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I blogged about something recently and I’m curious if people think it’s as big of a potential problem as I do. I’ve seen stuff out there that kind of approaches my concern but nothing that spelled it out completely.
Basically the idea is that social media companies could selecting for stuff that makes us sad and lonely inadvertently through the use of machine learning, if (Rat Park’s fuzzy results notwithstanding) being sad and lonely increases vulnerability to addiction and addiction to a first approximation looks like engagement.
https://wearenotsaved.com/2019/05/02/ai-risk-might-be-more-subtle-than-we-expect/
Thoughts? Criticisms? People who beat me to the punch?
Sorry if this is pedantic, but: wasn’t it not that Rat Park’s results were fuzzy, but that what made it fuzzy was its failure to replicate (because it turned out the rats in the experiment had been bred to be genetically predisposed against addiction)?
Anyway, lots of people have made the argument that (A) social media makes people sad and lonely through the use of machine learning, and lots of people have pointed out ways in which (B) social media is designed in ways that makes it addictive. I don’t know of anyone who has argued that A is part of B.
If nobody has it might be because they don’t need to: it’s not a secret that social media companies employ people trained in cognitive psychology to help design their products in maximally addictive ways, and the tricks employed by those people are not a secret either.
Also, I don’t see why there wouldn’t be lots of social media users who aren’t sad or lonely but are still addicted. Let’s say Rat Park is 100% not-fuzzy and being sad and lonely makes you 100x (or some such figure) more likely to become addicted; it doesn’t mean being happy and socially engaged equals immunity from addiction, especially not from things that are specifically engineered to be addictive, which you would be considered weird not to carry around in your pocket at all times, and which you would be considered weird if you didn’t use regularly.
Anyway, lots of people have made the argument that (A) social media makes people sad and lonely through the use of machine learning
I’m sure that everything that can be said about social media has been said, somewhere, but with that caveat … can I (genuinely, not to be argumentative) ask if you have any examples? The “through the use of machine learning” turns it from a commonplace gripe into something quite different and weirder, assuming this means that machine learning is causal and important to the sadness and loneliness, and assuming this is talking about what happens today rather than future speculation.
Offhand: Sam Harris has talked about this at length in many of his podcasts.
Oh here, Tim Pool too: [link]
thank you!
It seems to me that being addicted – to anything – is itself a factor tending to increase sadness and depression – because the essence of a true addiction is doing whatever it is even when it’s not good for you. (Or, if you prefer, even when that’s not what you want, except in the moment – mistakenly doing something bad for you is not generally related to addiction.)
Maybe people who are online rather than exercising get more depressed than they did before they developed an online addiction, because of exercise’s known protective effects.
I know people who go to the gym every day but still have internet addictions. (Not that it refutes your argument, which seems reasonable, just that it’s a data point against it.)
This blog is my chief internet addiction at the moment, but I don’t find it particularly depressing. Long before that it was Usenet, ditto.
“through the use of machine learning” isn’t necessary for this argument. Slot machines and their floor layouts at casinos, for example, are designed to maximize engagement, through means that end up making people sad and lonely. No artificial intelligence need be involved, and the system is extremely efficient thanks to applied psychology.
Shortest: “Never trust anything if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”
Short: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
Medium: http://stanleylieber.com/2017/11/07/0/
Long: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/against-facebook/ (and the follow-on two posts, also long–the third talks about RSS feeds as a solution)
These are all from 2017, but I was at an Ivy when Facebook was launching, and I had friends who refused to join Facebook from the beginning, or who joined only in very limited ways (place-holders photos, instant-acceptance for friend requests, but no contact info and no ability to see their other friends)… and who seem to have made the right choice, after all. Or anyway, it is, from where I stand, at best a tie.
Alabama senate passes super broad abortion ban.
So the bill’s obviously unconstitutional under current Roe/Casey precedent, and obviously it’s a naked attempt at getting a broad abortion case into the Supreme Court’s docket and thus getting a relook at Roe/Casey. So… will it work?
I haven’t followed abortion cases too closely, but the points of contention I’ve seen were very much nitty gritty What-Constitutes-Undue-Burden stuff with Roe itself taken as given. It’s hard to imagine conservative judges going from Undue Burden chipping to full on overturning Roe, unless Gorsuch+Kavanaugh are super anti-abortion or something.
Probably not, Roberts and Kavanaugh are not locks, and abortion is a super-right, so at least one of them isn’t going to flip the table.
What’s a super-right?
One that traditional rights give way to, like how the 1st amendment falls away around abortion clinics
Say wha?
@greenwoodjw
Are you referring to Madsen v. Women’s Health Center?
If so, it seems to be a fairly minimal limitation. A 36 foot buffer zone still allows one to be heard by people who enter.
That’s one of several instances, yeah. But can you think of a “buffer zone” in any other context? It’s also a de facto prohibition on the kind of quiet, personal advocacy that’s most effective.
Oh lord, I’m not sure if this genuinely naive, or just a troll.
I don’t see anything trollish about pointing out that a 36 foot barrier limits interactions between protesters and patients to shouting. You can’t exactly have a quiet or personal conversation between people 36 feet away. Even if you don’t think protesters would have a quiet or personal conversation with patients, the rule makes it impossible in any case.
@FWALB:
I believe the relevant buffer is 8 feet and not 36. 8 feet was upheld in Hill V. Colorado and 35 feet was struck down in McCullen v. Coakley.
But, that isn’t the point of my post.
The point of my post is that what Operation Rescue was doing in the 90s, which is what spurred the buffer zone legislation that was upheld, was decidedly not limited to quiet intimate conversation.
Is there another instance where a blanket prohibition on a certain viewpoint within an boundary on a public area was upheld, even when bad actors were present?
“I only shout obscenities at the people going into this building because I can’t get close enough to have a polite conversation with them!”
Have any other industries tried to establish a buffer zone for protestors and been told “no you cannot do that”?
@greenwoodjw:
1) You are characterizing the “bad actors” as the tiny minority which wasn’t true.
2) How about even when no bad actors are present?
What if, maybe, that’s 2 different groups of people?
Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
The “Free Speech Zones” covered all viewpoints and all speech activity. The buffer zones covered ONLY one viewpoint on one topic. That’s face-first into Reed v. Town of Gilbert.
@The Original Mr. X:
Are you familiar with Operation Rescue at all?
@greenwoodj:
No, Hill vs. Colorado was content neutral.
“protesters within one hundred feet of any healthcare facility may not approach within eight feet of any other person without consent for the purpose of protest, education, distribution of literature, or counseling.”
The word “protesters” does all the work there. Anyone is free to hand out pro-abort literature, because they aren’t protesting. No one is able to hand out anti-abort literature, because it’s a protest. The dissent in that case called it out. This is exactly the kind of decision I’m talking about.
Scalia’s dissent in Hill vs. Colorado
@greenwoodjw:
Under that standard, I do not believe I would be permitted to provide pro-choice material outside a Catholic Hospital…
The Supreme Court also allows buffer zones for funerals.
I used to think that the clarity of the US constitution made it better than the Dutch constitution, where most rights are hedged, allowing for exceptions. Yet I’ve come to realize that important rights are in conflict a lot. The US system puts more power in the hands of unelected judges, rather than politicians who can be held to account.
At the risk of arguing with a Supreme Court justice…does the ruling really prevent people from arguing/campaigning that abortion should be legal? The answer is obviously no, because people are doing it. That statement only holds if you believe the only way to advance the pro-life cause is to physically protest at abortion clinics…which it seems to me is probably the worst way to sway the public opinion to your side, and in any case certainly isn’t the only way.
Don’t worry, you’re safe: you didn’t disagree with him, you just misread him. He said their right to persuade the electorate has already been deprived (viz., by making it a constitutional right). He’s saying this ruling, on the other hand, assaults their “individual right to persuade women contemplating abortion that what they are doing is wrong,” which has nothing to do with swaying public opinion, just the opinion of the women entering the clinic. You can agree or disagree whether this “assault” is justified, of course.
@Nick
Aha, thanks. My disagreement is reduced to a quibble, then.
Nobody is prevented from persuading the electorate of this…they just can’t actually enact full-on bans once persuaded. Abortion is certainly restricted by law, and becoming more so in some places recently (subject to the legal challenges I assume are coming). The phrasing used has more rhetorical weight though, I’ll admit.
FWIW, if vegan activists made a habit of accosting people entering Five Guys I would support a buffer zone for burger joints, as well. It seems like a pretty minimally restrictive balancing of the rights of both parties involved.
Right; with “deprived” and “assault” especially Scalia was using rhetorical flourish.
Lots of states have them around polling places.
It’s got to get past the federal district courts and the Eleventh Circuit first. If the Eleventh strikes it down (which seems most likely), the Supreme Court is going to deny cert faster than you can say “nope!”. The liberals on the court don’t want to revisit the issue, and the conservatives certainly don’t want to do it with _this_ law; they’d almost certainly rather continue chipping away at it.
Even assuming Roberts and/or Kavanaugh wants to flip, Georgia has to give them something. Some way to plausibly distinguish this case from Roe/Casey. I don’t think there is such a thing, but maybe I missed it.
You might think so.
But they already overturned a precedent this session without this, at least going by Breyer’s dissent.
If they wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade entirely, they wouldn’t need anything to distinguish the cases. They could either find they erred before, or (not likely in this case) claim that conditions had changed. But I agree they aren’t likely to do that, and if they want to chip away at it, they do need a distinguisher.
Actually it is more likely than you might think that they would claim the conditions have changed. There is a legal argument to be made that Alabama has the right to expand the definition of constitutionally protected rights beyond Federal standards, and by expanding the definition of personhood to include the unborn they have changed the legal calculus in their case. David French lays out the argument here:
Now whether this argument will actually work depends on the Justices, but there is an argument to be made here that legally the conditions have changed.
Yes, but French thinks it’s unlikely Roe will be overturned; he believes SCOTUS would uphold it 6-3 if it came down to it (see 30:00 or so). His argument for supporting laws like Alabama is that we’re in the best position to attempt this as we have been in decades, and that it will be very useful to know what the court really thinks of Roe.
Yeah, but somehow we are supposed to believe that Republicans don’t actually want to overturn Roe…
Secretly this is all kabuki, just a show for … who? The other Republicans who don’t actually think it should be overturned? Theater just to outrage the libs?
I’m not buying that. Even if it was so at some point, you repeat the lie often enough and you start to believe that it’s true.
There are lots of GOP donors and elected officials who don’t want to re-litigate Roe, but say they want to ban abortion so the base will go to the polls. They don’t want the base to figure out that all they care about is cutting taxes for people in their own income bracket, so they can afford to eat caviar off naked whores in their private jets.
But it’s not unlikely that some elected officials really mean it, especially in a state like Alabama.
There are also a whole lot of Republican voters, as well as some media and political elites, who really, truly *do* want to ban abortion. Plenty of other Republican voters and media/political elites don’t really care very much either way, but are willing to join a coalition that includes pro-life policies as long as it also includes low taxes/less regulation/no gun control/aggressive foreign policy.
I’ve watched you argue this point on open threads before and I have to say: I agree completely.
I’m a Republican. I’m pro-life. I want Roe v. Wade overturned. So does every other pro-life Republican I know. So does, I imagine, the majority of the states of Alabama and Georgia. Sure, maybe some Republican politicians are just using us to get into office and have no intention of repeal. I doubt all or most do. Republican politicians start out as Republican voters, and Republicans, by and large, want Roe overturned. This isn’t complicated.
I just wish Alabama had waited for us to flip one more court seat so we would have a real chance.
The “lie” has resulted in consistently accurate predictions for coming on half a century now.
This seems like a bad argument when the outcome is binary; “it doesn’t happen, until it does.”
If the competing argument is “it will happen in the next four years, unless we defeat [Republican] in November”, then “you’ve been wrong the past forty years” seems like a fairly good argument to me.
I suppose the Democrats can try to retcon all their past arguments into “We’re going Full Gilead in 2021, unless we win in 1976, 1992, 1996, 2008, 2012, and 2020, but we can survive losses in 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, and 2016”, but I was there and I’m not buying it. The argument was always one of imminent catastrophe.
The argument is that the Republicans are actively trying to over run the barricades and that they need to be defended.
Or, perhaps more accurately to today’s situation, each election loss is like another foot the sappers have dug the tunnel.
To back Hoopy and HBC up a little:
it’s worth asking why Republicans have failed to overturn (or chip away into irrelevance) Roe–and the answer is not because Republican politicians have reliably backed away from it at the last minute.
If Bork had made it onto the court, I don’t think anyone disputes that Bork plus White, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas would have joined together in Casey to strike down Roe; but Bork not making it onto the court wasn’t because of a failure of nerve on Reagan’s part or anything like that: it’s because a small group of Republicans, representing a now-mostly-defunct faction of the party from northeastern states (plus Oregon) defected.
Unless I am mistaken, Republicans have not had a chance to shift a median-or-further-left vote on the court since Clarence Thomas (when they appointed someone who would almost certainly vote to overturn Roe), so the fact that it hasn’t happened since then doesn’t tell us very much at all.
Moreover, in the ensuing time, the faction who opposed Bork has declined in importance within the Republican party, and since David Souter, Republican presidents have been held to the fire by conservative groups to make sure their nominees are reliably conservative.
In summary, the reason Republicans haven’t overturned Roe in the past 50 years is because of a) lack of opportunity to appoint the relevant SC justices, b) Democratic opposition when they have had the opportunity, c) the opposition of a faction of pro-choice Republicans, and d) the difficulty in making sure that any given judge will actually rule as expected.
a) and b) don’t apply, since clearly Republicans have managed to appoint a majority of justices (with the exception of Thomas, all the conservative judges were confirmed by Republican senates), and the importance of c) has declined: Republicans have no senators from Oregon, Connecticut, Vermont, or Rhode Island like they did when Bork was Borked; they have one senator still from PA who unlike Specter is pro-life, and they have Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. So, the 6 defectors on abortion who kept Bork off the court are now down to 2 (though the number was still higher when Roberts and Alito were nominated).
Which means that at this point, the argument that Republicans won’t overturn Roe is down to d): it’s not clear that Roberts and Kavanaugh will actually vote to overturn or severely weaken Roe. But even though they might not, it’s not a guarantee: Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Kentucky, Missippi, Missouri, etc. are not passing bills that challenge Roe all at once due to some freaky coincidence: Republican lawmakers in those states clearly think there’s at least some chance of Roe being overturned or rolled back. It’s very plausible it won’t be successful, or at least wholly successful, but we should be very clear about why.
If I’m right, and the reason Republican presidents haven’t produced a SC majority to strike down or roll back Roe is mostly because of d), then concluding “it hasn’t happened yet, so it won’t happen” is like concluding “the last ten shots on goal didn’t go in, so the next one won’t either”, or “none of their shots have gone in; the team must not really want to score”.
They still might miss this time, but that’s no argument to stop playing defense.
The argument has always gone beyond that and insisted that the wall was actively in danger of falling, and that the only defense that would keep it from falling was a Democrat winning the next presidential election. That argument has proven false half a dozen or so times. You can point at someone repeatedly ramming a clown car into the wall and say “they’re trying to overrun the barricades”, but at some point the rest of us are going to notice that the GOP has often commanded the sort of resources that should have sufficed to breach the wall (conservative majorities on SCOTUS + competent lawyers + compliant state governments) and the wall still stands.
The territory immediately in front of the wall, with e.g. the public funding for free abortion on demand, yes, if you want that then you have to defend it and the GOP has been fairly effective at taking and holding it at least in red states.
One blast for Rangers, two blasts for wildlings, three blasts for White Walkers, four blasts for the Georgia GOP…
Five blasts to come watch the spectacle of the Georgia GOP running into the White Walkers? Because I’d skip the CleganeBowl for that…
@Eugene Dawn
Great post, you articulated my vague thoughts way better than I could. I’m generally skeptical of “They don’t REALLY believe in what they’re peddling and just want votes” arguments, getting shit done in U.S politics is just hard and especially around something that has strong constitutional backing. I’m unclear on what more Republicans can do, winning presidencies to get a favorable SC and chipping away at Undue Burden in the meantime seems close to best effort.
Isn’t that always how you rally enough people to the defense?
You mass your people. If I don’t mass mine, you win. If I mass mine, maybe we don’t even fight. It doesn’t mean there was no danger.
Thanks, ManyCookies.
In exactly the way that crying “wolf!” is the way you rally people to defend the flock, yes.
@John Schilling:
This strikes me as incredibly uncharitable.
We have wolf prints, wolves howling, wolves snarling at the dogs, missing lambs, etc.
And hear you are telling me that because we still have a flock, the wolves must not exist.
We have things that you claim are wolf prints, etc.
Fortunately, we have a control group for this experiment. Half the time y’all cried “wolf”, people mostly said “meh” and stayed home (voted Republican), and the flock is still there, just like it was all those other times when we rushed out to heed the call.
So the theory that these are timid wolf-like creatures whose bark is very much worse than their bite, looks pretty good. Likewise the theory that they are clever foxes who masquerade as wolves when it suits their purpose. The theory that we are in constant imminent danger of wolf attack, not so much.
@John Schilling:
In your wolf analogy, we can all see the wolves. They have cut 8 sheep from the heard and are encircling them. A couple of the sheep have blood on their flanks.
Our 9 guard dogs are ambling over. Well, at least 4 of them are, we aren’t sure about the other ones. They have mostly stopped the other wolf attacks over the last 40+ years, so you are confidently claiming that everyone worried about the sheep are hysterical, plus you are positive these wolves don’t even like mutton, and will just spit it out after they have swallowed it.
You continue to conflate some republicans with all republicans.
Yep, just like repealing the ACA when it didn’t matter, or passing the ryan budget when it didn’t matter, or the many, many other times legislators have grandstanded (grandstood?).
Not all Republicans.
Just nearly the entirety of most Republican caucuses in legislative bodies around the community country. Find me the elected pro-choice Republicans, the ones who vote for pro-choice, and against pro-life, legislation.
In other words, there are enough Republicans who will 100% vote on this issue as a litmus test that you cannot win a Republican primary without committing on this issue. Thus further and further abortion restrictions pass in state after state under Republican control.
Go look at vote tallies in Alabam and Georgia and Ohio.
if the republican party was half as dedicated to the issue as you claim, one would think that they would have accomplished something meaningful on that front in the last 40 years. They haven’t. And it’s not like they’ve done nothing, they always manage to pass a tax cut bill, for example. If someone says they want to do something, and spend 40 years doing other things, the logical conclusion is that they don’t want to do it nearly as much as they say they do.
Nonsense.
The Republican Party of today is a different party than it was when Roe v. Wade was first decided. At that time their were plenty of pro-choice Republican politicians and plenty of pro-life Democratic politicians. Although the Republicans adopted a pro-life plank in their platform in 1980, that didn’t immediately eliminate that intermingling.
Over the last 40 years Republicans have succeeded in making their party firmly pro-life. The Democrats have only slightly less throughly become pro-choice. The parties have achieved sortition on this issue.
With that sortition has come successes in legislation and judicial appointments. Each election cycle brings further state level legislation restricting abortion access. Many of these fail ultimately at the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t restore the clinics which have closed in the mean time. Some remain in place.
I know of providers in my state that stopped offering abortion care because of the restrictions placed on them by the legislature and the governor. That is personal knowledge based on relationships with the providers.
Each election cycle brings new judicial appointments. That bench of judiciary appointed by Republicans is more likely to overturn Roe than one appointed by Democrats.
These are all accomplishments. They are not the absence of accomplishments, and they are not meaningless.
I would disagree that the democrats are less sorted on the issue. Safe legal and rare is dead.
Funny to see the left concerned about the costs of overregulation of small businesses in this one particular area. But more importantly, is that why they’ve shut down? Or is the bigger issue that the number of abortions is half what it was in the 80s? Abortion clinics would be closing even if there were no republican party, and the number of clinics closed is not a good measure of access to abortion.
Accomplishments are outcomes, not inputs and not outputs. You’re measuring effort, not result, and result is what matters.
Replaced by what, if this is true? This is an intensely confusing claim.
“Hooray!”, it seems like, at least sometimes.
Replaced by “Abortion is a good thing, so #shoutyourabortion to let The Man know where you stand on the issue.”
Intensely confusing how? “Rare” hasn’t worked out: states with the more liberal abortion laws seem to have higher abortion rates, and these are progressive places so lack of sex ed and contraception can’t be the reason. Progressives fight abortion clinic safety regulations tooth and nail, so I don’t think “safe” can be maintained either. The #shoutyourabortion crowd, meanwhile, is fortunately limited to a small, hysterical minority on Twitter, but it has outsized influence with activism and the media.
Imagine putting a decade’s worth of your time and energy in to building a community of rational/skeptical people who attempt to discuss complex policy issues with charity and nuance, and then you log in one day and the most recent post is someone suggesting that the left’s position on abortion is “Hooray!”.
That seemed a simpler method to express my understanding than saying “There’s seems to be a large portion of the American Left that actively celebrates abortions to the point of occasionally bragging about them”. But I can see you’d rather mock my shorthand instead of engaging with the very next post which effectively lays out the position in some detail.
The safe and legal part are obviously unobjectionable to the left; the only issue is rare. I think most on the left will still give lip-service to this last, though the left is generally unwilling to trade-off “legal” for “rare”, which means that the left ends up arguing that better healthcare, childcare, sex ed, etc, are what’s necessary for rare.
Some of this is obviously just another way to justify preferences the left already has, but if you think of the “safe, legal, rare” formula as also establishing the rank-ordering in terms of priority, you’ll see why the left tends to focus more on “legal” than on “rare”, if those two are seen as mutually incompatible.
I don’t know what other interpretation of rare would be available. It was never intended to mean “rare for legal reasons” it was always “rare for social reasons/because there are better alternatives available for people considering abortions” as I understood it.
The priority ordering is something I’ve never considered before. But I think the obvious ordering, then, is “legal, safe, and rare.”
The office and the provider still exist, they just don’t offer abortion services anymore.
It’s certainly possible that they would have fought harder against the tide if they perceived greater need. I don’t think that is either here nor there. They aren’t seeing any fewer patients, they just force the particular patients who need these particular services to go elsewhere. The preference would be to be able to care for their patients that need the service.
But it’s very interesting to contrast this with the argument later on that the “rare” part of safe, legal and rare is dead. Effective Sex Ed. Readily available, effective contraception. Those are both parts of equation near universally supported by the pro-choice side because they would prefer that unwanted pregnancies be prevented rather than aborted.
I obviously can’t speak for the pro-choice movement at large, but I personally think “safe” takes priority over legal; I am inclined to agree though, with the pro-choice movement at large that some degree of “legal” is probably a necessary precondition for “safe”.
I believe you; it sometimes seems like my outgroup hates babies, too. But I think a big part of the point of this blog and some of the ones in the sidebar is not stopping there.
Gentlemen, for all those arguing “well I’ve never seen anything on the left about cheerleading for abortion”, may I make you aware of a speech from 2007 by the Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, at the time President and Dean of Episcopal Divinity School. Now, I think you’ll agree, you can’t get any more reliably left than a lesbian Episcopal clergywoman in charge of running a seminary who then left that job to become the interim president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation. And here’s a direct quote from what she had to say in encouraging the brave souls who all help provide abortion services (she also later declared that George Tiller was a saint and martyr) – bolding in the following mine:
“You’re healthy, can afford to have a kid, and instead of giving it up for adoption decide that abortion is more convenient, this is a blessing!” does not sound to me very much like “let’s keep it rare, there are other options”.
I’ve seen some articles that I really do think are trolls, the most egregious of which was a woman allegedly telling the story of her abortion and her decision to have it, which made her out to be such an immature, selfish and stupid bitch that I can’t believe it was anything other than “outrage clickbait to own the conservatards”. But I have noticed a drift in “why the heck should we say ‘abortion should be rare’, like we’re ashamed of it or think it’s wrong?” in both media commentary and personal opinions online.
I think it’s a mistake to evaluate “safe, legal and rare” as anything other than a pithy rhetorical encapsulation designed to look good on a bumper sticker. I don’t think we need to analyze the particular order much past “beginning and ending on one syllable words is punchier”.
I would like to point out that “make abortions accessible” is not incompatible with “make abortions rare.” If literally nothing else, abortion is a birth prevention method that’s significantly more harmful to the would-be mother than just about any alternative.
My understanding of “safe, legal, and rare” has always been, “abortions suck, so let’s make sure as few people end up getting inadvertently pregnant as possible instead of pushing abortion as The Answer to the unplanned pregnancy problem” which is not the same as, “abortions suck, so let’s encourage people to give babies up for adoption.” I don’t know if the latter was ever on-message, so it still doesn’t make much sense to me to call it dead unless one also claims it was stillborn (heh).
I would agree with this, I’ve seen that as well. I think a lot of older pro-choice people have a kind of “yes, we all know that abortion is inherently bad, but banning it is even worse” conflicted kind of position. And I think that (meaning, the concession that abortions are morally bad) is less common among younger people, presumably due to have grown up in a world in which it’s less stigmatized.
But that’s not the same as cheerleading for abortions, that’s just not thinking they’re evil. If you feel that it’s a morally neutral medical act, like a blood transfusion, then it logically follows that it is a blessing to have safe and legal access to it. And yet, I still want it to be rare, because most abortions are pretty unpleasant and difficult on the people involved; for the person to have not needed an abortion would’ve been a better outcome, just like I’d prefer for people who need blood transfusions to have not gotten sick.
Having the decision made in the supreme court moved abortion outside the reach of any politics other than Supreme Court nominations. However, at this point, every presidential election, the argument used to convince fringe members of either party that they must hold their noses and vote for Trump or Hillary or whomever involves the balance on the Supreme Court.
Now, I suspect that some of the state laws banning abortions would not happen in a world without Roe v Wade (or would have more exceptions), because the state legislators would pay a price if those restrictions went into effect. On the other hand, many states have a substantial pro-life majority, and abortion would probably be illegal in those states if not for Roe v Wade.
ACA repeal failed by one vote in the Senate, a vote that probably owed more to personal pique against the President and the Senate Majority Leader and their process than to any other principle, and a vote that would not have made a difference if 20,000 votes in Alabama had gone the other way.
The idea that it was all just grandstanding, and no one seriously intended to repel the ACA is not particularly credible in my opinion.
There are Republicans who want it overturned, Republicans who do not, and Republicans who would want it overturned except they expect it would cause an absolute shitstorm that would hurt their electoral chances and other plans. I suspect the latter are the majority of Republican politicians.
TBH, I don’t think their motivations (complete ban vs. restriction) matter. Complete ban is not on the table no matter your legal cleverness until SCOTUS, which is not guaranteed to be granted. So, your logic is kinda backwards: Because of the existence of Roe, it is impossible to tell the difference between people who believe in restrictions, and those that believe in complete bans.
This is a lot like what has happened in death penalty cases, because anti-death penalty advocates have won so many cases, the system has become a labyrinth of insane hoops and ladders in order to execute the serial murder-rapist. When a bill passes that makes executing serial murder-rapists slightly easier, its impossible to know if that politician believes in public hangings on arrest, or simply doesn’t want to spend 20 years and millions of dollars executing serial murder-rapists.
This seems like the literal opposite; if the law is struck down, it will do nothing. If it isn’t, it’ll be like going back to hanging burglars.
If my law that results in serial murder-rapists being executed in 15 instead of 20 years is struck down we go back to hanging burglars?
I think you’ve misunderstood. Currently the Constitutional law in abortion cases requires no restrictions on abortion, just as it allows states to not have capital punishment. It is the pro-life and pro-capital punishment people who have to jump through hoops to get anything through. As a result, its extremely difficult to tell the difference between moderates and hardliners in that movement.
If we reversed the situation, and the Supreme court constitutionally banned abortion, and also mandated capital punishment, the situation would reverse. It difficult to see the difference between a person who votes for morning after pills and people who favor abortion at the 9 month mark; and it would be difficult to determine who wants to let serial-murder rapists go free, and those who simply want to give them appeals and a few due process rights.
No, I’m saying the opposite. If this abortion law (specifically this one, mind you) ever goes into effect, it will be more like going back to hanging burglars than like pushing the execution timeline back 5 years. Your argument is predicated on the idea that people will advocate for things they don’t believe in if there’s no chance of them getting it, but if you look at states where the death penalty has been declared unconstitutional by the courts, nobody is trying to pass “kill all drug dealers” bills. In fact, the bills that get proposed tend to be specific to… basically just particularly heinous variants of murder, AFAIK.
Yes and?
This isn’t a “ban all abortions” bill. It is a “limit abortions” bill that utilizes a brand new never before tested with the courts rationale:
That you can accurately show when a heartbeat exists in the fetus and this should confer personhood based on the original Roe decision which said,
Thus, the state has asserted an interest in this life, which was previously unreliable to identify, but is now certainly easily identifiable. This is a new legal ground to stand on. Is is the strongest one to stand on? No. A 20 week ban would be unimpeachable under Roe and Casey (even if controversial politically today), a 12 or 16 weeks is probably the legal grey area for a cutoff based on precedent (imagining nonpartisan judges of course, which is hilarious, but I am just saying).
That’s literally factually incorrect. The text of the bill is here: http://alisondb.legislature.state.al.us/ALISON/SearchableInstruments/2019RS/PrintFiles/HB314-int.pdf
As for Roe, no. The court answers the questions posed in your quote later in the opinion, with:
Under Roe, it’s insufficient for the interest to exist; it must be compelling as well as extant. If you want to go around Roe, you need a direct reply to this reasoning.
That’s my mistake, I was confusing it with the Georgia bill that preceded it (and also threw people into fits). So, yea, this is the hang them bill. But there are many others that aren’t, and are generally more applicable.
I’m not sure how the other bills are somehow “more applicable”.
The official Republican position, codified in the party platform, is that a human life amendment should be added to the constitution to classify that unborn children are persons. The Alabama bill is just that, a statement that “unborn children” are persons.
The Alabama bill is the Republican party position.
This is a statement of fact, but an obvious Bailey. The national GOP is not going to fight to pass a bill like this, which is why they didn’t when they had Senate/House/White House.
Alabama GOP is not the GOP, it is a subsection of the GOP.
The official Republican party position is a bailey? The party position that has been consistently and publicly maintained? The position that has consistently resulted in legislative efforts to limit abortion access? That is a bailey?
Georgia just passed a ban past (roughly) 6 weeks, which is before many women even know they are pregnant, one that ALSO establishes the unborn child as a person.
It’s not accidental that these are being passed right after we have a replacement for Kennedy, who generally voted in favor of maintaining abortion rights. The people passing the bills are specifically intending to try and break Roe with a new court. Any previous actions have to be analyzed with the previous court in mind.
Yeah, it’s a bailey. The Georgia GOP is also not the national GOP. No state party is going to be reflective of either national party, and that’s just going to be more true the more local you go.
Why doesn’t the national GOP just nuke the filibuster and pass their own heartbeat bill?
A definite Beta Guy:
… Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, Iowa, and North Dakota also have all passed 6 week bills in the last year.
But … still a bailey?
Kavanaugh wasn’t sworn in until October 8th, 2018. Nor is there any need to attempt to pass a federal ban, as the states can and already have provided the legislation to challenge Roe. They are allowed to think strategically.
I’m not saying Republicans think their position is broadly popular. Just that it is genuinely held (to the extent that any political body can be said to genuinely hold some belief).
ETA: To be clear, what I am saying is that the rump of conservative evangelical voters really do genuinely believe what they say they believe, that abortion is the taking of a person’s life and therefore murder.
The reason I bring up the 6 week ban is because it fits perfectly into my point of, “divining the intentions is pointless”. Its surely true many people want total bans on abortion. Its also true that there is a significant part of the Republican coalition that would be most comfortable with something around the 12-20 week range as the cutoff.
For the most part its impossible to distinguish between the two in the current legal climate because the courts treat almost everything like a total ban. So its difficult if not possible to tell the difference. Just like its hard to tell the difference (in most cases) between guy who wants serial murder-rapists to be executed promptly, and the guy who wants to execute for all felonies in the public square.
This whole debate is fairly futile, since it’s built on extrapolation and conjecture, but this is just poor form.
Also, @Clutzy, I generally agree for reasons of [see above], but I’m pretty sure that advocacy of specific policies is solid evidence of holding the position you’re advocating from. Now, party national platforms are stupid bullshit, but successfully-passed legislation is much less bullshit IMO. The fact that the Alabama GOP passed this legislation is just as meaningful as the fact that the Georgia GOP passed the other. Cautious inference is advised. “[People] may hold one of these positions” seems obviously true. Questions of prevalence are less clear, but “the predominant position is somewhere along the spectrum of passed legislation” also seems obviously true.
I 100% agree with this, and I think arguments to the contrary are pretty wrong-headed. I know a bunch of conservative evangelical GOPers, and they honestly believe abortion is murder and they want to ban it in almost cases. When the Alabama GOP says they want to ban abortion, I totally believe them, or at least this group is powerful enough in the Alabama GOP that the rest of the GOP legislators are just along for the ride.
However, these voters don’t account for all the GOP voters, and certainly doesn’t mean the GOP leadership or legislators are on board for a big abortion fight, or want one even if they get dragged into it. Like, a good example is John Roberts. I suspect John Roberts is strongly against abortion. I also suspect John Roberts is not cackling to himself about how the secret GOP plan to ban abortion has finally come to fruition: he’s probably cursing his bad luck that he might have to step into this particular mudpie.
This is what people mean when they say that the national GOP has really just been pandering to GOP voters, because they really don’t want a knock-down, drag-out fight over this. If they did, they could’ve forced the issue already, like they tried to force ACA, like they have tried to force tax cuts (which is their actual uniting, dominant ideology).
@A Definite Beta Guy
Yeah, I more or less endorse what you’re saying, and what HeelBearCub said there. And to add to it, I’d say there’s lots of conservative ‘influencers’ who are sincerely and strongly pro-life too. Not congressmen, necessarily, but congressional staff, or think tank intellectuals, or conservative journalists… people that, I think, have a big influence on the Republican platform even when it’s politicians themselves who get to set the priorities, as it were. And finally, yes, there are politicians who are pro-life, and maybe would like to push such things, but for reasons of expediency, self-interest, and priorities don’t and won’t.
When my side does it, it’s all political games and obviously not meant to be taken very seriously. When their side does it, it’s obviously because the commies are at the gate.
So there was a little discussion in a prior OT about RTS games and how there aren’t that many right now. Warcraft 3: Reforged is being developed, and the original Warcraft 3 is available for download for anyone with an original CD-Key. Both Starcraft: Brood War and Warcraft 3 are perfectly playable, so
Is anyone interested in building a guild/clan/corp in Warcraft 3?
I have a long history with Warcraft 3 and am intrigued by this notion. My email is my username at gmail, and my handle on US West is also my username, if you want to try to organize something.
I’m mainly on USEast. Which server should we organize on?
I’d also be there if my computer was repaired. But I am a D2 HC player.
HC?
Hardcore. If you die your character is always dead.
Oh, ok. Well, if you play War3 by those rules I would love to play with you. 😉
Man, it’d be fun to fire it up but my WC3 CDkey is probably in a landfill under five year’s worth of junk.
Dig it up man, you only need the CD-Key to get a free digital copy.
That was too many computers ago, and I ditched all my old CDs on the last move, or possibly the one before that. Unless it’s trivially pirate-able or on sale for a buck or two, I’m unlikely to be able to join in.
Oh, I didn’t realize “landfill” was literal 😛
You can’t buy the original War3 anymore. War2 is available on Gog.com for $10 though.
You are invited to tell the tale of California’s failed attempt to comprehensively restructure its healthcare industry along (British/French/Canadian/Swiss/take your pick) lines. This attempt was kicked off with the election of Governor Lee in 2011. Lee campaigned on this specific issue, and had broad support for his plans. Things looked good there for a while, but by the time Lee was termed out in 2019, it was clear that things just weren’t working, and his replacement, Governor Levy, made no secret of her intentions to roll back much of what Lee had instituted.
So, what did the Californians try, and how did it fail?
Their attempt to replicate the NHS only succeeded in making National Health specs de rigueur eyewear for hipsters?
If you love socialist eye-glasses, try communist condoms!
“Control the Means of Reproduction!”
California institutes a single-payer system. They make it illegal to buy healthcare with private insurance or even with cash; the only alternative is Medicare. Of course this means they set the prices. For prescription drugs, they have a controversial plan based on a sketchy legal theory that the state can re-import drugs regardless of Federal law. At first, things go OK; health care costs go down as the providers grumble, drug prices go way down with the Ninth Circuit upholding California’s right to re-import. However, with payment no longer an issue, health care demand starts going up rapidly, and this strains the budget. The state cuts the price it will pay to the point where providers find they cannot stay in business. In some cases, this is because the state cuts prices below Medicare rates. Since providers cannot charge less than that, they are forced to choose between Medicare patients and everyone else. Health care availability takes a nose dive. To make things worse, the Supreme Court strikes down California’s sovereign import theory 6-3, and they have no prescription drug story.
The poor are faced with long lines and rationing of care. The well-off are stuck paying for California’s system AND their out-of-state health care, and start leaving the state. Silicon Valley starts to collapse due to it being hard to get employees. And worse, from tech execs’ perspective, whereas before they were biased towards young male employees, now that’s practically all they get, women and older people being far less willing to put up with lack of healthcare. The major companies move or plan to move their headquarters to Seattle and other locations. In Los Angeles, the reaction is a bit different, with a robust network of cash-only unlicensed doctors with foreign medical credentials, smuggled medications (many of them genuine), and in Hollywood, copious amounts of cocaine. But what’s changed?
For prescription drugs, they have a controversial plan based on a sketchy legal theory that the state can re-import drugs regardless of Federal law
Alternatively, they use their absolutely massive (and now monosponistic – the worlds fifth(/sixth) largest economy’s) – buying power to drive down drug cost directly. As New Zealands’ s pharmac does (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmac) but even more wildly successful. The cost savings on this alone (and yet there are other similar cost savings) are so huge as to make up for a lot of the rest of the costs. It’s California! To reimport from Canada (which basically means: to become well over half the market for Canada’s pharmaceuticals) never is an equilibrium and it’s a straw-man to propose it as part of any solution then “find” that it doesn’t work.
But negotiating means saying “no”, and here’s this new drug that has a non-replicated once-marginally-statistically-significant chance of cute little Tilly another month or so to live. Yeah, it will cost $10MM, but “Tilly”! The California political establishment can’t and won’t resist the money and influence to rebut the pro-Tilly forces (“even while we were debating lives versus money, poor Tilly died in agony”). And/or the courts find federalism grounds to prohibit the monospony. All down in flames.
expenses on drugs in the US are something like 10% of healthcare costs. What you could reasonably expect to squeeze out by volume purchasing isn’t meaningless, but its very far from transformative.
From what I understand, I agree. So the “import from Canada” idea – whether or not overturned – is not that critical either way to the broader question of whether California can go it alone. If there are huge savings that way, the same savings can be obtained otherwise. There probably aren’t transformational savings in pharmaceuticals. “Renounce the US patent system” is also on a par with the Canada and monopsony paths – and so, even aside from the fact that this would be even more blatantly illegal, doesn’t help that much either.
Wasn’t it historically that they tried to do some kind of universal healthcare scheme but there was a rule that specified a certain % of the budget be spent on education, meaning a massive increase in a new budget area would result in a proportional increase in the education budget? I apologize in advance if that’s just a story people tell.
The fact that any universal health care system that calculates the cost of implementation at current health care prices is going to be smothered in the crib at the latest doesn’t help much either.
Unfortunately, the bill got hijacked so that it also had to cover alternative medicine. Even worse, there was minimal regulation of alternative medicine, so it quickly began to supplant welfare as the main means of transferring the state’s money to citizens. Go to one of the “alternative medicine schools” springing up, get your homeopathy license, and then start prescribing to your friends. Who are also prescribing to you. This quickly took over so much of the medical budget that actual medical services had to be cut back.
That’s a horrible, horrible thought. I wish I could say that it was an impossible one. Or, barring that, that I had seen the pitfall myself. Definitely something to watch out for; should be possible to safeguard against.
Good news is, the high-profile vaccination controversy may have, ahem, vaccinated some of the more vulnerable segments of the population against mindless “alternative medicine is Good, western medicine doesn’t have all the answers” nonsense. So I think even California could avoid that one at least for the next few years. The immunity will eventually fade, I fear.
Game of Thrones and history(spoilers):
Qnanrel’f qrfgeblf Xvatf Ynaqvat va gur ynfg rcvfbqr naq vgf vzcyvrq gung rirelbar guvaxf fur unf tbar penml. Ohg vg’f cerggl pbzzba gb fnpx n pvgl. Jbhyq n zrqvriny ybeq nhgbzngvpnyyl ivrj n ehyre nf na rivy nhgbpeng sbe yriryvat gur pncvgny?
Westeros is obviously based on England and England (for a variety of reasons having to do with society/government) has tended to have much gentler civil wars. The last time London was sacked was 60/61 AD. It’s been occupied at least a dozen times but even the peasant rebels declined to sack the city. Anyone who sacked London would have been regarded as a terrible tyrant. Centuries before the laws and customs of war were a thing, the English considered it barbaric and foreign to even extort money from cities in the middle of a civil war. At least, from English cities. As with many things, the rules applied more to fellow Englishmen than foreigners.
Even setting that aside, it was a major taboo to sack a city whose walls hadn’t fallen or been breached. This was universally a circumstance of light demands and mercy. The Ottomans at the height of their expansion left cities that surrendered before their walls fell intact. The Mongol hordes would set deadlines and even sometimes rewarded cities that surrendered quickly. I’m struggling to think of a time when a ruler received a surrender of a still combat effective fortress and then failed to show mercy.
Then again, most rulers don’t have dragons. There was a certain logic to encouraging surrender: often times an invasion could get many fortified strong points to surrender instead of having to sit down and besiege each one. Even letting them surrender after breach made sense because actually fighting through that breach would be intensely painful. Maybe Dany feels her dragons make her invincible.
England (for a variety of reasons having to do with society/government) has tended to have much gentler civil wars
I don’t know if those who lived in the period when Christ and His saints slept would regard that as “gentle” but it’s all relative, I suppose! 🙂
The generally-accepted rule in both medieval and classical civilization was, I believe, that a walled city was expected to hole up behind its walls when raiders or invaders came in numbers too great to defeat in the open field, but also expected to surrender as soon as the food ran out or the walls were breached. Such a surrender was expected to be honored – though “surrender” does not mean “you get to fly your flag over our city while fully respecting our human right to live as we please under our democratically-elected leaders” or any such; often it means that you get to be the conqueror’s slaves or quasi-slaves unless someone can come up with a ransom comparable to your market value as slaves. Though pre-industrial city-dwellers were usually rich enough to negotiate a reasonable deal on that point.
If the city did not surrender at that point, and the attacker took it by storm, then the generally-accepted price for making the attacker go through all that bloody trouble (including atrociously high casualties among the first-wave assault force) was that the city would be sacked and e.g. the surviving first-wave assault troops would get their pick of rapeable women before burning the place to the ground and picking the shiny golden bits out of the ash.
These are stable, balanced incentives on both sides. Sacking and burning a city that had surrendered after a relatively bloodless siege was I believe rare and generally considered an atrocity even by medieval standards. I’m not aware of precedent for cities surrendering after the defending garrison has gnxra urnil pnfhnygvrf sebz qentbasver juvyr gur nggnpxref erznva ynetryl havawherq, be jurer gur svefg-jnir nffnhyg sbepr crargengrf frireny oybpxf vagb gur pvgl orsber rapbhagrevat betnavmrq qrsraqref ernql gb fheeraqre, but those seem a close match to the traditional “surrender when the walls are breached” standard.
Also, vapvarengvat zbfg bs gur pvgl’f encrnoyr jbzra vfa’g tbvat gb jva lbh gur yblnygl bs gur Qbguenxv, naq cebonoyl n snve ahzore bs gur Jrfgrebfv enax naq svyr jvyy funer gung fragvzrag. Fortunately, Mad Queen Dany does still have the Unsullied…
Erusian mentions the Mongols and they were also the first thing that came to my mind. However, it is my understanding that in their case, if it came to actual blows (that is: if the city did not surrender before an actual battle was joined) the gloves came off hard, post-battle.
Here’s what the wiki has to say:
“Conventional” warfare is all well and good if you’re dealing with people that are much like yourself and who may be expected to abide by the conventions when luck turns against you. The downside is that you’ll be fighting pretty much the same people in a little bit, after everyone has had the chance to recover and resupply.
There’s some good parallels with Dany and the Mongols, considering that the Dothraki are directly inspired by them. However, she’s also trying to push herself as the legitimate ruler and burning the city to the ground doesn’t help her case. I’m just not sure that it would necessarily ruin her legitimacy in the eyes of the populace or the lords backing her.
It never did Stalin any harm.
Legitimacy is good. Legitimacy and scaring the bejezus out of anyone who might be getting ideas is better.
Jus’ sayin’…
Depending on the period, cities were generally expected to surrender either before the walls were breached or before the first assault on the breach started. Since Daenerys’ forces had already breached the walls the defenders would have no right to expect to be offered reasonable terms, and Dany would be quite within her rights to sack and pillage the city as much as she wanted.
Admittedly this sort of rule was adopted to prevent unnecessary loss of life, so perhaps they’d be considered inapplicable given that Daenerys had a dragon which could smash down fortifications and burn enemy soldiers with ease… Although if the writers hadn’t nerfed the Lannister scorpions this episode a dragon wouldn’t be such an invincible killing machine, so maybe not.
It’s also worth noting that Westeros seems to be pretty brutal in general. Arya Stark tricked Walder Frey into eating his own children, for example, and nobody seems to hold this against her. So slaughtering an entire enemy city and burning it to ashes sounds like the sort of thing I can imagine being a not uncommon feature of war.
People are really weird in their application of “insanity”. In the show, I doubt Arya went around telling people that she baked Frey’s son in to a pie, but viewers still see her as this badass, feminist icon. Meanwhile, Dany sacks a city and everyone draws comparisons to her paranoid, schizophrenic father.
There is a certain amount of scale difference involved. Baking someone into a pie isn’t significantly worse than killing someone, and Arya’s killed maybe a few dozen people. Furthermore, all of her targets were either her direct enemies (Walder Frey murdered her brother, her mother and several other friends or household members) or very closely related to her direct enemies (Frey’s children). Given the violent nature of Westeros, it’s not hard to see why people are willing to give her a pass for that. After all, Jaime and Brienne and Jon have all killed quite a few people in battle as well.
The reason why Dany is treated as a Mad Queen after burning King’s Landing is because it was so unnecessary. She had won. The Iron Fleet was destroyed, the Lannister forces were surrendering, Cersei was trapped. If she had accepted victory and let her army sack the city, that would have been brutal and ruthless, but not worse than Khal Drogo or any similar conquerer. But instead she decides to outright destroy most of the city and kill – at minimum – tens of thousands of innocent people in the process. All for no gain to herself beyond instilling fear and personal satisfaction.
Basically, the distinction comes down to what constitutes an “enemy”. King’s Landing was no longer her enemy when she started to burn it. The Freys were still Arya’s enemy when she killed them.
Strongly disagree. Murder + cannibalism is very much worse than murder, especially if you trick someone else into committing the cannibalism, especially especially if that person is the victims’ father, and especially especially especially if you make sure you’re there to watch his reaction when he finds out. That has a whole level of inventive sadism that just killing somebody, or even flying around on a dragon and torching a whole city, lacks.
Outright destroying cities after they surrendered wasn’t unknown in past times. Carthage is the best-known example, although there are other instances as well.
Burning a city down and plowing it with salt is something that could be reasonable for that historic period, but only for a city you don’t intend to rule. The point of the Punic wars was dominance in the Mediterranean. If they couldn’t get Carthage to become subservient to Rome, they would burn it to the ground.
Daenaerys intends to rule the city she just burned. That’s the stupid part. It would only be reasonable if she just wanted to destroy Westeros before going back to Mereen.
To be fair, razing the city and rebuilding it anew could be a good way to demonstrate your power and overawe your subjects, although I’m not sure I can think of any examples of this happening. (Possibly Jerusalem, as Hadrian had it rebuilt in Roman style and renamed after himself, although a quick glance at Wikipedia suggests that it’s not certain whether this was done as punishment for the Jewish revolt of the 130s or whether it preceded and caused the revolt.)
The breach and the assault were basically simultaneous, and the first organized resistance surrendered. Then there was the drawn-out pause. Going on to destroy the city after that seems comparable to rejecting a surrender after initial breach.
And Arya is definitely a psychopath*, but she has no dragon and isn’t seen as a candidate for the throne. Westerosi psychopaths are a dime a dozen.
* I am not a psychiatrist and cannot officially diagnose even fictional characters.
Book Review and Bleg: Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk
I saw this on the shelf and it looked like Lewis is trying to hop on board the train to make a quick buck writing about how horrible Trump is. I cannot blame him that much because I would do the same thing. Somehow, despite those reservations, I read it anyway.
The book is interesting and a quick read, because Lewis is a good writer.
The main theme, at least at first, is that Trump wanted nothing to do with running the government. These are stories we’ve heard elsewhere. Before the election and after the nomination, Chris Christie realizes there is no transition team, Christie puts himself into the role of running the team, because he knows it’s an Important Thing, and in fact legally required[1]. Every time Trump hears about Christie running this team and independently raising money, Trump goes on a tirade about how Christie is “stealing my money” and demands it be shut down. Steve Bannon eventually gets Trump to relent by appealing to how it would look on Morning Joe if Trump didn’t have a transition team.
The night of Trump’s victory, Christie is trying to give Trump a document describing the victory protocol, including which world leaders to call in roughly which order, and also which countries you need to be careful talking to because in a lot of the shithole countries you want to know which asshole is which. Before any of that happens, the Egyptian President calls into Trump Tower and gets patched directly to Trump, who starts talking about The Bangles. The next morning Christie is out of a job, because now that it is confirmed valuable, some member of Trump’s inner circle takes over.
Again and again we get tales of departments under the Executive Branch ready to turn over control to Trump, having blocked off meetings with all sorts of personnel the day after Election Day, since that’s what’s happened when Obama and Bush won[1]. And no one shows up. No one that day. No one the next day. Usually no one even the next week. They are prepared to give control over to whomever wins, but no one shows up. When someone does show up, they are usually a joke. He gives us a look inside some of the departments. The Department of Energy is more like the Department of Nuclear Weapons, because they make sure our own nukes are safe as well as tracking everyone else’s. The Department of Commerce is another, which is more like the Department of Data.
There are lots of stories of Trump’s people being inadequate and unprepared. In more than one department, the only question the Trump appointee has is the chilling “give me the list of all the people working on climate change.” Lewis can’t leave it there, though. In something sure to make our host flip out, he approvingly quotes Politico journalist Jenny Hopkinsons saying “Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries.”
I would describe most of the book as “a love letter to Big Government.” Lewis talks about all the essential and necessary and lovely things government does, and why it’s so important to have someone competent doing the job. There are many stories about people who figured out all the good things in their life was because of the government, or switching parties (always from R to D) because the government is good. And Lewis is pretty clear he’s writing this for people who already believe it. He’s not writing for conservatives, who he considers an alien species. Starting on page 57 is an interview where he decides to role-play as a Trump person might: “a self-important, mistrustful person newly arrived from some right-wing think tank.” Later, staying in character, he has “important op-eds to write, and perhaps a few meetings with people who might know people who might know the Koch brothers.” Ob page 184 he talks about how his interviewee needed Amazon to move huge troves of old weather data on tape to the cloud. But don’t congratulate Amazon for this: his friend needed to pay the government to ship it to Amazon on hard drives, and in the very same paragraph Lewis wants to emphasize that only the government would collect this data.
Bulverism abounds. Since Trump wants to reduce the food stamp program, he is “more or less abandoning the notion that the country should provide some minimum level of nutrition to its citizens.” (p. 98) When he likes someone, he talks endearingly about how they scraped through school: “he graduated from high school — after a merciful school administrator changed an F on his transcript to a C.” (p. 147) When he doesn’t like someone (in the same chapter!), their (temporary) school failures get a different treatment. “He was a lawyer. …’I then dropped out of (meteorology) school because I was a horrible student. I was never interested in learning, which I look at now as sort of funny.'” (p. 166) Lewis frequently talks about how poor and misunderstood and hard-working the government is, it’s just that you cannot see it, so you imagine the worst. This does not stop Lewis from imagining things about Trump’s people when he can’t see them. One example I could find on a re-skim: “Yeah, well, never mind science–we’ll deal with Iran, I could hear some Trump person thinking to himself.” (p. 62)
On page 178, talking about the value of data in policing, Lewis introduces the idea of using data to help police interactions with the story of how “a white policeman shot a defenseless black man in Ferguson, Missouri.” Does Lewis check the DOJ’s report on this event? Nah.
Like people, some companies get a lot of hate, and some don’t. AccuWeather gets the hate. I have no idea if this company really sucks, or if it is just the latest trend where we find someone associated with Trump and begin the dragging. Lewis talks a lot of shit about how AccuWeather dares to provide information only to its customers, and how they are inaccurate. He later alludes that no one company is better than another at predictions. The criticism section on AccuWeather’s Wikipedia page has a third-party ranking them most accurate among six competitors on specific findings. (Check the Talk page for details.) Later, after talking about how important it is for weather data to be public[2], he is fine with a new insurance company (the one who mailed the data to Amazon above) using private analytics of NOAA data to insure people against losses. I have no real problem with this, but I don’t get why they aren’t scum in Lewis’s view.
One reason I called this review also a bleg was because I want to get a different perspective from some other people. Small government conservatives: is this the way to shrink government? Having the departments neglected? It seems to leading to brain drain, and getting different thugs in charge, but doesn’t reduce the insane level of control the government has over our lives. Another bleg I have is for Trump supporters: even if you elected Trump to mess with things, aren’t there some important things that the government does, like weather data collection and nuclear weapon maintenance, that need serious ongoing attention? Even if you think the government should not be doing them and we should have private industry doing it instead, we would want to get those private efforts clearly established before letting the old programs rot.
[1] The requirement to have transition meetings is a recent development that Lewis spends a lot of time talking about. It’s the result of Max Stier’s work to help the government run more smoothly.
[2] I largely agree, especially if the government funded it. Lewis’s book made me install an app that simply shows NOAA data for my area.
Frankly, I don’t think this is really happening to enough of a degree to actually do anything meaningful to affect the career choices of a significant number of civil servants. 95% of the government will churn on doing its thing regardless of who the president is, and all the pearl clutching and teeth gnashing of the Michael Lewis’ of the world won’t change that.
1. Before I even saw the cover of this book, I had heard about the brain-drain from people I know in specific industries that interact with government. The clock-punchers are staying put, of course. The people who have understanding of risks that you would expect of your typical SSC reader? Those people are bailing.
2. If the government is churning on doing it regardless, then by definition we aren’t shrinking it.
Right, because only Congress can do that. Also its not a Trump admin priority. He seems to be a classic boomer that cares not about fiscal conservatism. Some of his appointees do, but that doesn’t reduce the budget of the department.
The best an appointee can do is reduce the level of harassment people regulated by an entity experience. They can stop preventing people from constructing decks in areas that might possibly be wetlands. They can let a coal plant win a case and send a little extra sulfur into the air. They can tell all ICE agents to sit in a room and not patrol the border. They can’t stop spending appropriated money. Nixon tried that, and it was not a success.
Oh, sure, there’s an intrinsic amount of brain drain from the civil service, because it so strongly selects for time servers and fails to reward ambition, but I don’t think trump is having a meaningful effect on that one way or the other.
Trump has moved far more aggressively on the regulatory front than I ever thought was possible or likely. we’ll have to see if it keeps up, but he’s did more deregulation in his first year than Bush did in 8, so we have that at least.
This is much more drain than usual. The departments I am familiar with are having the people who are not just waiting around heading out, not like what it was like under Bush. (If I told you which department, you would say “well they shouldn’t be doing stuff anyway,” which isn’t relevant to the turnover question.)
Incidentally, I went searching for sources on Trump’s deregulation, and found this third-party source:
https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/tracking-deregulation-in-the-trump-era/
@Edward Scizorhands
Can you show numbers to that effect? Because where I have looked at the actual personnel numbers, I haven’t seen this.
No; I went looking for turnover numbers and couldn’t find them. (I found the nice source about dereg, though.)
Presumably they are somewhere in here: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/#url=Reports-Publications but I don’t know if they distinguish the more professional class in any way.
This is an entirely subjective source: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19641717/trump-public-servants-suffer/ It’s possible this is all “zomg Trump is worst ever” over-reaction so I understand wanting something objective. I want it too. But an objective confirmation may not exist even if true.
Given that weather data is still being collected and the nukes appear to be fine, maybe having executive meetings the day after the election isn’t really all that big of a deal?
I’m interested in the big picture stuff. Are we trying to stop people from entering the country illegally or are we trying to give them free stuff to encourage them to come here? Are we standing up to China’s unfair trade policies or are we happy with them? Are we bombing ISIS or are we funding them?
The transition probably would have worked better if the Republican party had been trying to work with Trump rather than sabotage him. Yes, I would prefer the little details be taken care of as well, but when we’re trying to steer the ship away from the iceberg, I’m not too concerned that turn down service in the passenger cabins was a little delayed.
Our nuclear stockpile is not going to break in one day. Or even in 2 years. If I were talking about the military and said “well, the Chinese haven’t invaded us yet, I don’t know why all y’all whining about preparedness” it would be obvious that I was being intellectually dishonest.
The nuclear stockpile requires upkeep by professionals that care about about the problem over the long-term, even though they may only be there temporarily. And if one ever does break, it’s going to be more “big picture” than Joe Biden’s immigration policies.
The RNC didn’t sabotage the transition team. It wasn’t Reince Priebus who fired Christie for prosecuting his dad for campaign finance fraud.
Yes, which is why not meeting them the day after the election is probably not a big deal.
I was talking about more than the transition team or Chris Christie, but would you describe the GOP establishment in 2016 (or even today) as being particularly supportive of Trump?
We’re mixing up object-level and meta-level, and I think it might be my fault.
Meta-level: Trump is disorganized and neglects important duties of the government.
Object-level: Despite dedicated resources from the government for this task, Trump fails to have people lined up for important roles. This is a demonstration of his lack of organizational skills for important issues.
Trump eventually got Rick Perry in charge of the DoE. Ironic given his desire to axe it, but Rick Perry is entirely competent. His choices are not always competent. Take his choice to head NOAA, the organization which collects and distributes weather data. Instead of any of the many competent conservatives who he could have selected, his choice is a lawyer, the CEO of AccuWeather who lobbied to make it illegal for NOAA to distribute any data except to commercial businesses. [1] I don’t know what possible sharing of philosophy that could entail, besides personal enrichment.
but would you describe the GOP establishment in 2016 (or even today) as being particularly supportive of Trump?
Today? Supportive.
In 2016? Not particularly supportive but not actively hostile. There were still lots of competent conservatives with appropriate backgrounds who could have been short-listed.
[1] I do not necessarily 100% buy this narrative, but most of the pieces are there, and it cannot be dismissed just by Lewis being biased.
@Edward Scizorhands says:
Is the head of NOAA actually incompetent? Because it sounds to me like perry picked someone who knew the weather industry pretty well, and unless he has made NOAA stop distributing weather data, there’s no fire here. It’s very hard to find people who are experts in an industry that don’t have all sorts of connections to that industry, because being in an industry is how you become an expert. This sort of pearl clutching does no one any good, because it’s never applied consistently. I have no doubt that the obama administration appointed people from the solar industry to various environmental positions, or healthcare executives to health positions. This is no different.
Is the head of NOAA actually incompetent?
Myers has not yet made it into the job. The Senate has refused to confirm him three times.
Because it sounds to me like perry picked someone who knew the weather industry pretty well
Perry was picked for the DOE. This is separate from NOAA. NOAA doesn’t regulate the “weather industry,” they do weather on their own and provide the data to the public, including private weather companies.
It’s very hard to find people who are experts in an industry that don’t have all sorts of connections to that industry
This is not “OMG someone with business experience ZOMGBBQ!!1” Myers has spent nearly 20 years trying to shut down NOAA distributing data to the public[1], because it would compete with his family business. The conflict-of-interest alone is naked. If you want to compare to Obama, imagine if two brothers owned Solyndra, and one sold his shares to the other to go run the department handing out loans to Solyndra.
There are plenty of pure-blood conservatives with weather chops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Secretary_of_Commerce_for_Oceans_and_Atmosphere Check out the people who have filled the role for Republicans and have Wiki pages. They have advanced degrees in a relevant field like oceanography, marine geology, or meteorology; and were often officers in the US Navy. I’m not seeing any with “weather industry” experience. Huh.
This is not some chair where you need to scratch the bottom of a barrel to find someone qualified and also conservative.
pearl clutching
For the love of oysters everywhere, find a different catchphrase.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Duties_Act_of_2005
Just like I’ve spent 5 years trying to beat my competitors, and if one of them hired me, I’d start trying to shut down my current company. If he actually tries to shut down the data distribution, or has said he wanted to, that would be cause for concern, but we’re talking about someone who no longer has a role in the company and who has divested himself of all ownership of it.
You mean like how he appointed people to govern puerto rico that loaned puerto rico the money in the first place?
The Trump administration has had trouble getting appointees all over the place, but frankly, this doesn’t seem to be a bottom of the barrel job.
You mean like how he appointed people to govern puerto rico that loaned puerto rico the money in the first place?
Someone lent money to Puerto Rico. That same someone was also included on the oversight board when Puerto Rico was having trouble making its payments. Creditors often have a say in bankruptcy proceedings.
Too bad. I was hoping for something better. I must say, though, I’m surprised to see you linking to a piece complaining about “predatory debt deals.”
If he actually tries to shut down the data distribution, or has said he wanted to, that would be cause for concern
Well, yes. Joel and Barry and Evan Myers have been at this for a long time. This is not a secret. Not at all. [2]
In 1997 Joel said NOAA should focus on its “core mission” of data-gathering and leave dissemination to companies like his.[1] In 2005 Barry agreed with “I advocate laws to govern and control the NWS.” The Santorum bill I already linked to was the same year. Santorum had no co-sponsors at all for S. 786 and didn’t care about NWS before or since. Santorum said that it’s “not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free.” [3]
Barry got himself onto a board that forbade NOAA from developing its own app, which is why you need to use a third-party app just to directly access NOAA data. Barry protested that the NWS should be forbidden from sharing information about Hurricane Sandy on Twitter and Facebook. I bolded that one because how can you complain that the NWS is warning people to seek shelter from a storm?
Even during his confirmation hearings, he was saying that he just wanted “a level playing field” because it’s unfair that NWS can distribute its data to the public. Imagine if I started a business reposting public government data, maybe even value-adding. Then I try to get the government shut down from providing the data it had been all along because it’s “unfair competition.” (I think it’s A-OK for private weather companies to build off of the public domain weather data and try to do better. It’s not OK to shut down that public domain they build on as “unfair competition.”)
So, yeah, those three brothers have made it their mission to stop NOAA from distributing data to the public. Why in the world is Barry still trying, after three failures to confirm, to still get himself confirmed? Do you think it’s a sincere ethical obligation? Why in the world would someone try so hard to die on this hill?
but we’re talking about someone who no longer has a role in the company and who has divested himself of all ownership of it.
AccuWeather is a private company and files no Form 4s. He is selling his shares to the company at whatever the company decides they are worth. After he is done with his tenure, the company will sell them back at whatever the company board, populated with his family members, decides they are worth. This is not a fair-market value. As a private company, no one will see these prices.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-pick-to-lead-weather-agency-spent-30-years-fighting-it
[2] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/10/12/trumps-nomination-of-barry-meyers-to-head-noaa-is-a-mistake/
[3] Congressional record, volume 151, page 6566.
Edward Scizorhands says:
So it’s different when my tribe does it? That’s your argument? This isn’t creditors having a say, this is creditors deciding which creditors get paid. the conflict of interest is blatant. And I’m sure if I bothered looking for more than 30 seconds, I could find more.
He WAS at it.
No idea. Maybe whoever he reports to think he’ll do a good job. Maybe they don’t have anyone better. Most likely the just don’t care enough to bother looking for someone else. But it’s definitely not a secret republican plot to destroy NOAA.
So it’s different when my tribe does it? That’s your argument?
In my time on this website, I think I’ve only been accused twice of ever being in any tribe. Both times by you. No one else has ever felt the need to put me in a box.
So it’s different when my tribe does it? That’s your argument?
I’m not defending Obama. The only people I’m seeing complain about this are people from the far left, like your link, or [2], or the literal commies at [1]. I can’t see any conservative complaining at all. Are you sure this is the argument you want to be making? That Obama isn’t commie enough?
Great Gibberish Ganesh, it turns out Trump reappointed all the same people! [3] What the fuck! Why do I have to look this stuff up for you? Why do you choose such bad examples?
He WAS at it.
If you put that in the past tense because, like, right now at this moment, he’s asleep, so he’s not trying to stop NOAA from distributing data at 12:27AM Pennsylvania time? Yeah, okay, fine.
But in his Congressional testimony last year for this job he said that NWS should not be allowed to “compete” by publishing the data they’ve been publishing for over a hundred years.
But it’s definitely not a secret republican plot to destroy NOAA.
I know you realllllly want to put me in that box, but I haven’t said one word about “secret republican plot.” I already said the previous Republican administrations had placed fine people into this position. And I made sure to include a link to a climate skeptic site, just for you. Did you read it at all? Conservatives are very concerned Myers wants to cut off their access to the data.
[1] http://www.watcherofweasels.org/obama-appoints-board-to-restructure-puerto-rico-the-new-greece/
[2] https://theweek.com/articles/724578/thanks-obama-puerto-rico-might-never-recover-from-irma
[3] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/economy/trump-to-renominate-puerto-rico-oversight-board-members-over-objections-of-governor-and-creditors
Boy, I feel the exact opposite. I would take a competent and effective administrator who disagrees with me on abortion and immigration over an ineffective/inexperienced administrator that I agree with on the big-ticket items.
This seems bizarre to me. “This leader sure is screwing me over, but he’s doing it so competently!” I would prefer someone to help rather than hurt me, even if he’s not maximally competent at the helping.
In trying to help you, he might end up harming your cause.
But the competent person trying to harm me will definitely harm me. Because he’s competent at it.
I don’t care whether the president disagrees with me (or claims to, at least) on abortion because presidents aren’t in charge of deciding abortion law. Which would be better for the world (from the left’s perspective), if George W. Bush had been pro-choice, or if he had appointed someone with relevant experience to run FEMA?
More generally, a big part of the reason I have trouble voting for ideological right-wingers is that, whatever policies they espouse on the campaign trail, I know that when they get in to office and go to hire their staff and appoint bureaucrats to run departments, a lot of them are going to be dingbats, because there just aren’t that many experienced middle-managers and executives with policy experience floating around who love Jesus and doubt global warming and hate immigration and so forth.
@dick says:
If I said that the reason I don’t vote democrat was that there just aren’t that many experienced middle-managers and executives with policy experience floating around who love hippies, think global warming is going to kill everyone in 12 years, hate the patriarchy and so forth, you’d rightly accuse me of being uncharitable.
For every Bush/FEMA you throw at me I can show you an Obama/Medicare CMS. If you want to put forth actual evidence, or even an argument, that republican stewardship of agencies is objectively worse, fine, but what you’ve done here is just shout “outgroup bad!”
Competent W wouldn’t have appointed John Roberts and abortion would be illegal now.
@dick:
I have to agree with cassander here. You can make good faith arguments about the idea that Republicans have ceased to value competency in governance without resorting to that kind of essentially ad-hominem rhetoric.
First, I said “ideological right-wingers”, not “Republicans”. Can you see why the distinction is important in this case?
Second, “the idea that
Republicansideological right-wingers have ceased to value competency in governance” is not something novel I came up with, smarter and better-informed people than me, on the left and right, have been discussing that problem ever since the alliance of fiscal conservatives and Christian evangelicals in the Reagan era, maybe longer. If you’re well-read, you already know some of the arguments for and against it. If you’re not, a half-assed attempt to summarize the matter by me is very much not the solution to that.I mean “right-wing” just means everyone in one of the caucuses, specifically the conservative one in modern parlance, but I get what you are saying, and I suppose “ideological” is doing some work in that sentence.
But, it certainly doesn’t scan the way you are saying. You are the one who brought in W. Bush. If he is your favored example for someone who is “ideologically right wing” (and therefore is inclined to appoint “dingbats”) then I think it’s fair to conclude that you are impugning pretty much the entire party. W. was more ideological than his farther or brother, but he is hardly a fringe outlier in today’s version of the party. If anything he is less-ideological in approach than the bulk of the party.
I actually think Brown is more just “crony” rather than “ideological” and represents the general disdain for things that smacked of welfare. But that is really a separate argument.
@dick
Not particularly. I could just as easily say ideological left wingers.
Yes, it’s a common slur on the left, and less commonly, on the moderate right. That doesn’t make it true. And there are plenty of right wing equivalents that are equally biased and lazy.
In a vacuum, any label could mean a lot of different things, but in context, in this specific discussion, would it not be reasonable to interpret “ideological right-wingers” to mean “right-wingers who do the ideological thing I describe in the remainder of this sentence”?
Somewhat more relevantly, it’s also the position of the guy I was responding to.
@dick:
It might be reasonable , but again, you brought GWB and Michael “Heck-of-a job” Brown into the conversation. I agree Brown was incompetent and without the requisite background. But do you understand why he isn’t a good example of someone put in place because of ideological considerations?
… Bush was the example of choosing ideology over competence. Brownie was the result of that choice.
@dick:
But Brownie was a crony appointment, not an ideological one. He was a long time friend of Bush’s campaign manager, who got the FEMA job first. His previous job was Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association.
He’s not a good example of someone who “love(s) Jesus and doubt global warming and hate(s) immigration and so forth”. He’s just a run of the mill political hack.
As something of an aside, George W. Bush was well to the left of his party on immigration. He was constrained by his party, but his inclinations were for pro-immigrant reforms.
…a crony who was appointed by George W. Bush, a president chosen more for his ideology than his competence. That’s why I mentioned it – this is a thread about whether it’s a good idea to choose presidents for their ideology more than their competence.
As something of an aside, George W. Bush was well to the left of his party on immigration.
A point we can agree on.
Not only was his position better, it would probably have been better for his party. On social issues the Hispanic voters are natural allies of the Republicans and there are a lot of them, but the Republicans (other than Bush) keep driving them away.
The 2nd part of this is a 0/10 as far as I can tell. Old country hispanic voters (who were in Texas and California pre-1900 and by modern times were also usually significantly genetically European) were basically a 50-50 split for Republicans-Democrats. Republicans were traditionally pro immigrant with the tide essentially turning with Pete Wilson and California Republicans who had realized that the state was being stolen from them because newer Hispanic immigrants were driving the ratio from 50-50 to 30-70.
Republican restrictionism is a reactionary phenomenon.
This mirrors the effect in “Asian Americans” who used to be fairly Christian/Conservative, but now are overwhelmingly not. This is not because of a change in the parties, but rather a change in the group that is called “Asian”, now it includes a much higer % of Indian and SE Asians, who are overwhelmingly Democrats.
I am curious what people mean by “unfair trade practices.” There seem to be two different things that get combined in that term.
1. Failing to protect U.S. I.P. That’s “unfair” to the extent that China is signatory to treaties and failing to act accordingly. Note that Taiwan, for a long time, was explicitly not signatory to copyright agreements. Similarly for the U.S. a century or so back.
2. Subsidizing export industries. That’s widely viewed as unfair, but since it is subsidizing what they are selling to us it benefits us at their expense.
I think I have also seen complaints about trade secret violation, but a trade secret is not legally protectable property. If you are so careless as to let other people discover it, that’s your problem, not theirs. The exception, in U.S. law, is if they discover it by illicit means, such as bribing an employee to violate his secrecy agreements with his employer.
In the short term. Once they have driven competitor industries under and captured their processes via forced technology transfer they will raise their prices. This is like selling someone your cow because they’re going to give you a good deal on milk. For awhile.
This sounds, in style, like the many liberals who insist that the government-run health care will work better[1] because “economies of scale.” Or the liberals who insisted after-the-fact that Solyndra was a good investment because we had to protect ourselves from the Chinese who would otherwise become monopolists and own the solar industry forever and ever amen. Or liberals who say that Walmart is only going to cut costs until they destroy competitors, and then will raise them through the roof, just you wait, any day now it will happen.
It is extremely hard to simply price another country’s industry out of existence. (The home country can destroy its own industry through policies that are orthogonal to trade.) When liberals would propose the predatory pricing theory for a local industry, and when I would ask for real-world examples, they never happened.
I’m not entirely against the idea that the US should subsidize or protect some specific industries to make sure we should maintain the ability to be self-sufficient for a short period of time in case of war or some other cause of global instability. I’m not against the US making sure that it maintains some level of production of everything. (And I’m not against getting “better” deals.[2]) I am responsive to issues that we are obliterating the livelihoods of people who cannot just #LearnToCode. But if these are the reasonings then there are better policy solutions than tariffs or Solyndra-style investments.
If we want to protect our steel industry for national security reasons, I’d start with questions on a) what is the amount of industry we would want to be able to create in 12 months?, and b) what is the smallest we can let our industry shrink and yet still be able to regrow it to that level?
[1] The assumption being we don’t have that now.
[2] I think it is quite possible to get a better deal on the tariffs, and why they strike so many people as unfair: Like in the Ultimatum Game, you should rationally keep the $1 even if the other person gets $99, but 1) you can do better, and 2) the real-world example of people refusing the $1 shows why it is so hard to maintain these rational-but-feel-unfair deals. But every negotiation for a better deal takes on a risk of ending up with a worse deal.
Okay, maybe they don’t raise the prices. But the competitors are still destroyed, and working as Wal-Mart greeters. It’s bad enough to be working for Wal-Mart. Far worse to be beholden to China.
Okay, but what industry is going to be destroyed by the Chinese selling to us below cost? Are the Chinese just destroying the US instance of this industry, or this industry in every other nation in the world at the same time? If just the former, we can simply resell the stuff they sell us below cost to other countries. If they are trying to predatorily price every other country on Earth at once, that’s gonna be expensive.
Again and again we get tales of departments under the Executive Branch ready to turn over control to Trump, having blocked off meetings with all sorts of personnel the day after Election Day, since that’s what’s happened when Obama and Bush won. And no one shows up.
Hmm – I agree that Trump and his merry-go-round of hiring and firing team were not very, if at all, prepared for what would happen after they won the election (great, now the dog has caught the bus, what does he do with it?) but I wonder how this account jibes with (a) in the immediate aftermath of the election, I saw a lot of La Résistance type blogging on Tumblr raving with delight over things like – I think the National Parks? – anyway, various government/semi-state bodies vowing they would have nothing to do with his administration, wouldn’t take any of his orders or carry them out, and wouldn’t consider any of his appointees their bosses (though all that seems to have gone by the wayside, if it was ever legitimate public employees posting it in the first place) and (b) the kind of purring approval generated over stories such as this one where alleged insiders reveal they are La Résistance in fact?
That sounds less like “we were ready and willing to hand over but they were shambolic” and more like the stories from the end of the Clinton administration where White House staffers were tee-heeing over tales of petty vandalism (e.g. when they had to leave before handing over to the incoming Bush lot, they broke off and took away one of the keys on all the office keyboards and so on).
So “badly unprepared, underprepared, and running on whim and perceived personal loyalty” is true for Trump and his team, but the situation can’t both be “nobody takes them seriously so we don’t even pretend we’re following his orders” and “we’re professional and willing to do our jobs no matter who the new guy is”, that is ‘heads I win, tails you lose’.
The sources are biased so some skepticism is healthy.
One thing that annoys me about Robin Hanson’s shtick of “X is not about Y” is that he assumes that if someone is not doing a certain course of action, it means they don’t really care about their stated preferences. Usually, the more parsimonious explanation is that they simply aren’t aware of this course of action or that people are reluctant to try new things. And some of policies he suggests as being more rational are just stupid anyways.
God, yes. Every so often I check Overcoming Bias just so that I can seethe.
From the most recent post:
Yes, Robin, auctions will solve ingroup bias and corruption. The fact that we don’t auction things is because we don’t care about fairness. But you know what, fine, whatever, let’s assume you’re talking about something that auctions can actually solve. Still, I’m glad you admitted that discretion can, rationally speaking, be viable…
Oh, wait, no, the fact that their are good reasons to favor discretion is incidental. People obviously favor discretion for irrational reasons. Because they’re stupid, or something. This isn’t quite attacking a strawman, but it’s so close that I can smell the hay. And, you know, it couldn’t possibly be down to people observing that deterministic systems are more simply (which is not necessarily to say more easily) be gamed than discretionary ones. Are people more annoyed by someone who waves their hands around their heads chanting “I’m not touching you” or by teacher’s pets?
So the reason it’s justified to assume that people have an irrational reason for preferring discretion is that it’s actually rational for people to say they favor discretion? This is at best as well-reasoned as the idea that people like discretion for first-level rational reasons.
Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to the winners, the signalers, and the dupes. Note the way he contrasts “fair” with “discretionary.” The “unusual details of particular situations” have disappeared into the ether.
If.
And yeah, jeeze, imagine if we had a court system where there weren’t objective pre-committed-to standards of evidence, but instead we relied on other people to make discretionary judgments. The people who would set up an institution like that clearly coulndn’t have had a clue.
Every once in a while I’ll reflect upon the fact that I don’t really fit in with any political movement, and it’s kind of discouraging.
I’ll agree with progressives when it comes to immigration, LGBT rights, drug legalization, decriminalizing sex work, and ending police brutality… but they go way too far to the left with some of their fiscal policies (“socialism can totally work this time, I swear!”), they support inane regulations on harmless things like straws and soda cups, and they’re married to gun control policies that are stupid, ineffective, and racist.
So then I’ll feel like I belong with the libertarians in the “socially progressive but also pro-capitalist” camp… except they go way too far in the opposite direction by wanting to end taxes and regulations and welfare altogether! Just like the socialists and communists, their ideas work great in theory, but never seem to work out in practice. And after a while, “that wasn’t real capitalism” starts to sound just as hollow as “that wasn’t real socialism.”
So then I’ll figure I belong in the middle, with the boring centrist liberal Democrat types… except they practically embody institutional corruption, they’re almost as hawkish on foreign policy as the Republicans, they support the surveillance state and indefinite detention without trial and the extralegal assassination of U.S. citizens, they keep pushing the War on Terror and the War on Drugs and the War on Prostitution, and their idea of centrism combines the worst elements of capitalism and socialism instead of the best (e.g. “the banks are too big to fail, but not too big to regulate”).
I don’t know where that leaves me. Is there a place for anti-establishment centrist liberals? Or left-ish libertarians who don’t go full anti-capitalist left-libertarian, but also aren’t hardline Randian-style right-libertarians? I know there are libertarian capitalists and libertarian socialists, but are there any libertarian social democrats?
All I know is that I’m vehemently opposed to nationalism and social conservatism, and I’m not exactly thrilled with the rest of mainstream American politics.
I’m calling this “common sense libertarian”. The baseline and strong prior is that open market is usually better and regulation has a habit of creating about as many problems as it solves, but has a number of departures from
strawmantextbook libertarianism:– awareness of problems that can’t be solved best by the open market, mostly Commons.
– flexibility in defining the world you want. If, for example, your desired world prioritizes certain values over sheer efficiency, it’s perfectly ok to say that you want, for example, universal healthcare. Just be aware that there is rather large cost that will be payed from somewhere else, even if it’s not obvious.
– practicality in choosing solutions. Social security net might be better implemented as private insurance, but for now, it’s easier to just treat is as a Commons issue.
And above all, a healthy dose of fear for the invisible costs of regulation. Measure everything in QALY, put a monetary value on it and calculate how many babies each subsidy kills per year. And even so assume you haven’t been able to track all the costs.
Interesting. As described, that’s close-ish to where I am, except I’d never call my position ‘libertarianism’, and have a lot less fear of the costs of regulation.
Is that because you think the costs of regulation are low?
I think it’s more that I see the costs of non-regulation as also being high.
I want e.g. safe food. I want to know what’s in the food I’m eating. I want a competent, effective check on the safety – and training requirements – for new airplane models.
Bad regulations happen – politics and humans being what they are – and everything can have unintended consequences. But I still expect more bad consequences from the absence of (sensible) regulations.
And I don’t consider the possibility of suing after an injury occurs to be either as effective as regulation for preventing the injury in the first place, or an adequate compensation if the injury does in fact occur.
One reason I’m skeptical of most regulation (though I can see why some regulation makes sense) is that it’s often hard to see the full costs of regulation. You don’t see the businesses that never got started, or the products that were never produced, or the medicines that never made it to the clinic. A consequence of this is that there’s often nobody really meaningfully weighing the costs and benefits of some proposed regulation, since many of the costs are invisible to the political process and maybe invisible to everyone who isn’t a reasearcher using subtle tools to tease out either costs or benefits.
I’m (more-or-less) libertarian in a very different sense that someone like David–I think that from where we are now, it would be reasonable to move in a more libertarian policy direction in most areas. But I don’t remotely think we should keep moving in that direction forever. I don’t know what the endpoint best society would be, but I doubt it would end up being no regulation.
George McGovern, Democratic candidate for President in 1972, learned some things about regulation after leaving politics and entering the private sector.
http://digital.library.ucla.edu/websites/2008_993_056/Politician_Dream.htm
It is tough to know just what the “right level” is, but we can’t be sanguine and assume the best and brightest are surely doing it right.
In general, I agree with Scott’s position when it comes to liberalism and libertarianism: Liberals tend to support welfare and regulations, libertarians tend to oppose welfare and regulations, I tend to support welfare but oppose regulations.
That’s not to say that I universally oppose all regulations, because I recognize that some are necessary. I just think we have a lot more regulations than we need right now, and I tend to be very skeptical of them on the whole, especially when they serve the interests of large corporations at the expense of small businesses.
Not having your political views represented is common for intellectuals, I guess.
For example, I support liberalizing GMOs, permitting more of them, making permissive new regulation on the new GMO technologies such as CRISPR. I also support drastic cuts to the Common Agricultural Policy.
There is not a single party I could find in Spain that supports it. I believe there are countries in Europe that have parties that support CAP reductions, but they are all in net payer countries.
Parties that really support low deficits and low spending when they are actually in power only seem to exist in Germany (where they catastrophically underinvest in defense).
For my other views, I have to choose between parties I am more-or-less aligned economically, but totally opposed on social views, and parties I support on social views, but whose economic policies I support. I occasionally think about holding my nose and voting for those parties whose social views I oppose, but then I don’t believe they will actually achieve anything in economics and may achieve stuff in their social agenda, which I oppose. So I never vote for them.
Yes, this is exactly why I find myself supporting Democratic candidates more often than not, despite being opposed to a good deal of the Democratic Party’s policies. It’s a combination of the fact that social issues are more important to me, and the fact that I think politicians are a lot more likely to live up to their promises on social issues than on economic issues.
For instance, I don’t believe the Republicans will actually stick to their campaign promises and fix the economy, but I do believe they can be very successful when it comes to making life harder for women and LGBT people. Conversely, I don’t believe Bernie Sanders has a snowball’s chance in Hell at actually enacting any of his crazier economic policies, but I do believe he would be a good ally to have when it comes to fighting for civil liberties, scaling back the military-industrial complex, and so forth.
Yes, this is exactly why I find myself supporting Democratic candidates more often than not, despite being opposed to a good deal of the Democratic Party’s policies.
I have a nightmare: one day, the politicians I vote for will actually start implementing the things they
threatenpromise to do, instead of just happening Any Day Now.Note that Bernie Sanders is not actually a Democrat, and he uses this fact as signaling his policy preferences are different than the average Democrat.
That said, what policies that you perceive Democrats to be for are you against?
To the great misfortune of the people of Germany, and I might add every other European country.
There is an XKCD that seems relevant, but I won’t link because it would come off as an attack, which is not my intent, but part of the problem is you finding a way to feel … elevated …above politics. You don’t seem to understand the messy realities of politics and how coalitions work. In some sense, you are Ned Stark, wanting merely being right to be enough.
This is especially true in a nationwide two-party system, which is nearly inevitable give the U.S. Constitution (and current national media availability). You have to move the coalition, at the primary level, to change it to more closely reflect your preferences. And for that to be ultimately successful requires persuading large numbers of people that your position is correct and beneficial, persuading people to vote in favor of candidates who support your position.
But that is work. It doesn’t feel as good, as morally superior, compared to standing on your principles. Because you are watching, even participating in, the sausage getting made.
I don’t think this answers LadyJane’s question, unless you are suggesting that she has subconsciously picked her idiosyncratic political views to get the pleasure of feeling aloof.
She asked “I don’t know where that leaves me.” I think that you are right about getting involved in making the sausage, but I didn’t read her as not wanting to participate. Rather, it sounds like she wants to participate but wouldn’t know where to start. Even if she wanted “to move the coalition to more closely reflect [her] preferences”, which of the current coalitions would she have the most success with?
And finding out if there are already people who think like you is a great strategy for figuring out how to make an impact. If there is a large group of like-minded people that aren’t currently well-represented, realizing that is a big step in pushing their ideas. And if not, then you can at least make informed decisions about which of your own views to ignore while you work on more feasible ones.
So what do you think? How can LadyJane best spend her political efforts, given the views she outlined?
I think you completely missed my point.
I’m saying very few people get their precise set of policy preferences met by one of the two parties platforms let alone what actually gets effort or becomes enacted. Expressing frustration that neither of the two party platforms meets your overall preferences misunderstands coalition politics.
Coalition politics is about horse-trading and accepting that you give some and get some. It’s about prioritizing certain wishes over others. It’s about making the best of the current situation.
So in expressing a certain kind of disgust that they don’t like that neither coalition met their preferences, and where does that leave them, what with this two parties being so unreasonable, this seems like simply feeling superior for not wishing to engage in process of joining a coalition.
You want the coalition to change? Well you have to put in the work and accept that … it still may not change because you haven’t convinced enough people in the coalition.
I think you are being judgmental where it seems like you could be more helpful. I don’t read LadyJane expressing “disgust” so much as frustration and confusion at not knowing how to engage. Coalition politics is hard and confusing and that’s a natural reaction to someone who wants to get started.
LadyJane has outlined some things she believes. If the answer is “get involved and start compromising”, why not advise what horse-trading you think she would be best to start with?
LadyJane already outlined the horse trade they have made in deciding to support the Democrats. The frustration expressed is that they are not satisfied with having to give up this thing in order to get that other thing. They are asking how they can get both.
In order to get both, they would need to engage in persuading the Democratic coalition to support those preferences.
And it’s quite unclear to me that the policy preferences objected to are actually ones held by the Democrats. The only person mentioned by name is Bernie Sanders … and he is not the mainstream of the Democratic Party, not actually even being a Democrat.
But at least Sanders is what it looks like when you are trying to pull a coalition towards some set of policy preferences.
Those are good concrete points. Thank you.
But still, she’s made some decisions and trades. Isn’t she allowed to want more and find out if there’s people she can work with to get more of what she wants? It seems like she’s asking a good question for the purposes of politicking: who else wants what I want so that I can form a new coalition to get what we want.
I just don’t see much room for the insinuation that she’s acting entitled or unrealistic.
Here is what I see Jane saying in the OP …
-I agree with the progressives in the Democratic camp (but some of them go too far into advocating outright socialism and I don’t think “stupid, ineffective” bans should be enacted)
– I agree with the libertarians because I am “socially progressive but also pro-capitalist” but I don’t agree that we should eliminate regulations or the taxes or welfare. [Hey wait, that sounds like a lot of Democrats]
– So that would label me as “centrist Democrat” but some of those people support things I don’t like either. Plus I think they are “corrupt”.
So basically I read all of that as saying “Really, I mostly agree with most of the Democratic platform, but there are people in the coalition (some times and somewhere, and maybe not even Democrats) that I sometimes disagree with and therefore I don’t want to say I am in that coalition”
Just a mentioned example: Soda Bans.
You know who enacted a Soda Ban? Michael Bloomberg.
You know what he is NOT? A Democrat.
You know who struck that ban down? A unanimous NY Court of Appeals with a number of Democratically appointed judges.
@HeelBearCub: As you said, I’ve already made a horse trade in siding with the Democrats in the first place. But within the Democratic Party, there are currently two major factions – the centrist wing and the progressive wing – and I’m honestly not sure which of those two coalitions is a better fit for me. I live in a city where the Democratic primaries are almost always the only elections that matter, and I often find myself torn between establishment and progressive candidates.
The progressive Democrats are much better from a civil libertarian perspective, since they’re the ones who favor things like electoral reform, criminal justice reform, decriminalizing drugs and sex work, opposing foreign interventionism, and so forth. And I think a lot of their critiques of the modern political establishment – the influence of corporate money on politics, for instance – are spot on.
But in terms of economic policy, I tend to be much more closely aligned with the establishment Democrats, despite my opposition to the corporate cronyism they often support. I prefer a centrist approach to fiscal policy, and I think a lot of the progressives’ economic ideas (for instance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s support of Modern Monetary Theory) are impractical and likely to lead to financial disaster if they were ever implemented. The constant pro-socialist and anti-capitalist rhetoric gets very tiresome too. As someone who broadly agrees with your stance that market capitalism with some regulations and a good social safety net is the best way to go, hearing progressives talk about how we need to “overthrow capitalism” and “implement socialism” is enormously frustrating for me.
Sure, this sort of reflexive “fuck the system, man” attitude that wants to burn everything down is both frustrating and, frankly, dispiriting. They don’t understand how many babies are in that bathwater.
These seem like they are all either already mainstream Democratic positions or are rapidly gaining support in the mainstream? They certainly aren’t only “Democratic-Socialist” positions.
I wonder whether the divide you are seeing locally, since it is a single party town, is more young/old than it really is “left-liberal”/”blue dog”.
I think the problem comes up when nobody close to power has anything even close to your views. Like, if you’re basically about 90% on board with the Republican agenda, but support gun control, you may well have to hold your nose and vote Republican, like all the other people who have issues on which they dissent from their favored party.
But if your views are not very close to either party’s platform or likely policies, then there’s not really anyone to hold your nose and vote for.
One possible tactic is to vote libertarian (or green or socialist) in order to signal to the major parties that there are votes there which they could get by altering their policies a little to attract people like you.
@HeelBearCub: This is a very unhelpful response. I have a Master’s degree in Political Science and I’ve worked on political campaigns. I am quite well aware of how coalition building works, thank you very much. I am also aware of the fact that almost no one is going to find a party or coalition or candidate that perfectly matches 100% of their own views, and that’s not something I realistically expect to find.
You seem rather eager to tilt against some strawman of a Naive Political Idealist ™, but that does very little to actually answer my question or address my point in any meaningful way.
OK. Point taken. But I’m still not sure what you are looking for?
As I said in a previous comment, you don’t seem all that well informed on actual Democratic party positions? You name checked Sanders, who is not a Democrat, and identified a soda ban as being a Democratic position when it was enacted by Bloomberg, also not a Democrat. Straw bans are much more of a local community issue and have been defended by Ron DeSantis of all people.
So it seems really unclear to me what you are really objecting to?
Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat, but he caucuses exclusively with Democrats, he nearly always sides with Democrats on votes divided along partisan lines, he ran for President as a Democratic candidate and plans to do so again, and he had an enormous influence on the emergent progressive wing of the Democratic Party. So to say he’s not representative of a certain kind of Democrat seems rather misleading.
Bloomberg is more of a gray area, because he’s repeatedly switched back and forth from Republican to Democrat to independent, but his soda ban had the support of New York Democrats including current Mayor Bill DeBlasio. At any rate, soda bans are honestly not an issue that I consider all that important in the grand scheme of things, and certainly not at the root of my frustration with the Democratic Party. It was just an off-the-top-of-my-head example, meant to illustrate a certain difference in mentality more than anything else.
OK, but honestly it reads like you have been sitting around watching Fox News critiques of the Democratic party.
How do you feel about, say, Stacey Abrams?
ETA: Or, other end of the “time in the Dem limelight” spectrum, Nancy Pelosi?
I don’t watch Fox News. For that matter, I don’t read or watch any conservative news outlets, unless you’re counting libertarian sites like Reason or vaguely center-right publications like The Economist.
I honestly don’t know that much about Abrams’ policies, most of the news I heard about her was just focused on how awful her Republican opponent was. I have very mixed feelings on Pelosi; I respect her for supporting LGBT rights and marijuana legalization well before those were popular stances to take, and for opposing the Iraq War at a time when many Democrats supported it, but she also supported foreign interventionism in a lot of other cases, and she endorsed things like the PATRIOT Act and the PRISM surveillance program.
@LadyJane:
How do you feel about pragmatism as a general approach to politics (as set opposite to, say, ideological dogmatism)?
You name checked Sanders, who is not a Democrat, and identified a soda ban as being a Democratic position when it was enacted by Bloomberg, also not a Democrat.
Bloomberg is a life-long Democrat who ran for office as a Republican so that he could have a chance for Mayor in New York City.
Sanders is a life-long Socialist who ran for office as a Democrat so that he could have a chance for the Presidency in the USA.
I don’t think the Democrats can disown both. I’m more inclined to give you Sanders than Bloomberg, and for what it’s worth, it appears that de Blasio continues to advocate for Bloomberg’s soda ban.
When, exactly, have libertarians seized power, established a libertopia, and had everyone starve to death on them because there are no roads, or something? Because I’m struggling to think of examples of excess libertarianism failing disastrously in the last century or so.
The Cuyahoga River caught fire a total of 13 times between 1868 and 1969.
You could at least have gone with the Chicago boys in Chile or something more plausibly related to libertarianism.
No party had a serious environmental platform before the 20th century. Connecting the Cuyahoga River to libertarians requires assuming they would have policies like those of totally different parties (Democrats and Republicans of the mid 20th century). But since that environmental policy failure was shared by almost every nation and party for a long time… well… yeah.
May as well say libertarians would be masters of making for a great environment because they’d support markets in cap and trade or water rights because their solution to everything is “more markets”. There’s a vague ideological connection, but they’ve never accomplished much. Which seems like a more relevant criticism.
An absence of an environmental platform would be endemic to a libertarian approach. Environmental regulations are frequently decried as examples of excessive governmental control by libertarians.
And of course the environmental movement was already alive and well in the early 20th century. As an example, the national park system was established by Teddy Roosevelt as a response to environmental degradation caused by logging in the West.
Libertarians generally recognize that the system doesn’t deal well with externalities, so showing an example of externalities in action, only solved by government regulation of the commons, is an argument against libertarian approaches.
Because they go so far and address things that don’t have an impact or the impact is neutral in effect. A libertarian approach based in property rights would support anti-dumping or littering laws, for example.
The United States between 1868 and 1969 is a pretty non-central example of something not working out in practice.
It’s a study of disaster after disaster, unchecked by the hand of the market, eventually requiring government intervention and regulation to mitigate.
The fact that we can point to these disasters that the private market did not solve, and which government regulation did mitigate, is certainly not evidence for the libertarian position.
This is not to say that this argues against the market existing. Rather it’s simply evidence for regulation and market working well together. Regulated capitalism is what has a good track record.
The post civil war to new deal US was arguably the most successful state in the history of the world. It went from a collection of farmers on the edge of the world to the richest, most powerful, most technologically advanced society in the world, and its ideology went from fringe to the conventional wisdom of most of mankind, with. If that’s failure, egged on earth would success have looked like?
@cassander:
You asked for examples of “excess libertarianism failing disastrously”. I gave one, of many, many possible, in which a laissez-faire approach failed disastrously.
And it isn’t as if early America had an absence of regulation. There was occupational licensing, required inspections of goods, regulations on the use of appropriate behavior in harbors, etc. The fact that a regulated approach to capitalism led to a flourishing country isn’t any mark in favor of libertarian approaches.
But the most libertarian part of US history seems to correspond to a time when we had unprecedented economic growth and social progress. We had disasters, too–as our current much-less-libertarian society does. But overall the picture looks pretty good to me. Perhaps not mainly because of the libertarian policies, but still, those policies don’t seem to have been an obvious failure overall.
Then early America can’t really serve as an answer to “When, exactly, have libertarians seized power…” And if the regulated approach to capitalism gets the credit for the flourishing country, how does it escape the blame for the river fires that came along with it? It always reminds me of one of those marriages where “our son” turns into “your son” the moment he misbehaves.
@heelBearCub says:
again, that period was one of the most overall successful periods in human history. that it wasn’t perfect is not much of an argument. especially given the results produced by the alternatives.
Paul Zrimsek’s critique would be mine. You can’t simultaneously claim that the period was a disaster because it wasn’t regulated, and a success because it was.
I, pointedly, did not claim the “period” was a disaster.
You are arguing against your preferred claim, not one I made.
The question was asked “When has excess libertarianism ever failed disastrously?” I gave an example. A claim was implicitly made that libertarian impulses have no downsides and don’t lead to failure and I disproved it.
If I asked “when has regulation ever failed disastrously?” and you provided an example, which you easily could, I can’t disprove the example by pointing to other, different, good things that come from regulation.
There ARE downsides to regulation, I am not claiming otherwise. But the absence of regulation in service of freedom also has downsides, and there are examples of it.
Do you really want to argue that having the Cuyahoga catch on fire again is a more preferable world? Because that appears to be the argument you are leaning into…
@HeelBearCub says:
And you accuse me of arguing against my preferred claim, not one I made? No one has ever claimed such a thing.
And my point was that downsides are not the same thing as disasters. capitalism has never failed as badly as the alternatives, and the alternatives have never succeeded as well.
Let’s do some actual analysis here. How many people were hurt by those river fires? How many people were helped by the economic growth that the practices that led to the river fires caused? Because I’ll bet that the latter was far greater than the former. You can’t just shout “thing not perfect, freedom bad” you have to show that the absence of freedom would have actually been better.
Alright, so how would you reframe this statement to make it clearer?
” I’m struggling to think of examples of excess libertarianism failing disastrously in the last century or so.”
What is “libertarianism” as opposed to a fully a libertarian state? What work is “excess of” doing in that sentence?
If you simply want to restrict yourself to the claim that we haven’t seen any fully libertarian states, I am going to concede that. But … it doesn’t really seem germane to what LadyJane was asking.
I am going to ask again, do you really want to argue that having the Cuyahoga catch on fire again is a more preferable world? Is that the thesis that you wish to defend? I don’t read you as claiming that people won’t openly dump waste into waterways in the absence of regulation.
@HeelBearCub says:
“Not perfect” is not synonym for “failing disastrously”, especially in the context of a conversation where failing disastrously includes tens of millions starving to death.
I think debating what constitutes a “fully” anything state is an exercise is futility. My claim is that there are states that were much more libertarian than the contemporary US and that they never suffered anything like the disasters visiting on the states much less libertarian than the contemporary US.
My point is that we don’t face a choice between clean river and dirty river. We face a choice between a clean river with the associated costs/benefits, and a dirty river with the associated costs/benefits. If the only costs of the dirty river were that it smelled bad and occasionally caught fire while the benefit was substantial economic growth in a poor society, that strikes me as a pretty good deal, especially because priorities change over time. Spending billions to keep the river clean in 1869 would be a much worse choice than spending billions to keep it clean today, because modern society can better afford it.
Shouting “It was a river. That was on fire!” is a great political slogan, but it’s not a cogent argument. To be a cogent argument you have to show that the river catching fire is worse than the actual alternatives that existed at the time, not an imaginary cost free clean river. In the long run though, few things will do more good for more people than a higher rate of economic growth, so we should be very wary of embarking on large scale, expensive efforts that are likely to reduce it, especially when the costs are not transparent, and the costs of environmental regulation are usually quite opaque.
Yes, I am very clearly aware of this.
Which is why I am very specifically asking the question do you want to make the trade-off to the dirty river?
And you seem unwilling to bite that bullet. Rather you appear to be simply saying we can “afford” it now. But if the world were actually better on net, you would simply prefer to live in that world. Or perhaps you might be making the calculation that, although the benefits would outweigh the costs, you wouldn’t be getting the benefits. Or maybe, now that others have payed the costs of dirty rivers, you would like to retain the benefits gained from prior activity without yourself having to experience the negative outcomes associated with it.
Yes, the river being on fire makes a nice light by which we can highlight the extent of the environmental degradation. It, of course, doesn’t represent the totality of the costs associated with unregulated pollution. I mean, what did the Romans ever do for us besides sanitation?
And of course that just represents one aspect of regulation. For one with a more obvious body count we might look at things like the Johnstown Flood, or the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Or we could look the failure to comply with or enforce regulation and examine fires like, say, the Hamlet processing plant fire where emergency exits were locked (similar to the triangle fire and for the same reasons).
Certainly, economic activity is beneficial and regulation contains costs as well as benefits. Certainly we would like regulations to be effective and deliver the benefits they promise without undue cost. Certainly circumspection is warranted and even laudable.
But an ideological opposition to regulation in general? That seems like … a disaster.
I said explicitly that I think the dirty river was the right choice in 1869.
where you stand depends on where you sit. I would like to have a lexus, but if my choice is between the lexus and paying rent, I choose rent.
These are just about the most uncharitable possible interpretations of my position.
I never claimed it did.
Yes, specifically you’re highlighting the benefits, not the costs. And that’s hugely problematic.
No, the disaster is the suffering caused by poverty. Economic growth fixes that better than anything else. Being ideologically disposed against something that gets in the way of the of the single most important way of improving human welfare is not a disaster, especially given the known limitations of the method you’re advocating.
@cassander:
And what of 1969? Do you think industry should have been allowed to continue in their practices?
I’m actually highlighting the costs of failure to regulate. Specifically examples of failings in a disastrous manner. My claim is that these are examples of “libertarianism failing in a disastrous manner”.
Of course, in many cases, we did then choose to regulate. These aren’t examples of the US being a libertarian state. I readily concede that.
Look, if you were to claim that Paradise and the Camp Fire was an example of fire suppression regulations failing in a disastrous manner, I would readily concede this. What I wouldn’t do is try to claim that the Camp Fire wasn’t an example of a disastrous failure because the number of wooded acres in the US has held steady since 1900.
@HeelBearCub says:
To know that I’d have to have a good idea of what the cost in 1969 actually was. What that cost is is decidedly opaque, which is a huge part of the problem with regulation. I would be much more comfortable with trying to impose environmental mandates if they were done in ways that made costs explicit and worked through markets.
You’re right, you’re highlighting the implied benefits of regulation, not even the actual benefits, by pointing out the supposed cost of non-regulation, ignoring that it’s far from clear that regulation actually solved the problem in a cost effective manner.
A few comments on the running exchange between HBC and Cassander:
1. It isn’t clear that the Cuyahuga catching fire is the result of libertarian policies. Libertarians believe in property rights as a central institution for solving the coordination problem. The legal system created by the government did not, I gather, recognize anyone’s property rights in the river. One alternative would be the river having an owner, who could then balance costs and benefits of permitting pollution, allowing for the costs to himself of lawsuits by people injured by his river—loosely analogous to the situation of English trout streams. Another would be some combination of riparian rights and the common law of nuisance, where land owners along the river banks had rights to continue making use of it in the way they had in the past.
But whether or not that is true of the specific case of the Cuyahoga, there clearly can be cases, such as diffuse air pollution or climate change, where there is no practical property rights way of getting the optimal outcome.
2. The problem arises because of situations where the individual decision maker is not bearing the bulk of the net cost from his decision. Such situations can exist in even a well designed private property system, but they are the exception, not the rule. They are the rule in a political system. The individual voter bears a trivial fraction of the costs or benefits of his decision at the ballot box. The individual legislator bears a trivial fraction of the costs, receives a trivial fraction of the benefits, from his legislative acts. Similarly, mutatis mutandis, for the judge or the bureaucrat. HBC’s argument depends on expecting governments, on the whole, to make the correct regulatory decisions, but we have no mechanism that predictably results in their doing so. A correct analysis of the underlying economics of trade was worked out about two hundred years ago, but very few governments have acted according to its implication–even though the few exceptions were very successful. And the reason is that the same policy that is unprofitable for the nation is politically profitable, because of the way the costs and benefits are distributed–details available for the curious if wanted.
3. As Cassander keeps pointing out, the question is whether the costs of regulation are more or less than the benefits. HBC wants to know if we are better off with the Cuyahoga sometimes burning. One of Peltzman’s statistical articles estimated that the effect of one change in drug regulation was to reduce the rate at which new medical drugs were introduced roughly in half with no detectable improvement in average quality.
How many people dying because regulation prevents the drugs that would save their lives from coming to market represent a price we should be willing to pay to keep the Cuyahoga from burning?
We don’t have the option of only having regulation when it produces good effects.
Finally, my wife, from the Cleveland area, suggests that HBC’s account of the Cuyahoga fires is exaggerated. A little googling produces the following factoids:
and, about the final 1969 fire:
(Both here)
That sounds like a set of pretty wimpy, if showy, disasters.
@DavidFreidman
I think the burning is not the primary concern, it is just the most visible symptom of the problem (that the river was filthy). Not so much “the river catching on fire was an expensive and dangerous disaster” but “that the river was so polluted that it caught on fire semi-frequently was a tragedy”. Or at least that’s my take.
Why does the Volga Catch Fire, New York Times, 1971
According to the webbed piece I read, Cleveland was drawing its water from the lake, so was willing to treat the Cuyahoga as a sewer. That isn’t a very aesthetic policy, but it might be the correct one, depending on the cost of alternatives.
That presumes that the Cuyahoga wasn’t poisoning the (very large) lake in any significant way.
It’s not nearly as disastrous as the worst communist states, but the United States was forced to abandon the Articles of Confederation because the central government was too weak.
A more serious objection, I think, is that depending on your definition of libertarian, I can’t think of any examples where libertarians have seized power at all, or anything that might count as a “libertopia”–I guess having no real-world examples to point at is better than having disastrous real-world models, but it still suggests a set of ideas better suited to theory than practice.
Can anyone elaborate on what the specific problems were? I figure defense is a big one, but I really don’t know.
Defense was definitely a biggie: it was impossible to raise a navy to fight the Barbary corsairs, for example, and the federal government was unable to raise the troops to put down Shays’ rebellion. The government couldn’t fund soldiers’ pensions, ratify treaties (including the Treaty of Paris for a number of months), or raise taxes without serious difficulty, which made it difficult to pay off debts incurred during the war of independence.
The Federalist papers probably gives a good overview of the reasons the pro-federalists wanted to move to a stronger union, though I don’t know them well enough to suggest a particular subset.
EDIT: Federalist 15 seems likely to be relevant.
I find this example much better than HBC’s.
I think there’s good reason to believe that libertarian polities (at least anarcho-capitalist ones, maybe not minarchist) would not be stable even if they could somehow exist. Some other more centralized group will grind you under their boot, or random looters will find easy pickings. Eventually some group will seize power and bring things back to equilibrium.
Or more speculatively, even markets have lots of little command and control organizations that make them up. The optimal size of these little command and control organizations is going to depend up on the function they serve. Companies replacing government will die or grow until they reach this size and this size may be roughly the size of a state government or even bigger loosely defined (number of functions subsumed by one company, people bound together by contracts with with it, revenue, some combination of the above, etc.).
If you’re talking about the Articles of Confederation a paragraph earlier, I’m pretty sure you are claiming that libertarians seized power in 1776.
And for that matter, I think most non-anarchist libertarians would point to the first century of Constitutional government in the United States, and the corresponding period in the UK, as being more libertarian than not and with the “not” being dominated by the unfortunate exclusion of women and people of color from the benefits of liberty. So unless you’re going to argue that this exclusion was necessary for the successes of the ~19th-century US and UK, that’s a good argument for libertarian ideals being able to take and hold a fair share of a society’s power and to good effect.
Indeed, the reason we had to invent the term “libertarian” is that the word we used to use to describe the ideology in question when it was a major player in Anglospheric politics, had been corrupted to a very different meaning.
This is exactly correct
The phrase “a more serious objection” is meant to signal that I do not think it obvious that the Articles of Confederation should count; cassander and Jane are welcome to elaborate on what qualifies as “libertarian” for them. And even with all that said, “existed for 13 years before being replaced due to dysfunctionality” isn’t the most dramatic improvement over “never existed”.
As to the 19th century United States: it’s true the worst features of the 19th century United States were not very libertarian, and I don’t think that slavery was necessary for the government of the time to remain libertarian–I do though, note, that in order to actually end the worst, most un-libertarian elements of the United States required an expansion of federal power, not a diminishment.
While it’s not strictly a necessity, I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the pithy phrase for a libertarian constitutional order is also the predominant legal principle used to argue against extending liberty to people of colour.
There are quite a lot of examples of more libertarian/less libertarian systems. England in the 19th century and Hong Kong in the 20th were more libertarian than most contemporary systems and very successful.
To balance HBC’s concerns about environmental problems due to lack of government intervention, consider the Love Canal story, at least as I understand it. Hooker Chemical company took a section of an old canal, lined the banks with clay to prevent leakage, and used it to dispose of dangerous chemicals. The local government forced Hooker to sell the land to them with the threat of eminent domain, then resold it to a developer who, despite warnings from Hooker, breached the clay lining, allowing the dangerous chemicals to get out and do damage.
And Hooker got blamed for a catastrophe that was the fault of the local government.
Anyone who has evidence that that account is not correct is welcome to point at it—it’s the story as I remember it.
For a more recent example, the explanation of the recent serious wildfire in California seems to be that government regulation under environmentalist pressure prevented the logging activities that would have, in the past had, prevented the buildup of deadwood that made the forests so vulnerable. Again, any one who has sources debunking that interpretation of the facts is welcome to point them out.
For a third example, from my geologist wife, the Army Corps of Engineers has, for a very long time, been preventing the Mississippi from changing its mouth, which is what normally happens when a delta gets too long. The result is that the soil brought down by the Mississippi gets dumped over the edge of the continental shelf into deep water, hence no longer washes back to balance the effect of land sinking from the overburden of past deliveries from the river, with the result that the coastline is moving gradually north. And when they do finally lose control of the river, the effects will be interesting.
It isn’t enough to show that relatively libertarian systems did not do a good job of dealing with environmental problems. To make his argument, HBC has to show that more interventionist systems on average do better with regard to such problems.
Long term excessive fire suppression is most definitely an issue with our current wildfires. It has left an overly dense fuel load of dead wood and small brush.
Of course logging isn’t particularly interested in clearing the little stuff that more frequent, smaller, less intense wildfires would burn. They want the big mature trees.
I know this is a talking point on the right, but I’m not aware of the idea that “logging stops wildfires” holds any merit.
In order for the trees to get big and mature, they have to not burn. Clearing out the flammable underbrush would help keep those fires down.
@greenwoodj:
Removing large trees leads to a flourishing of small growth, it also leaves lots of debris behind. AFAIK, fire suppression is then required to allow that growth to mature.
Whereas frequent small fires among mature trees tend to clear out small growth and leaves the mature growth in place. When excess fire suppression allows fuel loads to rise, wildfires are then more likely to damage the mature growth, as the fires burn hotter and longer.
Logging trees at maturity just eliminates the point where the old growth inhibits the small brush that leads to easily started wildfires.
That’s why you have to actively manage forests you cut in. If you don’t, you lose your stock.
The Irish potato famine?
“Oh, no, we can’t stop food exports, that might interfere with the market!”
@cassander
Really you can’t?
After the fall of the Soviet Union the Yeltsin administration followed the advise of western economists and implemented radical neoliberal “shock therapy” policies. Starting in the nineteen seventies China fallowed a different path and pursued a gradual policy of transition to a mixed economy where state control of the commanding heights of was balanced against a market mechanism.
Between 1991 and 1998 Russia lost around a third of it’s real gross domestic product, with disastrous human consequences( In Post Soviet Russia market free you!). On the other hand, since it’s reforms China has been the greatest economic success story, certainly of the twentieth century, and perhaps in human history. You can’t do controlled experiments in economics, but the transition from Communism is as close as you’re ever going to get, and the results fly in the face of the predictions of neoliberal economists.
In somewhat looser sense almost almost every third world country suffers from an excess of “libertarianism”, or at least a from a lack of effective state intervention in the economy. Billions of people around the world live in poverty thanks in great part because “because there are no roads, or something”. If you wan’t to see a libertarian dystopia look at Guatemala, or maybe Pakistan.
Both are countries where the state collects little in the way of taxes, engages in minimal regulation of the domestic economy (barriers to foreign trade are a different question), provides little in the way of services to it’s citizens, and spends most of it’s time protecting private property rights (at lest when it comes to the property of the elite). Guatemala even has an abundance those “private defense agencies” that David Friedman is so fond of; i’ll leave it to you do judge the effectiveness of such local firms as Los Zetas, MS-13, and Calle 18 at providing public security.
You can try to argue that those are not real examples of libertarianism, but that’s kind of the point. Beyond a certain point the true results of the withering away of state is not a utopia of voluntary cooperation but corrupt, unstable, low trust societies riven by brutal social conflict. Marxists will argue that no Communist state was ever really Communist, perhaps they’re right. But I tend to think that’s just proof that the dictatorship of the proletariat was always going to be a pretty bad deal for the actual proletariat.
I used to be a libertarian, but the fact is that a close examination of social and economic history shows that libertarianism has been falsified.
No, they didn’t. The russian federation started doing sock therapy then reversed course after about 6 months, and today have one of the most statist economies in the world. the countries that pursued shock therapy and stuck to it, had the most successful transitions.
In other words, they adopted more libertarian policies and they succeeded massively.
No, they don’t. most developing countries have corrupt, intrusive state that stifle growth. there is a very strong correlation between economic freedom and GDP per capita.
You mean number 77 and 131 on the economic freedom index? Yeah, not libertarian. A corrupt state is not withering away.
This is straightup false.
I think this is a common misconception, where a place is too poor to afford infrastructure, and thus you can assume its because the government isn’t doing it. The reality for those countries is they don’t have any disposable income, and their GDP/capita is similar to sustenance levels. For example, almost every African country is a net importer of Food, because they can’t grow enough to feed their population. A place like Somalia has 15 million people in it, but less human capital and disposable income than the 2.5 Million American colonists did in 1776.
You’re a genuine libertarian, not an anarchist-disguised-as-libertarian, basically.
Could you explain the distinction you are making? The claim that a stateless society would be freer and more attractive than alternative institutions may or may not be correct, but how is it non-libertarian?
Libertarianism is normally minarchist, and anarchists confuse the issue by claiming that they’re libertarian. The difference between a night-watchman state and no state is huge, and it’s a bit frustrating to constantly have to push past all of the easy arguments against strawmanned anarchism when discussing libertarianism.
They’re similar and share many of the same principles, but they’re hardly the same.
I don’t know what you mean by that—there have been libertarians who identified as anarchist for at least the past fifty years. Is your point that more libertarians identify as minarchist than anarchist?
That confuses the issue only if it isn’t true. You are assuming your conclusion.
Yes. The difference between Catholics and Baptists is pretty big too, but they are all Christians.
What do you take to be the defining characteristics of libertarianism?
And if you want a word to embrace the grouping, you’re in a much better position to develop one than I. But the anarchists also claiming the libertarian label is like the Baptists also claiming they’re Catholic. Right now, largely complements of the Progressives and the non-Communist Anarchists, there’s no word that exclusively applies to people who want a small state with limited responsibility. In fact, we’ve lost two and the only reason we can still use libertarian at all is that the Anarchy movement is only large enough to confuse it, not to displace it.
(Incidentally, I used to joke that I’m sufficiently bull-headed that I would argue medicine with a doctor. Pretty sure arguing the definition of Libertarianism with David frickin’ Friedman 1-ups that. :D)
You are again assuming your conclusion–that propertarian anarchists are not libertarians. You haven’t offered any defense of that claim–just repeated assertion. You haven’t even explained what the defining features of “libertarian” are, although you apparently believe that one of them is wanting a government.
Suppose it turns out that an anarcho-capitalist system results in a more libertarian outcome, individuals more free to live their own lives, rights better protected, than the governmental alternative. Will you then conclude that you were not a libertarian and I was? If so, don’t you have to actually respond to the anarcho-capitalist arguments, rather than simply defining them as not libertarians?
They are called minarchists.
Earlier:
—
No. I’m not saying anarcho-capitalism is bad. I’m just saying it’s not libertarian, because of the separate stances on government.
(Although, I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer to how anarchist territories aren’t immediately conquered.)
Yeah, over the past decade we just managed to get the general public to get a vague grasp of what “libertarian” means. You’ll forgive me if I don’t take you up on that.
So the general public will never understand what “libertarian” means until they all agree with one another? Hope you’ve got a comfortable place to wait that one out!
I consider myself a libertarian and an ancap. To me, ancap is just taking the libertarian moral and economic foundations to their extreme.
Morally, the non-aggression principle taken consistently would be opposed to coercive taxation even if it is for police, military, and courts. Economically, libertarians get that markets work better than government for the provision of consumer electronics, food, and cars; ancaps use the same economic reasoning to suggest that markets rather than politics should provision security and law.
I understand the objections that the majority of libertarians would have against the small ancap subset of libertarians (I used to have those same objections myself!), but to me it’s the same political family. Similarly, lower tax/lower regulation libertarians may have disputes with minarchist libertarians, but they’re in the same family too.
Absolutely. I’m just sick of dealing with “But Somalia!” when I mention Libertarianism because of the line-smudging. That’s the AnCap’s problem, not the Libertarian’s one.
Anarcho-capitalism is different from minarchism. Where do you get the idea that that difference is part of the definition of “libertarian,” such that only one of the two qualifies?
I don’t think I have yet gotten you to give your definition of “libertarian.”
I devoted one chapter to the subject in the first edition of The Machinery of Freedom, an additional chapter in the third edition.
I can’t tell from this discussion how long you have been involved with the libertarian movement. The distinction between the minarchist and anarchist versions goes back at least the fifty some years I have been involved with it.
I do have to read your book.
I think I’m going to white-flag the rest of it. I think my position ended up more calcified than I intended it to be, mostly out of a generalized frustration with stretching the meaning of words to meaningless.
“Every once in a while I’ll reflect upon the fact that I don’t really fit in with any political movement, and it’s kind of discouraging.”
Maybe it’s because you’re an individual human being, a person, not a Party-line drone. Maybe it’s actually something to cherish? How you vote is not in the top ten most important things about you.
I agree with this. My votes aren’t even top 100 most important things I do each year. Your contribution to your friends, your family, and your job will totally overwhelm the miniscule contribution voting makes. Keeping yourself as healthy as possible and reducing the pressure on the welfare state is probably be a bigger contribution to the good of everyone else than voting or being a more informed voter. And that’s ignoring the benefits of improved health to yourself. If you are a government employee, what your job does exactly will be much more important than who the current administration is.
If you’re thinking about being a politician and that’s why you’re sad, my advice is don’t. But if you have to and your goal isn’t just power but rather improving something, you should focus on horse trading.
If it makes you feel better, no one agrees with any one political movement unless they’re like, a tankie whose identity is bound up in always reflecting the party line. You just have to do what the rest of us do: find a coalition that fits you a little better than the others and vote for them once every few years, and otherwise don’t get too caught up in that identity.
Or, if your political identities matter a lot to you, and you wish they were better represented, join your marginally-preferred party and try to push it in your direction; or join various action groups and organizations to advocate for your preferred causes.
You’ll want to check out the Niskanen Center if you haven’t already. I don’t know if that counts as a “place” in the sense you want, but it is a place where most of the prominent people might well describe themselves as “libertarian social democrats”.
I’m familiar with them, they might be the only American political organization whose views really match my own. I actually considered applying for their summer internship program earlier this year, but I decided I’d be better off using this time to finally complete my thesis.
In the UK the Liberal Democrats, the distant-third party, is the result of the merger of the Liberal Party with the Social Democrats.
> but they go way too far to the left with some of their fiscal policies (“socialism can totally work this time, I swear!”)
Two things.
1.”Progressives” are not actually socialists – as James Connolly put it – “state ownership and control is not necessarily Socialism – if it were, then the Army, the Navy, the Police, the Judges, the Gaolers, the Informers, and the Hangmen, all would all be Socialist functionaries, as they are State officials – but the ownership by the State of all the land and materials for labour, combined with the co-operative control by the workers of such land and materials, would be Socialism.”
2″Socialism will work this time” is not something that actual socialists say, it’s just a right-wing meme.
They unquestionably are socialist functionaries.
No, they usually denied it failed last time. Just look at how venezeula was celebrated until the collapse, and how now it’s “Not real socialism”.
>They unquestionably are socialist functionaries.
If you want to use some strange colloquial definition of socialism where its defined as the state doing things then that’s your prerogative but that’s not what most people mean by it. Socialists don’t use that definition so it makes no sense to engage with us using that definition, in fact its unconstructive.
>No, they usually denied it failed last time. Just look at how venezeula was celebrated until the collapse, and how now it’s “Not real socialism”.
Putting aside the fact that Jimmy Carter was never and is not a socialist, no socialist actually calls Venezuela a socialist state, indeed we never have. The whole “Venezuela is socialist” myth is one spawned by anti-socialists who either don’t know what socialism is, dont know anything about the actual social character of Venezuelan society or wanted to call it that for ideological convenience or a combination of the above. You wont find a single quote from a socialist calling Venezuela socialist, socialists like Corbyn have rightly so praised Chavez’s live-changing reforms but that’s not the same as calling it socialism.
No, I’m defining it as the state ownership of the means of production, which the prisons and military definitely are. It’s the definition socialists have used for almost 2 decades. That socialists often dislike the results of what they call for is their problem, not mine.
Except, of course, the socialists who run Venezuela and his many supporters around the world.
But I suppose now you’ll say those aren’t real socialists, which nicely proves my point about the inability of socialists to own up to their failures.
@cassander
>No, I’m defining it as the state ownership of the means of production, which the prisons and military definitely are.
Except we do not use that definition either. Socialism is the social control of the means of production which is significantly different. You’re definition excludes Anarcho-Communists, who no socialists denies are socialists.
>Except, of course, the socialists who run Venezuela
Chavez always made it clear Venezuela was on the parliamentary road to socialism (as evident from the Chavez quotes in the article), as opposed to actually being a socialist state
>But I suppose now you’ll say those aren’t real socialists, which nicely proves my point.
The first article don’t call Venezuela socialist, perhaps you could quote them where they do? The second article is a capitalist publication, not a socialist one. A quick google search would show that journal is funded by the US congress.
If you start defining state financed armies, jails, judges as socialist, then every society since the dawn of civilization is socialist, and it stops being a useful definition.
What even is “social control”?
Lets say we re-appropriate everything to the workers. Why wouldn’t they just end up selling their interests to other people? If we ban that isn’t that also totalitarian? Isn’t it worse for the worker if he loses his job and his retirement when 1 company goes under instead of only losing his job when his money is invested in other companies?
@ana53294 says:
that you have a socialist institution or two doesn’t mean you are a socialist country/society, but a national army is definitely collective ownership of the means of production of violence, and thus quintessentially socialist.
“Socialism” is a word that means lots of different things to different people. The standard economic definition is government ownership and control of the means of production. By that definition the army, the court system, the public school system, and a variety of other features of modern developed societies are socialist.
That doesn’t mean the countries are socialist–because there are other important means of production that are privately owned and controlled. But it does mean that there are socialist institutions within what are commonly referred to as capitalist countries.
That’s a very fuzzy definition—what does “social control” mean? One possible meaning is “control by the government,” but you don’t seem to like that.
In a capitalist society, the means of production are controlled by the interaction of the people in the society. If consumers don’t want to eat broccoli, the capitalists who own broccoli fields produce something else. If most workers would much rather work four ten hour days than five eight hour days, employers find that running their factories that way is more profitable.
If the conventional economic description of how a market works is correct (you may believe it isn’t), does it follow that capitalism is socialism–social control, exercised through market interactions?
If not, what does “social control” mean?
@DavidFriedman
>The standard economic definition is government ownership and control of the means of production.
But that isn’t how socialists define socialism. What’s the point in defining a word a certain way if the people who self-identify with that word don’t even define it that way?
>That’s a very fuzzy definition—what does “social control” mean? One possible meaning is “control by the government,” but you don’t seem to like that.
Social control is where things are based on common ownership, common ownership is not the same as government ownership. Government ownership is just where the government comes into possession of a thing, if the thing taken possession of is still run for the purpose of personal profit then its not common ownership.
And I have no idea what you mean by “common ownership” other than government ownership, don’t know if you do.
The owner of something gets to control it. What does it mean for ten million people to own something?
One possible answer is “it is controlled by a government whose citizens are those people,” but you reject that answer. What is yours?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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?
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.
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?
@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.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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
@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.
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.
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.
@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.
@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.
@Le Maistre Chat
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?
Different states have different race make-ups and different wealth levels. A univariate analysis is useless.
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.
@LadyJane
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.
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.
@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.
The teachers and classrooms may well be underfunded in DC, but the school system almost certainly is *not* underfunded.
@Edward Scizorhands
Is there a single state in the country without a teacher’s union?
@greenwoodjw:
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Literally nothing. It just sounds nice.
toastengineer banned for six months for this and several other comments
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”.
This seems close to the mark: “US economy=capitalism; US economy seems unfair; fuck capitalism.”
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.
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.
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.
I asked for workable systems.
Maybe women shouldn’t spend their most fertile years chasing careers so they can slave for The Man?
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?
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.
I fail to see how coarsening social relations is a benefit.
“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.
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.
If you are a man, you may perhaps be ignoring the disadvantages of patriarchy for women.
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
JamestownJanestown, 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.
@ Conrad:
Walk this back to something plausible, like “these things never happen to people that
know their placemy preferred system is optimized for”.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.
This, but unironically. You don’t get credit for reforms forced on you by opposing parties.
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.
@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.
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.
@ Dan L:
Whatever point you’re trying to make, I think you’d make it more effectively if you cut out the concern trolling.
@Conrad Honcho
You write
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 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.)
@DinoNerd: Your post was quite good, up until this part (emphasis mine):
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.
@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.
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.
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.
@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.
_______________________________
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.
@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 childrenmasturbate myself on my prostitute-servant.@LadyJane
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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 at above replacement (something like 2.1 or 2.3). If anyone knows what I’m talking about, do you have a link?
@Conrad
You’re assuming that high-birthrate social values can be passed down reliably enough that the patriarchy inherits the Earth. Is there any reason you don’t expect a long, slow decline?
Look, women have demonstrated some degree of disfavor for having children. You keep presuming that women want to have children, but this assumption contravenes the available evidence.
I know you love and want for the best for your kids. No idea whether you have a daughter, but let’s imagine you do. Imagine your daughter grows up, moves out, shacks up with a nice guy and still doesn’t have kids. You ask her why. “We don’t have enough space. It’d be stressful. I don’t want to move back with you and Mom. I don’t think I could handle being a stay-at-home mom.”
What do you say to her? She has priorities, a life she’s not particularly unhappy with, independence, a good relationship with a loving husband, and no kids. Maybe she wants them, but not enough to sacrifice the above for them. Do you tell her that she’s
Or maybe that
Or that she
These might be true from your perspective, but they aren’t particularly convincing. The “””problem””” here is that she doesn’t want to bear the cost. And having kids always carries a cost. In order to make the alternative attractive, it seems like the only real alternative is raising the cost of not having children for her.
You could pester her to have kids every time you see her, or disown her, or something else that would bring down her quality of life, but would you do that to your own flesh and blood for the sake of The Birthrates?
Most people wouldn’t.
I tell them to focus their efforts on things that will bring lasting joy to their lives, as they do to mine, and not on temporary comforts. I point out that a women will often regret putting off childbearing, assuming that they can do so at any time, but that they, like their mother, may find their fertile years cut short and grow to regret misordering priorities. I tell them that I find it is a shame to cut off the chain of generations for fear of minor inconveniences or missing the latest toys, and probably mention my own disappointment at not being able to visit affections on grandchildren, with the implication that they may also feel this regret someday, not to mention also missing out on the relationships with grown children that can’t be replicating or likely approximated by transient modern friendships. I mention the dearth of space we had growing up, and how we wouldn’t have traded one of them for acres more.
Should they find themselves unmoved for this, I mourn quietly in private and pray I am mistaken and that they are able to satisfactorily fill the maternal lack with vacations and cats.
@Hoopyfreud
If I can I’ll try to find the breakdown of birthrates by region and race. That should demonstrate that the declining birthrates are rather localized to the Femtocracy, but the Patriarchy is alive and well out here in the Red States. Remember 53% of white women Betrayed the Sisterhood and voted Trump. The Amish will do fine, the Mormons will do fine, the Muslims will do fine, we Catholics are doing fine. If the 0.9 children/woman birthrate for white urbanites is accurate, the decline will be neither long nor slow. It will be short and fast for those who have placed as priorities absolutely everything that reduces one’s chances of reproduction. Promiscuity, homosexuality, delayed marriage, abortion, female career advancement, etc. These are clustered memes, sacred values to the Blue Tribe, but not the Red Tribe.
I don’t think it does? Do you have any recent surveys about to what extent women want to have kids? And again how does that break down by locality? I was under the impression as Aapje said that current childlessness is more people being unable to have kids rather than not wanting them.
I do have a daughter. In your example it seems that she wants to have kids but can’t afford it? I would give her money.
No, I’d just give her money. I’m financially stable now and expect that by the time she’s old enough to marry I’ll be much better off than I am now.
Well, no, I’m just going to mainly avoid exposing her to foolish Girl Power Careerist memes and instead expose her to pro-family memes, the most important being the example her mom and I set for her. That should probably take care of it, and if not it’s the same old problem of “well, I did my best, now it’s up to the kids” that every parent has dealt with since Adam and Eve. Nature pretty much takes care of this stuff. You have to propagandize people away from the Natural Order of Things in order to have a problem (like the memes I listed above) so…just don’t do that and you’ll probably be fine. If not, c’est la vie.
I think you’re under the mistaken impression that The Femtocracy has already conquered the world. No, just the Blue Tribe. So it might look like the whole world because the shows on TV are all made by the Blue Tribe, but out here in Redstateopia we switched that dumb thing off a long time ago.
Uhhhhhhhh…”when am I getting grandkids” is a constant refrain. It’s partly why I suggested my wife tell HER mom about our fertility issues, because they were getting antsy for grandkids and the questions/expectations were getting painful for her.
I can’t speak for Conrad, but I strongly suspect that my daughters and sons will want to have kids, because they will be around other young people that also have kids. It wouldn’t be anymore unusual than going to college, just another expected life milestone. The real challenge will be making sure my children do not make colossal mistakes along the way that PREVENT that.
If people don’t get credit for reforms forced on them, do they get blamed for bad things forced on them? Because if they do, you end up with a situation similar to this Asymmetric Justice lesswrong post, except that instead of “there is no ethical action under complexity”, you get “there is no ethical action under force”.
@DinoNerd
While I otherwise whole-heartedly agree with 100% of your post, this seems extreme, uncharitable, and needlessly inflammatory. And I say that as someone who generally doesn’t mind spicing up arguments with a bit of hyperbole.
@Conrad Honcho:
Honestly, everyone should learn to cook, at least on a rudimentary level. Our society does a very poor job teaching children the basic essentials of how to live their day-to-day lives. I’d be fine with bringing back cooking classes and carpentry classes, and if some men learned to cook while some women learned carpentry, I’d be fine that too.
Doesn’t the same apply for men too? You could just as easily ask why men should have to do the thankless drudgery of pushing papers and answering phones instead of traditionally masculine work like building houses. And a few men do choose to go full Ted Kaczynski and withdraw from society, build their own home with their bare hands, and live off the land out in the woods somewhere. But despite being a much more traditionally masculine way of life, the vast majority of men don’t opt for that choice.
As you mentioned, we live in an interconnected society. And some thankless drudgery needs to be done in order to keep society functioning, even if the impact of that work isn’t immediately visible in the same way that building a house is. It’s not very emotionally rewarding, because it’s hard to find any real sense of pride or satisfaction in getting TPS reports done on time, but until we reach full automation for white-collar work, someone needs to do it. The simple economic fact is, capitalism apparently needs paper pushers and call center workers more than it needs housewives and mothers.
Because in the past, when we did have strict patriarchal social norms, it was almost always detrimental to asexual women, queer women, ambitious career-oriented women, independent libertine women who wanted to travel and experience the world, and women who simply didn’t like the idea of getting married or having kids.
Maybe it’s possible to have a traditional system that’s a little more flexible and willing to tolerate exceptions, as long as they don’t become the norm. But I hope you can understand why social progressives don’t have a lot of faith in that working out, given the course of history.
I think that has a lot more to do with minimum wage laws, labor regulations, and perverse incentives than a straight-up lack of people.
@Adrian & LadyJane
The idea of “wife” as being a combination of (contracted) prostitute, servant, etc. comes from a female child in the early ’70s, who had developed a serious case of feminism, and was pushing back against attempts to make her change her behaviour to be more “attractive”.
She intended to support herself in some non-traditional role rather than relying on a husband, and therefore insisted loudly that she didn’t need to take Home Economics, learn how to use makeup, or pay attention to fashion. The same child also insisted that “effeminate” and “feminine” were synonyms, to the consternation of her grade 9 English teacher.
I figure that in an age with more strongly enforced gender roles, this kid would either have eventually abandoned her birth community and taken on a male identity elsewhere, or become a suicide and/or mental health statistic.
She’s my mental image for the type of person who gets harmed by strongly enforced gender roles.
And the image of “masturbating with someone’s body” – there I’m just imagining the experience (or expectation) of e.g. a lesbian who “settles” for marriage in a culture that’s offering her only extremely limited choices, so as to promote their birthrate.
Because there’s little pressure on people to marry currently, at least in the west, it’s not likley that this is a common experience – not even for Aapje’s wife 🙁 But it is the obvious outcome of must-marry-to-avoid-penury and similar social rules.
Though I figure there’d also be a lot of women-not-attracted-to-men trying to attract the richest, oldest, lowest life expectancy husbands they can find, so as to spend the least amount of time possible married, and the longest as a comfortable widow. That’s of course unfair to the men involved, but presumably good for the birthrate.
@ The original Mr. X:
I’m flippant, but honest. In my experience, this topic is not at all unusual in grad/law/med school. I’ve yet to see anyone “ostracized from polite society” for discussing it appropriately, but pressing it on an arbitrary stranger when you have a clear agenda is creepy as fuck.
@ Randy M:
This approach is a fine one specifically from a parent to their child, more awkward the more tenuous the link. But please be careful in assuming that everyone has a offspring-shaped hole in their heart – weep not for that I do not share your utility function.
@ Conrad Honcho:
This can work, if it’s a known quantity and can be planned around. But it can also backfire, and it definitely doesn’t generalize. Yet. Build the Cathedral of the Miracle of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes, and I bet you’d have a lot of volunteers.
(Patent the tech and refuse to license it though, and the ethics get complicated again. Ditto with the government officially endorsing such a monopoly.)
@ Jiro:
Maybe I was unclear – I’m speaking of cultures, not persons. A culture gets a black mark for not fixing a problem while it was ascendant in a way that it wouldn’t if people in that society had alternatives.
(Does this mean Archipelago is preferred as a series of incommensurable societies? Sounds like a feature.)
But to elaborate my point, I’m deeply suspicious whenever someone targets the 1950s as a traditionalist golden age – either they’re actually in favor of things that would be deeply non-traditional for the vast, vast majority of western civilization, or the advice is just a particular flavor of “try being rich and privileged, that worked for me/Beaver“.
Aw, Dan you remembered the name of my daydream! Sweetheart, you!
I’m just saying, pick a meme. Evaluate the meme to see whether it’s pro-reproduction or anti. If it’s pro it’s probably red tribe. If it’s anti it’s probably blue. If you apply the memeplex to a population…what happens?
Re: cooking. Warning, slight ramble. Better point at the bottom.
I really hate to say it, but I only know of 2 women that know how to cook decently, and they are both in the same family (so probably something about their upbringing).
Most women (including my wife) have cooking skills ranging from abysmal to “meh.” My one sister-in-law doesn’t even have working pots and pans, my other sister-in-law doesn’t even have basic pantry ingredients. One of my friends thought she was a great chef because she prepared those Costco pre-prepared meals. One of my friends dated a girl who was shocked and surprised that he knew how to cook chicken (???). My sister, God bless her heart, asked her husband how to boil vegetables.
Now, as for the guys. Multiple (okay, 2), have been personally yelled at on TV by Gordon Ramsey. It’s just shocking how much care and effort the guys put into their cooking, and how much the girls just. Don’t. Give. A. Shit.
Broader point: Rudimentary cooking skills are not enough. People have higher incomes now and can afford to eat out more often, but this is a consumption trap, and a huge problem for your caloric and salt intakes. You should be able to cook well enough that you can produce a tasty meal that reduces your likelihood of wanting to go out. If your best home-cooking is inferior to McDonalds, you cannot cook good enough.
Also, Thanksgiving at my in-laws is fucking horrible. They ALL need to learn how to cook. Kraft Mac&Cheese is better than what they make.
@Hoopyfreud
I think that society is lying to people, including to women, who get told that they can have it all: a strong career, a very good partner who performs the traditional male role and also part of the female role, a long period without kids while still having them, etc. A lot of Dutch women are smart and ignore the worst feminist lies, but plenty don’t.
This study found that a majority of UK and Danish women desired their first child after age 30, when fertility is already on the decline. One fifth of women and one third of men actually desired their last child at age 40. The study found a strong correlation with women being misinformed about fertility declines and a desire to have children late.
I see a lot of upset women who end up in trouble. The most recent example from my country is single women fighting for (and of course getting) publicly funded sperm. Traditionally, this was paid for by healthcare insurance for couples with an infertile man, but now it seems that not having a man/sperm donor is a medical problem that needs healthcare. Furthermore, it seems that a single woman who can’t afford a few hundred Euro’s for sperm is assumed to have the financial resources for a kid.
Anyway, I personally believe that both the earth in general and my country even more so, is overpopulated, so I’m good with (somewhat) below replacement birth rates. However, I’m not so delusional to believe that the current way we achieve this doesn’t cause severe distress in many people.
@Conrad
The number of parents/women who desire zero children seems to be at lizardman levels in the US and EU, at 2% and 3% respectively.
@A Definite Beta Guy
What is your definition of knowing how to cook?
In Spain, at least, the only people I know who don’t know how to cook are those who lived with their parents for their entire adult life. Those who moved out for college all learnt how to cook, and even most of the ones who lived with their parents.
Knowing how to cook in Spain means, at a minimum: being able to make a decent paella*, a spanish omelette, fry an egg*, make a salad, fry a steak, bake a chicken and make pasta sauce. Everybody I know also learnt how to make yoghurt cake.
*How paella is made and how an egg is fried is a culture war issue in Spain. We take paella very seriously.
@Aapje, @Conrad Honcho
An anecdote: the only person I know who didn’t want children was a girl in my high school, and she was very, very vocal about not wanting children. She was visibly disgusted by young children. She also identified as asexual; I don’t know how much of it was a disinterest/disgust for sex and how much of it was disgust for children.
Probably an outlier even by “don’t want children” standards, I guess….
@ana53294
I would guess that the USA is a bit of an outlier in terms of massive decline in ability to cook. The dominance of fast food/casual dining and pre-prepared meals in grocery stores probably has a lot to do with this, I guess.
I’ve never tasted pre-prepared meals that were particularly good*. Even pre-made pizza is not very good, and I love pizza. Take-out tends to use bad quality oils for cooking, and you can notice it in the taste. It also tends to be very carb heavy.
Does this mean many Americans spend their whole life eating gross food? Or are American take-out and pre-prepared meals better than in Spain (which would be strange, in a country which has lost cooking skills)?
*The best I’ve found is the quite fancy brand Picard, which kind of approximates homemade food. Most pre-made food is nowhere near home-cooked stuff.
There’s also a gender divide in cooking methods. I wonder what percentage of men don’t know how to grill?
I guess it depends on whether you use a gas or charcoal grill. There’s more skill in the charcoal grill.
Depends on your tastes. I can cook a few more complicated dishes (and my wife is a better cook), but the fact is that for me just throwing a hamburger or some chicken on the grill is going to be just fine. No grill? I can put a steak in the broiler, cook pasta with tomato sauce, or a few other simple things.
@Aapje
Is that was the survey was asking?
@DinoNerd
You’re setting up a straw
manwoman for the most oppressed woman imaginable, then you stamp the label “wife” on it, disregarding that your description doesn’t apply to the vast majority of those women called “wives” in modern Western society. That’s downright disingenuous.If I misunderstood you and that’s not what you’re doing here, then please be more straightforward and less cryptic.
I’m not sure how far back you are going or how large an effect you count as “detrimental.” If you go back to about the first half of the 20th century, Edna St. Vincent Millay was openly bisexual. A woman who was a friend of my parents when I was growing up was, looking back at it, pretty clearly a lesbian, living with another woman—it didn’t seem to keep her from having a successful academic career and an active life. There seem to have been a fair number of women who didn’t marry and did pursue careers.
How much of the difference you are seeing represents women unable to do what they wanted because there were large barriers, how much women who choose to be wives and mothers because that looked like a relatively attractive life? How can one tell?
If you go back a little farther, there were some careers, such as law, that were not open to women. But if the question is whether one can combine a society where the default pattern for a woman is marriage and children with a reasonable set of options for women who reject that default, then the mid-20th century seems looks to me like evidence that you can.
A point I probably didn’t make clear enough:
The cost of having children is not solely monetary and it’s stupid to pretend it is. “Give them more money” isn’t a cure-all. IME (though I run in a young crowd and I expect this to change as age increases), most of the people who say they want children don’t think much about what parts of their lives they’ll have to give up for it. Most of the people who don’t, do. There’s a difference between “want kids” and “want to give [~50% of my life] up for kids.”
Like, this whole movement did not come from nowhere. A group of lizard
menbeings didn’t get together at the center of the hollow earth and devise the strategy of female empowerment in order to ride the ascendance of the Hasidim all the way to the White House (and I’m obviously not saying you think they did; I’m making the following point). If women didn’t want this, why did they march for it, agitate for it, vote for it? Why is the (full) tradwife crowd so small? I don’t begrudge anyone that life if they want it; it’s just as valid as the sort of life my sort of people appear to want. But the existence of this (from your POV) predicament is my evidence that it isn’t one, at least not on a grand scale. There aren’t (there may actually be, I’m too lazy to run the numbers and this number is meant to mean, “a majority of childless”) tens of millions of women out there with a gaping hole in their lives that would be filled by dropping a happy bundle of childcare, housemaking, expenses, and depression into it. Conditions need to be right for the tradeoffs to be worthwhile. For a fraction of those people, the major tradeoff is money, not the emotional load. But only for a fraction. If things were otherwise, I don’t think women (mostly) could have pushed this whole institution so far uphill.Also, everyone should cook. Everyone can cook. IME, cooking is also actually one of the very best things to do with a child, if my relationship with my father is anything to go by.
Also, eggs are properly fried over hard. @ana, los huevos de España faltan porque les faltan huevos.
Locked out of editing;
Should read
Pretty much, except for the times someone goes out to a nice restaurant. My in-laws unironically think Olive Garden is an awesome restaurant, but it is honestly superior to anything they cook.
You mention eggs. My wife makes “scrambled” eggs by cracking them directly into a pan and running a spatula through them like a mad men. Totally fine if you are a college student in rush. Not okay for Sunday morning Breakfast (with a capital “B”).
I mean, I’m not a particularly GOOD cook. I definitely oversalted the hash browns this morning. But it’s not really hard to make some decent food that makes fast food seem unappealing by comparison. Cut up some onion, grate some potatoes, throw in some bacon fat, season a bit. Proper scrambled eggs over the top (since my Wife doesn’t like fried eggs, particularly over-easy).
The majority of your female friends will likely be mothers by the time they are in their 40s. The childless rate of women in their early 40s is something like 15-20%.
The difference between having children when you are a 25 and you are 40 is that you are much less healthy and active at 40 then you are at 25. Also, if your kids decide to birth children at the same time you did, it’s the difference between having grand-kids at 50 or grand-kids at 80. And it is the difference between seeing your grandkids get marry and have great grandkids being born at 75, or never seeing it because you are dead.
Also, with the specifics of partnership, if you delay finding a partner till you are in your 30s….well, those people largely have a reason they are single.
@Hoopyfreud
Like most progressives causes, it’s a small percentage of loud activists responsible for changing the social norms for the majority. Propaganda works.
ETA: I think you’re not getting my point. You’re explaining why your social group doesn’t have kids. I agree they don’t want or aren’t having kids. Regardless of why, systems that do not procreate do not survive into the future. That they’ve got a really good reason for it doesn’t change the fact they still die out.
I don’t know what kids are thinking – but when I’m disgusted with ‘capitalism’ in soundbite mode, I’m often actually thinking of:
1) Externalities of all kinds. Everything from phone bots with ad spiels thru environmental degradation. Also things like ever-lengthening copyright terms – and their effect of making things I want difficult to acquire.
2) Regulatory capture and related phenomena, and their effect on public health and welfare.
3) Especially ugly-looking examples of greed. Or less ugly/more questionable cases, otherwise similar. For a soundbite example, try whatever headline you first find involving massive sudden increases in the price of some medicine people need in order to survive.
4) Systematic transfer of risk from corporations to individuals.
And for the record, I’d probably say “American capitalism” in my soundbite mode, or American-style capitalism” not just “capitalism.”
I strongly agree with your points #1, 2, and agree somewhat with #4. I think you did a pretty good job compactly describing what I dislike about capitalism.
More specifically, I don’t think capitalism is intrinsically evil. I think it is an extremely useful tool for organizing some types of human behavior, and I don’t think humanity could have transitioned from feudal society to modern society without capitalism.
But I think capitalism (as currently practiced in the Western world) is extremely vulnerable to two major classes of failures: externalities and regulatory capture. I think that over the past half century or so some groups have gotten so good at exploiting these two failure modes of capitalism and by doing so are causing so many problems for humanity that we really need to reduce or dependence on capitalism as an ideology, at least in some areas. I think a capitalist model works well for things like making shoes, less well at making things like software, and very poorly at providing healthcare. I would abolish capitalism from some sectors of the economy, but not others. But I don’t exactly have a plan on how to do that so…
Regulatory capture is an effect of the political system though.
Okay, but you realize the people who say they like “capitalism” aren’t talking about anything like any of these things, right?
As soon as you get out of soundbite mode, everything gets much more complex.
But I can’t easily imagine a person who liked capitalism because of those particular aspects of it. Maybe a particularly amoral capitalist, who consciously figured on using elements of that list to increase their own personal wealth would in fact see these as positive qualities, but even they probably wouldn’t say so publically.
What they mean (unintentionally) is to show that they have no experience of not-capitalism. A nice long holiday in Venezuela or North Korea might be educational, assuming they survived it.
“I’d probably say “American capitalism” in my soundbite mode”
This is a softer and more sensible form, but it still usually depends on an idealised set of beliefs about the way capitalism works in Western Europe (or Canada or Japan). Or to put it another way, comparing the worst of America to the best of Europe.
Maybe a nice long holiday in the capitalist utopias of Somalia, the Congo and Uganda would set them straight? Assuming they survived it.
Wait, those are capitalist? I thought they were libertarian strawmen, not capitalist ones?
(Really, they’re tribal, possibly feudal, societies, if anything)
OK mixed feelings here. On the one hand, I think Somalia and Uganda are less-central instances of capitalism than Venezuela and North Korea are of not-capitalism. On the other, my comment was on reflection too much like drive-by sarcasm and I’ll refrain from such flippancy in future.
How about we all agree that North Korea or the Soviet Union are not central examples of socialism, Somalia is not a central example of liberty, Nazi Germany is not a central example of traditionalism, et cetera et cetera, so we can have some actual discussion instead of flinging shit at eachother?
Because for 80 years, the soviet union was the heart of the world socialist movement, celebrated by socialists around the world, and no libertarian as ever claimed Somalia. the situations are not comparable
I can agree with some of that, but the Soviet Union is absolutely the central example of communism, and we’ve got people saying that nothing counts as “socialism” if there is any private ownership of capital, so I’m sticking those socialists and anyone who stands too close to them with the central example of the Soviet Unions.
I mean, are they? My impression is that they aren’t. Musicians got stuff lobbed at them with people yelling dirty capitalist their way twenty-five years ago in ways that seem almost quaintly silly today. The ones that do say so are louder, because they have Twitter, but are they larger in number?
I believe it generally means “I am in favor of programs that take money from older people and give it to younger people like me”. This is because it tends to come along with a sense that Millennials and Gen Z are facing a far worse employment and economic situation that older generations (who they round off as “boomers”) ever did, and this is somehow the result of the actions of those older generations. Since the system that created this is called “capitalism”, anti-capitalism rhetoric is very convenient.
The premise is false; it’s false even for those who had the misfortune to graduate into the Great Recession (who had it almost as bad as those who graduated in the 1970s and early 1980s). But I see no way of convincing them of that
Far worse might be hyperbolic, but “worse” does seem to have some truthiness . Wage stagnation plus higher health insurance premiums covered by employers [which said millennial will likely not use for some time] plus bachelors degrees for modest entry level service sector jobs.
Yeah, the mandated government transfers from young to old have only increased over the past decade. And credentialism is making it harder and harder at the bottom rungs.
Aren’t “millennials” projected to have worse financial outcomes than their parents (with the claim that this will be the first time that has happened)? Maybe that oft repeated claim is dubious (I don’t know how accurate it is), but average people probably tend to believe it which is all that really matters if we want to explain why they say things.
You have to search pretty far to find a cherry to pick that demonstrates that. By most measures things are better, by many very much better.
Better for who? Maybe the economy is doing better, but that does not necessarily translate to job prospects for young people being better.
And people who entered the job market during the recession are doing worse than both the people who graduated before and after them, so you have a few years worth of people who probably have a legitimate gripe about how things are going for them.
I would look at things like inflation adjusted entry level salaries, net worth at different age brackets 20-30, youth mortality, suicide, percent dating or married.
The “anecdote” as I understood it was that a 25 y/o boomer obviously had less access to technology than a 25 y/o millennial but he could start remunerative entry level work at a younger age with no debt, get married and live away from his/her parents earlier etc. etc.
You sound like you have something more concrete that disproves the anecdote. I’m genuinely interested in seeing it.
Better for everyone, in vague general terms. But specifically, a mid-level administrative or managerial job in the 1980’s was something you could work your way into, but now you need to a Bachelor’s Degree in [nobody cares]. Which means you have to mortgage your future career before you even get started, which means you have to put off buying a house, which means putting off family formation. Deviating leaves you stuck as lower-class basically forever.
Mechanic? Degree. Barber? Degree. Paralegal? Degree. Management position? Degree.
On top of that, any time you do business with anyone collecting Social Security you’re basically paying for them yourself.
So, you can’t start a family because the generation before you walled-off normal avenues for advanced work, made mortgaging your future a requirement, and now demands that you give them money on top of it.
Regardless of how much “better” the world is, that will breed resentment.
@greenwoodjw
For a subset of this age group, add someting about the previous generation implementing policies/business practices that lead to the recession/housing crisis and I think that pretty much nails it.
greenwoodjw, I agree with your assessment, but:
Really? Maybe a certificate for a mechanic and higher rates if you do two years at a vocational school, but a barber? Isn’t that just a training course and a license?
It’s a $10,000+ training course that lasts over a year. I’m counting it. 😛
Do you have a source for that? I know credentialism is out of control, but I have a hard time believing it costs $10k to become a barber. I can believe there exist high-end and high-tuition beauty schools for people who want to be hairdresser to the stars or something, but you’re telling me the person doing $7 snips at Supercuts spent $10k on his or her license?
https://govt.westlaw.com/mdc/Document/N58B587A026C611E5B2B5A75792492041?viewType=FullText&originationContext=documenttoc&transitionType=CategoryPageItem&contextData=(sc.Default)
Just for Maryland:
1200 hour course. 150 days, or at least 5 months. In a state-accredited school. I’d be shocked if it was less than $10k
I’m going to push back on this. Median student loan debt at graduation is I believe under $20,000, which I do not believe can be fairly described as “mortgaging your future career”. Obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree in [nobody cares] from [random college] because a BA is the new High School diploma, does not require crippling debt and often involves no debt at all. The nightmarish debt stories seem to mostly involve either MAs in [uselessology] because one is part of the Intellectual Elite and not one of those damn dirty plebs barely better than a (gasp) high school graduate, or BAs/BSs from elite universities because “everybody knows” that if you don’t go to one of the best universities you’ll die in the gutter. And it doesn’t take many of those nightmare stories with six-figure debt to push the average up to $30-40K.
If there are career paths that require six-figure debt and don’t have starting salaries adequate to pay it off, that’s a problem. But, anecdotally, my colleagues and I hire a fair number of people with freshly-minted MSs from elite universities. And we have the ability to offer student loan forgiveness, because we are technically a non-profit working in the public interest. Almost nobody takes us up on it.
So, I’m not buying the narrative where crippling student debt, “mortgaging your future career”, is anything close to a universal or necessary condition for success in the 21st-century American economy. If there are parts of the economy where that narrative does hold, let’s start by figuring out which parts those are. They probably aren’t the “generic BA as the new HS diploma” parts, and they aren’t the high-level STEM parts, so where else should we be looking?
That’s not what it is, its ‘I didn’t get into an Ivy League and my kids are going if they get in, come hell, high water or repossession of my house’ because admitting that a top level education isn’t totally necessary is the same as admitting my professional limitations have to do with me and not the system.
@baconbits9
Do you really think that is a good representation of the thought process?
In my experience a subset of people go to the ‘best’ college that they get into without regard for cost and with a total unwillingness to take a cheaper route. Those people who ended up with large debts generally had gone to a university a level or two above their parents or went a degree deeper.
I confess “mortgage your career” was a hyperbolic rhetorical flourish. I was trying to get how it feels, rather than the actual numbers. I loved [uselessology] though.
My point was, starting in the hole because of red tape put up by the people who also decided you were going to fund their retirement would breed resentment.
To actually answer the question, no I don’t think its a representation of the thought process. I don’t think its a specific thought process, but more a general feeling of ‘I’m not particularly happy with my station, I want my kids to be happy, and the people I am envious of mostly went to top schools’.
I know one place: social work, or many sorts of mental health therapy that require a masters degree. Degrees are expensive, work is often fee-for-service except for some of the worst jobs (e.g. locked wards) and the fees aren’t high because insurance won’t pay much. Also clients tend not to show up and it’s the therapist who takes the loss, and there’s a lot of (unreimbursed) paperwork hours per therapeutic hour.
Wage stagnation, to the extent it’s true in some income percentiles, is adjusted for inflation, so it’s “not better”, rather than “worse”.
Do you have any numbers showing that graduating in the 70s and 80s was worse than graduating in during the recent recession?
Unemployment rate:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
The 1983 peak was worse, the 2009 peak was wider, but unemployment rate was generally higher in that period; there were about 5 years where unemployment was above the lowest level between 1975 and 1987.
Unemployment for 20-24 year olds is similar, though worse for the 2008 recession.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000036
Unfortunately figures for high school grads and college grads separately are not readily available for the earlier period.
Inflation
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=nWfb
Clearly worse in the 70s and 80s.
Median personal income
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
But being unemployed isn’t the only way to be worse off. One of the big issues with graduates during the recession was under employment, and one of the lingering issues is that they subsequently got leapfrogged by fresh grads when the economy recovered a few years later (the last part could have been the same, better, or worse in the past depending on business hiring practices at the time…I wasn’t there so I can’t speak to it directly).
I’m looking for but haven’t found any good historical underemployment numbers (same issue you had with finding separate stats for high school/college grads I imagine) so it is difficult to cross-compare. Unemployment was pretty close in the two periods, although as you mention the 2009 peak took longer to come down. If underemployment were higher in the 2009 period, that would make the 2009 era worse on net, even granting that there were slightly less unemployed.
As far as inflation, I’m not enough of an economist (read: I am not an economist at all) to make this argument, but there is certainly debate over whether we are properly measuring inflation suggesting that it is higher now than the numbers show.
Median income is slightly surprising, but to be relevant to this discussion it would really need to be separated by age (which I also couldn’t find, unfortunately).
Finally…what were young people saying about prior generations in the 70s and 80s? My impression isn’t that it was all warm fuzzies then either.
Nybbler — Only median personal income there seems convincing to me in terms of “things are getting better.” Yet the obvious retort is that the 50% growth in income over the past 40 years has been dwarfed by the cost disease stuff — growth in housing prices (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA) or the growth in cost of public universities in the past 30 years (https://trends.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/cp-2018-figure-3.png) or the massive increase in health care costs generally.
Can you elaborate on why you think that’s not valid?
The shift in income is real, ie inflation adjusted, and inflation includes these issues. The housing price one is also wildly overstated by most people, the 30 year mortgage rate was 2-5x higher during the 70s and 80s. $100,00 on a 30 year loan at 8% will cost you $260,000 in payments, similar to a $150,000 loan at 4%. My parents bought in the US in 1986 with interest rates around 12%, and didn’t get to refinance to less than 10% until the early 90s. IIRC they refinanced again in the late 90s and their average rate (ball parking the weighting) would have been around 10% for the first 20 years of that loan. Yeah, their nominal house price was lower but their actually housing costs were closer than the raw numbers look.
@baconbits9:
The issue being that you can refinance when rates come down.
But if rates go up, you are in a precarious position. You are locked into your current situation, or worse you default. Which is what happened to a lot of first time buyers post-2008.
I addressed that in my example, mortgages taken in the mid 80s took 20+ years to average 8% interest rates, and mortgages in the 70s basically never averaged 8% rates.
The point stands that using nominal housing prices as a stand in for costs gives a highly distorted picture of costs.
A house that cost $100,000 then would (in most cases) be worth quite a bit more than $150,000 today. That seems like evidence that housing costs have gone up to me, not that they’ve gone down or even stayed the same. At the very least, it calls for a smaller down payment (lower barrier to entry).
Since this conversation is (or at least was) specific to young people, rental costs may be as important as housing. Apartmentslist is not necessarily some kind of highly touted authority on housing stats, but this seems like a good place to start for info on this:
https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rent-growth-since-1960/
This happened to no first time buyers post 2008 because rates never actually went up.
I didn’t claim that they declined or stayed the same, the op is about how median incomes have gone up and the rebuttal was increased housing and education costs.
I…know? You appeared to be arguing that housing and education costs did not outweigh median wage increases, but your numbers don’t really support that claim. Did I misunderstand what you were trying to say?
They clearly do outweigh housing and education cost increases.
@baconbits and @nybbler my bad, didn’t realize how extensive CPI was.
My interpretation is that they want various political and economic changes,* and they perceive capital as obstructing their goal of reorganizing society. They view “the rich” as earning too much money and exercising too much political power.
* Roughly, they want more political and economic power for themselves and for people who they view as having similar views to themselves, and they want to reorganize the world economy to eliminate the use of carbon. Being young, they also think that a number of complex problems have simple and obvious solutions.
Charitably: we live in a capitalist system. This system is capable of producing great wealth and prosperity. The results of that great wealth and prosperity are distributed really unevenly, even within the richest countries. This indicates something is wrong with the system. Right now, a system could be constructed where people work a lot less than they do, or maybe don’t have to work at all, and still enjoy a good quality of life. This wasn’t possible before, and it’s always been necessary for most people to work to live – but now we can end that.
A lot of the time it makes me roll my eyes… but at the same time there’s often cases where it very much looks like society and government has been optimized to the benefit of the big companies, the ultra rich and big shareholders. Which it has… because that’s kinda how power works.
Expecting the world to not be such would be like expecting medieval kings to not routinely fuck over their peasants.
I can understand that often they’re pragmatic choices: sweetheart deals and low taxes on highly mobile ultra rich people who can take their tax residence anywhere may be pragmatic for a local government… but it is inherently unfair, in a way that any small child can understand when a billionaire has a lower effective tax rate than their PA.
And there’s endless little obvious unfairness’s where each locally often make complete sense when viewed from some angle… but sum up to a lot of people looking at the world and seeing that the deck is very much stacked against them because they weren’t born to the right family and that a lot of the people in charge who talk about freedom and fairness aren’t playing fairly and only care about their own freedom.
“fuck cronyism and unfair but pragmatic responses to local conditions” might be more accurate a lot of the time but lacks punchiness.
At least for federal income tax, the pattern is the opposite. Essentially all of it is paid by the top half of the income distribution, and the ratio of tax to income is pretty much monotonically increasing with income.
Sure, but Warren Buffett is an unusual case, and his secretary was in the top 1% when he made that remark about paying a lower percentage in taxes than his secretary.
his secretary could have had quite a bit higher effective rate while in the 88th percentile. No need to go up to the 99th.
According to this article she had to be well into the top 5%. I don’t have my calculations that I did at the time that showed her in the 1%.
It wouldn’t really be surprising that Buffett’s secretary were in the 1%. In fact, I might have been surprised if she wasn’t.
https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secretary-taxes/index.html
It’s a reference to the 15% capital gains rate that allows some ultra rich making money purely from investments to pay a lower effective rate, far lower than many people working for their money.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/sep/21/does-secretary-pay-higher-taxes-millionaire/
It’s a pragmatic choice given how mobile billionaires are… but expect it to trigger peoples sense of fairness.
Capital gains taxes are a pretty good deal at present, with inflation rates low. They were quite a bad deal back when inflation rates were up around ten percent, since you ended up being taxed on a capital gain that was mostly fictitious.
I mean, you have it mostly correct, your only issue is not taking it seriously because it is vague. These people generally do not have a strong understanding of what “capitalism” is vs “socialism” and might be confused about certain policy specifics, but you have a close enough mental model.
Maybe model these people closer to the “keep your government hands off my Medicare” crowd.
I speculate that there’s a psychological element to it. Young people are people who’ve lived all their lives up to now in a world of face-to-face relationships, and are now getting their first taste of the impersonality of the wider world. While there will always be those of us who find it liberating, coming to grips with the fact that strangers don’t (under any system) care very much about you is probably hard for most people; “fuck capitalism” is, among other things, a way of shooting the messenger.
@onyomi
Beats me, I haven’t heard many examples of “younger man on the street” use the word “capitalism” in over 25 years, and not many more before then, most young guys I’ve encountered in the last 20 years seem to lean apolitical or more anarchist, libertarian, or nationalist, and they actually don’t use the word much, but they do use the word “communist” which in one memorable case when I asked he meant said something close to “a Hearst family member who hired a lesbian artist for a party”???!!!
Some young women I’ve encountered on the other hand sometimes use the word and they seem to mean “a system that has some be poor, and I don’t like that”.
What I’ve heard old men (and a few old women) say about ‘capitalism’ could fill a book, but I put the gist as either “An ideal I approve of” or “the way things are that I don’t like”.
In general I’d say the discussions here on the topic are better than “on the street”.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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….
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
or
And what really cracked me up:
If you type Gaea’s Cradle correctly, you only get boring discussions about that it’s the best land drop.
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.
Yes, it seems to try to make a list of videogames that start with “H”. But now I really want to play Loot Hacker Evolution.
Hand Simulator!
The following prompt gives pretty nice bizarro versions of Pokémon:
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.
Don’t leave me hanging! How big are the Pope’s hands?
Here’s a good one:
The deer are coming to get you . . .
Edit: for comparison here’s the actual source from which I took the first phrase:
GPT-2 imitates the style quite well but seems to think deer are carnivorous.
Sounds like a Michael Crichton science-horror novel waiting to happen.
A fun response about the abundance of cyanide (trimmed off the last partial sentence of nonsense)
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.
Good one FullMetal.
I like the blending of science and myth in the first one.
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!)
“‘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
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.
There was the Magneto prison escape sequence from X2.
I read a bunch of Discworld books years ago, but I don’t think I ever read that one. Good find.
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.
While we are waiting…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA7UQOYskas
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Hahahaha! Elizabeth Warren confirmed total (*) Dothraki Khaleesi 🙂
(* 1/1024)
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.
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.
Is this alluding to
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.
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.
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?
God yes! I mean, the least they could do is spell the names right.
Har har. I googled it but I guess enough people misspell it that it didn’t come up as wrong. I’m leaving it.
Is this the culture war thread?
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.
4 and 5 were still good, but something was definitely lost.
Yeah, “books 4 and 5 are boring and pointless” is the most wrong opinion I’ve seen on SSC.
Don’t blame them. They were probably copying the spelling off the Starbucks cup.
Is their firstborn named Cark?
If you add “compared to 1-3”, you will be closer to a universal truth.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
best to worst:
4 1 5 2 3
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.
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.
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.
@ Conrad
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.
@Douglas Knight
32145 or maybe 31245; what do you have against book 3?
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
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 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.
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???
@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
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.
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
Barristan would be a very sweet husband. Robert would be terrible in general. The choices are obvious:
Fuck Eddard, Marry Barristan, Kill Robert
Assuming no consequences for my choices afterwards:
Fuck Cersei, Marry Catelyn, Kill Olenna
Assuming consequences:
Fuck Catelyn, Marry Olenna, Kill Cersei
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?
If the story is any indication, marrying Margaery is a terrible mistake, so:
Fuck Margaery, Marry Sansa, Kill Missandei
(obviously all assuming events don’t go as in the real GOT, in which case most of these people are dead anyway)
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.
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?)
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.
You don’t consider the Queen of Thorns the more prickly one?
She’s certainly got the rep, but I’d put them pretty evenly matched in the prickly department (going from the show).
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)
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HelmetsAreHardlyHeroic
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.
Quite ridiculous. The Starks should have armored like veritable iron men.
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.
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.”
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.
Needle is made of ordinary steel.
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.
I’m not even angry, just disappointed.
I consider this garbage all non canon. Even if it’s all we ever get.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
I thought Bran was the one who handicapped him by accidentally reaching into the past?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also forgotten because he was a prisoner and then hand, but I assume Tyrion is now Lord of Casterly Rock?
1. After Jon gets done killing Dany, he peels off his face and it’s Arya.
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.
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.
I think after she easily killed every single Frey she decided it was too unsporting to use them.
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 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”.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
would love to see the hbo subscriber count change from today to tomorrow.
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
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.
Oligarchic elective monarchy isn’t necessarily a bad choice. In the Holy Roman Empire it worked for a thousand years.
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.
Election of monarchs by conclaves of nobles was a widespread practice in feudal Europe.
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.
In Westeros, it means the Three-Eyed Raven can reign indefinitely.
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.
I think someone here already said it, but the Night King was the right king. Sign me up for Team Winter.
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.
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.
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 Viksouth 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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Unsullied
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.
I wonder if her entry included “Kicked King Bran out a window”
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.
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.
I believe he tells her as he is leaving Winterfell.
You notice how they never show Brienne and Ender Wiggin in the same shot?
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.
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.”
Well, Brienne is good, not smart…