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I already posted this on the subreddit but I thought I’d also put it here for more visibility:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190806073614/https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/health/military-institute-s-research-halted-at-fort-detrick-after-failed/article_767f3459-59c2-510f-9067-bb215db4396d.html
Basically, the USAMRIID top research facility has had some really egregious safety violations. (I am very thankful for the CDC inspectors who found these). The USAMRIID researchers were supposed to be the experts. If they can’t handle dangerous pathogens safely, then I shudder to think about what might be going on in other labs.
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Do you think the following story is just a crazy conspiracy theory?
The social background of The New Trier High School (rated by Newsweek as the 17th best high school in the country) is non-uniform. Most students come from highly affluent neighborhoods, such as Kenilworth (>97% white, median income $567,115) . A significant minority comes from neighborhoods, such as Willmette (aka Wilmetto) where the median income is several times lower and there is a growing population of highly educated Asian immigrants. Several years ago, the school instituted a new policy prohibiting its junior and sophomore students from attending AP classes or even just taking AP exams. The official explanation is that the policy aims to reduce the stress on the students. The “conspiracy theory” is that the school wants to cut by half the number of AP classes on Asian students’ college applications to prevent them from outcompeting students from the upper-class neighborhoods.
Which version sounds more plausible to you?
I’m not sure the latter plot makes much sense, even if it is plausibly the motivation someone senseless. Most colleges, especially the prestigious ones, attract applicants from across the state, if not country or world. Reducing the number of AP classes on the transcripts of a portion of a portion of one high school class seems like it is going to be entirely pointless in improving the odds of the students who would only take senior year APs.
But either way it sounds like a stupid blanket policy. My HS Junior year was super hard, with AP Chem and AP Physics, but those classes prepared me for college–though I didn’t skip Freshman chem, I should have, and I skated through it, and physics was similar. And though it was a hard year in high school, it was interesting!
It’s not going to matter at the level of college admissions (except, of course, for screwing over some middle-class Asians), but it might matter at the level of soothing some rich kids’ feelings of inadequacy while they’re still in high school. Or perhaps of opening up AP slots for senior-level rich kids that would otherwise be saturated with sophomore and junior Asians, but the math there only works if you make some assumptions.
Petty and mean-spirited either way, but I wouldn’t put it past your average school board. The stress explanation on the other hand is obvious horseshit.
The better option in that case would be to just have more AP classes. No reason you can’t convert a regular physics block into an AP block if there are enough applicants to warrant it. (Probably what you mean by the last phrase)
Yeah, there needs to be something holding the number of AP classes constant. It’s not implausible to me that there is such a something, though: maybe there’s something about scheduling that means you can’t make the conversion, or maybe there’s only one teacher who’s qualified to teach AP physics classes, all his slots are full, and a second one can’t be hired for some reason.
Hearing only that, the conspiracy theory. I find it hard to believe a high-achieving high school cares about stress on students.
ETA: Oh, but I agree with Randy the reasoning behind the conspiracy makes little sense. I could believe it has something to do with discouraging the asian students from attending that school.
This is where my mind immediately went as well. If you want to have fewer Asian students and you can’t just dictate that directly by fiat, what you can do is make the school generally undesirable in the criteria that Asians might use to select schools in the first place…
I third this new version of the conspiracy theory.
Yeah, if they want to chase away the most competitive students, this might be a way to do it.
Didn’t Palo Alto actually try something like this after a string of suicides? They wanted to cut before-school classes or something like that.
ETA: I’m thinking of this.
This conspiracy theory sounds sketchy to me. Several reasons:
First, at least according to The school’s website you actually are allowed to take some AP classes as a junior. There may be limits on how many (the article isn’t clear) but the strict prohibition only applies to sophomores.
Moving on, it looks like the school is split into two campuses, one just for freshmen, one for everyone else. Sophomore year is a student’s first year at the New Trier primary campus.
Reading between the lines, it looks like the school treats sophomores the way that other schools (and colleges) treat freshmen, IE, they are too new to be trusted with any kind of serious academic load. I think that’s more likely the reason they don’t let Sophomores take AP classes, not the conspiracy theory.
If there is a nefarious hidden purpose, my money’s on gaming ratings statistics.
Since you brought up Newsweek’s Best High School ratings, I looked up their criteria and it looks like they rate based in part on average AP score. The school could be figuring that by restricting younger students from sitting AP exams, they’re preventing the least-prepared students who would be likely to bring the average down. This could backfire, since my intuition is that the sorts of students who would be sitting AP exams as Sophomores would be the likeliest to score highly, so you’d be better off letting them sit as many exams as they want.
US News also rates High Schools, but their AP metric is the percent of students who pass at least one AP exam. By this metric, there’s no benefit from letting top students run up their scores by taking more exams, and no harm from letting them sit exams younger. But there may be benefit to the school from limiting younger students from taking AP classes, since that limits how many AP classes each student can take, freeing seats in a given number of classes to make sure as many students as possible can take at least one AP class.
I don’t think AP classes were traditionally available to Freshman or Sophomores at my high school, possibly with some rare exceptions for one or two massively advanced kids or something.
The conspiracy theory seems implausible to me. “Reducing stress on the students” may not be a great reason to enact the policy, but I don’t see any reason not to think it is really why they implemented it.
How many AP classes were the relevant students taking as freshman/sophomores before anyway? It isn’t as though their entire schedule all 4 years was AP.
Conspiracy Theory, though not specifically “the Asians,” though, yeah, “the Asians.”
There is a huge college credentials arms race in these schools. The expectation is that you will be taking multiple AP classes by your sophomore year, participate in multiple extracurriculars, and be state-level competitive in at least one. Plus maybe place in the Science Fair or the poetry slam on the side. Many kids cannot compete and even among kids who can, you parents bristle at the never-ending arms race. They would like it to stop, and they definitely notice that particular ethnic groups are very Tiger Mom.
Most would not be so…unwise as to specifically call out any particular groups, unless you are my Mother-in-Law.
I know the wrestling coach there. He thinks it was an attempt to game the ratings which value extra curricular activities and too many kids taking AP classes without doing sports/etc were not getting into their top picked unis.
Note: it’s still possible to self-study and take AP exams at a different school. That’s what I did when I was homeschooled in 7th and 8th grades (AP Chemistry, Bio, and Comp. Sci.)
What’s the difference between art and science? Think of the popular phrase “It’s more of an art than a science.” What does this imply?
My impression is that art is when the outcome is unspecified and success is measured on a spectrum with no clear gradations.
Or maybe it has more to do with objectivity?
Art is measured by people’s appreciation, and science by concordance with reality.
Science is supposed to consistently replicate.
Art is not.
Given the replication crisis, this sadly means that a lot of doing science is really more of an art than a science.
That’s a good point, that’s surely some of it. But I don’t think the expression is usually used to denigrate the activity in question; there’s a sense that an artist is someone with greater talent or skill than a scientist, though not greater intellect.
Indeed. If I can be the first person to invoke Seeing Like A State, I think it implies that there is a certain amount of metis required. That the act involves skills that must be learned and perfected over time, and cannot simply be absorbed by intellectual study.
It’s worth pointing out, since this gets forgotten sometimes, that metis was contrasted with techne. From a random article googling for an illustration:
There’s something to be said for thinking this is just science vs. arts, but I’m not so sure. Like, architecture is very definitely an art, but it can rely a lot on universal (which is not to say abstract) principles. The classical orders are pretty well-defined; there is a sort of grammar of classical architecture, and everyone knows that metopes in the Doric order must always be square. There’s a grammar to human languages too, though they’re too complex to obey very many universal principles, and sometimes a language has a pretty strong rule that nevertheless admits exceptions. Latin, for instance, obeys neuter law—nominative and accusative forms of the neuter are always the same—but its conjugation families have a few irregular verbs.
I think this is as good a delineation as any.
Science (at least in the central examples) follows strict rules and following certain steps should give the same outcome every time.
Art may still have “rules” but relies more on intuition and inconsistent outcomes. Where I think some people get confused is that most any art will have science behind it (for example, there is obviously science behind how music works and even why certain things sound good, or why certain pigments when mixed produce certain colors, etc.).
As a possibly unusual example, you might say that surgery is an art.
The starting point for surgery varies wildly. That cardiac bypass might be blocked in a different place than last time, the veins of differing firmness, the precise shape and size of the heart vary, the patients over all health could put a limit on the time they can be open, and so on.
But if you account for that (and the more important factors I’m ignorant of), the number of ways to operate are fairly small. I think ultimately a robot could be a better surgeon than a trained person by following an expertly designed heuristic, except for the case with unprecedented complications that the human’s understanding will better deal with.
Whereas the composer has a vast amount of variation in which his song can take. Even if he is going for a particular mood, there is a lot of ways to get there.
I might be underestimating robots, but I think it would take a very advanced one to create an original artistic piece aimed at a particular mood or feeling better than a human.
Maybe that’s what I was trying to say though. Art is based on heuristics, not hard and fast universally applicable rules/laws.
When criteria of success are difficult to state objectively, we call it an art. I think that’s really about it.
Mmmm, no, I’d say the statement is more about the process than the outcome.
Lots of skills that result in a quantifiable outcome end up getting described as more art than science. Anything with a fair amount of variability in input parameters, or even variability based on small changes in input parameters, might end up described this way.
That sounds right: when the steps towards a desirable outcome cannot be specified easily, then?
Yes, I would say that is more to the spirit of it.
Now, to your original point, the inability to quantize the results is one way that the process becomes hard to specify. That applies especially to actual artistic endeavors, but lots of other things as well.
Yup.
Assuming your question is about what I want the definitions to be rather than what I think the consensus is.
I like the definition that art is anything that’s the output of creativity. Writing, painting, composing is all highly creative and pure art. Translating is only a little bit creative so it’s only a little bit art. Factory work is probably zero art in many cases. Reading something loud isn’t art per se but if someone spends thought into how to make it better (as professional audio book makers do) it becomes more art. So it’s a not a binary value but a spectrum.
Science I would define as something like “the process of learning things about the world through experiments”, where any stage of that is part of doing science.
Going by these two, they can definitely overlap, and I think it’s important that they’re allowed to. Science and art really aren’t opposite concepts, I think the idea that they are is just a weird and poorly thought out cultural thing.
So designing experiments might be art (depending on how much creativity is needed). Following an experimental protocol closely would not be art. Both would be science. This matches with my intuition as to what these terms should mean.
I’m not sure how generally it applies to art or science as concepts, but I interpret the phrase specifically to be about heuristics. I don’t think it refers to the specificity of the outcome, but to the degree to which a process can be reduced into a sequence of steps or instructions. “X is more art than science” is saying “X involves a very complex set of heuristics and trade-offs, far too complex to be conveyed in a set of instructions, and can realistically only be gained by experience.” Baking is a science, cooking more generally is an art. But like I said, I’m not sure how much art and science in this context have to do with those concepts more generally.
I could swear Paul Graham had an essay on the difference between art and science, with programming as the example, but I can’t find it. Ah well.
For me, the difference is that where art is an organized body of skills and techniques, science is an organized body of knowledge. As I see it, the two complement each other while still being distinct: optics is one thing, how to draw something in perspective is another.
ETA: Of course, to preempt the inevitable objection, skills and techniques are knowledge too, but not in the same way. For instance, some knowledge is embodied, as it were, like how to throw a free throw.
You are probably referring to this:
http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html
Egad, hosted by Graham but written by Knuth! My sin compounds!
It looks on review like my post is basically channeling Knuth, so I’m going to call this a victory. Now if only I can channel him in my day job….
Per “The Beginning of Infinity,” David Deutsch would say that a good piece of art, and a good scientific theory, are both hard to vary. It’s difficult to explain, since his world view depends on parallel universes, but the gist is that the most successful art objects/scientist theories are the ones that are preserved unchanged across the largest number of parallel universes.
Perhaps a more metaphysical answer than you were looking for, but still.
I run with the following distinctions:
Science is the study of the physical/non-human world
Art is anything whose purpose it to trigger an emotional response
Technique/skill/craft are tools to achieve any, both or none of the above.
As a rule of thumb, if you argue wether something is an art or a science, it’s probably neither:
-Mathematics are not a science, but a technique/skill/craft. It’s quite useful for the practice of most, if not all, sciences, through.
-Cooking is mostly a technique/skill/craft, but can be approached as any or both.
-War is a technique/skill/craft, and not an art. The emotional response it causes is a byproduct, not the goal of it’s practice.
-The deal is obviously a technique/skill/craft, Americans have to be completely acultured degenerates to qualify it as an art.
-Social Sciences are not sciences, but fields of study. Stop trying so hard.
-Computer Sciences is applied mathematics, and therefore not science.
Science has unambiguously wrong answers. And if you’re well inside the frontiers of science, you should be able to identify wrong answers a priori just by doing the math.
Grillbot X600 and TechGrill 2400, however, are a science.
Is there anyone here who isn’t very rich (I’m thinking, like, net worth <$1M) and who also owns land (let's say 5+ acres that you don't currently live on?)
Ever since I got a decent job with some disposable income, I've had this weird urge that I should go buy some land. Even if it's in the middle of nowhere. I don't really have any good reason for wanting it. I'm not a very outdoorsy person. I don't need a place to shoot guns or ride ATVs or whatever. I just… feel like a man should own some land, I guess.
Am I crazy? Can someone give me a good reason to justify my weird craving here? Anyone else feel this, and even better, go through with it and have any thoughts on it?
a) Not weird. A desire for autonomy is arguably the American Dream.
b) You only need to justify it in the sense that you aren’t displacing some other spending on “optional” things.
c) B only applies to yourself. Spouses are another matter and you have to do what works for your relationship.
Well, in a practical sense, the money that would be going towards land would otherwise be going towards retirement savings.
So another relevant question might be – is there any particular reason to think “unimproved land in a location currently thought to be completely undesirable” will offer reasonably decent investment returns?
That’s not the way I’d bet, especially since you’ll be paying some taxes on it. If you want to make money on land, you have to either buy land that becomes useful and then sell it, use it yourself to make profit or off-set expenses, or rent it to someone else who does.
You’re coming closest to the first option, but only if you know something the market doesn’t.
I thought the stock answer was “they ain’t making any more of it.”
That’s true Conrad, but there is currently a lot of land that nobody really wants. At least in the US, we have land to spare.
Matt, I have heard of people renting their empty land for cattle grazing.. I don’t imagine the revenue would be that good, but it would at least be something.
Oh of course, never take investment advice from me. I’m way too dumb for that. I just buy index funds and forget about it.
Yeah, using prices as a guideline, if you can afford to buy a car, you can afford to buy land. It’s just that the land you are getting is barren desert in the middle of nowhere.
But it’s your barren desert! And you get the right to vote.
Depends where you look!
Even if you earn almost nothing from the rental, it can still be a useful tool in managing expenses. If your parcel is in or near a developed area, you can minimize your taxes by having your land zoned agricultural. I know a guy who owns a large valuable lot in the suburbs who brings in half a dozen cows for a couple months a year to graze. He calls it “cow camp.” Based on that, he can retain his ag zoning and avoid tens of thousands in taxes on that lot.
Are we sure? What if he’s suffering some sort of time travel whiplash after accidentally traveling back to 19th century America and living there as a homesteader for years and currently suffering amnesia after making his way back to modern America. He’s now left with a strange craving for empty land…
@Matt M
You should check for signs that you’ve passed more time than your remember. Healed injuries you don’t remember getting. Pain due to manual labor you’ve never done. A sudden change in weight over the course of one night. An unusual amount of hair growth. You may have time traveled and popped back to the same time you left.
I want land, its going to be a few years at least though.
If you want to just buy land near me I will manage it for you for free.
Well I’m not in a position to afford it yet either, just starting to think about it.
So unless you live in the middle of nowhere in West Texas, I probably can’t afford to buy land near you!
Not me exactly, but my family owns some land in Arkansas that’s used to grow timber. Basically my grandfather bought a few hundred acres of Arkansas timber land to provide himself an income in his retirement. When he died it was divided among my father and his siblings. Presumably when my parents die, my siblings and I will divide up his share at which point my portion will be pretty small. My parents are well off, but well under $1M net worth.
I’m afraid I can’t really contribute to the meat of your question. I’ve never even seen the land (I did not grow up nor do I currently live in Arkansas). It’s basically the same as any other investment. My father and his siblings split a check once or twice a year whenever they harvest. It definitely doesn’t feel like it’s satisfying some primal need to own property. I own my home, but that’s mainly because interest rates were so low my mortgage payments are about half of what my rent was.
I’m not rich, and my family owns a farm in East Texas which I get a lot of satisfaction from. Just under 50 acres. We grow trees and deer hunt.
Technically, I don’t own it; my father owns it, and prior to him, my grandfather owned it, so it’s not legally mine, but it’s psychologically mine. If that makes sense.
I also own (with a mortgage) a suburban house, and have gotten a great deal of satisfaction from that. Just a 1400 square foot house on a regular lot, with a garage and a yard. The house did a lot more to fill my primal desire for property than the farm did.
So, honestly, if you’re feeling a weird urge to own property, I would advise you to start with a piece of property you will use, not a parcel out in the boonies somewhere. You love and value property by using it. If you aren’t very outdoorsy, and you aren’t going to shoot or drive ATVs or garden or buy a tractor and luxuriate in your ability to mow whenever you want, a few acres in the country isn’t doing much for you.
But a house you actually live in, with walls you painted the colors you want and doors that stick in a familiar way when the temperature shifts and a mailbox you fixed after the neighbor kid backed into it by mistake is just the thing. It feels solid, gives you something to grip.
Then, after you’ve had that for a while, you’ll know if you want more land, or different land, or whatever.
For the record, I already own a house. It’s my second one, actually.
You are not crazy, this post describes me exactly. Around the time I hit 40 I started idly browsing land for sale, with a vague idea of maybe making some money off it via timber, or maybe going camping on it, or maybe building a home there twenty years from now.
I don’t know where it came from either. It might have something to do with having kids and wanting to pass something tangible on to them. It also might be this is “what’s next” after you feel like your immediate needs are covered and your retirement fund is on track.
Clearly another case of time travel to 19th century America, followed by a return and amnesia. You’ve even managed to subconciously recall that you sold timber while in the past. It’s the only plausible explanation.
I’ll tell everyone when I hit 40 if the same thing happens to me.
@quanta413,
The further you’re past 40 the more you are a time traveler!
The present seems strange!
@Plumber
You got me there. I’m not feeling the time whiplash too much yet although I still find Facebook pretty weird.
I doubt it. Not so much because land is expensive but because getting land for the sole sake of having it requires enough leisure time and extra cash that the person is probably wealthy. There are probably lots of people who own vacation homes or rural land they do live on.
One thing that’s always been curious to me. Americans have a lot of empty land and concentrated urban centers. The Eastern Europeans have the tradition of having a small house in the countryside. For whatever reason, virtually no Americans do this outside of the very wealthy. Like, if you’re going to buy a million dollar house, why not split it into a $800,000 house in the city and a $200,000 house on Lake Vacationstay? Or if you’re renting an apartment, why not get a small $100,000 cabin in the sticks? It will build equity and be a nice little retreat. A $100,000 mortgage is $400 a month and you can find or build decent rural houses if you’re willing to drive half or a full day.
Cultural pressure. “A man ain’t a man if he ain’t got no land,” as the saying goes.
This does happen in America, but I think the standard for the “cabin in the woods” is much higher due to cultural demands.
Like, I had a friend going up whose family had a “cabin in the mountains.” But by “cabin” they meant “second house” and by “in the mountains” they meant “close enough to civilization to have paved roads, running water, electricity, is 20-30 minutes away from a grocery store, etc.”
Any land that has all of that isn’t going to be dirt cheap, especially if it’s also near an aesthetically pleasing vacation spot. In fact, if your first home is in the suburbs, it’s probably going to be about as expensive as the first one was…
Running water, paved roads, pretty natural scenery, and electricity wouldn’t be asking too much. I was able to find three houses under $150k in South Maine (so, like half a day’s drive from Boston) that fit all that. 20-30 minutes to basic shopping isn’t impossible either. But the house isn’t going to be super nice with every modern convenience. It’s mostly going to be older or not as fashionable.
Now, if you want a vacation home with all the modern amenities in the south of France near the mall, then you’re going to pay appropriately.
It depends on the area. Where I grew up, it was common for a lot of people to have a “camp”, which was basically a weekend house for use during the summer. However, they’re almost always pretty spartan. They do have electricity, but running water would be from a well (and some didn’t have running water, you had a hand pump). It’s rare that they’d be on paved roads, with the typical one being on a dirt road and many on two-tracks. Many would be on a small lake, on a few-acre lot but others, typically for hunting, would be on a 40 in the woods–the “deer camp” referenced in this comedy song. You’re typically talking places that would go for less than $100k, often much less.
They’re less common now, because of a combination of factors: the area suffered an economic collapse that meant many young people (like me) moved away, and the aging retirees who remain are less able to keep up with maintaining a second home; the people who do own camps from out of town are typically richer and have bid up prices on the best places. It’s probably much more the former than the latter. If you don’t live quite close it can mean you pay a lot of money for a place you can’t use more than for a week or two of vacation, and a place can go to seed quickly if it’s not lived in more than once a year.
As far as the original OP, I technically own land. Soon after I was born (or, since I was adopted at 6 weeks old, was brought home), my parents “sold” me half of the quarter-quarter section they owned. Land that’s improved has higher taxes. By splitting off 20 acres and putting it in my name, the higher taxes only apply to the half-quarter-quarter section with the house on it. They’ve always paid the taxes and controlled the land, and I’ve never had any reason to concern myself about it, but according to the courthouse, I own property.
moved
I’ve thought about buying a woodlot. One that’s recently been cut takes decades before it’s ready to cut again, so it’s certainly a long-term investment. I think it would be satisfying to manage something tangible, compared to the same amount invested in index funds.
I had this exact reaction when I first started working a good-paying job and had finished paying off my loans. I started looking at land while I was still living in an apartment. It’s not unusual, and in fact I suspect it’s even more common when you’re living in an urban area constantly surrounded by other people and their demands. The prospect of a place that’s fully “mine” and that’s quiet and rural starts to sound grand.
That being said, I waited to buy a house, and that’s filled a lot of it. I still do crave land, but that will require a lifestyle shift for my family, so we’ll have to see how things go.
As to the financial side of it, random cheap land will almost certainly be a net financial loser. If it’s cheap, it’s because nobody wants it, so renting it won’t be practical. It will probably only appreciate based on development you don’t control – the standard saying in real estate development is “buy by the acre, sell by the square foot.” Land is always taxed, but unimproved land taxes will generally be small. The bigger financial risk is liability – if kids come on your land and get crushed by a rotted tree or whatnot, they’re likely to sue and you’re likely to lose for having an attractive nuisance or negligent upkeep. Or if a meth lab gets set up, you’re going to run into potential trouble with the authorities. Stuff like that. It’s risky to keep a property that you never visit.
Depending on your budget, you might be able to get low-level farmland which you can rent out for row crops. The most productive Class A farmland will be well outside your price range, since it’s more than $10K per acre (and usually no parcels below 40 acres), but there are lower-productivity farms you can buy for perhaps a quarter that cost, which would put it potentially in range depending on parcel size. Of course farm rents then are also a quarter or less of Class A, so you’re not making much money, but you could probably cover the taxes. Another option is to look for land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program – it’s a USDA program that basically pays farmers to take land off the cultivation market and let it grow wild. CRP payments aren’t terribly large, less than farm rent, but they can also apply to areas of land somewhat more visually interesting than row crops.
The risks can be handled if you’re used to it and willing to sue overzealous types. But you’re right the value is unlikely to go up on its own. (Actually, it is likely to go up: but basically at the rate of inflation.) You’d either have to get lucky (the price goes up due to other people’s actions, which is unlikely) or find a profitable use for it.
As for USDA programs, if you’re going to be buying land at $2.5k an acre in a medium sized parcel or beter, it’s better to get new farm grants. Get forty of them and start growing potatoes or something. The USDA will get you loan assistance and give you a lot of support. There’s also organizations to help young people get into farming.
My understanding is that he’d be keeping his day job, so using the land himself for a full-time gig (e.g. organic farming) would presumably not be an option.
If the activity is profitable, farm labor can be had cheaply in many parts of the country. But sure, I get most people don’t want to be farmers. Renting it out might not be better then.
I own a forest. My dad planted it 20 years ago, and it will be ready for harvest in 40-50 years, so for my grandkid’s college fund. Really small; just a hectare or so.
My grandfather sent my father, and his three siblings, to college with the money from the forest my gran-granparent planted.
It’s not worth much, but it gives me roots and the idea of continuity.
Land takes a lot of work to be improved, though. And you’ll have to hire non-Americans; the kind of work that land improvement takes (at least forests and agricultural land, for the stuff that can’t be done with machines) will not have many people working legally.
In Spain, at least, most forest work is done by now-legal Romanians. Can’t hire a Spaniard for that, it’s too hard.
> And you’ll have to hire non-Americans; the kind of work that land improvement takes (at least forests and agricultural land, for the stuff that can’t be done with machines) will not have many people working legally.
Why do you believe this to be true? I actually met with a consulting forester today to plan out some work, and he seemed very American. And from what I can tell, the rest of his crew is American as well: http://www.longviewforest.com/about-long-view.html.
I wonder if you’ve been misled by the media into believing that Americans no longer do outdoor physical labor. Many still do. Even in California, which has considerable legal and illegal Mexican immigration, many outdoor workers are native born. I’m surprised to hear that Spain is different.
If you don’t know what you’re going to do with the land, I’d advise against it. Even if the cost of the land and taxes are trivial to you, dealing with the bureaucracy of owning things is a hassle.
Yeah. The worst part about when I owned a house I *didn’t* live in was having to deal with the state taxes for a state I otherwise I had no business with. Was glad to finally sell it, not because I needed to, but just to get rid of that headache.
Play the long game. Buy land in Alaska and watch its value rise as the globe warms.
What do I buy if I think it’s a hoax?
Waterfront land in New Orleans?
Probably not. You’re still competing with the ignorant, those who buy into it but have short time preference, and others with your view.
If you’re crazy, I am in a similar way. I have a pretty good income (top 5% US) and am now in a very good situation financially, and I keep thinking I might want to buy some land somewhere.
I’ve also looked at buying houses in places where I might vacation and have family close enough to have them rent it out for me, but that’s a different craving.
NIMBYs in Montgomery County being honest about their NIMBYism:
“Just because others flee crime-ridden and poverty-stricken areas doesn’t mean Montgomery County has to be turned into a slum to accommodate them.”
For context, that quote is from a letter to the editor against new policy that would rezone neighborhoods and allow people to put trailers and mobile homes on their property.
It’s funny because this is perhaps the most literal use of NIMBY I’ve ever seen: they’re actively complaining about stuff being put in people’s back yards.
Nice, but it’s more of “Not in Your Back Yard” policy. (As I suppose most NIMBY is, and the back yard is more literal in this case).
Yeah, I realized that, but calling someone a NIYBY doesn’t roll off the tongue as well.
Can anyone recommend a good anime series to binge on Netflix or Amazon Prime? My feeble attempts so far:
Attack on Titan–premise is cool and creepy, but I ducked out halfway through season 1 because there was no forward momentum. I may read the manga instead, if I can find it second-hand.
Neon Genesis Evangelion–I probably read too many reviews of this beforehand, and it couldn’t live up to my expectations. Made it through about 10 episodes. Weird mix of giant robots and ephebophilia. We can discuss.
One-Punch Man–More like one-gimmick man, and that gimmick wears out pretty quick.
Devilman Crybaby–?????
I’m not a hobbyist, but I have fond memories of the movie “Akira” and would like to watch something just like that. Or something like that, combined with something like “Spirited Away.” If that is at all possible. (Sadly, “Akira” itself isn’t available for streaming.)
May I mention, too, that there are an astonishing number of anime series on Netflix and a newcomer has No Hope of identifying which ones, if any, are worth watching.
No real recommendations to add, but I can’t concur enough with your assessment of Devilman Crybaby; I’ve spent the last few months positive that show’s near-universal high reviews are some kind of elaborate prank being pulled specifically on me.
I’m still trying to work out a motive for this plot.
Bleach or Full Metal Alchemist are the only two I have enjoyed, but I like them both a lot (though Bleach starts to fall into the Dragon Ball Z trap eventually of just powering up and having stronger villains every time. Fullmetal was on Amazon prime for a while but dropped off a few months ago, don’t know where you can stream Bleach either.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is on Netflix and is highly enjoyable. I haven’t seen the other fullmetal alchemist, but I hear it’s not quite as good.
Both are on Netflix now, actually. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is significantly better (a highly contentious subject) and I highly recommend watching that version. Probably my top recommendation from the Netflix library.
I was watching Bleach when it played weekly on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block, and explained to my daughter back at the beginning of the Soul Society arc.
Every few months, she would ask me “so has that guy saved his friend yet?” and I’d have to say no, until one day I got to say “yes, but now he’s trying to save a different friend.”
So, I just watched Neon Genesis Evangelion and…you probably got out at the right time. I went in knowing next to nothing about it other than that I’ve seen it mentioned in a lot of places. I’m still not sure what the heck just happened. I then watched End of Evangelion which I was told would help and…it did not.
Other than Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood which was already mentioned (and I also heartily recommend), you might consider Durara! which is weird and quirky but got me fairly sucked in for a while. I haven’t finished it, but try maybe 2-5 episodes and see if it grabs you at all.
Fate/Zero is also worth a look if it’s still on there, as well as Sword Art Online (but I think SAO got taken off Netflix recently). If you haven’t seen Death Note the first season of that is really good (the second season is just OK but is almost a totally different story so you don’t have to watch it).
If feel like there might be one or two more I’m forgetting, I’ll look at the Netflix list when I get home.
I should correct myself…if you are going to watch the Fate series on Netflix (it is still on there) start with Fate/Stay Night and then watch Fate/Zero. Fate/Zero is a prequel but the payoffs in Zero are much better if you’ve watched Stay Night (and I think watching Zero first would spoil some of the things in Stay Night also). If you try and like either, do not be tempted to watch any of the other Fate series on Netflix (Apocrypha and some others I forget the names of) as they are not really connected and also not really good.
Inflicting the Studio Deen anime on an unsuspecting audience isn’t quite criminal, but I’ll pretty strongly argue that for a routine anime-watcher it’s almost certainly better to start with Fate/Zero. (Ufotable’s version of UBW is better, but I still think going with Zero first works.) If someone’s willing to sink 50+ hours into a VN as a first entrance to the franchise then they’ll get a way better experience by doing that with F/SN, but I recognize that’s a big commitment to be making up front so I’ve stopped giving it as my primary recommendation.
Stay/night and Zero are very different stories on a structural level, and Night is a lot more… anime, I guess. You could probably sell a pretty faithful HBO miniseries for Zero, with its premise, its characters, and even a lot of its script intact (Saber might be a sticking point, but I think you could get her in if you talked fast and moved your hands a lot), but I can’t see that working for any route of Night without an extensive retool.
That being the case, I think Zero is the better entry point for someone that’s not into anime.
Attack on Titan has serious pacing issues in the first season, yeah; that improves in the second and third. I’m halfway through the third right now.
I liked Kakegurui, but you’re going to have to get past the prurient depictions of women in the series. Also watched Lupin the 3rd recently and it was good. Also Baki, though it’s not for everyone.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is a classic.
Kakegurui is just so brazen about everything it does that the psychosexual-ness of it all wraps back around to being a plus.
The live-action version of Kakegurui (also on Netflix!) is slightly less overtly sexual, but makes up for it by having all of the actor go for the most EXTRA reaction faces they possibly can, so is still very entertaining.
Oh geez, how could I forget.
Dragonball Z Abridged on youtube (channel team fourstar). Now that is a binge worth show.
Seconding Dragonball Z Abridged. I started watching it because I wanted to get a general idea of the plot of DBZ but now I’m pretty half convinced the Abridged series is actually better than the real thing.
Seconding this and recommending Sword Art Online abridged, which is almost universally considered to be superior to the source material. It’s hilarious when it wants to be yet isn’t afraid to play serious moments straight.
Not sure if you’ll like my recommendations – if you don’t like Anime that shifts from inexplicably slow and philosophical to awesome and back to slow, you won’t like most shonen anime.
Stuff in Netflix that I liked that you might (or might not)
Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood: Awesome integrated story that goes somewhere. Good characters and fights.
Ajin: Dark conspiracy oriented fighting anime with some horror elements. Might scratch the itch you have left over from Akira.
Kill La Kill: Super weird high school fighting anime, with exceptionally good music. My guess is you won’t like it, but it’s awesome. (ETA: Given your screen name, you might like weird anime more than I initially thought)
Hunter x Hunter and Fairy Tail: Pretty straight forward fighting anime, but IMHO really well done.
P.s.: I’d argue that the primary appeal of One Punch Man is all the other characters, who are inventive and often compelling. The fact that Saitama makes them all a joke is a way for the other characters to experience development.
One Punch Man is one of my favorites, so you will have to take this with a grain of salt I suppose.
Attack on Titan is slow, but otherwise really good. Naruto is childish, but endearingly so and with enough mature themes to be worth while. FMA: Brotherhood and Death Note are probably the pinnacles of anime, but dark.
Whoops, forgot about Death Note. Seconded, although I think the OP might find it’s plot unnecessarily convoluted.
There are quite some old-but-good animes on netflix, of the top of my head, Trigun, Cowboy bebop, Samurai Champloo or the 90’s Berserk.
Cowboy Bebop is not on Netflix. That would be easily my top recommendation if it were. I had forgotten about Trigun, which is good but takes a little while to get going (I’m also not sure it is still on Netflix).
Record of the Grancrest War isn’t a great show, but it’s okay for a binge. Basically like watching an anime of a D&D campaign by way of Fire Emblem.
Madoka Magica is a classic for good reason.
Violet Evergarden might not be your thing, but is also critically acclaimed as a “tearjerker vignettes” type of anime. Anohana is similarly a tearjerker drama.
Hunter x Hunter is critically acclaimed as one of the best of the long-running adventure series, but it does take a while to get going. It’s kind of rooted around puzzles-as-combat, but later arcs have some heavy thematic and character work.
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is what happens when a classic adventure serial runs on Rule of Awesome, and also all of the characters are named after music artists/bands.
Ouran High School Host Club might not be your thing, but it’s pretty strong as a comedy.
Little Witch Academia >>>>> Harry Potter
Code Geass and Death Note aren’t necessarily good, per se, but are designed to be enjoyed as addicting/bingeable yarns.
Durarara is also a good yarn, almost like a Guy Ritchie film as a longform.
Aggretsuko is TOO REAL. WAY TOO REAL.
Black Lagoon is a good action yarn.
Mushishi is highly critically acclaimed, a series of supernatural vignettes.
March Comes in Like a Lion is critically acclaimed, but acclaimed for being an insightful depiction of depression, so might not be your thing.
Honestly, Naruto is a solid longrunning show, but only if you judiciously skip through any part that bores you.
Films:
A Silent Voice
Miss Hokusai
In this Corner of the World
They’re mostly all character studies, except for Expelled From Paradise, which is interesting for taking place in a post-Singularity world. Better than Westworld for dealing with transhumanist themes.
I hadn’t realized that before but those are both among of my favorites, so thanks for dropping that penny for me!
(Also some have mentioned Baccano, which is by the same author as DRRR. Gets a big second from me)
Yes, I like Baccano more than Durarara, but unfortunately, I don’t think it’s streaming anywhere.
Articles like this make me dispair for capitalism. Summed up in the author’s conclusion of
The summary of the piece is that the author
1. Had no other job prospects
2. Started driving for Lyft
3. Managed to stay afloat thanks to that work
4. Felt motivated to keep working for Lyft due to the way they incentivised their workers AND
5. Felt better about her work because of the incentives
The conclusion that she reaches is that its awful (the great part as I read it relates to Lyft’s perspective) she managed to get a paying job with unlimited hours, good flexibility,that she felt good about. What more could an employer plausibly do for her?
I think you’re wrong about 5. She felt worse about her work because of the incentives. She was more desperate, more stressed, and her attention was monopolized by the game. She was encouraged to identify her self-worth with the score given to her by the game. That’s a kind of power people usually don’t like to give away.
She specifically describes feeling ‘great’ about having a high score, and specifically states that she needed the money from extra driving. Was she stressed? I don’t doubt it, working for a living is generally stressful, getting to work on time for jobs who will fire you if you don’t is stressful, worrying about job security is stressful.
She was encouraged to have some self worth tied to her performance at her job, which most people experience.
Yeah – being evaluated on your work, when the result might very well be termination, is always stressful.
The relevant question would be, is it more or less stressful to be constantly in receipt of objective and obvious feedback, or would she prefer the average approach in the white collar world, which is that once a year you get a vaguely worded paragraph of buzzwords about your performance, some sort of ill-defined categorization, etc.
The latter question needs to be expanded to
‘Would she prefer the white collar approach, and also put in enough hours to support herself on that level of pay’.
I think you’re underestimating the vastly different effects those gamified systems have on people. Some people ignore them, most people can deal with them in a healthy way and some people get invested in them to a downright unhealthy degree. It sounds like this author is in the last category.
I played online poker for a living for 3 years, and found it very stressful for me personally so I don’t think I underestimate that. I have also worked the midnight to 8 am shift at bakeries where I was alone for the first two hours of my shift and my ability to get everything ready directly impacted how hours 2-8 went for everyone else on the crew (as well as me). That was also stressful, as was washing dishes at Applebee’s on a Saturday night with servers running back to scream at you that they are all out of silver wear.
Productive work generally has significant elements of stress to it, only jobs that don’t matter at all can be done by large swaths of people without stress.
I don’t think that you’re really getting it. It’s not about stress from responsibility, but stress from self-worth. If you fuck up opening shift, you’re going to take shit because of it that you probably deserve, and you’re going to feel bad, and you’re going to have to work hard to make up for it.
If the author of this piece sees her rating start to spiral, on the other hand, she’s going to be cruel to herself for failing the people she has an obligation to. She’s going to work harder to make it up to the people she’s failed, and she’s going to go home and cry because she feels like a bad person. (This is probably extremely hyperbolic, but I think this is a reasonable description of the feelings involved for the most extreme cases). If Uber is maximizing the production of this feeling in its employees in order to get them to produce more labor, that’s really bad. The author’s argument is that gamified systems promote this sort of response. By extension, the only way to develop emotional equanimity when faced with highly emotional stimulus is to crank down your overall emotional sensitivity, which is also really bad.
Think of it as the author claiming that Uber shows you pictures of mass graves and child soldiers when you drive poorly. Does this encourage good service? Yes. But it’s needlessly cruel.
I’m not sure I agree with either part of this — that you have to desensitize yourself to emotional stimulus generally rather than to a particular emotional stimulus, or that it’s a bad thing if you do. On the first point, most people seem quite capable of dialing down their responses to distressing aspects of their jobs without thereby becoming robots; and on the second, we do have a concept of being oversensitive.
@Nornagest
Now obviously drone operators are in a very different class from Lyft drivers, but… evidence shows people are just not that good at compartmentalizing. Especially when (if) the system is designed to exploit their emotional vulnerability.
Sure, and managing emotional reactions is a good skill for people to have. IF Uber is actively trying to make that harder (or if they get returns from gamification in large part because that’s hard and people aren’t able to do it), that’s still morally reprehensible.
We aren’t talking about killing people, we’re talking about an idiosyncratic performance management system. I can’t deny there are jobs that just swamp the average person’s ability to regulate their emotions: I know doctors, nurses, social workers, and while they’ve all developed strategies to cope I wouldn’t say they’re fully compartmentalized. But those are all jobs where screwing up can end or permanently impair someone else’s life. This is a job where screwing up can make someone’s Friday night slightly less fun. No matter how it’s gamified, it’s going to take more than a hand-wringing webmag article to convince me that most people deal with that by going comfortably numb.
Could some people react badly to it, if they’re unusually bad at emotional self-regulation or unusually sensitive to gamification? Sure, but we don’t demand that every job suit everyone’s personality. I’m a pretty good engineer but I’d make an awful car salesman.
@Nornagest
I mean if you want to go there you’re welcome to – I don’t have a good sense of where the line should be drawn – but consider that gambling addiction exists. Does the idea of a company that forces you to play a slot machine every week bother you? All it does is make your Friday night slightly more fun.
Effective exploitation of the kind of reward the human brain craves can be extremely powerful. There’s a line beyond which I think we should hold companies responsible when it comes to doing that. I don’t know where it should be. But I don’t think it’s ridiculous prima facie.
Not particularly? I mean, slot machines do nothing for me, but there are jobs where doing your job entails actions that might be addictive to certain personalities. There are jobs that involve social drinking; more to the point, there are a lot of jobs where your take-home pay depends partly on luck. As long as they were up front about it and there was a halfway reasonable business purpose (which is silly, but I don’t want to fight the hypothetical), allowing the slot machine is a bullet I’m willing to bite.
@Nornagest
No, I mean, say, you work for a casino and every week they give you a free dime slot pull. For no reason other than the hope you develop a taste for it. And if you don’t play you don’t get paid.
Obviously this isn’t an exact parallel for Uber. I’m not saying it is. I’m saying that I think that there’s a point at which exposing your employees to systems designed to prey on their emotional vulnerabilities is worthy of condemnation (which is NOT automatically the same as illegalization), even when those systems are relatively benign.
@ Hoopyfrued
You are steelmanning her argument for her without any real basis. First of all she said she ‘felt great’ about having a high rating, this wasn’t merely the absence of seeing horrible pictures. She additionally notes that the incentives caused her to drive more AND that she did need that money, she didn’t find herself working 70 hours a week for no extra real benefit, she found herself giving up a bit of her money for a feeling of a better job done.
This would probably encourage people to just quit.
@baconbits9
Am I supposed to feel bad for this? You’re the one trying to claim that her objection to her job is that it’s stressful when it’s very clear that her objection is that it’s exploitative and that there is a real basis for the steelman.
Isn’t that where I just ended up?
I’d consider that (mildly) exploitative, but only because there’s no reasonable business purpose to it. If you’re working as an usher in Vegas and they’re having you play the slots every so often to keep the blinkenlights blinking or something, and you can keep any winnings as a perk of the job? That seems equivalent to someone in the hospitality business drinking with customers, i.e. fine, even though the addiction risk is presumably the same.
Uber’s review system doesn’t seem particularly well designed to me, but I don’t think you can say that it’s exploitative in the same way. There’s a clear, legitimate purpose behind incentivizing drivers to meet their customers’ needs. That’s enough to put it in conceptually legitimate territory for me — it could still be punitive or disproportionate, but it’s not evil simply on account of carrying a risk that certain personality types might get overly invested.
@ Hoopyfrued
I would agree with some of your points if the accusation was that Lyft was manipulating her star rating to induce a negative reaction, but the accusations of manipulation were things like changing the amount of money they offered her as a bonus for extra rides. Most of this is really basic supply/demand stuff, the longer someone drives for you the less likely it is that they have other options, ie the less valuable in general their labor is. This is a person, apparently with an undergraduate degree, who has been unable to find regular work during one of the tightest labor markets in US history. The complaint at its core seems to be that Lyft has managed to accurately assess her prospects and abilties* and is actually paying her the market wage.
*Barring the possibility that she is doing it to get published in which case everything has to be taken with an even larger grain of salt.
You are steelmanning in an underserved way. She is trying to make it sound exploitative, but gives no actual evidence for it being exploitative. The casino analogy doesn’t hold (which is why she just sort of leaves it there) because casinos are trying to get you to gamble more than you want to, while Lyft is offering to pay her more money for working more. Here are two separate hypotheticals
1. Lyft goes through her data and sees that she never manages more than 20 trips in 48 hours, and then they offer her a bonus for making 23 trips in 48 hours, trying to giver her a boost for a task she is unlikely to achieve and a reward she is unlikely to reach. This would be unethical as hell.
2. Lyft expects higher volume this weekend, and offers a bonus for working more than usual. They use her data to figure out her reserve wage for working more hours, they then offer it to her.
Shes keeps implying #1 (I couldn’t tell why my rating dropped…..) but doesn’t provide direct evidence for it, and ignores that working more can be good for both Lyft and its drivers.
Its a vauge anecdote and ignores the massive differences. No one is shocked that a job which pays $10 an hour and is open to anyone with a drivers license and the ability to qualify for a car loan is boring. Lyft made it less boring for some of its workers… how is this different from putting the radio onto a station I like while I am kneading bread at 3am? How is it different from my boss giving me a $50 gift card once in a while after a long week of work?
Wait, hard disagree. I think that her complaints are more about the interface than the content.
Like, this obviously speaks of at least somewhat high neuroticism on her part, but she’s actually making a point here about the way these things are communicated biasing her decision-making process.
How could she? She doesn’t have access to the algorithm. It may not even be human-readable. She’s going on her own feeling of being manipulated.
She tries to make that case, but they don’t hold up to scrutiny.
But you didn’t bold the most important part of that section.
A title of ‘I took a bad job because I couldn’t find a good one, and sometimes I took worse working conditions for extra pay’ doesn’t roll off the tongue though. From what she wrote it sounds more accurate to present her position as ‘I felt manipulated into doing something that I wanted/needed to do, yuck’, but ‘Lyft found a way to motivate me to make ends meet’ doesn’t have a whole lot of teeth.
She says she went beyond that point and you say she’s lying. There’s no solid evidence either way. Will you agree that rhetoric can change behavior at the margins, and that sufficiently strong rhetoric can push people into suboptimal behavior? Because I can’t tell right now if you’re denying that that’s true or denying that Lyft’s nudges were strong enough to push her that way.
I’m denying that its a meaningful way of describing the situation*. The facts that she introduces are
1. That she had no other work options
2. Lyft had monetary and psychological incentives for her to work more
3. Lyft (afaict) lived up to the moneytary end of the bargain
4. She had to work more hours and/or in more difficult situations to gain the extra monetary and psychological rewards**.
Laid out in this way it sounds just like every other job. If you want a promotion or a pay raise then you work harder/more hours. If you want your boss to hold a higher opinion of you then work harder, if you want more money you can take worse shifts, drive worse routes etc.
I would like to add that there are ways this type of approach could be used that would count as abuse. For example if Lyft was advertising that their drivers made $20 an hour and then used the bonuses to get new drivers to that rate for just long enough and then used distractions and ratings manipulation as cover while they slowly chipped away at the bonuses until they were making much less. This is why I have highlighted the fact that the writer had no other real options for a job, these companies are taking on low end workers and to think that they could run a business comprised of flawed contractors with no set hours without attempting to motivate them beyond just cash payments is fairly naive. The whole is the opposite of what Marx predicted, rather than squeezing the wages of workers and treating them as completely disposable cogs who are to be ground down these workers have near total autonomy on the hours they work, get incentivised to work more with better pay and have individual plans tailored towards keeping them motivated.
* Yes, it is likely that any strategy that a large company takes is going to push some number of people to a sub-optimal side of decision making, that is the nature of margins. It also is likely that these decision push other people to the optimal side of decision making, the case being made here isn’t ‘Lyft wasn’t right for me and here is why’ its ‘The workers cant win here’, which is a very different piece.
**Or she could trade one for the other, paying more for car cleaning etc to get a psychological reward of a higher rating.
This sort of thing isn’t at all rare/new/enabled by tech “gamification” either.
I have a friend who started a sales job where they started her at a really high rate. But it turned out it was commission based and their policy was to pay you as if you had met 100% of your goal for the first six months. But the goals were very high and even the best/most senior salespeople struggled to meet them. And the managers pretty regularly adjusted the goals for all sorts of arbitrary and non-transparent reasons very frequently.
At least part of the answer is “pay at or above minimum wage”. Not sure about the more philosophical aspects of the article, as I don’t see people being excited and engaged with the work they do through gamification as a bad thing per say. But making below minimum wage is clearly bad, and “unlimited hours” isn’t a positive if it just gives you the ability to work the crazy volume of hours you need to survive while working for a company that doesn’t pay minimum wage.
*Insert standard “does minimum wage destroy low wage jobs and thus hurt poor workers?” argument here*
It’s conceivable an employer could institute a cunning gamification system that creates employee satisfaction despite low pay. If one could, one would, certainly–hence all the surveys or studies about “how can we improve employee morale?” which employees laugh at with the rejoinder “pay us more money.”
I scrolled to the bottom and found the problem. Author is graduate student. Made that mistake myself! Although I was paid a low but very livable amount for where I was, and it’s not clear if the author is/was. Ok, I’m not really serious about that, but
You left out that the author also
6. Got an article out of their work.
7. Probably uses their experience as fodder for their study of “platform-mediated labor”.
Put error bars on the star rating and explain uncertainty and sampling? I mean that wouldn’t benefit the employer but it probably wouldn’t hurt them either. And I can wish for whatever I want. The most obvious explanation for this…
Is that the change in ratings is just noise (assuming an out of 5 stars system). If every passenger randomly rated you either 4 or 5, the standard deviation in your average rating would be .05. That’s assuming there’s no passengers who likes to hand out lower scores even if the ride was perfectly fine. For example, if one person gives you a 1-star rating out of 100 passengers rating you, that’s .04 off your average compared to if that person gave you a 5-star rating.
EDIT: Of course, it’s possible that turning noise into seemingly meaningful feedback is a benefit from the employer perspective. Whoever may have thought of that would have committed an unforgivable sin, and must be punished appropriately.
Man, now I feel sorry for customer service people or anyone else graded on such surveys that I might have taken. I usually always just check 4 if I had a reasonably positive experience. I’m satisfied with a 4 out of 5 service. I’ll return for 4 out of 5 service. And somewhere, someone is getting dinged because what I saw as a ‘pretty good’ rating was interpreted as ‘okay’.
They probably have a huge sign in the break room that says “We want our customers to be thrilled to shop with us!”
Listen, I am fine going through my day less than maximally thrilled.
Yeah, to date I’ve only given out one rating below 5 stars on Uber, because I don’t want anyone to get screwed this way. I already know from other situations how inflated these scores will get, and I don’t want to be the only one giving an ‘accurate’ score.
On any of the occasions my mom has called an Uber, she always asks “what rating should I give?” The answer is “always 5 stars unless something particularly bad happened”.
Ages ago, YouTube used to have a five-star rating system. They changed it to up/down because they found that most people were giving one- or five-star ratings, and those that weren’t had all sorts of opaque criteria that didn’t hash out to anything particularly actionable.
I think Uber should probably do the same.
That’s probably for the best, yeah.
What’s really interesting is that there are cases where this is mostly mitigated—Amazon or goodreads book reviews still tend toward 1 or 5 stars, but there are often a lot of 2, 3, and 4 star reviews, too. I’m not sure what makes the difference. Maybe if e.g. 80% of all reviews are by the 20% most discerning users, they give more useful ratings.
I’ve often heard the advice that if you want the most useful Amazon reviews you should look for the 2/3/4 star reviews.
They are less likely to be unrepresentative or biased, whereas a thoughtful 3-star review will list pros and cons and you can judge what is more important to you.
@Nick, speaking of reviews, still inclined to throw me one?
@Randy M
Oh man, I forgot! Sorry. My weekend was totally full.
I’ll take a look tonight.
This is a big issue for me that I think about quite a lot. I’m only really usefully using a rating system if I’m rating on roughly the same scale as the average, otherwise I’m mostly just penalising or rewarding services for having used by me. For Trip-Advisor I basically just add one star to what I’d give if it were just my own rating system. That means I can’t differentiate between my 4 and 5 stars, but it means my average rating is closer to the overall average rating, so I’m not just penalising everywhere I’ve been to versus everywhere I haven’t. For my “true” 5 star experiences, I just try to write a particularly gushing review text, and point out how sad I am that my system, which I embrace in sum, sadly stops me from being as specifically positive about this particular place as I’d like.
Other system are far, far more inflated than Trip Advisor, though. Ebay is basically 5 stars for anything except them taking your money and never sending you the product. My dad is an eBay power seller, and when buying he gives 5 stars on all ratings unless something utterly insanely bad happens. He knows that just a few 4 star reviews can lose someone their power seller status. It’s a frankly insane system, but as it’s there, I regrettably admit that it’s probably better to adapt within it. It strikes me as more honest to communicate within the rules of the system I’m in, so say what I know will be most likely understood to mean what I think, than to just say what would mean what I think in the system I’d prefer prevail.
NB: The headline eBay ratings are just 3-point (positive, neutral, negative) which is a bit better, but there’s a 5-star system for things like “were the postage costs reasonable” and “was the item well-described”.
This quote enrages me. The entire point of capitalism is that people don’t want to serve, they want what they want. Capitalism is a brilliant system that takes people’s selfish desire to get ahead and channels it into serving others. That’s why it works, because it doesn’t rely on the better angels of our nature. This post is a shining example of what might be the most dangerous blind spots of the modern left (at least the american left), the failure to grok that good results are a product far more of good incentives than good intentions.
The argument is that Uber builds gamified reward systems into your work life so that it can pay you less. It’s not that it’s relying on the better angels on our nature, but that it’s exploiting them.
I agree with you, I think, but the point is subtle and I’m not sure I can phrase it in a way that would convince someone who doesn’t already agree. I assume we’re all okay with straightforward reinforcement mechanisms (e.g. top salesperson wins a cruise), and that the concern here is reinforcement mechanisms that seem manipulative or like they’re relying on dark patterns that exploit psychological weaknesses, but defining the difference between those objectively seems pretty tough. And explaining that difference is a precondition to deciding which side Uber’s driver rankings fall on.
Yeah, for sure. I’m not saying that Uber’s system crosses the line, just that that’s the argument the author is making. Without firsthand experience I don’t feel competent to make that call.
@Hoopyfreud I think the counterargument Cassander is making is that systems like this only succeed in taking advantage of the better angels of our nature because we (meaning the article’s author here) expect the system to rely on them and thus open ourselves up to exploitation.
I.e. a person who expects the employer/employee relationship to be based on a desire to feel good and feel productive or whatever is going to get abused by this gamification system.
To put something of a rhetorical flourish on it, if you trust the corporations to support you, you will get hurt (which is a weird thing to say as a capitalist, but I’m going somewhere with this), whereas in actuality capitalism is based on “relationships that are like trust, but better.”
This brings me back to a deeper issue, that I think cassander was hinting at with his comments about the left, which is that people who are pro-capitalism tend to view employer/employee (and other) interactions as a kind of adversarial collaboration, where different actors’ incentives keep each other in check, and are thus not offended when one side pulls harder, instead expecting the other side to pull back.
Those against capitalism seem to view these interactions as strictly collaborative, and thus see one side attempting to over exert itself as a betrayal of trust (I’m ignoring the “class war” idea, which sees it as explicitly antagonistic, which I think is the older more traditional left). Would like to explore this point more, seems to touch something fundamental.
@Peffern
I think that many anti-capitalists accept that capitalism/being employed is adversarial, but feel that power is lop-sided to such an extent that the company/employer gets to abuse the consumer/employee, where the latter has no recourse.
I really, really like this line.
I don’t know the answer, but my take is that this is more about capitalism’s relentless drive for productivity than it is about gamification. It’s not much different from Wal*Mart rating its managers on store productivity or GE firing the bottom 10% of its workers every year.
The result is that the author picked people up in a cleaner car, did her best to pick radio stations her passengers enjoyed, provided snacks, etc. As a result, she worked harder, they had a more pleasant ride, and hopefully, she got enough in tips (or star rewards, if there are any) to make up for the extra effort and expense.
On the other side of it, constant pressure to perform at a high level is stressful, you have people who believe that the dignity of the worker makes it offensive to demand qualities like cheerfulness or frequently washed cars.
I guess there’s a point where gamification can “trick” workers into working harder than they would prefer outside of the game, but I’m not sure what to make of that.
Edited to add the following unrelated point.
As I think about it, I struggle with akrasia as do many others – if gamification can make me more productive, long term me might see it as a tool in the war against short term me.
That “slot machines on wheels” header almost made me think they found a way to add gacha to Lyft.
Only a matter of time, I guess. Looking forward to the reports of people driving 120 hours a week so that they have enough points to roll the latest SSR girl.
My wife and I are currently looking into buying our first home. Since we have two kids, one of our criteria is quality of the public schools. Sites like Zillow give schools a rating from 1 to 10 based on the site greatschools.org’s ratings system. I think the best way to measure the quality of a school is most likely to do detailed research on each one, but that is impractical at the home buying stage.
What I’m wondering if anyone here has figured out a good mechanism or resource for comparing school quality. I know this is a hard problem, but I figured if anyone is going to have already done this research, they quite possibly already post here. 🙂 . I’m especially interested in schools that serve the “gifted” end of the spectrum well.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
I assume you live in one of the larger US cities (or are looking at multiple cities)? I live in a metro area of a little over 2 million and don’t think this would be impractical. Particularly since you can filter out the ones that have blatantly bad ratings and then do a deeper dive on the good ones.
If you already live in the area and know people who have kids, word of mouth on where the good/bad schools are isn’t a bad way to start either.
We are considering multiple cities, so that is part of my problem yes. It’s a long story, but the gist of it is that I’ll be working remotely so have more options than is typical for someone in this situation.
That definitely makes it harder. My suggestion would be try to narrow it down to a city based on other criteria and then use school as a factor for where in the city you want to be.
Why not look for schools first, since that sounds like your main criteria
“Top schools in X city”
Then find which neighborhoods feed into them to look for possible houses
Check out home prices on the borders of school districts, if one school/system is particularly bad there will be a notably shift in prices right around the border. This only gives you a relative value between the two but clarifies how large parents actually think the gap is.
Buy a home in an expensive area and the schools will be good.
Decent heuristic but not universally true. It is true I suppose for the most expensive area, but high-end upper middle class homes can fairly easily be in a district with some bad schools. It even varies by grade level (for example my elementary school was excellent, one of the best in the system, but my middle school was arguably the worst, then my high school was probably the best or at least top 2 again).
Roughly what area of the country are we looking at here?
Mainly Los Angeles and Atlanta for non-school related reasons. But schools will be a factor in our decision.
For general quality, look at the test scores for whites only. To a large extent, school test scores are a reflection of the school’s demographics, and a school that’s 40% Hispanic isn’t going to do a noticeably worse job than a school that’s 20% Hispanic, but the former will have lower test scores. There’s a point where schools start becoming unsafe, but that’s not too hard to research. As long as the school is safe, the demographics don’t matter that much.
However, schools that serve well particularly bright students are not as easy to figure out. If a school has “ability grouping”, go there. Otherwise your results may vary year by year depending on the teacher more than the school.
Considering the sheer range of territory you’re covering, it seems to me that the best thing to do would be to narrow down houses based on other, easier criterion first, and do thorough research on the school districts of your top three to five picks. It’s not the shortcut you want, but I’m not sure there will be one when you consider that you’re looking at homes that are thousands of miles apart.
Be aware that Zillow shows the nearest school to the selected house which is not necessarily the one that falls into the school district (at least that used to be the case a few years ago).
That’s a good tip. I’ll watch out for that. Thanks.
Review the arguments of the two income trap and the case against education and do the cost benefit analysis on the increase in mortgage payments vs investing the same money in a Roth IRA or saving bonds, and giving them as a graduation gift to the child. Personally, I’m not worrying about school quality, only crime quality when picking my first house, but my children are only planned at this point.
What would be engineering best practices for building a geothermal power plant on a glaciated active volcano?
If I find hot springs as evidence of vulcanism below the summer snow line, should I drill a well down to the magma chamber from there (after chasing off the naked anime characters)?
1) buy a nose plug.
There’s so much sulphur in the air everywhere around and inside a geothermal facility
2) probably get a load of geophys folks to work out where to site the boreholes
etc.
You’re asking in the wrong place. Try an Icelandic-language engineering forum; I’m pretty sure that’s their bread and butter.
Step 1: Learn Icelandic…
Sure, it’s hard. But there are other benefits. It will also let you read the Sagas in the original, or at least a closer translation. And if you don’t look Icelandic, speaking the language will shock any Icelandic person you ever meet.
Or maybe r/TotallyNotSupervillains.
That subreddit has been dead for two years. 🙁
So, Senior Agent, I have read your formal report for the Time Patrol, detailing your undercover intelligence gathering in the year 1923. I am satisfied with your activities, and your orders for the next year are to continue as before: remain undercover, cultivate contacts, and keep reporting.
But I would be interested in an off-the-record impression of this assignment. What do you find you miss most from your home time, which I see is a good century later?
I miss the opportunity to hunt down and kill whoever decided that the best place to sequester greenhouse gases would be the year 1923. Jesus, it’s hot.
Hey, you’re not my senior agent! She was much cuter and had a thing for me — how do you think I kept avoiding the Mongol Horde assignments? Curse that butterfly effect.
But as long as you’re asking, it’s air conditioning.
Proper sanitation, and clean air!
Everything is just so filthy. Even things they claim are clean. They haven’t discovered proper antibacterials yet, so even things they claim are clean really aren’t. Everyone thinks I’m weird for insisting on silver plates and cutlery. It’s the best I can do in the circumstances.
And it smells. By God does it smell. I know we complain about air pollution nowadays but you try living in 1923! The usage of motor-vehicles is increasing (which at least means there’s a little less horse shit on the streets, so small mercies) and these are not the hyper-efficient engines we’re used to now. No, these things are belching out all kinds of crap.
Including lead, which some bright spark has just discovered reduces knocking and improves engine life. So they just started adding it to petrol.
So yeah, thanks for that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going for a thorough medical check-up.
I sometimes wonder if America would get better* results if suffrage was restricted by property qualifications.
I think that a homeowner is making a commitment to a community and has a vested interest in it’s long term success as opposed to renters.
Homeownership shows the ability to prioritize long term planning over short term benefits.
I generally think that voting is one of the most important things a person can do, and think that the easier it is to vote, the less thoughtful and more flippant someone is going to be. I once had a buddy who voted for a candidate because he had the same name as his favorite singer. Creating some “starship trooper” style restriction would help create a situation where the only people to vote are the ones who really want to vote.
* I’m going to arbitrarily define better to mean higher GDP per capita. There are good reasons for universal suffrage, I understand that it would be a human right violation, and I’m not seriously advocating to abolish it. I’m specifically thinking about productivity in an “unfeeling robot overlord” sorta way or I’m running a simulation with p-zombies sorta way.
My proposal would be only net tax payers, veterans, and parents. Skin in the game.
How is “net tax payer” calculated?
Taxes paid minus government benefits received.
How do you calculate the benefits of roads, police services, sewers, etc etc etc?
^^ That’s what I was wondering.
Perhaps take an average? $X spent on roads divided by Y people, etc.
Accounting for non-direct transfers is almost impossible, and trying to average it out to a flat liability for each person encounters the issue that a government with large deficits might render even substantial tax contributors net tax eaters simply by the technicality that spending >> revenues.
The simplest approach would be for each level to just set a threshold for individual tax receipts, adjusting for any credits as a result of dependents. (I don’t think someone who pays less in taxes because they have kids should be penalized), the threshold would be based on what a net taxpayer would be *on average* assuming balanced budgets.
People who are close to but fall below the threshold by some slight amount can donate to whichever treasury the difference to vote in the election following the tax year in question.
It also has a problem in the US context in that different levels of government have different funding sources and not all of them can be traced to a single individual [sales, VAT, corporate income, etc.]
Property qualifications would exacerbate the problem of land-use regulations. While I’m not against the right to exclude entry into a nation, having local property owners being the only voters in an area sounds like a recipe for nimbyism and skyrocketing home prices.
I would only calculate income received from the government. I would, however, say that if you work for (or are) a government contractor, the percentage of your employer’s revenue that comes directly from government is multiplied by your income and counts as “income from government”. So if you work for Huge Aircrash, and 40% of their gross revenue is from governments (federal, state, local), 40% of your salary is considered government income.
I think this would be ideal as well, but as Well… says, the devil is in the details. So you knock out people receiving direct government subsidies and salaries, that’s straight forward enough. What about people working for staffing companies that staff government offices? what about the people at huntington ingalls, at least 90% of whose money comes from government contracts? what about people who work at boeing, for whom only 20% of company revenues is defense? What about employees of a company hired by lockheed or boeing?
I don’t think you could ever reasonably disentangle things.
I don’t think having people vote to get themselves more government contracts is a good idea, either, so sure, if you work for lockheed or boeing (in areas related to the government work), no vote. Make as part of the contracting process, “these are the positions at the company that will be unable to vote.”
Leaving aside that I don’t like this plan for several reasons (one of which, admittedly, is kind of self-serving), you listed three qualifications above. How do they interact? If you’re a government employee/contractor who is also a veteran or a parent, do you get to vote? What if you’re both, for that matter? And then there’s the issue that a lot of people who are definitely not net taxpayers are also parents. So a responsible employee of LockMart who couldn’t join the military because of medical issues and doesn’t have kids yet can’t vote, but a classic welfare queen who has had four kids on the public dime can? Besides implementation headaches, this system has other and obvious political issues.
Right, but where to draw the line? So let’s say we say lockheed is out, what about the people who work for the accountants lockheed hired? what about the janitors hired by the building management company in a building where lockheed occupies 51% of the floorspace or a temp sent over by a temp agency? It’s turtles all the way down.
It would be an OR function not an AND. Any one of those three. Yes, the classic welfare queen gets a vote, but I was under the impression the welfare queens don’t really exist and that’s a boogeyman, so not something to worry about.
My take is to keep it simple. Net tax-payers, period. Any money you get from the government which isn’t directly tied to work you do/did is counted against your taxes. So a civil servant can vote, as can someone at LockMart or Boeing.
Yes, there’s some moral hazard when the money is coming from the government, directly or indirectly. But trying to cut those cases out is going to be a giant partisan mess. And you’re not thinking about the really hard cases. What about teachers, or about someone who works for a construction company that does roads? Or what about someone who provides information, primarily to the defense industry, but not directly through government contracts?
That said, the idea of teachers not being able to vote in local elections has a certain appeal. If anything, I’d make a much stronger case for restrictions in that sphere. One vote has a pretty small impact on the national elections. It has a bigger one at the local level, where you’re also more likely to have someone running on something like “higher pay for teachers”.
@souleater’s original proposition seems strongest for elections to offices for governments which are primarily funded by property taxes (e.g., cities & school districts).
If there’s one class of people that should absolutely be banned from voting (or any other political activity), it’s government employees They’re supposed to be civil servants, after all. To steal from SST, what if they vote not to serve?
I’m a lot less concerned by this on the federal level than on the local level. Pandering directly to the civil service is pretty rare, particularly because “more pay for government bureaucrats” is the sort of thing that your political opponent prays you say. “More pay for teachers” sounds a lot better, and less people who aren’t teachers care about local elections.
@Bean
Conservatives have the same uncritical reverence for law enforcement as a class [not to speak to the virtue/vice of any individual] as liberals do for teachers, and with potentially similar results.
I’m inclined to agree that teachers may be the most obvious case, but i’m not sure by how much. A no exceptions [no public employees] approach for government employees seems like it’s riddled with difficulties, but allowing all employees but teachers is probably going to come across as vindictive] it also ignores the fact that employees can influence politics indirectly and the indirect approach may be where most of the effect comes from.
I actually thought about including something about law enforcement in the post, but didn’t. This isn’t a plan to single out teachers (although I do think they’re a little worse about this than other public employees) so much as it is pointing out that local public employees have a lot of power in local elections.
Whatever laws your property-owners pass are going to be enforced against everyone, whether they own property or no. That’s skin enough in the game as far as I’m concerned.
This is reason I have some sympathy for those who want to lower the voting age. I was not allowed to vote before going to university, yet I was strongly affected by government policy regarding university. Young people have a load of skin in the game and are completely at the mercy of older people to not screw them over too much. To be sure they would make some silly decisions at the polling booth, but I think ‘people should be able to vote on policy that affects them’ is an important enough principle to trump that.
When you’re even younger policy still affects you, but less permanently than student debt, and you are (at young enough ages) so incapable of reasoning that on balance you still should not be able to vote. But I think I would support lowering the voting age to 16 (in Australia, anyway).
Does being vulnerable to state coercion not count as “skin in the game”?
I’d suggest some sort of weighted system, so everybody gets at least one vote, and then people who pay more tax get more votes than people who pay less. Or perhaps something like the Prussian three-class system.
Net tax payers would be extremely funny, as people would start giving subsidies and exemptions to others as a way of disenfrachise them.
The system barely works as is, you’d probably have a revolution in a gen or two.
At best, the system would get a drop in the GDP, as the free market would basically die, as land owners try to make sure their enemies don’t pay taxes, they themselves stay profitable and paying some taxes, which would lead to monopolies, the most profitable industries becoming feudal institutions (as only working on profitable industries would guarantee your vote) which would be outcompeted by subsidized, non voting companies. Which would then be outlawed by the voters.
If the rule is net tax payers, all you have to do is give back half of what you get and you can vote again. And you still get to keep half!
Yeah no.
Remember how on tax day, the government will give you back the extra taxes they decided you gave them?
Is there any reason we can’t just allow a voluntary donation to the government over and above a person’s tax liability, for exactly this reason?
I can’t really see the negative consequences of this. It seems like it would only really come up in the situation you outlined where the tax system is being gamed to disenfranchise people, and it’s a pretty clean solution: the people they attempt to disenfranchise net money and still get to vote.
I don’t know if anyone would actually do this in our current system, but it’s a safety valve for how much you can screw people over. If they’re waist deep in subsidies but feel like the vote is more important, they now have that option.
It creates a weird situation where someone is saving up an “election fund” over years to vote in an election they consider particularly important. I’m not sure I like that, but I think that ties into the other objections to this system rather than the “subsidy” problem.
@moonfirestorm , the State of Arkansas already does that!
As does the USG:
https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html
You could have legal gifts to the government but by looking at the current world, where parties try to use vote suppression, the electoral college and gerrymandering to manipulate elections and rob people of representation, I assume that gifts to the government would be extremely legislated, so that only the people in power would be able to use them to keep power.
There’s clearly a strong incentive there, but there are reasonable explanations for those policies, and insofar as there’s a voter suppression motive it can be concealed behind the other purposes. What’s the plausible explanation for “this person wants to give us money for the explicit purpose of enabling their vote, but we aren’t going to let them”?
Especially when, as the other commenters have taught me, there’s an existing unconditional gift system that would have to first be modified.
I think it would be a little too obvious, but trying to steelman: maybe arguing that it’s an irresponsible act to donate the money when they need X, and the government should protect them from their own irresponsibility?
I’m not sure that’s compatible with “we gave them a bunch of subsidies they don’t have any plausible use for, just to deny them the vote” though. If they clearly don’t need the money, then how do you argue it’s irresponsible to spend it (and not even all of it) to vote? If they do need the money or it’s ambiguous, it seems like the subsidies are actually doing good by letting them solve those needs, so it’s not really vote suppression so much as expanded welfare.
On further reflection, I found a method: illiquid, bloated benefits.
If you get a food stamp program with enough food to feed 8 kids, that could still get counted as a cost to the government, but you have no realistic way to turn that into extra taxes paid to get back to a net taxpayer. And it’s entirely possible that there aren’t levels to the system, so you either get food stamps or you don’t. And you’re unlikely to be able to sell it on the black market or anything, since everyone has access to this system and there are plenty of people who will have accepted nonvoting and will be trying to sell off their extra food for other stuff.
To solve this, we’d want to make sure that we have one of:
1. Benefits are in cash: no food stamp programs, just UBI equivalents.
2. Benefits have a defined cash value and can be donated to the government in taxes, or at least the “extra gifts” to reenable voting, at that cash value.
3. Benefits are arbitrarily scalable: if you don’t need 8 kids worth of food, you should be able to scale down what you get and get the appropriate reduction to your “voting balance”
Regulations affect the distribution of income without being easily measurable [especially on an individual basis] — i.e. a large taxpayer could work for a company that has a monopoly granted to it by a government. This costs nothing to the government but the company’s finances are dependent upon a particular law.
If regulations [which tend to affect everyone] and spending [which have much clearer beneficiaries] could be separated in terms of laws, bearing in mind that most regulatory enforcement is a relatively small portion of government budgets, then you might be able to restrict the franchise to some elections and not others; but this requires changing the legislative branch of government, and again it assumes that spending and regulation can be separated.
For example, the ‘tax and spend’ house may agree to always fund the regulators, but if the regulations involve levying fees, they can function like taxes. The affordable care act is a good example of this.
Notably, in Starship Troopers, “don’t be poor” was not the criterion for suffrage. Are you aware of the history of poll taxes?
Yes, it is a nasty, racist history.
I would point out, however, that poor people can own land. there are places in kentucky with a median home price of $145k with a 30 year mortgage that’s $686 a month.. not unreasonable to me.
I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole on this though.. I understand how a policy like the one I describe would make it difficult/impossible for inner city populations to vote.. which would be bad from a human rights perspective. But I do wonder if it would improve GDP per capita.
25% of Kentuckians earn less than $20k per year. How many of them do you think are going to get approved for a $145k mortgage?
Would you be willing to provide a source so I know we’re talking about the same thing?
The share of the US population who are children is 24% but I don’t imagine thats what you’re reffering to.
But the fact that the bottom quartile of people can’t get approved for a median income home is unsurprising.
In any case, a married couple who are both in the bottom quartile would bring in $40k pre tax.. so I would imagine a good number of them could get approved for something. Saving a down payment would take a lot of discipline.. but that’s sorta the point..
If the median home price is $145 then the median mortgage will be lower, and there will be many houses available for less than $145. If 25% of the population currently makes less than 20k per year they would only be disenfranchised if they remained at that level of pay for most of their life. If a substantial portion of those people are working their first job or seniors living on a pension then they likely will have, did, or did have the opportunity to buy a home.
I don’t agree with the general premise but using average home prices and a portion of the populace’s income doesn’t give an accurate picture.
Poll tests have a bad history, too, but I’d be in favor of them.
Oh, don’t turn anybody away.
Just have one question on the ballot that will disqualify you if you get it wrong. Something easy, like “select the Senator from your state” or “Which of the following was not a recent US president.”
Is Bill Clinton a recent president? Ronald Reagan? I guess if it is a multiple-choice question, you’d just pick the person who was never a president (if any), or else pick the president who served longest ago.
I don’t object to this idea in principle, although I am leery of who gets to decide what the reasonable questions are.
I was thinking the answers would be:
A) Donald Trump
B) Barrack Obama
C) George W Bush
D) Kanye West
No response to that; I consider it a sufficient refutation.
Per Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter, I wouldn’t necessarily expect large gains in voter competency from such a restriction. But even if the effects on candidate quality were significant, it’s my understanding that broader suffrage has the add-on effect of increasing stability, both civil and political. Succession crises and civil unrest are huge wealth destroyers (both in the near and long term as political instability reduces foreign interest in investment). A restricted franchise, while probably producing “better” leaders as defined in technocratic terms, would likely result in a less stable, and thus less wealthy, society. (This is ignoring the immediate negative effects of any attempt to claw back the franchise from some demographic group).
That’s a good point. This reminds me of reading Zinn’s People’s History and he frequently made comments of the form, “once again, the people’s rage was channeled into voting.” So he saw this as a bug instead of a feature. The elites buy the masses off with meaningless voting rights, which makes it harder to get to Glorious Revolution.
That’s a really good point.
When people demand change they do it from the soap box, the ballot box or the ammo box
First, the end result of this will be that homeownership will be restricted by law to families that are already homeowners. Why would the existing landed aristocracy risk letting their power be diluted?
Secondly, you’re turning private institutions (mortgage lenders) into gatekeepers for public institutions. That seems almost axiomatically terrible.
By this logic women have never been allowed to vote.
They got it, but that doesn’t mean it came easy.
It’d be more like one group instituting literacy tests as a prerequisite for franchise and then making schooling for other groups as difficult as possible to prevent those groups from passing those tests. Which actually did happen in the US.
THIS.
Goodhart, Goodhart, Goodhart, Goodhart, except with the corollary, that they’re not just aiming for the proxy, they turn the proxy into a gate to fastidiously keep.
We already see this in action in the Bay Area, wherein homeowners are more likely to vote, so of course they’re all NIMBYs. And that’s before it’s codified into law and the non-homeowners’ suffrage is outright revoked!
By your definition of “better”, I agree with you, but I think that what this shows is that your definition of “better” is a bad one. My (non-arbitrary, or at least not-wholly-arbitrary) definition of better is the common or garden Rawlsian veil of ignorance – society A is better than society B if, given a choice of being born in one or the other without knowing who you’d be born as, you’d choose A.
I think that restricting suffrage to a richer-than-average class of people will mean that you get policies that favour the rich more, and emphasise wealth creation at the expense of poverty minimisation more than would be the case otherwise.
And I think that that will lead to a higher GDP per capita, but also to lower living standards at the lower centiles – essentially, the function of wealth that you’re trying to maximise the average of will become less sublinear.
And that will result in a society that will have more total wealth, but which I would be less keen on being reincarnated into.
Yeah.. I recognize that it wouldn’t really be better in many important respects.. it would have been more accurate to say “more productive”
I think that a societal emphasis on wealth creation (which is synonymous to resource creation) can’t help but be beneficial to everyone over a long enough timescale. Especially considering how growth is exponential.
… Maybe I just found a round about way to argue trickle down economics.
I’m curious-is there empirical support that an oligarchy or limited franchise governments are more productive? I thought a “free men and free markets” “creative destruction” sort of model would argue that if you concentrated power in a moneyed clique they would throw up barriers to market entry/zealously guard their privileges and distort the market. I can imagine stereotypical monocled Mr. Monopoly who creates goods for the domestic market having his ideal economic policy being high tariffs to keep out his foreign competitors and low taxes. Would that increase productivity?
History isn’t the same as a science experiment but the US, France, the UK and many other countries all had suffrage limited by wealth at different points in time. Is there any evidence that during those periods policies were enacted that helped productivity and that productivity declined as the franchise expanded and the ignorant masses took power? Admittedly, about 20 years ago I would be more confident that an oligarchy and long term planning can’t deliver consistent growth before the PRC enjoyed their great economic success.
To answer your question directly, there is no evidence that oligarchies or limited franchise governments are more productive as far as I know.
I do want to clarify that I wouldn’t really consider my proposal to be an oligarchy. According to census data, 64% of people own their own homes. I also expect that number to rise in the event of my proposal’s widespread adoption.
A halfway point would be to apply the restriction only to elections for the upper legislative chamber (presupposes bicamerality; sorry Nebraska); bifurcated systems have worked well for the British & the Romans.
The hoi polloi would still get a voice, maintaining some damper on their revolutionary fervor, while the hypothetically more prudent property owners would temper the rate of change.
Extension to assignment of Electoral College votes is left as an exercise for the reader.
This sounds massively counter productive as it would simply emphasise the clashing interests of the rich and everyone else and mean you constantly had cases where the democratic choice was being explicitly thwarted by an elite. Within a few years you’d have a shopping list of ‘what we’d have if the rich didn’t block it’ including things that are proposed because they know they’ll be blocked so you don’t have to worry about praxticality.
Notably in England the Lords was explicitly made subordinate to the Commons (and the Roman senate wasn’t really an upper house and relied on moral authority, executive powers held by its members and its collective wealth rather than being able to overrule the people’s assembly.
I guess I’ll pile on to the people saying that I don’t think that a property qualification per se is what you want here.
Heinlein’s insight in Starship Troopers was that by restricting the franchise to veterans and volunteers for equivalently-risky civilian service jobs, everyone willing to die for something greater than themselves was represented in the government. He represents it as ensuring that the voting public has good character, but on a more practical level those are the only people capable of effective violent or nonviolent resistance. If most of those people mistakenly think that their votes count (public choice theory plainly tells us they don’t) then any challenger will find it almost impossible to organize against you.
Personally, though, I think that sortition makes for a better system than voting. Have everyone go through the ritual of filling out and submitting a ticket, to get the same emotional buy-in as representative democracy, but have the actual representatives periodically chosen by lot. That way every ethnic, religious, or political minority gets a seat at the table proportionate to their prevalence in the population and can feel heard but the ultimate result is statistically identical to holding a referendum on each issue that comes before the legislature.
Strictly speaking this isn’t true. It guarantees that everyone represented in the government is willing to die for something greater than themselves, but it does not guarantee that everyone so willing is represented. Which kind of kicks the legs out from under the “effective resistance” argument.
You can choose my legislature by sortition, but please don’t choose my president that way!
I once had an idea along these lines, based on a Milton Friedman observation to the effect that you can justify government redistribution as a public good but only insofar as the people voting for it are the donors.
First, create a rule for dividing the population into income brackets. Maybe pick some percentile thresholds or something?
Now, each bracket gets its own legislature. They can only pass flat taxes to be assessed on income within that bracket. So if there’s a 0-10k bracket, and they pass a 20% tax, everyone making under 10k pays 20% of their income and everyone making 10k or more pays 2k.
People can only vote in elections for legislatures they pay tax to, with a vote proportional to how much they pay. (You can’t pay extra above the maximum to get more votes). Each bracket-legislature has control over allocation of the taxes it collects. Lower brackets can veto higher ones. (Remember that the rich also vote in the lower brackets).
And how does this not result in mass-defect, every bracket votes that they pay 0%, on the grounds that the bracket above should pay more (they’ll miss it less)?
I don’t think restricting the franchise would be particularly helpful. I’ve laid out that argument at length elsewhere.
I do sometimes think indirect elections might be better for higher-quality candidates. In particular, I’m beginning to wonder if national general elections are a bad thing and having a bunch of small local candidates elect people further up the chain might mitigate some of its bad effects.
Not sure if this is meant to be obvious (not American) but isn’t your last proposal how the US was set up? And isn’t the lesson that people will hack those systems to make then more democratic? Presumably that would be basically instant given people are used to direct elections and we have social media. There’s all sorts of ‘check how your representative votes’ stuff there didn’t used to be and I expect you’d have very clear ‘I vote for Bob because he’ll vote for Alice’
Sort of. The US used to have indirect election of senators. While the EC made the president officially direct, there were national elections for president very early on. You’re right the trend would be towards more democracy.
And yes, parties would still exist. But I think voting for someone purely on national terms would be a little harder when that person had real authority. Like, ‘Vote for DavidS, he’ll vote for Obama!’ and then DavidS is now your councilperson for the next six years and his agenda is… I don’t know, kicking puppies. That would moderate it somewhat.
It would perhaps get better for propertied classes and almost certainly worse the poor.
Bicameralism. Two houses of congress, one elected by everyone, one elected by net taxpayers, veterans, and parents.
The country closest to this in practice is probably Italy, who elects their lower house with suffrage for those 18 and over and their upper house with suffrage for those 25 and older.
The genuinely closest is Great Britain before the House of Lords reforms. It was considered one of the best-governed countries in history, so that’s a solid idea.
This is not factually correct. Britain was never close to such system.
Main reform of House of Lords was Parliament Act of 1911 , which removed power of Lords to veto bills originating by the Commons. In 1911, members of Commons were not elected by everyone by any reasonable definition of everyone. Universal male suffrage in Britain was established in 1918, for men over 21, along with suffrage for women over 30 meeting certain property qualifications. Truly universal suffrage in Britain was established in 1928. Wikipedia claims that between 1885 and 1918 about 56 % of men over 21 had right to vote.
Previous paragraph of course ignores small issue that inhabitants of colonies under British rule, constitutiong several times of the population of Britain, had no right to vote for members of Commons.
Also House of Lords prior to 1911 (and after) most definitely wasn´t “elected by net taxpayers, veterans, and parents”.
I truly fear the HOAs in such a world, even more than I fear them in ours.
Unintended consequences of this policy:
1. Property immediately gets more expensive. Maybe not everywhere, but any moderately-populated area is going to see property prices go up.
2. The voting power of cities will go down, at least least initially. There are some parts of the country where it just doesn’t make sense to buy property. When I lived in suburbia, I bought a house. When I lived in a city, I rented. Given the voting demographics of cities, you’ve just shredded the base of one of our political parties.
3. Eventually, the system will self-correct around this policy and design property arrangements that meet the absolute letter of the law to let the residents vote, but don’t fundamentally change anything. Instead of a company owning my apartment building and renting us rooms in it, it would instead probably turn into a company building an apartment complex, then selling us rooms in it – but we have to get the mortgage loan through them, we have to agree to a ridiculously long repayment schedule and we’d have to agree to sell it back to them when we wanted to move out.
Do people care enough about voting to go to that much trouble? Bad weather already has a decent impact on turnout where I live.
In Spain, because election fall on Sundays, good weather also has an effect – people go to the beach. At least at the local level, it’s quite noticeable.
Most people, probably not. But a vocal minority of city could likely pressure companies to change their policies / city governments to change zoning laws / whatever. The fact that this change would largely target the left would immediately make it a cause among the woke crowd.
Yeah how high was the GDP of the world in Starship Troopers anyway.
> I understand that it would be a human right violation
Nit: Depending upon what model you go with, it’s not a human rights violation but a political rights violation. There’s no inherent reason to think that voting is inherent with personhood. Indeed, the idea of having infants voting is pretty silly. But we recognize all sorts of other human rights at that stage.
Even if this gets you better qualified and/or more thoughtful voters, it formally entrenches a class divide into your political system. That’s the sort of thing that can lead to Revolutionary political change, if you get my meaning, and not always the happy fun kind of revolution either. I’d rather not loose my head over it. Same for the “only net taxpayers vote” schemes.
What might be of some value, along the same lines, is making voting in state and local elections contingent on the same sort of five-year residency requirement that goes with citizenship and voting in federal elections. Once you’ve decided where you’re going to settle down and live, you get a voice in that polity’s future. Until then, vote with your feet like you demonstrably have been.
For this to work, you’d either need to place more clearly defined and rigorously enforced bounds between state and federal authority than are currently in place (in the US at least), or you’d need to make at least the Senate a state-elected body in that only settled residents get to vote for senators. Maybe both. Otherwise everything just shifts over to being in the Federal domain, and that makes things worse rather than better.
I read of some ancient society where having children was a requirement for voting. Knowing how much my personality has changed since becoming a parent, I view this positively.
That said, I’m afraid any qualifications would be gamed to exclude voters that someone in power does not like. Once the idea of voting qualifications become accepted, altering them will be far easier.
+1
The example that strikes me here is literacy tests. When I first heard of literacy tests for voting, I thought “Yes, of course you should only vote if you’re literate.” And then I found out that they had been explicitly used to suppress voting by blacks. Now, sufficiently crooked election officials can probably find other ways to suppress voting, but it’s useful to have a *worked example* of a seemingly-plausible rule for excluding voters being misused.
In theory, a test can work if it’s very simple (not that the requirement is easy to meet, but one that is unambiguously easy to describe), and socially accepted along with a social norm against changing in.
A voter must have children, or must be of a certain age/gender/height, must own property, etc could all work. By work I mean be relatively resistant to manipulation in order to suppress voting. For most of these, I’m not sure it would be a huge improvement over the current situation.
Something like “must be able to pass a test that gets re written by some committee every few years” would be very vulnerable to being hijacked.
As I get older, I think that voters voting themselves an ever bigger share of the public purse for selfish reason isn’t as big of a problem as a younger me thought it was. People tend to vote for principles that fit their ideas of what a fairer world would be, even when it goes against their immediate interests. I don’t think that most of the people who want more redistribution do so because they personally want more money, but rather because they think that world is superior (many of them would see their own income reduced). Likewise, most of those who vote for lower taxes on the upper brackets feel that this also makes for a fairer world, and most of them won’t see any direct benefit.
I think if voting were likely to make a difference, most people would be voting for more goodies for themselves. But since my vote has little consequence, I can use it to indulge my ideals/beliefs/prejudices.
So people can’t raid the public treasury because of coordination problems? That’s beautiful!
@MartMart
A downside would be that you’d expect an even greater wealth transfer from the childless and/or single to parents and/or those in a relationship.
That looks like an upside to me. Since today’s children will be the workers supporting tomorrow’s retirees*, those who do not contribute biologically to the future generation should do so financially.
*Retirees cannot consume more value than is produced by contemporary workers, regardless of financing arrangements; fewer workers = less surplus value available for retirees.
What does “produced by contemporary workers” mean? Are you ignoring the role of capital in production?
Suppose that, before I retire, I plant an apple orchard. Workers harvest ten bushels of apples a year. Are all ten “produced by contemporary workers” or are some of them produced by my past labor in planting the trees?
@DavidFriedman,
Produced by combining their labor with the capital stock at the time.
I was eliding rather than ignoring, because allocation of value produced between labor & capital is orthogonal to the point I was trying to make.
In the dependency ratio context I was focusing on, the former; no contemporary workers, no apples harvested, regardless of how many trees were planted in the past.
During my working life, I earn money that I can use for a variety of purposes, including current consumption for myself, raising kids, saving money that can be used to make more capital. But I can also literally save some resources I intend to use.
For example, if I pay off my house before I retire, and maintain it properly, then I get to keep living in my house after I retire. Nobody needs to keep producing that home (though someone will need to continue doing maintenance to keep it from falling apart). In principle, I could store up food in my basement during my working years, and use that to feed myself–again, no additional production would be needed by anyone else. If I retire having just bought a new car, then I can probably keep using that car for a decade or so after I retire without requiring anyone to produce a new car for me. And so on.
@Ghillie Dhu
I’m not arguing that children should not be subsidized, but rather, that this should not be excessive.
Presumably, parents get more benefits from their children than others. If only parents get to vote, they can spread the cost very equally over society or even make having kids be profitable, while the benefits are not spread equally. This seems unfair to me.
To what extent was the previous generation of billionaire philanthropy (eg, the Rockefeller Foundation) simply expropriated by the CIA?
In Screwtape Letter 26, Lewis writes:
A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others. As a result, a woman who is quite far gone in the Enemy’s* service will make a nuisance of herself on a larger scale than any man except those whom Our Father has dominated completely; and, conversely, a man will live long in the Enemy’s camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman may do every day. Thus while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.
My own experiences suggest that this is getting at something real and important. Has “values taking trouble vs. values not giving trouble” ever been studied as a personality trait? Does it show the gender difference Lewis claims (in direction, if not effect size)?
And, on a more personal note, any tips for managing this issue in a personal relationship?
* In The Screwtape Letters, ‘the Enemy’ is Jesus and ‘Our Father’ is the devil.
I’m not sure if I would ascribe this as a male/female thing, but I’ve definitely felt this dichotomy in my personal life without ever seeing it articulated so clearly.
Seems to me more like extraversion and introversion. (And only indirectly about genders, because it is known that all men are introverts from Mars, and all women are extraverts from Venus.)
I will have to show that to my wife to get her perspective on our relative behavior. It rings true as a difference to me; probably with a gender skew but at least as a potential difference people have.
I feel that I am quite virtuous when I make as little trouble as possible for anyone–see the previous thread where we talked about how to minimize delay as pedestrians.
(Heck, look at the fact that I’m feeling guilty about posting so much in one thread, rather than for not posting encouragement or something)
But it’s good to consider that maybe I’m neglecting the other side of the coin.
As a Dad, I emphasize to my daughters that they need to try to solve their problems before asking others–for example, asking the time, or how long until home, or looking for something. I want to teach them how to be independent, but some of it might be this. Don’t inflict bother on others. But maybe it’s an instinctual female community building instinct to ask each other for minor favors, and there’s no real need to discourage it.
Hopefully you’ve paired with someone willing to forgive small faults and to speak openly about their feelings. Otherwise, you’re going to need to give have to meet on their side of the issue in this and many other cases.
Thanks, glad to hear this resonated with someone else
I think I’d characterize the current situation as, the amount of trouble that she makes/I take is a decent compromise between what we respectively consider reasonable, but the trouble I make/she takes is more dominated by my standard and remains quite low. Not a crisis, but sort of an ongoing drain on the fault tolerance budget.
I imagine it would help if I learned to ask for things and appreciate receiving them, but I have a hard time a) thinking of things I want that aren’t “deal with the problem you asked me to deal with” and b) convincing myself that it’s okay to further deplete the resources of someone who already needs help all the time.
Ack, you quoted a rather mangled sentence, but I think you got the gist?
Anyway, wrt your situation, your comparing the trouble each person makes for the other, but don’t forget to consider the opposite perspective, the ways in which one party goes out of their way to help the other. I think you are saying you make less trouble, but maybe she’s thinking that that is more than made up for by doing things for you–even if you don’t actually happen to care about those things.
And if you can’t convince her to not take trouble for you, you have to put up with more trouble from her, because she sees the ledger as balanced.
If she does things for him because it makes her happy to be doing things for him, is she doing those things for him or for herself?
Doesn’t really matter; if he can’t convince her not to, and he wants to keep the relationship, it’s best to assume she’s doing it for him.
Maybe it will be productive to say “Hon, when you fold may socks, that’s selfish, ’cause I don’t really need that. Don’t assume that makes up for leaving your things all over the counter.”
But probably not. Take the more charitable interpretation.
(Obviously some humorous exaggeration here; oftentimes some negotiation will be possible. But questioning motives still probably not helpful, especially unconscious ones.)
It’s not about charitability, but about balance.
If Mary does things for Bob that makes Mary feel good and Bob feel neutral or bad, she shouldn’t count that as a sacrifice made for him, that Bob should reciprocate with a sacrifice.
Being able to discuss the fairness in a relationship and finding a balance that both think is fair presumably contributes to mutual happiness and the stability of the relationship.
True. If he can convince her to consider his perspective, so much the better.
I can imagine it has something to do with what kids are told. Boys are generally more boisterous (“making trouble”) while girls are generally quieter but equally self-focused and without much functioning empathy. So when you’re a boy, people will more likely scold you with “Don’t be so selfish! Stop making trouble for once!” and when you’re a girl, you get “Don’t be so selfish! Don’t you see there are people working their asses off for you? Make yourself useful for once!”
Grown-up versions of those kids will then be proud of their developed selflessness when they learn to stop making trouble/to make themselves useful.
Anecdotally, I do know many more women who (exaggeratedly) want a “high-traffic” relationship (I make your cup of coffee in the morning, you clear away my plate, I pack your lunch, you pick up my dry cleaning, I give you a back rub, you run my bath – voluntarily taking over each other’s tasks) and men who want a relationship where they basically only interact if they have to (“I told you I loved you when I asked you to marry you and if I ever stop loving you I will let you know, and don’t expect me to say it again in the meantime”).
My husband and I are stereotypical in this way. He’d rather chew off his own foot than ask me for help with something, which I find extremely non-endearing. Especially since the flip side of that is that he doesn’t like me asking for his help either, because that means he’d be doing more than his fair share. Another tough result is that he sometimes wants things but doesn’t want to negotiate how that could be good for me too: he feels that, since he doesn’t ask for anything unless it really cannot be avoided, I shouldn’t ‘make trouble’ for him by asking him to ‘take’ some of the trouble that thing creates for me.
The way I manage that in my personal life is to figure out which things are worth picking a fight over and not giving up until we find a solution that is satisfactory to both. He manages it in his personal life by generally being more stubborn than I am – the downside of wanting something that someone is not willing to give is that there’s really not much you can do about it, so the default is inaction. We both manage it by trying to manage our own insecurities. His desire for a more autarchical setup makes me feel lonely and unappreciated so I need to actively work on reminding myself that that is not why he does it. My desire for proactive load-sharing makes him feel stressed and like a failure, and he needs to actively work on reminding himself that that’s not why I do it.
In practice, we go up and down a bit – we have a lovely time of much connection (from my POV), I am full up on feeling appreciated so I can be much more generous when he needs to withdraw, until we reach a point where I feel like we’re ships passing in the night and I can’t get horny for him anymore and I let him know we need to increase the traffic. By that time, he’s had a lovely time of feeling unfettered (from his POV) and he can be generous for a while in stepping up. It’s not ideal, but it works.
Thanks! It especially helps to hear that from someone coming at this from the other side from me.
I’m 24, and I have dreadful teeth. Not as in yellow teeth, they’re just very misaligned. Does it make any sense for me to try to get dental work done now, with a steady job and HRA and all? Or would it be a waste of money?
Also, how actually long would I have, say, braces, if that’s what I did? It seemed to me like kids had them for eons when I was young, but I’m sure I didn’t have an accurate sense of it.
My father is in his 70s and just finished Invisalign to correct a tooth misalignment that was finally starting to cause him serious issues. I don’t see why you couldn’t do it now.
Yeah, I had a cousin who did it in her late 30s. Seemed to have mostly a positive experience.
@Nick,
You’re only 24?
IIRC your’e already married, have kids, a stable job, and are out of school, I know that San Francisco is an outlier in how late these things are usually done (if ever), but even when I consider that, 24 seems very young to have achieved all that in the 21st century and I’m very impressed!
Oh dear God no, I am not married and have no kids!
Go find a nice girl at church!
The worst place for meeting girls! We discussed this!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/14/ot132-open-shed/#comment-774580
… oh, yeah. So we did.
Wait a second, I have it on good authority that church is just like a fashion show, and christian girls are the freakiest hoes.
Well, those things could be true and church still not be the best place to meet those girls. The best place to pick up sexy librarians isn’t necessarily the library either.
But, outside of a convention or training program, that’s the best place to find and compare the librarians.
So the thing to do is hang around then Library/Church, the follow the pretty ones and flirt with them once they reach their chosen location of leisure or relaxation.
This will be biased towards the extroverts, though, so be sure to spend some time hanging around their chosen grocery store, hair-dresser, mailbox, etc.
“Single Christian Man seeks SCW for Godly dating. If interested, open your mailbox (I’m getting a cramp).”
Ask a dentist. It needn’t even be a dentist who does braces, any ordinary dentist can give you general advice about this. You’re seeing a dentist every year to check up on your tooth every year anyway, right?
As for me, I have one incisor tooth that is too big so it’s misaligned because it doesn’t fit between the two adjacent teeth. When I was around 18 years old (so I had stopped growing), I asked my dentist if it has to be fixed with a brace. She said that it can be braced, but worth only if it bothers me that my tooth is like that. It never bothered me, so never had a brace. But perhaps it’s different if your tooth are more misaligned than mine.
No, I haven’t seen a dentist in a really long time. I know I’ll have to see one, which I can now afford to do, but I was hoping to get general advice first.
I haven’t been to a dentist in a decade or more.
I’ve got good teeth and a good diet; never had a cavity or serious toothache.
My teeth could use some whitening, but they’re performing well.
Could use some straightening too, on account I kept breaking my retainers. I’d probably do it again, though.
Dentists would like you to come in twice a year, but after your teeth are all in place the final time I think your mileage may vary as to how necessary that is.
Ask me in another thirty years how that worked out long term, though.
Absolutely get it if your dentist recommends. Tons of adults get them, Invisalign is barely noticeable, and it forces you to take better care of your teeth. Two years later, you’ll thank yourself.
I’m looking at Invisalign now, which I’ve never heard of, and it looks ideal. A little more work to keep it and my teeth clean, but I would benefit from that anyway. Thanks.
My kids both started it a month ago, and I’m paying full price (neither of our insurances cover it). You change the sheath (or whatever it’s called) once every week or so, and for the first couple of days it hurts a bit, but not that much, and otherwise it’s really not too bad, and as you said it’s good to put in the extra work to clean it and your teeth. Good luck!
I got braces when I was about 20, for a misaligned front tooth. (Prior to that I had had a retainer for some years). I had them for about 15 months, and they solved the problem almost completely. This was before Invisalign tech, so they were kinda ugly regular braces. It worked, I’m glad I did it, and it was not a multi-year process. With today’s technology, I would definitely consider it if I were in the your situation and it was financially feasible.
Crooked teeth can be a health problem; I’ve heard they are related to sleep apnea. They also wear each other down, so that is also an issue with time. It also makes you more attractive; it’s incredible how much your face improves with straight teeth.
Unless your insurance covers braces (in Spain, at least, elective dental stuff is never covered; it can cost tens of thousands of euros), getting braces can be expensive enough that it may be worth travelling abroad. I don’t know where in the Americas you can get cheaper dental care (maybe Mexico?); in Europe, we go to Hungary. And then you use a local dentist for the maintenance care.
Orthodontics are covered on many US dental plans, but IIRC mine (in NJ, USA) would have been about $5000 if I’d paid out of pocket, so not as bad as Spain.
I was in a similar situation. I put it off for various reasons until my mid thirties. In retrospect, the various reasons were dumb and I wish I had done it earlier. The results were great. I was an extreme case and I did invisalign for about two years. Once you get used to it, there is very little hassle or inconvenience.
It’s a pain in the ass, but if you want it, why not? I was one of those kids who had them for eons when I was young, and my teeth were stronger than the retainer so I ended up with one tooth crowded out anyway. I had that fixed (with Invisalign) a couple of years ago. I think it took about two years — the catch is to avoid backsliding you’re supposed to wear a retainer at nights for life.
The time it takes is dependent on the amount of correction you need (which is not obvious to the layman; I had one tooth crowded out but all the teeth needed to move quite a bit to make room and keep my bite correct), so you’d need to talk to an orthodontist about it.
My sister-in-law got braces in her early 20’s (I think she was 21); it’s a bit slower than when your bones are still growing, but she’s much happier with her teeth now. Ask your dentist, but I expect the answer willb e Yes.
Okay, so what I’m hearing here is that yes, this is a reasonable thing to want done, and it sounds like it’s going to be even easier than I thought (see: Invisalign, thanks HeelBearCub, Enkidum, et al.). Thanks, everyone!
What do y’all think of this? Hoover Inst. video about mathematical challenges to Darwin
I knew there were fundamental intra-scientific debates about evolutionary theory, but I wasn’t familiar with any serious defenses of intelligent design, and I might not have been aware there were any. In that sense, this video opened my eyes a bit. But the three guys interviewed had only their interlocutor (a journalist, presumably?) to lob softball objections, so I know it doesn’t give both sides either. How would an informed Darwinist respond to their specific claims?
This isn’t what you’re asking for, but I wouldn’t.
I refuse to watch the video, and my prior is that there’s about a 99.5% chance that it’s misleading horseshit, and a 0.45% chance that it’s just misleading. (Protip, if the argument contains the word “complexity”, run like hell. Actually, even if it doesn’t, just run.)
It’s sometimes worth looking over these arguments as a sort of intellectual exercise, and certainly when you’re young it can help you understand the argument space. Hopefully someone will be less of a jerk about it than I am, and do the work of explaining the specific form of garbage that is at that link for anyone who’s sincerely looking for the response.
I’ve read dozens of arguments against the modern Darwinian consensus, and summaries of many more. With no exceptions, they were all garbage. There isn’t any “there” there. These arguments deserve exactly as much respect as blueprints for perpetual motion machines.
You can absolutely judge some books by their covers, and to quote Dawkins (I think), don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
Not really responding to the question either, but be careful with this kind of response. If someone has any uncertainty about an issue, a response along the lines of “I’m so certain that I’m right that I don’t even need to consider engaging with people who disagree with me” is going to make it look like you’re pushing dogma, not science.
On the other hand, I get your point that you can’t go diving down every rabbit hole of an argument that seems persuasive to somebody. I’m not sure how to balance these two considerations, but I just know that if I saw this kind of response on any kind of issue where I wasn’t really sure was settled, it would push me towards thinking that the video’s position was more credible.
Yeah, you’re not wrong. Mine is essentially the kind of answer a priest might have given to someone interested in this new-fangled natural philosophy 400 years ago. It just happens to be that this dogma IS true.
I don’t know how to balance this either.
I’ve idly mused over this for years. The best method I could sketch is to have tiers of people assessing rabbit holes, much like a support shop has tiers of technicians. If you’re the challenger, then you present your argument to interns, who give it a coarse skim. If it passes, you go to the post-docs. If they can’t find anything wrong, you get to see professors, and finally Nobel laureates.
If you’re part of the orthodoxy, you weight a new argument by how far it’s currently getting in your trusted expert hierarchy. A theory about planetary motion gets less weight if some Jesuit rando is mulling it, than if the Pope is looking at it.
Which expert goes in which tier is often organic. A professor might give Timecube stuff some attention just because she’s bored. And any argument ideally gets multiple looks, to ward against single experts with axes to grind.
To be frank, I’m not going to watch an hour long video because I’ve paid my dues with that. I read the description, and I’ve read that Gelenter was making yet another combinatorial argument against evolution. So honestly, I’m just going to kind of spout off, but focus on the supposed combinatorial impossibility thing which is the argument that never dies.
These arguments about the supposed impossibility of random amino acid sequences reaching optimum performance are wrong because (A) Evolution does not reach optima (your optic nerve is in a kind of terrible place for example; and we routinely engineer proteins that are better by some metric than natural ones like brighter fluorescent proteins) and (B) Evolution doesn’t have to jump to a local peak of the genetic landscape of whatever trait you are interested in.
The argument by combinatorics is like claiming that you can’t sort a list of one billion numbers because the odds of randomly choosing the correct list are 1/(10^9)! which is about 10^-(9*10^9). Ok, but you can actually sort a list pretty fast by sorting each half of it and so on recursively and then merging. Analogously (but without intention), even extremely complicated functions can be reached by little pieces coming together. It’s not like evolution started with a bacteria and had to select for a human. That would be ridiculous and would never work. Instead what happens is that new forms of life evolve, they change the environment and new possibly beneficial paths open up. But even most beneficial paths are never taken. And lots of paths that lead to functioning organisms aren’t beneficial in their original environment. For example, wolves are (ok, maybe were at this point; I’m not sure how much of a bottleneck various wild wolf populations have been forced through) more genetically diverse than dogs, but dogs show far more phenotypic variation because humans bred dogs to do all sorts of things. Wolves won’t follow where humans point. That’s a new function. Wolves won’t herd sheep. New function. Wolves don’t “point” at prey they hunt with a human. New function. And that’s a only a few thousand years of evolution on an extremely small population. And different dog breeds do different things too.
Evolving amino acids that have a new function isn’t rare either. For example, see this post by Richard Lenski on evolution of new function in lambda phage. https://telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2019/03/06/evolution-goes-viral-and-how-real-science-works/ Lenski has 4 posts responding to Behe’s third book.
There are interesting things about evolving new function. It’s greatly constrained by the past history of an organism. For example, as far as I’m aware there is a vastly larger number of chemicals that various bacteria can “eat” than animals or plants. Animals and plants have much longer generation times, more complicated development etc. And this may interfere with cows say… evolving the ability to digest cellulose on their own. Or at least, that type of thing doesn’t appear to be a path that has happened much in mammals. What happened instead is that cows evolved an organ (the rumen) that holds a variety of bacteria that break down cellulose (and other things).
Continuing on this constraint theme, notice that even though mammals have existed for millions of years, they’ve all still got four limbs. It seems evolution just isn’t very likely to add more limbs. But those limbs get used for different purposes pretty easily.
It’d be one thing if we couldn’t evolve bacteria, flies, etc. in the lab. If we didn’t find all sorts of fossils. If the earth hadn’t been around long enough for some of the major transitions to occur. Millions of generations is two orders of magnitude past our longest lab experiments (Lenski’s long term evolution experiments). And evolution has proceeded for billions of year which for bacteria likely translates into trillions of generations. You can find mutation and selection effects in experiments on the order of 10-100 generations. The overarching mechanism is known even if the exact physical details of every change in every organism are extremely complicated and will be studied until all humans are dead without finishing.
So evolution really is hard in any specific case and super hard for some collections of cases (there are no birds with jet engines or fixed wings), but it’s not always hard. There are too many viable paths. That’s the mistake all of these critiques make. Any particular viable path in unlikely in the same way any particular configuration of air molecules in a room is unlikely. But on a less detailed level, there are so many viable paths that lead to increasing complexity that the expected result is that you’ll see a lot of complexity. In the same way that even though any microstate of a gas is unlikely, if the as is close to an ideal gas you’ll find PV ~ nRT.
This is a wonderful effortpost and I’d like to signal boost it.
Also, super-duper minor quibble, but some marine mammals (I think just dolphins and whales) have only two limbs (just front flippers). They have vestigial hip bones though, showing that they previously had four limbs and lost two. Your overall point that evolution didn’t lead to mammals with *more* limbs stands.
Actually, it’s kind of interesting that there’s no mammals with six legs. It’s probably not very useful so perhaps it’s selected against – what use do the extra legs even give a quadraped? – but extra legs are actually the sort of thing that aren’t *too* unusual to evolve. IIRC*, the Hox genes that control body sections in most animals (conserved between mammals and insects, for example) were duplicated by transcription errors several times over history, leading to the duplication of body sections. For example, duplication of Hox genes can give extra body segments in insects, the least nightmare-inducing example of which is double wings on flies (which normally have a single pair of wings). It can also give extra thorax segments, which might lead to extra legs although I couldn’t find any examples with a quick search. This normally isn’t useful for the insect (in fact it’s usually quite bad for its chances of survival), but something of this sort likely happened earlier in history to duplicate various body segments in all sorts of animals.
*From reasonably good memories of college biology and a quick Google.
Woops. I totally forgot about marine mammals. But yeah, it’s hard for limb number to change in mammals though.
Does the lack of mammals with six limbs have something to do with their size? Or is there no easy place to put them on a body plan that lacks segments? So many arthropods have more than 4 legs so it seems like it’s beneficial sometimes. There are definitely cows that have six legs (although not six useful legs) due to mutations so I agree it’s likely a selective issue that prevents mammals from six legs with arising rather than the rarity of such a mutation.
Gene duplication is pretty interesting, and I’m glad you bring it up. I probably should have mentioned it above as part of the answer to the combinatorial problem. As I understand it, it’s a very important mechanism for evolution since proteins can easily have two functions or one function and another weak side effect and a duplication followed by specialization of each copy is one of the primary routes new proteins are produced by.
Locomotion with six or more legs can be performed in static equilibrium: with three or more legs on the ground at all times you can easily keep the vertical projection of the center of mass on the ground within the convex hull of the contact points, which means that you could stop at any time without falling over and moderate external forces won’t knock you over even if you don’t apply any compensation. This makes it easy for the simple, decentralized brains and mostly rigid bodies of arthropods (and for artificial robots).
Four leg locomotion, unless performed in unusual and inefficient gaits (e.g. moving one leg at time, dragging the feet the ground, resting the body on the ground between steps) requires dynamic equilibrium: each step requires solving the inverse dynamics of a multi-jointed closed kinematic chain (pacing or trot gaits) or an inverted pendulum that can jump off the ground (gallop gait). This requires much more expensive computations, ask any roboticist. Also, quadruped vertebrates have flexible bodies built around their spine (usually extending into a tail), which allows for fine-grained control of the CoM position, unlike the rigid bodies of arthropods.
Thanks for answer. Very interesting! So six legs is actually simpler. I didn’t realize how much adding two more legs would change that.
Losing some accuracy, would it be roughly correct to say three points of contact (not all colinear) means it’s harder to tip over because there’s no single axis a small force will easily rotate you around? Whereas with two points of contact, if you’re pushed perpendicular to the line between the two points of contact you’ll fall over in that direction pretty easily?
One of the points that those in the video make is that the odds of a viable short protein being created are 1/(10^77). The odds of this happening are so extremely low as to be “impossible” with the current timescales given.
Now, perhaps once a viable protein is already formed, the odds of it mutating/changing into another, different protein might be much higher as only (perhaps) a smaller number of changes are necessary. But it does seem to me that evolution has no answer for how any of the amazing complexity of single-celled organisms came about.
I’m deeply skeptical of the abiogenesis explanations offered by current paleobiologists, and I’m sympathetic to the IDers’ instincts, but I think that particular numerical issue is overlooking the crux of the scientists’ argument. And it overlooks it in a way that I think can feel particularly Euler-y, obtuse, and innumerate to the other side. Specifically, as I understand it, the crux of the biologists’ argument against the hugely unlikely numbers is that statistical randomness is not the appropriate measuring tool for a process that has a preferential direction. Let’s say I have three atoms (two one kind, one another), enclosed in a vacuum container. Let’s also say that each is physically capable of combining with each. You could argue that there are four different states of the atoms: all single, one with one and other alone, one with other and one alone, and all three combined into one molecule. Is the chance of getting the three combined into one molecule 1/4? Not if the three atoms are H, H, and O and there is a heat source. The very strong preference will be for H20. Simply counting the atoms and doing the probabilities doesn’t mean anything.
So I think in order for the abiogenesis science to have any case, they must be assuming that it’s “selection all the way down,” that there is an inevitable physical reason (even among non-living molecules) to expect certain configurations of chemistry to preferentially occur. Then you don’t need to get a hundred atoms in the right place purely by chance, and the “chance” argument has no weight.
I am not fully convinced that current science has successfully made their case that this preferential pre-biotic chemical selection is true, or at least not that its mechanisms have been identified as anything more than rank speculation, and certainly have not been replicated or conclusively proven. But if the IDer’s argument is just “random pairing of atoms = impossibly unlikely,” I can see why that argument is perceived as frustratingly irrelevant by the scientific consensus.
It’s worth realizing that upon finding evidence of irreducible complexity in evolution, many religious people may see that as evidence of God’s hand, but many nonreligious people (as well as weird religious people like me) will be thinking about aliens.
@albatross11
I do see God’s hand in the evolutionary process, and my own thinking on the matter of life and creation is fairly idiosyncratic. Aliens raises an interesting point, though, which I think is under-discussed. I think it’s clear that discovering alien life forms would not be inconsistent with Christianity or theism or other religious forms. (See, e.g., fairly widespread postulating of extraterrestrial life in medieval literature; also C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy). It just wouldn’t move the needle much either way. But if life is not eventually found, it seems to me that strikes at the “chemically inevitable preferential processes” part of the current abiogenesis argument, and would seemingly be a blow (non-conclusive, but some weight) against purely materialist abiogenesis solutions, a greater blow the further afield we go without finding it. Personally, I’m hoping to find alien life somewhere, I think it’d make creation even more interesting, but the null result also seems like it would tell us something.
I see at least two distinct ways of viewing this (plus ways in-between). Do you mean (A) God designed physics and physics is amenable to evolution thus I see God’s hand in the rules of the universe or (B) I see God rigging the dice occasionally in order to take things down a certain path.
I don’t put much weight on (A), but it’s perfectly elegant. The universe is comprehensible, evolved apes called humans have a strange urge to occasionally look at creation and often worship a creator, therefore the chance of a creator rises in probability.
For (B), I don’t really see why God would rig chemical probabilities against the emergence of life and then basically cheat at dice. God gets to pick how physics and chemistry work, doesn’t he? Once you concede all of evolution post abiogenesis happened, what’s left to lose?
Why wouldn’t God make a universe where life tends to evolve? That seems a lot more godlike to me (in the all-knowing, all-seeing sense) than a god that has to cheat the odds to make stuff happen.
Aliens would be interesting because they could help answer questions like “How likely is life to evolve a similar way on two different planets? How does this depend on the differences between the planets?” or “If all the aliens have the same biochemistry, is that a sign of panspermia? Was there one first living planet or does life actually start off planet?” or if you get really lucky/unlucky “Is God some alien civilization/individual who we can physically reach a piece of but never comprehend?” Maybe God can access those extra dimensions string theorists are always on about, or we are to God as a physical simulation is to us but he puts a representation of himself into the simulation.
@quanta413
As I said, my own views on the creation debate are a bit idiosyncratic, moderately long to explain, and wouldn’t be of much interest in general. Probably the shortest thing I could say on it is that I don’t consider the matter to be fully susceptible to current human knowledge anyway, so I consider it of limited import. “A mirror darkly,” and all that.
As to your point though, I think there’s plenty of room between A and B for a normal theistic approach. It’s clear enough for anyone that the laws of the universe permit life, so in that sense it’s clearly A. It also seems plausible that life is not inevitable in any one specific place or time, which would leave room for more active divine intervention. And accepting post-abiogenesis evolution does not seem to me to obviate the ability of God to direct its course, since as you’ve mentioned, there are lots of possible pathways for most of these processes. I believe that’s pretty close to the Catholic position on evolution (though I’m not Catholic myself).
@hls2003
Sure. What gets me is that if God fully controls the rules and start of the universe, I just can’t see the need for (B). Everything that happened or will happen is known to him, and as long as you’re not concerned about Satan or the problem of evil activist intervention on earth doesn’t gain anything. But those problems don’t really seem relevant before humans existed which is when almost all evolution occurred.
From the point of view of God (or man really), controlling all the rules and the start of the game is basically indistinguishable from occasionally changing the rules later except that (B) seems like a much less elegant way of viewing things than (A) to me.
Humans can make little evolution worlds on a computer, and control the outcome so to speak (except humans lack the whole all-knowing thing so they usually don’t know what the results will be). I can get different results from an evolutionary process by changing the rules and I can get pretty replicable behavior from a process without choosing all the random numbers myself. I don’t believe in God, but if I’m wrong, I figure God can easily pull off a much better trick with a universe. Metaphorically speaking.
Although from inside the universe I don’t know if there’s any observable difference between (A) and (B). There’s an Orson Scott Card short story about angels coming to earth that explores some of these themes that I like.
@quanta413
I think this is one of those instances where we end up, inadvertently, kind of playing word games. On one level, I agree with you that God could have “wound up” the universe in such a way that the dominoes would fall just right to have uniquely guided evolution in a specific place and time, not requiring a “special touch” right then and there. It’s all a question of viewpoint. From an internal perspective, bound by time and space, it looks like either a crazy coincidence or evidence of divine providence. From the external perspective, it looks inevitable and part of the law of the universe. Since we’re internal, most of the time I assume we’re talking about that perspective. For example, I don’t really understand the people who try to use “natural explanations” for things like God parting the sea (“well, there could have been an earthquake downstream, which caused a landslide, which…”). I mean, I guess you can do that, but it simply bumps the question up one more layer, isn’t it miraculous that the natural event happened right on cue to help the Israelites at their exact moment of need when they called upon God. Most religions, including Judeo-Christian Scriptures, talk about it from a human perspective of God’s intervention at that moment, and even if it was set up from the beginning of time, it’s not really wrong to view it from either direction.
From another perspective, I think that even the semantic debate is rather time-bound, because there’s both everything and nothing “inevitable” about God acting in creation. If everything is contained in the mind of God, and he is omnipresent, then there’s no distinction between past, present, and future to him, causality is itself contingent on his own nature, and asking whether something was pre-programmed or divine intervention is meaningless because all of time and space is active divine intervention. I agree, more or less, with your ending comment, which is that this is one of the things we are simply not well-placed to understand or distinguish given our natures – A can look like B from inside the story. “There seems no plan because it is all plan; there seems no center because it is all center.” –Perelandra
This is also part of why I generally don’t view the creationism controversy as particularly salient, and have no problem using evolution as a working model. Do human things, use a human model.
The numbers are just an ass-pull though based upon the assumption that there is precisely one way to get life from an amino acid sequence and that it has to over 100 amino acids. All the same reasoning I said above about there being many viable paths to life and it being a stepwise process still applies as to why the argument is wrong. Start with shorter sequences and fewer amino acids and figure out a way to count the number of possibilities that would lead to success and that would be a little better. Although that would probably be the wrong chemistry for the start of life.
Let’s get nitty-gritty. Life isn’t thought to necessarily have started with proteins. Making an argument about amino acids that is supposedly an attack on whatever the current theory is for biogenesis just shows deep ignorance. Considering that either RNA or RNA plus peptides are the most plausible candidates.
People have been working on the start of life for a long time. Slowly though because it’s honestly not super important and the original physical evidence is long gone. Here’s a recent paper I pulled at random about self-replication of chemical reactions. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/278119v2.full Notice the reference to multiple self replicating cycles in that occur in biological systems besides ones involving DNA. Self-replicating systems aren’t a weird special case that only occurs for one set of chemical reactions. They are a whole class of phenomenon.
The idea that chemical self replication is somehow impossible (despite being observed) is a lot like the idea that proteins couldn’t possibly fold into their three dimensional configuration (which they do). It’s based upon an either accidental or intentional misunderstanding of how to calculate the relative probabilities. Not all possibilities are equally likely and assuming that is just empirically wrong. Here’s a laymen level post on why the assumption that amino acids have to be super long and all have to had exist at once is junk from a biochemistry point of view https://www.randombio.com/evolution5.html . No one claims to know the probabilities involved in abiogenesis. If the goal is to attack abiogenesis, you don’t attack the underlying chemistry of evolution long after that period passed.
No, the problem is that you have to give the correct weights to each possibility to calculate the right answer. Statistics is fine, but you have to use the correct probabilities. So when someone uses the principle of indifference to assign probabilities in a case where that is known to be wrong, they look either ignorant or dishonest.
Self-replicating chemical systems are not unknown, and there are multiple examples of such so it’s not surprising that some set of them could be biogenic. And it’s also not surprising we don’t know exactly which set since it happened billions of years ago, and basically no set of small molecules is going to survive that long on a living planet. Probably not even a dead planet. Maybe in outer space dust or something although even then it seems extremely unlikely.
I think we are in agreement on this. That is more or less what I was intending to convey, that you can’t just assign all configurations an equal probability based on combinatorial multiplication of atoms-in-place. That particular ID argument doesn’t mean what they think it does and thus kind of looks, as you say, either “stupid or dishonest.”
I believe the numbers are simply the mathematical probability for any 100+ amino acid length protein from being assembled correctly. A good comparison would be the idea that enough monkeys banging on typewriters could produce the works of Shakespeare.
It seems your argument is basically that there other types of proteins that use to exist, but no longer exist. Because my understanding is that the probability given is for what we know is currently true of all life today. Basically, there are no “shorter” proteins than 100+ amino acids.
As far as probabilities, I agree that the above assumption is that all of them are equally probable. However, all of these arguments basically boil down to faith-based assumptions, not evidence based ones. There “could” have been shorter proteins in the past that led to life and they all disappeared and there “could” be a bias towards “life” as far as protein construction goes. But there isn’t any evidence for either of these assertions.
No, it’s not a purely speculative could. Some things I said are true right now, and other things have had significant work evidence for them. It’s not faith when you don’t claim to know which reactions are first. Some people have entertained ideas of panspermia followed by normal evolution which although very farfetched is not obviously wrong but that’s not what Gelenter is arguing for. My answers were already very long so I’m not going to exhaustively spell out the evidence for every detail. I can’t even know 1% of the details of such a vast literature. I already linked to a paper with references to multiple examples of self replicating systems and explained that life probably starts with RNA (because it can do both catalysis and serve as information storage).
On the first point, there are functional 3 amino-acid peptides right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutathione. I didn’t forget a 0. There are functional 20 amino-acid proteins (they have secondary structure like an alpha helix) https://www.rcsb.org/structure/1L2Y . So when someone just claims “you can’t have a functional protein of less than ~100 amino acids” that’s just ignorance. The biochemistry post I linked also already mentioned that you can see binding specificity in reactions involving small number of peptides so it’s not like these are weird exceptions. Early life could be very slow to replicate and very error prone because there’s no other life to compete with it.
On the second point, again it’s RNA that’s the most likely candidate for the first replicators. You have to get this detail right. If someone doesn’t get that detail right, then all the math that follows will be junk. The exact set of reactions isn’t currently known and probably never will be known since the original stuff is all gone, but progress on each step of how abiogenesis can occur is occurring. There’s nice overview of some of what’s been figured out in the last couple decades here https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128251-300-first-life-the-search-for-the-first-replicator/.
Also early life wouldn’t be so much alive by modern standards as poorly self-replicating, but what self-replicating molecules do is increase in number. We know of lots of self-replicating reactions so the implausibility that some exist using RNA or some similar molecule is not very high. One you have self-replicating reactions with mutation, evolution is occurring. And mutation is a byproduct of chemistry so it’s harder not to have it than to have it.
But this is far afield from the original point. Abiogenesis from RNA forming in clay or little pools or whatever is not really a solidified part of modern evolutionary theory. So if Gelenter fixed all the horribly broken details of his argument and ran perfect chemistry simulations showing that RNA can’t possibly self-replicate that would be interesting in that another hypothesis would take the number one spot but it still would make no difference to all the things about evolution people have known about since the 19th century or almost any of the modern evolutionary synthesis. All the clades of current life would be unaffected; we’d still be studying speciation in the fossil record, in the wild, and in the lab; etc. etc. etc.
Basically, there are no “shorter” proteins than 100+ amino acids.
Proteins of less than 50 aminio acids are important
It sounds like you’re saying evolution still explains everything from bacteria to humans. I strongly agree, and perhaps Gelernter does as well(?). But it could still be the case that something else better explains the segment from random amino acids to bacteria. Or, to factor in that New Scientist article you linked, the segment from amino acids to one of the larger forms of RNA.
I don’t know what that something else would be. You hinted at “another hypothesis”, but I simply don’t know the research terrain there – how many hypotheses there are, which ones look the most plausible, etc. And that link is eight years old, so I’m sure there’s been a lot done since. The math says it’s probably not aliens, let alone a Watchmaker (either would just raise the same questions anyway, earlier in time). So now I’m wondering if there was some sort of RNA ladder, and if so, what other forms of RNA or other amino structures could have come about.
I agree. Although our understanding of the physical side of things like developmental processes, pattern formation, and such means our understanding of large evolutionary transitions is relatively weak on a lot of interesting details.
From reading Gelenter, I’m pretty sure he disagrees. He seems to think the Cambrian explosion is impossible to explain and that’s well past the transition to multicellular life.
There’s a details side of things where some things are known like some possible mechanisms by which membranes might form that start bundling reactions together. There’s some stuff known here. But the details of what sort of chemistry formed life may in some sense be contingent on history.
And then there’s a branch that to me really gets at what’s interesting here which is a theory of self-replicating chemical reactions. The statistical mechanics and thermodynamics of these processes, their time evolution, etc. etc. I know close to nothing about that. It’s not totally unstudied, but I imagine deep knowledge of that would do a lot more than solidify our theory of the emergence of life. It’d probably help us understand how to build nanomachines, more sustainable chemical manufacturing process, etc. etc.
Unfortunately, I’m largely out of my depth in biochemistry. Never liked chemistry much. From wikipedia my impression is most alternative chemical candidates are other types of nucleic acids. Wikipedia’s got a link to an article about some chemical precursors that have some of the necessary properties.
Ditto Zeno: thanks for this post.
How many generations ought a bacteria take to evolve, according to Lenski? Or anyone else? Is there a way to derive this number from something other than “well, that how long it seemed to take during the Precambrian”? What are the likely next lifeforms beyond bacteria?
This seems to be one of the key questions for Gelernter et al. to ask. I.e., what is the theoretical minimum number of generations for bacteria to evolve into something else.
Meanwhile, I can respect the challenge to abiogenesis, as hls2003 says. AIUI, we haven’t quite figured this out. I’m not inclined to rule absence of evidence as evidence of absence, but nevertheless, I’d really like to know how far this study has gotten.
Evolved how much? You can get bacteria able to digest new substrates in ~ ten thousand generations (E. coli that can digest citrate in Lenski’s case). Orders of magnitude fast if you increase the selection pressure for being able to eat citrate (can’t remember citation right now). Lenski has evolved E. coli for ~60,000 (6 x 10^4) generations but that’s still ~eight orders of magnitude short of the rough number of generations we know occurred (~10^12) and the population size is also many orders of magnitude smaller than the entire earth population. He’s evolving populations of a size around 10^8 or 10^9 (going off memory at the moment). Even a single human has a few orders of magnitude more bacteria than that and a worldwide population is probably more like 8 orders of magnitude larger again. So his experiments although interesting, long, and impressive, are still ~8 orders of magnitude short in two different dimensions compared to what you’d need to fully compare to how bacteria evolved in the wild.
You’re going to have to make significant extrapolations compared to pure lab experiment is what I’m saying. Unless humans figure out immortality. But you can look at closely related bacteria in the wild. Like E. coli and Salmonella. That gives you some idea of how fast an organism diverges into two species.
You can also look at organisms that have both single and multicellular forms to get some idea of how that transition may occur. Like slime molds. That’s a eukaryote though. I know very little about the bacteria, archae, eukaryote split which happened in the precambrian. Really, it’s most speculation although we can estimate relatively how related those three groupings are. They appear to have diverged from each other similar amount for all three pairings.
Some think the formation of the cell membrane and split of eukaryotes off is related to transposons. There is evidence for this, but it’s a relatively new branch of study. Transposons are interesting bits of DNA that encode a protein to copy of themselves and insert themselves elsewhere. They act kind of like a genetic parasite but they also can end up as useful parts of the genome.
Abiogenesis is not my field and is indeed not solved, but here’s a news article about some of the work in the field for the past decade or two https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128251-300-first-life-the-search-for-the-first-replicator/. See my other replies above for maybe a couple other details on that (although it’s mostly from that article anyways, so just read that if you can).
What argument do you think opened your eyes a bit. It seems Darwinists think it is the same old argument that species couldn’t have evolved by chance because the to many nucleotides needed to change at once. And ignores the possibilities of intermediate forms.
https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2019/07/A-dramatic-new-mathematical-challenge.html#more
I think the issue is that when you dig down into the basic building blocks of life, things don’t get any less complicated. So you still need thousands of changes at once to make any kind of “major” change. I think its important that none of them dispute that evolution is true, but they dispute that evolution can every result in large changes, such as going from one species to another.
So, uh, Kashmir: is the change in its status just symbolic posturing or does it change the strategic balance in the region?
It’s amazing how little play a potential war between two nuclear powers gets in the media.
Understanding based on magazines/news: In Kashmir itself the regional government is being reordered, with provinces being consolidated and ruled directly from Dehli. Having an increased military presence and disruption at the local level from the reordering (specifically, a reordering which removes local autonomy) might (will likely) result in incidents between the majority Muslim residents and Indian state police/soldiers. The Kashmiris are sympathetic to Pakistan, which would be domestically pressured to intervene in some way to protect them. Both states have a history of military incursions into parts of Kashmir controlled by the other, so anything that increases the likelihood of that “changes” the balance in the sense that the situation is more unstable, but I couldn’t say in whose, if anyone’s, favor.
I don’t think it’s symbolic. The change is fundamentally about giving the Indian government the capability to exert more power in Kashmir than previously. It’s unlikely this is an accident.
One possible explanation is that India is somehow gearing up for a possible renewal of violence as Afghanistan winds down and Pakistan has more resources to shift into Kashmir. Possibly only attempting to establish a credible deterrent, though US withdrawal from Afghanistan will weaken Pakistan as well as it probably means the end or curtailment of US cash and materiel and the removal of potential US “tripwire” forces.
Or, India’s response may not be completely military. Apparently the loss of autonomy includes lifting restrictions on purchasing land etc in Kashmir, and there’s some concern that India will attempt a Tibet-style population transfer to demographically marginalized Muslim Kashmiris, possibly under the guise of restoring displaced Hindus. That would probably be difficult to hide, though.
Thanks for the explanations.
Have you ever read a book that more strongly convinced you that the author’s thesis was wrong than before you read it? It’s not just that it was unconvincing, it’s that it was anti-convincing. What was it?
I once read a book called “Work” that was put out by some sort of anarcho-socialist syndicate collective or whatever.
I was expecting some sort of nuanced argument for anarcho-socialism. But it was really just a screed telling people that they should steal from their employers more.
I don’t know that it convinced me that anarcho-socialism was wrong, but it certainly convinced me that those particular anarcho-socialists were not serious people…
I read a book about 20 years ago, of which I can’t remember the title or the author. So I’m off to a great start. It was a call for a radical ecological movement, which I was very sympathetic to at the time (and still am, more or less). The author was a founder of some relatively important environmental organization (not Greenpeace) or perhaps a journal/magazine. I believe that in one of its early chapters, he discussed a joke from Woody Allen, something along the lines of “I don’t want to swim in the sea or a lake – things live in there.” The argument was that this joke reveals a fundamentally pathological and ultimately morally incorrect attitude. I agree with that, pretty much.
It ended with a chapter that came out of nowhere, saying that the critical first step was acknowledging the truth of Lamarckian evolution, because evolution by natural selection could not allow for a sane approach to nature. This was such a terrible take that I immediately began to trust the rest of the book less, which until then had been preaching to the choir.
Not a book, but this article, in my opinion, disproves its own thesis. Specifically, the data has to be aggressively twisted and manipulated to show what the obvious interpretation does not, in a way that I do not find honest.
For one, guns per person or total number of guns makes the US more of an outlier, due to population and a small number of people with many guns. Gun ownership rate (i.e. people with at least one gun) is much closer to other countries than one might expect, and since most shootings (even mass shootings) involve only 1 gun per attacker, it’s more informative.
Second, the claim that “More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis.” This claim is a blatant lie. Their first 2 links clearly say “gun deaths” (so including suicide), and the meta-analysis below also says “deaths.” The other 2 links are harder to evaluate easily, but the ncbi study doesn’t establish causality, and the book most likely doesn’t either.
Third, the US/Yemen being the only outliers on either metric mean that you don’t really have that many data points, and the data are probably not distributed in a way where linear regression is a valid approach.
Fourth, excluding countries with less than 10 million people makes some sense, but hides the real important fact: That mass shootings are really really really rare, even in the US. Excluding, say, Norway, means excluding a data point which you would need decades and decades of information to precisely measure, but if you look over the last 20 years (more than double the time period since Anders Breivik’s attack), then Breivik alone means that Norway is near the top of the chart (a population of 5.2 million gets you almost 19 shooters per 100 million people). It also means you exclude Switzerland and Finland, discussed below.
Then we get to this passage:
What absolutely unhinged nonsense. This last sentence is one of the most obvious examples of “selective interpretation of data” I’ve ever seen. The “per person” figures are *obviously* the correct ones to use. The fact that the United States has more people in a single country doesn’t mean that “mass shootings” are more routine. Finland has a population of 5.5 million, and Switzerland 8.4 million. States with similar populations would be Virginia and Minnesota. What happens if you compare those states with those countries? Do either of them have enough mass shootings for them to be considered “routine”? Of course not. I have no reason to care about the raw number of mass shootings in an arbitrary boundary rather than my probability of victimization.
It doesn’t sound like it really changed your mind about anything in any way. You just thought it was a bad article. I’m not really looking for examples where people were hostile to an argument, read an article/book and were still hostile to it. I’m more looking for things were you were at least neutral to some idea but by the end of the book/article, you came away more convinced the author was wrong.
A simple tally of mass shootings is obviously biased against large countries but with sample sizes so small, adjusting for population is just biased against small ones. This video makes the same point in reference to the Olympic games. When we ask who “won” the Olympics, we usually refer to who has the most medals, which of course favors big countries. But if we adjust by population, then it gives a ridiculous advantage to small countries. If Grenada wins one medal, the US could win literally every other medal but it would still mean Grenada “won”. Similarly, it doesn’t really matter how many mass shootings the US has by this ranking. Norway had that one incident in 2011, so it will rank as the “worst country of mass shootings per capita” for the foreseeable future. If you do a more apples-to-apples comparison of US vs the EU, the US is higher.
Then call it a poisson distribution and find the error bars.
Yes, like Enkidum I can’t remember the author or book title, and I often try to find it out so maybe this can help me.
Its plot was essentially this: A man is somehow transported into the future (perhaps he was frozen?), and is led by a guide in this amazing new world. This world is, essentially, communistic but the central organizing factor around the community is an annuity paid to all people. This annuity is described as the fruits of labors past, wherein machines are now so productive and we essentially redistribute its earnings to all in this annuity.
Now, no book or essay has ever presented a UBI in a more childish fashion.
This happened in Heinlein’s “For Us, The Living”, though that may not be the specific book you’re thinking of. It was the first novel he wrote, and the last one published (posthumously). For good reason.
The Wiki seems to reflect the disjointed confusing system that I remember.
That particular factor was present in _Beyond This Horizon_ as well, though not as prominently (nor introduced as clumsily).
Currently reading Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, and it’s having that effect. The distinction between “constrained” and “unconstrained” visions does seem to exist, but it does not separate conservative and progressive thought as he thinks it does, and his applications of the distinction are either really stretching things or just downright incoherent (e.g., somehow the “unconstrained” vision leads to judges letting criminals off on technicalities). And really, the only place that the constrained vision is well-articulated is in economics, as there is a mechanism that explains why markets / price systems distribute information better than top-down command economies. In all other areas, there is no proposed mechanism why cultural practices that have survived have survived because they are beneficial (in some sense), just the assertion that they have.
I thought the model was useful, but Sowell was missing all the places it applied to the conservative movement. The neocons were working within the unconstrained vision when they proposed remaking Middle-Eastern countries into liberal democracies via invasion and nation-building.
A number of books and other media have this effect on me. One, The Church of Rome at the Bar of History, was so anti-convincing I had to put it down to preserve objectivity on the broader question.
When I was a kid I thought Christianity was obviously and undeniably correct. So I thought it was very important that I read the instructions for the universe God had given us. So when I was something like 11 I read the Bible cover to cover.
I was an atheist by the time I finished a few months later (I don’t think this kind of thing is that uncommon).
This article. I suppose there’s a decent chance that guy is reading this comment section, so, sorry to put you on blast like this lol.
He really had me going at first, because I do think that tolerance of occasional negative events is an important skill.
Honestly, I had this response to “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”.
I was inclined to view J Peterson favorably, based on Scott’s review of this book, and also by the fact that the 12 Rules made reasonable sense by themselves.
However, when I checked the book out from the library, I found most of the chapters I read to be roundabout elaborations on a simple concept, with some being outright incoherent.
For instance, the chapter for rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you. As stated in one sentence, this seems very correct and simple. However, reading several pages about his experiences growing up in a small town, and which friends ended up doing OK in life….Provided no additional information, and just left me shaking my head about the specific antidotes (and to be clear, I agree with the one sentence rule as stated).
I ultimately put the book down, and then returned it to the library. I wanted to be excited about about this book and it’s concepts, but after reading it, my position was downgraded to: “Meh”.
That’s kind of the self-help formula since Dale Carnegie: A few concepts which aren’t really actionable on their own, and elaboration through personal anecdotes (at least in Carnegie’s case, mostly chosen to make him look important)
Nybbler: I think what your saying in entirely true.
However, I would say that I’ve read two Dale Carnegie books, and I generally felt that the personal anecdotes he shared reinforced the points he made in the chapter descriptions.
Maybe this just means I just like the Carnegie style better than the Peterson style, or that I went in with different expectations.
On the other hand, I would really encourage any “buckos” who have had success in cleaning their room to read How to Make Friends and Influence People. You might not like it, but if you do, it may help you continue on the self improvement path.
I’m pretty sure that Peterson talks a lot about how his life wasn’t going in the direction he wanted into graduate school, and the only way he did got to where he wanted was by quitting his drinking and losing a lot of his friends.
The bible. Reading the bible is what originally made me an atheist. I have more solid grounds for it now, but the bible is what killed my faith.
I am curious what about it did that. My experience was the opposite.
Firstly, the god of the bible is a moral monster – Taken seriously, the bible reads like the accounts written down by people with a bad case of Stockholm syndrome from living under the reign of a demon lord. Basically, the entire text is a pretty strong argument for the Gnostic Heresy.
Secondly, the world it depicted is simply not the world in which we live. Preachers speak of the mysteries of god, and of the need to have faith in absence of concrete proof, but in addition to being Evil, the God of the bible is the very opposite of shy.
Concrete, overt, massive acts of divine interventions are constant in the text, and rather noticeably absent from the world. Which is why I became an atheist, rather than a Gnostic. You can not ask me to have faith in the absence of proof, and also ask me to direct that faith at a deity who is claimed to be perfectly happy to miracle vine into being for a party. That is just logically inconsistent.
Thanks for your perspective.
I disagree with it, especially calling God a moral monster, but I am always interested in hearing what other people think about it.
@EchoChaos
“Monster” is a pretty strong and emotionally loaded word, but – if I may ask – how would you reflect upon characterizing God as a “superweapon”, especially in Moses’ time? The covenant appears to be pretty much “you people worship me and only me and I shall overcome any problem that stands in your way”.
It might be hip to say that in those particular chapters God’s da Bomb, but it seems a bit too literal if I think about it.
@EchoChaos:
You really don’t understand the perspective of viewing the God of the Old Testament as, a narcissistic, amoral psychopath?
I’m not going to argue for it, I’m asking you whether you can see how other people look at it given the overall picture of God in the OT?
@HeelBearCub
EC didn’t say that he found the perspective incomprehensible, only that he disagreed.
@Faza (TCM)
God’s intervention waxes and wanes. Under Moses, it was pretty substantial, but that’s noted as exceptional even in Old Testament times. There are plenty of long periods of history where no visible intervention occurs. Even for famous Biblical figures like David, much of the intervention could be written off as natural events.
@HeelBearCub
I understand the perspective. I just disagree.
It implies a moral code that exists outside of God. As a theist, I’m not sure how you can claim that. Deontology is pretty required if you have a Supreme Being.
Atheists are essentially saying “my personal moral code is violated by God”, which I find relatively uninteresting.
@J Mann:
He strongly implied that he didn’t understand how reading the Bible could cause one to become atheist when he said:
@Echo Chaos:
Why did it pique your curiosity that someone would read the Bible and not be impressed by the God contained therein?
@HeelBearCub
I’m not EchoChaos, but SSC is a good place for hearing oddball* approaches, so it’s one of the better places to probe others’ beliefs.
*sorry, Thomas
@HeelBearCub
Because he was, according to his comment, he was a theist when he read it.
@ Echo Chaos:
Yes. Also, focus bias: the Bible is about God’s relationship with mankind, so of course it’s going to focus on miracles as opposed to ordinary, non-miraculous stuff, and of course a naïve reading of the Bible is going to give the impression of constant acts of divine intervention. Plenty of people claim to experience miracles even in the modern world, and if you wrote a book recounting these claims, it would probably give a similar impression of constant divine intervention. Or, to use a secular analogy, if I wrote a book about notorious murderers, somebody reading it might well get the impression that people are constantly being murdered left, right and centre; the fact that this isn’t the case wouldn’t prove that my book was wrong, just that I chose to focus on a particular kind of event.
@EchoChaos:
This. Even Nietzsche talked somewhere about reading “silly English people like George Eliot who have started rejecting Christianity because the Bible violates the moral code the Church implanted in them. They’re not serious enough to realize that rejecting the metaphysics loses them any logical claim to the ethics.”
@EchoChaos:
I take it you have almost no experience with the broader ex-theist community? This is very far from an uncommon story.
@HeelBearCub
You take it correctly, and I know it’s a large community and I haven’t talked to a necessarily representative sample. But if this is a common occurrence, it seems non-intuitive to me and I haven’t encountered it.
Most of the atheists and ex-theists I’ve talked with had at best a surface level understanding of the Bible and theology where I don’t believe that any serious reading of the Bible outside the snappy bits atheists love to quote has occurred.
This is a pretty bad misquote, or a modeling failure anyway. What the atheists are usually saying is “the moral code shared by practically everybody is violated by God”, which I think is pretty interesting if true. Now if it could be proven (rather than merely asserted) that without God there can be no morality, that might be a nice little gotcha for the atheist but it doesn’t appear to help the theist much: if the rules come from God, doesn’t that just make it worse that he doesn’t seem to be following them?
A more challenging question for the OP might be: the morality of God is a separate question from the existence of God. How did changing your belief about the first cause you to change your belief about the second?
Is this actually true, or just practically everybody in their bubble?
While to be sure shallow atheists outnumber the sophisticated philosophers, knowledge of the bible seems to be yet more uncommon among self-proclaimed Christians than among atheists, and not by a small margin. Either your local environment is providing you with unusually low quality atheists, or, possibly, you might be underestimating how much they know of the Bible (perhaps on the basis of falsely assuming that if they knew it better they wouldn’t disagree with you so much).
Who’s this “practically everybody” you refer to? If you mean modern Westerners, then this runs into the problem raised by Nietzsche, which Le Maistre Chat referred to. If you mean everybody as in the whole of humanity, then I don’t think such a view can really be squared with a glance at the pre-Christian pagan world — a world in which the Romans regularly forced people to murder one another for fun, the Spartans had an annual festival where they went around murdering their own slaves, poverty was seen as an occasion for contempt rather than pity, any Roman who tried to help the poor was liable to be accused of aiming at kingship and lynched by a mob of senators, and committing genocide against enemy cities was an accepted part of warfare. I love the ancient world, but seriously, if I got teleported back to Republican Rome or Classical Greece, by first move would be to try and stow away on a boat bound for Judaea.
@Echo Chaos:
Then I am going to go back to my original question, what part of you doesn’t find it intuitive to recoil from worshiping a narcissistic, amoral psychopath?
I understand you don’t come to that conclusion, but if someone does come to that conclusion, how is it not intuitive that they very well may lose their faith?
This summarizes most atheists, agnostics, theists, deists, spiritual but not religious, … pretty much everyone. This isn’t really saying anything at all.
If you wanted to understand the perspective of those steeped in knowledge of the Bible but lost their faith, you could read one of Bert Ehrman’s books or listen to Matt Dillahunty’s deconversion story.
Obvious counterpoint: atheists who are interested enough in religion to get into scriptural arguments aren’t going to be representative of the broader atheist population and are going to be overrepresented amongst the atheists whom you notice, so “It seems that atheists know more about the Bible” is likely to be unreliable.
Mr. X: Beware the automatic inference from “this happened a lot” to “everyone approved of it”: the difference may be harder to see in the past than in the present (“I wouldn’t want to go back to the 21st century, when mass shootings were so popular”), but it’s still important.
@Protagoras
That certainly depends on the self-proclaimed Christian, of course. But the average Christian is involved with one to many actual Bible studies, which the atheist certainly isn’t.
https://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey/
Shows that while they know less about OTHER religions, white American Protestants and Mormons are by far the most knowledgeable about Christianity, including the bible.
@HeelBearCub
I am curious how you get that I don’t. I said that I disagreed that the Bible represented a narcissistic, amoral psychopath. I am surprised that a theist, who presumably takes their moral code from Biblical teachings, would find the actions of the Bible indicate that God is one, since that would require a non-God moral code.
@EchoChaos, the survey you cite says Mormons and white evangelicals outscore atheists and agnostics when it comes to knowledge of Christianity; atheists and agnostics outscore all other groups of Christians. Thus, unless your definition of Christian excludes Catholics or something, the study does not in fact say that the “average Christian” knows more about Christianity than atheists and agnostics do. I also have my doubts about lumping atheists and agnostics together; I expect the lazy agnostics are dragging the average down.
I’m well-acquainted with that survey, and frankly I don’t think it’s a very good measure.
The general rule is that self-identified atheists are better educated than the general population, mostly because the less educated select “none” for religion instead of calling themselves that. You can pull the atheist numbers way down depending on the definition you want to use; Nones are generally worse educated than the general population.
@Protagoras
What Jaskologist said. I am including all the irreligious, who score worse than all Christians but Hispanic Catholics. Avowed “atheist/agnostic” tend to be better educated overall, so it is actually even more a strike against them that they are also better educated than average Evangelicals, which includes many more below average people.
Atheist vs. “None”: I don’t know when y’all are pulling numbers from, but “atheist” is both the better-educated endonym and the lower-status one (as the IdPol Left becomes more powerful). Creationist-bashing is out of date, and the same beliefs that made the likes of Dawkins bash Christianity makes him bash Islam.
More from the same link (italics in original represented by removing italics in quote):
Sorry, this source just doesn’t say what you claim it does.
Man, those Ashkenazi excel at everything intellectual, even other religions! 😛
This is circular logic.
The inference isn’t from “this happened a lot” but from “this happened a lot, and everybody just took it for granted as a normal thing to happen”. E.g., there were no moves to abolish gladiatorial games until the Empire became Christian; Sparta’s annual orgy of Helot-killing didn’t stop the country being looked up to as a model of orderly governance; etc.
It’s not circular, it just includes an assumption that’s probably mistaken — that Christians are likely to get their moral code from the Bible. If you get your morals from the Bible, it is in fact surprising that you’d find God’s actions in it to be immoral; but while most of the Christians I’ve met privilege the Bible in various ways, they get most of their moral code the same way the rest of us do, by inference from the society they live in.
Only because one of those morals is to trust and obey God.
But he does plenty that you aren’t to do. Smiting people on his own say-so, or collective punishment for example.
Save for the last few decades, that society has been taking a large part of it’s moral instruction from the Bible for about 1500 years, though. You’d expect a fair amount of convergence in that time.
Is there a Biblical prohibition on collective punishment? I’ve only read it cover-to-cover once, but I don’t remember that bit if so.
In its historical context, that’d be odd and rather progressive.
You could read the parable of the weeds and the wheat that way, but it would be a stretch.
Hmm, good for you for asking. I’m thinking for example of:
Where we see that you aren’t to punish without multiple witnesses attesting to guilt, and punishments are to fit the crime. (eye for an eye is presented elsewhere as a more general legal principle).
Of course, in the next chapter they are told to kill everyone one cities that resist their take over. I think this argues for my point in that it is God’s prerogative to judge collectively and the Israelites are carrying out his judgement; they aren’t to do such things of their own accords.
But maybe it’s a “different rules for treating in-group vs out-group” situation.
What I meant by circular logic is that the true believer 1) reads the Bible (and listens to their pastor and faith community, etc.) to form their moral code, then 2) they encounter something in the Bible that they realize does not with the moral code they have already learned from the Bible, but 3) refer back to rule 1, so clearly they can’t be finding any actual moral problems in the Bible.
The way this typically turns into a crisis of faith is that you start (as most Christians do) by forming your moral code based on the big teachings of the New Testament. Because the God of the Old Testament is quite a bit different.
Somewhat related to this. My good Christian schoolteacher said something like “Read the Gospels, if you read nothing else, just read the Gospels – and you’ll learn all about Gods love.”
But of course the school’s message was a flaccid protestantism that felt God was never better expressed than in cozy middle class homes in North Idaho in the 90s. I read the gospels and, barring anything about miracles and whatnot, found a Christ who never laughed, never smiled, and didn’t talk about love hardly as much as I expected. What he talked about was the Kingdom of God, and how it was coming, like, tomorrow. He was urgent, things are happening guys get with it, repent, what are you doing?
On the one hand it helped me understand the awful awful Christian Redoubt people who moved in next door and the subsequent shift in neighborhood makeup from Libertarian to Evangelical, and got me studying early Church history, but it did not really teach me about God’s love, only his tardiness.
Not a book per se, but Mencius Moldbug’s Open Letter to an Open-Minded Progressive. In fairness to Moldbug, this is because I found some of his insights valuable, but they happened to cut both ways.
Been a while since I read it, so this may not match his terminology, but basically be convinced me that there’s a meaningful category “Enlightenment Progressive” defined by a goal of striving for an ethical society–am aspiration to do better than Moldbug’s preferred philosophy of “Uti Possidetis”, which roughly cashes out as ‘might makes right’.
The Open Letter convinced me to examine that goal instead of taking it for granted. And upon examination, I found that I do believe in it, am proud to pursue it, and have something important in common with others who share it however much we differ on the details.
Wait, I have a much better answer than the one I just said. Marx’s Capital.
Okay, it was just one section. But I was scanning for a crux of disagreement, and found my way to the part on surplus value–I figured that his position would fall apart if capitalist profits were earned, and my own (strongly libertarian at the time) position would fall apart of they were unearned.
What I encountered was an argument that put forth some questionable axioms about use-values and exchange-values and used them to carry out a proof that could apply equally well to long-distance trade as to industrial capitalism. So I concluded that one of Marxism’s core premises was based on a dumb mistake, and I could be justified in dismissing the whole philosophy.
(I no longer believe they all of Marxism falls without that specific argument, but I do still think that argument is bad)
I read an anti-<specific religion> book which had that effect. The author based it on various weird claims about what various leaders of the church had said over time which contradicted the current teachings, didn’t match up with other source materials, etc…
I looked up the footnotes for the claims in the speeches and documents the author cited and found they were all either obviously taken out of context, or simply didn’t exist where he said they did.
So I figured if that was the best someone devoted to attacking the religion could do, flat out lie about it at book length, then the opposite of the author’s thesis was more likely true.
*(Deliberately not mentioning the specific religion in order to avoid an off-topic discussion.)
Scotts post of why consequentialism was superior to deontology convinced me that deontology was a far better ethics system. Before that, I did not give the subject much thought
I read a book on the Alger Hiss case written by a high level British legal authority, I think the equivalent of the U.S. Attorney General or something similar—I believe “Earl” was either his rank or part of the title of his office. It argued that Hiss was innocent. The central thesis was that the evidence against him looked pretty strong, but someone that respectable couldn’t have been a traitor.
I concluded that if that was the best argument someone defending Hiss could make, Hiss was probably guilty. Also that I now better understood Kim Philby’s success.
What are some possible non-caloric food fillers and why aren’t they more prevalent?
What I mean by food fillers are things that are added to food and can replace some of its content but generally minimally affects the flavor.
The most typical non-caloric example is water.
Most other examples tend to be some kind of carbohydrate.
There’s some made of low-quality meat/bone for patties and chicken tenders.
Sausages can have those or carbohydrate types like cereal binders.
Pills often use sugar or starch for its bulk material. Similar for candy.
I’d argue that a lot of non-flavorful bread (ie. hot dog buns) is also mostly acting as a filler and edible plate.
Yet the only solid non-caloric food filler I know of is cellulose – often described as wood pulp and rather negatively.
Substituting lettuce for buns also kinda fits. Non/low-caloric sweeteners would count if those weren’t either super sweet and themselves need a filler, or be rather expensive.
But given the obesity concerns, more focus to low-carbohydrate diets, and calorie counting in general, shouldn’t using non-caloric fillers be a rather popular thing?
The main issue I see is it being “unnatural” and may cause digestive issues (it may also help, ie. fiber). There’s also some concerns about it being low-status for not being “real” food, but that’s not an issue if it’s purposefully being done for diet concerns.
I feel that some customers desire to lower calories should be more than enough to overcome those downsides.
I belive the trick is, rather than add non-caloric filler, to never remove it in the first place.
i.e. wholemeal bread, brown rice etc.
What about foods that aren’t great in large quantities?
Ie. Meat, candy
Also, though I’m not sure how it would affect people’s appetite, what about people that just eat too much in general?
Jerusalem Artichokes are near zero calorie and taste good (ie better than potatoes as a substitute in most situations, and I like potatoes).
But they give bad gas to a large minority of people who try them.
There are Japanese zero calorie noodles called shirataki, which are made with some kind of noodle that expands in water, so they are almost basically water. They taste pretty neutral and absorve lots of flavor.
It’s pretty standard diet advice to eat lots of vegetables at every meal. Obviously vegetables have *some* calories, but they also do the job you’re thinking of. Eat lots of vegetables, beans, whole grains and other high-fiber food and you can get this result without waiting for someone to invent a new substance.
Given the spectacular failure rate of almost every manufactured-food intervention for health and weight-loss, it seems much more logical to use the “fillers” we’re already adapted to and from which we obtain actual physiological benefit (i.e., fiber in all its subtypes).
It’s likely that Paleolithic humans ate 50%-100% as many grams of fiber as they did grams of digestible carbohydrate, with obviously huge effects on satiety, gut bacterial ecosystem health, and perhaps even cognition (via conversion of fiber into short-chain fatty acids like butyrate that have beneficial cognitive effects).
If you want fillers, eat more food with beneficial fiber, especially of the prebiotic types:
-Jerusalem Artichoke/Sunchokes
-Legumes (especially cooked, cooled, and then reheated for resistant starch)
-Potatoes (cooked and cooled as well)
-Dandelion
-High-fiber fruits
-Mushrooms
-Onions and other alliums
-Lotus root
-Konjac noodles (also known as shiritaki noodles)
-Mung bean noodles
-Green bananas
If you rely on those as your primary starches, it’s not hard to construct a diet with 50-100g of fiber a day–quite a decent amount of the filler you’re looking for.
I have to say, it is difficult to get just 40 grams of fiber per day (the recommended daily amount of fiber is somewhere around 40 for males, depending on who you ask). Several years ago I decided to get more fiber in my diet for all the reasons you said above (plus hemorrhoids) and I thought “Hey, this will be easy! I’ll just need to add some fruits and veggies to my diet, no problem. I’ll go pick up a head of broccoli and eat it with ranch, that should do me for the day.” Then I find out I would need to eat something in the neighborhood of 2.5 to three heads of broccoli just to get above 40 grams: and I’d have to do that every day! That’s too much broccoli. I tried different things, and eventually settled on black beans. A can of black beans has 17.5 grams of fiber in it, and I can generally eat a can of black beans a day. I switched out all refined flours with whole grain flours, and tried to eat some fruits and vegetables to make up the difference. It’s hard work doing it every day though: sometimes I have a meal that doesn’t feature an entire can of black beans, and that sets me back.
Your list mostly reminds me of how difficult it is. A cup of mung bean noodles has something like .7 grams of fiber. An 8 oz package of uncooked shiritaki noodles has about 8 grams. A cup of potatoes has a little over 3 grams of fiber. One cup of onions has a little under 3 grams. A cup of Jerusalem Artichokes has about 2.4 grams of fiber. So you can see, it can be extremely difficult to get just up to 30 grams of fiber in a day, much less 50. I have no idea how you’re going to get to 100, unless you plan on eating 10 cups of mashed potatoes, 5 cups of onions, 10 cups of mung bean noodles, an entire 8 oz package of shirtaki noodles, and top it all off with over 14 cups of Jerusalem artichoke. That’ll get you to 100 grams: now keep it up every day!
Fiber is tough.
You looked at the wrong places:
100g Hasle nuts have ~10g, almonds 11g, crushed linseed have around 39g, wheat bran has 45g.
100g Fiber still seam hard. But 40 should be possible.
Hachee machee, thats a lot of fiber for wheat bran! Do you know of a good recipe for preparing wheat bran? I mean I eat a lot of whole wheat products, but if I can skip eating beans for a day by eating a half cup or so of bran I’d be very interested.
Bran flakes? They’re like conflakes, but made from the ipart of a grain you’re supposed to throw away.
I remain unconvinced they’re not just pencil shavings.
Eat with dried fruits for peak old-man energy.
I know people that put ~20g of bran to their breakfast cereals. Problem is that bran is very light and 20g is a lot of volume.
I personally try to eat self mixed cereals every day with a lot of nuts and crushed linseeds, and with out the cheap filler material you find in the industrial cereal mixes. (I don’t know how much fiber I actually get by that).
Dairy Queen Fudge Barsare like a magic food. They have 50 calories and 6g of fiber. I haven’t found a similar recipe in other brands.
I’ve had a lot of success with Psyllium husk capsules. Pretty close to pure fiber that expands. Inexpensive “Now” brand on Amazon. Take a couple either at the start or 15-20 minutes before a meal with water and they make it so you get full while eating less. Never seen any negative digestive issues, only positive one.
You still eat good tasting food, you’re just satisfied with less of it/sooner by it.
I’ve always hated exercise, and I think I’m on a path to finding a regime that works for me.
I hate sweat, a pounding heart, and running also makes me itchy. But I’ve discovered that slow-heart rate running (with one of those smart watches measuring heart rate), although boring, is quite unobjectionable for me, because I don’t feel my heart pumping, my skin doesn’t itch, and I don’t get diaphragm pain or lose breath.
I’ve also discovered that I love the objectivity and measurability of weightlifting. I follow a simple workout, where I only do squats, presses/bench presses and deadlifts. And, unlike other sports, where I don’t get an easily measurable improvement, the weight I lift slightly increases with time, so I can really see how much more I can do than last month/year. This ticks all my Aspergery requirements for a sport: no heart pounding, no much sweating, and measurable improvements that motivate me to keep training.
What are the things you have found that makes exercise more enjoyable/less objectionable? What activities make it more fun for you to do exercise?
Listening to music makes lifting a lot more enjoyable for me. You might also consider yoga (not hot yoga). It’s generally pretty low-intensity, and you can really see your ability to do poses increase over time.
I fun sports like skiing and rock climbing, but they’re not things I can do regularly. If I was less awful at ball sports I’d probably join some sort of team to motivate myself.
Right now, the only way I can reliably make myself do intense exercise is riding my bike to work and not leaving until the very last minute, so I have to pedal furiously to make it on time.
How walkable is your town? I have been walking anything 1 mile or less, when feasible (feasible=no rain, not below freezing, not carrying a large amount of items-and I actually got a cart so “large” means more now). If you want to give this a fancy name, call it Urban Rangering.
I got some mileage for a while from using a treadmill, which enforced a speed, and listening to music selected for a beat that matched my pace. If you use iTunes, there is a mostly free adjunct called beaTunes that either knows the meters of songs or, if necessary, gets it by “listening” to them, so you can filter your favorites for the ones you want.
Then I read The One-Minute Workout, which turned me on to interval-training; the title promises more than the book can deliver but I started doing twenty-minute sessions that I believe did more for my heart than the much longer sustained speed did.
@ana53294 >
Except for running things that involve some exploring: bicycling, swimming, even the bit of rowing when I worked under the piers, changes of scenery make exercise more tolerable for me, running around a track less was more like doing heavy lifts which I didn’t like.
I am a person that was able to train himself to have a urge for movement back in high school, so maybe I’m not the best person to ask but thinks that help me to keep up an certain regime:
– Change the course you run, from time to time to keep things fresh.
– If you run alone listen to something. I actually prefer podcasts to music, something about calm talking voices works for me to keep me going.
– I was to a running event this year the first time in my life. See how I messaure up against other people gave me a real motivation boost.
– Develop a ritual, when you do it every wensday and saturday at 19:00, you won’t get that “but I like to sit here and do nothing” feeling.
And at last a think I never really learned although I should have by know: Do not try to meassure up to other people. Some people will run further than you, some people will do just on set more than you.
Skipping one and a half week of training due to sore muscels will throw you back much further than it’s worth.
This isn’t an answer to your specific question, but itchy as in a rash? If it is, it’s possible you have cholinegic urticaria. It doesn’t sound like a problem if you prefer other exercise anyway, but it might be worth trying an antihistamine / seeing a doctor.
(I am not really qualified to give out medical advice, but I did have this for a while and antihistamines stopped it bothering me. I used to get it even if I walked too fast).
Nah, I don’t get bumps or anything. My skin just becomes red and itchy. I’ve read on it and it seems to be just capillaries in the skin expanding.
It apparently goes away if you keep training regularly, but it drives me crazy.
I found cycling to be an enjoyable, but time consuming and expensive form of exercise. You can start slow enough not to raise your heartbeat very much. You can burn more calories in an hour or two than just about any other form of exercise. Playing an audiobook distracts from the pain and allowed me to keep cycling longer. At first, long endurance rides provided a feeling of accomplishment (knowing that 100 miles is something you can ride feels great).
Using power meters and training programs that rely on them really step it all up to the next level, and by that point even short periods of really high exertion start to feel good when you start seeing the data.
Does anyone have advice for dealing with long distance relationships? I’m going to be away from my partners for three months until their lease runs out and I can move in with them to a new place, and things are… rough for me right now because of that.
Not poly, and you may be feeling even more alone because they have each other. That’s one of the reasons I’m not. But that’s neither here nor there.
Say good morning and good night every night. If you find an interesting article, send it and talk about it. Find a game or activity you can do together. Pick up a book or television series you can watch “together.” Send photos if you go anywhere neat. Buy a stuffed animal (this is fantastic) to hug at night. Try very, very hard to maintain the same degree of emotional intimacy in your communications you have face-to-face. Last one is the real killer for me, and requires me to really spend some time with the conversation I’m having. It’s still stilted. Just have to power through. Be honest about how and why it’s hard.
As for physical intimacy… doing anything over video or audio calls is a bit more awkward than I’m comfortable with, and the feeling of physicality is definitely missing. YMMV.
This, and the rest. Communicate early and very often. If you went a day without both of you saying at least something, you have screwed up. …This isn’t fatal, but by jove, you had best repeat this as a mantra to yourselves until it’s second nature, so that the next day, you’re apologizing profusely for having missed the previous day.
I have about 6 years of LDR experience… All I can say is it’s a ton of work… I spend 3-5 hours a day on the phone with my GF as well as driving 3 hours one way every other weekend or so to visit her.
We like to play video games together.. we didn’t at first.. but MMORPGs are a way to “see” you partner/s even though you’re apart.
LDRs can work.. you just need to spend an unbelievable amount of time to make them work.
I’ve read advice not to eat apple seeds because of their cyanide content. Should I be convinced by this? A person would have to eat a truly unreasonable number of apples in order to reach a fatal dose, but is it possible that the cyanide accumulates in the body over time? Or that lower-level cyanide poisoning could cause symptoms?
I kind of suspect this is purely a theoretical possibility. I’ve never heard of anyone getting sick from eating whole apples, and I’ve been doing it for ~17 years with no apparent ill effects. Admittedly, I eat less than one apple a day on average.
No, there’s just not enough cyanide in the apple seeds to get an acute dose. I seem to remember there’s about a gram; the lethal dose of cyanide is something like 2 g/kg. Those numbers might be off, but not by a ton. So you are looking at needing to eat potentially hundreds of them to get to a point where you’d be hurt, and that’s if you are chewing the apple seeds. Cyanide doesn’t bioaccumulate, so there’s not really any “small amounts over time” worries.
“A fatal dose for humans can be as low as 1.5 mg/kg body weight”
Also chronic cyanide poisoning is a problem with Cassava so this could be a problem with apple seeds. But otherwise I do not know.
> the lethal dose of cyanide is something like 2 g/kg
Yikes! You may be right that eating apple seeds is safe, but I think your numbers are dangerously off. The actual LD50 of cyanide is about 1/1000 of that amount:
“Absorption of the alkali cyanides in amounts as low as 50 to 100 mg from a single, instantaneous dose may be followed by immediate collapse and cessation of respiration [Clayton and Clayton 1982]. It has been stated that although the fatal oral dose will vary considerably, depending on whether or not food is present in the stomach, it is probably in the order of 1 to 2 mg/kg [Clayton and Clayton].”
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/cyanides.html
The lethal dose of cyanide is off by a few orders of magnitude, but fortunately so is the cyanide content in apples: the correct value is about half a microgram per seed, according to this Quora post. You’d need to eat a truly stupendous number of seeds to be in any serious danger, though less-than-lethal neurotoxic effects mean you probably don’t want to be snacking on them by the handful.
Isn’t that about inhaled cyanide?
Much of the linked page is about inhalation, but since the part I quoted refers to the “fatal oral dose” and since the dosage depends on the presence of food in the stomach, I don’t think the LD50 dosages are referring to inhaled cyanide.
Thankfully, it’s still enough to kill weird amorphous blob monsters if they absorb enough of them.
Woops! Yeah, that’s what I get for going off memory. I’d looked into it in the past and the general message applies, but I definitely thought I was remembering the numbers better than I apparently was.
I eat apple seeds incidental to eating an apple. If you eat a couple in the course of eating an apple it isn’t a problem, but I’ve heard if you save a cupful and eat them all at once it would be a problem.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318706.php
Wait, people eat apple seeds? Why? And more importantly, how?
I had a colleague who would eat entire apples including the core. She didn’t think this was weird, and in fact thought we were weird for throwing away perfectly edible apple cores.
For regional context, she had grown up on a farm in former East Germany (but was born after the wall came down). There were no other Germans in the group.
As a German: This is not considered normal behaviour around here.
People already think it is strange how clean I pick the apple core before I throw it away.
How? The same way you would eat any small thing…they tend to fall out when you bite into the core. I like the taste and texture, and it’s more convenient and less wasteful than having to carry an entire core around and find a place to throw it away.
(try it yourself! it probably won’t kill you)
Almost certainly not, it will just make me not want to ever eat an apple again. Do you at least remove the stem?
Yes, the stem is the only inedible part. I don’t know why you assume the core and seeds taste bad? They taste largely the same as the rest of the apple, with less soft texture.
Because I’ve accidentally eaten too far into the apple before. Personal experience.
Texture and taste kind of go hand in hand.
I’m not sure I’d express it the way acymetric does, though on the other hand I’m not sure why the going hand in hand wording strikes me as wrong. I certainly would agree that texture is an extremely important part of the eating experience, quite frequently making the difference between what I seek out and what I avoid eating. And in this specific case, apple core texture is definitely in the to be avoided category for me.
Has anyone else been following the theory that Lyme Disease was caused by U.S. biological weapons development on Plum Island, NY? The case is laid out in a couple of books as described here. The circumstantial evidence seems overwhelming.
I’ve seen a couple of responses purporting to discredit the theory, but these seem disingenuous and shallow.
When the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming, the burden of proof shifts to the “nothing to see here” crowd, in my opinion.
Thoughts?
What was disingenuous or shallow about that first article (a Tufts professor who says that the Lyme-causing bacteria has been found in samples from decades before the conspiracy was alleged to have occurred)?
Thanks for all the responses.
Responding to dick:
The Tufts professor seems inappropriately assertive, as if it’s absurd to think something might be up when:
1. Lyme disease has spread geographically outward from an island that was used for bio-weapons development.
2. The bio-weapons development on the island was notoriously sloppy.
3. The person who discovered the Lyme Disease pathogen in 1982 had written a paper in 1952 about the intentional infecting of ticks with the Lyme pathogens while working for the U.S. government on bio-weapons development.
An honest response would have admitted that it can’t be stated for certain that this is all coincidental. The intent of the response leaves the impression that Telford’s purpose is to shut down discussion of this conspiracy theory, as opposed to honestly addressing the circumstantial evidence. And the alternative explanation for the spread of Lyme’s Disease — “reforestation, suburbanization, and a failure to manage deer herds” — doesn’t explain anything.
point 1 Lyme disease spread from a location close to the island which is kind of circumstantial but not the same as spreading from several locations around the island.
point 3 The person wrote a paper about the intentional infecting of ticks with a different pathogen in 1957 while working for the department of health. A search in google scholar didn’t find a 1952 paper and he couldn’t have been writing about infecting with the Lyme pathogen since it wasn’t officially discovered.
The big question is how would the military have known about the Lyme pathogen since would have been very hard to discover before hand and it doesn’t seem like a promising military weapon making the soldiers come down with arthritis after a couple of years.
responding to abystander:
Regarding point 1:
Regarding point 3: The Lyme pathogen was discovered by Willy Burgdorfer in 1982.
As to how and why the military was working with the Lyme pathogen, Kris Newby says:
@detroitdan
The guy can write about the existence of paper in 1952 but a literature search didn’t find it.
The claim is that the Army knew of Borrelia causing disease before the public, so they could use it to infect the ticks.
For that to be true there had to be a program to find these slow-acting incapacitating microbes. This would have involved taking biological samples from hundreds of people with diverse pathologies like arthritis, back pain, asthma etc in hopes of finding some new microbe. Is there any evidence that the army did widespread canvasing to find to find novel biological agents?
Then they had to learn to grow it. It took the public almost 40 years to learn to reliably culture Borrelia.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3590594/
Then they would have to test the organism to ensure that it had the desired affect. Are there any records where prisoners or recruits that the army could keep under observation had symptoms similar to those caused by Borrelia?
replying to abystander:
Check out the Bitten document trove. It’s not surprising that a 1952 paper, that evidently embarrasses the government, is hard to find. I believe the Bitten author that they really did find it, but you are free to be skeptical.
Again, it’s a matter of who you trust. I believe Kris Newby and the obvious evidence of the disease emanating from Plum Island, along with the extensive corroborating evidence they’ve unearthed. My take is that Burgdorfer and his associates in the bio-weapons program were screwing around with stuff they didn’t really understand. Decades later they realized what had probably happened. Makes more sense to me than that this is all a coincidence — that were admittedly infecting Lone Star ticks with the Lyme Disease pathogen, and that Lyme disease broke out subsequently from the exact location where the admittedly sloppy military testing had taken place.
@detroitdan
That bitten files link points to a bunch of mug shots.
You may want to recheck it and find the papers describing what he was actually infecting the ticks with.
I think this happens with an awful lot (all?) conspiracy theories. Like, I’ve never doubted that the Sandy Hook shooting happened as the media reports it did. And if it were just some hoax to push gun control, well it didn’t work. But I did see the videos of the father of one of the slain children before the official interview starts and he’s laughing and joking, and then it’s time to talk to the reporter and he appears to “get into character” and starts crying. That made me say, “that sure is strange behavior, but then again I have no idea what kind of things I’d do or how I’d act if I just experienced that kind of horror. Kind of like Ben Affleck in Gone Girl. Can someone who knows about the psychology of trauma explain this behavior to me?” Alex Jones sees it and yells “hoax!” But nobody bothers to explain the bizarre behavior to Alex or me or anyone to rebut the hoax charge. They just scream “how dare you!” at Alex and that’s that. I don’t think it was a hoax, but I’d still like an explanation for that behavior.
Same thing with pizzagate. No, I do not think there’s a child sex ring being run out of a pizza shop in D.C. But that was the least interesting part of that conspiracy theory. Tony Podesta has some weird, weird art on his walls. And there were some strange things in his emails. I would still like to know what a…I think it was a “pizza-related map handkerchief” is, and why anyone would bother trying to return one to someone who lost it. And I know it would be super awkward to ask and everything, but it would be nice if someone asked Podesta so he could say “it’s one of these things, ya dummies!” and show his famous collection of handkerchiefs that have maps to restaurants on them or something. But instead the media just yelled “debunked!” No it wasn’t. No one ever did any investigation. Now, it’s a fantastical claim so I don’t think it’s true, but it was declared false before anyone even tried to see if it was true.
With regards to conspiracy theories, the refutations would be more convincing if authorities tried to figure out why someone might have the erroneous beliefs they do, and then point out the errors in their facts or logic rather than flatly stating “false” with no investigation or explanation. Used to be when you saw a UFO the g-man shows up and says “you’re just confused friend, ’twas merely swamp gas reflecting off a weather balloon.” Now we don’t even get that. It does look suspicious.
ETA: Oh, but the big question I would have about lyme disease is…why on earth would anyone try to “weaponize” lyme disease via deer ticks? Where’s the military advantage? How would you use this in warfare?
responding to Comrade Honcho…
Tackling the big question first, here’s the rationale for weaponizing deer ticks:
With regard to Sandy Hook and PizzaGate, the burden of proof would seem to be on the conspiracy theorists to come up with a plausible narrative, which they haven’t as far as I know. This differs from the Plum Island events which are widely acknowledged (there was bioweapons experimentation there — everyone agrees, and no one disputes that it was very sloppily managed).
I mean, have you ever been to a visitation/funeral? It isn’t just weeping and wailing for 2 days and 2 nights…people do joke, catch up on non-death related things, and so on. It also wouldn’t be surprising (or even bad) that the father would play up his grief for the interview…made all the easier by the fact that he has real massive grief to tap into.
@detroitdan but why lyme disease?
@acymetric sure, that is a plausible explanation. Someone should have said that to Alex Jones instead of just screaming “how dare you!”
@Conrad Honcho
Well…I don’t think Alex Jones has earned a lot of charity from those people. That explanation also seems…kind of self evident, in the way that it not being the default conclusion kind of suggests an agenda. Since Alex Jones is the kind of guy that…certainly tends to have agendas (or at least that is how he is perceived by people on the left), I don’t think it is terrible surprising that the response was “don’t be an ***hole” rather than a calm, reasoned explanation in response.
Yeah, but the problem with Jones is that he has an audience. It’s not just that he’s wrong, it’s that he convinces many other people of the wrong thing by saying plausible(?) things. If the media/left is bothered by that, perhaps point out the errors in Jones’ logic, discrediting him. Instead they just want to shut him down. This sends the messages to his fans, “Alex is right and the Illuminati space lizards just don’t want us to know!”
The blanket denials of the lyme disease thing didn’t convince detroitdan the military didn’t weaponize lyme disease, they made him think they were covering it up.
No, absolutely fucking not. Alex Jones is a completely vile monster who deserves everything that comes to him. If I met him, I would spit on him. This is not a metaphor, it’s just all I could do without getting serious charges. If you think otherwise, you really, desperately need to recalibrate.
You don’t get the benefit of civilized discourse when you go down his road. Calling people paid actors whose children have just been slaughtered is not something that is within the bounds of reasonable discussion. The correct response to people like him IS to scream at him, and refuse to allow him any entry point into discussion with people who aren’t moral monsters.
The “investigation” consists of walking into the pizza parlour, and noting that it doesn’t have a basement. That is it. And various outlets did exactly this.
Why the fuck shouldn’t we just make fun of people who take this shit seriously? At best, it’s really really dumb. At worst (pizzagate and Sandy Hook), it’s actively evil. There is no reason why these morons are owed an explanation, other than a slap across their goddam face.
@Enkidum,
Not trying to derail the discussion here, because it’s really interesting, but can you elaborate on why you feel so strongly about Jones in particular?
I can understand what you’re saying to an extent, because I get pissed off by e.g. the 9/11 truthers who hang around One World Trade with their conspiracy theory signs. Those kind of antics are incredibly disrespectful both to the families of the victims and to the city / country which still have the scars of the World Trade Center attacks. I don’t spit on them, but the saying “if looks could kill” is applicable.
The language that you’re using though sounds more applicable to Adam Lanza himself. I wouldn’t call a truther a monster, and I think that the people who provide point-by-point rebuttals to the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” crowd are providing a valuable service. So my empathy is kind of failing me here.
+1 to what Enkidum said. I can’t even imagine being a Sandy Hook parent accused by Alex Jones of lying about the murder of my own kid. And I’m comparably baffled by the inclination here to give Jones and his followers any moral latitude whatsoever.
Two things.
One, calling bereaved parents actors is a direct attack on real people. Blaming “the government” gives you plausible deniability when it comes to doing that. It’s still offensive, but it’s not a direct attack. A more direct comparison might be, “the 9/11 flight crews did 9/11 and framed innocent Muslims for it.” That’s pretty spit-worthy.
Two, there’s no way to actually attack the claim. No equivalent of, “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.” The entire conspiracy is built to make counterargument impossible; everyone’s an actor, all documents are fake/planted, Sandy Hook is a potemkin village. It looks like a house of cards from the outside, but the fucking thing is superglued together.
@Enkidum> There is no reason why these morons are owed an explanation, other than a slap across their goddam face.
What about the pragmatic reason that an explanation might prevent others from being persuaded by them? Conrad’s main point isn’t that they have a right to an explanation, but that an explanation prevents others from hearing only one side of the argument and being falsely persuaded. Do you feel that the current approach of refusing to engage is working well?
Sometimes blanket denials are appropriate, when there is little evidence to support a theory and/or the theory is unjustly maligning innocent people.
Sometimes blanket denials are inappropriate. When someone admits to playing with matches at the spot where the forest fire started, it’s reasonable to assume that they might be responsible. In that case, a blanket denial is not helpful.
Basically every time I go on social media, I am accused of being a racist white supremacist bigot who is actively contributing to the rounding up and probable eventual genocide of vulnerable minority children.
It sucks but eventually you just sort of learn to tune it out?
@Matt M
<troll> Have you tried not
being a racist white supremacist bigot who is actively contributing to the rounding up and probable eventual genocide of vulnerable minority childrengoing on social media? </troll>Yeah, it seems to me there’s a difference between:
1) Alex Jones is a bad person because should have known that his theories were so hurtful that he had a special responsibility to investigate further and more skeptically than he usually does. (Agree)
2) Jones is a bad person because there is reason to believe that he knew there were substantial reasons to doubt his theory, but he pushed it anyway and did not disclose the contrary info. (I think this is true, but don’t remember where I read it, so take it with a grain of salt.)
3) Hurtful ideas like the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory should require an additional burden just to enter the conversation. They’re so offensive that we shouldn’t even discuss the merits until the proponents come forward with an unusually substantial amount of evidence.
(I can agree with #3 as well, but it seems that you then end up in a discussion of whether the conspiracy theorists’ initial evidence is sufficiently substantial. I’m also a little disgruntled that the norm doesn’t apply to, e.g., twitter shaming, which can put ordinary people on the front page of the NYT with little or no fact checking.)
Jones has been weaponizing discourse to dangerous and gullible fools for the past thirty or forty years. He is one of the people most single-handedly responsible for harming public discourse in that time. Every 9-11 truther, every Obama birther, every Sandy Hooker, every anti-vaxxer, every chemtrail activist, every pizzagater, all of these twits have a direct connection (whether they know it or not) to Jones. He is pretty much the prime stream from which all of this nonsense flows.
(Almost) all of which is perfectly legal, and acts as a relatively safe warning sign – as soon as someone mentions his name positively, you know that they are someone you can safely ignore. But what he’s done recently with Sandy Hook (and other massacres) is way beyond the pale. He doesn’t get to get away with that (and, for the first time in his entire career, he appears to have suffered actual material consequences as a result of it).
I think it worked reasonably well from roughly the point at which Buckley kicked the lunatics out of mainstream conservative discourse until around 2005ish. Around that point, mainstream conservative discourse invited the lunatics back in.
I’m not sure what the solution is.
I will note that detailed, point by point refutations of pretty much all these conspiracy theories are available, and have always been available, and anyone who is sincerely interested in learning why they are stupid and evil can find these things out without too much difficulty.
The answer to this is, “You can’t win, and any action you take will make the problem worse. Also, not taking any action will also make the problem worse.”
Provide reasoned arguments against Alex Jones? You’ve legitimized him, and you’ve made his platform seem more respectable to people. Shout him down? You’ve made him a martyr, and his followers will dig in even more. Do nothing? He’ll just yell that you’re ignoring his arguments. Now you look like an idiot.
There’s no solution to this.
Great idea, and then we can explain to the professional wrestlers that they don’t need to hit each other, they could just talk their problems out.
Good idea. Maybe I’ll just watch CNN or read the New York Times instead.
@acymetric
As I’ve thought about it I withdraw my agreement with this. Yes, when my grandma passed away in her sleep at 97 after a protracted decline in her health, we were sad at her funeral but there was little wailing and gnashing of teeth and despair at the cruelty of the world. When my brother’s wife died suddenly at age 46, there were many more tears at the funeral. The jokes remembered good times we had with her, followed immediately by sobs over how much we’d all miss her, but even then none of the smiles or laughs came from my brother, who was despondent. For a father to be laughing after his five or six year old is senselessly and suddenly murdered requires a deeper explanation than “eh, people joke at funerals sometimes.” That needs an explanation like “the trauma is so extreme people can experience something akin to a psychotic break where their behavior is nearly unfathomable because their perceptions and reality are entirely disconnected.” I think of something like the guy at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan bending over on the battlefield to pick up his blown-off arm while bullets are still whizzing by him. That’s not rational behavior, but he’s experienced such immense trauma “rational” is no longer on the table.
@Enkidum
I think he’s a kook but mostly harmless. There are plenty of nutjobs out there with an audience, like the Black Hebrew Israelites or the bizarre afrocentrist conspiracy theorists who think everything notable in ancient history was really done by Africans and white people stole their history. See also Ancient Aliens on the History Channel. As far as poisoning public discourse goes, I’ll point you towards the Rachel Maddow Show.
It would also be easier to despise Jones if it weren’t for all the government conspiracy theories that turned out to be true, like mass surveillance and CIA mind control drugs. Perhaps he serves the barely useful purpose of “being willing to entertain literally any idea.” There are even kooks who will entertain completely nutty ideas like did Abraham Lincoln sign a demonic pact with the ghost of Attila the Hun?
I like conspiracy theories. They’re fun.
@Two McMillion
Yes there is. You do what Snopes does well with regards to urban legends and miserably on politics. You examine the claims, point out why they’re wrong, and when somebody says they believe in the theory or try to convince you of the theory, you link them to the refutation. Snopes fails because they strawman any argument right of center. For instance, what Enkidum did with
ignoring that I was talking about Tony Podesta’s art collection and emails. The pizza parlor was the last and least interesting part of the conspiracy theory developed, but rather than look at why people thought there might be something going on with Podesta, where the theory started, he deflected to the pizza parlor and the basement. And the basement wasn’t even central to the claim there was weird stuff going on at the pizza parlor. A lot of that was questionable looking things involving children posted on the social media accounts of the parlor owners/guests. Explanation of those things are more important than “somebody on the internet said there was a basement and look there’s not.” This was exactly what the mainstream media did when they became aware of the theory. They immediately framed it as “pizza parlor basement” but it all started from people looking at Podesta’s leaked emails and making connections.
Podesta’s emails said weird stuff that doesn’t make obvious sense and sounds like some kind of code. Like “Do you think I’ll do better playing dominos on cheese than on pasta?” Now, that does not make sense without context. I’m assuming this is some kind of inside joke? But the conspiracy theorists thought it was a code for some kind of illicit sex thing. It would be easier to debunk if somebody could ask Podesta, “what does that mean in context?” And then he would say…I don’t know. I literally can not come up with a way that is a sensible statement. It can’t even be like “play the game of dominoes better after eating cheese or after eating pasta” because no one thinks cheese or pasta influence table top game performance? “On a full stomach” or even “on a stomach full of cheese” might make sense, but no one says “on cheese” as a shorthand for “on a stomach full of cheese” and even then it makes no sense next to “dominoes.”
It’s kind of like hearing your neighbor say “I’m going to smoke grass and snort some snow.” It makes no sense because no one smokes literal yard grass and no one snorts literal snow. What the hell is “grass” and “snow?”
Explaining the innocuous meaning for this would be more useful because I could then completely dismiss the people who say it’s a code. This would be much more useful than, say, spitting on people who say it’s a code, because it seems like a way over the top reaction, and spitting on someone who questions why a weird thing is weird makes me have sympathy for the questioner and highly suspicious of the motives of the spitter.
That email is not very confusing, in context. In thanking John for this year’s Christmas gift, Herbert included a postscript referring to some humorous shared experience they had relating to last year’s gift. As evidence of child sexual assault goes, this isn’t.
@Conrad Honcho
The reason why Podesta (and other targets of right-wing conspiracy theories) shouldn’t engage with conspiracy theorists is that it legitimizes them and helps them secure and expand their audience. In a broader sense, private citizens don’t have a moral obligation to engage with every ludicrous demand on their time. What’s the fundamental difference between making Podesta explain why he isn’t a pedophile and making Jordan Peterson explain why he isn’t a homophobe or a white supremacist?
@dick
Great, then ask him for the explanation of the humorous thing. More importantly, ask him about his art collection. I’m on a work computer right now so I’m not going to go looking that stuff up, but you can search for it. Like he’s got paintings that appear to depict a group of adults watching another adult have sex with a child. This is the sort of artwork I would not want to own, not only because it’s disturbing to me, but I would be worried other people would look at it and think I was involved in some kind of group sex abuse of minors. It’s not like these things don’t exist, like the UK parliament scandals and the Catholic Church. So people saw stuff like that, thought that’s what Podesta was up to, went looking through his emails for “evidence,” found sentences that don’t make sense, add some confirmation bias and we’re off to the races.
But thank you for addressing the actual “evidence” for the theory, rather than deflecting. That’s all I’m saying should happen. Look at the actual claims and provide alternative explanations.
@broblawsky
The mainstream media would never do the former and will never stop doing the latter?
ETA: I just realized I was saying “Tony Podesta” in some of these posts. That’s his brother. It was John Podesta’s emails and art collection.
Doesn’t this ultimately just boil down to naked power politics though?
As a counter-example, CNN regularly promotes the conspiracy theory that Trump called white nationalists “very fine people.” This is a lie.
But because CNN has more power than the various right-wingers who (correctly) call it out as a lie, calling it out as a lie doesn’t work. The only option for the right is to produce a five minute video very thoroughly debunking it on a point-by-point basis. But I’m not aware of anyone on the right who thinks that Prager U is somehow horribly mistaken in doing this – that they’re just “legitimizing CNN.”
Basically, you casually dismiss Infowars because you can. Because 95% of Twitter employees agree with your politics, you can simply ban him. But if 95% of Twitter employees were red tribe, that sort of thing wouldn’t fly.
Look, I understand exactly what you mean, but, holy balls this is not a “conspiracy theory”. C’mon, man.
I think almost any set of personal emails or text messages you could get would include a lot of weird-sounding cryptic comments, and would support connecting-the-dots to “prove” various crazy sh-t about the writers in the hands of a conspiracy theorist.
No, don’t. Leave him the fuck alone.
If you get access to my personal communications, or even if you figured out who I was IRL and looked at every post I’ve ever made under this pseudonym, you are not suddenly entitled to pester me about them. Despite the fact that there are thousands, many of which are really hard to understand, and many of which make reference to public figures.
You think some random dude who owns a pizza parlour is somehow required to respond in detail to a bunch of dangerous lunatics who have been combing through his life for a couple of years? This is a really bad judgement. Seriously, the legitimization of this kind of horseshit is not ok, and to the extent that you are doing it (which is precisely what you are doing in this thread), you are doing something morally wrong.
This shit isn’t harmless. People have shown up at this pizza joint with weaponry. People have, repeatedly and often, threatened the Sandy Hook parents. This is not the kind of thing that one should just brush off. There are some questions that are not worth answering, because their asking indicates that there is something wrong with the person doing the asking.
@albatross11
Yes, I agree, I think the Podesta email stuff was confirmation bias. I don’t believe in the conspiracy theory (although I do have questions about his art collection), all I’m saying is the proper way to debunk a conspiracy theory is to provide alternative explanations for the facts rather than spitting. Or what the media does and call something “debunked” without ever bothering to do the debunking.
ETA: @Enkidum
You can’t stop people from asking questions about major news events. Once they’ve done it and, as you rightly recognize, it’s serious enough that potential violence is involved, you can either ignore it or answer questions. It’s bad all the way around (assuming the accusations are false), but answering the questions is probably a better choice.
Like look at Covington Catholic. People on twitter were screaming for violence against those boys, bomb threats were being made against their school, crazy protestors were showing up at their school because people wrongly thought they were evil. I think the boys were right to go to the news media and explain their side of story. Should they have had to do that? No, it’s terrible, people should have left them alone to begin with. But there’s nothing morally wrong about asking them to tell their side of the story to clear the air.
ETA: I mean, I don’t really see the moral reasoning here. The pizza parlor people posted images on their public facing social media that, combined with the captions, appeared to sexualize children. People noticed and wondered if they were having sex with children. How does asking them to explain the context of the photos and captions make one a moral monster? It seems reasonable, particularly when sex with children is “frowned upon.” Showing up with a gun is right out, that’s definitely moral monster territory, but asking them to explain is not.
Would this standard apply for somebody that you didn’t like being questioned by somebody you do? Like if Ben Shapiro were posting weird pictures of children with sexual comments on them and left-wingers demanded an explanation, would you accuse them of being moral monsters for bothering poor Ben?
Appear to whom, the same people who see secret pedophile codewords everywhere? And they would totally see why they’re wrong and drop the whole thing, if given a reasonable explanation? Because trolls are so well-known for going away if only you feed them enough?
@Enkidum,
Fair enough, thanks for answering my question.
I don’t see secret pedophile code words everywhere and that painting looked like people having sex with children to me. If you want, later I’ll find it and link it and you can tell me what you think, as I assume you are not the sort of person who sees secret pedophile codewords everywhere.
All of them, no, most of them yes.
What’s the standard you’re arguing for here? Never respond to any accusations? Even if you could do so with ease?
Conrad,
Once again, it’s about power.
Podesta doesn’t have to explain himself to Alex Jones, because he’s more powerful than Alex Jones. And the longer he goes on refusing to explain, the more this is confirmed. Covington Catholic does have to explain themselves to CNN, because they are less powerful than CNN.
As another analogy, couldn’t Barack Obama have dispelled a lot of the rumors and conspiracies surrounding his birth by producing his birth certificate? Most certainly. So why didn’t he? Because it wasn’t in his interest to do so. It was more useful of him to say “No, I won’t do it, and you can’t make me” because that confirmed he was more powerful than his accusers.
@Matt M
Eh, I don’t’ think that was a mere power play with Obama. I think he’s a very smart politician and, with allies in the media, framed any questions about his past as racist. Birthers were perceived as racist, and nothing they did would make a damn bit of difference to Obama supporters, so why interrupt your enemies when they’re making a mistake?
I believe this is the exact same reason Trump will not release his tax returns. Not a single vote would change one way or the other if he did. If his tax returns show he’s just the richest, best, most charitable businessman in the world, Rachel Maddow is not going to say “oh, guess I was wrong about Trump, he’s a great guy now vote for him.” And if they show he’s poor and stingy I’m not going to say “aw man, guess I’m ready for open border and socialism now.” But his enemies in the media are wasting barrels of ink harping about his tax returns instead of focusing on something that might actually make a difference in his support. If I were his advisor, I would say “never release the tax returns. Your enemies are wasting their time on something meaningless, so let them.” If I were Obama’s advisor I would have said “never release the birth certificate. Your enemies are wasting their time on something that makes them look dumb.” It’s not just a show of power, it’s a media strategy.
Of course not. I don’t understand why you would think that. The answer to “So, are you also taking a much stronger and more general position than the one you just described?” is almost always going to be no. That’s sort of what the principle of charity means.
@Matt
Do you have any objection to parents of murdered kids having more power over their own lives than an obnoxious scaremongering radio show host? Or having more power over their lives than the idiots he managed to convince?
“Papers, please” is bad enough when it comes from Joe Arpaio. It’s worse when it comes from Alex Jones and his internet mob. The correct response to, “you’re not a real American” or “you’re a crisis actor and that’s not your kid” or “you rape kids in a pizza parlor” is “go fuck yourself,” not “here’s access to all my personal information.”
@Conrad
1) Do you think that Podesta explaining the domino joke would deflate the conspiracy theory by much? My guess is that people inclined to believe the theory would announce that they found his explanation unbelievable and demand more proof. (Compare Kavenaugh explaining Devil’s Triangle.)
2) The whole thing seems like an invasion of privacy. This guy got his emails stolen, so now he has to satisfy internet randos by revealing more of his life?
I’d be happier with a norm that says we don’t pry into people’s private lives unless someone comes up with a lot more than the Pizzagate people ever did.
No, I’m asking about the meta-level principles, which I think is enlightening, and kind of what moral philosophers do.
Alice sees Bob do something suspicious, but there is an innocent explanation. Alice goes to Carol and says, “I think Bob is doing a bad thing.” Carol wonders if Bob is doing the bad thing.
What should Bob do? Tell Carol and Alice the innocent explanation, or ignore it?
Fair enough – my proposal is that “get your nose out of other people’s business” is a good enough norm that we shouldn’t covenant this kind of Rear Window citizen’s inquiry unless there’s a pretty convincing case.
@J Mann
Some. It would mean that when someone uses that as evidence I could say to them “no you moron, he was talking about the time the flkjsihewoh did the aousdofih” instead of me shrugging and saying “yeah, I have no idea what that means.”
Yes it is, but that’s never stopped the media. And we’re talking about the guy running the political campaign for one of the two people who would be President of the United States. They absolutely love leaks from the Trump campaign and the Trump White House, which are certainly invasions of privacy and have no problem asking Trump very embarrassing questions in response to unverified leaks of private conversations in front of other world leaders. I’m not sure how hard I’m supposed to clutch my pearls for John Podesta.
I mean, do we honestly think that if Trump’s campaign manager’s emails had been hacked he wouldn’t be hounded to answer questions based on the most uncharitable interpretation of his words as possible relentlessly?
Absolutely not. He can do whatever he wants. But damage was done, and once you’re in damage control mode, I’m not sure ignoring it is the best option.
Also we might want to make a distinction between how the victims of conspiracy theory accusations respond and how the media covering them responds. For instance, @Hoopy, yes, the father should tell Alex Jones to fuck off. However it’s still a weird video, so when reporting on the evil accusations Alex Jones makes, it would be worthwhile for the good media to bring on a grief counseling expert to explain the thing that made Jones think his evil accusations had merit. “Oh, yes, I can see how someone might think that, but people simply do not understand the completely erratic and unpredictable ways people respond to trauma.” Or whatever the real explanation is.
ETA: All I’m saying is, if one is trying to debunk a conspiracy theory, attacking the “evidence” is probably more useful (and less suspicious) than attacking the conclusion. There are still people who believe Trump conspired with Russia to steal the election, but when I was arguing with people on this forum I attacked the evidence for the conspiracy theory. I didn’t just say “HOW DARE YOU QUESTION A PATRIOT LIKE DONALD TRUMP!” That would not have been very effective.
Reverse that and you understand why these people shouldn’t engage with conspiracy theorists: right-wing media will never stop accusing them no matter what they do. Or do you believe that the kind of people who signal-boost Alex Jones rants are inherently more trustworthy journalists than the “mainstream media”?
@broblawsky
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Should Peterson refuse all interviews with mainstream media outlets and only talk to YouTubers?
I feel like this is ignoring that while yes, there are die hard partisans who act in bad faith, there still exists at least some group of people who can be persuaded by truth.
Conrad:+1
[To the post about why Obama didn’t release his birth certificate and Trump won’t release his taxes.]
As far as I can tell, the kind of “journalists” who signal-boost Alex Jones are exclusively the former.
The appropriate analogy here is Time Cube guy.
One day TCG walks into a professors office and explains his theory of perpetual motion and free energy. It’s complex and multi-level and completely wrong. The professor spend 8 hours showing him why his theory is wrong. TCG seems mollified, but not yet totally convinced.
The professor tries to work on his research project, but is mentally drained by how damn hard it is to try and explain things to someone who is just on the other side of the sanity line.
On day 2 he comes back again with small alterations that change nothing fundamental. Professor only gives him 4 hours and says he has to work.
….
On Day 31 after TCG has been escorted off the premise yet again by security, Time Sphere Guy shows up…
There’s a kind of ugly tradeoff here.
a. Implausible conspiracy theories are pretty common in the world, and some subset tend to be taken seriously and widely reported on by mainstream sources, while others are dismissed.
b. Most of these conspiracy theories are nonsense. Occasionally, one is true or at least has some grain of truth at its heart.
c. Some subset of crazy people and sociopaths on the internet key off these conspiracy theories and then do nasty and sometimes horrifying things in response.
d. We know of examples where the real conspiracies went on for years under the noses of both legal authorities and media sources[1], while not getting much coverage or even being dismissed just like the crazy conspiracy theories.
e. The same mechanisms of angrily dismissing a claim and calling its adherents crazy or evil is used all the time for plausible claims[2], by the same mainstream sources that do it with Alex Jones’ nonsense.
f. It would in some sense be nice to see serious people willing to address the non-crazy versions of these conspiracy theories in a fact-based non-crazy way. But doing so tends to lend credence to them, in ways that encourage the crazies and sociopaths to more nasty behavior.
[1] For example, consider the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, or Bernie Madoff’s long-running Ponzi scheme. Or the CIA’s network of secret prisons, or the incredible depth of mass-surveillance carried out by the NSA against Americans after 9/11. And these are the things that came out–presumably many more things along these lines never came out and so remain crazy conspiracy theories that everyone knows are silly.
[2] For example, consider “IQ is racist pseudoscience” or “Science proves that race doesn’t exist.”
Except… Alice is a verified moron, who has been spouting utter horseshit for decades.
Carol is in the wrong here for not immediately dismissing this. She can get fucked.
Conrad:
I’d recommend avoiding engaging with any journalist or media personality who you think will not be engaging in good faith. That includes many mainstream journalists, but it also probably includes Alex Jones. (I’ve never seen anything by Jones, so I don’t really know that–I’m judging him by reputation.).
That certainly sounds lofty. But going from, “This guy should not respond to those people because they’re trolls” to “People should not respond to other people atall” is not ascending to a higher meta level, it’s stripping context and exaggerating.
Back on the non-meta-level, I think the best response Podesta could offer for any and all questions about his confusing emails is the one Peter Sellers gave in Murder By Death:
You simply cannot make heads or tails of why Podesta has acted the way he’s acted or why someone here would say what they say without remembering that the theory being alleged is deeply, deeply stupid. It is a category error to compare it to other theories that aren’t.
Hmmmm…
Not for the first time, I may be overstating some things.
To be specific about my claims that I’m still comfortable with:
1) Alex Jones is straight up evil. He’s also not very smart.
2) Taking Alex Jones’ claims seriously is a moral failing. People (most specifically Conrad Honcho) are doing that all over this thread. This is not ok. You should not do this. Anything along the lines of “but look at those photos of the kids”, or “but look at the way the dad was behaving at the new conference”? Not ok. Stop it. You are making a serious mistake by not immediately rejecting evidence that comes from him, or that he popularizes. You have something seriously wrong with your threshold for what counts as good evidence. Consider “but what if the Jews ARE sacrificing gentile babies”? The only difference here is the number of people targeted by the evil lie.
2a) All of us make mistakes, and all of us are blind to them. Being criticized for a moral failing is not the same thing as being accused of being a monster. Jones is a bonafide monster. You shouldn’t pay attention to him, and you should have immediately rejected all of those lines of “evidence” you’ve been discussing (please don’t share them, they’re nonsense and everything you’ve said about them is nonsense). But that doesn’t make you him.
3) There probably does need to be some kind of way to deal with these claims that isn’t what I’ve been doing. I am clearly not the person to be doing this. And none of the people personally targeted by these vile campaigns owe it to the world to be doing this (although, I will note, several of the Sandy Hook parents have spent years doing precisely this, engaging the lies and the hatred as best they can). I have no idea what the best solution is.
4) I feel like I’m honour bound, given where I’m posting, to note that there have been various phenomena of a similar nature that have been blown up by the left wing. I do think none of the recent ones have been remotely as vile, or as obviously false, as FALSELY ACCUSING SOMEONE OF RUNNING A MURDEROUS PEDOPHILE RING, or FALSELY ACCUSING GRIEVING PARENTS OF BEING PAID ACTORS. But I’ll agree that what happened to the Covington kids, for example, was not really the right way of dealing with what was, at absolute worst, some kids being kind of assholes (and I suspect it wasn’t even that).
@Enkidum> You think some random dude who owns a pizza parlour is somehow required to respond in detail to a bunch of dangerous lunatics who have been combing through his life for a couple of years?
Part of the problem with the discussion is that different people focus on different details.
Personally, I find the trope of referring to James Alefantis as “some random dude who owns a pizza parlor” to be terribly misleading. I feel like calling him that either shows that you’ve been misled by the respectable media, or that you don’t mind misleading others.
In 2012 GQ magazine included Alefantis a list of “The 50 Most Powerful People in Washington DC”: https://www.gq.com/gallery/50-most-powerful-people-in-washington-dc. This wasn’t done as a joke, but because like everyone else on that list, he’s one of the most influential and politically connected people in DC, which is the one of the most politically powerful places in the US.
This doesn’t at all mean that Alefantis was running a pedophile ring. It doesn’t mean that armed men should be wandering into one of his restaurants looking for evidence of molested children. It doesn’t mean that he has a responsibility to answer to anyone for the details of his private life.
But it’s does mean that it’s really misleading to call him “a random dude who owns a pizza parlour”. So in a discussion about how trust is established in cases where parties are starting from different perspectives, why call him that?
@Enkidum
Ad hominem attacks don’t change my mind much. I saw the Sandy Hook father video before I ever heard of Alex Jones and thought it was weird when I saw it. Jones did not invent pizzagate, that was going on in the chans and reddit. That Jones believes the CIA did mind control experiments doesn’t mean MKULTRA didn’t exist.
Also I have never watched an episode of his show. The only time I’ve seen him was the time he was on Joe Rogan.
Your method of debunking conspiracy theories by ignoring facts and calling people evil is the thing I’m saying is ineffective. It doesn’t change the fact the Sandy Hook father acted weird. It does not change Podesta’s bizarre taste in art. It does not change how other people interpret those things.
In the interest of reducing the chances internet crazies harass people accused of vile conspiracies, let’s do the effective method of debunking the conspiracy theory by providing the reasonable alternative explanation to the events that make someone think a vile conspiracy is going on rather than the ineffective method of calling people evil. Agreed?
I was not aware of who he is. I have done my best to learn as little as possible about the case. Thanks for the clarification. I don’t think this changes anything of importance?
(And yes, I am perfectly comfortable being as dismissive as I have been about this case which I know very little about. It’s garbage.)
But it’s pretty clear, based on the way you’re talking about pizzagate, that at least some of the media sources you follow are signal-boosting him and those like him. Do you think that their decision to uncritically repeat these claims should have no impact on your personal perception of their trustworthiness? At what point do you consider yourself obligated to update your priors regarding your media consumption?
No. Conspiracy theories are bottomless, and people like Jones and his supporters can be assumed to always be acting in bad faith. Once you’ve caught someone lying to you and operating in bad faith often enough, you are no longer obligated to respond to them in good faith. This is a pretty clear-cut ‘tragedy of the commons’ type problem, and after a certain point, the correct solution to misuse of the commons is to bar some people from using it.
@dick
“Is stupid” was my first reaction to the Trump-Russia conspiracy, too. It never made any sense that Trump and his smart and evil compatriots would sell their souls to Putin in exchange for some mostly innocuous emails. And since Hillary losing was in Putin’s interests anyway because she wanted his ally Assad gone and Trump don’t care, also pipelines, there’s no reason for Putin to withhold the emails without Trump’s cooperation. The idea that megamurican icon Donald Trump plus Manafort and Bannon and Kushner and Don Jr are all going to put explosive collars around their necks and give the trigger to Vladimir Putin in exchange for some emails that do not reveal high crimes or devil worship is stupid. Is very stupid. Is so so so so stupid. This did not stop the entire media establishment, half the country and the very smart and wonderful Democrats of SSC from going all in on this incredibly stupid conspiracy theory.
@broblawsky
What lies are you talking about? The video of the Sandy Hook father was real. It wasn’t some guy they lied about by pretending he was the Sandy Hook father when he wasn’t.
Jones takes true facts and draws erroneous or unsubstantiated conclusions but I’m not aware of him deliberately lying, which is more than I can say for CNN. When they claim Trump called white nationalists “very fine people” they’re deliberately lying and they know they’re lying.
Jones is an honest idiot. CNN is deliberately malicious. What’s your opinion of CNN?
Those are not remotely comparable. The idea of Trump colluding with the Russians isn’t stupid, his underlings actually considered it. A high-profile DC politico being a child sex criminal isn’t stupid either, something similar seems to have happened with Jeffrey Epstein. What’s objectively and obviously stupid is thinking that Podesta is a child sex rapist, accusing him of it, finding no evidence, and carrying on believing it anyway.
That’s not the equivalent of the Trump investigation. It’s not even the equivalent of believing Trump colluded despite the Mueller report. It’s the equivalent of believing that the Trump pee tapes are real because you found “PEE” spelled out in acrostic in an old magazine ad for Trump Steaks.
Except no one bothered to investigate Podesta. They stopped at “is stupid.” Even though that one’s not actually stupid if you look at his art collection. Sandy Hook is stupid because it makes no sense: even if it were staged for gun laws they didn’t get their gun laws and there’s no plausible way the staging gets to the gun laws. It was stupid on the face of it just like Trump-Russia.
Trump-Russia was stupidly implausible to begin with, occupied the entire nation for two years and even after a multi million dollar investigation disproved it people still cling to it. And have morphed it into new ridiculousness like “Moscow Mitch.”
How do we diffuse these incredibly stupid conspiracy theories?
Eta: oh, and no his underlings did not consider it. You’re stating falsehoods, unlike Alex Jones.
When I said his underlings considered it, anyone with even an ounce of charity would’ve conclude that I meant “the stuff that his underlings did as described in the Mueller report, which some people say was super bad and others say was totally fine but which I can’t describe explicitly because you would just argue with how I characterized it”, and not… I don’t even care what you assumed I meant.
@Enkidum> I don’t think this changes anything of importance?
At the object-level of “Is there a child sex ring operating out of a DC pizzeria?”, I think it’s safe to say that nothing of importance changes. Your priors that it’s obviously ridiculous are almost certainly correct, and anyone who claims that this specific scenario bears serious investigation is probably misled or trolling. But this is mostly because of the prior unlikelihood of the scenario, and not because there is completely zero evidence.
At the meta-level I think there’s something more interesting happening, which is that the media has done an impressive job of replacing the original narrative (which Conrad describes) with a strawman, which it then decisively refutes. There are a number of conclusions one could draw from this, but I think a useful one is that in the very unlikely case that there was a horrible conspiracy in plain site, a similar strawman would likely be constructed and also decisively refuted.
I don’t know, however, what one should do with this insight. In any case, thanks for your polite response.
@dick
Nothing in the Mueller report indicates consideration by Trump underlings to engage in conspiratorial behavior in exchange for illegally hacked emails. The only people who got dirt from Russia was the Clinton campaign, and the defense of this behavior is that they paid for it. So if the Russians actually had proof Hillary had engaged in illegal behavior, to make the acquisition of this information unassailable all a Trump lawyer would have had to do is lean over and say “cut them a check.” Which they certainly would have done but never had the opportunity to do because no such information existed.
Also, say what you will about his motivations, at least Alex Jones recanted his Sandy Hook accusations. Does it mean anything that Alex Jones is more intellectually honest than you are? He says true facts and draws false conclusions, and recants them when proven false. You say false facts, draw false conclusions, and do not recant them when proven false. This is really not good.
Jones is an idiot. You don’t seem to have that excuse.
You brought up Mueller, not me.
dick, in the spirit of SSC love and charity, it’s ok to admit Trump didn’t conspire with Russia. Yes, he’s a horrible person and everyone who supports him is moral monster. But naw, he didn’t conspire with the Russians. No one will think worse of you for admitting that. Quite the opposite.
Every now and then I manage to force one of those out :).
@dick
I didn’t, and charity has nothing to do with it. You’re assuming I read the Mueller report. I avoided it because the conspiracy theory of collusion seems “deeply, deeply stupid”, as you put it.
@ Enkidum
One point seems to be that you undermine your creditability with statements like that. So, yeah, it changes things of importance if you consider important your ability to be persuasive. Ignorance is strength!
@ Conrad
Re Podesta. The reasons behind the strange emails and/or his art collection might be embarrassing for non-pedophile-related reasons. In which case, his refusal to engage seems sensible and justified.
You agree that falsely accusing the President of the United States, and an extreme American patriot of literal treason is bad, right? The penalty for treason is death.
Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon and the rest of their ilk pushing the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory is orders of magnitude worse than falsely accusing grieving parents of being paid actors or falsely accusing someone of running a murderous pedophile ring. The false accusations against the Sandy Hook parents and Podesta and the pizzeria are bad, and I feel bad for them. But that only really effected them and doesn’t seem to have cost them anything besides emotional angst.
TDS is real, and has real world consequences. Go to /r/politics* and it is not at all hard to find people who have cut family members out of their lives because they support an evil Russian traitor like Trump. I’ve posted before my wife’s best friend lost her marriage to TDS. That stuff drove her so crazy her husband couldn’t stand her anymore and they’re getting divorced. They have two sweet little boys who are going to grow up in a broken household now because of the vile and incredibly stupid conspiracy theories pushed by CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, WaPo and people on this very website. The MSM’s stupid conspiracy theories have damaged millions of lives.
Add in the millions of dollars wasted on the Mueller report. Add in the opportunity cost of the government tied up for two years on this monstrously stupid conspiracy theory. Imagine what we could have done with international relations with Russia without this shit-stirring? A safer Europe, a more peaceful planet.
And all anyone had to do to debunk that incredibly stupid theory is think for two seconds, just like Sandy Hook.
“Would anyone with two brain cells to rub together stage an elaborate fake mass shooting of children to hopefully move the needle ever so slightly on the gun control issue and maybe get some laws passed, which incidentally were not passed? Oh. No. While my political opponents are evil, no one is that stupid because the risk is enormous and the gain is both minuscule and uncertain.”
“Would anyone with two brain cells to rub together commit literal treason with an evil foreign autocrat in such a way that he could destroy me and my family and everything I’ve ever built and have me executed in infamy in exchange for some emails that don’t really reveal anything we don’t already pretty much know? Oh. No. While my political opponents are evil, no one is that stupid because the risk is enormous and the gain is both minuscule and uncertain.”
And Maddow and Lemon and the rest of them don’t even have Jones’ excuse of just being stupid. They knew this stuff was false and pushed it anyway. And still won’t recant!
So, if you want to turn this into a left vs right thing, you are throwing stones from a house that’s already shattered into a million pieces. Nothing Alex Jones could ever do will be as bad as Maddow and Lemon and the rest, and they still have shows.
* Do not go to /r/politics.
ETA:
That’s a very good point and reasonable explanation.
I don’t think Trump colluded with Russia. I don’t know why you think otherwise. I ask again, stop trying to goad me into defending something I didn’t say. It’s really aggravating.
Jones explicitly argued that the Sandy Hook shootings were a fraud, that no one was actually killed, and that everyone involved was a paid actor. He isn’t “just asking questions”, he’s making assertions that he himself has claimed were the product of
mental illness, presumably in order to avoid legal liability for them. Frankly, I’m amazed that you’re willing to defend him or them.
This is pure whataboutism, as are your references to the Trump-Russia scandal. I won’t respond to them, and neither should anyone else.
I’m not defending Alex Jones, I’m just not condemning him any more than I condemn anybody else who believes crazy stuff and spouts it on the internet. There’s nothing uniquely bad about Jones.
And there’s nothing wrong with bringing up CNN and MSNBC and the rest. Rachel Maddow is every bit as bad as Alex Jones but I wouldn’t spit on her.
You just defended him in this post, and you previously defended him by claiming that he was “honest”.
And yes, Alex Jones and his ilk are uniquely bad. He and his supporters are unique in accusing grieving parents of being paid “crisis actors”. The magnitude and cruelty of these accusations are staggering. And you’re defending his honesty and morality, signal-boosting his ideas – ideas that he himself has described as being the product of mental illness – and claiming moral equivalency between him and conventional media sources. All I’m asking you to do is to reevaluate the perceived honesty of the media sources from which you got these ideas.
And again, I will not engage in whataboutism. This blog is, at least theoretically, dedicated to rational and logical thought. We should be above the classic Tu Quoque fallacy.
(1) Jones later apologized and said he now no longer believes Sandy Hook was a fraud.
(2) On a lark, I listened to Jones’ second(?) appearance on Joe Rogan, as well as a clip of an interview on some British show. He probably does have a mental illness, based on the way he can’t seem to stop himself from interrupting other people.
(3) Jones may be uniquely bad in having once asserted Sandy Hook was a fraud, but he’s nowhere near unique in misrepresenting the news in a way that gets people hurt.
These “whataboutism” accusations have been aggravating me lately. It’s not whataboutism; it’s pointing out a double standard. Side A does something rotten, and side B hurls no end of tomatoes at it. Side A points out that side B was doing something rotten too, and side B cries “whataboutism”. If side A caves and fixes A’s rottenness, B conspicuously finds something else A is doing, rather than fixing the rottenness on the B side.
End result: we can’t have nice things. Sure, maybe A is pointing out rotten B in order to skate by without cleaning up A’s side. But by that same meta-argument, B is launching a DoS attack to paralyze A, and is indistinguishable from someone unwilling to apply B’s own standards to B’s behavior. Moreover, B started that whole fight.
Edit: wrote something then decided the world was better without it.
Can we just declare this thread CW and let it die?
I respect your restraint (note: what you had written is still in my email), but if you really want to make the world better, consider what I was going to write in response:
My personal solution isn’t to do nothing; it’s to acknowledge that the problem has grown wedged over the years, and is not solved by having conservatives denounce skinheads and liberals doing nothing else. It also helps to acknowledge that if a crazy identifies with you, that doesn’t mean you necessarily identify with the crazy.
Over time, everyone hopefully gets used to distinguishing the crazy from the not. Also, distinguishing the sides within sides. Libs and cons are complicated. There’s no substitute for trying to track the complexity, at least a little. This is one of the few forums that seems to recognize this.
After his career and his life had been destroyed by his own cruelty. I’d be more inclined to forgive him if he recognized the consequences of his actions before they affected him.
I’m reluctant to try to psychologically diagnose public figures, but I am comfortable with calling him an asshole.
Whataboutism – and it’s more general form, the Tu Quoque fallacy – is bad because it derails the argument. Fallacies aren’t necessarily useful at winning discussions, but they are effective in turning conversations into screaming matches by appealing to the worst in people. Tu Quoque, in particular, is functionally identical to an Ad Hominem attack – it attacks the target’s tribe, rather than the target itself, but the effect is similar. If you believe that it’s good to try to actually have conversations rather than “win”, you have a moral obligation to ignore these kinds of tactics.
If your kid touched a hot stove, would you be more sympathetic if they got burned, or if they escaped injury?
I repeat: It’s not whataboutism; it’s pointing out a double standard. It’s not derailing the argument; it’s pointing out a problem with it.
FWIW, I think this discussion needs to welcome Whattaboutism – if the proposition being debated is that Alex Jones is uniquely or unusually bad, I don’t see you can test that concept without examining other cases.
I’d say the closest recent example is people who continued to argue that Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in the act of surrender long after it became apparent that was unlikely to be the case. There are distinctions, but he was not a public figure, it put lives at risk, and the people pushing the story probably honestly believed it, but seem unlikely have approached the facts very objectively.
I don’t think this is a good metaphor. It’s more like if my kid got burned in the process of trying to force someone else to touch the stove. In which case, no, I’m not going to be sympathetic at all.
I disagree: claiming the existence of a double standard is absolutely the technique behind standard Tu Quoque fallacies. The classic example, of course, is the Soviets deflecting criticism from their human rights record with And you are lynching Negroes. It’s a way of derailing and reframing the argument rather than addressing the opponent’s point. In this specific case, @Conrad Honcho was using this technique to avoid having to defend his decision to cast further aspersions on private citizens who have been harassed for years by dangerous conspiracy theorists. I feel that if you start a conversation with, “you know, I think maybe these guys really are pedophiles”, it’s justifiable if someone asks you to defend your position.
J Mann:
I think there have always been crazy conspiracy theorists/mongers out there, and I guess Jones is one of them. But it seems like the damage done is not done by him, but by the very small fraction of crazy and sociopathic members of his audience who actually act in some nasty way on the crazy conspiracy theories–say, by harassing the parents of children murdered by the Sandy Hook nutcase, or by walking into that one DC pizza place with a gun.
One plausible model for this sort of thing is stochastic terrorism. Some media personality somehow incites a few crazy or evil people to do some horrible thing, while denying any responsibility. But if you hold that to be the case for the Alex Jones w.r.t. the awful people who threaten the Sandy Hook parents, I think you also have to hold that to be the case for the media who misrepresented the shooting of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, w.r.t. the awful people who threatened Wilson and Zimmerman. Or for the organizers of BLM w.r.t. the lunatics who were inspired by them to shoot policemen in New York City and Dallas.
The stochastic terrorism model seems like it’s inconsistent with individual responsibility for your actions. And it seems very convenient for people who want to justify shutting down their opponents’ speech.
You changed the metaphor and made a critical disconnect in the process. A closer change would have been: would you be more sympathetic if your child tried to force someone else to touch the stove and burned themselves, or if they tried to force someone else to touch the stove and got away with it?
It’s also the technique behind pointing out that the accuser is being unfair. The accuser demands the accused to honor the accusation, but will not honor the accused’s concerns in return.
So, what then? No one can ever point out double standards? To repeat again: the left is conducting a DoS attack against the right. The left gets to make one complaint after another, never letting go of the microphone. It gets to accuse the right of reframing the argument, because the left is the only side that gets to choose a frame to begin with. It gets to accuse the right of never addressing the left’s point, while conveniently ignoring that the left is the only side that gets to make points.
There is nothing fair about this. More importantly, there’s no incentive for the right to comply. And it’d be just as dishonorable if it were the right doing it.
I changed the metaphor because I didn’t feel that it accurately represented the reality in question, but if I misrepresented your argument, I apologize. In the metaphor you describe here, I wouldn’t be sympathetic in either case.
I don’t think I was being unfair – I asked whether @Conrad Honcho felt that Alex Jones and his supporters were arguing in good faith, and if not, why he was engaging with the media outlets that were promulgating accusations of pedophilia against their political opponents. He responded by trying to deflect the argument to the perceived misdeeds of the mainstream media rather than explain why he felt these outlets were worthy of his, and by extension, our time.
The point of the Tu Quoque isn’t to point out the double standard, it’s to avoid having to defend yourself. It lets you deflect the conversation. In this case, it let @Conrad Honcho shift the conversation from their decision to accuse private citizens of being pedophiles to the more partisan issue of bias in the general media ecosystem.
Since you’re worried about scurrilous leftists like me preventing people like @Conrad Honcho from making any kind of argument, I will commit to this right here and now. If @Conrad Honcho can defend his decision to accuse people of being crisis actors and pedophiles and his decision to continue to trust the kind of media outlets that promulgate these theories, and if he posts this response in this thread before 11:59 PST, Saturday, I will, before 11:59 PST Sunday post a similar justification for my belief that Alex Jones and his ilk are arguing maliciously and in bad faith and should not be engaged with. If I do not make this post before that deadline, I will ask our gracious host to ban me for a month. Is that fair?
@Conrad Honcho
I feel like I’ve explained Russia-Trump before. Here we go again. You make a number of false assumptions and characterizations in this thread.
1) That the Russia investigation was a “monstruously stupid conspiracy theory” based on nothing. The investigation determined, among other things, that Russia illegally hacked the DNC. That’s pretty big. Watergate-level, even. Literally, the same thing that happened in Watergate. Anyway, the investigation began when a Trump campaign staffer was heard talking about his attempts to establish a working relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, as well as his supposed foreknowledge of the email hacks. That sure sounds like a legitimate reason to investigate to me.
Further, the report found that there were multiple attempts by people in Trump’s orbit to connect with the Russian government during the campaign. Others in the campaign resisted these efforts, probably because they were smarter and knew that doing so was a bad idea and possibly illegal. Two of the most damning instances, among many, include Manafort sharing proprietary polling data with Kilimnik, and Trump literally asking the Russians, on television, to hack Hillary’s emails (followed hours later by attempts of Russians to do so).
I don’t know if you’ve read the report, but you really should. At least seek out a detailed summary of the evidence before calling it a stupid conspiracy theory. If you do that and still dismiss the hundreds of pages of evidence in the Mueller report as meaningless while fixating on something weird Podesta said in an out-of-context email as potentially meaningful, you need to step back and examine what your confirmation bias is doing to you.
2) The definition of treason. The Trump-Russia allegations do not constitute treason in the legal sense, and so the suspected actors in the conspiracy would not have been in fear of the death penalty. They were mostly stupid and either did not consider the laws prohibiting foreign involvement (like say, Don Jr) or they were lifelong slimedogs who thought they could get away with anything (like Manafort).
3) “Millions of dollars were wasted on the Mueller report.” The Justice Department pulled in more money than it spent on the Mueller report by seizing the assets of the white collar criminals it caught. It also resolved one of the two big questions it sought to answer: Did the Trump campaign illegally coordinate with Russia? (answer: some evidence, but not enough to establish a criminal conspiracy). The other question, on obstruction of justice, neglected to make a legal decision due to Justice Department policy but laid out pretty conclusively damning evidence that Trump obstructed justice a whole bunch of times (impeachment process ongoing as I type).
4) That Rachel Maddow’s exaggerations are worse than Alex Jones’ accusations. Calling the president a treasonous traitor is boilerplate TV pundit wankery which, at worst, encourages people to hate Trump 1% more than they already should. On the contrary, calling the victims of a massacre evil liars and inciting harassment towards them imparts much greater harm.
Elsewhere you mention a couple getting a divorce over Trump. Good, I say. Support for Trump is a totally legit reason to end a relationship, with or without the Russia aspect, which is but a drop in the bucket of his awfulness. Lord knows I could never maintain a romantic relationship with someone who thinks Trump is somehow good and doesn’t respond to the planet-sized supply of evidence that he is obviously bad. You blame the wife for having “TDS”; I blame the husband for revealing himself as being so hopelessly ignorant or immoral as to be worthy of ending the relationship.
5) That Hillary did the REAL collusion with Russia. This one is particularly stupid. The Clinton campaign legally paid a research company to legally obtain information on Trump’s various shady ties with Russia. They discreetly handed over their findings to the FBI, rather than using it for the campaign. On the contrary, the Trump campaign allowed, and at times encouraged, illegal activity by the Russians on their behalf. It pains me that some people can’t see the difference. Recall that Al Gore immediately contacted the FBI when presented with campaign research that had been illegally obtained.
I’ll say it again: if you are unswayed by the hundreds of pages of evidence in the Mueller report, the evidence from investigative journalists, and the evidence of your eyes and ears (“Russia if you’re listening…”, Trump’s witness intimidation on Twitter, Trump admitting to firing Comey over Russia on TV, etc.) but you think a grieving father laughing for a second demands further inquiry, you need to re-evaluate how you are processing evidence.
Criminy, I thought this was an old example, but Elizabeth Warren just accused Darren Wilson of murdering Michael Brown yesterday.
She’s a lawyer, I think she’s pretty smart, and she’s certainly capable of reading the DOJ investigation. This is really reprehensible.
@Eigengrau
Such are the times we live in. Sigh. It was not always so.
In the sense that, before TV, they had to call presidents traitors in newspapers?
The Abraham Lincoln museum has an exhibit of contemporaneous press clippings, quotes and political cartoons from his enemies that kind of cured me of the notion that there was a period of gentility and mutual respect in American politics that we lost in the modern era. The “papist puppet” JFK stuff leaps to mind as well.
@dick
Well, I might be overreacting. But surely Lincoln is a special case.
I’ll grant you the concerns about Catholic Kennedy.
But seriously, can you honestly say there was similar punditry about Carter, Reagan, either Bush, or Clinton? Hell, even Nixon was called a criminal but never a traitor. I would certainly not claim the press’s treatment of Trump was completely without precedent, but to characterize it as standard seems over the top.
My vague impression is that in the modern era, the tendency to treat the President as the avatar of everything the other party hates started sometime in Clinton’s second term and ramped up steadily after that. Clinton got called a corrupt, lying philanderer; Bush II got called an idiot, a hick, a puppet, a liar, and a war criminal; and I think we all remember what Obama and Trump have gotten called.
In hindsight this might have something to do with a post-Nixon emphasis on honesty and integrity in the office wearing off, but that doesn’t mean that emphasizing honesty and integrity in the office was a bad thing.
I was a (politically-interested) kid when Reagan was president, and people absolutely did vilify him and call him terrible names. I don’t remember that kind of venom against Bush Sr, but that may just be because I wasn’t paying attention. Clinton got a ton of it–some because he really is pretty sleazy, some crazy conspiracy theories spread, presumably, for political advantage.
I dunno. Pat Robertson was flogging videos on the 700 Club about Bill Clinton selling cocaine and murdering hookers and stuff. What would be the Reagan equivalent of that? It does seem like we found a new level there.
(Missed the edit window, but apparently I was thinking of Jerry Falwell, not Pat Robertson. The video was called The Clinton Chronicles)
@albatross11
Maybe it’s just me, but accusations of treason seem an order of magnitude worse to me. Note that I’m bipartisan here; I include the over-the-top responses to Obama’s “more flexibility” gaffe, which is why I didn’t include him in my list of recent Presidents.
To a given President, the distinction might not matter so much, but I consider accusations of treason vastly more destructive to the country as a whole.
Once you claim he is uniquely bad you no longer can legitimately object to Tu Quoque, since if someone else is at least as bad your claim is false.
I think at this point I have read almost all of the thread, and I have not seen Conrad do anything even close to what you accuse him of doing. What he has been saying is that there are facts which could be interpreted in that way and it would be a good thing if people who are confident such interpretations are wrong would explain why the facts do not support the interpretations.
If you disagree, I suggest that you point at things he said which accuse private citizens of being pedophiles. If you cannot do so, you owe Conrad a retraction and apology.
Heh. And they say this place leans right!
@David
I’m pretty sure that the issue here is that practically nobody here agrees that
More specifically, the disagreement is that, at least on the level of human decency, the statement,
is obviously untrue.
I’m not especially interesting in arguing the point, but I strongly agree with it. I’d much rather be accused of treason than of raping kids or faking my child’s murder.
@Hoopyfreud:
I thought it was clear that the comment I was responding to was arguing, not that Tu Quoque was in this case false, but that Tu Quoque was an inappropriate argument. That’s true in many contexts, but not in the particular context of the claim the poster was making, as I pointed out.
@broblawsky
Wasn’t on SSC this weekend, but even if I had been I would not have posted such a thing because I never believed Sandy Hook was faked and never accused anyone of being a crisis actor. The second sentence of my initial post we’re all responding to is:
However, when trying to analyze why Jones might think it was faked, well, yes, the father acted weird in the video. I can see how that would make someone think it’s fake. So if someone says that’s why they think it’s fake, maybe it’s worthwhile to explain why the guy acted weird. My explanation is “he suffered such immense trauma there’s no such thing as ‘acting weird’ or ‘acting not weird’ in this case.” All I was trying to get into with this was “best methods of debunking false conspiracy theories.”
Evidence of conspiracy theories is not usually made up out of whole cloth. A theory, in the broad sense, is an explanation for facts. When we want to discredit any type of theory, including scientific theories, we do this by pointing out that either the facts don’t fit the theory or the theory doesn’t follow from the facts. Jones took a true fact (“guy acts weird in video”) and explains that with a false theory (“he’s an actor.”)
I would also not defend my “decision to continue to trust the kind of media outlets that promulgate these theories” because I do not view or trust these sorts of media outlets. I have never watched a single episode of InfoWars. The only time I’ve seen Alex Jones was when he was on Joe Rogan and I thought he was a wacky guy with bizarre ideas. And I’ve probably seen a few memes, like a gif or something of him and Cenk Uygur getting into it. I do not watch InfoWars for the same reason I do not watch MSNBC: I think I would wind up dumber after watching than I was before watching.
So I don’t know who you’re arguing with here. The things you accuse me of are the exact opposite of everything I’ve said in this thread.
@Eigengrau
Almost everything you’ve said about Trump is some kind of half-truth or lie, but I don’t think pointing them out (again) will do any good and I’d prefer to stick to the topic of conspiracy theories and media double standards. To that end, I’ll respond to:
That’s the double standard right there. When Alex Jones says “a bad thing happened, my outgroup did it!” with scant or no evidence, I roll my eyes. When Rachel Maddow says “a bad thing happened, my outgroup did it!” with scant or no evidence, I roll my eyes. You, however, get furious at Jones and defend Maddow’s phoney accusations as mere “wankery.” He’s a “conspiracy theorist” and she’s a “pundit.” No, they’re both conspiracy theorists.
Jeffery Epstein died this weekend in prison. The official claim is suicide, which is not unreasonable because if you’re going to be convicted of pedophilia and spend the rest of your life in jail, you don’t have much to live for. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC immediately implicated the Russians on twitter with zero evidence. I haven’t checked what Alex Jones has to say about it, but I will express absolutely no surprise if I were to learn he implicated the Clintons with zero evidence. I bet if I head over to Stormfront, those fellows will have placed the blame squarely on the ethno-religious group they blame everything on: the Amish. All looks the same to me. But I’m sure it was fine when Scarborough did it, because baseless speculation is okay for “TV pundits,” just not “conspiracy theorists.”
No, her husband is a Democrat who hates Trump. But the wife was driven to such depression and anxiety by the baseless half-truths, lies and speculation that make up the rest of your post he could no longer stand to live with her. You have to remember, not everyone is smart enough to dismiss your baseless speculations as “wankery.” Some people are dumb enough to actually believe this stuff. This has real-world implications, because people come up with false theories of how the world works when they believe baseless speculation by people they foolishly trust.
@Hoopy
Yes, on the level of human decency, Jones is worse. On “impact from peddling baseless conspiracy theories” I say MSNBC/CNN/NYT/WaPo/etc is worse because audience size and veneer of respectability. Almost no one bought the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory. Half the country bought the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory.
BACK TO THE POINT: All I’m saying is, lots of people engage in conspiracy theories, so instead of just calling them evil based on who they’ve identified as their outgroup, how about we all just agree to point out the reasons why the theory is false by providing legitimate alternatives for the facts in evidence?
I think Conrad is right that mainstream media sources push plenty of conspiracy theories, and many of them involve smearing powerless people who then have their lives upended.
I think there are way, way too many people who have high prestige and lots of media access, who put very little value in the truth relative to winning today’s political battle or teaching the right kind of lesson. And I also think modern communications technology has been *great* at democratizing this–it’s commonplace for memes or “retweets” to have changed the original source (or just made it up) to enhance the message. Once, you had to be 60 Minutes to misleadingly edit a video interview to put words in someone’s mouth–now every rando on the internet can do it.
This is moving the goalposts. You started this whole thread by suggesting we should “all agree to point out the reasons why the theory is false” re: Pizzagate, and no one’s position on Pizzagate reduces to “calling them evil based on who they’ve identified as their outgroup.”
My position (and I think the majority position) on Pizzagate is “I don’t know many of the details but I assume it’s bullshit because nobody seems to take it seriously.” I maintain that that is a perfectly useful heuristic; spending time refuting the individual pieces of evidence for such theories is usually a waste of time. I demonstrated this when you cited a piece of evidence for Pizzagate, and I looked at it, and my time was indeed wasted thereby.
The Trump/Russia stuff is completely orthogonal to all this. Theories that ideologically divide the left from the right are different from theories that divide the mainstream from the fringe. They require different heuristics.
dick:
+1
The other side of this is that it’s probably useful to have a heuristic for how to notice when something’s really going on even though most of the mainstream types in the world say it isn’t. Finding smart people who are willing to contradict received wisdom and reading their comments is probably useful. Though to some extent, it’s a matter of when you need to care. If some sleazy dude I’ve never heard of is (was) pimping underaged girls and then blackmailing his clients to get lots of money and power, or some apparently benevolent old guy is (was) running an investment fund that turns out to be a Ponzi scheme, that’s kind-of abstractly interesting, but maybe not tremendously relevant for my daily life. Unless my daughter wants my permission to get taken on some wonderful trips to exotic locations with Mr Epstein, or I’ve been offered the chance to put some of my money into Mr Madoff’s exclusive fund, in which case I’d better develop the ability to think for myself about these questions.
There’s a conspiracy theory mode of thinking that’s broken, where everything is always more evidence for your theory and you’ve built an evidence-proof shell around your ideas. Any given conspiracy theory may or may not have some truth to it, but you definitely want to avoid the conspiracy-theory mode of thinking.
dick
You were convincing me until this, which to me undermined the entire foundation. This is because casting things as left/right or mainstream/fringe misses that the whole point of calling things conspiracy theories is an attempt to make them fringe, and media tries to do this on the left-right spectrum all the time.
@dick
I don’t think it’s moving the goalposts. Look back at my original post. I prefer conspiracy theories to be debunked by pointing out the errors in the theory rather than by saying “debunked!” with no debunking. This tends to happen when the people making the claim are the media’s outgroup or the alleged conspirators are the media’s ingroup. Jones isn’t just wrong he’s evil. Maddow’s conspiracy theories are fine, though, that’s just speculation by a TV pundit. Completely different thing. Even though they behave in the exact same way.
And Trump/Russia is not orthogonal to this because, as albatross11 says:
This was exactly how CNN/MSNBC and the rest treated Trump-Russia. Someone hacked the DNC and Podesta, perhaps the Russians. This benefits the hundreds of millions of people around the world who do not like Hillary and would prefer her not to be President (including me!), perhaps because they don’t want to be “liberated” like the Libyans and Syrians etc. This obviously also benefits Trump. Therefore, Trump conspired with the Russians on this crime. He either directed it or knew about it or engaged in some quid pro quo. There was absolutely no evidence of this at the start of the conspiracy theorizing. And the Mueller report confirms that there is no evidence of any US person conspiring with the Russians to hack the DNC and Podesta.
The media latched on to this “truth,” and then went hunting for proof of the thing they already knew to be true. Then confirmation bias and the conspiracy-theory mode of thinking albatross11 describes took over. Things that don’t fit the theory or are even exculpatory are twisted and warped into supporting the very theory they refute.
For instance, that Papadopolous was told the Russians had thousands of Hillary’s emails. This does not fit with the theory. Hillary’s campaign emails were not hacked. The meeting took place months before the hack occurred. Mifsud might have been talking about her State department emails that were kept on her bathroom server. There’s no reason for Papa to even be surprised by this disclosure because literally every Republican in the country was making the joke about “if you want to know what was in Hillary’s deleted emails, just ask the [Russians|Chinese|North Koreans]!” This meeting does not fit the claims of the theory, but the media flogs it like it is.
Maggie Haberman pushes stuff like Kushner Is Said to Have Discussed a Secret Channel to Talk to Russia during the transition. This should be unsurprising, because back channels are part of diplomacy. I hope he was also looking for back channels to talk to China and Saudi Arabia and India and everybody else. Also, this should be considered exculpatory: if Kushner was looking for secret back channels to talk to Russia during the transition, then he didn’t have them during the election. Perhaps an interesting story would have been “Kushner Goes Looking for Backchannels With Every Country…Except Russia.” Despite this story not fitting the conspiracy theory, it gets thrown out there to keep people like my wife’s friend wrapped up in the false worldview.
We learn about the Trump Tower meeting. It’s the smoking gun! Well except what was being offered was not hacked emails from the DNC and Podesta but “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.” Democratic party campaign emails are not official documents from Russia. None of them incriminate Hillary in any way (except maybe that campaign finance bundling scheme but that’s inside baseball), and certainly not with Russia. I have never seen such documents, but if they exist I would very much like to because perhaps they can be used to #LockHerUp. The fact Don Jr. needed an introduction from some other acquaintance should also be exculpatory: why bother with the introduction and the meeting after the hack if the working relationship was already established before the hack?
When I pointed this out on this very forum (I can go back and find the posts if you want) I was corrected by our left-leaning posters that, of course they’re not going to come right out and say they’ve got the hacked emails, the description in the email was just bait so they could offer the hacked stuff at the meeting! In the conspiracy theory mode of thinking, when the evidence does not support the theory, one just needs to rewrite the plain language in the evidence to support the conclusion you already “know” to be true.
And remember, from the beginning, the Trump-Russia conspiracy was stupid. The idea that these people who are at least smart enough to tie their shoes are going to commit a massive crime in conjunction with untrustworthy people for such small and uncertain gain is ridiculous. It should have been dismissed out of hand. It wasn’t because the alleged conspirator was in the media’s outgroup and the victim in their ingroup. They went looking for evidence, confirmation bias takes over, and we’re off to the races. It’s not orthogonal to the discussion because the media’s behavior with regards to Trump-Russia was indistinguishable from Alex Jones’ behavior with regards to his conspiracy theories.
Conrad was the one to refer to the Trump-Russia stuff as a conspiracy theory. I wouldn’t use that term, but I also don’t want to get in to a semantic argument about which things we can and can’t call “conspiracy theories”. Arguing semantics on the internet is the Most Boring Thing in the World.
You’re moving the goalposts by suggesting that people are dimissing Pizzagate or Alex Jones “based on who they’ve identified as their outgroup”. No one’s doing that. Or, if you think they are, say who and why. Dismissing ideological conspiracy theories because the side that benefits from it doesn’t believe it is not a partisan heuristic, it works both ways. I find that Fox is very reliable about investigating Clinton scandals, and flogging them if there’s a shred of evidence. They’re not flogging this story, QED. You can use the same heuristic to dismiss anti-Trump theories that the left isn’t flogging.
Again, hard pass. Are you going to do this every time a liberal mentions Mueller?
You’ve brought this up before. I’m not any more impressed now than I was then.
Thanks Nornagest. I’d forgotten that I posted about this before, and I hadn’t seen the responses there for some reason. So sorry for the repetition.
Nobody is claiming that the Lyme pathogen was invented by the U.S. bio-weapons researchers (re your comment about Otzi the Iceman having it). The claim is that Burgdorfer and others were attempting to weaponize the pathogen via ticks, and Burgdorfer himself admitted doing this.
Why would they weaponize via deer ticks? That’s a terrible delivery method. Slow, can’t be aimed, and can only be deployed in North America and Europe.
The upside is that when someone dies of this, you can say: oh deer.
responding to Jaskologist:
Good question! In fact, 2 other people, immediately above, asked it and I responded with the same quote both times. The bottom line is that, in the Army’s own documented words explaining why ticks were weaponized,
Homer Simpson accidentally releasing Lyme into the wild: “Doe!”
@ detroitdan
Could you provide the direct source for that quote? I see you quoting the full passage, but I would be interested in the original document.
The reasoning seems insufficient to me. Jaskologist is correctly pointing out that ticks are only able to survive in the US (and surrounding locals), and in europe… but a tick with lyme disease seems like a useless weapon.
They’re like a minefield except imprecise and spread randomly (ticks scatter over time, and you can’t remove them)
Ineffective at area denial (you can drive through the area safely and even walk relatively safely so long as you wear long sleeves)
Not that dangerous (My coworker thinks he has lyme disease, and he’s still showing up at work and productive)
I mean… a solider is more likely to be wearing sleeves than a mask right? it just seems like a really poorly conceived plan.
@ souleater
Here’s where I got the quote: Kris Newby responds to Telford’s criticism of BITTEN
Newby lists her source as Source: U.S. Army Chemical Corps, “Summary of Major Events and Problems (Fiscal Year 1959),” Rocky Mountain Arsenal Archive. She has a link (at the link above) to all her sources, but it seems a bit overwhelming to me. I’m not sure if the 1959 U.S. Army Chemical Corps doc is online.
As others have noted, it seems like a stupid idea. They probably didn’t know what direction the program would take, and would have been greatly surprised by the ultimate result of Lyme Disease.
I don’t consider that a very strong source. That’s just an author on a book on weaponized lyme disease, defending the idea.
I hope this isn’t an isolated demand for rigour, but I doubt the central claim that ticks were ever weaponized. A .gov paper, or a news article from a reputable news organization discussing the history of it would be sufficient to change my mind.
The source you are questioning is U.S. Army Chemical Corps, “Summary of Major Events and Problems (Fiscal Year 1959),” Rocky Mountain Arsenal Archive. That is not the author. That is the U.S. Army, the agency responsible for the bio-weapons program.
Appreciate the pushback, but the author doesn’t seem to be making stuff up, but rather has done her homework and is quoting the U.S. Army.
That source wasn’t the US army, that was a book salesman claiming he was quoting the US army.
That’s not a source, that’s hearsay. XKCD I don’t know where that guy found his quote, but claiming that it’s equivalent to a .gov paper is irresponsible at best.
I don’t like to be flippant, and I’m not trying to mock you, but I feel like the Lincoln quote does a good job at making the point that its very easy to create fake quotes out of thin air and you can’t just accept them at face value.
You mean the link to “The Bitten Files”?
Did you follow it? It’s to a large number of documents, of which the first three have nothing at all to do with any of the subjects she is making claims about. It looks as though she is claiming to have evidence and supporting that claim with a pointer to a pile of documents almost all of which are irrelevant.
Which suggests to me that she is either a nut or a fraud.
What am I missing? How did you find documents at that link that support her claims?
The document pile has 2.6 million separate files..
This is a variation on a common fallacy known as a Gish Gallop. It takes 10 seconds to post a quote, but would take his opponent years to poor through the millions of unrelated documents to find a source.. if one exists at all.
How do you know that? Have you found an independent source for the document or are you going on what the author says her source is–which is poor evidence that she isn’t making stuff up?
It is online, though it is 181 pages (unsearchable) so I didn’t look for the quote.
I suspect a bad link for the bitten files. Searching for Summery of major events and problems U.S. Army Chemical Corp. I found Federation of American Sciences has some of them although not the Fiscal year 1959 in question
https://fas.org/irp/threat/cbw/
Fiscal year 1962 does mention contracts for building a pilot plant for a an entomological agent and viral/Rickettsia agent at Pine Bluff Arsenal.
So there is evidence that the Army wanted to weaponize ticks.
However that is still a long way from linking Lyme disease to an Army biological weapon and if the documents don’t get sorted out I’m not going to pursue it. Borrelia explains most of the Lyme disease cases and Kris Newby concedes that Borrelia would be an “unlikely weapon.” This organism reproduces very slowly and it can’t be mass produced in large volumes.
With the pathogens I’m more familiar with, if they escape usually the people in the facility are the first to be affected.
If National Geographic is to be believed, Lyme disease may go back 5000 plus years (based on “Otzi the Iceman”): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131016-otzi-ice-man-mummy-five-facts/
Right. The claim is not that the Lyme Disease pathogen was created by the bio-weapons program. Rather, the bio-weapons program sought to weaponize the pathogen by putting it in deer ticks, and doing some other pathogenic manipulations.
OK, so this appears to be a case where you show up with a general question, but then when people reply, you have a number of specific, detailed responses that imply you have researched in detail.
At best, you have already made your mind up, and are using a rhetorical technique in an attempt to convince bystanders.
At worst, you are trolling.
Either way, it’s really not worth further engagement.
The avatar is sort of a giveaway.
responding to Gray Ice:
This is just an interest of mine. I think it’s a good idea to test one’s ideas and see what others think. I thought perhaps that I would get some interesting feedback that would help my understanding. But it’s not surprising that others who happened by haven’t previously looked into this very much.
I was thinking that perhaps there’s a larger point which may be of interest regarding circumstantial evidence and burden of proof in argumentation. But I guess that was too much of a stretch.
I have no vested interest in this one way or the other. Just something I saw a couple of months ago that seemed pretty obvious, yet not widely acknowledged.
Why is the avatar a giveaway? a google search directs me to modern monetary theory.
Also, I think it’s reasonable for someone to have something they want to discuss, and open the comment with a general observation, but have already researched it in detail… I do that sometimes.
I’ve never heard of the lyme disease thing before, but I’m not opposed to someone trying to convince me. I don’t think anyone would be able too.. but a good debate never killed anyone
responding to souleater…
Thanks for the supportive words. I like the quality of the conversations here at slatestarcodex, and people don’t seem to be overly partisan. So I was hoping for an intelligent discussion, and I did learn a thing or two.
Weeeeell, don’t look below, because we do someone stating:
@ anyone
I see that dick’s comment has now disappeared below. This is actually the second time I’ve seen comments vanish.
If a comment is deleted (within the edit time window), do all responses to it also get deleted? Further, can a comment that is outside the edit window be deleted? I’m not understanding how this works.
I think comments get deleted automatically if they get enough reports. That was admittedly not the nicest thing I’ve said here, but the thing I was complaining about seemed pretty egregious.
Area denial only works if the soldier can conclusively attribute a serious problem to visiting a specific area, and if there is no reasonable countermeasure.
Lyme disease has none of those characteristics.
The symptoms of Lyme disease do not develop quickly and are not serious. Ticks do not remain confined to a single field. There are simple countermeasures, such as tucking your pants into your socks, checking yourself for ticks, wearing DEET, mowing the lawn, and if you get infected a short course of doxycycline or an injection of ceftriaxone will suffice.
So this is a phenomenally bad rationale and it is no wonder the military abandoned the concept of tick warfare.
Also your thesis is unclear to me : which organism is alleged to have been weaponized – Borrelia or Ixodes?
@ rahien.din
I agree it seems like weaponizing ticks with the Lyme disease pathogen seems like a stupid idea in retrospect. Nevertheless, it is on record and not seriously disputed that this is what the Army did.
Newby lists her source as Source: U.S. Army Chemical Corps, “Summary of Major Events and Problems (Fiscal Year 1959),” Rocky Mountain Arsenal Archive. She has a link (at the link above) to all her sources.
As others have noted, it seems like a stupid idea. They probably didn’t know what direction the program would take, and would have been greatly surprised by the ultimate result of Lyme Disease.
The thesis which I am referring to (not exactly “my thesis”) is the Ixodes (Lone Star tick) was weaponized with Borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme disease pathogen), and possibly other pathogens. Again, this is well documented and doesn’t seem to be a point of contention.
So I just watched the first five episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and it’s as great as you guys said it was. Thanks for the recommendation!
(Edited to add: I thought I was responding to a thread below, but apparently this registered as a new post…sorry about that.)
Sword Art Online was considered to be good and was popular. I don’t think anybody likes Angel Beats but me, but I remember liking it a lot. It’s not my cup of tea, but all the young women I’ve ever met who are into anime but would have been into The Cure if they were born 15-20 years earlier seem to like the “Fate” series of animes.
I gave up on SAO shortly after the second…season? arc? whatever… started. The first arc was full of cliches but handled them well, the second just piled on more cliches and undid the parts of the first that I liked. Also, if anyone ever tries to argue there’s no such thing as a male Mary Sue or one that exists in canon, I’m just going to point at Kirito and leave it there.
Angel Beats was pretty uneven. Points for a weird premise and mishmashing a bunch of different genres together, but as a whole it didn’t really work.
A lot of highly praised anime is pretty niche and assumes you’re already steeped in otaku culture. I liked Steins;Gate a lot but a good chunk of it will just go over an anime noob’s head. Also, I don’t know if Madoka Magica has the same effect on someone without at least a passing awareness of Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura.
I pretty much define SAO as just the first season. I’m not sure I know of anybody who thinks the other stuff is anything but weird spin-offs, like those chibi shows they make from serious shows.
I think it’s a fundamental part of liking anime to tell someone you like something and have them say some version of “Oh that’s fucking terrible I hate that”. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, or even avoidable.
One of my favorite anime in recent years is about bicycling; another is about a 20-something girl in love with a middle-aged paunchy middle-manager who in turn is in love with marshmallows(and the show is an ad for marshmallows in real life, or something). I think both of these are genuinely good shows but the chances of someone else liking them, especially another anime person with their own refined tastes, is slim.
So then you need stuff that defies classification and is also really fucking good; that leaves us with Miyazaki, Cowboy Bebop / Samurai Champloo, and FMA. I honestly can’t think of anything else that would be a “I liked that thing you recommended!” hit at a rate of >20% besides those.
“I think it’s a fundamental part of liking anime to tell someone you like something and have them say some version of “Oh that’s fucking terrible I hate that”. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, or even avoidable.”
These strips are really funny: https://gunshowcomic.com/ac/
That’s because there are like 5 anime total that are actually good and everything else is shades of shit. You just get to choose what sort of shit you like best.
Not that I’m judging – I unironically like Serial Experiments Lain and Cyber City Oedo 808. Just, you know, justifying my life choices.
Yeah, but this is true of everything. There are like 2 good TV shows at one one time and everything else is shades of shit, and then most people don’t even watch those two good shows, but get really excited for the walking dead.
No, I mean that anime operates on Sturgeon’s Law cubed. I’m saying that literally 5 good anime have ever been made.
I’m kinda baffled. What makes so much of anime shit? The writing, the characters, what?
There are definitely ones I’ve watched because I’m total trash for the setting or plot or whatever, like Mirai Nikki, but that isn’t most of my viewing habits.
@Hoopyfreud
I feel like this comment is in about the same category as when I say “every sports game is the same as every sports game, and sports games are dumb.”
There are like two good sitcoms ever made.
Advancement in sitcom technology has rendered this retroactively true.
I can’t sit through anything with a laugh-track.
That twenty seconds of faked and way out of proportion laughter there? That could have been another joke. Instead, you merely pointed out how wildly out of proportion your estimation of your own humor is.
@Hoopyfreud:
What are you talking about? There might be that many legitimately good shows per genre, not including inherently bad ones like harem comedies and anything centered on moeblobs.
I had to look up “moeblob.” My life is richer now.
“Listen to me, you…you…moeblob, you wouldn’t know a contract deliverable if it was tattooed to your forehead.”
Yeah, definitely going to have to try that one out at work.
So you’re saying I’m in the right order of magnitude.
I mean, it obviously depends on how thin you slice “genre,” but if you eliminate anime with waifubait, excessively lecherous camera angles, Mary Sue main characters, >25% of screentime spent screaming, >25% stupid love polygon drama that would be resolved if anyone were capable of communicating, >25% filler, or a total lack of visual or textual originality, 5 good ones per genre seems excessively optimistic to me.
In SF anime, which is the richest genre I can think of, I can hit:
Cowboy Bebop
Serial Experiments Lain
Texhnolyze
Planetes
Ghost in the Shell: SAC (and this one is marginal)
Cyber City Oedo 808 (I’m not serious about this, it’s the Johnny Mnemonic of anime and I love it for that, but it’s not good)
Hey now, what do you not like about Ghost in the Shell?
Also, I think your standards for “good” might be different from everyone else, because your standards suggest that almost all visual media is bad (and I’m not saying you’re wrong to feel that way, you should just know that isn’t in step with how the general public gauges things).
@acymetric
It’s… fine. It takes a LONG time to get the Laughing Man plot to do anything but just sort of be there, and the Villains of the Week tend toward the not-compelling-enough-to-not-count-as-filler IMO.
And yeah, the bit about “what counts as good” is probably fair. My standard for “good” is, “noticeably artistically better than the cultural background entertainment radiation,” or maybe “worth making an effort to find.” My backlog of “good” movies is several times longer (in number but also overall length) than my backlog of good anime.
@Hoopyfreud
That’s fair. I’m fairly certain there was a “Laughing Man” release that was just the episodes relevant to the Laughing Man arc without all the filler which would probably have been better for you.
When I like anime, it’s often at least partly because of the alien perspectives and conventions, though I’ve watched enough anime for some of them to start to wear on me. But apart from the fact that levels of xenophilia vary (and perhaps even more importantly different people tolerate or enjoy different kinds of alienness), being an English-speaking anime fan means either dealing with subtitles or dubbing. Subtltles are annoying and aren’t necessarily all that faithful, with the translators obviously rarely making improvements when they make changes. Dubbing is often even less faithful (with the need to match the timing), and the quality of voice actors for dubbing is generally considerably lower than the quality of voice actors for the original (and there are few enough voice actors doing dubbing that it’s not uncommon for one character to quite inappropriately remind you of another from another anime because it’s the same overworked voice actor). These factors do not help things.
@Hoopyfreud
Are you serious? Arteeestic critically acclaimed anime there is a-plenty. And, honestly, anime scifi is less likely to be great than their slice of life character studies.
Kyousougiga
Eccentric Family
Your Name
Mob Psycho 100
Sound Euphonium
Gatchaman Crowds
Flip Flappers
Giant Robo
Mushishi
Kino’s Journey
Shin Sekai Yori
Tatami Galaxy
Ping Pong
Shiki
Hyouka
Katanagatari
Made in Abyss
Casshern Sins
Land of the Lustrous
Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju
Paranoia Agent, really anything Satoshi Kon has done
Sarazanmai
Concrete Revolutio
Haibane Renmei
Kids on the Slope
Cross Game
Run With the Wind
A Silent Voice
Little Witch Academia
Alderamin on the Sky
Wolf Children
and of course, the truest anime of our times, Pop Team Epic
http://thecartdriver.com/animetacritic-v-2-more-reviewers-more-lists/
I toughed out SAO for 1 Season. The tone was all over the board for me. I could handle the clichés, but SAO felt way too much like standard-anime-festival-at-Christmas and much less Black-Mirror-Dystopia. I feel like that show would’ve held together a lot better if it just held the tone of the first two episodes: we’re stuck in a video game, if you die in the video game you die in real life, and these Boss Fights are super-super hard (and there are a HUNDRED of them you have to survive!)
Angel Beats had a few cool moments and a cool concept, but totally incoherent and hand-waved a whole bunch of actual tense moments. Like Angel fighting 100 copies of herself. “Oh, yeah, I just did that off-screen, no biggie, what’s for lunch?”
Does anyone argue that? I thought the go-to obvious rebuttal was James Bond.
[long digression about Star Wars redacted for the sake of sanity]
Yeah yeah I know everyone discovered what a Mary Sue was when The Force Awakens came out. But the argument was whether or not Rey was a Mary Sue (she totes is) and not whether or not all Mary Sues must be girls.
Both “you’re just saying she’s a Sue because she’s a girl” and “it’s about fan fiction, there’s no way to have a Sue in canon” were arguments I saw deployed to defend Rey.
Mary Sue as a term came out of fanfic, where she’s generally a wish-fulfillment character, or even an idealized author insert. There’s very much an analogue in male fanfiction, but in my experience it’s less often discussed as a matter of story quality.
ETA: Oh, since the discussion shifted a bit, yeah, Mary Sues can totally exist in canon.
Bond is near, but I could see an argument against. He is trained and backed by the British government and a lot of his escapes are thanks to Qs gadets etc, where it is the work of others that get him out of trouble. There is a large gap between ‘guy who was trained for years to be a spy’ and ‘person who picks up weapon for the first time/defeats expert in that weapon’.
If you take everything Bond did across all of the movies then he clearly is a Gary Stu, but he isn’t one in every movie individually.
I would say most male characters that are set up as Mary Sues are set up as villains so that the hero can overcome them at the end.
Wesley Crusher. Bond is on the edge of the concept: too old, and not an insert into an existing franchise, and his extraordinary competence is plausibly the result of training and experience. Wesley is 100% Mary Sue, including the part where he’s Eugene Wesley Roddenberry’s authorial self-insert.
Honestly, Kirito is on the relatively benevolent side of Mary Sue-dom along with Rey. Anime power fantasy protagonists have gotten so, so, so much worse. Smartphone, Demon Lord, Death March, Wise Man’s Grandchild, Mahouka, Big Order, @#$%ing Hand Shakers, it really, really can get much worse.
I mean, Kirito doesn’t @#$%ing own slaves.
Like, I can enjoy the Kirito curb-stomping sometimes, if it’s within the bounds of the current game rules, and some of the other characters also get chances to shine. It’s when Kirito outright breaks game rules for hand-waved Reasons and the other characters become useless, that he becomes an aggravating character.
The Ordinal Scale film was a lot of fun.
To be a power fantasy character is not inherently bad. Xena is ludicrously entertaining, for example. Same with Rey. She’s just a classic sports film prodigy character.
The anime characters above I list as bad are bad not because they’re overpowered, but because they make their shows boring. Sometimes Kirito does that, but not always.
My understanding of the characteristics of a Mary Sue include their being an insert around whom the plot and characters warp, a character so aggressively perfect that they overshadow the canon characters in their own wheelhouses and are probably their love objects (as the saying went, “braver than Kirk, smarter than Spock, more compassionate than McCoy, and sleeps with all three”), and an author identification figure.
The term has obviously undergone a fair amount of memetic mutation by now. But I think that some combination of those characteristics should really be involved.
Characterizing the protagonist of a story as a Mary Sue is kind of fraught, since they’re supposed to be the focus of the action (rather than stealing the spotlight) and there’s a long tradition of heroes who win because they’re better than everyone else from Doc Savage to Superman to the aforementioned James Bond.
Maybe there’s a case to be made if they’re also very clearly an author insert, but it’s at least far from the original sorts of central example.
I do think Rey is limited as a character by the fact that they appear to have been reluctant to give her any flaws or weaknesses or need for anyone else to ever help or save her, for fear that it would send the wrong message. But I don’t agree that alone makes a Mary Sue.
(I’ve seen it argued that she’s no different from Luke Skywalker in being a natural wunderkind. But Luke was a whiny kid who resisted joining the fight till forced, was barely able to make use of the Force, with difficulty, for the first two films. He was the despair of his teacher, and lost his first major fight flat out. He needs to be rescued, and he fails in his first solo initiative. He was an instinctive hot pilot, but not omnicompetent.)
I thought the go-to rebuttal of the rebuttal was “have you seriously never watched Goldfinger?”
This naturally warps the plot around her, either she can’t be the central focus of a conflict since she has to be able to get out of it on her own every time, or other characters have to be bent around this. Kylo can’t be a great fighter and also fight Rey, the outcome is he looks like an emo cosplayer with his actions. Luke can’t impart wisdom to her because she doesn’t need it, and she can’t be shown to rely on it later. If Rey and Poe end up on a space ship fleeing the enemy and they need evasive maneuvers then Rey has to be the pilot, despite it being established that Poe is a great pilot.
The creation of a flawless character necessitates that you bend the universe around them, other characters can only impact the situation when the perfect character is off screen.
Rey is Kathleen Kennedy’s Wesley. Boom, done.
We don’t have Rey’s 3rd movie yet, but in Luke’s 3rd movie he gives in to the dark side and attacks Vader out of anger, besting him and seemingly proving the Emperor’s point. Then he is overwhelmed by the Emperor, his abilities are definitely bounded in these scenes.
Hmm, if this were true, than a Star Wars movie with Rey in it would require pretty much the entire supporting cast to disperse throughout the galaxy for most of it in order to have any development at all Better yet, they’d disperse the cast and then send Rey off to the middle of nowhere for most of the plot so that it can actually develop.
Even if doing so messed up the pacing of the movie and resulted in a jumpy, uncohesive mess, it would still have some conflict, rather than rey confronts and then immediately solves every problem.
Since now my mind is stuck on this-
The difference between a Mary Sue and a generic protagonist is how other characters can influence the plot. Lets take a mediocre to poorly written movie where the end is pre ordained but doesn’t elevate the protagonist to a Mary Sue, and how it could have.
Kickboxer
Jean Claude Van Damme (JCVD) is an assistant to his older brother (OB) in a fight against the Bad Guy (BG). His older brother establishes two things, one that he is a better fighter than JCVD which prevents him from being a Mary Sue from the get go, and that BG is really strong and really bad when he beats, and then paralyzes OB.
OB then hangs out in a wheelchair for the rest of the movie as a reminder that there are real stakes to JCVD’s eventual fight, and also that JCVD wasn’t strong enough to protect him. Remember how Finn got his ass kicked by Kylo with Rey watching, but then later Finn totally gets healed and there are no real long term repercussions for him. That is a Mary Sue warping other characters, you can’t have the constant reminder of their failures with Finn losing a limb, or being in chronic pain.
Then JCVD convinces a guy to train him to fight BG, reinforcing that he isn’t strong enough and we get a long stretch of JCVD struggling, failing and suffering to get stronger.
Then we get the Love Interest (LI), BG rapes LI to infuriate JCVD and make him fight worse (also to reinforce that he is bad). LI acts with agency and decides to conceal this from JCVD so that he can fight without that distraction (later BG taunts him with this, setting JCVD off so that her actions actually do impact how events go).
At no point in the movie is it made clear until the final fight that JCVD is going to win (outside of our understanding of the genre), he fails as a man to protect his brother (crippled for life) and his girlfriend (raped), and even in victory the long term repercussions of these actions will always be with them. These repercussions are persistently reinforced as well with the brother in the chair being prominent and the reveal of the rape occurring at the climax.
To make JCVD a Gary Stu you have to
1. Have the brother lose, but only to be relegated to a side character, not permanently wounded.
2. Skim over the difficulty of training.
3. You can’t have his girlfriend get raped, that is a total failure of masculinity, so its either cut or he bursts in at the last second to save her.
Each of these cuts out any possibility of developing the three side characters, and strips any tension from the rest of the movie. 1+3 reduce the stakes, and 2 makes it obvious that the hero is going to win when they show up their master right at the beginning of training.
And this is a pretty generic movie, following generic tropes that manages to understand how to avoid over building the protagonist. All the actions center around JCVD but the side characters still contribute to building the story.
Interesting, but does that imply that any story without any side characters has a Mary Sue by default?
Admittedly, the only genre I can think of where there are routinely no side characters are those “lost in nature” movies where it’s one man’s ingenuity and pluck against an uncaring wilderness.
Again, the issue isn’t about any “tangible detail” about what Rey can or cannot do. What makes a Mary Sue is if their warping the story around them is detrimental to the story. The original Star Trek examples applied because people weren’t there to read about an original character showing up the Star Trek protagonists they actually wanted to read about.
I don’t care whether or not Rey is overpowered in The Force Awakens, because she’s just a part of an ensemble there, and whatever her skill level was, it did not make the film boring. (Have not seen The Last Jedi yet.)
I also don’t think it’s possible for a protagonist to warp the plot around them, since the plot exists around them by definition. Everyone in the Iliad is responding to Achilles’ actions (or inaction) to one degree or another, but that’s not warping the story, that is the story.
Whether Rey’s story is interesting is another question and mileage may vary. I thought her plotline was the best part of The Last Jedi: a reasonably well-told story albeit not to my personal taste.
(I don’t particularly enjoy the decision in the sequel trilogy to make the victories of the original films’ heroes to be basically ephemeral and empty, and it doesn’t jibe with my sense of those characters. That’s all within legit artistic discretion, but I don’t have to like it.)
The other two plot threads in that film work much less well, but not because of anything to do with Rey. (Poe’s could have been a decent parable about military discipline or “the skipper’s right even when he’s wrong” but was mishandled badly, and I’m not sure what could be done to salvage Finn and Rose’s Excellent Space Vegas Adventure.)
It’s possible, and wonderful when it happens. Harold Bloom memorably wrote that Falstaff and Rosalind have so much power as characters that they seize the narrative from Shakespeare himself, and there are other characters who have grown so memetically powerful that they shift stories that they’re in. (Batman, IMHO).
As for Mary Sues, it’s probably up to people to decide individually. I can see people complaining about One Punch Man or Mob Psycho, but for me, although those characters are so powerful that they unavoidably warp the plot, I still find the plot interesting.
I don’t think Rey is much worse than, say Goku (although at least he’s kind of dumb sometimes), but DBZ has the same problem that most characters can only (1) help Goku from time to time, (2) job for him, or (3) try to hold out until Goku arrives.
That was very interesting, thanks. And the idea that the Mary Sue-ness you described in Rey (can’t accept wisdom from Luke or help from Poe, etc) is sort of an accidental overreaction to the general societal backlash at weak female characters, that seems obvious now that you mention it, but I hadn’t really gotten that. Seems like it applies to Captain Marvel, too.
ETA: I finally watched the Avengers endgame movie the other night, and (without getting in to the many weird and confusing things that I assume have already been discussed) it’s already clear they’re going to have a hard time finding ways for Captain Marvel to be challenged. Like, she can fly faster than light, her fight with the biggest baddest warship in the universe lasted literally one second, but then we’re supposed to have dramatic tension when someone punches her? They need to invent her version of kryptonite or something.
Sorry, but these are terrible examples of characters being “so powerful that they unavoidably warp the plot.” Saitama can’t get anything he wants in the series. Nobody will thank him for his heroism, and until Genos no one even recognizes his potential. He barely passes the hero test, and the first season is a slow grind of getting characters, one by one, to recognize him for what he is. Mob may have immense power, but he doesn’t even want it. His goals totally orthogonal; he wants the girl, he wants to become strong, and he doesn’t want to hurt anyone with his powers. With the second, we are reminded over and over again how painfully inadequate he is, while with the third, the first season treats in great detail the terrible consequences for his relationship with his brother when he failed. These characters are comically overpowered, but they’re not Mary Sues.
Is now the time to claim that the real Mary Sue of the new Star Wars movies is Rose?
Her part of the story basically requires Finn’s character progression from the previous movie to regress so that he can go through it all again. She gets to teach the main characters valuable lessons and then die nobly and beautifully at the end in the arms of the main character who definitely loved her because she was so wise and beautiful.
Uh, Rose didn’t die (and she’ll be in Rise of Skywalker).
If she were truly a Mary Sue, it’d be named Rose of Skywalker.
1. She isn’t dead, or at least not confirmed to be at the end of the film.
2. When she kisses Finn… he just looks confused?
I disagree. Not only do they leave whole organizations in ruins, they force other world beaters to change their philosophies once they become aware of the main character’s existence.
IMHO, one of the main things the author likes to write about is how other people react to learning that there’s someone so powerful that the other character is basically irrelevant to them.
Disagree here, DBZ has a ton of issues (namely no real repercussions due to magic dragon) but Piccolo beats Raditz, Goku needs the aid of the most marginal character to beat Vegetta, and Gohan beats Cell. Beyond that every time Goku does win it is after he gets the crap kicked out of him repeatedly, and he trains/suffers to get stronger.
Demonstrating once again how badly written Rey/TLJ was, even childish cartoons put more effort into character development.
Edit: Actually its Gohan who beats Vegetta as well.
Wow, my memory was way wrong re: Rose dying. I don’t think it changes my point about her presence distorting Finn’s previous character development, plus her getting to teach lessons without having to learn anything of consequence herself.
Coming up with an overoptimistic plan that fails spectacularly, as Rose does, doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing that normally characterizes Mary Sues.
Her only concrete accomplishments in the film are with respect to Finn, first preventing his taking French leave and then ditto his heroic sacrifice. The latter is tactically dumb, but very much a romantic adventure nonsense sort of thing to do. (And arguably no dumber than Luke and Han detouring from the already difficult task of escaping the Death Star to spring a prisoner from a guarded cell block.)
Good or bad, she’s not exerting vast power over the plot and characters. I’m also not really seeing how Finn’s character regression relates to her. Hitting the reset button on character development (or, more charitably, acknowledging that hard choices aren’t always made all at once) happens all the time, with and without the introduction of new supporting characters.
(Falstaff is a huge presence in the Henry IV plays, but Prince Hal doesn’t redo his development in Part II because of Falstaff. Except in the Doylist sense that the play exists because Shakespeare wanted to pump some more money out of the Hal-Falstaff dynamic.)
I don’t think this is a strict definition of protagonist, but I still think it can happen. For example Luke Skywaker can be the protagonist, and a good pilot but still be saved by Han Solo’s flying chops. Luke’s ability to fly is important to the story, but he does not need to be better than everyone else, just good. If you take all the Han flying scenes and give him a broken arm then stick Luke in the drivers seat to save them then that greatly diminishes Han’s character, which diminishes Han leaving them with the reward money before the attack on the Death Star, which diminishes his heroic turn at the end. If Luke is to good at everything there is no need for the other characters.
Likewise lots of events don’t happen if Achillies isn’t sulking in his tent, his flaws allow other characters to show their strengths/weaknesses and move the plot along in a different way.
Rey, for all her relative flawlessness, doesn’t do everything in the films. She’s pretty hypercompetent in the context of her own plotlines (and arguably the main thing she’s wrong about in TLJ is thinking that she needs a teacher at all). But TFA is also about Finn’s finding a cause worth fighting for (to which she pays at best a supporting role) and the Solo-Organa family dynamic, which she’s largely an observer to. And two thirds of TLJ has basically nothing to do with her. (That two thirds isn’t very good, but it’s hard to put that on Rey.)
Rose reads like an audience insert to me – she’s quirky and charming, and everyone reacts inexplicably well to her – but she doesn’t display the powers or success that I expect from a Mary Sue, and arguably quite a few characters in the Star Wars mythos are audience inserts at some level.
Do a lot of people react well to Rose? Finn does, though that doesn’t seem that odd for a young man in a meet cute with a pretty young woman. I guess Poe goes for their plan pretty easily, but he’s established as impulsive and inclined towards big heroics. (And presumably feels some guilt about having just gotten her sister killed.)
The slicer is a conman who’s obviously going to be friendly to any mark. Phasma isn’t a fan, though she’s mostly mad at Finn.
I’m trying to remember: Does anyone else interact with her?
She defintely matures as a Sue in the 2nd film.
The important aspects are that when she is on screen she will overcome what ever she needs to or turn out not to need what she came for, and that almost nothing else in the film matters except as a setup for Rey to be Rey. The weird excursions by Finn and Rose don’t do anything, Finn’s attempt to destroy the laser to save his friends doesn’t do anything. In the end a tiny band of people sits and awaits their doom until Rey is magically there, magically giving them a way out.
The difference here is that Luke in the 2nd movie, on his 2nd Jedi master with some period of training can’t lift his own X-wing out of the swamp. This demonstrates how much he still has to learn, with a puppet being vastly more powerful than he is, and makes it apparent that Yoda’s teachings are valuable and necessary. At the end of Rey’s 2nd movie she still has zero real training and is able to lift a massive load of rocks to save her friends. This demonstrates that Luke’s decision not to train her doesn’t matter, it wouldn’t have mattered if Finn had smashed the giant “laser”, it doesn’t matter that Holdo’s sacrifice didn’t stop the bad guys, nothing matters except getting to the point where Rey is amazeballs.
I don’t disagree that Rey is much higher powered than Luke, or that she doesn’t have much to learn or many flaws to overcome. (Though being a fan of, e.g., Superman, I don’t think that necessarily makes for a bad character. Though Rey thus far isn’t as compelling to me as Superman done well.) But without the aspects of being an external insert into the story or a clear case for author-self-identification, I think “Mary Sue” isn’t the right term.
Language evolves, and maybe Mary Sue will come (or has come) to mean merely a too-perfect or too-important character. (Though in that case it probably covers a lot of action heroes. And I’m still not sure that it’s possible for the protagonist to be too important or central to the plot.) But since I think that the original sense is descriptively useful and doesn’t have a good substitute, my preference would be for it not to go quite that general.
Rey is a creation of a corporation that is image focused and has faced criticism for its female character portrayals, and they put a person in charge of the projects who has clearly pushed a feminist view of the project. There is a definitely a case for being an external insert into the starwars universe.
For my money, Mary Sue means “main protagonist” + “no serious flaws”, all other stuff (like warping the plot or whatever) is optional or derives from those. The “author insert” part was obviously part of the original definition, but doesn’t make as much sense outside of fan fiction, with a few notable exceptions (like the time Heinlein wrote a story about an aging science-fiction writer with a beautful young wife and a huge dick).
I didn’t know Heinlin was so progressive.
Even the more modern Disney Princesses, which appears to be what Rey is written to be, usually encounter more personal development than Rey. They’re much more self-directed and omni-competent than they used to be in the ’50’s, but there’s usually some faults to be overcome. Still, if the obstacle to be overcome is “you need to accept just how awesome you are,” that’s… not great theater, but also not so terribly far off from a lot of other Disney movie messages?
So just to clarify (since while it’s not the way I use the term, arguing definitions never goes anywhere): Doc Savage, Superman, etc. would likewise be Mary Sues under this definition? Would (MCU) Captain America?
Not the person you asked, but since I have been overly active in this thread…
Superman has been written at times like a Mary Sue, his sudden ability to turn back time in one of the movies is a good example of that type of writing, BUT in that movie he is given a clear weakness, and that weakness is exploited by the villain, and he is saved by another character (who is a terrible person otherwise). You can view this as his strengths overcoming his weakness, but he has one to overcome. I am sure there are many comic book issues where he functions as one though. Captain America I know less about, but her persona is pretty close to one for sure.
Well, and with Superman, One Punch Man, Captain America, etc., some of the story is explicitly about “what do you do when you are a near-flawless (Supes and Cap) or ridiculously powerful (Supes and One Punch Man) individual living in the world?”
If the next Rey movie does a compelling job of “what’s your responsibility when you’re born as the most powerful Jedi ever seen on film?”, they might make an interesting story out of it, but then you usually need some compelling conflict in the choice of what to do.
In TLJ, Rey is captured by the villain, and is saved by Kylo Ren, who in short order proves himself a terrible person otherwise. (In what I thought was one of the better scenes of the film, though Snoke was in full premature villain gloat mode.)
Granted, her one weakness being “much more powerful Force users” is more limited in scope than Kryptonite. Maybe not much, though, given that she’ll presumably not be able to overcome Kylo in film 3 by sheerly overwhelming him no matter how much we’re signaled that her potential is greater.
(Better than even odds that she redeems him, however unsatisfying that may prove. But he’ll capture her at least once first.)
Again, the tangible details aren’t the point. They’re a Goodhart’s Law proxy.
Tropes are not inherently bad. Overpowered / flawless / power fantasy characters are not inherently bad.
The tangible details about whether or not Rey is overpowered (in the classic SpaceBattles sense) have no bearing on if she is a Mary Sue or not. What matters is if her being overpowered harms the storytelling.
Such as with baconbits9’s example of how comparing her development to Luke’s results in Force Mastery Inflation, reducing the impact of the mythology. Personally, this did not impact the storytelling, because, again, Rey was just an ensemble character, in sports team prodigy archetype, and I thought that she was fine in that capacity. For all of her powers, Rey doesn’t render other characters superfluous.
Remember, this thread began with Kirito. He gets special snowflake powers in his various video games that no one else gets. He literally breaks the code a few times in order to win at the arc climaxes, which no one else gets to do. He accumulates a social group of girls who are ambiguously in love with him, despite us being told (not shown) that he’s socially awkward. And as per my first comment in this thread, I don’t even mind, sometimes, but there are definitely parts where Kirito being OP makes SAO boring, especially in that other more complex side characters are left unexplored.
In comparison, Rey is so much in the blurry line area that trying to nail a yes/no on her Mary Sue status is really pointless. Do either TFA or TLJ get more interesting by reducing her powers or focusing on other characters more? No. The actual criticisms of TFA and TLJ are about broader world-building changes, on how to better write all of the characters. Not “character B is way more interesting, but we’re focusing on character A instead because they’re more powerful.”
I don’t think Rey’s being overpowered harms the storytelling per se. I do think the storytelling has issues, whose roots certainly include (but aren’t overwhelmingly dominated by) a fear of repeating previously identified problems with female heroes leading to the creators being very overcautious about Rey.
But in TLJ in particular, that’s way down the list of problems. If the stern chase/mutiny plot had been handled better and the Finn/Rose plot replaced with something else featuring those characters, Rey being a little bland and insufficiently challenged wouldn’t have been fatal to its being a perfectly competent Star Wars film.
Doc Savage – maybe? I had to google him, he’s before my time. There’s also a related-but-different “competent man” trope that might be more apropos. Superman – definitely in some of the old comic books, but it’s possible that those were too juvenile for modern literary notions like character flaws to even apply to them. I mean, a lot of those barely had plots. But in the movies, no, I don’t think so, he had flaws sometimes, and failed at things sometimes. Plus, kryptonite. MCU Captain America – definitely not, he might not have flaws in the usual sense of bad habits or crooked teeth, but he definitely has character flaws in the literary sense.
More generally, “lack of flaws” might not be the right way to phrase it. Maybe ostentatious lack of being bad at anything? Like, consider Captain Marvel. She’s apparently the most powerful creature in the universe, basically a god, she makes Superman look like Lois Lane. And that’s fine, she’s a superhero! What makes her a Mary Sue to my mind, is when she broke in to a Radio Shack and MacGuyver’d up a space phone. Like, really? While you were off learning to harness your stupendous powers by punching holes through stars or whatever, you were also taking the alien equivalent of Ham radio classes? That’s classic Mary Sue.
That’s not even close to how the term has traditionally used, and is presently used in almost every context that isn’t narrowly Rey-focused.
“No significant flaws” is insufficient or at least likely to be misunderstood. Sue has implausible omnicompetence; that one is pretty central. Whatever skill or ability the plot requires, Sue has it or will quickly pick it up without training. If it turns out Princess Leia isn’t an ace pilot who can single-handedly destroy the Death Star and needs some guy to do it for her, if it turns out that McCoy is in fact a doctor but not an engineer and so can’t fix the warp drive, nobody will count those as “significant flaws”. It’s when Leia turns out to be an ace pilot as soon as the plot turns to flying, or McCoy a talented engineer, that we begin to suspect Mary Sue is on stage.
Equally important, and missed in most of the discussion here: Everybody loves Mary Sue. Well, they like and respect and trust her at least, unless they are an outright enemy in which case they fear and respect and trust her. Without having had a chance to demonstrate competence or earn trust, they are nonetheless given respect and trust beyond reason, assigned tasks and missions of implausible importance, etc. And, yeah, they might as well be spiking people’s drinks with love potions when their interest turns in that direction.
There’s at least a strong implication that Mary Sue is an insert into an existing franchise rather than the protagonist of their own story, and that they are there as a wish-fulfillment fantasy probably of the author. Youth is also implied, but that may be a second-order effect of older and more experienced authors not doing that, and of older characters not needing authorial fiat to be extraordinarily skilled within their professional sphere.
I consider Rey to qualify on this count. She’s a foreign plug into an existing franchise and wish-fulfillment fantasy of aging feminist corporate executives who I suspect had more say than the male writer… she’s dirty woke capitalism combined with the worst flaws of the innocent amateur (Sturgeon’s Law Cubed) medium of fanfic.
I agree and said something to this effect, probably as you were typing this. Also it occurs to me that Mary Sues don’t need to be protagonists. In fan-fiction (I gather) it’s common for Mary Sues to be side characters. But I don’t read fan-fiction, and I suspect the Mary Sues in TV and movies tend to be protagonists because the protagonist hogs the screen and there isn’t much room for side characters to exhibit that kind of perfection.
I disagree, watching TLJ I felt like they wrote themselves into corners and then just went ‘then Rey does something’. Because they didn’t stop to examine what that ought to mean in the universe you got a bad story. The elements in RoTJ fit together well, Luke is seen practicing floating rocks while doing a 1 handed handstand, but then Yoda does something he can’t do, which sets up the battle scene where Vader is tearing stuff from walls and throwing it at Luke to beat him easily. With Rey there is no build and so no limits on what she does in any scene which is what ruins the world building. If they showed her plans of the new death star in the next movie could she just ‘force crush’ some critical unit and make the whole thing explode? Why not? What can’t she do? Without those limits you break world building because world building is about limits. You can’t threaten her with falling rocks because she can move any amount of rock she wants. You can’t threaten her with laser swords because she just whipped a bunch of super fancy laser sword fighters in red suits*. How do you world build on this stuff?
You don’t have to focus more on other characters, you just have to give the ones you have weight. In the Superman movie I mentioned Superman is saved by a comic relief character, because they used basically one line to show that she is human and to give her a real motivation to act in the way she did (while also adding weight to the events for the audience), all of which they could do because they established that Superman can’t do this on his own.
World building is about limits, you can invent almost anything but it will go off the rails without starting out with limits. No one is going to buy hobbits walking up to Sauron and killing him once you set up Sauron unless you give him some limitation they they can exploit**. When running from the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica there is a set amount of time after jumping before the Cylons catch up, the why isn’t very important, but the limitation on the Cylons allows you to have a pursuit with their technology without it ending in 30 seconds.
With the lack of rules in place any character they introduce could logically be the one who beats Kylo, since anyone with no training could just be a super max force user who can stand up to him. Rose could kill him and it would fit within their rules just as well (it would also explain how she force jumped her ship to catch up to finn’s in that terrible scene). If your answer to the ‘how strong is your protagonist’ is ‘as strong as they need to be’ then you have no structure to build your antagonist around, and you have no tension if you reveal that halfway through your series. Without that grounding it is hard to connect with a wider audience.
*That type of scene should have been the last, or 2nd last fight in the final movie with Rey as the main character, no halfway through the series.
** One reason that I think the LOTR movies are bad is that Legolas can basically do anything, and its basically because he is an elf (yeah, he’s a prince, not that they go into that), and they have a whole army of these guys at their disposal. Why are they walking the ring towards Mordor with 9 people and no real plan again?
(sigh, everyone else is still hung up on tangible details)
@baconbits9
See, but at the point at which the rules allow anyone to plausibly be the next chosen one to defeat Kylo (such as how Finn picked up the lightsaber in TFA), then Rey isn’t uniquely the problem, and therefore isn’t a Sue. That’s just general shoddy world-building.
However, it seems like TLJ was indeed going for a “yes anyone can plausibly be the next chosen one” by having that scene of the kid force-pushing the broom.” I don’t strictly have an issue with that, either, it seems like regular power creep that you see in longforms. Donnie Yen wasn’t even a Jedi in Rogue One, and he could take out a platoon of Stormtroopers, too. If they all took as long as Luke to train, then things would get boring in a different way. It’s also easy enough to hand-wave, as something like, “because the number of trained Force users was so low due to Order 66 and Vader’s subsequent Jedi-hunting, the Force has made the new generation extra gifted, to start restoring the balance.”
I think that a lot of the people here are underestimating how much the general audience forgives continuity errors for spectacle, Rule of Awesome things. And not just the general audience, either. Anime very frequently world-builds just so that their character looks extra cool when they break all of those rules, and they revel in climaxes that basically burn all of the world-building down. That’s because the world is just an elaborate metaphor for the character journey, adolescence as apocalypse.
Hell, people mentioned Fate/Stay Night below, and that’s like a textbook example. Nasu makes all these intricate rules about the magic system, with concepts and whatnot, just so Shirou can be a special snowflake aberrant that conveniently wins by bypassing all expectations. There’s no Worf Effect if there’s no follow up.
Now, there certainly is a pleasure in imagining the follow up, trying to figure out the Watsonian implications of such events. I like FSN fanfic that does this more than the source material, actually. But that doesn’t necessarily reflect on FSN poorly, because that wasn’t the point FSN was going for.
People hated that Star Wars got less mythological in the prequels, especially the quantification of Force skills via Midi-Chlorians. So is it really a problem that TLJ tried to course-correct by returning to a more mythological frame, where the magnitudes of abilities are more vague, and just fitting to the current story being told?
Character building and world building are inseparable here. One of the understood rules of the Star Wars universe has been that there is a master Jedi who teaches an apprentice, and this rule gives some structure to the story. If Rey goes off to find a master but then it is revealed that she doesn’t need a master then you have shaken some of the previous world building. You have to build some new structure around her (which is difficult to avoid feeling tacked on) or you are just out some structure. If you have it understood that you have to train yourself to use the force well then every character who uses the force well has some backstory to them without you having to show it. If you stick a character in who barely trains at all and is suddenly at a high level then that strips the backstory out. If your antagonist is struggling to achieve something, who is willing to murder his own father to get to where he wants and to serve under whatever Snoke is, and then Rey walks in and goes ‘if you need to do something, just do it, pretty sure it will work out’ then that undercuts all the build up you have done to that point.
There are so many artistic flaws in the new Star Wars movies that I don’t think you need to infer some kind of political or social motive for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if such motives featured in making these movies the turkeys they are, but there are probably a hundred equally-accurate explanations of why horrible decisions were made.
@albatross11:
+1. TFA had a ton of problems other than Rey, almost to the point that you could excise her without changing it. TLJ revolved around her, but there were still even more problems going on.
If you wanted to retcon this a bit, you could imagine that the Force draws on a reservoir of power that only refills slowly. Further, it’s somewhat location-dependent–maybe it can’t refill from other location faster than light. When there are hundreds of Jedi and probably thousands of other Force-users around, there’s not much power available and it takes serious talent and training to be able to pull a lightsaber to your hand. Killing off almost all the Jedi, and then stamping out the religion that created other force users, made a lot more of that power available. The emperor was drawing vast amounts of that power for his own purposes, as was Vader, but by the end of ROTJ, they’re both dead. (And even so, they were just two men, so they could only use so much.). Luke starts training a very small cadre of new Jedi, one of them turns on him, and this leaves very few people using the Force on the planets where they live. For that matter, Luke has decided to become a hermit and doesn’t do much with the Force anymore, so it’s just Kylo, Snoke, and maybe occasionally Leia. This might also explain how Luke was lifting giant rocks with the Force after a month of training, whereas we basically never see any Jedi other than Yoda and Dookoo able to do that in the prequels.
This might also explain how Luke could get strong enough to fight Vader with only a few months’ training, whereas old-style Jedi took years. When everyone was tapping into it, it was just barely possible to get power; now, it’s easy to get at it, and so with a little concentration and natural talent, anyone can do it. Absent Force superiority, Vader was a sick old man being kept alive by advanced technology, so an athletic fight with laser swords against a 20-year-old wasn’t going to go well for him. (The even-older emperor prudently refrained from trying to jump around and swing swords against someone young enough to be his great-grandson, preferring instead to use *his* Force superiority to zap Luke with Force lightning.)
This might also explain the Sith’s behavior. They understand about the limited pool of power, and so they use techniques that make it easier to draw on the power even at the cost of damage to their bodies and souls. And they only keep one apprentice each, to avoid spreading the power around too much. The Emperor’s motive (alongside just being evil) is that he needs increasing amounts of Force power to keep himself young over time, and he can see that he will soon begin to weaken and die with the limits on Force power he can reach in a world with all those Jedi using it.
This also fits Kylo having trouble controlling his use of the Force (wrecking things with fits of temper). But it still doesn’t explain why Rey can beat Kylo with a lightsaber. Presumably, he was being trained in the lightsaber for quite awhile, whereas she’d barely picked one up when she defeated him for the first time.
Nothing can make most of those turkeys make sense, but this is kind of a fun intellectual exercise.
Addendum: To push the idea a little further, imagine that the Death Star and Starkiller Base both draw on the same reservoir of power in some technological way. Killing off most of the Force users is a requirement to be able to keep them working.
@albatross11
(Blink.) … I…actually kind of like this a lot.
Given that Finn seems to show basic competence with a lightsaber despite never having wielded one before either, we can conclude that there is not a lot of special knowledge required to wield a lightsaber effectively. It seems that being trained in melee weapons in general will translate pretty well to lightsaber combat. The Force Awakens establishes early on that Rey is in fact very good at hand to hand combat, as she is shown taking on and defeating two men who are each larger than her while using a staff as a weapon. Additionally, Kylo took a goddamned bowcaster bolt to the gut, a weapon which we repeatedly see physically blowing lesser men away. What’s more he is emotionally distraught on account of having just murdered his own father. He is not fighting at anywhere near full capacity. All these factors combined give a pretty satisfactory explanation for why Rey could beat Kylo in a lightsaber fight.
I actually find it funny how people brought up One Punch Man in this.
Bringing it up means you don’t understand it. His struggle is an emotional struggle. The fact that most cinematic writers don’t understand that those also need to be central to Superman storylines is why almost all Superman movies also suck.
But its also funny someone brought up Goku, and how easy it would be to Goku-ize Rey, and make her story better. You see, Goku-Rey would lose her first lightsaber battle with Kylo and barely escape. Then she goes to train and wins, but there is a bigger, big bad, who she has to train more to beat or has to rely on friends to beat. It giver her something of an arc.
@ AG:
I feel compelled to object that it makes perfect sense from both a Doyist and Watsonian perspective if you account for [solid hour of impassioned ranting omitted]. Remember – it’s not a post-hoc justification if it was buried in the VN the whole time!
The second arc (episode 15 and on) really grinds my gears. I hate that vg gheaf Nfhan vagb n cevaprff gb or erfphrq sebz gur perrcl creireg.
The second season on the other hand has some cute arcs. I really like the last Arc Mother’s Rosario although it’s a bit maudlin.
And the spin-off show about gun gale online is cute too although completely ridiculous.
Gun Gale Online at least recaptured a sense of imminent danger that was severely lacking throughout the Alfheim arc (and is what made even the weaker part of the “main” SAO arc enjoyable). It wasn’t great, I’m not even necessarily glad I watched it, but it was better than the Alfheim stuff.
I mostly enjoy SAO for the John McClain effect. Somehow, this one kid keeps getting drawn into playing life of death immersive out of control videogames ever few months. It’s “Why does Jean Luc keep operating the holodeck,” but on steroids.
The spoilered bit is what I was referring to. That, and introducing Kirito’s adopted sister who’s in love with him and I nope’d the fuck out.
Is the sub/dub problem unique to Anime? It seems like this would be a problem for you with any non-english-language television or film.
Yes, but Hollywood is such a cultural powerhouse that an English speaker can usually get along perfectly well without watching any foreign language video media, and most do, specially when you thrown in the occasional Canadian or British production. Note that even when a foreign language property gets successful, Hollywood will often remake the property rather than simply subbing or dubbing it (for example, the Spaniard [REC] movie franchise turning into the American Quarantine film series).
Anime is the only major exception to this. For some reason, Japan punches well, well above its weight in the cultural exports department (and it’s not just anime, either; the Japanese video game industry is the only one in the world that can compete with the American video game industry). Therefore, the archetypal example of an English speaker having to deal with the sub/dub problem is someone trying to watch anime.
To clarify, this post was a response to somebody saying, essentially, “anime sucks because subtitles are a thing”. I understand a person can avoid subtitles by speaking English since the US and UK produce English speaking media.
It’s just that this complaint seems a lot like “France is the worst country because none of the television is in English” or “immigrants are bad because they have, usually, ten fingers”. I’m mystified by complaints leveled squarely and sincerely at one group as if it’s unique to them when the perceived fault is common among many groups.
My snarky response to the sub thing is “people who don’t like subtitles are usually just people who read slowly” but I’m aware that’s neither (entirely) true nor kind.
It’s complete nonsense. Reading fast doesn’t prevent having to read the subtitles from being a distraction from watching the action, nor does being a fast reader improve the quality of the translations in the subtitles any. Nor does it change the fact that you’re getting less of the actor’s performances when their voice work is nonsense to you.
For my part, i watch everything with subtitles on because i’m hard of hearing with respect to speech but sensitive of hearing with respect to everything else, so any volume loud enough for me to understand the dialogue is too loud to be comfortable for any other sounds. So having subtitles on doesn’t take anything away for me because the subtitles are on even if i understand the language. Though of course bad quality subtitles are always a problem.
Also maybe i’m better at integrating subtitles with voice lines on account of being forced to do it pretty much all the time, but i don’t feel like i get less out of Japanese voice actors than i do out of English ones. Indeed i generally feel the Japanese is higher quality than the English for most anime, though there are some exceptions. Admittedly it does help if you learn to actually hear the language enough to make out the words even if you don’t know what they mean. It’s definitely a different experience to hear “Omae wa mou shindeiru” over “omauemoshindeeru” even if both cases you need to read the subtitles to know it means, “You’re already dead.”
It is also harder to translate Japanese into English subtitles than say, Spanish to English.
I loved Ghost in the Shell: SAC but the dubbing translation was wordy and not very natural which made it tiring to watch.
Yeah, I’ve tried watching some subbed shows before, and it just isn’t for me.
Part of it is an attention thing (you literally can’t look away from the screen without pausing or rewinding). In fact I think that’s the main issue, honestly. I would have to be really engrossed in something in order to never look away so I could read all the dialog. For a show I’m just starting…I’m just not that engrossed yet.
I’ve learned to just deal with the occasionally awkward/stilted dubbed voice acting, if something isn’t available dubbed I’m probably never going to see it.
I love Angel Beats, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Clannad. Anybody that’s enjoyed Angel Beats for the heart reaching story should absolutely watch Clannad and the sequel After Story.
I will have to. I never got around to Clannad, and I honestly think it’s because the title as represented in text is visually unappealing to me. That’s not a good reason.
My firm opinion is that the original Fate/stay night visual novel is the greatest work of art produced in my lifetime, and any praise I could give it would sound like fanboy-ranting. The anime adaptions are good-I-guess-sorta, but don’t compare to Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.
(Fate/zero, which is an anime prequel, is solid, though.)
Baccano is actually tied with FMA:B as my favorite anime, though it’s much more of an idealistic Tarentino movie with immortal alchemists than it is something you’d normally call an anime. Erased! is good but bizarre, One Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100 are good…
(And I also hear Angel Beats is amazing, but I haven’t seen it, so can’t recommend it.)
I thought Fate/Stay Night was the anime prequel. I always get those two mixed up for some reason.
Greatest work in the field of seafood metaphors, certainly.
Tsukihime exists, and takes offense.
Strongly agree on the Fate/Stay Night visual novel!
In regards to the anime adaptations, even if the general consensus is that the Ufotable UBW anime is the best adaptation, it lacks certain supporting details and really only works properly for people who already read the visual novel, I think. I would recommend the original Studio DEEN adaptation first if you aren’t going to read the VN.
Also, if anyone is interested in reading the original VN, please do that first and do not watch Fate/Zero beforehand. The world is full of Fate/Zero fans who misunderstand the themes and then go on to hate Fate/Stay Night. (More charitably, Stay Night is just something different from what one might expect from having only seen Zero.)
Elucidate? My first guess is that Fate/Stay Night is erotic wish fulfillment about being saved by a badass sword girl who then Stay Night at your house. (That girl is King Arthur, because Oh Japan.)
Is that really a guess? Because I haven’t read the visual novel and don’t intend to, but I have read about it after watching the series, and while I don’t doubt there are other meaningful and enjoyable themes going on that is definitely one of them (and it isn’t just the Sword Girl).
The anime mostly avoids that and thus is probably more palatable for the average person.
Please note beforehand that I’m not too good at explaining this sort of thing, so please read with charity.
It is fairly well-accepted that the parts of Fate/Stay Night that are erotic were inserted to be able to market the VN better. In other words, what eroticism there is ends up being limited to some two scenes of bad writing per route, out of approximately a million words. They are so minor that the PS Vita version (after Type-Moon ended up hugely successful) lacks them entirely. I won’t deny that there are some character building parts of them, but otherwise they are a total joke (it is very bad writing) and nobody who has the least access to content more suited for that purpose will be using Fate/Stay Night like that.
Also, IIRC the most eroticism takes place in the third route, which is about 700,000 words in.
Now, about the VN itself. Once again, please note beforehand that Fate/Stay Night was hugely influential to myself as a person, so I am not unbiased and may be prone to motivated recall. In addition, I’m not great with literature and such.
Also, are you alright with spoilers? I’m trying to leave things vague here, but I could go into more detail.
Emiya Shirou, the protagonist, is the survivor of a disaster in which a fire in the Fuyuki city park killed some 500 people. Due to this and other reasons, he carries an ideal of “saving everyone”, which he acknowledges as impossible but wants to work for anyways. He also carries a number of pathologies which he mostly avoids thinking about; the VN is mostly about resolving the conflict between his ideal, the real world, and himself as a person. In this world, it isn’t possible to save everyone. Moreover, that’s something that will definitely grind upon the soul of a person who wishes to do so as a deeply-held conviction.
Saber is essentially presented a role model; the platonic ideal of his goal. There’s more to her than that, of course, but that is the main point.
There are things that the anime simply can’t capture. For example, I think that the UBW anime basically tells you nothing about Caster’s character, right? But she’s one of the most prominent villains of the route.
@Laukhi: Ah, thanks for elucidating that the sexy stay the night bits are ephemera needed to sell to Oh Japan better.
It actually goes even a level deeper than that – the original drafts* had a female protagonist and a fairly conventional male Arthur, and when the protagonist was genderflipped to play better with the audience the author decided to flip Arthur as well to keep some of the dynamic. But the franchise’s fate is to be cursed by its commercial success, and it turns out people give you their money if you keep re-imagining historical figures as cute anime girls. So that’s a large fraction of what they do now.
*Known as Fate/Prototype, now that it’s getting fleshed out into spinoff material in its own right
@Dan L:
Yeah, I’ve long felt that the entire anime industry and half the Japanese video game industry are bad in the way they are just because Philip J. Otaku says “Shut up and take my money!”
King Arthur being secretly a girl was actually pretty cool storywise in a lot of ways. For example in some versions of the Arthurian mythos Arthur knows Guinevere and Lancelot are having an affair, but chooses to overlook it and only punishes them when other people finding out forces his hand.
With Arthur actually being actually a young woman disguised as a young man by Merlin’s magic, it gives a new dimension to the whole thing. In the Fate universe, Guinevere and Lancelot are among the few people who know Arturia’s true identity, and while they help her hide it it’s very stressful for everyone involved. Especially Guinevere who is stuck in a sham marriage that can never be consummated. So when Guinevere and Lancelot fall in love, it’s easy for Arturia to just let them go ahead with the affair, since for her it’s just letting her two best friends be together.
Also Fate actually covers a thing about Arthur i always felt a lot of the stories tend to elide: He’s actually a bad king. As a result of his actions the kingdom is plunged into war and destroyed, which is pretty much as central an example of being a bad king as it gets. Arturia’s entire motivation for seeking the Grail is that she realizes this and wants a redo, so that someone else can become king and do it right instead of her. This motivation and Arturia’s associated feelings of illegitimacy fit very well with King Arthur’s entire reign being conducted under false pretenses.
Additionally Arturia is extremely selfless and self-sacrificing as a major part of her character. This too fits with the idea that she’s someone who gave up her very identity and self for the good of the kingdom. Ironically of course that’s also part of what made her a bad king, as Alexander the Fucking Great bluntly points out to her in Fate/Zero. On the whole, i feel like “Arthur Pendragon was actually Arturia Pendragon” was as a plot point very well thought out and integrated into the larger story.
@ Lillian:
Oh, I don’t disagree – Shirou and Arturia are definitely more interesting characters than Sajyou and Arthur. A little tweaking added a very interesting angle to explore… but I’m not a huge fan of some of the other gender flips they have going on. Super profitable, but not always the most narratively interesting.
Yes, these are some of the things I love about the Fate route. It gets really fun when Arturia as fulfilled-ideal-gone-wrong gets played against the other characters’ ideals/ism. Heck, a decent chunk of the VN is this against Archer, in a manner of speaking.
Thirding the quality of the VN. Get me going and I’ll talk your ear off on the literary merit of UBW. (The three archetypal conflicts are traditionally given as Man v Nature, Man v Man, and Man v Self. In this story…)
But per my comment downthread, I’d actually recommend people start with F/Z than the F/SN anime. So much of the impact of the original VN comes from the fact that we’re getting it from Shirou’s perspective and with his thoughts, and from a third-person perspective he’s a bit… off. Especially in the first route, which the Deen anime is based on.
I think this channel does a pretty good job of recommending anime (nice selection, well articulated opinions, good editing):
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTIWuVJE1Ms0-H8gBImjeZg/videos
I would recommend starting from the first video. You’re unlikely to find anything new if you’re already invested, but it’s really handy for presenting the big picture.
New York City just decided to extend its moriatorium on new Lyft and Uber cars for another year. It seems the race between innovation and regulation is once again being won by the regulators. They also set a limit on the percentage of time for-hire cars can cruise without passengers, which strikes me as the sort of thing King Canute might want to talk to them about; no driver _wants_ to spend time not making money, after all.
Reducing congestion is a good idea. Writing detailed regulations in an attempt to control exactly how congestion will be controlled is a bad idea. They should put in a congestion tax and increase the costs of street parking. Turn those knobs up until the congestion returns to a level such that taking a bus is a viable option again. Rinse and repeat.
I heard a few weeks ago that ridesharing has actually exacerbated traffic problems in cities, because it encourages folks to take trips that they wouldn’t have otherwise taken. If it’s true then it’s a real shame, since I had hoped (naively?) that more would go without a car and use ridesharing where they didn’t have any better options.
When I can walk as fast as the M14 (not because of congestion, we’re not talking the M42 here), the bus is never going to be a good option.
Also put some work into making the buses clean and safe
(ETA: not a dig at NYC specifically)
I note your parentheses but just FYI in nyc the busses tend to be more pleasant than the subways, if slower. Out of towners often avoid them because of their experiences elsewhere but those don’t carry over.
Huh, good to know. Thanks!
Any idea what NYC does differently?
Middle class and even wealthy people take mass transit. Less so since uber, but still in significant numbers. So it was never allowed to go completely to shit because people that count cared.
NYC transit WAS allowed to go to shit, hence all the gritty 1980s movies set in the subway. It was actually brought back to relative decency.
Even in the 80s, the subways were considered safe during daytime hours in core Manhattan. Compare that to e.g. Central Park during the same time.
@brad
Any idea why the bus/subway differential is different in NYC than elsewhere? I get that overall, public transport is important to the influential–but in Washington DC or Paris, the subway is nicer than the bus–in NYC, it seems the bus is nicer than the subway.
@SamChevre
Not sure either why buses are better than subways in NYC or are worse elsewhere. From first principles I’d have thought it’d be easier to keep buses and bus stops decent vs subway cars and subway platforms because they are easier to access.
There are good reasons for a municipality to limit the amount of taxis, specifically congestion and air pollution:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/8/18535627/uber-lyft-sf-traffic-congestion-increase-study
Admittedly I’m generally pretty sceptical of the idea that “ride sharing” companies are going to revolutionise transport.
Restrictions on things like e-scooters and dock-less hire bikes bother me more than regulations on what are basically taxi companies.
Although there are different ways of doing it- New York has a fixed number of licences that can be bought and sold on the open market, while London makes it infamously difficult to get a licence to drive a taxi.
London also has an effectively-unlimited number of “minicabs” similar to New York’s car services- the main difference is that minicabs are not allowed to use a taximeter or pick up passengers who hail them on the street. There was a recent court case about whether Uber met the definition of a minicab or whether they were illegally operating taxis.
Apologies for my ignorance of political donations:
Does some sort of program exist where two people, one Republican and one Democrat, can both donate the same amount of money to a charity they agree on, where they would otherwise have donated directly to their respective parties?
Obviously in the primaries there are multiple candidates so it wouldn’t be feasible, but in the general election, I assume many Americans donate directly to the parties.
I assume that in the general election most people would acknowledge that it’s essentially a zero-sum game between two parties, and therefore money withheld from the opposition is as good as money given to one’s own party.
Does such a thing exist?
I think someone linked favorably to an article outlining a proposal for something like this a while back. Can’t recall who.
Play guitar: get dates.
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1159087942348017664
Actually, you don’t even have to play the guitar. Just carry it.
I wonder what the figures would have been if this guy had been carrying a laptop. Or a chess set.
I’m told that you can further improve your chances by bringing a dog along.
ETA:
Anecdata isn’t data, but I found out personally – and much to my surprise – that guitars do, in fact, get you girls.
And now I’m picturing the guy who’s out walking his dog while carrying a guitar case.
Keikaku doori.
Name the dog Keikaku.
Now the question is, what kind of dog goes best with a guitar? A husky, because they vocalize so much?
> A husky, because they vocalize so much?
Anecdotally, I once had a German Shorthair pointer that liked to “sing” along when my girlfriend would play the cello. The dog’s pitch wasn’t perfect, but for a dog, it was surprisingly good! The dog was rather slow at pitch changes, doing best with slow simple melodies. The dog would lag the cello by about 1/2 a second, then glide somewhat smoothly from the previous pitch, sometimes overshooting, but eventually arriving reasonable match.
I’m going to try bringing along my wife and kids to demonstrate what a good provider I am.
Anecdata here – my brother in law reported, years ago, that he was apparantly extremely attractive to random women when he took children to parks etc. (The way I heard it, they were coming on to him.)
Next question–if you have one kid and one guitar, who should hold the guitar, you or the kid?
You should be holding the guitar, obviously.
If the kid is holding the guitar, one of two things might happen:
1. The kid gets the girl* (not as planned),
2. Since bringing your dad as wingman has not been shown (and is intuitively unlikely) to be a successful strategy, both of you might strike out.
* Guitars being an attractiveness multiplier, as already demonstrated, means that having a guitar-toting wingman is generally unlikely to produce desired results.** Strapping a guitar to your dog might be a workable strategy, but in these sensitive times a risky one.
** As both the Nibelunglied and Tristan and Iseult teach us, it shall typically be found that having a wingman more attractive than yourself is a bad idea.
“I took my kid out when I was trying to pick up chicks.”
“Any luck?”
“Well, he was adopted.”
I wonder how it shakes out for, say, guitar vs bassist vs violinist vs drummer.
Poor pipe organ players.
I’d be *very* impressed if you carried a pipe organ around.
Still a good way to let the world know you have a Great Organ. Or a swell box, as the case may be.
People who would be impressed by you carrying a guitar usually can’t distinguish between guitar and bass cases. Drummers as a rule don’t carry a drum kit around, they would usually carry a bag of cymbals which looks like a bunch of discs in a sports bag. Violinist probably have the advantage due to being rarer than the other types.
Correction: the percussionist is either only carrying their stick bag around, or they’re lugging/rolling a whole bunch of equipment around in various bags/cases/dollies and cursing every minute of it.
If I saw someone only carrying a cymbal bag, then either:
1) they are doing trip 3 out of 5 to the car
2) they just bought the bag/cymbal
3) wtf is this, did they steal it like a bike wheel
Hmm interesting, where I live most venues and all rehearsal spaces have their own drum kit, so the drummer often only brings cymbals (in most cases just crash, ride and hi-hat) and sometimes a snare drum. The reason being that in rehearsal studios you gotta pay extra to use their cymbals, cause they suffer the most wear and tear, consequentially they are often of poor-ish quality, maybe that’s not a thing in the US though.
The only times, I can think of, when the drummer brings the whole kit, is when performing in unusual place (loft, museum etc.), or when the band is so famous/rich that they bring everything of their own to ensure top quality, but then they got special people to carry/setup the stuff.
note: IANAD
Ah, that’s true. I was thinking more of orchestra or pit players, less livehouses. But also, restaurant/club gigs. The professional percussionists I know aren’t really going for a recording label deal, so they’re more often playing locations where they have to bring everything. And most of them also have kit customizations. Drum gel, snare-bourine belt, other accessory attachments, cushioning in the kick drum, a drum in a crate for Aesthetic, etc.
It would still be cymbals + stickbag, though. And still have to bring stands for cymbals/sheet music, too.
And I thought double-bass players have it rough :).
Generally you use stands from the in-house drum kit, as they don’t matter much and are adjustable anyway. Never seen a stickbag in the wild, or a drummer playing from sheet for that matter, probably has to do with the genres I favour.
Yeah, I play guitar, but I don’t walk around with it like some asshole. That’s one step away from ruining the party by getting out the acoustic.
No dates though, I suspect I do it wrong.
In theory you might be walking around with your guitar if you are going somewhere to use it (a gig, for instance, or even just heading to a friend’s place to jam).
Well, I’d have the case on my back when biking to the music store or open mic nights, but walking around with it for no reason? I imagine the woman asking why I’m carrying around it, and now I wonder if saying “I’m doing it to pick up chicks” would help or hurt.
@Matt I got into guitar for the music LIKE A SUCKER, partly because back then it was unimaginable that a woman would be attracted to me. Shy, nerdy, weird, yep
You could go sit on a bench and play it, which might lure women, if it works as a mating call.
It really depends on what we take “walking around” to mean. As a friend’s grandmother used to say: “if you see a woman walking around for no reason, you know the reason”.
Back in the day, I used to lug my guitar all sorts of places – mostly because I’d be going someplace else (gig/rehearsal/studio/other) afterwards. However, you don’t actually need any more of an excuse than “I’m gonna be needing it at some point in the near future”.
Thinking about it, I’d consider “I’m doing it to pick up chicks” an expert-level line – with the correct amount of lubrication, you could probably pull it off, but overall: best avoided. That is, if you actually want to pick up chicks. 🙂
Failing that, it could earn you a spot of cash.
You probably have to choose, though.
Either put the hat on the ground and play for money or be the guy playing the guitar for fun.
Being a bit shy, not a bit nerdy and generally socially withdrawn in my younger years, it took me pretty long until I stumbled on this one weird trick: you actually have to talk to them…
Uh, yeah. Walking around with it like an asshole is the whole point.
By the time you get to organically discussing your interests with a girl you are most of the way there anyhow, so just playing the guitar doesn’t work.
You could say it’s purely instrumental.
If I had a dollar for every band that was formed largely for that purpose, I’d probably be richer than Warren Buffett.
Probably the laptop wouldn’t help now, but I think there was a time where a shiny Mac laptop would.
What about the accordion?
Only at beer festivals.
Or maybe for picking up latinas. IIRC, the button accordion features in quite a few styles of music south of the border.
Unlike guitars, this would prolly work better if your wingman has the accordion; if you’re a competent dancer, that is.
Maybe in Cleveland.
Fashion Discussion: Socks
For a large portion of my life, I wore socks that basically matched the color pattern of the pants/shoes I was wearing that day. If it was wearing khakis, I’d wear socks somewhere on the light brown/tan side of the spectrum. If I was wearing dark pants and shoes, I’d wear black socks.
Recently, as part of my ongoing quarter-life crisis, I got rid of my boring socks and bought a bunch of colorful socks with noticeable patterns. Nothing overly ostentatious, but they’re definitely eye-catching. Public reception has been almost uniformly positive, even in my relatively conservative office.
Assuming you’ve got the desire, is there any reason not to exclusively wear interesting socks?
I switched my sock collection over to Darn Tough socks, because everything else falls apart inside of a few months. My impression of all novelty products is that they are of exceptionally poor quality and can be expected to fall apart in short order.
Ohhh, I just got that. I read it yesterday but only on skimming past this morning did it click.
“Darn it, this dog has torn my socks apart,” Tom cursed.
I thought of this one the other day and I’m not sure if it’s original or I accidentally stole it, but:
“My lenses are fogging up,” Tom said optimistically.
Justin Trudeau is that you?!?
Don’t do it exclusively, or else you’re Weird Sock Guy. Mostly wear the boring ones, bust out the colorful ones on Fridays. That’s what I do, and obviously everyone should take fashion advice from me.
Yeah, “flashy socks” is a super-commonly adopted modern business fad.
I feel like more of a rebel continuing to wear just plain black socks all the time, while my male co-workers all try to out-do each other in their “sock game”
Semi-related: “No pocket square” is the new pocket square.
I’d be sincerely sad if my man stopped wearing a silk pocket square when he puts on a jacket. That much plainness is ugly.
All this sock fashion talk reminds me of an idea I’ve had for years.
You know those stores where you pick out your own pottery from their selection, paint it however you like with store equipment, then buy it? I figure you could do the same with socks. You’ve got several shapes – ankle, knee high, stocking; with toes or without; tube or heeled. You’ve also got various fabrics – silk, cotton, wool. And sizes of course. Then you combine that with your own design you make on a computer, using custom colors, custom sayings or designs, stripes, polka dots, and so on. That produces a screen printing solution. You could even figure out a way to attach custom lace trim or something.
I call it: Socks To Be You.
I bet it’d sell.
When you lose a sock, the other won’t match any others. But if you have a dozen pairs of the same kind, half the time you’ve still got a full pair.
Literally the one criticism I’ve gotten from someone about my socks fell into this same line of reasoning. My rebuttal is: who loses socks? They go from feet to laundry bin to washing machine to drier to dresser. Wallets and keys, I get, but socks?
You’ve never had socks mysteriously vanish while doing laundry?
In communal settings (college, while on deployment, etc.) yes. Since I got my own place and started doing my own laundry (3+ years), no.
In the last two years I think I’ve only lost one sock. Definitely happens more often to some other folks, though. I find socks left behind in the laundry room all the time, or better yet, find them in my own laundry after folding everything.
Don’t be a denialist, Nick: inability to keep matching socks is a real phenomenon, caused by house elves.
Is your shoe game on point? Interesting socks are one of those highly-visible yet attainable forms of men’s fashion that I think lots of people can’t actually pull off. Shoes, however, are a deceptively important aspect of most outfits, and woefully under-invested in by people starting to mind their style.
Personally, I find fun socks the most old-mannish thing imaginable – just behind fun ties – and so not really fitting a quarter-life crisis. And anyone who wanted to “up” their fashion game, I would point towards investing in shoes.
And of course before that is do your clothes actually fit, but that’s fundamentals.
I’m not sure: my shoe game is limited but I think acceptable:
For black, I’ve got standard black oxfords (that I bought only because of Kings Men). Cost around $200, but their fairly non-distinct.
I’ve got some suede desert boots and brown leather Blundstones that I wear when I need brown shoes.
and I’ve got a pair of the Nike Killshot 2s that I wear during casual events.
What am I missing?
Aesthetic harmony. No-one will ever compliment boring socks because they are just the right thing in the right place. A few people will notice the colourful socks and mildly disapprove, though of course they won’t bring it up. Obviously the desire is for the compliments, not the socks; stand up to the crowd!
In light of this, I pledge to compliment someone tomorrow on their plain navy socks.
I live in Texas, where it is socially acceptable to wear cowboy boots to any gathering, whether casual, business, or formal.
Thus, my socks are seldom, if ever, visible.
So, the only reason for me to wear interesting socks would be if they were as comfortable, or more comfortable, than the more boring options.
Have you considered wearing boring socks that contrast with your pants and shoes?
Speculative question inspired by learning how much historical warfare was affected by changes in materials.
What if (for whatever implausible fictional reason) a modern military with decent budget wanted to equip an army solely with cold weapons, using today’s world technology and industrial base? Assuming that army needs to fight against its peer, or some other close combat adversary, what designs and improvements can we come up with based solely on improved materials and manufacturing methods, and how much would it change the warfare compared to the high medieval one (or whatever was the historical peak of cold weapons warfare)?
Obviously steel is better and cheaper now, but what if we made weapons out of aluminum or titanium alloys? Some submarines have hulls of titanium so we apparently can afford enough of the stuff to make millions of swords – but I have no idea about how feasible are they to produce, sharpen etc, nor to which extent a sword actually benefits from being heavy (and so a lighter alloy will actually be worth). What about shields and body armor? Using plastic or composites for handles? Can we get to the point where it’s essentially impossible for a human to pierce enemy’s armor and fencing boils down to trying to hit a small opening on joints or face? Or at least where a sword and/or spear are no longer optimal and give way to something more exotic – like war hammers, idk? Will anything change if we add bows and crossbows to the picture, will they be of use at all?
At the end of the day, how much of an advantage such a “kinght” will have over a historical counterpart (assuming comparable skill and experience)?
Caveat: no power armor, electronics, electricity, compressed air or any other external power sources – all weapon and armor must be driven only by the muscle strength of the owner. No explosives whatsoever.
Relatedly, how much would it be possible to improve fencing techniques due to the progress in training methods, sport martial arts, medicine and whatelse relevant?
I imagine members of HEMA and SCA will have a lot to say on this, although I take it their goals are to recreate historical martial arts and have fun rather than kill people in close combat as effectively as possible, and the budget is considerably smaller.
Are you trying to recreate Barsoom? Because their big R&D program to revive chivalrous melee weapons with high technology didn’t involve armor at all.
Hah, never heard of it. Or rather I probably did hear something about the series at some point, but not about this aspect. From the absence of armor and brief googling, I wouldn’t suspect them of high technical accuracy.
Titanium and especially aluminum would make crappy swords. They’re lighter, and typically stronger for their weight (though it depends on the alloy), but steel swords are pretty light already — typically between two and three pounds. On the other side of the equation they’re softer, meaning that they can’t hold an edge as well, and less dense, meaning that you need more cross-sectional area for the same strength. Swords work by getting a lot of momentum behind a hard, narrow shearing edge, so simple physics says this isn’t what you’re looking for.
If Raytheon woke up tomorrow and decided that medieval-style melee combat was the future of warfare, there might be a place for polymers and ceramics on the armor side of things but edged weapons would probably still be made of steel. On the other hand, the steels available now are vastly better than historical ones — high-quality swords are still mostly traditionally made, and low-quality mass-produced ones don’t use anything especially exotic, but knives made from high-performance steels like S30V are readily obtainable and significantly outperform anything you could get even thirty years ago. The best fencing weapons on the market use maraging steel, which is even better in terms of strength and toughness; it holds a poor edge, but there are probably games with lamination you could play here.
Hm, I didn’t know steel can be harder than titanium. Is it possible to use it for armor or shields, or will ceramics and polymers be superior?
Titanium’s been used for aircraft armor, thanks mainly to its high strength-to-weight ratio; the Russians are the most prolific users, but the US has gotten into it too (the A-10’s cockpit armor is titanium, for example). It’d probably be a decent choice for personal armor. The M2 Bradley’s armored in aluminum, as the Pentagon Papers pointed out at length.
The ceramic strike plates that’re used for modern heavy personal armor work by deforming rifle bullets, but there’s no need for that against sword or spear, and they have problems defending against multiple impacts in the same location. Bullet-resistant vests made from ballistic fibers are lighter, but they tend to perform poorly against slashing attacks with sharp blades: modern armor intended to counter those threats often includes metal components. Edged weapon defense doesn’t see a lot of research compared to ballistics, though, and DuPont might be able to come up with something.
Bulletproof vests stop bullets, not blades.
Edged weapon defense sees plenty of research in places with lots of knives and few firearms.
Most UK police routinely wear stab vests rated to defend against a 24J impact from a hardened steel knife. Standards also exist for higher energies and shiv resistance.
http://ped-cast.homeoffice.gov.uk/standards/39-07_C_HOSDB_BodyArmourStandards_(2007)_Part3_KnifeandSpikeResistance.pdf
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/370346.pdf
As is the case for more technologies nowadays, the best solutions are composite. It’s not metal vs. ceramic vs. polymer, it’s Yes. Modern cut gloves weave threads of various materials (primarily aramids and steel).
I don’t know how expert this guy is, but assuming this isn’t all bullshit it’s an interesting write-up.
Hardness isn’t the goal, as it would mostly make armor resistant to scratches.
You want something stiff, so as to not deform under load, and with a high tensile strength so it would resist being pierced. Titanium alloys do very well here. But I think plastics will do well enough to be more popular.
As I understand it, a sword was very poor against late medieval plate armor, and much lighter and yet still much better armor could be made with the superior materials of this hypothetical. So whatever primitive weapons this hypothetical army used, they probably wouldn’t be swords; AlexOfUrals was right to think they’d go in other directions. Are crossbows in, as authentically historical, or does the ability to store energy in the bow arms rule it out as compressed air is apparently ruled out? Otherwise, there were late medieval crossbows with terrifying draw strength, easily drawn (by the patient) with a windlass. Superior materials could definitely produce a huge improvement to those already astonishing weapons, perhaps sufficient to get through the improved armor.
That’s what I thought too, but at a certain point, you’ve just re-invented guns, just with the projectile energy stored in a different form. I agree with you that it’s really hard to imagine warfare not advancing in that direction given the nature of armor, since military tech is almost by definition the most ruthlessly practical and inventive of all tech trees.
I think that there was never a time when the majority of people on the battlefield would have been in plate armor, but you might have faced a lot of people wearing mail or a coat-of-plates or something. And there were specialized weapons for fighting against armored opponents–maces, warhammers, poleaxes, rondel daggers, etc. OTOH, I’ve seen stuff on Youtube (scholagladitoria, et al) talking about a “murder strike,” where you turn your sword around and use it as a two-handed hammer, holding it by the blade and smashing into your opponent with the crossguard of your sword. I imagine this is the sort of thing you’d do when faced with someone whose armor was too good to allow you to do anything to him with the blade of your sword.
“Mordschlag” from Talhoffer’s Fechtbook, if I remember correctly.
I think we’d see weird composites. An insert along the cutting edge or tip made out of steel or tungsten carbide. The body made from a lighter metal, or possibly some kind of composites or polymers.
I don’t think I’ve come across the term “cold weapons” before. For those like me that are unfamiliar, it means weapons that do not use fire or explosion. So clubs and knives, but not guns and bombs.
The phrase seems to be a calque from the Russian phrase “Холодное оружие” (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Холодное_оружие). Here’s a page discussing how it came to English: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/343741/what-is-the-origin-of-cold-weapon-in-the-sense-of-non-firearm.
Interesting. In Portuguese the term is “white weapons” (armas brancas).
Yeah sorry, very stupid of me, I just translated the Russian term literally without bothering to check whether it is correct. I believe I’ve seen this in English though, but that probably was someone else making the same mistake.
It’s understandable enough, just not standard.
>Can we get to the point where it’s essentially impossible for a human to pierce enemy’s armor and fencing boils down to trying to hit a small opening on joints or face?
We were already at that point by the end of the medieval era.
Techniques to get around that included blunt implements, holding the middle of a sword for control and going for the joints/eyes (halfswording), holding the pointy end of the sword and clubbing the other guy with the hilt (Mordschlag) and wrestling the opponent until you can remove his armour or jam a dagger through the eye holes.
I suspect the biggest area for improvements is reducing the weight and encumberance of armour.
Full plate armour heavily restricted the user’s vision and range of motion.
Replacing mail with kevlar and plate with composites, as well as replacing small eye slits with large polycarbonate windows would make the wearer far more aware and agile.
EDIT: Not sure what modern compound bows would do to the equation.
If a carbide-tipped bodkin can reliably penetrate armour, you might just get a quieter version of early modern warfare, where everyone stands around in minimal armour shooting each other.
Riiight, but wasn’t that armor only impenetrable to slashing? I thought even though it greatly limited usefulness of swords (or at least demanded high creativity at that, as you describe), other types of weapon could penetrate it – pointed war hammers, or some kinds of pole arms, or even a sword specialized for thrusting like estoc?
Also, do I understand correctly that even though top tier armor of that period limited use of swords, only few can afforded it so having a sword was still useful against lighter armed opponents? That would change if you have the armor produced by modern industry.
There were two main methods of dealing with late medieval armor: penetrating with a stabbing weapon (I’m counting things like spiked hammers as stabbing), and just hitting really hard with a blunt weapon. A strong enough hit can transmit lethal force through armor without penetration. If they’ve got some kind of super-material that you can’t penetrate, blunt force is the way to go.
Period composite reflex bows give some of the same effect, since the string’s leverage against the bow increases as the siyas come closer to a right angle to the string. I’m not sure how much advantage the modern pulley bows have over that. You still have to put in the energy–the advantage of both designs is that the draw weight is lower at full draw, which makes aiming easier.
Someone mentioned crossbows using a mechanical cocking device. They could be very powerful, but at the expense of a very low rate of fire.
Windlass crossbows have been pictured on medieval drawings.
It seems that old crossbows had very small drawing distances due to the poor metalwork. You couldn’t flex the metal too much.
I was counting windlass crossbows as one kind of mechanical cocking device, the windlass being a mechanism. A goat’s foot cocking device is much faster but much less powerful.
I believe some crossbows used composite bows, presumably wood/horn/sinew like the middle-eastern composite bows. Judging by the latter, the drawing distance would be substantial.
The things that look like giant crossbows are usually, perhaps always, using rigid arms and skeins of twisted cords for springs.
A very long time ago, someone I knew in the SCA made a small version of one of those. He was from a different barony than I was but the same kingdom. I asked him whether he had made it for his baron or his king, since I wanted to know which end of it I had to deal with.
Like the others said, I don’t think swords would change all that much. Regarding handheld weapons, I think the most change would be seen with the use of compound bows and crossbows. Assuming that all fighters would have armor (unlike most of history, in which mostly armored fighters were the exception, if my understanding is correct) then weapons designed for defeating armored opponents -maces and war hammers- will be far more common.
Our ability to care for and selectively breed horses and beasts of burden has also significantly improved, so I’m guessing massive warhorses would be a somewhat common sight.
I think that the greatest changes would be in armor. Clear visors like those of riot armor would allow fighters much more situational awareness. The protection worn by American football players would probably be enough to absorb most of the impact of many blunt weapons. Kevlar, carbon fiber and other such materials are very resistant to slashing attacks, once again forcing a focus on weapons designed for blunt-force trauma. Modern materials are also more comfortable, breathable, flexible, and generally would allow for fighters to keep going for longer. Now that I think about it, I wonder how armor would be worn. Historical plate armor (worn by a minority) covered the entire body, but modern military body armor focuses on the head and torso. I think we would see riot-like polymer armor on the limbs, which is enough to protect them against blunt force trauma and provides (?) moderate protection against slashing and piercing strikes, while the torso and head would get the fancier materials that could stop almost anything a human throws/swings at it.
Ballistae and other such field artillery would probably be lighter, smaller, and more mobile while packing a bigger punch, so I think they would be far more common (perhaps taking the place of the LMG at the squad level).
What about shields? If I understand correctly it should be possible to a make shield out of light alloys or composites which is pretty much impenetrable to melee weapons, while having manageable weight and decent size – since ballistic shields are as big or larger than most historical ones, and provide protection from higher-energy threats. On the other hand, afaik in high middle ages shields wasn’t used much, at least not by armored foot soldiers, right?
For the armor, I’d rather expect the opposite pattern – protect limbs only from slashing, critical areas from everything. Slashing protection restricts motions much less, and blunt weapons are probably easier to dodge.
The idea of GMO warhorses on steroids is interesting, I haven’t thought of that. Do you know if we’re also better at training them? As for the field artillery, I guess it provides just too much room for creativity to avoid reinventing firearms one way or another.
Shields were common in the High Middle Ages (roughly 1000 – 1250). They fell out of favor with heavy infantry and cavalry in the Late Middle Ages (1250-1450 or so), because personal armor got good enough that they weren’t necessary — if it’s basically impossible to cut through your armor anyway, you buy yourself more by freeing up an arm to wield two-handed weapons. They continued in use with light or no armor, though, until the 1600s or later depending on region.
I would think that a ballista made with modern materials would be absolutely devastating by medieval standards, but depressingly all I can find is attempts at replicas using period materials.
Plus we’d be able to use the aiming/accuracy technology from modern artillery.
You could make life very dangerous for any high-value targets, like commanders and heavy cavalry.
SM Stirling’s _Change_ series (modern technology stops working suddenly due to a Plot Device) has the eventual armies using the springs from truck suspensions in their catapults, and getting striking power out of them that was close to what you could get out of some of the early black powder cannon.
Isn’t the constraint on the ballista and related devices how much human energy you have to put in? You can store a more or less unlimited amount of potential energy in a trebuchet with a heavy enough counterweight, or twisted skeins with enough sinew, or … .
I would expect modern materials to give you lighter and more mobile artillery, but not substantially more powerful. Am I missing something?
With gearing, the energy you can put in is almost unlimited as well. You can have 20 people wind a spring thru a gearing system for an hour before shooting. Yes, your rate of fire becomes very low, but the energy can be fierce.
It seems to me that there are going to be limits on how much energy you can store in a reasonable size/weight spring, and they’re going to be higher with better materials.
I’m sure a modern ballista would be much more efficient, due to precision engineering and modern bearing technology.
With a bit of ingenuity, there are also better ways of getting human power than a simple winch or crank handle. Something like a static bike or rowing machine allows far more muscle to be used.
Between those two things, I suspect you could increase the total output power (projectile KE * ROF) by an order of magnitude, assuming the same number of crew.
If we define useful output power to be that delivered *on target*, improvements in accuracy might give another order of magnitude.
ADDENDUM:
What happens when you give folks a junkyard and some power tools, then tell them to build modern siege weaponry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8WpXF42_14
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7kuGdDctgE
How about a slingshot? We have made massive improvements in durable elastic materials. Not very good against a heavily armored opponent, but could be quite effective against light armor. But since the topic is cold weapons, how about a slingshot that fires bombs filled with liquid nitrogen :P. But seriously, liquid nitrogen might make heavy armor highly brittle, and so easier to break through with some other kind of weapon. And if the nitrogen seeps through holes in the armor it might cause quite a lot of damage even to a heavily armored opponent.
You would need to deliver a lot of LN for it to be of any use. Having a gallon splashed at you would be mildly annoying if you have face protection.
For whatever reason, it helps me to think of armor first, and then reach for weapons that would be helpful in defeating that armor.
Medieval armor had to work around several disadvantages that would no longer apply.
*It was expensive, so most warriors could not have it. I don’t think this would be much of an issue today. Titanium isn’t that expensive. Plastics and composites are really cheap.
*Manufacturing techniques limited the possible shapes, leaving weak spots. There are limits to what can be done with stampings, but once you start welding them together, virtually anything is possible. Fewer limitations with plastics. There are two factors that would still leave some weak points, the need for the wearer to move (although we got pretty good at various flexible hinge mechanisms) and the need to get in and out of the armor, especially if one needs to do so quickly.
*it was heavy, limiting how much armor the wearer could have. Again, with alloys and composites, that’s much less of an issue.
As I understand cold weapons, you’re basically limited to muscle power. Maybe muscle power stored in some kind of a spring.
I think it’s possible to build armor that would be virtually immune to piercing attacks from any kind of sword like weapon, and provide it in abundance. There would be some weak points, but I don’t think they would be exploitable unless the wearer was not able to fight back. The best use of bladed weapons in this case would be a surprise attack where you could catch the enemy outside of their armor.
Provided various forms of springs are allowed, you could probably build an arrow firing weapon that could pierce just about anything. Pneumatic springs would allow this weapon to be relatively compact. Since the spring has to be recharged by muscle power, expect a very low rate of fire. For an attacker, this is likely a one time use weapon. A stationary defender could fire multiple times, once every 5-30 minutes. (assuming sufficient attack strength to defeat armor previously mentioned).
Blunt force attacks are harder to defend against. You can spread the energy out, but limited to how far you can spread (probably no more than chest size) and you can try to absorb it with various foams. The best mechanisms there would collapse the foam, and so be of a single use status. So hammers are likely to be useful. You can knock an opponent down to get them out of the fight, or you can attack their limbs overpowering the various hinges and breaking the limbs. A hammer to the head would be a pretty useful attack, but hard to accomplish.
Basically todays technology allows you to build an armor that could absorb more energy than mere muscle can exert. You need to add more energy to your attack, somehow. So, spring loaded arrow shooters. Large weights that are thrown from above. If allowed, hot liquids, or chemically reactive liquids that pour on the enemy. Poisons. Genetically engineered insects.
Assuming that modern vehicles aren’t allowed, surprise attacks would be limited. However, there will be some really cool siege engines being employed.
As long as we’ve got hydrocarbons, I’d expect various kinds of fire weapons that would be pretty hard to armor against without unacceptable weight/heat problems. That probably doesn’t count as “cold weapons,” though. Similarly, I assume you’re excluding poison gas.
Would it make sense to make new weapons whose purpose was to immobilize armor? I don’t need to kill a knight to mission-kill him–if I could get him tangled up in steel wire enough that he’ll need several minutes of help to get out, I may not need to bash his brains in with a mace. Could you make weapons that incorporated some kind of fast-acting glue to immobilize an armored opponent? Maybe bolos with glass beads full of super-glue on the connecting wires and balls, so when they wrap around a limb, they stick? Or arrows that shatter on impact and stick to everything?
Armor tends to be hot. Could we make it worse? Cover a lot of my armor’s surface with space blanket (aluminumized mylar) or fiberglass insulation, and I’ll be too hot to fight.
Maybe try to cut off ventilation? Lots of sticky bits of stuff might manage that, too–once most of your air holes are blocked, you’ll be taking off that impenitrable helmet. If you can still get it off, that is.
I really like the idea of immobilizing armor. I suspect that tangles of wire would work better than adhesives. We’d probably see mass use of barbwire, again.
You say “again” as if we stopped. Every military has large stockpiles of concertina wire, to be used in standard wire obstacles. Pretty much every military unit is going to be putting triple-strand all over creation the very first thing they do after setting the parking brakes on their vehicles.
This blog post is from a prepper (I didn’t read anything else on the blog, so I don’t know just how crazy the guy is, or if his prepping is mostly harmless), but his guidance on obstacle emplacement and the use of concertina wire is really good.
He discusses how wire obstacles can even stop tanks by getting wound up in the road wheels and causing the tank to throw a track. As an engineer conducting obstacle planning, I think he overstates this a bit; I wouldn’t count on a triple-strand stopping a vehicle and would use an 11-row obstacle for that purpose, though I’d certainly take a lucky M-kill by a triple-strand.
You can imagine this as a zombie-apocalypse story. You want to make armor to protect your soldiers from bites, slashes, bashes, splatters of zombifying bodily fluids, etc. Make your zombies faster/stronger/smarter as needed to make this work. (For example, your zombies are smart enough to use found melee weapons[1], so you’re facing zombies with baseball bats/signposts as well as teeth and fingernails.)
[1] I like the term “cold weapons.”
I wondered about the opposite zombie story. One where the zombies are much weaker.
Suppose they are largely too weak to take on a healthy adult, but still dangerous if they outnumber the victim, or if the victim is disabled or injured.
Suppose they have enough intelligence not to start a fight they are clearly going to loose.
Suppose that they are mildly infectious. Say each bite or scratch has a 5% chance of infecting the victim.
Suppose that the infected are somewhat difficult to identify reliably. Something you could do via a test, or a conversation, but not at a glance. Again, they have enough intelligence to try and take advantage of this.
Suppose that exceptionally rarely, the disease can be cured. No one is sure how exactly, but there have been a handful of what appear to be recoveries. So it’s at least theoretically possible.
Suppose also that by the time anyone realized that this is a serious problem, roughly a third of the population is infected.
What sort of tactics would be used? What would the rules of engagement be? Would the healthy have some duty to isolate and care for the infected, knowing that they might be cured one day?
This has nothing to do with armor, just something I was thinking about.
I wonder if you could make projectiles with contact fuses that had spring loaded functions. Like a crossbow bolt, in which the bolt had a spring-hammer that tripped on contact, releasing more energy against the target.
I like the idea of using flywheels to store energy for projectiles. Like the disc shooters that shoot foam discs Disc Shooter. A pedal-powered flywheel could fire many small metal discs (like disc golf discs, but smaller) with an aero foil shape and a razor edge, functioning as an light machine gun. A system to alter the angle of release could allow the discs to curve around obstacles. The discs themselves could have enough spin to be designed to break into shrapnel on contact.
Flywheel power could be used to launch ball projectiles, just like a baseball pitching machine. In theory it should be possible to launch spin-stabilized projectiles that way, like bullets.
Air support would be interesting. Gliders launched via winches, again powered by fly-wheels, could drop flechettes and gain intelligence.
Could you make springloaded projectiles that would fragment to increase the damage? Or to spit some kind of nasty thing (glue, poison, skunk scent) all over the area where they hit?
Seen on Facebook: a cute video of a cow playing with a beach ball like a dog.
The text: “Their lives are equal to ours in every way that matters.”
OK, so I’m sympathetic to vegetarianism and the truth claim that it’s logically indefensible (and in some sense ethics come from logic) to eat cows, pigs, etc. – let alone factory farm them! – when we don’t eat dogs. But “Their lives are equal to ours in every way that matter”? An ideology that says irrational animals are equal to us in every way that matters is implying rationality/logic doesn’t matter. So what then? I don’t need to practice ethics, because cows don’t.
I can potentially see this belief becoming hegemonic not leading to a stereotypical Dark Age, but I wouldn’t trust Western secularists to thread that needle. I’d feel safer with the whole Western world converting to Hinduism.
What’s the term for the fallacy that involves taking a statement, interpreting it to mean something ridiculous, and then arguing that vegans will lead us into a new dark age because “Western secularists” are apparently disposed to believe that cow lives being “equal” to human lives means that there’s nothing wrong with being a violent psychopath?
@Hoopyfreud> What’s the term for the fallacy that involves taking a statement, interpreting it to mean [what it literally says], and then arguing [about the logical conclusion of that overly literal interpretation]?
Maybe “rationalism”?
I think that you’re putting too much thought into it, almost certainly much more than the person who posted that meme.
It doesn’t make any sense to say that a cow’s life is equally valuable to that of a human, but people don’t say it because it makes sense to them. They say it because it sounds caring and empathetic to have an exaggerated level of concern over a cute baby animal. People have always been willing to say idiotic things if others will praise them for it, and social media beams that praise directly into the palm of your hand 24/7.
The correct response to this nonsense is to just unfollow them, or if you’re feeling particularly mean reply with a link to your favorite veal recipe.
Yeah, I’m sorry for posting such overthinking. I have an Asperger’s diagnosis.
Tangent: I totally repudiate the idea that autism is a superpower (even the over-sensitivity alone is a disability), but… does anyone wonder if Socrates couldn’t stop himself from corrupting the youth away from signalling conventional Athenian virtue because he was on the spectrum?
Tea-reading historical figures for such-and-such a trait under modern understandings of psychology is never something I like to do, but it’s halfway plausible in this case. That particular type of intellectual stubbornness is something I associate with ASD cases, at least.
Thirded that an exaggeration in a slogan on TV is probably not evidence that the entire western world needs to convert to Hinduism to avoid a new dark age.
But “Their lives are equal to ours in every way that matter”? An ideology that says irrational animals are equal to us in every way that matters is implying rationality/logic doesn’t matter.
People who say that kind of thing are idiots. Often well-meaning, well-intentioned idiots, but idiots. Probably never seen a real cow or pig in their entire lives. Possibly an over-earnest thirteen year old sharing Baby’s First Big Breathless Revelation.
I don’t think it will lead to the downfall of Western civilisation, but I would agree with you that it’s indicative of a softening of social intellectual fibre (if I can be so pretentious) that doesn’t augur well because of the primacy of Feeeelings over facts. Even the most devoted and dedicated do-gooder, if they want to achieve any of their aims to help people/cute fuzzy animals has to buckle down to the cold equations of “if I only get X funding and there are Y number of cute fuzzy animals, then Z percentage of cute fuzzies are going to die because I can’t save them all”. It’ll probably get worse before it gets better, but I do think there are faint indications that “it hurts my feelings so you’re a big meanie to say that so you better shut up (or else)” is getting pushback with “I don’t care if it hurts your feelings, grow the heck up, you’re trying to fight reality and the cold heartless indifferent universe doesn’t care about your feelings and if you want to survive, you better start paying attention to the facts and not the inside of your head”.
Dennis Prager used to discuss how his proxy for society’s moral decay was asking audiences he was speaking in front of “If you could only save from drowning a random stranger, or your own pet, which would you save” and charting how over time, “my pet” becomes an increasingly popular answer.
And the answer given is not what people really think, but rather what people think is the answer most likely to get them cudos.
…because morality doesn’t exist, we got it.
You may be correct, but the measure of how many people are so lacking in self-awareness or outright liars in this regard is just as much a good proxy for moral decay, yes?
There isn’t any point in human history where self-awereness was not a scarce resource.
But even if it’s only for social kudos, the acceptability of an animal over a human is interesting indication of a trend.
It could just be that for the average human empathy is a finite resource and so, if we care more about about animal wealthfare on average, mutatis mutandi we care less about human wealthfare on average. The solution is to find ways to increase the global supply of empathy, rather than to try to go back to the glorious times where if you slaughtered a pig in the open in the middle of town, the only thing people would complain about was the noise.
Presumably, you wouldn’t see anything wrong with people choosing to save their own child, rather than a random stranger, so we’ve already established that faced with a situation where we have to choose the loss of one life over another, not saving the random stranger may be the correct choice. Why is that?
Unless you want to argue that your child has superior moral weight to the random stranger, as a human being and person, you might bring up something like having a duty of care to your child and not the stranger.
That’s all well and good, but we could also argue that you have a duty of care towards your pet and not the stranger, because that’s what the master-pet relationship implies (you are severly restricting your pet’s agency and thus you assume a responsibility for its well-being).
If you want to slice it along emotional impact lines, many people would be more distressed by the loss of a pet than the death of a random stranger. People are dying in droves as I write this. Do I care? Not really. Do I expect random strangers to care when it’s my turn? Not in the slightest.
You may postulate a general obligation to save people’s lives, that your duty of care towards your pet doesn’t override, but in that case why aren’t you out there looking for deaths to prevent? There are some practical considerations that may have greater weight than efforts to save the life of someone who may need saving, but posting to the SSC comments section almost certainly isn’t one of them.
It be interesting to see how many people feel you can have a duty to animals.
Against:
Animals are not moral agents
Animals are unlikely to reciprocate
For:
Animals are capable of feeling suffering
There is a relationship between the two perhaps analogous to some human relationships that carry obligations
Children have more moral weight than adults. This is descriptive rather than prescriptive: I don’t have the philosophical foundation to say why but that’s what society claims.
So to make your counter-hypothetical more interesting: would you save a random child or a close friend?
(Me personally, I find the thought of saving a pet over a human being to be repugnant)
The fun part is that you can have a duty even in the absence of moral agency or reciprocity.
Given that the animal is not typically seen to have a choice with regards to whether the relationship exists or not, the entire moral weight of this choice – and everything arising therefrom – rests on the human. The animal’s moral agency or lack thereof isn’t an issue, because the animal isn’t the one making a moral choice.
(It’s like the joke: Does that dog have a license? He doesn’t need one, officer, he’s not driving.)
So it is with reciprocity: any duties arising arise from your own unilateral moral choices. By instituting yourself as the pet’s master, you need to accept the entire package that comes with it.
Remember, kids, there are no rights without responsibilities.
ETA:
Gobbobobble,
Given a choice of random child or close friend, close friend wins hands down.
I reject the higher moral weight of children and frankly don’t give a flying duck what the rest of society thinks. I can be convinced otherwise, but someone would have to try first.
That you find the idea that someone could choose a pet over a human repugnant doesn’t surprise me. A lot of people do. Some don’t.
I don’t necessarily believe either side is correct, but don’t mind them holding such opinions.
Not true of dogs. This only works against a generalized moral obligation to animals.
Right conclusion, wrong reasoning; there are plenty of obligations where choice doesn’t matter for either party. We don’t have a choice who we’re born to, but we still owe filial piety to our parents. So we certainly could have a duty to save a perfect stranger from imminent death that trumps any obligations we have toward our own pets.
I am not convinced animals can make moral claims on a person. After all, a farmer can slaughter an animal under his care.
Do I have an duty to water my plants?
Do I have an duty to my computer to install anti-virus software on it?
I am not convinced I don’t, though, mind. I’d error on the side of care even if there weren’t also practical reasons to care for animals.
But I’d have to be convinced of the matter before I put even a beloved pet before a stranger. However, in contrast, I recognize a very strong duty to my children, above strangers or even other family or my spouse. I might love my wife more, but I have a unique duty to my children.
Nick:
This must be demonstrated, not assumed.
(I mean: sure, you can assume it for the purpose of guiding your own moral choices, but you shouldn’t expect anyone, much less everyone, else to agree.)
Ditto.
Randy M:
The animal isn’t the one making a moral claim (animals aren’t moral agents). The claim is one you make on yourself.
This requires an elaboration: by choosing to institute a specific type of relationship between you and another living being – a master-pet relationship – you are unilaterally assuming a set of obligations with regards to the pet, which roughly translate into a duty of care. It isn’t particularly controversial to expect the master to feed the pet, provide shelter for it, not mistreat it, etc. etc. Notice that these obligations aren’t conditional on any particular set of behaviours from the pet – it’s not typically justifiable to starve your dog simply because it wasn’t loving enough (whatever that might mean).
If a master fails in his duties to his pet – for example, it dies of neglect – then they have proven unfit for the duty they have taken upon themselves. It was either a failure of wisdom (not being able to forsee they were inadequate to the task), of responsibility or something else perhaps. Nevertheless, their moral responsibility is to themselves.
Despite superficial appearances, this is not the soft option: personal failure is something you have to live with for the rest of your days. Any attempts to mitigate are in themselves a failure – a failure to acknowledge one’s errors.
Immoral people will, of course, have none of these problems, but what else is new?
Notice that this is a different situation from the farmer, where the animal is treated as a means to an end from the beginning.
The reason these situations are different, morally, is that it’s the people, not the animals, who are moral agents making moral claims.
And rightly you should. Parental responsibility towards the child is greater than perhaps any other (any I can think of anyway), because without the (biological) parent, the child wouldn’t have come into existence.
I should, in light of previous discussion, note that this responsibility to your children doesn’t generalize to everyone else’s children – because in their case your decisions are not a cause of their existence. If you are an adoptive parent, the obligation arises out of the choice to adopt and the situation is analogous to the one I outlined for pets – you have a moral obligation to yourself, first and foremost, to discharge the duties you’ve taken upon yourself to the best of your ability.
No, I expect lots of people to agree, because lots of people actually do believe in filial piety.
You yourself said that there are no rights without responsibilities. Well, kids have rights to care by their parents. Consequently, kids have responsibilities to their parents. Alternately, supposing you believe the converse is true as well—that there are no responsibilities without rights—the parental responsibility to care for their own children you later mentioned has a corresponding right.
What if I told you that they don’t?
Picture, if you will, little Robbie Crusoe, aged 4, on his desert island. His parents, regrettably, died in the shipwreck that stranded him here.
Would you be so kind to explain to lil’ Robbie how he has a right to parental care? You can’t actually help him in any meaningful way, but I’m sure as soon as he knows his rights, he’ll feel all better.
It is my position that nobody can speak meaningfully of having rights, if they are unable to enjoy these in the absence of other people. Yes, this does mean that the catalogue of rights I am willing to acknowledge as “fundamental” is fairly small.
It’s unquestionable that a child can only obtain parental care if it has living parents. There is no requirement or guarantee that any particular child’s parents are alive. This being the case, it seems peculiar to postulate a right to parental care, if its enjoyment is necessarily predicated on circumstance.
If you read my response to Randy, this does not absolve the parent of responsibility for the child. Indeed, the parent owes the child big time, because they have chosen to bring the child into existence.
Given that I reject the premise (right to parental care), I must reject the conclusion (responsibility that comes with the right).
This does not mean that children cannot acquire responsibilities towards their parents in the course of their lives – as a result of the relationship – nor that they cannot unilaterally accept such.
You’re going to have to expand on this, because it appears to be the crux of your position, and I don’t know what it means. And then I have two followup questions: first, what rights do you believe exist then? And second, in what sense are they fundamental; do you mean these aren’t grounded in anything like human nature or dignity?
Since I think I strongly concur with Faza on this point, I’d like to take a stab:
Your truest rights include things like the right to breathe; the right to seek food, drink, clothing, and shelter (but not to have them provided); the right to be left alone.
None of these is grounded in human dignity, but they are grounded in human nature as an entity capable of independent thought. Seeking is broadly defined here; you could be born without arms or legs, or with an addled mind, and your options when seeking food would thus be quite limited. But you could still consciously will yourself in the direction of whatever you suspect is nearby. The right to be left alone is perhaps the most important one, as it puts in sharp relief the obligation to others to not go out of their way to hinder you.
All other rights are atomically based on agreement between individuals. I agree to give you the right to some of the food I found; you agree to give me the right to some of the clothes you found. We have no moral obligation to make this agreement; it’s rather that we may find it practically advantageous to do so.
The rights of a newborn are consequently limited indeed. It is wholly at the mercy of other people. However, we may agree to give each other the right to stop each other from harming a newborn, or to force each other to provide it with care, just as we may agree to give each other the right to do the same for the sick, the elderly, the poor, or anyone at all. In other words, we are giving away part of our right to be left alone.
It just so happens that some such agreements (such as to require care for newborns and children) are very quickly made, and very strongly enforced, in western societies. We know of some societies where the agreement is held more loosely, either in other places or earlier in history.
It seems to me, though, that that account either produces vacuous rights—I have a right to will that I have food? I’m pretty sure my stomach is willing food with or without my say—or else rights that are conditioned by circumstance the same as the parental care case, which doesn’t meet Faza’s definition. And anyway, in the latter case, I don’t see why by a person has “more” right to seek food just because they have arms. What’s more, if that’s the route you go, conditioning rights on individual capacities, you get absurd results, like that the diabetic have no right to life, or that the politically savvy have a right to rule.
@Nick
From what I understand, based on the reasoning of “no rights without responsibilities,” if kids have rights to care by their parents, that means that those kids, once they grow up and become parents, have the responsibility to care for their kids. Not that those kids now have the responsibility to take care of their parents.
Likewise, if we consider the converse, then the parental responsibility to care for their own children means that those parents had the right, when they were children, to be cared for by their parents. Not that those parents have the right to be cared for by their kids.
The obvious solution is to eat dogs. Like i’ve seen that video of the cow playing ball, and i still think cows are delicious. Also saw a video of an adorable little piglet enjoying a warm shower, it looked tasty. And since i’ve been told that dog is delicious too, i’m certainly trying it the first time i see it on a menu.
I hear dog tastes like a mix of pork and chicken. Haven’t had the chance to try it though.
It’s a mighty good thing cows don’t live to voting age.
I’m not buddhist, but I hang out with them enough to hopefully give a passable rebuttal to this: some people honestly believe that life itself is what makes these beings special, not the various attributes those living beings present. It’s not that rationality and logic don’t matter, it’s that a being’s rationality and logic in no way change it’s inherent value.
Sure, I get that. A dog has a Buddha nature, a monk has a Buddha nature. But a monk or nun’s ability to intellectually assent to Dharma in this life and try to practice it, taking the Triple Refuge, is better than a dog’s inability, and that matters. Logic and ethics matter: I remember reading that Gandharas (supernatural musicians whose ethics consisted only of consent) were a stock example of an embarrassingly bad reincarnation for a monk/nun.
Vegans don’t have that kind of discriminating intellect behind them.
This sounds really interesting. If you happen to remember where you saw it, would you mind posting it? I love reading about that sort of thing.
Fully concur; although I might amend it to “most vegans” or whatever. That being said, posts like this still don’t bother me all that much. If I’m sympathetic to the complex, intelligence and nuanced version of an argument, is it ok to be sympathetic to the stupidest version of that argument?
I think some things are being conflated here. It’s perfectly fine to be sympathetic to folks who have their hearts in the right place but can’t defend their beliefs with good arguments. And it’s fine, in a way, to be sympathetic to an argument that’s close to a better one. All the same, it can cause no end of trouble when folks latch onto a bad ‘version’* of a good argument. Imagine the neverending misery caused me by theists defending the “everything has a cause” premise of faulty cosmological arguments. 😛
*For the record, I think two arguments can be similar or share premises without being “versions” of the same argument, so I’m hesitant to adopt this language. But there are definitely times when someone has back-constructed a bad version of a good argument they once heard.
Reading this, and getting really confused about what you mean for a few seconds made me realize that I perceive and argument’s uniqueness largely in terms of what outcome their success would bring about.
I mean, clearly there’s a line somewhere. “Don’t eat meat because all life is equal” is fundamentally different than “Don’t eat meat because the lizard people who control everything have decreed it thus.” But especially for moral arguments like the one above, I guess I tend to see it more as people attempting to explain a concept/belief that exists independently of them; the difference in how they express it is more a reflection of their inherent capabilities than the overall reality they’re advocating for.
All I meant by it is that in philosophy, there are families of arguments that lead to the same conclusion with similar but distinct premises. Some arguments are weak to certain objections but not others. Some might be invalid and others not. And I just want to be careful, because thinking of them as “versions” of the same argument may lead us to elide important differences. Like it matters a lot whether my cosmological argument uses “everything has a cause” or not, because if it does it will only persuade people that I’m a dummy. In this case, the vegetarian really is hurting her credibility with meat-eaters by deploying a bad argument, and I can sympathize with her without sympathizing with the argument.
You’re conflating the scholastic idea of a rational soul with Yudkowsky’s rationality in your mind. Realize that they are different and stop mixing them, and your confusing will disappear.
Then, is it okay to kill and eat irrational humans?
Is it okay to kill and eat humans who don’t practice ethics, e.g. because they are small babies?
What counts as “practicing ethics”? Does it need to be verbal, preferably in English?
Or is the fact that the cow doesn’t try to kill and eat you enough for you to reciprocate by not killing and eating the cow?
Let’s list stuff that lived up to the hype.
The Grand Canyon
I found it every bit as impressive as its reputation said it would be.
Disney World
I was in high school when we went, and was absolutely primed to think it was lame stuff for lame kids lame. But somehow I kind of liked it, particularly Epcot Center.
The Rocky Mountains
They promised me big-ass rocks, and they delivered.
I actually wasn’t that impressed by the grand canyon. Sure it was big, but big =/ beautiful or breathtaking or whatever…
Later on the same trip I visited Bryce Canyon and was blown away. Much cooler looking by far!
Yeah, I used to be into Bryce Canyon. Like, five or ten years ago maybe. But I’m into other places now. They’re pretty obscure. I doubt you’ve heard of them. 😉
@johan_larson
This is fantastic. Thanks.
I felt the same about Grand Canyon. Bryce is really nice, and If you ever get the chance, Zion is in that same area, Really worth seeing.
Doom, the 1992 video game.
id Software promised substantial improvements over Wolfenstein 3D. Bullet holes persistent in the walls. Floors and ceilings at different heights. Falling. Elevators. Chainsaws. Projectiles with their own velocity. Multiplayer. Customizable maps. And the first episode was still free.
Sex. I was worried as a kid that it wouldn’t be everything I hoped – it’s different than I thought, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t undersold.
Food/drink: truffles, Chateau d’Yquem
Scenery: Glacier National Park, Switzerland (all of it)
Games: scythe, go, catan (long ago), Azul
Music: Tribe Called Quest, RHCP
Movies: Spinal Tap, Dr Strangelove, The Godfather, Casablanca
Things that didn’t (for me):
Food/drink: everything else w/ alcohol, uni, bird’s nest soup, shark fin soup
Scenery: Vienna
Games: Terraforming Mars, Munchkin
Music: Kanye post MBDTF
Movies: too many to list
Mandy: the trailer for this film started slow and progressively grew insaner and insaner by the second. This looked like it was going to be the most crazy-awesome film of the decade.
And then I saw it and it exceeded all hopes.
IMDB shows two such movies. Are you referring to “The enchanted lives of a couple in a secluded forest are brutally shattered by a nightmarish hippie cult and their demon-biker henchmen, propelling a man into a spiraling, surreal rampage of vengeance” or “A woman becomes obsessed with a sofa she has seen in a shop window. Unable to think of anything else, she goes to desperate lengths to possess the furniture of her dreams”?
The one with Nicholas Cage in it
Yeah, the former. Here’s the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI054ow6KJk
The recent movies that come to mind for me are Terminator 2, The Fellowship of the Ring, and Saving Private Ryan. All three were highly anticipated, and totally delivered.
Among older films, The Godfather and The Apartment absolutely deserve their places in the pantheon of classic films.
The original terminator I always found really underrated.
I saw t2 first and when I saw t1 the vision seemed way more complete and the cyberpunk (in the present) aethetic way cooler.
Definately one of the most stylistically and thematically compelling movies I’ve seen
Dom Perignon champagne. I’m not a big wine / sparkling guy, I usually can’t discern the difference between wines, and most champagne is “eh, pretty OK.” When I tried a long-saved bottle of Dom Perignon, it was a categorically different experience. Based on the price point, it should have been the best I’d ever had, by a long way. It was.
Place: Carlsbad Caverns. I had been to Mammoth Cave several times, as well as lots of other show caves. Mammoth Cave is very cool and reminds me of the goblin tunnels from The Hobbit. I thought I was prepared for Carlsbad. I was not. It was breathtaking, the type of place that makes you believe Hollow Earth stories.
The Wire
Beethoven’s 9th
Jackson Hole, Utah
Remy Martin cognac.
Skeiðarársandur / Öræfi (Iceland). The name Öræfi means “wasteland”. What the Mos Eisley Cantina was to scum and villainy, this place is to wasteland. A black sand desert for miles and miles; on the day we crossed the wind howled without end and rain came down frequently. We stopped at one spot near the eastern end to take some pictures of the glaciers in the distance; strategic parking was necessary to open the doors of the car safely, and the air was full of grit.
Baby Driver
The trailer had action sequences synchronized to music and I decided to see it in the theater hoping for more of that. It delivered that way beyond my expectations in the opening scene, and then more in the rest of the movie, on top of a pretty good story.
Hamilton
I’m a bit of a compulsive pop culture contrarian so I’m sure that if I had heard of Hamilton a couple of months earlier I would have been super into it. As it happened I ended up waiting a year or two before looking into it because it was too popular. Finally I listened to the soundtrack on a roadtrip with my wife and it was as amazing as everyone was treating it. I teared up with patriotic fervor at Washington’s introduction. (After we saw it live I like to make people guess which scene made my wife cry and which scene made me cry.)
A happy marriage
Yosemite
Beer as a category. Not every beer. But oh god, great stuff
Parks and Rec
Seeing the night sky
Those cheesy cliché nights around a campfire with friends where you just drink beer and make smores
Into the Spiderverse/Infinity War. Went into both with really high expectations. Disappointed with neither.
Ender’s Game
Queen
For Ender’s Game, do you mean the movie, the book, or both? I haven’t seen the movie, but agree that the book lived up to the hype.
Obviously the book.
I thought the original novelette was even better than the book.
Milford Sound, and the entire fiordlands region in NZ. Stunningly beautiful.
+1. The South Island of NZ is in general one of those places where you see the photos and say “oh come on it can’t actually look like that in person” and then you go there and it does.
I fly into Milford regularly. Occasionally passengers tell me that it was the best experience of their lives.
If you’re going to visit Fiordland, an overnight cruise on Doubtful Sound is the way to go. You’ll also want to do a flight either helicopter or fixed wing.
Doubtful was great.
Saw an albatross and a load of seals.
If you’re in that area, the gloworm caves on lake Te Anau are also amazing.
Epic Rap Battles of History
Getting a good nights sleep
Brazilian barbeque
Holding your baby
The Swiss Alps
Going away to college
Fall from Heaven
Breaking Bad
The Tule Elk preserve
This and drinking enough water
for me, barbecue as a category seems to fit: texas bbq, kansas city bbq, north carolina bbq, south carolina bbq, korean bbq…
I can’t quite agree. I’ve had Texas BBQ a couple times (in Texas, mind), and it was very good, but not great.
Going to a Churascuria and having twenty varieties of meat, all tasty, brought to you until you tap out, on the other hand, is often one of the highlights of my year.
Jerusalem (the Jez Butterworth play, in its original production with Mark Rylance)
The Godfather
The Last of Us
And in a slightly different but related area, seeing my football team win the Champions League in person was more thrilling than 29 year old me would ever have imagined. I thought that level of excitement and joy over watching a sporting event had vanished with my childhood.
My new diet plan is “keep eating as much as I want of exactly what I was eating before, but before every meal I have to eat a whole celery stalk.” Is this genius or terrible? It seems like it might not have a ton of impact, but it should be at least marginally better right? I’m replacing some amount of volume that would normally be occupied by pizza and cheeseburgers with celery. And I do seem to be unable to eat as much pizza and cheeseburgers as I did before.
My first instinct is that this is really stupid, but so stupid it just might work. I am very tempted to try it myself, please update how it goes!
Maybe chug a glass of water, too.
Drinking a glass of water before each meal is an old trick that supposedly works.
This also reminds me of a diet a character in a series of books I read as a kid went on. He ate a slice of melon before each meal, and had no fried foods.
I will often avoid drinking anything just before/during a meal precisely in order to ingest more calories.
Depends on the timing. Hot dog competition champions have reportedly drunk loads of water a while before they compete in order to expand the volume of their stomach.
Why? Unless you’re eating ridiculously low-nutrient dense food and literally don’t have the stomach space to spare, what’s the point? Also, doesn’t that impact your enjoyment of the overall eating experience?
@Aftagley
I’m trying to eat as many calories as possible because I need to gain weight. You may have missed the thread about it from a few weeks ago.
Probably depends on what your goals are. If you’re trying to lose weight it likely won’t work since you’re almost definitely still eating more calories than you burn.
But if you just want a marginally healthier diet it should be somewhat effective. Will get more fiber going through you and take up space in your stomach you’d otherwise be loading up with excessive amounts of unhealthy/empty carbs, fats, and protein.
That’s just my general understanding, I’m not a dietician. At best I’d call myself a friendly internet armchair nutritionist.
Depends on whether he’s gaining weight pre-celery intervention, and how much. If his weight was stable and this cuts out ~400 calories a day, you’d expect him to lose >3lbs a month for a time, until his BMR reduction from losing weight equaled ~400 k/cal.
If he was gaining about a pound a month, that typically means he had a calorie imbalance of 115 k/cal, so he’d only lose 1-2 lbs with the same calorie reduction.
I don’t think either situation is unrealistic; it’s not really that hard to cut 400 k/cal in the first place and “ruining my supper with nutritionally barren food” isn’t a bad way to do it. I do the same thing with carrots/broccoli over my first two meals a day to control weight and it works fine.
I am looking for a piece of research about whether the market has priced in the impact of likely global warming on equities. I vaguely remember Scott mentioning it in the past. Secondarily, is there any evidence the market has priced in likely climate change related regulation – for example, oil company stocks trading at a discount because of implied likelihood of a carbon tax. Does anyone have anything?
Oil companies are asking for a carbon tax, which should tell you that this is a complicated situation, where oil companies may even benefit from certain climate change regulation, or at least compared to other regulation.
I think you’ve to an extent strawmanned the Christian viewpoint on why there is suffering. Recall that in Christianity’s narrative, there isn’t any suffering initially; everyone pokes around in a garden naming things, chitchatting with God, not needing clothes and all that. Then there’s a conscious choice to rebel away from perfection and subsequent punishments; childbirth hurts, food is hard to get, animals are dangerous.
And for Christianity, even this suffering is partially voluntary in the short term. Most biblical rules have to do with being nice, avoiding conflict-causing behaviors, sharing with needy people and not eating shellfish. Meanwhile absolutely all suffering is voluntary in the long-term, which is what the whole heaven bit is about.
So if you wanted to steelman this, you’d come up with an argument something like “We had an opportunity at perfection and chose to go our own way; God allowed us to do so with a non-extinction level punishment to go with it. Still, most of our own suffering is self-imposed in the short term, in that humans treat each other poorly. We are all offered an escape from temporary and eternal unhappiness to eternal happiness, in any case.”
You may not believe any of that is true, but since that wasn’t your argument that’s moot. You might also believe that an omnipotent creator-god has no right to punish anyone for disobedience or that you have a better concept of what an appropriate punishment is than an omnipotent creator-god; that’s not an argument anybody can win in either direction.
At any rate, this is a lot closer to what Christianity is than pretending that free will and an incomplete understanding of God are its only explanations for suffering while simultaneously representing the free-will portion of the explanation as something different than what Christianity represents it to be.
For context, “we” = two people who lived 6000 years ago. Even the most charitable interpretation of Christianity includes being punished for someone else’s transgression.
(But they were your great-great-great-…-grandparents, who ate a fruit!!!, which makes it totally reasonable to make you suffer and die. Any omnipotent and infinitely loving being would react the same way.)
That sounds like a Protestant weakman.
Eastern Orthodox, f’instance, come across as treating Adam and Eve like the Form of Man and Woman. Archetypal Man and Woman made a choice to participate in evil, each individual recapitulates that, the New Adam Jesus Christ saved them, and the Church commemorates this with icons of Jesus breaking the gates of Hades and Adam and Eve coming out in the lead.
For the record, a correct reading of the Adam and Eve story is that God made a world where there was no good or evil, no good or bad, no better or worse. That was the world he intended for humans. But he gave them a choice of rejecting that world for a world of good and bad. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil can just as well be translated the The Tree of Belief in Good and Evil. They chose that world and the rest is history. The world itself did not change. There is still no good or evil. However, people think there is. The cool thing is that at any time we can choose to reject the idea of good and bad, better and worse and live in a world without this. That world, by the way, has no suffering.
This schtick of yours is getting a little tired.
@Viliam:
Given your general tone, I’m pretty sure you aren’t interested in arguing with anything resembling the actual nuanced beliefs of an actual Christian, but just in case (or, barring that, for observers)
1. The argument that a person shouldn’t be punished for Adam and Eve’s disobedience would be valid coming from a person who was not similarly disobedient in their own right. Outside of the biblical representation of Jesus, no such person exists. Most protestants don’t think/talk much about the Catholic concept of original sin; that’s because there is plenty of new, non-original sin to render the matter moot.
2. The “ate a fruit!!!” thing is beneath you; it’s beneath anyone. The text has Adam and Eve surrounded by perfectly adequate fruit they are allowed to eat. They are told not to eat a fruit that will make them die, and they do so anyway and enter into a world in which death is a thing. That’s the explicit text. Barely into the metaphor is a clear choice between perfection and imperfection, between a world run by God or a world run by man.
You might still disagree with all of that, but at least do yourself the favor of arguing with something that actual exists instead of the theological equivalent of going “capitalism? LIke I want to live in a world where people sell a BABY’S KIDNEYS so they can drink more DIET COKE”.
3. The post you replied to wasn’t meant to convince you to be a Christian, or that God’s punishments are just. It was a response to a strawman, and an exhortation to at least argue against the actual beliefs held by the people you disagree with instead of a made-up version designed to be easy to defeat. It’s depressing to me that you read this (spoiler: or not) and then went right back to the strawman well.
To be clear, again: I’m not trying to convince you to be a Christian. I’m trying to convince you and the thread originator that, if you hate the beliefs of Christians, you should at least hate them for a non-weakman version of what they actually are.
But they were your great-great-great-…-grandparents, who ate a fruit!!!
(1) The fruit is metaphorical; the sin was disobedience and pride and deceit.
(2) Plainly this argument means that great-grandparents who had lower intelligence cannot then produce offspring who will be of lower intelligence and so on down the family line, glad you’ve solved that problem so worrying to people about the current problem of dysgenics because all the dum-dums are having kids and the smart people aren’t, therefore the nation and civilisation is doomed due to general fall in IQ continuing over generations on a population basis.
But the mythology is, in part, one somewhat-more-concrete approach to answering that philosophical question.
@Atlas, yes, that’s a strawman. You can’t go “Christians are stupid because they say ‘God is love’ and yet there’s some level of imperfection in the world” and then say “well, yeah, I know their concept of God has an explanation for this, but I decided to completely ignore it because my priors are that religion is stupid” and still be taken seriously.
If you want to argue that adherents to a religion are stupid because their religion is internally inconsistent, you have to, you know, acknowledge what the actual internals of the religion are. What you are actually doing is going “I think all religion is a fairy tale, so I think anyone who believes it is stupid” and then dressing it up as something you think looks more interesting.
This would have been a lot quicker if you just posted “All religion is a lie prove me wrong”.
And there you go! You don’t believe any of it. That’s fine. I don’t need you to. This is MUCH closer to not being a strawman.
This is just standard “it’s a fairy tale and I don’t believe it” stuff. Boring, and also no way for me to change your mind, nor mine yours. This, incidentally, is your actual objection and what you should have lead with – you think it’s stupid to believe in any of this at all, regardless of the good/evil thing.
This is a good question – much better than you give it credit for. There is a question of whether or not an entity, knowing another entity will or might do a “bad thing”, is responsible for that thing.
Let’s take my son; I don’t want him to yell randomly. When he yells randomly, I punish him in some way or another (usually just scolding) to get him to stop.
I could keep him from screaming at random times by making him wear a gag; I could similarly keep him from screaming by paying a psychologist to drug him. I could also have kept him from yelling by just not having him. But in that I wanted a son who was an actual human with some agency, I don’t do these things. And in that he wants to exist without being drugged into a near-coma or wearing a gag, he knows that when he yells randomly, some form of punishment might be coming.
But to the point: When he yells, yes, I knew to a near statistical certainty he was going to yell. Neither he nor I would suggest that this absolves him of absolutely all blame in the matter, and it’s silly for you to do so.
It’s equally silly to go “I know the exact answer to the question ‘Does knowing someone is going to do something make you responsible for what they do, even when restraining them from doing it would be a massive restriction of their agency?’ And the answer is yes; there is no sane way to think not” when there are debates about, say, free speech and recidivism on the ground in every developed country right now.
This is what free will is. The Christian God values it; so do you. You are suggesting God should have made meaningless obedience robots, but he already had those. They are called trees. In that he wanted anything with any meaningful level of free will, there was going to be disobedience. And not crippling your creations doesn’t make you wholly responsible and them wholly free of blame for disobedience either. You are treating this, too, as a simple question, but this, too, is not.
I really feel you wouldn’t feel it was as simple a question if I was to say “there’s a high incidence of people who are released from prison committing a crime; let’s throw a tracking anklet on them for life, and also they are on house arrest, and also we follow them with a monitoring drone.”. You might eliminate their ability to do bad, but you’d also eliminate their ability to do good in the same stroke. You’d certainly have plenty of people who wouldn’t accept “well, I had to tie him down to the bed to make sure he never did anything wrong – if he did, wouldn’t that be on me?” as an excuse.
Facile as shit, frankly. Your argument is, boiled down:
Since we are still bad, doesn’t that mean we shouldn’t be punished? And since we are all bad, as a race, shouldn’t that mean that the race doesn’t mean to be punished?
You then minimize that humanity, as represented in Christianity, fundamentally different in it’s nature after the fall, by saying “it’s convenient” that they were different, as if Christianity doesn’t address this, or as if the entire point of the apple bit wasn’t that the choice would in fact change them, their mindset, their knowledge, and their relationship to sin. This is lazy and dishonest of you; again, you are going “Christianity has no answers for this!” when they do, instead of going “I don’t believe any of this and think Christians are stupid!” which is what you mean.
You then strawman what Christians think salvation is/does; It’s not only not promised that salvation releases somebody from suffering during their earthly life, it’s clearly stated that it will likely increase that suffering. The promise of salvation is an end to suffering at the gates of heaven. And then this gem:
I mean, come on. If your argument is, as you claim, that you just don’t get why people believe this stuff, you really can’t then pretend to not understand that Christians think there’s a promise of less suffering at least after death. That’s too cute by half.
This is unbelievably dense; you actually believe you can ask “How could people believe this theology and philosophy?” and then not… deal with the theology and philosophy they believe?
I would suggest your arguments, thrust and tone are about a subtle as a brick, and if you think more than about 20% of the people in can’t tell what your general intent is, you are vastly underestimating them in a way far more uncharitable than what I’m doing to you.
A new study just came out about Growth Mindset working. Thought this would be good information to add to the ongoing discussion.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/08/study-finds-growth-mindset-intervention-taking-less-than-an-hour-raises-grades-for-ninth-graders/
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/08/multilevel-bayesian-analyses-of-the-growth-mindset-experiment/
You really buried the lede here. This study finds a robust POSITIVE effect to the growth mindset with just 1 hour worth of intervention, and its impressive-looking modeling/analysis technique includes pre-registration of the analyses they would run, AND Andrew Gelman participated in the design!
I don’t have the chops to contribute anything here, but this looks like a huge deal in the ongoing conversation.
How much is there to explain? There are only three big universalist missionary religions. Two of them are monotheist. Maybe that’s just a coincidence. If Manichaeism had won, would you think up something else it had in common with another winner?
And these are hardly independent events. Islam is a descendant of Christianity. How many of the details it copied matter and how many are decoration?
Some from Column A, some from Column B?
Hitlerism didn’t become a religion but went extinct after 12 years except for a few marginal nuts, and we can explain that as it being too evil to survive longer. OTOH, while Islam had clear advantages on spreading itself in a pre-industrial world, is it just harmful forward from that?
0. You sound like a man with a hammer looking at everything like a nail. Don’t you trust NNT to suggest more tools? Don’t be fooled by randomness.
1. When NNT says that something is Lindy, he doesn’t expect to understand why it is robust, does he? Maybe there are reasons for the winners, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to figure out what it is. Islam and Christianity have a lot in common, not just monotheism and the problem of evil. Hinduism and Buddhism have a lot in common.
2. The obvious hypothesis, as several said, is that it is fit to be a universalist missionary religion. (Although Hinduism is also fit!) How many such religions have had enough success to be worth talking about? 20? That’s a pretty small bracket. For any pair of them, you could probably come up with something in common, even if they weren’t directly related.
3. Are religions subject to a lot of peril? If they fought it out every year, I think the world would look pretty different. We do see Axial religions eat away at pre-Axial religions. I believe that there is a discrete jump in fitness between the two types. But when Axial religions fight each other, it’s pretty much a stalemate on the scale of centuries. Their position on the leaderboard is caused by being carried by empires. The expansion of empires is driven by a few big wins, not a lot of peril. I think NNT calls that a top-down phenomenon that leads to power law outcomes. We don’t have enough data to see which religions are better at capturing empires. We don’t have enough data to see which religions strengthen empires.
(I think of Hinduism is as a pre-Axial religion that co-evolved with Buddhism and/or absorbed some traits to become resistant to Axial religions. But those traits were not universalism or missionaries.)
Enough of the Lyme disease subthread. Let’s talk about Lyme disease.
Now from one perspective, these “chronic Lyme” patients are a bunch of delusional people, primarily women, from whom a handful of shady doctors have been able to extract countless sums of money for worthless treatment of a nonexistent disease. From another, this is yet another example of an insular medical establishment that doesn’t listen to patients, especially women, and a handful of courageous doctors have bucked the establishment to give them the treatment they need. As a scientifically minded person my instincts trend towards the first, but lately I’ve seen too many stories of “solid” scientific findings being based on total junk. If “standard medicine” is little better than N-rays and phrenology, then maybe chronic Lyme could be real. I mean, it’s not, but it could be.
The general consensus is that “chronic Lyme” is actually an autoimmune disease caused by reaction to the initial Lyme infection. That means antibiotics won’t help against it (contrary to many claims of “chronic Lyme” patients).
See for example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15214872
https://www.nature.com/news/2011/110805/full/news.2011.463.html
https://medium.com/emerging-infectious-disease/chronic-lyme-disease-and-an-autoimmune-response-aa9ec36a9a4a
I think there’s something to PTLDS. That’s distinct from the “chronic Lyme” described in the article, which seems to be so vaguely defined and have such common symptoms that practically anyone could be diagnosed with it, whether or not they ever had the bacterial infection.
@BBA
Isn’t there a third option where chronic Lyme disease is real, but the treatments don’t work?
Polytheism- dualism may get a leg up on problem of evil, but monotheism is a stronger on a range of philosophical points. These are subtler and less emotionally salient so for popular appeal are relatively unimportant but they help with the elite I guess.
Dualism tells us why evil exists, but sacrifices the justification for preferring good over evil in doing so. It only “solves” the problem for as long as you keep a core belief that “they’re not actually equal, good is the better one.”
If they’re both equal forces then one isn’t worse than the other, it’s just different. Think of the fight as being Red vs Blue, not Good vs Evil, if you want to think about it in the neutral terms dualism posits.
I don’t follow? You seem to be equating between “equal in power” and “equal in moral value.” The fact that the God of Good is equal to the God of Evil in strength does not mean that good is equally preferable to evil – that would be like saying there’s no reason to prefer capitalism over communism because the USSR and the USA were both superpowers.
If you go hard into divine command theory and say that good is whatever the God of Good says it is, then sure, having two gods just gives you two divine commands to choose from. But I think most people are okay with having a separate definition of morality, in which case your reason to follow the God of Good is because he commands good things.
Yeah, but this then raises the old conundrum: where does Good come from? Is Good more fundamental than God? If so, it diminishes the notion of God.
I have no solution; I’ve never liked the taste of “God made the universe so He gets to set the rules” much either.
The Form of Good IS God.
Note that Plato and almost all Platonists taught that evil is not ontological. Good exists and the referent of “evil” is lack thereof, as light is waves/photons and the referent of “dark” is absence of light, not the fundamental particle darkons.
Having a separate definition of morality also means that when you talk about the God of Good you’re actually saying something meaningful, as opposed to talking about the God of Whatever God Says.
Good is a transcendental, so I wouldn’t personally call God the Form of the Good. But the transcendentals are convertible, so God being Subsistent Being Itself means He’s also Subsistent Good Itself.
(…Sheesh, that was way too many capitals.)
@beleester,
I don’t think you’re quite grasping the Problem of Good yet. It’s tough to do, because most human are programmed deep down to believe that Good is a real thing, and that’s hard to turn off even for the ones who claim to be relativists.
But try hard to think of them as a Red and Blue God. What are you really saying when you tell us that we “should” support the Blue God over the Red God? How do you ground the “should” in any way that’s not arbitrary?
The points above are all quite good, but don’t discount the importance of what you could call historical accidents. North and South America were colonised by monotheists and are populated by people of such beliefs with near universality, but the necessary parts were inherent in Europeans learning about it and sending people there first, not because monotheism is uniquely suited to colonisation. In a world where the billion people in the Americas today got there through India, you might have wondered why Hinduism was such a prevalent thing.
One thing all the monotheisms have in common is that they proselytize, and (most?) have at times demanded that people convert or die.
Maybe that’s their comparative advantage – it’s not that they are more believable, or more satisfying, or better for their host societies. It’s just that people with these memes work a lot harder to infect their neighbours.
FWIW, I don’t think this is unique to monotheisms. It’s a feature of “world religions” – among which I’d definitely include Buddhism. (And from where I sit, Buddhism has a far better solution to the “problem of evil” than any religion that tries to postulate an entity that’s all powerful, all knowing and also benevolent.)
Judaism is monotheistic and doesn’t proselytize.
I believe that it has done so at times in the past.
It definitely did in the last couple centuries BC (you can see mentions of “proselytes” and “God-fearers” in the New Testament), and IIRC again a couple times afterwards.
Manicheanism is something of a one off and it may be a matter of fluke as Douglas Knight says – we’re only really talking about two big monotheisms and they’re clearly related and we don’t have many data points.
As for why it beats polytheism, polytheism leaves room for competitors to come in and take over and is less able to have a clear message of salvation. Even in Hinduism which we think of as polytheistic the major waves of religious enthusiasm have centred on worship of shiva or Vishnu/Krishna as supreme and in a sense are as monotheistic as Christianity.
Manicheanism was not a one-off, if we’re using it as a stand-in for Dualism. That’s a recurring heresy in the Christian world, probably because dualism is a tempting way to answer certain Problems of Evil (it raises new ones, but never mind that).
Zoroastrianism is also dualistic, was a major religion until very recently, and has no Abrahamic roots.
Not never mind that; that’s just the thing! If dualism’s philosophical problems are insurmountable, or even just a lot more perplexing, then it’s less surprising it fell out of favor.
ETA: hedging
There’s a philosophical problem in polytheistic religions as well, namely: where does existence come from? This problem has led some Zoroastrians to slap a god of time and space on top of their regular good and evil god twins.
Some Christians decided that the Old Testament God is evil, and Jesus was sent by a good God. Merits of this view aside, it was never politically tenable because a lot of early Christians were converts from Judaism and so they’d never buy something like that.
> If I was a villager in some Near Eastern village in the 7th century,
You would’ve witnessed that the Persian Shah, invincible due to Ahura Mazda’s farr (sun-like charisma), has capitulated, and Adur Gusnasp, one of the non-physical, non-extinguishable fires that burned since creation, was easily put out by Heraclius. Not a great promotion of dualism. Muslims, on the other hand…
And here is some monk writing in some Near Eastern monastery in the 7th century:
Some
Christiansheretics decided that the Old Testament God is evil, and Jesus was sent by a good God.There, fixed that for you 🙂 Marcionism was pretty much condemned by everyone as unScriptural and nuts. The Carthaginian theologian Tertullian, nobody’s idea of a cooing dove and so one whom you would expect to be sympathetic to anti-Semitism, let rip in five books Against Marcion:
Fix declined: the term “heretic” has no place in a purely historical discussion. In a theological discussion, I don’t trust the Pope enough to tell me who’s heretic and who isn’t.
I’m not saying that Marcion is correct in his guess that Jesus opposed Yahweh. But there’s a real theological problem that the OT God has owned evil, and NT God disclaims all responsibility for it. Look at this development by St. Anthony the first monk (Philokalia, 150):
Why would such a God ever utter something like “I am He that creates evil” (Isaiah 45:7)? Tertullian answers by lots of swearing and then mocking Marcion’s God who is suspiciously similar to St. Anthony’s God:
Say what you will, but I like Marcion’s error more than Tertullian’s orthodoxy.
The civic religion of one of the greatest empires on Earth had gone stale, and those at the highest levels wanted something new.
The Catholics managed to build an institution able to survive the fall of Rome.
THey were all that was left standing amongst the rubble.
Some Christian heretic in Arabia had a vision in a cave and won a load of wars.
The people living where the Romans used to be got really good at sailing.
Does anyone have thoughts on the situation between India and Pakistan?
Here’s my take.
Source.
Here is another article, from Reuters, about misinformation on social media during the last flareup in February.
Starting to sound like a dystopian cyberpunk novel yet?
It puts our discussions about social media in a different light when the two parties in the meme war are nuclear powers, don’t you think?
How do you expect the situation in Kashmir will ever resolve itself when the most divisive takes have a systematic tendency to go viral?
I’m with Senator Josh Hawley: We might be better off if Facebook, Instagram and Twitter vanished. Not just us, but the rest of the globe too. Which do you care more about: Trying shoehorn a long-dead slaveholder’s ideas about free speech into 21st century communication technology, or preventing nuclear war?
I feel it necessary to point out that we need not actually do anything that implicates the First Amendment to get rid of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. All that is necessary is a strong set of social norms against using them.
Imagine if tweeting carried a similar sort of social stigma as tweeting racist jokes. I’m not talking about people getting fired, or anything like that; rather, a situation where admitting to it would be a cause for social disapproval. Some people might engage in it in private, but most wouldn’t actually admit to it in public.
Even if it wouldn’t be enough to kill those social networks, it would greatly reduce the damage they do to public discourse. I’m perfectly okay with Warmfront (not sure if banned word, you know who I mean) to exist, somewhere, as long as it’s not driving public discourse in any meaningful way.
We might even direct this norm against the chattering classes – I’m thinking about media people first and foremost – initially. A concerted political effort to effect this might look like: politicians stop using Twitter and refuse to talk to any media people known to use Twitter (or even if they do, they can make it clear they consider Twitter-users as being the same kind of people as “famous for being famous” celebrities, like the Kardashians). In short, if you want to get any respect as a serious journalist, you do not use Twitter. A Twitter-user is probably a gossip-pages hack, or something just as unsavoury.
I happen to have had the good fortune of being in on the ground floor of Twitter’s emergence and being on the fringes of the early-adopter/influencer group that got us to where we are today. I still remember “Tweet that you’re eating soup, so your mom doesn’t worry.” being proposed, by the site, as a serious use case.
A lot of journalists got in on Twitter early and a lot of people were evangelising Twitter to media people/celebrities. Imagine an opposite scenario: “I won’t set foot on Twitter and have no respect for people who do”. Without the signal boost from traditional media, Twitter would cease to be relevant for national discourse.
When was the last time you got wound up over something someone posted on MySpace?
If you and yours can unilaterally set social norms, you’re already in charge.
A beautiful dream, but I don’t think we can get there from here.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma with no enforcement strategy. What is the tit for tat here?
Besides which, like with healthcare insurance, the industry is too deeply rooted, meaning that they will fight tooth and nail to keep surveilling and mining data to sell.
Yes, large, powerful, information controlling governments have never been a threat to international peace.
+1
I’m not proposing the US government control information. I’m proposing a return to the pre-Internet era of political discussion.
All you have to do is remove legal protections for social media sites: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Then users could pay social media sites a usage fee, scaled based on that user’s estimated chance of triggering a lawsuit. Boom, serious people having civil discussions rule social media. As a bonus, social media business models are no longer driven by maximizing engagement.
In terms of international peace… right now we are in a Pax Americana period which is unusually peaceful. This is not the first time a large, powerful government has created international peace. Check out Pax Romana and Pax Britannica.
Because, let’s face it, “serious people having civil discussions” and “not defamation under US law” are two ways of saying the same thing.
The social media site has an incentive to develop e.g. a machine learning model which predicts the probability of a defamation lawsuit. If the person is a serious person having civil discussions, their likelihood of triggering a defamation lawsuit is low. It’s no different than auto insurance: Your insurance will be cheaper if you don’t get in accidents.
Even assuming this to be true, the converse is not. People say lots of things that are neither actionable defamation nor civil discussion.
In any case, Section 230 doesn’t change what you can sue for, only who you can sue. Repealing it would merely shift the liability from those who have direct knowledge of who they are and direct control over their own actions, to those who have neither.
…but who do have extraordinary amounts of money.
My intuition is that, if 230 were repealed, social media sites would just reinstate it via other means – elaborate disclaimers, clickwrap agreements, relocating servers to countries with different laws, etc. Any reason to think that’s not the case? In a way, 230 has kept us from finding out what happens when you sue Facebook, which might still turn out to be nothing.
Section 230 cannot be enacted by click-wrap agreement because libel can be claimed by someone who doesn’t use the service. If someone libels me on Twitter, no agreement between Twitter and its users can shield Twitter from liability to me, a non-user; it has to be law.
And no agreement between Twitter and a user can make the user assume full liability for libel against third parties because Twitter has deep pockets and random internet trolls don’t.
Maybe. But “can’t” is a strong word for something that’s never been tested. I don’t think the first person to walk in to court asking for $10M from Facebook are going to feel as confident as you sound.
There’s no “maybe” about it. If Facebook tries to limit its liability to libel by agreement with its users, the first lawyer walking into court with a libel case from a non-user is going to feel very confident that agreement will not affect the case. There may be other reasons the case will fail, of course, but that won’t be one of them.
If you say so, counselor. But I still think your confidence is misplaced. In the first place, CDA 230 says that when I put something on Facebook, Facebook should not be considered the speaker; it doesn’t immediately follow that when 230 is rescinded, Facebook would perforce be considered the speaker, someone still has to persuade a court of that, right?
In the second place, huge corporations with huge legal teams seem to have a knack for getting things to work out. I wouldn’t say “there’s no maybe about it!” re: winning damages from Facebook if I had video evidence of Zuckerberg and the entire BoD singing “To libel dick, we’ll invent a flaw / even though it’s against the law” in three part harmony.
I think you’re misunderstanding the confidence. The Nybbler isn’t saying Facebook wouldn’t win in court. Just that they wouldn’t win based on a user agreement.
Yes, and it seems like “FB won’t fail because of X” is narrower than “FB won’t fail at all”. But FB gets to come up with a legal theory (as to why they’re not liable) first, then change the product to suit it, and then write a user agreement based on that. It’s hard to see how a claim that that agreement will fail to protect them is not a claim that their legal theory is wrong.
But this new (as in not contained in original comment) proposal has nothing to do with Thomas Jefferson or any other dead slaveholder.
That’s true, I just came up with this idea. Sorry for the slaveholder thing, it seems to have derailed the discussion.
Reasoner:
I agree that social media are messing up public discourse in a lot of ways. But I think various ways to either shut down destructive discourse or try to legislate what communications technology should look like in the future is going to do more harm than good.
I come at this as someone who holds some pretty unpopular views on questions of fact, which I think are correct and important. I expect that any mechanism to shut down socially destructive public discussion will shut down discussions of human b-odiversity long before they get around to shutting down the kind of rage-fueled clickbait that IMO is poisoning a lot of public discourse. Similarly, I expect that discussions that are upsetting to powerful people will be targeted for shutting down–opposition to popular wars, demands to hold war criminals accountable, critiques of busing or affirmative action.
Making it easy to sue websites for anything written on them by their users won’t just stop social media, it will also make it easy to shut down public discussions like the one here, or on other blogs and online fora that exist and allow for interesting, high-quality discussions. Those fora often bring up issues that never show up in mainstream US media, and even more often bring up perspectives that show up in mainstream venues only as ideas to be condemned without a hearing. I think they make the world a better place, and don’t want them destroyed.
Further, a lot of the most destructive discourse (rage-inducing stories written for clicks, often with major factual distortions) are staples of mainstream media outlets, and have been for a very long time. Neither Rachel Maddow nor Tucker Carlson is a product of social media.
I think as a culture (and as institutions) we need to develop a kind of cultural antibodies to the kind of destructive side of social media. But nothing I’ve seen from previous regulation of tech companies suggests to me that Congress will do any kind of good job helping that process along. The fact that social media is impacting elections makes this even less likely–everyone is going to be looking to help their side in the next election, regardless of the long-term effects.
I agree, and I think this is already happening, and part of the reason I can’t take right-wing social media fears (that Twitter is silencing conservatives, so-and-so got fired for a FB post which is a slippery slope, etc) seriously is that they contain the implicit assumption that this won’t happen naturally and relatively quickly.
+1
@dick
The attempts to form competing spaces don’t seem to work out very well, so the antibodies in practice seem to be communal feelings of resentment and ressentiment.
This doesn’t solve the issue in any way, but result in more focused hatred and increasing support for insurgency.
Look at it this way: is your social media better or worse than five years ago? I don’t mean social media generally, you’re not qualified to talk about that and neither I am. I mean, your little corner of it. Your personal experience using it. Better or worse?
If better: great, it’s working!
If worse: think about why. Pick an experience you had that illustrates how awful social media is. Whatever it was, you could’ve avoided it, right? If it was an offensive post from your uncle, you could block your uncle. If it was a dissatisfying argument, you could’ve not argued. If it was an enraging article, you could’ve not clicked on it.
Doing those things, avoiding the shit, is the antibodies. People are getting inured to clickbait, people are learning that some types of arguments aren’t useful, but it’s a slow process. We as a society are still grappling with the idea that maybe junk food isn’t very healthy and we shouldn’t eat too much of it, and that’s been around several generations. Social media has communities based around broadcasting and amplifying hatred, and it also has communities based around regifting out-grown baby clothes to neighbors who need them, and people are still sorting themselves. Give it time.
One of my interests is a topic that the blue tribe considers evil (weaponry), resulting in YouTubers covering that topic being excluded from recommendations, monetization and such. This clearly exasperates the YouTubers covering this topic and requires extra effort on their part and on the part of the fans.
One of them, Jörg Sprave, started a YouTubers union and is trying to attack YouTube policies with EU law.
The point is that the blue tribe considers many red tribe politics and hobbies to be hateful and are trying to use their power to prevent those communities from existing. So the issue is not that these communities are insufficiently sorted, but that there is intolerance on the part of the blue tribe for the very existence of things that go against blue tribe orthodoxy.
I see no indication that the tolerance is increasing, rather the opposite, with social media increasingly trying to eradicate the other.
Exaggerations and persecution aside, you just said that there would be more videos about your hobby on youtube if more people liked it. That seems pretty axiomatic.
Other than the weapons the belligerents will have access to, how is this any different than Hearst pushing us into the Spanish-American war? Jingoists have played up national grievances to incite war forever.
I’m with the dead white guy on this one, and I’m willing to wage a nuclear war over it. And your phrasing makes you an obnoxious troll who should be ignored rather than engaged.
All will try to abridge freedom of speech in the name of a worthy cause, and the answer should always be the same: No.
I’m going off on a tangent here:
Freedom of speech isn’t the most important freedom along these lines. Freedom of though is more important. People shouldn’t forget this.
It’s arguable that the US constitution’s fourth amendment is a more important freedom than speech portion of the 1st amendment.
I didn’t derive all my political and philosophical from first principles.
I was pursuaded by others’ speech.
Without that speech, I’d never have even got the opportunity to think those thoughts.
Yeah, the “I’m with Senator Josh Hawley” and using “long-dead slaveholder’s ideas” un-ironically strongly points to trolling. I presume the point is to criticize Hawley as a “hypocrite” for supposedly being against “free speech.”(Regulation of social media companies is no more an abridgment of free speech than regulation of paper-making is an abridgment of freedom of the press)
I think Hawley’s attitude is the future of the Republican party. Everyone here knows that, if the situation with big tech were reversed, that they were censoring liberals rather than conservatives, almost every single liberal would be demanding government regulation. After all, they just spent a decade banging the drum that “money is not speech and corporations are not people.” And they are winning, because it’s always easier to fight when you don’t have sacred cows to work around.
I’m not sure what this means. Are there regulations that require papermakers to sell paper to all comers regardless of politics?
(As to the other side winning, Citizens United is still good law despite any outcry against it, was decided by a strong majority, and none of the changes in justices since then seem likely to provide votes for a reversal.)
“Are there regulations that require papermakers to sell paper to all comers regardless of politics?”
I don’t know, there might be. During the 19th century the “robber barons” loved the “we’re a private company and we can sell or not sell to whoever we want, at whatever price we set,” and so a lot of rules were put in place to combat “predatory” pricing strategies and monopolistic behavior. These weren’t just demanded by socialists, many found the business environment easier if they didn’t have to worry that one day the railroad might double their rates or their supplier would cut off their service after being bought up by a competitor. So for all I know there are strict rules like this in the paper industry.
Regardless, the question is whether those regulations would be a violation of the “free speech” of the paper manufacturers. I don’t think anyone would argue that they would.
Being required to bake cakes or perform wedding photography are live controversies as free expression issues, so I’m guessing that a fairness doctrine for papermakers would likewise be if the issue arose. Especially if the group a papermaker was refusing to do business with wasn’t an already established protected class.
You’re assuming paper companies want to use their business power to obstruct newspapers they disagree with politically. But you shouldn’t project the attitudes of the tech industry onto traditional manufacturing, usually, businesses just want to make money.
I’m not trolling. I unironically think Josh Hawley is spot on. I expect many agree with him, but they have already left social media:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/08/46-of-u-s-social-media-users-say-they-are-worn-out-by-political-posts-and-discussions/
I’m not a troll. I’ve left hundreds of comments on this site, and I’m a huge fan of Scott’s.
I did choose to be slightly provocative with the dead slaveholder phrasing in an attempt to inject some ideological diversity into this forum. Although this style of argument is very popular outside the forum, I almost never see it here. I’d hate for the SSC community to be one that relies primarily upon shibboleths like this to determine whether someone should be classified as a troll or not. I do feel that if someone has made clearly mistaken moral judgements (e.g. regarding the acceptability of slave ownership), this should make us a bit more skeptical of their moral judgements in other areas (e.g. free speech). So I think my argument here does have some merit, even if arguments made with this shibboleth are typically obnoxious arguments made without merit.
You guys can’t both claim that your community is ideologically diverse, and instantly label me a troll when my argument even superficially resembles the sort lefties make!
But in any case, the point is important enough that I wish I had not been unnecessarily provocative this way, so consider that bit rescinded.
I did choose to be slightly provocative with the dead slaveholder phrasing in an attempt to inject some ideological diversity into this forum. Although this style of argument is very popular outside the forum, I almost never see it here.
Yeah, because it’s “acting like a troll”. If you come off sounding like trolls, then you are going to be treated like a troll. I could be edgy and provocative and all that juvenile ‘look at me, Ma, being outrageous on the Internet!’ showing off using deliberately offensive comparisons and metaphors on here, but I try not to be, because that is outrage for the sake of it and pluming myself on how big-brain I am.
It’s also perilously close to ad hominem: yeah, I’m fat and ugly and old and you wouldn’t even [x] me, but have you any argument that will hold water against my criticism? No? Then the “dead slaveholder” thing is the equivalent of “No, you’re a big poopyhead!”
Please don’t inject anything in here before you ask people if they consent to having needles stuck into them.
A lot of SSC comments would be considered trolling (in the sense of being edgy/provocative) if they were posted to a left-leaning forum.
This seems to be a non-sequateur. That sites with a particular ideology take expressions of alternative ideologies as provocative does not justify a deliberately-provocative presentation on a different site.
“deliberately-provocative”
If I express an alternative ideology, people will take it as provocative. If I know this in advance, any expression of an alternative ideology could be considered “deliberately provocative”. So if everyone tries to avoid saying anything provocative, we get groupthink, moral tribes, and filter bubbles.
When I said I meant to be provocative, I meant in the sense of getting people to think thoughts they don’t usually think and consider perspectives they don’t usually consider, not in the sense of trying to start a fight.
Our community remains intellectually diverse because we dismiss as trolls people who deliberately toss offensive and ideologically charged ad hominems for the explicit purpose of being “provocative”. That’s a central example of trolling in the classic sense, and it is incompatible with sustained ideological diversity.
Yesterday, you were a troll. Has nothing to do with left vs right, but with promoting anger and shouting vs. civil discussion. Try not to be a troll next time you start a discussion.
You consider it offensive to point out that someone was a slaveholder?
When is a factually true but unflattering statement offensive? Am I no longer allowed to say anything bad about dead people? Would it be offensive if I pointed out that Stalin killed millions, for instance? I’m pretty sure this sort of “offensive” allegation regarding Stalin-type outgroupers has been made many times on SSC with nary a peep.
I’m sure I’d be labeled a troll if I disparaged Stalin on a communist forum though.
Just because someone doesn’t walk on eggshells around an ideology’s sacred cow does not mean they are a troll. Just because someone thinks the outgroup has a point now and then does not mean they are speaking in bad faith. Citation: many SSC posts.
Reasoner:
I’m finding it very hard to assume good faith here.
You wanted to load up the traditional idea of freedom of speech with lots of negative associations, so you described it as the idea of a long-dead slaveholder. The point was pretty obviously not accurately describing anything, but rather to weaken the idea by associating it with something everyone now agrees was bad.
Nobody here is going to complain if you bring up the fact that Jefferson was a slaveholder in a context where it makes sense. But whether or not the first amendment was a good idea as written, and whether or not it’s a good idea in the (much different) way it is currently interpreted by the courts, has zero connection with whether or not Jefferson was a slaveholder. The only reason to bring it up is to try to weaken the concept by association.
You consider it offensive to point out that someone was a slaveholder?
And here we see the classic troll tactic of dissimulation, pretence, and outrage-baiting. Fascinating to observe the traditional, even instinctual, displays that the creatures demonstrate when engaging in threat displays, mock combat, and other bluffing strategies. If you listen closely, you may hear the distant cries of No, you are… no, you are… that are one of this animal’s distinct and unique vocalisations.
Nature is awesome in its myriad creations.
I would dearly love for this to happen. But I dearly love freedom of speech even more. It’s always painful to choose between the ones you love, but I will bite the bullet on this one.
You can have both though: If social media websites go away, we will still have free speech in the sense that the founders intended. (Newspapers can print whatever they want, but there’s a nontrivial cost to setting up a newspaper.) That’s what I was trying to get at with the shoehorning comment.
IMHO, this is on Modi. He’s the one leading this, not Indian twitter users.
Which do you care more about: Trying shoehorn a long-dead slaveholder’s ideas about free speech into 21st century communication technology, or preventing nuclear war?
Donatism as a political governing philosophy doesn’t really work, my friend, because all of us have sinned. All our righteousness is as filthy rags, and President Squeaky Clean Hates Slavery Free Speech Means Hate Speech Punch A Nazi is going to be outed by the kinds of people who dig up twenty year old social media posts where Squeaky admits they got drunk/high/made a joke in poor taste/used slang or a term that was in widespread use at the time but is now An Awful Hate-filled Slur (“gasp, they used the word “g*ypsy”, can you imagine!!!”)*
*Yes, with mine own two eyes I have seen people censoring “gypsy” as though ’twere the n-word because the slur is so Awful and Hate-filled. Pacific Rim got blasted over this for having a jaeger called Gypsy Danger, to the point where some people writing fanfic changed the name to Lady Danger. Those are the very people who would be in agreement with Reasoner over “long-dead slaveholder’s ideas about free speech”.
Interesting heresy. Did Donatists not buy into original sin at all? Christianity really doesn’t appear shy about the statement that all humans are flawed, to me.
Oh, Donatists were very big on sin, especially if you fell short after baptismal regeneration; St Augustine – whom Calvin thought was on his side when it came to damnation – argued against them because they sought an impossible standard of purity and made themselves the judges of who was and was not perfectly pure.
Rather reminiscent of some social media, come to think of it. But it’s the same argument as “so if Surgeon X is cheating on his wife, is he still the best person to perform this operation?” We generally don’t take the surgeon’s private life into account but rather his professional ability. Now, if he turns up drunk or high before the operation, then yeah we judge his morals, but otherwise no.
Donatists insisted that only those with a perfect level of zeal and purity could be clergy, and moreover that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on the personal purity and belief of the officiant. Take that into the secular world, and you get the “yeah but Washington/Jefferson/other Founding Father owned slaves, therefore everything else he said or wrote is only waste paper, let’s whitewash over the mural” arguments. It’s entirely possible to be a dead slaveholder and to be right on a principle of law or governance.
Last weekend’s events got me to thinking that the First Amendment and the Second Amendment are incompatible. Internationally, of course, the same dynamics are even worse.
I think Christianity is significantly more alien than you’re imagining because you seem to be conflating “evil” with “suffering”.
Now I have no special knowledge of Christianity but it seems like the entity that devised a plan to overcome death by having both his personal incarnation and his son brutally tortured and murdered might not prioritize suffering minimization. I might suspect that a religion that celebrates the suffering and persecution of its adherents, literally to the point where all their hero/saint stories involve brutal murder, might have different values.
Because from a surface reading of the Bible, it seems like God cares a lot more about whether you masturbate than whether you are brutally murdered because one is a temporary inconvenience where the other involves the fate of your immortal soul. It’s not even harm mitigation, like endure suffering now to minimize suffering in Heaven/Hell, but because becoming one with God or being faithful or whatever is literally the purpose of existence and “good” in a sense I’m not even sure materialism/modernity can convey.
Judging God by how much he minimizes suffering is about as useful as judging Cthulu by how much he lowers the unemployment rate or Marx by how many things will be colored Pink under Communism. Like, that just does not seem to be a priority.
That doesn’t mean you have to like it or agree with it, but it’s going to be hard to understand it’s appeal and adherents if you can’t understand it’s values.
Or to put it another way, God cares about who you are, not what happens to you.
It’s not quite as black and white as that; part of why he cares about who you are is how you will help or harm others.
But yeah, the Christian God is not concerned with giving you a comfortable life on Earth.
From a surface read, it has always struck me that the obvious reason that God slew Onan in Genesis 38:8-10 was for betrayal, disobedience, and rape. You have a duty to your brother, your father commands you to fulfill that duty, you selfishly follow through with the fun part of the process without actually fulfilling your duty. This makes the first two crimes pretty obvious, they are pretty serious and entirely thematically consistent with the rest of the bible.
But look, we consider condom sabotage somewhere on the sexual assult to rape spectrum because the consent was obtained under the explicit precondition of using a condom. By the same token, when consent is obtained under the explicit precondition that you finish the job inside… well, it falls in pretty much the same place.
So he managed to violate the whole trifecta of worst crimes you can commit (because let’s be honest, murder is a modern obcession) at the same time. I would say the slaying was well deserved.
ETA: And just so we’re on the same page, the rest of the chapter makes it pretty clear she was an active participant to the arrangement, and rather upset by Onan’s crime of seed spilling.
Plus, infertility in women was often seen as a divine punishment for the woman’s sins. So by making it look like his brother’s wife was incapable of conceiving, Onan would have been opening her up to all sorts of slander and snide gossip.
(Tangential, but funny: Dorothy Sayers called her pet parrot Onan, because he was always spilling his seed.)
Yes, while I understand it’s historically been interpreted that way at times, I have never seen anything in the story of Onan that really relates to the masturbation prohibition. It’s pretty obviously about Onan’s selfish rejection of his duty and God’s law. If you’re looking at a masturbation prohibition, it’s a much easier interpretive fit to cite admonitions against lust, coveting, and imaginative porneia.
There are of course natural law arguments as well. And we should weigh the opinions of for instance the Church Fathers pretty heavily if that’s how they interpreted the sin of Onan. (I don’t actually know offhand what any of them said about masturbation, though.)
Yeah, I’m not saying there aren’t other arguments to be made, but if you’re going to pick one single “proof text” against masturbation, Onan seems like a weird choice to me.
If we’re looking for Biblical arguments, Jesus’ injunction against looking at a woman lustfully would be pretty hard to square with masturbation.
Hey, he didn’t say anything about those rocks over there that kind of look like boobs.
The Grand Tetons?
Buy the BluRay to see the Smoky Mountains in their uncut uncensored glory!
This but unironically. A lot of modern liberal Christians would argue that the problem with lusting after a woman (or a man) is the covetous aspect, the act of desiring to have someone who doesn’t belong to you and imposing a sexual fantasy on someone who didn’t consent to it. If you have a sexual fantasy in your head about a hypothetical person who doesn’t actually exist, then it wouldn’t be sinful because it’s not violating anyone’s integrity, at least going by this interpretation of the Bible. By the same logic, a married person who masturbates and has sexuality fantasies about their spouse wouldn’t be doing anything wrong. It’s also theoretically possible to masturbate without thinking about anything beyond the physical sensations involved, although I’d imagine that’s not a common practice.
I went to a Catholic high school, and they taught us in religion class that pornography was sinful because it was effectively a form of prostitution, since the actors were being paid to fornicate. I asked the priest if looking at hentai was okay, since there weren’t any real people involved, and he gave a fairly non-committal answer like “sometimes you have to decide for yourself what’s in keeping with Christian values.” Of course, he also made it clear that the Catholic Church also forbids masturbation itself, so it’s something of a moot point unless you’re watching Japanese anime porn for the riveting plots. But other sects of Christianity might be more flexible, given that the actual Bible merely prohibits covetous lust and not the act of masturbation per se.
Further to this, she has a name: Tamar. Genesis 38 is really about Tamar and Judah; Judah’s sons Er and Onan are a bit of a sideshow. In spite of the immoral behaviour of not only Onan, but everyone in the chapter, Tamar eventually bears twins who will carry on the line of Judah. Prophecies and genealogies elsewhere in the Bible suggest that God had a plan for Judah and Tamar’s offspring–interfering with a plan like that is unwise.
This definitely follows from the Bible, but it’s essentially solving the problem of how God can be omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent by saying that God isn’t all-benevolent. This is one of the solutions to theodicy, but it’s one the flies in the face of what most Christians seem to believe, even if there’s support for it in the Bible (if the Old Testament counts, at least). You put it very directly, but the common refrain that “God works in mysterious ways” or “God has a plan” is pretty much suggesting that god is not, in fact, maximally benevolent.
(The standard, or at least a common, counter-apologetic to the idea that God allows suffering on Earth to help people get into Heaven is that God makes the rules on who gets into Heaven and it’s immoral to *not* let people into your dimension of infinite joy.)
No, it just says that benevolence isn’t exhausted by suffering-minimisation.
I don’t think so, any more than “Trust your doctor’s prescription, even if the medicine doesn’t make you feel any better at first” implies that the doctor isn’t interested in making you feel better.
“God makes the rules, so why can’t he change them so that [fornicators/murderers/tyrants/people who urinate all over the rim of the toilet seat and don’t wipe it clean afterwards] can get to Heaven?” would only work if your interlocutor holds a particularly strong version of divine command theory, according to which God’s moral commands are entirely arbitrary and there’s no reason, other than divine fiat, why a life spent raping and murdering small children is any worse than a life spent running a soup kitchen for the poor. If the content of the moral law isn’t arbitrary, then it’s not arbitrary for some people to go to Heaven and others to Hell, so the objection wouldn’t work.
Of course, if we’re going to assume divine command theory, then it makes no sense to say that it’s immoral of God to forbid certain people from entering Heaven, because ex hypothesi morality just is what God commands.
Your doctor is not, shocking I know, all powerful. Nor are they all knowing.
If they were …
I liked Unsong‘s solution to theodicy (spoilers follow): vs gurer ner na vasvavgl bs jbeyqf pbagnvavat ab cnva be fgevsr, gurer’f n zhpu terngre vasvavgl bs jbeyqf perngvat fbzr cnva naq fgevsr, naq na bzavoraribyrag tbq frrxvat gb znkvzvmr gur tbbq zvtug perngr nyy cbffvoyr jbeyqf gung hygvzngryl pbagnva zber tbbq guna rivy. Bhef whfg unccraf gb or n jnlf qbja gur fpnyr. Gur nafjre gb “jul qvqa’g Tbq znxr gur jbeyq xvaqre?” vf gung Tbq qvq; vg whfg vfa’g bhe jbeyq.
Yeah that one drifts into “haha only plausible” for me more often than I’d expected
Or it just means that your definition of benevolence differs from theirs.
Like, take Ignatius of Antioch. Big Church father guy, eaten by lions in the Coliseum. Here’s his take on Martyrdom:
“…nearness to the sword is nearness to God; to be among the wild beasts is to be in the arms of God; only let it be in the name of Jesus Christ.”
And it’s interpreted by Christianity.com as
“To die for Christ, even if it meant becoming a sport to bloodthirsty spectators, was to inherit eternal glory.”
Now I’m not going to say Ignatius was overjoyed to be martyred by lions but on a scale from “This sucks” to “Best thing evah”, both Ignatius and modern interpretations of this lean towards being eaten by lions as a good thing if it’s for God. Ignatius told his followers not to interfere in his martyrdom. Would he consider it “benevolent” to save his life?
I’m reasonably confident that both you and the OP think God is suffering is bad/not benevolent/ungood. Isn’t this kind of the whole point of religion, like your instrincts about right and wrong are false, you need to learn what’s actually good, and the end goal is to realize/train yourself to believe that being eaten by lions for God is awesome?
Or to simplify, there’s pretty solid evidence in early Christendom that suffering isn’t always bad, in fact, it’s awesome for the right cause. You don’t agree, cool. But you’re wondering why they weren’t caught up in a logical contradiction that exists with your definition of benevolent/good but not theirs. If suffering isn’t intrinsically bad, see Ignatius, then the existence of suffering under a benevolent God isn’t confusing because he actively calls for suffering in certain circumstances.
I don’t want to oversell this, lot’s of people seem to believe in “Buddy Christ”, but I think that’s basically a sanity thing. If you take it too seriously, you end up with really weird societies that die out. For example, if you’re looking for philosophical coherence, I’m pretty confident the Shakers had a more philosophically rigorous theology than the prosperity gospel guys but the Shakers also banned procreation, so that was pretty much the end of them.
Addendum: I wonder if this is just a word thing. Like, if all-benevolent=”doesn’t allow suffering”, this makes sense, but just insert “God doesn’t allow suffering” instead of “God is all-benevolent” I think the distinction is clear.
This makes me think of CS Lewis’ comment that people of his day had confused charity (doing good for someone, an active virtue) with unselfishness (not causing someone trouble, a passive virtue). Maybe he’d say something similar here — people seem to treat benevolence as simply avoiding causing suffering, whereas in reality it means bringing about another’s good, which may sometimes require causing them suffering in the process.
The Hugo Award Ceremony will be on August 18. It will probably be live-streamed, but I don’t have a link for that.
My intro about the Hugos, including the question of discrimination against white men
My reviews of the Graphic Stories
Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
1 Doctor Who: Rosa– my favorite because of striking performance and writing for the part of Rosa Parks. Who and crew have to make sure Rosa Parks sets off the Montgomery bus strike as it was said in history. Their ability to deal with the local culture is erratic and no doubt plot driven. I loved the bit where Rosa is impatient with people who are her fans for reasons which make no sense to her. I’m not convinced the strike had to be started exactly as it happened– it seems very likely it would have happened anyway– but good enough for science fiction.
6 Doctor Who: Demons of the Punjab– least favorite because it just didn’t grab me. Not awful.
5 The Expanse: Abaddon’s Gate– not awful, but the end(?) of a series I wasn’t involved with.
4 The Good Place: Janet(s) Fairly good, but I liked the other Good Place entry better. The Hugo panel had group viewings for the dramatic presentations, and I was surprised at what quick pleasant shows the Good Place entries were even though I’d seen them fairly recently. This one didn’t do it for me because actors were playing each other and I don’t think they were quite good enough.
3 Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae– at least, something that isn’t part of a series! A fairly standard sf frame (a woman’s memory of her deviant behavior and emotions is being wiped, and that behavior consists of music videos).
They are very good music videos.
2 The Good Place: Jeremy Bearimy– fun and funny, very little of it remembered, but there was an explanation of how time is sequenced in the good place.
Dramatic Presentations, Long Form
6 A Quiet Place– an adequate movie with a strong premise. Aliens (who turn out to have great big ugly ears) have conquered earth. They’re blind, but hunt people by sound. People have to be very quiet all the time. The movie wasn’t clear about spacial relationships, and it needed that desperately. People *eventually* figure out that they should bait the aliens with loud noises, but it took a while.
5 Annihilation– a mysterious alien infection(?) site is investigated by an all-women scientific team. Again, not awful, but kind of slow-paced and without having specifics, it seemed as the the team’s mission wasn’t handled thoughtfully.
4 Avengers: Infinity War– I had a bit of a hard time choosing because I find I’m getting tired of the MCU. Also, I’d seen Checkmate first, and things still weren’t making sense. I probably need to watch more of the movies to pull things together if I care that much.
3 Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse– this has a lot of clever use of various animated styles. The family dynamics (especially the uncle) are interesting. I’m unhappy with abuse in families being solved that easily (I hated Coco a good bit more), but I’m curious about whether these movies get some abusive parents to clean up their acts. I find it hard to believe that the universes will remain separate.
2 Sorry to Bother You– a very weird movie with crude special effects. I suspect I rated it high partly for not being from the MCU. At least it was something different. A black man who’s down on his luck gets a job at a call center. It turns out that when he uses his white voice (pretending that life is great), he’s brilliant at selling. And that they’re selling slave labor. Then things go sideways– as he rises to the job of the organization, it develops that biotech makes is possible to turn people into part-horses– stronger, more enduring, and more docile than humans…
1 Black Panther: my favorite, partly because I like Wakanda (a very lively culture) and partly because it was surprising to see a superhero movie with serious discussion of foreign policy.
Gur *vqrn* bs guvf frevrf vagrerfgrq zr irel terngyl, ohg V ernq n ovg bs fcbvyref nobhg gur cybg, naq vg frrzf yvxr gur frevrf tbrf pbzcyrgryl vagb vgf bja aniry jvgu penml pbafcvenpvrf vaibyivat gur zrzoref bs gur grnz naq gur betnavmngvba vairfgvtngvat gur fvgr, naq V’z yvxr, jul jbhyq V tvir n fuvg nobhg nal bs gung? Jbhyq lbh whfg trg onpx gb gur ernyyl vagrerfgvat fghss cyrnfr?
ETA: I haven’t seen Black Panther, but I’m still disappointed Into the Spiderverse isn’t your #1. 🙂 What did you mean about abuse in families? Who was being abused? It didn’t seem like Miles was, though he was definitely not communicating well with his dad.
ETA2: Re #2:
Wait, Regal are turning people into horses?
Mile’s father was ignoring Miles’ actual emotions and trying to force him to an extent that I hated watching.
And the idea that becoming an adult is pretty much about a leap of faith rather than needing to actually know how to do things strikes me a bad idea.
This feels like one of those bravery debate things. Like, for some people the advice they need is “do some actual thinking before you make life-changing decisions,” and for other people the best advice is “stop sitting around in analysis paralysis and actually try to do things.”
Miles needs to learn how to do Spiderman things, yes, but he also needs to develop his own style of being Spiderman, because he has powers that the other Spider-people don’t.
Regal is turning people into big strong horse-headed humanoids.
The movie gets described as surreal, but I’m not sure that’s the right word.
Someone should write an essay about the relationship between sf and satire.
Regal is turning people into big strong horse-headed humanoids.
Who is going to be woker than woke and accuse the movie company of cultural appropriation? This is disrepecting Lord Hayagriva! 😀
Yeah, Into the Spiderverse was a 10/10.
And I just remembered Nick Cage’s performance, so make that an 11/10.
The first book doesn’t do much of that. It sticks mostly with the interesting stuff, I believe. It’s rather short, I’m glad to have read it, and don’t feel the need to finish the series.
Then things go sideways– as he rises to the job of the organization, it develops that biotech makes is possible to turn people into part-horses– stronger, more enduring, and more docile than humans
Ordinarily, I’d wince at this as exactly the kind of woke bait movie that turns me off (of course he’s black, of course they hit us over the head with an anvil about assimilating into the dominant culture by pretending to be white, and whiteness is associated with evil, and the evil is literal not metaphorical slavery where literal humans are being dehumanised, of course it all is), were it not for stories like this. Gosh darn it, Reality, you do not have to copy hokey old TV series! This is not compulsory!
(Theme to the TV series if anyone is interested).
A question on Black Panther. Was I the only one to find the concept that the high-tech hidden but socially-aware African society was somehow an absolute monarchy (male rulers only) with the right to the crown determined by who was the best fighter really uncomfortable? It seems a clear echo of attitudes of Africans as primitives unable to rule themselves without a strong guiding hand, of the sort that underlie a lot of US history, but also the highly-damaging tolerance of strongman government in Africa.
Apparently this was a ‘woke’ movie. If wokeness is resorting to the view black people can’t rule themselves well, then there’s something wrong (or my suspicion that it’s a dividend conquer ideology are accurate). I guess the writers had this from their source material, but the MCU is not a faithful recreation of the comics, so someone actually chose to retain this, hopefully without thinking it through…
Good movie still, but I was expecting a more positive view in this respect.
Wakanda’s government bothered me, but it is a standard conceit of the superhero genre that hand to hand combat is a good way of settling all sorts of things that it wouldn’t be remotely appropriate or effective for in the real world. So I tried to treat it as just more of that genre convention.
The story I’ve heard: Black Panther was made as a subversive response to basically racist demands. The creator of Black Panther wanted to make an African American superhero. Specifically African American. His editor told him he couldn’t. So he tried to make an African superhero. He was told he could but only if he agreed with certain racist views (being a black separatist, against interracial marriage, etc). The author agreed. The editor thought he’d make a nice, unthreatening, servile black hero. Instead, the author wrote someone who was a separatist because his society was so much superior to white society.
Honestly, what they came up with is pretty cringe-inducing in modern-day. But that’s the basic rule for Black Panther: he has to be authentically African, ideally relatively untouched by Europe, and yet from a society so superior he’s xenophobic or even quasi-racist. Yet, because he’s heroic, he ultimately overcomes these xenophobic/racist instincts for the good of the common humanity (though always rooted in a form of nationalism).
Also, my impression of the Wakandan monarchy was that it was a traditional tribal monarchy rather than an absolute one. There were councils that weren’t appointed by him and assemblies that appeared to be able to have power outside his. I’d caution against reading too much into this unless you’re willing to claim that Wonder Woman is a sign that the Greeks need to be ruled by dictatorial women.
Looking at Greek governments throughout history, are you sure that isn’t worth trying?
Black Panther was created by Jack Kirby, a Jewish New Yorker of the WW2 generation. His Editor-in-Chief was Stan Lee, the guy writing the dialogue for all the stories he drew at 1960s Marvel (their flagship collaboration being Fantastic 4, where Wakanda and Black Panther made their first appearance).
You’re welcome to give it a shot. Volunteers?
Perhaps I’m misremembering the title. I thought Stan Lee was the writer, so I misremembered his. Or perhaps the story is false: it’s second hand, told by a friend.
@Erusian: I’ve heard the same story, although the way I heard it told, publisher Martin Goodman was the one who set up all those limitations, not the editor-in-chief.
That said, a lot of stories about 60s Marvel tend to exaggerate Goodman’s reluctance to publish anything new or experimental, in order to play up Lee and Kirby’s rebelliousness. For instance, Stan Lee always talked about how he had to fight tooth-and-nail to convince Goodman that a realistically flawed hero like Spider-Man could be profitable, or that there could ever be a market for disabled heroes like Daredevil and Iron Man. But other Marvel employees claim that Goodman basically let the writers do whatever they wanted, and even encouraged Lee to experiment with novel ideas (the superhero industry was dying prior to 1961, so he probably felt like they had nothing to lose). So it’s unclear exactly how much these stories are true.
Yeah it seemed to me to be a pretty racist movie. The implication was that even though they lived in an advanced society, their leadership was determined by a trial by combat because… all I can think of is that they are Black and Africans, so they don’t have the sophistication of Whites to make their nation a democracy? Of course they also treat Wakanda as governed better than other countries, so maybe they are saying that trial be combat is the best way to pick a leader? (Except of course the one time it resulted in a leader who was going to bring the world to an apocolypse). Is it woke to be in favor of picking leaders this way?
OF course this is a superhero movie, which tend to lean in a might makes right fashion, and politics is never their strong suit. But then this movie is treated as some kind of an anthem or something for Blacks, but to me appears to be the opposite.
I liked Black Panther and I’m cutting Wakanda some slack.
It seems to be a well-governed place, presumably because its culture and the advice from ancestors are good enough. It took extreme bad luck to almost break the system of succession.
We had a brief discussion of this in one of the open threads last week.
One of the central conflicts in the film is whether it’s more important to observe (Wakandan) tradition or to set it aside to help strangers / foreigners. It’s an internal conflict for T’Challa throughout the film, which he resolves when he confronts his dead father in the panther-dimension prior to the climactic battle. This is a fairly old-fashioned but serviceable metaphor for the conflict in Wakandan society that we see the other characters engaged in: the king here represents the soul of the nation.
Black Panther wasn’t a masterpiece and if this really was what they were going for they could have expressed it better. But it is definitely a theme in the film that Wakanda is backwards-looking in its isolation and focus on ritual, and in desperate need of fresh ideas.
Short Story
At last, text science fiction! This is a fairly good category– there are things I didn’t like, but none of it is bad.
6 “STET” by Sarah Galley: A presentation about the ethics of autonomous cars. It’s handled as a scientific paper with footnotes. It turned out that those (like me) who read the free version liked it less than those who got the Hugo packet– in that, it was a pdf which made the ideas easier to follow.
5 “The Court Magician” by Sarah Pinsker– A well-written story about a magician who pays a price for every spell while the king gets all the benefits. If you’re in the mood for a sad, poetic story, it’s a good one.
4 “The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat” by Brooke Bolander– this is nicely done, I just wasn’t in the mood for a story about the justifiable death of a completely awful man. Still, a good rendition of an alien point of view (predatory lizards). Humor is mildly funny.
3 “The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society” by T. Kingfisher. A number of fantasy males pining for a sexually awesome woman who is involved with them for a while and leaves them without caring. A one-joke story but well done. Has a reading of the story and an interview with McGurie/Kingfisher, the interview describes McGuire’s grandmother who inspired Rose in the story– it isn’t known how many husbands the grandmother had. She mentioned one not previously known to her family on her deathbed.
2 “A Witch’s Guile to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow– this story pings the desire to get out of this world. I’d like to know more about the renegade librarians.
1 “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” by P. Djèlí Clark– this one is a collection of very short stories about teeth that George Washington got from slaves. There’s lively invention, and a mixture of tragedy, revenge, and escape. I would be glad to read a novel set in that world.
That’s doesn’t strike me as a lot of sci-fi. 6, and maybe 2.
Is this in the vein of “If you were a dinosaur my love?
No, The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters is solidly fantasy (big intelligent predatory lizards who generally don’t like people, use magic, and have a plausible culture), and a straightforward story.
There’s nothing like “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” this year, and nothing like “The Rain that Falls on You from Nowhere” either
“The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” by P. Djèlí Clark
That’s the one I disliked because I thought it was lazily done – yeah yeah, Washington the slave-owner, we get it; the African and other cultures Clark plunders (oh yes he does) for his heroes get very short shrift in description, and I was unconvinced by the characterisation – so even the woman from Wakanda (which is what he’s basically describing) is caught by the villainous stupid unmagical whites and enslaved, but she still manages to introduce advanced ideas which are naturally stolen from her and claimed as their own inventions by the villainous etc. Now, that might be a useful antidote to the usual stories of “time traveller/person from advanced society goes back in time to/visits less advanced society, becomes rich and famous if not world-ruler because of their knowledge of Science and Progress” as showing how if you’re one person with few to no tools stranded in an era not your own, the society and people of the time will outweigh you and overcome you even if they are primitive, but it’s not done that way – it’s all more “black people are super awesome and supreme victims” meaning of the story. Using other cultures to sprinkle some exotica over your base story is in the vein of Orientalism and not well done, Mr Clark. He may be striving for magical realism but instead he’s ending up with the accuracy to fact of Ingres’ Turkish Bath: using real cultures as a jumping-off point for titillation, whether that be of the erotic nature of Ingres’ work, or the we wuz kangz type of self-consolatory mythologising by the oppressed.
I can understand that kind of story telling, I’m Irish, we’ve done exactly that as consolation for moral victories when the Brits were beating the tar out of us (“sure, they’ve got the worldly power, but we are morally superior to them”) but it isn’t enough to produce a mature worldview and like teenage revenge fantasies, eventually you have to grow up and give that up.
This phrase has made me giggle excessively ever since I discovered that Marvel Comics has a time-traveling villain named Kang, who meets his ancient Egyptian alias (Pharaoh Rama-Tut) in a time paradox. Literally we wuz Kangs in Egypt.
Pharaoh Rama-Tut
Was this because they couldn’t go for Pharaoh Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong as that is under copyright? Oh Marvel, never change with the goofiness 🙂
Novelettes
6 “The Only Harmless Great Thing” by Brooke Bolander. It turns out that there are different strands of Social Justice, and I hate some of them and like others. In this case, we have a story about negotiations to genetically modify elephants so that they glow in their reservation near near a nuclear waste dump.
The fact that this is an alternate history is slowly and gracefully introduced.
People (except for low-level abused women employees) are horrible (I think all the high status people in the story are men, but I’m not checking). Male elephants are horrible. Don’t expect anything but treachery from the people in charge.
Could someone who was paying more attention tell me whether the rkcybfvba made sense?
The story is well enough done.
One of the club members said she liked the anger in the Bollander stories (the other one was about the raptor sisters), which was a polite way of handling how much I dissed those stories. Obviously a lot of people like that sort of anger.
5 “When We Were Starless” by Simone Heller. This is a surprisingly old-fashioned technology is good and there is hope story. I rated it low because for some reason I just couldn’t focus on the beginning. People(?) under threat from chaotic robot(?) predators. Once I got past that to seeing the story elements in functional terms (sympathetic character, suspicious but help-worthy tribe, touching story of high tech guide with barely enough resources), it was alright.
4 “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” by Daryl Gregory. Alien invasion by a wild variety of plants. The last days are the last times various things happened in the viewpoint character’s life. Let’s call it 30% alien plants and 70% good enough people stuff.
3 “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try, Again” by Zen Cho– a magical creature works very hard to become a dragon, but keeps failing. The essential thing is learning how to become emotionally attached instead of focusing so hard on becoming a dragon.
It’s a decent story, but there are some morals I’m getting tired of.
2 “The Thing about Ghost Stories” by Naomi Kritzer– an academic researcher of ghost stories encounters a real ghost. Good balance of intellectual and emotional elements.
1 “The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections” by Tina Connolly– magical bakers who make desserts which bring back memories are enslaved. Persistence eventually pays off. Vivid writing.
I bought one of those “Year’s Best Sci Fi” collections last month so I’d have something hefty for low-tech entertainment while flying up to Alaska and driving back down, and Heller and Gregory were both featured in it. I rather liked “Starless”, probably because of the AI facility manager. “Nine Last Days” I was rather less keen on; once the main character was out of the closet the plants fell by the wayside. I wanted more plants!
People (except for low-level abused women employees) are horrible (I think all the high status people in the story are men, but I’m not checking). Male elephants are horrible. Don’t expect anything but treachery from the people in charge.
That is what tires me about these kinds of stories – the lack of nuance. If you’re writing YA fiction for twelve to sixteen year olds, then this kind of black and white, here are the baddies and there are the goodies, story-telling is okay because they’re learning to read in a mature manner. If you’re writing for an audience in (it is hoped) at least their early 20s, you need to expand to “okay, so not all the baddies are personally bad people, and the goodies can be pretty nasty betimes, and sometimes there are no baddies or goodies, just crappy situations and people trying to survive and make the best of things”.
I am too old now for “men and male beings bad and oppressive, women and female beings good and oppressed, nothing in between” stories. That’s not feminism, that’s ranting.
For me, the problem is the lack of hope rather than the lack of nuance.
+1. If I wanted hopelessness and joylessness, I’d be watching the news.
+1. This world has enough problems and I sometimes have enough trouble keeping my hope up; why should I immerse myself in another’s if there isn’t any hope there?
Oh, any grimdark stuff I just “nope” straight away. I don’t mind horrible villains and crapsack worlds, but I do insist on some kind of hope for redemption. Anything that’s all “and it was horrible and it is horrible and it will be horrible forever” I don’t bother with.
Which is why I get disappointed when I start something that does not seem like this but then turns out to be simplistic “all men mean, all women martyrs!”
I’m surprised that hardcover editions of novellas seem to be doing well. Books priced at about $17 for 200 pages (admittedly cheaper on amazon) are a category, which is going in the opposite direction from three old-fashioned short novels being bound together into single volumes.
Novella
For some reason, I didn’t have much enthusiasm for most of this category. I expect it was a matter of chance.
6 “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach” by Kelly Robson. Aftermath of ecological disaster, research into ancient rivers, time travel, funding issues. Pay attention to personnel problems, or you could get into real trouble. Very depressing.
5 “Binti: The Night Masquerade” by Nnedi Okorafor– completion of a 3-part series. Viewpoint character is person who doesn’t fit in, but gets things right. I find that very little of it has stuck with me, and they’re spoilers. If you want a rather dreamlike story, here it is.
4 “Beneath the Sugar Sky” by Seannan McGuire– part of her series about children recovering from having been in portal fantasies. Not bad, not great.
3 “Artificial Condition” by Martha Wells. #2 about Murderbot, a security robot who broke its governor and now wants to spend its time consuming fiction rather than taking care of people. It still gets stuck with taking care of people, and is also involved with trying to sort out it’s own probably falsified history. Not bad, but the first one was better.
2 “The Tea Master and the Detective” by Aliette de Bodard– People need specially formulated tea to endure being in space. Not everyone can afford custom tea.
1 “The Black God’s Drums” by P. Dèlí Clark– very strong beginning, fair to middling story. Lively steampunk civil war AH, and I especially liked successful Haiti. I’m also in favor of any story where weather magic is political because of course it’s political.
I would have expected a British name, or possibly Chinese.
French-American of Vietnamese descent.
I didn’t expect to research popularity of Tea in Vietnam today, but here we are.
You might get some decent stuff out of the highlands, but I suspect most of Vietnam is too hot and low down to make good tea.
All the good tea comes from places with a Cwb climate (Dry-Winter Subtropical Highland)
It’s more Orientalism. If I’m in the mood for it, that’s fine, but personally I think it works better as fantasy/science fantasy than straight science fiction. Of course, the Hugo categories are now so blurred that stories I think are fantasy/science fantasy are lumped in as science fiction.
I like stories about dragons and the Mystic East, don’t get me wrong, but I do weary of the finger-wagging about on the one hand “you cannot wear a kimono as a Hallowe’en costume” and on the other hand “this is True Representation” when a Frenchwoman does it (well, French-Vietnamese). Not about her own culture, which is fair enough, it’s what she knows and it’s also what will make a buck writing for a Western market, but writing about the Aztecs? It’s not even original in “okay so everyone says the Aztecs are bloodthirsty but did you consider they were better than Westerners otherwise?” Mercedes Lackey for one did that back in the 80s and I’m sure a slew of fantasy/horror/urban fantasy writers have been just as original:
Yeah, you know, apart from making children cry so their tears would evoke the rain god before you pulled out their hearts and wore their flayed skins, the Azteca were so much more socially aware:
Honestly, I do think that today a shocking, taboo-breaking, transgressive fiction piece would be one where the Aztecs are villains!
I’m not sure it was orientalism– the “teas” were as much like custom prescription medication as anything thing else.
I see a glorious future when child sacrifice becomes the next great progressive cause, and Aztecophobia the next great thoughtcrime.
You joke but I don’t think it’d take more than a few well-positioned blog posts to make a more general “Indigenophobia” into a thing
I’m not sure it was orientalism– the “teas” were as much like custom prescription medication as anything thing else.
Well, you coulda fooled me with the cover art for various editions. I did see it recommended on Amazon, and my “Hmm, Holmes/Watson pastiche in space with gender and race flipped and one of them’s a space ship? Well, that’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, we’ve already had an android Watson in Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century” ran smack-bang into my “Yeah but do I wanna wade through pages of exquisite depictions of Exotique Future Confucian Empires – okay, yeah I do – but of ‘explain like I’m five Oriental tea ceremonies and naming conventions to Westerners, the big galoots’?” and the “nah, not really” won out.
I don’t think there were tea ceremonies.
Nancy Lebovitz, your description makes me more inclined to give it a try. I may well do so after I finish the three books I’m currently reading 🙂
I really loved the Murderbot series, but it made a lot more sense as a series than as standalone stories after the first one. I thought Artificial Condition was probably the weakest of the four novellas so far.
I want Wells to write about what happened to the liberated sexbot, whose internal voice will be very different from Murderbot’s. Or to expand on what’s really going on with ART, who is *way* more competent and independent than any other bot we see. And I have this vague idea that you could imagine Preservation Aux passing a law giving constructs/high level bots full citizenship and becoming the core of a Culture-like civilization.
Novels
6 Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee– conclusion of a trilogy. I read the whole thing because I’d been told this book will make more sense if you read all three.
I’m actually hesitant about talking how much I hated these books because I read the author’s blog, and I like him, but oh well. There’s a reasonable chance that someone who likes or loves the books is here. Please chime in.
The background is that magic is possible, but it’s powered by having a lot of people living by the same calendar. This results in competing dictatorships.
I have limits to how much violence I want to read about, and those limits are probably inconsistent and Unfair to Authors. Still, book 1 had altogether too much horrible death and book 2 had altogether too much torture.
I had trouble keeping track of what was going on, which was odd because Lee was doing a decent job of dropping reminders in and it still didn’t help. I suspect the tone of the writing was too even and the the characters talked too much like each other.
I wasn’t even sure whether there were two instances of Jendao in the third book or three. There are two.
Even for me, there were some charms– there’s some very nice luxury in the books and wry humor about it. Jendao becomes part fcnprfuvc and I found that oddly satisfying. There’s a subplot about involving low-status robots, and that’s pretty good.
Was there an explanation for why there were “remembrances”– torturing people to death as a yearly ceremony?
5 The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Koval. This one is fairly good, but I was selecting for fun and having the main character being blackmailed for having an anxiety disorder and hanging on by her fingernails is not my idea of fun.
Anyway, a meteor destroyed a lot of the Baltimore-Washington area in the 50s and as a result, the space program is accelerated. The main character is a Jewish woman who’s a brilliant mathematician. A lot of the book is about her getting work fit for her talents. There’s a sequel, but I haven’t read it yet.
I think that it would have been plausible for her to be up against more antisemites. Instead, she worries about antisemitism (and has to be polite to Mengele(?)), but most of the onstage prejudice is racism.
Also, there’s opposition to women in the space program– just a blind spot of “of course no women”. This is odd because the survival of the human race is at stake. I could believe it more if it was “the men go first (and get the fame and most interesting work) to make it safe for women”.
There’s a threat of global warming from the meteor, which I find unlikely. In any case, this is sufficiently SJW that any happy ending will have to be good for the vast majority of people, not just a small handful surviving.
4 Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse– there’s been apocalyptic flooding. Most land area is under water, but Dinétah (formerly the Navaho reservation) is safe, though dry and poor.
Maggie Hoskie has some magic and hunts monsters. deals with an unusually nasty version of Coyote, also deals with her ex-teacher and lover. If you like paranormal romance at all, you should read this. The sequel is even better.
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Bechy Chambers– third in a series, but stands alone well by itself. Most of humanity has left earth because of environmental disaster and has a moderately communal society in colony ships. People have made contact with a richer and more individualistic galactic culture and are figuring out how to deal with being able to buy cool stuff.
The book seems generally reasonable and emotionally satisfying (a lot about funeral customs) and I found it refreshing to hove a plot turn on one death rather than the usual sf body count.
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik– set in fantasy eastern Europe. A poor Jewish money lender’s daughter figures out how to make money and runs afoul of winter elves. The complex plot expands to include peasant who are working for her and the czarina.
I liked this a lot –there’s quite a bit going on, excellent confrontations, some plot twists I didn’t expect….
1 Space Opera by Catherine Valente– I was selecting for fun, but it was a close call between this and Spinning Silver for first. Space Opera is Galactic Eurovision, and strongly influenced by Douglas Adams. The human race is forced to compete. If we come in last, we will be destroyed, and we don’t get to chose our musicians, either.
The thing is, I think most sf humor is pretty dire– the merest stereotype-shuffling and joke-shaped objects. This book has me laughing every ten pages or so.
And there was some light parodying of Social Justice, too. I can appreciate it when Social Justice gets to the point of “no one has clean hands”.
There are people who thought the book had too much word salad, and I can see their point, but I found that it wasn’t a problem for me.
I think this one is on my wishlist. Does the author touch on how you can get millions/billions of people on ships? Or did most of humanity die off? What’s the culture on the human gen ships like?
It goes extensively into the culture of the Exodus Fleet, yeah. They’re a highly collectivist society, which is contrasted against the more capitalist cultures they interact with (some aliens, the humans on Mars). The engineering challenges involved in building/launching the ships are mostly glossed over, as is the environmental disaster that rendered Earth semi-uninhabitable; it’s all considered history.
I’d strongly recommend it, as well as the rest of Becky Chambers’ novels.
Imo, we can save humanity by transplanting a few hundred elsewhere to start a back up planet, but in terms of actually evacuating significant numbers from Earth (similar to a Dr Who episode early in the first season with Amy, iirc), we’ll need something roughly, well, planet sized to support that.
It is, in fact, theoretically possible to launch utterly ridiculous amounts of mass into space with known materials science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
The foundations for the base stations are going to be under load in a big way, and you need something like 8 EPRS feeding it power, but if you want to launch stuff into space by the millions of tonnes, there you go, much more reasonable requirements than a space elevator.
Well, that solves one problem.
Space Opera is Galactic Eurovision, and strongly influenced by Douglas Adams. The human race is forced to compete. If we come in last, we will be destroyed, and we don’t get to chose our musicians, either.
What does Australia know that we don’t? 😀
Yeah, we’re ready, the aliens won’t know what hit ’em with the Ultimate Eurovision Song!
For the US:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlpBPO9_L4E
Or against the US. I didn’t know my speakers could produce such painful high notes.
Oops, sorry! Forgot about the whole “you can’t play this in your region” thing!
The performance in the final was better than the official video – better as in “the effects were amazing” rather than the song itself being better.
Bring it on, Space Eurovision! We have painfully normal acts trying to persuade the Chinese not to block the contest on grounds of decadent perversion, but we’ve also got the good stuff as well, anything you can do, we can match and outdo! 🙂
Club awards– not part of the Hugo awards.
Dragon Award
For whatever dragged on the most. I gave mine to Revenant Gun. The big battle at the end was awful– i kept feeling like there were so many pages to turn. (Actually 20 or so, I think.) Weirdly, the denouement was easier going.
Best in Show Spinning Silver
Over time, humans manage to get closer to the truth.
A lot of people would disagree that monotheism is the object truth, but it would neatly explain the phenomenon.
In conjunction, if one supposes the Devil wants to deceive humanity, he will deceive in the current most popular direction, as well as conforming as closely as possible to objective fact to avoid obvious unveiling of the deception.
That would certainly explain why they believe in steadily fewer gods over time, yes.
I found this Quiz: Let Us Predict Whether You’re a Democrat or a Republican> quiz and essay which shows and discusses with lots of charts changes in the last 50 years of the party affiliation of various demographic groups interesting and recommend checking it out, warning though: if I was a Republican while I’d be heartened by the changes in affiliation it reports over the last 50 years I might be insulted by some of the language (it’s from The New York Times of 2019 so…).
The results for me declared someone with my demographics as a Republican, but when I changed “no college” to “some college but did not graduate” (I’ve never attended a four year college but I’ve had some community college classes, mostly welding) it flipped me to a Democrat.
The most interesting (to me) factoid is the narrative of unmarried women switching to the Democratic Party isn’t true, theyhave about the same percentages of Democrats and Republicans as 50 years ago, it’s more that so many other demographic group now lean Republican, and there’s more unmarried women so the make uo a bigger part of the Democratic coalition now than then.
Most of the other info I’ve seen reported before, but having it all in one place at once with charts is interesting to me.
Lower influence than I thought. I’m rephrasing as white because I suspect American Indians lean D and NYT just forgot about them.
At first I thought this was huge, as surely many blacks and hispanics say yes but lean D. Then I remembered this is conditioned on the first response, and I suppose that makes more sense. Still, +45D from one question
Doubling my score. Not really surprising.
Not a big change, but there wasn’t much space left to increase anyways.
So on the one hand, I’m definitely not in the D section, so their guess would be wrong here. On the other hand, their data suggests 11% of white, college-educated secular gays identify as Republican. That’s…interesting. Also the comment section does not seem to understand the data–all the upvoted comments are “it said I should be R but I’m actually a D–clearly this is wrong”. Noticeably none of them seem to be wrong the other way.
I don’t know what I expected.
No surprise that the readership of the NYT skews Democratic even if their demographics would suggest otherwise, besides I imagine many Republicans would see the commentary and give the rest a NOPE!
I did warn about the language, still the charts are interesting, and I think it’s fun to play around with the answers and see what causes a flip, they real value though is finding how compared to 50 years ago today’s voters are motivated more by hatred of one Party rather than love of one:
There are a lot of white people in both parties, so saying you’re white doesn’t shift it much. Saying you’re black shifts it a lot.
Plumber, you’ll be pleased to know that union membership is what tilted me Democrat 😀
This is a fun quiz, but about as reliable as any other “Tell us your favourite colour and we’ll tell you your inner goddess” online quiz. I find it interesting that they didn’t bother with asking me about education; presumably as a religious female leaning Republican (by their metrics) they assumed I’d just be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen so no point asking about education and career 🙂
Questions simplified from the nice way the NYT put them, as you may see my results zig-zag all over the right hand side:
White yes/no? Yes: +8R
Religious yes/no? Yes: +33R
Protestant yes/no? No: +14R
Straight yes/no? Yes: +18R
Jewish yes/no? (Shouldn’t this have gone in with religion, not sexuality? Oh well) No: +20R
Female yes/no? Yes: +11R
Married yes/no? +0D
Union member yes/no? +17D
People like me are: +17 Democrat! Which seems to fit in with the 1968-1978 Americans on their handy little graph. I think the results are fairly accurate; I’ve always said that were I one of the Irish who emigrated to the USA, I’d have ended up voting Democrat like so many of my countrymen who did the same, and the party of the 70s-80s would certainly have been the one for me before they started chasing college-educated middle-class votes and assuming all women wanted the full Planned Parenthood panoply, which would have stranded me as “socially conservative, fiscally liberal” to try and vote for the local Democrat who wasn’t 100% rated by PP or find a Republican candidate who I could hold my nose and vote for.
@Deiseach >
You know me well!
Glad you had fun!
*roots for Minerva*
According to the quiz people like me are +31 Republican, but stretching the meaning of ‘has attended college’ enough that I did flips me to +31 Democratic.
If really would have been easier to find anti-abortion Democrats to vote for in years past (or a pro abortion Republicans if that’s your thing, as even Ronald Reagan signed a bill legalizing abortion while he was still Governor of California), nowadays the most prominent anti-abortion elected Democrat left that I can think of is the current Governor of Louisiana, but if he ran for national office I’m sure his view would have to ‘evolve’ like Joe Biden’s had to for his
extended roving mea culpa for being born too sooncampaign for President, as for prominent current elected “pro-choice” Republicans? Yeah, I haven’t ever felt a need to find any so I don’t know of any!There is a U.S.A. political party that looks to have a platform better matching your views than either the Democrats or Republicans: The American Solidarity Party, which likely has an even lower chance of having one of it’s nominees elected to national office than does the Libertarians or Socialist Workers Party does with our ‘two party system’ (also known as “a snowball’s chance in Hell”)!
Interestingly, a Dutch far-right politician, Baudet, likes to talk about the Owl of Minerva.
So picking Minerva might result in +400R 🙂
+48 Democratic. Having very different political opinions than your demographic data would predict is tough sometimes! Then again, I have a pretty contrarian personality, so maybe I’d be a Democrat if my data predisposed me to be a Republican (though apparently being a white, straight, male from the south, isn’t nearly enough to outweigh being educated and non-religious??).
though apparently being a white, straight, male from the south, isn’t nearly enough to outweigh being educated and non-religious??
That’s why I think this quiz is as accurate as the usual Facebook filler; they’re plainly operating on raw data, which is fair enough, but weighting it so that it comes out in accord with their preconceptions (e.g. first half of this – straight white Southern male – cannot comport with the second – educated and non-religious – because they know that What’s The Matter With [the South] is that it’s full of rednecks who are straight and white and male and keepin’ the good folks down ‘cos they never got no schoolin’ and the preacher done told them they alone was God’s own).
Which is silly, because where do they think all the white liberals come from? All the smart cis het white males who went to university and got out of the small towns? And got jobs writing for the New York Times? If they looked around their own newsroom, couldn’t they find an example of such?
@Deiseach >
While my demons drove me to post my second comment on Twitter this week (my first was just about exactly one year ago and around the same time as my first SSC comment, madness, but with so many links to Twitter duty calls!), but so far though I’ve avoided following the Siren’s call of ever logging into Facebook (which would likely mark my complete fall into “I’m not crazy you’re the one’s that are crazy I won’t take those pills, take out of this straight-jacket, Iä! Iä Shub-Niggarauth!
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn dagnabbit!”), so I’ll have to take your word about Facebook, but I did note that my initial answers had me as being +31 Republican, but despite my hearing her say far more criticisms of Democrats than Republicans over the decades, putting in my wife’s demographics have her at +42 Democratic, and while one question could flip me from R to D, changing her from D to R was really hard according to the quiz, (I finally had to change her into a Protestant to work the flip, which almost fits, she did tell me that while she was a teenager in Catholic high school she decided to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses for a while).
From The Cut, a followup to the article about Harvard’s brightest, Bruce Hay. Six other men have come forward with similar stories (except they didn’t fall for it, quelle surprise); an old friend of Shuman from London also contributes. Hardly necessary reading, but it’s nice to hear about a few times the trap failed.
My god, it’s just as much catnip as last time. Really top-shelf gossip.
Seems like this same motivation could extend to her scamming/hustling guys, as with the guy in the first story. Wasn’t that someone here’s analysis, that it couldn’t really have been for money, but must have been about power?
In fact, as stated, that line sounds like a sort of cleaned-up, glossed-over, vaguely woke/empowered version of a really pretty nasty drive for power over men.
This story just gets even better, which is to say, crazier. Just goes to prove you should always stay away from bunny-boilers. I’m impressed by how she behaves in what would be considered a stereotypically male fashion from stories by women, i.e. hitting on someone, not taking ‘no’ for an answer, still continuing even after being told ‘I’m in a relationship’, following them down the street, looking for their number and so on. It really is the gender-flipped version of so many stories you hear, and I wonder if that’s all part of it – that she really is acting off a script and playing the part of the aggressive male.
I do wonder how many people she has pulled this trick on? These six men, plus the original story with Hay, Doe, Roe and another guy – how many others in other countries?
The part I do find hardest to believe is that she really is who she claims to be, this Maria-Pia Shuman. I genuinely thought she was a con artist stealing that identity, but no.
2 things are likely contributing to her success:
First, guys are not used tondealing with sexually aggressive females. By and large, women are going to have had way more experience/lessons on how to deal with pushy guys than vice versa.
Second, women can behave in ways thay would get men arrested and there is no little to no social repurcussion for doing so.
Both of these mean that there’s little cost for her behavior and her odds of success will be startlingly high.
Are men that startlingly dumb, though? If a woman just came up to me and said “you’re attractive and I want to have sex with you” on the street I would immediately assume a scam. And even back when I had a full head of hair and dressed a lot better and what not. Like, she’s going to take me back to her place, we’re going to get busy, and then her pimp is going to bust in and demand $500.
I assume the whole con takes a little longer than just the harvard guy being propositioned on the street, but I admit have not looked into this whole scam because I know it’s going to be cringey.
No, I read the article and she goes straight for the D in most of the cases.
@Conrad
After reading the latest article, it makes sense. It sounds like she’s propositioned dozens of guys around the Boston area and gotten a few takers.
Pick-up artists advise guys to try the same thing. Although the acceptance rate is higher for guys, if you just tell women they’re attractive and you want to bang, you supposedly screen out the 99% who say no pretty quickly and ideally find 1% who say yes.
Right. I boggled at this for a second, until I remembered that email scammers do the same thing. It’s not in their interest to make the initial email more credible, because the best they can hope for is drawing in folks who will only become suspicious later, wasting their effort. Make it ludicrous, and they’ll only hook the complete suckers.
In other words, the answer to the original article’s headline of “is this the most gullible man in Cambridge?” is “yes”.
Agreed, these women are going after the suckers. But, I’d argue that only some of not being a sucker is natural skepticism and some of it is learned behavior.
Most men, by and large, are going to have very little learned experience not being a sucker when attractive women proposition them. For this reason, even if her reported success in Boston is only something like 2/8 on the nerdy white dudes she’s going after, I’d postulate it would be way lower if this was a guy running the exact same lines on women.
OTOH, women do proposition guys for sex sometimes and not rob/stalk/etc them. What seems unusual about her is not that she was doing that, but that she was doing it during the day, and sober. And it sounds like she was doing it kind of brusquely or ham-handedly, though obviously this is all third-hand so who knows.
Anyway, there’s definitely something salacious about this whole affair that makes it easy to keep reading about it despite feeling like I shouldn’t!
@Nornagest:
Didn’t we establish this the first time? There was some CW involved, along the lines of “the exact same woman could have become a con artist in the absence of SJ, but Harvard being an SJ echo chamber helped make this man a perfect victim.”
Sure, the theory was there, but it’s nice to have some empirical support.
In other words, outside of a socially acceptable context, and without any kind of plausible deniability.
If you’re a sucker, you could see that as a costly signal that she’s really into you, in the same way breaking into a bank could be a costly signal that you really want to make a big deposit.
Like, she’s going to take me back to her place, we’re going to get busy, and then her pimp is going to bust in and demand $500.
Conrad, that’s because you’re sensible. I don’t want to sound like I’m picking on the progressives, but I do wonder if one reason she seem(s)/(ed) to target Harvard was because of the attitudes on display in the first story: that it would be insulting and rude to question if a self-identified lesbian had slept with other men (if she slept with you) and who was the father of the baby if you thought it was unlikely to be yours. If the prevailing ethos is to not question women in any way, especially when you should be always aware of your cis white hetero male privilege, then the turning off their brains and being led by the (nose) sounds more like it could happen.
Some of the guys do seem to have been very easily manipulated by their vanity and I wonder if there wasn’t some subconscious stereotypes going on as well: “oh, she sounds French; oh well, the French have a different attitude to sex than we do, this seems plausible!” as well as the desire to be up with the attitude of “I’m liberated, I’m sex positive, I’m not like those conservatives with their hang-ups, if a woman makes a pass at me this is her right of sexual equality”.
I do wonder about the brains of guys being told “I’m a lesbian, I have a wife, but I want to have sex with you baby” but who knows? At least some of them were smart enough to figure out this was crazy behaviour and to stay away.
@Conrad Honcho
A Youtube channel did an experiment where they had an attractive woman proposition men for sex and vice versa, with the results that you would expect.
One guy openly wondered whether she was going to lead him to some muggers, but he still went with her.
I think that you underestimate how much risk many men are willing to take for sex.
And, as I mentioned in the last discussion, I don’t see any evidence that the Social Justice aspect was anything more than a convenient post-hoc rationalization that the professor used in a flimsy attempt to preserve what little was left of his dignity. I don’t think having Social Justice attitudes made him even the slightest bit easier to scam, it just gave him an excuse that sounded slightly better than “she was really hot and I was really lonely and horny.”
As for why she targeted Harvard academics, I’d imagine it’s because they tend to be successful and moderately well-off, but also not particularly famous or powerful or influential outside of academia, which makes them ideal targets: they have money, but they’re not so high-status that scamming them would be dangerous. On top of that, there’s a stereotype of academics being savants who lack common sense and social skills despite their intelligence, on top of the broader stereotype of male nerds being shy, awkward, bad with women, and desperate for female attention – all of which turned out to be painfully true in Hay’s case.
I knew a guy who got scammed out of almost $1000 because he met a girl on OKCupid who was supposedly interested in him, but needed money to get her passport back and buy a plane ticket back to America. (Apparently she lost her passport while visiting Uganda and somehow became stranded there.) Needless to say, she didn’t come to visit him like she’d promised. So yes, some men are really just that dumb.
And in the interest of fairness, it’s worth mentioning that I’ve heard stories of women falling for almost identical scams, but they always tend to be older divorcees or spinsters, whereas the dude I knew was only in his 20s.
I found the initial story a bit too conveniently supporting my preconceptions, and this follow-up dont really change that.
It’s coming from the same website, the same author, is stuffed with stories that, while similar, either are pure recollection of short encounters that werent continued, or whose proofs conveniently disapeared “because changing phones” (i’m not saying that it doesnt happend, i lost some pretty precious messages by changing phones myself, but it makes the claim unprovable).
I’ll wait for another trusted source (he said, repressing his own snark) or a follow up with the outcome of the legal proceedings to form a strong opinion on that story.
edit:
Boy, without the supposed blackmail, it sounds like a win-win behaviour.
Boy, without the supposed blackmail, it sounds like a win-win behaviour.
And that’s the exact attitude she’s counting on to hook her victims – “hey, I get free sex out of this, what’s the worst that could happen?”
The worst is that you get two batshit crazy harpies ruining your life, is what. Do men not use their brains at all when the possibility of a woman sleeping with them is on the horizon? Even when it’s not a conscious scam as with these two, there’s disease, pregnancy, one or the other of you developing an infatuation and making a mess of things – it’s never as clear-cut as ‘I’m so hot a random woman stopped me on the street to ask me for sex, what could possibly go wrong?’.
Did you read the articles? Most men she approached turned her down. The ones who accepted make better stories, though.
Most men she approached turned her down.
Which is the bare minimum you’d expect in a scenario where a perfect stranger propositions you and then talks about being a lesbian and married with a wife, but even some of them exchanged numbers and texted with her. The fact is that she shouldn’t have succeeded with anyone with that kind of approach, and yet she did, to the extent of being able to cause quite a lot of worry and distress and interference in the lives of several men.
Women do stupid crap like this all the time with strangers, it’s a particular confidence trick, it’s probably just unusual in these circumstances where the men in question are supposedly intelligent and worldly-wise and that it’s all wrapped up in PC terms and expectations (“she told him her lawyer had contacted Harvard, retrieved all of his personal information, and was now preparing documents to have him release his parental rights to the child”, threats to contact the workplace/university about them, taking out a Title IX case against Hays in the original story) .
Depends on the woman. Having seen pictures of the woman in question, I can state that she’s not attractive enough to shut off my capacity for reason, but I can see how she would be for others.
If that sounds sexist, please note that my critique (such as it is) is aimed squarely at myself/other men.
To quote Portnoy’s Complaint: “Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd.”
@Deiseach >
Sometimes.
TLDR: It depends on circumstances, mostly relative loneliness and attraction.
To expand: at no times do I remember a direct “Let’s have sex” propisition, but a few times there’s been some “Do you want to come back to my place?”, or “Do you want to go to my car?” questions,.and my reaction mostly depended on if I had a girlfriend/was married or not, but others factors were involved. So, my reactions to my being proposition by women who were strangers (all of these are in the ’80’s or ’90’s):
1) I was walking back to my apartment wearing my favorite red shirt and some hip looking sunglasses, an attractive young lady parked her car and asked me “Do you want a ride?”, I answered “I’m already here”, went upstairs and immediately bragged to my wife that “Be warned, I still got it!”, and told that story, and Hell, that was decades ago and I’m bragging about it now!
2).She straight up asked me if I wanted a date, and I said no, while she was attractive I was married and even if I wasn’t it was a sketchy neighborhood and I suspected that.she was either a prostitute or an undercover cop predending to be a prostitute.
3) I went to a breakfast restaurant that I liked and my waitress didn’t smile, ever instead she called be me by my name and mentioned places we’d known each other, and mutual friends we once had. She was cute, albeit blonde instead of the dark-haired girls that usually held my interest, and I saw her again at the restaurant a few more times, when she’d come up and say hello, even when another waitress was assigned my table, and also later at a bookstore where she was a cashier to my surprise (yes, yet another cashier girl who knew me at yet another bookstore!), and while she really seemed like wanted me to ask her out,, I never persued a date with her, probably because I was usually near or all the way broke, sometimes I already was dating someone, but also because, while I remembered the people and places she mentioned, I had no memory of her at those places and with those people, which I was ashamed to admit that to her and everytime I saw her I pretended that I remembered her from before she was my waitress, but I never talked long to her out of my fear of having to admit that “I just don’t remember you from then”.
4) I was at the coat check of a nightclub after the show was ended, when a women told me that “You really look like someone I used to know” and asked me for my phone number, and since I had I had been walking the pavement applying for jobs earlier that day and had one with me I gave her my resume, and we did go on a few dates, she encouraged me to read A Confederacy of Dunces though mostly she seemed to want to present me to her friends, and show them how much I looked like someone they already knew, I remember meeting her ex-husband at a party at her house, and he seemed nice and the situation weird, whether she stopped calling or I did I can’t remember.
5) We met at a party and she invited me back to her place, we had a long talk and I definitely got the impression that she really wanted to be liked, but I just didn’t find her attractive though I wished I could.
6) A few times I was Invited back to her place, and I spent the night, the emotional effects of which I already posted about below.
@MorningGaul >
That wasn’t my experience of the few one-to-three-night stands I experienced as a youth, they were awkward at best and heartbreaking at worst, only once was it the stereotype of my realizing “Wow, she’s really stupid, I don’t like her” after we spent the night together, but more often the roles were reversed, and I was the one who hoped it was the beginning of something longer, I really did want someone to give flowers to and have an “our song” – the whole deal, but instead the girls would have to tell me “Look, I just wanted someone right then, but I don’t want you now, and only once was it less than heartbreaking to find that it was supposed to be “no strings”, but that was because we had been friends before, and she had given hints that she was with me because she saw how sad I was after a break up and was being kind by being with me, plus she had just ended another one of her flings – so with the inevitable “Your nice, but that was just temporary” it only made me melancholy instead of despondent, and it really seemed to my 20 something self that it was girls who wanted to be the “poly/freespirts” more than – well me, and only later did I realize that what many women wanted was guys with cars and houses as well as guitars and motorcycles (though exactly how to get all that was far from obvious to me and turned into a decades long struggle luckily with a woman who stuck it out with me – I basically married the first woman who’d have me who never got a tattoo, and I’ve been with her since ’92!).
As for the whole deal from the girls point of view one of my exes put it this way on YouTube, so I think only short happiness could be found out of it, and I really don’t recommend it.
I just read This Piece from the NYT which has the thesis that people of different persuasions are going to read this article in 2 different ways: left leaning folks are going to focus on how dumb Bruce Hay was while right leaning folks are going to see this as
I’m vaguely lefty and I definitely think the guy was a moron, so the writer’s at least half correct. How well does his prediction for those on the right hold up?
Bruce Hay was a victim of progressivism and exceptionally gullible. I wouldn’t call him “a moron” because that feels like pure victim-blaming, but he’s the most extreme outlier on a spectrum of Marks. How much of that is on him, culpably or non-culpably (say a mental disorder making him oblivious/gullible), and how much is on the society that rewarded him with wealth and status for parroting lefty IdPol? Too complex to answer.
I’m reluctantly right-wing(despite being an Andrew Yang supporter, the right is still the closest I have to a tribe), and I agree that of course the guy was a moron. But suppose the genders were reversed, a man tries to victimize women, most don’t fall for it but one does. Would you “blame” her for “not seeing the warning signs?” When that happens, the Usual Suspects scream to high heaven about “victim blaming.” So you can see why, when they make this argument, I see it as hypocritical.
More to the point, the takeaway from the story is not “person X victimizes person Y, this is very bad.” People will always try to victimize one another. It’s that the institutions managed by the Usual Suspects enabled it to occur. Person Y’s stupidity was necessary but not sufficient to make it happen.
Personally speaking, I’m a radical centrist on this: I think he was dumb as a stump if his behaviour as described is anything like how he really did act, and that the desperation to act enlightened enables con artists and scammers to manipulate woke progressivism.
I didn’t really think of that interpretation although I’m vaguely right-wing. Sure the guy is a sucker for woke progressivism, but he’d probably be a sucker for some born-again young “sinner” who was really ready to turn over a new leaf or whatever if he grew up in a different milieu. Granted, I think woke progressivism is one of many ideologies that is unusually bad for the gullible or bleeding hearts, but there are a lot of those. It’s not really a new way to be suckered anyways. Bertrand Russell has an old essay on the stupidity of assuming that oppressed people will behave more morally than not oppressed people. His example groups were different back then, but the tendency he’s talking about is the same.
EDIT: He’d probably be a sucker for the “born-again sinner” too even though that’s not much of a thing where he is. He sounds so gullible I dunno if you even have to press any ideological buttons.
As an atheist, my opinion doesn’t really count for much when it comes to theology but the solution to the problem of evil which I find most convincing is found in Stoicism. It doesn’t really matter whether the God they’re referring to is Zeus / Jupiter or Jehovah, works either way.
Stoicism holds that nothing which happens in the “external” world of the senses is inherently good or bad. If you feel the pain from hot wax dripping on your skin, whether that’s a painful annoyance or a pleasurable night’s fun is determined entirely by how you react to the sensation and not by the sensation itself. Similarly, experiments in psychology have shown that we rely on context cues to determine whether to interpret physiological arousal as anxiety or excitement: the body can’t tell them apart. Humans suffer through choice, even if we’re not usually aware that we have a choice in how to interpret our senses.
So God creating a world where we can sense pain and pleasure, cold and heat, bright light and darkness, etc. creates neither good nor evil. Good and evil are created by the free will of humans who have those experiences to interpret them. The things which matter to God, and which determine whether you’re creating a heaven or a hell for yourself, are entirely happening within your mind / soul.
The Stoics did actually consider this objection; the usual answer was the doctrine of preferred indifferents, the idea that whilst things such as health, security, etc. aren’t good per se (and hence somebody who lacks them isn’t strictly speaking worse off than someone who doesn’t), it can still be rational to choose them, provided that doing so won’t hinder our pursuit of virtue.
Leave it to Bertrand Russell to pronounce “the” difficulty with Stoicism was something they answered two thousand years prior.
As I understand it, indifferent here means indifferent with respect to morality, viz., things which don’t hinder or encourage the pursuit of virtue. So the idea is that it’s possible to prefer more or less health without treating that as moral or immoral.
The key is to realize that a choice has to be made. Choices cannot be avoid. Let’s say you have a choice today between being eaten by a lion and appealing your sentence. You choose to be eaten, but there is no emotional commitment because you attach no importance to it. Eaten is equally as good or bad as appealing your sentence. Suppose, something happens to postpone the eating appointment. Your response is “oh, well. Just as well.” There is no emotional preference. Life is not better or worse given this choice or that, but that fact cannot eliminate the necessity of making a choice.
How do you know based on his actions whether he took them because he thought they were the moral thing to do or because he had a personal preference for them? Did he ever say, “I have a moral duty to prevent harm to my subjects”?
I don’t buy Stoicism myself, but you have to be really careful not to beg the question here.
Unfortunately I’m not a Stoic philosopher, so I’m not sure exactly what Marcus Aurelius would say, but I imagine it would be something like that doing one’s duty is morally good, even if the thing it is your duty to do is neutral considered in itself. So even though the welfare of the Roman Empire is an indifferent, Marcus Aurelius’ duty as Emperor was to defend its welfare, and hence it would be morally good of him to do so, and morally bad of him not to do so. (And to head off a potential objection, I don’t think the Stoics recognised such a thing as a duty to do something immoral.)
The original Mr. X gave the historical answer, and it’s not a bad one by any means, but personally I would advance a slightly different argument.
Stoicism belongs to a family of philosophies concerned with being unconcerned. One thing that all of these philosophies have in common is caring more about how you do things than with the results of the things that you do. It makes sense within that philosophical framework, as your efforts are under your control but the consequences of your efforts are not.
A sage who rules a country won’t suffer if his subjects go hungry, because he has freed himself from suffering. And knowing this, he can execute his duty towards his subjects to keep them fed without being distracted by concern for the outcome. It’s the Taoist concept of wu wei or the modern idea of “flow”: by concerning himself solely with executing his duty and banishing fear of failure, he can calmly approach difficult tasks with undivided focus.
@Atlas,
No, you’re misreading me here.
In this system of ethics, whether or not the subjects experience hunger is morally neutral. The consequences of the ruler’s actions are explicitly not the justification here. If he acts correctly in accordance with his duty and his subjects starve, that’s no less praiseworthy.
The only things that are morally relevant are a) whether the ruler’s conduct fulfills the telos of a ruler and b) whether the ruler is able to recognize that the results of his actions are neither good nor bad. The former is standard virtue ethics, comparing one’s actions and habits against those of a theoretical ideal version of himself. The latter is specific to stoicism and related philosophies, which view suffering as bad but ultimately self-inflicted.
I don’t think that’s a very well-supported reading. Look to Lear’s redemption:
Lear’s turn causes him enormous pain, while Cordelia, for her part, offers him sincere forgiveness. Both are sublimely virtuous. Neither are, I think, what one could call “stoic.” Cordelia is crying along with her father, and it’s the depth of her love that really gives the scene its impact. Without that, we can imagine a totally different scene, in which Lear professes his sorrow and Cordelia simply tells him that what’s past is past and doesn’t shed a tear. In this alternate text, Lear comes off worse, or else he agrees and calms the fuck down, and the impact of the last act of the play is completely lost.
Lear only comes off as pro-stoicism if you look at the body count and decide that everyone who got whacked deserved it; that’s an unconventional way to look at Lear, to say the least, and one that the framing of the last scene doesn’t support in the slightest IMO.
@Atlas,
Telos is your metaphysical reason for being, closely related to your nature. I tend to conceptualize it as similar to an evolutionary niche. It’s the theoretical ideal that you’re approaching when you behave more virtuously: the best version of yourself.
Plato explains the idea very well in the dialogue about justice between Socrates and Glaucon in the Republic, better than I can. If you want to dig into the idea more I’d suggest checking that out: it’s very short, since this all is laid out way before metaphor of the city starts in.
Unfortunately no, I haven’t seen it. I’m not really as up on my Shakespeare as I should be.
That said, I doubt that it espouses stoic ethics because it’s very hard to write drama around a serene protagonist. You could purposefully structure a story that way, with a protagonist who grows and learns to embrace that by the end of the work, but that’s more of a hero’s journey than a tragedy.
This is taking things ad absurdum.
Yes, some sensations can be interpreted as either pleasant or unpleasant, depending on the context your mind provides. On the other hand, some sensations are much more likely to be interpreted as pain than others. Perhaps faster breathing can be interpreted as either excitement or fear, but being stabbed with a knife is very likely to be interpreted as a negative feeling. Yeah, there are some people who enjoy cutting themselves, but I really doubt that most stoics could remain… ahem… stoical after being repeatedly stabbed with a knife.
Yeah, I don’t have my copy of Meditations in front of me but I remember Marcus Aurelius at least made allowances for sudden, extreme sensations causing momentary anguish.
That said, the bar is still very high. A stoic sage is supposed to be able to take the news of the death of his child calmly, and I think that most parents really would prefer to have been stabbed. Either people were actually able to reach that level of apatheia or nobody felt like contradicting them.
…because he has, every day, meditated briefly on the awareness that he might lose that child. Thus he treasures the child during life, and is girded for the eventual loss, with no regrets about missed opportunities.
That's the theory anyway. It's still a high bar.
Random thoughts about relationships
Kids* appear to have very low ability to hold grudges, you can upset them to tears and have them back in a good mood in minutes without actually apologizing/bribing/consoling them. They rarely remain angry about an event even for multiple days, despite often being angry enough to try to hurt people verbally (I hate you, I’m never talking to you again). This appears true both for kid/adult relationships and kid/kid relationships taking the power dynamic out of the equation. Watching my kids this doesn’t appear to be because they have poor memories, they often remember things, especially things that are important to them, for long stretches of time and have done so from a fairly young age (under 3).
As an adult I often find myself stewing over some slight, and then mentally conjuring other times that person slighted me. It appears that my wife does this, in her own way, as well.
Two main possibilities occur to me
1. Grudge holding is a developmental milestone
2. Venting your emotions when they happen really does help a huge amount, and could dramatically improve people’s lives.
*in general, exceptions likely exist
At what age would you say kids start to hold grudges?
I don’t know. My kids aren’t older than 6, and I haven’t spent a lot of time (as an adult) with kids 12+.
I have a family member who is currently 11 and has held a grudge against his 4th-grade teacher since he was 9.
Trouble is, even if venting is emotionally healthy (which may not hold for adults since as you note we do develop mentally beyond childhood), the way you vent could very well have terrible consequences that makes everyone’s lives worse. A bit of road rage can blow up a minor accidental slight into a brawl as harsh words are exchanged (I’ve witnessed this begin to occur). According to your model, perhaps the man originally enraged later will not hold the anger from the incident because of this… but what about the injuries from the fight? The inconvenience to everyone else?
I don’t think that’s a strawman, since even expressions of emotion that fall short of venting could escalate situations.
One anecdote in support, though. When I was younger, my dad got into a scuffle with a neighbor, I don’t even recall why now, parking perhaps. Later, though, the grudge was held against a different neighbor who avoided the conflict entirely since my dad felt the former friend had not sufficiently supported him.
I think all in all, though, it’s much more complicated, especially given the social environment and dangers of the modern world, than saying we should vent our emotions, even if the opposite strategy leads to some personal anguish at times.
In general it is definitely complicated, but in a lot of scuffles like this you can find multiple offenses. If the older stuff had been displayed at the time perhaps the new offense wouldn’t have set off the powder keg.
Honestly I am having a lot of thoughts about this stuff because my relationship with my wife was neglected as we had kids and we are working on building it back up, so we have a backlog of issues to go through. Literally rectifying some of them directly is impossible, but it still seems to improve the situation if one of us can spit it out, and the other can more or less take it without escalating. With multiple kids and work we are doing it piecemeal and also occasionally adding new complaints, so its rattling around in my head.
Communication and genuine acceptance are good for relationships, and also the hardest part of relationships. Good for you guys.
Remember that communication, even when it’s confrontational, is anathema to stewing.
I vividly remember being beaten about the head with a school bus seatbelt by another student in third grade. I cannot remember ever not being angry about it.
Well that is quite a bit further down the path of behavior (also sorry to hear that).
Upon some further reflection, I think that the issue isn’t that kids don’t hold grudges, but that kids are chronically emotionally disregulated. Anything that’s likely to cause a major falling-out with an adult is still likely to do so for a kid, with the caveat that kids are much more vulnerable to gaslighting and Stockholm syndrome.
Stewing (especially over minor slights) isn’t healthy for anyone. We expect adults to be mindful enough to avoid doing it without screaming at their friends, but I think that more-neurotic adults may find it beneficial to find a way to externalize those feelings somehow.
As a kid, I remember frequent fights over video games* that resulted in one kid screaming “I hate you and we’re not friends anymore!” and storming out of the house, and then everybody gets together the next day to play more video games like nothing ever happened. One time, though, I was friends with a kid I no longer liked and didn’t want to hang out with anymore. One day we got mad over…I want to say the original FIFA Soccer on SegaCD, I kicked him out of my house and then “held the grudge” forever. I wasn’t still mad about the game, I just needed an excuse to “break up.” The next day he called and I said “No, I said we’re not friends anymore!” I wonder if to this day he honestly thinks he lost a friend over FIFA…
* the fastest way to lose three friends is Gauntlet on NES.
“Elf shot the food — AGAIN, Orlando? We’re not friends anymore!”
The worst was the teleporters. If one person hit a teleporter that put him on the other side of the screen in a way that blocked the screen from scrolling so the other players could get to the teleporter, that was it, game over. You’re stuck. Lot of shouting matches over that. Lot of shouting matches.
The slowest way, meanwhile, is Diplomacy.
Kids do hold grudges, but only in specific cases. They will frequently hate any step-parent they perceive as being in the way of their parents being together. They can make life literally hell for them, if allowed.
Also, half-siblings (who live in a different home) they perceive as taking their parent’s love away.
I would guardingly classify these differently. A grudge is where you hold onto one action for a long period of time, if someone egged my door once and I hated them forever. If someone egged my door every day then hating them is just because they are persistently a jerk to me.
Then by your classification, I don’t hold grudges. Unless something really serious was done, a one-time bad act won’t make me hate anybody, I’ll just try my best not to deal with them.
It’s usually the bad act that breaks the camel’s back. A small bad act can make me realize stuff about people and make me avoid them, but I still don’t held grudges.
Well good for you!
Kids appear to have very low ability to hold grudges, you can upset them to tears and have them back in a good mood in minutes without actually apologizing/bribing/consoling them.
I don’t know about that, I think a lot of people remember those kinds of things happening as children, and do hold it as negligent or even malicious parenting: my father/mother used to upset me then ignore what they did and behave as if I should be happy, so I learned that I couldn’t trust them and I should pretend to forget what they did otherwise they would just nag me and blame me.
Children do switch from mood to mood very easily because they’re young, and if the reason they got upset was a small thing then they do forget about it, but if there’s a pattern of “person X is mean to me but I have to act as if I’m happy”, then they realise they don’t have any power to do anything about it, but they do remember and this makes a change in mental attitude that may not be obvious on the outside.
Until years later, when it’s “why doesn’t Junior ever want to see me or have me visit?” Well, that’s because you treated Junior like shit when they were four, and continued to do so until they were old enough to leave home, is why.
I like the advice in Ephesians/Colossians from Paul: “Do not provoke/exasperate/aggravate your children.” (I remember it is ‘frustrate’ but that doesn’t actually seem to be used in any translation).
It doesn’t seem like the most critical advice, but it’s basically all Paul says specifically to fathers, maybe because it’s something that might well be overlooked by even a well meaning parent, rationalizing that the parent knows better, and the child needs to obey, and will learn in time that the parent was right, and so on; but an accumulation of small abuses will poison the relationship.
Aggravate or exasperate is a pretty good translation, it seems; from Strong’s Concordance:
Kids have short attention spans. Grudges are more a matter of attention span than memory.
Little kids forgive a lot, because… realistically, what other option do they have?
From evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for the ability to hold a grudge to activate at the age where you can actually do something about it. In ancient environment, a one-year old child who would decide to treat their parents forever as enemies, for whatever reason, would in effect commit suicide. Holding a grudge becomes a useful mechanism when making coalitions with peers, at the age when you can decide to avoid some person and actually fulfill the promise.
I think that venting your emotions is not really helpful for family dynamics. The thing that saves families is that parents are usually smart enough to react differently to their kids than they would react to another adult. Kids contribute to family harmony by forgiving, parents contribute by a combination of forgiving and not taking their kids’ words literally. (When my kids are super annoying, my reaction is “oops, they are probably hungry, must give them some food quickly, let me grab a banana”.)
Between adults, I think the good rule is rather “don’t say anything that you could regret tomorrow, no matter how strongly you feel it at the moment”. Because most of the time, tomorrow you will be happy that you didn’t say it. (And in the few cases when you feel the same way for many days… then it makes sense to think about it and derive consequences. But this is better done in calm mood, anyway.) On the other hand, remember to share the good emotions.
When I was my mom would do a lot of really hurtful things, and violated my trust more than once… I never forgot that she did that… but I had no ability to get food for myself, Couldn’t drive myself to the store, I had no money.. and I knew that as long as I was holding a grudge I wouldn’t get things I wanted or needed.
She was threatening to send me away to a military school since I was 8…
Even as a young adult, 19-24 I could have moved out, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get a degree while working full time. I still resent her for the way she treated me when I was vulnerable.
It wasn’t that I didn’t hold a grudge.. it was that keeping her happy was the only way to make sure I had clothes, food, or a roof.
I don’t think it has anything to do with adaptation, it has to do with coordination difficulties.
Suppose it’s ancient Greece or Rome or any other polytheistic society that’s well-developed enough to possibly be into proselytizing, but seemingly didn’t. I’m a supporter of Zeus who wants to go out and spread the good word of my thunder god; that means I also have to spread the good word of every other god in the pantheon, even that watery asshole Poseidon and the creepy Hades. Not only am I not really qualified to talk about the other gods (i’m a Zeus diehard, after all) but I also probably wont want to. Fortunately, if I want to proselytize, I don’t have to go out into the world of non-believers, I can just convince people who already believe in the pantheon to support Zeus instead of whichever god they’re currently praying to. Thus, instead of conversions being focused outside the ingroup like it would need to in order to expand, it is instead focused inside the ingroup. Maybe my religion will expand, but only as my society expands; it won’t be able to cross out into the wider world.
What would it take in order for this difficulty to be overcome? Significant coordination between the proponents of the various gods. You’d need a plurality of religious figures to all come together and agree to send multi-party delegations out for conversion missions. They’d need to agree to treat all gods in their system fairly, and not try to pressure the converts into picking their favorite god. This would likely be a nightmare to organize and wouldn’t bring much success, therefore it never happens.
Compare this to a monotheist who wants to go convert people: there’s no competing power centers or warped incentives to stay within the group of believers, they just go out and start converting.
Remember Scott had a post about how it was next to impossible to get any permission to do even harmless research because of hospital boards insisting both that the forms were filled out in pen and also that you couldn’t give patients pens instead of pencils?
Well, those kind of nit-picking red-tape bureaucrats are because of stunts like this.
What is it about consultant gynaecologists that makes them act as if the Lord God Almighty descended to Mount Sinai wasn’t even fit to hold their instrument tray? And before anybody goes “Chinese robbers”, maybe I was just unlucky but all of ’em I ever met were Chinese robbers.
Consent? Sure, why would I need that? Possibility of disease transmission between patients? Ha ha, Lister is only a fanatic and his theory is unproven! And the guy seems to be convinced he did nothing wrong at all and this is just an administrative snafu that will be sorted out by his lawyers writing a stern letter to the hospital, then he can get back to work using women as guinea pigs:
But Deiseach, aren’t you making a mountain out of a molehill? No, I don’t think so. The nearest thing I can imagine for gentlemen is a prostate exam: gynae exams are very invasive, humilating (you’re lying there stripped to the waist, legs in the air, with strange people poking around your most intimate areas), can be painful, and the consultants aren’t inclined to tell you what they’re doing or listen to you even at the best of times. Then imagine finding out that some guy has decided to do some experimenting without telling you or asking consent, and if it wasn’t for the nurses, he’d be using the same piece of equipment on every patient because sure why would you need to clean or change the parts after using them in areas where there was the possibilty of bacterial infection?
It would have been very easy to ask a patient “We’re doing some research, do you mind if we use this test procedure?” Most women would probably have said yes, in order to help other women. But the attitude of “I don’t need consent because I know best because I am The Doctor” is breath-taking arrogance, not to mention treating your patients like slabs of beef.
Don’t they also have cadaver labs to at least do a first-pass functional test? The whole “donate your body to science” thing?
And “said the transducers on the equipment were changed between patients on the insistence of nursing staff” is rage-inducing. You need disposable transducers, autoclaving between patients, or disposable probe covers. This is basic sanitation/hygiene.
AFAIK Prion diseases generally only transfer through things such as neural and lymph tissue, but there are various microorganisms that can survive an autoclaving in their spore state. Autoclaving alone doesn’t seem sufficient for such invasive procedures.
> AFAIK Prion diseases generally only transfer through things such as neural and lymph tissue
I think this is currently in dispute. One of the prion diseases in North America is “chronic wasting disease” (CWD) which affects deer and elk. There was a lot of reporting about a study that demonstrated that macaque monkeys were able to contract the disease after eating only muscle meat from CWD-infected animals: https://www.jsonline.com/story/sports/columnists/paul-smith/2017/06/28/macaque-study-heightens-concerns-human-susceptibility-cwd/430046001/
A number of US states and Canadian provinces went proceeded to issue warnings about the consumption of meat from diseased animals, but there haven’t been any confirmed cases of transmission to humans, and I don’t think the study (which was done by very reputable researchers) has been replicated, or even published yet.
I don’t understand why you find this so upsetting. Can you explain why you do?
Did you even read the paragraph starting with “But Deiseach, aren’t you making a mountain out of a molehill?” ?
I don’t understand why you find this so upsetting. Can you explain why you do?
This is basic sanitation/hygiene.
Well, that one for a start. Extra procedures being carried out without your knowledge and consent. Attitude that “I am God Almighty and you are insects before me” on the part of the doctor. Accompanying “I did nothing wrong and I’m going to make the hospital take me back and let me continue doing whatever I damn well like” on his part as well. Little things like that.
As an aside, you missed a great opportunity, not phrasing your hypothetical question above as, “But Deiseach, aren’t you being hysterical?”
I didn’t get it at first, but then I thought about it for a few seconds.
You’re right. Huge missed opportunity.
In the immortal words of Basil Brush, BOOM BOOM!
Whenever I read stories like this I’m shocked A) that no one tries to pursue charges of sexual assault (doing invasive things to someone’s genitalia without their consent is kinda the definition) , and B) that more of these doctors who fuck over and fuck up their patients don’t get bushwhacked.
Like I’ve heard stories of surgeons leaving surgical sponges in the patient and severing spinal cords out of rank incompetence (courts decades later determined criminal negligence and manslaughter). And yet no one resorted to law .308?
It’s not like they’re prosecutors or cops with highly protected information, all of their patients have visited the offices where they spend 40hrs a week and their home residences are usually listed in the phone book.
Maybe I grew up in a rougher country side than I thought but there were always stories about crooked cops who planted drugs or contractors who destroyed properties waking up to the sound of their car exploding or a round smashing through their kitchen window, the stories always ended with them moving away and never being heard from again.
To what extent do our systems of accountability not work when there isn’t a deafault to vigilantism if it isn’t seen to work?
I suspect part of it was just how the old polytheistic religions were falling out of favor anyway. Even Socrates didn’t sound too much like a hardcore Zeus follower, and the romans were deifying their emperors when christianism struck. I assume Christianism-like religions would not have had such success during the heyday of the Hellenic religion.
On the other hand, Zoroastrism still is around, while Hellenism or whatever it’s called is *checks* …still around, although probably not as strong as Zoroastrism.
Maybe we’d be a more Zoroastric culture if Zarathustra had spoken a few centuries later.
Absent some amount of regulation, power consolidates. So goes for anthropomorphized power figures.
The “some amount of regulation” for the old polytheistic religions was geographic isolation. Each local tribe developed a god, and then when tribes finally started meeting up, they duked it out until one tribe had the hard and soft power to wipe the others’ god from cultural memory. The old testament wasn’t strictly monotheist in the “only one exists” sense, only that the Jews had to be loyal to theirs. Only when the religion gained enough power, could it start declaring that they’ve got the only real deal. Polytheistic regions arose if the religion wasn’t so closely tied to conquest ambition, as power was linked to other things than an anthropomorphized figure, so they weren’t dedicated to dethroning the neighbors’ gods. And yet, they were indeed out-competed by the ensuing religions that yet consolidated more power, in the monotheist form.
I’m not sure that really matches up, at least in the case of Judaism. Without diverting into drnsrn’s bailiwick too much on Biblical criticism, my understanding is that traditionalist understanding of the Jewish Scriptures puts monotheism further back than what you’re suggesting; while modern Biblical criticism puts strict monotheism somewhere within striking distance of the Babylonian exile and subsequent centuries. In neither case would the Jews have been going monotheistic based on their unquestioned martial success as a people.
Was there any time when Ancient Israel was a major conquering power?
Christianity eventually became the religion of a conquering power (or at least a power that had previously conquered a whole lot of area), but it spend a good 300 years notably lacking in martial power, and it stayed monotheistic that whole time.
I’m not sure. I think not according to modern archaeology. The closest I can think of is the Assyrian stele in the British Museum that refers to that region as “Omriland” after the Israelite king. If you look at the reign of Solomon as described in Kings, that sounds like a claim for at least regional hegemony, where Solomon’s primary wife is the daughter of Pharaoh and other nations recognize his greatness.
Ancient Israel was never a major conquering power. But I don’t recall the Old Testament ever saying “Dagon/etc. doesn’t really exist,” just not to worship other gods because God is a super jealous one.
Isn’t the story of Balaam and the talking donkey kind of within a polytheistic context?
I’m not saying monotheism didn’t exist back in the day, just that, over time, as there was more and more gloablization, monotheism would begin to out-compete, because they are a proxy for consolidation of power. Conquering in the name of the pantheon is less convincing a cry than conquering in the name of the one true god.
The OT doesn’t always explicitly say that the other gods don’t exist, although it does call out idols a lot as mute, powerless objects.
Early Christians often preferred the belief that the pagan gods existed, but were demons. There’s plenty of room in every monotheistic mythos for powerful being which are above humans but still far below God.
That doesn’t seem accurate. Rather it looks like interaction between “tribes” speaking the same language was a key part of polytheism coming into existence. The people in each city might have worshiped the city’s god semi-exclusively, associating other “obvious” gods in the physical world with them (hence so many Egyptian and Classical sun gods and moon gods, so many storm gods in the Hittite Empire…), and sustained interaction required myths to explain their relationships.
We can actually see this happening in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Isis, for example, is an Egyptian goddess who became the central figure of a Greco-Roman mystery cult, and was likely in the process of being adopted into the Greco-Roman pantheon when Christianization happened.
Perhaps my wording was bad, but this is basically what I was getting at. Consolidation of power, including absorbing other traditions into the mythology. “You were actually worshipping my god because they were the same figure the entire time,” still moves towards a lower number of deities over time.
Syncretism is one way that pagan cultures coming into contact can reconcile their religions with each other (Thoth came to be worshiped as Hermes Trigestimus, for example). But it isn’t the only one. It’s not much less common for both pantheons, or elements of them, to end up being worshiped in a blended culture.
One of the hypotheses for why the Norse pantheon looks the way it does is that its two “tribes” of gods, the Aesir and the Vanir, were originally separate pantheons from different proto-Germanic peoples. And it was common during Christianization for local gods and goddesses to end up being venerated as folk saints.
Thesis: it’s called Dungeons & Dragons because digging underground compounds is the rational military response to the existence of durable flying units that breath fire or toxins. This is obfuscated by the incorrect use of medieval castles in published settings, but it’s correct.
There was a Second Edition supplement that argued this, as I recall. Don’t remember which.
The Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide, maybe?
Plausible. I don’t think I ever owned that one, but I flipped through a lot of 2E supplements in the comic book store, too.
It would be interesting to see a setting where humans had developed castles and other fortifications as a way to survive dragon attacks instead of or in addition to to resisting seiges. Maybe the dominant form would be something like a Hochbunker made with Roman concrete or cave castle?
That aside, it’s a pretty good title because it’s alliterative and concisely lays out the two core engagements of the game: dungeon-crawling (exploration) and dragon-slaying (combat). I would prefer another few “D’s” to represent hexcrawls, domain-level play, or becoming an Immortal but since those have all been dead since Rules Cyclopedia it wouldn’t be accurate.
Ooh. Maybe instead of tels, D&D archaeologists excavate chthonic pits expanded by centuries of burrowing peoples.
That’d go some way towards explaining the Underdark.
They might look something like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city
(Someone should really write a secret history of the dragon threat in 1st millennium BCE Asia Minor.)
I’ll get around to this if no one else does first…
Or maybe something like Petra – it’s not entirely underground, but it’s still carved out of solid rock, which should give you a decent amount of dragon-proofing for the city without needing to live like a dwarf.
And big whitewashed wooden spikes driven into fields.
Like a cross between pigeon spikes and Rommelspargel.
I like this. I don’t usually use below-ground dungeons, because I can’t think of a good reason why someone would’ve built them, but this totally makes sense.
Thanks! I ran a campaign that lasted a year and a half with very few dungeons, for lack of a good reason “why?” My players will tell you that my ideas for such were limited to “this mine has fallen into disuse because a necromancer raised all the dead workers as skeletons” and “you’re in the Underworld, and this part is confined passages.”
I’m not expecting a lengthy backstory, but ostentatiously silly D&D locations are kind of a pet peeve. F’rexample: in the campaign I play in, the DM had us discover a cemetery, and in the middle was a caretaker’s shack, and under a rug in the shack was a trapdoor leading to a ladder leading down to an ancient Dwarven king’s burial chamber, and, after you insert the Amulet of Etcetera in the doohickey, it revealed a secret passage to a cave constructed entirely of volcanic glass, which contained the undead champion of a long-lost mad god, and behind that, a bedroom and kitchen.
I know I should cut the guy slack, but honestly, a kitchen? Was the champion of the mad god really carrying vegetables down the ladder, through the secret door, etc, cooking his meals, and then carting the compost back out? And, why is there a Dwarven king burial chamber and also a mad god’s undead champion housed in the same dungeon? Was it a condo situation? And did that cemetery’s caretaker seriously never once move his rug? His only rug?
All he wanted to do was cook you a meal, and here you are talking shit about his god.
Honestly I kind of love that dungeon concept because the implication I took away was that it’s the groundskeeper’s kitchen.
I’m just picturing groundskeeper Willie shooing away the undead champion of a mad god away with a broom while he comes back upstairs with his morning plate of eggs and bacon.
Heh. I love that mental image but it’s a stupid level of bathos if the DM doesn’t have buy-in for that tone.
I like the imagine that Nabil ad Dajjal has of groundskeeper Willie, but I also think this is funny going in the other direction where the rooms are reversed.
The kitchen is under the shack. It may have been there all along, but it’s hidden because the caretaker prepares meals for the mad god (and they’re not based on vegetables, if you know what I mean). The mad got has direct access for meals, but also picked this site for due to the nearby Dwarven burial. He keeps the Dwarven king as a pet and enjoys his frustration (mad god, after all).
For the adventuring party, this means that when they move the rug and find the basement kitchen, it seems….mundane. Then, if they survive the confrontation with the mad god, the obvious assumption is that the other rooms are for storage or loot. If they don’t heal before searching, their confrontation with the ghost of the Dwarven king will catch them off guard, and make them more wary about looting after a “Boss Fight”.
it revealed a secret passage to a cave constructed entirely of volcanic glass, which contained the undead champion of a long-lost mad god, and behind that, a bedroom and kitchen
Your god is long-lost! You have no idea when or even if he’s coming back! You’re undead, so you have to wait it out! Even an undead champion of a mad god needs to rest and consume some form of sustenance. And a hobby, to while away the centuries. Maybe he took up gourmet cooking?
Maybe this is all part of the recompense for the cemetery groundskeeper? “Bed and board provided – hot meals daily; you deliver the groceries and take out the rubbish, he cooks, and no necromantic hanky-panky takes place in your cemetery to alarm the villagers with the shambling possessed corpses of their departed loved ones roaming the night to destroy and haunt and make your job tougher”. Everyone’s a winner!
why is there a Dwarven king burial chamber and also a mad god’s undead champion housed in the same dungeon?
Well, if the undead champion was already there, and the Dwarves knew about it, then he acts as the eternal guardian of the Dwarven king’s tomb and funerary treasures for free – Dwarves are thrifty folk, why buy a dog and bark yourself?
What about look at the real-world examples of underground tunnels/systems?
Anything from building over (European sewer systems), hiding from the “public” (drug/rebel tunnels), buildings that used to be part of the side of a mountain/cliff but later covered/sunk, elaborate spy/penetration setups (bank heists, digging below a trench to blow it up), needing a quick path through something that’s difficult to either pave over or buy up (Boring Co.).
None of this is exactly trophe fantasy stuff except maybe the sunken cliff-side dwellings.
And all of this is not assuming some weird fantastical traits/characteristics like fear of sunlight and whatever dwarfs have.
Note that most of this is NOT for “having elaborate rooms filled with treasures and traps”, which I only know hold for some tombs. But generally, it’s easy enough to simply have another group take over/reuse the space afterwards.
The most common real-life underground works are mines, but those tend to be boring in gameplay. Sewers, too, are pretty common IRL but have limited gameplay potential (you can only make a narrow slice of concepts work with them, and they’ve been thoroughly mined out).
Utility tunnels, subways, and tunnels built as part of highway or rail systems are all common IRL but don’t really work with pseudo-medieval fantasy.
That leaves catacombs, which might be the closest thing IRL to classic dungeons, and military installations, which are more or less what we’ve been talking about upthread. Caves, of course, are classic trope material despite being natural. There’s also a grab-bag of more obscure concepts, like qanats.
Been there!
Funny that industrial-era underground adventures didn’t become more popular.
And depending on the culture, you can get military installation + residence + catacomb of tombs. A castle is 1+2 by definition, and some cultures buried rulers and such in their own basement.
Trying to figure out how qanats would function… puzzles of swim vs. shut off the water supply like a Zelda water temple?
I imagined something like that scene in Cryptonomicon.
Nornagest: Another set of real life underground works are steam tunnels. A number of Government buildings and Universities have underground connections, with access varying between: (any employee going from building to building) and (specific maintenance personal only). How these structures would be used in a D&D or Shadowrun campaign is up to the GM, but they can certainly serve an interesting purpose.
There’s a big network of old mines and other tunnels under Paris. I think it’s probably more interesting than regular mines and could make sense in a fantasy setting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_of_Paris
It was my understanding that the Underdark is largely a natural cave system, parts of which somehow have forests of fungus that produce enough food to support underground cities nearby.
The setting of Earthdawn is pretty much entirely predicated around trying to have a lot of D&D tropes actually make sense. The backstory is that there was a magical apocalypse that caused beings called Horrors, which feed on pain and suffering, to enter the world and start rampaging about. In order to survive them, people had to hide in sorcerously warded underground bunkers and cities called Kaers. Though some wealthier and more magically adept peoples enclosed their above ground cities in domes of elemental air or fire. Not all of these made it out the other end, and some that made it still suffered partial infiltration or penetration by Horrors and had to be abandoned quickly as soon as it was safe to do so. Thus the world is littered with ruined settlements both above and below ground which are filled with monsters of every kind, but also contain the lore and treasure of lost ancient civilizations.
There’s also some effort put into justifying small adventuring parties. In Earthdawn some portion of the population has some amount of magical affinity, this affinity allows them to become Adepts following a particularly Discipline which are basically the character classes. Since Adepts are rare, it’s hard to deploy them in large groups, but since they are powerful, they can be useful in small ones. Additionally a group of Adepts swear a blood oath to each other so that their group become a metaphysical Thing that they’re all bound to, but which in turn they can draw power from. So a party of oath-bound Adepts can be significantly more powerful than sum of the individual members.
A nice thing about all player characters being Adepts this is that every character class is explicitly magical. This means you can have cool stuff like Warriors having the ability to glide along the battlefield like an air hockey puck, and Swordmasters being able to do the air-gliding Wuxia thing, and Thieves having abilities that let them hide in plain sight and pull off impossible disguises. Hell with magical linguistics you can even pick up an entire language just by talking to someone who speaks it for a few minutes. Spellcasters still have spells though, which give them a lot of utility and flexibility (hey everyone, hop on this cloud and let’s go flying!) as well as the classic blasty spells like fireballs and lightning bolts.
There’s also a high degree of mechanical-setting integration. Character levels actually exist in-universe, they’re called Circles and they represent mastery in each particular Adept Discipline. So you can totally go around telling people that you’re a 5th Circle Elementalist or an 8th Circle Sky Raider and that totally means something. What’s more going up a circle doesn’t just happen, you need to find someone to actually train you. This makes character progression feel more grounded and also gives the game some enforced downtime, which i feel is good for game pacing. Even XP is somewhat setting linked in that it’s called Legend Points and tied to your personal legend. You still get the bulk of your LP for actually doing heroic things regardless of whether anyone learns about them or not, but you do get bonus LP for spreading your legend, telling tales of your derring-do, and showing off trophies from your adventures.
Incidentally, yes Sky Raider is pretty much what it sounds like. There in fact are flying ships in this setting, and Sky Raiders are areal commandos who can be pirates or marines depending on your inclination. There is also an Air Sailor discipline for those who want to be airship captains. Naturally, since there are flying ships and flying pirates, there are also flying troll vikings with crystal weapons. Yes that’s them jumping out of the ship without parachutes in the picture, because Sky Raiders get an ability called Wind Catcher that lets them glide and it’s as awesome as it sounds.
I get what they’re going for, but that reification of character class and level actually feels really unappealing.
Bending the fiction to reflect the mechanics seems totally backwards to me. Instead of starting with a shared fictional world and modeling it with RPG mechanics, you’re starting with RPG mechanics and designing the fictional world around them. Do not want.
Personally i hate character levels because unlike attributes, skills, or powers, they don’t seem to correspond to anything in universe. They’re just too abstract and game-like, as there is simply nothing in a person that would make me think something like, “She is surely Level 10”. Consequently game systems that have levels are just profoundly unappealing to me and it takes a lot to get me to buy into them, it’s one of the reasons why i’ve never played D&D and possibly never will.
Earthdawn solves this problem by making levels an actual in-universe thing. A better solution would be to not have levels at all, but if you’re going to have them i certainly appreciate being able to relate them to the characters in a concrete way. Also they put so much effort into the setting’s metaphysics it actually feels like an organic part of the universe rather than something awkwardly retrofitted into it.
But why are they called dungeons? Most of them aren’t for locking people up.
Good question.
Transcription error? They’re not dungeons, they’re donjons. Just underground ones.
From wiki:
The 2002 movie Reign of Fire which unfortunately wasn’t as good as it could have been (due to honking great plot holes and the jarring contrast between the Americans coming in and the setting in Britain as established).
Dragons are real, they’ve come back and destroyed civilisation as we know it (here some of those honking great plot holes come in – even though we start off with only one dragon, then a couple more, even nuclear bombs can’t take them out?) and the scattered survivors are living in underground fortified keeps scavenged together from old castles, venturing out only rarely to grow and harvest food.
So far, so good, but then the Americans turn up with functioning tech and declare that they’ve solved their dragon problem and are going to do the same for the Old World, which is all fine and dandy except if nuclear weapons can’t knock out the dragons, how will a helicopter? (Another one of those honking great plot holes, as well as the one about “the Brits are scrabbling around living in holes under ruined castles but the Yanks have enough fuel to fly a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy all the way over the Atlantic plus avoided dragon strikes on the way over”?) Oh well, it all ends relatively happily with the humans winning even though IT MAKES NO CONCEIVABLE SENSE EVEN BY THE RULES ESTABLISHED IN THE MOVIE.
I’ve had dreams with fewer plot holes than that movie.
I only watched it for Christian Bale doing his Beren impersonation; even the dragons were vaguely disappointing.
Scrolled up for a moment hoping to see Christian Bale in an adaptation of Silmarillion; was unfortunately disappointed.
Strong against dragons, weak against Lannisters. Gotta stay on top of the meta.
I think the question here is, how common are dragon attacks? In normal D&D, even adult dragons seem to be pretty rare, let alone wyrms. Giants might be a more reasonable justification for dungeons – they’re essentially living siege weapons, but they can’t do anything to a dungeon.
Atleast one of the in canon interpretations I’ve seen is that most of the evil races have to hide their presence from celestial and interplanar forces sworn to hunt them down. At that can swoop in out of the astral or celestial planes (read d&ds equivalent of space).
The Mindflayers are the classic example of this: a lovecraftian super race of hyper intelligent squid-men who keep humanoids a chattle to eat and preform nightmarish experiments on (Ridley Scott’s alien would be something they’d come up with). But who have a collapsing population and almost no major cities left since the goth (a blended race of humanoid rebelled slaves) hunt them down across dimensions exterminating them with extreme predjudice.
Because it’s easier? If you’re a 7th century polytheist villager, it sure makes it a lot less hard work to keep a set of rules to appease one (1) god than worry about “did I piss off the god of rain so that is why there is a drought? and did we make sure to offer to the ancestral spirits? and maybe the local village spirit is unhappy so I have to be sure about that”. If there are lots of small local spirits plus bigger gods plus the big god of the city and the king plus an entire pantheon with that, you run a lot more danger of unwittingly breaking some rule and causing trouble.
All the Pagan gods ask is that you offer incense and sacrifices to them.
Now this Yahweh bloke comes and says you have to *love* him.
And worse, each other!
Hahahaha, this.
I just realized that the Forums I’ve commented to are:
1) a plumbing tool Forum where most fequent commenters are an amateurs or self-employed, wheras I’m a government employee plumber.
2) A Dungeons & Dragons Forum where most frequent commenters are fan’s of 3.5 which is my least favorite edition (admittedly I have almost no knowledge of 4e, but at least it wasn’t 3.5!).
3) Here where most frequent commenters are in “Tech” and are conservative and/or libertarian, wheras (while I’ll cop to some trad-con and loyalist leanings) are more of a tax-and-spend Democrat.
Uh-oh…
Thankfully folks are really nice.
A BDSM forum where most of the posters are sadists but I’m…
I feel like tax-and-spend is becoming an outdated label. The political fortunes of libertarianism are shriveling and people are more concerned with the efficiency of spending and the CW factors of beneficiaries. IMO.
@Le Maistre Chat >
And that just sounds like a battle for spoils, which I guess ultimately it is and always was, but somehow it being explicit is saddening.
The tax-cutting side of the Republican Party is still powerful—consider that the only major legislative victory of this presidency was a tax cut—but there’s definitely a lot of churn among conservative intellectuals about this. The spend-cutting side has been completely routed, though. Do the math on that one….
@Nick,
Yeah, Im a bit behind the times in that I still suspecting that some of “Modern Monetary Theory” is hooey and that just spending without also taxing may induce inflation.
> may induce inflation
It may, but also may not. At the most fundamental level all MMT is saying is that everyone has spectacularly failed at predicting what inflation will do, so let’s treat it as an observed variable instead of pretending we have a good model when we so clearly don’t.
I used to believe that, but I just can’t square it with the behavior of inflation in the post-crisis, and especially post-tax cut period.
When the Fed attempts to increase inflation they do so with the expectation that they can tame if if things start getting out of hand. Treating inflation as an observed variable would mean that MMTers would tacitly be admitting that they have no plant to combat inflation if it occurred under their preferred structure, in effect saying their plan is to hope everything works out because they don’t know what they are doing.
This might be the most honest assessment of MMT I have yet seen.
The post crisis world has seen well below average growth for a rebound period, which implies a lot of things about MMT that its proponents don’t generally address.
If no one knows what they are doing is better to be honest about that or pretend otherwise?
All my friends like 5e
I’m DMing Pathfinder
Plumber:
While my background could be considered to be technical, one of the things that made me stop lurking and start commenting was the apparent respect for practical skill and knowledge that I have seen. I’m glad that you comment here, and I like see comments from people all over the world (and even from people I strongly disagree with). I hope you keep commenting (even if I might argue with you in the future), and encourage other people who are watching and thinking they don’t fit in to give it a an honest, charitable, in good faith attempt at commenting.
@Gray Ice,
Wow! That’s very kind of you, thanks!
Can I enquire as to what sort of loyalist leanings you have? Ie Ulster loyalism some other form of loyalism or simply a general support for loyalist causes? I am a loyalist of the latter category.
@edmundgennings >
Oh jeez!
Well in this case my “loyalist leanings” is: “My tendency to loyally assume that auto-correct won’t mangle what I meant to convey”, as I was trying to say I had “localist leanings” as in Localism:
Plumber, localism sounds somewhat like the Catholic principle of subsidiarity (wordy Wikipedia article here, video by Dominicans – so not too prog as would be risked with the Jesuits – here).
@Deiseach,
Thanks for that.
Sounds like a wise goal.
BTW, starting (I think with reading the news of Dayton and El Paso) I’ve been feeling pretty despondent this last week (and my demons have given me a cavalcade of different thoughts to be sad about, as logic-ing myself out of sadness doesn’t work well for me) and like a fool I thought “If the world is Hellbound anyway why not check out Twitter a second time?”, so I did, which as as more wise person than I’ve been would realize, didn’t improve my mood, but I did find this gem of a thread that’s somewhat related to your island, enjoy:
"...Protty girls can not be Dancing Queens..."I am a loyalist of the latter category.
Okay, so we Jacobites are present, are there any Jacobins? 😉
It’s good to have a viewpoint from the non-tech side. Outsiders tend to have distorted views of how the inside works…and blue-collar fields are pretty much “outside” for almost all of us. Even those of us with family members in blue collar fields!
Yeah, I like having you around, Plumber… even if it means I have to scroll even longer to get past the D&D threads. It’s nice having an old-school, blue-collar leftie around—it probably helps the rest of us not get too carried away with our grey tribe technolibertarianism.
@James,
Thanks!
But I’m only an “old-school, blue-collar leftie” relative to most frequent SSC commenters, the former vice-president of my old union local fits that bill better, quite a character who I had many conversations with – I don’t agree with him about everything, but I learned a lot from him (especially labor history, ’cause he was there), and in some ways @DavidFriedman reminds me of him despite they’re being on different “sides” of issues.
“Here where most frequent commenters are in “Tech” and are conservative and/or libertarian, wheras (while I’ll cop to some trad-con and loyalist leanings) are more of a tax-and-spend Democrat.”
According to all the yearly surveys, the majority of readers of this blog say they are centre-left.
@Yair,
I believe Dan L. crunched the survey’s numbers and found that while the majority of SSC readers are “center-left” the majority of frequent commenters lean conservative or libertarian.
Given Dan L is one of the people most given to complaining about how right-wing the comments are, I have some reason to doubt his objectivity.
I think the analysis of the survey data was fairly reasonable. Would you like to do your own analysis of the survey results to rebut or explain why the results Dan L got were wrong (if it was in fact Dan L, I remember reading where someone had done the analysis but couldn’t tell you for sure who it was…trusting @Plumber on that one).
rlms has posted his results before. Dan L may have been referring to that, to Scotts surveys, or done his own.
@ Nornagest:
Unless you can critique my numbers, I think we have a genuine ad-hom on our hands here.
@ acymetric:
Here’s the thread I posted with the most links. All results are my analysis of 2019 survey data.
I have a few pet theories regarding the commentariat, but I haven’t really put them in writing precisely because I’m underconfident that they’re backed by data. (So far.)
@ Randy:
I’ve only glanced at the 2018 data in passing and don’t love some of rlms’ methodology, but I see general agreement between those results and mine.
Perhaps you prefer target rich environments?
@DavidFriedman,
Glad to see that your back, I hope you had wonderful time travel adventures!
That sounds much better than head trauma for a reason, thanks!
If I want to read a modern adaptation of the story of King Arthur, is there a better choice than T.H. White’s The Once and Future King?
TOaFK doesn’t cover most of the classic tales, though. It arguably has the best look at the interiority of the characters, but for learning about the actual events, Roger Lancelyn Green is still pretty good.
I also quite like Gerald Morris’s Arthurian books, with a higher emphasis on fae world-building and a bit of humor. (That series begins with “The Squire’s Tale.”)
And then there’s the Arthur King of Time and Space webcomic, but I believe it’s been on hiatus for a while? And is also more contingent on knowing the legends already.
Unfortunately he never completed it before his death, but there’s still a lot of John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, and it’s good.
Iris Murdoch
Roland Barthes
I would say that “The Sword in the Stone”, by one T.H. White, is probably superior to “The Once and Future King”.
TSitS is an earlier work, and the first quarter of TOaFK is an adaptation of it, but I prefer the original.
If you want, you could read TSiTS and then go straight on into the next 3/4 of the tetralogy.
But apart from that quibble I think White does a better job than anyone else I’ve read of capturing the rather chaotic feel that multiple semi-contradictory sources have give Arthurian in the popular consciousness.
I don’t know if I’d say “better”, but I very much like Jack Whyte’s Camulod series, starting with The Skystone.
Very feminist and the author is problematic, but The Mists of Avalon is probably the most influential modern re-telling.
Tolkien has a poetic adaptation which takes elements from a few of the early sources while adding some narrative elements of his own (partly to make the whole thing hold together). Unfortunately it’s unfinished, but the ~30 pages he did complete are very polished. (The rest of the book is Christopher Tolkien explaining the history of the text and its relation to other stories in the Arthurian tradition.)
I know it’s very controversial because of Marion Zimmer Bradley but Mists of Avalon remains a really good re-telling.
There was a major problem with early Jewish monotheism: people asked why, if we have the right religion and the gentiles don’t, do they keep pushing us around? The common answer is that the Jews were being punished for not following the Torah. The authors of the bible didn’t dwell much on the question of whether God was morally justified in punishing the Jews for not following the Torah. For many rules, such as the Kosher laws, no justification was needed. Which I interpret as meaning the question of the “problem of evil” wasn’t asked much, if it was a major hurdle, much ink would have been spilled on it. Why? Maybe it’s because the era was so brutal. People expected to be treated brutally by others and expected social acceptance for brutal behavior toward others. Morality was heavily particularistic, it was wrong to steal from your brother but not from the tribe who lived down the mountain. In this environment, an entity that gives you manna from heaven for following a bunch of silly rituals seems supremely good. It is only in our era when we are expected to act morally toward outgroups do we start to ask why God is exempt from all these rules.
Does nobody read Job anymore?
The book of Job pretty clearly comes out against omnibenevolence, demonstrating instead that God is a real asshole who seriously abuses his #1 fan on a bet.
As I recall, the conclusion of Job is God showing up and saying “you’ll never understand Me because I’m God and you’re not.”
I’m not saying you have to like the answer, just don’t tell me ‘the question of the “problem of evil” wasn’t asked much’. Much ink was spilled on it. 42 chapters is a lot in the Bible!
As I write this, French news media have slowly but surely become obssed with environmentalist. On French public radio, there isn’t a single day without multiple news or subjects about global warming, plastic pollution in the ocean, increasing drough, the effects of pesticides, and so on. As far as I can tell this reflects real public concerns, environmental issues are on everyone’s mind. In the last European elections, the French green party scored 13.48%, beating the traditional mainstream right and mainstream left parties.
So I’m making a series a prediction for the next French presidential elections (april 2022):
80% confidence: the green candidate will score no lower than 4th place in the first round.
65% conficence: the green candidate will score no lower than 3rd place in the first round.
40% confidence: the green candidate will make it to the second round.
Provided the green party makes it to the second round:
80%: the green candidate will win the second round if they run against the populist candidate.
30%: the green candidate will win the second round if they run against the incumbent president.
The big caveat is that in previous elections, the greens have made their best scores in the European elections and this generally failed to translate into political momentum for national elections. But with the enormous and seemingly relatively recent shift of public discourse toward omnipresent environmentalist, I assume this could change.
Are there plausible Green presidential candidates, that is, people who have enough name recognition and seem qualified enough to the French voting public? If so, who are they?
I dont share your optimism. It’s my impression that the greens did better than most left party because they’re just competing for the same demographic, one of the last remnants of the crab barrel of the clusterfuck of the 2002 elections.
And while they’ll maybe manage to cannibalize some more of the left, they’ll be stuck between supporting actual environmentalist policy, such as carbon taxes, which will put them at odd with the populist left of Melanchon (which 1.is the only left left, and 2. would have a field day at stomping over dem rich environmentalist who want to tax dem poor workers), or keep arguing for progressive environmentalist, which wont work with the center liberals, which they’d need to get to the 2nd round.
Also, there’s the bit where presidential elections run on personalities more than european elections, and the green leadership is…who?
@Machine Interface
You should keep in mind that the media mostly consists of a non-representative subset of society, so increased support by them doesn’t necessarily reflect a large increase in overall support.
In general, I see a shift among the left to focus on environmental concerns more, but this shift being partly due to evaporative cooling. So Green parties are partly cannibalizing the left, contributing to a situation where you have many small parties.
The Green party may become the largest of the small parties in one or more countries, but that is still going to be a mandate by a relatively small percentage of the population.
Kull of Atlantis
Before Conan the Barbarian, author Robert E. Howard created the barbarian King Kull. The central conceit was clever: if Atlantis ended as an advanced civilization, the Atlanteans must have previously been barbarians. Kull is an introspective barbarian who made himself king of the decaying empire Valusia (which Howard penpal HP Lovecraft name-dropped as Europe’s name in legends “of blasphemous antiquity” in two stories).
The first Kull story published was “The Shadow Kingdom” (Weird Tales, August 1929), noteworthy for depicting a conspiracy of disguised
lizardmenserpent men constant since the first human ruler.Kull was back next month in “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune”, in which affairs of state are suffering because he’s depressed by not knowing the meaning or ontology of life. A woman advises him to seek the soothsayer Tuzun Thune, who claims to have all the answers in a hall of magic mirrors. Kull seems to start disappearing into a mirror universe until his friend Brule slays the defenseless Tuzun Thune, leaving it ambiguous whether he was a real wizard or Kull was the one who altered reality, through meditation.
That was it for Kull in Weird Tales, except for a supporting role in “Kings of the Night”, a Bran son of Morn yarn.
But Howard had a chest of rejected Kull manuscripts (one would get rewritten into “The Phoenix on the Sword”, the first Conan story). These first saw publication in 1967, with L. Sprauge de Camp and Lin Carter as editors. I consider a particularly memorable one to be “The Cat and the Skull” AKA “Delcardes’ Cat”. A noblewoman has a talking cat that claims to be a seer. Kull tests the cat by acting on its vision (“your friend Brule is being killed by a monster in the Forbidden Lake”), only to almost get killed. He realizes that Delcardes’ mute servant was the cat’s voice via ventriloquism, and captures him like a Scooby-Doo villain, only to find…
… that’s not good writing, but it’s not good in a very distinctive, cartoony way. This is the first appearance of Skeletor!
Were these in collabs? I don’t remember ever coming across the name.
E: ah, no, The Haunter of the Dark – and apparently also referenced in AtMoM.
Yeah, here’s the passage in AtMoM:
I think part of the answer is that “monotheism” and “polytheism” aren’t alternatives; they are different levels in the same hierarchy. (This is admittedly one of my weirder ideas, but hear me out.)
The “gods” in every polytheism I’m aware of are limited; they are not “gods” in the sense that a monotheisitic “god” is. They are not self-existent, not the ground of reality, and so forth. So well-developed monotheisms have limited supernatural beings (angels, saints, etc) who look a lot like “gods” in a polytheist context. Similarly, well-developed polytheisms tend to develop a concept of a fundamental ground of being behind the “gods” (Hindu Brahman, Stoic logos).
So my answer is that as philosophical reasoning develops, the focus tends to shift to the monotheistic level.
This doesn’t strike me as at all weird.
As you say, polytheistic gods tend to be humans writ large. Often there are even naturalistic explanations for where they came from: Ymir was “a primeval being who was born from venom that dripped from the icy rivers Élivágar and lived in the grassless void of Ginnungagap.” If you start asking where the Élivágar came from, it leads very nicely to more and more distant and abstract gods; my sense is that the Greeks didn’t talk much about Chronos. (At least, Wikipedia doesn’t have much to say about him.)
Eventually you get to a god which did literally create existence, or maybe just is existence, for whom the question of origin is definitionally meaningless, and you get to stop.
But pareidolia is very strong, and the desire to attribute agency and thought and bonding to such a god leads to the idea of the “ground of reality” god who nevertheless has a personal relationship with you. It makes it even easier to note that such a fundamental god would of necessity be powerful enough as to have no bandwidth problems in having a personal relationship with every human who ever lived or will live.
This raises the interesting question about Hinduism, where as I understand it the ground of reality is Brahman, which is related to Brahma but not identical; they seem to have personified the ground of reality considerably less than the Abrahamic religions did. Why is that? And what does it say about my whole analysis?
In Catholicism, we have one God in three persons, and then we have Mary (who’s kind-of a special case), all the other saints, and the angels. We pray to all of them–God (Father, Son, Spirit), Mary, the saints, the angels (collectively and individually–for example, the prayer to St Michael).
I gather that other monotheists (Protestants, Muslims, Jews) tend to find this very odd.
The other monotheisms find praying to the angels and saints problematic, but I believe all of them believe in angels, and most believe in saints.
I’ve seen praying to saints explained as being equivalent to asking a friend to pray for you. Since saints are alive and active in Heaven, why wouldn’t we ask them, too?
This sounded considerably less problematic to my Protestant ears, although I’m not sure it ends up working that way in practice.
I’m a Catholic, a convert from Anabaptist and then Protestant Christianity. That was the argument that made sense to me.
That was what I was taught as well.
I just finished watching the movie “Act of Valor” based on our earlier discussion of films that we liked but critics hated. It was good. I liked it. Sure, some of the acting could have been more nuanced, and I don’t think there was a moral gray area anywhere on screen, but the fight scenes were really outstanding and the cinematography was beautiful.
It’s a good action movie, and well worth watching as such. It just isn’t anything more than an action movie.
Point of contention that has to be made at the end of the life of this thread, because CW potential:
Speculation about Jeffery Epstein is not a “conspiracy theory”. The hallmarks, IMO, of an actual conspiracy theory are post-hoc reasoning, and a claim to secret knowledge. Neither is present.
“Epstein is going to suicide himself with cyanide, a noose, and 2 gunshots to the back of the head,” jokes have been mainstream since his arrest. This means there is no post-hoc reasoning. Everything happened as the alleged conspiracy theorist would have predicted. This means his model of the world is at least accurate on this one dimension.
Also, no one seems to be claiming secret knowledge of who’s done it. Although some have made vague claims like Joe Scarborough, who’s tweets boil down to, “Trump, Clinton, or Dershowitz prolly did it.”
Rather that a conspiracy theory, I think this is like a classic self-defense case in law. There is a body. There are two competing theories of how it became a body. Neither has gotten to the high levels of proof required in crim law yet, and even a civil case wouldn’t be certain for either side. There certainly is evidence for both sides.
The information I’d like is how often people on federal suicide watch successfully commit suicide. Just the general numbers. Maybe suicide watch is useless and people kill themselves all the time.
It won’t completely defuse my own doubts but it will put them in context.
The point is that now the conversation on the topic is mainstream. I find it eerily similar to the jokes on how Putin’s enemies get cancer.
(but yes, numbers on suicide watch suicides is a pretty good starting point)
edit: not really. He had been removed from suicide watch. A bureaucratic way to kill if there ever was one – facilitate a small oversight and let him kill himself.
I’ve been seeing conflicting information about whether he even was on suicide watch. Apparently it was reported first that he was, and had been since an attempt a few weeks ago, then it was reported a little later that he’d been taken off watch on the 9th.
If that’s true, the question becomes who decided that. Cui bono?
It may not be someone big thing. There was a mobster who was murdered by the federal bureau of prisons (they transferred him to a the general pop of a different facility and he was beaten to death within 24 hours) because he had pissed off a mid-level prison official.
I thought this this sequence of tweets from Popehat raised an important issue–it’s easy to have a TV/movie idea of the care and competence of prison officials that makes Epstein’s suicide seem like some kind of aberration. But actually, they let prisoners die from malice or indifference or incompetence pretty often, and there are basically never any consequences for doing so.
That doesn’t mean he didn’t get murdered somehow–pimping underaged girls to the rich and powerful seems like the sort of thing that might shorten your life expectancy quite a bit. But if he were Jerry Epscon the small-time pimp of underaged girls who got busted and sent to prison, and he’d died in the same way, we’d probably never have heard about it.
[broblawsky got there first]
See John Schilling’s comment below regarding the nature of suicide watch: Most likely him and his lawyers. I disagree with some of the generalities about prison guards, but I think it gets the basics right. Measures vary from facility to facility, but generally include:
-Padded Cell with no furniture or even bed linens. You sleep on the ground.
-The prisoner is either A) dressed in clothing they cannot remove without outside assistance, B) dressed in clothing that is particularly tear/rip-resistant or C) kept nude (can’t choke yourself with a cloth gag if you don’t have cloth).
-The prisoner is then checked on by guards -very- frequently. By which I don’t mean hourly, but rather every 5-15 minutes. As John notes, the ways of practically verifying that the prisoner is still responsive and alive often end up being de facto sleep deprivation. In its most intense form, you actually have someone with physical eyes-on the prisoner 24/7 for the duration of the watch. Imagine being escorted to a toilet stall with the door removed, and doing your business while a prison guard stands within arms reach, watching you.
If these sorts of measures aren’t enough, the next step is to combine the 24/7 monitoring with keeping the prisoner in 5-point restraints, letting them exercise and move one limb at a time every few hours under supervision.
TL;DR: If you weren’t on Suicide Watch -before-, being on it for very long may well push someone in that direction all on its own.
It sounds like it would be cheaper, easier, equally effective and more humane to dispense with all the paraphernalia and just have someone sit outside their cell and watch them 24/7. If you have a guard checking on them every 5-15 minutes, that guard isn’t going to be doing anything else useful anyway, so why not just have them pull up a chair?
Which I suppose probably means that the objective here isn’t just to keep the guy from committing suicide.
Keeping a guard permanently stationed outside the cell would be much more humane: most of the sleep deprivation comes from the guard coming and going, not from the guard’s presence.
It wouldn’t work. The guard would fall asleep or just stop paying attention.
It doesn’t have to always be the same guard. Prisons still have guard towers, right? However they’re doing the rotation for those, they could do the same for prisoners on suicide watch.
Mental hospitals deal with suicidal patients all the time. How much better is being on a suicide watch there than in prison?
Hell, even perfectly nice hospitals with well-intentioned employees and sympathetic patients are terrible places to try to get a good night’s sleep.
I’m pretty sure regular (multiple times per hour) bed checks are a part of the procedure for mental hospitals as well, although they very well might be more…polite (quiet) about it.
If you have the manpower, having 1 on 1 oversight (that is, the person on suicide watch under constant direct observation) IS what’s done. Guards are rotated in or out as-needed.
However, a lot of times there isn’t the manpower, and that means leaving, then coming back to check on the prisoner and verify they’re still alive. Generally speaking, COs don’t enter any prisoner’s cell alone if at all possible for obvious reasons. That means either you have to have two people there to run the checks in person, since you have to get close enough to visually verify they’re still alive and breathing….or the one person making the checks finds a way to get movement/response from the prisoner without entering the cell…which means waking them up. You can see how the rest falls out from there. Another option that’s used is simply keeping the prisoner in 4-5 point restraints all the time, which obviates the safety issues, but again, not pleasant or humane…
Instead of directly trying to prove what happened with Epstein, it may be better to start from common ground. I think most people would agree that in this case, “Justice was not served.” As a result, many people have lost at least a bit of their faith in the universality of the US system of justice. What would need to be done to rebuild the faith that we have a system that works for everyone, even if they are rich and well-connected?
My question would be “To whom was justice not done?” If it’s just Epstein, and Epstein’s victims–he’s dead and there’s little that can be done.
My fear, though, is that the people escaping justice include a lot of powerful, wealthy participants in his appalling behaviour; I would hope that his death doesn’t lead to anyone else escaping justice.
One claim I read yesterday: Epstein’s death will apparently make it a lot easier to get his seized papers/correspondence/computer files admitted as evidence, because there’s no longer anyone who has standing to try to assert any kind of privacy right / lack of warrant over them.
That assumes the existence of some sort of law agency so desperate/committed to bringing justice to his accomplices that they’re willing to keep this going despite the fact that the main person involved is now dead.
I guess time will tell, but I consider that highly unlikely. Epstein’s death is just the thing that every law enforcement agency needed to wash their hands of this whole mess and say “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Federal prosecutors have already stated they’re continuing the case, and noted that some of the charges were conspiracy charges – ie others were involved: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-suicide-investigation.html
There’s one or more federal prosecutor working on this case, who sees that if he can nail a couple of really high-profile Epstein clients, he will become a household name with a brilliant political future. That provides quite a bit of incentive for continuing the case.
People predicted the Branch Davidian compound at Waco would burn before it did, too. Whether that’s a point for or against your claim, I’ll let you decide.
Popehat, who is usually pretty reasonable about legal issues, seems to think it’s plausible that Epstein’s suicide is the product of simple incompetence.
Ken is a smart guy with more experience in crim law than me, but that’s exactly what I’d guess Ken to say. He is a little too institutional for his own good, and requires a lot of evidence to start thinking in other ways.
Not that the incompetence theory is wrong. Its probably right. I’m just saying there isn’t very good evidence for the incompetence theory yet.
Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Epstein had already attempted suicide. Prison guards are, in general, not exactly the sharpest tools in the shed, and have a well-earned and longstanding reputation for incompetence.
There are certainly a number of powerful people who would have greatly benefited from his death (most obviously: Trump and Clinton). Despite the fact that I think these are fairly awful people, I think thus far there is no evidence that any of them are murderers (please, don’t bother explaining how I’m wrong, I don’t have the patience). Also, murder is difficult, and tends to leave traces.
The fact that there are powerful people who would benefit from his death is literally the only evidence in favour of it being murder.
I don’t find incompetence to be implausible. My point is there is no public evidence in favor of it yet. Its not like prison guards are beacons of integrity. 2 missed their rounds. One or both could easily have been bribed to miss the rounds and slip him some good hanging sheets. By Epstein or his friends.
He also had a pretty clear motive for suicide–it was absolutely clear he was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars, and no amount of influential friends, blackmail material over powerful people, or briefcases full of cash were going to get him out, now that the case had become so visible. Probably he was also not anticipating any kind of humane treatment by the guards or any other prisoners he came in contact with.
You’re right that there’s no positive evidence in favour of it. But there’s no positive evidence in favour of the other possibility, which is a prior much less plausible.
Instinctively, probably based on news reporting, I would have guessed that homicide by another inmate was as likely as suicide, but statistically I’d have been wrong — although the numbers are close.
“The number of federal prisoner deaths in federal prisons increased 11%, from 400 deaths in 2013 to 444 deaths in 2014. The vast majority of federal prisoner deaths (88%) could be attributed to natural causes. Unnatural deaths— including suicides (4%), homicides (3%), and accidents (1%)—made up less than a tenth of all federal prison deaths.”
From “Mortality in State Prisons 2001-2014”: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/msp0114st_sum.pdf.
So with nothing else to go on, and if we assume the death was “unnatural”, suicide is indeed the most likely explanation. I do wonder whether this remains the same after one controls for the crime. I’d guess that sex offenders might be more likely than others to die by homicide.
(For state prisoners, the disparity between suicide and homicide is greater, 6% vs 2%. For local jails, it’s even more lopsided. But I think Epstein was in federal custody? I also don’t know whether the ratios for prisoners as a whole and those of jailed suspects are comparable.)
I’m fairly suspicious of the possibility that “natural deaths” is excessively broad (or just under investigated) in that reporting. I suppose an easily preventable death might still be considered “natural”.
A lot of people die in prison because medical care was withheld, sometimes after hours of serious symptoms like vomiting, convulsions, delirium, and screws yelling, “Stop faking!” There’s also the one where they call an ambulance but it gets held up making it through the security checkpoint at the gates. All of these would be recorded as ‘natural deaths’ even though some portion were wholly preventable if not for malicious or negligent withholding of care.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was getting at.
@Enkidum:
He claimed it was not attempted suicide but an attempt on his life. I don’t say I believe him, but it raises enough doubt in my mind not to want to say categorically that he had already attempted suicide.
Still, right now I lean toward suicide, just from Ockham’s Razor. But I really want to hear definitive answers to a few important questions.
Was he in fact on suicide watch? If not, why not? I gather that it is rare to be on suicide watch for a week and then removed.
If he was, how did he accomplish the suicide? Was he just very resourceful with the standard limited access to tools, or did somebody slip him a rope?
Would one expect there to be video records? If so, and if the video records are somehow missing, I’m going to downwardly revise suicide by a lot, especially if the apparent suicide did not involve contraband items.
If he bribed somebody to slip him a rope, that individual has a motive to disappear the video. But in the absence of contraband, I don’t see what Epstein’s motivation is to make the video go away — unless he wanted to make it look like a murder, just as a big F U to the powerful people who he expected to protect him but who didn’t. But it sort of seems like early days for him to have given up on that.
That is, in fact, the one reservation I have about suicide based on the data I have now: How much danger is he really in? If we posit that there are lots of powerful people who might be afraid they would be fingered, those are also people who can pull the strings to get him off. His story strikes me as that of a guy who thinks himself above the law; what would make him give up so soon?
(Trying very hard to put out of my mind the fact that at his level of the elite, faking the death altogether would be pocket change. But the life he would be buying, anonymous and furtive in a foreign land, would be quite a hardship.)
>Ockham’s Razor
“The lady down the street is a witch; she did it.” —Robert Heinlein
That heuristic grants you no absolute understanding. There is an empirical observation that the more complex a plan is the more likely it is to fail simply by having more links in the chain, so thus bayes theorem and combinatoric optimization point you towards discussing “simple” plans first.
I mean. Occams razor is “god did it” for everything. So I don’t know what the simplest explanation actually is!
Occasionally complex and convoluted plans actually work!
I disagree. “God did it” proves too much. It justifies everyone going on a murder spree; it also justifies everyone not doing so. It justifies everyone both liking and loathing violence at the same time, as the solution to any given problem. Early on, people learn that there are things that make more sense to them one way or the other (even if they disagree in certain cases), and such preferences only make sense in a universe that has rules for this and against that.
Therefore, Occam’s Razor requires rules. And the more we learn about the complexities of the universe, the more rules we end up requiring in order for everything to continue making sense.
And really, if he wanted to FU the people who didn’t protect him, the best way of doing so would surely be to spill the beans about all their sex crimes and take as many down with him as possible.
Good point. I was just groping for a possible reason to obscure a non-contraband suicide, and that was the best I could come up with.
It obviously demands an investigation. How many plea deals could Epstein could have made to eek out a comfortable prison sentence at a place that wasn’t *that* bad? How many people could he have taken down who had millions and millions of dollars?
Instead of “never ascribe to malace what can adequately by explained by incompetence ” a better answer is bayes theorem and historical pattern matching.
https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note-Anonymity
One problem with narrowing down the Bayesian estimates of suicide vs murder is the absolute lack of performing controlled experiments in these situations.
Wouldn’t bribing a guard or others at the prison just create more witnesses to a crime? Don’t see how it would put one in less legal danger on net.
Why are people ashamed of discussing a conspiracy theory? Is it social status linking? The fear of becoming involved?
Everyone who has picked up a few books on the cold war knows that conspiracies happen all the time. Everyone who has read the history of medicine knows that conspiracies happen with hundreds of people (Quite a few doctors were well aware that blood letting harmed their patients yet still did so for a buck)
I’m glad to discuss the Epstein “suicide” that uh….is very questionable.
People aren’t ashamed, I think, in a general sense.
I was just kind of pointing out that, despite a lot of larger outlets calling this a “conspiracy theory” it is not (yet) and it is not irresponsible to call for greater inspection of what happened, etc. And my larger point is that people should not be shamed away from the inspection and calling public officials to action, because there is a body, and we haven’t gotten evidence of how it was done, its hard to even get prisons and the like to divulge statistics as to what normally happens inside them, etc.
Here’s as good a place to put this as anywhere.
Some years back I took a course given by an eminent professor, a pioneer in his field, someone universally renowned and well-liked. I won’t name him because I don’t want to dox myself, and anyway it’d just be a distraction. This professor was known to have attended some of those kooky futurism conferences that Epstein sponsored in his spare time. A couple of days ago, when the lawsuit documents were unsealed, I saw that one of Epstein’s victims named this professor as one of the many prominent men she’d been forced into sex with.
Obviously, I had no idea at the time I took his course. (In fact I think it was before the first charges against Epstein became public.) Looking back at my memories, I didn’t have the slightest inkling that anything was out of the ordinary about him. So now I’m wondering – am I a bad judge of character? Was I just blinded by his star power? Or was he really able to hide this side of himself from everyone around him? I can easily imagine the university knowing and covering it up, that’s what institutions do, and I’m particularly oblivious to social subtext (and was even more so back then). I still find it highly disturbing that I came this close to someone involved in this and didn’t have a clue.
It’s in one’s interest not to seem like a rapist.
And you don’t know how many others around you would do what he did, if they were given the chance.
I don’t think you can tell someone is a child rapist by looking at him, or taking a course with him, or even having a beer with him. I also think you can’t tell whether or not the accusation is true even now.
So now I’m wondering – am I a bad judge of character?
No. And while it is possible that this man was indeed a rapist, it’s also possible that this particular person making all the splashy accusations and doing her version of “Pick a famous name – yeah I was forced to have sex with him” is the Epstein-related counterpart of a case that just concluded in the UK, about Carl Beech – who, alias ‘Nick’, spun a web of fantasies about child abuse and even murder, got the police force to hold a very expensive investigation, was backed by at least one member of Parliament and had the ear of the media including a now-defunct online site Exaro which publicised his claims in reports that caught the attention of the police – who has now been jailed for eighteen years.
Remember the Kavanaugh case, where there were all kinds of accusations – including an opportunistic fake one – levelled at him as soon as Blasey Ford’s accusation became public. Remember how the ‘believe all victims’ emphasis means that Title IX investigations can and have been pure hearsay with no attempt to find out if the alleged assault even happened. Remember the “I was a child sex slave raped by Trump and Epstein” case that got shopped around to two different jurisdictions, with certain elements in the media salivating over how this would take Trump out, and yet even sympathetic reporters finally backed away from it and the courts wouldn’t even countenance it.
When there are big, lurid cases like Epstein and Savile and the Catholic sex abuse scandal in the news, there are also con artists and scammers and opportunists who come forward to see if they can make any pickings out of it, be that selling extravagant stories to the tabloids or putting in claims for compensation (as Beech started off doing with the Savile enquiry before branching out). Sometimes it’s down to mental illness and psychological problems – as with the case in my own town, where I was acquainted with one of the accused from school years ago, and where my first reaction was “if this was alleged physical abuse, I’d believe it possible, but not sexual”. Everyone in the country went nuts over it being OF COURSE TRUE sex abuse, the person was jailed, but thankfully soon afterwards the truth came out that the story was all a fantasy and backed up by a ‘witness’ who had a grudge against that person and saw this as an opportunity to get revenge on them.
Trust your own instincts. You could be wrong. Or you could be right about this person you interacted with, and some of the more lurid and public accusations being made are fantasies of a troubled mind at best, deliberate hoaxing at worst – that happens too.
I don’t want the accusations to be true, and that’s exactly why I have to believe they are.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, nothing else I can say about it will.
That’s kind of how I felt finding out about my best high school teacher.
This makes you exploitable: anybody can destroy the reputation in your eyes of a person you care about by making a false accusation.
I once had a really, really good professor in a class on business law (basically a law class for undergrads). He was probably one of the two or three best teachers I had in college. He went to prison for sexually abusing a metally-disabled kid[1].
In high school, there was one teacher who was widely acknowledged by basically everyone as the best teacher in the school–I certainly found her an excellent teacher. I recently heard a very credible story (secondhand, but from someone I don’t think would lie about it) that several girls who were her students had reported that she’d either slept with them or tried to talk them into bed[2].
What I take away from this: It’s absolutely possible for the same person to be a great teacher, brilliant scientist, capable businessman, wonderful doctor, etc., while also having terrible moral flaws. And I think sex is a particular area where this happens–where peoples’ strongest desires come into conflict with ethical behavior, and where there’s often a fair bit of gray area allowing people to do stuff that is genuinely horrible, but that they can convince themselves is okay in a fog of horniness and desire. (And stuff like age of consent really is full of gray–it’s not like there’s some clear moral principle that tells you that sex with a 15 year old is unspeakably evil, but sex with a 17 year old is perfectly okay. Different times and places have very widely varying ages of consent.)
[1] I don’t know for sure he did it–people have been railroaded for that sort of thing before–but he was a law school professor with resources and a sophisticated understanding of the legal system, being tried in the college town where he was employed, so I assume he had as good a shot as anyone was ever going to get at justice. Guilty is the way to bet, by a pretty good margin.
[2] I am less sure of this–there was no formal proceeding anywhere, and she was certainly not living in an environment in which being a lesbian would in any sense help her case. OTOH, my informant talked to several students who had complaints of this type, and she was in a position to hear these complaints. As far as I can tell, these accusations never went anywhere formal–probably some mix of the admin wanting to quiet down any scandal, and lack of evidence / people willing to go on record with the accusations.
We all know you’re talking about Marvin Minsky.
And I knew you all knew.
About 1% of people are sociopaths/psychopaths, so it’s not that surprising when somebody you know turns out to have done something bad.
As for Marvin Minsky in particular, how do you know he’s guilty?
I want to know who took him off suicide watch.
I would wager that Epstein and Epstein’s lawyers demanded that Epstein be taken off suicide watch, and that if they had not we would instead be dealing with conspiracies about how “they” were trying to torture Epstein into insanity to e.g. prevent him from defending himself by outing his co-conspirators in court.
“Suicide Watch” does not mean pressing the button that routs the cell’s video feed to the nice people at the local mental-health department. It is by all accounts an intrusive, degrading process that if implemented by the sort of people who choose employment as prison guards and to the sort of people as admired as Epstein, probably does approach the level of torture. By prolonged sleep deprivation at very least. As such, I don’t think it can be justified except as an extreme last resort and even then only for short periods.
Anyone who is for whatever reason not OK with prison inmates committing suicide to shorten their inevitable life sentences, needs to start by hiring a better class of prison guards. And they need to have started at least ten years ago, or else accept that suicides are going to happen, that this isn’t the result of conspiracy, and that it’s probably the best that can be hoped for in the short term.
I can’t think of many things I’ve seen/read that follow that pattern. Perhaps the end of Revelation Space? But we know that there is greater evil at that point. I think, perhaps, too much is contextual and for people/times?
I almost always end up rooting for certain characters at a midway point of the book/movie/series, and those reasons are not usually connected to the traditional tropes (for instance your Prospero example carries no weight with me), rather they are connected to other things mostly about me. I have no qualms about being narcissistic in what art I like, I like what I like. I think “Law Abiding Citizen” is a good movie that could have been the Pulp Fiction of its decade if they changed the ending to the one I wanted. I think The Persistence of Memory is the best painting of the 1900s. IDK if other people like melted clocks nearly as much as me.
I’ve seen a couple of anime characters where a main character has a motivation of “I want to make a lot of money,” and it’s portrayed very positively. Leorio from Hunter x Hunter wants to become a Hunter so he can make money, and when another character calls him on this, he points out that you can’t do all that idealistic stuff without money. He wants to become a doctor, and med school is expensive!
There’s also Uraraka from My Hero Academia. In the Sports Festival arc, she gets really fired up and motivated to win, because… if she can make her name here, she’ll become a famous hero, and she will make so much money. Because she comes from a poor family, and she wants to support them.
Not quite what you’re describing, since these characters are portrayed positively from the start, but it’s still kinda neat that they turned greed into a positive motivation.
There were a few NCIS episodes that featured a guy made out from the start to be a typical amoral political scumbag making his career by destroying others’ . . . and Gibbs was his next target. This guy knew all sorts of things and was going to take him down, but by the time he exited he was a heroic figure. Turns out he really was trying to see justice done as he had claimed from the start — he just had a slight change of perspective.
The Assassin’s Creed franchise is on sale on Steam with titles anywhere from 50% – 70% off. I have watched a couple of gameplay videos on the latest one, Odyssey, and it seems like it could be a good time. Is it representative of the series? Anybody care to recommend one or two of the games particular as standout(s)?
I will make the following anti-recommendation:
AC gameplay has little depth and writing that’s mediocre at best. It’s best characterized as an amusement park ride, except that it’s padded to hell with things that struggle to remain engaging. There are many games that are mechanically more interesting that share many of the systems AC has in it; the point of the series is the breadth and the environments it offers, rather than anything else.
Conrad can tell you why he thinks it’s good.
This was a long time ago now, but I remember being unpleasantly surprised by the simplistic movement system when I played one of the AC games. It looks like you’re pulling off all sorts of cool stunts, but the fluidity and apparent complexity is achieved by giving you very little actual control, and translating your ‘move in this direction’ input into whatever lower-level moves are required to do so. (I don’t know to what extent this applies to the later games, or even to the later stages of whichever one I played.)
Odyssey is representative (and the best example) of the newer, open world style of Assassin’s Creed games. For my money however, the best of the bunch is still 2.
No, Origins and Odyssey are the new massive open world, hit box combat style of AC games. All the ones before that were more scripted/mission based, de-emphasized combat, and the combat you did have was…I’m not sure what the term for it is. It’s like the Batman Arkham games where you time button presses to parry or break blocks and such.
Odyssey was my favorite game of 2018. Does it have the best combat? No. The best game mechanics? No, some of them are kind of incoherent with the auto-leveling feature. The story does not make any sense at all. Is it an accurate portrayal of ancient Greek combat or culture? No, there’s no phalanxes and there’s women all over the place instead of being confined to the gynaeceum. But it was, like Hoopy said, an amazing amusement park ride. I liked the characters, I liked the setting, I liked the nonsense story, I loved the ship combat. Between the game and the 6 DLC chapters I got almost 200 hours out of the game and smiled the whole way through.
I think Odyssey and Origins are the best AC games. After them I’d say Black Flag and Rogue but mainly because the pirate ship combat is so great. I also really liked Syndicate but no one else did.
The term you’re looking for is “quicktime”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_time_event
I disagree, they’re not QTEs. QTEs are things where a button or joystick move is flashed on the screen and you just have to press those or you fail. In AC and Batman you’re still in control of the combat, you just get telegraphed information like incoming attacks you can parry.
My reading of both these characters is very, very different to yours.
Exley is not subverting an evil-character stereotype by turning out to be a good guy, he’s subverting a good-guy stereotype – the straight-arrow lawman – by turning out to be a ruthless, selfish, dishonest bastard who’s happy to bend the truth provided he gets a medal out of it.
L.A. Confidential is a deliberately dark film where the point is that two characters who look superficially like different archetypes of stock heroes are really massively flawed; the “happy ending” isn’t quite as deliberately false-note as the one in the Beggar’s Opera, but it’s very much from the same stable.
And calling Prospero a good guy who wins in the end is massively oversimplifying. Prospero spends the play manipulating all the other characters for what he considers to be their own good. He’s arguably right, but ultimately he comes to the realisation that even so it’s not for him to do so, and choosing to step down off his lofty vantage point and live as a mere mortal, an equal to people who up until then he’s treated (for noble reasons) as pawns on a chessboard.
(I think the crux of the play is act V, scene i, where Ariel says that his heart would melt, “were I human”, and Prospero realises that in trying to be more than a human he’s at risk of becoming less than one; the subsequent “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves” speech, in which Prospero forsakes his art, is my favourite piece of writing of any kind ever).
Is he a “good guy”? He’s a more complicated character than that. You might as well ask whether a real person was one of the good guys – he has a variety of character traits, some admirable, some not.
Does he have an ambitious streak? Sort of – he was so disinterested in temporal power, prising certain volumes above his dukedom, that his brother was able to displace him without him noticing, but he certainly defaults into controlling other people for their own good without seeing why that might not be the right thing to do?
Does he win? Hard to say. Most of his manipulations have come off successfully by the end of the play. His daughter has been set up for a potentially-happy future, his throne reclaimed for his bloodline. He has exacted a partial vengeance on those who wronged him, although he stops sooner than he might have, and depending on which production you watch he may or may not have reconciled with them. Most importantly, he’s made a decision to abandon his lofty, lonely role as the outside manipulating events, and become a participant instead of a scriptwriter. But the cost of that is steep – he starts the play as a mighty magician capable of commanding the very elements, and ends it as an old, powerless man, whose every third thought will be his grave.
(Fun Tempest anecdote: the first time I saw The Tempest, Prospero was played by Ian MacDiarmid, better known as the Emperor from Star Wars. It lent a whole new significance to his threat to Caliban “I shall wrack thee with cramps”!)
FWIW, my favourite example of the trope you’re describing is probably Kipling’s short story “A second-rate woman” if you’re interested.
My interpretation of this seems to be that the optimal religion (good vs evil, evil could win if you don’t do your best, lots of regional and aethetic personalization) is Manichaean polytheism…
so the Dungeons and Dragons cosmology?
I found this blog post/article an interesting discussion of the online influences driving some of the mass-shootings. I don’t know enough to tell whether the article is correct or not, though it was R/T’d by Niall Fergusson, who I think of as a pretty serious thinker, so probably it’s not obvious fluff. (Though I don’t think Fergusson knows a lot more than I do about 8chan culture.)
This ties in with the stochastic terrorism idea I linked to earlier. And it seems to me that this is parallel to the discovery that Twitter bots (maybe Russian, maybe controlled by someone else) often coordinate to signal-boost “scissors-statement” type controversies on Twitter. The linked article claims that there’s a substantial online effort to encourage and cheerlead this kind of right-wing mass-shooting. I’ve read the claim (I think here on SSC) that there’s something similar for incel-related mass-shootings. I guess the Islamic terrorist lone-wolf mass-shootings are similar, just with different signal-boosting. And probably there’s comparable rhetoric toward antifa-aligned violence, though other than that wacko who tried to blow up the ICE office, it seems to mostly lead to people getting beaten up rather than shot.
This makes me wonder: are the same organized forces[1] pushing this online effort as are pushing the great effort to stir up outrage on social media generally? Is this an emergent social phenomenon where crazy people and sociopaths and some susceptible others get caught up into some self-sustaining chain of encouraging and cheerleading this sort of attack? (Many of the participants may simply be trolling, but clearly some take it very seriously.)
[1] The Russian influence effort was/is apparently very broadly targeted to stir up trouble everywhere. BLM, white nationalists, evangelical Christians, gay rights activists, animal rights activists[2]–they were happy to get *everyone* riled up and angry. There is zero chance that it’s only the Russian government doing this. In fact, we know there have been PR firms that carried out similar campaigns (notably the one in South Africa that was trying to stir up racial tensions to keep Zuma in power). You could imagine a dozen governments and a hundred political campaigns, NGOs, shadowy cabals of billionaires, PR companies, etc., finding some reason to stir up chaos in the US.
[2] Somewhere out there, there’s pretty-much got to be someone who is in all five categories at once.
Mostly, although the Ohio shooter was a self-declared left-wing antifascist.
Does anyone know his motive, though? While yes he was an extreme left-winger I find it very unlikely that his actions were politically motivated.
The last statement by the police seems to be from the 5th of August where they claim to not have found a motive yet, but the writings they did find don’t indicate a political motive.
I used to use 8chan pretty regularly until about 2 years ago. I have a few disconnected thoughts on the linked article.
– The fact that the author initially thought “check these incredible digits” referred to the body count tells me he doesn’t have more than a surface level understanding of chan culture.
– People on the chans were talking about “high scores” way before these recent sorts of shootings were happening. They were usually more associated incels or other types that had lost all hope.
– There’s been a slow boiling off effect going on for years now, where when someone on 8chan does something horrible some portion of the more reasonable users leave for good. At this point, all the voices for reason have left and the site has turned into an extremism amplifier.
So, what does “check these incredible digits” actually mean? (I, too, have only a surface-level understanding of chan culture.)
Not a chan reader, but from what I’ve soaked up, I think it’s this: posts are assigned numbers sequentially, which means the number of any given post is effectively random. Sometimes posters joke and/or compete about the luckiness of getting special-looking numbers, especially where digits at the end are doubly-repeated (‘dubs’), triply-repeated (‘trips’), or quadruply-repeated (‘quads’).
I think that poster is just joking about that post ends in ‘1414’ (‘incredible’ is overstating it, but whatever).
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dubs-guy-check-em
Oh, I see that they’ve now edited this explanation into the original article.
If the claim of incredibility was from a WN/WS/nazi type, “14” is representative of the “14 words” WN credo, so “1414” would be particularly meaningful to them.
We’ve all heard of the multiocular O, ꙮ. But I just learned that there are also monocular (Ꙩ) and binocular (Ꙫ) O’s in Unicode, along with the double monocular O (Ꙭ) double O (Ꚙ) and crossed O (Ꚛ).
All of these are used in Old Church Slavonic as a sort of rebus in related phrases (monocular O, for example, appears in a word meaning “eye”). Following on from this, I propose we revive the double monocular O for the phrase “gꙬgly eyes”.
So Old Church Slavonic was the world’s first eyebalphabet?
“We’ve been neglecting these letters all this time,” Tom said optimistically.
The double monocular changes everything.
It made me see things clearly.
Are those gs or bs in them eyes, boss
Professor Snape?
Snape does do a noble sacrifice, though.
It wasn’t redeeming though. He didn’t have anything to seek redemption for.
He told Voldemort about the prophesy and indirectly caused the deaths of the Potters. IMHO, all of his actions subsequent to that are an attempt to atone for or get revenge for Lily’s death.
In addition to that, he was just an honest to goodness Death Eater prior to his defection. It would be reasonable to guess that he might have killed people, or at least done some horrible things that he needed to atone for.
I still think Snape is an example of the kind of thing Atlas was talking about. Snape did his conversion years before and off camera. From the time you were introduced to him in the books you thought he was bad but he was really good. He wasn’t bad the whole time and then converted with a heroic redemptive sacrifice at the end.
I think JKR made it fairly clear that Snape was still a shit person, and that his mistreatment of Gryffindors was because of actual dislike, and that he actually hated Harry, and that his only redemptive quality was love for Lilly/guilt over her death. He wasn’t a good guy, he was a bad person whose better nature needed an amplifying boost to get him to preform good acts.
Christina Kirchner (although she is the vice-president) won the first round of elections in Argentina (primaries). Markets have fallen down in Argentina as a result.
Does anybody know how much Macri is to blame for the current state of the Argentinian economy? My basic take was that, when he became president, Argentina was running at a severe deficit, lots of government control, lots of subsidies to energy and a terrible corruption that meant no infrastructure could be built. AFAIU, he cut a lot of the spending, but the deficit was still so big that he had to keep printing money, because cutting even more would be catastrophic. The Argentinians I know hate him, because the cuts have really empoverished them. But they also happen to be very skeptical of the EU – Mercosur FTA, which makes me doubt their economic intuitions (and Kirchner’s candidate is also skeptical of the FTA).
It was an attempt at a “soft landing” instead of a shock – and it clearly failed. Although making even more severe cuts could have been even more catastrophic.
My take is that he was bad – but Kirchner would be even worse.
Argentina was like a person living with huge credit card debts, paying lots of interest and having to take loans to make ends meet. Resolving that is always going to be more painful in the short term than trying to drag the situation out until the inevitable crisis that is going to be far worse.
The 2018 shock resulted in part from letting the peso float again, which allows the peso to reflect the actual economic strength and thereby helps fix the trade (im)balance. Macri settled the debtors claims that remained from the economic crisis, giving Argentina access to outside capital again. He raised Argentina 22 places on the corruption perception index. He reduced the tariffs on agricultural products, encouraging exports, but a huge drought pretty much negated this. Can’t blame Macri for a natural disaster.
The increasing interest rates in the US have resulted in quite a few US investors pulling out of South America (not just Argentina). Again, not something under Macri’s control.
So my tentative verdict is that Macri was screwed over by circumstances outside of his control more than he is to blame for bad policies. Perhaps his timing for certain policies was poor, but that is easy to say in hindsight.
So, basically, he didn’t do that bad.
It seemed to me that Macri would only be able to bring improvements if he was a two term president – because it would take at least two terms to see any improvements.
It’s a pity if Argentina goes back to its ways. Although who would be stupid enough to buy Kirchner’s bonds?
Policies that result in short term pain can be offset with (worldwide or regional) economic growth or other positive influences that are not under the politician’s control.
An alternative is that the politician falsely blames outside influences, which can work as well.
IMO, South America could do with a bit more Calvinist culture, with more focus on hard work, discipline and frugality.
Vox article on Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warrens’ tweets w.r.t. Ferguson.
I tend to have a somewhat negative view of Vox, as having a strong enough ideological position that it often seems to compromise their honesty or at least objectivity. So I think it’s important to point out times when they do the opposite. This wasn’t the story that supported their preferred policy goals, but they told the truth on it anyway. I think I need to revise my opinion of them upward somewhat.
I’d give it one of those “Not the Literal Worst” ribbons: the line between falsely accusing someone of murder and not falsely accusing someone of murder really isn’t all that fine.
At least they don’t end up going with “fake but accurate”, even if they do try it out.
Being clear about the record when it contradicts the narrative they’d like to tell, and also pointing out that two of their own were wrong about it, seems pretty solid to me. Are there other liberal-leaning media outlets that have done as well on this issue?
The WaPo did, that’s where I read about it. I agree, this seems like kind of a big deal. Are there righty news sites that do this when Trump tweets something false? It seems like a lot of lefty sites don’t bother anymore.