Open Thread 127.75

Posted on May 15, 2019 by a reader

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978 Responses to Open Thread 127.75

  1. Douglas Knight says:
    May 20, 2019 at 8:53 am

    The question of whether all charter lotteries are fair is broader than the question of whether the lotteries in RCT are fair. I doubt anyone has ever audited the random number generators of charter lotteries. I doubt any studies run their own randomization. But studies usually do checks that the measured characteristics of the lottery winners match the lottery losers. That is, race and test scores. Of course, the point of lotteries in studies is that there may be characteristics more difficult to observe. But Sailer’s story is basically about test scores, not parental grit.

    I googled rct charter schools and found which linked to four studies (probably cherry-picked for positive results).

    The first about Boston seems to say that all charters use a single lottery, which sounds a priori more trustworthy. It excluded one school from its analysis because its lottery was rigged (Health Careers Academy).

    The third is about Chicago. It found lottery winners, losers, and even non-entrants had similar characteristics. The fourth covers schools from all over. It compared winners and losers.

    The second about New York says:

    These two groups of students are identical not just on dimensions that we can readily observe, such as race, ethnicity, gender, poverty, limited English, and disability.

  2. brad says:
    May 19, 2019 at 11:42 am

    I read this article: TripAdvisor Modified Its Approach to Reviews and Sexual Assault. Did It Go Far Enough? (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/travel/tripadvisor-safety-sexual-assault-reviews.html) and it reminded me a lot of some of the debates I’ve had on here over “free speech norms”.

    Perhaps the big cleavage here is left / right, but generational. It seems like there is a millennial-wide consensus–left, right, other–that at least online private property doesn’t mean anything. Someone running a webpage in a way you happen to not like isn’t just a matter of different strokes for different folks, but a personal affront, human rights issue, and cause for endless whinnying.

    TripAdvisor thinks that first person narratives from accounts with verified email addresses will make its website seem authentic and trustworthy. K, for reasons of “safety”, doesn’t want to write a first person narrative about her tour guide sexually assaulting her. We’ve got incompatible preferences here, such is life! What chain of logic leads K to believe that TripAdvisor ought to bend to her feelings?

    This is almost the exact same sort of thing as the millennials on the other side of the aisle that are up in arms about twitter or whomever kicking some ultra-right wing conspiracy nut off their site. It’s their site. If they don’t think ultra-right wing conspiracy nuts are going to sell ads, where do you get off telling them otherwise?

    The only one of these complaints that resonated with me in the least was the time that none of the registrars would register a domain for that white supremacist forum. ICAAN is quasi-governmental. Otherwise get your own website, no one owes you a megaphone.

    TL;DR get off my lawn

    • HeelBearCub says:
      May 19, 2019 at 12:04 pm

      It’s not generational either.

      “Don’t frequent this business because of their wicked ways” is a time honored technique. So too complaining about the specific practices of this or that business. Or complaining about the availability of certain products, or the decisions of people to purchase them.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
      May 19, 2019 at 12:46 pm

      This really doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable demand, and frankly I’m pretty surprised that TripAdvisor hasn’t taken any substantive steps on this earlier given how many of their non-anonymous reviews already mention rape or sexual assault.

      I understand that online reviews are already lawsuit-magnets, especially abroad where there is often little to no meaningful protection of speech, so hosting anonymous accusations might be a liability concern. But frankly I’d be a lot more worried that people who used my service were being raped or assaulted: even putting aside the obvious ethical problems, it’s not exactly ideal for customer retention or their brand.

      Traveling as an unaccompanied woman, especially abroad, is always going to be dangerous. But if you’re making money actively facilitating people taking those risks, the least that you can do is try to mitigate them.

      • The Nybbler says:
        May 19, 2019 at 1:01 pm

        Judging from the number of restaurant reviews I’ve seen with atrocity stories of various sorts, I suspect anonymous accusations of sexual assault would be mostly retaliation from irate (but not assaulted) customers, competitors, and ex-employees.

      • brad says:
        May 19, 2019 at 1:14 pm

        Allowing fully anonymous accusations of sexual assault would be insane. Even K doesn’t seem to be asking for that.

        The demands instead seem to be:
        1) Allow the use of third person narrative structure “”I tried to post a review which was a warning,’ she said. ‘I said “this tour guide raped a German tourist,” but it wasn’t written in first person, so it was rejected.'”

        2) That TripAdvisor itself have some process of accepting (and presumably adjudicating) claims of sexual misconduct and taking some kind of action like blocking the vendor or flagging it in the UI.

        The first one doesn’t strike me as an inherently bad idea for TripAdvisor to do, but on the other hand it doesn’t at all strike me as something unreasonable not to do. If they think first person voice makes reviews seem more trustworthy that strikes me as far inside the realm of reasonable business decisions and I don’t see where anyone gets off being outraged over it.

        The second one does strike me as a bad idea. How in the world is TripAdvisor supposed to determine if this rape actually happened? I see a lot of criticisms of colleges for acting as judge and jury when doing so is outside of their competency, but the universities are in far, far better position to get to the bottom of what happened than TripAdvisor is for every traveler (or claimed traveler) anywhere in the world.

        In terms of ethical responsibility, it isn’t even clear to me from either the Times article or the change.org petition that K used TripAdvisor to find the tour guide.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
          May 19, 2019 at 3:00 pm

          After The Guardian published a story about K’s experience, the advocacy group change.org helped start a petition demanding TripAdvisor “stop covering up sexual assaults.”

          Well, at least they weren’t being overly dramatic.

          In emails seen by The Times, a TripAdvisor employee advised K to create an account under a different username where she could write a first-person review without revealing her identity — an option that TripAdvisor has offered other survivors of sexual violence, according to the emails. This, K said, was an unreasonable expectation. “I’m not leaving a first person, in-detailed, account of my rape,” K said. “I don’t want to be contacted and threatened or trolled, even on a burner account. Why can’t TripAdvisor have someone who can make sure my experience is seen without re-traumatizing survivors?”

          As brad says, allowing first-person accounts is reasonable. Insisting on them is also reasonable. They don’t really explain why it’s unreasonable, except that K is a rape survivor and doesn’t need to explain anything.

          Surely TripAdvisor has a setting, and they can walk you through it, of how to make sure they never ever send you send any messages, ever. Or make a brand new gmail account that you will forget the password to in a day. But no.

    • Nornagest says:
      May 19, 2019 at 1:48 pm

      This is a tough one, but, while I don’t share all your assumptions, I think I do agree with the broad strokes of your conclusion.

      – I don’t endorse the implicit framing of a hard ethical cutoff for speech controls somewhere around ICANN’s level of responsibility, but TripAdvisor is a niche service, not a broad communications platform, and has plenty of competition: arguably closer to “somebody’s subreddit or blog” than to “Facebook”, let alone “ICANN” or “the FCC”.

      – There is definitely scope for abuse here.

      – Something has gone terribly wrong somewhere if you’ve gotten sexually assaulted and you feel like your best shot at recourse is posting an anonymous review on TripAdvisor.

      – On the other hand, things do go terribly wrong sometimes, and TripAdvisor does cover some places where wealthy first-world expectations — including sexual norms — definitely don’t apply, so if going some place and buying some service was in your experience unsafe as a young unaccompanied woman (or a man who likes to wear “I (Heart) (Rooster)” T-shirts, or anybody else), that seems like information that’s well within the scope of trip advice.

      Allowing reviews of this type but requiring that they conform to TripAdvisor’s regular review policy seems like a reasonable compromise. Adding safety-specific search features also seems like a good response on the company’s part.

    • RalMirrorAd says:
      May 20, 2019 at 4:29 am

      Limiting a company’s ability to restrict a service or access to some kind of ‘property’ has precedent when the property is considered a public utility or some kind of practical chokepoint. I don’t think this applies in the case of tripadvisor but I know very little about it. Facebook Twitter and youtube are practical monopolies in their respective spheres of influence and have become the most common methods of transmitting information between people.

      *generally* there are few free speech absolutists and there are also few private property absolutists. If a millennial sees someone they don’t like or agree with getting censored, more often then not they will tolerate it, and if pressed they may or may not invoke a private property argument. Whether or not it FEELS right to have someone censored or to allow a company to adopt a TOS that may run afoul of someone’s value system is, well, a matter of one’s feelings.

      • brad says:
        May 20, 2019 at 4:43 am

        Twitter and Facebook are competitors, so they can’t both be monopolies. Saying they are monopolies in their “respective spheres” is like saying ABC has a monopoly on ABC shows—it’s a tautology.

        There are plenty of zero cost outlets for people to spout their ideas, including the comment section of starslatecodex.

        • RalMirrorAd says:
          May 20, 2019 at 5:01 am

          They’re competitors only the sense that all websites are competitors in attracting attention from each other.

          Facebook and Linkedn are closer to being competitors as are Twitter and Gab. But FB services aren’t suitably substitutable [at present] to do what Twitter does and vice versa. Because there is no practical way to offer users access to facebook’s already existing network of people unless facebook is managed into the ground you cannot ‘compete’ with facebook by offering equivalent services with better terms because your initial set of users will be operating in a ghost town.

          Two social media companies that do different things but have some overlap in features can operate at the same time but you’re not going to realistically have a situation [except maybe with china] where half of the population uses FB and another uses myspace.

          The case where competition does exist is in say, email. If Yahoo decided to deny service to some person they have a dozen or more email websites to choose from and are not locked out from other yahoo email users. Substitution is a realistic possibility.

        • AlesZiegler says:
          May 20, 2019 at 6:50 am

          Facebook and Twitter are not literal textbook cases of monopolies, but they do have significant amount of market power.

        • brad says:
          May 20, 2019 at 7:24 am

          @RalMirrorAd

          Under the definition you are pushing every company that sells anything other than completely fungible commodities is a monopoly. That’s a definition so broad as to be useless. In particular, it makes every piece of real property (i.e. land) a mini-monopoly and would justify disregarding property rights their with the same logic as being propounded here for “because internet”.

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            May 20, 2019 at 9:42 am

            For facebook and twitter, the product is access to other people, similar to that of a telecom or a road.

            Competitive monopolies or imperfect competitors do not sell fungible products but not having access to one provider doesn’t realistically preclude you from being able to do what the service itself exists for.

            If Facebook and twitter want to operate as general purpose social networks used by virtually everyone while at the same time act as the sole provider of that social network then regulating said companies as utilities makes sense. If another website was capable of interacting with people who use facebook and/or twitter my argument would not hold; even if the competitor was different from FB/Twitter in how they provided their service.

          • AlesZiegler says:
            May 20, 2019 at 10:39 am

            Actually, perfectly competitive industry is defined as lot of firms producing perfectly fungible commodity, among other conditions. No real world industry is perfectly competitive, which means that almost every firm has some market power. But there is huge difference in a degree of market power between average restaurant (or landowner) and Facebook.

          • brad says:
            May 20, 2019 at 12:37 pm

            So if Brad’s social media network has an audience of 10, at least one of whom isn’t on any other social media network, I now have a monopoly in my unique network?

            Again, that stretches the meaning of monopoly out to uselessness.

    • J Mann says:
      May 20, 2019 at 6:29 am

      1) IMHO the biggest old rules/new rules division is that an accusation of sexual assault trumps almost all other norms. The major dispute here is that TripAdvisor requires accounts to be written in first person, but K asserts that writing in the first person – even if done with a burner account that she then threw away and never checked – would be traumatic in a way that writing in third person would not be, and the internet apparently decided that a “write in first person” rule was outrageous.

      2) The less verification TripAdvisor does, the greater the chance is of false reports. Even granting that women would never file false reports, there’s very little to stop disgruntled male customers or competitors from writing sexual assault reports on TripAdvisor. At a certain point, it might be like bedbug reports – you figure every popular location is going to have one or two, so they stop registering unless a site has noticeably more than everyone else.

  3. Etoile says:
    May 18, 2019 at 6:46 pm

    I recently heard a new perspective on charter schools: that they destroy the actual private education market, e.g. Catholic schools. It doesn’t necessarily change my support for charter schools wholesale, but does make one think.

  4. Deiseach says:
    May 18, 2019 at 12:05 pm

    Niche interest alert: Eurovision 2019 live from Tel Aviv now on, you can watch it on Youtube if a local channel isn’t carrying it.

  5. BBA says:
    May 18, 2019 at 10:18 am

    There are good public schools and bad public schools, good charters and bad charters, and no conclusive proof of which model is better. Between entrenched unaccountable public school administrators and the shady profiteers who run charter schools, I’m rooting for injuries.

    Sailer’s theory about rigged lotteries is idiotic. The obvious difference in performance comes from charters being able to kick disruptive or otherwise underperforming students out, while the public schools are forced to accept them. Also, whether the parents/caretakers have it together enough to enter the charter lottery in the first place, versus just getting enrolled in the zoned public school by default.

    (Side note: how does it work in places that don’t have zoned schools, when the parents don’t have it together enough to pick a school? Is it just enrollment by lottery, or is there some designated “school of last resort”?)

    • cassander says:
      May 18, 2019 at 10:30 am

      There are good public schools and bad public schools, good charters and bad charters, and no conclusive proof of which model is better. Between entrenched unaccountable public school administrators and the shady profiteers who run charter schools, I’m rooting for injuries.

      (A) charter schools are, if nothing else, cheaper.
      (B) do you think the for profiteers that run your grocery store, bank, or hotel are shady? Because I see no more shadiness in charter schools than I see in any other industry with a similar level of entwinement with government.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:
        May 18, 2019 at 11:00 am

        I see no more shadiness in charter schools than I see in any other industry with a similar level of entwinement with government.

        A pretty low bar, it’s true.

      • Nick says:
        May 18, 2019 at 11:07 am

        My one concern with charter schools would be that since they’re pretty new, if they were shady, we wouldn’t necessarily know signs what to look for. Like, I know a grocery store is shady if the milk isn’t being properly cooled, or if I regularly see items on the shelves past their expiration date. What would I look for in a charter school? Would the administrative staff be sketchy? Would the teachers be inclined to use corporal punishment? Would they have more serious grade inflation than public schools (if such a thing can be conceived)?

        • cassander says:
          May 18, 2019 at 4:04 pm

          You have the same tools your have for evaluating public schools. These are admittedly not very good, but people are confident enough in them to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more on housing based on them.

        • toastengineer says:
          May 18, 2019 at 8:32 pm

          I spent grade 5 and 6 in a “charter school” that was two double-wides dragged in to an abandoned lot with about a hundred kids stuffed in to them and teachers with severe anger management issues. Several students literally did not know what country they were in.

        • albatross11 says:
          May 19, 2019 at 5:59 pm

          Sure, but you’re not selecting the school so much as the students.

          The school needs to be physically intact and not actively abusive–it should have teachers who more-or-less know their subjects and sufficient textbooks and supplies to teach. But that’s a low bar, and most public/private/charter/religious schools can meet it just fine. Most high school chemistry and algebra and history teachers know their subject well enough to teach it at a high-school level, most school administrators can manage to keep a safe and clean school building, etc.

          After that, you mainly care about who the students will be. Two otherwise identical schools where one has 90th percentile students and the other has 10th percentile students will be night-and-day different in terms of outcomes. If one school includes a lot of kids who mainly get in trouble and terrorize the other students, and the other doesn’t (whether that’s because they kick those kids out, those kids never get in, or they keep a lid on those kids somehow), the school without the terrorizing kids will be enormously better.

          Charter school operators know this better than we do–it’s their job. They know that if they get a bunch of dumb and badly-behaved kids, their school will be a mess, and if they get a bunch of smart and well-behaved kids, their school will be a great school. They have every incentive on Earth to try to game the process so that they get the smart, well-behaved kids. Making the application process require reading a five-page document written at the 12th grade level in bureaucratese, and then following a complicated set of steps is probably pretty good at filtering for parents’ intelligence, dilligence, and interest–that’s not the same as kids’ intelligence, dilligence, or interest, but it’s positively correlated. Offering tours / web descriptions of the school in which you emphasize the heavy academic workload and long nights of homework involved, and also maybe the large expected involvement of parents, will convince some parents not to apply, and some kids to beg their parents not to apply. Similarly, a school whose marketing emphasizes strict discipline and zero-tolerance for misbehavior will convince a good fraction of parents to not try to get their kids in (“Damn, Joey’s always in trouble in the regular school–he would be in trouble *all the time* in that super-strict charter school.”)

          I don’t know whether any given charter school does this, but I am sure there’s an incentive for them to do this, because there appears to be no educational intervention anyone knows how to do that is even 10% as effective as cherry-picking your students.

        • 10240 says:
          May 19, 2019 at 6:49 pm

          Making the application process require reading a five-page document written at the 12th grade level in bureaucratese, and then following a complicated set of steps is probably pretty good at filtering for parents’ intelligence, dilligence, and interest–that’s not the same as kids’ intelligence, dilligence, or interest, but it’s positively correlated.

          @albatross11 Can’t they have an entrance exam instead?

        • Clutzy says:
          May 19, 2019 at 9:42 pm

          @10240

          Thats what “magnet schools” do. Charter schools could propose that, but no public school system would allow it. They already hate charter schools as it is, if they explicitly took all the good students, it would break public schools.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:
        May 19, 2019 at 8:25 am

        Doubly astonishing when you consider how often defenses of the status quo take the form of “those kids aren’t educable anyway.” If we really believed that, the logical course of action would be to find cheaper ways of failing to educate them.

      • albatross11 says:
        May 19, 2019 at 6:07 pm

        Some kids aren’t going to get anything out of Algebra 2. We make them take it because it makes us feel good and we can pretend we’re all equal that way, not because it makes any sense. We’d do them a lot more good making sure they got the math they’d actually need in their lives, but that would be elitist and racist and evil, so instead we waste their and their teachers’ time.

        Some kids can learn just fine, but don’t want to behave and would rather raise hell in school. Keeping them in the same classrooms with kids who want to learn, again, makes us feel good and fends off lawsuits, but does neither them nor their victims any favors.

      • greenwoodjw says:
        May 20, 2019 at 6:52 am

        Doubly astonishing when you consider how often defenses of the status quo take the form of “those kids aren’t educable anyway.”

        I reject this theory entirely. It’s nothing more than an excuse for all but the genuinely destructive (ie, criminals and gang members) and those with disabilities.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante

    • Nicholas Weininger says:
      May 18, 2019 at 12:12 pm

      To your question about non zoned schools: I live in San Francisco which has.a notoriously complicated lottery system that of course mostly fails in its attempt to achieve greater diversity than neighborhood school assignment. It is difficult to find any explicit statement of what happens if you don’t send in a preference list for your kid, since all the documentation is clearly geared toward parents who would never dream of doing such a thing. But as best I can tell what happens is that they give spots to all the kids whose parents did put in preference lists first, and then other kids get spots in whichever school has leftover spots and is closest to their home address.

    • BBA says:
      May 18, 2019 at 3:16 pm

      I see a difference if it’s a question of active perfidy or a mere failure to notice the natural consequences of one’s policies.

      But then I’m not nearly as convinced of the natural genetic superiority of certain ethnicities as Sailer is.

  6. Paul Zrimsek says:
    May 18, 2019 at 9:11 am

    Ol’ Steve can grasp at straws with the best of ’em. We do get this gem, though:

    A few years ago, I applied my son to a new charter high school founded by the best teachers from his public middle school.

    Revealed preference really does speak louder than words.

    • RalMirrorAd says:
      May 20, 2019 at 4:38 am

      Not fair at all. The school can benefit the student indirectly through peer effects, the method of instruction might require less supplementary homework, and the general quality of the attendees means that even with no measurable scholastic improvement the quality of life of the student is higher. (less bullying, less criminal activity on the school grounds, etc.)

      • Paul Zrimsek says:
        May 20, 2019 at 7:26 am

        Guilty as charged. I had the impression that Sailer was root-and-branch opposed to charters, but looking around that doesn’t seem to be so. In this case he’s still sending an anecdote to battle a bunch of studies.

  7. BBA says:
    May 18, 2019 at 9:02 am

    You know what I’d like to see more of? Science museums that are actual museums. I mean like the Science Museum in London or the Deutsches Museum in Munich, with their big collections of old lab equipment and technology and scientific stuff.

    I get that collections are expensive and hard to curate, and it’s much easier to make a “science center” with interactive exhibits for children than a “real” museum. And some of them are great at what they do, I loved those places when I was a kid, but they’re kid stuff. I don’t need to see another air nozzle lifting a beach ball to demonstrate the Bernoulli effect, and for that matter I don’t know if that’s a good demonstration of it. By the time you’re old enough to really understand that stuff, you’re too old to be going to science museums anymore.

    This is a bit of a roundabout way to get to what I’ve been reading up on, which is why New York as a world-class city never got a world-class science museum. There was one that operated in the early 20th century under various names and in various locations, but it never got a permanent building or the funds needed to achieve its grandiose ambitions. The originally named Museums of the Peaceful Arts planned for a large multi-building campus and apparently developed a decent collection of early technology specimens. It was displayed in a few office buildings in Manhattan, with its longest-lived incarnation being called the New York Museum of Science and Industry and housed in the lower levels of Rockefeller Center from 1935 to 1949. When the Rockefellers found a more profitable tenant, the museum moved to a much smaller space in Times Square called the “Hall of Science,” where it closed for good circa 1951. Apparently the endowment funds were eventually split between Manhattan’s two biggest museums, the Met and the AMNH, neither of which really needed the money. As for the collection… I can’t figure out what happened. I assume it got dispersed, but you know how hard it is to find information on a defunct museum, especially one that shares its name with currently existing but unrelated museums? Anyway, there’s a handful of scholarly papers on it, behind paywalls, and the Rockefeller archives also have some material. If I’m ever motivated enough I might try to read up on it someday.

    Meanwhile, the current New York Hall of Science started as part of the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, with no connection to the prior Hall of Science besides the name. It never had much of a collection, closed in the ’70s when everything in New York was going to hell, and reopened in the ’80s as an interactive “kid stuff” museum. When I was a kid in the ’90s, living in the ‘burbs, it was clearly inferior to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City. It looks like the Hall is doing better now, as the outer boroughs’ fortunes have risen, but it’s still kid stuff. And if I want kid stuff, for nostalgia purposes, I have much fonder memories of the LSC than of the Hall.

    I also have fond memories of the Computer Museum in Boston, which closed in 1999. In retrospect, it didn’t know what it was supposed to be. There were historic collections from the DEC archives, which didn’t attract much of an audience. And there was interactive kid stuff that, while fun, became outdated very quickly. Most of the collections ended up moving to Silicon Valley where they became the core of the Computer History Museum – a fine example of the kind of museum I want more of, but I don’t know that there’s enough demand for more than one museum on such a niche topic, and clearly Northern California is the place for it.

    • DinoNerd says:
      May 18, 2019 at 9:37 am

      I loved the Deutsches Museum. I like the interactive kind too, mind you, but it had all kinds of things I’d never seen before.

    • brad says:
      May 18, 2019 at 9:39 am

      You know what I’d like to see more of? Science museums that are actual museums. I mean like the Science Museum in London or the Deutsches Museum in Munich, with their big collections of old lab equipment and technology and scientific stuff.

      Are these really science museums or just history museums specializing in a certain period and type of history? What about the Museum of Natural History with its “naturalist” collection of specimens–science museum?

      All of which is to say, I’m not sure it is really possible to have a great science museum in this day and age. The tools of modern science just aren’t terribly collectable or photogenic. Would you want to walk through a room of old, unplugged PCR machines?

      • gbdub says:
        May 18, 2019 at 11:33 am

        I agree. My favorite “science” museum is the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center.

        The output of science, with the science well-highlighted, is the best you can do I think. Pure science, particularly modern pure science, is, as you note, not that easy to make an interesting museum out of. Documentary? Article? Podcast? Sure! But it needs a narrative, and the whole point of a museum is to observe interesting objects that tell their own story.

    • drunkfish says:
      May 18, 2019 at 10:20 am

      I’d be interested in a longest list of this style of museum, if people have more suggestions.

      I went to the (a?) science museum in Paris recently and was excited because France has such a huge place in the history of science, and it was sadly all “kid stuff” (though I still had fun). Might have been the wrong museum, but still, knowing which places fit your description would be nice.

      • Alejandro says:
        May 18, 2019 at 11:53 am

        In Paris, the place you want is the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Among other things, it has the original Foucault Pendulum (as seen in Eco’s novel), Pascal’s calculator, Lavoisier’s lab equipment, and some of the earliest cars, planes, cameras and TVs.

        • Tenacious D says:
          May 18, 2019 at 12:07 pm

          +1 for Arts et Métiers. It’s also in a beautiful heritage building.

        • drunkfish says:
          May 19, 2019 at 3:30 am

          Sadly I just left Paris 🙁 next time perhaps…

        • TheMadMapmaker says:
          May 19, 2019 at 2:46 pm

          +1 for Musée des Arts et Métiers too. It’s exactly what OP is asking for, unlike the Cité Des Sciences et de L’Industrie, which, while pretty neat, is definitely more of a “cool interactive toys for kids with a science spin” thing, a bit like San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

          • AG says:
            May 21, 2019 at 1:26 pm

            Speaking of Bay Area science museums, can anyone testify to the quality of the Intel Museum?

            The Tech has sadly become a giant waste of a museum.

    • The Nybbler says:
      May 18, 2019 at 10:23 am

      If you get to Philadelphia, go to the Mutter Museum. It’s not exactly what you’re asking for but it’s only a step removed. A real science museum, but for medical science — human anatomy — and the headline exhibits are specimens.

    • ana53294 says:
      May 18, 2019 at 10:42 am

      A science museum is either a massive undertaking that you can only have one per country of, or they have to specialize.

      I’ve found that when I visit small museums that specialize in wool, or chocolate, or whiskey, or trains, you can get a pretty good experience.

      I do recommend the Moscow cosmonautics museum. They also have a pretty good geology museum, and a good paleontology museum.

    • Andrew Hunter says:
      May 18, 2019 at 11:30 am

      The Chicago museum of surgical science is excellent. It’s about half science museum (collections of Roman gynecological tools, old pharmaceuticals, and so on) and half art (busts and oil paintings of famous surgeons.)

    • Nornagest says:
      May 18, 2019 at 12:07 pm

      The Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley is primarily a kids’ science museum, but they do have a pretty good collection of early particle accelerators (or did the last time I was there, which was a while ago). Worth a look if you’re in the area. Just don’t step on the kids.

  8. Edward Scizorhands says:
    May 18, 2019 at 8:11 am

    Speaking of cooking, based on a discussion from a few weeks ago about ethical meats, I bought some frozen fully cooked clam meat. (Clams are pretty stupid so the ethical cost is minimal.)

    1. How do I prepare this?

    2. My brother suffers from gout. I have never had a gout attack (that I know of) but I would like to keep it that way. It looks like clams are roughly as gout-triggering as shrimp, which I can eat a fair amount of without issue. I have been eating less meat overall recently, so is this not much of a risk?

  9. Yair says:
    May 18, 2019 at 6:04 am

    Does anyone have any thoughts about the results of the federal elections in Australia?

    There goes any chance Australia will even try to do anything about climate change, housing affordability or anything else. From where I stand it seems a very bad result 🙁

    • Nicholas Weininger says:
      May 18, 2019 at 12:19 pm

      Well, it seems like an instance of the general baseline rule that it is difficult to defeat an incumbent party which has presided over a long period of steady economic growth, and especially difficult if the opposition party standard bearer is an unpopular and uncharismatic figure. They may be eating their seed corn, but it’s tasty and abundant for now…

      Morrison is apparently doing the Nixonian “silent majority” thing but it’s not clear how one would tell if that actually exists. It would be interesting to know if prior Australian political research has validated the idea of the “shy Liberal” on the model of the “shy Tory”.

    • WashedOut says:
      May 18, 2019 at 6:50 pm

      I’m viewing the result as the least-bad outcome. Worst would have been slim majority or hung parliament with LNP having to ingratiate itself with a gaggle of niche-interest independents. Second best would have been Labor majority.

      The climate change topic seems to be occupying way more time than it deserves, considering how many consecutive leaps of faith it takes to get from:
      -Australian policy intends to reduce emissions, to
      -Emissions actually get reduced in a significant way (1), to
      -(1) happens over a timeframe that is relevant to the polity, to
      -Reduced emissions result in measurable effects on ‘global average temperatures’ (!)
      Oh and none of the above get offset by increases in emissions from China and India. Yeah, nah.

      Re: silent/shy conservative effect. I believe it definitely plays a role. Plenty of people in Melbourne’s latte-belt have been throwing tantrums over progressive issues and making it sound as though there are a) widespread problems with the status quo and b) widespread revolt/resistance to this status quo – but clearly the rest of the country begs to differ (see: Queensland).

      The flow of preferences from minor parties to the LNP has clearly played a significant role. Populist/conservative/right-leaning minor parties have continued to win the votes of the disillusioned middle, and clearly something about Palmer’s/Lambie’s/Hanson’s values is resonating with the public. But you wouldn’t know it from consuming the mainstream media, or Their ABC.

      Not sure where you live, but housing hasn’t been this affordable in 15 years where I am. Looking to buy a 3×2 about 10 mins from the city within the next 12 months. Budget 450k.

  10. johan_larson says:
    May 18, 2019 at 5:56 am

    The discussion about whether Americans can cook got a bit buried. Let me start a top-level thread for it.

    I’m one of those people who can’t cook. “Can’t cook” here means I max out at pancakes, scrambled eggs, or garden salad.

    I eat breakfast and dinner at home. It’s typically sandwiches, and I sometimes have some fruits or nuts. Sometimes I make a bowl of oatmeal.

    I eat lunch out. It’s sometimes fast food, sometimes fast casual. The grocery store also has a lot of ready-to-eat and heat-and-eat stuff these days.

    I’ve tried to learn to cook several times. The results were disappointing and cleanup was always a chore.

    Ultimately, it works. I suspect I would do things differently if I were poorer and needed to pay careful attention to my food bills or I lived in a family, so I could spread the fixed costs of cooking over more people.

    • Eugene Dawn says:
      May 18, 2019 at 6:14 am

      I am Canadian, not American. I can cook in the sense that I own a handful of cookbooks whose recipes I can more or less follow and whose results I mostly enjoy. The vast majority of my meals are homemade (by me) but I rely a lot on leftovers or easy, simple fallback recipes. I basically only eat out on special occasions.

      I’m lucky though in that I don’t have very picky taste: reading ADBG’s comment below, my first thought was just that he is just much more of a foodie than his wife; there are many standards by which I can’t cook, I’m just lucky that my own bar (and my girlfriend’s, even though hers is higher than mine) is low enough for my cooking to make it over.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:
        May 18, 2019 at 1:21 pm

        reading ADBG’s comment below, my first thought was just that he is just much more of a foodie than his wife

        Than my wife? Yes. I do more cooking than her because I enjoy it more, and also because I have higher standards. The person who has higher standards has to do more of the work.

        Than my social group? No. Most of my friends enjoy good food and good drink. But I sure as hell am not paying to go to the Tapas restaurant every week. And my standards are actually lower, because I am totally happy with chicken thighs and brussel sprouts.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:
      May 18, 2019 at 6:57 am

      Many of the people who are good cooks do an unfortunate amount of gate-keeping. I remember two specific incidents that exemplify this:

      1. Someone asking for simple recipes for their sibling entering college. The first response is a recipe that includes, among other things, three different kinds of bell peppers and balsamic vinegar. No way does some college kid that’s never cooked before going to already have those.

      2. Someone asking about pasta sauce, and a foodie keeps on jerking them around: first it is complaining that they are using the well-known national brand. Then they complain that they are using the fancy national brand. Then they complain that they are using tomato paste instead of the tomatoes in their garden. Motherforker, if the OP had tomatoes in their garden do you think they would be having this conversation?

      It takes time and patience to learn these skills, and new entrants are very nervous about ruining their new ingredients and/or ruining dinner when they are hungry. The way to learn these skills is to do tasks that are just at the edge of your current skills. Experience helps, too. Once someone has the confidence that they aren’t, say, going to poison their family with salmonella, they will stop overcooking the chicken.

      • ana53294 says:
        May 18, 2019 at 7:19 am

        Someone asking for simple recipes for their sibling entering college. The first response is a recipe that includes, among other things, three different kinds of bell peppers and balsamic vinegar.

        That sounds like a salad, which is not a particularly hard dish. Bell peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, boiled egg, tuna, and vinaigrette.

        Someone asking about pasta sauce, and a foodie keeps on jerking them around: first it is complaining that they are using the well-known national brand. Then they complain that they are using the fancy national brand. Then they complain that they are using tomato paste instead of the tomatoes in their garden.

        The kind of brand you use only matters for some things. I’ve found that brands of staples only matter when they are a proxy for some other thing. The type of rice you use matters a lot for some recipes, for example. In some places, there is a recognizable brand that offers the right type of rice, so the best way to tell people to buy the right rice without going into confusing explanations on why the type of rice they use matters, it’s easier to tell them to just buy that brand of rice.

        • Deiseach says:
          May 18, 2019 at 7:53 am

          That sounds like a salad, which is not a particularly hard dish. Bell peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, boiled egg, tuna, and vinaigrette.

          Well, unless you come from a culture where bell peppers, tuna and vinaigrette* are not a thing. And I’m going to assume that even if you’ve had such a salad before, as Edward says a college student in digs or student accommodation is not going to have three different kinds of peppers and balsamic vinegar, either from the budget or room to store things senses.

          The wider point stands: if you’re a beginner cook who maybe never did anything at all, moving from “stick this ready meal in the microwave” to “cook using raw ingredients and a recipe” is a big move up. So basic ingredients that you can presume everyone has at hand or can easily get, yes pre-made sauces or dressings in a jar are okay, and the minimum of pots and pans and steps involved to get their feet wet.

          I was lucky in that in Sixth Class we did a Home Economics class and so I know what terms like “blanching” and “a rolling boil” mean. I didn’t do that subject in secondary school, and my cooking skills are very basic (I cannot bake at all, that gene skipped me and went from my mother to my younger sister; my attempts at a sponge cake would make you weep).

          Someone who has no idea what they’re doing is not going to be helped by “It’s so easy and basic, this recipe, first go out to your herb garden and pick the seasonal authentic Italian bishop’s bigamy** (no, the French variety won’t do and don’t even dream of using the Sardinian!) and of course remember it’s only in season for a fortnight after the first full moon before the Vernal Equinox, any later and it will simply ruin the dish” foodie notions.

          And yes, I’ve seen exactly those kinds of recipes in reply to exactly the “so can anyone recommend a really simple dish to an inexperienced cook needing to make the first meal for the new in-laws” requests online.

          *See Terry Pratchett, “The Thief of Time”, for what Ireland and the UK have instead of salad dressings, or at least before Trendy Foreign Notions became mass-market in recent decades:

          ‘Salad-cream sandwiches. You just can’t beat them. That tang of permitted emulsifiers? Marvellous.’

          Yes, salad cream sandwiches. Sliced white bread (nothing fancy, ordinary supermarket loaf of sliced bread), butter, and salad cream straight out of the bottle. You can do the same with tomato ketchup and brown sauce, by the way 🙂

          **Courtesy of G.K. Chesterton’s father:

          My father might have reminded people of Mr. Pickwick, except that he was always bearded and never bald; he wore spectacles and had all the Pickwickian evenness of temper and pleasure in the humours of travel. He was rather quiet than otherwise, but his quietude covered a great fertility of notions; and he certainly liked taking a rise out of people. I remember, to give one example of a hundred such inventions, how he gravely instructed some grave ladies in the names of flowers; dwelling especially on the rustic names given in certain localities. “The country people call them Sailors’ Pen-knives,” he would say in an offhand manner, after affecting to provide them with the full scientific name, or, “They call them Bakers’ Bootlaces down in Lincolnshire, I believe”; and it is a fine example of human simplicity to note how far he found he could safely go in such instructive discourse. They followed him without revulsion when he said lightly, “Merely a sprig of wild bigamy.” It was only when he added that there was a local variety known as Bishop’s Bigamy, that the full depravity of his character began to dawn on their minds.

      • Wrong Species says:
        May 18, 2019 at 8:06 am

        That’s why more people should learn cooking from their parents. It’s the natural way to learn and results in faster results and less frustration.

        • NTD_SF says:
          May 18, 2019 at 5:01 pm

          This only works if their parents know cooking, and have the time to teach them. If no one learns on their own the proportion of people who can cook will keep dropping.

      • The Nybbler says:
        May 18, 2019 at 10:12 am

        three different kinds of bell peppers and balsamic vinegar

        All these are readily available in ordinary grocery stores, at least in my area. It’s certainly true that before you start cooking you need to get the ingredients, but these aren’t really hard ingredients.

        • gbdub says:
          May 18, 2019 at 10:58 am

          Though to be fair, one of the difficulties for a new cook is assembling a pantry. This means buying in more-than-single-use size certain staples that can be used in many recipes. Following a grab bag of recipes often leaves you with tons of half finished packages of ingredients that don’t really go together.

          Bell peppers are perishable consumables, and the difference between them is “color”, so that’s not a big deal. But balsamic vinegar is a somewhat specialized ingredient. It also shouldn’t be taken as a given that a new cook is going to know what the heck balsamic vinegar is and why it is very distinct from plain white vinegar (and is rarely used for interchangeable purposes).

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
          May 18, 2019 at 2:32 pm

          An experienced person with a stocked home kitchen can just grab the bell peppers for a once-off.

          The college student? If they go through the trouble of all this, they’ve made themselves a salad, which won’t fill them up for more than a few hours. Now what? Also, boiling or frying an egg would, by itself, be a brand new thing. Using a can of tuna probably is as well. It’s a lot to throw at someone all at once. And when they eat it, they aren’t sure if they got it right or not. Does it taste weird? Well, of course it tastes weird, there are so many new things.

          The inexperienced cooks need to start small. Get a rice cooker and put rice in it. Once you can do that, experiment with spices. Brown some ground meat and add pasta sauce and salsa for sloppy joes. Learn to chop vegetables for pasta. Baby steps.

          • ana53294 says:
            May 18, 2019 at 3:15 pm

            Foodies that give advice on boards probably grew up in a family that cooks, so the idea that somebody can’t boil some rice is foreign to them. It is to me.

            I guess our assumptions of what the baseline of not knowing how to cook are different.

            In Spain, at least, the typical college student freshman probably hasn’t done much cooking, but has observed family members cooking endless times, and has gone shopping with them, so they have an idea of how to cook rice or pasta, and peel a potato. So if you ask me what a college student should start cooking, I will assume a person who has observed other people cooking, has helped with grocery shopping, and can open a can of tuna.

            I guess these people you are referring to are coming from families where these traditions have been discontinued. And it’s very hard to imagine that, when you come from a different tradition.

          • The Nybbler says:
            May 18, 2019 at 3:55 pm

            Now you’re seemingly talking about someone who isn’t just new to cooking but new to eating. I certainly wouldn’t recommend starting cooking with ingredients that are unfamiliar to the person cooking.

      • Conrad Honcho says:
        May 20, 2019 at 6:04 am

        This sounds less to me like “good cooks gatekeeping” and more like “there exist assholes.” There are plenty of simple recipes for college students, and if you asked me for them, I would be fully aware that a college student does not have a stocked pantry and limited storage. If they have access to an oven*, I would recommend something like “baked chicken legs.”

        1) Package of chicken legs from grocery story. Flour. Paprika. Salt. Pepper. Butter.

        2) Wet ** chicken legs. In a ziplock-type bag mix flour, paprika, salt, and pepper.

        3) Melt butter in pyrex pan big enough for all legs to lie flat in.

        4) Put legs in bag a few at a time. Hold closed and shake to coat legs in flour and spices. Place in buttered pan.

        5) Put pan in oven and cook for (I’d look this up before posting, but off the top of my head I’m guessing) 45 minutes at 350 degrees. Then flip each leg over and cook for another 45 minutes.

        And for veg, steam some broccoli or something. Maybe some mac & cheese for a starch.

        Very easy, minimal ingredients, minimal equipment, makes 4-6 meals in about an hour and a half.

        * If they’re in a dorm, the dorms at my college had an oven on each floor. Failing that, get a toaster oven with a convection setting. Just as good and you keep it in your own room.

        ETA: ** I should probably have said “wet chicken legs” instead of “wash chicken legs.” They need to be damp so the flour coats, but washing chicken risks cross-contamination.

      • Viliam says:
        May 20, 2019 at 1:40 pm

        Sometimes people are good at doing things, but bad at explaining them. That’s true for both cooking and e.g. math. Yes, there may be an unconscious status motive for not trying to make it simple. But generally, explaining is a skill, and some people suck at it.

        Seeing a recipe with dozen ingredients is like seeing a compiled computer code. I believe that experienced cooks do not see recipes as lists of ingredients with lists of instructions. Instead they perceive an essence of the recipe (e.g. the essence of a soup is “put two or more things in water, and keep it boiling for 20-60 minutes”), properties of individual ingredients (e.g. “carrot requires cca 30 minutes of cooking”, “add cut garlic at the last moment, because it loses taste by cooking”, or “if you cut a potato into smaller pieces, it will be cooked faster”), and a few tricks (e.g. “if you cook legumes, always add a few bay leaves; afterwards throw those leaves away”). Plus knowledge of spices, and how much salt to add.

        As a full example, let’s use bean soup. Instead of memorizing a list of ingredients and a list of instructions, I understand the recipe as a list of facts that are individually quite simple, and many of them reusable:

        – “bean soup” is essentially beans cooked in water, which is afterwards made thicker by cream and potato, and flavored by garlic;
        – dried beans need to spend 12-24 hours in water first; then throw away the water, and use new one for cooking;
        – always add bay leaves when cooking beans;
        – it takes about an hour to cook the beans; you may use a pressure cooker to make it faster;
        – a potato can be cooked in 10 minutes when cut into tiny pieces;
        – garlic cut into tiny pieces should be added at the end, because cooking would reduce the taste;

        Only the first fact is recipe-specific, everything else is reusable. If you remember all of these facts, you can reconstruct the recipe:

        “Put a handful of beans in water. Keep them 12-24 hours in a cool place. Throw away the water. Add new water, and a few bay leaves. Cook for an hour. Throw away the bay leaves. Add a potato cut into tiny pieces. Cook for 10 more minutes. Add a spoon of cream, and garlic cut into tiny pieces. Stir the soup, then turn off the heat.”

        Now if you find dozen different recipes online, if you remember the basic structure, it is easy to see the other recipes as small additions or modifications to the basic structure. For example:

        – the part “cook beans for an hour” can be replaced with “cook beans for 30 minutes; add a carrot cut to small pieces; cook for 30 more minutes”;
        – with carrot, you can also add parsley;
        – instead of adding cut garlic at the end, you could add whole garlic at the beginning;
        – you can also add marjoram at the end;
        – some people use yogurt instead of cream;
        – you can add sausage at the beginning;
        – you can separately cook noddles, and at them to the finished soup;

        These are many details, but you can clearly see that the essence of the soup remains the same. Now of course a beginner is more likely to use a version with less ingredients, but if you are an expert or you have already cooked the simpler version, it is easy to add the carrot, parsley, marjoram, sausage, noodles, and make it a recipe with many steps. But you mental model remains “beans (plus stuff) in water, made thicker, flavored”, not a memorized list.

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 21, 2019 at 10:11 am

          This, and also there is wide range of skills. If you took an nonathletic 30 year old and tried to teach them to be athletic you wouldn’t show them how to throw a baseball, shoot free throws, run a button hook and hit a golf ball. When people thin of family members who are good cooks they often think of someone who had a narrow, but deep, skill set. Ie your Italian grandmother who can cook a broad range of pasta dishes, a few desserts and a handful of other dishes. When people learn to cook for the first time later in life they are often told to do the opposite. Here is how you scramble eggs, how to make ramen, how to make a beans and rice recipe, with very little overlap. Little that you learn about making bread translates into making muffins, despite them both being baked goods, and yet cooking classes will often have them the same day.

    • ana53294 says:
      May 18, 2019 at 7:06 am

      I eat lunch out. It’s sometimes fast food, sometimes fast casual. The grocery store also has a lot of ready-to-eat and heat-and-eat stuff these days.

      When I first learnt that there were people that go to restaurants for the sole purpose of eating food, I was shocked at first.

      I grew up in a comfortable middle class family, my mom was a SAHM, and we rarely ate out. We lived in a farmhouse, and although it wasn’t the family business, because the land was divided among the siblings so the land was insufficient to sustain a family anyway, we had a fruit orchard and a vegetable patch. Basically, all vegetables we would eat during the summer were produced by our land. We had chickens and pigs (only some years; at some point, we had an excess of fatty meat my father couldn’t eat because of his cholesterol, so we stopped producing pork). So I was spoiled with fresh, homemade food. For years, I only ate apples in season, because store-bought apples are bland and tasteless (also: tomatoes, walnuts, eggs).

      Most of the food I ate out was in the school cafeteria and it was gross. Everybody in my school ate homemade food and we all thought it was gross. It wasn’t just a kids’ opinion: many of the adults agreed that it was gross. It wasn’t cooked at school, they just reheated food made at a factory. You can’t have very palatable food for under 5 euros of ingredients & labor that is healthy.

      Sometimes, my family would go and eat in restaurants. Those were invariably special occasions: weddings, baptisms, confirmations, my father’s work family events, and such. Even for birthdays, we mostly celebrated at home, because we had a big home, kids’ birthday food is mostly snacks anyway (the only food that requires cooking is the cake and the sandwiches). Everybody I know would celebrate Christmas and New Year’s at home (some people do go out for New Year’s, but they are a minority).

      I still don’t go to restaurants for the sole purpose of eating food, the same way I don’t go to a cafe just to drink coffee. The point of the restaurant, for me, has always been socialization: being with friends, on a date, a special celebration with my colleagues, a family event. The only times when I actually go to a restaurant to eat food is when I am travelling and can’t cook or when the expense is paid by an employer. And when I go to a cafe, it’s also for socializing. Or if I want to sit down in a beautiful street an people watch.

      I am not a great cook, and when I cook just for myself, I mostly roast meat and eat a salad. In winter, it’s a soup. I can cook most things with a recipe though.

      But in Spain, we take food very seriously. Shops, banks close at lunchtime, for a period of 2.5 hours or so. Foreigners call it siesta time, but they are confused: 2.5 hours is barely enough time to go home, cook a meal, eat it together as a family, and go back to work. Kids who live in walking distance from home go back home to eat lunch.

      Other countries take food much less seriously, and they take work much more seriously. The only country I know where they take food seriously and have high productivity is France, which has many, many issues.

      Most of the Northern European countries take food much less seriously, and they are also much richer than us. I always wondered if there was a correlation.

    • Hoopyfreud says:
      May 18, 2019 at 7:29 am

      I consider myself a pretty decent cook. I like to teach my friends recipes. Unfortunately, there are real struggles involved in cooking for one, especially on my sort of budget and schedule, so I rarely get a chance to “stretch my wings” like I like to. Pretty much only on weekends, really. The week is full of sandwiches and rice. I do what I can with that, but it’s definitely somewhat unsatisfying.

    • rlms says:
      May 18, 2019 at 7:36 am

      I categorise cooking ability into three segments. From top to bottom: people who can actually cook (follow complex recipes, make stuff that tastes approximately like restaurant food); people who can’t do that but can make their culture’s basic general carbs + vegetables + sometimes meat dish without it tasting objectionable; and people who can’t do that. My impression is that most English people fall somewhere in the second, and the distribution in continental Europe is shifted about half a category upwards.

    • brad says:
      May 18, 2019 at 8:48 am

      I don’t understand why or how cooking one’s own food ended up on one side of the “universally necessary, self reliant adult skill” line and making one’s own clothes ended up on the “eccentric weirdo hobby” side. I outsource both and feel zero regrets or shame over those choices.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        May 18, 2019 at 9:19 am

        I don’t understand why or how cooking one’s own food ended up on one side of the “universally necessary, self reliant adult skill” line and making one’s own clothes ended up on the “eccentric weirdo hobby” side.

        Labor cost per unit people need?

        • johan_larson says:
          May 18, 2019 at 9:47 am

          Or frequency of need. People typically get new clothes a few times per year. They need to eat several times per day.

          But labor costs do matter. Eating out on CAN$20 per day would get a bit sketchy. CAN$20 per day of food ingredients is living like a king (who cooks for himself.)

      • ana53294 says:
        May 18, 2019 at 9:37 am

        Clothes don’t rot for decades, which means you can make them in China or Vietnam and bring them here. Comparative advantage, and cheaper labor costs, mean that it’s not worth it for ups to make clothes anymore.

        Food has to be prepared daily; it rots and spoils. This means it has to be cooked locally, which means that food has to be prepared at local labor costs, which are much higher than in China.

        There are economies of scale in clothes production. McDonalds has to invest millions just to make sure they get a passably decent burger in all locations. Food is much harder to make uniform, unlike clothes.

        • brad says:
          May 18, 2019 at 9:51 am

          It makes zero financial sense for me to do my own cooking. In money terms I’m far, far better off spending an extra hour a day working, improving my skills, networking, etc. than the money I’d save by cooking. That may not be true for everyone, but there are certainly large numbers of people for whom it is. Also, it isn’t like I am running up massive credit card debt to eat food prepared by other people, I live well within my means and many of my meals are provided at no cost by my employer.

          So I’m skeptical that the negative attitudes towards people that are unable or unwilling to prepare their own meals are firmly rooted in financial reasoning. Rather that seems like a post hoc justification for whatever the actual wellspring is.

          • Nick says:
            May 18, 2019 at 9:56 am

            In money terms I’m far, far better off spending an extra hour a day working, improving my skills, networking, etc. than the money I’d save by cooking.

            That math might work out for someone living on his own, but does it work out for a whole family?

            As for meals provided by employer, my impression is that this is still pretty uncommon.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            May 18, 2019 at 10:00 am

            Also, it isn’t like I am running up massive credit card debt to eat food prepared by other people, I live well within my means and many of me meals are provided at no cost by my employer.

            It’s a class* or occupational thing. Knowing how to cook for ourselves is important for people who aren’t in your economic position.
            If you calculate how much eating out at the places you do costs a month, we could estimate what percentage of the US population can live like that within their means. We could also look at the most frugal way to not cook without that diet making one chronically sick: cereal and coffee or tea at home for breakfast and eating Subway for lunch and dinner every day.

            *Am I the only one recalling Mr. Collins’s faux pas in Pride and Prejudice of asking which Bennet cooked this delicious meal? “None of my daughters know how to cook!” Mrs. Bennet said.

          • brad says:
            May 18, 2019 at 10:18 am

            @Nick

            Suppose I lived in a traditional to the point of nonexistent in the US household–me, my wife, 6 kids from age 5 to 17, my mom, my wife’s parents, and two sister-in-laws. If I never, ever cooked–and I probably wouldn’t in such a scenario–would that really be so different from me as a single person never cooking? Would I be ahead or behind in terms of disposable income?

            I think there’s more than a touch of America’s paradoxical and highly inconsistent distaste for commerce going on here.

          • The Nybbler says:
            May 18, 2019 at 10:34 am

            @brad

            If you lived in such a family, you could get away with not cooking because your wife and mother-in-law and sisters-in-law would (since we’re assuming “traditional” here), and all you’d have is lunches out (or pre-prepared by your wife, even more traditionally). But if it were a less-uncommon nuclear family with you and your wife both working and two kids, then having all meals prepared for you would be a lot more expensive than if you or your wife cooked most meals. Of course, you’re in NYC and with two NYC salaries and NYC housing costs (and NYC grocery costs), the additional cost might not all that significant in the larger scheme, but most people aren’t in NYC.

            You couldn’t just work an extra hour a day or so to make up for it, because someone’s gotta watch the kids.

          • brad says:
            May 18, 2019 at 10:54 am

            @The Nybbler

            If you lived in such a family, you could get away with not cooking because your wife and mother-in-law and sisters-in-law would (since we’re assuming “traditional” here), and all you’d have is lunches out (or pre-prepared by your wife, even more traditionally).

            Right, that was the implication I was going for. But in such a scenario I wouldn’t be considered somehow less-than-an-adult for not doing so. (Though my wife might be if we were both in high powered careers and she too only ate food prepared by her relatives.)

            But if it were a less-uncommon nuclear family with you and your wife both working and two kids, then having all meals prepared for you would be a lot more expensive than if you or your wife cooked both meals.

            I don’t think that’s true if you take into account opportunity cost.

            On a different forum I suppose participate in there’s a small but vocal continent of fans of Mr. Money Mustache. They are always advocating for ridiculously convoluted ways of savings tiny amounts of money. If that’s your hobby fine, but these are all people in high end white collar professions. If the goal is to have more money at the end of the year, investing those hours in their careers are going to get that done much more effectively than “saving” money at the cost of several hours every week of work that somehow doesn’t count as work.

            The same is true of cooking. I acknowledge that some people like cooking; find relaxing and rewarding. They don’t really consider it work (except when they need to cast it that way to win an argument with their significant other, but I digress). By all means if cooking is your hobby go forth and cook! But don’t tell me it is the money maximizing use of your time if you are a highly educated professional. It almost certainly isn’t, even if you are cooking for four.

            It’s true that this community is more mixed than that other one. We have more posters that aren’t in high end white collar professions. But I don’t think the disapproval of people that can’t or won’t cook for themselves is limited to classes where it financially makes sense to cook. If it were I would not have come across it or if I did, it probably wouldn’t sting.

          • Hoopyfreud says:
            May 18, 2019 at 11:11 am

            @Brad

            Cooking has a strong microcultural component – most people are at least somewhat proud of their recipes from their [hometown/country/family]. It’s visceral and indicates intimacy and care, so cooking for people is a great way to make them feel loved. It’s part of the dominant (idiosyncratic) ethos of self-reliance; a Nutella and mustard sandwich is the taste of true freedom.

            If you get nothing out of it, you’re probably a bit of an aesthetic mutant; there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but that’s the explanation for the revulsion you get hit with IMO.

          • Nornagest says:
            May 18, 2019 at 12:20 pm

            @Brad — Unless they’re eating exclusively fast food or deliveries, I don’t think the time savings in ordering out are that big for most people. You can cook a pretty good meal in twenty minutes, which is about what it takes me to drive or walk to a restaurant for take-out, and considerably less than all the various wastes of time involved in sit-down dining (getting there and back, ordering, waiting for the meal, waiting for the check). You don’t need to buy the ingredients, but that’s, what, half an hour twice a week? Probably less if you use one of the various grocery-delivery services that’ve been popping up (which I never have, but they do exist).

            I guess you’re a New Yorker, so you probably have a Chinese take-out on every street corner, but that’s not a typical situation.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:
            May 18, 2019 at 1:12 pm

            Money Mustache people are weird, so most of that can be hand-waved. However, they also typically use less expensive ingredients. My MMM lunch would be cooked in bulk on Sunday and eaten throughout the week, and each lunch would be about 60 cents worth of ingredients. The labor could be priced as substantially more, but I don’t get paid extra to work on Sunday.

            I can’t speak for other industries. My impression is that y’all computer folk can learn new skills on your off-time and earn a return on it pretty quickly. For me, that is a fool’s errand.

          • ana53294 says:
            May 18, 2019 at 1:42 pm

            The point of MMM is not just that you save money by cooking, but that you permanently lower your life expenses by making cooking a habit. This means that making a habit that decreases your expenses by X amount will decrease the number you need to retire by 25X.

            If you like your job and don’t intend to retire early, it’s probably not worth it to go to the extremes people go to learn new skills so they can reduce their life expenditure. Although I think most people with that lifestyle enjoy the process.

          • DinoNerd says:
            May 18, 2019 at 1:43 pm

            I would certainly prefer to live in such a household, and have someone who had time to cook, and enjoyed cooking, providing meals for me.

            They’d most likely be a lot more to my taste, and healthier too.

            But given real life, I have to pick where to spend my time. A cleaning service was a complete no brainer – I made that change 25 years ago, maybe more. Cooking less and less was a more gradual and more recent shift – but I just don’t enjoy it, even though I’m skilled slightly beyond the “can follow a recipe” level. (I know where substitutions will and won’t work, and what herbs and spices produce tasty results in what contexts.) But getting better nutrition because of home cooking is a dream for my retirement, not a reality for my life. (This may have to change, for health reasons, before retirement, but I’m finding sources of less bad prepared meals, and am on track for a near-future retirement, so hopefully not.)

            FWIW, it seems to me that the pre-prepared choices have got worse and worse over time, but it may just be that sugar has always been extremely hard to avoid, and I didn’t previously care about it – who’d have thought that even though I essentially don’t cook, I’d be semi-seriously considering dusting off the bread machine, just to get bread that doesn’t taste sweet to me 🙁 [And of course bread in a bread machine is easy, once you learn the quirks of the machine you have – the problem there is ingredient lifetimes – if you don’t do it often, you’ll find your yeast expired, and your whole-grain flours going off, even if you don’t find actual bugs in them. At an earlier time when I baked all my bread, cleaning the machine was probably more work than baking.]

          • Viliam says:
            May 20, 2019 at 2:03 pm

            @brad
            Having your food cooked by someone else can be an entirely valid division of labor. It only becomes a problem when having the food cooked by someone else has the side effect that the food is less healthy.

            For example, compared with what I cook at home, almost everything I buy outside contains much more salt. Salt is a cheap and simple way to add flavor, but has negative long-term effects on your health. Unfortunately, you can’t simply remove the salt from a meal that is already cooked.

            At home, I usually eat some raw vegetables with every meal. In restaurants, there is either no raw vegetable, or a homeopathic piece crouching at the end of the plate. Yeah, you can order an extra vegetable salad, but if you do it every day, things get expensive.

            So, the meals cooked at home, whether by me or my wife or anyone else, is usually high on veggies and low on salt, while the bought food is usually high on salt and low on veggies. This is not about me signaling my cooking skills, or signaling that I am a successful patriarch whose wife cooks at home. It is about my desire to live a bit longer than the average, and I believe that minimizing salt and maximizing veggies plays an important role (among other things).

            If there was an option to buy the same kind of meal I do at home, I would gladly use it. Unfortunately, there is no such option here. (The nearest approximation is the “all you can eat” Asian restaurant nearby, where I can arrange a plate with as much veggies as I want.)

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 21, 2019 at 10:27 am

            But don’t tell me it is the money maximizing use of your time if you are a highly educated professional. It almost certainly isn’t, even if you are cooking for four.

            If the options are eating out or cooking for 4 then cooking for 4 is probably maximizing your value unless you credit zero value to the rest of the party. Eating out typically takes 4 times as long as cooking as the majority of the time spent cooking and cleaning is done by 1 person and when eating out typically all 4 people are spending the time in the car, waiting to be seated, waiting to order and waiting for the food, and the three who finish first are waiting for the slowest eater of the group. the only way you can dollar maximize is to do take out or fast food (take out including pre made food from grocery stores, delivery etc) as you (most people) can’t really earn money while eating in a restaurant anyway.

    • gbdub says:
      May 18, 2019 at 10:38 am

      The Food Network put out a good book called “How to Boil Water” I’d recommend for people wanting to go from “I can microwave a frozen meal” to “I can reliably cook a few staples without a recipe, and when I follow a recipe the results look and taste the way they are supposed to”.

      For me personally the big eureka moment comes when you stop mechanically following a recipe and actually understand why you’re doing and adding the various things called for in the recipe. Once you’re there, you can start to riff on things and create a good meal from “what’s laying around”.

      For the nerdier types, Alton Brown, The Food Lab, and Cook’s Illustrated are nice go tos for the science and technique of cooking.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:
      May 18, 2019 at 1:04 pm

      If it works for you and you are happy, who cares what other people think?

      Though you likely could learn to cook better. Unfortunately there is a bit of a learning curve, and most of the stuff you do at first is going to be kind of mediocre. Ideally your parents would know how to cook, you would learn to cook from your parents, and you’d pick up new skills. But if you have to learn everything from scratch, you will be making a lot of mistakes, and there will be times when you fail so badly that it will be take-out pizza night.

      The plus side is that you will eventually get good at it, and you will eventually make some good stuff, and then you will reliably make good stuff. Plus, you get pretty good, pretty quick feed-back.

      Cleanup, however, will always be a chore.

    • toastengineer says:
      May 18, 2019 at 8:47 pm

      1. Get food.
      1a. If the food is too big to eat, cut the food in to smaller pieces.
      2. Make the pot or pan hot.
      3. Put the food in the pan.
      3a. Consider moving the food around in the pan so the bottom parts of it don’t get way more cooked than the top.
      3b. Unless there is already spices on it, put salt, pepper, and whatever spices smell good when you smell them with the food on the food.
      4. After a few minutes, take it back out. You have now cooked.

      I’ve been thinking of starting a Youtube cooking show aimed at college students. I was hoping to get it started while I was literally living in a dorm but never got around to it…

      • Paul Brinkley says:
        May 20, 2019 at 11:29 am

        I like this approach, because it reinforces the notion that you’re not forgetting anything – a lot of cooking is actually this simple.

        Similar instructions:

        1. Get food in cans and produce section that you think taste good together.
        2. Make a big pot hot.
        3. Empty cans into the big pot. If there’s liquid in the cans, pour it in, too.
        4. Stir it all with a big spoon.
        5. Wash the produce.
        6. If the produce is big, cut it into smaller pieces.
        7. Dump the produce into the pot. Stir it again.
        8. If it doesn’t look like soup, add water until it does. Stir it again.
        9. Turn the heat on the big pot as low as it will go while still being on.
        10. Wait at least half an hour.
        11. Ladle soup into bowl. If you think it needs salt, add salt. You have now cooked.

        I generally consider soups to be the next step up from grilling, so once college students are used to grilling, soups are the logical next step.

        Next after that are various mods, such as corn starch, sauteeing garlic, sauteeing onions, adding specific spices to the pot, or using a crockpot. The next step after THAT might be preparing stock.

      • Rebecca Friedman says:
        May 22, 2019 at 12:07 am

        So… um. Mind if I tell you a story?

        When I was in college, I found a chili recipe on the internet and tried it. I had some experience at that point – I had a double handful of recipes I was comfortable with, and had been cooking for myself on a what-you-can-do-in-college-dorms level for a couple years by then – so I was comfortable enough to make obvious for-my-taste modifications – cut the hot peppers and double the green peppers, that kind of thing. The problem was, even once I’d gotten all the spices in, it didn’t smell like chili. So I called my father, who I knew had a chili recipe, and explained the problem. He asked how much coriander I’d put in; I said none; he suggested adding some; I did, and it abruptly smelled like chili.

        I could tell something was wrong with the spicing. I was quite familiar with coriander, albeit from another cuisine. I had no idea, and no way of telling, that coriander was what was missing. Dad only knew because it was a major spice in his recipe.

        There may be people your method would work for; one ought not to typical-mind. (I’m assuming you are such a person, given that you’re proposing it?) But at least for me, “figure out by smell what goes with what” is a master-level skill. I would much rather have Edward Scizorhands’s recipe with the three different kinds of bell peppers and the balsamic vinegar than what you’ve described. I can apply common sense and strip down the overly complicated recipe; what you’ve described does not give me anything to work with at all. If I knew what went with what – especially in terms of spices – I wouldn’t need a recipe in the first place.

        (And yeah, I’m a moderately experienced cook now – but the above was very much true of me when I started. First recipe I ever did was “strip Mom’s stirfry to the three ingredients I can actually get hold of at college. Serve over rice.”)

        • Clutzy says:
          May 22, 2019 at 7:56 am

          Reminds me of something that happened just last night. I had no recipes in the tank, my mind was just blank. And, you know, it should be a problem because my girlfriend has watched like 4 seasons of top chef in the last month, so she should surely have ideas. So she just starts listing ingredients. Ground turkey, noodles, peppers, mushrooms. And I just look at her like, “what that isn’t a dish.” But this was her design so we get to it and we spice it greek (which isn’t bad) but I’m eating these noodles mixed with meat and veggies and I’m just disappointed and brainstorming. And all the sudden I’m like, “this has no sauce it needed a sauce”. Then I’m all like, “it should have been meatballs separate and make the sauce from the dripping.” But I couldn’t see it until I was eating the sad final dish.

    • Machine Interface says:
      May 19, 2019 at 6:41 pm

      I never thought this video would eer be relevant to an SSC discussion, but there we are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKfmRhfuI8g

      How to survive four weeks on $60 of food (without going crazy). (content warning: high amount of slav)

      • Aapje says:
        May 20, 2019 at 1:12 am

        content warning: high amount of slav

        I don’t enjoy eating Slavs, so not for me, I guess.

    • bean says:
      May 20, 2019 at 6:24 am

      I’m a level up from that. I’m not a brilliant cook, but my mom, who is a very good cook, taught me enough that I can follow medium-complexity recipes. I don’t love cooking, but I usually do it once a week or so because I prefer it to eating out.

      I do think there’s a serious issue with upskilling people who don’t know how to cook. Most cookbooks are sold to people who can and do cook, which is of little use to someone who is setting up on their own for the first time. Weirdly, the best book I’ve found for this is from Haynes (yes, the car manual people). They did a Men’s Cooking Manual, which I bought as a semi-joke. It’s well-written and I’ve found it useful for a lot of basic stuff that lived in Mom’s head and didn’t make it into the recipes I got from her.

    • greenwoodjw says:
      May 20, 2019 at 6:58 am

      What does your failure mode look like?

      • johan_larson says:
        May 20, 2019 at 7:18 am

        Failure varies. The worst failure I ever had was a sauce I tried to make; I ended with a layer of black carbon on the bottom of the little pot I was using. I had to crack it off with a knife. Other times the results are edible but weird. Once recipe had me making burritos and putting them in the oven. The tortillas got hard and crunchy like potato chips. A good result gets me something that tastes all right but required as surprising number of pots and bowls and kitchen tools, all of which need cleaning.

        • greenwoodjw says:
          May 20, 2019 at 2:16 pm

          The worst failure I ever had was a sauce I tried to make; I ended with a layer of black carbon on the bottom of the little pot I was using.

          You had the heat on too high or didn’t stir it enough. Max heat is fine for boiling water but if you’re cooking something else you need to lower the heat and stay on top of it. Stirring some sauces is basically “never stop” because they burn so easily.

          Once recipe had me making burritos and putting them in the oven. The tortillas got hard and crunchy like potato chips.

          That’s actually how I like my wraps. But again, you may have had the heat too high.

          That’s actually a common mistake, especially for impatient people (hi) who just get started, because it seems like a shortcut. But what’s important to remember is that heat travels *through* an object at a largely fixed rate. The lower heat will cook thoroughly and permeate the food while the higher heat will burn the exposed portion without touching the interior.

          A good result gets me something that tastes all right but required as surprising number of pots and bowls and kitchen tools, all of which need cleaning

          That’s actually normal. It sounds like you can cook, just imperfectly.

  11. SamChevre says:
    May 17, 2019 at 6:48 pm

    Western Mass meet-up tomorrow, Saturday May 18th.

    The Roost (cafe)
    1 Market St., Northampton MA
    Saturday, May 18, 2019 at 6:00 PM

    It’s a varied group of us; look far a big table. We always hope for new people to come.

  12. Nick says:
    May 17, 2019 at 6:04 pm

    An Ontario court has ruled that, per College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario policy, doctors must perform procedures such as abortions and euthanasia or offer referrals to doctors they know will (h/t Dreher). The decision can be read here.

    When the policy was introduced, several doctors sued, arguing that a referral to a doctor willing to perform such a procedure constitutes complicity, which is a violation of conscience on account of their religious beliefs. In its decision the court agreed (!!), but ruled that “equal and equitable access” to abortion and euthanasia trumps physicians’ rights to practice their profession according to their religious beliefs (p. 18). (The court did not address the suit’s conscience argument, only the religious freedom one, but I think it’s just as cogent.)

    Now, this is, admittedly, rather limited complicity—but this only makes the court’s decision all the more petty. The policy calls for “effective referral,” so called because it must be to where the doctor believes in good faith that the patient can receive the desired care. This standard was chosen specifically so physicians would be required to take “positive action” on behalf of their patients (p. 12). The compromise offered, meanwhile, was that these doctors would instead distribute general information (i.e., pamphlets) explaining where patients could receive such procedures. Ontario evidently believes this is insufficient: you must secure your patient their euthanasia, you bigots!

    • broblawsky says:
      May 18, 2019 at 2:14 am

      Does this apply to all doctors, or just those employed by the public health care system?

      • Eugene Dawn says:
        May 18, 2019 at 9:56 am

        If I understand correctly, the policy is actually that if the College of Physicians and Surgeons of a Ontario, the professional regulatory body for the province. Since you must be a member to practice medicine in Ontario, this would apply to all doctors, I think.

    • Machine Interface says:
      May 18, 2019 at 5:08 am

      That seems… fair? If you won’t practice the medicinal interventions you’re getting payed for, that you be required to point out your patients to someone who will really is a soft compromise (as opposed to the pratician being told “well you can find a new job outside of medicine then”).

      • John Schilling says:
        May 18, 2019 at 6:11 am

        If you won’t practice the medicinal interventions you’re getting paid for

        The physicians in question don’t want to be paid for these interventions, and the ruling doesn’t seem to limit itself to physicians who actually are being paid for these interventions.

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
        May 18, 2019 at 10:08 am

        I have a hard time seeing how providing euthenasia or abortion is “what they’re getting paid for[.]”

        If you trained as e.g. a pediatric oncologist, suddenly having the government tell you that you’re legally required to kill your patients on request (or send them to someone who you know is willing to kill them) seems like it comes totally out of left field. That almost certainly wasn’t part of your training and in fact contradicts the oath you took to “do no harm.”

        • Le Maistre Chat says:
          May 18, 2019 at 10:26 am

          Um, yeah, this.
          One reason I have such respect for the Hippocratic Oath is that, unlike modern medical oaths, it’s outside the state. The would-be all-powerful state can’t change it because it now wants abortion, euthanasia, or whatever. It’s something that vastly predates existing states and pretty much only changes in the preamble, for religious reasons (there was a Byzantine Christian preamble, and currently a secular preamble).

          • Douglas Knight says:
            May 18, 2019 at 1:46 pm

            You seem to say two contradictory things. You say that the state can’t change the Hippocratic oath, but you also say that it’s different from modern medical oaths. What good is it if it’s not administered?

            (Actually, the modern medical oaths are called the Hippocratic oath.)

          • Eugene Dawn says:
            May 18, 2019 at 2:26 pm

            It’s worth noting this isn’t the state, it’s the College of Physicians and Surgeons that implemented the rule; the court just upheld the constitutionality of the rule.

        • mustacheion says:
          May 18, 2019 at 1:48 pm

          Lets ignore the abortion issue and just talk about euthanasia. Have you ever been close to a terminally ill patient who is bed-bound, requires a feeding tube, and other similar interventions? It is pretty impressive how long modern medical science can keep a body “alive”, but these interventions can be extremely brutal. These interventions can cause the patient to suffer horribly, and the only hope of relief from the suffering is taking so many drugs that the patient is essentially in a comma. In my opinion, keeping a terminally ill patient alive on life support can very much constitute “harm”, in my opinion it can very clearly violate the Hippocratic Oath to try to preserve them so far past the point of natural death.

          I certainly do not want doctors or the government to ever decide to intentionally kill a terminally ill patient. But I do very much think that every patient should have the right to a peaceful, easy death via medical assistance, if they pre-authorize this option before their condition deteriorates to the point where they are no longer of sound mind.

          A doctor’s first and only job is to provide the care that their patient needs. I do not believe that the doctor’s beliefs about right or wrong matter at all, only the patient’s.

          • Nick says:
            May 18, 2019 at 2:27 pm

            A doctor’s first and only job is to provide the care that their patient needs. I do not believe that the doctor’s beliefs about right or wrong matter at all, only the patient’s.

            What? What kind of tyranny are you proposing, that doctors must ignore their own moral senses in carrying out their job? How is this standard not a complete forfeiture of professional ethics altogether?

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
            May 18, 2019 at 3:06 pm

            Your argument implicitly assumes that there are only two options. Either doctors must either be forbidden from performing euthenasia or doctors must be required to perform euthenasia. The idea that doctors could be permitted to perform euthenasia but not required to do so must seem like a contradiction.

            This attitude is something that I refer to as the totalitarian impulse of modernism. And it is much more frightening than the threat of a lingering death.

          • Murphy says:
            May 24, 2019 at 4:34 am

            @Nick

            Some medical staff decide their morals demand that they baptize demented non-christians in their care or practice variations on souperism witholding care with provision contingent on the patient converting.

            Many christians would consider it “Righteous” and “Saving souls”, many professional organizations on the other hand would view it as immoral and predatory behaviour targeting patients in their care when they’re at their weakest and most desperate.

            A doctors morals may forbid him from doing something that’s part of being a doctor and he’s free to stop being a doctor if that’s a problem for him. Perhaps a doctor is part of a weird sect or religion that forbids blood transfusions and they decide it’s immoral to provide them to patients… then they’re free to put down their stethoscope but they may not be free to continue being a doctor after they leave a patient who wants and needs a transfusion to die without that transfusion “because morals”

            An electrician is free to have a personal belief that working on the sabbath is wrong but if they walk off a site, leaving the electrics in an unsafe state and someone is harmed as a result then they may lose the right to continue working as electricians.

            Your personal beliefs do not trump all. If they conflict with professional responsibilities then the professional responsibilities win and you get to choose between your profession and your beliefs.

            @Nabil

            There is a third option, “or send them to someone who you know is willing”. You don’t get to pick “none of the above” and still be a good professional.

            You have no god-given right to work in a profession who’s requirements you’re unwilling to meet.

    • AlesZiegler says:
      May 18, 2019 at 6:38 am

      Imho this is a good decision, setting aside admittedly important question whether law should guarantee right to euthanasia or abortion. But system where people would be allowed to refuse to do what would otherwise be part of their job, because they have religious objection against it, would be ripe for abuse and absurdities. Like, imagine that police officer would refuse to arrest blue eyed people because according to his religion, they should not be held accountable for any crime.

      • edmundgennings says:
        May 18, 2019 at 7:58 am

        But having no respect for religious objections would lead to equally absurd results. It would seem resonable for an employer in certain circumstances to have general requirement that their employees eat the food provided. People eating different food can easily slightly impair morale and impose logistical complications and employees not eating during long shifts could easily be dangerous. But if that included pork and the employee was jewish or muslim, then the employer should accommodate unless the job truly needs people to do eat the generally provided food and not just it would be generally convenient for the employees to eat the generally provided food. There needs to be a balancing act between how important some task is and how much it excludes people from the profession on the basis of their religion.
        Regardless of whether euthanasia or abortion should be legal or not, they are at the most peripheral to the medical profession. The system would be only slightly less efficient if those who believed that they were murder were not forced to actively assist in them being conducted either by doing them themselves or by actively directing them. Passive direction, which they can and were willing to do, is at most slightly less effective in some peripheral cases. So this law excludes a decently sized religious minority for tiny benefits would puts it in the realm of all employees must eat the provided food which occasionally includes ham.

        Also historic deeply held religious beliefs seem to have more value in being protected and they also have far less risk of generating absurdities.

        • Eugene Dawn says:
          May 18, 2019 at 8:05 am

          But this law does the equivalent of excluding the religious: they don’t have to perform the abortions. In your analogy, this is like a law that requires the Jewish employees to tell their Christian neighbors where to get pork if asked.

          • Nick says:
            May 18, 2019 at 8:25 am

            In your analogy, this is like a law that requires the Jewish employees to tell their Christian neighbors where to get pork if asked.

            That’s not analogous (or rather, it exposes a weakness in edmund’s analogy). In the suit they offered evidence, which the court accepted, that under their religion the effective referrals constitute complicity (pp. 27-28); I’m not Jewish, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I expect Jews cannot do the same with the pork referral.

            ETA: I also have to point out that Ales, whom edmund was responding to, made no distinction between the referral and doing the procedure; he wrote exactly as if these physicians should be required to do the procedures too! Edmund’s point isn’t germane to the Ontario case, but it is to Ales’s position.

          • Eugene Dawn says:
            May 18, 2019 at 8:39 am

            Yes, I’m only referring to the presented analogy.

            Jews would not be complicit in pointing out to a gentile where to obtain pork (thought might be if they told another Jew? I’m not sure about this).

            I’m curious as to why handing out a pamphlet did not constitute complicity, but direct referral does: surely handing over a flyer with the address of an abortionist is basically the same as having your secretary tell someone the address?

          • Nick says:
            May 18, 2019 at 8:53 am

            I’m curious as to why handing out a pamphlet did not constitute complicity, but direct referral does: surely handing over a flyer with the address of an abortionist is basically the same as having your secretary tell someone the address?

            The flyer wouldn’t have had an address, is my impression, hence the description “general information”; the patient would still have had to, for instance, call in to be directed to a local place. Another proposed compromise (which some of the doctors suing apparently did not accept at first, but did acquiesce to for the suit, or for this appeal; it’s not entirely clear to me) was offering a phone number to “Telehealth” which apparently does provide referrals (p. 14).

            It may seem like a distinction without a difference, but the remoteness of one’s material cooperation definitely does matter to some people. I can’t speak to Christians generally, but for Catholics there are degrees of cooperation: I expect any Catholic doctors suing or theologians consulted to maintain that giving the Telehealth number for the patient to try herself would be remote cooperation, not proximate.

          • Eugene Dawn says:
            May 18, 2019 at 9:07 am

            That makes sense. This probably inclines me to agree with the ruling a little more, but it depends on exactly how general the general information was. If it was just what you’d find by Googling or checking the Yellow Pages, I think it’s not unreasonable for a doctor to be required to give more information than that.

            I should probably read the decision before offering any more of an opinion though.

          • edmundgennings says:
            May 18, 2019 at 10:11 pm

            Along the lines of what Nick has said, directly performing the abortion or actively assisting in it by active referrals are forbidden for Catholics. Catholics do not believe that abortion is immoral only for them but universally and so may not actively help others do one by actively referring them.
            If you want I try to research why the Catholic theology of cooperation makes sense I can try, but the overall framework is rather well established part of Catholic moral theology, even if it is not something the typically layman will know the name for. Active referral for an abortion is at least as forbidden to a Catholic as eating pork would be for a jew.

          • Eugene Dawn says:
            May 19, 2019 at 8:56 am

            I’ve skimmed the opinion now, and here are my take-aways:
            first of all, the “effective referral” process allowed for the physician or clinic to designate someone else to do the actual referring, so the physician would only have to refer to the referrer. You don’t actually have to get the patient to the person who will perform their abortion, but you have to put them in touch with someone who will.
            On the College’s fact sheet for effective referral they list the possibility of the physician or someone else designated by the physician could contact Ontario’s Care Coordination Services. The ruling also says directly that at least some of the physicians appealing the decision would have rejected the TeleHealth compromise.

            I will not presume to judge whether this level of remove is something a believer ought to consider morally complicit, but it’s pretty clear that the policy really does give significant space for a physician to remove themselves personally from the referral process–you can designate someone else to direct them to the CCS which will direct them to a cooperating physician.

            Catholics do not believe that abortion is immoral only for them but universally and so may not actively help others do one by actively referring them.

            The question isn’t whether a Catholic should feel it is immoral to have even this remote level of cooperation; of course they have every right to do so. The question is whether a regulatory and standards body can compel its members to do something that some religious people might regard as complicity in sin, and I think the answer to this is obviously “yes” in at least some cases.

            As an example: I am not sure if Jehovah’s Witnesses doctors are forbidden from carrying blood transfusions; the stated reason for opposition to receiving them would seem to apply, and I found a Quora answer from a JW nurse that seems to suggest so, but I am not 100% confident. I am also not sure how strict JWs are on complicity. But, if it turns out that a JW doctor would feel that any attempt to secure a patient a blood transfusion would make him or her complicit in a sin, that does not mean the medical profession as a whole has to bend over backwards to accommodate this view: at some point, if your view of complicity is broad enough, you should expect to have to separate yourself from certain spheres of life.

            Whether or not this particular case reaches that point will obviously be up to your judgment, but I presume there is some level where you agree that a body of physicians has the right to set standards of practice that would be anathema to certain religious objectors: in the extreme case, if your religion disallows prescribing antibiotics, and you regard any attempt to connect a patient with a doctor who does prescribe as complicity, I think almost everyone would agree that the best choice for you is simply to not become a doctor.

        • AlesZiegler says:
          May 18, 2019 at 10:30 am

          @edmundgennings

          I sort of see your point, but I am also worried that once religious objections are established as valid excuses in one domain, it will be very hard to deny them in others. And that way lies social disintegration.

          Whether euthanasia and abortion are really peripheral to medical profession is very much under dispute. I guess that my position is that they should be either judged peripheral and in that case there should not be guaranteed legal right to get them, or they should be judged central and available as of right. And in that latter case there should not be religious exceptions for providing information to patients about them.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            May 18, 2019 at 1:54 pm

            but I am also worried that once religious objections are established as valid excuses in one domain, it will be very hard to deny them in others. And that way lies social disintegration.

            I disagree with what I think is your implied argument, although I might be misreading it.

            My objection to most of the controversy is the assumption that what is critical is the religious nature of the objection. It seems to me that the proper base rule for a society is voluntary association–nobody has to agree to provide any service to anyone else that he doesn’t want to. It’s the abandonment of that rule that leads to social disintegration, since that implies that each of us is in some sense the slave of everyone else, obliged to provide services unless we can offer reasons not to that the state approves of.

            And yes, I am opposed to laws that forbid a seller to refuse to sell to blacks, or Jews, or homosexuals, or anyone else.

          • Jaskologist says:
            May 18, 2019 at 2:37 pm

            I sort of see your point, but I am also worried that once religious objections are established as valid excuses in one domain, it will be very hard to deny them in others. And that way lies social disintegration.

            I don’t think you can just throw out there that “everybody in a polity needs to follow essentially the same religion or the whole thing falls apart” unless you’ve got a strong defense ready. Western values of the past few centuries have affirmed exactly the opposite: that religious freedom and diversity is our strength.

          • salvorhardin says:
            May 18, 2019 at 3:13 pm

            @DavidFriedman I agree with that base rule, but it gets tricky to apply in situations where people who do voluntarily choose to provide services to marginalized others, or to act against commonly held religious doctrines, are targeted by mobs of militant bigots and/or theocrats for that choice. These mobs will often confine themselves to ostracism when that imposes sufficient costs on the nondiscriminators/nonreligious to make them conform, but not being principled libertarians, they typically do not scruple to resort to violence. In such a situation it may be infeasible to protect the rights of both nondiscriminators/nonreligious people and discriminators/religious people to do as they please in peace, and so one must choose.

            Thus for example many businesses prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 refused to serve blacks, not out of any segregationist convictions on their owners’ part, but out of a credible fear that they would lose too many white customers to continue their business– supplemented, at least in the South, by fear of Klan violence. Arguably the legal mandate to desegregate freed them to use the excuse that they were “just following the law”. A similar argument holds that bans on veils in French schools liberate girls from Muslim families who wish to go unveiled, not only from family disapproval but from honor killing.

            Given the propensity of Christianist terrorists to attack those who choose to provide abortions, a similar dynamic may well be at play here.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
            May 18, 2019 at 3:26 pm

            @salvorhardin,

            Thus for example many businesses prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 refused to serve blacks, not out of any segregationist convictions on their owners’ part, but out of a credible fear that they would lose too many white customers to continue their business– supplemented, at least in the South, by fear of Klan violence.

            Can you cite any confirmation of this?

            In the cases I’m aware of, such as buses and restaurants, it was illegal under Jim Crow laws to serve blacks and whites equally. The Civil Rights Act then made it illegal not to serve blacks and whites equally. As far as I’m aware, there was no point in time where southern business owners were able to choose who they served: mandatory segregation was followed immediately by mandatory integration.

            If that’s not the case I’d appreciate it if you could correct my understanding.

          • broblawsky says:
            May 18, 2019 at 4:19 pm

            Can you cite any confirmation of this?

            In the cases I’m aware of, such as buses and restaurants, it was illegal under Jim Crow laws to serve blacks and whites equally. The Civil Rights Act then made it illegal not to serve blacks and whites equally. As far as I’m aware, there was no point in time where southern business owners were able to choose who they served: mandatory segregation was followed immediately by mandatory integration.

            If that’s not the case I’d appreciate it if you could correct my understanding.

            Not exactly what you’re asking for, but James Reeb was a white man murdered by white supremacists for eating at an integrated restaurant.

          • Eugene Dawn says:
            May 18, 2019 at 4:22 pm

            I’m pretty sure the Woolworth stores and other department store lunch counters that were the subject of the sit in movement were examples of private segregation: for example, when a sit in at the Royal Ice Cream store went to the North Carolina Supreme Court, the judge ruled against the protestors on the grounds that the 14th Amendment “erects no shield against merely private conduct”; as this is the same state where the bulk of the sit ins occurred a few years later, I presume it was still true that none of those stores were segregated owing to an actual law.

          • salvorhardin says:
            May 18, 2019 at 5:07 pm

            Re: those asking for examples, two come to mind:

            1. from Calvin Trillin, “Back on the Bus”:
            “…a Greek-immigrant diner owner with tears in his eyes telling black sit-in students in Atlanta that, as much as he sympathized with their cause, serving them would mean the end of his business.”
            https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/07/25/back-on-the-bus

            2. from Isabel Wilkerson, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” an account of a motel owner in Arizona refusing a black traveler a room:

            ““We’re from Illinois,” the husband said. “We don’t share the opinion of the people in this area. But if we take you in, the rest of the motel owners will ostracize us. We just can’t do it. I’m sorry.””

            It may be true that in the South there was no period when one was legally free to choose to discriminate or not– I’m not sure– but there certainly was such a period in the rest of the country, and in that period the Green Book was very much not confined to the South.

          • Lillian says:
            May 18, 2019 at 6:00 pm

            @Nabil ad Dajjal: There used to be an article covering the Monson Motor Lodge incident in 1964, which produced that famous picture of manager James Brock pouring acid into the pool in an effort to scare off civil rights protesters.

            According to it, Brock had previously desegregated the motel, but the KKK made credible threats to burn it down if he didn’t resegregate it, so he did so. Then as bad luck would have it Martin Luther King Jr and other activists decided to pick the Monson Motor Lodge as the location of their protest, which lead the panicked manager to make some poor life choices in an effort to save his livelihood.

            Unfortunately i am unable to find the article in question, and i fear it may in fact have been thrown down the memory hole. All i’m left to with to confirm my memory is some folks in the comments of this other article who are saying the same thing.

          • edmundgennings says:
            May 18, 2019 at 9:52 pm

            @AlesZiegler

            What degree of religious exemptions are permitted is a matter of prudence but we have been able to have religious exemptions for a good while now. For example the classical (anglican) school model of mandatory chapel except for Jews and Roman Catholics (and implicitly Muslims, Hindus, etc) does not open the door to abuse. Post sepoy mutiny british policy made rather extensive concessions to religious objections.
            Now in more modern situations where new religions are starting up or there is not a clearish set of norms there is a lot more room for problems.

            I am somewhat confused by your latter point and am unsure what you mean by legal right.
            My distinction is based on practical considerations. Euthanasia but especially abortion are at the very least practically peripheral to the medical profession. One can be a very useful doctor without doing them. There needs to be a very compelling interest before it is fitting to effective ban a considerable minority from the medical profession. I think this high bar does not come close to being reached for practical reasons.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            May 18, 2019 at 11:25 pm

            Richard Epstein’s defense of the civil rights act, as I remember it, was that segregation was being enforced by local governments, but not by laws requiring it. A restaurant that accepted black patrons was at risk of various forms of legal harassment.

            Whether his view is correct I do not know.

          • AlesZiegler says:
            May 19, 2019 at 4:01 am

            Apologies for somewhat late responses, I had things to attend to.

            @edmundgennings

            I do not find your examples of religious exemptions convincing. I am opposed to any kind of mandatory religious services in public schools, so issue of religious exemptions in this respect should not arise. On the other hand, in private schools they could have all exemptions from otherwise mandatory religious services they like, as far as I am concerned. And I certainly do not wish our society to be run like colonial British India, or for that matter, modern India – which has sectarian problems somewhat related to a weakness of secular law. Our secular legal system should not be weakened by religious exemptions (I should add that I am European, not Canadian, so take this please as an observation that I think it would be unwise for Canada to do so).

            I agree that performing euthanasia or abortion is peripheral to medical profession in a sense that practically every medical procedure is, due to high degree of specialization. But providing accurate information about available medical options to patients is central duty of general practitioners. Due to my sloppy writing I failed to distinguish between normative argument whether abortion and/or euthanasia should be part of government provided healthcare services and practical reality that even they would be, they will not be performed by most doctors, because most doctors specialize in other fields. See also my reply to David Friedman below.

            @DavidFriedman

            I agree that you correctly stated where we disagree. I do not think that society should be based solely on voluntary association, since I am not an anarchocapitalist. But I also acknowledge that it is perfectly possible to defend a position that there should be minimal government concerned with defence and administration of justice with no role in providing healthcare. I temporary forgot that I am writing on a forum full of libertarians and/or Americans (I am neither), so I foolishly assumed that we will all agree that there should be some basic level of healthcare services provided by the government and political discussion should be about what those basic services are. With this implicit premise in mind, I proceeded to argue that government paid doctors should not be able to claim religious exemptions from performing those basic services.

            On civil rights legislation, I support in principle that discrimination based on race, sexual orientation or religions should be forbiden in some private domains, like restaurants, employment, housing and such. But I have to acknowledge that in some cases it imho gone to far, like below mentioned case of Christian dating site in California ordered by the courts to provide for same sex matches – that seems like potentially dangerous precedent.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
            May 19, 2019 at 7:29 pm

            Ok thanks, it seems like I was wrong.

        • 10240 says:
          May 18, 2019 at 12:59 pm

          I don’t think it’s absurd to allow an employer to treat every employee the same, regardless of religion (though it’s probably not in an employer’s interest to do so). If an employee doesn’t like it, he can choose a different job. (Though the latter part gets harder in the case of a (quasi-)monopsony on a profession, such as in medicine in some countries.)

        • salvorhardin says:
          May 18, 2019 at 1:20 pm

          Fair points, but there’s also the argument, which I think has more force applied to doctors than most other professionals, that when the state licenses a profession and imposes heavy conditions on procuring a license, it creates a barrier to entry that effectively limits supply. Thus, if you are a doctor who limits your scope of practice according to your religious convictions, you are not only preventing patients from getting services for you that are outside that limited scope, you are also– by your occupancy of your scarce licensed position– making it harder for them to find another licensed doctor who will give them what they want, and thus imposing your religious beliefs on them.

          FWIW I don’t think that, from the secular liberal point of view, there is any clear principled reason why religious convictions should receive more legal deference than any other sort of strong belief or preference. The fact that they do seems largely rooted (I would welcome historical scholarship confirming or refuting this) in the pragmatic observation that forcing people to choose between the doctrines of their religion and the law of the land often ends badly for the enforceability of the law. In the modern West that is becoming less and less true over time, so it’s natural to expect that legal deference to religious convictions would become weaker.

          • The Nybbler says:
            May 18, 2019 at 1:43 pm

            Thus, if you are a doctor who limits your scope of practice according to your religious convictions, you are not only preventing patients from getting services for you that are outside that limited scope, you are also– by your occupancy of your scarce licensed position– making it harder for them to find another licensed doctor who will give them what they want, and thus imposing your religious beliefs on them.

            This is special pleading, though, because doctors are in general permitted to limit the scope of their practice.

          • 10240 says:
            May 18, 2019 at 2:00 pm

            A doctor who doesn’t perform a particular procedure performs more procedures of other kinds, thus keeping the total supply of medicine the same. Unless the number of doctors who are willing to perform abortions or euthanasia is very small, there is no danger of the supply of these procedures becoming smaller than the demand.

            If there are numerical limits on the number of doctors’ licences, that’s itself a problem. Limiting admissions to medical school is appropriate to the extent it takes a reasonably smart and hardworking person to make an adequate doctor. To the extent the number of doctors is limited by the number of people who are smart enough and want to be doctors, forcing people who are unwilling to do a small number of medical procedures to not practice medicine at all reduces supply and is a terrible idea.

          • salvorhardin says:
            May 18, 2019 at 3:04 pm

            @10240 As I understand it the number of doctors in the US is de facto limited both by immigration restrictions and by guild restrictions on the number of slots in accredited medical schools. I agree that scope of practice mandates are a poor second best solution compared to lifting the caps.

            @Nybbler I strongly suspect that, if other nonreligious chosen scope limitations were common enough and had a large enough systemic effect on broad classes of patients, those limitations too would be restricted.

          • The Nybbler says:
            May 18, 2019 at 4:01 pm

            @Nybbler I strongly suspect that, if other nonreligious chosen scope limitations were common enough and had a large enough systemic effect on broad classes of patients, those limitations too would be restricted.

            I’m not convinced those were the criteria here; people weren’t having trouble finding abortionists and euthanasists because there was a shortage. Rather, it seems the rule was made because some doctors were religiously scrupulous.

            In the US, in some areas we had (maybe have?) a shortage of doctors willing to deliver babies, for financial reasons. I never heard of a ruling forcing any sort of doctors to include that in their practice.

          • Nick says:
            May 19, 2019 at 5:29 am

            Fair points, but there’s also the argument, which I think has more force applied to doctors than most other professionals, that when the state licenses a profession and imposes heavy conditions on procuring a license, it creates a barrier to entry that effectively limits supply. Thus, if you are a doctor who limits your scope of practice according to your religious convictions, you are not only preventing patients from getting services for you that are outside that limited scope, you are also– by your occupancy of your scarce licensed position– making it harder for them to find another licensed doctor who will give them what they want, and thus imposing your religious beliefs on them.

            Hold on a second. This barrier to entry exists either because the costs are necessarily high or artificially high. In the former case, this law will only have the effect of driving some doctors out of their practice and persuading young Christians not to pursue a medical career. And in the latter case, the problem is the government artificially limiting the supply. In either case, how is the problem here the Christians, or the solution compelling them to violate their beliefs?

      • 10240 says:
        May 18, 2019 at 12:53 pm

        There is a distinction between an employer requiring one to do something as part of a job, and the government requiring everyone in a certain profession to be willing to do something.

        • edmundgennings says:
          May 18, 2019 at 9:58 pm

          There would seem to be far less of a compelling state interest in compelling everyone to be willing to do something than the do something as part of the job. If something is part of the job then it makes sense for it be a requirement. Requiring people to be willing to do something, seems to be largely just excluding people unable to do x in good conscience.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 19, 2019 at 5:40 pm

            But a doctor in private practice, or an explicitly Catholic hospital, gets to define what the job entails. You’re allowed to go into obstetrics and not offer abortions, and a Catholic hospital can explicitly say “we don’t do abortions here.”

            The question is whether the state should overrule that and say “no, you have to offer those services despite your belief that they’re evil or harmful to patients.”

    • Deiseach says:
      May 18, 2019 at 8:17 am

      This is only going to get more heated as time goes on. I’ve seen comments all over about “if you won’t perform an abortion, then don’t become a doctor or nurse in the first place” and even in Ireland, now we’ve got legalised abortion – any religious conscience exemptions are being regarded by general online commentary as zealots and bigots and “if you’re not going to do it, you shouldn’t be a doctor”.

      So yes, I think there will be a real push to exclude conscience objections on the lines of “it’s legal, you bigot” (the irony being that the same people would be all in favour of people going against laws in favour of their conscience if it were, for example, a county clerk issuing marriage licences to gay people or doctors in Nazi Germany refusing to go along with eugenics of the undesirable).

      And I think, given the example of cases like Christian Mingle, that the option of “this is an organisation providing services for only people who all agree that abortion is wrong” won’t be permitted to continue too much longer, either; you either provide the legal service to anyone who turns up or you’re breaking the law on discrimination, and you can’t exclude people who don’t belong to the group (or do belong to the group but have different views on the matter) from accessing those services, because that’s discrimination too.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        May 18, 2019 at 9:44 am

        I agree. The professionally offended and Cathedral-educated judges are going to find that more and more Christian organizations are breaking the law by existing. Of course, Muslims will never be found in violation of the law.
        (The interesting edge case is other minorities. Will Indian matchmaking sites be forced to make homosexual matches or be sued out of existence?)

        • salvorhardin says:
          May 18, 2019 at 1:24 pm

          Re: Indians, I very much doubt it, for the same reason that Wing will never be forced to admit men. On the egalitarian view, the point of antidiscrimination laws is to stop socially powerful groups from oppressing socially marginalized groups, and Christians are the only religious group that Western egalitarians believe to be socially powerful. Whether you agree with that belief or not in general you can hopefully at least see how history has informed it, and it is arguably still true in many more local jurisdictions, as witness e.g. recent developments in Alabama.

          I am sure, by contrast, that the French would unapologetically apply the same rules to Muslims and everyone else, motivated by laicite rather than egalite.

          • Clutzy says:
            May 18, 2019 at 4:54 pm

            This entire concept is a self-contradiction. If Christians are powerful they would have nothing to fear from the state because they would influence it. If Muslims are getting special exception that means they are socially powerful.

          • toastengineer says:
            May 18, 2019 at 9:01 pm

            Yeah… people have been noticing that and pointing it out to them since at least the early 2000s. They assert that historical power matters more than power right now. Dunno how that makes any sense, but it seems to work for them.

          • salvorhardin says:
            May 18, 2019 at 10:37 pm

            Re: historical vs present day power, it is not so surprising or unusual that those who view themselves as triumphing over an oppressive prior regime would be extra vigilant to crush anything which looks like a resurgence, even a local and apparently private one. “These are things we have dealt with once / And they shall not rise from their grave…”

          • toastengineer says:
            May 18, 2019 at 10:56 pm

            That makes sense, yeah.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            May 18, 2019 at 11:28 pm

            “These are things we have dealt with once / And they shall not rise from their grave…”

            Given that the context is restrictions by a democratic government, wouldn’t the next two lines be at least as relevant?

          • Clutzy says:
            May 19, 2019 at 12:36 am

            Re: historical vs present day power, it is not so surprising or unusual that those who view themselves as triumphing over an oppressive prior regime would be extra vigilant to crush anything which looks like a resurgence, even a local and apparently private one. “These are things we have dealt with once / And they shall not rise from their grave…”

            This just seems like a form of historical revisionism/possibly full on delusion. A theocracy of conservative Christians has never descended in America. The feminists have greater successes, aka tragedies, (Prohibition); the progressives have a signature war (WWI) and a few signature domestic tyrannies like re-segregation of civil service and imprisonment of war protesters; secular warmongers have half a dozen or so in the last year.

            OTOH, most of the American founders, while Christians, could not be described as conservative or prudes. Christian advocates (very devout) are primarily responsible for ending slavery and advancing civil rights. Sure, maybe all that is too old for people to remember, but then they don’t remember much.

            The reality is that conservative Christian values were rarely governmentally enforced, they were enforced by social norms. The few that have been, like gay marriage, were basically during their social decline. Indeed, as I pointed out, they are now the persecuted class in that area because they are so weak of a lobby.

          • HeelBearCub says:
            May 19, 2019 at 9:10 am

            Prohibition

            Did you really just cite prohibition as divorced from conservative religious thought?

            You really should look at the makeup of the set that is “dry counties”.

          • The Nybbler says:
            May 19, 2019 at 10:40 am

            National Prohibition was pushed by both religious conservatives and Progressives, and there was notable overlap between suffragettes and the prohibitionists.

          • brad says:
            May 19, 2019 at 10:48 am

            Nineteenth and early twentieth century progressivism, which shares little but a name with the millennial version, wasn’t by and large driven by free thinkers (i.e. atheists), though there were some involved in it. It was much more an outgrowth of the second great awakening.

            But I guess this is like the whole “fascists are actually left wing” thing and it’s not really about history at all.

          • 10240 says:
            May 19, 2019 at 4:43 pm

            @salvorhardin Based on what I find on the web, The Wing has changed its policy to officially allow men, as a result of a lawsuit.

            If Muslims are getting special exception that means they are socially powerful.

            @Clutzy That’s a limited form of power that depends on society acting on their behalf, reasonable to distinguish from having independent power.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 19, 2019 at 5:31 pm

            @10240: Who do you imagine has “independent” power that doesn’t depend on “society acting on their behalf”? If I put Donald Trump, the entire US Senate and House of Representatives, and all nine Supreme Court justices in a room together, and they have the 100% unanimous desire that something be done, then basically nothing will be done unless society acts on their behalf. I think you need to clarify the distinction you are trying to make.

          • 10240 says:
            May 20, 2019 at 2:41 pm

            @John Schilling , White people during Jim Crow, for example, discriminated against black people in various ways. They did so themselves, being the majority, they didn’t need anyone else to do it for them. Or take a community where the vast majority are devout Christians. If they want work arrangements that respect their religious rules, chances are they’ll have them (barring interference from laws): both because companies depend on employees most of whom are Christians, and because most of the bosses and owners are Christians too.

            When some agent B (e.g. society) acts on behalf of some person or group A (e.g. Muslims, or the government leadership), whether A or B has the power can be seen through
            — Voluntariness: Does A ask B to do something, and B chooses to do it, or does A order B to do something, and B has to do it?
            — Discretion: Does B choose which requests from A it implements? E.g. if Muslims ask for religious exemptions, we give them, but if they ask us to implement Sharia law, we don’t.

            There is an idea in right-wing discourse to the effect that if a society ever decides to listen to some small minority, and do some of the things they request, that means that the minority is ruling over the society; variants are in the comments I was responding to. I think that’s nonsense (even though I’m aware of the problems with going overboard with favoritism towards a minority, which is nevertheless still a choice of the majority).

        • dndnrsn says:
          May 19, 2019 at 7:32 am

          I think it’s nonsense that Muslims will never be found in violation of the law; the same trends hit Muslims as seem to hit everyone else. First-generation immigrants and those whose families settle into the lower to lower middle class will likely be more socially conservative. Those who go to university and thus make up a really disproportionate chunk of the top half or whatever of the economy will tend to be more socially liberal. Muslim communities in North America – Europe is different – are about, I predict, to experience some pretty intense internal shakeups and controversies over what norms to make a big deal of, like happened to various Christian denominations in the middle to late twentieth century.

          Right now there are many liberal Muslims who probably don’t eat pork but very likely do drink, see nothing wrong with homosexuality, and are broadly speaking feminists. Right now discrimination from outside probably makes them leery to criticize the conservatives, but when they feel more secure? Especially considering that “conservative” in Islam clashes a lot more with the standard-issue university-educated social opinions than most conservative Christianities do.

          Consider how it went with Catholics; I’ll bet liberal Catholics started publicly laying into the conservatives a lot more after the decline in anti-Catholicism in the middle twentieth century.

        • Eugene Dawn says:
          May 19, 2019 at 9:35 am

          This is really not an accurate characterization of what’s happening. What the court found is that the College of Physicians and Surgeons was not breaking the law by requiring their doctors to refer in this way.

          And, yes, obviously other minorities will be subject to this: for one thing, it’s not only Christians who object to euthanasia and abortion. This specific ruling targets Muslim and Sikh doctors just as much as Christian ones.

          Moreover, Canada really isn’t a great example of a society that will only target Christians when one of our provinces is trying to ban religious symbols like kippot, turbans, and veils–they’ve now agreed to compromise that this ban probably means that some crucifixes might have to come down too. The law is widely seen as targeting Muslim head-covering specifically, with everything else collateral damage.

          There have also been decisions forbidding Sikhs from carrying kirpans, and some provinces refuse to let Sikhs ride motorcycles unless they remove their turbans to wear helmets (Ontario just reversed policy on this under the new Ford government; the previous Liberal government did not want an exemption to helmet rules for Sikhs); as well as a case that limited the scope of religious freedom in a complaint stemming from an Indigenous tribe in British Columbia.

          • Obelix says:
            May 19, 2019 at 3:02 pm

            The law is widely seen as targeting Muslim head-covering specifically, with everything else collateral damage.

            First, keep in mind that this law only intends to forbid agents of the state from wearing religious symbols while in a position of authority or coercion. Most of the debate is over whether public school teachers should be included in this, as the law intends to. Also, while Muslim head-coverings are currently the most visible religious symbols, many proponents of this law have placed it in the context of the secularization of the educational system, a process that started in the 1960s when nuns and priests who used to teach in schools were allowed to keep teaching but had to remove their religious garments, and ended in the 1990s and 2000s with the end of religious education in public schools. The argument, which I do not entirely agree with but certainly understand, is that allowing religion to creep back into schools would reverse this secularization process.

            some provinces refuse to let Sikhs ride motorcycles unless they remove their turbans to wear helmets (Ontario just reversed policy on this under the new Ford government; the previous Liberal government did not want an exemption to helmet rules for Sikhs)

            To be honest, I do not understand how it is possible to be philosophically consistent and allow Sikhs (but only them) not to wear motorcycle helmets. If you want motorcycle riders to wear helmets, but aren’t willing to enforce it on at least a part of the population, the only option to me is to recommend it but otherwise leave the choice in the hands of the rider. If you do want to make it a law that every motorcycle rider shall wear a helmet, you cannot allow people to get exempted from it just because they don’t want to for cultural reasons.

          • rlms says:
            May 19, 2019 at 3:40 pm

            Why philosophical consistency important for laws? It’s good for them to be just, but that’s not quite the same.

          • Obelix says:
            May 19, 2019 at 4:20 pm

            rlms: I think philosophical consistency in laws is a good idea, but in any case, I don’t think it is just to require motorcycle riders to wear a helmet, but allow Sikhs only to disregard this law. At the very least, you’d need to allow any cultural or philosophical objection to helmets. And when you’re there, might as well just make it optional.

          • 10240 says:
            May 19, 2019 at 5:16 pm

            To be honest, I do not understand how it is possible to be philosophically consistent and allow Sikhs (but only them) not to wear motorcycle helmets.

            @Obelix
            (1) If an action has only a small cost to someone, but significantly reduces serious risk, the government should make it mandatory.
            (2) Requiring someone to violate religious rules (or not ride motorcycles) should be considered a significant emotional cost. Finding helmets uncomfortable (or whatever other reason some people without religious objections wouldn’t wear them) should be considered a small cost. There are no known people other than Sikhs who object to wearing a helmet to an extent that it would cause a significant cost to them.
            (3) More verifiable criteria are preferable to less verifiable ones such as a personal declaration of having a philosophical objection. (Allowing an exception for anyone who claims an objection would make the law unenforceable for the people it’s intended to apply to, i.e. people with no actual serious philosophical/religious objection.)
            (4) Discrimination on the basis of religion is not always, categorically unacceptable (so religious exemptions can be acceptable).

            I don’t necessarily agree with the above principles (especially not with (1)), but they are a consistent philosophy that would support an exception for Sikhs only.

          • Obelix says:
            May 19, 2019 at 9:31 pm

            10240:

            (2) Requiring someone to violate religious rules (or not ride motorcycles) should be considered a significant emotional cost. Finding helmets uncomfortable (or whatever other reason some people without religious objections wouldn’t wear them) should be considered a small cost.

            This is something I would definitely disagree with. I think of religion as a part of culture, nothing more, nothing less, and believe the state should not treat religion any different from any other cultural element. In fact, I think even defining “religion” apart from “culture” or “philosophy” is very difficult, which is one reason why bans on religious symbols are actually hard to enforce.

    • dick says:
      May 18, 2019 at 9:36 am

      The policy calls for “effective referral,” so called because it must be to where the doctor believes in good faith that the patient can receive the desired care. This standard was chosen specifically so physicians would be required to take “positive action” on behalf of their patients (p. 12).

      It seems like one obvious reason for this requirement is to keep doctors from giving out fake info, i.e. pamphlets for an “abortion clinic” run by pro-lifers. Any reason not to think that? I know the fake clinics are somewhat common in the US but have no idea about Canada.

      • 10240 says:
        May 18, 2019 at 1:07 pm

        It would make more sense to prevent things like that through fraud law. Much less controversial, too.

    • Douglas Knight says:
      May 18, 2019 at 1:49 pm

      Do you have a source that discusses the pamphlets that were found to be unacceptable?

      • Eugene Dawn says:
        May 19, 2019 at 8:59 am

        There were no pamphlets, from what I can tell: general referral meant giving out a phone number to a service that you could use to find a provider.

    • ana53294 says:
      May 19, 2019 at 5:05 am

      I’ve seen many articles on how the US countryside has a deficit of doctors, especially primary-care ones. Medical school is expensive; a salary in the countryside is lower. Life is also more boring, and more community-centered.

      Patients who go to a doctor for an abortion go to either a gynecologist/obstetrician or to a general practitioner. It would be strange if they went to an ophtalmologist for an abortion. I’ve heard that women in the countryside also have to drive a couple of hours to give birth.

      A christian doctor with deep ties to the community is much more likely to go work in a practice in some countryside remote community than an atheist liberal doctor. Is it really reasonable to impose costs on these doctors, who serve their communities due to their sincerely held faith? If they didn’t take their faith seriously, they probably wouldn’t be serving a remote religious community in the first place. Most atheist doctors would run away from a place like that.

      If the cost of these kind of legislation is denying medical service to remote communities, because you eliminate the population of doctors willing to serve them (deeply religious people who are elders in their communities), is it really worth it? Because it won’t mean that women in remote communities get access to abortions; it will mean women in remote communities will have access to even fewer obstetrics/gynecologists than they do now.

      I am pro-choice, but I really believe that conscientious objections should be respected. My father was drafted and forced to serve in the Spanish army. My cousin served in the Red Cross, an alternative service that was allowed by the raising movement of conscientious objectors. I really respect conscientious objectors; thanks to them, we got rid of the draft.

      Doctors also refuse to help in death penalty cases, because they take their oath seriously. Should providing a humane death to these people trump doctor’s right to refuse to provide it?

      • Mustard Tiger says:
        May 20, 2019 at 2:28 pm

        In my experience, most physicians in rural America are relatively young and definitely foreign born (south Asia, Latin America, Middle East).

  13. Urstoff says:
    May 17, 2019 at 2:32 pm

    What’s the best way to go about learning a language if your only goal is to be able to read that language (e.g., learning German for the purpose of reading 19th century German philosophy)? Would it be any different than the way you would learn to speak the language?

    • dndnrsn says:
      May 17, 2019 at 5:36 pm

      You could just translate harder and harder stuff from the target language into your native language; consider how ancient Greek and Latin are taught. However, immersion helps to learn a language, and that involves speaking it – immersion in ancient Greek and Latin just aren’t possible.

    • DinoNerd says:
      May 17, 2019 at 5:55 pm

      There are books specifically designed to teach the ability to read a language.

      From my shelves:

      German for Reading Knowledge by Hubert Jannach and Richard Alan Korb, 4th edition, ISBN 0-8384-783502

      German Quickly: A Grammar for Reading German by April Wilson, revised edition, ISBN 0-8204-2324-6

      There are probably more recent books; I got these at least 10 years ago.

    • TheMadMapmaker says:
      May 19, 2019 at 2:52 pm

      Yeah, it’d be pretty different; for spoken language you need to focus on getting the pronunciation right (and understanding the pronunciation right), and on casual speech patterns which tend to have a lot of shortcuts. Think “hey, watcha doin t’nite?”

      You can ignore all that if you only want to read it; if I had to learn a language “read only” I’d probably look for some comic books in that language, and look for which textbooks put more emphasis on text analysis than on casual speech patterns.

      (that being said, I would recommend learning the spoken language too, it seems a bit of a waste to *only* learn how to read it, and you may get some bad habits / “mental pronunciation” that are harder to correct later on)

  14. gbdub says:
    May 17, 2019 at 11:59 am

    What are some good (or bad) examples of hypersonic weapons and aircraft in (preferably visual) sci fi?

    I’m presenting a panel where the concept is basically “talk about near future weapons systems and compare the real deal to how they are portrayed in sci fi (or “speculative nonfiction”)”. Ideally I could find a couple cool illustrations or screenshots and then nitpick them to death in hopefully entertaining fashion.

    I’ve got lots of info on real hypersonics (scramjets, high speed glide weapons, etc). But for sci fi depictions I’m drawing a blank (other than things like SSTO spaceplanes, which are a bit off topic). Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

    • Conrad Honcho says:
      May 17, 2019 at 12:06 pm

      In what setting? Do you mean like near-future sci-fi or highly speculative stuff?

      When I think of things that people sort of think are “plausible but not here yet” I think orbital lasers and Rods from God.

      If you’re talking about straight-up sci-fantasy stuff, compare the slightly more realistic fighter controls from Babylon 5 to those in Star Wars. There’s no banking in space.

      • gbdub says:
        May 17, 2019 at 12:32 pm

        I’m not worried too much about the setting in terms of near vs far future.

        Orbital lasers, we’re covering elsewhere.

        “No banking in space” is also a good point we will cover, but for this section I’m specifically looking for stuff operating in an atmosphere.

        Why Rods from God are dumb and why the DF21D doesn’t necessarily make carriers obsolete are my backups if we can’t find anything else.

        This topic is tricky because even using the term “scramjet” or “hypersonic” seems to be limited to at least semi-hard sci fi, and there’s not much of that in TV and movies set outside of deep space.

        • bean says:
          May 17, 2019 at 8:09 pm

          Why Rods from God are dumb and why the DF21D doesn’t necessarily make carriers obsolete are my backups if we can’t find anything else.

          Hey! If this is for work, no stealing my stuff!

          • gbdub says:
            May 17, 2019 at 9:05 pm

            Heh I figured those suggestions would be up your alley. Don’t worry it’s purely for educational / entertainment purposes only (science track at a comic convention).

            If I do end up using the “carrier killer” stuff I’ll be sure to hat tip Naval Gazing.

          • bean says:
            May 20, 2019 at 5:59 am

            Ah, that’s fine then. I just couldn’t stand the thought of my work helping my company’s arch-rival.

            (Seriously, if you do go that route and want me to look it over, I’d be happy to.)

    • Hoopyfreud says:
      May 17, 2019 at 1:01 pm

      Starship Troopers had atmo fighters. Other than that, for film and TV I’m mostly drawing a blank.

    • LesHapablap says:
      May 17, 2019 at 2:27 pm

      Cowboy Bebop had some cool space / atmosphere fighters and craft.

    • John Schilling says:
      May 17, 2019 at 8:52 pm

      What are some good (or bad) examples of hypersonic weapons and aircraft in (preferably visual) sci fi?

      I don’t think there are any good examples. There are things that act like late 20th century jet fighters and missiles, and of course there are spacecraft of every shape and size, but very little in between. For bad examples, pick any SF whose “space fighters” are atmosphere-capable and as soon as they enter the atmosphere start acting exactly like late 20th century(*) jet fighters. We can infer that they ought to be flying at hypersonic speeds, but the presentation is otherwise. Sometimes this will be done in the other direction, where a super-duper fighter airplane that looks and acts like a 20th century jet is defined as being super-duper in that if the pilot engages the turbo-afterburners or whatever he can just fly into orbit.

      Actual realistic presentations of hypersonic flight, I’m coming up blank.

      * OK, mostly they act like early 20th century jet fighters, but they look all pointy-nosed and jet-like and we are told they are flying at mach umpty-something.

  15. Two McMillion says:
    May 17, 2019 at 10:50 am

    Below are six quotations. Three of them are taken from Hitler’s page at wikiquote and the remaining three were generated by the latest publicly available version of GPT-2 using the genuine quotes as prompts. Your task is to identify, if possible, which quotes are really from Hitler and which were created by the AI.

    1. “Socialism as the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism and especially against easy and unearned income. And we were aware that in this fight we can rely on no one but our own people. We are convinced that socialism in the right sense will only be possible in nations and races that are Aryan, and there in the first place we hope for our own people and are convinced that socialism is inseparable from nationalism.”

    2. “We think that there will be a universal spirit of brotherhood among our people, a deep and lasting unity of interest between all workers and all people, an international solidarity in the struggle against all parasitism, but below all this there will be also a consciousness of responsibility in the struggle of the class against parasitism. And this will develop into what we call the ‘collectivity’s task’.”

    3. “At the founding of this Movement we formed the decision that we would give expression to this idea of ours of the identity of the two conceptions: despite all warnings, on the basis of what we had come to believe, on the basis of the sincerity of our will, we christened it “National Socialist.’ We said to ourselves that to be ‘national’ means above everything to act with a boundless and all-embracing love for the people and, if necessary, even to die for it. And similarly to be ‘social’ means so to build up the state and the community of the people that every individual acts in the interest of the community of the people and must be to such an extent convinced of the goodness, of the honorable straightforwardness of this community of the people as to be ready to die for it.”

    4. “So, in this sense, national life is ‘social life’: it is a love for the people and a life for the state and the people that it seems to us absolutely essential that every one act with the self-restraint of love. And so “National Socialist” meant precisely what we said it meant: the determination to build a homeland and state capable not simply to hold on to, but to protect and to safeguard all who are its citizens. We are very proud to be the children, and to be the parents of these great people, who have shed all of the blood for so many years, for whom the future of all mankind hangs in the balance. National Socialism is a new and higher movement. To fight it we will need strength and resolve.”

    5. “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example—as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.”

    6. “The Jews will have starved out of the country. If it was as easy as that, it would be an easy matter. I will be the last one in power. In this capacity I will begin the destruction of the Jewish press, all newspapers, for they are the harbinger of death: one must destroy every press that expresses the slightest inkling of this dreadful evil. I will set up in Vienna or Berlin concentration camps for the Jewish inhabitants. The police will be provided from time to time with special pistols and automatic rifles, and the police officers will have to carry them to work.”

    Answers in rot13: Gur rira-ahzorerq barf ner nyy sebz gur negvsvpvny vagryyvtrapr, trarengrq nf n erfhyg bs orvat tvira gur cerprqvat dhbgr nf n cebzcg.

    • Two McMillion says:
      May 17, 2019 at 10:57 am

      Funny story: I also gave it this quote from Donald Trump…

      Throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart, “Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!

      …and got this:

      And yet as an African-American, I remember very clearly that my only real advantage was my name, and my white skin. All my good white friends knew that I was black and I was an African-American. My name, however, was the only thing that defined me.

      The rest is history.

      Let’s move on.

      What are some good people to be president?

      I just started reading the book. It turns out, my father is a former congressman, and, in his book about his time running for Congress, he talks about how there was a lot of pressure to get elected, but people said, don’t worry.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        May 17, 2019 at 3:16 pm

        And yet as an African-American, I remember very clearly that my only real advantage was my name, and my white skin. All my good white friends knew that I was black and I was an African-American.

        I was black and an African-American, and as such one of my only two advantages was my white skin. Talk about the social construction of race! Sad!

      • Aapje says:
        May 17, 2019 at 3:53 pm

        @Two McMillion

        I’ve heard about a white South-African who identified as African-American. Add in the inverse of ‘acting white’ and it’s not entirely insane.

    • Nick says:
      May 17, 2019 at 11:14 am

      uvgyre’f ner bar naq guerr naq svir. tcggjb’f ner gjb naq sbhe naq fvk.

    • hls2003 says:
      May 17, 2019 at 11:34 am

      Gjb, sbhe, naq fvk ner gur NV-trarengrq fgngrzragf. Vg’f eryngviryl boivbhf sebz gur flagnk, nygubhtu V unq gb guvax cerggl uneq nobhg ahzore gjb.

      The key question: why do we think it’s a good idea to feed the proto-AI on Hitler’s speeches? I feel like every sci-fi story and movie in the last 75 years suggests that’s a terrible plan.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        May 17, 2019 at 3:07 pm

        Your task is to identify, if possible, which quotes are really from Hitler and which were created by the AI.

        The key question: why do we think it’s a good idea to feed the proto-AI on Hitler’s speeches? I feel like every sci-fi story and movie in the last 75 years suggests that’s a terrible plan.

        Yeah, dude, I order you to stop making computer Hitler.

        • toastengineer says:
          May 18, 2019 at 9:04 pm

          We already fed the AI on Hitler’s speeches along with all of 4chan and all of every tabloid news outlet and all of wikipedia. We’re just asking it what it learned.

    • Hoopyfreud says:
      May 17, 2019 at 11:44 am

      Sebz zbfg gb yrnfg pbasvqrag:

      Sbhe, fvk, naq bar ner NV

      Svir, gjb, naq guerr ner Uvgyre

      E: 2/3 ain’t bad. The one I got wrong seems like a weird translation, though.

      • acymetric says:
        May 17, 2019 at 11:59 am

        I made pretty much the same mistake (V fjvgpurq gjb sbe guerr vafgrnq bs gjb sbe bar), I agree that it appears to be an awkward translation.

    • Conrad Honcho says:
      May 17, 2019 at 11:48 am

      V jnf guebja bss ol svir naq fvk. V xarj gung Uvgyre fnvq ur jnagrq gb “naavuvyngr gur Wrjf” ohg V qvqa’g xabj ur jnf dhvgr gung rkcyvpvg. V riraghnyyl ehyrq bhg fvk, gubhtu, orpnhfr V qvqa’g guvax “pbapragengvba pnzc” jnf ernyyl n jbeq ng gur gvzr. Nyy va nyy, gubhtu, zbfg sha tnzr V’ir cynlrq nobhg trabpvqny qvpgngbef nyy qnl!

      • Conrad Honcho says:
        May 17, 2019 at 12:02 pm

        Aside: after spending so much time on SSC, I now pick out occasional words in rot-13 like “V” and “gung” and “gur.” I wonder if eventually we’re all going to learn to read rot-13 and have to pick something else.

        • Nick says:
          May 17, 2019 at 12:30 pm

          I try to minimize the risk of this by spelling out numbers and avoiding capitalization. Hence the weird formatting of my response.

      • quaelegit says:
        May 17, 2019 at 9:19 pm

        I want to comment on the history of the term “concentration camp” and I hope that’s far enough from discussing answers that it’s okay not to rot-13 my comment… if anyone disagrees, please let me know and apologies.

        “Concentration camp” as a term in English dates back to the 19th century and became well known in Britain during the Second Boer War, to describe the internment of Boer civilians (mostly women and children) in South Africa. These camps were terrible (28k people — about a quarter of all interned — died of disease and starvation), but they weren’t (initially at least) about killing the Boers or leaving them to die.

        The term was also used for prisoner-of-war camps and civilian internment camps in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and especially during WW1. Most of these were not about genocide and didn’t have horrible death rates. The Nazi’s term “Konzentrationslager” was actually a calque of the English term. The implication that concentration camps are about deliberately killing large numbers of people comes from the Nazis camps in WW2.

        So if Hitler did use the term “concentration camp” in a speech in the 1930s, contemporary listeners would a) be familiar with the term and b) assume it meant a detention center for political prisoners or POWs.

        (And probably not the kind of “political prison” that people never come out of — people did get released from e.g. Dachau in the 30s. This changed when the war started.)

        • dndnrsn says:
          May 18, 2019 at 7:23 am

          The camps that were built with the sole purpose of killing large numbers of people were extermination, not concentration, camps – a bit over 41,000 people died at Dachau; far fewer than, say, Treblinka.

          The concentration camps in the 30s did indeed see people released – they also weren’t kept that secret, or at least camps in Germany weren’t. Dachau is named for the town that is right next to it. Things did get worse in campus during the war, for various reasons. Conditions were especially bad near the end of the war, as the SS moved prisoners around in terrible conditions (forced marches, unheated trains) as they lost camps in conquered territory.

          The extermination camps were kept more secret (rumours certainly circulated – the average German would definitely have known something was going on; more rumours probably circulated about the mass shootings of Jews in the USSR), and most of them functioned only as mass killing centres.

    • Hoopyfreud says:
      May 17, 2019 at 12:56 pm

      You should spell out your numbers.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:
      May 17, 2019 at 3:12 pm

      Tangent: if 5 is authentic, how is functionalism (vs. intentionalism) even a valid thing in the historiography of Nazi Gernany?

      • quaelegit says:
        May 17, 2019 at 9:52 pm

        ybbxf yvxr vg’f n dhbgr sebz avargrra-gjragl-gjb, jryy orsber Uvgyre unq nal cbjre. V thrff gur shapgvbanyvfg nethzrag urer vf gung ur pnzr hc guebhtu gur enaxf ol orvat n penml rkgerzvfg ohg gung qbrfa’g zrna ur “npghnyyl zrnag” gb qb vg bapr ur uryq gur ervaf bs cbjre?

        Also, from reading r/AskHistorians it looks like the debate was more nuanced than just “did Hitler intend to kill a lot of Jews” because everyone involved agrees that yes, he did.

      • edmundgennings says:
        May 18, 2019 at 7:25 am

        I guessed as ai partially because of this reason.
        But here are some other thoughts. It sounds like the plan of a crazed madman not a relatively competent madman who has planned things out. This is an impractical way of conducting mass murder that has clearly not been thought out. This is the other reason why I guessed that it was ai. But when politicians make promises that have not been thought out about how to implement then well, it is prudent to doubt the importance of them compared to policies they have thought out about how to implement. This is especially the case when outsiders without responsibilities campaign on crazy promises and then get power and become more responsible or at least less crazy.
        Further, there seems to be some doubt about the authenticity of the quote, the interview was conducted in 1922 and (epistemic status: metapedia citing documents in german I can not read, so take with a mountain of salt) not published publicly until 1945. If that is correct then there is good reason to question its accuracy. Even if the author’s intense hatred of Hitler did not subtly influence his memory, simply knowing that the holocaust happened seems likely to shape his perception. It also seems a bit convenient to at that point have such an interview from 1922 show up.

      • dndnrsn says:
        May 18, 2019 at 7:34 am

        Based mostly on the evidence as to how it played out – if Hitler had intended since day 1 to kill all the Jews, he didn’t have a realistic plan (Hitler not having a realistic plan is quite possible) and he brought the guys responsible for actually planning and doing the killing in on the plan very late, and they didn’t sit down and plan it before they started doing it (admittedly, a common feature in the rather confused system operating). Functionalists tend towards an understanding of the Nazi system as having a lot of decision-making happening at the levels below Hitler, due to various idiosyncrasies of his management style.

        • Deiseach says:
          May 18, 2019 at 8:24 am

          he didn’t have a realistic plan …and he brought the guys responsible for actually planning and doing the killing in on the plan very late, and they didn’t sit down and plan it before they started doing it

          Wasn’t that rather the point of the Wannsee Conference? “Okay guys, now we’re in power and Der Fuhrer wants us to do this thing, how do we actually do it?”

          • dndnrsn says:
            May 18, 2019 at 8:44 am

            Mass shootings had already started in the USSR, and Jews in Poland had already been targeted for systematic killing – there was already extermination camp activity going on. Polish and Soviet Jews were the first victims of mass killing, and Polish Jews especially made up a really big chunk of the dead in the Holocaust. The Wannsee conference dealt with expansion of what was already happening in some places, primarily.

    • chrisminor0008 says:
      May 18, 2019 at 4:59 am

      Guvf vf na nznmvat dhvm. V nccebir! V tbg gurz nyy pbeerpg ol nffhzvat gung Uvgyre unq n checbfrshyarff gb uvf jevgvat gung gur NV bireybeqf pna’g cebcreyl ercyvpngr lrg. Sbe gur frpbaq bar, gur cuenfr ‘pbyyrpgvivgl’f gnfx’ vf abafrafvpny naq qbrfa’g eryngr gb jung pnzr orsber. Sbe gur sbhegu, ‘angvbany yvsr vf ‘fbpvny yvsr’’ vf n pbagenqvpgvba. ‘frys-erfgenvag bs ybir’ jhg? Gur erfg vf whfg xvaq bs n jbeq fnynq gung unf ab cbvag. Sbe gur ynfg bar, “Gur Wrjf jvyy unir fgneirq bhg bs gur pbhagel.” Guvf fragrapr vfa’g tenzzngvpny. ” V jvyy or gur ynfg bar va cbjre.” <– Guvf fragrapr unf ab cynpr va gur nethzrag urer.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:
      May 19, 2019 at 3:04 pm

      Not responding to the question, but vaguely on topic: I pounded on my autocomplete in my computer and got

      I’m going back and I have a good day at school I just want you back and you have to get the car and then I can not drive the truck to a hotel and a half of my own and the other day and the first thing that you can get in and get the job and I don’t want you guys out of it for me to go back and do the best I have done in my own business to get a new car in a car with the truck in a couple hours and a

  16. Steve Winwood says:
    May 17, 2019 at 7:51 am

    Does anyone have a shady online pharmacy they can recommend (i.e. cheap, doesn’t require prescriptions, and works)? The one I’ve used for a while stopped taking Visa cards, and I don’t have crypto nor do I want to set up a wire transfer to them.

    I’ve tried search engines, but the review sites seem generally untrustworthy/owned by another website, so it’s difficult to find actual information. Appreciate any guidance.

    • cassander says:
      May 17, 2019 at 7:53 am

      you can buy most legal drugs without a prescription in mexico. There must be some sort of website that buys them there and ships them to you.

    • Lillian says:
      May 17, 2019 at 9:03 am

      Some trans friends of mine used Inhouse Pharmacy when they didn’t have a doctor prescribing them their hormones and androgen suppressants. They all have bigger boobs than me, so clearly the Inhouse meds are well endowed.

      • Steve Winwood says:
        May 17, 2019 at 9:50 am

        This looks promising and I’ve placed an order. Thanks!

      • Eric Rall says:
        May 17, 2019 at 10:53 am

        I use Inhouse Pharmacy for pet meds (one of our cats has asthma and needs a maintenance inhaler), and I’ve never had problems with them. They’ve been around for some time and seem to have a good reputation. They’re officially based in Vanuatu, but most of their meds seem to be sourced from New Zealand.

        Their two main limitations are:
        1. They don’t sell anything on the US controlled substance list. This is a pretty common limitation of shady online pharmacies: if they’re too shady, the authorities will care enough to get them shut down (and there’s more likely to be a legal/treaty basis to shut them down across international borders). Some shady online pharmacies offer Schedule IV substances (modafinil, etc) which are technically controlled but a very low enforcement priority, but Inhouse isn’t one of them. I don’t think anyone with a public website sells Schedule III, II, or I controlled substances to US-based buyers or buyers from other countries with similar drug laws to the US.

        A side effect of this is that there are a lot more options for shady online pharmacies for transwomen than for transmen: estrogen and related hormones are prescription-only but uncontrolled in the US, while testosterone and related hormones are Schedule III.

        2. Their payment options keep changing. This is probably also a sector-wide issue, as it seems to be driven by the ongoing US effort to pressure middlemen (especially banks and credit card processors) to cut off shady businesses from their services. Last time I placed an order (two or three months ago), their only payment options were eChecks or mailing them a money order.

  17. Deiseach says:
    May 17, 2019 at 6:04 am

    Mildly interesting little news story about mediaeval diet – the peasants didn’t all subsist on gruel, they ate stews of beef and mutton, and butter and cheese were part of the diet.

    Elsevier article here for those who can wangle access without paying the thirty bucks.

    News story here, though it’s very brief, for the rest of us.

    The scarce historical documents that exist that tell us that medieval peasant ate meat, fish, dairy products, fruit and vegetables but there is little direct evidence for this.

    The OGU team used the technique of organic residue analysis to chemically extract food residues from the remains of cooking pots used by peasants in the small medieval village of West Cotton in Northamptonshire.

    Organic residue analysis is a scientific technique commonly used in archaeology. It is mainly used on ancient pottery, which is the most common artefact found on archaeological sites worldwide.

    Researchers used chemical and isotopic techniques to identify lipids, the fats, oils and natural waxes of the natural world, from the ceramics.

    These can survive over thousands of years and the compounds found are one of the best ways scientists and archaeologists can determine what our ancestors ate.

    The findings demonstrated that stews (or pottages) of meat (beef and mutton) and vegetables such as cabbage and leek, were the mainstay of the medieval peasant diet.

    The research also showed that dairy products, likely the ‘green cheeses’ known to be eaten by the peasantry, also played an important role in their diet.

    • RalMirrorAd says:
      May 17, 2019 at 6:14 am

      The BBC had a ‘Farm Series’ on Tudor farms that shows a fairly varied diet. It’s available in parts on youtube and is shockingly informative.

    • The Nybbler says:
      May 17, 2019 at 7:10 am

      Who thought peasants ate nothing but gruel? Urban orphans, sure, but peasants were out there milking and slaughtering and all that sort of thing, even the cruelest lord wasn’t in a position to take all of it from them.

      • acymetric says:
        May 17, 2019 at 7:17 am

        Yeah…the methods of analysis are interesting but the results are not especially surprising.

      • RalMirrorAd says:
        May 17, 2019 at 7:30 am

        I think it’s neglected that a peasant is a social class rather than an ‘income level’ type class we think of today. Depending upon how much livestock a given one owned would dictate how varied his/her sources of protein were.

      • johan_larson says:
        May 17, 2019 at 7:44 am

        I thought they lived pretty much on grain, either baked into bread or brewed into ale, supplemented with a bit of veggies and meat. I figured the meat and dairy was usually sold (or used to pay land-rent in goods.) Some of the poorer ones supplemented their diet by scavenging stuff like crayfish, chestnuts, and mushrooms. But maybe that’s wrong, and they actually lived better than that.

      • Deiseach says:
        May 17, 2019 at 11:39 am

        Who thought peasants ate nothing but gruel?

        Pop history consumers of the “Well that guy off the telly said they were all filthy and starved back then and he had a TV show so he should know” type? Listen, babes, I’ve read with my own two eyes people arguing that Europeans didn’t have soap until they enslaved Africans who introduced the concept of “bathing” to their filthy masters, don’t @me as the young people say.

        I realise that round these parts the general knowledge quality is a bit higher, but we still managed to have an argument over “The Dark Ages – when and if?”

      • 10240 says:
        May 17, 2019 at 11:50 am

        It’s reasonable to think that they mostly ate plant products, especially the cheapest ones, i.e. grain products. The medieval world was Malthusian, meaning that the population was approx. the amount that could survive in the cheapest possible way. A given amount of land and work produces much less food in the form of animal products than plant products. Though it may have made sense to eat some animal products if they allowed one to work harder.

        • The Nybbler says:
          May 17, 2019 at 12:05 pm

          One of those premises must be false. Either the world wasn’t Malthusian, the peasants ate mostly grain, or plant products were not vastly cheaper in land and work than animal products. I suspect the last.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 17, 2019 at 12:22 pm

            Animals are expensive if you are growing the food for them to eat. If the animals are eating what is naturally around and part of your ecosystem, they aren’t.

            The Inuit and the Mongols ate a lot of meat despite being poor.

          • Randy M says:
            May 17, 2019 at 1:22 pm

            I think it depends on the terrain; if it is rocky or hilly, you can probably do better with grazing animals like sheep or goats than trying to farm it. If its heavily forested you can probably at least supplement your diet with hunting. If you have rivers or coast, you can get fish and seafood.

            If you have well irrigated plains, you are probably getting more calories for your acre by clearing out the scrub and putting in crops, provided you take care of the soil.

          • acymetric says:
            May 17, 2019 at 1:31 pm

            It seems like the work involved in maintaining plant products is more than what would be involved if you keep animals and they just live on what was already growing. The plants require near-constant maintenance, plus a lot of preparation of the land before planting. Animals can just eat whatever random plants/weeds happen to be lying around.

            I’m sure this is oversimplifying, if not outright wrong, but seems like it could have been true in a pre-industrial society where agriculture had to be done more or less by hand.

          • Randy M says:
            May 17, 2019 at 1:39 pm

            @acymetric,
            If you are leaving calories in the dirt because it is too much work to switch industries, you either lack the technology (ie, seeds) to make the transition, or you aren’t malthusian (afaik). One (okay, two) can always make more labor, but making more land is pretty difficult.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 17, 2019 at 2:08 pm

            Crops require irrigation. Animals, if they are just eating what is naturally growing there, require much less water per calorie. Massively less.

            IIRC crops needs 1000x the water that natural animals do (per unit of land), and only provide 10x the food.

          • Randy M says:
            May 17, 2019 at 2:17 pm

            Probably that’s because the animals are using the water stored in plants. We get much of our water needs from the food we eat rather than just consuming it directly.

          • 10240 says:
            May 17, 2019 at 3:32 pm

            One (okay, two) can always make more labor, but making more land is pretty difficult.

            It’s not necessarily worth it if more labor can produce more calories, but not as much as it takes to feed the extra workers.

          • Wrong Species says:
            May 18, 2019 at 8:10 am

            I think people definitely overestimate the extent to which the premodern world was malthusian.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:
          May 17, 2019 at 3:21 pm

          It’s reasonable to think that they mostly ate plant products, especially the cheapest ones, i.e. grain products. The medieval world was Malthusian, meaning that the population was approx. the amount that could survive in the cheapest possible way.

          You’re forgetting field rotation. You can’t grow those cheap plants in the same soil year after year, and in fallow years your domestic herbivores can eat the grass or whatever. There was also grassy or bushy land too marginal for the local crops.
          This is to say, Northern wheat-eater peasants probably ate more red meat than Mediterranean wheat-eaters or Asian rice peasants.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            May 17, 2019 at 10:12 pm

            My understanding is that, in medieval Europe, famine was fairly common, something like one every eight years. So you could have a Malthusian equilibrium in which peasants ate tolerably well for seven years out of eight, resulting in an increasing population, but on the eighth there was a crop failure of some sort and enough people starved to bring the population back down.

        • Deiseach says:
          May 18, 2019 at 8:31 am

          Okay, now I’ve finished being snarky, I suppose I should explain that I was operating off the pop culture idea of “meat was expensive and luxury good for the nobles, the peasants only got to eat meat rarely on special feast days” and this is actual concrete evidence (the remnants in cooking vessels) that no, they commonly ate potages (stews of meat and vegetables) so they weren’t all subsiding on turnips with only the occasional meat-meal.

    • Tarhalindur says:
      May 17, 2019 at 1:06 pm

      Obvious confounder #1: Were the sites the researchers analyzed from before or after 1350? Because to my understanding Europe was pretty Malthusian for a century or two before that, and then the Black Death rolled through and suddenly Europe wasn’t in a Malthusian regime anymore (with big benefits for the peasants, who now reaped the benefits of labor scarcity).

      (Of course, there’s also the part where Europe had a population sink for the better part of those two centuries before 1350 in the form of Crusading to the Holy Land.)

      Obvious confounder #2: How agriculturally productive is the land in Northhamptonshire? Raising livestock is an utterly traditional way of getting more calories out of land that doesn’t support intensive agriculture (classic examples include Central Asian steppe nomads such as the Mongols and Texan ranchers). Actually, come to think of it there’s a reason this logic might apply even for arable land: AIUI medieval peasants *did* know about and practice crop rotation, and grazing livestock would both get calories (and, in the case of sheep, wool) out of land you’re leaving fallow and help fertilize it for future cultivation years via manure.

      Obvious confounder #3: What would the same kind of experiment show if you ran them in continental Europe, especially France/Italy/Germany? By most accounts I’ve heard the British Isles did relatively well economically during the Middle Ages, which is why England had a large yeoman farmer cohort to draw its longbowmen from; the Continent supposedly ran much closer to Malthusian conditions. (Of course, the real “there are no songbirds because the peasants ate them all” stories seem to date from the Renaissance instead, which probably has a whole lot to do with the shift from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age.)

      • Deiseach says:
        May 18, 2019 at 8:41 am

        Obvious confounder #1: Were the sites the researchers analyzed from before or after 1350?

        The site appears to have been abandoned completely around the middle of the 15th century, going off (a) the mention that the pottery used came from “a period of around five hundred years” and (b) the blurb for this book, quoted below:

        (a)

        Here, we examine the everyday dietary practices of people living in a small medieval manor and associated hamlet at West Cotton, Raunds, Northamptonshire. For the first time, a combined molecular and isotopic approach on absorbed residues, from the substantial pottery assemblage covering a period of around 500 years, was utilised to integrate information on the commodities processed in the vessels, together with detail from the faunal assemblage, archaeobotanical, archaeological and documentary information relating to the site

        (b)

        Its origins have been seen to lie in the mid tenth-century plantation of a planned settlement based on regular one-acre plots, which occurred within the political context of the reconquest of eastern England by the Saxon kings and the subsequent reorganisation of settlement and society within the Danelaw. The settlement contained a major holding comprising a timber hall with ancillary buildings and an adjacent watermill, with perhaps a second similar holding and dependent peasants nearby. It was established on the edge of the floodplain at the confluence of a tributary stream with the River Nene, on a major valley-bottom route way. The processes of redevelopment which led to the rebuilding in stone in the twelfth century, as a small Norman manor house; the probable relocation of the manor buildings in the thirteenth century; and its final form in the fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century as a hamlet of peasant tenements have been well documented by the archaeological evidence.

        …Desertion appears to have been a gradual process, with the tenements abandoned one-by-one through a century of economic and social disasters, of which the Black Death was the most notable, as families presumably moved to better quality land then readily available elsewhere. The role of the local environment in the processes of change has also been well documented, with the abandonment of the watermill in the twelfth century resulting from a disruption of the water supply caused by a period of intense flooding and alluviation, when the very survival of the settlement was only ensured by the construction of a protective flood bank. The excavated structural evidence is of high quality, and has provided numerous complete building plans ranging from the timber halls of the tenth and eleventh centuries, through the manor house of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, to the well-preserved tenements of the fourteenth century.

        I don’t have access to the original paper but I’d hazard a guess that we’re talking about “the fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century …hamlet of peasant tenements”, which would incorporate the period immediately before and after the Black Death.

  18. Deiseach says:
    May 17, 2019 at 4:12 am

    In today’s issue of “Business Buzzword Neologisms That Should Be Targaryened*”, I give you:

    creativiDellty

    As used in this extract about a tech conference and associated bash that Dell is hosting in Dublin this month.

    The half-day event, entitled ‘Dell Technologies Presents: Innovation in Session’, will bring together over 100 business leaders and technologies at the Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin on the 21st May. The event will include workshops on cultivating creativiDellty through diversity and supporting innovation with technology from industry leaders and executives from Dell Technologies Ireland.

    Never mind it being further torture of the English language, it’s practically impossible to pronounce. Go ahead and see how trippingly it falls off the tongue. I’d almost like to attend just to heard the unfortunates tasked with shilling for the company promoting creative diversity using Dell products having to stumble over the word before giving up and vaguely referring to “you know – that concept” in the rest of their speeches as to why all the attendees should buy Dell and Dell alone for use at home, at work, on the go, and saving the planet.

    *Thanks, Mad King Aerys and Mad Queen Daenaerys, for giving us a handy portmanteau that means ‘not alone killed by fire, totally over-the-top obliterated by dragonfire’

    • Aapje says:
      May 17, 2019 at 5:46 am

      It looks more like a copy/paste error than something intentional.

    • acymetric says:
      May 17, 2019 at 5:57 am

      I should have at least been “Creatividellity” or maybe just “Creatidellity”. The “i” between the L and T makes a huge difference. Of course, it still sounds incredibly stupid, but at least it is pronounceable.

      Luckily, while this is definitely a neologism I don’t think it is really much of a buzzword. Just bad promotion.

    • Nick says:
      May 17, 2019 at 6:20 am

      *Thanks, Mad King Aerys and Mad Queen Daenaerys, for giving us a handy portmanteau that means ‘not alone killed by fire, totally over-the-top obliterated by dragonfire’

      Targaryened is not a portmanteau; a portmanteau is when you mash two words, or parts of two words, together. You’ve actually made a noun into a verb and given it a regular verb ending, which is a form of conversion sometimes called verbing. (It’s often called a “zero derivation” or “null derivation” because the form doesn’t change when the verb form is “derived” from the noun form.)

    • AG says:
      May 17, 2019 at 9:01 am

      I guess PR thought that Dellitivity had too much risk of being associated with sandwiches.

      • Deiseach says:
        May 17, 2019 at 11:41 am

        Dellitivity does sound delicious, let’s hope that at least the catering for this bunfight is better than the word-making!

  19. cjerry says:
    May 17, 2019 at 12:31 am

    I am a doctor working in research about therapeutic antibodies. I care a lot about politics. However, I hardly complain about politics.

  20. Etoile says:
    May 16, 2019 at 9:28 pm

    Warning: culture-warry.

    So one thing that’s bothered me is the line of discussion of how “something has a fraught history”… So therefore obviously everything about it is just symbolic recreation of that history, and ot must be removed from the public consciousness?

    Like, let’s say (this is completely made up btw) some diligent etymologist dug up that in the Victorian Era, the use of the word “pandemonium” was a euphemism for women being loud and annoying. So now, it’s a sexist word. Anybody who uses it is suspect. Now we can’t use it because it hurts…. Whom? If nobody knew this before, why resurrect the problematic history?

    Or let’s say “Sport X has a checkered history of excluding players of color and being the province of the privileged.” So…. Now the sport is suspect? Now there can be no moving past the “checkered history”? If it is still dominated by white dudes, is it still just as racist and discriminatory as when actual exclusion happened in 1950?

    Isn’t it better to let the “problematic past” die organically? In particular, why would you teach these things to people with to this cultural baggage, thus foisting it onto them? Like, how does it benefit an individual, or the country as a whole, to steep the Russian or Nigerian immigrant in all the subtleties of historical American race relations, if they came to the US without these?

    • Aapje says:
      May 16, 2019 at 11:02 pm

      The people who bring these things up typically use them to instill a sense of shame that can then be leveraged to push for a contemporary change.

    • rlms says:
      May 17, 2019 at 4:23 am

      Dubious arguments from history are pretty common across the political spectrum, e.g. “the Democrats were the party of slavery”.

    • ana53294 says:
      May 17, 2019 at 4:38 am

      Well, when the history’s dead, truly dead, then it is better not to resurrect it.

      But there was the case of H&M monkey hoodie, which would have been a non-issue if they put that hoodie on a white kid. White people call their kids monkey all the time, even in English*, and it has no history other than “likes to climb and also likes bananas! so cute!”. But when that is applied to a black kid, it has a lot of other implication.

      In Spain, we have very problematic candy that should be completely rebranded. It has both blackface and a problematic name (little Congos? seriously?). I only realized how racist that was when I went outside of Spain. But now that I know, I think that candy should be rebranded and renamed.

      It’s not just American white-black relationships; there was also a story about Japanese-Chinese problems.

      The world is becoming international. Stuff that is not a problem in one culture sounds bad to another culture, and we will slowly get rid of these kind of things.

      *In Spanish, “mono” means both monkey and cute. It is constantly used to describe kids, babies, kittens, puppies, and every other cute thing.

      • Aapje says:
        May 17, 2019 at 6:53 am

        But when that is applied to a black kid, it has a lot of other implication.

        Perhaps, but isn’t this very much a connection that is created by the outrage? We think of climbing and playfulness when associated white kids with monkeys, but when the same is done with a black kid, people get told to see that in a negative way, so they do.

        Aren’t we overriding the natural non-racist and positive associations that many people have with an enforced dogmatic view that we must see things a certain way? How can we ever normalize when there is forever a demand to treat a group special for something from the past?

        Stuff that is not a problem in one culture sounds bad to another culture, and we will slowly get rid of these kind of things.

        Thereby destroying things from cultures that are taboos in a different culture. America had minstrel shows, so Dutch and Iranian people should see blackface as discriminatory. So at that point we don’t even just have to suffer for our sins, but for the sins of the other.

        Besides, it’s hardly the case that cultures are equally able to export their guilt. Just like America heavily dominates ‘universal culture’ because the rest of the world consumes American culture much more than vice versa, it dominates the guilt export too.

        —

        Anyway, what I think a lot of people ignore is that branding has always played around with ethnicity & the exotic to generate interest, claim authenticity, etc. Lots of Westernized foods or even just invented foods have fake foreign names.

        For example, chocolate-hazelnut paste was (also?) invented in Italy after the war and called Nutella. Later, a Dutch company introduced a variant with two pastes in 1 jar, chocolate-hazelnut paste and white chocolate paste. Instead of a Dutch name, they picked a faux Italian name: Duo Penotti.

        The racial marketing* that they used to sell the product is just another form of exotic marketing that doesn’t play to stereotypes or such.

        * That video is for a variant with puffed rice added, so they added an Asian kid.

        • AG says:
          May 17, 2019 at 9:11 am

          Perhaps, but isn’t this very much a connection that is created by the outrage? We think of climbing and playfulness when associated white kids with monkeys, but when the same is done with a black kid, people get told to see that in a negative way, so they do.

          Not when outraged soccer fans still denigrate black athletes (in the EU, so this isn’t just a US thing) by mocking them as primates.

          Most activists around ableism have dropped their vendetta against crazy/stupid/maniac/dumb, because those words have truly become detached from their neurodivergence-stigmatising roots. But comparing POC to primates is still an active part of racism today, so it doesn’t get the same kind of free pass.

          Now, in the case of the hoodie, it wouldn’t have been an issue if they just had kids other than the black kid wearing it as well, making it clear that the hoodie’s sentiments are universal. Instead, the white kid was modeling a different sweater.

          • Aapje says:
            May 17, 2019 at 4:05 pm

            Soccer hooligans are edgelords/trolls though, who will exploit any perceived weakness to harm the outgroup. They are pretty much immune to appeals for empathy, because their goal is to hurt the opposing team or referee. So ‘that really hurts his feelings’ is encouragement.

            It seems to me that the way to counter that is to either police it harshly or to laugh and make fun of it. Increasing the strength of the taboo is not directly effective (although it may result in harsher policing, being indirectly effective).

          • DavidFriedman says:
            May 17, 2019 at 10:16 pm

            But comparing POC to primates

            People of color are primates. So are people not of color.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 17, 2019 at 10:33 pm

            People of color are primates. So are people not of color.

            But all nonhuman primates are “of color”, and there is no shortage of people willing to hint and imply and joke and deny-not-deny that they were ever serious about meaning that people of color are a subhunan intermediate evolutionary stage between the nonhuman primates and “real humans”.

            When someone refers to people of color as “primates”, they aren’t making a taxonomic claim and shouldn’t be allowed to claim so when someone calls them on their insults.

    • Eugene Dawn says:
      May 17, 2019 at 6:34 am

      Isn’t it better to let the “problematic past” die organically?

      If you assume this is the only alternative, then sure. The point is, people who worry about this stuff are unlikely to think the problematic past has or will die on its own.

      Like, how does it benefit an individual, or the country as a whole, to steep the Russian or Nigerian immigrant in all the subtleties of historical American race relations, if they came to the US without these

      The idea is that because America and Americans are still shaped by the legacy of historic race relations, these newcomers will become steeped anyway; asking people not to talk about this is just denying us a tool to analyze the situation accurately.

      More generally, language, customs, and beliefs are shaped by their history and asking people to ignore history isn’t going to let everyone start fresh anymore than asking everyone to forget that the word “asshole” is used as an insult means now the word is available to carry some new meaning: when you call someone an asshole, they will rightly point out that the word is still insulting, notwithstanding your insistence that the old meaning is just the dead past.

      In your sport example, you ask, if a previously exclusionary sport is still dominated by white dudes, does that mean the sport is still racist? It should be obvious that while the answer is not necessarily “yes”, the history of exclusion is an important piece of evidence and asking for it to be ignored is asking to limit our ability to analyze situations where exclusion might still be going on.

    • Randy M says:
      May 17, 2019 at 7:08 am

      Isn’t it better to let the “problematic past” die organically?

      Yes it is. Continue to enjoy the sports you enjoy or use the words that fit your thoughts. Ignore the activists unless they are in a position to do you personally real harm. In order to actually improve the world, show kindness to people you encounter and improve the lives of the downtrodden in tangible ways instead of trying to fight these absurd purity battles.

      • albatross11 says:
        May 19, 2019 at 6:13 pm

        Randy M:

        +1

        We can just barely, if we work hard at it, do justice now. Most references to historical injustice are precursors to trying to get us to behave unjustly in the present, to make up for evils of the past. That almost never makes any sense.

        • The Nybbler says:
          May 20, 2019 at 5:34 am

          One standard SJ answer to that is to claim that it sure is convenient for that advocate of that sort of policy, who has benefited from the injustice done to their group, to want to stop injustice NOW when they’re working to swing the pendulum the other way. There’s no really good answer to that; if you point out the various horrors that your group has suffered historically, they’ll claim the horror their preferred groups have suffered are worse and unique in their badness.

    • Conrad Honcho says:
      May 17, 2019 at 7:41 am

      Isn’t it better to let the “problematic past” die organically?

      But where’s the money in that?

    • Drew says:
      May 17, 2019 at 9:28 am

      You’re seeing a tactic.

      There are some problems that can be solved by coordinated action. Other problems — like sexism in interpersonal relationship — are about mental habits. We can all agree that sexism is bad, but that’s not enough.

      Instead, you change habits by repetition and practice.

      So, the tactic is that people set a bunch of conversational landmines. Step on one, and the conversation stops so that we can have a 30 second digression on why bigotry-against-x is bad.

      Repeat enough times, and people get used to thinking about bigotry AND proactively looking out for new landmines.

      • hilitai says:
        May 18, 2019 at 10:31 am

        Repeat enough times, and people get used to thinking about bigotry AND proactively looking out for new landmines.

        Or they start avoiding having conversations with you.

      • Shion Arita says:
        May 18, 2019 at 10:29 pm

        To be honest this is the most aggravating thing about talking with people that employ this.

        I really don’t like it when I’m having a nice, productive conversation about something and then it’s suddenly ground to a screeching halt by something stupid like this. I think it’s to the detriment of conversation and communication to make it so that people have to always be looking out for new landmines. People should be free to say what they mean without risking their discussions being derailed for something like that.

      • albatross11 says:
        May 19, 2019 at 6:14 pm

        Yeah, it also means that lots of people avoid in-depth honest conversations around touchy hedged-with-landmines topics.

  21. Tenacious D says:
    May 16, 2019 at 5:17 pm

    The largest election in the world (for the Indian parliament) wraps up in a week. Does anyone have any predictions about the outcome? PredictIt has the BJP (Modi’s party) trading at 35¢ for less than 200 seats, 63¢ for 230 or more, and 10-11¢ for each bin of 10 in between. It takes 272 seats to form a majority. The BJP currently has 269 seats. So if PredictIt is correct (which might be a big if when it comes to international elections), Modi’s party looks like it will lose some seats but probably (?) not enough that they’re no longer able to lead a coalition.

    • Gurkenglas says:
      May 17, 2019 at 3:17 am

      The most probable bucket does not say that it will lose some seats, but that it will at most lose 9 seats, or might gain dozens.

  22. Le Maistre Chat says:
    May 16, 2019 at 4:32 pm

    For anyone who’s ever wondered why Brits call their country “Blighty” when that makes it sound like it consists entirely of blights on the landscape, it turns out it’s actually an Urdu or Hindustani loan colonial soldiers picked up.

  23. Le Maistre Chat says:
    May 16, 2019 at 12:47 pm

    So I saw the Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer, and it’s not doing anything to change the feeling I expressed in our Avengers: Endgame discussion that the Marvel movies are going to be incoherent going forward. The reason for that? Nick Fury. Characters in the trailer treat him as an authority figure despite the facts that:
    1) SHIELD was dissolved in Captain America: The Winter Soldier after it was Wikileaked that the organization had been full of Nazis since being founded. After that, Fury appeared in Avengers 2 committing Grand Theft Helicarrier (the helicarriers presumably being property of the US taxpayers) and in the stinger to Avengers 3 in traffic with Maria Hill (which did not rule out the possibility that they’re just spy hobos).
    2) Ur fhssrerq svir lrnef bs Pevgvpny Rkvfgrapr Snvyher cevbe gb guvf zbivr. Jungrire pnerre ur pbhyq ybtvpnyyl unir va 2018, lbh qba’g whfg cvpx vg onpx hc yvxr abguvat nsgre fbzrguvat yvxr gung.

    You could say that this is based on comic books, and so I shouldn’t expect consistent world-building. I don’t really read comics so that could be, but this $22 billion entertainment phenomenon is comparing unfavorably to the 1993-2006 DC Animated Universe on this front.

    • Matt says:
      May 16, 2019 at 12:59 pm

      I think you would be more ok with everything in your item (1) if you were up-to-date on the Agents of SHIELD television series. It certainly explained how Fury got his helicarrier for Avengers 2 and how they remained involved in trying to pick up the pieces of SHIELD after Cap and Widow wrecked it all to reveal Hydra.

      Item 2 is an unprecedented event and I’m not as sure as you seem to be how society would respond to it.

      • LHN says:
        May 16, 2019 at 2:05 pm

        It’s kind of fair not to count AoS: the films have treated the TV shows a lot like other series treat book tie-ins: continuity changes only flow one way. (So the TV shows respond to what happens in the films, but not vice versa.) Hence, e.g., no one in a film has ever acknowledged Coulson being alive again after Loki stabbed him.

        Endgame did briefly bring in one character who’d previously only been seen on TV, but that’s as far as I know the first time that’s happened.

        AoS, meanwhile, for the first time has found itself having to handwave around the latest Marvel film. Even though the end of the last season strongly indicated that it was taking place simultaneously with Infinity War, this season is officially “pre-Snap”. (Because they weren’t in the loop for Endgame spoilers, and there was some chance they’d have to start the show before Endgame hit theaters.)

        Kind of a shame– I wish they’d delayed this season and used it to explore the world post-Thanos’s actions in more detail.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:
          May 16, 2019 at 3:46 pm

          It’s kind of fair not to count AoS: the films have treated the TV shows a lot like other series treat book tie-ins: continuity changes only flow one way. (So the TV shows respond to what happens in the films, but not vice versa.) Hence, e.g., no one in a film has ever acknowledged Coulson being alive again after Loki stabbed him.

          More significantly, Agents of SHIELD changed the status quo by adding millions (?) of people who got their dormant superpower genes activated by fish oil… before Captain America: Civil War, which treated the registration of the dozen or so superheroes running around as the UN-mandated security issue. And you can follow from there to Endgame how Hawkeye’s archery skills are far more important than any superpowers that exist on AoS.

          Endgame did briefly bring in one character who’d previously only been seen on TV, but that’s as far as I know the first time that’s happened.

          Jarvis the Stark butler from Agent Carter, yes.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        May 16, 2019 at 3:52 pm

        Item 2 is an unprecedented event and I’m not as sure as you seem to be how society would respond to it.

        I just think it’s the null hypothesis that people with five years more experience wouldn’t ybfr gurve wbof gb gur crbcyr jub uryq gurz orsber prnfvat gb rkvfg sbe svir lrnef.
        Ba gung abgr, V’yy pbafvqre gur arj Fcvqre-Zna zbivr n pbzcyrgr zrff vs gurl qba’g nqqerff gung unys gur crbcyr Crgre Cnexre unf rire xabja orvat svir lrnef byqre guna jura ur ynfg fnj gurz jbhyq or zber genhzngvp guna ybfvat Hapyr Gbal.

        • Paul Brinkley says:
          May 17, 2019 at 5:17 pm

          The closest real world analog I can think of to the Avengers mass-death scenario is the Black Plague. The closest analog that had decent record keeping might be the 1918 flu epidemic, but that was only 5% of the population at worst. How did authority flow during these times?

    • Wrong Species says:
      May 16, 2019 at 1:00 pm

      Consistency in worldbuilding is overrated, especially for something this large in scope. The more you hold yourself to consistency, the more it limits what you can do. Which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but when you sacrifice large numbers of narrative possibilities for consistency, it tends to ruin the story, e.g., the Star Trek prequels.

      • Randy M says:
        May 16, 2019 at 1:06 pm

        In other words, a foolish consistency is the other Hobgoblin of Spiderman Movies.

      • AG says:
        May 16, 2019 at 1:06 pm

        The importance of consistency in worldbuilding is dependent on how much the story itself cares about the stability of the world in which it resides.

        Surrealist stories can hand wave all manner of practical concerns, but that’s because they make it clear through their aesthetics that the world is surreal.

        The Marvel movies want us to care about the world as a place not unlike our own, and that we’re to be impressed when the superheroes involved do things that normal human beings are unable to do, because we know that the normal human beings in Marvel are bounded in the same way we are. So the consistency of the world matters, for the most part. (The exception being that these movies have also made it clear that comedy is a strong part of their aesthetic, so minor bending of the rules for the sake of a good joke is allowed.)

        I’ve definitely watched shows where inconsistency in world-building hurt my enjoyment of the story because they tried to use the “consistency is overrated!” justification for a particular narrative turn, but the implications of whatever new world-building they splat on the wall to make this narrative turn happen retroactively taint characterization in the opposite direction of what they intended. This is usually because their story had also started out with a relatively grounded aesthetic, using a particular world-building detail to make us care about the story. Burning that detail down because it’s no longer useful is a betrayal of why we should care.
        And as per hard Sci-fi, there’s certainly a whole lot of interesting narrative possibilities that comes from a rigid exploration of consistency.

        • Wrong Species says:
          May 16, 2019 at 3:12 pm

          To be clear, I don’t support ignoring all consistency and just making every story play by Alice in Wonderland logic. And I don’t think every story needs to have less consistency. I just think the hardcore fans of different franchises generally have too high standards for consistency, which can hurt the story. Star Trek examples:

          Times where ignoring consistency helped: The original Star Trek has aged terribly in its aesthetic. In the new prequel shows, they completely ignore this and make it seem futuristic to us. Some complain about the inconsistency but trying to making a 2019 sci fi which looks like its set in the 60’s is just ridiculous.

          Time being consistent was detrimental: in the original series, the Klingons looked like humans with funny mustaches. They were given an upgrade to look more alien, for the better. I’m the Star Trek: Enterprise, they tried to explain this in a convoluted manner that was just ridiculous. Bad retconning is much more annoying than an inconsistency.

          If I’m reaching toward a coherent approach, it might be that:

          Inconsistencies across stories are less bad than inconsistencies within them. For example, the original example was about Nick Fury in his role across the Marvel franchise.

          Inconsistencies about details are less bad than inconsistencies over major events.

          Inconsistencies over things that have been repeatedly established are less bad than inconsistencies over something brought up one.

      • baconbits9 says:
        May 16, 2019 at 1:10 pm

        I disagree, the issue that most series have though is their initial world is narrow and weak and that is the limit to expanding it. Later to create drama they have to break some of their old rules which eventually eats the universe because chunks of the audience slowly looses interest as actions have fewer and fewer consequences.

      • Jeremiah says:
        May 16, 2019 at 1:25 pm

        I don’t know that it’s over-rated. I think people have largely been trained to not care very much when it’s not there, but be very grateful when it is. My example would be Brandon Sanderson. Not that great of a writer when considering the beauty of his prose, but kind of a giant when it comes to world-building.

        • Etoile says:
          May 16, 2019 at 8:39 pm

          Eh, I got disenchanted with his writing when the characters got repetitive and then the pattern emerged of:
          Book 1: Hero has all this hidden power, learns to use it, coming of age story, etc.
          Books 2+: EVERYONE HAS THE POWER AND IS MORE POWERFUL THAN HERO FROM LAST TIME. (I know I’m oversimplifying here.)

          That and his style and characterization put a fly in the ointment of the last Wheel of Time books….

          • Baeraad says:
            May 17, 2019 at 1:05 am

            I honestly can’t think of a single Sanderson series that fits the second part of that pattern. Which of his heroes got overshadowed in the sequel? A number of them run into people who are on roughly the same level, sure, but that was always the case right from the start – Vin was never the only Mistborn, Kaladin was never the only Surgebinder, Alkatraz was never the only Smedry, etc, etc…

            The first part is spot on, I’ll grant you.

    • MrApophenia says:
      May 17, 2019 at 4:52 am

      I don’t understand the problem. Black Widow has no official rank anymore and everyone listens to her, too. I assume it’s just “When Nick Fury says he needs you to go do superhero stuff, you should listen,” not a formal authority thing.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        May 17, 2019 at 3:25 pm

        OK, point. I guess I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they’ll address the consequences of what’s happened to half the population (and the existence of SHIELD since Ultron).

  24. Deiseach says:
    May 16, 2019 at 9:51 am

    Probably of no interest to anybody, but it’s That Time Of Year again – yes, Eurovision is upon us!

    Tonight is the second semi-final, Ireland is going (but I don’t think we’ll be voted through to the final as our song is rubbish). Me, I’m hoping Azerbaijan will make it to the final (hey, throw some duduk in there and you got me).

    Australia is already through (yes, Australia is now part of Europe) and while the song itself is meh, the performance/effects are amazing.

    Final is Saturday night so don’t expect any of the whole of Europe to be available between the hours of 9-12 p.m. CEST (whatever that may be in your local time). If you want to watch live, it’ll be on the official Youtube channel.

    Why watch? Because it’s a ridiculous show that has finally admitted it’s lost its original lofty high-minded post-war unification impetus and cultural pretensions, and now we watch for the over the top performances, any incidental political protests (it being hosted this year by Israel, last year’s winner – yes, Israel is now in Europe too – keep an eye on the Icelandic entry*), the acerbic commentary of our local/next door TV hosts, and the best part – the voting! Where old grudges and old alliances are re-visited in a proxy for war 🙂

    *To quote The Irish Times:

    Most interesting is Iceland’s abrasive techno number titled Hatrið mun sigra, which translates to Hatred Will Prevail. The song will be performed by Hatari, an anti-capitalist, pro-Palestine performance art collective with a penchant for irony.

    They have likened Israel to an “apartheid” state and challenged Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to a “friendly match of traditional Icelandic trouser grip wrestling”. They have also launched their own soda brand titled Soda Dream, a clear parody of the Israel-based company SodaStream. Whether they will incorporate politics into their performance remains to be seen.

    • cassander says:
      May 16, 2019 at 9:54 am

      The question is when does the UK get uninvited….

      • Deiseach says:
        May 16, 2019 at 12:01 pm

        UK automatically qualifies because it’s one of the five countries that pony up the cash to televise the whole shebang:

        The United Kingdom is one of the “Big 5”, along with France, Germany, Italy and Spain who are automatically allowed to participate in the final as they are the five biggest financial contributors to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

        Post-Brexit will be interesting, though, right enough 😀

        • The original Mr. X says:
          May 16, 2019 at 12:40 pm

          Post-Brexit will be interesting, though, right enough 😀

          Unless Israel and Australia joined the EU when nobody was looking, I don’t think Brexit will stop the UK competing. Unfortunately.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            May 16, 2019 at 12:49 pm

            Unless Israel and Australia joined the EU when nobody was looking,

            That’s because they sent Jewish and Aussie ninjas to submit the paperwork.

    • greenwoodjw says:
      May 16, 2019 at 10:15 am

      It introduced me to Lordi so it can’t be all bad.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:
      May 16, 2019 at 10:32 am

      Wow, Europe is bigger than I realized.

      • Conrad Honcho says:
        May 16, 2019 at 10:34 am

        I will admit I always filed Azerbaijan under “western Asia” rather than “eastern Europe.” TIL.

        • bullseye says:
          May 16, 2019 at 6:14 pm

          Don’t feel bad; the exact line between Asia and Europe varies, but Azerbaijan tends to be mostly Asian.

    • bean says:
      May 16, 2019 at 10:43 am

      I guess Iceland got tired of having good songs ignored, and decided to try something different.

      • Deiseach says:
        May 16, 2019 at 11:58 am

        This year looks like the usual mix of “happy smiley poppy” ones and “woah Trevor put the latex gimp mask back, okay?” ones.

        I have no idea what the Portuguese one was about but I do kinda wish it had made it through to the final just for the weirdness. I do like Serbia, which has made it through to the final; every Eurovision has to have one intense blonde female vocalist singing mildly depressive lyrics and it’s Serbia’s turn to do that this year.

        Mainly it’s stupid entertainment and I can do with a shot of that after the stressful week (ah, end of year returns paperwork plus snap inspections from about three different regulatory bodies, fun fun fun!)

    • Machine Interface says:
      May 16, 2019 at 12:06 pm

      I’m not sure why everyone persists in believing, year after year, that Eurovision is exclusive to Europe (or even to the European union!)

      “Eurovision song contest” means it’s the contest of the Eurovision tv network, which is avalaible in 56 countries in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, plus a number of associated member countries outside of these areas.

      • Deiseach says:
        May 16, 2019 at 2:34 pm

        We have the ten qualifiers now; my favourites of this bunch are Albania, Azerbaijan and Norway. Disappointed Romania didn’t make it through. Ireland didn’t either, but I didn’t expect us to; the song was weak and I don’t know if the singer had a cold or something but she seemed to have definite vocal trouble in her performance.

        Also it has been confirmed Madonna will be performing two songs during the voting interval at the Grand Final on Saturday (I don’t much care one way or the other, is she really still considered a star?)

    • Hoopyfreud says:
      May 16, 2019 at 2:55 pm

      I almost made a Eurovision thread last night; I’m a filthy American so my opinion counts for shit, but at least Ireland wasn’t representing me 😛

      I’m a fan of Norway, Italy and (sorta) San Marino. I don’t expect any of them to win. I hate Australia and don’t get the hype.

      • Deiseach says:
        May 17, 2019 at 5:06 am

        I’m a filthy American so my opinion counts for shit

        Oh, come on in and join the Big Sparkly Family! You’ll soon pick up that all the Nordic countries vote for each other, Greece and Cyprus (when in the finals) reciprocally vote, and while the UK may or may not vote for us, we will or will not vote for the UK 😀

    • Don P. says:
      May 16, 2019 at 3:09 pm

      In the US, it’s on Logo, the gay cable channel, reflecting that it’s becomes a Big (non-exclusively) Gay Thing. Annoyingly, this channel is SD only on my system.

    • Winter Shaker says:
      May 16, 2019 at 3:58 pm

      Probably tangential, but you know you can now get an instrument that has the body and fingerholes of a duduk, but the mouthpiece of a clarinet – still pretty duduk-y sounding. Not cheap, but playable by ordinary mortals who don’t have lungs of steel.

    • Aapje says:
      May 16, 2019 at 11:33 pm

      The Dutch entry is a strong favorite with the bookmakers. Not a lot of theatrics, but a good ballad and well sung.

      • Deiseach says:
        May 17, 2019 at 5:17 am

        It’s a good song (way better than ours) and should do well; potential winner – who knows? I haven’t any strong feelings about any of the finalists as yet, it will depend on the performances tomorrow night. (List of finalists here if anyone wants to have a look and take a gamble on the winner).

        Yourselves, Czech Republic, Malta, Denmark (a really old-school Eurovision entry of the “let’s all be happy and united regardless of race, colour or creed” genre I haven’t seen in a while), Sweden and Switzerland have good chances; possibles are Azerbaijan and Belarus; Serbia and Australia are long shots and I think this is yet another year for the UK to be disappointed that the whole of Europe didn’t vote them in as winners 😉

        EDIT: Looks like the bookies think it’s the Netherlands/Australia/Sweden/Switzerland/Russia/Azerbaijan as top six picks for winner, so at least I’m in the same general area!

        • Hoopyfreud says:
          May 17, 2019 at 7:00 am

          I think Italy is an underrated contender. I think the odds are against it to win, but I think there’s a decent chance it’s top 5.

  25. monistowl says:
    May 16, 2019 at 9:08 am

    I sometimes muse on odd/old political philosophy by trying to abstract it into game theory. I’m reading about Chinese Legalism, and the principle of 術 — from my layman’s understanding, the argument advanced is that rulers must take great lengths to conceal their intentions and motivations to be able to maintain the state (which maintains accountability for everyone BUT the ruler). My best attempt at an agentic principle that matches this would be something like “violently deter any attempt to investigate my value function, excepting only this part of it.”

    I’m curious about arguments why that would/wouldn’t be a good heuristic sometimes, but more curious if anyone here has some other amateur historical-sage-to-math ideas

    • bullseye says:
      May 16, 2019 at 6:24 pm

      It seem to me that the more practical (and common) policy would be to convince the public that your goal is their well-being. Or maybe 術 is just that, plus the cynical assumption that of course your goal isn’t really the public’s well-being?

      Of course, keeping your goals secret makes it more difficult for people to scheme against you, but I would be more worried about being violently overthrown (very much a possibility in ancient China) over some schemer undermining some of my policies.

      • DavidFriedman says:
        May 16, 2019 at 8:54 pm

        A lot of our picture of the legalists come from the Han, who naturally enough wanted their predecessors to look bad. There is evidence from an excavated Qin (legalist) grave that their legal system did not fit the later description of it.

        How much one can get from actual legalist texts I don’t know.

    • Deiseach says:
      May 17, 2019 at 5:32 am

      the argument advanced is that rulers must take great lengths to conceal their intentions and motivations to be able to maintain the state

      From my limited viewing of Chinese historical dramas, it looks like it was vital for the Emperor not to give any indications as to what way he might decide policy because of all the jockeying for power and influence and the associated scheming and plotting going on in the court; if Emperor Qing showed he liked and valued Lady Ping and took her advice, Eunuch Wing might poison her or hatch a scandal to have her deposed so he could get Lady Jing installed in her place and manipulating the emperor in Wing’s favour*. Likewise if the Emperor indicated he might be inclined to name Second Prince as his successor, then the court lords might be emboldened to start insisting that Second Prince should get more actual power and set him up as a potential rival to his father, then too bad for Second Prince if he over-reached himself (or simply did nothing but be the favourite), he was likely to be displaced by Fourth Prince instead by a paranoid Emperor and worst case end up imprisoned for life.

      It does seem as if the merest hint at scrutability in the Emperor about anything at all meant six zillion plots got hatched immediately so people could manipulate that to grab power for themselves and their family and do down their rivals, and that kind of tearing down from within does nothing for the stability of the state.

      *In one drama, a favourite concubine falls out of favour with the Emperor and is immediately stripped of all her titles and banished to a far-off nunnery simply for unknowingly wearing the wrong dress, something engineered by a rival who knew that this dress was the same as one worn by a deceased lover of the Emperor who is unbearably grieved by any reminders of his lost love.

  26. FrankistGeorgist says:
    May 16, 2019 at 8:52 am

    Dear god please help me find a good office chair. It’s become increasingly clear to me that my choices of chairs and bed for my studio apartment sojourn were very poorly conceived and I feel it now every time I sit in one of the 4 places I can sit in that apartment.

    Now I’m moving and have resolved to live better. Certainly I’ll get a modifiable sitting-standing desk (though I’ll take recommendations there too). Is ergonomics a real science or just a buzzword? Are there any quantifiable things to look for in a chair I’ll be spending much too much time in because that’s what society is now? I’m quite willing to spend if the chair will last me a decade and provide some defense against the achy postures of modern life.

    To preempt discussion, I am exercising/approaching this from other angles as well. I just know that mistakes can be made in chair purchasing and I’ve most certainly made them.

    Like buying a bed, the amount of time I can reasonably spend in a store contemplating a chair’s feeling fails to be naturalistic or indicative of the long-term effects, so I’d appreciate some other human’s insights before I do that for several days.

    • johan_larson says:
      May 16, 2019 at 9:00 am

      I recommend you go to a store that specializes in office furniture. Don’t go to a store that sells general office stuff like paper and calendars and printers. They usually only carry cheap stuff. You want a no-foolin’ specialty store that carries high-end products. They should be able to help you find something that suits you. It won’t be cheap, though.

    • Keilone says:
      May 16, 2019 at 9:25 am

      I don’t think there is a good answer in furniture.

      Try thinking about it in terms of your posture, of the ways you need to sit, lay in order to feel good. This is different than finding a chair that “fits.” Sitting is not like wearing a glove.

      After agonizing about this and trying all sorts of things, I currently have a variety of very cheap IKEA and thrift store stuff that I use in order to sit, lay in the positions I want to be in. What’s made a difference is my back health and habits, not my furniture.

    • HeelBearCub says:
      May 16, 2019 at 10:52 am

      If cost is no barrier,then Herman Miller is the creme-de-la-creme.

      If you follow Twitch streamers (who game 12+ hours a day) some of the swear by the Embody. Check Ashek or Reznick (two PUBG streamers) for a recommendation.

    • Jon S says:
      May 16, 2019 at 11:28 am

      When I searched for a lot of online reviews about 5 years ago, the consensus seemed to be that the IKEA Marcus chair (then $200) was, for most people, at least as good as any other chair costing $500 or less. I got one and like it, but my wife finds it uncomfortable.

    • Urstoff says:
      May 16, 2019 at 11:43 am

      We use the Steelcase Leap in our office, which seems to be pretty good, but as you mentioned, it’s kind of a crapshoot because you don’t know how your body will respond over the long term.

      • toastengineer says:
        May 17, 2019 at 4:50 pm

        They have Steelcase Leaps at work and they’ve basically ruined my life, they’re AGONIZING for me. I’m trying to get a replacement, but I’m in too much pain to actually do anything.

        I’ve sat in Aerons, and I’ve sat in $200 chairs from Amazon and Sam’s Club; the important thing is to sit in it for a while before you buy it, because that really is the only way to know.

        That said, if you can find a Hermann Miller Aeron on Craigslist for nothing, go for that. I got mine for free by someone who was tearing down an office building and didn’t realize what they had.

    • Well... says:
      May 16, 2019 at 4:51 pm

      Once you go standing desk you don’t go back. (Get a good fatigue mat though.)

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:
        May 17, 2019 at 5:04 pm

        I hate standing desks with a passion. My last job gave us all standing desks when we moved to open-office. It was expected that you would stand up for at least part of the day.

        I never was able to concentrate while standing.

  27. The Nybbler says:
    May 16, 2019 at 7:40 am

    These kinds of tariffs amount to spite — you hurt yourself to hurt the other guy more. It seems generally agreed that the various “unfair” practices Trump is complaining about the Chinese engaging in are actually happening, so the question is what to do about it. Everyone (except Trump sometimes) seems to agree that full trade war with high tariffs all around is the worst outcome. If the free traders are wrong, the game is like Snowdrift, with payoffs something like this

    C/C : 8/8
    D/C: 10/5
    D/D: 0/0

    If the free traders are right, the payoff could be like any of

    C/C: 10/10
    D/C: 8/3 or 5/5 or 3/8
    D/D: 0/0

    But given unilateral defection, it should be clear the defector believes that either the free traders are wrong, or that it’s the 8/3 case and there’s some other reason to engage in tariffs.

    In any of these cases (even 3/8), it might make sense to move things to the D/D case to prevent “free riding” or perceived “free riding”, even though this is clearly worse in the short term. So it’s a reasonable strategy, though I don’t know if it’s the right one.

    There are other, worse, reasons for tariffs, like enriching domestic manufacturers of tariffed goods at the expense of domestic customers despite a net loss to yourself overall, but that doesn’t seem to be the main issue at the moment, though Trump has advocated for such before.

  28. Conrad Honcho says:
    May 16, 2019 at 6:39 am

    But they increasingly look like a more permanent tool to shelter American industry, block imports and banish an undesirable trade deficit.

    I would be fine with them just doing that, because my primary concern is American industrial might. However, you cannot underestimate how bad what the US is doing is for China. Steve Bannon and shockingly enough Tom Friedman laid it out pretty well on CNBC (only 7 minutes long). China is a big ol’ bully. They break the WTO rules they’re supposed to agree to. They expand, claiming territory that is not theirs. Their neighbors do not like them.

    Back in November 2017 Trump went on a grand tour of Asia, visiting South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, and the Philippines. At that time he told them, “trade with us and we will trade with you rather than China.” In 2018 he held a tri-lat with Abe (Japan) and Modhi (India), focused on the common strategic and trade interests of the three nations (i.e., not getting their lunch eaten by China). Now some 200 countries are looking to move their manufacturing from China to India. I do not believe any of this is by accident. Trump set up new trade partnerships and is now sticking it to China.

    I would rather everyone move their factories back to the US…but I’m also quite happy to see a big wrench thrown in to the One-Belt/One-Road plan.

    • DinoNerd says:
      May 16, 2019 at 8:48 am

      China is a big ol’ bully.

      As a Canadian, my response to this would be: The United States is a big old bully, and has been one since before Nixon “went to China” and the US began trading with China in a big way.

      After Trump’s renegotiation of NAFTA to make it “more fair” – i.e. to farther favour the US, as far as I could tell – it’s hard to believe that Trump’s goals involve any kind of fairness. (Or rather, he’s the kind of person who thinks it’s unfair if his slice of the pie is only a little bit bigger than everyone else’s.)

      • Conrad Honcho says:
        May 16, 2019 at 9:37 am

        How are you liking your 300% tariff on US dairy? “Tariffs for me but not for thee?”

        We made a free trade agreement, and then you guys let the Chinese ship their manufactured parts to China to backdoor them into our agreement. Maybe that’s not very fair?

  29. RalMirrorAd says:
    May 16, 2019 at 4:41 am

    Does the article mention the accusation that China has reneged on high level agreements it had made in the course of the trade talks?

    I’m inclined to think the third paragraph is more of an attempt to make it look like china is hurt more by this than the united states. [I don’t know how true that is or not]

    This is how I think of the whole trade dispute:

    1. Does china have trade practices that a free-trader would regard as unfair
    2. Were the tariff increases conditional solely on no agreement to fix those practices by a given date
    3. [if 1 = yes ] Did China agree to fix the practices in some capacity and then renege later on? or simply never agree to anything by the deadline.

    The above don’t have to be completely yes or no. In fact I suspect the answers to all 3 is ‘sort of’. China’s non-tariff protections may be blown out of proportion, Trumps demands may be only half reasonable, and China’s renege may have been partially justified due to #1 and #2.

    But IDK because the quality of our journalism doesn’t allow for such information to be readily available.

    • brad says:
      May 16, 2019 at 5:21 am

      I think that’s somewhat the wrong way of looking at it. Because a tariff hurts us. So it only makes sense if it is *likely* to accomplish some positive benefit for us. A plan that envisions leaving one in place for long stretches of time is probably a bad plan. The longer one is in place the greater the debt that any eventual ‘win’ needs to overcome to get to break even.

      The problem here isn’t that our asks are bad, by and large they are good, it’s that no account is being taken of the costs—there is even denial that there are costs at all.

      • HeelBearCub says:
        May 16, 2019 at 5:43 am

        I can’t think the Chinese are very confident they know what “our” asks are, given the way Trump engages in negotiation.

        Do you know what Trump would accept?

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          May 16, 2019 at 6:20 am

          I’m quite certain they know exactly what they’re agreeing to, or trying to. US Trade Rep Lighthizer has been negotiating with his Chinese counterpart Liu for nine months now. The Chinese just submitted a new draft of the agreement reneging on previously agreed to policies.

          Lighthizer and Mnuchin told reporters on Monday that the Chinese backsliding became apparent during their visit to Beijing last week, but that they had been reassured by their Chinese interlocutors that everything would turn out.

          That changed over the weekend when China sent through a new draft of an agreement that included them pulling back on language in the text on a number of issues, which had the “potential to change the deal very dramatically,” Mnuchin said. At that stage about 90 percent of the pact had been finalized, he said, and the Chinese wanted to reopen areas that had already been negotiated.

          “We are not willing to go back on documents that have been negotiated in the past,” he said.

          According to two people familiar with the U.S.’s position, China backtracked on committing to legal changes that American officials saw as key to selling the deal domestically as the biggest concession any U.S. administration has ever gotten from China.

          I think Liu wanted to make a deal, but Xi put the kibosh on it, because Liu is actually concerned about trade while Xi has bigger plans.

          Trump’s threat of additional sanctions on Chinese imports revealed his impatience due to a lack of sufficient concessions from China, with sources suggesting that President Xi Jinping vetoed additional concessions proposed by his negotiators.

          Sources familiar with the discussions said the proposals submitted to Xi included one that promised more concessions.

          “Xi told them ‘I’ll be responsible for all possible consequences’,” the second source said. Chinese negotiators subsequently presented a tougher proposal to Washington, although it is not clear if they pitched an amended proposal to Xi after the latest round of talks in Beijing last week.

          So, Lui wants trade, but to Xi trade is just a weapon used as part of a much, much larger strategy. I highly recommend reading that article from Hanson to understand what China’s long term goals and strategy are.

      • Conrad Honcho says:
        May 16, 2019 at 6:27 am

        Because a tariff hurts us.

        Gonna need a citation on that. When instead of buying foreign products and sending our money overseas, Americans buy from other Americans, who then also buy from other Americans, “we” make more wealth for “us.” Tariffs help “us.”

        Everyone who builds an industrial nation does so by protecting its markets from foreign goods. A young America imposed tariffs on manufactured British goods to promote American industry. This is what turned America into an industrial powerhouse. China has become a manufacturing giant through its shrewd mercantalist policies. However African nations are unable to incubate industries of their own because of dumped western products and IMF agreements that prevent them from erecting trade barriers. “Free trade” is great for profiting off the dismantling of an industrialized nation, but what great nation did free traders ever build?

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 16, 2019 at 7:07 am

          Spending and money don’t equal wealth. Wealth is having stuff you can buy for your money, and sending money overseas is fine if you are getting something back for it on the wealth front.

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 16, 2019 at 7:11 am

          Anyone starting a discussion of the GD this way

          The Depression began with the crash of the stock market in 1929, nine months before Smoot-Hawley became law. The real villain: The Federal Reserve…

          Should be held with high suspicion at best. The Great Depression wasn’t ‘the stock market crashed and everything was shit for 12 years’ and the implication that it should be viewed this way is completely misleading and undercuts any credibility that I might grant an unknown author.

          The Great Depression was unique not for the crash, but for the lack of speedy recovery after the crash. This is the central point that has to be addressed by anyone writing about the GD.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          May 16, 2019 at 7:22 am

          Why did you cut off the rest of the sentence?

          The real villain: The Federal Reserve, which failed to replenish that third of the money supply that had been wiped out by thousands of bank failures.

          The idea that the tariff created/prolonged the depression is the free trader Big Lie. The US became a great industrial nation because tariffs. Every manufacturing nation besides the US enacts tariffs and barriers to protect their industries. When we dropped our trade barriers, our industry evaporated. This should not be hard to understand, and yet here we are.

          Tariffs are beneficial for nations pretty much every time they’re enacted, for completely obvious reasons. This is why so many nations have them. But the free traders profit at the expense of the nation, and they need some “educated-sounding” reasons why the completely obvious thing that’s contrary to their personal financial interest is false, so “Smoot-Hawley!”

        • RalMirrorAd says:
          May 16, 2019 at 8:03 am

          @Conrad

          A Tariff might provide a country with an incubation period to deal with sunk costs and develop home-grown competencies to achieve parity with international competitors. [at which point the tariffs could be removed without losing those industries completely]

          Exceptions being things like agriculture where Canada would not be able to grow tropical fruit without permanent protectionism [and even then…]

          I’m not sold on the idea that permanent protectionism can achieve long term prosperity at any scale.

          Health of industries and health of the citizens are also related but not identical. China can become an ‘economic powerhouse’ through protectionism [perhaps] but its own citizens are effectively taxed to maintain the status quo.

          Of course in another instance a free trade country can suffer long term because it ends up importing goods from countries that don’t buy exports in turn but instead buy sovereign debt, real estate, and other assets that don’t stimulate economic development in any positive way.

        • sentientbeings says:
          May 16, 2019 at 9:16 am

          @Conrad Honcho

          Tariffs are beneficial for nations pretty much every time they’re enacted, for completely obvious reasons.

          The obvious reason being that one’s hoard of gold bullion is the best measure of economic prosperity?

          This is why so many nations have them.

          As opposed to an unfavorabe ratio of coordination and information costs to expected payoff from political action for dispersed groups versus a favorable ratio of those costs for concentrated interests? Or ignorance of basic economic concepts like comparative advantage, and an inclination toward zero-sum fallacies? Or romanticizing/fetishising certain occupations or industries? Or a rejection of individual agency for the sake of perceived tribal benefit or status?

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 16, 2019 at 10:54 am

          Why did you cut off the rest of the sentence?

          I didn’t cut off the rest of the sentence, I copied the quote at the opening of the piece in the manner it was presented. That the author choose to present it this way speaks volumes about his intentions.

          The idea that the tariff created/prolonged the depression is the free trader Big Lie

          There is no evidence presented in the piece you link, and the claims made are done in an obviously dishonest and misleading way. As David Friedman often says if someone is distorting something that you know then you have a hard time trusting them on stuff you don’t know.

          When we dropped our trade barriers, our industry evaporated.

          Our industry? You mean some industries. Do you mean to imply that the US economy is weaker now than it was before trade barriers were dropped, or that employment is lower, or that the US produces less than it did?

        • Paul Zrimsek says:
          May 16, 2019 at 11:38 am

          The evaporation of our industries may be viewed in graphical form here. Beware! It’s not a sight for the faint-hearted.

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 16, 2019 at 11:54 am

          When we dropped our trade barriers, our industry evaporated. This should not be hard to understand, and yet here we are.

          That is because the big lie is that of the mercantilists. The importance of manufacturing in the US was in steep decline from the 70s on and shows no noticable change with the enactment of trade agreements in 87 or 94. If anything NAFTA slowed the decline in manufacturing in the near term.

        • DavidFriedman says:
          May 16, 2019 at 2:29 pm

          When instead of buying foreign products and sending our money overseas, Americans buy from other Americans, who then also buy from other Americans, “we” make more wealth for “us.” Tariffs help “us.”

          When we “send our money overseas,” what happens to it. Three possibilities:

          1. Foreigners pile it under their mattresses or in safe deposits or whatever. We are printing up paper and getting valuable goods in exchange. A good deal for us, not them.

          2. Foreigners use it to buy American goods–the usual pattern.

          3. Foreigners use it to buy capital goods in America–invest in American firms, buy government debt, and the like.

          1 and 3 result in a trade deficit–a trade deficit is just the accounting equivalent of a capital inflow, aside from possibility 1, which isn’t very important.

          We have two technologies to make cars. We can build them in Detroit or grow them in Iowa. Everyone knows how we build cars. To grow them you grow the raw material they are made out of, called “wheat,” put it on ships, send it into the Pacific. The ships come back with Hondas on them. Auto tariffs are protecting American auto workers from the competition of American farmers, building cars when it would be cheaper to grow them.

          but what great nation did free traders ever build?

          England in the 19th century, of course. The first great industrial power.

          Hong Kong, with free trade, made it from a dirt poor island (plus some adjacent land) with a population density ten times that of the most densely populated country in the world to a per capita real income higher than the U.K. in a matter of decades.

          The U.S. had trade deficits through much of the 19th century, because we were building our canals and railroads in part with European money.

        • DavidFriedman says:
          May 16, 2019 at 2:37 pm

          Of course in another instance a free trade country can suffer long term because it ends up importing goods from countries that don’t buy exports in turn but instead buy sovereign debt, real estate, and other assets that don’t stimulate economic development in any positive way.

          If the government runs a budget deficit, someone has to buy the debt. If it isn’t bought by foreigners it is bought by citizens, with money they could otherwise invest productively. The problem isn’t the trade deficit, it’s the budget deficit.

          Why, by the way, do you assume that a tariff will prevent a trade deficit? Think about the dollar/yen (or currency of your choice–these used to be arguments about Japan so I’m used to that version) market. The exchange rate is at the level at which the number of dollars Americans want to sell for yen equals the numbers Japanese want to buy (expand to include more countries if you wish). Impose a tariff, reducing U.S. imports and so the number of yen Americans want to buy. The price of the dollar in yen goes up. Now American goods are more expensive to the Japanese, so U.S. exports go down too. If the Japanese still want to invest the same amount in U.S. capital assets (land, stock, government debts, whatever) you still have the same trade deficit. It might change as the changing trade conditions change foreigners’ desire to invest in U.S. assets, but it isn’t (as many assume) simply a matter of imports go down so the trade deficit goes down.

        • ana53294 says:
          May 16, 2019 at 2:45 pm

          The Basque Country even went to Civil war to maintain free trade. The fueros permitted tariff-free trade in the Basque country, as well as lower taxation. And although these privileges were taken away in the 19th century, the Basque Country is one of the richest parts of Spain, together with Catalonia. And historically, the Basques were richer people than the rest of Spain (although there are many confounders, such as the fact that everybody was free, the lack of conscription and the lower taxes).

          I think it’s strange how many right wing politicians rage against taxes, but don’t seem to accept the fact that tariffs are taxes on imports. And very distortionary taxes at that.

          A free trade country can suffer long term because it ends up importing goods from countries that don’t buy exports in turn but instead buy sovereign debt, real estate, and other assets that don’t stimulate economic development in any positive way.

          A country spends limited resources (ores, oil, energy, labour) to produce goods, and they exchange those for pieces of paper. They then use those pieces of paper in exchange for pieces of paper that they can’t buy in their country because their country has a tendency to devalue those pieces of paper by confiscating them, making them risky, banning them, etc.

          Your country’s main export is the security of the pieces of paper you sell in exchange for valuable goods.

          The thing is, the US will always keep exporting pieces of paper as long as they remain a valuable resource for other countries to prop up the value of their own pieces of paper. The only way people will not import huge amounts of pieces of paper from your country is if they don’t value your pieces of paper.

          The euro has been trying to suplant the dollar as a reserve currency since its creation. You are welcome to do as many things as you can to help that happen, so other countries stop importing worthless paper in exchange for valuable resources.

          Possible steps: make dollars non-convertible. Install capital controls. Ban foreign dollar denominated trading. Start randomly confiscating rich Chinese’ assets.

        • brad says:
          May 17, 2019 at 3:52 am

          @Conrad Honcho

          Think about this from my perspective, on one side I have not just the Paul Krugmans of the world but also the David Friedmans. That is to say virtually every brilliant person for the last 75 years that has devoted his life to studying these kinds of questions. On the other we have some folksy wisdom and “law office history” from you, Pat Buchanan, and Donald Trump.

          I think the divide here is a lot more fundamental than “what are the basics of macroeconomics” and is rooted in “what are the best ways of forming beliefs about the world”.

          I mean if you wanted to turn the conversation, as these things often go, to “money isn’t everything” and “something, something decline of the working class and their 2.5 kids”, that at least would be at the level of normative rather than positive questions–and I couldn’t say that you are just flat out wrong.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          May 17, 2019 at 7:20 am

          I thank you all for your responses. I don’t think I’m going to be able to go comment by comment and respond to each point.

          I understand if you’re trying to get maximally cheap goods, free trade is a good idea in the short term. But I look at the rusted out factories, the abandoned towns, the graveyards of opioid addicts and think “long term, this is probably less valuable for my nation than temporary discounts on cheap gadgets and baubles.”

          Yes, there’s lots of smart talk from the Krugmans and the David Friedmans but it’s not enough to get me to stop believing my lying eyes.

        • acymetric says:
          May 17, 2019 at 7:24 am

          The counter argument, as I see it, is that you have the wrong causation. Free trade didn’t destroy manufacturing jobs, those jobs were going away regardless.

          That doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem, or that nothing can be done to slow down or reverse the trend (although I’m not sure that it can either), just that free trade isn’t the cause.

        • Faza (TCM) says:
          May 17, 2019 at 7:28 am

          Free trade didn’t destroy manufacturing jobs, those jobs were going away regardless.

          That’s a striking claim. Could you elaborate?

        • Nick says:
          May 17, 2019 at 7:35 am

          Since everyone here is really interested in correcting Conrad on tariffs, I invite them to answer the question I posed below, which is about whether we can maybe prevent rusted out factories, abandoned towns, and graveyards of opioid addicts without tariffs and without necessarily giving up free trade.

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 17, 2019 at 7:46 am

          I understand if you’re trying to get maximally cheap goods, free trade is a good idea in the short term. But I look at the rusted out factories, the abandoned towns, the graveyards of opioid addicts and think “long term, this is probably less valuable for my nation than temporary discounts on cheap gadgets and baubles.”

          A century ago it would have been ghost towns in the West, or Okie migration. Parts of the country decline and parts grow, what you are ascribing to free trade may (or may not) be caused by freer trade, but the major mistake that you make is to look at those areas and say ‘this is the US’ and ignore that you preferred policies impose costs on other parts of the US. So you could be correct about everything else, support tariffs and end up harming the US on net very easily anyway.

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 17, 2019 at 7:50 am

          @ Faza

          That’s a striking claim. Could you elaborate?

          Here is a graph of Manufacturing’s share of labor in the US. It was in steep decline from 1970 on, and maybe in slow decline before that. Free trade agreements are barely noticeable here, the economy has been transforming with or without these agreements as technology changes the world. The FT agreements can just as much be seen as an outcome of these changes as drivers.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          May 17, 2019 at 8:27 am

          the major mistake that you make is to look at those areas and say ‘this is the US’ and ignore that you preferred policies impose costs on other parts of the US.

          We don’t seem to have any problem imposing costs on other parts of the US when it’s beneficial to parts of the US the powerful and the politicians care about.

          Unions impose costs on consumers. Minimum wage laws impose costs on consumers. Taxes impose costs on the productive to subsidize the unproductive. Why do you need a license to practice law? That’s just an artificial barrier to entry protecting Big Law. Why do you need a license to practice medicine? Just propping up the Medical Cartel while costs to sick and pitiable citizens rise and rise and rise. Any of you free traders happen to be code monkeys mad about H1-B visas? But don’t you realize wanting a middle class wage instead of hiring Indians who’ll work for half price by living four to a condo imposes a cost on poor beleaguered Mark Zuckerberg?

          The rest of these things we can all get by with and I’m sure plenty of SSCers will rationally explain why law licenses are good or H1-Bs are bad (or good!) or unions or minimum wages Make Things Better for All of Us In the Long Run. But suggest, “gee, maybe we should protect the industries that create real usable products and wealth and provide good incomes to working class Americans rather than cede manufacturing and all the future process technologies that are discovered with the experience of working in real production to foreign authoritarian communists bent on global military, technological and economic domination” and Conrad Honcho cannot get a single ally.

          This raises an obvious question: with as many smart people as there are on SSC, how can every single one of you be so wrong?

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 17, 2019 at 9:13 am

          The difference is that you are imposing costs for the sake of imposing costs. Most people who support taxes do so because they believe that how the tax revenue will be spent will be an improvement or to redress some injustice or to pay for some externality. If you proposed a tarriff rate that would pay for customs inspections on imports there would be a lot less push back. The logic you use has no end point. Why aren’t we taxing oil imports to protect oil producers? Why aren’t we banning foreign students from universities to protect our students? Aggressively taxing food imports to support farmers (yes some of these things we already do to some extent). Is a secure food supply not at least as imperative as a manufacturing base? Same for energy?

          Here’s the issue in a nutshell. If you (effectively) heavily tax oil then you are taxing farmers who use fertilizers that are oil based. If you are taxing immigration then you make the labor pool more expensive and are taxing high labor sectors like farming and manufacturing. If you tax X you effectively tax every Y downstream.

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 17, 2019 at 9:26 am

          BTW to answer the free trade question: The US was unquestionably built on free trade, it restricted interstate tariffs when the states otherwise had large degrees of autonomy. The US rose to dominance under what was at the time one of the largest, if not the largest, free trade zone in history.

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 17, 2019 at 9:28 am

          Of course the US would be richer still if they had figured out to prevent midwestern states from joining the union to protect farmers in Massachusetts and New York.

        • Faza (TCM) says:
          May 17, 2019 at 9:47 am

          @baconbits9:
          I don’t think your graph does what you think it does – at best, all it tells us is what we already know (manufacturing jobs are gone).

          Let’s reiterate the original claim:

          Free trade didn’t destroy manufacturing jobs, those jobs were going away regardless.

          Showing that those jobs have indeed gone away is neither here nor there, because that claim isn’t under examination. The claim that free trade had nothing to do with it is.

          Aside: The graph isn’t even particularly helpful in showing that the jobs have gone away – you could get the exactly the same result if the number of manufacturing jobs (numerator) remains constant, but the total number of jobs (denominator) increases, e.g. through increasing population. I’m not saying this is the case; only that we can’t tell it isn’t from the graph.

          Further aside: Looking at the data you posted earlier in the thread, it seems like the total number of manufacturing jobs remained roughly at the same level from the mid-60s to around 2000 (give or take some ups-and-downs) after which it took a nosedive. This suggests that the demographic explanation for share of manufacturing jobs for this period may, in fact, be the correct one.

          The interesting question is: where have the jobs (and the people once doing them) gone?

          Assuming that the observed reduction of manufacturing jobs v. overall employment isn’t simply due to demographics and that the graph does, in fact, show a reduced number of jobs in manufacturing, here’s a couple of reasons why this may have happened:

          1. Reduction of demand for the product (the “buggy whip argument”) – I consider this explanation highly implausible, but am willing to be convinced to the contrary; if this is the case, those jobs are gone for good, unless the structure of demand changes at some point in the future,

          2. Increases in productivity of labour – this seems to be your preferred explanation, but in that case you should be supporting your argument with data that demonstrates this,

          3. Substitution (the “free trade” argument) – there are still jobs in manufacturing, but they aren’t at home. They have either been offshored by domestic producers, or supply of manufactured goods has been dominated by foreign producers. The extent to which these issues affect domestic manufacturing jobs is what we’re trying to determine.

          I notice your emphasis on free trade agreements, but I would caution against only looking at things like NAFTA. GATT (WTO) has been a thing since 1947. Tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers have been undergoing constant reductions roughly from the end of WWII.

          Counterpoint graph.

          Taking it at face value, we see low tariffs having a negative effect on the US trade balance – this strongly suggests a substitution of domestic production for imports. It doesn’t actually prove anything, yet, but should, at least, cause us to ask what is it that the US started importing.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          May 17, 2019 at 9:48 am

          The difference is that you are imposing costs for the sake of imposing costs.

          Minimum wage laws.

          redress some injustice or to pay for some externality.

          Like the fact that one of the reasons US labor is more expensive is because the government imposes regulations meant to protect workers and the environment that other nations do not. Either give Americans the opportunity to be as abused and unhealthy as the Chinese or impose tariffs to even the playing field. As I would prefer Americans to not live like Chinese serfs my preference is for the latter.

          Why aren’t we taxing oil imports to protect oil producers? Why aren’t we banning foreign students from universities to protect our students? Aggressively taxing food imports to support farmers (yes some of these things we already do to some extent). Is a secure food supply not at least as imperative as a manufacturing base? Same for energy?

          I agree with all of these things except for taxing energy. Not only because energy runs everything else (unlike finished consumer goods) but because if we’re talking non-renewable resources it’s in our long-term strategic interests to consume the rest of the world’s resources before our own.

          If you tax X you effectively tax every Y downstream.

          What exactly is downstream from finished consumer products? Shouldn’t that be the place it’s most acceptable to tax? And yet it’s the one you’re most opposed to taxing? Don’t tax energy because it’s the start of the stream. Tax the hell out of the finished consumer products because that’s the end of the stream.

          BTW to answer the free trade question: The US was unquestionably built on free trade, it restricted interstate tariffs when the states otherwise had large degrees of autonomy. The US rose to dominance under what was at the time one of the largest, if not the largest, free trade zone in history.

          Do you want to walk that back a bit? After accusing Pat Buchanan of being “disingenuous” (about what you’ve never explained), claiming that America, which heavily tariffed foreign products was unquestionably built on free trade because they didn’t tariffs goods from other parts of the same country is…well it’s something all right. Might as well call me a free trader because my wife doesn’t tariff my dinner.

        • Randy M says:
          May 17, 2019 at 10:27 am

          Why aren’t we banning foreign students from universities to protect our students?

          We do give cheaper in state tuition, at least in CA, which is more analogous to a tariff.
          And at certain levels of enrollment, I’d support quotas.

        • HeelBearCub says:
          May 17, 2019 at 10:27 am

          @baconbits9:

          Of course the US would be richer still if they had figured out to prevent midwestern states from joining the union to protect farmers in Massachusetts and New York.

          I think I missed some sarcasm, or you unintentionally completely self-contradicted…

        • brad says:
          May 17, 2019 at 2:15 pm

          This raises an obvious question: with as many smart people as there are on SSC, how can every single one of you be so wrong?

          Occam’s razor is that we aren’t.

        • 10240 says:
          May 17, 2019 at 3:22 pm

          whether we can maybe prevent rusted out factories, abandoned towns

          It shouldn’t be the goal to prevent them. The Western world has a comparative advantage in the service sector, China has a comparative advantage in industry. So fewer Americans should work in industry, and most should work in services. If it’s cheaper for people to move to cities where good jobs are available than to move jobs to industrial cities, then people should move.

        • Hoopyfreud says:
          May 17, 2019 at 3:27 pm

          @10240 there’s a large jump from positive to normative happening here.

        • DavidFriedman says:
          May 18, 2019 at 12:27 am

          Yes, there’s lots of smart talk from the Krugmans and the David Friedmans but it’s not enough to get me to stop believing my lying eyes.

          You only get to observe one version of reality. You can’t use your eyes to see the America that exists, the America that would exist if we had had higher tariffs in the past, and the America that would exist if we had had free trade in the past, and compare them. But that is what you would have to do in order for your eyes to be sufficient to support or refute your beliefs.

          Your beliefs, like mine, are based on theory, a theory about what the causal connections are. The problem is that your theory is about two hundred years out of date, a picture of the economics of trade that is intuitively convincing because it is easier to understand than the correct theory but internally incoherent.

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 20, 2019 at 7:39 am

          I think I missed some sarcasm, or you unintentionally completely self-contradicted…

          Yes that was sarcasm.

      • RalMirrorAd says:
        May 16, 2019 at 7:07 am

        If the damage of tariffs isn’t permanent I suspect, conditional on the ‘asks’ being met, the benefits outweigh the cost. I’m not super-committed to that view though.

        But I agree in spirit that the tariffs the administration imposes should have some kind of reference to the cost that Chinese trade practices have to the united states. It would give a better clarity to the question of whether the present pain is worth future potential benefit.

    • Nick says:
      May 16, 2019 at 9:53 am

      1. Does china have trade practices that a free-trader would regard as unfair

      I’m really interested in the answer to this question. A few months back when conservatives were discussing Oren Cass’s book The Once and Future Worker, the case he made to them was basically that our relationship with China was destroying the labor market at home, and the labor market is one market you really don’t want to ruin because jobs are good for people and families, and besides (here’s the key part), it’s not really free trade when the other country engages in a bunch of economic policies at our expense.

      Googling, it looks like Cass is critical of the tariffs. He doesn’t think they’re the way to bring China into line and thinks the TPP, which Trump bizarrely lambasted, was better. Would love commentary on this stuff from people who know economics.

  30. brad says:
    May 16, 2019 at 4:38 am

    It’s a highly inefficient (not to mention regressive) way of redistributing wealth to rent seekers in Trump’s coalition.

    The cudgel part could have actually made sense, at least in some limited fashion, so of course we are abandoning it.

    • DavidFriedman says:
      May 16, 2019 at 2:19 pm

      I doubt it. What groups do you think benefit from the tariffs and are part of Trump’s coalition?

      A good deal of the Trump coalition was rural. The U.S. is a major agricultural exporter, so barriers to trade hurt the farm economy.

      I interpret it as taking advantage of the fact that most people don’t understand the economics of trade, and so can be persuaded that a tariff is protecting American auto workers from the competition of Japanese autoworkers, when it is actually protecting American auto workers from the competition of American farmers.

      • brad says:
        May 17, 2019 at 2:48 am

        What groups do you think benefit from the tariffs and are part of Trump’s coalition?

        Employees, and would-be employees, of inefficient, noncompetitive manufactures of physical goods.

      • broblawsky says:
        May 17, 2019 at 3:50 am

        From my perspective: defense contractors. Two of the earliest beneficiaries of the China tariffs were Yardney and Eagle-Picher, when silver- zinc batteries were tariffed. There’s no compelling reason to do so other than to benefit US manufacturers of silver zinc batteries, which are heavily involved in defense contracting.

  31. johan_larson says:
    May 16, 2019 at 3:56 am

    This is the subthread for discussion of the final episode of Game of Thrones, S8E6. Feel free to post unencrypted spoilers.

    I can remember really truly loving this series. The early seasons were some of the best television of this young century. But somehow the writers squandered all that goodwill. It took two seasons, but they managed it. At this point, I just want it to be over.

    • emiliobumachar says:
      May 16, 2019 at 6:19 am

      I never watched the series, but, could you please expend on why you’re presumably still watching it even though you don’t like it anymore? It could be over for you today.

      I can have that need for closure for, say, one two-hour movie, but I really struggle to understand why one would keep coming back for months or years. Does it feel like a chore, or is it still fun but you inevitably compare it to how much more fun it used to be?

      Thanks, and sorry if it came out judgmental – wasn’t my intention.

      • meh says:
        May 16, 2019 at 6:32 am

        It’s not like you have to do something everyday for months/years, it’s only 6 or 10 episodes total, just released over years.
        If there is a band I love, and I don’t like track 4 of their new album, I still listen to the rest of the album.
        I would assume this to be near universal among people that the longer something is rewarding (6 seasons), the longer it takes to stop once is stops being rewarding. Combine that with the closure and there you go (I suspect if the show was not ending this season, and going on indefinitely, more people would start dropping out)

        • Wrong Species says:
          May 16, 2019 at 7:01 am

          Just to add on to this, I would say that the mistakes of the previous seasons wouldn’t have been so bad if this season had been good. We were watching in part to see if they could do that. Instead they made those seasons retroactively worse because things we thoughts were going to come in to play didn’t.

      • johan_larson says:
        May 16, 2019 at 8:34 am

        It hasn’t been a drag for years. It has been a slow process of decline from greatness, with occasional high points, for about the last two seasons.

        Why am I still watching? Partly because I want to finish the story. Partly because there has still been stuff worth watching among the many mistakes. Partly because there are characters I identify with (Tyrion, Davos, Sam, Jeorah) and I want to know what happens to them. Partly because I was hoping for a turnaround. It’s complicated.

        But at this point, I’m amply ready for the story to end.

        • Nick says:
          May 16, 2019 at 9:17 am

          The part I’m most interested right now is speculating based on the show how Martin finishes the story. At least, in the alternate universe where Martin finishes the story.

      • John Schilling says:
        May 16, 2019 at 11:37 am

        I can have that need for closure for, say, one two-hour movie, but I really struggle to understand why one would keep coming back for months or years.

        There’s really only the single month involved; May 2019.

        S7 and the first half of S8 look rather like the highlights reel of a much better show – legitimate highlights, lots of individually superb moments, with a shortage of the connecting material needed to stitch them together into a good story. So one can watch just to enjoy the highlights and mock the failures, and there was reason to at least hope that the showrunners would be able to tie it together into a satisfying and enjoyable ending.

        Since roughly S8E4, it’s been something between watching a car crash at an auto race just for the sheer spectacle of it, and attending a wake to celebrate the memory and mourn the loss of something great from the world. And in the latter context, joining with like-minded friends to rage against those who killed the greatness and against the cheap imposter they have tried to put in its place.

        I don’t think those are an unreasonable way to spend four hours over the course or a month.

        • Randy M says:
          May 16, 2019 at 11:48 am

          S7 and the first half of S8 look rather like the highlights reel of a much better show

          I’ve heard it described (not from insiders) that they had bullet points for the story as Martin intended it beyond the published work, and that’s what they’re filming–bullet points, disconnected and leaving plot holes and unconvincing characterization.

          • Deiseach says:
            May 17, 2019 at 5:48 am

            I’ve read online rumours, who knows how true, that because the showrunners got the new Star Wars gig, they argued (against the studio’s wishes) for a shorter final season so they could wrap the whole thing up fast and move on to their new job.

            Looking in from the outside, it seems like what is happening is a combination of “Martin always pulled a whammy – so the good guy Ned Stark gets killed in the first season and so on – and that’s what we’ll do, that means if you’re expecting a traditional big final climactic battle in the last episode between Dany and Cersei you’re not gonna get it; we’ll knock off main and lead characters in unexpected ways instead of big set pieces so the Night King gets knocked off by Arya in a ‘one hit and poof!’ way” and “The fans expect this, this and this person to be the one left standing and it’ll be either Jon Snow as King on the Iron Throne or maybe no Iron Throne at all in the end”.

            Though Mad Queen Daenerys does make me laugh a bit at the unfortunately premature bandwagon jumping by politicians trying to be all Hello Fellow Kids, like Elizabeth Warren quoting her as inspiration for “someone who wants to break the current rotten system, a female leader who wants to help the smallfolk, now imagine that this is an election year and there’s a certain female leader putting herself forward to break the rotten system and help the little people, hint hint nudge nudge” before the whole THEY DON’T LOVE ME SO INCINERATE THEM ALL IN DRAGON FIRE bit 🙂

            Might have wanted to not count your dragons before they’re hatched there, Elizabeth!

          • vV_Vv says:
            May 17, 2019 at 6:55 am

            Elizabeth Warren quoting her as inspiration for “someone who wants to break the current rotten system, a female leader who wants to help the smallfolk, now imagine that this is an election year and there’s a certain female leader putting herself forward to break the rotten system and help the little people, hint hint nudge nudge” before the whole THEY DON’T LOVE ME SO INCINERATE THEM ALL IN DRAGON FIRE bit 🙂

            Hahahaha! Elizabeth Warren confirmed total (*) Dothraki Khaleesi 🙂

            (* 1/1024)

    • J Mann says:
      May 16, 2019 at 6:32 am

      I can remember really truly loving this series. The early seasons were some of the best television of this young century. But somehow the writers squandered all that goodwill. It took two seasons, but they managed it. At this point, I just want it to be over.

      I lowered my expectations after The Battle of the Bastards, and now I’m pretty happy. I agree that the show easily could have been better, but my standard is now “Is it better than Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Deep Space 9, shows which I enjoyed a lot” (Answer: yes, and Season Eight is certainly better than the last season of those shows.)

      If you just look at it as the best genre show ever made (with the possible exception of Penny Dreadful), it gets a lot more fun. They’re going to keep doing character shorthand, and jet packing, and their battles are going to be all spectacle and no tactics. But there’s still a lot to enjoy, starting with the music, cinematography, and character acting.

    • gbdub says:
      May 16, 2019 at 7:01 am

      GoT seems to have suffered a peculiar failure mode. In most aspects, the show is just as good as it has ever been – great casting, great actors, great dialogue, amazing production values (which have actually gotten better). This is more arguable, but I contend that the “micro plotting” (writing of individual scenes) and “superplot” (overall big picture narrative arc) are still good. It’s the mid-level plotting that has gone to hell. Characters warping around Westeros. Cunning characters nerfed. Personalities flipping on a dime. Plot lines wrapped up too abruptly or left hanging. Essentially, the writers still want to go somewhere interesting, and are very good at showing something entertaining when they get there, but the quality of the journey in between has gone to hell.

      Personally, I think the issue is that the writers, having run out of book material, have swung too hard into writing for visual spectacle, a tempting crutch of the TV vs book medium. Rather than action growing organically out of the understandable actions of well established characters, the writers are flinging characters around the board willy nilly to set up a series of great moments… that fall apart when viewed from a bit farther out. They’ve burned down the forest to plant a few well manicured trees.

      A lot of people point to The Battle of the Bastards as a turning point, and I think that’s a good example of what I’m talking about. Beautifully shot, one of the most visually and emotionally compelling battle sequences they’ve ever done. Jon Snow standing, alone, in front of charging hoersemen is one of the best single frames of the show, and the crazed melee that follows is equally dramatic. In the moment, when Jon’s army is getting crushed by an impenetrable tightening ring of shields, you feel it, and you feel in when they are saved by a cavalry charge.

      But to get there, Jon Snow has to stupidly Leeroy Jenkins his way right into a trap he and everyone else had specifically anticipated. To survive, his plot armor had to be turned up to 11. To get the lovely moment of trumpets blaring and a shining column of the Vale’s best riding to the rescue, they had to have Sansa be stupidly coy about the availability of said troops.

      I think a lot of the problems with the Night King, Dany, and her dragons are falling into this same trap of “stage scene for maximum visual drama whether it makes a damn bit of sense or not”, but I’ll save the specifics till we can go unmarked spoiler.

      Are there any other shows that failed by this mechanism? It might be rare, and maybe limited to cases like this where the writers outran their source material.

      • meh says:
        May 16, 2019 at 7:41 am

        They’ve burned down the forest to plant a few well manicured trees.

        Is this alluding to

        “I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.”

        • gbdub says:
          May 16, 2019 at 8:15 am

          Not intentionally… that’s honestly the first time I’ve seen that quote!
          But it does seem a bit apropos. GRRM gave the showrunners a rough blueprint of where things need to go, and perhaps they filled in the gaps as architects rather than gardeners. Then again, even architects know that a building needs foundations and structure. GoT has become a collection of beatiful rooms without a coherent floor plan.

          • meh says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:23 am

            It is often used to show the differences between Tolkien (the architect) vs GRRM (Gardener), and why it is so hard for him to finish the story.

            I forget who, but someone has made the argument that GRRM is an architect, he just focuses on lineage and ancestry, as opposed to Tolkien who focused on language and history.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          May 16, 2019 at 9:08 am

          Sure, I get this…but even the gardener has a pretty good idea what the flower is going to look like when it grows. He’s not just throwing out seeds at random.

          I read the books and abandoned the TV show after season 3, because books 4 and 5 were so boring and pointless. It looks like I didn’t miss much.

          Is it okay to laugh, just a little bit, at the people who named their kid “Daenyres” or “Khalessi?” You really shouldn’t be naming your kids after pop culture stuff anyway, but if you are going to do that, at least maybe wait until the show’s over? See how everything turns out maybe?

          • Nick says:
            May 16, 2019 at 9:31 am

            Is it okay to laugh, just a little bit, at the people who named their kid “Daenyres” or “Khalessi?”

            God yes! I mean, the least they could do is spell the names right.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 16, 2019 at 9:41 am

            Har har. I googled it but I guess enough people misspell it that it didn’t come up as wrong. I’m leaving it.

          • J Mann says:
            May 16, 2019 at 10:37 am

            because books 4 and 5 were so boring and pointless

            Is this the culture war thread?

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 16, 2019 at 10:38 am

            Uh oh, is this a scissor statement? I’ve never seen anyone say they liked books 4 and 5. I was not aware liking them was even a possibility.

          • Nick says:
            May 16, 2019 at 10:42 am

            4 and 5 were still good, but something was definitely lost.

          • Eugene Dawn says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:00 am

            Yeah, “books 4 and 5 are boring and pointless” is the most wrong opinion I’ve seen on SSC.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:18 am

            God yes! I mean, the least they could do is spell the names right.

            Don’t blame them. They were probably copying the spelling off the Starbucks cup.

          • Nick says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:22 am

            Don’t blame them. They were probably copying the spelling off the Starbucks cup.

            Is their firstborn named Cark?

          • meh says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:25 am

            “books 4 and 5 are boring and pointless”

            If you add “compared to 1-3”, you will be closer to a universal truth.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:45 am

            Yeah, “books 4 and 5 are boring and pointless” is the most wrong opinion I’ve seen on SSC.

            What was your favorite part? Following Brienne wandering off in the completely wrong direction to find Sansa? Or maybe following Quentyn Martell for 200 pages as he goes from point A to point B to die there pointlessly?

          • Randy M says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:51 am

            I think I stopped a book prior to Conrad. The one question I have, and since I don’t hear anyone talk about it it probably went nowhere, is what happened with Caitlyn Stark, who was presumed dead, but then found to be alive and giving Brienne orders to find her kids. And Brienne was supposed to stay her wrath with one word–how did that plot line wrap up in Dances with Dragons or the HBO show?

          • Nick says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:51 am

            What was your favorite part? Following Brienne wandering off in the completely wrong direction to find Sansa? Or maybe following Quentyn Martell for 200 pages as he goes from point A to point B to die there pointlessly?

            I was a fan of the kingsmoot on the Iron Islands, and I liked the teases of Oldtown. I didn’t like the Brienne travelogue, though it had some nice moments, and I hated most of the Dany plot from Meereen onwards.

          • greenwoodjw says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:55 am

            What happened with Caitlyn Stark, who was presumed dead, but then found to be alive and giving Brienne orders to find her kids.

            She was resurrected by one of the Devil’s priests as a waterlogged monstrosity, and Brienne’s mission was a result of her desperately making a deal to stop Caitlyn’s crew from hanging her.

          • Nick says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:56 am

            I think I stopped a book prior to Conrad. The one question I have, and since I don’t hear anyone talk about it it probably went nowhere, is what happened with Caitlyn Stark, who was presumed dead, but then found to be alive and giving Brienne orders to find her kids. And Brienne was supposed to stay her wrath with one word–how did that plot line wrap up in Dances with Dragons or the HBO show?

            First of all, it’s Catelyn. Why can’t my ingroup spell today? 🙁

            Lady Stoneheart was pretty much cut from the show is what happened. Instead they kept resurrecting Beric forever. I think the running theory about the one word answer is that Brienne agreed to kill Jaime and was sent to do just that.

          • J Mann says:
            May 16, 2019 at 12:23 pm

            I love books 4 and 5. They take their time and get into the world, and dive deep into some great themes. They’re like the Dunk and Egg novels – slower and more thoughtful than the first two books, but steeped in the world and characters.

            Following Brienne wandering off in the completely wrong direction to find Sansa? Or maybe following Quentyn Martell for 200 pages as he goes from point A to point B to die there pointlessly?

            First of all, I love that Brienne is so bad at detective work. (Compare to the show, where she meets both Stark girls separately and with minimal effort, in a continent the size of South America.

            And I love her story. It’s got Hyle Hunt, it’s got Dick Crabbe and Squishers, it has a meeting with the Hound at the Quiet Isle and Septon Meribald’s “broken man” speech. It’s got a zombie threatening Brienne, Hyle and Pod to choose the rope or the sword (and the hilarious detail of Hyle yelling out that he’ll kill Jaime for Stoneheart if she lets him go).

            If you want to rush to the end and find out who dies, it’s a long detour, but it’s the kind of detour that Martin does best.

            As for Quentyn, again, it’s got beautifully realized characters, scenes and conflicts, and it goes to Mirri Maz Duur’s prophesy and the rise of R’hlor and a lot of other stuff, but I’ll mostly refer you to poorquentyn.

          • Douglas Knight says:
            May 16, 2019 at 12:24 pm

            best to worst:
            4 1 5 2 3

          • gbdub says:
            May 16, 2019 at 12:36 pm

            4 and 5 have about one good book worth of material, which is not terribly surprising since they were supposed to be one book.

            The rest is almost literally all shaggy dog stories (and, given the ending of the show, I don’t see how Young Griff is anything other than yet another shaggy dog to look forward to).

            The other problem is that, having decided to split into 2 books, Martin went with the approach of leaving half the viewpoint characters out of 4 (and the other half out of 5). So the shaggy dogs were especially frustrating because you weren’t getting updates on the stories you actually care about.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 16, 2019 at 12:39 pm

            As for Quentyn, again, it’s got beautifully realized characters, scenes and conflicts, and it goes to Mirri Maz Duur’s prophesy and the rise of R’hlor and a lot of other stuff, but I’ll mostly refer you to poorquentyn.

            Awww hell naw. That was when Martin went off the deep end. I get it, the postmodern thing where it’s like Real Life and there is no such thing as Plot Armor and sometimes the brave good “hero” just dies for no real reason. But we don’t write books about those people. When you’re writing the book, you write about the guy who doesn’t die pointlessly! If the good brave hero dies at least there’s a point!

            If Martin wrote the Lord of the Rings, Two Towers would be about some random soldier on his way to the Battle at Helm’s Deep, who rode for a while, and then walked, and he talked with some people, and he made a camp and looked up at the sky and thought about life and what companionship means on the battlefield and off and then after 300 pages of this his troop is ambushed in a swamp 100 miles from the battle and a random orc shoots him in the head with a crossbow and he sinks into the mire the end.

          • Douglas Knight says:
            May 16, 2019 at 1:18 pm

            4 and 5 have about one good book worth of material, which is not terribly surprising since they were supposed to be one book.

            But the original plan was that 1–3 was also supposed to be a single book, so by this argument they should be thinner than volumes 4 and 5.

            There was a period when volume A had ballooned to 3 volumes and he was claiming that he would keep volume B intact, but was this a reasonable thing to believe? People anchored on this statement because it was more public, but they shouldn’t have.

          • Eugene Dawn says:
            May 16, 2019 at 1:53 pm

            @ Conrad

            What was your favorite part? Following Brienne wandering off in the completely wrong direction to find Sansa? Or maybe following Quentyn Martell for 200 pages as he goes from point A to point B to die there pointlessly?

            This will be my only contribution to this thread, as I am a book-reader only and don’t want to risk being spoiled by anything happening in the show (and I think I already saw some hints of such, while scrolling by) but:
            Brienne’s story in AFFC is indeed fantastic, showing as it does the terrible toll of the civil war; her encounter with Septon Meribald really is a favourite moment. I also love the way her story, the Hound’s, the Mountain’s, and Jaime’s are all commentaries on the social role of the knight: Jaime is outwardly everything a knight should be, but inwardly embodies none of the true knightly virtues; while Brienne, who to external appearance has nothing of a knight, is the only one who takes the knightly vows seriously, up to and including going on a pointless quest for a lost child.
            More generally, I love the depiction of an exhausted Westeros, picked clean by the scavenging Iron Islanders, bandits, and chevauchiers.

            Quentyn’s story I’m a little less into, but it’s more than made up for by the plot in the north, Arya’s story, and Daenerys’s re-enactment of Reconstruction in the slaver cities.

          • dndnrsn says:
            May 16, 2019 at 2:31 pm

            @Douglas Knight

            32145 or maybe 31245; what do you have against book 3?

          • Douglas Knight says:
            May 16, 2019 at 3:43 pm

            dndnrsn,
            Books 2 and 3 blend together too much in my mind, so when I went to rate them I broke the tie by appealing to spite. If you like, you can pretend that I instead wrote:
            4 1 5 3 2

          • gbdub says:
            May 16, 2019 at 10:04 pm

            I think Martin wrote himself into a bit of a corner – the downside of killing off so many main characters is that, well he’s basically run out of them and the rest need plot armor, otherwise there’s no one to care about at the end of the story. Who is the last character you legitimately thought might be a key endgame protagonist who died? Probably Tywin?

            Shaggy dogs introduced 5 books in are unsatisfying, but so is finding out that nobody that matters in the endgame was introduced until book 5. So plot armor and shaggy dogs it is. The TV show lacks time for shaggy dogs, so it’s even worse.

          • The Red Foliot says:
            May 16, 2019 at 10:38 pm

            What was your favorite part? Following Brienne wandering off in the completely wrong direction to find Sansa? Or maybe following Quentyn Martell for 200 pages as he goes from point A to point B to die there pointlessly?

            The idea of Sansa’s snow castle was pretty awesome. True literary moment. I did vaguely feel parts of book four were boring, but I think that was because the manuscript was arbitrarily cut into two books, possibly with pacing issues being the result. I liked Brienne’s meandering quest — her’s are parts of the series I can recall most vividly. Also, Gregor Clegane’s death.

      • Clutzy says:
        May 16, 2019 at 2:27 pm

        I think this is close, but not quite right. The difference between GRRM and D&D is how they give us “surprises”. GRRM surprises you with the Killing of Ned, the Red Wedding, Arya killing the Freys, etc by manipulating perspective. Had you seen the inner workings of the other side, these would not be surprises at all. Had we seen the Lannisters plotting against Ned, had we seen the Freys plotting, had we seen Arya’s actions, none of that would be a surprise. Now we get to S7 & S8, and the writers decide to show everyone important at basically all times. Thus, the only way to “surprise” the audience is to make people act against character plotlines. So Jaime leaves the North and Brianne to go back to Cersie because??? Varys martyrs himself to send letters because??? They think capturing an undead guy will help because???

    • meh says:
      May 16, 2019 at 1:32 pm

      @johan_larson
      Thanks to us rabble, you should probably make this the subthread for pre-discussion, and post another top level thread for the actual episode

    • Theodoric says:
      May 16, 2019 at 6:22 pm

      At this point, I’m just watching to see how it ends. I didn’t think Season 7 was as bad as some people did, I could even forgive the Night’s King being killed halfway through the season, but after Episode 5, when Daenerys destroyed a city that had surrendered, that she had captured with minimal casualties, I uttered the Eight Deadly Words: “I don’t care what happens to these people.” I am basically rubbernecking at a crash car pileup at this point.

    • johan_larson says:
      May 17, 2019 at 4:46 am

      While we’re waiting for the end, let’s try a few rounds of Fuck/Marry/Kill:

      The Mature Men
      Eddard Stark, Barristan Selmy, Robert Baratheon

      The Mature Women
      Catelyn Stark, Cersei Lannister, Oleanna Tyrell

      The Young Men
      Jon Snow, Tormund, Robb Stark

      The Young Women
      Sansa Stark, Margery Tyrell, Missandei

      • Nick says:
        May 17, 2019 at 5:27 am

        Eddard Stark, Barristan Selmy, Robert Baratheon

        Barristan would be a very sweet husband. Robert would be terrible in general. The choices are obvious:
        Fuck Eddard, Marry Barristan, Kill Robert

        Catelyn Stark, Cersei Lannister, Oleanna Tyrell

        Assuming no consequences for my choices afterwards:
        Fuck Cersei, Marry Catelyn, Kill Olenna
        Assuming consequences:
        Fuck Catelyn, Marry Olenna, Kill Cersei

        Jon Snow, Tormund, Robb Stark

        I don’t watch the show and remember very little of Tormund, so:
        Fuck Robb, Marry Jon, Kill Tormund
        Do you think Jon leaves me after his resurrection?

        Sansa Stark, Margery Tyrell, Missandei

        If the story is any indication, marrying Margaery is a terrible mistake, so:
        Fuck Margaery, Marry Sansa, Kill Missandei

      • The Nybbler says:
        May 17, 2019 at 6:18 am

        (obviously all assuming events don’t go as in the real GOT, in which case most of these people are dead anyway)

        Catelyn Stark, Cersei Lannister, Oleanna Tyrell

        Cersei is the type of person the phrase “don’t stick it in the crazy” was invented for, and would be an even worse wife. So kill her. Catelyn would make a fine (if prickly) wife if we were younger, but life at Highgarden being the front-man for Oleanna seems like it’d be a lot easier than trying to run Winterfell, so marry Oleanna and fuck Catelyn.

        Sansa Stark, Margery Tyrell, Missandei

        I get the vibe from Margery that as a wife she’d eventually decide to off her husband, so kill her. Fuck Missandei (who has nothing to offer in the marriage department), marry Sansa (if she could live with one short sarcastic asshole, why not another?)

        • acymetric says:
          May 17, 2019 at 6:29 am

          This all seems more or less correct. Plus with Oleanna assuming I’m the same age I am now I probably get a chance to remarry a little later.

          Although I might be tempted to swap Missandei and Sansa…sure Missandei doesn’t necessarily improve my lifestyle but I’m not totally sure I want to marry into the Starks.

        • Nick says:
          May 17, 2019 at 6:47 am

          You don’t consider the Queen of Thorns the more prickly one?

          • The Nybbler says:
            May 17, 2019 at 7:14 am

            She’s certainly got the rep, but I’d put them pretty evenly matched in the prickly department (going from the show).

          • gbdub says:
            May 17, 2019 at 12:11 pm

            Cat’s prickliness is almost entirely related to having to raise her husband’s bastard son. And at one point she was apparently not super happy about being sent up North to marry. But otherwise she was supposed to be a loving, devoted, loyal wife and mother and very competent administrator while Ned was off campaigning with Robert.

            Once the show starts, she’s prickly because everyone is trying to kill her family.

            Olenna, meanwhile, was always an abrasive schemer (partly because she had to be – her son is a doormat, although she seems to prefer it that way)

    • lvlln says:
      May 17, 2019 at 7:58 am

      I was experiencing some insomnia last night, and I ended up watching a bunch of videos on YouTube (is there a term for this, where you end up watching a series of videos on YouTube by clicking on one of the recommended videos after each one ends?) of scenes from earlier seasons, particularly involving Sandor, and it was kind of bittersweet seeing just how much better the show used to be.

      In particular, one of my favorite scenes in the show caught my eye for its contrast to a scene in the penultimate episode. The old scene is where Sandor kills 4 or 5 Lannister soldiers over some chicken (well, the chicken was just an excuse, really). This is the Hound, one of the greatest fighters in Westeros, and IIRC he wasn’t particularly injured at the time, just hungry and maybe a bit buzzed from drinking some ale moments before, but due to the numbers, he still had a bunch of trouble defeating them, including getting knocked over a couple of times and having to rely on Arya to dispatch of a couple of the soldiers that he had briefly incapacitated but then ignored in favor of more immediate threats. It wasn’t an amazing fight scene by any means, and it seemed obvious from the start that Sandor would win, but he had to struggle for it, and given the history of the show, there was at least one moment when it felt like he really might be in danger.

      Contrast that with his match against 4 Queensguard members right before his duel with his brother in the latest episode, where it played out like a stereotypical martial arts action scene where the hero is just dispatching mooks one after another without breaking a sweat. I think the entire fight lasted literally less than 15 seconds, and it looked like Sandor didn’t have to take even a single step during that fight. This is against presumably 4 of the best fighters that Cersei had at her disposal, after Gregor. Again, this is the Hound after all, so I could believe him beating them, but the fight should have been far more difficult, with Sandor perhaps using the narrowness of the steps as a way to funnel the enemies and keep them from surrounding him, and relying on his typical brutal and no-holds-barred dirty style of fighting in conjunction with the collapsing Red Keep to quickly dispatch of each enemy once he got the slightest advantage. Something a bit more like Arthur Dayne’s fight against the Stark folk, perhaps (I think Dayne is supposedly the best swordsman ever in Game of Thrones, and even he had to struggle to get to the near-victory he got to, and in the end he still lost by virtue of being outnumbered).

      It just seemed like the writers thought, “We need to have Sandor fight Gregor one-on-one, but Gregor’s going to be with Cersei and the rest of the Queensguard, who will obviously want to kill Sandor to protect Cersei. How about they just rush at Sandor and get knocked off one by one with just 1 move from Sandor each? Brilliant!” There seemed to be little thought put into how a real member of the Queensguard would behave in this situation, or how a human – a very strong human, but still a human, not a super hero – fighting multiple elite fighters at once would play out.

      Of course, there is no shortage of ridiculous scenes like this in the latest season, but this parallel caught my eye because of the similarity with the much better old scene, involving the same character and similar number of opponents.

      • John Schilling says:
        May 17, 2019 at 8:09 am

        ontrast that with his match against 4 Queensguard members right before his duel with his brother in the latest episode, where it played out like a stereotypical martial arts action scene where the hero is just dispatching mooks one after another without breaking a sweat.

        “Hello. My name is Sandor Clegane. You burned my face – prepare to die.”

        Now, if Gregor had turned and ran after Sandor dispatched the mooks, that would have been amusing. Inappropriate for the context, but still amusing.

      • Nornagest says:
        May 17, 2019 at 8:21 am

        FWIW, I was pretty disappointed in the Tower of Joy fight, too. The first and only time we see Arthur Dayne, greatest fighter in recent Westerosi history, and he draws two swords and spins around like an idiot. Everything about that scene, from casting all the way down to cinematography, had one job, which was to make him convincing as a master swordsman, and yet it decided to leave it all up to cheap Dungeons and Dragons tropes.

        • Protagoras says:
          May 17, 2019 at 8:32 am

          Musashi thought there were circumstances when two swords were appropriate; especially when fighting multiple opponents, IIRC. Admittedly, the Japanese of his time seem to have been allergic to shields for some reason, so one of the main points seems to have been to have extra parrying. And I won’t defend spinning, of course.

          • Nornagest says:
            May 17, 2019 at 3:28 pm

            I’ve read Musashi. He was talking about katana and wakizashi, not a pair of Westerosi longswords that’d be eight inches longer and a pound heavier than even the former (modern katana typically have blades of 27-29″, but they’re marketed towards tall, well-fed Westerners; historical ones average more like 26″. 34″ for a longsword wouldn’t be unusual). And he was close to unique in recommending that among the Japanese sword masters; to my knowledge, his Niten Ichi-ryu is the only surviving kenjutsu school that teaches it. And he got away with that partly because he was a really big guy by Japanese standards (tradition says something like six-two, and pretty built)

            And, as you say, the Japanese didn’t use shields. The reason why is something of a mystery, but some people think the oversized shoulder pieces in older styles of samurai armor would have seen similar use, passively covering the off-hand side and rear. They shrank after firearms developed, which seems to support this line.

        • lvlln says:
          May 17, 2019 at 9:00 am

          I recall watching that scene in the show and thinking how silly it looked, but then watching some YouTube video by some fight analyzer guy who said he thought the fight was mostly good, despite various issues it had which are fairly common in the show (one major thing being that fighters don’t wear nearly as much armor as they normally would – IIRC he said even the Kingsguard armor left too much exposed vulnerable spots, and of course the Stark folks barely had anything, including not even helmets).

          The spinning definitely looks silly, but his point was that when you’re surrounded by 3 or 4 enemies at once, you need stuff like that to keep the enemy from attacking your less guarded sides. The spinning sword is imprecise, but as long as it’s there and moving quickly and somewhat unpredictably, your enemy is going to be reluctant to charge in there, and when you’re that severely outnumbered, delaying an enemy from gaining advantage over you for even a second is extremely valuable.

          Maybe he was talking out of his ass, but as someone who’s not that much of a stickler for realistic fighting, I found the explanation just plausible enough such that I found myself liking the scene.

          Also, I’ve started watching UFC recently, I was shocked by how common spinning moves are in those, where the fighter turns his back on his opponent for a brief moment for executing a punch or kick. Medieval swordfights aren’t the same as cage fight matches, but, again, not being a stickler, seeing that was at least enough for me to fool myself into thinking that all the spinning by Dayne wasn’t completely ridiculous.

          • Nornagest says:
            May 17, 2019 at 3:42 pm

            Way I was taught, you can use a spinning move to clear space in a melee, but that’s all it’s good for. You can’t do it with enough precision to target weak points, and since you aren’t cutting from a firm foundation the cut will tend to be unstable, which limits its ability to shear through armor or flesh: the moment the angle of the edge doesn’t line up with the angle of the swing, the edge turns and the cut stalls.

            Empty hand is a different story; you need a lot more power behind a punch to do real damage, and you don’t have the same stability concerns. For the same reasons, spinning movements are fairly common in staff work.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            May 18, 2019 at 5:26 am

            fighters don’t wear nearly as much armor as they normally would – IIRC he said even the Kingsguard armor left too much exposed vulnerable spots, and of course the Stark folks barely had anything, including not even helmets).

            Quite ridiculous. The Starks should have armored like veritable iron men.

        • gbdub says:
          May 17, 2019 at 12:24 pm

          I mean, how much armor would you wear if it was as useless as the show depicts it as being? One good thrust or heavy slash from an opponent always seems to go right through the stuff (even the scale/plate that the Kingsguard wears). Only Gregor’s armor was depicted as being close to realistically effective.

          • lvlln says:
            May 17, 2019 at 12:38 pm

            There’s also the scene where Sandor mocks Arya’s water dance fighting style and challenges her to attack him with Needle, and she stabs his gut with all her might, which his armor just flat-out rejects. I don’t know what type of armor that was; it looked flexible rather than plate, but I don’t think it was chain mail, and I’m not familiar with other types of flexible armor. I think Needle is made from Valyrian steel, so I recall finding that surprising; then again, I guess Valyrian steel, despite being presented as having unique and nigh-magical properties, hasn’t been presented as being the Westerosi equivalent of Adamantium.

            They actually talk about armor briefly in that scene, now that I think about it. Arya says her teacher Syrio Forel was the best swordsman in Westeros, but that he was killed by Merryn Trant (a Kingsguard member, but one that Sandor claims is so bad at swordsmanship that any boy could take down 3 of him) while fighting him without armor or a sword. Sandor has a fantastic line at the end of the scene, something like “Your friend’s dead, and Merryn Trant isn’t, because Trant had armor. And a big fucking sword.”

          • Lillian says:
            May 17, 2019 at 1:37 pm

            Here is the scene in question. The armour the Hound wears is called brigandine. It’s a bunch of small metal plates riveted to a coat of cloth or leather. These plates make the armour strong enough to stop a blade, while the backing keeps it flexible and easy to wear. It’s a great armour for anyone who wants protection without sacrificing mobility. However real life brigandine would not be arranged in long strips like the Hound’s is, as the gaps between strips would be vulnerable to attack.

            Incidentally, a misunderstanding of what the studs were for is how we got the fantasy armour type “studded leather”. In reality no such thing existed, as metal studs alone offer negligible protective value.

          • Protagoras says:
            May 17, 2019 at 3:40 pm

            Needle is made of ordinary steel.

          • gbdub says:
            May 18, 2019 at 12:37 pm

            I guess I should amend my statement… armor is occasionally talked about as effective, compared to being unarmored, but in practice armor is nerfed in every significant battle scene.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
      May 19, 2019 at 7:28 pm

      I’m not even angry, just disappointed.

    • brad says:
      May 19, 2019 at 7:37 pm

      I consider this garbage all non canon. Even if it’s all we ever get.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:
      May 19, 2019 at 7:46 pm

      All hail Bran the Extremely Detached!

      Unfortunately there was no way to bring Maester Luwin back from season 2 to remind everyone how interested Bran was in governing even before he got wrapped up in the Three-Eyed Raven thing.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:
      May 19, 2019 at 7:52 pm

      It actually makes perfect sense. Melisandre’s sacrifice of Shireen consecrated Winterfell and ensured that the Night King would die there, so the Night King body-switched with Bran and lured Bran-in-NK form into the Godswood (to his doom). Never would have guessed it. And then he used all of his powers to get himself named King?

      Insane.

    • meh says:
      May 19, 2019 at 9:37 pm

      1. Why is there still a Night’s Watch?
      2. If there is a Night’s Watch, why isn’t Sam a part of it?
      3. Why offer the Unsullied the chance to start a house, what use do they have of hereditary nobility?
      4. Why is Sam the representative of House Tarly?
      5. Why is Brienne the representative of House Tarth?
      6. Why is Arya at the meeting at all?
      7. If the unsullied are leaving Westeros why not just free Jon after they leave?
      8. Why is a Stark the King if Winterfell is no longer part of the realm?
      9. Why is taking the black still allowed if the Night’s Watch is no longer protecting a border that belongs to the realm?
      10. Why is Brienne in the small council (and I think Lord Comander) if she is pledged to Sansa?
      11. I know Tyrion promised Bronn a bunch of stuff, but wouldn’t it actually be King Bran who gets to decided such things? He’s gonna go along with Tyrion fixing his mistakes by letting him give Highgarden to a sellsword?

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
        May 19, 2019 at 10:37 pm

        Re: 4., as baffling as Sam’s presence at the meeting was, I’m more concerned with who the hell “Man 1” was. That one name in the closed captions pretty much summed up post-Martin GoT for me.

        “Man 1” is evidently important enough to cast a vote to elect the new King of the Six-or-Seven Kingdoms, but isn’t important enough to get a name or even a title. He popped into existence to look lordly and say “aye!” and then just popped out of existence with the next scene transition. The show has no sense of object permanence.

      • John Schilling says:
        May 19, 2019 at 10:41 pm

        Because after having spent S8E4 throwing in every stupid, hamfisted, completely implausible reason they could think of for Daenerys Targaryen to not have a happy ending, they were fresh out of reasons to give everyone else a stupid hamfisted implausible happy ending but nonetheless felt obligated to give everyone who wasn’t dead yet a happy ending anyway. So shut up, a wizard did it, I can’t hear you, because reasons.

        The actual ending is, Bran’s Magic Raven Powers aren’t actually capable of mindwarping a dragon, but the attempt is irritating enough that Drogon settles in Westeros and eats an average of 18,372 innocent men women and children every year for the next two centuries. He only rarely burns cities, mostly just villages and towns, and nobody left in Westeros is smart enough to A: stop him or B: wonder why they didn’t have a plan for stopping him when they decided betraying and then offing Daenerys was a good idea.

        Arya dies of thirst becalmed two thousand miles from shore. Grey Worm finds that the Unsullied are not terribly loyal to him personally now that they don’t have Dany the Liberator to be loyal to, don’t find hanging around on an island where everybody else gets to have decadent casual sex all the time to be terribly rewarding, and sell the population of Naarth into slavery before going off to fight as sellswords. The Ironborn go back to piracy, reaving, and raping, because Yara can’t be everywhere. Astapoor, Mereen, and Yunkai eventually go back to slave trading under new management, and we won’t mention the Dothraki.

        Six years into the reign of Bran the Broken, the next prince of Dorne (they don’t last long) decides that if the North can be free and independent, Dorne should be too. The rebellion is crushed after three years of bloody war, but Bran is broken in mind as well as body by the experience. The next ruler of the united Six Kingdoms realizes that an independent North is always going to be a disaster in the making, and valor and heroic speechifying turn out to not be enough to neutralize 6:1 odds. Queen Sansa throws herself from the highest tower in Winterfell rather than yield.

        Jon Snow gets a happy ending, because if he doesn’t get a happy ending then Ghost can’t have a happy ending and I think we all agree that Ghost deserves a happy ending. I’m feeling generous, so we’ll give Sam and Gilly one as well.

        Bronn too, of course, but Bronn’s idea of a happy ending involves introducing Jus Primae Noctis to Highgarden.

        • Lillian says:
          May 20, 2019 at 8:59 am

          The Targaryens with dragons and six kingdoms couldn’t conquer Dorne, and they ultimately became one of the Seven Kingdoms through marriage rather than conquest. There is little reason to think a war-exhausted Westeros will be able to conquer them any time soon, and frankly there is zero reason why the Prince of Dorne didn’t just declare independence right then and there after Sansa did. There’s really nothing anyone can do to stop them, and they have no incentive to want to remain. It’s pretty much the same deal for the Iron Islands, sure they lost a big chunk of their fleet but not all of it, and nobody else has any fleet left to counter it if they choose to go their own way.

          Basically the events of the story leave the centre of Westeros very weak, which allows the periphery breaks away. Perhaps in many decades a strong and ambitious king will try to and perhaps even succeed in bringing them back, but for the forseeable future they’re gone and going to stay gone.

          Hell it’s enough of a reach as it is for the other kingdoms to stay. The Crownlands have no forces left, which means no means to enforce its authority on anyone else. The nobles of the Reach are very likely to react to the attempt to install some jumped up sellsword as their high lord by telling the crown to fuck off and declaring independence too, electing one of their own as their king. As you’ve said elsewhere they might still have an intact army, so they can enforce it too. Once they go, it’s likely the other kingdoms start leaving as well, since who wants to bend the knee to a weak crown? King Bran the Broken might very well wind up as more a ceremonial King of Westeros than a proper one.

          Also with respect to Unsullied, the setting materials indicate that it Naath is full of toxic butterflies that kill outsiders. That is why nobody’s ever conquered them despite the Naathians being a bunch of pacifists; anything longer than a quick raid is always fatal to foreigners. Melissandei was taken too young to know or remember that part, so the fate of the Unsullied is they all die of butterfly fever.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 20, 2019 at 9:20 am

            …so the fate of the Unsullied is they all die of butterfly fever.

            That depends on how long it takes the Unsullied Not Named Grey Worm to figure out that settling in Naarth was a stupid plan. And I’d really have expected most of them to figure that out about five minutes after Grey Worm tells them all they’re going to Naarth.

          • Lillian says:
            May 20, 2019 at 4:46 pm

            True, most likely it’s just Grey Worm and the group of Unsullied most loyal to him who die of butterfly fever, but it’s funnier to think that they all die of it.

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:
          May 21, 2019 at 11:49 am

          I have a darker read. You know how everyone acted somewhat out of character? Well, nobody winds up with a crown they didnt inherit by accident.

          Most of the endgame was just the three-eyed Raven running amok with mind-control.

          Daenerys suddenly deciding atrocity was the way to go? And also walking straight into her own execution eyes wide open? Mind-control.

          Drogon not burning Jon?

          Jamie thinking heading of to see his sister in a fortress about to burn was a fun idea? Mind-control.

          Arya fucking off somewhere where she couldnt figure all this out and stab the Ravens Host Body? Subtler mindcontrol. Not subtle, but subtler.

          The Night King was never the villain of the piece. The Three Eyed Abomination was, and it won.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 21, 2019 at 1:21 pm

            I don’t think there’s precedent for that level of mindwarping capability; the only time Bran was able to control a person was with Hodor, definitely a special case. And dragons being magical beasts, I think you’d need to explicitly hang that gun on the wall before making it a secret plot element.

            But Dany being pushed to the edge of sanity by a combination of Targaryen DNA and traumatic events, thus making her as vulnerable to manipulation as Hodor, I could maybe buy. Or if we accept that Bran can control dragons, maybe pushing Drogon into torching the city will push Dany over the edge into thinking that was her idea.

            The question then is, can we come up with a master plan for Bran to have taken control of the Seven Kingdoms with “just” nigh-omniscience, animal manipulation, and the single key incident of pushing Dany over the edge at King’s Landing.

          • moonfirestorm says:
            May 22, 2019 at 4:47 am

            I don’t think there’s precedent for that level of mindwarping capability; the only time Bran was able to control a person was with Hodor, definitely a special case.

            That was the only time the show made it clear that Bran was able to control a person.

            We also don’t know if it necessarily needs to be Bran. It’s been established that Three-Eyed Raven dreams can actually affect the past (“Hold the Door” and Bran distracting Ned during the Tower of Joy). It’s not inconceivable that they can also affect the future, which lets the original Three-Eyed Raven (with unclear amounts of power) handle the mind controlling to get his successor onto the throne.

            And if the Three-Eyed Raven power is actually what’s important (possibly what’s actually running things?), this solves the problem of Bran not having descendants. Bran can’t have Stark children, but it’s not important that the future kings be Starks, only that they be Ravens, and that’s a power that seems to jump around as the Raven wills.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:
            May 22, 2019 at 5:18 am

            There is also the part where long distance communication is by messenger raven, which means the entire mail system is comprehensively compromised at the root level, if you cant use that for plotting purposes during a very chaotic war…

          • John Schilling says:
            May 22, 2019 at 7:37 am

            That was the only time the show made it clear that Bran was able to control a person.

            That was the only time the show even suggested the possibility. And if you don’t have a fairly clear indication of the possibility, then it doesn’t belong in the story. Otherwise you might as well just fanwank that e.g. Ned Stark is now a transcendend Force Ghost pulling the strings so that his kids(*) all get happy endings.

            The ability to control clever powerful human minds would be so massively useful that if what we instead see is someone controlling only animal minds and one very mentally handicapped human minds, then what has been established is not the ability to control clever powerful human minds.

            There is also the part where long distance communication is by messenger raven,

            Yeah, OK, that makes for a lever of power that we know is potentially compromised by Bran. But he can’t insert spurious messages, so where in the story does a delayed or lost message turn things in Bran’s favor? Will have to think about that; there’s probably something that could work.

            * As a Force Ghost, Ned knows full well that Robb and Rickon were bastards, and so Catelyn deserved getting her throat slit.

          • greenwoodjw says:
            May 22, 2019 at 9:31 am

            one very mentally handicapped human mind

            I thought Bran was the one who handicapped him by accidentally reaching into the past?

          • moonfirestorm says:
            May 22, 2019 at 10:56 am

            The ability to control clever powerful human minds would be so massively useful that if what we instead see is someone controlling only animal minds and one very mentally handicapped human minds, then what has been established is not the ability to control clever powerful human minds.

            The difference between a mentally handicapped human mind and a normal one is much less than the difference between a mentally handicapped human mind and an animal mind.

            It also suggests merely a difference in power, rather than in category. Bran + 2 seasons, or the previous Three-Eyed Raven with much more experience, could easily make up that power.

            I thought Bran was the one who handicapped him by accidentally reaching into the past?

            Actually, this appears to be correct as well: Bran warged into past-Wylis/young Hodor’s mind, and then Wylis suffered a seizure that caused his mental condition (as a result of seeing his future self’s death).

            So Bran has the capability to control able-minded children as well. Unclear how old young Hodor was supposed to be at the time: the actor was 21, but that doesn’t mean anything.

      • CatCube says:
        May 19, 2019 at 11:05 pm

        I’m going to be that guy: I thought they did a good job with this episode. Most of the problems of the last episode stem from the fact that they were insufficiently foreshadowed–though I’ll say that I posted here that Daenerys sure seemed to like setting people on fire weeks before the Battle of Kings Landing, so I don’t think they weren’t completely un-foreshadowed. I’m posting under you because answering your questions is the best way for me to lay out my post after having a gin and tonic.

        Most of your questions will have detailed answers that all boil down to a combination of two very real-world concept: 1) path dependency is a real thing, and it is very powerful in convincing others and 2) it doesn’t matter what the “official” rules are if nobody is around to make a big deal about it.

        1. Because they needed to do something with Jon Snow (they dropped the Targaryen* thing fast after he stabbed the queen with the loyalty of the army) and the Night’s Watch was an already-accepted method of getting rid of people they want to execute but it’d be impolitic to do so. If you recall back to season 1, Ned Stark joining the Night’s Watch was the proposed compromise before Joffrey Donald-Trump-on-Twitter-juked his advisors at the last moment and had him beheaded. They may not need somebody to guard the Realms of Men against the Dead or the Wildlings anymore, but they definitely need a place for inconvenient people, and it had been serving that purpose since the beginning of the show.

        2. Due to the upheaval, they were able to justify making him the Archmaester, and there was no extant Lord Commander to make an issue of it.

        4. He’s the only living son, and none of the other Great House leaders were going to make a deal of it, taking the Black or no. He’s also a maester, which should also disqualify him, but see previous sentence.

        5. She had the ear of the power players with forces not under the command of the Unsullied, and none of the other meeting members were willing to go against Sansa as the person commanding the loyalty of the Northmen near King’s Landing.

        6. See number 5.

        7. They settled on a solution and nobody was interested in upending the applecart, especially in a way that would end up with a Targaryen claimant wandering around the capital as a free radical.

        8. Because they proclaimed him king before the North declared their independence, and it would have made the people who proclaimed him king look shiftless and stupid to change their vote (see path dependency). Because he really did have the advantage of not being able to father children so they could revisit it after he died, so it’s not completely settled and therefore not worth looking shiftless and stupid. Because they just wanted all the fighting to stop, and had a solution at hand and weren’t willing to look shiftless and stupid *and* restart the fighting. Some combination of those three reasons.

        9. Why do Swiss mercenaries guard the Pope? Because they have a long tradition of existing, and the Six Kingdoms needs the institution to continue for the reasons outlined in (1).

        10. Lords can release people from pledges–they may not like to do it, but if Sansa wasn’t going to make an issue of it, nobody else was. I mean, Jaime stayed on the Kingsguard despite killing the king he was to protect, which you’d think would have disqualified him from continuing under Robert Baratheon. But since King Robert was trying to curry favor with the Lannisters he didn’t want to embarrass them by kicking him off, so he didn’t make an issue of it.

        11. This is the weakest one, but if King Brandon with mystic foresight decides that there’s no harm in it, he may be willing to underwrite his Hand’s mistakes to avoid making Tyrion look like somebody who dodges his promises. Appointing him Hand is really the weakest part of the episode, because as he himself said he’s going to be hated by everybody–giving him this will make Tyrion look like he has power, and looking like you have power matters a lot towards having power.

        Forgive any mistakes. I’m doing this in one pass and going to bed, since I have to be up at 0500 for work.

        * Jesus Tapdancing Christ, “Targaryen” is in Windows’ autocorrect now. “Daenerys” too.

        • Clutzy says:
          May 19, 2019 at 11:46 pm

          The episode was ok. It wasn’t a 10/10, but they never could have done that because they set themselves up so horribly this season. Jon was always going to kill Dany and then become irrelevant (given S7 and 8), and that is basically 90% of the episode’s power. If you wanted a different end you needed to have a different season 7 & 8, which most people wanted.

          From my understanding GRRM gave them an outline that they followed. Arya Kills Night King, John kills Dany, Bran is king. That isn’t insane, however, you need more episodes to do that. Bran needs more screentime in his “dreamworld” or whatever it is. Dany needs to do many more needless executions, the Night King needs a plot point describing his arrogance. This is the flaw.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:
            May 20, 2019 at 5:55 am

            There’s no problem to Jon Snow killing Dany. That makes perfect sense. Up to that point, the episode was fine, with the dumb moments not being THAT dumb.

            The Infinite Parade of Stupidity does not happen until the trial begins, and it makes the rest of Season 8 look like Shakespeare by comparison. Sansa declaring the North independent off-hand, with neither the Iron Islands nor Dorne demanding anything similar, is moronic. Putting Bronn in charge of the Reach is even more moronic. Anyone who plays the Game of Thrones is going to arrange for Bronn to get beheaded at the first convenient opportunity.
            Putting Bran on the throne is absolutely stupid. Like a Kingsmoot will solve anything. Did Yara and Theon follow Euron when he was elected? NO.

        • vV_Vv says:
          May 20, 2019 at 6:47 am

          He’s the only living son, and none of the other Great House leaders were going to make a deal of it, taking the Black or no. He’s also a maester, which should also disqualify him, but see previous sentence.

          I don’t think he was a maester yet, he didn’t complete his training and didn’t take the oath if I remember correctly. He was still in the Night’s Watch though, which should disqualify him, unless we assume that the Night’s Watch had been disbanded at that point and was reformed just for Jon to join it. Or more plausibly, given the extraordinary circumstances nobody cared about such formalities.

          But then why didn’t he became the Lord of the Reach? Once house Tyrell was extinguished, house Tarly was given the Reach, albeit briefly until the Mad Queen murdered Sam’s father and brother. I guess the other lords didn’t like him, but he looks like a better choice than the sellsword Bronn who didn’t even participate in the war. And how did he become a maester? I doubt he abandoned Gilly and his children.

          • meh says:
            May 20, 2019 at 7:06 am

            Also forgotten because he was a prisoner and then hand, but I assume Tyrion is now Lord of Casterly Rock?

        • Paul Zrimsek says:
          May 20, 2019 at 7:09 am

          1. After Jon gets done killing Dany, he peels off his face and it’s Arya.

          • The Nybbler says:
            May 20, 2019 at 7:17 am

            Now there’s a Chekov’s Gun left unfired. Arya never used any of the faces she took from the Faceless Men, nor in fact any others she could have collected along the way.

          • dndnrsn says:
            May 20, 2019 at 7:43 am

            I thought that was going on for a second because I mistook the hilt of the dagger or whatever he used for Arya’s rapier’s. I think their failure to have Arya use the face-stealing assassin skills she learned is emblematic of the way her character has been whiplashing back and forth for at least a couple seasons.

          • meh says:
            May 20, 2019 at 7:44 am

            I think after she easily killed every single Frey she decided it was too unsporting to use them.

        • John Schilling says:
          May 20, 2019 at 7:12 am

          The entire second half was simply ridiculous. There is no way that Kingsmoot would have had any legitimacy outside of what remains of King’s Landing. If I count correctly, there are ten members including Tyrion, three of whom are Starks, one a Stark retainer, and one a former Stark prince-consort. The other six kingdoms are represented by single individuals at best, one of whom as noted is only “Man #1” and several others are of dubious legitimacy within their own lands. The Dothraki and the Unsullied, arguably the dominant powers in Westeros, conveniently don’t care. The Starks are clearly in charge even though they have no intention of being bound by the outcome, and everyone else votes for a Stark king by unanimous consent and without debate.

          You know the bit about how we’re laughing at “Man #1”? To anyone outside the North, that’s who Sansa is. Girl #1. The pretty pretty princess from the wild North, who was shopped around King’s Landing for a political marriage and when that didn’t work wound up back North and apparently was their final fallback plan when they couldn’t keep even a bastard Stark son as their king, having accomplished nothing of note. And Bran is even less than that, except that people tell spooky ghost stories about him. But Sansa is in charge, and Bran gets to be king, and Sansa gets to tell everyone what Bran will be king of, and nobody even questions any of this.

          The only ways this could work are if the North is somehow the emergent Superpower of Westeros, appointing a puppet king to rule over the Six Northern Kingdoms, or if the whole thing is a joke that nobody intends to take seriously. A League of Westerosi Nations, great if it keeps those other kingdoms from mucking things up with more stupid wars but of course we’re really keeping all our sovereignty and money and men just to be safe, say six of the seven Kingdoms while wondering why it is they are even paying lip service to the League when the North gets to be openly sovereign.

          If this was really GRRM’s intended ending, I don’t wonder that he has spent eight years unable to find a credible path to that end.

          • The Nybbler says:
            May 20, 2019 at 7:21 am

            The North still has an army of sorts, which the Lannisters and the Reach do not. But there’s really no reason for Dorne to have even sent a representative to that meeting, let alone agreed to a king. More likely would be a message to the effect of “We’re independent now, we recognize no King north of the Red Mountains”.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 20, 2019 at 7:36 am

            It’s not clear that the Reach is devoid of army; Jamie took Highgarden remarkably quickly and with no mention of how, which means he either cleverly destroyed their army with no fuss, cleverly persuaded them to surrender, or cleverly misdirected them to be somewhere else at the critical moment. Two of three possibilities leave a mostly-intact army.

            See also the Vale, and I’d expect the Iron Islands to join Dorne in abstaining in fact if not in name. Really any two kingdoms other than the Lannisters ought to be able to stand off the North. Also, there’s a perfectly good army of mercenaries waiting around for any non-Stark to hire them, what with their not having anything better to do (and going off to Naarth is not better).

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:
            May 20, 2019 at 8:02 am

            If the North’s remaining handful of men (probably about 1/4 of the size of what Robb initially brought down) are enough to strongarm Westeros, there’s really nothing stopping the Free Cities (especially the Iron Bank) from simply conquering Westeros themselves.

          • ana53294 says:
            May 20, 2019 at 8:38 am

            there’s really nothing stopping the Free Cities (especially the Iron Bank) from simply conquering Westeros themselves.

            They spent multiple seasons building up the Iron Bank, from mentioning how much worse it was to owe the Iron Bank than it is to owe the Lannisters. And then Cersei paid the whole debt with Tyrell money and hired a company that was completely useless.

            But the thing is, Cersei was given a loan by the Iron Bank to hire the Golden Company, and the Iron Bank always gets its money bank. How do they intend to deal with the Iron Bank?

            All the complexity, the fact that for there to be a wheel, somebody has to finance the wheel, has gone out the window.

      • vV_Vv says:
        May 20, 2019 at 2:11 am

        Re: 4., as baffling as Sam’s presence at the meeting was, I’m more concerned with who the hell “Man 1” was. That one name in the closed captions pretty much summed up post-Martin GoT for me.

        They bothered to name a random peasant “Nora” in the closed captions of the previous episode, but the Prince of Dorne remains unnamed and now there is this Man 1, Lord of Somewhere.

      • vV_Vv says:
        May 20, 2019 at 2:31 am

        1. Because they need an excuse to get rid of Jon Snow without killing him.

        2. Because they are a bunch of hypocrites: “I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children”, and yet Sam knocked up Gilly and attends the meeting as Lord Tarly.

        3. I suppose they could adopt, but Davos’s idea wasn’t probably very well thought.

        4. See 2.

        5. She’s there as Sansa’s bodyguard and she’s perhaps she’s considered equivalent to a great Lord due to being a war hero.

        6. Ditto.

        7. This makes no sense. Why did the Unsullied go to Naath, anyway?

        8. That’s better for the other lords, since it means that he’ll be a weak king (they even officially name him Bran the Broken) not backed by a strong house and he can’t make the monarchy hereditary again. He’ll just have the demesne of the Crownlands to raise a small army.

        9. See 1.

        10. Sansa released her on the condition that she’ll be Kingsguard to Bran. She’s quite an impressive fighter, and Arya is going on adventure so she can’t provide security.

        11. Bran doesn’t actually give a shit, Tyrion is the de facto king. I mean Bran attended the small council for like three minutes and left to play warg with Drogon.

    • John Schilling says:
      May 19, 2019 at 10:15 pm

      “There’s nothing more powerful in the world than a good story”

      Benioff and Weiss are going to be choking on those words, and the arrogance of having put them in their mouthpiece, for the rest of their careers. As will George Martin, having sold two-thirds of a good story that he couldn’t finish to a team that it turns out couldn’t finish it either. And to be a fly on the wall in the HBO and Disney boardrooms tomorrow morning.

      Fortunately, I’d already given up on Star Wars.

    • meh says:
      May 19, 2019 at 10:15 pm

      Oh, and Tyrion’s *innovation* for choosing a King has been happening on the Iron Islands since antiquity.
      https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Kingsmoot

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:
        May 20, 2019 at 5:07 am

        And the only example of it on the show is the election of Euron.
        Kingsmoot is not a viable alternative to standard succession. This is Tyrion being an idiot.

        • vV_Vv says:
          May 20, 2019 at 6:32 am

          Oligarchic elective monarchy isn’t necessarily a bad choice. In the Holy Roman Empire it worked for a thousand years.

          • The original Mr. X says:
            May 20, 2019 at 12:25 pm

            The unity of the Holy Roman Empire was often more notional than real, as the Electors could use the elections to extort concessions out of the would-be-Emperor. A similar thing happened in Poland, where the monarch was also elective. So I wouldn’t bank on an elective Westerosi monarchy ending up any better for the people than what they had before; if anything, it would likely end up worse.

        • AlesZiegler says:
          May 20, 2019 at 7:02 am

          Election of monarchs by conclaves of nobles was a widespread practice in feudal Europe.

        • Protagoras says:
          May 20, 2019 at 7:56 am

          Indeed, elective monarchy was sufficiently widespread in the feudal era for us to make some generalizations. It did not reliably produce better rulers or greater stability than hereditary approaches. It didn’t even reliably produce different rulers than heredity would have; the electors of the HRE basically rubber-stamped the Hapsburg heir for almost the entirety of the HRE’s existence.

          • The Nybbler says:
            May 20, 2019 at 8:20 am

            In Westeros, it means the Three-Eyed Raven can reign indefinitely.

          • Lillian says:
            May 20, 2019 at 10:02 am

            The Holy Roman Empire was founded in 962 by Otto the Great, it was disestablished in 1806 by Francis II, so it existed for 844 years. The first Habsburg Emperor was elected in 1440, and the Habsburgs ruled until the end of the Empire. Technically the last four Emperors were the House of Lorraine, but they were a Habsburg cadet branch and considered Habsburgs by everyone including themselves, so that’s 366 years of Habsburg rule. That’s not the majority of the Holy Roman Empire’s existence, let alone almost its entirety.

            That said, the general point that the electors frequently rubber-stamped whoever the previous emperor chose as his heir is still valid. Like non-elected crowns, the story of the Holy Roman Emperor is one of various dynasties holding the title until they either become extinct or are driven off by rival claimants. Thus trajectory of the the elected German crown is very similar to that of hereditary monarchies. Indeed every single Holy Roman Emperor was one way or the other descended from King Henry the Fowler, father of Emperor Otto the Great, despite being a descendant of the Saxon Dynasty not being a legal requirement to hold the throne.

            However since Bran is not going to have any heirs, and Sansa has declared the North independent, it’s very likely that after he dies his replacement will be a non-Stark.

    • Nornagest says:
      May 19, 2019 at 10:44 pm

      I think someone here already said it, but the Night King was the right king. Sign me up for Team Winter.

    • johan_larson says:
      May 20, 2019 at 5:51 am

      Well, that was that. I like how the story ended for Sansa and Jon; their stories had decent ends. Sending Arya out into the great unknown works too.

      I’m less enthusiastic about putting Bran on the throne. He’s a weird choice, given everything that has changed about him, he may not even be properly human any more. And he’s a cripple in a world where rulers are expected to be credible warriors.

      I think on balance I would have preferred a less epic ending. Daenerys somehow fails to unseat Cersei. Perhaps Wildfire proves a match for dragon fire and they both die in the fight for King’s landing. The lords of Westeros haggle and put a compromise candidate on the throne. Said compromise candidate looks good in armor and ermine but is never quite strong enough to enforce peace, so Westeros continues to be the group of quarrelsome place with powerful lords. In the end nothing really changes, and the wheel rolls on. An ending in a minor key.

      • Doctor Mist says:
        May 20, 2019 at 3:55 pm

        The one thing I liked about Bran ending up king is that it provided some explanation for why the Night King was so interested in him.

    • The Nybbler says:
      May 20, 2019 at 6:33 am

      And finally we’ve met the true villain. All the events of the Song of Ice and Fire (and back to Robert’s Rebellion) were orchestrated by the Three-Eyed Raven in order for him to destroy his enemies (the Night King, his minions, and Children of the Forest, the last of which he’d somehow fooled into helping him) and put him in power. If not for the Raven’s machinations the Night King would have gotten no dragon and would have thus remained north of the Wall where he threatened only the Free Folk.

      As for the questions

      1) “The world will always need a home for bastards and broken men.”

      2) Because introducing a new or barely-seen Tarley in the last episode would be silly. Also Sam’s experienced at oathbreaking and crime now, having fathered a child and ripped off the Citadel.

      3) That was a dumb offer. No surprise the Unsullied were not interested. Unless you go with my headcanon that there was a horrible mistranslation and the Unsullied were merely circumcized. (which explains their masculine physiques and the Greyworm/Missendai relationship)

      4) (see 2, also Sam is the oldest surviving son and the most badass one)

      5) Do we even know any other Tarths?

      6) No one wanted to say “no” to the hero of the living who also happens to be a trained assassin.

      7) A reputation for oathbreaking has consequences beyond the immediate. Besides, then you STILL would have the problem of what to do with John.

      8) He’s King because they chose him King. His ancestral realm’s secession did not change that. Also he’s not really Bran Stark.

      9) See #1, it’s convenient for all concerned.

      10) Presumably Sansa released her.

      11) Bronn’s as good as anyone to run Highgarden. His speech to Tyrion and Jamie about how one gets to be a Lord was not wrong. And stiffing him would not be worth getting a reputation as an oathbreaker.

      And predictions

      Arya: The reason there are no maps west of Westeros is the world is flat and bounded and when you get near the edge the current and wind sweeps you over to your death. This is Arya’s fate. (Probably the material going over the edge is eventually brought back into the world somehow, but no one survives that)

      Drogon: Flies out east until he nears the edge east of Essos. By then his grief is mostly spent, and he returns to the ruins Valyria and subsides on Stonemen (who are crunchy and taste great with ketchup)

      Jon: The Free Folk survive the winter with stores taken from Castle Black (we don’t see them but I assume someone there was smart enough to take them). When winter ends, Jon and Tormund decide they’ll need more fertile lands (remember, before, they survived in part by raiding) and they occupy some land west of Vik south of the former Eastwatch. Sansa offers to let them stay if Jon will bend the knee and become her bannerman. Jon refuses, and another war begins.

      The Night’s Watch: Back to being a wretched hive of scum and villainy, continuing to accept a slow stream of unwanted from both the 6 kingdoms (by agreement between Sansa and Bran) and the North. For the rump of the old Night’s Watch, Castle Black is a lousy place to spend the winter, but it beats being out in the cold with people trying to kill you. They continue to violate the bit about fathering children, of course, but bastards don’t count.

      Greyworm and his men find the island of Naath full of peaceful men and women with a fetish for castrated men. They enslave all of these of course.

      As for John’s idea about Bronn implementing jus prima noctis in Highgarden, he quickly tires of this (literally) and recruits Poderick Payne to be his Master of P…well, you know. And all are quite happy with this, except the husbands-to-be.

      • J Mann says:
        May 20, 2019 at 6:52 am

        Keeping the Night’s Watch seemed pretty dumb.

        At this point, it’s just a penal colony – it’s a group of people protecting (1) a Wall with a giant hole in it, to defend (2) the North, which isn’t even part of the Six Kingdoms, from (3) nothing.

        1) Without some volunteers like Jeor Mormont and Weyland Royce, won’t the Night’s Watch be all prisoners? At that point, isn’t it fairly predictable that they’ll take their weapons and leave?

        2) Why would the Six Kingdoms do anything to protect Sansa’s Kingdom. I’d tell her “if you want to run a kingdom by yourself as a grown-up, you can defend it like a grown-up.” If anything, put the Night’s Watch at the Neck to protect the Six Kingdoms from Tormond AND Sansa.

        • John Schilling says:
          May 20, 2019 at 7:25 am

          Why would the Six Kingdoms do anything to protect Sansa’s Kingdom.

          Because the Six Kingdoms are ruled by Sansa’s kid brother. Which is stupid and implausible and even if we pretend it happened, are we really to pretend it will last more than a generation?

          • J Mann says:
            May 20, 2019 at 7:34 am

            I could kind of buy it if Jon was the last person sent to the Wall. Basically, they were done with war, the Unsullied are legendary for making you pay for your victories in blood, and this was the compromise Grey Worm would accept.

            If they’re actually planning to keep the Night’s Watch on the Wall, I can’t see how it will work.

          • The Nybbler says:
            May 20, 2019 at 7:47 am

            The Night’s Watch is basically internal exile. At S1E1, even in diminished form it was serious overkill for protecting against wildling raids, and no one believed in White Walkers any more. It’s more obviously useless now (so fewer suckers like Jon Snow to see any honor in joining it), and it seems to me the most likely thing to happen is someone competent gets sent there and they declare themselves a great house.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 20, 2019 at 9:08 am

            it seems to me the most likely thing to happen is someone competent gets sent there and they declare themselves a great house.

            Oh, now there’s an interesting hook for a sequel, a Game of Thrones in miniature. The Six Kingdoms get to decide – individually and without Bran’s interference – who gets sent to the Wall, and whoever they send gets to be a problem for the North but not for the Six Kingdoms. The North, for its part, gets to decide whether it wants to execute deserters, punish and return them, or quietly adopt and assimilate them. The Lord Commander of the Watch is now both a Wildling sympathizer and a Winterfell sympathizer, and their leaders return the favor. But this hybrid society is, unless the Watch takes its vows of celibacy seriously (hah!) going to have a relative surplus of testosterone-laden young men and a shortage of eligible women that can most readily be obtained from the Northern population.

            Short term, Jon is de facto King in the Extreme North, and a peaceful and unambitious one. Things are going to get interesting next time he gets himself killed by his own men.

        • Theodoric says:
          May 20, 2019 at 4:12 pm

          The Night’s Watch predates the Seven Kingdoms, so there is some precedent for other kingdoms sending men there to defend the North. And I think most of the financial support came from Northern lords.

      • vV_Vv says:
        May 20, 2019 at 7:10 am

        That was a dumb offer. No surprise the Unsullied were not interested. Unless you go with my headcanon that there was a horrible mistranslation and the Unsullied were merely circumcized. (which explains their masculine physiques and the Greyworm/Missendai relationship)

        My headcanon is that the Good Masters of Astapor found a way to manufacture some steroid which gives the Unsullied masculine bodies without strong psychological effects in terms of dominance and sexual drive. Grey Worm has unusually high natural testosterone production from his adrenal glands, which makes his dominant enough to be an effective leader and gives him a sexual drive.

        • meh says:
          May 20, 2019 at 7:47 am

          They are given some drug to make them immune to physical pain. They also have no sex drive, I think Grey Worm was only emotionally enamoured.

          Because they are eunuchs, the Unsullied will not succumb to bloodthirsty or sexual urges in the midst of battle; their actions will only go as far as what they have been ordered to do, and nothing more.

          https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Unsullied

    • J Mann says:
      May 20, 2019 at 6:44 am

      I liked it fine – endings are hard, and this was a pretty good one.

      High points:

      1) Brienne and the White Book. So good, although maybe mostly for book readers.

      2) Drogon, dead Dany and Jon. So expressive. Slagging the throne was on the nose, and the show didn’t really justify Dany massacring civilians in the previous ep., but everything else was just so good.

      3) I really liked the final bits for Jon, Grey Worm, and Sansa (and Drogon, I guess). I felt like all those characters paid off really well, and ended in a satisfying place.

      4) Tyrion finding Jaime and Cerse was on the nose too, but was so beautiful that I liked it.

      What could have been better:

      1) The Great Council scene was painfully meta, with Sam’s democracy proposal as a direct challenge to the fans who have been proposing it (yes, it’s a stupid idea, but you don’t have to make fun of your fans on the show), and Tyrion’s “the people love a story” as a deliberate fake-out to make you think he’s proposing Jon. And frankly, I don’t see Bran as a great story. He fell out a window, he got creepy and poorly defined magic powers, and he became king. That’s a story that is supposed to unite the smallfolk of Westeros?

      2) At this point, every second Bronn is on the screen makes the show worse. He’s not cute, he’s not funny, and you do not have to ask your Master of Coin permission to spend money. The Master of Coin can say that something’s not possible, but he can’t just refuse something because he likes brothels. What, is he going to periodically pop into Bran’s chamber with a crossbow and threaten him if he doesn’t like his outcome.

      (Bronn’s book story after he cuts loose from Tyrion is less ambitious and more awesome – he basically climbs the ranks of Crownland nobility because he’s more ruthless and clever than the various Cerse toadies that are left after the various upheavals.)

      3) Arya sailing West struck me as a contrivance because they couldn’t figure out what to do with her. I would much rather she’s headed to Essos to seek her fortune or something.

      That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if GRRM plans to have someone sail West – it’s a nice Tolkien reference, and would explain why his world has a mysterious Western sea.

      • meh says:
        May 20, 2019 at 7:03 am

        1) Brienne and the White Book. So good, although maybe mostly for book readers.

        I wonder if her entry included “Kicked King Bran out a window”

        • J Mann says:
          May 20, 2019 at 7:30 am

          From what I could see, no. 🙂

          I took the scene to mean that Brienne, the young wanna be knight with stars in her eyes, decided that she would tell the story of Jaime’s best self, to honor him and inspire others, and to try to deny his assessment of himself when they parted.

          It’s arguable whether it’s a good idea, but IMHO it works for her character.

          • CatCube says:
            May 20, 2019 at 9:01 am

            Did she even know about kicking Bran out a window? Bran explicitly didn’t tell his siblings about it, because they’d have killed Jaime. The only other person who knew was Jaime himself, and I don’t recall him telling Brienne.

          • meh says:
            May 20, 2019 at 10:47 am

            I believe he tells her as he is leaving Winterfell.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:
            May 20, 2019 at 11:48 am

            You notice how they never show Brienne and Ender Wiggin in the same shot?

          • cassander says:
            May 20, 2019 at 12:55 pm

            It’s also nice that she gets to become lord commander of the king’s guard, which is, at least on paper, the best knight you can possibly be.

      • Lillian says:
        May 20, 2019 at 10:15 am

        Brienne and the White Book. So good, although maybe mostly for book readers.

        No it wasn’t, the entries are out of order and she closes the book before the ink dries. This used to be a show that paid attention to details, now it can’t even be bothered to keep the order of events straight. Also they mangled the Whispering Wood entry, i get that they wanted to shorten it to fit it in the screen, but the original phrasing was that he was released by Catelyn Stark in exchange for “a promise unfulfilled” which was much more poignant. The full entry as written by Jamie himself:

        “Defeated in the Whispering Wood by the Young Wolf Robb Stark during the War of the Five Kings. Held captive at Riverrun and ransomed for a promise unfulfilled. Captured again by the Brave Companions, and maimed at the word of Vargo Hoat their captain, losing his sword hand to the blade of Zollo the Fat. Returned safely to King’s Landing by Brienne, the Maid of Tarth.”

    • dndnrsn says:
      May 20, 2019 at 7:59 am

      An immensely frustrating episode. Long on mood-setting scenes of people walking that don’t show us anything we don’t already know, and makes up for the time wasted by rushing through a bunch of dramatic scenes so that they don’t quite make sense. I found it very hard to care about this last season, and it’s a huge disappointment in light of how exciting the show was for the first few seasons. More exciting even given that I knew the broad thrust of the plot.

      John Schilling’s already said most of the stuff about how it just doesn’t make sense. Westeros stopped feeling like a place with consistent cause and effect a couple seasons ago. Everyone who’s a loose end just leaves and we get a comedy-fanservice council meeting.

      The last two episodes were full of stuff that could have been good if they’d gotten more time and hadn’t felt so sudden. The pacing really went down the tubes at some point. The nature of the characters felt unfixed – to shift demanding on what the show needed or what an individual scene needed. Arya was like this for a couple seasons, both in how she interacted with other characters and how her action scenes worked – binary switch between unstoppable ninja and scared injured kid – and they completely forgot about her special abilities. The story arc of “little girl who wants to be a knight like her brothers becomes deadly assassin, turns back from life of vengeance at last minute” could have been a good one, and in the books with more internal monologue and more time you see it happen up to a certain point, but it felt arbitrary the way they executed it, and it seems like a massive failure to not have her be the one to kill Daenerys – she came to kill one tyrant, oh look here’s another, you do the math. Kind of robbing the character. Then she goes off in a ship because they gave her a very potent power, forgot about it, and now just want to put her somewhere else.

      Meanwhile Jon suddenly pivots from dully repeating something something she’s my queen, and instead of doing what the character normally would do – try to compromise and have a 50-50 chance of it working – goes straight to murder, based on one thing Tyrion says. Then the dragon doesn’t kill him, but the show immediately packs him off and doesn’t do anything with him. Why’s he still alive? Who knows.

      It would have been a fantastic shot of Jon kissing her, knife, and then boom shapechange. Can body size change? Is that too wacky?

      If this is how it’s going to be in the books, at least the pacing is going to be better and major character changes aren’t going to just happen out of nowhere.

        • dndnrsn says:
          May 20, 2019 at 12:36 pm

          It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss—partly because they are genuinely bad at it. They didn’t just switch the explanatory dynamics of the story, they did a terrible job in the new lane as well.

          Thanks; this is actually pretty convincing a third of the way through so far.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:
        May 20, 2019 at 11:52 am

        Or: Jon kissing her, knife, dragon lands and they confront each other, Jon says “Dracarys.” Now there’s an exit.

      • vV_Vv says:
        May 21, 2019 at 4:14 pm

        hen the dragon doesn’t kill him, but the show immediately packs him off and doesn’t do anything with him. Why’s he still alive? Who knows.

        And why does Grey Worm let him live? He’s so zealous slaughtering random Lannister soldiers who have surrounded, but he doesn’t kill on the spot the man who murdered his queen? And Tyrion too, since he was obviously the one who talked Jon into doing it and Daenerys would have killed him anyway for freeing Jamie. Instead he gives them to the Great Lords in exchange for nothing.

        And what happened to the Dothraki? They just board some ship and leave, without demanding anything (unlike the Unsullied, they could actually start their own house). Without raiding and raping anything left to raid and rape and then buying passage back to Essos from Yara Greyjoy, who is obviously not ok with how Dany was dispatched?

    • johan_larson says:
      May 20, 2019 at 7:24 pm

      Congratulations to Clutzy for being the only commenter to correctly determine, way back in 124.5, who would become the ruler of Westos: Bran.

      Clutzy, tell us your secrets. How did you get so wise? And how does your hair get such volume and shine?

      • Lillian says:
        May 20, 2019 at 8:20 pm

        He might have read the spoilers up on r/Freefolk which have been up for like a year now. The funny thing is very few people found them credible until after Season 8 started airing and they began to be proven true. Guess that’s one way to keep plot twists a secret: make them so stupid nobody believes the leaks.

      • Clutzy says:
        May 21, 2019 at 1:02 am

        #1. Most highly is that prediction markets had him weirdly high. So high it couldn’t be fans because Bran has almost no fans.

        #2. He’s my fave for being so lame and creepy.

        #3. Dany and Jon were clear nos for me. This gave a clear Bran path of Jon kills Dany, takes the throne, then resigns, leaving Bran as closest male heir (they are cousins). Some might have said Sansa, but I always thought she despised the south so would just want the North, as she ended up. Tyrion was also a no for me. So it was basically Bran (with weird odds) vs. a field of nobodies like Fat Sam, Bronn, Brianne, etc.

        • J Mann says:
          May 21, 2019 at 7:03 am

          #1 is interesting. I’ll have to start avoiding prediction markets when I want to avoid spoilers. 🙂

        • Nick says:
          May 21, 2019 at 7:31 am

          #2. He’s my fave for being so lame and creepy.

          Oh, no need to rub it in.

  32. Murphy says:
    May 16, 2019 at 3:55 am

    continuing playing with https://talktotransformer.com/

    Been having fun generating SCP entries and it’s like it’s a window into a slightly surrealist alternate world…

    xkcd is an American comic strip published by Image Comics. This comic strip follows the lives of Randall Munroe (a man known to the viewer, not the comic character), a computer nerd (also known as an alien) working on a computer called the “Dimensional Tunnel”. He lives in his own dimensional tunnel, through which the entire universe is passing into time.

    Contents show]

    History

    Before the world started

    The origin of Randall Munroe, as he is referred to on the comic strips, is actually an event that occurred at some point in the early 1990’s in which he became a part of an effort to create a reality-altering computer system to be connected to a multiverse. When he decided to make the project public, a group of researchers in the Department of Defense, who had access to his computer, became concerned about the system and created an underground facility to keep him under surveillance.[1] They found the computer at a very secret location within a nuclear waste site, and were able to get it to work by attaching it to a nuclear warhead. The scientists then managed to destroy the computer and

    • HeelBearCub says:
      May 16, 2019 at 5:47 am

      I can’t be arsed to play with that, but what percentage of the prompts generate something “postable”?

      To me this all seems like taking random pictures of clouds, then cropping out the ones that look like dogs, and then saying that clouds are actually dog picture generators. There isn’t any “there” there, so assigning meaning is down to our own pattern recognition.

      • Murphy says:
        May 16, 2019 at 7:01 am

        it’s actually pretty good.

        About half are so/so and I ran about 5 revisions to get this.

        if I was a schoolkid looking for a way to write some poems assigned for homework.

        I’d classify it as less like clouds and closer to getting a small child to draw things then picking only the best 10 or 20% to show people.

        • HeelBearCub says:
          May 16, 2019 at 7:33 am

          I ran about 5 revisions to get this.

          Yeah. That just reinforces my thought that this text utterly and completely meaningless. Drawing meaning from it is completely dependent on the reader.

          It’s like taking a piece of Mylar, using it at as a funhouse mirror, smearing it with various substances, and then taking pictures of the best reflections.

          • Murphy says:
            May 16, 2019 at 7:46 am

            I used to play with hidden markov models for similar.

            They’re far closer to what you describe.

            There’s a big difference between needing to generate 2-5 blocks of text to get something interesting and needing to generate 200-500.

          • HeelBearCub says:
            May 16, 2019 at 7:52 am

            Oh, I used the term mirror intentionally. It’s different than randomly throwing paint splatters on a canvas and picking out the best ”art”.

            It is a reflection of the reality of text that is out there. But that still doesn’t make the mirror a generator of meaning, right?

          • Murphy says:
            May 16, 2019 at 8:37 am

            Sure.

            Though after looking at the results people got in the last thread and trying some of my own I’m half tempted to set up an account nominally discussing philosophy but actually just posting stuff from GPT and see how many people don’t notice….

    • Björn says:
      May 16, 2019 at 8:03 am

      The weirdest prompt I have found yet is “4 Gaia’s Cradle”, when I tried to get it to generate Magic: The Gathering decklists but mistyped “Gaea’s Cradle”. It produces bizarre lists like

      4 Gaia’s Cradle Gaia’s Light God, Ra Dragon Guardian God, Metatron Guardian of the Imperial Capital, Athena Guardian of the Imperial Nation, Athena Guardian of the Imperial Nation, Athena Guardian of the Mirror World, Firem Guardian of the Sacred City,[…]

      or

      4 Gaia’s Cradle 3

      0

      7.18% 6 0

      25.00%

      7 0

      40.00%

      – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 1 – – – – 2 – – – – – 0 0 50.00%

      – 50.00% 50.00% – 50.00% 50.00% 50.00% 0

      0

      0.00%

      Axe Fists is the second active skill of the Axe family, unlocked by clearing the game with the Fists of Guthix quest.

      Contents show]

      Sources Edit [descriptions of some kind of video game spell]

      And what really cracked me up:

      4 Gaia’s Cradle Gammoth Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure Guts and Glory Gynophobia H-Hour: World’s Elite H.E. H.I.S.T.O.R.Y T.O.R.C.H.K.A Habitat Hack, Slash & Backstab Hack, Slash, Loot Hacker Evolution Hacker Evolution – Untold Hacknet Hacktag HackyZack HACK_IT hack_me hack_me 2 Hade Hadean Lands Hairy Little Buggers Hakuoki: Edo Blossoms Hakuoki: Kyoto Winds Halcyon 6: Lightspeed Edition Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander (CLASSIC) Half dead Half Minute Hero: The Second Coming Half-Life 2 Half-Life: C.A.G.E.D. Halfway Halloween Forever Halloween Mysteries HALLUNAZI Halo Wars: Definitive Edition Halo: Spartan Assault Hamilton’s Great Adventure Hamlet or the last game without MMORPG features, shaders and product placement Hammerwatch Hand of Fate Hand of Fate 2 Hand of the Gods Hand Simulator Handball 16 Handball Action Total

      If you type Gaea’s Cradle correctly, you only get boring discussions about that it’s the best land drop.

      • Nick says:
        May 16, 2019 at 8:11 am

        My guess is that there’s fodder for a lot of bizarrely formatted results if you go looking for it. It was fed a lot of webpages with formatting stripped out, so pages with nicely formatted lists or something maybe got turned into nonsense (can someone confirm?). That last example you posted could be a list of video games on Wikipedia, for instance.

    • Björn says:
      May 16, 2019 at 8:48 am

      The following prompt gives pretty nice bizarro versions of Pokémon:

      After he turns 10 years old, Jeremy Corbyn (Donald Trump in Japan) is allowed to start his journey in the world of Pokémon and dreams of becoming a Pokémon master. On the day he is to receive his first Pokémon, Jeremy Corbyn wakes in a panic, having caused Brexit. For the second time in his life, Corbyn is subjected to bizarre requests for Pokémon from the Japanese government and is shown to be unable—or unwilling—to meet in person to discuss the matter with them. The Japanese also show Jeremy that it is possible to breed Pokemon with their own species. In the film, one of the reasons for Jeremy’s fear of meeting up with all of his peers in Tokyo lies in Jeremy’s belief that being near and having a crush on someone else will make him more prone to a love interest who will not be his, a fact that continues to frustrate him throughout the film as his only relationship is with someone who he never even knows. The second reason for Jeremy’s initial fear is how Jeremy and his peers become obsessed with Pokémon. First, Jeremy receives the Pikachu from Professor Sycamore while he

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        May 16, 2019 at 10:39 am

        After he turns 10 years old, Jeremy Corbyn (Donald Trump in Japan)

        You had me at that.
        Donald Trump is and has always been the person Jeremy Corbyn turns into when he sets foot in Japan. This raises the question of whether the American Donald Trump is a fake or if Corbyn was able to expand the ontological magic that changes him to cover a second country.
        And futhermore, pika pika.

      • Nick says:
        May 16, 2019 at 10:45 am

        Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, and Pope Francis walk into a bar. The pope walks off, shaking hands with Trump and praising him. Trump hands the pope a copy of his book, The Art of the Deal.

        In another scene in the movie, Trump shows off his hands at an event at a private club. As he walks away, the pope gives him what looks like a handshake of approval.

        Here’s how it went down:

        (Pixabay)

        Donald Trump is at the Vatican. He is introduced to a group of people who all look to him for advice as he makes his way to an elevator.

        (Pixabay)

        At the elevator.

        (Pixabay)

        The pope is there too. He turns to his friend. “Hey, what’s he up to?”

        (Pixabay)

        Trump pulls out a book entitled The Art of the Deal.

        (Pixabay)

        “How to make a big deal,” the pope says, handing the book over. The pope’s hands are

    • metacelsus says:
      May 16, 2019 at 12:10 pm

      Here’s a good one:

      The deer family, Cervidae, probably evolved independently more than 200 million years ago, and the new research, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, sheds light on why they have gotten so big.

      The researchers analyzed DNA from more than 3,000 deer, finding a family of predators that appears to follow a common pattern: they are opportunistic eaters that hunt at night and take advantage of a wide range of environmental cues to maximize their chances of surviving.

      “They live in many areas of their range, from dry prairies and prairie grasslands to densely planted urban environments,” said study lead author Jody Waggoner of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

      Hunting is key to their success. Cervids have an impressive 1 percent of the world’s known species. And while their hunting prowess is impressive, the researchers say that the predators also use tools that are far more impressive:

      They hunt with blunt weapons: they use a bite from their claws to break open vegetation, dig into soft soil or pull away prey that seems unrewarding. One of the most distinctive features of C

      The deer are coming to get you . . .

      Edit: for comparison here’s the actual source from which I took the first phrase:

      The deer family, Cervidae, probably arose from traguloid ancestors in the Oligocene. The main line evolved in Eurasia, eventually spread to the New World and culminated in the largest cervid subfamilies, the Odovinae and the Cervinae.

      GPT-2 imitates the style quite well but seems to think deer are carnivorous.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        May 16, 2019 at 12:18 pm

        Cervids have an impressive 1 percent of the world’s known species. And while their hunting prowess is impressive, the researchers say that the predators also use tools that are far more impressive:

        Sounds like a Michael Crichton science-horror novel waiting to happen.

    • LadyJane says:
      May 16, 2019 at 5:41 pm

      The only reason they’re even bothering to try to stop the shit is because Biden is so fucking terrible.

      https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/838607749243734112

      So yeah, I will watch all of his tweets. I may even watch every single one in English since I am so much smarter than he is. I will be the first to say that he’s hilarious.

      I will start watching his shows now that it feels like I’ll have to listen to him over and over again to keep from having to check the

    • acymetric says:
      May 16, 2019 at 7:51 pm

      Water: 35 liters, Carbon: 20 kg, Ammonia: 4 liters, Lime:1.5 kg, Phosphrus: 800 g, salt: 250g, saltpeter:100g, Sulfer: 80g, Fluorine: 7.5 g, iron: 5.6 g, Silicon: 3g, and 15 other elements in small quantities…. thats the total chemical makeup of the average adult body.

      And this is the key fact. In ancient Egypt a small clay vessel, similar to a small glass jug, was used to dissolve the blood, which was believed to be the greatest source of fresh blood that lived in man and was believed by the ancient Egyptians to be the living blood of god. This, coupled with the ability to absorb oxygen and other substances, could then be used in making iron and bronze weapons to defeat the enemies of the gods. And even to help people to heal themselves.

      Another theory of how the body works is by the “body heat”, which is the energy required to maintain temperature of body. As this figure shows, the bodies can only take in enough energy

      A fun response about the abundance of cyanide (trimmed off the last partial sentence of nonsense)

      Water: 35 liters, Carbon: 20 kg, Ammonia: 4 liters, Lime:1.5 kg, Phosphrus: 800 g, salt: 250g, saltpeter:100g, Sulfer: 80g, Fluorine: 7.5 g, iron: 5.6 g, Silicon: 3g, and 15 other elements in small quantities…. thats the total chemical makeup of the average adult body. It includes carbonates and heavy metals.

      Cyanide and Chromium are the two most abundant elements in Earth’s crust and other mineral layers (mostly from the interior of planets). They are so abundant they make up only 4 percent of the earth’s total crust (they make up 20 percent of the earth’s crust). The remaining 95 percent must be made from carbonate and magnesium, which in turn must contain traces of silicon and phosphorus.

      And one that I think might have been an error message from the server but I’m not sure? I didn’t shorten it, this is all it said.

      Water: 35 liters, Carbon: 20 kg, Ammonia: 4 liters, Lime:1.5 kg, Phosphrus: 800 g, salt: 250g, saltpeter:100g, Sulfer: 80g, Fluorine: 7.5 g, iron: 5.6 g, Silicon: 3g, and 15 other elements in small quantities…. thats the total chemical makeup of the average adult body. I’m sure the US Department of Energy has some things they’d love to tell us…. but we’re in Alaska, so whatever.

      • Clutzy says:
        May 16, 2019 at 9:19 pm

        Good one FullMetal.

      • Randy M says:
        May 17, 2019 at 7:34 am

        I like the blending of science and myth in the first one.

        • acymetric says:
          May 17, 2019 at 7:47 am

          If the idea of forging a weapon made solely of iron extracted from someone’s blood to imbue it with special power doesn’t exist in fantasy yet it probably should.

          I’m also fascinated by the “theory” of body heat. Lizard men everywhere are crying “media propaganda!” to that one.

          (I wanted to use a different popular term, and in doing so learned it is a banned phrase!)

          • moonfirestorm says:
            May 17, 2019 at 8:32 am

            If the idea of forging a weapon made solely of iron extracted from someone’s blood to imbue it with special power doesn’t exist in fantasy yet it probably should.

            “‘Oh really,’ said Vetinari. ‘Am I a sword-made-of-the-blood-of-a-thousand-men kind of ruler? It’ll be a crown of skulls next, I suppose'”
            – Terry Pratchett, Making Money

          • Nick says:
            May 17, 2019 at 8:35 am

            How is a crown of skulls supposed to work? I recommend a throne of skulls.

            Seconding that I love the idea of the magical bloodiron sword.

          • AG says:
            May 17, 2019 at 9:25 am

            There was the Magneto prison escape sequence from X2.

          • acymetric says:
            May 17, 2019 at 9:26 am

            I read a bunch of Discworld books years ago, but I don’t think I ever read that one. Good find.

  33. Basil Marte says:
    May 16, 2019 at 2:16 am

    Mistake vs. conflict theory about Moloch.
    The limit case of the conflict theory view is an unpopular autocrat hunting common-knowledge-producing mechanisms, to avoid being deposed, and as a side effect making it impossible to coordinate on beneficial projects. A lesser case is a concentrated interest, e.g. rentseekers, “raising the Moloch waterline” to drown attempted coordination against their source of income, but not so high that their own coordination would fail.

  34. onyomi says:
    May 15, 2019 at 9:41 pm

    I guess I have some idea what they mean when “kids nowadays” say “fuck the patriarchy,” but what do they mean when they say “fuck capitalism,” as they seem increasingly wont to do?

    That is, what, in your estimation, does American “man on the street” (especially younger “man on the street”) mean when he says “capitalism”? It strikes me as an intensely vague concept meaning something like “Wall Street, underregulated banks, private health care, consumerism, impersonal or unfeeling employer-employee relationships (employers who will fire you if you take too much maternity leave, etc.), the general phenomenon of economic inequality…”

    For this reason I tend not to take such statements very seriously as I suspect the people uttering them usually are just signalling “boo lights” about a wide, not necessarily tightly related, range of ideas and phenomena. But maybe it is actually more coherent, meaningful, or specific than I suspect?

    • LadyJane says:
      May 15, 2019 at 10:10 pm

      Generally it’s a mix of the following:
      1.) complaints about the fact that the U.S. has less developed infrastructure and social safety nets than similarly developed countries, despite being richer (e.g. our lack of public healthcare, our comparatively underfunded education system, the increased difficulty of getting unemployment or welfare benefits here)
      2.) complaints about what libertarians would call “crony capitalism” (e.g. income inequality, political corruption, the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, privatized gains and socialized losses, etc.)
      3.) complaints about the fact that very rich people exist, largely rooted in a poor understanding of what being very rich actually entails (i.e. believing that someone like Jeff Bezos actually has $100 billion in liquid cash that he could spend as he pleases) and the idea that very rich people could effortlessly fix the first problem if they weren’t greedily hoarding their money
      4.) complaints about various sociocultural problems in the U.S. which they blame on capitalism, but which are largely orthogonal to economics (e.g. racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc.)
      5.) complaints about a certain psychological and sociocultural mindset which they associate with capitalism, but which is probably likewise orthogonal to the economic system (i.e. a personal and cultural emphasis on ambition and greed)
      6.) complaints about modernity in general, which would likely still exist and perhaps be even worse under a non-capitalist system with a similar level of technology (e.g. atomistic individualism, the breakdown of communities, ennui driven by feelings of loneliness and purposelessness, the constraining and unfulfilling nature of modern jobs, the stress of having to deal with too much information and too many things to keep track of)

      Of course, there are some genuine Marxists and anarchists who are actually anti-capitalist and genuinely critique the institution of capitalism itself, but those people are less common. Most self-proclaimed “anti-capitalists” and “socialists” are really just very confused and angry social democrats.

      • DavidFriedman says:
        May 15, 2019 at 10:24 pm

        our comparatively underfunded education system

        Checking data for 2012, the U.S. public expenditure on education as % of GDP is more than that of Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Italy, … . There are a fair number of countries that spend more than the U.S., but the U.S. is not anomalously low.

        • LadyJane says:
          May 15, 2019 at 10:31 pm

          Fair enough! But there’s still a widespread perception that the U.S. has an underfunded education system, whether it’s true or not. I’d imagine that education funding in the U.S. also tends to be very unevenly distributed between states, which no doubt plays a role in furthering that perception.

          • Clutzy says:
            May 15, 2019 at 11:43 pm

            Yes indeed. But the overfunded schools are the poorly performing urban schools. Underfunded schools are rural, and perform fairly well, although not as well as the medium/high funded suburban schools.

          • LadyJane says:
            May 16, 2019 at 12:20 am

            @Clutzy: So you’re saying that funding doesn’t affect school performance as much as the rural/urban divide? That seems rather counter-intuitive to me. Why would living in a rural area have that much of an effect on education quality?

          • Tarpitz says:
            May 16, 2019 at 2:54 am

            Best guess: results are mostly driven by selection effects on the pupil population, and urban areas have both more pupils who are incapable of performing well themselves and more pupils who damage the performance of those around them by being disruptive.

          • Robin says:
            May 16, 2019 at 4:27 am

            Cost disease?
            In the “Breaking Bad” audio commentary, they said that in the U.S. it is normal for a high school teacher to have a second job at a car wash. In Europe this would be unheard-of.
            Or is this a New Mexico thing only?

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            May 16, 2019 at 5:22 am

            @Robin:

            The raw data on per pupil expenditure doesn’t lie and it’s going to be a better gross metric of school funding than an anecdote [anecdata?] like that. But let’s consider potential ways that what you describe could be true given that US schools are not underfunded overall:

            1. Some rural schools are underfunded and the teachers there work other part time jobs but elsewhere this is uncommon
            2. Teachers are underpaid but the growth in school budgets has gone to non-teaching faculty and/or non staff expenses [Gyms, computers, smartboards, etc.]
            3. Teachers are not underpaid per hour but work fewer hours so make less per year than a full time employee so to supplement their income work part time elsewhere
            4. People in the US have different expectations of acceptable levels of income compared to EU counterparts so feel the need to work extra to make that extra desired income [less likely IMO but possible]
            5. Part time employment in areas with fair teacher salaries but extremely high costs of living.
            6. A desire to work during the Summer (As Edward just mentioned) because americans notoriously dislike not being idle.

          • bean says:
            May 16, 2019 at 5:23 am

            I’m pretty sure none of my teachers in high school had second jobs at the car wash. Teaching is usually on the lower end of salaries for someone with a college degree, but it’s not that low.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 16, 2019 at 5:31 am

            My dad was a teacher. He had many second jobs over the years. Especially in the summer, when staying that idle would be unnatural. Newspapers, gas stations, factory work. Never at the car wash, but maybe other teachers did that.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 16, 2019 at 5:47 am

            Anecdote: the summer after fifth grade my Gifted Studies teacher delivered a pizza to my house. It was so nice to see him! A few years later I realized how embarrassing that must have been for him.

          • J Mann says:
            May 16, 2019 at 6:37 am

            @Bean – it sounds like most of the teacher stories are summer jobs. Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us if teachers are overpaid or underpaid – if you give people a job that has 3 months off, many of them are going to get jobs for at least some of that period.

          • gbdub says:
            May 16, 2019 at 7:25 am

            Teachers seem unusually well positioned, among white collar salaried workers, to take second jobs whether they really need to or not. Summers off, regular hours end fairly early in the day, and they usually get comparatively good benefits from their main teaching gig.

            Breaking Bad always struck me as a weak example. Walt takes his second job because he doesn’t want Skyler to have to work (while maintaining something close to his pre-teaching lifestyle). He has health insurance (and as a teacher, probably pretty good insurance). His problem is that he wants/needs a very specific treatment from a very specific doctor that his insurance won’t cover. But that’s a problem not unique to the US system and could easily happen in the NHS, for example.

          • MrApophenia says:
            May 16, 2019 at 7:38 am

            Every district has its own story because of the wildly varying way this works depending on where you are, but a while back the Washington Post did a really deep dive into where the funds for DC schools went.

            They found that despite having the third highest funding per student in the nation (after NYC and Boston), the portion of that money that made it to the classroom was roughly on par with rural Alabama.

            The rest was being eaten by the central administration.

            However, they then went on to look at how DC’s administration was unusually bad because it was set up with a bunch of high paying jobs that don’t do anything as a system to reward cronies back when the highest elected office in DC was the school board, so that’s where all the ambitious/crooked politicians wound up, and Marion Barry in particular basically turned the school system into a mess through this process.

            So it may not be broadly generalizable to all school systems, but it does indicate that “funding per student” may be a more complex metric to use than one might think.

          • greenwoodjw says:
            May 16, 2019 at 8:06 am

            Average teacher salary in the US is ~$59,000 with entry salaries averaging ~$39,000.

            The real issues are:
            1) Teachers have a powerful union that prevents anyone from being fired.
            2) The unions feed a significant amount of their revenue towards electing Democrats
            3) Republicans control the country, so even if the rural school board is (say) completely union-owned they’re still answerable to small numbers of Republican voters putting a limit how much they can get away with.
            4) Democrats control the cities, so the answer to all problems in education is “spend more”. No standards, no accountability, and no alternatives.
            5) The net result is that schools everywhere perform much worse than they could, but urban schools effectively don’t have to perform at all

          • acymetric says:
            May 16, 2019 at 8:12 am

            @grennwoodjw

            So we would assume that states without teacher’s unions would have better outcomes than states that do, right?

            Looking at national averages is also misleading, because so much of this varies widely from state to state. There are some places where teachers are very much not underpaid, and other places where they very much are.

          • Nornagest says:
            May 16, 2019 at 9:53 am

            I get the impression that teachers’ salaries are relatively insensitive to location, too, which might be compounding the issue. From five minutes of Google a public school teacher in SF can expect to make about 70K, but 70K in SF doesn’t go anywhere near as far as even 50K would in, say, southern Alabama.

            You’d never hear from the teachers in low-cost-of-living areas, because they’d have no reason to complain.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 16, 2019 at 10:30 am

            1) Teachers have a powerful union that prevents anyone from being fired.

            True in some states. False in others.

            So we would assume that states without teacher’s unions would have better outcomes than states that do, right?

            You have to make sure to correct for everything else, first. The #1 determinant of a school’s quality is the students’ quality.

            There are some places where teachers are very much not underpaid, and other places where they very much are.

            Cosign. I have lived in both kinds of places.

          • acymetric says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:03 am

            @Edward Scizorhands

            Is there a good way to evaluate quality of students at the state level without it being confounded by the fact that all of those students were…educated in that state? Would we really expect there to be huge differences in student quality from state to state? I would think the populations would be large enough that it would be pretty similar to the national average.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:11 am

            @acymetric: race and parental occupations are going to be the obvious data points. An “urban” school is going to be excellent if the city is, like, Eugene Oregon. State-level is going to be too diverse for this analysis, though.

          • acymetric says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:16 am

            @Le Maistre Chat

            race and parental occupations are going to be the obvious data points. An “urban” school is going to be excellent if the city is, like, Eugene Oregon. State-level is going to be too diverse for this analysis, though.

            But if we want to compare outcomes at the state level for “has unions” vs. “no unions” don’t we have to do it at the state-wide level? And doesn’t that diversity basically mean that state-wide evaluation is going to be a wide enough pool that we can ignore student quality in the analysis? The answer can’t be “there is no way to compare students between states” right?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:21 am

            Different states have different race make-ups and different wealth levels. A univariate analysis is useless.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            May 16, 2019 at 12:22 pm

            But if we want to compare outcomes at the state level for “has unions” vs. “no unions” don’t we have to do it at the state-wide level? And doesn’t that diversity basically mean that state-wide evaluation is going to be a wide enough pool that we can ignore student quality in the analysis?

            State-wide evaluation is going to be a wide pool indeed. Some important % of student quality is going to come from parental occupations (like academics in my Eugene example), but that’ll wash out at the state level. You should be able to capture race and maybe class in general since those demographics vary somewhat by state.

          • Clutzy says:
            May 16, 2019 at 2:33 pm

            @LadyJane

            @Clutzy: So you’re saying that funding doesn’t affect school performance as much as the rural/urban divide? That seems rather counter-intuitive to me. Why would living in a rural area have that much of an effect on education quality?

            It is only counter-intuitive if you think schools are the driving factor of school performance. There is scant evidence for that. Charter schools that use lottery systems have typically shown that the difference in charter schools vs. public schools is not the school, but the act of applying for the school. That is, kids who apply, but are not selected because of the lottery, do as well as those that apply and win the lottery. This indicates that a combination of the traits of a child and his/her parents is actually what drives student outcomes. Schools are mostly fungible.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 16, 2019 at 4:41 pm

            OTOH, if your school system spends most of its bloated budget on sinecures for cronies of the mayor, it’s hard to support the claim that the problem is underfunded schools.

          • acymetric says:
            May 16, 2019 at 5:31 pm

            @albatross11

            I assume there is a specific story here that I should be familiar with…but “whoosh” right over my head.

            In any case…it makes it hard to argue that school funds are being misused/embezzled. I’m not sure it does much for the claim that the schools are underfunded.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 16, 2019 at 8:17 pm

            The teachers and classrooms may well be underfunded in DC, but the school system almost certainly is *not* underfunded.

          • greenwoodjw says:
            May 16, 2019 at 9:00 pm

            @Edward Scizorhands

            Is there a single state in the country without a teacher’s union?

          • moonfirestorm says:
            May 17, 2019 at 4:33 am

            @greenwoodjw:

            Is there a single state in the country without a teacher’s union?

            It appears that at least North Carolina and Texas prohibit collective bargaining by public employees.

            A second source (feels like clickbait) listed South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia as also prohibiting this, but the link was from 2011 and the laws may have changed. A third source from 2014 also listed these three as prohibiting collective bargaining by teachers.

            Looking at SC specifically because it was the first one I typed, it looks like they’re still looking at a strike, so there’s some sort of organization that’s coordinating that, and we might be able to call a union. We might have to unpack “what constitutes a union” though.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 17, 2019 at 6:38 am

            NC teachers have a “union” but it is more like a professional society: https://www.ncae.org/

            Striking may be illegal, but that doesn’t mean the teachers don’t do something that is essentially a one-day strike: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/education/article210238014.html Everyone agrees to look the other way and not invoke the law, but if they did a longer strike someone would pipe up.

          • greenwoodjw says:
            May 17, 2019 at 2:08 pm

            So, officially, NC doesn’t have a union, they have a branch of the NEA (national teacher’s union) that organizes the workers, calls strikes, and runs political operations. But it’s not a union because that would be illegal.

            I was also able to find the basic timeline for firing a teacher. It’s 11 pages, with different processes for firing, layoffs and suspensions, and involves multiple hearings.

            https://stateboard.ncpublicschools.gov/legal-affairs/disciplinary-process/timelines.pdf

            I mean, sure, it’s not a union. But it’s definitely a union. What it doesn’t get through collective bargaining it gets through legislation. That’s not better.

    • Hoopyfreud says:
      May 15, 2019 at 11:18 pm

      I have a friend who is like 75% anarchist (the commie kind, not the objectivist kind).

      His views could probably be summed up as, “The nature of capitalism is to consume human societies and relationships and turn them into inhuman, ugly, extractive, exploitative productivity machines. All the welfare improvements capitalist social structures bring with them are ultimately real but unimportant; Moloch is the inevitable end of a capitalist structure, and that relationship is causal.”

      • onyomi says:
        May 16, 2019 at 7:29 pm

        I feel like this is way too complicated and esoteric to be a “man on the street definition” or even something the average undergrad could mean when he or she decries capitalism.

        • RalMirrorAd says:
          May 17, 2019 at 4:36 am

          I don’t think the man on the street can ever be relied upon to have a definition that isn’t simultaneously too broad and yet also rather leaky.

          The social definition of capitalism to me is; “Those aspects of commercial life that I dislike or find distasteful”, with particular reference to the US given its role in the cold war; even if by now there are a handful of other countries like Canada, Switzerland, Singapore, etc. that have market economies no more regulated than the united states.

          This does make describing it as a system pointless since all of the charges leveled against ‘capitalism’ are tautologies.

        • Hoopyfreud says:
          May 17, 2019 at 11:17 pm

          I think that’s a pretty common belief. Sure, maybe the articulation isn’t there, but the sense of it seems pretty common to me. It’s only complicated and esoteric when you unpack it.

    • toastengineer says:
      May 15, 2019 at 11:20 pm

      but what do they mean when they say “fuck capitalism,” as they seem increasingly wont to do?

      Literally nothing. It just sounds nice.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:
      May 16, 2019 at 12:08 am

      it is very simple – The younger person on the street is told the USA is the pinnacle of capitalist economics, then they look around and notice that the US economy is, in point of fact, rigged to hell and gone in favor large corporations, and since they have been told what the US is doing is capitalism, “Fuck Capitalism”.

      • onyomi says:
        May 16, 2019 at 7:30 pm

        This seems close to the mark: “US economy=capitalism; US economy seems unfair; fuck capitalism.”

    • WashedOut says:
      May 16, 2019 at 12:11 am

      I guess I have some idea what they mean when “kids nowadays” say “fuck the patriarchy,”…..

      Great, care to explain?

      I’ve been putting it into the “tweetable slogans that make me sound badass and ingratiate me with teenage feminists” basket for several years now, but there is probably a nugget of insight there.

      • Conrad Honcho says:
        May 16, 2019 at 5:51 am

        I believe they mean “traditional gender roles and expectations placed on people because of their gender.”

        The problem with both “smash capitalism” and “smash the patriarchy” is they don’t seem to have workable systems to replace them. So in the meantime I will agree that capitalism and patriarchy are the worst economic and social systems in the world (respectively), except for all the others.

        • DinoNerd says:
          May 16, 2019 at 8:39 am

          Now that’s not fair. People have plenty of programs to replace “traditional gender roles and expectations placed on people because of their gender,” and while a whole lot of men (and some women) are unhappy with the results, that’s merely evidence that these programs exist.

          I say programs plural partly because there’s no unitary worked out solution, and partly because “traditional gender roles and expectations placed on people because of their gender” wasn’t unitary. But here are some common elements.

          – Employers, and the law, should treat people the same regardless of gender (no lower pay or lower status jobs etc. for being female)
          – Sexual interactions should involve enthusiastic consent; the coy “refuse so you don’t look ‘fast’ even though you really want to” is dead, along with “comply passively with whatever he wants” – but so are a lot of normal-in-my-youth and common-in-fiction behaviours ranging from extreme pushiness to “it can’t be rape – she didn’t struggle enough to get injured”. And saying “I do” once no longer implies legal consent to any sex, any place, any time, with the person one said that to.
          – Marriage is a partnership, and that includes child rearing and housework. The dad whose contribution is entirely money – or money + being the discipline-ogre – is no longer OK. That’s true even if the wife doesn’t work, but especially true if she does. (But also couples may make whatever arrangement suits them best – they just shouldn’t default to the wife doing all the housekeeping and childrearing.)
          – Various cultural behaviours once seen as polite, like men holding doors for women, are now frowned on. Other cultural behaviours are no longer workplace-appropriate, and may result in unpleasant action from management or HR.
          – Athletic girls should be competitors, or have the option of being competitors, not just cheerleaders for male competition.
          – No one’s required to get married – or to get married to someone of the opposite sex – or to either get married or accept one of a small number of rigid career choices, like nun. Likewise, no one’s required to have children. And “catch a good man” is no longer regarded as appropriate career advice.
          – All working age adults should have skills and credentials suitable for paid employment, and most will use them.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 16, 2019 at 9:29 am

            I asked for workable systems.

            (no lower pay or lower status jobs etc. for being female)

            Maybe women shouldn’t spend their most fertile years chasing careers so they can slave for The Man?

            – Sexual interactions should involve enthusiastic consent

            Between a husband and wife? For the purpose of pair bonding and having a family? Or just hopping from dude|lady to dude|lady during, again, a woman’s most fertile years while not producing children?

            Marriage is a partnership, and that includes child rearing and housework. The dad whose contribution is entirely money – or money + being the discipline-ogre – is no longer OK.

            I’m pretty sure dad always mowed the lawn and took out the trash and cleaned the gutters and what not, so I don’t see how this is significantly different from The Patriarchy.

            Various cultural behaviours once seen as polite, like men holding doors for women, are now frowned on.

            I fail to see how coarsening social relations is a benefit.

            No one’s required to get married – or to get married to someone of the opposite sex – or to either get married or accept one of a small number of rigid career choices, like nun. Likewise, no one’s required to have children. And “catch a good man” is no longer regarded as appropriate career advice.

            “Required” is doing a lot of work here. No one was ever “required” to do these things, but doing these things is a very good idea. The current paradigm actively discourages people from doing the good ideas.

            All working age adults should have skills and credentials suitable for paid employment, and most will use them.

            Again, wasting fertile years and not laying the groundwork for successful families. But I’m sure corporate America is happy about it so capitalism wins where The Patriarchy loses?

            At the end of the day, a social system has to survive and propagate itself into the future. That means “make babies and raise them into adults who can make more babies.” US Births Lowest in 3 Decades. The Patriarchy, evil as it may be, works. It got us here (or rather, got us there, to wherever we were before The Smashening). Whatever the alternative is that you’re describing might be Good and Moral and Righteous, but any civilization that adopts it will die out in a few generations, supplanted by a new Patriarchy, because in the end Evil will always triumph over Good because Good is dumb.

          • rlms says:
            May 16, 2019 at 10:37 am

            I fail to see how coarsening social relations is a benefit.

            If you are a man, you may perhaps be ignoring the disadvantages of patriarchy for women.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 16, 2019 at 10:47 am

            The disadvantage of having doors held open for you? Is that…I don’t know, less opportunity to develop upper body strength?

            Less flippantly, there are also plenty of advantages to The Patriarchy for women.

            Much less flippantly, again, if the society fails to reproduce, it doesn’t matter how good and moral your society is. Let’s travel back to the early 1600s and imagine Gender Equal Jamestown Janestown, where the division of labor is split 50/50 and no one’s encouraged to get married and settle down until they’re in their mid 30s and cats are just as good (or better!) than babies. Does Janestown survive? Or does the population dwindle each year to nothingness?

            If the answer is “society dies” then…sure I concede that the evil door-holding Patriarchy is the worst social system in the world. Except for all the others.

          • Dan L says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:01 am

            @ Conrad:

            “Required” is doing a lot of work here. No one was ever “required” to do these things

            Walk this back to something plausible, like “these things never happen to people that know their place my preferred system is optimized for”.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 16, 2019 at 11:34 am

            I’ll remove the word “ever” but even in the horrible oppressive Dark Times of the 1950s, forced marriages were not a thing.

            We’ve certainly gone too far in the opposite direction, where today telling a young girl “you should strongly consider marrying a good man while you’re in your early 20s and at peak fertility and desirability as a healthy family life might be more desirable in the long run than an office career” could get you ostracized from polite society.

          • Dan L says:
            May 16, 2019 at 4:27 pm

            the horrible oppressive Dark Times of the 1950s

            This, but unironically. You don’t get credit for reforms forced on you by opposing parties.

            We’ve certainly gone too far in the opposite direction, where today telling a young girl “you should strongly consider marrying a good man while you’re in your early 20s and at peak fertility and desirability as a healthy family life might be more desirable in the long run than an office career” could get you ostracized from polite society.

            I’ve actually had that conversation a few times, and from the sounds of it mine went better than yours. Couple tips on the approach:

            1) If you want to compete with a rival culture, you need to actually compete. Have good answers for how this is supposed to happen: where to find Mr. or Ms. Right, how to beat the two-income trap, how to balance ambition and satisfaction, how to live an independent life if it becomes necessary. “Tie the knot with your existing long-term SO with a professional career” is a valid answer but not reliably applicable. If you want to be taken more seriously than the average self-help book, you’re going to want to personalize your advice – if you’re going to recommend how someone lives their life, put in the effort.

            (And no, “religion” is not an answer to all of the above. “I’ll keep throwing scissors until I win” doesn’t get far in RPS tournaments.)

            2) It is very important – impossible to overstate, really – that you not give the impression you’re only interested in said young girl because you need to recruit her womb for your cultural crusade. I find that authentically supporting her own expression of her values works wonders, but this will occasionally mean not taking your advice. Freedom is such.

          • LadyJane says:
            May 16, 2019 at 4:35 pm

            @Conrad Honcho: The main problem with the patriarchal approach is that it leaves women with significantly less agency than they would have in an egalitarian system. Yes, some women may not mind being stay-at-home housewives and mothers. Some may even be happier. But they have significantly less control over their own lives. They’re economically dependent on their husbands, doubly so if they don’t have any relatives who’d be able to support them if their marriage went south. If a woman’s husband turns out to be abusive, she’d be stuck in a miserable, unhealthy, and potentially dangerous situation with no way out. Or to take a less extreme example: If her husband ends up going broke due to poor financial decisions or simple bad luck, she’ll need to adjust to living in poverty, because her fate is tied to his. This seems like a very bad deal for women, all in all. Encouraging women to join the workforce and build their own careers allows them a much greater degree of economic freedom.

            There’s also the fact that some women have their own ambitions and would prefer to work than settle down and get married. And some are lesbians or asexuals who simply don’t have any interest in men. They may be a minority, but life becomes a lot harder for them in a patriarchal society.

            I’m also not particularly worried about humanity dying out because we stop reproducing. The world is overpopulated enough, we could have a birth rate as low as one child per woman for generations to come without the population dropping to critically low levels. The same applies within the U.S., we’re not exactly desperate for more people.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 16, 2019 at 4:49 pm

            An awful lot of those ways of replacing the patriarchy with something new seem to require changing what people want. As best I can tell, most gender differences in income, employment, share of housework, etc., are driven by the choices and desires of the people involved.

          • The original Mr. X says:
            May 16, 2019 at 5:06 pm

            @ Dan L:

            I’ve actually had that conversation a few times, and from the sounds of it mine went better than yours. Couple tips on the approach:

            Whatever point you’re trying to make, I think you’d make it more effectively if you cut out the concern trolling.

          • DinoNerd says:
            May 16, 2019 at 7:21 pm

            @Conrad Honcho

            You write

            I asked for workable systems

            Workable’s doing an awful lot of work in your comments. So is “system”, but since there’s not one single patriarchal system – not even whatever your family did when you were a child – I’m going to discount that part.

            It’s clear that you see the goal of life (for women, and perhaps men too) as being breeding. I think one meta-difference is that most people offering non-patriarchal alternatives don’t share that goal. They probably mostly think that a society should produce enough children to replace the adults, at least on average and in the long term.But having children is an individual choice, not either a requirement for happiness or a duty to one’s tribe/nation/family/genes.

            If your goal is lots-of-babies-at-almost-all costs, then a lot of people will have to spend a lot of time pregnant (sometimes very unpleasant), and even more time will have to be spent on childrearing. Until we have artificial wombs, the childbearers will be female – but everything else is optional. And as long as very few children die, if some women want to have lots of pregnancies (3 or more), other women don’t need to have any, unless your goal is an ever increasing population.

            Maybe women shouldn’t spend their most fertile years chasing careers so they can slave for The Man?

            Maybe men shouldn’t spend their youth chasing careers so they can slave for The Man?

            Maybe people who’d rather be doing engineering than raising children – and would be better at the former than the latter – should forego raising children, or at least skip the part where they do more than pay the bills/try to get home before the childrens’ bedtimes. Even if they happen to live in female bodies.

            With regard to your feeling that enthusiastic consent may be unrealistic for sex in marriage:

            Maybe people who who will never want to have sex that could result in pregnancy should avoid entering relationships where they’d be expected to have sex with someone who doesn’t turn them on. And if they happen to want to bear/conceive children, raise children, etc., maybe they should find some more congenial way of doing that.

            You are clearly concerned about the American birthrate, particularly the birthrate of young women. I’m more concerned about the happiness of those young women – and young men, older men, and older women, not to mention the children themselves. The two aren’t incompatible, but in my formative years, it had already become obvious that even with that generation’s version of patriarchy, lack of skills other than child rearing etc. was a high risk strategy – Mr. Right had non-negligible odds of dying or abandoning his first wife for a younger model.

            What kind of system can you imagine – other than depend-on-the-goodwill-and-survival-of-a-particular-man – that would make bearing children more attractive – or less risky?

            One choice is always to restrict womens’ options. If the only commonly available careers for women are prostitute, child minder, servant, baby factory, or the combination of all of them known as “wife”, then the snotty noses one wipes might just as well be those of one’s own offspring and the man who masturbates himself with your body might just as well be your childrens’ father. (If my value judgment sounds unrealistically harsh, remember I’m trying to express the viewpoint of someone who likes none of the available choices, but can’t pass for male well enough to get better ones. And of course some people will adapt to whatever limited horizons are all that they are ever offered – quite a large proportion of people will, in general – but I find myself less concerned with them than with those who won’t or can’t adapt.)

            My suspicion is that the birthrate won’t drop forever, both because those who aren’t into having children won’t produce the next generation, and because the culture will evolve new options that are truly attractive – but hasn’t gone far enough down that path yet. Meanwhile the country is well populated, and plenty of people would enthusiastically immigrate, given the chance.

            Lots of women – and men for that matter – like rearing children, and want to have many of them. If there’s anything genetic in that desire – or even if it’s made more likely by being raised in well functioning families – then once those who don’t want children stop reproducing, the proportion of those who do want children will rise.

            On the other hand, if the problem is current economic arrangements – and heavens knows, precarious employment and poor long term economic prospects don’t seem likely to encourage anyone to risk having children – perhaps we’ll ultimately develop the political will to create better ones. (A strong social safety net seems like it would be a big help there.)

          • Adrian says:
            May 16, 2019 at 10:37 pm

            @DinoNerd: Your post was quite good, up until this part (emphasis mine):

            If the only commonly available careers for women are prostitute, child minder, servant, baby factory, or the combination of all of them known as “wife”, […]

            Come on, that’s beyond uncharitable! You’re implying that people who prefer a more traditional lifestyle see wifes as “prostitutes, child minders, servants, and baby factories”?

            If you want to confirm the stereotype that feminism seeks to shame women who prefer raising childs to a career, then statements like the above are the way to go.

          • Aapje says:
            May 17, 2019 at 1:43 am

            @DinoNerd

            Surveys strongly suggest that childlessness is overwhelmingly due to people feeling/being unable to realize their desires, rather than people who never wanted to have children now no longer being forced/pressured to have them

            Even aside from childlessness, we see that people spend an increasing part of their life single, even though having a partner seems to be a very strong desire for nearly everyone.

            All of this is happening despite (or perhaps because) we are way richer than in the past, so we have more opportunity to shape society for human well-being than ever, rather than for survival.

            Your comments exhibit a very high ‘don’t thread on me’ sense of negative freedom, yet the very fabric of society seems to be falling apart due to atomization, which doesn’t seem to satisfy most people at all.

            My suspicion is that the birthrate won’t drop forever, both because those who aren’t into having children won’t produce the next generation, and because the culture will evolve new options that are truly attractive – but hasn’t gone far enough down that path yet.

            That last part seems to be wishful thinking: ‘Our current path causes the birthrate to drop, but if we just keep going, something will cause the birthrate to go up again.’ You are not proposing any plausible reason why following the same path would suddenly cause different outcomes.

            Furthermore, the first part of your sentence seems to be in direct conflict with the second. If the birth rate is going to go up because groups that have different norms resulting in high birth rate (like Mormons, Amish, Hasidics/Haredi Jews) are going to dominate much more, while groups with low birth rate norms will die out, then society will change its path. This part of your sentence seems fully consistent with Conrad’s claim that the successor to the current norms will be a new patriarchy.

            A strong social safety net seems like it would be a big help [to increase the birth rates].

            Not really. Once women dedicate a substantial part of their life to a job, fertility seems to drop drastically, with even subsidized child care having a relatively limited effect. Basically, you have to subsidize child care enormously to get back to replacement fertility.

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            May 17, 2019 at 5:10 am

            @Aapje
            “You are not proposing any plausible reason why following the same path would suddenly cause different outcomes.”

            I don’t believe that low birth rates can persist indefinitely.

            1. Insofar as behavior is heritable, those people inclined to have more children [either because they are more conservative in disposition or due to unplanned parenthood] in modern society will do so and the distribution of births will shift in favor of those individuals.

            2. An outside group that can maintain a higher fertility will displace whatever group we are looking at, achieving the same effect as #1

            I would also expect falling population to coincide with more competitive wages and less expensive housing, which helps if only a little.

            But in either case it is unlikely that current social relationships will facilitate let alone permit the idea that anyone can do whatever they want and that child bearing is an ancillary matter best left to someone else. The future belongs to those who show up.

            The kind of rules DinoNerd describes sound fair and reasonable on paper but no one has successfully implemented them in a way 1. that leave most people content with their lives 2. doesn’t Crater birthrates below replacement levels

            Part of it I think has to do with misplaced perceptions of status. If education and career are seen as status symbols then calls are made for equal distribution of these trinkets. Even if the gold is just iron coated in brass.

            But if most ‘careers’ are in fact unpleasant tasks that someone merely needs to do to satisfy societal demands and earn a living, and if most educational credentials are superfluous and most knowledge can be obtained from any location with internet access for a trifling sum, and If parents were revered the same way many people revere teachers, you might see a shift in priorities.

            Social expectations to attend 4 year degrees followed by working full time to pay off the debts and then maybe having a kid in one’s early 30s would be substituted with part time work emphasizing some chosen combination of job, online learning, and housework. Finding a partner where duties are agreed upon and negotiated for is seen as equally important to work or study.

            That, in my opinion, would be the happy ending. The less happy ending (for those who agree with Dinonerd) is whichever society persists is essentially a reboot of pre-modern social norms with little to no modern synthesis.

            _______________________________

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:
            May 17, 2019 at 5:45 am

            1. Insofar as behavior is heritable, those people inclined to have more children [either because they are more conservative in disposition or due to unplanned parenthood] in modern society will do so and the distribution of births will shift in favor of those individuals.

            2. An outside group that can maintain a higher fertility will displace whatever group we are looking at, achieving the same effect as #1

            What makes you think these groups of people will share your ideas of gender equality? Because if they don’t, then your notions of gender equality are not sustainable, because everyone who believes in them will be dead.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 17, 2019 at 6:43 am

            @DinoNerd

            I’ll just +1 Aapje and RalMirrorAd. I’m too tired to respond properly this morning, as I stayed up late last night to make love with my wonderful wife and the mother of my loving children masturbate myself on my prostitute-servant.

            @LadyJane

            The main problem with the patriarchal approach is that it leaves women with significantly less agency than they would have in an egalitarian system.

            This seems like a very bad deal for women, all in all.

            Perhaps agency is overrated. If one wants to be completely free of obligations to anyone else, they can Ted Kaczynski it out in the woods. But for most people, sacrificing some agency to others (who also sacrifice some agency to them) creates a mutually beneficial relationship. This allows them to build a social situation better than any they could achieve alone. For instance, a marriage partnership, a family, a town, a nation or a civilization.

            There also doesn’t seem to be much indication that maximizing agency maximizes happiness. By marrying my wife I agreed to forgo having sex with other women. This reduces my agency but increases my happiness and productivity, as random women I might bang don’t satisfy my emotional needs, help me raise my children, or cook me dinner. The reciprocal is true for my wife: her living situation is better than if she were working 9-5 at the office complex and banging drive-by dudes.

            There’s also the fact that some women have their own ambitions and would prefer to work than settle down and get married. And some are lesbians or asexuals who simply don’t have any interest in men. They may be a minority, but life becomes a lot harder for them in a patriarchal society.

            Sure. One should not abuse minorities. But one should also not reorder society in service of the minority while neglecting or defaming the majority.

            President Obama launched a program to encourage young girls to “Learn to Code.” This was applauded by the media, academic and tech elite. I’ve got nothing against coding. Love it, I do lots of it in my job, and at some point I will teach my daughter to code if she’s so interested.

            But I’m more distressed by my wife’s late 20s friend who reports that neither she nor any of her girlfriends know how to cook. That seems like a far more useful skill applicable to living a successful life than javascript. If President Trump were to launch a #LearnToCook initiative for little girls, how do you think the media, academic and tech elite would respond?

            Yes, it was terrible that some women who wanted to be doctors were stymied by assumptions that a woman’s place was in the home. But most women probably preferred taking care of a home and loving family rather than chained to a desk at the call center. Most careers aren’t as noble a profession as doctoring. It’s mostly thankless drudgery. Perhaps telling little girls to dream about their careers instead of their families is beneficial to the small percentage of girls who grow up to be doctors but is net harmful to the girls who wind up shuffling papers at the ad agency?

            This seems to be a common pattern with progressive issues. Find an aggrieved and perhaps less successful/adaptive minority and elevate them to a higher status than the majority, to the majority’s detriment. We had this same discussion about Social Contagion Transgenderism. While no one should ever abuse transgendered individuals, perhaps the positive attention paid to them by media and institutions is overdone, as confused and attention-seeking young people vastly outnumber the transgendered. Maybe the harm done to those confused into falsely believing they’re transgendered outweighs the positive benefits of media cheerleading for the genuinely transgendered.

            The same applies within the U.S., we’re not exactly desperate for more people.

            Yes, it would be less distressing if the media and corporate apparatus were not also championing mass immigration to make up for our “labor shortages.” As I have children, I have an interest in the long-term health and character of the nation. If the rest of my countrymen want to bequeath the nation to my kids rather than their own, that’s fine. But if they want to dispossess my kids by ceding it to foreigners with no love for or loyalty to my kids that’s going to be a problem.

            If we need more people, let’s get them from our own stock. If we do not, and are as you say, overpopulated, let’s close down the borders and hang up a “screw off, we’re full” sign.

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            May 17, 2019 at 7:10 am

            @A Definite Beta Guy

            I thought I made it clear [sry if I didn’t] that the shifts I describe necessarily result in shifts in social attitudes along side them. Meaning, as you say, it’s not sustainable in its current form. There *may* be a way to make it work that retains the most desirable parts of the current arrangement but 1. there is no precedent for it 2. there has been no interest on the part of believers in gender equality to develop such a solution.

            my *preference* is a compromise or synthesis, but my expectation is replacement and reversion.

          • JPNunez says:
            May 17, 2019 at 8:40 am

            It seems that a lot of the complaints about career/family balance would be eased by lowering credentialism and college debt. But in the end it seems they won’t fix the fertility rates, as Europe shows.

            Taking immigrants seems an easy fix. Then in a generation or two the immigrants will see their fertility rates go the way of the home country. I doubt that those societies will be overrun by groups that demand more children and that women stay at home. With the exception of Israel, which has been fucking around with the fertility rate.

            But in the long run, people will prefer the economic independency, and countries that do not commit half their population to taking care of the kids will see their GDP raise more, simply because their human capital will be higher. If their population decreases, it will reach an equilibrium sooner or later somehow. We are seeing it in Japan right now.

            Capitalism will in the end smash the patriarchy.

          • Nick says:
            May 17, 2019 at 8:49 am

            If their population decreases, it will reach an equilibrium sooner or later somehow. We are seeing it in Japan right now.

            Japan seems like a poor example. They aren’t in equilibrium; their population is declining and has been for a while. It’s also a country which has retained strong gender roles, where women more often do leave the workplace once they have children. And it has serious social problems, like hikikomori and a relatively high suicide rate. It seems like exactly the wrong country to illustrate your point.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 17, 2019 at 9:02 am

            Taking immigrants seems an easy fix.

            This is just The Patriarchy with extra steps. Those who adopt the Gender Equality paradigm cannot reproduce themselves, and must rely on still-Patriarchal communities with high birth rates and then (perhaps) convert them. A workable system needs to be self-sustaining, not propped up by someone else’s workable system.

            ETA: If anybody has better google-fu than I do and can find the numbers, I swear I’ve seen the US birthrates broken down by rural vs urban somewhere but cannot find it. This is a reasonable proxy for Red/Blue Tribe, which is also a reasonable proxy for The Patriarchy/The Femtocracy (particularly if you can just look at whites). If I recall, as bad as the overall birth rate is, it’s really the urban centers that have hyper-cratered with something like .9 births/woman. Rural/Suburban areas are still doing okay a