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It’s Sunday, so let’s fight about religion and politics!
First up, there is this TIME story by David French about Evangelicals and Trump – why oh why did they support him? (Answer: they’re just dumb ignorant scared rednecks acting out of irrational fear):
Glad you asked, David! Turns out there are some journalists/religion beat reporters who have done a bit of work on that question:
There’s an evangelical left? Appears so! And the question for the Democrats and religion is this – how did the Dems go from “three-quarters of voters/supporters have some kind of religious belief” to the ‘rise of the Nones’ wing dominating the party, and what (if anything) are they going to do about it?
It would seem to be this:
So, on both sides, there’s a small percentage who are really committed to what they believe – in one estimation, about 20% on the right who really are serious about their faith and trying to live it, and about 28% on the ‘spiritual but not religious’ side who are equally committed. The vast majority are the mushy middle. For the moderate right/centre-right/centrists, those are looking to see if there’s any Democratic candidate they could in good conscience vote for – they just want to be thrown a bone about the religious topics they care about (which is possibly why Biden is the candidate for them and most electable if you’re going for ‘who can appeal to the nation as a whole’).
On the moderate left/centre-left/centrists, again Biden is probably the man (or someone like Romney perhaps, or any Republican that seemed centrist/moderate). However, the most vocal, most active, and most engaged element is the progressive wing, which is rather the tail wagging the dog as they’re the smallest part of the party but the ones most likely to run and turn up for campaigns, write/phone/email the congresscritters, post on social media etc. They’re also reliably liberal and that’s why campaigns like the one Hillary ran tuned their note to what were perceived to be their concerns.
The problem there is that by tailoring public policy pronouncements to the progressives, the Democrats are losing the moderate righties who take a look at “all the candidates raised their hands in unison” debates, where one guy is talking about – as one of THE big, major, social and national problems – the vital importance of making access to abortion for trans men easier and more widely available, and they are presented with “either hold my nose and vote for Trump or vote third party or don’t vote at all” choices, even where they might be old-school blue-collar white working class Democrat voters.
It’s a problem for both parties, and the answers are not glib “it’s only a problem for one side and it’s because they’re all just dumb ignorant scared rednecks” pieces in the slicks.
@Deiseach,
Well among the differences between Democrats and Republicans is that according to polling a majority of Democratic Party voters say the want the Party to move in a more “moderate” and less “liberal” direction, while the majority of Republicans want their Party to move in a more “conservative” direction, but the more “moderate” inclined Democrats are on average older, less educated, less urban, less white, and more likely to live in “Red States” (those that are majority Republican) so their influence is stronger on Presidential primary elections than on most others.
An example of a successful Red State Democrat is John Bel Edwards the Governor of Louisiana (not to be confused with John Reid Edwards the 2004 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee) who is anti-abortion in a pro-abortion Party.
An example of a successful “Blue State” Republican is Mit Romney (who you mentioned).
Compared to 60 years ago there’s been a shift in who’s likely to vote for which Party, back then the Democratic Party coalition was (on average) blacks, Catholics, Jews, “Southerners” (south east U.S.A. excluding Florida, and including Texas), and union members, while Republicans were mostly business owners, “far westerners” (Arizonia, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming) and northern white Protestants (especially in New England), since then Catholics are about split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, Southern whites are now overwhelmingly Republicans, union members are still mostly Democrats but there’s just a lot less of us, and northern white Protestants are much more likely to be Democrats if they’re college graduates with lower incomes who live in cities (basically the younger ones).
As it stands a slight majority of Americans sides more with Republicans on “cultural” and “social” issues, and a bit larger majority (but not on overwhelming one) of Americans sides more with Democrats on “economic” issues, and it would seem an easy win for either Party to drop the more unpopular “axis” of economic or social, but the donar base of both parties is more “fiscal conservative”/”social liberal” than the majority of voters, and (as you mentioned) on the Democratic Party side, by far the energy and growth has been on the “social liberal” side, plus “social liberals” are typically the sort of college educated young urbanites who major media market journalists are more likely to encounter (and they’re also more likely to post on Twitter than most Democrats (and Twitter is the lazy journalists insta-poll), and that narrative is what shapes the impression of what Democrats want, and with story being destiny, what new Democrats will be, with Republicans going the other way in reaction.
The only way I see around that are a continuous high level of immigration, because just as a hundred years ago, the children of immigrants tend to be Democrats (but less so their grandchildren) despite usually being more “socially conservative”, and/or enough African-Americans (who tend to be the most loyal of Democratic Party voters despite usually being less “liberal” than the rest of the Party) move to a currently “Red State” and flip it “Blue”, which is a possibility as African-Americans have been moving back to the South which would give “Red-Tribe” Democrats an electoral base beyond just presidential primaries.
And that’s a element that our host’s original “Blue-Tribe” and “Red-Tribe” (and the tiny-tiny “Grey-Tribe”) list of attributes missed, his “Blue-Tribe” list (to me) just looks like “cultural attributes common with college graduate white women”, and his “Red-Tribe” list (to me) just looks like “cultural attributes common with non-college graduate white men”, and that ignores a significant portion of Americans – simply put, black and non-Cuban Latino Americans vote “Blue” and worship “Red”, and non-religious Americans are a growing portion of the population that don’t have as many kids as the religious (they’re growing because of conversions), and while religious whites have more kids than the non-religious, they don’t pass on their faiths to all of they’re kids.
If current demographic trends continue (and I probably won’t live long enough to see it, but my son’s likely will) combined together both our host’s “Blue” and “Red” “Tribes” will be outnumbered by non-white religious Americans who didn’t fit either of those “Tribes” and today’s “culture war” will be a footnote for antiquarians, as white Christians fail to reproduce culturally (enough to halt their decline as a percentage of the population), and white atheists fail to reproduce physically (compared to everyone else), leaving a non-white religious majority (with Catholicism the biggest faith), which unless black Protestants and brown Catholics fail to get along (and so far they haven’t shown much sign of that), will mean future Americans will get along with far less rancor than is the current state.
That’s right, I predict that what David Brooks called “the white civil war” will fade away because of demographics no matter how much the donar class tries to stoke it, after centuries of squabbling the Puritan/Quaker alliance and the Borderlander/Cavalier alliance will no longer have sufficient numbers to continue the struggle for dominance, the “Blue-Tribe’s” aggressive cultural imperialism wouldn’t save it (unless there’s a global warming caused mass exodus to Canada, but even in that case how long did the Shakers last? Can a culture centered on values discouraging parenthood last?), and the “Red-Tribe” refusal to even integrate the extremely culturally similar African-Americans into their ranks, and without assimilation, they’ll decline as a percentage of Americans, as too many of their kids run-away to “Blue” cities and become acculturated there.
It probably shows the limits of my imagination, but I just can’t conceive of a pro-natal “Blue-Tribe” that’s still recognizable as that tribe, the “Red-Tribe” on the other hand has actually been successful in evangelizing Latin Americans to their brand of Protestantism, so maybe bits of their culture will continue.
Oh wait…
…I had originally thought to end on a note of ‘The “culture war” has a time limit on it, and good riddance!’, but now I’m seeing a possibility of the CW perpetuated even among a population that’s even further from the “Albion’s Seed” origins of it than today’s, with close-enough versions of our current Red-Tribe providing enough converts to the Blue-Tribe for it to continue to exist as well, which is a bring-down for me, as the thought of the current CW fading into irrelevance pleased me, but now I’m wondering if the same stupid script will play on for centuries more.
Damn!
I agree with this. The Red Tribe breeds at replacement rates and the Blue Tribe does not. There are not enough conversions to keep the Blue Tribe going, and conversions happen both ways. And the Red Tribe is now fully aware of Blue Tribe indoctrination efforts via media and academia and are actively guarding against it.
I really don’t think this is the case. I live in a Red State in the south, and half the population is non-white. We whites work, worship and to a lesser extent live with blacks and everyone else just fine. It’s the big city Blue Tribe media that won’t shut up about how horrible and racist we all are, but they’ve never been here to meet us.
@Conrad Honcho
Good.
With black American families returning to the South for a generation now (though not in the numbers that their grandparents left the south), I would hope that they’re going to place that’s become more welcoming, and not just leaving places that have become less welcoming.
I’ve posted some similiar thoughts before, but Biden’s Democratic frontrunner status has produced a lot of ink and pixels explaining how “older black voters support him and don’t blame us journalist for being suprised, they’re sneaky about it ’cause they don’t go on Twitter and post endlessly about who they do and don’t support!”, and lots of pieces explaining how black voters are more loyal but less liberal than other Democrats, and the pieces reminded me very much of 2015/2016 pieces on white Evangelical Christian voters and their support for Trump, and what really struck me is that for both voting for their Party correlates with church-going; and other than political party and genre of music (country & western or rhythm & blues) how very similar cultural attitudes were and even attitudes on a lot of political issues, the evangelicals aren’t “Wall Street” Republicans, and I know why they aren’t on the same side (affirmative action, civil rights, voting rights), but the similarities really strike me, and why not?
Both cultures “homelands” were the rural south for generations, and the oddity is almost that they aren’t on the same side – except for a time they were – the most being the 1936, 1940, and 1944 elections, when northern blacks and southern whites (not southern blacks, ’cause they mostly weren’t allowed to vote).
Most “new immigrants” strike me as more “red tribe that votes blue” as well, and in some ways the old white “red tribe” Democrats are preserved in West Virginia similar to the way that the Mormons in Utah have preserved some aspects of 19th century New England culture that have dissipated in New England.
I’m very curious about how the party coalition’s will shake out in the next few decades, but I’m doubtful that I’ll live long enough to find out.
Are you sure about that? Something like 2/3rds of all high school graduates go on to college, and college Red->Blue conversion levels seem extraordinarily high.
But it’s too late; Blue has taken the primary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions and nearly all the media. People who homeschool and allow only pre-screened old media through are not even a blip on the radar.
I believe that this includes spending a year or two at the local community college with vague notions of becoming a dental hygenist and then dropping out, and…
…maybe not so much outside the central example of spending four years in residence at a traditional college or university.
But remember the old adage about people getting more conservative as they get older. I think it is mostly true. It has been true for at least as long as I’ve been alive (I am 62) that young 20 somethings are left of center, often far left, but most of them become more conservative as they age. Conversions do go both ways.
On college, some more numbers here. Two thirds of the college enrollees went to 4-year colleges. So still a quite large set of targets for conversion.
As for the other: The theory I subscribe to is that people do not become more conservative as they get older; they’re just overtaken by the world moving lefter faster.
I don’t know. I have certainly changes as I aged. Not particularly left to right (I was essentially a libertarian by 5th grade, which was a worldview shaped by the obvious failure of group projects and collective grades), rather I have shifted in all directions wherein the shifts are all driven by my lesser trust in the goodness of individual humans. Also less faith in the blank slate theories.
@The Nybbler
And something like 34.98% of Americans in 2018 who were at least 25 years old have the privilege of a four-year college diploma, even though the majority have “some college”.
Even I have “some college”, one Cultural Anthropology class, a European History class, and some time in the welding bay at Landry Community College in Oakland, California.
BTW: “Of high school graduates” doesn’t clue me in on how significant it is without telling what % graduate high school.
That doesn’t fit my lifetime experience at all, the most “Left” the “World” changed in my lifetime was from 1968 to 1975, most of which changes I was too young to be aware they were happening at the time.
Since then I’d say the world and the U.S.A. have moved more Right than Left, but in a two steps forward one step back fashion, a tax cut, and destruction of public housing here, the S-chip program, and Obamacare there, a gutting of unions here, Gay marriage there, the end of the Soviet Union way over there, a liberalizing of China and India far away there, tariff threats here, “the end of welfare as we know it” here, et cetera.
Most of the change I experience that’s getting faster is from the market not the government.
I fail to see any increase governmental policy movements to the Left that are further than the movements to the Right in my lifetime, if I was born just before Brown vs. Board of Education in ’54 I’d say the U.S.A. got more “Left” in my lifetime, but still not the world as a whole, and most of the leftward changes were before ’75.
As for myself, on the “social”/”cultural” side I’m more ‘Right’ in that I increasingly feel that local cities and counties should just decide for them damn selves and there not be a national debate at all, on economics, I’m no longer conservative, as the ‘Great Society’ has been too long gone, I’m now a Left reactionary, please bring back public housing, unions, “welfare as we know it”, the WPA, and British Leyland (I want a ’68 MGC-GT like Prince Charles had).
So I’m not really more conservative at all, except for technology – that should be slowed way the Hell down, and that’s where “progressivism” may work like magic, since full “actually existing socialism” freezes most technological development, I imagine it’s diluted form in a “mixed economy” should just about slow progress nicely so the winds of change will blow more softly, as it’s undiluted capitalism that’s really the most “progressive” force, and the older I get the more I want it brought to heel (and yes, I really think that “liberals” are actually more conservative, and “conservatives” are both far more liberal and for more progressive than so called “liberals”).
That shouldn’t be a mystery. You can nominate someone of completely unblemished character, like say, Romney. The opposition will still tar and feather him as a racist, classist, sexist, etc. Everything-ist that they can get away with. And then they have to much character to fight back.
I kind of figured my DM was phoning his sessions in a bit, and that my fellow players weren’t entirely interested in the role-play perspective, but last night’s game was definitely….uuhhhhhh…
1. Two of us play characters hostile to the nobility and law/order in general.
2. A group of miners started a raid for “healthcare benefits” (that’s the DM’s word, followed by “whatever passes for healthcare benefits in the medieval world).
3. We apparently were supposed to help the nobles crush this miner revolt (uhhhh…we don’t like the nobles and made that clear as a character point the last several sessions)
4. We needed to do this because we were apparently introducing a new PC who was Lawful Good and specifically loyal to the Town Guard.
5. The player controlling the PC decided her character loyal to the town guard would betray the town guard and help the rebellion because OOC he supports healthcare benefits.
6. Cue two line-conversation, where the DM says “so-and-so explains the plight of the workers” and the player says “okay, I’m a rebel now.”
7. We were already attempting to grab one of the other numerous quest hooks presented, so this kind of character conflict wouldn’t come up in the first place.
Kind of an interesting session….
A group of miners started a raid for “healthcare benefits” (that’s the DM’s word, followed by “whatever passes for healthcare benefits in the medieval world).
Real world historically, this would have been some outreach of the Church and/or charitable religious associations set up by the laity. Your rich nobles might well have been donating to and/or setting up almshouses. There would also be shrines and holy wells etc. renowned for healing, so people would go on pilgrimages, seek the use of relics and so on – so in a game world where the gods are actively involved, healing from the local shrine is very possible. In our world the patron saint of miners is St Barbara, in your game world whatever god or local god is the patron of miners would be the one responsible for taking care of their health (via their clerics and so on, with cures at the shrine).
a new PC who was Lawful Good and specifically loyal to the Town Guard …would betray the town guard and help the rebellion because OOC he supports healthcare benefits.
That’s not impossible to pull off; if the town guard is under the orders of the mayor or local lord or whatever, and the big-wig is supposed to be funding the shrine/almshouse for the sick miners, but is diverting the money into their pocket and letting the sick/injured miners go without treatment then siccing the town guard on them when they protest, then it would be plausible that “this is a case where an unjust law and a tyrannous ruler can be disobeyed”. It would need more setting up than “yeah I heard a sob story and now I’m Robin Hood”, though.
Yeah, none of these things are really impossible to pull off. It’s just that the DM (and the party) is new to the game, and for all of them their knowledge of the Middle Ages comes from Princess Bride and Monty Python.
Because it’s a new group, it has all sorts of problems endemic to new groups, like an infinite number of called shots, rerolling perception checks continuously, 5 minute adventuring days (I think we took 5 long rests in a dungeon?), using Charisma as mind control, and Liam O’Brien having a cameo to give one of our party rogues multiple magical daggers, boots of haste, and a blink belt. Plus cribbings from Matt Colville, but not 100% adapted. He, for instance, adapted Against the Cult of the Reptile God, but removed important allies like Ranme, railroaded two of us into getting drugged (because we didn’t drink the poisoned drinks) because it sounds cool to have a PC go against the party…and no one in our party is particularly interested in teasing out mysteries in the first place.
Just beginner group problems.
Just beginner group problems.
And the perennial “the good guys have to have 21st century Western liberal attitudes even in a 19th/18th/mediaeval setting” problem of novels, movies and what have you 🙂
Beginners will improve with time and practice. Could try slipping the DM a copy of the Horrible Histories; they may not be hugely more accurate but they will be a lot more fun!
One of the things I liked about the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels was the lack of “good guys have to have 21st century Western liberal attitudes”. The two central characters, in their very different ways, have what I find convincing 18th/19th century opinions and morals.
To paraphrase Aubrey (I couldn’t find the exact quote in short order): “Stephen gets outrageous on the subject of slavery, and I can see his point; but at the same time I can’t help feeling that a couple of biddable young blacks around the house who could not give notice would be very useful.” Not exactly a modern attitude.
I was struck by the contrast with the Hornblower novels. Hornblower is different from those around him in being more like us. Aubrey and Maturin are not.
What is the setting of where that story happened? Was it similar to our world, and if so, is there an approximate date and location? You say “medieval”, but I’d like a bit more specific than that. How much is magic available?
As a DM, every time I roleplay a medieval ruler, I have to go to great pains to accentuate how benevolent and just they are; otherwise, the PCs have a tendency to shout “Sic semper Tyrannis!” and give them the murderhobo treatment.
Actual conversation at the end of a campaign derailed by the PCs betraying their employer, the rightful monarch:
PC: The Queen was evil all along, right?
DM: What? No!
PC: But she cast Suggestion on me. Mind control is totally evil.
DM: Suggestion is not inherently evil,…and she was trying to find a way to get you to do your job so that she wouldn’t have to charge you with treason.
PC: I don’t know…
From the annals, Scott’s review of MacIntyre’s After Virtue. I was looking through some old SSC comment threads for… reasons, and this is one of my favorites. Highlights include Deiseach explaining how Catholic CS Lewis was (answer: not very) and why Dawkins is wrong about the Troubles (answer: he’s English),
Christopher Hallquist’s suggestion to read The Abolition of Man with a transhumanist mindset, and muflax getting a blank check to pick Scott’s next book and choosing… The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.Deiseach explaining how Catholic CS Lewis was (answer: not very)
Well, you know – for an Ulster Protestant from County Down he’s surprisingly sympathetic to the question, but no way he’s going to go the full Anglo-Catholic, let alone Roman, route 😀
Re:Dawkins – I STAND BY THAT UNABASHEDLY, UNASHAMEDLY, AND UNCHANGINGLY!
I was shocked when I learn that Lewis was not Catholic several years ago. It turns out that that belief was just an assumption based on going to Catholic school and being required to study/read Lewis and having all of his teachings, writings, and ideas presented as fully orthodox.
I had no idea what town he was from.
Why is Sagat from Street Fighter considered an honorable opponent rather than pure evil when one of his battle cries is “TIGER GENOCIDE”? Wouldn’t it be a very effective form of altruism to hire a hitman to kill him before the next tiger is killed?
Maybe the tigers are doing the genocide? And that makes it ok somehow?
Possibly he just takes a robust approach to the problem of wild animal suffering?
He’s a supporter of the Voluntary Tiger Extinction Movement.
Well now you’ve said it too.
I have a new explanation for Trump’s trade war with China. It makes us poorer. Ending it will make us richer, raise the stock market, make Trump less unpopular with tech firms. Voters vote largely on current information. So if he ends it a few months before the election …
Which reminds me of the story of the man in the insane asylum for hitting himself in the head with a hammer. When one of the doctors asked him why he did it, the answer was “Because it feels so good when I stop.”
I have a somewhat more 4D-chess version. If things look too good, the Fed will raise interest rates quickly. Trump thinks this will crash the economy. So he makes enough noise and makes enough token gestures towards trade war to keep things apparently cool enough the Fed doesn’t do so. Then he backs off a bit. Lather-rinse-repeat. And of course talking trade war helps him with his base.
Trump actually, genuinely believes in tariffs. I’m not sure he believes in anything else besides himself, but he believes in tariffs. His wishy-washiness is probably more closely linked to how easily manipulated he is when flattered, as Xi or Abe did.
No, as broblawsky says, Trump likes tariffs. Tariffs only make “us” poorer in the sense that “us” is the professional and investor class. But for the working class, unemployment can’t get much lower, wages are rising for the first time in a long, long time, and the economy is making jobs including manufacturing jobs like crazy. You simply have different economic values than Trump and Trump voters.
Fully agree.
Trump doesn’t need to win votes in Manhattan or Silicon Valley (which is where “tariffs make us poorer” is considered dominant and obvious).
He does need to win them in rural Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, etc. Where what’s considered dominant and obvious is closer to “All our great jobs have been stolen by the Chinese.”
In 2012, Barack Obama was running campaign ads bragging about how he kept tariffs on tires high, while greedy capitalist Mitt Romney wanted to sell out to China by lowering them, which would cost Americans tons of jobs. He did that for a reason. Trump dropping his trade war right before the election would be a disaster for him (but he might do it anyway, if he listens to his almost-entirely-neocon advisors…)
Like Peter Navarro, Larry Kudlow, and Wilbur Ross? Not happening. Those guys are loving every minute of the trade war.
ETA: Timely relevant. Larry Kudlow on Fox Business Network about the 224,000 jobs added in June. Nothing’s changing.
@Conrad Honcho,
Frankly with median wages finally rising for the first time since, what the ’90’s? And no increase of and relatively few Americans coming home in body bags, I don’t see that they’ll be any “voters remorse”, and meanwhile the Democratic candidates seem to not just doing the “circular firing squad” thing, but to almost activey trying to hurt themselves in the general election.
Barring changes, it really looks like your man Trump will be re-elected.
We’ll see what happens during the inevitable “shift to the middle” in the general election, but right now I think the Democratic candidates are badly misreading the electorate. You can’t win on things that 60% of people outright oppose and only ~25% support, like free healthcare for illegal immigrants. But if they walk that back they’re going to look like flip-floppers.
I think Biden might have had a chance if he’d stuck with working class economic issues, but his numbers keep slipping as he has to dance around (or with) the progressive identity issues. And even among working class voters, in the general if I were Trump I would be hammering him over his comments that China is not a threat. That does not sound like the sort of thing people who are worried about their jobs going overseas will think is true.
Also, Trump’s approval among black and Hispanic voters is significantly higher than it was during the last election, so I don’t think you can necessarily count on high minority turnout. If Harris is the nominee (which was my prediction in one these OTs at the beginning of the year) she’s going to have another problem, which is many African-Americans don’t see her as one of them, anyway. I’ve recently become aware of the ADOS movement, which is short for “American Descendants of Slavery.” This is African-Americans whose families were here before the Civil War, trying to make a point to distinguish themselves and their experience from latecomers, like Obama’s Kenyan father or Harris’ Jamaican father. It’s not really the same thing when your parents chose to come here at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement.
So long as the economy stays strong, I could see Trump’s electoral college victory widening. But I can also see him losing the popular vote by an even wider margin as nobody in California or NY sits this one out.
As an aside, there’s a basic problem with affirmative action that applies to this stuff. If you think of affirmative action programs as a kind of reparations or fixing the harm done by slavery and Jim Crow, it’s really hard to see why that should apply to (for example) West Indies or African immigrant blacks. OTOH, if you’re Harvard and you’re looking for black students who can keep up, you’re going to take the top black students you can find, rather than restrict yourself to only the best black students whose great-great-grandparents were mostly slaves.
I think the Democratic candidate is going to have widespread commercials of his or her most out-there comments during the debate. The Democrats can win this election on a return to normalcy and moderation, but there’s no way they can win it on a return of mandatory busing, reparations for blacks, and trans rights.
Are any of Trump’s actual policies abnormal or immoderate?
Or just the fact that he’s crude and boorish?
One could argue border enforcement / family separation, but then we get into the “Obama did it / Obama didn’t do it” arguments. But I think if illegal immigration becomes the central focus of the election, Trump wins because more people want the border shored up than want to give free healthcare to illegals.
The only other “abnormal” thing is the trade war, but the “normal” thing wasn’t working for working class voters, anyway.
meanwhile the Democratic candidates seem to not just doing the “circular firing squad” thing, but to almost activey trying to hurt themselves in the general election
I’m slowly coming round to the notion that Biden might actually get to be the Democrat candidate, because while he’s old white cis het guy, he’s also a known quantity, liberal enough on the right questions but not batshit crazy (sorry rest of the field; for the first time ever, a nice lady like Marianne Williamson who is plainly wired to the moon did not strike me as the nuttiest person there).
The party has to make a choice: does it want a good chance at winning the election, or does it want to pander to the ever tinier slivers of “who can scream the loudest about being oppressed?” Hillary bombed, and for all the talk of “she won the popular vote!”, yes she did – in areas solidly and reliably Blue which did her no good at all by voting 95% instead of 90% for her. The “basket of deplorables” thing was a bad, bad mistake that she (or her campaign) could not resist because they were focussed on appealing to the progressive wing.
Well, that got them four years of Trump and the very strong possibility of another four years after that. So Biden is the best chance they have to appeal to the widest swathe of the American electorate. It will be interesting to see if the party machinery will let the other candidates claw each other to pieces and then when all the shouting is over, quietly push Joe into place.
Biden vs Trump would be interesting to see and not that easy to call.
@Deiseach,
The problem is that to get the nomination Biden is having to walk back his previous “moderate” positions i.e. his decades long support for the “Hyde Amendment”, which prohibited Federal funds for abortions, which are exactly the kinds of positions that broaden a candidates appeal in the general election.
It’s like if in order to win the Republican Party nomination their candidates had to multiple times promise to “Destroy social security (old age pensions) with fire!”.
Madness.
A Biden vs Trump debate would be pure comedy gold. The battle of the uninformed, uninhibited blowhards!
I think Biden’s weakness against Trump is that, while both of them are old, Biden looks old. Trump is a bully. He likes pushing people around. Reasonably or unreasonably, voters don’t like identifying with the person who is being pushed.
But I may be underestimating Biden.
@DavidFriedman,
If you’re underestimating Biden you’re not alone, as I share that impression.
Judging by polls Biden is the Democrat most likely to beat Trump, but it seems a slim chance.
I don’t think polls at this point mean much. First off you need state by state polls. Second, the election will not be held today. It will be held after another year and a half of propaganda and shit flinging. I don’t think that works in Democrats’ favor, because there’s not much more shit you can fling at Trump that everyone hasn’t already heard ad nauseam. We’re in a perpetual media cycle of racist -> sexist -> Russia Russia Russia -> nazi and then back to racist again. So, take Biden now, fling $2 billion worth of mud at him for a year and a half and we’ll see where we stand then.
+1
There’s not much anyone can say about Trump that hasn’t already been said, and everyone’s already priced in all that stuff.
Biden is amazing with the unforced errors he makes, like saying that the election hacking would not have happened under his or Obama’s watch. He would probably be a fine centrist good-government Democrat, but he is incredibly bad at campaigning.
Timely column from Pat Buchanan about the difficulty Dems will have shifting to the middle: Are Democrats Ceding the Center to Trump?
That Obama ad is linked from this piece. Politifact said it was “mostly true” but that involves a lot of parsing of what was said. The ad was “I did tariffs because China was flooding us.”
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/01/barack-obama/ad-says-obama-defied-china-save-tire-making-jobs-h/
I can see a difference between “tariffs to boost our own markets” and “tariffs to retaliate against flooding” but I suspect the rust belt voters do not.
I recently started rereading Gate if Ivrel, C.J. Cherryh’s first novel. The introduction is by Andre Norton, at the time a very successful author.
Cherryh, in that novel, is doing the sort of thing Norton did, but doing it much better. And Norton, to her immense credit, realizes it and is willing to say so. The end of the introduction:
What changes could have made Battlefield Earth a good movie?
The most important part is to realize that no one is impressed by the Scientologist creation story.
I am not saying that a stupid story is a problem per se. You can make a successful movie based on a stupid story. But it needs to have something else, for example awesome graphical effects, lot of fighting, or nudity and sex. It is a combination of stupid story + long boring moments when nothing happens, that is fatal.
One possible approach is to improve the story. “Humanity was enslaved by evil alien Psychiatrists and reduced to the level of savages, but one truly dedicated self-educated person can kill them all by (1) breaking the glass dome that protects a breathable atmosphere for the aliens on Earth, and then (2) teleporting a nuke to their home world, which explodes the entire planet” is simply not enough for two hours of a movie. It would need something less linear; to introduce a few different pieces that at the end interact in an interesting way.
The problem is, I guess, making some of the Psychiatrists smart or non-evil would be a heresy against Scientology, and with one race being stupid savages (with the exception of the protagonist, who is an exceptional smart savage) and another race being utterly evil and boring aliens, there is no material to build a story on. — Perhaps introduce a third race? Someone also enslaved by the Psychiatrists (i.e. not utterly evil), but not reduced to savages. The other aliens could be a different kind of slaves, e.g. someone who does the accounting or navigates the spaceships for the Psychiatrists, so they are left with high intelligence and education (and perhaps crippled in some other way). Now someone from that third race, at a great risk for themselves, could help humanity, at least as an “enemy of my enemy”. They could follow their own goals, and either succeed or fail at them (or it could be open-ended: humanity delivers a fatal blow to the Psychiatrists, the interstellar wormholes between Earth and the alien empire is destroyed, we have no idea what happened to the other aliens).
Another possible approach is to add giant fighting vehicles, a lot of alien monsters, tons of ammunition, and spend 1/2 of the time showing fights and explosions, 1/3 showing awesome technology, other impressive graphics, and sex among the humans, and at most 1/6 with the story.
The book was more like your suggestions.
I like your ideas, but a constraint I’m adding is that the film can’t depart too much from the book. Unless there was a third species in the book and it had a significant role (e.g. – not just mentioned in passing by the Psychiatrists), they can’t be in the film adaptation.
There were many other races in the second part of the book, who show up to fight for ownership of Earth since the Psychlos have lost their claim on it.
Wait, was Battlefield Earth at all related to Scientology’s origin story other than being by the founder?
It looks like the “distrust psychologists” aspect of the book was as a result of the APA coming out against Dianetics, but the actual storyline is unrelated, and I don’t remember any of that anti-psychologist stuff being in the actual movie. The movie Psychlos were just a generic evil hierarchical empire.
If anything, I’d say it sort of contradicts Scientology: surely the Psychlos would have mentioned something about the ancient alien souls in the people they just conquered? Or “hey isn’t this the place that Xenu landed on way back when?”
First, pick any other novel other than something by L. Ron Hubbard.
My own suggestions:
1) Get a better cinematographer. Battlefield Earth is notorious for its overuse of tilted angles (“Dutch angles”). The lighting effects are also cheesy.
2) Get a better composer for the movie’s score. As is, the soundtrack is forgettable and uninspired. Sphere (which I actually like) is an example of a sci-fi film whose musical score hits above the overall weight of movie.
3) Add more jokes and humor. At least make Battlefield Earth funny to watch (and not in an inadvertent way that strays from the filmmakers’ intent).
4) Try to get Tom Cruise to star in it. He’s also a Scientologist and might have been willing to be in the movie for a low salary given that it was a “labor of love” for “the Church.” A Cruise-Travolta pic would have definitely made more money.
5) Open the movie in the year 2000, with the Psychiatrists invading Earth, and show a gripping CGI battle scene where the aliens destroy the humans’ armies and cities. Cut to black and then have the words “500 years later” shown.
https://www.newsweek.com/scientists-vortex-black-hole-speed-light-1447729
Very tentative: I’m guessing these black holes are in the centers of galaxies, so they’ve got the rotational energy of matter from a large region concentrated into a relatively small area.
Now I’m realizing that I have no idea why galaxies rotate.
It’s plausible that they concentrate the rotational energy of large regions, but I find it surprising that there could be such huge asymmetries of rotational energy. Or do they only look huge because my sense of scale isn’t large enough?
Is it possible rotating regions are more hospitable to star formation?
And if a black hole is rotating at close to the speed of light, is that adding to its mass?
Isn’t galactic rotation just the product of a bunch of mass orbiting a barycenter?
Re: galactic rotation:
Galaxies (like stars, but on a larger scale) coalesced from immense low-density dust clouds which collapsed under their own gravity. Obviously, collapsing decreases the radius of the cloud. Thanks to conservation of angular momentum, a decrease in the radius of a rotating object of constant mass will necessarily increase its angular velocity. (You can test this out for yourself with an office chair.) Thus, even the slightest net angular velocity of the dust cloud would have been greatly magnified by the gravitational collapse and voila, a rotating galaxy.
(This is a repost. I originally posted this in the 131 OT, and some folks argued it was too culture-war for the whole-number threads.)
An interesting take on Women’s Studies by Suburb Dad, who is a dean at a community college in New England somewhere.
Unfortunately the formatting on the blog really sucks. I’ve contacted the author about it, and he says its a platform problem and out of his hands. You might want to copy the text into an editor for easier reading.
All the spans in the body of his blog post have a bunch of custom styling on them, including white-space: pre. If you inspect element and remove it, word wrap works again:
https://imgur.com/vf9sDNS
Why is it styled that way? Blogspot definitely doesn’t do that by default. Is he pasting his posts into the editor and it’s assuming/carrying over a bunch of bizarre styling? This is why I hate wysiwyg editors. It can make all of these unwarranted assumptions about the styling of your post you can’t do anything about, and sometimes can’t even see until it’s published, and it won’t just show you the damn markup. Or worse, the markup isn’t even plaintext so it would look like nonsense anyway. There is no excuse for it.
Clean copy:
*****
Confessions of a Community College Dean
In which a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990’s moves into academic administration and finds himself a married suburban father of two. Foucault, plus lawn care. For private comments, I can be reached at deandad at gmail dot com. The opinions expressed here are my own and not those of my employer.
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Revisiting a Favorite
Chuck Pearson reminded me of this piece from 2012 this week. Reading my old stuff usually makes me cringe, but this one holds up better than some.
The Stonewall riots happened 50 years ago this week. In honor of that, the piece below is (was) aimed at my straight male counterparts who aren’t quite sure what to do as the world changes.
It’s possible to learn, and to grow. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be in education.
—
Why Men Should Take Women’s Studies
Women’s studies courses were some of the most useful courses I’ve ever taken.
I’m not kidding.
Moreover, I can imagine them being incredibly useful for other men in management roles.
That flies in the face of cultural stereotypes, I know. Courses like those are usually held up — by those who like to make such arguments — as among the most self-indulgent of the purely academic enterprises. They elicit snickers from some. I get that. But there’s a tremendous value in them that rarely gets expressed, even by supporters of courses like those.
At their best, the women’s studies courses I took — yes, I used the plural — helped with two incredibly important management skills. They helped me learn to navigate complex and emotionally charged issues, and they helped me learn to depersonalize categories.
These skills are useful every single day.
I was reminded of this a few days ago, when I was on the receiving end of an extended, vitriolic outburst. It would have been easy, if unhelpful, to respond in kind, or to try to respond point by point. Without betraying any confidences, it was based on different sets of assumptions crashing into each other.
Getting through that and coming out in a better place required the patience to first try to figure out where it was coming from. It required accepting that the reason I was being yelled at was my office, as opposed to me personally. And it required emotional self-control in a charged setting that was moving pretty quickly.
Looking back afterwards, I realized that women’s studies classes were the first academic setting in which I honed those skills.
As a clueless — if well-meaning — straight young white guy from the suburbs, I went into those classes without malice, but with some pretty glaring blind spots. And back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, some of the theoretical issues were, um, let’s go with “at an early stage of refinement.” Some discussions were conducted with appropriate academic distance, but some of them got pretty raw. And it was easy to fall into the demonization/defensiveness spiral that we all know so well.
But it was also where I was first blindsided by arguments about things I thought I already understood. I remember being struck dumb when someone made the point that the question of mothers working for pay registered differently in low-income communities, where the “choice” was never a choice. I hadn’t thought of it from that angle. And I remember repeatedly getting flustered as statements that had seemed obviously correct were parsed for unintended, but real, effects on folks I wasn’t thinking about.
If that isn’t preparation for administration, I don’t know what is. Everything here has ripple effects, and dealing with those ripple effects is a huge part of the job. For some of us, the patience to take those seriously is a learned skill. (There’s always a temptation to just throw up your hands, say “screw it,” and do what you wanted to do in the first place.) And learning to at least think about possible unintended effects is incredibly helpful.
I won’t claim that all was sweetness and light. There was some groupthink, and heaven knows that the prose style of, say, Gayatri Spivak, can sap the will of even the most tenacious reader. Some of it was a bit much, and at least back then, the standards of proof weren’t always what they could have been.
But that’s not really the point. The point was to develop habits of mind that acknowledged that even things that seem obvious may have more to them, and to be able to separate, say, an attack on “patriarchy” from a personal attack as a guy. It wasn’t always fun, but it was incredibly useful.
It wasn’t marketed as vocational, but I use it on the job every single day. For any guys out there considering administration or management, I really can’t recommend it highly enough.
Ugh, mansplaining… does anyone feel like we really need a cishet white male to explain why men should take women’s studies? This article completely erases the effort of all women who wrote so many insightful articles on the same topic. But instead of supporting one of them (e.g. by linking to her article and making a regular donation to her Patreon), the author believes that writing his own opinion from the perspective of a privileged male is the part that was missing from the discourse. This is what actual privilege looks like!
😛
More seriously, I suppose one can find enlightenment in anything. So if Women’s Studies gave you something insightful, good for you. I voluntarily took Gender Studies (the same thing? not the same thing? what’s the difference?) at university, and the amount of useful information was zero. So the advice is not universally helpful.
My perhaps uncharitable reading is that this dean would have benefited from more classes with a postmodern bent generally, not just women’s studies, since the benefits he identifies seem to be those of effectively-taught postmodern thought, primarily challenging categories.
I’d never considered the fact women’s studies could be the major vector of postmodern teaching into colleges before though, which might well be the logical implication here.
As ideologically opposed to both women studies and postmodernism I always thought one contains a lot of the other 🙂
But I don’t think he was referring just to the content of the course, but to the (accidentally) perfect mix of content with the opportunity to apply it in defusing the situations he got himself into, as a “cis white male” that expressed his naive thinking.
Also, his experience is different than the modern one, at least as often described. He seemingly engaged to profitable discourse. The modern experience has much more of a “shut up and listen” narrative.
Clutzy:
Have you taken such a class and had that experience? Or is this just your impression?
No, I haven’t. The closest was a mandatory “diversity and inclusion” course, which was pretty much closed off to debate and was not interesting in the least.
Other than that it would be all 2nd hand accounts from people I went to college with.
Yeah, I’ve actually had interesting diversity training a few times (like having a guy come talk about the research behind implicit bias tests–very interesting, and even more so as most of those results have since failed to replicate), but most of the time, diversity training is a rehash of high school–a bunch of students who don’t want to be there, being lectured by some lady from HR who also doesn’t want to be there. Usually a kind of dull secular sermon on the virtues of diversity and acceptance.
Nitpick: Dean Dad (who I’ve been reading since his now-in-high school daughter was a newborn) used to be in Western Massachusetts (Holyoke), but is now in New Jersey. One of my great regrets is being too shy to reach out immediately when I moved to Western Mass – he moved to NJ 6 months later.
Doubtfully so, for reasons others have stated.
This proves too much. Even if you ignore the points Thomas Jorgensen makes, that the south was in no way a very well-functioning democracy even among its white population, the amount of black people living there numbered well into the double digits. If southerners had the right to leave the union, would black southerners not have the right to leave the south?
If the Union had let the Confederate states secede, within a few years they’d be going to war anyway. We’d see the Fugitive Slave Act getting repealed and slave-catchers operating illegally within the Union, meanwhile abolitionist militias would follow in John Brown’s footsteps. Sooner or later there’d be a casus belli. A peaceful divorce was not in the cards.
Remember, this was a time when wars of conquest were still considered legitimate. Barely over a decade beforehand, the US had conquered the Southwest from Mexico because
it was our manifest destiny to reach the Pacificwe felt like it.A few months ago here I wrote
Responses then were mainly people saying that I was wrong, drug cartels weren’t actually sponsoring Dark R&D. Turns out, if Fentanyl, Inc. is to be believed (and the summaries I’ve read are accurate), we were both wrong and right: the Dark R&D is going on in quasi-legal factories in China, often subsidized. Which might make this project harder for non-China entities in some ways, but at least might mean it could be done openly–is it possible that someone in China has invented a non-addictive opioid, had no easy way of monetizing it, but is still sitting on it and would gladly sell it?
I’ve a suspicion drug cartel ‘near misses’ tend more towards ‘kills the customer on first dose’ rather than ‘not addictive enough’ or ‘doesn’t get you high but man can you jam crazy jazz riffs when on it’.
Even if it existed, how would you find it? It’s not like these guys are doing extensive and well-documented research and human testing on their products. How would they know if they had something useful? And if they don’t know, how could you?
You’re assuming a less addictive drug would automatically be considered a fail. I don’t think so – they’re neck deep in the drug market, and they probably know better than everyone just how many functional, non-addicted drug users are there.
It’s probably one of the ways the universe is cruel – most pills that make you feel good also get you addicted. Which makes sense, if you consider “feeling good” to be an instrument for habit making.
Accidental contamination during synthesis of opioids has led to a useful model of Parkinson’s disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP , https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/01/12/frozen-addicts-garage-drugs-and-funky-brain-chemistry-10728 .
Oh, interesting, thank you!
One question that sometimes gets discussed here is to what extent things have gotten better (or worse) over recent decades. I recently came across some calculations of how the ratio of prices of goods to the wages of an unskilled worker changed from 1979 to 2019. If their figures are correct, the average cost of goods measured in hours of labor fell about 72% over that time period.
Their price calculations are based on the Sears Christmas Book for 1979, Walmart’s web site for 2019, so for goods, hence do not include schooling, medical care, or rent. But the result is still pretty striking as a contrast to the idea that things have not improved over that period.
Very few people these days seem to complain about the price of consumer goods, but lots of them sure are complaining keenly and at length about the prices of schooling, medical care, and rent. It seems to me that to the extent that people think things are worse, it’s in great part precisely because of the costs in these three categories. It makes sense too that increases in costs there would be more keenly felt, as while people generally find relatively easier to cut back on consumer goods if they are too expensive, they find it a lot more difficult to cut back on healthcare, rent, and schooling.
Except people aren’t buying anything remotely like the same goods today than 40 years ago when you look at medical care and rent. Medical care is incalculably better, with whole swathes of disease that used to be death sentences now survivable. Housing today isn’t just higher quality, we have something like twice the square footage per person with the same amount of land.
Education, I grant, hasn’t seen the enormous increases in quality of those other industries, but what do you expect from the most socialized industry in the country?
There was an article (or facebook post?) by Eliezer Yudkowsky some years back, probably at the time he started thinking about Inadequate Equilibria. I really wish I had a link, it’s been relevant to a lot of discussions here.
The way I remember it, it was about how society has wealth-sinks that make sure we’re always at an equilibrium level, comfort-wise. They will extract a variable amount of resources until they reach the point we refuse to pay more – so most of progress goes the way of rent-seeking instead of actual human enjoyment.
Products are not well suited for this, except very specialized or branded categories (iPhones come to mind). Too much competition and choice, including the possibility of not buying. Education, health and rent/home ownership on the other hand are not really optional, easily regulated and much less subject to competition. They make ideal choke points for human wealth.
Safety is a massive wealth sink. For a trivial example, a coworker visited the US recently and was shocked when he visited a Home Depot and saw guy working there, walking in front of a forklift with warning flags. That was his job, to walk in front of a fork lift waving a flag.
Another example would be rules around duty time limits for doctors in the UK. My uncle was an anesthesiologist, now retired. He said when he started out he did some procedure 500x per year, and now the doctors do it about 200x per year, just because they aren’t allowed to work as much. (it was in the context of new doctors not getting the proficiency as fast)
Another example: hour requirements for airline pilots. After the Colgan Air crash first officer requirements went up to 1500 hours. Or duty time limits, which have gotten more restrictive over time, meaning more crew need to be hired per aircraft.
Another example: there was a crew of NYPD pilots that all refused to fly their anti-terrorism missions because they were worried about flying single-engine turbine 25 miles off shore. NYPD/ In this case it is the pilots demanding more safety: a few million more to get a twin engine plane. (the single has a failure rate of 1/330,000 hours, and ditching has a sub 10% fatality rate)
Yep, safety is exactly the kind of thing you buy according to how much you can afford to pay, instead of making a rational choice.
One of the links I like to pull out at the slightest excuse is on the US Bureau of Reclamation’s website: Fatalities on the worksite during the construction of Hoover Dam. Note that this is pulled from the official construction history, and the Bureau acknowledges that there may be other fatalities not counted, because they died in the hospital, rather than on the worksite; it’s provided for historical purposes rather than as the last word on the subject.
They break down the fatalities by year, and within the year by cause, and within the cause by date. When you start looking closely you realize that the timelines are remarkable. Look specifically at 1933: They had a guy killed on the first of the year from a fall in the Arizona Valve House, two people died due to an explosion on January 10 & 11*, another fall on the 1st of February, two deaths on February 7th due to falling rock in a penstock tunnel and being struck by a motor vehicle. The list goes on.
Looking at that, you realize that they were killing a guy every two weeks on average during that quarter. That would be absolutely appalling today. And some of these are things that would today be considered appalling carelessness if they happened even once: accidents where people are killed by explosives, for example.
In government construction nowadays, we literally will stop work for an investigation after one fatality, and part of that is a lever to make the contractor care about safety. Of course, we pay for that in the bids.
The death rate for workers constructing the Empire State Building was higher than that for soldiers in Afghanistan.
It makes me wonder: if at some point, to stop climate change we need to do something drastic that is definitely going to risk a lot of lives, will it even be possible or will the safety and liability red tape prevent it? We can’t even use nuclear power to solve it since that is deemed too risky.
What about in the military? Maybe bean would be able to answer that one.
I’m not bean, but:
We can definitely nuke China. Yes, it involves the use of nuclear power and is deemed risky, but it doesn’t require a consensus and if a moderately-competent POTUS wants it done, it will happen. If we’re careful about how we do it, there should be some short-term cooling due to stratospheric soot, and a substantial long-term reduction in China’s carbon footprint. Also, our negotiating position when we tell e.g. India to reduce their carbon footprint as well, would be substantially enhanced.
If your plan wasn’t to solve the problem by killing people, breaking things, and scaring the crap out of the survivors, then the military is the wrong tool.
John,
I didn’t mean using the military to solve global warming, I meant more like “does the military suffer from increased safety rules that are now irreversible.”
The though came up because I was listening to a retired navy seal (Jocko Willink) interviewing a green beret from the vietnam war. During the interview it was obvious that the safety standards had completely changed, and that what would have been a stock standard SOP or mission during the Vietnam War would be too dangerous to be considered in the 2000s. For special forces, anyway. I was just wondering if a) is this change reversible if necessary and b) does that apply more generally in the military.
I’ve actually wondered this myself, from the inside. Standard practice now in our asymmetric conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is to conduct a formal investigation of every combat death, with the investigating officer being no less than a major. Operations are conducted with that calibrating an acceptable level of risk.
If this is how the Army handles casualties occurring in relatively small numbers (the worst day was 30 KIA, on August 6, 2011), I don’t have a good feeling about how we’ll fare against a near-peer, where you can regularly expect those kinds of casualties. When training to conduct an in-stride breach of an obstacle, 50% casualties of the breaching platoon is considered a “GO”, so that’s going to be a psychological hurdle for the chain of command ordering that.
One I forgot to mention: parenting. Parents spend twice as much time parenting as they did 50 years ago.
The amount of work and expense involved has surely gone up as well. This certainly counts as a wealth sink.
Or as a legitimate way of spending that wealth, depending on your position. For many parenting may just be a primary goal in itself. After all, you do have to spend the extra resources on something. It’s just where marginal benefits get a lot lower that you have a problem.
Even safety – there was the Hoover Dam example above. To increase safety from that level is a legitimate way of spending wealth (because we don’t like dying) and also profitable – dead people are a waste of experience and potential, so long term it’s just better to have less casualties. But we get to the point were we stop children completely from interacting with strangers because there might be that one in a million danger, while ignoring other much more statistically relevant problems. That’s not safety, that’s security theater. And when it becomes socially impossible to protest security theater, it gets into a positive feedback loop that is making costs almost irrelevant.
Not all extra parenting has any benefit. As an example: you can no longer leave your kid in the car to go grocery shopping. Even though your kid is more likely to die walking through the parking lot than staying in the car. This new norm makes parenting much more difficult for no benefit, and is only possible because our society is rich enough to afford it.
Fourth of July posts reminded me:
This Fourth of July (and not before), I’ve noticed quite a few people from the US posting comments and memes to the effect of “British people suck!”, plus the near-literal storm in a teacup about the women’s football. None of them have been serious but a few seemed to have at least a bit of a barb to them. Is this common, or a new thing, or a just-because-of-the-football thing?
I’m British but not looking to start a fight. It just seems like a bit of an old issue to drag up from the winning side.
I’m an American living in England. British people don’t suck, in my experience.
On the 4th I had a BBQ outside with some of my American friends. A few British people also came. To my great disappointment, the person who was supposed to bring the fireworks didn’t bring any. Still, it was generally a good time. There was a bit of banter about independence, but it wasn’t hurtful to anyone.
Yeah, this is what surprised me – in my general experience Americans seem pretty friendly to and positive about Brits. So I was wondering if it was based on the football, or something something Trump Brexit something, or even if it was just that a few more memes get popular every year, so you see more of them repeated.
The US and UK have been on the same side of every major fight for a century now, haven’t they?
The biggest disagreement that I can think of was the 1956 Suez Canal crisis
It’s really just a 4th of July thing. Come July 5th, we’ll be back to thinking you’re better than us.
So this feeds into my alternative hypothesis of “I just happened to check my Facebook account on 4th July this year but not the last few years”.
As a Brit living in America, I hear that type of thing around the 4th a lot in person (and have for years), but always meant in a jocular manner. I haven’t heard anything in particular about the world cup, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some American friends wanted an extra reason to gloat in a friendly way about how “Britain sucks”.
It’s definitely a fair-weather fan thing too, no one in the US would care about the world cup if the US hadn’t been doing so well in women’s soccer recently, much as they don’t care about men’s soccer because the US team doesn’t have any global standing.
Yeah, this is almost certainly a 4th of July thing. With football (and the quasi-warm beer) as our go-to examples of things the British just get Wrong. The remaining 364 days of the year, you can join us in griping about how French people suck.
This reminds me of the story of an Englishman boasting about the long string of English victories through history. An American interrupted with “but what about the American Revolution?”
“Another fine example. A victory by brave English colonists against the Hanoverian King George and his Hessian mercenaries.”
Hah! Yes, we’re well-positioned to place ourselves on whichever side of history suits the moment. My oppressed underdog ancestors, the Saxons, were ground beneath the heel of my glorious conquering ancestors, the Normans.
I guess a lot of Americans can similarly choose to identify with or against the British depending on whether we’re being awesome or brutish at any given point in history.
Americans really, really like the UK and Canada. Gallup has their favorability ratings are in the 90s. It is almost impossible to get something that high. Like, I am doing some quick googling for comparisons, and those are higher favorability numbers than cheese and Aaron Rodgers. In Wisconsin. It’s up there with Abraham Lincoln and Jesus.
I hate the UK and Canada. They’re run by lizardmen.
It’s the same as jokes made during Eurovision. People have joked that the US being unable to participate in the Eurovision ribbing is payback for all of our 4th of July ribbing.
Gentlemen! (or indeed, ladies, let’s be inclusive here!)
Are you looking for a sure-fire way to pop the question and get a positive response? Look no further!
Paint it on the side of your cow 😀
This is the best article that I’ve read in a while. Thank you.
When Tolstoy was a guest of a Caucasian chief of Circassians, a people who lived in the mountains far from civilization, he found them most desiring to hear about Lincoln.
I’m trying to take advantage of this community to better understand positions I disagree with. In the last open thread I asked about arguments in favor of the minimum wage and got several interesting responses. The issue is that to me most libertarian conclusions seem obviously correct. Not only that, but I have this odd expectation that anyone who spends long enough thinking about the political issues eventually ends up more libertarian than they were before.
Now before everyone jumps on me, I want to say that I know that this cannot be correct. There are a lot of people smarter than me who are not libertarian, and if the issues seem one-sided to me it’s probably just because I haven’t heard the best form of the other side. So, in the interest of correcting my biases: those of you who are now less libertarian than you used to be, who were once more laissez-faire in some domain but are now more pro-government, what changed your mind?
I briefly identified as a libertarian in the early 2000s, mainly because the rise of neoconservatism in the Republican party made me no longer want to identify as a Republican, and I was looking for some rational justification for my preferences towards small government and free markets. What drove me away from libertarianism was social issues and pragmatism. The realization that libertarianism is just as much a utopian fantasy as communism. “Well, I’m not greedy and I’m easygoing so if everybody else were not greedy and were easygoing then we could all share everything!” “Well I don’t want to force anybody to do anything and would never violate the NAP so if everybody else were just as easygoing and peaceful as I am…” If men were angels we would have no need for government, but if wishes were horses beggars would eat and here we are.
This leads me more towards “conservatism.” Yes, taxation is theft, but we have to pay for roads and police and defend ourselves from hostile foreigners, so some theft is required. Let’s try to keep it to a minimum, though. Sure, free movement of people is a great thing. But it turns out lots of other people in the world don’t have the same attitudes towards individual liberty and healthy suspicion of collectivism as we do, so maybe we need to tightly control the border so those people don’t wander in, set up shop and vote themselves our property. Nobody ought to be going around telling anybody else what to do with their bodies or in the privacy of their own bedrooms, sure. But it turns out once we remove all the sexual taboos we get tinder and lots of women sleeping with the top echelon of men and lots of people have really dysfunctional relationships and don’t wind up settling down and having kids, and with families being the foundation of society and all this will result in bad things.
Libertarianism is like most ideologies: sounds really good until it bumps up against humanity.
+1
Incidentally, I believe Jayne’s exact words were, If wishes were horses, we’d all be eating steak. 😀
That was the way my dad said it when I was a kid, which predates Firefly. I hate it when that happens. Some joke I tell appears in mass media and then I can’t tell it anymore or else people think I ripped it off from the TV.
I don’t see what that has to do with libertarianism. Libertarian minarchists expect the government to continue law enforcement. Libertarian anarchists expect law enforcement by private rights enforcement agencies.
There might be problems with either approach, but neither depends on other people being easygoing and peaceful.
Some things that pushed me from being very libertarian to being a libertarian-flavored moderate who wants to make very small incremental changes and see how they work instead of break the wheel:
a. More life experience which led me to see that often, private businesses are dysfunctional and government agencies are effective and well-run. (Plenty of times it goes the other way, though.)
b. Realization that there are a hell of a lot of people who aren’t very smart. Reading _The Bell Curve_ was a big part of this for me. A substantial number of people are pretty dumb. It’s not their fault, but it’s also probably not possible to fix. (At best you can hope to help the next generation with better schooling, better nutrition, less lead in the environment, etc.) Maximal freedom often seems to end up with the dumber people getting ground up in the gears.
c. Personal experience where I manage to make a lot of irrational/suboptimal decisions due to time constraints, personal failings of willpower, distraction, etc. This made me a lot more sympathetic to other people whom I could see had made dumb decisions, and somewhat more sympathetic to proposals to set up government programs/rules that made it harder to make those decisions.
d. Lots of vicarious experience and some personal experience of clever schemes to remake the world along some pure ideological lines being implemented and going horribly wrong, often yielding outcomes the opposite of what their believers expected. I once believed that the net plus strong crypto plus widespread computing power would destroy governments–this turned out not to be the case.
e. Having kids, and watching my parents and grandparents get older and less mentally sharp.
f. Seeing a couple situations in which badly-behaving companies were reined in by government regulators in exactly the way you’d hope for.
All this left me with libertarian leanings, and a recognition that just because government *could* solve some problem doesn’t mean it will do a good job of it, but also with the belief that it’s probably the best tradeoff we can make to have mostly free markets and societies, but with some government regulation and safety nets and such.
I still have a lot of personal sympathy towards these folks which I don’t think I can explain. I’m also not sure why they declined—well, did they actually decline, or did I just shift bubbles/change who I read, or what?
Our predictions turned out to be approximately as good as those of the utopian socialists.
I think you have a very bad mental model of this comment space.
Very possible, and I apologize, but I spent a lot of time trying to think of a way to say “I feel like all the smart people agree with me” without it sounding inflammatory and I wasn’t sure I succeeded.
I think you misunderstand my point.
There are more commenters here favorable to libertarian ideas than most places. “Everyone” will definitely not object to you saying how you think libertarianism is clearly correct.
I think libertarian ideas are useful. I recognize that they are appealing in certain ways, and very appealing to some. I think capital-L Libertarians are mostly deluding themselves. But you aren’t asking for my opinion.
Ah, I see. Yes, the commenters here being largely libertarian makes this less than ideal for my question, but even if it’s 90% I still think this is a decent place for this discussion because the remaining 10% will be of unusually high quality for the internet. Basically I feel like I’m more likely to get interesting responses here than somewhere like AskReddit, even if it’s a much lower volume.
I’m not sure about capital-L Libertarians, I use the word libertarian because it seems maximally open to interpretation while still gesturing at the ideas I want to gesture at.
If you mean that expecting to win the presidency is a delusion I agree, but that isn’t the only reason to run candidates.
Or were you thinking of something else that distinguishes Libertarians from libertarians?
@David Friedman:
I think Jake perfectly understood the distinction I was making.
As the old joke goes, there are more libertarian philosophies than there are libertarians. There is very little coherence in the typical libertarian, little real thought about what should actually be done, just something of a vague notion that rules can be impediments to happiness. Little-l libertarian is maximally flexible gesturing.
This I would disagree with. I would define libertarian philosophy as believing the ideal amount of government to be very much less than the current amount of government. The problem is many people who believe that would deny the label, and in asking my question I wanted to try to limit it to people who considered themselves libertarian by their own definition, not by mine. The label, like all labels, has become subtly loaded with other qualities and I wanted to leave room for that without over-specifying the problem.
I agree that there is dispute over the exact inclusion criteria of the label “libertarian”, but I don’t think that implies the label has no descriptive value for grouping specific policy preferences. One hundred people can have one hundred precise definitions of “libertarian”, but I’d bet almost all of them would be at least partially in favor of redirecting public education funds into school vouchers. That’s not exactly a “vague notion.”
@HBC:
Then what do you mean by big L libertarian, and what part of that is self-delusion?
@David Friedman:
A fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, much in the way of the Big-C Communists.
@Jake Rowland:
Not to be too harsh, but, that is about as milquetoast a definition of “libertarian” as you can possibly get. It’s just an impulse.
Let me ask, do you think the state should have some sort of standards for the money going into vouchers? Do the students need to demonstrate anything at all? If the money be simply kicked back to the parents in a 50-50 split do you have any issues with that?
@HBC:
That tells me what you think is wrong about Libertarians but I still don’t know what you mean by “Libertarians” as contrasted with “libertarians.”
The usual convention is that “Libertarian” means a member of the Libertarian Party, “libertarian” means someone who believes in libertarianism. It doesn’t sound as though that’s how you are using the term but I’m not sure, and if not I have no idea what you mean by the distinction.
@David Friedman:
I mean those who believe society can be fully organized around and entirely consistent with libertarian principles.
I predict that the conversation that follows after this is likely to be boring.
Possibly.
It consists of my pointing out that inventing your own meaning for a term and using it without explanation is especially confusing when the term already exists and already has a (different) meaning.
@David Friedman:
What would your preferred term be for people who think society could and should be entirely organized around libertarian principles?
Short answer: I considered the role that peer pressure and social norms play in our lives, and how, even if something (shacking up with another man’s wife, say) doesn’t directly affect you, it can still have an important indirect effect (in this case, by contributing towards the normalisation of adultery and so making my wife more likely to cheat on me). But then, once I started taking indirect harms into consideration, I just couldn’t see any reason to follow the libertarian principle of permitting anything that does not fall foul of the non-aggression principle.
I was quite a liberatarian in my youth but now am not.
I became convinced that the NAP and claims that state action illegitimate were wrong and thus moral risk involved in state action was much smaller. To some extent this was the result of a discovery of to pre enlightenment theories of government; I have never found Lockean consent of the governed convincing.
Also in social ontology I came to think that social groups exist and have moral standing. Relatedly I came to feel that we have a broader range of moral obligations to people outside our immediate family. Along those lines, I have developed a sense of modern noblise oblige especially because of behavioral genetics.
Encountering people who embrace a full throatedly paternalist position opened a more coherent moderate form of paternalism when I had previously rejected the incoherent moderate paternalist position I grew up thinking was the only form of paternalism. A practical presumption against certain forms of paternalism for specific reasons while having only a weak presumption against other forms when those reasons do not apply makes sense in a way in which the acceptance of certain forms of paternalism while viewing paternalism in more personal areas as a priori objectionable is not. Similarly becoming convinced that human flourishing was to an important extent objective if immeasurable thing as opposed to subjective
More generally modus ponuses became mudus tollens in philosophical questions.
In empirical questions I am have become a bit more centrist but I have not had any significant changes of position.
In my mid- to late-20s I considered myself an anarcho-capitalist. I got less libertarian after that.
What changed my mind, I think, was first-hand knowledge that kids can be old enough to be in a position to make their own decisions, yet young enough to be easily preyed upon. Related to this is the realization that most people are pretty irrational, and even the most rational people still have biases and other little cognitive weak spots that can be (and are) exploited.
The result of this is a lot of voluntary exchanges that aren’t actually win-win.
I’m definitely not convinced that big bureaucratic government organizations are therefore necessarily the solution to everything, but I don’t see them as evil and obviously malicious as I used to. I might go so far as to say in most cases (in the US, at least) they often are comprised of people — including politicians — who are earnestly trying their best and doing a pretty good job given the constraints.
@Jake Rowland,
I’m under-educated for this crowd, and my alcohol pickled and age addled mind isn’t that quick either, so I doubt I qualify as “smarter”, but I have dim memories of Libertarianism once sounding more appealing to me, but I doubt I was ever much of one, but I’m pretty anti-libertarian now, even if long-term it would be better, ’cause utopia is a bet, and I think it’s cruel to destroy institutions that people have grown up with and have been in place for generations, besides, as unpleasant as my time in public (government) schools was, my time working for “private industry” is far from fondly remembered.
If you must “make the world a better place” please do it slowly so people have time to adjust.
Otherwise, the places where people seem to thrive most (Canada, Scandinavia, et cetera) by-and-large mostly seem to adhere to the “social democracy”/”welfare state capitalist” model, they’re exceptions to that model of places where most do well such as Utah which seems to have a church substitute for state social welfare programs (and even though it’s also a Communist dictatorship, mostly Catholic Cuba isn’t quite the Hellscape North Korea is, so I suspect that the culture of a place is as or more important than the laws), there is Singapore which we may as well just call fascist which is a thriving place that’s an outlier from the social-democracy model, but there’s also Costa Rica, which may be the most libertarian-ish (no standing army) but happy and healthy place I’ve heard of.
I’d advice looking to actually existing models and also recognize that the laws of one place may not fit another culture so well.
As for me, the U.S.A. of February 1973 seemed better than before and after, so more like then, or more like modern Canada seem good goals to me, I really don’t see a gentle way to turn the U.S.A. to be more like Costa Rica (or Cuba, or Singapore, or whatever is your thing), and frankly I don’t think “broken eggs” now, are worth promises of “omelettes” later.
I don’t know, maybe become a missionary and try to make the rest if the U.S.A. more like Utah?
Yeah, this is more or less the clincher for me. I’d say Canada, Scandinavia and similar places are pretty much the best places to live for the average human, in all of human history. I don’t actually think that’s an exaggeration. It may be that this style of society is unsustainable, and certainly there are many people doing their best to change it for the worse, but thus far it’s not doing too badly.
I was never much of a libertarian per se, somewhat of a wannabe anarchist but I can’t muster the enthusiasm any longer.
A hypothesis of mine: It’s the cold weather.
If someone is unable to get/hold a job, unable to file paperwork, and antisocial to the point that no one (even the shelters) want them around, they are very likely to die when it his -40 over the winter.
In warmer areas “nature” won’t do the job for you and so you are much more likely to have a population of people who survive who are unemployable, unable to fill out the paperwork, and anti-social.
Bitter-cold weather is a surprisingly strong civilizing force.
Best comment of the week.
Engaging with the US health insurance system made me substantially less libertarian on healthcare issues. And before anyone starts talking about regulatory capture, I regard the existing system as already being the end result of libertarian principles coming into contact with reality.
The weird thing is, sometimes you get computers or consumer electronics, and other times you get the clusterf–k that is the US healthcare system.
Consumer electronics is running full speed ahead into a hell world, so that’s not a good example.
What, you don’t like IoT vibrators?
@broblawsky
The health insurance business in the US is pretty much a creature of the government. Not just regulatory capture, but the tax deductions that make it rational to treat insurance as a medical paymaster instead of coverage for catastrophic care, and the many many regulations of each state. I am only kind of a libertarian, but it is very clear to me that our medical system would work much better under a free market than the mostly socialized system we have in the US.
I also used to have more libertarian outlook than I have now. Things that changed my mind: life experience, paying attention to world and domestic events, reading social science in my spare time. All of that however has an overarching cause – living through the great recession and being impacted by it. We are all products of our time.
Not less libertarian, but had a small epiphany that refined a lot the way I think about things. tl;dr: I’m libertarian as a personality characteristic. I _also_ agree with both economic and social libertarianism, but I now view this agreement with skepticism instead of enthusiasm. There will probably be a longish process of reviewing my beliefs, and I really hope to retain a good 90% of them, but still – accepting that your driving ideology doesn’t come from reason but because it fits your emotions is sobering and needed.
Also I missed the last thread’s question. Too bad, I have an answer to add: It may be that the economic optimum is paying $6 per hour for unskilled labor. But if all companies collectively raise that to $12, they won’t lose much: prices go a bit up across the board, and no company actually loses money. But employees earn a lot more than before.
The problems with that are left as an exercise to the reader.
And this line of thinking is how California ended up with 100 different regulations (each one with an associated bureaucracy staffed with politically engaged employees who will treat rolling back their own one regulation as an existential risk to their own personal livelihoods, and each one with some PIG who regularly publishes an array of shiny websites full of photogenic suffering children illustrating why their regulation is just barely holding back some civilization ending disaster), each regulation adding “only” $500 to the cost of each housing construction.
And yet nobody can quite figure out why it costs an additional $50,000 to build a house in California, before turning over the first shovelful of dirt.
It must be the fault of “the rich”, or of “greedy” real-estate “speculators”, or of “techbrodudes”, or something.
God, I’m so trying not to start ranting right now. I have a huge chip on my shoulder since I cleaned up an apartment a couple of years ago, and later found a homeless guy sorting, in the dark, for a couple of hours, through plates and pans I had thrown out. That’s the point I started to consider minimum wages pure evil, and not just inefficient. The guy was willing to put work time in uncomfortable conditions for … $1-2 equivalent value? But he couldn’t wash a car for triple that because he needs to be full time employed for minimum wages, and he’s, not offence, just not productive enough for that.
I was a full on anarcho-capitalist before rejecting it for both philosophical and pragmatic reasons. One of the things that got me was how every libertarian had these stock answers for how the free markets are always better and every time I tried to look in to it I was overwhelmed by the complexity of the issue. I became suspicious that these libertarians didn’t actually know what they were talking about and started suspecting it would be extremely coincidental that every possible issue of market vs state ends with the market being the superior option.
Indeed it would. Fortunately, we don’t need that to be true in order to make the case for anarcho-capitalism.
We don’t have any way of getting the state to only intervene in those cases where state action would be beneficial, since the state isn’t run by wise philosopher kings. All you need to defend anarcho-capitalism from a consequentialist point of view is to argue that the damage done by the state intervening where it shouldn’t is larger than the good done by it intervening when it should.
@DavidFriedman,
For me the best argument for statelessness is that the worst Hells humanity has known were creations of states, but I don’t know of any of the best places being stateless, and I can’t imagine how a stateless society could protect itself from conquest, or an armed and well-drilled minority tyrannizing the majority.
There are no modern developed stateless societies. But there are a fair number of past stateless societies and some current embedded stateless societies–subgroups at least nominally under the rule of a state, but enforcing their own rules on their members by non-state mechanisms.
Some of the past ones got conquered (the Commanche) or ended due to internal conflict (saga period Iceland, which should probably be classified as semi-stateless, since there was a law code and a court system but no executive arm of government to enforce verdicts). But the Commanche lost to an overwhelmingly more powerful opponent, after making quite an impressive fight of it—against people with similar levels of population and technology they were more than able to defend themselves. And the Icelandic system lasted considerably longer than the U.S. has so far.
If you are curious about how a modern stateless society might deal with such problems, the second edition of my first book is a free pdf on my web page, the third edition an inexpensive kindle on Amazon (and slightly less inexpensive paperback). There is even an audiobook.
All the historical examples of “stateless” societies I am aware of, and the modern ones too, have two distinguishing features. A known, fixed, code of law everyone agrees is the law, and an incredible level of bloodymindendness about punishing people who break that law.
Medieval Albania was not lawless because the average albanian would literally rather draw steel and die fighting than to suffer breeches of traditional law. Ditto Island. And the various places where failure of central government means the actual law code is Sharia.
There is no path from here to there. You cant just wish that level of concensus and brutality into existence. Also, it is a worse way to run a society, because it sheds lots more blood. Albania and Island may not have had roaming bands of thieves, but they did have lots of corpses by the wayside as a result of freelance law enforcement.
One of the reasons I’m no longer all that libertarian is that I moved to a place that actually has a community. I had undervalued the importance of communities being able to make collective decisions about how they want to be. When I was a libertarian I had very little empathy for places being gentrified, for example. Now I understand more that disrupting a community’s neighborhood actually destroys a lot of value for people.
Socially, there are things like the concept of Chesterton’s fence which I had no appreciation of before. Total freedom is actually pretty distopian. I had very much underestimated the importance of family and close relationships.
If you don’t mind the risk of self-doxxing, where?
SSC, perhaps?
I moved to a town in New Zealand
Most of the above are fairly similar to my reasons. For me, I’d articulate my moving away from libertarianism as a combination of four things.
1) Coming to think that most property in the modern world is dependent on a legal system, and so the legal system can’t take “property” as the starting point. “My pencil” is a kind of property to which NAP applies well; “my pencil factory” is less so; “my land on which the pencil factory is built” even less so; “my CDS on the debts of the pencil factory” is pretty much entirely a creation of a system of laws and contracts.
2) Which led to thinking that the system of laws and contracts could be evaluated by whether it produced good results, not just whether it did a good job of protecting what it defined as property.
3) Combined with both observation and Catholic social thought to say that protecting individual rights was important, but that protecting on-average beneficial social norms is also important.
3a) That, along with my history, leads me to want small-ish groups with different social norms to have to co-exist, and compete for people’s allegiance. (See “liberalism as alien machinery forged in the fires of hell.)
3b) I think that most towns are small enough that exit is a sufficient right, and support much greater ability to set norms as the scale diminishes.
4) Combined with the increasing domination of official libertarianism by the group that I refer to as pro-rape libertarians – slightly edited quote below.
If libertarian still meant Buckley and Rockwell, rather than “cheerleader for every anti-community project that likes pot”, I’d probably still identify as libertarian.
The more familiar I become with human nature, and the way politics and other human activities work out in practice, the less I find libertarianism credible. As a callow young nerd with limited experience of the world, and a chip on my shoulder about the superiority of reason over most people’s decision making methods, it looked extremely attractive.
For me, it’s yet another example of the difference between theory and practice. Communism looks attractive too, if all you get to see is the theory, not any real world implementations.
Note that my issues are almost entirely with economic “liberty”, when it takes the form of large/powerful/rich individuals and groups throwing their weight around at the expense of the small/weak/poor majority. Also when it takes the form of having to sue for damages after harms occur, because that basically doesn’t work at all in many situations.
I briefly considered anarcho-socialism to be the ideal system before I realized that reputational signals alone would not be sufficient to organize a broad economy and settled into minarchist libertarianism about thirty years ago.
And haven’t much changed, for basically all the reasons other people here are saying they did change. Dozens of variations on “nice theory, but in practice people are scoundrels and if left to their own devices will do things that hurt other people”, for which the proposed remedy is pretty much always to appoint a different group of scoundrels, give them more power with less accountability, and ask them to pinky-swear that they’ll keep the first group of scoundrels in line without becoming bigger scoundrels themselves. And, every time this works badly in practice, saying that’s just because it was the other statist party that chose the scoundrels and if it had been the good statist party then the pinky-swear would totally have worked.
Liberty isn’t meant to guarantee utopia, and shouldn’t be judged on that standard. None of your alternatives have generated utopia either. Liberty, is the best we’ve got to stave off several ugly varieties of dystopia, which if you can’t see on the horizon you’re not looking very hard.
Less fatih in price mechanisms to allocate all resources and more faith in government services. I do not mean that I trust the government more than the market: FAR from it. But younger, more libertarian ADBG had basically no faith in government. This is hard to reconcile with the performance of modern Western mixed market economies. It’s also harder to believe we are all on the Road to Serfdom when we actually enjoy more rights than any other group of humans in history.
On issues like tax policy, regulation, etc, government intervention seems much less damaging than younger more libertarian ADBG would expect.
Also, most libertarians I know lost pretty much all their credibility with me after the 2008 crash. I am temperamentally libertarian, but I am not an Austrian. Given that is THE defining economic issue of the last20 years, it’s really hard to sign on board with the overall movement.
The non-libertarian response to 2008 was for the state to put about eight trillion dollars on the national credit card and spend the next decade conspicuously not coming up with a plan to ever pay off that debt. And it’s the libertarians who lost credibility with you?
If it were possible to borrow real money indefinitely without consequence, but only when the State does it, that would be an argument for having a powerful state to go around tapping into this infinite cornucopia for the public good. But it isn’t, and you know that. There are consequences as well as benefits, the state can ensure that it is first in line for the benefits and last in line for those consequences, and they act like it.
This strikes me as disingenuous. When (general) you go around loudly claiming that the apocalypse is going to come next year unless all the sinners repent, none of the sinners repent, and the apocalypse doesn’t come you don’t get to blame the wiles of the devil and say that it is definitely coming next year. You’ve already lost all your credibility.
If I had said the apocalypse was going to come next year, or last year or ten years ago, you would have a point. I didn’t, so you don’t. But feel free to treat me as non-credible if it makes you feel better.
Understand that I hold you in equal contempt, as if you were playing literal Russian Roulette with your childrens’ lives because someone offered you a few months’ salary every time you pulled the trigger and nothing bad happened the last three times.
How about if you say “unless the government follows my policy, the unemployment rate will reach X,” the government does follow your policy (you being the President), and the unemployment race reaches X+Y, Y positive?
JS
I prefer evidence driven policy to policy by dour Calvinist morality tales. YMMV.
DF
Sound like whoever that is doesn’t have much credibility.
What was your evidence, in 2008, that it was safe for a developed nation to push its debt-to-GDP ratio above 90% in peacetime?
Japan.
You personally may not have but many prominent libertarians were. They were literally telling us that sustained, uncontrollable high inflation was just around the corner and that if we didn’t switch to a “sound money” policy soon, a new recession worse than old one was bound to happen. 11 years later, it hasn’t happened and there’s really no reason to think it will.
I am, as it happens, a prominent libertarian, and I wasn’t.
Perhaps you are overgeneralizing, and should limit your views to some subset of libertarians?
It’s true that certain versions of Austrian economics are more popular among libertarians than elsewhere, but that is not a defining characteristic of libertarians. I can think of six Nobel prize winning economists whom I would describe as libertarians of various sorts. One of them might be described as an Austrian, but I don’t know what his views were on the details of macroeconomics.
In case it wasn’t clear in this sub-thread (below ADBG) my points have nothing to do with libertarianism per se.
@David
I don’t think that the post-recession events discredited all libertarians. However, John implied that what happened should be considered more damaging to non-libertarians than libertarians, which I think is ridiculous. I don’t know what the exact distribution of Austrians in the libertarian camp is but surely we can agree it’s non-trivial, especially during the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession and the rise of Ron Paul as a presidential candidate.
Didn’t the Austrians predict the 2008 crisis, while the mainstream economists all said that everything was fine? Part of why I became a libertarian was because of all those youtube videos with Peter Schiff predicting the problem with the housing market.
@LesHapablap
Austrians are a classic example of a broken clock being right twice a day. They proclaim constant doom in the economy, and when there is a problem, they pat themselves on the back for “predicting the future”. When an Austrian put his money where his mouth was, he was embarrassingly wrong.
Wrong Species, you’re probably right and I certainly don’t have any inclination or ability to defend Austrians. At the time though that ‘broken clock’ criticism was leveled at Schiff etc, and my thought was that by the same token a group of people saying that “everything is fine, nothing to worry about” will always be right until it isn’t. So that broken clock criticism never meant much to me.
Schiff has been making terrible predictions since the recession. That article came out in 2015 and it looks even worse for Schiff since then.
Well that’s unfortunate. I wonder how much of all that stuff has infected my understanding of economics.
It’s not possible to borrow money indefinitely without consequence, but even as early as 2008 we knew that the US had a lot of fiscal runway from Japan.
Meanwhile we spent a great deal of time listening to conjectures that the US was going to soon enter a debt spiral or an inflationary spiral or both. This wasn’t credible even in 2008, but it should have been really obvious by 2011, 2012, 2013…
I am annoyed by mainstream economists and politicians for other reasons, and I am pretty sure I have explained my specific frustrations with center-left economists (who I think are basically bad faith pundits at this point), but on this issue the libertarians just have no credibility with me.
I was, ah, liber-curious before 2008. I still think, in the abstract, that Andrew Mellon’s “liquidate, liquidate, liquidate” might be the best way to handle a financial crisis, putting the system as a whole on firmer ground to prevent future crises. Key words being “in the abstract.” In reality the short-term harms of liquidating everything are very real and very severe, to the extent that it’s politically impossible to implement even for someone as well-connected and insulated from political forces as Mellon was. Theoretical soundness does you no good when it leads to an angry mob out to tar and feather you.
I seem to be missing the significance of 2008. Surely the modern Western economies were every bit as mixed in that year as they had been before, and have been since?
Something similar happened after 9/11. We’d had a violent interventionist foreign policy with plenty of involvement in the middle east before 9/11, and yet when the 9/11 attack happened, it seemed like everyone suddenly decided that this had discredited the idea of a less-interventionist, less-violent foreign policy with less involvement in the middle east. Instead, the only thing to do was to continue with our previous policy, but do it harder and with bigger bombs.
To be fair, despite some notable exceptions, the trend for bombs has been to become smaller and more precise.
I recall reading someone (it might have been Scott Sumner) draw that exact parallel: the neokeynes after 2008, like the neocons after 2001, benefited from having a prefabricated narrative ready to go at a moment when everyone else was still trying to figure out what the hell just happened.
We make it up in volume.
The 2008 financial crisis has come up in this thread a couple times. My understanding is that individual homeowners learned a very expensive lesson about the nature of the housing market. There were probably cheaper ways to learn that lesson, but in this case the role of the government looked a lot like making sure those most responsible suffered the fewest consequences.
The people pushing the bad loans knew they were exploiting financial ignorance for personal gain. I would prefer a government that prevented people from doing that, but the one we had in 2008 didn’t. Instead it bailed them out afterwards.
The people on the sharp end pushing the bad loans weren’t bailed out. They weren’t exposed to significant risk in the first place; they were loan originators, writing loans and immediately selling them while keeping a commission. The loans were then securitized and sold; many of the holders of those securities were bailed out, as were many of the homeowners who defaulted, but the people selling things like NINJA loans and 5/1 ARMs which the buyer barely qualified for based on the initial (teaser) rate didn’t need to be bailed out.
It seems like the 2008 meltdown should weaken your confidence in financial regulation, rather than strengthen it. We had (and have) a heavily regulated financial sector, and an activist treasury department and Fed. We still had the 2008 meltdown, and worse, when things really got ugly, the government largely bailed out the big players in ways that let them benefit from taking risks and not lose when the dice came up wrong.
I think the 2008 comments should be taken as critical of (some) libertarians, not of libertarianism. There is no inconsistency between Keynesian economic theory and libertarianism, although many people use the theory to argue for non-libertarian policies. I think there used to be a textbook by a Keynesian libertarian economist, although I no longer remember the details, and Keynes himself wrote a glowing endorsement of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
I’d like to think I’ve held on to the best part of libertarianism. Insights like: the people that make up the government are just people like everyone else, there are always unintended consequences, and that doing nothing is an option worth considering. But I know longer think that maximizing liberty is of such paramount importance that it overrides every other consideration. I’ve seen too many people clearly not living their own best lives.
It’s a good heuristic, though, and a Schelling point.
Most libertarians don’t think so either. If they did, they would put all resources not needed for their own survival into working to reduce the power of governments, and few if any do.
I’m always surprised by how many tales of personal apostasy, here and elsewhere, take the form of “I used to believe in X but no longer do because [Very first objection that pops into everyone’s head when they hear of X]”– as opposed to “…because (defense of X against [Very first objection etc.] stopped seeming adequate, because reasons)”. The first version just leaves me wondering how they were ever able to believe in X.
possibly just trying to avoid writing a wall of text?
That’s partly it for me. I used to spend a ton of time trying to get libertarians to understand my POV and failing to get anywhere. When you spend a lot of time trying to communicate and neither side is convincing to the other, it seems fruitless. It’s not just both sides talking past each other. Sometimes you think your point is compelling and they don’t, and there’s no non-biased referee to adjudicate who is more compelling. It makes me wonder how important non-rational psychological states are needed to accept certain arguments or what kind of frameworks you need as a foundation. I know that I’ve gone back and looked at arguments that seemed really compelling at one point and even though the logic doesn’t seem wrong, it seems unimportant now.
An example that should be non-controversial for this crowd: a creationist will often point to some feature of people or animals that scientists don’t really have a good explanation for why that came about through natural selection and will use that as one of their arguments. They aren’t wrong exactly but it’s not going to be convincing to the evolutionary biologist.
Wasn’t there an SSC article about that?
Mostly the things others already said.
I think that non-aggression principle is a good approximation of personal ethics. If you are the kind of person who enjoys starting fights or scamming other people, I do not want you in my social group.
On the other hand, I find the idea of buying police protection on free market implausible. The reason, in a nutshell, is that if an organization is strong enough to protect me e.g. from organized crime, it is also strong enough to intimidate me into remaining their “client” even when I change my mind. I find it unlikely that the top dogs would achieve the perfect balance that would allow me to freely choose among them, with them only helplessly watching the loss of income from a departing client.
My time and attention are limited, and the world I live in is complex. I do not have time to research all the products I use, or to understand the details and implications of all contracts I would have to sign in a society where all contracts are explicit. I trust the world around me that no one puts poison in the food I buy, and that no small print can turn a purchase of a mobile phone into a slavery contract. Having a government that finds the poisoners and punishes them for me, and makes hidden slavery contracts invalid, seems like a reasonable solution. (Yeah, in a libertarian paradise, there would be an agency I could pay to do this. Which would again require me to do my individual research, albeit on a higher level: instead of researching who puts poison in food, I would have to research which agencies properly detect those who put poison in food. I probably wouldn’t have time and attention for doing that kind of research properly either.)
Yeah this is probably the best critique of libertarianism. But still there is the question how far do you push it? Government makes life easier because you don’t have to do all the research yourself. But at what point do all the defects of government; such as reducing choice, rewarding mediocrity, cost disease, etc., make life worse more than make it better. IMO, the crossover size is a whole lot less government than we have today.
I see only a critique of anarcho-captitalism. Where is the critique of libertarianism?
Obviously it depends on how you define libertarianism, but…
I do think it is a pretty standard libertarian stance to want to greatly decrease or eliminate product bans due to safety by government. As someone who is only moderately libertarian, I am in that camp. People should be allowed to make their own decisions what is too dangerous, most such decisions are made for political reasons, not scientific ones, regulatory capture of such agencies by the companies they are supposed to control, etc. Viliam has not convinced me otherwise, but he makes a good counter-argument, and I think most of society would be in agreement with him.
I’m not a pure libertarian, but even if the government weren’t doing testing, there would still be private groups like UL and Consumer Reports doing it, and people could use those tests.
Most libertarians still accept that companies can’t use fraud or force so they can’t lie about getting approval or change their product ingredients to rat poison without writing that down.
(I’m not saying that government regulation of products is bad, just arguing against the idea that we would all have to do it individually if the government did not do it.)
“Can’t” or “shouldn’t”?
“Should be forbidden by law,” though anarchocapitalists might prefer the law to be privately produced and enforced. In general, a libertarian is going to be okay with you selling me enough fentanyl to OD myself a hundred times over, as long as it’s correctly labeled as fentanyl. But if you sell me something labeled as heroin which is actually mostly fentanyl plus inert ingredients, you get in some kind of trouble–perhaps you’re help liable for my OD death.
You won’t meet many people with whom the Argument From Laziness resonates more than it does with me. But one of its implications is that the people I’m trusting to take care of all those things for me will be operating mostly unsupervised: monitoring their performance is another of the things I’d rather not be bothered with.
I’d say two important things explain my gradual path from libertarian to anti-libertarian Andrew Yang supporter were:
1. The whole “woke capitalism” thing. Many conservatives/libertarians scream when some university forces that crap down people’s throats, but say “meh, who cares,” when a corporation does it. Gradually I decided that the conservatives/libertarians had replaced the liberals as people who wouldn’t take their own side in a fight, and definitively left that sinking ship.
2. An understanding of positional goods and signalling. The quintessential example of positional goods are those luxuries consumed by the very wealthy who are trying to compete with other very wealthy people in the status game. Nobody feels a lot of pity for those rich people “forced” to compete with other rich people. But now look at the funeral industry. They specialize in guilting the grieving into spending large sums to signal that they care about the recently deceased. Why shouldn’t the government just step in and shut the whole thing down? Establish price controls? Sure, some would try to skirt the law, but consumers would now have the excuse of saying that while they would love to pay the exorbitant prices because person X was very important to them, they aren’t willing to break the law to do it. Or they could just nationalize the whole darn thing, so long as they run it with a modicum of competence so bodies don’t start to line the streets, it could end up much cheaper than the current system with no downside,* people would quickly find other ways to show their loved ones’ how much they care, ways which might actually benefit somebody. When thinking in this mindset, the classic libertarian argument of “nationalizing all the industries doesn’t work so why should this one industry be nationalized,” doesn’t apply. When you have an industry like education, where it’s mostly signalling, it may be better to leave it in the hands of the government. While in theory private education could find more efficient ways to impart knowledge to students, in practice they wouldn’t do this because learning isn’t the goal of the students. Instead, their capitalistic energies would be thrown into finding ways to convince their students to spend more money to signal the value they place on education.
*Though it’s possible that it could end up massively bloated as we collectively want to signal how much we care about the recently deceased and demand everyone get the Gold Package.
With respect to the funeral industry, there’s a very straightforward private sectors solution to it: Make it known to your family that you want your funeral arrangements to be as cheap and simple as possible, and back it up with a will containing the same stipulations. Both of my parents have done this, because they have no wish to encumber my sister and me with ruinous funeral expenses when we could spend the money on ourselves. Literally all my mom wants is for her body to be donated to science, and then cremated and the ashes scattered somewhere nice. It’s cheap, simple, practical, and sentimental. For my dad it’s the same except he doesn’t care what happens to ashes, we could use them for kitty litter if we like. We’ll probably also scatter them somewhere nice.
If any relative objects to this arrangement on the grounds that it’s insufficient on my and my sister’s part at conveying how much we loved them, we have their stated beliefs and their will on our side. “It’s what they wanted,” is something of an argument stopper when it comes to the dearly departed. The fact that solution is so simple and straightforward and yet not widely adopted tells me that there is a big preference for big expensive funerals. Personally, i don’t believe there is much good to be had in telling vast swathes of the populace that their preferences are wrong, and that henceforth they are not allowed to exercise them. That’s why the government shouldn’t step in and shut the whole thing down.
It’s worth noting that the Confederate government was substantially more tyrannical than the US federal government at the time. The Confederate Constitution gave its president a line-item veto, a massive expansion of executive power that is beyond the pale even in the modern era of the Imperial Presidency. The individual states were also stripped of their power to grant voting rights to non-citizens, their right to trade freely with each other, and their right to outlaw slavery within their borders. You can argue that even white citizens were substantially worse off in terms of their individual freedoms under the Confederacy, especially non-slaveholders.
A line-item veto isn’t that far beyond the pale. We actually had one for a couple years during the Clinton administration; it was ultimately struck down, but the concept has returned every few years since then in various forms.
I think 1996 was peak “minimal concern about the Imperial Presidency”, though.
So I recently had a fairly unpleasant experience while traveling, and it made me wonder about millimeter wave body scanners. Besides being a prop in security theater or an excuse to feel up air travelers, are they actually useful in any way?
Wikipedia strongly implies that the answer is no, because they have a >50% false positive rate and have never actually caught a terrorist. However, if you’re trying to catch every instance of something that happens at a very low frequency it would make sense to minimize false negatives even if it meant a high rate of false positives. You could even argue that not having detected a true positive is expected because of how infrequent they are, although that borders on making it unfalsifiable.
So what do you guys think? Is it actually helpful in any way or just another random indignity of air travel like taking your shoes off?
Honestly, it seems mostly like trying everything other than profiling (for obvious reasons).
Because profiling is much harder to get right than it seems, you mean? If you profile narrowly, terrorists will pick people who don’t fit the profile for their attacks on airliners, while if your profile is broad, you’ve only reduced the problem of too many targets a little bit. And the terrorists might still be able to find someone who doesn’t fit the broad profile, though of course if your profile is “everyone except the most absurdly unlikely” then it will at least be true that the terrorists will have great difficulty finding anyone in the absurdly unlikely categories willing to be terrorists. Still, profiling “everyone except the most absurdly unlikely” means a very large minority if not a majority of flyers being treated as suspicious, so again not much saved effort. Keeping your profiling criteria secret won’t help either; it’s trivial for the terrorists to do dry runs to see if their intended operatives get extra scrutiny or not, and then only run the op with the ones who don’t get extra scrutiny (terrorists are known to have used that tactic; I believe it was used by the 9/11 plot).
And if you profile somewhere between the two extremes, you make it much harder for terrorists to successfully carry out terrorist attacks while requiring only modest resources on your end.
Or maybe not, but “here is how the proposal fails at one extreme, and here is how it fails at the other extreme” is a poor argument against any proposal, and if it’s the one you go to then the rest of us are going to suspect that it’s the best you’ve got and that the proposal is a pretty good one.
Only if your profiling criteria are deterministic, invariant, and always result in a detectable signal but no more than modest inconvenience to terrorists who match the profile. It is trivial to arrange for one or more of those conditions to be false, and it is trivial to recognize that it is trivial to arrange for one or more of those conditions to be false, so again this is the sort of low-grade argument that makes me think you don’t have any good ones.
Profiling is how the Israelis do airport security, and they have a much better track record than the United States in that department despite being a much more frequently targeted. Given proper training and procedures it absolutely works and works well. The problem with implementing such procedures in the United States is political rather than practical, in that our race politics make it effectively impossible
Bluntly, even if you implemented profiling policies that were properly weighted and calibrated to the most rigorous of standards, the general populace will simply refuse to believe that it’s not racist. Like i recall a story of a security guard who was given a pseudo-random mechanical counter to determine who would get additional screening. However they were not allowed to tell the people in the queue about the counters, just that they’d been randomly selected. Consequently when members of visible minorities happened to come up, the guards would frequently be accused of racism. People simply could not believe that their race really did have nothing to do with it, even though that was objectively the case.
In the face of such paranoia it’s completely impossible to implement any profiling system without it being immediately denounced as unforgivably and irredeemably racist. What’s more i’m not even sure the paranoia is unjustified! While i generally believe that the American public is ridiculously over-sensitive on the subject of race, i also find myself unable to trust the TSA to not abuse their profiling authority. Frankly i expect that within a couple of years of this system being implemented we’d get a leak about a private TSA Facebook group where they brag about how they go out of their way to give certain demographics an extra hard time or something.
So yeah, in theory it could be done, in practice it’s not happening.
A metal detector has probably never caught a terrorist with a gun, but that doesn’t mean the metal detector isn’t doing its job.
There is a lot wrong with airport security, but we need to make sure we ask the right questions.
IIRC, the TSA has never stopped a terrorist. This is mainly because there aren’t very many terrorists trying to get bombs onto planes. However, two have managed to get bombs onto planes through TSA–both failed to do much damage because their bombs didn’t go off. (I’m guessing Al Qaida’s QA department isn’t too well-run.).
It’s possible that we’d have a lot of hijacking attempts and bombings without all that security, but I am extremely skeptical. I think it’s mainly security theater to make the passengers feel better and the politicians look like they’ve done something about the threat of terrorism.
If I were in charge of airport security, there are a lot of things I would just get rid of entirely.
But I would keep metal detectors. Even though they’ve never caught a terrorist with a gun. Saying “there has not been a problem, so let’s fire security” is a classic blunder, and you don’t want to make it just because you are trying to avoid the opposite anti-tiger-rock blunder.
I like Charles Murray’s half-joking proposal to replace all the TSA song-and-dance with a retired big-city homicide detective sitting at the door who is allowed to flag anyone that makes him uneasy for a thorough search and frisking.
@albatross11,
Judging by the homicide detectives I see they’d have a hard time complying with the no smoking rules of airports without being able to leave it and get a cigarette break at least every couple of hours.
It’s not only possible that we’d “have a lot of hijacking attempts” without airport security, that’s what actually happened, and the reason we have airport security.
They instituted screening on January 5, 1973, after somebody hijacked a plane and threatened to fly it into Oak Ridge National Lab. This was just the last straw; from 1968-1972 they were averaging a hijacking every 2-3 weeks just people demanding to fly to Cuba. (91 hijackings in 5 years for just that scenario–I don’t have the patience to pick out the US ones from the general hijackings list on Wikipedia.)
The introduction of airport security didn’t stop hijackings, but it cut the numbers way back.
9/11 changed the meta for hijackings. If someone tries to take over a plane (in America) today, they aren’t getting into the cockpit, no matter if they say they have a bomb or start slaughtering every last passenger. And because this is Common Knowledge, people don’t even try.
Pre-9/11, if the airlines had tried this policy, no one would have believed it, and they would have lost the lawsuits if they followed it.
Wikipedia never disappoints when it comes to lists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings none in the US since 2001.
You still have to worry about suicide bombings, so we need some level of screening. I don’t want to get rid of everything.,
@CatCube
You are talking about security before 9/11. I don’t remember too much about security back then, but it was a lot more minimal than it is today. I don’t remember hating security like I do today. I agree with Edward that we still need security (maybe the big city cop Albatross wants, or the metal detector Edward wants), but a tenth of what we have now.
from 1968-1972 they were averaging a hijacking every 2-3 weeks just people demanding to fly to Cuba.
Gosh, this brings me back; yeah, I remember as a child the news stories about hijacking planes to fly to Cuba! If hijackings still happened like that today, what is the modern equivalent (Cuba seems to have fallen out of favour) as the Utopia of the disaffected (I can’t seem to imagine a lot of demands to “fly me to Canada or else!” “um, sir, we’re already flying to Canada?”)
Can anyone get me a copy of
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1335-8
Dunno if we can actually generalize knowledge except for a few things this way, but should still be interesting.
It’s here.
oh that is a crazy-interesting paper.
‘NiFe’ is to ‘ferromagnetic’ as ‘IrMn’ is to ‘?’
I’ve already got ideas spinning through my head for how someone might throw it at my own fields blobs of data.
For example, when trained on a suitable body of text, such methods should produce a vector representing the word ‘iron’ that is closer by cosine distance to the vector for ‘steel’ than to the vector for ‘organic’
Hm – one objection that immediately comes to mind is that such training means you’re bunched if you want to find out about iron deficiency and haemoglobin/blood research, but I presume it’s going to be specified to the field – someone wanting to know better ways to make steel girders isn’t going to care about blood and vice versa.
You would just want to be very careful that your department bought the software model trained on “steel” not on “blood” and the other way round for whichever purpose you’re needing.
Looking at the paper, it looks like they trained it on research papers downloaded from a pair of journal API’s.
Thing is it isn’t just about closeness, it’s about direction in a sort of multi-dimensional space in which the direction and distance you’d travel to get from “king” to “queen” is the same as you’d travel to get from “man” to “woman”
The fun thing though is that it looks like it can identify properties that may have been mentioned or merely implied in research papers that haven’t made it into formal databases.
So I might throw it at a million genetics papers and then ask for genes that have a similar relationship with the words “cancer” or “neoplasm” as BRACA1 (well known breast cancer gene)
Or gene names that have a similar relationship with [any disease name] as BRACA1 has with cancer then filter out the well known ones.
then see if any of the results aren’t in databases of known cancer causing genes and investigate further…
There’s a similar-sounding tool that scrapes tens of thousands of fMRI papers and shows you brain areas associated with functions across all of them… I’m trying to remember the name but haven’t looked at it in years. It’s a nice way of constraining hypotheses, among other things.
And here is that tool: neurosynth. – it’s really quite an incredible piece of work. I saw Yarkoni give a talk on it and was incredibly impressed.
It would be much harder to dislodge CSA if it would have been given time to establish itself as a functioning government and form alliances with European powers, e.g. with France, which invaded and occupied Mexico in 1862. If you take as a premise that CSA was an evil regime that needed to be destroyed (and I do), Lincoln did his job brilliantly.
How can one know that? We don’t have parallel histories where someone else did the same job in different ways.
Winning the Civil War is a complicated problem which none of us are competent to solve—we don’t have the relevant detailed knowledge of the society. Perhaps an abler president could have picked better generals, done a better job of persuading states in the upper South not to secede, run the war in some different and better way.
We know two things. The North won, and it won at a horrendous cost in human life on both sides. That doesn’t tell us whether Lincoln did his job brilliantly or badly, just that he didn’t do it badly enough to lose. Given the facts of the war and his assassination, he was pretty much guaranteed to be viewed as hero whether or not he deserved to be.
Yeah, we don´t know the counterfactual, but I think results speak for themselves. I do not claim his performance was flawless, but CSA was annihilated and slavery abolished. As far as I am aware, Lincoln didn´t commit any major blunders during the war, and showed considerable political skills in maintaining political unity and commitment to the Union cause in the North, in the face of inevitably huge costs of the war. Imho this was no small achievement.
The Union had over twice the population as the CSA and something like ten times the heavy industry. Frankly I think it very discreditable that it took the Union so long to win.
Is there a name for acting in some way because of the chance that one is wrong on some question of the moral reality? I think that animal suffering is irrelevant. But I am not sure about that. There are a number of reasons why factory farming could be morally objectionable. While I think it is probable that they are all largely false, I am not enormously confident and so I try to less meat than I otherwise would. I am not sure how odd it it that I do this.
Hedging?
It’s perfectly natural to do this; we aren’t always sure about what to do. In Catholic moral theology there are a variety of positions on how to resolve this, but the rule per St. Alphonsus Liguori is equiprobabilism: if one opinion is more probable than the other, follow the more probable, but if two opinions are about equally probable, it’s up to you. Probable is a technical term here meaning that it’s based on a reason (or a cumulative case of reasons) strong enough for a prudent person to assent to it, but with doubt. Meat eating, even of factory farmed animals, passes the test for probable—I guarantee you that you know plenty of very prudent folks who eat meat—as does the contrary, so they’re both probable.
A tutiorist (Latin for “more safe”) would say that, since avoiding factory farmed meats is the more safe opinion, that is, the less morally risky, it should be preferred. Liguori at least would disagree, since prudence does not dictate that you minimize moral risk. But if you actually believe the case against factory farmed meat is definitely stronger, i.e., definitely the more probable, you should refrain anyway.
ETA: For a rough draft summary that I’m not entirely intentionally channeling here, see Brandon on Liguori’s account.
In terms of what one is bound to do or not do under pain of sin some mix of a little tutoralism and probabilism or equiprobabilism seems correct. It would seem sinful to do what has a good chance of being a moral catastrophe even if it were the weaker position for deeply trivial reasons but full tutoralism seems rigorist.
But it seems supererogatorially good to lower moral risk.
I once had a conversation with a libertarian Jesuit (Father Sadowski, if I remember correctly). His account of the Catholic position on abortion, if I understood it correctly, was that it wasn’t that abortion was murder but that it might be, and one should therefor not do it on the chance that it was.
That is a questionable interpretation of Catholic teaching, but it is a very sensible position.
Yes, this seems pretty sensible, with the probability that you’re killing a full human being going up as you approach birth. This assumes that there is some point at which the fetus becomes a baby, and we don’t know what that point is.
> with the probability that you’re killing a full human being going up as you approach birth
At risk of going into a CW topic (?) this statement seems fundamentally flawed. Whether a fetus is or is not a person is a question of definitions and norms, not probability. The probability that the number of cells in the fetus is odd is .5, the probability it is a person is NULL.
Raj
Are you a moral realist?
His account of the Catholic position on abortion, if I understood it correctly, was that it wasn’t that abortion was murder but that it might be, and one should therefor not do it on the chance that it was.
That’s a very Jesuit way of phrasing it, and my Dominican senses are tingling, but if you need to put the case to sceptical secular worldlings who’ve been raised that abortion is as acceptable as having a glass of water when you’re thirsty, it may have the better chance of working as an appeal.
(Meanwhile, in the Fourth Sphere of the Sun, Thomas Aquinas is giving Ignatius Loyola consolatory patting on the back: “I know, I know; you should see what some of them are doing with my theology based on the science of the time on this question”.).
Not just Jesuit, but Jesuitical.
You got bit by a radioactive Dominican in high school, huh?
And here I thought Domini canes’ bark were worse than their bite.
@Nick: DOMINUS! CANIS!
Le Maistre Chat
Saint Christopher pray for us
You got bit by a radioactive Dominican in high school, huh?
Close, for some reason I’ve always had a grá for St Thomas Aquinas and then Chesterton’s biography put the tin lid on it (how can you not love somebody who ran away from the (cushy sinecure provided by his family for him as abbot with the) Benedictines, had his idiot brothers try ‘if we hire a hooker for him, that’ll cure him of his fancy moral notions and then he’ll get with the plan like the family want him to do!’ and when he finally got to university in Paris had his classmates call him The Big Dumb Ox?)
There is actually. It’s called moral risk.
Thank you, wrong species this is exactly what I was looking for
Amusingly, I was going to mention the modern notion of moral risk in my own post. But every single search was returning moral hazard, even when I used quote marks, because Google in its wisdom decided we’re no longer serious about searching exact words. So I gave up and stuck to theology.
Looks like you can still do it through the Advanced Search interface. And typing it into the search bar in quotes returns the same results for me; maybe your browser’s stripping the quotes for some reason?
I was searching from google.com, not from my address bar, so I don’t think my browser can be at fault. And I tried just now through advanced search and got good results, so wtf.
Maybe we’re being A/B tested.
I’ve had failures using exact words through advanced search too. I no longer expect special search features to work consistently 🙁
I agree that moral risk is a right term. I also think this kind of action is very closely related to Pascal’s Wager.
Lincoln has a stellar reputation because he was a powerful orator, prosecuted one of the single clearest examples of a Just War in the historical record to a victorious conclusion, and then was murdered before he could blemish that accomplishment by fucking up the peace.
You can argue that he was just in the right time and place to be immortalized by historical forces he actually had very little control over – Because no president could have permitted Treason in the Defense of Slavery to stand, and given the disparity of resources, any not-utterly-incompetent president would have won the civil war.
But arguing that prosecuting the war was wrong is.. I have no words. This is a mighty offering of Error you are making unto the altar of Azathoth.
The people in charge of the confederacy had been arguing for expanding the reach of slavery by force of arms for decades. They wanted to wage naked conquest upon Cuba and Mexico to create more slave states. That is who they were. They fired upon the forces of the US, and committed atrocity upon their political enemies. There could be no peace with the confederacy, not ever, at most a truce while they armed themselves further before trying to enslave the north.
Except Lincoln was at least a century late for the era when heads of state actually won wars. 19th and 20th century heads of state delegated the war-winning to their generals, and given the utterly incompetent(*) collection of generals Lincoln inherited and the low esteem with which the few competent exceptions were held by their colleagues, it is quite possible that a mediocre president would have lost the war in the first year or two.
* At warfighting; some of them were fairly good at e.g. training peacetime armies
Heads of state no longer commanded armies in person, but they were (and are) still in charge of managing the home front, determining overall strategy, maintaining good relations with third parties, and all sorts of other things that have a major impact on whether a side wins or loses.
“Major impact” is not the same as “absolutely decides the outcome”; the other factors deciding the outcome were so thoroughly stacked against POTUS-16 that simply doing a competent job of managing the home front, determining overall strategy, and maintaining good relations with third parties, would have been insufficient to provide a Union victory.
I can’t think of any period when the leader could absolutely decide the outcome on his own; chance and the actions of other people have always played a role. And personally I think the idea that the Union leadership were much more incompetent is just a myth; yes they had their share of duds, but so does every army, and more to the point, so did the Confederates.
The Union, in the first year of the war, had their share of duds and at least half of the Confederacy’s share of duds. And their few geniuses were largely marginalized. Trying to turn that into “meh, there were duds on both sides, I don’t think it made any difference” is not just wrong but boringly wrong.
Do you have any way to measure this? Because otherwise, it just seems extremely vague.
Lincoln was Commander-in-Chief of the US army. IOW, he had the ability to promote genius commanders over their incompetent colleagues. Bad leadership isn’t just a force of nature which no military head can do anything about.
Pick a random sample of “worst generals of the Civil War” list and start counting. Either the Union candidates will substantially outnumber the Confederate, or the Confederate list will be rounded out with lower-ranking officers and/or those promoted later in the war, or both. This is not a controversial position.
Abraham Lincoln had this ability, yes. It is not the case that everybody who sits in the POTUS chair has this ability. In order to actually have this ability, one needs to be able to recognize military talent when one is being told by experts that this guy just got lucky and/or is a talented front-line leader but in either case is not ready for a major command (which is often true), and to recognize military incompetence when the expert opinion is that so-and-so faced an untenable position and did the best that could be expected (ditto). It is also necessary to persuade people to accept new officers that they’ve never heard of in place of the leaders they came to legitimately respect in peacetime and who are being unceremoniously replaced for no apparent reason. Because no, you can’t just say “this guy is in charge, you have to do what he says or else” and expect to win wars.
Most heads of state aren’t particularly good at these things. Lincoln was. That mattered.
Bad leadership is not a trivial matter that any moderately competent “military head” can sweep aside into irrelevance by just picking the good commanders and putting them in charge.
Well, if you say so. But for your claim that “the other factors deciding the outcome were so thoroughly stacked against POTUS-16 that simply doing a competent job of managing the home front, determining overall strategy, and maintaining good relations with third parties, would have been insufficient to provide a Union victory” to be true, it’s not enough for the Union leadership to be more incompetent than the Confederates; they’d have to be so much more incompetent as to cancel out a two-to-one population advantage (three-to-one if you only count free citizens), a ten-to-one advantage in industry, almost all the pre-war army and navy, and international recognition as the legitimate government. And that is not only implausible on the face of it, it’s also not the sort of thing you can prove by just counting names on a list.
No more so than the thirteen colonies defeating the British Empire in a war for independence, against far greater disadvantages. But I take from your phrasing that you’re not actually interested in discussing the matter beyond tossing out canned arguments and saying “I so obviously win that I don’t need to listen to any counterarguments”.
@John Schilling
Much greater relative strength, yes. But with a capital 150 miles away from the enemy’s, not 3,500.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think I’ve ever played a strategic-level Civil War game that didn’t have a mechanic to represent the high political cost of replacing a Butler or a Fremont with a less well-connected general who knew what he was doing.
Not really; the Thirteen Colonies were much further away and communications were much less well-developed, making force projection a major problem for the British. Plus of course the rebels had half of Europe on their side, which is the sort of thing that evens the odds a lot: there’s a reason why plausible scenarios for Southern independence almost all involve Britain and France joining in on the Confederacy’s side.
Actually my position is more along the lines of “Strong claims require strong evidence; ‘McClellan et al. were sufficiently incompetent, and in the right way,* to cancel out a three-to-one population advantage, a ten-to-one industrial advantage, international recognition, and the support of almost all the pre-war army and navy’ is a strong claim; therefore this claim requires strong evidence to prove it”.
[* McClellan’s main problem as a commander was his unwillingness to take any risks, and whilst this makes a decisive victory unlikely, it also makes a decisive defeat unlikely as well. So McClellan at least was never likely to lose the war, except perhaps by making it drag on so long that the North got tired of fighting and voted for a peace candidate; but then, that would take longer than “the first year or two”.]
Also, if you’re going to accuse other people of “tossing out canned arguments”, you might want to come up with something more original and/or in-depth than “Pick a random sample of “worst generals of the Civil War” list and start counting”.
McClellan WAS incompetent enough to squander a 2:1 advantage and a 10:1 industrial advantage. That’s what he actually did when he was commander. Yeah, it basically is impossible for the South to decisively knock out the North, but that’s not what was required. What was required was for the NORTH to invade and occupy the SOUTH, which is actually really difficult to do.
In the prime timeline, Lee took his poorly supplied army into Maryland, where he was strategically outnumbered, divided them so they could be defeated in detail, McClellan managed to get a copy of his maps, and McClellan still almost lost at Antietam. And even after wrecking the Army of Northern Virginia, he didn’t press his advantage.
Yeah, maybe Robert E Lee never had a chance of taking Washington DC, but under McClellan, the Union never had a chance of taking Richmond either. At that point the war drags on forever.
Also, the Union had actual good generals in the West, and still had a hell of a time taking it.
Not true. In an extended war, the North was always going to defeat the South, due to the aforementioned manpower and industry shortage. Consequently, even if McClellan remains in charge forever and never manages to exploit his victories, the North still wins due to attrition (Lee’s constant invasions were expensive in men and materiel, and the South could much less afford to lose these things than the North).
Basically, the only ways the South could hope to win are (1) if the Northern public get war-weary and vote for a peace candidate, or (2) foreign powers — specifically, Britain and France — throw their weight behind the Confederacy and tip the balance of power against the Union. (1) is probably the most likely possibility, although it would take years to get to that point, and it’s not clear that the South could have lasted that long anyway due to the aforementioned inadequacy of men and war supplies, even with people like McClellan in command of the Union armies. (2) isn’t really very likely — France didn’t want to get involved without explicit British support, and Britain didn’t really have any desire to aid the Confederacy, so unless Lincoln does something very stupid to alienate them, they aren’t going to get involved.
Basically, the war was the North’s to lose, so the fact that the North didn’t lose it doesn’t imply any particular brilliance on the part of the Northern leader, any more than the modern USA winning a war against somewhere like the Philippines would imply that Donald Trump was a great war-leader.
The confederacy – to me – is mostly interesting because it is a very potent example of the power of disinformation, both in its own time, and to this very day.
The confederacy embarked on an utterly insane war of choice, because they had censored the press, censored the mail, and also were in the habit of outright killing voices of dissent. Fireeaters proclaimed any southerner was worth five northerners in a fight, that the United Kingdom and France would Kow-Tow to King Cotton and.. Then they based their war plan on those things being true.
And that was insane.
http://www.historyofwar.org/Maps/maps_acw_population.html
That is a map of the census of the south in 1860. An absurd fraction of the total population of the south were slaves, who obviously could not only not be put under arms, they would rise up and fight in droves for any enemy the second the battle lines got within reach. The north was also just vastly more populous in general. And much, much more industrialized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_Census
The union states had five times the population, to a first approximation, all of the industry, and an international situation where nobody could, or would, support the confederacy without getting in dire trouble with their own citizens because slavery was Fucking Evil and people outside the disinformation regime of the southern states had noticed that.
Then after the war, the south engaged in a concerted propaganda effort to gild a giant stinking pile of manure, and it mostly worked! It is a rare example of history being written by the loosers. I keep running across people who claim the war was about states rights or tarrifs or.. anything. Which is just amazing. The primary sources are a very minor google effort away, and before they got their asses predictably kicked, the confederacy was in no way shape or form subtle about the fact that they were going to war to preserve and expand slavery.
For anyone interested in The Religious Left and politics, an online post about Democratic outreach attempts and what journalists could be covering, or should be looking for if they want to cover, the topic (did you know the Democratic Party had a Director of Religious Outreach?)
@Deiseach,
Five Thirty Eight did a similar piece called Why Democrats Struggle To Mobilize A ‘Religious Left not to long ago that was pretty good.
That’s a good piece, Plumber, and I think the answer to the question is buried within it, though it doesn’t seem to have come to the attention of the writers:
And the problem there is that this is describing “religious people who are on the left” but not “the religious left”. Black churches tend to be more socially conservative and lag behind on the LGBT+ rights that the Democrats are broadly supporting (though that is changing) and Hispanics are either culturally Catholic or these days, quite often, members of Evangelical churches, especially Pentecostalism, which have made huge inroads in South America. They have ties to and are loyal to the Democrats on civil rights, immigration and so forth, but the social liberalism is not the key element.
The Religious Left, such as it is, is more like these organisations – female pastors, LGBT+ members, pro-choice, etc. Buttigieg being raised Catholic (however loosely), coming out as gay and converting to Episcopalianism (which is much, much more liberal on gay rights) is the model here: my old church was stodgy on Position X so I switched to a new church that told me it was just fine since the Zeitgeist had settled that question. Trouble is, being left-liberal in theology means that there isn’t much impetus for people to sign up to be members, since they can be just as left-liberal as secularists and your own teaching is telling them this is just fine (but hey, how about that God thing – oh okay, you’re spiritual but not religious, we’re down with that! but wouldn’t you like to join like-minded people to help improve the world – no? you’re already doing that via secular philanthropy? okay, fine, we don’t believe in scaring people into conversion, you’re doing great as you are!)
The Democrats problem with religion is a bit like the Republicans problem with appealing to minorities 🙂
… and as you point out, very few people join a church to have leftism preached at them.
Then you get the sight of Anglican bishops from the world’s poorest countries telling the Episcopalians they’re heretics, and the rich white leftists shrieking “Homophobia!”
Then you get the sight of Anglican bishops from the world’s poorest countries telling the Episcopalians they’re heretics, and the rich white leftists shrieking “Homophobia!”
Even worse than merely yelling. You get snide remarks (by a black American bishopess herself, for the irony) about the Global South primates being bought off with chicken dinners, and ‘jokey’ posts about primates illustrated with photos of chimpanzees because ha ha they’re primates, geddit?
(I remember being an onlooker at the Anglican Wars and thinking however bad our crowd were, at least it wasn’t quite this bad even with the liberal Spirit of Vatican II lot).
I wrote about this topic a while back, and I don’t really think anything has changed. tldr; the Religious Left died when they signed on to Obamacare, and therefore suing Hobby Lobby (and later nuns) for not buying abortion pills.
What does “the Religious Left” offer that is distinct from “the Left”? What will they stand up for, even against the party?
John 10:1:
More glibly, Heaven has high walls, a fiercely guarded gate and a strict immigration policy. Hell has open borders.
Careful with your metaphors, man….
I am fully in favor of strongly revising US immigration policy at the End of Days.
Are you trying to prove Buttigieg’s point with this prooftexting, or are you actually claiming that Jesus was making a statement about national immigration control when he described hself as a good shepherd?
No, I think there’s plenty of stuff in the bible about the importance of walls and borders, of obeying secular laws, and of foreigners respecting the laws and traditions of places where they are guests. Buttigieg is grandstanding as “more Christian than thou” and is absolutely wrong about some kind of incompatibility between Christian faith and US border policy.
There is some stuff in the Bible about obeying laws. Perhaps you should have quoted one of those passages, instead of blasphemously misusing the words of our Lord for your own ends.
If you’re going to accuse someone of prooftexting and blasphemy, it would behoove you to show us how Conrad is misreading the text.
Bible quote fight! *grabs bible*
fight fight fight
@Nick
For reference, here’s the whole passage:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber; 2 but he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 To him the gatekeeper opens; the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. 5 A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.” 6 This figure Jesus used with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.
7 So Jesus again said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. 8 All who came before me are thieves and robbers; but the sheep did not heed them. 9 I am the door; if any one enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. 11 I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12 He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13 He flees because he is a hireling and cares nothing for the sheep. 14 I am the good shepherd;[a] I know my own and my own know me, 15 as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. 16 And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd. 17 For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father.”
Jesus says that the one who enters by the door is the shepherd, and then says that he himself is the shepherd. He also says, mixing the metaphor a bit as often happens in the Gospel of John, that he is the door by which the sheep go in and out. Jesus, then, is both the door and the one who goes in by the door. “All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not heed them”: clearly this refers to false prophets, false teachers, and false messiahs (which were abundant at the time) who attempted to lead the sheep astray. There’s absolutely no warrant for seeing the “thieves and robbers” who climb over the wall as economic migrants. Picture a scraggly, half-starved sheep sneaking through a hole in the fence looking for grass: does that have anything to do with the image Jesus uses? Obviously not.
As for the flock itself, it first means the Jews to whom Jesus preached, and then is expanded: there are other sheep from a different fold, who will also follow the shepherd’s voice, making “one flock”. Therefore not just the Israelites, but all the nations will be saved by hearing and following Jesus, and all of them will mingle together. Insofar as the sheepfold represents a nation, it’s the nation of Israel, which is then expanded to include everyone who follows Jesus. There’s no indication that it can represent any arbitrary nation such as the USA. Furthermore, if the passage makes us think about national borders at all, it should make us take them less seriously.
What Conrad did is take a metaphor for the salvation that comes from faith in Christ (hearing and following), and divert it to a completely unrelated political point. In the process, he twisted a teaching that goes out of its way to be inclusive and expansive into something exclusive and narrow. He did this in such a blatant and egregious manner (seriously, I’ve never heard anyone say that the Good Shepherd sermon is ambiguous or difficult to interpret) that I find it impossible to believe he cared about the true meaning of the passage he used. He chose to weaponize the word of God for his own political ends. I stand by what I said: that is blasphemous, and it’s a sign that Buttigieg’s rebuke isn’t entirely off target.
Fortunately we don’t need to work out the question for ourselves: Christ promised us that the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth, and hence we can trust that the Church’s teaching has not habitually been in error. Or, if you prefer a more secular argument, the Apostles and Church Fathers came from a much more similar social and cultural background to Jesus than we do, and consequently are less likely to misunderstand him as saying something completely different to what he was actually saying.
So, did any of the Church Fathers tell us that the Roman Empire had a moral imperative to let in anybody who wanted to find a better life for their families? It’s not as if there were no opportunities for them to do so, if they thought that keeping people out was morally wrong. And yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much as one Christian left person produce so much as a single Patristic citation for their position.
When I think of the bible and walls I mostly remember the history of the walls of Jericho, so I guess that God is strongly on the side of “fuck walls”.
I’m surprised Nehemiah hasn’t been getting quoted more in the current year.
@The Pachyderminator
Jesus had a tendency to use easily understandable metaphors to explain himself and the kingdom of God. One that’s incredibly basic, that simple people can understand is that those who try to enter a sheep pen without going in the proper way (through the door) are thieves and robbers. This is the concrete part of the metaphor that should need no explanation. It very well applies to economic migrants, who seek to enter the country not the proper way, through the immigration system, but by either sneaking through the desert or climbing over or under the fences, and when caught they lie and say they’re fleeing violence. They come like thieves and robbers, to steal social services they didn’t pay for, to steal time, attention, and care away from legitimate asylum seekers, to steal jobs from Americans at wages lower than Americans are legally allowed to work.
The metaphor is apt, and nothing here is blasphemous. I’m using the same metaphor Jesus did because it’s so simple and obvious it should require no explanation, and yet here we are.
@Conrad
Yes, here we are, when opportunistic pseudo-Christians like you won’t hesitate to use any mental contortions, no matter how tortured, implausible, and anachronistic, to make Scripture say exactly and only what they want to hear. This is what Buttigieg was talking about in the quote you posted, and he’s 100% correct.
No, I’m not saying you’re explicitly lying. You’ve probably deceived yourself too thoroughly for that to be necessary.
The USA is not the Kingdom of God. Jesus didn’t preach in order to supply you with political prooftexts. Jesus’ warning against false prophets was not meant as an excuse for you to deny your responsibility to the poor.
What about my responsibility to the poor Americans whose jobs are taken by illegals? What about my responsibility to the poor Americans whose neighborhoods are taken over by hostile foreigners? What about my responsibility to poor Americans whose social services are diverted to foreigners? What about my responsibility to Americans murdered by people who broke the law to come here? What about my responsibility to not support endeavors that funnel money to cartels that butcher people in Mexico? What about my responsibility to poor asylum seekers denied their day in court because the system is flooded with lying illegal aliens? I’m pretty sure Jesus did not call on me to screw over the group of poor people I have greater responsibility to by ignoring or subverting the law in favor of a different group of poor people I have less responsibility towards. Tell me, who will speak for the poor Americans? Who will help them? Not their own government, apparently. Not the elite in their own nation. Will the government of Guatemala care for the poor Americans as the US government is expected to care for the Guatemalans?
And don’t call me a pseudo-Christian.
ETA:
Will you tell that to Buttigieg? I didn’t start with the injection of my religion into politics. He did, and he’s wrong about it.
Apparently not.
I mean, if you think the Southern states had the right to secede, yeah, Lincoln is probably a bad President. The arguments that Lincoln is one of the greatest Presidents assume that the Civil War was a just war, the South did NOT have the right to secede, and keeping the Union together was a great thing.
But, to your point: Secession and Rebellion are NOT the same rights. Secession is a political right granted to political entities. A right to secede would grant a political entity the right to secede from the Union, for any silly old reason, including just losing a political fight. That would mean California could secede if they lost the election, for instance.
The right to rebellion is a human right, emergent from other rights which are inherent to us as humans because they were granted to us by our Creator. And it is specifically to be used when governments become destructive of the ends of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. And there’s a pretty high bar for those grievances, like “suspending all representative government” and “eliminate trial by jury” and “stationing armies in cities during peace-time.” AND there’s a strong implicit argument that you need to actually try to resolve these disputes through peaceful means, in good faith, with an eye towards keeping political union together.
So, Californians do not have a right to rebel, just because Donald J Trump got elected. It doesn’t matter if they don’t like Trump, because losing a political fight is not just cause for rebellion. And even if DJT were doing bad things, Californians would be obligated to use our existing political system to try to challenge them, in good faith, with an eye towards keeping the Union together. If they lose all of that, and Trump does things like send the army into California, suspend the California legislature, dismiss Newsom and replace him Trump Jr., arrest all the Hollywood actors and just declare them guilty, etc, THEN, and only then would Californians have the right to revolt. This right would not need to be exercise through the state of California, though that’s probably the easiest parallel political institution to leverage.
The South had disputes, but they essentially just decided to quit as soon as they lost a Presidential election. I do not think this is close to a valid rebellion.
Ya, the whole process around the south seceding seemed sketchy as hell.
it’s like if instead of a brexit vote to remove the UK from the EU…., a bunch of rural brexiters had just turned up with guns, formed an army and declared the UK separate and started shooting at the french…..
There is a real world Cal-exit movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_California
And if they did indeed get a decent majority (vs the 13% they were polling at) in california in favor of secession… I could very much see things going a bit different vs the civil war because a strong democratic mandate holds a lot more sway with courts than “we have a lot of guys with guns”.
Well, my first intro to CalExit was via a Trump-supporting co-worker who explicitly cited the precedent of the Civil War, seemingly approvingly, to suggest what would happen to them if they were successful.
the British line against the colonists was essentially, “the least taxed people in the world started screaming about liberty while demanding rights that had no basis in law. I do not think this is close to a valid rebellion.”
And the other British line seems to have been “a bunch of slave holders yammering about ‘liberty’; isn’t this rich :-(“
Rights are often granted as the result of armed combat at various points in history, not just given in a deliberative body. The Colonists were not asking for anything but the rights of full Englishmen, as created post Glorious Revolution. Britain treated the colonists like Jacobites instead of Englishmen, and did things like essentially revoke the Bay Colony Charter. Had the King done the same in England, he would have been beheaded.
Either way, the Colonists by and large clearly wanted to remain part of the Empire until at least 1775. The South basically up and quit as soon as they lost an election.
This isn’t a remotely accurate statement. You can’t just gloss over the 40 odd years of increasingly rancorous sectional conflict that led up that secession as “they lost one election”.
It is, if anything, overly charitable to the south. That previous history you mentioned basically boils down to the confederate states being run by, and represented in the federal government by, enormous assholes.
Censorship of the post, the gag rule (and its eventual overturn) the caning of Sumner.. Ect.
And, you know, slavery.
This animal is dangerous, when attacked it defends itself…
Does “attacked” here refer to anything other than “had its slavery-based economic system challenged”?
@Enkidum says:
No, and that’s the point. After 40 years of union with a bunch of polities that were increasingly challenging something they considered fundamental to their way of life, it’s not surprising that they decided to go for a divorce. It wasn’t a tiff over a single election.
This isn’t some grand meta-level claim people are making against you – and it shouldn’t be, because the object cases aren’t one and the same. Seceding over high taxes or religious intolerance isn’t the same as seceding over your god-given right to brutalise your fellow man for profit.
The increasingly sectional conflict was being managed by political compromise almost every single step of the way. The North didn’t just disregard Southern political wishes until it was actively fighting the South in the Civil War. Sectional conflict is unavoidable and isn’t justification for secession. Parliament effectively disbanded Colonial assemblies, put Massachusetts under martial law, and tried to confiscate colonial weapons. The North did not do that to the South until the South had already passed its secession acts.
I don’t see why an 1860 Southerner would agree with this statement. They joined the Union under the premise that they could keep their slaves. If the Union simply mobilized an army and declared that they were going to attack the South to free the slaves, without an amendment or anything of the sort, I don’t see how the South wouldn’t have the right to secede given the understanding of politics and rights at the time.
Given whose understanding?
I can’t understand people that want to defend southern chattel slavery. Or ignore it to move on to some contrarian actually point.
This isn’t some judging Romans by contemporary morality—lots of people at the time pointed out it’s evils.
@DeWitt
What about your right to brutalize indians and take their land? Or the right to keep catholics oppressed, both of which were signifcant points of contention in the revolution and the latter of which is actually mentioned in the declaration of independence?
@A Definite Beta Guy says:
One could say the same thing about the conflicts between the colonies and the UK. Everything is managed by compromise, until it isn’t.
Why not? If you and your wife are having increasingly violent fights over time, maybe you should get that divorce.
the first continental congress met a year before the british came to Boston, and Bostonians started training up an army at about the same time.
Many of them did. Some confederate states did. Presumably, a supermajority of black southerners did. It wasn’t beyond the pale at all.
I thank you for literally prefacing your whataboutism with what about, because it’s made it really, really easy to recognise as such.
The US government made a decision to defend chattel slavery at its founding and through the Civil War because large portions of its citizens did not agree that chattel slavery was evil. If you choose to disregard those political compromises, your political union is invalid. If you don’t want to make those compromises, don’t invite people you think are evil into your political union.
Ah, that’s a fair point. Well, they were evil, and deserved to be destroyed then.
@DeWitt says:
You: “The motives for the revolution were just and had nothing to do with oppression, unlike secession.”
Me: “Um, what about all these motives that were oppressive?”
You: “Quit your whataboutism!”
You can’t assert two things are distinct and then insist that attempts to compare them are whatbaoutism, at least not if you want to argue honestly.
I don’t really care to defend the American revolution in general, because I don’t find it particularly admirable or detestable of a revolution. I certainly find the south’s reasons for seceding detestable; I will not defend it. If you want to tell me it was okay because the American revolution was okay, that’s fine, there are enough other rebellions I’m much happier to defend than one I don’t even know about too well. And even in a counterfactual world where Confucius is right about everything and rebellion is never, ever justified, the south’s secession is something I’d find particularly heinous.
Refer to the keeping a double digit percentage of your population in horrible conditions, all along with state-sponsored violence and terrorism bit if you don’t think the throwing a temper tantrum because you didn’t get your way bit was enough.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t being sarcastic. Fuck the Confederacy.
This sort-of-obituary for Christopher Booker, the former Private Eye editor and latterly Sunday Telegraph columnist, reminds me somewhat of Muggeridge and Chronicles of Wasted Time: the scion of liberalism turning against liberalism
(I don’t know enough about Muggeridge to say if the parallels are deep; apparently MM was Booker’s mentor in some ways. Booker spent his latter years loudly decrying expert knowledge without any real knowledge of his own – on climate, Europe, smoking, evolution. I don’t know the extent to which MM did that.)
Anyway I thought it might be of mild interest.
T
After my last post on the subject of “Antifa” I came across Conservatives Conjure Up Liberal Support for Antifa Violence
Despite trawling social media, conservative publications found scant evidence that mainstream commentators approved of an attack on a journalist in The Atlantic Monthly which in part read:
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to read an equivalent story of “liberals”/”left” ascribing views to “those conservatives”/”the right” that are equally uncommon.
I’m reminded of the recent post of @albatross11 where he shares the polling results that show that “Most Americans with a political side (Republican or Democrat) significantly overestimate how extreme the other side’s average views are”.
Today isn’t the 1860’s or even the 1970’s, actual advocates for political violence are just plain extremely rare.
I saw a lot of victim blaming, though. When liberals or those they sympathize with are victim blamed, they seem to generally regard that as support for doing the harm.
It’s not surprising that some/many conservatives then adopt the same reasoning, if only because not doing so makes them weaker in the culture war.
Quite a few people present escalations of violence against their opposition as self-defense or as not being violence, though.
Despite the right’s effort to affix the term leftist to everyone from Joe Biden to Chairman Mao, there’s a vast ideological gulf between mainstream American liberals and antifa
I am quite happy to accept this. I just wish the same was promoted in the other direction:
Despite the left’s effort to affix the term rightist to everyone from Larry Hogan to Adolf Hitler, there’s a vast ideological gulf between mainstream conservatives and fascists
I think the Atlantic piece is more driven by journalists being in high dudgeon over being called out for hypocrisy (how dare you say we liberals and fellow-professionals did not strongly condemn an attack on a journalist! Even if he wasn’t a real journalist, and besides he holds the wrong opinions, and it doesn’t count that he’s a minority because Asians are coded white and being gay in his case is the cis type of gay which is the wrong type of gay nowadays…) than anything else.
I don’t know anything about Ngo and had never heard of him before this incident. I could be wrong, but I don’t think he was doing anything to incite the attack on him beyond filming, which is sort of the thing journalists do. We hear endlessly from the media about Trump allegedly inciting violence against the media (which I would characterize as “criticizing them back when they unfairly criticize him”). When Jim Acosta had his press credentials pulled, Fox News issued a statement in protest and I believe joined in on the lawsuit to get them reinstated. But when Ngo gets actually assaulted an awful lot of blue checkmarks did the whole “this is bad but he kind of had it coming” thing. Which tells me it’s not really about inciting violence against the media, it’s about whose media is getting violence incited against it.
I live in Portland, and while I don’t follow this super-closely, I think it would be fair to say that there is a small group of “right-wing protesters” and an opposing and equally small group of “antifa protesters” who have been skirmishing, IRL and online, for a year or two, with Ngo being part of or associated with the former. The spate of scuffles that have been happening here recently have a lot to do with the specific people involved, but have very little to do with Liberals and Conservatives generally.
The idea that antifa is representative of the left is just as absurd as the idea that the Proud Boys are representative of the right. I mean, each of them works really hard to get their message out and get people to show up at their rallies, and each of them winds up with a couple hundred people, most of whom just gawk, every time. That’s pretty good proof that their views are not popular within their respective tribes.
Ngo is not “part of” the Proud Boys, and he’s only “associated with” them in as much as he’s given antifa negative coverage. It’s true that when the Proud Boys and antifa skirmish, there’s a measure of mutual combat. That isn’t true of Ngo. Yet when antifa beats up Ngo, the wagons are circled in defense of antifa. To me this indicates that while antifa may not be representative, they or their actions are at least popular.
@The Nybbler
In remembering how the same bunch and modus operandi were really hated in 2011 I find it hard to fathom that they suddenly became popular.
I think you’re confusing people on the left defending Antifa with people on the left defending the left. Imagine the Proud Boys beat up some liberal, and we were having the same conversation, but in reverse. If I said, “Man, those guys who beat that guy up are jerks,” I’m guessing you’d agree. But if I said, “…and that’s just more evidence that conservativism is a violent ideology,” you’d object. And then I could say you’re circling the wagons, etc, etc.
Andy ngo has much relation to militant rightists as George Bush has to Hitler.
You’re repeating his opponents smears without pointing out that they’re blatantly false.
+1
@Deiseach,
On the tendency to “call out” out-group wackos and cite them as examples of said out-group, your quite right, i.e. as informative as some of Paul Krugman’s columns are, he also keeps on a drumbeat of “No the Republicans don’t have a difference of opinions of what’s best, they’re just greedy racists rant rave grumble mumble fume see this example….!”
A term for this tendency of citing some wackjob as an example of many [outgroup] is “Nutpicking”, and I’m noticing it more.
This isn’t helped by another tendency I noticed of “reverse motte-and-bailey” or “Tony Blair sings ‘The Red Flag'” i.e. Sanders and “socialism” and “We need a political revolution!”, when what’s actually being asked for isn’t storming the Winter Palace but instead the no tuition college that my Mom’s generation had.
There’s just some political cosplay going on, both of claiming that Democrats are the Cheka or Republicans are the Gestapo, and of claiming oneself to be far more radical than one is, in another thread @Matt M aluded to the tendency of “property is theft” vs. “taxation is theft” rhetoric when the actual discussion is a few percentage points of the top marginal income tax, which brings me to “antifa”.
I first heard the label “antifa” from a Trump supporting co-worker he cited as an example of “the Left”, and it didn’t take much research to figure out that they were likely the same self-proclaimed “revolutionary anarchists” that called themselves the “black bloc” a few years ago, and were much decried back then, that are basically a tiny group of window smashing ex-punk rockers, who now get to schedule fistfights with self-proclaimed “nationalist” ex-punk rockers and both cosplay Weimar republic Left vs. Right street fights as a step up from the ‘Peace Punks’ and ‘Skins’ fights of the ’80’s, hardly 1930’s Spain.
As to The Atlantic Monthly article, I read that there was “widespread media excusing of Antifa’s actions”, but nope – the first I heard about any of that was a comment here at SSC, so hardly “widespread”, and a couple bloggers are hardly “The Press”.
Sometimes (as in the Covington schoolboys D.C. kerfluffle) this kind of niche crap does briefly become “widespread news”, but not this time.
I wish Newsweek and Time magazine were still displayed at gas stations so I had a better idea of what’s “widespread news”, but until then radio and T.V. news seem a good indication of what’s niche and not, and yeah most of internet “news” doesn’t become water cooler talk, call me extremely doubtful of any Orson Scott Card’s Empire second civil war scenerios, and I don’t even think the 1970’s scale of political violence will come back anytime soon, marginalized groups of marginal people have always been around, internet attention of them doesn’t mean that they’re more of them.
“Tony Blair sings ‘The Red Flag’” i.e. Sanders and “socialism”
I actually wouldn’t mind Tony Blair singing The Red Flag (I have old-school Old Labour sympathies), I simply don’t know if he ever did sing it – or if he did, was it like John Redwood’s (the then Tory Secretary of State for Wales) much-mocked attempt to ‘sing’ Land of My Fathers in 1993?
Some cursory Googling reveals Blair hated The Red Flag as a symbol of everything New Labour had dumped and left behind, tried and finally succeeded in getting it banned/dropped during his stint in office, it came back briefly in a tidied-up ‘properly sung‘ (ahem) version for the 2011 party conference and it only really came back under Corbyn – so a bad analogy there!
@Deiseach,
I had thought that even “New Labour” still sang “the Red Flag” once a year as a ritual.
Thanks for the correction,
Covington had nothing to do with antifa.
No, but it had a lot of blue-checkmark journalists from high-profile publications beclowning themselves in public.
I was citing the Covington schoolboys kerfluffle as an example of an “internet story” that did become an on the radio story in contrast to anything Antifa related, which I don’t think has really reached mainstream news (ABC, CBS, NBC) yet.
Yeah, most liberals sort of disapprove of beating up random conservative journalists, particularly then the people doing the beating are white and the people getting beaten are of color, but:
– Not many are interested in stopping it (say, by encouraging police departments to protect conservatives or supporting laws making masks illegal).
– Many of them think there are so many bigger problems that they basically “all lives matter” the issue – there isn’t that many antifa attacks and we have bigger problems, so let’s cluck our tongues and let antifa keep attacking people.
J Mann:
How do you know what most liberals think on this issue? Do you have polling data you can link to?
The most extreme voices are the ones getting massively amplified right now, largely due to the need for clickbait headlines and algorithms that are optimized for increasing engagement. It’s quite possible that 90%+ of liberals think these guys are whackjobs who belong in jail, and yet that 90% of the liberals you see on Twitter or on the Web generally are cheering the antifas on.
I don’t know, albatross11, all I know is that Vox found it necessary to put out an explainer setting us all straight about how it wasn’t what it appeared to be:
Note that it isn’t an ” this is” attack, it’s a “looks like” attack. Great! Now the next time some thug beats up a black or gay person, can we get “yeah, that only looks like some right-wing fascist is beating them up for being black or gay”? Yes?
I put the responsibility on the Mayor of Portland, who seems to have instructed the police to just stand there with their hands hanging and let antifa do whatever the hell they like in previous stunts; this is simply the fruit of such a policy.
Can confirm that the Mayor of Portland is very woke and it’s extremely hard to get laws enforced unless the victim is the right kind of person. Heroin needles on public property, or in a low-income person’s yard? De facto legal. Throwing trash in the Mayor’s yard? Very illegal.
This tells us what Vox’s writers think, but not what the average liberal or progressive thinks.
IMO, the city letting this crap continue is the political version of the “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller” financial strategy. Most of the time, nothing really bad happens and the mayor gets a small benefit for the police’s “restraint.” Eventually, someone’s going to get killed, or the opposition will bring guns and there will be a bunch of killings, and then it will blow up catastrophically in the city government’s face.
@albatross11
Sorry, I should have put an IMHO in there. It was shorthand for “most liberals with whom I have discussed the issue or read” (which is several liberals)”, coupled with my general model, which is:
1) People are generally lukewarm good when they think about it and it doesn’t cost them anything, so I am comfortable assuming that most liberals vaguely think that people shouldn’t be attacked for being in Portland, even for (somehow) being in Portland in a provocative manner.
2) I’m also pretty comfortable assuming that most liberals won’t do anything to limit or reduce antifa, because I think I would notice if they were. Maybe they would vote for anti-mask laws if they were proposed, but I doubt it.
So I’m pulliing it from my butt, but I’m still relatively confident that I’m right. 😉
I think most people won’t do anything to limit or reduce anything they disapprove of, short of very personal, cheap and safe actions like voting, recycling, and arguing on the internet (which is probably counterproductive a lot of the time). Self included.
What are these 90% who think these guys are whackjobs doing? If they’re just tutting about it and then getting on with their lives, or saying “They should be in jail” when asked by a pollster and then giving the issue no more thought, describing them as “not interested in stopping it” seems reasonable enough to me.
OK, but by that standard 95% of right wingers are also not interested in stopping antifa.
@albatross11,
Once again I post a link to:
The Democratic
Electorate on Twitter
Is Not the Actual
Democratic Electorate
Twittered are not reflective of a majority of Americans, and certainly not of Democratic Party voters as “Twittercrats” are on average younger, more college educated, and whiter than most Democrats.
They reflect a subset.
I’m a liberal, I think antifa are generally twits, and yet I also think a law against masks is a terrible idea.
If you’re not a fan of anti-mask laws, does that include wanting to repeal the anti-mask laws created to fight the KKK?
Anti-mask laws are not a bad idea. Not obviously good either, but I think probably good narrowly applied.
You’re free to support anti-mask laws, and you’re free to be against antifa. What you can’t do is claim that people who are against anti-mask laws must not want to stop antifa, which you did when you said, “Not many [liberals] are interested in stopping [antifa] (say, by … supporting laws making masks illegal).”
You’ve mistaken me for someone else, since I didn’t say that or you’ve responded to the wrong thread. I think the second more likely since you didn’t respond to my question.
Leftist here: Yeah, I am totally in favor of repealing anti-mask laws that were created to fight the KKK. Anti-mask laws are a terrible idea. I strongly disagree with your assertion that they can be probably good, or are at least not bad.
That’s nice. Now tell me about the prominent blue-state mayors and police chiefs who deployed police officers to stop the attacks, as opposed to stopping the other side from holding the speeches, etc, that were “inciting” the attacks. Tell me about the blue-state district attorneys who, when a clear case of antifa violence is dropped in their laps, seek more than a slap on the wrist.
I am unimpressed by opinion polling that basically just asks people whether they want to give the obvious virtue-signalling answer to questions like this. Liberals all love their country, or at least they say they do if you ask them on the 4th of July, and conservatives all oppose racism and yes progressives all deplore political violence. Just ask them, and they’ll tell you. And most of them are telling the truth, in the sense that they e.g. hold the abstract preference that antifa should not beat people up. But do they care enouh to lift a finger and actually DO anything about it? Even to speak out against it without being prompted and put on the spot? Some will, some won’t, but either way that’s a question worth asking.
If it’s their actual job to do something about it, saying that you deplore political violence constitutes praising with the faintest of damns. And we live in a sufficiently cynical society that the politically violent will read it that way.
@John Schilling,
I don’t know about your town, but during the 2011 “Occupy” protests the ‘black bloc’ window smashers were very much decried in Oakland, California, and how our Mayor handled (and didn’t handle) that mess was a big reason she wasn’t re-elected.
As for professor Clanton, yeah he should’ve had a harsher sentence, stuff like that is why me and my wife got a house just north of Berkeley instead of inside city limits, we decided that policing was insufficient there back in ’92.
I don’t doubt it, but the original post was about what prominent liberals think about Antifa et al. The mayor of Oakland is a prominent liberal. The various Oakland citizens who were fed up with the window-smashing, may have been liberal but don’t have prominence.
At least they still have the franchise, and it sounds like they used it wisely.
Well, at least Salon is consistent on this one. Not even on the Fourth of July.
Well, at least Salon is consistent on this one. Not even on the Fourth of July.
I’m beginning to wonder if pieces like that aren’t the secular equivalent of the Christmas-and-Easter stories about “This will SHOCK AND APPALL YOU! Tehre was no Star of Bethlehem/We’ve found the tomb of Jesus/the three wise men were not kings but astrologers and there probably weren’t three of them anyway/A LOST GOSPEL DEVASTATES THE VATICAN AND EXPLODES CHRISTIANITY!!!!” we get every year like clockwork. (Do I really need to explain that the author’s notes beneath the video are absolute porridge and Not Really So?)
After all, religion as a punching bag has lost a lot of its appeal since people are less religious and it has lost much social influence and power, so the ‘bold defiance of established orthodoxy’ frisson can only come now from challenging the civic orthodoxy – but make sure it’s the right orthodoxy to attack (‘patriotism bad’) not the wrong one (‘there are only two genders despite what a tiny minority claim’).
The people actually not doing their job w.r.t. the head-breaking at political rallies (mayor, police chief, DA) are responsible for a lot of the harm being done. I hope the voters make it clear to those folks that head-breaking thugs at political rallies aren’t acceptable. I’ve seen news coverage of a bunch of incidents in Portland that look like the mayor is broadly on board with these masked thugs doing whatever they want, but I don’t know how representative of reality that is.
I agree there. If the Proud Boys or whomever are cracking skulls (as distinct from simply marching and being gobshites) then they should get hauled in. Same with the antifa/Black Bloc if they crack skulls, throw milkshakes, and take it upon themselves to divert traffic.
One of these groups getting thrown into the paddy wagon but not the other is just making things worse. Be equally lenient or equally ‘this is police brutality!’ but don’t take sides so obviously.
Right; several quasi-defenses of antifa I’ve been seeing are of the form “they have to be there because of the far-right, sometimes violent, demonstrators.” It would seem both sides agree, at least implicitly, that the local police are fracking useless.
In cities where the police don’t let this crap go on, we hear about an occasional violent protest or riot, but not the pattern that appears to be going on in Portland. But I’ll note that black-clad masked antifas don’t seem to be kicking the shit out of journalists filming them in Washington DC or NYC or Chicago too often.
In fact, showing up at a political protest dressed up in your own uniform and then busting heads is a strategy that only works when the police are inclined to back off and let you do it. Otherwise, you just all get arrested before the protest starts on some kind of bullshit incitement charge, and they let you go the next day with no charges, but with your names and fingerprints on file. Or they watch your group carefully and as soon as someone starts a fight, a dozen riot cops show up and arrest him, dealing with resistance from the other black-clad thugs by bringing in more and better-armed thugs of their own.
Beinart is basically lying. Warzel of the New York Times said (in several tweets)
Yes, he gives lip service to violence being unacceptable. “But” it’s right before a “but”. Louis CK used to have a signature line which was “Of course, but MAYBE“, and that’s what Warzel is doing here. “Of course violence is wrong, BUT MAYBE this guy had it coming”.
Then you’ve got stuff like this which slyly implies Ngo provoked the attack.
Also, consider the source; Beinart is a professor at CUNY, which is itself at least sympathetic to left-wing violence.
@The Nybbler,
That’s a good point, if I remember “Days of Rage” correctly that fates of the terrorists of the 1970’s really diverged with collegiate credentials, some of the terrorists got long sentences or death, others got short sentences and tenure.
That’s pretty much how I remember it, having read the book two or three years back.
I think Warzel is basically right, and you’re misinterpreting him. He’s not justifying violence. He’s saying, both sides are trolling each other and trying to generate narratives about how bad the other side is, and in this case the right did it better. If the Proud Boys had busted the eye of someone from the left, we’d currently be going through a round of “Has conservative violence gone too far?” in the national media, rather than the opposite.
Am I saying Ngo wanted to get kicked in the face? Of course not, you can die from that if you’re unlucky, no one would. But the whole reason all those people were out there yelling at each other in the first place was to make something like this happen.
My initial reaction to briefly viewing a story of an “antifa vs. nationalists” fight in Berkeley (me and my wife could actually hear a helicopter circling around the “event” for hours from our house) was that “Well I guess it’s consensual head smashing of each other, it would be nice if they didn’t block public walkways and maybe kept their fighting inside an auditorium and sold tickets to finance it”, it really did sound to me like a 1980’s “mosh-pit”, where some just wanted to fight each other out of their desire to “punch a commie/punch a nazi”.
Maybe designated “Thunderdomes” are called for?.
But yeah, these “fight clubs” really should be broken up before more bystanders get caught in the crossfire.
If the police beat you up for taking pictures of them, I want those policemen off the force and in jail. If random protesters beat you up for taking pictures of them, I similarly want them in jail.
@albatross11
I agree, and it does seem to me that going masked should equal “probable cause”.
I don’t know much about Portland today, but in Oakland 2011 the police really were between “a rock and a hard place” caught between orders to “stop the property destruction” and “don’t be brutal”, but at least then it was kinda obvious who was going to break windows, the masks were a “tell”.
One of the Popehat bloggers who lives in the Carolinas tweeted
“When southern states finally got serious about the Klan, the first thing they banned was gatherings of masked cowards.”
I suppose it can be argued the Confederacy never successfully invaded the North. This is mostly because the North put them on the back foot though. The opening stages of violent conflict were not Fort Sumter: they were the Confederates massacring pro-Union communities and supporters in their putative states. The earliest battles of the war were actually these southerners fighting other southerners. The first battles where Union forces engaged Confederates were defensive actions against actions where the Confederates attempted to attack Union loyalists in Appalachia. Surrounding Union states and the military fought alongside these white pro-Union forces.
So yes, the Union could have let all their supporters in any Southern state (as far north as the tip of West Virginia) get massacred and let the South fire on Federal troops without response. Maybe the South (which had stolen significant Federal property, including military weapons) would have stopped at the borders. But from the Northern point of view, secessionist rebels were killing loyal Americans in what was American territory. If the Confederates had refrained from doing so, perhaps the Union army wouldn’t have invaded as early as it did.
False. While some did so, others seceded despite losing the vote. Secession was highly controversial and faced significant legal challenges from loyalists who pointed out the Secession Convention was a new political procedure that no one had agreed to. The North, meanwhile, pointed out that there had never been such a procedure and the states had agreed to a perpetual union.
The Continental Congress, meanwhile, was arguably an illegal organization but it was following a format that had been used before. The British didn’t even try to claim the Congress was illegitimate as a Congress: they claimed it was treasonous because it was rebelling, not because it existed.
Also, keep in mind, the British started the war with the Proclamation of Rebellion. They had forces in the United States seeking to occupy territory and disarm inhabitants. The United States did nothing nearly so provocative to the Confederacy. Likewise, the fighting started only after the British declared war in the Proclamation of Rebellion. This action was considered so provocative that British commanders on the ground quietly didn’t fully enforce it because they believed it would provoke a shooting war. In other words, no shooting war existed at the time. The shooting war started when the British went on an expedition to disarm locals and shot some local militia in the process.
The Congress then sent a petition asking for an end to the war. And the British doubled down on the whole, “No, we’re at war and you’re all traitors” thing. Only after that did the Americans declare independence as a war aim.
So you believe states do not have a right to maintain their territorial integrity, regardless of where the state draws legitimacy from? Is there any limit to this principle, or can I buy some land, declare independence, and not have to pay income tax in exchange for having to pay tariffs?
No. While some countries abolished slavery without violence many did not. Plus there’s the question of what you count colonialism as: when Italy invades Somaliland, executes a bunch of Somalis, and declares the slaves free, was that without violence? If you say yes, how about rebellions in Puerto Rico or the civil war in Cuba? Or the violent suppression of the Circassian trade by the Young Turks that was combined with a package of other violent measures?
They were. In particular, many loyalist slave owners received some form of compensation. Many states successfully abolished it locally through attrition and making it unprofitable. In fact, New York abolished slavery partly because one of the Founding Fathers (a financier) managed to manipulate the market and use regulations so that holding slaves was less profitable than free labor. Prior to being a Founding Father, that’s what he was known for. And for being obscenely wealthy.
They did not work in the South because the South was dominated by slaveholders. Laws were put in place to encourage slavery even when not as profitable. When they faced the prospect of a more moderate abolition, they rebelled. Had they not rebelled, they might have formed a Senate majority with pro-Union Democrats. They would have still been outnumbered by abolitionists but, had they remained, could have undoubtedly got more favorable terms than they did. The Radical Republicans would have been much more fringe than they were without the war.
The Declaration of Independence is quite clear that people have a right to rebellion, so either the “perpetual union” would have to carry the implicit proviso “unless the government becomes tyrannical”, or it would contradict its citizens’ inalienable rights, something which it would have no authority to do.
Your chronology is a little off; the Proclamation of Rebellion was issued in response to news of the Battle of Bunker Hill. In other words, the fighting had started well before the Proclamation was made.
Worth noting that Congress had already authorised an invasion of Canada before sending the Olive Branch Petition. IOW, “We’re at war and you’re traitors” was a perfectly reasonable way of viewing the situation.
ETA: Also, if secessionism is ipso facto wrong, as many in the North argued in the run-up to the USCW, then it was still wrong when the colonials did it, whether or not the shooting had already broken out.
“No taxation without representation”, whereas the South seceded because they lost a single presidential election. The Revolutionary War was fought on the principle that democracy was necessary. It’s no good blaming the North for the South’s unwillingness to submit to democratic rule.
If the South had, it would have taken the US far longer to abolish slavery. They wished to dictate whether new states would be slave states. The South could have prevented the abolishment of slavery in their own states simply by remaining in the Union.
the South seceded because they lost a single presidential election.
That was the trigger, but it clearly wasn’t the sole reason, any more than the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the sole reason for WW1 breaking out.
The Revolutionary War was fought on the principle that democracy was necessary.
Eh, kinda. It was fought on the principle that *representation* was necessary, but that’s not quite the same thing, and the Constitution deliberately included plenty of non-democratic features (Senators being chosen by state legislatures, Presidents being chosen by special Electors rather than the people as a whole), since it was considered that a democratic government would inevitably descend into anarchy and mob rule.
That’s the old line of “It’s a Republic, not a Democracy” which is just bullshitting about definitions.
Seriously now.
No, the Declaration of Independence is quite clear that people have a right to alter or abolish the government. Since the United States is a democracy, there is a procedure to do that. Unlike the colonists who had no right to change the British government, the Southerners could have changed anything if they had the votes. They didn’t but that’s the system working. It was not ‘any armed militia can rebel for whatever they want’. George Washington himself forcibly suppressed rebellions.
Also, the DoI is not a legal document.
Correct-ish. My mistake was mixing up the Proclamation of Rebellion (which was issued on August 23rd, 1775) and earlier declarations that people, states, or organizations were in rebellion (which go back to 1774).
There are arguments for it being a reasonable interpretation, especially after 1775, sure. My point is to say that the Congress was relatively reluctant to declare independence: there was a formal declaration of war in August of 1775 and it took them until July of 1776 to declare independence. During that time, they still tried to seek a resolution that didn’t necessarily involve secession. This was not the case with the South.
The North didn’t argue that secession was ipso facto wrong. They argued that the South had no legal grounds to secede. They were objectively correct that the South had agreed to a perpetual union freely and without coercion, which was not true of the colonies.
The fundamental question is where you believe a state derives its legitimacy. If you buy the American theory that uncoerced representatives make binding agreements in the name of their people, often in perpetuity, then the South has no case. If you believe all sources of legitimacy to be equal, or that the divine right of kings is at least equally as good, then yes they both did the same thing.
I’m curious, not knowing much about the controversy. What act by representatives of the states constituted agreeing to a *perpetual* union?
I dunno, if the country as a whole is hostile to your interests and shows no sign of becoming less so, I think it’s at least non-obvious that seceding would be wrong just because this hostility is expressed by democratically voting for laws that harm your interests.
(ETA: And if the answer is “Well then, you should just do a better job of convincing the people to support your interests!”, then I don’t see why the answer to the rebellious colonists wouldn’t just be “Well then, you should just do a better job of convincing the King to support your cause!” In theory this should be the easier task, because they only have to convince one person (well, OK, they’d need to convince some important ministers as well, but still nowhere near 50% of the British population).)
Andrew Jackson’s line about how saying that states have a right to secede is tantamount to saying that the US isn’t a real nation seems to imply that secession is ipso facto wrong if the people you’re seceding from are of the same nationality as yourself, or at least that’s how it’s always seemed to me. As for legal grounds, I’d be surprised if there were any legal grounds for British subjects to declare war against their sovereign.
Was there an explicit statement they signed up to saying that secession was forbidden? All the arguments about this I’ve seen have centred on the idea that the Constitution doesn’t explicitly authorise secession, which aside from being an argumentum ex silentio is also difficult to square with the Tenth Amendment.
And again, it’s not obvious that sovereign governments can bind their successors in perpetuity; at any rate, there are plenty of legal theorists who would deny that they can, on the grounds that equals cannot bind other equals.
The Articles of Confederation were explicitly perpetual, as were several other representations made at the birth of the country. The Constitution was meant to establish a more perfect union and had no procedures to exit. A union that is perpetual is more perfect than something that is temporary and the Founders considered the union (though not the Constitution) to be perpetual.
Even the Confederates acknowledged this frame: they thought they were dissolving something perpetual, not that the union was a temporary measure they could exit as they please. In contract terms, the Confederacy saw itself as breaking a contract that had become so disadvantageous that whatever costs the Union sought would be worth it. But they agreed they were breaking the contract and even attempted to offer the Union compensation, acknowledging the North had legitimate interests that were damaged by Southern secession. The Union decided letting them out of the contract, under any circumstances, would be so damaging they needed to be forced to continue to bear the contract’s obligations.
This is in contrast to the Revolution, where the British Crown claimed absolute power. They explicitly believed they could rewrite the contract however they wished whenever they wished. The colonies disagreed. In contrast, both the North and South agreed they had agreed to a Constitution that was fully legitimate. It was simply a matter of whether they could dissolve that prior agreement. The Union case was they had not agreed to any way to exit the obligations at the beginning and had made it explicitly perpetual. The Southern case was that the will of the people overrode this and allowed them to exit the contract, though it acknowledged they were breaking prior obligations and might need to compensate the North as a result.
You’re missing the point. The Constitution was meant to give you the right to try under a preset set of rules, which the colonies did not have. It was not meant to be a guarantee of success. No political system can perpetually guarantee success to all factions. The Southerners indeed had the right to try under a pre-agreed set of rules, which was more than the colonists had.
You can make the argument that isn’t sufficient, that people need exit rights. But that wasn’t the intent.
Or it could be him pointing out a nation whose states can ignore its laws would mean it doesn’t exist. That’s how I took it. The United States could survive a state leaving. It couldn’t survive the precedent that political units can ignore the Constitution and Federal laws when it doesn’t suit them.
There were, actually. There had been numerous successful rebellions in the colonies in the 17th century. For example, England sanctioned the rebellion against Andros, where the colonies rebelled against an appointed governor and jailed him. Meanwhile, back in England the right of elected representatives to determine, and even depose, the sovereign was already a thing.
The Revolution actually turned on rather complex legal questions about colonial status, legal rights, and a variety of other topics. But the colonists absolutely had a legal case. So did the British, of course.
See the response to Friedman. In order for the Constitution to only be the relevant document, you have to believe that the Constitution abolished all the agreements that preceded it. The burden is in the opposite direction: legally binding documents make secession forbidden, then the Constitution comes along and doesn’t allow it. Does the lack of explicitly forbidding it now make it legal?
I’m not sure what legal theorists you’re referring to. The Constitution could be amended to allow secession, I suppose. But I’ve never heard anyone make a good faith argument a law shouldn’t apply because everyone who wrote it is dead. That would overturn not only the Constitution but many other laws. Would we start tracking all the people who authored the bill and make it invalid when the last person died? Or would we need a sunset provision on all laws so it isn’t perpetual? We have none of these things.
Doesn’t that make the Constitution illegitimate, for the same reason you are arguing that secession was?
Why? A union that is perpetual is worse than one that is temporary if circumstances arise in which breaking up the union becomes a good thing and you can’t because it is perpetual. There is a rule against perpetuities in the Common Law —are you claiming the law would be more perfect if there was no such rule?
Possibly, but so far that’s pure assertion. They didn’t write it into the Constitution. Given that they had just terminated the Articles, which did include such a provision, that is at least suggestive.
I don’t think you have provided any support for your claim that the South “had agreed to a perpetual union.”
No, the British Crown claimed that its authority extended and had always extended to making rules for the colonies. Maybe this was right and maybe this was wrong, but the Crown believed that it was following the rules as they had stood, not making up new ones.
Why isn’t “Petition the government, and if you’re successful they’ll do what you want, and if you aren’t they won’t” a “pre-set set of rules”?
If that’s a reference to the Glorious Revolution, then no, the legal theory behind that was that James’ flight represented an abdication, and consequently he had ceased to be sovereign through his own actions.
As David Friedman said, if the Articles of Confederation are to be regarded as perpetual, then the US Constitution is illegitimate.
It’s not that laws cease to apply when everyone who wrote them dies, it’s that you can’t validly put on a bit saying “…and nobody’s ever allowed to repeal this!” At any rate, that’s the case in British jurisprudence, because each sitting of Parliament carries equal authority, whereas to forbid Parliament from repealing a law would imply that the body doing the forbidding has greater authority than Parliament. I believe the same principle is also found in canon law regarding the legal authority of popes, and it or something similar dates back to Roman times.
No, not at all. The Constitution, like the Articles of Confederation, could be replaced at any time and the union would still exist. The union is perpetual, the laws of the union are not.
You seem to think the Constitution founded the country or that in the absence of a constitution the union would not exist or that the union derives its validity in some way from the Constitution. This is not the case. At least not legally. We celebrate July 4th, not September 17th.
Well, in this case I’m relaying the relevant decisions. You certainly could point out that the state has an interest in declaring that to be the case but that doesn’t change the fact that is legally what they said. Also, you’re misunderstanding the word ‘perfect’ which in context means ‘complete, total’ not ‘good, without flaw’. You would not have to prove a temporary union was better, you would have to argue a temporary union was more total and complete.
They didn’t write any way to exit the Union into the Constitution either. If you want to look into specific rules about rebellion and secession, the debates around the Whiskey Rebellion and the Tariff of Abominations both had Founders engaging in their thoughts about rebellion against the United States and secession and what they thought they had made the rules.
I have cited the relevant documents where they affixed their signatures agreeing to a perpetual union. I have shown that they were still considered to be in force and everyone acted as if they were, including the secessionists during the early stages of the Civil War. If that is insufficient, it is insufficient.
The British Crown and the colonies had been going back and forth about what rights colonists retained or lost since at least the mid-17th century. If the Americans retained all the rights of Englishmen, then the Crown could not make rules or set terms as arbitrarily as they did. The British position was that they had surrendered their rights by leaving England. The American position was that they had not. Which position was correct is a matter of interpretation.
To spell it out, the British claimed the right to revoke and replace colonial charters. This would be the equivalent of claiming the Constitution could be changed at any time without the consent of the governed. That was not the situation the South found itself in.
The union is perpetual. The Constitution and Articles are not. Or do you believe we would become an entirely new country if we ratified (for example) the Equal Rights Amendment? Or that France became an entirely new country when it promulgated its latest Republic?
Sure. But you could say, for example, “there is no procedure to repeal this. Before you repeal this you must create the procedure to repeal this through the new procedure creation procedure.” Which is where we currently stand and also stood in 1860.
You are the one claiming that ” in Order to form a more perfect Union” in the preamble implies that the union was to be perpetual, so the burden of proof is on you to show that a perpetual union is more perfect.
But it occurs to me, reading the preamble, that even that wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t say “in order to form the most perfect possible union.” Even if a perpetual union was more perfect than one that could be terminated, a terminable union might be more perfect than what preceded it in other respects, so they might still be attempting a more perfect union.
I also note that it says “in order to form a more perfect union” not “in order to make the union we already have more perfect,” so if we are taking the wording of the preamble as evidence, it’s evidence against your claim that they believed the union was already there and already perpetual due to the wording of the Articles of Confederation.
So then how exactly did the South agree to a perpetual union, if not by signing up to either the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution?
No, but they did write that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Since the Constitution never says that states have no power to exit the union…
You’ve cited the Constitution and Articles of Confederation, but you’ve also said that the union wasn’t brought about by either document, so I’m left confused as to where actually you think they signed up to a perpetual union.
I’m not sure that’s a good analogy — the British Crown had granted those colonial charters in the first place, so it’s certainly not implausible that it had the right to alter them (and indeed this had happened several times before the Revolution, without anybody disputing its right to do so, IIRC). A better analogy would be, say, a state government granting a town charter and then later altering or revoking it; as far as I’m aware, nobody disputes their right to do such things.
The problem with that, though, is that if the majority don’t want the minority to declare independence, they can refuse to allow the creation of such a procedure, thus keeping the minority in the country against their will. Just imagine how far the colonists would have got if they’d sent a polite letter to Parliament saying “We’ve decided that we no longer want to be ruled by you, but there is currently no legal procedure whereby we can declare independence. Could you please pass a law creating a procedure for us to leave and form our own country?”
Perhaps if the American revolutionaries hadn’t all just so happened to have been great philosophers, this thread would have been much more about realpolitik than about notions of nationhood and rights and ius belli.
It is a little strange to treat this all so legalistically. Of course, the real reason was because the Northern troops won the war. International anarchy and all that.
I have a question about an old essay Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote. I’m not sure where to ask it, so I’m asking it here. If anyone can direct me to a better place to ask it, I’d very much appreciate it.
Anyhow, the piece in question is called ’FAQ about the Meaning of Life’. It’s about 20 years old, and some parts of it are very similar to what I independently came up with a few years ago.
This piece is listed as “wrong, obsolete, deprecated by an improved version, or just plain old”. Since Yudkowsky has had 20 years to think about this, I want to know how his thoughts have changed, and if there’s anything more recent which he’s written on the subject (section 2.5, ‘What is the meaning of life?’, in particular).
Can anyone direct me to the best representation (i.e. a more recent essay) of Yudkowsky’s current thoughts on the subject of this FAQ (esp. section 2.5), and/or how those thoughts have changed over the past two decades?
These things seem to me like something Yudkowsky would obviously disagree with today:
“Can an AI, starting from a blank-slate goal system, reason to any nonzero goals? [blah blah, yes]”
“How can I live my present life in such a way as to promote the Singularity? Rich: Make seed funding or venture capital investments in technology companies, especially information technology, neurotech, network-based supercomputing, advanced search engines (especially collaborative filtering), new programming tools, and AI. Sponsor computer-programming classes for Welfare recipients.”
…and generally, the tone of the article how “Singularity” is the awesome thing, and the assumption that it will result in things better than humans (whether those will be our descendants, or our replacement).
Instead, Yudkowsky today would say that an awesome technical achievement has a potential to kill humanity (e.g. gray goo); the superhuman artificial intelligence will likely exterminate humanity (not because it hates you, but because you are made of atoms it can use for something else); if you instead augment human intelligence, there is a chance it will create an imbalance and the augmented humans will become crazy (somewhat related: Algernon’s Law), and therefore… we must be really really careful to make sure the glorious future will actually be good… as opposed to humanity exterminating itself, or creating a machine that takes over the universe, exterminating humans and potential alien intelligences as a side effect.
Thus, the recommendation for the “rich” would be to support AI safety research (and reducing other existential risks), rather than going full speed ahead.
And the part about AI deriving its goals from blank-slate system… Yudkowsky today would probably just call it confused thinking. (See “No Universally Compelling Arguments“, “Created Already In Motion“.)
Not sure what would be the best link, but “Yudkowsky’s Coming of Age” is the text where he criticizes his former opinions. It may not include a specific answer to your question, but it describes the general change in perspective.
> blank-slate goal system
What does that mean?
All the research on ML and AI starts with a goal, then trains the algorithm to do that.
I’d expect an AI sans goal to just be an overcomplex RNG.
Let’s suppose a friend of yours spends a lot of time on a hobby. It might be video games, or maybe something more traditional like cards. Whatever it is, it is nothing productive; it doesn’t make your friend richer or fitter or more knowledgeable or more connected within his community. But on the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be doing outright harm; your friend does a decent job at work, keeps a presentable house, doesn’t seem to have any real problems with money, and is appropriately involved with his children. All this being the case, is there some level of involvement at which you would advise your friend to cut back on his hobby? 10 hours per week? 20? 40?
If someone isn’t suffering problems, they don’t have a problem. The point at which something is too much is the point at which it starts cutting into their job, family, whatever. If they are somehow playing video games 40 hours a week without sacrificing anything else, I’m not telling them to cut back, I’m asking where they got the time-warping magic.
Why exactly should your friend being happy bother you?
It doesn’t bother me that he is happy. It bothers me that he is wasting his life.
I think we can agree it is OK to spend at least some time on rest, relaxation, and just plain fun. If someone wants to spend ten hours a week on video games or sitcoms or paperback thrillers, that’s just fine.
But there are more worthwhile things than R&R: accomplishing actually useful things, helping people who really need it, or even just self-improvement. And once we are talking about the bigger batches of time, particularly the 20 hour a week level, the opportunity cost starts to look rather daunting. The three hours a day that went to watching TV could have been spent becoming a very fine amateur pianist, or running a part-time business.
Your numbers are wrong. The alternative to 3 hours R&R a day is surely not to work those same hours. The people for whom that works don’t spend 20 hours/week on R&R in the first place.
Instead, realistically, your friend could maybe gain another 7hrs/week. At which point the gains are a lot less convincing.
Also:
(1) There are discontinuities in engagement. E.g. if you play tabletop RPG with a bunch of students who have 20hr/week to sink into that, cutting your own involvement back to 15 is hard. If you’re a regular SCC commenter, you can comment less, but at some point your involvement sinks so low you can keep up with the threads anymore. Maybe the 20hour engagement offers a feeling of competence/expertise that a 10 hour engagement with the same matter wouldn’t.
(2) You insufficiently account for gains and risks: E.g. say cutting back on stress relief has a 20% chance you buddy starts smoking (again) is that a good trade? Or is insufficiently relaxed to deal well with his job, his partner or his kids when they’re stressful. Maybe your buddy gets something else besides stress relief out of the activity.
This is just as much of a hobby as anything else. I think you are typical minding.
I also have a hunch that if this person was working their way through written works, rather than televised media, you wouldn’t find it objectionable.
I’m having a hard time coming up with a reply that isn’t sarcastic.
“It bothers me that he is wasting his life.” Fine, let it bother you. Your friend doesn’t think he’s wasting his life. (And what does “wasting” even mean? He could argue, of course, that you’re wasting your life by commenting on the internet rather than volunteering at a homeless shelter, or whatever else he things gives meaning to existence. Does that mean he should tell you this? Why?) It’s ok if you’re bothered by other people having different goals and values than you. It’s not ok to act on this and actively bother them.
Regardless of everything else, 40 hours per week is another-job level and it could easily be worrying
The OP states the hobby doesn’t do damage to the friend’s ability to do his day job well, keep good relationships with his family, maintain his house, and it doesn’t present money issues. To me this suggests a baked-in upper limit of time, because you simply can’t work a full-time job AND have all those other things if you also have a hobby that requires 40 or even 30 dedicated hours a week.
So, the determining factor on when you might advise your friend to cut back has nothing to do with hours per week.
You put in some caveats but I would generalize to a more broad one: if it wasn’t causing him problems and it didn’t interfere with any of his duties, then it’s fine. The problem is that the duties we are obligated to do are not always straightforward and are dependent on the society we live in. For example, am I obligated to hang out with a friend a certain amount of time? How would I determine what that level should be?
The level at which I’d advise my friend to cut back would be the one at which “everything is fine” is no longer true. I think there’s a cap somewhere not far north of 50 hours, but that that escapes the hypothetical.
Whatever it is, it is nothing productive; it doesn’t make your friend richer or fitter or more knowledgeable or more connected within his community.
There are several communities, though: your friend might not be very tied-in to the community in the neighbourhood/town where he lives, but in the case of his hobby community (be that knitters, gamers, or Makers swanning around Maker-spaces being all creative unlike ordinary schlubs in their garden sheds making things which is not at all the same thing), then he may be very connected and indeed of high status/popularity (“Joe is the guy to go to when you need an answer about ‘how do I turn the heel?'”).
Now, if it really means he is neglecting responsibilities or duties, or that you’re afraid he’s socially isolated and cut-off, then that’s a problem. But if he’s holding down a job, has a family, has real-life friends and isn’t blowing the mortgage/rent money on action figures, then what’s the problem? Either Joe will eventually burn out and reduce the time spent on his hobby to a reasonable level, or he’ll continue to be happily engaged in his hobby even post-retirement.
What’s your friends terminal goals?
I know one woman who loves making figurines, not as anything economic, she just loves making them.
Another guy I know makes weird mathematical simulations.
Another reads detective novels.
Another woman who just really loves pretty shoes and has a large number and enjoys caring for her collection.
None of them would be terribly happy if I took that time from them and split the time evenly between them working overtime, time on a treadmill and time reading encyclopedia articles.
> weird mathematical simulations
Do they put them online or anything?
Because I sure like looking at weird mathematical simulations.
3blue1brown just posted this 12-minute animation of using Fourier transforms to draw pictures.
They were outtakes of the video where he explains what’s going on here.
In the comments section of this post, Scott says:
Is the rebuttal available online? Does anyone have a link to it? Or was it verbal?
https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/c8x2p0/these_shapes_shouldnt_be_able_to_coexist_like_this/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ios_share_flow_optimization&utm_term=control_2
Optical illusion where dots moving in straight lines can be seen as triangles, squares, or a seven-pointed star.
Does this have something to do with the corners of the squares and triangles adding up to seven?
Fascinating. I do not know if there is any deeper mathematical meaning to it, but thank you for pointing it out.
I don’t buy this. Specifically, the points don’t really make sharp corners, and they had to rotate the whole star to make this less visible. If you pause the video on the last second, you can see that the points near the corners are actually outside the star.
Not sure what that means, but you can see all of the math behind this structure here and can play with similar patterns here.
Alright, but the video tries to pretend that the lines of a hypotrochoid are straight, and that is the problem.
a = 4./7
Sorry, posted an incomplete comment by accident (where’s the edit button??).
In pylab, try this:
or use your favourite plotting software. That would plot the hypocycloid as in the paper.
But whoever made the video tried to straighten the lines by increasing the squares relative to triangles, maybe with
but that dulls the corners of the star, which is why the points in the video don’t fit around the corners.
The implication that this was some sort of malicious act, as opposed to a limitation of the tool used to superimpose the shapes, is confusing but ominous.
In the pre-modern world, before Western academics got their hands on the Greek primary sources, Alexander the Great was only known to non-Greek-speakers as the hero of the Alexander Romance, a fictionalization of his life that starts with Pharaoh Nectanebo II, defeated by the Persian Empire, fleeing to Philip of Macedon’s court, where he conceives Alexander by cuckolding his patron in the form of a dragon, telling Queen Olympias he’s Zeus Amun.
The Greek original was translated as far West as England via Latin, and as far East as Mongolia via Syriac. The story also includes such charming fabulisms as Alexander romancing the Amazon queen, trying to reach the heavens in a griffon chariot and inventing a submersible to explore the sea.
So that explains why he’s depicted underwater, looking profoundly displeased.
I believe my favorite story about this is that Alexander’s legend grew up very fast around him. Shortly after he died, Lysimachus (a former general and one of his successors) heard a fantastic fable about him romancing the Queen of the Amazons. He famously remarked, “καὶ ποῦ, τότε ἤμην ἐγώ?” (roughly, “And where was I when this happened?”)
To be fair, even in the history books he has this mythical, Homeric flair about him. I know he’s one of the most well documented figures in the ancient world but I sometimes wonder how accurate those sources are.
Minor correction here: Alexander was well recorded in the Latim world. Plutarch’s parallel lives, which include a biography of Alexander, don’t seem to have been lost in the west. And slightly-later Christian works in Latin, particularly Orosius’s History against the pagans and the chronicles derived from translations of Eusebius both had information on Alexander derived from earlier sources as part of their creation if Christian history built on the foundations of earlier empires.
Whilst the Alexander romance was maybe the most-encountered version of his life, information from more historical sources was available for those interested.
Oops, you’re right about Plutatch in Latin. It’s the other four primary sources (actually written centuries after his death!) that were limited to the Greek East until the Renaissance.
And yes, Eusebius. I haven’t read Orosius to confirm if it sticks to the mundane rather than taking any material from the Romance.
Are you ignoring the Iskandernama, or is that closely linked to the Alexander Romance?
It sure is. It also appears as part of Ferdowsi’s Shahnama, which shares with the extended Iskandernama the signature Persian change of making Alexander Philip’s grandson via a daughter and Shah Darab, also father of Dara (Darius III).
I like how “Ha, ha, how can anyone be so dumb as to fall for Al’s real dad being Zeus? No, it’s much more believable and realistic that he was a pharaoh transmogrified into a dragon” 😀
You wouldn’t want to say this in Alexander’s presence, though; he had a childish obsession with being another Achilles, so he surely greatly preferred the Zeus story, since Zeus was supposed to be an ancestor of Achilles.
@Deiseach: I know, right? 😀
On the topic of “vaguely fantastical stories of Alexander” I vaguely remember reading, long ago for a class reading, an old Jewish story involving Alexander travelling to see some Jewish authorities about philosophical questions, or something like that.
Now, as is the way of such things, I can’t find it. I thought it was Talmudic, but Google brings up a reference to Alexander that’s in the Talmud and also Josephus.
However, those – while interesting, especially the Josephus (which paints Alexander as being pretty philosemitic) – aren’t what I remember. Which I can’t find now. I vaguely remember it as having sorta-fantastical elements. Any ideas?
You might have read “From Behind the Dark Mountains: What Alexander Found at the End of His Road,” in _Tales From the Wise Men of Israel_ by Judith Ish-Kishor.
https://books.google.co.il/books?id=sr8qAAAAYAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=amazons
(snippets only)
That might very well be it; I think Amazons might have figured.
Skerples was setting up a pointcrawl D&D campaign based on the Alexander Romance.
Question for the statistically inclined.
How would we model expected win rate in Battle Royale games based on stats?
BR games like the currently popular PUBG, Fortnite and Apex Legends (although I want to ignore Apex for the moment) start with a number of players distributing themselves across a map. Players then search the map for weapons and other gear, and then proceed to attempt to defeat each other in combat. The map area shrinks over the course of the game, via a Damage Over Time mechanic applied to players outside the safe zone. The last person standing wins.
(Nearly) by definition, the Kill/Death (KD) ratio in every solo game is very close to 1. It would be equal to (N -1)/N if there were no mechanics like self-damage from AOE attacks, out-of-zone DOTs or fall damage. As Apex doesn’t have any solo mode, I want to ignore it for the moment.
The median player will have a KD significantly below one, as the best players will have KDs significantly over 1.
Of course, it’s possible to win the game with only one kill (or rarely zero kills, if the last opponent dies to the DOT zone). But I think we can say that KD should correlate well with expected win percentage when playing solo games, even though different play styles can generate different results for the same stats.
The other stat that people will examine in determining how “good” a player is “Average Damage per Round” (ADR). Damage in many BR games is expressed as percentage of a players health. Thus an ADR of 300 indicates that in an average round you do enough damage to kill 3 players. You may not have a KD of 3, however, for a variety of reasons (there is healing in the game, you can kill people who are low on health). KD and ADR do tend to be correlated, and ADR is generally viewed as a more reliable indicator of skill.
So, given these two stats, and given an initial number of players in a game of 100, how would we model expected wins based on those stats?
Assuming you’re not on a team, of those two stats, I think only kills matter. To the extent that ADR is a reflection of skill, over time that same reflection will average out in the kills column, but ADR can also indicate you’re not confirming your kills (ie you wound but don’t finish your opponents), so I think consistently high kills with low ADR is a better indicator for wins than low kills with high ADR.
Kills also net you loot. And not just random loot, but loot that’s been pre-filtered to be useful and work together. Damage gets you nothing but unwanted attention. Anecdotally, I’ve found it’s not very hard to last to the final rounds of a game just by being cautious and staying hidden, but when the circle finally forces a confrontation, you stand a far better chance if you’ve been accumulating kill-loot.
Regarding your actual question about modeling wins, I don’t quite understand what you’re asking. Or more specifically, I don’t understand what data is available to the hypothetical statistician. Is it the records of 100 players over the last season (or whatever), or are you asking how to predict who the winner of a particular match was based on the stats at the end of it?
I’m trying to keep this as simple as possible, so I am not considering duos or squads, only solo play.
The question is, given that you know a player’s k/d (given that you think this is the most relevant stat), how would we predict how many games out of 100 games played the average player with those stats “should” win.
As a further data point, I think we can model the tail end of the k/d distribution at about 6. With even people at the top of the (public) game averaging about 4 to 4.5.
What is your motivation for pursuing this statistical model?
Curiosity more than anything.
Baseline model:
Assume players die in one-on-one fights, always. Make a single-elimination bracket. 2^6 = 128, so the bracket is approximately 6 rounds deep. Assume KDR is the ratio of win:lose in each bracket round and is normalized to 1 death. Then you have
P(win) = (KDR/(KDR+1))^6
Sanity checks:
A 100:1 KDR yields a win in ~95% of games
A 6:1 KDR yields a win in ~40% of games
A 2:1 KDR yields a win in ~9% of games
A 1:1 KDR yields a win in ~2% of games
Someone with more experience in the genre can say whether these numbers seem accurate.
Improvements: Add more stats than KDR in P(round win). You can probably make most stats better by normalizing by the average of log_2 “players left alive at elimination.” Also, given what you said about top pub players averaging ~4, there’s probably a way to assign byes that’s based on average time between engagements.
@Hoopyfreud:
Interesting.
Does that formula assume that everyone else on the server has a k/d of 1:1? Or is it just that starting population of any game has a k/d averages to 1? I’m not sure I’m quite understanding the leap we have made.
One obvious issue with the model as described is that encounters are not strictly 1v1. How to deal with “third partying” an ongoing engagement is an important strategic consideration. I suppose we can simply say that comes out in the wash of k/d though. There is an order to the deaths in a multi-player skirmish after all.
The other issue is that high value loot locations tend to attract players with the best k/d averages. Thus a player with a high k/d is much more likely to encounter similar players in the early rounds of this model.
Lastly, as a reality check, one of the better players is a guy named Ashek. He carries a ~5.9 k/d, and a win rate in solos of 13.5%. chocoTaco has about a ~4.6 k/d and an 8.7% win rate. WtFMoses has a ~2.7 k/d and a 6.5% win rate.
So until now I’ve been pretty chill about privacy, browser security etc. Until, well… today.
Apparently there’s a market for “traffic”, where pretty much everybody (including the free browser extensions you are using right now) is selling your traffic to integrators, which then offer access to marketing companies. In practice it means a friend of mine spends his fun time finding gross security or GDPR violations… in freaking URLs. Ok, if you’re not pissed yet: in freaking URLs sent over SSL – because in this scenario it doesn’t matter.
Pretty much everybody in an ads agency has access to the full GET queries you’ve used over the past few years. If this doesn’t make you livid… well, you probably don’t understand what I’m saying. Or maybe I’m waay behind the curve here and everybody else already browses full time in incognito.
But personally I think this is so much worse than any facebook scandal in the past years that it’s not even in the same category.
This is known, Khaleesi.
It’d still be good to break the wheel, even if that involves dragonfire burning down
King’s Landingthe whole internet advertising business.The basic issue isn’t that people won’t pay for things. You know the old (in Internet years) adage, if you aren’t paying you’re the product, not the customer.
I am not sure it won’t break itself. A lot of internet advertising is eating its own over whether targeted ads are more effective than normal ads. And particularly whether they are worth the price to develop them enough so that they can be, theoretically sometime in the near term.
In the end, its possible Google and Facebook will have massive platforms on which to advertise, but their data collected will not be useful on the white market. The only people who will have much use are “Nigerian princes”, and the like, which hopefully is too much of a risk for firms like that to pay.
Incognito mode doesn’t do much, by the way. It just doesn’t save to your computer the history of the browsing session, but your ISP and your extensions still see everything you do. Besides, people are now fingerprinting browsers to make anonymizing harder.
ISP doesn’t see your encrypted traffic, and most traffic is encrypted nowadays. And incognito by default does disable extensions, you have to manually activate them for incognito.
But I’m not really freaking out about my data – everything really sensitive is dual factor anyways, and the rest… meh. I’m freaking out about how a huge part of our collective data is mine-able, and what I read in the news is freaking Cambridge Analytica where some people had access to my friends list at a time when it was common knowledge that you can get access to one’s friends list. It’s freaking Alice and the Looking Glass.
I use Mozilla, always on “Private browsing” mode. DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, and I use Privacy Badger, the DDG Privacy essentials plugin, HTTPS Everywhere, and basically anything else DDG recommends. I figure I’m probably still being tracked a lot, but at least I feel like I’ve done my due diligence.
It’s apparently a matter of some controversy what internet users’ expectation of privacy ought to be.
Well yeah. And mine were always pretty low, and deliberately so. But the full history of accessed URLs … man, that’s a whole different ballgame. I know how software is made. Those guys are literally knowingly selling passwords, api keys, and god knows what else – no, not god knows, _everything_ else. How on earth isn’t existing legislation enough to put them in jail?
Not to mention how I’ll have to change the way I’m writing software. Until now I lived in a world where a 100 char random string over SSL was a pretty solid way to protect access to a resource. Now I find people mining for it. A common scenario: send an invoice to a client by email, with a print/download link. That’s public now. Hell, ANY autologin link is public now. WTF.
Wait, you were writing software that sent passwords in the URL?
Is this a “REST is best” paradigm?
Not since 1996, probably 🙂 But I am sending lots of moderately confidential information by email, that’s protected by a random code. Goes from my server (secure), by ssl to the emailing service (secure), to the recipient inbox encrypted with TLS (secure)… and then he proceeds to click on the link from a browser with a screenshot extension installed and BAM, in a searchable database.
Edit: but the chance that there aren’t passwords (or password equivalents like autologin links) in there is nil. Somebody out there is definitely sending passwords by url. And shitty practice or no, those guys are selling them. For money.
It sounds to me like you are using something in a URL to “protect access to a resource”. And that’s been a flawed approach for a long time. As you already mentioned.
Of course, people do demand it.
That works if you want the URL to be public but don’t want people to bruteforce your site and find all the public resources.
@JPNunez
“Worked”. Because right now that’s exactly what happens – with searchable databases you get ALL resources. Or, well, most of them.
We already changed the behavior in one SaaS to require login before accessing the information, but that’s gonna suck: just imagine all those accounting departments that can’t just be forwarded the link anymore. “This is why we can’t have nice things” etc.
I’m thinking long term to do a soft-autologin thingy. I leave a cookie forever in the browser, and let the autologin/resource access work only if that cookie exists, which is telling me the user has previously logged in from that machine. A weak form of two factor: you need both cookie and link for it to work. Full login page otherwise.
I don’t know if maybe this is stupid, but I try to use meatspace analogues of whatever kind of internet use I’m partaking in to figure out what my expectation of privacy ought to be.
I had this idea of writing a book where each chapter is from a different characters POV but each chapter has inaccuracies based on the bias of the character. You can tell this by the contradictions between the chapters and it’s up to the reader to try and determine what the truth is by critically examining the sources, like a historian would do. Would that be too confusing?
It can be done, but it can also be confusing. Rashomon would be one of the most famous examples of it being done well, although the ultimate point of that may well be that there is no single truth. If yours actually expects the reader to be doing some work, as opposed to simply accepting each story and noting that they are incompatible, this could be interesting.
Probably not; I imagine books like this exist already, although I can’t think of any off the top of my head. For some reason, I associate this more with movies – maybe it’s easier to notice discrepancies when there’s visuals?
A Song of Ice and Fire (the book series) in some great part gets its power from revealing the inherent bias in telling the story from the point of view of the protagonist, accomplishing this by switching protagonists each chapter.
Perhaps not quite the same thing, but worth mentioning.
That’s actually what I had in mind. Something like A Song of Ice and Fire except instead of character motivations being suspect, certain events that are told are in question. For example, imagine instead of accepting that Jeoffrey is a tyrant, you have to filter out his supposed evil actions from the bias of the person exaggerating and even outright fabricating his deeds, trying to parse out the truth from mere hearsay.
Well, look at Jaime.
If introducing him as a protagonist in A Storm of Swords didn’t make you question whether the versions of events you are being fed were actually always true …
Sure but when you read about Jamie and Cersei’s incestuous relationship, you’re supposed to accept that instead of wondering whether it’s propaganda.
The narration of Ice and Fire hardly ever straight-up lies to the reader. You can almost always trust the actual events you see on page; characters often lack the context to fully understand it, or leap to conclusions about it, or their opinion of it is colored by personal likes or dislikes, but if Lord Rocky’s narration says says Ser Boris stabbed Lady Natasha, then Lady Natasha got stabbed as best Rocky can tell in that moment.
Can’t always trust their recollections either, though — a certain interaction between Sansa and the Hound comes to mind.
… but that’s relayed to the reader as an eyewitness in the first few chapters of the first book. Whereas the various characters opinions on what has or hasn’t happened are suspect.
Perhaps you are actually thinking of something that’s more akin to a murder mystery, where we get very little “eyewitness” to the relevant events.
@Heelbearcub
When Augustus Caesar boasts about his glorious reign, do you take him at his word or do you apply some skepticism? After all, he was a eyewitness to all that he did. Think of it like that.
@wrong species:
Sure, I get where you are coming from. I’m just saying Jaime and Cersei aren’t a good example of that. We don’t hear someone accusing them of incest, we see them committing it.
In Fight Club, you see Brad Pitt’s character doing all these things but he’s not.
If you haven’t seen Fight Club, I want to question what we see in addition to what we hear. I think this would be easier in book form since we don’t “see” anything.
The Rules of Attraction by Brett Easton Ellis did this. All the chapters are through various characters POVs and their are a number of discrepancies. The main one being that one of the main male characters is in a homosexual relationship with the other in his point of view but not in the others. And you get a conversation where he hears the other ask him if he wants to get a “quesadilla” with him while in the other characters POV he asks him to get a “case of beer”.
This is what the Alexandria Quartet did, except that it was each book being from a different viewpoint, at least as I remember it from reading it a very long time ago.
The Bartimaeus books are told mostly from the perspective of eponymous demon who has been summoned by the wizard Nathaniel, but also party from the perspective of Nathaniel and a couple other characters. There’s a great moment where Nathaniel talks about how fashionably dressed he is, only for the next chapter to open up with Bartimaeus’s rather less flattering take on the same outfit.
Oh, oh, if we’re doing examples: Dresden Files. It does the unreliable narrator very subtly, but also with devastating effect. The original POV is the eponymous wizard, so we know his intentions and his troubles, and it’s an almost tired trope that he has a bad reputation. As the books progress you slowly realize that the rest of the world sees him as a 7 foot freaking wizard, with mysterious motives, very dark past and a rather long trail of bodies behind him – because that’s what he is. The misunderstanding is not the world’s, but entirely his.
(also yeah, Rashomon is the first in the list for good reason).
The other thing to keep in mind about the changes in perspective about the Dresden Files is how the protagonists change over time.
In book one Harry has a stoop, a pauch, and can run less than a block before getting winded. In the later books, he stands straight, has abs, his chest and back have filled out his signature coat, and he charges his punch rings by boxing with a sandbag each morning.
The characters get older, the much younger ones become adults. As they get older, they act older, and their viewpoint is as from an older person. And as they get older, they start better understanding the people who had been older when they were younger.
Characters exhibit multiple symptoms of PTSD and other trama disorders. Various characters make hard choices, they cross various formerly uncrossable lines, and it changes them.
There is no “reset button” at the start of each Harry Dresden novel. There is no happily ever after, there are barely any happy endings, and most of the happy endings that do happen are for the next generation or for the blissfully unaware.
I do really like the twist of realizing “hey, all the red vampires are rich Mexicans, what the hell, OH FUCK they are AZTEC PRIESTS!”
Poor Murphy. Poor Molly as well, actually, after a certain idiotic character uses her like he did.
Edit: I just realize the women in his life don’t fare very well, and very directly due to him. I’m a bit afraid for Mab now…
It’s a good, proven idea but it is a lot of work.
The Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) is written like this. Each book is divided into sections, and each section follows a different character, often with different opinions and biases.
I don’t remember any of them straight up _lying_ to the reader, but you can see how the people interpret each other and the events very differently.
I’ve seen a lot of examples where the characters give different perspectives on events but I’m more focused on the idea of the contradictions in the events told being central to the story, not just mere differences in opinion. I’ve also seen movies where there is an unreliable narrator but that is usually explained by the protagonist having a mental disease, rather than more mundane reasons.
I think that people don’t like being lied to in their fiction. The characters may lie to each other, but straight-up-lying-to-the-reader/spectator/player should be done carefully and sparingly.
Everyone mentions Rashomon, but do note how rare Rashomon-like movies actually are, compared to the copies of other Kurosawa movies (7 samurai and hidden fortress come to mind). How many movies that do this that are not Rashomon or Rashomon copies can you name?
Rashomon itself is cool, but it is not even in the top three Kurosawa movies for me (Kagemusha, Ran, 7 Samurai for me, that order).
Tread carefully, and only lie to the reader on a central thing.
I wouldn’t intend it to be lying any more than fiction is lying. It could just be a concept that people have to get used to.
Ideally what would happen is that you’re a decent way through the book and enjoying it but you’re really confused about these contradictions and then suddenly you have this eureka moment where you realize that the authors are all unreliable. It’s kind of like the movie Memento, where you gradually pick up that the other characters are manipulating the protagonist. My problem would be if it wasn’t communicated that they should pick up on it in a reasonable way. But I also don’t want to simply announce it. That just seems clumsy.
I am reminded of an episode of Bob’s Burgers where they put on a a poorly acted murder mystery dinner theater show. The show begins with Linda explicitly telling the audience that she isn’t the murderer and ends the show by revealing the “twist” that she is the murderer. The audience members precede to argue that a lie is not a twist.
Point of fact, we don’t have to get used to it. And your finding the idea to be indescribably clever and appealing from the authorial point of view, isn’t a reason for us to try. This is the part where you explain why we should bother.
This is exactly the kind of thing I’m thinking of. Does the book tell you that they are unreliable or do you have to figure it out? Is this framing distracting in a way that hurts the plot?
Browning’s novel-in-verse The Ring and the Book does something like this. It’s not the easiest book to read, but the wikipedia page has a quick summary.
I’ve never tried The Ring and the Book, I have read Sordello and I have to agree with Tennyson:
The problem with overlapping unreliable narrators is – are you going to have a third version that is the ‘true’ version? Else it becomes We dined with friends, we dined alone, a tenor sang, a baritone and the reader has no idea who is telling the truth, if anyone is, and what really happened. You would have to write it really well to pull that off, and if you fail the reader is angry and disappointed because if everyone is wrong and telling it wrongly, why should the reader care what happened?
You need to make it obvious to the reader that this is happening early on, or they’ll feel like the “contract with the reader” has been broken down the line for a cheap gotcha.
One approach might be to make it epistolary. The chapter isn’t what the author is telling the reader, it’s what one of the characters is telling another—and there is no reason to assume that he is always telling the truth.
I have a bit like that in the (unfinished) sequel to my first novel. The speaker, a soldier from the defeated army getting room and board at an inn by attracting customers with his account of the campaign, gives a significantly distorted report of events in the previous novel. A scene a little later has two other characters going over the account (one of them was taking notes), concluding that parts of it cannot be true, but coming up with the wrong explanation of what really happened.
Yea, this seems like the right way to do it to me. Letters/emails/etc written by the characters rather than their first-hand accounts also works.
Narratively speaking, there’s often not much of a distinction; a lot of stories that aren’t explicitly epistolary nonetheless have a frame indicating it’s an account of events written by the narrator. And it seems to me that an explicitly epistolary story might undermine Wrong Species’ intent: we don’t just tell things differently, sometimes we see them differently.
I don’t think it would be too confusing, but you should somehow indicate very clearly that this is what’s happening, since the way people are the first conclusion most readers will jump to is that the author is making mistakes.
The various books in the Black Company series by Glen Cook have only one narrator per book, but it isn’t always the same one between books, and they do disagree with one another. Honestly in that case I have some suspicion that it’s mostly a cover for Cook being a bit sloppy about consistency, but the less than perfect reliability of the narrative is explicitly mentioned in the narrative.
The Poisonwood Bible The mother of the family, narrates the introductory chapter in five of the novel’s seven sections. The narrative then alternates among the four daughters.
The writing style differs greatly between the characters (especially the elder teenage daughter) so you’re not confused as to who is observing/narrating.
The biography of Bill Black is like this in places. The biographer will relay Bill’s version of some story, and then someone else who was there will write a section about how the incident happened in their own memory. Often quite funny, like when Bill hovered his helicopter right on top of a local hotel to wind up the owner, with the propietor running out screaming. Then hearing later that the downwash had emptied the contents of the chimney all over the lobby.
The larger category is unreliable narrator, with this specific case being multiple unreliable narrators. As I Lay Dying is a famous example.
Your Fourth of July story about arguably un-American behavior by government officials:
https://theintercept.com/2019/06/22/cbp-border-searches-journalists/
I admit my bias is strongly against both government officials generally and border enforcement specifically, so: what am I missing here that would excuse the actions of the CBP officers in the story? What is this other than absolute power corrupting absolutely?
I’m sorry, I stopped right at the headline because it smacked too much of “How dare they do this to me – A JOURNALIST???!!!!”
I don’t like abuse of civic power, I think the press does have a role in making government and other big functionaries accountable, but I also think that if you deliberately go somewhere in order to be offended and you’re walking around with a neon halo of “I am the one and only true source of facts, truth, virtue and freedom” then I’m going to want you to back that up with a lot more than “I’ve got a press card!”
Doorstopping grieving family members and naming defendants in cases where the judge has ruled, for damn good reasons, that they shouldn’t be named is too often defended as being in the public interest. And too often it’s not “what is in the public interest”, it’s “what the public are interested in”, as well as “this will enable my employers to sell more advertising space by grabbing eyeballs with shock, horror headlines”.
+1
As I’ve said many times now, the news is just a bunch of English and Acting majors (or dropouts!) who get together and put on a show where they pretend to be the experts on things.
The journalist in question’s name is Seth Harp. I’m not 100% sure but I think this guy has a degree in…journalism. In other words, he has no real expertise in anything he writes about, only in doing the writing. His authority as a purveyor of truth and facts comes from…magic? Well, nothing actually.
Less than absolutely, since he didn’t “have a fatal heart attack while in custody”. But bad enough, and the privilege of cops to mess with people who fail to ‘respect their authoritah’.
I find the behaviour both very bad and completely unsurprising. The shocking thing to me is that an experienced traveller like the author would be so foolish as to wilfully increase his risk of getting fucked over by border officials.
Reading between the lines this seems to reflect poorly on both of them. The journalist, whose side of the story we are reading, comes off as overly self important, needlessly suspicious, and conflict prone and the officers seem to take their powers way too seriously and be corrupted by them. But people being suspicious and evasive are seem like they should receive additional scrutiny and I would be angry if someone was being needlessly so and thus wasting my time.
I’d already seen this one, and I’m pretty close to Deiseach on this one. Object level, it was a foolish abuse of discretionary authority granted to civil servants working in my name, and I’d rather they not have done that. But at the end of the day, everybody was alive and in good health and nobody was in jail, so pretty far down on the outrage scale.
Except, I’m clearly being told that I have to be outraged over this, because it was done to a journalist. A deliberate smart-ass journalist who went out of his way to antagonize cops and then cashed in by telling a story about how the cops he antagonized were mean to him. Why, they didn’t even serve him coffee!
Journalists are basically spies who don’t happen to work for a government. Well, maybe not the journalists who tell me who won the latest sportsball game and how thrilling it was, but the ones who set out to uncover corruption that the corrupt don’t want uncovered, yeah, that’s spying, and doing it in what you or some wealthy philanthropist(*) believe is the public interest, doesn’t change the fact that you really have to expect to be treated like a spy.
Not because spying is intrinsically evil, but because humans are intrinsically incapable of being nice to people who are spying on them. We can have rules like “if you don’t do the hardcore James Bond stuff and if it’s not wartime, we don’t execute or disappear you”, and we do, and in the United States those rules are particularly favorable to journalist-type spies. The enemy is still going to rough you up as best they can.
So, tell me the story about how you crossed enemy territory and infiltrated the enemy stronghold to get the goods in the name of the Public Interest, and the hardships you endured and how you outfoxed the enemy and most importantly what you learned, and I’m good with that. Tell me the story about how you found yourself in enemy territory and they were mean to you for four hours, and they didn’t serve you coffee, and you a journalist, and eyes roll, moving on.
* Does anyone else even hire journalists any more?
Why, they didn’t even serve him coffee!
John Schilling, no! Oh, the humanity! At least in Manchester they’ll give you tea and cake* 🙂
*Note: tea and cake may not be applicable for real villains
But was the cake fresh or stale?
If the cake tastes stale then it’s grossly inhumane treatment!
Governments. For many of the same reasons. And also a dash of “Sending a gaggle of reporters to poke about openly is a very useful intelligence tool”.
Sure.
To see the flip side of this, read a classic Last Psychiatrist.
Bottom line, there’s no reason to be angry with the CBP officers, there’s some reason to be concerned about the underlying policies.
The situation is scary to the journalist because it’s never happened to him before. The officers involved have literally done hundreds of these before, there’s 40 pages of paperwork and checklists they have to fill out before they’re allowed to release him, and within 5 minutes of talking with this guy they know that he’s both unpleasant and not a real threat, which reclassifies him into busywork. But at a personal level, none of them care anymore, and anyone who does care was probably transferred out by a supervisor awhile ago because you don’t put psychopaths in public-facing roles, psychopaths do stupid things, which generate lawsuits, which are one of the few things government orgs actually care about. The only things the CBP officers did that seems questionable is on their answers to his rights (ie right to enter the US, right to an attorney) where they seem to have been either unclear or lied.
At the policy level, it seems like the CBP and others have found a legal loophole around citizens rights when they cross back into the US. This is somewhat defensible since border crossings are a logical place to apply extra scrutiny to people, but there don’t seem to be good limits on how far that extra scrutiny should extend. Good luck finding 50+ senators to vote on it though.
And this guy should not have been panicked. He works for Glenn Greenwald, who’s been subject to this for a decade+. Everyone at The Intercept should be familiar with this, so his panic/fear comes across as deeply unrealistic.
But to defend the CBP officers, which seems like the main thrust of your question, they don’t care about you or him anymore than the DMV lady does. They don’t get a high off this because this is just work, they’ve done it hundreds of times before, and no one they’ve examined is really that important or interesting.
As an aside, bullies and sadists often manage to stick around on normal police departments that deal with citizens and are subject to local government control. I’d expect that to be much easier for CBP folks, who overwhelmingly deal with noncitizens who have little familiarity with US laws, fewer rights than citizens even in theory and way fewer in practice, almost no chance of having any connections who can push back on misconduct, no money to hire a lawyer, and who probably won’t even be in the country anymore in another year.
I know nothing about the Intercept reporter’s situation, but I don’t think it’s safe to assume that the bad apples are being sorted out of CBP with any particular regularity.
Sorry, let me clarify. “Transferred out” doesn’t mean fired. This is government, no one’s getting fired (joking/absolutely not joking). I mean assigned different duties. These are CBP officers, they sit behind a desk scanning passports all day, the passports of people with the resources to fly internationally. I’m sure any sociopath quickly got assigned to desk duty far away from the public.
Are there some places I’m worried about sociopath officers? Sure, in the Baltimore Police Department or the Folsom prison guards but these are places that #1 require or induce some level of socipath-y just to function and #2 are desperate for people.
But these guys just sit behind desks all day? Do you really think this lady is a budding sociopath?
You don’t need to be a full-on sociopath to be an asshole, especially if the cultural norms of your employer is to be an asshole. There must be some reason why the TSA and CBP officers in the US are known for being rude assholes compared to the rest of the world.
Indeed, it seems like perfectly normal people can end up behaving like monsters when put in the right circumstances and given the right incentives. This is really important to keep in mind for times when *you* might be the person put in a position to behave like a monster.
As far as I can tell, there’s never been a nightmare state with anything like enough sociopaths and sadists to staff all their gulags/concentration camps/death squads/torture chambers. They had to *create* the supply they needed from normal morally-flawed people.
There has to be some reason that US police and customs agents strut around like roided up prison guards, like 80s movie high school jocks prowling the halls for nerds to throw in trash cans, while the same civil servants in other western countries are friendly and nice and de-escalating.
I don’t know what it is but there is an obvious difference, and I wouldn’t rule out that the American police force advertises a certain lifestyle that attracts a certain type of applicant.
Edit: top result for “NZ police recruitment video” vs. “US police recruitment video”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9psILoYmCc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy_k7KC_d1g
Bloody obvious when you compare the two
Could it be that the bottom end of society, which police inevitably spend much of their time dealing with, is just plain nastier in the US than elsewhere? That would explain a more aggressive posture. The Brazilian police, who have to deal with flat-out shanty towns, are known for being extremely aggressive, both formally and informally.
Are the worst neighborhoods in New York worse than the worst neighborhoods in Berlin, say?
Yeah, no wonder US cops often seem to act like an occupying army… There was so much militaristic imagery in that video, I had to keep reminding myself that it was trying to get me to join the police, not the army.
I don’t know, but size/proportion of bad neighbourhoods could also explain things. If (just pulling numbers out of my backside here) 10% of New York is really bad but only 1% of Berlin is, then even if those 10% and 1% are both as bad as each other, I’d expect the police in New York to spend much more time interacting with the nasty people, and consequently to be more aggressive in general.
Edit: top result for “NZ police recruitment video” vs. “US police recruitment video”
Feck’s sake. If I wanted to soldier, I’d join the army, not the rozzers.
As for Irish police recruitment ads, this is unrealistically glamorous. The truth is more like this.
Just to clarify, this is a CBP officer.
there’s 40 pages of paperwork and checklists they have to fill out before they’re allowed to release him, and within 5 minutes of talking with this guy they know that he’s both unpleasant and not a real threat
Exactly this. “I know you’re not a terrorist, just a pain in the arse, but due to all the panic about Something Must Be Done there are sixteen checklists I have to tick about “are you sure this guy isn’t a terrorist? really sure? super-duper really sure? have you checked about his great-granny? okay maybe he’s not a terrorist but if we let him back into the country is he going to park on a double yellow line?” before they can show him the door and say “good riddance”.
All that paperwork takes time, and probably there was an element of “this guy wanted to be a huge pain in the arse, so let him sit there and stew for a bit, turnabout is fair play” as well. Not great practice and not to be encouraged, but understandable on a human level.
Social history question: in medieval western europe, did women have any social standing over men in any circumstances at all? If the answer is “within this time period and location, it varied some amount”, I’m interested in an “average”.
By this I mean “were there many ordinary couples who, in their day-to-day lives and communication with one another (as opposed to property/business/legal dealings), had the woman act as anything more than a a passive infant”. My understanding is that ancient Athens was a bit like this, women couldn’t even sing. I am most interested in hearing about letters/first-hand accounts.
Simple answer is yes. Women had their own property since they would have a dowry on marriage, and could inherit from parents under many systems. This was recognisable separate property: husbands could be taken to court over misusing the wife’s share of the property and dowry was returned on divorce for example (note also women could initiate divorces).
Taking England as an example, women were involved in 15%-20% (sorry – no idea where the exact figure is) of property transactions. The records I’m most familiar with, for eighth-century Francia (most of western continental Europe north of the Pyrenees and Alps), have lower female participation (5-10%) but I think this reflects the fact that these were generally big transactions with churches, not between private individuals due to the partial survival of evidence. Women definitely were able to act with husbands (or other male family members), and in some cases on their own.
This is not to say this was an equal society in any way: women would need a male advocate in court for example, even if they were head of the household. But women could hold authority and could on occasion actually own all the property.
Women clearly had meaningful agency in medieval Europe both in the boring everyday sense as well as legal. There are a number of cultural records that only make sense if women had meaningful agency. It would clearly be much less than modern feminists would like but there is a huge difference between 0 and that. There were a number of instances where women held superior power to men whom they outranked. Abbess who were surprisingly powerful being the fullest example, but women would sometimes hold power on their own and would often exercise power in the name of a male relative.
Common sense says no: whatever the official and legal case may be, people are people and there will be couples where the wife wears the trousers.
For further evidence pertaining to (late) medieval England specifically, consider the Wife of Bath’s prologue from the Canterbury Tales, starting around line 154:
“An housbonde I wol have – I wol nat lette –
Which shal be bothe my dettour and my thral,”
It goes on.
+1
People are people, and for any literate society where literature survives about people outside the court of the king making the laws, you find evidence of women with power.
Heck, even for the Mycenaeans, a warrior society whose documentary evidence consists entirely of accidentally-burnt clay tablets, we know about Karpathia of Pylos arguing at the royal court for her property rights in two plots of land.
Are we sure that the destruction of Mycenean civilisation wasn’t a proto-red-tribe reaction to a proto-blue-tribe judge letting a woman plead her case?
If you work hard enough you can make anything about the culture war…
Epistemic status: low-probability but who knows? 😛
This is not a real answer, but it seemed to me that the stock figure of the henpecked husband is probably old as time itself, and only really works as a humorous figure if it approximates to the experience of ordinary people. Sure enough, I found a rather charming popular lyric from the 14th/15th century (excerpted):
And according this blog post, “the image of a wife beating her husband with a cudgel is a common sight in medieval English cathedrals”. We all know the kind of couples in the modern world that this trope makes fun of (rightly or wrongly), and I doubt earlier times lacked the relevant personality types. Ordinary daily interaction is surely governed mainly by relative strength of personality of the husband and wife, itself probably largely genetic. It is not easy for me to believe in a population of almost exclusively “passive infantile” women, even if that was more common than it is today.
For a Muslim example, consider one of my favorite medieval Islamic law and econ stories.
A certain vizier was going about the countryside taking petitions and giving alms and dealing with what must be dealt with. A poor woman asked him for alms, and he wrote “give this woman two hundred dinar” and gave the writing to her to take to his treasurer. The treasurer was surprised at his master giving so large a sum in alms, so took the writing back to the vizier:
“Master, is this your hand?”
“It is. It was my intention to write ‘two hundred dirhem,’ but since it was the will of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful, that my hand slipped and I wrote ‘dinar’ for ‘dirhem,’ gold for silver, pay it out as it was written.
Three days later, the vizier received a petition from a poor old man. It said that three days before the vizier had given his wife two hundred dinar, and she had now decided that she was too wealthy a woman to be married to a poor man like him, and was threatening to force him to divorce her. The petition asked that the vizier appoint someone in authority to prevent his wife from making him divorce her.
The vizier thought a moment, took out paper and pen, and wrote “Pay this man two hundred dinar.”
Under Islamic law, a husband can divorce his wife but a wife cannot divorce her husband. The implication of the story is that, in practice, the wife can make being married to her so unpleasant that the husband will divorce her—and that not even the much wealthier and more powerful vizier can stop her from doing so, or at least would be sufficiently hard so that paying the husband is a better solution to the problem.
Why I consider this a law and econ story I will leave for readers to figure out. Or you could look at the chapter on marriage et. al. in my Law’s Order.
I’ve recently learned that instant coffee is not nearly as good as “real” coffee.
Any recommendations for an easy and inexpensive device or method for making coffee for one person?
If you like espresso/Americanos (and you should), you can get a stovetop espresso maker for 20 bucks or less. It’s a little more effort than a machine, and you can screw it up, but it’s actually quite easy, and done properly it’s as good as anything you’ll get at a coffee shop. Lots of youtube videos etc showing you the details.
EDIT: “screw it up” here means you’ll get a cup of shitty espresso if you leave it on too long. The maker itself is essentially indestructible, I bring it camping all the time.
It’s not real espresso, since it only reaches a couple of atmospheres, compared to the optimum of around 9 bar for espresso.
But it’s very good nonetheless.
Most importantly, get a decent grinder. The Hario Skerton is the usual reccomendation for your first grinder, and it’s what I use. Ground beans will be stale long before you buy them.
It’s a good idea to go to high-quality coffee shops, in order to see what you like.
Doubly so if the shop also sells beans. I usually buy beans from nearby roasteries.
I might be able to give recommendations, depending on what continent folks are in.
r/coffee is a good place for information.
Alas, the 3rd wave coffee scene is a bit hipster: a pre-17:00 mirror of craft beer. But there’s some damn good coffee out there.
I stand corrected. Thanks!
Electric Kettle, Burr Grinder, French Press. There’s an initial outlay of cash, but it’s pretty solid.
You can dump the used grounds in the sink…but the catch is to have a strainer in your sink. It makes the biggest hassle of a French press (clean-up) into a simple action.
You’ll need a grinder, it’s table stakes. If you have the patience the manual one Lambert recommends above is good & cheap. Since you are making for one, it won’t be too bad. You’ll also need at least decent beans–don’t need to go overboard here, but you want beans roasted relatively recently. Sticking with the cheap but manual theme, I’d go with a french press. I like pour over when a pro does it, but it’s more expensive and it takes practice to get right.
I’m a big fan of the Aeropress. It takes a little muscle to use, but it makes better coffee than any stovetop espresso maker I’ve ever seen.
Seconded — the Aeropress is cheap and great.
Thirded – an aeropress is great.
Cafejo used to make a similar product that used K-Cups or reusable K-Cup filters. I love that even more, but it looks like they don’t make it anymore, so I suspect patent trouble.
Considering the “easy and inexpensive” criteria, the other suggestions here might be too fancy. As a notoriously thrifty person who made coffee for myself at home from whole beans for several years (until I decided I needed to cut out the caffeine), perhaps my old method would work?
You will need:
1 cheap coffee maker, probably 5-cup – especially since everything else is larger and probably too much for only one person. (No-frills models are often available at supermarkets like Wal-Mart or Target for less than $50; these tend to lack electronic controls in favor of an on-off switch (and possibly a timer you can set in order to automatically make a cup at a given time), but I tend to consider that a feature rather than a bug. Some of the cheap ones do have problems; IIRC the last time I got one I picked up a $40 model rather than one of the $20 ones specifically to try to avoid that.)
1 coffee grinder (not sure exactly where mine came from since it was a hand-me-down, but I’m pretty sure it was from a box store); a spice grinder might also work.
Package of coffee filters (grocery store, Costco/Sams Club/etc. may have larger batches)
Bag of whole coffee beans (grocery store will do – last couple of batches I got were Eight O’Clock brand, IIRC). Whole is important, the ground kind lose their flavor.
Measuring scoop (it’s not clearly labeled, but I think the one I was using was a refitted 1 tbsp measuring spoon).
Should come out to less than $100 (well, assuming you’re not in an area with inflated prices), at least until after you have to pick up enough new replacement bags of beans (and to a lesser extent coffee filters).
My usual prep method (aka “making a pot of coffee for dummies”):
– Put two scoops of whole coffee beans into the coffee grinder.
– Grind beans in grinder until powdered (or sometimes just small chunked)
– Put ground coffee beans in a coffee filter (should vaguely resemble dust covering the bottom of a bowl).
– Open the lid of the coffee maker.
– Put the filter with beans in the spot in the coffee maker that is designed to hold beans in a filter (usually the overhang right over where the coffeepot goes).
– Take the coffeepot out of the coffee maker and over to the sink, fill it up (there will probably be markings on the side of the pot indicating how full you’re supposed to fill it), take it back to the coffee maker, and pour it in the large chamber that’s meant to hold it (usually at the back; my most recent machine had a set of water level markers so you would know whether you were getting it too full) and pour it in. Tap water should do fine here, since you’re boiling the water anyways.
– Turn on the on switch and come back in a few minutes (there’s a distinctive gurgling when it’s almost done, you can use that to time once you’ve learned it).
– Enjoy your coffee!
I use a pour over cone and use pre-ground coffee. I’m sure the foodies here can give several reasons why this is bad, but I am satisfied with it.
This is undoubtedly the easy entry on ramp to raising your coffee game.
Just buy quality beans. If you like a bold cup of coffee, with a very dark roast, Peet’s is a good brand.
If you want to go just one step more, buy a kitchen scale to use the same amount beans each time. 35 grams is a nice starting point. Obviously use the same size cup each time, or get a Hario server and make 400 ml of coffee.
+1.
I would take it a step further and say the pourover cone is the best way to make coffee. Step 1: put finely ground beans[*] in a cone filter, in the cone, set on a carafe or just on your mug if it’s a #2 size cone. Step 2: heat water to just below boiling, about 110˚. Step 3: pour just enough of the hot water over the beans to soak them through, then wait about 30 seconds. Step 4: pour enough more hot water over the beans to fill the cone.
*Use medium- or light-roasted beans, never dark roast. Quality beans can sometimes be found for under $10/lb at places like Trader Joe’s, but usually you’re going to be spending at least $12 or more per pound for anything decent. Beans from East Africa tend to be fruity and tangy. Beans from Central America tend to be rich and chocolatey. Beans from Oceana and the Pacific Islands tend to be fruity and zesty. It’s fine to buy your beans pre-ground if you’re going to make coffee every day, but if you only have coffee once in a while then you should buy whole beans and grind the ones you’re going to use. Try to use a finer grind for pourover, but it doesn’t have to be powder-fine like for espresso. Use two or three heaping tablespoons per 8oz mug of coffee.
Depending on where you live, a local roaster is perhaps the best option. Also, different people like different roasts!
I mention Peet’s because they are a national brand that’s much better than Starbuck’s IMO, and it’s more likely you can get some where you live. I agree that the aggressive dark roasts aren’t the best for letting the coffee be itself and one will be amazed at how different they can be.
I’m not a coffee drinker, but I’m surprised at the immediate jump from “instant coffee” to “grind your own beans”. Is just-in-time grinding really that much better? (Especially if you’re comparing it to instant?)
Instant coffee is miles and miles away from even pre-ground beans.
It’s analogous to the difference between a frozen dinner and actually cooking your own meal from a blue apron kit.
IME, yes, grinding your own beans is FAR better. Plus, a decent burr grinder is relatively small and super-easy to use. You just dump in your beans and press a button. It’s actually easier than making coffee with a standard coffee machine.
It’s not super-expensive, around $40-$50 if you pick it up from Bed,Bath,Beyond or some place like that, and I am sure there are cheaper models.
The biggest drawback is that it takes up counter space, but this is one countertop appliance I think is worth it.
I’m getting my coffee ground at specialty shops in 200g batches, so it doesn’t have (that much) time to lose flavor. That’s probably the best compromise, considering they’re also grinding to the proper size for my coffee-making method, which I probably couldn’t without a lot more fuss.
An electric burr grinder will grind it exactly as fine or course as you like.
The shop is using an electric burr grinder as well, I would guess, just one built for many more duty cycles.
Really? Things evolved since I last got my hands on a coffee grinder.
@Radu Florica:
You are likely thinking about a blade style grinder, which would frequently have been referred to as a simply a coffee grinder. The blades spin and repeatedly cut/break the beans. Control on the grind is minimal and limited to how long you spin the blades.
A burr grinder uses a conical base and an inverse conical top plate that can be adjusted farther and closer to the base. The beans make one pass through the grinder and the fineness is precisely determined by the distance between the grinding surfaces.
@HeelBearCub
…And I found myself looking at shopping options. Thank you… I think.
@Radu Floricica:
I have owned this model, the Capresso 560.01 Infinity, for several years and like it.
Depends on how “good” you want and how much coffee. A 4-cup drip coffeemaker with pre-ground beans is acceptable to me (I have a burr grinder and grinding just before is better, but not THAT much better), but if you only want 1 mug it’s not so good (4 “cups” is usually about 2 mugs, but making less than that in a automatic drip coffeemaker doesn’t work out IME). They make manual “pour over” single cup devices (which basically just hold a filter cone into which you pour hot water), I haven’t tried them but they’re cheap enough to experiment. A french press is good for single cups but then you need a grinder because the pre-ground beans are too fine.
More important is likely the coffee you’re using. No matter what you do to brew lousy coffee, it’s still lousy coffee. And if you like one roast, a much darker or lighter one may not be to your taste. Same with regions; Colombian coffee is different from Costa Rican is different from Hawaiian.
If you are stuck with instant, the Starbucks VIA Ready Brew is surprisingly close to their regular coffee. I’m not a great fan of that but it beats chewing No-Doz.
I got to this by pure laziness, but apparently it’s an official way of making coffee (to the point where good baristas know the grind size for it). Boil some water in a tea kettle and pour in a cup over a couple of teaspoons of coffee. That’s it 😀 A splash of cold milk to settle the beans is welcome. Be careful, you end up with pretty strong coffee this way, caffeine-wise.
Nowadays I’m using an espresso machine – it takes about the same time, but quite a lot more skill.
If you just want the coffee without the fuss, get an espresso machine with pods. Put the pod in, push a button, drink surprisingly good coffee.
Boiling water is too hot. The water should be at just under 185F, not just over 210F.
This is why I have an electric kettle that heats water precisely to the temperature at which I want. And for whatever reason, I get best results at 200 (maybe because I use a French press and let it sit for quite some time).
That was in my lazy days, before I learned to appreciate a well made cup of coffee. I find there’s a delay of a few good years before “I’m a guy that drinks fancy beers/good coffee” and “I actually can tell the difference” – I only got there with coffee this year.
But it’s easy to play with the temperature. Just leave the kettle a minute, or pour the water into another cup first.
Pourover. I do it each morning.
The night before, I set up two cups, each with a teaspoon of sugar, put a filter cone on each, and put a filter in each one. In the morning, I hit the start button on the kettle, put a heaping spoonful of ground coffee in each filter, and then feed the cat. A few minutes later, the kettle is at 185F, and I pour that water into the filter. A few minutes later, there are two cups of fresh coffee to walk to the bus with.
There is no complicated equipment to maintain or clean, the filter cones just need a rinse every few days, the filters the cups and the lids are all compostable, and I can pipeline interleave the process with other morning prep chores.
You can get your coffee beans ground at many cafes and most good grocery stores.
The absolute lowest effort is to cold brew in concentrate, then serve individual diluted portions. This way, you don’t even need to brew that often.
(You can even freeze some for the long term.)
I’m using pre-ground beans and a single-serving french press . I got the french press from some local coffee place – Peet’s, I think.
Seconding this: for cheap and easy, decent preground coffee and a stovetop espresso maker (AKA “Moka pot”) is a great place to start if you like dark, strong coffee. My preferred coffee is Café Bustelo. This is the coffee I grew up with, and it doesn’t require filters or fiddling–put coffee and water in it, put it on the stove, pour out the coffee and dump the grounds and rinse it.
For more “American-style” coffee, a french press or aeropress and Folgers coffee. (Yes, you are supposed to use coarse coffee in a French press; I don’t bother.
I don’t find the extra effort of grinding my own beans worth it.
Why do children’s book publishers bring out new editions with new illustrations every few years? For example, “Flat Stanley” from 2018 is different from 2012, and “Ramona” 2013 from “Ramona” 2006. I understand they might not want to use the original illustrations from the 1960’s (though I think they’re charming), but does something really become outdated in just a few years?
I suspect this is one of those cases where if the question is “why”, the answer is “money”. Even if nothing has changed aside from the size of Ramona’s cell phone (OK, I checked, and at least on the cover she doesn’t actually have one), putting out a new edition garners interest and produces sales.
Yeah, this sounds like a weird case of planned obsolescence to me.
More plausible for textbooks, where there is a reason why the (student) buyer needs the current edition.
I don’t think planned obsolescence.
It’s for a saturated market where new title sales can be impacted by how appealing the cover art is. The target market is in constant flux, being primarily young readers.
People looking specifically for Ramona books specifically, they just buy the current edition. The cover isn’t for them. The cover is for people who don’t know they are looking for a Ramona book.
Louis Sachar’s “Wayside School” books got made into a cartoon, and now you can only buy with illustrations those cartoons, even thought the previous illustrations were far superior.
I don’t know why I’m the general case, but is unfortunate one.
By the way, the above are excellent books to read aloud to grades K-3, and full of little things for adults to notice as well.
Edit: spelling
Money.
I’m a bibliophile and sometimes I buy two different editions of a classic because I can’t decide which illustrator is better, e.g. the original Tenniel Alice books and also Harry Rountree’s Alice in Wonderland or The Hobbit by both Alan Lee and Michael Hague. Very often the best illustrations for an old book are either Victorian or Edwardian.
I’ve got this need for speed in my interactions with tech. And I get extremely impatient, when it can’t keep up.
my fast browsing setup for PC (something I’m still tinkering with):
Microsoft Edge Dev
cVim
I don’t care about cookies
uBlock Origin
Boostaler
Edge Dev is Chromium-based. It’s MS way of saying: “If we can’t beat them, join them”. And it looks really neat. I always liked the look of Edge tbh, but it was missing all the extensions I needed. It had adblockers but not a single vim-extension, so that’s fixed.
cVim
Only extension right now that allows me to press “mf” and then have letters appear on all links and letting me open them up in another tab with two keystrokes. Usually vim-extensions vanish the letters after selection. Vimium for Firefox could do this as well, but the Quantum-update killed it so I’ve abandoned FF.
Usually I just use “f”, but often with link-posts from Scott or MR or when I want to download a lot of files at Uni, I get really pissed if I have to click little words on my screen, moving my hand and this taking seconds.
I scroll with jk and ud.
I don’t care about cookies
To stop the
microaggressionscookie prompts.uBlock Origin
Read an article recently showing several adblockers and how they perform in various scenarios. uBlock seems to always be among the best or is the best. Can’t find the article 🙁
Boostaler
Just installed it. I think it makes very big difference. Often I feel that because of cVim I can do things faster than the browser can comprehend. Now that problem is much less present.
Ah, had not tought of vim controls on a browser.
Gotta try this.
There’s a lot of smart, nerdy people here. Has anybody solved a Rubik cube?
I don’t mean “has anybody learned the algorithms that allow them to consistently move the blocks to the right places as fast as possible?”. I mean sat down to it, as a puzzle, without looking up the solution, with a pencil, paper, time, possibly a computer, and solved it?
If so, what was it like? How did you do it? Was it very hard? How long did it take? I learned the algorithms about ten years ago and I’m a little sad that I’ll now never be able to try to solve the puzzle. My impression is that it’s very hard and I might not have been able to do it anyway, but I’d love to hear from somebody who’s done it.
If you mean “pencil, paper, time, possibly a computer,” and a Rubik’s cube: yes. Actually, minus the computer, and (intentionally) not looking anything up. I highly recommend it. It took me a long time — many hours, but spread over many weeks (10?), often in bits of otherwise useless waiting time.
After poking around with the cube for a while, I started drawing what various combinations of moves would do, eventually thinking up with patterns that would do particular operations. (I printed many copies of blank cube pictures that I could write on.) I’m sure my combinations are very inefficient, but it was a really great feeling to come up with them myself!
I recommend it.
Yes, I was of course including a Rubik cube in the “allowed equipment”. To be honest I didn’t really expect the computer to be useful… it’s probably not really the sort of maths that requires that. Speaking of maths, are you trained in group theory? Did you use it? Did your approach involve a lot of trial and error? How did you plan which parts of the cube to solve in which order? Have you since looked up existing solving methods to see if your method was equivalent to one of them?
Also, when you say you recommend it, do you mean to imply that you disagree with my assumption that I, as somebody who has looked up existing solutions, cannot ever really solve the cube? Or do you just mean you recommend it in general terms to people who have not already spoiled it for themselves?
Good questions!
About group theory: no, I am not trained in it, though I have a minimal knowledge of it, which I didn’t make any use of (other than the trivial bit of insight that cube operations don’t commute).
About trial and error: yes, I did a *lot* of trial and error! Much of this involved writing down what various combinations of moves (X, Y, inverse X, inverse Y) would result in, and then staring at these notes to see what combinations of these results could accomplish.
About what order to do things: I don’t really remember — sorry! Certainly the last things were figuring out what moves would switch pairs or triplets of blocks on a single face, leaving everything else unchanged.
About looking up existing methods: I haven’t done this. It might be interesting, but I don’t really care. (If I had more free time, I’d instead work on other cubes, like 4x4x4.)
About recommending: I certainly recommend trying it for people who have not spoiled it for themselves. (Also, I don’t understand why people look up the solutions — what’s the point?) About whether you can really “solve” the cube now that you know existing solutions is an interesting question. If you internalized the solutions so well that you absolutely can’t get them out of your mind, then I don’t think there’s much to do. However, if you can still “play around” with exploring combinations of moves and finding sets that do useful things, I think you can certainly meaningfully solve the cube!
Thanks for your answers! I don’t really have anything to add, but that was really interesting. 🙂
I was able to figure out algorithms for the 1st and 2nd layers, but not the 3rd.
I was the same. I spent a few weeks playing with an old cube to see what I could figure out, and that was as far as I got before I decided to learn existing algorithms.
Yes, I have. When I was a young child of 8-9, I learned how to solve it from a book “The Simple Solution to Rubik’s Cube”, which involved a very minimal algorithm set. I never got faster than about 4-5 minutes, and forgot everything I learned.
Fast-forward a decade and a half, and I was a college student studying group theory on the way to a B.S. in Math. I impulse bought a cube because I remembered liking it as a child, and spent about three hours that evening solving it. I manually worked out the first two layers, then experimented to find a few sequences of moves (mostly depending on the “commutator principle”: if X and Y are short move sequences, then X Y X’ Y’, where X’ is the reverse of X, is probably a sequence that changes very little). I wrote down the effects of the ones I had found in cycle notation, and once I had accumulated a few, I worked out on paper what would happen if I composed them, and gave those variable names too, until I found a way to compose them to solve the situation I had (it was many hundreds of turns for the accumulated levels). It was a very enjoyable three hours.
Though I’m done answering your question, there’s more to the story. I forgot about the cube for a decade, picked it up again about five years ago and decided to be good at it. I went to the site of a Dr. Fridrich that I had briefly looked at before, noted with delight that she had changed her name and gender from when I had last looked at her speedcubing page (I was to do the same about a year later, so that was an unexpected bit of positive representation) and learned her eponymous method. My current average time is 27-28 seconds, I still practice regularly (on public transit, mostly) and I still feel like I have another 5 seconds or so that I can shave before I peak.
Very cool! Thanks for sharing. I’ve not heard of the commutator principle, and google isn’t helping. Is this a concept in group theory? Frankly I’m amazed that you solved it in three hours in one evening. I was expecting answers more along the lines of Elephant’s “many hours over many weeks” above. So is it not as hard as I think it is? Or do you think your maths knowledge helped you? Or did your vague memories from fifteen years ago help at all? Or are you just a genius? 😛
It is indeed from group theory. A while back I asked a friend who’s into that how general the methods are, and he had this to say:
That still doesn’t answer the question how obvious the application of commutators is, though.
I asked the followup question:
Ah, that’s really interesting. Thanks for sharing. As somebody who knows more about mathematics than Rubik cubes, I am also familiar with commutators, but I guess it makes sense from what your friend says that this property of them is not of very general application.
It helped specifically that I was studying permutations, yes – which is an example of a group that my textbook heavily leaned on. And it did speed things up; for instance, it meant that once I found a sequence that interchanged, say, cubies 1 and 3 and cubies 6 and 8 I could just write on my paper “A = (1 3)(6 8)”, then “multiply” that by any other sequence I found to make a new sequence – much faster and less error-prone to do the multiplication on paper with symbols than on the cube by composing long move sequences.
I don’t think I knew the “commutator principle” I mentioned by that name at the time (I think I picked it up from Fridrich’s page later), but I remember it being kind of intuitive – you do something on the cube that does what you want, but also messes up an unrelated bit – so you want to fix it by doing the reverse, but you don’t want to undo everything, so you jog something else first and see what happens.
Bonus fact: Commutators show up in many other physical contexts (huge handwaving and imprecision ahead but I think it gets a non-false point across): in quantum theory, nontrivial commutators of observables are uncertainty principles – XPX’P’ is nonzero where X is “observe position” and P is “observe momentum”, therefore Heisenberg, which is super cool.
Yes, I can see that the understanding that you can multiply group operations would be useful in forming algorithms.
As a physicist, I’m familiar with commutators of quantum mechanical observables. More so than in a pure group theory sense anyway!
No, but I made some partial solutions. In particular, I independently rediscovered one of the useful simple algorithms that modify only the last layer, (R U R’ U R U2 R’).
How high is the probability a restaurant is a front for the mob, and how do I tell?
Background: I recently went to a sushi place where all the workers were heavily tattooed. I’m vaguely aware that in Japan tattoos are associated with criminality, but nowhere near savy enough to judge the nature of these particular tattoos or the strength of the association under a prior of living outside Japan. The sushi was great, but I wouldn’t want to help the mob with money laundering if there’s a high probability the restaurant is a front for them.
(FWIW, I have a similar story about an Italian restaurant, where the same thing applies: Stuff that is ‘off’, but filtered through a foreign culture whose rules I’m not suficiently familiar with.)
Tattoo’s are extremely disapproved of in Japan. A basic arm tattoo is probably similar to a face tattoo in the West. There is a youth counterculture that has them, but they seem unlikely to be heavily tattoo’d.
On the other hand, the Yakuza seems to regard tattoos as private, so they would presumably not flaunt them.
So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you’re looking to launder money through a business, you don’t then employ mob members in the business surely? Firstly, they probably have the wrong skill sets: customer service expertise being a particular concern… And secondly, getting investigated and arrested is normal for criminals: drawing attention to the business where you’re laundering your money by employing people in whom law enforcement is likely to take an interest might not be wise.
So I’d be inclined to doubt the tattoos reflect a Yakuza front organisation. If it does, expect detectives to spend a lot of time eating sushi, and there to be some big trials forthcoming.
If the sushi place isn’t in Japan itself, it almost certainly isn’t Yakuza-associated. The Yakuza have very little presence outside of Japan beyond money-laundering operations, where the rank-and-file street soldiers wouldn’t be welcome.
Additionally, if the sushi place isn’t in Japan itself, the workers are unlikely to be Japanese, and it’s very likely there are no Japanese people involved at all, unless you’re somewhere relatively high-end.
You might also consider the possibility that these workers were not Japanese.
Especially if this restaurant was not in a place with lots of Japanese immigrants. Where I live in flyover country, it seems like every sushi restaurant is actually owned and run by Koreans.
I lived in Atlanta (not exactly flyover country) and I knew a guy whose Korean parents owned a Japanese restaurant.
When I lived in Scotland a few chip shops would only take cash and be very bare bones inside. always wondered how they stayed open and assumed it must be something shady like money laundering.
Also nail bars are commonly used for money laundering (and people trafficking), to the point where my old business wouldn’t taken on the investment portfolios for clients who owned one.
I am curious if people here have opinions on the idea of jury nullification. Advocates of this believe that juries should have the right to vote their conscience about a case even if it violates the law. That is, if members of the jury think a law is bad, they should vote acquit someone of violating that law even if they did the deed. This seems to be a common belief of libertarians, even though it seems to be that it violates the concept of the rule of law, which libertarians also believe.
I am currently reading Hayek’s book, The Constitution of Liberty, which he wrote about 1960. He has emphasized quite strongly that the rule of law is necessary for liberty to happen. There are two good reasons to support the rule of law: 1) Citizens of the regime know what actions will be illegal, which gives them more freedom of action, and 2) The actions of government enforcers will be less likely to be capricious or self-serving if they have to follow the law, instead of just throwing in jail the people the sheriff or judge doesn’t like.
But recently I was reading some CATO publication, and they were pushing jury nullification, which seems to contradict Hayek’s dictum. Of course there is no reason CATO has to follow Hayek’s policies, but I would think CATO would want to follow the rule of law. I don’t think that jury nullification follows the rule of law. I also think CATO and other libertarians are wearing rose colored glasses about what would happen in a jury nullification world. CATO imagines juries letting off suspects that ran afoul of laws that CATO doesn’t like, such as drug laws. But the same rule could result in juries convicting suspects even though that wasn’t the law, such as juries that think criminals shouldn’t get off on technicalities. Or even more pernicious, that the suspect is guilty because those type of people no doubt committed some crime, even if innocent of the crime charged (type being perhaps Blacks, or CEOs, or Republicans, or socialists). Am I creating a straw man of jury nullification?
The point of a jury is that in order to convict someone of a crime, you have to convince 12 of his neighbors who don’t really care one way or the other and would rather be somewhere else that the accused did something worth punishing him over. Jury nullification seems to me to be an essential part of that process, at least logically. Besides, any power that can only err on the side of not imprisoning people is going find favor with libertarians.
In cases where nullification is at issue it comes down to this: At the end of the day, you’re sitting there on the jury. You have a choice to make. Do you, personally, vote to uphold the law and commit an injustice? Or do you do what is in your power to prevent that injustice from happening?
I know my answer.
Jury nullification, properly understood, stands as a citizen bulwark over selective prosecutions. Imagine a town with an arcane law that requires hand signaling when making a left turn. But given the invention of the automobile and turn signals no one obeys this law, and the police don’t enforce it.
Until some alderman is a big pain in the side of the mayor, and now he gets stopped every day, and his wife, etc, etc.
The problem with people like CATO is they apply this too broadly and say that if a law in general is unjust, juries should nullify. That is stupid because the only way unjust laws get repealed is if they are enforced. Otherwise they only exist for the purpose of selective prosecution.
Liberty is the core of libertarian thought. I dont think you’ll find too many people let alone libertarians these days who would convict someone of harboring run away slaves or of hiding Jews in their attic or of any other number of attrocities that used to be the law in the developed world. Some people see a few residual attrocities that are still the law now. Jury nullification is supposed to be one of the last lines of defense against a corrupt government. It unfortunately doesnt work very well because, it turns out, most people just go along with things.
Ultimately, however, there better be a damn good reason to take away someone’s freedom and it is up to juries to be the final arbitor on whether they are going to do that. And jury nullification is part of the rule of law anyway, because, by law, it is the decision of the jury and not anyone else.
@Eternaltraveler
Well this juror will gleefully convict anyone who’s credibly shown to keep their neighbors awake with the sounds of drums, televisions, or loud parties – a sentence of being put in stocks and pelted with foul smelling garbage, or suffering exile to solitary confinement seems appropriate, especially if the landlord is also so sentenced.
Even if, as you recently proposed, evicting a tenant is a criminal offense? Is the landlord’s crime his failure to predict in advance that the person who wanted to rent from him would behave badly?
I think it was a joke.
I think of jury nullification as a way of getting the government to be no worse than the public and no better. You take your chances.
Morally speaking, jury nullification seems correct–if I don’t believe someone has done anything for which he should be punished I shouldn’t take an action–voting for conviction–that results in his being punished.
On the other hand, people believing in jury nullification might have serious negative effects. The main problem isn’t convicting innocent people—criminal conviction requires a unanimous vote and it isn’t likely that every juror will deliberately vote to convict someone who is innocent but part of an unpopular subgroup. The problem is acquitting the guilty.
Consider a society where a sizable minority, say forty percent, are strongly prejudiced against some group, such as gays or Republicans. If jury nullification is widely believed in, a member of that minority can beat up or kill a member of that group and be reasonably confident that at least one member of the jury that tries him will share his prejudice and vote for acquittal.
I’ve never seen an example of jury nullification work in this way though, at least outside of the old south which I’d discount as a fundamentally non-democratic society anyway. Whilst it’s a theoretical danger, do we have examples of this happening in a functioning modern democracy?
I heard that is what happened with Klan members in the south – even when caught, jury nullification meant they didn’t get a sentence.
Jury nullification with voir dire seems to risk only people willing to lie being able to nullify which is a bad situation. If jury nullification is to work on a general basis, voir dire needs to be changed. I suspect voir dire is the reason why there are not a lot of jury nullification abuses because not a lot of jury nullification can happen with it.
Having jury nullification for extreme circumstances would not risk this but I worry about the potential for it to encourage culture war vigilantism. One could easily imagine a situation where a prosecutor in a left leaning city does not prosecute an anti fa member who 4-chan has conclusively identified as being responsible for a relatively clearly criminal assault on a far right rally member. If jury nullification has teeth, I could easily imagine a jury, at least in a red tribe area, being unable to convict someone who later tracks down this anti fa member and equivalently assaults him. This would seem likely to escalate with anti fa retaliating and so on. Culture war violence along these lines even if relatively rare would be destructive to social trust. I could easily imagine a number of culture war issues that are sufficiently hot button to escalate to vigilantism if we leave the present equilibrium.
Yes, last time I was called to jury duty they let me go because they asked if I would be willing to convict if I thought they were guilty of the charges (there was about a dozen charges relating to theft). I replied I would have no problem at all except some petty paraphernalia possesion charge they threw on top, and that I would not convict on that. Either that or telling them I was a scientist (lawyers hate scientists in court, their entire game is convincing sounding arguments) resulted in the judge dismissing me (after the judge was done dismissing and it was supposedly the lawyers turn) and I havent been called for jury duty since. I did wonder if I had a moral obligation to lie after the fact.
There is a “right” to nullify in US law. I haven’t looked at this for many years, but I believe the right is recognized by appellate opinions. It is a peculiar right in that attorneys are not permitted to argue it to the jury.
It does not capture the idea of nullification, I think, to says that “if members of the jury think a law is bad, they should vote [to] acquit.” The “should” is too strong. It is a bit like the Quaker idea of consensus. The right to block a decision (under that model of consensus) is not that I should block any decision if I think the decision is wrong. Blocking a decision is supposed to be understood as an extreme measure to be taken only rarely—say, once or twice in a lifetime, if ever. (I have known organizations that attempted to operate on the Quaker model of consensus without understanding it in this way. In every such case it turned out to be completely unworkable.)
Recognizing the right to nullify but not letting the attorneys argue it to the jury can be viewed as an imperfect way of trying to calibrate nullification in the direction of requiring something more than just disagreeing with the law. I know there are cases where I, if I were a juror, would vote to nullify. These are extreme cases in which the law seems to me to have simply failed. That is different from me disagreeing with the law.
Think of it as a citizens’ pardon power. [Edited to correct an error.]
From what I’ve heard, in death sentence cases, juries are chosen on the basis of whether they don’t oppose the death sentence in principle – because otherwise too many jurors would vote for jury nullification just to avoid giving the death sentence to the accused.
I think that if you have a punishment many citizens in your country are unwilling to sentence a man too, you should suck it up and allow nullification, or don’t press for the death sentence.
There is no mandatory death penalty. When prosecutors try to get “death qualified” jurors, they are looking for jurors that will vote for the death penalty after conviction, not jurors who will convict in the first place. I’m not sure that a juror voting against the death penalty is really nullification. The jury evaluates the mitigating and aggravating factors; this is inherently subjective. It’s entirely possible for someone to think there is no aggravating factor bad enough to execute someone.
That’s not true in practice. People who are in favour of the death penalty are also more likely to trust the government, and so are more likely to believe the prosecution’s case and vote to convict. This means that some prosecutors may seek the death penalty precisely because it makes it more likely to secure a conviction.
Uhhhh, yeah, you’re creating a bit of a straw man, because you’re talking about a jury voting to convict someone, as opposed to a jury NOT convicting someone. If juries want to convict someone because they don’t like the color of their skin, they can do it now.
Jury nullification becomes a problem when juries refuse to convict based on the law, but that’s entirely up to your judgement of whether the law is good or not. Is the Fugitive Slave Act good? 3 Strike Laws?
If jury nullification is part of the system then it is no more a violation of the rule of law then a judge dismissing charges in the interest of justice. The questions are: 1) is it a part of the system, and 2) if not, should we make it part of the system?
Thanks Brad for specifically discussing my issue of jury nullification going against the rule of law.
But please explain to me further what you mean by a judge dismissing charges in the interest of justice. DO you have examples of judges doing this when the defendant is clearly guilty of committing some crime? To me the judge in this case is clearly not following the rule of law. I do think judges have the duty to follow the law as written, regardless if they think it is just or not. Otherwise, the judge is writing his own law. Where is the separation of powers? Although I could understand a jury member not accepting this same responsibility for doing this as a judge, since the jury is drafted and not voluntarily a member of the court.
I get Polycarp’s point of juries over-riding the law in extreme cases. The rule of law isn’t perfect. But it should be very rare.
I don’t know about other states, but in NY judges are authorized by statute and case law to dismiss charges in the interest of justice. It’s a power with limits and subject to review, but it’s wholly part of the system. Or what about pardons, do you think they violate the rule of law?
I could be wrong here, but I get the sense that you perceive the justice system to be far more algorithmic than it is. It has discretion built into it by design.
You mean Presidential pardons? Absolutely! I’ve always thought they were a travesty. How could anyone think a Presidential pardon has anything to do with justice?
There is plenty of decision-making necessary in any court of law, without them making their own decisions outside the law. I thought judges made an oath to follow the law. I think they should follow that. And it is true that legislators often do give administrators and judges too much latitude. Which is one reason the country is sometimes at the mercy of Trump’s emotions.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take the setting of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare seriously.
In this universe, Russia is capable of simultaneously invading America, France, and Germany with minimal difficulty. The American and French nuclear arsenals appear to be nonexistent: the single nuclear weapon used in the conflict is a captured Russian ICBM fired by a rogue British soldier in order for its EMP to eliminate the Russians’ air superiority over Washington, D.C. (plus the ISS, but who’s counting?). The U.S. Navy has no operational capabilities: the Russian fleet sails into New York harbor unopposed.
How did the world get into such a state? Is every country except Russia abiding by a strict arms-control treaty? Discuss.
I need to know the power levels of China and India to proceed.
China and India are never mentioned and can be assumed to be strategically impotent.
I find this to be the most plausible explanation:
Following WWII, environmentalism erupted in North America and Europe, this results in a series of increasingly restrictive Kyoto-style restrictions on industry. These restrictions result in strains on the community to build nuclear power, but it is hastily done. Chernobyl happens in America, then in a European country, and now it is too stigmatized and turned off. This backlash includes nuclear weapons, but most leaders resist full denuclearization because of the Soviet threat.
While the Wests’ economy struggles, China and India have no rising tide to lift all boats, and there is no competition for the USSR in turning them into client states, which they do, and they prevent market reforms in those states, keeping them weak and starved.
The economies in the West continue to stagnate as they cannot meet demand for energy, much of the military budget (including upkeep for nukes) is cannibalized into frivolous projects targeted at green energy, stimulus projects, and varieties of boondoggles. Fertility decline is even steeper than currently. The population ages rapidly resulting in even more strains on government. As this happens, a populist uprising occurs, but the cure is as bad the sickness, as it results in dismantling some of the few remaining successful private businesses in the EU/US.
Meanwhile, the USSR faces extremely low energy prices, which they are happy to use. Khrushchev’s reforms now appear to be an outstanding success. And he is able to transform the USSR to look similar to modern China in its internal governance policies. It progresses along, obviously not as fast as China did post 1978, because there is no rising tide to participate in, but decently well. There is also a baby boomlet in the 70s & 80s makes the demographics of Russia the envy of the modern world.
There is my scenario.
How far back can we diverge from real history? I’m thinking of a Soviet Union that took world revolution seriously, has united with Eastern Europe if not also half of China while somehow avoiding ruining its economy, and might have been the first power to invent the nuclear bomb.
On the other hand, according to the Wikipedia article, it looks like things are far too realistic for that far back a PoD.
Unfortunately, the PoD is unlikely before 2001, as the U.S. is depicted as occupying Afghanistan immediately before the war begins.
I suppose all that’s necessary is to strongman the Russians and weakman the US and its allies. Bear in mind that I know very little about the Call of Duty franchise.
Instead of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Brezhnev, Russia got generations of Deng Xiaoping and Lee Kuan Yew’s unholy love-children, fostering intense development. Russia has access to large export markets for its natural resources, oil prices are unusually high. Maybe Saudi Arabia got nuked, or some regional exchange occurred between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which also had the effect of reducing nuclear stockpiles (especially the more easily used tactical variety). Assume Russia has strong allies as well: India, China and possibly Brazil.
The Russian military also is designed to perfectly counter what NATO is doing (if NATO still exists). Stealthy submarines and guided missile cruisers > Carriers. ATGMs, ballistic missiles and mobile SAMS > high quality air superiority fighters. Ekranoplanes actually work really well, they’re not just a good subject for documentaries. Lets add extensive code-breaking and intelligence coups for good measure.
In the West, we have ineffectual, pacifist-leftist governments, leading to brain-drain capital flight and savage military cutbacks. Assume the Bundeswehr is in an extremely sorry state (not a terribly big ask) due to government unwillingness to fund it. Perhaps all the soldiers are doing public works, not training with their tanks. Same as in France, though we add festering civil disobediance and student riots.
NATO invests in dead-ends, not 4th gen aircraft or smart weapons. Maybe instead of GPS, they focus on SDI or Rods from God. Perhaps they try to make a half-decent air mobile tank. Military lasers could be a pretty big dead end, along with spaceplanes.
Air and naval superiority over the US is gonna be a big ask. We can rip off Clancy and say paratroopers took Iceland, letting Russian naval bombers win the battle of the Atlantic. We can say the US fleet is tied down fighting in Asia and the Indian Ocean, perhaps Panama got blown. We can imply they have fuel difficulties (the navy is after all the biggest guzzler of oil), but an invasion of the continental US is still quite difficult.
Canada allying with Russia is probably the
least ridiculousbest option, unless we go full World in Conflict and have the Russians hide in container ships (something too implausible for even this post). We probably need the US airforce to be sabotaged or bombed on the ground in the first few hours of hostilities, while being a ghost of its former self due to savage cutbacks. Political appointments are also a good way to lower efficiency, imagine left-McCarthyism against the military.If we tweak every variable in Russia’s favour, there’s no way they can lose.
The reality is that Russia’s military spending is actually than that of the UK and France combined, never mind the other NATO nations in Europe who probably match it again. The Russian technology is mostly older as well. Whilst Russia has the tanks, artillery and air force to roll through an unprepared country, I can’t see how they could ever invade the US without the total removal of any defences the US could have. You’d have to rewrite history to make Russia a truly productive and powerful country: say perhaps that 1917 saw a revolution that created a free-market economy that was strong enough to deter Hitler and therefore suffered no major war damage, and likewise avoided poor government decisions? This could out-develop the US and western Europe over a century, but there is a logical flaw here. This sort of economy only seems to work as a democracy or a very benevolent dictatorship (which tend to mature to democracy), and these sort of states do not go to war with each other. So we’d have to assume the US, France and Germany (and if allied with them, the UK) were not free-market democracies, the easy explanation for which would be that Nazi Germany, which remember didn’t attack radically free-market Russia, won a somewhat more focused mid-century war, and as a result fascist governments rule the western countries (or at least those named). Fascist governments tend to be collectivist rather than free market, handing a development advantage to Russia which would help this scenario. Russia would also have natural allies in any remaining democratic nations or socialist countries (perhaps Canada or Sweden, and quite possibly some Central American states), and probably in the territories of the British and French empires, assuming these had fallen, so could be in a position to launch attacks from outside its territory.
All of which is to say that if you’re playing Call of duty: modern warfare then you’re probably playing the bad guys.
To make the setting plausible, we’d probably have to create an alternate timeline that diverged from ours starting in the 1980s.
1) The Cold War ends, but less disastrously for the Eastern Bloc. Since the game has “Russia” as the villain and not the “Soviet Union,” then the latter still collapses. However, Russia doesn’t have its “lost decade” under Yeltsin, and someone more competent and authoritarian is in charge. Let’s just say a guy like Putin, but who is also less nepotistic and kleptocratic, so the country makes a more successful switch to semi-capitalism and the economy strengthens. This means no degradation in Russian military capabilities.
2) The West would also have to play a different hand of cards. Assume that NATO honors its promise to Gorbachev to not expand east. That means the countries of Eastern Europe fall back into Russia’s orbit by the end of the 1990s. As a result, Russia can move its troops through Poland in secret, right up to Germany’s border. Instead of joining the E.U., they and the ex-Soviet republics join a Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, which operates better than in OTL.
3) As for the vanishing of the U.S., French and German military forces, we can get partway there by assuming that post-Cold War disarmament happens to a much greater degree than in OTL. Maybe the Russians used various ruses to lull the West into a false sense of complacency while it maintained a significantly larger military in secret. The Russian amphibious/airdrop invasion of the U.S. could have been timed to coincide with a big U.S. military exercise in the Pacific or Indian Ocean, where they would be too far away to help. But still, this only gets us halfway to the situation depicted in the game.
Relatively embarrassing, but this is my first comment…and it’s about a decade old video game storyline. 😛
To strongman(?) the CoD:MW story a little bit (not that I find it plausible, but I actually thought it was better done than many ‘near future’ games), I think there are some key parts of the story that are missed in the parent post.
The Russian invasion starts with the US (in MW2), after years of military buildup of an ultranationalist block in Russian politics (driven by hero worship of the big bad that was killed at the end of MW1). Although not obvious at the beginning of the game, this is done in collaboration with an American general (who wants to produce a war for his own reasons), and involves compromise of American defense satellites so that the invasion isn’t detected in advance.
Those two bits are the parts of the story that are the biggest stretches.
A lot of the other aspects of seem reasonable to me…the casus belli is a mass murder of Russian civilians by a CIA agent (organized by the above general…if you accept that a general could defect in that manner, it isn’t that much of a stretch to assume Russia might respond militarily).
As an aside, “No Russian”, the sequence involving mass murder, was pulled from several country versions of the game.
The invasion is conventional and largely contained to the eastern seaboard of the US, so response with nuclear weapons might be viewed as a dangerous escalation. The broadening of the campaign against Europe starts with terrorist attacks followed up with conventional forces…again I don’t think there would necessarily be a nuclear response.
Also keep in mind that the end result (because good guys have to win) is that the Russian aggression is locally devastating but contained in relatively short order.
To answer the parent post more directly: Given a few years of ratcheting up tensions between the US and Russia, a US action sufficiently reprehensible that allies might be slow to mobilize in defense, and a general on the inside facilitating Russian aggression…it really isn’t *that* hard to believe that Russia might engage in an invasion that is quickly contained.
All that being said, I agree that Russian navy getting that close to the US without anyone knowing is pretty unbelievable…I know submariners that follow foreign subs around. My understanding (maybe wrong) is that neither Russia or China are within a decade of our stealth level for submarines.
Glad to e-meet you all. I might even comment on something I know about someday.
Allies don’t immediately respond to the invasion because the c
If the Russians had invaded Alaska (leaving aside the question of what they would hope to accomplish there), then the scenario might just barely be plausible enough for me to go with it, but even with magic satellite hacking I don’t see any possible way for an invasion force of that size to get from Russian territory to the Eastern Seaboard without being detected by a whole bunch of people along the way. Do Russian fighter jets even have that kind of range to begin with?
The problem is, the first MW game is (relatively) well anchored in reality: Russia is a bit more fractured (hence the antagonist, a Russian Ben Laden), and Not-Irak actually got WMD (and not-Saddam is a middle-eastern Fidel Castro), but the US is pretty all-powerful, to the point Russia require their intervention to save them from a nuclear coup by said Russian Ben Laden).
Even considering a nuke wiped out a large US offensive in Not-Irak, accepting the setting of the first game makes the rest absurd.
RPG thread: am I right that rules impose a tone or genre?
Using D&D for examples, they’re all supposedly the same kind of fantasy, but.. editions before 3rd are Weird Tales. It’s common for monsters to kill a short story protagonist and running away (typically of dead guy’s companions) is common, like in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands or any number of Clark Ashton Smith tales. When a protagonist survives long enough to level up, they tend to keep surviving, becoming a serial protagonist of short stories like Conan.[1] 3.X is… this unprecedented genre where certain classes (Wizard, Druid, Cleric) are superheroes, except recurring villains are very rare because they quickly murder everyone they get into combat except casters played at the same level of system mastery as themselves, who have a ~50% chance to murder them instead.[2] 4th Edition is medieval shounen anime, where opponents try to beat each other down with named attacks they can use once per fight. And 5th Edition is more like medieval Justice League, since other classes aren’t so badly balanced with Wizard/Druid/Cleric and it’s usually impossible to kill an enemy with one hit even if they’re already unconscious, while one-hit kills are Standard Operating Procedure in optimized 3.X.
[1] It also does Tolkien, obviously. Hand out magic items at Level 1 to help your PCs survive and remember to describe overland travel Romantically.
[2] Other classes get to do superhuman things like Barbarians easily surviving 200-foot falls by getting angry, but they’re so much weaker than “full casters” that support for adventuring together like Hawkeye with Doctor Strange is negligible.
Depends on the ruleset. If the mechanics place bounds on the ease of death/availability of certain things/difficulty of tasks, yes. If those things are left in the hands of the GM, or the group, no.
GURPS is interesting here because it may be the only simulationist system capable of playing in almost any tone, simply by dint of having so many variant rulesets that may or may not be in use.
So the more rules, the more yes.
GURPS, being a universal simulationist game, would get to “does any tone” in the opposite way. Its core tone, as far as I know, is “stories of dangerous events from real life”. You can use the core rules to simulate the life and death of a Chalcolithic bumpkin like Otzi the Iceman, the story of how many buddies Grandpa lost in WWII, or the dangers facing astronauts.
So then if you add magic, the genre of your Fantasy will definitely be “how casting spells affects an otherwise completely mundane universe.” If instead you want Ulster to not get steamrolled by an enemy’s spell, you then use rules from the GURPS ??? book to give them Cu Chulainn.
Definitely. I’d go so far to say that if you want to impose a tone or genre, or more broadly have something matter in-game, you need to have rules that impose, or at least incentivize, it. Going hand in hand with this is my belief that “sometimes we spend the entire session talking, without rolling dice or consulting rules!” is, far from being a positive, a major negative. It’s a sign that you either did nothing of importance in that session, or that you are doing things that are important in the game world but which the rules do not support, which shows you are using the wrong rules.
If you want to play a game (I’m using this to mean a particular campaign or whatever, eg, “I’m playing in Brenda’s cyberpunk game”) in which combat is a big part of gameplay, you’ll need a system with relatively robust combat rules. If you want to play a game in which overland movement is a big deal, you’ll need rules for large-scale movement, random encounters, food and camping on the road, encumbrance, etc. If you want to play a game in which court intrigue is a big deal, you’ll need a social system for the game heavier than “talk real nice to the GM and maybe roll against CHA”. Brenda’s cyberpunk game needs rules for hacking and putting cybernetics in your body.
If you play a game with a system that doesn’t accommodate it, at most tone/genre is going to be given lip service. As an example, imagine Call of Cthulhu without a Sanity mechanic. Some players might decide to act out their character being scared of things, running away, becoming increasingly unstable as they realize what they thought was reality was but a sham, etc. In practice, though, I would expect CoC without SAN to play like low-level old-school D&D: PCs running away from Serious Business enemies and relying on strategy, tactics, and firepower for lesser foes (it is a common claim that “guns are useless in CoC”, but this is a “lip service” claim that I think is intended to paint it as a higher class of game, where PCs don’t fondly stroke their assault rifles; if you actually look at the rules, sufficiently powerful small arms allow a party to take on more modest foes, and even bigger things can be dealt with or inconvenienced with heavier firepower) but without either the slow, gnawing degradation of SAN wearing down characters over time or the occasional high-individual-loss case of insanity throwing a wrench into a tactical situation. SAN also helps the world make sense – sure, a platoon of tanks will, by the rules, wreck a lot of big monsters, but not if a quarter of the crews just went temporarily insane. One might go as far to say that SAN makes CoC what it is; it is game-defining that characters basically have a self-destruct countdown built in.
I think that most frustration in games is due to a lack of negotiation and communication in terms of expectations from the game, and using the wrong rules system – using a system that does not create the tone/genre desired – is a big part of that. I honestly believe a lot of people playing D&D would be better off with a storygame type system: they want a rules system that protects the narrative by ensuring that Chosen One Hero PCs don’t go down to some kobold with a critical hit, the GM wants to have the BBEG show up to laugh evilly without getting killed by some clever PC ruse. By the rules, no edition of D&D does anything like this that I know of, and so the task falls to GM fudging of dice, retroactively deciding the BBEG has a Ring of Immunity to Boiling Oil, whatever.
Largely, I agree with you. Great points.
As a contrary opinion “Boot Hill is the best political intrigue system I’ve ever used.”
Again, much agreement.
OTOH, if the case was “We didn’t use the SAN rules in our CoC session because we were all too afraid to do anything that made us lose SAN” or “We never used the highly detailed injury and dismemberment table because we took appropriate precautions against getting hurt” that might not be so bad. Rules can influence a game even when they aren’t used. Now, if that happened consistently, they might not be needed, or could stand to be simplified.
OSR games generally have more rules for combat than… anything else really, but they also have the slogans “If you’re in a fair fight, something has gone wrong.” and “The best plans don’t involve rolling dice.” But such plans and unfair maneuvering are certainly important.
I disagree that
always need to be supported by rules.
I guess another issue is scale. If you’ve got 3 lines on your character sheet and 10 pages in your rule book and “sometimes we spend the entire session talking, without rolling dice or consulting rules!”, then IMO you haven’t gone far wrong.
Absolutely.
Really good point.
It’s worth noting that a lot of Lovecraft’s actual stories climax with the monster getting killed by dogs/small arms/a yacht, followed by a denouement from a mentally ill narrator. “Guns are useless” would only be highbrow if don’t care about emulating the source material.
Ugh, so much yes. If you want your Barbarian to be an awesome hero, don’t ask me to run D&D 3.5 and then pout at the rules. 🙁
Interesting article, and I’d agree with the point that lacking rules on something can create useful uncertainty. I found that with the original Twilight 2000 rules – extremely lethal, and with mechanics that might reward ambush even more than Boot Hill. However, a good GM can do a lot with just about anything – I’m thinking more of the lowest common denominator. Plus, those are games without any CHA type of stat. An ugly middle ground is CHA stat, no social system – I remember back in the 2nd ed days, using CHA as a dump stat and relying on the likelihood that a GM would just react to what I the player was saying and not rely on a CHA roll. Generally, if someone wants a game with a lot of intrigue, they should take a rules system designed to support that.
I think that if a fear of the way certain mechanics will go down influences player behaviour in a way that’s appropriate to the tone/genre, the rules are still involved in what’s going on.
In something extremely rules-light, sure. (Although I question whether ten pages of actual rules is rules-light; the homebrew gritty-fantasy system I cooked up by ripping off various editions of D&D and OSR games plus stuff I read on the internet comes to about six pages total of text).
However, in my experience, sessions where no dice are rolled tend to involve a lot of stuff that doesn’t matter: intra-party conversation about nothing, for example. If stuff that does matter to the game is being handled without any recourse to dice, that creates the problem of GM fiat (to go back to the Boot Hill example, I can think of GMs who would turn the lack of rules into a nightmare railroad; generally, defined rules are on the side of the player more often than not). I think that dice rolls are a better way of representing the vagaries of life than the GM deciding – even if it’s just the saying “well, there’s no rules for this, but I think you succeed on a 3+ on a d6, so roll.”
There’s this idea of the talking-no-rolling bits as “roleplay” and superior to dice-rolling, and I think that’s where this idea of a session where no dice are rolled is somehow elevated – but I’d argue (not an original argument) that roleplaying is the act of making decisions in character, no matter what they are. Stressful, fast, high-stakes situations such as combat (in games where it’s actually lethal and PCs actually get maimed or die or whatever) are a great way to make choices based on what the character would do and reveal the character through choices made: “you’re running away from the bad guys, a bullet hits your buddy and he goes down, what do you do?” creates a very interesting roleplaying question.
I disagree. Strongly.
What, at the end of the day is an RPG rules system? Archetipically, a set of probability distributions. Probability distributions are not generally known to be great sources of intrigue.
I know I keep reiterating the same point, but it’s kinda important: RNG in old-school D&D combat made sense, because the expectation was you would be doing your best to avoid combat.
More broadly speaking, any game that combines:
1. The result being dependent on a random event, and
2. The expectation that “everybody wins”,
is simply not going to work. The two premises are at fundamental odds with one another.
What happens in practice is that premise 1 has to be discarded more-or-less gracefully. If we don’t do so, the players lose – generally rather quickly – because each has only one character and the DM has unlimited monsters.
The same applies to non-combat situations. If your success at social skills depends on the result of a die roll, you’ve got a problem when that success is actually meaningful to the success of your adventure. If you absolutely must succeed at something, rolling dice is the absolutely worst way of doing it.
If you want to have a game that’s heavy on politics, intrigue and social interaction, the last thing you want is a system with Persuasion checks.
ETA:
I’ve something of a reputation as a killer DM, but even I know that having your players lose all the time over bad die rolls is a sure-fire way to have no players in your game.
Further edit, to address key point:
I completely agree, but making decisions is not synonymous with rolling dice – quite the opposite. I find rules actually constrain decision making in a role-playing context, rather than enable it.
In a rules-light system, you’re likely to try whatever you think the GM will let you get away with. In a rules-heavy one, here’s your three-to-five options, except we already know which one is META.
This carries the implicit assumption that you’re placing everything on one roll, which is almost never true unless the GM is a sadist/you’re playing Paranoia. In combat, if a player misses a shot, they’ll get another chance next turn. In a social situation, if one of my players rolls badly, I’ll give them a chance to salvage the situation. In both cases, they’re likely to be worse off than they’d have been if they’d rolled well the first time, but unless they have truly terrible luck/are being deliberately stupid, they should be able to come back and win.
So, in addition to what bean said, where does this idea that “everyone wins” is one of the expectations come from? If you’re setting randomization and everyone being guaranteed to win against each other, sure, randomization makes it possible people will lose.
I have quit the expectation that the players will always win, and I’ve made that clear to them. I don’t go out of my way to screw them, but neither do I do what I once did, which was to basically keep the ball bouncing for the players so they could succeed in-game. In the end, I decided that winning means nothing if you’re guaranteed to win. I’ve played in games where victory was assured – and what happened very quickly was people started phoning it in, doing things like running into danger and halfassing everything because they know the GM will save their bacon. In comparison, once I started doing things like rolling in the open so as to remove the temptation to fudge the dice to save PCs, beloved NPCs, etc, the attitudes of the players changed: they started debating what they would do a lot more, in combat they started thinking strategically in addition to tactically, and they dotted their i’s and crossed their t’s.
I like randomization because it is something that nobody, if the GM is being honest and the players aren’t cheating, has control over. It is a way of letting chance have a seat at the table, to represent the things we can’t control. Best laid plans and all that. I think that, in fact, it increases roleplaying: running out from cover to save your buddy says a lot more about your character in a game where there’s a significant chance you end up shot right next to him.
In practice, this goes back to what I wrote about negotiation and so forth. If what players and GM want is the story of heroes destined to win, and what they’re interested in is what happens along the way and so forth, then they should play a game based around that – most likely a storygame. Playing with a system that includes in it the possibility of failure, with the expectation that failure will not happen to the heroes, leads to all sorts of problems.
CHA stat and no social system does one useful thing, which is telling the DM that you want to run a party face and you’re prepared to sacrifice a more mechanically useful stat for it. That’s not nothing, and in fact I think it gives you about 80% of the value-add of a full social system — they tend to require a lot of fudging and interpretation anyway.
I’d say the 3.5/Pathfinder version, where there’s a kinda-sorta social system but it’s game-breaking in a light breeze, is the real low point.
If your GM is letting you roll against it in social situations, having a high CHA is useful. I suppose that without social rules, the GM might still take it into account – though that creates the problem of fiat.
What I remember of 2nd ed though, was GMs basically ignoring CHA. Looking at the 2nd ed PHB, CHA, mechanically speaking:
1. Determines maximum number of henchmen. I don’t remember this ever coming into play, because by the late 90s when I started playing, and probably earlier, the old-school “bring a bunch of henchmen to increase combat power/reduce the chance an enemy attack is targeted at a PC” had been replaced by the idea of the adventuring party as all you need to go adventure. Probably this was fed by the norm, starting in the 80s but probably strongest in the 90s, that adventures have a plot and it’s about following the plot and killing PCs gets in the way of that, so GMs fudge to avoid player death, so you don’t need those meat shields anyway. Any time I remember a henchperson of any sort being hired, it was just handled by fiat.
2. Modifies loyalty. Same deal. Plus, I don’t remember the morale rules ever getting used, for either PC followers or for the enemies. Whether your allies or your enemies run or fight was determined primarily by the adventure or by the GM.
3. Modifies reaction rolls. I don’t remember reaction rolls getting used at all, for the same reason as morale; I also think they mostly happened in a context of random encounters, which by my recollection had died out by then.
With nonweapon proficiencies using CHA, only Etiquette seems like anything that could be considered a social skill (unless you let a PC sing or talk about local history to impress someone) and is very limited.
What I remember happening was GMs ignoring CHA entirely in social situations and just letting players talk. A player with a bit of charisma themselves could play a character with a low stat as charismatic as they themselves were, in a way that a guy who lifts weights could not play a weakling but amble over to the corner of the room and deadlift something when an in-game situation involving a feat of strength came up.
Has anyone else found that their tastes in music and film have gotten more…’masochistic’ over time? Nowadays it seems the arts that I enjoy most of all and gravitate towards are the ones that are difficult and a little bit uncomfortable/painful to experience.
In the world of film, the only ones that *really* grip me are nonlinear, surreal, have a strong undercurrent of looming violence, and have a score that resembles a swarm of wasps attacking a man using an angle-grinder.
In music, i’ve listened to metal since I was 14, and am well and truly desensitized to heavy thrashing sounds and screaming. But lately the music I crave is more industrial/power-electronics like Prurient, essentially one guy screaming poetry over the top of feedback loops and distorted synths.
Is this the slippery-slope of ‘alternative’ art appreciation? Don’t most people mellow-out as they get older? Is there something about the way the brain learns to process creative stimuli that thrives on challenge and discomfort?
How have your tastes changed over time?
@WashedOut,
As a little kid I liked “classical” music, Star Trek, and The Hobbit, as an adolescent I liked Punk Rock (the Dead Kennedy’s et cetera), the novels of Michael Moorcock, and “Cyberpunk”, as a young adult I liked bands like Sonic Youth, The Velvet Underground, and My Bloody Valentine, “noir” films like The Third Man, and the novels of Joseph Conrad, now as a 51 year old man I like the short stories of Fritz Leiber, I can’t stand “Cyberpunk”, I like classical music (Ralph Vaughan Williams) again, as well as blues (John Lee Hooker), folk (Richard Thompson), some country (Hank Williams senior Lucinda Williams), ’60’s proto-punk/garage/British Invasion (The Yardbirds, et cetera), Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and The Gun Club, and probably the best films that I’ve seen recently were ’71, and Locke.
I’d say my time craving more “difficult”/masochistic art was something that grew in my teens and faded in my late 20’s, my current tastes are a bit more like 12 year-old me than 22 year old me.
There is a noted effect in metal, where the first time you listen to it you are stunned by that sense of “fuck this is heavy”. However, as you listen to more of it you become acclimatized and it takes more, heavier, more progressive stuff to trigger that same response. I’ve heard it said that nobody can listen to metal as their primary genre for more than 5 years without going off the deep end of either extremely heavy or extremely progressive stuff.
Personally, I’ve noticed a bit of the same effect. I still like a lot of melodic and poppy stuff, but I’m always surprised when i spend time with individuals out of that music scene and they consider so much of my playlist unlistenable.
In contrast, there seems to also be a bit of a metal–>Jpop pipeline, and not just through alt-idols. More that the metalheads just come to deeply appreciate the techniques in pop maximalism that they didn’t before.
I think if you do a deep dive into any genre, you end up appreciating some of its weirder branches (that’s a terrible mixed metaphor). And as @GreatColdDistance discusses with metal, this is going to be particularly true of genres that are somewhat non-mainstream to begin with, and have aggressive content.
So I think it’s a matter of geekery, and the particular genre you’re geeky about. I don’t think it’s particularly a function of getting older – lots of people just become more and more incapable of appreciated anything but the music they liked from 18-22.
My level of musical masaochism has remained more or less the same over time.
I can enjoy Stravinsky or Ayler or Bartok or Cherry, but I mostly listen to more tonal stuff.
I dunno, my tastes in music have changed bu I would not say they have gotten more masochistic. After years listening primarily to industrial and industrial metal, I have recently made a concerted effort to get more into other types of metal, and found that I like the “heavier” and weirder ones (death, black, prog) the most. But I would not call it more difficult-to-listen-to than what I had before; I moved sideways but not up or down. I could have switched into more brutal industrial or straight-up noise, but I can never listen to it for pleasure- only if I’m in a particular mood, or want to explore new bands.
But in other media, I still enjoy more or less the same kinds of anime I always have, though I can appreciate the weirder ones more than as a teenager.
And anyway, supposedly your music taste is set at 14.
@rubberduck
Were that true, I wouldn’t listen to much beyond “Rocket to Russia” by the Ramones, and “Hypnotised” by The Undertones.
I interpreted “taste as music” as whether you prefer music that’s slow or fast, aggressive or calming, experimental or conventional, etc., not specific artists. Are there people who, for example, listen to metal as teenagers but switch to easy listening as adults?
Not easy listening per se, but I listened to a fair bit of metal as a teenager and now listen to very little of it, but I do listen to a lot of country and hip hop that I’d never have touched with a ten-foot pole growing up.
Under anarcho-capitalism, if you agree to use somebody’s currency, can part of the contract include taxation? Principally, why is the focus on “taxation is theft” when the real problem from the voluntaryist perspective is that the government tries to limit alternative currency systems? Taxation doesn’t inherently violate the NAP, it’s simply that forcing people to use a certain currency, and then demanding taxation powers outside of currency you have personally issued (such as if the USA demands taxes on bitcoin) is both coercion and theft. However, if you are specifically using US dollars minted by the Treasury Department, then you should be subject to the rules of the property you are borrowing (money). I guess the real libertarian fix is to put other currencies outside of government taxation powers, and to make clearer contractually that the dollar is something you borrow from the issuer and attending institutions with various subcontracted rights and not something you singularly own.
Secondarily, some ancaps and libertarians believe something to the effect that “inflation is theft”, because it dilutes the power of the currency, and thereby is a kind of soft stealth tax. I think that’s dubious however, because there’s a big difference between what ancaps define as coercion, and any actions in general that affect property. If this wasn’t so then it would apply just as much to private instruments, such that a company increasing the supply of stock was ethically equivalent to a thief. In fact, by extension literally any action that changes the value of some asset could be in the same line of fire as government inflating the currency. This sounds unworkable. Fortunately, I think most libertarians just disagree with fiscal expansion in general as a policy and don’t utilize the same ethical arguments they would to say a government banning certain things is violating the NAP, but in that case we can see that the two arguments are quite separable, and it makes me wonder; where are all the pro-deficit spending libertarians? Is it just that Austrian economics has a monopoly on people who also hold to libertarian ethics? Keynesian libertarianism seems valid to me.
You don’t need to contract with someone to trade in a currency they issue. It’s possible to imagine someone trying to implement a currency that carries taxation rights along with it, but that, first, looks a hundred times sketchier to me than your average EULA, which is already pretty sketchy, and, second, doesn’t play nice at all with forex trading — lots of people hold dollars, or euros, or yuan, who have never paid taxes in any of those countries.
On the other hand it looks totally legit to me to build inflation into a currency system; private parties already do this in the cryptocurrency world.
People would not agree to use a currency that included their transactions and possessions being taxable except under situations of fraud or some strong external reason.
I am very skeptical of inflation as theft thesis but it seems defensible from a NAP perspective. The states pervasive and from a NAP perspective coercive backing of its own currency is probably the reason why people use it. For example, one has to pay taxes in US dollars in the US.
@edmundgennings
But we have to consider that most people today like the institution of taxation and the result it has. Now, this is because most people are not anarchists, but to the extent that an anarchist society is possible it will not be because people are convinced to dislike taxes and government services, but because there exists voluntaristic versions of those things.
I think that even in a private society there are going to be certain things people want monopolies to do for scale reasons among others, and since currency is at the base of a modern economy, the currency issuer that wins out among the majority of the populace is going to be best situated to provide those services.
Under those conditions, people in our hypothetical anarcho-capitalist society might well choose the taxed currency. If there was an expansion of services people want, they might accept the taxes as a way of controlling inflation while still funding new contractors to do the work, which is exactly what government does now. Alternatively, if the same company didn’t issue a tax but wanted to just spin new money into creation then that would be voluntaryist deficit spending, which would of course, be inflationary to some level. They could always sell bonds like governments do, but then the currency agency risks becoming insolvent if it uses this tactic to continually expand as governments do without paying out to bond holders, and it might then lose out to a competitor currency.
We’re essentially arguing voluntaryist tax and spend vs voluntaryist deficit spending, and it almost certainly has to be one or the other. The third option is to just not have social services, but since the majority of people like social services, healthcare, a police force etc, even in a voluntaryist society I think people will sign up to the agency offering them. Normal people have to live in an anarcho-capitalist society too, and so they will exert their demands as consumers on the organizational structure of that society, until you get an NAP compliant society that doesn’t look one million miles removed from our own.
This seems like a public goods problem. This depends on a variety of factors but even if most people wanted those things, only strict social pressure combined with exclusion of non payers or coercion would get people to pay the vast amount of money to get those public goods. If only altruism, social pressure, and being able to benefit from these services are being used, these seem more like club dues than taxes
Of course it does. Taxation is the involuntary taking of money by an organization calling itself a government. Later on you talk about voluntary taxes. I think that is a contradiction in terms. Well, I will agree that if you could get agreement of everyone in some geographical area to agree to make payments to support the organization that runs the area, one could call those things taxes and a government. So I take it back that it is a definitional issue. But one could never get such 100% agreement for any group over say 100 people, so it is not possible for 95% of what people call taxation and government.
Edit: By the way, this isn’t me attacking government as a bad thing, it is me attacking NAP as unrealistic in modern society. I think a government is inevitable and is overall a good thing. It is the NAP that is nuts.
Contracts are not considered in violation of the NAP though. I also assume that you can still borrow things without owning them in Ancapistan, and this therefore brings in the possibility of usage stipulations and requirements to give some of those assets back later. I don’t think you’d need to do it based on geographical area.
I also think a government is inevitable and good, but I’m interested in how anarchists address this issue.
Agreed; we already have “charity” for people voluntarily giving money to an organization that spends it on their behalf.
Let’s go farther than agreeing to simply “use currency”.
Posit: People are free to renounce their citizenship and move to any other
nationsecurity contract organization that will accept them.Ergo: We already live in an anCap utopia. anCaps just don’t like that there is no coop of security organizations that meets their particular and very small market demand. Perhaps if land was an infinite resource, things would be different.
Ergo 2: Society trends towards anarcho-capitalism the more available free land there is but never quite reaches it.
Ergo 3: Interstellar society is closer to anarcho-capitalism than terran society, and beings that are able to survive more environments are more anarcho-capitalism compatible.
Ergo 4: Ancaps should employ a strategy more like Marxists, where they support state action to lay down the material conditions for their end goal. Generally; state action to create more available free land, and more particularly; state action to subsidize space travel, nuclear fusion, robotics, and medical science relevant to transhumanism.
The Ethereum cryptocurrency has a built-in feature called “gas” as a fee on transactions that goes to those providing the infrastructure. I haven’t used ETH very much, but if I recall correctly, you can choose how much gas to spend on a transaction but the amount affects the priority of processing—too low and it might wait a long time.
The challenge with the US government is that as a part of the tax system, exchanges are ultimately valued and taxed in USD, even if the currency isn’t used.
For example, let’s assume that you ask me to write some minor software for you and in exchange agree to fix my roof for me. This trade doesn’t use USD. However, under the tax code it’s supposed to be reported in equivalent USD. As a *practical* matter, the government isn’t going to chase down two random folks who traded some small amount of labor which is highly difficult to come to a determined valuation.
Now assume that eg. Google decided to hire its kitchen staff by offering not dollars, but Google Cloud Services in exchange. Suddenly you go from some one-off few hundred dollars which are difficult to track, but possibly tens of millions of dollars. The IRS would have a field day with this as-is.
Now, if you are asking if taxation could only be done if the transaction was performed in USD? In that case, everybody working there would suddenly prefer to be paid in CAD or EUR.
Sometimes I hear it claimed that the if you average all the guesses in a “How many jellybeans in the jar?” contest, you’ll get a number pretty close to the answer. Has that been tested? I assume it’s based on Francis Galton doing something similar in a “How much does the bull weigh?” contest, but has it been tested in jellybean contests?
As it happens we actually had one here at the office recently, and I checked this. The average guess was way off. The wisdom of the crowds works if-and-only-if people are about as likely to guess too high as to guess too low, and by roughly similar amounts; in our case, the too-low guesses were both more numerous and more egregiously wrong than the too-high guesses. No idea if that generalizes though.
did you try a geometric mean? Those have a habit of working better in my experience.
That would make things worse! The geometric mean of a collection of positive numbers is never greater than the arithmetic mean, and we only have equality if all the numbers are the same.
You need to use a power mean with a higher power, like the quadratic mean (i.e., root-mean-square). If anybody guessed too high, then a high enough power will get you the right answer, so it makes me wonder how high a power you’d need.
BTW, the way to win is to bear in mind the utility function.
The aim of the game is not to get as close as you can to the true value; it’s to get closer than anybody else.
Big gaps in between the guesses of other players should be exploited.
You’re not generally allowed to look at the other guesses.
@SteveReilly
To add on what dick said, I think that the problem is systemic bias. For example, we had an Easter egg jar guess contest last year, where the Easter eggs were of varied size (and type). Some people used ‘send all’ to send in their guess and their guesses all seemed way too high to me, suggesting a systemic bias in human perception.
Note that my floor won the contest with the following strategy (that I came up with and got people to use):
– Have two people count the eggs using a count of the eggs per layer and multiply by the rough number of layers (the jar was not entirely even, so this required a little fudging)
– Average these numbers
– Create a list of guesses around the average with an even spacing of 5 (my confidence in the initial guess was not so high or else a normal distribution would make more sense – also, I was lazy and this was easy)
– Assign a guess to different people to send in and commit to share the winnings with the floor
The goal of the strategy was to saturate the region with the correct number, with guesses, with those guesses spaced out enough enough to cover it, but close enough to reduce the chance of getting pipped. Also, due to uncertainty on how many colleagues would participate and not wanting a two-pass solution, I assumed a conservative number of participants in my scheme.
It turned out that the initial guess was extremely good, with the real number being only 5 off. So my strategy probably resulted in way too spread out guesses in hindsight.
What kind of questions can I expect for a front end web developer interview?
First time ever interviewing in web development as someone switching industries.
I don’t know the answer to this, but if you go to glassdoor and find companies with front end developer jobs, you can usually find interview reviews; these usually include questions they were asked, conversations they had, etc.
I hire front-end developers from time to time and can help, but would need some more details. Are you a 23yo fresh CS grad whose last job was barista? 48yo bootcamp grad who spent 20 years as an accountant and Excel wiz? What job are you applying for, in what kind of company, etc? Also, there’s a long ton of general software interviewing advice out there as well.
No CS degree, I just did a Udacity certification for front end web dev. Still youngish at 30, but I was doing design/marketing work before.
Just applying for a general front end web developer position in a medium sized Bay Area company.
Can’t speak to the Bay Area, where the rules are a little fuzzy due to the outrageous competition level, but generally speaking the market is a little overrun with entry-level front end devs because of bootcamps, so your main goal is demonstrating that you’re one of the good ones (where the bad ones are the people who are doing their best to look like a programmer, but don’t really like it and won’t excel at it). Some general advice would be: a) be willing to accept a worse job (lower pay, worse commute, less-sexy product area, etc) for your first job, because what will really make you marketable is 2 years of experience; b) the biggest failure mode for entry-level devs is losing interest and treating it like “just a job” once you get past the easy stage, so don’t skimp on telling them how much you love it and how you can’t believe it took you so long to get in to the field which is definitely your true calling in life, etc; c) if you haven’t mastered the basics of npm, git, and VS code (or their equivalents), do so, that’s expected for entry-level; d) the most marketable thing you can take in to the interview is a side project that you’ve been pushing a PR to every day or two for several months, because it shows that you are getting something out of this and are not just doing the bare minimum required to get a cushy job. (I know people bitch about this – “How dare employers expect me to work in my spare time” etc, but this is not something employers demand because they’re mean, this is something the market demands because most of the people you’re competing against for jobs really enjoy programming and do it as a hobby)
As for specific questions: they will probably ask some low-to-mid level technical questions about their main front-end framework (What’s a react component? What is jsx and how does it differ from javascript?). Some employers are happy to hire good programmers even if their experience is in a different language/stack, but I would imagine entry-level front-end in the Bay is competitive enough that in practice, React shops don’t hire people that did their bootcamp project in Angular and vice versa. I would expect some simple programming questions in JS. This might be done on a whiteboard, or on a laptop in front of the interviewer, or on a screensharing app during the phone screen. It varies a lot but often starts with something simple they expect you to do fairly quickly without problems (e.g. write a function that takes a string and returns true if it’s a palindrome) and then might try to test your depth with something harder (e.g. write a function that calls an API and uses the response to update a UI component using a promise). They will probably ask some questions to test your general understanding of how browsers work (What’s the DOM? What’s a viewport? How do you make a web app reactive?) They might also ask general questions about HTML/CSS (e.g. Why is it bad to use divs for everything? How do you use variables in CSS?) and front-end design principles (When should you use a modal? What are some pitfalls to avoid when implementing one?) and tools (what is transpiling? how does a website get deployed?). And they will also probably ask some general behavioral questions (Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker) which you can use whatever your last field was to answer.
Hope this helps. A lot of it will vary widely from company to company. Apply to everything and anything and get some interview experience under your belt, and remember that 90% of the interviews will be for jobs you weren’t going to get anyway, because “entry level” is often code for “we want to underpay a solid junior”. And to reiterate what I said above, a good side project is the most useful thing you can do, both for convincing employers to hire you and for actually getting better. Doesn’t matter if it’s just a webapp to organize your Magic cards, as long as you’re actually working hard on it and the hard work shows.
@sunnydestroy
Given your clarification, the company is probably going to worry about two things:
– your current ability and ability to learn
– how likely you are to leave (which is a bigger issue for inexperienced developers)
So you can expect the company to try to figure out whether it is worth investing in you or whether you will drop out, either due to lack of ability or lack of desire to continue.
So, to be sure I’m clear, what exactly is the policy on CW talk? I thought some of the threads had a little note in the body asking us to avoid it in those specifically, but I just read someone saying we should confine them to the fractional threads so we don’t scare off nonlocals, and the nonfractional thread in question doesn’t have the little note.
I’m not making any sort of claim about what the rule should be, I just want to be completely sure I know what it *is* (would suck to be banned).
Only .25, .5, .75 are CW-okay.
No CW in the integer threads. CW content is allowed in the fractional threads, but you’re still expected to abide by “true, kind, necessary, choose two”… whatever that means in a world where the political tribes have very different interpretations of all three of those things.
We only have one moderator, so it’s pretty easy. If you insist on the tribal lens, he’s grayish blue.
(but you’re right that some threads used to have little notes)
Most of the recent whole number (i.e.130) “Open Threads” have a note reading: “….please try to avoid hot-button political and social topics…”, while the fractional number “Hidden” Open Threads don’t have that note, though 131 didn’t have that note, so maybe “CW” was allowed, but the fractional threads are only one few days away so some of us just wait.
Regardless our host does say to try to be at least two of “true, kind, and necessary”.
Thanks! (Everyone!)
I really like the ‘kind, true, necessary’ rule, at least the way they’ve actually played out. Agree with Nornagest that they require some interpretation, and that differing tribal norms are likely to exacerbate this problem. (I do think that, even in the absence of tribal differences, we’d see some confusion due to differing individuals/mind designs, although I expect they’d be greatly reduced).
I think Scott’s original reason for it was to just have a thread that would be relatively devoid of the same arguments over and over. IIRC, the rule was originally “no race or gender discussion,” because that would reliably ignite argument, but it was then extended into “no culture war” to generalize it, where “culture war” is a thing that reliably generates the same arguments with a lot of heat and very little light. It also wasn’t originally to “avoid scaring new people;” until quite recently, the visible integer thread was CW allowed and the 0.5 thread was the CW banned one.
To take an example that doesn’t apply here to illustrate the point: If, say, we had a large group of commenters that were super into game consoles, video games would be “culture war” because when somebody posted “Hey, the new Halo is siiick!” you’d end up with a 70-post thread between the Xbots and the UnbeWiivers rehashing the same shit over and over with very few minds being changed.
One of the more baffling things I’ve repeatedly encountered: people who don’t want to do relatively high paying jobs (often much higher than their current job) because it’s a trade or involves moving. I can probably get you a job that pays $40-60k with benefits and room for promotion. You just need to be reasonably willing to learn, show up on time, and not have major personality issues. No experience required.
Now, you might be saying, “Wait, I’m a programmer at Schmoogle, why would I want to take that job?” And I’m not talking about you: I’m talking about the half of American households who make less than that. I would repeatedly see things like factory owners bussing in former waiters from major cities to train up. They’d go from making $8.25 to $25 an hour. The bus was never full. Several times I offered to put in a good word for someone who dropped out of college or was getting back on their feet or needed a new career. They almost always turned me down.
These people are turning down 2-3x their income either because they don’t like the job or because they don’t like having to move. That really baffles me. Normally I’d think the wages aren’t high enough but these are already pretty decent wages in low cost of living areas. I used to think it was because people associated certain professions with being a failure. But professional prestige surveys repeatedly show these professions are reasonably well respected (often more so than higher paying ones).
I’ve recently struck on a theory: it’s another pernicious effect of the increasing pillarization of America. Professions and areas have become culturally divided and people don’t want to leave a profession and area that belongs to their tribe. People would rather be an urban Democrat waiter than go to a smaller town, get paid three times as much, and have to deal with something less politically homogenous or culturally prestigious in their tribe.
Think about a white male religious factory worker in South Bend, Indiana. What are the chances he supports Mike Pence? Actually, it’s dramatically low. It’s about as likely as in Chicago. But that’s not what people think, is it?
Any thoughts? Does anyone have this problem solved?
I think “don’t like the job” and “don’t want to move” are separate issues, tbqh.
I’ve ranted quite a bit about people refusing to re-locate before and don’t want to go over all of it again, but I’m generally of the opinion that if people refuse to accept any trade-offs in life, they have no right to complain about sub-optimal results on one particular dimension.
In other words – if you aren’t lucky enough to be born in a place with great opportunities (that continue to last throughout your entire life), then you’re going to have to pick between “stay where you’re from” and “be able to easily and comfortably make a decent amount of money.” And if you pick the “stay” option I am under no moral obligation to help you or provide you with assistance/charity in any way.
I think you might be imagining larger moves than they actually are. Sometimes it’s a labor recruiter bringing people from California to Georgia, but more often it’s a few hours. Chicago to South Bend is two to three hours. There’s even a train that runs between the two cities (technically thirty minutes north of South Bend) regularly.
If it really was a simple distance issue, you would see a similar effect for moving from one side of Chicago to the other.
Note that this view is potentially in tension with support for restrictions on immigration. Surely if someone would willingly relocate to a higher-opportunity place, but can’t because of border controls, they are far less blameworthy than someone who could move but won’t, no?
The initial observation is also relevant to arguments about immigration for another reason. A lot of people seem to assume that, since things are better here than in many places elsewhere, if we had open immigration we would get tens of millions of people a year. The observation that people are often unwilling to move a short distance within a country in order to get a much better job suggests that many people in poor countries would be unwilling to make the more profitable but also much larger change of coming here.
It so happens I’ve been down that path – my family moved from Communist Poland to the Middle East in the early/mid 80s, so I think I can offer some comment on this.
Pretty much all the problems pointed out by others upthread were present, and then some: we were expats, for one, meaning that we had just as much in the way of rights as the locals were willing to give; we had no command of the local language (Arabic) and only some command of English, we had no fallback assets to speak of (what little we had in Poland had pretty much no transferable value) and the Polish intermediary agency that my father was required to work with took 60% of his pay in commission.
Given all of this, why on in the world would we have made such a journey?
Elementary: whatever problems moving to the Middle East had were laughable compared to the situation in post-martial law Poland, which was a right shithole. The fact that the aforementioned (government) intermediary was involved made the employment issue fairly certain and that was all we really cared about at the time.
The point of the above is that it’s very much a matter of gradient. If Poland wasn’t restricting exit at the time, do you think millions of Poles wouldn’t have been scrambling for greener pastures elsewhere? Hell yeah, they would’ve and the last one out would’ve turned the lights off, as we say ’round these parts. One of my college friends actually did escape and make his way to the US at around that time (via refugee camps in Western Europe IIRC).
The same applies on an individual level. When Poland joined the EU and the UK opened its borders to Poles, do you think the best and brightest were the first on the bus to Victoria Station? Hardly! A large part of the first wave of EU-related emigration was by people who’d had no luck here. Living in London six years later I still ran into some of them.
When you’ve got nothing to lose, difficult choices suddenly stop being so difficult.
I don’t find it surprising that people don’t want to move. It takes time and effort to build up a social support structure in your area. Friends and family are a big part of our lives and aren’t usually easier to replace than employment. Plus, you get into habits, have your favorite park or restaurant, have nostalgia for the neighborhoods.
I think a lot of people are not plugged into their local community, but those who are probably find significant value in it. That said, if you’re actually offering a job in Indiana, I might have to look up the housing market there.
See my comment above: it’s usually only moving a few hours away. Sure, they don’t get to go to that restaurant all the time. But if you friends won’t meet with you once a week or you won’t drive a few hours, the friendship isn’t all that strong.
The housing market is great, by the way. Lots of land and all that. Significantly lower cost of living. You can easily buy a full-size home in a nice area for the rent of a one bedroom apartment in a major city.
Moving also isn’t free (or necessarily fast). You have to break your current lease, find a new place in the new city (and apply, and hope they have availability soon), put down probably a month’s rent deposit plus the actual first month’s rent, then either pay to have all your stuff moved, recruit people to help you move it (still have to pay for a truck), or get rid of it and buy all new stuff once you’re there.
The company looking to hire you may or may not offer assistance with any of the above.
I’ve been hearing lately about companies (not all, of course) offering to help with stuff like that. But yes, the lower you are socioeconomically, and the less certain the job is, the more serious this is. Actually, I believe someone in a recent thread said saving up for all that took several years?
I feel like you have to be pretty close to paycheck-paycheck for it to take years (although an uncomfortably high number of people do live that way, including me occasionally) but it definitely isn’t something that can be pulled together on short notice.
I’m sure this has been discussed here as well, but it kind of creates a rent trap where the rent at your place goes up so much that you really need to move, but you can’t afford the up-front costs to do so and end up stuck paying way too much for rent.
Sorry if this is changing topic to grind a culture war axe, but as it’s something I’ve been thinking of in my private life I’d like to share.
I suspect that this contributes to the gender wage gap. I’ve moved twice for jobs with more money (once internationally), having to renew my social circle and losing some great colleague-friends.
My girlfriend doesn’t want to change her low-paying job, because she’s scared she might not like the new one, and she likes her colleagues. I earn more than her, and there is significant flow from my wallet to hers. Her job is also far enough away from my job that moving together would be impractical.
I respect her choice of safe and happy work environment over money, but sometimes I feel a little resentment at having to subsidise it, particularly because it’s something she doesn’t seem to appreciate.
This sounds more of a girlfriend issue than a job issue! I don’t think her making more money would solve that for you….
It’s not really a big deal between us.
I just think it represents a larger pattern of men being more willing to sacrifice less tangible benefits for higher pay, and that being something that’s generally not recognised.
There are substantial costs to moving–you have to pack up and sell your house, move your kids from their current schools where they’re happy and have friends to new schools, leave your neighborhood and church and friends, and adapt to a new place. There are times when this is worth doing, but in many cases, a small pay increase isn’t worth it.
Additional factors that matter here:
a. You may have a good setup w.r.t. babysitting/childcare in your current environment that wouldn’t be available if you moved–say, dropping the kids off with your mom while you’re at work.
b. You may have family obligations that make it extra-hard to move–say, you’re taking care of your aging father, doing stuff around the house for him, bringing him over to dinner most nights so you know he gets a hot meal every day, etc. Leaving may just mean he dies or ends up in a nursing home.
c. You may not expect the job to last all that long. If this is a boom job and there’s a substantial chance it will go away in a year or two, paying all those costs may not be worth it.
d. You may be underwater on your mortgage. In that case, you’ll have to come up with a big chunk of cash to be able to move out of your house, or you’ll end up in foreclosure. This can also be true if you’ve got lots of deferred maintenance on your house that you’ll have to catch up on to make it saleable.
As with most other cases, I think it’s easy to assume you know what’s in a stranger’s interest better than he does, but you’re probably wrong to think that.
Full-time daycare is less than the pay increase you’d be getting. Also, some offer it as a perk.
Or he could move with you a few hours to the east and live in your new, much bigger house. Or you could rent him a cheap little apartment near the hospital for a few hundred a month.
Not boom jobs. Some of these workplaces are over a century old.
This is a valid but very specific scenario. Besides, statistically most people making minimum wage are renting.
Sure. What I want to know is the reasoning. I fully accept it’s there and valid. I just don’t understand it.
Not that much less, and at that point you’re basically moving for a small increase in disposable income and the privilege(?) of using some full-time daycare center instead of whatever you had been doing before. Is that worth it?
The pay you mentioned is not enough to afford a primary residence plus an apartment. As far as moving him in with you, you may want to have your dad nearby but still prefer he not actually live with you.
Which means they have to break their lease, and come up with first month’s rent + deposit in order to move.
I feel like you have a decent, valid point but you are massively overstating the case, ignoring or hand-waving fairly obvious potential roadblocks, and weakening your position in the process.
Entirely possible. I think you’re overestimating prices slightly (they’re all lower) but I take your point.
Some of the problems mentioned are ones less likely for low income people, who seem to be the ones being discussed. They are unlikely to own a home. They probably don’t have a lot of stuff to move.
They also face higher barriers to move tho.
@albatross11
You forgot one of the most important in modern society:
e. Your partner already has a job locally and would lose it by moving with you.
I’m inclined to say one thing (which I’ll say below) but first I think you’d need to know more about the people who are turning down the higher-paid work. Like, maybe it’s a cultural/tribe thing, but here are some other things it could be (and it likely isn’t just one thing):
– They don’t want to leave their friends and support network, on whom they genuinely rely
– They don’t like the hours/work-life balance
– They have a very negative mental model of what that higher-paid job is like
– They instinctively don’t believe they are capable/qualified to work a job that pays that much
– They’re just not very capable in reality. They don’t show up on time, they’re not willing to learn, they have major personality issues — and they know it.
– Etc.
If it’s actually your job to try and get jobs for those people, I suggest you do more research with them to find out what the obstacles are.
My inclination that I mentioned earlier: it’s a prestige/glamor thing. “Eww, work in a factory? Like with a hair net and stuff? Yuck.”
Valid, though I imagine they could still keep in touch and drive a few hours to see them.
These are mostly union style, forty hours a week or overtime jobs.
Possible.
Possible.
There was a study done (in Indiana, admittedly) and it was found about 2-10% of people in a given community were disqualified due to this sort of thing. The average was about 5%.
I thought that too. But at what point do you just decide that an extra $20k and 2,000 square feet in your apartment and your own yard are worth not being prestigious?
Not to nitpick, but I think you’re underestimating this one. A support network can’t live hours away, so at best this can only be mitigated. It’s especially serious if it’s family you’re relying on, like your parents to watch the kids regularly, because you don’t have an alternative like making new parents.
No, you’re right. Plumber pointed out I was being dismissive further down thread and I think he’s right.
Yeah. Friends who regularly drive hours to see each other is something that exists, and no doubt nice to have, but it isn’t common (those end up being the friends you see once a twice a year when one of you or the other is “in town” or whatever).
Edit: Credit to Erusian for backing off that one a little, I posted this before seeing the post directly above mine.
Those might just sound like extra responsibilities to some people.
Well, you can have a small apartment if you want it. Having extra money might entail extra responsibility but seems a pretty unvarnished good.
I recall being unable to find an apartment to rent in the Colorado town where my new job was located. I wound up in a rented townhouse in the nearest real city, in spite of a strong preference for short commutes.
I think it probably wasn’t as simple as “there are no apartments”, and I believe I had pets at the time, which always makes it harder to find rentals. But basically there wasn’t anything available locally, short of buying a too-big-for-me suburban house.
Could it be zoning laws? I know a lot of small towns try to pass zoning laws to prevent apartments.
OT: where could I find listings of these jobs?
Where’s the job? You say “no experience necessary”, but what’s their resume need to look like otherwise?
Mostly either small cities or areas near larger cities but not themselves super urban. You do occasionally get them in company towns or middle of nowhere but it’s not super common.
No violent felons, no drug convictions unless you’ve got strong evidence you’re clean, graduated high school or have a good excuse as to why they didn’t (grades don’t matter really unless you flunked every subject or something like that). They hired people right out of high school, waiters, in at least three cases I know of a factory owner took a literal homeless person and trained them up. This is not rocket science: you’re going to be packing chicken or quality checking candy or sewing something. They want someone who can do that and won’t give them headaches. Long term you might get a degree in operating machinery or move up to management.
If you have previous experience in this line of work, they’ll probably give you a small signing bonus, extra hourly, and might even send you straight to some former higher training. People who are known to be good get poached pretty regularly.
Well if college-educated people with long work gaps are eligible, I’m interested.
( lamaistrechatte at yahoo dot commie )
Are you possibly underestimating the number of people with drug convictions, or who don’t have drug convictions but use drugs recreationally and aren’t willing to give them up in order to move hours away and start a new job?
No. We looked into that pretty thoroughly. The number of people with drug convictions was obviously a known quantity. Likewise, we had business owners self-reporting how many people they turned away for being potential druggies (which, if anything, would be higher than reality since it’s socially acceptable to turn someone down).
As to drug availability, we had fairly normal drug use rates. We actually had lower prices: we were on more general trade routes and dealers would prefer to sell into nearby towns for a variety of reasons.
Lot’s of recreational drug users would not be rejected for being potential druggies because they don’t come off as druggies, but some of those people still might decline to pursue jobs that would necessitate that they quit using (if there are pre-employment drug screens, or even worse random testing once employed).
Based on your description of the people you’re talking about, I would suspect that your pool of candidates has a higher rate of drug use than the overall population in the area.
This is not rocket science: you’re going to be packing chicken or quality checking candy or sewing something
Ah, this might be where some of the problem lies. You say to someone “I can get you a job doing industrial sewing”, they’re automatically associating that with “sweatshop”, not “decent paying wages in factory that doesn’t actually chain the doors shut so you’ll die in a fire”. Same with packing chicken – people may think of it as working in a slaughterhouse or that it’s dirty, cold and tedious work involving a lot of standing on your feet (years and years back, my First Real Job was working on the packing line in a fish factory and the filleting work was something I was glad I wasn’t doing – wet and cold with all the water and ice, the really sharp knives meaning constant nicks and cuts, and of course all the fish guts. The packing line still meant standing on your feet all day, but it was clean and warm and the fish were nice little fillets or nuggets or whatever).
Also, maybe some of the people have had similar “standing on your feet on the assembly line all day” jobs, and are going “yeah the money is nice, but the swollen legs, back pains, joint pains and the rest of it are not worth it, I’m not twenty anymore”.
I assume most waiters aren’t planning to work as such indefinitely (e.g. they’re waiting to get their big break as authors).
Probably. But at some point, wouldn’t they figure out they’re not even going to be the next Stephanie Meyer, let alone Robert Frost?
Everyone’s too set on the road less taken.
At that point they do switch jobs — there aren’t many 70 year olds in that position so the 25 year olds who were must have changed somehow.
Most of my peers that I grew up with left the area because of ever rising rents, and I’ve been down to San Jose (I suffered a decade working in and near there), and out to “There be Dragons”, and the water tastes off, the air smells funny, my eyes start to itch, my sense of direction is askew, and/or the weather can go from below freezing to too damn hot in less than a day,
No thanks!
Experience has taught me that the further from my birthplace in Oakland, California a place is the more “wrong” it will feel.
In my ideal economy/society only the exceptionally adventurous/ambitious would feel the call to “go seek their fortune”, the rest of us could comfortably stay near where we’re born and have a family and a good home, instead of all this migration.
Huh. Fair enough. I suppose I’ve always been rather mobile (even as a child I moved around a lot) so the idea of moving from (say) Oakland to San Jose seems trivial to me. I suppose I was being too dismissive of the preference. Thanks for the perspective.
@Erusian,
All that said, while I really hate moving, if what you said was true, and I had known about the opportunity 30 years ago, and, somehow had the resources to apply, and move, it sounds attractive.
But, I had no idea that such opportunities were available, and I certainly didn’t have enough resources to take advantage of such an opportunity until I already had a steady job, and a wife and sons I wouldn’t want to uproot.
It seems to me an effective “workforce development”/”social welfare” program could consist of transportation and temporary housing to get people into these opportunities, as well as publicising them.
The informational bit is valid. There’s an entire profession of labor recruiters. Maybe they’re just not very good at their job.
As for the social welfare bit, the usual set up is they had agreed to a (paid) training period. That was guaranteed. If they passed, they got a long term job. If they didn’t, they’d still get the money but have to either apply to a new factory or go home. References for cheap housing and the like were available. Places fifteen to twenty minutes away from the factory could be rented for about 25% of the training wage.
Basically, if you were bussed in the procedure was: you got off the bus at the factory, you signed your contract (often with some small token like a gift bag), and got told who was training you and when/where. They’d sometimes give you a modest signing bonus. There would be a bunch of people hanging around trying to sell you stuff, including apartments, that you had to walk past to get anywhere. (The factories sometimes tried to stop this but they’d just move further out.) While it wasn’t standard, I saw about a dozen of the savvier folk negotiate a lease that would end if they didn’t make it through training. I saw many buildings agree to give two weeks or one month free (conveniently lining up their first rent payment with their first paycheck). Deposit was usually a token amount.
You’d usually be starting Monday of next week, so you had 3-7 days of just hanging around with a little money in your pocket to get oriented. All of the factory management were of the opinion that most of them paid rent, bought cheap furniture and some basic food, and spent the rest at bars. There was a repeated legend (that I never confirmed) about some guy who used it to buy lotto tickets, struck it rich, and left back home with several million dollars.
@Erusian,
I’d definitely say that either labor recruiters are terrible at their jobs, or I was particularly dense, as I hadn’t the slightest idea of any such opportunities when I was young and very desperate.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it was the former. Not at all.
Well, this bit seems like it might answer your initial question for you.
Give up what you have now on the promise that maybe you will have a good job later. Absent some sort of personal connection to people already working there, which will allow them to more accurately judge how good the opportunity is, people are going to be very reluctant to let go of the “one in the hand” to reach for “two in the bush”.
Actively looking for, and paying for, recommendations from existing workers might get you farther.
Of course, if the job is also mind-numbingly awful, this might not work.
Pass rates were usually over 70%. If you included people who got failed out and went to another factory, it went up close to 90%.
@Erusian:
I am beginning to think you don’t want to actually understand.
It’s all well and good for you to say that people passed. That isn’t the issue.
You want people to trust you? Why on Earth would they do that?
I am trying to understand but I don’t take your point. I took it as that people might move and not get a job. As I said, something like 90% of them did and those that didn’t got paid above their previous wages for a few months while it didn’t work out.
They’d trust me to what? (Actually, it’s not me it’s the employers.) Are you saying people go on Indeed.com and see jobs and narrow their eyes and go, “Pff, everyone knows nobody hires employees anymore. What a scam!”
If you mean trust the recruiters, what exactly is their angle to lie here? These people tell you there’s an open job, arrange everything, negotiate an offer with you, pay for a bus ticket, and send you down to a factory where you sign a legally binding contract and… what. Someone jumps out and goes, “YOU GOT PUNKED SON. YOU THINK FACTORIES EXIST ANYMORE!? HOW STUUUUUPID!”
Or it could be the nice gentleman with documents from a company that you can find online in a town that really exists and is on Google maps might… you know, need workers.
There are a lot of deeply, deeply terrible jobs that pay $12/hr. A job that pays twice that with no salient downsides is… not impossible, but not the way I’d bet, either. MLM jobs sound great when you listen to the person recruiting for them too, y’know? I’m not saying you’re a liar, but I’m not surprised people are wary either.
@Erusian
Actually that is a problem.
It was before the internet was common, but many “Help Wanted” ads did prove to be scams or when genuine the work proved dangerous and/or extremely painful.
In my area getting work on fishing boats in Alaska was publicized, well-known to be lucrative, and equally known to be very hard and life risking.
I’m surprised the recruiters aren’t partnering with local high schools and community colleges as “feeders”.
Seems a natural fit.
@Erusian:
You are asking people to:
– quit their existing job when local jobs may be hard to find
– get out of their existing lease when securing a lease may be a time intensive process
– move to a town where people are trying to hustle you as you get off the bus
– spend all of their resources securing local accommodations when they have no knowledge of the housing market there
– AND, you are telling them there is no guarantee of a job.
Most of the people on the low end of the wage scale have had bosses, at some point, that they felt blatantly cheated them. Whether it’s shorting them on hours, firing them and not paying their last wages, not paying them the wage they were promised when hired, etc.
The whole setup screams “get them in a vulnerable position where they don’t have options.” They are used to people trying to do that. It’s what they have come to expect as a very real possibility.
So I don’t really see it as a surprise the factory might struggle to attract people with this approach.
As something of a side note, your stats don’t make much sense. If 70% get a job at the first factory, and 20% fail the first time but get job in a different factory, that means a full 67% of the workers who fail the first succeed at the second.
If the first factory is so desperate for people, they find it so hard to recruit, why aren’t they the ones giving that second chance? They already have this person in the door, and they have about as good a chance of converting them to an employee as a brand new guy. Why are they leaving the proverbial $20 on the sidewalk?
If the first factory is so desperate for people, they find it so hard to recruit, why aren’t they the ones giving that second chance? They already have this person in the door, and they have about as good a chance of converting them to an employee as a brand new guy. Why are they leaving the proverbial $20 on the sidewalk?
While I agree with you about the “This sounds too effin’ good to be true” element, to be fair to Erusian if factory A is looking for industrial sewing machine operators, some of the people might not be what they need (not able to churn out piecework at the rate required even after training) but could do better in factory B which wants people on packing lines packing chickens.
Though this ad from Disney World looking for industrial sewing sounds so appealing – might be asked to do double shifts, full-time is seven days a week, climbing ladders and working “in various elevations”, standing all shift – yeah, even with excellent pay that’s not going to appeal to some people (and even those who do take it up might not stick it out for more than a year or two).
@Deiseach:
That’s a fair point, but:
a) factories frequently have different kinds of jobs requiring different skills, and,
b) that makes the story from the workers perspective even worse. “I came for for job in sewing, but now I am stuck butchering chickens” is just the kind of thing one fears.
Also, minor nit, but these aren’t piecework jobs as described, but carry an hourly wage.
They did with local high schools. And there was one high school in a very poor neighborhood in Chicago where a local activist partnered with them. But there weren’t enough people, plus some people have other preferences or better opportunities.
To be clear, my claim wasn’t that there were no salient downsides. The work is repetitive and boring. It can be stressful physically (though much less than working in a warehouse, for example). Its pay is much better than most jobs for a comparable labor pool but it is not especially high paying overall. And you’re not going to be living in some hip, fun place.
My question isn’t why anyone would ever turn these people down. My question is why these people are so desperate for labor. Every job is a bundle of good and bad. These jobs have the definite benefit of full benefits, guaranteed hours, and high pay in low cost of living areas. They’re also stable and not customer facing. People can do better but they can do a lot worse.
Disney is known for its bad industrial conditions. They also tend to underpay.
Most of the industrial sewing operations I knew involved sitting in front of a sewing machine all day making articles of clothing or operating a larger machine that pumped out shirts or things along those lines. For example, I knew one factory that finished military uniforms: sewed on rank patches, name patches, all that. Your job would be to sit there, open a package with the right jacket size, take out the right patches, sew them on, then send it down the line on a conveyor belt. It was dull but not especially stressful.
Yes, that’s exactly correct. It was actually higher than 67%.
To clarify completely: there was a training program set up by agreement of the local unions and business association. 70% of people passed in their first factory (though sometimes they did shift to other jobs). Of the remaining 30%, about 70% of them found work in another factory in the same area. The remaining 10% mostly did things like get into fights with their coworkers or come to work high or never showed up on time.
Everyone got at least a second chance unless they did something completely disqualifying. Most common was showing up to work high or drunk, which is a huge insurance liability and in some cases illegal to not fire them.
One woman got placed five times before she settled in to a sewing job.
Yup, particularly young people. Chicago is a hip, happening city with lots of cool stuff. South Bend has 100,000 people. And it’s in Indiana. What is there to do in Indiana?
You’re also trivializing the distances. I barely see friends that live in downtown Chicago, and I live in the suburbs. I barely see friends that live in the northern suburbs, near Wisconsin, because quite frankly it’s a damn hike. Most of the people I see live within 20 minutes of me.
Now, me, I’ll go wherever there is money, and low taxes.
Well, these days: become Vice President and maybe President. South Bend is tiny but the same problem existed near Indianapolis (which is a much larger city).
But fair point on trivializing distances.
Honestly Indianapolis isn’t that exciting either. Not trying to rain on your parade, I wouldn’t mind living there, but a lot of folk, especially young folk, won’t find it exciting.
And, again, you’re right: urbane blue tribers don’t want to live with what they perceive as red necks.
Indianapolis is kind of the worst of both worlds. Big enough not to appeal to people who like smaller cities, but without a lot of the things lifestyle-wise that people attracted to big cities are interested in. I can’t necessarily think of a reason I would rather live in Indy over say…Columbus, OH or Raleigh, NC (both much smaller) for instance.
Unless you’re a big Colts fan or love NASCAR.
Man, I’m sick of all the ragging on Indianapolis.
I was there for a summer on an internship and loved it. Big enough to have everything I wanted, but without the big city hassles (and without the big city prices).
Of course, I was eventually able to get to Texas, which was bigger and more spread out and cheaper. But I’d take Indianapolis over NY, Chicago, Boston, California, etc. any day.
That probably didn’t come out right.
I didn’t mean “worst of both worlds to live in” I meant “worst of both worlds for attracting people”. Indy is fine, I have family there and have been several times. I’m not saying there is nothing attractive about living there (obviously there is or it would be empty), just trying to explain why it doesn’t seem to frequently appear at the top of peoples “I’d love to live in [X] city” lists.
Was not intended to come off as ragging on Indianapolis.
In my observation the people most willing to move to “boring” places are couples with young kids that don’t live near close relatives.
Unmarried people tend to want to live near lots of other unmarried people. Married couples without kids are likely to be using the amenities of a “fun” city. Parents of young kids that live near close relatives often rely on them for free babysitting and are reluctant to give that up. Parents of older kids generally don’t want to pull those kids away from their friends.
Parents of young kids without nearby close relatives don’t have time to do anything fun, so they might as well move somewhere where they can not being doing anything but with more money.
Well-put about the young kids and unfortunate, because then you are also teaching your young kids thwr having kids sucks.
I would consider two income households limiting someone’s ability to relocate. It’s tough to find two new jobs in the same place at the same time. If you relocate for a higher wage means that your spouse is now unemployed, you’re likely worse off than before.
There’s no gender requirement and the preference, if anything, skews towards women. They will happily take men and women.
??? Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything having to do with gender.
My point was that if you have a low paying job, and your spouse (gender non-specific) has a higher paying (breadwinner) job, then you are unlikely to choose to relocate.
My point is that both spouses could find a new job.
@Erusian: That’s great! Let me tell my husband. 😛
I don’t know much about factory work but my dad was an HVAC mechanic for most of his working life and as much as I respect him I wouldn’t ever consider doing the same.
Skilled tradesmen like plumbers, carpenters, electricians, HVAC, etc can make solid money even without advanced degrees. In theory, you could support a family on that income. In practice, all that money you earn will go straight to alimony and child support since even a woman who dropped out of college herself will look down on you for doing manual labor and eventually divorce you. A college degree and an office job might pay less but it’s less embarrassing for your wife to tell to her girlfriends and in our family court system that counts for a lot.
Assuming that you can find a loyal wife, there’s another problem in the form of career advancement or the lack thereof. It doesn’t seem like there’s much room to climb the ladder: you can gain seniority within your job but it doesn’t seem like many tradesmen make it into management.
Less of this please. The content is empirically untrue and it smells vaguely of misogyny or nihilism, and both are miserable.
No.
If you want to make an argument or present any form of evidence that I’m wrong, please do so. But this sort of content-free pointing and shrieking is the thing we need less of around here.
If this counts as pointing and shrieking I have no idea what your standards for friendly discourse are. From The Nybbler’s link, the highest-rate professions for divorce in the US are seeing a divorce rate of ~50%, closer to ~38% for the professions you’re describing. 1 in 3 is a long way from inevitable, and that’s assuming that ALL of those divorces are a result of the woman “look[ing] down on you for doing manual labor.” I’d be happy to bet that not more than 50% (extremely generously) have that as a contributing factor.
Your statement is factually incorrect and phrased disparagingly. “Neither true nor kind” is supposed to be disqualifying, even if you can make a case for necessary. Recalibrate.
I agree with hoopyfreud. If you were honestly surprised that post would be received as outright trolling, well, now you know.
+1 to the above two, and thank you for making the points I was trying to make, but allowed myself to get carried away with. This kind of thing is poison, and you’ve been throwing it into several posts recently, with no attempt at justification or evidence (making your demand for such from your respondents even more silly). Please stop.
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@Hoopyfreud,
I’d say about half of my co-workers over 40 years old have been divorced, and my wife has personally said to me “Can you please look less working class when you come home!?”, so I suspect a kernel of truth to what @Nabil ad Dajjal wrote, my mother certainly divorced my blue collar Dad and then married a man who had more education but not more income than my Dad.
There’s definitely something to this, part of the broader societal trends of devaluing labor and over-valuing secondary education. It’s a real problem and I don’t have a clue what the solution is.
There’s sure as hell a lot of kids in my university who can barely boil water, much less install a faucet, and I think among some of them there’s a mostly unspoken assumption that being able to do things with your hands is at best a quaint affectation, and perhaps a sign of something worse.
Is this a thing? Because I’m just going to thank my lucky stars that I’m in a whitish-collar field where doing things with your hands makes you cool and/or sexy. The viewpoint described above is like, the most bothersomely posh attitude I can think of.
Purely anecdata: I’ve noticed it quite a bit among wealthy kids, particularly Chinese kids here for school. I’ve talked to some of them about doing renovation work on my dad’s house, and they look at me like I’m an alien.
I’m trying to think if I’ve seen this exact thing among non-immigrants, and I’m not sure off the top of my head. But it’s definitely a thing I noticed both in China and Japan.
@Enkidum
I’d expect the there are selection effects when looking at foreign students here for school, in thst they are much better off in their own countries than the average American college student is in the US.
I think of cooking, which is a practical hands-on activity, as positive status for high status women. Consider all the expensive cooking gear for sale in upper class mall stores.
Maybe it’s different subgroups, but I make jewelry and furniture and cook, and have never had anyone say anything suggesting that any of that is incompatible with being a university professor. My father and uncle did carpentry as a hobby.
I don’t think “woking class” as a turnoff to women is in the working with hands part or dressing in messy clothes.
It might be about attitudes toward money for example – patterns of cheapness or spendjng contrary to what she expects or was raised to think as proper.
It might be certain cultural aspects – e.g., crude language, crude jokes, low-brow topics of discussion – which she had never been around and finds uncomfortable, if not downright bigoted or gross (especially with low-grade non-PC-ness).
Some of it might be in embarrassment before friends or family – an issue when marrying outside of one’s cultural circle generally, be it religious, economic, or ethnic. The same woman will find it attractive if her professor husband csn fix the car himself but won’t date a mechanic.
> I’ve talked to some of them about doing renovation work on my dad’s house, and they look at me like I’m an alien.
FWIW, when I was in college (equivalent to associates-degree) in the Toronto area (major metro area) in Canada, I would occasionally mention about some of the home renovation work I’d previously done with my family.
One of my instructors (I think he had a BA) mentioned that he and his wife were getting a house built. I asked if they were doing any work themselves or actively supervising the work being done. I was told “we don’t have barn raisings down here”.
So it’s not limited to the US, to immigrants, or to the wealthy.
Women already exceed men in college graduation. Which means that for all blue collar worker to marry, some of them would have to marry a college educated woman. Women so far seem to prefer staying single than marrying less educated men.
So even if the man earns the same or more, the marginal blue-collar worker will have difficulty finding a wife that is acceptable to him (a woman of his age or younger, no drugs, no kids, and willing to settle down).
@ana53294,
As one data point, I’m a plumber without a college diploma, my wife has a University diploma and a few years of law school.
Hmm, is this really true? I can imagine a woman thinking a guy who digs ditches or works on an assembly line is just a meathead, but is this really true of skilled blue collar work? It has been my impression that skilled blue collar had a better reputation than your average corporate pencil pusher. Yes, a doctor or a lawyer has a better reputation, but I didn’t think that was the case for a bureaucrat. And I sometimes hear of women looking for men who can fix things around the house, which is more likely of a tradesman than a pencil pusher. I say this as a pencil pusher myself, who isn’t much use in fixing things.
@Mark V Anderson,
No, my wife still pretty much regards me as a meathead, but I suspect that most wives regard their husbands as such by the third year of cohabitation at the latest, judging by fellow husbands tales (they must have a hidden guideline manual on how to treat us, ’cause the similarities are too striking!).
As for “fixing things around the house”, that’s only impressed her when we were courting, afterwards it’s expected.
Yeah, my Mom has a degree and my Dad is a blue-collar guy, but that’s one data point. As alternative data point, almost all of my young urban professional colleagues have married other young urban professionals. I think the biggest discrepancy is one girl who married a fitness instructor, but the fitness instructor works at East Bank Club, which is basically a luxury gym.
I’ll try to put this in a way Mom would put it: good little girls want to be with good little boys, and good little boys work in offices or other clean places, and have titles like “engineer” or “architect” or “doctor.”
There are obviously exceptions, and this isn’t even a strong rule, and there are selection effects, but Nabil is directionally correct. And since it’s my life (or my son’s life), I’d be remiss not to value office jobs. Particularly since divorce is a huge
risk.
If he’s suited for an office job, that is.
This thread was more about people who are not suited for such things.
Yeah I don’t know a single university-educated person of under 50 who married someone who isn’t also university-educated. Given that the majority of 50-year-olds don’t have university degrees, this is a pretty massive selection effect.
I can understand the broad reasons behind this – of course you’re likely to want to marry someone with common interests, from the same tribe, etc. And university education is a pretty good indicator of all that. But the extreme rarity of this happening is worrying to me.
@Enkidum
It’s a great reduction in social mobility and wealth transfer of/to poor women.
As it turns out, there’s data on this.
Unfortunately this particular set fails to distinguish between men and women. It doesn’t look so good for the skilled trades.
I’d assume that the trades I mostly think of (plumbing, electrical, carpentry, construction) are >80% men at least. So yeah, it’s tough being a skilled working class guy (although I’d assume that there’s strong correlations between salary, skill level, and staying married).
@Enkidum,
Just judging by former co-workers the usual pattern is “Guy gets a bit more money, buys house big enough for a family that’s far enough away to “afford”, spends a lot more time commuting and working overtime, wife seldom see’s him when he’s awake so she divorces him”.
The old journeyman would tell us apprentices “If it looks like your about to come home earlier than usual, call ahead so Sancho can get out first, that may save your marriage” (“Sancho” being a personification of every wife’s lover)
Am I missing something in that link? I didn’t see any tradespeople on any of the charts, high or low divorce. It looked to me just that conservative professions such as actuary have lower divorce rates, and go getter professions like gaming managers have higher rates. I would think that tradesmen would be about in the middle of conservatism, and so probably divorce also. I think it’s just about the type of person that has these professions, no causation involved.
Average divorce rate by profession table. I would think most trades fall into “Construction and Extraction” and “Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers”.
Which I’ll point out are better than the worst category:
“Office and Administrative Support.”
This is partly because many of them prefer to stick to their trade. We had an entire program to help older tradespeople transition and it was very successful. As for the factory, if you’re competent it’s very normal for the factory to send you off for training (something like a college polytechnic degree to operate machinery) and then maybe again for management. It’s very normal to work your way up off the shop floor. It’s highly preferred. Now, whether you can get into general management depends more on the company but your immediate boss who runs your facility probably worked their way up.
I know a lot of people have brought up this point but: You are underestimating what a pain in the ass even a relatively short move is (break lease or sell house, buy new place or have to put down security deposit, possibly moving kids, possibly not being able to take care of aging parents, loss of social networks, moving costs).
How much physical strength do these jobs require? In what kind of physical condition does the worker have to be?
With respect to drug testing, have the companies considered not caring what substances their employees put in their bodies during their off-hours, as long as they don’t show up to work high or stoned or for that matter drunk?
Agreed. It’s possible that it is a net positive, but I suspect a lot of businesses are missing out on quality employees with various drug testing policies (in many cases their hands are at least partially forced by insurance, I suspect). Years ago when I was a regular smoker it was one of the first things I looked for in job postings (admittedly I was in a position where I could afford to be choosy).
Not much physical strength. They do have to be able-bodied and it often involves moving and standing a fair amount. I suspect it would be less strenuous than something like being a server but certainly would require someone who could actively move about. Dexterity is definitely more important than raw strength.
Some have. It helps but not a ton. More to the point, a lot of them are required to because of various government/insurance/whatever pressures. If there’s a workplace accident and someone has something in their system (even if they weren’t actively high), they can have huge issues. The people who’ve relaxed standards are mostly working in industries with much less heavy machinery. People working with food or heavy machinery mostly can’t.
This is, by the way, a knock-on effect of regulation. If marijuana were completely legal, evidence that they smoked it the night before and were completely competent at the time would be fine. That’s the case with alcohol. But if it’s illegal, then they are dead in the water if even a small trace is found.
I wonder if you are really acknowledging how big of a risk moving is if you are poor/very poor, or how big of a risk it at least seems. Let’s take me as an example:
I have no money. Literally. I have less than $20. I can’t move unless I strap all my stuff to my back.Let’s say I get together, what, $1,000? That’s not enough to move my stuff. That’s not enough to get into a place. Let’s pretend I get, say, a couple grand, four grand, something like that. I’ve now spent it all to get there and into an apartment, with maybe a little margin. Now I’m fine unless something goes wrong.
What if I get fired or the job isn’t as represented? I’ve been fired before. I’ve found jobs to be lies many times. Now I’m broke or nearly so and I just moved. I can’t move again. I don’t know anybody in your local job market, and depending on the economy of where you are there might not be any other decent jobs to have. I’m screwed.
Locally, to a small extent, I have a support network; if my shitty car breaks down, I know a guy local to me with tow straps. If I need emergency stitches, I have people who would theoretically care about me enough to help me with that. Some of that support would follow me, some of it wouldn’t. I at least don’t have nearly as much. If you’ve been living on the brink of disaster for decades, giving up all your support structure is terrifying.
I’m intellectually aware there are good jobs out there and I might eventually get into one; too many people have told me so for it to be impossible. But the reality of being the kind of person who has already been roped into the low-income-unless-you-get-certain-kinds-of-paper-and-probably-still-then group is that most jobs that look good are scams; most jobs that pay well lie about the pay, the hours, the morality of the work or any combination of the lot.
So taking all my whining into account (I know it’s whiny, sorry) if you say “Hey! Commit all your resources to come to this town! Abandon the structure that has kept you barely afloat! I promise this is a good job that pays well!” it sounds an awful lot like me slitting my own throat. It still sounds like that even though I know, intellectually, that you probably have that job and it’s probably how you describe.
OT: I have some online grunt work I need done. All it requires is a knowledge of English (other languages help), an internet connection, basic excel skills, and the ability to take instruction/meet deadlines/basic work skills. Basically internet research and data entry. It’s not glamorous or engaging or regular or high paying. But if earning a few hundred dollars would help I’m happy to throw it your way.
Firstly, please don’t apologize. I asked a question and it was a question. You are actually exactly the type of person I wanted to hear from.
As to the rest, fair point. One thing I’ve learned from quite a few people here is that even though they acknowledge this sounds pretty non-risky, they’ve learned to be extremely risk-averse. That, along with people strongly preferring not to move due to local connections, seems to be the main answer. Next thread I might ask how that could be solved. If people have a preference that’s one thing but people not being able to take even rudimentary risks is another.
When I was unemployed at the beginning of last year I did a combination of manual web scraping, data entry, and light excel work on a contract basis for $40/hour. The company I was doing it for was thrilled to have me for that price and I was happy to have some money coming in. But they had hired other people before and after me didn’t do a very good job–they weren’t careful or diligent enough, or they couldn’t or wouldn’t figure out some fairly simple excel tricks to make the work go reasonably quickly.
I’m sure there are people out there for whom it would be a dream job and that could do it really well, but how is a small business supposed to find one of them without spending inordinate amounts of time filtering resumes, interviewing, and trying people out?
@brad:
How did you find that job?
There’s an entire industry based around providing such skills. I’ve never heard them paying as high as $40, though I’ve heard of them charging that much. A lot of very small businesses just bear the search costs but others pay for the convenience. A lot of times the work is being handed off to people in the Philippines or India for $5/h though.
@HBC
Old college friend works there. Not a model that scales.
It actually would help a lot right now, and I have the skills you described. I appreciate you thinking of me for this.
If you take my username and remove my middle initial, that’s the non-@gmail.com part of my email address.
Late edit: realized you said languages help. For full disclosure, I have a rudimentary understanding of Japanese(spoken, not written) and Spanish but nothing so complete as would probably be helpful here.
Sent.
Maybe they don’t believe the opportunity is real. Or long-lasting enough to treat as real. I know if I were to see a job offer for triple my salary, my first reaction would be to wonder if it’s a pyramid scheme or some other type of scam. If I gave it a second look, I’d be looking very hard for the catch. The possibility of getting stranded away from home is scary. There’s a reason I haven’t looked for an expat job in Saudi Arabia, despite the stories of working 5-10 years then retiring.
With that much of a wage difference, it seems to me that employers could provide buses to commute to a four-hour try-before-you-buy work day, pay the employee 12.00/hr including time on the bus, and it would be win-win – still better paid but without the risk. After employee has worked for a couple months offer the permanent position at $25 without transportation, possibly along with a couple-thousand dollar loan to get established in the new city. Or better, a thousand-dollar signing bonus but the first six months pay only $20/hr.
Or…aim to move a whole sub-community. Why is recruiting done by providing buses, rather than by having their current happy workers give a ride to their old friends from the city, in their own personal car with company reimbursement? Chain migration works – if you can convince the first couple people that the opportunity is good, then word of mouth can do the rest.
Or aim at high school graduates, rather than ex-waiters. I’m sure most high schools, urban or not, have guidance counselors who know some of their charges just wouldn’t fit a college path, and a counselor ought to be able to do enough due diligence to convince the kids (and parents?) that it’s a real job.
I do have to admit, I thought the ‘pyramid scheme’ angle would mostly go away because it’s not a leap to great wealth or anything. You’re still in the poorer half of the distribution, just closer to the middle than the bottom. If they were lying, why not say you’d make six figures? But what you’re saying makes sense.
And some people did commute in, especially during training. But most people didn’t want the long commute.
Moving the whole community is an interesting idea. I know of historical examples (as in a few decades ago) where they did just that. But I don’t know anyone doing it these days. Which is odd, because the relevant factors (conflicts between groups, urban decay/crime, immigrants) seem to be much more of a factor today than they were in (say) the ’70s. I’m curious why that stopped, or at least became less common.
These lower middle class pyramid schemes are the essence of MLM schemes that take in moms all over the country. Why should their male, fellow HS grads without a good salary, think they wouldn’t also be taken in?
There’s not much point in a lie that is unbelievable. Some of these jobs do exist – that makes it a good anchor point for the cloud of scammers. Probably no one would give you the time of day if they thought there wasn’t any chance you were telling the truth.
Keep in mind that it’s not just you they have to trust. They have to believe that the job exists, that the employer will be fair about it, and that the manager in charge of, say, the training evaluation, will be fair. First hurdle is ‘is Erusian telling the truth’, second is ‘does Erusian know the truth and the whole truth, including what happens three months later after he’s out of the picture?’
One plausible scam would be for the factory owner to make sure no one is accepted after the training period. But the factory across the street, also owned by him, is hiring at 8.25/hr, and you’re now stuck here in town until you manage to scrape up the cash to leave. Another classic scam is for the pay to be real, but the company who owns the town to jack up prices on everything so that they get all their money back.
Turning an eight-hour day into a 12-14 hour day is painful, but I can see why people would want to do that, especially in the beginning while they’re trying to figure out if this is trustworthy.
My proposals were all ways for an employer to sacrifice a bit in order to buy some trust. Make it still an eight-hour day, only from their current home, rather than a 14 hour day – you can do that if the total day’s pay corresponds to the fraction of the day spent working. Basically inspired by Joel on Software’s essay that emphasized providing customers an escape hatch so that they can leave you if they want.
That makes sense. I wouldn’t call them UX savvy. It’s a good idea. I could easily see convincing them to make a deal where you get $X per hour or $X-Y but they pay for a commuter bus and pay you for time spent on the bus. Or something of that nature.
Though there is one thing that did support this direction: if you failed out for a non-cause reason, they had to pay you the remainder of what you would have made. So, if they were paying (say) $15 an hour for three months of training and you failed out after one month because your boss didn’t like your face, they’d have to send you home with the remaining two months of wages. This rarely happened though.
I work as an attorney. If I could make 2x or 3x in a thing that makes me sweat balls I would switch immediately. My ideal profession is landscaper, but not the guy in charge, just the guy smashing grass and dirt.
@Clutzy,
I’m a plumber and I suppose my first ideal job would be “Captain Kirk”, after that librarian.
Doing less heavy lifting and more reading would sound good to me, no idea as to how ti make a living doing that though.
Maybe that is an age thing, or just an experience thing. I’ve had many jobs. By far my two favorites were refereeing soccer games and mowing lawns. I still do the first, and it makes me a little extra money on the weekends (I will probably have to stop once I have kids of my own). Also I mow many lawns charitably. They are essentially the same job: mild cardio outdoors with a bit of variance. Elite level refereeing is the only of those that pays well, and I am frankly not that good. My height and speed are hindrances, as well as the overtly political nature of it.
I do love your Kirk idea though it gave me a chuckle and sent me down a rabbit hole of weird ideas. Librarian would be even worse for me. Databases bore me.
I can fairly easily think of a whole raft of reasons why a job with higher pay might have lower utility for a particular individual, or even for most individuals. And anything that involves relocating adds extra costs (not all financial) and risks.
In general, all these can be problems:
– only one suitable local employer; if this job doesn’t work, you’re moving again
– unpleasant or dangerous working conditions
– lack of opportunity for family members (schools, jobs, etc.)
– distance from (extended) family and friends
– lack of particular amenities, especially social ones (no church you’d want to attend; no one who shares your hobbies etc.)
– unpleasant or dangerous climate (I don’t apply for jobs in areas where being outdoors is likely to be problematic for me)
– relative time spent working, commuting, and doing other things mandated by the job (I might not be thrilled to work 80 hour weeks for double the pay of a 40 hour a week job, and even *less* thrilled if all I get for double the hours is less than double the pay :-()
None of this explains what you are seeing, without more details, particularly with the scale of the increases you are citing. But I know people who’ve made decisions against opportunities at nearly this financial scale, for reasons on this list.
Consider also the premium that must be paid to get people to do live-in-a-bunkhouse jobs where they leave their family behind. Some working / living conditions require a lot of financial compensation.
And that’s before you start worrying about actively hostile neighbours 🙁 – or about the “job offer” actually being some kind of scam.
Fair enough. Some specific points:
There were multiple employers for most. These people tended to cluster for a variety of economic reasons.
Maybe unpleasant. No dangerous. These are not sweatshops: they were fully compliant with the relevant laws. They all had healthcare benefits and I don’t think there was a workplace death or maiming the entire time I was there.
Possible. There were plenty of jobs to go around but the schools weren’t great. They were above average though: better than you’d get in a poorer part of a city.
This is the one a lot of people have brought up and I think might be completely true.
Possible. There were a lot of hobbyists around because of the relatively high pay and free time. And people established local churches all the time. But fair point.
Some of the agricultural related ones involved being outside. Most didn’t.
All of them had overtime. If you worked 80 hours, you’d be making 120-160 hours worth of wages. The vast majority of people did exactly 40 hours every week. But I take your point about commuting.
Fair enough. I will say: the housing stock was fairly nice. Most people didn’t have roommates. Land was so cheap it was basically free and the zoning board was friendly so there was a ton of people constructing homes and the like.
Reading all the comments up/down-thread, it seems like most of the objections you’re getting apply more to people with established roots and families and such. I think you are really asking about a sub-population – e.g. single, unattached younger people, maybe college-educated, maybe male? If you clarify that sub-population maybe that can focus the discussion more?
For example, when I was a single unattached female seeking out my fortune – college-educated but without a car to my name – I would probably not even have considered or looked for a factory-type job somewhere outside a major city unless I had really run out of other palatable options in the city. As it is, I found a job – which probably paid less then a good trade job, but was enough for ne at the time and situated me near friends, trains, activities and (not uninportantly) a large enough population of males doing the same thing.
I think you are misrepresenting the objections. Job, apartment, friends and a routine are all the roots one needs to posit for most of the objections raised.
True, but there’s the relative difficulty of changing those. I don’t mean to neflect the objections of trust (I think some of those appeared after I posted, but I might be wrong), and cost of relocating when you have no money whatsoever.
But if you’re 23, healthy and unattached, with a small amount of money saved, and willing to live with roommates, and not looking for a relationship, the risks are a lot less for moving somewhere on a whim; that’s why I was asking about the demographics.
(I don’t mean to dismiss that it can be difficult have a “little bit” saved, especially if one has loans to pay, roommates might not be available, etc.)
They were pretty egalitarian. Single, married, male, female, young, old (so long as they could do the work)… didn’t matter. I will say they rarely took people older than in their late thirties or early forties.
Despite imagining manufacturing/trades as male work, there was a significant female population. Specific firms might be heavily skewed one way or another but the overall population was pretty even. (This is in contrast to, say, the Bakken or many coal projects which were overwhelmingly male.)
How long was the average/median length of employment at these jobs?
There were three groups: some people who were there for a few years to maybe a decade at most. Two other groups stayed there basically their whole career: either being promoted over time or just continuing on in the same job and saving up for retirement.
To be clear: it was rare they stayed at the same firm. They’d usually opportunistically move between firms to get higher wages/better conditions/promotions. But it was still in the same industry.
At a tangent to this …
Early in the last century, there were firms in the South that were in the business of matching up black workers in places where they were very badly off with jobs in places, also in the South, where things were better for them. They got shut down by state level restrictions, resulting in a Supreme Court case which, I think to the discredit of the court—this was in the Lochner era, when the court was relatively skeptical of economic regulations—the state won.
Labor recruiters. They’re still around. I can’t tell you what exactly the legal twists and turns of the profession were but they operate openly. At least as far as I saw. I do know they used to go abroad a lot but don’t as much because immigration law has apparently gotten much harder to deal with. Or so they say.
What are systems an older teenager can use to remember household chores?
Assume good faith effort to help, but ADHD and low conscientiousness.
Written lists, posted prominently in places where he/she is sure to see them.
If the teenager has a smartphone, there might be a reminder app. Or, just call/text the teenager frequently until habits are formed.
Calendar reminder on a smartphone, hands down. I still use them today.
To-do lists have the problem that you still need to remember to look at them, although posting them somewhere noticeable like the fridge or the front door is probably the best non-technological option.
This is helpful, but only if you have the discipline to use it. It’s what I do for my modafinil. I can snooze the alarm, but I won’t turn it off before I am on my way to take the pill. As a result, I essentially never forget to take it. But it’s not quite as effective for other tasks because I might be in the wrong place to deal with it when the alarm goes off, or I might turn it off and not do it.
Do they want to remember the chores? Or do you want them to remember the chores?
The difference between those two makes a big difference on recommendations, I think.
I don’t know if they want to remember, since I can’t see in their head, but I’m assuming good faith.
What I want is to not have to constantly follow up. Executive functioning is probably below average, and things will be agreed to and then quickly forgotten.
So, given that they indicate a desire to remember their tasks, here are two approaches:
– Start with only ONE daily chore. Say it is their job to do this chore without being asked to do it. When they inevitably fail, wait until the next day to gently remind them and re-emphasize they are to do it without being asked. Rinse and repeat until it is habit. Make sure to tell them that this you helping them build skills, and that as they build those skills, you will add more chores to the “expected without asking” list.
– A more general approach, for non-repeated tasks, is to help them build a habit of making handwritten lists they carry in their pocket at all times. Add to and cross off each day. Redo the list each morning. First help them with writing and using the lists. Then help with just reminding them to make and and use the lists. Then make it a daily “without asking” task.
Well… got there before me with the written lists.
In “back when I was your age” times, there was also the wooden spoon, but that seems to be frowned upon as motivational child rearing tool these days 🙂
I’m a fair bit younger and I definitely remember the wooden spoon. There is a significant decrease in effectiveness as the child gets older though. I don’t think it’s terribly useful on teenagers.
I’m not sure that research has yet proven the effectiveness of wooden spoons in producing effective memory. Possibly they might make people regret forgetting but I’d have seen that as a remedy for ditching duties rather than not being able to remember them.
There’s still la chancla.
Don’t know about effectiveness on teenagers, but implementing 5S at work involves:
1. checklist that you have to sign off on for daily, weekly, and monthly tasks (could be in calendar form)
2. rotating roster inspections, so sometimes they inspect the area themselves, sometimes someone else inspects it, so you can verify that everyone is on the same page for the standards. Inspection form is worded via questions, whereas the checklist is worded as statements or commands. (Is the laundry above the allowed line? vs. Empty laundry if above line.)
3. Organize areas to make it easy/convenient to do chores, as well as minimizing how much chores need to be done in the first place. Visual standards (photos), lots of labels, shadowboarding/bins, etc.
4. Reward them for coming up with improvements to the system overall. 5S is implemented to make an employee’s work easier, so similarly, make sure the teenager understands chores as things that enables and improves their own quality of life, and so therefore has a stake, or finding ways to make chores less onerous for everyone. If they take on some part time work to buy a robot vacuum, good on them! If they discover a more efficient dishwashing technique and share it with everyone, great! A huge motivator for them to notice and follow the standards themselves is if they have the chance to call their own parents out for failing them.
In contrast, there’s no faster path to resentment about an assigned task than when you don’t understand the benefit you’re getting from it.
But yeah, big visual images of “THIS IS AN ACCEPTABLE STATE” vs. “THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE” is important. I get the impression that most parents fail to define these states to their kids at the start, and that drives a lot of frustration and apathy. But “this pile is above the line!” or “there are things on the table that aren’t in the picture!” or “let’s put the thing next to the label!” are much easier for someone to follow long-term.
This could be a big win.
One issue with “signing off” is that the teenager doesn’t keep regular hours, and I think subconsciously there is only a reward from getting weirder and weirder hours: parents cannot ask you to do things if you aren’t awake at the same time.
We can’t have a “sign off” on dishes, because those are always in a constant state of movement.
A few things need to be done on a schedule because of other people. Like, if the teenager has one specific day to do laundry, we don’t have them running it late at night because they ignored it too long. Cooking dinner, same thing.
One thing I hope might work is an app where the teenager explicitly signs off on having completed the task, and other people can see the complete-or-not state.
Yeah, there are cases where these aren’t appropriate, mostly for time sensitive tasks like washing dishes. (And the issue with weird hours isn’t a thing for a 9-to-5 workplace)
I think that having very clear guidelines and visual standards are effective here, but also blocking out the schedule can also be useful, as then you can put calendar alarms on their phone. Laundry time is always 6-7PM or something. For some ADHD people, adding structure to their life is a way to maintain function.
I normally use Any.do to remind myself of whatever task I got to do regularly. But this is self driven. Wife, a college teacher just fills up her google calendar to the point of making it unreadable.
A kid may benefit from a gamified chore reminder, but I don’t have any experience with them.
Depends on the chores. Give more details and I’ll tell you how I do it.
Keeping them visible helps. I have no cupboard doors on my upper cupboards. I leave the dishwasher open til I run it. I leave stuff where I will see it, so it is remembered. Labels can also really help. The less I have to remember about where I’m putting something or finding something, the easier it is for me.
Systems. All my dirty laundry baskets are one type. All the clean ones are another type. They have places they are kept, that are easy to put them back in after use (clean laundry baskets by the washer, dirty laundry baskets in the closet).
Ease of access. One of the weirder ADHD symptoms is a tendency to view obstacles as bigger than they are. When I switched from a baby gate blocking the dog out of my laundry room to a half-door, I did it more because the half-door was easier to open. Moving my laundry room upstairs, near the laundry, made me do a ton more laundry. I have several different stick vacuums, because I’ll pick them up and do a bit of light vacuuming, and seeing them in the various rooms reminds me to do so.
Guilt trips and regular reminders do not necessarily help, and may make it worse.
Reading Gabor Mate’s book re ADHD will likely help.
EDIT: Score-keeping or other goals! Make things have a point. For example, When my (now-ex) wife complained things were unequal, we came up with a score-keeping tally board. And tracked what each of us did. It worked really well. Cleaning up my dog’s fur became less soul-crushing when I started saving it for yarn (he’s a husky mix. I would vacuum four times a day when he was shedding, and it wouldn’t be enough. But if I was saving it for yarn, there was a point).
One solution I found, not likely to work in most cases.
Both I and my two adult children use ice for drinks, mostly diet sodas and smoothies. The trays have to be refilled, and doing so is a public good. It seemed to me that I ended up doing most of it, so I put a sheet of paper on the refrigerator with a column for each of us. When I refill the trays, I put a check mark in my column.
Doing that converted the public good problem into a competition, with each of us—currently mostly me and my daughter, since my son has fallen fairly far behind—trying to be the one who notices that the container next to the trays is almost empty so as to pull ahead in the number of check marks.
On the cumulative record I’m ahead, but Rebecca has been beating me on the current sheet so is closing my lead.
Aside from harnessing our competitive instincts, this has another advantage. Each person has a cognitive bias with regard to chores such as refilling the trays or emptying the dishwasher, things that anyone in the household can do. I notice when I empty or load the dishwasher. If my wife does it I probably don’t, so I am likely to overestimate how large a share of the chore I am doing. The pattern can lead to each member of the household feeling as though he is doing an unfairly large amount of the common chores.
Keeping a public record of how many times each person does such a thing solves the problem—although so far we’ve only bothered to do it with the ice cubes.
Sample tasks:
* Vacuum floor
* Empty recycling bin
* Clean the toilet
* Get all cans out of a room
* cook dinner (on one specific day)
* take out trash (on one specific day)
* sweep floor
* dishes: this one is more difficult, because unless someone else has come through in the past hour, there is always something to be done. But it is very easy to skip.
Disclaimer: Heavy CW
I’d like to advance the following proposition: Among all large and powerful institutions that the average American interacts with on a regular basis, the one most sympathetic towards red-tribe cultural values is… the United States Federal Government.
Even putting aside swings in voter behavior which may well result in blue tribe regaining say, both houses of Congress, the executive branch, and a couple Supreme Court seats… we would still have a government whose top officials are approximately 30-40% red tribe. How does that level of representation compare to say, the amount of red tribe representation we might expect in say, the Board of Directors of Google, or the deans at Harvard, etc,?
This creates an obvious conflict between red tribe CW/social values and “conservative” economic positions that favor free markets and minimum government intrusion. One prominent example that’s being increasingly discussed is regulation of tech companies. I have to say, I’m as libertarian as anyone else, but when libertarian outfits pose questions like “Do you REALLY want people like AOC setting the moderation policies for Twitter?” my response is something to the effect of: “They already are, except now it’s a committee of exclusively people like AOC, whereas Congress would be forced to include at least 40% red-tribe representation. Do you really think that a committee composed of 60% blue tribe and 40% red tribe is going to produce a policy that’s less red-tribe friendly than the existing ‘Trust and Safety Council’ of Twitter?”
And I don’t think this is exclusive to debates about social media content. Across the board, from free speech, to abortion, to religious freedom, to gun rights – the federal government (in all three branches) seems, as far as I can tell, to be significantly more red-tribe than just about any large corporation or other such institution that I can think of.
Unfortunately, yes. It’ll be turned over to the bureaucrats, and as we see in places like the EEOC (which has ruled that the Gadsen Flag may be considered racial harassment, and expressing opposition to Hillary Clinton on the grounds that “women shouldn’t work full time” can be sexual harassment), they get captured fully. And it’ll cover everything. Right now I get banned from r/newjersey, I can go to r/newjerseyuncensored. If I get banned from Reddit I can go to Voat and hang out with the Nazis. If I get banned from Twitter (tough because I’m not on it), off to Gab with the Nazis again. A Federal Board of Social Media Standards is going to control not just Twitter and Reddit and Facebook, but Voat and Gab and the Firearms Forum and City-Data and the chans and probably this blog’s comment section. You can say it’ll only be limited to the biggest ones… but I won’t believe it.
This +1000, with the additional note that if the Red Tribe does in fact get power to do so, it will no doubt have no compunction whatsoever about using the regulatory state to tyrannize those with Blue Tribe cultural values: as evidence, the fact that it had no such compunction when it had that power in the US before the 1960s, and has no such compunction in other countries where it still has that power today.
Exit >> voice.
@Matt M,
Current military and veterans seem to lean “Red Tribe” to me, Post Office employees are a bit more mixed, but definitely not overwhelmingly “Blue-Tribe”, at the local government level cops, deputies, and firefighters definitely lean Red Tribe (even in San Francisco!), though local librarians and public school teachers seem pretty “Blue” to me.
Both private and public University academia seems mostly “Blue-Tribe” to me, and except for oil and natural gas companies, most large corporations management seems “Blue-ish” to me (Gillette, Google, Nike, et cetera), as is Hollywood.
Whether government as a whole leans Blue or Red I think depends on if cops or teachers are more numerous, but the Federal government?
If you include the military it’s a slam dunk for the Red Tribe.
@Matt M,
I just came across this from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman:
If the other half of “state and local government employment” is overwhelmingly cops, firemen, and guards I think that’s a good case that government workers as a whole are about even Blue/Red “Tribes”, though really a proxy could be found be the percentage of college educated women which will (in my far from humble opinion) give an indication of “Blue Tribe”-ness, it really (it seems to me) about how many are “Fighters” (cops, firefighters, guards, sailors, soldiers) or “Teachers” (Academics).
In looking it up, there seems to be about 700,000 to 1 million cops,, about 375,000 guards, and about 3.2 public school teachers total in the U.S.A.
Since volunteer fire fighters are a factor I’m just going to extrapolate from the City and County of San Francisco and assume about a third to half as many cops, I’m just going to ignore my fellow Public Works employees which makes me think that local and State government employees as a whole are more “Blue” than “Red”, but the inclusion of the military makes Federal government more Red than Blue.
My short-hand for “Blue-Tribe” is “culturally more like college educated women” and “Red-Tribe” is “culturally more like non-college educated men”, so keep that in mind for my interpretations.
Lazy counter #1: the Federal Government is almost universally staffed with Blue Tribe to the point that Trump had to fire a lot of career civil servants just to stop them sabotaging him. Which we know because they repeatedly leaked how they were doing so to the media.
Lazy counter #2: Are the the Republican Party, the Southern Baptist Convention, or the Chamber Commerce not ‘large and powerful institutions’? Have you considered you are a blue triber and have carefully constructed a world where all the institutions in your life are blue tribe?
I think what you’re really seeing is honest ideological divide. The stereotypical Republican divides are the religious right, the cultural conservatives, the libertarian/constitutionalists, and the business community. Only the libertarians are really opposed to intervention in a principled way. The business community tends to dislike it but more for pragmatic than principled reasons. But the cultural conservatives and the religious right are, if anything, pro-government intervention. A lot of them are very sympathetic to European style Christian Democrats.
Take Google. The business community mainly wants to make sure Google doesn’t interfere in their business (and so dislikes it when they throw monopolistic weight around by banning categories, for example). But they don’t care that the company is radically leftist, except perhaps tactically. The libertarians don’t love their ideals but will defend their right to express them. But the Christian Democrats/Cultural Conservatives? Google is propagating bad values and needs to be stopped.
Counter-counter 1: Yes, I do realize that. The “middle layers” of the government are extensively blue tribe. But the upper layers are not. I am; however, willing to believe that the middle layers are actually more important than the upper in terms of how things actually get done, so I consider this a somewhat legitimate counter.
Counter-counter 2: I’ve been accused of being a lot of things here before, but I think this is the first time I’ve been accused of being blue tribe. :p
I can’t speak for religious institutions as I am not religious, but when you name the chamber of commerce, please keep in mind I am speaking in this case about social/CW issues exclusively. As far as I know, the chamber of commerce is not a loud and prominent advocate of say, gun rights, or abortion restrictions.
I live in Texas, which is stereotypically famous for being a place where everyone loves guns, right? Every business I see has giant signs on their doors and windows with a bunch of legalese that essentially translates to “I DON’T CARE WHAT THE GOVERNMENT TOLD YOU, YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE GUNS HERE.” How can the chamber of commerce, which represents the collective businesses who individually all ban guns, be considered more red tribe than the institution that explicitly protects gun rights?
I think at some point the red/blue delimitations stop making much sense; the federal government worries about upholding the -federal- constitution, and thus is forced to uphold the second amendment, despite the opinion of whoever is in charge at the time. The chamber of commerce worries about the due paying members, aka the actual business owners. If a good portion of the business owners don’t want guns in their buildings, well, the chamber of commerce doesn’t want guns there either.
Don’t think this is a red/blue thing.
I don’t really get the sense that Ted Cruz and Dan Crenshaw are being reluctantly forced to go along with gun rights solely because the Constitution says they have to. Especially given that we know approximately half of Congress believes that the constitution in no way protects individual firearm ownership and that the federal government can be in full compliance with the second amendment solely by properly equipping a standing army.
Yeah, no kidding. Which might be taken as evidence that the business owners themselves are not actually red tribe at all. Because the official red tribe doctrine is “everyone is safer when well armed citizens are around to stop trouble.” So if we find out that 90% of business owners believe “we shouldn’t allow guns in our establishment because it makes people less safe” then, uh….
That’s probably “because it makes us business owners less safe from the great menace of our time, the personal-injury or wrongful-death lawsuit”. If they thought guns made people materially less safe, they’d probably install metal detectors. If it’s just a few lines of text in the List of Very Official Policies, it’s lawsuit protection.
And very few people consider it real hypocrisy to include a few lines of Very Official Text that they don’t actually agree with if their lawyers say it will ward off lawsuits, so that’s not a reliable way to determine what people actually believe. I’m certain Miramax had a Very Official Policy that Sexual Harassment is Bad.
This is the reason why I went on a rant against assuming nonconformance with “logical extensions” of someone’s reasoning are proof that they’re [bad/lying/hypocrites/don’t mean it/etc]. The cost of a metal detector (both financial and in terms of pleasantness) can be greater than the benefit. The fact that someone doesn’t hire off-duty TSA agents to give their customers patdowns doesn’t mean they don’t care about customers carrying indoors.
Are the the Republican Party, the Southern Baptist Convention, or the Chamber Commerce not ‘large and powerful institutions’?
The Southern Baptists are having their own troubles on various topics.
Specifying cultural values, it might be municipal transportation workers, churches (high variance), and/or local police/security guards. I’d argue the average American has about as much direct interaction with those as the federal government.
I’ve always thought that one of the cause of heavy libertarianism and hate for governments among americans is the whole dealing with two levels of government, local and federal. Not that it doesn’t happen anywhere else, but the whole government hate seems reasonable if you suffer two of them. It’s v possible the europeans will go the same way (see: brexit).
That observation, of course, does not make any prediction about which of the governments would a particular red tribe member prefer to get rid off, or weaken, first. Maybe it makes sense that it’d be the local one.
Other way around, I think. The founders, being suspicious of government, set factions against each other.
@JPNunez
A factor may also be that IMO, the American federal government is extremely undemocratic. Lots of things are decided by judges and are taken out of the hands of congress.
Matt, the Red Tribe in the federal government is completely impotent. They can’t even make state universities obey the 1st & 14th Amendments. They can’t make PBS & NPR conservative. Why give the federal government any more power if it can be used for enforcement and propaganda of the Left’s values but never ours?
I don’t deny that they mostly suck at their efforts to protect/secure red tribe values.
But they’re the only ones even trying… or even pretending to try.
@Matt M: Sure, and if they did more than pretending to try, we could talk about measures as extreme as nationalizing left-wing megacorps. But that’s not good economics, and there’s no point in trading away economic efficiency for sacred values if Red politicians are utterly worthless at imposing those values.
They already are, except now it’s a committee of exclusively people like AOC
I particularly liked Reddit’s new Anti-Evil Operations jobs (are there fancy spandex uniforms that go with the role? a catchy team slogan like “Anti-Evil – Assemble!”?).
Though I do have to say, my immediate reaction was “How far up your own arse do you have to be to think that calling a censorship model anti-evil is just spiffy?”
Well, “Ministry of Truth” was taken.
I ‘like’ how the posting contradicts itself:
It’s also rather Orwellian that the banhammer has to be wielded in a positive manner. That reminds me of something.
We’ve discussed this before and I don’t know that it’s worth hashing out again, but I still feel that the idea that companies are unwelcoming to the right because of their leaders is nuts. It’s the users/advertisers. Though to be fair, they do put a lot of effort in to trying to hide that – believe me, no one is more delighted that you think the people who run Twitter are acting out of a commitment to progressive ideals than the people who run Twitter.
Also, I’m curious to see the argument showing that Twitter (or Google, or Silicon Valley, or whatever) is anti-conservative in the first place. I mean, I know it looks too lefty to people on the far right, but it looks too righty to people on the far left. So, if you think this is the case:
Far left —– Twitter —— C ——————— Far Right
where C is some hypothetical center that Twitter would be at if they weren’t so mean to you, how do you know where C is, and how do you know Twitter is to the left of it?
Is the CEO admitting they had a left wing bias not count to you?
@Wrong Species,
Fit for CEO’s!
What a deeply bastardized and diluted meaning of “Left wing”
The proletariat is hopelessly reactionary, comrade. We must rely on students and racial minorities to accomplish a Socialist Revolution.
Would you take him at his word if he said you were wrong?
Of course not. A statement against interest is inherently more credible than a statement concordant with the stater’s interests.
How is that against self-interest? “We’re super progressive but we try to be neutral in spite of it because we’re so committed to fairness” is about as self-incriminating as, “I guess my biggest flaw is that I work too hard.”
My question is whether the CEOs of these companies really are responding to a legitimate threat to their businesses when the left gets up in arms about something, or if they’re using, “Of course we have to respond to the latest Twitter outrage!” as a fig leaf to do something they want to do. E.g., if Disney told people who were pissy about the Georgia that Disney does not get involved in the non-entertainment politics rather than having their CEO publicly mull over how difficult this law makes things, would there actually be any long-term consequences? I suspect that Iger and the Disney board personally dislike the policy and will cheerfully use the excuse to push their politics.
How many people here still refuse to fly United after they kicked that guy’s ass?
+1
I’m also very skeptical that Disney, Google, the NBA, etc., jumped on the anti-trans-bathroom law bandwagon for good solid business reasons. They pissed off about the same fraction of potential customers as they pleased, and trans rights is not actually anywhere near as popular a movement as (say) gay rights or full civil rights for blacks.
I think the Left has lost sight of the fact that black civil rights was/is a constituency >50X larger than transgender rights plus anti-racism has altruistic appeal in other tribes, like Christians. University-educated corporate executives are in a bubble where any minority can be an oppressed cause celebre to LARP the 1960s Civil Rights movement with.
@Le Maistre Chat
The only reason why caring about ever smaller ‘marginalized’ groups works reasonably well for the Democrats is the self-hatred among white liberals, which means that this group doesn’t have to benefit themselves.
0/3
@dick
Young white liberals are the only group with a negative bias to their own race.
I think that white people having bias against white people can be called self-hatred.
Internal commentary at Google, by Google employees, when I worked there, was that if you didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, you were a Nazi.
And the mandatory taking of the IAT upon being hired. And the Damore firing. And the company internally only seeming to care about left-wing cultural issues while rejecting any attempts to improve tolerance for right-wing cultural issues.
I’m not even a conservative, I’m a libertarian politically and a classical liberal philosophically. But I could tell from day 2 that expressing any genuine support for right-wing ideas would get you counselled, de-rated, and ultimately fired. And that merely being not left-wing was close enough that it didn’t matter for employment retention purposes.
And where 90% or more of everyone below the very highest level is hardcore blue tribe. I’d absolutely prefer to interact with an entity where the rank and file are sympathetic than the leadership are. the leadership, even if they want to do more, can only do so much.
Google I’ll give you, but Harvard? Who’s interacting on a regular basis with Harvard?
I believe it was Matt Yglesias who recently pointed out that there are so many veto points in our government that no matter what your position is, you feel like “your side” doesn’t have any power because the enemy can always veto you.
I’d extend this to all of society. Nobody feels like they’re winning because everyone can point to somewhere their enemies have power over them.
Right now I’d say the balance of power belongs to the “blue tribe Republicans” who dominate the judiciary. This is a microscopically small faction, and virtually nobody else is pleased with what comes out of the courts.
And this goes double for people who spend a lot of time on WhatTerribleThingsHasMyOutgroupSaidToday.com.
I post it here, because this does not directly answer Scott’s questions.
Just wanted to say that I am sad about the need for self-censorship. As someone who grew up in socialism, I understand the fear. But giving up is defecting in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The more people give up, the easier it is to focus the attacks on the remaining ones.
(Imagine an alternative reality where everyone makes fun of political correctness. How easy would it be for the social justice brownshirts to censor them all?)
The Harmonious Jade Dragon Empire wasn’t a key part of the story, it was just a background joke. And IIRC a lot of people in the revision thread said that they didn’t get how the Ethiopian thing was supposed to be an attack on outrage culture and that it raised some potential plot-holes.
I’m generally sympathetic to “the author’s vision got suppressed by social pressure” issues, but we shouldn’t elevate that to “only the first draft represents the author’s authentic vision, everything else is inauthentic.” A story is generally written to entertain other people as well as yourself, and it’s perfectly acceptable to revise your story if something wasn’t having the intended effect on your audience.
(I’m reminded of the controversy in Overwatch over Tracer’s butt. Someone comments that one of Tracer’s victory poses did nothing but show off her butt and seemed out-of-character. Blizzard says “Yeah, we’ll take another pass at that.” Internet firestorm results with lots of people decrying how the SJWs have forced Blizzard to compromise their artistic vision by removing the butts from it. Argument fizzles out when it’s revealed that the revised pose still shows off her butt, just in a way that fits Tracer’s style a bit more.)
I was laid off a couple of weeks ago and am seeking work in the greater Chicagoland area as an Electrical Engineer. If anyone has any contacts seeking a Junior Electrical Engineer, I’d appreciate the help with finding a new job.
About once or twice month me and the crew at work have to attend a “safety meeting”, usually on topics like “avoiding electric shock”, “fall protection”, “toxic atmospheres”, et cetera, and we’ll read from a packet, or watch a video.
Last week the “safety meeting” was us watching a video I’ve never seen on “workplace violence” and dealing with an “active shooter”, a topic that’s new to us.
Just yesterday the son of my co-worker of seven years was a witness to a shooting in a nearby shopping mall.
I had hoped that we left behind gunfire in the ’90’s, but I guess it’s back, and now our kids will have to grow up with this mess as well.
Is it clear that there is more shooting than ten or fifteen years ago, rather than just more news stories on it? The murder rate is about half its 1980 peak, violent crime rate about two thirds.
I have a feeling that active shooter training’s become fashionable recently because the big tech companies got spooked by the Yahoo (IIRC) office shooting a couple years back, and then everyone else followed suit. The timing fits. It shouldn’t be necessary to add that it has almost nothing to do with the actual rate of violent crime.
It’s also always the same damn video.
My friends in the EU who work for EU companies have started complaining that it’s been added to their annual workplace safety required training.
It’s also generally bad advice for when there actually is an active shooter situation. The advice in that training is designed to minimize the employer getting sued after the fact, not to maximize the bystanders and victims odds of survival.
Any chance I can see the video?
YouTube office shooting. Technically the patio, but whatever.
To my amusement, those injured were taken to Zuckerberg Memorial Hospital for treatment.
Whatever it is, it isn’t clear. I think there was a study recently that showed a huge number of school shootings this year, but when looked at more closely it included things like having a drive-by shooting occur next to the school after school hours.
Which reminds me, we don’t really hear about “drive-by” shootings very much lately, do we?
Every time I see an article like that I tend to assume it’s been massaged to hell and back to make a political point, and the three or four times I’ve actually bothered to dig into the data, I haven’t been disappointed.
Don’t believe everything you read, kids. If it’s a culture war battleground, don’t believe anything you read.
Tends to scare the other people in the Uber.
(looks suspiciously at this entire thread)
There isn’t necessarily a rise (there is a rise in profile and spikes that aren’t necessarily trendlike in recent years), but it’s hard to make the claim that mass shootings have actually followed the downward trend of the violent crime rate. This RAND report has a good analysis.
AFAIK there are definitely less murders overall, just more random “person grabs a gun and goes shoot a school/mall/cinema for no good reason” incidents.
Those are horrifying but overall just a blip in the murder statistics which are measured in dead people per 100,000 habitants.
USA still has a abnormally high murder rate for a developed country. And those random incidents cannot really be treated like regular crime shootings that drive most of the murder statistics.
Well, if you’re a generally well behaved person who lives a conservative, low-risk life, this seems like a poor trade.
Meaning, if “murders overall” mainly comprise stuff like gang shoot-outs, domestic violence incidents, robberies gone wrong, etc. there are various things you can do to mitigate the chances you’ll be in a situation like that.
But “random person goes to normally safe public place and starts firing” is sufficiently, well, random, that you lose that locus of control. Everyone is equally at risk.
Note that this is also my explanation as to why people fear terrorism more than car crashes. Terrorism is a random thing that can happen to anyone regardless of the choices they make. Car crashes only happen to people who suck at driving (obviously false, but most people tend to believe this), and good thing I’m not one of those!
Regular crime is also concentrated in certain places, etc, etc, yeah.
just more random “person grabs a gun and goes shoot a school/mall/cinema for no good reason” incidents.
More of them, or has the rate of them just dropped more slowly?
My own personal im-probably-wrong theory is that for many of these incidents, its a one in million slow burn side effect of psychiatric medication, especially in young men.
I read a few years ago just after the Vegas incident a post by a writer (cant remember which one) telling the story about how it nearly happened to their spouse: she was put on psychiatric medication, she started coldly and secretly plotting out how to kill a bunch of people who “deserved it”, managed to check herself into a hospital before she actually went through with it, and then the hospital sent her home because she had started to recruit the other patients into her plan. Successfully.
I don’t have the statistics; obviously school shootings rose after Columbine, haven’t heard of a serious one for a while, but you still see them on the news from time to time -quick google says there was one in colorado last month-.
It’s possible all the shooting preparations have worked and most shooters will manage to shoot one or two surprised persons, and the rest will manage to run away in time. But a big one with victims in the double digits will still happen from time to time
Hard to say.
@DavidFriedman,
Until yesterday I’d have said that shootings are down from the ’80’s (I personally was last near gunfire in the ’90’s), but it was just eerie to have had a video training on “what to do” and then have less than a week passes before a co-workers son witnesses a shooting.
I was last near gunfire, not counting a visit to a shooting range, in the seventies. In Philadelphia.
In the thread for nice people, Nate Gabriel asks for people in intimate polyamorous relationships who would be willing to sue over single-family occupancy zoning laws, adding
When I read Obergefell, I noticed that you could basically just find “same-sex couple”and replace with “group of three or more” or “man and three wives” or “two men, three women, a donkey, four midgets and a shaved asian boy” and it wouldn’t really read any differently. Now that marriage licenses are no longer a matter of record keeping and pragmatic dispute resolution during divorce but a right enshrined in the Constitution, what’s the argument against polygamy? Are the rights of (some) Mormons, or Muslims who have multiple wives being violated? Why may not a Muslim and his three wives file their taxes jointly, or be included on each others’ health insurance plans, or be easily afforded hospital visitation rights?
There are more Muslims than gays, but perhaps fewer Muslims with multiple wives than gays interested in gay marriage.
A minority has to be large enough to be politically important. Caring about microscopic minorities is not profitable.
I’m not talking about political willpower, I’m talking about individual rights. Realpolitik is not a very interesting answer.
That might be the real answer though.
If someone wants to get a judge to order that three-person marriages are legal, they should wait until some other state already has that and everyone knows the sky didn’t fall. “Do this completely new thing” is a hard sell. That’s part of why intimate association is a safer bet–it comes down to “say something nice about polyamory, you have to, it fits right here in the framework and all you have to do is say some words.” Even the favorable decisions say things like “as long as no one applies for marriage licenses.”
This is true whether or not failure to do it is violating anyone’s rights. It’s right there in the Obergefell dissent, except that one person’s modus tollens is another’s modus ponens.
(The other part of why use intimate association instead of equal protection is that there somehow isn’t a stated right to live with who you want, and I want there to be.)
Polygamy has been practiced in cultures since the beginning of recorded history and is still in existence today. Gay marriage was invented about 20 years ago.
Muhammad lives in Kansas. He wants to marry A’ishah, so they go to the county clerk’s office and get a marriage license and perform the ceremony. The next year he wants to marry Bahiya also, so they go to the county clerk’s office and the clerk says, “I am sorry, you are already married to A’ishah, I cannot grant you a marriage license.” Muhammad is a doctor with good health insurance, and his insurance company will only let him add A’ishah to his policy, but Bahiya is left without. The government will let Muhammad file his taxes jointly with A’ishah, but not so much as claim Bahiya as a dependent.
Muhammad sues. Should he win?
@Conrad Honcho
Yes. Clearly. Got any harder questions? 🙂
(Turning to realpolitik, one plausible outcome of polycules winning such cases would be the end of special government treatment of marriages vs other contractual relationships. Which would be a feature, not a bug.)
there somehow isn’t a stated right to live with who you want
Because while you may want to live with me, I may not want to live with you.
I think the ban on “more than X people living in this place” has more to do with anti-slumlord legislation, but I agree that it’ll probably be easier to get “it’s okay for ten people to live in this three bedroom house and never mind the previous legislation on square footage” passed when all ten are fucking each other, so it’s okay if you have multiple people sharing rooms by sleeping in the same bed. It’s not so okay when it’s members of a family because nobody wants adult siblings to be forced to share beds, or maybe even rooms.
I’m pretty sure Muslim polygamy rates are low even in countries that have enshrined sharia, so Muslims could agitate for it just as a matter of principle.
“perhaps” should be “blatantly obviously”
The most common one I’ve encountered is that polygamous marriages are either more likely to result in abuse, or are inherently abusive in and of themselves.
Granted, that sort of logic won’t withstand a serious legal challenge, but it does seem to be a reason many people are morally opposed to it (and there’s plenty of reason to believe that the Supreme Court won’t overturn any bans on it until such point as they believe most people aren’t morally opposed to them doing so).
Monogamy was a deal worked out so the below-average men could have mates. I’m not sure how that fits into the Constitution, though.
The highbrow arguments against legal recognition of polyamory I’ve seen are social stability arguments–basically that polyamory in practice will mostly mean high-status men with multiple wives and low-status men with no hope of ever getting a wife.
The lowbrow arguments I’ve seen are either arguments from incredulity/everyone-knows, or claims that polyamorous relationships will be abusive or bad for the children with very little evidence offered. (They’re arguing for something everyone knows is wrong, so they can phone it in and the argument will still seem solid.)
I mean… yes?
If the highest-status 2% of men have 4 wives each, 6% of men will be incels unless they can capture a war bride. Taking war brides is against international law (being enshrined by a hegemonic West that seems to have forgotten that not taking war brides is a Christian thing). So there’s your stability problem.
Sure, the arguments for why it’s culturally a bad idea are obvious. Normalized polygamy is not “Bay Area rationalist group house cuddle puddles” it’s “Donald Trump has 100 wives.” Because you know he would do that. Just to brag about how much hotter his 100 wives are than your one dumpy wife.
But we’re not talking about whether marriage legalisms are culturally good or bad anymore. Divorce is a thing, gay marriage is a thing. Marriage is now a right, so whether you think it’s a cultural bad idea for Donald Trump to have 100 wives or Mohammad to have two is irrelevant: is the county clerk infringing upon their rights by not granting them multiple marriage licenses in the way the county clerk was unconstitutionally infringing on Adam and Steve’s rights by not granting them a gay marriage license?
Gotta say, the idea of Trump getting ripped to shreds in a 101-way divorce is appealing. More generally, “don’t bite off more than you can chew” seems like an appropriate aphorism. Why not give mistresses standing for a claim on the philanderer, after all?
@Conrad: I’m not really disagreeing with you that we’ve argued ourselves into de-ontological principles that reality won’t support. 🙁
This suggests some kind of Grand Compromise wherein we allow both polygamy and also substantial immigration of women between ages 20-60. A policy that Oligarchs and the Woke can both get behind!
A decade later, all the poor countries whose women tend to do well in the US husband sweepstakes are torn by civil war caused by the large pool of involuntarily celibate men having nothing better than revolution to do with their time.
You’re just cribbing Ali G’s immigration policy.
The argument being offered here against polygyny is an argument for polyandry. It’s also an argument for discouraging lesbian marriage, encouraging male homosexual marriage.
I wonder, if polygyny were legal, how many men who could afford a second wife would choose to have one—I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t. At present, polygyny is effectively legal, since although one can’t get legal recognition of the second marriage, there are few legal barriers to living with two women and having children by both.
My suspicion is that the argument against polygyny, while logically sound, depends on what would be, in practice, a fairly minor effect.
According to The Modern Egyptians, a 19th c. account of life in Cairo by an English author, very few of the men he knew had more than one wife and when they did the wife worked, was a productive asset for the family not a consumption good. Of course, he wasn’t describing life among the elite.
Yeah, I’m not sure the model that says “polygamous marriage = mass inceldom and social instability” is right, but this is the highbrow argument I’ve heard against legal recognition of polyamorous relationships in general.
I think in some cultures, it’s pretty common for a high-status man to have a wife and also a mistress. I don’t know enough to know how much that affects the dating market, though.
The more common pattern in our society seems to be serial monogamy, with the classic version being the well-off middle-aged man trading in his first wife for a much-younger wife. Assuming no other infidelity and assuming the older wife doesn’t remarry, that probably works rather like bigamy in terms of the dating market. But I don’t really know how big the effect is, or whether it’s got much social relevance.
In a world with no-fault divorce + contraception (and the ending of children as a central part of the covenant) a lot of the arguments for the very existence of marriage as a legal construct break down. So I’m not sure that polygamy is unique in its ability to transgress this “new normal”.
We are at the point where the only significant justification for marriage as anything other than a normal contract is to keep the estate tax in place, because otherwise there’d be a lot of angry widow(er)s with sob stories about how they have to sell the house they have lived in for 40 years.
Hmm – I think we need to distinguish between polygyny and polygamy. Something like Robert Heinlein’s “line” and “clan” marriages had approximately equal numbers of male and female spouses. (He didn’t have any gay people at all – these were marriages where all possible male-female pairs within the marriage would have sex, but not the other possible pairs.) They wouldn’t have an effect of creating gender imbalances in who got married. (Whether they are plausible, given human nature, is another question entirely.)
Ideally, in a egalitarian society, women take several husbands too and polygamy balances out.
As a practical matter, polygamy is much more complex than gay marriage. In a world with legal exclusive monogamy, a marriage is either in effect or totally torn apart. There is no case where a marriage survives but one person separates from it. It makes for considerably more complicated community property and, especially, child custody. It also admits the possibility that multiple spouses might disagree on, say, what course of medical treatment to take for their incapacitated mutual spouse, and then what the fuck do we do?
Can you have a marriage, with community property, that has none of its original members in it? If so, how does that work for inheritance? Have we just completely destroyed inheritance tax? And gift tax?
There are probably a dozen more thorny legal questions that would come up if we suddenly judicially created legal polygamy in the US.
@sandoratthezoo
INAL, but I’d say “Yes, even with only heterosexual monogamy permitted.” Widows and widowers remarry all the time, and their widows/widowers can also remarry.
As a person who separates the concepts of “marriage in the eyes of the law” and “marriage in the eyes of the participants/their society/their gods and regards the former as little more than a tax and planning device, I’m surprised more people aren’t actively using the potential loophole. You could theoretically skip inheritance taxes for generations with a series of May-December marriages.
Consider rich widow X, and rich widower Y, both of whom want to get the tax man out of their attempt to give an inheritance to one of their great grandchildren, who is barely of legal age. (Call them XX and YY.) X marries YY, Y marries XX, and the ‘spouses’ duly inherit. If X and/or Y is still married, they have a nice amicable no fault divorce, split their property by agreement (without tax consequences?) and now they can each “remarry”.
It’s made more complex if all marriages need to be opposite sex, and it doesn’t work for splitting the tax free inheritance (beyond 2 way). And of course it requires a lot of trust – you can hardly bring in the law to enforce contracts of this nature. But if the government rakeoff that needs to be avoided is big enough, I’d expect it to be tried.
But regardless of whether or not the conscious scam version of this is workable, the natural experiment (real May-December love affairs, resulting in widow/er hood and eventual remarriage) is presumably already happening.
I thought a lot of American anti-polygamy law was about the Mormons, particularly back in the early days when they had their own militia shooting people. So while matters have changed today, there’s a lot of resistance to “okay, anyone can have an unlimited number of simultaneous spouses or significant others who will want legal rights” baked in to current law.
@Conrad Honcho,
My first thought was that “zoning rules violates poly rights” will be a fig leaf used by the YIMBY’s in their efforts to destroy local democratic self rule and turn as many places as possible into 1910 style Lower Eastside crowded tenements packed with young adult “new economy” workers.
Our rulers hate “married with children” and the mid 20th century broad middle class that lived in single family homes, ’cause “inefficient” and “environmentally irresponsible”, that’s why they import so many single childless young adults and astroturf “YIMBY” in their blatant attempts to return us to the world of a few mansions and many tenements in the style of the turn of the last century with “Artists” and “Tech” their shock troops.
This is to say the least uncharitable, and the idea that if you let people build low-to-mid-rise apartment buildings in a neighborhood it will somehow inevitably turn into tenement-level crowding strains credulity and is backed by no evidence. It also ignores the fact that most of our “traditional”/”nice” residential neighborhoods allowed apartment construction until the 60s/70s, when they were downzoned as a way of defying the Fair Housing Act’s spirit while following the letter. The ones that were SFR only from the start were made so for blatantly racist and classist reasons– the historical record is clear on this.
Plenty of families with kids lived in those older apartment buildings, too. On the YIMBY view, a local democratic preference for keeping poor people, families or not, financially unable to buy into your neighborhood is an inherently evil preference, and local self-rule that allows expression of that preference richly deserves destruction.
@salvorhardin,
I’m seeing a few but not many “low-to-mid-rise apartment buildings” going uo, they are by far out numbered by new skyscrapers filled with warrens, and I lived in a 1920’s built one bedroom apartment for 17 years, with my wife and then our first son, it was hateful and when we finally could move into a house our lives greatly improved.
The less apartments are built, the fewer will have to suffer living in them, and if I was King of California I’d employ eminent domain and have more decent family oriented housing available, with means to earn a living nearby.
Today is far too “Honeymooners” and not nearly enough “Leave It to Beaver”.
And “YIMBY” is for the poor?
Don’t make me laugh, the “YIMBY” shills advocate more high priced condos that only the rich can afford, there’s no new public housing going up, and what there is is being destroyed along with the rent controlled units the elderly live in to make way for new skyscrapers filled with “Tech” workers, if “YIMBY” was for the poor the poor wouldn’t be evicted to make way for all these “market rate” developments!
To help the poor I’d go with:
1) New public housing, lots of it.
2) High taxes on empty “investment properties” and “pied a terre’s”.
3) Very high “second residence” property taxes.
4) Very high taxes on upper incomes that bid up housing.
5) Massive tax bills when a property is sold for a big gain.
6) Massive rebates when a property is sold for a loss..
7) Jail time for evictions, especially of those that evict the elderly.
8) More building in Silicon Valley, stop evicting Oakland/Berkeley/San Francisco and turning them into dormitories for their workers.
9) Less college students coming here, build campuses wherever the Hell they come from instead.
Imagine that you are considering investing in rental housing in Silicon Valley. Do you think being told that once you rent to someone it will be illegal to evict him, even if he doesn’t pay his rent, trashes the apartment, or is a nuisance to his neighbors, will make you more or less likely to invest in housing, as opposed to alternative ways of spending your money?
You don’t mean “if I was king of California.” You mean “If I was God.” What you are describing is a set of outcomes you want, with very little attention to the fact that there are causal links in how a society and its economy works, ones that not even a king can avoid. Kings, unlike God, face budget constraints.
At least in the Bay Area, the fact that the missing middle is missing is fairly clearly due to zoning: there are places where high-rise towers are permitted, and places where only single-family homes are, and very little in between. Plus, if there is a fixed regulatory cost to getting a permit for basically any size of multi unit building, you’ll see more high-rises relative to missing middle buildings, because they make it easier to amortize that fixed cost.
You’re welcome to your preference for houses over apartments. FWIW I share that preference. But I don’t think it’s right to use state power to impose that preference on others who might make different tradeoffs.
Re: welfare of the poor, the best available scholarship clearly says that supply increases at any level of the market– including new market rate luxury condos– really do make housing more affordable across the board, because e.g. if people who can afford luxury condos have more of those available to them, they’ll choose those and leave other housing units which they would prefer less open to others. Plenty of single yuppies would prefer a luxury condo to sharing a single family house with roommates, for example; build them that condo and they’ll free up that house for a family. Maybe you’d rather the yuppies just go away or never move to the area in the first place, but again, in a free society you should not get to decide that for them, and neither should your neighborhood’s xenophobic voting majority.
The way to address the tenement problem is just to flat out insist that apartments be large. Copenhagen does this by law – The city is pretty aggressively apartment oriented, but also insists that those apartments be large enough for families. Makes for an expensive city, but no tenements
I don’t know of ‘YIMBY’ people are *motivated* to help the poor, but that certainly looks to be one effect of their actions.
More housing = more supply, and should drive down the price of existing units, even if those units aren’t marketed to the same income brackett. (Also, by building new housing for high-income workers, we reduce the number of people competing for low-income housing- although maybe that’s just another way of saying the same thing?)
Also, why is “Tech” in quotes?
Bay Area rent is unaffordable because many more people want to live in the Bay Area than there are housing units available there. Housing units are unavailable in the Bay Area partly because buildable land area is limited, but mostly because it’s full of vast tracts of single-family homes that can’t be torn down because of restrictive zoning and other development processes. Yes, there are a few high-rise apartments going up in San Francisco. They account for a few thousand units. That isn’t nearly enough.
In other words, Bay Area rend is unaffordable Bay Area homeowners want a “Leave it to Beaver” life and are economically illiterate. You are creating the problem you claim to oppose.
Stop digging.
@DavidFriedman,
True enough, sadly the incentives don’t pencil out.
@salvorhardin,
Seems to me that we have a surfeit of “freedom”, more peace and quiet would be nice, as would a lot of eminent domain to make decent housing for the majority.
@Thomas Jorgensen,
With enough sound proofing, family sized apartments could be a great alternative, but I’m doubtful that it can be enough sandproofing, as one loud childless twenty something with a stereo and extra big speakers can easily ruin the sanity of 30 units in an apartment building.
@Jack Lecter,
I put Tech in quotes because the actual workers inside the Intel chip plants were by-and-large middle-aged women of Vietnamese descent, along with a few men of usually Indian descent who were just trying to support their families by working at a factory, and they didn’t move to Berkeley/Oakland/San Francisco, they stayed down near San Jose!
It’s the 20-something childless invading “Tech” (I’m guessing marketeers or programmers) who want to congregate here for some reason that are causing all the displacement.
@Nornagest
Sure, tax “Silicon Valley” till it moves elsewhere, and the problem is solved.
I have read of Google finally having some housing built done down near their headquarters, which is good, San Mateo and Santa Clara County have lots of land that’s nowhere near as dense as the central Bay Area, please build there and stop evicting people to make way for your developments up here.
If your “Leave it to Beaver” fantasy starts with thousands of people uprooting their lives and moving elsewhere (presumably to a warm welcome from some other, less “Leave it to Beaver” set of incumbent landowners), that might be a clue that it’s an unreasonable one. No one owes you a white picket fence.
@Nornagest
Too bad, I replaced the old fence that was falling down and built a new fence out of redwood on the side of the house, but we never had one in the front.
What I would’ve liked would be to have what I have now 20 to 30 years sooner, if we had had the house and I a civil service job earlier we would have had kids earlier and at least one more (I think that so many don’t have a house and a secure seeming job is why the birthrate is dropping).
To read @Erusian apparently that would have been possible elsewhere, but I was completely ignorant of that, all I knew was the lower the rent, the less the pay, and the fewer the jobs as far as I could see.
But organizing our society so that more get what they want seems a good thing to me, and I suppose that if the rest of California has decided that the central Bay Area should be some sort of collegiate class childless young adult playground with already existing residents removed to make way that’s sort of democracy as well.
That’s part of it, but there is also lot of land that isn’t built on at all, because of restrictions of one sort or another. Some time back I saw a news story about a sizable farm in Milpitas that was finally being sold. It was zoned agricultural and couldn’t be used for housing. The story included the price, and after a quick look at Zillow I concluded that it was at least an order of magnitude, possibly two, below what the land would have sold for to have houses built on it.
From time to time I drive up 280 from San Jose to San Francisco. I see an awful lot of empty land. The claim I have seen is that between eighty and ninety percent of the Bay Area is unavailable for housing. I haven’t checked it, but I have seen it made both by someone who thought it was too much and by someone who thought it was too little.
Here is an example of a European city with multiple-use houses. I think it looks rather nice. And it’s not a slum.
@ana53294,
That does look nice, but I have a very strong “No Drums” bias, and to me suitable housing allows for a nights sleep, so either have special zones just for childless twenty-somethings to
inflict their sanity destroying racketplay their radios, or have building codes that provide far more soundproofing than I’ve ever experienced in decades of living in apartments.I suspect physical separation via zoning laws is easier than better soundproofing technology.
Actually AIUI soundproofing is not so hard in modern mid-to-high-rise apartment buildings: the key technology is thick concrete walls.
@salvorhardin
I’ve worked on some buildings with concrete outer walls, but interior walls were metal framed with sheet rock, and hardly sound proof at all.
If interior concrete walls prove soundproof, and existing tenants don’t get evicted or their rents jacked up, then I could see myself voting to allow developments that have even more people being crowded into here in order to spare existing apartment dwellers more years of hearing every breath, footstep, faucet drip, and spoken word of their neighbors, but that’s a hard sell until I witness a demonstration of the effectiveness of the soundproofing, and I’m sure not going to trust the word of developers or landlords on that
Age discrimination in housing is illegal in California. One of my colleagues was involved in the legal movement that produced that result. I concluded that she was probably responsible for more human unhappiness than anyone else I knew, between childless adults being woken up crying babies and kids growing up in places with fewer other kids to play with than there would have been without the legislation.
I didn’t tell her that—she is a nice lady—but it struck me as an example of the amount of damage that good intentions without adequate thought could do.
You would be another example of you were actually in a position to try to implement your desires and chose to do so. I understand that you like writing about how the world should be. But I am not sure you appreciate the enormous amount of human damage that has been done by people acting in the way you like to imagine yourself being able to act. Venezuela is the current example, but there have been much worse ones.
I grew up in Hyde Park on the south side of Chicago, not far from what I think was the first urban renewal project, the use of eminent domain and government money to “eliminate urban blight.” It consisted of replacing low income housing with a nice development of single family townhouses.
For a different class of people.
> I’ve worked on some buildings with concrete outer walls, but interior walls were metal framed with sheet rock, and hardly sound proof at all.
The first and only apartment I lived in was a low-rise block while working for my first two employers. At 3 levels in total, plus basement for utilities/laundry, the whole building was cinder-block outside and between the units, and concrete slabs between floors. With a brick exterior. My first thought when I found the place was: “cool – the place is a free-fire zone”. It was substantially quiet. I could occasionally here something from one neighboring apartment, but nothing of note above or below.
So, yes. Concrete can work and be done fairly easily.
See also: The Traditional City is the Densest City
Lower East Side. Also I’d like to know why city is the perfect level of self rule and not block or state?
@brad,
California is way too big, as for blocks having self rule?
I’m open to the idea.
Too big for what? Is there a principle beyond “my preferred policies would likely win at this level”? If not, okay points for honesty I guess, but it isn’t very convincing.
@brad,
As to an ideal size for self-government, I’d say big enough to provide:
1) a public library
2) a sewage treatment plant
3) a fire fighting service
4) a police force
5) a court
6) a jail
Otherwise government should be small enough so that candidates for elective office solicit my opinions and vote face-to-face
After moving from Oakland to a small nearby town a city councilman knocked on my door and asked me “What issues are important to you?”.
I liked that, I also liked union meetings where we had discussions and votes.
In 17 years and in the same apartment in Oakland no one came campaigning, I’ve never seen the Governor in the flesh, and the only Presidential candidate to come near my neighborhood was Jesse Jackson in ’84.
That’s far too remote.
California is too big.
I could imagine a system where every hundred adults or households elect a delegate, who elect delegates, who elect delegates, and so on up to a large sovereign state, but I still think some devolved local control on some issues would be good (where to place stoplights, et cetera).
IIRC, you live in New York City, and in such a densely packed place I could imagine seperate floors of large buildings having self-rule (as to the anarchists who advocate each individual having absolute self rule, I just don’t want to have to go everywhere armed for battle).
There’s only room for two names on the form.
This is snark, and simultaneously isn’t. There are all kind of ingrained assumptions within our laws and policies and institutions regarding marriage that it is a relationship between two people, as significant as the laws of divorce and inheritance and as trivial as the number of spaces on the form.
Now you may say the same argument goes for “one man, one woman”, but well before Obergefell there had been a decades-long project to change marriage from a relationship in which the wife is legally subordinated to the husband to one in which the spouses are equal partners with symmetric obligations. And once the law is written so that it no longer matters who is the husband and who is the wife, it becomes trivial to drop the gender requirement entirely.
But now we just finished changing all the forms and it’d be a pain to change them again.
This. Multiple partner marriages just open a bigger can of legal worms than same sex marriage. A B & C are married. A & B have a child, D. C does a lot of the caretaking of D, and develops a strong bond with D. C then divorces A & B. What rights, if any, does C have with respect to visitation from D. Suppose A is the one who divorces. Can they prevent C from seeing D? Is A entitled to child support from C, if C was the main breadwinner for the household. Suppose A is in the hospital, and is incapacitated. B & C disagree on the course of care. Who decides? Yes, there are legal agreements that can settle these matters, but what should the default be? It is much more complicated than replacing “husband” and “wife” with “spouse 1” and “spouse 2”.
@Theodoric
Very much agreed. As you said, “Yes, there are legal agreements that can settle these matters, but what should the default be?” so this isn’t a showstopper, but it is inherently a lot more complex than extending pairwise marriage to include same-sex couples.
One odd possibility that triples produce that pairs don’t is that there could be a
marriage that continues after each member in it is replaced:
A, B, and C marry,
then divorce A but still keep B and C together,
then they add D,
then {B,C,D} drops B,
then {C,D} adds E,
then {C,D,E} drops C.
How much community property carries over from {A,B,C} to {D,E}?
That’s all well and good for marriage as a legal arrangement with the government involved mainly to adjudicate divorces. But marriage is not a right. So when Muhammad is already married to A’ishah and now wants another marriage license to marry Bahiya too and the county clerk denies them, the fact that arbitrating their divorce would be difficult is irrelevant.
I think marriage is a right? Seems the american supreme court agrees with this, as well as several human rights orgs.
scotus argued it was a right to end bans on interracial marriages, which seems p strong.
Now, that does not mean the right is unlimited and that you can marry unlimited people.
Why not? Particularly when polygamous marriage is an institution as old as civilization.
Muhammad sues, and tells the court to find the same way they did in Obergefell: Love is love. He loves A’ishah and he loves Bahiya and they all consent to this. And it’s part of their culture and history and religious practice. By what reasoning would the state argue against Muhammad et. al. besides “nah. It would be too much trouble.” When it comes to rights, “bothersome” doesn’t really matter much. It’s pretty bothersome giving people fair trials, and providing them with attorneys and such when they can’t afford them. It’s pretty bothersome having to respect the “human rights” of illegal aliens instead of simply shooting them.
Why may not the right be extended to Muhammad, A’ishah and Bahiya?
Edit: I just realize that said “marriage is not a right.” It should have said “marriage is now a right.”
Marriage, at least for me, is for having a family, i.e., getting kids. There is a strong implication that all the people in a marriage are parents when they adopt or the woman gives birth.
Our laws only recognize legal parenthood to two people at the same time.
So for example a step-parent has no right to adopt a kid unless the parent that is not the spouse is dead or their parental rights were taken away. Even a step-parent that has raised a child since it was a baby to an age were the child can decide who to go with, and they prefer the step-parent, has no parental rights, unless they adopted the child.
If there are going to be polygamous marriages, who will be the parents of the kids born/adopted into the marriage? How will parental rights and custody be divided in the case of a divorce?
I’ve heard cases where, in lesbian couples who have adopted jointly, the non-biological mother got custody. I don’t think biology should be the only thing that decides custody.
If even within a polygamous marriage, only the two biological parents are parents, and everybody else is an accessory, what’s the point of calling it marriage?
Actually, I’ve always thought the parenthood aspect was the strongest argument in FAVOR of polygamy. I think it is a good thing for kids to have several adults to use a role models, and as caretakers. Of course it greatly complicates breakups to have several adults involved. But my bias is that the benefits of many adults in a family is higher than the deficits in case of breakup.
Regarding all the comments stating issues for laws to accommodate polygamy –
So how did Utah deal with it previously?
Not saying there won’t be problems, but that I suspect there’s been at least attempts to sort of most of the main ones before and for the US, you don’t even need to look at foreign cases.
Utah wasn’t exactly civilization at the time. It was a territory, not a state (banning polygamy was one of the conditions for statehood), and American federal jurisdiction was pretty tenuous; the Mormon pioneer settlements pretty much ran themselves.
Well, given the medical technology of the 19th century, many issues, such as A being on a ventilator, and A’s spouses B & C disagreeing on whether to pull the plug, no advance directive, simply didn’t come up.
I’m pretty sure partner in the health insurance case is shorthand for a single adult who’s health outcomes are strongly tied to yours. If you successfully argue that you have a right to multiple partners your health insurance company is either going to make you pick one or stop offering partner coverage.
Similarly in the housing case, we make an exception to the one bed per adult rule for a pair of adults who can reasonably be assumed to be sharing a bed. Changing the definition of related adult to include all 6 members of your poly relationship is just going to result in the occupancy laws also changing. Nobody is just going to shrug their shoulders and go “I guess we have to let them squeeze 6 adults into a 1 bedroom apartment”. Best case you can put 6 adults in a 3 bed apartment, but you can probably already do that.
In some cities, the owner of a house with five bedrooms and three people can’t legally take on a lodger. And this is renting out a spare room in the house they’re living in, not people buying up properties and using them as apartments. Forcing cities to retreat to “no more than two people per bedroom, plus one” or whatever would fix…some of the problem.
I don’t follow the news but a few articles and one very short TV news segment about the situation at the US southern border, with the “camps”, have shot across my field of view. With my thusly described level of ignorance as a caveat, it seems to me like there might be a few instances where things have been very poorly implemented and maybe some mid-level people should be reprimanded or fired, but in general the government is handling the situation about as well as can be reasonably expected given the constraints they’re working with. Also: some commentators claim the way the situation is being handled is evidence of a malicious attitude toward foreigners, and it seems to me these commentators are obviously wrong and arguing in bad faith.
If anyone here knows about this issue in much more detail than I do, can you tell me why my impression is basically wrong or right?
I recommend Brandon Darby, who has been writing about this issue for years. Unfortunately, he was easy to ignore, and I did, because the people most willing to publish his stories in 2014 was Brietbart.
But you can read his Twitter feed (which today includes a Zakaria piece that documents just how much of a surge we are getting in asylum claims) without ever having to see another Brietbart piece in the sidebar.
It doesn’t sound like that would provide the clarity I’m looking for. Exposés only help validate the claim that bad things are happening, but they don’t validate the implied claim that the whole thing is being done maliciously or incompetently (compared to some other obviously better solution I haven’t heard about yet).
Fair enough.
Like in 2014, there has been a surge of people coming across the border. There are finite resources to house and feed these people. The solutions include
1) throwing more resources at the facilities. Probably a good idea.
2) letting the people be released into the US, and ask them to show up later. There is large reason to be skeptical they will show up, and if they have nothing and no work papers, how are they planning to support themselves in the meantime?
3) an NGO offers to house/shelter them. Has anyone done this? Many groups could do this, but ideally one would build up a reputation for making sure the people show up for their hearings, instead of simply vanishing
The parts that make it feel like malice are the refusals of material aid, like diapers and toothbrushes. I get why a bureaucracy would refuse to take donations of unknown providence, but some reputable aid groups could volunteer to collect and be responsible for what is turned over.
Yeah, I’ve only heard anyone suggest (2), which strikes me as obviously dumb. Mostly it seems like people don’t suggest anything, they just make Holocaust/Japanese internment comparisons and say “See? Trump is a racist!”
(2) is only dumb if you think asylum seekers’ “sneaking” into the US this way is a worse outcome than their being interned in bad conditions for long periods. For those of us who do not actually see immigration as a threat, there’s no reason to think it’s actually a worse outcome. “Just let them in and stop fearmongering” may sound simplistic but it’s not obviously dumb if you’re not a restrictionist.
Depends on whether “bad conditions” are horrific or just not very comfortable, and whether these conditions exist at just about all detention centers or just a few of them.
Even most restrictionists agree that there should be an orderly process for immigration and asylum-granting. Letting would-be immigrants/asylum-seekers in and trusting them to show up for their court dates or whatever, and not just disappear, seems naive to say the least.
That’s basically open borders. “Let them in and stop fearmongering that they’ll game the system by never showing up for their hearing” will lead to >99% of foreigners who cross the border doing so.
This makes Bernie Sanders denigrating open borders as “a Koch brothers proposal” baffling.
Bernie Sanders is one of the rare Democrats (well, okay, independent and he calls himself socialist, but let’s be real here) that actually has a serious ideological commitment to Old Left ideals. Those include labor protectionism. I don’t agree that his preferred policies are actually a good deal for American workers, but he’s serious when he talks about cutting good deals for them.
Yeah, the transition from the donor class right being the pro–open borders side to the woke left has been a real thing. One more reason I sincerely miss the left’s class-based politics compared to what we get today.
@Nornagest:
I just don’t know how to square “securing the border out of an ideological commitment to labor protectionism” with “I’ll be called a Nazi if I do anything at the border other than let everyone cross but pinky swear that they’ll show up for a court hearing on whether they get to stay or not.”
@Nick:
Yyyeah.
To be honest, I don’t think Bernie Sanders does either. But that just means he has a problem, it doesn’t mean that he’s lying through his teeth when he says he doesn’t want open borders.
If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say that his stance is about 50% deploring everything happening on our southern border because that’s what you’re expected to do as a Democrat when Trump’s in office, and the other 50% sincerely believing that he’ll be able to come up with a more humane but nonetheless effective system, details to be determined. But that’s a guess. I don’t follow everything he says about immigration.
Was just reading, h/t Rod Dreher, that we’re being flooded with African migrants now too:
This isn’t even Breitbart, it’s NPR.
But since the overwhelming majority of the population are in favor of restricting immigration …
FWIW I’m no fan of Sanders and can’t speak for him; I’m much closer to the Koch brothers politically, frankly. I would not draw generalizations about which political tendency/sub-tendency is most likely to be anti-restrictionist– there is neither a uniform nor a fixed mapping. In any case the point is that, on the anti-restrictionist view, asylum-seekers “gaming the system by not showing up” is not a bad outcome because it doesn’t actually hurt anyone, and the fearmongering to be stopped is the fear that somehow it does hurt people.
Question I have for this is, if a migrant/asylum seeker shows up and is detained, are they free to return to Mexico/Canada, or are they keep in detention of some sort until they are processed?
I would find poor conditions in the first situation should change but it would be a lot less offensive than poor conditions and not allowing them any recourse.
My impression, which could be very wrong, is that these people at these facilities have walked into the US and asked to be let in. Conservatives have claimed “they can walk out at any time”, which I haven’t seen factually challenged.
Fareed Zakaria, h/t Andrew Sullivan, points out “the number of asylum cases from Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela has soared at the same time as the crime rate in those countries was being cut in half.”
Is it meant to imply the crime rate dropped because these people were the criminals and they left, or that the crime rate dropped and therefore it is unreasonable to grant them asylum?
There are babies there without their parents tho.
How did the babies get there? Were they dropped off by people who then vanished, or are there adults or older kids who could be said to be responsible for them?
I remember when Obama was dealing with unaccompanied minors, and feeling it was the thing maximally designed to put strain on the system. Kids show up without adults; what do you do? Obama’s answer was to get the word out that this was not a way to get your kids into the US.
I feel that when we’re stuffing a hundred plus people into cells for three dozen, denying them medicine and basic hygienic products, and making them drink from toilets, all orchestrated by people who participate in Facebook groups advocating violence and sexual assault against asylum seekers and our own politicians, (to say nothing of how many of the 300+ (but we don’t actually know how many more) children who are being punted around from site to site will almost certainly disappear into sex slavery because of the secrecy being deployed to keep these camps out of the public eye) we have left the point where “some mid-level people should be reprimanded”. At the very least, the Border Patrol needs a complete overhaul and if this situation genuinely arose from incompetence, steps need to be taken to codify what will happen to get future Border Patrol employees the resources they need for asylum surges quickly.
As for “obviously wrong and arguing in bad faith”, in my time lurking here I have seen that be deployed by members of both sides of the CW for virtually every issue of note. If you refuse to acknowledge that the [Color] Tribe is sincere in its beliefs and has arrived at its conclusions for genuine reasons (even if you do not agree with those reasons), you are never going to attain any epistemic achievements beyond telling yourself what you want to hear.
But again, did these things happen at a couple of non-representative detention centers, or are they rampant widespread problems across the whole immigration enforcement arm of the government? You said “Border Patrol needs a complete overhaul”; to me, that kind of language suggests you think the whole thing has these problems from top to bottom. Does it really? I’m willing to believe any answer if it’s supported by good evidence, but if not, isn’t it an example of “obviously wrong and arguing in bad faith”?
Do you have any evidence of what fraction of border patrol people at what level participate in such a FB group?
How would you react if I said that the Democratic party is orchestrated by people who wear black masks to beat up people who disagree with their politics? The number of Antifa members who behave that way, and most of whom probably vote Democratic (call it the progressive movement instead of the Democratic party if you prefer), may well be larger than the number of people on the FB group you are referring to.
The Facebook group, which purported to be for current or former agents of the CBP, had 9,500 members.
CBP has a total of 20,000 employees.
That is consistent with some large fraction of CBP being part of the group, but not conclusive.
I’d say that purported is quite important. Is there any verification required?
I’m skeptical of there being a stable equilibrium where the group includes both a large number of actual/former CBP members and a large number of wannabes and poseurs. One will almost certainly drive out the other.
So either this is the wannabe/poseur facebook group, which I expect we’d have heard by now, or it reflects the culture of a large minority of the CBP, at least.
I don’t know, however Pro Publica was able to connect a number of the posts to confirmed CBP agents.
It was a secret group, and secret groups require an invite from a current group member.
@HBC:
Thanks. As you say, relevant but not conclusive. Still disturbing.
The group HeelBearCub presents is the evidence. Note that ProPublica was able to link profiles to agents, and remember that secret Facebook groups are by invitation only. Unless this whole thing is a vast conspiracy of fake accounts, an extraordinary claim requiring evidence of its own before being able to dismiss the claims I’m making so thoroughly as to say that they must by default be in bad faith (a little something you should be reminded is the subject at hand), it seems reasonable to assume that the group is what it says it is. After all, some Border Patrol members have come forward to corroborate claims that racism and cruelty are distressingly rampant in the enforcement agency.
I’d say that your attempt at engaging about whataboutism is as transparently shameful as it is piss-poor. The topic at hand is the scale of the problem at the border camps, the proper response to it, and whether or not those who say it is a very bad problem are at least genuine in their convictions. What does the Democratic party or my stance on it have to do with any of that? How is that even a relevant response? I criticized a branch of the federal government, not the Republican party. But again, the crux of the argument is whether or not arguments are in bad faith. I have described the situation in a way that fits all the evidence we have. Even if it’s wrong, that doesn’t make it bad faith. That requires being able to present evidence that I’m wrong and my ignoring it anyway. It’s a very high bar to clear.
But frankly, the way you come rushing in to defend the situation with aspersions and distractions, ignoring claims of the federal government horrifically mistreating people over a misdemeanor, probably is in bad faith. You can’t refute the critique to any meaningful degree, so you just start banging your chest and shouting, “BLUE TRIBE BAD! BLUE TRIBE BAD!” because the alternative is risking someone in your tribe realizing that the best you personally can claim is, “Yeah, we’re bad, but no one is any better than us.” All right. All of humanity sucks, man. Embrace that nihilistic worldview. It’s your life. But the Border Patrol has actual, legal power. Antifa members who commit crimes can and generally will be sent to jail for what they do – the police are not their friends. I can trust that justice will be done.
With the Border Patrol, that is not so. It is the greater crisis; the wheels of justice have been deliberately misaligned. Those who commit these cruelties seem to operate with impunity. After all, if as Well… claims these were outlier sites, the product of local mismanagement, one would think that those people would be removed and whatever policies the Border Patrol should be employing in overcrowding situations used instead. It’s an easy PR win for all involved and a moral obligation besides. Stuffing 100+ people into a cell meant for a third of that number is clearly a cruel and unusual punishment and forbidden, so it shouldn’t take long. As no one has been fired yet, one must conclude that they either cannot be or will not be.
If they cannot be, the Border Patrol needs to be overhauled so that these local powers can be removed. This will probably require intervention from the rest of the federal government and certainly fits as a top to bottom overhaul. If they will not be, then the heads of the Border Patrol need to be removed from power in addition to those who are causing the problems at specific sites. If Well… is wrong, and these are not outliers – if Border Patrol is overwhelmed with no relief in sight – then quite a good deal needs to be fixed because it does not seem like this crisis is ending any time soon and more resources will be required to deal with it humanely and legally.
So I say again: my argument is not in bad faith. It is arrived to with reason, and arguments against it that are not fallacious distractions, such as Well…’s, provide various nuances that are important to consider for implementing the actual solution to this problem, but do not change the crux of the issue as I understand it.
To Well…, I would like to reiterate attempting to dismiss it as “bad faith,” is a mistake. Being able to present counter scenarios that also fit the evidence doesn’t make someone willfully wrong. Political debates of this nature are important – the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and your political opponents are answering the question, “Who watches the watchmen?” with “All of us”. I really, really want you to understand that overcrowding people into cells over a misdemeanor isn’t okay. Not even once. It’s not just the human rights violation that the imprisonment entails, though that should be a big issue here. What if there was a fire, and people – both guard and prisoner, in case the only way I can get you to consider the humanity at risk here is to remind you of the ones there in your own tribe – died because they couldn’t all evacuate in time? What if there’s a riot, like even the Border Patrol agents are afraid is going to happen? So many people would die for no reason. We could avoid it. We’re standing in the train tracks, watching the train come, and people are trying to play fucking chicken with it.
This is a goddamn fucking problem, man. I’m begging you to see that and to do something – to call your fucking representatives at least and tell them to take action if nothing else – and to not just take the easy route of saying, “I don’t like my opponents, I don’t want to give ground to them, so I will not hear them.” You admit that you’re ignorant of this situation, so why is it that the first thing you wanna do is decide you know enough to dismiss what half the country is saying?
@DavidFriedman
Since they look exactlly like 2011’s “Black bloc” (dark bandanas covering face and hoodie, and mostly joined existing protests, and then smashed windows) I very much doubt many of 2019’s “Antifa” vote at all.
At least in Berkeley and Oakland, California my guess is they’re allied with the Long Haul “infoshop” and left anarchism.
If they have red bandanas instead they’re likely affiliated with Bob Avakian’s Maoist personality cult, Revolution Books, and the “Revolutionary Communist Party”.
In most cases they seem to come up and be “radicalized” via the Punk Rock “scene”, and often are young whites with “dreadlock” hair.
These people largely have contempt for electoral politics, mainstream “ruling class” political parties (both Democrats and Republicans), “false consciousness”, and “liberals”.
The likely call themselves “progressives”, but not “Democrats”.
If the police put shampoo in the water supply before fire hosing them, will their hair get clean and straight?
Netflix recommendation:
Last night I watched The Wolf’s Call. This is a French movie with English subtitles available. It follows a sonar analyst in the French navy. First, he’s on a sub rendezvousing with special forces off the coast of Syria, then he’s assigned to an SSBN. In the movie, Russia has invaded part of Finland and the US has not responded, so European militaries are on full alert. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the depiction of submarine warfare (though I suspect some SSC commenters would get nerd sniped by some aspects), but as a drama it was pretty good.
Is this modern or Cold War period?
Modern
In OT 130.5, we lament that the island of stability remains elusive in the wake of the synthesis of element 118. If there’s an island at all, it’s further out. This in turn pushes away the possibility of making exotic SF technology by reaching Really Big Elements.
Where else can we go in speculative science to make wonder materials? Nanotech seems promising, and all the rage lately – it seems plausible to put enough atoms together, one by one, to produce something at least capable of some quirky tricks.
But what about alloys or composites? What’s on the horizon on combining elements on a micro or milli scale? How much of that concept space has actually been explored? What could be lurking out there, that could yield a miracle shock absorber? Insulator? Heat absorber? Heat reflector? Transparent infrastructure? Superfuel? Superexplosive? Superconductor?
(I could find no Project Rho section on this, so it seemed worth asking here.)
* Muon substitution for elections
* Quantum Wellstone
* Claytronics
* Quantum wells, dots, and wires
* Quantum harp emitters
* High temperature superconductors
* Fullerine trapped antimatter
* Fullerine trapped molecules trapped outside their energy, geometry, or reaction minima.
see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Matter and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_matter
The FiveThirtyEight guys are gonna love this one.
Moscow State University published about it a few years ago, but then it turned out they p-hacked the elections.
Nanostructures/features are still something to look forwards to.
Anything from having high traction, superconductors, and whatever nanotubes were rumored to do.
Speaking of which – graphene, nanotubes, buckyballs – we’ll probably get some new hyped up carbon allotrope eventually.
On the less stable side, if humans can find some way of creating large nitrogen allotropes, that might spark some interesting new explosives.
Silicon lifeforms are a pretty old scifi staple. Complex silicon structures aren’t seen as likely nowadays but I wouldn’t say they’ve been ruled out.
what would the application of an island of stability actually be? I have a vague memory of being taught that as you move vertically down the periodic table, the characteristics of the elements get more extreme (I recall a fun video of the consequences of dropping a tiny amount of lithium vs. cesium in water) and can see how that would be useful in theory, but am not aware of any particular envisioned uses.
The most visible problem with large elements is their short half-life – you get literally three to ten atoms, and they survive for a few milliseconds, meaning you can’t build anything useful at a human scale. And the larger the atomic number, the shorter the half-life seems to be.
However, half-life also isn’t monotonically decreasing; it seems to depend on several things, including proton-neutron ratio, group, and so on. No one knows the exact formula, but data collected so far suggest one could make some predictions, and one of them was that half-life might be longer in certain cases beyond the reach of current collider technology. A few hopeful theories even suggested half-lives of millions of years, a mythical island in the unexplored sea, or as I tend to visualize it, like a Shangri-La in the treacherous radioactivity mountains. It’s remote enough that an enterprising SF author could ascribe all manner of magical properties to it. Cf. vibranium.
So far, though, no one’s sighted land.
I get that’s the problem with the superheavies, I’m just not sure what would be useful about, e.g., moscovium if it turned out to be relatively stable
That’s just it – I think no one really knows. There’s a lot of theory, but no one can know for sure until they get to actually play with the stuff for more than a tenth of a second. So no one bothers to figure out what moscovium might be good for, since it’s obviously not going to stick around long enough.
It’s not the most exciting application, but the predictions for some of the superheavies we haven’t made yet do still include a few with half lives into centuries, which makes it possible they could be used as fuel for RTGs. Presumably they’d have more energy than current RTG fuels, but that application would require being able to produce substantial quantities at less than insane cost, and no clue how much shielding they’d require. Or, similarly, reactor fuel or bomb-making material; again, would require mass production of elements we haven’t figured out how to make even a single atom of yet, and no clue whether they’d have troublesome drawbacks, but in principle one or more could turn out to be superior for such purposes.
That’s not exactly right.
Beyond a certain point, the chemical reactions of atoms stop being so critically dependent on the valence elections (what the periodic tables categorizes) as there’s more “wiggle room”.
So elements stop following the pattern set by the other elements in their column/group.
So for your example – the heaviest element of the first column/group Francium and the statement “Thus, contrary to expectation, caesium is the most reactive of the alkali metals, not francium.”
As for what good does a stable super heavy atom does?
Some theorized properties it might have are – good source of neutrons, stronger/denser source of nuclear fuel, low yield critical mass, and interesting “mixed” group properties due to what I mentioned before of superheavy elements not following the group trends
I’m useless for materials science questions, but in terms of actually achievable nanotech a huge breakthrough would be a ribozyme which can reduce ATP.
A deoxyribozyme or ribozyme is an enzyme made of nucleic acids, DNA or RNA, instead of amino acids. They can fold into secondary and tertiary structures like a protein but are much easier to engineer. The downside is that they can’t really do much interesting biochemistry because unlike proteins you can’t use the energy from ATP to drive reactions. I’m not aware of any theoretical reason why it couldn’t work but neither science nor natural selection has delivered it.
Solving that problem won’t get you to Drexler but it would be a huge game-changer.
Interesting!
Yeah, ribozymes get a surprisingly small amount of press.
Like protein domains you can have different parts of the sequence form modular structures, but since the folding is a lot less of a pain to deal with you can do some crazy things with them that would be harder with proteins. For example, scientists have been making deoxyribozyme logic gates and performing simple computations (one I saw was a set of nine test tubes that could play tic tac toe against you) since the turn of the century but from what I understand synthetic protein circuits have only just recently been developed.
My guess is that it’s because without the ability to hydrolyze ATP they’re not nearly as sexy as proteins and futurists have greatly underestimated how long it will take to solve protein folding.
DNA is fascinating because it is a language derived from the fundamental laws of the universe, as opposed to simple conventions like human language.
I think you mean hydrolyze ATP. Reduction of ATP to deoxy-ATP would be interesting, but it wouldn’t provide a useful source of ∆G.
This is why I’m a biologist and not an organic chemist.
Anyway, yeah that’s what I meant. Thank you.
Why not be both, and become a chemical biologist? It’s quite fun to use organic chemistry to mess with biology and see what happens.
Anyway, you may be interested in this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammerhead_ribozyme#Cleavage_by_phosphodiester_isomerization
It’s not quite ATP hydrolysis, but it’s very similar, and with a bit of tinkering I expect that an ATP-hydrolyzing ribozyme could be created.
OK, what’s the reality behind nano-manufacturing? When I was in the Golden Age of SF (12) around the end of the 1990s, I remember Drexler fans online saying it would be realistic for any private individual to turn a tree into a chemical rocket by sprinkling a vial of nano-replicators on it to turn it into hydrogen, oxygen, and diamond. But I have the feeling that these people thought since a microscopic self-replicating thingy demonstrably doesn’t violate any physical laws, they could handwave energy requirements away and still call it realistic.
I don’t know about “these people,” but in the version I am familiar with you dump in some gasoline or other suitable chemical that can be disassembled to get the energy to do your constructing with.
>Where else can we go in speculative science to make wonder materials?
I’m not sure if it would count as a wonder material, but if neutrinos indeed have mass,
(and are too light to decay into anything else), then a collection of enough of them, moving
slowly enough should be a stable material not found on the periodic table.
Holding them in anything would be a problem though… I doubt they will interact enough
to bounce off any wall material…
Molecular machines, and more complicated polymeric materials are going to be a very big deal.
Ok, so sure sure, you’ll say you just want your kids to be happy, but supposing you have 3 kids born this year, in two years, and in 4 years, what do you *aspire* your kids to be?
For me, eldest to youngest:
1. Programmer
2. Chef
3. Math professor
And hobbies?
1. Board games
2. Pianist
3. Computer game making
what do you *aspire* your kids to be?
1. Healthy
2. Wise
3. Happy
As for job or economic role? Meh. Anything congruent with those three, plus no student debt.
Hah, it’s easier for me to say what I don’t aspire my kids to be. But since you asked in the positive, I can only answer in vague sweeps:
1 (elder, daughter): something respectable[*] that makes her happy/fulfilled, is decidedly safe, doesn’t require her to alter her body, and doesn’t prevent her from getting married and having kids.
2 (younger, son): something respectable that makes him happy/fulfilled, is reasonably safe, and allows him to provide for a wife and kids.
*This means not stripping, writing phishing bots, journalism, etc.
I can pretty much cosign this. There’s lots of ways to lead a good life, and other than avoiding some definitely disappointing possibilities I don’t feel strongly about the careers they pursue. Their husbands and children (or lack thereof) will have a larger impact on their own lives. Obviously I hope they largely share my culture, faith, and values. Sharing hobbies would be nice, I guess, but I’m willing to meet them half way on that.
My eldest daughter did at one point express interest in being an astronaut, which I gently discouraged on the basis that setting a goal only a very small fraction of people can ever attain seems like setting yourself up for disappointment. I might have been more encouraging if she was passionate about space, but that didn’t seem to be the case.
I don’t know the biographies of many astronauts, but the ones whose biographies I do know at least a little about all seem to go like this (in approximate but not exact order):
– Bright and relentlessly inquisitive as a young kid
– Military (usually something to do with engineering or flying planes) as a young adult, displaying obvious talent and phenomenal work ethic
– Top of their field as a professional test pilot or engineer
– Excelled in higher education, not necessarily at an elite school but at least at a very respectable one
– Excelled at everything they did after that, including work, extracurriculars (including something physically demanding), and family life
– Got very, very lucky
You forgot “be born in Ohio.”
Heh, right.
Or Oklahoma, which had I think the highest number of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo astronauts by population. This does raise two questions:
1. What does Oregon’s astronaut population look like?
2. What were Cooper, Stafford et al so eager to get away from?
>doesn’t require her to alter her body
nit: Most of the population winds up needing at least some dental fillings.
That little bit of bodily alteration is routinely necessary.
I was thinking about stuff like “Needs a new chin so she can be a Hollywood star”, and I also had the daughter character in that movie “Synecdoche, New York” flit through my mind.
Many Thanks for the explanation!
Parents.
+1
If there was only a choice between “My kids will be really happy but none of them will have kids” vs. “My kids will be pretty miserable but I will have lots of grandkids” I’d pick the latter.
+2
Well, I’m in the “encourage children to have their own children because I think it actually will make them happy” camp, rather than the “suck it up and do it for my sake” camp.
If I thought one of my children really would be made miserable long term, like they were a carrier for a rare disease that caused their children to die early and painfully, I wouldn’t encourage it.
Yeah, I should clarify that I was only saying that to make a point; I rarely think the choice I outlined is the one people get in real life. Generally I’m in the same camp as you.
Yeah, but I think the more likely “I don’t want to have kids” follow-up is “so I can travel the world” or something bizarre like that. If I hear that from one of my kids, I’ll wonder what I did wrong.
I want all of them to end up as parents. I like having grandchildren.
Beyond that, doing something they enjoy doing, think is of some use to the world, and pays tolerably well.
List in order of preference, not by age:
1. Entrepeneur (successful hopefully)
2. Researcher in the hard sciences
3. Teacher (but the really clever kind that teaches really well at the sort of rich selective schools I went to, not the kind that gets abused and bullied by their thuggish students)
4. Fiction writer
Hobbies:
1. Fencing
2. Origami
3. Cross-country running
I have been banned for 3 months as “EC” for no stated rule violation. That time has expired, but my ban still has not been lifted.
I would like clarification as to when it will be lifted.
@Scott Alexander, please un-ban @Echo Chaos (no space), so I may argue/converse with him again.
Thanks
TheAncientGeek’s ban also ended a few days ago.
I’m pretty sure he’s just not that great at checking for expired bans. Someone had to remind him about Matt M, too.
Please recalibrate your psyches to Maximum Snob.
All done? Good.
Now, what works are truly essential reading for the modern intellectual?
You are not worthy of my recommendations, and providing them to you would be as useful as throwing pearls before the swine.
If you were really that snobbish, you would not have deigned to follow johan_larson’s petty rules.
/sniff
These attempts at meta-humor are as passé as they are predictable.
Yes, you would say something like that, wouldn’t you?
sips from snifter
Ah, but I was following the rules before I set my phaser on
stunsnob.@johan_larson,
I don’t have the credentials and education to qualify as an “Intellectual’, but snob comes easy!
When we get interns from time-to-time I often give them copies if two books:
How to Tell When You’re Tired: A Brief Examination of Work by Reg Theriault
and
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford
I used to recommend Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad as a good novel to get moral lessons from, but I tried to re-read it this year and found it to be too dense to recommend (I think I just had more patience and mental agility when I first read it years ago).
Some of the works of John Steinbeck is could also be good, but while I think the lessons are true, it just may be cruel to teach them.
Lord Jim is an interesting case. On the one hand, I found it to be a very rewarding read – once I finally managed to get through it. On the other hand – my God! Getting through the setup (the whole Patna sequence) was such a slog!
All in all, I’m not convinced that the whole “Marlow tells a story” framing device works all that well. It seems to me to add unnecessary padding, without actually contributing anything to the story as such.
Would you agree?
@Faza (TCM) ,
Yes I agree, there’s lots of padding that could be removed without diluting the core story, I can’t judge if that would lessen the total emotional impact, it may be argued that spending so much time/effort with the character enhances that, but at least in my re-read attempt it did indeed seem like too much of a slog.
Oh for the mercy of a good editor!
That said, I think it’s a good book to read at least once. More would seem to be a matter of acquired taste.
The true modern snob is distinguished not by what they have read, but by what they haven’t.
I can’t recommend anything on the grounds that I haven’t finished my novel. But when I do, you will find it prefigured most in Homeric epic.
On careful, measured consideration I submit The Doll, by Bolesław Prus. The linked wiki entry does not do the work any kind of justice (as is to be expected), but – despite appearances of being exactly the kind of book high school students are tormented with in lit classes – it turns out to be, much to my surprise, not only an excellent read, but smart, nay!, wise.
It’s also cynical and merciless to everyone and everything, which is a definite bonus to this reader.
I cannot speak for the English translations, such as may be, so you’re on your own there. Some of the magic of the original language will surely be gone, but the story and thought contained therein should nevertheless be preserved, even if you don’t have the good fortune of having the background to appreciate certain nuances of the milieu depicted (and how little things have changed over the 100+ years since).
Noting that the challenge specifies the modern intellectual as intended recipient, I submit that true intellect is timeless and that a wisdom focused but on the here and now does not seem particularly wise.
(For extra Snobbery Points, I’ll mention in passing that the copy in my family’s possession dates back to 1905, complete with Russian imperial censorship seal. As usual in my posts, my tongue remains planted firmly in my cheek, apart from the key point: it really is an excellent book.)
Infinite Jest seems like the obvious answer.
I mean Ulysses is probably more appropriate. Infinite Jest is infinitely more readable.
That’s a couple of snobbery cycles ago. Current snobs dismiss DFW as such a “bro” author.
I found that book ironically addictive. I don’t even know why really.
Got obsessed and spent whole days just reading it to the exclusion of other activities. I didn’t even enjoy reading it that much.
I don’t play Tennis. Quebecois seperatist wheelchair assasins while a cool concept…. don’t actually make sense. And I don’t play Tennis.
Eventually skipped a lot of content so I could finish it and get closure. Seeing that there’s none to be had anyway……. Surreal.
Guess DFW got a way with words.
That’s so pedestrian. Go with House of Leaves instead.
Now, what works are truly essential reading for the modern intellectual?
A genuine intellectual, or what passes for such in our enervated, decadent end-times?
Maybe it happened a long time ago, but intellectual seems completely fractured now. There’s some must read books every year but they high middle-brow at best because no one can be highbrow in more than a handful of relatively narrow areas.
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. Everyone in my family has read it. After reading the first three-and-a-half pages when I was fifteen I was so incredibly bored by it, that I put it down and have been a hold-out ever since.
Don’t know if the translation is any good. If you’re not conversant in German then you ain’t an intellectual anyway 🙂
I didn’t like Buddenbrooks, except for a few really incredibly cool chapters (where the old father dies during the thunderstorm; where the son discovers that Schopenhauer book; and of course the 1848 revolution). The Zauberberg (magic mountain) was much much better. Thomas Mann should have received the Nobel price for this one!
About the original question, I would throw in Marcel Proust “A la recherche du temps perdu”. But if you are maximum snob, you’ll think that Proust is totally mainstream and you should read Romain Rolland instead.
I actually found The Magic Mountain unbelievably dull, and pretty much gave up on Mann as a result. But perhaps I wasn’t being snobby enough while reading it.
Cor blimey. I laughed my socks off.
It might be that I can find humour in little things, like somebody drinking blood-coloured liquid which turns out to be rose hip tea; or knowing twenty-eight different kinds of fish sauce.
But perhaps I wasn’t being snobby enough while reading it.
That’s possible: did you peruse a volume languidly, reading it through a lorgnette held in one listless hand while with the other you delicately dipped a madeleine into a bone-china cup of tea whilst reclining on a chaise-longue beneath the exquisitely melancholic aura of l’heure bleue?
This seems to be a harder or perhaps less interesting question than I expected.
Over in my intellectual stomping-grounds, computer science, there aren’t really any essential books. There’s a common body of knowledge, sure, but you can learn about algorithms and data structures from any number of books.
The magnum opus of the field, Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, is too massive to be required reading. It’s a reference work, really.
I suppose if you’re looking for snob appeal, you might try Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a rather difficult introduction to computer programming that was used at MIT for many years.
Niklaus Wirth’s Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs might work for snob appeal; it used to be popular but now it’s not. Might be too accessible. For utterly inaccessible and so snobbish even most of the snobs have never heard of it (and so can be snob-snubbed), you need to go to either lambda calculus or category theory. Church’s The Calculi of Lambda Conversion seems promising.
The Dragon Books — Principles of Compiler Design and Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools — would be reasonable candidates.
That’s good thinking. Anything truly essential can’t be too specialized, and I could see someone arguing that if you’ve never written a compiler, you haven’t really learned computer science deeply.
But that’s still within the field. I’m not sure a modern intellectual snob absolutely has to know any computer science at all.
The snob position in CS is to mock people for knowing any tech older than about 6 months.
And somehow reconcile that with some major open-source projects being written in (God help us) C.
There are two kinds of snob in software engineering. The front-end snob changes software stacks like some people change clothes, and pretends not to know anything that’s old enough to have most of the bugs worked out. The back-end snob might have started to grudgingly accept C++11, but uses it to write what’s pretty much still just idiomatic C.
C++ seems to me like such an enormous language that I can hardly blame anyone for sticking to an older subset of it.
> C++ seems to me like such an enormous language that I can hardly blame anyone for sticking to an older subset of it.
The addition of the ‘auto’ keyword substantially reduced the verbosity to the point *not* migrating to the newer spec is basically an exercise in sadism.
OTOH, lambda expressions …
You only really need “auto” if you’re working with iterators, which confuse and frighten these guys anyway.
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) was good enough for my father* and it's good enough for me.
* Actually he used
" DO 10 I = 1,10 "@Nornagest
That would be me 😉
The back-end snob might have started to grudgingly accept C++11, but uses it to write what’s pretty much still just idiomatic C.
I’m snobbier than that.
https://gitlab.com/NTPsec/ntpsec/blob/master/devel/hacking.adoc
text: The baseline C standard to write to is ISO/IEC 9899:1999, also known as C99 (but see the following section on banned functions). Note that C99 is a coding standard, not an ABI standard, so it can happily coexist with distributions that use C89 conventions. You *may* use C11-style anonymous unions.
And then a dozen more paragraphs refining on that.