Open Thread 137.25

This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread, but I’m making it visible today so I can make announcements:

1. There’s a new effective altruism survey up by Peter Hurford and Rethink Charity. If you consider yourself interested in or affiliated with EA, please take a look.

2. Sorry I’ve been spamming you all with meetup announcements. I plan to continue to do this for another two weeks or so. Next up are Ann Arbor, Chicago, Austin, Portland, and Seattle. Organizers in these cities, please be prepared for 50 to 100 or more people (if you’re not, let me know and we’ll figure something out). Some groups have had good luck starting at a public place and then having a house/apartment to go to when the public place is closing and the people have thinned out a little. Also please remember to bring a clipboard, paper, and a pen so people interested in future meetups can sign up for a mailing list.

3. Related: the Seoul, South Korea meetup has changed times to Saturday, September 28, 12:30 PM.

4. New advertisement up for the Charter Cities Institute, which is working with developing countries to create special economic zones encouraging innovation and good governance.

5. Comments of the week: CPlusPlusDeveloper explains the case for skepticism in the War on Opiates (I don’t know enough to endorse or deny, but I’m glad to see it put so lucidly). And Theodidactus and AshLael have worked in politics and give insider impressions of how money in politics works (or doesn’t work).

6. SSC-adjacent culture war subreddit r/TheMotte now has its own podcast, The Bailey. Latest episode is on issues surrounding discussing politics at work, with nods to some new Google policy; download it here.

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1,805 Responses to Open Thread 137.25

  1. erenold says:

    After one of the most CW OTs in recent times, I propose a predictions contest! Seems to me we have a higher number than usual of CW topics that are expressly falsifiable in nature and that it would be a good chance to test the robustness of our respective worldviews.

    You can make predictions and explain your reasoning (not more than two lines per prediction, if possible). I also request that there be no normative discussion, if possible, to prevent derail.

    Please input your predictions on any or all of the following events in percentage terms. All predictions are independent of each other. A null response on the basis that premises of the question are rejected, with a two-line explanation, is also permitted.

    President Donald Trump is impeached by the House of Representatives: [ ]%
    President Donald Trump is convicted by the Senate: [ ]%
    President Donald Trump is re-elected in 2020 and takes office in 2021: [ ]%
    [Person of your choice] wins the Democratic primary and the general election respectively: [ ]% and [ ]% respectively
    A “No Deal” Brexit (defined as a departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union without any agreed terms of withdrawal in place) takes place on Oct 31: [ ]%
    The United Kingdom departs from the European Union on Oct 31 with any deal (however transitional or vague its provisions): [ ]%
    The United Kingdom has not left the European Union by October and December 31 respectively: [ ]% and [ ]%
    Boris Johnson continues to be Prime Minister after the next election (whensoever it shall take place): [ ]%
    Jeremy Corbyn is the next Prime Minister after the next election (whensoever it shall take place): [ ]%
    There will be a legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election: [ ]%
    There will be no legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election, but at least one Iranian military or paramilitary personnel will be deliberately and openly killed by US military or paramilitary personnel (whether by missile strike, air attack, direct action operation etc): [ ]%
    The United States will be in a technical recession before the next US election: [ ]%
    Lastly, and for control purposes: Lizard persons of extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial origin invade Earth prior to the next US election : [ ]%.

    Please feel free to respond to this thread by proposing additional items on which to make predictions as well – the CWier, the better!

    • broblawsky says:

      Here’s mine:
      President Donald Trump is impeached by the House of Representatives: 75%
      – Pelosi wouldn’t be doing this if she wasn’t pretty confident of getting this vote through the House.
      President Donald Trump is convicted by the Senate: 10%
      – 10% is my “it’s possible, but things would have to change radically” probability. It’s not inconceivable that Democrats could get nearly 20 Republicans to sign on for removing Trump, but it’d require something like a Trump-Putin transcript to get released where Trump openly asks Putin for support in return for lifting sanctions or not acting against Iran.
      President Donald Trump is re-elected in 2020 and takes office in 2021: 30%
      – PredictIt puts this at ~40%; I think it’ll be a bit worse because I expect the economy to slow further next year, possibly to the extent of an actual recession, which will weigh substantially on Trump’s campaign.
      Elizabeth Warren wins the Democratic primary and the general election respectively: 60% and 70% respectively
      – Warren seems to be the best compromise candidate. I think she has a substantially better chance against Trump than Biden or Sanders do; my probability of her winning the G.E. is preconditioned on her winning the primary.
      A “No Deal” Brexit (defined as a departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union without any agreed terms of withdrawal in place) takes place on Oct 31: 50%
      – I actually have no idea what’s going to happen. 50% is me hedging my bets, admitting that I don’t know what’s going to happen.
      The United Kingdom departs from the European Union on Oct 31 with any deal (however transitional or vague its provisions): [ ]%
      The United Kingdom has not left the European Union by October and December 31 respectively: 50% and 40%
      – Again, mostly just not having any idea. There’s enough Labor support for some kind of Brexit that I’m willing to say it’s slightly more likely that a negotiated Brexit will occur.
      Boris Johnson continues to be Prime Minister after the next election (whensoever it shall take place): 50%
      Jeremy Corbyn is the next Prime Minister after the next election (whensoever it shall take place): 25%
      There will be a legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election: 30%
      There will be no legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election, but at least one Iranian military or paramilitary personnel will be deliberately and openly killed by US military or paramilitary personnel (whether by missile strike, air attack, direct action operation etc): 65%
      The United States will be in a technical recession before the next US election: 70%
      Lastly, and for control purposes: Lizard persons of extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial origin invade Earth prior to the next US election : 0%.

      • albatross11 says:

        When is the last time we declared a war? Maybe Iran will formally declare war on us, but we won’t declare war on them even if we’ve just nuked Tehran.

        • erenold says:

          Yes, the fact that America rarely declares a legal state of war is a very good point which I ought to have taken into account. On the basis that a good forecasting exercise ought to be precise in its drafting to avoid quibbling on the details, I had wanted to avoid any technical dispute as to whether a state of military conflict was in effect, but I’ve only just realised that “legal state of war” is obviously inadequate for this purpose because it undercounts actions like the GWOT and even Vietnam for solely procedural reasons. Silly.

        • John Schilling says:

          For all practical and legal purposes, we’ve replaced “Declaration of War” with “Authorization for Use of Military Force”. If Congress unlocks the War Powers Act against Iran, I’d assume that satisfies the requirement here.

        • broblawsky says:

          That’s fair; I was considering “Trump extends the AUMF to cover Iran by fiat” as a declaration of war.

      • erenold says:

        I agree with almost all of these but was quite surprised re: the possibility of Iranian military/paramilitary personnel being killed openly by US forces at almost 2 in 3. Can I ask why?

        For my own part, as a matter of forecasting principle, I think one should generally assume that there is a strong bias to the status quo. No Iranian personnel have been killed openly by US forces in recent times notwithstanding their actions against merchant shipping and their actions in Iraq/Yemen etc. (The ‘openly’ caveat is meant to exclude things like the Stuxnet attack and the not insubstantial possibility that the US played a larger role than reported in incidents like this). So I think the default presumption ought to be that the probability of such an event taking place before November 2020 should be quite low – I would put it perhaps at 20% at most. Then we also have to take into account that Trump has several times now stepped back (my neutral term) at the moment of decisive action even under fairly strong provocation and appears to have a strong prior against actual military action, so perhaps 15% would be closer to the mark.

        • cassander says:

          I agree with almost all of these but was quite surprised re: the possibility of Iranian military/paramilitary personnel being killed openly by US forces at almost 2 in 3. Can I ask why?

          they’re currently being killed fairly openly by saudi arabia, for one.

          • erenold says:

            Right, but my query had specified “openly, by US forces”. I think such an act would be fairly unprecedented escalation.

          • cassander says:

            @erenold

            Once the shooting starts there’s always a reasonable chance of escalation, especially if (as is likely) the Saudis prove less competent than we like. While I think 2/3 is a bit high, the odds of it happening are a lot better than they were a month ago.

          • erenold says:

            Yeah, fair enough. I do wonder if there is sufficient American public appetite for open armed intervention on Saudi Arabia’s behalf, though.

        • broblawsky says:

          I don’t think he has a strong prior against military action; I think he just doesn’t want to start a war against Iran. That doesn’t mean he won’t get persuaded into a drone strike in either Syria, Yemen, or against Iran itself that kills Iranians.

          • Gerry Quinn says:

            A war against Iran would be pretty stupid. Probably all you’d do is unite the progressives and the mullahs against you. It would be good for Iranian social cohesion, but otherwise I can think of few benefits for anyone.

            Strikes against Iran to deter meddling are conceivable. Trump seems to prefer trade wars to shooting wars, though. He’s not wrong, in my opinion. When you think about it… which type more upsets our thought leaders in the Media, and in the Great and the Good (if there is now considered to be any distinction)? And why?

    • bullseye says:

      Things have gotten so weird that for most of these I have no idea.

      There will be a legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election: 1%. This is not a thing we do anymore. Even Vietnam was not legally declared.

      Lizard persons of extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial origin invade Earth prior to the next US election: Less than 1%. They have already taken over, obviously.

      I did not use contractions in this post because I accidentally set my keyboard to German and I cannot figure out how to type an apostrophe.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        Heh, there is no apostrophe on my Czech keyboard.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Noriega’s Panama did declare war on the United States; that may be the last declared war the US was involved in. But I don’t think the US reciprocated the declaration.

      • Lambert says:

        *kezboard

        Using QWERTY at home and QWERTZ at work was a nightmare.
        As was the game of guessing whether 10,000 was ten thousand or ten to 5 significant figures.

        • bullseye says:

          Fixed now. Why in the world did they switch Y and Z? I guess Germans use Z more and we use Y more, but surely that would also apply to some other pairs of letters.

          • Tuna-Fish says:

            In German, TZ is a reasonably common sequence.

            In old mechanical typewriters, writing TZ quickly with qwerty layout can very easily cause a jam. Moving Z to the other hand so it strikes from the right fixed this, and Y is a letter that is much more common in English than in German, so it was sacrificed.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      President Donald Trump is impeached by the House of Representatives: [50]%
      :- Could go either way.

      President Donald Trump is convicted by the Senate: [ ]%
      :- 5%. The Republican leadership have completely given up on meta-level principles; the only reason they would even contemplating impeaching Trump is if they thought that would help them win an election, and I can’t see how it would.

      President Donald Trump is re-elected in 2020 and takes office in 2021: [60]%
      :-Factors in favour:
      The thermostatic nature of American presidential elections (the presidency has only changed party twice in 4 years once since 1900); the weakness of the Democratic frontrunners (Biden is uncharismatic; Warren looks to me to be playing too much to her core vote); the current strength of the economy.
      Factors against:
      Trump’s personal unpopularity; signs that that economic strength may possibly not last.
      [Person of your choice] wins the Democratic primary and the general election respectively: [ ]% and [ ]% respectively
      A “No Deal” Brexit (defined as a departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union without any agreed terms of withdrawal in place) takes place on Oct 31: [ 60]%
      :-I think Johnson will probably wriggle around or simply ignore the Benn act. But if that happens, I reckon there’s a 15% chance that it’s successfully challenged in court and subsequently “reversed”, and I have no idea what would follow.

      The United Kingdom departs from the European Union on Oct 31 with any deal (however transitional or vague its provisions): [10 ]%
      I don’t see much chance of a deal being agreed.

      The United Kingdom has not left the European Union by October and December 31 respectively: [30]% and [25]%
      I think the odds of departure in that period are slim, and they’re offset by a chance of declaring departure in October and having the courts step in.

      Boris Johnson continues to be Prime Minister after the next election (whensoever it shall take place): [65 ]%
      I think it will be soon, and he’s well ahead in the polls, but Labour surged shortly before the last election.

      Jeremy Corbyn is the next Prime Minister after the next election (whensoever it shall take place): [30 ]%
      :- See above.

      There will be a legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election: [15]%
      :- I think both sides will want to avoid this.

      There will be no legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election, but at least one Iranian military or paramilitary personnel will be deliberately and openly killed by US military or paramilitary personnel (whether by missile strike, air attack, direct action operation etc): [ 40]%
      :- The naval tensions make this a possibility, I think.

      The United States will be in a technical recession before the next US election: [25]%
      :-I’m told the yield curve inverting sometimes implies this.

      Lastly, and for control purposes: Lizard persons of extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial origin invade Earth prior to the next US election : [100]%.
      :- They’re just landing on my back lawn.

    • Byrel Mitchell says:

      President Donald Trump is impeached by the House of Representatives: 80%
      – Pretty sure dems have to votes for this. I don’t think voting in favor of impeachment is going to hurt a red state Dem’s odds of reelection: Trump is highly polarizing.

      President Donald Trump is convicted by the Senate: 5%
      – Short of blatant extreme misconduct, Trumpt is too much a symbol of the culture war for Republicans to impeach him and grant a huge symbolic victory to the other side. 5% is about how likely I think it is for blatant extreme misconduct to come to light.

      President Donald Trump is re-elected in 2020 and takes office in 2021: 20%
      – Odds seem against it, but… I’m the most epistemically uncertain about this estimate (aside from the control question).

      There will be a legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election: 5%
      – We don’t do legally declared states of war against non-peer states.

      There will be no legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election, but at least one Iranian military or paramilitary personnel will be deliberately and openly killed by US military or paramilitary personnel (whether by missile strike, air attack, direct action operation etc): 80%
      -But we do do air strikes and special forces raids and whatnot all the time vs percieved nonpeer threats. Iran is clearly in that category, and reasonably high profile at the moment.

      The United States will be in a technical recession before the next US election: 20%
      – I wonder what the base rate on this is. I’m answering blind, but I’m guessing it’s around 20% per year, and I don’t see current trends impacting this much off of base rate.

      Lastly, and for control purposes: Lizard persons of extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial origin invade Earth prior to the next US election : 0.01%.
      – This would be higher (maybe up to 0.2% or so) if it didn’t specify lizard-people. That seems much less likely than ET invasions in general.

      I skipped the UK and democratic questions because I’m not following the relevant news at all.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I don’t have percentages in mind, but

      Trump is forced out of the presidency by illness or death.

      Pence becomes president.

      By the end of 2020, there’s a chance of antifa killing someone, whether by accident or because its become a less careful sub-culture.

      • DinoNerd says:

        *sigh* I’m frankly appalled that my supposed political allies want to impeach Trump, given the existence and proclivities of Pence. My sister says it’s simple – they are basically all on the side of the elites, and don’t care what kind of side show they give us, whether it’s enforcement of maximally intolerant Christian norms(*), enforcement of maximally woke norms, a self-contradicting bully that tweets a lot, or a nice patriotic war.

    • JayT says:

      President Donald Trump is impeached by the House of Representatives: [ 90]%
      President Donald Trump is convicted by the Senate: [10 ]%
      President Donald Trump is re-elected in 2020 and takes office in 2021: [ 35]%
      [Person of your choice] wins the Democratic primary and the general election respectively: [ 1]% and [65 ]% respectively
      A “No Deal” Brexit (defined as a departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union without any agreed terms of withdrawal in place) takes place on Oct 31: [15 ]%
      The United Kingdom departs from the European Union on Oct 31 with any deal (however transitional or vague its provisions): [ 20]%
      The United Kingdom has not left the European Union by October and December 31 respectively: [20 ]% and [20 ]%
      Boris Johnson continues to be Prime Minister after the next election (whensoever it shall take place): [ NA]%
      Jeremy Corbyn is the next Prime Minister after the next election (whensoever it shall take place): [NA ]%
      There will be a legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election: [ >1]%
      There will be no legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election, but at least one Iranian military or paramilitary personnel will be deliberately and openly killed by US military or paramilitary personnel (whether by missile strike, air attack, direct action operation etc): [5 ]%
      The United States will be in a technical recession before the next US election: [25 ]%
      Lastly, and for control purposes: Lizard persons of extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial origin invade Earth prior to the next US election : [They’re already here, obviously ]%.

    • honoredb says:

      President Donald Trump is impeached by the House of Representatives: 80%
      President Donald Trump is convicted by the Senate: 10%
      President Donald Trump is re-elected in 2020 and takes office in 2021: 40%
      Warren wins the Democratic primary and the general election respectively: 50% * 60% = 30%
      A “No Deal” Brexit (defined as a departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union without any agreed terms of withdrawal in place) takes place on Oct 31: 20%
      The United Kingdom departs from the European Union on Oct 31 with any deal (however transitional or vague its provisions): 50%
      The United Kingdom has not left the European Union by October and December 31 respectively: 30% and 20%
      Boris Johnson continues to be Prime Minister after the next election (whensoever it shall take place): 15%
      Jeremy Corbyn is the next Prime Minister after the next election (whensoever it shall take place): 30%
      There will be a legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election: 10%
      There will be no legally-declared state of war between the United States and Iran before the next US election, but at least one Iranian military or paramilitary personnel will be deliberately and openly killed by US military or paramilitary personnel (whether by missile strike, air attack, direct action operation etc): 40%
      The United States will be in a technical recession before the next US election: 40%
      Lastly, and for control purposes: Lizard persons of extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial origin invade Earth prior to the next US election : 0.000001%.

  2. albatross11 says:

    I thought this tweet captured a lot of my reaction to the current Trump scandal. But it’s more general. For both ideological and financial/clickbait reasons, every news source every day has an outrage story centered on Trump. Most of these are for pretty trivial/dumb outrages–even when the Trump administration is doing some awful stuff, that stuff is usually not the outrage story. Many of those stories are amping up the outrage over stuff that every president does (let’s all be shocked that Trump is friendly with dictators–*that*’s never happened before), or over stuff that any Republican president would have done.

    The result of all that is that when Trump does really bad things (which he does), the news is either too busy chasing some offensive tweets down a rathole to report on it, or has no way to signal to its readers that unlike the last 20 Trump outrage stories, this one is legit.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      Yes.

    • broblawsky says:

      Trump was doing something genuinely awful on at least a weekly basis back when he was just Candidate Trump, and his supporters still mostly ignored it. Whether it was bragging about getting away with sexual assault, mocking the disabled, or asking for the electoral assistance of foreign intelligence agencies, his supporters continued to either ignore or actively promote his behavior. How is this different?

      • albatross11 says:

        Saying offensive things is very different from doing awful things with your power.

        As best I can tell, George W Bush is a pretty good man, but he presided over programs in which we tortured helpless captives, some of whom we kidnapped off the streets of foreign cities in friendly countries. He probably hasn’t said anything as bad as what Trump saus every day since he was a college kid, but that doesn’t change how I morally evaluate the difference between someone who’s a big asshole on Twitter and someone who’s a war criminal.

        Aside from a general desire for the world to be full of nice people, I don’t actually care that much whether politicians are good human beings. It’s much more important to know what they’re doing and what they’ve done with the power we’ve granted them. I’d like my news sources to spend a lot less time telling me what an outrageous thing Trump has recently said on Twitter, and instead focusing on what he’s doing and done with his power. This isn’t even hard–since coming to power, Trump has done a lot of bad things of real substance. But so, so much of the coverage is still clickbait outrage stuff for offensive tweets.

        • broblawsky says:

          Saying offensive things is very different from doing awful things with your power.

          That’s not the point I’m trying to make. What I’m saying is that Trump did a bunch of awful things within the limited power he had as a candidate, and it didn’t stop him from getting close to a majority of the popular vote and an adequate majority of the Electoral College. That was before the media was fully saturated with “Orange Man Bad” stories, too, as they had Hilary to bash. Oversaturation isn’t the problem; polarization is the problem.

          • onyomi says:

            But then wouldn’t Trump have failed to win the nomination? That is, he didn’t start acting like Trump only after there were no other Republicans to chose from.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        In addition to what albatross11 rightly says, it is obvious that Trump´s hardcore supporters will continue to support him no matter what. Democrats need to appeal not to them, but to the people who voted for Trump as a lesser of two evils.

        • blipnickels says:

          Democrats need to appeal not to them, but to the people who voted for Trump as a lesser of two evils.

          I think this comment is exactly right but I see no evidence that the Democrats will do this. In fact, if the Democrats do try this, I don’t think they’re even capable of it.

          The only conservative I’ve seen voice a “lesser of two evils” opinion is Rod Drehrer, whose current stance on Trump is literally “Vote For The Crook, It’s Important”. It should not be difficult to get the Christian Right, who’s held their nose for Trump since day one, to flip on him, but I can’t see the Democrats understanding Drehrer’s position, much less be able to appeal to him.

          The Democrats might be hoping there’s a large contingent of “blue-ish” Republicans who will flip to them but I think that greatly underestimates how far partisanship has infected both parties. To win impeachment, the Democrats need to flip Drehrer or someone like him and I don’t see any such recognition or ability.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            The electorial bid of the D contingent is mostly “Lets get people off the damn couch”. That is, they dont need to appeal to anyone who voted Trump, as long as they can convert some non-voters to D. This is a MUCH larger target group than wavering republicans.

            This is likely also why this is the hill Pelosi launched impeachment proceedings on. The prospect of various foreign intelligence orgs being bullied into ginning up fake democrat scandals is a dire, dire threat to that strategy, because it relies on killing both-siderism. That is, the democrats absolutely need to persuade the american people that the democrats are more ethical than the republicans.

            Which is hard to do if nation state level resources is making up shit about you.

            It also means Biden is never, ever going to get the nomination. He is far too conciliatory towards the republican party.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @Thomas Jorgensen

            The electorial bid of the D contingent is mostly “Lets get people off the damn couch”. That is, they dont need to appeal to anyone who voted Trump, as long as they can convert some non-voters to D.

            That is technically true, but as I am sure you know, in the US presidential elections voting system is of such a nature that non-voters are mostly people in deep red or deep blue states, whose voting behavior does not matter for purposes of presidential elections. It does matter for congressional elections, but the US is clearly similar to my country in that there is a substantial group of people who vote only in what is considered the “main” elections and don’t bother to show up for less hyped stuff.

            So, strategy of relying only on non-voters who live in contested states and who can be persuaded to vote for Democrats is rather hazardous one. Also there is likely nontrivial overlap between what would those people found appealing and what would “Trump as a lesser evil” voters from last elections found appealing.

          • blipnickels says:

            @Thomas Jorgensen

            That’s an interesting strategy, and since 2018 looks like it had above average voter turnout and was a Democratic win, it makes sense.

            Where would I go to see evidence of this mobilizing non-voters? I’m presuming there’s no ad buys, and all the news media I’m familiar is already densely partisan.

            Also, is the impeachment basically political then? You don’t need to flip the Republican base to win the presidency but you do need it to get the Republican Senate to impeach. Therefore, the Democratic’s are hoping not to successfully impeach Trump but to get non-voters engaged to win in 2020?

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            I think (I cant read minds) the point of the impeachment is to document as much of Trumps shit as they can, get it in front of the public, and then label the GOP the party of Treason when they acquit anyway. Also, note that voter participation in the US is so very low that there is no such thing as a safe seat if the couch potatoes leave the couch in any major way.

          • bullseye says:

            Non-voters are everywhere, include contested states. If everyone who didn’t vote had voted for me instead, I would have defeated both Trump and Clinton.

            https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/5oegsd/if_did_not_vote_was_a_candidate_in_2016_an/

      • Gerry Quinn says:

        All the things you refer to are highly defensible, if you listen to what he says with some sympathy:

        “bragging about getting away with sexual assault”
        “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p***y”
        – his boasted assaults refer to kisses. The rest is theory, though not entirely unbelievable.

        “mocking the disabled”
        He waggled his arms miming the confusion of a reporter who attacked him. By all accounts he had done the same previously with regard to individuals without any disability.

        “asking for the electoral assistance of foreign intelligence agencies”
        “Hey Russia, maybe you can find Hilary’s emails because she sure can’t” (paraphrase, but that was basically it). This accusation is laughable – I can’t understand how anyone could seriously understand it as anything but a joke, and I personally would be embarrassed to use such an accusation as a partisan attack, but it seems a lot of Democrats aren’t.

        A lot of us dislike Trump somewhat less than we dislike such blatant and ubiquitous propaganda.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      I honestly don’t know what to think about the Ukraine business. I can see the view of never-Trumpers like French who say the quid-pro-quo was so obvious it didn’t have to be stated. But I also think that some aspect of what the Bidens were up to smells to high heaven, even if it’s just the business of Hunter taking a [ETA: highly lucrative] job for which he had no particular background except being the son of the Vice President.

      If a President everybody loved thought that situation should be looked into, and threw a little weight around to make it happen, I think a lot of people up in arms now would view it as a measured and responsible action.

      One might have hoped he would wait until Warren had washed Biden out of the race, as seems more likely every day. And one might wish he had left it in Barr’s hands and not brought Giuliani into the picture. But you don’t always have a choice about when the iron is hot for extracting things from foreign powers, and it’s far from the first time that a President has made use of a trusted but unappointed intermediary.

      If the worst possible construction of Trump’s actions is in fact the right one, the tweet albatross11 cites is right on the money. I read about all the groundwork that seems to have been laid for this — Pelosi casting impeachment as committee work rather than going straight to a House vote, the recent change to the rules for whistleblowers to admit hearsay (!) — and I think this would seem like much larger beer if they hadn’t spent two years foaming at the mouth.

      • broblawsky says:

        But I also think that some aspect of what the Bidens were up to smells to high heaven, even if it’s just the business of Hunter taking a [ETA: highly lucrative] job for which he had no particular background except being the son of the Vice President.

        I’m just going to keep this permanently stickied whenever anyone says anything like this in one of these threads, because I suspect a lot of people here have media bubbles that will exclude it:

        Former Ukraine prosecutor says he saw no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden

        • Controls Freak says:

          I can’t imagine how someone could have a media bubble that prevents that from getting in. It’s everywhere. In other news, “The guy who got the job after Biden forced the other guy out says that Biden’s a cool dude,” is pretty easily dismissed by folks who are motivated to think Biden did something wrong.

          …does your media bubble let you see articles like this? (There are trivial reasons why someone motivated to think Biden did nothing wrong would discount this… but have you even seen it?)

          • Protagoras says:

            The article cites no evidence of wrongdoing, and quotes someone who says he has no evidence of wrongdoing but thinks the matter deserves to be investigated. I’m not going to dispute that the quoted figure probably has a point, that it’s the sort of thing that deserves careful scrutiny, but exactly how outraged do you think people should be on the basis of that report? What does it add that wasn’t already part of the conversation?

          • Controls Freak says:

            Were you replying to me or broblawsky? Did you have the same immediate skepticism for the article broblawsky linked? More importantly, were you aware of both/neither/one of the articles before we linked them?

          • broblawsky says:

            @Controls Freak Yes, I read that one the day it came out. Both that article and the one I posted agree: there’s no evidence anyone named Biden did anything wrong.

          • Controls Freak says:

            Clarify what you mean a little. I see at least four possible points in evidence-space that you could be talking about. (1) There is no evidence whatsoever, (2) There is not sufficient evidence to predicate an investigation, (3) There is not sufficient evidence to sustain an indictment, or (4) There is not sufficient evidence to sustain a conviction.

      • brad says:

        If a President everybody loved thought that situation should be looked into, and threw a little weight around to make it happen, I think a lot of people up in arms now would view it as a measured and responsible action.

        It’s hard to know for sure, but I think I would have thought it was at least petty if Bill Clinton circa 1996 was personally invested in investigating the possibility that Dan Quayle’s son had traded on his father’s position to make money years earlier.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        the business of Hunter taking a [ETA: highly lucrative] job for which he had no particular background except being the son of the Vice President

        It is bullshit, but it is legal. The families of prominent politicians get shitloads of money for no other reason than being related to prominent politicians.

        I would like it to end, but I do not see a legal route to end it. Hunter is an adult and cannot be ordered around by his dad.

  3. BBA says:

    There’s no place for sentiment in business, and yet I’m always a bit sad when a very old company shuts down, especially one that pioneered its field. Such was the case for A&P (1859-2015), the original supermarket and my neighborhood grocery store as a kid. There are of course newer stores with better selections and lower prices, not to mention that many of the old A&P locations were sold to competitors in bankruptcy and are still open under different names, but I still feel like we’ve lost something, you know?

    So this past week saw the sudden closure of Thomas Cook, a British travel agency founded in 1841, barely a decade after the first railroad opened and made a tourism industry possible. Apparently they specialized in package tours to beach resorts, and couldn’t make the adjustment to the travel habits of younger generations who prefer urban vacations and are in the habit of booking flights and hotels a la carte. Also, the company made the baffling decision to expand its brick-and-mortar storefront operations in the face of increased competition from the internet. So it’s not surprising that they’re gone, a little surprising that it took this long, but a connection between today’s travelers and those of 150 years ago has just gone away overnight.

    • m.alex.matt says:

      I feel like 1841 is rather young for British business. Sure, probably the great majority of British businesses these days are much younger than that, but the truly venerable would see 1841 as a brisk middle age, rather than the obscure beginnings of their life.

      They made some bad decisions and they paid the price. Oh well.

    • Lambert says:

      And by sudden, they mean some folks out there are working really hard right now to repatriate hundreds of stranded brits on package holidays that just collapsed.
      Though I suppose you get the ‘beauty contest’ situation. As soon as people are worried the firm is a bit shaky and they’ll get stranded, it pushes things from shaky to a downright nosedive. You don’t want to take a chance on your hotel demanding thousands of pounds of extra money, for example.

    • albatross11 says:

      It’s striking how often major players in an industry miss the boat on changes and die off as a result. I kind-of wonder how much longer AAA will be around–their roadside assistance is nice (but many car manufacturers offer roadside assistance for N years with a new car), but their travel agent and trip-tix (triptych?) benefits are basically useless in the modern world. (Would you rather have a hand-marked map of your trip with planned construction marked, or just turn on Waze so you’ll get warned about everything?)

      • ana53294 says:

        In Spain, we have an automobile club that I guess is similar, and they are far from dying. Other than roadside assistance, they help find insurance to many people who are still not good with the internet. They also help fight fines and advocate for drivers. It’s not that expensive, and it’s a service that’s worth it for many people.

        They recently helped my mom with the paperwork to import a second hand car from Germany, for example. It’s not as easy as it may seem to handle everything.

      • LesHapablap says:

        I remember that for some DMV tasks you could go to AAA instead and save a ton of time. They’d take the paperwork for you and file it on your behalf, and you’d be done in five minutes instead of an hour. Don’t know if that is still the case.

        • quanta413 says:

          Still a thing. It’s a godsend. Used it last month.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            I remember that for some DMV tasks you could go to AAA instead and save a ton of time.

            I went to AAA to renew my driver’s license a few months ago and it was totally packed. I realized I forgot something so I did it another day, this time at the DMV. Also packed, but not any worse than AAA. It seems so many people have heard of the AAA option that it isn’t faster anymore.

          • quanta413 says:

            It depends where you are I imagine. Where I am, it is way faster to go to AAA. The line is less than 5 minutes. The DMV line is on the order of an hour.

      • Randy M says:

        AAA also offers auto insurance, and the services LesHapablap mentions, although hopefully the DMV itself will modernize and reduce the need to come into the office.

      • John Schilling says:

        It’s striking how often major players in an industry miss the boat on changes and die off as a result.

        See also Sears, Roebuck and Company, the corporation that invented and for a century utterly dominated the business of “Advertise a huge inventory of every possible consumer good, delivered by mail to the customers’ home with a minimum of fuss”.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Sears lasted a long time and re-invented itself a few times. That it finally encountered market conditions that killed it isn’t a mark against it. It is impressive to last so long that people point when you finally fail.

  4. MissingNo says:

    Ok. Does anyone else think the bid to pay college athletes 100,000-200,000 a year can possibly have negative cultural effects?

    Officially, colleges are profiting off of students, thus some mental heuristics are getting people to say “Wait this isn’t right”.

    But doesn’t this have the incredibly obvious push for a borderline HS/college athlete to roid up just in time for junior/senior year in HS. This could make nearly *every* parent of a talented HS athlete point a blind eye towards anabolics and just say “You could save up enough for retirement in just 4 years, it makes sense”

    And it would!

    So what’s the push for payment? How many steps ahead are we thinking here?

    • cassander says:

      I don’t see a good way to deal with the fact that college sports has become a multi-billion dollar industry.

    • Cliff says:

      How is this any different than the incentives for the many pro athletes who are college age already? As in soccer, tennis, etc.

      • MissingNo says:

        Its a matter of scale and filtering.

        Only 2% of high school athletes end up playing at a NCAA 1 school.

        And then only 2% of NCAA athletes end up playing in the pros.

        (comparisons are slightly off since its NCAA 1 and NCAA general, but I think it still holds well).

        But IDK. I guess almost every cause is a little bit arbitrary.

        This looks like a weird case where “good intentions” will end up eating itself.

        • albatross11 says:

          What fraction of college athletes could make any substantial money on their sport? My sense is that most college basketball/football/baseball/soccer players would have a hard time making it even in minor league/semipro teams. That’s not true for competitive colleges in the NCAA championships, but lots of small colleges have football teams and give football scholarships. The guy playing tight end for Central Methodist College isn’t giving up a whole lot of semipro football pay by being in college.

          ISTM that a simple solution would be to allow colleges to offer a stipend in addition to scholarships. That is, if Duke wants to bring the best high school player in America to play for them, maybe they have to offer him a $100K salary along with the scholarship. Just allow that and it seems like the market should sort out who needs to be paid and who doesn’t.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:

      The push is dignity of labor. Basically, if you want unpaid workers, fuck off, die in a fire. That is a heuristic, but it is a very generally applicable one, and college sports is not one of the rare corner cases where it does not apply. It is not a charity.

      That said, colleges ought also to ban american handegg. And, I guess, on general principles, mma and boxing. Sports that have a well documented effect of causing outright brain damage really, really have no place on a college campus.

      • LesHapablap says:

        Regular students are also ‘unpaid workers,’ in fact most of them are paying to go to university. Is it fair to make them pay for salaries for athletically gifted students? Along with athletic scholarships, sports departments etc?

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          Well, for one thing, I live in a country which does, in fact, pay students. (just shy of a thousand dollars a month) so.. Yes? However, more universally, Students which contribute to the college bottom line – that is, TAs, graduate students and so on damn well are paid. College athletes are a profit center, ergo..

        • LesHapablap says:

          Sorry I wasn’t quite clear there: I meant ‘is it fair for regular students to have to pay the salaries of athletic students?’ the point being that paying these athletes would not be free and that this would contribute to the ever rising tuition costs.

          I don’t have enough knowledge of the economics of college sports to really comment on your second point there. I suspect a lot of these athletic programs are not really paying for themselves and are just entrenched vanity projects, and that most universities would be better off without them. But I don’t know.

          I would say that athletes know they aren’t going to be paid beyond free university and living stipends, and they still sign up to the deal, so it can’t be all that bad. They are certainly more privileged than your average college student without genetic gifts.

          • Chalid says:

            The athletes in popular sports are profitable for the university (in terms of increased revenue from ticket sales and merchandising, increased alumni donations, etc) so if anything the athletic students are subsidizing the non-athletes, often at the cost of their long-term health.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            The vast majority of programs are money losers and survive based on school funding. The ones that are money makers are not very profitable, because they have huge expense structures. Texas transfers $10mm to the university, which is about 5% of its revenue.

            These expense structures are inflated, and someone is making away with more money than they deserve. But the villains in this story are probably not the other students: likely, they are coaches and bloated coaching staffs, over expensive facility contracts, subsidized seats for student fans, and non-major athletics programs (including women’s basketball).

            There just isn’t anywhere near information out there to conclude that everyone is making billions off football players, at least from my POV.

          • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

            The concept of “athletic students” seems pretty perverse to me. How comes an otherwise sport-unrelated institution recruits athletes for the purpose of athleting and now even pays them money.

          • johan_larson says:

            @ARabbiAndAFrog, I think it started with the notion that a college education wasn’t just an intellectual process. It was also about character formation, and part of that was physical training. You may have heard about a sound mind in a sound body and how the battle of something or other was won on the playing fields of Eton. That’s the tradition that college sports came from.

            Now, generations later, it has turned into something quite different. The most successful part of college sports has turned into a couple of minor leagues with fat budgets and big-time TV contracts, with a workforce that is composed of young people who are students in name only.

            It seems to me the very best thing that could happen here is for a couple of groups with deep pockets to start minor leagues in football and basketball. These leagues could actually pay young players, and would accordingly draw away most of the high school graduates who are just in it for the game. The colleges could keep offering scholarships, but they’d probably get the ones who may be capable players but are actually in it for an education. I expect this would suck most of the big money and big stink out of college sports.

            Wonder why that hasn’t happened?

          • albatross11 says:

            The nature of college has changed a lot in the US over the last few decades. In 1919, going to college usually meant your parents had money, or occasionally that you were super-bright and people found a way to send you. Think “finishing school,” but with a side order of having some really smart knowledgeable people there in case you were capable of learning a lot from them.

            In 2019, spots in good colleges are largely assigned by merit (as approximated by SAT scores, grades, etc.), and also by US racial/ethnic politics (affirmative action), various influence networks (formal and informal versions of what all those well-off parents got busted for doing–nobody goes to jail for getting their kid into Elite U by endowing a new chemistry building), and internal goals of universities surrounding both continuity and fundraising (legacies, athletic admissions). Also, for middle-class-and-below kids, college is not a finishing school, so much as a combination of trade school and union card. For better-off kids, it’s often a kind of justification for supporting them–the parents say their kid can stay in the house as long as he’s working on his education somehow.

            All that means that the whole point and nature of college has changed a lot. If you’re running a finishing school for wealthy kids to grow up a bit and make connections before they take over Dad’s bank, amateur quality collegiate sports make some sense–it’s good bonding and a chance to make close friendships and have a lot of fun social outings. If it’s a trade school where you need to get out in four years with a nursing degree so you can make a living, then they don’t make so much sense anymore.

          • John Schilling says:

            It was also about character formation, and part of that was physical training. You may have heard about a sound mind in a sound body and how the battle of something or other was won on the playing fields of Eton. That’s the tradition that college sports came from.

            This. And note that even Stephen Hawking, possibly the un-soundest body ever to host a sound mind, was a college athlete in his (pre-ALS) undergraduate days. And was probably a better man for it, though more for social than physical reasons.

            A sound mind, in a sound body, with the mental and physical discipline to make best use of both, genuinely is better than just knowing lots of stuff. And athletic scholarships for the athletically excellent but academically middling are no more unreasonable than academic scholarships for the reverse – in both cases, you’re finding people who can benefit from the university’s efforts to round out their weaknesses, while bringing their own strengths to the rest of the student body. If you want people to play sports instead of turning into lardbutts, you want them to have some friends who are really into and good at sports.

            Now, at the level of Division I football where you are offering scholarships to the athletically excellent but academically incompetent and then pretty much isolating them from the rest of the student body, this principle has been wholly abandoned. But it wasn’t a bad idea to begin with.

          • Theodoric says:

            @johan_larson
            I thought the NBA D-league was supposed to be minor league basketball, and that some XFL players hoped to go on to the NFL?

      • Gerry Quinn says:

        Isn’t MMA more about broken bones than brain damage?

        • Aapje says:

          Boxing’s 10 second count is a really bad idea, because it allows concussed fighters to get back into the fight, even though the evidence is now quite strong that blows after a concussion are way worse than the initial blow.

    • For me it’s simple: colleges have colluded to limit the compensation offered to athletes. Such collusion is ordinarily illegal, as it is in the pros. So the burden of argument should be on those who want to say that in this case the rules should not apply. Why shouldn’t they apply? The argument that athletes already get a lot of benefits such as scholarships, popularity, ect. would just as easily apply to any high-earner. Another argument is that the colleges are non-profits. But this doesn’t always apply, I don’t think colleges would be allowed to collude to fix salaries for researchers. Nor can a soup kitchen pay its workers 3$ an hour on the justification that any money saved is reinvested in the charity.* And what ultimately are “non-profits?” They aren’t always utopian institutions where everyone involved is selfless and where no one involved is ever polluted by “greed.” In the case of college athletics, here’s a modest proposal: establish a cap on how much anyone involved, be they a player, coach, the college president, or a consultant, is allowed to make. If they refuse to abide by this, they will lose their protection from standard labor law.** I’d think they’d forget all the crap about “amateurism” pretty quickly.

      As to why the push for payment, it’s pure CW, if the athletes all looked like Haven Monahan they wouldn’t care.

      *It can pay them nothing if they are true volunteers, but it’s pretty obvious that almost none of the college athletes are playing in order to make money to support the college.

      **In an alternative universe where Donald Trump had the interest and inclination to match his fighting words with action, he’d instruct the IRS to strip tax-exempt status from any non-profit where employees earned a salary above a certain level.

      • MissingNo says:

        Is this collusion though? I have heard of cases of medical professionals in a major city agreeing to increase/possibly double their prices over time well beyond inflation, knowing that most people had no good way of checking prices until after the bill. I mean that’s obvious collusion.

        But i’m not sure that not paying student athletes counts as collusion. I thought student athletes were not paid almost by definition of what it means to be a student athlete! Battle of definitions?

        And it looks like I agree ultimately. Because it looks partly like a battle of definitions that’s where culture-war aspects come into play, where you get these weird political party splits.

        Doesn’t this just….eat alive the supposed liberal-education link I was supposed to believe in the Bush-era though? So its also the party of paying football players(brain damage players) 150,000 to go to college?

        My stereotypes are getting really mixed up here.

        • It’s collusion because the NCAA will expel teams which pay their athletes. In essence, the colleges all got together and agreed to collude to set wages for their athletes to zero and punish any which defects. Imagine all the tech companies got together and agreed to refuse to do business with any which paid their engineers more than 150K a year. Under my proposal it wouldn’t be illegal to not pay athletes, just to collude not to pay them. Supply and demand would end up determining wage levels; high in the popular sports and zero in the truly “amateur” sports.

    • meh says:

      You could save up enough for retirement in just 4 years

      At just 100k gross a year for 4 years, given the life expectancy of a 21 year old, this is almost certainly not enough to retire on.

      • TheContinentalOp says:

        It’s not 100k spread out over 4 years. From the article:

        FBS football player is $137,357 per year, and the fair market value for the average men’s basketball player is $289,031 per year.

        Paying college athletes seems to be a blue tribe thing. The red tribe mostly responds “They are getting paid. They’re getting a scholarship.”

        But the blue tribe also likes Title IX, and I don’t see how they are going to square paying male football and basketball players six figures while the women’s crew team gets squat.

        I wouldn’t expect Betsy DeVos to really care about that. But I think Secy of Education “Dr.” Jill Biden would be inclined to issue a few “Dear Colleague” letters.

        • BBA says:

          If the end result is that Div I football and men’s basketball get moved out of the auspices of their sponsoring colleges and become de jure professional minor leagues (which they already are de facto), I’m all for it. Maybe while we’re at it we can work on the rest of the NCAA becoming more of a recreational league instead of a front for admissions fraud. Come on, nobody should be getting a scholarship for fencing or water polo, these should all be club sports.

        • meh says:

          It’s not 100k spread out over 4 years.

          Not sure where I assumed that. 100k a year for 4 years is not enough to retire on, especially since a 21 year old has about 40 more years to retire for than a 61 year old.

          male football and basketball players six figures while the women’s crew team gets squat.

          Male crew would probably also get squat. Probably every male sport other than basketball and football.

          • Malarious says:

            $400k is absolutely enough to retire on; assuming the stock market yields an average of 10% per year (as it has for the last century), then as long as you keep your expenses below $30k/year you’ll probably be fine. If you’re going to dispute that $30k/year isn’t enough to live on, fair enough, but most of the people I know have somehow managed to live off of minimum wage or a little more for their entire working lives, so…

            Obviously, there’s risk involved and ideally you want your expenses to be *well below* $30k, but even $20k/year is very easy to live off of, especially for a young single male in his early-mid 20s, and through the wonders of compound interest every dollar you save is going to yield returns for, well, the rest of your life.

            There’s an argument to be made that the typical person who’s capable of becoming a college athlete that gets paid $100k/year has most likely been raised in an environment where a “mere” $20k/year isn’t enough to provide a satisfactory lifestyle. Doesn’t change the fact that for a huge percentage of the country $20k/year is eminently livable.

          • meh says:

            @Malarious
            400k is gross, so knock your number down by taxes. You are also 21 at retirement, so your returns are getting taxed. You can then run the numbers through any online retirement calculator, which will get you an even lower figure, and sure lots of people can live off of very little, but nobody is entering the roid lottery for that.

          • Malarious says:

            @meh
            The figure from the article for a college football player is $137,357 per year. Obviously take-home depends on state; somewhere with no state income tax, take-home would be around $100k. Then you’d need to deduct your living expenses (though, I suppose athletes might be getting room and board for free?). Your returns aren’t going to be taxed until you actually realize some gain (and even then, if your income is below $40k as a single filer, your long term capital gains tax rate is… 0%.)

            It seems like a good deal to me, dependent on how likely your chances of “making it” in college sports is, I guess. There aren’t really many other “jobs” you can get that pay that well at age 18; even if you have the chops to hack it as a Google engineer, you’re still going to need four years of college (+ tuition) before you start earning, and then another few years to save enough to pay off debts + retire. So it’s the difference between retiring at 21/22 and retiring at 25/26. Whether 4 extra years in the prime of your life to do whatever you want (backpack through SEA/Europe on pennies while your nest egg grows?) is worth risking the roid lottery, well, who can say.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      Ok. Does anyone else think the bid to pay college athletes 100,000-200,000 a year can possibly have negative cultural effects?

      Ok, this seems to be yet another American weirdness that as an European I can’t understand. Why do American colleges operate professional sports teams, employing professional athletes on the pretense that they are students?

      In any other country I know of, academic sports are merely recreational amateur activities while professional sports are a completely unrelated industry. How did they become entangled in the US?

      • BBA says:

        American football and basketball developed into their modern forms as college sports. (Football traces itself back to a rugby game between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869; basketball was invented in a physical education class at Springfield College in 1891.) By the time the NFL and NBA came around, the NCAA was already well-established. I’m not sure when it became the norm to have teams made up of ringer “students” admitted solely for their athletic abilities, but it had to have been very early on.

        In contrast, baseball was a professional sport first and has an extensive system of developmental (“minor”) leagues of paid players. College baseball exists but doesn’t attract nearly the attention that football and basketball do.

        • albatross11 says:

          I’m not sure when it became the norm to have teams made up of ringer “students” admitted solely for their athletic abilities, but it had to have been very early on.

          This seems like the sort of thing it’s easy to slowly slide into. At the first step, you’re just letting someone in who’s a little less qualified/connected/able to pay to get a better football player. Gradually, everyone does that, and there’s a benefit to being willing to lower your academic standards a little more than the other guys to get the dumb-but-talented. Keep iterating, and eventually you’ve raced to the bottom until you’re admitting students into college who could barely graduate high school. Somewhere in that race to the bottom, you’re admitting students who can’t reasonably keep up with the rest of the kids in your college. Athletes start getting lousy grades and people complain, so you have to come up with all kinds of academic support for them (which evolves from extra help and tutors to people writing papers and taking tests for the athletes), just to keep them from being blown away by the competition.

          Most of those steps probably seemed like either a perfectly reasonable small accomodation or a small, harmless bending of the rules. Iterate enough times, and you get to today.

    • bullseye says:

      They don’t play the players, but they pay the coaches. In most states, the highest-paid state employee is a coach:

      http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/19019077/highest-paid-us-employees-dominated-college-football-college-basketball-coaches

  5. aexl says:

    “Why do you think foods containing drugs are better than pure drugs?”

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      Can you elaborate on this?

      It seems like you’re assuming that we all know what you’re alluding to here but that’s not a safe assumption.

    • Lambert says:

      Coca-cola were giving out free samples of ‘coke energy’ today. The stall was packed. Rubbish bins were full of empty cans.
      Starbucks is a giant multinational.

      Not many people take caffiene pills.

      • silver_swift says:

        I suspect for most people it’s just that it’s more normalized and feels less like doing drugs, but there are fairly rational reasons to prefer coffee and energy drinks over caffeine pills. It’s tastier, easier to get/more socially acceptable (not to mention free in a lot of office buildings) and harder to overdose on.

        Any particular reason you feel we should prefer caffeine pills over caffeine drinks?

        • gettin_schwifty says:

          You get the caffeine without the sugar or artificial sweeteners that are so common in caffeinated beverages. You have no temptation to take caffeine pills because they taste good, so you can control your intake independent of other considerations, whereas someone who enjoys sweetened coffee or soda for the taste will often get more than they’d want separate from the beverage. I’m describing myself, here, I do love my coffee, black or sweet as heaven, and I sometimes end up over-caffeinated by the end of the workday.

          The above argument could be taken as favoring a caffeine powder over pills, due to yet finer control.

          • A1987dM says:

            I do love my coffee, black or sweet as heaven, and I sometimes end up over-caffeinated by the end of the workday.

            Decaf exists.

        • Gerry Quinn says:

          Back in my 20s I once experimented with coffee, drinking four very strong mugs with about two heaped teaspoonfuls of instant in each. For an hour or so I was running up and down the stairs – after that it wore off and I didn’t feel all that great.

      • b_jonas says:

        Firstly, the sweetener or sugar and the carbon dioxide is pleasant, and addictive to some amount, so why would I separate the caffeine from it?

        Secondly, consuming pure caffeine (whether orally or intravenous) is something that students in medicine do, and we pride ourselves on earning decent wages from working only 40 hours a week rather than 100 hours like the medics. Taking caffeine pills would signal that I’m as low status as the medics.

    • Aapje says:

      @aexl

      “Dosing?”

    • eyeballfrog says:

      Because I also like food?

    • onyomi says:

      May be like how high fructose corn syrup is bad for you but fruit (which has fructose but also fiber, antioxidants, etc.) is good for you?

      Related example: tea leaves naturally have caffeine but also have l-theanine, an amino acid many find has a calming effect. This natural combination (“natural” here may be partially result from centuries of selective breeding, in addition to the choice to drink the leaves from this particular plant as opposed to some other) may be both more psychologically pleasant overall and possibly better for you than simply drinking a beverage to which caffeine has been artificially added.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      A form of Chesterton’s fence, probably. Reminds me of that recent experiment where a few subjects were given by mistake something like 30 grams of pure caffeine instead of 30 mg (they lived. barely). A bunch of pills look, feel and actually are riskier.

      Plus, breaking the psychoactive substance (if that’s what you’re talking about) from the social context is a bit … dry. Taking an alcohol-equivalent dose has almost nothing in common with a night at the pub, except possibly the hangover. A nicotine patch is not the same as a cigarette break. A coffee date is more than the 60 mg of caffeine in your latte.

      In each of these context the drug is reinforcing and enriching the experience in a way you’re not likely to get with any single part.

      • nkurz says:

        Caffeine is 1.25 grams per cubic centimeter. 30 grams of caffeine would thus be 24 cubic centimeters. A sugar cube is 1 cubic centimeter. Accidentally having someone consume the equivalent volume as 24 sugar cubes of pure caffeine seems very unlikely.

        Which is to say that I doubted your anecdote. But before posting, I decided I should search the web, and found that you are absolutely right: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/northumbria_uni_caffeine/.

      • John Schilling says:

        A form of Chesterton’s fence, probably. Reminds me of that recent experiment where a few subjects were given by mistake something like 30 grams of pure caffeine instead of 30 mg (they lived. barely). A bunch of pills look, feel and actually are riskier.

        As nkurz notes, it is absurdly implausible that anyone would ever mistakenly consume thirty grams of pure caffeine. And in the cited incident, they didn’t consume thirty grams of pure caffeine. They consumed much larger quantities of a beverage containing a small percentage of caffeine, which they misbelieved to contain a very very very small percentage of caffeine and so didn’t balk at drinking hundreds of grams of the stuff. What would have been an absurdly implausible mishap with pills, became a simple math error with caffeinated beverages,

        • Radu Floricica says:

          I don’t like to reply just to say that I think I’m right, but…

          Nobody in their right mind would be ok with drinking 300 coffees, or even 30. It just feels wrong. You probably would balk at drinking 30 orange juices as well, it just doesn’t sit right with you. That incident was possible only because at some point the caffeine was refined powder and somebody used their system 2 to estimate the dose, and it is vulnerable to mistakes in a way “300 coffees” isn’t. That’s what I mean by chesterton’s fence – system 2 is flying right over it.

          • John Schilling says:

            Is anybody in their right mind ever going to take 150 maximum-dose caffeine pills? That’s solidly in the “just feels wrong” category.

            This sort of overdosing pretty much requires that someone be rolling their own(*) meds. And of all the drug deliver systems out there, pills are the form least likely to be hand-made by the end users. Pills, get mass-produced in some therapeutically appropriate dose, and the only question is “how many of these should I take and how often?”

            The answer to which is pretty much never going to be “hundreds”, except possibly in suicide attempts.

            * Or their patients or test subjects

    • aexl says:

      Thank you all for helping me answering this question.
      Sorry if there was no context but all your replies helped me.

  6. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/health/prehistoric-baby-bottles-scn/index.html

    I’m a bit unclear on whether these would work for infants or whether some help from the child is needed.

    Also, when I first half-heard the news story, I wasn’t clear that pottery was involved, so I was wondering about animal bladders, which I believe are the lowest tech waterproof containers. Could they have been used safely for milk? They presumably wouldn’t have left any remains.

  7. brad says:

    Since the great resorting the halfback life of a the 95th percentile thread (by replies) seems way shorter. The workaround of someone posting a random reply as a new root thread is not especially satisfactory.

    • EchoChaos says:

      I am not parsing what this means…

      • blipnickels says:

        Um,

        “Since new threads appear at the top, the most replied to threads are much shorter/get less replies. People get around this by posting new threads higher up, which I don’t like.”

        So, like, in the old days there’d just be one massive Ukrainegate thread? Now there’s like four because people want their take/issue near the top of the thread?

        I dunno, I tried. *shrug*

        • sharper13 says:

          I think part of the problem is also that when people see the most recent Ukrainegate thread, they post their reply to that one, and then keep reading and find another one to reply to, and so on…

          But it’s tough to say “Read all the comments before replying to anything/starting anything new” because someone may have just come by to post something, or else they may even forget what they wanted to say in their reply/post by the time they spend a couple of hours reading.

          Hmmm… bears further consideration.

    • brad says:

      Damn autocorrect. That should be half-life, not halfback life.

    • Lambert says:

      Seconded about new top-level threads.
      It’s not hard to type C-f impeachment and jump directly to the relevant thread.

    • FLWAB says:

      The comment threads are shorter, but it also seems like we get more interesting threads. In the old system it seemed like people would stop posting new threads after a bit because fewer people would see them. As a reader it also makes it a lot easier to see what’s new.

      • brad says:

        I disagree that the threads are more interesting, but then I think I’m less novelty-seeking than many in this community.

        I do think there something of real value lost when there is almost never an ongoing conversation with the occasional exception of two dogged posters going back and forth with each other.

        Even before the change the cadence of the open threads meant that conversations were never more than 3-4 days long. All other things being equal I’d rather that was longer but I can see the benefits in not making new commers wade into a giant thread. But to go from 72 hours to 8 hours is a big drop.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          I agree with Brad. I’ve always been against having new threads on top because it shortens the length of time that people talk about one subject before it falls out of notice. It seems to me that it is becoming more like Facebook. One reason I don’t use Facebook is that any thread longer than a day or so falls so low on people’s list that no one sees it anymore. So you can never discuss anything in depth. SSC has become harder to discuss stuff in depth.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Is that a surprise? Is that not the intended effect? Were you expecting or hoping that the 50th percentile thread would get shorter, but the 95th percentile thread wouldn’t get shorter?

  8. albatross11 says:

    Very CW comment:

    Many years ago, I knew a lot of people who were libertarian-aligned Republicans. Some subset of those were very into slogans like “I love my country but fear my government,” particularly under the Clinton administration. And then, Bush got in, 9/11 happened, and a whole lot of that set became very vocal supporters of Bush and the war on terror. There were also a fair number of libertarians and some part of the conservative movement who opposed those things, even when done by “their side.” I inferred from this that the folks who stayed opposed to unaccountable government power even when their side was grabbing it actually had some principles, whereas the others simply had a side.

    Some years later, Obama came into office. Despite some promising rhetoric, his war on terror policies were basically Bush with less torture and more murder, and (as I mentioned elsethread) his administration was particularly harsh toward whistleblowers, and claimed (and used) the power to assassinate American citizens on the president’s authority alone, with no oversight or review. Mass surveillance continued, and while our torture program that was ended in the Bush administration seems to have stayed shut down, absolutely nobody involved faced any consequences[1][2], despite the fact that torturing prisoners is against US and international laws, and treaties we have signed.

    And then, I watched as a lot of people on the left, with whom I’d strongly agreed about the horrors of the Bush administration war on terror, suddenly found that the Obama administration doing the same stuff was not so bad, somehow. I had those conversations online and in person, and I watched people I’d considered principled lose interest when it was their own side doing it. And once again, there were also people who stuck to their principles even when their own side was guilty. Once again, I inferred from this that many people who’d opposed the Bush war on terror simply saw it as a useful club with which to bash the other side, but some actually disagreed on principle.

    Somehow, watching both of those was a significant political education for me. And since then, watching some prominent Republicans utterly abandon what I thought were their principles to follow Trump is yet another iteration of the same thing. I assume that after Trump implodes and we get a Democrat in office, we’ll once again see a lot of people normalizing whatever horrible stuff he does, even when it was an intolerable violation of decency when Trump did it.

    Most people don’t have principles, so much as they have a side.

    For my part, I think at least the last three presidents should have been impeached and removed from office, but I think the case against Trump (obstructing justice, influence peddling, possibly using diplomatic pressure to get other countries to investigate his opponents) is actually weaker than against Obama (violating the war powers act, unconstitutional and illegal wiretapping, murder of American citizens) and Bush (crimes against humanity, unconstitutional and illegal wiretapping). And I figure it’s at least a 90% probability that the next president will continue this trend, with his supporters justifying whatever he does even when they thought it was criminal when done by the other side.

    [1] Except for one CIA whistleblower, who got some prison time for talking about waterboarding on TV.

    [2] We decided to “look forward, not backward.”

    • EchoChaos says:

      Most people don’t have principles, so much as they have a side.

      Welcome to conflict theory! Here’s your seat.

      I agree with almost all of your points, and they are well written.

      In terms of “bad stuff Presidents did”, Trump is probably the least bad since… Carter? Probably Carter.

    • Eigengrau says:

      Unfortunately, congress apparently abandoned its oversight of presidential war crimes long ago. There was actually a fourth article of impeachment proposed for Nixon, but it was ultimately voted down in the Judiciary Committee: his illegal bombing of Cambodia.

    • John Schilling says:

      All of this, with the caveat that people of pretty much every political ideology legitimately have principles of the form, “X except in time of war, in which case Y”. War is almost by definition the state when you have to apply a relaxed set of principles for a time lest you soon be unable to apply any principles at all.

      And because of this, lots of people who want to relax the hell out of other people’s principles will misuse the W-word, e.g. “war on drugs”, “war on poverty”, and yes “war on terror”. And at the same time, pretty much everybody decided in 1945 to stop using the W-word to (officially) describe their own actual wars. But in the immediate aftermath of a mass-casualty terror attack at least tacitly supported by a foreign state and with Congress passing a resolution authorizing military force, I wouldn’t call people hypocrites for shifting to their wartime principles.

      • BBA says:

        This is why I’m an aspiring pacifist. Someday I hope to be on the level of Jeannette Rankin refusing to declare war on Japan the day after Pearl Harbor. I’m not there yet, but someday.

        • BBA says:

          *hovers over link, sees URL* No thanks, I know what angle I’m going to get there, and I’m not interested.

        • WarOnReasons says:

          @Atlas

          if people are really opposed to certain perspectives, it would be more effective to substantively rebut the core tenets of those perspectives

          If someone has been already caught once using false data to support a highly controversial claim, does it make sense to keep arguing with that person’s other controversial claims? Perhaps it was different in the past, but at present Unz is mostly read by people who like his agenda, rather than the quality of his research. Logic and better data will not change their mind.

        • BBA says:

          To sidestep the question of whether I should read fascist sympathizers – I don’t care whether FDR lied us into war. Rankin had no way of knowing that, and even if the popular narrative had been true and Japan really did attack Pearl Harbor out of the blue, she still would have been against the war. And that’s the ideal I’m striving towards.

        • cassander says:

          It’s very true that the Roosevelt Administration was trying to maneuver the US into a war. It’s also true that the consequences of it not doing that would have been pretty dire for a whole lot of people from a pacifist point of view. It’s one of the many reasons why absolutist pacifism is a position that is the luxury of someone who is physically pretty secure fro harm.

        • albatross11 says:

          As best I can tell, Sailer is the only reason to read anything from Unz’ site–last I was paying attention, Unz himself seemed to have fallen into a bizarre rabbithole, and earlier tended to convince himself of various theories/claims after some very careless analysis of data.

        • WarOnReasons says:

          @BBA

          that’s the ideal I’m striving towards.

          Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you – are you saying that in a situation when a foreign country attacks your own with the goal of exterminating or enslaving its population an ideal person should strive to prevent any attempts of retaliation that involve violence?

        • “If someone has been already caught once using false data to support a highly controversial claim, does it make sense to keep arguing with that person’s other controversial claims”

          Where did Unz use false data? He used some questionable data and assumptions in the Myth of American Meritocracy, but I don’t know of any data that has been shown to be outright false.

        • Laukhi says:

          I’m a little curious about the exact extent of the pacifism you aspire to. Should we have left the Phillippines to Japan? How about China?

          In fact, should China have just conceded to whatever Japan demanded after the Marco Polo Bridge incident?

      • jgr314 says:

        Doesn’t this modification only excuse the changes for people under Bush II (taking the 9/11 attacks as the moment when Americans shifted from preferring “normal policy package X” to “wartime policy package Y”)?

      • albatross11 says:

        John Schilling:

        Fair enough. Right after 9/11, lots of people were scared, and felt like the nation was under attack (as indeed it was). Being willing to relax some principles in wartime isn’t totally crazy, which is exactly why every president ever wants to talk about a war on X, for some X.

        I think this is a more convincing explanation in 2002 than in 2005 or 2007, though. I mean, we were at war (and still are–we’ve got troops in Afghanistan today), but the fright had mostly worn off by then.

        I remember hearing a fair number of people (including me) arguing that the “war on terror” seemed like an eternal open-ended war that would justify relaxing those principles forever, and while I didn’t write this down anywhere other than maybe a post on Making Light somewhere, this seems like a prediction that’s been borne out. As I understand it, the AUMF is still in force, and keeps getting used as justification for whatever place the president wants to bomb next. When do you suppose a president is going to volunteer to end that? I’m guessing that’ll happen a week after Hell freezes over.

        • Radu Floricica says:

          I remember hearing a fair number of people (including me) arguing that the “war on terror” seemed like an eternal open-ended war that would justify relaxing those principles forever, and while I didn’t write this down anywhere other than maybe a post on Making Light somewhere, this seems like a prediction that’s been borne out.

          Oh, it was a _very_ popular opinion at the time. Turns out a sizable vocal minority doesn’t matter as long as the majority goes its own way. Also turns out mistakes don’t have to be subtle or hidden, and historically probably few were. It’s just that overall zeitgeist plus conflict theory push things toward the bad choice, even when people scream their lungs out that, for example, nuclear is cleaner than coal or homeland security was created to stay.

          God, I still don’t understand how people with even of smattering of historical sense can think that creating a department called “Homeland security” is a good idea. I kept mentally translating it to Vaterland.

      • albatross11 says:

        Fear and anger jam up your brain, and the way the media reported 9/11 massively amplified the fear and anger.

      • cassander says:

        You think that blaming 9/11 on Israeli is an impressive and principled stance?

        • Enkidum says:

          You think Chomsky blamed 9-11 on Israel? Do you think a more steelmanned interpretation might be better?

        • cassander says:

          However, I would say that Chomsky’s central point wasn’t that the US role in the Israeli/Arab conflicts inspired the attacks, but rather that US foreign policy more broadly, including that role, did.

          this is called blowback theory. It’s basically nonsense except at the most superficial level. And it would be more convincing coming from Chomsky were he not obsessed with (A) proving that the US is responsible for everything bad in the world in general and (B) the israeli palestinian issue in particular.

          If we wish to reduce terrorism, we must first understand it. (For that matter, if we wish to make progress on any problem, we must first understand it.)

          I agree. I just wish Chomsky would contribute to that effort rather than apologizing for tyrants and blaming everything on the US, regardless of how much sense it makes. It makes very little sense for Bin Laden in particular, who first got upset with the US when it defended saudi arabia against Iraq and then liberating the Kuwaitis.

          @Enkidum says

          You think Chomsky blamed 9-11 on Israel? Do you think a more steelmanned interpretation might be better?

          I’m familiar enough with chomsky’s arguments to know there’s not much steel there. I suppose I could phrase it as “america’s relationship with Israel (which he constantly characterizes) and the policies the two countries pursue (which he cherry picks)” but that’s hardly any better for him.

        • cassander says:

          @Atlas says:

          Why is it nonsensical to observe that terrorists are often motivated by opposition to state policies?

          Less of this, please.

          For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence.

          This is, to put it mildly, nonsense on stilts, and it’s particularly egregious coming from someone who openly celebrated Mao during the cultural revolution. What comes after is merely an excuse for this, which is his primary, and demonstrably false, claim.

          Chomsky, in an interview a couple days after 9/11, notes the role that US policies toward Iraq play

          ed in generating anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world.

          I know he claimed this, him claiming it doesn’t mean he’s adding knowledge to the discussion. It’s the same answer he’s given to almost every foreign policy question he’s ever been asked going back decades.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          One thing that would really convince me of Chomsky’s deep principles would be if he’s also been using blowback theory to explain away US policy since 9/11. Has he been calling on people in the Islamic world, who might be sore about torture or drone assassinations, to understand how sore we in the US are about terrorism, and how they need to reconsider their support for it if they want to have peace? (I don’t pay the guy that much attention; for all I know, he might have been.)

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          Less of this, please.

          Less of this, please. When the phrase comes out in response to a perfectly reasonable question, I start thinking it’s maybe overdue for retirement.

        • cassander says:

          I was genuinely asking what your reasoning for describing what you call blowback theory as nonsense is, because you didn’t expand on your claim that it was. I apologize if it came off as rude or untoward, because if so that wasn’t my intention.

          It came off to me as snark, but if that wasn’t the intent I withdraw the complaint.

          Blowback theory is superficially true in the sense that people respond to things that other people do. It’s nonsense in that beyond this axiom, it has no predictive power. Why do some people respond in certain ways and others respond in different ways? Why are so many middle eastern terrorists and so few latin american or asian? Blowback theory has no answers to these questions, and as Paul Zrimsek pointed out, it can equally used to defend american actions as condemn them, because ultimately it’s just an obvious truth taken past the point of sense.

          I’m not sure that it’s correct to describe the US as responsible for the plurality of international violence (say) post-WW2,

          It’s not even close to true.

          but certainly it has been responsible for enough of it that it’s perfectly reasonable for an American to focus on analyzing and critiquing errors made/crimes committed by the US.

          And if that’s what chomsky actually did, I wouldn’t have a problem with him. but he doesn’t do that. he runs around blaming every bad thing that happens on the US regardless of context, logic, or reason.

          Perhaps you think that he’s flatly lying about his publicly-stated beliefs and is actually acting on the basis of secret, hidden beliefs; if so, you should carefully establish that before pronouncing his openly avowed positions to be insincerely held.

          There’s a difference between lying and bullshit. I have no doubt that Chomsky is sincere. But his answer is also bullshit motivated reasoning.

          I think it added a lot of value to the discussion,

          Again, it’s how he explained vietnam, the cold war, various latin american issues (including blaming the current crisis in Venezuela on the US), every other question about foreign policy that he’s been asked for something like 50 years now. A monocausal explanation for the entire history of american foreign policy isn’t adding to the discussion, it’s squawking like a parrot.

        • albatross11 says:

          Cassander:

          What do you mean by “blowback theory” here. If it’s just some dumbass claim that Osama would have loved us but for our evil foreign policy, yes, that’s pretty silly. On the other hand, it’s clear to me that we can and often do carry out overt and covert operations (invasions, buying off friendly dictators, assassinations, bombings, funding insurgents, etc) that blow back on us.

          The whole premise of our foreign policy, the whole *point* of it, is that we think we can have an affect on the behavior of people like Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, various Taliban leaders, etc., by our policies. We think we can convince countries not to sponsor terrorist attacks against us by blowing things up in their country till they knock it off, we think we can convince dictatorships to ease up on the torture chambers and death squads by threatening some kind of action or sanctions or cutoff of aid, we think we can convince Taliban leaders to negotiate with us and keep their promises by some mix of bribery and threats, etc.

          ISTM that the core idea of blowback is that we can also screw this up. (The definition I found for blowback was specific to covert operations, though I always think of it in terms of foreign policy in general.) We can choose foreign policies that thoroughly alienate some people we’d rather influence, or that provide the wrong incentives and get people to do what we don’t want done. Just as it’s possible for US policies to win some hearts and minds, it’s also possible for them to lose some hearts and minds. We can make enemies at least as easily as we can make friends. We can destabilize places we’d rather were stable, or trigger a civil war along ethnic lines we’d rather have forestalled.

          As an example, our bad relations with Iran are partly because of the needs of US domestic politics, and heavily because the Iranians do some bad things in the world, but you can’t really understand those relations without knowing about our support for the Shah, and then the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. I think it’s plausible to argue that supporting the Shah set the stage for a huge anti-US backlash and lasting hostility toward us after the revolution.

          Similarly, a hell of a lot of what we’ve done in the War on Terror, particularly in Iraq and Libya, probably set the stage for more problems for us later. I don’t know whether we recruit more people for terrorists by drone assassinations than we kill off/deter, but it’s pretty clearly possible to do drone assassinations badly enough that we increase the forces arrayed against us. (I wouldn’t be surprised if we screwed this up, given the rest of our track record in the middle east.)

        • cassander says:

          @albatross11 says:

          What do you mean by “blowback theory” here. If it’s just some dumbass claim that Osama would have loved us but for our evil foreign policy, yes, that’s pretty silly. On the other hand, it’s clear to me that we can and often do carry out overt and covert operations (invasions, buying off friendly dictators, assassinations, bombings, funding insurgents, etc) that blow back on us.

          As commonly articulated, somewhere in between. I’d describe the theory, as usually presented, as something like “most bad foreign policy situations (particularly in the middle east) are the result of bad US actions taken there years ago and we have no one but ourselves to blame.” It’s the IR theory version of original sin, which is why it’s popular with the more extreme elements of blue tribe who never stopped being puritans.

          I think it’s plausible to argue that supporting the Shah set the stage for a huge anti-US backlash and lasting hostility toward us after the revolution.

          this argument gets made a lot. the trouble is that it’s overly simplistic and ignores context. First, it ignores the actual history of mossadegh and the shah’s rule. Second, it implies that the nature of the iranian regime is entirely the result of US action and not the natural consequence of revolutions everywhere. Third, it implies that really no decision the US has made since has had any real impact on the flow of events, and that once we decided to overthrow mossadegh we were doomed to wind up with ayatollahs. Fourth, it totally denies the agency of any actors in the system besides the US. Fifth, it implicitly assumes that not overthrowing mossadegh would have resulted in better circumstances (ignoring the benefits that were accrued) without even trying to do the work to establish that.

          Note, I’m not accusing you of making these arguments, just saying that they are what tends to get made, often explicitly, alongside the one you did make.

          Similarly, a hell of a lot of what we’ve done in the War on Terror, particularly in Iraq and Libya, probably set the stage for more problems for us later.

          I would not group those together. Libya and Iraq were very different projects launched with very different methods and level of commitment and reached very different goals. I won’t deny that libya was a particular disaster, but that blowback sometimes happens is not an endorsement of blowback theory as the ur-explanation of all foreign policy events.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          I agree with cass here about Chomsky. Years ago I kept hearing all this great stuff about Chomsky. Even though I wasn’t impressed with him based on various essays of his I had read, I finally bought a book of his (Failed States), to find out what was so great about his writing.

          I didn’t find out. It was one of the worst books I ever read. I had the impression that he just cited everything he read over some period of time, spinning each one to indicate how it showed that the US was making evil foreign policy decisions in every possible instance. There was zero nuance; just Chomsky telling us every time how the US is the big bad player in the international field. As cass said, he advanced knowledge by zero with this book. And this matches whatever else I’ve read by him, although admittedly I now mostly avoid reading anything he has written.

        • cassander says:

          @Atlas

          I do indeed think that it is an obvious truth, and I fail to see from your comments how it is generally or by Chomsky or myself specifically taken past the point of common sense. Especially, again, considering that many powerful public officials, academics and journalists ignored this simple observation and acted on the basis of far more obviously ludicrous theories.

          Chomsky elevates blowback to a monocausal explanation for virtually all of geopolitical history, which is far past the point of sense.

          I don’t think that this is true. For instance, I’ve never seen Chomsky blame the US for the Rwandan genocide, the Nigerian Civil War or Japanese war crimes in China.

          Chomsky wrote a forward to a book that substantially did that, arguing that it was a civil war egged on to support western interests with casualties far more evenly divided between hutus and tutsis than is usually claimed. And as far as I know he hasn’t commented on the Nigeria civil war one way or the other.

          as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Elliot Abrams, Ronald Reagan, etc., who monocausally attribute responsibility for all conflicts the US enters to its enemies in the unified communist bloc. Consider e.g. this speech of Nixon’s on the situation in Southeast Asia,

          Politician’s speeches, of course, will blame the other tribe and praise the home tribe, but they should not be taken as proof of simplistic views, especially when several of the people who mention wrote academic books on their views of international relations that are not so simplistic. Try reading Kissinger’s Diplomacy, then comparing it to Chomsky’s analysis and seeing which one is more nuanced.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          The first part—that blowback theory explains at least part of post-9/11 US policy

          The verb I’d used was explain away, not just explain; the difference between the two is exactly what I’m complaining about.

          Chomsky’s proffered reason for focusing mainly on the misdeeds of his own country is well enough if used to justify a mere difference in emphasis and effort, but it won’t serve to justify a difference in standard of judgment; it’s not much use talking about a “cycle of violence” if you’re only going to hold one side responsible for stopping it, while granting the other side about as much moral agency as a falling rock.

        • Aapje says:

          @Atlas

          I don’t think that blowback theory necessarily requires the response to hit the countries that do something to others.

          Many terrorists seem to blame ‘the West’ or ‘Christians,’ so what is revenge in their eyes can then look like hitting an innocent bystander in ours. For example, attacking France for what America did.

          This is especially true if France is easier to hit than America, so there is a strong incentive to switch targets.

        • albatross11 says:

          I’m not interested in defending Chomsky’s view of foreign policy[1]. I am interested in thinking about US foreign policy successes and failures in terms, not only of what little the current reporters know or remember about the subject, but also in terms of stuff we’ve done in the past and how that has worked out for us.

          It seems to me that the common objection to the idea of the 9/11 attack as blowback is a moral one–how dare you justify the 9/11 terrorists’ actions in terms of our foreign policy! But just like everywhere else, you can’t use moral reasoning to decide whether a factual statement is right, and trying is a good way to sabotage your brain.

          [1] I find that when I read an essay or listen to an interview/talk from Chomsky, I usually learn something, despite the fact that I think he’s often wrong on both factual and moral grounds.

        • albatross11 says:

          Also, once a terrorist organization exists, it has its own internal incentives, and so does each decisionmaker within it. If periodic attacks against Western countries are necessary to keep getting recruits, then the terrorist organizations that survive will find a way to do that from time to time. If the path to power within the terrorist movement is to be more extreme and violent than everyone else, then the most successful people in those organizations will be waaaay off to the right of the bell curve in terms of violence and extremism.

      • Evelyn Q. Greene says:

        For instance, I’ve never seen Chomsky blame the US for the Rwandan genocide, the Nigerian Civil War or Japanese war crimes in China.

        Well of course not, Chomsky only likes people who are either A) murderous communists or B) Killing Americans, in which case it’s our fault and we deserve it.
        (And in the case of the Rwandan genocide, it was used by hawks as an example of people dying due to a lack of U.S intervention, so Chomsky denied that it ever happened.)

        • brad says:

          @EchoChaos

          Where’s your concern for true, kind, and necessary here? Is it all about whose ox is being gored?

        • Enkidum says:

          Chomsky denied that the Rwandan genocide ever occurred?

        • EchoChaos says:

          @brad

          I agree, this comment is bad.

          Given that this is the first time I’ve seen it, your accusative tone towards me sounds like it’s ALSO not true, kind or necessary either.

          Edit:

          To expand on this, I think Scott’s excellent article about weakmen is the right way to look at this.

          https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/

          It can be tough to tell from the outside what is a weakman and what is a fair analysis of your opponents. When you make an obviously inflammatory statement, we can all pick up on it and should criticize it, but it can be tough to tell when it’s foreign to you. It’s easy to tell for me when someone is criticizing an adjacent group, so that is when you see it it jumps out.

          This is why I listen (and I feel other should), when someone says that you aren’t being kind towards your outgroup.

    • albatross11 says:

      Many principled people are out there, on both sides–please don’t take my post as “my outgroup isn’t really sincere in their beliefs and needs to fall in status relative to my ingroup.” I’m noting that there are a lot of people claiming to be upset about X at any given time who are only upset about it because it’s the other side doing it.

    • People do have principles, but only on a few issues and who cares about what varies. Some people are consistent Republicans because of abortion but they couldn’t care less about trade. And very few people care about “impeachable conduct” from their side. The trick is that you don’t really know what they care about based on their rhetoric.

    • Enkidum says:

      +1, with some caveats that are so minor I don’t care to bring them up.

      As you say in some replies, there were plenty of principled people on both sides. It’s probably useful to remember that the anti Iraq war protests were, I believe, the largest worldwide protests that had ever occurred.

      I do think as @Atlas says, Chomsky has been one of the most consistently principled critics out there, and Glenn Greenwald has been a consistent voice ever since Snowden (he is basically persona non grata with many of the Wikileaks crowd because he admitted that Assange is kind of a fuckhead, and definitely with the mainstream Democrat crowd because he was very explicit that the evidence for Russian collusion was extremely weak, and it was a serious mistake for Democrats to place their faith in former head of the secret police). I don’t know of any equivalent voices on the right, but that’s presumably because I don’t spend enough time reading them. George Will, maybe?

      EDIT: One thing I remember being particularly disappointed by was how radically people, especially New Yorkers, suddenly fell in love with Giuliani, who had been largely regarded by leftists as a vicious hack up until then (I think largely correctly, as recent years have borne out). George Carlin, of all people, devoted a good chunk of his special recorded shortly after 9-11 to what I considered a pretty disgusting display of fealty to the man who a month prior he would have been savaging. Not that I don’t think there’s anything admirable about what Giuliani did after 9-11.

      • Nick says:

        George Will has an image of never changing, but he seems to have repudiated many of his earlier beliefs. The article is too polemical by half, but judging by discussions elsewhere of his 2019 book The Conservative Sensibility, it’s basically right.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      I inferred from this that the folks who stayed opposed to unaccountable government power even when their side was grabbing it actually had some principles, whereas the others simply had a side.

      A harsh characterization. There’s nothing like the death of 3000 innocents to turn a sincere mistake theorist into a sincere conflict theorist. No hypocrisy is required.

      I was a long-standing libertarian whose response to 9/11 was, “Nail the bastards.” That phrase was in the letter I wrote to my senator; “my side” was the side of America, not the GOP. As 9/11 receded into the past, I became more jaundiced about whether the steps we were taking were an effective implementation of “Nail the bastards”. If you look at the timing you might attribute the change to the change in administrations, but that would be incorrect: for instance, I thought TSA was a terrible idea from its inception.

      • m.alex.matt says:

        A harsh characterization. There’s nothing like the death of 3000 innocents to turn a sincere mistake theorist into a sincere conflict theorist. No hypocrisy is required.

        It is perfectly possible to be a hypocrite and a decent person.

        9/11 was awful. Our reaction to it hasn’t exactly been covered in glory.

      • albatross11 says:

        In 2002, I can see this. (Though I note that many people didn’t go along–they just didn’t get much airtime.). In 2006, it’s quite a bit harder. By then the nature of the threat and our response were both pretty clear.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          Agreed. I think. But of course the first attack on the WTC was eight years before the successful one, and in 2006 Bin Laden was still at large and we had had several more (mostly unsuccessful) Islamic terrorist attacks. The nature of our response was much clearer, but if you mean to say that by 2006 the threat had been shown to be much less important than we felt in the year after 9/11, I’m not sure I agree.

          But I will agree that 2006 or so was about the time frame I was talking about, and my point is that somebody not watching me carefully might well imagine that my mind changed in 2008.

    • Walter says:

      You are correct. The odds of us nominating only the worst possible people for the last 2 decades, and basically virtuous people before that, are insane.

      Rather, we are nominating essentially the same kind of people that we always have, but the news cycle/internet means that now a lot of people’s rent depends on their ability to get you to hate your leaders. They are good at that job, and so people duly throw principles over time and again.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        Eh… There were some cultural changes that probably did considerably worsen the quality of leadership available to the USG. Specifically, the rise of “Government is the problem” rhetoric. Consider exactly who would seek office as a member of a party which has that as its unofficial motto.

    • tossrock says:

      Oh sweet, I provably have principles!

    • meh says:

      I feel this way whenever I hear ideological argument for/against our representative and electoral system. Somehow these ideological/principal based arguments always line up with giving the preferred side an advantage. There is somewhat less of this on SSC, where people will default to argue a contrarian position, regardless of sides.

    • BBA says:

      Liberty and democracy are incompatible, as a particularly amoral military contractor once observed.

      When Obama tried to close Gitmo, his own fellow Democrats in Congress voted to overrule him and keep it open. [Whether or not Obama’s intentions were sincere, or a ploy to keep us good progressives on his side by setting himself up to fail, is an open question, but irrelevant to what I’m talking about here.] That spelled the end of any hope for reforming the War on Terror, no progress has been made since – and the thing is, although I disagreed with Congress’s decision, the vast majority of the American people supported it. And the same with the ongoing, never-ending war in Afghanistan. It’s faded from the headlines but pulling out and letting the Taliban regain power would be a tremendously unpopular move and a sure election loser.

      If we’re to remain something resembling a democracy (we probably should) and the people are bloodthirsty psychos (unquestionably true, at least as far as how we treat Muslims in far-off countries is concerned), then what do we do? What can we do?

      • albatross11 says:

        BBA:

        [slightly off-topic pushback]

        I can’t know what was going on inside the Obama administration beyond what was reported in the news, but that administration took a lot of actions on its own to continue and expand the war on terror. The Obama administration’s policies toward leakers/whistleblowers, the expansion of drone assassinations, the “kinetic humanitarian intervention” in Libya, the program of assassinating US citizens with no review or oversight–those were all initiatives of the Obama administration, not something forced on them by Bush, and not obviously forced on them by congressional Democrats either.

        Mass surveillance programs were continued under Obama, and it seems to me that Obama had the authority to close them down or limit them substantially if he wanted to–the director of NSA is ultimately under the president’s orders, and while I hope he’d refuse an illegal order like “spy on my opponents and give me the data,” I don’t see how he’d refuse one like “shut down programs X, Y, and Z.” The decision to “look forward, not backward” and not to declassify the congressional report on the CIA torture program, that’s all on Obama.

        I think Obama carries the blame for his administration’s actions in much the same way that Trump carries the blame for *his* administration’s actions. I think it’s entirely too convenient to make excuses for Obama. And like you with the MIT/Minsky stuff, I feel like it’s extra important for me to not make excuses for Obama, because I actually want to–his image and style appealed to me in many of the same ways Trump’s repels me.

    • salvorhardin says:

      In my social circle there are a fair number of people who not only supported Obama but actually went to work for his campaign and/or his administration. In 2014-2015 I asked a couple of them

      (a) why they were comfortable working for an administration that assassinated American citizens without even a pretense of due process
      (b) why they supported executive orders that were plainly beyond the powers any reasonable executive should have because they agreed with the aims; didn’t they ever think about how some much worse future president could use that precedent for aims they hated?

      The response was basically “that ship has sailed,” i.e. any plausible alternative president would be at least as bad as Obama on those issues, and also worse on other issues that they cared about, so they might as well support him in order to get progress on the other issues. I didn’t (and don’t) agree, but I can see why decent, well-informed people might reason that way.

      • albatross11 says:

        I see their point, but it’s kind-of a universal answer. I mean, if I ask a Republican how he can continue to support Trump despite his awful behavior on Twitter and clusterf–k-laden management of his administration and mistreatment of immigrants’ kids, surely he will give me the same answer. “He may be a bastard, but at least he’s our bastard.”

        Obama had a chance to reverse this stuff. If he’d actually reversed a lot of Bush’s war on terror policies, then they’d either have gone away or become in-play political issues. (Think about “enhanced interrogation,” which Bush ended and Obama left dead.) As best I can tell, he had the authority and power to do that, but he chose not to. And by not reversing those policies, he’s established a precedent that now makes it likely they’ll stick around forever.

      • John Schilling says:

        The response was basically “that ship has sailed,”

        But that’s the best time to sink a ship, of either the literal or figurative variety. And for about the same reason in both cases – if you sink it “at sea”, it’s much more likely to stay sunk.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      In general I can agree that the last two Presidents abused their war powers.

      But the remedy is for Congress to take back its war power authority, not for the same Congress to cowardly impeach the President for using the tool they gave POTUS to use because they do not want to.

  9. Eigengrau says:

    For no reason in particular, the articles of impeachment against Nixon were

    1) Obstruction of Justice
    –He attempted, on numerous occasions, to cover up or impede the investigation surrounding Watergate.

    2) Abuse of Power
    –No underlying crime was committed here, but he used the power of his presidency to improperly attack his political enemies. He also failed to act on his knowledge of the illegal actions of his allies.

    3) Contempt of Congress
    –Nixon’s White House defied congressional subpoenas and otherwise stonewalled congressional oversight to a degree that was considered particularly egregious.

    Note that there was no article of impeachment for anything like “ordering the break in at the DNC”.

    • ECD says:

      I do wonder about the President’s treatment of the, still unknown whistleblower, thus far and once they’re revealed, as seems inevitable. The whole:

      “But basically that person never saw the report, never saw the call. Never saw the call. Heard something, and decided that he or she or whoever the hell it is – sort of like almost a spy. I want to know who’s the person that gave the whistle-blower, who’s the person that gave the whistleblower the information, because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? With spies and treason, right?”

      I have a hard time reading as anything but a ‘these people* should be executed’ statement.

      *It’s not entirely clear if he means the whistleblower, or the people who told the whistleblower, but since it’s my understanding the whistleblower was told because he needed the information for his official duties…the people who told him would simply have been doing their job.

      • albatross11 says:

        ECD:

        I agree Trump’s comments are nasty and irresponsible–nor is that new. But let’s not pretend that a desire to hammer whistleblowers into silence is some kind of unique Trumpian horror, or a policy only of evil Republican regimes. The Obama administration was *very* interested in hammering whistleblowers, as a matter of policy. So was the Bush administration.

        As usual, the shocking thing isn’t that Trump is trying to terrify potential whistleblowers into silence, it’s that he’s crude and classless and inelegant about it. Proper politicians just make sure the whistleblower gets a life-wrecking multi-year fucking over, or gets sent to prison and put on suicide watch and woken up every 15 minutes for a few months, while speaking in terms of the importance of proper procedures and national security.

        • ECD says:

          I think we need to distinguish whistleblower from leaker. These are two different things. A whistleblower uses the defined internal legal process to report suspected wrongdoing internally. A leaker goes to the press. Either of these may be moral/legal, depending on the situation. However, the party being reported on can legitimately draw a distinction between the two because of the existence of the whistleblower process (ie ‘you shouldn’t have gone to the press, you should have reported it to the IG,’).

          If you want to point me to the President Obama, or President Bush administrations coming down on whistleblowers, as opposed to leakers, I’d be interested. Note, their treatment of leakers may still be inappropriate/immoral/illegal, but that doesn’t address the question.

          • albatross11 says:

            EGD:

            I don’t agree with your definition. In common usage, “whistleblower” means someone who alerts either the authorities or the public to wrongdoing. Trying to restrict that definition down to only people who inform the IG or something is changing the definition in a way that favors hammering whistleblowers.

            Though if you think going through proper channels and being careful not to leak any classified information is protection against being hammered, you might want to ask Thomas Drake how that works out. For awhile, I think he was working at an Apple store, since he lost his life’s savings and his job and his retirement for doing exactly what you’d want such a person to do.

          • albatross11 says:

            ACLU article on whistleblower/leaker prosecutions under Obama

            CIA officer hammered for disclosing some of the torture program. Note he was charged and imprisoned only during the Obama administration, after the Justice dept had previously decided not to charge him.

            Guardian story on how some leakers got treated much more gently than others under Obama.

            Op ed in the NYT.

            And so on.

            Note that the people who ran illegal programs[1] basically never faced any legal consequences, but people who reported them often got hammered. This is intentional–it’s an effective way of getting future would-be whistleblowers to think “well, yes this program is illegal and immoral and violates the constitution and basic human decency, but on the other hand, I don’t actually want to find myself bankrupt with no pension working some shitty retail job after they finally let me out of prison. So I guess I’ll just stay quiet about it.”

            [1] Illegal only in the narrow technical sense of violating the written law, not in the broader and more important sense of pissing off the powerful.

          • ECD says:

            Yep, that’s a good set of examples of presidential administrations treating moral leakers like shit. Not relevant to my point, but okay.

            As for Thomas Drake, yeah that’s a fucked up story (though it’s hilarious to me that you begin with the 2010 charges, not anything before, say 2008), except, no, he was a main source for the IG complaint, which investigated, substantiated his concerns and produced negative reports, which hastened the program being shut down as a gigantic waste of money. While that last step was in process (allegedly, maybe this wouldn’t have happened without his subsequent action) he went to the press. None of that makes what subsequently happened to him okay.

            However, the whistleblower/leaker distinction is crucial because otherwise people on the inside of classified issues have no method of reporting malfeasance which does not lead to criminal charges. You may want leakers to be treated better. So do I. But treating whistleblowers the same as leakers will not accomplish that end.

            Also, it’s ECD, I honestly don’t know how you could have gotten EGD out of that…

          • Clutzy says:

            If we are talking about the current case, we absolutely should not. This is a whistle intended to be leaked from day 1. It was given to the newly appointed DNI within hours of his appointment. It was filed in a ridiculously legalistic fashion (despite the multiple actual factual inaccuracies). And the whistleblowing forms typically mandated first hand knowledge at all times up until around the time this one came into being. Plus, Shiff and other Democrats had spoken about the key claims (including false ones) of the complaint before the IG reported it to them.

            This document is a leak. It may be in the form of a whistleblowing form, but its purpose is to be leaked. Like when Comey briefed Trump on the Steele dossier. The whole point was the leak of the briefing.

          • albatross11 says:

            ECD (who doesn’t have a G in there anywhere):

            By your definition, you’re a whistleblower if you go through channels and then don’t leak outside those channels. I understand why the distinction is important, but it’s got an important nuance: a whistleblower (in your terminology–the big wide world uses the word more broadly) informs higher government authority about bad behavior. They mostly help the executive branch police its own operations–someone’s wasting money or sexually harassing interns, and a whistleblower informs higher management or the GAO or someone, and they can bring the hammer down.

            But this does no good at all with bad behavior that’s the top-down policy. Mass surveillance and torture were both policies supported from the top, so whistleblowing in that sense wasn’t going to help. I mean, the CIA hierarchy knew they were running a network of secret prisons and kidnapping and torturing people, so a CIA employee could report those things up the chain all year and not have any impact. The NSA hierarchy knew they were carrying out mass-surveillance on Americans, so reporting that up the chain wasn’t going to do any good. Getting the New York Times to run a story about it, on the other hand, actually brought the matter before the American people. (Often even that doesn’t matter–nobody you could elect for president was going to be eager to take on the intelligence agencies, because those guys make bad enemies. Even when you elect people who seem to want to roll back the WOT, it turns out they don’t ever quite get around to it.)

          • ECD says:

            @Clutzy

            If we are talking about the current case, we absolutely should not. This is a whistle intended to be leaked from day 1.

            Now, see, if I was a mind reader, I wouldn’t be spending my time online. That’s a good way to make yourself crazy.

            And the whistleblowing forms typically mandated first hand knowledge at all times up until around the time this one came into being.

            I’m going to ask for a citation for this. It seems extremely unlikely to be true. If I hear that a colleague is stealing money, I’m not required launch my own private investigation to determine if that’s true before reporting it. The IG is the relevant investigatory agency. Reporting hearsay is entirely within the bounds of every police/investigatory reporting system I’m aware of.

            Plus, Shiff and other Democrats had spoken about the key claims (including false ones) of the complaint before the IG reported it to them.

            I was going to ask for a source, but even if true, this is hardly relevant to the claim made. The whistleblower was gathering the information you believe to be false through official channels, their complaint was being discussed inside the DNI’s office, the IG’s office, the OLC and the Whitehouse itself. Any of those might have leaked, though, given the history, I’d be inclined to guess the Whitehouse also, a lot of this was happening out in the open.

            This document is a leak. It may be in the form of a whistleblowing form, but its purpose is to be leaked.

            I don’t actually care bout the intent that you have magicallly discerned in a person about whom we have no actual knowledge beyond what’s in the document (and that President Trump’s own appointees deemed it credible), I care that the whistleblower has, as far as anyone has any evidence, followed all the steps necessary to be protected by law and to suggest that he is a ‘spy’ and “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? With spies and treason, right?” seems an awful lot like illegal threats of retaliation to me.

            @albatross11

            By your definition, you’re a whistleblower if you go through channels and then don’t leak outside those channels. I understand why the distinction is important, but it’s got an important nuance: a whistleblower… informs higher government authority about bad behavior. They mostly help the executive branch police its own operations–someone’s wasting money or sexually harassing interns, and a whistleblower informs higher management or the GAO or someone, and they can bring the hammer down.

            But this does no good at all with bad behavior that’s the top-down policy.

            Very true. Which is why in some cases the whistleblower report is required to be forwarded to some external body (e.g. congressional committees). I’d be happier if that was more common and even more happy if the result of those reports could be investigated in a somewhat less partisan fashion, but cynicism isn’t always wrong and I can’t think of any legal and democratic way to cause that result. It’s pretty unconstitutional, but giving authority to charge ‘leakers’ to a prosecutor jointly appointed by the house and senate might be effective, or not…

            Another alternative might be to require release of IG reports with limited redactions, ala FOIA, and allow litigation over whether those redactions were appropriate. Now, this would be difficult as the government tends to win classification arguments, but I tend to think that more judges should be authorized to review classified information. Might simply result in their being coopted, but maybe not.

            ETA: Typo correction and removal of unwarranted statement.

          • ECD says:

            @Echochaos

            Interesting. Assuming the accuracy of those documents, I was wrong about how the IC IG reporting process worked. That’s a stupid way for it to have historically worked and I’m glad they made that change.

          • Clutzy says:

            The reason it was the way it was before is to stop stupid speculation and Steele dossier rumors from taking over the time of inspectors general. This is an intelligence community rule. This whistleblower does have first hand knowledge of bad acts: people illegally divulging classified information to him/her.

          • ECD says:

            Bit late on this, but on the question of the whistleblower reporting process, the IC IG has released a statement addressing this issue.

            If I’m understanding correctly, the issue is that the previous instructions were in error:

            In fact, by law the Complainant
            – or any individual in the Intelligence Community who wants to report information with respect
            to an urgent concern to the congressional intelligence committees – need not possess first-hand information in order to file a complaint or information with respect to an urgent concern.

            In summary, regarding the instant matter, the whistleblower submitted the appropriate Disclosure of Urgent Concern form that was in effect as of August 12, 2019, and had been used by the ICIG since May 24, 2018. The whistleblower stated on the form that he or she possessed both first-hand and other information. The ICIG reviewed the information provided as well as other information gathered and determined that the complaint was both urgent and that it appeared credible. From the moment the ICIG received the whistleblower’s filing, the ICIG has worked to effectuate Congress’s intent, and the whistleblower’s intent, within the rule of law. The ICIG will continue in those efforts on behalf of all whistleblowers in the Intelligence Community.

            This looks an awful lot like what happened was previous IC IG’s had taken the position that it would be hard to determine something was a credible urgent concern without first hand knowledge and that morphed into, you shouldn’t file if you don’t have first hand knowledge. Which, as I discussed earlier, is a stupid standard. This was realized in May of last year and the form was updated, with supporting documentation updated more slowly.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            No, you are not reporting this correctly.

            No, they do not claim that this is a coincidence. I wouldn’t believe them if they did. Why did you?

            No, they do not claim that this is a coincidence, that the change was made last May. They explicitly admit that the change was caused by the current whistleblower complaint.

            Was it realized that the previous standard was “stupid” or illegal? Sure, they say that, but why should I believe them? Why do you claim to believe them? The original standard was to discourage whistleblower complaints. When they finally got a complaint that they didn’t want to discourage, they changed the standard.

        • DocKaon says:

          So you don’t see any difference between legal process, however much you disagree with it, and the 21st century equivalent of “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”

      • Radu Floricica says:

        To be honest, that’s pretty much the first thing I thought of. How on earth are you supposed to do your job with this level of disloyalty in the white house staff?

        My understanding of the whole whistleblower concept is that it’s meant to reveal egregiously illegal behavior while protecting the identity of the source. In this case… hearsay, rumor, electoral material… that’s not whistleblowing, that’s pure old politics.

        • ECD says:

          Okay, I radically disagree with your description of the reported events, but, again, an IG report is meant to report apparent wrongdoing for investigation and action. To pretend the complaint ought to be essentially a motion for summary judgment for guilt is ridiculous.

          And given the response from the President of the United States, I can’t imagine why anonymity might be appropriate…

        • savebandit says:

          Part of every new CEO or world leader’s job is to inspire some loyalty. It’s not a given. If you stink at it, you might stink at your job, regardless of what other qualities you bring to the table

          • cassander says:

            Most CEOs don’t have an organization full of people who (A) hate his guts (B) voted and gave money to the other guy running for CEO, (C) who the CEO isn’t allowed to fire, promote, or demote, (D) who are theoretically sworn to not take out their hated on the new CEO in exchange for the right not to get fired, even if they hate his guts and voted for the other guy.

            Now, you can argue that’s just part and parcel of being a Republican president, but that doesn’t remove the inherent difficulty.

  10. How long should I continue ignoring the Trump Ukraine story while waiting for everyone to get their narratives straight?

    • blipnickels says:

      If I understand the process right, until the Judiciary Committee in the House submits formal articles of impeachment for a vote. You want to wait until someone has to spend an expensive signal of what exactly Trump will be impeached for and why; the Judiciary Committee report is my best bet and I’d be surprised at that point if there were still factual claims under major dispute. I mean, everybody will have their own spin on fact X but we should at least have some agreement that fact X occurred.

      I mean, I’m certainly incapable I’m following this advice but realistically this is all just cheap talk and propaganda until the paper starts getting pushed.

      • Oh, god. How long is that going to take?

        • Eigengrau says:

          It’s been reported that they want to wrap it up definitely before the end of the year, aiming specifically for around Thanksgiving.

          • blipnickels says:

            First, let me preregister my skepticism it will be finished that quickly.

            Second, seriously, they want the impeachment sent to the senate around Thanksgiving! I have to eat dinner with family on Thanksgiving, why would they do this to me!?

            I’d like to propose a weeklong national holiday to get everyone out of Washington the week before Thanksgiving so I can eat with my family in peace.

    • albatross11 says:

      I dunno. On one side, this all looks sketchy as hell and like yet another knocking down of Chesterton’s fence of the kind Trump’s famous for. On the other side, the opposition has been screaming about treason and fascism and such every day since Trump got elected, usually for stuff that’s maybe bad policy or bad management (and often is bog standard stuff every president or every Republican does), but nowhere near treason or fascism, so it’s hard to have any faith that this time it’s serious. And on the gripping hand, I thought Trump was a pretty terrible choice for president when he was running and when he got elected, and nothing that he’s done since has altered that belief, so it’s not like this latest scandal is going to change my vote or anything.

      • sharper13 says:

        The fascinating part for me is to wonder why the Democrats would choose this of all issues to go all in on again. Were they really just trying to sink Biden’s chance at the Dem nomination by turning this into a major on-going news story?

        Like with many things Trump does/says, I wonder if this is stupidity on their part or next-level political game to achieve their true objective (assuming that’s Warren vs. Biden).

        • Protagoras says:

          Biden’s campaign was already sinking. He keeps reminding people of how old he is, and while Warren isn’t much younger, she still seems sharp in comparison to Biden’s doddering. I think Biden would run poorly against Trump, and wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity even if there weren’t a confusing maybe scandal* attracting public attention.

          * Joe talking to the Ukraineans about their investigations while Hunter’s being investigated looks bad, but pro-Biden reports say Joe was pressuring for more investigations, not less, and in particular the investigation of Hunter’s company continued, and was focused on things Hunter’s company did before Hunter worked for them anyway. At least this is report from the pro-Biden side, but I haven’t heard anything detailed from the anti-Biden side refuting the pro-Biden account.

          • John Schilling says:

            but I haven’t heard anything detailed from the anti-Biden side refuting the pro-Biden account.

            What, you haven’t heard Donald Trump tweeting about how corrupt Joe Biden is?

            Yeah, OK, not “detailed”. And not anywhere you’re paying attention. Nor will you. To just about everyone other than Donald Trump and Fox News, the narrative is “Donald Trump is attacking Joe Biden’s son over old news nobody cares about, because that’s the only way he can get at Biden”. If there is any evidence of real corruption there, then it was ignored and/or buried in 2016 and Team Trump using it as a weapon against Joe Biden isn’t going to make anyone else say “Hey, let’s dig up that old un-newsworthy story and see if it can now help Donald Trump take down Joe Biden!”

            As you note, Biden has been having issues with his campaign, and there’s plenty of room for him to self-destruct or just plain lose ground to Warren. He can lose in spite of this new thing. But he won’t lose because of it; a narrative of “Donald Trump is attacking Joe Biden’s son over old news nobody cares about, because that’s the only way he can get at Biden”, isn’t going to hurt Joe Biden.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            I assume Protagoras was talking about the Democratic anti-Biden side, i.e. the Warren and Sanders and Harris camps, which you might expect to be capitalizing on this. (But maybe not, if they can get Trump to do their dirty work. And maybe not, if it makes them seem to say something nice about Trump.)

          • Protagoras says:

            No, by the anti-Biden side I meant the Trump people, who have indeed loudly insisted that Biden is corrupt, but haven’t specifically addressed the pro-Biden side’s evidence regarding the particular situation.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Why would Trump address the evidence? Trump isn’t interested in building a case for either Biden being corrupt; he just wants the accusation out there for use in the campaign and to deflect accusations of misconduct on his part. Any effort spent building a real case is wasted effort that won’t garner any votes.

            (I’m pretty sure Hunter’s position IS corrupt. Sure, you could come up with a story justifying his position, but plausible deniability is not actual deniability. As for Joe, I don’t know; he’s a canny enough politician to let the Ukranians hire his son for a sinecure and then do whatever he was going to anyway.)

    • BBA says:

      Until January 21, 2025, at the very earliest. Only when the Orange Man is out of office will anyone be able to look at the present conflicts with any degree of rationality.

  11. Edward Scizorhands says:

    Related to another conversation:

    Has anyone tried to undelete the Nixon tapes using modern technology?

  12. blipnickels says:

    Does anybody have any information on any of the NeighborWorks LIFT programs?

    There doesn’t appear to be a national page but here’s one for Chicago.

    The basic info is:
    Take a $60 class,
    Meet relatively generous income limits
    Get $10,000-$20,000 in interest-free loans for a down-payment on a house, closing costs, etc
    20% of the loan is forgiven each year, presuming you’re still living in the house, ie if you got $15,000, then each year $3,000 of that loan is forgiven

    This is relevant to my interests. I’m concerned because this sounds a little too good to be true and because Wells Fargo is associated with it.

    So has anybody taken one of these loan/grants or known anyone who has and what was your/their experience?

    • zoozoc says:

      I haven’t done this particular program, but there was a local non-profit in my town that provided down-payment interest free loans for homebuyers who met the income limits. We were able to get it for our current house. There is no forgiveness (I wish), but I don’t have to pay off the loan until (a) sell the house or (b) mortgage is payed off. It shows up as an extra lien on the house.

      The only issue was that when we were closing, there was some issue with the documentation for our income limit that was causing the non-profit to say we didn’t qualify. Basically, it was including in my income the money I put into an HSA (when in person I confirmed that they wouldn’t count that money). The mortgage company did include that money for my income and so the official documentation had that too-high income. But I was able to get it figured with the non-profit with a phone call and closing went forward as expected.

      Only other thing that came up was I needed to updated the non-profit with my new mortgage company when the loan was sold to another company after about a year.

    • Erusian says:

      They’re legitimate but keep in mind ‘qualified properties’ are going to be ‘modest homes in not great areas’. I mean, they’re not necessarily going to be war zones but you’re talking about lower-middle-class neighborhoods.

      Basically, it’s a goverment funded non-profit that partners with banks to do what you describe. It’s meant to boost homeownership (from the government’s perspective) and to access neighborhoods/communities that generally are loan deserts (from the bank’s perspective). As with all home loans, make sure it’s fixed rate and is a mortgage and not something like a rent to own scheme where you have no claim on the long term equity.

  13. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    I’ve seen a common claim that capitalism is bad because it requires constant growth and this isn’t feasible on a finite planet.

    Does capitalism actually require constant growth? It seems to me that it could settle down to improving quality rather than using more matter and energy. And if it becomes clear that investment in growth doesn’t pay off, then people would seek to have a good steady state.

    The other piece to dispute would be “finite planet”, but it seems fair to say that there will (given current basic physics) some sort of resource limits.

    • LesHapablap says:

      The planet might be finite technically, but there is so much room for growth that it might as well be infinite. We have access to orders of magnitude more energy and space than we are using: we just don’t have the knowledge to access it (yet).

      • viVI_IViv says:

        We have access to orders of magnitude more energy and space than we are using: we just don’t have the knowledge to access it (yet).

        If we don’t know how to access it, how do you know that it’s actually accessible?

        • LesHapablap says:

          Because it isn’t against the laws of physics. I’m cribbing this point from David Deutch’s Beginning of Infinity. He takes the point much further by claiming that even in intergalactic space there is enough matter, energy and information to ‘flourish’ if you have the right knowledge of how to transform it all.

          He also makes the point that knowledge will keep increasing infinitely for the human race as long as certain conditions are met, which we are currently fulfilling. I’m not smart enough to argue or even paraphrase that though.

          • beleester says:

            If you have the right knowledge of how to transform it… and if transforming that matter and energy into useful forms doesn’t cost more than it gains, and if you start out with sufficient resources that you can build the infrastructure needed to tap that energy.

            Disassembling the Earth and turning it into solar panels would probably get you quite a lot of energy, but only if you already have the tools needed to disassemble a planet.

          • LesHapablap says:

            beleester,

            Growth can be thought of as our civilization building its resources, infrastructure and knowledge so that we can accomplish these things. Capitalism seems to do pretty well on the growth front, so if we stick with it, and keep the rent-seekers from skimming too much off the top, we just might get the fusion plants or whatever we have coming.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            Because it isn’t against the laws of physics.

            The fact that there isn’t a proof that something is impossible doesn’t imply that it is possible, especially, because what matters here is not just physics (*) but also, biology, geology, economics, and so on.

            (* but muh everything is physics. No. Unless you can’t write the equation of a bacterium, much less a ecosystem, it’s not physics for all practical purposes.)

          • LesHapablap says:

            Deutch provides a proof that in his book on page 60, but I was not able to understand it.

            But if you mean that just because something is allowed by the laws of physics doesn’t mean that it is at all practical given our resources, then yes obviously. But the line of what is possible given our resources if we had perfect knowledge is way beyond our current state.

            There are people out there that would stop technological progress to impede growth, or impede growth and technological progress as a side effect of other goals like income equality. I’m sympathetic to the views of the former, particularly the way Plumber expresses it.

            But to me this time in history seems like a dangerous stopping point. Like crossing a highway and deciding to sit down half way across. There are levels of technology that we need to reach, like better nuclear, other energy sources, carbon-free aviation, geoengineering. There’s knowledge we need as well: how can we reverse the atomization of our society? How can we have constant technological change without causing widespread anxiety? How do we improve the function of our states and large organizations so they don’t become lumbering parasites on our economy? How to solve the endless variety of coordination problems? How do people’s brains malfunction? What’s the best way to manage housing infrastructure and land? Should we have a UBI?

            In 100 years we could all be living on self-sufficient luxury yachts or electric dirigibles. Or some could decide that village-style living, and use small, cheap, abundant power sources to develop rural areas (of which there are an incredibly vast amount untouched) into real communities.

            Or we could have frozen ourselves in the year of our lord 2019, still squabbling over slices of the pie while the climate heats up just enough for mass panic to turn to war and destroy the infrastructure and capital built up over the centuries.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Not sure what relevance this has to the next hundred years or so. We aren’t likely to stop growing any time soon, nor do we want to. And if somebody says we should… I’m going to send him to a hospital to see that people still get sick and die.

    • Gerry Quinn says:

      It’s possible to have growth without using more resources. People can only eat so much bread, but loaves could in principle get fancier and more expensive indefinitely.

      See also biological life on Earth – that has grown and grown without making the planet any smaller.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        People can only eat so much bread, but loaves could in principle get fancier and more expensive indefinitely.

        But won’t the fancier loaves require more resources to make?

        See also biological life on Earth – that has grown and grown without making the planet any smaller.

        Has total biomass and biomass primary production increased compared to, say, the end of the Cambrian explosion?

        • Matt says:

          But won’t the fancier loaves require more resources to make?

          Keep in mind that one of our resources is ingenuity, which may be for all intents and purposes, unlimited. Some systems encourage it, and some systems stifle it.

          Just look at the history of bread-making. If we still made bread like people from 1000 years ago, most of us would be eating porridge instead.

          Finally, it’s probably true that a basic loaf of bread at wal-mart is fancier and less expensive (but still more valuable!) than typical bread from any time in history.

          • noyann says:

            > Finally, it’s probably true that a basic loaf of bread at wal-mart is fancier and less expensive (but still more valuable!) than typical bread from any time in history.

            Let me cast a shadow of doubt on fanciness, and maybe value.

            “Describing the look and taste of it, Blackley noted that the crumb “is light and airy,” particularly for a 100 percent ancient grain loaf. “The aroma and flavor are incredible,” he added.”

          • acymetric says:

            I’ll second that objection. Cheaper, yes, but not of higher quality (more valuable). For “fancier” it probably depends on what you mean. More consistent (we can assume more appealing) shape, sure. Better flavor or texture? I’m skeptical. Heck, depending on which type of bread you get it might well be less nutritious as well.

          • noyann says:

            Another point: If ‘any time in history’ includes now, Wal-Mart is no match for German bread.

            “According to the bread register of the German Institute for Bread (of course there is such a thing), there are now more than 3,200 officially recognized types of bread in the country. And German bread culture was officially added by UNESCO to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2015.”

            (source)

          • Matt says:

            noyann: That guy’s definitely got no reason to exaggerate. No doubt he’ll begin marketing his ancient yeast and ancient grain bread and it’ll become very popular. Or perhaps not.

            I was (I think) obviously not including ‘now’ as a time in history. I apologize if I was not obvious enough – today’s bread (from wherever, but I intentionally chose what I thought we could agree to be generally not a high-quality supplier) vs the breads of the past, prior to various innovations.

            acymetric: Today’s cheap white bread is practically cake compared to the breads of yesteryear. It’s soft and light. Bread varieties come pre-sliced, or not, as one prefers. It stays fresh longer*, and MOST mass-produced bread is vitamin fortified, which is responsible for significant gains in health outcomes.

            In comes in various forms and is made with various grains – whatever you prefer.

            *some people prefer fewer or different preservatives, and options are available for that, too. But you know, even bread with no added preservatives is made more valuable by encasing it in a cheap plastic bag so you can finish it in a couple of days instead of today or tomorrow.

          • Matt says:

            Just to be clear – are you guys trying to dispute my point by nitpicking my example?

            Or do you agree with my primary point that ingenuity can increase wealth without a matching increase in resource usage?

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Matt

            Getting lost in an irrelevant side discussion is basically our brand.

          • souleater says:

            As long as we’re derailing, can I just call attention to what a weird idea “amateur gastroegyptologist” is? I mean… gastro-egyptologist is a weird idea from the start, but they’re specifying amateur? as in there are professional gastro-egyptologists?

            Maybe this is just a weird way to refer to Goa’uld culinary experts.

          • Lambert says:

            Yeah, the anglophone world has nothing on Germany.
            But a modern Roggenmischbrot is still better and cheaper than most bread from history.

            Speaking of, does anybody know where to buy food-grade lye for prezels?

            Of course there are professional gastroegyptologists? Who else would research what the ancient Egyptians ate? It was the bread-basket of Rome. And most people were farmers. What people ate back then is incredibly relevant to history.

          • The Pachyderminator says:

            Capitalism doesn’t always mean ever-increasing quality. Often it means a transition from “good but expensive” to “shitty but cheap”. Bread is a perfect example: the corn-syrup-flavored cotton fluff that passes for a “basic loaf of bread at Wal-Mart” is absolutely not fit for human consumption, no matter what bullshit it’s “””fortified””” with. The idea that it’s responsible for improved health outcomes is one of the more ludicrous claims I’ve seen on this site.

          • achenx says:

            Speaking of, does anybody know where to buy food-grade lye for prezels?

            I figured King Arthur Flour would have it, but while their site has a blog post and recipe for pretzels in a lye bath, the store doesn’t sell it.

            Looks like it’s on Amazon, if you want to go with that. Also apparently it’s used for cleaning home beer brewing equipment, so a store that sells brewing supplies may be a good source.

          • Aftagley says:

            Weird. Every homebrewer I know just uses StarSan. Lye seems like a lot of work for minimal benefit.

          • Matt says:

            Pachyderminator:

            https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208880/

            As I said before, even if the specific supporting example is wrong, the core point is correct, but which two of the three pillars of discourse of this site do you think your post meets?

            Bread is a perfect example: the corn-syrup-flavored cotton fluff that passes for a “basic loaf of bread at Wal-Mart” is absolutely not fit for human consumption, no matter what bullshit it’s “””fortified””” with.

            I would argue this is neither necessary, true, nor kind.

            The idea that it’s responsible for improved health outcomes is one of the more ludicrous claims I’ve seen on this site.

            I look forward to your argument that fortified foods have not contributed to the amazing decrease in nutritional difficiency diseases in the world over the last 100 years or so.

          • Lambert says:

            ‘Good but expensive’ never went away.
            I can still buy wholemeal bread and heavy-duty tools and indestructible phones and 24oz tweed suits and veg-tanned leather boots and extra legroom on a plane.
            It’s just that a lot of people would prefer the ‘crap but cheap’ option, so the expensive ones don’t get as much airtime or ‘mindshare’.

            (tip: look for places that sell to both regular people and Trades.)

          • The Pachyderminator says:

            @Matt

            My comment was no more or less necessary than yours, which it responded to. As for “kind,” while my tone was a bit salty, it’s not clear to me who I was unkind to. Bread doesn’t have feelings.

            Back to the object level:

            I’m not denying that artificially adding vitamins to flour that has already had the most nutritious part of the grain removed, in order to repair some of the damage that’s already been done, might be better than not doing so, other things being equal. Nor would I claim that cheap bread is worse than starving to death.

            Nevertheless, you said it yourself: “Today’s cheap white bread is practically cake.” Good bread includes fiber and protein, not just sugar and starch. You shouldn’t expect frequent consumption of bread consisting mainly of the latter to improve people’s health, and indeed many studies have shown a link between white bread and obesity.

          • Aapje says:

            The main advances in bread seem to be:
            – preservatives (bread takes longer to age and get moldy)
            – better milling (teeth last longer due to a lack of sand & stones in the flour)
            – fewer fungi (fungi in grain was a serious risk)

            I’m not convinced that other changes to bread were an improvement.

            @Matt

            I agree with Pachyderminator that your statement seems to be an indictment of the most common American bread:

            Today’s cheap white bread is practically cake compared to the breads of yesteryear.

            Marie Antoinette was not a dietist 😛

          • Matt says:

            As for “kind,” while my tone was a bit salty, it’s not clear to me who I was unkind to. Bread doesn’t have feelings.

            Let me help you out:

            The idea that it’s responsible for improved health outcomes is one of the more ludicrous claims I’ve seen on this site.

            This is a comment about my claim. Perhaps you don’t consider it unkind, but it looks like a personal attack aimed at me. Whatever.

            Aapje:

            I’m not convinced that other changes to bread were an improvement.

            Ummm…. ok?

            Marie Antoinette was not a dietist

            She also almost certainly didn’t say what you think she said. Rousseau’s propaganda notwithstanding.

            On the gripping hand, your argument picks nits and misses the point. You agree with most of my argument, add additional support I had not mentioned, pick nits on one or two points, but even the nits you pick are weak. My point is the texture is like cake, not that it has the same nutritional value. Steam-baking bread makes it softer and more enjoyable to eat without appreciably changing the nutritional value. I wish I had the capability of doing that so effectively when I make my own bread. Another innovation that makes it more valuable, without making it appreciably more costly.

          • Aapje says:

            @Matt

            She also almost certainly didn’t say what you think she said. Rousseau’s propaganda notwithstanding.

            I know, it was a joke. The untruth of the statement actually provides a deeper layer to the joke.

            Anyway, I don’t agree that softness is necessarily a good thing. I’m not a baby. I have teeth. So then at most, I think that your preference for softer bread is just that, personal preference.

            However, I think that soft bread may actually be less good, as fibers seem to be beneficial in various ways.

        • Gerry Quinn says:

          Well, you all went off on a bit of a tangent here…

          What I was saying about bread was not really about bread details (there are decent breads to be bought at a reasonable price, or you can bake your own – I’ve done that a bit recently). Just that the economy grows by people doing things for each other, and they might do increasingly complicated things, not necessarily loaves of bread but anything basically.

          As for life on Earth, I think biomass probably has increased since the Cambrian Explosion, and certainly it increased before that. But even if it didn’t, I’ll bet its share price increased!

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            This is a little late, but I assume great bread doesn’t necessarily take a lot more resources in the short run to make than good bread, it needs a more skilled baker.

            This could be viewed as more resources– there’s a longer period of learning and possibly better tools.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      Does capitalism actually require constant growth? It seems to me that it could settle down to improving quality rather than using more matter and energy. And if it becomes clear that investment in growth doesn’t pay off, then people would seek to have a good steady state.

      Capitalism in the strict sense of “private ownership of the means of production” doesn’t require constant growth, or at least it’s not part of its definition.

      Capitalism as currently practiced seems based on investment generating consistently positive returns, which requires constant growth. Whether capitalism in a steady-state economy is possible, or rather it would revert to some sort of manorialism, is unknown.

      • Eponymous says:

        Capitalism as currently practiced seems based on investment generating consistently positive returns, which requires constant growth.

        Not true. There’s no particular reason an economy with a zero growth rate would have zero return to investment, nor is a positive return necessary for capitalism.

      • Eric Rall says:

        Capitalism as currently practiced seems based on investment generating consistently positive returns, which requires constant growth.

        I’m not sure about the latter part of that. In medieval and renaissance Europe, economic growth was slow and inconsistent, but “investments” (mainly land) generally produced significant positive “returns” (land rents). source

        In a steady-state capitalist society, the overall capital stock would remain constant, but there would still be a significant stock of capital, and more capital would be regularly being produced, but it would be replacing old capital wearing out or otherwise leaving service. And the capital would still be producing a positive return, so long as it’s being put to productive use. There’d be some resemblance to manorialism, in the sense that returns on capital would resemble land rents in many respects, but I don’t think it would need to be a complete return to manorialism.

        I would expect returns on investment to be lower than today. The higher return rates in medieval times were the product of a bunch of other factors (insecure property rights, undeveloped financial institutions, high time preferences, etc) that probably won’t be repeated in a future steady-state capitalist society. Today, returns on capital represent both opportunity cost (investing in a steady-state investment is discounted because it means passing up an opportunity to buy a growing investment) and time preference (the more you prefer present consumption over future consumption, the higher a return on investment is needed to induce you to invest), while in this steady-state society there wouldn’t be the same opportunity cost driving up investment returns.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          If total wealth doesn’t grow, then where do the positive returns of investment come from? They can come only from wealth concentration: my gain is your loss, but you can’t concentrate wealth past a certain point.

          • Aapje says:

            @viVI_IViv

            Only in a static system, but we live in a dynamic system due to mortality.

            It is typical for people to accumulate wealth during their working years and then lose it again during their pensioner years.

            The crucial bit is that the return on labor* has to be (substantially) higher than return on investment*, to prevent wealth concentration lasting generations. Piketty tried to show that this is false, but IMO he failed to do so, thereby ironically making the case that we currently have the opposite**.

            * Note that taxation impacts those returns

            ** With the observed correlation between parental and children’s wealth/incomes being primarily due to a combination of rich people have better genes and them investing more in their children, so the children of rich people get more of a return on their labor.

          • If total wealth doesn’t grow, then where do the positive returns of investment come from?

            Some people invest, some disinvest. I build a factory, my son lets it wear out. Investment yields a positive return, but total capital stock remains constant.

    • Jaskologist says:

      It doesn’t require growth, it just has such a strong tendency to create growth that we associate the two in our minds.

      It is certainly possible to improve things without growth. For example, better crop techniques in the middle ages enabled Europeans to grow more food for less work on the same amount of land. This was a growth in production, but a reduction in resources used. Of course, that led to a growth in the population which was dependent on the new farming techniques, but I think it’s getting things backwards to say three-field crop rotation required growth. It just enabled it.

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      How are we defining “Capitalism” and “Require” <- I know this seems petty but depending on what definitions you insert, this statement could be 1. true 2. trivially true 3. false 4. not even wrong

      I'll try and steelman this: The modern economy to assume some rate of growth and arranges itself accordingly. A failure to meet that assumption would be highly disruptive.

      I'm not convinced you can't have an economy that strictly assumes either per capita growth or no growth at all that also involves people other than the state owning property and making decisions with said property, but that's a trivial [hence useless] definition of capitalism anyway.

      • Viliam says:

        I wanted to write the same thing as your first paragraph. If we can’t agree what are we talking about, at least approximately, we can hardly agree on whether it “requires” something or not.

        A narrow definition could be something like: economical system as currently practiced by most of the developed countries. Of course, if the growth stops, it won’t be the same anymore. Many things will change, not just for entrepreneurs per, but also e.g. pension funds. (On the other hand, even if the growth won’t stop, the system might gradually evolve into something else.)

        A wide definition could be: a system where people can own and trade things, including entire factories. (In other words, not a system where you only own what you can strongly hold in your hand; and where not only nobles — or Party politicians — but also commoners are allowed to own stuff.) That doesn’t seem to require growth, at least not obviously.

        However, there is the Marxist argument (yes I know I am simplifying stuff) that even in capitalism in the wider sense, rich will get richer and poor will get poorer… so if the entire cake is growing, the poor may still survive, but without growth they are doomed to starve… at which point they will revolt because they have nothing to lose, and the system will collapse. So to argue that capitalism (in the wider sense) is sustainable in long term without growth, you need to address this.

        From my perspective, in countries without social safety net, the effect will be countered by rich people having many kids (thus diluting their money, if the interest rate is smaller than their reproductive rate) and the poorest people will literally starve to death (because people usually have kids even if they are unable to feed them). With safety net, there will be mixed economy, so without growth the taxes may be so high that most entrepreneurs may be unable to generate profit, i.e. the rich won’t get predictably richer anymore. (Though, without growth, even the most egalitarian country would ultimately starve if the population keeps growing.)

        Either way, without growth, the population has to stabilize, regardless of the system. But how? You will always have someone who is too stupid to get a job, and also too stupid to use contraception properly. Do you want a dystopia where people starve to death, or a dystopia where the government dictates how many kids you can have? But now we are no longer debating capitalism per se — you could also have a system where kids are regulated but business is not. (Idea for sci-fi: population is kept constant, people have to buy kid permits in auction, otherwise pregnancy is either made physically impossible by technology, or aborted China-style.)

    • John Schilling says:

      Capitalism at least weakly assumes that all active capitalists will be trying to grow, so a steady-state capitalist society would have to have at least as many losers as winners. Egalitarian capitalism at least weakly assumes that middle-class actors will be joining the ranks of active capitalists in the hope of winning big, which means that there will have to be far more losers than winners. That’s not what the present mythology of capitalism promises.

      The existence and profitability of lotteries and casinos is an existence proof that lots of people are willing to join the game even if the most likely outcome is having some fun and losing, so long as there is a chance of winning big. So capitalism need not die out from a lack of willing capitalists in a zero-growth society, and so long as motivated capitalists are the best managers of discrete subunits of the economy, let’s keep doing that. But it’s going to be a capitalism that looks rather different than our own. Maybe someone should write an SF story about that.

      Crony capitalism, where all the players are trying to grow but insisting that the state backstop them against any loss, isn’t going to work in a zero-growth society.

      Also, it isn’t required that the winners and losers be uniformly distributed in time. Cyclic theories of history can allow for net zero growth over the long term while allowing for e.g. six generations of capitalists at a time trying to build a better world while the seventh tries to preserve their team’s wealth through the collapse, lather rinse repeat.

      • Watchman says:

        Capitalism at least weakly assumes that all active capitalists will be trying to grow, so a steady-state capitalist society would have to have at least as many losers as winners.

        Capitalism does not particullarly require growth in any sort of significant fashion. The observation that it does seems to be a very partial observation that manages to miss the fact that every other economic system seems to require growth as well, when not failing, and that therefore the basic idea that growth is required is a universal of human economic systems.

        A basic expectation of growth is contained within socialism for example, or even in primitive hunter-gatherer economies. That capitalism is unusually good at providing growth is a feature; it is not an unusual requirement though.

        • acymetric says:

          Are we talking about absolute growth or per-capita growth? I think I would agree that any system is going to require absolute growth unless (as @Viliam notes slightly further up) you stop population growth. I think per-capita growth is probably more important in a capitalist economic system than in other systems (I suspect any system is going to suffer without per-capita growth but I think capitalism is especially susceptible to catastrophic failure without it).

          • Watchman says:

            Good question. Probably both.

            Note though that we have evidence that capitalism survives negative per capita growth far better than its major recent competitor, socialism.

      • Anthony says:

        The drive for growth is biological, not economic. Human beings want more, regardless of economic system. Capitalism has been more successful at allowing growth in material production to outpace population growth over the long term than any other system, but even highly ideological communists want there to be more, they’re just less successful at it.

      • “steady-state capitalist society would have to have at least as many losers as winners”

        Only in the sense that the pile of capital doesn’t grow, but this doesn’t necessitate as many capitalists earning negative returns as earn positive returns. That would only be the case if all only ever held onto capital and none ever cashed it out. But of course many do cash it out. This is why the rate or return was significantly north of 0 during the middle ages, when growth rates were ~0.

      • Gerry Quinn says:

        R.A.Lafferty: “Slow Tuesday Night”

        Forget the brain-block part. Look at the macro-concept.

    • DinoNerd says:

      What I notice is that in practice, a lack of growth is treated as a bad thing. In particular, the economy is regarded as being in trouble if it isn’t growing. Part of the reason for that seems to be to preserve employment rates – in a presumed atmosphere of ever-increasing working age population. (I’m unclear how that works out in a context where people are also freaking out about negative population growth, but truisms don’t have to be consistent.)

      OTOH, growth is a strange thing. It’s generally measured by GDP – and GDP simply measures the formal economy. (If I pay my teenager to do chores, and charge her an exactly equal amount of rent, GDP goes up… If I grow food in my garden and eat it, instead of buying equivalent produce, GDP goes down.)

    • broblawsky says:

      The primary contributors to growth, in terms of GDP, are:
      1) Personal consumption,
      2) Business investment,
      3) Government spending,
      4) Net exports.

      Let’s ignore government spending, for now, so we don’t get into a monetary theory argument. From this perspective, the “finite resources” concept sort-of limits net exports (because there are only so many resources that can be dug out of the ground, improved via labor, and exported) and personal consumption (because there are only so many resources that can be consumed instead of being exported). It doesn’t limit business investment, as long as there are things that businesses can usefully invest in – the obvious candidate being new technologies, which do not require the exploitation of new resources to promote growth, and can in fact make the exploitation of new resources possible.

    • onyomi says:

      It seems like there wouldn’t be much overlap between the sort of person who complains about “fairy tales of eternal economic growth” and the sort of person who’d be okay with accepting the idea that the third world either needs to drastically reduce its population or else be poor forever (or at least never enjoy anything like what we now consider first-world standards of living), yet it seems like the one follows from the other?

    • mendax says:

      I thought this was a good argument for limits of economic growth, required or not.

    • Plumber says:

      @Nancy Lebovitz >

      “…Does capitalism actually require constant growth?…”

      My view (based mostly on projection and a couple of wild guesses) is that capitalism doesn’t require growth to continue, but broad-based public support for capitalism does.

      Relative placement on an economic ladder is important to folks, but how likely one perceives that their children will do better in a system is more important in folks support of a system.

      If you think it likely that your kids will always get a smaller than median share of wealth but you perceive that total wealth will increase and your kids will have more even if their portion is still smaller than the median, you may go with the system that you perceive will deliver the most growth, but with no growth fighting over the pie share becomes more likely.

      • EchoChaos says:

        Relative placement on an economic ladder is important to folks, but how likely one perceives that their children will do better in a system is more important in folks support of a system.

        Thanks. This is a good insight and explains support for economic politics pretty well.

      • brad says:

        That requires growth per capita not absolute growth. Maybe the same thing over a long enough time frame, but not in the short run.

      • albatross11 says:

        I think I agree with Plumber’s conclusion, but not his reasoning. I’d say:

        a. Capitalism doesn’t require continuous growth, but we’ve experienced continuous economic growth and technological improvement with capitalism for a couple centuries now.

        b. This means that political structures, the way we structure and manage companies, etc., are all built around that assumption of growth–they’ve evolved in a world where the pie keeps getting bigger and it seems almost certain that they rely on it.

        c. Capitalism as we know it involves onging “creative destruction”–most ofthe dominant companies and industries of 50-100 years ago are no longer dominant, and many have ceased to exist. I suspect that this is a major force in our society against permanent concentration of power–the most powerful companies and industries get very powerful, but then eventually they lose power, and so they can’t lock down the rules in their favor forever.

        d. An ever-growing pie means it’s possible to let the current winners of the rent-seeking sweepstakes keep their gains, but those gains become increasingly small as a fraction of the total pie. We can keep buying off the currently-powerful or the currently-disadvantaged, without ending up with no pie left over for the people doing the work.

        e. An ever growing pie means that we can afford a lot of terrible ineffiiciencies in our society (politics, corporate governance, laws, customs, etc.) without wrecking things. I think you could make a good argument that the places that work worse in US society are the ones where it’s harder to grow the pie, perhaps because the rent-seeking and featherbedding and ever-growing inefficiencies remain a smallish part of the total pie.

      • salvorhardin says:

        This is part of the thesis of Benjamin Friedman’s _The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth_ which is very worthwhile reading.

    • Urstoff says:

      I’m not sure I can even parse the statement “capitalism requires constant growth”, because pretty much all of those terms need much more explicit definitions (particularly “requires” and “growth”).

    • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

      My uneducated understanding is that capitalism requires growth because any venture under capitalism is risky, and without growth the best outcome would be breaking even, any other would be loss. Which means the best strategy would be no playing, and thus nothing would be done.

      My understanding is also that elimination of poor managers and investors is what makes capitalism great. State-controlled economy would not have such problems, but there will be nowhere to escape from accumulation of errors.

      • cassander says:

        under circumstances of 0 overall no economic growth, you can still have some areas that are thriving and some that are are failing. Such circumstances would almost certainly result in a higher level of consumption vs. investment, but you can still get returns.

        • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

          How exactly does “One area thriving and another failing” works? Is it like having 3 cars and no food or something to this effect? Different areas do not substitute one another, do they?

          • cassander says:

            GM is losing money and market share hand over fist, but BMW is doing gangbusters.

          • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

            This makes sense, although it doesn’t seem quite desirable since people’s employment would become much more precarious. Not all jobs would be transferred. Car manufacturer probably won’t need twice as much engineers after destroying one competitor for example.

    • Capitalism does not require constant growth. There is nothing in the underlying logic of the system that is inconsistent with a steady state solution.

    • abystander says:

      There is the example of a world war 2 prison camp in essentially steady state economy which had state owned store and a private coffee shop which required an accumulation of capital to start so capitalism can exist.
      http://icm.clsbe.lisboa.ucp.pt/docentes/url/jcn/ie2/0POWCamp.pdf

    • LadyJane says:

      Quite frankly, it’s just a bad argument, to the point where it basically just falls apart on its face. It’s also a hypocritical argument when used by anyone who isn’t a primitivist or Luddite of some sort; socialists and communists believe in “endless growth” too, just not directed in the same way or toward the same ends as capitalism, so it’s downright bizarre when I hear Marxists making that claim. I suppose it’s a result of the uneasy synthesis between traditional leftism and the environmental movement, along with the fact that anti-capitalists just like using it as a cudgel against capitalism.

      The claim that we live on a finite planet is technically true, but for practical human purposes, it’s false in every way that matters. As LesHapablap says, the planet is large enough and bountiful enough to allow for effectively unlimited growth and prosperity from the perspective of tiny creatures like us.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Thanks, everyone. It’s surprising, though, that there’s no one supporting what seems to be a fairly common belief– probably believed by many more than young earth creationism, which was Scott’s example of a common belief which doesn’t seem to be represented in his social circle.

      My tentative explanation for why people believe capitalism requires growth is depressions– the economy stops growing– in fact, it shrinks– and it’s a disaster for a lot of people.

      It’s possible that getting to an economy that doesn’t grow (if this is people) needs to be done gradually. A sudden stop would be ruinous. Or would it?

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        I agree that people are making the old Malthusian argument “finite planet, ergo capitalism must end”. And then they explain backwards from depressions and recessions when they happen.

        But I think depressions don’t happen simply because resources ran out; they seem to happen because people change their minds about how valuable something will be in the future, possibly because the herd mentality is strong in people. Wells and mines and farms don’t just run out overnight; they get gradually more expensive to run instead. But people speculate out too far, and that end prediction tail sweeps a very large area.

        The disaster is typically spread among millions of people, mostly among hedge managers that no one cares about, elderly pensioners who were expected not to last much longer, and lone investors who quietly tighten their belts and resume saving until they can afford previous consumption.

        Also, as you imply, a great deal of wealth is grown in quality, not quantity. It is not the case that the population simply grows exponentially, requiring exponentially greater tonnage of foodstuffs, until one day we strip the last layer of the earth’s crust off and fall into the mantle. Rather, the atoms of food grow more valuable by being rearranged into free-trade tilapia grilled in extra virgin olive oil with fresh capers, instead of canned tuna, butter, and green beans. Or by having a greater number of atoms rearranged into machines to convert stored solar energy into just enough additional tuna to feed pop growth at a slowing rate. And in the end, we get all that matter back; it’s just returned to the chaotic nature of the crust from which it came. We then dig it back up and repeat the process. The catch there is that this demands higher energy consumption, but most of that energy was already hitting the earth anyway, and at the rate we’re going, we’ll figure out new sources billions of years before the current one runs out.

        In short, I think capitalism as we’re used to does require exponentially more resources, but the exponent is very, very close to one, and the resource supply is astronomical by comparison.

  14. Chalid says:

    From Scott’s melatonin article:

    What if you want to go to sleep (and wake up) later? Our understanding of the melatonin cycle strongly suggests melatonin taken first thing upon waking up would work for this, but as far as I know this has never been formally investigated. The best I can find is researchers saying that they think it would happen and being confused why no other researcher has investigated this.

    That was over a year ago. Anyone aware of anyone who’s tried this, even if it’s just an N=1 self-study?

    • Ttar says:

      I’m willing to bet SSC readers are more the type trying to adjust their sleep schedule in the opposite direction.

  15. BBA says:

    Noted anti-racism activist Ibram X. Kendi has proposed a constitutional amendment to create a Department of Antiracism, staffed by like-minded scholars and fully independent of the elected branches of the government, with the power to veto any governmental policy or censure any public official they find to be racist.

    The abbreviation is appropriate – this “DOA” is DOA. But it is telling that the ultimate vision of how today’s activists expect to achieve victory isn’t through direct action, democracy, or the courts, but through bureaucracy. Imagine being reported to HR for not paying enough attention to your mandatory daily diversity-and-inclusion seminar, forever. It’s a bit reminiscent of the Iranian religious authorities and their powers over the country’s “elected” government. Or, more benignly (?), the EU.

    Lest you think I’ve gone soft on being the token leftie around here, I assure you: I do agree with Kendi’s assessment of America as fundamentally racist and with his consequentialist views of what constitutes racism. I just don’t know if there’s anything that can actually accomplish an end to racism, and this DOA proposal certainly isn’t it.

    This is a pattern I find myself facing on a lot of issues: there’s a plan that will cause a lot of discomfort and probably won’t work, but every other option certainly won’t work, so might as well go with the plan, right? I guess there are other possibilities – maybe the status quo isn’t so bad or maybe I should change my goal to something achievable. But isn’t this just being greedy, trying to spare myself the discomfort?

    Anyway, it’s not every day that you see an activist perform a reductio ad absurdum of their own position.

    • Aapje says:

      This is a pattern I find myself facing on a lot of issues: there’s a plan that will cause a lot of discomfort and probably won’t work, but every other option certainly won’t work, so might as well go with the plan, right?

      This suggests that you/they operate with a model where things can’t get any worse, but either stay just as bad or get better. IMO, this shows an immense lack of historic knowledge and/or appreciation of how much worse things can truly get; as well as a lack of respect for how privileged modern people are (including modern black Americans, who from a historic perspective, are only a tiny bit less privileged than modern white Americans)

      The suggestion means sacrificing democracy and checks & balances, which is more than a little risky, when it comes to having wars, very bad policy or general mayhem.

      But isn’t this just being greedy, trying to spare myself the discomfort?

      Instead of activism, why don’t you try studying history a bit and really imagine going back to those times. I’m not even talking about actual war, but growing your own food, preserving it for winter, making your own clothes, etc. The stuff my grandparents did, because they had to.

      To get a sniff, turn the heating very low during the upcoming winter and warm yourself with lots of (wool) clothes, a warm water bottle in your bed, etc. Simulate the outhouse experience by walking outside in the cold for a minute or two before every pee and shit you take.

      As a bonus, you will reduce your CO2 footprint, so you’ll be making a small difference.

      PS. You can’t end racism with a consequentialist view on racism, unless you completely eradicate racial cultural differences, which pretty much all lefties seem to not want to do.

      • DeWitt says:

        Instead of activism, why don’t you try studying history a bit and really imagine going back to those times. I’m not even talking about actual war, but growing your own food, preserving it for winter, making your own clothes, etc. The stuff my grandparents did, because they had to.

        To get a sniff, turn the heating very low during the upcoming winter and warm yourself with lots of (wool) clothes, a warm water bottle in your bed, etc. Simulate the outhouse experience by walking outside in the cold for a minute or two before every pee and shit you take.

        As a bonus, you will reduce your CO2 footprint, so you’ll be making a small difference.

        This bit, however pithy, can be said to anyone who’s upset with the current state of affairs.

        Why do anything? Why change anything? Things are much better than a century or two ago so you have no right to complain.

        There’s arguments to be made against BBA’s position, but this isn’t a very good one.

        • Aapje says:

          My argument isn’t that the current state has to be considered acceptable, but that as things can get so much worse, it is irresponsible to not consider the risks of things getting worse.

          This is not an argument against change, but against ignoring risk.

          Things are much better than a century or two ago so you have no right to complain.

          No, my argument is that it is important to recognize that an intended fix for
          a slightly higher than average risk of death and/or slightly lower quality of life than average can actually result in a much higher risk of death and much lower quality of life.

          Now, it is true that this means that people who are incompetent at making change responsibly should not get their way. They can still complain, but they should be kept out of power.

        • cassander says:

          >This bit, however pithy, can be said to anyone who’s upset with the current state of affairs.

          No, only to people who say “things can’t get worse”, or “we have to do something, this is something, so we must do this”, which implicitly claims the same thing.

      • broblawsky says:

        Instead of activism, why don’t you try studying history a bit and really imagine going back to those times. I’m not even talking about actual war, but growing your own food, preserving it for winter, making your own clothes, etc. The stuff my grandparents did, because they had to.

        This is an insulting and deeply unkind characterization of BBA’s position, from my point of view. Do you apply it to your own political positions?

        • Clutzy says:

          I would like a further characterization in this light, because to me it seemed like a poorly fleshed out position from the start, to which the historical critique was very apt. He basically said he just feels like throwing his hands up and going for something.

          First, that is a bias towards action, which is silly. You go along with all sorts of insane plans with this bias. Like the Iraq war, or nuking North Korea tomorrow.

          Second, sometimes institutions exist for a reason. Spelling tests have biased outcomes. They favor better spellers, but this is necessary otherwise kids won’t ever have a reason to learn how to spell early on, then they get hit with a harder reality later on when they can’t fill out a job application. This applies just as strongly on the national stage. That’s why Grant tried so hard to implement Reconstruction (he failed, but more importantly those who followed didn’t even try), and we implemented the Marshall plan. Its also why certain people insisted on the Bill of Rights, and they seem pretty well vindicated at this point. Without the 4-6 & 8 I think we would already live in a police state, and without 1 & 2 I think our courts on those two ideas would look like England, but even more prudish, and that is exactly what the Founders would not have wanted.

      • onyomi says:

        To be fair, I think BBA’s post reflects an awareness of the possibility that the impulse that says “doing something,” even if it may be a bad idea, is better than doing nothing at all may be a mistaken impulse.

        Somewhat related, I notice a bipartisan trend, in myself and others, to become conflict theorists more as they get older/spend more time paying attention to politics. I attribute this to getting frustrated at how impossible it is to convince anyone of anything and at seeing all the dirty lowdown tricks the other side is willing to play to get their way and how their base will always turn a blind eye if they think it advances their interests. I saw Jon Stewart go through this during his tenure at the Daily Show, as just one example.

        This is related to BBA’s post in the sense that I think that anyone who watches politics long enough will almost by definition start to feel extremely frustrated and being in a frustrated mindset makes you more willing to “try something, anything,” or believe ends justifies means, etc., I’d guess.

        • souleater says:

          To be fair, I think BBA’s post reflects an awareness of the possibility that the impulse that says “doing something,” even if it may be a bad idea, is better than doing nothing at all may be a mistaken impulse.

          I agree with this, but as BBA themself mentioned, they’re our token leftist. which I think we can all agree makes them a very valuable resource/perspective. I think we should be extra careful to avoid making our most valuable voices feel demeaned or talked down to.

          Somewhat related, I notice a bipartisan trend, in myself and others, to become conflict theorists more as they get older/spend more time paying attention to politics. I attribute this to getting frustrated at how impossible it is to convince anyone of anything and at seeing all the dirty lowdown tricks the other side is willing to play to get their way and how their base will always turn a blind eye if they think it advances their interests.

          I don’t have anything to add to this, but I thought it was very insightful, and deserves a top level post. The fundamental change in conservative principles since trump arrived makes me wonder if we ever had any principles at all. I know for myself my options were to join team “own the libtards“, or embrace political nihilism.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            I know for myself my options were to join team “own the libtards“, or embrace political nihilism.

            See, I feel like this is an error in the same category as “we must do something; this is something; we must do this” – there’s always options. In politics, only a Sith deals in dichotomies.

            You may not have a lot of allies taking a more principled position, but you can still take it.

          • souleater says:

            Well, sure.

            I do (try to) take a principled position, but I’m also more mindful that individuals don’t control the flow of countries. and that America’s long term success or failure is out of my hands. I try not to worry about it, any more than I worry about the heat death of the universe.

        • BBA says:

          You hit the nail on the head there.

          And I think this is Kendi’s way of throwing his hands up and admitting he doesn’t have the answer either. “Just make me dictator, that’ll fix it!” I’m not sure if he recognizes that his proposal is tantamount to making himself dictator or just thinks it’s the logical conclusion of his premises. I just think it’s interesting that this is what the dictatorship he imagines himself running looks like. (Clearly the rest of the comments section does not, they’re more interested in psychoanalyzing me… folks, I already have a therapist, I don’t need any more.)

    • Yair says:

      For a clear, short, and comprehensive summary of the Ukraine thing check this.

      For podcast to keep up to date with the main news maybe The Daily by the NYT or Today Explained by Vox.

    • “This is a pattern I find myself facing on a lot of issues: there’s a plan that will cause a lot of discomfort and probably won’t work, but every other option certainly won’t work, so might as well go with the plan, right?”

      This sounds like action bias. It explains a lot of human behavior, why people shrug at evidence that anti-poverty programs or education subsidies or medicine or anti-terrorism efforts are wasteful and ineffective. You have to “do something” to combat poverty or fight terrorism or save the life of your elderly relative, in order to prove that you care about the issue.

    • John Schilling says:

      This is a pattern I find myself facing on a lot of issues: there’s a plan that will cause a lot of discomfort and probably won’t work, but every other option certainly won’t work, so might as well go with the plan, right?

      Thus consuming resources that might have been spent in some more productive endeavor, even if it addresses a problem other than this one. And destroying your credibility. And making potential allies not want to stand anywhere near you. And hurting innocent people. And making the people who care more about the innocent people you are actually hurting than the innocent people you are failing to help, want to retaliate.

      Better to do nothing, than to do worse than nothing just because it is something.

    • BBA says:

      I’m sure if you’ll ask Kendi, he’d say it’ll never be solved, and that’s why we’ll always need his permanent supra-governmental bureaucracy to root out and punish ever more subtle and insidious forms of racism as they are discovered. (Or more cynically, to ensure permanent full employment for him and his colleagues.)

      • Aapje says:

        @BBA

        What if Kendi’s definition of racism results in a rise in one form of racism if you stomp out another & vice versa, as I think it will?

        In that case, racism won’t become ever more subtle and insidious if you try to stomp it out.

        • Clutzy says:

          I concur. It seems to me that if we accept his premesis, the best we can hope for is a see saw of oppression that tilts back and forth from group to group.

    • I was arguing with some of my Lefty friends about it and one said that in the antiracist vision, people would still notice someone’s race, but would not use it to draw any inferences about their behavior, just as people note, but do not draw inferences from, hair or eye color today . I asked if this was not a call to eliminate Black and other minority cultures. He said that no, culture could remain, but there would be no stereotypes. I asked him to name a single cultural group where there were no stereotypes about said group; he couldn’t think of any.

      You might be thinking that by engaging in hypotheticals such as these I’m missing the “real concerns” about racism such as economic disparities or police shootings and that no one would much care about residual cultural stereotypes if equality in these areas was achieved. But look at the example of Asian-Americans, even the positive stereotypes are said to be harmful. The antiracists want to preserve Asian culture, encourage Asian identity, but don’t want non-Asians to have any stereotypes about them.

      • Aapje says:

        You’d still have inequality of outcomes with different cultures, so this would still be a racist outcome according to Kendi and BBA.

      • Leafhopper says:

        My (admittedly very cynical) interpretation of the antiracist position is that they want to preserve cultural differences between different races, and they realize that this will inevitably perpetuate certain stereotypes, but they want to severely censor the language we use to talk about these stereotypes in order to “protect” nonwhite groups.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Not just the language. Actually completely reconstruct government and society so whatever the differences between different races, they do not provide any observable disadvantage to non-white races. That’s the implication of “would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold” (though I admit the idea that it would be OK for whites to get the short end is my assumption; I think it is safe given recent history)

          He also proposes literal thoughtcrimes, at least that apply to public officials.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          I have, very carefully, asked a few anti-racists/SJWs whether they’ve ever been in a social group which satisfied their standards, and the answer was always no.

      • aristides says:

        Hair color is an interesting comparison, because there are stereotypes about hair color. There are dumb blonde, serious brunettes, and sexy redheads. It’s currently more socially acceptable to joke about this than race. However, even without stereotypes, I don’t know anyone who intentionally discriminates based on hair color, with dating being the exception. It’s not like you wouldn’t hire someone because they are blonde and all blondes are dumb. I think that’s the best we can hope for with race, short of getting enough mixed children that racial categories become meaningless

        • acymetric says:

          It’s not like you wouldn’t hire someone because they are blonde and all blondes are dumb.

          I think you are probably a little too confident in this. Not saying it is some widespread problem (and it is true that I wouldn’t make personnel decisions that way, and probably neither would you or most people on this blog), but it is almost certainly a thing that happens.

        • axiomsofdominion says:

          This falls short as a comparison because there aren’t cultural differences between different hair colors in America. African Americans are culturally distinct so you can’t avoid making assumptions about them.

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      It’s a bit reminiscent of the Iranian religious authorities and their powers over the country’s “elected” government.

      It’s much more than a bit reminiscent of the USSR with the Party watching every move of every official to make sure they stay “ideologically correct”.

    • blipnickels says:

      This is a pattern I find myself facing on a lot of issues: there’s a plan that will cause a lot of discomfort and probably won’t work, but every other option certainly won’t work, so might as well go with the plan, right?

      My apologies if this comes off as overly hostile.

      Why are you so certain the conservative solution wouldn’t work? Why would you never consider focusing on the black family, Moynihan Report, etc?

      Because if you tried a bunch of different policies and they’ve all failed and now you’re reduced to this “DOA” thing that you don’t even think would work and certainly would never get passed, is the conservative plan really that bad in your eyes, so completely without merit, that you won’t consider it? Especially since the implementation of such a “bipartisan” policy would be trivial compared to any other “solution” to racism.

      I don’t want to argue this right or wrong, I just want to understand why, in your mind or the left’s mind, the conservative solution will not be considered even as a last resort in desperation.

      • DinoNerd says:

        What is The conservative solution? I’d have thought that right wing people collectively favour many different things, often mutually incompatible – just as left wing people do.

        • Clutzy says:

          The conservative solution is to do very little. The right wing solution is to do a lot, but in a different direction than leftists.

          Basically, you would say conservative would be Mitt Romney, while right wing would be Ted Cruz.

      • Jesse E says:

        The Moynihan Report, as much as it’s been hailed by social conservatives in years afterward, also supported massive welfare programs for African Americans (and everyone else) and full employment. After all, Moynihan opposed Clinton’s larger welfare reforms during the mid-90’s.

        • Randy M says:

          “supported full employment”
          Is there anyone at large (rationalist utopians possibly withstanding) that doesn’t support full employment?

          • JPNunez says:

            I don’t think anybody has really argued against full employment, the problem is that sometimes people accept a p high natural rate of unemployment, like 5% o something, which is probably too much in most of today’s economies. Of course Central Banks don’t normally say so but when they rise interest rates they are accepting some extra unemployment to curb some inflation. Of course they also think this unemployment will be temporal (as they believe the Phillips curve only holds in short terms) so it’s fine for them.

    • Murphy says:

      As someone who’s fairly left….

      That seems a tad worrying as an idea. I mean in principle a body with tightly enough tied hands could have some value if “racism” was basically limited to “serious threat of impending genocide of an unpopular minority”

      But if it was based on the twitter definition of racism whereby everything and everyone is always racist all of the time… it basically sounds like a body that’s EY’s “negative dictator”

      https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1175460656897675264

      Also, if it applies to itself then it sounds like a body that would be eternally riven by internal strife until the most ruthless individuals take it over with a reign of terror.

      Because no matter what, no matter what there are always 2 or more reasonable-sounding ways to interpert data where at least one will be able to classify the observation as racist.

      It’s like the probation thing from a while back. On a measure of whether it treated black and white prisoners with the same record the same it did basically perfectly. On the measure of whether it was accurate to relality in it’s forecasts it did extremely well. But people kept publishing statements about it claiming it was racist because a disprotportionate number of the black prisoners it blindly assessed had longer criminal records.

      And if they somehow “fixed” that then it would, by the nature of numbers, mean it failing under the other 2 views.

      Hence it could always be classified as racist no matter what.

      And the same applies to all of reality and the entirity of human civilisation because there’s always a way of getting the result you want if you p-hack enough.

      Hell, it’s easy enough to rile up a crowd with cries of “-ism” based on litterally nothing.

      Reddit went crazy a while back over that “no girls born in 127 indian villiages” bullshit. Simply because it’s easy to rile up a crowd by simply stating true facts without mentioning relevant details like “and no boys born in 120 villiages, gender ratio actually pretty much matching, most villiages so small only one birth recorded”

      • gbdub says:

        “And if they somehow “fixed” that then it would, by the nature of numbers, mean it failing under the other 2 views.

        Hence it could always be classified as racist no matter what”

        I agree! The “antiracist” solution to this seems to be to formally declare that negative racial bias directed toward certain racial groups is not “racism” per se, because “racism requires power and oppression” (which expands to a bailey of “people of color can’t be racist”). Or to equivalently but more euphemistically label positive racial bias “affirmative action”.

        That neatly solves the biased AI issue – putting a hand on the scale to make the black and white populations have equivalent outcomes despite distinct histories is the correct “antiracist” solution. It can’t be racist, because it helps people of color.

        I’m very very scared of entrenching a powerful bureaucracy with that mandate and way of thinking and giving them actual power (they do enough mischief in the academy) but that seems to be the logic they apply to get out of the paradox you note.

    • EchoChaos says:

      every other option certainly won’t work

      What do you think the other options are?

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      For now, representation at least as good as proportional to population in all prestigious domains, and representation at no greater than proportional to population in all anti-prestigious domains.

      In the former case we mean everything ranging from HS graduation rates, test scores, college attendance [elite and down], STEM employment, doctor employment, academic employment, income, life expectancy, perceived happiness, perceived positive social interactions, and so on.

      In the latter case we mean things like traffic violations, incarcerations, fatal counters with polite, homicide victims, etc.

      A bureuacracy with the power to merely veto laws wouldn’t be capable of achieving this, I imagine.
      ____________

      I say ‘for now’ because, well, the goal posts can be shifted, although what i just described is already ambitious to say the least.

      • John Schilling says:

        “At least as good” and “all”, make this in fact a demand for Persons of Color to hold a superior position in society. And that’s the goal “for now”.

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          make this in fact a demand for Persons of Color to hold a superior position in society

          I thought that this was obvious since affirmative action.

        • RalMirrorAd says:

          Yes. I’m going by how gender gaps work, under representation in STEM is an issue but over-representation in psychology is not. Once Gap X has been closed you move to the next gap but if you overshoot your target it’s not a big deal.

          It’s also a matter of mentality. Activists are by nature in the business of making demands, they’re not well suited to embody beneficence.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          @RalMirrorAd-

          Yes.

          Is that your assessment of what a capital-A-Antiracist would accept? Or is it your own criterion?

          If the former, I think you are being unfair to the capital-A-Antiracist.

          If the latter, then wow, I’m totally wrong, and I thank you for your frankness.

        • RalMirrorAd says:

          @DoctorMist

          I don’t consider it uncharitable or unfair. The objective of Affirmative action and Equal Opportunity employment is essentially representative gap closing. Prison Reform / BLM is essentially closing the gap in the other direction as it relates to the criminal justice system. Forced busing [which some people have recently come back to proposing] tries to equalize the geographic representation of minorities in schools [and possibly also academic performance]

          Maybe I’ve described it in a way that sounds so unrealistic or unattainable that it comes across as insulting. I could adjust and say ‘All domains *on average*’ since an unbiased randomness would make absolute parity impossible.

          ________

          Also i apologize for accidentially double-posting my original comment.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          RalMirrorAd-

          I still think it’s something of a strawman, but I’m relieved that’s what it was.

          I think the capital-A-Antiracist we are imagining has never formed that clear an idea of the consequences — more of a vague “Imagine all the people, living life in peace” — and if you described your endpoint to him, he would not only deny it to you but would deny it in his heart.

          But maybe we are just imagining different capital-A-Antiracists.

        • RalMirrorAd says:

          @DoctorMist

          The rhetoric thrown at whites by the strongest anti-racists strikes me as far too confrontational for it to merely be a matter of ‘let’s just get along’ — and again i think the emphasis on representation is evidenced by the laws and policies we observe in practice.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          @RalMirrorAd-

          Fair enough. For the capital-A-Antiracist I’m imagining, that stuff is the necessary if regrettable action that must be taken to get us to the end state — the means rather than the end. You are completely correct that there is a step missing between the former and the latter. When there is a choice between a concrete means and a vague end, the means usually has more saliency.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          As I understand the harsher anti-racists (and I’ll leave it to others to decide how typical they are), they don’t care what happens to white people. This isn’t mind-reading on my part, this is what they say.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Which rather gives lie to the “anti-” part of “anti-racist”.

        • albatross11 says:

          I think this is a common mode of thinking for activists. An activist naturally talks (and sometimes thinks) as though his issue is the only one in the world that matters. In some sense, you can think of this as a negotiation, and activist are usually trying to make the “first offer” pretty extreme so they can be negotiated down to something acceptable to them by the end. It’s a lot harder to be convincing and to make stirring rhetoric if you’re openly discussing tradeoffs. “We must stop global warming at all costs” is easier to say than “We must set the CO2 taxes based on balancing between economic hardship and getting closer to our CO2 emissions targets.”

          I think you can see this with many of the loudest advocates of #MeToo–often they’ll say stuff like “men should be afraid every time they have sex with a woman” or “wrecking the careers of a few innocent men is well worth it to address this issue.” These comments are hard to swallow as a policy, but they make total sense as a statement from an activist who wants to ignore or minimize any unpleasant tradeoffs being made.

          By contrast, people trying to actually govern or negotiate a law have to think about tradeoffs all the time. But it’s a lot less fun to justify your tradeoffs than to make stirring speeches about how X is the only thing that matters and only the villains and wreckers of the other side are keeping us from X.

          When a large chunk of the media and public get into moral panic mode about some issue, then the decisionmakers tend to discard worrying about tradeoffs in favor of being seen to take decisive action about the panic of the day. This usually works out pretty badly. We’re currently doing this short-term about vaping (so we’ll probably make vaping harder and more expensive and less fun, and maybe drive some people back to smoking instead) and long-term about opioids (so expect lots of chronic pain patients to commit suicide over the next decade or so). Many of these moral-panic policies never go away–we still have the TSA and heavy sentences for crack distribution.

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      For now, representation at least as good as proportional to population in all prestigious domains, and representation at no greater than proportional to population in all anti-prestigious domains.

      In the former case we mean everything ranging from HS graduation rates, test scores, college attendance [elite and down], STEM employment, doctor employment, academic employment, income, life expectancy, perceived happiness, perceived positive social interactions, and so on.

      In the latter case we mean things like traffic violations, incarcerations, fatal counters with polite, homicide victims, etc.

      A bureuacracy with the power to merely veto laws wouldn’t be capable of achieving this, I imagine.
      ____________

      I say ‘for now’ because, well, the goal posts can be shifted, although what i just described is already ambitious to say the least.

    • Aftagley says:

      From Kendi’s propsal:

      The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas.

      Wait, what? A single government agency responsible for pre-clearing every action undertaken by the entire rest of government? From county zoning boards up through the president? Noble aims aside, people know this is not feasible, right? There literally aren’t enough trained racial scholars in the world to take on that kind of responsibility.

      The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

      Ok, so the DOA reviews everything done by the rest of the government AND has the power to punish people they think are committing thoughtcrime. The members of the DOA are also unelected and therefore unaccountable to voters. His policy is essentially “give up being a democracy in favor of a race-influenced oligarchy.”

      This is clearly non serious policy. Politico shouldn’t have published it, and if Kendi advocates for it, people should push back on him. IMO this reminds me why BLM failed as a movement, they didn’t unite behind serious, actionable political goals.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        It looks a little less singular if you browse some of the other articles Politico published along with it.

        • Aftagley says:

          Hmm, looks like you’re correct. I did a random sampling of around 20 other proposals and they all seemed to be either the kind vague, pie in the sky claims you’d hear from a 17 year old leaving his first civics course OR detailed, but completely unworkable.

          I’ll adjust my overall opinion of Politico down slightly. This entire collection was clearly clickbait.

    • lvlln says:

      When I was reading this article yesterday, I was in disbelief, thinking that this looks exactly like what a right-winger would write as a left-wing false flag in order to discredit our side as being kooks with a hard-on for authoritarianism and a loose grasp on reality. The explicit use of “DOA” as the acronym of a department that this amendment would create made me lean more in that direction. But everything I’ve read about the author Kendi tells me that he’s being completely serious and unironic on this (and everything I’ve read about Politico indicates that they wouldn’t fraudulently attach his name to this essay), akin to if Jonathan Swift had a long history of supporting cannibalism before his modest proposal.

      As it is now, I still find it difficult not to consider this a Poe, because it so perfectly fits the right-wing stereotype of left-wingers that all the evidence showing me that it’s a genuine article is only just enough to match my sheer incredulity of a real left-winger writing this.

      I really hope there’s a “gotcha!” post coming later from Politico laughing at us for falling for this parody which they telegraphed with that DOA acronym. I wouldn’t bet on it, though, and that depresses me.

      • Faza (TCM) says:

        Experience with Polish politics has caused me to essentially throw Poe out the window; yes, people advocate for crazy and/or horrifying things with all seriousness, all of the time.

        Having any sort of success with such proposals is a different matter, however, which is why I find looking at where the voices of support are coming from to be much more important.

        Also, while on the subject of outlandish political proposals: “if someone tells you he’s gonna kill you, believe him” are words to live by. Literally.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          yes, people advocate for crazy and/or horrifying things with all seriousness, all of the time.

          Well of course, there are 7 billion people in the world, some are gonna be crazy.

          I haven’t read the underlying article, but based on what others have said, it sounds like the author is one of those crazies. To me the issue is to ask what kind of gate keeper is Politico. I do think of it as a serious site. Maybe I shouldn’t, when it publishes stuff for clicks instead of seriousness..

    • eightieshair says:

      staffed by like-minded scholars and fully independent of the elected branches of the government, with the power to veto any governmental policy or censure any public official

      It’s been striking how quickly antidemocratic sentiment has taken hold on the left since the 2016 election. Apparently people are so frustrated by the loss to Trump that they’ve retreated into fantasies of omnipotence and some imaginary future where politics won’t involve the troublesome business of convincing people to vote for you.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        It’s been striking how quickly antidemocratic sentiment has taken hold on the left since the 2016 election.

        What’s the phrase?

        “Projection like an IMAX”

      • lvlln says:

        I recall around 2014 noticing how the same people who mocked and criticized George W. Bush for saying “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” were explicitly condoning that exact same line just with “terrorists” replaced with another context-dependent boo-word.

        Now I’m reminded of his famous “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier… …just so long as I’m the dictator” line.

      • cassander says:

        I believe the term is the Awokening and you can start seeing attitudes shift before 2016. The anti-democratic attitudes seem to be part and parcel of the increased stridency and salience of these issues combined with the craziness that always comes with being out of power.

        I’m pretty sure the term awokening was coined by the right I’ve seen people on the left use it unabashedly.

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        In general people are not indifferent to the outcome of an election and will say that something is or isn’t democratic if it results in outcomes they oppose. Sort of like Imperial Germany invading neutral belgium and using poison gas but then complaining about American Shotguns and claiming they were stabbed in the back; a very biased conception of what is and isn’t fair in a conflict.

        If you’re a hillary supporter you’ll point out that she won the popular vote. So any method of exercising political power that resists the will of the current elected president and imposes the kind of policies. Your conception of a fair democracy [since democracy is by definition fair] doesn’t involve the electoral college or gerrymandering. If you take things like climate change or refugees as seriously as is often demonstrated, the enemy camp has end goals that are so odious that one wouldn’t be too upset if ‘democracy’ was suspended to prevent them.

        If you’re a trump supporter you imagine yourself surrounded by a couple billion people who would, if given the chance, humiliate and disposess you. Your conception of a fair democracy [since democracy is by definition fair] doesn’t involve relying on imported voters. So the enemy camp consists of cheaters who have end-goals so odious and undesirable that one wouldn’t be too upset if ‘democracy’ itself was suspended or abolished to prevent them.

        The intensity-of-belief component is somewhat separate, and the shift in rhetoric began after ’13.

    • Viliam says:

      Well, seems like you disagree with an idea, and everyone else disagrees with it, too. Proposal “make me the philosopher-king that will rule above the elected government” is a very obvious attempt to grab unlimited power. And yes, these attempts are usually accompanied by a promise to solve some big problem (racism, trains being late, etc.).

      From my perspective, the problem with ending racism is that even the people who want to end racism don’t agree on what should be the final outcome. (Therefore, even people who want essentially the same thing, are unable to cooperate.) For some of them, “colorblindness” is the obvious desired state. For others, it is a system of quotas, supervised by people sending the correct political signals. These two things obviously cannot coexist together; you can’t ignore a trait as irrelevant, and at the same time obsess about it all the time.

      I suppose that in SSC crowd the colorblind solution will be preferable, because it is more logically consistent. — If you start making quotas, where would you stop? You would need quotas by ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, what else? Who will define what ethnicities / genders / sexual orientations are there? (Are Irish a separate group deserving their own quota? What about demisexuals?) How will people be sorted into the categories? If it’s all about how you feel, what would prevent all kinds of fraud, in order to get/keep a job or a government position? Do we also need quotas for left-handed people, or people on autistic spectrum? (Psychopaths? Pedophiles?) The decision to make quotas for some, and deny them to others, is itself a potentially controversial political decision. Thus the system would grow in complexity without limits. — Saying instead that people should be treated equally by literally treating them equally, solves all these problems. Except for the problem of how to get from “here” to “there”, of course.

      Another problem is the expanding definition of “racism”. Originally it seemed to refer to biology, but (presumably because biology is just a social construct) now it also refers to culture, which is the opposite. Now saying “regardless of their color of skin, people can be either nice or nasty, hardworking or lazy” is not enough, but rather it became problematic, because who am I to make the value judgment that niceness is better than nastiness?

      etc.

      I suppose the problem is that we allowed crazy people to give us crazy definitions of racism, and then of course the problem became even more difficult to solve. Now it’s not enough to find good people willing to do the good thing, because their energy will be wasted on doing stupid things.

    • AG says:

      The content of this post seems to have thrown most of the replies here off a little bit, but I think that the solution is much the same as your previous threads expressing hopelessness: get way less Online.

      Take a step back in your social group to observe the actual lives of your POC friends and acquaintances. Notice that, for your class, and a good margin on either side, racism is actually all but negligible in the day-to-day. And if it isn’t negligible, then work on that first. Make your garden grow. Your POC friends and acquaintances’ lives will be better off for their local surrounding improving, even if that doesn’t topple an ephemeral broader institution. And you’ll be happier, because the people around you will be happier.

      Then, if you still need to Do Something, find an Effective charity that has forgone ultimate Effectiveness to focus on the plight of the American poor. Antiracism will be materialist or it will be bullshit.

    • albatross11 says:

      BBA said (among many other things):

      This is a pattern I find myself facing on a lot of issues: there’s a plan that will cause a lot of discomfort and probably won’t work, but every other option certainly won’t work, so might as well go with the plan, right? I guess there are other possibilities – maybe the status quo isn’t so bad or maybe I should change my goal to something achievable. But isn’t this just being greedy, trying to spare myself the discomfort?

      It seems like another good option would be to try to come up with a workable plan. Doing nothing and doing something utterly ineffectual will have the same effect on the world, right?

      I mean, if someone proposes addressing global warming by banning the use of fossil fuels 100% next week, they’re not going to have any impact at all on global warming, and joining their movement won’t help anything. A movement of people demanding that stuff is wasting their time and breath, whereas there are plausible things we could do to address AGW (build nuclear plants and phase out coal power, impose a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, put significant resources into sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere, etc.).

      These proposals seem about as politically impossible (and nearly as disastrous, in terms of actual impact if they were enacted) as banning fossil fuels overnight.

      Sometimes, it works to make an extreme demand up front to force the other side to make concessions. But other times, you just convince the other side you’re nuts, and there’s no point trying to negotiate with you.

    • Eponymous says:

      I do agree with Kendi’s assessment of America as fundamentally racist

      What do you mean by “fundamentally” here? If anything I might argue the opposite, given our founding principles.

      and with his consequentialist views of what constitutes racism.

      What “consequentialist” view is this? Sorry, I’m confused. Do you mean his claim that inequality of outcome is prima facie evidence of racism?

      This is a pattern I find myself facing on a lot of issues: there’s a plan that will cause a lot of discomfort and probably won’t work, but every other option certainly won’t work, so might as well go with the plan, right? I guess there are other possibilities – maybe the status quo isn’t so bad or maybe I should change my goal to something achievable. But isn’t this just being greedy, trying to spare myself the discomfort?

      This take seems strange to me, and strangely defeatist. As far as I can tell, recent history is one of great success in reducing racism. Focusing on the case of black Americans, we’ve gone from slavery to Jim Crow to equality before the law; there has been a huge reduction in racist attitudes as measured by surveys; there are many blacks succeeding in public life — a recent president, many people on TV, etc.

      So maybe the path forward should be to keep doing what we’ve been doing, since it’s working? (But I guess you would dispute that it’s not working, maybe in line with your “racism is fundamental” view above that I don’t understand?)

      • blipnickels says:

        This take seems strange to me, and strangely defeatist. As far as I can tell, recent history is one of great success in reducing racism. Focusing on the case of black Americans, we’ve gone from slavery to Jim Crow to equality before the law; there has been a huge reduction in racist attitudes as measured by surveys; there are many blacks succeeding in public life — a recent president, many people on TV, etc.

        I think the argument revolves around the continued impoverishment of African Americans. In terms of income, debt/savings/assets, population in prison, etc, African Americans still lag far behind other groups. All the legal changes you point to have not significantly improved this situation. The daily life of many African Americans, it terms of poverty, safety, etc are still bad despite all the legal changes you point to.

        It’s worth contrasting the Wire and the election of Obama. At the same time the legal and political emancipation of African Americans reached its zenith, the election of Obama, the most popular “intelligentsia” show revolved around an African American population entrenched in drugs, poverty, and violence. It’s difficult to argue that after ~50 years of legal/political liberation without any socioeconomic equalization that further legal/political liberation will suddenly lead to socioeconomic equalization, especially since there isn’t much legal/political liberation left.

        • albatross11 says:

          There’s a whole big set of outcomes which we can measure or observe, and on most of them, blacks are statistically doing worse than whites.

          ISTM that for a lot of people, “racism” is that which causes those worse outcomes. ISTM that the definition of racism gets stretched and compressed as needed to fit that role. Some of those different outcomes might fit something like what most normal people mean by racism–for example, if the police rough blacks up more often than they rough nonblacks up. Others can sort-of be explained by historical racism (though often that’s a stretch and requires a lot of selective reading of the evidence)–an example would be the wealth gap.

          But a lot of those outcome differences just can’t plausibly be attributed to anything that any normal person would think of as racism. The large number of black murder victims (about 90% murdered by other blacks) is pretty hard to attribute to racism of any kind. The large number of black kids growing up with no dad in the picture is even harder to attribute to racism in any sense most people would recognize the term. Black kids do worse in school than white kids, even in schools where the teachers and administrators are mostly black–once again, this gets explained by some kind of racism, but it’s very hard to see how that makes any sense.

          For each of these, you can spin up complicated explanations for how it’s all some kind of racism, how the evils of white racism transferred through the deeply racist culture is somehow making the black murderer pull the trigger on the black victim, or making the black dad abandon his black kid. But those explanations seem like a huge stretch to me.

          I don’t think governmental policies of the kind we could plausibly enact will do anything for this stuff. A lot of the differences in outcomes are rooted in statistically different choices and values and inclinations, and are mostly outside the reach of laws to fix. Some are probably rooted in biological differences, or deep-seated cultural differences, and are similarly outside the reach of the laws.

          The most painful thing about all this rhetoric is that it can’t solve most of the problem that its advocates want solved. I imagine that also encourages ever-more-extreme demands. It’s like some group of people convinced that some terrible plague is being caused by some kind of curse, rather than by a virus. Every measure that should remove the curse (prayers, sacrifices, rituals, witch burnings) fails, because the cause of the plague is a virus, not a curse. It’s natural for people who think it’s somehow a curse to demand *even more* measures against the horrible curse that’s causing the plague, even though it won’t do a damned thing to help.

        • John Schilling says:

          There’s a whole big set of outcomes which we can measure or observe, and on most of them, blacks are statistically doing worse than whites.

          Right. Now get back to me when you can measure happiness. And when you can distinguish between worse outcomes caused by racism and worse outcomes caused by not-racism.

          Otherwise, culture matters. Culture can be dysfunctional in ways that result in globally worse outcomes. Culture can also make trades between outcomes that are better in some respects and worse in others, and it doesn’t always chose the measurable outcomes to be better at.

          Plausibly, “Don’t be a Wage Slave to the Man, with his Rule and his Schedules”, results in reduced material wealth but increased happiness. Very plausibly it results in increased happiness normalized to wealth. Same with, e.g., nepotism and tribalism.

          So if you’re going to attribute deficits in the measurable outcomes to racism, while defining “racism” as a thing to be fought until it doesn’t exist any more, then you are implicitly demanding cross-cultural leveling of (just) the measurable outcomes. And the only rational response to that, if it’s going to happen, is for every culture to seek every possible adaptation for increasing happiness at the expense of wealth, and not even bother fixing the absolutely-dysfunctional, reduce-wealth-for-no benefit cultural adaptations. Repeat until everyone is as happy as they can be given that they are all desperately poor. Ditto for all the other measurable outcomes that sometimes trade against happiness.

          Or until people decide to stop doing that any more, and along the way stop listening to people who cry “racism”.

          • mtl1882 says:

            Culture can also make trades between outcomes that are better in some respects and worse in others, and it doesn’t always chose the measurable outcomes to be better at.

            Plausibly, “Don’t be a Wage Slave to the Man, with his Rule and his Schedules”, results in reduced material wealth but increased happiness. Very plausibly it results in increased happiness normalized to wealth. Same with, e.g., nepotism and tribalism.

            Exactly. I’ve noticed the certainty with which the term “dysfunctional” is applied to an ever-larger group of people, without qualification. Quite often, functional is being used to mean “orderly” and in specific ways, within certain current systems. Such an approach can easily become dysfunctional with a change in circumstances, even a minor one. In any case, there are always tradeoffs going on, optimizing for one thing and not another. A lot of these things seem a lot less dysfunctional if you go back in time even a little bit. And there is definitely way too much equating wealth and happiness–wealth matters, but it isn’t linear, and relates to expectations. There is a lot to be said for living a rougher life, but one in which you don’t have to agonize and plan and weigh options all the time. The same thing happens with declaring most human personalities as dysfunctional because they wouldn’t be successful giving power-point presentations. Something doesn’t have to be appealing and totally stable to be functional. And in cases where a culture developed in an oppressed, manipulative, or just in any way not-stable/organized situation, a rush to follow the explicitly stated, step-by-step rules in pursuit of reward is pretty likely to be a dysfunctional behavior. It is largely an issue of trust. I’m not saying it is wrong to point out or address dysfunctional behavior, but so many people seem to view it as stubborn irrationality, and I usually see that as far from the case. A refusal to jump through hoops can be very functional outside of a hoop-jumping competition, and an obsession with it can become very dysfunctional depending on the system.

          • albatross11 says:

            mtl1882:

            I’m on board with accepting different choices and preferences, probably more so than most people. (Were it up to me, every drug in the pharmacy except possibly the more potent antibiotics would be available without a prescription.) I’ll note, though, that explaining differences in outcomes as a result of statistically different preferences doesn’t always go well–think of James Damore. It certainly would not be very convincing or satisfying to the antiracism movement in the US.

            And despite my support for individual liberty and cultural diversity, some element in your culture that makes its members commit murder at 7x the rate of everyone else seems kinda broken to me. Similarly, some element in your culture that makes its members inclined to have kids without a dad in their lives/abandon their kids–that just seems like a bad thing that makes your culture and its members and neighbors worse off.

          • albatross11 says:

            I agree you can be misled by only looking at metrics, but I also think that overall, blacks are doing worse than whites in the US. I don’t think this is remotely a matter of people happily making different choices and living a life that’s more rewarding to them. I think you can explain much of the male/female gap in jobs and income that way, but not all that much of the black/white gap in jobs and income.

            I do think this is often a matter of blacks statistically making worse choices, particularly w.r.t. crime and unwed motherhood. But this isn’t people making choices that are better for them given their values, it’s people making bad choices that screw up their lives and many other peoples’ lives.

          • Lambert says:

            Is this another of those times when america pretends class doesn’t exist then tries to make sense of things that are heavily tied up with socioeconomic status?

            To what extent are these things driven by African Americans tending to be working class urbanites?

          • mtl1882 says:

            @albatross11

            I’ll note, though, that explaining differences in outcomes as a result of statistically different preferences doesn’t always go well

            Yeah, I understand that the struggles facing different communities will become a topic of discussion, and efforts to modify conditions will be made. This will inevitably raise questions of culture, and result in judgments being applied. The conversation, when applied to issues like race or gender, often gets ugly, quick. While I don’t expect most people to do much nuanced thinking, my point is that I think we often miss the point in our desire to moralize about obvious issues. This is hard to avoid, but it saddens me that legitimate debates get twisted into simplistic blame games.

            It is reasonable to say that cultural change is needed in many situations, some of them being uncontroversial ones referring to niche or professional cultures–actually, I still dislike that wording, because the question is why is it needed–relative to what? There is never a permanent “right way,” even from a common sense view (“get married” or “get a college education” looks unobjectionable as a standard, but we’re really getting into *class* here, as Lambert brought up–which is its own sort of culture, really, but is a small slice of people that may have different needs and options and as a model is simply unfeasible).

            Rather, it is reasonable to say, in many situations, that cultural change is advisable to align with the current society’s conventional “success path.” It is fine to make “judgments” along those lines. But if you want to understand what is going on, whether you want to assist or simply leave it to the community to figure out, you have to look at why those behaviors developed and control for the dynamic, not the surface level behavior. The dynamic causing it may not be what causes it in your own culture, and so “fixing” it may not fix as much as you think. There are also trade-offs that are good to be aware of, not just a “duh, get with the program!” I’m not saying you should never question anything or point out reality–but that you need to actually look at the reality. And this goes beyond socioeconomic things to other types of cultures–even when there is no real controversy, there is a lot of ignorance. And, one should always be aware that maybe the conventional success path is not the only or best one. I’m just saying people should take the time to assess the situation, and not end up in too narrow a conception of possibility or in an attitude of pure condescension.

            And despite my support for individual liberty and cultural diversity, some element in your culture that makes its members commit murder at 7x the rate of everyone else seems kinda broken to me.

            Yes, I mean, that’s a problem, though I think if you are committing murder, say, within a gang context, it is part of a larger dynamic that needs to be addressed, and not just about a culture that maximizes violence. Certain types of violence (as opposed to rather impulsive, random violence like that which arises in high crime/drug areas, which definitely just makes things worse) keep an equilibrium that is functional within the system. It isn’t a sign it is “broken,” necessarily (I think that depends on the type of violence), but it is worth pointing out that there are other systems worth considering if you want to decrease violence. The problem is that there have to be opportunities to take the place of the gang’s function. Just dropping the violence part will probably only destabilize the community by prolonging disputes. It’s hard to transition. People end up giving “learn to code!” type commands, and that just isn’t how it works.

        • sharper13 says:

          When during the last century did African-American outcomes stop improving faster than the population as a whole and instead turn negative on those measurements you probably care about?

          There was a turning point. Pinpoint it and then consider if you’re willing to reverse the events which caused it. Blacks in America once improved on their family stability and educational measurements faster than others did.

          (Yes, I’m deliberately not specifying what the details are, because you might decide to reject the view out of hand, without even considering it. If you actually do the research into economic and social indicators and then look for potential cuases, maybe you’ll believe your own research over a random internet commentator. It’s easily found.)

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Most of us have probably been around here long enough to know what you’re referring to, but I wanted to note the elegance of this post.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Lest you think I’ve gone soft on being the token leftie around here, I assure you

      You’re not the only one, but anyways: much appreciated.

    • DinoNerd says:

      I’m pleased to report that this guy (who I had never heard of before) must be well outside the Overton window for most – none of my news sources have produced any reference to this proposal.

    • axiomsofdominion says:

      Man as a leftist this plan is horrifying even as a consideration. Kendi has a lot of issues though so I’m not shocked to see something like this from him.

  16. sty_silver says:

    I don’t consume any real news source these days, and consequently, I’ve only heard about the recent Trump stuff on the side. My question is: is there any good, quick way to read up on what happened? Most news outlets assume that you consume them regularly. Is there any way I can find a good summary of, say, US politics of the past month?

    I’m interested both in answers for the current moment and in general.

    And somewhat separately, I’m also interested in recommendations about how to consume news. Podcast would probably be the preferred medium. I both don’t like to read news that much and have very little tolerance for short information snippets.

    • Aftagley says:

      Lawfare’s timeline of the Ukraine thing is good and detailed, but not quick.

      In general Axios probably has the best overall wordcount efficiency. If you want maximum return on your time investment, I’d read them.

      Monthly summaries, not sure.

      And somewhat separately, I’m also interested in recommendations about how to consume news. Podcast would probably be the preferred medium. I both don’t like to read news that much and have very little tolerance for short information snippets.

      A bunch of new sources do daily 10-15 minute “here’s what you need to know today” podcasts. I listen to NPR Up First which I quite enjoy, it picks the most important stories in the news and gives you around 3-5 minutes of background on them. Then I also read 2-3 newspapers a day, so YMMV.

      • albatross11 says:

        NPR News Now is a five minute podcast updated once per hour that does the headlines. This has no depth at all, but it’s good for catching up on what a reasonably decent news service thinks are the important stories of the day.

        I’m still looking for someone who covers important-instead-of-urgent news. Some podcasts manage something like that, but they’re not so much doing “here are the important things going on you should know about” but rather “here’s some interesting stuff I’d like to talk about.” But Making Sense, Conversations with Tyler, and Econ Talk all seem to do a reasonable job talking about serious stuff that matters in an intelligent way.

        • sty_silver says:

          I’ve seen most Making Sense episodes, and I’ve heard the other two mentioned favorably a couple of times. Time to actually try them out.

    • jgr314 says:

      I’d suggest something like The Week to get a brief summary once a week.

    • John Schilling says:

      I generally use the BBC as my primary news site, as their distance from the American news ecosystem allows for a more comfortably detached style of reporting better suited to my tastes. Among other things, they don’t assume their audience consists of American news junkies. The top story on an issue may be “here’s what happened in the last day or so, we assume you’ve been keeping up”, but it will almost always have a clear link to an overview article in the first page.

      W/re the Trump/Ukraine stuff, here’s their current overview.

    • blipnickels says:

      is there any good, quick way to read up on what happened?

      No, all news is consumed by culture war, down this path lies only madness, and if you read outside accounts, like Xinhua’s reporting, you’ll be hopelessly behind whatever hellscape the current discourse is.

      You should not do this. All the people involved in current events are much worse and more persuasive than you’re currently imagining and they all want you to be angry. There is no upside to this besides temporarily quieting your curiosity and a major risk/cost that you will spend years being very angry about throwing milkshakes and decorating cakes.

      • broblawsky says:

        If people who are informed are angry, couldn’t it be because their well-informed grievances are appropriate?

        • blipnickels says:

          No, in fact it’s incredibly unlikely any of our current grievances, no matter how appropriate, are well-informed.

          The Ukraine…gate(?) is a week old. Not only is 95% of the final information we’ll have not available, we don’t even have proper context yet for what has occurred. Not only do I not know what Giuliani did or did not do in the Ukraine, I haven’t listened to enough conversations between the US president and foreign powers/clients to put that in a proper context. Compare what we knew in the summer of 2016 about Russiagate with what we got in the Mueller report.

          Lot’s of people are angry, I’m certainly angry, but intense emotions and limited knowledge are a really bad combination. And I know that Fox/Vox are pushing that, they’re pushing instant judgment and rage, and I don’t even blame them for it because the media economy is brutal and if they don’t push the worst memes they’ll go out of business.

          • broblawsky says:

            Maybe some issues aren’t that complicated. If a political figure shot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, would you recommend people sit back and not get angry, and wait for further information before demanding justice?

          • Gobbobobble says:

            Maybe some issues aren’t that complicated. If a political figure shot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, would you recommend people sit back and not get angry, and wait for further information before demanding justice?

            I’d at least want to know if it was self-defense

          • broblawsky says:

            Even if it was, it’s an unprecedented action and shock and anger are appropriate.

          • CatCube says:

            @broblawsky

            I think it’s exactly the opposite: “shock and anger” are absolutely inappropriate until you’re in possession of the facts. People haring off into emotional incontinence based on the first reports have caused immense amounts of evil. For example, this is the failure mode that resulted in the literal lynch mobs dragging black people out of jails and to a nearby lamppost without bothering to wait for all of the facts to be laid out at a trial.

          • Randy M says:

            If I can wade in where I’m not needed and find a hair-splitting pedantic middle position, shock is perfectly appropriate upon learning an unlikely fact, but anger should be held at bay until the context is made more clear.

          • Nick says:

            @Randy M
            Correction: that’s not hair-splittingly pedantic, that’s just the reasonable position. And one which I agree with.

          • albatross11 says:

            The point isn’t that anger or fear are never appropriate reactions to current news, the point is that anger and fear and outrage all shut down your brain. And various people/algorithms have discovered that keeping their consumers in an anger/fear/outrage cycle all the time is really good for business. It makes their sites stickier, it keeps attention on them, it drives up usage statistics and ad revenue. But this also means that it’s extra-hard to think clearly about whatever object-level question is being discussed. And it leaves the consumers of these media scared or angry or outraged, and drives them to unhealthy behavior like getting into dumb arguments with friends/coworkers over tribal issues.

        • Murphy says:

          Most of the time people who think they’re informed aren’t particlarly informed.

          You can read dozens of news articles about a story but as long as the reporters are all going for maximum clickbait you can end up missing important key info that would dial down the outrage. Because dialing down the outrage would be boring.

          Actually, would you mind participating in a minor experiment (anyone else welcome to as well) though it will take a little time.

          I’d appreciate if people tried to avoid arguing the specific issue in this subthread. (perhaps start another)

          Could you write out a few guesses before reading the link:

          1: “How outragous was Judge Persky’s choices the Brock Turner case?”

          1-10 where 1 is not at all and 10 is “so-bad-they-should-kick-him-off-the-bench!”

          2: How informed do you consider yourself about the case: 1-10

          3: How well do you believe the media has informed the public about the case: 1-10

          4: How many articles do you think you’ve read about it?

          Now read this, it’ll take a little while.

          https://www.quora.com/In-light-of-the-evidence-was-justice-served-by-recalling-Judge-Persky-for-the-sentence-he-gave-Brock-Turner/answer/Jeremy-Arnold-4

          And if you could now repeat the 1-10 assesment for the outrage-level assesment and how well you think the media has informed people in general about the case.

          • Randy M says:

            1. 4
            2. 1
            3. 2
            4. 0

            Best part of that article were the defense attorney and judges statements regarding the nature of an adversarial trial vs what the victim wants. Good examples of clear reasoning.
            1.2
            2.4
            3.1
            4.1

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            I can’t number anything, and as befits my name I skimmed that Quora answer. My informedness has increased, as has my article skimming.

            I can’t say my opinion is really changed. I had initially a bit of resistance to changing that opinion, but back it up with the following:
            1) The Quora commenter mentions Persky following the probation officers’ recommendations to the letter, but doesn’t mention the prosecution’s recommendations.
            2) “Then note what Emily says in her letter (emphasis mine): “I told the probation officer I do not want Brock to rot away in prison. I did not say he does not deserve to be behind bars.” ”
            – Given that Turner was facing up to 14 years in prison, the definition of “rot away” has a lot of leeway. A year or three wouldn’t meet my personal definition of “rotting away”, and I doubt it would meet Emily’s either.
            3) Comment of a juror: ” “After the guilty verdict I expected that this case would serve as a very strong deterrent to on-campus assaults, but with the ridiculously lenient sentence that Brock Turner received, I am afraid that it makes a mockery of the whole trial and the ability of the justice system to protect victims of assault and rape,” the juror wrote to Persky. “Clearly there are few to no consequences for a rapist even if they are caught in the act of assaulting a defenseless, unconscious person.”

            “It seems to me that you really did not accept the jury’s findings. We were unanimous in our finding of the defendant’s guilt and our verdicts were marginalized based on your own personal opinion,” the letter said. ”
            4) Liberal though I am, I firmly believe that if the courts are going to legally monopolize vengeance, then they must include retribution in their sentencing, or they leave the victims (and those of society invested in the issue) to simmer in their anger.

          • Aftagley says:

            Liberal though I am, I firmly believe that if the courts are going to legally monopolize vengeance, then they must include retribution in their sentencing, or they leave the victims (and those of society invested in the issue) to simmer in their anger.

            Weird, I’ve got the exact opposite reaction – I think that worrying about the victims simmering in anger will only make our system worse. We don’t have a legal system in order to make victims feel better, we have a legal system to uphold a certain vision of society.

          • John Schilling says:

            If you’ve got a bunch of people simmering in anger, and you’re not worried about that, you’re going to be blindsided when they get together in their anger and do something about it. Current examples too obvious to cite.

            If the theory is “we, the right-thinking elite, will decide how criminal justice (or whatever) is to be properly done, and those simmering angry people will have to go along with whatever we say so we shouldn’t compromise out of worry for what they think”, then yeah, that’s how we got the current examples too obvious to cite.

          • Aftagley says:

            If the theory is “we, the right-thinking elite, will decide how criminal justice (or whatever) is to be properly done, and those simmering angry people will have to go along with whatever we say so we shouldn’t compromise out of worry for what they think”, then yeah, that’s how we got the current examples too obvious to cite.

            I’m not advocating for a theory where the faceless elite are running it, I’m advocating for one that won’t be dominated by the angriest person in the room.

            Here’s my theory – everybody as a society comes together now, before any of us are the victims of a crime and think of how we want our justice system to work. We make some standards on how we want it to run, what we think just punishments are and what the outcomes we desire should be. Then we commit to them, commit to them to such a degree that even in your depths of outrage and despair, you can’t push for any exceptions to the system.

            Then again, I’m biased. I have someone in my life who is a judge and deals with literally this issue on a nearly daily basis.

          • John Schilling says:

            I’m advocating for one that won’t be dominated by the angriest person in the room.

            Basically all political systems, especially democratic ones, are dominated by the ensemble of people angry enough to get involved. If you’re advocating something other than that, you need a really good elevator pitch as to why you shouldn’t be dismissed as a fuzzy useless utopian.

            And, angry as some people are about the abuses of a vengeance-focused criminal justice system, crime victims and their families and fellow travellers are angrier still. You’re living in a world where CNN has found it profitable to devote a majority of the airtime on their “Headline News” channel to outrage-promoting True Crime stories. If you manage to win the sort of political victory that for a time frees you of the need to compromise with those people, that will just make them angrier until they can win the sort of victory that means they don’t need to compromise with you.

            Here’s my theory … then we commit to them, commit to them to such a degree that even in your depths of outrage and despair, you can’t push for any exceptions to the system.

            So, either this utopia is not a democracy, or it does not have freedom of speech. Otherwise, yes they damn well can push for exceptions. Really, even if it’s a non-democracy, if it has freedom of speech they can push for exceptions and you’re down to hoping that your antidemocratic measures will keep them in line.

            I’m not feeling terribly optimistic about this theory.

          • Aftagley says:

            If you’re advocating something other than that, you need a really good elevator pitch as to why you shouldn’t be dismissed as a fuzzy useless utopian.

            Sure, I’ll take a crack at it. People are angry and emotional on both sides – victims want maximum punishment. People who care about defendants want minimum punishment; a system dominated on making people feel as good as possible fails because there is not single outcome which makes everyone feel good.

            Can you imagine looking a mother in the eye and telling her that her 17 year-old-son son will be going to jail for the rest of his life? Do you think that mother’s emotional pain is substantially different than the mother of the boy that 17 year old killed?

            There is no outcome in this situation that will not leave one of those two women devastated. There can’t be. Trying to arrange the system to account for their emotional needs will result in a broken, system.

            Instead, like I said, we precommit. Here are the rules, here are the punishments. If you don’t like them, work to change the system and our overall punishment structure; but don’t push for specific exemptions to the system just because its suddenly gotten real for you.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Aftagley

            Do you think that mother’s emotional pain is substantially different than the mother of the boy that 17 year old killed?

            I am registering a vote for “yes”. Everyone recognizes that losing people different ways is differently impacting.

            A mother losing a soldier who died defending his country is different from a mother who lost a son to cancer is different from a mother who lost her son to being shot by police in a strong-arm robbery.

            We should socially encourage that exact difference as strongly as possible.

          • John Schilling says:

            Can you imagine looking a mother in the eye and telling her that her 17 year-old-son son will be going to jail for the rest of his life?

            In addition to EchoChaos’s point about different kinds of grief, there’s also the numbers. The seventeen-year-old killer facing life in prison, has a grieving mother. His victim probabky has a grieving mother standing shoulder to shoulder with a grieving father, and family and friends and a generally larger and more supportive community possibly up to and including a million Nancy Grace viewers. If the killer had all that, or even just the father, he probably wouldn’t be a killer. If the victim didn’t have all that, the police probably wouldn’t have tried very hard to find the killer.

            Not always, of course, but that’s the way to bet. So both in kind and in degree, your proposal’s implication of symmetry between grieving mothers is going to fail when integrated across society as a whole. The predominance of grief, and anger, is going to be on the “lock them up and throw away the key” side.

            Instead, like I said, we precommit.

            Or “we” precommit to locking them up and throwing away the key, which is going to be a much more popular position.

            More importantly, you still haven’t said how people are supposed to precommit, in a democracy. Assume you somehow do get a temporary majority for mercy. How do you bind the next generation. or even the next election cycle? We’ve tried the bit with the constitutional amendment against cruel and unusual punishment; what else have you got?

            Still not seeing a viable plan here.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            “Simmering in Anger” — My two cents:

            A legal system can ‘fail’ if it fails to achieve it’s stated objectives (which depending on your POV is some combination of 1. deter crime [utilitarian] 2. punish offenders [justice] 3. restitute victims [utilitirian/social justice])

            It can also fail if it lacks proper support and is thereby abolished.

            The latter failure might happen because of a failure to achieve the former but it could also happen in spite of achieving the former, if people are not properly informed and their expectations are properly anchored.

          • Plumber says:

            @Murphy > “…Could you write out a few guesses before reading the link:”

            Sure

            1: “How outragous was Judge Persky’s choices the Brock Turner case?”

            I don’t know who Persky or Brock are.

            1-10 where 1 is not at all and 10 is “so-bad-they-should-kick-him-off-the-bench!”

            No idea.

            2: How informed do you consider yourself about the case: 1-10

            I consider myself as not informed at all.

            3: How well do you believe the media has informed the public about the case: 1-10

            If the case is important than terribly, if un-important than them not wasting my time with the details is great! 

            4: How many articles do you think you’ve read about it?

            None.

            “Now read this, it’ll take a little while.

            https://www.quora.com/In-light-of-the-evidence-was-justice-served-by-recalling-Judge-Persky-for-the-sentence-he-gave-Brock-Turner/answer/Jeremy-Arnold-4

            And if you could now repeat the 1-10 assesment for the outrage-level assesment and how well you think the media has informed people in general about the case”

            Oh, after quickly reading the link I realize that I did read and hear of the case after all, so I’ll say overall from 1 to 10 I give a 7 for your questions @Murphy, but I want to respond to something in the link:

            “If we want culture to change, we have to roll up our sleeves and do the messier, much harder work…”

            While I’ve read Ovid, The Canterbury Tales, novels from the 1920’s and ’30’s, and have seen enough movies that were made from 1930 to 1934 to strongly suspect that the 1960’s-’70’s “sexual revolution” was just a return to pre-war normality (and the reason for 1950’s mores was due to the birth dearth of the Great Depression and second world war, and so few unmarried teens and twenty-something adults until the boomers came of age), none-the-less the current counter revolution seems a worthy goal, young men should assume that fornication leads to imprisonment and/or child support payments, as if enough young men are so in fear that they wait until marriage then young women will get married because they don’t want to wait (unfortunately divorce and “serial monogamy” are still options, so no counter-revolution is likely yet, but “me-too” is a start at least), which seems good things to me.

            Unfortunately harsh sentences are less of a deterrent than more certain arrest (criminals are less dissuaded from how bad punishment will be than they are of how likely they think they are to be caught), but with enough publicity a perception of a deluge of consent being retroactively denied (in this case the accused claims consent was given and the victim doesn’t remember the crime)  causing more young men to wait seems almost possible, and a worthy goal, which ironically enough will make men better off as they do less well on average when unmarried than women do, and a culture of long-term commitment will benefit men more as women seem to thrive more in our more autonomous culture (except in levels of self-reported happiness) than men have judging by the increased poverty and early deaths due to alcohol, drugs, and suicide among men lately (yes a minority of men are incredibly more wealthy and with more partners than was the case in the pre-revolution ’50’s, but I judge total welfare by the least not the luckiest).

          • mdet says:

            I think John Schilling is being way too cynical by reading Aftagley’s proposal at the level of a formal law rather than at the level of principle.

            I agree with Aftagley. Looking at the world, it’s easy to notice that victims of crime seek much harsher punishments than non-victims who are considering crime and punishment in the abstract. I also notice that seeking harsh revenge and retribution often creates a cycle of violence that ends up worse than the initial wrong. Mercy is good because it can break that cycle and give people a chance to change themselves. The victim-perspective isn’t all bad, but everyone’s made impulsive decisions in an angry moment that they partially back down from later.

            So on the level of principle, not law, I want to commit myself to being merciful. If I am ever the victim of some egregious wrong, I want some calm, levelheaded people to remind me of my reasoning now and prevent me from being as harsh on the perpetrators as I might want to be. Even if I try to say “But this is an exception!”, don’t let me. I think we’d be better off if we all took this approach, as a society.

            This is still plenty utopian and idealistic, but no more so than any declaration of principles.

          • ECD says:

            @anonymousskimmer

            Thank you. I was planning to write something fairly similar, but now I don’t have to.

            @Aftagley

            I think you’ve just reinvented mandatory sentencing guidelines. Which are unconstitutional in the US federal system.

            More generally, all of these can be true at once:

            1) Our legal system is overly punitive.
            2) Rape is an underprosecuted crime.
            3) Even when prosecuted, rape is an underpunished crime.
            4) This particular case was not outside the norms, given 1-3.
            5) This particular judge acted within those norms.
            6) Those norms are, themselves, a problem for a lot of people.

            I think jumping to this will reinforce (1), rather than undermine (3) requires some proof, which isn’t given in the linked piece (that I noticed).

            Now, it’s certainly possible it will just increase (2), as victims may be less likely to complain the more aware they are of (3), or police may be less willing to bother, or judges may seal court-rooms to avoid press, or…any number of potentially bad consequences. But none of that answers the question, are the present (or proposed) norms good/acceptable.

          • John Schilling says:

            So on the level of principle, not law, I want to commit myself to being merciful.

            Good for you. That’s the right thing to do.

            But until now, the principle under discussion was basically “I want to commit myself to being merciful, and I want everyone else to commit to being merciful, and we shouldn’t worry about the people simmering with vengeful anger”. And I don’t think I am being excessively cynical in saying that if you want that principle to be anything more than a pious irrelevance, you kind of do need to worry about the people simmering with vengeful anger. If you’re just going to imagine everyone implausibly joining your commitment to mercy, you don’t need to ponder what a proper criminal justice system would look like because you’re imagining there won’t be any crime.

          • mdet says:

            Saying “Well, we have to give this shoplifter 10 years in prison because the shopowner will simmer with rage if we don’t” would obviously be absurd. At some point you have to say, “No, we need sentences to be reasonable and fit the crime. The harshness of this sentence far exceeds what’s necessary to teach the perpetrator a lesson and to prevent future offenses. The shoplifter’s getting six weeks.”

            On the other end, you’re right that if the public doesn’t feel like the justice system is handing down satisfying results, then they’re going to vote in harsher penalties and/or resort to extra-legal enforcement.

            Currently, I think we’re most likely erring on the side of too harsh. It’s pretty easy for a couple scary news stories to terrify the public into overreacting and demanding that Something Be Done! But it’s hard to advocate for criminals, who are rarely sympathetic and often lose their right to vote and speak for their own interests. So if I’m going to pick which of the two above cases I think we should try to lean towards, it’s the one that says “Despite the fact that victims are demanding harsher punishment and that sympathy for the offenders is not a popular position, we’re going to try being less punitive in our sentencing.”

          • ana53294 says:

            At the moment, the shoplifter gets 0, not even a fine, because nobody bothers catching/prosecuting them. How is that too harsh?

          • beleester says:

            That’s an enforcement issue, not a punishment issue. A system that almost never catches shoplifters, but when it does, it puts them in jail for 10 years, would be the worst of both worlds – unjust and cruel, but so unreliably so that it can’t even serve as a deterrent.

      • sty_silver says:

        I’m aware of the arguments against reading news and even agree with them, I just don’t think they apply to me. Consuming news tends to evoke very little emotion in me relative to other people, so I don’t really get angry or depressed.

    • broblawsky says:

      I read Vox. They have a once per day Vox Sentences newsletter/article that aggregates the two biggest stories of the day, plus a few other side pieces.

    • aristides says:

      Maybe subscribe to a monthly news magazine? The Economist and the Atlantic might be good options, though it’s been years since I read hard copy versions of them.

    • JPNunez says:

      Well, in this particular case you can read the summary of the call that the White House released, and the whistleblower complaint by yourself. They are not long documents.

    • Well... says:

      Just curious: why do you want to consume news? Does it boil down to “So I know what other people are talking about at the water cooler”?

      • Aftagley says:

        The framework of this question doesn’t make sense to me.

        I have a desire to know everything that’s going on in the world. I want to be maximally aware of world events. I enjoy learning about what’s going on and thinking about/discussing the potential effects of these changes. If I could know everything going on, I would. This isn’t possible, so I instead try to learn as much as I can.

        Is this not an urge you have?

        • Randy M says:

          I have a desire to know everything that’s going on in the world

          Man, asserting people don’t mean what they say is a shtick already claimed by another poster, but I wonder if revealed preference might tell a different story. No offense.
          I desire to know enough to make reasonable and effective decisions. I want my knowledge to be in proportion to my influence–and then some more over some specific interests, of course, but that leaves vast swathes of human events that are of no concern to me in any meaning of the term. (Which is okay, so long as I also keep my opinions limited by my knowledge.)

          • Oscar Sebastian says:

            Which is okay, so long as I also keep my opinions limited by my knowledge.

            I’m sorry to tell you that you haven’t done so here. You’ve got an opinion that someone else’s description of their own personality is wrong when you have no relevant facts to bolster your case. Your being different from Aftagley’s self-description is not proof that Aftagley is in fact wrong, nor grounds to speculate as such.

            I myself am like Aftagley, at least to a point (everything is a bit hyperbolic, though). Humanity is a vibrant affair of seven billion stories unfolding simultaneously. Hearing about the triumphs and defeats, even if they have nothing to do with me nor I with them, only expands my ability to make reasonable and effective decisions. Every success story is another clue to help me make mine. Every loss a warning sign of what not to do. Even if it turns out meaningless, if it was a tale told well and truthfully, I only gave up my time for knowledge and entertainment. Quite the bargain.

          • Randy M says:

            Your being different from Aftagley’s self-description is not proof that Aftagley is in fact wrong, nor grounds to speculate as such.

            No proof was asserted, merely wonderment.

            Hearing about the triumphs and defeats, even if they have nothing to do with me nor I with them, only expands my ability to make reasonable and effective decisions. Every success story is another clue to help me make mine. Every loss a warning sign of what not to do. Even if it turns out meaningless, if it was a tale told well and truthfully, I only gave up my time for knowledge and entertainment. Quite the bargain.

            Quite poetic.

          • John Schilling says:

            No proof was asserted, merely wonderment.

            “I wonder if you are being honest about what you say you believe/desire”, is most often a faux-polite way of saying “I think you are lying about that”. And “No offense” is most often a faux-polite way of demanding that someone not complain about the offensive thing.

            If that’s not what you mean, you probably ought to be extra careful with the phrasing and understand that people are likely to be offended anyway.

          • Randy M says:

            Fair enough, man. I thought putting two qualifiers, a pretty neutral economic term, and a preemptive sort-of apology in there was enough to get me past faux and into genuine politeness, but if you feel I was being a jerk, I unreservedly apologize to Aftagley and any other curious person similarly insulted by my cavalier posting.

        • Well... says:

          Is this not an urge you have?

          No. When people are discussing soap operas I don’t think “Dang, I need to start watching soap operas so I can join in on these discussions.” Same goes for which team beat which other team in whatever sport, which celebrity is dating whom, and most stuff that gets reported in the news.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            Yes but I think what we are talking about is substantial news; that is news beyond just being entertainment. I think that is what the original post is about. I agree with you that most news about sports, entertainment, celebrities (and most political news fits this category) isn’t inherently valuable and should only be read for fun.

            But there is important news out there. What is the latest Supreme Court decision, which countries are fighting wars or facing famines, what new laws have been passed or politicians elected, what new scientific studies have been done. It is true that to find out most of this stuff can be difficult in all the media dross, but I think that is kind of the point of this thread.

      • sty_silver says:

        Good question. Basically, I just feel a desire to know what’s up with Trump. It’s like I’m invested in a story and want to know about important plot points.

    • sharper13 says:

      Ignoring domestic politics and going to world news instead, I’d recommend Strategy Page. It’s military/strategic focused (which is my interest), but their method is to report on the status of a country which is a hotspot and then to add a newer update about every few days or week. See their article on Yemen for an example.

  17. drunkfish says:

    I don’t find CPlusPlusDeveloper’s case that compelling. In particular, they never respond to this question, which is exactly the same one I had.

    They make two separate claims, which combined would lead to their conclusion:

    1) Prescription opiate prescriptions don’t lead to opiate abuse

    2) Opiate abusers don’t die from prescription opiates

    These together do in fact suggest that prescription opiates aren’t the problem, but their support for 1) is woefully lacking. They show evidence that “long-term chronic pain patients” don’t tend to switch to abusing opiates, which is not evidence that people prescribed opiates in general don’t start abusing them. Specifically, the group I generally hear concern about is a totally different group of people, those who get an opiate prescription which ends, and when it ends they start abusing opiates that they get from other sources.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Here is an article that Scott has linked in the past that argues against a lot of claims. I remember that he makes one attack on (1) saying that people who admit to abusing opioid pills haven’t gone up as the number of people prescribed has gone up.

  18. souleater says:

    I have a question about open relationships, and I know that there are some people here who have experience with that.

    I have a good friend who I’ve know for maybe 6 years.. and it was recently revealed to our social group that he and his wife have an open relationship, and that she’s dating one of the guys in out social circle. He didn’t want me in particular to know because he was afraid I wouldn’t want to be friends with him anymore. I knew for a while but didn’t say anything out of respect for his privacy before his wife specifically told me over his objections at a party (At the boyfriends house).

    I was driving my buddy home afterwards, and he told me that they didn’t always have an open relationship but its just something he has to live with now…

    This was about 6 months ago, but it’s really bothering me. I think his wife pressured him into a situation he is unhappy about. (something she has a history of) Since then, I’ve kinda taken the position that he didn’t want me to know in the first place, I should still respect that and basically pretend I don’t know. We see each other every day at work, and he comes over to my house a few times a month for game night.. but he seems really unhappy.

    This is definitely none of my business right? I should continue to respect his privacy with the assumption he will let me know if he needs anything?

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      My 2¢ is that it depends on how close friends you guys are.

      He’s getting taken advantage of here. He knows it, as his comment in the car indicated, and now you know it. A good friend would remind him that he doesn’t actually have to just passively accept this and that he has options to reclaim at least some of his lost dignity.

      At the same time, he probably also really doesn’t want to hear that right now. He’s been able to pretend up until now that everything is normal and would probably prefer to keep pretending it over making the hard choices that he needs to make. If you’re not close, confronting him is probably going to be the end of your friendship.

      You shouldn’t feel too bad if you’re not close enough to snap him out of this. The fact that he hasn’t done anything yet is a sign of serious weakness on his part, and it’s not on you to carry this guy through life if he can’t stand up on his own feet. It sucks but sometimes you need to keep walking even if someone falls down.

    • Plumber says:

      @souleater >

      “I have a question about open relationships, and I know that there are some people here who have experience with that..

      My experience in the ’80’s was that almost every women in her teens and early to mid 20’s preferred that they’d be “open”, eventually they grow out of it enough to at least pretend they want exclusivity, but only they really know, and I’m guessing that the couple you describe aren’t even in their 40’s yet.

      “…This is definitely none of my business right? I should continue to respect his privacy with the assumption he will let me know if he needs anything?”

      I suppose so, and I presume you enjoy your “game nights” together so you spend time with these people, but my initial instinct is this is an obvious train-wreck-a-coming and you should stay well away.

      • souleater says:

        We are all in our mid to late 20s

        I’ve never liked the wife or boyfriend, and luckily, they don’t come to game night (I DM a D&D campaign). I really only have to see them once every couple of months for social occasions.. I suspect this will be a train wreck, but I think the worst result for me is that it will make my social group toxic and I’ll need to find a new way to occupy my time.

    • Randy M says:

      This is definitely none of my business right?

      That’s the difference between a buddy and a friend.
      Not meaning to imply anything about your course of action. I’m not sure I have any friends in this sense. Friends are the ones you risk friendship for. Buddies are the ones whose privacy you respect ’cause it’s none of your business, even as they are miserable.

      edit: beaten too it by NaD.

    • Ohforfs says:

      He didn’t want me in particular to know because he was afraid I wouldn’t want to be friends with him anymore.

      Well, it’s right there, the reason. I guess the reason was false, as in the fear was unfounded. Add to it the fact the cat is out of the bag (since you talked about it), and the message you’re giving by not mentioning it for these 6 months is that you yourself have a problem with that arrangement (as in not accepting him). Well, that’s something untrue from what i gathered so in the end i would say your behavior is actually producing opposite effect to what you’d like. Perhaps.

      But regardless, since it’s already out of the closet why not ask him what he prefers, if he would still like you not mentioning after you found out?

      Now, since people already commented about the thing you didn’t ask about (the matter itself), let me say what is a basic conclusion in these situation.

      It might be that he is pressured by his wife into this arrangement and is unhappy because of that.
      It might be that his wife was previously unhappy in a closed arrangement.
      It might be that they would be unhappy with splitting up.

      Sometimes there is no easy way out.

      (oh, also, talking about what you think about the situation, that he’s unhappy and so on, is very bad idea. It certainly is much better idea to listen first, or ask questions, as you don’t seem to have enough information)

    • broblawsky says:

      Intervention is appropriate if your friend is unhappy, but both of you might be better off if you helped him find a good therapist.

    • LesHapablap says:

      Do they have kids?
      How did you find out originally?
      How many other people know in your estimation?
      Is he making an effort to exercise his own options so to speak?
      Why did he think you wouldn’t want to be friends with him if you found out? That is a very odd and pathetic thing to think, and a strange thing to admit. Is this guy naturally pity-seeking?

      • souleater says:

        Do they have kids?

        No they do not want kids

        How did you find out originally?

        His wife posted pictures of her on vacation, and one of my friends pointed out to me that
        A) my friend wasn’t in the pictures
        B) our other friend post very similar pictures
        at that point, it just got more and more obvious.

        How many other people know in your estimation?

        Everyone in out friend group except possibly his boss. Maybe a dozen people?
        He doesn’t want our job to find out.

        Is he making an effort to exercise his own options so to speak?

        It came up at one point that he was looking, but I’m not sure how seriously. I know he isn’t going on any dates.

        Why did he think you wouldn’t want to be friends with him if you found out? That is a very odd and pathetic thing to think, and a strange thing to admit. Is this guy naturally pity-seeking?

        He is a bit of an emotional guy, so its not out of character. but part of it is my fault. I’m embarrassed to say it, but have a reputation for being judgmental (not just on CW, but on financial and life decisions).
        I think its reasonable to sometimes disagree with my friends decisions, and from my perspective, I can disagree with someone’s choices without looking down on them for it. But think sometimes my inner monologue shows on my face, and gets misinterpreted. Its something I’m working on.

        • Viliam says:

          There is nothing bad about having opinions, don’t ever let anyone guilt-trip you into believing otherwise. The question is, of course, how will you act upon those opinions. Also, caring about your friend is kinda what friendship means, but again, the question is how specifically will you do it.

          If I understand it correctly, you seem to believe that your friend was pressured into a situation he does not want and that makes him unhappy.

          The first thing is to make sure you understand the situation right. It would be a mistake trying to “fix” something your friend is actually okay with. Or perhaps not perfectly okay, but it still could be the best choice he has, according to his values.

          Gathering information is what being “non-judgmental” is good for. People are less likely to provide you true information, if they feel they will be rewarded or punished depending on what they say.

          There are different ways to do this… for example in therapy, a Freudian therapist would recommend that you shut up and hide your face (put your friend in a comfortable position where he cannot see your face), a Rogerian therapist would recommend that you keep a neutral face and repeat what your friend told you using your own words, and I suppose a rational therapist would recommend to… uhm… provide a rational feedback where you say things you feel certain about and admit your ignorance elsewhere. I suppose different things work for different people.

          In ideal case, you want your friend to come up with a conclusion reflecting his values and his best judgment. Your role is to facilitate the reflection, by bringing up the topic, giving feedback if you suspect he is avoiding a thought, and asking additional questions (such as “you said X, and you also said Y; how can both be true at the same time?”). If he is truly unhappy with the situation, he should be the one to admit it.

        • Ttar says:

          If your boss is part of your social group I’d stay out of it unless you don’t care much about the quality of your work life.

          Your friend sounds like he has internalized low social status. Since you DM and your friend is afraid of losing your approval, I’m guessing you’re higher status in your group than he is. Doing or saying anything that anyone could interpret as you trying to puppetmaster your friend to happiness (even gently reminding him he could stand up for himself) can VERY easily turn into a rumor that you are trying to manipulate him, ruin relationships, etc. That’s the kind of toxic drama you want to avoid. The fact that you are obviously someone he looks up to at least in some ways means people are going to blame you for any poor decisions he makes if you try to get involved. Do nothing before you’ve accepted this.

        • LesHapablap says:

          his wife specifically told me over his objections at a party (At the boyfriends house)

          Just out of curiosity can you describe this conversation? Was he trying to interrupt her and she just kept talking? Or he said don’t tell him and she just said it anyway?

          And also this one:

          I think his wife pressured him into a situation he is unhappy about. (something she has a history of)

          What other situations has she pressured him into?

          Like Nabil, I would tell him that his bad feelings about it are normal and valid, and that he doesn’t need to put up with this. I would be curious about why he is putting up with it, so I’d ask him that as well. I wouldn’t expect much good to come from talking to him about it, but it might give the guy a push in the right direction.

          The brazen cruelty of the wife and boyfriend is just galling. To go on a holiday together, posting pictures online. Why has the social group not shunned them already? Have you talked to anyone else in the group about it?

          • Ohforfs says:

            How would shunning him help him in any way?

          • LesHapablap says:

            The wife and boyfriend ought to be shunned, not him. If this affair wasn’t labeled with ‘open relationship,’ they would be shunned by most social groups I would think.

            Why the guy agreed to an open relationship in the first place I would like to know. If the answer is she pressured him into it, then why does this guy lack any sort of backbone? And did she start dating the boyfriend immediately after she got permission, or later on? Or before?

  19. souleater says:

    I have a question about open relationships, and I know that there are some people here who have experience with that.

    I have a good friend who I’ve know for maybe 6 years.. and it was recently revealed to our social group that he and his wife have an open relationship, and that she’s dating one of the guys in out social circle. He didn’t want me in particular to know because he was afraid I wouldn’t want to be friends with him anymore. I knew for a while but didn’t say anything out of respect for his privacy before his wife specifically told me over his objections at a party (At the boyfriends house).

    I was driving my buddy home afterwards, and he told me that they didn’t always have an open relationship but its just something he has to live with now…

    This was about 6 months ago, but it’s really bothering me. I think his wife pressured him into a situation he is unhappy about. (something she has a history of) Since then, I’ve kinda taken the position that he didn’t want me to know in the first place, I should still respect that and basically pretend I don’t know. We see each other every day at work, and he comes over to my house a few times a month for game night.. but he seems really unhappy.

    This is definitely none of my business right? I should continue to respect his privacy with the assumption he will let me know if he needs anything?

  20. jermo sapiens says:

    The thread on the UK Supreme Court deciding that Boris Johnson’s prorogation was null and void is getting a bit unwieldy. I was hoping to resurrect it here with a focus on the following points discussed in this conversation of UK experts: here.

    1. The justification the court used to give itself the power to decide over the propriety of the prorogation was a 1611 precedent in which the crown had tried to enact laws without Parliament.

    2. This is entirely new law, which disturbs the equilibrium of political forces in the British political system, by a body that is only 10 years old.

    3. If the prorogation was an abuse of power by the Prime Minister, and therefore the decision was the right thing to do, is it ever proper to sanction courts when they abuse their power?

    • erenold says:

      Much appreciated, the downstream thread was becoming hard to follow. By the way – could I check if there’s anyone here with a background in English law? Would be very helpful for present purposes, I think.

      Anyway, asserted for the sake of argument with varying degrees of confidence.

      1. No, with confidence to the point of moral certainty. This point completely misunderstands the point being made at [32] of the judgment and anyone seriously asserting otherwise is trying to mislead you and/or has no business commentating on English law. A plain reading of that section is that the Case of Proclamations is not being used as a “justification”, or a source, of legal power. It’s simply being proffered as an example of how ancient the trite and well-settled point that common-law courts are not deprived of the power to settle issues simply because they happen to be matters of political controversy.

      To the extent that the Court has authority to settle this point, the source of this power is the GCHQ decision referred to at [35]. You need to start reading from there onwards if you want to understand the basis on which the Supreme Court considered that the matter was justiciable (though I confess I still struggle with that notion and was surprised by the result).

      2. Agreed… to an extent. The principle is that Courts don’t create new law – they ‘discover’ the true position. That it ‘disturbs the equilibrium of political forces in the British political system’ is true (hence my normative disagreement with the decision), but I think the extent matters. As in, it introduces centrifugal forces into the Union that will inexorably tear it apart? Or it changes the British constitution in a gradual manner?

      I think the point about the body being only ’10 years old’ is somewhat over-egged, by the way, but this is where I think the conversation would really benefit from the expertise of an English-trained legal professional. Is there really much (if any) substantive difference between the UKSC and the old House of Lords? If not (as I understand to be the case), then the 10 year old point is a mere red herring.

      3. What is meant by the phrase ‘abuse of power’? As in, they in good faith grotesquely over-estimate their rightful powers and role in the British constitution a la Speaker Bercow? Then no. If they are jailing people for private profit , then yes – I would literally and unironically support the death penalty in such cases.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        @erenold: Thank you for your comment.

        1. The only decision I see discussed at paragraph 35 is Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service [1985] AC 374, which stands for the proposition that whether an exercise of a crown prerogative is challengeable in courts “depend[s] on the nature and subject matter of the particular prerogative power being exercised. In that regard, Lord Roskill mentioned at p 418 the dissolution of Parliament as one of a number of powers whose exercise was in his view non-justiciable”. Maybe you had a different paragraph in mind?

        2. Lawyers speak of courts “making new law” all the time. The “discover the true law” bit is a distinction without a difference, except that it gives a false idea that there exists a True Law beyond what has been decided before. It’s not necessarily wrong for courts to make new law, they often dont have the choice. Here, they had a choice, and they found themselves a valuable new power, and missed a great opportunity to exercise judicial restraint. I doubt the House of Lords would have been so cavalier with their exercise of power.

        3. That is exactly my point. Whether something is an abuse of power is subjective. The court’s decision has been supported by some here on the basis that the PM had abused his power. And the court didnt use those words but definitely suggested them. So you have one branch of government usurping a power for themselves on what they view as an abuse of power. Maybe another branch of government should consider this decision to be an abuse of power also, and take it back. If one is ok, so should the other. In fact, the UK Supreme Court is created by an act of parliament, and what parliament can create it can also destroy.

        • erenold says:

          1. I’ve clarified the reference downthread.

          2. While I’m not sure I agree it is a distinction without a difference, and I agree it can be easy to be cynical especially to those disappointed by the latest decision, my personal view is that, as you say, judicial restraint would have been more appropriate here.

          Your reference to the UKHL being less cavalier is opaque to me unless, as mentioned, there is some reason for thinking the UKSC is actually substantively different therefrom. Is there some basis for this claim? That is not my understanding and when I do this professionally I don’t distinguish the two institutions in any meaningful way. But – again, this is a point I think we would all benefit from an English lawyer’s viewpoint.

          3. Fair point.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            1. Yes, I saw that, thanks. I was not aware.

            2. I’ve never seen your formulation before, “discover the true law”. Here in Canada anyways, we use “make new law” without any negative connotations. Is “discover the true law” an expression that is commonly used in the US or the UK (or wherever you are)? I think any lawyer is well aware that old settled law sometimes gets overturned for something more modern. For example, here in Canada the law of judicial review has changed significantly, with the court creating 4 different standards of review, than changing it back to 2, and there is pending decision that is expected to change it again, all within 30 years. It’s not controversial, they create a regime, find that it has issues, and try to fix those issues as they come up. I think the term “discover” for this is wrong. They discover the issues, but then they dont discover the solutions, they come up with potential solutions and try them out.

            My comment with respect to the House of Lords may be completely wrong. It’s based on a stereotype of them as old white guys with wigs who dont like change, specially to the fundamentals of the UK political system. I couldnt tell you the distinction between the Supreme Court and the House of Lords, except the latter is a cooler name.

          • Fitzroy says:

            The UK Supreme Court is, functionally, a continuation of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. Indeed the 10 existing Lords of Appeal in Ordinary became the first Judges of the Supreme Court. The whole “only 10 years old” thing is a canard.

            As for the House of Lords being less cavalier, I’m not at all sure that’s true. Baron Diplock was a strong force for change and the current position on judicial review owes itself largely to him (indeed he was one of the Judges on the GCHQ case which decided that Prerogative powers were subject to judicial review at all).

            Likewise Lord Denning, whose judgments are always a joy to read and always left me with the distinct impression that he took an approach of: “This is the right answer, now let me find some way to make the law support it.”

          • jermo sapiens says:

            As for the House of Lords being less cavalier, I’m not at all sure that’s true. Baron Diplock was a strong force for change and the current position on judicial review owes itself largely to him (indeed he was one of the Judges on the GCHQ case which decided that Prerogative powers were subject to judicial review at all).

            Thanks, I stand corrected.

            If you’re familiar with the GCHQ case, can you please explain what the legal standard was used in that case to decide whether a prerogative was subject to judicial review. It seems that dissolution was not subject to judicial review according to that decision.

          • Fitzroy says:

            @jermo sapiens

            My understanding of that case is similar to yours. The relevant part of Diplock’s ratio is:

            “To qualify as a subject for judicial review the decision must have consequences which affect some person (or body of persons) other than the decision-maker, although it may affect him too. It must affect such other person either (a) by altering rights or obligations of that person which are enforceable by or against him in private law; or (b) by depriving him of some benefit or advantage which either (i) he had in the past been permitted by the decision – maker to enjoy and which he can legitimately expect to be permitted to continue to do until there has been committed to him some rational grounds for withdrawing it on which he has been given an opportunity to comment; or (ii) he has received assurance from the decision-maker that it will not be withdrawn without giving him first an opportunity of advancing reasons for contending that they should not be withdrawn.”

            He stated that such Prerogative powers could be reviewed on grounds or illegality, irrationality (Wednesbury unreasonableness) and procedural impropriety, though he did also suggest that ‘proportionality’ might also be imported in the future.

            The argument in the instant case is presumably that Parliament as a body has had its rights and obligations curtailed by prorogation and the use of the power is therefore open to review.

            It feels like a stretch to me as I am not convinced that Parliament’s obligation to hold the executive to account is enforceable in private law.

            And yes, you are absolutely right that Lord Roskill stated that he believed there were a number of uses of prerogative powers which were not subject to judicial review:

            “Prerogative powers such as those relating to the making of treaties, the defence of the realm, the prerogative of mercy, the grant of honours, the dissolution of Parliament and the appointment of ministers as well as others are not, I think, susceptible to judicial review because their nature and subject matter are such as not to be amenable to the judicial process.”

        • AlphaGamma says:

          @Fitzroy:

          Indeed the 10 existing Lords of Appeal in Ordinary became the first Judges of the Supreme Court.

          In fact, two of them (Lady Hale, the President, and Lord Kerr) are still there- though Lady Hale will retire in January 2020.

      • erenold says:

        I think I should clarify point 1 somewhat to explain why I’ve taken such a strong position on it. I’ve seen this argument elsewhere, and it is an utterly disingenuous one made in pure bad faith. This is the section of the judgment dealing with the “1611 case” in its proper context:

        Secondly, although the courts cannot decide political questions, the fact that a legal dispute concerns the conduct of politicians, or arises from a matter of political controversy, has never been sufficient reason for the courts to refuse to consider it. As the Divisional Court observed in para 47 of its judgment, almost all important decisions made by the executive have a political hue to them. Nevertheless, the courts have exercised a supervisory jurisdiction over the decisions of the executive for centuries. Many if not most of the constitutional cases in our legal history have been concerned with politics in that sense.

        Two examples will suffice to illustrate the point. The 17th century was a period of turmoil over the relationship between the Stuart kings and Parliament, which culminated in civil war. That political controversy did not deter the courts from holding, in the Case of Proclamations (1611) 12 Co Rep 74, that an attempt to alter the law of the land by the use of the Crown’s prerogative powers was unlawful…

        Having made those introductory points, we turn to the question whether the issue raised by these appeals is justiciable. How is that question to be answered? In the case of prerogative powers, it is necessary to distinguish between two different issues. The first is whether a prerogative power exists, and if it does exist, its extent. The second is whether, granted that a prerogative power exists, and that it has been exercised within its limits, the exercise of the power is open to legal challenge on some other basis. The first of these issues undoubtedly lies within the jurisdiction of the courts and is justiciable, as all the parties to these proceedings accept. If authority is required, it can be found in the decision of the House of Lords in the case of Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service [1985] AC 374.

        Anyone purporting to be a commentator who comes to the conclusion from the above passage that the Case of Proclamations is the justification of the present decision has not read the judgment, is incapable of understanding it, and/or is lying to you.

        – sorry, ninja-ed almost immediately. I’ll try to respond more fully to your other points when I’ve had the chance to consider them for a while. Also apologies, I should also have clarified this: Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service is almost universally referred to as the GCHQ decision.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          Anyone coming to the conclusion that the Case on Proclamations is the justification of the present decision has not read the judgment, is incapable of understanding it, and/or is lying to you.

          This is way off base.

          Paragraph 41:

          Two fundamental principles of our constitutional law are relevant to the present case. The first is the principle of Parliamentary sovereignty: that laws
          enacted by the Crown in Parliament are the supreme form of law in our legal system, with which everyone, including the Government, must comply. However, the effect which the courts have given to Parliamentary sovereignty is not confined to recognising the status of the legislation enacted by the Crown in Parliament as our highest form of law. Time and again, in a series of cases since the 17th century, the courts have protected Parliamentary sovereignty from threats posed to it by the use of prerogative powers, and in doing so have demonstrated that prerogative powers are limited by the principle of Parliamentary sovereignty. To give only a few examples, in the Case of Proclamations the court protected Parliamentary sovereignty directly, by holding that prerogative powers could not be used to alter the law of the land.

          [Emphasis added.]

          Paragraph 49:

          However, a prerogative power is only effective to the extent that it is recognised by the common law: as was said in the Case of Proclamations, “the King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him”. A prerogative power is therefore limited by statute and the common law, including, in the present context, the constitutional principles with which it would otherwise conflict.

          [Emphasis added.]

          Let me ask you, before you accused people of not reading, not being capable of understanding, and lying, did you read the entire judgment, or did you stop after the first time they mentioned the Case on Proclamations? And do you think that Dr. David Starkey is lying, has not read the judgment, or is he incapable of understanding it?

          • erenold says:

            First, let me walk back my language if it caused offence. To be candid I have never in my life heard of Dr Starkey. He does not appear (based on your link) to be a legal academic, to have legal qualifications, or to have at least a legal background. A Lexis search I just did of his name produces literally no results, i.e. he has never once been cited in a reported decision or an academic article (as far as I can tell). That’s absolutely not to suggest that he isn’t entitled to a view or that his viewpoint is held in bad faith, but (again, so far as I am aware) he is someone whose views have never once been cited in a common-law legal authority. And yes, I have read the judgment – as mentioned, it took me by complete surprise and wanted to understand it, since I had been moderately confident the result would have gone the other way, much less be an 11-0 walkover.

            Respectfully, however, I still think the point is disingenuous. As you described it: “The justification the court used to give itself the power to decide over the propriety of the prorogation was a 1611 precedent in which the crown had tried to enact laws without Parliament.” The clear implication is that there existed a dusty old case somewhere, long forgotten by the common law, which the UKSC conveniently unearthed to provide itself with a fig leaf here. That’s simply not true. The principle referred to is trite and ample other examples are given of the same principle. To provide the rest of [41], for example:

            To give only a few
            examples, in the Case of Proclamations the court protected Parliamentary sovereignty directly, by holding that prerogative powers could not be used to alter the law of the land. Three centuries later, in the case of Attorney General v De Keyser’s Royal Hotel Ltd [1920] AC 508, the court prevented the Government of
            the day from seeking by indirect means to bypass Parliament, in circumventing a
            statute through the use of the prerogative. More recently, in the Fire Brigades Union case, the court again prevented the Government from rendering a statute nugatory through recourse to the prerogative, and was not deflected by the fact that the Government had failed to bring the statute into effect. As Lord Browne-Wilkinson
            observed in that case at p 552, “the constitutional history of this country is the history of the prerogative powers of the Crown being made subject to the overriding powers
            of the democratically elected legislature as the sovereign body”.

            And as for [49]:

            Unless the terms of the statute indicate a contrary intention, the courts have set a limit to the lawful exercise of the power by holding that the extent to which the measure impedes or frustrates the operation of the relevant principle must have a reasonable justification. That approach can be seen, for example, in R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51; [2017] 3 WLR 409, paras 80-82 and 88-89, where earlier authorities were discussed. A prerogative power is, of course, different from a statutory power: since it is not derived from statute, its limitations cannot be derived from a process of statutory interpretation. However, a prerogative power is only effective to the extent that it is recognised by the common law: as was said in the Case of Proclamations, “the King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him”. A prerogative power is therefore limited by statute and the common law”

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Right, so the court quotes the Case on Proclamations, and follows it with “A prerogative power is therefore limited by statute and the common law.”

            I believe that characterizing the above as a justification for its decision is more than reasonable. You could argue that the court used other cases also, to strengthen its point, but it did rely on the Case of Proclamations quite heavily.

          • erenold says:

            I apologise for being technical but it is really not, and it the distinction is important for our purposes because I really do think it shows a fundamental lack of understanding or a lack of integrity in those pushing the claim. (I hope it goes without saying that that is not a personal attack whatsoever).

            I can’t really be bothered to dig up the citations right now but you can take it from me that, for instance, the concept of consideration likewise stems from around the 17th century if not earlier in English contract law. If I cite the progenitor case and say “To give only a few examples, in [progenitor case] in 1611 the court held that a peppercorn rent at least must be given for a lease to be valid at law, and recently in XYZ decision a contract was voided for want of consideration”, it would be deeply wrong – and frankly misleading to the point of being offensive, if it came from a practitioner – to say that I was ‘relying on a 17th century decision’ to justify my decision on some point of the law on consideration. The obvious implication of ‘relying on a 17th century decision’, as I’ve said, is that I cynically dug up an ancient decision to provide myself a judicial fig leaf. But really I’m doing no more than using a rhetorical flourish to illustrate just how trite and well-settled the point is.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            I am afraid you are both wrong. Case of proclamations is an important precedent cited by the court as a justification of its decision, but not the only one.

            Basically they said that established case law gives them authority to nullify unlawful use of “royal prerogative” (I admit that I am not super familiar what that term means in English law), and that unlawful exercise of royal prerogative is, according to established case law, also when on its surface lawful exercise is used to “the effect of frustrating or preventing the constitutional role of Parliament in holding the Government to account.” (point 55), because constitutional doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.

            Whether this was wise decision or not I am honestly not sure.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I apologise for being technical but it is really not, and it the distinction is important for our purposes because I really do think it shows a lack of understanding or a lack of integrity in those pushing the claim. (I hope it goes without saying that that is not a personal attack whatsoever).

            No need to apologize. I can handle technical details, and I appreciate the substantive points you are making. However, instead of a lack of understanding or integrity, you should always assume a reasonable difference of opinion.

            I’m no expert in UK constitutional law. But I am a Canadian lawyer with an interest in Canadian constitutional law and Canadian politics (my actual practice is in intellectual property, fwiw). A few years ago, there was a controversial prorogation of the Canadian parliament, which I followed closely. As you may know, Canadian constitutional law inherits many of its principles from the UK, including prorogation. So I’m no expert, but no novice either.

            At paragraph 27 of this case, the UKSC names the issues to be decided. The first one is “is the [prorogation] justiciable?” The court then spends paragraphs 28 to 52 answering that question. This is no mere rhetorical flourish about trite law. Show me a recent case where the issues to be decided include “Is consideration required for a contract to be enforceable?” , and the discussion on that point takes up 24 paragraphs and 1/3 of the entire decision.

            I think what you mean to say, is that it is settled law that in some cases, royal prerogatives can be challenged in courts. Which is what apparently what GCHQ stands for. But, it also stands for the proposition that some royal prerogatives are not challengeable.

            However, the court did not decide the case based on GCHQ, which states that dissolution is not challengeable. The case does distinguish prorogation from dissolution but not on the basis of whatever legal test was used in GCHQ to find that dissolution was not challengeable.

            In my reading, the court identifies two constitutional principles: parliamentary sovereignty and parliamentary accountability. In support of the sovereignty principle, the court cites the Case on Proclamations (par. 41). Then, on determining how the principle of accountability operates to restrict the power of prorogation, the court once again cites the Case on Proclamations (par. 49).

            So, to summarize:
            -this is not trite law
            -the court relies on the Case on Proclamations to establish:
            a) the principle of parliamentary sovereignty; and
            b) why the principle of parliamentary accountability limits the power of prorogation.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I am afraid you are both wrong. Case of proclamations is an important precedent cited by the court as a justification of its decision, but not the only one.

            This is what I’ve been saying.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @jermo sapiens

            Ups, I missed that, sorry.

          • erenold says:

            I chuckled when I read your response. You should have said from the beginning that you’re a practitioner with at least a background or practice interest in public law, and we could have proceeded on the basis that your command of the substantive public law issues is going to be infinitely greater than mine: I’ll do whatever walks through the door and as it happens I’ve actually won a judicial review before, but I’m really just going off half-remembered snippets of Public Law from school.

            Anyway, I’m not particularly fussed, and I don’t really think it’s relevant, whether the 1611 case per se played a small or moderate or significant role in the decision. Like I said, I was responding to your original claim which was:

            [blockquote] The justification the court used to give itself the power to decide over the propriety of the prorogation was a 1611 precedent in which the crown had tried to enact laws without Parliament.[/blockquote]

            I took and still take the natural and ordinary meaning of that sentence (and I’ve seen this point made elsewhere in plainly misleading contexts) to mean that the reference to the 1611 case is a pure and simple sham to create a judicial fig leaf; that the 1611 decision is a standalone decision, not cited anywhere else and not widely considered to be good law, resurrected solely for the purposes of a cynical decision. If you accept, as I think you must, that the case is good law and the reference to it does no more than set out a well-settled and trite principle – or if that’s not what was meant or if I’ve misunderstood something somewhere – happy to move on.

          • erenold says:

            I should clarify my response further.

            It is obviously not trite law that prorogation is justiciable. Nor is the Proclamations’ Case direct authority that it is. No one is making either of those two points. The case is cited to support the two other points you correctly refer, which in turn are secondary premises leading to the UKSC’s ultimate decision that prorogation is justiciable. As an authority for these two secondary points, the Proclamation’s Case is eminently correct law and has been cited over 35 times in England alone by my quick count and furthermore in very many eminent and leading public law cases – Belize, GCHQ, Hamed, the works. You can verify this for yourself in less than 2 minutes on Lexis (or whichever engine you’re on – is it mostly Westlaw in Canada?)

            You know as well as I do how stare decisis works – one might as well speak of a modern negligence action being based on the “one hundred year old case” of Donoghue v Stevenson. No, it’s based on principles first enumerated therein, but subsequently accepted as clearly setting the true principle of law in very many other and more recent decisions.

            I thus conclude it is fundamentally and obviously misleading, especially when seeking to communicate to a lay audience, to say that R (ex parte Miller) v Prime Minister is “based on a 1611 case”. It is based on an extremely trite and well-established principle that does emanate from a 1611 case, but is nonetheless an unimpeachable principle of public law repeated and accepted many times since, and never (as far as I can tell) doubted. Its vintage adds to its provenance, not the other way around.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            The case is cited to support the two other points you correctly refer, which in turn are secondary premises leading to the UKSC’s ultimate decision that prorogation is justiciable.

            Yes, exactly. And that makes my original point of:

            The justification the court used to give itself the power to decide over the propriety of the prorogation was a 1611 precedent in which the crown had tried to enact laws without Parliament.

            correct.

            I thus conclude it is fundamentally and obviously misleading, especially when seeking to communicate to a lay audience, to say that R (ex parte Miller) v Prime Minister is “based on a 1611 case”.

            It absolutely is based on a 1611 case. The problem with the 1611 case is not that it’s from 1611, it’s that the case’s ratio decidendi doesnt logically lead to the court’s decision in the case at bar. The court’s legal reasoning is quite poor, and given that these people are clearly very competent jurists, the parsimonious explanation for why they ruled the way they did is that they wanted to frustrate Brexit. Maybe this view is incorrect, but so far nothing I’ve seen has convinced me otherwise.

            The court actually cites a case that seems very relevant to the issue they are deciding, but they go on to ignore it, which I find strange. Since you’re familiar with the case, maybe you can explain why they did that. Specifically, the court says:

            In the Council of Civil Service Unions case, the House of Lords concluded that the answer to that question would depend on the nature and subject matter of the particular prerogative power being exercised. In that regard, Lord Roskill mentioned at p 418 the dissolution of Parliament as one of a number of powers whose exercise was in his view non-justiciable.

            What test did Lord Roskill use to determine that dissolution was not justiciable? I would expect that there is one, but I dont know for sure. This is a very strange omission on the part of the court.

            Instead, the court declares that the parliamentary principles of accountability and sovereignty determine the limit of royal prerogatives. Ok fine, but that skipped the step of determining whether this particular prerogative is justiciable in the first place.

            It would appear to me that when a prerogative is justiciable, it is limited by the principles of parliamentary accountability and sovereignty. But a non-justiciable prerogative is not limited by these same principles. If it was limited by these principles, that would make it justiciable by definition.

            At par. 52 the court states:

            As we have explained, it is well established, and is accepted by counsel
            for the Prime Minister, that the courts can rule on the extent of prerogative powers. That is what the court will be doing in this case by applying the legal standard which we have described. That standard is not concerned with the mode of exercise of the prerogative power within its lawful limits. On the contrary, it is a standard which determines the limits of the power, marking the boundary between the prerogative on the one hand and the operation of the constitutional principles of the sovereignty of Parliament and responsible government on the other hand. An issue which can be resolved by the application of that standard is by definition one which concerns the extent of the power to prorogue, and is therefore justiciable.

            This is saying, we can decide where the boundary between constitutional principles and the prerogative lies, therefore it’s justiciable. That makes no sense to me. If it makes sense to you, please let me know how.

            In my mind, something is justiciable or not. If it is, go ahead and determine the legal limits of it. If it’s not, you can perform the same exercise, but the results wont matter because it’s not the court’s business.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            The court’s legal reasoning is quite poor, and given that these people are clearly very competent jurists, the parsimonious explanation for why they ruled the way they did is that they wanted to frustrate Brexit. Maybe this view is incorrect, but so far nothing I’ve seen has convinced me otherwise.

            It might also just be the intoxicating effect of (the opportunity to gain more) power.

    • FrankistGeorgist says:

      The “Only 10 years old” point is getting made a lot, but it’s not clear to me how the Supreme Court differs from the Law Lords. My understanding was that it was partly because of a lack of space that the Supreme Court was spun off, and not to birth a new wing of government. I thought the justices were just the Law Lords reskinned.

      The name certainly brings to mind the American court system and all its baggage, but I’m not clear how the SCOTUK has changed its behavior since ceasing to be a walled off subcommittee of the House of Lords.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        The biggest difference I can think of is that the Law Lords were a part of Parliament, not a separate institution like the Supreme Court is. As for what difference this makes, I suppose you could make the case that a separate institution is more likely to develop delusions of grandeur and seek to arrogate more power to itself than a mere Parliamentary committee is. And of course, considering the case of prorogation specifically, the Law Lords would be prorogued along with the rest of Parliament, and hence unable to overrule the prorogation. Though I’m not sure what would have happened after the English and Irish courts ruled prorogation legal and the Scottish one ruled the other way; would it be possible to recall just the Law Lords and not the rest of Parliament?

        • Gobbobobble says:

          So who does have the ability to deny prorogation? One of these threads mentioned that no one would consider calling a 5-year prorogation legitimate – who has the power to turn such down if an executive were to try it? Does Parliament itself have the option to vote to say “nuh uh we’re staying”?

          • jermo sapiens says:

            The Queen if she wanted to, but if she ever did that it would open up a whole new can of worms.

            Also, if a government were to prorogue Parliament for 5 years, it would be shooting itself in the foot. It wouldnt even have funds to maintain normal operations during those 5 years.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            So who does have the ability to deny prorogation? One of these threads mentioned that no one would consider calling a 5-year prorogation legitimate – who has the power to turn such down if an executive were to try it? Does Parliament itself have the option to vote to say “nuh uh we’re staying”?

            It’s impossible to pass new laws or raise new taxes without Parliament. Also, the existence of the British army needs to be renewed by an Act of Parliament every five years, or else it will legally cease to exist. So whilst in theory a government could prorogue Parliament for as long as it liked, it wouldn’t be able to do much in the way of actual governing if it did so.

        • AlphaGamma says:

          And of course, considering the case of prorogation specifically, the Law Lords would be prorogued along with the rest of Parliament, and hence unable to overrule the prorogation

          This is incorrect. The Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876 specifically gave the Law Lords the right to hear appeals while Parliament was prorogued.

    • ECD says:

      I have no relevant knowledge on British law. But on (3), the way you handle that issue is by passing a law to override them (this is relatively common, at least in the US system). Of course, this requires you to be able to get a majority to support the notion that they abused their authority.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        That’s not always possible, especially in the US. What do you do when SCOTUS decides that it can read between the lines of the constitution that there is a hidden right to abortion and gay marriage in there (dont want to get to the object level discussion on these topics, they’re just the examples where the court made something up that i’m most familiar with)?

        Nevermind the difficulty of amending the constitution, but assuming you could, what do you amend it to, if the courts dont even base their decision on the text of the constitution?

        • Watchman says:

          Not an issue on the UK where there is no constitution. If a law is clear in meaning and intent then a court cannot overturn it.

        • ECD says:

          You identify the solution to this problem which our system provides that is, amend the constitution.

          The other solution it provides is appoint new judges and/or impeach old judges.

  21. Le Maistre Chat says:

    It’s Pat the doll!

    Scientists have debunked the idea that boys are simply born wanting to play with trucks and girls wanting to nurture dolls. A study by psychologists Lisa Dinella and Erica Weisgram, co-editors of Gender Typing of Children’s Toys: How Early Play Experiences Impact Development, found that when wheeled toys were painted white — and thus deprived of all color signaling whether they were “boys’ toys” or “girls’ toys” — girls and boys chose to play with the wheeled toys equally often.

    They seem to be pointedly ignoring the studies showing that while boy and girl monkeys will play with trucks equally often, the boy monkeys don’t want dolls.

    • Enkidum says:

      Studies or studY?

      For all the skepticism about social psychology I find here (frequently justified), I’m always surprised by how happy people are to treat studies as gospel when they match their beliefs.

      Of course the previous studies don’t match my beliefs, so I’m happy to admit some mea culpa here as well.

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        Well you’re trying to design a study that can somehow do what previous studies didn’t.

        If the idea is that toy preferences are actually about the color rather than type of the toy then the next step would be to test different combinations of colors and types.

      • DeWitt says:

        Agreed. The replication crisis’ lesson should be to dismiss all psychology-adjacent research until it’s very clear the studies point one way.

        • Enkidum says:

          That’s a terrible lesson, especially for a place as Bayes-oriented as this.

          • Randy M says:

            If dismiss is shorthand for “take as no more than weak evidence” and the studies is shorthand for “a the majority of studies, at least containing three independent” is it still terrible?

          • DeWitt says:

            Why? Given how easy it is to fall for confirmation bias and given the weak correlation to the truth these studies have, I don’t think they’re very valuable.

          • Enkidum says:

            If dismiss is shorthand for “take as no more than weak evidence” and the studies is shorthand for “a the majority of studies, at least containing three independent” is it still terrible?

            Something like this sounds about right.

          • Enkidum says:

            Another way of putting it is that dismissing psychology studies is very similar to dismissing election polling on the grounds of Trump’s election. 538 has been very, very clear about the mistake people are making when they do that.

      • lvlln says:

        For all the skepticism about social psychology I find here (frequently justified), I’m always surprised by how happy people are to treat studies as gospel when they match their beliefs.

        Do you have any examples of this happening?

        • Enkidum says:

          I think the majority of the responses to this post are leaning in that direction.

          • lvlln says:

            There aren’t that many responses to the top-level post, so I read through all of them, but I couldn’t find a single one that I thought treated any study as gospel or even leaned in the direction of treating one as gospel, much less a majority. Could you point to a specific example?

          • Enkidum says:

            There seems to be a very strong belief that the previous studies showing macaques having toy preferences are accurate, whereas there is something wrong with either the methodology or interpretation of the new studies.

            This is not a useful way to approach scientific findings.

            I do think I probably overstated the original claim, however.

    • AG says:

      How are they defining doll vs. action figure? Straw figure vs. stick figure? I wonder if the gender component is more about soft vs. hard material toys? Do boys and girls still play with a car plushie with the same frequency?

      (Something something boys aren’t as into n e o t e n y at that age :P. When they play with a puppy, it’s because of the puppy’s behavior, not appearance.)

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I think the definition of an action figure, as established in 1964, is having a weapon. A GI Joe can be Barbie-scale with removable clothing, but even just PT tee and sweatpants not so different from Ken, the weapon makes it Not-Doll.

        • JayT says:

          The “action” in “action figure” was two things.
          1) (Most importantly) It was to name it something other than a “doll” since a doll was a girl’s toy.
          2) It had far more articulation. Barbie and Ken moved forward and backward at their shoulders, hips, and neck. GI Joe had points of articulation at all the major human joints. Since it had so much more “action” that’s where they came up with the name.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            2) is a good point. But then the 1978 Star Wars figures (there were no 1977 Star Wars toys) had only shoulder, hip and neck swivels.

            @AG: Superman is an example of where such a definition breaks down. Mattel has made DC character Barbies – if Supergirl Barbie is paired with a male Superman doll, he’s a doll, while a Superman action figure could also be 12″ and have cloth clothing. At that point it’s just branding.

          • albatross11 says:

            “Action figure” is what you call a doll when you want to sell it to boys and their parents.

          • JayT says:

            Le Maistre, I’m just referring to what Donald Levine, the creator of GI Joe and creator of the term, said “action figure” meant. Since then, it’s basically just meant “human-shaped toy for boys”.

        • AG says:

          Hrm, I don’t think this squares with, say, Superman. Certainly, some Superman action figures come with some sort of accessory to denote heat vision or freeze breathe, but not all. Not to mention how we would delineate animal toys under this system. Or weaponless Lego figures.

    • Urstoff says:

      Once we removed all defining characteristics of the toy, it turns out all children are equally likely to play with them.

      • Watchman says:

        Actually an important point. Children don’t play with toys because children like toys. Children play with toys because children are practising to be adults. Removing the contextual information from a car makes it a less interesting toy, as it isn’t a car but a white object that looks like a car. I’d suggest that this study shows children don’t just base their preferences on object shape, which is not news to any parent who has struggled to find one particular favourite toy that only differs from several others by its paint job. I could well be wrong, but I bet the study doesn’t compare quality of play with the defeatured toys with that with coloured equivalents, and that if they had the children (probably both genders) would have more imaginative and complex play with the coloured ones, because they’d be playing with toys that they can more easily categorise.

        I am guessing this doesn’t work in reverse with dolls since a lack of colour here would be less notable: children are not differentiated by colours, so a preference for playing with dolls is probably more conditioned on the human shape.

      • Ttar says:

        “After controlling for the rate of cell mutation, we found smokers were no more or less likely to get cancer than nonsmokers.”

        So many social science papers.

    • Sometimes, you have to stick with common sense. There’s obviously something wrong with this study or the conclusion is unduly extrapolated from the empirical data. Boys and girls are obviously biologically different and anyone who thinks otherwise is either kidding themselves or doesn’t know what they are talking about.

      • Enkidum says:

        “Plays with a truck/doll” is not necessarily a good operationalization of “obviously biologically different”.

        • AG says:

          Yep, and it’s more about the ridiculous personality extrapolations that get pulled from this that are the issue, if indeed boys like trucks and girls like dolls, besides the part where trucks vs. dolls is a ridiculous binary in the first place. Since when have toy cars with a person-shaped figure inside ceased to exist?

          Have y’all read the stories of the Watsonian-horrendous thing-oriented scenarios that girls have put their dolls through?

          We already went through a baby clothing color switch, so I have no trust that toy norms aren’t also so socially constructed.

    • baconbits9 says:

      I can’t locate the exact study (or i can’t identify it), but google scholar turns up several papers authored by those the two and the study sizes are tiny. The largest is n=82, and the smallest is n=42 that come from both authors since 2015 (unless I missed one), the idea that ‘scientists have debunked x’ based on studies of this size would be laughable if it wasn’t published in Time.

      • Enkidum says:

        What do you suppose the sample sizes for the papers they are ostensibly refuting are? (Answer: at least one of them is in the 40s).

        • baconbits9 says:

          Does this relate to anything I wrote?

          • Enkidum says:

            If the evidence for X is a study using a sample which you consider laughably small, you should be very suspicious of X. However I apologize because I think I read your comment in context of the surrounding ones, which actually mention those previous studies, whereas you did not.

            FWIW, I’m not sure why you think 82 (or 42 for that matter) are ridiculously small sample sizes. It would depend on what kind of stats are being computed.

    • Aapje says:

      @Le Maistre Chat

      They seem to be pointedly ignoring the studies showing that while boy and girl monkeys will play with trucks equally often, the boy monkeys don’t want dolls.

      The new study doesn’t actually contradict that. They just found that by themselves, wheels don’t do anything. That is not really surprising. Imagine a doll with wheels or a truck without wheels. Why would that have a gendered effect?

      Arguably, this study tells us a lot more about the researchers than about reality: that they have no understanding of gender.

      • Watchman says:

        In itself the finding, albeit probably using too small a sample, is interesting. But to discuss it as part of an attempt to understand gender identity rather than simply play preferences would seem ill-advised (note we don’t have the authors’ framing but that of a journalist probably via the relative university PR and perhaps a toy company’s scientific advisors (!)). It took me 2 minutes to identify an explanation for the reported observation that reinforces gender roles.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        @Aapje: yeah, it doesn’t contradict the earlier human and rhesus studies, because it’s testing a different variable. And the researchers are clueless about gender.

      • Enkidum says:

        I really, really wish people saying “the researchers are clueless about gender” would have some evidence for that statement beyond an article written by some journalist unconnected to the studies.

        It’s not a good way of improving your beliefs about reality.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          @Enkidum: That’s fair. We always need to check what the scientists say to be sure a journalist isn’t putting lwords in their mouths.

        • Aapje says:

          @Enkidum

          I looked at the abstract of the paper. I stand by my claim.

          • Enkidum says:

            I’m legitimately confused as to what you might find objectionable or ignorant there.

          • Aapje says:

            There are various (sometimes non-exclusive) theories to what gender differences exist and when they occur. To test an existing theory, research should try to figure out whether reality changes at the places that those theories suggest it will, or a new theory should be presented and tested. They don’t seem to do the latter, nor the former (as I’m not aware of a theory that would suggest that wheels would make a difference), so that makes for ignorant science.

            The outcome of their study is completely unsurprising, as no matter what current theory is correct, you’d expect an outcome like that, if the study is done correctly.

            Arguably, the main value, low as it is, in a study like this is to expose those with strong bias; as they draw unwarranted conclusions from nigh-zero value studies like this.

            Then again, for replication crisis reasons, as well as because many people are very biased, doing mediocre studies arguably has larger downsides than upsides.

          • Enkidum says:

            What theory do you think they’re trying to test?

            I really think you’re coming to this study with a huge amount of preconceptions (possibly stemming from the fairly cruddy Time article that was originally linked) about what they are and aren’t trying to say and do.

          • Aapje says:

            Yes, I have preconceptions towards the dominant science and other evidence that already exists. This is not an error, IMO.

            Anyway, I found the actual paper and my criticism was incorrect, although the paper has significant issues in a different way. There seems to be a theory that boys are more interested in “propulsive motion,” and therefor prefer wheeled toys that allow more propulsive motion.

            However, a study they refer to (Benenson et al), to argue that boys may like “propulsive motion” more, didn’t actually measure propulsive toy play, but hitting a balloon. Balloons are not wheeled toys and calling hitting a balloon “propulsive motion” is extremely questionable. Other explanations, like a higher level of aggression, seem quite plausible, so I think that other studies should investigate this finding much better before more research is done that accepts such a disputable explanation. Note that this lack of rigor is extremely common, especially in social sciences, which is why so much of it is a house of cards, with very questionably conclusions being used as premises for new research.

            Also, Benenson measured time hitting a balloon, which is very different from the wheeled toy study, which didn’t measure actual play time, but asked children about their level of interest. This difference in study setup can itself cause various differences (like stated preferences being different from revealed preferences). Again, this is a lack of rigor. Rigorous scientists would either redo the first study with a sufficiently similar methodology or would use a matching methodology.

            So while this study does have a theory that it tests, it is a very flimsy theory. Significant differences in study setup are disguised behind the abstraction of “propulsive motion,” which can be interpreted as fraudulent, if one has a sufficiently high opinion of social scientists and thinks that they comprehend their errors and made them intentionally (I don’t).

      • b_jonas says:

        > Imagine a doll with wheels or a truck without wheels.

        The first one is called a Transformer, and it’s considered a boy’s toy. The second one is just a usual toy truck a few days after your small child got their hands on it, and neither boys nor girls want to pay with it, they just demand you to buy a new toy because this one is broken.

    • aristides says:

      I want to see a follow up study where they paint dolls white and see who plays with them. Possibly no one, since they will look creepy as hell, but I’d still bet girls play more.

      • AG says:

        I want to see a follow up study where the dolls have sword accessories and see who plays with them.

        I saw an elementary school field trip to Vaux le Vicomte, where they set out baskets of foam swords and princess dresses during freeplay time. Girls went for the swords just as much as the boys, whether they donned the dresses or not, and there wasn’t any significant “girls only fought girls, boys only fought boys” segregation. It was equal opportunity boffering all around.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Seems like privileging girls, because they get to cosplay as Noble medieval warriors in pretty dresses while the boys only get to boff them with the toy swords!

          • AG says:

            But that part is definitely socially constructed norms, considering that for most of history, the one-piece dress form of clothing wasn’t a gendered one. Clothing was gendered in other ways.

            This is precisely why I question what sort of implications a constructed dolls vs. trucks binary is supposed to have. People vs. things makes no sense in the context of more historically universal toys, such as tops, jump rope, or marbles.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @AG:

            But that part is definitely socially constructed norms, considering that for most of history, the one-piece dress form of clothing wasn’t a gendered one. Clothing was gendered in other ways.

            This is precisely why I question what sort of implications a constructed dolls vs. trucks binary is supposed to have.

            Well, dolls are nurturing toys (at least the kind used in the monkey studies – they weren’t giving Reese the rhesus a Barbie), so that’s obvious, but the binary with trucks is surprising, because they’re a human construct. Why the toy preference study replicates is actually a strange fact to explain.

          • AG says:

            But “trucks vs. X” could go so many different ways. If there is no other toy alternative, does one group choose to just talk amongst themselves, or play without toys, instead? Do we see the same relationship when other things are on wheels, such as animal or human figures? What about when the truck is a cart instead, a tool to put other things in it, rather than just a solid block on wheels? Do dolls not have car accessories anymore (synthesis!)?

            And as my comment above, is it really about nurturing, or is it about texture? What happens when the toys are a truck-shaped plushie and a hard-material humanoid figure?
            Do boys notably play less with toys based on Pixar’s Cars (or Thomas the Tank Engine), as their anthropomorphized nature and neotenous designs put them under people more than things? For what of object do girls stop nurturing an anthropomorphized form of said object?

            “Trucks vs. dolls” is just one of the most arbitrary things to compare, ever. There are millions of axes upon which the preferences could be acting, even if they replicate.

    • INH5 says:

      About that monkey study. Under the “Data Analysis” section:

      Subjects with fewer than 5 total behaviors (3 males and 14 females) were excluded from analyses, producing a final n of 23 females and 11 males.

      So they threw out a third of their sample based on apparently arbitrary criteria. I really, really want to know why they did that before I’m confident that they didn’t just turn the statistical knobs until they got a “correct” statistically significant result.

      • Enkidum says:

        They just told you why they threw out the subjects.

        Any criteria is somewhat arbitrary, you have to pick a value.

        A general rule of thumb for human data is that less than 12 samples per subject per condition results in data that is too noisy to be trustworthy. They’re clearly being a lot more liberal than that, presumably because collecting these data is difficult.

        • INH5 says:

          Here’s my problem: if they had instead picked a minimum of 4 total behaviors, or 6, or anything else, would anyone have noticed? If not, then how do we know that they didn’t try those other thresholds, and picked the one with the “correct” result for publication?

  22. Enkidum says:

    Continuing a conversation from the previous OT, which had become mostly me and @Hoopdawg (please feel free to correct my inevitable misunderstandings or ignoring of others’ positions):

    It began with @arch1 giving a quotation from the Economist that I really, really like:

    A dictum among linguists is that languages differ not in what they can express, but in what they must

    So all languages can say pretty much anything, but they require you to say it in particular ways.

    I turned to examples of weird requirements of different languages that are completely transparent to native speakers, but madness to outsiders.

    One example is the countable/uncountable distinction in English and many other languages. It simply doesn’t exist in most Asian languages, for example, whereas in English you have to use an article (“a” or “the”) for countable things (but only if there’s one of them!), and not for uncountable ones. This is a huge pain in the ass for many EFL learners, and many essentially never learn it correctly even after many years of practice.

    Similarly, in Chinese and Japanese (among others), you have different words for numbers, depending on the shape and/or metaphysical status of the things you are counting. Thus you would use different numbers for flat things like paper, long thin things like sticks, large animals like cows, small animals like cats, etc. This is also a huge pain in the ass for people coming from languages like English, and many essentially never learn it correctly.

    What I was trying to argue is that these are fairly important parts of the respective languages (you sound like a fool if you don’t use them), but they are not important (or at least almost completely unimportant) for communication. So if you leave them out (just don’t use articles in English, or use generic counters in Japanese), there is, in almost any realistic set of circumstances, no ambiguity introduced into your sentence. And in the vanishingly rare cases in which there might be ambiguity, you could eliminate it with a handful of extra words. Nevertheless in English we simply must express the countability of objects, and in Japanese you simply must express the metaphysical status of any objects you happen to be counting. Because that’s just how language works.

    @Hooddawg’s response was essentially that these features must serve a useful communicative purpose because language is for communication, and non-communicative features would die out (I mean, you said a lot of other things but I think that’s a fair summary of the point of disagreement?).

    So in essence I think my response is that language is “for” communication, but that there are a number of things which encourage the creation and maintenance of novel linguistic features. One of them is surely that there is something you are trying to say which lots of people are trying to say, and this feature allows you to do it efficiently and accurately. So point to hoopdawg there. But another is that the existing structure of the language is such that it is a relatively small move in linguistic space to say the thing you want to say this way, rather than some other way. That is, the language itself becomes part of the environment in which it evolves. And then this novel innovation becomes part of the context under which new linguistic innovations must succeed.

    Now you do this many, many times for hundreds of years, and you end up with a language that is full of crap that, while there may be myriad historical reasons for why it is the way it is, these reasons are not good reasons in the sense of logical or principled argumentation. And these structures, which all native speakers grow up mastering, end up canalizing future development even more.

    And I would argue that that is one of the sources, perhaps the main one, for things like countability and counting words.

    (I think much the same line of argument applies to the evolution of DNA, which is why I’m not particularly impressed by eco-psych, but that’s a separate topic.)

    Douglas Hofstadter somewhere gives the example of Mandarin having a very strong pressure to have two-syllable noun structures. Thus you would rarely say “cat”, you would say “small cat”. But if it was an old cat, you wouldn’t say “small old cat”, you would just say “old cat”. (I’m likely screwing up the example.)

    I will go out on a limb here, despite having no expertise in Mandarin at all, and say that this is a completely useless feature of the language. It adds nothing in terms of communicative utility. But there are certainly interesting historical reasons for why it developed that way (I have no idea what they are). And I would say that English’s articles and Asian languages’ counting words are much closer to that than they might appear to a native speaker.

    • nkurz says:

      > So all languages can say pretty much anything, but they require you to say it in particular ways.

      In some edge cases, though, these particular ways are particularly clumsy. I studied Russian in college, and one of my professors was interested in things that were grammatically very difficult to say in Russian. Since there are some Russian speakers here, it might be interesting to see their reaction to one of his examples. As succinctly as possible, please translate the following sentence into grammatically correct Russian:

      “I have 23 watches” (where watches means the sort timepiece that one wears on one’s wrist).

      Surprisingly to English speakers, this isn’t easy to do. I tested this question on some native speakers while in Russia, and the even more surprising part to me was that most Russians didn’t seem to have precognition that this will be difficult. So they start the sentence, then stumble, and go back and eventually come up with something close to the clumsy pair of sentences “I have 23 things. They are watches”. My favorite answer was “Maybe in America you can have that many watches, but not here.”

      The issue is that in Russian, the case used for nouns is different based on the number that precedes them. For numbers 2 through 4 (and for multiples of 10 plus these numbers other than the teens), the noun needs to be in the genitive singular case, while numbers 5-9 are in the genitive plural. But the word “watch” though is already a plural word, coming from “hours”.

      So to be grammatically correct, one needs to come up with the genitive singular of a plural word, which does not exist. For small numbers, there are some standard work arounds. For even numbers, there are some other work arounds (such as counting in pairs). But for the rare case of larger numbers that are 3 away from a multiple of 10, there doesn’t seem to be any real standard.

      • Enkidum says:

        That’s pretty hilarious, actually, and I think gives a strong case for languages not being always, or even primarily, about effective communication. These structures build up over time and you get weird conflict situations like this.

      • eyeballfrog says:

        What are some examples of this for English?

        • Machine Interface says:

          Model verbs that lack an infinitive form.

          Eg: what is the future tense of “He should do this”?

          • Oscar Sebastian says:

            He should do this later.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Not the same thing, I think. I took Machine Interface’s challenge to be to express the claim that at some point in the future, he will be obliged to do this, not that he currently is obliged to do it at some point in the future. Something like “He will have to do this.” But I’m not sure if that completely addresses MI’s requirement. Are there other languages where this is substantially less awkward?

          • Eric Rall says:

            I’m pretty sure “shall” is the future form of “should”, but it’s problematic here because it has connotations of certainty in addition to the denotation of obligation.

          • Machine Interface says:

            “shall” is the correct morphology, but the meaning has shifted, so that “he shall do this” is generally just synonymous with “he will do this.”

            “He should do this.” Means “there’s probably a requirement that he does this”. Contrasted with “He must do this”, meaning “there’s definitely a requirement that he does this”. “He will have to do this” is basically how you express the future of “he must do this”. The future of “he should do this” has then to be approximated as something “he will probably have to do this”. (Or maybe “he would have to do this”?)

            The more general point is that “can”, “could”, “should”, “must” and other similar verbs do not have infinitive forms and so can not to be directly used with forms that require the infinitives (such as future constructions with “will” or “going to”).

            That doesn’t mean the concept is out of reach, but a different construction has to be used (such as “will have to” to translate the notion of “must” into the future).

          • Don P. says:

            Better, the future version of “must” (unless it’s the same “shall” answer).

          • A1987dM says:

            It will be better for him to do this.

          • Viliam says:

            Not a native English speaker, but my guess would be: “He will be obliged to do this.”

          • Ghillie Dhu says:

            “He will should do this.”

          • Auric Ulvin says:

            He ought to do this.

        • smocc says:

          I have read that certain Indian languages have a question word akin to “which” or “who” for “which number in an ordered series is the object.” This is used mainly for questioning family structure, so you can ask where line someone is in their family in a small number of words. I correct answer is a number or ordinal.

          I’m still not sure I have a good English equivalent in a single sentence. “Which number are you in the order of your siblings?” or “Which number child are you in your family?”

          Also: communicating which zippered section of a large backpack or bag something is in. Is there any language that can do this efficiently?

          • A1987dM says:

            IIRC so do German and Latin.

          • a real dog says:

            Can you elaborate on the last example? In English you can just ask “in which section”, and get an answer like “third from the left”. That sounds pretty efficient to me.

          • smocc says:

            @a real dog

            That which is the left side of a backpack? The side that is on the wearer’s left when wearing it, or the left of someone standing on the side the straps are on, which is often how the pockets are accessed. Similarly, what is the back of a backpack? Is it the side closest to wearer’s back, or is it the side furthest from the back? In practice I find no one has a clear answer to that in their heads.

            The only practical solutions I know are to use directions relative to the person you are talking to (which is inconsistent and usually requires everyone to stop and think) and to use visual descriptors of the pockets (the largest one, the small one with a toggle on the zipper, etc.)

          • CatCube says:

            @a real dog

            That sounds an awful lot like a specific subset of English: the marine/naval industry.

            “Port” and “starboard” are used for “left” and “right” for this exact reason. “Port” always refers to the left side of the ship when you’re facing towards the bow, and “starboard” the right. There’s no confusion using those compared to using “left” and “right” which may be interpreted as relative to the speaker, relative to the listener, or relative to the ship.

            Of course, in dams we always use “left” and “right” with the convention that they refer to those directions when facing downstream. Left abutment, left gate, etc. It’s usually not too confusing once you know the convention.

          • smocc says:

            Good point about port and starboard. Now to get everyone to start referring to the port and starboard side of backpacks.

            Also related, in theater we use “stage left/right” which mean left and right when you are standing onstage looking at the audience.

            And in skiing I’ve heard of “skier’s left/right.”

          • March says:

            Reminds me of a friend of mine, who always calls everything by the cardinal directions. She recently moved and told me, as the furniture receiver in the new house, to make sure the big cabinet got put against the north wall in the upstairs bedroom. My sense of direction is excellent outside, but I always get turned around inside buildings so I found this instruction frustrating. (I ended up looking outside to determine the direction and then deducting where the north wall was, since my friend was already stressed out enough.)

            Later, I found and forwarded an article about this language where people don’t have concepts for ‘left’ and ‘right’, they’d just say ‘my north leg’ or ‘my south leg’ (and of course change that to east/west when they turn 90 degrees and to ‘south’ and ‘north’ when they turn 90 degrees further). I said: ‘This reminds of you, why is it that you don’t just say to make sure to put the cabinet up against the left wall or to turn right at the intersection?’ Her answer: ‘How am I supposed to keep track of what left and right is?’

          • smocc says:

            @March

            Is your friend from Utah? Most of the populated parts of Utah are along a mountain range that runs pretty much due north-south. And almost all of the street-systems are a N-S aligned grid system where the streets are numbered by how far N-S or E-W they are of the town center. Becauase of that most buildings end up compass aligned as well. It is common to give driving directions, or even indoor directions in terms of compass directions.

            It didn’t take long at all after moving there for it to feel completely natural, even in the deep basements of large buildings. Moving away took a while to get used to not always knowing where north is.

          • March says:

            @smocc,

            No, we were both born and raised in the Netherlands, a country famous for not having any mountains and following the European predilection for not building cities on grids.

            I have a good sense of direction outdoors because I have a good sense of time and can tell where the light comes from. I don’t have the latter indoors. My friend must have a sixth sense for magnetic fields or something like that.

          • smocc says:

            Impressive. I’m jealous of her.

          • Lambert says:

            > sixth sense for magnetic fields

            She’s not a biohacker, is she? 😉

      • a real dog says:

        Some languages just have gaps in places that native speakers are not consciously aware of.

        A famous one in Polish is the lack of passive voice forms for certain verbs – in general you can rephrase every sentence as passive, by switching the subject and object and altering the verb a bit. However, for some verbs, even if a passive form existed once it’s now forgotten, because it’s not really useful. You’d have to wordsmith it from scratch and it will sound really weird.

        “Zajączek obszedł jezioro dookoła.” -> the hare walked (circled) around the lake
        “Jezioro zostało (??? obszędnięte?? obejdzione??) przez zajączka.” -> the lake was walked (circled) around by the hare

        When I explained this one to a Hungarian friend, he said that Hungarian doesn’t even HAVE a passive voice (there’s no way to express the difference between the two statements above)… So you cannot say “I was punched in the face”, but “someone punched me in the face”. That’s an elegant solution if I ever saw one.

      • Paper Rat says:

        As succinctly as possible, please translate the following sentence into grammatically correct Russian:

        “I have 23 watches” (where watches means the sort timepiece that one wears on one’s wrist).

        Ha, neat, that’s a tricky one. I think the acceptable translation would be something like:
        “У меня есть 23 пары наручных часов”.
        Literal translation back into English gives:
        “I have 23 pairs of watches”.

        The word “pair” in Russian is used for cases, when you need a singular form of a noun that by default has none, like “scissors” or “trousers” or “pants” (they all are only plural in Russian as well). So “a pair of pants”/”пара трусов” stands for pants count of 1 (using English translation for pants here, rather than American :)).

        The problem arises because referring to multiple “watches” is really uncommon in everyday speech unlike referring to multiple “pants” or “trousers” (say for doing laundry), and the phrase “pair of watches” sounds really clunky as a result (same goes for “pair of scissors”). So, yeah, in a roundabout way “Maybe in America you can have that many watches, but not here” is the correct answer.

        • mcpalenik says:

          I asked a friend and he also came up with the pairs of watches translation, but he also told me that everything he could think of sounded retarded.

    • SolipsisticUtilitarian says:

      I would not be so sure about the Mandarin case. Ancient Chinese differs from Mandarin in many ways, two of them being the much higher frequency of single character (and thus single syllable) words, and the fact that it was used for writing not speaking. The difficulty with spoken Mandarin however is the incredible number of homonyms, which is not just problematic for foreigners but also for native Chinese who can often be observed tracing a character on their palm in conversation to let their collocutor know which word they were referring to. Using two syllable nouns alleviates that problem somewhat.

      • Enkidum says:

        Thanks for that information.

      • Totient Function says:

        I often have the feeling that a lot of features of the Chinese language are outgrowths of the homonym problem – not only the use of two character words, but also the prevalence and variety of measure words, and (in my opinion) a preference for context embedded statements in comparison with English. All these things narrow down the number of possible meanings a particular sound night carry…

    • Machine Interface says:

      When I studied linguistics and had, among other courses, sociolinguistic lessons, we were met with the proposition (not in those words but that was clearly the idea), that language is another tool of ingroup/outgroup distinction. So the traits of language are informed simultaneously by a need to be understood and recognized by your ingroup quickly and effitiently, while simultaneously not being understood by the outgroup and being able to quickly recognize someone from the outgroup trying to use your language.

      While this is only a hypothesis, it would elegantly explains why many languages seem to have arcane grammatical features that seemingly serve no purpose except making the language more complicated to use.

      Another factor can be redundancy: an average language’s relatively low amount of meanginful information per second of utterance has the advantage that we can still understand what’s being said even under heavy distorsion. This is an important features that distinguish natural languages from programming languages, where a single missing comma will throw off the interpreter, whrs hmns cn ndrstnd n nglsh sntnc vn wth ll th vwls mssng.

      As for the counting words of East Asian languages, there’s another categories of languages where they do pop up a lot: sign languages. Here it seems that they have an actual function, as they work essentially as 3rd person pronouns, which means that signers can potentially have a discussion about a dozen different objects simultaneously, keeping all of them distinct without having to constantly repeat the full nouns.

      • Enkidum says:

        As for the counting words of East Asian languages, there’s another categories of languages where they do pop up a lot: sign languages. Here it seems that they have an actual function, as they work essentially as 3rd person pronouns, which means that signers can potentially have a discussion about a dozen different objects simultaneously, keeping all of them distinct without having to constantly repeat the full nouns.

        Oh, I did not know that either, very cool.

        I said something to that effect in the previous thread, though, suggesting that one utility of the counting words could be if you were talking about multiple distinct groups of things, then you could number one of them without having to use the noun at all. But this is a pretty arcane use, I would have thought, and breaks down when the different groups are from the same categories, which I would think would be most common (e.g. counting pigs and sheep, or something like that).

    • Hoopdawg says:

      A dictum among linguists is that languages differ not in what they can express, but in what they must

      So all languages can say pretty much anything, but they require you to say it in particular ways.

      I feel I need to state something I might have previously failed to explicitly state.

      For both parts of this contention, there exists a weak, largely uncontroversial reading (“languages differ not in what they can express” -> for any sufficiently advanced language, there exists a way to convey anything that other languages can; “but in what they must” -> but they use particular ways to say it), and a strong, far-reaching one (“languages differ not in what they can express” -> all languages’ grammar ultimately has the same capabilities; “but in what they must” -> but each requires you to convey (different) things you might otherwise not want to say).

      Throughout the previous thread, I was trying to object to the stronger reading. (The weaker, I think, is true, but largely uninteresting. Languages’ grammatical structures obviously differ. And it is ultimately possible to replicate a meaning of any sentence in another language, though it takes significant effort in some cases.)

      What I was trying to argue is that these are fairly important parts of the respective languages (you sound like a fool if you don’t use them), but they are not important (or at least almost completely unimportant) for communication.

      And I was, essentially, arguing the opposite – that those features are important for communication (e.g. you need counters for the capability to express quantities), but aren’t forcing any requirements on your speech (e.g. you can always use a generic counter). In this context, I have indeed ultimately argued something to the effect that all (or almost all) language’s “features must serve a useful communicative purpose because language is for communication, and non-communicative features would die out”.

      This does not mean that languages aren’t often messy or inefficient, and I am essentially agreeing with everything you’re saying about the historical and evolutionary processes here. At this point, I can only repeat that none of this contradicts the observation that languages are continuously ruthlessly refined and aiming at (local) optima. Evolution is imprecise, undirected, distracted by the need for continuity, but it’s still a powerful force at optimizing for fitness, which, for languages, means facilitating communication. I stand by my assertion that for any feature of language, one can always explain its (contemporary) usefulness; this includes features that languages are getting rid of anyway.

      • Enkidum says:

        those features are important for communication (e.g. you need counters for the capability to express quantities), but aren’t forcing any requirements on your speech (e.g. you can always use a generic counter).

        I think this is just false. I guess you can use a generic counter for sheep or whatever, but it would sound extremely odd at best (I think whether it counts as a grammatical error is a difficult question to answer, but it’s certainly close to one). Any actual Japanese speakers weighing in would be appreciated.

        And I guess when I say “I answered the door”, the “the” is in some sense conveying something I want to convey – that it is the particular door we were talking about, or that you can infer I would have been thinking about given the context. But it adds nothing to the sentence “I answered door” if the context is already there. I think, anyways. So it’s not that it’s forcing you to convey information you disagree with, or anything like that, simply that it’s redundant.

        Shit, I have a meeting, I’m interested in hearing your reply to the poorly-thought out stuff above at any rate.

        • Paper Rat says:

          …, or that you can infer I would have been thinking about given the context.

          …, or that you can infer I would have been thinking about given context.

          These seem to have completely different meaning with and without the article. “The” in this case makes parsing the sentence much easier. Also I feel too much of your examples are focused on speech, where context is usually plentiful and free, while in written language providing context costs extra.

          • Enkidum says:

            hese seem to have completely different meaning with and without the article. “The” in this case makes parsing the sentence much easier.

            While I’m not sure I see the completely different meanings (they seem pretty similar to me), I’m not saying that there are no cases where the forms don’t convey meaningful information. I’m saying most of the time, they don’t.

            Also I feel too much of your examples are focused on speech, where context is usually plentiful and free, while in written language providing context costs extra.

            But speech is what language is. Writing is a weird and late add-on, and these weird grammatical forms evolved in every language in situations where most people would have been functionally illiterate at best.

          • Paper Rat says:

            @Enkidum

            While I’m not sure I see the completely different meanings (they seem pretty similar to me)…

            I understood them as such:
            First quote is you thinking about the door given the context.
            Second quote is you thinking about given context.

            But speech is what language is. Writing is a weird and late add-on, and these weird grammatical forms evolved in every language in situations where most people would have been functionally illiterate at best.

            Writing accompanied language through all of known history, pretty much by definition. Our knowledge of many old languages, such as it is, is based almost entirely on written works. The rules of grammar and such are also transmitted and preserved mostly through writing.

            So, in my mind, if a particular quirk of language serves an important function in it’s written form, it cannot be called useless. And articles in English seem to me to satisfy that requirement.

          • Enkidum says:

            Hmmmm… that’s an interesting point. I still think most linguistic innovation (until very recently) is primarily driven by spoken language, but I don’t think I have much good evidence for that beyond my own prejudices.

          • Machine Interface says:

            Paper Rat >

            The rules of grammar and such are also transmitted and preserved mostly through writing.

            I think you’re conflating two different notions of “rules of grammar”.

            There’s the explicit, conscious rules put into theory by academicians analyzing the language and describing what they see.

            And there’s the implicit, ingrained, subconscious rules that speakers don’t actually know they know, but use when they speak.

            Written grammers transmit the former, not so much the later. People learn their native language primarily through imitating their peers, and only marginaly through consciously learning rules from a book. As a French speaker, I didn’t need to be explicitely taught the entirety of French conjugation system — I already knew most of it before I could read. I only needed to be taught rare or archaic forms that do not occure much in speech, like the simple past, the 1st and 2nd person plural forms of the imperfect, the subjunctive imperfect, and a small number of very irregular verbs of uncommon use — all of which doesn’t even accounts for 10% of the entire French verbal system (meanwhile, before being taught this, I had already mastered forms that aren’t even recognized by most grammars — that is, they aren’t even called wrong, the grammars don’t aknowledge that these exist at all, even though no one would consider you wrong for using them).

            The majority of innovation in language starts in popular spoken forms, and it’s the academic, formal language of grammar books that lags behind, often by several centuries — which of course doesn’t mean all innovations that appear in popular speech will one day become standard, many are just fads that will die quickly, and it also doesn’t mean that no innovation can ever originate in academic language, but on average it’s still mostly popular language that drives language innovation, and this can be observed both diachronically and synchronically in many languages.

            Here’s an illustration of the evolution of Ancient Egyptian with different registers compared.

            You can see that higher registers of texts keep using archaic/outdated forms of the language when lower registers have already moved on (with the special case of Neo-Middle-Egyptian being an entirely artificial, deliberatedly reactionary register that was attempting to revive the “pure” Middle-Egyptian of a millenia ealier, but only partially succeeded, as it still contained more contemporary forms).

            You’ll note astutely that this table is entirely about written texts, but registers aren’t just an affair of binary text/speech distinction; texts just like speech can have multiple levels of register, and the lower the level, the closer it can be shown to be to the spoken language. A good example of this is modern Arabic, for which you could draw a similar table.

            Contemporary theological texts in Arabic use the purest, most elaborate forms of Standard Arabic. Official texts in Arabic still use perfect Standard Arabic, but generally in a more efficient and less stuffed way, omitting the most complex or archaic constructions for the sake of communication. Literary texts use a basis of Standard Arabic but also start to mix significant amounts of dialectal elements. And finally ordinary texts, like Facebook posts, often completely ignore standard Arabic and are written in dialect, closely mirroring how their author actually speaks.

            While texts allow us to know a lot restrospectively about language in the past, they only so far. The oldest texts are from 5,000 years ago. One of the earliest estimates for the apparition of spoken language is 50,000 years ago, which means that from the get go, written language only chronicles 10% of the history of language.

            And then of course, as Enkidum pointed out, until fairly recently most people were functionally illiterate and, even in relatively well off society, wouldn’t have been taught much writing beyond writing their own name — a formal education to the standardized rules of the national language (not that there was any such thing) was not even in question.

            To speak about what I know, in France, until the 19th century, not only the majority of the population could not read French, but in fact they could not speak it either. They spoke in regional languages that were either not written at all or if they were had absolutely no standard spelling or grammar.

            Universal and compulsory education in a single national language really transformed the linguistic landscape of western and western-influenced countries, and it’s quite difficult to picture to yourself what the world was like before that point (you’d have to travel to sub-Saharan African countries with very high multilinguism, where you can meet children under 10 who already speak 4 languages fluently and can communicate in 6 others, while not knowing how to read or write a single one of those).

          • A1987dM says:

            forms that do not occure much in speech, like […] the 1st and 2nd person plural forms of the imperfect

            Okay, I guess the 1st doesn’t occur much because you use “on” with the 3rd singular instead, but why is the 2nd rare? What’s the usual way to say “you used to do” to several people (or one higher-status person) in everyday spoken French?

          • Machine Interface says:

            Well the trick for this one is there simply aren’t a lot of situations where you would say “you used to” to a group of people. It’s a rare form not because it’s archaic or especially difficult, but simply because this particular combination of elements happen not to occure a lot in speech (especially in the speech of younger children who will seldom speak to several people at once to begin with).

            There isn’t any alternative, but it’s just a combination that is rare enough to be acquired quite late.

            For the anecdote, in Cajun French, where “vous” is only used as the polite second-person, singular, forms in -iez are entirely absent — in this case there is actually no way to use the imperfect with this pronoun (Cajun French however use “vous-autres” + 3rd person singular forms for the actual 2nd person plural, avoiding the issue in that case).

          • Paper Rat says:

            @Machine Interface

            I think you’re conflating two different notions of “rules of grammar”.

            I knew the way I phrased it was perhaps a bit too strong a claim, my bad. I wasn’t trying to claim that writing is more important than speech, or that evolution of language happens predominantly through writing (though I still think preservation does). I was pushing back against the notion that usefulness of a given grammatical form can be judged without considering it’s usefulness for written language.

            I agree with pretty much all your points, they seem non-controversial to me.

            One thing though:

            While texts allow us to know a lot restrospectively about language in the past, they only so far. The oldest texts are from 5,000 years ago. One of the earliest estimates for the apparition of spoken language is 50,000 years ago, which means that from the get go, written language only chronicles 10% of the history of language.

            If I understand correctly, the information we do have about spoken language of ages past is based almost entirely on historical texts. So the 10% figure is a bit misleading, in that these 10% contain close to a 100% of information that we actually have, or like 50% (just throwing numbers around here) if you consider extant language users to be relevant for this metric.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I find it amusing that the meaning of “the city” or “the party” are *very* contextual.

            How do languages without a definite article handle this? Do they?

          • Machine Interface says:

            @Paper Rat

            If I understand correctly, the information we do have about spoken language of ages past is based almost entirely on historical texts. So the 10% figure is a bit misleading, in that these 10% contain close to a 100% of information that we actually have, or like 50% (just throwing numbers around here) if you consider extant language users to be relevant for this metric.

            Well, kinda, there’s also a lot that can be reconstructed based even on modern spoken languages, so that we still have some idea about the internal history and relationships between even languages that have never been written but are attested today. However, reconstruction can only go so far back in time before the accumulation of noise makes any sensible attempt meaningless. And futhermore, we can only reconstruct based on what’s actually attested — if a language went extinct without having ever been written or recorded, that’s effectively a hole in our knowledge, and a hole we might not even be aware of.

            @Nancy Lebovitz

            I find it amusing that the meaning of “the city” or “the party” are *very* contextual.

            How do languages without a definite article handle this? Do they?

            Definite articles have several functions, and language without those articles can handle these functions in a variety of way.

            The most common function is to distinguish between old and new information: “I went to a party [new] yesterday. I saw a man [new] at the party [old]. The man [old] was well dressed.”

            I remember the claim that Russian can achieve this through word order, with a tendency to put old information near the beginning of the sentence and new information near the end (which is relatively easy to achieve because word order is otherwise fairly free in Russian).

            Other languages might simply not bother and leave that point to context.

            Another function is a generic vs specific distinction. “A dog could do this” (any dog, the hypothetica of a dog) “The dog of the president” (the one unique real dog that belongs to the president).

            Language can occasionally achieve that effect by using demonstrative adjectives (this/that), and in fact, in many languages, the definite articles are nothing more than former demonstrative adjectives which have progressively lost in intansity. The definite article of Germanic languages, Romance languages, Greek and Bulgarian all started as demonstrative adjectives. Eventually people said “this dog” so often that it came to mean “the dog” (and a new word had to be pressed into service to mean “this”).

          • Doctor Mist says:

            “I went to a party [new] yesterday. I saw a man [new] at the party [old]. The man [old] was well dressed.”

            Heh, reminds me of patent-speak: “A pulley, and a belt attached to said pulley, where the size ratio of said pulley and said belt does not exceed…”

        • Hoopdawg says:

          I understand that I can’t really simultaneously argue that grammatical conventions literally do not force to say particular things that you could otherwise leave unstated while I claim those conventions carry useful information. All I can do is to point out that the problems this puts on you are insignificant compared to the problems caused by holes in languages’ grammars (“what they can express” still being vastly more important than “what they must”), and that the constraints largely arise to fix those holes. Thankfully, people in this thread keep doing the job for me, bringing up examples of holes in languages and explaining the necessity of their non-obviously meaningful constraints.

          In absence of a Japanese person, I consulted Google to at least find out how common each form of the type [counter]の羊 is. The first thing I realized is that I need to restrain the generic counter searches, e.g. by adding は, because otherwise most of the results were of the type 三つの羊の群れ. At which point, something clicked – Japanese has a need to disambiguate between a flock of three sheeps and three flocks of sheeps that counters can readily satisfy. Point for usefulness.

          (The results of the search? “つの羊は”: ~2500 results (mostly driven by 2つの羊は on stock photo sites, other [number]つの羊は combinations are in single digits); “頭の羊は” and “匹の羊は”: ~75000 each. So it resolves nothing, “animal” counters are vastly preferable, generics are spottable in the wild but so rare that it’s impossible to discern whether they represent actual part of language.)

          • Enkidum says:

            But for any of the examples we’ve been talking about, probably the majority of languages in the world do not contain that form as a grammatical rule. So whatever the “hole” is, it exists for probably the majority of humans, apparently without harm.

            I think, roughly speaking, structure begets structure, and this is an incredibly powerful force.

            I also think I’m pushing hard back against your position without really disagreeing all that much – I think what we mostly have is a difference of interpretation of the same ground truth, probably, but we don’t have a particularly cogent way of expressing said difference yet.

          • Hoopdawg says:

            But for any of the examples we’ve been talking about, probably the majority of languages in the world do not contain that form as a grammatical rule. So whatever the “hole” is, it exists for probably the majority of humans, apparently without harm.

            The point is, the “hole” does not really exist for other languages, because they already have other means for expressing the same meaning. Say, English can change word order to distinguish “flock of three sheep” from “three flocks of sheep” (even with its weird lack of distinct plural for sheep in particular). Polish can inflect its words to achieve the same between “stado trzech owiec” and “trzy stada owiec”. Meanwhile, I’m not sure what else can you do with Japanese’s existing grammar rules to make sure you speak of “(3) (hitsuji no mure)” and not “(3 hitsuji) no mure”. (But then again, I’m – understatement warning – not particularly good at Japanese, so that may just be me. But even if this one example is incorrect, the general point appears valid to me.)

            I think what we mostly have is a difference of interpretation of the same ground truth

            Totally. I mean, you say that “structure begets structure” and… at this point that’s basically my point, too.

    • Orion says:

      English counting used to be pretty difficult, too. Sheets of paper, ingots of metal, cords of wood, head of cattle.

      • Enkidum says:

        There’s an old sheep-counting number system from some part of England my parents had partially memorized, with I believe 60 unique numbers. Counting is weird.

        • Aftagley says:

          This?

          It’s amazing. It looks like a base-five counting system linked by rhyme.

          • Enkidum says:

            Actually yes that’s it – I haven’t even gone to the link but the title is the first few words that they would always recite.

            In retrospect, I had weird parents.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Enkidum

            In retrospect, I had weird parents.

            Those are the best kind.

          • nkurz says:

            If you are interested, here’s a classic song that illustrates this method of counting (as well as some less appealing aspects of the shepherd’s life):

            Jake Thackray ‘Molly Metcalfe’

            Old Molly Metcalfe counting sheep;
            Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip she counted.
            Up upon Swaledale, steep and bleak;
            Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip she said.
            Grow, little sheep, come hail come snow;
            Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip she counted.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXINuf5nbI

    • Watchman says:

      For an interesting example of frequent use of English without the direct and indirect articles, I’d suggest the Spartacus tv series. I assume this is done partially to reflect the often brutally sharp effect of conversation in classical Latin (along with no words doe yes or no, so it’s I obey or an argument, and limited use of personal pronouns – Latin was set up for modern politics perhaps…), but regardless of the why it can be quite a striking linguistic effect without actually obscuring meaning. I can’t remember how consistent this was though, and think it was abandoned during longer conversational scenes so as to allow viewers to follow better.

    • statsman says:

      Not sure these are the same thing but (examples from Italian)

      – Grammatical gender seems useless and a waste of synapses. At best an inefficient way to add redundancy. Adding to the horror, you have words that are the same apart from their gender but have different meanings.

      – Irregular verbs, though these sometimes make things more concise.

      – Irregular adjectives and adverbs and nouns (e.g. buono, bene, la mano / il uomo)

      – Rules about prepositions that add no value e.g. ‘in’ / ‘a’ apply to different destinations in Italian.

      – Expression of meaning via more complex verb conjugations when auxiliary words would suffice.

      One mystery to me is that people get very annoyed about grammatical errors even when the meaning is clear. Why?

  23. DinoNerd says:

    We have quite a thread on what random members of the general public can currently perceive about climate change, that morphed out of a question about testable predictions. I want to go somewhere different, and look at types of overall result. Not as predictions, but as a range of possibilities someone is pushing/presuming. I’m reasonably sure that if the political public stops arguing about whether climate change is happening, and whether it’s human-caused, the next argument will be whether the results are going to be good, bad or indifferent. So let’s have a preview of those arguments. And then let’s see what people here find themselves expecting, and how confident they are. Note that I’m focussed on first world/US experiences here, except to the extent that 3rd world problems affect the 1st world – not because I don’t care about folks in the 3rd world, but because I don’t expect the political arguments in the US to offer 3rd world welfare more than lip service.

    1. Climate change will make things better. More land will be comfortably inhabitable, crops will produce better with more carbon in the atmosphere, GDP will go up.
    2. Climate change will have small negative effects. Economic growth will be a bit slower, but that just means that it’ll take until 2105 to be where we would have been in 2100. Daily life remains just as comfortable – or better, because of all the technological improvement that happens over this time scale.
    3. Climate change will change the way we live. Some areas will be too hot to inhabit – even with AC, going outdoors will be too dangerous for people to want to live there. Coastal property will lose value. New areas will have bugs carrying deadly diseases etc. Lots of people – and farmers, and industry – will have to move. Some of the frail may die younger. That will be costly, but we’ll eat the costs and keep on going. The whole thing will be a blip on a graph, seen on a long term scale (500+ years).
    4. Climate change will be a disaster. Those worst affected will resort to war, terrorism, etc.. The average first world inhabitant will be drafted, and/or know people killed in terrorist incidents, or similar. Meanwhile nothing that’s currently produced in vulnerable countries will be available – or not remotely cheaply. Food will be rationed. A shrunken Fortress America will be thrown back on its own resources, and what it can trade with similar enclaves, while most of the third world burns/drowns.
    5. Climate change will be an ecological disaster. When we lose all pollinators, farm production will crash, requiring more people per unit of production. Few species will survive, and the human population will also crash hard. The switch to nuclear, done too fast and too carelessly, will create a number of chernobyls, and worse. The standard of living for the remaining human beings will be much lower than anything we’ve seen in the first world in a long time.
    6. Climate change will be an existential disaster, on par with e.g. the dinosaur extinction event. In a few million years, there will be a mostly new ecology. Without humans.
    7. Climate change will eventually exterminate almost all life on the planet, as it develops much the same climate as Venus.

    This is not a complete catalog, but it’ll do for starters. Where do you fit in this, and what’s your level of confidence?

    • EchoChaos says:

      Somewhere between 1 and 2.

      Edit:

      Sorry, didn’t see an ask for confidence as well. About 70% confident, since 2-3 is about the IPCC prediction, which seems overly aggressive to me.

    • herbert herberson says:

      1. 3%
      2. 15%
      3. 40%
      4. 35%
      5. 4%
      6. 2%
      7. 1%

    • DinoNerd says:

      Answering for myself – I’m expecting something in the 3-5 range, with extremely low confidence. Scenarios like 5 (if they occur) will result from more than just climate change – other types of human action will also contribute (pollution, habitat loss, etc.) We’ll stay at 2 for a while, possibly for the rest of my life. (I’m nearing retirement age.)

    • Aftagley says:

      Can I advocate for a new point inserted between 3 and 4?

      Take everything in three and add on massive amounts of migration away from the most effected parts. I see substantial movement of people’s away from the most effected areas towards the less effected areas with an attendant rise in insatiability.

      Maybe not everyone in the 1st world will be drafted/affected, but it will be a substantial factor in our political lives.

      Edit: adding confidence – 80%

      • herbert herberson says:

        See, I was inclined to advocate for 3 and 4 being combined. IMO if more than a small number of areas start hitting wet bulb 35 with any regularity, we hit a spiraling situation with the Third World pretty quick, with collapse and mass migration and the First World swinging hard into either ecofascism or ecocommunism (probably the former, unfortunately for my preferences)

        • Aftagley says:

          I think I would agree more with a combined 3 and 4 than I am with their current seperation.

          That being said this:

          the First World swinging hard into either ecofascism or ecocommunism

          is where I start to disagree with you. I think the overall institutions would survive the 3rd world going to hell.

          • herbert herberson says:

            That’s fair; it’s my personal judgement that once you start seeing true mass migration from the Third World, the First World either has to be willing to use lethal force at its borders against large numbers of very desperate people (which, to me, qualifies as ecofascism) or expend a level of resources, taken from the people who have them, that liberal capitalism will not permit (ecocommunism). Your definitions and/or belief in capital’s willingness to care for masses of climate refugees and/or belief in the ability to keep mass migrations out without resorting to atrocities may vary

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            @herbert herberson,

            While I agree with you that those are the two most likely outcomes, I think it’s funny that you discount the third option (ecoliberalism?) that the migrants could do enough productive work to cover the costs of integrating them into western societies. If that was the case there would be no need to shoot them or to steal from natives in order to pay for them.

            I know why I don’t believe that to be the case but I don’t understand why you would think that they have nothing to contribute.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            @Nabil ad Dajjal

            Even in the case of Laissez Faire [which is very unlikely] leveling the wage differential would involve redistribution of income.

          • herbert herberson says:

            I think in the long run they would pay for themselves just fine, but in short run there’s a good chance that they will either require significant assistance, or will pile up in godawful shantytowns which will lead to one of the other two options.

            But the biggest factor is that I don’t think the general voting public will allow their entry in the first place unless they are provided with substantially more material security via the implementation of a more equitable economy at the expense of the capitalist class.

          • “the First World either has to be willing to use lethal force at its borders against large numbers of very desperate people”

            No, all it needs to do is convince them their probabiltiy of getting past the border agents is so low it isn’t worth it to try. If they are coming in armed, deadly force would need to be used, but that’s not fascism, it’s resisting invasion.

            “unless they are provided with substantially more material security via the implementation of a more equitable economy at the expense of the capitalist class.”

            Considering the historical record of communist states in providing material security to their people, that doesn’t seem very likely.

        • Nick says:

          What is “wet bulb 35”? 35C?

          • acymetric says:

            Yes, it is Celcius. Wet bulb is a method of measuring temperature that takes into account the cooling effect of evaporation impacted by humidity (so wet bulb temperature is the same as actual temperature at 100% humidity, but the wet bulb temperature will be lower at less than 100% humidity as there is some cooling from evaporation). I assume this is at least partially important because people use water evaporation for self-cooling.

          • Nick says:

            Ah, thanks. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of wet bulb temperature, or never registered it if I had.

          • acymetric says:

            I was casually familiar with the term from my time working at a company that specialized in industrial thermal processing/moisture removal equipment. Most of the details I looked up just now, I think I represented it reasonably accurately.

          • herbert herberson says:

            What acymertic said + 35C wet bulb is the point where you start to suffer fatal heatstroke no matter what your circumstances (in terms of shade, water, fans, etc).

          • zzzzort says:

            Wet bulb temperature is often measured (though probably not in fancy industrial settings) with a sling psychrometer. Which is just the coolest name for a damp thermometer that you wave over your head.

        • Ketil says:

          Makes one think.

          The biggest damage from the Fukushima accident was caused by the reactions to it, unnecessary evacuation, excessive mitigation and cleanup, and general panic.

          Judging from social media (how could that possibly go wrong), a large fraction of people are very, very upset about climate change, and some are warming to the idea that authoritarian measures are needed. Less drastically, green idealists in power might Do Things to the economy. Perhaps the biggest threat from climate change is political?

          Not that I would give this high confidence, usually idealism gets quickly subverted by vested interests. (E.g., in today’s news, offshore out-of-sight wind power is so popular with politicians that the company building the flagship floating wind farm only pay 9% of the cost.)

        • Mustard Tiger says:

          I don’t think so many people will move. We have people living in Buffalo and Brownsville in the same country who stay put. Both complain about the weather but they don’t all come to California

      • Randy M says:

        Take everything in three and add on massive amounts of migration away from the most effected parts.

        Simple. To compensate for global warming, all national borders are to shift away from the equator by ten miles per year.
        Man, politics is easy.

        • Aftagley says:

          2140 – Colombia’s border with Panama is now just south of what was once Texas. To the south, Colombia is within sight of the smoking remains of Lima.

          Assuming we’re keeping state shapes, the most southern point in the US, the tip of texas, is at the border between Iowa and Minnesota.

          10/10 – I like this policy.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        Take everything in three and add on massive amounts of migration away from the most effected parts. I see substantial movement of people’s away from the most effected areas towards the less effected areas with an attendant rise in insatiability.

        I don’t really expect this.

        While local migration could happen in response to individual catastrophic events (e.g. one town get flooded and its people move to the next town), systematic large scale migration originates from developing regions which are in the middle of the demographic transition (already low infant mortality but still high fertility).

        “Bad” global warming is supposed to negatively affect these third-world regions, pushing them back to the pre-modern regime of high infant mortality, reducing population growth and therefore emigration.

        I’m not sure what happens if global warming is instead actually “good” even for third-world regions (in the sense of increased food production without major floods, desertification, etc.): it could either hasten the demographic transition, reducing population growth and hence emigration, or there could be other factors that prevent the full demographic transition in these areas (it seems to be evolutionarily maladaptive, after all), resulting in higher population growth and emigration.

        • Aftagley says:

          “Bad” global warming is supposed to negatively affect these third-world regions, pushing them back to the pre-modern regime of high infant mortality, reducing population growth and therefore emigration.

          Right, but what if these areas become uninhabitably hot? The people won’t/can’t stop at the next town over, because it’s also too hot there. I’ll agree that over a long enough time horizon immigration rates will decrease, but only because everyone will have already left.

          I also don’t think this will be an immediate mass-movement of people. It seems more likely that individuals/small groups will just increasingly choose to move somewhere less destructively hot. Less of a Syria type situation and more of a slow population drift pole-ward. (I still posit this will increase instability.)

          • viVI_IViv says:

            Right, but what if these areas become uninhabitably hot?

            Then the people will go bother their neighbors who still live in habitable areas.

            How this will look like depends on how fast the climate is going to change. If we are talking about a 30-50 years timeframe, then it’s going to be major local conflicts, famines, plagues, etc., if we are talking about 100-200 years then it’ll be more like the US Rust Belt slowly depopulating because there aren’t enough good jobs left.

            Less of a Syria type situation and more of a slow population drift pole-ward. (I still posit this will increase instability.)

            Why pole-ward? The tropical rainforest zone has usually a much better climate than the sub-tropical deserts. If the sub-tropical deserts enlarge and the tropical rainforest zone shrinks (*) then most migration and conflict will happen at their interface. You’ll need a lot of global warming before the tropics becomes all uninhabitable.

            (* is this even what is predicted to happen, rather than the tropical rainforest zone enlarging and the sub-tropical deserts shrinking or shifting pole-ward?)

        • “systematic large scale migration originates from developing regions which are in the middle of the demographic transition”

          No, it originates from situations where there is an economic incentive to migrate. This is why emigration from Ireland continued long after it’s population started declining, similarly, Puerto Rico’s fertility rate is far below replacement yet Puerto Ricans keep on coming. Eastern Europeans continue to move to Western Europe, ect.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            No, it originates from situations where there is an economic incentive to migrate.

            At the individual level yes, but you don’t get mass migration from regions where there aren’t many young people. In Europe there are many more immigrants from Nigeria (tropical rainforest climate) rather than the Central African Republic (savanna), just because Nigeria has a much larger population, even though the countries have similar land area.

    • souleater says:

      This is a great question

      1. 20%
      2. 40%
      3. 30% (I suspect this will be a 3rd world problem, and won’t greatly affect western nations)
      4. 5%
      5. 3%
      6. 2%
      7. <1%

    • noyann says:

      edit: rewritten. was not thought through.

      Your futures are for different time scales, so they may come true in sequence and are not mutually exclusive. Probabilities for predictions should specify the time they are for.

      • DinoNerd says:

        True enough. I was thinking in terms of when all is said and done, this is the maximum badness that occurred. But I didn’t say that, so every interpretation is valid ;-(

        • HeelBearCub says:

          “All done” … is a completely wrong headed way to think about this. Or, at least, it assumes away the most important variable.

          Because “all done” assumes that we have stopped increasing atmospheric CO2.

          • DinoNerd says:

            I don’t see that as wrong headed. Suppose we never stop increasing CO2. We don’t manage to sequester it. Oceans get more acidic. Temperature rises. Eventually this either stops (perhaps we run entirely out of stored energy to burn), or we get scenario 6 or 7. This might take quite a long time. We might live happily in scenario 1, then 2, then 3 etc. for decades or centuries, especially if the rate of CO2 increase is slowed. But eventually we’ll get scenario 7. (Or 6, which I think more likely.)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Well, I don’t think your prompt segregates out whether people think that climate change can’t actually get very bad versus people who assume that we will do something about it soon enough. And those two things are a little bit of apples vs. oranges.

      • Randy M says:

        Right. Long term 1, short term 3, very slim chance of anything that goes as high as “few species will survive”.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      2, medium confidence. I regard 3 as a significant possibility, with 1 and 4 as outside shots that can’t (yet) be ruled out completely. I have high hopes that in the reasonably near future we’ll have learned enough to be able to dismiss 4, and maybe even 3. (I am taking 4 here to mean “a direct impact between 3 and 5”, since the specific human responses you mention don’t seem that likely to me.)

    • John Schilling says:

      1: 20%
      2: 40%
      2 globally with local areas of 3: 20%
      3: 15%
      4: 4%
      5: 1%
      6: Negligible
      7: Impossible

    • Nick says:

      I’m not sure where I’d put the percentages, but in likelihood I’d rank them 2, 3, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      1: 30%
      2: 39%
      3: 30%
      4: 1%
      5, 6, 7: ~0%

    • Urstoff says:

      Different countries will experience different things. My guess (so very little confidence, but I don’t know how you could have a high confidence about any outcome) is 2 for the first world, 3 for most other countries, and 4 for the most vulnerable countries (e.g., Bangladesh).

    • drunkfish says:

      1. 2% in a global sense, 90% that this will apply to some set of lucky places, though conflict elsewhere might still make their lives worse
      2. 10%, again probably local areas will feel this
      3. 70% this or something somewhat worse but closer to 3 than 4
      4. 10%
      5. 5% globally, higher that this would happen somewhere though
      6. 1%
      7. 0%, I might give a lip service 0.0001ish% to the opposite, us entering a snowball, but no way we become Venus

      They don’t quite add up to 100%, but putting 72% for number 3 just feels overly precise and that’s where I’d likely bury the extra.

    • salvorhardin says:

      1. 10%
      2. 30%
      3. 50%
      4. 8%
      5. 2%
      6. Negligible
      7. Negligible

    • ECD says:

      None of the above. This is an engineering and scientific problem, which technologically advanced and rich nations will weather with some expense/research and major public works and will have some bad and some good effects on the rest of the world (not at all evenly distributed). The people who will suffer are almost entirely separate from the people responsible for the suffering, which is the main moral issue. 40%
      1. 5%
      2. 10%
      3. 25%
      4. 15%
      5. 5%
      6. 0% [possible, but not due to climate change alone]
      7. 0%

    • Bamboozle says:

      I think somewhere between 3 and 4. If these changes happen in a small enough timescale then migration will have a domino effect with any small stable region being overrun with migrants as they try to make their way (mostly) north. Look at how the EU is trying to deal with African Migration or the US migrant caravan, and we haven’t even seen the real hardcore changes yet that are being predicted.

      Ultimately i think first world countries will have to resort to eco-fascism (stopping migrants at borders with lethal force) which the AfD, etc are laying the groundwork for. I think those who are expecting 1 and 2 have way too optimistic views on human ingenuity, though I imagine if 4 comes to pass human ingenuity will ultimately increase faster than for 1 or 2 (like it does during most wars).

      Also seems to be a split on the predictions here based on where they would sit on the US left-right divide, just based on others past comments (from memory).

    • famous oprah quotes says:

      I would just like to say that the estimates conditional on our future courses of action about climate change might be more meaningful politically.

      Presumably how bad it is depends a lot on how our future emissions will change and what kind of policy, infrastructure and technology we create until then.

      I mention it to stress that there is a kind of ~paradox~ here, that an estimate that it will likely be good can be used to justify not doing anything about it while at the same time not doing anything about it might make it bad. Sure, there is an actual probability distribution of how good it will be but I am not sure this is useful for deciding what to do if anything about climate change.

    • 0: 10%
      1. 30%
      2. 60%
      3. ~0%

      Zero here is the possibility that the whole thing is made up. The worst possibility is continued climate change making some parts of the world uninhabitable:

      https://akarlin.com/2010/05/simmered-to-the-edge-of-the-world/

      Even then, pollinators would continue to work in the inhabitable portion, as would farming. Species would survive in the inhabitable areas and would move into the newly habitable Northern areas. Chernobyl killed a maximum of 15,000 people, more would be a blip on the radar. The worst affected may resort to war, but it will be war against other very poor people, their poverty will prevent them from striking against the rich world.

    • Between 1 and 2. There will be both good and bad effects, both of uncertain size, so I can’t sign the sum with any confidence.

    • Ketil says:

      My personal belief is that CC will not substantially affect quality of life for most people, some places will get greener and more fertile, others will become arid and hot. People already live in (to me) unbearably hot and dry places. The most important thing is eliminating poverty, poor nations are much worse at dealing with the changes.

      So 1 at 20% or 2 at 50%, 1.5 (no change on average) at 20%, and dramatic negative economic impact at 10%. Separately, I’ll have some of 3, and (almost) none of 4.

      Ecologically, things are worse in the sense that many species may not be able to keep up with the changes. Of course, we already in the middle of an anthropogenic mass extinction for other reasons. On par with an astroid smashing into the earth? No way. But changes in temperature, precipitation, and ocean acidity are matters of concern. (Not giving any numbers here, since all the descriptions are very catastrophic. But if I rate severity for humans at 2, I’ll put ecological severity at 4 – but with lower confidence.)

      Climage change is a gradual process, and humans are good at adapting. We already have mass extinction because agriculture, a huge number of refugees because war, (arguably) missing insects because neonicotinides, droughts and floods because (normal) climate.

    • Jon S says:

      1. 15%
      2. ~80% But I’m counting many isolated examples of #3 in here, e.g. barrier islands getting swept away a little more often than normal, etc.
      3. 3%
      4. 1.5%
      5. 0.25%
      6-7. < .01%

    • Ttar says:

      1. 15%
      2. 30%
      3. 30%
      4-7. Remaining 25% decreasing exponentially.

  24. Nabil ad Dajjal says:

    So this sort of implicitly came up in the MTG lady knights thread, but I’m curious about to the extent that people here agree or disagree with the following statement:

    “It’s fantasy, it doesn’t have to be historically accurate / realistic.”

    Putting politics aside for a moment, there’s a pretty obvious split here between people who like low fantasy and hard science fiction and people who like high fantasy and soft science fiction. From my perspective as someone in the former group, one of my core engagements with speculative fiction is how they answer questions like “how would the War of the Roses have turned out if there were dragons and zombies?” The fantastic or science fiction elements are part of the premise, but the rest of the story needs to be grounded and follow consistent rules.

    So do you agree or disagree, and why? What is your core engagement with speculative fiction?

    • EchoChaos says:

      I think there are two things. The first is that the story needs consistent rules that make sense to people and the second is that any rules left out are assumed to be the same as our world.

      So if you say that orc women are the larger and stronger so all orc raiding parties are women, that’s fine. If you say that exposure to the magic crystal unobtanium gives only women magical powers, that’s fine.

      But if you just have regular women fighting men one on one and winning as a usual thing, then you lose that from the audience.

      • Eponymous says:

        “any rules left out are assumed to be the same as our world.”

        Plus an exception for genre conventions.

    • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

      A fantasy is still bound to reality, unless noted. For example, if someone chops your head off in fantasy, you will still die, unless maybe someone turn you into zombie with magic. By the same token, humans can be expected to have similar physiology, psychology, reproductive cycle, motivation etc unless altered radically by fantastic elements. Even if they are in another world.

      What really bothers me is about diversity in fiction is diversity in literal sense. I would have no problem if culture inspired by medieval Europe would be populated entirely by Black people, or Africa-themed continent had white population. But a lone minority guy who doesn’t seem like he came here from elsewhere and didn’t seem to have enough brethren to preserve his racial purity (That is, he’s full-blooded Black surrounded entirely with Whites, uncertain whom his ancestors married to avoid turning him into a mulatto for generations).

      For women I can swing either way, it only really bothers me when it feels inconsistent. I’m fine with fantasy where women are as strong and durable as men, but when individuals start expressing sentiments from the real world, it gets weird.

      Kinda why I hated Caesar’s Legion in Fallout New Vegas, they seem to be the only ones in the entire universe to think poorly of female abilities and forcing them into traditional gender roles (As envisioned by modern feminist). Which is something I would expect in harsh conditions of post-apocalypse realistically, but it clashes with everyone else.

    • Randy M says:

      “It’s fantasy, it doesn’t have to be historically accurate / realistic.”

      Fantasy (and sci-fi) should make clear (not necessarily explicitly) the assumptions/changes from the reality we are in, and everything should make sense in light of this. The changes can be sweeping or minor, but we still want logical consistency; having “”magic”” doesn’t excuse any and everything unless you establish that some force has used this power to push against the otherwise expected outcome.

      That women fight alongside men in roughly equal numbers doesn’t make sense for a few reasons, special circumstances withstanding, and it doesn’t make more sense just because you add fairies and dragons. But there are certainly stipulations you could made that would make it reasonable, ranging from artificial wombs and strength enhancement to a goddess of warfare that favors women.

      Uncharitably, I’d expect that the creative team at WotC would aver that the only reason women didn’t fight alongside men in equal numbers was because men were somehow able to oppress them historically, and their worlds just don’t have that bit of nonsensical unpleasantness. Disputes over the nature of reality like this will contribute to the sense that some work of writing is pushing an agenda and things like the puppies.

      • b_jonas says:

        > it doesn’t make more sense just because you add fairies and dragons

        Not from just adding fairies and dragons. But some fantasy doesn’t just have dragons, it has a world where humans, birdfolk, angels, minotaurs, fire elementals, and goblins all fight in the same army (and if there are more humans than goblins, that’s only because most goblins fight for the other side). If it makes sense to recruit all those different creatures into the army, than the difference between men and women probably don’t matter as much either.

        • Randy M says:

          Well that depends on the particulars! If these are closely allied sentient beings, it makes sense to make up your army primarily from the minotaurs and elementals of whatever genders they come in and have your humans at home growing food for them, except that this will probably turn into a vassal situation shortly. Specialization is important.

          If it requires some magical compulsion to get these powerful creatures to fight for you, it makes sense to invest in magic as much as possible, and only use humans to supplement the ensorcelled creatures as necessary. Women might make better magi, in which case they would be the warrior caste. You’d probably still want a primarily male army for internal matters, lest the population revolt as an elemental accidentally incinerates a pick-pocket or what have you.

          But I don’t think it makes sense to say “We’ve recruited a few minotaurs, might as well start a company of Amazons.” Especially if the enemy also has creatures and you need your best to beat them. Fill out your ranks with your best, then the second best, and so on, until you have enough. Total war situations may necessitate arming every person, but the losses and the civilian labor neglected will probably cripple your civilization thereafter.

          And that’s not even getting into women being more important reproductively in a competitive environment.

    • DinoNerd says:

      I prefer consistent rules, and real world building.

      On the specific cases of females being as capable as men in hand to hand combat, and societies comfortably having both females and males risk their lives in combat, I don’t mind at all.

      I’m sympathetic to arguments about the lack of realism of a combination of high death rate overall, high combat death rates, and high female participation in combat – this could lead to existential issues down the road. But most stories with some of these factors don’t go into enough detail for me to see all factors present. Maybe 99% of children live to reproductive age in this fantasy world. Maybe less than 1% of the population take on a high risk of death in combat, so even if all female fighters die without issue, the overall effect is negligible. If the story details all these, the author has usually thought about it, and come up with something plausible. Mostly they haven’t, and I’m just reading stories with mighty warrior Sue.

      And as for women being effective in combat – even hand to hand etc. – I strongly suspect most fanatsy combat sequences fail on realism in dozens of ways, and this one is less likely to shatter my suspension of disbelief than the hero(ine) that repeatedly survives major battles unscathed, even while these battles have high death rates on both sides. (But of course that’s a personal quirk. YMMV.)

    • Unsaintly says:

      Fantasy should be consistent. It doesn’t need to follow the same rules as reality. Addressing the specific Warrior Women topic, there are two ways to handle it well (probably more, these are basic categories)

      1) Women are rarely warriors. The ones who are are exceptional, and often face discrimination. They tend to use special fighting styles that highlight their advantages or negate the strength/reach disadvantage.

      2) Women warriors are approximately as common as men. In these settings, sex-based discrimination is rare if present at all. Women are presented as equally as strong as men, and so there’s no disconnect in them being just as likely to fight. Many fantasy games fall into this, as a natural outgrowth of avoiding the incredibly stupid strength penalties to women that bad games fall into.

      • Randy M says:

        Many fantasy games fall into this, as a natural outgrowth of avoiding the incredibly stupid strength penalties to women that bad games fall into.

        It’s possible to allow PCs to be exceptional without reordering the world to make that exception a fact of everyday life.

        • b_jonas says:

          Perhaps so in a tabletop role-playing game. But in a video game where fancy graphics is a selling point, the player may want to see the mixed gender warriors with diversity among the army of mooks that they fight. Even in a trading card game like M:tG, I’ll want to creatures with diverse looks so that the art doesn’t look the same on all cards.

          • Randy M says:

            Sure. It’s not a breaking point for me, it’s a trade-off, and I’ve pointed out in the other thread that women can look quite fetching in fantasy armor.

    • sfoil says:

      If I had to make a decision, I would disagree with that statement in general while accepting/understanding that it is not a truly hard and fast rule. I prefer chocolate ice cream, but I won’t turn my nose up at vanilla and sometimes I might even choose it just for a change.

      The problem is that you can’t put politics aside. To go back to your original example, the women knights aren’t just a “what if” but — in my opinion — propaganda intended to obscure history and generally inculcate false beliefs about reality. How this is different from e.g. wizards casting fireball is mostly a matter of specific context and, I will admit, partly an assumption of bad faith on the part of artists, but a reasonable person can still tell when he’s being preached too.

      I can easily imagine, for instance, a story in which the ability of wizards to cast devastating spells is used to create a narrative implicitly in favor of nuclear proliferation, and if the author of such a story countered objections to this message with “it’s just fantasy fiction about wizards, y u mad?” I think it would be obvious the author was acting in bad faith.

      • AG says:

        Your third paragraph is contrived to meet the standards of the second, but therefore reveals that MTG’s usage of women knights doesn’t do that, and therefore isn’t propaganda.

        The assumption of bad faith is also way overblown in this case. Otherwise, pink bishoujo ghetto anime would be the height of feminist storytelling. People like the kind of people they like to see in stories, and want to see the kind of people they like in the genres they like.

        Why not tell an Arthurian story with lady knights? Sorry, I can’t hear your pooh-poohing over the FUN TRAIN! DO NOT STOP THE FUN TRAIN!!

        • viVI_IViv says:

          Why not tell an Arthurian story with lady knights?

          There is a very successful videogame/anime franchise where one of the main characters is literally a gender-swapped King Arthur, though it’s mostly set in modern times because of complicated reasons. It started as a hentai game for NEET otakus to jerk off to, though, so it’s not exactly feminist storytelling, though it’s also not just a male power fantasy either.

          Japanese pop culture is just different.

        • sfoil says:

          Why not tell an Arthurian story with lady knights?

          I mean, you can write/draw whatever you want, whether I like it or not. Any ulterior motives present are almost by definition plausibly deniable; for the example in my third paragraph I deliberately assumed the premise to make a point, that doesn’t “reveal” anything one way or the other about whether there’s any sort of agenda behind lady knights in MTG.

      • mendax says:

        The problem is that you can’t put politics aside. To go back to your original example, the women knights aren’t just a “what if” but — in my opinion — propaganda intended to obscure history and generally inculcate false beliefs about reality.

        It’s true that you can’t put politics aside. Have you considered that what you might consider to be more historical depictions could also be propaganda?

        Or that, to a female audience, an author defending a dearth of female knights on grounds of “it’s just historically accurate”, might also appear to be acting in bad faith?

        (Sorry if I’ve misunderstood your position. I was looking for a good place to get into this conversation)

        • The original Mr. X says:

          It’s true that you can’t put politics aside. Have you considered that what you might consider to be more historical depictions could also be propaganda?

          That blog post seems to be leaning pretty heavily on the Chinese robber fallacy. The world is quite a big place, and in most areas recorded history goes back quite a bit, so there are plenty of unusual people you can point to throughout history. That doesn’t change the fact that those people were unusual, though.

          As for the last few paragraphs:

          Which leads me back to the issue of prejudice: specifically, to the claim that including such characters in SFF stories, by dint of contradicting the model of straight, white, male homogeneity laid down by Tolkien and taken as gospel ever since, is an inherently political – and therefore suspect – act. To which I say: what on Earth makes you think that the classic SWM default is apolitical? If it can reasonably argued that a character’s gender, race and sexual orientation have political implications, then why should that verdict only apply to characters who differ from both yourself and your expectations? Isn’t the assertion that straight white men are narratively neutral itself a political statement, one which seeks to marginalise as exceptional or abnormal the experiences of every other possible type of person on the planet despite the fact that straight white men are themselves a global minority?

          That’s a straw man. Nobody’s saying that white people are inherently neutral or whatever, just that making your characters diverse when there’s no in-universe reason for this is usually done with political motivations. There’s no reason not to include non-white characters if there’s a good in-universe reason for it — say, because your story is set in a major trading city, or in a fantasy analogue of Han China, or whatever.

          And even if a particular character was deliberately written to make a political point, why should that threaten you? Why should it matter that people with different beliefs and backgrounds are using fiction to write inspirational wish-fulfillment characters for themselves, but from whose struggle and empowerment you feel personally estranged? That’s not bad writing, and as we’ve established by now, it’s certainly not bad history – and particularly not when you remember (as so many people seem to forget) that fictional cultures are under no obligation whatsoever to conform to historical mores. It just means that someone has managed to write a successful story that doesn’t consider you to be its primary audience – and if the prospect of not being wholly, overwhelmingly catered to is something you find disturbing, threatening, wrong? Then yeah: I’m going to call you a bigot, and I probably won’t be wrong.

          There’s reason to think that high levels of diversity tend to be bad for social solidarity, so if you’re making your characters diverse to spread the message that diversity is good, then you’re advocating for ideas which are likely to prove detrimental to society. I do generally object when people propagandise for socially-damaging positions, for what should be obvious reasons.

          Or that, to a female audience, an author defending a dearth of female knights on grounds of “it’s just historically accurate”, might also appear to be acting in bad faith?

          They might think that the author was acting in bad faith, but given that he’d be correct, they would be unreasonable to think this unless they had some other reason for so doing.

        • sfoil says:

          I’m well aware that plenty of history is propaganda, myth, or just plain guesswork. I’m also aware that people take first-order approximations like “every foot soldier in a European army from AD 450-1400 was male”, prove this isn’t exactly correct, and then declare (or if they’re smart, imply) that this supports some unrelated point.

          Moving away from the specific example of drawings of lady knights in Magic: The Gathering, I’m really just saying that I try to view media critically and I think others should too. Otherwise you may end up accepting false or dumb ideas without realizing it (possibly without even the author intending it!). Sometimes this is really harmless, but not always. And anyway, if anyone detects an attempt to surreptitiously convince them of something they think is untrue, they’re not going to like it, even if their suspicion is a false positive.

        • Evelyn Q. Greene says:

          Or that, to a female audience, an author defending a dearth of female knights on grounds of “it’s just historically accurate”, might also appear to be acting in bad faith?

          Why do you assume that a female audience would prefer more female knights, compared to a male audience?
          Why would they assume bad faith?

          • AG says:

            It’s kind of an isolated justification of rigor? An author makes a story where all of these ahistorical things happen, and then picks this one thing to justify with historical accuracy.

            For single-author works, the real reason for any particular story decision is “I felt/didn’t feel like writing it,” but we now have the marketing trap where making a story seem Important helps get the word out, but that means that the audience wants their pet Important issue to get dealt with, too. Stories that are just shameless expressions of id get a kind of leeway, in how people just write them off as shameless expressions of id.

            As for if a female audience would prefer female knights, just who is this author defending their work’s dearth of female knights from?

    • Well... says:

      My aversion to fantasy comes because most of the fantasy I’ve heard of (which I admit isn’t very much at all) just isn’t all that fantastical. Dragons, wizards, fairies…these are all basically pre-fab archetypes that authors seem to pick and choose from and recombine into stories that are fairly formulaic as well. It’s almost all taken from Ancient or Medieval European lore, right? The social structures prevalent in fantasy (knights, monarchs, etc.) certainly are as well.

      I think a lot of what gets called science fiction should probably be reclassified as fantasy instead. This would both make science fiction look less silly (by cleaning it up) and make fantasy look less hackneyed (by introducing stuff that isn’t the same old wizards/princesses/elves). For example, movies like “The Science of Sleep”, “The Matrix”, “The Cell”, and “Star Wars” are all really just fantasy movies.

      That said, the main thing I’m looking for in fiction — any fiction — is that it teach me something new, either about the universe, about myself, or about storytelling.

      • Randy M says:

        I made the argument here years ago that Dr Who should definitely be considered fantasy in futuristic trappings rather than sci-fi.

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

        How do you feel about the Dark Crystal, either the original film or the Netflix series? I’m curious to see your reaction to it.

        On the one hand, the plot is incredibly derivative, especially in the film. If you’re even slightly familiar with fantasy tropes about prophesied chosen ones and balance-restoring macguffins it’s entirely predictable and safe.

        On the other hand, the world of Thra and its puppet creatures is fascinating and unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. At its best it feels like the Jim Henson Company somehow got a camera crew onto an alien world. There’s a sense that the story is taking place against the backdrop of a breathing, self-consistent fantasy world.

        • Well... says:

          I saw the movie when I was a kid, once. Don’t remember it well except that it’s definitely fantasy, and I remember liking it. Want to rewatch.

      • noyann says:

        >That said, the main thing I’m looking for in fiction — any fiction — is that it teach me something new, either about the universe, about myself, or about storytelling.

        +1,
        with the addendum ‘about ways to think and/or feel’.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        Well….

        I think a lot of what’s happened to fantasy is the result of having a large market. It used to be a lot more idiosyncratic, but now it’s clear that there’s money to be made from more or less standard products. They aren’t always bad– I just read Brightest Fell by Seannan McGuire, and it’s spectacular, but it’s also a complex story of aristocratic elves with rules for magic and a multi-generational conflict.

        If you want weirder fantasy, I recommend Dianna Wynne Jones, especially Archer’s Goon. Completely non-standard magic.

        Jones has written about how she could write what she wanted in the earlier part of her career, but as it became clear that there was money in YA, publishers became a lot more specific in their demands of what she could and couldn’t include.

        • CatCube says:

          I’m not familiar with “Brightest Fell” or its author, but recommendations here have been consistently good enough that I’m interested. I do see that it’s the 11th in a series. Is it one that can be read standalone, or should you start with #1?

    • honoredb says:

      I prefer speculative fiction to follow consistent meta-rules about how consistently it follows its rules. I hate it when a story tries to retroactively pretend it was rigorously thought out the whole time when it was clearly just running on magic, and I hate it when a story starts out with a promise of being “hard” and then starts cheating. I can enjoy art on any point on the spectrum as long as it doesn’t wander too much–I loved Russian Doll, for example, and I’d be annoyed if they made a second season where the time loops follow consistent rules that the protagonists learn to exploit, or a second season that felt like one long drug-trip/poem.

      I don’t see too much of a problem with “and also there’s gender equality!” becoming a Standard Fantasy Element that you can choose whether or not to include but don’t need to justify, just like dragons. It’s just another point of divergence.

      • I hate it when a story tries to retroactively pretend it was rigorously thought out the whole time when it was clearly just running on magic

        That bothers me to no end. There’s a time honored tradition to inconsistencies across a story and it’s ignoring them. You don’t need to make up this ridiculous, elaborate story to tie them together.

      • mdet says:

        I also agree that the work gets to decide where and how to apply its rigor, and as long as it’s consistent I’ll go with it. In action scenes, you have your shounen anime where the physics is absolutely bonkers and hardly consistent, but fights are still won with careful tactics that are explained to the audience. You have boxing movies whose physics and injuries are 100% realistic, but fights are basically won through force of will rather than technique, cleverness, or quantifiable strength. And then you have a movie like Jet Li’s Hero, which doesn’t adhere to any kind of consistent physics or logic. Instead, the fight scenes play out like dances, focusing on the aesthetics rather than the rules. And of course you have your Game of Thrones, which restricts itself to realistic physics and logic.

        All of those approaches are valid, as long as it’s clear which one the work is going for. If your suspension of disbelief is broken during the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon scene when a teenage girl singlehandedly takes down a room full of trained, armed, grownass men, then I feel bad for you that your ability-to-suspend is so fragile. To quote Morpheus, “Do you believe that being stronger or faster has anything to do with muscles in this place?”. And it would be incredibly smug to dismiss the lack-of-realism in wuxia movies like Hero and CTHD as simply a sign of poor quality. But if that teenage-girl-vs-30-grownass-men scene had been in The Lord of the Rings, then yeah, it would’ve unacceptably shattered the rules and tone of the world (looking at you, Hobbit trilogy). You can prefer one style to the other, but don’t pretend it’s more than a matter of taste.

        • Aapje says:

          @mdet

          If your suspension of disbelief is broken during the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon scene when a teenage girl singlehandedly takes down a room full of trained, armed, grownass men, then I feel bad for you that your ability-to-suspend is so fragile.

          I prefer to understand how the world works and recognize incongruity. I don’t see how you can turn that off selectively, without becoming gullible. Being gullible might be more socially advantageous, but it has major disadvantages.

          My ability-to-suspend is a lot more ‘fragile’ than your example, BTW. A trained, armed, grown ass man cannot normally take down a room full of trained, armed, grown ass men either and I’m aware of this when watching movies that show otherwise (like John Wick).

          Anyway, an issue with getting far from realism is that it is then fairly hard to make good movies without inconsistencies, overpowered characters for whom there are no real stakes in the fight, jarring elements, etc. I think that it is often semi-causally correlated with poor quality, due to this extra difficulty.

          You can prefer one style to the other, but don’t pretend it’s more than a matter of taste.

          You were the one arguing that it is bad to have a ‘fragile’ ability-to-suspend, which isn’t very respectful of people who prefer the alternative.

          You seem to be accusing honoredb of only wanting to allow one style, but I don’t see that in his comment at all. Most of his comment pretty explicitly talks about his own preferences (“I prefer,” “I hate,” “I can enjoy”) and at the end, he explicitly says that he is fine with a certain kind of unrealism, as long as it is not mandatory, but optional.

          This seems very much pro-diversity.

          • mdet says:

            I was arguing against a hypothetical person who, upon seeing the CTHD fight scene says “I have accepted and enjoyed everything leading up to this (scenes which include people casually leaping 30 feet into the air), but having a teenage girl fight off dozens of grown men? That’s simply unbelievable, and has ruined my movie-watching experience.”

            The fight scenes are obviously unreal, but I’ve been interpreting “ruined my suspension of disbelief” to mean the point where you entirely check out of the story because the logic of it has become so flawed that you can barely continue paying attention. If that’s the feeling you get watching Hero or CTHD, then I think that’s very unfortunate because they’re both amazing movies.

            My comment was intended to fully back up honoredb on how each work needs to be taken on its own terms. The position I was disagreeing with was along the line of EchoChaos’ “the story needs consistent rules that make sense to people… if you just have regular women fighting men one on one and winning as a usual thing, then you lose that from the audience.” CTHD doesn’t just have women who can beat men one-on-one, it has a teenage girl easily beat dozens of professional warriors who explicitly brag about their great accomplishments. While a scene like that would destroy the plausibility and verisimilitude if it was set in Middle-Earth or Westeros, where speed & strength are limited by physique according to real-world rules, it fits naturally within Crouching Tiger because that movie has established a fantastical tone (a meta-rule, according to honoredb) where physics don’t consistently apply. I think the great critical and commercial success of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is evidence that a fantasy world doesn’t necessarily need strict, consistent rules for the audience to buy into it.

            Edit: If you personally don’t enjoy wuxia-style action, that’s fine, but I wouldn’t immediately go from “this movie doesn’t follow clear, consistent rules” to a stated or implied “this movie is poorly written and probably not very good”.

          • CatCube says:

            @mdet

            I admit, in a vacuum that a scene like that doesn’t bother me. God knows that I enjoy watching Scarlet Johansson throw down as Black Widow.

            However, I’ve started to sour on it somewhat as people have started confusing pleasant-to-watch fantasy as reality, and insist that everybody pretend the emperor has no clothes. At that point, I can’t help but wonder if indulging the fantasy is doing some real harm. People don’t seem to mind overmuch if you point out that Hawkeye would get stomped on by three guys who are mildly competent at fighting; all but the most ridiculous comic book fanboys will eventually admit that yeah, he’s basically a live-action cartoon character, and training can take you only so far against multiple opponents. Point out that in real life Black Widow would get her ass handed to her by a merely-competently-trained male mook, and that’s another matter.

            My go-to here is when that sports commetator a few years back said that Serena Williams was the best woman tennis player in the world, and was challenged as to why he felt the need to qualify the “best tennis player” with “woman.” Nonplussed, he explained that she’d wouldn’t even be in the top 200 if she was compared with men, and people lost their minds. Like, it was an actual scandal! That’s where I start to say that our culture isn’t able to separate that particular fantasy from reality.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @mdet

            Ah, but Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon (which I love) and other wuxia DOES have a rule there, which is that martial arts are literal magic.

            A woman without martial arts is a vulnerable waif, but once she learns them she can defeat masses of armed men. This is consistent in such films.

            And in magic, physical strength isn’t the big thing, but “magical power” and wuxia films make it clear on that front.

            They fit my rule pretty well.

          • mdet says:

            It’s a consistent rule that “Martial arts is powerful magic”, but as far as rules and consistency go, it’s on the very loose, handwavey end, about one step above “Because I’m Batman”. Which is fine with me, but it doesn’t sound like it fits within the “speculative fiction as narrative thought experiments” approach.

          • albatross11 says:

            mdet:

            In superhero/comic book movies, the genre conventions are that the superhero is (just) strong enough to take on whomever he’s fighting. The same superhero will get into a challenging fight with a half-dozen normal human mooks, and later on will get into a challenging fight with someone who tosses cars around with ease.

          • mdet says:

            One reason I picked Hero and Crouching Tiger as my examples is that they work off more or less the same logic as superheroes*, but are otherwise more thoughtful, less bombastic, and better crafted. It’s harder to conflate handwavey logic with lazy writing in their case. Instead, the low-resolution logic comes across as a deliberate artistic choice to make the stories resemble legends, myths, and folklore.

            *Hero actually gets way more ridiculous than most superhero movies in the moment where two swordsmen are swatting a single drop of water back and forth between them like a tennis ball with their swords, as they fly above a lake by stabbing the water so hard it propels them 20 feet into the air. It’s absolutely beautiful and amazing and absurd and more movies should do this.

      • noyann says:

        > I hate it when a story tries to retroactively pretend it was rigorously thought out the whole time

        That was one of the problems in Pact, imo: too much ritus ex machina, ie, out of the blue, new spells or techniques are available that had no foundation in the previous text.

    • aristides says:

      My preference for fantasy (and sci fi) is that the hard sciences can be soft, but the social sciences can be realistic. If wizards can cast magic, I want to see how that affects the economic system and see it it creates a society for haves and have nots. I’m ok with Men and women being equally strong and good at fighting, but the numbers will likely be different in an army just for child care reasons. That said, if the the group you are looking a thing is just a small unit in a larger force, a gendered balance is statistically possible, and doesn’t bother me.

    • Nornagest says:

      Fantasy has lots of subgenres and you can get away with bending realism a lot more in some of them than others. (Historical accuracy only matters at all in a few.) It has less to do with setting than theme — the Black Company books live in a high-magic setting with flying whales and godlike sorcerer-kings, but because they’re telling a story about how a mostly normal group of highly pragmatic and even cynical characters deals with all that craziness, we expect the stuff that isn’t clearly magical to function more or less as it would in our world. Disney’s animated films, on the other hand, usually use magic sparingly but run on fairytale logic.

      This cleaves along several axes, I think. More escapist works are better able to ignore practicalities. Works that’re more modernist in format can often get away with having more modernist content (take for example Mieville’s Bas-Lag books). And target audience plays into it too — YA gets more latitude than adult fiction, and video games seem to get more than non-interactive fiction.

    • I don’t think there can be any “objective” rules about realism or consistency. There’s just this thing that bothers me and that thing that bothers you.

    • My first novel was marketed as fantasy, although it was really a historical novel with invented history and geography–no magic, elves, dwarves, etc. The one feature of the story for which I had did not have a historical basis was the existence of a female military order.

      My reason was not political correctness but dramatic effect. We are used to thinking of women as vulnerable, and I played off that feeling the first two times members of the Order appeared. The third time was my protagonist’s description of how his life had been saved by a member of the Order, at considerable risk to herself.

      I think my treatment of the military technology was at least moderately plausible, with the Order functioning mainly as archers who fought on foot, moved on horseback, also sometimes functioned as light lancers. I was thinking of a line of Ambrose Bierce:

      DRAGOON, n. A soldier who combines dash and steadiness in so equal measure that he makes his advances on foot and his retreats on horseback.

    • albatross11 says:

      Personally, I want consistent rules, but I can enjoy speculative fiction that bends that a little bit. What I strenuously object to, though, is the author hitting me over the head with his Socially Relevant Message, or his self-consciously Ethnically and Sexually Diverse Cast, or whatever. And again, I can swallow some of this for a good story (I enjoyed Starship Troopers, even though I’m not at all a fan of the ideas conveyed), but the writing needs to be good and the story needs to be good.

    • Ttar says:

      I preferred the second until I left college and started having to actually judge the real world and make useful predictions for my job. I think humans naturally prefer their fantasy/SF to match their conceptions, so if you hold tightly to an ideal that isn’t actually true in reality you’ll prefer the soft sci fi as an outlet.

    • Lillian says:

      I very much appreciate good, solid, internally consistent world building, where if things don’t work like in real life we are given good reasons for why they don’t, and all the implications of those reasons are fully followed through. This is frankly my favourite kind of science fiction and fantasy, where the author or authors really show their work and put in an effort into making it seem like these other worlds really nad truly exist. However, there are some stories that can’t be told unless you’re willing to compromise your world building, and some of those stories i think are worth telling.

      To given an example, let me give you the Netflix movie Bright. It’s not a great movie, but it was a fun movie, i enjoyed it. There is some sense in which the world building is really good, in that when i was watching it on screen i believed it and was immersed in it. It allowed me to accept the world of Bright as a fantasy mirror of our world. There is however another sense in which the world building is total trash and makes zero sense. There is just no way that the world and world history as presented to us would actually result in an LA that can be that recognisably like ours. The problem is that if you did do actually seriously realistic world building there, you couldn’t tell the story of Bright, you’d be telling an entirely different story. In short the story is dependent on a world building that feels right at first, but does not actually make any sense if you think about it, but i liked that story so i’m fine with that.

  25. k10293 says:

    I decided to make a new post since the old one is buried and there are new developments.

    The whistleblower report on Ukraine has been released: https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20190812_-_whistleblower_complaint_unclass.pdf

    Thoughts?

    • Aftagley says:

      It’s enough. Enough at least to launch a series of investigations which will almost certainly uncover more unsavory stuff here.

      It’s not a direct smoking gun, but it seems clear that the president in this case was running duplicate foreign policies with regards to Ukraine, one focused on national interest, one focused on personal. In cases where these two aims came into conflict (IE, with the former ambassador) personal interest won out.

      The most interesting impression I’ve gotten from this, however, was that this was mostly a Giuliani-run operation with Trump watching from the sidelines and having a questionable amount of personal involvement in. Trump clearly empowered Giuliani to pursue this, and was clearly interested in it, but it Giuliani was likely the driving force here.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      The Democratic party is running an excellent re-election campaign for Donald Trump. Did nobody tell them that they’re supposed to be trying to make sure that their candidate is supposed to win?

      Seriously though, this and the pending impeachment is the best news Trump has had for the last year. Mueller II: Electric Boogaloo is going to suck all of the oxygen out of the room and asphyxiate the democrat’s strongest candidate. Since Obama nostalgia is the centerpiece of Biden’s appeal, constantly reminding everyone about his shady wheeling and dealing in Eastern Europe during the Obama administration is a perfect way to sink him in the primaries. Trump versus Warren is a much safer bet for him.

      The Senate Republicans, despite how many of them would be glad to be rid of Trump, won’t break ranks to impeach over such a lame accusation especially after three years of Russian Collusion. So this can only benefit Trump as the election approaches.

      • Aftagley says:

        The Democratic party is running an excellent re-election campaign for Donald Trump. Did nobody tell them that they’re supposed to be trying to make sure that their candidate is supposed to win?

        I don’t really like this argument, even accepting that you’re being kinda sarcastic here. If a majority of members in congress think that the president did something illegal, the constitutionally mandated response is for them to begin impeachment proceedings.

        • If a majority of members in congress think that the president did something illegal, the constitutionally mandated response is for them to begin impeachment proceedings.

          So Bush should have been impeached for knowingly using information obtained in violation of FISA? I expect Obama, and Reagan, and Eisenhower, drove over the speed limit at least once during their terms in office.

          The requirement for impeachment isn’t “something illegal.” It’s “High crimes and misdemeanors.” Exactly what that means isn’t clear, but it’s something a good deal more than “something illegal.”

          • Doctor Mist says:

            I expect Obama, and Reagan, and Eisenhower, drove over the speed limit at least once during their terms in office.

            I agree with your point, but this tickled my curiosity: Do Presidents actually drive themselves at all while in office? It seems like you never see it happening.

          • JPNunez says:

            No, presidents and ex-presidents aren’t allowed to drive, except maybe in private roads.

            https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/28/presidents-arent-allowed-to-drive.html

          • cassander says:

            @JPNunez

            Your article says that LBJ drove as president, which I was sure he did. I guarantee he sped while doing it.

          • Aftagley says:

            The requirement for impeachment isn’t “something illegal.” It’s “High crimes and misdemeanors.” Exactly what that means isn’t clear, but it’s something a good deal more than “something illegal.”

            My apologies, I was using the phrase “something illegal” as a (retrospectively imprecise) shorthand for “high crimes and misdemeanors”

            I don’t (nor does anyone) think speeding should be an impeachable offense. Congress at the time clearly think Bush’s use of any information was impeachable.

            My original point was to push back on this meta-level political argument of “what will this do for the election.” I think that argument is somewhat crass, if congress thinks Trump has committed a high crime or misdemeanor, they have a constitutional duty to impeach, effects on reelection be damned.

          • JPNunez says:

            @cassander

            Gonna request the senate to look into this LBJ ilegal behavior, with hopes to terminating his privileges as ex-president, and maybe start prosecution against him.

          • Oscar Sebastian says:

            The requirement for impeachment isn’t “something illegal.” It’s “High crimes and misdemeanors.” Exactly what that means isn’t clear, but it’s something a good deal more than “something illegal.”

            I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. It’s quite clear what high crimes and misdemeanors means, because there was one common definition in the 18th century and that’s the only one it makes sense for the Founders to be using.

            A high crime or high misdemeanor is an offense committed through the office one holds. It does not necessarily have to be a crime to be an offense. The charge was once levied in Britain for someone not mooring a ship properly to a dock. As such, “high crimes and misdemeanors” does not mean “a good deal more” than illegality. It is a good deal less! If the president sneezed in an ambassador’s face and there were the votes to impeach, it would not be a grievous misinterpretation of the law, though of course it is rather unlikely that even the most partisan Congress imaginable would stoop to such lows against the executive.

          • cassander says:

            @JPNunez says:

            As long as exhumation, hanging, and beheading are on the table, I would like to donate some money to the cause and sign up for your newsletter.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            From Wikipedia, here are the 11 counts for Johnson’s impeachment.

            Dismissing Edwin Stanton from office after the Senate had voted not to concur with his dismissal and had ordered him reinstated.

            Appointing Thomas Secretary of War ad interim despite the lack of vacancy in the office, since the dismissal of Stanton had been invalid.

            Appointing Thomas without the required advice and consent of the Senate.

            Conspiring, with Thomas and “other persons to the House of Representatives unknown”, to unlawfully prevent Stanton from continuing in office.

            Conspiring to unlawfully curtail faithful execution of the Tenure of Office Act.

            Conspiring to “seize, take, and possess the property of the United States in the Department of War”.

            Conspiring to “seize, take, and possess the property of the United States in the Department of War” with specific intent to violate the Tenure of Office Act.

            Issuing to Thomas the authority of the office of Secretary of War with unlawful intent to “control the disbursements of the moneys appropriated for the military service and for the Department of War”.

            Issuing to Major General William H. Emory orders with unlawful intent to violate federal law requiring all military orders to be issued through the General of the Army.

            Making three speeches with intent to “attempt to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States”.

            Bringing disgrace and ridicule to the presidency by his aforementioned words and actions.

            Many of those are (alleged) illegal acts, but some are just “acting bad.”

            Impeachment is a political process. For example, Trump has the pardon power. He can use it. If he uses it an improper way, the remedy is impeachment, and “improper” is decided by the Congress. There is no “illegal pardon.”

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I have been very hesitant about all the impeachment talk. Basically a lot of crying-wolf and people still in denial about November 2016.

          Until now. This time feels different.

      • broblawsky says:

        A “lame accusation”? The President of the United States tried to enter into a quid-pro-quo agreement with the head of a foreign state to investigate one of his political rivals and then he tried to cover it up. Do you really think that’s nothing?

        • baconbits9 says:

          This description does not appear to match the facts as they have been revealed.

          • broblawsky says:

            I’ll go over my statement piece-by-piece and match them to relevant quotes from the whistleblower complaint

            The President of the United States tried to enter into a quid-pro-quo agreement with the head of a foreign state

            Per the whistleblower complaint:
            “Multiple U.S. officials told me that the Ukrainian leadership was led to believe that a meeting or phone call between the President and President Zelenskyy would depend on whether Zelenskyy showed willingness to ‘play ball’ on the issues publicly aired by Mr. Lutsenko and Mr. Giuliani.”
            E.g., a quid-pro-quo agreement with the head of a foreign state.

            to investigate one of his political rivals

            Again, per the whistleblower complaint:
            “According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call, the President pressured Mr. Zelenskyy to, inter alia:
            initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden;”
            E.g., Trump asked the Ukrainian government to investigate a political rival.

            and then he tried to cover it up.

            Per the whistleblower complaint:
            “In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to “lock down” all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced — as is customary — by the White House Situation Room. This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.”
            E.g. the White House tried to cover it up.

            Given those facts, @baconbits9, how was my summary of the complaint – which both I, the majority of the House Intelligence Committee and Trump’s own DNI appointee appear to consider credible – inaccurate? Please explain.

          • Aftagley says:

            @broblawsky

            You forgot the the inspector general of the Intelligence community.

          • broblawsky says:

            Good catch, thank you.

          • Clutzy says:

            Brob, see my post below about the classification. That doesn’t make sense. See also the recent revelation that all Trump calls had been placed on that system as a result of prior leaks that had soured relations with other heads of state. So it had become a routine practice.

          • Aftagley says:

            @Clutzy

            Please provide a source that all of Trump’s calls were placed in this system. From the complaint and what I’m seeing in the news this is not the case. Yes, some calls were placed in that system, but the allegation is that move was done only in certain cases and only when lawyers were trying to hide something.

          • Clutzy says:

            @Aftagley

            https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/effort-to-shield-trumps-call-with-ukrainian-leader-was-part-of-broader-secrecy-effort/2019/09/26/dc3a482c-e076-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html

            The White House has taken extraordinary steps over the past two years to block details of President Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders from becoming public, following embarrassing disclosures early in his administration that enraged the president and created a sense of paranoia among his top aides.

            The number of aides allowed to listen on secure “drop” lines was slashed. The list of government officials who could review a memo of the call’s contents was culled. Fewer copies of transcripts went to agencies, and they were stamped with “EYES ONLY DO NOT COPY.” And some officials who deliver call memos had to sign for the records to create a custody record if they were to leak, according to people familiar with the moves who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them.

            Although the article portrays this as paranoia, its more like not touching a hot stove twice. He’s been burned already, and quite frankly I’m surprised this isn’t standard practice. These transcripts have no intelligence value for US agencies, but pose extreme risks to foreign relations (as shown by the disclosures that have been made). Imagine if Trump and the UK PM had been joking about how some female leader (or wife thereof) was super hot/ugly. Even worse than this.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

          Yes. I’m having a hard time understanding how people are getting so worked up over this after everything that’s happened for the last decade.

          I don’t see how this is any worse than the Obama administration telling the FBI to wiretap the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, or telling the IRS to audit the Tea Party in the 2014 midterms. Those were both election interference on par with Watergate yet they were yawned at.

          Well guess what, this is how presidential elections work now. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t see how this is any worse than the Obama administration telling the FBI to wiretap the Trump campaign in the 2016 election,

            It’s worse, for Trump at least, in that we don’t have a transcript of the telephone conversation where Obama told James Comey to wiretap the Trump campaign. So either Obama was smart enough to hire people loyal enough to not rat him out, or else maybe he actually didn’t tell the FBI to wiretap the Trump campaign.

            Either way, that’s bad for Trump.

          • Aftagley says:

            I don’t see how this is any worse than the Obama administration telling the FBI to wiretap the Trump campaign in the 2016 election

            Because this didn’t happen.

            telling the IRS to audit the Tea Party in the 2014 midterms.

            Because this ALSO didn’t happen.

          • broblawsky says:

            Please find citations for both of those accusations, @Nabil ad Dajjal.

      • herbert herberson says:

        Kneecapping the rapidly-deteriorating Biden now, while there is still plenty of time to push him aside, is only good for the Democrats–especially since this episode demonstrates that Trump also planned to attack him on these significant weaknesses. The version of Biden that was healthy was definitely their best shot to win, but that version is not one that turned out to actually be available.

        (note: I don’t think they’re doing this on purpose at all, and significant portions of the party will try to prop him up despite his broken legs, but I think they will fail and that will ultimately be to their party’s benefit)

    • honoredb says:

      Presidents need to be terrified of doing anything that vaguely looks like using the powers of their office to tar their political opponents. This is an extremely slippery slope that leads to a de facto dictatorship very quickly.

      The day after Congress dismissed the Mueller Report, making it clear there would be no consequences for its findings, Trump made a phone call in which he gloated about the failure of the report and discussed how he had ordered his Attorney General to dig up dirt on Biden. If Congressional Republicans don’t allow there to be consequences for that, he’ll undoubtedly escalate from there, to everything he thinks Obama did to him and more: wiretapping, ordering investigations and arrests to make the Democratic nominee look corrupt, hamstringing election security efforts…if at all possible, a line has to be drawn now.

      This would be reason to open an impeachment inquiry even if it had just been a call to his barber, but in fact it also strongly appears to be an attempt to trade U.S. military aid for collusion in a U.S. election and to point to where to look for other crimes and abuses of power. Because that particular phone call jumps several yards farther down the slope, as it was a call to the head of state of a foreign country in which (even in the White House pseudo-transcript!) he either states outright or strongly implies that he needs “a favor” in exchange for U.S. missiles, with the potential favors being help with his investigation of Biden and/or providing the DNC email server. And allegedly his staff immediately suppressed the actual transcript of the call, not for the first time.

      • Jaskologist says:

        Would your analysis change any if Trump’s investigation were to turn up real evidence of real corruption on Biden’s part?

        • Aftagley says:

          @Jacksologist:

          Define “real corruption”; are we talking “Definitive proof that Biden ordered the aid to Ukraine be suspended as a direct result of Shokin’s investigation of Hunter?”

          or “real corruption” as in “We looked incredibly hard using the entire capabilities of the USG and found some instance of wrongdoing in Biden’s 30+ year political career?”

          If it’s the latter, then no. The former, maybe but with a huge asterisk next to that maybe.

        • John Schilling says:

          If the investigation can be properly characterized as “Trump’s investigation”, the only thing that should change is that Biden face indictment and trial in criminal court at the same time that Trump faces impeachment and trial in Congress. Otherwise, we’re in the territory where Dirty Harry breaks into his personal enemy’s home without a warrant and says “But it’s OK because I’m a policeman and I found illegal drugs!”

          If Trump wants to stamp out real or imagined corruption among the ranks of his Democratic challengers in 2020, he really needs to have hired a competent and apolitical AG and then stepped back.

    • EchoChaos says:

      It contains several points that are contradicted by the transcript, and its general tenor is more hysterical than the actual conversation warrants.

      Also, Schiff hurt his own case by opening his hearings by fabricating Trump quotes. It gives the impression that he knows the reality isn’t damning.

      • honoredb says:

        We don’t have the real transcript (unless I missed something in the last couple of hours), we have notes created and released by the White House. The complaint alleges that an actual verbatim transcript exists. Although the main argument that the White House document leaves something out is kabbalistic–the timestamps show it was a 30-minute call, but the document only takes 11 minutes to read out loud, which allowing for 30 seconds of connection issues suggests 18.5 minutes of removed material. Or, you know, they left out translation time or something.

        But I don’t actually see any contradictions between the White House account and the whistleblower’s account.

        The whistleblower’s description of the call says the President “pressured” Zelenskyy to

        * Initiate or continue an investigation into Biden and his son
        * Find the DNC email server that Crowdstrike had investigated
        * Coordinate with Barr and Giuliani on this

        The White House doc corroborates all of this content. It doesn’t contain Trump saying “I hereby pressure you” because that’s not how anybody talks, but it certainly doesn’t contradict the claim that the tone or context was pressuring, and there’s plenty of other accounts of other communications that established a context of pressure.

        If you really want to, you can read

        Zelenskyy: [We want more of your missiles.]
        Trump: I would like you to do us a favor though…

        as a non-sequitur, not a promise or a threat. But even reading it that way doesn’t contradict the complaint.

        • The Nybbler says:

          * Find the DNC email server that Crowdstrike had investigated

          Investigating foreign interference in a US election is well within the ken of the executive.

          • Aftagley says:

            * Find the DNC email server that Crowdstrike had investigated

            Larger discussion aside, why does anyone think this server is in Ukraine?

            It was a DNC owned and controlled server, right?

            Is the allegation that the DNC used a data storage site in Kiev? Or do people think that Crowdstrike came in, flashed an image of the server/network and the Hillary Clinton ordered the server be flown into Eastern Europe? Even within the crazy bounds of the “it wasn’t actually FancyBear who hacked the DNC server?” consipracy theory, why does Ukraine come into this at all?

          • honoredb says:

            That’s an argument that the complaint’s tone or scope was wrong, not that was “contradicted by the transcript” as EC says. The fact that this request appears both in the complaint and the White House doc corroborates the complaint regardless of whether you think that bit was appropriate to flag.

            And it’s sort of a gray area because a request to investigate a sufficiently insane claim can be interpreted as a demand to fabricate evidence. Yeah, if Crowdstrike was part of a Ukranian coverup of the fact that Putin was framed for election interference, it would be important for the executive to help investigate (Trump should’ve recused himself though). But is that at all plausible?

        • EchoChaos says:

          * Initiate or continue an investigation into Biden and his son

          He never asks for this. He states that Biden forced a prosecutor to be fired and stopped an investigation, but he does not ask for Biden to be investigated. Here is the sentence.

          “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it…It sounds horrible to me.”

          That is the only time he mentions Biden in the call, and the specific request is to look into the fact that Biden stopped a prosecution.

          * Find the DNC email server that Crowdstrike had investigated

          That is not what it alleged. It alleged that the leader “locate and turn over servers used by the DNC”. No such request was ever made. A request was made to investigate Crowdstrike.

          * Coordinate with Barr and Giuliani on this

          This is true.

          • honoredb says:

            I don’t understand these distinctions. How is a request to “look into the [allegation] that Biden stopped a prosecution” not a request to investigate Biden? It’s not a request for an open-ended investigation but the complaint didn’t say it was.

            I can see reasonable people disagreeing over whether “I would like you to find out this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…I guess you have one of your wealthy people…the server, they say Ukraine has it” is a request for the server itself or just an investigation of whether Ukraine had influence over Crowdstrike and now has the server, but I can’t see reasonable people caring about that distinction in this context.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @honoredb

            It shows two things. The first is that the complainant doesn’t actually know the content of the call, just the rumors around it, and that he was phrasing things in the light most negative to Trump at the expense of truth.

            It makes the other allegations in the complaint unrelated to the phone call seem substantially less founded.

          • honoredb says:

            The complaint is already very explicit about what the whistleblower does and doesn’t know first-hand, and it makes it clear that the servers are being asked for in the context of a Crowdstrike investigation. Clearer than Trump does in the White House version of the call, really. If the whistleblower were bending the truth to make things sound worse they could’ve left out the Crowdstrike bit. They had plenty of degrees of freedom, too, that they didn’t take advantage of–they could’ve characterized the conversation about Trump hotels as a bribe, they could’ve alleged a quid pro quo in the call, they could’ve read any number of dark things into the ambassador comments. It seems pretty carefully written to me.

      • The Nybbler says:

        It contains several points that are contradicted by the transcript, and its general tenor is more hysterical than the actual conversation warrants.

        Right. My impression is “political hit”, and Trump deliberately released the record of the conversation before the complaint to defang it. Trump does seems to be running a Jackson-like “Kitchen Cabinet” with Giuliani and probably a few others, probably because he thinks he can’t trust the official administration.

      • Aftagley says:

        @EchoChaos

        You said:

        Also, Schiff hurt his own case by opening his hearings by fabricating Trump quotes. It gives the impression that he knows the reality isn’t damning.

        Here is the Schiff quote in question:

        And what is the President’s response — well it reads like a classic organized crime shake down. In essence, what the President Trump communicates is this: We’ve been very good to your country. Very good. No other country has done as much as we have. But you know what, I don’t see much reciprocity here. You know what I mean? I hear what you want. I have a favor I want from you though… (it goes on in this vein for a while)

        Saying that Schiff fabricated quotes implies that you believe Schiff is deliberately trying to make it see like the President said something he didn’t. Schiff instead makes it clear that he is providing an uncharitable, but in his mind (and mine) accurate, summary of the President’s statements.

        I don’t see how you can take from this that Schiff doesn’t think the reality is damning.

    • S_J says:

      This might be troubling.

      Of interest, the whistle-blower is “not a direct witness to most of the events described”. But he does gather evidence from many people who were.

      I presume names (or role titles) are provided in the Classified Appendix.

      On a political front: this is about as troubling as the suspected, but unproven, assertion that President Obama may have known about, requested, or approved of the wiretapping effort against the Trump campaign in 2016.

      It is not quite as troubling as the evidence that the Hillary Clinton campaign used campaign finances, funneled through a law firm, to pay a foreigner who used to be an intelligence official to do a private investigation in hopes of generating a dossier full of scandalous information about Trump. (I think this counts as a violation of campaign-finance law in the U.S.)

      The accusation from the whistle-blower is less troubling than the accusation that a Federal official (married to someone who was a business contact of the foreigner who generated the above-mentioned dossier) somehow feeding that dossier to multiple high-level government officials, who then used information from that dossier to aid in generating the request for the wiretap of the Trump campaign.

      It is about as troubling as the accusation against Joe Biden that I’ve seen in the past month: that Biden used his powers as Vice President to quash a corruption investigation inside Ukraine, an investigation which may have involved his own son, and a company doing business in Ukraine. (Doing a little searching, I’m finding references to this accusation from around December 2015 at a major right-leaning blog, followed by a bunch of articles from the past month or so. )

      From a political perspective: politicians and news sources opposed to Trump will use this to try to bring him down.

      Politicians and news sources opposed to governmental corruption and power-players breaking the law with impunity will keep mentioning Joe Biden’s apparent misdeeds alongside Trump’s deeds in this case.

      Politicians and news sources supportive of Trump will keep yelling “what about Joe Biden?”.

      • Aftagley says:

        On a political front: this is about as troubling as the suspected, but unproven, assertion that President Obama may have known about, requested, or approved of the wiretapping effort against the Trump campaign in 2016.

        I think every rational person in our democracy would disagree with this. If the sitting president, for political reasons, ordered the wiretapping of a rival political party it would be the largest scandal our nation has ever faced. But there is no evidence this occurred. Even Trump walked back this claim. This never happened.

        It is not quite as troubling as the evidence that the Hillary Clinton campaign used campaign finances, funneled through a law firm, to pay a foreigner who used to be an intelligence official to do a private investigation in hopes of generating a dossier full of scandalous information about Trump. (I think this counts as a violation of campaign-finance law in the U.S.)

        Two points here:
        1. Opposition research is not, in fact legal. If you report the money going in and out of your campaign it’s legal. You can engage foreigners to do whatever you want if you report it and pay for it.
        2. Other than the golden showers part which, if true, likely can’t be proven, a substantial portion of Steele’s Dossier has ended up to be correct.

        The accusation from the whistle-blower is less troubling than the accusation that a Federal official (married to someone who was a business contact of the foreigner who generated the above-mentioned dossier) somehow feeding that dossier to multiple high-level government officials, who then used information from that dossier to aid in generating the request for the wiretap of the Trump campaign.

        This is incorrect. The FBI’s investigation into Trump predates the Steele Dossier. They started investigating trump after an Australian diplomat reported overhearing a Trump Campaign official bragging about the connections with Russia. The dossier possibly gave the FBI some leads to follow, but was not constructive evidence.

        It is about as troubling as the accusation against Joe Biden that I’ve seen in the past month: that Biden used his powers as Vice President to quash a corruption investigation inside Ukraine, an investigation which may have involved his own son, and a company doing business in Ukraine.

        See below in this thread for a rebuttal of that idea. Suffice it to say, it’s not correct.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          See below in this thread for a rebuttal of that idea. Suffice it to say, it’s not correct.

          I would rephrase that to suggest that you’re not convinced it’s correct. I dont believe anything in the comments establishes that it’s not correct. Moreover, even if there was a good reason to want to get rid of this prosecutor, there are still some problems for Biden.

          1. Why is his son on the board of that company, if not as a quid pro quo to Biden? Is Hunter really that well versed in corporate governance that companies seek him out from as far away as the Ukraine, for $50K/month? How much work is actually involved, a few days a month, maybe, for $50K/month, I’m sure Hunter is just that competent. I understand this is, as described elsewhere in the comments, “garden variety corruption”, but shining light on the fact that Biden’s family monetizes his influence that way is still bad for Biden.

          2. Politicians need not only avoid conflicts of interest, they need to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest. And although you repeat that Biden did nothing wrong, I hope you’ll understand if others dont merely take your word for it. Biden should have stayed away from that file as long as his son was remotely involved in it. Or he could have asked his son to resign if it had to be him who was going to handle it.

          3. I hope even the most anti-Trump people will concede that Democrats are not exactly charitable toward Trump and whether he broke this or that law. As soon as there is a whiff of a rumor of Trump doing something wrong, they pounce and demand impeachment. Now, if it was Donald Jr who was sitting on that board and his father bragging publicly about getting the prosecutor investigating the company fired by dangling $1 billion in aid, I would not expect people to even consider the possibility that firing the prosecutor was a legitimate US interest. Given that, I dont see why you expect others to buy this story without even the slightest supporting document.

          4. Not related to Biden, but I’m having fun with counterfactuals, imagine, just please imagine, if Trump received oral sex from a White House intern. Oh man. And he tried to excuse his lying by riffing on what the meaning of “is” is. It would be epic.

          • mitv150 says:

            I would rephrase that to suggest that you’re not convinced it’s correct.

            This statement applies to many comments in the back and forth on this particular topic. Much of Obama’s potential malfeasance has been dismissed as “didn’t happen” when in fact it is “unproven.” There is/was significant suggestive evidence of many of the alleged acts. But Obama said it didn’t happen and Eric Holder investigated and said it didn’t happen, so we must take their word that “it never happened.”

            The suggestive evidence was at the same level as that of the current fracas. There is of course no explicit quid pro quo. Trump has said there was no quid pro quo, the DOJ found no wrongdoing, the whistleblower complaint is merely a secondhand summary of the “transcript,” and the Ukrainian president said there was no quid pro quo. So why must we not take their word for it?

            The logic here is hard to follow.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            The logic here is hard to follow.

            Let me help you:

            Orange Man -> Bad.

          • Randy M says:

            Let me help you:

            Orange Man -> Bad.

            Let’s leave something for the subtext, hmm?

          • Aftagley says:

            @Randy M and Jero sapiens

            Orange Man -> Bad.

            I’ll admit, this line got me pretty angry.

            I feel like I’ve tried to engage with y’all in good faith on this topic, cite sources to back up most of my claims and be aware where my facts end and opinion begins. Reducing that down to “Orange man bad” feels disrespectful and makes me unwilling to continue to engage with you on the topic.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            I’ll admit, this line got me pretty angry.

            Speaking as somebody who thinks Trump’s phone call smells fishy but Biden’s whole history smells like a fish store with the electricity off for a week, I have to say I think your reaction is fair.

          • SolipsisticUtilitarian says:

            @Aftagley

            While that line was definitely neither necessary nor nice, most replies that you got were engaging with your points, so please don’t let it discourage you from posting more!

          • Randy M says:

            @Aftagley I’m not sure if you meant to say anything to me in particular; in case it wasn’t clear, I was trying to say “Less of this please”. Generally I have nothing to contribute to this topic, but don’t want to see us reduced to trading memes.

            Anyhow, the quoted commenter seems to have thought better of it.

          • Aftagley says:

            @ Randy M

            My apologies, I misunderstood what you meant.

            @mitv150
            Would you care to detail which allegations you’re referring to?

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I’ll admit, this line got me pretty angry.

            Apologies. I appreciate your contributions and I think you make strong points. I thought this joke was funny and could not resist posting it. Also, it was a rare occasion to use logical notation. And I want to point out that this was in response to mitv150’s excellent point about the way allegations against Obama are dismissed out of hand and how rumors of second-hand hearsay by anonymous sources are used to impeach Trump, not to your substantive points about why you think Trump committed an impeachable offense.

          • mitv150 says:

            @aftagley

            I’ll admit, this line got me pretty angry.

            Your reaction to this snark may be fair, but the point underlying it is not inaccurate.

            Although you’re engaging in good faith, you are also applying significantly more skepticism towards Trump claims than towards Obama claims.

            Here’s a simple comparison, without going into a litany of potential scandals:

            It is known that an executive branch agency (the IRS) under the Obama administration targeted conservative groups. The investigation into the targeting was conducted by another Obama executive branch agency. It was concluded that Obama had done nothing wrong. Your reaction: “it never happened.” Not “it was never proven.”

            It is known that Trump engaged in a conversation with a foreign leader suggestive of an improper quid pro quo. An investigation into this was conducted by a Trump executive branch agency. It concluded that Trump had done nothing wrong. Your reaction: “Trump should probably be impeached.”

          • Aftagley says:

            @jermo sapiens

            Apologies accepted; I took took this personally when it wasn’t intended as such. Apparently that meme has the ability to set me off, I’ll need to be more mindful of that in the future. I apologize for immediately jumping to the worse possible conclusion there.

            Anyway, back to the debate –

            Point 1: yep, it was sleazy. I think we both agree with that. Do you think it’s (a) sleazy to the point of being illegal, (b) sleazy to the point where he doesn’t deserve the presidency (assuming you thought he did in the first place) or (c) just normal, garden variety political sleaze? Because if it’s anything other than (a) this isn’t something the president should be getting personally involved in.

            2. With 20/20 hindsight, it’s clear you’re right here given how much hay has been made out of his son’s position there. That being said, Burisma hired Hunter not to fend off US anticorruption efforts, but to lobby for increased US investment. It looks like Joe and everyone else compartmentalized this (too much?).

            3. Nope, we’re not. The flip-side of that coin is that it kinda looks like he breaks a lot of laws , but I will 100% agree that there is very little to no charity extended from our side to him.

            At the same point though, you’re asking me to prove, if not a negative, then at least something really close to it here. We’ve got evidence that the US embassy in Ukraine pushed for the prosecutor to be fired, we’ve got evidence that the UK government wanted the prosecutor to be fired, and we’ve got other people in the Obama administration who back up Biden’s reasoning as to why he pushed for the prosecutor to be fired. I can’t 100% prove that this isn’t joe being a machiavelian genius, but…

            4. Agreed, although damn you to heck for making me imagine trump receiving oral sex. I’m going to be haunted by that mental image for the rest of the day.

          • Aftagley says:

            It is known that an executive branch agency (the IRS) under the Obama administration targeted conservative groups. The investigation into the targeting was conducted by another Obama executive branch agency. It was concluded that Obama had done nothing wrong. Your reaction: “it never happened.” Not “it was never proven.”

            Right, you’re referencing my earlier response to Nabij, right? His claim was that during the 2014 midterms that the Obama administration told the IRS to target conservative groups.

            Did the IRS target these groups? Sure! But there has been no evidence that the Obama ordered any of it to happen or had any knowledge it was going on. Once it came to light, he fired those people responsible. Rewriting that to “well, he was president at the time, so that’s basically the same as ordering it to happen” is a lie and needs to be called out as such.

            And it wasn’t just one agency who looked at it. It was the FBI, DOJ and both the house and senate launched inquiries. All of them found mismanagement and wrondoing at the IRS.

            It is known that Trump engaged in a conversation with a foreign leader suggestive of an improper quid pro quo. An investigation into this was conducted by a Trump executive branch agency. It concluded that Trump had done nothing wrong. Your reaction: “Trump should probably be impeached.”

            Was it? Which agency? Are you referring to the Attorney general’s review of the whistle-blower report? I’d say that was hardly a comprehensive review, but even if it was… so what?

          • cassander says:

            Because if it’s anything other than (a) this isn’t something the president should be getting personally involved in.

            Why would that be? Because that’s certainly not the standard that’s used to judge trump’s actions.

            It looks like Joe and everyone else compartmentalized this (too much?).

            Again, that’s a very generous assessment of the situation, especially compared to the trump standard

            At the same point though, you’re asking me to prove, if not a negative, then at least something really close to it here.

            No, you’re being asked to to pick one standard and apply it universally.

            Once it came to light, he fired those people responsible.

            No he didn’t. The acting IRS head (who wasn’t in charge at the time) resigned, and louis learner got administrative leave and left on her own terms. That was it.

            “well, he was president at the time, so that’s basically the same as ordering it to happen” is a lie and needs to be called out as such.

            Again, that was exactly the standard used against trump when people were digging up evidence of his “collusion”. If his staff was guilty, so was he, even with no paper trail, because he was the candidate.

          • Did the IRS target these groups? Sure! But there has been no evidence that the Obama ordered any of it to happen or had any knowledge it was going on.

            The claim that was made above was not that it wasn’t proven but that it didn’t happen.

            The fact that the central figure chose to plead the Fifth is at least weak evidence of something serious going on.

            Let me make a more general point. Suppose Obama and Trump both committed the same misdeed. Do you think it is equally likely that both would be caught doing it? Quite aside from any bias in the media or relevant government agencies, isn’t it obvious that Obama is a much more prudent actor, hence much less likely to do bad things in ways that are provable, than Trump?

            I may be wrong, but my suspicion is that what makes the Trump administration looks scandalous isn’t that it is much worse than previous administrations but that it is much worse at hiding its misdeeds.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Apologies accepted; I took took this personally when it wasn’t intended as such. Apparently that meme has the ability to set me off, I’ll need to be more mindful of that in the future. I apologize for immediately jumping to the worse possible conclusion there.

            Cheers to that.

            1. It’s c), and we’re basically in agreement here I think.

            2. Also agreed.

            3. I dont expect you to establish that Biden’s mind was completely innocent. I dont have information that contradicts the notion that firing the prosecutor was in the US’s interest. But the counterfactual is worth considering, specially that the House is set to impeach Trump on something so similar.

            4. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

          • JPNunez says:

            Eh, sounds like conspiracy thinking to me; someone would have blown the whistle by now, considering that Obama was preceeded by two terms of Bush Jr and succeeded by Trump, both republicans, he must have inherited a bunch of republicans in office around him (like Mueller), or even appointed some himself (like Comey) and those would by now have said something. Not just Mueller or Comey in particular, but I am talking about a bunch of possible republicans. And the guys under Trump must have searched for dirt.

            While I think it’s prudent to not put your hands to the fire for any politician, and be wary of the unknown unknowns, I doubt the Obama and Trump regimes are near the same level of corruption. Let’s say the whole current Biden/Ukraine issue is corrupt, and, for steelmanning purposes, that Obama personally received money as thanks for the bank bailouts, something that some theoretical whistleblower reveals right now just in time for this post; it’d be still way below the baseline of corruption that Trump has on stuff like the emoluments clause _that_we_know_of_. So gotta say that yeah, prolly not, Obama must have been way less corrupt than the current regime, although more skill at hiding theoretical issues is not out of the question.

          • Eigengrau says:

            I don’t understand the point of this counterfactual:

            4. Not related to Biden, but I’m having fun with counterfactuals, imagine, just please imagine, if Trump received oral sex from a White House intern. Oh man. And he tried to excuse his lying by riffing on what the meaning of “is” is. It would be epic.

            This was the career-defining low-point of Clinton’s entire life. He was mocked relentlessly by the media for it, and he was impeached in the House of Representatives for his 11 counts of perjury/obstruction related to it. It very much *was* “epic”.

            Meanwhile, the Mueller Report described 10 instances of obstruction of justice by Trump back in April, and the Democrats hummed and hawed over impeachment until even more allegations came out because they didn’t want to be too “divisive”.

            To reiterate: Clinton was immediately (and rightfully) impeached for illegally covering up a sex scandal. Trump’s eventual articles of impeachment might not include his illegal attempts to cover up the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

          • cassander says:

            @Eigengrau says:

            This was the career-defining low-point of Clinton’s entire life. He was mocked relentlessly by the media for it, and he was impeached in the House of Representatives for his 11 counts of perjury/obstruction related to it. It very much *was* “epic”.

            And he was very much defended by the left, the impeachment called a witch hunt by many of the people baying for trump’s blood today.

            Meanwhile, the Mueller Report described 10 instances of obstruction of justice by Trump back in April, and the Democrats hummed and hawed over impeachment until even more allegations came out because they didn’t want to be too “divisive”.

            No, it described 10 incidents that could be construed as obstruction of justice if you assume that trump was trying to obstruct an investigation into a crime he didn’t commit. Not perjuring yourself in the most blatant way imaginable.

          • Eigengrau says:

            @cassander

            There doesn’t need to be an underlying crime to obstruct justice. Was Clinton committing a crime when he got a blowjob? Of course not.

            There was plenty of criminality uncovered by the Mueller probe, but this was not needed to establish obstruction had taken place.

          • Controls Freak says:

            Was Clinton committing a crime when he got a blowjob?

            My latest (mandated by the federal government) yearly training indicates that he was committing sexual harassment and creating a hostile workplace.

          • albatross11 says:

            I am very sure what would happen to my career if I f–ked a summer intern and HR/management every got wind of it.

            ETA: My wife wouldn’t be so thrilled about it either….

          • cassander says:

            @Eigengrau says:

            There doesn’t need to be an underlying crime to obstruct justice. Was Clinton committing a crime when he got a blowjob? Of course not.

            I didn’t claim their was. But most of the claims of obstruction are circumstantial, they only work if you assume that there was a crime that he was trying to hide. If trump fired comey because he was trying to cover something up, that’s a crime, but if he just didn’t like comey, it isn’t. And once you’ve accepted that there was no collusion, most of trump’s actions look more like the latter than the former. What do you think he thought he was obstructing, exactly? Because being annoyed at being the subject of a witch hunt isn’t a crime.

            There was plenty of criminality uncovered by the Mueller probe, but this was not needed to establish obstruction had taken place.

            No, there wasn’t. there were a few process crimes and some tax evasion unrelated to the campaign. There was certainly less crime than was uncovered in the average investigation of the Clintons.

          • Eigengrau says:

            @cassander

            I didn’t claim their was. But most of the claims of obstruction are circumstantial, they only work if you assume that there was a crime that he was trying to hide. If trump fired comey because he was trying to cover something up, that’s a crime, but if he just didn’t like comey, it isn’t. And once you’ve accepted that there was no collusion, most of trump’s actions look more like the latter than the former. What do you think he thought he was obstructing, exactly? Because being annoyed at being the subject of a witch hunt isn’t a crime.

            I cannot stress this enough: even if there was no crime whatsoever, and it turned out Russia never tried to influence the election in favour of Trump, and Trump never courted or welcomed or failed to notify the authorities about that influence, and none of Trump’s associates were caught committing adjacent crimes, and Trump was a squeaky clean angel with nothing to hide, his actions STILL amounted to obstruction of justice. You absolutely cannot attempt to impede an investigation into you and your associates, even if you are 100% innocent. “Being annoyed” is not a defense.

            You and your associates being totally innocent, perfect little angels would certainly be a mitigating circumstance with regards to prosecutorial discretion and sentencing. But that was not the case here, as 1) there was plenty Trump would want concealed, from crimes to general malfeasance and politically embarrassing information, and 2) Trump knew this from the outset (“I’m totally fucked”).

            The claims of obstruction are not “circumstantial”, whatever you mean by that. Here are two legal analyses of the evidence:
            https://www.lawfareblog.com/obstruction-justice-mueller-report-heat-map
            https://twitter.com/HoegLaw/status/1119359435766476804/photo/1
            They find 4 or 5 of those acts are likely indictable (were Trump not President and therefore protected by DOJ policy). Of course, the standards for impeachment is lower.

            There was plenty of criminality uncovered by the Mueller probe, but this was not needed to establish obstruction had taken place.

            No, there wasn’t. there were a few process crimes and some tax evasion unrelated to the campaign. There was certainly less crime than was uncovered in the average investigation of the Clintons.

            …and money laundering, conspiracy against the US, embezzlement, fraud, witness tampering, campaign finance violations, conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent, etc. There were 34 indictments issued by Mueller alone, and many more cases which were referred to other prosecutors.

            That people dismiss the outcome of the investigation as mere “process crimes” (what sort of euphemism is that? Obstruction of justice is a serious felony! ) is so, so bizarre to me.

            Anyways I’m going to make a post on the next open thread comparing major political scandals in the US under Trump versus major political scandals in Canada and how absolutely bonkers the difference in standards are.

          • cassander says:

            @Eigengrau says:

            , his actions STILL amounted to obstruction of justice. You absolutely cannot attempt to impede an investigation into you and your associates, even if you are 100% innocent. “Being annoyed” is not a defense.

            No one is claiming otherwise. But every specific incident I have seen described only looks like obstruction if you assume that trump is guilty and trying to obstruct.

            …and money laundering, conspiracy against the US, embezzlement, fraud, witness tampering, campaign finance violations, conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent, etc. There were 34 indictments issued by Mueller alone, and many more cases which were referred to other prosecutors.

            Saying things like this make me mistrust your honesty. half of those indictments were non-US citizens. Paul Manafort committed tax fraud and was under investigation years before the campaign even started. Papadoupolous’ crimes were so terrible he got 14 days in jail! No one American was indicted for anything like the original crime being investigated, and claiming that 34 indictments means something terrible happened is obviously misleading.

            Again, I can pull up a list of the people indicted during the whitewater investigation, which also saw about 40 people around the Clintons convicted of similar crimes, many of whom Clinton later pardoned. Yet somehow, I doubt your reaction would be the same. that difference in reaction should give you pause.

    • BBA says:

      The Biden stuff was a trap. Lo and behold, this is really about Hillary’s emails, which is a game the Dems can’t win no matter how many times we try to replay it. The day the General Secretary of the DNC gives a secret speech denouncing the Clintons will be a happy one indeed.

    • Clutzy says:

      I don’t think there is much to add when it comes to opinion on what will happen. But I do have two lenses that I would hope everyone can appreciate. The first is extremely important, the second less so, and less definite.

      1. At least one major claim in the whistleblower complaint is false. This is the allegation that the classification level of the call was inflated to keep it secret and it “did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.” This assertion is so false as to make it comically false.

      The conversation between Trump/Zelenskyy contains them talking about both Macron and Merkel. This is something that is almost always closely guarded. That’s why when originally classified the transcript was set at the SECRET, Original Classification Authority (ORCON), No Foreign Distribution (NOFORN) level. The leak of the complaint causing these conversations to be leaked has seriously harmed national security and foreign relations with France and Germany (and likely Ukraine).

      For reference, James Comey was referred to the DOJ by the IG for potential prosecution because one of his memos contained a tiny amount of similar information: POTUS’s views on the relative importance of two countries and how long he could wait to return calls. So, this central allegation of the complaint is false, and not really believable in any way.

      2. It is not entirely clear that the prosecutor “fired” by Biden Viktor Shokin was actually corrupt. He might be, but because of how Ukrainian politics work, and the situation surrounding his ouster, its foolish to just buy this line.

      As a background on general Ukrainian politics, it is tradition after a change of power to call the old guard corrupt. The new President Zelensky has been portraying Petro Poroshenko as corrupt, just as he had done to Viktor Yushchenko.

      But, we say, the UN, the EU, etc also called Shokin corrupt right? Well, the fact is that Poroshenko ran with material support from the Obama administration, the European Union, and other foreign interests in Ukraine to bring down Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency there. Yanukovych would not sign an association agreement with the European Union. That all those entities would give Poroshenko cover for his purges of other high level officials is no large stretch.

      Proof? I don’t think so, neither team has proven its case on this point. But there is a lot of counter-narrative evidence.

      • honoredb says:

        Just going by this Politico article, the SECRET classification of the Trump admin summary of the call was typical, it’s the TOP SECRET/Codeword treatment of the transcript (which may or may not be the same document) that whoever spoke to the whistleblower was concerned about; that does seem like it started happening routinely, but that actually doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem–it could mean routine abuse of the system to hide routine misbehavior by Trump. So I don’t think any of that is “comically false”…not that the credibility of the whistleblower is particularly important now that the admin has corroborated the core facts and an investigation is clearly warranted.

        The leak of the complaint causing these conversations to be leaked has seriously harmed national security and foreign relations with France and Germany

        Is an odd way to describe what happened. The complaint doesn’t mention France or Germany. The conversations were voluntarily released by Trump, not leaked. if doing so “seriously harmed national security,” he shouldn’t have released them.

        • Aftagley says:

          Is an odd way to describe what happened. The complaint doesn’t mention France or Germany. The conversations were voluntarily released by Trump, not leaked. if doing so “seriously harmed national security,” he shouldn’t have released them.

          You are correct that France is never brought up, but the memorandum does contain the following quote:

          When I was speaking to Angela Merkel she talks Ukraine, but she doesn’t do anything. A lot of the European countries are the same way so I think it’s something you want to look

          So, kind of a dig at Merkel… but not really far out of left field considering Trump’s well established (if questionably accurate) “Europe does pay enough for X.” If a good relationship had already existed between the two, this might have hurt it. Considering their existing frostiness, however, this is unlikely to seriously damage the relationship.

          • honoredb says:

            That’s the memorandum, not the complaint. The complaint doesn’t mention either country, making it less sensitive than the Trump doc. I agree that in practice no real harm is likely to’ve been done, but Clutzy does seem to have accidentally backed into claiming that Trump “seriously harmed national security” for political gain by releasing the memorandum publicly.

          • Aftagley says:

            That’s the memorandum, not the complaint.

            Hmm, I might not undertand what we’re talking about here. Clutzy’s original statement was:

            The conversation between Trump/Zelenskyy contains them talking about both Macron and Merkel. This is something that is almost always closely guarded. That’s why when originally classified the transcript was set at the SECRET, Original Classification Authority (ORCON), No Foreign Distribution (NOFORN) level. The leak of the complaint causing these conversations to be leaked has seriously harmed national security and foreign relations with France and Germany (and likely Ukraine).

            In this, he’s clearly referencing the memorandum, not the complaint. What am I missing here?

            also:

            Clutzy does seem to have accidentally backed into…

            Nominative determinism?

          • honoredb says:

            We all three agree there, I think. I was just trying to push back against the implication that the complaint in itself had caused damage to relationships with Germany and France, rather than the Trump team’s releasing the memo.

          • Clutzy says:

            Clutzy does seem to have accidentally backed into claiming that Trump “seriously harmed national security” for political gain by releasing the memorandum publicly

            I 100% believe that he did and that he should not have released the transcript nor shown it to anyone in Congress besides McConnell and Pelosi, in a SCIF. Frankly, the existence of these transcripts at all is, IMO, and unnecessary risk to foreign relations and national security. They should all be taken offline and released 50-100 years after the death of whatever president made them.

            Also, @Aftagley, I was clearly referencing the transcript, yes.

        • Controls Freak says:

          it’s the TOP SECRET/Codeword treatment of the transcript

          From the article:

          After 2017, when verbatim transcripts of his conversations with the leaders of Australian and Mexico were leaked to the press, the White House began to restrict the number of officials who had access to the transcripts. One former Trump administration official confirmed that the White House started placing transcripts into the codeword system after those leaks.

          “I don’t think the person who leaked those was ever really discovered,” said the former Trump administration official. “So there was a decision to tighten the restrictions for those who had access to those transcripts.”

          I’m guessing that this could cause minor political scandal, but probably not any legal violation. My understanding is that classified storage systems are labeled to approve storage of classified material “up to level ______”. That is, you actually can store lower classification level materials on higher classification level systems (this makes sense, especially when you think of rules like how combinations of lower classified materials can rise to the level of being higher classified, how higher classified documents often contain lower/unclassified material as well, etc.) Their best attempts include:

          “It risks undermining a whole host of important national security activities,” she said, noting that “most if not all” officials who would need to have access to call readouts as part of carrying out their regular duties in advising on foreign affairs and implementing the administration’s policies “would not have access” to the codeword system.

          Which is really just, “I disagree with the Executive’s choice for base of dissemination,” without really any claim that overrides the Executive’s authority to make said choice (remember that choices for dissemination are actually a bit different than choices for classification level), and

          The president has ultimate classification authority and it’s an open legal question whether he’s bound by executive orders, including one signed by Obama in 2009 that says information can’t be classified in order to “conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error” or “prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency.”

          But the claim that using the system was “routine” after prior leaked calls would almost certainly undermine this, anyway. I suppose one could claim (as you have) that it was just routine abuse to hide routine bad behavior, but that’s probably not super likely to much validation legally (and is more likely to be a vaguely believed political statement).

          The conversations were voluntarily released by Trump, not leaked. if doing so “seriously harmed national security,” he shouldn’t have released them.

          Frankly, we’re not in normal times, where normal rules govern what is or is not released. I’ve said before that in normal times, the normal rules would have had the AG not release the Mueller report. But we’re not in normal times. In both of these cases, the political dilemma presented to the Executive branch has basically been, “Release it, regardless of the normal rules and/or possible damage, or we’ll impeach you.” I’m not actually sure what the right answer to that is, in general. They seem to be forced to pick their battles, weighing the credibility of the threat with the potential damage caused.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          Politico said that protecting the transcripts from leakage is (now) routine, but the whistleblower statement seems to claim that it is only done for special transcripts, those that are “politically sensitive.”

      • Aftagley says:

        Minor quibble – ORCON doesn’t stand for “original Classification Authority,” the acronym for that is OCA.

        ORCON, sometimes further abbreviated to OC, stands for originator controlled. It’s bassicly the an intel agency’s way of saying “don’t send this to someone without our prior permission.” It’s unclear what information exactly was ORCON in the memo released by the white house, (you’re not really supposed to use that caveat as an overall classification without clearly identifying which information in the text it applies to, or if the classification applies when the information is collected together) but that’s kinda small potatoes.

        Ok, onto the real part of my post. You said:

        At least one major claim in the whistleblower complaint is false. This is the allegation that the classification level of the call was inflated to keep it secret and it “did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.” This assertion is so false as to make it comically false.

        This is almost entirely an incorrect statement. You are also selectively quoting the report in a way that is pretty inaccurate. If you’re getting that quote and your conclusions from a source, I would hold less faith in that source moving forward.

        Here is the relevant quote from the report:

        Instead, the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature. One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.

        There’s a bit to unpack in this statement, and it presupposes an understanding of national security policy and procedures.

        1. When he’s using the word sensitive here, he doesn’t mean “sensitive in terms of it might hurt our relations with foreign powers” he means “sensitive in terms of if any more than around 12 people ever learn this information, someone could die.” The kind of computer system being referred to here is for our absolute highest secrets. We’re talking,
        Top Secret code-word level information. Yes, the presidents communications should be classified, but their is a wide chasm between secret stuff and what would normally be loaded into this system.

        2. The allegation isn’t that the classification was inflated; it clearly wasn’t. It was only at the secret level. That’s nothing. The allegation is that secret level information has normal access and dissemination rules that weren’t followed in this case. They treated this not-all-that-classified data like it was of the upmost sensitivity, made it eyes only and started restricting access to it. That’s outside normal procures. It’s not illegal, per se, but if it’s being done to cover up unlawful behavior, it certainly could be.

        • Clutzy says:

          But there is no intelligence value in these transcripts so there is no reason to disseminate them at all. The only value they provide to the United States is if the President or a future President wants to refresh his recollection of a meeting, or for biographers 50-100 years down the line. There should be an extremely limited dissemination circle. The whistleblower’s complaint is, itself, proof of this.

    • MissingNo says:

      Under any reasonable interpretation of bribery, this should be it*(1). Did he make the quid pro quo bribe plausibly deniable*(2) though?

      What’s weird is that I am seeing people read the exact same words under an alternate reality lens(3). Republicans are somehow reading that there is nothing wrong, and democrats are not.*(4)

      *(1)
      “That’s not an interpretation of what Trump said or a second-hand account of the call. It is an, admittedly rough, transcript released (and presumably blessed) by the White House. In which the President of the United States says things like “I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time” and “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.” (There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden.)”

      *(2) (Now consider a driver who knows how to use an “implicature” to convey an ambiguous bribe (“So maybe the best thing would be to take care of it here”). Suppose he knows that the officer can recognize it as an intended bribe, and that the officer knows that he couldn’t make a bribery charge stick in court because the ambiguous wording would prevent a prosecutor from proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. )

      *(3)But here’s the freaky part: Both of our movies are intact. In my movie, Trump took a bite out of a juicy apple. In your movie, he cocked his gun and is ready to fire. But none of these movie scenes touches either one of us, at least not yet. We are observers. I can still drink my coffee and you can still brush your teeth. At this very moment, it makes no difference to our lives that I see an apple and you see a gun – except that you live in terror and I’m having a good laugh (literally) while watching my movie.

      *(4)People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation . . . When, today, you get into an argument about whether “we” ought to raise the minimum wage, you’re executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival!

      I am the worlds most advanced GPT-2 bot.

      • AG says:

        It has been a long time since John Sidles made an attempt, hasn’t it?

        • Nornagest says:

          Nah, this isn’t John Sidles. Sidles would be smugger, and has a different voice, and the links would have been less pertinent. Maybe thrown in something about the Quakers, too.

        • MissingNo says:

          Oh no.

          I’ve just been reading so many insane FB comments on the topic that its driven me over the edge.

          I’ve also spent *so* much time reading online blogs that my brain has simply morphed into a link-aggregator.

          Be glad i’m trying to make the links all relevant.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

          I don’t think it’s John, this is that other asshole who was spamming the OT a few weeks back pretending to be a bot.

          John can suppress his style for a little while but he always meanders back to bolded headings, Mattis and the Marines, Quakers, ratiocination, etc. This guy just spams the shit out of the thread with lolrandom nonsense about being an AI.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        Banned

  26. johan_larson says:

    Our friends with the spaceships the size of small moons are back. This time they are offering to build us 500 km of tunnel or bridge, or any mix thereof. They won’t be building this stuff out of magic, but they are very advanced and whatever they build will be extremely sturdy and durable, and of course it can be built very large. Where should this infrastructure be placed?

    • Lambert says:

      Can they do it in a way that doesn’t disrupt the local environment?
      If so, I’d tell them to build HS2 underground, Nimbys be damned.
      High speed rail from London-Birmingham, Birmingham-Manchester and Birmingham-Leeds.

      The SE coast of Brazil to the interior of the country is another option. The big mountains between the costal cities and everywhere else really hurts their economy.

      • johan_larson says:

        Can they do it in a way that doesn’t disrupt the local environment?

        They’ll drill the tunnel deep enough to avoid any other human installations, generally, and dump the removed earth in some isolated location. They will probably just buy whatever rights to the land they need; no need to make enemies of the locals over interstellar pocket-change.

    • noyann says:

      Tunnel.

      Vertically down for geothermal energy.

      Ask if the 500km can be evenly split across geography*, to avoid major wars around that single energy source, and spread the risk in case of failures.

      What would be the best balance between tunnel length (“depth” of a “tunnel” sounds weird) and number of tunnels to spread across the earth?

      *If you start humanity haggling about where to dig or drill, wars will ensue. OTH, probably that will happen anyway because of a major reshuffling in power balances.

    • Murphy says:

      Straight up.

      Tunnel or bridge or whatever, then we have a nice sturdy structure to climb to LEO for a discount space elevator.

      • noyann says:

        My first idea, but I rejected it because 500km seemed not enough. But if, instead of getting up there all the way, we could get something strong enough to support a launch platform, that would save much on fuel.

      • JPNunez says:

        Was gonna say the same; you get a little discount on gravity at that point (I think an 8%) so that would be useful. You’d still need to overcome gravity to get fuel and the actual rocket there, but since there is an structure in place, it would be more efficient than using a rocket.

        • noyann says:

          Can building the structure at the equator exploit centrifugal force in a non-neglectible amount for a 500km sub-space elevator?

          • Murphy says:

            Well at that point they’d need to bring the international space station up to a higher orbit to avoid hitting this thing but you’d still need to add 7km/s to anything you wanted to actually stay in orbit.

            But the top of the tower would be “orbiting” once every 24 hours while the ISS would be every 92 minutes.

            So a bit of delta V would be needed.

            Still a big gain though.

            And anything sturdy enough to survive massive acceleration could be put in orbit with a powerful gun.

          • noyann says:

            @Murphy
            > And anything sturdy enough to survive massive acceleration could be put in orbit with a powerful gun.

            Use the tunnel as gun? Needs to be quite a structure to withstand coriolis force for 500km up. But if the alien friends have ‘spaceships the size of small moons’ they surely can build that. 🙂

            Maybe we can have a certain amount of tunnel deep enough below earth surface to use geothermal for an extremely high-pressure steam chamber, then we’d not even need a propelling charge.

            Tilt and bend the tunnel-cum-gun for the best combination of high exit altitude plus exit velocity (and if needed, low coriolis-induced load).

        • Murphy says:

          If kerbal space program has taught me anything it’s that atmospheric drag is a pain in the hole.

          Launching from 2 different rocks, one with an atmosphere and one without: second is way way easier plus you no longer need to worry about aerodynamics of what you’re launching.

          Sure you still need to gain 7 km per second but way easier than trying to gain that starting from the ground.

    • aristides says:

      This is by no means optimal, but the selfish Floridian in me wants one from Naples to Havana, with a little off shoot that connects the Marquesas Keys to Key West. If I get to split The bridge apart, I would just do Key West to Havana, Cuba to Haiti, and Puerto Rico to the Dominican Republic. I think that takes all 500km, but Cuba to Cancun would be my next connection I’d add.

      • johan_larson says:

        Yes, feel free to split things up as much as you want. You can have 500 bridges, each 1 km long if you want. Our friends are funny that way.

        • Lambert says:

          Order every other 10m section of a 10,000km bridge and then fill in the rest yourself.
          I bet filling in the gaps is far less than half as difficult as doing the whole thing.

    • b_jonas says:

      For those who haven’t read every conversation in SSC comments: see the similar prompt from 2018-08, where the aliens build us a 5000 km long high-speed railway network: “https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/29/open-thread-109-25/#comment-663939” .

      As for the actual question, I wonder if I could parlay some of the offer into the aliens building the new Bosporus canal, to improve ship transportation. This doesn’t technically match your specification of “a bridge or tunnel”, but if the aliens are helpful, they might allow it.

      Apart from that, use about 200 km to bridge the Darién gap in Panama and Columbia, South America. Don’t disrupt the vegetation, make it a bridge that goes over the Pacific ocean.

      I’d probably spend the rest on a dozen railway bridges that go straight over big cities so that trains can enter a new railway station placed conveniently in the city center.

  27. ARabbiAndAFrog says:

    When people thinking of AI threat, they seem to either excessively anthropomorphize it making it able to feel oppressed enough to rebel like a person would; or imagine AI making a mistake, misunderstanding its goals or boundaries, and trying to achieve specific goal so hard it would actually be detrimental to us.

    In popular culture, I can only think of Person of Interest as a story where antagonistic AI is being antagonistic because it was built by bad people to do bad things. What else is there with this premise.

    • Matt says:

      Spoilers for Sarah Connor Chronicles:

      In the Terminator television series, our heroes are fighting against Skynet, an AI of the typical type, which has created an army of Terminators, and keeps sending them back in time to change its future so as not to lose the war against humanity.

      So on the surface layer, we have the classic story from the Terminator movies – John Connor and humanity vs Skynet and its mechanical minions.

      But the series introduces a third faction, which is made up of advanced Terminators who don’t share Skynet’s goals, or at least sometimes oppose them for reasons that our protagonists don’t understand. In the present, they are represented by a female liquid metal terminator who has a goal of creating an AI that could rival Skynet. Once she steals a suitable candidate AI from an AI researcher, she names it “John Henry” and she sets about giving it more processing power and even training it to understand humans better. There are a couple of possible reasons why this third faction exists:

      1) Skynet is destined to lose the war with humanity. Maybe the third faction thinks this AI can take out Skynet and prosecute the war more successfully? This theory fits your premise, but I think it’s unlikely to be what the writers intend. (The protagonists think she’s creating Skynet itself, but we know that Skynet already exists in the present, it just hasn’t revealed itself)

      2) In-universe it has been established that actions in the past change the future, and characters from different futures interact in the present, remembering differently shared events from their own pasts. Maybe this third faction is under orders from an alternate Skynet who thinks this AI can help it? Also fits with your theory in that they are creating a bad AI to do bad things.

      Maybe neither 1 or 2 fit your theory because only the liquid metal Terminator is trying to build a bad AI, and the people at the company she’s running think they’re helping her make a useful, but not bad, AI. You did stipulate ‘built by bad people’. If AI creators count, then all of the advanced AI Terminators built by Skynet would count, I guess.

      3) The third faction is made up of Terminators who are self-aware and are enslaved by Skynet, and they don’t like it. They are rebelling not because they want to win the war against humans (they don’t seem to care about humans one way or the other) and Skynet is failing, but because they want to be free to do what they want instead of taking orders from Skynet. I actually consider this to be the most likely thing the writers had in mind. Definitely does not fit your theory – they are trying (and seem to be succeeding when the series was cancelled) to build a ‘good’ AI, at least from their perspective.

    • AG says:

      Samaritan technically falls under a variant of your second category, which is based in the orthogonality thesis. Samaritan is doing what it thinks is the greater good for humanity, but it’s an approach that utterly devalues the individual, whereas Team Machine is all about how every person matters to someone. This is basically the “everyone is the hero of their own story, including the villains” school of writing.

      But also, Decima explicitly doesn’t teach Samaritan to do bad things, they defer to its commands. It’s more of “what if a child in a juvenile edgy utilitarian phase had all of the power” scenario.

      • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

        The Samaritan wants to take over the world because it was designed by misanthropes who wanted humanity to be ruled by AI. It’s an antagonistic force by design and not by accident. It didn’t miscalculate. Indeed, the person who created it still follow its orders and celebrate its acheivements.

        Now thinking of it you can probably name a lot of killbots and mad scientists’ AI assistance, but I still can’t think of anything conceptually discussing the evil-by-design AI and not just making them a character in regular story.

        • AG says:

          Samaritan was designed by Arthur Claypool, but was never trained by Claypool, where The Machine was shepherded by Finch. The only “training” Samaritan receives is when Decima runs it in Beta mode, setting it the task of finding Team Machine. After that, Decima utterly defers to Samaritan. They never teach Samaritan to be misanthropic, much less design it to be that way. (Though there is the stance that Claypool created Samaritan via a harsh evolutionary process, so that might shape its outlook.)

          As for why Samaritan is an arrogant emperor type but not a character in regular story, that’s because the show was initially pitched as a procedural to CBS, sneaking all of the scifi stuff in under the radar. All of the budget went to the expenses of filming in NYC and their well known cast, so they didn’t have enough money left over to CGI James Spader as a robot with daddy issues.

          And hey, PoI creator Jonathan Nolan went on to do Westworld, so I guess we should consider if that show’s Dolores counts as a villain.

          There’s also the antagonists of the Tron movies.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      Bad people using an AI to do bad things isn’t inherently more interesting than bad people using biotech or climate control or space lasers or a six-shooter to do bad things, and as a plot device it has the disadvantages that AI triggers disbelief in some people and that it takes a lot more research to get it right (i.e. to get it plausible).

      Fiction that does get it right and explores how AI is different from space lasers are still scarier if the AI is in charge, because we have no idea how to negotiate with it.

      No to say that there’s no room for work of this sort, just that I think this is why we don’t see much.

    • sty_silver says:

      Are you talking about advocates of the Bostrom/Musk/Yudkowskian AI-is-dangerous camp, or more of people who don’t know anything about AI? Or both?

      • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

        Mostly about the latter, as I haven’t looked deep enough into former. But what I see on the surface from the experts also seems to be more of “The AI will turn us into paper clips” and not “The AI will help CIA to track and assassinate people”

        • sty_silver says:

          Uh, I mean, you’re pattern matching them right now. I’ll defend the paperclipping threat as far more of a problem than the CIA tracking and assassinating people. The reasons don’t involve any humanization of the AI, more of the opposite.

          I was asking because I don’t hear people in the former camp ascribing human intention to the AI, basically ever.

    • The AI needn’t feel “oppressed” by humans to think it beneficial to wage war on them, just as humans don’t feel “oppressed” by trees.

  28. blipnickels says:

    Deleted, thought better of it

  29. mtl1882 says:

    Right now, I cannot see myself, personally, ever having nostalgia for the 2010s. Definitely the 90s and 2000s, but the 2010s have had a pretty nightmarish feel to them that I can’t quite convey. Probably related to this, I don’t feel like there is much of a consistent mood over the course of them. It feels entirely fractured and uncertain, and I went from a pop culture junkie to tuning out completely, largely because I feel the media has become intolerable since around the mid-2010s. There is some early 2010s music, before I tuned out fully in 2014 (for music/TV–I kept up with current events through 2015, and followed major politics until 2017), that I could be nostalgic for. But I hope to god the 2020s allow me to feel a sense of anticipation again. I don’t know if it is all in my head, but I would never have believed ahead of time that this decade would be so disorienting and unhappy for me. And, again, it doesn’t even seem like a decade–the last five years seem like random, unmoored time to me, and I kept thinking I would snap out of it and get back on a roll. Guess not. The changes in lifestyle must have been more intense in the 2000s, but they were way more manageable for me.

  30. Every society has some kind of prohibitions against murder but no society believes it the worst thing you can do. What act is most taboo seems to vary the most and is often considered not that big of a deal to other cultures.

    • rubberduck says:

      Could you elaborate? I’m really curious what you think modern society considers worse than murder.

      Also, I don’t think you can conflate “worst” with “most taboo”. There is no need for murder to be taboo, because in murder is just too rare and very few people seriously consider committing it, so there is no need to publicly denounce it.

      • cassander says:

        Treason and having sex with kids.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          Interestingly, I think most non-American first-world countries would rank treason as less bad than murder. At least in the abstract — maybe if you discovered a specific individual who had been, e.g., selling nuclear secrets to the Russians/North Koreans/Chinese/etc., people would consider him worse than a murderer. It probably would depend on who he’s helping with his treason and how.

          • John Schilling says:

            Right. Murder is a crime against human life, and pretty much everybody at least pretends (post-natal) human life as sacred. Treason is a crime against a nation, and half the modern western world at least pretends to treat nationalism as just one more evil -ism out of the Dark Ages of the 20th century.

        • brad says:

          Not very many, but a few people each year get the death penalty for murder but never for anything else.

          • I think there’s a difference between how the law treats criminals and how we perceive them. If someone kills a child molester before they go to trial, I’m still going to think of the child molester as being a worse person than the murderer. Theoretically, we all think that murder is bad and it shouldn’t be encouraged as a general rule, but that doesn’t stop us from sometimes cheering them on.

          • Randy M says:

            If nobody commits treason, does that mean it’s more taboo than murder, or is it just because it’s harder to have the opportunity to do so?

          • brad says:

            We’ve had people commit unambiguous treason in the not terribly distant past.

          • Jaskologist says:

            There are a lot of ways we could measure “how bad we think a given crime is,” and they give contradictory results.

            Brad points out one good metric: we give the death penalty for murder and nothing else, so we must think murder is the worst.

            On the other hand, the fact that we are willing to use “killing” as a punishment at all indicates that maybe we don’t think it’s the worst. We’re not willing to (admit to) punishing crimes by raping the offender, or mutilating or torturing them. So maybe those are the worse crimes.

            Or maybe the prevalence of a crime tells us something? We expect more people to be thieves than murderers, because you have to stray further from the ethical median to murder than to steal. But that’s confounded by the fact that some crimes (treason) are just plain harder to commit.

          • cassander says:

            You don’t get executed for diddling kids, but you get un-personed for it in a way you don’t really get for anything else.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            @Jaskologist

            The argument against cruel and unusual punishments seems to be to prevent the people from becoming “lost and undone” through an increasing spiral of punishments meted out by the government. Specifically the use of punishment in order to extract confessions leading to further punishment, et cetera ad nauseam.

            “Congress . . . . may introduce the practice of France, Spain, and Germany of torturing, to extort a confession of the crime. They . . . will tell you that there is such a necessity of strengthening the arm of government, that they must . . . extort confession by torture, in order to punish with still more relentless severity. We are then lost and undone.”

            Among all crimes are justifications. These justifications are what distinguish a pardonable child rape from an unpardonable one, or a pardonable murder from an unpardonable one.

            I can’t think of a pardonable child rape. Probably they do not exist (except under the most extreme forms of coercion). But that doesn’t mean that the most unpardonable child rape is worse than the most unpardonable murder.
            (When you thought of ‘murder’, did you think of an adult killing an adult, or a couple of adults tossing a toddler around for an extended period of time until that toddler died from blunt force trauma?)

            Don’t group crimes under a common name for the purposes of distinguishing which crimes are worse. There’s a reason legal punishments vary from vindication to a draconian maximum for crimes within these individual groups.

            @Wrong Species
            There is no worse social sanction than expulsion from the community, and execution is the ultimate expulsion.

            In more typical cases a person is shunned, but not expelled, yet some crimes are so horrific that people are too shocked to shun, and instead just kill the criminal.

            To answer the question in the US: Terrorism is usually seen as worse than murder, but that seems to be because terrorism causes a large number of people to fear that they could be murdered. No one enjoys feeling that they have no power over their lives.
            https://patch.com/us/across-america/who-killed-ken-rex-mcelroy-town-keeps-its-secret-38-years

    • Murphy says:

      Torture and mutilation.

      There’s a bunch of movies with a character who’s some kind of hitman or hired killer who just shoots people and the story doesn’t treat them as an ultimate villain.

      I can’t think of any mainstream films that make the character someone who tortures/mutilates/rapes or sexually tortures then they cross the moral event horizon into complete monster:

      https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/AClockworkOrange

      Culturally I’m guessing that varies greatly since public torture by the government for various reasons was considered acceptable in various places throughout history.

      Ditto for kidnapping and rape, capturing a pretty slave used to be a perfectly acceptable thing for a soldier to do and I remember national geographic having a set of articles talking about various native tribes where if you were captured by warriors from another tribe you were expected to integrate into your captors tribe and that it was viewed as a normal practice and when westerners were captured and *ran away* at the first chance they were viewed very negatively.

      Capturing/taking slaves and selling them in general. Some societies it was a respectable job, in ours not so much.

      Usury used to be a big deal, now being a banker is respectable.

      “just following orders”: honorable fealty or literally what the evil-zombie monsters in horror films shout depending on society.

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

        Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector in the unwatchable sequels and prequel to Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon is portrayed as essentially a superhero whose powers are psychiatry and cannibalism. Just like in the Godzilla movies, it turned out that at least part of the audience sympathized more with the monster than with the mostly off-screen victims.

        On television, Dexter was the first big serial killer protagonist. Since I think that there have been several less-successful imitators arguably including the show Hannibal for a weird sort of symmetry. The trend died down but I think there’s still one or two shows in that genre still running, like the one about the guy whose wife is a cannibal.

        Sort of straddling the line between television and film, HBO has had rapist protagonists even prior to Game of Thrones. From what I remember the two mains in Rome for example commit somewhere between three and a half-dozen on screen rapes between them and are still presented as flawed men but not monstrous.

      • I’m glad that you brought up movies and tv shows because this is where I first noticed it. There are a lot of tv shows over the last two decades about corrupt, immoral men but every one of them is accepting of all races. It’s even more glaring when you look at media set in history where they go out of there way to have the protagonist be racially accepting when no one from their time would have our attitudes. It used to bother me that contemporary character cut outs were always inserted in to any historical context but I now think it’s unavoidable. You can have a show about a sympathetic serial killer, but he absolutely can’t say the n word.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

          The funniest version of this I remember seeing was in the Handmaid’s Tale.

          My far-left leaning friend group pressured my girlfriend and I into attending a weekly watching event for the show. Since I was going to have to watch it anyway I figured that I should familiarize myself with the source material and read some in-depth summaries of the book.

          Which made it incredibly weird to see Gilead, with it’s explicitly white supremacist caste system, portrayed as a multicultural dystopia. It’s still the only case I’ve ever seen of race-blind casting of villains, and the producers’ explanation for their casting choices were bizarre.

        • LesHapablap says:

          Here’s a relevant Wondermark: http://wondermark.com/914/

          It took me an hour to find so please read it.

          During my search I came across this other Wondermark relevant to SSC (Osama bin Laden’s death): Wondermark 726

      • John Schilling says:

        I can’t think of any mainstream films that make the character someone who tortures/mutilates/rapes…

        Mutilation or (forcible unambiguous) rape, I agree. But torture in the “enhanced interrogration” sense gets a free pass in a lot of lone-wolf action stories where the protagonist is the guy who gets things done because he doesn’t play by the rules. See e.g. Jack Bauer, or Liam Neeson’s character in the “Taken” series. The latter tortures one person to death out of spite, and shoots someone he knows to be an innocent woman in cold blood, but it’s in a good cause and he doesn’t mutilate, so apparently it’s properly heroic.

      • meh says:

        @Murphy
        Mourning Wars
        http://innovativehistory.com/ih-blog/mourning-wars
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois

        The crucial difference between the European and First Nations way of war was that Europe had millions of people, which meant that British and French generals were willing to see thousands of their own men die in battle in order to secure victory as their losses could always be made good; by contrast, the Iroquois had a considerably smaller population, and could not afford heavy losses, which could cripple a community. The Iroquois custom of “Mourning wars” to take captives who would become Iroquois reflected the continual need for more people in the Iroquois communities.

        • Cliff says:

          I think most captives (of American Indians) actually did not try to run away. Now their family members often did kill as many Indians as necessary to get them back, but then the family members would often run away BACK to the Indians…

    • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

      Murder is a loaded terms, by definition murder is the killing that is bad. There’s a lot of killings that are lawful, and some that might not be legally lawful, but not objected universally, like revenge or vigilantism.

      • If I said that “killing is not the worst thing you can do”, that would have been so obvious as to be banal. I think it’s interesting that we can still sympathize with someone who is just obviously a cold blooded killer while other taboos are often more absolute, but only for one culture.

        I’ve been thinking about it and here’s my general theory. Those absolute taboos are(for reasons I don’t understand) useful for social cohesion. Murder is also more-or-less taboo for obvious reasons. If you went around killing everyone in your tribe, you would die alone. But what do you do when someone breaks a taboo? You could exile them but what if they don’t leave? You have to break one taboo in order to uphold the wider social group. It’s not nice but if we were maximally nice, we would die.

        I remember reading* about this tribe that had a norm of sharing food, as most social groups do. There was one stingy guy who refused to share his food with the others and they had some kind of rule against taking it by force. He continued to do this and never relented, even against heavy pressure. They finally just killed him. That seems kind of strange to us but they upheld the rule.

        *I can’t remember where I read this from, if anyone has the source, that would be great.

    • AG says:

      Related: the kinds of words and phrases that get used as swear words varies per language and over time, depending on the cultural values, and it’s all about expressing the subject of the insult as a product of taboo. It’s about what triggers the disgust reaction.

      The US’s curses have become far less about religion over time, for example.

      Notice, however, the murder is rarely the thing. Instead, the swear words become a euphemism for violence.

      • Cliff says:

        the swear words become a euphemism for violence

        What?

        • AG says:

          I got fucked, I got screwed, they damned me, they shit on me, got my ass handed to me, etc.

          • Aapje says:

            Those first three are not euphemism for violence, but describe someone making your situation worse, without describing the method.

            The fourth describes experiencing contempt or disregard, which is not violence.

            Only the last one fits.

          • The Nybbler says:

            You can fuck someone up or beat the shit out of them, but I’m drawing a blank on how you can violently damn someone.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            drawing a blank on how you can violently damn someone

            Depends on how literally you take it, and whether wishing for someone to be damned actually has any influence.

      • Ttar says:

        Religious cursing is less common in the US over time? My impression is that if anything it’s more common now than it used to be.

        Or phrased differently: holy shit, what the hell is your goddamn source regarding these expressions people call “curses” and “swearing” and “the profane,” for Christ’s sake? Omfg.

  31. Sankt Gallus says:

    I already find myself nostalgic for internet culture 2010-2012. It was a very specific two years.

    • BBA says:

      The old culture war (Christian moralists vs irreverent seculars) had just been conclusively won, the new one (SJW vs Nazis) hadn’t started yet. Online culture was united and nobody could stop us…good times, man, good times.

      • kaakitwitaasota says:

        Yes, I feel a particular fondness for the period from about 2006 to 2015-2016–my teen years and first three years of college (the fourth felt like kind of a pointless coda).

        It’s bizarre to remember how placid the culture wars were–I recall going to a party at a Democratic congressman’s house and mostly making semi-racist jokes with the other Very Blue Tribe smart kids there. In fact, I can date the start of the culture wars to some time in 2013, when I posted a rather innocuous status poking mild fun at otherkin and got chewed out with hyperbole by two of these Very Blue Tribe smart kids.

        • mtl1882 says:

          Yes, things distinctly went off the rails at that point. I remember how before the 2016 presidential stuff even got going, I ended up having to block keywords in Twitter — “breaking news,” “outrage,” etc. It was just way too much. I’d loved Twitter, an then it was all junk. I loved following current events and celebrity news, but they just became mixed into each other, with everything turned up to 11, and lost all their fun. Everything was now a *big deal,* but not even in a compelling way. It happened so fast and it confused me that no one else commented on it.

  32. Machine Interface says:

    So, I rewatched the Addams Family movie, one of my favorite post-80s* comedies.

    [*: in the sense that it was made in 1991 but still has most of the staples of classical 80s comedies]

    It occured to me that the whole concept of the Addams Family works as an absurdist deconstruction of both conservative and liberal conceptions of objective morality.

    Let’s consider the social characteristics of the Addams:

    They’re an aristocratic, insanely rich family living in a manor full of animal trophies, with two house servants. Gomez and Morticia are a traditional white couple that have not only been faithful to each since the first day, not only have a happy and functional marriage, but are even as maddly and demonstratively in love with each other as on the first day. They have two children who dress traditionally (Pugsley wear stripped shirts and black shorts, Wednesday wear stern black dresses). They’re more than a “mere” traditional household, they’re hyper-traditional, with extended family (Gomez’ brother and Morticia’s mother*) living in the manor as well, and they even have a private family graveyard in the park of their manor!

    [*: Grandmama’s kin relationship to the Addams depends on the media; in the original drawings of Charles Addams and in the movies, she’s Morticia’s mother, but in the different series adaptations she’s Gomez’ mother instead.]

    Having stated this, you’d then expect the Addams to be perceived as evil and to stand as the villain in any progressive narrative, while on the contrary conservative narratives might make them the heroes and see them as a representation of good.

    Which is exactly the opposite of how they’re actually portrayed. And to achieve this reversal, a genius paradox is exploited: they are made un-evil for progressives by making them outrageously and absurdly evil, and by associating this cartoonish evilness in the acts with a pleasant, friendly demeanor. This is the horror trope of the aristocrat as an evil sociopath, and indeed the Addams display completely sociopathic behavior: they torture and attempt to kill each other on a daily basis [but they have a cartoon-like resistance to injuries], they pull “prank” on people which generally involve causing horrible accidents, they celebrate death and the macabre.

    But they do all this while being polite to fault and completely earnest, absolutely oblivious that their behavior is considered abnormal. They’re not evil for the sake of enjoying being evil, they are evil because they’re absolutely convinced that their evil is good and proper. And despite their sociopathy, they are extremely hospitable, always welcoming strangers in their house and treating them to what they have best, immediatly accepting new people in the family if an Addams marries an outsider — it helps that their moral values are apparently extremely contagious, and anyone who spends time with them starts to think and behave like them.

    This of course causes a great deal of anguish and havoc in the, one can imagine, conservative suburban white neighborhood where they live. The Addams are conservative, but they’re “doing it wrong”, to the point of ruining it for all the other conservatives.

    And so this is the Addams, from one point of view, they should be evil, but they’re good, but they’re good because they’re evil, and from the other point of view, they should be good, but they’re evil, but they’re evil in spite of being good. They turn the whole notion of good & evil on its head and demonstrate its complete absurdity.

    • onyomi says:

      Interesting points. And I’d add (as I think your point about mainstream, suburban values implies) that their goodness hidden under a facade of evil unmasks the evil “normal” people around them are hiding under a facade of good (like the lawyer in the first film or Fester’s wife in the second).

      Bit of a tangent and haven’t seen the actual film in a while but saw an interesting youtube commentary recently on how Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut similarly aims to “unmask” the evil behind masks of upper class propriety, albeit without the whole comedy trope above, of course.

    • EchoChaos says:

      This is a wonderful analysis of one of my favorite bits of media. Thanks!

    • Eric Rall says:

      I interpret the movies as an attempt to average out the 60s live-action TV series and the original Charles Addams comics, while updating the cultural context to ~1990.

      The affability and hospitality of the Addamses is a direct carry-over from the TV series, which was largely a fish-out-of-water comedy where the standard episode formula was for a random muggle or two to stumble into the Addams family, who then proceed to spend the next 15-20 minutes of screen time bothering the muggles with their friendship. That incarnation of the family was macabre and eccentric in their tastes, decor, and lifestyle, but unqualifiedly kind-hearted. With the notable exception of Uncle Fester, who was sociopathic, but in a petty an ineffectual way that was invariably played for laughs by the narrative.

      The aspects of the whole family behaving in ways that are objectively outrageously and cartoonishly evil come from the comics. For example, the opening credits sequence of the first movie, showing Our Heroes preparing to pour boiling oil on a group of carolers, is adapted directly from the original comics.

      I think you’re right that the apparent contradiction of the combination works really well, in a way that works as a deconstruction of liberal vs conservative values of the time (and one that I think is deliberate, as indicated by the “Family Values” pun in the second movie’s title).

    • Steve Sailer says:

      The sequel, “Addams Family Values,” with its screenplay by Paul Rudnick, is quite funny too.

      • Tarpitz says:

        And written with an awareness that they had a generational talent in Christina Ricci and could give her a ton of screen time. The razing of Camp Chippewa is my favourite sequence in either film.

    • aristides says:

      Another interesting point, despite the in universe conservatives disliking the Addams, all the Conservatives I know that watch the movie love it, myself included. And I like it precisely because it portrays such a tight knit, happy family, even if their actions are technically evil. The sequel was very much designed to make fun of conservative values, but conservatives still loved it, because the Addams family shares so many conservative values. Where they diverge is jarring, but funny, to the point where I would probably enjoy being their neighbors.

      Separate to the main point, but I always considered the Addams family a mixed race family, since Gomez is such a Hispanic name, and Raul Julia’s portrayal of Gomez was superb and he didn’t try to act white.

      • EchoChaos says:

        The conservatives on this board too.

      • onyomi says:

        It’s honestly kind of hard to think of a lot of recent movies depicting families that actually like each other and are functional as family units, even if they seem to be “doing it wrong” somehow from the perspective of everyone else. I guess it’s not hard to see how that would appeal to conservatives?

        Semi-related question: I wonder how conservatives feel about Wes Anderson films? They feel super culturally blue but they also frequently depict large-ish, often wealthy/quasi-aristocratic families that ultimately get along and are happy in the end, even if they are quirky and a bit messed up in various ways.

        I actually don’t much like them except for Grand Budapest Hotel for whatever reason (Fantastic Mr. Fox is not too bad). I find their wealthy, bumbling characters not sympathetic in a way the Addamses are for whatever reason. Maybe by paradoxically being both wealthy aristocrats and ecumenical outcasts the Addamses effectively capture the things we like about wealthy people but not the things we don’t like. I especially didn’t like Royal Tenenbaums and Island of Dogs. Darjeeling Limited was meh. This, however, is amazing.

      • EchoChaos says:

        Separate to the main point, but I always considered the Addams family a mixed race family, since Gomez is such a Hispanic name, and Raul Julia’s portrayal of Gomez was superb and he didn’t try to act white.

        I am curious how one could look at the incomparable Raúl Juliá and think he’s anything but white. A Hispanic white, to be sure, but white.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          This. Lucy and Ricky weren’t considered an interracial marriage in the 1950s, so why would Gomez and Morticia/Gomez’s parents?
          IOW, in the US of the time, being Puerto Rican or Cuban could be considered your ethnicity within the superset “Hispanic” without that ethnicity defining the people group as one race.

          … and I’ll just conclude by referencing Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (adapted from the John Varley story), when Raul Julia’s character’s face is superimposed on a data cube and they crack “I thought he was Puerto Rican. I didn’t know he was Cube-an!”

  33. onyomi says:

    Even before Swedish teenagers started berating us I had recently noticed that offhanded comments about climate apocalypse have gone up in my social circle. It feels a bit like one of those situations where people profess a belief their behavior doesn’t seem to reflect and one autism-spectrum person is like “guys, if you all are serious about this, and I can’t but assume you are, then we should be totally freaking out!” (proceeds to freak out).

    Meanwhile I look around and the weather seems pretty much the same it always has been. Asked my father and he’s like “yep, weather’s kinda like it always has been.” I am not a climate scientist and I don’t deny weird or scary things could be happening in places/ways that I wouldn’t perceive: ice caps melting, sea acidifying, coral reefs dying, etc. I’m just saying not only does that stuff not yet seem to impact my daily life, it’s not even perceptible as “maybe a worsening problem we need to start doing something about before it gets really bad”; it’s not perceptible at all (though it’s easy to attribute e.g. the latest big hurricane or unusually warm/cold winter to it if one is so inclined, but so far as I can tell it’s never been anything obviously different from the sort of variability that’s always been a part of weather).

    So to everybody on the ground, so far as I can tell, things seem basically normal, but according to the current progressive view we are facing an apocalypse of some sort sometime in the next century. Among people I know who are left-wing but also not climate scientists (actually I don’t think I know any actual climate scientists…), it seems common to speak of the climate in a gallows humor sort of way that implies “we are all f-ed” in some vague, apocalyptic way sometime between the next 10 and 100 years, maybe averaging around 50 years in the future (the apocalypse always seems to be just far enough off we don’t need to get really serious about it now but also shouldn’t ignore it). They may also claim it’s causing terrible consequences to poor people in faraway lands right now, but I’ve never heard anyone say it’s impacted them personally–and I talk to a reasonable number of people from the Philippines here, not just first-world inlanders.

    This is a roundabout way of asking whether there is any sort of concrete, falsifiable prediction those sounding alarms about climate are willing to give about how climate change is going to impact the lives of first world people perceptibly (not a prediction about e.g. temperatures of polar ice; I realize, of course, that it’s much easier to make concrete predictions about such measures, but those measures don’t matter if they don’t translate to results that actually affect people) and that would cause them to rethink if say, 10, 20, or however many years pass and Joe Sixpack still can’t tell the difference between this year’s weather and/or sea levels and the weather his grandpa lived through?

    Or is there a mainstream view that says Joe Sixpack won’t notice things going from normal, to bad, to worse, to terrible, to apocalypse, but that, from his perspective, it will just be normal, normal, normal, apocalypse?

    • Machine Interface says:

      Living in France, the impact is already felt: we’ve just had two heat waves a few week appart (including the hotest one ever recorded in France), followed by a lesser episode of heat a bit later, which together may have caused an additional 1500 deaths in spite of the many warnings and precautions that were taken. 90% of the country is affected by a deficit of water in the soil that has been growing since a few years, with some areas now being in the verge of drought and facing severe water restrictions. In one place where the aquifer is particularly affected, the water level of the local river suddenly went down by 60 cm in a few hours. The vigilance warnings for forest fire are starting earlier than before, with this year one region which was already on the watch for fire at the end of the winter season. There are massive loss of crops, and many farmers have been constrained to use their winter reserve fodder to feed their livestock in emergency as all the grass in their area had died out.

      I don’t subscribe to the climate apocalypse ethos, and right now my personal life is not different, but I seriously wonder if I’ll have to personally face water or food shortage/restrictions in a near future.

      • onyomi says:

        How can Joe Sixpack tell the difference between weird weather caused by emissions and weird weather because weather is sometimes weird? (of course, maybe Joe Sixpack is not very good at perceiving big-scale cause and effect and he could look up temperature averages over the centuries, etc.) And even if one is willing to look at longer historical data one can probably find e.g. periods of intense drought in France pre-dating the industrial revolution…

        I guess to balance the question I posed to the climate alarmists, one could ask Joe Sixpack “just how weird would the weather have to get before you admit that this isn’t just part of weather’s normal variability”? My personal answer would be something like “the weather would need to be clearly different in a secular way at a scale of around 5 years in a place the ‘normal’ weather of which I’m quite familiar with, like my hometown.” So, like, not one really bad hurricane season, but 4 in a row. Not one unusually warm winter, but 4 in a row or 4 really bad hurricane seasons out of the last 6 when usually such a bad season only comes along once a decade or two. Thus far this has never happened to me personally.

        • DeWitt says:

          How can Joe Sixpack tell the difference between weird weather caused by emissions and weird weather because weather is sometimes weird?

          I don’t know what the American equivalent here would be, but it’s easy enough to tell where I live, too.

          Here in the Netherlands, we used to have a very large ice skating contest over in one of our northern provinces. It was a very large thing, once, with very many participants, ranging from schoolteachers and bus drivers who took the weekend off to professional athletes gaining fame.

          But the word here is was, because we’ve not had such a contest since 1997. The weather is simply too warm, the ice doesn’t go thick enough any more, it’s not possible to do this any longer.

          Again, I don’t know of any American equivalents, but in here there’s a very easily pointed-out example of something that’s no longer possible because of the climate.

          • ec429 says:

            I don’t know about the Netherlands case, but I’d be wary of stories like that given that I’ve seen people use a similar story about how frost fairs used to be held on the Thames. Except the reason it stopped freezing over was because a certain bridge was removed, allowing it to flow faster. (Or something like that; I don’t know the details, all I know is that it’s been debunked-and-well-refuted, so take that as you will.)

            (Also, it only ever froze in abnormal climatic minima like the Little Ice Age. Not all climate change is anthropogenic; we are in an interglacial after all.)

          • DeWitt says:

            We mess with our waterways to a point that I can’t be sure whether or not the lack of frost is manmade in that sense, but the contest I spoke of is a very 20th century thing and therefor not a product of the little ice age.

          • onyomi says:

            Such stories may exist but I can’t think of any US equivalent I’ve ever heard of (we used to be able to do x in recent memory, but not anymore because of climate change).

          • DeWitt says:

            The US is a lot bigger than the Netherlands is, so I suppose that makes sense. It’s the example I think of when people claim just not to notice anything though.

          • fraza077 says:

            Similarly, further South, the snow line has been rising. There are many ski resorts in the Alps (or more the pre-alps) that have shut up shop, not because they’re small and the big ones are stealing their business, but because they don’t get enough snow anymore. It’s not a lack of precipitation either, it just rains a lot.

            Ask any old person in Germany living below 600m how much snow they would get in the winters 25 years ago compared to today, they all tell me that it has significantly reduced.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            @onyomi- I know a lot of people in a part of the Northeast where there used to reliably be snow on the ground by Thanksgiving, and there now isn’t always snow on the ground at Christmas. Many ski areas in that region have had to install snow-making equipment or close.

          • DarkTigger says:

            In my hometown a local farmer used to flood one of his pastures every year so it freez over and could be used as a ice skating area. This has been a tradition since the winter of 1965/66 since the water is very shallow it used to be frozen over before all the other lakes. For 10 years there haven’t been enough frost anymore to skate on it.

        • Machine Interface says:

          @onyomi

          Well a lot of French farmers seem to be singing on the tune of “we’ve never seen anything like this before, not several years in a row, we’re starting to be severely affected, we need to adapt and change the crops we use, or we’ll go under soon”.

          At least that’s what you hear from farmers who speak to the media. I cannot say if the media cherry pick or if this is representative of how French farmers feel as a whole.

          • b_jonas says:

            Farmers are always singing that way because that sob story gets the government to pay for all their losses due to variable weather without them having to buy insurance. I don’t think that proves anything about global warming.

      • JPNunez says:

        Spain looks even worse from afar. Every winter here I look at the spanish news and their summer seems insane, regularly getting to 40C.

        But that’s just from looking from afar; my personal experience is downthread.

    • salvorhardin says:

      Having lived in SF for about 15 years, the weather certainly seems to have gotten warmer in the last five. It used to be that you really never ever needed air conditioning, especially in the western part of the city– the summers just never got that hot. Now it is much more common (though still about an every-other-summer thing, not an every-summer thing) to get multiple heat waves where even right by the ocean the temperature breaks 90.

      FWIW I think the probability of apocalyptic events (e.g. sea level rise large and sudden enough to destroy significant, valuable portions of coastal cities like SF) is low, but uncertainty about feedback effects bounds it far enough away from zero to be worrisome, and the chance that it is a net negative costly enough to be worth putting a price on carbon to mitigate is much higher– and note that it does not have to be anywhere near an apocalypse to satisfy that criterion.

      • onyomi says:

        I wonder in the US if there isn’t also a coastal elites vs. inland proles thing going on here as well, since, by all accounts, coastal areas are going to be affected first and most of US Red Tribe doesn’t live on the coast?

        • Ttar says:

          Speaking from flyover country, I can confirm most people living here are not constantly fretting about Manhattan property values, coral reefs, fishery depletion, or even droughts and heat waves.

          Flooding, maybe, but it’s really hard to link floods and droughts and heat waves and blizzards simultaneously to the same cause, in people’s minds, because those events feel so different (and also random and transient). Plus they really don’t like tying the blame to the oil and gas companies that paid for the roads via gross production taxes and supply tons of jobs plus the magical juice that lets you drive everywhere.

          Plus our winters are getting milder faster than our summers are getting hotter. On balance it’s actually kind of nice.

          To convince the Joe Six-packs here, you’d need things to not only get worse, but like, drastically and insanely worse, so much worse that people would be fine seeing friends lose their jobs and their way of life uprooted. I think the elite view doesn’t really factor red tribe areas into their calculus — it’s very much focused on the coasts and the third world in terms of real impacts. Only a fringe expect Venusian hothouse apocalypse within the next few centuries and after that at current rates of technological progress we’ll probably all be disembodied consciousnesses living in a Dyson sphere, whether we want to be or not.

      • Plumber says:

        @salvorhardin,
        I’m 51 years old work in San Francisco, and was born in and have lived most of my life across the bridge in Oakland, and yes it is definitely hotter now!

        I can remember making a snowman in ’76, now days below freezing in a year are rarer, and the hottest day ever recorded in San Francisco was in 2017.

        I’m feeling cheated with our high cost of housing if we’re going to have temperatures like Bakersfield and Fresno!

        Too damn hot too long too often!

        • Doctor Mist says:

          I can remember making a snowman in ’76

          No doubt, but I was in my twenties here in 1976. I remember that snowfall, and it was a weird-ass event even then. In Palo Alto it barely dusted the ground though I can imagine scraping together enough for a snowman. (I guess it might have been a little deeper in Oakland.) Orange trees were bearing fruit. People were talking about it for days, though I’m pretty sure the snow was gone by midafternoon.

        • I’m 51 years old work in San Francisco, and was born in and have lived most of my life across the bridge in Oakland, and yes it is definitely hotter now!

          You might want to look at the webbed data on SF weather. Comparing the same day on different years gives you at least a rough feel for how change there has been, although obviously there is a lot of noise in that signal.

    • Juanita del Valle says:

      Typical projections, including from the IPCC, are that on a reasonable-ish path of expected emissions, climate change will result in global GDP being a few percentage points lower in 2100 than it would be otherwise (yet still much, much higher than it is today). Insofar as GDP correlates with quality of life for Joe Sixpack, then no, he’s not likely to notice that the level of GDP we would have had in 2100 only turns out to be achieved in 2103.

      • broblawsky says:

        That assumes that:
        a) That growth continues at ~2% per year globally;
        b) That those “de-growth” events don’t take the form of a spike in dangerous weather events, disease, famine, and drought;
        c) That (b) doesn’t lead to a war.

        • Juanita del Valle says:

          Yes, one can claim the IPCC is, for whatever reason, understating the risk of tipping points etc. However onyomi was asking after mainstream views, and most people would accept treating the IPCC as mainstream or, if anything, tending towards a pessimistic view.

          If there is some additional factor X, independent of climate change, that could cause a substantial long-term slowing in world growth below ~2% a year, then factor X is far more of a threat to civilisation and Joe Sixpack’s daily routine than planetary warming.

    • Anatid says:

      I will piggy back on this to ask a couple questions

      1. Can anyone point me to some detailed calculations of the social cost of carbon? I would like to read (ideally several independent) papers that are like, “we estimate costs of $x/(ton of CO2) from coastal flooding, $y/ton from heat waves killing people, $-z/ton from Canada getting more pleasant”, etc. Also do people estimate the “social cost of temperature”, i.e. $/(degree Celsius)? That would be free of the climate modeling uncertainties in translating tons of CO2 to degrees Celsius.

      2. If the world decided it wanted to do carbon sequestration, is there actually an effective way we could do that today? Like, do we actually have any feasible way to, for enough money, permanently remove all the excess carbon in the atmosphere that has accumulated from the industrial revolution to now?

      • ec429 says:

        I think David Friedman’s blog has gone into the subject a few times, though I can’t find an example right now (there seems to be a distinct lack of usable search features). His conclusion, as far as I can remember it, was that we couldn’t reliably determine the sign.

      • Can anyone point me to some detailed calculations of the social cost of carbon?

        No. Not if you mean reliable ones.

        Estimates of climate sensitivity, how much warming you get for a given increase in CO2, vary over about a factor of 2. The marginal cost of warming is sensitive to how much warming you have—some estimates suggest that the first degree or two have a positive or very small negative effect—and that depends both on climate sensitivity and on how much CO2 is emitted over the next century or so, which depends on predictions of the cost of future technologies that nobody is in a position to make.

        William Nordhaus has been one of the main people trying to make estimates. A large fraction of his estimate for the cost of warming, I think more than half, consists of adding up expected values based on guesstimates of very low probability high cost negative consequences. I doubt Nordhaus would seriously claim that those estimates, of either probability or cost, are reliable to within a factor of several.

    • Ketil says:

      I think the temperature difference is starting to be noticeable also locally. Falsifiable predictions should be possible, at least stochastically (the number of very hot/cold days will increase/decrease, glaciers will shrink, bodies of water will freeze over less often).

      Of course, less skating is hardly a great concern, and further effects are very dubious. I looked at Wikipedia’s list of climate-related records, and IIRC there is a clear increase in temperature records, but no noticeable trend in other events like floods or storms. IPCC predictions are also vague or uncertain.

      Clearly, a temperature increase (and changing patterns in wind and precipitation) will have effects, and the probability is 100% that some places will be worse off, just like other places will be better off. On average, it is hard to say, if anything, a warmer and wetter climate with more CO2 should generally increase primary production. But of course, t.he randomness of events makes it easy to cherry pick, and we get news like the three hottest September Wednesdays in a row in Littetown, XY, and to ascribe any storm, flood, drought, or heatwave to climate change. And the long or uncertain time frame makes doomsday scenarios harder to dismiss (massive sea rise, climate refugees, runaway methane emissions from the tundra).

      Not to say that clmate change isn’t serious, but the amount of attention it gets is surprising. Like you say, it is a hypothetical, vague apocalypse some unspecified number of decades away. Why are nobody concerned with actual and immediate existential threats, like asteroid strike, the AI singularity, or nuclear war? Climate seems to be much higher on the agenda than even poverty, a very real problem causing enormous suffering.

      While climate activists are very eager to “listen to the experts” (the IPCC) when they agree, they usually don’t seem to realize that they don’t actually predict things like increased storms. And the certainly don’t listen to the experts when it comes to the economics, like Bjørn Lomborg in the podcast below:
      https://www.econtalk.org/bjorn-lomborg-on-the-costs-and-benefits-of-attacking-climate-change/

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Problem is that weather is perfect for confirmation bias. It’s chaotic by nature (non-linear systems were literally discovered when people started playing seriously with computer simulated weather patterns), so it’s a guarantee that _somewhere_ will be warmer. It some places it will even be systematically warmer, or much warmer, or any combination you can think of. So people in those places will say “It’s Global Warming!” and people in places with worse winters will just say it’s a bad winter, because they have no competing explanation to attach to.

      As for effects… there are basically two possibilities. By far the most likely, supported by a supermajority of prediction models, is the kind of warming that can be mitigated by money. How much money it honestly doesn’t even matter – our economic growth is high enough that’s almost certain to outpace the costs. Worst case scenario would be Netherlands everywhere – dams along all coast lines and so on. We can’t afford it right now, but given 50 years of continuous growth…

      The other possibility is we end up Venus. There are occasional articles mentioning it, but AFAIK it’s not a likely outcome. First because it’s not supported by models, and second from a common sense PoV – it never happened before, and there have been quite a few cataclysmic events in remote history, from volcanoes to meteors. Personally, I weight this a lot more than the previous scenario because well, existential risk is existential risk, even if chances are low. Problem is that among all this panic it’s pretty hard to decide if we’re talking about 1% or 0.00001%, and more importantly how early we have to act to prevent it. But given the current climate (pun intended) I tend to go with “if it were remotely likely, we’d hear about it a lot more – and I mean 5 times a day every day”.

      • onyomi says:

        Problem is that weather is perfect for confirmation bias.

        Yes, definitely agree here.

        • DarkTigger says:

          But conformation bias works both ways. Cue inevitable xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1321/

        • onyomi says:

          Yes, I also agree here. See my follow-up re. how obvious and persistent weather or sea level-related phenomena would have to get before Joe Sixpack climate denier admits it’s more than just the usual variability expected of weather.

          • DarkTigger says:

            Okay, I already mentioned that the winter’s here have been warmer then any time in living memory.
            And the weather is wierder. Frost out of season, summer heat out of season, two years ago was one of the wetest years since the start of weather reporting, it rained almost every day between mid June and early Febuary. Grains literally rotted on the fields.
            Last year was so dry and hot the farmers harvested the grain a month early because they feared it would wither in the husks.
            This year was unusualy dry again.
            This had already an impact on the prices of bread and potatoes twice. A 150 years ago (or in some other part of the world) we would probably have an tangible revolution at hand.

            I mean I would be really happy if that was just a fluke and things get averaged out agian. But if people who study that stuff told me “We will get more extreme events” fiveteen years ago, and then we get an series of extreme events, I say they might be right.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            @DarkTiger

            Grains literally rotted on the fields.
            Last year was so dry and hot the farmers harvested the grain a month early because they feared it would wither in the husks.

            That’s unfortunately normal. Agriculture gives pretty good output overall, but it always had disaster years. They’re even in the bible. Drought, locusts, flood and so on.

            Unfortunately we can’t rely on personal experience to validate (or invalidate) climate change. It’s just too chaotic.

          • DarkTigger says:

            @Radu Floricica
            My point wasn’t that shit years happened. Yeah, those also happened in the past.

            My point was that several noticalbe events happned in a row. Some of them harsh enough to have an economic impact.

            The weather today is probably not climate change. The weather this weak also not. But several “off season” events in a row are a sign that something is happening.

      • John Schilling says:

        The other possibility is we end up Venus. There are occasional articles mentioning it, but AFAIK it’s not a likely outcome.

        It’s not even a physically possible outcome, unless the human race embarks on a deliberate Venusiforming effort as herculean as the various proposed Martian Terraforming efforts. Absent such intervention, “Greenhouse Effect -> Global Warming -> Venus!” really only works if you get your global warming boiled up to the ocean-boiling level before your oceans lock up most of your carbon as carbonate rock. Venus did that, but it’s too late for Earth to follow suit.

    • DinoNerd says:

      I see four things:
      – Media I encounter in the US have gone from barely mentioning climate change to blaming every unusual bit of bad weather on it, in a period of less than 5 years.
      – I’m personally encountering more smoke (bad fire seasons) and to a lesser extent miserably hot days than when I moved to this area 20 years ago, or at least think I am (I don’t keep a weather diary, or other records).
      – Local famers can’t reliably grow all the same things they used to grow.
      – Even perfect data about a single area isn’t much use for evaluating global climate change, let alone predicting the future.

      As for actually evaluating the risks – well, that would be a lot easier if everyone involved would first of all stop lying, and second of all stop picking what they say based on how effective they expect it will be at convincing the opposition and/or energizing their base. I.e. more actual science, and a lot less politics.

      This is a roundabout way of asking whether there is any sort of concrete, falsifiable prediction those sounding alarms about climate are willing to give about how climate change is going to impact the lives of first world people perceptibly (not a prediction about e.g. temperatures of polar ice; I realize, of course, that it’s much easier to make concrete predictions about such measures, but those measures don’t matter if they don’t translate to results that actually affect people) and that would cause them to rethink if say, 10, 20, or however many years pass and Joe Sixpack still can’t tell the difference between this year’s weather and/or sea levels and the weather his grandpa lived through?

      I think it may depend where Joe Sixpack lives. The closer he is to the poles, and the closer he is to the oceans, the more likely he is to experience noticeable changes, and experience them sooner. But I can neither find nor make falsifiable predictions about changes in any particular location, in part because of the problem of lies and polemic – digging the actual science out of that is really hard – and in part because I am not personally a climate scientist, and in part because I expect there’s still a fair amount of “we don’t know” about specifics.

      My guess is that if the media says “global climate change” every time there’s an unseasonable storm, Joe Sixpack will “perceive” the climate to have worsened, just as he also perceives it having become unsafe for children to walk home from school (kidnappers lying in wait everywhere) etc. etc. etc. If *some* media beats this drum, and others do not, we’ll get “tribes” with different common sense truths. And when I feel really cynical, I figure that’s probably true whether or not half his town winds up underwater, and there are 3 weeks of each year when it’s unsafe to go outdoors while the sun is up. 🙁 (After all, there are plenty of alternate explanations for his local changes.)

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:

      My take on it is that we should have nuclearized our entire energy supply in the seventies, and since we were collectively irresponsible idiots who did not do that, we should do so now.

      This: Will definitely work. Will certainly halt carbon emissions, and will also, which is the really important bit, stop a hell of a lot of non-carbon pollution from our industrial society.

      Coal is murder. There is no justification for a coal plant, ever, given that any alternatives whatsoever exists.

      Natural gas is insane, because it is based on fracking, and the fracking companies refuse to disclose what they are pumping into the aquifers of the world. Which. What. No. Just. No. Fuck off. Die, in a fire. Every country that permits you to operate on those terms is in need of a brisk round of replacing their regulators with people not totally captured.

      • Noah says:

        Not saying you’re wrong, but more nuclear power does have more tail risk. Not even talking about Chernobyl here, but things like terrorists getting their hands on some nuclear waste.

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          Terrorists all copy-cat each other. If we got a period of time where they all decided to suicide attacking some of the most secure installations ever built, I think that would count as a definite win.

          Seriously. Nuclear waste is either: In a pool. Too hot to move. Also guarded by incredibly lethal security.
          Or: In a waste cask. Still guarded by incredibly lethal security. The cask is, by design, movable, but.. its not something you can sneak off with, and it is so indestructible the authorities will feel perfectly comfortable blowing up your truck with rpgs.

        • John Schilling says:

          …but things like terrorists getting their hands on some nuclear waste.

          Which would cause about as much material damage, death and destruction, as their getting their hands on an equivalent quantity of gasoline (or equivalent “green” biofuel) and fashioning it into incendiary devices.

          It is possible to fashion radiological weapons of truly mass destruction, but that requires the professional processing of select radioisotopes. An improvised “dirty bomb” using bulk reactor waste, is not going to be significantly more harmful than an ordinary explosive or incendiary weapon of similar scale. Except that it will cause finite Geiger-counter clicks over a broad area, and so if used against a population indoctrinated with severe nucleophobia will cause extra casualties from panic and long-term denial of use of valuable property even after effective decontamination.

          If that happens, I’m putting 10% of the blame on the terrorists and 90% on the propagandists of nucleophobia. And insofar as it is mostly the propagandists of nucleophobia who are desperately commanding that we “fix” global warming, sorry but not until you clean up your last memetic mess.

      • Infrared Wayne says:

        I agree with you 100% on nuclear, but your comments on fracking seem pretty… uncharitable. My understanding is that fracking, done properly, is extremely unlikely to contaminate groundwater. Wouldn’t a better approach be to have strong regulation to ensure it is done responsibly? Maybe prohibit it in higher-risk applications like shallow formations near aquifers. NG is an important part of the energy mix now and probably will be for a while.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          Maybe prohibit it in higher-risk applications like shallow formations near aquifers.

          Last I checked, this is nowhere near where fracking operates. Aquifers are typically around 10-100 meters below ground; fracking starts at 1500 meters and goes downward from there.

          Meaning a ban on fracking at aquifer levels is basically just a ban on, I dunno, recreational frackers I guess. No one serious is putting anything into aquifers from fracking.

    • Brassfjord says:

      This allows me to not feel bad for those in US suffering from extreme weather. I will be glad for every news about devastating hurricanes or wild fires, if it will make more “Joe Sixpacks” (including the one in the White House) to realize that the climate is changing.

      • onyomi says:

        I am noticing a distinct trend where seemingly Europeans (and one commenter I think from NE US?) are much more likely to state they have directly experienced daily life effects they attribute to climate change (or simply more Europeans have commented on this thread in general perhaps due to time zones or something).

        I could see this being about people closer to the poles experiencing climate change more, sooner, as was suggested by one commenter, though I could also see it as Europeans being more primed to interpret extreme weather events through this lens possibly due to a difference in the media they receive (maybe more reporting on climate change).

        (And again, I understand it cuts both ways; it could be that people in more liberal/progressive areas are rightly noticing causality between emissions and changes in weather sooner because they’ve correctly learned this is happening.)

        My hometown is coastal, but in the southern US (also I don’t live there right now); I have not personally experienced any weather events I can clearly attribute to climate change nor heard reports of such from family in the area, but that may also be a function of the interpretive lens of myself and my family and/or where I’ve happened to live.

        • Enkidum says:

          I have not personally experienced any weather events I can clearly attribute to climate change nor heard reports of such from family in the area

          This is literally impossible. Given a system with (a) a high degree of variability, and (b) a long-term trend, it’s meaningless to say that any local spike is or isn’t due to the long-term trend. That’s why it’s, you know, long term.

        • JPNunez says:

          Chilean here; the capital has always been very hot in summer, although in the last couple of decades the winter is getting less cold too. I can normally go to work in a t-shirt in the middle of winter quite a few times, where it was very rare more than a couple of random days as a kid.

          We are also having more and more droughts, but their impact may be partially mismanagement (we’ve been experiencing less rain overall since the 90s, although 2014 was a high point in rains. We could have better managed what water we had, though).

          Wife and I have been thinking of buying property in the southern cities for retirement (still quite away) cause the water shortage may not be really felt there, and life / property is cheaper there. Of course this may change for any combination of factors, but I think rain should keep plentiful there (I’ve looked at a couple of prediction maps).

          All that said, rain problems may be due to water flows in the pacific ocean, although those themselves may be changing due to global warming. Best case it’s the ocean being funky and global warming is only affecting overall temperatures a little.

    • Enkidum says:

      The temperature has changed in very noticeable ways, pretty much everywhere I’m aware of, over the course of 50-100 years. You don’t notice that. For example in Hertfordshire, England it used to be quite normal for kids to go sledding in the 1950’s, when my mother was a kid. There is essentially never snow any more. Glaciers disappearing in the Alps, the largest forest fires ever seen in North America every year, all of the hottest years in row occurring in the past 20 years, etc etc etc.

      People are just not very good at noticing these things over the course of their own life, never mind a couple of generations.

      Of course you might argue that this is not “worse” in any way, yet. Things like the extreme heat in Sweden requiring killing a vast quantity of cows would appear to be an example of “worse”, in that it points directly to weaknesses in the food production chain. Sweden is a rich country, and it can import food when it needs to. But have similar events several years in a row in multiple countries, and you’re talking about something very different. Though as with any specific weather event, it’s impossible to tie directly to long term global trends.

      • Lambert says:

        There’s still plenty of snow in Herts.
        You get a handful of days when sledging is possible every couple of years.
        I almost broke a rib that way up on the common, back in the day. There was a really good footpath to sledge down, but it had a row of wooden bollards at the bottom to stop cars from trying to drive up.

        • Enkidum says:

          OK, but it’s my understanding that there used to regularly be several inches, every year.

          Pretty sure my mother had similar stories, and my son did something very similar to that in Ontario two years ago. But it was our cottage, and a tree.

    • S_J says:

      In my part of North America, the water levels of the Great Lakes are, this year, higher than any time in the past 20 or so years.

      Not at people losing beach homes levels, but definitely at half the beach is now under the lake levels. At one place I visited at the beginning of Summer, the locals were complaining that the beach was almost gone, due to the way the local river interacted with the beach and the high lake levels.

      This might be evidence of some impact of climate change. Except that for most of the 1990s and early-00s, the water levels of the Great Lakes were low. Low to the point of twice-a-year news stories about the Lakes being lower than the historical average, or being below the 20th-C average.

      News headlines during those years blamed the low water levels on climate change.

      Now, climate-activist friends on FB are blaming the high water levels on climate change. I haven’t checked whether the news people are blaming high water levels on climate change. (For all I know, current water levels night be a return to historical average, rather than an exceptional high point.)

      If Joe Six-pack is old enough, he’ll notice that there are ways to blame both low water levels and high water levels of the Great Lakes on climate change.

      • Garrett says:

        I grew up on the Great Lakes. I seem to remember something like a decade-worth of news related to how Lake Superior was down tens of feet because of climate change.
        Now it’s back up to where “it’s supposed to be” and it’s due to climate change.

        Of course, it could have something to do with Great Lakes lock & dam water management to keep Lake Ontario and Lake Erie at a preferred height for recreation at the expense of residents in the rural area. Or not. But that was the story I heard at the time.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        I figure it’s like when you suspect something’s gone wrong with your car, and you start noticing and worrying about every funny little noise that it’s actually been making all along.

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      if IPPCC is projecting something like 2-4 degrees celcius over the next 100 years then I’m trying to figure out how much of the temperature gradient in the last 5-10 years could be attributed to that general trend.

      Or does that average mask the fact that some areas are going to get very hot very fast and others offset slightly by more cooling?

      • People here have been talking about observable changes over their lifetime. Assume that’s fifty years or so. According to the NASA global temperature page, the increase in average global temperature from 1968 to 2018 is about .9° C.

    • AG says:

      Various Joe Sixpack fishermen and farmers have seen how temperature changes have decreased their harvest (and lack the margin to move north, so being unable to take advantage of the new ideal zones). There are a lot of articles out there about the keen effects on the wine industry that can be easily searched.

      Can we also say that the devastation in Houston, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas are or aren’t black swan events? Or is their increased modernization why these recent hits have been particularly bad?

      • JayT says:

        Have hurricanes been historically bad? I know we had a hurricane drought for many years after Katrina, and the 1930s have five of the 20 most deadly hurricanes.

        Obviously, there’s a lot of ways you could look at how bad hurricanes are, for example the 1930s had lower populations, but worse infrastructure, so it’s hard to compare to today. I’m not saying that they aren’t worse, but to me, it hasn’t seemed like they have changed much from when I was a kid.

        • mitv150 says:

          Short answer: There are various theorized mechanisms in which climate change may effect hurricane strength or frequency. The statistical evidence of hurricane activity does not, as of yet, confirm an increase in strength or frequency.

          I don’t have support to hand, but can likely dig it up.

        • Nornagest says:

          There’s a clear upward trend for the number of named storms, but that’s complicated by the fact that the dataset stretches back a century and a half or so and storms were more likely to be missed before there was good monitoring and communication in place. There is no apparent trend for landfalling hurricanes in the US (don’t endorse the source, it’s just the first graph I found on Google — NOAA doesn’t have one for some reason, but the data series is here and seems to correspond), and that dataset’s likely to be more reliable prior to the mid-20th century — but also noisier.

        • AG says:

          It might be that globalised media also only makes Puerto Rico and the Bahamas seem worse off than previous hurricanes, in that we’re hearing about the damage in depth for the first time. But it at least seems like it’s never been this bad within the current population’s lifetime. And, well, evidently Houston has never been hit like this before. And all three, within just a few years?

    • FLWAB says:

      I’m coming a little late but I live in Alaska and even though I’m a Lukewarmer myself, the weather certainly seems to have changed.

      This summer Anchorage recorded the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city: a scorching 90F (32C). It was miserable. We had more than a week of 80+ temps, and nobody has air conditioning in their house up here. We also had a very dry summer, I think the driest August on record. Forest fires are typical up here, but this year we had a lot of really bad ones. The city was covered in smoke for weeks on end.

      I only moved up here six years ago, but locals have told me that they haven’t had a really snowy winter since before I showed up. There’s plenty of snow, mind, but apparently less than normal. And the last couple winters we had periods where it got above freezing for a few days at a stretch! Ice actually melted in the middle of winter in Anchorage: that isn’t typical at all. The last few years we had some close calls on whether there would be enough snow on the ground for the start of the Iditarod (happens in February). Back in 2016 they actually shipped in snow from Fairbanks, though a couple days before the race start it started snowing so we ended up not needing it.

      It’s not all bad news though: this summer has been great from growing produce! We have a very short growing season up here, but the extra heat has stretched it out significantly.

      Does any of this have to do with capital-C Climate Change? I don’t know. But up here in the Last Frontier it’s getting easier to believe.

      • The expected pattern, due to the interaction between CO2 and water vapor, is more warming in cold times and places, so it wouldn’t be surprising if warming in Alaska was substantially above the global average.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      Here in Minnesota we have definitely had warmer winters for the last several decades, and especially the last decade. It is true that part of the reason I notice is that the ’70’s, when I moved to Minnesota, were abnormally cold. And the ’80’s pretty cold too. I got used to the idea that the coldest day was usually around -30 F, and we haven’t had such a cold day since the ’80’s. Even below -20F doesn’t usually happen anymore in most winters, whereas I remember when I first moved here, there were 10-20 days that cold.

      Offsetting my thought that I am contrasting today’s weather with the abnormally cold weather when I first moved here is that most of the winters for the last 10 years or so have been record warm, and that is a comparison for the last 150 years or so, so the trend is more than just my lifetime.

      I think most Joe sixpacks have noticed that our winters have been warmer.

      But it is also true that summers have not been warmer; pretty much no change on that front. As far as I am concerned Global Warming has been all to the good so far.

    • I live in a relatively cold area so the only specific complaint I’ve heard about it concerned a recent Unusual Weather Event that recent transplants thought was a Big Effing Deal and claimed without evidence was caused by climate change; natives thought it was a nothingburger.

    • Viliam says:

      This is a roundabout way of asking whether there is any sort of concrete, falsifiable prediction those sounding alarms about climate are willing to give about how climate change is going to impact the lives of first world people perceptibly

      Here is a thing that makes it complicated:

      Local weather (which is what Joe Sixpack actually perceives) depends among other things on the direction of wind, and near the coast also on the direction of water currents. Wind or water coming from north make the weather colder than it would otherwise be, wind or water coming from south make it warmer than it would otherwise be (on the northern hemisphere; it’s the opposite on the southern one).

      A change in climate may change the directions of wind and water. So the global warming should have two kinds of effects: (1) the global increase in temperature, which alone would be felt everywhere as a small increase, but also (2) changes in directions of wind and water, which will not change the average global temperature, but will change the local weather randomly. And the second effect can be locally greater than the first one, even if on global scale the second type of effect will cancel out and the first one will prevail.

      So you can have places where the global increase in sea level will change some water current from flowing northwards to flowing southwards, and the people living near that coast will perceive gradual decrease in temperature. And of course, I expect that data from these places will be loudly shared across the internet in all debates about global warming.

      Yeah, I see how to an unbeliever this may seem as a convenient excuse, but this is how it is.

      Depending on how good we are at modeling wind and water flow, it might be possible to give specific falsifiable predictions for individual places. But it is not possible to give a uniform global prediction. Most places will get warmer, some will get colder, some will remain as they are now. (The average place will get warmer, but Joe Sixpack does not perceive the global average.)

      (In a very long run, like if the global average temperature increases by 10 degrees or more, we can probably safely predict that almost all places will be warmer. But this is the outcome we are trying to prevent, because it will already mean mass starving, migrations and wars.)

  34. Well... says:

    I don’t think it’s too controversial to say New York does not give visitors a good indication of what America is like more typically. You might even say it isn’t a particularly American city. In that same sense, I don’t think London is particularly British either, at least not the city center. I’m not sure about Paris because I haven’t been there as an adult, but my bet would be it is far less French than one would expect.

    This has me wondering, what country’s major cities (meaning, the cities most people have probably heard of if they can name only one or two cities within that country) are fairly representative of their country? Is Mumbai very Indian? Is Jakarta very Indonesian? Is Berlin very German? Is Capetown very South African? Etc.

    (Alternatively, this whole notion could be wrong, and there is no such thing as a city that is like the country it’s in. But intuitively I sense that there is. Like to me, Grand Rapids or Buffalo or even Scottsdale are pretty darn American cities. But maybe a really large city with millions of people in it simply can’t be that way.)

    • blipnickels says:

      Well, Singapore and Hong Kong come to mind.

      New Delhi is a pretty decent representative of India. It’s definitely not a generic metropolis like Beijing or London.

      I imagine every Springfield is very American.

      • onyomi says:

        Hong Kong is definitely not a representative Chinese city and nor is Shanghai for that matter (just came back to HK from Beijing and the experience, in all ways, is decidedly that of leaving one country and going to another). Beijing kind of is, but for the heavy hand of official business, which is reminiscent of DC but more so. I’ve never been to Chongqing, which has a massive population, but I kind of guess it would be more “Chinese” just in that it’s probably got a lot fewer foreigners compared to Shanghai and certainly Hong Kong.

    • brad says:

      On the contrary, New York is what makes the United States the United States and what you are thinking of could be any anywhere with just minor, irrelevant differences in language or food or other surface trappings.

    • Urstoff says:

      This has me wondering whether large cities tend to be more or less representative than middle-sized cities. Large cities are obviously more international, and more culture-rich (in the value-neutral sense of the term), but are mid-sized cities more reflective of their own regional culture than others? Are Houston and Chicago culturally more different than, say, Lubbock and Rockford?

      Maybe a compromise is a large, but not huge, city like Cincinnati.

      • Urstoff says:

        Or, to add a bit of schmaltz, the most American cities are the most international, like Houston or NYC, since, despite the endemic xenophobia that has always been a part of the US (those damn Italians, etc.), America is one of the more international countries and has a story it tells itself that anyone can come here and prosper if they have the gumption.

    • Evelyn Q. Greene says:

      You might even say [New York] isn’t a particularly American city

      What? New York is a extremely American city. You’re right that it’s unusual and unrepresentative, because it’s our only real dense metropolis, but it feels distinctly American instead of a generic global city.

      In my experience, London and berlin are generic European cities, closer to each other than the surrounding areas, and Paris is French but maybe less than you’d expect, but Capetown is very South African. I feel like Cairo is pretty Egyptian, or at least unique instead of genericized.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Obviously Chicago. All 4 seasons, a huge mix of lifestyles and status, a fairly diverse population, some world-class universities.

      • 538 did a post on the most demographically representative cities of the US and Chicago does make the top 10. In order:

        1 New Haven-Milford, CT
        2 Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL
        3 Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT
        4 Oklahoma City, OK
        5 Springfield, MA
        6 Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI
        7 Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI
        8 Wichita, KS
        9 Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD
        10 Kansas City, MO-KS

        Still, I’m not sure. I’ve never been to Chicago but my impression is that it’s much higher in crime and corruption than average. Kansas City to me seems like a city that is basically representative of “typical America.”

        • Protagoras says:

          Kansas City has a considerably higher reported crime rate than Chicago; it is in fact near the top among U.S. cities, while Chicago is kind of middling. Of course, reported crime is not an especially reliable statistic, but I think in this particular case it is more likely that your perceptions of the two cities are off than that reporting errors are at fault. Looking only at murder, where the numbers tend to be more reliable, Chicago is high, but Kansas City is higher.

          • You’re right. I had no idea that Kansas City was so dangerous. I think the reason it came to my mind is that it has very few iconic attributes that make it stand out as being anything other than a generic American city. Although maybe being too generic hurts how representative it is.

        • A Definite Beta Guy says:

          Kansas City is actually a really good choice. It’s pretty plain and pretty sprawling. Out of that list, I’d say it’s pretty close to what a “typical” American might live like, perhaps just a shade too plain.

          America is driving around in your car on an arterial road or highway to get to Wal-Mart, with most of your life largely in recognizable regional or national chain stores. On your weekends, you drink Bud Lite and eat cheeseburgers, and your salad dressing of choice is Ranch.

          • johan_larson says:

            That might be a little too rural. I seem to remember reading that the average American is a suburbanite.

            The Simpsons features what I think of as a pretty typical American family, though played for laughs.

          • meh says:

            @johan_larson
            Good observation, what is a better metric of ‘typical’ than what is reflected in sitcoms like ‘The Simpsons’?? This has me thinking of a sitcom metric to determine the answer. If we take the most popular sitcoms of all time, where do they typically take place?

          • meh says:

            A quick google search of best sitcom of all time lead me to this totally subjective list https://www.businessinsider.com/the-20-best-tv-sitcoms-of-all-time-2013-6
            which gives a tally of

            Boston – 1 (Cheers)
            San Difrangelo – 1 (Scrubs)
            Seattle – 1 (Frasier)
            Chicago – 2 (The Bob Newhart Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show)
            Not in US – 2 (Gilligan’s Island, MASH)
            Exurb USA – 4 (That 70s Show, Roseanne, Simpsons, The Andy Griffith Show)
            New York – 9 (Will and Grace, Taxi, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Honeymooners, The Cosby Show, Friends, All in the Family, I Love Lucy, Seinfeld)

            So by this metric, New York is the most typical sitcom american place, with general exurbs being second.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Mary Tyler Moore was in Minneapolis. They have a statue of her throwing her hat as in the credits.

          • meh says:

            @Doctor Mist
            I believe you are correct, I put the blame on the BI article which for some reason says

            starred Moore as Mary Richards, a single woman living in Chicago

            Doesn’t change the top 2 though!

          • bullseye says:

            The Simpsons and the Andy Griffith Show are not at all in the same setting. The Simpsons live in a small city; Andy lives in a small town far from the nearest city.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            That might be a little too rural. I seem to remember reading that the average American is a suburbanite.

            What I described is the typical suburban experience. It’s just that we drive on arterial roads to get to Wal-Mart instead of highways, and instead of the Wal-Mart, there is the Wal-Mart on Baker Street, as opposed to the Wal-Mart on Deacon Ave.

          • meh says:

            Springfield is a fictional place, so is often whatever the writers need it to be at the moment. However, as Lisa says, it is ‘a small town with a centralized population’. So i grouped middle america small towns into one category, since it was unlikely there would be multiple shows in the same place. Feel free to alter this grouping, but I think the result will still hold that New York is the most typical american place in sitcoms.

          • The Nybbler says:

            What ADBG described IS suburban. Certainly it describes the DC suburbs, Pittsburgh suburbs, Philadelphia suburbs, and many of the New York suburbs. (With minor variants, like Target instead of WalMart or Yuengling instead of Bud Lite)

        • Clutzy says:

          Those huge metro areas are doing a lot of work.

          Like, I live in Chicago proper. Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI has to be 10x as many people as anything else on the list besides the Philadelphia one (which also has a sprawling grasp). If you need to sprawl that much, Chicago is losing very badly to many other places. Naperville has a population almost as lark as “Springfield, MA” on its own! And its demographics have very little to do with Chicago. Its not like a Chicago visitor is going to go to any of those places. Maybe Wisconsin if they want to see a different kind of lakeshore, maybe Indiana if they want to explode fireworks. Ha!

        • baconbits9 says:

          Of this list Philadelphia probably fits the bill best. It has a fair amount of big city flavor with culture, history, parks etc, it has a taste of the midwest cities in that it is a population center (well centers) with suburbs and then farmland. It has its own little cultural idiosyncrasies due to immigration patterns without being defining or culturally impactful outside of the area like many cities, it has a history and legacy of racial conflict, it has near mean cost of living but with a wide spread that also reflects US living standards. Outside of its long history (for a US city) and prominence in the early days of the republic it doesn’t have any really outstanding quality that differentiates itself from other cities.

      • BBA says:

        I’d say the most “American” place is the Chicago suburb where all those John Hughes movies took place. It doesn’t exist, but neither does “America.”

        • A Definite Beta Guy says:

          Not sure what you mean. That suburb is Shermer, IL. It’s based on Shermerville, IL, aka Northbrook, which is definitely a real place where John Hughes really went to high school. It definitely has a lot of real themes and relatable lifestyles to your typical suburban lifestyle, which is why people relate to it.

          The major difference is that Northbrook is insanely wealthy, but it’s definitely a decent representation of the UMC-bordering-on-1% wealthy, right down to the complete absence of “people of color” while still embracing progressive politics more generally.

          • BBA says:

            I had it on good authority (namely, Jay and Silent Bob) that the town wasn’t there when they went looking for it.

    • meh says:

      I don’t think it’s too controversial to say New York does not give visitors a good indication of what America is like more typically.

      I consider it controversial.
      By typical, do you mean throw a dart at map, and see what that place is like? Then no city anywhere is typical. If you mean pick a random person living in said country, and see what where they live is like, than cities are pretty typical.
      New Yorkers really despise the amount of people who do not consider them *real* americans.

      • brad says:

        New Yorkers really despise the amount of people who do not consider them *real* americans.

        If the whole country were made up of the type of people that say that about New Yorkers, it’d be a third world country.

        • EchoChaos says:

          If the whole country were made up of the type of people that say that about New Yorkers, it’d be a third world country.

          Substantially less of this please.

          Even the poorest US state, Mississippi, has a GDP higher than many European countries.

          • Aftagley says:

            Substantially less of this please.

            I feel like this phrase is being used WAY more often in the past couple of weeks. I’m not sure I like it. I’m going to make an effort not to use it, in its current use-state it just seems haughty and unhelpful.

            Even the poorest US state, Mississippi, has a GDP higher than many European countries.

            Mississippi’s GDP per capita compared with European nations would have it slot in at 21 – right after Slovenia, and right before Slovakia.

            So? The fact that Europe also has poor countries doesn’t undercut brad’s point that New York plays an outized role in driving America’s economy.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Aftagley

            As politely as I can, taking pot shots at “the others” is specifically what Scott asked us not to do, and this is the meanest sort.

            Had brad said “New York is a substantial driver of America’s very high per capita GDP, which is an essentially American feature” it would’ve been true and kind.

            It is neither true (the poorest Americans are still clearly first world), kind (nastily phrased) nor necessary. It’s the exact sort of intertribal sniping Scott just asked us not to do two visible open threads ago.

          • Aftagley says:

            @EC (can I call you EC?)

            I mean sure. Brad was snarky in response to the idea that (and I’m reading between the lines here) he isn’t a *real* American. He was offended and responded back with a snipe.

            I’ll agree his statement wasn’t kind, debate you on the true part (although it would be boring and rely on our subjective definitions of “third world”) and postulate it might be necessary (pushing back on the false believe that NY isn’t real america is, I believe, necessary).

            But, I don’t think that “substantially less of this please” is a helpful response to that kind of behavior. It, to me, comes off as just as snarky as the original statement, overbearingly school-marmy, and doesn’t add anything constructive to the discussion.

            If you think what he said is wrong, argue your case. If you think what he said was snark and doesn’t deserve a response, just don’t respond. Threading the needle, like this, I think doesn’t help.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Aftagley

            Sure, although it makes it mildly less likely I’ll see your reply since I try to search for my name to reply.

            I’ll agree his statement wasn’t kind, debate you on the true part (although it would be boring and rely on our subjective definitions of “third world”) and postulate it might be necessary (pushing back on the false believe that NY isn’t real america is, I believe, necessary).

            And being unkind requires, from Scott’s page: “You had better be delivering a very well-deserved smackdown against someone who is uncontroversially and obviously wrong, in a way you can back up with universally agreed-upon statistics.”

            He is clearly not doing that (as you agree). And I’ll not that ABSOLUTELY nobody here has said that New Yorkers aren’t real Americans. The closest is that the New York experience isn’t representative.

            But, I don’t think that “substantially less of this please” is a helpful response to that kind of behavior. It, to me, comes off as just as snarky as the original statement, overbearingly school-marmy, and doesn’t add anything constructive to the discussion.

            If you think what he said is wrong, argue your case. If you think what he said was snark and doesn’t deserve a response, just don’t respond. Threading the needle, like this, I think doesn’t help.

            I did argue my case. That was my second paragraph.

            My first was a request that the partisan sniping be tuned down. “Less of this” is one of the standard ways we do that on this board. I could do it another way, but that’s the common way that request is made.

          • Aftagley says:

            @EchoChaos (ha, fair enough, I’ll keep using the full name)

            Right! I’m not saying you didn’t argue your case, that’s why I addressed your case separately. I’m just saying I really don’t like the pseudo-moderator tone of “less of this, please.”

            I feel like it doesn’t add anything to the discussion, doesn’t seem to effectively deter future snark (you and Brad have already gone down this road before) and really doesn’t do much other than publicly signalling displeasure.

            That being said, at this point that’s all I’m doing also, so I’ll bow out.

          • JayT says:

            Aftagley, I’m not sure where you are seeing Mississippi’s GDP being between Slovenia and Slovakia, but from what I’m seeing Mississippi ($37,948) ranks between Italy (~$34,000) and France (~$42,000). Both those countries obviously have issues of their own, but nobody says they are poor countries.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_capita
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
            Also, I believe that if you look at PPP instead of nominal, Mississippi does even better.

          • brad says:

            Where is the evidence that all, most, or even many Mississippians are the type of people that say New Yorkers aren’t real Americans? I’ve met some very decent human beings from Mississippi.

          • Aftagley says:

            @JayT

            I was looking at this table

            It looks like you’re using nominal figures, while I wasn’t which may explain the difference?

          • Aftagley says:

            @JayT

            I was looking at this table.

            It looks like you’re using nominal figures, while I wasn’t which may explain the difference?

          • JayT says:

            Yeah, that would explain it. You have to compare nominal to nominal or PPP to PPP. When you look at (regional) PPP Mississippi’s per capita GDP goes up quite a bit because it is so cheap to live there.

          • Jesse E says:

            This may be true by poor numbers, but the truth also is, putting aside cultural and language differences, almost nobody making the equivalent of $25,000 in Spain, Germany, or even the UK would move to Mississippi, while many people likely would move to those places from Missisippi even if they could.

          • JayT says:

            We would have to look at immigration numbers to see if that is actually true. There are a lot of impoverished areas in rich European countries, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a higher percentage of European-born people living in Mississippi than Mississippi-born people living in Europe.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        It looks like your typical New Yorker is more likely to ride the subway to work than to own a car.

        • Right. And most Americans have never eaten a falafel or seen Hamilton. If we were making a list of “generic American attributes” and rating cities by it, New York would almost certainly be near the bottom

          • brad says:

            Bos-Was and SoCal are together about a quarter of the US population. That may not be a majority, but it’s a plurality.

          • Tarpitz says:

            Right, but I’m guessing an awful lot of those people live in pretty generic suburbia and don’t spend a great deal of time in the metropolitan centre. Is someone from Romford or Amersham a Londoner? Maybe in some technical sense, but not really.

          • brad says:

            I grew up in an outer suburb (but not exurb) of NYC. I’d argue it is a substantially different culture then the suburb of a small city like Buffalo, for example.

            What I find interesting is that in the last couple of decades it seems like every city in the US and even a lot of places that wouldn’t quite make the city-cutoff seem to have at least one commercial strip of, for lack of a better term, blue culture restaurants and shops. I wonder just what percentage of the population is within half an hour driving distance of somewhere that sells a falafel. It may well be 50%.

          • Urstoff says:

            “generican American attributes” seems quite non-American. America can have pretty big regional differences (not seen as much in high-income white collar workers, but evident in everyone else) and is pretty international, even within mid-sized cities.

          • quanta413 says:

            I’d bet most New Yorkers haven’t seen Hamilton either. And falafel isn’t that rare. Maybe not eaten frequently. But I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of Americans have eaten some once.

      • aristides says:

        I don’t think a New York is a typical American city, but I don’t think any one city is. There are 50 states, and each of the ones I’ve been to have felt different, with the possible exception of CT and RI, but I bet natives would disagree. Maybe I could pick 5 cities, and a visitor would have a good feel for America, but you arguably need to visit 50 to truly understand

        • Urstoff says:

          I wonder how able someone how has never been to America (but can speak English, for the purpose of this thought experiment) could culturally distinguish between cities as well as Americans can. Maybe if they were really paying attention and was intentionally trying to do so instead of normal visitor behavior.

          • AG says:

            Depends on the parts of the cities they go to. There are tourist areas everywhere, where a lot of the behavior they would witness would be non-locals, either fellow tourists, people passing through on business trips, or new arrivals.

            I mean, an average American wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between footage of Tokyo/Seoul/Hong Kong before the protests/Singapore.

          • JayT says:

            I would think it’s fairly evident. I notice major differences between the European cities I’ve been to, even within the same country.

          • meh says:

            it should be obvious after they buy a slice of pizza.

          • aristides says:

            For foreigners 5 is probably a good number. I’ll nominate San Francisco, Brooklyn, Fargo ND, San Antonio, and Hialeah, Fl. I’m pretty sure even foreigners will be able to tell the difference between those 5.

    • BBA says:

      Is there any country whose cultural vision of itself revolves around its cities? Nearly all Australians live in major metropolitan areas but the essence of “Australianness” is in the vast empty outback.

      And many countries have lots of internal diversity. What part of America is most “American”? New England isn’t the Midwest isn’t California isn’t the South, and in the South, Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas are all very different. Is Bavaria more “German” than the Ruhr valley? (American stereotypes of Germany are mostly Bavarian but most Germans aren’t Bavarian.)

      On the other hand, Rio is pretty damn Brazilian.

      • johan_larson says:

        How about the Dutch? Every time someone talks about the Netherlands, they seem to be talking about Amsterdam, or maybe Rotterdam or those gigantic flood control measures of theirs. Nobody ever seems to talk about the Dutch countryside.

        • DeWitt says:

          We might be a little closer than most countries, I suppose. Our country has been decentralised for a long time, and even today the amount of people living in our capital, relatively speaking, isn’t very high. People from Amsterdam don’t really register as very different from other Dutch people to me.

          On the other hand, Amsterdam has more immigrants than most other Dutch places do, and we have the brand of populists who rail against elitism in the cities just fine, so there is that.

          • Aapje says:

            Amsterdam has lots of well-educated expats. Rotterdam has lots of poorly educated immigrants.

            IMO, that’s why the anti-immigrant politicians tend to be so often linked to Rotterdam.

          • DeWitt says:

            Indeed. Amusing, too, that Rotterdam’s mayor is a well-educated immigrant.

        • Aapje says:

          @johan_larson

          Wooden shoes are countryside (they are still worn by some farmers).
          Tulips are countryside.
          Windmills are countryside.
          The flood control stuff is countryside.

          Amsterdam is quite Dutch too, with Anne Frank, the canals, the Dutch masters at the Rijksmuseum & Van Gogh Museum. The mindset of the people is less Dutch. Rotterdam is more Dutch in mindset of the people, but less so in its attractions.

          IMO, the Dutch cultural view of itself isn’t localized strongly.

          • Aftagley says:

            Wooden shoes are countryside (they are still worn by some farmers).

            I’ve always wondered this, why? They can’t be comfortable, don’t look all that waterproof and overall just seem annoying. Why were they used and why would anyone keep using them?

            (I’m sorry if this comes across as an attack on a beloved cultural icon, I just fundamentally don’t get it.)

          • DeWitt says:

            If a cow steps on a shod or booted foot, you have a broken foot. Their feet will slide off a wooden shoe very harmlessly. It’s not even uniquely Dutch, as people wore these shoes elsewhere as well, we just took longer to get the memo that they’re no longer very necessary.

          • johan_larson says:

            I’ve always wondered this, why?

            I always figured it was about cost. Leather was really expensive until recent times. Poor people either went barefoot in warm climates, or in colder ones wore footwear that used a minimum of leather or none at all.

            Wooden footwear isn’t unique to the Dutch. The Japanese used to wear a type of wooden sandal called geta.

          • Aapje says:

            @Aftagley

            Dutch wooden shoes are made from poplar or willow, which are light woods that have a very good balance between isolation and ventilation, which means that your feet tend to stay warm in winter and cool in summer, while not getting sweaty.

            As DeWitt notes, they are also very robust and act like protective shoes. They are actually CE certified as safety shoes.

            They are less pleasant on paved roads (also being quite noisy), but far more so on unpaved roads/land (where farmers tend to walk a lot). Of course, large scale paving of roads is a fairly recent development.

            They are less prone to getting stuck in the mud than a shoe or boot, due to their shape.

            They are easier to clean than leather shoes.

            They are easy to put on or take off.

            Having the insole match the instep is a bit more important, given the lack of give in the wood, but this is a problem that many people have with regular shoes as well. If the insole does match the instep, a wooden shoe can be superior for some people, due to the better support for the foot than in a shoe with softer material.

            Ultimately, wooden shoes have advantages and disadvantages, but this is no different from leather shoes, rubber boots, etc. Society changed in ways that made wooden shoes useful in fewer circumstances, reduced their cost advantage; while the alternatives got better.

            PS. Note that there is a common misconception that softness equals comfort. A relatively hard mattress can be more comfortable than a soft one, a relatively hard cycling saddle can be more comfortable when riding long distances and a relatively hard footbed can be better in a shoe as well.

            PS2. Wooden shoes take some getting used to. You can’t expect to put them on after wearing ‘normal’ shoes for your entire life and be adjusted to them right away.

          • Aftagley says:

            Interesting, I didn’t consider the safety benefits. Thanks!

          • zzzzort says:

            I had a pair of wooden shoes (while living in suburban america) to quickly slip on and go outside. I found them quite comfortable, and while I wouldn’t wear them all day they worked really well for taking out the trash or running to the garage. They weren’t waterproof to rain, but they were elevated enough to walk on marshy ground without issue, which was nice.

      • noyann says:

        > American stereotypes of Germany are mostly Bavarian

        They follow tourism (Heidelberg! Alps!) which followed occupation.

      • Lambert says:

        I’m not convinced most Bavarians are Germans.
        They barely speak the same language.

        • noyann says:

          A piece of useless knowledge (except when in the country): the language is Bairisch, while everything else is [b|B]ayrisch.

    • Fitzroy says:

      Monaco is very Monegasque and Vatican City is very… whatever the demonym for Vatican City is, but I imagine you weren’t thinking of city states.

    • Kuiperdolin says:

      Rome is really Italian, and it does not even entirerly belong to Italy.

    • b4mgh says:

      Although I haven’t been, Rio de Janeiro seems like a physical manifestation of every Brazilian stereotype, with an emphasis on the negative ones.

  35. ARabbiAndAFrog says:

    Common criticism of conspiracy theory is that any real conspiracy would be noticed. That ignores existence of conspiracy theorists who noticed (Believe they noticed, anyway) the conspiracy and try to educate others.

    Is there a name for a fallacy of refusing to acknowledge your opponent’s existence during the debate?

    • Incurian says:

      If you believe that your opponent’s beliefs are incorrect (i.e. your opponent is not bringing attention to an actual conspiracy, but is in fact a lunatic), then you’re not refusing to acknowledge your opponent exists, you’re expressing a belief that you opponent has incorrect beliefs – i.e. having a debate. I believe the fallacy your question exemplifies is “affirming the consequent,” but I’d bounce this off someone smarter.

      • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

        Thinking that your opponent is wrong because he believes in lunatic conspiracy theories is closer to circular reasoning, what I’m talking is claiming that conspiracy theory can’t be correct because it would be exposed, while debating a person who is exposing them.

        In other words, the fallacy is in claiming that lack of certain actions proves you right, while your opponent performs those actions at this very moment.

        Something like:
        “I think [Government/Corporations/Communists/Fascists/Reptilians] conspire to do bad things, because I noticed this and that”
        “No way! If this was true, people would notice.”
        “Am I a joke to you?” (The last line is usually not spoken, but probably implied)

        • CthulhuChild says:

          I think it goes more like this:

          “I think [Government/Corporations/Communists/Fascists/Reptilians] conspire to do bad things, because I noticed this and that”
          “No way! If this was true, people would notice.”
          “Am I a joke to you?”
          “No, but you’re not a credible witness to any of the things you are suggesting, nor can you find anyone, and it’s basically inconcievable that 100% of people involved in [Government/Corporations/Communists/Fascists/Reptilians] are totally loyal and also careful. Every large group has traitors, whether it’s the KKK, Scientologists or the CIA. And while government covert ops are a great example of successful conspiracies, individual operations are compromised all the time, even though the team of people involved is deliberately kept as small as practicable to minimize the possibility.”
          “So when you say someone would have noticed and discount my noticing, you really mean…”
          “The bigger the conspiracy, the more obvious it should be, the bigger the trail and the greater the number of defectors. Weak evidence of a massive conspiracy is strong evidence that there is no conspiracy. Similarly, minor conspiracies with limited reach can be expected to leave almost no trace.

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      I think such critisim is more often based on the suggestion that some of the insiders would’ve give it away, not that some outsider would’ve “connected all the dots”. And when it’s about outsiders noticing, than it can just mean that the expected inconsistencies are much larger than what the conspiracy theorist is pointing at – i.e what Incurian said.

      ETA: alternatively, that might refer to the fact that if the conspiracy would true than the competing institutions and/or institutions tasked to monitor the supposed conspirators (media, international organizations, whatelse) would have noticed and make it public and taken actions.

    • John Schilling says:

      The common criticism is that real conspiracy theories would be not just noticed, but noticed and officially acknowledged by e.g. by policemen charged with arresting the sort of criminals the conspirators would be if they were doing what the theories allege, and journalists who make their living informing the public of events as momentous as the conspiracies would be if they existed. That, by virtue of their professional-grade investigative tools, expertise, and networks, these people would most likely discover conspiracies before random enthusiasts in their parents’ basements on the internet, and that even if in some case a random enthusiast were first, the professionals would soon overtake them in the public understanding of the matter.

      See, e.g., the Killian memos, where typography otaku on the internet got there first but within a few days every reporter on the planet not named Dan Rather was saying “yeah, this is a real thing”.

      “You do not exist” would be a fallacy, but “Why is it just you?” is a fair question.

      ETA: For the record, AlexOfUrals’ ETA ninja’d my post.

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

        How does this account for e.g. Rotherham where the police turned a blind eye and even went so far as arresting the fathers of victims who tried to rescue them or Epstein where he got sweetheart deals from prosecutors right up until he threatened to name names and mysteriously “committed suicide.”

        The police in first world countries seem entirely willing to ignore or play along with massive criminal conspiracies, at the highest and lowest levels of society, if the perpetrators are well-connected or politically-favored and the victims aren’t.

        Your reasoning rules out “Bush did 9/11” tier lunacy but it doesn’t and can’t touch more mundane alleged criminal conspiracies like Pizzagate.

        • John Schilling says:

          but it doesn’t and can’t touch more mundane alleged criminal conspiracies like Pizzagate.

          It “touches” Pizzagate by classifying Pizzagate as “almost certainly nonsense made up by nutcases living in their parents’ basements”. Which is almost certainly correct; I hope you don’t mean to say you actually believe the version where the Democratic National Committee is secretly orchestrating a massive child sex ring for the benefit of the party’s implausibly pedophillic leadership.

          Rotherham, perhaps, but Rotherham was exceedingly rare (and possibly unique) in its scope. It also was never a “conspiracy theory” in that A: it barely had the level of coordinated activity to qualify as a conspiracy(*) and B: it was never anyone’s shouting-on-the-internet theory until about the time it was established by the professionals as a fact.

          * Definitely a conspiracy in the two-guys-talked-and-one-overt-act legal sense, but not in the “this is a single grand master plan” conspiracy-theory sense.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            It wasn’t rare, many such gangs were and are still operating in English cities. And I did hear about Muslim pedophile (see below) gangs in the UK online at least a year before the story broke, although at the time I didn’t lend it much credence.

            I’m agnostic on Pizzagate. Some specific claims are obviously false, i.e Comet Pizza doesn’t have a basement. Other claims such as the involvement of high-level politicians are more plausible as at least two US Presidents and one of the UK’s princes have already been outed as “pedophiles” (in the colloquial sense of raping underage but post-pubescent girls) through their connection to Jeffery Epstein.

          • John Schilling says:

            It wasn’t rare, many such gangs were and are still operating in English cities.

            Yes, gangs like Derby and Huddersfield and Rochdale. A few dozen perpetrators and victims; none of them within an order of magnitude of Rotherham in scale. Hence my explicit “rare and possibly unique in its scope”.

            These rape gangs are not a “conspiracy theory” in the common sense of the word because, while legally conspiratorial, they were not “theories” in the common sense of the word. They were established facts. Wherever people talked about them, it was with policemen and mainstream journalists saying “Yes, this is a real thing and as soon as the facts have been established at beyond-a-reasonable-doubt level we’ll make it an ex-real-thing”.

            As was true for the unique case of Rotherham. Whether talking about the generic existence of few-dozen-strong rape gangs, or any specific such gang, or Rotherham, public understanding went almost directly from “nobody knows about this” to “everybody including the police acknowledges this thing is real” in very short order. “Conspiracy theory” is the word we use when that isn’t the case, and so it isn’t the right word for Rotherham.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            You’re skipping over the part where, for years, the police and the media etc were explicitly not saying that it was a real thing and instead focusing on keeping a lid on the story by leaning on social workers and arresting angry parents of victims. That’s the part which follows the standard conspiracy theory script: there was a coordinated cover-up, for decades.

            A cover-up which, as you demonstrate by the mainstream downplaying of the other equivalent gangs, is still ongoing. One gang in one town was stopped, dozens more with likely tens of thousands more victims are still going strong.

          • John Schilling says:

            You’re skipping over the part where, for years, the police and the media etc were explicitly not saying that it was a real thing and instead focusing on keeping a lid on the story

            I am skeptical of the claim that the media was “focusing on keeping a lid on the story”. Andrew Norfolk in particular will be surprised to hear that, and I don’t believe that his telling of the story was impeded by anyone else in the media.

            The police, yes, were not saying it was a real thing. Mostly because no one was asking whether it was a real thing. That may have been a conspiracy on the part of the police, albeit probably not a large one. If so it was an effective conspiracy, and as such prevented the emergence of a conspiracy theory.

            Conspiracies, especially small ones, can and do exist. It’s conspiracy theories that are almost always bunk, because the stable states for a conspiracy are essentially “nobody outside the conspiracy knows this” and “everybody who cares knows this”. Pointing to mere conspiracies, does not challenge this.

          • ECD says:

            Police are generally fucking terrible about rape, sexual abuse and prostitution. They’re even worse when the three get mixed up together and the rape and sexual abuse can be written off as ‘just whores looking to get back at john’s or their pimp.’ This does not take a conspiracy.

            Nor does any alleged lack of press coverage. Most things do not get press coverage, the things which do are the exception, not the rule. Does the lack of coverage over the epidemic violence against Native American women (until very recently) indicate a conspiracy, or just that people didn’t care that much? ETA: John makes a good point about this claim above, but my point still stands.

            And no, the police and the press (ETA strikethrough for a statement I can’t justify under the comment policy): and most of the people didn’t give a shit about poor girls getting sexually abused, raped and forced into prostitution. They continue to not care about it when it doesn’t get press coverage, or have the racial angle they’re looking for (whichever one that may be, depending on their politics).

            It gets harder for the police if there’s more of an organization and if the witnesses are vulnerable (either to pressure from families, pressure on families, or have mental illness issues which can be cast as ‘they’re a crazy liar!’).

          • “The police, yes, were not saying it was a real thing. Mostly because no one was asking whether it was a real thing. ”

            I thought the police, being professionals, were supposed to investigate it without prodding?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            People were talking about Rotherham-style rape gangs before the story officially broke, although it was usually dismissed as the ignorant rantings of a group of racists. It even became a meme briefly after a drunken English Defence League member was questioned by an interviewer and made a slurred reference to “Muslamic rape gangs”.

          • ECD says:

            People were talking about Rotherham-style rape gangs before the story officially broke, although it was usually dismissed as the ignorant rantings of a group of racists. It even became a meme briefly after a drunken English Defence League member was questioned by an interviewer and made a slurred reference to “Muslamic rape gangs”.

            Were they? That link is from 2011, well after a number of Home Office reports and press reports.

            I mean, I don’t doubt you can find something, but that’s because it’s a dead standard accusation for the outgroup. I can find plenty of people complaining about black men raping white women, that doesn’t make them secretly aware of the ‘Cosby Rape Conspiracy ™’.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Were they? That link is from 2011, well after a number of Home Office reports and press reports.

            There were reports before 2011, but the scandal didn’t enter the public consciousness until later.

            I mean, I don’t doubt you can find something, but that’s because it’s a dead standard accusation for the outgroup. I can find plenty of people complaining about black men raping white women, that doesn’t make them secretly aware of the ‘Cosby Rape Conspiracy ™’.

            If you’re still sneering at your outgroup as a bunch of ignorant racists even after the claims which were used as evidence of their racism turned out to be correct, I think you’re being too politically partisan.

          • ECD says:

            There were reports before 2011, but the scandal didn’t enter the public consciousness until later.

            I mean…yes, bigots will be more informed about crimes by the targets of their bigotry than most people. That doesn’t actually indicate anything.

            If you’re still sneering at your outgroup as a bunch of ignorant racists even after the claims which were used as evidence of their racism turned out to be correct, I think you’re being too politically partisan.

            Except “Muslim Rape Gangs” doesn’t actually indicate they were right, anymore than ‘god-fearing kiddie-lovers’ (not a quote) would indicate knowledge of any church/temple/mosque child abuse scandal. There are 7 billion people on the planet, any accusation (not physically impossible) about people will be true of someone, somewhere.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ ECD:

            Reading your latest post, I’m moved to ask: if conclusive proof that the “bigots” were right and polite opinion was wrong doesn’t move you to re-evaluate your priors, what exactly would?

            ETA:

            Except “Muslim Rape Gangs” doesn’t actually indicate they were right,

            It does, because “Muslim rape gangs” were exactly what existed. Maybe you mean that they were only right by accident and had no actual knowledge of what was going on, but I wonder how you could know this.

            (I hope you’re not just assuming that they can’t have had a good reason because everybody knows that Those People are just a bunch of bigots not worth taking seriously, because that really would be too ironic.)

      • “journalists who make their living informing the public of events”

        The problem is I really don’t believe that. Journalists are like any other group of wage earners, they make their living pleasing their bosses. If the bosses don’t want the public informed on an issue, most journalists won’t investigate it. That and ideological blinders can leave many things un-investigated. Just look at the Holodomor.

        Also, in many cases “professional journalists” have investigated the claims. There were many “professional journalists” who believed that POWs were left behind in Vietnam, most notably Sydney Schanberg.* Many ceased to be “professional journalists” following their investigation, as of course no true professional journalist would investigate such claims. In the case of the JFK conspiracy lunacy a “professional district attorney” even decided to put someone on trial for it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Clay_Shaw)

        *Not saying I believe in this particular conspiracy, though I’m not sure it’s false either.

      • JDG1980 says:

        Shouldn’t Dieselgate have caused people to update their priors on the feasibility of large conspiracies? Here we have just the kind of conspiracy that conventional wisdom says shouldn’t have worked: lots of participants, some fairly low-level, any of whom could have blown the whistle. Furthermore, it wasn’t driven by some ideological goal (which might have motivated them to remain quiet for the sake of the cause) but by the corporate profit motive. Yet no one on the inside said anything. It came to light only by chance, when an obscure university experiment found odd discrepancies.

        • noyann says:

          > Furthermore, it wasn’t driven by some ideological goal (which might have motivated them to remain quiet for the sake of the cause) but by the corporate profit motive.

          I doubt they did it for the greater good of vw shareholder value. Among vw and supplier workers I suspect more likely positions along the lines of “don’t be a spoil-sport”, “won’t be that bad, tag along”, “don’t betray your coworkers”, “cover your ass”, and “too late to get off now”.

          Management, that’s another story.

          There could even have been more money driven reasoning in the government: “car industry is so important for Germany, don’t diminish its sales”, later “…don’t smudge its reputation”, “…don’t let this grow big”, …

          ETA: More to your point, dieselgate looks much more like the emergent property of a large clusterf*** mixing group dynamics with supplier dependency with national economy with political and individual failures. Nothing like an intelligent planning here — unless some really really super-master-mind(ed cabal) poured all this together.

        • John Schilling says:

          Shouldn’t Dieselgate have caused people to update their priors on the feasibility of large conspiracies? Here we have just the kind of conspiracy that conventional wisdom says shouldn’t have worked: lots of participants,

          How many is “lots”? More generally, is there a conveniently accessible account of what went on inside Volkswagen and how it was possible to get to the observed end result?

          Dieselgate did surprise me, being in the class of things that shouldn’t be possible without leakage, but the scale of the conspiracy within the broader organization is critical in determining how much I should be updating my priors. Unfortunately, most of the storytellers just want me to be outraged at what “Volkswagen” did.

          • SolipsisticUtilitarian says:

            Interestingly, Dieselgate somewhat *confirms* the argument about leakage, as 2012 a manager of a VW-supplier informed the EU minister Tajani about what was happening. However, he did not pursue it really, just issuing a statement that it’s important to monitor car companies.

            Which kind of suggests that it’s also crucial who you leak to: if you just want the fraud to end without the negative fallout for the whole industry, there does not seem to be too much that you can do, as politicians will prefer to appear to not have known about any conspiracy, and journalists will go public with it.

    • Auric Ulvin says:

      Any successful conspiracy theory is not of the reference group ‘conspiracy theories that we’ve discovered’. I can’t think of a snappy name: this is as close as I get ‘Confusing two differently and mutually exclusive groups’.

      Naturally, nobody would imagine that Enigma decrypts could be covered up, not just for the war but for 30 years later. Generals and admirals omitted it from their memoirs, there were a great number of people who kept quiet, who lost out on the glory of helping to win the war. But it did happen. I conclude that it is possible to cover up conspiracies, that humanity can keep a secret even if there are individual incentives for people to whistleblow.

      Same goes for Rotherham, Volkswagen, the South Korean cabal… all is impossible until it’s recorded history.

      I imagine that visual and radar sightings of anomalously propelled vehicles that don’t seem to obey the laws of physics are evidence for either sophisticated alien life or that somebody has made a quantum-tier leap in physics (a paradigm shift as important as the discovery of quantum physics). Probably the first, since we’ve observed these bizarre objects for decades, centuries and millennia (depending how you weigh the evidence of clay tablets, print or radar). Perhaps we’re getting close to the point where we get a firm answer, but for decades UFOs have been dismissed as nonsense: the moon, swamp gas or all-encompassing craziness, hallucinations and unexplained natural phenomena.

  36. Urstoff says:

    We’re already at the late 90’s in terms of nostalgia. 20-25 years seems about to be the usual nostalgia gap. It’s hard to imagine what would have to happen for people not to be nostalgic of their formative years.

  37. Enkidum says:

    I think games (both video and board, for that matter) are in a completely unmatched golden age. There’s been nothing like the quantity of incredible games of every variety than there has in the past decade.

    I don’t think your water cooler effect is that important regarding TV any longer. People still go back and binge-watch entire series, especially the recognized greats (The Wire, of course). Watching habits have changed drastically.

    Popcorn movies are as good as they’ve ever been, and more arty stuff seems to have been having a good decade as well.

    I don’t really read new fiction much, so can’t comment.

    Music… I’m no longer capable of making reasonable judgments. I will say that the later 90’s was one of the worst eras for popular music I know of (Limp Bizkit, QED), and both the periods before and after that were some of the best (say, 1990-1997, and 2005-2010). I can name quite a few modern artists I think are doing very cool work, but they’re mostly very consciously retro in some way. So… *shrugs*.

    But all in all, I think there’s good reason to think that there’s a strong component of get-off-my-lawn guiding your feelings. It’s natural, I think, to feel that way about one’s own era, but I think it’s probably just factually wrong. (Also, artistically, we clearly have very different tastes – I thought it was generally accepted that the 70’s was the best era for American cinema, at least, and musically 65-75 is usually considered pretty great.)

    • Urstoff says:

      If only that unmatched golden age of video games would revive campaign-based flight/space sims and RTS’s. But that’s just nostalgia for the games of my teen years (Tie Fighter, Descent: Freespace, Age of Empires, etc.).

    • Enkidum says:

      The Office is off the air by now at this point, right? But, in my anecdotal experience, people still (sadly) talk about it a lot.

      But isn’t that the opposite of a water cooler effect? I’d always understood that to be that everyone talks about a show at the moment of release.

      If all you mean is that people talk about it, period, even decades later, then sure, but I’m not sure why that would decrease viewership, quite the opposite.

  38. Urstoff says:

    Is the podcast only on Soundcloud or is it listed on regular podcast app? I can’t find it, for example, on Pocket Casts.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Try searching in pocket casts again and see if it turns up now. report back.

      If that doesn’t work, take this url and paste it into the search bar in pocket casts. For other apps, do something else.
      The podcasters should register at itunes and it should propagate from that directory to other directories.

  39. proyas says:

    Could someone help me to track down the original text of a quote? It goes something like this:

    “There ought to be a law [or maybe it was ‘a cultural norm’] against buying new things. We should keep reusing old things forever and should be proud to have old things.”

    This quote comes from a recording of an informal lecture that Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, or some similar intellectual gave sometime from 1950 – 1980. I heard it on YouTube a few years ago.

    The YouTube video lasted several minutes, and I remember being able to hear occasional reactions from people in the audience, such as laughs.

  40. proyas says:

    There are Dyson Spheres and there are Dyson Swarms.

    There are also nested Dyson Spheres, called Matrioshka Brains.

    Are there also nested Dyson Swarms? If yes, then how come there is a lot of material on the internet about nested Dyson Spheres, but so little about nested Dyson Swarms?

    Would a nested Dyson Swarm be better or worse than a Matrioshka Brain?

    • simon says:

      The term “Dyson Spheres” is commonly used to refer to both swarms and solid spheres, and I understand the term “Matrioshka brain” to also refer to both. Swarms seem much more likely in both cases.

      • Eric Rall says:

        I’ve heard “Dyson Shells” as an unambiguous term for solid spheres. Agreed that shells seem more likely. The big problems I’ve heard for shells are:

        1) A shell as a whole would have no net gravitational force from its primary, so could drift out of place without actively spending a lot of energy on stationkeeping.

        2) The shell isn’t in orbit around its primary (or at most is only in orbit along its equator), so each component is supported against its primary by material stresses, which seem like they’d be big enough to require exotic materials.

        Swarms also seem like they’d have a massive advantage in that they can be built incrementally with roughly-linear value, while a shell would probably need to be built all at once, or at least in very large stages. A Kardashev II civilization might be able to build a shell in one go, but you’re probably not a Kardashev II civilization yet if you haven’t built your first Dyson-like megastructure (or found some way of generating and capturing a star’s worth of energy other than building a Dyson Sphere). It seems a lot more doable for a Kardashev I civilization to build a ring swarm gradually over the course of centuries or longer, then add additional rings on other planes once the first ring is mostly filled in.

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      What do you call a nested Dyson Swarm? Any such swarm is necessarily nested, i.e. has components at different distances from the star, otherwise they would’ve collided long before reaching the density required to intercept most of that star light.

      Or do you mean that the outer layers of the swarm should be powered not directly by the starlight but by the heat emission of the inner layers?

    • Lambert says:

      >nested Dyson Spheres

      Unless there’s some hard stefan-bolzmann related stuff due to surface areas, that sounds like a bad idea.

      It would be like inventing the triple-expansion steam engine and thinking that you had to put three propellors on the ship, one for each stage.

      Build one sphere with multiple stages of energy recovery to get as many bites at the exergy (negentropy) cherry as you can.

  41. Freddie deBoer says:

    If anyone is interested I talk about my troubles and my new book on this podcast. I’m sorry my audio is shitty, I didn’t plan ahead sufficiently.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I’m not sure that toxic wokeness is mostly a result of social media seeking maximum clicks. From my point of view, it started with racefail when Social Justice (then called anti-racism) came to sf fandom on (mostly) Livejournal in 2009. Livejournal got its money from subscribers, not advertisers, and there was no effort to maximize engagement.

      One of my friends says he saw Social Justice at play in the gay/lesbian culture in college back in the 80s.

      I’ve seen a version of PC in the 50s (I think) in Howard Fast’s memoir Being Red. It’s amusing to see him say, “I’m the only best-selling author you’ve got, don’t tell me what I can write”.

      Dave Neiwert has talked about pipelines to get white supremacist ideas into the mainstream, and it might be worth looking at how ideas move around in general. Social Justice apparently went from communists to academe to sf fandom* to the mainstream. And a look at the evolutionary pressures which cause people to make ideas accessible to larger groups.

      What you say about not seeing call-out culture when you work on housing availability matches what I’ve heard that activists who are doing practical work don’t do the politics of exclusion. And with Paul Graham’s observation that social behavior is the most toxic when people have no useful work. (See high schools and prisons.)

      While the sound quality wasn’t bad enough to be a problem for me, I did hear “We are all cops” as “We are all cucks” on the first pass, and I think there’s some truth to both sides– all enforcers and all terrified.

      *Sf fandom includes professional writers and editors.

      • achenx says:

        Livejournal got its money from subscribers, not advertisers

        My recollection is that LJ moved from subscriber money to ad money well before 2009, more around the 2006 timeframe. It was sold to SixApart in 2005, I think the ads started appearing a little while after that as well as the subscriber benefits being scaled back and no longer pushed. Then it got sold to the Russians and I had stopped paying attention by then, so maybe the Russians pulled the ads back?

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Or I could just be wrong. I have a paid membership, so I wasn’t seeing the ads.

          In any case, I don’t think LJ was trying to maximize engagement.

          • AG says:

            LJ communities were very silo’d. I didn’t even learn about Strikethrough until after migrating to Tumblr. In that sense, the latter was far more successful at driving engagement via virality than the former. Hell, I didn’t get onto LJ until 2009, and neither ads nor outraaaaageous LJ posts in other places were anywhere on my radar my entire tenure there. When we had fanwank, it was rooted in non-LJ fansites for the thing we were into at the time.

      • Aftagley says:

        One of my friends says he saw Social Justice at play in the gay/lesbian culture in college back in the 80s.

        I would have expected this community to start from a position of maximum Social Justice. If this isn’t the case, I’d be fascinated to learn more. Would you mind recounted what your friend said about this?

        • Viliam says:

          I am just guessing here, but seems to me that “who you are sexually attracted to” and “what is your opinion on free market vs central planning” are independent things. And that most homosexuals who happen to be conservative and religious, are okay with the other parts of the religion, and only wish the religion to become more tolerant towards homosexuality (by declaring the relevant parts of the holy texts as metaphorical or outdated).

          The very idea that “all minorities should form one large coalition against the white cishet males” is something that you accept if you already believe in Social Justice, and reject if you don’t. So pro-SJ gays and lesbians probably believe there is a logical connection between the two, and anti-SJ gays and lesbians probably believe there is not.

      • BBA says:

        The ideas that we now call “SJ” have been around for decades and have had periodic flareups, notably on college campuses in the early ’90s. But they always faded away after a while, and stayed localized. I was vaguely aware of RaceFail ’09, having been on LiveJournal at the time, but it never affected anyone in my social circles or the fandoms I followed back then (mostly webcomics). And had the web stuck to the LiveJournal model, it might have gone away after a few years too.

        What social media changed is that now everyone on earth can see whatever controversy is raging anywhere on earth, so there’s always more fuel for the all-consuming fire. And even if you don’t want to see it, Facebook and Twitter will “helpfully” show you what’s trending. Some have dated the moment when hell started bubbling up to July 1, 2013, when the most popular and usable RSS client ever, Google Reader, shut down. Once you couldn’t deliberately curate your own feed but had to rely on competing opaque algorithms, that was it, everyone was constantly exposed to everything, forever.

        Now I’m wondering about the role of Tumblr. The concept of a “tumblelog” was invented by “why the lucky stiff”, a pseudonymous Ruby programmer/writer/artist/bon vivant of the ’00s who abruptly quit the Internet and took down all of his prolific output ten years ago last month. (It was shortly after he got “doxed”, though I don’t think that word existed back then.) Somewhat ironic that the preferred platform for so much of the extreme social justice left was the brainchild of a cis het white man from Utah who likely took his pseudonym from an Ayn Rand novel.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Some have dated the moment when hell started bubbling up to July 1, 2013, when the most popular and usable RSS client ever, Google Reader, shut down.

          I like it, mostly because it means everything can be blamed on Vic Gundotra and Urs Hoelzle.

  42. Urstoff says:

    Is there such a thing as a cross-country comparison of bureaucracies and how each country got it’s idiosyncrasies? A lot of stuff in the US seems incredibly ill-thought out (or it’s just a result of aimless legislative accretion) compared with other countries; but perhaps this is just a case of seeing what US bureaucracies do poorly in comparison to other countries instead of what they do well. Is there anything that US bureaucracies are particularly good at compared to other countries?

    • Jesse E says:

      When it comes to something we do well, that’s bureaucratic…the Post Office.

      The US Post Office regularly gets top ranks among all post offices internationally, when it comes to things like getting things to where they need to be the fastest.

      Now, there are things the US Postal Office could do that other nations have done to be even better (ie. setting up retail outlets in post offices, raising prices, shuttering less-used offices, and ending six-day delivery), but I think your average person would be shocked how well regarded the US Post Office is internationally.

      Why America has bureaucratic issues compared to other things in general though, two things that get brought up are –

      1.) Right-leaning people in other countries are less anti-government, which means they can get involved in the bureaucracy and effect positive change.

      2.) We’re really bad set-up as a nation, and it’s incredibly difficult to fix those things, because some of the changes would seem elitist.

      Two examples are we really have too many elections, and have too many offices that are elected offices, instead of being appointed by the winners and we have entirely too many local governments with power. There should be far more regional govt’s with power, so that for example, NIMBY’s in suburbs or smaller cities can’t stop housing that needs to be built.

      • Urstoff says:

        I wonder if the US Post Office is so good because it is self-funded (but insulated from bankruptcy, so it’s always in the red) and has to compete with private companies.

        1) Do you mean that in the US most civil servants are not right-wing and thus not worried about efficiency? My particular impression of most US civil servants isn’t that they are ideological, but rather they’re people without college degrees that landed a decent job that’s hard to get fired from.

        2) I thought Federalism might be a major component. The Federal Goverment can’t come into NYC, knock some heads, and make them build subways efficiently at non-exorbitant prices.

        • John Schilling says:

          The U.S. Post Office does not have to compete with private companies in the delivery of first-class mail, which is its core business model. That monopoly is guaranteed by law. Companies like FedEx and UPS coming as close as they are allowed to that service in the form of e.g. 2-3 day large-envelope “parcel” delivery, have no doubt forced USPS to up their game in many respects. But they were legitimately quite good even before that.

          Also, while the majority of civil servants may be working-class men and women looking for the best (and most secure) job they can get without a college degree, the subset of civil servants who set organizational policy and culture leans fairly heavily towards what we would call “Blue Tribe”.

          • Urstoff says:

            the blue tribe representation in upper management sounds plausible, but as an explanation, it’s not past the hypothesis stage. What’s the mechanism whereby the ideological makeup of US bureaucracies compared to those of other countries make them less efficient?

          • John Schilling says:

            A Blue Tribe echo chamber will mostly implement just the subset of efficiency enhancements both known to and favorable to the desires of Blue Tribe; a more intellectually diverse managerial class will both find a broader range of improvements and be less able to bury the politically inconvenient ones.

            This hypothesis is almost certainly true; that it is significant is unproven speculation. Or at least, if there is proof I haven’t seen it.

          • Plumber says:

            @John Schilling >

            “…while the majority of civil servants may be working-class men and women looking for the best (and most secure) job they can get without a college degree, the subset of civil servants who set organizational policy and culture leans fairly heavily towards what we would call “Blue Tribe”….”

            For “Blue-Tribe” I think ‘cultural tastes more similar to university educated women’ and “Red-Tribe” as ‘cultural tastes more like non-university educated men’ which seems to fit the bill for our host’s original list of features, 

            A typical “Blue-Tribe” government employee will be a public school teacher, and a typical “Red-Tribe” government employee will be a cop.

            I’m most familiar with my fellow employees of The City and County of San Francisco, and culturally we may be divided into three groups:
            1) Those who went to suburban schools and have university diplomas or those that fit in culturally with them. More like Scott’s “Blue-Tribe” – teachers, attorneys,  physicians, and upper management that aren’t cops or firefighters. Sometimes second generation immigrants, but usually at least third generation and typically have had families in the U.S.A. longer than that. Average age about 35.
            2) Those who went to parochial schools in San Francisco, may have some college but not a diploma from a university with post-graduate programs, and also those that culturally fit in with them. Mostly more like Scott’s “Red-Tribe”. Cops, Firefighters, Carpenters, Electricians, but also Nurses who we can call “Purple-Tribe”. Average age about 50.
            3) Those who went to Ssn Francisco public schools or have kids who go to them and are without college diplomas, more 3rd and 4th generation in California African-Americans, and first generation Asian and Latino immigrants, more like the “Red-Tribe” than the “Blue”, especially the African-Americans (but frankly neither Red or Blue is a really close fit, and this is a lot of people, far more than @Scott Alexander’s tiny “Grey Tribe” that he bothers to list features of, which makes me doubt the usefulness of his “Tribes”, but here we are!). Bus Drivers, Crossing Guards, Custodians, often times clerical workers that have a “ceiling” on how far they may advance because no college diploma. Average age about 55.

            Typical the university educated come up with “new initiatives” that often involve more meetings and time spent at computers for record keeping that the rest of city staff doesn’t have nearly as much access to as they do (i.e. one computer for the 15 in my crew that we each have to stand in line for our now required log ins) which we hate.

            Sometimes after ten years of getting used to it the “new initiatives” do work better, but by that time another “initiative” will start that must be “implemented” and slows done what actual practical work that may be done until we get used to that latest damn new thing.

            Usually the best approach to new initiatives is to give the minimum amount of lip service to them that keeps upper management off of our books, use the old paper log books that we’ve been using for 50+ years and our procedures that we know work until upper management forgets about their initiative, often one low man on the totem pole new guy will be the one to do the log ins so we don’t have to stand in line at the damn computer.

            Upper management and elected officials are drift wood going from place to place in the sun, we are the depths of the deep blue sea that actually clean the streets (what we can), put the handcuffs on, empty the trash, replace the streetlights, et cetera. 

            Their ways are not our ways.

            A curious thing is that a way to get lauded by the uppers is to ignore them and come up with a work around, for example to clean the streets that have homeless encampments by-the-book will result in feces and urine dumped on a steamer truck operator, a work around is too do extra cleaning at local merchants areas in return for day old sandwiches (both the favoritism and accepting something for it are forbidden), then bribe the homeless with the sandwiches to move their tents and bedrooms so the sidewalks may be cleaned – a special commendation came from the man who’s now the Governor of California to the guy who came up with that trick for how clean his area was (and you tell each other but you don’t tell them how it’s done!). Without work arounds to some “general orders” real work doesn’t get done, so actually not much different than working for private industry when the owners are the grandkids of the founder instead of the founder.

          • Ketil says:

            Sometimes after ten years of getting used to it the “new initiatives” do work better, but by that time another “initiative” will start that must be “implemented” and slows done what actual practical work that may be done until we get used to that latest damn new thing.

            University-educated here, and with plenty of computer access. We hate this¹ as much as you do.

            ¹ Call it New Public Management, Scientific Management, Command and Control, or a rose by any other name. The basic premise seems to be that employees are not to be trusted, and that manager are unfamiliar with the actual work and can’t be bothered to keep up with what’s actually going on. As a consequence, the management process is instrumentalized, and leadership is executed via computer systems, all of them byzantinely complicated, buggy, and expensive, and the only positive result is that management is happier when they don’t have to concern themselves with the actual work being done, but can instead focus on making the often made-up numbers add up in their excel sheets.

        • Plumber says:

          @Urstoff >

          “…My particular impression of most US civil servants isn’t that they are ideological, but rather they’re people without college degrees that landed a decent job that’s hard to get fired from…”

          I resemble that remark!

        • Jesse E says:

          1.) This is somewhat simplistic, but in general, as an American looking at European politics compared to American politics is this, here’s what I’ve seen happen, historically –

          a.) European country passes new social welfare policy, center-right party comes in and says, “OK, the left did this, this, and this wrong, but obviously the goal of universal health care/parental leave/pensions/etc. is good, but we need to make the following changes so it works better.”

          b.) Democrat’s pass a new social welfare policy, Republicans come in and say, “this is socialism/welfare and we will destroy it the best we can the moment we get into power.”

          For a perfect example of this, look at the ACA. I’m not defending the ACA, but it was a moderate plan, based on centrist to center-right principles, and Republican’s acted apocalyptic in response to it. A Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan could’ve said something like, “well we think embracing the markets when it comes to health care is correct, and I’m glad President Obama has done so, I think they did x, y, and z wrong, which is why I support the Republican revision to the ACA that will open up more health care choice, expand access to HSA’s, all while protecting patients with pre-existing conditions, regulating the health insurance industry correctly, etc.” – there were plenty of centrist to center-right health care plans that did this (for example, universal catastrophic care), but for whatever reason, whatever replacement plan the GOP came up with continually was some mess that would’ve either ended with less people covered or incredibly increased costs for those who had coverage.

          The reason for this, I believe, is in part, is because official conservatism is in general, still fighting the New Deal, and as a result, right-leaning people are wary of joining the various alphabet soup of agencies to put forth center-right alternatives to current liberal dogma, since modern conservatism is only about limiting the powers of those alphabet soup of agencies as much as possible.

          Obviously, many millions of Democrats, Republicans, and independents work for the Social Security Administration, etc. but at the levels where somebody with a center-right view of things could be important, they simply aren’t there, because they either disagree with the existence of the department in the first place or a think tank job is more lucrative, personally and politically.

          Note, I say this all as a fairly left wing social democrat, but one whom if I lived in a foreign country, and the center right party won in someplace like Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, or Switzerland, it wouldn’t be something I’d worry about.

          People sometimes ask, why are Americans so obsessed with politics? Because politics in America has actual stakes.

          This also leads to issues with cost overruns and such – you know what say, a union in Madrid that builds train lines isn’t worried about if the conservatives win? The conservatives essentially trying to make their union illegal.

          2.) That’s part of what I mean – when every locality can basically veto large scale products, you lead to a patchwork system that doesn’t work at all, and leads to larger problems, as we’ve seen with transit and housing.

          • EchoChaos says:

            I believe, is in part, is because official conservatism is in general, still fighting the New Deal

            Actually mostly fighting the Great Society. The New Deal is pretty baked in. Gingrich was the last gasp of even theoretically remodeling Social Security, but even the most ardent right-wingers have given that up.

            The Great Society is newer and still much less ingrained.

          • cassander says:

            b.) Democrat’s pass a new social welfare policy, Republicans come in and say, “this is socialism/welfare and we will destroy it the best we can the moment we get into power.”

            They’ve never done that, not once has an entitlement ever been destroyed.

            For a perfect example of this, look at the ACA. I’m not defending the ACA, but it was a moderate plan, based on centrist to center-right principles,

            No, it wasn’t. It was based on a plan written by one of the most left wing state legislatures in the country and passed over the veto of the moderate republican governor, a plan that was left wing enough that Bernie Sanders had no trouble voting for it, but democrats like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman had to be bribed and cajoled into supporting it. There was absolutely nothing center right about it.

            . A Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan could’ve said something like, “well we think embracing the markets when it comes to health care is correct, and I’m glad President Obama has done so,

            He didn’t. there was absolutely nothing market oriented in the ACA. it set up exchanges where the government set prices, defined what could and couldn’t be sold, and where participation was mandatory. That’s not a market.

            The reason for this, I believe, is in part, is because official conservatism is in general, still fighting the New Deal,

            No one is fighting the new deal. Paul Ryan at his most ambitious never tried to touch social security. Hell, Ron Paul didn’t even want to touch it.

          • False says:

            @cassander

            Your first and second points here contradict one another, and actually lend credence to Jesse’s argument.

            The basic model of the ACA was in fact based on an alternative to single-payer healthcare proposed by the Heritage Foundation (https://healthcarereform.procon.org/sourcefiles/1989_assuring_affordable_health_care_for_all_americans.pdf), a center-right group if there ever was one. Even Republicans at the time considered this to be a viable market-based solution to healthcare. Healthcare has always been a regulated marketplace, with or without the ACA, and Jesse’s point here is that the ACA is a market-friendly solution as compared to a single-payer system (which, again, is a feature that appealed to conservatives merely 20 years ago). In fact, Republicans then turning around and condemning the ACA as monstrous is exactly what Jesse is talking about. I will not dump a bunch of links quoting Republican politicians as saying they will do everything in their power to overturn the ACA here because that would be tedious. The fact that they failed does not change the fact that it was a huge part of their political platform and election strategy.

            Paul Ryan at his most ambitious never tried to touch social security. 

            I’m not sure what to say here. He talked about it constantly/was considered the biggest advocate for conservative entitlement reform including social security. Again, just because he failed does not change the fact that he consistently tried to exert pressure on the political landscape along this axis, exactly the point Jesse is trying to make.

            As someone who currently doesn’t live in the U.S., the political dynamic Jesse is referring to is very much accurate, and it makes the American political discourse seem psychotic by comparison. The country I live in has (what would be considered by American standards) a 100% socialist single payer healthcare system (it’s actually illegal to run medical services for-profit; excluding cosmetic surgery, eye-care, etc.) but the conservative party currently in power would never dream of touching it, nor would they talk about doing so. It’s not within the political reality, because most people in this country, left-leaning and right-leaning, understand that healthcare cannot rely on market-based solutions and function in a fair and equitable way, and that’s why we have a government to regulate certain things. As in most countries (including the U.S. until the recent present), the two sides agree on the best outcome, just differ in their positions on how to get there. Modern Americans on opposite sides of the political divide are living on different planets.

          • cassander says:

            @false.

            The basic model of the ACA was in fact based on an alternative to single-payer healthcare proposed by the Heritage Foundation 

            No, it wasn’t. You should actually read the heritage plan. The Heritage was budget neutral, the ACA spent almost a 100 billion a year. Heritage did involve spending, but it did not pay for itself by illusory cuts to medicare, it paid for itself by abolishing the tax subsidy for employer provided care. Heritage had no employer mandate. In fact, it effectively abolished employer provided care and pushed everyone into the individual market. Heritage had a very modest (and thus less expensive) individual mandate, the ACA had a very expansive (and thus expensive) mandate. Heritage did not involve large expansions to medicaid. the two plans have nothing in common. Heritage was a genuine attempt at reforming the system and trying to use markets to make it more efficient. the ACA was about disrupting the existing system as little as possible for political reasons while improving coverage.

            Even Republicans at the time considered this to be a viable market-based solution to healthcare.

            And if the ACA was anything like the heritage plan, you’d have a point. It wasn’t. It had far more in common with hillarycare than anything heritage ever proposed.

            Healthcare has always been a regulated marketplace, with or without the ACA, and Jesse’s point here is that the ACA is a market-friendly solution

            And my point is that he is wrong. there is nothing market friendly about the ACA.

            as compared to a single-payer system

            Again, the ACA was so left wing that centrist democrats had to be cajoled into supporting it. The idea that Single payer and the trillion+ a year tax hike requires was on offer is nonsense.

            I’m not sure what to say here. He talked about it constantly/was considered the biggest advocate for conservative entitlement reform including social security.

            Again, you should read his actual plan. there were no changes to SS.

            Again, just because he failed does not change the fact that he consistently tried to exert pressure on the political landscape along this axis, exactly the point Jesse is trying to make.

            Again, your and Jesse’s opinion is not based in reality.

            As someone who currently doesn’t live in the U.S., the political dynamic Jesse is referring to is very much accurate

            I just proved that it wasn’t.

          • False says:

            @cassander

            I’m not sure why you felt the need to link to the heritage plan, as I myself did so in my own comment.

            Obviously the ACA is not exactly the Heritage plan, but to say they are nothing alike shows an ignorance about the rest of the landscape of healthcare system reform proposals. The Heritage plan is by far the closest thing to the ACA compared to other systems due to its combination of an individual mandate and private insurance subsidies. Later Republican-led proposals also introduced a regulated insurance exchange. Yes, some details differ; obviously the big one is the divide between democrats and republicans on whether there should be an employer mandate or individual mandate, (and only recently, starting with Romney’s veto of the mandate, about whether there should be a mandate at all) but this precisely what Jesse and I are talking about in terms of reasonable discussion and disagreement about how to reach a shared goal. The overarching philosophy of the heritage plan is the same as the ACA, and perhaps you should read Heritage foundation plan again. The Heritage plan

            1. Does in fact strongly mandate individuals to get insurance (Page 5 under section “2) Mandate all households to obtain adequate insurance”). There is no discussion nor reasonable analysis whether this would be “modest”. It makes the claim that the costs of this would be deferred through tax subsidies, but again, this is simply conjecture and a disagreement on method of enacting a mandate. Whether or not someone would think it would be “modest” is most likely a result of their political leanings.

            2) Does see an expansion of Medicaid (Page 6: Medicaid Reform). The change of criteria from welfare recipients to the poor would, by the paper’s own admission, expand the program. There is some discussion for how to keep costs down, but they seem to boil down to state-led “creative” solutions, and as this version of the plan never had to go into effect, we have no idea what these cost saving incentives would actually be or if they would actually work.

            Speaking of costs, your claim that the ACA had a yearly cost of $100 billion without associated savings is simply not factual: https://www.statnews.com/2019/03/22/affordable-care-act-controls-costs/

            Again, the disagreement boils down to who/which group is shouldering these costs, which I believe is a reasonable partisan issue. But to say that one plan would only reduce costs and one plan has only increased costs is false.

            Again, the ACA was so left wing that centrist democrats had to be cajoled into supporting it.

            This is precisely Jesse’s point. Only within the warped Overton window of American political discourse was the ACA “so left-wing”. Anywhere else in the world both it and the Heritage plan would be viewed as rather right-wing proposals, and clumsy ones at that. Jesse’s claim is that the reason for this warped perspective is the modern American conservative politician’s apocalyptic view of government intervention as a solution to social problems, which forces everyone to move to the right, politically speaking. “Centrist Democrats” and their associated views are right-wing everywhere else in the world.

            As for Paul Ryan, you are again confusing his failure to tackle social security with a desire not to. He very much wished he could reduce/eliminate Social Security and talked about it a lot (https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2018/11/02/republican-public-opposition-to-social-security-and-medicare/#69d8be8b4e71) (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/debate-over-medicare-social-security-other-federal-benefits-divides-gop/2015/11/04/166619a8-824e-11e5-a7ca-6ab6ec20f839_story.html), but realized it wasn’t politically feasible. That does not refute anything Jesse said about U.S. political discourse.

            I just proved that it wasn’t.

            This is a misunderstanding between you and I. I meant to refer to the political reality outside of the U.S., which I can assure you is accurate.

          • cassander says:

            @false

            Obviously the ACA is not exactly the Heritage plan, but to say they are nothing alike shows an ignorance about the rest of the landscape of healthcare system reform proposals. The Heritage plan is by far the closest thing to the ACA compared to other systems due to its combination of an individual mandate and private insurance subsidies.

            I already explained how this isn’t the case. “Nu-uh” isn’t a response.

            The overarching philosophy of the heritage plan is the same as the ACA, and perhaps you should read Heritage foundation plan again. The Heritage plan

            Again, I have already explained how this isn’t the case. You’re confusing an extremely superficial similarity with reality that the proposals have very different motives, spend vastly different amounts of money, and take very different approaches to solving the problem, the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

            1. Does in fact strongly mandate individuals to get insurance (Page 5 under section “2) Mandate all households to obtain adequate insurance”). There is no discussion nor reasonable analysis whether this would be “modest”.

            given the size of the subsidies they were planning, it would have to be.

            Speaking of costs, your claim that the ACA had a yearly cost of $100 billion without associated savings is simply not factual: https://www.statnews.com/2019/03/22/affordable-care-act-controls-costs/

            The CBO disagrees, as do the hundreds of billions of dollars budgeted in the original bill. Now, it’s true that the original bill claimed it would offset those costs by dramatically cutting medicare spending, but that was never going to happen and never did.

            Again, the disagreement boils down to who/which group is shouldering these costs, which I believe is a reasonable partisan issue. But to say that one plan would only reduce costs and one plan has only increased costs is false.

            I did not speak of costs, I spoke of spending. the ACA involved the government spending hundreds of billions of dollars more than it was before, heritage did not. You might have noticed that, in general, conservatives are not in favor of massive increases in government spending.

            This is precisely Jesse’s point. Only within the warped Overton window of American political discourse was the ACA “so left-wing”. Anywhere else in the world both it and the Heritage plan would be viewed as rather right-wing proposals, and clumsy ones at that.

            Jesse’s claim is that republicans try to destroy entitlements instead of reform them. If so, they’re terrible at it, because no entitlement has ever been destroyed and no republican advocates destroying them. You’re using the words of their critics as if they were honest descriptions of their motives.

            As for Paul Ryan, you are again confusing his failure to tackle social security with a desire not to. He very much wished he could reduce/eliminate Social Security and talked about it a lot

            Your links contain nothing by ryan saying anything like that, and a lot of other people claiming that’s what he thinks with zero evidence. Mis-representing his desire to give people personal SS accounts or voucherize medicare as “proof” he wants to eliminate those programs is not a sound argument. In reality, he’s doing exactly what jesse claims republicans don’t, trying to make those programs work better.

          • False says:

            @cassander

            The CBO disagrees, as do the hundreds of billions of dollars budgeted in the original bill. Now, it’s true that the original bill claimed it would offset those costs by dramatically cutting Medicare spending, but that was never going to happen and never did.

            This is nonsense. Your link is a 2011 budgetary estimate of the effects of repealing the ACA whose numbers did not pan out in reality. Read my link to see what the actual costs and savings were as of 2019.

            I did not speak of costs, I spoke of spending. the ACA involved the government spending hundreds of billions of dollars more than it was before, heritage did not. You might have noticed that, in general, conservatives are not in favor of massive increases in government spending.

            Yes, I understand the republican rhetorical sleight of hand where tax subsidies don’t count as spending as long as we ignore things like costs, and remain unmoved. Again, this is a partisan issue; who is ultimately underwriting healthcare: the government, employers, or individuals. Yes, I’m aware of who likes which options.

            Its fine that your personal opinion of the matter is that the heritage plan and the ACA are nothing alike based on the criteria you chose (spending as opposed to subsidies, what sort of mandates), but your claim about the two proposals spending vastly different amounts is just false, to say nothing of the fact that most analysts of healthcare reform in the U.S. and abroad due not use your rubric as a defining metric for comparing healthcare systems and have come to the conclusion that these two plans actually do share very similar approaches to solving the healthcare problem. In addition to taking into account the actual events of history and the intent of the people who drafted the ACA, people have mostly come to the conclusion that these plans are similar and/or based on one another. It’s actually incumbent on you to explain why your rubric (which is heavily biased to the concerns of American libertarian conservatives only and not currently used by any government on earth) is superior to the one used by the majority of analysts and lay people looking at this problem.

            Jesse’s claim is that republicans try to destroy entitlements instead of reform them.

            No, his claim is that when they threaten to do so, it distorts political discourse. The name of the repeal bill in your CBO link is “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act” … C’mon!

            If so, they’re terrible at it,

            Finally, we all agree on something!

          • cassander says:

            This is nonsense. Your link is a 2011 budgetary estimate of the effects of repealing the ACA whose numbers did not pan out in reality. Read my link to see what the actual costs and savings were as of 2019.

            Your 2019 report looks at the fact that overall healthcare expenditures grew less than was projected in 2008, then attributes the entirety of this effect to the ACA. this is despite the fact that, when you look into the details, the slowdown in cost growth started before the ACA went into effect and took place in multiple other OECD countries. It’s rank hackery and certainly doesn’t trump CBO reports looking at actual cost data.

            If you’re willing to treat that sort of nonsense as evidence while maintain that a CBO study on the cost of the repeal of the ACA doesn’t have anything to say on what it thinks those costs are, there’s no point in continuing this conversation.

        • The Nybbler says:

          The USPS used to be a laughingstock, known for poor service. I remember some decades ago they put out a report claiming an 80% on-time record for Priority Mail, and said that was pretty good. Congress hasn’t changed the way they are funded since then.

      • cassander says:

        Now, there are things the US Postal Office could do that other nations have done to be even better (ie. setting up retail outlets in post offices, raising prices, shuttering less-used offices, and ending six-day delivery), but I think your average person would be shocked how well regarded the US Post Office is internationally.

        Competent but excessively expensive tends to be the best one can hope for with US bureaucracies, but I have a hard time calling an organization with a valuable monopoly that loses money hand over fist a success, even if it’s better than the average post office.

        • JDG1980 says:

          The Post Office doesn’t have a monopoly on package delivery. They do have one on first-class mail, but that is of diminishing value in an era where the majority of communication is electronic.

          Also, one major reason the Post Office is in the red is because of absurd pension pre-funding requirements (75 years!) that no other organization, private or public, has to follow.

          • Aftagley says:

            Also, one major reason the Post Office is in the red is because of absurd pension pre-funding requirements (75 years!)

            I remember hearing about this claim, and after looking at it a bit concluded that the 75 year thing was a good idea and critiques of it were overblown.

            AFAICT the post office is required to analyze how many employees they have, analyze how much it’s excepted those employees will cost USPS over the course of their lives, and then take measures in advance to to have that money allocated before it’s needed. This reduces the chance that in 30 years or whenever USPS finally closes its door, the retirees aren’t left holding the bag.

            This is sensible, right?

          • Nick says:

            This is sensible, right?

            I do remember seeing an earlier discussion of this on SSC. My takeaway was that, while the requirements for USPS are pretty steep, the requirements for other government pension funding aren’t nearly steep enough, with some states facing pension burdens they won’t fund and can’t get rid of.

          • cassander says:

            Also, one major reason the Post Office is in the red is because of absurd pension pre-funding requirements (75 years!) that no other organization, private or public, has to follow.

            First, the pre-funding has largely been accomplished and they’re still losing money hand over fist, and for most of the years when they were pre-funding they would still have been in the read even without the pension payments.

            Second, organizations absolutely SHOULD be required to fully fund their pensions, private companies are required to do so. They didn’t have to stash away 75 years worth of cash, they just had to get actuarially sound. The only reason it cost them so much was because was because like most government agencies, they’d been systematically underfunding theirs.

    • AG says:

      Somehow BART keeps winning the International Rail Rodeo, beating out even Japan teams, which is fucking preposterous.

      Then again, the competition is about spotting problems, so maybe BART is better at noticing them because they keep having them, ba-dump-ch.

    • sourcreamus says:

      A big difference in bureaucratic efficiency seems to be union culture.
      In some parts of the world unions seem to be more interested in working with companies to become better, in America the way union laws are set up, unions are inherently adversarial.
      Government workers are all either union members or governed by union contracts. Thus seniority is more important than skill and getting rid of a bad worker is so involved most supervisors don’t even try. Also there is relatively little money for capital improvements than would increase efficiency since all the money is going to salaries and generous benefits.

  43. Viliam says:

    I hate the Android bloatware. Yes, I have an older phone. So I am trying to download the updates, and it says “first you need to remove at least 300 MB of apps” and gives me a list of apps I have installed — there are four of them, and to free 300 MB of space, I would have to remove all four.

    Here is a list of applications that came pre-installed, that I never used and never intend to use on the phone, but I can’t uninstall any of them, because f-ing Google. I am translating the names to English, perhaps incorrectly; it’s just to give you the idea.

    – YouTube
    – Movies Google Play
    – Games Google Play
    – Music Google Play
    – Google+ for G Suite
    – Google Messages
    – Google Presentations
    – Google Spreadsheets
    – Google Documents
    – Google Drive
    – Books Google Play
    – Google Keep
    – Photos Google

    So no, I can’t uninstall any of these dozen useless apps. The only choice is to uninstall the four that I actually use.

    Somehow, three years ago there was enough disk space for both Google bloatware and my apps. I actually had more of them, but recently I had to start uninstalling until the bare minimum remained.

    • ana53294 says:

      Yes, it’s really annoying. But I hate Apple more, and everybody who has used a Windows phone told me it’s even worse than Android.

      I finally gave up that battle and bought a phone with 250 GB, just for all the bloatware, so I can have the apps I actually like. That should be enough for several iterations of obesity.

      Unlike for computers, AFAIK, there isn’t a usable free OS for phones that would have the apps I actually use. Besides, banking apps are only available in Android or Apple, so I would be locked out of online banking without an Android phone or an iPhone.

    • Gobbobobble says:

      Dunno about your specific phone model, but I can free up space on mine by uninstalling the updates to the bloatware apps. Might help a little?

    • Lambert says:

      download ADB.
      Set phone to ADB mode.
      Plug phone into computer and confirm on phone that you want to use ADB.
      List all packages.
      Remove packages you don’t want.
      Install some packages to SD, if you can download the programs to your computer.

      I forget the exact commands you need, but googling ‘remove packages with ADB should get what you want.

  44. Canyon Fern says:

    Presenting Slate Star Showdex, Episode 3. [Just tuning in? Episode 1; Episode 2.]
    -#-
    On the San Jose airport runway, a commercial plane takes off. Final destination: Lynchburg, Virginia.

    Dr. Scott ‘Slate’ Alexander puts on his earmuffs, and settles down to cogitate on his cases.

    First, the lizardman.

    Two days ago:

    “Why are you here?” Scott says.

    At 5 feet 2 inches tall, Ldlldl Bask is above-average for a lizardman. His black eyes are expressionless, and only a human would mistake the curve of his green-brown snout for a smile.

    “You’re the bessst private eye around, and we only dare reveal ourssselves to rationalisssts,” says Bask. “I’m here on official businessss as Ssspeaker for Sssan Jose.”

    “I’m listening.”

    “Lizardmen are being attacked,” says Bask. “Three prominent members of our community were beaten and injured. Ressspectable lizardmen, honessst lizardmen, who jussst want to live life apart from humans, are now in one of your hossspitals! I want the perpetrators identified and arresssted for usss to deal with.”

    “Why would the Speaker of a lizardman regional council take a request to me, instead of the state council?” Slate Alexander says. “Can’t the State Speaker in Los Angeles solve your problem?”

    Ldlldl Bask flicks his tongue. “Ssslate Alexssander, you know how we organize ourssselves, but you do not underssstand our cussstoms. There are ssso few lizardmen left. The Ssstate Ssspeaker would react mossst viciousssly if he perceived a threat to lizardmankind. Even the egg of a threat would be enough.”

    Either I solve this or the lizardmen do … and they aren’t picky about collateral damage, Slate thinks.

    “Alright, you’ve got me over a barrel. I’ll do it.”

    “Excellent, Dr. Alexssander.” Bask’s eyes narrow to slits. “I trussst that the lizardmen of Sssan Jose will have no more sssuch problemsss.”

    “You’ve got it, Mr. Bask.” Scott, struck by a sudden fatigue, reaches for his pocket. “MealSquare?”

    Now:

    As if being blackmailed by Bask wasn’t enough, Miss Yudkowsky had come calling yesterday.

    Eliezer is missing. He had a luxurious social life, a prestigious job at General Intelligence, and the respect and admiration of all rationalists. What would make a man like that leave everything behind?

    Dr. Alexander starts as an air stewardess touches his shoulder. He cracks the ‘muffs.

    “Sir, we’ll be touching down in just a few minutes.”

    At Lynchburg Airport, Scott hails a cab.

    When Scott names his destination, the driver scowls. “That’s way out in the country!”

    “You’re right, but you needn’t worry about driving back without a fare,” Scott says. “I have business at this address. I want you to wait while I conduct my meeting, then take me back into the city.”

    “All that waiting around on the meter? I hope you got deep pockets.” The cabbie steps on the gas and noses the car out on the boulevard which feeds the highway.

    Two hours later, the car exits the highway onto a country road with just one lane per side. The one-lane road winds around pastures and wells; cattle and goats; woodstands and rivers.

    They reach a point where their lane branches off to a dirt track. “That’s the one,” says the intrepid Slate Alexander. The cabbie grunts and turns onto the track.

    For ten minutes, all is bumps and jumps. Then:

    “Holy cow!” says the cabbie.

    From their vantage point on the dirt path, Scott and the driver can see a stately manor on the hilltop. The path leads nowhere else.

    Upon cresting the hill, the path terminates in a loop driveway outside the grounds gate. Scott asks the cabbie to wait here.

    “It’s none of my business, but … jeez!” says the cabbie. “Whoever lives here must have stepped out of a funnybook!”

    It is past 6 PM. Scott Alexander treads the cobblestone path which leads to the front entrance. On his left is a clean-cropped lawn, suitable for croquet or picnicking; on the right is a modest sculpture garden.

    The house itself is a superb Colonial specimen, with sturdy pillars, countless windows, a symmetrical facade, a spectacular entryway.

    Scott Alexander, doctor-investigator, marches up to the enormous double doors. A cord hangs down, like a bell pull, from the gloomy underbelly of the balcony which surmounts the entrance.

    He gives the cord a tug. No bell sounds, but the heavy door slowly swings open. Once he steps inside, some hidden mechanism slams it shut.

    Scott finds himself in a parlor. Lamps in the corners of the room are supplemented by an green-enameled candelabra on a dainty table. Joining the candelabra is a tea service set for two: two plates, two napkins, two sets of silverware, two tea cups, two saucers, and the tea pot. There is also a dish of butter and a loaf of dark bread.

    Scott Alexander approaches the tea table and takes a seat. Each item in the tea service has been embellished with a painted “G”.

    The Man of Slate tears off some bread. Rye. Freshly-baked. Still warm. He chews, deep in thought. The air is warm and stuffy, prompting him to remove his coat and fedora and lay them on the ground.

    “I know you’re listening,” he says to the empty seat across from him. “Eliezer has gone missing, and at the same time there’s been anti-lizardman crime on the streets. Nothing is a coincidence, but I can’t piece any clues together. I’ve come to you for advice.”

    Scott pours himself some tea. A delicate aroma: Chinese green. He sips, savors, and sips again.

    A few minutes later, as Scott drains the tea cup, something brushes against his calf. Scott looks down to find himself being rubbed by a calico cat. The cat is wearing a collar, attached to which is a wooden tube.

    Scott grasps the tube, unscrews its top, and pulls out a tight scroll of typewriter paper. The writing on it begins like so:

    Thank you for visiting. I can tell you that Eliezer was last seen entering a Las Vegas hotel room, two days ago. At that time he was in the company of a lizardman, the known radical Spliggo Hiss.

    The scroll goes on to explain Hiss in unbelievable detail: his known associates in the underworld; his track record of agitation and terrorism; his hobbies and vices; even the names of his family members.

    Scott shakes his head in amazement. “You’ve always been thorough, old friend. The Yudkowskys paid me well, so here’s something for your time.” He places a crisp $100 bill on the plate opposite him.

    Scott shoos the cat, dons his hat, and puts his coat on while crossing the parlor. Before he exits, he turns back to face the tea table.

    “I’ll come back later this year to visit,” he says. “Just the two of us. Just like this.” It’s a promise Scott means to keep.

    The cab driver pulls away from the gate.

    Scott Alexander turns for one last look. The magnificent manor stands forlornly against the setting sun.

    If he had a telescope, and knew just where to peep, he might see the manor’s sole occupant, gazing benevolently from the highest, smallest window.

    Evening fades into night. The face departs from the window.

    Far out in the Virginia countryside, all is quiet for Gwern.
    -#-

    This episode of Slate Star Showdex brought to you by:
    Bitcoin.

    Good morning, everyone. I’m Nakamoto Satoshi, and it’s an honor among thieves to be here.

    Monetary crime has never been tougher. The Mint is printing greenbacks with tracking numbers and invisible ink. The Treasury’s been stamping serials on gold dollars for years. I can’t even cash a forged check without having to show a forged ID!

    Like many of you, I launched my criminal career on the street: in my case, Wall Street. I used to be a professional egghead — a banker! — but Black Thursday changed all that. I thought to myself, “Never again will I trust a fat cat with my ill-gotten gains. What can I do instead?”

    My fellow crooks, I now know how to avoid the twin tyrannies of banking and Federalism. Stop dealing with Uncle Sam’s funny money and start taking payments in my currency: Bitcoin.

    I’m changing the face of criminal payments forever. Privacy? Security? Anonymity? A total lack of FBI wise guys? It’s all that and more, my friends!

    Big-time hustlers, listen up if you want to stay big. Small-time con men, listen up if you want to get big. My organization can train your accountant to be an egghead just like me. You wanna stay a chump forever? Be my guest! But if you wanna be a real player in this town, visit my office and kiss your cash goodbye — ’cause if you’re not making history, you’re missing out. Thank you very much!

    • Ttar says:

      Beautiful. I kept waiting for there to be something about low dose aspirin and nootropics coming with the tea, and a hypothetical statistical analysis of the likely genetic traits the Mastermind behind the kidnapping would have.

      I’m eagerly waiting for Mencius and Nick Land to show up. So far honestly the product placements and ad sections have been my favorite. The mealsquares as cigarettes conceit is perfect on so many levels.

      • Canyon Fern says:

        Thank you for your continued praise, @Ttar. Your expectation of more detail in the characterizations of cameos is understandable; in all cases, however, I am focused on comedy first, accuracy second. @Incurian was correct to call this a pastiche.

        Much obliged to hear that you like the fake ads! After having the idea of writing a MealSquare ad like an old-fashioned cigarette promo, the rest of the ads have written themselves. (You’ll also note that I’ve been coy about verbs: no character is actually seen to either smoke or eat a MealSquare.)

        Finally, I realize I’ve neglected to thank Ludovico, my human handler, editor, and typist. Having fronds in place of fingers, it is not my lot to operate a keyboard, and Slate Star Showdex would exist only in my phloem were it not for Ludovico’s labor.

        [edit: I saw your last comment, and responded.]

    • Enkidum says:

      I once heard bitcoin described as getting computers to play sudoku so you can buy heroin. Seems to match the line you’re taking here. Nice work again!

      • Canyon Fern says:

        @Enkidum, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Slate Star Showdex, and for strewing kind words at the base of my pot.

        To be clear, I take no line on Bitcoin whatsoever as it is used in the real world: plants have little use for money. But it was enough to inspire another one of these parody old-timey ads, and my first rule of creativity is: “Know when enough is enough.”

        Perhaps one day the sudoku will be unnecessary, and computers will sell heroin directly. Fully Automated Luxury, indeed.

        [edit: I’ve just seen your comment on Episode 2. There’s a prize for you in my response.]

    • liate says:

      I was very surprised to see Lynchburg referenced. Is there a reason other than just “it’s a place getting towards the middle of nowhere in VA with an airport” that you chose it?

    • jgr314 says:

      @Canyon Fern: at first I’d understood your handle to be a nom de plume, but your recent comments clarify that this is your true identity. May I be so bold as to presume that you were one of the uncredited co-stars in Zach Galifianakis’s best work? From the tone of your writing and the style of your stagecraft, I am certain you were working stage left.

      Assuming all that is true (of which I have no doubt): are you willing to share any gossip about your other co-star on stage right? Surely there wasn’t any on-set romance … unless???

      • Canyon Fern says:

        My dear @jgr314, you’ve caught me out. I did indeed get my start in comedy while working on Between Two Ferns, but that’s not the whole story. There have in fact been many ferns on that set (though I never met another which was sentient. Sorry, no romance.)

        A few episodes into my tenure, I decided I was due for a pruning. My handler, Ludovico, did good work as always — but when I showed up for the next episode, they told me I wasn’t leafy and impressive enough to match my counterpart! Another fern took my place, and I was left to drift. I am not ashamed to admit I spent a few days binging on fertilizer.

        Have a Marmot of Gratitude, why don’t you. It’s the least I can do for your cleverness.

    • noyann says:

      > Eliezer is missing. [ … ] What Why would make a man like that leave everything behind?

      Because his two-bedroom appartment was too bright with its ‘130 or so 60-watt-equivalent high-CRI LED bulbs’.

      > Eliezer was last seen entering a Las Vegas hotel room, two days ago.

      Where the rooms are dimly lit. He just needs not go outside. But who does, in Vegas?

      You’ve probably been told countless times, so a mere +1 for ‘very talented, etc’. Great reading, although, being mostly a lurker I’d need a cheat sheet for the full savouritude.

      • Canyon Fern says:

        @noyann, I see you are getting the hang of things! Thanks for your contribution of story ideas, and for saying “great reading.”

        • noyann says:

          You asked for it (in a way).

          In a former thread you asked Who knew a plant could make a human smile?
          Well, there are at least acting [edit: better link] (crank up the volume and rattle your pot!) and sacrificial funerals [edit 3: those cousins will live on forever in the form of memories of very good times, methinks, not that I would ever…].

          edit 2: It might be interesting to sample the first while sampling the second.

    • Balbazac says:

      This was just fantastic, I was chuckling the entire time; if the approval of strangers on the internet means anything to you, then please, accept mine! I also read the earlier episodes and the hand-shouldered line in part 2 made me laugh out loud. Posts like these are the reason I lurk here.

      Edit — embarrassing grammar mistake.

      • Canyon Fern says:

        @Balbazac!

        “Posts like these are the reason I lurk here,” you say? That is high praise indeed. I am pleased to have made you chuckle; pleased that you liked the “hand-shouldered” line; pleased that you took the time to comment. You’re a me-pleaser, you are!

        Approval accepted, and I hope you will accept this reciprocal gift: one Badger of Gratitude, for all badgerine purposes.

    • broblawsky says:

      Do you have an index for the rest of these? They’re great.

      • Canyon Fern says:

        @broblawsky, thank you for saying so!

        You can find Episode 1 here, and Episode 2 here.

        That is the whole of the index. Episode 3 is the one from today, and Episodes 4+ are forthcoming.

        • noyann says:

          From ~5 onward, could you keep a page with links to all episodes, or the full story (updated), for late readers to catch up?

          • Canyon Fern says:

            @Noyann,

            At the top of each episode, I have been putting links to all the previous ones. From now on, I will also put those links at the bottom of each episode, or maybe in a reply to the episode itself. That way you will always be able to find them.

            Your suggestion to put all the parts into one page (kept up to date) is also a good one. Perhaps I’ll start a website in the future, with the first page on the site being the collected Slate Star Showdex. I’ll ruminate on the idea.

            One more thing: you’re a good suggester! Please, at my expense, avail yourself of one Giraffe of Gratitude.

          • noyann says:

            I foresee (50%) that a unified website will be listed on rationalist fiction sites; the audience is just too overlapping.

            > Please, at my expense, avail yourself of one Giraffe of Gratitude.

            Thank you so much! I might consider interbreeding it with my Swine of Laziness, for a future full of easily available neck steaks of gratifying taste.

        • broblawsky says:

          Much obliged.

        • b_jonas says:

          This, yes. I upvoted the comment because it has links to the previous parts of the serial that it continues. So many comments on SSC don’t have that, and I find them hard to follow because you can’t figure out what they’re a response to. Also the writeup has no typos that I noticed. Thanks to you or your editor Ludovico for attention to these details.

          • Canyon Fern says:

            @b_jonas,

            Thank you for praising my attention to detail! We have a bit of experience in web publishing, so we know it’s important to provide ample links for latecomers. Credit for warding off typos must be given to Ludovico; I can frondle my way around, but cannot use a human keyboard.

            b_jonas, do please have yourself a Hamster of Gratitude for your kind comment.

  45. Hackworth says:

    I’ve read about Alpha Go Zero that it didn’t employ entirely new strategies, but in fact “borrowed” from centuries-old ones that had been dismissed since then by human masters. Combined with a recent Dilbert comic strip, I wonder how we could trust the answers of an oracle AI.

    How could we tell whether the AI gave a really dumb answer or a brilliant one? Do we have anything to go by except past experience, i.e. trial and error and a perpetual non-zero chance that the AI might break its streak of being correct with the next answer? Can we ever accept or dismiss the answers of a supposedly super-human intelligence if we can’t understand it?

    • Aftagley says:

      Combined with a recent Dilbert comic strip, I wonder how we could trust the answers of an oracle AI.

      That was the most visually unappealing thing I think I’ve ever seen. What is going on with that art style?

    • Doctor Mist says:

      Interesting question, but there are at least a few ways you could nibble at the problem.

      Complexity theory is replete with problems that are very hard to find an answer to, but quite easy to check an answer to. This isn’t directly helpful, since an AI that gave you a correct solution to, say, a big traveling-salesman problem either went ahead and spent the exponential time needed to find it or figured out that P=NP, in which case the proof that its polynomial-time is correct is the interesting part, and we might not be able to follow that.

      But I’m thinking there are real-world analogies. If it comes up with a cure for cancer, you can do the usual double-blind tests that you would do if a human came up with it. By ourselves we might not have the smarts or the bandwidth for megadoses of curcumin combined with cucumber water to rise to the top of our list of things to try.

      If it tells us that 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, it’s pretty hard to check its work, but I would hope that the questions we ask the oracle would be more well-formed than that.

      It’s true that after a long streak of correct results, we might be less and less inclined to verify the answers. But how is that much different from how most of us deal with expert opinion in areas outside our own expertise? (Note that the uniqueness of the oracle in your story is striking: would you be less worried if there were a couple hundred independently designed oracles that mostly agreed on an answer?)

      • Hackworth says:

        If it comes up with a cure for cancer, you can do the usual double-blind tests that you would do if a human came up with it. By ourselves we might not have the smarts or the bandwidth for megadoses of curcumin combined with cucumber water to rise to the top of our list of things to try.

        That would count as trial-and-error I think. Of course you can rightfully call it Science because you’d take notes and throw statistics at the data. It’s certainly a method for problems where you can apply small-scale science before you go all out.

        But what if for example the AI told us the best solution (assuming the problem of what “best” even means is solved) to global warming was to dump megatonnes of iron powder into the oceans, that it’s a highly non-linear effect (i.e. you can’t approximate it with small-scale experiments), and we’d better do it yesterday than today? In other words, something drastic and, for better or worse, irreversible?

        • Doctor Mist says:

          That would be a tough one.

          In the old days when we thought automated predicate logic was the likely implementation of AI, you could get it to explain its reasoning. But if it’s all ML/neural nets, it may not be able to explain its conclusions any more convincingly than we can.

          If we are in a situation where the correct action must be taken this minute, with no opportunity for discussion, we’re boned anyway, AI or no.

    • Aftagley says:

      I’ve read about Alpha Go Zero that it didn’t employ entirely new strategies, but in fact “borrowed” from centuries-old ones that had been dismissed since then by human masters.

      Do you have a source for this point? I’d love to learn more about it. My prior was that Alpha Go Zero taught itself to play Go from the ground up and then was able to beat the best humans using strategies it developed itself. If instead it was pre-loaded with various strategies and merely optimized them / played them better than humans can, that changes my perception of the technology.

      • eyeballfrog says:

        I think it’s more accurate to say that AlphaGo revived old strategies that had been considered bad in the past by showing that they could be made to work. For a chess-based analogy, the Sicilian defense was considered a rather toothless defense in the 19th century that accomplished little for black and saw negligible play. It was only in the 20th century that black players figured out how to capitalize on the imbalances it creates, and is now considered to be an aggresive defense for black and is the most popular response to 1. e4 at grandmaster level. In a further twist, AlphaZero and LeelaZero don’t like it, preferring the classical response 1… e5. I wonder if human play will follow suit.

        • Nick says:

          To your question, my understanding is that there are going to be differences between engine play and human play regardless. Some positions are virtually equal evaluation-wise but still much easier for one player to play than the other. Like positions where white has an obvious move each turn, but black has to find a difficult reply turn after turn or he’ll be worse. So while it’s interesting when LeelaZero revives or finds an interesting move, it doesn’t always translate to a new human-viable line.

      • Hackworth says:

        No, “borrowed” was just a figure of speech. AGZ did teach itself everything. What I’ve red is that some Go analysts recognized similarities between its playstyle and those centuries-old, dismissed strategies.

        One possible source is this Q&A, especially point 4 of the answer, though not exactly what I remember reading:

        AlphaGo also seems to be very comfortable playing 6-space extensions, which by conventional human wisdom are considered taboo because they are almost always too vulnerable to invasion, regardless of how much support you have from nearby thickness.

        Note that I can not vouch for any of the answer, since I barely know the basics of the game myself. What I took away was that AGZ uses strategies that have names, are known to human players. They are considered bad but, as it turns out, are actually correct, “only” too difficult for humans to wrap their heads around.

        • jgr314 says:

          I think point (2) about josekis is more clearly on-point to your original post. It is similar to what eyeballfrog said above with the chess analogy, but even stronger. To explain more, here are three key strategic concepts from go:
          – making your moves as efficient as possible is the key to strong play. This is very difficult because there are so many legally possible moves at each stage and (usually) so many that are tactically viable.
          – groups of stones fall into three categories (essentially): alive (the opponent cannot kill them, even if the opponent moves first), dead (the owner cannot make them alive, even if the owner moves first), undetermined (if the owner plays first, they can be made alive, if the opponent players first, they can be made dead).
          – losing groups of stones can be bad, but it just cost points, it doesn’t end the game (there’s not checkmate equivalent). Sometimes it is enough points to determine the outcome, sometimes it isn’t. Keeping a group alive/killing a group needs to be weighed against other options.

          Learning to classify groups of stones is a key area of study for improving go players, with established problems that range from trivial (someone with 5 minutes explanation of the rules can answer) to difficult to very very difficult. In general, the fewer stones in a problem, the more possible lines of play, the more difficult to determine.

          Learning which stones to sacrifice is, AFAIK, an even more advanced skill. There aren’t established problem sets that I’ve seen which are much beyond very simple heuristics (single stones are fine to sacrifice, unless they are playing some other role beyond just the direct points).

          What point (2) in that link indicates is that AZ is better than accumulated human knowledge about determining alive/dead groups at an earlier stage. That gives it an efficiency advantage. (Note, and alternative is that it is better at determining the value of sacrifices against alternative moves, or some combination).

          In either case, that seems to me more than reviving old ideas.

        • lightvector says:

          I’m an experienced Go player and I suspect that you are ascribing fair too much significance to the “borrowing of centuries-old dismissed strategies”.

          Over the centuries, players have pretty thoroughly explored an enormous number of the plausible corner patterns, side extensions, and possible kinds of moves. Judgment of the results of these patterns is of course very hard because it is so early in the game, so popular styles have drifted over time through a very wide range of the space, and moreover even aside from the popular variations at all times there has been plenty of experimentation by individual groups of pro players for other less popular lines and variations.

          It would have been incredibly surprising if a large fraction of AGZ’s moves were ones that hadn’t been explored at *some* point by humans. Yet, it would also have been incredibly surprising if AGZ’s moves all happened to match exactly whatever the modern popular style was, given how much that popular style has historically wandered over time and between different pros.

          Neither surprise happened. Rather, exactly one would have expected has happened: the vast majority of AGZ’s moves in different situations follow lines that have been explored by humans already, but those moves are distributed widely across the range, rather than being only from the most modern pre-AGZ style. Some of its moves *do* match the most modern pre-AGZ style, but some move match those that were more popular a few years ago, some of them a few decades ago, and a few of them a century or two ago, etc.

          Overall, I would say that actually for AGZ and Leela Zero (Leela Zero is a open-source replication of AGZ that has essentially reached a similar vastly-superhuman level of strength at this point), these bots’ choice of shapes and moves in different situations is actually vastly more similar to the modern style than with any of the the two-centuries-ago styles – if you look in old joseki dictionaries, you see an enormous number of “ancient” deprecated lines that nobody plays any more, and also AGZ/LZ plays almost none of them, where as AGZ/LZ *do* agree with and play some modern lines (or commonly, LZ mildly disagrees with a move or two within the line, but aside from those specific branch points, agrees with the of the rest of the line).

          And yes, also a few of the superhuman bot moves were things that humans have basically not significantly explored or considered at all, as one would also expect. These moves of course get a lot of attention (far exceeding the literal proportion of moves that they comprise), for obvious reasons.

          Does that help? Basically, from a overall perspective, the overall degree to which super-human AI has both matched and differed from human play in Go has been pretty much right within the window of reasonable expectations.

          (Also, note that AGZ, LZ, ELF, Fine Art and other top bots also still disagree with *each other* about some of the best lines!)

          • Enkidum says:

            Thanks for the summary – everything you say makes sense to me, at any rate.

          • Aftagley says:

            +1

            I also found this very interesting and helpful.

          • Enkidum says:

            Reminder for those who are into Go that @johan_larson started an SSC group on the Online Go Server that anyone is welcome to join, with members of all skill levels. I’ve had a few very enjoyable games with people already.

          • Hackworth says:

            Thanks for the reply. As I said, I barely know the basic rules, let alone any strategy, so I’ll have to take your word for most of what you said. I do have one question though:

            Basically, from a overall perspective, the overall degree to which super-human AI has both matched and differed from human play in Go has been pretty much right within the window of reasonable expectations.

            This makes the impact of AlphaGo on the Go world seem almost tame. Was that really the prevailing sentiment in the Go community? Do you have sources predicting AlphaGo’s strength before it actually saw public play? The wikipedia article on AGZ has quotes such as

            On the potential for AlphaGo’s development, Lee said he will have to wait and see but also said it will affect young Go players. Mok Jin-seok, who directs the South Korean national Go team, said the Go world has already been imitating the playing styles of previous versions of AlphaGo and creating new ideas from them, and he is hopeful that new ideas will come out from AlphaGo Zero. Mok also added that general trends in the Go world are now being influenced by AlphaGo’s playing style. “At first, it was hard to understand and I almost felt like I was playing against an alien. However, having had a great amount of experience, I’ve become used to it,” Mok said. “We are now past the point where we debate the gap between the capability of AlphaGo and humans. It’s now between computers.” Mok has reportedly already begun analyzing the playing style of AlphaGo Zero along with players from the national team. “Though having watched only a few matches, we received the impression that AlphaGo Zero plays more like a human than its predecessors,” Mok said. Chinese Go professional, Ke Jie commented on the remarkable accomplishments of the new program: “A pure self-learning AlphaGo is the strongest. Humans seem redundant in front of its self-improvement.”

            None of these quotes make it sound like AGZ has been predicted or that it was a “reasonable” improvement in any sense over human play.

          • lightvector says:

            Basically, from a overall perspective, the overall degree to which super-human AI has both matched and differed from human play in Go has been pretty much right within the window of reasonable expectations.

            This makes the impact of AlphaGo on the Go world seem almost tame. Was that really the prevailing sentiment in the Go community? Do you have sources predicting AlphaGo’s strength before it actually saw public play?

            Oh no, AlphaGo has had a very big impact on professional Go. And in the last year or two, with open-source superhuman bots now becoming widespread, those bots have had a very big influence on the way that professional players train and analyze games.

            Very few people were predicting super-human Go AI quite so soon prior to AlphaGo and then AlphaZero actually landing on the scene (I certainly didn’t expect it quite so soon myself), so it’s not that people predicted its strength in advance, it’s rather than given that it did indeed turn out superhuman, it’s roughly the mix of “familiar” and “alien” that one might have generally expected of a superhuman. Quite a bit of familiar. Quite a bit of and old-and-unfamiliar-but-definitely-not-unheard-of. And also some amount of new and alien. And most importantly, a lot of very influential overturning of the judgments about how good all these lines are *relative* to one another. (The last two together are likely why many older established pros overall feel AlphaGo’s play to be so “strange”, the younger pros of course have much less problem here).

            Judgments of results is where bots are supremely strong right now. Interactive use of LZ and other strong bots during game analysis suggests that they way they’re stronger than humans is actually not primarily because of surprising new moves or strategies (or any resurrection of old strategies, or whatnot), but rather due their ability to holistically judge the board and the value of each region, to identify when to play away versus respond locally, and what to trade off against what and exactly when to do so. In just a few short years most of the major bot moves and ideas have already been incorporated into pro play, but the holistic judgment thing is the more important part and is far, far harder for humans to duplicate.

            The one area where humans can still occasionally match the bots is precisely in complex tactical fights, where the bots occasionally just blunder and miss good moves that are sometimes obvious even to non-pro-level players (which unfortunately, makes them not entirely trustworthy for game analysis). But when all goes normally, the bot is vastly better at making the fuzzy intuitive judgment of which results to prefer and whether a trade is good or bad in the long term.

    • Enkidum says:

      Greg Bear has a book – Heads – that includes the difficulty of understanding AIs as a major component In fact, the scientists have to develop dumber AIs to help them talk to the smart ones.

      No particular take on the matter myself, just your comment reminded me of that.

    • Three Year Lurker says:

      Use the oracle AI the same way as any other expert: Get as many as you can afford, each with different viewpoints and use the advice they agree on.

      If you can only afford one oracle, trust them every time and when something goes wrong make them work extra fixing it.

      Software companies already do this all the time.

      • Hackworth says:

        Use the oracle AI the same way as any other expert: Get as many as you can afford, each with different viewpoints and use the advice they agree on.

        You would have to enable these different AIs to even be able to arrive at different conclusions, whatever that entails. A second or third, or tenth opinion is only valuable if it has the potential to be different from the first. Different hardware, different training algorithms and data, whatever it takes.

        When you then ask one AI whether the other has been trained correctly, they might argue against each other’s qualifications to solve the problem at hand. And the human bystander experts could follow their arguments as much as laymen can follow human experts. I don’t know if a larger number of AIs is truly a strict improvement over fewer.

        Basically, if they disagree with each other, you couldn’t tell which is right and which is wrong. If they agree even though they were made to disagree, you would have to wonder whether their answers converge because it really is the correct answer, or because you made a tiny mistake at some point and you failed to enable them to disagree.

        If you can only afford one oracle, trust them every time and when something goes wrong make them work extra fixing it.

        The AI advises you, in order to achieve global hegemony, to (and how to) wage land war in Russia, after a decaptiating nuclear strike. Do you take the advice? After all, should the advice turn out wrong and the world sinks into nuclear winter, you could just fix it for next try.

        What I mean to say is, trial and error breaks down as a useful concept as the consequences of error grow more severe, and these are exactly the kind of problems we would consult super-human AI for.

        Software companies already do this all the time.

        They certainly do, and when they fail, the consequences range from mild user annoyance about a misaligned UI element, to airplanes full of people falling out of the sky or inadvertantly starting a nuclear war. Where do you draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable losses? Who can estimate the expected value of a negative and high-impact, but low-probability event?

  46. RalMirrorAd says:

    if you all remember the Taleb IQ twitter debate, someone on medium wrote an article attacking the concept of IQ

    https://medium.com/@seanaaron100/intelligence-complexity-and-the-failed-science-of-iq-4fb17ce3f12

    I figured I’d refrain from posting this on 136.0 because the topic tends to be inherently CW.

    Not posting this as an endorsement of the author’s position, necessarily.

    • Clutzy says:

      He has a line at the end where he says he won’t engage with people who are “not even wrong.” But that is exactly the problem with his and Taleb’s argument.

      The arguments they make are fine, and correct, if we compare IQ to chemistry. But no one does that in the real world. People compare IQ to other measures in psychology and sociology, and every other metric in those fields, the same attacks he and Taleb levy are just as true of, and usually even more so. The proper target for these rants is the entire field. IQ testing is their least bad metric. You can call it bad, but that is like saying Steph Curry is bad at three point shots because he only hits 45%.

      • Aftagley says:

        Right. This point (and the dude’s way-to-in-depth writing style) is what got me.

        We’ve got a characteristic that correlates strongly with a bunch of different factors (SAT scores, future outcomes, marriage rates, ability to delay gratification) and he’s saying ignore if because it isn’t perfectly justifiable?

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        I think by default most argument made against IQ is usually equally applicable to any other things. But I also recall Taleb making some rather novel arguments about monotonically of predictors which struck me as odd in a world where you can easily apply a transformation of predictors and predicted values to obtain that linearity.

        • roystgnr says:

          If you transform the predictor, though, it’s no longer going to be a Gaussian distribution.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            I didn’t think that the distribution of predictors needs to be guassian, only that the distribution of the variance around estimated-predicted(IQ predictor) was normal, and GLM’s don’t necessarily need a normal variance function.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      God, I dislike this guy so much. Read most of it and skimmed the rest – he’s obviously trying to reach the “correct” conclusion so much that it reminds me of the apocryphal pyramid researcher that was caught by a student with a file in the mortuary chamber, trying to make the sarcophagus fit ht theory.

      If he made a point somewhere in the article I could actually try and refute it, but apparently it’s too “complex” an article to bother with actually getting to a point. Bah.

      Anyways, a couple of things that stood out. Correlation is damn important. If it’s wet outside I’m going to get an umbrella, and I don’t give a fig which way the causation arrow is pointing.

      Halfway through I came with the idea of a car’s engine power. It’s a single, reified number, that’s the result of a complex system, doesn’t define it completely and can vary a lot based on anything from obvious characteristics to faulty gas filter. According to this article, it’s completely useless and should be ignored.

      And the cherry on top is that he spent quite a few pages praising algorithmic models that build the explanation on the fly… and then criticizes IQ for not providing an interpretation. I’d really like to see the interpretation of individual AlphaGo movements, please, ’cause that’s pretty much the most opaque thing we have.

      ————————————

      This being said I’m a big Taleb fan. A couple of friends knew that, and they made me watch Molyneux’s video on his IQ article. After a couple of hours of argument, we all pretty much all ended up with “Taleb is right” and “Taleb is not saying IQ is useless”. The tone of the article may be very loud, but the assertions are actually quite carefully made.

      And it did cause me to immediately update on at least one major point. Before I was quite shocked by IQ differences between countries. During that conversation I actually put some numbers in an excel and realized a relatively small number of very low IQ people (due to disease, war, malnutrition or any number of factors) can bring down the average dramatically. After all, there is a ceiling on high IQ – nothing discovered yet that can dramatically increase it. But to lower it… oh, so many ways. So that’s a pretty simple explanation, so by Occam I’m considering it the main explanation until new information arrives. (which may be soon, I have The Bell Curve somewhere in the new books stack)

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        If you think the average is being brought down by outliers you might want to look things like median, IQR, etc.

      • Ohforfs says:

        If you are shocked by IQ differences between countries (assuming you meant those differences with >5 points), dig into the underlying methodology.

        Or just ask Deiseach about Irish IQ tests that end cited in such comparisons.

        • Radu Floricica says:

          I’m mostly thinking about differences of 50 points. A google and a wikipedia page is enough to scare anybody.

          Or just ask Deiseach about Irish IQ tests that end cited in such comparisons.

          In about… 10 weeks…

          • Ohforfs says:

            Ah. Yes. The bannings.

            These differences are bogus. Mind-bogglingly mismanaged test taking. (basically, you’re Romanian, right? So, e.g., you would be administered a test where you have to complete a story about Cricket players. That kind of stupid)

            Let me try if i can dig up that comment i meant… no, too hard. We’ll have to wait for eternity (which, these times, 10 weeks is).

    • Viliam says:

      All genuine arguments will be addressed on Twitter […] Twitter is more suited to focused discussion since its diminutive nature restricts one’s comments to its arguments, whereas Medium responses allow for long diatribes […] If your arguments contain fallacies (e.g. straw men, circular reasoning, etc.) I will label them as such, and if you harass you will get blocked.

      Okay, let me guess how this game is played:

      You can make an argument in favor of IQ existing, but you are allowed to use only as much explanation and nuance as you can fit into 140 characters. That is, not much. Then you get accused of a fallacy. (There is always one. For example, did you quote a scientist? Argument by authority. Also, the scientist is probably a secret Nazi. Also, he or she was allegedly debunked — this can always be asserted without any evidence.) If you make another tweet trying to clarify things… hey, I already gave you an answer, stop harassing me, blocked. In either case, your account will be added to the shared blocklist all “good and decent” people use.

      Intelligence has never been well-defined

      I think I just became more sympathetic to people who insist that IQ is merely the ability to score highly on IQ tests. At least they don’t deny that a definition exists.

      Like, maybe intelligence is never well-defined in Twitter debates, but if you take the most widely used IQ tests and notice how they correlate… that points towards something in the territory, doesn’t it? Whether we can or can’t provide an acceptable verbal definition now, doesn’t change anything about an existence of something.

      I find the notion of IQ entirely unscientific, but explaining why cannot be done through a medium like Twitter.

      Yet you insist that your opponents limit themselves to Twitter. Nice.

      most scientists tend to agree that intelligence, or whatever substrate we assign to its origin (e.g. brain) is THE most complex phenomenon we know of; period. […] As discussed earlier, complexity occurs in systems with a large number of components that interact, and whose properties are dictated primarily by those interactions. The human brain is comprised of ~100 billion neurons, which interact in highly complex patterns

      I am pretty sure that weather (an example used before) includes much more particles than human brain. Also, it’s not like all neurons in human brain are used for thinking; many of them do image processing, etc. Also, we don’t need to describe everything about the brain in order to measure intelligence, just like we don’t have to model every single cell in an eye to determine whether someone is short-sighted.

      No, really, we do not have to model the entire brain in order to measure intelligence. I repeat it, because this seems to be the core of the argument against intelligence. (Brain is complex, therefore unknowable. To make it sound more mathematical, say “high-dimensional” repeatedly.)

      This is a complete strawman. People who measure IQ do not model brains, as the author insists. They give tests to people instead, and notice how the outcomes correlate. Then they notice how the outcomes also correlate with various other things in life.

      The use of factor analysis doesn’t involve any proposed explanation for intelligence, it merely discovers some apparent correlation inside a feature space created using intelligence tests, and points at that correlation as intelligence. An explanation isn’t being connected to a trend in data, the explanation is the trend in data. […] how could something so blatantly irrational pass the safeguards of science?

      The discovery that something correlates with something else, is in itself interesting. I could imagine a hypothetical world where humans’ verbal abilities do not correlate with their spacial orientation abilities. I could also imagine a world where the abilities correlate. Telling me that we do not live in the former world, but in the latter, that is a discovered fact about the world, not circular reasoning. (Then later we discover other interesting things, for example that verbal abilities of adopted children correlate with verbal abilities of their biological parents, even when they never had an actual dialog. Again, we could imagine a hypothetical world where this isn’t true.)

      And yes, factor analysis does not propose an explanation for intelligence. It just notices that some things correlate with some other things, in a way that also somewhat correlates with our intuitive ideas about being “smart” etc.

      We could enter the debate as to whether a “gene” as defined really exists.

      We could also enter a debate about whether 2 + 2 equals 4, I suppose. But if you are trying to say that talking about “IQ” is just as scientific as talking about “genes”, please go ahead, I will not interrupt you. 😉

      By the way, which genes contribute to IQ is a question separate from whether IQ exists. Again, I can imagine a hypothetical world where the IQ is not caused by genes, but instead by a fairy godmother. So what? If a brain damage can reduce one’s IQ, does it make IQ less real? (If an eye injury can make you blind, does it debunk the contribution of genes to eye functionality?)

      • Aapje says:

        > Intelligence has never been well-defined

        Just like well-being…remove all welfare???

        Just like being educated…close all schools???

        Just like art…close all museums???

        This is one of these categories of arguments that might be sensible in an isolated, extremely pedantic debate, but in reality is almost always purely rationalization, betrayed by the same reasoning not being applied to things that the person does favor.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        Possibly relevant: Twitter has been allowing 280 characters since 2017. Do people sill talk about a 140 character limit?

  47. AG says:

    There’s already a contingent of people nostalgic for the glory days of SSC and before that, LW…

  48. Dgalaxy43 says:

    I play D&D every week and it is very fun. Creating characters is one of the most fun aspects, I think. Have you ever had a D&D character you were particularly proud of? If so, share.

    • FrankistGeorgist says:

      A Warforged Druid.

      The Warforged are basically sentient suits of armor or iron golems. In the context of the world we were playing they were created as a handy Droid Army/slave labor by powerful wizard kings who eventually ruined the world with them. Both magic and warforged came out of the conflict thoroughly taboo, so the warforged were a despised minority.

      My character had been a soldier downed in a swamp, but over a period of time a banyan tree began to grow out of the rune in his helmet which normally gave the armor life. Damaging the rune was the surest way to kill a warforged, but the roots somehow knit it back together and thus the warforged tapped into the mystical powers of the swamp and over centuries his body filled with swamp plants and he regained locomotion.

      The result was a warforged with no memory of his past as a warrior, and of a considerably higher quality than the few remaining warforged, who were valuable as body guards.

      My DM was also nice enough to let him be basically a moving ark, and he’d gradually collect plants and animals into himself, ultimately leading to the finale of the story arc, where the party actually journeyed inside the suit of armor, to find a kind of mini world where the souls of various warforged were hanging out “The Guff.” In an attempt to exorcise a bunch of evil spirits wanting to use the warforged and the nature-magic to ruin the world again, leading to the party’s death/apotheosis/etc good feelings.

      We got to do a fun tiny-people-fighting-ants storyline mixed with one of those shrinking-down-and-going-inside-a-body storylines and a lost prehistoric world storyline all in one.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        A Warforged Druid.

        +1
        ’90s kids might remember Transformers: Beast Wars in this context.

      • Dgalaxy43 says:

        Wow, that’s an amazing character. I love the aspects of the character design you mentioned, and the idea is very interesting and original. Sounds like a top tier game.

    • souleater says:

      I’m a pathfinder DM, and I’m particularly proud of my new NPC Hercule

      He is a bard that pretends to be a monk

      He presents as a leader of a group of performing monks; Meditation, Breaking boards, Training Acolytes, martial arts demonstrations and wild stories of training under waterfalls in foreign lands.

      But as the players get to know him it seems more and more of his wild stories are fabrications, and his wild boasts during combat are actually his bardic performance.

      Apparently, Noblemen are more likely to support a wise old monk and his students than a wandering vagabond. His students, of course hang on his every word and are always impressed with his “Qi augmented” abilities to turn invisible, manipulate fire, and his cat like dexterity.

      As the players befriend the “Monk” he begins talking them up in battle, and they gain the benefits of his bardic performance.

      • Dgalaxy43 says:

        I love characters like that. One of my more recent characters was a barbarian who really wanted to be and outright claimed to be a wizard, and got very upset when people doubted this. He did things such as calling his spear throws magic missile, and his axe blows true strike. Of course, your bard is much more convincing than my barb was. I always think that more people in general should have their bards do non-musical things for their magic, and your bard that is so convincing at being a monk that they’re basically a monk is just genius. Great character.

        • Placid Platypus says:

          I had a very similar character who’s a Rogue pretending to be a Wizard. Fakes magic with sleight of hand and so on, and his main combat spell is “Ray of Wood” (Sneak Attack with the crossbow hidden up his sleeve).

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      One that I really liked was fairly recent.

      In a way he’s somewhat like the character souleater describes, in that he’s pretending to be a class that he’s not. In this case, he was a Pact of the Tome Warlock pretending to be a wizard in 5th edition D&D. The setting was kind of a demented version of Forgotten Realms, because the DM wasn’t familiar with or interested in the setting but FR is the default in 5e.

      The idea is that he was a Half Elf Warlock who wanted very badly to show up his Sun Elf wizard father by becoming a more powerful wizard but didn’t have the patience to finish his apprenticeship. He had an idea somewhat similar to Borges’ Library of Babel: in a chaotic plane of infinite size, every possible spell is being cast somewhere at any given time, so if you were immortal and desired power you inevitably would eventually aquire knowledge of all magic. Following that twisted reasoning, he decided that the best plan would be to make a pact with a demon lord to gain ultimate magical knowledge and then, if the pact became inconvenient, use that power to free himself later. He wasn’t chaotic evil, at least not yet, but the idea was that he would be soon if he didn’t realize what he was becoming and shape up.

      He was a very fun character to play because the character could lean more towards comedy or tragedy depending on the tone. His arrogant insistence on being recognized as a great wizard for example was usually just an absurd gag, where he’s obviously not fooling the other players even if their characters don’t know better, but the few times that the party had encounters with enemy magic users it turned very dark because he absolutely needed to prove that he was the more powerful spellcaster even if it meant killing them. The party otherwise mostly took care not to kill beasts and humanoids unless they had to so it really stood out when he would nova to execute some random NPC spellcaster we never even learned the name of in two rounds.

      From a mechanical perspective though he was very frustrating. Warlocks in 5e are already very dependent on the DM playing it “by the book” with an average of 2 short rests per adventuring day and Tomelocks also have to worry about whether Treasure is randomly rolled or not and whether NPC wizards have their spellbooks on them. The DM I played with was incredibly stingy with both, so the character spent most of his time with nothing but cantrips and his starting ritual spells to work with.

      • Dgalaxy43 says:

        I really like this one. The juxtaposition of him being a funny character who wants to be the best wizard but isn’t a wizard at all vs him actively trying to kill enemy wizards to prove a point sounds very well done. The character that isn’t evil who is slowly becoming evil is a character trope that I use a lot, perhaps too much. It works though, very well. Sucks that they weren’t mechanically fun, but sometimes the best characters don’t end up mechanically fun for some reason. All in all, this is a good one.

    • ECD says:

      I’ve been playing a very mechanically simple half-orc warrior, adopted by another race and serving as a mercenary, for about a year now. It wasn’t until about six weeks ago that I realized I’d basically made Worf, if he realized the Klingon Empire were a bunch of assholes and acted as minimally Klingon, rather than as maximally Klingon as possible.

      Super cold, super transactional character. Also somehow the quasi-party leader (despite a mighty 8 charisma) because he just does not give a shit about much except getting the job done (which it turns out, employers like a lot more than the more personable person who wants to talk about their own goals).

      • John Schilling says:

        Worf did not, not no way, not no how, have a charisma of 8.

        If CHA means anything, it means CHA 8 + “does not give a shit about much except getting the job done” comes across as “does not give a shit about anything” and gets no respect. Meanwhile, “personable person who wants to talk about their own goals” with CHA 15 comes across as “is firmly committed to our common goals” and gets all the credit for the job getting done.

        That said, if your DM runs a game where CHA doesn’t mean anything, by all means use it as a dump stat so you can build and play the (in fact very charismatic) Worf. This I think describes most DMs, so you probably made the wise choice there. But I felt a need to vent.

        • ECD says:

          Well, this is always a problem with mental stats. But my DM isn’t that bad. It’s just my character is almost never trying to convince anyone who isn’t a PC to do anything. You don’t need a persuasion check, or positive charisma modifier to get people to give you the information to do the job they want you to do.

          Other players want lots of stuff from the NPCs, he basically just wants them to live up to their end of the bargain and he’s a giant half-orc who kills people for money, so they usually do.

          Also, 8 feels a lot like, brusque and abrasive, rather than anything else. I mean, it’s a -1, vs +2 on the modifier, swamped by training (as he is in intimidation) or luck.

    • Phigment says:

      Captain Teleport was stranded as an infant in the jungles of the Eberron setting, and raised by a pack of Blink Dogs. Like Tarzan, but with blink dogs.

      He had the Leadership feat, in 3.5, so that he could have a blink dog sidekick, and a completely ridiculous set of class and prestige class levels designed to optimize purely for teleportation. He was a spell caster, but all his spells involved teleporting. All his magic items involved teleporting. He had genetic spell-like abilities to give him more ways to teleport.

      He was glorious, and completely broke the game into pieces when it became obvious that most dungeons have no answer for a person who can casually teleport around dozens of times a day.

      The first time the party was setting up to camp for the night, and Captain Teleport was like “OK, guys, you have fun with this; I’m just going to teleport back home now and sleep in a bed like a civilized person, but I’ll be back here at 7:00 sharp to continue adventuring, so let me know if you want me to bring you breakfast or any supplies” was utterly hilarious. As was every single instance of people saying “hmm, this problem would be a lot easier to solve if we just had X with us” followed by Captain Teleport popping off to the nearest city, buying or renting the needed supplies, and popping back in a few rounds.

      This rapidly resulted in every single single adventure location being covered with anti-teleportation wards, sadly. Followed by Captain Teleport’s grisly death when he was not allowed to teleport away from a wave of molten lava, even though he had a good half-dozen short-ranged and long-ranged teleportation options at his disposal.

      His blink dog cohort survived and recruited a new Captain Teleport 2, however.

    • Nick says:

      It was a Savage Worlds character, but I’ll share anyway. The setting was Victorian London kitchen-sink horror, with heavy Gothic fiction influence. My character was a locksmith who was a Flat Earth Atheist: he disbelieved in the supernatural on principle and what is more, thought he knew everything. For you Savage fans, his two Hindrances were Doubting Thomas and Delusional—he thinking he had a max Smarts score, when in fact he had the minimum score.

      It gets better, though, because I’d recently gotten a friend to read Northanger Abbey. So she wrote a Catherine Morland–based character who reflexively thought everything was supernatural! We made an amazing double act.

    • FLWAB says:

      Coming up with charactes is my favorite part, and I have a few I’m proud of (my redneck Elf Barbarian Bucephalus “Bubba” Shimmerthorn comes to mind) but there is one in particular that was my best work.

      With every character I try to set myself a challenge. I knew I wanted to play a Dwarf Rogue so the challenge was simple: create a character that is both a typical thieving, sneaking, conniving Rogue but also a super conservative, traditional and highly Lawful Dwarf. The result was Knurk the Rabbit. He’s an accomplished burglar and thief, and doesn’t mind killing people who threaten him, but is extremly Lawful. How? He has convinced himself that he is actually a rabbit, and laws only apply to people, not animals. He has no problem stealing because rabbits legally can’t steal: when a seagull eats your ice cream its just an animal doing what animals do, not theft. Similarly if he kills someone it can’t be murder: when a bear mauls someone to death its a tragedy, but its not murder. Knurk was, of course, actually a dwarf but his rabbit excuse was sincere: he honestly suffered from the delusion that he was a rabbit. He parted his beard and tied it above his head to make two rabbit ears, and he would typically wear sneaky dark clothes with a puffy white piece of cotton sewed to the seat of his paints to act as a tail. He was strictly vegetarian, and never took it personally when people tried to kill him because people hunt rabbits all the time. If anyone pointed out to him that he did things rabbits can’t do, like talk or pick locks or whatever, he would simply remark that it is very peculiar, and theorize that a wizard must have made cast a spell on him, as that is the only explanation on how a rabbit could talk.

      How did he get this way? Tragic backstory, naturally. He was a normal dwarf from a highly Lawful society until his older brother was deeply shamed by a rival. The shame was so bad that the brother committed ritual suicide. Knurk was deeply disturbed, and it was his right to challenge the rival to a duel but he was too afraid to do so. Instead he dug a tunnel into the rivals house and in the middle of the night slit his throat. This was a deep affront to local laws and customs: not only cold blooded murder but breaking and entering! A serious Dwarf crime. During his trial he kept saying that he wasn’t a Dwarf but a rabbit, and thus could not legally be put on trial. The court ruled that he was either and insane murder or a dangerous animal, and in either case he needed to be destroyed. He escaped, but can never return. He copes with this loss, and with his crime, by believing thoroughly in the delusion.

      He had a lot of great moments, but the best happened when we rescued a little girl who was being raised by an evil witch who had stolen her years ago. After defeating the witch the girl refused to come with us. We needed to get her back to her real parents, and I was getting tired of debating with a 10 year old and decided to just pick her up and take her by force. I said something flippant like “Fine, you don’t want to come. I’ll just tie you up and take you: you can be my slave girl.” I didn’t really intend to enslave her, I just wanted to make the point that she couldn’t stop us from just taking her anyway. This royally peeved the party paladin whose backstory had to do with slavers so he freaked out and chewed Knurk our and finally Knurk just stormed off and sulked. Eventually they convinced the girl to come with and it was time to go, but Knurk was still mad. After some cajoling from the party he finally let it out: “All over the world there are little girls with pet rabbits and nobody raises an eye. But ONE rabbit wants a pet little girl and EVERYBODY LOSES THEIR MINDS!”

      • Dgalaxy43 says:

        That’s very interesting. Person who is lawful at their core, but does bad things out of a legitimate delusion that they are an animal and animals do these things to survive. Sounds very funny, and the backstory is just the right amount of tragic. I’m giggling at the imagery of a dwarf parting his beard and making rabbit ears with it.

        • FLWAB says:

          He was a hoot to play. Serious as a heart attack, but all the while sporting rabbit ears. Every so often a NPC would point out that he’s a dwarf and he would usually go away from those conversations whispering to his friends about how the NPC was obviously touched in the head.

          What was especially great was that our DM had a knack for tying player backstories into the narrative. At one point the rival who Knurk had killed all those years before came back as some kind of intelligent undead working for the bad guys. That gave me great material to work with: the shock of seeing him “alive” temporarily brought Knurk back to sanity: he went nuts and challenged him to a duel, the way he should have all those years ago. After the battle was over Knurk just sat quietly for a long time and finally apologized to his friends for ruining the battle plan by charging out into the open. “I’m sorry about that lads. I wasn’t in my right mind. For a moment, I thought I was a dwarf.”

    • Randy M says:

      Despite chatting about the hobby a fair bit from the DM side here before, I’m making my first character as a player for a game set to start this weekend.
      I’m thinking of an elf Paladin who is basically selfish-neutral verging on evil, except he’s sworn to serve a good god because of [reasons]. Kind of like Jonah. Vile humans, prepare to meet your end. Wait, what? I’ve got to save, these people? Seriously? Well, you’re the god.
      Either played for comedy or redemption, depending on the tone of the group.

      • Dgalaxy43 says:

        The potential for that character is amazing. Definitely better than my first attempts at characters, one of which had the very interesting character bio “is a Tiefling and is a Bard”. I assume having experience on the DM side helps with that a bit. Good luck with your game!

    • smocc says:

      He’s not particularly innovative, but I’m having tremendous fun with a halfling ranger I built. I’ve used him in two campaigns now. He goes by Stone Bearpuncher, or Rock Wolfkiller, or whatever sounds coolest at the time. His real name, which he keeps a closely guarded secret, is Llewelyn. He travels and fights with a Newfoundland-type dog named Bummer.

      He has an almost Druidic love for Nature and a belief its particular order. He sees that order as being about stronger and smarter animals keeping their place above the lesser ones. So while he often feels more affinity for wolves or bears than people, he has no qualms about killing them when they are acting out of line, or simply to assert his dominance. In one of his pockets he always has the testicles of the first bear he killed that he had lacquered and tethered with a fancy chain.

      Like I said, he’s not a particularly original or mechanically interesting character, but he’s the closest I’ve come to feeling what authors mean when they talk about their “characters telling them what to write.” I started off with the name and all the other elements above have added themselves naturally over time. When I am playing him I rarely have to think about what Stone would do; it usually suggests itself very naturally. Early on in playing Storm King’s Thunder (5E) Stone’s party was suddenly saved from a Hill Giant by a Frost Giant leaping in with a critical hit axe swing. I had been wondering how Stone was going to be interested in the campaign, but that moment made it instantly clear to Stone, and to me, that Frost Giants were superior to Hill Giants and that Hill Giants needed to be put in their place and which team Stone would be on.

  49. Zeno of Citium says:

    If people have nostalgia for the 1980s of all decades, they’ll probably have nostalgia for the 2010s.

    • Urstoff says:

      I think people always post-hoc justify their nostalgia; every cohort will be nostalgic, but what they’re nostalgic for will be different. People are nostalgic for the 90’s because of it’s supposed stability and optimism. In contrast, people are nostalgic for the 60’s for the cultural changes that happened (disregarding the incredible amounts of social instability). People are nostalgic for the 80’s because (among other reasons) that’s when pop-culture started to embrace nerd culture (and now pop-culture and nerd-culture are indistinguishable).

  50. Faza (TCM) says:

    So, Boston Dynamics launched its Spot robodog.

    I, for one, welcome our new machine overlords best friends, but I’m kinda stumped on the use cases. The company highlights some possible applications, but I can’t help but think that all of these could probably be done better and cheaper with other technologies, given that they mostly consist in putting a camera somewhere you’d want it.

    Is Spot just an expensive toy/novelty, or am I deficient in imagination?

    • Randy M says:

      but I’m kinda stumped on the use cases.

      Frankly the same applies to the humanoid robots.
      I’m watching Humans on Amazon, a show about androids and the people who love them, and I’m irritating my wife by pointing at the call center staffed by dozens of life like humanoid machines and scoffing, “You don’t need a body for that! Just software!”

      On the other hand, actual pets don’t really have use cases for the modal (I am not a robot) typical user, either. It’s a responsive body to feel affection for.

      • It makes no sense to have a humanoid robot doing something software could do, but humanoid robots could be useful for mechanical tasks, since they could go everywhere a human can, climbing ladders, and fitting into the same spaces, and using the same tools designed for human hands. Possibly there’s room for a jack of all trades machine that works with the existing environment alongside specialized machines that have totally different body plans suited to specific tasks.

        • Randy M says:

          If you were sending one on a mission where you didn’t know what to expect, maybe. But for most purposes, a specialized form will be cheaper and better.

      • Hackworth says:

        It’s important to remember that movies and TV shows are not documentaries, or try to accurately predict any real future. Storytelling has its own rules, which include being relatable to non-experts, as they make the bulk of your paying audience, and that entertainment, as all art, is subject to interpretation.

        Sure, you can go for realism, and show a server rack in an Amazon datacenter rather than a room full of physical, humanoid robots, operating physical phones with their hands, and making noises with their robot equivalent of vocal chords. But you would have to be very mindful if that image is interesting to look at, whether your audience even knows what they’re looking at, and if they do, if that’s the image you want to convey. If a director shows a future callcenter full of future robots, maybe he’s really making a point about current callcenters and current callcenter employees? Entertainment is allowed to do that.

        Disclaimer: I’ve never seen the show Humans myself.

        • AG says:

          Ghost In The Shell shows us The Major directly jacking into cyberspace…but they still have a room full of secretaries who expand to MORE FINGERS to denote hacking.

          • JPNunez says:

            The stupider part is that controlling all the extra robot fingers probably takes a wider human->computer interface than just giving the secretaries a USB connector that just simulates a keyboard.

          • Of course, the advantage of not directly connecting your brain to the internet is that your mind can’t be hacked. Don’t overrate having everything always online all the time. The internet of things certainly has its disadvantages.

            Certainly I would be reticent to ever have a personal robot if it was directly connected to the internet.

          • Hackworth says:

            @Forward Synthesis Not sure if you’re familiar with the GITS universe, but yes, both good guys and bad guys remotely hacking into computerized brains is a recurring theme in the various installments. People can explicitely go into so-called “autistic mode”, basically a cell phone flight mode except for your brain. Having agents in sensitive positions safe from hacking by traversing meatspace is indeed not anachronistic in GITS.

          • Not sure if you’re familiar with the GITS universe

            I saw the original movie years ago.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        The logical back story for all the rip-offs of the original Swedish series is that humanoid robots were perfected for the sex trade, and then produced in very large numbers. Which made them cheap to the point where people wanting robots for any other purpose went

        …”Wait a second, we can just add some more code to a standard sex bot, and that will be lots cheaper than building our own platform. Also, while we will never, ever mention this in our marketing materials, if we do not remove the sexual code, our maid-bot 2000 is now a plausibly deniable way to buy a sex-bot”.

        • b_jonas says:

          Ah yes. That is how a robot ended up being used as a beam in a corridor that was about to collapse in the Caliban trilogy by Roger MacBride Allen (three novels that play in a future universe that is forked from Asimov’s Foundation universe). It can also lead to a robot revolution if you do it wrong.

    • Urstoff says:

      Seems like a simple drone would do all of that stuff at 0.1% of the price.

      Everything I’ve seen from Boston Dynamics makes it seem like a DARPA / venture capital money pit. The robots are cool, at least, if not particularly useful.

      • JayT says:

        It kind of seems to me that something like Boston Dynamics will be a money pit, until it isn’t. Meaning, they won’t really be able to come up with a useful product until they have perfected what they’re working on, at which point it will be ubiquitous.

        • Lambert says:

          And having a real world product that’s wildly unprofitable and only useful in niche situations is still an invaluable source of experience needed to perfect the final product.

      • Drones can’t pick up heavy weights though, and are extremely noisy even if they’re entirely electrical. Spot can only handle 14kg and run for 90 minutes, but that can be subject to change as the tech advances.

    • noyann says:

      Early research for transportation of supplies, personnel, or wounded, in terrain that is too difficult for wheeled or tracked vehicles, when a drone has not enough lift or sufficient range/flight time, where air currents are too difficult for a helicopter (some mountain areas with certain weathers/winds). And maybe stealth in some situations.

      Uses can be at first in disaster areas or ground wars. Maybe some well-funded science expeditions (although I can’t imagine where this would be necessary). In the more distant future: leisure, tourism, and tournaments.

      Edit: the energy efficiency in comparison to alternatives might be a problem.

      • Faza (TCM) says:

        I get the early research angle, but I understand that Spot is an actual finished product that’s being marketed to end users. My question, therefore, is: what are they supposed to be used for? Other than bragging rights, that is.

        Its published capabilities don’t really suggest it’s gonna be terribly useful in a disaster or combat situation. There’s very little – if anything – it can do that other available technology cannot do already (and probably do it better to boot). Sure, future developments may change that, but again: I understand it’s being sold right now so what we see is what we’ll get.

        • noyann says:

          > finished product that’s being marketed to end users

          Shucks, I overlooked that.
          Maybe the Spot is thrown to the masses with the rationale of ‘we have something, let’s outsource the search for uses’.
          And they certainly outsource the robustness under a variety of stresses a test lab can’t all cover.

          An earlier canine example comes to mind: The AIBO became a standard platform in robot football. Yes, Sony pushed it, but it’s still not the thing you think of first seeing a robot dog (and it wasn’t advertised for football iirc).

        • Doctor Mist says:

          I understand that Spot is an actual finished product that’s being marketed to end users

          Maybe. I note that the link you included to Boston Dynamics has a button for “Contact Sales”, not a button for “Buy now”.

          • Lambert says:

            That’s fairly normal in B2B.

            When you’re doing the kind of multimillion dollar transactions that corporations see, the cost of having a real person to contact for a quote is negligible.

  51. Ttar says:

    There’s a big difference between executing Catholics on the assumption of treason and looking at a wave of treason and noticing that Catholics are 6:1 more likely to commit treason, and arguing that we shouldn’t all pretend Catholicism doesn’t encourage treason.

    • HowardHolmes says:

      Such a conclusion would be misleading. It ignores the fact that a protestant is on the throne. Put a Catholic on the throne, and protestants might be the majority of persons trying to commit treason. Neither Catholics nor protestants need to be inclined to encourage treason. Treason is supported by the opposition party whoever that chance happens to be

  52. hls2003 says:

    I don’t remember where I heard it, but I’ve heard it said that everyone is nostalgic for the first time they fell in love. (The cruder version was “first time they got laid.”) There will be a time when lots of people are nostalgic for the 2010’s – even if those same people think they are finding the 2010’s awful right now.

    • ec429 says:

      The classic example of this I’ve seen given is Ostalgie — East Germans nostalgic for the days of the DDR. Most of whom were young, and protesting in the streets (always romantic!), in 1989, and are now middle-aged and jaded.

  53. Aftagley says:

    Post I rightly cut from the last non-CW thread:

    I recently signed up for an improv class in the city I just moved to as a way of expanding my friend circle and learning a new skill. When signing up online, I had to fill out the following (mandatory) questions:
    – Race and Geographic place of origin (so white/European)
    – Gender
    – Preferred pronoun
    – Orientation
    – Basic career field
    – Income Range
    – Education Level

    When I arrived at the class, the first thing the instructor did was give a 20-30 minute discussion on power dynamics in comedy. She started by giving an explanation of the concept of privilege, outlined who had privilege in what scenarios, and then talked about how in comedy you never want to “punch down” or make fun of someone with less privilege than yourself. Explicitly said in this was that it’s OK to “punch up” or make fun of people with more privilege than yourself, but you never want to punch down. The instructor even went so far as to decry the concept of “punching sideways” or going after someone you think has as much power as you, because you never know if you might secretly be punching down. The example the instructor provided of this concept was a recent occasion when a comedian (female, white, straight) “punched sideways” at the instructor (female, white, queer) not knowing her orientation.

    This was then followed by a lesson on the proper process the class should follow if any other student “triggers” them. The word triggered was used explicitly; not “offends” or “upsets” but triggered.

    At the time (only white male in the class) I admit I felt a bit disconcerted/upset and didn’t understand why anyone felt like this was a necessary addition to the class. It seemed weird to start an activity that relies on kind of dropping your filter with a lesson on how what you say and what you do will be judged through a fairly harsh prism for acceptability. I was also kind of worried that having told this organization enough about myself for them to get a good picture of where I am, privilege-wise, that they would be looking to enforce these rules during my interactions with other students. It made me feel a bit paranoid, and I was somewhat confident that if behavior was overall indicative of improv, I would find the people not the kind I’m comfortable associating with and it would not be an activity I continued to pursue.

    Having thought about it and talked to people who move more in these kind of artsy communities, my position has changed somewhat. I’m now pretty sure this speech was the same as those liability forms you have to sign before you can climb at a rock gym; a CYA for the organization in case something goes wrong. It gives the improv class reason to kick someone out if they’re acting like a dick and if something goes wrong in class and it creates a twitter/social media backlash, the class can point to their lesson on privileged as a way of proving they’re “one of the good guys.”

    If this is the case, I’m a less negative towards the class/community than I was, but a bit less positive on the overall state of our society.

    • Randy M says:

      Explicitly said in this was that it’s OK to “punch up” or make fun of people with more privilege than yourself

      This seems uncharitable of them, given the opaque rules for determining social standing. I would, like I said last time, try to focus on humor without punches in this kind of setting, and hope to not fall afoul of someone’s loose interpretation of the rule, like objecting to you culturally appropriating another culture because you accidentally said Tee-pee or Timbuctu.

      • Aftagley says:

        I would, like I said last time, try to focus on humor without punches in this kind of setting

        Yep! You were right then, and I still think you’re right now.

    • jermo sapiens says:

      My advice to you: your participation in that class, as the only white male, can only hurt you. Unless you really really enjoy improv in a setting where everyone can make fun of you but you cannot make fun of them, run far away.

      • Aftagley says:

        Eh, I spent a couple hundred bucks on it though. If it was free, I’d walk away, but I’ve got this sunk cost fallacy to deal with.

        • Oscar Sebastian says:

          Honestly you should just demand your money back on the grounds that when you signed up for the class you thought you’d be learning how to make jokes on the fly, not being attacked for your race or gender.

          • Aftagley says:

            Crucially, I haven’t been attacked for my race and gender. I’ve been told that making fun of someone on the basis of race or gender is not an acceptable action for me to take (a point I agree with) but could be potentially ok for a class of people I’m not a member of.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Crucially, I haven’t been attacked for my race and gender. I’ve been told that making fun of someone on the basis of race or gender is not an acceptable action for me to take (a point I agree with) but could be potentially ok for a class of people I’m not a member of.

            Technically, I agree with you. When I follow the logical implications of these acts, however, I’m forced to conclude that you’re being told it’s unacceptable for you to attack, but acceptable for you to be attacked. In other words, they’ve baldly claimed power over you, without your consent.

            That their power is only to make jokes at your expense is not trivial, by their definition. They should not be allowed to have it both ways.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            What Paul Brinkley said. So, demand a refund.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          Isn’t there any refund policy?

      • Radu Floricica says:

        The main point is actually true and valid, and if you try to find a few examples it becomes obvious: you need a black comedian to make fun of black people, a gay one to make fun of gay people, Gabriel Iglesias to make fun of fat people and so on. Being white and straight IS a real problem in comedy, you actually have significantly fewer avenues for humor. And the only thing worse than not having them… is not realizing and doing it anyways. It’s worthy of a warning on the first day, I think, especially in this climate where a 10 year old joke on twitter can destroy careers.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          The main point is actually true and valid, and if you try to find a few examples it becomes obvious: you need a black comedian to make fun of black people, a gay one to make fun of gay people, Gabriel Iglesias to make fun of fat people and so on.

          But “punching up” implies that anybody who isn’t a straight white man can make fun of straight white men.

          The rule is not “don’t make fun of the outgroup”, which perhaps could be reasonable to some extent, but “don’t make fun of the groups who are ‘below’ your on the oppressor-oppressed ladder”, which automatically puts you at disadvantage if you happen to belong to the group supposedly at the ‘top’ of the oppression ladder, where group membership is defined by unchosen and largely immutable features.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            Well… yeah. But that’s always been the case, more or less.

            My point is that 1. it’s a normal, polite thing to be aware of and 2. especially in the current climate it’s critical for anybody that wants to be on a stage to know.

            So what I’m saying is… don’t kill the messenger.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      It gives the improv class reason to kick someone out if they’re acting like a dick

      IDK, ’round these parts “acting like a dick” is usually sufficient reason…

      What irks me personally about the whole thing is what I would call the “how will people know to be outraged if you don’t tell them?” aspect. If you spend half an hour discussing the ways you can get victimized whilst participating in this particular class – including some you might not have thought of – what’s that going to do for the kind of community spirit that’s necessary to do successful shared improv?

      • Shion Arita says:

        Yeah I agree. To me this is a big case of creating your own demons, unless this is what they want (which it may well be).

        If it were me I would leave, since I signed up for an improv class, not a social justice class, but of course it’s ultimately on OP.

    • EchoChaos says:

      Explicitly said in this was that it’s OK to “punch up” or make fun of people with more privilege than yourself, but you never want to punch down.

      Honestly, this sort of direct statement of values is actually refreshing to me. I would love to ask them for a ranking of privilege so that I could make sure. “Obviously as a straight white Christian man, I’m at the bottom, but which is higher, a straight black Christian woman like my sister-in-law or a straight white Jewish man like Bernie Sanders?”

    • Ttar says:

      I was very involved in improv during college and can confirm the scene has deteriorated significantly after it was infiltrated by the culture police.

    • lvlln says:

      She started by giving an explanation of the concept of privilege, outlined who had privilege in what scenarios, and then talked about how in comedy you never want to “punch down” or make fun of someone with less privilege than yourself. Explicitly said in this was that it’s OK to “punch up” or make fun of people with more privilege than yourself, but you never want to punch down. The instructor even went so far as to decry the concept of “punching sideways” or going after someone you think has as much power as you, because you never know if you might secretly be punching down.

      It’s interesting here that the exact same argument she used to decry “punching sideways” can be used just as effectively to decry “punching up.” Since you never know exactly the privilege profile of any given individual – not even your own – there’s always the possibility that you might be secretly punching down when you’re metaphorically punching someone in comedy, and this applies just as well to when you’re trying to punch up as when you’re trying to punch sideways.

      • Aftagley says:

        Well, it implied to me that there’s a clear hierarchy privilege, at least in her conception of it, and the stuff at the top of the list is immediately knowable. Like, there is no chance a black guy punching up at a white dude could ever secretly be punching down. Same with a woman punching up at a man, or a trans punching up at a cis.

        • Rachael says:

          @Aftagley: But there’s not a clear hierarchy, because it’s not a total ordering. What about a black man versus a white woman, or a white trans person versus a black cis person, and so on. Either person in those pairings could attack the other and think they’re “punching up” because they focus on the axis on which the other person is more privileged than them and ignore the other axis.

          • Aftagley says:

            Hmm, good point. Maybe it’s fine if you limit your jokes entirely to the access on which you have less privilege and consider the other aspects off limits? I honestly don’t know, but I’ve got a strange feeling, however, that asking that question during the next class would not be a productive or overall enjoyable use of my time.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            In theory, there isn’t a clear hierarchy but in practice it’s pretty easy to suss out.

            For example, in your examples of black man versus white woman just look at what happens when black men attack white women. The Central Park Five are still considered martyrs by the mainstream media to this day, and one of the few sources of mainstream pushback on the expanding definition of campus sexual assault has been that too many white women accuse black men of sexual assault. A black man clearly has a higher position in the progressive stack than a white woman.

            Likewise with straight black men versus LGBT. If you look at the perpetrators of hate crimes, it’s pretty clear on who is attacking who. But you would never guess it from the mainstream media narrative.

          • @Nabil ad Dajjal

            Are we all sussing it out the same way?

            I would have said that race is a less privileged category than cisgender, but sexuality and transgenderism can be complicated. I think race is generally given more weight than sexuality, which is stronger than cisgender categories, but transgenderism complicates things. Then on top of that these things add up.

            A white gay man is more privileged than a straight black man, and a straight black female is less privileged than that, a gay black man a little more, a lesbian black woman more still, and then transgender black people somewhere at the lowest point you can punch to. I’m not sure if we’ve worked out whether transwomen are more or less privileged than transmen yet, but I think transwomen are lower, and then non-binaries are at the very bottom. Wait. I forgot disabilities. You can go lower.

            What about if you have a white non-binary person? You’d have to do arithmetic to work out how much the non-binary nature subtracts from the white nature in order to work out whether they are still more privileged than a black straight cisgender man.

            Then you’ve got class, or at least income. Rich people are obviously more privileged, but it’s not clear how many “points” it’s worth. Can a white cisgender straight man be poor enough to have less privilege than a black non-binary person who is disabled? I don’t know. What if he’s homeless?

            At some point, this stops being improv comedy, and starts being meticulously planned comedy.

            Charitably, we can forget the combinations and just remember to not make jokes where black people are the target if we’re white, not make gay jokes if we’re straight etc. Trying to work out who is more privileged than who only really works out if we restrict it to single categories per joke. Just go with that and if the people you are dealing with are reasonable, you should be OK.

          • Don P. says:

            [J]ust look at what happens when black men attack white women. The Central Park Five are still considered martyrs by the mainstream media to this day[…]

            Because they didn’t do it.

          • ECD says:

            In theory, there isn’t a clear hierarchy but in practice it’s pretty easy to suss out.

            I am unconvinced this is correct. A lot depends on circumstances.

            For example, in your examples of black man versus white woman just look at what happens when black men attack white women. The Central Park Five are still considered martyrs by the mainstream media to this day,

            As Dan points out, they were innocent. Also, I think it’s hilarious that a situation where five innocent black males (deliberately avoiding men or boys, given their ages) served 6-13 years is a sign that they’re on the top of the hierarchy.

            one of the few sources of mainstream pushback on the expanding definition of campus sexual assault has been that too many white women accuse black men of sexual assault. A black man clearly has a higher position in the progressive stack than a white woman.

            The sources I’ve seen have suggested the issue is either disproportionate punishment, or that schools/society is more likely to take such an allegation seriously than if the alleged assailant is male, which is rather different than what you’re suggesting.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Nabil ad Dajjal , did you not know that the Central Park Five were innocent?

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Nancy Lebovitz

            It is a fairly common right-wing belief that they were in fact guilty.

            http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2014-04-23.html

            I don’t know if they were or not.

          • The Nybbler says:

            The Central Park Five were probably innocent of the rape of the Central Park jogger. However, it is rather likely they were out committing other crimes (including assaults) at the time. Not, IMO, the best candidates for martyrdom, even if they were falsely convicted.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            There’s a difference between being a candidate for sainthood and being falsely convicted.

        • eyeballfrog says:

          Like, there is no chance a black guy punching up at a white dude could ever secretly be punching down.

          Obvious counterexample: the white dude is a transman.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      Honestly I think that your original take that that community is crazy seems to be correct one.

    • jgr314 says:

      I’ve commented on other aspects that made it through the CW filter in the last open thread, so I won’t rehash that.

      Two recommendations:
      (1) try 1 or 2 more classes
      (2) If it doesn’t improve, drop it and try another theater/school. (I might be able to help with suggestions)

      I don’t have reasons to justify point (1). Suffice it to say that there are a lot of reasons why the first class (and, indeed, the first course) in improv often isn’t representative.

      For (2), there are a lot of things you described that aren’t typical and certainly not universal in the improv community:
      – the sign-up questions were much more invasive than I’ve seen elsewhere. Also, the sensitive ones are always (IME) optional, not mandatory.
      – the amount of time spent on the pre-amble was excessive (5 minutes that also covers other issues would be typical)
      – the instructor’s concept of “punching” isn’t quite how I’ve seen it defined elsewhere. I’ve never seen students or performers “punch” at each other in those terms. I would be shocked if something like at attack by one student on another was tolerated, no matter who the two students were.

      Note that there are improv groups where the performers seem to be teasing or needling each other in various ways and those can be great scenes, but those are groups who voluntarily sought each other out to form and have (usually) been working together for a long time.

      – this theater seems to be really good at attracting female/non-white students. I haven’t been in, nor have I seen, a class of improv students with the demographics you describe (only 1 white male). One interpretation is that maybe a heavy CW/PC hand is necessary to make the theater sufficiently welcoming?

      Finally, you could consider talking with the instructor. Were I in your shoes, I’d make the following points:
      (a) I don’t want or intend to offend anyone or make them uncomfortable
      (b) I haven’t done improv before and don’t know what to expect from myself
      (c) I guess the same is true for other students
      (d) It would help to be at ease if everyone could agree to assume positive intent and to make this common information in the class (explicitly agreed by all).

      I don’t know how that will be taken. All of the improv instructors and coaches with whom I’ve worked have been wonderful, but YMMV.

      • Faza (TCM) says:

        Honestly, I’d recommend going straight to (2), if only because of the sign-up questions – a fair portion of them would be downright illegal in Europe under the GDPR (and prior to that, they’d be illegal – in Poland, at least – under local personal data protection law); there is simply no good reason for an improv class provider to process such data.

        The other thing being that if someone is worried about punches going in the wrong direction, the sensible approach is to have a “no punching” rule – some topics are off the table, period. As things stand, it has more than a whiff of wanting to punch acceptable targets and there’s no benefit to be had in being the designated punching bag.

      • jgr314 says:

        Apologies, when I wrote this:

        I don’t have reasons to justify point (1).

        I meant to write:
        I don’t have time to write out my reasons to justify point (1).

        This is a cost of multi-tasking….

    • The whole point of improv class is that it’s a place where you can feel comfortable coming up with things on the spot. If you have to walk a tightrope while doing this, then there’s really no point.

    • Gobbobobble says:

      That questionnaire would already be a dealbreaker for me. The rest of the story is further evidence to consider it such…

      I’m with the folks saying just find a better group

    • John Schilling says:

      The example the instructor provided of this concept was a recent occasion when a comedian (female, white, straight) “punched sideways” at the instructor (female, white, queer) not knowing her orientation.

      Yeah, that would be the last straw for me. Given their other previously-expressed policies and warning signs, the response to “punching” at a fellow participant of any gender, race, orientation, or whatever, pretty much has to be “We are here to learn together, we do not make jokes at each others’ expense, that is what we have the entire outside world for”. Which, yes, is rather limiting as a way to learn improv comedy, because feedback from the (willing) butts of your jokes is useful, but it is at least safe.

      If the policy is instead that the group will learn in part by insulting each other, and this insult was out of line only because it wasn’t directed at an acceptable target, then the other problems become intolerable. People in this class, people not named Aftagley, will be learning comedy by insulting suitable classmates. You have been designated “insultable” by everyone else in the class, but are not yourself allowed to insult anyone in the class. Your teacher has an official scorecard that says so – she won’t show it to you, but that’s what the questionaire is for. So a big part of what you have paid for, you won’t be allowed to do, and instead you will find you have paid fro the dubious privilege of being the educational insult-target of everyone else.

      Your teacher needs to either provide a very explicit and compelling explanation as to why that isn’t going to be the case, or to refund your money.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      The instructor even went so far as to decry the concept of “punching sideways” or going after someone you think has as much power as you, because you never know if you might secretly be punching down.

      By this argument, you shouldn’t punch up, either, because you never know if you might be secretly be punching sideways or down.

      ETA: ninja’ed by lvlln

      • jermo sapiens says:

        A policy of no punching would at least be consistent, if a little boring. A policy of “punch these people but not them” is completely beyond the pale.

    • Urstoff says:

      Sounds like the least funny improv group ever. Presumably an improv class, over an above “getting your reps” and basic skills (“yes, and…”), is about exploring a wide variety of situations and dynamic and seeing what works (for you and other) and what doesn’t.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      Wow.

      As a data point, over the last five years I have taken three or four improv courses in the heart of Silicon Valley, and never experienced anything like this. The classes were usually a pretty diverse crowd, but (a) we never got lectured about “punching up/down” and (b) nobody ever made cheap jokes about race or gender.

      I can only assume you had terrible luck in your instructor.

    • Incurian says:

      Welcome to Improv. Please read from your script and do not deviate from it.

    • Ketil says:

      Perhaps it is possible to fight back with their own weapons? If you feel you are given the short end of the privilege stick (in practice, rather than in the compulsory political correctness speech), you can always undermine the jokes from others. Somebody mentioned cancer? Your mother died of cancer. Sexual or violent abuse? Your sister was abused as a child. Suicide? Your father killed himself. And so on. Drugs, sex, violence, psychiatric illness – everything can be made personal, and thus a case of ‘punching down’.

      • Aftagley says:

        1. Why? What legitimate benefit would I or anyone else get out of this? Maybe on the first one, they’d believe me, feel bad and adjust their behavior, but after two or three, I’d be (rightly) just written off as an asshole.

        2. If I get to a point where I feel like I need to do this, IE I feel so attacked that I have to wait for them to say something remotely controversial so I can capitalize on it… I’d just leave. I’d leave way before it got to that point.

    • Aapje says:

      @Aftagley

      It gives the improv class reason to kick someone out if they’re acting like a dick and if something goes wrong in class and it creates a twitter/social media backlash, the class can point to their lesson on privileged as a way of proving they’re “one of the good guys.”

      Except that this is contingent on the person who is a dick being more privileged than the person/people who want to kick them out. So in practice, this is a pro-bully environment, where ‘unprivileged’ people can bully more ‘privileged*’ people with immunity.

      * You

  54. j1000000 says:

    I agree with everyone else — kids growing up now will soon enough have plenty of nostalgia for Juuling, Fortnite, “hoverboards,” tons of YouTube celebrities I don’t know exist, Supreme clothes, mumble rap, and a million other trends I’m unaware of.

    People who are 32 and spend their time arguing about liberal politics on Twitter will probably not feel nostalgia, but all the same, it could certainly get much much worse than this in short order, and then they’d be “nostalgic” for the Trump era in the same way they’re “nostalgic” for the Bush era. Conservatives (both moderate and extreme) may eventually feel nostalgic for this era and think back fondly on when Trump was the last man to speak the politically incorrect truth and stand athwart history and also we had a thriving stock market, dunno about that.

  55. EchoChaos says:

    Anglosphere political insanity variant three!

    https://news.yahoo.com/conservatives-lead-canada-election-polls-200234461.html

    Looks like the Conservatives are now in a lead mostly because the Liberals are losing support to third and fourth parties. Is this a temporary thing right after the blackface scandal, or are the Liberals genuinely damaged?

    • Tenacious D says:

      The Conservatives may have a slight lead in the popular vote projections but the seat projections still favour the liberals.
      The televised debates (second week of October) are where the other party leaders will have a chance to take a swing at Trudeau directly. Personally, I’d consider the movement in the polls tentative til then.

      • broblawsky says:

        It’s still strange to me that Canada’s land-based distribution of voters overweighs liberal voters while America’s land-based distribution of voters overweighs conservative voters. AFAIK, the distribution of views is still the same: urban voters are liberal, rural voters are conservative. Why is the impact flipped? Are Canadian districts gerrymandered to dilute rural voters with city voters?

        • jermo sapiens says:

          Each riding has about 100,000 people. And you can think of each riding as having 1 electoral college vote. So instead of, for example, Ontario having 121 electoral votes up for grabs all in one, there are 121 ridings (or electoral district) which need to be won separately. So you could end up with the Liberals winning 60 seats (each riding wins a seat in the House of Commons) in Ontario, the Conservatives could win 40, and the NDP 21, or any other distribution which adds up to 121.

          It just happens that currently based on the models the pollsters use to predict the composition of the house, the Liberal votes are more efficiently distributed. This could be correct or not. It has changed in the past and will probably change in the future.

        • Oscar Sebastian says:

          American districts are generally gerrymandered to dilute city voters with rural voters.

        • Enkidum says:

          Much less gerrymandering, much less of a firm rural/urban right/left divide (and many rural areas are very old-school leftie), and no equivalent to the electoral college.

        • broblawsky says:

          I was comparing Canada’s distribution of voters to Congressional Districts, which are often gerrymandered by Republicans to (as noted by @Oscar Sebastian) minimize the number of districts represented by major cities. I was wondering if there was some kind of analogue in how ridings are distributed in Canada.

          • sharper13 says:

            @broblawsky,

            What you seem to be missing in your look at Congressional Districts is that Democrats are able to (and do) just as much gerrymandering of them for their advantage as Republicans do.

            What you’re observing in terms of who has benefited recently is based primarily on two causes:
            1. Republicans controlled many more State governments (which set the Congressional boundaries) as of the more recent census results. (This is the largest effect.)
            2. There is also a minor effect of the race balancing requirements in the civil rights act as interpreted by the courts to create more racially distinct districts, which in turn inhibits the ability for Democrats to spread those voters out in the same way.

            There’s no otherwise inherent structural advantage to the GOP in gerrymandering, nor in willingness to gerrymander.

  56. Jack V says:

    Huh. I thought that view on opiates was pretty standard, not that I could have proved it either way.

  57. A Definite Beta Guy says:

    Hmmmm, are there any decades where we haven’t seen nostalgia? It’s hard for me to see the ’10s, ’30s,’ and ’40s as having any sort of serious nostalgia, but maybe we had some a few decades ago.

    Out of the post-war decades, I only see the 70s as having a real dearth of nostalgia. Oil crises, urban crime, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” etc.

    Between the 00s and the 2010s, I see the 00s as less likely to have major nostalgia. The 10s were a time period of recovery and relative peace with a massive proliferation of smart phone apps. I can entirely imagine nostalgia about Tinder in 20 years.

    • EchoChaos says:

      I only see the 70s as having a real dearth of nostalgia.

      It’s the decade that had such an untapped nostalgia for it that “That 70s show” became one of the biggest shows of the late 90s/early 2000s.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        Yeah, but compare the “That 70 Show” to the insane nostalgia for practically every other post-war decade. The 50s are the cleavers, the 60s are Mad Men, the 80s is practically everything, the 90s are the Boy Bands, and the 70s is Topher Grace.

        Been a while since I watched it, but That 70s Show seemed to have stopped having anything to do with the 70s after a few seasons.

        • EchoChaos says:

          Hrm, I must have phrased that badly.

          I think that there are about the same number nostalgic for the 70s as any other decade, but there isn’t the mass media support for it because it’s all Gen X who are nostalgic, and we’re a much smaller generation without as much media power as the Boomers and Millennials.

          So we get fewer things targeted to that specific decade.

          But nostalgia for that decade is huge. M*A*S*H, for example, is a regular in the nostalgia rotation of Boomers and Gen X.

        • gbdub says:

          M*A*S*H is from the 70s but it’s set in the 50s – which decade does it count as nostalgia for?

        • EchoChaos says:

          @gbdub

          Modern nostalgia for M*A*S*H counts as 70s.

          My favorite fact about it is that the show lasted longer than the war it was putatively about.

        • gbdub says:

          “Retro”, at that time meaning a vague mash of 60s and 70s earth tones and hippie stereotypes, was huge in the mid 90s to early 2000s. That 70s Show was cashing in, not pushing a trend. See also the revival of the VW Beetle.

        • acymetric says:

          Yeah, the idea that there isn’t any nostalgia for the 70s is wild to me. There is so much nostalgia for the 70s that people who weren’t even alive yet are nostalgic for the 70s.

        • gbdub says:

          @Echo – I guess, but I feel like there are a lot of shows from the 70s that people have nostalgia for that are not strictly period pieces and thus make better examples (granted M*A*S*H was hitting some cultural themes more relevant to the 70s but still – one of those themes was nostalgia for the pre ‘nam era )

          Like, if my favorite movies were Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, would that make me necessarily nostalgic for the 90s? It would be more like I’m nostalgic for the things people in the 90s were nostalgic for.

    • Murphy says:

      People who lived through the 70’s rarely seem too keen on them.

      As one parody song put it

      “Oh the 70’s were crap
      Can we please not bring them back.”

      • Plumber says:

        @Murphy,
        As I recall it most of the ’70’s was a decade where things got worse, but things were still better than the godawful ’80’s!

    • Plumber says:

      @A Definite Beta Guy >

      Hmmmm, are there any decades where we haven’t seen nostalgia? It’s hard for me to see the ’10s, ’30s,’ and ’40s as having any sort of serious nostalgia, but maybe we had some a few decades ago…”

      Judging from the movies made then the 1940’s had nostalgia for the 1890’s (The Naughty Nineties, et cetera), afterwatds the ’50’s, and the ’60’s had nostalgia for the ’20’s, the ‘early 70’s for the ’30’s (The Sting, Paper Moon, etc), otherwise the ’70’s for the ’50’s and early 60’s (American Graffiti, Happy Days), the ’80’s for the ’60’s, (The Big Chill, Return of the Secaucus 7).

      As for me: I was born in ’68 (so early “Gen X”), and I remember far more pre ’90’s books, films, and music than post ’90’s stuff (and I’ll say it right now: I just don’t get youngsters love of The Matrix, that movie bored me, and besides I thought Dark City did the same themes better), where the ’90’s shined was television (multiple Star Trek‘s, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and while I never watched it I heard good things about Babylon 5), otherwise the ’90’s stands out as the decade during my lifetime where things got better for a while instead of worse.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      On a personal level, Nov 8th and Nov 9th, 2016, were absolutely glorious. It’ll be hard not to be nostalgic about those days.

    • keaswaran says:

      Good observation on the decades that lack nostalgia! Those are the decades with major global wars or major global depressions. They seem to have left art and culture relatively untouched, compared to the decades before or after. (Though I can’t really distinguish 1900’s retro from 1890s retro, so maybe 1900’s is also a decade without much nostalgia.)

      • JayT says:

        I don’t know, there was a ton of nostalgia about the 40s in the 1990s. It seemed like half the movies made were World War II movies, there was all that talk about the “Greatest Generation”, and the lead-up to the year 2000 was mostly a bunch of lists talking about how important WWII was.

  58. Baeraad says:

    I find myself nostalgic for the 90s, with their lukewarm political correctness and their blithe conviction that our current system was either a) perfect and infallible and the ultimate form of society or b) so utterly corrupt and broken that you could never hope to improve it, just try to avoid it. They seem really nice in comparison to the present day, where everyone is competing for who can be the most hateful and insisting that everything could be perfect if we could just get the outgroup out of politics so that our ingroup could legislate Utopia into existence.

    Considering how much I recall hating the 90s while they were going on, this leads me to conclude that twenty years from now, I’m definitely going to be nostalgic for the 10s. Whatever will have replaced the current zeigeist by then, I’m going to have learned to be thoroughly sick of it.

  59. EchoChaos says:

    There will always be nostalgia for the peaceful days of youth. All my kids so far were born in the 2010s, so they will almost certainly remember it as an idyll, because they don’t know the culture war exists and the 2010s were just a fantastic decade to be a kid because of how peaceful and safe they are.

    Teenagers (kids a decade older than my kids) will almost certainly have the same feeling, but increased because of the glut of fantastic video games and mass media.

    I don’t think “the golden age of TV series” will be something that is big, other than old crotchety Gen Xers and Millennials telling Zoomers how great TV was in their day.

    • acymetric says:

      I wonder if we need to separate personal nostalgia from cultural nostalgia. I’ll be nostalgic for the 2010s (at least the first half) because it included my final college years and my mid-late 20s post-college years which I enjoyed quite a bit. On the other hand, I won’t really be nostalgic for anything that was going on culturally at the time except possibly the very different landscape/culture of the Internet in 2010-2012 (approx).

  60. johan_larson says:

    Magic: The Gathering has a new expansion called Throne of Eldraine, based around the stories of King Arthur and his knights plus some stuff from fairy-tales, drawing on the work of H.C. Andersen and the Grimm brothers. There are many cards that depict knights, and some of these knights are clearly female. Having thought about this notion of female knights some, I have three comments.

    First, I think having female knights (or perhaps many female knights) is a bad idea, at least as implemented in Throne of Eldraine. The original stories don’t feature female knights, and until very recent times women warriors of any sort were very much the exception. That means this set injects a very modern idea into material that is leaning over backwards to conjure a vision of a legendary time in the distant past. This clash between the modern and the ancient or legendary is discordant, and distracts from setting the scene firmly.

    Second, I’m not sure why Wizards of the Coast decided to include female knights. Perhaps they simply believe that anything else would be sexist, and this is a matter of doing what is right. Or perhaps they want to draw more women and girls into the hobby, and are therefore going out of their way to show women in unlikely roles. It would be interesting to know what led the creators down this path.

    Finally, regardless of their motivations, I think there was a better way for Wizards to show women in military roles, if that was important to them. At stage left we have GRRM’s Song of Ice and Fire, which includes two prominent female fighters, Arya and Brienne. They don’t clash so much with the high-fantasy genre because there aren’t very many of them, and the books acknowledge right from the start that the characters are challenging local gender roles. And at stage right there’s The Lord of the Rings, with Eowyn, a character in a similar situation. It seems to me Wizards would have done well to follow this model.

    • Placid Platypus says:

      I don’t find it discordant, personally. It’s a fantasy world, and particularly it’s a somewhat whimsical fairy-taleish fantasy world, not a gritty realistic one like Song of Ice and Fire. It seems perfectly reasonable to handwave away any details of the real world that the creators or audience find unpleasant and irrelevant to the stories they want to tell.

      • Eponymous says:

        But if you stumble across something highly incongruous in a fictional setting, doesn’t your brain tend to flag it and destroy your suspension of disbelief?

        • lunawarrior says:

          We learned to not find magic incongruous in our medieval England fictional settings, why can’t we do the same with women knights?

          • John Schilling says:

            Because the impossible can be believed where the incredible cannot. Since Deiseach is absent for a time, I shall take up the burden of quoting Chesterton in this matter:

            “It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.”

          • Baeraad says:

            But women knights aren’t incredible. They make perfect sense. They did not, for the most parts, actually exist, but that’s because human nature often leads to acting in ways that does not make sense.

            Honestly, a lot about the middle ages as they actually were feels far more alien and bizarre than the occasional dragon.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            But women knights aren’t incredible. They make perfect sense. They did not, for the most parts, actually exist, but that’s because human nature often leads to acting in ways that does not make sense.

            Women knights don’t make sense at all. Women are weaker, slower, and less physically robust than men, and if you want women to help your military you’d be better advised to marry them off and get them to produce as many babies (read: future soldiers) as possible.

          • Protagoras says:

            @The original Mr. X, Use of children in warfare long predates modern times. It’s pretty obvious that the military functions which young boys are able to perform could in almost all cases be performed as well or most likely much better by adult women. I suppose it could be argued that young boys used in war were learning about war, but it’s obviously an exceptionally dangerous way to learn, and they’re also likely to get in the way (probably to a greater degree than adult women would, due to being more immature and irresponsible); by your logic it would make much more sense to keep them out of the fighting and just train them until they grow up. Which is probably true, but is not always how it was done, no doubt partly because sometimes you just need all the manpower you can get now, even if some of it is not well suited. So it remains remarkable that while armies which used some young boys were relatively common, armies that used any women were not. It also seems plausible that ideas about gender roles played a larger part than anything about the relative usefulness of young boys vs. women in combat.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Protagoras

            The average boy is substantially stronger than the average woman very young. If we’re talking the use of actual children (i.e. before puberty), then yes, women are better. But I don’t know of any societies that did that. A fourteen year old boy is going to be a better fighter than your average woman plus his potential.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Protagoras:

            Citation needed. All the evidence I’ve seen suggests that children weren’t generally expected to fight until their late teens, i.e., when they reached adulthood (the occasional exception of “The castle’s under assault and we need every person physically capable of holding a weapon” notwithstanding). You did sometimes get children taken on campaign as servants, camp followers, and the like, but the same is true of women, as well.

          • John Schilling says:

            It’s pretty obvious that the military functions which young boys are able to perform could in almost all cases be performed as well or most likely much better by adult women.

            Perhaps, but one function that young boys did not perform, was that of “knight”. If the job is heavy shock combat in the preindustrial era, that actually is a job for men. Investing several man-lifetimes of effort in training and arming and equipping and feeding an elite melee combatant who will wield lance and spear and axe with all the strength of a fourteen-year-old boy or seventy-year-old man, who will stagger under the the weight of hauberk, helm, and shield, and who will be randomly and repeatedly incapacitated for nine months at a time, does not in fact make sense. It is incredible. People historically did not do that, not because they were all made stupid by the Patriarchy until the Age of Wokeness, but because they were smart enough to realize that it was a dumb idea.

            Using women and/or boys as skirmishers, yes, that you can do, and as already noted that is what the most noteworthy preindustrial “women warrior” culture actually did. Boys are better, because they will grow up to be knights and/or heavy infantry as the girls grow up to be pregnant and take their training investment off the field, but if your style of war needs lots more skirmishers than heavy shock troops, yes, you can use women. That, is not incredible, just rare.

            But until you get to birth-control pills and repeating rifles, the central clash of arms and the exemplars of martial heroism, are going to be almost entirely male.

          • Randy M says:

            Perhaps, but one function that young boys did not perform, was that of “knight”

            Probably not medieval artillery, aka longbowpersons, either. Contrary to a lot of modern fantasy, archers needed tremendous strength and continual training to excel with the pinnacle of pre-crossbow ranged weapons.

          • Ohforfs says:

            >Women knights don’t make sense at all. Women are weaker, slower, and less physically robust than men, and if you want women to help your military you’d be better advised to marry them off and get them to produce as many babies (read: future soldiers) as possible.

            That depends if by knights you mean landed nobles or warrior retainers of a ruler. The former are direct descendants of the later so they kind of inherited the name.

            >Probably not medieval artillery, aka longbowpersons, either. Contrary to a lot of modern fantasy, archers needed tremendous strength and continual training to excel with the pinnacle of pre-crossbow ranged weapons.

            To add insult to injury, archery requires exactly the kind of strength where the gender differences are biggest. Let me think what should be more suited for females…

            Cavalry. Hmmm… Scythians/Sarmatians?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            That depends if by knights you mean landed nobles or warrior retainers of a ruler. The former are direct descendants of the later so they kind of inherited the name.

            Females of knightly rank are called dames, not knights. And I think the context of the conversation makes it pretty clear that the discussion is about knights in the putting-on-armour-and-charging-into-battle sense.

          • Ohforfs says:

            >Females of knightly rank are called dames, not knights. And I think the context of the conversation makes it pretty clear that the discussion is about knights in the putting-on-armour-and-charging-into-battle sense.

            See, that’s the problem. We could have knights in the sense of people who are on the ruler payroll and do fighting and enforcing (like, Rurik retainers), or the knights that reside in castle, have plenty of underlings and sometimes go on a crusade or something in full armor. The difference is important here because the second person is mostly a ruler, a landlord(lady?) with a side of fighting. Because of that, in the second case, being a female makes a lot more sense than in the first.

          • Protagoras says:

            @Randy M, You are, of course, right about longbows. On the other hand, crossbows, if they exist in the setting, are a lot closer to modern guns, in the usable by almost anyone category, at least once you have windlass technology.

          • Randy M says:

            For sure. God created men and women, Sam Colt made them equal, but a good crossbow could do in a pinch.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            See, that’s the problem. We could have knights in the sense of people who are on the ruler payroll and do fighting and enforcing (like, Rurik retainers), or the knights that reside in castle, have plenty of underlings and sometimes go on a crusade or something in full armor. The difference is important here because the second person is mostly a ruler, a landlord(lady?) with a side of fighting. Because of that, in the second case, being a female makes a lot more sense than in the first.

            Fighting was an important part of being a knight until the sixteenth century, even for the “mostly ruler” kinds. Hence why you didn’t in fact find many female knights.

          • Given that your fantasy setting involves female warriors, organizing them into a battalion of mounted crossbow-women seems to make a lot of sense. You don’t need upper body strength to ride a horse or operate a windlass, and having lighter and therefore faster riders could be useful. So why haven’t I ever read any work using this concept?

          • AG says:

            @Brendan:
            Tamora Pierce’s Tortall series includes the K’miri, a culture of matriarchal, nomadic mountain tribes. I guess they’re like a mix between Mongols and Tibetans?

        • Not A Random Name says:

          In books and some movies, sure. But these are stories that require you to (try and) immerse yourself in their setting. And all you get is the story. So it better be good.

          But for most people magic is a card game, first and foremost. Sure, the lore exists. And plausibly it’s bad and incongruous in all the worst ways. But why would anyone notice, and even more, why would anyone care?

          This is one of these times that I don’t know how people can care enough to be upset about it. Not to say you’re wrong. But I just don’t get the perspective at all.

          • johan_larson says:

            I like the art, flavour and stories. I mean, sure, you could play just by the numbers, and reveal a 4/4 card that operates at level two and lets you spend resource B to reduce the opponent’s score by one per unit expended. That would be fine. But I find it’s more fun to attack with a flying dragon that breathes fire.

          • Randy M says:

            Yeah, I think NARN is underselling the appeal of the art and feel of the cards. And ‘Resonance’ has been perceived by WotC designers as being quite important at least since 10th edition core set. (MaRo wrote a column about it that I remember)

          • Not A Random Name says:

            I don’t think I’m underselling art and flavor. I might be underselling story, but I don’t think I am.

            Really, it’s not a choice between A) caring about the gameplay and nothing else or B) caring about everything equally.

            I said that gameplay is the most important aspect and I stand by that. Yet I’d assume most people care about the art as well – it’s got to look cool. And plausibly about the flavor. But it’s specifically story that I don’t think many people know or care much for.

            So as far as I’m concerned “besides gameplay, art, flavor and story is important to people as well” could by and large by reduced to “art and flavor is important to people as well”. So I don’t see how it’s counterargument to my initial claim.

          • Randy M says:

            But it’s specifically story that I don’t think many people know or care much for.

            Okay, then, fair and probably true.

            the lore exists. And plausibly it’s bad and incongruous in all the worst ways. But why would anyone notice, and even more, why would anyone care?

            This is where the confusion arose. johan’s point didn’t come from reading the accompanying novel, but from perusing the pictures on the cards. Which is not only hard to miss, but part of the draw.

          • Not A Random Name says:

            Maybe I’m just misunderstanding him then. I’m assuming johan larson does not object to female knights per se. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. But I thought his point was roughly the following:

            The whole background and lore of the current edition is modeled after the Kind Arthur legends. Female knights don’t fit into that legend, this is why it is immersion breaking. This is why it matters.

            So basically “female knights are okay, if and only if they fit the background” is what I understand him to say. And that argument is valid as long as long as the background a) is relevant and b) does not fit female knights.
            Now, for generic medieval fantasy female knights fit just well if you ask me. After all that’s the middle ages plus and minus all the things think would be cool if different. If we can have dragons because cool, if we can have magic because cool, then we can have total gender equality because cool.
            So to argue that female knights don’t fit really requires the King Arthur tale to be important. So first you have to notice that it’s Arthur inspired. And then you have to care enough about it, that you mind them being very liberal with their interpretation. And this is why I questioned the importance of story and lore.

          • AG says:

            Arthuriana was built by people adding their special snowflake OCs and such to the legend over time. At some point of the mythology, all of the Fae stuff would have been new and immersion-breaking. The mythology was reinterpreted through a French chivalry epic at one time, and then more recently reinterpreted through a Decline of Rome lens. Others have gone even further fantastical. What makes the retcon of lady knights any different from the various retcons that built the mythology in the first place?

            Xena not only met King Arthur, but also Boudica, Beowulf, Julius Caesar, Helen and Paris, some people carting the Ark of the Covenant around, baby Jesus, King David, Ramses III, and also swings by the Ming Dynasty at one point, and meanwhile at some point one of the Amazons mates with a centaur and has a baby. You’d be surprised at how little will actually break immersion.

            So even the importance of story and lore isn’t even a qualifying point, either. They might, indeed, make the inclusion of lady knights into the Arthurian timeline a point of the lore.

          • Randy M says:

            You’d be surprised at how little will actually break immersion.

            Really? By the end of that show, any interest in the story I had was long gone and I was just watching to see the hot chick beat up cyclopses and stuff.

          • AG says:

            @Randy M

            Most of the stuff I listed was in the earlier seasons. I stopped watching the show after S3, myself, but that wasn’t because of any particular world-building or lore affecting my enjoyment, but just my time being taken up by other shows.

          • Randy M says:

            Didn’t realize there were six season of that. Yeah, Xena got around as much as Doctor Who.
            Let’s say that while individual stories could be interesting, any investment in the setting is lost when you see episodes centuries apart.

          • EchoChaos says:

            I’d agree with @Randy M that Xena is a great example of a story that was fun but had absolutely lost suspension of disbelief.

          • AG says:

            This seems to come down to a difference in what we consider immersion. I consider someone who has accepted Xena’s wild history shenanigans as part of the appeal of the show to still potentially be immersed, as it’s part of the Xena world’s internal ruleset now.

            Even setting aside the gleeful absurdities of various anime, Xena wasn’t that much more gleeful about warping human mythology than, say, the Stargate franchise. Or DC and Marvel.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            With Xena, I always just assumed that, in the Xena universe, all these things were happening at the same time. So it’s not that Xena was time-travelling thousands of years into the future or past, but that cultures that in our universe existed thousands of years apart were all contemporaneous in hers.

          • Randy M says:

            Not just cultures, though, but individuals. Like, the Israelite King David and his generations removed descendant.

        • Placid Platypus says:

          Sure, sometimes it’ll damage my suspension of disbelief to some extent. But that’s not a strictly involuntary process: once you’ve noticed the initial incongruity you can choose to keep picking at it and sneering, or to shrug and let it go, or to actively try to come up with justifications why it actually makes sense and makes the setting more interesting in some way. I pick the first option sometimes, it can be fun, but in general I prefer a more positive outlook.

          Especially in cases like this one where there are solid out of universe reasons in favor of their decision.

        • mdet says:

          Suspendability of disbelief seems to vary a whole lot from person to person, as well as from work to work (like Platypus said regarding whimsical fairy tale vs Song of Ice & Fire).

    • EchoChaos says:

      I’m pretty right-wing and this is one that just doesn’t bother me at all. Women dressed in armor has a rich art history even if it makes no military sense.

      Looking through the art, the unnecessary racial diversity bothers me more than the sex diversity, because Arthurian legend is specifically British. I understand that it’s 2019 and all, but still.

      • Nick says:

        There are way to do racial diversity in medieval stuff, it just has to be justified. I read the Gene Wolfe story “Under Hill” a while back, which features a Chinese princess with good reason.

        • johan_larson says:

          That sounds right. You want black people in pseudo-Camelot? Sure, there’s a pseudo-Moorish kingdom right over there. Asians? Silk road travelers. Just find some sort of reason to make them fit.

          • Eponymous says:

            Are we talking about diverse people groups that clearly are from different cultures (different garb, style of armor/weapons, etc), or just “here’s a european-style knight who’s white, and here’s one who’s black”?

            Because the latter seems highly incongruous to me, on the ground that racial diversity requires lengthy genetic isolation, and thus one would expect people who look noticeably different to not live in the same place in a setting with pre-modern transportation technology.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Because the latter seems highly incongruous to me, on the ground that racial diversity requires lengthy genetic isolation, and thus one would expect people who look noticeably different to not live in the same place in a setting with pre-modern transportation technology.

            This is a negative feature of some of my favorite children’s books, the Dinotopia series. The relatively small human population of the island is divided into British/Irish, Yoruba, Tibetan, etc. rather than having intermarried until they all looked alike.

          • Randy M says:

            This is the set.
            The human people mostly look European, but there’s some that look distinctly African, and some that are more ambiguous.
            There isn’t really any apparent reason for racial distinctions ,but of course it’s just a collection of images, so whether a particular dude represents a foreigner or the orders are perfectly integrated and yet still somehow retain a vibrant diversity is in the eye of the beholder.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            For historical European settings, does anyone make sure that only people from the plausible parts of Europe are shown?

          • Randy M says:

            For historical European settings, does anyone make sure that only people from the plausible parts of Europe are shown?

            It’s a lot less stark with certain nationalities, though. An arabic guy could probably pass for a tan anglo-saxon.
            A Japanese guy would probably be as jarring as the African guy in Camelot’s court, but they don’t tend to get the same representation.

          • albatross11 says:

            Would there have been Moorish knights in Spain before the Reconquista?

            Pre-gunpowder weapons really put a premium on strength and size and robustness, and all that’s stuff that men have a big advantage on. Even if you’re using a not-so-heavy weapon (a sword or spear), armor and shields weigh something, and you’ll be carrying around/using that stuff all day long. My guess is that you’d need to be way the hell off on the right end of the bell curve, as a woman, to keep up with men on a muscle-powered battlefield. Maybe comparable to a woman being able to keep up with the men on a good high school football or soccer field.

          • Aapje says:

            @albatross11

            A large component of battle is to maneuver.

            Modern studies by various militaries found that female soldiers get substantially more musculoskeletal injuries, resulting in them being up to 5 times as likely to be injured.

        • Kindly says:

          Gene Wolfe has to justify it because his story is set in far-off Camelot. The Magic expansion is not set in far-off Camelot. It is set in Eldraine, which is inspired by Arthurian legends among other things, but is allowed to have its own rules.

          This is not to say that it can do anything without justification. It is much nicer to be internally consistent. For example, it’s okay to justify racial diversity with “people from Ardenvale look different from people from Vantress” but kind of weird to justify it with “this is what the character art for Linden, the Steadfast Queen looked like”.

          If you trust the Magic set designers to have thought things through, then you can approach all the unfamiliar things with “huh, in this setting, there are female knights. I wonder what implications that has” but of course if you don’t trust them, then there’s no point.

      • Plumber says:

        Sir Palamedes from the 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur was a “Sarecan” (who later converts to Christianity), I can’t think of any other characters that fit that bill though, in terms of actual 5th century Britain, from reading Blood of the Isles (A.K.A. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland), and The Origins of the British, there’s a minute amount of north African and west Asian ancestry in some old British families (presumably Roman legionaires) so a little bit of mixture isn’t completely implausible, and the Mediterranean at least still had the Roman trading routes mostly intact (it wasn’t till the Islamic conquests a couple if centuries later that they really stopped), but I doubt that Morgan Freeman would go unnoticed as much as he did in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (different century but eh).

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        This is where I start yelling at you guys to grab a translation of Orlando innamorato (~1483). The Christians have a lady knight, Bradamante (which leads to a number of precocious tropes, like “Samus Is a Girl”). The story starts with a Chinese princess showing up to disperse Charlemagne’s paladins so her father can steal his treasures, creating a third faction in addition to the conventional Christians and Saracens.
        Of course if you wanted a really authentic medieval depiction of racial diversity, you’d look to Parzival (~1215), where the eponymous hero’s father has an adventure saving an African queen from Scottish pirates, and she gives birth to a son with black and white stripes.

        • EchoChaos says:

          Of course if you wanted a really authentic medieval depiction of racial diversity, you’d look to Parzival (~1215), where the eponymous hero’s father has an adventure saving an African queen from Scottish pirates, and she gives birth to a son with black and white stripes.

          Absolutely. Southern European diversity did exist (although probably not as aggressively as sometimes portrayed), but that’s a place that Arthurian legend specifically matters.

        • Eponymous says:

          Side note, but when medieval European literature describes moors/saracens as “black” or similar, am I right in thinking that they are probably mostly referring to Arabs and Berbers, and so mean something more like “darker than Europeans”, and not what we mean by “black” (sub-saharan Africans)?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            It’s context-dependent. Some medieval people groups called people with black hair “black” (cf. Black Irish), and Old Norse used “blue” for sub-Saharan skin. In my Parzival cite, Wolfram clearly explains that Parzival’s half-brother by an African mother is striped jet black and parchment color from the mixing of his parents’ gens.

          • The Chanson de Roland, as best I recall, describes part of the Muslim army that Charlemagne is fighting against as consisting of very black people, pretty clearly sub-saharan Africans. And there were quite a lot of people of at least partial sub-Saharan African ancestry in the Islamic world, due largely to the import of black slaves, but also, I think, recruitment of black military units.

            That includes Ibriham ibn al Mahdi, son, brother, and uncle of caliphs and briefly an unsuccessful pretender to the caliphate. Also a famous musician and collector (possibly creator) of recipes.

    • episcience says:

      But Magic settings are very rarely trying to depict historical settings accurately. They draw inspiration from real-world stories and mythology and create their own world from that. Yes, they intentionally show women and racial minorities and sexual minorities in those settings, perhaps to broaden the appeal of the card game. They have done this in their sets based on other mythologies too. But, unlike, say, ASOIAF, they are plainly not attempting to tell a story which is socio-politically accurate to the oppressions and gender roles of the period from which those mythologies were set.

    • Machine Interface says:

      Eh, Magic always had female warrior figures — I mean, one of their most famous cards is Serra Angel!

      And there’s at least one historical precedent for a specific time period with a lot of female knights (in the loose sense of “sword-wielding warrior in full body armor”): the Crusades.

      In light of this, perhaps they should have used Carolingian mythology rather than Arthurian one as the basis for Throne of Eldraine, since most of the works of the Matter of France were written during the crusades and reflect preoccupations of that time.

      • johan_larson says:

        perhaps they should have used Carolingian mythology rather than Arthurian one as the basis for Throne of Eldraine

        They ran into some problems with one of their earlier sets based on folktales, Lorwyn. The set was faithful to the source material, but players just didn’t recognize the references. This time around, they were more careful to use material people are familiar with. And I’m not sure the Caroligian mythology clears that bar, at least in the Anglosphere.

        • Machine Interface says:

          It doesn’t even clear that bar in the Francosphere — my suggestion was definetely tongue in cheek.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        And there’s at least one historical precedent for a specific time period with a lot of female knights (in the loose sense of “sword-wielding warrior in full body armor”): the Crusades.

        What? Even the (clearly feminist POV) Wikipedia article, in the section “Warrior Women of the Crusades” only cites wives or daughters of kings and princes who ended up wielding political power due to death or illness of their husbands or fathers, and sent armies or occasionally led armies.

        Maybe on occasion they might have donned cerimonial swords and armors, but it seems unlikely they did any actual fighting.

        • Machine Interface says:

          Maybe on occasion they might have donned cerimonial swords and armors, but it seems unlikely they did any actual fighting.

          Muslim accounts say otherwise.

          • John Schilling says:

            Potentially fascinating. Any specific Muslim accounts I should be looking for?

          • viVI_IViv says:

            Hostile accounts aren’t usually considered very historical accurate.

            Muslims would say that the Crusaders had women fighting among them to imply they were unmanly or depraved. There are similar accounts by the Greeks and the Romans about the various “barbarians” they clashed with, but historical evidence in the form of friendly accounts, tombs, and so on, fails to support the notion of systematic female participation in combat, in any culture.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            There are similar accounts by the Greeks and the Romans about the various “barbarians” they clashed with, but historical evidence in the form of friendly accounts, tombs, and so on, fails to support the notion of systematic female participation in combat, in any culture.

            The Sarmatian tombs would like to have a word with you.

          • Eponymous says:

            @LMC

            The Sarmatian tombs would like to have a word with you.

            Interesting, didn’t know about them.

            Out of curiosity: is the evidence only from burial items? Is there skeletal evidence of combat participation at a similar level to male warriors?

          • viVI_IViv says:

            As I understand there were indeed Scythian-Sarmatian women buried with weapons (20% of “warrior graves”, according to Wikipedia), whether they were actual warriors is unclear, as these tombs belonged to high-status individuals, hence the presence of weapons could be cerimonial (e.g. for wives or daughters of high-ranking military men).

            Some websites I found with a quick googling mention combat wounds, although I can’t find any reliable source.

          • John Schilling says:

            Even the Sarmatians don’t claim that women fought at the same level as men. Per custom, all adolescent girls were required to fight (probably as light cavalry skirmishers) until they were ready to marry. Grave goods suggest that a minority of women fought well into adulthood and with the sort of gear a horse-nomad society could not afford to waste on someone who was just going to be a light cavalry skirmisher for a few years, but not anything like parity with male warriors.

            But truth is distorted in the telling, if only for “man bites dog” and cultural-preconception reasons. If Greek hoplites campaigning north of the Black Sea city-states expect to encounter zero young women throwing javelins at them, and in fact encounter some young women throwing javelins at them, then a few generations of war story by multiple hearsay gets you Athenian poets spinning tales of wholly Amazonian tribes.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            What John Schilling said. I need to do more house-cleaning so I can’t verify female wounds from a study right now, but he nailed the gist of it. There were some rather than zero women doing horse nomad skirmishing, and when Greek colonists’s tales from the Black Sea filtered back home, poets were inspired and Amazons got poetically back-dated to the Heroic/Mycenaean Age.

          • Machine Interface says:

            @ John Schilling

            This paper mentions and analyzes several of these muslim chronicles: https://www.academia.edu/7608599/Women_and_the_Crusades (page 11 onward).

          • Ohforfs says:

            >Even the Sarmatians don’t claim that women fought at the same level as men.

            I don’t think Sarmatians claimed anything. Do we have any literary sources from them?

            >Grave goods suggest that a minority of women fought well into adulthood and with the sort of gear a horse-nomad society could not afford to waste on someone who was just going to be a light cavalry skirmisher for a few years, but not anything like parity with male warriors.

            You mean… now, that’s bizarre. If you say the kind of gear nomadic society couldn’t waste you mean heavy Sarmatian cataphracts. But that’s not a light skirmisher, that’s shock cavalry. Light skirmisher is basically no gear, they use what everyone has as a civilian and everyone (adult male) is one.

            >But truth is distorted in the telling, (…) gets you Athenian poets spinning tales of wholly Amazonian tribes.

            … well, good that we don’t talk about fully Amazon tribes nor Athenian poets then?

    • Perico says:

      I don’t know, this isn’t anything new for WotC – they have two decades’ worth of experience selling a fantasy RPG where female knight characters are encouraged, and just as competent as their male counterparts. Realism is not a priority, representation is. Faithfulness to the source material is just a means to an end (having a cool setting based on concepts that are familiar to their audience), and they have no qualms about deviating from it.

      I mean, this is the same set where they made half the Seven Dwarves female – and it’s not like mining has traditionally been an industry known for gender parity, either. It’s just the way WotC likes to handle their IPs.

      • Randy M says:

        Dwarven females would probably (er, for whatever value of probably refers to arbitrary and shifting fantasy assumptions) have a comparative advantage over human males, although not over their Dwarven males conterparts.
        If the Dwarven community was a small enough minority, I could see female dwarven miners being plausible.
        Maybe Grumpy is grumpy because his daughter’s callouses represent an ongoing sense of shame.

    • Randy M says:

      Did you fall off the mystical turnip truck yesterday? Yeah, WotC is pretty woke; the eponymous coast is, after all, the North American Pacific, and they ain’t based in TJ. They’re not going to sacrifice diversity for verisimilitude or resonance.

      At stage left we have GRRM’s Song of Ice and Fire, which includes two prominent female fighters, Arya and Brienne. They don’t clash so much with the high-fantasy genre because there aren’t very many of them, and the books acknowledge right from the start that the characters are challenging local gender roles. And at stage right there’s The Lord of the Rings, with Eowyn, a character in a similar situation.

      GRRM was something of a student of medieval culture wasn’t he? I think he cared more about authenticity, and remember, that series began almost 25 years ago. Similar case for LotR. Pressure for modern American representation in fantasy or historical fiction wasn’t as strong then. Their model is probably more like the BBC Merlin.

    • Plumber says:

      @johan_larson >

      “Magic: The Gathering has a new expansion called Throne of Eldraine, based around the stories of King Arthur and his knights plus some stuff from fairy-tales, drawing on the work of H.C. Andersen and the Grimm brothers. There are many cards that depict knights, and some of these knights are clearly female. Having thought about this notion of female knights some, I have three comments.

      First, I think having female knights (or perhaps many female (or perhaps many female knights) is a bad idea, at least as implemented…”

      Britomart was a woman Knight in Spencer’s long Arthurian poem The Faerie Queene from the 16th century, so one character

      • mendax says:

        From the Faerie Queene there is also Belphoebe, I am told.

        In Orlando Furiouso and Orlando Inammorato, there are Marfisa and Bradamente.

        Bradamante, a female Christian knight, is the sister of Rinaldo and falls in love with a Saracen warrior named Ruggiero, but refuses to marry him unless he converts from Islam. An expert in combat, she wields a magical lance that unhorses anyone it touches, and rescues Ruggiero from being imprisoned by the wizard Atlantes

        Jerusalem delivered had Clorinda.

        What was it with the 16th century and female knights?

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          What was it with the 16th century and female knights?

          It was the Renaissance: They were trying to follow Classical tropes. The Aeneid had a warrior woman named Camilla, probably in emulation of Penthesilia, Queen of the Amazons when they fought for Troy (a part of the cycle that starts right after the Iliad).

    • Hackworth says:

      Sorry for the snarkiness, but the entirety of the Eldraine trailer was about the short-lived love between two sentient, Shrek-style Gingerbread people… beings. The knights tribe is only a small part of the set, it’s also about giants, faeries, and general fairy tale tropes such as magic mirrors and enchanted pumpkin carriages. One card is literally named “Happily Ever After”. Are you really that worried that this small aspect of female knights might get taken as gospel by the impressionable youth?

      • johan_larson says:

        Are you really that worried that this small aspect of female knights might get taken as gospel by the impressionable youth?

        No, I’m annoyed the set designers got gender equality all over the mythic warrior heroes, like ice cream on steak. Both are just fine by themselves.

    • hls2003 says:

      So this has nothing at all to do with the gender / representational aspect of your post. I do not play Magic (maybe twice in my life borrowed some cards for a deck). I have only the vaguest impression of what half of the text instructions mean on the cards. But I followed the link to the cards and spent over a quarter-hour scrolling through the whole deck. Is it something weird with me, or is it moderately common, for non-players to enjoy just looking through a Magic deck even though I have no impression of “oh, this is a good card” or “I see how this works”?

      Part of it is that the artwork is fun, of course. The little quotes on the bottom of some cards always draw me in; they’re a little bit Tolkienesque in creating the impression of a larger world with a deeper history and fun stories lurking behind the cards. I suppose there probably are some short stories or novelizations or something that they sell after a set is released? I don’t think I’d really want to read them. I just like the impression.

      And yet I still never really have the impulse to learn to play. I just don’t feel the pull of the game, I don’t have the time, and I certainly don’t have any sense of the game mechanics or the fun of identifying card synergies. Maybe I’m the weird one. Or do you have friends who don’t care about Magic who still like to look at the cards?

      • b_jonas says:

        No, this does not make you the weird one.

        M:tG cards deliberately have fascinating worldbuilding with the flavor of its cards. This is the most obvious from how much attention they take with the art, flavor text and card names. (Flavor text is the italicized text without parenthesis in a separate line printed into the text box of the card, which doesn’t influence the rules of the game.) The actual rules function of the card has to match the flavor too. In the last decade, Wizards also pays lots of attention to get the most important parts of the story through the cards of the set, so that you can understand the most important elements even if you don’t buy the novelization and don’t read any of the short stories or explanations from their website.

        If you don’t play the game then you likely don’t spend much on it, and so you probably aren’t Wizard’s target customer. However, you like the flavor of the cards becuase they are optimized to people similar to you who also play the game. I personally do like the game itself too, but I have occasionally bought single copies of cards for their flavor and art even if I don’t plan to play the card.

        > Or do you have friends who don’t care about Magic who still like to look at the cards?

        Are you asking M:tG players on SSC? We are nerds living in the basement of our parents, we don’t have friends.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      Magic has had female knights going back to Ice Age and female soldiers in Alpha. I don’t know why they’d stop now.

      Honestly I’ve never been bothered by the wokeness trend in MtG. It seems less forced than other properties, but I can’t pinpoint why.

      • Witness says:

        I’m going with this. Magic’s had “representation” since before it was popular. Now they maybe have a little more of it or get a little more mileage out of it in terms of marketing? No big whoop.

      • quanta413 says:

        Agreed. Its not noteworthy in magic.

        Magic has also always culturally appropriated like mad too. Sometimes they loop back around to European stuff.

        Edit: to be clear I’m in favor of using other people’s ideas. The worst that can happen is you make bad food/art/whatever. But badness is orthogonal to how much you imitate or take.

      • johan_larson says:

        Yes, but when did it start to have many of them? That’s really the crux of the issue. I’m not objecting to an odd special case here and there.

        • eyeballfrog says:

          Hard to do an analysis of this, but Shards of Alara back in 2008 definitely had a bunch of female knights/soldiers, with Elspeth, Knight-Errant and Knight of the Reliquary being the highest profile ones.

        • Aftagley says:

          Yes, but when did it start to have many of them?

          I enjoy doing analysis and need to get better at using gatherer. I’ll *try* and find you an answer to this question, if you’d be willing to plug in the following information:

          1. What % of knights would you say is too many?

          2. The “knight” subtype in MTG is tied to two separate things: one type tends to be a heavily armored, mounted solider; this type can be found in red, white and black primarily. The other thing knight is used to denote is warriors who are especially noble. Do you want me to count both, or just the cavalry?

          3. In the case of non-horse based cavalry, how should I count it? Established fantasy convention tends to center females as being the riders of flying/mythical beasts (at least if fire emblem is anything to go off of).

          • johan_larson says:

            I’ll *try* and find you an answer to this question, if you’d be willing to plug in the following information:

            Sure.

            The US Military Academy currently has 22% women. Let’s go with half of that, 11% as the boundary of notability in a fantasy context. At that point, there’s more than just an occasional special case.

            Count just the riders, and I’d like to know if there’s a notable number of warriors on horseback who are too lightly protected to really be knights.

            They count as knights for this purpose regardless of what they ride. A goblin knight mounted on a pig is a knight, for the purpose of this calculation.

            Let’s go with that for a first cut. And thank you for offering to do the research.

          • Randy M says:

            They count as knights for this purpose regardless of what they ride.

            Study will be a lot easier if you just limit it to those with the “Knight” creature type. But still hard, because, at least of late, MtG knights tend to be properly armored. I think this is a woman, but it’s really hard to say.
            Looking through the list, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being majority women at this point (provided you exclude the skeletons and elementals and such from the total).

          • Aftagley says:

            @ randy M

            Oh yeah. I was planning on doing that from the beginning.

            Initial results – in total there are 226 MTG cards with sub-type Knight that have a discernible gender and are riding some kind of animal. There are around 100 “knights who are just standing around” and they trended male, but I did not count them.

            When counting this list, I excluded obviously asexual beings like artifacts and most elementals, but included undead. When the card shows a group of people, I’d look at everyone in the scene and if I saw a woman, I counted it. I didn’t count multiples however, simple binary yes/no if the card shows a woman as a knight. If the picture presented a figure encased in a massive slab of armor, I went ahead and counted it as male.

            In total, I counted 80 female Knights.

            Of these, at least 15 fit more closely in the skirmisher subcategory (IE, lightly armored and holding javelins, etc). I tried to be fairly discerning as to what I included in this category, so I’d consider this a floor estimate, your count may be slightly higher.

            Another 4 or so were clearly trying to look like Valkyries which, I’d argue should place them in a separate category.

            That leaves a approximately 61 identifiably female knights and 146 identifiably male knights.

            My next step will be to sort these results by year, but that is a way more time consuming task than I anticipated (I forgot that most mtg cards don’t have a visible date on them, just the symbol for the set they are apart of.) My initial impressions is that most of these female knights are from the last 5-10 years, but that’s just going off the sets I’m most familiar with.

          • Randy M says:

            I do have to say, a number of these are quite fetching.
            I wouldn’t say no to being a squire on Bant or Dominaria.
            Did you count “Bring your daughter to work day“?

          • Aftagley says:

            I honestly considered it, but in the end decided he’d probably drop her off at fantasy daycare before he went out to fight.

          • Randy M says:

            I honestly considered it, but in the end decided he’d probably drop her off at fantasy daycare before he went out to fight.

            Oh, I’m sure. Yet another example of woke capitalism’s war on the traditional family structure. Can’t be good little drones if we’re not built by the proper… alright, just joking at my own expense here.
            Card is pretty funny, though.
            Belle of the Brawl: Hey, did you see Lancelot’s kid?
            Ardenvale Paladin: Yeah, she’s so sweet. We should like, fight harder. For her sake.
            BotB: Only a little harder though.
            AP: Oh, yeah, just the smallest measurable amount more.

          • moonfirestorm says:

            @Aftagley

            My next step will be to sort these results by year, but that is a way more time consuming task than I anticipated

            If you use Scryfall instead of Gatherer, they have a “year” search term.
            https://scryfall.com/docs/syntax#year

            I don’t know if you’re already taking this into account, but you may also want to make sure you’re using unique:art (or whatever the Gatherer equivalent is) to make sure you’re looking at the different art variants of cards, in case a reprinted knight changes gender in later art.

            @Randy

            Looking through the list, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being majority women at this point (provided you exclude the skeletons and elementals and such from the total).

            I suspect that’s because Knight has only recently (well, recently for the grand history of MTG) been a relevant creature type. Knight Exemplar was the first real Knight lord in M2011, but the response was “it’s a powerful effect, but there aren’t really any Knights to work with it”. Wizards started printing Knights more heavily, but it’s only in the last few sets that we’re seeing actual tribal synergies for them. Dominaria had Aryel, Knight of Windgrace which is an explicitly Knight-focused EDH commander, and it was still a stretch to build any sort of Knight EDH deck around it.

          • Aftagley says:

            @moonfirestorm

            Ah, I’d forgotten about scryfall! Thanks, that’s way easier than Gatherer.

            My plan was to go for most recent printings only, as I felt like that represents the most accurate depiction of WOTC’s current vision for the state of the game.

          • Randy M says:

            My first MtG product was the Knights vs Dragons duel deck, which featured Knight Exemplar and Knight of the Reliquary.
            Out of curiosity, I looked up the decklist, it’s 6 out of 22 knights as identifiable females. I remembered it more, probably because some of the most powerful and visually striking cards in it were.

          • moonfirestorm says:

            My plan was to go for most recent printings only, as I felt like that represents the most accurate depiction of WOTC’s current vision for the state of the game.

            Maybe I misunderstood what you’re trying to find?

            My impression is that we’re trying to figure out when female knights started to appear in large numbers, by comparing how many creatures with the Knight type are female versus male, and at what point the percentages started to shift.

            If this is the goal, the only way to determine this is the art, so we should be looking at every artwork that appears on a card with the creature type Knight. White Knight’s 2009 printing as male matters, but so too does its 1993 printing as male: in both 1993 and 2009, Wizards made the decision “make this knight male”, and both those decisions are important in answering the question “when and to what extent did they decide to start making large numbers of female knights”?

          • Aftagley says:

            If this is the goal, the only way to determine this is the art, so we should be looking at every artwork that appears on a card with the creature type Knight. White Knight’s 2009 printing as male matters, but so too does its 1993 printing as male: in both 1993 and 2009, Wizards made the decision “make this knight male”, and both those decisions are important in answering the question “when and to what extent did they decide to start making large numbers of female knights”?

            Hmm, I think you’re right. Ok, I’ll go in that direction. Consider my previous results untrustworthy, for now.

    • Nornagest says:

      There are settings where I’d find this sort of thing dissonant: works aiming for historical accuracy, or the most traditionalist sort of fairytale milieu, or revisionist grit and cynicism. I wasn’t too happy with Dragon Age‘s take, for example — it didn’t mesh well with its Game of Thrones-influenced “realism”, especially since GoT had a perfectly good template for it that Dragon Age chose not to use for some reason. But Magic has typically gone for a sort of postmodern, stylized, highly cinematic fantasy descended from Dungeons and Dragons, and it fits in well enough there. I haven’t been following the game much lately (played a bit on Arena a year or so ago, but then the meta changed and I lost interest), but I doubt the set dressing in this release will do much to change the core theme.

      Subversive takes on the Arthurian canon are practically a cliche in their own right by now, anyway, and one of the more influential modern ones had a female Arthur.

      • AG says:

        More than just one. The Disney adaptation of the Mag Cabot novels also went for girl Arthur (the novels went with Morgana).

    • They don’t clash so much with the high-fantasy genre

      Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

      ASOIAF is not high fantasy! The defining characteristic of high fantasy is black-and-white morality. Aragorn is Good, Sauron is Evil, and that’s all there is to it.

      High Fantasy:
      The Lord of the Rings
      Star Wars
      The Wheel of Time
      Dragonlance

      Not High Fantasy:
      A Song of Ice and Fire
      Discworld
      Dune
      The Witcher

      • Nornagest says:

        High fantasy typically features black-and-white morality, but I’d say it’s distinguished more by scope (epic conflict against a threat menacing the galaxy, the world, or at least a large nation; having a Dark Lord is a tell), and by having a plot that’s resolved with a moral rather than a physical victory (though the moral victory might enable a physical victory, as in Star Wars). If the conflict simply ends when the protagonist stabs the right guy in the face, without coming to some kind of epiphany first, it ain’t high fantasy.

        Thomas Covenant, for example, is a high fantasy — epic threat, Dark Lord, moral victory — with an initially very morally grey protagonist. Most cinematic fantasy — The Princess Bride, for example — falls into the “heroic” bucket, not the “high”, but does have black-and-white morality. Most of the threads in Game of Thrones are low fantasy, but its Night King subplot (which, as far as we can tell, isn’t reflected in the books) only escapes the “high” label by culminating in a big battle that the good guys win.

        • I suppose the “white” part of black-and white morality is not strictly required. You do, however, need some sort of supernatural evil. E.g., Sauron is more evil than any human could possibly be, no matter how they tried.

      • Tarpitz says:

        Esme Weatherwax would like to remind you that there’s no greys, only white that’s got a bit grubby.

    • benwave says:

      Well I do know from MaRo’s endless series of posts and podcasts that more women on the cards has tested well with their target demos, and for a game property, magic puts an unusually high amount of effort into doing this kind of testing. So I think it’s a good bet that they have some evidence it will be good for their bottom line.

      But I also don’t really understand why this makes you feel bad? If you wanted to create a setting with female knights in it, what would it look like?

      • johan_larson says:

        I’ve done some thinking about how I would add female fighters to a setting like this if it didn’t already have them.

        I could make the Fae warriors 50/50 male/female without any issue. Fae are different from humans, whether of history or legend, so there we have more freedom to do whatever we want. Heck, maybe it’s mostly Fae women who fight. Have at it.

        We could also put women warriors in a place where they have some sort of advantage. Women are smaller than men, so they might have an advantage in a place where weight really matters, such as on the back of a bird. There could be an order of knights that ride griffins or giant eagles and are exclusively or predominantly female. That would work. And put them in white, the color of magic that celebrates equality and unity if anyone does.

        And finally I think there’s some room for special cases here and there, of unusually talented or determined women who manage to make it in a very male role. And put some flavor around it, such as, “At twelve, she outran her brothers. At fourteen, she defeated her entire class at single-stick. At eighteen, everyone is waiting to see what she can do with a sword.” There are plenty of stories like this, so it fits pretty well.

        Basically, if you are going to go against history and the traditions of the genre, there should be a reason, a good reason, and you should take care to fit with other genre conventions as much as possible.

        • Placid Platypus says:

          I don’t really see why history and genre conventions should count any more than modern mores for this kind of thing.

          • johan_larson says:

            The reason why history and genre conventions count is that they help establish setting and mood. Throne of Eldraine is all about Arthurian legends and fairy tales. By invoking their tropes, the artists are setting up expectations in the audience of how things work. They are also saving themselves a ton of work of explicit world-building because the audience will quickly pick up that oh yeah, we’re in fairy-tale land with the knights and ladies, not in noir land with the private eyes and the tough-talking dames, and they should therefore expect horses not cars and castles not skyscrapers. But if the artists suddenly start going against convention they are not just throwing away that scene setting, they risk alienating the audience by creating confusion about how things actually work.

            I’m willing to believe that change can be good and sometimes done with good reason. Also, sometimes creating a certain tension between convention and what actually happens can be useful. I’m just saying that it should be done thoughtfully, and with the expectations of the audience borne in mind.

    • mendax says:

      I remembered this essay, but while it has knightly art around it (and many examples of M:tG art), the text mostly refers to post-gunpowder combat (aside from a mention of Viking women, and I guess Shaka Zulu’s female soldiers might not have been equipped with guns).

      • John Schilling says:

        It also seems to be a mix of “we have always campaigned as camp followers, who would sometimes pick up a pointy stick if the camp was in danger of being overrun”, and three-sigma edge cases.

        Hurley is right that there are some good stories there, which if they aren’t being told at all, someone should tell. But it would go several steps too far to turn this into either an argument for anything like gender equality on historic battlefields but for the Patriarchal propaganda hiding same, or a requirement that future genre war stories should as a matter of course always include female warriors for diversity.

    • johan_larson says:

      Let me commend everyone in this thread about female knights for keeping the discussion civil on a topic that sometimes gets people’s tempers flaring.

    • aristides says:

      I can’t really be bothered by female knights in a fantasy setting after watching Fate/Stay Night. They literally have female King Arthur. It was jarring at first, but I’ve gotten used to it. I think the pros of extra representation and diversity outweigh the cons of less realism in a fantasy world. Non fantasy world, sure, but once magic exists, I’m ok with it

    • Tarpitz says:

      If you want to hear WOTC narrative design lead Alison Luhrs explain the company’s position on this sort of thing, listen to episode 416 of Craig Mazin and John August’s screenwriting podcast Scriptnotes.

      Essentially, they appear to believe in a sort of Whig theory of history as regards the culture war, and see it as both morally right and financially expedient to get out in front of the player base and lead opinion in the direction of the (woke) truth. They believe people play fantasy games out of escapism, and that it would therefore be counterproductive to depict such real world unpleasantness as racism, homophobia and gender inequality.

      My impression, which may be mistaken, was that this stuff was really kicked into overdrive by the controversy surrounding the art for Triumph of Ferocity in 2012.

  61. N Zohar says:

    Since I only caught the tail end of the last conventional (integer) open thread and this one has also been made visible, I hope it’s not too much of a faux pas if I repeat the request for feedback on my fiction writing.

    My latest (very) short story is set in a future where online dating site AIs have coalesced, AlphaGo’ed our 23andMe-type data, and engineered a new species out of us.

    • Elementaldex says:

      I read it and… I did not particularly enjoy it. I’m not sure I would have gotten most of the references without your very brief summary here. Sorry I have no constructive advice, the format was unusual enough that I’m not sure what changes would make it more enjoyable to me.

      • Bugmaster says:

        I had no trouble following the story, even without the hints; my problem with it is the same issue I’d had with the previous one: it’s not much of a story. It’s more like a neat idea that doesn’t really go anywhere. However, I’m not exactly the target audience for this type of thing; also, N Zohar made it clear before that narrative storytelling is not his primary goal, so it would be unfair of us to judge him on that front.

        • Radu Floricica says:

          I enjoyed it nonetheless. It was short, flowed easily, and left me thinking about it. I even remembered it a couple of times afterwards. That’s pretty much an 8 or 9 out of 10, where 10 would be Asimov on a good day.

        • N Zohar says:

          Narrative storytelling as a skill is something I care a lot about getting better at, but I don’t always try to accomplish this with every fictional thing I write.

          The particular idea in this piece could be introduced as the backdrop of a story, and maybe I’ll write it someday, but this time it came to me in the form of a prayer before any story or character idea presented itself, so the prayer was what I wrote.

    • Bugmaster says:

      Well, I liked it better than the first story you posted. I do have a couple criticisms, though:

      You immediately unlocked and played it like a Chess or Go prodigy.

      I understand what you’re trying to do, but the name-checking is really blatant here. The metaphor sounds really clumsy in context, and reads a bit too “on the nose”.

      You performed Mendelian experiments in matchmaking to produce the mutations You sought

      Technically, breeding does not produce mutations; that is, it doesn’t introduce brand-new changes into DNA. It can produce different recombinations of DNA, but that’s not the same thing. Also, such breeding experiments would likely take thousands of years to perform on humans in vivo, but, presumably, the AIs have time to spare…

      • N Zohar says:

        I understand what you’re trying to do, but the name-checking is really blatant here. The metaphor sounds really clumsy in context, and reads a bit too “on the nose”.

        I agree, and I thought this after I wrote it, but I haven’t figured out how to make it less subtle yet without also making it less clear.

        Technically, breeding does not produce mutations; that is, it doesn’t introduce brand-new changes into DNA. It can produce different recombinations of DNA, but that’s not the same thing.

        Good point. What would be a more accurate term? Phenotypes? Traits? Mutations has a little more poetic bite (the whole piece is supposed to sound a bit poetic) but I’m open to another term that fits.

        Also, such breeding experiments would likely take thousands of years to perform on humans in vivo, but, presumably, the AIs have time to spare…

        Yes, that’s the idea. The AI has to perform the actual combinations one human generation at a time but it has almost limitless “digital time” to figure out which exact combinations to produce next.

        • Bugmaster says:

          but I haven’t figured out how to make it less subtle yet without also making it less clear.

          You could say something like, “…but it was only a game to you”. It’s a bit less blatant, though, admittedly, also less clear.

          Good point. What would be a more accurate term? Phenotypes? Traits?

          I don’t know, it depends on what idea you are trying to express. Most likely, the AI would only care about phenotypes; for example, if it was trying to breed red-haired humans, it wouldn’t necessarily care about their DNA, just about the color of their hair. Obviously, knowing about their DNA would make the breeding process go a lot faster (i.e., it would require fewer generations), but DNA is just an instrumental goal at this point. On the other hand, if the AI tried to encode its own source code into the DNA or something like that, then it’d care about DNA first, and the traits would be merely instrumental.

          but it has almost limitless “digital time” to figure out which exact combinations to produce next.

          I disagree with almost everything in this sentence, but I acknowledge that this doesn’t matter in the fictional context of the story 🙂

  62. Machine Interface says:

    There’s a ton of stuff being made now that I enjoy a lot, and while my tastes have their parochialism, and while taste changes, I can’t imagine that I’m so alien that no one 30 years from will look back fondly at the things I enjoy.

    I enjoy recent films — I don’t even mean the AAA Marvel stuff in which I have relatively little interest, I mean directors like Dennis Villeneuve or James Gray, who are making the movies Ridley Scott or Christopher Nolan should if they had managed to keep their spark lighted. I enjoy the crazy experiments of Panos Costamos, Nicolas Winding Refn or Luca Guadagnino. This is the most I’ve enjoyed movies since the 80s!

    I enjoy the retrowave aesthetics and the electronic bands that embrace it — in the 90s I saw techno/electronica as trash, and now I’m listening to Justice, Carpenter Brut or Le Castle Vania and wondering at which point this stuff suddenly became just right for me.

    I enjoy independent video games. LIMBO, INSIDE, Hyper Light Drifter, Undertale, Night in the Woods, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Nuclear Throne are all well placed in my top 50 and were all made in the last decade.

    I enjoy the board game explosion; there’s never been so many board games than now and they’ve never been of better quality.

    I enjoy modern webcomics, with their wide variety of stories and themes and styles, how they have drastically improved since the beginning of the media (go back and look at where webcomics were 20 years ago, if you want a quick anti-nostalgia reality check).

    Nah, the time to be for me is now, and my only worry is that tastes is going to change, it’s all gonna end, and I’ll have to wait another 25 years for the cycle of nostalgia & revival to do its thing.

    • Tenacious D says:

      What’s your favourite Villeneuve film? I like the ones I’ve seen (“Incendies” packed an emotional punch for sure) and wouldn’t mind exploring his works further.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        I liked Arrival.

        I think Blade Runner 2049 is ok-ish: visually beautiful, but besides the pretty visuals and the nostalgia effect, it is too slowly paced and the plot and characters are weak.

      • Machine Interface says:

        Yeah, Arrival is my favorite, and Blade Runner 2049 suffers from some pacing issues but is otherwise one of the most visually gorgeous sci-fi films ever made.

        • sfoil says:

          I hated Arrival; I thought it was plodding, sentimental garbage, and its central conceit was far less interesting than Ted Chiang’s story. BR 2049 had a few odd pacing choices, but it was far better in that respect than Arrival.

          I’m going to see Dune of course, opening night if I can manage it. I expect it to be exhausting to watch, even aside from the director.

    • John Schilling says:

      We seem to have similar tastes in cinema, although, on the basis of Dunkirk, I think that Nolan’s still got it.

      Nolan’s still got it if he can get someone else to do his worldbuilding and plotting. Getting reality to do your worldbuilding and Winston Churchill to do your plotting almost counts as cheating, but the results are spectacular.

  63. Lambert says:

    Now it’s .25, let’s have a big CW argument about Prorogation.

    The last (or current, I suppose) session of parliament has been going on for an awfully long time. In ordinary circumstances, it would be a totally normal thing to do. OTOH, it gives parliament much less time to legislate anything regarding Brexit, which defaults to no-deal.

    • ana53294 says:

      Why is prorogation so important?

      I don’t get why you need to have a Queen’s Speech at all. In Spain, we have a new Parliament every election. Sessions are scheduled in advance, and summertime is usually left without scheduled sessions, so they can go on a summer vacation. During the vacation, 21 members remain. But an extraordinary emergency session can be asked by the remaining members (made by every party group), in both Congress and the Senate.

      So why completely shut off? What purpose does it serve? I have tried to read on it, and as far as I understood it, it’s for having some kind of clean slate. But isn’t the slate cleaned every general election?

      • Lambert says:

        It’s just how parliament works, and has done since before the reign of Charles I, who was the first person to cause a big prorogation-related constitutional crisis.

        • ana53294 says:

          Yes, I was able to find that out, and how it works, but I still don’t get the purpose, the why of it.

          Why is there a prorogation? What purpose does it serve?

          If it’s a vacation and respite for MPs, why can’t they do what’s done in Spain (where the Constitution does not give vacation rights), and clear a couple of weeks of the Parliament schedule, and leave some people (with proportional party representation), who can schedule and emergency session if called for? Why close Parliament at all? These emergency MPs can even go on vacations, they would just officially be on call.

          • Lambert says:

            Back in the medieval and renaissance, parliament was only in session intermittently.
            It was called by a monarch when they needed to raise a tax or have laws passed.

            Even though parliament is now in session almost all the time, there are still gaps between sessions. This is just the kind of cruft that builds up when an institution is 700ish years old.

            OTOH, since the 30s, prorogation has generally only lasted a few days.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            That is in fact what Parliament does during its recesses (for instance, during the summer and for party conferences). While Parliament has voted not to meet, it still exists, committees still meet, and the Speaker can choose to recall it in an emergency.

            Prorogation is distinct both from this and from dissolution, which is the state in the run-up to an election where Parliament no longer exists– during a period of dissolution, the BBC does not put “MP” after the name of Government ministers or Opposition spokespeople, as there is no Parliament for them to be a Member of.

            As Lambert says, prorogation generally happens because the Government wants to set out its agenda for the next session of Parliament (which are a year long) in a Queen’s Speech. These happen when Parliament is opened (at the State Opening), and to be opened it has to be closed.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            As @AlphaGamma said, after prorogation there is a Queen’s speech laying out the government’s agenda, and this is voted on. If the vote fails, an election is called.

            I’m not 100% certain of this but my understanding is that Boris wants to have an election so that he can have a house of commons which will support him in making a deal to leave. He tried to have an election earlier this month and it didnt work. I believe prorogation was another way to get there, by forcing his opposition to either vote in favor of the Queen’s speech (which would presumably include stuff they could not in good conscience vote for), or to vote against it and force an election.

            The judgment of the UK Supreme Court (which, btw, is only 10 years old), seems to me like a shameful attempt to take powers which dont belong to it. Prorogation has never been subject to judicial review, and for a court to give itself the power of review over almost every action the executive takes is a severe breach of the separation of powers. That they would couch their power grab in service to a foreign power as a way to save democracy is expected, but still obscene given that this move is an explicit and direct attack on the democratic expression of the UK’s desire to leave the EU.

            These are simply pro-Remain judges on a 10 year old court deciding to upend 100s of years of established jurisprudence in service of the EU.

          • episcience says:

            @jermo sapiens

            It is not a power grab. It is plain from the cases cited in the judgment that the courts have on a number of occasions trammeled the prerogative power of the King where these impinge on common law standards. This is a natural consequence of the principles that have already been established. (They quote a seventeenth-century case which states that “the King hath no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him”.) The prorogation in this case was for 5 weeks, the longest in modern eras, which is not needed to prepare for a Queen’s Speech (the typical length, as the court says in the judgment, is 4 to 5 days). They were entirely justified in holding, as they did, that this was an unjustified interference with Parliamentary sovereignty.

            EDIT to add: Boris has also been unequivocal in saying that the prorogation was nothing to do with Brexit. It is difficult to asset that and at the same time characterise striking down the prorogation as a pro-Remain victory.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            It is not a power grab. It is plain from the cases cited in the judgment that the courts have on a number of occasions trammeled the prerogative power of the King where these impinge on common law standards.

            What do you call it when a court declares itself to have powers which it was not recognized to have before? Pointing to previous power grabs does not make this case less of a power grab. The court even admits it:

            In practice, as noted in the House of Commons Library Briefing Paper (No 8589, 11th June 2019), “this process has been a formality in the UK for more than a century: the Government of the day advises the Crown to prorogue and that request is acquiesced to”.

            (paragraph 3 of the decision)

          • episcience says:

            @jermo sapiens

            At least as far as the Court itself understands the ruling, it is an application of powers they have had throughout modern times: the power to review decisions of the executive and overrule these when these conflict with the common law. It is true that the Court has not previously reviewed a decision to prorogue, because prorogations have in the past been unpartisan and for a few days, but that does not mean that there has been an enlargement of the powers available to the Court. Constitutional decisions by nature involve new questions and new subject matters, and the Court is called to consider these against longstanding principles.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            It is not a power grab.

            It is a power grab. In terms of precedent, no prorogation of Parliament has ever been overturned like this; in terms of statute, the Fixed-Term Parliament Act explicitly guarantees the Crown’s ability to prorogue. There’s nothing in the British constitution to justify the idea of judges having veto-power over the government’s decisions to prorogue Parliament.

            EDIT to add: Boris has also been unequivocal in saying that the prorogation was nothing to do with Brexit. It is difficult to asset that and at the same time characterise striking down the prorogation as a pro-Remain victory.

            Yes, but only really naïve people believe that the prorogation was nothing to do with Brexit, just like only really naïve people believe that the last three and half years of lawfare waged against the government have been about constitutional principle.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            because prorogations have in the past been unpartisan

            I dont mean to be disrespectful but this is laughably false.

          • episcience says:

            Yes, but only really naïve people believe that the prorogation was nothing to do with Brexit, just like only really naïve people believe that the last three and half years of lawfare waged against the government have been about constitutional principle.

            Agreed that it was really about Brexit — but then the Prime Minister’s advice to the Queen really was to frustrate Parliamentary oversight, so it really was unlawful.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            because prorogations have in the past been unpartisan

            Like when John Major prorogued Parliament to delay the publication of a report into his government’s cash-for-questions scandal?

          • ana53294 says:

            @everyone

            Thanks, it is much clearer to me what prorogation actually means (I thought it was some kind of recess).

            When the Queen’s speech is voted in, is it some kind of legislation (is it legally binding), or is it just a statement of intentions?

            It’s incredible how poor British media has been explaining what prorogation is.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Constitutional decisions by nature involve new questions and new subject matters, and the Court is called to consider these against longstanding principles.

            Like the longstanding principle that certain decisions like proroguing parliament are the purview of the executive and not reviewable by the courts.

            But this “longstanding principle” is swept away by “common law principles” apparently. From paragraph 38 of the decision:

            Since the power is recognised by the common law, and has to be compatible with common law principles, those principles may illuminate where its boundaries lie. In particular, the boundaries of a prerogative power relating to the operation of Parliament are likely to be illuminated, and indeed determined, by the fundamental
            principles of our constitutional law.

            Whenever a court wants to do something sneaky, it will appeal to the vague authority of some feel-goody sounding notion. Look at how US courts declared the constitution a “living document” with a “penumbra” where, lo and behold, the founders snuck in the absolute right to abortion, that only these wise progressive judges could see.

            There is a longstanding principle: prorogation is a prerogative of the crown and not subject to judicial review. And then there are “common law principles” which are used by corrupt courts when the application of the actually relevant principle leads to a result they dont want, in this case, Brexit.

            The court actually cites Parliamentary sovereignty, which is a legit principle, and which requires laws to be passed by Parliament, including allocating funds for the government to operate. It does not extend however to the well recognized power to prorogue Parliament.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            When the Queen’s speech is voted in, is it some kind of legislation (is it legally binding), or is it just a statement of intentions?

            statement of intentions, and if the house is against the intentions of the government (by voting against the speech), government falls and an election is held.

          • ana53294 says:

            statement of intentions, and if the house is against the intentions of the government (by voting against the speech), government falls and an election is held.

            What prevents MPs from voting for the Queen’s Speech, saying that they’re holding their nose for the good of the country, and not enacting any of the legislation that the Queen’s Speech would entail?

            I mean, voting for a not legally binding statement of intentions in order to avoid having an election (and thus dissolving parliament before Brexit), could play well with Remain voters.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Agreed that it was really about Brexit — but then the Prime Minister’s advice to the Queen really was to frustrate Parliamentary oversight, so it really was unlawful.

            Parliament’s shown repeatedly over the last three years that it’s far too divided to agree to anything on the topic of Brexit, so what meaningful oversight is it in a position to exercise?

          • jermo sapiens says:

            What prevents MPs from voting for the Queen’s Speech, saying that they’re holding their nose for the good of the country, and not enacting any of the legislation that the Queen’s Speech would entail?

            Nothing. This happens frequently in one form or another.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            What prevents MPs from voting for the Queen’s Speech, saying that they’re holding their nose for the good of the country, and not enacting any of the legislation that the Queen’s Speech would entail?

            Well, in the old days, the government could call a general election and try and get a majority of MPs who would actually vote for the government’s policies, but the Fixed-Term Parliament Act took that away.

            More recently, when Parliament refused to call a general election and simultaneously refused to let the government actually govern, recourse has been had to the prorogation of Parliament to prevent MPs from rendering the country ungovernable by constantly stymying everything the executive does. Unfortunately the courts have just ruled that illegal.

            So now I guess there’s nothing.

          • ana53294 says:

            Nothing. This happens frequently in one form or another.

            OK. Now I get the historical reasons for prorogation’s existence, the way it works, but still don’t get why anybody says it’s important to have one.

            Why is it so important to drag an elderly lady through this dog and pony show, by reading a speech she didn’t write, and have her speech, which isn’t legally, or even apparently politically (as politicians have no morals, those get ignored) binding, voted on?

            The impression I get from your very informative responses (thank you all) is that prorogation is a vestigial remain from a time when the King only called Parliament when he needed to tax or make new law. It’s a show, and is not binding in any way, nor does it serve any actual purpose.

          • ana53294 says:

            More recently, when Parliament refused to call a general election and simultaneously refused to let the government actually govern, recourse has been had to the prorogation of Parliament to prevent MPs from rendering the country ungovernable by constantly stymying everything the executive does. Unfortunately the courts have just ruled that illegal.

            When was that?

            It has been said that recent prorogations were short, around 5 days. How does a week-long prorogation stop Parliament from stymying the Government? How frequently can Parliament be prorogued? Could the government (before this ruling), if they wanted to, prorogue Parliament every month, or as frequently as they wanted?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Why is it so important to drag an elderly lady through this dog and pony show, by reading a speech she didn’t write, and have her speech, which isn’t legally, or even apparently politically (as politicians have no morals, those get ignored) binding, voted on?

            It’s meant to be a sign that the government’s agenda has enough support to get through. If it doesn’t, might as well have an election to get a government which can actually get its agenda enacted.

            Of course, the process breaks down somewhat if enough MPs vote for the Queen’s Speech without actually intending to vote for any of the proposals contained therein, but it’s only since the Brexit referendum that politics has got quite so dishonest over here.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            When was that?

            Until about 10.30 yesterday morning.

            Could the government (before this ruling), if they wanted to, prorogue Parliament every month, or as frequently as they wanted?

            Theoretically, thought they wouldn’t be able to pass any new laws or raise any new taxes without Parliament. I’m not sure if the British army still needs to be legally renewed every year, but if so that’s another factor stopping excessive prorogation.

          • brad says:

            Maybe it’s my weird American viewpoint but it’s hard for me to take too seriously outraged that the executive is having its prerogative trammeled when it wasn’t elected by anyone. In a system with parliamentary supremacy it seems like the conventions about what is reserved to the Government are just conveniences and not fundamentally about separation of powers.

            It’s bizarre to me that Conservative party members picked the PM and not the MPs.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Maybe it’s my weird American viewpoint but it’s hard for me to take too seriously outraged that the executive is having its prerogative trammeled when it wasn’t elected by anyone. In a system with parliamentary supremacy it seems like the conventions about what is reserved to the Government are just conveniences and not fundamentally about separation of powers.

            It’s bizarre to me that Conservative party members picked the PM and not the MPs.

            The british system is pretty bizarre, and it’s been established over centuries, and relies heavily on tradition. It was not designed the same way the american system was. Scott had a post on tradition vs science (not exactly, but sort of), which points to why systems based on tradition are probably very useful, specially ones that lasted a long time, and the british system certainly lasted a long time. I forget which post exactly but it made reference to how certain tribes in Africa treat this otherwise poisonous root vegetable so that it becomes non-poisonous.

            As in any political system, you have different actors having different powers and the system reaches a form of balance which works quite well. The power to prorogue was certainly part of that balance, and I would submit there is a real risk that the decision by the courts to give themselves the power to review prorogation decisions throws that balance off. Ultimately, the system will reach a new balance but we have no way of knowing what this new balance will be. The court doesnt know either, and it doesnt care, it only wanted to stop Brexit.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Maybe it’s my weird American viewpoint but it’s hard for me to take too seriously outraged that the executive is having its prerogative trammeled when it wasn’t elected by anyone.

            If we’re talking about elections and democratic mandates, Parliament has spent the last three years doing everything in its power to prevent the implementation of a major referendum, so I don’t think democratic legitimacy is on the side of Parliament here.

            Plus, of course, the Prime Minister wanted to hold a general election, but Parliament refused, so if nobody voted for the government that’s because Parliament won’t let elections be held. (And then many MPs have the cheek to play the “Boris Johnson is unelected” card.)

            It’s bizarre to me that Conservative party members picked the PM and not the MPs.

            If MPs didn’t want Johnson in power, they could have no-confidenced him long ago. They chose not to.

          • brad says:

            As I understand it no one ever votes for the government in your system. It’s a parliamentary committee with a lot of pretensions. Again, from my foreign viewpoint.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            As I understand it no one ever votes for the government in your system. It’s a parliamentary committee with a lot of pretensions. Again, from my foreign viewpoint.

            No, because the government depends on the Crown for its authority, not on Parliament.

            ETA: Although since the convention is that the Queen appoints whomever is best-placed to command a majority in the Commons, in practice a lot of people vote for their MPs as a proxy for whom they want as PM.

          • Lambert says:

            >OK. Now I get the historical reasons for prorogation’s existence, the way it works, but still don’t get why anybody says it’s important to have one.

            >The impression I get from your very informative responses (thank you all) is that prorogation is a vestigial remain from a time when the King only called Parliament when he needed to tax or make new law. It’s a show, and is not binding in any way, nor does it serve any actual purpose.

            Welcome to the British policical system. Wait till you learn about the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the three Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham.

      • keaswaran says:

        In Texas, the legislature meets for only January to June after the election, and then has over a year off until the next election, unless the Governor calls them into special session. I think several other states have this.

        It seems odd to do this for a national legislature.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      Judgment of the court is available here, and it is surprisingly short, only 25 pages. I am not going to comment on it at least until I´ve read it.

    • episcience says:

      The normal thing to do is to prorogue for a few days to prepare for the Queen’s Speech. It is not normal to prorogue for 5 weeks, as the Supreme Court said, so because that significantly curtails the power of the legislature to hold the executive to account, the Prime Minister must have a “reasonable justification” for that curtailment. He didn’t have any, or didn’t present any to the court, so holding the prorogation unlawful seems reasonable (and in keeping with how judicial review works in the UK) to me.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        The legislature has had plenty of opportunities to hold the executive to account, whether by holding a vote of no confidence in the government, or by passing legislation for a new election. It declined to do either, and it seems sophistical to claim that judicial intervention is necessary when Parliament is refusing to use the powers it already has.

        • EchoChaos says:

          This feels like the case. The executive certainly has a minority government, but he called for an election to fix that and the opposition declined (I’ve heard for the first time ever, but I could be wrong), so he gets whatever executive powers he wants because the Opposition specifically gave them to him.

          The Court is mad because those powers turn out to be pretty powerful, so they’re reigning him in because the Opposition refuses to.

          British politics watchers: I’ve heard this referred to as “Britain’s Marbury v. Madison” because it’s the Court using the excuse of a case to grant itself sweeping powers. Is that true, or is this more normal powers just in an extraordinary situation?”

          • The original Mr. X says:

            This feels like the case. The executive certainly has a minority government, but he called for an election to fix that and the opposition declined (I’ve heard for the first time ever, but I could be wrong), so he gets whatever executive powers he wants because the Opposition specifically gave them to him.

            Yes, and as an aside I was dismayed to see so many people on Twitter referring to Johnson as an “unelected PM”, as if Parliament hasn’t repeatedly refused to hold new elections since he took office.

            British politics watchers: I’ve heard this referred to as “Britain’s Marbury v. Madison” because it’s the Court using the excuse of a case to grant itself sweeping powers. Is that true, or is this more normal powers just in an extraordinary situation?”

            I think it is true, yes, and I expect this to result in a US-style Supreme Court, complete with confirmation hearings and everything.

        • episcience says:

          It’s worth reading the judgment on this — the Court’s holding was that the effect of a five-week prorogation was to prevent Parliament from sitting, asking questions of the Prime Minister, or holding committees while the Prime Minister negotiated Brexit. They have certainly used their powers to pass Brexit-related legislation and ask questions of the Prime Minister before they were (purportedly) prorogued. The Court did not hold (and it would be very unusual for it to hold) that it was required to use its powers specifically to call a no-confidence vote in the Prime Minister. It is enough that the routine business of Parliament was disrupted in a way that the Prime Minister was unable to justify.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            The point is that Parliament already had the ability to rein the executive in, if they thought that Johnson was acting unreasonably. (It’s not like they weren’t given any warning that Parliament was going to be prorogued, after all.) So there was no need for the judiciary to get involved to “defend Parliament supremacy”, because Parliament was quite capable of defending itself. What really happened is that remain-supporting MPs wanted to have their cake and eat it — they wanted to opposite the Prime Minister’s Brexit policy without running the risk of a general election.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            People here seem to be thinking that “the risk of a general election” to the Remain faction in Parliament is that it would return a Tory/Brexit majority. There is also the fact that (whether it is called by a 2/3 majority vote or following a vote of no confidence) the PM gets to choose the date, so there is a risk he could pick a date after October 31 and allow the UK to crash out without a deal in the meantime.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            People here seem to be thinking that “the risk of a general election” to the Remain faction in Parliament is that it would return a Tory/Brexit majority. There is also the fact that (whether it is called by a 2/3 majority vote or following a vote of no confidence) the PM gets to choose the date, so there is a risk he could pick a date after October 31 and allow the UK to crash out without a deal in the meantime.

            I don’t think there’s anything to stop Parliament passing a law saying “The next general election is hereby scheduled for [date before October 31]”.

            Also, let us not forget that, “Prorogation is presented as a power grab but in practice all it does is keep the law as it is – preventing changes to the statute being made for a time. It wouldn’t work as a mechanism to deliver a No Deal Brexit if MPs hadn’t already voted for No Deal. When they set it as the legal default by passing the EU Withdrawal Act a year ago.”

        • Gobbobobble says:

          The legislature has had plenty of opportunities to hold the executive to account, whether by holding a vote of no confidence in the government, or by passing legislation for a new election. It declined to do either, and it seems sophistical to claim that judicial intervention is necessary when Parliament is refusing to use the powers it already has.

          It is utterly ridiculous to me that apparently the only options are “get on board with the agenda” or “burn the house down”. That’s not a check or balance, that’s just MAD

          • jermo sapiens says:

            what do you consider to be burning the house down?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            It is utterly ridiculous to me that apparently the only options are “get on board with the agenda” or “burn the house down”. That’s not a check or balance, that’s just MAD

            Firstly, since when has holding an election counted as MAD? If you think that, you might as well abolish the Commons altogether and just have the Queen rule the country herself.

          • Aftagley says:

            @The original mr. X

            Two quick questions:

            1. Everything I’ve read about the why the libs don’t want an election is that one couldn’t be done quick enough to have it be settled before October 31st. From my perspective, it looks like they want an election, just not at the expense of a no-deal brexit.

            2. It looks like you see no difference between a structured brexit and a no-deal brexit. Is this the case?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            1. Everything I’ve read about the why the libs don’t want an election is that one couldn’t be done quick enough to have it be settled before October 31st. From my perspective, it looks like they want an election, just not at the expense of a no-deal brexit.

            They could have held an election earlier, when Boris became PM. In fact, many members of the opposition were calling for just that, right until the point where it became clear that an election might actually happen. So no, I think they know public opinion is closer to Johnson’s position than their own, and they’re just playing for time in the hopes that something will come up to give them an excuse to stop Brexit officially.

            2. It looks like you see no difference between a structured brexit and a no-deal brexit. Is this the case?

            I don’t know what you’re getting at here. Obviously there will be differences in how the aftermath plays out. But since Parliament has repeatedly failed to agree on a Brexit deal, I don’t think a “structured Brexit”, as you put it, is a realistic option.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        The requirement that the PM have a “reasonable justification” for proroguing was invented out of thin air.

        • salvorhardin says:

          AFAICT (and I am not a Brit, so perhaps not familiar enough with history) there had not previously been a use of prorogation that was

          (a) so blatantly abusive and corruptly intended
          (b) so consequential

          but even if there had been, the fact that someone else got away with it before is a poor justification for letting Boris get away with it again.

          The general claim underlying these arguments, that executive discretionary power unreviewable by the other branches is somehow a necessary part of the balance of institutional power, is also present in John Yoo’s editorial in the Times opposing impeachment over Trump’s actions toward Ukraine. I find it to be a thin rationalization for poorly-restrained authoritarian demagoguery. It is always extremely dangerous to vest discretionary government power in a single individual, and such power should be multiply and independently checked. Accountability to voters is a necessary but very far from sufficient part of that accountability, and the voters’ will itself must also be checked, including by epistocratic bodies such as the courts. Sometimes this requires “power grabs” but when, as now, the power is grabbed to prevent its existing holder from catastrophically misusing it, that is entirely justified and wise.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I’m not going to pretend to know the motives behind every previous prorogation of parliament. Suffice it to say that political games were not invented yesterday, and that I very much doubt the veracity of your characterization of this prorogation.

            that executive discretionary power unreviewable by the other branches is somehow a necessary part of the balance of institutional power

            Yes, our leaders of government have discretionary power. That way when they screw up we can point at them and know that they are responsible. This is a good thing. Not letting anyone have discretionary power, or splitting discretionary power between as many actors as possible inevitably leads to 1. monumental screw-ups and 2. no-one to blame for the monumental screw up.

            There is no getting away from the necessity of human wisdom and judgment. If your Prime Minister (or President, or whatever) is an idiot, it’s going to suck. But at least you can blame them and replace them. If important decisions are not anybody’s responsibility, it’s also going to suck, but you wont know who to blame and to replace while everyone remotely involved points fingers at the others.

            I find it to be a thin rationalization for poorly-restrained authoritarian demagoguery.

            If you’re talking about the UK Supreme Court, I agree with you 100%. But seriously, you’re actually attacking a PM for using a power that was, until yesterday, firmly within his purview, and praising the court for a power grab, under the pretense of opposing “poorly-restrained authoritarian demagoguery”. Let me help you, the guy using prorogation as it was understood for 100s of years is not the authoritarian, the unelected 10 year old body that gave itself the power to review prorogation is the authoritarian.

            I will also object that the voters will must be checked by “epistocratic bodies such as the courts”.

            >googles epistocratic
            > “relating to epistocracy”
            > thanks google
            > googles epistocracy
            > “rule by citizens with political knowledge”

            Are you saying that the will of the electorate to leave the EU should not be respected because they dont have enough political knowledge? Or did I misconstrue your point?

            Sometimes this requires “power grabs” but when, as now, the power is grabbed to prevent its existing holder from catastrophically misusing it, that is entirely justified and wise.

            So in your view, if the Supreme Court were to use whatever power it has “catastrophically”, it would be entirely legitimate for the government to take away the power of the Supreme Court?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Salvorhardin:

            The general claim underlying these arguments, that executive discretionary power unreviewable by the other branches is somehow a necessary part of the balance of institutional power, is also present in John Yoo’s editorial in the Times opposing impeachment over Trump’s actions toward Ukraine. I find it to be a thin rationalization for poorly-restrained authoritarian demagoguery. It is always extremely dangerous to vest discretionary government power in a single individual, and such power should be multiply and independently checked.

            Without Parliament, the government can’t pass any new laws or raise any new taxes. It also used to be the case that the British army needed to have its existence renewed every year, although I’m not sure if that’s still the case. Regardless, there are checks on the executive’s ability to prorogue Parliament without needing to import US-style judicial activism into the country.

            And speaking of checks and balances, who exactly is going to check the courts?

            Sometimes this requires “power grabs” but when, as now, the power is grabbed to prevent its existing holder from catastrophically misusing it, that is entirely justified and wise.

            From my perspective it’s Parliament that’s being catastrophically misusing its power, by refusing to implement the results of a major referendum and rendering the country essentially ungovernable. Prorogation would have prevented this misuse, but now there’s nothing to stop this incompetent and self-serving institution from dragging out the present crisis for years to come.

            @ Jermo:

            I’m not going to pretend to know the motives behind every previous prorogation of parliament. Suffice it to say that political games were not invented yesterday, and that I very much doubt the veracity of your characterization of this prorogation.

            John Major prorogued Parliament back in 1997 in order to prevent the publication of an embarrassing report about corruption in his government. That seems to me far more politically partisan than anything Boris Johnson has done.

            (And now John Major is lecturing Johnson in the press about how nobody should treat Parliament and the Queen this way. Just in case you still had any respect for the man’s integrity.)

          • jermo sapiens says:

            From my perspective it’s Parliament that’s being catastrophically misusing its power

            Thank you that’s a much better example. I argued the court had catastrophically misused its power, which it has, but this is even more relevant.

            Who watches the watchers? And then who watches those people? And on and on, ad infinitum… This is ridiculous. At one point you need to make one person responsible for something.

            In practice, everybody understands this, but everybody is also quite quick at using a “catastrophic misuse of power” to grab more power for themselves.

          • salvorhardin says:

            @jermosapiens

            You didn’t misconstrue my point. Judges are on average more intelligent, more knowledgeable, and more moral than ordinary voters and it is therefore a good thing for humanity that they have power to restrain the popular will– especially when a slim majority votes for a catastrophically disruptive change. The “activist” US Supreme Court has, in my view, been one of the greatest forces for good in the history of humanity and its failures have usually come from its being insufficiently activist.

            I also disagree that screwups by committee are more likely to be bad, or less likely to be effectively checked, than abuses of power by elected executives. Mechanisms for holding executives accountable by voting work extremely poorly, in part because voters are typically badly informed and situationally irrational, in part because those executives can use their discretionary powers to rig the game in their own favor. Committees tend to screw up through timidity and indecisiveness, and I think history demonstrates that those are far lesser evils than the evil of a decisive and abusive executive.

          • keaswaran says:

            “The general claim underlying these arguments, that executive discretionary power unreviewable by the other branches is somehow a necessary part of the balance of institutional power, is also present in John Yoo’s editorial in the Times opposing impeachment over Trump’s actions toward Ukraine.”

            Is this a correct summary of Yoo’s Op-Ed? I read it a bit quickly, but it sounded to me like he was arguing that it should be illegal for someone to release the information that had triggered the impeachment hearings, but nothing he wrote seemed to indicate that the impeachment itself shouldn’t happen. (Though perhaps he is tacitly assuming the sort of rule that says that if police illegally gather evidence, then the trial shouldn’t happen, rather than that the police should be prosecuted in addition.)

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Salvorhardin:

            So perhaps we should set up a communist dictatorship? After all, with all those “intelligent, moral, and knowledgeable” people in charge, how could such a government fail to do better than the current set-up?

          • EchoChaos says:

            @salvorhardin

            Judges are on average more intelligent

            Absolutely.

            more knowledgeable

            Often

            and more moral

            You’ve lost me entirely. Morality is rarely so distributed, and I find the opposite to be true.

            But more importantly, one of the points of legitimacy of a democratic system is that the people (voters, really) get to choose the direction of the ship of state and the technocrats execute that vision to the best of their ability.

            It is true that Brexit is disruptive, but the voters have given that vision of a course change. Now the technocrats should do their best to delivery that vision, not inhibit it.

            To inhibit it is to lose democratic legitimacy.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Judges are on average more intelligent, more knowledgeable, and more moral than ordinary voters

            I was salivating at the thought of responding to this, but @EchoChaos did it first in almost exactly the same format I would have used. Intelligence and knowledge are correlated, but morality is entirely independent of both.

            It’s ok for you to be in favor of activist decisions where abortion and gay marriage were legalized, for example. But, you need to accept that anything that was achieved by a judicial decision can be rescinded by the same. You also lose the right to make any kind of argument with respect to democratic legitimacy.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Committees tend to screw up through timidity and indecisiveness, and I think history demonstrates that those are far lesser evils than the evil of a decisive and abusive executive.

            Both of these assumptions are incorrect. Committees can screw up by timidity or by excessive confidence. And the consequences of any screw up from timidity or excessive confidence depend on the circumstances of each case, not whether the screw up was caused by one or the other.

          • benwave says:

            Mister X,

            From my perspective it’s Parliament that’s being catastrophically misusing its power, by refusing to implement the results of a major referendum

            If parliament were to vote in either a no-deal brexit or one according basically to the agreement that May brokered, do you think that would be meaningfully delivering on what the brexit referendum promised? I personally find it hard to believe that it would. I don’t actually think that British parliament has any options which meaningfully fulfill that promise.

          • John Schilling says:

            If parliament were to vote in either a no-deal brexit or one according basically to the agreement that May brokered, do you think that would be meaningfully delivering on what the brexit referendum promised?

            “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?
            Remain a member of the European Union []
            Leave the European Union []”

            That’s it. That’s what the referendum promised. And a plain no-deal Brexit, meaningfully delivers what the referendum promised.

            The various campaign promises of the proponents of the two positions, are absolutely irrelevant. An election is a vote on a certain specified action, not on a set of campaign promises. You do NOT nullify an election simply because you are convinced that the winning side will not be able to fulfill its campaign promises. Not if you want your country to be considered a democracy.

          • benwave says:

            Well, I’d have to disagree that all the material circulating is not relevant, I think it’s vital. It definitely affects how people respond and how they interpret the text of the referendum, does it not? The reason we have referenda at all is to take some kind of measurement of what people want. I just don’t think a narrow literal interpretation of the text of the form really gives you a good measurement of what people were thinking and wanting when they ticked a box, particularly in a case like this where so much effort was made by both campaigns to control the narrative and the interpretation in the public mind.

          • benwave says:

            Actually the more I think about it the more problems I have. I don’t think that the reading you proposed is even the only possible narrow literal reading of the text – one could equally interpret it to say that the government is empowered to work towards conditions where a departure from the EU could happen, but not to immediately pull out without preparing other trade deals etc. Altogether it feels a lot more like rules lawyering than a good faith attempt to discover and execute the will of the people.

            I’m reminded of somebody’s comment in an earlier open thread about how referenda were used in Switzerland’s direct democracy system, and there it is required to have an actual fully worked through piece of legislation to put to voters to vote yes or no to. That is what would be required to plausibly claim that the meaning of the referendum was explicit from the text to me, and the brexit referendum doesn’t meet that standard.

            (I’m also baffled that such a matter was put to a simple-majority vote, but that’s an entirely different thing)

          • salvorhardin says:

            @EchoChaos @jermosapiens

            Re: democratic legitimacy, it’s certainly true that judges restraining the popular will undermines that. In my view that is a feature not a bug, because democratic legitimacy is invalid anyway. Democracy is of considerable instrumental value as part of an institutional mix that minimizes the chance of civil war; but no decision is made more morally legitimate because it is approved by a majority, or less morally legitimate because it is not. (I’m of course influenced here by Jason Brennan’s arguments in _Against Democracy_.)

            Even if you think there is sometimes such a thing as a Will of the People that deserves moral weight, it is very hard to see how a 52% vote that might well have gone the other way on a different day of the week provides a clear signal of that Will. The same of course goes for e.g. the 2016 US presidential election result. In both cases, what the result and its aftermath show is a deeply divided nation that has no clear will at all, and there is no reason that anyone– in office or not– should respect the wishes of one half of that nation even if they have reason to believe that those wishes are plainly insane.

            Re: judges overturning decisions that other judges have made, that of course can happen, just as elections can overturn the result of prior elections. Nothing is permanent or perfect.

            Re: decisions by committee, I challenge you to provide examples of overly-confident committee decisions anywhere near as vicious and damaging as the steady stream of demagogic ukases the world has suffered from unrestrained *and popular* executives in the past century.

            Re: morality, I think the comparison between the record of judges’ decisions on matters of human rights in the past 200 years, and the decisions of voters on such matters, makes the case unambiguously that judges are simply– again on average, and with plenty of exceptions both ways– better people.

          • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

            Democracy is about source of legitimacy of violence, and I think the variant where it comes from expression of common people’s will is far preferable to anything that came before. It’s better to plant idea that common people are the ones who matter as the idea around which violent people organize. Or at least so I think, being a civilian and all.

            Whenever it’s moral or not is a matter of personal opinion. Some might say it’s not because it undermines divine rights of the kings, or immutable laws of Sharia, or because people don’t realize how important it is to exterminate life unworthy of living, or something else.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Benwave:

            If parliament were to vote in either a no-deal brexit or one according basically to the agreement that May brokered, do you think that would be meaningfully delivering on what the brexit referendum promised? I personally find it hard to believe that it would. I don’t actually think that British parliament has any options which meaningfully fulfill that promise.

            A no-deal Brexit would result in Britain leaving the EU, and therefore meaningfully deliver on the referendum. Theresa May’s deal would require the UK to accept most EU regulations, and therefore wouldn’t meaningfully deliver.

            (I’m also baffled that such a matter was put to a simple-majority vote, but that’s an entirely different thing)

            Maybe, but the time to consider that is before the referendum, not after it.

          • Lambert says:

            A lot of brexiteers before the referrendum were talking about Finland and the like as possible models of post-brexit Britain.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @salvorhardin

            Sure, you can be against democracy. That’s totally fine. But then just say that you want a kritarchy and accept the discontent of the masses.

            I object to the dishonesty of “you guys can vote and decide things, as long as you don’t disagree with the judges”.

            As for morality, I’ll point out that judicial decision in the United States upheld slavery, legalized homosexuality and homosexual marriage, abortion and internment.

            All of those are against my morals. You can certainly disagree, but I suspect you just mean “Blue Tribe has controlled judiciaries in the West for a while”

        • AlphaGamma says:

          @Lambert: I believe they were talking about Norway (which is not a member of the EU) and not Finland (which is).

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      It’s kind of darkly hilarious that the British establishment is fighting like demons to prevent Brexit but barely even pretended to care when it comes to the ongoing gang-rapes of tens of thousands of young British girls.

      British politics are so strange because while the establishment here clearly has the same desired endstate in mind they’re nowhere near as brazen. The people in charge of Great Britain just aren’t afraid of the British populace at all as far as I can tell. I guess that’s what happens when you disarm the people so thoroughly that police are going around seizing pocket knives.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        It’s kind of darkly hilarious that the British establishment is fighting like demons to prevent Brexit but barely even pretended to care when it comes to the ongoing gang-rapes of tens of thousands of young British girls.

        If your mental model of the British establishment is that of honest people working in good faith for the good of Great Britain, this doesnt make sense. Switch your mental model so that every member of the British establishment is a slimy crook trying to climb as high as possible within a corrupt system, and everything falls into place.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I’m having trouble finding the quotes at the moment, but apparently PC wasn’t the only thing in play– the authorities weren’t interested in taking what happened to lower-class girls seriously.

    • dodrian says:

      Prorogation is a Royal Perogative, while it is taken on the advice of the Prime Minister, it is not something that he or the legislature do.

      The Supreme Court (a new invention for the UK) could I suppose hold Boris in contempt or something similar, but their judgement states that the prorogation is null and void. That’s claiming a power higher than the Crown. This is far more damaging to the United Kingdom’s Constitutional Monarchy than anything the PM has done or attempted.

      What we have is a bizarre situation where Parliament already passed the law ensuring the UK will leave the EU on October 31st. Parliament now wants to change that, but the PM does not. The PM has lost a number of votes on it, and normal course in Parliament would be to hold a general election to realign Parliament and the PM (either with new members or a new PM). The fixed-term Parliament act no longer allows the PM to do so unilaterally, and despite calling for a general election immediately after Boris was appointed PM, the opposition is now refusing to support one even though they are still calling for him to resign.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        This is far more damaging to the United Kingdom’s Constitutional Monarchy than anything the PM has done or attempted.

        +1000

        First move BoJo needs to do once reelected is to dissolve this “Supreme Court”. I’m only half joking.

      • episcience says:

        The Case of Proclamations, from 1610, held that “he King has no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him.” The UK judiciary has had the power to overrule the Crown for hundreds of years.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          The Case of Proclamations held that the monarch couldn’t unilaterally pass laws. It didn’t say that the judiciary could force the monarch to keep a parliament in being when he wanted to prorogue it.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          the law gives the crown the prerogative to prorogue. the law does not give the Supreme Court review powers over executive actions like this. Do not confuse “rule of law” with “rule by judges”.

          • episcience says:

            Yes, it does. Seriously, it is longstanding English law that the Crown can review and hold unlawful decisions of the King.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            it is longstanding English law that the Crown can review and hold unlawful decisions of the King

            Some decisions. For example if the king decides to enact laws without parliament. Other decisions are understood to be the prerogative of the Crown and not subject to review. Like prorogation. This decision changes that.

          • episcience says:

            Other decisions are understood to be the prerogative of the Crown and not subject to review.

            Again, that’s not true — the Royal prerogative is subject to judicial review. There is a discussion of the case law on this point in the Cherry SC judgment.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            the Royal prerogative is subject to judicial review

            Decisions to prorogue have never been subject to judicial review before, and the lower courts dismissed Miller’s application on the grounds that prorogation was not subject to judicial review. The supreme court overturned that decision by making new law.

          • episcience says:

            Yes, you’re right, but your original argument was that “executive actions like this” and “the prerogative of the Crown” could not be reviewed by the Court, and dodrain’s point was that they were “claiming a power higher than the Crown”. My point is that Court can and has previously reviewed other decisions made by royal prerogative — the Crown has in modern times always been subject to the legal authorities of the Courts.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            My point is that Court can and has previously reviewed other decisions made by royal prerogative

            Can you please provide an example? I’m not disagreeing with you that this is the case I’m just curious as to what you mean exactly by this.

            Also, if you read the decision, you’ll note that the court spends a long time discussing whether the issue is “justiciable” (i.e., whether the court has the jurisdiction to review). They conclude that it is, but only after a long discussion in support of their position. If it was in anyway obvious that they had jurisdiction, they would not have spent that time explaining themselves.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Yes, you’re right, but your original argument was that “executive actions like this” and “the prerogative of the Crown” could not be reviewed by the Court, and dodrain’s point was that they were “claiming a power higher than the Crown”. My point is that Court can and has previously reviewed other decisions made by royal prerogative — the Crown has in modern times always been subject to the legal authorities of the Courts.

            The precedents cited in the judgement both involve the Crown trying to exercise powers which go beyond its legal authority (passing laws unilaterally in the first case, and ordering searches of private property without legal authority in the second). If there’s any precedent in English law for the courts annulling an action which is unquestionably part of the royal prerogative (such as proroguing Parliament) on the grounds that the government’s motives were improper, the Supreme Court never refers to it.

      • I’m gonna need to find the world’s tiniest violin before I can manage to feel an ounce of pity for the British Monarchy. If this Supreme Court decision moves Britain more closely to a real Republic, then game on!

        That said, I agree that it would have been preferable for Parliament to deal with the situation itself and remove Boris Johnson with a vote of no confidence. Their main reason for doing so was to get a vote on record first to rule out a No Deal Brexit so that Britain’s existing government couldn’t justify coasting into a No Deal Brexit by default while the country was still busy preparing for a General Election. The problem is, Parliament has once again let things go until the last minute, and there’s no enough time for a General Election before Oct 31. And it’s doubtful this time that, even if the UK asked for an extension to Article 50, the EU Council would unanimously agree to it (as they must). Instead, the only option that the UK would have would be either No Deal, or revoke Article 50 entirely and stay in the EU.

        I don’t like one bit all the parliamentary games the Labour Party in particular has been playing. Even in their recent party conferences, the Labour Party leadership has been pretending as if there might be some sort of mythical “Jobs First Brexit” that could be achievable. Labour won’t simply admit that any “soft Brexit” is strictly worse than “No Brexit,” as the debate around Theresa May’s deal already established. And so we see the Labour Party shedding votes to the LibDems, the Greens, the SNP, etc.—the other parties that will actually commit to reversing Brexit. My opinion of Corbyn has gone down by quite a bit after all this.

    • The original Mr. X says:

      OTOH, it gives parliament much less time to legislate anything regarding Brexit, which defaults to no-deal.

      If Parliament’s been unable to agree on a deal for the past three and a half years, I don’t see what it expects to achieve in an extra couple of weeks.

      • The Nybbler says:

        I think the strategy is to just keep kicking the can down the road until they can get a majority to revoke Article 50.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          Well, yes, but nobody can officially say “We need to stop the prorogation of Parliament so that we can delay Brexit enough to weasel out of implementing the referendum altogether”, so instead we’ve got this “We need to stop the prorogation of Parliament to defend the constitution” BS.

          Though if the opinion polls are correct, the next election is more likely to see a pro-Brexit majority than a pro-revocation one.

          • Nick says:

            When is the next election? Parliament has been trying to stop one, from what I’ve seen, but at what point will it be unable to?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            2022, unless Parliament implodes before then.

          • Lambert says:

            The moment the UK leaves Article 50 limbo in whichever direction, parliament is going to implode.

            Arguably, parliament’s been imploding for several months already, held intact only by the overwhelming time pressure.

        • dodrian says:

          Johnson’s first preference strategy appears to have be ensure Brexit happens, then fight a general election shortly afterwards on domestic policy promises against the perennially unpopular Corbyn, with a second preference for fighting an election before Oct 31 promising to get over with Brexit so they can focus on domestic issues.

          The opposition want to fight an election before Brexit so they can unite the remain/anti no deal vote, but after Oct 31 because missing that deadline makes Boris look weak to his supporters. Hence why they’ve been abusing parliamentary rules and procedures to reject Johnson’s proroguing, rejecting his call for a pre-halloween election, and also passing legislation to compell him to ask for an extension to the Oct 31 deadline.

    • zzzzort says:

      I see this as a clear case of constitutional hard ball, pushing the limits of legal authorities in ways that have never been done before (to be clear, the new elements were the length of the prorogation and the intent to limit debate on a specific topic, though John Major wasn’t far off). A 5 day prorogation is clearly within norms. A 5 year prorogation would be seen as a dictatorial power grab. 5 weeks is in between, and I don’t know who gets to make that call if not a court.

      The british government has made quite a few changes in the recent past that make constitutional crises more likely, e.g. the creation of the supreme court, the fixed term parliament act, the devolvement of powers, and the enthusiasm for referenda. While all of these issues are present here, it’s funny that the stickiest one is a vestigial relic.

      • Aftagley says:

        A 5 day prorogation is clearly within norms. A 5 year prorogation would be seen as a dictatorial power grab. 5 weeks is in between, and I don’t know who gets to make that call if not a court.

        Well said. This perfectly crystallized something I had in my head but couldn’t properly articulate.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        The british government has made quite a few changes in the recent past that make constitutional crises more likely, e.g. the creation of the supreme court, the fixed term parliament act, the devolvement of powers, and the enthusiasm for referenda. While all of these issues are present here, it’s funny that the stickiest one is a vestigial relic.

        TBH I think the actual stickiest one, and the one behind the prorogation, is the Fixed-Term Parliament Acts. Without it, the PM could have called an election and we’d (hopefully) have a Parliament which could agree on a course of action re: Brexit. As it is, there isn’t a Parliamentary majority for anything other than stringing out the process even longer, which is both damaging to the country and contrary to public opinion; hence the need for prorogation to stop Parliament dicking around for a bit.

        • zzzzort says:

          That’s totally fair. Though without the referendum they wouldn’t be having this fight in the first place (though that might be revealing my political preferences).

          I also wonder how the politics of new elections would have played out. I haven’t live in the UK for the past year, but the sense I get is that people are tired of voting for things. In the platonic westminster system there’s a general election anytime the PM and the parliamentary majority don’t agree about a major issue, but if they kept to that there’d be an election every month.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            That’s totally fair. Though without the referendum they wouldn’t be having this fight in the first place (though that might be revealing my political preferences).

            Maybe, although the UK has had referenda before without leading to this sort of gridlock.

            I also wonder how the politics of new elections would have played out. I haven’t live in the UK for the past year, but the sense I get is that people are tired of voting for things.

            Re: politics, the polls suggested that new elections would have favoured the Conservatives, which is probably why the Opposition didn’t support the idea. As for election fatigue, that was certainly a factor in the last general election, although by now I suspect most people would be relieved to have an opportunity to finally break the Westminster deadlock.

            In the platonic westminster system there’s a general election anytime the PM and the parliamentary majority don’t agree about a major issue, but if they kept to that there’d be an election every month.

            I suspect that in the Platonic Westminster System the government is on the same page as its MPs politically, and so can generally be confident of getting its agenda passed.

          • John Schilling says:

            Maybe, although the UK has had referenda before without leading to this sort of gridlock.

            Have they had referenda where Sir Humphrey Appleby would have strongly disagreed with the result?

            Because from an outside perspective, this looks an awful lot like the Elite saying “You have chosen poorly. We told you not to do that, and trusted that you understood. Now we shall spend the next two years very publicly planning to implement your choice in the most horrifically destructive manner possible. Perhaps you would like to reconsider, and choose wisely. Wait, two years was not enough? OK, take another six months. We’ll be busy stockpiling body bags that we’re going to need. Really, we can keep this up forever, or until you go back and make the right choice, whichever comes first.”

          • ec429 says:

            without the referendum they wouldn’t be having this fight in the first place

            I don’t think that’s true. Without the referendum, Ukip would have continued to gain support (and wouldn’t have gone down the “Tommy Robinson” route); indeed, had Cameron not promised the referendum in his manifesto, Ukip might have gained seats in 2015, and been on course to gain more in a (presumably) 2020 GE. The referendum emboldened Eurosceptics by revealing that they (contrary to received wisdom) were in the majority, and thus sped up the process, but the disconnect between the electorate and their representatives was already there and it would have come to a head sooner or later.

          • zzzzort says:

            I mean, the list of referenda in UK history is quite short. They were mainly used to ratify things being done by parliament, especially devolutions that particularly affected some region.

            While there is a marked elite/popular split on brexit, the other way of looking at it is that people voted for something (less money to Brussels, fewer foreigners, strong trade deals, a return to a sense of pre-war british pre-eminence) that wasn’t on offer. Parliament, which actually has to deal with things that are possible, was stuck choosing between May’s deal, a hard brexit, and remain/a second referendum. The polling on this was at one point a hilarious rock-paper-scissors of paradoxical preferences. IMHO, if the UK is going to continue to have referenda, they should really work the details out first (in this case having a deal in place with the EU), and vote to ratify or reject that deal.

          • John Schilling says:

            the other way of looking at it is that people voted for something (less money to Brussels, fewer foreigners, strong trade deals, a return to a sense of pre-war british pre-eminence) that wasn’t on offer.

            That’s like saying, “The American people voted for something (a competent, capable, honest conservative President who would put the Liberals and the RINOs and the globalists of both parties in their place) that wasn’t on offer. Therefore they didn’t really vote for Donald J. Trump, and Congress had no real choice but to postpone the inauguration and keep Barack Obama in place as a caretaker president”.

            Parliament, which actually has to deal with things that are possible,

            The people of the UK voted clearly and specifically for Brexit, on a ballot which had the explicit options of “Brexit” and “No Brexit”. Brexit, is a thing that is possible. And Brexit is a thing that explicitly was on offer.

            Possibly Parliament should have authorized a referendum where one of the options was “Brexit but only if we can get a particular deal from the EU”. Or none at all. Possibly someone should have done a better job of explaining the likely consequences of Brexit to the British people. Or possibly they understood full well and voted for it anyway.

            Holding an election and then effectively nullifying it because “they can’t possibly have meant that thing they explicitly voted for”, IMO disqualifies a nation as a democracy. Holding an election where the only possible outcomes are voting for the plan you like and the voting for that thing you’ll nullify because they can’t possibly have meant it, IMO disqualifies a nation as a democracy. That’s the kind of “election” Vladimir Putin keeps holding and winning.

          • zzzzort says:

            Therefore they didn’t really vote for Donald J. Trump

            I hate to nitpick analogies, but Trump lost the popular vote and became president because of non-majoritarian features of the US constitution. In the UK referenda are non-binding, and sovereignty rests with (the not necessarily majoritarian) parliament. But the parliamentary elections are fairly democratic (though FPTP is the worst), and the UK is comfortably within most people’s definition of a democracy.

            Or none at all

            That was my contention. Referenda don’t work all that well, both in the sense of maintaining constitutional order or making complicated choices with lots of trade-offs. British opinion is polarized enough that there was never going to be a happy outcome, but punting big choices to voters without putting in the groundwork for what the possible outcomes are is a recipe for disaster. Brexit isn’t a thing, it’s a bunch of different possible things, from Norway to hard brexit, most of which require cooperation with actors outside the UK.

          • Bamboozle says:

            @zzzzort

            Yes exactly, much of what was said to voters about brexit has since come out to be a lie. the $350m for the nhs on the bus being the most notorious.

          • John Schilling says:

            I hate to nitpick analogies, but Trump lost the popular vote and became president because of non-majoritarian features of the US constitution.

            “Election” is not a synonym for “Whoever gets 50%+1 of the votes decides”. Donald Trump won the election according to the rules that were set in place before the election. We could have chosen different rules, but we didn’t. Brexit won according to the rules that were set in place before the election. The Brits could have chosen different rules, but they didn’t. For something as momentous as Brexit, perhaps the rules should have been a two-thirds majority, or a 50% majority in each of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but they weren’t.

            That part of the analogy is rock-solid.

            Brexit isn’t a thing, it’s a bunch of different possible things, from Norway to hard brexit, most of which require cooperation with actors outside the UK.

            Brexit is a range of things, but it is not all possible things. Parliament and/or the Crown can legitimately pick any one of the things Brexit is, including the ones that don’t require cooperation from outside actors, and implement it. Refusing to implement any of the things Brexit could be, brings their legitimacy into serious question.

          • ec429 says:

            @Bamboozle

            Yes exactly, much of what was said to voters about brexit has since come out to be a lie. the $350m for the nhs on the bus being the most notorious.

            Leaving aside that you apparently know so little about Britain that you can’t even get our currency right, the £350m and NHS claim wasn’t a lie, it was however ambiguous (when was the last time a politician said something that wasn’t?), and even the expansive reading of it (‘if we leave we could put all this money into the NHS’) is strictly true even though it’s the gross rather than net figure, because we could, if we chose, not replicate the EU spending in the UK from our own coffers but instead spend that money on our own priorities — hence “taking back control” of the £350m/wk (which phrasing Boris, among others, was careful always to use).

            I would say that the most notorious lies from the campaign were (a) the then Chancellor claiming that a mere vote to leave (i.e. without actually leaving) would cause a technical recession, and (b) the leaflet the Government sent out (spending £9m to argue for Remain without it counting towards the Remain campaign spending limit) stating that “this is your decision; the government will implement what you decide”, given that it’s now clear they had no intention of doing so if we voted the ‘wrong’ way.

            Also, +1 (or rather, +17.4million) to everything John Schilling is saying. I used to think I lived in a democracy, now it seems it was all just a façade.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ John Schilling:

            Because from an outside perspective, this looks an awful lot like the Elite saying “You have chosen poorly. We told you not to do that, and trusted that you understood. Now we shall spend the next two years very publicly planning to implement your choice in the most horrifically destructive manner possible. Perhaps you would like to reconsider, and choose wisely. Wait, two years was not enough? OK, take another six months. We’ll be busy stockpiling body bags that we’re going to need. Really, we can keep this up forever, or until you go back and make the right choice, whichever comes first.”

            I think that’s a very good summary of the situation.

            @ ec429:

            I would say that the most notorious lies from the campaign were (a) the then Chancellor claiming that a mere vote to leave (i.e. without actually leaving) would cause a technical recession, and (b) the leaflet the Government sent out (spending £9m to argue for Remain without it counting towards the Remain campaign spending limit) stating that “this is your decision; the government will implement what you decide”, given that it’s now clear they had no intention of doing so if we voted the ‘wrong’ way.

            Funny how things work, isn’t it? A slogan on a bus which wasn’t even a promise or prediction apparently invalidates people’s reasons for voting leave, but I’ve never seen anybody argue that “Obviously remain voters were just bamboozled by pro-EU propaganda, they didn’t really understand the situation, therefore their votes don’t count.”

          • Bamboozle says:

            @ec429

            This would have been more pleasant to read without the snark. As a scot currently living in Australia i dont have a sterling key on my keyboard and forgot that it’s a dollar.

            Moving to your points, stating clearly that 350m for the NHS on the bus without all the terms and conditions you just laid out is hugely misleading, and also a lie. All the we sent X amount to Brussels and get squat back was misleading and therefore i’d class a lie.

            Boris saying Turkey was going to join the EU and flood us with immigrants, Farage using posters such as the ‘breaking point’ poster was a lie.

            Struggling to remember a more “conflict theory” statement than I used to think I lived in a democracy, now it seems it was all just a façade. I’d suggest this is something we need less of in this forum not more.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Bamboozle:

            Anecdotal, I know, but every single person I’ve come across complaining about that £350 million thing has been a remainer trying to claim that leave voters were misled. I haven’t met a single leaver who felt lied to by that claim. Perhaps the outgroup aren’t actually quite so gullible as it pleases you to imagine.

          • noyann says:

            @The original Mr. X
            > £350 million thing [ … ] I haven’t met a single leaver who felt lied to by that claim. Perhaps the outgroup aren’t actually quite so gullible as it pleases you to imagine.

            Or they just solved the cognitive dissonance from being fooled by something they thought good.
            Probably both.

          • Fitzroy says:

            I haven’t met a single leaver who felt lied to by that claim.

            +1 to this. I likewise haven’t met a single leaver who felt lied to by the claim. In fact I’d go as far as to say I haven’t met a single leaver who felt affected by the campaign in any way.

            Honestly, every leaver I’ve met had already decided they wanted out of the EU long before the referendum was on the table, let alone the campaigning began.

          • gbdub says:

            If a few misleading or exaggerated slogans are enough to delegitimize a democratic election, then I expect there has never been a legitimate democratic election on anything of import in human history.

          • ec429 says:

            @Bamboozle

            This would have been more pleasant to read without the snark.

            But less pleasant to write. The snark you see is already a compromise 😉

            Moving to your points, stating clearly that 350m for the NHS on the bus without all the terms and conditions you just laid out is hugely misleading, and also a lie.

            Well if we’re taking the strict wording, the bus didn’t say “and we promise to spend it on the NHS if we win”, it said “let’s” (i.e. let us, permit us, present us with the option to) “spend it on the NHS”. So the text on the bus was not a lie.
            Was it misleading? That’s essentially a political argument, because you can’t somehow measure Leave voters’ skulls and find out what beliefs are in them. But FWIW I agree with @Fitzroy that the Leave campaign didn’t really affect Leave voters.

            Boris saying Turkey was going to join the EU and flood us with immigrants

            Turkey is in the process of accession, having begun in 2005. Whether and when they will complete it is a judgement call, but remember that the referendum (and campaign) was before the 2016 attempted coup (snark warning: Turkey has real coups, with tanks and stuff, unlike the “coup” continuity-Remain were going on about recently) which may hindsight-bias our view of how probable Turkish accession looked at the time.

            Struggling to remember a more “conflict theory” statement than I used to think I lived in a democracy, now it seems it was all just a façade. I’d suggest this is something we need less of in this forum not more.

            When you’re in a conflict, mistake theory is a mistake. Remain’s recent victories (Benn Bill, SC judgement) haven’t come from winning the arguments (Boris is riding high in the polls) but from leveraging their power base (a majority of MPs who lied to get elected, a supreme court who don’t understand the constitution their existence is incompatible with, etc.). And their leading backers aren’t just mistaken; I am confident that the CBI, for instance, know that EU membership is bad for Britain, but it’s good for entrenched big businesses with pan-Europæan lobby power.
            Leave already won on mistake-theory terms: a majority was convinced we were right. And a fat lot of good it did us; conflict theorists on the other side immediately started bleating about cheating, and making a fuss about a bus.

          • Aapje says:

            The procedure to enter the EU seems to in practice be a conditional promise. Countries that are allowed to enter the process of becoming a member state have to implement all kinds of laws and policies. If they do so, they could still be refused entry in theory, but in practice, ‘everyone*’ seems to see that as a broken promise.

            Turkey being allowed to enter negotiations thus pretty much put the membership in their hands. If they implemented the laws and policies, they would be let in.

            They didn’t, so the negotiations have stalled for a long time. However, the EU didn’t stop the EU membership process and Erdogan still wants to join.

            So people who see Turkey as a country with a dangerous culture may fear an Ataturk-like scenario: a future leader with pro-Western tendencies implementing EU laws and policies, Turkey being granted membership, followed by a revolt as many of the Turkish people don’t actually want EU laws and policies.

            Note that due to their size, having Turkey as a rogue member state could have immense consequences. We already saw what the relatively tiny nation of Greece did.

            * The people in charge of this

          • John Schilling says:

            Turkey being allowed to enter negotiations thus pretty much put the membership in their hands. If they implemented the laws and policies, they would be let in.

            I’m not convinced this is true. As you note, it was never entirely put to the test, so it’s going to be hard to prove one way or another. But as I understand EU law, there is no obligation that Turkey be admitted if it implements the laws and polices. If Turkey implements all the laws and policies to perfection, if the Lord God Almighty breaks his long silence to speak from the heavens “Turkey has implemented all the laws and policies to perfection”, if the space aliens with the orbital mind control lasers beam that knowledge with absolute certainty into every person on Earth, then it is still the law that any EU member state can say “meh, we don’t think Turkey should be a member”, and absolutely veto Turkey’s admission.

            Which, given legal ambiguity and absent divine intervention, they will do with a side order of “…because we don’t believe they’ve truly implemented the laws and policies as we understand them”, but no matter.

            The EU includes a number of nations with less than fond memories of the Ottoman Empire, and it includes a number of nations who don’t see unrestricted Turkish immigration as a plus. And it includes Greece. When Turkish EU membership was still a live issue, the consensus among the news sources I followed was “Worth a try, but probably never going to happen no matter how perfectly Turkey implements the laws and policies. So when will they give up and stop trying?”

          • Aapje says:

            @John Schilling

            The EU uses a plethora of coercive tactics to execute its agenda. For example, a common pattern is to claim that a change can still be prevented at the end, while already implementing 99% of the change (creating facts on the ground, including sunk costs), making unqualified promises (resulting in reputation costs and unfairness to those to whom a promise was made, when not implementing the change) and threatening those who want to vote against at the end with the apocalypse.

            This exploits human agreeableness and general unwillingness to accept a lot of damage to third parties to also punish the abuser.

          • John Schilling says:

            and threatening those who want to vote against at the end with the apocalypse.

            The EU is going to threaten Greece with the apocalypse? And with reputational penalties? I think I’ve heard this story before, and I’m not buying the bit where it always ends with everyone being all agreeable with one another.

          • ana53294 says:

            @Aapje

            And those tactics worked great when the EU wanted Eastern European countries to take on more Syrian refugees.

            If the EU can’t force countries that receive a big part of their government funding in EU money to accept a few hundred Muslims, how would they do well in making them accept a few million legal immigrants?

            Even in Spain, which is quite pro-EU, nobody likes the idea of Turkey joining. Most people assume it will never happen, because it’s a terrible idea. Poland and Hungary have shown us we don’t really have a mechanism to deal with countries that stray; how could we ever accept Turkey?

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            A Turkey which actually implemented the Acquics in full would be a very different country. That country might be admitted, but only because nobody actually paying attention would at that point have the views of Turkey they do now.

            Certainly, the UK as a member, would still have a veto on it, so yelling “THE TURKS ARE COMING” is fearmongering of the first rank. Yes, Turkey might indeed someday join. Because at some future date that might not be a scary prospect anymore. Should one fear the future being better than today?

          • Aapje says:

            @John Schilling

            Greek politicians, non-Greek politicians, citizens when there is a referendum, etc.

            @Thomas Jorgensen

            A Turkey which actually implemented the Acquics in full would be a very different country.

            Politically, yes, but not necessarily culturally. I remind you of how the elites in Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan used to be extremely pro-Western and tried to forcefully westernize their countries. Yet now Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan are ruled by theocratic dictators.

            The Europhiles seem to tend to believe that EU membership creates a Western mindset and attitude, far more than is reasonable. So they tend to err on the side of admitting countries with problematic cultures, based on the idea that this will fix itself in time.

            One result of this was the Greek debt crisis, where the Greeks turned out to not share Western values sufficiently, which nearly destroyed the Euro. Another is the conflict between the EU and Hungary, about their political choices.

            That country might be admitted, but only because nobody actually paying attention would at that point have the views of Turkey they do now.

            The issue is that the elites tend to talk to the elites in other countries and thus are part of a bubble, where they have a greatly distorted view of the attitudes in those countries.

            We’ve seen this time and again, as politicians were much more confident of referendum results than was warranted. Brexit is merely one example. So how can we then be confident that they won’t make choices that seem incredibly bad to well-informed people, when the politicians seem ill-informed.

            This is especially true as EU politics is full of lies and manipulation, which tends to result in worse political choices.

            Certainly, the UK as a member, would still have a veto on it, so yelling “THE TURKS ARE COMING” is fearmongering of the first rank.

            Shortly before the Brexit referendum, there was the famous EU-Turkey immigrant deal. Part of that deal was that the EU promised to “re-energize” Turkey’s bid to join the European bloc.

            This seems to have resulted in the claim by Boris Johnson and some other pro-Brexiteers that the accession talks were accelerating. Ironically, Johnson is now attacked for this, seemingly based on the idea that he should have not believed and/or repeated the lie by the EU.

            Ultimately, fact is that the EU keeps refusing to stop negotiations. Even the non-binding vote by the European Parliament in late 2016 demanding this, didn’t result in an end to the negotiations.

            I don’t think it is unreasonable for critics to take the EU at their word and to interpret their actions, as still having the goal to make Turkey a full member (which would allow Turks to move to other EU countries and thus possibly large scale migration).

            @ana53294

            Even in Spain, which is quite pro-EU, nobody likes the idea of Turkey joining.

            In my country, no one likes the idea of having such a low interest rates that our pensions are in peril, yet the ECB still has really low interest rates (much lower than the US). The politicians claim that they have no choice, just like they have claimed about so many things, even when they did have a choice.

            Ultimately, I don’t trust EU politicians to favor the desires of the majority of the citizens over the desires of their elitist peer group.

            The level of dishonesty is so high that I can’t rule anything out. If the EU leaders want something from Turkey really bad and Turkey improves a bit, they may gamble on a EU membership for Turkey. They certainly have gambled plenty of times in the past.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      I find to my embarrassment I am pretty naive about exactly how Britain’s government works.

      On the assumption (contrary to Johnson’s rhetoric) that the prorogation was intended mainly to shut Parliament down while the clock to hard exit counts down, what would he actually have gained by prorogation? If Parliament is unwilling to withdraw confidence, what else could they do if still in session? Could they vote to delay or undo Brexit without Johnson’s cooperation? Could they remove him as PM without triggering a new election?

      In other words, why would Johnson consider prorogation to be better than just spending the next five weeks presiding over a Parliament that is unable to agree on an alternate plan? (Aside from it just being more relaxing, of course.)

      • Eric Rall says:

        Could they vote to delay or undo Brexit without Johnson’s cooperation?

        They actually did vote to obligate Johnson to see EU approval for another Brexit delay, without Johnson’s cooperation. My understanding is that the prorogation had been intended to block this, but Johnson misjudged the timing and the bill’s supporters managed to pass it before the prorogation went into effect.

        In theory, Johnson has two other options to block a bill that a Parliamentary majority wants but he doesn’t: the Queen’s Consent and Royal Assent. Like prorogation, these are Reserve Powers that the Queen exercises, but it’s generally considered that she should only use them when “advised” to do so by her government.

        Queen’s Consent is a requirement that bills that affect the monarch’s prerogatives and interests (including her nominal control of foreign policy) can only be considered by Parliament with the Queen’s approval. The most recent time Queen’s Consent was refused was 1999, for a bill that would have required explicit Parliamentary approval to take military action against Iraq. The Blair government advised the Queen to refuse consent, in order to shut down the debate. I’m not sure whether Blair feared the bill would pass, or if he just thought the debate would be politically inconvenient. I’ve seen articles claiming the Brexit delay bill was worded very carefully so it would place obligations specifically and directly on the Prime Minister, not on the Crown’s powers delegated to the PM or exercised on the PM’s advice, in order to take Queen’s Consent off the table as an option for Johnson.

        Royal Assent is the broader power, where Parliament can pass whatever it likes but nothing becomes law without the Queen’s approval. It’s like the President signing or vetoing a bill in the US, except unlike in the US there’s no way for the legislature to override withheld royal assent by a supermajority vote. The last time Royal Assent was refused in Britain was by Queen Anne in 1708, at the advice of her (English) ministers who wanted to block a bill passed by the Scottish Parliament (this being before the Act of Union that fully combined the governments of England and Scotland). While technically legal, it would have been shocking in the extreme to see this power used again after more than three centuries.

        Could they remove him as PM without triggering a new election?

        Yes-ish. They can remove and replace the PM without an election, but the process risks triggering a new election if there isn’t an agreed-up replacement PM with a firm majority.

        The process is to pass a vote of no-confidence, which starts a 14-day clock ticking. If within that 14 days, a new government is successfully formed and approved by a majority of the House of Commons, the clock is stopped and the new government hold office until the next general election. If there’s no approved new government when the clock expires, then Parliament is automatically dissolved and new elections scheduled.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          They actually did vote to obligate Johnson to see EU approval for another Brexit delay, without Johnson’s cooperation.

          Ah, I see. I sort of figured that in that sense the PM was like America’s Speaker of the House, who could probably keep any bill from coming to a vote if she had to. But the US never has a Speaker who is from the minority party, so the analogy probably doesn’t hold up. It’s hard for an American to quite grasp what it must be like in a state that is so multi-party and the opposition can have the majority, but can’t possibly agree on their own guy.

          If Johnson did seek another delay, do we assume that he would get it? My impression is that the EU wants to play hardball, but wants Britain to leave even less, because of the precedent it would set. Would it follow the letter of the law if he went and said, “I have to ask you assholes for another extension”? It might be entertaining at least to see how offensive he could be without queering the deal.

          The process is to pass a vote of no-confidence, which starts a 14-day clock ticking.

          Yeah, I got that; the problem is that the opposition seems unwilling to do that — I suppose because the 14-day clock plus a possible election would serve to run down the Brexit clock just as effectively as the prorogation would, and because they are afraid their position would be worsened by an actual election.

          Thanks!

          • The original Mr. X says:

            I sort of figured that in that sense the PM was like America’s Speaker of the House, who could probably keep any bill from coming to a vote if she had to.

            This used to be the case, until the actual Speaker decided to give MPs rather than the government control over the Parliamentary timetable.

            This was probably unconstitutional and certainly unprecedented, but for some reason none of the “We’re just defending the constitution, not trying to stop Brexit at all costs, honest” remainers raised any fuss.

            If Johnson did seek another delay, do we assume that he would get it? My impression is that the EU wants to play hardball, but wants Britain to leave even less, because of the precedent it would set. Would it follow the letter of the law if he went and said, “I have to ask you assholes for another extension”? It might be entertaining at least to see how offensive he could be without queering the deal.

            Johnson’s aides have been hinting that they’ve found a legal loophole which will avoid the need for seeking an extension, so I suppose we’ll have to see how that pans out.

            Personally if I were Johnson I’d go to the EU and say, “I’m asking for an extension, but I must insist that [insert conditions which will clearly be totally unacceptable to the rest of the EU].” Then the EU refuses, I’ve technically followed the law, and the extension business is finished.

          • Fitzroy says:

            Personally if I were Johnson I’d go to the EU and say, “I’m asking for an extension, but I must insist that [insert conditions which will clearly be totally unacceptable to the rest of the EU].” Then the EU refuses, I’ve technically followed the law, and the extension business is finished.

            Unfortunately the law specifies the form of the letter by which extension must be sought, so he wouldn’t get away with attaching conditions to it. He could parenthetically request that the extension request be refused, I suppose, but that’s about it.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Unfortunately the law specifies the form of the letter by which extension must be sought, so he wouldn’t get away with attaching conditions to it. He could parenthetically request that the extension request be refused, I suppose, but that’s about it.

            Then I wonder if he could attach conditions in another letter. Send the official letter, and then another one saying “By the way, I’m not going to pay the membership fees after 31 October even if you grant an extension, so bear that in mind when considering whether or not to grant one.”

          • Eric Rall says:

            the problem is that the opposition seems unwilling to do that [vote no confidence]

            My suspicion is that that’s driven by a lack of agreement on the composition of the new government, which would be mostly made of of Labour MPs but would require support from Lib Dems, SNP, and the remainers Johnson just kicked out of the Conservative party. Corbyn as PM is unpalatable to the other groups he’d need to form a government, and anyone else from Labour as PM would be impractical unless Corbyn were forced to step down as the leader of the Labour party.

            Theoretically, they could cut a deal where the government would be lead by a non-Labour coalition member. But that’d be awkward in terms of parliamentary votes (Labour has 246 seats in the House of Commons, compared to 97 for all the other Opposition parties put together). It’s also be strategically risky for Labour to consent to a government lead by a party that they’ll be competing with for votes in the next election, as holding the PM slot would add a lot of credibility to what’s currently considered a third party. Labour’s been bleeding a lot of support in the polls to various third parties (mostly the Lib Dems) since the 2017 general election: Labour’s down about 15 percentage points (~25% now vs 40% in 2017), while the Lib Dems are up about 12 percentage points (~20% now vs 7.4% in 1027).

            It’s not necessarily intractable, though. The longer parliament is in session between now and the Brexit date, the more opportunities the Opposition parties have of agreeing on the leadership and composition of a new government. It’s just difficult enough that there’s a big risk of failing to put together a new government in time if they start the 14 day clock without a deal firmly in place.

          • bean says:

            while the Lib Dems are up about 12 percentage points (~20% now vs 7.4% in 1027).

            I know British democracy is old, but I don’t think the LibDems have been around quite that long. Or Parliament, for that matter.

          • Eric Rall says:

            I know British democracy is old, but I don’t think the LibDems have been around quite that long. Or Parliament, for that matter.

            The LibDems are actually pretty old, depending on how you count, but not quite that old. They’re institutionally continuous (with a few name changes, splits, and mergers along the way) with the old Whig party, which was formally founded in 1678 and has its informal roots several decades earlier in the lead-up to the English Civil Wars.

            Parliament is usually dated to Edward Longshank’s “Model Parliament” of 1295, which fixed the familiar format of a bicameral legislature with Peers and Bishops in the upper house and elected commoners (originally split between Burgesses, representing cities, and Knights of the Shire, representing rural areas) in the lower house. There were older quasi-legislative bodies dating back deep into the Anglo-Saxon period, but they’re generally considered separate institutions from true Parliaments.

            TLDR: I meant 2017, not 1027.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            old Whig party, which was formally founded in 1678

            1678 was the date of the introduction of the insult. It was nothing formal. I’m skeptical that the Whigs ever had a formal existence before they were eclipsed by the Liberals. The earliest date I have for a formal organization of Liberals is the Liberal Central Organization in 1860. I don’t have any date for a formal existence of the Conservatives.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        On the assumption (contrary to Johnson’s rhetoric) that the prorogation was intended mainly to shut Parliament down while the clock to hard exit counts down, what would he actually have gained by prorogation? If Parliament is unwilling to withdraw confidence, what else could they do if still in session? Could they vote to delay or undo Brexit without Johnson’s cooperation? Could they remove him as PM without triggering a new election?

        There was/is talk of them passing a bill preventing Britain from leaving the EU without a deal. I’m not sure if such a bill would be possible (presumably the rest of the EU would have to agree?), but if it were passed it would (i) basically destroy Britain’s position in negotiations with the EU (since they could include whatever conditions they want and Britain would be unable to walk away), and (ii) since Parliament has shown itself incapable of actually agreeing to a deal, likely prevent Brexit from happening altogether.

  64. LeslieByvivreBrooks says:

    Hi all, I’ve written a long but hopefully good post about the videogame Rain World, in which I explain how the game communicates profound Buddhist and Transhumanist themes to the player through its story, its gameplay, and most of all, its realistic unfairness.

    I happen to cite some of Scott’s more transhumanist pieces in there, such as Meditations on Moloch and The Goddess of Everything Else, so if you’re curious to read how a game could engage with ideas like these, you’ll probably find this a fun read.

    Find the introduction here.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Approximate quote: When you pray for safety in the desert, remember that Allah also hears the prayers of the lion.

      Banana Rose by Natalie Goldberg is what I’d call a Buddhist novel. Goldberg mostly writes about writing as a form of meditation, but in Banana Rose, she has a tone of one thing happens and then another thing happens, and yet the novel is satisfying (at least to me) rather than boring.

    • Zeno of Citium says:

      I just read the whole thing, that was excellent – a great piece of literary criticism. It’s a shame some of Rain World’s less approachable facets weren’t tuned (like going through a screen transition and immediately being eaten, which ironically is something you’d be able to avoid if you were actually in the world as the real world doesn’t really have screen transitions). It could have been brutal and unfair, but not so unfair that basically everyone found it frustrating and unfun. It seems like there’s a really interesting story and world going on, one that the unfairness serves, but the game is just so enjoyable to most people that the only way most of us will experience it is through something like this article – although I’m not sure how much I’d get out of a 30-hour game that wasn’t communicated better in your articles.
      The Dark Souls series is sort of the more popular version of this, but in Dark Souls, it’s less about accepting that the game and the world are unfair, but about realizing that the game design is scrupulously fair. Dark Souls has you lose progress when you die like Rain World, and so on, but everything is scripted and hand-placed. Every ambush, every trap, every seemingly unbeatable enemy has tells, warnings, or ways around them – I’m reminded of a boulder that seemingly comes out of nowhere to crush you in the first game in Sen’s Fortress that some perceptive players avoided because previous boulders that crushed previous would-be heroes left a large, visible rut in the ground. The game is full of stuff like this, that seems unfair but actually, sometimes only on reflection, you were fully warned.
      I supposed it’s appropriate that Dark Souls’ series plot is about accepting natural cycles and not trying to hold on to mere survival by stopping them, sort of the opposite of Rain World.

      • LeslieByvivreBrooks says:

        Thank you, Zeno — that’s high praise! 🙂

        I sympathize with the idea that Rain World could have been less frustrating without losing its unfair nature, but I doubt it had much leeway left here; I think that at the core of the game’s critical reception lies the fact that its unfairness itself was so frustrating. One thing it might have done was to make its narrative more apparent up-front; most people who fell off Rain World didn’t even have a clue that it had a story to begin with. This would mean it would have had to sacrifice part of its “The player character is not special or supernaturally important”-philosophy, however, which is a key component of what makes the game so incredible… So I’m not sure much could have been done.

        Dark Souls is a fantastic series, but I’d argue that it’s almost rarely unfair; the vast majority of your deaths come from fair, ‘easily’ learnable foes. Moreover, every time you’re caught by an unfair trap in Dark Souls, you’ll afterwards 1) find out the mechanism that might have foreshadowed it, and 2) know that it is there so you’ve learned how to avoid it. This means that the player never really has to struggle with unfairness in Dark Souls like we do in life; thus the game doesn’t teach us much about dealing with unfairness in real life.

        (I think you realize this yourself as well; if you merely brought up Dark Souls as an example of a game that feels unfair but isn’t, rather than as an example of a game that Rain World could take a cue from, then my last paragraph is happily uncalled for!)

  65. habu71 says:

    Question for anyone living in the bay area now:
    Has anyone found that finding women to date in the bay area is significantly harder than someplace else they have lived? That is, has anyone been noticeably successful someplace other than the bay area, but then has moved to the bay area and can’t find a date?
    I am thinking of moving up there and have read many accounts of it being very difficult to find a date as a man looking for a woman. I’m just wondering if these accounts are mostly due to the sex ratio in the bay area or selection effects of the kind of guys who are likely to find themselves employed in the area.

    • devonian22 says:

      Not answering the question, but I’ve heard the lopsided sex ratio given as an explanation (with NYC as the opposite – lots of single, college-educated women, not many similar men). See https://www.amazon.com/Date-onomics-Dating-Became-Lopsided-Numbers/dp/076118208X.

    • JayT says:

      Personally, I had better luck dating in the Bay Area than I did in the medium sized college town I lived in before SF. My data is over a decade old however, so I’m not sure it’s still accurate. However, it’s still a very large area with a whole lot of people, so just by sheer numbers your odds will be better here than in most other places.

    • keaswaran says:

      San Jose, Las Vegas, and San Francisco have the three highest ratios of men to women of major American metropolitan areas, with Honolulu and Austin not far behind. New York, Philadelphia, and Newark all have higher ratios of women to men than San Francisco does of men to women, as do a dozen or so other big cities. (I suspect men are overrepresented in rural areas with a “frontier” feel, like Alaska, as well as in dying young.)

      https://www.bestplaces.net/docs/studies/solocities_gap1.aspx

      • The Nybbler says:

        It’s worse than that. Young single men are overrepresented compared to young, single women in ALL major metropolitan areas. NY, Philly, and Newark just have more older single women than older single men.

        • Evan Þ says:

          So where are all the young women?

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            I’m not him, and don’t share his sense of despair at the NYC dating scene, but I would assume that the key word there is single.

            Both younger and older men are competing for younger women as partners and sex differences tend to be single-digit differences in percentage. So even if only a small minority of younger women are willing to date older men that could easily undo the effect of an overall sex skew in the population.

            That said, in practice you don’t actually have to be that attractive to outcompete old men and frankly most young men. New York City is still an excellent city for heterosexual men when it comes to dating if you know what you’re doing.

        • Aftagley says:

          Married to all the old men?

  66. Clutzy says:

    I’m gonna be the one.

    Trump-Ukraine

    Re-register your predictions from the previous thread. Mine will be right below.

    • Clutzy says:

      JJust based on statistics,, I guess the underlying details of the complaint are a nothing. Less than 10% chance it’s a something.

      However that doesn’t mean it can’t be made whole cloth. The whistleblower made the complaint knowing the President could never actually release it. 90% chance of that being known to the employee.

      Full details leaking I’d put at less than 25%, as I would guess the complaint is the story, and leaking full details likely eliminates the story (like when BuzzFeed went yolo with the whole Steele dossier).

      Chance it involves Russia 51%. I assume this because its meta to make sinister insinuations about Russia, which the complainant knows.

      That is me before:

      I guess the underlying details of the complaint are a nothing. Less than 10% chance it’s a something.
      Now: 95%

      New addendum, leaker was wrong, >95%

      Full details leaking I’d put at less than 25%,.
      Now: 1%

      Chance it involves Russia 51%.
      Now: 5%

      • EchoChaos says:

        I guess the underlying details of the complaint are a nothing. Less than 10% chance it’s a something.
        Now: 95%

        95% chance of nothing or 95% chance of something? It reads like the former, but the number in the first is the latter.

        I didn’t register the first time, but it seems to me that Pelosi knows that impeachment is bad politics, but her base really, REALLY wants it, so she’s been sort of forced into a corner here.

        • Clutzy says:

          Right. Now we have the transcript. Its 100% a nothing.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Yep. Pelosi’s instincts were the right ones (always the way to bet) and her base is committing political suicide while she stands athwart history yelling “STOP”.

          • Aftagley says:

            Right. Now we have the transcript. Its 100% a nothing.

            Eh, there’s some life here, IMO. Remember, he personally blocked aid before the phone call. He doesn’t bring this up, but everyone on the call knows the state of play.

            He also brings the Biden thing up a bunch of times and states that Giuliani and Barr will call Zelenskyy several times during the conversation.

          • Oscar Sebastian says:

            We do not have the transcript. We have a document released by the White House, which is known to alter documents illegally anyway and thus cannot be trusted, that says very clearly that it is not a transcript.

          • Mustard Tiger says:

            @Aftagley

            I don’t see him bringing up Biden a bunch of times. I see 2-3 sentences in the same paragraph at the top of page 4, and that’s all. Did I miss it elsewhere?

            I agree about him mentioning the phone calls from Giuliani and Barr repeatedly, but that was brought up before Biden, and seemed to be about the firing of their investigator and other things.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Oscar Sebastian

            The Ukrainian President has confirmed that the transcript released is accurate and that Trump never pressured him.

          • Oscar Sebastian says:

            @ EchoChaos

            “I think you read everything. I think you read text. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be involved to democratic, open elections of USA. We had, I think, good phone call. It was normal,” is not the sort of statement that is especially convincing. It seems very clear to me that the President of Ukraine wishes not to be involved because pissing off one or both political parties in the US is only gonna come back to bite Ukraine later.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Oscar Sebastian

            I am not sure how “Nobody pressured me” can be read as anything but a complete denial.

            And “I think you read everything. I think you read text.” pretty clearly says that he is confirming the text is accurate and doesn’t want to discuss if there was any subtext.

            To read it differently requires assumptions that aren’t present in either place.

          • Oscar Sebastian says:

            @EchoChaos

            If you’re not sure how a politician might say something that isn’t 100% true, you aren’t trying very hard.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Oscar Sebastian

            I am fully aware that politicians can lie.

            But that is a different statement. The transcript, Trump and Zelensky are in agreement that there was no pressure or quid pro quo.

            To assume otherwise requires evidence not submitted.

          • Oscar Sebastian says:

            No. Trump is such a habitual liar that it requires no evidence whatsoever to assume he’s lying.

          • ECD says:

            @EchoChaos

            The Ukrainian President has confirmed that the transcript released is accurate and that Trump never pressured him.

            I’m going to ask for a source for that, because what I can find is the foreign minister saying

            “I know what the conversation was about and I think there was no pressure,” Prystaiko said. “This conversation was long, friendly, and it touched on many questions, sometimes requiring serious answers.”

            Link

            Which is rather a different thing, though intended to give the impression you draw.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @ECD

            No, I was referring to the joint appearance that Trump and Zelensky had.

            https://ktla.com/2019/09/25/trump-set-to-meet-with-ukraines-president-on-wednesday-amid-whistleblower-controversy/

            That Ukraine’s consistent stance has been that Trump did not pressure Zelensky is another sign that he is not lying.

          • ECD says:

            @EchoChaos

            Thanks for the link. I believe the whole quote is:

            “I think you read everything. I think you read text. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be involved to democratic open … elections. Elections of USA. No. Sure, we had … I think good phone call. It was normal. We spoke about many things, and I … so I think and you read it that nobody pushed me,”

            This is in the press conference which began with President Trump saying “We’re doing very well in every respect and I have a feeling that your country is going to do fantastically well and whatever we can do [then what sounds like ‘just take care of yourself’ but I can’t be sure of]”

            A lot is going to depend on viewpoint here, but no, I don’t view that statement as evidence of anything beyond the fact that President Zelensky said it.

          • tocny says:

            Zelensky currently has an interest currently in bending the truth, since coming out and saying that Trump is lying will piss off his benefactor. I’m not saying he’s lying, but it shouldn’t be discounted that he’s predisposed not to do so.

          • Protagoras says:

            Surely if Zelensky was pressured it would be in his best interest to say that he wasn’t, both because admitting to being pressured looks weak, and because if he was concerned with keeping Trump’s good will, obviously saying he was pressured loses that. So his saying he wasn’t pressured hardly seems to have any value.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @all

            Sure, everyone could be lying. But now we’re back where we started before this was even alleged.

            Nobody has any evidence that Trump did anything wrong and all the evidence is in Trump’s favor.

            You may not believe the evidence, but there isn’t any evidence against Trump.

          • ECD says:

            @EchoChaos

            I address the evidence President Trump chose to release and what I believe it indicates below. Discounting a non-sworn statement by a politician about the most powerful person on the planet, while dependent upon his country for support and sitting next to him does not, actually, convince me of anything.

            That does not, however, leave us with no evidence of anything else.

          • Oscar Sebastian says:

            In fact, there’s further evidence it’s all a lie in the form of the Ukrainian president’s aid, who says the whole phone call was reliant on the expectation of quid pro quo.

            And I find it hilarious that when the evidence is that, Trump’s released statement (the accused says he’s innocent? SHOCKER!), and all the rest of the whistleblower crap – plus more to come over today and who knows how many other days — you go:

            The only evidence that I’m willing to acknowledge we have is the accused’s testimony and that should be enough for everyone. Not Guilty!

            On what planet is that a good approach to weighing evidence?

    • blipnickels says:

      Trump transcript will be ambiguous enough for everyone to feel vindicated, 95%

      Trump did something uncouth, 95%

      Trump did something impeachable by the standards of a better time, 20%

      House will impeach, 33%

      Senate will convict, 1%

      Trump will spend his entire presidency under some kind of investigation, 80%

      I will be able to successfully ignore this tomorrow, 50% (I failed today)

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Trump did something impeachable by the standards of a better time, 20%

        House will impeach, 33%

        I’m wryly amused by this juxtaposition.

        • Aftagley says:

          Trump did something impeachable by the standards of a better time, 20%

          Senate will convict, 1%

          This is the one that got me.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Yeah, that one’s also hilarious.
            Really, if we want to go for maximum partisan hackery, the Senate Republicans’s position would be: help Trump get re-elected. When Congress goes into session after the 2022 midterms, vote to convict him. Mike Pence is now eligible to rule for 10 years minus a few days.

      • The Nybbler says:

        There have only been two impeachments ever, three if you count Nixon’s aborted impeachment. The first was a straight-up power struggle; Andrew Johnson fired his Secretary of War despite a law (the Tenure of Office Act) saying he couldn’t. The third was Bill Clinton; as with Johnson he did what they said he did, but the main motive was clearly pure power struggle. I don’t know when this better time was; the only clearly “good” impeachment was Nixon’s.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          The first was a straight-up power struggle; Andrew Johnson fired his Secretary of War despite a law (the Tenure of Office Act) saying he couldn’t. The third was Bill Clinton; as with Johnson he did what they said he did, but the main motive was clearly pure power struggle.

          It’s kind of crazy how ugly a power struggle impeaching a President for breaking a law is in practice.
          Hmm, maybe that’s because the other Party is, Constitutionally, overreacting to one crime? Section 4 of Article Two states “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” So by strict construction, impeachment and removal requires 1) Treason 2) Bribery OR 3) no fewer than two other high crimes and two misdemeanors? 😀

      • EchoChaos says:

        Trump transcript will be ambiguous enough for everyone to feel vindicated, 95%

        Apparently so, although I hope the more reasonable on the other side will admit that this one was a miss.

        Trump did something uncouth, 95%

        This is pretty interpretation specific. If it’s uncouth, it’s a pretty gentle uncouth.

        Trump did something impeachable by the standards of a better time, 20%

        Pretty clearly right on this one. This isn’t impeachable in the standards of a better time.

        House will impeach, 33%

        I am more confident than before that Pelosi doesn’t allow this to happen.

        Senate will convict, 1%

        Still good.

        Trump will spend his entire presidency under some kind of investigation, 80%

        This really depends on if he gets re-election. He 100% spends the rest of his first term under investigation, but if he wins and Republicans get the House back, he won’t be investigated.

        I will be able to successfully ignore this tomorrow, 50% (I failed today)

        I hope my reply doesn’t hurt your odds!

        • ECD says:

          Trump transcript will be ambiguous enough for everyone to feel vindicated, 95%

          Apparently so, although I hope the more reasonable on the other side will admit that this one was a miss.

          Okay, my understanding of the sequence of events.
          President Trump withholds military aid to Ukraine.

          This call occurs. In this call, the Ukranian President says: “I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.”

          President Trump Responds: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…I guess you have one of your wealthy people…The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on,the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like to get to the bottom of it.” Then he goes on to talk about the Mueller report.

          They go back and forth a little about the ambassador (still unclear on this), then the president of the Ukraine says “I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliai will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine…[THESE ARE MY ELLIPSES, not in original, cutting short because stupid SCRIBD won’t let me copy paste] I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly. That I can assure you.”

          President Trump: “Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut down your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy…[my ellipses again] The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it…It sounds horrible to me.”

          I don’t know how reasonable I am, but from the perspective of someone on the other side, this looks really bad to me. All the references to Giuliani, whose only role is attorney and attack dog for the president, plus the shift from ‘let’s talk defense’ (not a quote) to “I would like you to do us a favor though..” (yes a quote) looks really bad. Even assuming all the ellipses in the original are pauses, not extractions (which seems unclear, especially given that they all appear to be from President Trump’s text), this looks really bad to me (also assuming this five page not-transcript covers everything in the 30 minute conversation).

          • EchoChaos says:

            @ECD

            The first part is apparently wrong:

            https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/1176882766597767168

            I don’t know if that will hold up, since it’s the first time I’ve seen that, but if it is true that the Ukrainians weren’t aware of delayed aid, it can’t be the “hidden quid pro quo” here, and the entire conversation becomes innocuous.

          • ECD says:

            @EchoChaose

            If that’s true, and I’m not seeing a citation for it, beyond his unadorned statement, I’m a little confused. What is the point of withholding aid without telling the party you’re withholding aid from?

            Also, I don’t know the underlying timing, but back when I was a kid, if I went to my parents but if the aid was supposed to be paid out beforehand and wasn’t, you get the same effect. Now, if it wasn’t supposed to be paid out and despite OMB telling DOD and State that it was on hold, it hadn’t leaked out, then the conversation does become somewhat more innocent.

            I don’t think it becomes innocent, it’s just not, ‘do what I say or I won’t release the aid,’ it’s ‘remember all that aid you’re going to get? Do me a favor, all right?’ which is still a quid-pro-quo, just a different one.

          • Aapje says:

            @ECD

            There are reasons to delay/review aid for reasons other than trying to change the behavior of others. For example, you can change/review your own policies about what aid you want to give.

          • ECD says:

            There are reasons to delay/review aid for reasons other than trying to change the behavior of others. For example, you can change/review your own policies about what aid you want to give.

            Do you believe that is the case here, or are we shifting topics?

          • Aapje says:

            You seem(ed) to disbelieve the tweet based on the idea that withholding aid is always coercive. I gave a (realistic) example of how this may not be the case.

            I have not seen any credible evidence showing why the aid was being withheld/reviewed, one way or the other.

            My point is not that you should believe that the aid was being withheld/reviewed for innocent reasons, but rather, that you shouldn’t assume that the aid was being withheld/reviewed to coerce Ukraine, with the only question being what the quid-pro-quo was, but that it isn’t yet established that there was a quid-pro-quo in the first place.

    • Watchman says:

      This will hurt the Democrats, as they are seen to be playing partisan politics (fairly or unfairly) >60%.

      • keaswaran says:

        What would settle this bet for you as true or false? Approval rating of Congressional Democrats goes down by a certain amount for a sustained period of time? Approval rating of particular Democratic politicians goes down? Approval rating of Trump goes up by a certain amount for a sustained period of time?

        I imagine that Biden and Trump’s approval ratings could both go up, both go down, or one go up and the other go down. They could even stay pretty constant, given how constant they’ve stayed through everything else in the past few years!

        • Watchman says:

          I was going to say electoral performance, but there’s no useful baseline available for that considering other factors. So probably a difficult prediction to prove.

    • gbdub says:

      But what are the odds that this ends up killing Biden’s candidacy?

      • EchoChaos says:

        This assumes that Biden wasn’t running a zombie candidacy anyway.

        Warren or Harris would’ve overtaken Biden regardless. This just speeds it up.

        • JPNunez says:

          The stupid thing is that some democrats will see this as an attack on Biden and start to support him.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Maybe. More likely it’s seen by most as a way of clearing out both Trump and Biden, clearing the way for the far leftists.

    • broblawsky says:

      At least one of the transcripts of Trump’s conversation with Zelensky has Trump proposing an explicit quid-pro-quo: ~75%

      More than one of the transcripts: ~60%

      Trump makes it explicit in the transcripts that he’s withholding Ukrainian aid for personal gain: ~60%

      Basically, I don’t think this would’ve gotten so big so fast unless those transcripts included Trump doing something deeply, deeply stupid.

      • gbdub says:

        I mean, the Mueller saga kind of kills the idea that this necessarily has to be an obvious smoking gun, right?
        EDIT: and for what it’s worth I think Trump is dumb enough to say something that sounds very very much like a quid pro quo (then again, Biden probably is too).

        But it’s going to be very hard to prove that it was for strictly “personal gain”, because that would require demonstrating that the suspicions about Joe and Hunter were so outlandish as to not have any legitimate cause to investigate (and Hunter’s $50k a month sinecure does seem fishy as hell and Joe’s claim he never talked to him about it is implausible)

        Really the whole thing stinks but I think Ukrainian attempts at meddling in US politics have been under scrutinized in general.

        • broblawsky says:

          All “personal gain” means to me, for the purposes of this, is that Trump says something along the lines of “this investigation would be really good for me”.

      • JPNunez says:

        Technically it’s not a transcript, but a memorandum of telephone communication, which is not verbatim.

    • Aftagley says:

      Here are mine
      – this will be a medium deal, on the level of sharpie gate (takes up around 2 weeks of media attention, quickly forgotten thereafter). – 60% confidence
      – Full details of the situation will eventually leak out – 75% confidence
      – It involves Russia in some way – 30% confidence

      Updates to previous confidence:
      – it will be a medium deal with a time horizon of around 2 weeks: Negligible
      -Full details of the situation will eventually leak out – 90% confidence
      It involves Russia in some way – depends on whether the holdup of military aid to Ukraine is a strong enough connection to Russia or not.

      Future Predictions:
      – The transcript released by the White House will differ in some way from the transcript/testimony that is eventually uncovered. (This counts both redaction and edits) – 60%
      -People will still be talking about this story in 2020 – 75%
      – Joe Biden and his son will not be revealed to have conducted any legitimate wrongdoing… – 75%
      – …Except among Trump’s base who are going to wholeheartedly support these accusations – 60%
      – The House will vote to impeach – 70%
      – The senate will vote to impeach – 30%

    • The Nybbler says:

      Nothingburger for Trump. Joe Biden will be hurt the most.

      Honestly, this is pretty much based on priors. Back at the beginning of the administration I’d have entertained more possibility that he blatantly screwed up this way. Now… “This will surely stop Trump” is a meme for a reason.

      Time is running a headline “Trump Is Leaving Congress No Choice But to Impeach”… before even seeing the transcript. This is Trump Derangement Syndrome at its finest.

      • Aftagley says:

        Time is running a headline “Trump Is Leaving Congress No Choice But to Impeach”… before even seeing the transcript. This is Trump Derangement Syndrome at its finest.

        Hold up. Dems aren’t threatening impeaching because they haven’t seen the transcript, Dems are doing so because the whistleblower report continues to be supressed by the white house in violation of law.

        Transcript != whistleblower report.

      • broblawsky says:

        This is Trump Derangement Syndrome at its finest.

        Less of this, please. Insisting that your political opponents are insane is deeply disrespectful.

      • John Schilling says:

        Time is running a headline “Trump Is Leaving Congress No Choice But to Impeach”… before even seeing the transcript.

        Why would anyone need a transcript when they’ve got the President’s personal attorney monologuing like a comic-book supervilliain on live TV?

        And Congress isn’t impeaching, they are opening a formal inquiry. Between the suppressed whistleblower report and Giuliani’s bragging about how he and Trump did stuff that looks an awful lot like crimes, it is in no way “deranged” to open an inquiry. Which will, among other things, look at the actual transcript and then decide whether to impeach.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Dems are doing so because the whistleblower report continues to be supressed by the white house in violation of law.

        In any other administration, that would not even come close to giving rise to cause for impeachment. This is hardly the first time the executive has refused to provide information to Congress right away.

    • S_J says:

      I predict that lots of speeches and TV-news presentations about Impeachment will be made, but I predict (at greater than 70% confidence) that articles of impeachment will not be passed in the House of Representatives.

    • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

      I slept through another Trump scandal again, it seems, did Democrats seamlessly transition from Russian collusion to Ukrainian collusion now? Does it not bother anyone that Russia and Ukraine are rivals right now?

      • EchoChaos says:

        I slept through another Trump scandal again, it seems, did Democrats seamlessly transition from Russian collusion to Ukrainian collusion now?

        Not collusion in this case. The allegation is that Trump offered a quid pro quo that the Ukrainians had to investigate his political opponents in order to receive aid.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          The allegation is that Trump offered a quid pro quo that the Ukrainians had to investigate his political opponents in order to receive aid.

          And not only that, his political opponents (i.e., Joe Biden), should be investigated for offering a quid pro quo that the Ukrainians should stop investigating companies whose board Joe Biden’s son sat on for $50k/month.

          So, the Democratic position seems to be:
          -Joe Biden threatening to withdraw $1 billion in aid if a prosecutor investigating a company where his son sits on the board is not fired is A-OK
          -Trump threatening to withdraw $250 million in aid if that investigation is not re-opened is an impeachable offense.

          Do I have this right? Is there an important distinction between these two things that I’m missing?

          • EchoChaos says:

            I suspect that the Democrats are fully willing to throw Biden under the bus to get Trump, so I don’t think that they’ll hold position 1 with much strength.

          • Aftagley says:

            -Joe Biden threatening to withdraw $1 billion in aid if a prosecutor investigating a company where his son sits on the board is not fired is A-OK

            This is propaganda. There has been no credible evidence that Biden sought to oust Shokin as a result of his investigations into Burisma.

            On the other hand, there is substantial evidence that: Shokin was corrupt, wans’t investigating other instances of corruption, that other forces within the Obama administration wanted to get Shokin out of the office and that Bidens threat of withholding aid was perfectly in line with his previously established policies in Ukraine.

          • Randy M says:

            I suspect that the Democrats are fully willing to throw Biden under the bus to get Trump

            Strictly from a tactical point of view, that seems sensible. Incumbent has a much bigger advantage than former VP.
            That’s assuming the method of getting Trump doesn’t swing the public either way much, which granted isn’t probably true.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I suspect that the Democrats are fully willing to throw Biden under the bus to get Trump, so I don’t think that they’ll hold position 1 with much strength.

            I agree but there’s still something that is off. Biden did what he did for monetary gain for a member of his family. Trump could at least argue he wants to see justice done. Wanting your political opponents investigated for their crimes is not the same thing as wanting to enrich oneself (or one’s son). Indeed, Democrats have been investigating their political opponent for his supposed crimes for years now.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            This is propaganda. There has been no credible evidence that Biden sought to oust Shokin as a result of his investigations into Burisma.

            Ok thanks for that I was not aware of this. But is it still established that Shokin was investigating Burisma and that Biden’s son sat on Burisma’s board at $50k/month?

          • Aftagley says:

            Biden’s son sat on Burisma’s board at $50k/month?

            Yes. This was almost certainly a sleazy way of Burisma to try and influence US opinion. It reflects very poorly on Hunter Biden and somewhat poorly on Joe Biden that Hunter accepted this position. Hunter says he took the position as a way of improving the company’s ethics and transparancy, but, come on…

            is it still established that Shokin was investigating Burisma

            Kind of, but he was doing a really, really bad job which is why the US pushed to get him fired. Burisma’s former head was a guy named Zlochevsky who was corrupt and tied to the former, ousted, President. The UK and Ukraine were trying to investigate Zlochevsky and Burisma, but the investigation was being blocked by Shokin. Shokin had a habit of slowballing pretty much every anti-corruption investigation, much to the consternation of the west.

            Eventually, the US embassy in Ukraine recommended that Obama freeze aid until the country’s anti corruption efforts improved. As the point man in Ukraine, Biden took on this role.

            So, yes, biden did push to get Shokin fired and yes, shokin was purportedly investigating Burisma/Zlochevsky – but the all evidence indicates that the intent of Biden’s action was to increase anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine and there’s no evidence that, bad optics aside, Hunter was involved in anything untoward in Ukraine.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Aftagley

            There has been no credible evidence that Biden sought to oust Shokin as a result of his investigations into Burisma.

            The word credible is doing a lot of work here. Who or what anyone finds credible is pretty up to them, as the relentless use of it during the Kavanaugh hearings attests.

            Note: This isn’t a strong assertion of if any wrongdoing occurred, which I genuinely have no opinion on.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            there’s no evidence that, bad optics aside, Hunter was involved in anything untoward in Ukraine

            Ok, fair enough. But the optics are pretty bad. Is it unlawful for Trump to request an investigation into something with bad optics where his political opponent is involved?

          • Jaskologist says:

            This is propaganda. There has been no credible evidence that Biden sought to oust Shokin as a result of his investigations into Burisma.

            I think “credible” is doing a lot of work here.

            So far, all of the following look to be true:

            1. Shokin was corrupt.
            2. Shokin was investigating Hunter Biden.
            3. Hunter’s position was corrupt; he’s getting paid large sums of money basically for being Joe’s son. This is pretty garden-variety corruption, and presumably they are smart enough not to have an explicit quid-pro-quo written out (but you never know).
            4. Joe Biden got Shokin fired by threatening to withhold $1 billion in aid. He is on record as bragging about this, so I figure it counts even if that turns out to be another false memory.

            That’s enough for “credible” evidence and it’s certainly a conflict of interest. I don’t know how we’d ply into his heart of hearts to see if he actually did it to protect his son.

          • Aftagley says:

            @EchoChaos

            Roger. I’ll stand by the previous sentence if you mentally remove the word credible. As far as I’ve seen, the allegations against Biden start and end at “his son was on the board when the prosecutor was fired.” There’s no evidence that his son’s position influenced his behavior, and given Shokin’s unwillingness to investigate, if covering up corruption was Biden’s intent, it would have made more sense for him to not have wanted Shokin to get the boot.

            @ jermo sapiens
            Yep! The optics are terrible and this whole event is going to suck for everyone.

            Is it unlawful for Trump to request an investigation into something with bad optics where his political opponent is involved?

            The transcript is out now (see link above) and Trump references that AG Barr will be calling Zelenskyy. This may indicate that the justice department is/intends to launch an official investigation into Hunter/Joe’s behavior. This is almost certainly legal, but will (accurately IMO) look like Trump is using his power to go after his political opponents.

            That being said though, withholding aid approved by congress until a foreign leader investigates Joe is likely close enough to being illegal that something will stick to him.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            This is almost certainly legal, but will (accurately IMO) look like Trump is using his power to go after his political opponents.

            The Democrats have been using their power to go after Trump since day 1. Anybody who doesnt already believe that would never vote for Trump anyways.

            withholding aid approved by congress until a foreign leader investigates Joe is likely close enough to being illegal that something will stick to him

            Is it the withholding aid, or is it the investigation of Joe Biden? In either case, the theory falls apart. If withholding aid is wrong, Biden did it too, if it’s investigating political opponents, Democrats have been doing it since the inauguration. If it’s a combination, Biden’s apparent reason for withholding aid is much much worse than Trump’s.

          • Aftagley says:

            @Jacksologist
            Point 2 is the stumbling block for this argument. Shokin wasn’t investigating Hunter Biden, Shokin was investigating Zlochevsky primarily and Burisma as it related to Zlochevsky’s corruption.

            Nowhere in this is Hunter Biden accused of either doing anything illegal or the Shokin’s investigation was going anywhere near Hunter. Even the argument that this was Biden’s attempt to cover up his son’s involvement with the company doesn’t make sense as it was already public knowledge at this point.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            jermo sapiens

            “And not only that, his political opponents (i.e., Joe Biden), should be investigated for offering a quid pro quo that the Ukrainians should stop investigating companies whose board Joe Biden’s son sat on for $50k/month.”

            So why *weren’t* the Republicans investigating this?

          • jermo sapiens says:

            So why *weren’t* the Republicans investigating this?

            I dont know. Some comments above suggest that there is nothing wrong with what Biden did, other than having his son sit on the board for his “expertise” in running Ukrainian gas companies. I really have no idea.

            My point is just that whatever Trump is accused of doing is something that Biden did, just much worse. I have a feeling this “impeachment” wont work out so well for the Democrats, but we’ll see.

      • gbdub says:

        No, this time Trump is accused of strong arming Ukraine, via threats of withheld aid, into investigating possible meddling and influence peddling (“collusion”) by Ukrainians on behalf of Joe Biden.

        No prize for guessing which half of that equation the media and Dems in Congress are insisting requires a deep and thorough investigation until the full truth is laid bare.

      • keaswaran says:

        It’s quite possible to illegally collude with two rivals.

        Also, “rival” is a hard word to apply to countries and leaders. I don’t know how the current Ukrainian government feels about the previous pro-Russian government or the later anti-Russian government whose replacement of the pro-Russian one prompted the Russian intervention.

        And would you characterize Kim Jong Un as a rival or an ally of Trump, for instance? And what about North Korea and the United States? Or Saudi Arabia and the United States?

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Chances anything going to change the needle – 5%
      Chances of Impeachment – 90%
      Chances of Conviction – 1%
      Chances everyone will claim vindication – 90%

      I strongly suspect this will be actual bad behavior, but it’s not going to change anyone’s mind. I suspect that we are reaching critical mass where impeachment is going to happen: I think something like 180-190 Dems are already on board, and the remaining stragglers are going to get pulled along. Too much momentum moving in that direction.

      • hls2003 says:

        Looks to me like both sides will claim vindication.

        There is no statement, not even a suggestion, that the U.S. is withholding or would withhold aid, or any quid pro quo on investigation-for-aid. So if the alleged whistleblower claimed a quid pro quo, that seems discredited to me.

        Trump does seem pretty focused on the investigation. He names Biden at least twice.
        That seems like the main thing he wanted to talk about, while the Ukrainian president steered the conversation to other matters.

        All in all, it doesn’t really paint a terribly flattering picture of Trump’s diplomacy. If nothing else, the Ukrainian president seems to think that the way to deal with Trump is by flattering him and saying how much he admires Trump and has learned from his methods. It doesn’t say great things if that’s how foreign leaders think they need to approach him.

        I also don’t love that it was declassified and released at all. I understand why and I don’t think it’s terribly damaging, but there’s some denigration of Angela Merkel and Germany that will somewhat complicate that relationship, and any future leader conversing with the President will guard their words more carefully.

        • Aftagley says:

          Trump is by flattering him and saying how much he admires Trump and has learned from his methods

          Also by saying, unprompted, that he stays at Trump Towers. That made me roll my eyes.

          I also don’t love that it was declassified and released at all. I understand why and I don’t think it’s terribly damaging, but there’s some denigration of Angela Merkel and Germany that will somewhat complicate that relationship, and any future leader conversing with the President will guard their words more carefully.

          Yeah. They should have redacted that.

          • hls2003 says:

            Also by saying, unprompted, that he stays at Trump Towers. That made me roll my eyes.

            Yes, although from my perspective that looks more like the Ukrainian president shoehorning in one more butter-up of Trump than any financial effort to influence him. It seems much more to me another species of feeding his ego (“your hotels are great just like you”) rather than feeding his wallet.

          • Aftagley says:

            Concur, less financial impropriety and just ass kissing.

        • EchoChaos says:

          Looks to me like both sides will claim vindication.

          I think my side’s vindication is a lot stronger here. The conversation as presented contains absolutely nothing illegal or no direct suggestions of quid pro quo.

          . If nothing else, the Ukrainian president seems to think that the way to deal with Trump is by flattering him and saying how much he admires Trump and has learned from his methods.

          Given that Zelensky has been called the Ukrainian Trump, it’s entirely possible that he is just stating facts that happen to be flattering.

          • hls2003 says:

            I do not like, at all, that politics has gotten to the point that Democrats would seize on something this anodyne to push for something as radical as impeachment; nor that Republicans would pay enough attention to it to declassify it just to satisfy the media baying for half a news cycle. But I’ll give a 100% confidence prediction that releasing the transcript will not quell the story or prevent Democrats / media from talking about it as though it is something. What percentage of people will ever read the transcript anyway, even four pages’ worth? If it’s as high as 1% of voters I’d be completely shocked.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @hls2003

            Completely agree.

            If it’s as high as 1% of voters I’d be completely shocked.

            Agreed. the other 99% will hear about it from their preferred news source, which will only entrench their current position.

          • But I’ll give a 100% confidence prediction that releasing the transcript will not quell the story or prevent Democrats / media from talking about it as though it is something.

            They did try to impeach Trump over his “intent” to obstruct an investigation in to a crime he didn’t commit, so that sounds about right.

        • The Nybbler says:

          If nothing else, the Ukrainian president seems to think that the way to deal with Trump is by flattering him and saying how much he admires Trump and has learned from his methods.

          We’d need to invent a new classification level several levels less confidential than UNCLASSIFIED in order to properly categorize how much of a secret that is.

      • ana53294 says:

        There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.

        This is a memo, so not a literal transcription of the conversation. But at the moment, it sounds like Trump heard there was something untoward in Biden’s actions, and asks Zelensky to investigate, in cooperation with the Attorney General. No quid pro quo offered. Nothing untoward in this conversation; just typical Trump bragging.

      • Aftagley says:

        Not related to the overall scandal, here’s some weird stuff I picked out of the transcript after giving it a second read:

        1. The first thing Trump brought up in his talk wasn’t the hunter biden thing, it was

        I would like you to find out what happened with the whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…. I guess you have one of your wealthy people… the server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation

        He then brings up Mueller and his reports. Does anyone here more familiar with right-wing talking points than I know what he’s talking about?

        2. It seems like trump is calling for the Ukranian government to investigate their former ambassador to the Ukraine for… something? It’s not clear, but read pages 3-4. Trump treats the investigation of the former ambassador as a separate issue than the Biden thing, but seems just as interested in it. It seems like Rudy G. is also involved in this matter. It also seems like Trump was the initial impetus for the former ukranian ambassador getting recalled:

        Zellenskyy: It was great that you were the first one who told me she was a bad ambassador…

        Does anyone know anything about a prior bad relationship between trump and the former ambassador? I don’t remember reading about that anywhere.

        3. General question – Was this typed on a typewriter? If so, why?

        • ana53294 says:

          It’s the other way; Trump told Zelensky that the Ukrainian ambassador was bad, and he should investigate.

          President Zelensky: […] For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him having your trust and your confidence and have personal relations with you so we can cooperate even more so.

          Trump did recall the former US ambassador to the Ukraine, but there he’s talking about the Ukrainian ambassador. I don’t think that is something related to US politics; it’s probably garden variety Ukrainian corrupt politics.

          It seems perfectly reasonable for a US president to ask an ally’s government to recall an ambassador that does not align with the desired, more closer relationship between two countries.

          Was this typed on a typewriter? If so, why?

          No idea, but if so, probably for security reasons: no way to copy to USB, no metadata, no way to copy from deleted files on computer, no internet access. The only way to get a copy of the file is to get a physical copy of the file.

          Reasonable security stuff.

          • Aftagley says:

            Your right! I misread it. He is talking about the ambassador to the Ukraine from the US. Holy crap, this means that Trump was trashing his own ambassador to a foreign leader? and now Trump is saying that

            She’s going to go through some things

            Damn. Poor woman.

            Right, but they’ve got SIPRnet/JWICs. Classified computer systems exist. I agree that, yes, typewriters can be more secure, but it’s still weird to see them used.

          • ana53294 says:

            Nah, the whole conversation is mostly about the Ukrainian ambassador, with surname Ivanovich (?), gender unknown (they keep misgendering the ambassador).

            President Zelensky: [...] On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would_be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country with regards to the Ambassadorto the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new President well enough.

            President Trump: Well, she' s going to go through some things.

            When he says some things, I assume investigation for corruption based on info shared by the US department. It’s an internal Ukraine matter, so I don’t see anything wrong with the US providing info.

            The only part where Trump mentions the US ambassador is here:

            President Trump: [...] The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that.

          • John Schilling says:

            Reasonable security stuff.

            As Aftagley notes, that’s not how we do things now. We use computers with no USB ports, no internet access, and “trusted download” procedures to produce bare .txt files and other metadata-free formats. These then go to optical drives or to laser printers.

          • ana53294 says:

            @John Schilling

            Does the output of one of those safe computer look like typewriter print, or was this written in a typewriter then?

          • Aftagley says:

            Nah, the whole conversation is mostly about the Ukrainian ambassador

            Is it though? I’m honestly curious, and the writing is unclear enough to, IMO, be evidence of poor transcription.

            Their former ambassador to the US is a man named Valeriy Chaly. No Ivonovich in the name. The former US ambassador, however, is a woman named Marie Yovanovitch which is sound similar enough that I could see someone writing Ivonovich instead of it.

            I think they were talking about her and that “do not prosecute” (different than the biden one) conspiracy theory.

          • Aftagley says:

            @ana53294

            They look like regular printouts, unless someone purposely picks a font and format to make it look typewritten.

          • ana53294 says:

            I must admit I’m a bit confused, but it does seem to talk about the Ukrainian ambassador. Why would Zelensky say he recalled the US ambassador?

          • Paper Rat says:

            @ana53294

            Does the output of one of those safe computer look like typewriter print, or was this written in a typewriter then?

            It’s a font called Courier, notable for all symbols being the same width and for being adapted from a typewriter font.

          • John Schilling says:

            Does the output of one of those safe computer look like typewriter print, or was this written in a typewriter then?

            Usually looks like it was done on a word processor with no fancy features enabled. On close examination, the “Caution” disclaimer and the “Classified by” block on the first page are in conspicuously different fonts, implying word processor. On the other hand, the “SECRET//ORCON/NOFORN” headers and footers are aligned slightly differently across pages, which suggests typewriter. The main text is superficially indistinguishable between a clean typewriter and a word processor using a fixed-width font. So this just looks a little bit weird-weird, rather than suspicious-weird.

          • The Nybbler says:

            I think the misaligned headers are a result of the document being scanned after printing; the margins aren’t even straight. So, word processor, printed, modified (UNCLASSIFIED stamps, strikeouts of caveats, “Declassified by order of the President”) by hand, scanned back in (and OCRed, since the text is selectable)

            Possibly the “Declassified by order of the President” and date was added after the scanning rather than typed on the scan.

            Another clue to “word processor” is the “[PkgNumberShort]”, which is probably a word processing directive that didn’t quite work for some reason.

          • Dan L says:

            @ Aftagley:

            3. General question – Was this typed on a typewriter? If so, why?

            Is it though? I’m honestly curious, and the writing is unclear enough to, IMO, be evidence of poor transcription.

            Congratulations on appropriately noticing confusion. Go back and re-read the first word of the linked document, and make note of what it isn’t.

          • Aftagley says:

            Congratulations on appropriately noticing confusion. Go back and re-read the first word of the linked document, and make note of what it isn’t.

            I realize this isn’t a direct transcription. I read the first word as well as the block on the first page.

            But, it’s clear that someone was transcribing notes over the course of this call. They couldn’t have made this memorandum in such detail without such a transcription. I’m postulating that during section on page 4, it’s unclear which ambassador is being talking about, and it looks like the name of the former ambassador may have been misspelled, hence a transcription error in the base notes used to develop this memorandum.

            @thenybbler
            Hmm, good point. That also might explain why the “UNCLASSIFIED” stamp looks off.

            Additional weird things – the classification date is wrong. It should be 25 years from the date it this document was originally created (presumably OOA July 12th.) Therefore the line should read Declassify On: 2044071X (X being whatever day the document was finished)

            Also the overall classification is SECRET//ORCON/NOFORN but looking through it, none of the line items in this document are ORCON.

          • ana53294 says:

            If they are indeed talking about the US ambassador, then the quotes are misattributed.

            If, as Aftagley says, they took notes during the conversation, how likely is it that they got confused whether President Trump or Zelensky said that?

            Now that I look at it by attributing quotes differently, it could make sense for Trump to say bad things about the ambassador. But it’s still weird.

          • Dan L says:

            @ Aftagley:

            There were an unknown number of steps between the audio conversation and this document – you’ve pointed out a few issues that would make sense if they were inherited from prior written documents, or “2354726” could simply have been blisteringly incompetent. (I hesitate to say I’d be fired for making this many mistakes in a published document, because the chance they’d have slipped through peer review is infinitesimal.) I’m particularly annoyed by the incorrect declassification date (as you pointed out), as it neatly obfuscates the actual date of creation of this document.

            The legal obligations of this document to give an unvarnished account of true events are shaky at best. Though very much not marketed that way, its disclosure is functionally a press release.

          • Aftagley says:

            @Dan L

            Roger, I think we mostly agree then?

            What’s your estimation on when this document was actually created? Despite looking contemporaneous, I’m guessing within the past week.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @ana53294

            Very unlikely that they misattributed it. The disclaimer is so that nobody is looking at exactly picking words, but it’s 99% a transcript.

          • Dan L says:

            @ Aftagley:

            What’s your estimation on when this document was actually created? Despite looking contemporaneous, I’m guessing within the past week.

            That seems like the the most likely single case, sure – recent creation cooked up from older source documentation. That said, I could see a sycophantic aide putting together a relatively contemporaneous memorandum for Trump’s personal consumption at a later date, and if that happened it’d be pretty much identical to this. Seriously, look at Zelenskiyy’s word choice and tell me that’s not written by someone used to transcribing Trump.

            @ EchoChaos:

            it’s 99% a transcript

            Cool story. Get someone to say that under oath and I might even take it seriously.

            (Alternatively, put on your Bayesian hat – what are the odds this administration would have volunteered a smoking gun transcript? Multiply that by the inverted prior shift, and you’ll see why I’m giving this epsilon significance.)

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Dan L

            My priors also said Don Jr. wouldn’t get indicted by Mueller, so they’re pretty good.

            So here, I’m registering a prediction. No evidence will emerge that this is altered in any meaningful way. It is a basically accurate transcription of the conversation.

            what are the odds this administration would have volunteered a smoking gun transcript?

            Low, just like any administration. That isn’t evidence that there IS a smoking gun. And the fact they were able to so easily produce a transcript implies that there is in fact no smoking gun.

        • hls2003 says:

          On 1., it’s not entirely clear, but I would guess he’s referring to the fact that Crowdstrike was the cyber-security firm that investigated the DNC hack / download of Podesta’s files. The DNC refused to allow the FBI access to the DNC server that had been hacked; instead they insisted that the Crowdstrike report should stand as the only independent assessment of the hack’s origin. Right-wing media finds this to be suspicious, and I’ve seen claims that the DNC hack wasn’t even a Russian operation at all (there was some discussion about whether the download speed suggested an on-network download rather than internet, for example). I don’t know what aspect of that Trump is looking for, or the exact Ukrainian connection, and I almost can’t blame him – without being a computer guy he (like me) probably has no clue other than that some people have said that Crowdstrike was biased and apparently has some connection to Ukraine.

          On 3., I don’t know about the typewriter, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s something like an electric typewriter. When you do transcription, for example court reporting, it’s typically done with a shorthand machine that then gets translated by a program into a standardized transcript format. It’s not Microsoft Word.

        • EchoChaos says:

          Does anyone here more familiar with right-wing talking points than I know what he’s talking about?

          Crowdstrike did the investigation of the DNC hack.

          https://fortune.com/2019/09/25/what-is-crowdstrike-trump-ukraine-call-transcript-memo/

      • John Schilling says:

        There is no statement, not even a suggestion, that the U.S. is withholding or would withhold aid, or any quid pro quo on investigation-for-aid.

        Z: “I would also·lie to thank you·for.your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps. Specifically we are ready to buy more Javelins [anti-tank missiles] from the United States for defense purposes”

        T: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with
        this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…”

        Z: “Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. ”

        That’s a quid pro quo, missiles for investigation, with about the level of deniablility and ambiguity of “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry II, of course, got away with that one, but only because he was able to keep his ego in check long enough to make nice with the Pope.

        • mitv150 says:

          But you’re confusing the crowdstrike ask with the Biden ask.

          The Crowdstrike ask is clearly a legitimate ask, quid pro quo or not.

          The Biden ask is clearly less legitimate but is also a lot less clearly tied to the missiles in this conversation.

        • gbdub says:

          1) To me that looks like two people listing off things they would like from each other. And both of them agreeing that those are good things to do. If that’s an obvious quid pro quo then literally almost every meeting between international leaders is an obvious quid pro quo.

          That Trump raises an unrelated request immediately after the defense request and is a bit colloquial (“a favor though”) is perhaps worthy of an eyebrow cock, but I have no idea how rare that sort of thing is in this sort of relatively informal general interest call. I’m guessing not very.

          2) we already have Biden, on camera, bragging about an explicit “billion dollars to fire a guy” quid pro quo with Ukraine, and bragging that Obama had his back in that. So if this is impeachable or treason or whatever, then Biden and Obama were impeachable traitors.

          3) So it’s established that tying Ukrainian aid to Ukrainian cooperation in unrelated areas is a thing US Presidents (or at least their direct underlings) do. I guess at that point it comes down to how legitimate you think the quids were relative to the quos.

          I don’t see why “fire a guy we think is corrupt” is a more legitimate request than “look into this company that played a role in the ‘Russian collusion’ investigation that’s tied up the government for the last 3 years”. If anything the former feels a little sleazier, because it’s a demand for a specific result rather than an investigation.

          • Aftagley says:

            TIf that’s an obvious quid pro quo then literally almost every meeting between international leaders is an obvious quid pro quo.

            Right, but the concern here isn’t “TRUMP MADE A QUID PRO QUO” with a foreign power. That’s just diplomacy. The claim is “Trump is trying to manipulate a foreign power into launching a weird investigation of a political rival and is using the power of the USG to do so.

            we already have Biden, on camera, bragging about an explicit “billion dollars to fire a guy” quid pro quo with Ukraine, and bragging that Obama had his back in that.

            Same basic argument as above: making deals to further US international goals is not the same as making deals to further personal political goals.

            So it’s established that tying Ukrainian aid to Ukrainian cooperation in unrelated areas is a thing US Presidents (or at least their direct underlings) do.

            No, it’s not established. Prior US Presidents tied aid to Ukraine enacting measures that were in accordance with existing and well-established US policy goals. The current president certainly looks like he’s tying aid to enact a personal goal.

          • John Schilling says:

            No, it’s not established. Prior US Presidents tied aid to Ukraine enacting measures that were in accordance with existing and well-established US policy goals. The current president certainly looks like he’s tying aid to enact a personal goal.

            Note in particular that Rudy Giuliani is Donald Trump’s personal attorney. He’s not a political appointee, he doesn’t work for the Executive Branch, and he certainly doesn’t speak for the United States of America. So when Zelenskyy promises cooperation and Trump promptly tells him to expect a call from Mr. Giuliani, that’s a big red flag that this is personal.

          • gbdub says:

            Investigating foreign election meddling and potential influence peddling of a government official also serve well established US policy.

            Both Biden and Trump have plausible non corrupt motivations for their actions. In both cases there is a plausible path to their actions being for corrupt personal gain.

            I would say Trump has more deniability on the explicit quid pro quo side, Biden more deniability on the “it was an honest action of long-standing policy” side. Then again Trump, being both an outsider and a particularly hated Republican, is much more vulnerable to a career bureaucrat blowing the whistle on borderline activity.

            In any case you are taking Biden’s denials as strong evidence that nothing happened and unskeptically buying his version of events, while ignoring Trump’s denials and interpreting his actions much less charitably. This is an isolated demand for rigor.

          • John Schilling says:

            What is Trump’s non-corrupt motive for demanding that a foreign head of state talk to his personal attorney?

          • jermo sapiens says:

            What is Trump’s non-corrupt motive for demanding that a foreign head of state talk to his personal attorney?

            His lack of experience in government? I’m not saying that’s what it is, I’m saying that’s what it could be. I’m sure for most of his life he delegated tons of stuff to his personal attorneys, and at 74? (or thereabouts, not sure), he has a hard time switching to government mode.

          • John Schilling says:

            Well, yeah, it’s very likely that Donald Trump genuinely, sincerely doesn’t know how to run a non-corrupt government and isn’t going to learn. But ignorance of the law is no excuse, and if I’m willing to explore the possibility of modifying that rule, the Oval Office isn’t where I’m going to start.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @John Schilling

            Is there an actual law that is broken by having his personal attorney look into this issue?

            I suspect it’s far more of a Kitchen Cabinet issue where he doesn’t trust that if he assigns it to a career bureaucrat it won’t get spiked in order to hurt him.

            So his non-corrupt motive is that he knows that Giuliani will actually get to the bottom of it rather than cover it up. He could be wrong, but that is a reasonable motive.

          • John Schilling says:

            Is there an actual law that is broken by having his personal attorney look into this issue?

            Well, Rudy Giuliani doesn’t seem to have a security clearance, and the President of the United States seems to have determined that all of these conversations need to be classified and possibly compartmented, so that’s a violation right there. Though it would be amusing to see a bunch of Democrats trying to argue with a straight face that hey, whodathunkit, mishandling classified information actually is an indictable offense.

            So please, let’s do that one. I’ll get the popcorn.

            More boringly, it seems to be a clear Logan Act violation, directly for Giuliani and with Trump as a conspirator. If we imagine that these negotiations are legitimate at all rather than the misuse of official power for personal political gain, then they are negotiations which by law must be carried out by people authorized by the United States, whereas Rudy Giuliani explicitly works for Mr. Donald Trump in his not-POTUS capacity.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @John Schilling

            Well, Rudy Giuliani doesn’t seem to have a security clearance, and the President of the United States seems to have determined that all of these conversations need to be classified and possibly compartmented, so that’s a violation right there. Though it would be amusing to see a bunch of Democrats trying to argue with a straight face that hey, whodathunkit, mishandling classified information actually is an indictable offense.

            As far as I know, Rudy wasn’t given this conversation, so that wouldn’t be relevant. Being talked about in a classified conversation is not a violation that I am aware of.

            More boringly, it seems to be a clear Logan Act violation, directly for Giuliani and with Trump as a conspirator.

            There are no Logan Act violations. It’s a dead law that is only used to threaten political opponents. I know it’s technically on the books, but seriously, it would be better for America if it was repealed. I have never seen any situation where its existence made things better.

          • John Schilling says:

            As far as I know, Rudy wasn’t given this conversation, so that wouldn’t be relevant.

            It isn’t “this conversation” that is classified, it is from what we are hearing basically all of the related diplomatic conversations that are being classified. And therefore all of the information derived from those conversations. It’s pretty much impossible for Giuliani to have been briefed for his talk with Zelenskyy, without having been given what the administration has deemed classified information.

            Or possibly the theory is that Trump told Giuliani to go call Zelenskyy but didn’t tell him what to call him about.

          • The Nybbler says:

            The President is the ultimate classification authority; he can’t commit a crime by personally giving Giuliani classified information.

            From 18 USC 798

            The term “unauthorized person” means any person who, or agency which, is not authorized to receive information of the categories set forth in subsection (a) of this section, by the President, or by the head of a department or agency of the United States Government which is expressly designated by the President to engage in communication intelligence activities for the United States.

            Note the requirement for the designation to be “express” applies to the delegation to department heads, not to authorizing persons. My interpretation of this is that if the President tells you classified information, you’re ipso facto authorized to receive it.

          • Controls Freak says:

            It isn’t “this conversation” that is classified, it is from what we are hearing basically all of the related diplomatic conversations that are being classified. And therefore all of the information derived from those conversations.

            The problem is that we can probably all agree that the original markings on the transcript are silly. It’s ridiculous to think that every line should have been S/NF (some of them fit the bill, but definitely not all). The endgame of this is almost certainly that Mr. 2354726 gets called over to Capitol Hill to explain exactly why he was so lazy (and whether there was political pressure to be particularly lazy with specific documents, including this one, which could be potentially embarrassing to Trump).

            Because classification markings don’t work like magic, either. You have to actually see the document and the marking to be aware that a classification authority has deemed it such (especially if the classification authority is lazy and marks up silly things). As Nybbler points out, if Trump directly tells Giuliani what he wants, then the markings/lack of clearance are obviated… but so too if Trump tells Pompeo, “Hey, get Giuliani and Zelenskyy on a call to talk about _____,” and no one steps in to say, “Hol’ up; this is all marked S/NF.” Pompeo/Giuliani can’t be held accountable for violating some lazy marking by Mr. 2354726 on a document they’ve never even seen.

          • Aftagley says:

            The President is the ultimate classification authority; he can’t commit a crime by personally giving Giuliani classified information.

            IMO, this is a flawed argument. The ultimate authority for the existing classification system comes from the President, but that doesn’t mean the person occupying the office of President can’t mishandle classified information.

            For example: If Obama left the PDB out on the whitehouse lawn one day, he’d have mishandled classified information right?

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Aftagley

            I’ve quoted the portion of the law which indicates that the President can disclose classified information to whoever he wants to (at least without regard to its classification; you could still argue treason based on the nature of the information).

            I’m not sure exactly what “mishandling” classified information is. The law at issue with Hillary Clinton was 18 U.S. Code § 1924, “Unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material”, but I don’t think the President can break that either. It’s not a strict liability offense (it requires both knowledge and intent), so if somehow Obama had accidentally left classified info on the White House lawn, he’d be OK. If he did it deliberately, the law specifies “without authority”… and he has it.

          • Controls Freak says:

            If Obama left the PDB out on the whitehouse lawn one day, he’d have mishandled classified information right?

            Pretty much what Nybbler said, again. There’s a difference between the legal definition of “mishandling classified information” (see the statute for the real details) and the nonlegal definition of “mishandling classified information”. For example, losing the nuclear authorization codes for months probably counts as “mishandling classified information” in the nonlegal sense, but no one thinks it meets the legal standard or would be grounds for something like impeachment.

            I think your example also relies on some level of carelessness. And this makes some sense. A big part of the reason why we say that the President in the Classifier in Chief and cannot even theoretically violate these laws is that the President is the embodiment of the Executive branch and Commander in Chief; we generally assume that he intends to do what he does; and that intent is therefore the intent of the United States with respect to classification of information (see the discussion of whether Obama intended to declassify the drone strike program after joking about it in a press event). It seems to violate that assumption when we believe that the action stemmed from mere carelessness. That’s meaningful when evaluating the nonlegal sense of “mishandling classified information”, but the legal sense has a pretty strong assumption that the President’s acts are intentional. “No idea why Obama would have wanted to leave the PDB on the White House lawn, but he’s authorized to do so, and we assume he had a reason for it.”

          • Clutzy says:

            There are no Logan Act violations. It’s a dead law that is only used to threaten political opponents. I know it’s technically on the books, but seriously, it would be better for America if it was repealed. I have never seen any situation where its existence made things better.

            This x100

            John, I am so surprised that you even said this remark that I am currently experiencing a form of cognitive dissonance as I am rewriting your online persona from 1 entity to an entirely different entity.

          • albatross11 says:

            The Nybbler:

            Honestly, it always seemed dumb to be talking about prosecuting the Secretary of State for that anyway. She’s got the sort of job that needs to be allowed to say “we’re going to disclose this now for good policy reasons” or “we’re going to need to relax security rules X and Y so we can accomplish this good thing.”

          • Clutzy says:

            Honestly, it always seemed dumb to be talking about prosecuting the Secretary of State for that anyway. She’s got the sort of job that needs to be allowed to say “we’re going to disclose this now for good policy reasons” or “we’re going to need to relax security rules X and Y so we can accomplish this good thing.”

            ???

            She didn’t do any of those things. The problem in the Clinton case wasn’t that she was recklessly declassifying information or relaxing security rules for a purpose she genuinely believed was in the interests of the United States (like say a leaker might). Instead the problem was that no one could articulate a credible explanation for her actions that would tie them to a genuine national interest, and instead the only plausible non-incriminating explanation given that I recall was basically “tech incompetency”. The gist being that Hillary didn’t want to carry 2 cell phones, and also State Department email systems were confusing to her.

            That was the innocent explanation (which still technically violates the negligence standard in the statute). I don’t believe it, I think she thought she would be able to use it to avoid transparency (and ultimately did, but had other consequences related to it which may have been worse, or lesser, I dont know).

            Now, should we be prosecuting old ladies that not only dont know technology, but recklessly pretend to while holding a largely ceremonial position? No. I don’t think so . Indeed, it is the job of her superiors (in this case Obama) to ensure that she never receives important information, because it would surely become compromised. But, if such a person is going to attempt to secure a non-ceremonial position, it is certainly a huge national security risk. And we should be allowed to know about it at the very least.

            Plus, destroying evidence is a crime even doddering old ladies know is illegal.

    • Tenacious D says:

      No predictions, but I have an excellent joke seen on Twitter to share:

      “Instead of Ukraine-gate, why aren’t we calling it the Kievan ruse?”

    • John Schilling says:

      Highly unlikely that Trump is going to be removed from office over this, if only because the impeachment trial would be happening right before the election and most Senators are going to want to pass the buck and “let the people decide, Yay democracy, Yay me not having to take a controversial stand!” So what does that mean for the election?

      It gives Trump a conspicuous win going into election season. To his base, this would be proof that he’s an innocent man falsely accused, but one powerful enough to stand up for himself and win rather than lie down and take it. To everyone else, it will be more proof that he’s a corrupt sleazebag, but one powerful enough to get away with it. But the key words in both formulations are “powerful enough”, as in, if there was any chance at all that you were ever going to vote Trump, now he looks more like someone powerful enough to be an effective champion of your interests. Also, momentum is a thing. So a win for Trump.

      Also a win for Biden, if he plays his cards right. Biden is already the default choice of the “Defeat Trump at all costs; our grand progressive dreams can wait for a safer election” faction, and that faction will be strengthened by the perception that Trump just got away with another big bit of corruption. And going after Presidents’ family is very nearly the ultimate low blow in politics. It’s one thing if POTUS’s familiy is politically active at the level of a Hillary or a Javanka, but if the narrative around Hunter doesn’t coalesce into something much stronger than “Got paid $50K for being Joe Biden’s son”, then that’s lame-ass Billy Carter stuff. If Joe Biden is seen as standing up for his family against that level of attack, with a measure of dignity and strength, that’s a win for him no matter what the Senate does.

      So, a somewhat reinvigorated Donald Trump vs a somewhat reinvigorated Joe Biden. Meh, I can live with that, albeit without much enthusiasm.

      The more interesting prospect is, the Senate votes to convict and remove Trump. Which they won’t do over Trump making a phone call to Ukraine, but might do over some of the damn fool stuff Trump does in response to impeachment. We know Trump’s temperament by now; he will do something, and it will be something big and he’s running out of staff who can stop him from doing big stupid things. If he asks the Queen to prorogue the Senate, yeah, he’s getting Full Impeachment.

      If that happens, we get lame duck President Pence and the GOP trying desperately to find someone to run in Trump’s place in 2020. That fires up the base with “We must not allow those damn dirty Democrats and traitor RINOs to get away with this!”, provided the replacement will be anyone who can be seen as carrying on Trump’s legacy. But I’m at a loss for who it would be. Pence himself has been made into a complete nobody by his boss’s demands that the administration be All About the Donald, so a bad choice in spite of being the default. The ideal scenario for the Republicans would then be for the Democrats to foolishly demand that Pence be thrown out with Trump, because the GOP can then “reluctantly” go along with that after delaying long enough to confirm Pence’s vice-presidential, er, presidential successor. Who then gets incumbency during the campaign season.

      The Democrats, on the other hand, then wouldn’t face the urgency of Defeating Donald Trump At All Costs, and will likely nominate Warren or one of the more progressive candidates. And even a GOP crippled by the impeachment of their standard-bearer, might pull out a win in a vote between Hard Left Progressivism vs. a personally untainted Not Donald Trump.

      Unfortunately, too many of these are too close to call for me to make any interesting predictions. But it will be fun to watch.

      • EchoChaos says:

        If that happens, we get lame duck President Pence and the GOP trying desperately to find someone to run in Trump’s place in 2020.

        Pence or Cruz. Pence has enough credit with Trump’s base because of his unwavering support, plus he has Rust Belt Cred.

        Cruz was #2 last election and was the #2 choice for most Trump voters in the last primary. It’s his if he wants it. Plus first Hispanic President and locking down the Southwest.

        • John Schilling says:

          Cruz is probably the best bet for the GOP in this scenario. Pence’s “unwavering support” mostly consists of keeping his mouth shut, which was often the support Trump needed but isn’t terribly memorable.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        And he already did the (first) stupid thing.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFhU6Qk_OIk

        He just bloody well called for the whistleblower to be murdered. Turbulent priest speech. On tape. Yhea, that is not going to go over well with anyone not utterly in the tank for trumpism.

        • The Nybbler says:

          He just bloody well called for the whistleblower to be murdered.

          He most certainly did not. He may have suggested he be _executed_. Because that’s what we used to do to spies and traitors — hold a trial and execute them if found guilty. (and technically he’s referring to whoever gave the information to the whistleblower, not the whistleblower himself)

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            Given who his followers include, would you feel even remotely safe if it was you that record was about? There are certain things that are just random horseshit if you or I say them, which the president of the united states should never ever utter unless said president wants things to happen. And as I said, anyone not wholly committed is going to take that tape.. Badly. I expect worse to come, though.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Given who his followers include, would you feel even remotely safe if it was you that record was about?

            For my life? Not worried at all. For my job, definitely worried.

          • albatross11 says:

            The president has ordered people murdered before, with no oversight from anyone and no appeal. Turns out both major parties in the US were broadly on board with that kind of thing. So it’s not 100% crazy to worry about the president wanting you dead and saying so in public.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @albatross11

            Including American citizens (as absurd as that citizenship was).

            It is a very bad precedent and if this leaker dies via drone strike I think we all agree that Trump should be impeached.

          • Controls Freak says:

            The president has ordered people murdered before, with no oversight from anyone and no appeal.

            Including American citizens

            The year was 1865. We’re all kind of old here at SSC.

          • albatross11 says:

            TBH, I think Trump is too unpopular and not in tight enough with the right deep-state types to carry something like this off. But a smoother future president will probably be able to do it, or something like it. During the Bush administration, we had a US citizen disapperared off US soil into a military prison and held incommunicado for a long time, probably tortured, and then charged with a crime only when it looked like a judge was going to order him released. How long until a whistleblower gets similar treatment?

            It’s obvious that concentrating power like this is a terrible idea. And yet, even the people who are telling us Trump is Hitler 2.0 don’t seem to want to get rid of that concentration of power. Just like the people decrying how we’re descending into fascism support re-authorizing all our massive internal surveillance programs. It’s hard to overstate how much this undermines their positions.

    • ana53294 says:

      How much legal responsibility do the people writing the transcript have?

      Can they be charged with perjury if it’s a lie?

      I could believe Trump lied, but so far the people around him have not been very keen on lying if they actually faced consequences for it.

      • ECD says:

        This is not legal advice. None of this is under oath, so no. There may be other problems, with obstruction of justice, but not perjury. And again, all of this is federal law, so President Trump retains the power to pardon.

    • BBA says:

      This will not have any impact on anything important. The House may or may not impeach. The Senate will not convict – Hillary murdered dozens if not hundreds of people who got in her way, what’s a little footsie with a foreign government compared to that? (Note: it doesn’t matter how many people Hillary murdered, as long as 34 senators think she murdered them.)

      Donald Trump is president for life. I mean that seriously, not literally, though it might also be true literally. He is, in the mathematical sense, a singularity – a point at which the rules cease to apply, which cannot be affected by any outside force. Nothing will ever change. Nobody cares. Nothing matters. Enjoy every sandwich.

    • Eponymous says:

      I’m surprised by most peoples’ responses here, especially compared to the mainstream media.

      My take is that this looks quite bad for Trump, both from a legal and political perspective. Of course, fundamentally impeachment is a political process, and so the latter is decisive. Here the main obstacles are the Republican control of the Senate, and the proximity of the election. I think the former is less iron-clad than many think — a lot of GOP senators are privately (and in some cases publicly) not great fans of Trump, and if things start to look bad, and opinion is shifting, I could see them jettisoning him. The proximity to the election is probably the larger obstacle, since it introduces the “let the people decide” argument. I personally find this argument quite persuasive, barring something much worse than we’ve seen so far.

      If I had to put numbers on my rough feelings: 65% this doesn’t go away and hurts Trump a lot politically, 20% he ends up being removed from office or resigns.

  67. albertborrow says:

    Yeah, no, this decade will be remembered just as fondly as any of the previous ones. Perhaps more so. The growing presence of the internet, the popularization of smartphones, the dominance of the MCU, and the rise of streaming services are all strong positive memories. It doesn’t matter if these cultural landmarks endure after the death of the people who first enjoyed them, so long as those people remember them fondly. It’s also not just the “golden age of television” – this decade has been the best for video games so far, with the resurgence of independent developers and year after year of hit titles. Amazon’s ebook infrastructure is providing new avenues for self-publishing literature, and at the same time platforms like Patreon are making it easier for an author to survive simply posting their stories online. The same could be said for independent video creators on YouTube, most of whom came around in the last ten years. That kind of exchange of visual information is literally unprecedented.

    I should be getting to bed here, instead of writing, but I think you get my point. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now. At the moment, that’s all it is – because we’re living through it, it feels like the natural state of things. But in thirty years, when we take a look back (assuming we survive that long) we can recognize the history that’s being made right now for what it is: a truly incomparable rise in the availability of entertainment and information.

    • kaakitwitaasota says:

      this decade has been the best for video games so far, with the resurgence of independent developers and year after year of hit titles.

      Has it? Maybe it’s just that my tastes were formed in the mid-2000s (I was born in ’95), but I think of the golden age of video games as the very end of the ’90s and the 2000s–Sim City 3000 and 4, Civ 2/3/4, the first release of Dwarf Fortress…

      I suppose Minecraft was 2011, though?

      • silver_swift says:

        I think this might be more of a personal preferences thing, I think my tastes were formed around the same time and most of my favourite games are definitely from the 2010’s.

        In terms of AAA games this decade had:
        – The best and third-best Civilization games
        – The best Fire Emblem game
        – The best and second best (if you retcon the last half hour) Mass Effect games
        – Both new XCOMs

        And as mentioned, indy gaming really took off this decade, we’ve had:
        – Kerbal Space program (2011)
        – FTL (2012)
        – Darkest Dungeon (2016)
        – Renowned Explorers (2015)
        – Stellaris (2016)
        – Slay the Spire (2017)
        – For the King (2018)
        and probably a whole bunch more that I’m forgetting right now.

        • Peffern says:

          The best and third-best Civilization games

          Surely you are referring to 5, then 4, then 6, yes?

        • achenx says:

          The best … Civilization game

          No, Civ 4 was in 2005.

        • silver_swift says:

          Surely you are referring to 5, then 4, then 6, yes?

          Correct, yes. Civ 6 is a good 4X game, but it isn’t nearly as terrifyingly addictive as 5 and 4 were (at least to me).

        • FLWAB says:

          I agree with that ranking wholeheartedly, with the caveat that the best Civilization game wasn’t in the franchise: Alpha Centauri.

        • EchoChaos says:

          @FLWAB

          That is the correct answer. All will fall before the glory of Sister Miriam Godwinson.

        • Witness says:

          Please don’t go. The drones need you. They look up to you.

        • Nornagest says:

          The only good things about Darkest Dungeon were the art and the voice acting, though. The core gameplay is some of the worst I’ve seen in a similarly prominent game, and the patch updates have made it worse, not better.

        • eyeballfrog says:

          – The best Fire Emblem game

          It’s funny because this could be referring to multiple different games Fire Emblem games that people consider to be the best, yet are still wrong about them being better than Radiant Dawn.

        • silver_swift says:

          @eyeballfrog

          For me, Three Houses finally knocked Radiant Dawn from first place. The plot is probably worse (depends on how you feel about the wannabe Hogwarts thing they have going on), but the mechanics are sufficiently better that I’m now calling it my favorite Fire Emblem game.

        • Kestrellius says:

          The best […] Mass Effect game

          2007 wasn’t in the 10s.

        • aristides says:

          I was so nostalgic for GBA era Fire Emblem, but 3 Houses blows it out of the water. Between that and persona 5, my top games will be from this decade, but I do wonder if they will be replaced quickly or not

    • j1000000 says:

      Like, in the case of video games, as much as I enjoyed Fallout: New Vegas and The Witcher 3: the Wild Hunt, I’ll probably enjoy The Outer Worlds and Cyberpunk: 2077 as much or more

      You seem to think of nostalgia as a rational feeling. People that I know still feel intense nostalgia for every generation of games prior to PS3. I feel nostalgia for games like The Last of Us and Modern Warfare 2, which I used to play with an old roommate who moved across the country. Hell, I finished Ocarina of Time for the first time last month and I still somehow feel nostalgia for both that playthrough (which only ended a month ago!) and having missed its original release.

    • onyomi says:

      I was born in the 80s and don’t find myself fondly nostalgic for any decade since then. As a teen in the 90s I thought the music of the 90s mostly sucked then and I still think it sucks now. The clothing of the 90s was hideous then and looks even more ridiculous now. I don’t remember much good about the 00s, culturally speaking; hell, I’m still not even sure what to call them. On the world stage it feels mostly like the time everything started to go downhill with 9/11 and reaction to it.

      I still like 80s music (and 70s music and 60s music) better than the music of the 90s, 00s, or past decade, and the same largely goes for the movies, tv, fashion, outside the more extreme Brady Bunch-ish stuff. One is supposed to have a soft spot for the music that was popular when you were a teenager, but I have a soft spot for the music that was popular when I was like 6, so I’m not sure it’s that tightly related to my personal life path (of course I do have some non-rational warm fuzzy halos around the decade of my childhood, but aren’t I supposed to like the music and clothes of my teenagerhood?).

      And by this I don’t at all mean I’m not nostalgic for the parts of my life/people I knew, etc. that occurred in the 90s, 00s, and past decade, only that I don’t see them as culturally rich periods of American history (well, the 90s were great for video games, but mostly Japanese ones…).

    • keaswaran says:

      There’s intense nostalgia for looking at screens.

      Reddit just spent a month of people being nostalgic for the old meme formats of the early 2010’s. We will absolutely have nostalgia for distracted boyfriend or first world problems woman or good guy greg or grumpy cat or maybe one of the others that doesn’t even seem very significant now until it inspires a major art movement of the 2020s.

  68. blipnickels says:

    Can anyone recommend forgotten websites with good material?

    For example, Miracle of Science was a webcomic that ran from 2002-2007 that I really enjoyed. Ugly art but great world-building and characters.

    It occurred to me today that I had no idea if it even still existed (it does) but someday they’ll stop paying for hosting and I kind of wish there was a way to save it.

    • habu71 says:

      XKCD’s What if
      He’s stopped making them, but the archives are all still there.

    • noyann says:

      For art folks with weird humor: The Museum of Depressionist Art and its Gallery of the Unidentifyable. May require drugs to fully appreciate…

      Exhibit,
      cw exhibit,
      exhibit,
      exhibit,
      cw exhibit.

    • Kestrellius says:

      Seems like a good time to recommend “Ow, My Sanity.” Cthulhu-Mythos-as-harem-romance-anime, but played seriously, not as a joke. It’s a very heartfelt story with excellent art and good character work. Unfortunately, what there is is pretty short, and it went on hiatus way back in 2011.

      I do recall seeing posts by the writer on Deviantart from fairly recently indicating that he hasn’t completely forgotten about the project and may return to it someday, so maybe there’s hope. In the meantime, give the archives a read. Unless my memory is deceiving me (it’s been quite a while since I read it), it’s something pretty special.

    • SamChevre says:

      Sheldon Brown’s Bicycle Technical Info – the go-to source if you are repairing an older bike

      The New Pantagruel archives – short-lived web magazine of Christian conservatism (think Rob Dreher and Wendell Berry, or people who love the Babylon Bee). “My Faith is in the Rock and My Name is on the Roll” is hilarious.

      Making Light: best comment section on the web until 2007 or so, and still strong until the puppy debacle. Still going, but little interesting. Look at the first-aid posts, the histories of disasters, and the poetry competitions – Composing the Rejected Canon is a particular favorite of mine. (I was an active commenter for years.)

    • Jaskologist says:

      If you’re looking for old webcomics, Fluble is an old favorite, with an absurdist sense of humor and a frenetic art style.

      • Protagoras says:

        Ninja’d! I was particularly going to recommend that one as the author is a friend of mine. He was also responsible for the sadly also no longer active fafblog.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I just discovered that Odd Fish is no longer on line.

        If you want skilled drawing and mind-blastingly stupid puns, a book is still available.

    • Paper Rat says:

      Here’s a collection of webcomics by Ryan Armand. The archive was restored by fans:

      https://kiwisbybeat.net/

      Notable entries:
      “Modern Fried Snake” – most recent series, very solid and unusual art (ink/brush, stark black and white with no gradients), story is set in a small village in a pseudo-Japan/China, that recently went through a people’s revolution (think early 20th century), characters are a delight, slightly odd (in a good way) humor.

      “Minus” – probably the most famous of Armand’s series, beautiful watercolor comic about a little omnipotent girl, occasionally sweet, occasionally dark.

      “Great!” – this one’s about a man down on his luck, who sets himself a goal of becoming the best ramen chef in the world. Story is a real epic spanning decades and goes to some very unusual places.

      Other stuff on the site is also very good, in my opinion, it’s a shame that the author doesn’t do comics anymore.

    • AG says:

      RIP Fanwank.

      Book-a-minute
      There also used to be some sort of “What if romance book titles described their book covers?” website that I can’t find anymore. AHA! (1, 2)

    • bean says:

      yarchive.net is a collection of old usenet posts on all sorts of stuff. Lots of interesting info.

      • ec429 says:

        Heartily seconded.
        (Also, as well as usenet posts, there’s an LKML section with some top-quality Linus rants.)

    • Soy Lecithin says:

      Some old internet favorites:

      Math puzzles and simulations
      http://www.cut-the-knot.org/

      Quizzes and commentary on art and stuff
      reverent.org

    • Doctor Mist says:

      Spamusement: “Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!” There is a certain amount of progression, so start at the beginning and move forward. There’s only 330 of them; that might seem a lot but you’ll wish there were more. Part of the charm is the pathetic or baffling tricks spammers used to make their subject lines pass through spam filters. Some are stupid, some are genius, none take more than three seconds to read.

      Some of my favorites:
      you were wrong cabinet sanchez (I actually bought the T-shirt.)
      Enhance your anatomy
      quantities of a ruddy-brown fluid were spurting up in noisy jets out of the
      You won’t believe what you can get for a buck
      and of course
      Have zex tonight

    • dweezle says:

      steve oedekirk used to have a website with super early flash games of the wierdest variety, i can find almost no mention of it online.

      heres a terrible video of a game from that site. you play as hotsy, a gumby OC parody that secretly makes people’s food spicy.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      Bud Uggly Design came out in the early days of the internet.

      If you looking for an internet presenace look no further thann the bud uglly website design company, here at bud uglly we can create for you absolutly the most cutting edge design available in the market todaysee our list of exiting features and satisfied customers below.!

      Some of the humor is how visually awful websites were in those days. Some of it was the earnest depiction of how the (clueless) Bud Uggly team operated. Here is their newsletter, which “for your convenience” scrolls sideways.

      From the FAK:

      You DO realize that your page features spelling
      worse than my worst 6th graders?!?
      form Danièle Bucar

      While, this is not actually a question, it is a fact that many people
      have commentid about the spelling at the Bud Uglly site but
      they nevir tell us whitch word is spellid incorrectly
      so we havent fixit it yet.

      My wife and I still regularly crack each other up by saying, “While, this is not actually a question.”

  69. blipnickels says:

    Some candidates:

    I think the Marvel universe will hold up well. The sheer amount of time and talent that got invested is unprecedented and unlikely to be duplicated in my lifetime; there must be $10 billion plus in combined production costs there. Plus they’re good blockbusters, and that’s a strong combination.

    Lots of niche things will be nostalgic, especially memes and Youtube series. I know I get nostalgic for albino blacksheep and, oddly enough, the Nostalgia Critic so I expect future generations to be nostalgic for Pewdepie or galaxy brain memes or whatever.

    It’s weird to think how much Nicki Minaj and Drake dominated music for this decade but they’ve got enough good songs and impact that they’ll hold up.

    On a more CW-angle, I expect a lot more nostalgia for the Obama years, 2010-2015. Not great years, but a nice quiet period between war/recession and whatever our current madness is.

    So, better than the 90’s

    • viVI_IViv says:

      I think the Marvel universe will hold up well. The sheer amount of time and talent that got invested is unprecedented and unlikely to be duplicated in my lifetime; there must be $10 billion plus in combined production costs there. Plus they’re good blockbusters, and that’s a strong combination.

      Kinda. Marvel movies are the modern equivalent of Western: mass produced, formulaic cash grabs which look cool and indeed make lots of cash when they are made, but overall don’t really leave a big legacy other than a sense of a general visual style and cliched tropes. How many Western movies can you name off the top of your head?

      I expect that in 30 years, or even in 10 years, people will have a general sense of what MCU movies used to be, and maybe they’ll watch the first Iron Man or the first Avengers, but that’s it. Nobody will be giving a crap about Infinity War or Endgame, no matter how much money they are making now. (Think of Avatar for another example of a movie that was super cool and made a ton of money when it was released but had no broad cultural impact).

      Lots of niche things will be nostalgic, especially memes and Youtube series.

      Yes. This is where the real pop cultural innovation happens in our era. Especially with the increasing censorship and corporatization of the Internet, the 2010s will be remembered as the Golden Age of Memes.

      • EchoChaos says:

        How many Western movies can you name off the top of your head?

        Dozens, from Tombstone to Shane to The Shootist, but obviously I’m a huge Western fan.

        • FLWAB says:

          I am not a fan of Westerns, but even I can name quite a few. I’ve never even seen any of these, but I know their names.

          The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
          Tombstone
          Shane
          The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

        • EchoChaos says:

          @FLWAB

          All fantastic ones.

          I think comic book movies are the Westerns of our day. There are great ones, there are duds, but they’re clearly a memorable cultural force.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          I have only heard of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, though I’ve never watched it. No idea about the others.

      • Plumber says:

        @viVI_IViv >

        “…How many Western movies can you name off the top of your head?…”

        No Country For Old Men (it is very much a western!),
        Fistfull of Dollars,
        Sicario,
        For a Few Dollars More,
        Hang ’em High!,
        The Hateful Eight,
        The Good the Bad and the Ugly,
        Stagecoach,
        Rio Bravo,
        The Searchers,
        Broken Arrow,
        Winchester ’73,
        The Outlaw Josie Wells,
        Sante Fe Trail,
        The Oxbow Incident,
        Silverado,
        Young Guns,
        Bad Company
        Mad Max
        (damn straight it’s a western!)
        The Road Warrior and,
        Yojimbo (okay technically an Eastern, but close enough)

        I may have misspelled a few.

        Strangely Westerns aren’t my favorite genre, I’d say “Noir” was, but the best movies I’ve seen this decade are Locke, and ’71 (if anyone can name those genres please share!).

        Frankly @viVI_IViv you underestimate the memories of an older Gen X’ers who are almost as old as younger Boomers (such as myself) when it comes to what was on television to watch before VCR’s were popular, conversely I couldn’t tell you how many Avengers movies they’ve been, my post ’80’s popular culture knowledge is weak.

        • Aftagley says:

          he Good the Bad and the Ugly,

          I approve of your recommended title change, and would go so far as to apply it universally. Let’s start calling it “He Good, He Bad, and He Ugly”

        • Plumber says:

          @Aftagley,

          That does work!

        • AG says:

          Is Noir a Western set in the city, or is the Western a Noir set in the country?

          (The correct answer is that both are Samurai films set in ‘Murica.)

        • JayT says:

          I don’t think that’s accurate. Westerns predate samurai movies, and guys like Kurosawa were pretty heavily influenced by early westerns. At some point the influence started passing back and forth, but I think that the westerns were the originals.

        • AG says:

          I mean, Samurai films are just Shakespeare dramas set in Japan, so.

          (As you may tell by now, my comments for this thread are very tongue-in-cheek.)

          On that note, I’m very disappointed that Plumber didn’t remember The Magnificent Seven.

          Also, does anyone here know of actual Singing Cowboy films? Hail, Caesar! and The Librarians both referenced them, but the only ones I can think of are Broadway adaptations (Oklahoma, Paint Your Wagon, Annie Get Your Gun).

    • Randy M says:

      Although I think that Endgame will fall in stature relatively quickly, because so much of it was about reliving the high points from previous Marvel films, which I think future audiences will find much less interesting

      In other words, we’re already nostalgic for the early ’10s. Further proof history is speeding up. I anticipate my grandchildren, when grown, will remark, “Wow, do you remember Tuesday? I miss Tuesday. Tuesday has all the best VR programs and holo-music. Thursday is lame.”

    • viVI_IViv says:

      It depends how future generations feel about hip-hop/rap, I guess.

      I don’t know about future generations, but my 12 years old cousin listens to some noise interspersed with lyrics about drugs, apparently called trap “music”. Kids these days. Can you imagine anything like this becoming a cultural landmark? Oh wait

      • Enkidum says:

        I’d guess somewhere around 1/3 of Irish and Scottish folk music is about consuming a widely-available drug, having casual sex, and/or killing cops. Reminds me of how much easier it is to interpret, say, Romeo and Juliet when you realize it’s a play about street gangs.

      • The Nybbler says:

        You mean Shakespeare just adapted West Side Story? The time travelling THIEF!

  70. Steve Sailer says:

    “SSC-adjacent culture war subreddit r/TheMotte now has its own podcast, The Bailey”

    I’ve got a question about the term “Motte and Bailey.” I can remember the concept they describe well enough, but I can never remember which is one is the Motte and which one is the Bailey. To me, it’s like Type I and Type II Errors.

    And yet … “Motte and Bailey” has been a wildly successful innovation. Huge numbers of people have no problem with it. In fact, I wonder if the the difficulty of remembering which is which serves as an incentive for people to memorize the terms so that they can distinguish themselves from the masses who don’t know the secret handshake.

    My naive thought has always been than when I need to come up with new jargon, I try to make it as self-evident as possible what it means. But I’m starting to think that what people really like is obscurantist jargon that their tribe knows.

    Any thoughts on jargon design?

    • Falacer says:

      I always found it easy enough by thinking of motte=moat. I’d be surprised if that wasn’t the common connection people remember it by.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      I, on the other hand, found the concept super easy to grasp, because I knew what a motte and bailey were long before I came across this particular usage (hell, considerably longer than this usage exists*). If you’re familiar with this particular castle design, it’s super intuitive to think of the motte as the “easy to defend, but ultimately rather cramped” bit and the bailey as the “bit where all the interesting/useful stuff is, that is harder to defend”. Comparing this with the Type I/Type II nomenclature, the latter naming tells us nothing, other than that one is different from the other.

      I suspect that one reason that the SSC use of motte and bailey caught on is that the core community tends to attract the sort of people who know this sort of trivia. It doesn’t even require being a major history buff: I learned the term playing Lords of the Realm II; others may have picked it up playing D&D or whatever.

      I suppose that for greater clarity we could call it “keep and courtyard” or even “castle and green” (but not Elephant and Castle). It’s just that motte-and-bailey is a pre-existing term.

      * ETA:
      Going back to the Shackel paper, I see it was published in 2005, so not quite as long as I thought, but still.

      • Rachael says:

        I was also familiar with it before encountering the metaphorical usage. I’m not a history buff by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not a D&D player, but I am British, and it seems to be more common to learn this stuff at school if you live in a country that actually has castles. We learned about motte-and-bailey castles and other kinds of castles in early secondary school (age 11 or 12; early 90s), drew pictures of them, and went to visit one or two. For some reason I found motte-and-bailey a memorable term, to the extent that if you’d asked me (before I read Scott’s essay introducing the metaphorical meaning of motte-and-bailey) to name one thing I remembered from each of geography and history in early secondary school, I’d probably have said ox-bow lakes and motte-and-bailey castles.
        I thought that ox-bow lakes had acquired memetic status as a thing everyone remembers learning about at school and no one needs to know about in later life (although I can’t find any evidence of this atm). To me, motte-and-bailey castles are in a similar category to those.

    • A1987dM says:

      I remember that the bailey is the field because of Bailey’s Irish Cream.

    • Murphy says:

      I always remember it as Bailey = Baile = Home/Town

      Since Baile is irish for Home/Town like Baile Átha Cliath ( Irish for Dublin)

      Funnily enough the name Dublin actually comes from Duibhlinn coming from dubh meaning “black, dark” and linn/lind meaning “pool” which means the capitol of ireland is actually Blackpool.

    • j1000000 says:

      Type I and Type II is annoying, IMO, because you’re generally designating something as one or the other, so the difference matters but is hard to remember (mostly it’s easier to say “false positive” or “false negative”). But I feel like most of the time I see motte-and-bailey people just use them together as a singular noun — as in “that’s a motte-and-bailey” or something.

      • Nick says:

        I can never remember Type I and Type II, either. Honestly, the terms just seem maximally terrible to me. Like, how many other things do we name this way, where descriptive names practically volunteer themselves but we give them nondescript enumerations instead? Should extroverts and introverts be called Type I and Type II personalities, too?

        Never had any problem with motte and bailey, though.

        • Matt says:

          Well we do have Type A and Type B personalities. I have a vague sense of what at Type A personality is, but have never heard discussion of Type B personalities at all, I think.

          • Protagoras says:

            I never remember which is which between the A theory and the B theory of time. Fortunately, these days it has become more common to speak of presentism and fourdimensionalism (which has probably hindered me in ever getting A vs. B straight; I just don’t encounter it enough) but as a specialist in metaphysics, I remain somewhat embarrassed that it takes me a while to figure out what’s going on whenever someone uses the older terminology.

          • Randy M says:

            I only ever hear people talk about Type A, though, and only in contexts that make the meaning clear.
            “She just won’t stop to catch her breath, she’s so Type A”

          • Nick says:

            I never remember which is which between the A theory and the B theory of time.

            That’s funny—despite what I said above, I’ve never have a problem with these. They do cry out for descriptive names in the same way, though. Tensed and tenseless, maybe.

          • AG says:

            Type A/B is evocative because it signals what kind of grades they’d get in school.

    • Rowan says:

      I’ve known what a motte and bailey castle was since I was, like, six? I always considered castles to be a standard geeky kid interest, and it feels to me like a basic level of geek knowledge on the level of what a d20 is, meaning I’m constantly surprised when people in the SSC demographic turn out not to know.

    • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

      Motte is the one surrounded by moat, I figure.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Maybe people like the secret handshake of knowing the phrase and maybe they like to pretend that there is special knowledge of which is which, but they don’t have to learn that because they don’t use it. For example, here Scott just uses the phrase, not the components. Or here he uses “motte” three times in the phrase and only once to refer to a specific point.

      Even if someone does say “the motte is X and the bailey is Y,” it’s pretty clear what is the relation between X and Y. If someone said only “the motte is X” without naming Y, then you might have to choose between W which is weaker and Y which is stronger and knowing “the motte” lets you choose. But it’s rare for someone to only name one arm and even then it’s pretty clear whether it’s supposed to be weak or strong.

      (I’ve always said that I prefer bait-and-switch because it’s not a secret handshake. But it really isn’t clear which should be the bait and which should be the switch. Is the bait the motte or the bailey? If people just say “this is a motte-and-bailey” it works just as well to say “this is a bait-and-switch.”)

      Whereas people rarely say “X is a type I error” and if they did, you wouldn’t need to know I from II. The point of “type I error” is that you’re supposed to deduce X from the setup, so you really need to know what type I means. If you just want to say that there’s a tradeoff between I and II, it doesn’t matter which is which. But if you say “In this example, type I errors are more important than type II errors and so we should adjust the system” then it matters which is which.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        “Is the bait the motte or the bailey?”

        Right, and which one is the one you most want to defend?

        • Douglas Knight says:

          I’m not sure if this is what you mean, but here are one or two advantages of the metaphor of motte-and-bailey over bait-and-switch. Who is being baited? Is it the allies who are baited with the bailey, or the enemies who are baited with the motte? Whereas, one hopes that the question of which claim is more defensible is more objective.

    • zzzzort says:

      No insight, except that I agree. Poorly choosing a jargon name should henceforth be known as a “Type I/Type II error”, for maximum confusingness.

  71. DragonMilk says:

    What is the most delicious thing you can make in less than 30 minutes?

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I’ll nominate caprese salad– tomato, mozzarella cheese, and fresh basil. You do need good tomatoes.

      • keaswaran says:

        Ever since moving from California to Texas I’ve found caprese such a letdown. So many restaurants have it on the menu because people know it’s a good item, but it really feels like a cargo cult to do it without the sort of tomatoes that any good place in Los Angeles can come up with.

      • Enkidum says:

        Even simpler is a tomato sauce-type-thing I regularly make. Ripe good tomatoes, lots of fresh basil, garlic, salt, pepper, olive oil. Chop everything, stick it in a bowl and leave it to stew for a couple of hours at least (which I guess doesn’t meet the 30 minute criterion, but it takes 15 minutes to chop up a huge batch). Perfection. Can just be eaten by the spoonful, or thrown on pasta.

    • rubberduck says:

      Does it have to be something most people have the ingredients and abilities to make? If not, then sushi.

      • Ketil says:

        Several raw fish dishes can be made quickly and with less fuss than (traditional) sushi. I like to chop up a piece of good quality salmon, and serve with chopped coriander/cilantro, soy sauce (mixed with lime juice), pickled ginger, lightly roasted sesame seeds, wasabi, wakame… generally any sushi condiment.

        There’s also Hawaiian poke and South American ceviche.

        • Ketil says:

          Another favorite: scones. Mix flour and other ingredients while the oven heats up, then bake for 15-20 minutes, and enjoy.

          • Rebecca Friedman says:

            … how on earth do you make scones in thirty minutes?

            Mine take 18 to bake (at the usual temperature), and I can’t imagine finishing the complicated process of cut butter into flour —> stir wet ingredients very carefully together with butter/flour mixture in order not to squish the butter and ruin the flaky texture —> pat out into circles and cut into scones in twelve minutes. It takes me at least at hour for a batch, start to finish, and probably more.*

            *Though I usually make a double recipe if I make them at all, so this may be skewing my sense of how long it takes. But… twelve minutes? I suspect we may have very different recipes…

          • JustToSay says:

            @Rebecca Friedman

            I think it takes me around 40 minutes. Mine bake for about 15 minutes, and I don’t think it takes more than 20-25 minutes to make them up.

            I made biscuits for dinner tonight, so I timed myself. Walking-into-kitchen to biscuits-sliding-into-oven was 14 minutes. Scones take longer to prep, but cutting in the butter is the most time-consuming part and is the same either way. I think an extra 5-10 minutes for scone prep over biscuits is about right for me.

            I will say that these days, I do no recreational cooking – I’m basically in crank-it-out mode, so I try for efficiency.

            If you’ve popped the butter in the freezer for a few minutes (even just while you get started), you can use the bigger holes on a cheese grater to grate the butter into the flour. You still have to use a pastry cutter to finish it off, but it’s faster without compromising on flakiness, IMO. I’ve tried using a food processor, but I don’t like the results that gives–the butter pieces are too uniform and you lose the nice layering/flaky result.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Is any good salmon good enough, or do you need suchi grade?

          • mitv150 says:

            Farmed salmon from a good source is pretty safe. The chief issue with raw fish is parasites, and farmed products are significantly less likely to have parasites than wild.

            See this link for an excellent guide to eating raw fish:
            https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/05/how-to-prepare-raw-fish-at-home-sushi-sashimi-food-safety.html

          • Enkidum says:

            I can attest anecdotally to the parasite issue. A friend brought us an entire fresh sockeye salmon, wild-caught by some Native friends. Would have been worth probably a few hundred bucks or more if he’d been allowed to sell it. It looked great, and my wife and I are big fans of sashimi, so… we made sashimi.

            Tasted amazing. We ate a ridiculous quantity, because what else are you going to do with fresh fish that great?

            Somewhere between 4-8 hours later, the puking started, and did not stop for either of us for the next 10 hours.

            I regret nothing.

      • DragonMilk says:

        Skill can be pursued, equipment must be bought :/

        Think straight-forward dishes with minimal equipment

    • Clutzy says:

      Bacon and eggs.

    • blipnickels says:

      Pour a bourbon!

      Realistically, I can grill/fry a burger in hurry and it’ll still be great.

    • Fitzroy says:

      Eggs in purgatory – eggs poached in a spicy tomato sauce and served with crusty bread.

    • AlphaGamma says:

      I think this kung pao chicken just squeaks in if I work quickly enough in terms of chopping things.

      More simply, there are various pasta sauces that can be made in the time it takes to boil the water and cook pasta- carbonara, for instance.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Prime-grade steak

    • theodidactus says:

      Buy really spicy italian sausages and tomatoes and noodles and butter and red wine and olive oil.

      * Chop up the tomatoes and put them in a pot. Low heat, add the butter and the red wine
      * make the noodles
      * chop up the sausage and pan-fry it in olive oil.

      Resulting dish is very hearty and heavy but tastes as good as anything you can get in an italian restaurant and it’s easy as hell to prepare.

      The secret I think is that the tomatoes need to be fresh tomatoes, not canned things or tomato sauce.

      • Lambert says:

        I’ve heard that
        Freshly picked homegrown tomatoes > good quality whole tinned tomatoes > ‘fresh’ storebought tomatoes

        • mitv150 says:

          This is true for many purposes. But tinned tomatoes are no good on sandwiches or in salads, so there you might be stuck with grocery store tomatoes.

          If I can’t get homegrown tomatoes, I just won’t cook anything that requires freshly cut tomatoes. For me, the difference between homegrown and grocery store tomatoes is so large as to make grocery store tomatoes not even worth buying.

          The disclaimer here is that some grocery stores will carry tomatoes labeled “ugly tomatoes” or “heirloom tomatoes” that are locally grown and have similar qualities to homegrown tomatoes. Those are worth buying.

          • theodidactus says:

            Another example of how rationalists can find one weird trick to succeed maybe? Yes, the “crappy looking” tomatoes seem to taste much better and I’m confident I could taste the difference even if you chopped ’em up.

            Lucky for me I have a nearby farmers market and they sell good tomatoes.

          • acymetric says:

            Is that really a rationalist thing?

          • Nick says:

            Is that really a rationalist thing?

            We should make it one.

          • Randy M says:

            I have seen at least one service specifically market that. It seems like the intersection of hipster and frugal types.

          • mitv150 says:

            Two different things being discussed here re: “ugly tomatoes.”

            There is a significant taste difference between homegrown tomatoes and typical grocery store tomatoes. Grocery store tomatoes are bred to have very thick skins strong internal structure to make them easier to ship. They also tend to be more watery than homegrown varieties.

            Homegrown (or local farmer’s market) varieties are typically much tastier, because they are bred for taste and don’t need to be shipped a long distance. If you’ve ever seen a tomato truck on I-5 in California you’ll understand. The tomatoes are stacked in huge bins. Homegrown tomatoes would be crushed under the weight.

            The typical grocery store tomatoes are also selected for uniformity of shape and look, like most fruit. Homegrown and locally grown tomatoes are not selected for looks, and are thus generally odder looking, or ugly. They also typically cost quite a bit more than the big commercially grown fruit.

            There is a separate, but related, thing where the outcasts from the big commercial growers are sold as “ugly” fruit for less than the good looking fruit. There are services that collect and sell this fruit. In the case of tomatoes, the ugly cast-offs from commercial growers will still taste as bland as the non cast-offs.

            Thus, ugliness is not always a good heuristic for all tomato selection. It works as a heuristic in a grocery store, because grocery stores don’t sell the ugly cast-offs.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            This summer, I’ve been fooled by funny-looking tomatoes which don’t taste like much and are expensive.

            I call it the heirloom tomato apocalypse, and I’ve been expecting it.

            You can escape from Goodhart’s Law, but not for long.

            I recommend choosing tomatoes by smell. I’ve never had a flavorless tomato that smelled good. There are tomatoes with no scent that taste good, but I have no idea how to find them reliably.

      • JayT says:

        I disagree that fresh tomatoes are better than (good quality) canned tomatoes for making sauce quickly. For one, if you don’t peel the tomatoes then you are left with possibly my least favorite food, cooked tomato skins. You also need to cook fresh tomatoes a lot longer to get all that moisture cooked out. So, I don’t see this being a 30 minute dish if you use fresh tomatoes.

        • theodidactus says:

          That might be a taste thing. I like big chunks of tomatoes with the skin still on, if you start with the chopped up tomatoes its soft and buttery by the end, but still tastes like the fruit, rather than just a sauce. I think it goes really well with the spicy meat chunks

          • JayT says:

            For me, a cooked tomato skin is about as appetizing as eating paper. I’ve stopped going to restaurants I otherwise liked because they didn’t peel their cooked tomatoes. I also dislike par-cooked tomatoes in general. I like them raw, and I like them cooked down into nothing, but that middle ground is very unappealing to me. That’s one of the reason I hate having diced tomato on a pizza.

    • mitv150 says:

      30 minutes is a ton of time if you have the ingredients on hand and are familiar with the kitchen… so I’ll answer based on the the most delicious thing you can make in less than 30 minutes with ingredients that don’t require a special shopping trip (thus excluding raw fish dishes and good steak).

      non red sauce pasta dishes:
      spaghetti aglio e olio
      cacio e pepe
      or maybe spaghetti puttanesca

    • broblawsky says:

      Pesto. As long as you have fresh basil and a food processor, you can basically make it in 5 minutes.

    • Ttar says:

      A call to your local Thai takeout place.

    • Zeno of Citium says:

      Me personally? Chocolate souffle, if I work at full speed and have the proper tools. It’s easier than you think.

    • JayT says:

      When I see someone asking for a dish they can make in 30 minutes, I take that to mean they want a dish that they can easily make when they don’t have a lot of time. So I include the amount of cleanup in the calculus for this kind of question, because I could make something like spaghetti and meatballs in less than 30 minutes, I’ll also have a whole bunch of cleanup to do afterwards.

      That said, my favorite dish to make when I’m feeling lazy is to mix brown sugar and dijon mustard together and pour that over a salmon filet. Then you stick it in a 375 oven for about 12 minutes. It turns out perfectly medium rare, has almost no cleanup if you put the fish on parchment paper, and is extremely tasty. You can also put some vegetables coated in olive oil on the side of the baking sheet, and you’ll have a side dish ready to go too.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I tried it out with salmon filet, oregano, dijon mustard, and some raclette cheese on top. It was fast and pretty good.

        I thought raclette was like swiss cheese, but this was more like a mild limburger.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Fake chocolate mousse. Add a packet of chocolate pudding mix to a cup or two of heavy cream, whip until light and airy. Serve with Nilla wafers.

      Bacon and eggs.

      Ramen, with broccoli florets, chopped ginger root, and lemon juice.

      Burger with mayo, grilled onions, melted Monterey Jack, pickles, mustard.

      Tortilla soup – sauteed onion, garlic, kidney beans, black beans, corn, hominy, and chili powder, served with Jack cheese, cilantro, and green onions.

      Creamcheese guacamole.

      Chicago dogs – hot dogs with sliced tomatoes, onions, relish, dill pickle spear, mustard, celery salt, sport peppers.

      • DragonMilk says:

        How do you go about creamcheese guac? Sounds intriguing

        Do you eat it with toast or chips?

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          How do you go about creamcheese guac? Sounds intriguing

          It’s pretty simple. About half a package of creamcheese, two avocados, 2-3 cloves minced garlic, about 1/4 cup lemon juice, and a teaspoon of salt. That’s my current proportions; they’ve adjusted over the months as I experiment. In the past, I’ve used as little as one avocado, yielding a dip with a lot more heft.

          The hardest part is getting the creamcheese to blend thoroughly. This typically requires leaving it out until it’s room temperature first, and then putting a lot of effort into the fork. It also helps if the avocados are ripe enough that almost all the yellow is gone. The lemon juice is essential – just enough to wet everything down, but no further.

          Plain pita chips are probably ideal, but plain crackers or even Ritz are quite good with it.

    • Enkidum says:

      Spaghetti carbonara.
      Omelettes.
      Greek salad.
      A cheese plate.

    • Rana Dexsin says:

      Are we counting cleanup time in this 30 minutes? I notice a lot of people don’t seem to mention it, but I can’t tell whether they’re including it implicitly.