
The words are similar, they just want to keep conserving different things.
I meant Conservatism in a sense of defending Traditional Christian Values, which is sometimes different position than simple preservation of status quo.
I do not know that Christianism has much to do with ecology? But “Traditional Christian Values” _are_ allied with the right from National Assembly times; the priesthood was seated at the right side, and they were defending the King. Of course these were Catholics, but I don’t think Protestantism moved TCVs to the left at many points, beyond a generic opposition to the Pope. There are a lot of examples of Churches to the left in social programs, but they will also fall to the right in family values, so _maybe_that side balances out historically. Except that today they are still to the right in general.
Current Pope looks a little more left-wing than usual, but I think this is a reaction to global politics and/or recent Catholic history. Or coincidence.
@JPNunez
I also do not think that defending traditional Christian values implies any position on environmentalism. My theory is that there is an alliance between defenders of those values and opponents of government regulation of business. Environmentalism is very much for government regulation of business, so environmentalists became opponents of traditionalist conservatives via “allies of our opponents are also our opponents” mechanism.
There was possibly an opportunity to make climate change in particular a rightist issue. Some of the scientists sounding the alarm were Republicans, but they thought if they kept their political affiliation a secret they could avoid politicizing the issue. In the universe next door (an artifact from which begins “In the 1950s, brave American scientists shunned by the climate establishment of the day…”), we briefly made headway against global warming in the 80’s, but then Clinton took power and dismissed the whole thing as nuclear industry propaganda.
For this to happen, the nuclear industry would have had to rally around the effort to de-regulate nuclear power, convince environmentalists to support them … and then the oil/coal industry would have had to fall in line on their own when they are deemed too contaminant to avoid politicians trying to regulate them too much and having the issue fall to the left wing.
Fossil fuel industries aren’t intrinsically right wing. See, e.g. the UK coal miners. They’ve become right wing because the left has been trying to limit/kill them for decades.
I think it’s misleading to conflate the political views of people who work for fossil fuel companies with the views of people who run them or own shares in them.
@Tatterdemalion
Good thing I didn’t do that. And especially good that I didn’t make any gross assumptions about the owners of capital on the basis of nothing but stereotypes.
If you consider the sanctity of private property to be a core value of the Right, then I don’t think modern environmentalism can also be a core value of the Right. I don’t believe there’s any useful way to address questions of pollution or climate change without the state infringing on other people’s property rights. Older questions of conservationism could have been addressed by the state without infringing on property rights – for example, through the state implementing national parks and wildlife reserves – but those are less core issues to the modern environmentalism movement.
Disagree. Pollution and carbon dioxide both infringe upon common property not private property. Protecting common property is more beneficial to the affluent who place a higher value on it
On the other hand, the affluent are in a better position to substitute private property for common.
There’s still no way to implement protect common property without the state controlling what people do with it.
By changing things the state does that cause pollution or climate change.
Forest fires are not primarily a pollution or climate change issue, but they have the same feel. It’s been argued that the main cause of the recent big California fire was regulations, pushed by environmentalists, that sharply restricted logging in government owned forests, leading to an accumulation of dead wood.
One environmentalist cum pacifist issue of the past was opposition to nuclear testing–done by governments.
Arguably, government restrictions on nuclear power are a major contributor to climate change, since nuclear is the one substitute for fossil fuels that can be expanded more or less without limit at a cost not enormously greater than fossil fuels.
As long as governments exist and do things on the scale that modern governments do, they are going to be making decisions about their activities relevant to environmentalist concerns.
Those are reasonable points, although I don’t think there’s evidence that the government is a significant contributor to climate change compared to private industry/consumers. As far as nuclear plants go – while you’re inarguably right about government regulations making it harder to build nuclear plants, the tail risk associated with unregulated nuclear power is pretty high, and I’m not sure that it’s actually economical to build nuclear plants without government subsidies.
@Wrong Species
I think the Black Panthers were considered “Left” and on the occasion of the 1970 “Earth Day” they said “The environment is not the issue, so back then at least one contingent regarded “ecology” (as environmentalism was called back then) as a ‘diversionary issue’.
There is actually a strong right-wing presence in environmentalism. They just call it “conservation” instead, and it is heavily associated with hunting and fishing and so on. This includes organizations like Boy Scouts, Ducks Unlimited, National Wild Turkey Federation, Boone and Crockett Club, etc. If you live near a Bass Pro Shop or a Cabela’s, stop in sometime and look at the community board there and you’ll find a ton of information about local conservation organizations and clubs.
Two main reasons: the economic right believes markets are the best way of solving problems. Preserving the environment and fighting climate change are two examples of situations where markets do poorly at solving them. As somebody else said, you do often get conservatives suggesting “pissing in the wind” solutions like everybody being careful to consume less; they’re just opposed to large-scale governmental action on the problem.
The social right is, on average, lower intelligence and worse educated than the left and centre. This makes them more likely to believe things that aren’t true.
Studies suggest that the well-educated are particularly good at rationalizing and are therefor very resistant to having their minds changed by new facts. So I would argue that the well educated tend to have different false beliefs as a result, but that they are not necessarily as good at believing true things as their IQs would suggest.
To follow up on that, Dan Kahan at Yale has published research about areas where beliefs have become linked to group identification, such as evolution or climate change. He finds that the more intellectually able someone is, the more likely he is to agree with his group’s position, whether that requires him to believe in evolution or not believe in it.
The explanation, which I like, is that this is rational behavior. Your individual belief in evolution has essentially no effect on the real world. But it has a lot of effect on how well you get along with the people who are important to you. The brighter you are, the better you are at talking yourself into the beliefs it is in your interest to hold.
I certainly don’t dispute the fact that intelligent, educated people also have many false beliefs!
I think it is just a historical accident. I think this for most issues though.
It’s my impression that in Japan, because of the connection of nature with Shintoism, environmentalism *is* often associated with the right.
Literature translated to English
The quality of a translation makes or breaks foreign novels for me. If the translation robs the text of aesthetic pleasure — usually done by taking the text too literally — or jarringly adapts idioms to English analogs, then I’m done, no matter how great the source material is.
Are there any particular translations that you have enjoyed/disliked? For example, I have read Swann’s Way in both the Moncreiff/Kilmartin/Enright and the newer Lydia Davis translations. I agree with Hitchens that the Moncrieff is superior.
Pevear & Volokhonsky do a better job of War and Peace (and probably their other Tolstoy translations) than anybody else I’ve seen.
I read a bunch of Dostoevsky in the positively ancient Garnett translations, and while I wouldn’t say the text was full of aesthetic pleasure I thought it was just fine. I may just have a tin ear for translation.
IMO this only holds for foreign poetry. I’m fine reading a foreign novel in a translation other than the best.
Mark Musa’s translation of Dante’s “Inferno” was beautiful in English, although I don’t know the original Italian so I can’t say how much exactly was lost.
Whoever’s translation it was I read, I thought Michel Houellebecque’s “Obsession” came off as exceptionally well-written in English.
Pinsky’s Inferno is also very good, although I can’t recall of he’s translated the other two.
Musa has.
Tao Te Ching is a favorite item for dispute. The language since it was written changed not only in actual words but heavily in context as well, so literal translations are, to my ears at least, complete mumbo-jumbo. There are many variants with many compromises, but the one I actually love is basically a modern rewrite from a zen buddhism perspective: Stephen Mitchell translation. Truly a beautiful thing.
Personally I’ve always been partial to the Robert Fagles translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. In fact there are even passages where I prefer his translation to the original Latin (don’t tell my old Classics professors, though :p).
I have Fagles’ Iliad and Odyssey and they’re quite good. My Aeneid is a Penguin Classics prose translation by someone else, I can’t remember who.
For Homer:
Lattimore for the best lyrical translation (there’s a reason it’s long been the standard)
Lombardo for best colloquial translation
Really don’t like Fitzgerald’s translation, particularly because rendering “Achilles” as “Akhilleus” bugs me for some reason
Fagles is fine, could definitely do worse than reading him
For Dostoevsky:
Others may be more accurate, but P&V sound the best to my ear. Often, other translators make Dostoevsky sound corny or British. Michael Katz is decent, too.
Plato:
In philosophy, where “accuracy” matters a bit more, the Grube/Reeve translation of The Republic still seems to be the best. I like Robin Waterfield’s version, but it seems to be more Robin Waterfield than it is Plato.
Does Fitzgerald’s
Akhilleusbother you so much more than Lattimore’sAchilleus?Fitzgerald’s Odyssey is the most popular, isn’t it? Not much
Akhilleusthere.Here are opening samples from many translations, if you want to check the Anglicization.
Yes, because my brain scans it as “Achilles” without that pesky k there.
The only work where I ever had enough command of the source language (yet! Growth mindset!) is the New Testament (and I basically forgot Greek after I graduated, so.) Translators have to walk a fine line on that one, because most Bible translations are aimed at being used in a liturgical context. Preserving, say, awkward Greek is great for the scholar, and it gives an immediacy I find extremely appealing, but you probably don’t want it when it’s being read at a wedding or funeral. I have a copy of the Bentley Hart translation, which is supposedly very literal, and gives a nice sense of “roughness” but the NRSV is OK as an all-purpose translation.
One pet peeve of mine is translations where they don’t translate words that are easily translatable. I think that, for example, when a historian is translating a primary source from Nazi Germany, they should render “fuhrer” as “leader” – a literal translation. “Fuhrer” is a scary foreign word to most English-speakers; having some primary source like a diary talking about “the Leader” gives a different sense.
The language known as Old English is different enough that it needs translation into Modern English…
I’ve read in full two different translations of Beowulf. I’ve sampled other translations of Beowulf, mostly ones that are now available online at Project Gutenberg.
Of those I’ve read in full: the version by Seamus Heaney is well-done. The voice and style of the translation feels like a story told in a meeting-hall after a feast. The opening page has an almost-conversational feel, and the telling of the story flows naturally and smoothly from beginning to end.
I’ve also read the version done by Tolkien, and published by his son Christopher. That version is also good, but has a slightly different feel: small differences in choices of word and phrase give it a more grand style. It also has a more didactic feel; especially in the quantity and quality of the notes and commentary after the main text. Despite the length of the notes section, every page of it was informative and educational.
Does clicking the report button not give a confirmation popup anymore? I accidentally clicked it and now there’s a red checkmark on the post and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. It seems like there’s two different report buttons now?
I reported you with the left one and got the red checkmark. I don’t think that’s what it did before, but I think I always use the one on the right anyway. There have been two for ages.
We are starting a new tradition at our home. After filing taxes, my wife goes to spend a day at the social security office to convince them she’s not dead.
This is the third year in a row, I believe.
Yes, they told her it was fixed in person last year. No, there has been no intervening reason to believe she has been. We had thought that it was due to a cancer treatment 6 years ago that somehow got miscommunicated to the feds. Now I think maybe its the same reason I get hassled whenever I cross the border–having a common name.
It doesn’t seem to be identity theft, given that we aren’t getting any unusual charges on our accounts.
Next year, get her to put on really pale makeup, dress all in black and speak with a thick Romanian accent.
I think she’s going to go in singing “I feel happy!”
That, or lose the accent but add hands outstretched yelling “Braaaaains!!”
“Five Signs That You Might Have Married a Lich”
Mitch McConnell’s actions in Congress have yet again spurred calls from random Internet commenters that he “do his job”. These lead to the usual observations that he is, in fact, doing just that.
For those unaware: McConnell is the US Senate Majority Leader. He sometimes blocks specific bills from being voted on by the Senate. His job, according to senate.gov, is to schedule bills for votes, which means he gets to decide which order they come down. That can mean delaying this bill or that, so as long as he’s making those decisions, he’s doing his job. Even if he brings every Republican bill up and delays every Democrat bill, resulting in dozens of dumb Republican bills that will get perfunctorily rejected while major Democrat bills end up mothballed indefinitely in their committees, he’s technically doing his job. If he expresses his policy in just that way, and acts on it, he’s doing his job. If the Democrats take the Senate in 2020 and Schumer does the exact same thing, he’s doing his job, too. This is obviously distressing if the SeMaLe isn’t from your party, and therefore it makes sense to be extra concerned about whether your party controls the Senate, but better or worse, that seems to the lay of the land.
My question: are there well-known cases of the SeMaLe blocking votes for conscientious, non-partisan reasons? Even mundane ones, like waiting until the bill’s author returns from an emergency surgery? Where does one go to find these records?
Is there an element of this game of each party being unwilling to change how bills are called to the floor, because they’re sure their party will get the SeMaLe position soon?
Talking of “blocking” bills is a bit misleading. The majority leader is in charge of scheduling the senate’s business. Every senate has far more bills submitted than go to to committee and far more bills that come out of committee then go to the floor. Most of them are “blocked” in the sense that the leader doesn’t bring them down to the floor for debate/votes, but that doesn’t mean the leader is actively thwarting people.
It’s important to remember that leadership, particularly in the senate, is not all powerful. If a lot of senators want a vote on something, then leadership will bring it to the floor or new leadership will be found. But senators are often perfectly happy to submit bills knowing they won’t pass, or to be in favor or against bills in public that privately they’re telling the leadership they want to keep bottled up. And leadership is usually happy to help them play that game.
As for records, the US house and senate do have legislative tracking software, but they track actions. The system works by someone positively deciding to bring bills to the floor. No decision is needed to not bring them to the floor, so no decision on that subject is likely to be recorded more often than not. But you could get some rough estimates by, say, looking at how many bills pass out of committee w/o ever coming up for vote.
Do these people have any opinion on McConnell scheduling a vote on the Green New Deal resolution?
Senator Ed Markey had proposed a version of that resolution, equivalent to the resolution proposed in the House of Representatives by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The resolution was brought up for a vote, and the vote results were…57 against, and none in favor. A total of 43 people voted ‘present’.
I can tell why, politically, this resolution produced that result. It gave the Senators a chance to vote in favor of (or opposition to) a resolution that called for use of zero-emission energy sources within a decade…and retrofitting every structure in the nation to be more energy-efficient.
Do the critics of McConnell think that this is an example of him not doing his job? Or an example of him doing his job?
The party that can change it is the one that currently has the majority leadership. So it isn’t a matter of will-have-it-soon, it’s matter of has-it-now.
The only situation where this could change is if a faction of the majority leader’s own party got upset enough to form a majority with the other party, at least for the limited purpose of reigning in the majority. See, e.g., the vote in the UK to allow backbenchers to make business motions.
I’ve observed before that Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi are very good at their jobs, and that’s why they both get so much bipartisan hatred.
In contrast, Chuck Schumer, John Boehner, and Paul Ryan were/are all lousy legislators. Harry Reid was somewhere in between.
I’d swap those considerations of Harry Reid and Pelosi. Managing the senate is considerably harder than managing the House.
Harry Reid was exceptionally good. McConnell is probably the best in my lifetime, if not longer. Pelosi is very average, and has had serious caucus troubles recently from the far left, but she’s not outright bad.
Ryan was awful, as is Schumer. I don’t know enough about Boehner.
I’m wondering about ways to train myself to become aware when I put something down. While it helps to have standard places to put things, sometimes I’m dealing with a new thing or I just don’t remember to use the standard place.
It does seem as though I tend to space out when I’m putting things down, and I believe Hermione is right that it’s easier to remember what you pay attention to.
Any thoughts about making awareness reliable?
When I was in university I read an article in Viz that recommended threading a piece of string through everything that you owned. That way if you ever lost anything then you could just go along the string until you found it.
Does this help?
It would if you couple it with the old stand-by of tying a string around you finger. And use the same string each time.
I think stringing bells along the string would be a necessary addition, because sometimes it’s dark, and sometimes it’s too quiet.
How about calling it out? IIRC there’s a lot of research that you can keep people from forgetting/missing important repetitive tasks by training them to announce them – e.g. “I’m setting the emergency break!” and “I’m removing the emergency break!” and so forth. This is big in airlines and railway operators and so forth. How about saying “I’m putting my keys on the dresser” out loud?
That might work. I could even hope it would train a mental habit so that I eventually would just say the words internally.
There’s also pointing at important things as part of work habits.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-japan-trains
Incidentally, i’ve heard people theorize that the whole thing in anime were people loudly call out the names of the techniques they’re using derives from the point and call culture pioneered by Japanese railroads.
A limited version of this is used on the NYC subway to make sure the train is correctly aligned with the platform before opening the doors.
This led to this delightful video.
If-then scripts you rehearse mentally seem to work in habit making (I might be able to dig up the source if you want). Imagine yourself doing something (put an object down) and then stopping for a second to consider where you’re put it.
Delaware just entered the NPVIC (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/436338-delaware-gov-signs-bill-to-bill-to-give-electoral-college-votes-to-popular)
My question: Suppose enough states enter the compact to give it 270 votes. At the same time, say a state not in the compact decides to use some other voting method (i.e. Range voting, or IRV) to award its EC electors. How does the NPVIC determine what the total popular vote is? What if the state used IRV, and the result changes if you use the initial votes, versus the final round votes?
It might well be that such a state wouldn’t count for the purposes of the NPV. In NPVIC world, presumably states would know that and choose their voting methods accordingly.
This definition does not seem to exclude non plurality methods.
It’s all blue states. I wonder how fast they would cancel this if Trump manages to win the popular vote while losing the traditional electoral college in 2020.
Not sure it’s relevant to the question about non-plurality voting, but the states that have passed it are not bound to assign electors to popular vote winner until an EV majority of states have passed it. So at it’s current state, if the situation you describe happens in 2020, the states would not need to cancel anything to award their electors according to the state winner.
Since an EV majority is needed, presumably there would need to be both Blue and Red states in the compact to reach 270 EVs. In such a situation it is guaranteed that a popular/EV discrepancy would lead to at least one state being bound to vote against it’s statewide winner. I wonder how fast they would cancel in such a situation? The biggest problem I can see is that elections are run by the states, not the federal government, so states would have to trust the election results from the other states.
@Conrad Honcho,
My guess is two Presidential elections in twenty years in which a Democrat wins the electoral college but not the popular vote will be more than enough for Democrats and Republicans to flip-flop on the merits of the electoral college.
Which nearly happened in 2004 and 2012.
Both of those were close enough and had a Democrat lean to the EC. Ohio in the case of 2004 and Colorado in the case of 2012.
Is there any body that determines the national popular vote?
I thought “Behind the Curve” was an excellent movie. Best documentary I’ve seen in a long time. (Caveat: I don’t watch all that many anymore. But I’m known to be pretty picky about movies.) Curious to hear y’all’s thoughts about the movie — even if you haven’t seen it! 😀
But in case you have: I can’t decide if the filmmakers’ treatment of the Flat-Earthers was ultimately derisive or affectionate. What say you, SSC?
I recently watched it, and enjoyed it quite a bit.
I think the filmmakers’ treatment of the Flat-Earthers was affectionate towards them as people, but derisive of their beliefs.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years. In the past week or two, the same search strings that have reliably been pulling up the same results for a year or more have suddenly started returning different results. I apparently am unable to enter a search string that takes me to any explanation or discussion about this, so I’m trying my luck here.
I started using DuckDuckGo recently, and I can’t make search strings, beyond the simplest, work. Is there a webbed description somewhere of how to searches? I would like, for instance, to be able to search for my name while eliminating references to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. If I enter [“David Friedman” -Israel -Ambassador], some of the hits I get contain the words I am trying to avoid.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/syntax/ But it says that the – operator gives fewer rather than no pages with the requested word, and doesn’t seem to offer a true NOT operator.
Thanks.
A rant — with 800 signatories — against misuse of statistics that produce too many false negative results:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00857-9
Andrew Gelman’s response, which includes some correspondence with others. I tend to agree with John Ioannidis’s take:
Is anyone in Nashville this weekend? There’s an electoral reform conference (Unrig Summit) going on at the Music City Center and I’m curious to know if that’s something other SSCers are interested in.
I am not, but that sounds like something I’d like to attend and wish them the best of luck.
Note to self: do not attempt to make a living as a freelance comedy writer.
Cracked is looking for freelance columnists. And they’ve posted their rates: $250 for approximately 2,000 words, $100 for approximately 1,000. These people are expected to be experienced writers, presumably at least semi-pro, but don’t get a regular slot. They still have to pitch columns, and may be turned down.
At those rates, if you manage to publish a long-form column every two days (presumably working with several publishers), and work regular weeks, you gross just north of $30K a year. That’s not great. Hope you’re living somewhere cheap.
It seems that any profession that relies on media has extremely lopsided pay rates. If your work can be copied and distributed to the masses, you have to be among the best to make a great, or maybe even good, living off of it. This applies to writers, pro athletes, actors obviously. You need a combination of luck and talent. And it’s probably even harder to break in lately with plenty of people giving away low level content for free on the web.
I’m not sure that this is correct – at least without some major caveats.
Pro atheletes quite obviously stand apart, because athletics is a rather direct form of competition – you either win or lose. As such, it is going to select very strongly for best-in-field.
With creative workers (writers, musicians, actors, etc.), the situation is somewhat different. Pre-internet, the main obstacle facing the creative was reaching an audience, which put considerable power in the hands of middle-men.
With the internet, the audience is accessible, but it’s nigh impossible to not get lost in the crowd. Moreover, the economics of publishing on the internet are whack.
The steelman for traditional publishers keeping rates low was that publishing is a high-risk business and that only a small proportion of the works published will sell enough to recoup amounts invested. This small portion of successful works would have to pay for all the costs associated with the unsuccessful ones.
The steelman for internet publishers keeping rates low is that internet advertising doesn’t pay very much either and you can’t charge users for access because internet users are allergic to paying for content.
It actually is kind of great if you make $30,000 as a freelancer. First these are bottom of the barrel in terms of experience or skill, its like looking at a waitress at a low end diner and saying “Your making $15 an hour, being a waitress pays terribly”.
To your other point “hope you live somewhere cheap” is dead on, most of these writers can live where ever there is a reliable internet connection. You could buy a cheap house in a cheap cost of living area on $30,000 a year with no commuting costs.
I actually used to be a writer for Cracked and for a few years I was a community manager for their writer’s workshop. I drifted away in 2015 after the whole pivot-to-video fiasco, but I can tell you that even back then practically no one involved in the writing game was a full time writer; it was something people did after work, as students or on the weekends.
Again, this was pre-video and adpocolpyse; this was the heydey of writing longform text content on the internet, and even then it was still seen as a waystation on the path towards a book deal, a regular column or a space on a TV show’s writing staff. Writing online for a brand you don’t own or have significant stake in isn’t and will never be a full-time job.
One thing I have wondered is if anyone uses voice to text software to double as a writer when working otherwise mindless jobs. Things like night shift security guard/ hotel desk where you could plausibly have large gaps of paid time to ‘write’ and then edit later.
Hotel desk you could be typing while waiting for another guest to show up.
There must be examples of famous writers who did the equivalent—composed their writing while employed at some job that did not require attention. Trollope seems to have done it, although he had the advantage of an internal word processor, so no need for speech to text or a keyboard.
IIRC, that’s exactly how Brandon Sanderson wrote his first published novel.
Wallace Stevens comes immediately to my mind.
If you can write 1,000 words an hour, you can work six hours a week and make close to the US median salary, without any bosses, fixed hours, or having to live in a big city.
(I think I can sometimes write 1000 words an hour, though I’ve never timed it. I’m probably an outlier, but professional writers will be outliers too)
I think I might have tried to do this once, for Cracked, and my column was rejected for vague bureaucratic reasons like posting it in slightly the wrong way. Nobody would tell me the right way to post it, and everyone seemed kind of hostile about it, and I cravenly gave up. I wish I could remember more details, but in retrospect it probably worked out well for my dignity.
Probably having to deal with this kind of thing, and with editors, and all that, makes it less fun than it sounds, though.
There is probably some variance, but professional writers write something like 1000 words of finished prose per day, including planning, first drafts, and revisions. For a novelist, that’s two big novels a year. Charles Stross, the science fiction writer, sometimes talks about his output and that’s what he manages.
Writing a thousand words in an hour or two sounds feasible if I already know what I want to say, and don’t have any reason to change it once it’s written. But I’ve never timed myself.
Some thoughts on gender relations:
If misogyny is common among men, freedom of speech on platforms like Facebook would be useful to eligible women for screening men women meet IRL. If misogyny is common and banned, that encourages witch hunts. Or it could be very rare and all those 4chan comments are from a few 10k men.
Generally, women value men for being stoic. This is not a Red/Blue thing: men suppress negative emotions in public to avoid status loss. But based on my voracious reading of old books, this doesn’t seem to have been the case as recently as the 18th century.
I saw a comment hear a couple OTs ago (by Aapje?) that “women tend to value men for their earnings, stoicism, etc.” Is that an example of bougeiosie values? In early modern books, women and men both seem to value potential mates for some individually variable combo of financial assets and moral sensitivity. I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen how many pounds a woman had cited in 18th century English literature… and yeah, don’t Appeal to Fictional Evidence, but I can’t help thinking about how the sisters in Pride and Prejudice were stuck having to attract husbands based solely on their personalities because Dad’s estate was entailed.
Studies have found greater gender differences in personality and interests in more equal countries.
The reason may be that strong, societally enforced gender roles reduce the need for signalling, as society will tend to enforce gender conformity when it matters to a partner (assuming that the partner demands what society decides he or she is owed). So it then is less necessary for men and women to have an inherent motivation to act in a way that benefits their partner, because society will make the person do it.
In contrast, in Western society you have to prove yourself more as a good and reliable partner, because people are much more easily allowed to forego on their implicit or explicit commitments.
This then goes both ways: men have to prove their stoicism and ability to earn more to women, but women have to prove that they are willing to have sex with the man and such.
The above can also explain why arranged marriage is much more common in less equal countries and why family wealth and status often seem much more important than the traits of the individual: the individual is assumed to conform, so his or her individual qualities are less important.
—
Something similar that I’ve noticed is that in gay-hostile societies and cultures, hetero men are often very open to male intimacy, even including men kissing each other (on the mouth) and having sex with each other. In contrast, hetero men in the West seem much more concerned about not showing signs that they might be gay. This may be because high acceptance of gay people means that there is a much higher risk for women to pursue a practicing gay man, so it takes much less for women to conclude that the man is too much of a risk. So men/boys then respond to this by being much less intimate with men, using ‘gay’ pejoratively to signal that they aren’t, etc.
Gay-hostile cultures may be much less insistent that ‘gay’ behavior means that you are gay and thus make it easier for men to act ‘non-binary’ and still be considered a suitable partner to the opposite sex.
That last part seems a bit far. In what sense is it gay-hostile at that point?
Presumably that society will pressure men into marrying women and having babies with them, rather than either shacking up with another man or living a life of freewheeling homosexual promiscuity.
Indeed. Afghan men may have sex with men/boys before and even during their marriage, but they are expected to marry and father children.
Also, it could be hostile to some forms of homosexuality but not to others. E.g., accepting a man buggering his male slaves, but regarding any man who enjoys being on the receiving end as a contemptible sissy.
Part of Cicero’s accusations against Mark Antony in his Second Philippic were that he and Gaius Scribonius Curio the younger were gay lovers when Antony was young, and it seems that Antony was indeed dissolute when young (he managed to run up such a debt that he was bankrupt by the age of twenty, for one thing).
Now, Cicero is trying to blacken Antony’s character here, but the phrasing includes what seems to be an acceptance that men will fuck pretty slave boys and nobody thinks they’re gay, but anything like a relationship is indeed gay and to be condemned as unmanly, immoral and vicious:
Uhh, what definitions of “hetero” and “gay-hostile” are we using?
There is situational sexual behavior where people have different sexual behaviors due to circumstances. Sex between men is fairly common in heavily gender-segregated societies where young men have no or a minimal chance to have sex with women. One such practice is Bacha bazi.
Men who have sex with men/boys for this reason typically identify as heterosexual and prefer to have sex with women if that option is available.
The kissing between men is not French and is/was not considered sexual, but very intimate in a blood brothers kind of way.
Actually identifying as gay, refusing to marry, living together with a man as husband and husband, etc; is typically heavily discouraged in these societies, resulting in consequences that can include murder.
I’m not so sure about the last bit. This US Army Report on “Pashtun Sexuality” writes that a common saying among Pasthun men in Afghanistan is “women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” More specifically, it describes a somewhat common practice as follows (starting on page 14):
So clearly at least some of the men who engage in “bacha bazi” are already married to at least one woman.
On personality tests that were developed in Western countries. It astonishes me that more people don’t ask whether those tests just don’t work as well in non-Western cultures. I’ve looked into one particular study in some detail myself (don’t have the link handy at the moment, sorry) and found that the correlation almost entirely disappears when you divide the countries into “Western” and “non-Western,” even if you define “Western” broadly enough to include Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Also, most of the studies that I’ve seen of this type either use samples of university students or internet polls. Both of these raise obvious questions about representativeness.
As for the gay stuff, I’m fairly certain, based on all of the old movies and TV shows that I’ve watched, that Western men weren’t any more touchy feely with each other before gay liberation. They certainly aren’t any more in some contemporary homophobic cultures such as Russia. I think we should keep in mind the problems with drawing causal inferences from regional scatterplots. It seems more likely that, for example, Arab cultures simply don’t consider men holding hands to be a sign of homosexuality. In Russia they do, and their reactions are as you would expect.
Now, there is evidence that some Arab cultures do have widespread male/male sex, but they’re generally expected to be discreet about this, and it seems to operate as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Chechnya, on the other hand…
Interesting post, thank you.
Old movies and TV shows may not be old enough. What do you make of these photographs?
I agree that gay liberation is, at best, just part of the answer, though.
FWIW, high school me, reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time, snickered a fair bit at Sam and Frodo’s expressions of mutual love, although Tolkien obviously didn’t think of them as gay.
Quoting the page that you linked:
If the change happened in the 1950s, that’s clear evidence against the thesis that “acceptance of gay people” caused it, because 1950s and 60s America was not particularly known for acceptance of gay people.
So I find the article’s argument more convincing: it’s not because the pre-mid-20th-century West and the contemporary Arab world stigmatized homosexuality more than the contemporary West, but because they stigmatized it in different ways.
While the hand-holding does seem gay to me, passing the arm behind the neck is totally normal behaviour among male friends in Spain. And Spain is a very LGBT-friendly country.
These are some sports team photos.
So half of the photos would read not gay in Spain, although hand-holding is something reserved to lovers and kids.
Is passing the arm behind the neck or waist of a mate considered gay in the US? What sorts of male affection is accepted in the US?
Almost none. You might put your arm around someone’s neck for a second while greeting them, or trying to tell them something in a very loud environment, but you wouldn’t leave it there. I gather this may be changing but when I was in high school, the only regular contact between boys was (playful) punching and wrestling.
Well, that seems to mean that male affection being considered gay and thus not OK for heterosexuals is just an American thing.
I have also heard that Americans are really uncomfortable with being naked in gender segregated changing rooms. In much of Europe, people are quite comfortable not hiding their naked bodies in gender-segregated changing rooms. In Germany, men and women go to saunas together, and it’s apparently OK. Asian countries also tend to be OK with nudity in gender-segregated areas. Children under 3 are also OK.
Hugging, in some contexts, as an expression of friendship for someone you haven’t seen for a while, or sympathy. Not that common, but not coded as gay.
Yes, unfortunately, anything more than a brief hug or arm around the shoulder is unusual for men in the US, and an arm around the waist would be seen by most as unambiguously sexual and/or romantic. The shifting conception of homosexuality in the twentieth century probably has something to do with this, as INH5 says above. It would take some complicated historical work to figure out exactly what changed in relationships between men and why. This r/askhistorians thread might be a place to start.
I have also heard that Americans are really uncomfortable with being naked in gender segregated changing rooms. In much of Europe, people are quite comfortable not hiding their naked bodies in gender-segregated changing rooms.
This too, yes, but it’s worth noting that expressions of male intimacy and casual nudity don’t necessarily go together. Finland is an example of a society that has relatively little social touching, but everyone uses the sauna naked together.
For American men, at least, there’s an age difference. Men older than me (I’m almost 40) tend to be very comfortable with locker room nudity, while younger men aren’t. Newer locker rooms have separate shower stalls instead of one big shower area.
As a counterpoint to the holding hands example, my experience is that Russian men are far more likely to kiss (on the cheek, or even on the mouth) other men than Americans are.
It seems more likely that, for example, Arab cultures simply don’t consider men holding hands to be a sign of homosexuality.
One reason a lot of Western gay men of a certain class and background ended up in Morocco was for precisely this reason; public displays of affection, as it were, between men were not considered to be signs of “he’s gay!” so they could get away with things that back home would never have been tolerated.
Plus they had the attitude that being rich Westerners (certainly rich by the standards of 1950s North Africa), they could hire plenty of ‘gay for pay’ pretty young men as sexual partners, and the guys would treat this as “earning money to enable me to get married”, wouldn’t think of themselves as gay, and this would be excused to themselves and by the society as “I’m going to marry, so I’m straight, this is just another form of selling my labour to these rich Westerners”. (I forget whose memoirs I read years back by one of those gay ex-pats who was quite cynical – or brutally honest, take your pick – about what would now be considered sexual and racial exploitation).
I’m not buying the gay-hostile link to hereto male intimacy. The ancient Greeks were famously gay friendly and they didn’t have a problem with lack of male intimacy.
The idea of “gay” as an unchangeable orientation didn’t really exist in Greek society, though — the closest I can think of is that bit in Plato’s Symposium where Aristophanes says that some men have male other halves, although he then goes on to say that we can just pass laws to make them marry women (and besides, I’m not sure how seriously Plato wants us to take the entire speech — Aristophanes was a comedian, after all). So that’s an obvious possible confounder for why Greek society might have differed from modern society in this regard.
I’ve read before that the Greeks didn’t have a concept of homosexuality and heterosexuality, but then that story shows the two categories quite plainly, and even mentions the stereotype of gay men being less manly. It refutes the stereotype, which implies the audience is already familiar with it.
Folks interested in how the modern concept of “homosexuality” differs from ancient conceptions of same sex relations may want to read Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality.
Not necessarily — modern society recognises that people have sexual preferences without thinking that preferences form the basis of someone’s identity. Gentlemen might prefer blondes, but nobody thinks of blondism as some sort of separate societal category. Ancient views of homosexuality were much like this — sure, they recognised that some men preferred to have sex with other men, but they didn’t consider “homosexuals” as a distinct group the way modern people do.
My memory from, I think, A History of Private Life, is that the equivalent of our category of gay was submissive, defined as being penetrated or being below when making love. So the penetrating partner was not considered gay (or whatever their term would be), the penetrated was. And heterosexual sex with the woman on top put the man in more or less the same category. And a better translation than “gay” would probably be “womanish.”
I think that was a description not only of classical antiquity but of more recent mediterranean culture.
I’m not sure that being submissive was really equivalent to our gay. Most importantly, there was no widespread notion of people being born submissives who had to be passive during sex or else be condemned to a life of unhappiness and self-loathing.
ISTM that this is some mix of
a. What biology / human nature pushes (Reacting to the last many thousand years of reproductive success)
b. What your culture/upbringing pushes (Reacting to the last century or so of quality of life and (somewhat) reproductive success)
c. What your own desires and views are (Reacting to individual variation plus your own beliefs and ideas)
(a) and (b) are likely to be out of date for the kind of life you’ll be living (especially (a)). (c) is likely to be based on too-small a sample size and too-cherry-picked a set of anecdotes to be all that well-informed.
It’s interesting to ask what fraction of whom you’re attracted to comes from each of those three. I gather that game / PUA is heavily focused on understanding (a) and (b), and figuring out how to adapt to them to get dates/get laid.
One of the common life experiences I missed was the stage of trying desperately to find a mate, and/or to at least get laid. It was the early 70s; there were lots of folks with round heels available, and STDs were temporarily not much of a threat (pre-AIDs awareness, pre-antibiotic-resistance). Some proportion of those who appeared (to my limited social skills) to be seeking to play consensual musical beds would then turn out to have decided we were “an item”, and they were “in love”, which I found bizarre.
Are normal people really that focussed on mate-finding, at any stage of their lives? I know most manage to wind up with partners, and that can be supported by evolutionary arguments – or better supported, in the generations before mine, by lack of better-paying, more secure career options for women than “housewife”.
Yes.
Well, there’s also raising kids. If you want kids, you almost certainly really want to raise them with a partner who will stick around to help. If you’re a woman, you really need to be done having your kids by the time you get into your 40s, because it becomes both harder to get pregnant and riskier for mom and baby as you get older. Those two impose some constraints on life choices w.r.t. mate selection that are pretty hard to get around.
On the other side, many high-achieving women don’t get to a point in their lives where they feel ready to have kids or even settle down until they’re in their mid-30s, which puts them in a pretty tough position–you finally get married at 38, decide to have kids at 40, and then go through a few years of really expensive, intrusive, and unpleasant fertility treatments to try to have a kid.
IMO, one of the best reforms we could do in our society for high-achieving women is to work out ways to make the high-achieving pathways more compatible with having kids. There are parts of that that would be nice for men, too, but for women it’s a much bigger deal, because the constraints they run into are biological and beyond our power to entirely overcome with technology.
One possible solution to avoid having children interfere with your career is to have children as soon as possible. Like, get pregnant a few months before graduation, and then have children in short intervals, until you decide it is enough. You would start your career a bit later, but then you would never have to take a break.
Another possible solution, if the high-achieving woman is also high-income (or has a high-income partner), is to pay someone else to do most of the parenting for you. For a high-income woman, the obvious candidate is her partner.
A solution on a society level could be to shorten the working week into three days; while allowing different people to choose different three days. Then a couple could arrange their working schedules so that each day at least one of them is free (and can take care of the kids).
The most effective solution that I’ve come across is “import lots of nannies and maids from the Third World and don’t have a societal stigma on hiring them.” See the Persian Gulf Petrostates, though presumably you’d want to avoid the accompanying human rights abuses seen in those countries. But good luck getting something like that implemented in Trump’s America.
Or simply accept that hiring a homemaker is a normal thing to do for a two-career couple. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day of a corporate samurai to do half the job of caring for a child, so someone else needs to step in. There’s no reason that someone can’t be a servant.
My impression is that a lot of two-career couples consider this option, but balk when they see how much it costs. Surprise, darlings, the work that women have traditionally done has real value; you just didn’t realize it until you tried to put a market price on it.
@INH5
Judging by the playgrounds in the “UMC” neighborhoods I’ve seen (and my stay-at-home wife reports even more) that’s already been done, which may help explain why Trump won.
The problem in a nutshell is that if there’s no inherited money, and if both spouses are early in their careers, it’s hard for them to afford good childcare, until they are already at the stage of higher risk pregnancies.
Some subcultures manage it – my Indian colleagues (techies, in an expensive area) essentially always have either a nanny of their own, or at worst an individual who handles a small number of children in her own home. But the other ethnicities almost never do, which pretty much convinces me there’s a big tradeoff involved, and differing values.
Maybe your third world nanny solution would bring the price down low enough for this to work for more people, if the anti-immigrant political situation in the US would allow that. But I’d be concerned about whether it would really be affordable at an early enough career stage.
It’s not Trump’s America which makes this impractical. It’s employment regulations. If you have to pay these nannies and maids $15/hour and provide health insurance and workers comp and all the other things that you wouldn’t need to do in a Persian Gulf petrostate, just being a mere 1%er isn’t enough.
It would be interesting to see some actual figures here. How much does it cost to hire a full-time reasonably-qualified nanny/homemaker completely legitimately in the US? And how big a gross salary does this translate to for the person who has to pay for it?
My impression is that some of these couples are expecting it to cost $20K, but it actually costs $40K, so you need a job that that pays $60K to break even doing this. But these are completely made-up numbers.
My parents hired a nanny/homemaker for me and my brother in Finland back in the 70s, when they were an assistant professor and an RN. It cost almost my mom’s entire take-home pay as a nurse, but she says it was worth it.
That was more or less the Victorian solution, although the nannies were not from so far away.
Three obvious disadvantages:
1. Interacting with your children is emotionally rewarding, even if sometimes tiring.
2. You want your children to end up with close emotional bonds to you, not to the nanny, since you may in various ways depend on them later in life.
3. You want your children acculturated in your culture, which may not be the nanny’s–sharing your values and such.
@johan_larson
I can speak somewhat to your question. I actually am an assistant professor at the moment and my wife is a nurse. We’re both new to our respective professions.
We have had a hell of a time securing any kind of reliable childcare that isn’t babysitting. Some of our difficulties are described in the resume conversation above — when we would try to post a job on various websites like care.com or sittercity, applications or employee profiles would invariably have appalling spelling or truly baffling errors. Things didn’t go much better at the interview state either. Most people we called to interview either didn’t pick up or had no conception whatsoever as to how to interview or the kinds of things we expected a professional to do — which obviously did not inspire confidence when working with kids.
We used to live on the Front Range of Colorado, so we weren’t exactly in the middle of nowhere — and we were offering $20 an hour, which was close to what my wife made as an RN!
When we DID hire childcare, they were generally unreliable. Some quit after just a few days of work, many were uncommunicative. I think of the (something like 6?) people that we worked with in a serious way, only one or two were actually good at their jobs.
I am not sure as to the economic reasons why this was the case — perhaps there was enough demand for childcare that the actual nannies could afford to be irresponsible. It is still something of a mystery to me, but it’s something that my wife and I find a constant thorn in our side as we try to navigate the work / life balance that is so hard for young families.
In NYC, the best source I know for nanny pay is the Park Slope Parents nanny survey.
60% of respondents admit to paying their nanny completely off the books (only 13% claim to be fully compliant) so I think it’s fair to say that employment regulations aren’t really stopping nanny hiring. “On the books” median pay was $18.00/hour, “off the books” median pay was $17.00/hour.
For context, Park Slope is a pleasant, family-friendly neighborhood. It is definitely richer than average for NYC, but not exceptionally so.
(Also, on the employment regulation thing, I’m sure you’ll recall how often cabinet nominations are derailed by nanny employment issues, which also suggests widespread noncompliance.)
No, this is completely circular. Among those who do have a nanny, employment regulations aren’t really stopping nanny hiring. Among those who don’t, your survey provides no information.
No it’s not. Stuff like this illustrates that it’s common knowledge that nanny employment law is not strictly enforced except at Senate confirmation hearings. Mere scrupulosity is not enough to stop most people from breaking commonly-flaunted laws.
@ ProfessorQuirrell
Re the babysitting issues, my wife and I were in a similar situation. We too were baffled by the lack of reliability and the apparent lack of interest in working as a babysitter.
We offered $20 per hour where the going rate, judging by care.com and word of mouth, is roughly $11 or $12. There were some bad experiences.
I don’t know if you’ve resolved your problem, or whether this will help you, but we found our solution by hiring directly from a childcare center (children up to age 5). We spoke first with the person running the center, and they allowed us to speak with the teachers directly. We were upfront about our expectations with these teachers, and we’ve had no problems. On time, reliable, personable, and they’ve been vetted by the school system (the center we used is part of the public school system).
If you haven’t tried this, I’d recommend giving it a shot. Good luck.
Another under-utilized option: part-time professional work. The number of white-collar people who would like to do half-time for half-pay far exceeds the number of positions available. If you’re in a highly competitive field (like software engineering) and you want to experience what it feels like to get so many great applicants that you can be choosy, this is one way. The challenge is convincing your employer to make it an option.
Are normal people really that focussed on mate-finding, at any stage of their lives?
Don’t ask me, I’m not normal! 😀
Anyone remember Mark Z. Danielewski’s (pronounced “daniel-loose-ski’s”) House of Leaves? I learned recently that he released the pilot script for a television adaptation of the novel. The project is dead, apparently, but fans of the book might enjoy the script.
I particularly love the throwaway comment early on that Danielewski ‘negated’ his father the director by becoming the novel’s editor, and then the script inverts the editor by having a director.
Tangential, but nominative determinism predicts that Daniel-loose-skis will either die in a skiing accident or found/manage/be largest shareholder of a company that makes unsafe skis.
Really? I think we should have a new rule: if you’re going to de-Polish-ise the pronunciation of your name, you should have to de-Polish-ise the spelling too.
Well, either that or Poland agrees to replace their letter ‘w’ with ‘v’ which they’re not even using at the moment
:-p
I read the house a few months ago. One of my friends gave it to me for my birthday.
It was a deeply unnerving (or should I say, unheimlichkeit) experience.
Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish.
I read that all in one go, in the middle of the night, in my dad’s unfinished basement. I don’t think there’s a better way to read it.
Honestly, I think it suffered from being overhyped – I’d heard how good it was, how scary, and while it started out really strong, I started to find the whole thing tedious about halfway through. It was one in a series of novels I read over the course of a year or two that would have been absolutely stunning had they been about half as long.
I’ve never heard of this book before. After I read your comment I went to Goodreads to check out some of the reviews. It sounds very interesting. There is a review by Wil Wheaton there. I ordered it yesterday and I’ll be getting my book in a few hours. I’m already scared! Thanks!
Anyone have a short take on how big an economic jolt a no-deal Brexit would be for the UK? They’ll still be able to trade with the world, including the EU. But a) trade with the EU will have to be under the rules the EU extends to the rest of the world, not to its insiders, and b) since the UK will no longer be part of the EU, it will not be able to make use of any trade deals between other nations and the EU. The UK will be running global trade on the default settings, as it were. Just how big an economic effect would this have?
I’m not sure, but given that the predictions of economic catastrophe made by media pundits and the Bank of England have proven false,* it’s probably a good heuristic to assume that the situation will be notably better than what they’re forecasting.
(* And no, “we haven’t actually exited the EU yet” is not a counter-argument. The predictions I’m talking about referred to the two years after a Leave vote, i.e., the period between the referendum itself and the actual leaving.)
Bad. Mostly because the UK has signally failed to prepare the basic logistics side of things. A customs barrier in and off itself? Not good, but also, not likely to ruin a nation. A customs barrier without sufficient customs officers to process the volume of trade? That is not going to be pretty.
I do kind of expect the house of commons to come somewhat to its senses and pass support for a customs union or the EEA, or something just to avoid that, but.. well, may be disappointed.
Well, strictly speaking the UK could choose to simplify or eliminate trade restrictions to the point that it could actually enforce its rules in a timely manner.
… That was a joke, yes? It is hard to tell on the internet.
Let’s call it an option that is in principle feasible but will not be adopted, people being people and institutions being institutions.
God alone knows. There’s great anticipation that it will hit Ireland hard, particularly the murmuring the British did about imposing tariffs because that would really knock our agri-business sector, which is still a hefty contributor to our economy and probably our largest native (rather than American multi-nationals notionally letting profits rest in the bank accounts here before being shuttled elsewhere) exporter.
On the other hand, I have to give credit to our government – they’ve taken it seriously and do seem to be making preparations, and Irish businesses are beginning to swivel more to directly exporting to Continental Europe rather than going through the GB ‘land bridge’. Small and independent businesses and set-ups are wincing in expectation of a hammering, since it’s a lot harder for them to switch from “75% of my business is a service to the UK”, but although we are expecting hardship, we’re kinda sorta prepared for once, which is nice.
Now if the British would only make up their minds… they’re in, they’re out, they’re going, they’re not, they want an extension of the extension of the extension, they got 16 options, pick 8, voted “no” to all of them, and now Theresa May is promising to resign as a bribe to get them to agree to a deal???
The thing that I’ve gathered is that if they do go out with no deal, then they’ll be under WTO regulations, and those seem to be harsher than they expect them to be for trade. So I have no idea if they have any idea what the likely consequences will be; no, I don’t think famine and running out of medicines and the rest of it, but price hikes unexpectedly for basic goods and a different selection than they’re used to, for a start.
We’re in the process of hiring for a new accountant. Reflections on the current market:
1. We’re still getting a lot of candidates. The candidates are at least nominally qualified: degrees in accounting and some level of accounting experience.
2. Resumes almost uniformly do nothing to emphasize transferrable skills or accomplishments.
3. Resumes almost uniformly contain some sort of spelling error or other type-o nested somewhere. They are not glaringly obvious, but they are noticed.
4. Familiarity with the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Resolution) is apparently not common. Given that most behavioral interviews follow this format and it helps to showcase your accomplishments, candidates really should follow this format.
5. Familiarity with common interview questions and the “expected answers” is also not common. As a pro-tip, if we ask you “tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager,” the correct answer is not “I never disagree with my manager,” particularly after a decade of work experience.
6. There’s remarkably little demonstration/showcasing of leadership or interpersonal skills, which is something we rather much want. We really need people who know how to pick a viewpoint and stand up for it in a way that’s not going to alienate everyone.
7. Expectations for our candidates may be too high given our salary range. The kinds of people who are both technically good and interpersonally good are obviously in-demand employees. They are frequently quickly promoted into senior staff roles at their current companies, and typically command salaries close to what we offer, or in excess. A friend reaching out about job opportunities mentioned a position to me that would be a 25% pay increase over what I currently make: typical senior positions are still probably offering 5-10% more than what we do here, and those other positions also offer better advancement opportunities. Plus, these people aren’t typically active searchers.
8. Not a lot of entertainment from our staff for diverse backgrounds. I don’t mean EEOC diverse, but “I worked myself up and got a degree” diverse. People are still picky about picking from good schools. Signaling supreme!
Leadership? For an accountant?
Also I’d expect a lot of the people drawn to accounting would be the same type originally drawn to computers. They like working with numbers in part because they aren’t ambiguous like people, don’t insist on time wasters like small talk, and you don’t have to be personally pleasing to be considered to have the right answer. Nerds, in a word.
Recently (last 10-20 years), software engineering has become well known as a “good career” and hence infested by non-nerds with anti-nerd behavioural norms. I’d expect an intelligent, aware person with my talents and tastes – except 30 years younger – to choose accounting rather than software engineering, just as my mother did back before software engineering was a thing.
Good luck finding a soft skills expert who’s also a competent accountant. And if you do, expect them to see their job as a stepping stone to management, and leave it (one way or another) relatively soon.
Resumes almost uniformly contain some sort of spelling error or other type-o nested somewhere. They are not glaringly obvious, but they are noticed.
Noticed the same thing. We’re currently recruiting for a part-time office administrator, which will require good written communications/word processing skills amongst other things, and it’s noticeable that quite a few have some error. Why does hardly anyone date their covering letter, for instance? And for people who will be producing letters etc. for posting out to various bodies, the formatting of their letters and CVs is atrocious in some instances.
How senior a position is the one you’re hiring for? If it’s medium to low-level, accountancy technicians are really good – there’s a qualification here that isn’t a degree, it’s a two-year Level 6 Certificate (which would be around the equivalent of a Diploma) that gives the graduates membership in this organisation, and it’s a good stepping stone to (1) getting the basic skills to get you into a job – graduates are sought after, and the school I worked at had no trouble getting them placed into jobs, and this was even when the recession of 2008 was beginning to bite and (2) going on for further qualifications.
It’s a tough course and does demand a lot from the students, so don’t write it off as “oh just some community college make-work qualification”. There must be something similar in America? Though from your description, it sounds that it’s not simply an accountant you want, it’s a senior position at management level, and that’s a different story.
As a pro-tip, if we ask you “tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager,” the correct answer is not “I never disagree with my manager,” particularly after a decade of work experience.
The last time I really disagreed with my manager, I got fired 🙂 And generally if you disagree, it comes down to “yeah well I’m the boss and I’m telling you to do/not do this”.
Happens all too often. My experience is what they really want to know: were you respectful or insubordinate? Did you still do the utmost to work their way regardless? And did you insulate the company from your manager’s bad decision in a way that didn’t make them or the company look bad?
Staff level cost accountant. Technical skills are important, but we really need the leadership and communication skills because we need people to communicate with the production team. Our team is expected to co-pilot and drive projects, not just run reports.
Unfortunately, this really isn’t a common skill set among people who go into accounting. Most people who go into accounting don’t like people and don’t like dealing with practical realities. The successful candidates we had in the past were bright kids right out of college who came through on a now-terminated management trainee program. They stayed for maybe 12-18 months, made some changes, and moved on. And the types of people who are generally good on the production side misunderstand numbers in critical fashion, so you can’t really train a production person to go into accounting.
My expectations are pretty low, but everyone else at the plant has high expectations. I do not know why, because most of the people who have come through our department in recent years have been disappointments. I expect we will hire a recent college graduate who will become frustrated with the position and leave in 2-3 years.
Classic failure scenario. You can’t get the “people people” to learn anything technical, so you go looking for a technical person who is also a people person. However, such people are rare, and don’t want the dead-end technical job you’re hiring for: they want YOUR job, or your boss’s job.
@A Definite Beta Guy
I’m reminded that U.A.Local 2019-03-243e (Vallejo) switched from accepting their apprenticeship applicants based on how well they did on a written test, to making the test pass/fail and then scoring them based on how much they impress a room full of contractors in an interview because “All the guys who did best on the test quit“.
I expect we will hire a recent college graduate who will become frustrated with the position and leave in 2-3 years.
It sounds like the problem there is that the role contains functional management requirements, while being treated and paid as “ordinary member of the accountancy team”, so I can see why someone would get frustrated about being stuck with the responsibility but not the job title plus perks, and leave for another job where they will get a higher rank.
I don’t suppose there’s any hope of some kind of mixed team, where the production-side people and the numbers people are on one team and can liaise with the respective departments, e.g. “Hey Joe, this is Bill; the bean-counters told me that the reason the Big New Machine is a no-go is…” and “Hi Tom, this is Mark, the grease-monkeys tell me that they really really need Big New Machine for production because…”?
That worked for a team I was on in social housing because at our monthly meeting it made it a heck of a lot easier if you could talk to one of the actual engineers about the reports and they could talk to you and then everyone went back to their respective departments knowing what was going on and able to explain it to their colleagues, instead of “yeah I’ll try and get one of the engineers when we’re back in the sub-office”, phonecalls and emails result, sit on your grug and wait for some response when they have time to get back to you and are not out in the field while progress is held up with the project.
I’ve come to suspect that this is a universal feature of dealing with college grads. At least for engineers, what you do in the workplace is never as fun as what you were doing in college, and the first job probably functions as a sort of reset for expectations. I really didn’t like my first job (although some of that was down to it being a technical writing job) and while I like my current one quite a bit, I’m not sure I’d be nearly as happy if I’d gotten it right out of school. This is supported by the new grads we’ve hired on, most of whom seem to be looking to move on.
A friend once asked if he could get a resume formatted like mine, so I deleted the body of the resume and gave him the file.
A couple of weeks later I got an email offering me a job I hadn’t applied for, because he never switched out the header.
Found the problem.
One thing I’ve learned: stingy companies still want blue supergiant employees, even if they offer brown dwarf prices. I’ve had seen companies flounder for years trying to find someone good to fill a role when the simple problem was either the job was too unpleasant in some way to be worthwhile or they weren’t paying enough in salary/benefits.
If Google is paying $200,000 a year and you’re paying $100,000 a year, Google is going to win. The logical thing to do is to start cutting things that are ‘nice to haves’ and to decide on what to prioritize. Then you’ll find employees Google rejected because they can afford to be pickier than Taylor Swift. A lot of hiring managers refuse to do this though.
This also applies to blue collar positions, albeit likely for different reasons.
Right before my father retired, he was working as a mechanical engineer handling the entire HVAC (and a great deal of the plumbing, electricity, etc.) for a fairly sizable office park. The reason that he was the only mechanical engineer was because the company which subcontracted him kept trying to promote custodians into the role. They had absolutely no training or inclinations for that kind of work but as illegal immigrants they would work much cheaper than an actual mechanical engineer… until each one inevitably quit or had to be fired.
“Penny wise, pound foolish” comes to mind.
It applies to any position that isn’t significantly subsidized/has large benefits not provided by the company. For example, it’s fairly easy to get even very pretty women to do amateur modeling because she gets social benefits from it aside from whatever you pay her. Many internships bank on a future, different company preferring to hire that person despite the lack of pay/benefits right then. And so on.
Outside that, there is a range of talent in the profession and a market rate. Some people are better and worse at their profession. And some people are more or less pleasant, kind, asshole-ish, etc. People who score high on both these tend to be towards the top end of the market rate or even above it. If you’re in the middle of the market rate, these people undoubtedly have better options than you and will probably take them. It’s best to accept that reality.
In general, it’s a failure of empathy/sympathy. The hiring manager doesn’t put themselves in the shoes of the potential employee they want. Sure, it’d be great for your company if Steve Wozniak showed up and worked fifty hours a week at your market average salary. What’s in it for Woz?
Once I heard a company boss explaining what would be their ideal employee. To make a long story short, the person should excel at almost everything that was needed by the company; not just their profession, but also management, customer relationships, sales, market research, strategic visions, etc.
I didn’t say anything, but my obvious thought was: why exactly would such person apply for a job? According to the description, they have all necessary skills to start their own company, and put the entire profit in their own pocket instead.
re: #5 – I do a lot of hiring, and this is my canned advice for new grads and people that are bad at job interviews:
1. Come up with ~5 stories about the best things you’ve accomplished professionally. They should be exactly like a story you would tell at a cocktail party – at most two minutes long, with a setup, conflict, and resolution. Practice telling them a couple times to a friend.
2. In the interview, when you get asked an open-ended question, tell one of those stories. If they say, “Tell me about a time when you disagreed with your manager”, pick whichever story is closest to that, and tell it exactly like you did when you were practicing except with one extra sentence in the middle that emphasizes or explains how you disagreed with your manager.
I’m going to be that guy and point out that it’s actually “typo” – from “typographical” – not “type-o”.
Regarding the “tell me a time you disagreed with your manager” type question – what’s the correct way to answer that, without seeming like you’re badmouthing a prior manager? Or is that OK?
For a techie position: We had a nice rational disagreement about means – never about ends – and settled it more or less amicably. (I presented my arguments, she made a decision based on them and other factors, and then we did it.) Stress that it wasn’t an open and shut case – even if you think it was – either your manager couldn’t be expected to know arcane-technical-detail, or it’s a situation where reasonable people regularly disagree. Bonus if your boss wanted to do something you suspect your interviewer wouldn’t do.
You need to voice your disagreement, in a respectful manner, with your reasons clearly explained. You also need to get on-board with the decision if it happened to be against you.
Your manager isn’t a god, a manager will absolutely make mistakes. Sometimes staff can catch mistakes and prevent them from occurring. This doesn’t even apply solely to disagreements with managers. If you disagree with something, we want to hear it, and we want to know why, but we don’t want you to be a dick about it. And we also want you to go along with the team whenever a final decision is made.
That reminds me of this article:
If you have good prediction skills, that’s true. But my experience is the best way is by being networked in the industry. If I had a bunch of money to hire a big team I’d reach out to a bunch of people I’ve met at industry vents and cocktail parties and who’ve given me lectures or whatever. They’re not active searchers but they can definitely be hired.
In my experience, there’s also a lot of opportunistic poaching to get top-tier employees.
I’m not so sure of that. When I hire, sometimes I get a better pool of applicants than others, it’s pretty apparent.
Huh, I thought that article would be about re-inventing the milk round but that company seems to go quite a bit further.
Thing is, though, that that advice won’t fit 99% of companies as well as the 99% who are not the 1% students, for the same reasons: your company may not be in the top 1%, fondly as you imagine it is. And you’re not going to want to throw money at college kids who, if they are superstars, are going to be snaffled from under your nose once you’ve trained them by the really big fish.
Maybe you don’t want or need the top 1%, somebody in the top 20% is quite good enough for purpose. And yeah, if you’re looking to hire a chartered accountant, even the really good graduates are not going to be the same kind of potential money-makers as the really good computer kids who are tasked with inventing a whole new product that the company can then make $$$$$$ off, so limousines and hotels with supermodels in the lobby is not worth the candle.
I think people can be a little sloppy about applications because they have it in mind “I’ve got years of experience in the industry, the really important bit is the interview, this is just to get me in the door”. Well, if you can’t or don’t take care to avoid basic mistakes (no date on the letter, poor layout, font too small to read, necessary information missing – yeah we really do need your home address, an email isn’t enough – and speaking of emails, please please please use a professional-sounding one rather than your personal account that you set up when you were eighteen and drunk one night and you thought patriciathestripper@yahoo* sounded hilarious) then that application is going to the back of the file and you won’t get in the door.
*Not a real example, but some of ’em have come close!
For me the important part was realizing that sup-par people (or companies) can be statistically overrepresented in the sample you meet, simply because the best ones are already taken, but the worst ones keep trying. This applies to various situations.
If you are a company looking for employees by posting a job announcement, consider this: the best ones get taken by your competitors, the worst ones have to keep applying for other jobs. Most overrepresented type of a candidate is the one who fails every interview, but is too stupid to realize that he is simply not fit for this type of job.
If you are an employee looking for a job by responding to job announcements, consider this: the best positions are already taken by other people who stay there, from the worst positions people keep running away if they get a chance. Most overrepresented type of a job is in dysfunctional companies, where people quit after realizing the mistake they made, but the management rejects any changes that could make people stay longer.
If you are looking for a partner, consider this: the best ones are already married to someone else, the worst ones keep approaching new people because they either can’t get a relationship or can’t keep it. Most overrepresented type of a man/woman is someone too horrible to live with.
To counter the incredible gloominess of this, I needed to remind myself that overrepresented doesn’t necessarily mean common. If horrible candidates / jobs / partners are 2% of the general population, then they might be ridiculously overrepresented and still be only 6% of the population you’re interacting with.
As does that sentence.
I am cool with this 🙂
I assumed “type-o” was a joke.
I’m a little surprised you are getting a lot of applicants. I contract in the tax accounting field, and I’ve been getting many many feelers out for my services in the last couple of years — I’ve been thinking that the market was real good for accountants right now, so you wouldn’t get too many resumes. OF course I am in a slightly different market. I have decades of experience, which I assume is different from what you are looking for. And I am in Minneapolis; I think you are in Chicago?
I do get kind of annoyed at the social skills looked for in interviews. I don’t really think interviewers are really any good at judging this. My impression is that they are looking for party animals that love to talk to people, because it makes them appear to be a “good fit” with the rest of the office. Good at making small talk seems to be how they judge leadership. I think the correlation is pretty low. Plus of course the company won’t want them to be constantly talking when on the job — someone has to do the work.
I never heard of the STAR format, even though I’ve had over 100 professional interviews over the years. I’m an old guy, is that a new fangled idea?
Those trick questions trying to trip up those folks who don’t think fast on their feet make me SO glad I only interview for temp jobs these days. I am frankly really terrible at interviews (which you might have guessed by my chip on the shoulder about this stuff), and I really hated those kind of questions. When I hired people, I never tried to trick them up, because I didn’t think it resulted in better hires. I thought I got some pretty good people.
I’m surprised you haven’t run into STAR questions yourself, since they are pretty much 99% of interview questions I have received in the past. I’ve only interviewed in big companies in the Chicago area if that explains anything.
I don’t like STAR behavioral questions much because they are easily beaten by a trained candidate. Dick’s advice does exactly this:
So if you can answer one or two really well, congratulations, you know how to beat a behavioral question. Then we can stop asking those.
What we really want isn’t necessarily someone that can small talk all the time, but someone who can work with other people to solve problems. The problems we have involve people who answer behavioral questions like they sit in a tiny silo that does not interact with anyone else, or basically treats other people like robots instead of people. We don’t want that, and most companies don’t want that. A lot of places can at least get away with people like that, but we can’t because we have a small accounting team, so all of us need to be interactive.
Not necessarily social soft skills. I was a socially awkward 20-something and I post on SSC a lot. You can infer my social skills from that and not be too far off.
I think the biggest problem with professionals is that they often have a hard time conversing with folks outside their specialty. So with accountants they may want to talk to production people about debits and credits, and overhead ratios, and manufacturing variances. Whereas the production folks are more likely to pay attention to tolerances and scrap rate and production speed. The industrial engineers use their own buzz words and the mechanical engineers different ones also. You may all be talking about the same thing, but with different words and a slightly different perspective. You need folks who understand the language of everyone else.
I don’t think the usual interview style will suss out such skills. If it’s really understanding the different groups, then I think the most important thing to do is just find the smartest folks you can (of course they need to have at least minimal social skills, and also not overly arrogant, both of which can be a disease of smart folks). When I hired people, the most critical factor is getting the best employees was their ability to ace a math test I gave to all of my candidates. OF course this was for Accounts Payable clerks, a wholly different class of employees, so perhaps I am all wet here. But I suspect even with professionals their level of intelligence is the most important piece. And I don’t think the smartest accountants are all swept up by the Big 4, because their accountants also need to pass the interview gauntlet, and not all the smart ones have the social skills to do this. SO there should be some out there.
This! Not so much the level of intelligence, as the ability to consider how to communicate to a specific audience, based on their likely knowledge and concerns. That’s a learnable skill, but lots of people don’t have it.
My impression is that they are looking for party animals that love to talk to people, because it makes them appear to be a “good fit” with the rest of the office.
I’m not one of those people and I am one of those people who does terribly at interviews. My jobs have mostly been “hired because they needed a warm body right then, were pleasantly surprised I could actually do the work, asked me to stay on”. The interviews I really wanted and worked like a dog to prepare for, I uniformly failed.
The ‘party animals’ are going to work in sales or the kind of customer-facing jobs that are not low-level grunts and where a talent for bullshitting will get you a long way especially when it comes to money and perks.
What we really want isn’t necessarily someone that can small talk all the time, but someone who can work with other people to solve problems. The problems we have involve people who answer behavioral questions like they sit in a tiny silo that does not interact with anyone else, or basically treats other people like robots instead of people.
I understand what you mean; someone who will not go “The facts are X, Y, Z and we require you to do A, B, C in response, why hasn’t this happened, it’s perfectly clear?” You need someone who can go “Ah howya Bill, how’s the form? Great weather for the time of year, isn’t it? Listen, I just dropped in to ask you about that oul thing, if you have a minute, can we go for a coffee in the canteen and I’ll tell you what the boss is on at me about?”
I’m not natively that sort of person (I’m the “here are the facts, gimme the results” type) but I can fake it in small bursts. Maybe the expectations for the job need to be turned down to get the “not the extrovert but can smile and make small talk when necessary” people?
That combination is deadly. If you think about a quadrant:
1) Went to Harvard and is competent
2) Went to Harvard and is incompetent
3) Didn’t go to Harvard and is competent
4) Didn’t go to Harvard and is incompetent
There’s no market failure when it comes to #1. They have their pick and they aren’t going to take your job unless it pays top of market *and* is interesting work *and* has great growth prospects *and* is where they want to live, etc, etc, etc.
Given that you can’t get #1, having gone to Harvard is a negative signal in your applicant pool. It’s highly likely that’s a #2. If you interview the not-Harvards there’s at least a chance you can get a #3. They may not stick around forever, because it sounds like your job opening isn’t great, but at least while you have them they’ll do good work.
FWIW, I just recently put some of my own credibility on the line to get someone hired that has a very non-traditional background. Hopefully moneyball works out for both of us.
Related:
I’ve recently failed a couple of interviews largely for not appearing interested/passionate enough about the company. For one of the companies, I wasn’t particularly passionate about the job apart from the salary, but for the other one I genuinely was but apparently didn’t express it! Has anyone else had and solved this problem?
#2: What kind of skills do you have in mind? My impression is that that highly transferable skills are completely abstract and unverifiable from a resume, so people don’t bother. There’s no concrete credential or qualification for communication, leadership, organization, or any of the other soft skills important for any job.
#4: This was taught to me in college, but 80% of interviews I’ve done have no questions that fit the format. I doubt it is widespread.
#5: Every employer thinks there are “correct answers”, so interviewees just give the answer most in line with the image they want to present. A depressing number of managers like completely agreeable employees.
#6: Combine the points I made for #2 and #5
#8: I doubt people value the signal as an indicator of employability so much as an easy shorthand justification. No one was ever fired for buying IBM or hiring the ivy-leaguer.
What do people think of this tweet? https://twitter.com/DellAnnaLuca/status/1102854634626985984
For people who don’t want to jump into Twitter, the text is
“The fact that (almost) all degrees have the same duration regardless of the complexity of the underlying field is the best evidence that education has been built around the universities’ needs, not the students’.” – Luca Dellanna
I hadn’t thought of it before, but requiring four years to get a bachelor’s degree in pretty much every discipline seems like an outright scam.
Not convinced. All degrees being the same length has obvious logistical advantages for a single university, and there are evidently incentives that encourage universities to offer a broad range of subjects. So one would expect content to be chosen to fill a set length. But also, I don’t think it’s true that all degrees have the same duration. The attitude towards master’s’ varies between subjects.
Why would those be significant? What makes it more expensive to offer a three year degree in one field, a five year one in another?
If you have some fixed length, it’s easy to predict how many students you’ll have in a year, so you can fill capacity in terms of housing, catering, classroom spaceetc.
The multiplication and such necessary to get the expected inflows and outflows assuming you have some 3 and some 5 year degrees is not nearly significant enough to make a difference. Many universities already have master’s programs ranging from 1 to 3 years and PhD’s ranging from 4 to 10 years. There is already significant variation in finishing time for the 4 year degree in the U.S. About 4 to 6 years is normal. And there are quite a few dropouts in the first year.
Maybe universities elsewhere are much stricter about time requirements, but in the U.S. I think it typically makes no difference.
I would expect PhD’s to require less logistical coordination in these areas, but you may be right. I was assuming the situation with undergrad timings in the US was similar to that in the UK, where dropouts and delays are not common.
At most California universities, most students aren’t on campus after the first year or two, so it makes little difference whether or not the students are PhD’s. I’m not as sure about other states, but a lot of places I’ve gone students are off campus after year one or two. There’s no worries about housing or food. Just classroom space. Which is almost always in excess except for the really big classes which students mostly take in their first two years anyways.
My dad did a year in the U.K., and assuming it hasn’t changed much I can see why that system requires tighter coordination. Everyone in a major had a professor/tutor they met each week who would test their understanding of the material. And they all took classes in lockstep. Super different from how the U.S. has been since at least the 70s if not a lot longer.
The educational “unit” in question isn’t really the degree but the course, or arguably the credit-hour which is how most majors are designated. Teaching and classroom distribution is done generally at that level.
Given that universities routinely accept transfer students and students with AP credits, the practical “modularity” of college courses suggests having degrees of varying course-credit lengths above and below 4 years is perfectly attainable.
That said this general twitter comment seems to be offering a minor critique to a very flawed system.
Credit hours aside, I think his point is still good. To pick a random college, here are the requirements for different majors from the University of Minnesota:
Degree, In-Major Credit Hours, Total Credit Hours Needed to Graduate, Difference
Accounting B.S.B., 79-84, 120, 41-36
Art B.A., 41-44, 120, 79-76
Astrophysics B.A., 72-75, 120, 48-45
Biology B.S., 69-78, 120, 51-42
Child Psychology B.A., 37-40, 120, 83-80
Classics B.A., 35-65, 120, 85-55
~70 extra credit hours to ~40 extra credit hours is nearly a year’s difference. At the University of Minnesota, that is $15,104-$33,330 (in-state vs. out-of-state) of additional costs incurred by requiring out-of-major credit hours to add up to 4 years.
The credit hours explains a bit, but not the padding to add up to 120. That just seems like graft on the part of the college.
References:
https://onestop2.umn.edu/pcas/viewCatalogProgram.do?programID=4
https://onestop2.umn.edu/pcas/viewCatalogProgram.do?programID=59
https://onestop2.umn.edu/pcas/viewCatalogProgram.do?programID=71
https://onestop2.umn.edu/pcas/viewCatalogProgram.do?programID=9
https://onestop2.umn.edu/pcas/viewCatalogProgram.do?programID=76
https://onestop2.umn.edu/pcas/viewCatalogProgram.do?programID=11600
https://twin-cities.umn.edu/admissions-aid
I just realized that you said that the credit hour makes a non-four-year degree attainable, not the other way around. Ignore my response, I think I misunderstood your position.
Yeah my point is that the indivisible unit for the university is the credit hour. So the question becomes, why is it that university degrees are created in packages of 120 credits when the actual course material associated with a degree most likely has more genuine variety?
The logistical advantages and broad range of subjects are advantages for the university more than the students – though that might not be a bad thing depending on whether you weigh the university’s preferences more than the students’.
Master’s degrees are a good example, but they don’t explain why, say, sociology with its 30 credit hour requirements make you take 30 credit hours in other subjects. Duration only goes up, not down, which seems like a point for the university over its students again.
You could consider Associate’s degrees as the inverse of that, but I think Luca’s point still stands. Having 4 ranked degree types still doesn’t explain why the Associate’s degrees are relegated to community college while universities offer Bachelor’s degrees and up.
I will say that thinking about your post has given me a caveat to my original beliefs. I think that community colleges are primarily focused on the benefit of the students over the university.
For sure, it’s definitely for the universities’ benefit, and only helps students in that cost savings from increased efficiency could in theory be passed on to them.
Alternatively, the amount of material is sized to fit the time allocated.
In the old days there was only one undifferentiated “Bachelor of Arts” degree that took three years for everyone. Earning a bachelor’s degree in something is a 19th-century innovation. So I think it’s just defined by the length of time, rather than the content or difficulty of the courses taken.
As for why the bachelor’s degree is four years in the US now, I understand it had to do with the Carnegie Foundation setting a standard and then only allowing universities that adopted its standard to enroll their faculties in its pension fund, now known as TIAA.
Well, degrees aren’t all the same length, of course. There are technical schools and community colleges that have 2-year or even shorter degrees and certification programs. And more complicated fields have longer degree programs, by virtue of requiring post-graduate programs to do anything with it.
Well yes this is clearly true. It gets back to the theory that the value of the degree is to signal that you can hack a four year degree. The subject is secondary. And if a particular subject only takes two years to learn what you need to know, everyone in the profession knows that a two year degree will be seen as inferior to four year degrees. So they figure out more stuff you need to know to fill the four year degree.
The duration of college studies is less strictly defined in Germany, but this is not without its consequences. It’s apparently quite possible to hang around universities in Germany for years without accomplishing much. I remember speaking to a German about that, and he was firmly of the opinion that having college be a defined length is a positive feature of the American university sector. Setting a clear expectation that college is four years, even if some students actually end up taking a bit longer, makes it easier to clear out the time-wasting laggards.
One critical difference between Germany/The Netherlands etc and UK/USA etc. is who bears the cost.
In the latter countries, vaguely hanging around university, or even getting superfluous masters’ sounds like a good way to rack up astronomical amounts of debt.
What about the students’ social needs? Having everyone on the same schedule might be helpful there, and who you know is just as important as what you know as far as job prospects go.
At Dutch universities, bachelors are typically 3 years, but masters can vary from 1 to 3 years. Masters at technical universities typically are 2 years, while most other masters are 1 year. Some or all medical masters are 3 years.
The lower tier Dutch colleges typically have a 4 year bachelor, presumably mainly to reduce the pace for the lower tier students.
An interesting example of someone completely ignoring the taboo around a tradeoff.
@rims,
I’m guessing “knife arches” are what we call metal detectors.
It’s news to me that we call metal detectors knife arches, but Google informs me that we do – or at least that government-/corporate-speak calls them that, in some contexts.
You know, while i’ve been convinced that there is zero correlation between legal gun ownership and gun crime, i do in fact believe that there is a correlation between gun ownership and mass shootings (using the “random spree killer” definition rather than “gangbanger shot four people” definition). The thing is, i oppose any further gun regulation because i’d rather have guns and mass shootings than no guns and no mass shootings. In fact, i want to open up the machinegun registry again, because i think having military weapons in civilian hands is more important than preventing the next Stephen Paddock (Vegas shooter) from having a real machinegun.
@rlms – Openly stating a preference for that side of the trade-off in this context is taboo, although the entire of society involves more subtle trade-offs that decide death ratios, A: because it’s a lot more direct, and B: because there was probably a more delicate and roundabout way to state this.
@Lillian
Honestly, the only alternative is to believe that the military will protect the people by refusing to follow the orders of a tyrant, but AI changes that completely. If you can automate the military, which will surely happen in the not too distant future, you can snip the last thread tethering government to the people. I want the right to bear arms in the form of guns now, because pretty soon we are are going to need the right to bear increasingly advanced drones so as to head off the historically novel form of state coming down the pipeline; a pure elitism, with no attenuating mechanisms.
This is a frequently proposed argument of the pro-gun side that to me seems to fail on several points:
1) The first thing a tyranical government will do is try and take away the guns. So say you have acquired a heavy machinegun. What do you do when the police comes knocking at your door to seize it? Shoot at them? You will last all of 2 hours before being neutralized by SWAT teams.
2) Let’s say that somehow you managed to keep your guns when the government really loses it and civil war breaks out. So what? What will a bunch of untrained civilians with heavy machine guns accomplish against drones, tanks, attack helicopters and heavy artillery from the highest-budgeted military in the world?
3) Let’s say that the government did take your guns, but civil war still breaks out and for some reason you do’t feel like living more than 6 months and so you want to fight. Well in that case, there is something called the black market which surprisingly seems to be extremely good at furnishing weapons to the underdog side during a civil war. So you get your gun anyway (except you pay for it twice since the legal one was seized by the government).
I think there is a common fantasy in the western world where everyone think they’ll be a brave underground resistance fighter comes a tyranical government, when the reality is that threatened with real life or death consequences (not to mention torture), most of us will stay home, shut up, and do as we’re told.
I see this a lot in France where everyone think that back under the Nazi occupation, they would have joined la Résistance, even though the number of résistance fighter never was above 1% of the total population (and that’s toward the end, it was much lower, by an order of magnitude, for most of the war).
1. That scenario is exactly the point. House-by-house fighting is extraordinarily brutal and costly: there’s a reason why they have to send a whole SWAT team in for a single guy with a shotgun. Conducting hundreds of thousands of such raids would be very costly in terms of lives and money, which dissuades would-be tyrants from attempting to disarm the American people.
2. Ask an Afghanistan or Iraq war veteran how harmless insurgents with small arms and homemade bombs are. It’s unbelievable that people still have their heads in the sand about this after all the wars we’ve lost to civilian militias.
3. Or, here’s a thought, I could just buy one now when it’s legal and easy and then just hold onto it instead of relying on hypothetical future black marketeers. This makes no sense.
1. but this completely misses the point that the government doesn’t need to send the SWAT everytime, because most people when actually faced with the threat will actually surrender their guns, no matter what they’re now saying they’ll do then.
2. because as we all know, american civilians with no training and used to a peaceful life are exactly equivalent to afghan militias which already had decades of experience with insurrectional conflicts when the US showed up.
3. so do you believe that say, the Free Syrian Forces already had all the weapons and arsenal they’re fighting with before the beginning of the war? Well it sure didn’t prevent Assad from oppressing them!
From “The critical fraction” by Eric Raymond:
How many guns have been lost in ‘boating accidents’ over the years?
I figure that’s the main issue with trying to take all the guns in a short timeframe (i.e. sub-decade).
And I think the outcome of this kind of armed resistance is more likely to come out looking like a complete collapse in civil society than some clean 1776 scenario, but a deterrent is a deterrent.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/182409543824-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
I think we may be at the point where it’s counter-productive to try to convince the marginal gun-grabber that armed resistance is plausible and effective. Let them be surprised.
@Incurian
It’s not the marginal gun grabber who needs to be convinced. It’s the wishy-washy conservative or “moderate” who might think the issue isn’t that important and they can just safely sell out gun owners to get whatever else they want.
What % of gun-owners are the sort of people who would go along with each possible flavour of tyrannical government? Let’s not make the assumption that owning a gun, or even a semiautomatic rifle, is evidence that someone is hostile to authority in general.
The number of guns floating around in the US would make any tyrannical government’s job harder. However, Americans tend to overrate the prospects of guerrillas, because they have only ever fought guerrillas in foreign countries. It’s very easy to make life hard enough for the foreign power that they will give up and go away. Domestic governments usually beat guerrillas.
In most countries with guerrilla/terrorist groups that fight against their own government, the government did not completely win. They usually had to sign agreements and give amnesty.
Colombia and Northern Ireland had a negotiation. In the Basque Country, you could consider it a case of the government winning, but a) the Spanish government is not tyrannical, b) it was a mostly internal Basque process*.
The Mexican government have not defeated the Zapatistas. Russia has not defeated the Chechens; they’ve just basically given up, and let them do whatever crazy thing they want to do, as long as they do it in their land. They also pay them off to keep them from messing inside Russia.
And the Russian army is one of the most powerful armies in the world. Sure, it’s not equal to the US, but gun ownership is not a constitutional right in Russia.
Where exactly has the government managed to defeat guerrilla groups? I just can’t think of any case.
Guerrilla groups are terrorists with legitimacy. Defeating terrorists is already very hard. Defeating terrorists when they have many hidden allies in your community, because your government is tyrannical, is much harder.
*The defeat against ETA was not so much a military defeat, as a propaganda defeat. After a certain point, ETA stopped being considered a freedom fighter and became an outcast. But I am sure that if the Spanish government was really a tyrannical organization, ETA would continue existing, and they would be popular.
This thread is fascinating. It’s helping crystalize why I don’t like or trust a largish set of Americans, mostly right wingers. (Not, I hope, a majority, even of committed right wingers.) Also why the term “culture wars” is used.
First of all, there’s a huge difference between foreign conquest, and a home grown dictatorship. Many of these people aren’t preparing to be invaded by the powerful aggressive military forces of Canada or Mexico. (Though I did read one prepper novel where the foreign conquerors were authorized by the UN, and mostly came from France.) They think violent suppression by The Government is a risk worth preparing for, in the US.
Second, they think they can and will fight off this government, doubtless the way the Germans fought off Hitler, the Russians fought off Stalin, and the Italians fought off Mussolini. (All of which didn’t happen, for those historically challenged.) As it happens, I imagine they’d be more likely to enthusiastically support any populist dictator – but failing that, most would simply comply out of fear for themslves and their families. And those who didn’t comply would fail, short of extreme squeamishness and/or lack of solid support for the dictator.
But the important thing to me is this understanding that violence – or the threat of violence – is a normal part of political discourse. Not just in the (I hope) symbolic sense used by libertarians, where “men with guns” turn up as the ultimate reason for obeying any law whatsoever.
I don’t like this. I prefer countries to be civilized, and solve things without recourse to violence. The US has been more willing to violently destabilize foerign governments, and to get involved in wars, than just about any other first world country, throughout my lifetime. Many of its citizens are also much more willing to consider a second civil war than I would like.
Somehow, this thread is making that clearer to me.
@DinoNerd
So you don’t like or trust them because you don’t think, based on your own priors, that they will live up to their own principles?
That’s not symbolic at all.
The general way things are solved without recourse to violence is that the losing side concedes that the winning side can and will apply sufficient violence if push comes to shove.
To Steelman the pro-gun position a bit: it’s not that a sufficiently ruthless and popular dictator couldn’t crush a bunch of uppity gun nuts, it’s that he’d have to be ruthless and popular in the first place. That is, having a well-armed citizenry isn’t a fool-proof way of stopping dictatorships, but it does make it harder for a would-be dictator to succeed.
@ana53294
I’m going off of the 2nd edition of War by Gwynne Dyer. Which, admittedly, I do not have a copy handy of right now.
To name a case where the government won: the Sri Lankan civil war ended in a pretty conclusive government victory, didn’t it?
I think in the case of the US, if Washington goes tyrannical, the question is the degree to which state, county, city, etc governments cooperate, the military in general and individual units specifically cooperate, etc is the #1 question.
Another way of putting this: no one looks like at Ruby Ridge and Waco and thinks “hell yea, the federal government needs to be more like that!”
Tyranny is not a binary, it comes in insidious gradations that can be applied subtly over time, so people become accustomed and come to accept them. The American public has already accepted all manner of tyrannical intrusions into their lives, and even allows the people charged with perpetrating these intrusions to have privileges and immunities afforded to no-one else. The first thing a tyrannical government will do is all the things they have already done, and all the things they will continue to do, all with the people’s tacit consent.
Nonetheless, it is precisely because of its many gradations that it is possible to resist tyranny, for the people to stand up and say “No”, without resorting to maximum force. Incidents such as a the Bundy ranch stand-off are very rare, but the fact remains, Cliven Bundy still has his cattle, and the reason he has his cattle is that the people who showed up to defend it did so armed. The authorities couldn’t simply forcefully disperse the protesters and then continue with the confiscation because the protesters were protected by men with guns. So they backed off, and they have continued to stay backed-off years after the last protester left.
When full blown tyranny comes to America, i expect it will be welcomed with open arms and shouts of “FREEDOM!”, as if the mere act of saying it made it true. Or worse, the people will thank their new masters, with weeping eyes, for taking their nasty freedom away. Still, with an armed populace there is a chance that when the ratchet of tyranny finishes putting the noose around our necks, the American public might wake up and do something about it before the floor drops. Without it there is no hope at all.
I fail to see how someone stealing from the commons with impunity is a sign that tyranny is being held at bay.
The Sri Lankan Civil war took 26 years. That is an entire generation.
Sure, a government can win a war against a guerrilla. But the Tamil Tigers only claimed a region of Sri Lanka. So the Sri Lankan government had the benefit of a big part of the territory that was relatively peaceful and could function in producing food and doing everything else you need to feed and clothe an army of soldiers.
Even that benefit is not always enough, as is shown in Colombia, Mexico and the Ukraine (although in Ukraine’s case, the guerrillas are getting weapons from Russia).
In the hypothetical that you get an unpopular tyrannical government in the US, and people decide to fight against the army, action would take place in the entirety of the US. There would be nowhere to safely produce food or build cars to buy food. The government would not have a safe logistics train.
I think the hypothetical US guerrillas that are fighting against a tyrannical government and are perceived as legitimate by a significant percentage of the population would give the US army a run for its money.
@ana53294
My point is that Americans look at Vietnam, where they were fighting both guerrillas and conventional forces – with the latter making up a larger portion of the communist forces (I think it was Harry Summers who pointed out that a lot of people confuse “war in a jungle” with “guerrilla war” but I’m not sure) and conclude that guerrillas have some kind of secret sauce. That has as much to do with Americans (or French, or British, or Soviets, or whatever) as it does with the guerrillas or with the communists (or whatever) more generally.
A tyrannical American government fighting against its own people would have much stronger reasons to stay in the fight than a democratic American government committing troops and money in South Vietnam against communist guerrillas and conventional troops from North Vietnam.
There’s also a lot of unknowns as to the nature of this tyrannical government, the nature of the resistance, etc. Again, I think the disposition of sub-national governments and the military are more important than plentiful AR-15s.
I believe that your model of politics is very naive. And, statistically speaking, it is likely a result of your personal experience, because most people are too small fish to be directly threatened by the major forces, and unless you are an investigative journalist, you probably don’t notice when it happens to others. (I mean, people credibly threatened by violence usually don’t post blogs about it. Neither do people who actually get killed.)
I am not an American, and I don’t know much about American politics. I live in Eastern Europe, where e.g. journalists getting killed now and then for knowing too much about some political deal is a part of life; something that creates an outrage for a month or two, but then, life goes on.
I find it quite likely that for each one person who is known to be murdered for political reasons, there are maybe ten people who also got murdered for political reasons, but we (the public) don’t know about it; maybe hundred people who were threatened by serious violence against them or their family members; and maybe thousand people who received minor threats, such as the possibility of losing their job.
And although America seems more civilized, I believe they are still essentially the same species. So I would expect this kind of violence to be perhaps less frequent (per capita), but to still exist.
Every society has organized crime. The organized crime has an incentive to get political power: to make their activities safer, to protect their people when they get caught, to eliminate competitors. The only question is, how high they can get.
To give you a local example, in Slovakia, Štefan Harabin is a former minister of justice, currently a judge of supreme court. He is also friendly with various forms of organized crime, is a close friend and a protector of an internationally sought drug lord (this was documented, their phone discussion was recorded and released publicly, however his friends in judiciary and in the Direction party helped to stop the entire investigation because… technical reasons). His face and rhetoric are similarly disgusting. Recently he ran for president… and received the third highest number of votes. (The only reason he didn’t get more is because he was targeting the same part of population as the local Nazi leader.)
Now, this disgusting pig is a specimen typical for former communist countries. But I believe that more civilized countries also have… essentially, a more civilized flavor of the same kind of guy. More careful about his tongue, more careful about covering his tracks, maybe higher IQ. However, organized crime and government both have the same goal: power over other people. Of course they are going to court each other.
Other examples from Slovakia where the line between politics and organized crime disappears: 1, 2.
And… to return to the original topic, I believe that politician exist on a spectrum. Some of them are completely decent. Some of them are parts of an organized crime group. And a lot of them are in between, using some shady methods now and then, but trying to avoid getting too far. (As opposed to believing in a few bad apples that always somehow magically succeed to infiltrate a group of angels.)
On the other hand, those politicians with criminal connections would certainly like to make debating about their violent side unacceptable as a part of the normal political discourse.
@The Nybbler
No, the real problem is that I fear they agree with you – the normal/right way to relate to other people – at least at the level of fellow citizens, perhaps even at the level of friends, neighbours, and family – is by violence and its threat.
I also suspect – or maybe just hope – that those Americans who talk as if this is the only way they can imagine to relate to their countrymen in this way – will in fact mostly wimp out if their lives were really on the line.
Note by the way that there’s a difference between “normal” and “right” above. It’s not wrong to use violence – or its threat – against people who do the same. It is, IMO, regrettable, and to be avoided whenever possible.
I don’t believe it’s in fact normal, at least within any reasonably functional group.
Compare a country where assassination is a normal tool of politics, with one where it is not. Which do you really want to live in? My guess is that you may not see a difference – you expect such behaviour everywhere, and the only counter to it you see, is for the folks defending the politicians to be more competent, better funded, etc. (Though I’m unclear why they wouldn’t themselves kill their charges. There’s no loyalty in a worl where everythign boils down to violence or the threat of violence.)
Whereas I think there is an implicit social contract, where most people actually agree to be governed, and taxed, and approve of most laws – even while opposing some pretty stridently.
What I’m noticing – again – is how many Americans talk, and to an extent act, as if there’s no limit on what their fellow citizens might do … to them or others. (And of course even more so with regard to outsiders.) And at the same time, how that implies pretty clearly that there’s also no limit on what they themselves might do. If the only reason you don’t kill and rob your neighbour is fear of the police, then I’d really not have you for a neighbour. And ditto if that’s what you believe to be my attitude – you might just commit a pre-emptive strike the first time you thought you could get away with it.
In the political realm, this is just how it is. I want to drive 95mph, my “fellow citizens” want me to drive over 65… well, I either yield because if I drive 95mph a man with a gun will put me in a cage, or I don’t because I figure they won’t catch me. Either way it’s all about force. Same with flying toy helicopters. There are places in this country where if you let your lawn grow a few inches too long, this will start a process which ends with you being thrown out onto the street by armed agents of the state. The reason this doesn’t happen all the time is only because people yield to the superior force long before that point. It’s all about force, and if you believe otherwise it’s probably because you’ve never pushed it.
I think that’s a strawman, at least when talking about the “resisting tyranny” type of discourse.
I doubt all that many Americans actually believe their neighbors would kill them if they could get away with it. Most people are decent, true sociopaths are rare, and even if murdering your neighbor wasn’t punished by police, social disapproval would be enough to stop most people (or you know, just thinking that your neighbor is a decent person and not having some compelling reason to be violent towards them).
But start aggregating preferences and using those to drive the decisions of a large entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and things get iffier.
We already have examples of governments being more violent than you’d estimate by looking at citizens’ opinions and behaviors. Consider the war on drugs, and how few people would spend their own time and money finding pushers in their neighborhoods and shooting or imprisoning them (or paying private security to do it). Contrast with the now routine use of SWAT teams to serve drug search warrants (62% of all SWAT deployments in 2011-2012). Germany has taken custody of children away from their parents due to homeschooling. The FDA has conducted armed raids on those selling raw milk.
Your neighbor isn’t going to kill you, but he may very well elect someone who will pass a law that puts you on the receiving end of state violence. After all, he has done so many times already to other people (and so have you).
That’s because it’s not a sign that tyranny is being held at bay, it’s a sing that it could be held at bay. It pains me that the people who came out to defend Cliven Bundy did so for so unworthy a cause, but it gladdens me that at least someone is willing to defend something. They went out there and proved that armed civilians can in fact stand against the government.
Thanks for explaining this so well. I couldn’t figure out a nice way to respond to the ridiculous claim
I wouldn’t be so worried about the results of trying to get rid of all the guns except the government’s if my fellow citizens didn’t keep electing legislatures who were so aggressive with the “use guns” solution to whatever happens to be bothering them at the moment. The fact that many of them don’t think very hard about the fact that a large subset of legal rules they impose on others are backed by the threat of violence is infuriating.
Yes, taboo tradeoffs don’t get made. But usually people respond to “so you think dead children are an acceptable price to pay for [x]?” with question dodging, not “yes, or at least one dead child is”.
Well, there is this meme.
I have frequently heard the theory that one of the regrettable side-effects of increasing gay acceptance has been the decrease of physical expression in same-sex friends, mostly in males.
Spain seems to be a country that accepts slightly more expressions of male friendship (although hand-holding and sitting on each other’s lap is not a thing), while being as accepting of the LGBT community.
I can’t speak for the whole Spain, since there are many cultural differences between the regions. But in the Basque country, social interactions tend to be very gender-segregated. Friends tend to form same-sex groups and they go out together.
America in the 19th century, and the modern Arab countries, would probably also be very gender segregated in the social, non-romantic scene.
Female and male physical affection tends to be slightly different. Girls tend to prefer grooming, boys like to wrestle each other. When the two gender mix, physical forms of affection would be partly supressed; girls don’t like to be punched, and little boys don’t particularly like to be groomed.
So, while increasing acceptance of homosexuality may play a role, gender desegregation in the social scene may also play a role.
Some conservative religious groups in Spain argue for gender-segregated schools, saying they are better for boys. This could be partly true if segregation can lead to deeper friendships.
This photographic essay on male affection and friendship in America actually argues the opposite to your first sentence. Looking at photographs of groups of men from the 1920s* onward, it notes a decline in affection and physical closeness after WWII, right around the peak pathologization of homosexuality in the US. The essay agrees with you that gender segregated socialization plays a role. (After WWII American youth socialization became more co-ed, and in fact during the 1950s some psychologists theorized that gender segregated socialization encourage homosexuality.)
My impression was that men showing physical affection for their male friends has become somewhat less stigmatized recently (at least hugging is more acceptable?) but I don’t have anything to back that up.
* I think — none of the photographs are dated, so I’m going off the essay headings.
I don’t think that article argues the opposite strongly. It doesn’t look at post WWII trends (hippie boomers are probably more physical than yuppie gen-x) and the NYT article it links is a completely anecdotal look at a few high schools. My experience is that same-sex physical displays of affection (SSPDAs) have become less frequent recently, though it is impossible to mentally separate societal trends from increasing social awareness as I’ve grown up.
My experience does confirm the gender-segregationist component, as sports were the one place that SSPDAs were always seen as both positive and platonic.
I’ve heard @ana53294’s first sentence called “signaling hazard”, that is, the risk of others taking one’s actions (SSPDAs) to draw incorrect conclusions (one’s homosexuality). Both widespread pathologization and widespread pride increase signaling hazard because they both increase public awareness of homosexuality as a concept and an identity, which increases the public estimation of percentage of gays. The public massively overestimates the percentage of gays. Increasing those rates increases the likelihood others will use SSPDAs as confirming evidence and, proportionally, avoidance of SSPDAs to avoid being perceived as gay.
Based on recommendations here I’ve been reading some of the articles at Vox.com and one of them criticizes Joe Biden for “inappropriately touching women“.
He was the leading candidate for the Democratic Party nomination despite not announcing if he was going to run, but it’s not 1992 and I think his chances just died.
My late grandmother loved Biden, and I think he’d have a better chance in the general election than any other candidates, well he won’t have a chance now.
Sanders is polling at about 19% of Democrats, after Biden’s (until now) 29%, but even at her 8% I’m guessing Kamala Harris wins the nomination, and barring body bags or soup lines Trump gets re-elected.
Looking at those, they felt like hit pieces by people who support one of the other candidates. The “inappropriate touching” they describe isn’t sexual, it’s the sort of thing someone from a culture where hugging people is normal do.
These stories appeared at the point when it looked as though Biden might get the nomination.
So what you’re saying is that he is also guilty of the crime of cultural appropriation?
Biden is more than half Irish, so we will have to ask our local experts on Ireland whether hugging people is part of their culture.
whether hugging people is part of their culture
Remember to leave room for the Holy Ghost! 🙂
Not really, though Modern Times may be different. It’s acceptable to hug at funerals as a sign of support/sympathy, though traditionally it’s more “line up to shake hand of bereaved, mumble “I’m sorry for your trouble”. Biden’s generation certainly would not have been brought up to be touchy-feely, though being of the age to be a grandfather and hugging/touching children and youngsters wouldn’t be that unusual.
Coming up from behind and sniffing hair etc. is more the “embarrassing drunk uncle at a wedding” and unlike Kavanaugh, he didn’t have the excuse of being a teenager with too much beer on board but being sober and adult.
I’m inclined to agree that (a) he probably was and is a bit handsy but (b) this is a hit-piece because we’re in the “clawing out each other’s eyes” stage of seeking the nomination for the Democrats. Once the field has settled down to a couple of candidates, and there’s sufficient space between the losers and winners, Biden and the rest will be rehabiliated as good party members whose support is to be solicited for the good of the country as I make my pitch to be The One.
@avidFriedman
The headline matters more than the story so far as it influences votes.
Even if primary voters regard the allegations as not “a big f…… deal”, how it effects the general election will be in mind.
It’s weird, I’ve been hearing about this for months. What exactly did people update on? Was the surprising point that some news organization decided to make it common knowledge?
Yeah, I’ve been hearing about it on the disreputable right for ages. What’s changed is that one of the women he behaved affectionately towards wrote an article and the article was published. We don’t have to believe the disreputable right, but we do have to believe women, especially Latina Democrats, so now it’s ok for the Good and Decent people to notice.
Hard to say if nobody had tried to write an article like that before, or just no one Good and Decent was interested in publishing it before Biden looked like he was going to take the nomination from somebody’s preferred candidate.
also, the disreputable right mostly memed about it online based on seeming video / photo evidence, whereas the Latina Democrat is describing stuff that actually happened to her (and seems much worse).
Biden has not really been dragged through mainstream media mud over this. There’s been criticism from some sources, but Biden has not been in a competitive election or primary, so there hasn’t been wall-to-wall coverage of the accusations.
Diving into a 20-person primary, though, and he will likely get attacked at some point. If the attack proves effective, other candidates will double-down on it.
My bet (if I had to bet) would be Harris.
Biden has not really been dragged through mainstream media mud over this.
Not to worry, Vox is on the case! It’ll be interesting to see if this gets any traction in the traditional media, though, and not just from right-wing and online sources where it’s been a meme.
@Scott Alexander
Then your more “in the loop”, as it was news to me.
Yes, exactly that.
Being made common knowledge makes all the difference.
When the story hits broadcast television, where older Democrats (who are more likely to support him) will learn of the headlines it will be all over for Joe’s chances.
“The internet is not real life,” they say. Nobody on the internet is particularly in favor of Biden and yet he’s been leading the polls since they started polling. And now this has the chattering classes ablaze, but none of them liked him before. Will it change the polling? Who knows.
Personally I find his behavior abhorrent and it’s a disgrace that this won’t stop his candidacy here and now, but what do I know? I’m from the internet and the internet is not real life.
I was expecting something like this. I’ve seen some semi-joking references to Creepy Old Uncle Joe about allegedly inappropriately touching children, but given that he was down as one of the runners for the nomination, that the field is very crowded, and that there are a lot of these ‘revelations’ coming out about various candidates (“did you know Tulsi Gabbard/Kamala Harris/Kirsten Gillibrand/Amy Klobuchar is problematic because of this, this and this” news stories popping up all over), I think this is just internal back-stabbing amongst the candidates to thin out the field.
The lady doing the accusing doesn’t help herself with the Twitter profile photo depicting her looking goofy, at the most charitable, plus her Twitter bio – what the heck is a SoulCycler?
Then again, if Swetnick et al (I’m excluding Blasey Ford from this, her accusations were at least credible to make in what she alleged happened) and their loopy stories were good enough for people in the rationalsphere to go “I’ll give them at least some credence and confidence”, then this is good enough to sink Biden.
One down, ninety-nine to go!
SoulCycle is a trendy cycling exercise workout routine/gym franchise mostly attended by upper middle class to upper class urban women.
Thanks for the information. I have no idea why you’d want the world to know about your exercise routine, but I suppose if it signals “I am an upper middle-upper class professional living in a large urban centre” then that’s what it’s there for.
See also: Crossfit
I called it earlier. There is just no way that this was going to be kept out of the campaigns in the current climate.
Also, Warren is weighing in and not on the side of Biden.
Well, Warren has no chance at all in the Election 2,000 Guineas Stakes, so Biden’s fate makes no difference to her chances. But given L’Affaire Kavanaugh, the Democrats have to double down on #BelieveAllWomen or else look like two-faced partisan hypocrites, so they made their bed and they can lie on it.
Going off at a tangent, reading up about the Guineas Stakes brought me to Newmarket and the Rowley Mile which is named after Charles II’s favourite racehorse which itself inspired a nickname for the king:
I love that Biden’s record on the war on drugs does nothing to diminish him in the eyes of Democrats, but inappropriate touching does. Quite a world we live in.
The standard Democratic position only flipped in the last 8 years or so from “Drugs are evil, lock all the bastards up!” to “Marijuana is cool but all other drugs are evil, keep locking the bastards up!”
#BLM and other criminal justice reform types are a fringe. Libertarians are an even fringier fringe.
10 years ago I would have said “goodbye Biden, and good riddance.”
Maybe my standards have been lowered, but I would really like a boring technocratic good-governance Democrat in the White House, and he looks like the best bet.
The CIA have apparently released a lot of papers via FOIA on the Chinese practice of qigong, with some seeming to show evidence of impossible acts. I’m also aware that in the past they’ve unclassified some of their studies on other supernatural effects. Has anyone read enough of these to have a good idea of what they actually say or conclude?
I hadn’t, but I found this interesting enough to take a quick look. At a high level, they seem to mainly be reports written by Chinese scientists and doctors about Qigong, up and down the spectrum from “interesting but believable effects consistent with some results on eg meditation, the benefits of exercise, etc” to “credulous report of inexplicable paranormal abilities”.
For an example of the first, there’s an excerpt from a larger paper which discusses the effects of Qigong on EEG readings, brain hemograms, and electrical skin resistance, which concluded
. They also show improved brain bloodflow in middle aged people who begin practicing 5-7 hours per day, etc.
For example of the second, one paper by a Dr. Li reported a case of a man named Zhang Baosheng, who lived a basically ordinary life as a factory worker, until one day becoming involved in a dispute for reading a coworker’s letter through it’s envelope as if that was a normal thing everyone could do. After being picked up by China’s Institute of Space Medico-Engineering, which appears to be a real thing, he was investigated by their scientists and found to be able to pass objects through sealed containers, burn clothing, and more, while being filmed at 400 FPS by a camera. They assert,
The paper brings up the possibility of sleight of hand / misdirection, but concludes that because the guy’s life is basically fully controlled by the ISME, there’s no way he could have received the requisite illusionist’s supplies, tricked all the investigating scientists, and done it consistently, on command, on film. And he just seems like an honest and sincere fellow.
Another case involved a rare combination of unusual Qigong powers and high education in the form a Dr. Xin who healed a broken bone by Qi projection, as verified by before-and-after x-rays.
At a basic level, there are two possible explanations: one, this is actually happening, and two, no it’s not.
Personally, I’d like to see the 400 FPS video, and would like to read the published papers as well – unfortunately I don’t speak Mandarin. Really, I’d like to meet Mr. Baosheng, which also doesn’t seem feasible. The paper says the institute takes as settled the existence of his powers, and only allows research access to people who are searching for explanations of the mechanism of action.
I have a pretty strong prior on magic not existing. I also know that there are well known problems with the veracity of Chinese science. And it’s also the case that during the 80s and 90s, the Chinese government was pleased by the emergence of the Qigong and traditional Chinese medicine trends, as examples of native Chinese culture which could be held up as countervailing forces to Western / “Universal” culture. (Then in the late 90s / early 2000s, they became less pleased as results like these continued being published and popularity grew to the point of threatening state control, so they started putting practitioners in camps, and executing them on demand for their organs.)
So, I would assign pretty high probability to the control group being out of control, as exacerbated by known research-quality issues and an environment which promoted motivated research and credulous approaches to investigations that should have been conducted skeptically.
Then again, by Cromwell’s rule, I can’t assign 0 probability even to something which falls outside the explanatory power of modern physics, and the part of me that thinks that names and narratives have power, that there may be unusual interactions between Many Worlds and consciousness, or even that this is all simulated, clamors for a generous 0.1% probability. In that modality, my first thought would be “I knew Anathem was real!”
Chalid’s comment
reminds me of this visualization.
I don’t know where that comment is, but it isn’t true. Park Slope wealth wouldn’t be exceptional for Manhattan, but that makes it exceptional for NYC.
https://streeteasy.com/building/294-12-street-brooklyn/2?featured=1
That’s not any kind of extraordinary block, in fact it’s too far south to be Park Slope proper. $1.3 million for 1200 sq ft. Plus carrying costs (taxes, common charges) of $1500/month.
Bayside is a family friendly neighborhood that’s richer than average but not exceptionally so, Park Slope is something else altogether.
The price of a single neighborhood doesn’t address how the neighborhood compares to other neighborhoods. The visualization provides a lot of information.
If I’m reading it right, it says Park Slope == Lower East Side, which I think supports the conclusion of “exceptionally rich for NYC though not Manhattan”.
OK, so you consider the word “extraordinary” to be less strong than I do.
Concretely, much of Manhattan is richer than Park Slope. So are parts of Brooklyn that are closer to Manhattan than Park Slope. And there are various patches around the city that are similar to Park Slope.
Fair enough. Park Slope isn’t Billionaire’s Row or even Carnegie Hill. But a friend of mine is a long time resident with two kids. At PS321 PTA events, he’s definitely on the poorer end; he rents and couldn’t dream of buying despite a HHI of ~$300k. It’s a crazy city.
The Senate is considering a bill condemning antisemitism. As a Jewish person, I’m generally speaking okay with that. Pleased even. But the proposed bill apparently specifically calls out accusations of dual loyalty as antisemitic.
As it happens I live in the world capital of Jewish culture and so have a chance to talk to a lot of different Jewish people. Since the last presidential election a topic of these conversations is sometimes Donald Trump. I’ve had more than one such conversation with a modern orthodox person or a baby boomer conservadox person where my interlocutor said in essence: I don’t especially like Trump as a person, I don’t especially care for his domestic policies, but he’s good for Israel.
What exactly is antisemitic about pointing out that if you are a single issue voter and that single issue is the interests of a different country rather than the interests of your own country (by your own standards even), then you aren’t very loyal?
It’s antisemitic because it reflects poorly on Jews? It’s not really particularly complicated.
It seems like a logical extension of identity politics: all criticisms of the ingroup are racist/sexist/otherist, while no criticism of the outgroup is out of limits.
Because it’s basically an isolated demand. Jews being loyal to Judaism or the Jewish state is the same as (for an example) Mexicans being loyal to Mexican identity and advocating for friendship with Mexico. Or the Irish advocating for Irish identity and that the US should support Ireland. Or Germans supporting Germany. Or (to go all the way back) that Hungarians keep Hungarian culture alive and push the US to back Hungary against Austria. You can say the same for Catholics, Buddhists, Muslims, etc.
In fact, digging into the Muslim one somewhat, you can look at Rashida Tlaib who has openly stated she votes (in part) because she believes the US should have closer ties with the Arab world and specifically Palestine. Does she have dual loyalty? A nativist might say yes but most people are demanding that standard only from certain, specific groups. Not just Jews, but it’s a common part of other anti-semitic tropes.
It’s not anti-semitic because Jews cannot be disloyal. Of course, they can be. If we caught an Israeli spy, I’d fully want them to be punished as any other spy. But this is about all Jews and not based on any specific, real incident or towards any specific, real person. Prejudice is not investigating Germans connected to Nazi Germany in 1942. It’s interning all of the Japanese. In both cases, some are disloyal and should be punished. But in one case, the entire community is blamed. In the other, only specific individuals are.
Some make an isolated demand, but others make exactly the same complaint about Mexican-Americans (you probably heard from or about them during the Trump campaign). And Irish-Americans, too, a common complaint once being about their willingness to fund terrorists.
Sure. Nativists are a thing and can be equally said to be prejudiced against everyone with foreign ties. It’s still somewhat an isolated demand because they don’t apply the same standards to (for example) people who have dual loyalty to non-foreign groups. But that’s at least a fairly consistent principle.
But it isn’t isolated.
Weren’t people suspicious of Presiden Kennedy because he was Catholic and thus loyal to the Pope?
One of the very important objections of anti-immigrationists is that the new citizens will have double loyalties. The US army even banned the enlistment of Green Card holders because of the double loyalty. Having a family member abroad was disqualifying. Don’t many American Jews have family in Israel?
Depends on how far out you define family members. If you include second or further cousins, yes. If you are only talking about parents, siblings, children–no. Though the answer might well change if you limit yourself to Orthodox Jews.
That anti-Catholic prejudice seems to have faded out.
For most people it is. There are Nativists who have a clear rule: no foreign ties whatsoever. It’s still somewhat a double standard unless they can justify why domestic or theoretical ties (like to global warming) are better. But it’s xenophobic, not inherently anti-semitic.
However, when it comes to (for example) Ilhan Omar, who openly advocates for the Somali community, it’s at least hypocritical and probably anti-semitic. Likewise for most Democrats and Republicans, who can’t really be described as universally nativist.
I think advocating friendship is soft peddling the position I outlined. I’m sure that there are other people from other cultures that are similarly single issue voters, but the only other ones I can recall saying so directly are Venezuelans.
And there’s another distinction: the Venezuelans I’ve talked to were themselves born in Venezuela. That kind of dual loyalty is expected and understandable. You can’t flip a switch. The MOs I talked weren’t born in Israel. Nor their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great grandparents, great-great-great grandparents—even to the tenth generation. Does one expect Elizabeth II to maintain a superior interest in the welfare of Hanover to that of the U.K.?
To give one example, Cubans. Most of them have been here since the ’50s at the latest. Most of them still very keenly influence US policy on Cuba. The same can be said of Latin Americans and immigration. And so on. You are singling out the Jews as especially loyal without much in the way of evidence. Notice too the sophistry: you go from talking about a tie to a ‘superior interest’.
And yes, Elizabeth II is still an Anglo-German. She can speak German, celebrates Christmas in the German manner, married a German… She was loyal to her country in both wars but she was and is Anglo-German.
But is it wrong to criticize Cubans if they vote or lobby things that would harm the US while benefitting Cuba? I haven’t heard that happening, but if it does, it wouldn’t be wrong to point that out, wouldn’t it?
No sophistry here, I outlined the position of my interlocutors in the very first post. They don’t think Donald Trump’s domestic policies are good, but they support him anyway because he’s good for Israel. How is that not a superior interest?
It’s based on personal experience. I’d be willing to wager I’m in the 99th percentile of regular SSC posters in terms of fraction of time in a typical week spent talking to American Jews. I have the vague memory that there’s one orthodox Jewish woman floating around, and I think she’s American. If so, she might well beat me.
I’m certainly in a better position to understand the range of beliefs among American Jews than random Christian conservatives from middle America.
On the other hand I will admit it could be the case that all my non-Jewish friends and acquaintances of various Scandinavian, German, English, Irish, Chinese, Filipino, Latin American, etc, etc, etc backgrounds are also single issue voters on the basis of whether American foreign policy is favorable to those countries and they just happen to not want to talk to me about it (other than the aforementioned Venezuelans). Seems unlikely though.
Both wars? She was born in 1926.
I’ve certainly seen plenty of complaints about Cubans in the US having their politics shaped by Cuban concerns (mostly anti-Castro) rather than US concerns.
Surely if she didn’t want Germany to gain European supremacy, she would do something about this Brexit shambles? Who benefits, I ask you?
She doesn’t have that kind of power nowadays, outside of the kind of plausibly deniable ability to make political commentary afforded by the art of the milliner.
Correction, Roosevelt did not intern “all the Japanese,” nor did he intend to intern any US citizens. Roosevelt had credible intelligence that Japanese in America and/or Japanese Americans still loyal to the Emperor were being used as spies or sabateurs along the west coast. His order established “exclusionary zones:” areas from which people of recent Japanese descent were excluded. Japanese people in those areas were ordered to leave, perhaps moving further into the interior of the country. Those that did not move on their own were moved by the government to what were officially called “relocation” camps, from which they were expected to move to somewhere else in the country that was not part of the exclusionary zone. There were also some exclusionary zones on the east coast that applied to American citizens of German or Italian descent.
However, because most people would rather wait out the war in a camp and then return to their home and community on the west coast rather than strike out for Ohio or something, the “relocation camps” became “internment camps.” Still, about 20-25% of Japanese Americans moved to the camps left and resettled elsewhere rather than wait out the war.
Just saying, FDR did not intern “all the Japanese.” If you were a Japanese American living in Ohio, nothing happened to you at all. If you were on the west coast, you were moved to a camp, and then either waited there until the war was over or you moved yourself somewhere else, e.g. Ohio.
There was, however, one camp that was more like a prison camp, but that was for citizens of Japan, rather than Japanese Americans.
Would the same be true if the single issue is something other than the interests of a different country?
Would you describe someone who has strong views on the need to prevent climate change as disloyal? What if he believes, what might well be true, that climate change will impose costs mostly on countries where too much heat is a serious problem, such as India, and he himself lives in a country where too much cold is a problem, such as Canada?
Similarly for any other single issue voter whose single issue is not the interests of his own country.
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone that’s said they didn’t think climate change would have any negative impacts on the United States but it was the only issue they cared about anyway. For better or worse, single issue climate change voters tend to go whole hog on apocalyptic predictions.
Similarly, American Jews who are pro-Israel argue that supporting Israel is in the interest of the U.S. The question is whether you can predict their position more accurately on the theory that it is determined by what is good for Israel than by what is good for the U.S.
Similarly with climate. Almost nobody who is concerned with climate comes out and says that global warming will be good for countries such as Canada or Russia, but is bad because of its effects on India and Bangladesh. But it’s hard to believe that anyone living in Canada hasn’t noticed that it is too cold there much more often than it is too warm, or that sea level rise has little effect on a country most of whose inhabitants live much more than a few yards above sea level.
See my original post for anecdotes to the contrary.
You think global warming/climate change will be good for Canada? At best, it will be less bad than for many other countries.
This is I think, an exaggeration. E. g. I certainly think it is very plausible that GW would benefit Canada and Russia and also I am very concerned about its overall global impact. Maybe I am an insignificant minority, but it is widely asserted that lot of effects of global warming for Russia will be beneficial. For example Vladimir Putin said that (see here). And it is unlikely that nearly all people who share this view would be unconcerned about global warming effects on India.
Yes. Very.
I haven’t done any detailed calculations, but I expect that 3°C of warming will come close to doubling the effective area of Canada, the amount of it that is warm enough for people to conveniently live and grow crops, as well as making most of the areas where people now live more livable. I’ve seen an online discussion of the expansion in agricultural land.
Doubling Co2 concentration will increase the yield of most crops (Maize is the one important exception for Canada) by about 30%, other crops by a lesser amount (C3 vs C4 crops).
To see the effect on Canada of sea level rise of a meter or so, the high end of the IPCC projection for the end of the century on the high emission scenario,, take a look at the Flood Maps page, zooming in on the east or west coast of Canada and varying the setting between 0 and 1 meter. I can’t detect any difference, but perhaps could if I zoomed in even farther.
The effect on rainfall is unclear–the current IPCC report retracted the claim in the previous report that AGW had increased droughts. The effect on hurricanes is also unclear–Chris Landsea concluded, a while back, that strength would probably go up a little, frequency go down a little.
The one big, predictable, form of climate change is warming, and for a country that far north that’s pretty unambiguously positive.
Why would you believe the opposite?
The question is whether anyone in Russia who wants to reduce AGW has said that. Or whether you have said that you think AGW will benefit the country you live in but still want to prevent it.
Interesting that Putin has said it. I had conjectured that he believed it, but thought he was going with the pretense of not believing in AGW.
I completely agree with @DavidFriedman about Canada. Late last year, I read a Wall Street Journal article reporting how a warming climate is helping northern Canadian farmers expand production, which IIRC took a surprisingly neutral-to-positive perspective on it all.
I’ve never met a single issue voter who says that he votes for the issue even if it hurts his/her own country (other than the issue being another country).
For any issue other than your loyalty being with another country, people will find a justification why this is bad for their country too.
Climate change single-issue voters will say Florida will get underwater, and where will we house all those people from Miami? Farmers who demand to keep their subsidies will talk about food dependency. Anti-war activists will talk about widows and dead soldiers and how much money is spent on that. Police violence activists will say that police violence destroys communities. Pro-lifers will say that killing foetuses is bad for their country.
Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter; on any issue, there will be people who are wrong and right, but they are sincere. They truly believe that the issue they care about will destroy their country.
It is much harder to justify why helping Israel/Venezuela/Ireland will benefit the US, even if the actions you are taking for that directly harm the US. It’s much easier to argue that slowing the US economy to prevent climate change will means Texas doesn’t get flooded with Floridians.
A bit harder to make an analogous argument for Canada, or Sweden, or Norway. Yet there are enthusiastic supporters of costly policies to slow global warming in those places as well
Well, global warming will be bad for conifer trees in northern regions.
Trees acquire frost hardiness during autumn; this mechanism is activated by short-day photoperiod and by cold temperatures (hardening starts when temperatures go below 5 C). When temperatures increase and photoperion lengthens in spring, trees lose their resistance to frost.
Hardening is a very slow process; dehardening is much faster (3-4 times faster).
For a tree, having a long, cold winter is much better than having a winter with lots of interspersed periods of warm temperatures. So yes, warmer winters will be bad for the flora of northern countries, also. Because plants will wake up from dormance, and right when the buds are most sensitive, a frost will happen, and the tree won’t grow that year.
I’m thinking about the difference between:
(1) “I believe that Policy X is actually totally fine for my country, for reasons you may not agree with”
(2) “I acknowledge that Policy X is bad for my country, but I’m voting for it anyway because I expect it will have good effects on Country Y”
The example that comes to my mind involves Trump withdrawing support for NATO. If he does that because he wants to save money for the US, that’s a valid decision even if we don’t agree with it. If he does that because he wants to weaken the US’s influence and increase Russia’s influence, that’s really bad.
(and of course there’s also a globalist position, “I acknowledge that Policy X is bad for my country, but from a utilitarian perspective I think it will have good effects on humanity as a whole.” We generally carve out an exception for that one, but I don’t think either the Russia example or the Israel example falls into this category.)
Right. It may be technically disloyal to put the interests of humanity as a whole above those of your own country but it isn’t offensively disloyal in the same way as putting the interests of some other country above those of your own. So in his example it makes a difference if the person is specifically worried about India vs more abstractly about the future of the planet.
The issue with these anti-semitism laws is moving goalpoasts. And it may be very counter-productive to those who are advocating for Jews.
Now, most people will agree that anti-semitism=bad. But the definition of anti-semitism they use will most probably include stuff like (from worst to less objectionable):
Killing, imprisoning and torturing Jews for being Jewish; advocating for the murder, imprisonment and torture of Jews; spreading malicious lies about Jews; denying Jews access and opportunity to work, study, buy houses, and live peacefully; denying the Holocaust.
But then zionist activists start trying to amplify the definition of anti-semitism to things like criticizing Israel and criticizing Jews who help Israel. And many people don’t think those things are bad. I personally don’t think those things are bad. And then, when a popular politicians is accused of anti-semitism, and it turns out they were not Holocaust deniers and they don’t deny Jews job opportunities, and their main sin is going against the Jewish pro-Israel lobby and accusing them of divided loyalties, then many people will start asking “Was this person accused of the OK sort of anti-semitism or the bad kind?” and when almost all cases of supposed anti-semitism are the OK type, people will stop caring about anti-semitism accusations completely, because they’ll think “Oh, there’s another pro-Palestinian who was just slightly critical of Sheldon Adelson or whatever”.
Agree completely. In my opinion the Likudniks are appropriating and burning the Jewish commons for their own ends.
This is all true. But it’s also true that actual Jew-hating anti-Semites will make an attempt to hide their anti-Semitism behind criticism for Israel, including accusations of “dual loyalty” for Jews in general (much as Catholics were once said to have loyalty to the Pope). I don’t, however, think it’s worth passing resolutions to get at these people, since they tend to be incredibly easy to spot — either they’ll forget and rant about “the Jews”, or their screeds will look like they did a search and replace of “Jew” with “Zionist”
Anti-zionism being dog-whistle anti-semitism in many cases may be true. But I don’t think that banning this type of activity will turn out anything.
In Spain, we are in the middle of a political campaign. Having any kind of political symbol in public building is banned. So there was this whole hullabaloo over Catalan civil servants hanging yellow laces on public buildings, in solidarity with the imprisoned Catalan politicians.
A City Hall was forced to remove all yellow laces from their building. They then proceeded to put a very, very big banner that says “We’ve removed the signs after 80% of the municipal plenum voted for it” in big yellow letters. And they also put a figure with a bottle of Fairy detergent*, and the text “Well, you get it”.
And I am sure that even if the Spanish government bans the color yellow from all public buildings, as dumb as that would be, Catalans will come up with another simbol.
*Allegedly, the detergent was placed on the stairs during the referendum to trip the police.
So while you can ban direct expressions of anti-semitism, you can’t ban dog-whistling, because censure just leads to more creative ways of expressing the same thing. Anti-semites will find a way to dog-whistle anti-semitism, even if they completely stop mentioning Israel.
Could you please give at least one example of this happening? While I hear this complaint a lot I have never yet heard anyone claim that any criticism of Israel is per se antisemitic. I’ve only heard people attribute antisemitic motivation to those who they believe criticizes Israel
unfairly or applies double standards (e.g., those who complain more about the death of a few Hamas “activists” than about thousands of Christian or Yazidi civilians).
It’s not a double standard to criticize your brother-in-law for groping someone at a party even though there are violent rapists. Your brother-in-law isn’t some random bad actor out their in the world somewhere.
If Israel and its supporters wanted it to be treated exactly the same as Myanmar, i.e. mostly ignored, by the West that would be one thing. But instead it and they want Israel to be treated as special when it comes to the benefits but to be immune from the criticisms that come with being high profile.
I’m reminded of celebrity complaints about paparazzi.
I think this is somewhat unfair to celebrities. Although there’s obviously a bit of symbiosis there, it’s not hard to imagine an actor who really likes acting but doesn’t do more than required publicity wise for the job (advertising the movies they’re in etc.). It seems unfair that they should have to put up with tabloids. There’s no moral requirements for an actor that don’t apply to a normal person and vice-versa.
I suppose there are people like that. But in contemporary times it seems like a lot of the celebrities are not celebrities because they are actors, sports stars, musicians or whatever — they are specifically sought to become celebrities and exploit their fame for money and attention. Then there’s an entire group that is famous solely for being famous (e.g. the Kardashians).
If the JD Salingers of the world are being chased by paparazzi, sure that’s a more sympathetic complaint.
Sure there are people famous for being famous, but the paparazzi hardly constrain their harassment to those people. I bet famous actors and sports stars are the most common targets. Well them or politicians.
I’m pretty out of step with popular culture, but my impression is that the Kardashian types are still not the majority of celebrities.
Could you please tell me what special benefits Israel gets from the Western Europe (compared to, for example, Morocco) that explain the special treatment of Palestine compared to Western Sahara?
WarOnReasons:
My best guess is that Israel is a first-world industrial democracy, so it mostly gets held to first-world industrial democracy standards worldwide. Whereas Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc. are horrible third-world dictatorships, so they get held to a much lower set of standards worldwide.
@ Brad:
I find this analogy unconvincing for a couple of reasons. For one thing, plenty of far worse regimes are propped up by Western aid without receiving one tenth of the criticism. For another, it’s not like the Palestinians are all just innocent victims who just want Israel to leave them alone. Heck, Hamas’ founding charter explicitly disavows any compromise and commits the organisation to total destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jews. So I think a better analogy than groping would be getting into a fight with someone who refuses to admit defeat and keeps trying to beat you up no matter how often you knock him to the ground.
@ Albatros11:
I’m not sure that being a first-world industrial democracy counts as a “benefit” when dealing with the West — indeed, as you point out, third-world dictatorships get treated more leniently, so arguably it’s a drawback.
Also, I’m not sure that comparing Israel to other first-world industrial democracy is reasonable, since most such states aren’t surrounded by countries that want to see them destroyed. Maybe France isn’t occupying and settling large swathes of German land and refusing to give Germans the right to vote in French elections, but then Germany hasn’t elected a government which calls France an illegitimate state and openly supports genocide against the French.
@The original Mr. X
Extermination of the Jews is not in Hamas’ charter.
—
Israel is discriminating against Arabs/Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and violating international law in not allowing refugees from past wars to return to their homes.
Many of the victimized Palestinians never fought against Israel, never voted for Hamas, etc.
Your rhetoric of collective punishment and the conflation of various Palestinian groups is common in pro-Israel rhetoric. This is just as racist as holding random American Jews responsible for the actions of Israel.
@ Aapje:
I think you’ll find it is. I won’t link to it, because my last comment didn’t display, and it might have been because the anti-spam filters didn’t like me linking to a terrorist organisation’s document. But you can easily find it by googling, and in Article VII it says:
Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
It also contains such comments as:
“The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgement Day?” (Article XI)
“Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement… Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?… There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.” (Article XIII)
“For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there… You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.” (Article XXII)
“The Islamic Resistance Movement calls on Arab and Islamic nations to take up the line of serious and persevering action to prevent the success of this horrendous plan, to warn the people of the danger eminating from leaving the circle of struggle against Zionism. Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country or another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.” (Article XXXII)
You get the picture. Anyway, I think it’s these sorts of texts which make anti-Zionists get accused of anti-Semitism. Hamas officially endorses conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the world, explicitly rejects the notion of compromise or peaceful solutions, claims that Palestine (including the present-day State of Israel, in case it needs pointing out) is inalienable Muslim land and that no non-Muslim state can legitimately possess it, and aspires to realising Allah’s promise, which includes the killing of the Jews by the Muslims. In other words, it’s perfectly obvious that, if they were able to, Hamas would do far worse to the Jews than Israel ever has to the Palestinians, and that, as far as they’re concerned, any peace can only be temporary. And yet it’s Israel that gets singled out for criticism in large parts of the West — because, apparently, taking military action against a bunch of people openly calling for genocide against you is racist, or something.
Many Israelis have never victimised Palestinians, either. If criticising the Palestinian government is verboten because #notallpalestinians, criticising the Israeli government should equally be so. Funnily enough, though, it never seems to work that way.
What rubbish. It’s a common figure of speech to talk about state or parastate actors as if they were individual actors — “Britain wants to leave the EU”, “North Korea wants to develop nuclear weapons”, “The US wants to strengthen economic ties with China.” It would be really dumb or really disingenuous to reply “No, because plenty of Americans don’t want to strengthen ties! You’re just employing rhetoric of collective responsibility and conflating various American groups, you big old racist!” So this insistence that it’s somehow racist to talk about the Israeli-Palestine conflict without using such locutions just comes across as an isolated demand for rigour.
Not to mention, you’re making the demand of the wrong person. It was Brad who first compared a state actor to an individual when he likened Israel to a guy groping someone at a party. If you object so strongly to such comparisons, maybe you should take it up with him.
@Mr. X
You are arguing the wrong question. You’re basically saying the B-I-L did nothing wrong. That’s a fine position, part of a debate I’ve been having (been on both sides BTW) for 25 years. I deliberately didn’t reopen that debate here.
All I’m saying is that Israel and its supporters definitely want it to be considered a fine, upstanding member of the first world democracy club. Given that it is totally reasonable to give its actions more scrutiny than some random 3rd world dictatorship hellhole. The constant whataboutism by Likudniks is not convincing.
@The original Mr. X
I agree that Hamas’ old charter is antisemitic and justifies violence against Jews. I disagree that it unequivocally calls for extermination of the Jews.
The passage you quote is about judgment day. Just like in Christianity, some religious people believe that judgment day should be hastened, while many do not. Hamas has hawks and moderates.
The latter seem to have gained influence, as Hamas has adopted a more moderate charter in 2017.
In the past, Hamas has shown a willingness to do all in their power to stop attacks on Israel, if part of a reasonable agreement where Gaza gets necessary goods. In fact, Hamas has shown itself to be a lot more reliable than Israel, who severely violated that agreement, while the violations on the part of Hamas were very minor.
In general, my opinion is that Israel has almost never shown a reasonable commitment to peace, with their zero-tolerance demands on others, especially when combined with an unwillingness to make good on their own promises. You can never achieve a peace deal if you cancel deals in response to militant actions by a tiny minority and if you demand that others obey a peace deal fully (or more than fully), while you yourself refuse to uphold even the majority of your own end of the deal.
Note that while Israel demands complete cessation of Palestinian violence, we have strong evidence that there is wide-spread Jewish violence against Palestinians (mainly by settlers), which Israel is obligated by international law to police. However, Israeli military and police forces seem to have a severe bias to Jewish civilians and against Palestinian civilians.
In my opinion, Israel is mostly to blame for the current situation, as well as for the radicalization of Palestinians, because it continuously denies Palestinians their human rights, expropriates Palestinian property and in general doesn’t reward moderate behavior on the part of the Palestinians. So I think that desperation on their part is fully understandable.
Ultimately, surveys show that the majority of Palestinians prefer a peaceful two-state solution, but that they have largely lost hope. This makes sense, as neither cooperation nor resistance has worked for them.
You are playing equivocation games here. My statement was about the “actions of Israel.” Interpreting that as if I criticized individual Israelis, so you can call me a hypocrite for not wanting all Palestinians to be blamed, is not honest or fair.
In fact, its also unfair even if I had blamed Israelis, because I argued against blaming Palestinians as an ethnic group, not as citizens of the Palestinian state (which doesn’t really exist). This should be clear since I talked about refugees who lived in what is now Israel. These people are not citizens of a (future) Palestinian state for now (although they might become citizens as part of a peace deal). So the correct juxtaposition in this context is Jews vs Palestinians, not Israelis vs Palestinians.
A common and just complaint by those who favor the current policies of Israel is that blaming all Jews for Israeli policies is antisemitic, yet the corollary that blaming all ethnic Palestinians for the actions of Hamas is similarly racist, seems to be a rare sentiment. This makes the complaint of antisemitism seem less than principled, but more of a weapon used in the defense of a favored group.
PS. Note that “the Palestinian government” doesn’t exist at the moment. You have the Palestinian Authority who runs the West Bank and Hamas who runs Gaza.
Sure. There was actually a conversation in some open thread were UK Labour’s antisemitism was discussed, and a person was insisting on the IHRA definition of antisemitism, because it’s the one legally accepted in the UK. I am not very good at looking through the archives, but there are people who sincerely believe that.
From that link, the points I think are the OK type of anti-semitism, if we use their definition:
Obviously, accusing all Jews of being loyal to Israel first would be wrong. But this definition insists that accusing any Jew of having his loyalties with Israel first is anti-semitic.
*I don’t think discussion on whether the foundation of Israel itself, the way it was done, was legitimate self-determination, is wrong.
I’m sorry, but the example you provided does not fit your original statement (“the definition of anti-semitism … criticizing Israel and criticizing Jews who help Israel”). In fact, your link specifically says that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic”.
It also seems quite a stretch to say that “discussion on whether the foundation of Israel itself, the way it was done, was legitimate self-determination” is equivalent to saying that “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”.
Regarding the phrase “Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel…” which you interpreted as “Antisemitism is to accuse any individual Jewish citizen of being more loyal to Israel“. I believe what the phrase really meant is that “Antisemitism is to accuse Jewish citizens in general of being more loyal to Israel“. To me, this interpretation seems more consistent with the rest of the text and the standard English usage.
A lot of the things Israel does are racist, though. And I think this definition kind of hints that criticizing Israel’s racist policies is anti-semitic.
The issue here is with “similar”. If somebody says Israel is an apartheid country that discriminates against some of its citizens based on race and uses racial profiling in policing, is that anti-semitic? It’s not like that is a criticism that can be directed at any other country, because there are currently no countries at the moment, except maybe China with the Uyghurs, that does something like that.
The “double standard” argument is also frequently used against BDS. Is there any movement that specifically tries to boycott, divest and sanctions companies that commit atrocities in Myanmar, or China? No, although there should be. Does the fact that the movement against Israeli settlements and companies that support it exists mean that they are anti-semitic? Well, if it does, for me, it’s the OK type of anti-semitism.
Do you mind explaining your motives? What makes you focus your antipathy on Israelis rather than, for example, Moroccan occupiers of Western Sahara or Sudanese Arabs in Darfur?
I’m curious about this too. Israel looks like a Jewish ethnostate, from all the media coverage it gets. But wasn’t Sudan likewise run as an Arab ethnostate that enslaved black infidels and eventually.got noticed by the UN for not treating the black Muslims of Darfur as equals? Hating Israel is an isolated demand for rigor if lots of nation-states are run by the main nationality to the detriment of others and they aren’t hated equally.
I care more about atrocities my government has materially contributed for.
There is an anti-Moroccan movement, too. The anti-Western Sahara occupation movement is a smaller movement, mostly centered in Spain, because of historical guilt (we fucked up the decolonisation). So I know many people who have actively participated in both pro-Sahrawi and pro-Palestinian activism. My neighbours fostered for many summers Sahrawi refugee kids, but they also participate in anti-Israel protests.
A lot of people may focus more actively on anti-Israeli activism for the same reason a lot of Spaniards focus on Sahrawi rights campaigning: because they feel their countries are or have in the past materially helped to create the current situation. Which is why they focus so much attention on this.
Sure, what is happening in Burma and China is terrible. But if our country did not fuck up something that led to this horrible thing, we may feel less worried about this, than about cases our country is directly or indirectly responsible for.
As I said, there should be a BDS movement against what is happening with Uighurs in China. More attention should be paid to what Morocco is doing, also. More pressure needs to be made against the Burmese government to stop the massacre of the Rohingya. There are many worthy causes, but it may make sense to focus on one issue if you think you are going to be more effective this way. And if your government is actively helping one of those countries that are commiting those horrible acts, and not helping the other countries, it makes sense to focus your efforts on the country your government is helping. What influence does Spain have over Burma? Do we even trade that much with them? So it makes more sense to focus on Sahrawi issues than on Rohingyas.
And the same with Americans. Does the US give as much help to Morocco as they do to Israel? Doesn’t it make more sense to focus on pro-Palestinian activities, considering how much the US government helps Israel?
I also have never heard pro-Sahrawi groups ever get accused of Islamophobia, while pro-Palestinian groups do get accused of anti-semitism.
My government has sold weapons to Israel and Saudi Arabia. They have a special, albeit complicated relationship with Morocco. My government, to my knowledge, does not trade with Sudan, or sell weapons to Sudan. So it is logical to me to campaign against weapons sales to the Saudis and Israel, and to address issues with Morocco, and ignore Sudan, because there probably isn’t that much that can be done by pressuring the Spanish government. Spain does trade with China, and we should do something about what is happening there, but I am not sure much can be done, considering how massively big the trade is. We can stop trading with Israel, and it won’t harm us; stopping trade with China would be ruinous.
When South Africa had its apartheid system, wasn’t it also the target of significantly more protests than would be justified by the conditions of the population alone? I don’t consider it particularly surprising that Israel’s version of apartheid similarly draws protests.
I think the main distinguishing factor from random oppressive dictatorships is that the countries otherwise appear, and try to appear, more civilized.
@uau:
South Africa was a white minority republic at the time it was bashed as much as Israel. Israel is a… white majority republic?
I wonder what a POC ethnostate would have to do to people to attract as much negative publicity as Israel or apartheid SA.
WarOnReasons:
If Israel is doing some wrong thing, it’s okay to point that out, even if you don’t first point out every worse thing done by every other country on Earth. That is the same rule that applies to other countries–the US, UK, Spain, etc. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing the corruption in Mexico even if the corruption in El Salvador is worse; there’s nothing wrong with criticizing human rights violations in Turkey even when Saudi Arabia is much worse, etc.
To count as single-issue voters, these people will need to actually vote for Trump next time. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly voted for Trump. The non-Orthodox voted overwhelmingly for Hillary.
You’re confusing Orthodox with Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox). Brad said “modern orthodox” to exclude Haredi. This says that Orthodox voted 55:40 for Clinton.
(Also, while Haredi are more Republican generally and pro-Trump specifically than Modern Orthodox, they are less concerned about Israel.)
I have to admit that even the 55:40 surprises me. I’ve been hearing from other people on the right, for going on two decades, about how the Jews are all going to come over to us Any Day Now because the left is now full of Jew-h8rz. I’d gotten so used to dismissing it as wishful thinking that it’s startling to see it come true even to that limited extent.
I don’t know any haredi in the sense of someone that I could have a casual conversation with. That’s mostly a result of deliberate decisions on their part to isolate themselves.
I’d say it depends on how the law is framed. If it calls out accusations that Jews in general are, simply by virtue of being Jewish, more loyal to Israel than to the US, then I think it’s reasonable to define that as anti-Semitic. If, on the other hand, allegations against specific individuals or positions are singled out, then I agree that anti-Semitism is being defined too broadly.
I’m Jewish and I think this is very bad. Even aside from all the problems with the vagueness of the term “antisemitism”, there should never be a law condemning any belief, even if it’s an irrational belief that bad things should be done to certain people (“kick the Jews out”/”kill all the Jews”/etc.). We already have laws against doing bad things to people. Let’s enforce those (and encourage all eligible citizens, including Jews, to exercise their 2A rights) and leave it at that.
That said, I’m not terribly concerned about this bill for two reasons: one, I don’t know but it seems like a publicity-seeking reaction to all those videos Youtube keeps recommending about some Somali representative from Minnesota who I wouldn’t have heard about otherwise; and two, because (based on the admittedly scant description given in the OP) it’s clearly unconstitutional and even if it passes through congress it won’t get very far before a court strikes it down, and then we’ll have a(nother?) precedent of a law attempting to control speech being struck down, and that’s a good thing.
I think there’s a significant problem when discussing (say) the influence of AIPAC or Israel on US politics is being discouraged by the danger of being accused of anti-Semitism. That’s a discussion that needs to be possible, and it certainly seems to me, as someone who’s not paying a lot of attention to the matter, like that kind of accusation does, in fact, discourage critical commentary on AIPAC in the US.
I’ve always been surprised that black Americans are not more stridently pro-2A. When the majority has done awful things to your group in the past, being well armed is a good deterrent to prevent the majority from doing awful things to you in the future. It’s hard to enslave people who are well armed.
An argument that is frequently used by gun control activists was that as soon as the Black Panthers started to open carry, it was banned. So those who defend the 2nd Amendment are insincere, because if they really cared about people using guns to defend against a tyrannical government, they would support copwatching.
Since the Mulford Act was 1967 and was particular to California, and like many gun-rights supporters I wasn’t born then and have never lived in California, I find that argument to be entirely baseless.
I agree with what Nybbler said. I don’t have any problem with the black panthers or anyone else open carrying.
I would prefer universal constitutional carry. I have a concealed weapons permit, but I don’t think I should have to. The constitution says my right to keep and BEAR arms shall not be infringed. Requiring a permit for me to bear the arms I had before losing them all in a tragic boating accident is an infringement on my rights.
I always remember those Oath Keeper guys who showed up armed at the Ferguson protests and had to frantically explain “no no no, we’re not here to shoot protestors!” while leaving the unsaid implication “… we’re here to shoot cops”.
For a lot of people who are not loyal to their country of citizenship, pointing that out is not an insult.
In certain parts of Catalonia and the Basque country, people* will get more offended if you call them loyal subjects of the Spanish crown than if you insult their mothers. If you accuse a Sinn-Feinn voting ex-IRA British citizen of being a loyal subject of the British Crown, they may very well punch you. Of course a member of the ‘Ndragheta will be loyal to his brothers first, isn’t that the natural state of the world? Russian Chechens are loyal to their clan first, and they don’t mind you saying that.
Why do American Jews get offended by the accusation of not being loyal to their country? Because they want to be perceived as being loyal to their country. Well, if so, they should start actually putting their country first, if they don’t want to be accused of disloyalty.
*I am one of those people. My main objection being to being a subject of the Crown, and to being called a Spaniard second.
I agree with you on the merits, Brad, but if you let the “dual loyalty” comments go unanswered, you’re basically plunging right into this kind of rhetoric.
I can’t help but be bitter towards the Likudniks for putting me between Scylla and Charybdis. If they weren’t cynically appropriating and exploiting the antisemitism commons then I wouldn’t be in the position of either having to tacitly support their cause or risk being a bedfellow with actual antisemites. I mean I’m unhappy with the actual antisemites too, but I didn’t expect any consideration from them in the first place.
ana:
I’m not 100% certain, but I think one reason a lot of American Jews may be extra-touchy about allegations of dual loyalty involves the Communist witch-hunts we went through a couple generations ago. We had a large Jewish community who at that time were mostly second-generation immigrants, and in that community there were a lot of really smart people who became important parts of the US scientific, political, government, media, and academic worlds. Also, in that community, there was way more support for Communism and socialism than in the broader population. One result of that was that there were prominent Jews who were targeted as Communist infiltrators. (One really famous case was Oppenheimer, who managed to effort to build the first atomic bomb.)
I’ve never read anything indicating that Oppenheimer was targeted for being a Jew. There were a lot of reason to suspect Oppenheimer. He was deeply sympathetic to communism and his wife and brother were communists which is merely circumstantial, but he lied to the military about being approached as a possible Soviet Agent by Haakon Chevalier. Which is definitely not circumstantial evidence.
And there was the time he tried to poison his tutor at Oxford. Not a sign of being a stable and trustworthy person.
Not surveilling him and not cutting off his security clearance once his talents weren’t needed would have been foolish and stupid. Maybe his testimony to HUAC was too much of a circus or occurred due to unfair suspicion; I don’t know. But Wikipedia indicates the hearing in ’53 about his loyalties was not public, and he had the option to resign so it’s not like those trying to remove him were trying to make a huge circus out of that. He was brilliant but also a fool and a loose cannon.
Sure, but other than not passing background checks for the military or government jobs, is there any risk nowadays in being accused of disloyalty?
When lies are spread about Jews being part of a global government, or any other wonky conspiracy, that is harmful, because it justifies then starting to advocate the elimination of Jews. Saying that all Jews in their totality are disloyal would be wrong, also.
But why is accusing specific people and organization who happen to have goals contrary to yours disloyal?
People who are against the US supporting Saudi Arabia constantly go around saying that Congresscritter X who supports Saudis has sold out to the Saudi lobby. Such accusations are normal and expected, why would it be wrong to do the same with Israel?
There’s nothing very anti-Semitic about making that point, unless all criticism of Jewish people’s behavior is anti-Semitic (see also: is all criticism of AA behavior racist?).
One thing I notice about myself, though, is that I’m more philo-Semitic than I would be in an ideal or rational world. I don’t mind going along with the Israeli Right’s broad definition in the context of political tribes being divided into pro-Jewish/Israel and pro-Islam.
(Non-Western example: Hindus were traditionally uninterested in and simply tolerant of Jews, but India’s BJP, which is considered the no-Muslims Party contra Congress’s Islamophilia, loooves Israel.)
@A Definite Beta Guy
Here’s the other horn of that dilemma.
This. When Palestinian flags are being waved in the crowd at the Democratic National Convention, and when waving an Israeli flag on campus gets you more hate than waving an ISIS flag, I can’t help but like people waving Israeli flags more than I rationally should.
A while back, Trump was running around using “America First” as a motto. He got a bunch of pushback, and eventually knocked it off, not because putting your own country’s interests first is a bad thing, but because some less than savory characters already used that motto and now it’s tainted. Likewise, the dual loyalty of the Jews was literally an accusation leveled in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so it’s something you can’t say in polite conversation. If you want to raise the point that you’re raising, you have to be super careful, because of the bad actors who came before you.
The only place where I’m concerned about dual loyalty is for members of Congress. Or perhaps as a government worker in general. And that’s not just Jews. For instance, it is good that Ted Cruz renounced his Canadian citizenship. Holding dual citizenship while being the people making the foreign policy has the appearance of impropriety. I think there should be a requirement that anyone serving elected office should be a citizen of the US only.
The value of learning that is not signalling. (Because all the people who had the opportunity to go to college but are now hopping aboard the Tyler Cowen bandwagon of “Yah, I didn’t actually learn anything there from my expensive education that got me a good job, he’s so right that people shouldn’t go to college” but would have had blue fits if anyone had said to them at the age of eighteen or nineteen “Here’s a trowel, go and learn a trade, college is only expensive signalling” are really annoying the hell out of me).
Or, how much is the value of a cow (since that was being discussed in another post)? It’s worth a book!
Ten years after the official end of the Famine (the effects of which did not end as neatly at a cut-off point like that), a small farmer in Kerry sells a cow to buy a book, and the neighbours are so astonished that the story remained in local folklore to this day:
19th century manuscript found in Kerry.
But it was not alone the book that he purchased, he hand-wrote out a copy of two poems and placed that manuscript with his precious book, and that manuscript has been re-discovered lately:
The hunger for learning outweighs the hunger for food:
And Plumber, I think, will back me up on this: it is really damn annoying to hear people who had opportunities you never had decrying those opportunities. The Cowen view works in a situation where college is widely available and easy to access (for a particular sense of “easy”) and everyone in your recent family and everyone you know went to college. It’s as normal as learning to read and write. In that atmosphere, “but all these plebians are getting useless degrees, they should be learning to tar the roads instead” is easy to cultivate and disseminate.
And I’m damn sure the kids of the people going “Yah, just signalling!” will be signed up for college and not to learn a trade as housepainters.
When education wasn’t easily available, a poor man might walk nine miles to sell a cow to buy a book for the love of it. Don’t scorn what others never even had a dream of having. Even if your point is “but it’s not education, they could just learn what they need to learn in two years tops and walk into a job”, even that much has not always been the case.
I think you are missing a part of the equation. I won’t say that none of the motivation is “all these plebians are getting useless degrees” but another big part of it is “I owe the government the cost of a house, what have I done?”
Yeah, a lot of higher learning can be done on the cheap: the humanities, math, chemistry, most of physics… Anything that doesn’t involve bleeding-edge research.
There’s money, and then there’s time. I wasted four of the most valuable years of my life working 18 hour days on projects that would be looked at once and thrown away, and I got a job immediately after despite not even getting the degree anyway.
Tyler Cowen is not a proponent of the signalling model of education; you’re thinking of his colleague Bryan Caplan. Cowen has actually written a ton of posts criticizing Caplan’s view, many of which you can find here.
I beg his pardon, for some reason I had Brian Cowen in my head and I went with the surname not the first name.
But a lot of the complaining does read like “why are all these people (not people like us) getting useless degrees?” and I think Caplan should be delighted: education is now accessible for all! If you have the luxury of complaining that there is too much of a good thing, then you really are living the high life!
Now, I do realise it’s a different argument over fees, employers requiring degrees when that is not really necessary for the job, loans and trying to pay those back, the lack of jobs where the promise was “a degree will get you a good job” and people made bad choices because it’s not “every and any degree” but I do think that’s a different problem.
I am not a 100 % supporter of Bryan Caplan´s thesis(yeah, not Cowen´s) but this is a misrepresentation. He holds that about 80 % of value of college education is about signalling. But from a standpoint of an individual, getting a degree which is 80 % about signalling is definitely not useless. It is very valuable.
Getting a job without a degree used to be more common, not less. Caplan’s book has good stats on the overall shift in requirements. Here’s a summary:
And the problem isn’t that people should choose not to go to college (As long as you’re reasonably confident you’ll finish in 4 years, the expected return on investment is quite good). It’s that, to the extent that signalling is the main cause of that individual return, educational subsidies are a bad social investment (in contrast, under the mostly-human-capital model, adding another year to high school would have a large positive impact on labor remuneration of new grads).
I think college is mostly signalling on average (although it depends a lot on the degree), but learning is good. Books are also cheap. Few people in the first world today are so poor they can’t afford books. Plus there’s the internet, public libraries, etc. etc. You no longer need to sell a cow to get one book. A cow is worth about 100 books. And most people own the equivalent of a lot more cows nowadays.
College is expensive as hell, and not everyone is going to get to go to it. It’s crazy that public money is shoveled at colleges to educate mostly middle class and up people, who if they paid for it themselves might be a little more circumspect. And then a lot of them get jobs they could have done without the degree if it wasn’t for this arms race.
At one point, I wanted to be a professor. I love learning, it’s great! But I’ve spent enough time in academia at this point both learning and teaching that I can’t in good conscience claim that what happens is mostly delivering valuable knowledge or skills to students.
If I ever end up hiring people or helping do so, I hope I’ll be brave enough to try to remove as much pointless signalling info as possible. Like if I’m hiring a nuclear engineer, then fine I need to know if you’ve worked as a nuclear engineer or have a degree in nuclear engineering. But if I’m hiring a secretary or executive assistant, I should be able to figure out if you can organize a document and spell properly from your resume and whether you’re punctual and reasonably sociable (read: not totally clueless) from an interview. And if I’m hiring someone who already has job experience or references, the earlier stuff doesn’t matter.
My experience has been that the organized learning – and feedback – I encountered in university – enabled better learning than simply reading about a subject. Some classes could have been replaced by reading the text book, to be sure, or even by reading a good series of effort posts (I’m thinking specifically of the Biblical scholoarship series). But it was much easier to get oriented to a field and the way people in that field think.
Now for what it’s worth, I’m thinking about bleeding edge fields, with the goal being to understand recent research, and potentially contribute. I’m not thinking about e.g. the ability to write one of more styles of “educated prose”, or learning enough about accounting to be an adequate bookeeping clerk.
Interestingly, I’m also not thinking about languages either. University teaching for them didn’t seem to work reasonably for me. But if I’d wanted to become an expert on e.g. Catalan language & literature, I suspect a university with an appropriate advisor would have provided the best start.
Also, FWIW, I’m not distinguishing between my undergrad and grad experiences – the overall learning effects seem to have been similar.
Yeah, but most learning is very far from the bleeding edge.
I majored in physics and mathematics, and all the physics I learned in undergrad hadn’t changed for decades to centuries. A book from the 1970s was fine. A lot of the math was also very old, but the presentation style had changed somewhat more and some of it was quite a bit newer. As teachers, I had a couple really amazing professors, a few good ones, and a large group of mediocre professors who had little effect on my learning.
And most people aren’t learning math or physics. A lot of books on history are perfectly readable without years of background or a teacher. There are good books on biology over a wide range of levels, although the bleeding edge is hard to access. A good teacher can speed things up, an average one will be of some help, and a bad one can hurt. But for some significant fraction of things the average teacher is good for, you can hunt down people to ask on the internet and get an answer. (EDIT: and to be clear by hunt down I mean use stackoverflow or askhistorians on reddit or something; things considerably cheaper and easier than going to college).
I think the biggest benefit of schools to learning besides the enforced nature of it is probably what universities seem most inclined to neglect or leave only to a niche of students. Laboratory classes, making art, etc. It’s very expensive to set up a lab for many things. It’s hard to get good feedback on music composition or performance or painting. You need more experienced humans. Of course, you can use private tutors for some of those things (not many labs though) but that’d be more expensive than a reasonably priced class (like community college prices or a little above).
That is true, and I agree that actors need to be taught. I’m much less convinced that a three year all-purpose course is the best way to do that, much less the most cost-effective. Unless you can get into one of the very few schools where having the institution’s name on your CV opens a bunch of doors and going there is liable to make you valuable contacts (RADA or LAMDA in England – I’m sure other countries have equivalents) I think it’s likely you’d be better served by taking workshops and classes on an ad hoc basis, shopping around for the best teachers in the fields where you need to develop.
You’re probably right. My knowledge of acting is minimal. Teaching acting seems much more labor and capital intensive on average than most school subjects will be. And so a concentration of teachers and stages and props could lower the cost to students. When universities or colleges accomplish that, I don’t really know.
It seems like a workshop model could work for a lot of fields that are almost entirely taught at universities. Including the more typical book learning focused ones. Why it’s not more popular, I’m unsure.
From what I’ve heard, if you’re a small business you actually want to pay more attention to the less traditionally qualified candidates – the pool of people who look hireable from 10,000 ft. up all got hired by the companies that could afford to pay them four times as much as you can, you’ll get better results deliberately looking in to the spots they can afford not to bother checking.
I don’t really understand your argument. It is perfectly plausible that modern education systems do very little education, do a lot of signaling, and education itself is still intrinsically valuable.
The complaint has never been that learning is bad, it is that learning is unconnected to accreditation, and there are no reliable ways to judge learning.
How often do people in gunfights actually need to switch to “backup handguns”?
It’s common in movies and TV shows for someone to pull out a secondary handgun–usually kept in a concealed ankle holster or tucked into the back of their waistband–because their primary handgun is lost (e.g. – ninja kicked out of their hand). How often do things like this happen in real life? Are there any documented cases?
Malfunctions are common enough to be a consideration to tactical planners.
To give some idea of frequency, consider the Joint Service Small Arms Program, which resulted in the selection of the M9 as the standard service handgun for the US military. During the Air Force’s testing in 1977, the entrants in the selection process experienced Mean Rounds Between Stoppages (MRBS) between 5 (for the H&K VP70 and the Star Model 80, probably due to incompatible ammunition) to ~2000 (for the Beretta 92 and S&W 459A). According the the Air Force testing, the M1911 had an MRBS of 748. The Army objected that the Air Force had used defective magazines and, discounting the failures caused by those magazines, the M1911 would have an MRBS of 2457. Thus an inter-service acquisition rivalry embroiled Congress for years to come. But that’s beside the point.
We’re going to use 2000 rounds between failures as a practical estimate for a “reliable” handgun. Randomly Googling around, the only (unsourced) number I could come up with is that an average gunfight has 3.59 rounds fired. (I am assuming the context is individual self defense.) Call it 4 to be round.
So for our wild-ass estimate, around one in five hundred gunfights will involve a stoppage. If you’re using a hand gun with a practical MRBS closer to what the Air Force found for their existing inventory of M1911’s, you’re looking at closer to one in two hundred.
I would say that’s enough to be a legitimate consideration.
Your standard infantry soldier is going to do extensive training on how to identify and correct stoppages under combat stress instead of carrying extra weapons. Military doctrine is centered around your infantry operating as part of a team. And spending as much of their time as possible behind cover and concealment. Consequently, if one of them experiences a stoppage the rest of that team is able to provide covering fire while that soldier corrects the problem from a position out of the enemy’s line of fire. In addition, the minimum weapon actually useful in a standard infantry engagement is the rifle. They are very large and cumbersome. Carrying an extra one is an huge amount of weight and space that could be used to carry some other lifesaving equipment.
Contrast that with close quarters combat such as clearing a room. While you’re still operating as part of a team, there is absolutely no cover and concealment. There is nowhere to hide while trying to correct a stoppage. There is no covering fire to give you time to do anything. In addition, in close quarters a handgun is actually useful. Marginal, but useful. It is way better than nothing, and the size and weight penalty are probably acceptable. If you are the first one through the door, for example, and have a stoppage… you are absolutely and completely fucked. And probably your whole team if your dead body ends up blocking the door. You’re only option is to keep moving so they can come in behind you and hope to God you have enough time to get another weapon out. The people doing this kind of work are very keen on having a backup handgun in addition to their main rifle/carbine.
But far more movies are made about the police, suave master spies, or just generic bad asses. In that sort of context, you’re far less likely to be working as part of a team much larger than a partnership, and still doing something that looks kind of like the close quarters work above. So they are probably keen on having a backup.
But it is also likely to be less a question of “primary” and “backup” and more along the lines of “on duty” and “all the time.”
See, the reason I said that handguns are only marginally effective in close quarters combat is because it is basically impossible to build a handgun that actually has stopping power. Pesky physics being what it is, you just can’t pack enough power into one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure it hurts insanely bad to get shot by one but adrenaline is a hell of a drug. So unless you get that one in a million hit (or they run, or weren’t actually serious and fall down screaming…), the person you’re trying to stop is going to roid the hell out on adrenaline with unlimited pain tolerance. And you need to shoot them a lot to stop them. Did I mention than your own adrenaline makes it very difficult to aim? In order to support the ability to shot multiple people as many times as it takes to stop them when they’re roided up on adrenaline, your on duty weapon is going to have to carry as many rounds of the biggest bullet you can reasonably carry. The virtually universal answer in this department is 17+ rounds of 9mm.
But this ends up with a big, heavy, conspicuous weapon that is an all around pain in the ass to haul with you when taking your family to the movie theater or whatever. The ever popular Glock 17, for example, weights in excess of two pounds. Throw in a retention holster, because having someone else pulling your gun out of your holster is nobodies idea of a good day, and maybe a couple magazines and you’re looking at a pretty substantial load.
So you find a smaller, lighter, less conspicuous off duty gun that is adequate for the much lower risk of stopping a stick up at your local gas station or running into that really nasty guy you put away for life but got let out on a technicality. Then just never take it off when you go to work. If you are willing to bump down to a smaller caliber like .380, you can pretty easily be looking at less than a pound. A Glock 42 in .380, for example, is around 15 oz.
You’re basically in why the hell not territory. (Department rules notwithstanding.)
Did I mention stoppages happen at a frequency worth at least considering?
ETA: There is also the retention question. The “21 foot rule” basically says that if someone is within 21 feet of you, they can (reliably) close the gap and assault you faster than you can you realize what is happening and shoot them. Consider how many places in your house it is even possible to be more than 21 feet away from someone in the same room. And consider how much of police work involves going into strange residential buildings. Getting tackled while you have your weapon half way out of the holster and grappling to try retaining control of it is a really, really, really bad day. If you can’t retain it, having a backup sounds like it might be useful.
But bear in mind that only something like 10% of police fire a weapon in their entire careers.
Having one is not uncommon. Using one is almost always dramatic tension.
So for our wild-ass estimate, around one in five hundred gunfights will involve a stoppage. If you’re using a hand gun with a practical MRBS closer to what the Air Force found for their existing inventory of M1911’s, you’re looking at closer to one in two hundred.
I would say that’s enough to be a legitimate consideration.
So in other words, if you get into a gunfight (in a non-military situation where your primary weapon is a handgun), there is a 0.5% chance your gun will malfunction before it’s over. It’s already a stretch to say that those odds justify carrying around a second backup gun.
Also, in most of those 0.5% cases, it would probably be better and faster to try fixing the first handgun’s malfunction rather than pulling out a second handgun. It takes less time and is less distracting to you to pull the trigger a second time or rack the slide to eject the bullet that it is to drop the primary handgun and to try pulling out your backup handgun in your ankle holster.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the odds of having your handgun malfunction in a gunfight so badly that you have to switch to a second handgun are 0.1%.
Is that supposed to be an argument against having a backup?
Yes.
Specifically, if carrying one gun provides 99.9% of the benefit(*) of carrying many guns, then saying that carrying one gun is not enough is roughly equivalent to saying that no number of guns is enough and you really need a different life strategy that includes way more of not getting involved in gunfights in the first place. If matters have escalated to an actual shootout, then I’m going to make the very safe bet that your odds of getting through it un-shot are already down to no better than 95%, and if your argument is “but without a second gun, that would drop to 94.9%!”, then A: meh and B: I’m certain that for the life cycle cost and inconvenience of carrying a second pistol you could come up with lots of things that would increase your odds of survival by much more than 0.1%
Alternately, you need to admit that this is about dealing with an irrational fear and that the backup gun is the equivalent of the hair dryer in the purse. In which case, if it works, great, but it’s not for everyone.
* Considering only the reliability angle here, and not the other more credible but specialized reasons for a backup gun
@Gobbobobble
Carrying a handgun rather than an SMG or rifle already severely sacrifices performance in a gunfight, in favor of other goals. So the police already sacrifices their gunfight performance.
Keep in mind that surveys among the police show that a quarter has ever fired their weapon on duty. Presumably, in some/many of these cases, other police officers are present.
Also, many officers carry tasers nowadays, so they would have a backup weapon for short ranges. Statistics show that police officers who are killed with guns were within 21 feet in more than 80% of the case. Police tasers can shoot up to 30 feet, so that is sufficient.
In general, an officer who faces a weapon can greatly reduce his risk of getting shot by increasing the distance, taking cover and/or moving; with or without a functioning weapon.
The typical firefight looks more or less like a couple of guys hiding behind something and peeking out to shoot at each other. If your weapon malfunctions, you stop peeking out to shoot until you can fix it while the other guys continue firing.
There’s also the scenario where someone attacks an unaware victim, who either dies, runs away, or hides behind something and we’re back to the first situation. In neither case does a second firearm help you very much.
I think a fair number of policemen carry a second, concealed pistol because the nature of their interactions with the public (alone, clearly marked as a threat, very close range) makes them feel vulnerable to being suddenly disarmed either by surprise or being physically overpowered. I’m sure there is plenty of police lore about times such a weapon came in handy, although I can’t give examples.
In military applications, basically all handguns are backups, and the number of handguns carried is either one or zero.
Police officers will still frequently carry backup handguns because their job description requires getting up close and personal with dangerous criminals, with their primary handgun in plain sight, and usually letting those criminals make the first move. Sometimes that first move is to grab the policeman’s gun, and it’s faster and safer to just use the backup gun than try to recover the primary.
Other than that, there’s not much call for it. In the days when the primary handgun was a revolver, a backup handgun was sometimes considered the fastest possible “reload”, but that’s mostly over. Modern handguns are extremely reliable if you’re not dragging them through mud or sand, and nobody other than a policeman has much call to ever reveal that they have one until they are ready to A: immediately shoot or B: back away and immediately shoot if the enemy pursues.
Related – are “throwdowns” (an unregistered second gun or toy gun you can drop at the scene of a shooting) common enough to worry about, or is being caught with one too much trouble to make it realistic?
Only for really crooked police.
If there’s a shooting, either the police are going to become involved, or not.
If not, obviously throwing down a spare gun is just a chance for you to introduce additional evidence against yourself, when the police find your fingerprints on the throw-down gun, or your cousin mentions that you told him you have a throw-down gun, or whatever.
If there IS a police investigation involved, adding an extra gun is only useful to try and establish a plausible self-defense motive, and you have to weigh the value of that against the possibility that you get caught carrying around a throw-down gun and have to explain to the police and/or jury why you’re walking around prepared to fake evidence for self-defense in a shooting if you aren’t a murderer.
For regular folks, it’s a bad plan. Regular folks don’t shoot people very often, and being over-prepared for doing it in sketchy circumstances is inviting trouble. Self-defense pleas aren’t that hard if they’re legitimate.
For premeditated murderers, it’s also a bad plan, because you’d rather not get caught by the police in the first place, and if you do this very often, it’s going to stand out.
So, law enforcement is the only group that might conceivably have reasons to shoot people frequently, and also reasons to think they would need to demonstrate self-defense to an investigation, but could get away with the shooting as long as there was any evidence. Obviously, scrupulously honest police wouldn’t do this, and making it work would probably require a lot of corruption by a lot of people covering for each other and refusing to look too closely at the evidence, but it might work for a while.
It’s more like comic book Gotham PD than real life.
There was the case of the Baltimore anti-gun unit who carried around BB guns to plant on people they’d inconveniently killed, but I don’t think they ever ended up using them, and they did eventually get caught and go to jail. I’d guess that the practice is like both rare, and more widespread than we’d think or be particularly happy with.
So, as background, I live in Chicago. My neighborhood is fairly safe, but, I am within walking distance of a very dangerous neighborhood, there was a 5x homicide there in the middle of the street. When this incident happened, I naturally followed it closely, including police reports, warrants, etc.
One thing I learned from closely following this is that gang members are not anything resembling well-trained marksmen. According to one report there were ~5 individuals on each side, and they found no evidence that any of them reloaded at all, they just ditched guns and started shooting with a second gun. They also missed a lot (one of the casualties was sadly a bystander), and not by small amounts, with bullets found basically everywhere on the street.
So, in certain populations it appears to be common. Although not one that we particularly want to cater to.