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Spoiler for the ‘catch’ to the fourth and final season of The Good Place.
This catch seemed obvious a day or so after watching the first episode of season 4, and is becoming far more evident after episode 2. Rot13 encoded 3 TIMES for safety. Do not read unless you want the surprise spoiled.
Gur sbhe crbcyr orvat rinyhngrq ner gur fnzr sbhe crbcyr jub unir nyjnlf orra rinyhngrq.
All of this has happened before and it will all happen again?
Ab, whfg n pbagvahngvba bs gur svefg rinyhngvba (jura gur whqtr ernyvmrq guvatf jrer uneq, naq gur flfgrz znl arrq gb or punatrq gb nppbhag sbe gur qvssvphygl bs orvat tbbq).
Vg frrzf yvxryl gung Wnarg naq Zvpunry ner va ba vg, ohg pna’g fnl nalguvat.
Gur bayl phevbfvgl va zl zvaq vf gur fpbcr. Vf vg whfg Ryrnabe, Gnunav, Puvqv, naq Wnfba jub ner orvat rinyhngrq? Be qbrf gur rinyhngvba vapyhqr gur Zvpunry, Wnarg, naq gur whqtr nf jryy – vf gurer n “tbq” nobir gurz?
Is this a joke, or did you do this mostly pointless thing? Internet jokes are sometimes hard to get.
This is a joke. Rot13 is a direct switch encoding, so doing it twice is unencrypting it.
That’s why I asked.
Yes. I hoped the bold and all caps would make it more evident as a joke. But I completely understand not being sure whether something is a joke or not.
Full disclosure: I’m a bit OCD (diagnosed), so did actually spit it through Rot13 three times, even though I meant it as a joke.
Full-full disclosure: and an extra two times (IIRC) after that, just for good measure.
You should have just rot39’ed it, it would have been faster.
It’s pretty common for me to see someone say that so-and-so changed course 360 degrees when they mean to say that so-and-so reversed direction, so I guess you can’t be too careful.
V gubhtug gung jnf xvaq bs nyernql fcryyrq bhg. Vs gur Znva Sbhe pnaabg fubj gung uhznavgl vf fnirnoyr, gurl tb qverpgyl gb uryy jvgubhg cnffvat tb.
In one of the previous Open Threads, some people mentioned The Good Place series positively. I don’t really understand why.
I have enjoyed the first season — the setting, and the conclusion. But everything that happened later felt like… trying to squeeze more juice from a lemon that is already dry. There was tension in the first season; and it was completely resolved at the end of the season. Then, the beginning of the second season was like “try again”, “oops again”, “try again”, “oops again”, which is funny the first time it happens, and then becomes quite boring, especially when it seems like the rest of the series will probably consist of variants of this. There was the hilarious episode about the trolley problem… and that’s probably the last episode I actually enjoyed. I have watched the rest of the second season and maybe also the beginning of the third one, but it was all like “lets try the same thing over and over again, with minor variations, and hope the audience stays”. So, I am surprised to see that some audience actually stayed and enjoyed it.
Question for those who liked the series (beyond the first season) is: why? Does it later get better? When approximately? Or do you simply not agree that after the trolley episode it became worse?
The plot picks up quite a bit toward the end of the second season through season three. I agree that the first part of season two dragged a bit.
I like the characters.
I also enjoy learning more about the architectural setup of the milieu.
I didn’t particularly care for the trolley episode, so our standards differ.
(In the previous OT I opined that Chidi was a 6w5. He’s obviously a 5w6 with a connection to 7 in the chili episode. And Jason is likely a 9w8. BTW, Jason is “dumb” like Ashton Kutcher is “dumb” – not so much.)
Anybody have any advice on how one might go about learning notetaking? Any notetaking systems to recommend? I have a student who is in one of the rare-yet-awful classes where there is no followed textbook or other corpus of information that contains the information he should know, so the only material he can rely on for tests are the notes he takes. I would like to be able to give him guidance beyond my personal compensation strategies which are to A) rely on people who take better notes, or, even better B) run like hell from those classes.
What area? I think the answers if it’s maths are very different to if it’s theology.
I’ll just throw a few links here, hope that something help. Seems like people have different strong opinions on this:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d9TKbcko8GsBihvxG/how-do-you-take-notes
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wiLaYDcshYr97R8Lr/tiddlywiki-for-organizing-notes-and-research
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wg9xC2BdjMXwbYNxb/what-s-your-favorite-notetaking-system
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892731
My own approach: if the notes will only be needed in short term (e.g. you take an exam and then feel okay to forget it), buy a separate notebook, keep writing the information as it comes to you, underline keywords and important ideas with color. Perhaps at the end try to process it, and write some summary.
If it is the “information you want to keep forever”, I would do that electronically, and choose a system that supports internal hyperlinks. Now it depends.
If you believe you will always be online, I would probably go with MediaWiki (the software Wikipedia uses), because it is thoroughly tested. My experience is that 10 times out of 10 someone recommended me a “better wiki”, sooner or later I found an annoying bug; usually it screws up formatting when you edit the page later. You can set up MediaWiki to be private, it supports hyperlinks and templates.
Offline, WikidPad seems like a nice choice. It automatically creates a navigation tree, and it supports categories. For example, if you add “category: contacts” in your page, you will automatically find it listed under “contacts” category. The categories themselves can be organized in a tree structure. (One annoying thing is that it uses a lot of markup, so if you write e.g. computer code, you have to do a lot of escaping manually.)
I actually use my own software, Notilo, because I wanted a combination of traits that I didn’t find elsewhere (plain text with no markup, hierarchical structure, Unicode, both Windows and Linux), but it is still missing a lot of features and I am currently rewriting it from scratch, with no end in sight.
Our friends with the giant spaceships have decided they want Earth money. To that end, they have scooped up the island of Manhattan in the middle of a work day, put it in a safe place, and are holding everything and everybody on it for ransom. If our friends negotiate shrewdly for the return of some or all of what they took, how much might they get?
Literally whatever they ask for. They’ve just demonstrated the ability to scoop up the entire island of Manhattan; not returning it comes right at the bottom end of the list of things they can threaten us with.
With that kind of power, there’s nothing simply purchasable with money and furthermore nothing movable that they need negotiate for, so they seem quite irrational. There’s certainly enough rich people in New York during the day for families to be able to raise hundreds of millions in ransom, perhaps billions. The buildings and rock likely won’t get them much, if anything, more. We might see tens to hundreds of millions for the contents of the museums.
I’d offer a straight trade for DC, with a few extra megabucks thrown in if they’ll leave us the Smithsonian.
If they were to scoop up the whole of the UK, for instance, would Sterling count as money any more? Who’s there to back it?
Holding the whole of Manhattan to ransom would surely devalue the dollar a bit. It took a hurculean effort after 9/11 to prevent a mild financial crisis.
Can we give them arbitary nominal amounts of money but make sure it can’t get into the economy? Kind of reminds me of the Hawaii overprint notes, which were to become worthless if Japan invaded.
If they scooped up all of Manhattan, they scooped up the NY Stock Exchange.
They already HAVE all of our money. By an alternative reading, they have already destroyed vast quantities of our money.
Frankly, at this point they can demand all the dollars in the world for the safe return of Manhattan, and it’s a coin flip whether we give them everything they ask for or nothing, on the theory that we don’t negotiate with alien terrorists. But either way, those dollars are pretty much worth the paper they’re printed on now.
The NYSE is in Mahwah, NJ and the NASDAQ is in Carteret, NJ so they missed the stock exchanges. The buildings in NYC are just front-ends.
I did not know that.
Good information.
I’d stop thinking in monetary value and start thinking in long term wealth. Say you hold 100 Bill Gates-types for ransom. Rich as fuck, right? Wrong – most of it is stock, and since it’s not really a hush hush operation, stock will plummet the instant this happens.
So you want to go with a partnership. Take all those rich guys you just kidnapped to dinner, and tell them this is a hostile takeover, but they can be 10x richer if they play it right. Then ask for (minority? controlling?) stock in their businesses and give them the right level of tech to make them filthy rich without blowing things up.
“‘The Ransom of Red Chief’ is a short story by O. Henry first published in the July 6, 1907 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It follows two men who kidnap and demand a ransom a wealthy Alabamian’s son. Eventually, the men are driven crazy by the boy’s spoiled and hyperactive behavior, and they pay the boy’s father to take him back.” — Wikipedia
I kid because I love.
… For pretty – wallpaper purposes, I suppose? The answer is “How much would you like?” onto the limits of the supply chain of suitable paper and ink. An alien armada is quite sufficient cause to roll the printing presses and then declare a jubilee and rebasing of the currency after they leave.
You see, everyone? This is why the last time we needed to get the Yamato and arm it with a wave motion gun. Precisely so we’d be prepared to fight back in the event of this kind of nonsense.
As soon as it hits the news, the US dollar value drops faster than the ruble did in the 1990s. Luckily, the US is prepared for this contingency, and promptly announces a new currency before the market has enough time to react. Some damage is still done – the currency necessary to buy back Manhattan fills several shipping containers – but it’s still there, in several barges parked off Long Island, ready to go.
Trump’s dealmaking is his usual, which is to say, utterly incomprehensible. Even to the savvy aliens. The only pattern they can discern is Trump’s frequent defaults to “doing something”, which apparently involves offering ever more containers of the new currency in exchange. Given that their aim is to get as much Earth money as possible, the aliens gesture in their equivalent of a shrug and press the farce of a negotiation until they think no more containers are forthcoming.
The shipment is trivial to move, though they have to find extra storage, as their cargoship is currently occupied by an island. The aliens can’t believe their luck. They have crates spilling out of their cargo hold and filling up nooks and crannies in every hallway and living quarter on every vessel in their fleet. Alien kids are rolling around in the strange new currency – trillions of spheres, about the size of a human finger, stamped “In God We Trust”, and marked with pretty anti-counterfeit fibers that gleam when held up to light of our star.
Which then spontaneously open, revealing drones the size of mosquitoes, swarming the fleet. Within seconds, every object with a heat signature is injected with a tailored virus, deactivated with a code only Trump knows. The aliens are had. They never should have trusted their idiotic captain, with his idiotic accent and combover…
Sacking their leader within seconds, the aliens offer a new deal, which Trump is only too happy to accept. He secretly knows he can always reactivate the virus later, but mostly he just likes making another deal. The aliens carefully redeposit Manhattan, in return for the code. Soon, the alien intercom plays the kill word throughout the fleet:
“Covfefe.”
Relieved but humbled, the fleet departs, having traded the remaining unopened spheres for one last keepsake: an Earth wallet containing approximately twenty-four US dollars.
.
I am someone who is going to graduate from college in the spring. From my experience, the end of high school college application process was the most vile, brutal, disgusting, and painful experience I had ever dealt with until that point in my life (surpassed later only by the death of a close family member). And yeah, that reflects a level of privilege.
However, your quote is almost word-for-word how I ended up coping with the stress of college applications and being rejected. And I think that’s related. If you, as I did as a child/young(er) adult, see the undergraduate application process as effectively handing out keys to success,money,power,etc. then it a) makes sense to treat the application process as as cutthroat and Machiavellian as you can stomach, and b) makes sense to demand the government regulate it in a way that’s favorable to you.
The solution to both is to not hold this worldview. Understanding that a college that doesn’t want you wouldn’t be good for you both helps with the feelings of the process and sidesteps the issue of how it ought to be distributed.
Note that I am assuming that this worldview is false, which is why ceasing to believe it can be treated as a viable course of action.
Renegade Cut is a youtube channel whose sole contributor specializes in analysis of films and film genre from an explicitely social justice point of view. These analysis tend to be well researched and, as far as I can tell, relatively nuanced (to the extense that they are still 100% embracing at least the academic, respectable version of social justice ideology).
In a recent, 20 minutes video, he develops an argument that christian horror films, that is, horror films with supernatural elements that are based on christian beliefs (such as demonic possession or witches), in spite of being generally made by liberal filmmakers who, if not atheists, are generally not strongly practicing christians, have in fact a tendency to work as christianism apologetics, because they systematically present a universe were not only christian beliefs in the supernatural are true, but where the occurence of the supernatural is always shown to be directly the product of a lack of faith and/or dabbing into occult practices/foreign religions directly condemned by christianity, and where a skeptic character is always introduced just to eventually be proven wrong; he goes as far as implying this has revisionist implications toward the history of witch hunting — since in these movies, witches are real and they are evil, it means the witch hunts were in fact justified.
Do conservative readers agree with this analysis? Do you think christian horror films actually work as a force to promote christianity?
Edit: as a time of me typing this, there are exactly 999 comments on this thread. Coincidence???
Unknown, but anecdotally, Christopher Lee believed that he could do evangelism as a horror actor by telling his directors to play up the power of Christian symbols against supernatural horror.
The Beast is doing a handstand.
The Wicker Man would seem to be a counter-example of this.
Yes, unless you were standing on your head.
There are plenty of horror films that don’t deal with the supernatural. Often these still have a moralistic element as the promiscuous/bullying/however troublesome get mangled first. Perhaps humans just instinctively don’t want to see innocents slaughtered.
I agree with your point in as much as there is often a tactic (if hardly orthodox) Christian back ground to the spiritual element. I don’t think this has a large impact on the culture or the way witch trials are viewed.
There’s also a lot of entertainment that portray witchcraft positively, like Buffy and that recent Sabrina show.
They work as a force to promote cultural Christianity. I don’t think they promote genuine religious knowledge. If you try brandishing a crucifix at a real demon the demon is just going to laugh at you.
Have you tried lately?
Can you expand on that?
As a non-Christian whose knowledge of demonology is very limited, I’d be interested in learning more about the mechanics of how “real demons” are dealt with.
I think it would be very analogous to Acts 19:11-16, specifically from verse 13 on:
11 God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, 12 so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.
13 Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon-possessed. They would say, “In the name of the Jesus whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out.” 14 Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this. 15 One day the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?” 16 Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding.
A crucifix is a piece of wood. Without the authority of Jesus channeled through a faith-filled person empowered by the Holy Spirit, the Bible suggests the empty symbol alone would be no protection.
I don’t think there’s a line in a horror movie that tops that.
Also, this conversation reminds me of the scene in the Mummy where the treacherous sidekick is trying one Holy symbol after another to placate the unholy abomination.
Ah ok, that makes sense.
Is there a source that goes into detail on how close a connection with God you need to drive out demons? Saint Paul’s used handkerchiefs can exorcise demons, which is described as extraordinary. And at least some members of the clergy are supposed to be able to exorcise demons, at least according to Catholics. But what about a Christian layman, like if an observant but not saintly Christian was the only one available to perform an exorcism would they be mocked and beaten or could they successfully drive out the demon?
For relatively detailed codifications about exorcism, you really have to talk to the Catholics. I don’t know the details of their doctrine on the topic. From a Protestant perspective, I think that it varies by denomination, and also varies significantly by circumstance. I’d say the general Protestant perspective is that there is a “priesthood of believers” inasmuch as a Christian layman has just as much authority as a Catholic priest, and doesn’t require a special mediator other than Jesus to intercede for them. I would say that also applies to a possession situation; a faithful believer’s prayer is no less powerful than a minister or elder’s prayer.
However, exorcism is a deadly serious business by most Biblical accounts, and not really laid out in a D&D rules ‘n’ rituals type of way. There is a passage in the Gospel of Mark 9:14-29 that makes it pretty clear that there are a lot of factors at play:
When they came to the other disciples, they saw a large crowd around them and the teachers of the law arguing with them. As soon as all the people saw Jesus, they were overwhelmed with wonder and ran to greet him.
“What are you arguing with them about?” he asked.
A man in the crowd answered, “Teacher, I brought you my son, who is possessed by a spirit that has robbed him of speech. Whenever it seizes him, it throws him to the ground. He foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth and becomes rigid. I asked your disciples to drive out the spirit, but they could not.”
“You unbelieving generation,” Jesus replied, “how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy to me.”
So they brought him. When the spirit saw Jesus, it immediately threw the boy into a convulsion. He fell to the ground and rolled around, foaming at the mouth.
Jesus asked the boy’s father, “How long has he been like this?”
“From childhood,” he answered. “It has often thrown him into fire or water to kill him. But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”
“ ‘If you can’?” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for one who believes.”
Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”
When Jesus saw that a crowd was running to the scene, he rebuked the impure spirit. “You deaf and mute spirit,” he said, “I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.”
The spirit shrieked, convulsed him violently and came out. The boy looked so much like a corpse that many said, “He’s dead.” But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him to his feet, and he stood up.
After Jesus had gone indoors, his disciples asked him privately, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?”
He replied, “This kind can come out only by prayer.” [some manuscripts “prayer and fasting”]
I do not think that I have the faith of a disciple, even the confused bunch before Pentecost. So that’s sobering. On the other hand, once Jesus rose and sent the Holy Spirit, Jesus is even more “personally present” with all believers than he was with the disciples. And in the Resurrection, Jesus permanently triumphed over death, Hell, and all its minions. So I think the Protestant perspective is, be very wary – but not mortally afraid.
ETA: I think I didn’t address your actual question of whether if a faithful Christian layman was the “only one available,” could he do it. I think the Protestant answer (and I suspect Catholic too though I don’t know for sure) is “Yes, if God wills it” because it’s not the person acting, it’s God acting through them.
@hls2003,
Thanks again, that’s very helpful.
I hope this came across but I wasn’t trying to trivialize your beliefs, just trying to sound the depths and get a feel for how this works.
@Nabil ad Dajjal:
No problem. And certainly the request came across as respectful inquiry; it’s not a topic I think a lot about and it’s interesting for me too to think through the implications.
@hls2003:
On the other hand, one of the things the goats say in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats is “Did we not case out many demons in your name?” Since the goats in this parable represent those who are going to Hell, it looks like at least some non-faith-filled people can cast out demons as well.
@Nabil:
If a goat can cast out demons, I expect that an observant but not saintly layman could as well, at least under some circumstances. But all the Catholic treatments of exorcisms I’ve come across strongly advise anybody who suspects a case of demonic possession to call for an exorcist rather than try and do the job themselves, since the risks of being mocked and beaten, or even possessed themselves, are just too great.
Well, for one thing, it is explicitly a parable, not a history. But we can see some indication elsewhere that invoking Jesus’ name and authority is not the only way God chooses to exorcise demons. E.g. Matthew 12:27 “And if I drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your people drive them out? So then, they will be your judges.”
I think the implication is that in every case, God is acting, not the individual alone. It seems to me that if a person deceives themselves into thinking that their own power or authority are what succeeds, then that may work for awhile – God may still work through that vessel – but it will work until it doesn’t. Then they’ll find that their power and authority are not real, and they may end up like the the seven sons of Sceva.
To wander around the point hls2003 is making, which I agree with:
To my recollection, most or all of the exorcisms in the Bible fall in to two categories.
1. Person demands demon leave possessed subject. Demon refuses. There is a fight. Sometimes the demon loses and gets cast out, sometimes the demon wins and you get the sons of Sceva.
2. Person demands demon leave possessed subject. Demon agrees to leave peacefully, often while pleading for mercy.
The difference between Case 1 and Case 2 seems to be whether the demon likes its odds of winning a fight and/or taking the victim out with it.
When Jesus casts a demon out of a person, his negotiating posture is “leave voluntarily, or I will MAKE you leave by force”. Being Jesus, he is fully capable of backing up those words with action, and most demons decide to go peacefully.
When non-Jesus people invoke the name of Jesus in an exorcism, they are taking a negotiating posture of “leave voluntarily, or I’ll call my big, strong friend Jesus who will make you leave by force”. Jesus has well established reputation for being big and strong amongst demons, so the key bit in this demand is not whether Jesus can make the demon leave, but whether the exorcist is actually close enough friends with Jesus that Jesus will come over and beat up demons on his behalf.
Cases like Mark 9:14 are when the demon was stubborn and refused to leave voluntarily when the disciples told it to go; it required an actual fight.
The Sons of Sceva were, by invoking Jesus through Paul, essentially saying “leave peacefully, or we’ll call our friend Paul, who will call his friend Jesus, who will totally wreck you”, and the demon responding with “I don’t believe you actually know Jesus well enough that he’s going to come wreck me on your say-so”.
It’s like a bar fight. “I’m a champion MMA fighter” is a very compelling argument for people not messing with you. “My friend here sitting next to me is a champion MMA fighter” is also pretty good. “I know a guy who knows a champion MMA fighter” is not.
Are you sure? Way back in the day, Athanasius recommended to non-believers that they make the sign of the cross as a way to test out his claims:
The rest of the tract is Platonic-style proofs. This is the only experiment he recommends.
This connects to a fun hypothesis I’ve been floating around.
I’ve often mulled over the fact that cases of demonic possession seem extremely rare in the West, while in the the East (and moreso the further east you travel, it sometimes seems) such cases become extremely common. An exorcist in America or Germany is a rarity to be marveled at, but in India, Malaysia, and the like they are far more common. My brother is studying to become a Bible translator, and he has traveled to missionary conferences across the world. In India he heard account after account of exorcists driving out demons. There was one man who was an extremely successful church planter, going from village to village and leaving behind churches in each one. It seemed that his primary method was to travel into a village and inquire as to whether there was anyone there possessed by evil spirits, and villagers would usually seriously and solemnly point them to some unfortunate person who was afflicted. He would then cast the demon out, and the family of the victim would be so amazed by his ability to cast out spirits that they would soon convert and start the core of a new church. He recounted exorcism after exorcism, and he wasn’t the only one.
Assume, for the sake of fun theorizing, that demons exist and actually do possess people in greater numbers in the East than the West. One common theory as to why this would be the case is that the Satan, ruler of evil spirits, has commanded his legions of darkness to work subtly and in hiding in the West, limiting themselves to temptations and the like. That way they can stay hidden from empirical science, and thus trick more people into becoming atheists. I never quite liked that theory, and an alternative presents itself to me. What if there are less possessions in the West because there are less demons, and there are less demons because Europe spent the last two thousand years putting crosses up everywhere. They consecrated land, baptized babies, said their prayers, and put the sign of the cross up on steeples on practically every inch of land from Constantinople to Edinburgh. And then they move to America and the first thing they do is put up more crosses, and say more prayers, and build more churches, and baptize more babies. And what if all that, apart from actual faith itself, is intolerable to evil spirits and have driven them away or weakened their power significantly? What if through the power of the mute crosses “demons are routed, oracles cease, and all magic and witchcraft is confounded” even to this day? What if the reduced numbers of possession cases isn’t due to the advance of science, but the vanguard of crosses that proceeded it? And what if Western Europe today, almost devoid of real faith, is still protected by the churches they won’t tear down, even if they don’t attend them? It’s a fun theory. At minimum it would make a good setting for a modern fantasy.
An interesting way to investigate this theory would be to look at the rates of demon possession in countries/regions which have burned or demolished some of their churches (e.g. when Republican Spain burned churches, was there a brief upswing in possession?). Also, “crosses and baptisms make things hard for demons” and “Satan is working subtly in the West” are mutually compatible. Perhaps the Prince of Darkness is working subtly in the West because his strength is far weaker there, and he has to use his resources cleverly.
I’m too lazy to look up sources now, but apparently there’s a growing demand for exorcists in the West… Maybe the idea that Christian faith keeps demons away really does have something going for it, and the decline of said faith is leading to a resurgence in demonic activity.
ETA: Fortunately, @Jaskologist has already sourced an article below: Catholic Exorcisms are Gaining Popularity in the US.
I’m currently serving with a Bible translation organization in Papua New Guinea, and there is definitely a much greater fear of spirits here than in the west. In some cultural groups spirit possession is a big concern and is traditionally viewed as incurable, except on occasion it is considered possible to make a bargain with a greater spirit that will then drive the lesser one out. Where I’m stationed people are mostly afraid of sorcery being practiced against them by another person, and sorcery revenge killings are a major problem.
Little Willie was a wizard,
Little Willie is no more,
What he thought a pentagram
Just made the demon sore.
I haven’t watched the video and am not in a position do so for quite a few hours, but based on your description of it, this looks less like analysis and more like an empirical claim about reality. The claim being that Christian horror films promotes Christianity in real life, with the mechanism being that the depiction of an in-movie universe in which Christian supernatural beliefs are true in a way that fits into Christian narratives (e.g. “the supernatural is always shown to be directly the product of a lack of faith”) leads viewers to see real-life Christianity more favorably.
I’ll have to check out the video later to see if this person presents any empirical evidence in support of this claim. But without seeing such evidence, I see no reason to take this claim any more seriously than any other bald, unsupported claim about reality. If the claim were based on a mechanism that’s well evidenced and documented, there might be some reason to consider it more plausible, but the alleged mechanism of (roughly speaking) [depiction of X as true in movie worlds] -> [audience is more favorable to X as being true in real life] also lacks evidence supporting it, from what I’ve read.
As a Christian, I tend to think such films are not effective as propaganda for actual Christianity. They’re probably mildly counterproductive.
Horror movies tend to slap Christian, and more specifically Catholic, imagery on to things willy-nilly, while completely ignoring the actual religious underpinnings of any of that imagery.
Essentially, media tends to treat Christianity in horror movies as magic; show this sign, or speak this chant, and you’ll counter the magic being used by the evil thing. Crucifixes are a thing that repels vampires, just like garlic, so carve little crosses into your bullets and dip them in garlic oil, then shoot them at the vampires! Easy! No actual religion required!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is sort of the ideal example of this; in the course of seven years of television episodes, the characters constantly use crosses to repel demons, they burn vampires with holy water, they actually use blessed swords, and actual relics of actual saints, but nobody goes to church. Nobody even brings it up as a possibility, like, “Maybe, given that Christian iconography has power over the evil creatures, and Christian religious authorities are able to create, easily, commonly, effective anti-evil countermeasures like holy water and hand it out for free, we should consider whether these Christians are on to something here?”
Religious icons in this view are just charms; no different than iron horseshoes hanging over your door to repel fairies. They don’t mean anything; monsters are just allergic to them. The “Holy” in Holy Water means exactly as much as the “Cold” in “Cold Iron”.
+1
Orthogonal to my religious beliefs, I really dislike dumb fantasy like that.
Not really a Buffy fan per se, but allow me to interject a slightly off-topic recommendation of The Dresden Files as Urban Fantasy that I think manages to do a rather better job depicting pious Christians in a modern day setting where magic is real. And the ways in which religious faith is fundamentally different from the sort of magic the main character does is examined from several aspects.
To quote the most recent book, in which a Knight Of The Cross is discussing the swords of his order with the main character:
This is like the third recommendation I’ve gotten for Dresden Files. I’ll source a copy of the first volume, unless for some reason that’s not the best place to start?
The Dresden Files books are generally good, and I enjoy them.
That said, the first few have some rough patches. Don’t be surprised when they aren’t flawless. They’re fast-paced action and adventure, and good at it, not philosophy. Strong page-turners, though.
I’d say start with Book 1, Storm Front. It’s fun. It’s quick. Many of the later books are stronger, because Butcher became a better writer, but they aren’t better starting points.
@Le Maistre Chat
I really enjoy the Dresden Files and just finished reading the series for the third time recently, but it does unfortunately heavily lean in to the sin you complain about: strong generic belief of any variety is sufficient to power “holy symbols” of whatever faith the wielder believes in. For example, the main character has a pentacle amulet from his mother, and it can function as a holy symbol because he believes in the generic power of Magic. He can’t use a cross because he doesn’t believe in it.
The Christian (mostly Catholic) characters are well treated and some of the most powerful opponents of evil. I do enjoy the series, but I’m willing to overlook this particular bit of heresy in my fiction, especially the tapdancing around how Harry Dresden sees Michael stomping on fallen angels but still refuses to believe in God (as well as, y’know, fighting fallen angels). It might be worth reading a few chapters of the first book in the library before investing in any of the books, but if you can get over this niggle, I’d heartily recommend the series.
@CatCube
One minor quibble, Cat. Harry believes, or more to the point knows that the Christian God exists. What he doesn’t have is faith in that god, in his benevolence, the idea that there is a divine plan, or that if there is one that it is a good one, and that is one of the fundamental conflicts between his worldview and his christian allies like the Knights of the Cross, Father Forthill, etc.
That crucial distinction between “belief that” and “belief in”.
@CatCube: I think that is a different thing from what Phigment describes.
In the Dresden Files, crosses don’t work because of divine intervention, they work because emotions and beliefs have power. Deep religious faith (regardless of what religion it comes from) and the objects and symbols that represent it have the power to ward of certain types of supernatural beings, but that’s in principle no different from the way thresholds work.
So vampires don’t like crosses, not because they are magically allergic to orthogonal line segments, but because of the faith those crosses represent.
Now, that is not the same as God intervening on behalf of pious followers (though there is some evidence that He does intervene on occasion, eg. the Knights of Cross’ ability to always be in the right place at the right time), but I do think it’s a little more dignified than how it is handled in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or various similar works.
Edit: So, I now see that this is exactly what hls2003 describes below, but my point is that “religious objects have magical properties because magic” and “religious faith has power that can be channeled through religious objects” are two different tropes.
Dresden not being religious despite hanging out with archangels is I think just the difference between matter-of-fact-knowing something exists and believing in something.
@Le Maistre Chat: I think the standard advice is either to start at book 4 or read book 1 to get familiar with the world and the characters and then skip to book 4, depending on how much you want to invest in giving the series a shot.
Books 1-3 are standalone stories that just aren’t on the same level as the rest of the series.
@silver_swift
While I’ll agree that book 3-4 is where Butcher really seems to hit his stride, I have to disagree that the first three are “stand-alone”. Without spoilers:
-Books 1-4 describe a through-arc in one aspect of Harry’s growth and development, and how it impacts his relationships with others, most especially Murphy.
-Book 1 establishes most of the basic building blocks of the setting, and skipping it would lead to missing out on things like some nuance in the characterization of Morgan (think of his actions towards the end), and the significance of Susan Rodriguez.
-Book 2 is probably the most “stand-alone” of the early books, but even here there are a lot of elements that are further developed. Karrin and Dresden’s working relationship. The introduction of Billy, Georgia, Andy, et al. Further development of Marcone, etc.
-Book 3 is one of the worst books to skip, precisely because it is where the really big long term plot elements of the series roll into motion. The introduction of Michael Carpenter, the character that started this digression. The first appearance of The Leanansidhe, and the first real explanation of Harry’s relationship with (and debt to) her. Pretty much everything that happens at Bianca’s party (Gur svefg nccrnenapr bs Pbjy naq Xhzbev, naq gurve tvsg bs gur Arzrfvf-gnvagrq Ngunzr gb Yrn. Gur vagebqhpgvba bs Gubznf naq Whfgvar. Gur pncgher naq sngr bs Fhfna Ebqevthrm naq gur jne orgjrra gur Erq Pbheg naq gur Juvgr Pbhapvy gung Uneel raqf hc fgnegvat orpnhfr bs vg, naq ba, naq ba.).
If you’re the sort of person who likes to skip ahead, I’d say books 1-2 are skippable if you must, though skipping them robs several later books of their full emotional and narrative impact at various points, but 3 is definitely NOT skippable.
I agree. In addition, a lot of times it’s basically a variant of “the power of heart” – strong-willed faith in something is the power, not the thing believed in. Christians, Shaolin monks, New Age crystals, shamans, Wiccans, even just “believing in yourself” are all equally valid paths to mystic power. To the extent Hollywood religion is praised, it’s usually in the context that some religious people have true spirituality, not that some spiritual people have found true religion. Usually to find “true spirituality” in this setting one has to cast off any trappings of merely parochial religion to find the “true power / truth hidden within.”
Technically not true! Buffy’s college boyfriend Riley arrives at a church to save the day in the episode “Who Are You?” because he is going to church there.
But yeah, general point is absolutely correct.
Doesn’t horror generally present a fairly conservative perspective? In pretty much every instance I can think of, whatever evil thing that comes after the protagonist always represents a punishment either for a moral transgression or pushing past certain natural laws.
It doesn’t shock me that Christian horror would therefore represent a conservative christian viewpoint.
Seems to me that cultural touchstones like Christianity can just be easier to work within and for the audience to understand than completely unknown/religions cultures (plus, if you make a horror movie about those, you might be accused of cultural appropriation).
RedLetterMedia just did a review of The Exorcist, and one of the things they mention is the the practice had largely died out at the time of the movie, but regained in popularity due to it.
I couldn’t find backing for that claim, but exorcisms are on the rise in America:
Haven’t we already had this discussion about how Scooby Doo is anticatholic?
That’s not what I remember….
Ah, I missed that discussion. I would have pointed out that “The Monk” actually doesn’t fit nicely into the mold of “anti-catholic gothic novels” as described by the article for at least two reasons:
1) The supernatural elements are not debunked — on the contrary, the book portrays ghosts and demons as very real and very dangerous.
2) This is the only novel I know of where the Spanish Inquisition are portrayed as the good guys, who arrive at the end like the cavalry to finally put an end to the deviance of the “evil clergy”, which in the book is clearly not evil by merely being catholic, but quite explicitely because they deviate from their own rules and faith and fall prey to temptation.
My understanding is that the Spanish Inquisition were the good guys in the witch hunts, insisting on serious standards of proof and light sentences for those convicted. Their concern was with Jews and Muslims pretending to be Christians after the expulsion, and they viewed witchcraft hysteria as an undesirable distraction.
In fact the Spanish Inquisition was generally considered more lenient than the secular courts, so much so that there were examples of people trying to get their cases transferred to the Inquisition’s tribunals because they thought they’d get a lighter punishment.
@Machine Interface
I suppose you’re right about The Monk. If you have better examples, let me know.
One thing to keep in mind about filmmakers is they work under an incredible array and volume of constraints. In the end shortcuts have to be taken somewhere, and when writing horror scripts these are often taken by falling back on symbolism and Schelling points the filmmakers can reasonably expect the audience to understand and use as a launchpad for whatever few novel concepts the filmmaker has come up with.
No, or at least if they do they’re not doing a great job. Also, in the most famous (and best) demonic possession movie ever, the protagonist who saves the kid in the end (by sacrificing himself) struggles a serious crisis of faith throughout the film. This crisis might even be the reason he elected to sacrifice himself. The main atheist characters (the kid and her mom) survive at the end, while the consistent believer (the older priest) is slain. Not exactly pro-Christian propaganda, at least read on that level.
Even if my take is totally wrong, it’s still possible for the takeaway from these possession movies to be “Sheesh, Christianity sure has a lot of scary stuff in it. Glad I don’t believe in all that!”
The big problem with reading stuff like this into movies is that movies are art and any art of marketable quality is going to contain some level of ambiguity, so it’s possible to find evidence for whatever you want. Thus all the amusing theories about the true meaning of “Citizen Kane”, “Inside Out”, etc. Movies therefore can be a useful way to illustrate concepts, but I don’t think (in most cases) it’s possible to point to movies as significant sources of social patterns.
China isn’t going to want Trump to win in 2020. I’m imagining that the election will be at least partly China vs. Russia.
Is this reasonable? Are there Democratic nominees which China is likely to prefer?
You mean likely nominees? ‘Cause one obvious, if unlikely, choice comes to mind.
I have no idea who you have in mind. perhaps rot13 it to avoid unnecessary CW? Or use another cipher to make it more of a game…
Andrew Yang.
Not to imply I think he’s a secret agent or anything, but Chinese government may feel they would have some cultural ties that would be advantageous.
His parents are Taiwanese, actually.
Just wikipedia’ed that actually. I was worried he was Japanese and I’d look like a real idiot.
Would an American born Taiwanese feel more affinity for mainland China than, say, Warren? Would the Chinese leadership think so? I don’t know. It seems to me that on issues other than Taiwan itself he might. How likely is that to come up in the near future?
My experience with American born Taiwanese people is that they don’t like China more than the average American, and the cultural ties are pretty weak. My experience with Taiwanese immigrants is that they really don’t like being mistaken for Chinese. This might not apply to Yang in particular.
“Yang” is not a Japanese surname. Japanese has no “ng” sound, and most Japanese surnames are polysyllabic (though I did know a Japanese person whose surname was Ai, which is two mora but would generally be pronounced monosyllabically by Americans and arguably most Japanese).
Interesting to imagine how average Chinese and Chinese government would react to a Yang victory. My guess is it would be something like a Cuban reaction to a Marco Rubio victory (my limited knowledge of those communities says that the Miami Cubans are virulently opposed to the Castro regime but that might not stop average Cuban in Cuba from feeling a twinge of pride if a Cuban American were to win the US presidency).
I’m pretty sure the average Chinese would see it as some kind of spiritual win for themselves, regardless. How the CCP felt about it might depend on Yang’s actual views on Taiwan, which I have no idea about. As others have said the average Taiwanese is more anti-CCP than the average American but Yang strikes me as less interventionist or bellicose than the average US presidential candidate.
I’m not sure. Put yourself in China’s shoes: yes Trump is an unstable actor and your economy is being undercut by his actions, but from a propaganda point of view, he’s a goldmine. China’s whole argument against a US-style democracy is that the instability it leads to would potentially harm the nation’s overall rise in standards of living. Having Trump to portray as an embodiment of that chaos is really, really useful for them. In interviews with Chinese nationals, you’ll constantly here Trump and uncertainty referenced.
Furthermore, despite hitting china on their trade practices, Trump has been noticeably silent on their human rights abuses. He’s signaled he doesn’t care about the crackdown in Hong Kong or the repression in the western provinces. This isn’t even going on the knock off gains china can make internationally as US prestige decreases globally. OBOR has stepped up in the bast 3 years largely as a result of US retrenchment. Any democrat would/could score easy points by going against China on these fronts and would be much more capable of rallying the international community against China than Trump has been.
All-in-all saying that China is unabiguously anti-Trump is simplistic. They don’t like him, they’d prefer to have an ally in Washington, but they can deal with having him here.
Compare that to his likely challengers: it’s hard to see China ever complying with Warren’s Trade Proposals and Sanders would likely take similar action. That being said, its possible that China would prefer to work with a moderate democrat like Biden or Butiegeg, but only if they aren’t forced to adopt a Warren style approach to trade.
All in all, I think China likely sees no reason to involve themselves in this election in dramatic support of one candidate or another. If they do, it will be subtle and mostly involve some soft cash around the margins aimed at influencing specific policy goals, not overall candidacies.
Yeah, I feel like all non-allies would rather see the internal strife caused by Trump continue rather than end.
I was thinking in terms of covert support, not dramatic support.
Right, but covert support follows the same logic as overt support: you only give it if there’s an obviously preferable outcome that your support will help achieve.
I’m arguing that China wouldn’t get a clear benefit out of a non-Trump candidate, so they’ve got no motive to assume the risk of being caught meddling in our politics.
But you don’t need a scapegoat if your economy is doing well.
Counterpoint: In unequal societies, the benefits of a booming economy are distributed unevenly. Scapegoats are massively helpful to divert public anger in that scenario.
The masses in China don’t have nearly the influence or power as the elites do, so the elites have more incentive to have things go well and the power (allegedly) to implement it.
…and the elites maintain their position of privilege over the masses via propaganda and attempts at thought control. Having a dramatic and mostly accurate example of the pitfalls of representative democracy helps them fend of their own people from demanding a similar system.
It depends on what happens with the Chinese economy in the next year. If the PRC follows the rest of the developed world into recession in 2020, they may decide that more competent leadership is preferable to continued trade uncertainty. OTOH, slower (but continuous) growth may be a price the PRC is willing to pay in return for the US essentially ceding hegemony in the Pacific to China.
Note that this ignores the possibility of the PRC and the Trump administration coming to some kind of agreement. I’d evaluate the probability of a real trade deal coming together any time before the election at ~20%. Any kind of compromise is less valuable to Trump than the political value of appearing to fight China on trade; only a complete surrender on the part of the PRC would be better, and the PRC will never surrender.
I disagree. Trump would love to have an agreement and even if it’s crap he’ll just say it’s a complete victory like with Mexico. He would much rather say he accomplished something others couldn’t by being tough than that he accomplished nothing but hardship for Americans by failing at Chinese negotiations for two years
If that was all he wanted, he’d have it already. Xi would be perfectly happy to increase farm purchases and make a few token reforms if it meant making Trump finally shut up and leave them alone to dominate the Pacific and Central Asia. Trump does appear to have some actual demands that Xi is reluctant to grant, although most likely they’re Lighthizer and Navarro’s ideas.
China’s 150,000$ in Facebook ads versus Russia’s 200,000$ in Facebook ads, it’s gonna be a massive battle!
+1
I don’t think people really grasp how enormous and complex the US presidential election is. It would take a massive and ridiculously intricate operation to actually have any effect.
Bigger than the almond industry?
Why would Russia want to see Trump re-elected? I’m not aware of any benefits his presidency brought to Russian bigwigs. The only reason that comes to mind is that Trump makes US in general weaker due to his incompetence (or perceived incompetence).
Well, they wanted him elected, so unless he’s outlived his usefulness, there’s no reason for them to stop trying to have him in office.
You are dramatically under-estimating how important this is for the current Russian administration.
@Oscar Sebastian
From what I gathered the reason for supporting Trump in the last elections was that he promised at least some positive dynamic in Russia-US relations as opposed to Hillary, who was straight adversarial. Seeing as Trump didn’t deliver on diplomatic front, I see no reason for Russian establishment to expend resources supporting him, seeing as that might compromise relations with his rival (in case of Trump not getting re-elected). Not saying they will try to stop Trump, just maybe won’t actively help him.
@Aftagley
I’m a russian, who lives in Russia. I’m not sure how much Trump weakens US, and in what way him being in power is important for our government. Can you be more specific?
The Russians didn’t support Donald Trump; they opposed Hillary Clinton. The Wikileaks dump was pure “Hillary is corrupt in ways that should make Democrats want to not vote for her”. The social media stuff was also more anti-Hillary than pro-Trump(*). And this was happening when the smart money had Trump’s prospect of electoral victory at less than 20%. The probability of Trump winning, believing himself indebted to Vladimir Putin for that victory, and then actually returning that favor, is laughable because this is Donald Trump we are talking about.
In hindsight, we can say that this election was so close that in the zero-sum game of politics, Putin attacking Hillary gave the win to Trump. But that’s our hindsight, not Putin’s foresight. If we’re trying to guess his motives, guess something that makes sense in 2015 or early 2016, and that’s not going to be “President Donald Trump will do favors for Moscow”.
Russia’s reason for meddling in the 2016 electoral campaign was almost certainly just to opportunistically weaken POTUS-45 by amplifying the domestic opposition they would face from day one. Actually arranging for POTUS-45 to be the weaker of the two candidates, was a nice bonus along the same path. No eleven-dimensional or even three-dimensional chess required, just “It is in our favor if our adversaries’ leadership is weak and distracted”.
The same will hold in 2020; the only question is what opportunities Moscow will have to arrange a weakened US leadership for 2021-2024.
* And there was some anti-Trump stuff too, now mostly forgotten. Also the Steele Dossier, which never would have made it out of Russia without the Kremlin blessing a dump all over Trump. Whoever won, Moscow wanted weakened.
You will excuse me if I do not believe that the Russians did not have a clear favorite in the race.
@Oscar Sebastian
Unless you have a similar list of Clinton associates to compare it to (to which a similar level of effort has been devoted), that list is largely meaningless.
ISTM that we’re pretty good at arranging weak, divided leadership for ourselves….
@John Schilling
Considering there were only two competitors, the distinction seems meaningless to me.
Sure, I never said that Trump would do some special favors towards Putin, just that Trump’s rhetoric was friendly-ish towards Russia, when Hillary’s wasn’t, so helping her win would seem counterproductive.
This assumes some scary level of competence of Kremlin intelligence. I’m not sure they have such a fine control of the information flow.
I would agree with that, except I’m not quite sure that Russian government actually wants adversarial relations with US, sure our local hawks and military contractors are probably pleased with current state of affairs and all, and they likely get a decent amount of say in our foreign politics, but this situation hurts a lot of more trade-oriented oligarchs, who likely have some serious influence as well. To me it seems that it’s the US military complex (and NATO) who benefit most from having an external enemy to point at, although of course I might just be biased.
It isn’t meaningless if the question is whether they would support him against a different opponent–which was the question that this thread developed out of.
@DavidFriedman
I disagree, in a situation with only two competitors you can support one by hindering the other. Calling it a different name tells us nothing about the underlying motive.
Yes, but now we’re talking about a new contest with a different set of competitors. If we’re trying to predict who Putin will favor in 2020 based on his actions in 2016, it does matter whether his 2016 actions were driven by his favor for Trump (who is running in 2020) or his disfavor for Clinton (who is not).
Bob and Alice run for class president; Malevolent Mike sneakily undermines Bob’s campaign and Alice wins. Next year, Alice is running against Charlie. What will Mike do? If Bob meddled the last time around because he lusted after Alice and wanted to win her favor, he’ll probably try to undermine Charlie as well. If Mike went after Bob because he hates Bob, then meh, Alice/Charlie maybe doesn’t matter so much. Or maybe he also hates Charlie, or maybe he likes and will support Charlie, but “Mike’s helped Alice when he trashed Bob!” tells us little about what Mike will do in the Alice/Charlie race.
@John Schilling
Yeah, but the fact that “Russian involvement during 2016 election hurt Hillary more than Trump” doesn’t tells us if the goal of Putin was to hurt Clinton or aid Trump, cause the action taken satisfy both those goals. Calling it “Trump support” or “Hillary hindering” doesn’t actually give us any new information, so the distinction is meaningless.
Your Alice/Bob example tells me that there seems to be a communication problem, rather than factual disagreement. Not sure how to solve it.
The point is that the Russian operation was intended to weaken whichever person ended up as president, largely by stirring up internal conflict.
I can think of some rational reasons: Putin wants to impress voters by making them believe the Russia got Trump elected story even as he publicly denies it. Or he wants the relationship between America and Europe to remain strained.
But ultimately I don’t think that really explains it. This is my model for most of Gee-Oh-Politics: it’s a jobs program. During the Cold War America was a facing a real threat in the Soviet Union. All that propaganda, all those suitcases worth of money funneled to some third world despot, it might not have been wholly wise, but at least the goal made sense. After the cold war, it stopped making sense. But people like to keep their jobs. So the solutions went looking for more problems, picking more fights. We need an alliance with country X to contain country Y! And why do we need to contain country Y? Look at their attempts to undermine our alliance with country X! It was much the same in Russia. The 200,000 in Facebook ads I mentioned above, that provided employment to a half dozen Russian poli-sci grads. What are they supposed to do, learn to code?
I… think I have to agree. So many of our post-1991 fights look incoherent, half explained by prejudice (“Russia is evil because it’s conservative! Let’s go tell the McCain wing of the other Party to keep hating them for old time’s sake!” “Let’s invade Iraq to impress my dad!”) and half by random noise.
Can’t just cut those State Department jobs.
I don’t have figures handy, but as I recall the state department did have substantial reductions post-cold war. As did the military. Defense spending as a share of GDP fell almost half, the navy went from 600 ships to 300, the Army 18 divisions to 10, the Air Force went from 700k to 500k airmen.
You’re mistaking idiocy for conspiracy. Most US foreign policy is driven by reaction, not calculation. Various buzzers go off, and the white house responds, almost always with an eye far more on the domestic implications than the international ones. It’s not calculated, it’s not a jobs program, it’s inertia leavened with knee jerk responses. And it’s also the area of policy that is by far the most actively managed and calculated. Everything else is almost pure inertia.
Well, Trump illegally asked them to investigate Biden and Warren for him, so I imagine their viability went way up from the perspective of the Chinese.
At this point, what do you think the odds are that he would trade such an investigation for a ceasefire in the trade war?
Considering the only reason the leader of the free world isn’t speaking out against China’s actions in Hong Kong is to appease China for the negotiations over this self-inflicted trade war, I submit that he is not intelligent enough to make such a trade.
But the leader of the free world is speaking out against China’s actions in Hong Kong.
Relevant polandball
Considering Trump’s usual attitude towards deals, he’d make that promise, then renege on it the moment the Chinese gave him the information. He can always re-impose tariffs, after all.
Illegally?
It is illegal to ask foreign powers to dig up dirt on your political opponents purely for political purposes. Unlike Ukraine, there is no Hunter Biden (let alone a Warren child) employed in China, so even that paper-thin, blatantly obvious excuse doesn’t apply here.
I saw a piece recently which described Hunter Biden’s involvement with China. As best I recall, he accompanied his father on an official trip there, shortly after which a firm he was connected to got permission from the Chinese government to do something they wanted to do.
That’s by memory, but I think correct.
What was your reason for asserting the opposite?
@Oscar Sebastian,
The Hunter Biden/Joe Biden China episode has been all over the news, but perhaps you just missed it. It may be a sequence of coincidences (or even partially wrong), but this randomly selected article contains most of the allegations:
This is what Trump was referring to, so that same excuse seems to apply.
Which Democratic candidate(s) would be mostly likely to end the trade war, or at least tone it down?
What defines a good conversation?
Here, by conversation I mean “small talk/attempting to know someone better/etc”, not for a specific purpose. My usual attempt is to optimize so that the other person is enjoying the conversation, whatever that may imply (listening more, being more expressive, being humorous, etc, etc.).
The trouble is divining if the person *is* enjoying the conversation. My rough metric for this is if they come back to talk to me again, which is slightly complicated by stuff like if they’re a longterm friend, if they interact daily with me, etc, basically reasons not directly related to “they want ot talk to me.”
I guess the specific question is are there better metrics to determine if someone enjoyed a conversation?
P.S. is this a good place to post these kinds of things? I’d like to ask a few more questions about these sort of things in the future, so if open threads aren’t the right place please let me know.
The easiest way to tell if your partner is enjoying the conversation is to stop talking for a bit. If they either say something on the same topic or ask you a question, they were probably enjoying it, or want to flatter you.
Seems fine
Also one of the most important parts of being a good conversationalist – conversations shouldn’t (usually) be monologues.
Interestingly (or unfortunately?) most of the conversations I have with the people I know are in a responder/listener role. In these cases, just active listening and asking questions seems to be sufficient. I’m actually not very sure if they just expect interest, or also expect information?
In the extremely rare cases that I decide to talk about something totally different than what people want to talk about, it is almost always something that I know the person has had experience in (their own interests, problems that they’ve experienced if it’s a closer friend, etc, etc…), and rarely my interests (mostly because discussing SSC-like content in a high school setting is…not ideal.)
I guess it just feels like, in the vast majority of cases, just being attentive and asking relevant questions makes me think people think they’ve had an interesting/relevant conversation, and I’m not really sure if information from my side is useful or required.
Depends on the person though, some people will try to keep the conversation going out of politeness and others will barely respond even if they are enjoying it
Yes. These are great topics.
A body language book I read stressed that before doing any interpretation, you need to get a baseline for that person.
I try to use active listening, and I also try to encourage it. I use (or I engineer) breaks in the conversation, and go “what were we talking about?”. I avoid like hell “taking turns conversations” – they’re the least enjoyable type. You know, the ones where you wait for the other person to stop so you can say something in turn. Much better to find a common topic, or at the very least a neutral or abstract one.
Pauses in conversations are much underrated. You can let the conversation stall and see where the partner goes – if he asks something about the current or a previous subject, you’re on the right track.
This painfully reminds me of a previous relationship – one of the earliest signs that it wasn’t working anymore was that she stopped wanting to talk about me. All conversation breaks took the topic went back to her or a neutral one. The reverse is probably a pretty good sign of romantic interest.
Are they lightly biting their lip, are they gently brushing your hand, are their pupils dilated, are their nipples erect…wait, what were we talking about?
Intercourse, naturally.
Define the good you say? Engaging robot brain. Follow me into the realm of spherical cows. Consider Grice’s Maxims as a starting point:
Quality: the speaker is saying something that they believe to be true
Quantity: the speaker contributes enough information about the topic. Not too little, not too much
Relevance : the speaker is staying on topic, or moving logically or at least appropriately between topics
Manner: the speaker expresses themselves well enough for the context
These maxims are usually presented descriptively, as an observation about how people naturally communicate crystallized into rules (which is confusing, none of them are rules). Specifically I was taught that they were rules Listeners assume the person speaking to them to hold to. This is part of the Cooperative principle of conversation. Now if we pretend these are 4 factors of some Platonic ideal of conversation, I think we can play with them and find some informative things.
First, they’re largely content neutral, which is good, because we want our Platonic Conversationalist to be able to converse about anything. Whether one is discussing themselves, the weather, sports, food, or film, the 4 maxims can be invoked.
Second, it’s real dry. Fine if we’re considering conversations as information transfers, but so inhuman. Especially in the context of small talk.
How do these relate to enjoyment of conversation as your question suggests?
That’s where flouting the maxims comes in. Choosing to defy parts of the 4 factors to create color, delight, or maybe bile. This is where Irony lives, and her daughter Sarcasm, doing creepy incestuous lesboid things with one another while Bragi watches from a corner.
Some people hunger for quality, they want information to be transmitted about the topic (which could be the speaker)
Some hunger for quantity, they want beautifully distilled information, Goldilocks porridge.
Some hunger for relevance, they want strictly delineated information which builds on itself logically and elegantly.
Some hunger for manner, they want things expressed clearly.
A person may have different hungers in different contexts. Multiple hungers which modulate each other and guide the rhythm of the interaction. One can see the outline of the Form of Conversation, an ideal interaction where the words are fair and delightsome, the topic stimulating and clear, a vector across which personality and information flow ecstatic and pure. The marriage of true minds. A land love might call home.
But wait, nobody thinks about these things, and I’ve had conversations so effervescent and riff-y and downright dank that not one of these rules applied except maybe relevance because the person I was speaking to vibed off me so well everything was relevant. And to that I say the cow is growing shapely udders and we must leave the garden of forms.
But, there’s 4 questions one can now ask in an attempt to bridge the gap and discern another’s enjoyment.
Do they like the topic under discussion? Do they meet quality with quality? Fact with fact. If not change it or puncture it or take the hint and walk away.
How are they contributing? Do they meet quantity with quantity. Is there an imbalance in the weight of the conversation. Sometimes the flow of conversation requires more of one party than the other at a given time, most dramatically when retelling a story. Conversational gaps can help find that line. The rhythm of turns might be culturally dependent, but there should probably be turns taken. The speaker will try and give the relevant information, but if you listen actively your own questions will inform just how much information you require. This is a mutual exchange.
Are they staying on topic or wandering? How do they manage relevance? Some people are annoyed by changes in topic, some people get bored if conversations don’t move with enough haste. You can try going deeper on a topic or changing the topic. With strangers, non sequiturs are riskier. We can’t all be manic pixies.
And how are they talking? Mind your manner. Don’t parrot your interlocuter’s style but at least try and be on an adjacent level.
And remember that the maxims aren’t applicable just to spoken language but to body language too! How excitingly dense this all gets!
My advice is to pepper sapphic incest into the conversation to see if anybody’s listening. I don’t know, people are weird, life is hard, if you think about how to converse too much the brain starts to ferment and it’s hard to talk to anyone.
That was wonderfully written and made me laugh! thank you!
I regret I don’t have anything else to say and thus can’t repay the effort you’ve expended. Maybe after I look into the links you’ve referenced.
Flouting the maxims.
It suddenly occurs to me that hunters need carrier bags almost as much as gatherers do. One man could carry a whole antelope back, but what about larger game? It’s possible that the whole tribe walks to where the mastodon was killed, but it might make sense that it was butchered and taken back in pieces. Anyone know about modern hunter-gatherers and large game?
Le Guin; The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction
“Human history, or so conventional wisdom goes, is a story of violent, merciless competition. We have come to embrace the idea that a succession of one thing defeating another literally is history, whether that’s between species, political leaders, or conflicting ideologies. In our inherited notion of human history, our caveman — and he is always a man — comes home from a hard day on the plains with a wildebeest or a deer slung over his shoulder. His adoring cavewife and cavekids tuck into the prize around the campfire, as the winner recounts the tale of his courage and heroism. Just as significant as the prize, that hard-won carcass of meat, is the story. “
Trick is to peel the mastodon, tan the outards and make a bag to carry lumps of the next mastodon, children, water (big one for persistence hunting) etc. Wicker baskets are also nice and low-tech, as are string nets.
Bring a stick and you can use it as a yoke so your arms don’t get tired.
If you’ve just killed a wooly mammoth, elephant seal etc, sleds are also an option.
What’s available for carrying water at that tech level?
And you also presumably want a bag to carry your butchering tools. They aren’t large or heavy, but they’d still be sub-optimal to carry in your hands during a long walk/run.
Leather waterskins with the seams sealed by some kind of gum, glue or pitch, I’m guessing.
It’s not like it needs to be hermetically sealed, if you’re only using it for a few hours of hunting. Also pottery, once that’s invented. And dried gourds.
There’s another elegant way to bag up meat that I forgot.
The stomach isn’t going to hold very much of the mastodon.
My understanding is that cured hide buckets are pretty great for water, and commonly used by hunter gatherers.
Game comes with leather. Big game hunters maybe dispatched a runner to tell the gatherers and children to come camp by the carcass long enough to tan the hide with piss, etc. Then next big kill, you may not need the hide because you made bags last time.
If you can create leather with piss, why were there incredibly toxic tanneries all over the place polluting everything and killing everyone for hundreds or thousands of years?
I think the toxic tanneries made superior leather?
People were working hides in the Paleolithic, but surely people came up with superior leather-working inventions with toxic side effects later.
Keratin is tough because it’s around 15% cystiene. Cystiene is an amino acid that contains sulphur and readily forms crosslinks with other cystiene units in the protien. Using nasty chemicals to break the disulphide bonds makes it a lot easier to remove hair from the hide before tanning.
Traditionally, ‘vegetable’ tanning was done using tannins. These were derived (both chemically and etymologically) from tree barks.
Around 1840, chrome tanning was developed. It uses chromium (III) compounds to bind the collagen protiens in the skin together, forming leather.
While chromium (III) is not terribly dangerous, chromium (VI) compounds are quite carcinogenic. I suspect that chromium (VI) contamination is/was an issue in the past and the developing world.
Both veg and chrome tanning is used nowadays.
Fungicides etc. are also widely used to stop the skin from rotting before it’s tanned. These are another source of pollution.
This was an article written in July of this year, the author isn’t super popular and i don’t remember it being discussed.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-private-equity-should-not-exist?utm_source=substack&utm_content=topposts
It also sites this report by marco Rubio of all people:
https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/5/rubio-releases-report-on-domestic-investment
I don’t see myself as necessarily enamored with the free market, whatever that means, but I’m inherently skeptical of people describing schemes or something as a scheme where i can’t understand how or why it would succeed. So for example i can understand how Ponzi Schemes would work both at a financial and psychological level. I can also understand something like pump and dump.
“PE” was by my understanding simply when a group of people buy out a company they think is mismanaged. I can conceive of said group of people being rich and ignorant and causing the company they buy to go out of business, but (and this is the reason for my post) can someone explain how PE can or could amount to a company being bought, looted, and bankrupted, and this somehow benefiting the people that own the stock of the company?
I think the principle is that of taking advantage of limited liability. Owning a company with a net value of negative 1 billion dollars isn’t very different to owning a company with a net value of negative 10 dollars.
You start with a company with low net value (priced as such) with significant assets but also significant long term liabilities.
(But that’s still a going concern.)
So on paper the company may have a billion in assets but it also owes close to a billion to creditors like employees owed some kind of long term benefit, ideally poorly secured with the debts belonging to the type of creditors with little power/clout to audit the company. ie employees.
You, along with a group buy the company and quietly strip out the assets, sell the buildings etc to other firms owned by the group of equity firms for a price chosen to be sorta-market rate… but decidedly at the lower end of “market rate” and then have your other firms rent the property back to the firm being stripped nominally at market rate but at the upper end of “market rate”.
Report it as an attempt to “free up equity” for the company to do something.
Money and real assets trickle out. Eventually the company ends up with vastly more debt than assets but with a slow-ish decline without creditors having any clear claims on any of the assets transferred to other companies .
They file for bankruptcy the creditors, aka employees have to go cap in hand and take pennies on the dollar for the debts owed to them.
Meanwhile the real assets end up elsewhere.
It’s basically a scam targeting the firms creditors for the benefit of the firms shareholders and their other holdings. ideally done well enough it can be hard to prove that it’s not just mismanagement.
After all, in companies that aren’t doing this it’s sometimes logical for owners to shift assets to different subsidiaries for management or tax reasons.
Acquiring a company with a net value of 1 billion is a lot different from one of negative 10 dollars.
I think his point is that you acquire a company with a net value of 10 dollars and drive its net value down to negative 1 billion dollars by legally moving the billion dollars worth of assets away and keeping the billion dollars of debt.
You can’t really do that either.
@baconbits9
I genuinely don’t know. I’m not a PE guy or a lawyer.
Lets put it this way, if a company was value at assets minus liabilities, and it could split the two every shareholder meeting would end with selling off all the assets and paying all that cash out as a dividend as that would increase the value to the shareholders by roughly the amount of debt held.
It looks to me as if “activist investors” routinely do exactly what baconbits says doesn’t happen, but with a bit more sophistication.
One trick is not to invest in the future – stop developing anything new, and use what you would have invested to buy back shares, raising the stock price. Sell your shares while they are high, before the lack of new profits kills the company’s revenue.
The classic method is to load the company up with debt, that’s only (barely) sustainable as long as interest rates remain low – and gets a lower rate today by having that rate be adjustable. Sell your shares before rates change – after once again using the money to raise share prices. (Alternatively, try Murphy’s suggestions for extracting the money, but I believe that’s got a lot more potential to get you in legal trouble.)
There are lots of ways that a company can increase the value of its equity at the expense of its creditors, though not so blatant as a direct transfer of assets.
In general, creditors’ upside is limited; it makes no difference to them if the company barely survives or if it does great, since they get paid first. For equity holders it’s the opposite – they have unlimited upside but their downside is capped at zero. It makes little difference to the equity holders if the company goes bust at -$1B or -$10B, but it makes a tremendous difference to the bondholders.
So anything which increases the *volatility* of future outcomes hurts bondholders and helps equity holders. Even negative expected-value changes to the business can help the value of the equity.
This effect is especially significant for the case where the business isn’t doing well. If my company is on the edge of bankruptcy, spending a ton of money on a risky and expensive investment makes sense for the equity holders – if it succeeds they get to reap the benefits, and if it fails, it just means the creditors don’t recover as much as they would have. And the equity holders of course are the ones who control the company and make decisions.
So who is lending this money? If the loans are barely sustainable why in the world are people buying these companies bonds? When have interest rates risen? They have been decreasing for nearly 40 years now.
These types of debt fueled stock buybacks are more or less an arbitrage on central bank policy, as long as CBs keep pushing rates lower ever cycle then bonds at the current rates will increase in value, and equity prices will likely be higher.
This is not true for several reasons. First bondholders care about the value of their bonds for the whole life of the bond, not just for the last moment when it pays out. A company that is on the edge will see its bonds fall in value, and a company that is doing well can see them rise quite a bit.
Secondly not all debt is equal, debt holders who are first in line care a lot about one margin, and those that are last in line have an entirely different margin.
Your company cant spend a bunch of money it doesn’t have, if you are on track for bankruptcy you have to borrow to put such a plan in action and those lenders should care what they are lending for. The situations where this can happen are very rare, and when they do happen they can be prevented by bondholders with a takeover (this is one reason why private equity is so important, it allows takeovers to protect bondholder’s interests in such situations, and a fair number of bids in such cases come from bondholders).
But typically shareholders believe that they will make a better return from their company using its assets than from selling its assets and investing the proceeds elsewhere; in a sense the entire point of being a shareholder (from their perspective) is getting a share of some sweet assets-being-used-productively action.
However, in situations where this isn’t the case there’s no general principle that prevents shareholders selling assets. In general this is a good thing! It’s not at all implausible that a company might be not be the optimal owner of its assets! Sometimes the benefits are less clear, at least for people with insufficient faith in the Market who sentimentally disapprove of forcefully turning a family-owned bakery/community hub into a strip joint even though it’s evidently the Optimal and Maximally Efficient thing. Sometimes it seems unlikely that there will be a benefit to anyone other than the party doing the takeover, for instance if they’ve bet a lot of money on the company they’re buying going bankrupt. And sometimes it’s obviously evil, for instance when the the “mismanagement” by the previous owners consisted of deciding to pay their employees pensions even though they could just not do that since their employees probably wouldn’t be able to sue them successfully.
The case for, by Danny DeVito.
This is not true for several reasons. First bondholders care about the value of their bonds for the whole life of the bond, not just for the last moment when it pays out. A company that is on the edge will see its bonds fall in value, and a company that is doing well can see them rise quite a bit.
Irrelevant, we’re talking about the decision-making and incentives of the equity-holders at a particular point in time.
Secondly not all debt is equal, debt holders who are first in line care a lot about one margin, and those that are last in line have an entirely different margin
All true but completely irrelevant to the equity-holders.
Your company cant spend a bunch of money it doesn’t have, if you are on track for bankruptcy you have to borrow to put such a plan in action
No it doesn’t, say the company has $250M in cash and $500M in debt coming due at the end of the year. The company can spend that $250M in cash.
This idea that volatility is good for the equity holders and bad for bond holders is literally a finance 101 concept. In finance language, equity holders have a call option on the firm’s assets and options’ value increases with volatility. Bond holders are short a put and therefore volatility is bad for them.
This doesn’t hold up. If you expect to make more by holding onto the assets why wouldn’t a potential buyer then be willing to pay that amount for said assets (at least discounted in the same way the equity holder would be discounting etc), and since that owner wouldn’t be also taking on the debt there could be a net benefit to both the buyer and seller to the tune of the amount of debt held by the seller.
That depends on the structure of the company and the debt etc, bondholders can have protections in these cases (ie convertible bonds).
You made the incorrect statement that bondholders don’t care if a company makes $1 a year in profit or $1 million, this isn’t true and your chain of incentives on both sides is incorrect because you are using a wildly oversimplified model for how asset prices work.
Sure you can invent scenarios where it might work, but in such a situation the bondholders have a large incentive to buy out the shareholders. The academic bright line between share and bondholders is blurry in reality, many shareholders are also bondholders, and many bondholders have options like convertibility.
Yes, and its a great reply for getting credit on your finance 101 test, or for using as a basis for understanding how companies actually get structured, but it is not so great for understanding what actually happens to companies that were structured by bond and equity holders who understood this concept going in.
You made the incorrect statement that bondholders don’t care if a company makes $1 a year in profit or $1 million,
I not make this statement. I said “it makes no difference to them” in the context of discussing their cash flows, which is correct.
I’ve worked professionally in both equities and in fixed income, I do understand that this is a simplification, but simplified models are how you illustrate the important dynamics.
The academic bright line between share and bondholders is blurry in reality, many shareholders are also bondholders, and many bondholders have options like convertibility.
I don’t think this is significant. The company employees are mainly paid in stock and stock options and not bonds. On the institutional side, most stocks are owned by pure equity funds and most bonds are owned by pure bond funds; there might be cross-ownership at a higher level (e.g. Fidelity has both stock and bond funds) but the bond people in Fidelity don’t talk to the stock people. Yes you get the rare hedge funds that own multiple parts of the capital structure but this is not the typical case. And of course individual investors are irrelevant here.
Convertible bonds are a small fraction of the market.
I invite you to make the case that the stuff you’re talking about is actually significant.
not so great for understanding what actually happens to companies that were structured by bond and equity holders who understood this concept going in.
So yes, everyone understands that what I’m talking about is an important effect. That doesn’t mean people don’t try to screw each other using it.
In particular, the interest rate a company is being charged reflects bondholder expectations about how the company is going to be run, which in turn reflect the bondholders’ understanding of the company’s management (based on the managers’ history, their claims both formal and informal about how they will run the company, their particular style and expertise, etc). If a new owner comes in and replaces the management, he can run the firm differently than the bondholders expected in a way that hurts them.
@ Chalid
You didn’t mention cash flows, you said
Restricting it to ex post cash flows, yes you can make that statement, but that statement misses large chunks of how the bond market operates. The statement that bond holders no longer care about the company after their last payment is received is true, but uninformative for this discussion. Bondholder behavior will be based on all of their incentives, not on a portion of their incentives in isolation.
People sometimes try to screw each other, but in most cases it is prevented through a variety of mechanisms.
seriously, you leave out the part of the quote about them getting paid?
More importantly, though, all of this is irrelevant. You can have a complicated capital structure and dozens of bond maturities and what have you and it will still be the case that an increase in the company’s asset value volatility will hurt all of the bonds and help the equity. Yes it will hurt different bonds differently based on their maturity and seniority and other terms but it will definitely hurt them all.
It’s not enough to assert that complexity exists, you have to make a case for it mattering to the question at hand. And you are conspicuously not doing that.
I’m done with this discussion.
I think the discussion of bondholders is missing the point.
In general, bondholders are fairly sophisticated, and bond covenants are clear and enforceable. But the PE model is claimed to be bad for creditors, not bondholders–and a lot of creditors and quasi-creditors are not sophisticated, and don’t have clear covenants that are easy to enforce.
Someone once defined PE as focusing on “monetizing implicit contracts.” When it is problematic, that’s the problem. A high discount rate pushes toward valuing short-term payoffs relative to long-term, and so PE tends to make business more profitable for owners/managers now, but less stable for employees and surrounding communities long-term.
Apologies, I don’t have time for a full reply or to even read the entirety of the article. I’m just going to address some considerations around “asset stripping.”
First, a key provision against removing assets and then declaring bankruptcy is “fraudulent conveyance.” The obvious strategy of owning a company and then giving yourself the assets is prohibited. The bankruptcy court has the power to reverse the transfer of the assets. More complicated schemes to effect the same outcome are also subject to getting reversed. This becomes contentious when there is a sale to a third party: (a) is it really a third-party/arms length transaction and (b) was fair value obtained for the asset.
Second, creditors generally have covenants in their lending agreements that prevent the dissolution of company assets.
Third, the easiest way for creditors to avoid losing money is to not lend. Standard underwriting is to check the value of the assets, the business plan and prospects of the company, the health and prospects of the sector, the experience, incentives, and intentions of the owners and managers.
Fourth, the real upside in equity investing is usually selling a business for a multiple (> 1x) of earnings. In general, the value of the hard assets of a company is not worth nearly as much as the business as a (successful) going concern. Just to give a concrete example (with #s that might not be quite right, this isn’t my field/disclaimer/disclaimer), Amazon at Dec 2018 had book assets of 163bn and liabilities of 119bn. That means book equity of 44bn (if someone shut down the business and could realize the book value of the assets and pay off the liabilities). If someone were able to steal all the assets and default on all the liabilities, they would keep 163bn, a lot more. However, the market value was around 740bn, so that was 4.5x more.
Of course, the world is a big and complicated place, there are lots of companies and lots of PE firms, lots of lenders, etc, etc. There are certainly people who try to cheat, gray areas in the rules, and probably some sneaky things that shouldn’t be allowed. Mistakes are certainly common and bad acts also exist. However, given the incentives, the thoughtfulness of people involved, the accumulated history and knowledge of moves/counter moves, it seems unlikely to me that this is a systemic problem in the economy or cause of “good companies” getting destroyed.
Didn’t read the whole thing, but I think the article agrees. It seems to boil down to PE buying something cheap and by hook or by crook, selling it at a much higher price. To which I will reply that:
– illegal practices should be curbed by the system of justice
– harmful practices should be curbed by law
– if a company is priced lower than its inherent value, then yeah: somebody will buy it and realize the value
Maybe it’s good for the workers in the short run if Toys’R’Us¹ continue to operate while bleeding cash, but it’s bad for the economy as a whole, and it’s only postponing the inevitable. And if you disagree, you are free to buy it – in fact, why didn’t you do so already, if you assert it assets are so much more valuable than its price tag?
This boils down to the usual whining that somebody else’s money should be used to scratch my particular itch.
¹ Used as an example in the article, I have no knowledge or opinion on that particular case.
Toys R Us was sold at an 8% premium to the stock price (which went up after news of a potential sale) and for ~20% more than for the first offer made. PE firms typically buy above market price, not below, the whole ‘buying cheap’ part comes from buying struggling companies not from actually buying things ‘cheaply’ how most people mean it.
Was surprised to find myself agreeing with the article.
I’ve only had time to read the article diagonally, unfortunately, but I think I understand the main issue. Let’s take a fictional example: we make a company together in which I own 51% and you own 49%. I have a controlling majority and am free to use it to manage the company. Question is: how is profit going to be split between us next year?
1. In repeated prisoner dilemma, it’s going to be 51-49. Because that’s how the ownership is, and we’ll just pay ourselves dividends. Everybody’s happy and we keep doing business.
2. In non-iterated prisoner dilemma, I just pay myself consulting fees and you get nothing. The split is 100-0. If this seems too brazenly illegal to you, I just add a couple of layers. Point is, with a controlling majority I also control where the money goes, which means I can also (legally) split the profit however I want.
The article is saying that most of our system works as iterated prisoner dilemma, but there are out there investment funds that work by exploiting the loopholes with hit and run tactics. Which I have to admit is probably very possible.
I wouldn’t mind a libertarian with better economic knowledge than myself give 2 cents on that. @David Friedman ?
No, a 51% owner of a company cannot do anything they want and direct money anywhere they want.
Main gist is short vs long term relationships. I’m pretty sure the 51-49 scenario is actually possible with enough sophistication, but for another example:
Company X is supplying a number of clients. Over the years, they became part of its supplying chain. Investment fund comes, buys company X, and renegotiates all contracts with the harshest possible terms, burning all bridges behind. In theory, clients should have backup plans and clauses against price gauging. In practice, a handshake and knowing your supplier for a long time is more likely.
You are positing asymmetrical power here. Investment funds tend to pay a premium for companies when they buy them, why do they suddenly have all kinds of leverage over the other companies in the supply chain? Realistically this only happens when the expected short term value of the company exceeds the expected long term value of the company (discounted etc) which typically happens when a company is already in fairly steep decline.
There are multiple accounts of the Toys R Us sale available, most of which contradict the impression that the article gives.
First is the health of Toys R Us at the time, it wasn’t particularly good. The company had been restructuring for years
and the toy stores weren’t very profitable, almost all the profit was coming from their Babies R Us segment (from 2005)
and
Thirdly it does not appear that the company was loaded up with debt, but that it was purchased with debt (ie borrowed money). A different PE firm apparently put in a bid that was higher than the stock valuation of the company, and the board then reached out to see if it could get an even better deal for its shareholders.
Fourthly the article doesn’t even establish that Bain made money on the acquisition, it says Toys R Us made payments totaling 500 million to Bain, but that number is well below the purchase price, and below the sale price minus the debt portion of the sale.
It really doesn’t take a lot of Googling to see that Toys R Us revenue declined by billions of dollars over the last decade. Store count wasn’t decreasing, so unless you severely cut your expenses, you aren’t going to make profit on your revenue (BTW, revenue and profit are two different things).
It’s really frustrating that people don’t understand small changes in % can really throw off numbers. Today, I spent all day in Excel, trying to figure out why our volume was 2% off. People were curious why. Well, our savings target is typically 3% of our budget. So a 2% difference is basically the entire difference between “we’re good on our savings goal” and “everyone gets summarily fired.”
PE and LBO aren’t necessarily the same thing. PE and activist investors are good at unlocking value previously undiscovered. For example, our factory is tremendously more expensive than our sister factories. That’s because our sister factories were bought out by a PE some time ago, and the PE cut stuff to the bone, whereas we have a ton of fat. They eliminated a lot of salaried positions that aren’t all that important, they hire a ton of temps in positions that can be done by unskilled labor, they source a lot of their production from Mexico where it makes sense, and they invest capital in areas where it actually is cost-effective. They also have substantially fewer fringe benefits and market-rate wages, rather than paying $45 an hour to people who cannot speak English and barely graduated high school.
(though thank god we don’t have to deal with unions)
LBOs are an entirely different story, but these aren’t necessarily bad, particularly for companies that do not carry a lot of debt.
i mentioned last time how i was getting so tired of politics and culture war and maybe i came across in a certain way or whatever, so i just wanted to explain better, its always getting worse and its just so exhausting when the first thing i see when i wakeup is this on my facebook feed: “First off THERE WAS NO FUCKING HOLOHOAX. 271314 SO CALLED PRISONERS DIED FROM DISEASES. THERE WERE NO FUCKING GAS CHAMBERS AND THERE WAS NO FUCKING HOLOHOAX.”
and its not like it was just one crazy person, a few argued back but everyone just ignored them and most of the replys agrees with it:
“Holohoax, political bullshit.”
“Holohoax!..sheep!”
“The holobunga”
“LOL. Hoax”
“he was after fake jews..but was actually puppets by.fake jews and ended up killing 200 , 000 orthodox jews. But not by gassing! Typhoid. Cyanide [ zyclon – B ]as used to ‘delouse’ clothing in little rooms. Lice spread disease and that’s how they died . they cremated the dead..teah sone were cruek..but any war their is cruelty..siciopaths need ‘ployment , too!”
“yesterday jim carry hero today crying about holohoax 😀 You are sheeple!”
“Where is the proof that millions died other than from Jewish historians.
Did you know that you can not even question that’s facts weather they are right or wrong”
but i dont want ppl to think im just singling out and attacking the right bc i think its important to keep in touch with public opinion and know what both sides are thinking so i follow both conservatives and leftists and i see the same kind of shit coming from the other side, like heres something else that came up on facebook a few days ago:
“I uphold Stalin.
I support China, The Dprk, Laos, Cuba, and other socialist states.
I don’t support anarchists, leftcoms or ultras of any kind.
I believe in establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat and a strong socialist state to defend the gains made by revolution.”
or these comments in reply to a post about how centrist liberals should be sent to gulag (there was a leftbook meme showing the screaming sjw girl from the Triggered meme in the prison camp and had pepe the frog with stalin mustache and military cap in front)
“gulags were small villages in siberia that had a military presence and political education programs”
“God, we need those gulags. Hell, I hate myself and this civilization so much, I’d willingly surrender myself to the revolutionary proletariat to be incinerated in one.”
“liberals are more or less right of center, left wing only in social regards and only when it benefits them and/or profits they may make
and absolutely in favor of systems like monarchism so long as they’re allowed to get fucked up in opium dens with any sex partner they want and can feel good about themselves
the left have no problems punishing the liberals as well especially for enabling the reactionaries and far right wing
especially since the liberals literally do not do anything or contribute anything unless directly affected
when it comes to pushing for any sort of human rights”
or picture of tenament square with protester standing in front of tank captioned “what if we kissed during the event where nothing happened”
or sometimes i cant even tell if the political stuff is left or right or both or neither, like all the people i know in 4chan boards and discord chat rooms talking about how the incel beta uprising will happen now that the JOKER movie is out and all theyll gun down all the chads and stacys and normies
and i just feel so burnt out and so tired of it all, and its not even just politics, its everything, its the reason the right and the left and the others all become this way, something is just deeply wrong with society and with human nature and with EVERYTHING, and i dont know whats at the root of the problem or what the solution is, i just know that the right and left are both wrong and horribly missing the point, its not because we lack traditional values or because workers are exploited by capitalists or any of that shit, those are the symptoms and not the cause
and i cant see the whole picture and im driving myself crazy straining my mind to comprehend the enormity of it… sometimes if i squint i can see the outline of it in the shadows… its hard to describe but i think Samzdat comes the closest to Getting It, and Bailoc and LastPsychiatrist/HotelConcierge highlight some aspects of it, SlateStarCodex himself touches on it a few times with his essays on Moloch and the toxoplasmosis of rage or more recently the article about how humans didnt evolve to be rational
i think im slowly going insane, having trouble believing the news or believing anything I hear is real and dont mean that as hyperbole, just feel so burned out, it all feels like a fiction, like a sloppy, incoherent, badly told story… scary thing is, i get how people end up becoming flat earthers or whatever, theres just so much information, no one knows who to trust or what to believe, it all just feels so unreal… what happens when everyone has unlimited information at their disposal? used to think people would become smarter and developed better critical thinking skills to sort fact from fiction, but that doesnt seem to be how most people are inclined, they just unravel… its becoming increasingly hard for any one person to verify much of anything on their own anymore… people literally don’t have the time or energy or mental capacity to learn about every issue in detail, and in a society this interconnected, every issue affects every other issue, i always keep putting off research projects because i feel like they’d be incomplete without more information, studying any one thing requires studying everything, its just an endless rabbit hole
if there’s one thing our society really emphasizes, its the removal of limitations, and without limitations, everything just kind of blurs together into an undifferentiated mess… people can’t handle freedom, or information, or even convenience, like the escalator dilemma in that medium piece about optimizing ourselves to death, so instead…? i dont know, i dont know the answer or the question or the problem or the solution, cant solve for X here when the whole equation is undefined
I don’t know whether this will help, but you are allowed to choose your inputs. You are allowed to be on your own side.
My impression is that you haven’t been in the habit of being on your own side, and that can be a hard habit to change, but it’s worth taking trouble over.
You don’t have to be on Facebook or any of the chans. However, I’m on facebook and my feed includes people on the right and the left, and none of them are as awful as the sample you’ve shared. It’s possible to go a good bit milder than my feed. too.
I’m not denying that there are people who write the kind of things you just shared, but I don’t know whether there are enough of them to be important. Or at least not very important– some of them do try to spread misery out into the normal world.
Part of what’s going on is what I call the rise of troll culture. These are people who are optimizing for upsetting normal people. You’re free to not voluntarily give them headspace.
You’ve probably got a point about it being hazardous to just remove restrictions– anything, whether it’s more restrictions or fewer restrictions, has to be in service to people’s lives.
i feel like id be deserting my post if i did that, it would be abandoning the responsibility tasked to me… i want and need to understand Humanity and you cant do that by ignoring the parts you dont like, the chan trolls and the holocaust deniers and the stalinists are part of Mankind too, they say aloud what the rest of us are really feeling deep down… its only when all restrictions have been lifted that our true nature is fully revealed, when we arent held back by standards of politeness and decency, thats why characters like the joker have such an appeal and why hes so popular among the 4chan crowd
if i just ignore the right wingers, then im no better than the left wingers in their echo chambers and vice versa, and if i ignore them both then im just completely out of the loop and stumbling in the dark… how can i afford to ignore these people when they vote and run for office and influence global politics?
plus i feel like it would go against rationality to ignore any theory no matter how ridiculous it sounds, even holocaust denial and anti vaxxers and flat earth… i read about how changes in culture are caused by the 11 year solar cycle because sunspot flares and cosmic rays have influence behavior, and it seems like nonsense but if youre truly objective then its just as valid as anything else… empiricism is useless because everything is too complicated to be understood through direct observation, and you cant rely on expert opinions because all the experts are biased or corrupt or lying or just plain wrong, and the fringe crackpots who say they have the real answers are lying or wrong too, so where does that leave you? nowhere, falling through an endless void of random and incomprehensible chaos with no clear meaning or purpose, with only the consolation that no understanding is better than a false understanding… except not really, because placebos and divination and witch doctor potions really work, they just work by making people believing false things and you cant make yourself believe something you know to be false
i cant even work on research papers anymore because its impossible to gain a complete understanding of anything because its all connected, you cant fully know one subject unless you have an understanding of all the others, you cant understand the totality of economics without also understanding psychology and politics and statistics and philosophy and biology and physics, so its pointless to try to study or research or learn anything because you can never have a complete picture and Truth will forever remain out of your grasp
It seems like you are exaggerating the incomprehensibility of the world for dramatic effect. The world really isn’t all that incomprehensible. Pick up a rock. Drop it. It will fall. Repeat the process as many times as you like, and the result will always be the same. Some things are more complicated, but you would be surprised at how often you can think your way through the complications. Doubting everything is all very well and good, but even if our entire reality is an illusion, you might as well just sit back and enjoy that illusion while it lasts. And it certainly seems like this is an illusion where rocks fall to the ground when dropped, and do not hover in the air or accelerate upwards into the sky.
NONONONONONONONONO
Absolutely not.
It can be worth it as an intellectual exercise to engage with some particular insane theory. Do a deep dive on the existing literature against it (and there is always a lot, if it’s a popular theory), educate yourself on the relevant science/history/whatever, this is super healthy and useful for you. But there’s no point in making this your day job. There’s real stuff out there to learn.
Never pretend that all ideas are equal, or all people are equally worthy of being taken seriously. Dumb, as well as actively malicious, people are very real, and what they say is not worth the same as what smart, or at least sincerely kind, people say. Feed your brain with healthy food.
EDIT: I’m pretty sure you’re relatively young, right? So, one thing you already know, given some of the commitments to rationality etc you’ve already presented, is that you don’t know everything that is important to know. And you never will, because there’s an infinite amount of knowledge out there and you are a very finite creature, and probably in less than 80 years you’re going to be worm food. If you are committed to learning what you need/should know, then every minute you spend dealing with someone saying THE JEWS DID IT or whatever is a minute you aren’t spending learning quantum theory or reinforcement learning algorithms or how the Chinese invaded Vietnam in order to force them to withdraw from Cambodia in 1979. Or even just masturbating, because at least that’s pleasurable. This IS a zero-sum game. Please, play on the winning side, where “winning” means becoming a healthier and better-educated person.
You’re allowed to take a break for mental health. I’ve said the same on your last post: cutting my social media was the best decision I made this year. And a funny thing is that when you come back after a couple of month… it just doesn’t have the same hold on you.
I decided I’m ok with Facebook in the weekends. So last weekend I go online and half an hour later I’m in a foul mood. And I’m like… “why?”.
That’s not the real world. That’s just shadows on the wall and echo chambers. “Winning” there won’t change much, for the simple reason people are already moving away. It used to be “hip” not to own a TV, some 20 years ago, because TV was the common denominator, opiate of the masses, “idiot box” etc. Guess what’s the next candidate for that.
More people are on SM (Facebook, instagram, chans, reddit), closer to a common denominator it becomes. That’s a story as old as the Internet itself. Usenet, slashdot, digg, 4chan, reddit, facebook…
I remember the reaction of Hacker News whenever it made the news somehow and got an influx of new visitors was to have a couple of days of Erlang stories, just to make sure the normies didn’t stay on.
If you allow me to get philosophical a bit, we’re living a time of change. During our lifetimes we’ll go through more societal changes than the world usually sees in a millennium. Most are good, but some of them are bound to be honey traps, because that’s how life and people are. So I think it’s important long term to be always critical of life habits and always judge them through other lens than just their dopamine hit. And we should be more ready to move on than our instincts tell us to.
“Feed your brain with healthy food.” – very well said.
The people in your Facebook feed, are they someone you met in real life? Because if no, I’d say there is no harm in dropping such “friendships”. You are building your bubble, except it’s a bubble of negativity. Some of them may not even be real people. There is a fraction of humanity that is irreparable; about 1% people are born psychopaths, and many more are simply dumb as fuck. No need to surround yourself with them, even virtually. And if you cast your net too wide, these people can generate more content than you could read during 24 hours a day. Sometimes even one stupid person is enough to take away like 20% of your life energy. Leaving them is not a loss, it’s a victory.
By the way, guessing by your writing, you seem to suffer from something… depression, I guess? Not sure which came first — the exceptionally insane social network bubble, or your obsession with them — but it’s a cycle you need to break somehow. Preferably by leaving social networks (let’s say only for 3 months, as an experiment), and some kind of therapy at the same time.
Your time is limited. You can’t fix everyone. Rationality is not “all or nothing”; you can improve incrementally, but spending time on social networks is the opposite of improving.
Villiam, I don’t think GhostUser’s drive is to fix everyone, it’s to understand everyone. Equally impossible, but different things.
Hey GhostUser I think you’re going to end up having a nervous breakdown if you don’t chill; I personally recommend permanently deleting your Facebook account (it worked for me, whereas not deleting, and merely promising to step away for a while, did not work), and Instagram and Twitter too if you do that.
Tasked to you by yourself, I expect? You are cruel. By the way you talk I infer that you value the truth: I seriously hope you don’t get lost in the wilderness of the historical truth of WWII when you engage in these discussions with holocaust deniers; their primary motivation certainly isn’t historical accuracy. Their objection to the holocaust story is a political one, not a historical one. That’s not to say that they aren’t incensed by matters of putative fact (wooden doors, which open inward no less, cremation ovens, elevators, chimney attached to nothing, electrified floors, pedal powered brain bashing machines, literal rollercoasters, the plaque, soap lampshades and shrunken heads, to name the first that come to mind) but if you want truth, get the FUCK away from Facebook of all places man, what are you thinking?? Holocaust deniers are revolting against ideology first and foremost.
I’d be happy to talk to you (or anyone) more about holocaust denial, as well as flat-earthism and anti-vaxxism; not that I’m going to engage in any of it, but unlike the vain shrieking harpy left, I pride myself on not pretending all my ideological opponents are inconceivably evil monsters who couldn’t possibly have a soul or deserve human rights.
Here’s the prob: You say “i want and need to understand Humanity”. Humanity is easy to understand. You don’t want to understand it; you want to control it. Humanity is not controllable. Understand that and you will understand humanity.
Just a small comment: you say “its only when all restrictions have been lifted that our true nature is fully revealed, when we arent held back by standards of politeness and decency,” but isn’t it in our nature to impose restrictions on each other, and to hold each other to standards of politeness and decency? Somehow, we got from being Australopithecines on the savannah just learning how to use fire to being in present-day civilisation, and we didn’t do that by acting like 4chan and Leftbook trolls. The social structures that suppress trollish behaviour are just as “true” a part of our nature as is the behaviour itself. When you’re investigating human nature, I don’t think you should equate “worst” to “most true.”
The vast majority of people are not Stalinists or neo-nazis. Perhaps not even the people who wrote those posts, seeing as the lizardman constant is a thing. So the question is, why are you devoting so much time to reading posts written by groups comprising such a small percentage of the population? Is it because you think they have unusually interesting things to say? Because it doesn’t sound like you think that. Is it because you follow those people on facebook? Unfollow them. They don’t have any good ideas, or even any interesting ones and they are too few in number to matter much in any other way.
Aw come on, you cannot argue with the trolls. That’s just feeding them. It’s like standing in the middle of the Reichsparteitag in Nuremberg and saying: “This is all wrong. Biologically races don’t even exist, least of all a ‘Jewish race’.” I don’t think that could be the beginning of a fruitful discussion.
In the Facebook groups, if you argue, you’ll be ignored or kicked. And you know what people are like. There have been journalists who have hunted down an internet troll, visited him at home and written an interesting portrait about what makes these people tick. If you want to argue with people, do it outside the forums in which you cannot expect a fair discussion.
Within Facebook, you can only report the posts. But Facebook is not known for working very hard on such complaints.
So what you’re saying is that, scientifically speaking, holocaust didn’t happen because it’s logically impossible?
(just kidding)
Why are so many people here so intent on listening to *words that got ate by the spam filter* and *a certain subreddit* and other people who hate us?
You all ought to set up a support group or something.
For what it’s worth, as I’m sure you know your FB feed is very specifically targeted to what makes you engage. Mine looks nothing like that. Like I’ve literally never had any posts as bad as you mention.
I recommend the FBPurity plugin, with certain words/phrases blocked.
Also, the large majority of those posts are not being made by genuine actors. Or, rather, they are being made by genuine actors, i.e. bots and paid trolls working in various Eastern European countries (from my understanding, particularly Kosovo, Moldova, and the Ukraine) and Russia, as well as China and other nations, with the express purpose of sowing discontent in Western nations. (I’m sure there are equivalents paid for by “us” posting in Russian and Chinese nations, but I choose for my own sanity to believe that they are more focussed on subtly increasing doubts in the existing systems rather than just universal discord.)
When I say “the large majority”, I’m really pretty sure this is true – the whole point of these posts is to create these feelings of confusion and disillusionment in people like you (as well as arguments between you and other people). There are very good studies on this – one of the “nicest” ones showed that almost all the awful posts created after a Swedish Muslim player scored an own goal in the last World Cup were by these type of foreign agents. Every now and then you can get one of these people to engage with you, and you realize they’re cannot possibly be who they claim to be.
So… these posts are part of a long-term investment by hostile foreign powers, and given your post they appear to be having their desired effect.
I realize this sounds paranoid, but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you, and in this case the weight of the evidence is very clear.
Steer clear of this poison, son, it ain’t helping you.
Firstly, dear God please use proper capitalization and punctuation. This is almost painful to read.
Secondly, just unfollow people who post things like that. I unfollow everyone who posts political screeds on Facebook, it makes my life a lot better not having to see the daily poorly thought out political views of every one of my acquaintances.
Have you considered that you may be giving too much credit to (mostly) over-the-top shitposting which only tenuously correlate with actual beliefs?
Maybe find less crazy people to follow online?
Online interaction seems to make some people act crazy who are perfectly nice folks in person. But you still don’t want to read their crazy screeds day after day.
I get it. I don’t have the answers, but I do have a link for you.
https://samreuben.wordpress.com/2017/09/14/therapy/
You may recognize his name from the samzdat comments.
How certain are you that you’re reading actual posts made by individuals rather than troll farms?
Ghost, this isn’t the first time I have deeply empathized with one fo your posts. I can tell by yout writing style and some things you’ve said that you are a very similar person to myself. And so I feel a need to help you with this problem since I have it as well.
The answer is to find a friend with whom you can trust your true political beliefs. They don’t have to match yours, for me it was my former roommate, a hardcore fundamentalist Christian (I am a bisexual Jew). But find someone you can trust not to call the thought police on you and sharr bad takes you find on the internet with them.
The act of going “wow look at what this idiot posted on facebook” out loud, to a person you trust, helps satisfy the urge to sample unorthodox and strange opinions while helping to shield you from the cycle of depression you get when you realize the world is crazy.
This is hard to say as an introvert, but don’t be alone for long periods of time. Not necessarily solitary, but id you aren’t having meaningful interactions for a long time you get sucked into this kind of spiral. I know. I’ve been there.
Tl;dr: find someone to share bad takes with so they don’t just sit in your brain and fester.
@GhostUser >
Oh good lord man, your feed is scary!
FWLIW, I joined Facebook two or three months ago and I haven’t looked at it in a couple of weeks, but last I looked my “feed” looks nothing like that!
The majority of my “Friends” are friends that I had thirty years ago, plus I “Follow” news from the San Francisco Labor Council (I’m a union member), and I do get political messages, about six-to-one “Left” messages (mostly from ladies I used to know who are now public school teachers) for every “Trad conservative” messages (a couple of guys I used to know), most are frankly boring (one “I really don’t like Harris”, six “I really don’t like Trump, and I’m tired of paying for pencils for the kids out of my own pocket”), the union messages are seldom “hot button” (or seem that way to me), I have gotten a couple of pro-Antifa “memes”, and one former friend I suspect of being a member, the furthest “Left” stuff came from a guy who moved to Alabama, no far Right messages (from my perspective) though I suppose the couple of “trads” would be regarded as such by some of the teachers and the guy who moved to Alabama.
About a half dozen of folks who’ve posted little but political messages I’ve unfollowed for a month, and then unfollowed most of that group for another month, I have newspapers for that stuff! I joined Facebook to talk about old times, find out how people’s kids are doing, what the places they moved to are like, watch a few videos of their dogs and cats, et cetera.
What has been interesting, is ths t folks I knew 30+ years ago definitely swing more Left (especially the girls) than most of the people I encounter daily face-to-face now, surprising how much more political some have become as I wouldn’t have guessed it, nor would I have guessed some folks current leanings, I’m not Facebook “friends” with anyone I still encounter face-to-face (I like to keep that seperate, plus I don’t want to share some “old times” stories with folks I still work with!) so they may be surprises there if I bothered.
Personally I would “unfollow” a lot of your feed @GhostUser, when I want to argue and learn disperate views of politics I come here, when I want to learn more I read a newspaper or magazine, other than getting a better sense of who believes what nothing political I’ve seen on Facebook has been informative or particularly interesting, though it has confirmed some guesses and given counter-examples to others: the “blue-tribe” is indeed most girls, the “red-tribe” more boys, jobs done correlates with politics, but I have to “adjust my priors” on ones politics correlating with where you live, it now looks like politics correlates more with where you grow up.
Facebook, school, work most are apolitical, of those that voice political opinions on Facebook the moderate Left predominates, next the further but not fully far Left, and a sprinkling of anarchists, moderate Right, far Left, but no far Right, for my school years it was much the same as Facebook but with more anarchists, what work moderate Right is the plurality, moderate Left a close second, a couple of Libertarians, no anarchists, a couple far Right, a couple far Left, and very few further but not fully far Left at work and in the neighborhood.
So conclusions about folks politics based on those who I knew in my teens and early 20’s and those I’ve known since?
Girls I knew (and my wife’s friends) mostly like Warren, a couple like Harris, guys I’ve known are more likely to be Republicans or Biden Democrats, with a couple guys being far Left or Right; so most men about 55 to 60% Left or Right, with a slight bit more Rightward, most women seem about 70 to 75% Left, a couple women 80+% Left, and a few guys 90+% Left or Right,
@GhostUser, with all the far Right, and far Left messages you see, you must’ve known quite a wild bunch in your youth!, but if they’re instead messages from strangers, and you don’t know much about them, what do you care, and why are you following them?
There’s seven billion people so someone somewhere believes most everything, if you want crazy talk go listen to the drug and schizophrenia fueled rantings from loud sidewalk beggars, no electricity required!
Seriously, unfollow crazy strangers.
Yeah, pretty much nobody has a Facebook feed like that. Facebook is really quite good at giving you what you “want”, in the sense of engaging with strongly and not turning away. If you don’t have friends like that, you don’t get posts like that. If you have friends like that but you only engage with their family-update posts and not their latest-political-outrage posts, you’ll see more of the former and less of the latter.
And as pretty much everyone else here has been saying, it’s not healthy to dive into that morass, made even worse by the positive feedback of Facebook’s algorithms piling on even more of the crap you are drowning in, because you are drowning in it. Seriously, this is not normal and it’s not good and it’s not necessary.
If you see that sort of crap in your Facebook feed, ask to see less of it, block it, if necessary unfriend the people who are sending it. You aren’t turning away from the fundamental evil of mankind that all good men must fight, you’re refusing to engage with a tiny fringe of ideological inbred freaks whose only power is your inability to ignore them. Then go look at what everyone else is doing. Which mostly seems to involve cute children and/or cats.
I relate to this….and I know what you mean by “the whole equation is undefined.” It is very hard to articulate, but the wording you use resonates:
I quit social media for the most part a while ago, and I tune out obvious trolls, but my everyday interactions are full of non-troll versions of this kind of nonsense, which is bad enough. And they are pretty educated, intelligent, successful people, which is what makes it painful. It’s not so much that things are bad as that they are “badly told”—like you can never actually get the problem in view, or be satisfied with any information you receive. So even with the self-awareness to avoid becoming a flat earther, it’s still disorienting. Everyone is missing the point, which causes a weird kind of frustration. That people are irrational is not news, nor is it necessarily even that big a deal—I’m plenty irrational. But the way in which that irrationality is channeled right now, due to the incentives of the current system, creates a special kind of hell that really gets to a certain type of person. Some irrationality takes a lot of work, and watching/accommodating it causes burn out. As others have recommended, the solution seems to be finding at least a few like-minded others, but boy is it tough.
I also totally get what you mean about feeling a responsibility, though I disagree strongly that being rational means dealing with 4chan and everything else. You have to accept you have limited energy and should channel it wisely. But a drive to engage intelligently with life makes it hard to automatically filter out anything that makes it onto your radar. I feel like I’m always pulled in, even though I’ve made a lot of effort to disconnect from the media generally. It seems like I have a responsibility to try and at least warn people I know away from really bad information/reasoning when they bring it up directly with me, but that requires me to dive in to it…
I feel that you’re getting all the wrong answers here, all those thought-terminating cliches like “it’s trolls, just don’t read trolls, man”, “they’re crazy”, or even some “it’s organized foreign propaganda”. (I second everyone pointing out that your mental health comes first, though.) I’m not sure I can meaningfully explain anything, but you deserve at least an attempt.
I’ll start with this, since it’s the clearest, most straightforward and obvious one and should be the easiest to grasp. There is a large and growing (though maybe it’ll stop now that the movie premiered) contingent of outright paranoia about the new Joker movie in fairly mainstream media, imagining exactly this kind of influence the film will have on the unwashed masses. Obviously, the fans have noticed. (The sentiment is not just 4chan either, I went to a perfectly normie box office forum to check how the film is doing – really well, BTW – and there’s plenty of jokes of the “look at what kind of dangerous behavior this film inspires” variety. 4chan just puts no brakes on things.) The reaction is part satire, part in-joking, part venting frustration, part a desperate plea for sanity. It’s what you do when you feel all attempts at civil, serious discourse are bound to fail.
Think of it as adopting satanism in response to christian fundamentalists and their moral panics about metal or DnD. “Look,” you’re demonstrating, “I am a living, breathing embodiment of all your paranoid delusions, and yet nothing is happening, I live my life just fine and the society keeps functioning as usual. Just snap the fuck out of it.” This tends to work, even with occasional setbacks when someone decides to actually burn a church or something – for about the same reason that pride parades tend to work. Once you show and substantiate yourself, you’re grounding the discourse in reality, rather than in someone’s wild imagination.
(Now, this is pretty much the same for leftists roleplaying This Godless Communism. It may seem less wise to joke about gulags when there actually were gulags, but encounter enough people who decided to hold a view straight out of This Godless Communism no matter what you say or do (I’m now looking pointedly at certain people here), and you realize you’re not really losing anything by it. You weren’t going to change their mind anyway.)
This is a healthy reaction, you should be skeptical of anything and everything. You just need to get used to the idea and its implications. Which are not “reality is unknowable”, but rather “the map is not the territory, especially when map-makers are biased ideologues”.
The problem with people who became genuine holocaust deniers or anti-vaccers or whatever is not their skepticism in mainstream sources, it’s their lack of skepticism in whatever alternative source they first encountered. They’re falling for the same instinctive trap that they tried to escape when they turned their backs to official sources. The same trap that seems to trouble you. Seeking certainty. There’s none. Accept it and become free.
the trick w conspiracy theorys is that if you ask what the world would look like if the theory is true, the answer is exactly the same as our world because thats how the conspiracies want it to look… if the jews controlled everything it would still look like holocaust happened because they planted all the evidence for it, if the earth is flat then people would still think its round because thats what the antarctican cabal living in the ice wall made everyone believe… the ultimate conspiracy theory would be if none of this exists at all and theres just an alien boltsman brain making us all think we exist, and how do we know thats not the case?
i dont really believe any of that but you dont even have to go that far, just look at issues like vaccines or climate change or cigarettes… theres no way to directly observe whether vaccines hurt or help, or whether the the earth is warming or cooling or staying the same as a result of carbon smoke, or whether tobacco causes cancer, you just have to trust the experts and the experts have repeatedly proven that theyre not trustworthy, like when they said that cigarettes were okay for so many years…! just look at nutrition science, it jumps back and forth every five or ten years… meat is bad and everyone should be vegetarian, no actually meat is good and thats all you should eat, carbs are bad, no carbs are good and thats all you should eat, fat is bad, no fat is good and its sugar thats bad, theres no way to tell if youre eating healthy or eating poison anymore
thats why it makes no sense when people say that you shouldnt pay attention to politics, because all of your life decisions affect politics and are affected by politics… the liberals say immigration and outsourcing is good because it gives opportunity to third worlders and makes everything cheaper for first worlders, but the conservatives say its putting first worlders out of work and the leftists say its exploiting third worlders, and they all have their own self serving justification for why you should believe them and favor the group they care about over everyone else, but the truth is that theyre all right because every option screws someone over and theyre all wrong because none of us actually know enough to do the math and figure out whats really best in the utilitarian gods eye sense, so just choosing whether to buy local or buy from the big international megacorp becomes a huge moral issue that cant be solved, because we need context to make any kind of moral or ethical or pragmatic decisions but we dont have it!
So far as I know, there really is a difference in the world because of vaccines. I admit I haven’t checked, but I’ve been trusting that diseases become much less common if a vaccine is deployed against them. This leaves the possibility open that vaccines or some vaccines are doing subtle damage.
Childhood measles used to be almost universal and now it’s almost universally absent. But at some point Scott posted a disturbing article with graphs of the death rate from measles and other childhood diseases. It fell over the course of decades, probably due to nutrition and sanitation, but the effect of the vaccine was not visible on the graph.
(There is also a theory that measles in particular, not mumps and rubella, makes children vulnerable to deaths from other causes.)
The drop in death rate from smallpox shows up fine. The thing about the childhood diseases is they generally aren’t all that lethal. Measles kills about 1 in 1000 nowadays, and I think it’s the worst of them. If sanitation and better general care brought that down from 1 in 100 (completely made up number) during the period vaccination came into play, that extra bit from reducing infections might be hard to see.
First of all, I don’t remember the paper, so it might not have been about measles or vaccines. It definitely was about more than one disease.
If sanitation saved 90% of the lives and then the vaccine saved 99% of the remaining lives, then you can say that the vaccine didn’t save as many lives and we don’t celebrate sanitation enough. But I don’t think it would be hard to see that the vaccine saved a large percentage of the remaining lives. In an appropriate log graph, the vaccine is doing twice as much and it’s doing it much more quickly. The main obstacle I can see is discretization error, if the number of deaths is < 10/year, which it is eventually, but I think that was later.
Wikipedia has a graph and it’s a linear graph, so I can’t tell what the vaccine did, but it’s obvious that I can’t tell, rather the effect of the vaccine being swamped by the long-term trend. I’d guess that, contrary to my previous claim, the vaccine did not occur in the middle of the long-term trend, but after it was pretty much over. It looks like there was a very noisy reduction of 90% of mortality 1915-1935, followed by another 90% reduction in the next 20 years, this time smooth. But because of the linear nature of the axes, I can’t really tell what happened after 1955 and maybe the trend continued in log terms, matching my original claim.
FWIW, the figures wikipedia claims are 50 million cases averted and 5k lives saved, so 1 death per 10k cases.
@Ghost User >
Sure it does, you have limited time and limited political influence. I’ve gone door to door and “phone banking” as a political volunteer so I’m not immune to the sirens call, but if what you want to do is good in the world you can lend your back, hands, and pick-up truck and help a friend move, roll out the garage bins on trash day for the old lady next door, treat someone to dinner, et cetera – you can do more real good by paying attention to folks in front of you than what’s happening in Sacramento or D.C.
I suppose (but I’m I government employee, so there’s some direct effects, plus my failures at preventing some things have gotten into the newspapers), but so what? Sure, try to be a good citizen, but for most folks being a good child, co-worker, neighbor, spouse, et cetera, is more important.
Outsource most of that, let your labor union, fellow parishioners, family, neighbors tell you how to vote, and what social mores are – if you don’t trust them why are you with them? If you’re neighbor on the northside of your house and the neighbor on the southside of your house support different candidates I suppose that’s a problem, but most in a neighborhood share political leanings so that seldom comes up, and when it does it’s usually folks of different ages, or different kinds of jobs, the cop and nurse I live next to now have a bit different leanings than the teacher that used to rent that house, but not that much, usually folks from different generations have greater differences in leanings, but other than teenagers arguing with their parents no one’s going to get in the face of the oldtimers or argue with passionate youngsters anyway.
Personally I get my list of endorsements from my union, listen to who and what my wife wants to win, split the difference and call it good, I used to read up on the arguments for those decisions, but I seldom bother anymore, when a city council candidate came to my door and asked me what I’d like, I didn’t have much in the way of things to ask for that was in his power, the local library already re-started Sunday hours, the police come when called, what I want government to do is a block and a half away where I’d like a stop sign so I could get thru the intersection more safely, and 3/4’s a mile away where there’s tents and shanties, both of which are outside my cities limits, frankly there’s only so much that what government I can vote for do – could move a couple of blocks, and try to influence that cities government as a voter or I can just bring a bag of canned foods to the library lobby donation bin, or over to the St.Ambrose food pantry collection or just write a check – any of which I judge to be more helpful.
On a national level?
I live in California, “every vote matters” is far from true here, my local union has already endorsed Harris (who was nice to one of are members), and she seems as fine as any of them, of more likely winners Biden, Sanders, and Warren have all said some stuff that sounds good (as well as some stuff that doesn’t), Trump every now says some good sounding things about starting new public works projects, maybe he’ll finally make a deal with McConnell and Pelosi, but frankly following all that is a hobby, I can do good for my family and neighborhood on my own without voting or arguing politics at all, and I can probably do more good for other people at by studying plumbing catalog more and the newspaper less.
They can talk to the public works people next door. Just as with actual neighbors, it would pay to be considerate.
This is a great post, and I think you are right about all the dynamics involved. I have found, though, that abandoning the desire for certainty has not felt freeing. As GhostUser is expressing, we have to live in a world in which we are constantly affected by other people who *are* seeking certainty, and who act on those views in ways that affect us, and a level of understanding of their views is necessary to function on a meaningful level (for all but a tiny number of people).
It *is* right and healthy to be skeptical, but when you are in that mode 24/7, it is exhausting and probably becomes counterproductive, because you have to make decisions based on incomplete information all the time. If you can moor yourself to certain values to prioritize these things, this causes less anxiety–you know the world is uncertain and uncontrollable, but you do the best you can under that system. But not having any direction at all is way more destabilizing than moving uncertainly in any direction.
I think this is partly generational–the amount of noise and interconnection that young people were raised with is just a lot higher. I was able to keep myself separate from these traps growing up, but the last ten years, which were my twenties, seems to have bound me up with them. Adapting to the working world made me lose my bearings outside of the system, even though I was becoming more skeptical the whole time. There’s no way to have a productive conversation, though I don’t particularly worry about knowing the truth about everything on earth. It’s just hard to interact with people who apparently have no such doubts, and who build the world around this view–I find this much harder than dealing with the extremist movements you describe, because I agree with you about the dynamic that drives them.
@ghostuser
I felt exactly the same way when i was in my early 20’s, wanting to understand everything there is to understand. Being driven to seek new outlooks, new facts, new understanding. I guess the good (or bad) news is that as you get older and start to think about a family you’ll naturally start to think something along the lines of :
‘right, i’ve been trying to understand this great big mess of the world with grand dreams of deriving some kind of helpful or unique truth, however small, that would help make sense of it all. The world it seems is just far too big to keep entirely in one head, so instead of trying to fix everything how can i just look after myself and those I care about.’
Obviously keep caring about the issues you care about and keep trying to understand other viewpoints but without a more attainable goal in mind, you’re gonna go mad.
In the climate change a few threads ago it is posited that terrorism might result if climate change is really bad:
“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.”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/24/open-thread-137-25/
This seems implausible to me. The worst effected are going to be the ones without much power and economic resources; for this reason they won’t be able to threaten the first world militarily in conventional warfare. What about terrorism? If you ignore the “lone-wolf” style terrorism and look only at organized terror groups such as the IRA or the PLO, they always have the following:
1. A clearly defined group organized on ethnic or class lines which is supposedly being oppressed.
2. A clearly defined oppressor group.
3. A clearly defined goal.
Those most negatively impacted by climate change are not a clearly defined group, nor are those who caused the problem. It’s more fuzzy than notions of “class” in communism, where wage-earners and tenant farmers could easily be set against bosses and landlords across many countries. The goal is also unclear. The more likely scenario is that the very poorest will focus on surviving, begging for aid from the rich world, and if they make war, will wage it against other very poor people they could conceivably beat. If there is a globalized ecoterror movement, it will be organized and led in the middle and high-income countries, much as the communist movement against the alleged evils of imperialist capitalism was led by middle-income Russia.
I think there’s a tendency to assume that if a group is screwed over by an action they will take violent action. Call it “pickle ree bias.” You see it in the failed predictions of crime and political instability due to the lopsided sex ratios in China, India, and South Korea. In that case you had the selfish decisions of one generation biting the next in the a**. I think part of this bias comes from the idea of karmic justice, people want to see the old farts who caused the problem suffering a crime wave they have only themselves to blame for. But for the low-status man who can’t find a wife, there’s no personal incentive to engage in crime; the police provide the same disincentive no matter the sex ratio.
You also see this in predictions of socialist revolution or racial conflict. Certainly both things are possible and indeed common in history, but the socialists or identarians who predict them often act as if they are inevitable. But even if the predictions of ever more horrid capitalism or ethnic oppression are correct, why should we assume the response should be violence rather than grovelling? Might the poor simply work harder to make ends meet, might the oppressed group work harder to quietly evade (rather than openly rebel against) the restrictions imposed by the oppressing group? In the case of emerging technologies such as genetic engineering, you hear that if the rich can afford them and the poor can’t, they will riot over the inequity. But if they aren’t rioting over current inequality, why would they riot over that?
I really don’t see any potential for serious eco-terrorism in rich, Western countries, largely for the reasons you stated. Environmentalists are very interested in convincing everyone that climate change is literally the end of the world and the human species as we know it because that kind of apocalyptic framing is the only thing that might actually motivate us to do something. The issue is that the sacrifices that would be required of us to avert or reverse climate change are so immense, it really does require “the end of the world as we know it” for these mitigations to even be on the table. (Consider: even if the USA could magically become carbon neutral tomorrow, it wouldn’t be enough. Any successful mitigation would require unprecedented international cooperation, or military intervention.)
The reality, last I checked, suggests that GDP growth in rich, Western countries will slow slightly, and then likely return to normal as we adapt, while poor regions are absolutely devastated. I predict “how much we should do for countries ruined by climate change” will be the most predictive question of someone’s political allegiance, probably even the primary dividing line between left/right — and I don’t think the empathetic view is going to win, when push comes to shove. So, obviously, if you care about those people, the time to try to help them is now, and probably in the minds of many, any kind of exaggerated, apocalyptic rhetoric is worth it if it increases the chance that we avoid billions of deaths in the future, and the threats and handwringing about eco-terrorism tie into that.
“The reality, last I checked, suggests that GDP growth in rich, Western countries will slow slightly, and then likely return to normal as we adapt, while poor regions are absolutely devastated.”
What’s the logic behind this? What will selectively devastate them and not the rich countries?
The same reason natural disasters kill tens of thousands in third world countries and tens of people in first world countries (yes, there are exceptions both ways, but the general pattern is clear).
“absolutely devastated” is much too strong. Something which is barely a blip on GDP growth for a developed nation does not translate to existential crisis for a developing nation – especially when we’re talking about slow-moving change. Smart and adaptable people are everywhere.
Plus by the time any significant impacts of global warming are felt, the amount of poor people in the world will be dramatically lower than it is today – Bangladesh, for example, the poster child for global warming impact, is on the growth track to comfortably be a developed nation by 2100.
Viz. poverty. So to what degree is it worth it to curb economic growth in order to reduce GHG emissions?
Well, it helps that most developed, Western countries are located far from the equator, in the northern hemisphere, with lower average temperatures than some of the more populated equatorial regions, so warming isn’t going to hurt us as much. We also have much better energy infrastructure, and our people are richer, so air conditioning is reliable (if expensive) and tens of thousands of people won’t die if we get 50 degree heat waves or whatever. People can be evacuated from poorer coastal regions that are prone to flooding, and rich coastal regions can just build seawalls. We have a huge amount of arable land far inland, and we’ll unlock more as temperatures rise; just look to the Canadian prairies. Our food situation is secure. What else is there to kill us? Hypercanes could be problematic if temperatures rise that far, but I don’t know of any reasonable models that predict the level of warming that would require.
Really, the biggest threats are political in nature. War and black swan events like extensive civil instability leading to total breakdown of effective government. If that happens, then we might be in danger.
Note that the effects of warming are substantially more pronounced further from the equator – the expected temperature change is greater for Canada and Russia than it is for Ethiopia.
The one large group that is predictably hurt by climate change is people currently living in very hot climates, hot enough so that another few degrees C would make some areas close to unliveable. The obvious exaple is India, which is indeed a poor country.
People in very low lying areas are also at risk, but unless sea level rise is substantially larger than the IPCC projections in the most recent report, that isn’t a very large group—on average, coastlines should be shifting in by something like a tenth of a mile, more in some places, less in others. And that’s over most of a century.
On the other hand, the most predictable large effect is the increase in crop yields due to CO2 fertilization, and that would be a larger benefit for poorer people, since poorer people spend a larger fraction of their income on food. Unlike most of the other consequences people talk about, that doesn’t depend on uncertain causal links between warming and effects such as hurricanes or rainfall–it follows directly from the CO2 increase that drives everything else.
What would hurt poor people is if the developed countries somehow got poor countries to abandon fossil fuels, making the rise out of poverty much more difficult. But I do not think that is at all likely to happen unless some alternative technology that is actually competitive with fossil fuel develops, in which case it isn’t a problem.
Is raw temperature the problem?
I’d have thought the bigger issue was semi-arid regions like the Sahel slowly becoming full-on desert.
Raw temperature is potential problem in specific sense, at least when we’re talking about the issue DF pointed at – in some, especially already humid climates, a not even very high rise in temperature causes human body to cease being able to manage heat dissipation by sweating resulting in inevitable heat stroke.
Some parts of most densely populated areas on Earth (South and South-East Asia) would not require a much higher temperature for such conditions to persist for months which would make them very hard to survive for humans in practice.
But in hot humid climates increasing the temperature requires much more heat because water has a high specific heat and heat of vaporization.
Why would you expect climate change to have that effect? One of the consequences of CO2 fertilization is to reduce water requirements for plants, since they don’t have to pass as much air though the leaves in order to get carbon for photosynthesis. That fits what seems to be actually occurring–not desertification but greening.
Higher teperatures will put more energy into the Hadley Cell, and grow the horse latitudes. Air pressures will rise in the Sahel, bringing dry air and reduced precipitation.
Maybe you’re right about climate change on a global scale, but I’d not want to be a farmer in Chad or Mali in 50 years.
I looked up the price of carbon credits the other day since we are considering making our aviation business carbon neutral. I was surprised at how cheap it was: <11 USD per metric ton of CO2 (from http://www.terrapass.com). That worked out to 5% of the cost of our fuel. Granted I'm in New Zealand where fuel is more expensive (~2.15 + GST per litre)
Could we really solve most/all of our CO2 emissions with a 5% fuel tax? That seems pretty easy, especially given most countries already have much higher taxes on fuel as it is.
I regard UN carbon credits as a scam, little different from indulgences. By handing a little cash to the chur….UN system, which hands some of it off to ostensibly good causes, you get the comfort of a clean conscience – and very little else.
Maybe this is uncharitable? I have more faith in EU’s cap and trade system, because, you know, cap. Cost of emissions seems to be about twice, and there is still a danger of emissions export – i.e. importing high-emission goods from third parties instead of manufacturing them under the quota regime.
“Could we really solve most/all of our CO2 emissions with a 5% fuel tax? That seems pretty easy, especially given most countries already have much higher taxes on fuel as it is.”
It is that easy to be able to claim that you are doing your part, which is why many companies, cities, college campuses, etc. have jumped on the opportunity. With that said, I do not think that carbon credits do much, if at all, to reduce emissions. Sure, they might encourage more wind/solar to be built, but usually that is on top of the regular energy sources as opposed to instead of them, plus carbon credits don’t encourage the development of storage and distributed energy, which would be necessary for a wind/solar heavy energy supply system.
A somewhat related interesting read:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032117312546
I think not. If you want to reduce carbon emissions substantially the tax (or other system) is going to have to hurt. A tax that only hurts a little can only produce a little change, almost axiomatically. The main problem is there’s no substitute. If producing carbon based energy cost $100/energy unit and producing energy using non-carbon-based fuels cost $200/energy unit, a tax that brought the carbon-based-fuel cost up to $300/energy unit would likely result in a substantial reduction of carbon based fuel use. But since the alternatives to carbon-based fuels don’t scale (for various reasons both technical and political), the alternative to carbon-based fuel use is shivering in the dark. People will pay a lot to avoid that, so your taxes are going to have to hurt a lot.
But once* the taxes are big enough that some people** start shivering, the same politicians will give them free energy***.
*Already happening.
** Poor people and the elderly
***Or energy credits, or will ban electricity companies from disconnecting debtors.
Trying to solve the “some people shivering in the dark” problem by giving out free energy vitiates your energy tax. If the government is using the proceeds of the tax to buy energy, the reduction in carbon use caused by the tax evaporates.
But really, I’m not talking about “some people” shivering in the dark. I’m talking about reducing energy usage to the point where almost everyone is shivering in the dark. Industries shutting down, the economy grinding to a halt, etc. That’s not a consequence of the mechanism; that’s a consequence of the goal (unless scalable alternatives are found, and I believe that any that are will be shut down by any government that thinks a carbon tax is a good idea).
Nuclear scales.
You may say there are political obstacles to it. But there are also political obstacles to a carbon tax, particularly a large one…
Nuclear is an example of a probably-scalable alternative (there’s still transportation fuels, but this is almost certainly solvable in the near future for land transportation) that “will be shut down by any government that thinks a carbon tax is a good idea”.
And they are tied. There’s large overlap between anti-nuclear and anti-carbon environmentalists. There are some pro-nuclear anti-carbon environmentalists, but I doubt the sincerity of some and I suspect the others would trade away nuclear before anything else.
As with everything else in the market, the price of carbon credits will increase with demand. The first carbon credits are dirt cheap, because they basically are dirt. Find some forest-adjacent farmland that’s barely worth the bother of farming, buy it for a pittance, throw down some acorns and add a covenant saying this land is now and forevermore an old-growth forest preserve. Bam, instant 200 tons/hectare carbon sequestration. But there’s a finite supply of such marginal farmland available, and as it is “consumed” for this purpose, you have to ramp up to more expensive sources, er sinks.
Right now the demand for carbon credits is a tiny fraction of the world’s carbon emissions. If we were to try to “solve” most/all of our CO2 emissions this way, we could do it but it would wind up averaging rather more than $11/ton/ Probably quite a bit more.
Also, as Ketil notes, fraud. The supply of carbon credits will always include the sum of honest carbon credits that map to actual carbon sequestration, and fraudulent carbon credits that slipped past whatever safeguards were in place. No matter how good the safeguards are, there will always be some fraud. So to completely solve the problem, you’d have to buy things claimed to be carbon credits at >100% of carbon emissions.
So the answer seems to be that $11 per ton is the low-hanging fruit price, and that if you suddenly tried to use carbon credits to reduce CO2 and methane by X% (X% being the amount to stop warming), the costs for each ton would be way higher than $11, and so the price of the credits would necessarily be way higher.
I’m curious how the numbers shake out: what is X%, and how does the cost go up for reductions if carbon credits were bought on a much larger scale? There has to be ceiling, like the cost of running those machines that just create big bricks of carbon from normal air. And surely if the demand goes up for carbon credits that would spur more innovation?
For reference, the terrapass site has this explanation for how they do things, and this is where all my knowledge of carbon credits comes from: https://www.terrapass.com/climate-change/climate-changecarbon-offsets-explained
Lastly, if my company were to buy carbon credits to offset all of our emissions, is that an effective way to help the world or is it just virtue signalling (assuming the bad about climate change)?
Right. For example, we know that we can pull one ton of CO2 out of the air and sequester it in a geologically stable manner by digging up 1.6 tons of olivine, crushing it to sand. and spreading it somewhere moist where it will turn into magnesium carbonate rock. Ideally, someplace like an unsightly old open-pit mine that would look a lot better if it were filled back up to grade.
Olivine is a fairly common rock, and mining it probably isn’t any harder than mining coal. We can mine coal, process it, and deliver it to power stations for about $40/ton, so if we can deliver crushed olivine to sequestration sites for the same price, that’s $64 per carbon credit. Maybe a bit more if we need a better final disposition than “spread it around an old open-pit mine and forget about it”, but somewhere in the high two-digit range.
And as you note, with innovation we can presumably do better. Maybe not $11 for all and for ever, but not an order of magnitude more than that either.
A brief look suggests that Terrapass is doing real carbon sequestration. That could just mean they buried the fraud one step deeper than my brief look can find, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for now. Buying carbon credits to offset your emissions would be an effective way to avoid making the world worse. It’s global warming, and/or climate change, so one ton of CO2 plus negative one ton of CO2 equals zero impact. If you were making the world worse, you’ve stopped doing that. Thank you, and go signal it so everyone else knows and doesn’t hassle you for crimes you’re not committing against Mother Nature.
If you want to actually make the world better, you have to A: buy more carbon credits than you need to offset your emissions and B: be right about the badness of climate change.
Thanks.
We primarily land in a national park, and the department of conservation is raising our landing fees 700%, to what will amount to about 4% of our revenue. There is also an ongoing dispute with them regarding access to the park full stop. So we (us and the other operators around here, heli and fixed wing) were considering taking our case to the media to garner support. This seems like an awful time to be doing that though with climate strikes and lots of panicked crowing about aviation causing the extinction of humankind. It could easily backfire: we could be seen as “a bunch of rich tourist operators, taking rich foreigners on expensive tours which create a noise all over the national parks and given nothing back to the people, and by the way killing the planet.”
With that in mind, calling ourselves carbon neutral would certainly give us good publicity, possibly resulting in more business for us just riding on the back of climate change hysteria. Then on top of that there’s the possible political benefits in our negotiations with the department of conservation.
@Les: Interesting business model, and sounds like fun. I agree that advertising carbon-neutrality is likely to be worth the cost of the credits if you’re flying tourists into a national park; I’ve seen dive boat operators prominently adopting biodiesel fuel for the same purpose.
As another data point, the carbon tax in Canada is $20 per tone CO2e, increasing to $50 per tonne by 2022. This is in addition to existing taxes on fuels.
I’m inclined to think that when people say “bad thing will lead to violence”, there’s frequently no reason to think it will lead to violence. People who say that may have a feeling that bad thing isn’t getting enough attention, so maybe adding a threat will lead to some action to make matters better.
Related to ex-officer Guyger being convicted of murder — a number of people I know are objecting that 10 years in prison is too light and lenient a sentence. The most common reasoning is “This person committed and equal/lesser offense and got a much longer prison sentence, therefore her sentence is too short.”
This is only a relative argument, justifying one sentence by comparing it to another rather than providing solid ground for how sentencing ought to work in general. As I mentioned a couple threads ago, I’m inclined to think that prison sentences might generally be too long — ten years locked in with the shittiest segment of society seems like plenty time to break and/or rehabilitate a person, if either of those are your goals. So instead of a relative argument, does anyone know of / would anyone care to come up with an argument for how long prison sentences should be based off principles? So something along the lines of “The goal(s) of a prison sentence should be X. Here’s what I think is necessary to achieve X, and here’s what I think would be excessive. A murder sentence should probably be about Y years long in order to accomplish X”.
The Sentencing Commission Guidelines may do some of what you’re looking for. But generally, I don’t think this is likely to be successful.
Honestly, I sympathize with the ‘this is too light’ crowd, but I’ve tried to train myself into a different reaction. This is probably a just and appropriate sentence. I try to wish people who did not have her advantages would get it as well, rather than that she be punished as excessively as they.
This is the approach I try to take as well. I would even have understood if the sentence were a little shorter, I think 10 years is about right (a awfully long time, but she can still have a legitimate life when she gets out if she makes it though the first year or two after getting released).
It is frustrating to recall or see examples of people who probably deserved as light as sentence or lighter given the circumstances of their crimes who didn’t for…reasons.
I think the federal sentencing system *before* the Supreme Court declared them advisory was the right approach. The problem with broad discretion isn’t a matter of “bad” judges. You are never going to get consistency from hundreds of judges without strong rails no matter how “good” they are.
To me, it seems obviously too harsh. Assuming she was genuinely mistaken, and given US laws that are very lenient on excessive violence for defense in general. Being removed as a cop is a must, found guilty is just and should include prison, but ten years is a long time for what was basically a fuckup with extreme consequences. And I don’t think there is much risk that she’ll go out and do it again, or that the length of the sentence is much of a deterrence to others.
Edit: Actually, one reason for a harsh sentence is to avoid criticism of lenience resulting from racism.
I follow quite a few (real) people who think it’s too lenient on Twitter, I have to say I don’t agree with their logic, but I do understand it. The constant things they keep pointing out are various people (mostly black) in jail for much longer for selling weed, firing warning shots at an intruder in their own home, sending their child to a school outside their catchment area, or committing voter fraud (supposedly accidental).
And I agree the disparity is real, and disgusting, whatever sentence Guyger gets should be worse than the ones that those individuals get. But the correct solution is not to raise her sentence, it’s to lower the others.
This is a thing that anyone thinks is relevant?
Yup, but apparently I misremembered (fortunately), and she actually only served a few days plus three years’ probation for using her father’s address instead of her own.
EDIT: Which is obviously awful… but it turns out the actual case I was remembering was one who got a 12-year suspended sentence and 5 years probation.
Oh sorry, I misread your sentence and thought “black people in jail” only modified selling weed, and the other things were things this officer had done that people thought should increase her sentence.
Because being in jail for that kind of petty fraud is pretty absurd, of course
Oh right, it’s not the clearest post I’ve ever made. Oh well.
I’m pretty sure that once found guilty you lose the presumption of innocence.
The point is that the court decided it’s wasn’t remotely plausible that she accidentally walked into someone elses house and simply had to shoot the guy eating icecream on the couch in his shorts watching TV.
The whole problem is people being entirely unreasonable in extending such extreme degrees of charity to her.
She walked into someone elses home and murdered them while they were eating icecream and watching TV.
Part of the point of the public backlash is that, not to put too fine a point on it, had that same neighbor walked into her apartment and shot her while she was eating ice-cream in her underwear the chances are basically nil that he’d be extended the same ridiculous level of charity.
And the local cops certainly wouldn’t have made sure to try to justify it by pointing to a few grams of weed in the apartment.
I personally don’t think the sentence is particularly extreme either way but I suspect people are worried that she’ll get the kid gloves from the probation service and be out in 3.
I didn’t say innocent, I said “mistaken”. In other words, that she walked into the wrong apartment by mistake and overreacted, rather than say, invented an elaborate scheme to murder the neighbor with the wrong skin color.
It boils down to what people think justifies sentences, whether it is protecting society by keeping harmful people away, exacting revenge for wrongdoings, dissuading others from harmful behavior by setting an example, or evening out societal injustices (which seems to be the more fashionable one these days).
Obviously, I emphasize 1 and 3, but if your main beef is 2 or 4¹, then sure: lock her up and throw away the key.
¹ Both white and a woman? From an intersectional point of view, she should get life times twenty. 🙂
I think prison sentences are both random enough and have enough weird inputs that it will always be possible to find outrageous-sounding cases–some really outrageous because the judge/jury/random number generator came up weird that time, others really outrageous because the legal requirements are goofy but that’s what the judges have to follow, and still others not at all outrageous but the reason why is down in the details nobody looks at closely.
Which means that for almost any case you can think of, you’ll be able to find minor crimes for which someone went to prison for life and major horrific crimes for which they got a slap on the wrist.
It was mentioned elsewhere that Texas does not have a distinction between First and Second degree murder, but that such things are considered during sentencing that her actions would otherwise meet the criteria for second degree murder. Hence, the recourse to her being mistaken is not to say she is innocent, but that the being in the lower portion of the sentencing is reasonable due to lack of prior motive.
Is there any evidence that it was deliberate, that she had a reason to want to kill him? Absent that, it was a mistake, pretty clearly an unjustifiable mistake, but not what we usually think of as murder.
It seems she testified she had the intention to kill Jean, despite having other options.
edit: it’s probable there’s a mismatch between what we understand for murder and texas law, though
As far as I know, there’s some negative evidence that indicates against a mistake, but no positive evidence in favor of a motive for her having a reason to want to kill him.
The negative evidence being that Jean’s apartment door looks very different from Guyger’s (illuminated door numbers, Jean had a brightly-colored doormat) and I’ve seen a claim that at least one neighbor testified to hearing someone banging on the door and a female voice shouting “let me in” shortly before the gunshots, which seems to contradict Guyger’s testimony that she found the door unlocked and seems inconsistent with even an unreasonable mistake on her part.
That being said, unless there’s other evidence I haven’t heard about, it sounds like the jury did the right thing convicting on the basis of an “unreasonable mistake” theory of events. The negative evidence is suggestive that there might have been something more going on here, but it doesn’t sound like it’s anywhere near establishing conscious premeditation beyond a reasonable doubt.
My reading of the news stories is not “she had the intention to kill Jean” but “she had the intention to kill the stranger she believed she had encountered in her apartment.”
My understanding is that she didn’t know he was just eating ice cream and watching TV. Rather, he got up and approached her, with unknown intent. (I can’t tell from the articles I read whether the forensics support this account.) If he’d just sat there on his sofa with ice cream spoon halfway to his mouth and a “wtf??” look on his face, I suspect she would have been confused, then mortified as she finally realized she was in the wrong apartment, holstering her weapon and apologizing profusely and backing out, and this never would have made news.
Why? If you are sitting quietly in your home when the door bangs open, and a uniformed police officer rushes in pointing a gun at you – what do you do? “Approach with unknown intent”? How is that in any way credible?
It’s situations like these that I think are good exercises in “walking in someone else’s shoes”.
She moves in, gun drawn, expecting an intruder in her house (after having, erroneous IMO, failed to verify her own location), sees one moving toward her.
He is sitting at home, relaxed, when suddenly a silhouette of someone with light build appears in the doorway, gun drawn.
I suspect he didn’t know it was a cop. (Did she announce “Police! Freeze!”?) In his position, I could easily see him judging his best chance was to get up and attempt to disarm, or even to approach slowly, trying to calm her down.
“Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) … signifies the subjective experience of ‘low-grade euphoria’ characterized by ‘a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin’.”
“Psychologists Nick Davis and Emma Barratt discovered that whispering was an effective trigger for 75% of the 475 subjects who took part in an experiment to investigate the nature of ASMR … personal attention was an effective trigger for 69% of the 475 subjects”
This makes me suspect that there may have been entire civilizations where ~75% of men went about their domestic(/farming) lives in a near-perpetual mild euphoria because the local gender roles made women speak softly and give them personal attention (women might have been receiving this euphoria from someone too though that’s less obvious). Implications for utilitarians?
I’ve gotten this response a few times, and (at least in my experience) it’s not perpetual or near-perpetual. Something sets it off, you experience it for a few seconds, and then it’s done. Continued stimulus doesn’t extend it.
Thanks. That could reduce the euphoria gains by about 3 orders of magnitude.
@AG: If this is a short-term effect, singing traditions evolving to activate it would be interesting and sufficient.
I don’t think male peasants in ages past spent significant amount of time getting their nails trimmed by women 😉
There’s a Lana Del Rey/Bilie Eilish joke to be made here somehow…
More indirectly, there’s something to be said for how various singing traditions have favored the head voice, and that style has made a relatively recent comeback in pop music. That nasal timbre isn’t whispering, per se, but in conjunction with modern mixing techniques, you do a sense of the voice more directly in your ear, without the lower frequencies that comes with projected chest voice.
Combine that with a little Max Martin magic, and, well, Britney Spears’ Toxic is some good shit for good reason.
What are the merits of your standard wealth tax as Warren is proposing, versus the estate tax? It’s interesting because Yang recently criticized the wealth tax proposals of Sanders and Warren. His points are all reasonable, yet won’t all of them apply equally to the estate tax? I think the reason Yang is criticizing the wealth tax rather than the estate tax is status quo bias: the Democratic Party has been for the estate tax for many years and criticizing it would put him at odds with the rest of the field, while half the field is still opposed to the wealth tax.
both are bad ideas, but the wealth tax is much worse one. Wealth is much easier to hide than income, so the tax will almost certainly be grossly inefficient.
I agree that both are bad ideas, but I don’t think wealth is necessarily easier to hide then income. If you’ve already hidden the wealth it’s straightforward to give your children access to it.
Taxes ranked from most to least justified are as follows:
1. Pigovian taxes, where the tax is equal to the harm you do to society. For example, if you drive a car, the exhaust tends to give people around you asthma and cancer. Experts should calculate how much these diseases cost society, and tax car drivers in an amount equal to this harm. A gas tax might be a good way of doing this.
2. Estate tax. It’s the only tax that doesn’t take away from the person who earned the money.
3. Income tax
4. Wealth tax
Suggestions for additions to this list are welcome…
Land Value Tax
Also frequently despised like the estate tax for how cruel it is to hypothetical widows in mansions.
I used to be enthusiastic about the LVT, I’m not especially worried about land-rich cash-poor widows, but I’ve become convinced that they are impossible to administer well. It’s hard enough calculating full property values, but at least houses sell. How do you calculate land values in an area that’s already built up?
It’s despised because people like private land ownership, and a Georgist land value tax essentially abolishes it. A 100% tax on the imputed land rent is equivalent to a market rate lease from the government.
so don’t do 100% land tax rates. We’ve learned to not tax lots of stuff at 100% if we want people to keep doing it, because it would be stupidly destructive to tax stuff at 100% of value. We’re actually pretty good at that, even if there’s always some idiot somewhere saying “We hates it, so tax it 100%!”.
So if we’re going to do taxes at all, “Taxing it at 100% would be stupidly destructive and there’s some stupid idiot who wants to do that!” is not an argument against land taxes.
I’m replying to someone with the username FrankistGeorgist, and the 100% LVT is the central plank of Georgism.
@John Schilling
Fair since it’s simply the justness of the tax under discussion and not the just rate. The benefits of LTV over property taxes still hold at the rates it’s been tried at.
@The Nybbler
Fair since it is in the username but also given the username my response is don’t throw me in that brier patch.
A similar issue:
California’s Prop 13 severely limits property taxes (both in percentage of property value, and the rate at which assessed value can increase). This limit has caused local government in California to be chronically underfunded, leading to massive deterioration in the quality of schools and other public services. It has also distorted the real estate market and affected land use in unhealthy ways.
Prop 13 was and is popular, due to the argument that it prevents older homeowners from being kicked out of their homes due to rising taxes on a fixed pension income.
However, I think there is a good way of accomplishing this without Prop 13. Allow the tax to rise without restrictions, but also allow the extra tax due to be deferred until the owner’s death. While alive, people would pay the Prop 13 rates and never be kicked out of their homes. But for a lot of people, once they died, the house would have to be sold to pay the accumulated tax, rather than inherited by the kids to create a local aristocracy.
Or a bit harsher: If an area has severe housing shortages because that is where all the jobs are, retired widows damn well should be economically pressured to sell and move someplace which is less of a productivity kettle.
That is probably not politically viable.
Anyway kicking out a few widows will not solve the housing crisis. Only relaxing zoning limitations can do that.
Is per capita local (or state and local) expenditure substantially lower than average in California? The first thing I found with a quick google showed state and local expenditure per capita in 2016 in the range $7,500-$10,000, when the average is $9,081, which suggests that California is around average.
For education in particular, in 2015 California spent $1856 per capita on elementary and secondary education, compared to a national average of $1904.
That site shows overall state and local expenditure for 2015 as $10,514 for California, compared to a national average of $8,845, so by that measure above average.
California seems near average, not “chronically underfunded.” Do you have data to support your description?
@DavidFriedman
Are those averages adjusted for purchasing power parity? I know that parts of California are as cheap to live in as any other random part of the country, so the locale specific averages may be more important than the statewide averages.
estate taxes are really just taxes on heirs and it would be simpler to tax those heirs on the income they derive from any assets they get as regular income instead of building up a complicated, and relatively easy to avoid, second system of taxation. Just eliminate basis step up and you’re basically there.
But then you only get a 20% or so tax rate, when really a 50% or 80% rate would be more appropriate. (Not because I like high taxes, but because a high estate tax allows lowering other less justified taxes, for a given level of government funding.)
I don’t see any evidence that the estate tax is easier to avoid than income tax…
Pigovian taxes are theoretically interesting but in practice the net externality is incalculable. And you have to apply it to everything or it’s not really doing its job.
(To take my example) we already have estimates for how many people get asthma due to car pollution, how much their medical expenses are, how much they lose in productivity, and how many gallons of gas are burned each year. That’s all you need to create a Pigovian tax on gas to pay for asthma medical expenses and lost productivity.
Of course this calculation would not be exact, but it would be much *more* exact than the current Pigovian tax of zero. (One is reminded of Asimov’s quote that it’s wrong to say the world is either flat or spherical, but if you think those statements are equally wrong, you are more wrong than either of them.)
That may be true, but estate taxes are very hated by people who would like to give stuff to their kids. This means that money and resources are spent on avoiding this tax, and resources are inefficiently allocated. At least an income tax more or less discourages all activities equally.
In the UK, agricultural land is exempt from inheritance tax. This means that a big part of the agricultural land gets bought by rich people so they can avoid paying inheritance tax. This leads to even more concentration of lands into fewer hands.
While land accumulation seems kind of inevitable, since all attempts of land reform have failed to work in putting smaller patches of land into poor people’s hands. There is probably some benefit to land accumulation. While I don’t want to do land reforms, since they tend to end up badly, I don’t see why the over concentration of agricultural land ownership should be incentivised.
In other countries, attempts to avoid inheritance tax probably also lead to all kinds of inefficient resource allocation, although the UK example is the one I am familiar with.
Just eliminate inheritance tax, with the step up benefit. You could even make it so people have to pay capital gains tax on the capital gains attained by the property the moment they inherit, instead of the moment of sale (for all liquid assets, such as publicly traded shares and cash; for the others, wait for the sale).
One of Yang’s arguments against the wealth tax was that wealthy people would just move themselves and/or their money to other countries where it couldn’t be taxed. For that to apply to the estate tax, wouldn’t the heirs have to move themselves out of the country before the wealth-holder dies? Seems much less practical as a tax-avoidance strategy.
Not just themselves but the wealth holder as well, right?
I’ve never been totally satisfied with the claim that wealthy people will all just pick up and move to (some country) to avoid taxes though. I mean, some people probably would (some people already do!) but things would have to be astronomically bad before it was happening en masse.
I don’t think most people are too worried about people up and moving, but rather moving a large portion of their money out of the country. This already happens, and it’s bad for the country because it moves investment that could have been in the US to other places. A wealth tax would exacerbate the problem.
Lets take the generic argument, and ignore the specifics to show what happens with a wealth tax.
Lets say I have 1 billion dollars in cash, and decide to buy 1 billion dollars worth of government bonds, currently yielding 2% (30 year us treasury closed last night at 2.04). A 1% wealth tax effectively means my income drops from 2% on that money to 1%, making it roughly the same as a 50% capital gains tax on those earnings. If interest rates fall to 1% it is the same as a 100% capital gains tax, and if interest rates are at 5% then its a 20% tax.
One way to describe a recession that is reasonably accurate is that it is a period where the expected return on investment is zero or negative, which marks a dramatic shift between a wealth tax and an income or capital gains tax, with the wealth tax being intact at those rates. These are the times when you see capital flight from countries, so while yes things need to be bad for a wealth tax like this to drive money out of the country, there actually are times when it happens and those are exactly the times you want investment to stick around and pick up, so there is risk for a vicious cycle of declining returns, leading to capital flight.
You’re computing an “effective interest rate” by mixing a fixed cost that would happen no matter what (the 1% wealth tax) with the return from an investment. I don’t think that’s valid. Once they’ve taken the 1%, you’ll get 2% better return (on the remaining 99%) by buying the bonds than you would by doing nothing at all, so that’s your incentive to buy the bonds. Unless I misunderstand the proposal.
The point is the strength of the incentive to get the capital out of the area with the wealth tax is higher during bad economic times.
It’s useful to look at the examples elsewhere of what happened when wealth taxes were imposed.
Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Sweden all had wealth taxes not so long ago. All of them repealed them not much later.
Basically, wealth taxes are difficult to enforce and relatively easy (yet wasteful) to evade (you can rack up debt to officially offset your wealth). They ultimately exist to fund lawyers and accountants a bit more. Anyone who is actually seriously affected certainly has the resources to shift themselves and/or assets in order to eventually evade it (revenue raised declined rapidly over time). In empirical experience from where it was attempted, people did move if that was the only way to evade the taxes.
In the end, the wealth taxes were a net money loser, because the wealthy who moved themselves or their assets also stopped paying other taxes to the country involved:
There appears to be a blind spot in which American policy proposals sometimes completely ignore the experiences with similar proposals in the rest of the world, but a claim that “this time it’ll be different” should also include an argument as to why the results would change.
But doesn’t the US require taxes from all citizens, regardless of residence? Including taxes when someone surrenders their citizenship?
@anonymousskimmer,
They try to yes, but when it comes to extremely wealthy individuals, what that translates to in real life is to increase the funding of the appropriate tax lawyers and accountants to develop the strategies and do the associated paperwork.
An actual citizen only owns wealth if they want to. To most of us, the distinction doesn’t matter (we want to), but Corporations, partnerships, LLCs, trusts, charitable organizations, etc… are all able to own wealth as well. Given the right financial incentives (IRS will take $10M, or you can spend $250K to avoid that), other arrangements can be made for what to do with your wealth.
The irrevocable trust has always been a good standby. Cosigning a loan to an offshore company you control and pledging your assets (stock, etc…) against the loan (so now you have a net $0 of wealth, but the offshore company has the proceeds of the loan) is also fairly common. Transferring intellectual property around has been big as of late.
When there is lots of wealth involved, the wealthy individuals find a way. For example, currently you can just pay an exit tax based on your current capital gains to renounce U.S. Citizenship if you have over $2M in assets and then be free of American tax liabilities (while not a resident).
Also, don’t ignore the public choice implications. Politicians want to be seen as sticking it to the rich, but also want those same rich to continue to fund their campaigns. The bureaucrats writing the rules want to get along with the lawyers they see all the time. The public doesn’t actually read the rules. Solving for the equilibrium, you end up with rules to “stick it to the rich” which the rich can avoid.
Wealth taxes and estate taxes aren’t the same. A wealth tax is a tax on your current wealth, and an estate tax is a tax on your distribution of income to other people.
For instance, if I buy $100,000,000 of Amazon stock and realize a net loss when it falls to $80,000,000, it is ridiculous to pay a wealth tax on it. It is equally ridiculous to continually pay a wealth tax on it as it continues to fall until it reaches the magical $50 million Elizabeth Warren discovered by pulling it out of her ass.
However, I cannot give you $80,000,000 of stock without paying a tax on it, because that is effectively income to you. The fact that I realized a loss on it is irrelevant. I cannot give you $80,000,000 of stock. I cannot give you $80,000,000 of stock, even if I die. However, I can give whatever value of stock I want to my wife if I die, because that’s not a taxable transfer. Whether this is an ethical tax is a different story, but the reason we tax estates is not so that we can seize Jeff Bezos’ money, it is so Jeff Bezos cannot give money to his kids.
I sure wish I had her elderly ass!
Pecunia non olet, as they used to say.
Can you elaborate on this? My car is a depreciating asset, and I pay taxes on it each year. Why is Amazon stock different?
Technically you only pay taxes to use it on the roads.
Do you pay taxes on it? I pay a registration fee, which is a user fee. I only paid a tax when I first purchased the car.
The kind of tax people are familiar with is a property tax, either personal or property. Ultimately, governments are going to tax with what they can get away with taxing, but taxing land value is actually economically useful because imputed land rents are economic rents. Taxing improvement value or personal property taxes are a different story, but it’s an easy way for local governments to tax people who are more able to pay taxes. Plus property taxes are local, and local taxes go to local services. I do not mind my property taxes because they go directly to my schools and my parks and my police. I can choose my property tax burden based on the services I would prefer.
My impression is that VAT+LVT is the best “efficient progressive” taxation scheme. Harder to sell politically, though, when whipping up your base against “the rich”.
People want to tax the rich just for having money, whether or not they ever spend and thus get to enjoy it. The little old lady who worked 60 years as a secretary and invested every spare penny and saved up $10 million to donate to charity when she died? Tax it baby!!!
Wealth taxes have nothing to do with efficiency or revenue or fairness or even covetousness of nice things. It’s about status.
Where did this little old woman work that she earned six figures a year as a secretary? I hate to break it to you, but you aren’t turning an actual secretarial wage into 10 million on investments without insider trading or something.
(EDIT: Accidentally saved instead of finishing the post.)
@Oscar Sebastian
You don’t need to make six figures. You do need to save every penny.
WWII vets had a fiscal advantage or two a secretary wouldn’t, though, even with the low-paying jobs he worked otherwise — and $8 million is not 10.
But hey, I suppose Ttar is describing a type of person that might, by the time the sun explodes, have one or two actual examples. So yeah, I’ll say it: tax the shit out of whatever the fuck Madam Secretary is up to on the stock market. Sure, she’ll only have $6 million at the end of her miserable life instead of $8, but it’s the thought that counts and maybe when her money goes to a library like the one Robert Read went to, it won’t be one that had to cut back hours because of years of budget cuts, but one that was funded properly in the first place.
An estate tax is a whole lot different from a wealth tax. An estate tax takes money from people who are dead. Sounds like the least obnoxious tax ever to me. Or one could say it takes money from the potential heirs. That doesn’t sound so bad to me either.
So why is Warren favoring a wealth tax instead of just upping the estate tax? Just because it sounds new and different? I suppose it will take a little longer to get the rich’s money with an estate tax, and she wants to start spending their money right now.
I am actually against estate taxes because they are so complicated and incent the rich to put their money into portable (hideable) wealth that isn’t as good for society. But as far as effects on the taxed, and causing of distortionary economic effects, I do think estate taxes are the least bad of all taxes.
I’d be happy to trade an estate tax for eliminating the step up basis at death (and the burden of proof should be on the taxpayer as to the original basis).
There’s an awful lot of very easily accessible reasons why wealth taxes are currently in vogue. Mostly stemming from Piketty and Piketty-esque ideas.
Piketty was mostly concerned with inter-generational wealth accumulation, which is (in theory) dealt with well by an estate tax. A lot of Warren’s criticism has focused on people who amassed a fortune over one lifetime and use that fortune to exercise outsize control of social/political spheres. A wealth tax is better at preventing large accumulations of wealth in a winner take all economy where a few people will reap enormous rewards.
Really, I think the reasoning behind the wealth tax is political. Republicans have effective propaganda around a ‘death tax’ and ‘double taxation’.
Piketty explicitly calls for a wealth tax as the primary means of combatting the problems he identifies.
Estate taxes kinda have bad optics, don’t they? It’s easily spun as ghoulish, insensitive, etc.
The wealth tax is my biggest objection to Elizabeth Warren. Not because of any policy objections I might have, but because it’s blatantly unconstitutional. An ex-law professor proposing a wealth tax without prominently mentioning that it would require a constitutional amendment is something close to lying by omission.
The Vancouver meetup this past Sunday went very well! Aside from me, everyone who attended were new to the local rationality scene and had not attended the previous year’s meetup.
It came out in conversation that people didn’t know about the many rationalist-related groups in Vancouver, so I’m posting some links here. Please comment if you attend or host a local group I don’t know about:
Vancouver LessWrong: https://www.facebook.com/groups/VanLWmeetup/
Vancouver Effective Altruists: https://www.facebook.com/groups/vancouvereffectivealtruists/
UBC Effective Altruists: https://www.facebook.com/UBC.EA/
If you came across a tabletop game called “Powered by the Apocalypse”, what would the name lead you to expect?
I’d be expecting to play magicians in a near-future setting where the only fuel for magical power is human sacrifice, so nudging increasingly apocalyptic events into happening unlocks increasingly powerful spells.
Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic vehicular combat.
A game about different factions managing and competing for electricity after an apocalyptic solar flare.
I’d expect to play a game with rules based on apocalypse world.
A post-apocalyptic setting where the end of fossil fuels has caused TEOTWAWKI, killing billions, and surviving settlements try to eek out an existence based on renewable energy sources while fighting off raiders and mutants. Something like Super Energy Apocalypse: RECYCLED or Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.
Is there some sort of rule of thumb for determining how big a mortgage you qualify for based on your annual household income, assuming no credit rating issues and a reasonable down payment? Or is this issue just too complicated for such a rule?
Yes. I haven’t house-shopped in some years, but my recollection is that it is usually 28% of your pre-tax income in mortgage payments with less than 36% pre-tax income for overall debt payments which will qualify you for a set amount of mortgage.
These rules of thumb can sometimes be reconsidered in special cases or with large enough down payments.
Where does a rule of thumb with weirdly precise numbers like that come from? I would expect increments of 5%, or at least something that approximates a simple fraction
As Eric Rall noted below, it comes out of Fannie/Freddie rules for conforming loans. Basically, you standardize the underwriting requirements to make the packaged loans more similar in risk profile. It’s like getting eggs all approximately the same size to put in a carton.
There’s a formula like that, except it gives you total housing payments (property taxes and homeowner’s insurance as well as your mortgage payments) instead of a mortgage balance.
The rule is that your PITI for your primary residence should not exceed 28% of your gross income, and the sum of your PITI and minimum payments on all your other debt (car payments, consumer debts, etc) should not exceed 36% of your gross income. This rule is baked into the Fanny Mae/Freddy Mac underwriting criteria for conforming mortgages.
How that translates into a mortgage payment is too situation-specific for a one-size-fits-all formula, since it depends on property tax rates, insurance prices, interest rates, and your loan’s term.
How big you qualify for? (And not what would be wise?) That depends on the individual lender. The others are right about the percentage but that’s not exactly what you asked.
Let’s presume no big HOA fees or unusually high other home expenses, no credit issues, full downpayment, and no other significant debt. In that case, you’re generally going to end up somewhere around pretax income times 4.5-5.5 for the loan. Not the loan plus the downpayment, just the loan the bank finances. Add in the 20% downpayment and you’ll end up with roughly 5.6-7 times pretax income for total house price. That’s a maximum: banks will always lend you less than they’d be willing to.
Of course, this is dependent on interest rates, the market, etc etc.
Note that the rules others are (correctly) describing are often modified upwards in cities where housing costs but not other living expenses are extraordinarily high. You can probably get a mortgage with payments of 40% of pre-tax income in San Francisco or Manhattan.
Others are giving you more precise answers but not specifically answering your question. The basic rule of thumb is that barring other issues, a bank will usually approve you for a loan of around 5 times your annual pre-tax salary. You’re a fool to take out this much, though. Yes, your effective tax rate increases with more income, but it’s balanced out by the fact that you need a smaller portion of your salary for the necessities of life.
This was basically my (fairly recent) experience. It’s shocking how much money they’ll pre-approve you for.
Depends on whether it’s a jumbo mortgage or not, income trajectory (like resident going to become doctor), and your other outstanding debts.
You should instead think personally if you can afford it, This seems to be a reasonable calculator. If you have good credit, then banks tend to let you borrow more than you can afford, so that’s not the actual constraint.
Fresh dispatches from the front lines of the culture war, where a British tribunal has just found that “belief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others” (para. 197).
(Background info can be found here.)
In this case, “belief in Genesis 1:27” is shorthand for
as is clearly established much earlier in the document. Whether that is the standard interpretation of that verse or not I can’t say, but this is much less inflammatory than suggesting they are actually just banning various Bible verses.
I’m not sure how much that matters, other than to assess how many people the decision could impact. Cut out the shorthand Biblical reference entirely, and you’re left with “lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others.”
On the other hand, it also includes
Which IMO is much worse than a certain interpretation of the Genesis quote.
It’s also pretty absurd if taken literally. Like, presumably small children who’ve never heard of transgenderism “lack belief” in those propositions, so is every baby in a state of continuously violating human dignity?
So this medical doctor doesn’t believe in the accuracy of what he’s been taught about the existence of intersexed conditions?
Or he simply believes that all intersex people can be so sorted (though perhaps not by him). Transgender is not intersex; most transgender people have no intersex condition.
The “human rights” of very tiny minorities, being deontological, can reduce total happiness, freedom, or some other universal good, if a right is interpreted as forcing everyone else to give up some freedom or stymie their own happiness.
I don’t know if that’s why Jeremy Bentham called “the rights of man” “nonsense on stilts”, but it’s a thing he said.
This is the kind of argument those of us on the autism spectrum should be very cautious about making.
If there’s anything the culture war proves, it’s that supporting the rights of other minorities in no way guarantees reciprocity. As one SJW once said to me (paraphrased) “Because I care about women in tech, not stinky MRAs like you”.
Its remarkable how quickly the victims calling for tolerance can become the bullies demanding conformance.
I wonder if I’ll pass that particular test, if my tribe ever becomes dominant.
The meek shall inherit the earth. They’ll rule it with an iron fist, too.
ISTM this is just utilitarianism vs rights. If we consider the question of how much accomodation must be made for very rare minorities by the majority, I suspect we often get different answers from those two systems.
I would disagree with that. This isn’t about rights, it’s about “positive rights” versus rights.
Everyone, even a doctor, has a right to free speech and the free exercise of religion. That right doesn’t place a positive obligation on any other person, the only thing that the government has to do is not to prevent him from speaking or holding his beliefs. And because of that he can live peacefully in society with other people who say and believe completely opposite things because their rights can’t conflict.
If transgender people have a positive right for other people to address and refer to them in a manner of their choosing, that is an entirely different kettle of fish. That alleged right would place a positive obligation on everyone else they encounter, and the government is obliged to compel those people to speak in a particular way. And because of that transgender people can’t live peacefully in society with other people who say or believe that they aren’t their chosen sex because their rights are in direct conflict.
In this case the doctor seems to be asserting a positive right. He isn’t complaining about being thrown in jail for his beliefs, he is asserting an entitlement to continued employment.
I think it’s more accurate to say that he’s asserting a right not to be fired for this reason. Presumably if he lost his job for another reason — say, because the office he works at closed down and all its staff were made redundant — he wouldn’t be complaining to the courts.
Not *just* utilitarianism vs. rights, surely, since it’s quite possible to build up a rights-based system in which either there’s no such thing as a right to be addressed by your preferred pronouns, or there is but such a right doesn’t trump others’ rights to conscientious objection.
Fair enough.
Legal issues are usually resolved in terms of who has some legal right to do something. A good example is courts deciding that intellectually disabled kids have a right to be mainstreamed into a public school classroom. This often gets to a different decision than you’d get to if you were weighing the impact of this decision on all the kids in that classroom. (Depending on the kid–many kids should be mainstreamed, but some are quite disruptive and probably shouldn’t be.).
This is an interesting way to describe a decision which concluded that no, religion is not an excuse for a doctor working for the Department for Work and Pensions as a Health and Disabilities Assessor to refuse to use the preferred pronouns of the people he was assessing for public benefits (as I understand my skim of the linked opinion).
He’s not “describing” it, he’s literally quoting the decision itself. That is indeed the context, but I don’t see how that excuses it.
He’s quoting part of it, while linking to (thanks!) but not including (boo!) the context needed to understand what it means. As to why it excuses it, it’s unfortunately phrased, but take a look at the discussion below and I think it becomes much less troublesome.
Wow, that’s tone-deaf. Or deliberately confrontational. If it had been “expressing a belief in…”, particularly in a professional context, sure, OK, the United Kingdom doesn’t do freedom of speech the way the United States does. But they did sign up for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Article 18 is pretty specific about the right to freely hold and change religious beliefs.
If an entire class of high-status professional jobs is officially declared off-limits to people who hold a particular explicitly religious belief, then that’s a pretty unambiguous foul. Even if, as acymetric suggests, it is only a particular interpretation of Genesis 1:27 at issue, you’ve still got the Crown telling Christians how they are to interpret the Bible in the privacy of their own mind.
No, they can’t enforce it at that level. But even to demand it, under the color of law, is a grave offense against human freedom.
+1
The rulers of the UK are going against the UDHR, utilitarianism, and libertarianism. The question is, does this brand-new interpretation of “human rights” trump all three?
I’ll disagree, they’re just saying you can’t express that belief at clients/constituents/whatever while acting in an official capacity as a government employee. Obviously there’s room for people to disagree with this as well (are/should government officials be obligated to perform same sex marriages comes to mind), but its a little different that what you’re describing.
“Nor do we have any doubt that he also genuinely (and fervently) held the beliefs we set out in full at (6) or his entitlement to hold those beliefs.
263. What this case concerned is whether he was entitled to manifest those beliefs in the circumstances that applied here. He accepted that his beliefs meant that insofar as a service user was a transgender individual within the meaning of the EqA, that whilst
he did not wish them to, his actions would cause offence and potentially breach the EqA. We find that if the service user also held a full gender recognition certificate Dr Mackereth’s position was that he would also potentially breach the GRA for the reasons
we give above.”
They may be saying that in one place, but in another place they’re saying that the belief itself is intolerable. Not the expression of the belief, but just the existence of the belief. And the place they’re saying it is in the top-level summary of the ruling, with the word “express” conspicuous by its absence no matter how much you want to put it in.
That was, as I say, either very tone-deaf or deliberately confrontational.
Also, that thing they don’t want people to believe, er, express even though they said believe, that has a definition. They really, really ought to have just spelled out that definition rather than blatantly saying “Chapter 1:27 of your holy religious book; yeah, that’s what’s verboten”.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was not meant for the doctor’s tribe, but rather the tribe of those demanding the pronouns.
It’s neither, rather it’s technical language that is misleading when viewed out of context. Both “belief in Genesis 1:27” and “compatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others” are have specific meanings, referring to the defendant’s interpretation of Genesis that “Any attempt at [changing sex/gender], or pretence of, doing so, is pointless, self-destructive, and sinful.” and the legal definition of “philosophical belief” from the case mentioned in paragraph 157 respectively.
In context, paragraph 197 is *not* making any claims about what beliefs are legal to hold in certain situations. Instead, it’s saying that the defendant’s beliefs are not a protected characteristic that can be used as the basis for a complaint about discrimination because (to condense things somewhat) they are themselves discriminatory.
Also, I’m not sure where you’re getting that paragraph being a “top-level summary” from. It’s 30 pages in.
Rights are weighted against each other.
in this case his boss said “be nice to the trans clients”
he threw a hissy fit and tried to paint it as some kind of sacred religious right/duty to be rude.
But in the UK religion doesn’t automatically win.
He’s entirely free to sit in church chanting anything he wants about trans people.
This ruling merely says that the department of work and pensions isn’t obligated to pay him to do so.
No more than if you run a gay bar and one of your bartenders keeps insulting your customers and ranting that they’re gonna burn in hell. You are allowed fire them for insulting your customers and if they cry “RELIGION!!!!” it doesn’t automatically win.
That doesn’t even bar that person from being a bartender, it merely bars them from being a bartender in any establishment where their boss will fire them for being rude to gay customers.
There is no “offense against human freedom” here in any way shape or form.
There’s just someone being unprofessional in their job and getting fired for insulting customers.
I think in the US the employer would be asked to make reasonable accommodations for the physician.
It doesn’t seem so unreasonable to me to send trans clients to one of the other Drs. on staff.
The opinion addresses exactly this issue:
Now you may feel that is insufficient under these circumstances, but no, you don’t have the right to continued employment if you offend your clients/customers.
I think that finding out a patients gender assigned at birth, and their preferred pronouns are reasonable questions for incoming patient, and they can route those patients appropriately.
For those that are transitioning while under that physicians care, I have had my physician switched on me often enough that I don’t think it would necessarily be obvious it is in relation to gender dysphoria.
I actually don’t think that’s true.
In the US, I don’t believe that customer offense is sufficient to fire someone for practicing their religion. If I walk into a restaurant, then complain to the manager that my waitress is wearing a headscarf, I don’t think she can legally be fired.
“Be nice to trans clients” is a pretty tendentious way of phrasing “Deny elementary human biology”.
Very much less of this, please.
None of this, even.
More of this.
Less of trying to win the argument by censoring out the opposing view.
I suspect the liberals here do not believe that if the complainant were a transgender woman who kept correcting all his Genesis 1:27 customers to use female pronouns instead of male or be transferred to another employee and was fired for doing so, the commission would in fact support such a firing.
For this liberal the more serious concern (in the US, at least) are various laws and regulations that constrain the medical advice a physician is allowed to give to a patient, or mandatory ‘medical’ advice that a doctor must supply to the patient even if the doctor believes it to be factually untrue or potentially dangerous.
Conservatives lawmakers are currently more guilty of this (AFAIK) than liberal lawmakers, though I think I recall liberal instances of this too.
@EchoChaos > “…I suspect the liberals here do not believe that if the complainant…”
The U.K.’s population is over 66 million people, which is even more than California’s nearly 40 million people, and both are over my personal bias that no polity with a population larger than The City of New York (about 8 million people) should enforce these kinds of social issue decisions over it’s entire area (people who want it one way should be able to live in county “A” that has it that way, people who want it the other way should be able to live in county “B” that has it the other way, all in my general “Salt Lake City and San Francisco shouldn’t have all of the same rules” mindset).
As to how I would vote on this stuff for my local polity?
Whichever way my wife tells me, I ain’t King Solomon!
No, but that’s a completely different issue because the basis for the discrimination on the part of the employer would be sexual identity not belief. If the complainant was instead correcting the pronouns that customers were using to refer to third parties then it certainly would be both legally and ethically acceptable to fire them.
I don’t follow. Isn’t sexual identity, itself, a belief? “I believe that I am a man/woman, and I believe that you should address me with male/female pronouns.” From the opinion,
Here, their life choice would be wearing certain clothes, hairstyles, etc. Their belief would be, “I do this, because I believe that I am a male/female.”
Transgender folks have a sincerely-held opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available to them. Or, as DSM-5 puts it, the present state of information available to them is, “A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender,” and their sincerely-held opinion or viewpoint is that they should be considered according their experienced gender.
Or we could consider how our host describes this issue:
He gave an example of “The Hair Dryer Incident,” where a person believed every morning that she had left the hair dryer on, even though the fact of the matter was the other way ’round. He turned aside the ‘rationalist schtick’ of “[we’re] trying to believe what’s actually true, not on what we wish were true, or what our culture tells us is true, or what it’s popular to say is true,” not by saying, “Hair Dryer lady doesn’t believe that she left her hair dryer on,” but instead by focusing on compassion and trying to improve life outcomes. He turned aside “trans-Napoleonism” not by saying, “This guy doesn’t believe that he’s Napoleon,” but by saying,
That is, at best, it’s a discussion about where one believes the category boundaries should be, not questions of fact. In any framework, I don’t see why we should consider sexual identity to be something other than “a belief”.
@Controls Freak
“I am black” is also a belief, but if someone who (truthfully) held that belief was unjustly fired they would sue for discrimination based on race not belief. It sounds like you think the situation is different for sexual identity in that there is no “real” thing that corresponds to race:
but this is obviously wrong. I’m pretty sure you believe “that I am a man/woman, and I believe that you should address me with male/female pronouns” but it seems (assuming you are cisgender) unlikely that you would be discriminated against for expressing it.
It’s not relevant to my point above, but your comments about the quote are wrong. It says
and besides I’m pretty sure identifying as a gender wouldn’t count as “a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour” anyway.
I am aware that there is a push for total anti-realism. Obviously, if the anti-realists win the day, then literally all things will be “beliefs”. I think most people still think there is such a thing as race (or perhaps some objective stand-in like ‘color’, which would suitably do the trick for this type of law). But, whether you, um, believe in realism or anti-realism concerning sex, I don’t think there’s much of an argument left that sexual identity is not a belief. You didn’t address any of the quotes from Scott’s post (sorry, I realized now that I left out the link). Even there, he’s trying to hold onto an underlying realism, while professing an anti-realism for the categories, leaving us with sexual identity being a belief.
I have no clue what potential discrimination or non-discrimination has to do with the status of things as beliefs.
Good catch. I have no doubt that I’ll lose this argument to folks yelling, “MY IDENTITY IS NOT AN OPINION,” so, I’ll concede it in advance.
I’m 100% sure those folks will disagree with you there. They are very very consistent that their sexual identity is an extremely weighty and substantial aspect of their human life and behavior. I’m not sure how to demonstrate this other than a poll of trans folks?
But isn’t that (the thought that there’s no “real” thing in sexual identity, it’s all subjective and culturally-determined) the belief that’s causing this case in the first place? If you think that there is some biological difference between men and women, then it’s quite reasonable to say “I don’t care if you believe you’re a woman, your huge bushy beard and set of male genitalia tell a different story”.
If gender identity isn’t a “weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour”, then why is refusing to use a person’s preferred pronouns treated as such a serious offence?
The fact that people are willing to undergo quite extreme surgery in order to look more like their preferred gender suggests that they do think it an important aspect of their life.
@Controls Freak
@The original Mr. X
In point (iii) of the quote, “weighty and substantial” seem to me to mean that the belief must be a general claim about human life and behaviour, not just that you feel strongly about it. Remember, this is a definition of “philosophical belief”. For example, “parents should love their children” might count, but “I love my children” wouldn’t and similarly neither would “I identify as x gender”.
@Controls Freak
It’s relevant because we’re talking about the law around discrimination in employment, no? It’s obviously true that “I identify as male and prefer he/him pronouns” is a belief just as much as “I am black” is. My point is that neither of those beliefs would come up in an employment tribunal. This is true both in the sense that the law lists “gender reassignment” and similar things as protected characteristics, and in that gender identity — as in the thing that trans people get discriminated against for having — really is not just a belief (it’s not as though the list had “platonist” listed separately from “religion or belief”) since cis women are not discriminated against for saying “I identify as female and use she/her pronouns”.
You’re just messing with levels of abstraction in a way that happens to suit you. There’s no reason why a person couldn’t say their belief is, “I shouldn’t address you as a male/female,” or, “Self-identification is the method by which humans should determine sex.”
I still can’t make sense of this. I’m glad that you’re admitting that sexual identity is a belief, though. That was really my point, so I’m glad we agree.
The law also lists religious beliefs.
Wait, just having a gender identity is what people get discriminated against for? What?!
Whether or not people are discriminated against for having a belief does not determine whether or not it is a belief.
@Controls Freak
Um, obviously those are also beliefs that people can have. I really don’t understand what your point is. I don’t know what “messing with levels of abstraction” is supposed to mean either. I’m saying what I think the only plausible interpretation of a legal opinion is. If you think there are other plausible interpretations, please feel free to argue for them.
If that was your point then it was entirely irrelevant to my original comment and also doesn’t seem at all interesting or controversial.
To recap, my original comment was saying that while the doctor in the case in question was accusing his employer of discriminating against him on the basis of his beliefs, whereas EchoChaos’s trans woman would be accusing her employee of discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Therefore the implication that liberals are being hypocritical or inconsistent in supporting one but not the other is false.
You then appeared to say that actually the trans woman would also be making an accusation of discrimination on the basis of (a kind of) belief and only that. I think this is obviously not true from a legal perspective; the court proceedings will refer to “gender identity” or similar, not “belief”. And it isn’t true from a philosophical perspective either, because cis women who believe “I am a woman who should be addressed with she/her pronouns” aren’t discriminated against for it, so holding that belief cannot be the only reason trans women are discriminated against (i.e. the fact that they were not assigned female at birth is also part of it).
You’re selectively choosing one level of abstraction for the belief you like, while choosing a different level of abstraction for the belief you don’t like, because you think this puts one in-bounds and the other out-of-bounds. But there’s no reason why we couldn’t flip that.
And to recap, my point was that the latter is also a belief, so there’s no distinction here. You’re saying, ‘[T]he doctor in the case in question was accusing his employer of discriminating against him on the basis of his beliefs, whereas EchoChaos’s trans woman would be accusing her employee of discrimination on the basis of [her beliefs].’ Therefore the implication that liberals are being hypocritical or inconsistent in supporting one but not the other is true.
The fact that the court is willing to play similar games with level of generality is why I’m claiming that they’re wrong.
That is absurd, and is not a philosophical perspective. I’ll bold it this time, so you don’t skip it again. Whether or not people are discriminated against for having a belief does not determine whether or not it is a belief.
@Controls Freak
OK, I can see what you’re disagreeing with now. But you’re wrong.
This is missing the point. Let me put it another way: if gender identity is *just* a belief, then there must be literally zero difference between trans women and cis women. But that clearly isn’t the case, as evidenced by the fact that we give those groups different names.
This does not follow. You might as well say, “If religious identity is *just* a belief, then there must be literally zero difference between Catholics and Protestants. But that clearly isn’t the case, as evidenced by the fact that we give those groups different names.”
@Controls Freak
Catholics and Protestants believe different things. Trans women and cis women believe the same thing (“I am a woman and should be addressed with she/her pronouns”). I thought that was obvious.
No, it would mean there must be zero difference (other than belief) between trans women and cis men.
No, they don’t. A trans woman thinks, “I am a trans woman,” and a cis woman thinks, “I am a cis woman.”
This shows that you’re playing fast and loose with levels of generality again. Could say that they both just believe, “I am a Christian.”
@The Nybbler
Well, yes and no. Under the “gender identity = belief and nothing else” definition, trans women and cis women are exactly the same. On what grounds are you disputing that? My whole point is that defining gender identity i.e. what our hypothetical trans woman is making an accusation of discrimination about i.e. being a cis woman/cis man/trans woman/trans man to depend only on belief and not e.g. assigned sex at birth — as Controls Freak is apparently doing — is nonsensical. So you can’t dispute it on the grounds that trans women and cis women differ in physical ways.
This definition also implies that the only difference between trans women and cis men or indeed trans women and trans men is belief, but that’s just because those groups evidently differ in gender identity and we have (stupidly) defined gender identity as just being belief. I get the impression that you were trying to reference a hypothetical definition of *gender* (not *gender identity*) where belief is the only component, but that’s not at all relevant to the discussion — our hypothetical trans woman is claiming to be a victim of transphobia (= gender identity) not sexism (= gender).
@Controls Freak
And that’s the only difference between them? If a trans woman believed “I am a cis woman” she would suddenly become one? And gender identity has a totally circular definition; someone’s gender identity doesn’t tell us anything about them except their gender identity?
To clarify, I was going off your original statement of the relevant belief:
I did not say. You think there are other differences?
What else do you think it tells us?
@Controls Freak
Obviously, for instance assigned sex at birth. I get the feeling that you think admitting this is some kind of gotcha that puts me in opposition to the mainstream liberal line that trans women *are* women. If so, that’s wrong. People who think that both trans and cis women fall in the same category don’t believe there are no differences between them, that’s like saying Catholics and Protestants must be exactly the same because they’re both Christians.
You’re not great with your feelings. You would do better to stop trying to predict some argument you think is going to be nefarious and just stick to what I’ve actually said.
I’m glad you agree with me. People who think that trans/cis women and Catholics/Protestants all fall in the same category of “humans” don’t believe that there are no differences between them. We can slide up/down levels of generality in order to include more/fewer individuals. I’m not sure what your disagreement is anymore. It sounds like you’re saying, “A trans woman thinks, ‘I am a trans woman,’ and a cis woman thinks, ‘I am a cis woman.’ Also, if we move up a level of generality, I believe we should categorize them both as ‘women’.” That’s all in accord with what I’ve said.
What was the purpose of your question then? Given that the answer is obvious I’m not sure what else it would be, and nothing in your most recent comment clarifies it.
I’m disagreeing with this:
Trans people are not discriminated against solely for having beliefs, because the characteristic of being trans is not solely a belief (and I really don’t understand how you can possibly claim otherwise). Therefore EchoChaos’s analogy is false, just as if he’d said “I suspect the liberals here do not believe that if the complainant were a black woman who kept correcting his customers not to use racial slurs and was fired for doing so, the commission would in fact support such a firing.”.
To learn what you think. You’ve now answered. This is how normal conversations work. You don’t need to make accusations of nefarious questions.
It turns out that your answer is that the portion that is not a belief is “sex assigned at birth”. Of course, a Catholic could have been assigned to be a Protestant at birth. Not sure why this matters.
But what other possibilities were there? Did you seriously think I might say “no, literally the only difference between a trans woman and a cis woman is their identification as trans and cis respectively”? I really don’t understand what other plausible answers there are to that question.
Yes… Do you agree that trans women and cis women differ in their assigned sex at birth? If not, please please explain why.
This seems like a complete non sequitur. Perhaps you’re trying to get at the idea that being a Christian is also not solely a belief, in which case you really should have said that rather than making the absurd claim that gender identity is.
I would certainly agree that that being a Christian involves more than just belief! And had the doctor in question been fired because his employer discovered he attended church regularly or had been baptised, then he could have sued based on the non-belief part of being a Christian, which would be comparable to our hypothetical transwoman’s case. But that was not the situation.
There are a variety of ways you could have phrased a response.
I was not actually expecting the conversation to go in this direction. That’s why I asked the question.
I guess we’ve arrived, because that was the situation.
(I suppose I should follow your example and add something like, “Unless you think that a person can be discriminated against based on a belief that never makes any observable mark on the world outside of one’s brain.” Or, maybe we could both back off the snark; there’s no one left watching for you to show off in front of.)
That continues to not be an answer to my questions in this thread, a fact that does not reassure me that you were acting in good faith.
No it wasn’t. An easy way to see this is the fact that the court had to deliberate about the content of his beliefs, because his case depended on discrimination against them. In comparison, if he’d been fired for a matter of purely religious identity, such as going to church or wearing a crucifix, there would’ve been no need to consider the definition of “philosophical belief”.
So, when a court deliberates on the content of a trans woman’s series of beliefs, “I believe am a trans woman; I believe trans women should be categorized as women; I believe that I should be referred to as she/her,” that implies that the case depends on that, rather than just the person’s assigned sex at birth? (FYI, there are a variety of alternative reasons why a court would deliberate about the content of his beliefs, but the reason he’s being discriminated against is because of the behavior that results from those beliefs; how do you think they can discriminate against a belief that has no observable effects outside of his head?)
You’re just trying to shortcircuit the link between, “I have a philosophical belief that I should go to church, so I go to church.”
Keep in mind the context. An employment tribunal where the issue was whether the employer had the right to fire him for his behavior: being rude to clients.
If your religion dictates that all black people are soulless p-zombies you’re perfectly allowed to have that religion.
But if you have a job where you deal with clients and refuse to refer to black clients as anything other than “mr/ms soulless husk” then your employer is in fact allowed to fire you.
> anything other than “mr/ms soulless husk”
I would *love* to read that court case, should it ever occur.
Nobody cares why this one guy was fired, except that guy. That’s not why we’re having this conversation. We’re having this conversation because we’re wondering why the next hundred guys will be fire. And, you know, even the tribunal that ruled on this case was mostly concerned with what sort of precedent they would be setting for the next hundred guys.
And in that context, if Bob believes X and does Y, and Y is something we all agree is reprehensible and Bob is properly fired for doing Y, a court saying “…and of course believing X is also a reprehensible thing that it is totally OK to fire people for” is a serious threat to human freedom. They could have stopped at saying that it was just OK to fire Bob for doing Y, but they chose to go beyond that.
In the spirit of implausible missions:
Your mission is to invade a country using the military, firefighters and paramedics of the city of New York.
NYPD and FDNY have fixed all fires and crimes in New York City and have decided to conquer a small country. They are mystically given a beachhead which connects to New York via magic portal.
NYPD and FDNY have all their equipment and can purchase spares from their budget if expended, but they don’t get a budget increase and still cannot purchase any arms not already available to police in the USA (i.e. no stealth fighters).
What is the largest country they can conquer and hold for a year? There are no international repercussions or embargoes from this because of their totally justified casus belli.
I think this is the premise of the “Mirror” Marvel Universe.
Do you mean the police? Or do you mean units of the actual military (army, navy, air force, etc.) that are stationed in the city of New York?
I did mean police.
I think they could probably take Panama. Panama abolished their regular army following the 1989 US invasion, and now they rely instead on a security guarantee from the US and a small paramilitary security force. The former is nullified here by your “no international repercussions” provision. The latter fields about 4000 border troops (including 3 companies of special forces) and about 22,000 armed police officers.
NYPD has about 36,000 armed polices officers, including about 500 SWAT officers in the Emergency Service Unit, so they outnumber Panana’s Public Forces by about 3:2. Whether that’s enough or not depends on 1) the effects of the strategic surprise the NYPD gets from showing up through magical portals, and 2) how well regular NYPD officers stack up in training and equipment against the non-special-forces part of Panama’s border force. My guess is that NYPD’s SWAT teams are roughly on par in equipment, training, and numbers with Panana’s special forces, and NYPD’s armed police officers are comparable or slightly better off than Panama’s Public Forces police, but the border force is the big wild card. If they’re close to a proper military unit, they could prove a major obstacle to the NYPD. If they’re mainly a customs patrol, then I think NYPD can handle them. Especially if NYPD teleports into a beachhead close on hand to Panama City and the Canal Zone and has a few hours to secure key positions, disarm the civil police, and prepare to receive a counterattack from the border force.
Assuming NYPD wins the initial invasion, they’ll be occupying a country of about 4 million people, or about half the size of the city they’re normally tasked with controlling. As an occupying army, they’d face more determined and organized opposition than they face back home, but they’d also have fewer restrictions on methods and rules of engagement (assuming that the constitution doesn’t follow the flag here). That could go either way, but I suspect they could hold for at least a year unless the Panamanian Resistance gets significant outside assistance.
The NYPD has 36,000 uniformed officers and about 9000 vehicles; the FDNY adds about 15,000 uniformed employees and 800 vehicles. In purely numerical terms that means New York’s emergency services are bigger than the active forces fielded by medium-sized European countries such as Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands, but it certainly couldn’t take them on head-to-head as is, since it lacks armor, artillery, air support, and even most crew-served weapons. And they don’t have the training or doctrine to use them, although there are enough veterans in most police forces that they could probably develop it given time.
They do, however, have a larger budget than many European militaries at about $7.6 billion combined — higher than Sweden’s military budget but lower than the Netherlands’. No crime in New York means they can free up a lot of that budget that’d otherwise go to maintaining precinct stations and the like. The magic portal solves most of the logistical problems they’d otherwise have. And a lot of heavy military equipment is technically available to police departments in the US, even if they presently have no good reason to buy it. That presents an opportunity.
Cross-referencing against Wikipedia’s list of countries by land area, I’d give them good odds against the DRC, maybe Kazakhstan at a stretch, but only if they have a couple years to restructure, retrain, and buy equipment. If they don’t, they probably couldn’t handle any significant military opposition, so we’re limited to failed states, micronations, countries that don’t have military forces, and maybe the odd island. Iceland might be a good choice.
But it might be able to capture some in the initial assault, depending on how well defended the bases are.
Does Belgium typically have sufficient defense to stop an army of 36,000 from overrunning bases with no support from the rest of NATO? I tend to doubt it.
Norway is probably safer due to geographical distribution of their military assets.
And I was unclear if I meant largest by population or land area. For land area, Kazakhstan seems plausible since they probably rely heavily on Russian support for defense. For population, Belgium may be their best bet.
How much re-organizing can we do? What about training?
As much as needed in… six months, let’s say.
That’s probably enough time for [an accelerated version of] basic and advanced training, plus a CTC rotation.
I think their major difficulty is going to be dealing with armor. Air and artillery will be of somewhat limited use in urban areas against light infantry, plus most countries have near-zero capability to actually employ them in a timely and accurate manner.
What’s the biggest country without a large armored contingent?
Do they have either strategic or tactical surprise? That is, does their target have, say, 6 months of warning? That would enable them to at least start pulling in reserves and conscripts, spending money like water to fix broken equipment and to move into forward positions away from their bases.
Or, for tactical surprise, if the NYPD just shows up to another country on a random Wednesday afternoon, they could probably conquer a pretty good-sized country, even with a good military. Armor doesn’t do you any good if it’s sitting in the motor pool while everybody is off at the bar at the end of the workday, and the NYPD could burn most of it to the ground with Molotov cocktails before starting to actually take ground outside of the target country’s military bases.
Total on both counts.
Remember that they only get the one entry point. Capturing bases on both sides of Poland, for example, isn’t going to happen.
All of Belgium might.
Stick the portalhead near Łodz at 02:00 and you can reach almost anywhere in the country by car in 4 hours.
What riverine capabilities does the NYPD have?
According to Wikipedia, they have 11 police boats.
Let’s keep in mind that the NYPD and FDNY are predominantly white people who speak English. That’s going to be a disadvantage if we send them out to conquer and hold a nation of substantially different ethnic and linguistic background. On the other hand, it’s an enormous advantage when it comes to pre-invasion intelligence and infiltration. So let’s go with that.
Ireland has a population half that the NYPD has historically P’d all over. It has an army with roughly one-quarter the manpower of the NYPD et al, and very little in the way of armed police or other paramilitaries or of an armed citizenry. And the NYPD’s particular brand of Anglospheric heritage is still disproportionately Irish in nature.
Politically, we can imagine it is going to spend 2020 caught between a post-Brexit UK and an EU that’s more interested in using Ireland as a tool to stick it to Boris than in actually defending the interests of Ireland, so that implausible “no international repercussions” bit may be slightly less ludicrous.
Ireland has no combat aircraft, three glorified coast-guard cutters, and fourteen light tanks. Plus a hundred-ish of armored cars, two dozen howitzers, and a bit of other military hardware that would pose a problem for an NYPD armed with nothing more than rifles. But in peacetime, all of that gear is going to be secured in maybe four or five places and not at a high state of alert. If the NYPD can predeploy a thousand or so Little Blue Men in the guise of tourists, they can probably neutralize those facilities before they can be operationally deployed to resist invasion.
This will require superb intelligence, and complete strategic and tactical surprise. Fortunately, lots of New York cops who can pass as Irish at need. And, Dublin’s agent in place for warning against anti-Irish conspiracies organized on SSC has been temporarily neutralized. But they’ll have to move fast, or they’ll be defeated just by language harsh enough to leave hardened NYPD veterans hiding under the bed.
Predominantly, but not as much as you think, actually. NYPD is only 54% white.
https://nypost.com/2014/09/08/nypd-is-as-diverse-as-new-york-city-itself/
I do love Ireland as a target, though.
I wonder if it would be stretching the ‘no international repercussions’ stipulation but:
Greenland.
Greenland is massive, has a tiny population (56,000) that would be almost outnumbered by the occupiers and, most importantly, has no standing military forces of its own, as defence is the responsibility of the Kingdom of Denmark.
Greenland is still part of Denmark, and the Danes would protect it. They just couldn’t call on the rest of NATO.
Well you can always try to get one of those small principalities in Europe. The most interesting target is, of course, the Vatican City. You could take a bunch of tourists and monuments as hostage and hold out for a good while. Maybe the NYPD can install their own Pope.
The stupid part is that the Vatican is maybe too small to hold all the police / fire fighters. A better idea is to use the mystical beachhead to go in, storm the place, kidnap the pope, steal some art, and go back.
There is, of course, the very real possibility of just storming any embassy in New York, even without magical portal. None will count as “conquering” a country, of course, but they could easily coordinate an attack on a fuckton of countries. Or just plain old attack the UN building while some delegations are in.
Having just bought tickets to the Vatican sights, I think NYPD should just keep the racket going and use the funds to finance the invasion of the rest of Italy. It shouldn’t take long with the prices they charge…
Take the Pope hostage or let him go?
He’s a really valuable hostage, but there are a lot of Catholics in New York City who might be against that. For that matter, your police force might be unwilling to conquer Vatican City.
The Vatican city is so small that you could probably not include all the catholics or conscientious objectors in the NYPD and still be able to conquer it easily.
On second thought, I was thinking too small. The NYPD is in a good position to conquer…the United States of America.
With some luck and good timing and preparation, they could convince Donald Trump there is a coup brewing. Invite him to give him some prize, or wait until he visits, take out the secret service, show him some prepared fake video evidence and convince him the secret service and Pence were against him, and that the NYPD is the only loyal to him. Depending on how much people they need to take down to put the chief of police as VP, then organize Trump’s death. Done.
edit: but JP, that’s not how succession works
just use the beachhead to storm and dissolve congress
Thinking outside the box. Nice.
This is along the lines of my opinions on how fragile the government is to internal takedown.
36000 is more than enough to bring the entire nation to its knees.
I expect it would be a lot harder than this sounds. No resistance from the US military?
The idea would be to keep Trump semi kidnapped. Basically surrounded by cops, and told/being shown proof that the high command of the military is against him. The necessary conspiracy theories would be seeded for him before hand. Best case, Trump would tell the military to stand down, or give orders that help the cops in the end.
The beachhead could be used creatively to make it look like the secret service in conjuction with some foreign power did an attack on congress, thus giving a casus belli to Trump, then the military, without congressional oversight, would probably obey.
The state governors would send their national guard
contingents in if Congress were dissolved/massacred and the President were unresponsive. The regular federal military branches would potentially be paralyzed if POTUS and the Pentagon were giving conflicting orders, but only the military high command would have the infrastructure needed to actually do anything with the armed forces. Trump could command them not to obey the generals but the most that would do is keep like 50% of them at home, while the other 50% would probably follow the chain of command until it stopped (short of POTUS in this example). If NYPD took out basically all of DC and also all of the military commanders between Washington and then Pentagon somehow, there would still be plenty of colonels stationed around the country and the world who could coordinate a response, and the assumption would be that any commands from any officials in NYPD-occupied territory were being made under duress.
Are you actually sure about that? The 1033 program gets an awfully bad rap for providing military equipment to the police. Maybe the NYPD could order up a couple F35’s; I certainly can’t tell because nobody seems keen on reporting what equipment is actually on offer. (Well, obviously not F35’s because they’re not being disposed of. A-10’s maybe? It looks like demilitarized mods are starting to pop up. (The A-10 obviously isn’t a stealth fighter, but once the AF finally gets their way in killing it there is a possibility they may start popping up in police departments. Surviviability against ground fire in high intensity drug traffic areas sounds like exactly the kind of justification that might work.))
I don’t know if anybody tied these concepts together, but here goes nothing: AI, consequentialism/deontology, and the latter’s extreme.
The standard AGI concept is to have the agent build a model of the environment, predict the consequences of taking a number of possible actions, evaluate the consequences with the utility function, and choose the action leading to the highest expected value. In online mode, in real time. What do you do if this doesn’t work, even in terms of the actually-implemented utility function (I’m not writing about alignment)?
Perhaps the agent is just too computationally limited. Perhaps its world-model is systematically garbage and produces incorrect predictions of actions’ consequences. Perhaps its “simulated” evaluation of its utility function over the predicted consequences is broken.
One obvious thing to do is to simply move the computation offline. Create some environments*actions->consequences table in advance, evaluate the utility function over it, pick the best action. And now that you have an environments->actions mapping, do clustering on it, “to fill in the gaps” of sparsity. (And you hope that the world is merciful, that your utility function has low derivatives.)
This is deontology. The agent now only has to recognize what environment it is in.
However, so far this only takes care of the first objection: computational limits. To handle the other two, one would have to say: let’s observe agents try various actions in various environments, and score the actually realized consequences by actually applying our utility function, rather than simulating applying our utility function to imagined consequences. This “extreme deontology” is, I think, at the core of.
Writing out the above also reproduces the standard objections, as well as some unusual ones.
Standard: We used clustering to “fill in” our environments->actions map. Clustering can be broken by intentionally constructed counterexamples, as well as by technology throwing up situations far outside the “training set” used to construct the clustering.
Unusual: We buried the utility function pretty deep in our deontology. If the agent doesn’t have exactly the same utility function, it would have to redo a whole lot of computations, on an extremely large set of data, which it presumably doesn’t have (the environments*actions->consequences table). Without doing this, on the other hand, the agent experiences predictable regret.
I like the idea of thinking about ethics through the hypothetical of “how should we program a robot?” That seems to make it easier to shed my biases/mood affiliation/whatever and consider the problem with an open mind. I guess at some point you run into the problem of “we can’t re-program humans, so those biases need to be taken into account when doing ethics,” but I think it would still be helpful for considering certain aspects.
I know that’s not where you were going with this at all, but it’s just a thought I had as I read your post.
“we can’t reprogram humans”
That’s where you’re wrong, kiddo.
Thinking of ethics as “How would I program a robot?” seems to be a large part of what Yudkowsky does in the ethics portions of the sequences, so I recommend you check it out, if you haven’t.
You can find it at lesswrong dot com.
IIRC those who apply to selective schools and are admitted but choose not to attend, economically, do as well as those who are admitted and who attend.
So it’s doubtful attendance at an elite university is ‘helpful’ for anyone except in terms of garnering prestige, and maybe social networking. Both of these things are zero sum.
As a method of equalizing economic outcomes, AA, especially at elite institutions where the graduating class is a miniscule portion of the population, is not very effectively. *unless* you can have AA apply throughout the economy. Federal employment does this somewhat but realistically it needs to be done a
If we assume standardize test scores are a valid predictor of ability to perform a broad variety of skilled work, it’s easy to see how overt wealth redistribution is probably more efficient than a potempkin economy, but it’s also a lot more humiliating in certain respects.
To an outsider the whole thing seems theatrical because it’s grounded in a pair of assumptions that are believed by almost everyone except the forum-goers: Blankslateism and the notion that postsecondary ed is a cause rather than an affect.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to describe the most Lex Luthor plan you can imagine Jeff Bezos carrying out.
He’s made public speeches about how Blue Origin is about baby steps toward the infrastructure for building O’Neill habitats for a trillion people. Could he get as far as a mass driver on the Moon before old age or cancer from carrying Kryptonite takes him?
Bezos decides that AmazonFresh-grocery should expand to offering baked goods. However, to cut costs, he decides that stores should be stocked via covertly re-directing deliveries from another franchise (it’s a simple process, by having Alexa change the GPS directions of the shippers). Across the country, one delivery of cake is stolen per hour of the weekday work week, when no one was looking.
And that’s terrible.
Dang, yes. That’s a way of being Lex Luthor that Amazon already has all the infrastructure for.
A good laugh from me. Wonderful, thanks.
A lot of people have been talking about abuse of the codeword system or otherwise over-classifying documents to prevent them from leaking.
Putting aside the specifics of the Trump / Ukraine situation, what would the proper precautions to prevent leaks be? If the White House staff and Intelligence Community are ideologically opposed to a sitting President and have demonstrated that they’re willing to leak any potentially embarrassing or politically damaging information that they have access to, how is a President supposed to deal with that situation within the rules?
People’s tones imply that the answer isn’t “there isn’t one, neener neener” so I’d like to know what the actual answer is.
The actual answer is “there isn’t one”, unfortunately.
The original idea of the bureaucracy was the spoils system, which meant that everyone would be ideologically aligned with the President. For obvious reasons, this meant government performance was bad.
So we went to the “apolitical” government employee with the protections implied in that. Unfortunately, this led to the fact of the government drifting to one party (left-right is irrelevant here, but once one party is captured, it reinforces itself).
This means that the non captured party will always be at a disadvantage.
This argument fails, however, given that in Trump’s administration it’s been his staff (IE political appointees (IE Spoils)) who have been doing the leaking. The actual bureaucrats, on the other hand, have mostly practiced commendable infosec.
For an example of this, consider how the details of a recent meeting with Trump’s appointed DHS secretary leaked to the NYT, but there still hasn’t been an IRS employee who’s leaked Trump’s tax returns.
The IRS is specifically very commendable here. But I haven’t heard that it is mostly political appointees. Where are you getting that from? As far as I know, most sources are still anonymous.
Yes, the sources are still anonymous, but almost all of them have been branded as a source within the white house. That means it’s a someone in the administration, not a public employee. Really, other than people in the military, the president doesn’t really interact much with non-political appointees. The entire staff at the west wing serves at his pleasure, as do the heads of the major agencies. Anything you see leaking about Trump doing or saying something in a meeting almost certainly came from someone he hired.
That being said, at this point your just trusting my word for it. Let’s see how to prove this claim…
Well, if you take this recent Axios rundown of the top 10 leaks from his administration as being representative, 6 of them could only have come from people in his administration (all the ones about personal meetings or internal disagreement) , 3 of them were either people in his administration or elected republicans (or their staff) (the ones that mention his discussion with lawmakers) and one of them could maybe have come from a person in the IC, but also could have been from his staff (the leaked calls with Mexico and Australia from the start of his presidency).
Thanks. That is very helpful.
But there have been many false “leaks” from murky sources not in the Trump Administration, including many which formed the basis for Mueller’s investigation. See The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.
The basis for the Mueller investigation was Trump firing James Comey. That prompted the Acting Attorney General to appoint him as a special prosecutor. AFAIK this had nothing to do with a leak.
If you’re talking about the FBI CI investigation, that was started after the gov. of Australia approached the US and told them that one of their diplomats had been told by a drunk Trump adviser that the campaign had Russian contacts.
It’s possible that’s thanks to information control. If there’s a pretty limited set of people who have access to Trump’s returns and a log of who views them, it makes leaking much more risky.
You’re almost certainly correct… but that’s also kind of my point.
The IRS, as a bureaucratic organization is mature/regimented/developed/whatever enough to prevent it’s members from accessing non-essential data and then sharing that data with unauthorized recipients.
Are you claiming that the reason government agencies were created and staffed was “the spoils system”? That the current bureaucracy is run by “the spoils system”?
The latter is unambiguously false for over 99% of it. (Per Wikipedia, there were about 4,000 political appointees in Federal positions as of 2016 vice over 2 million federal civilian employees. (That number does not include the 600,000 postal service employees.)
“Can those political appointees do spoils-by-proxy?”, you might reasonably ask. Well, political appointees are concentrated in leadership roles, many of which have hiring privileges. They have some privileges to reassign/move around non-appointee civilians, though that’s not usually done without some type of internal process to recommend the change in structure, and even then you don’t get new billets to fill unless the folks you reassigned actually end up quitting. But most Federal hiring requires its own diligence and administrative/bureaucratic process, which you don’t get to just ignore/change overnight. This means that for most roles, the political appointee doesn’t get to choose whomever they want based on ideology. In a four-year or eight-year term, there’s very limited change you can effect on personnel throughout an organization, even with a concerted effort.
As for the historic purpose of “the bureaucracy”, the purposes are are diverse as the extant organizations and the programs they administer.
I’ll add that the Federal bureaucrats that I interact with take their jobs seriously, and in most cases, have turned down more lucrative private-sector jobs to work a harder job because they view the mission as important. They are politically diverse but I don’t hear much discussion of politics in the office. (The exception to this rule being the political appointees.) They don’t view their positions as “spoils” but rather as the earned result of long service and dedication.
Originally the latter. It was seen as a perk of your guy winning the office that he gave out jobs to his supporters.
Absolutely not. Most Federal bureaucrats are in fact not on the spoils system.
I think it’s a bit more subtle than that. Sometimes you give out positions as perks/rewards, but just as often, you give them out to accomplish a policy goal. Perhaps this is a “spoil” for some of your constituency or something, but I don’t think that’s what’s traditionally meant by “spoils system”. I think of old-school Machine politics or Andrew Jackson when I hear “spoils system”, which was about favors more than accomplishing policy goals.
So, for example, if you have a constituency that thinks that Federal fracking laws are too stringent, you don’t want to appoint some rando who gave you money or hosted some campaign events to run the agency in charge of fracking laws. You want to appoint a skilled bureaucrat who know how to efficiently re-direct the non-political bureaucracy to loosen regulations. If you’re giving this job away as a political favor for prestige or a subtle quid pro quo, you’re not being a very effective politician. Maybe the person you appoint helped campaign for you or endorsed you or something, but you should choose them for reasons beyond (or at least in addition to) those. So it’s a bit more subtle than that is all I’m saying.
I wonder if this isn’t also sort of what happened to academia
I’m not aware of all the specific legal rules governing the President’s authority to classify things, but I’ve heard that the President is the ultimate classifying/declassifying authority, and also that classifying things as secret to avoid embarrassment is a crime (see @EchoChaos below).
Personally I like the idea of giving the President alot of leeway to classify documents as he sees fit, in part for dealing with leaks, but also as a general principle. If a President starts classifying too many things as secret, there will be a political price that will/should be paid.
I particularly dislike the idea that classification should be criminalized based on some vague standard like whether the information is embarrassing, specially given our elite’s tendencies for prosecuting Republicans and letting Democrats off the hook.
Two minor quibbles about your question:
As far as I’m aware, they weren’t putting it in the codeword system or over-classifying the documents to reduce leaking per se; they were doing so in order to restrict access to potentially leak-able information. This might sound like I’m arguing over semantics, but it’s an important distinction.
Unless I’m forgetting any, I’m pretty sure only a few leaks have come out of the Intelligence Community. Almost everything we’ve seen get to the press has come from political appointees and staffers. As far as I remember, Reality Winner is the only IC member who’s gone to the press.
Anyway, on to your question:
There are three basic strategies:
1. Only hire people who are motivated and dedicated to you and your cause. These people aren’t going to leak.
2. Actively hunt down and punish people who leak to such an extent that the risks of doing so are perceived to be unacceptably high.
3. Get really good at compartmentalizing information. The fewer people who know something, the less likely leaking becomes.
The thing is, Trump can’t do any of these things.
1. He’s already had trouble attracting talent, especially talent with any kind of experience. He’s been able to attract some conventional republicans, but these people aren’t loyal to him, so they leak.
2. AFAIK, he hasn’t punished anyone too stringently for leaking, despite constantly tweeting about it. Even the secretary he fired for talking trash about Tiffany got a relatively nice goodbye. I don’t know if he doesn’t want to punish people for leaking, or if he can’t.
3. Compartmentaling information takes discipline and control. You’d need an empowered chief of staff who has the authority to tell people “no, you can’t see this call transcript or by on the line.” You’d need a President who knows when he’s saying stuff that needs to be controlled and doesn’t go off in public meetings.
He/His administration can’t do any of the above things, so leaks will continue to happen.
More generally, no President can do any of these things, to an extent that will make a difference. A President can hire maybe ten people who will never leak, which is enough to run two and a half games of bridge, but not enough to direct ten departments full of the thousands of people necessary to conduct investigations, implement trade sanctions, handle reporters, etc. That also includes the people necessary to hunt down and punish the people who leak; try to bind them, and one of them ends up leaking. And the sheer amount of information generated by any administration dealing with over a hundred other administrations on behalf of over 300 million people flatly precludes the type of compartmentalization that would permit any sort of effective coordination or even the President’s awareness of all those compartments. The best you can do is spot check here and there, varying certain key reports and watching the other end of the pipe like a mid-series Tyrion Lannister.
All of which is probably a good thing.
Furthermore, a good administrator in the Machiavellian sense wants leaking. It’s vital. You need certain information to get out through disavowable channels, and you can’t have that if you start punishing all your leakers or failing to disavow one or two when they do.
Well, it depends on your definition of difference. As far as I remember, the previous president tried to do #1, arguably overdid #2, and took a reasonable stab at doing #3. As such, it definitely seemed like we had less “he said, she said” leaks come out of the white house.
Sure, stuff still leaked, but not as much and it was not as gossipy.
There are two sides to news stories about leaks, someone wanting to leak something and someone wanting to write about it. All the evidence I’ve seen points to a considerably higher level of willingness to do the latter when it comes to the trump administration. Probably more of the former too, but I lack direct evidence on that.
Maybe, but that’s only a meaningful observation if there are similar events going on behind closed doors in both administrations.
Say you’ve got two presidents: one is boring, doesn’t talk much and when he does tends to be overly careful and professorial. This president tends to surround himself with equally boring, or at least careful people. The second president, on the other hand, is known to say inflammatory stuff and hires a host bombastic personalities.
That the press will want to write more about the goings-on of the second presidency is obvious, and not, IMO, evidence of an agenda-based conspiracy.
You seem to be assuming that reporters don’t have intrinsic motivation of their own. Obama smokes, seems to have tried to quit but never managed it completely, and worked hard to keep it on the DL. The press seems to have cooperated with him fairly well on that front. Do you doubt that if trump smoked and tried to keep it discreet, we’d have a cottage industry dedicated to people trying to sneak pictures of him smoking and publishing them?
I don’t doubt that Trump says more things that the average member of the press corps doesn’t like than obama did, but that’s not the only factor at play.
You’re putting a lot of faith the consistent agenda of the media, which is far from monolithic.
-Partisan media outlets exist on both sides, so everyone has a friendly ear for damaging leaks
-Most media outlets are desperate for traffic, and would sell out their own mothers for a click.
-Not all scandals are equally compelling. Having trouble quitting smoking is not really a scandal, whereas suggesting shooting immigrants in the legs to slow them down (to pick one example from just this weeks) has that clickbaity quality, even if it’s unlikely to have been meant literally.
@zzzzort says:
not a consistent agenda, but a consistent attitude and culture. And the research backs me up on this one.
Not really. I mean, there are partisan outlets, but even the people working the republican institutions are far more blue tribe than the average republican, by education if not by upbringing.
And most outlets are commenting or riffing on stories reported on by a few core institutions, the AP, Reuters, Washington post, NYT, etc. They are even more overwhelmingly blue tribe.
Sure, but the things deep blue thinks of trying to get clicks is notw what deep red would.
My point is that it would be a scandal, if trump were doing it.
Two minor quibbles about your question:
As far as I’m aware, they weren’t putting it in the codeword system or over-classifying the documents to reduce leaking per se; they were doing so in order to restrict access to potentially leak-able information. This might sound like I’m arguing over semantics, but it’s an important distinction.
Unless I’m forgetting any, I’m pretty sure only a few leaks have come out of the Intelligence Community. Almost everything we’ve seen get to the press has come from political appointees and staffers. As far as I remember, Reality Winner is the only IC member who’s gone to the press.
Anyway, on to your question:
There are three basic strategies:
1. Only hire people who are motivated and dedicated to you and your cause. These people aren’t going to leak.
2. Actively hunt down and punish people who leak to such an extent that the risks of doing so are perceived to be unacceptably high.
3. Get really good at compartmentalizing information. The fewer people who know something, the less likely leaking becomes.
The thing is, Trump can’t do any of these things.
1. He’s already had trouble attracting talent, especially talent with any kind of experience. He’s been able to attract some conventional republicans, but these people aren’t loyal to him, so they leak.
2. AFAIK, he hasn’t punished anyone too stringently for leaking, despite constantly tweeting about it. Even the secretary he fired for talking trash about Tiffany got a relatively nice goodbye. I don’t know if he doesn’t want to punish people for leaking, or if he can’t.
3. Compartmentalizing information takes discipline and control. You’d need an empowered chief of staff who has the authority to tell people “no, you can’t see this call transcript or by on the line.” You’d need a President who knows when he’s saying stuff that needs to be controlled and doesn’t go off in public meetings.
He/His administration can’t do any of the above things, so leaks will continue to happen.
Nothing new in any way here, except well, Trump. The current system deals with this by stomping on the source of the leak, hard. And it works, in the sense that leaks are rare. Very rare, actually, considering all the opportunity.
“Trump” means… well, nothing non obvious. People in the bureaucracy vote predominantly Democrat and the media is ridiculously biased against him, but on the other hand he’s so erratic and they’ve cried wolf so many times that he’s almost immune to scandal. This applies just as well to whistleblowers: if he tries to deal with them the exact way Obama did they’ll try to skin him alive, only to find there’s no skin left.
Powerlineblog has an interesting article related to this point.
The author’s contention is that pre-9/11, information was much more restricted within the bureaucracy to try to reduce leaks, but post 9/11, we’ve transitioned to a lot more sharing (inside the security bubble) to try to increase collaboration and reduce siloing.
Unfortunately, that means it is pretty hard to lock down information that your political opponents in the bureaucracy have an incentive to leak.
I’ve no experience with the classification guidelines, and I’ve been wondering something similar since reviewing the transcript notes. I was initially pretty surprised to see the release, because whatever else there is, there’s frank discussion and/or negative treatment of (1) potential military purchases by a foreign state (which is fighting Russia); (2) potential military assistance from EU countries; (3) Merkel and Macron’s lack of follow-through or commitment; and (4) ongoing Ukrainian investigations into corruption.
To my untrained eye, this looks like the textbook definition of a communication I think should be highly classified. It reveals elements of Ukraine’s military posture or planning to its adversary Russia; it reveals the EU’s strategic planning with regard to its eastern front; it could affect relationships with our allies; and it could alert potential corrupt persons to investigations coming their way. At the very least, I would think that leaking of a transcript like this might be expected to threaten real national security and/or foreign policy consequences, and so I would see higher classification to avoid leaking as itself an understandable rationale.
I’m not saying this was the rationale or that it’s appropriately classified or anything else, because I know little about the process. My question is, if this doesn’t qualify for pretty heavy classification, why not? What further elements would be required to justify a higher classification level?
ETA: If asked if this means I don’t approve of the Trump Administration’s decision to release the transcript, the answer is “correct, I don’t.” I think it was a bad idea, although due to the President’s powers of declassification probably not illegal.
I’ve already linked to the State Department’s official guide to what they think should be highly classified.
And very little of what Trump and Zelensky discussed would qualify. In particular, things like the United States selling Ukraine anti-tank missiles is almost never classified, even if it includes the exact number and model. That’s usually public information, regularly reported in the trade press. You’d need to get into e.g. the engineering details of the weapons to merit a SECRET.
Same deal with the existence or negotiation of defensive alliances. Details like “…and so the 82nd airborne will parachute in to defend the Debaltsev salient” are SECRET; the simple fact that the US is lining up to help guarantee Ukranian territorial integrity while the EU is still wishy-washy is not going to rise above the default CONFIDENTIAL for any direct communications between heads of government.
You could probably find an excuse to mark one or two paragraphs with an (S) if you really tried, but it would probably be a stretch and it would probably look like a stretch. The whole document, no.
Thank you for the link.
It was once pointed out to me that stuff which was done in the White House tended to get leaked. But stuff done at his Golf Courses tended not to get leaked. Thus a serious incentive to to golfing on a regular basis.
The other commenters have covered the general issues with preventing leaks, but I’d note that the most recent scandal started with a whistleblower, not a leak – AIUI, the person who made the complaint went through the correct legal procedures for reporting something that they thought was illegal, various lawyers and officials looked at it and said “Yes, this was a legal reason to blow the whistle”, and eventually Congress got wind of it and started asking questions.
So there isn’t really a remedy for that one beyond “change the law to remove the legal route for whistleblowing” and that’s obviously a can of worms you don’t want to open.
This isn’t exactly right, they changed the rules for whistleblowing, and then he went through those new rules. what was done wouldn’t have been legal (or, at least, valid) a year ago.
I do not believe that is a correct description of events.
ETA: a bit of courtesy.
I don’t see what you think that proves. It’s not (as far as I know) disputed that the old form specifically told whistle blowers not to report information second hand without proof, and the new one did not. And I am not aware of claims that the WB has first hand knowledge of the events in question, though I haven’t been following closely.
You:
IC IG:
Now previously:
Which included the language being referenced, however, you obviously can’t change the law with form instructions. As to why the change occurred now:
Also, even if the requirement was for first hand knowledge before it rose to the level of urgent concern
But, even if it had failed that test, that would not mean the whistleblower had done anything invalid, or improper, or illegal.
ETA: None of the above is legal advice.
@ECD
The old language wasn’t clarified, it was radically altered. Someone explicitly laid out that you couldn’t report hearsay, and someone decided to change that. Whether or not the change was accompanied by a formal change in regulations seems rather besides the point to me.
I think you’re reversing the order and the burden. At some point (unknown, based on the coverage I have seen, though I’d be interested to know when and why) this instruction was added, without change in law or regulation to support it. This was recognized and removed at a later date. That did not require a change in law or regulation.
So what do people think of the judge in he Dallas Cop trial hugging the convicted and giving a bible, along with a brother-of-victim hug?
I think a white judge would probably not have been able to do that. But I didn’t catch whether the killer showed any particular remorse. This implies she did.
So long as the judge ruled fair, expressions of compassion are probably usually beneficial. It’s probably the best end something like this can have.
She broke down crying (enough that they had to call a recess I think) several times during her testimony. It isn’t hard for me to believe that she feels really bad about killing an innocent man in his apartment. No problem from me with some compassion from the brother and the judge when it comes to a tragedy that ended one life and ruined another one.
+1
This woman killed a random stranger sitting in his own apartment watching TV. She did it, not from any particular malice, but just because she made a terrible mistake and then made bad decisions that disastrously compounded it, until a potentially funny misunderstanding ended with one person dead and another looking at a decade in prison. By all accounts, she was genuinely remorseful, just as any non-sociopath would be in this awful situation[1]. The laws of Texas presumably required something like the outcome here, and there are good reasons to try to discourage others from making such bad decisions that lead to shooting an innocent person dead in his own home, but it’s still basically destroying her life, and her victim is already dead (with all the damage that did to his family and friends and community).
Hugging her and giving her a bible doesn’t seem crazy in these circumstances. Showing her compassion is the decent thing to do, a way for the judge to express that he had to send her to prison given what she did, but he still sees the human inside. And her victim’s brother hugging her is a genuine burst of human kindness in the middle of an awful situation.
[1] I suspect she’d have had a good chance of staying out of prison if she had been more sociopathic, and thus willing to stick to the usual police script of “I was in fear for my life, I thought I saw him reaching for a gun and had to defend myself.” It probably speaks well for her as a human being that she couldn’t stick with that script, though the shooting indicates she should never have been walking around with a gun, let alone a badge.
I am not terribly emotional, so saccharine displays like this don’t do much for me, but if it helps the victim’s family, they can engage in whatever display they need.
I find the judge doing it modestly inappropriate, but not worthy of any censure.
The brother-hug is certainly a positive thing; if forgiveness helps him move on, he has every right to express it in whatever way he feels best. The judge should’ve stayed on the bench.
I thought it was very touching and heartwarming. On a purely formal note, it’s probably not legally appropriate for a state official to give a defendant a Bible.
Eh, sentencing hearings always tend to be a bit looser than actual cases. Once guilt is established a bunch of the previous rules on formality become less important.
That being said, not sure why the judge felt the need to get involved but, eh.
Of particular note, it looks like the judge was following the brother’s lead in the hugging department. And that the legally significant parts of the trial had concluded. Mercy and forgiveness are usually good things; endorsing someone else’s offer of mercy and forgiveness even more so.
I’m definitely for more forgiveness/reconciliation being part of the justice system, especially (as pointed out by Schilling) when it is led by the victim’s family. However, I worry that this a bit of a bad example, as society is already very willing to sympathize with (and the justice system gives a lot of deference to) police officers who shoot people.
What do you think of the movie Ad Astra?
It received stellar reviews (pun intended) from the critics (save for a few ranting about toxic masculinity), so I watched it expecting a good hard(ish) sci-fi flick, and I was disappointed.
The movie has amazing visuals, mostly in the backgrounds, but that’s about the only thing that I’ve enjoyed. It feels like a sequence of largely disconnected scenes that look individually good and even introduced some good ideas, just to throw them away and never mention them again. E.g. gur ovt-nff beovgny nagraan gbjre gung Oenq Cvgg snyyf bss va gur bcravat frdhrapr. Pbby fprar, ohg gura jura ur unf gb pnyy uvf qnq bss va Arcghar, ur unf gb tb gb Znef. Jul pna’g ur pnyy sebz Rnegu, vs gurl unir nagraanf guvf ovt? Vs gur genafzvffvba unf gb tb sebz Znef, jul pna’g gurl whfg ebhgr gur fvtany sebz Rnegu?
Ohg naljnl, gurl unir gb fraq Cvgg naq fbzr bpgbtranevna qhqr (Qbanyq Fhgureynaq) gb Znef gb ernq n cer-jevggra zrffntr, naq gurl unir gb fgbc naq punatr ebpxrgf ba gur Zbba, orpnhfr bs ernfbaf. Gur fcnprpensgf nyy ybbx yvxr gur Ncbyyb cebwrpg: zhygv-fgntr ebpxrgf, cbjrerq ynaqref. Qvq gurl sbetrg gur ovt-nff gbjre? Jul ab fcnpr ryringbef? Gurl jbhyq jbex rira orggre ba gur Zbba naq Znef.
Ba gur Zbba gurl qba’g rira ynaq ng gur fnzr fcnprcbeg gurl jvyy qrcneg sebz, vafgrnq gurl unir gb geniry ba gur fhesnpr, ba Ncbyyb-fglyr ohttvrf, juvyr gurl trg nggnpxrq ol “cvengrf”. Gur Znq Znk-rfdhr ybj tenivgl pne punfr ba gur Zbba ybbxf pbby, naq gur vqrn bs gur fcnpr orvat n ynjyrff jnfgrynaq bireeha ol cvengrf pbhyq unir orra na vagrerfgvat cerzvfr, rkprcg gung vg’f arire zragvbarq ntnva.
Naljnl, Cvgg naq Fhgureynaq znxr vg gb gur fcnprcbeg, rkprcg gung Fhgureynaq unf na urneg nggnpx naq pna’g pbagvahr. Jryy, qhu, nera’g nfgebanhgf fhccbfrq gb or culfvpnyyl svg? Rfcrpvnyyl vs gurl ner gnxvat cneg gb n zvffvba gb fnir znaxvaq. Gurl unzzre vagb hf gung Cvgg unf gb pbafgnagyl gnxr culfvbybtvpny rinyhngvba grfgf, bgurejvfr ur’f qravrq gb syl, ohg gur 80-fbzrguvat thl jvgu n jrnx urneg pna gnxr ebpxrgf naq or punfrq ol cvengrf.
Fb Cvgg tbrf gb Znef jvgu n perj bs zrgu-nqqvpgrq vqvbgf. Qhevat gur wbhearl gurl cvpx hc n qvfgerff fvtany sebz n ovbybtvpny fcnpr erfrnepu fgngvba, juvpu jnf whfg beovgvat gurer, va gur zvqqyr bs abjurer. Gurl fgbc gb vairfgvtngr, rira gubhtu gurl jrer fhccbfrq gb pneel bhg n fhcre-vzcbegnag zvffvba. Gheaf bhg gung gur fgngvba unf orra bireeha ol zbaxrlf, jub nccneragyl znhyrq nyy gur perj (jr qba’g npghnyyl frr nal pbecfr), gur zbaxrlf znhy gur pncgnva, Cvgg rfpncrf, gur enovq fcnpr zbaxrlf ner abg zragvbarq rire ntnva, nabgure qebccrq cybg cbvag.
(cont.)
Ba Znef ur farnxf vagb gur fnzr ebpxrg gung vf abj tbvat gb Arcghar gb oybj hc uvf qnq, gur vqvbg perj gevrf gb xvyy uvz ol hafgenccvat gurzfryirf qhevat yvsgbss naq oenjyvat jvgu uvz naq fubbgvat uvz jvgu n tha. Gurl fubbg n tha vafvqr n ebpxrg. Boivbhfyl gurl nyy qvr, rkprcg Cvgg orpnhfr ur jnf jrnevat cybg nezbe.
Svanyyl ur trgf gb Arcghar nsgre gelvat gb onqyl cyntvnevmr 2001 npvq gevc frdhrapr (thrff ur sbhaq gur perj’f qeht fgnfu). Gurer vf fbzr grpuavpny fghcvqvgl urer (cnexvat uvf fuvc ba gur jebat fvqr bs gur evatf, yrggvat gur fuhggyr sybng njnl, whzcvat guebhtu gur evatf jvgu n zrgny cnary nf n fuvryq, rgp.), ohg zl znva tevcr jnf jvgu gur erfbyhgvba bs gur znva cybg nep: Jung vf tbvat ba jvgu uvf sngure naq uvf nyvra yvsr frnepu zvffvba gung jnf ybfg 30 lrnef ntb naq vf abj gelvat gb sel Rnegu jvgu nagvznggre RZC ZpThssva chyfrf? Qvq ur svaq nyvraf naq jnf ur oenva-jnfurq ol gurz? Qvq gurl nyfb oenva jnfu gur fcnpr zbaxrlf sebz orsber? Jnf ur vafgrnq gelvat gb svtug gurz fbzrubj? Jul qvq gur perj zhgval? Gheaf bhg gung gurl qvqa’g svaq fuvg, gur byq zna jrag penml naq fravyr naq zheqrerq nyy uvf perj jura gurl gevrq gb yrnir, gur nagvznggre ZpThssva ernpgbe whfg oebxr naq vg’f whfg enaqbzyl selvat Rnegu (ybbxf yvxr n qnatrebhf cvrpr bs rdhvczrag gb chg va fcnpr).
Fb gur byq zna whfg qrpvqrf gb or n wrex gb uvf fba sbe gur ynfg gvzr naq gura pbzzvgf fhvpvqr. Cvgg ernyvmrf gung ur fcrag nyy uvf yvsr gelvat gb tnva gur nccebiny bs uvf sngure, ohg ur arire arrqrq vg orpnhfr uvf sngure jnf na n-ubyr, naq ur unf gb or n orggre zna naq pner sbe bgure crbcyr, lnqqn lnqqn lnqqn, V’ir frra guvf n zvyyvba gvzrf orsber, qbar orggre. Ubj znal qverpgbef ner fnygl gung gurl qnqf qvqa’g nccebir gurve jrveq negvfgvp pnerref?
Overall, the characters hardly speak, instead we get this continuous voiceover with Pitt rambling, stream of consciousness inner monologue.
Anyway, rant over. What are your opinions?
In brief, I thought it was a visually beautiful movie with a terrible plot, minimal and shallow. A minimal plot can be great (2001, for example), but Brad-Pitt-wants-to-find-his-dad-and-whines-a-lot has hardly any depth to it. I don’t really care about the technical / science-ish objections you wrote about. I just want a good, thoughtful story, and this wasn’t it. On a big screen, though, it was gorgeous.
Why is that the people in Hollywood are only capable of talking about two interpersonal relationships: romance and fathers?
They also do stories about friends, mothers, coworkers, neighbors, and rivals.
Which relationships exactly do you feel are underrepresented? I’m pre-registering that it is almost certainly some kind of confirmation bias.
Obviously, I’m exaggerating. Those other movies do exist. But the things I talked about are certainly over-represented.
“We have this character that seems cool, but we need to give them a vulnerability that affects their ability to connect with others. Here’s a crazy, unique idea: their dad was emotionally unavailable and never thought the kid was good enough”.
“We have this cool high concept idea but we don’t think it can stand on its own. I know, let’s dedicate most of the screen time to a romantic sub-plot and say the movie was really about love the whole time.”
Because most directors and screenwriters are artsy men who spent their youth not being laid and getting told by their fathers to get a real job?
“Fathers” does seem to be what a lot of popular space sci-fi movies are about. Contact, Interstellar, etc. Lots of people looking for their dads. I’m not sure I buy vIVI_IViv’s explanation for this, at least not in many cases.
I really liked it. I liked the visuals, notably for their inventivity in terms of staging and editing — it didn’t feel like watching yet another sci-fi space film stuck in the shadow of 2001; this felt more like the cinema of Dennis Villeneuve or Terrence Malick, who are building their own cinematographic language and codes, than of Nolan or Ridley Scott, who desperately want to be the next Kubrick.
It seems to me that the negative critics missed the point of the movie. Sure the plot is bare-bone simple — it’s about man trying to find his father — and the science-fiction is minimal (with the science itself not particularly solid), but that’s not what the story is about, that’s not the theme of the movie.
The movie is about a confrontation between a worldview where one has to be independent, self-reliant, unbending and single-goal focused versus a worlview where people have to be social, mutually supportive, charitable and participating in the full range of human experience.
Gur fva bs obgu sngure naq fba va guvf fgbel vf gung gurl rzoenpr gur svefg ivrj fb enqvpnyyl gung gurl raq hc znynwhfgrq naq qlfshapgvbany, ohg va jnlf gung qba’g vzzrqvngyl fubj hc — gurve eryragyrffarff cnffrf sbe pbasvqrapr naq va n abezny raivebazrag znxrf gurz frra nf pbzcrgrag urebrf — hagvy gurl unir gb snpr n pevfvf naq fhqqrayl gurve orunivbe orpbzrf jubyl znynqncgvir naq pernfgrf n pbafvqrenoyr nzbhag bs qnzntr nebhqa gurz.
Gur sngure qvqa’g qrpvqr gb nggnpx Rnegu jvgu gur nagvznggre chyfrf, ohg vg’f uvf hapbzcebzvfvat zvffvba-sbphf gung riraghnyyl yrq gb zhgval nzbat uvf perj, jvgu qvfnfgebhf erfhygf.
Gur fba qbrfa’g jnag gb svaq uvf sngure gb tnva uvf nccebiny (V’z abg fher ubaarfgyl ubj lbh pbhyq neevir ng gung ernqvat — ur pyrneyl gehfgf uvf sngure naq gehfgf gung uvf snure jbhyq or cebhq vs ur xarj nobhg uvf tebja hc fba), ur jnagf gb svaq uvf sngure orpnhfr gur npphfngvbaf ntnvafg gur ynggre ner na nggnpx ba uvf ebyr zbqry. Gur fba zbqryyrq uvf orunivbe ba gur fnzr cevapvcyrf nf uvf sngure, naq fb ur pnaabg pbaprvir gung guvf jbeyqivrj jbhyq ghea uvf sngure vagb na rarzl bs gur uhzna traer, orpnhfr gura guvf jbhyq unir gur fnzr vzcyvpngvba sbe gur fba.
Ohg qhevat vf vapernfvatyl hauvatrq wbhearl gb svaqf uvf sngure, gur fba qvfpbiref gur xvaq bs qnzntr ur pna qb jura sbyybjvat uvf jbeyqivrj, ur raqf hc xvyyvat frireny crbcyr — gung’f gur jubyr cbvag bs gung fprar, gb fubj ubj qnzntvat gur jnl ur npgf vf, naq gura gb unir uvz geniry nybar gb ernyvfr (naq gur vaare zbabybthr rkcyvpvgryl zragvbaf guvf) gung gur gbgny fbyvghqr ur gubhtug ur jnagrq, njnl sebz nal bgure uhzna jub pbhyq “oheqra” uvz, vf npghnyyl n avtugzner.
Naq fb jura ur ernpurf uvf sngure, uvf ivrj bs gur jbeyq vf nyernql oebxra — naq frrvat uvf sngure nf n oebxra, harzbgvbany uhfxf, jub’f bayl pncnoyr bs fnlvat gb uvf fba gung ur unf ab srryvatf sbe uvz be uvf zbgure, abg gb uheg uvz, abg bhg bs fcvgr, ohg nf n pbyq znggre-bs-snpg fgngrzrag, vf bayl gur svany pbasvezngvba bs gur fba’f eriryngvba — ur zhfg punatr, be vaqrrq orpbzr yvxr uvf sngure, jub jnf fb sbphfrq ba uvf tbny naq fb hasbetvivat naq hagehfgvat bs bguref gung ur raqf hc nybar, univat qrfgeblrq rirelguvat nebhaq uvz naq abg rira univat orra noyr gb frr gur inyhr bs jung ur unq sbhaq ng gur rqtr bs fcnpr.
—–
Bgurejvfr, V qvqa’g frr n ceboyrz jvgu gur rcvfbqvp angher bs gur svyz, abg rirel zbivr unf gb sbyybj n ol gur ahzore guerr npg fgehpgherf, naq ryrzragf orvat vagebqhprq gura sbetbggra vf n abezny cneg bs zbivrf pragrerq ba n wbhearl; vg’f jbeyq-ohvyqvat, vg’f abg gurer sbe gur cybg, vg’f gurer gb tvir qrcgu gb gur havirefr. Gung’f yvxr pbzcynvavat gung Uneevfba Sbeq be Eboreg Qhinyy bayl fubj hc sbe bar frdhrapr va Ncbpnylcfr nsgre juvpu gurl pbzcyrgryl qvfnccrne sebz gur zbivr.
Nf n uneq fpvrapr-svpgvba svyz, vg zvtug or ynpxvat, ohg vg’f ntnva abg gur cbvag — gur zbivr pbhyq unir orra frg nyzbfg naljurer, gung gur fgbel unccraf va fcnpr vf zbfgyl vapvqragny.
Relating to two of the issues you pointed out:
Gurl pna’g fraq gur fvtany sebz Rnegu orpnhfr gur Rnegu nagraan jnf qnzntrq ol gur fhetr. Gur Znef rdhvczrag jnf zbfgyl haqretebhaq, naq fb fgvyy shapgvbany.
Gurl qvqa’g ynaq ng gur fnzr Zbba onfr gurl qrcneg sebz orpnhfr gur bgure Zbba onfr jnf gbc frperg, juvpu nccneragyl zrnaf lbh pna’g geniry gurer qverpgyl sebz Rnegu.
I thought the movie was good, but not great. A slow, lonely, melancholy drama + pretty space visuals + two or three action scenes which are more about making sure you’re still awake than directly contributing to the plot, and which hint at interesting ideas that are never followed up on. Then again, given how episodic James Gray’s The Lost City of Z* is, “episodic” might just be his style. Glad I went see it, but I don’t see myself coming back to it.
*Now that I think about it, the protagonists of TLCoZ and Ad Astra are pretty similar too. Is Ad Astra just “The Lost Dad of Space”?
What do you think of the movie Ad Astra?
It received stellar reviews (pun intended) from the critics (save for a few ranting about toxic masculinity), so I watched it expecting a good hard(ish) sci-fi flick, and I was disappointed.
The movie has amazing visuals, mostly in the backgrounds, but that’s about the only thing that I’ve enjoyed. It feels like a sequence of largely disconnected scenes that look individually good and even introduced some good ideas, just to throw them away and never mention them again. E.g. gur ovt-nff beovgny nagraan gbjre gung Oenq Cvgg snyyf bss va gur bcravat frdhrapr. Pbby fprar, ohg gura jura ur unf gb pnyy uvf qnq bss va Arcghar, ur unf gb tb gb Znef. Jul pna’g ur pnyy sebz Rnegu, vs gurl unir nagraanf guvf ovt? Vs gur genafzvffvba unf gb tb sebz Znef, jul pna’g gurl whfg ebhgr gur fvtany sebz Rnegu?
Ohg naljnl, gurl unir gb fraq Cvgg naq fbzr bpgbtranevna qhqr (Qbanyq Fhgureynaq) gb Znef gb ernq n cer-jevggra zrffntr, naq gurl unir gb fgbc naq punatr ebpxrgf ba gur Zbba, orpnhfr bs ernfbaf. Gur fcnprpensgf nyy ybbx yvxr gur Ncbyyb cebwrpg: zhygv-fgntr ebpxrgf, cbjrerq ynaqref. Qvq gurl sbetrg gur ovt-nff gbjre? Jul ab fcnpr ryringbef? Gurl jbhyq jbex rira orggre ba gur Zbba naq Znef.
Ba gur Zbba gurl qba’g rira ynaq ng gur fnzr fcnprcbeg gurl jvyy qrcneg sebz, vafgrnq gurl unir gb geniry ba gur fhesnpr, ba Ncbyyb-fglyr ohttvrf, juvyr gurl trg nggnpxrq ol “cvengrf”. Gur Znq Znk-rfdhr ybj tenivgl pne punfr ba gur Zbba ybbxf pbby, naq gur vqrn bs gur fcnpr orvat n ynjyrff jnfgrynaq bireeha ol cvengrf pbhyq unir orra na vagrerfgvat cerzvfr, rkprcg gung vg’f arire zragvbarq ntnva.
Naljnl, Cvgg naq Fhgureynaq znxr vg gb gur fcnprcbeg, rkprcg gung Fhgureynaq unf na urneg nggnpx naq pna’g pbagvahr. Jryy, qhu, nera’g nfgebanhgf fhccbfrq gb or culfvpnyyl svg? Rfcrpvnyyl vs gurl ner gnxvat cneg gb n zvffvba gb fnir znaxvaq. Gurl unzzre vagb hf gung Cvgg unf gb pbafgnagyl gnxr culfvbybtvpny rinyhngvba grfgf, bgurejvfr ur’f qravrq gb syl, ohg gur 80-fbzrguvat thl jvgu n jrnx urneg pna gnxr ebpxrgf naq or punfrq ol cvengrf.
Fb Cvgg tbrf gb Znef jvgu n perj bs zrgu-nqqvpgrq vqvbgf. Qhevat gur wbhearl gurl cvpx hc n qvfgerff fvtany sebz n ovbybtvpny fcnpr erfrnepu fgngvba, juvpu jnf whfg beovgvat gurer, va gur zvqqyr bs abjurer. Gurl fgbc gb vairfgvtngr, rira gubhtu gurl jrer fhccbfrq gb pneel bhg n fhcre-vzcbegnag zvffvba. Gheaf bhg gung gur fgngvba unf orra bireeha ol zbaxrlf, jub nccneragyl znhyrq nyy gur perj (jr qba’g npghnyyl frr nal pbecfr), gur zbaxrlf znhy gur pncgnva, Cvgg rfpncrf, gur enovq fcnpr zbaxrlf ner abg zragvbarq rire ntnva, nabgure qebccrq cybg cbvag.
Ba Znef ur farnxf vagb gur fnzr ebpxrg gung vf abj tbvat gb Arcghar gb oybj hc uvf qnq, gur vqvbg perj gevrf gb xvyy uvz ol hafgenccvat gurzfryirf qhevat yvsgbss naq oenjyvat jvgu uvz naq fubbgvat uvz jvgu n tha. Gurl fubbg n tha vafvqr n ebpxrg. Boivbhfyl gurl nyy qvr, rkprcg Cvgg orpnhfr ur jnf jrnevat cybg nezbe.
Svanyyl ur trgf gb Arcghar nsgre gelvat gb onqyl cyntvnevmr 2001 npvq gevc frdhrapr (thrff ur sbhaq gur perj’f qeht fgnfu). Gurer vf fbzr grpuavpny fghcvqvgl urer (cnexvat uvf fuvc ba gur jebat fvqr bs gur evatf, yrggvat gur fuhggyr sybng njnl, whzcvat guebhtu gur evatf jvgu n zrgny cnary nf n fuvryq, rgp.), ohg zl znva tevcr jnf jvgu gur erfbyhgvba bs gur znva cybg nep: Jung vf tbvat ba jvgu uvf sngure naq uvf nyvra yvsr frnepu zvffvba gung jnf ybfg 30 lrnef ntb naq vf abj gelvat gb sel Rnegu jvgu nagvznggre RZC ZpThssva chyfrf? Qvq ur svaq nyvraf naq jnf ur oenva-jnfurq ol gurz? Qvq gurl nyfb oenva jnfu gur fcnpr zbaxrlf sebz orsber? Jnf ur vafgrnq gelvat gb svtug gurz fbzrubj? Jul qvq gur perj zhgval? Gheaf bhg gung gurl qvqa’g svaq fuvg, gur byq zna jrag penml naq fravyr naq zheqrerq nyy uvf perj jura gurl gevrq gb yrnir, gur nagvznggre ZpThssva ernpgbe whfg oebxr naq vg’f whfg enaqbzyl selvat Rnegu (ybbxf yvxr n qnatrebhf cvrpr bs rdhvczrag gb chg va fcnpr).
Fb gur byq zna whfg qrpvqrf gb or n wrex gb uvf fba sbe gur ynfg gvzr naq gura pbzzvgf fhvpvqr. Cvgg ernyvmrf gung ur fcrag nyy uvf yvsr gelvat gb tnva gur nccebiny bs uvf sngure, ohg ur arire arrqrq vg orpnhfr uvf sngure jnf na n-ubyr, naq ur unf gb or n orggre zna naq pner sbe bgure crbcyr, lnqqn lnqqn lnqqn, V’ir frra guvf n zvyyvba gvzrf orsber, qbar orggre. Ubj znal qverpgbef ner fnygl gung gurl qnqf qvqa’g nccebir gurve jrveq negvfgvp pnerref?
Overall, the characters hardly speak, instead we get this continuous voiceover with Pitt rambling, stream of consciousness inner monologue.
Anyway, rant over. What are your opinions?
What do you think of the movie Ad Astra?
It received stellar reviews (pun intended) from the critics (save for a few ranting about toxic masculinity), so I watched it expecting a good hard(ish) sci-fi flick, and I was disappointed.
The movie has amazing visuals, mostly in the backgrounds, but that’s about the only thing that I’ve enjoyed. It feels like a sequence of largely disconnected scenes that look individually good and even introduced some good ideas, just to throw them away and never mention them again. E.g. gur ovt-nff beovgny nagraan gbjre gung Oenq Cvgg snyyf bss va gur bcravat frdhrapr. Pbby fprar, ohg gura jura ur unf gb pnyy uvf qnq bss va Arcghar, ur unf gb tb gb Znef. Jul pna’g ur pnyy sebz Rnegu, vs gurl unir nagraanf guvf ovt? Vs gur genafzvffvba unf gb tb sebz Znef, jul pna’g gurl whfg ebhgr gur fvtany sebz Rnegu?
Ohg naljnl, gurl unir gb fraq Cvgg naq fbzr bpgbtranevna qhqr (Qbanyq Fhgureynaq) gb Znef gb ernq n cer-jevggra zrffntr, naq gurl unir gb fgbc naq punatr ebpxrgf ba gur Zbba, orpnhfr bs ernfbaf. Gur fcnprpensgf nyy ybbx yvxr gur Ncbyyb cebwrpg: zhygv-fgntr ebpxrgf, cbjrerq ynaqref. Qvq gurl sbetrg gur ovt-nff gbjre? Jul ab fcnpr ryringbef? Gurl jbhyq jbex rira orggre ba gur Zbba naq Znef.
Ba gur Zbba gurl qba’g rira ynaq ng gur fnzr fcnprcbeg gurl jvyy qrcneg sebz, vafgrnq gurl unir gb geniry ba gur fhesnpr, ba Ncbyyb-fglyr ohttvrf, juvyr gurl trg nggnpxrq ol “cvengrf”. Gur Znq Znk-rfdhr ybj tenivgl pne punfr ba gur Zbba ybbxf pbby, naq gur vqrn bs gur fcnpr orvat n ynjyrff jnfgrynaq bireeha ol cvengrf pbhyq unir orra na vagrerfgvat cerzvfr, rkprcg gung vg’f arire zragvbarq ntnva.
Naljnl, Cvgg naq Fhgureynaq znxr vg gb gur fcnprcbeg, rkprcg gung Fhgureynaq unf na urneg nggnpx naq pna’g pbagvahr. Jryy, qhu, nera’g nfgebanhgf fhccbfrq gb or culfvpnyyl svg? Rfcrpvnyyl vs gurl ner gnxvat cneg gb n zvffvba gb fnir znaxvaq. Gurl unzzre vagb hf gung Cvgg unf gb pbafgnagyl gnxr culfvbybtvpny rinyhngvba grfgf, bgurejvfr ur’f qravrq gb syl, ohg gur 80-fbzrguvat thl jvgu n jrnx urneg pna gnxr ebpxrgf naq or punfrq ol cvengrf.
Fb Cvgg tbrf gb Znef jvgu n perj bs zrgu-nqqvpgrq vqvbgf. Qhevat gur wbhearl gurl cvpx hc n qvfgerff fvtany sebz n ovbybtvpny fcnpr erfrnepu fgngvba, juvpu jnf whfg beovgvat gurer, va gur zvqqyr bs abjurer. Gurl fgbc gb vairfgvtngr, rira gubhtu gurl jrer fhccbfrq gb pneel bhg n fhcre-vzcbegnag zvffvba. Gheaf bhg gung gur fgngvba unf orra bireeha ol zbaxrlf, jub nccneragyl znhyrq nyy gur perj (jr qba’g npghnyyl frr nal pbecfr), gur zbaxrlf znhy gur pncgnva, Cvgg rfpncrf, gur enovq fcnpr zbaxrlf ner abg zragvbarq rire ntnva, nabgure qebccrq cybg cbvag.
Ba Znef ur farnxf vagb gur fnzr ebpxrg gung vf abj tbvat gb Arcghar gb oybj hc uvf qnq, gur vqvbg perj gevrf gb xvyy uvz ol hafgenccvat gurzfryirf qhevat yvsgbss naq oenjyvat jvgu uvz naq fubbgvat uvz jvgu n tha. Gurl fubbg n tha vafvqr n ebpxrg. Boivbhfyl gurl nyy qvr, rkprcg Cvgg orpnhfr ur jnf jrnevat cybg nezbe.
Svanyyl ur trgf gb Arcghar nsgre gelvat gb onqyl cyntvnevmr 2001 npvq gevc frdhrapr (thrff ur sbhaq gur perj’f qeht fgnfu). Gurer vf fbzr grpuavpny fghcvqvgl urer (cnexvat uvf fuvc ba gur jebat fvqr bs gur evatf, yrggvat gur fuhggyr sybng njnl, whzcvat guebhtu gur evatf jvgu n zrgny cnary nf n fuvryq, rgp.), ohg zl znva tevcr jnf jvgu gur erfbyhgvba bs gur znva cybg nep: Jung vf tbvat ba jvgu uvf sngure naq uvf nyvra yvsr frnepu zvffvba gung jnf ybfg 30 lrnef ntb naq vf abj gelvat gb sel Rnegu jvgu nagvznggre RZC ZpThssva chyfrf? Qvq ur svaq nyvraf naq jnf ur oenva-jnfurq ol gurz? Qvq gurl nyfb oenva jnfu gur fcnpr zbaxrlf sebz orsber? Jnf ur vafgrnq gelvat gb svtug gurz fbzrubj? Jul qvq gur perj zhgval? Gheaf bhg gung gurl qvqa’g svaq fuvg, gur byq zna jrag penml naq fravyr naq zheqrerq nyy uvf perj jura gurl gevrq gb yrnir, gur nagvznggre ZpThssva ernpgbe whfg oebxr naq vg’f whfg enaqbzyl selvat Rnegu (ybbxf yvxr n qnatrebhf cvrpr bs rdhvczrag gb chg va fcnpr).
Fb gur byq zna whfg qrpvqrf gb or n wrex gb uvf fba sbe gur ynfg gvzr naq gura pbzzvgf fhvpvqr. Cvgg ernyvmrf gung ur fcrag nyy uvf yvsr gelvat gb tnva gur nccebiny bs uvf sngure, ohg ur arire arrqrq vg orpnhfr uvf sngure jnf na n-ubyr, naq ur unf gb or n orggre zna naq pner sbe bgure crbcyr, lnqqn lnqqn lnqqn, V’ir frra guvf n zvyyvba gvzrf orsber, qbar orggre. Ubj znal qverpgbef ner fnygl gung gurl qnqf qvqa’g nccebir gurve jrveq negvfgvp pnerref?
Overall, the characters hardly speak, instead we get this continuous voiceover with Pitt rambling, stream of consciousness inner monologue.
Anyway, rant over. What are your opinions?
Legally, I think Harvard has the right to it, though public universities shouldn’t do the same things. What affects this has on my views, I now give less prestige to graduates of Ivy Leagues overall. I give even more prestige to Asians that graduated from Ivy Leagues, and I now give equal prestige to a white legacy or athletics student as I give to a top state university graduate.
It should be stripped of its status as a tax-exempt charity just as the segregation academies where and for the same reason. Trump has the power to instruct the IRS to do so, in a world where he was competent he’d do it.
ISTM that the whole point here is that being able to give away some spots at Harvard for political, financial, or other influence depends on it not being visible from the outside. Probably this weakens the signaling benefit blacks get–if you meet a white guy who graduated from Harvard, you don’t assume he only got in because his dad played football there, but if you meet a black guy who graduated from Harvard, you might suspect he only got in because of affirmative action.
For someone who wants to increase flexibility in basically every joint, which is better, assuming this person is a complete novice to both: yoga, or a straightforward stretching routine?
For increase in basically every joint – Yoga.
For quicker results in a few specific stretches – Stretching Routine.
Yoga is basically just a really broad, (overly mysticized) stretching routine. It’s benefit, IMO, is that it tends to get you to stretch muscles you otherwise wouldn’t notice and then hold that stretch for longer than you would normally. You’ll end up with more overall flexibility over 6 months.
That being said, if you spend 15 minutes doing focused stretching a day, you’ll likely be able to touch your toes in around 3 weeks, while an equal amount of time doing yoga probably wouldn’t lead to those kind of results.
Could you recommend a good source for learning Yoga at home? At least on the beginner level.
Honestly, unless it’s physically not possible, I’d recommend just going to a class. Every one I’ve ever gone to has been super friendly and welcoming for new people. The class environment also seems better, because it gives you the added social pressure to actually hold a pose long enough instead of giving up. A good teacher will also know how to modify certain poses to make them easier or harder, depending on what you need.
If you live in any moderately sized city, I guarantee there will be at least 4 free yoga classes in the next week, so the up-front cost is really low.
If you can’t do it in public, the youtuber Bad Yogi is ok, and most of her stuff has a minimum woo quotient, but again – I’d really recommend just getting out and doing it.
Yoga classes will also improve your balance, and they’re a good way to meet people. Go for yoga.
Really? I haven’t found this to be the case. It’s an activity that doesn’t involve interacting with anyone during it and afterword you’re sweaty / kinda tired.
I do some Yoga, and it hasn’t led to me meeting people, but maybe I’m doing it wrong.
I feel like the kind of people who meet people at yoga are the kind of people who would meet people doing basically any activity that involved proximity to other people.
That said, I guess you are more likely to meet people doing yoga in a class than you are stretching by yourself in your living room.
Other group classes that are a little…higher energy I think have a higher rate of meeting people (spin classes, for example).
Not saying that it’s the best way, but resistance training is an extremely underrated way to improve flexibility. Catch is you should do it with a full ROM (Rage of Motion), which is how you want to do it anyways for maximum muscle growth. Not only you move your joints to the end of their natural position, you do it in a dynamic, controlled way with a weight on top. So pretty much perfect 🙂
And a couple of negative points: static stretching is not only useless, but it’s actually bad for you. And foam stretching does improve your flexibility… because it’s so painful it lowers your sensitivity to pain. Seriously, it doesn’t do much else.
I find this typo to be hilarious and entertaining. I could certainly see a veteran Marine personal trainer using the phrase to encourage who ever he’s training at the time. “You, Worm, ensure to go through the entire rage of motion with every rep. Every rep you dirty dog!”
I think we’ve hashed out on here before whether static stretching is good or bad for you. I believe “good for you” tended to come out on top in those discussions.
I am also interested in studies/data in this area. I have done/tried the following things:
(1) yoga
(2) stretching, sometimes trying to follow Kurz’s Stretching Scientifically
(3) massage and foam rolling
(4) mobility exercises in the spirit of Functional Movement from Gray Cook.
My personal results have been:
(1) yoga: unclear effect on flexibility/mobility, mostly improved my balance. I personally found it hard to allocate the time to group yoga classes and only occasionally will do a quick routine on my own.
(2) stretching: as a kid, did a lot of this in the context of martial arts classes and had pretty good results. As an adult, I found it very hard to maintain as a habit.
(3) M&FR: these have been critical tools for me to deal with pain and maintain an ability to keep a consistent exercise routine. However, I don’t directly see them increasing flexibility. BTW, for me, any massage that is pleasant during the experience is essentially a waste of time.
(4) functional movement: the biggest source of benefit. I was really lucky to work with a group of trainers who were very focused on mobility. For me, I think this has been the best approach, but I wouldn’t have been able to create the right program on my own.
Finally, I think optimization is more subtle than just “more flexible = better.” Consider, what’s the difference between toned muscle and tight muscle? For joints, where do you see “flexible” vs “stable?”
I see “stable” as having to do with well-developed muscle around the joint, along with healthy tendons and ligaments. I see “flexible” as having to do with being able to bend the joint comfortably over a wide range of motion.
I lift weights 5 days a week to take care of the former. I’m trying to be more strategic than I have been in the past about how I tend to the latter.
When you say increase flexibility in every joint, I assume you mean increase the flexibility in your major muscle groups so that the range of movement around, e.g. your shoulder joint is greater (since actually increasing the flexibility of the joints themselves is both difficult and undesirable outside a few special cases)?
If so I think it’s really just about learning and doing a lot of stretches consistently. If you don’t know how to stretch going to yoga class will certainly teach you some ways to do so, but it’s a rather indirect approach as a lot of yoga isn’t stretching or not primarily about increasing flexibility.
To actually increase your flexibility in a more long term-ish way you should hold stretches for a fairly long while. Two minutes is a good target to aim for. And this kind of static stretching is also largely best done at or near the end of a workout as the muscles are already warmed up and it can actually make you a bit weaker temporarily. That said, as some others have mentioned, some exercises are themselves good stretches; this exercise, for example, is a good stretch for the hip flexors of the opposite leg to the one working (this channel also has a lot of good stretches, incidentally).
One area especially overlooked is flexibility of internal hip rotation. This is basically what allows you to squat deeply without rounding your back or lifting your heels off the floor. There are some static stretches I’ve figured out for this but it does seem to be one that responds well to a more dynamic approach (indeed, doing e.g. goblet squat with good form can itself be a good stretch for this area).
My goal is to not be really stiff when I’m older. And I’m already getting older.
Yeah, then it is muscular flexibility you’re after, not joint flexibility per se. I’m not old, but I’m no longer very young, and I manage to maintain a pretty high level of flexibility just by running through various stretches for about 10 or 15 minutes at the end of my workout, which is only about 3-5 times a week.
Having met a fair number of Chinese martial arts practitioners who managed to maintain a high level of flexibility and mobility into old age, consistency seems to be the key, as opposed to intensity. If your morning tai chi routine takes you through a lot of deep squatting and other stretched positions and you’re consistent about doing it it seems like you can just keep on doing it almost ad infinitum.
And it doesn’t even have to be something slow like tai chi (in fact, the way a lot of people do tai chi doesn’t take you through big ranges of motion and so may not be useful for it). But if you “fall off the wagon,” so to speak, at seventy, whether due to illness, injury, or just lack of consistency, it seems to be a lot harder to get back where you were than it would have been at 50 or 30. That’s where tai chi may be good: the slowness reduces risk of injury and injury is the enemy of consistency.
Swimming also seems to be a good one, though I personally find it a bit boring to keep up consistently.
Related tangent (as in, more info than anyone wanted): lots of people mistakenly say of contortionists “he/she must be double-jointed!” when in fact most of the moves contortionists do simply require a high degree of muscular flexibility.
“Double-jointed” just means hypermobility of one or more joints and, while more common in those with a genetic predisposition to high muscular flexibility, e.g. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, is not the same as having flexible muscles, nor particularly useful, healthy, or desirable, other than as a parlor trick or if you’re trapped in a straight jacket or something.
So, for example, nothing you see here requires being “double-jointed,” though the type of person for which this high level of muscular flexibility comes easily is also more likely than average to have hyper-mobile joints; as you can see, these girls often have elbows that easily pass 180 degrees.
Pulling your shoulder out of its socket is a case of true joint hypermobility or “double-jointedness,” but again is not something easy to achieve or worth pursuing for most people if it isn’t something you were just born being able to do (as I can randomly pop my left thumb in and out of its socket, for example).
I have a notion that connective tissue varies a lot from one person to another, and one axis of variation is how long the connective tissue is compared to the skeleton and another is how strong it it.
Hypothesis: contortionists have long, strong connective tissue.
People with Ehlers-Danos syndrome have weak connective tissue– possibly also long connective tissue.
Any thoughts about whether cats have long connective tissue and that’s why they’re so flexible?
Argues that restricted movement is more likely to be a matter of the nervous system than the fascia
“Moshe Feldenkrais, one of Tom’s teachers, repeatedly showed that supposed “physical restrictions” in the body were actually habitual parasitic muscle tensions that could be eliminated simply through a few minutes of low amplitude client-directed movements to bring awareness to those parasitic actions. Joanne Elphinston in her excellent text Stability, Sports and Performance Movement takes us critically through many of the stereotypical aberrant movement patterns we in the fascial world have always credited to fascial “restriction.” She shows how these are often related to and corrected by addressing weakness in stabilization strength and stabilization strategies. She also shows how weakness in stabilization in one area of the body can demand compensatory and inefficient movement patterns elsewhere in the body. Like fascia, movement strategies are also global whole body phenomenon, and weakness in one area can result in visible movement compensation across joints distant from the weakness. Not only are these compensation strategies clearly visible, but being inefficient, often lead to pathology and injury, again distant from the underlying problem. Without fascial work these problems can be reversed through skill and strength acquisition.”
@Nancy,
I don’t know whether there’s a lot of variability in length and strength of connective tissue; one thing I do think is a common misconception (used to be more common, less so now) is that muscular strength and muscular flexibility are somehow mutually exclusive, when actually, I believe, the nervous system is more “willing” to allow stronger muscles to lengthen precisely because it’s less “concerned” they might go too far and allow injury.
I think there may be a tradeoff wrt joint flexibility and joint stability; many contortionists do have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (as did, I think it’s conjectured, successful amateur wrestler Abe Lincoln), and as a result are more prone to suffer joint pain and injury if they aren’t more careful and/or assiduous about developing the muscular strength they need to keep their joints from moving too far.
I don’t know much about fascia, but I have found trigger points to be a useful concept–basically just points of chronic muscular tension that result from imbalances in posture, movement, daily habit, etc. and respond well to massage and strengthening since the chronic tension restricts blood flow and ultimately results in pain, though sometimes referred away from the problem point itself (you probably already know about this but others may find it helpful to check out e.g. Davies’ “The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook”).
Scott Sonnon’s IntuFlow and Ageless Mobility are good– they’re based on taking every joint (or at least all the major joints) through their range of movement 3 or 4 times once a day.
Feldenkrais Method (gentle repeated exploratory movement) can produce dramatic improvements in flexibility.
The Harvard admissions thing looks to me like two sides being fairly disingenuous. On the one side, you’ve got right-wingers who want done away with AA and preferential admissions and trying to “balance” the student body and all that jazz, advancing this under the claim that they’re defending Asians. They wouldn’t give a hoot about Asians if white kids were getting passed over in favour of Asian kids – but right now it does look like it’s the other way around.
On the other, you’ve got an elite university that wants to keep out (mostly East) Asian students regarded as boring grinders, to be able to stack the deck in favour of (mostly white) legacies, and to admit enough black kids to try and head off awkward questions about the role of an elite institution like that in a society that supposedly wants equality, the role of slave trade money in founding the place, etc. They justify this on various different grounds that don’t always make sense (and there’s often an ugly assumption that people of similar colour are fungible – at good schools the black student body is often heavily composed of kids from well-off African, often Nigerian, families; this doesn’t really dovetail with the idea that something is being done for the descendants of American slaves through Harvard admissions – already an odd idea, since if you can get into Harvard, you’re probably not in that bad a situation; the people in a bad situation are the ones flunking out of high school).
The means of keeping the number of Asians down are pretty ugly and are very similar to past tricks to keep the number of Jews down; Harvard’s preferred way of tweaking numbers is subjective assessments of personality. People they want more of have more “effervescence” and so on, those they want fewer of, or to hold the numbers static, have less. Having a rich family with a history of going to Harvard, it would appear, improves one’s personality. Generally, the big winners from Harvard’s thumb on the scales are black kids, Hispanic kids, and rich/legacy kids; losers are Asian kids and white kids who aren’t from rich and/or legacy families. Harvard, and other elite schools, can’t defend with what’s maybe the truest thing to say, that they don’t want grinds or people perceived as grinds around more than a certain number, because the leaders of tomorrow aren’t going to be grinds, and the leaders of tomorrow are scared off by grinds. As are the people who could donate enough money to have buildings named after them.
I find myself wondering if Harvard features a thumb on the scale in favour of men; from what I recall, the Harvard incoming class tends to be 50-50 male-female, while the split is around 33-66 for undergraduates as a whole. AA for men isn’t the only possible explanation, but I suspect it benefits a university with a big legacy thing going on to have an even split: maximizes the number of alumni babies, who bring in money.
+1 to that.
Generally speaking, this whole affair has left Harvard and its sisters looking a bit worse in my eyes. If they want to claim to admit on merit, they have a really bizarre notion of merit. I think a more reasonable assessment of their actions is that they admit partly on merit, but there are also other considerations, such as boosting donations (by using the sports teams and legacy admissions) and serving social justice (through affirmative action.)
They are also weirdly hard on Asian-Americans, for reasons I don’t really understand. Why prefer a white american to an Asian one, all else being equal? Could they be worried about becoming too Asian? It’s strange.
There’s something very Old World about the whole thing, with unstated criteria, subjective judgments, special preferences, and insiders-only privileges. It’s entirely too nineteenth century, when the rest of us are here in the early years of the twenty-first.
Are there any good definitions of merit?
I mean, I graduated highschool with around a 4.2 GPA. My school was competitive and I was 6th in the class; my girlfriend was valedictorian and graduated with just over a 4.4 GPA.
That being said, I took more and slightly harder classes than she did. I was also captain of a couple sports teams. I got a better SAT score than she did, she got a better ACT score than I did.
Looking at the two of us, who has more merit? This is an honest question – we both applied to some of the same schools. And that’s just comparing across the same system! What it some other school hard caps their GPA at a 4.0… does that mean that I’m automatically better than them just because my school doesn’t?
If I had the enormous resources of Harvard, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out a measure of merit that took into account minor discrepancies you mention.
It’s a regression problem, and not a cutting edge one where no research has been done on this type of issue. I doubt figuring out a good measure would cost Harvard more than a few million. That could pay for a whole team of top statisticians and such for a few years.
Hell, they’ve probably already figured it out, but it would be too awkward to admit that the merit they’re optimizing for is largely what John Schilling said, which means engaging in a significant amount of making sure the elite stay on top even when it’s a bit to the detriment of everyone else.
The factors mentioned here all seem like they fit the definition of “merit.” It’s hard to say what makes a better definition of merit. But it’s easy to say what doesn’t sound like merit in any non-Orwellian sense of the word.
The white American is statistically more likely to wind up being a congressman, federal judge, fortune-500 CEO, etc, and Harvard likes to think of itself as educating, developing, and promoting incestuous hobnobbing among the Future Leaders of America(tm).
For that matter, a black American is more likely to wind up as a congressman, federal judge, CEO, etc, and particularly so for the subset of black Americans who are plausibly Harvard candidates. Asian-Americans have a high average level of achievement, but seem to get that way by narrowly and effectively targeting upper-middle-class levels of achievement and are statistically underrepresented at the top. The principle exception being in STEM, where UMC Asians can easily slide into Tech-CEO status, but that school is a few blocks down the street.
This is pretty unique to Harvard and maybe Yale; everywhere else, “most of our graduates have to settle for being upper middle class professionals” counts as a win and Asian-Americans are or ought to be solid candidates.
This is some fascinating sociology.
@Le Maistre Chat, I think this is what’s sometimes called the Bamboo Ceiling. Asian-Americans are underrepresented in the highest positions, at least relative to their accomplishments in high school and college.
No one really seems to know why it’s happening. My theory is that stereotypically high-pressure parenting techniques are really good at getting Asian kids to do well in high school and college, but once the kids are out of the house, and mom and dad aren’t around any more, that advantage drops away, and the kids (now young adults) revert to levels of accomplishment more in line with their inherent talents. Or perhaps Asian parenting builds great study skills, but crappy networking skills.
Or maybe America is just a racist, racist place. That’s another theory. It’s hard to know.
Also for some reason, male Asian-Americans don’t do as well in the dating pool. I suspect that somehow the reasons are linked: some sort of racism that leaves them as lower status, or a cultural background (parenting) that ingrains behaviors that code as low-status in American culture.
Certainly status in high school in the USA is earned in very different ways than in China, where academic achievement gets you laid from what I gather.
On the specific issue of dating, the reason Asian-Americans struggle may be physical. Some of the signs of manhood are just stronger in white men than in Asians. Grown men are larger than women, and white men are biggest of all. Grown men have manes, in the form of beards and chest hair; white men can grow big bushy beards while Asians grow just a wisp or two. If women are viscerally attuned to markers of masculinity like these, it would explain part of why Asian-American men struggle in dating.
Asian men do worse than white men in the dating pool, but Asian women do better. It’s not obvious how you’d explain that via anti-Asian racism.
@albatross11
That’s pretty easy. It could be the view that Asians are more “feminine” than whites. So Asian women win (men like very feminine women) while Asian men lose (women don’t like feminine men).
Of course, that’s a hard view to square with actually meeting any Asian men, who tend towards pretty macho pursuits (e.g. Asian lifting dude is a byword in any gym), but it’s a plausible prejudice to have if you’re uninformed.
From what I’ve seen trying to wingman for Asian friends / roommates johan_larson is only half right.
Asian men and women both have a markedly more feminine appearance than men and women of other ethnicities, which helps Asian women and hurts Asian men when it comes to dating. But beyond that, Asian men tend to be very hesitating when it comes to dating and that allows men of other ethnicities to eat their lunch.
I often saw these guys slooowly build up the courage to approach an obviously interested woman for months, only for another guy to swoop in and start dating her before they made a move. You can’t expect an attractive woman to still be single next week, never mind next year, so if you want her you need to man the fuck up and go for it ASAP.
Maybe that behavior is driven by lower testosterone levels but at least to some extent it seems to be cultural. If every man is timid, there might be less urgency but add in even a handful of bold men and they’ll quickly deplete the dating pool.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
I’m not sure all that wingman implies; could that observation be confounded by the fact that you were watching people who specifically requested help?
I think some chunk of the difference is cultural.
If you compare Chinese Chinese to Chinese Americans, the latter group has a lot more jacked bros than the former.
I bet height differences do sometimes bite though for dating or being CEO (maybe an exception if you start your own company; a lot of tech founders are on the shorter side). American CEO’s are usually tall, and it’s probably a dominance signal thing from our monkey instincts.
@quanta413
Is this true? China DOMINATES men’s weightlifting internationally, by massive margins.
I see jacked masculinity as common in both white and Asian cultures. Perhaps Asians tend to be more polite and whites more in your face, but in terms of “macho dude-bro” I don’t see a strong difference, honestly.
China should dominate most international competitions, thanks to being able to grab the outliers from their 20% of the human population. It matters a lot less where the mean is when your population is big enough.
@Jaskologist
Counterpoint: India.
It really does matter what your population cares about.
And what your government cares about. And how effective it is, generally.
China seems to care an awful lot about its international prestige. They’ve been dumping a lot of money into their top-level sports programs.
I’m not really sure what India cares about. I’m guessing between Pakistan, internal tensions between regions of India, and economic development to help their masses and masses of poor people, they have their hands full.
@johan_larson
But it isn’t just China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_medalists_in_weightlifting
Lots of Thais, Koreans, Taiwanese, etc.
Asians just like lifting.
So it’s immigration selection effects, then. The Asians who like to lift get recruited at home, so they don’t need to move overseas. Which means that the people who do emigrate have other specialties/priorities, which passes down to their children.
I love that we’re having a conversation about culture and lifting on SSC. Please go on.
@AG
The initial assertion by @quanta413 was that Chinese Americans were MORE jacked than Chinese back home. You are saying the opposite. Obviously both can’t be true.
My experience is that in America Asian men are really into lifting, and they clearly are in China too. I am asserting that Asian men just like lifting, which matches my experience and the medals table.
I think the stereotype that Asians are more feminine is based on appearance (Asians aren’t as hairy as whites) and culture (Asians are less in your face aggressive), not actual masculine pursuits, where Asians are as or more masculine than whites.
Actually meeting Asian men destroys the stereotype pretty quickly.
@Le Maistre Chat
I aim to please.
@EchoChaos:
>80% of Indians care about not killing animals, and while there are even vegan lifters in the West, vegetarianism must suppress getting jacked, at least at the margin.
But then, >14.2% of Indians are Musalmen.
@EchoChaos,
You’re badly gerrymandering masculinity here. If we don’t define masculinity by appearance or behavior, only by Olympic medals in lifting, then that definition of masculinity is worthless.
Asian men are more feminine looking than European or African men. Even among athletes, the same trend applies if you compare apples-to-applea instead of trying to compare Asian athletes to European or African non-athletes. It’s not just body hair either, the facial bone structure and distribution of body fat is also quite feminine.
That doesn’t mean that Asian men are bad, it’s just a recognition of the obvious reality of the situation.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
I’m saying that Asian men are as masculine as white men in interest and personality and used weightlifting as my specific datum for a general point. I could have used computers, fatherhood or any other marker of masculinity, because in almost all of them they match us whites.
I conceded that the reason they are thought of as feminine is appearance and culture, but that once you actually know them and their hobbies, they are just as masculine.
This is prejudice, and the specific prejudice that I think is at play here.
East Asians may have a more neotenous/gracile appearance, but it’s not obvious that would be sufficient evidence of either low-T or less masculine interests.
I had an anthropology professor at U of Oregon who tested Yanomamo men’s T and found that the average was far lower than American college men despite their violent macho culture. He explained this as T suppressing the immune system, and Yanomamo live in a high-pathogen environment with less access to modern medicine.
Fair enough, I’ll agree to disagree on this one.
We’re operating on fundamentally different definitions here so now that we agree on the facts there’s not a lot further to take this discussion.
I don’t have a survey, but this is my impression comparing what I saw of men in Taiwan or Chinese foreign students in the U.S. to Chinese Americans I’ve seen or known. I’m not thinking of high level competitors.
My sample is highly biased and may not be representative of the larger population. Also on campus, this wasn’t just people I knew, but also my rough impression from seeing people in the street. Foreign Chinese on average had a different fashion sense, manner, etc. than Chinese Americans. It’s possible the ones who do lift a lot are more likely to dress like American bros, and thus my impression is wholly wrong.
@EchoChaos
China seems to especially dominate the lightweight and below category for weightlifting. In the others, it’s more even.
John Schilling provides a lot of the context, in terms of what schools want out of their alumni. Being really good at working hard marks one as a grind; it alone will not get you to the very top, and working too hard might hurt you, because the time you spend in your room working late is time you’re not spending getting to know people who will be Very Important one day.
Plus, keeping them out of the schools where people network to get the top jobs means they can’t compete with you to claim those top jobs. There’s clearly a certain extent to which well-off white people are threatened by Asians, especially East Asians.
This is unfair and inaccurate. There is an alliance between certain right-wingers, and some Asian litigants and interest groups in this case (and some similar ones). The case is not being driven by white people manipulating East Asians for the benefit of white people as you imply.
If SFFA had won or goes on to win in a higher court, the effect would be most favorable for Asian applicants (if Harvard didn’t just laugh and ignore the ruling by making some cosmetic changes to the process and then reaching the same racial composition again) and probably near neutral for white applicants.
And Edward Blum is a neoconservative Jew. Would it be surprising if his motives were less impure than you imply (that he wouldn’t care if the racial discrimination was purely in favor of white people)? Especially given the obvious parallels to the case of Jews at Harvard about 100 years ago that you yourself mention.
I will cop to a certain degree of unfair and inaccurate, because I was trying to keep it short, but my understanding is that the money in the case is coming from people who have gone after AA on other grounds before – meaning that giving a hoot about Asians is clearly secondary. I’m not sure why you think I think Blum’s motives are impure or why you think I’m implying he wouldn’t care about discrimination in favour of white people only.
Yeah, but Edward Blum (among many others) claims to dislike affirmative action because it leads to unfair outcomes like this. It’s only secondary in the sense that he’s attacking the policy he believes to be the cause of the problem. It’s not like he woke up one day and decided he disliked affirmative action because… I don’t know.
It’s pretty standard for legal groups to have to trawl around for test cases and then cover all the costs. The ACLU does the same thing among many others. You make it sound sinister when it’s one of the primary ways any significant legal challenge can afford be made. Very few people (or groups of people) can afford the legal resources necessary to challenge a large corporation, the government, or Harvard.
From this, although now that I read it I’m no longer sure what you meant.
It occurs to me now that I may have misread this because it’s sort of incoherent with what else you said because it implies that Blum only cares about Asians when Asians are being passed over in favor of whites but not when whites are passed over in favor of Asians? But in fact that’s what you would expect if someone cared about Asians as a group rather than about discrimination itself. They wouldn’t worry about this case if Asians were doing as well as expected obviously. Where as you claim Blum isn’t primarily motivated by helping Asians.
The only other reading I’ve figured out reading it again, which I think less likely and even weirder with what else you said and even less charitable to Blum, is that Blum cares because White and Asian kids are getting passed over in favor of other minorities like African-Americans and Latinos (whereas somehow, he’d be ok with Asians getting an advantage over whites???). Like, why would that be the sticking point, unless Blum was secretly John Derbyshire?
You didn’t say Blum specifically, but I assumed you mean him given that he’s largely responsible for fronting the costs of all of this so there isn’t really any other possibility.
What I meant is that the people backing the Asians going after Harvard are motivated by going after AA rather than helping Asians; Asians are the focus insofar as they’re the victim of something that is, broadly considered, AA.
I don’t think any of it is sinister. Personally, I think racial preferences and quotas are bad; if one wants racial equality there are better ways to go about getting it, and “alter demographics of top universities” is probably the worst way to go about getting it.
By “they” I meant less Blum and the people funding it, and more… I’ve seen some people attacking Harvard who put on that they care all of a sudden about the Asian kids. Blum is, from what I’ve seen, fairly open about why he’s doing what he’s doing. My moral compass probably assigns too much significance to hypocrisy and inconsistency; what Harvard does bugs me because it’s dishonest – it doesn’t help the people it’s supposed to help as much as it helps other people who are better off than the median Asian Harvard applicant. Similarly, it bugs me to see people who suddenly care about the poor Asian kids who can’t get into Harvard with an infinite GPA – it doesn’t bug me to see someone say “this is just the tool that was available”.
(Based on what I know of his personal life, John Derbyshire probably has an interest in how Asians do)
What you’re saying is technically accurate, but I believe is telling a story backwards in a way that makes motivations sound worse than they are. Helping people just because of their skin color without reference to why is not typically looked upon as a particularly good motivation anymore (except by a small but sometimes significant subset). Helping people being hurt by others bad behavior or policy is a more broadly acceptable reason.
The way you describe people against affirmative action is like how some people say that a BLM activist protesting police abuses doesn’t really care about black people just about police violence. And thus they are using black people to help their forward their separate cause of being against the police. I’ve seen this narrative, and it’s way more wrong than right. Although you can find a rare whacko for whom it may be true.
It’s a backwards narrative. BLM activists are against many police policies or legal outcomes because they’re for black people not getting strangled to death for selling loose cigarettes. The harm precedes the dislike of the policy. But then activists often have to go around finding hopefully representative cases to push back against law, policy, or behavior. If you don’t mention why an activist is seeking out representative cases, you can make it sound like their dislike of the policy is prior to their caring about the people it hurts.
Similarly, Blum is against affirmative action because he believes it hurts people. Sure, he doesn’t think it hurts just Asian people, but that’s not a strike against him or his beliefs.
I agree, and I think what Harvard is doing is much less defensible which is why I’m bothered that Blum is being treated as having behavior comparable in hypocrisy to Harvard. Because the defenses I see of Harvard’s behavior largely don’t match Harvard’s behavior, whereas Blum’s behavior roughly matches his purported beliefs.
Is affirmative action reparations? Well not really, because Harvard draws most of its black students from immigrants or their children at this point. Is it to help those whose social background disadvantages them among the elites? No, because they reserve a huge fraction of slots for legacies and then actively work to cap the number of Asian admits they have (because on paper they’re just poor Chinese immigrant grinds, and Harvard doesn’t want them).
So what does Harvard have left? Their only defense is diversity because… something. Which I can’t help but suspect wouldn’t be as popular a defense of affirmative action if the Supreme Court hadn’t made some baby-splitting decisions with regards to affirmative action (especially Grutter v. Bollinger).
It’s not that I think their motivations are worse than they are; it’s that I think some people are all of a sudden pretending to have different motivations than they do – again, this isn’t really aimed at Blum, so much as the people cheering him on (just as for every person actually involved with Harvard’s defence, there’s however many people backing Harvard up). I would agree the pro-Harvard position is worse, because holistic admissions frequently entail benefiting the well-off at the expense of the less-well-off, justifying it on the grounds of supposed (but usually not actual) benefit to the least-well-off.
Why do you think people have opposed AA in the past, before the Harvard case?
There’s been opposition to AA for many decades, and at least the arguments offered against it are overwhelmingly based on the idea that it’s wrong to make admissions decisions on skin color and that they should instead be made on merit. (Where “merit” might have many plausible definitions, but none of them would turn on your skin color.). As best I can tell, most of the people making those arguments are sincere. Do you have some reason other than mood affiliation to claim otherwise?
A general sense that people who actually value fairness as a terminal goal are pretty rare, which I will admit is not strong evidence.
“They wouldn’t give a hoot about Asians if white kids were getting passed over in favour of Asian kids”
Did you mean to say something else here?
Sort of; I phrased it in a confusing way as discussed elsewhere in the thread.
“from what I recall, the Harvard incoming class tends to be 50-50 male-female, while the split is around 33-66 for undergraduates as a whole.”
Men are overrepresented among those with very high test scores, so I doubt it.
That’s another possible explanation. I’m not sure how exactly to figure out which explanation is the most correct.
Are there test score numbers for male vs female students admitted to Harvard? That would be an easy way to check.
The question I want to know the answer to is if they have to pull in more underqualified men to fill in various sports teams or more underqualified women. Same thing for legacies.
It could really go either way. Maybe it’s equal. It may even be answerable from some of the released materials, but it’s not an important enough question that I’m going to scrape documents to figure it out.
This might make sense for private clubs, but keep in mind that Harvard receives government funding from taxpayer money, which should reasonably come with equal opportunity strings attached.
Private companies that qualify as “public utilities”, which operate expensive infrastructure that provides basic services to a large number of people and therefore operate in natural monopoly/oligopoly regime, are also subject to anti-discrimination regulation, and with good reason. I think that in fact the “public utility” statute should be extended to many large Internet companies that provide communication and banking services.
Government funding as in gifts to subsidize schooling, or government funding as in government paying people at Harvard to do research the government wants done? The former strikes me as inappropriate, the latter not.
I’m fine with freedom of association for everyone, or antidiscrimination law for everyone. I’m not so fine with freedom of association for the important people and organizations and antidiscrimination law for the little people.
If Harvard can discriminate in order to choose the racial/ethnic/religous/gender/sexual orientation mix of their student body, I can live with that, but then the University of Alabama gets to do the same. Anything else is just setting up one set of rules for the nobility and another for the proles.
And I’m definitely not okay with rules that say discrimination against my kids (and other kids who look like them) is okay, but discrimination against other peoples’ kids isn’t. Hell will freeze over before you get my support for that.
So November 19 is International Men’s Day.
My wife’s employers are planning to do something for it and she asked me for suggestions. As she’s in the health sector I suggested focussing on the fact that men are 3 times more likely to commit suicide than women, or how invisible men are as victims of domestic abuse. But because she’s in the health sector they are already covering this stuff. My wife wanted things to celebrate about men and manhood.
And honestly, I drew a complete blank.
I can’t think of any man, or anything uniquely masculine, to celebrate. There are plenty of inspiring men whom I consider genuine heroes – men like Chiune Sugihara, Stanislav Petrov, Jonas Salk, Alan Turing – but the fact that they are men is merely incidental. And it’s always hard (for me at least) to shake the idea when celebrating such heroes, that there may be a woman being overlooked somewhere (indeed, as soon as I typed Turing a voice in the back of my head said “Don’t forget Ada Lovelace”) or the faint worry that there may be some yet hidden controversy waiting to burst into toxic bloom. It’s equally hard to think of uniqeuly male activities that aren’t also likely to be ripe for criticisms of toxic masculinity.
As an aside this is an interesting look into how thoroughly captured I have been by woke culture (which I thoroughly object to most of the time) that the mere idea of celebrating the male is impossible to process.
So, SSC commentariat, how would you celebrate International Men’s Day?
Certainly it wasn’t incidental for Sugihara and Petrov, as they were military officers, probably it wasn’t incidental for Salk and Turing either, but saying it aloud would get you into Summers-Damore-Strumia troubles. Anyway, it’s certainly no more incidental than any women hero being celebrated on Women’s Day being a woman is incidental, so go ahead and celebrate them, and if any SJW complains just ignore them.
I wouldn’t and would advise against doing so for reasons I’ll outline in just a bit.
On the conrary, this shows that you haven’t been captured by it, because celebrating the male, qua male, in a way that would be socially acceptable (i.e. not touching sex), is dumb.
It’s really obvious if you think about it (and you even said it yourself):
When we celebrate people who happen to be men, we celebrate them for what they did or who they were (the virtues they represented). We don’t celebrate them for their, to put it crudely, reproductive apparatus, ‘coz that’s nothing to be proud of.
A hypothetical Stanislava Petrova would be just as praiseworthy and for exactly the same reasons as her spear counterpart in our reality. The fact she is a woman would neither enhance nor diminish her value.
The reason we have an International Men’s Day at all is that we have a – much better known – International Women’s Day. IWD dates back to 1909, IMD to 1992. As for the November 19 date – first time I’m hearing it.
Per wiki:
That, frankly, doesn’t sound like a particularly appealing celebration of masculinity. Most of these things, if I may be permitted to stereotype, seem like issues women care about. Somehow I don’t expect “improving gender relations” to mean letting men be men (even if it makes the women in the room uncomfortable*) or “promoting gender equality” being a call to abolish gender-based affirmative action or to reform the way family courts award custody. “[C]elebrat[ing] [men’s] achievements and contributions, in particular for their contributions to community, family, marriage, and child care.” also sounds a lot like “this is what we (women) expect of men” as opposed to “this is what we (men) are proud of in particular”.
In short, the question leads to contradiction. I can’t think of any way “things to celebrate about men and manhood” doesn’t map to “this is why men are better than women” – which is a complete non-starter.
You can’t avoid this. If thing X doesn’t imply men are better than women, then either:
a. thing X isn’t something to actually celebrate (I can’t think of any reason why I should enthuse about beards, for example),
b. both men and women are equally able to do/have thing X, so there’s no reason to celebrate the fact that men, specifically, are (if thing X is especially desirable, it would be more sensible to celebrate thing-X-ers).
And yes, the foregoing applies to IWD, as well. Make of that what you will.
* Just to be clear, I’m not talking about anything like unwanted sexual advances. I’m talking about men frankly exchanging views (including views on women), humour, etc. Working in a woman-dominated company I’m witness to a fair amount of male-targetted sexism in everyday conversation. It would never occur to me to try to force a change. On the other hand, I have – on more than one occasion – heard demands that a male-majority community that functions well change its ways in order to be more inclusive (appealing) to women. None of those communities were overtly hostile to women. They simply didn’t care that you happened to be a woman.
Speak for yourself. Sure, I want men to do all the extreme awesome things that revolutionize our experience of being human (invent technologies, land on the moon, create amazing works of art, etc.) but I’m fine with just a few outliers doing those things. For everyone not way out on the right tail of whatever bell curve, I’d like them to contribute to communities, families, marriages, and ensuring future humans aren’t horrible, or at least not sacrifice these things in vain efforts to create perpetual motion machines or run a 3-minute mile whatever. I have to live in those communities with my wife and kids too, ya know.
So, “celebrate men” could either mean celebrate those weird outliers, or it could mean celebrate what half the population does, or at least what we’d like them to do.
Yes, but that’s called “being a decent person”, not “being a praiseworthy man“.
Unless you don’t believe that women contribute to these things to exactly the same extent and in much the same way.
I think it makes sense to link it back to being a good man (perhaps not necessarily praiseworthy because it should be something that’s considered doable and worthwhile, not something only the bravest and best can pull off), because the whole problem is that the old-fashioned male ways of family- and community-building aren’t cool anymore and the extant ways of family- and community-building are considered girly/effeminate/unmanly, so there’s a need for reconnecting the masculine image to that type of work.
I agree with March, and also I do think men contribute to these things in not exactly the same way as women. A dad is different from a mom, in more than just the fact of which one of them the baby comes out of.
We do have a Father’s Day as well as a Mother’s Day.
The problem, as I see it, is that “extant ways of family- and community-building are considered girly/effeminate/unmanly” exactly because actual masculinity isn’t particularly desired and no amount of image reconnecting will help until you let men be, y’know, actual men.
I don’t know if you have kids, but as someone with a couple of them I can tell you masculine traits are necessary to be a good father.
Two traits I consider fairly masculine are compartmentalization and emotional self-control. It takes a lot of those to deal, for example, with a tantruming grade-schooler in a way that is both effective and doesn’t leave the child feeling traumatized or unloved.
Well…
I’m in full agreement with you on that. I still contend that’s what Father’s Day is for.
Excepting whatever sentiment is expressed in the feel-good phrases companies put in commercials and on cards, I don’t think either Mother’s Day or Father’s Day is about much else than selling stuff. Dedicating an “international day” on the other hand brings to mind an opportunity for something more thoughtful than mega-sales at jewelry or hardware stores.
Honestly, if IMD becomes about selling stuff, I’d count it as an achievement.
Father’s Day is as international as these things get (differing dates between countries notwithstanding). If it’s not serving its purpose as a celebration of fatherhood, it’s not through obscurity. We have no reason to believe that whatever circumstances are the cause of it not being up to our expectations will miraculously not apply to IMD.
Or, to use an unkind, but hopefully eye-opening formulation: “You already got a celebration of fatherhood and ruined it, why should you get another one? Fix the one you have.”
(General “you”, of course.)
Now, it so happens that International Women’s Day is as big in Poland as these things get – at least partly because the communist authorities of yesteryear pushed it hard as part of trying to establish a secular counterweight to the Catholic traditions firmly embedded in the culture. What’s keeping it afloat these days – apart from inertia, of course – is that it’s a convenient date for political action by feminists and feminist-adjacent groups (the marriage of socialism and feminism that birthed the event in the first place still has some strength, 110 years on). In spite of all of this, it’s a holiday everyone celebrates (workplace observance is widespread), that doesn’t really have much meaning beyond observance of the forms.
International Men’s Day has none of the advantages of IWD. It was thought up by a random dude (Oaster), whom I don’t know and have no reason to care about. It’s date is another random dude’s (Teelucksingh) dad’s birthday – why is that a date I should assign any significance to? The only readily apparent political angle is Men’s Rights Activism – and that is considered toxic. In short, the whole thing strikes me as being on roughly the level of Talk Like a Pirate Day, except talking like a pirate is fun and requires no expensive components.
Well, I agree with that last part. I’m not a proponent of any of these “X days”. I mainly was trying to contribute ideas, given that IMD is a thing that isn’t going away.
By that logic, should we not celebrate e.g. female scientists on Women’s Day because e.g. science is stereotypically something men care about?
ETA:
That IWD is a political event first and foremost was never under any doubt, was it?
Do we? I looked over the slogans from last year, and it is roughly a) general expressions of solidarity, b) against various sexual transgressions/metooisms, c) against trafficking and prostitution, and then to a lesser degree d) pro transgender, e) pro Palestine, f) pro minority women, g) against war/crime/violence, h) pro shorter workdays.
If anything, I think pushing feminine values onto men is a better fit for IWD than celebrating women in traditional men’s roles.
(Disclaimer: This is here, YMMV elsewhere in the world)
You can’t have kids without sperm. Research also tends to show that without dads around, kids turn out pretty lousy.
Those seem like two pretty good starting points.
Stereotypical men crap. Blast “Danger Zone” all day long, people dress up as 80s action heroes, guys grilling outside (just because it’s November and snowing doesn’t mean it’s not grilling weather) with other guys running brats to and for while cracking Dad jokes. A strong-man competition outside with a huge crowd drinking Bud Lite shouting various lewd, off-color, politically incorrect comments.
It’s America, we celebrate by going over the top and leaning aggressively on stereotypes.
I changed my mind, this is the right answer.
Agreed, this is the right answer. The employer is already doing things to help actual problems faced disproportionately by men and we already have a bunch of holidays that celebrate specific awesome men, so there’s no need to treat Men’s Day as a day to do some sort of social justice work. Drinks, grilling, and dad rock are something that everyone can get behind but are still, if not “manly”, at least “guy stuff.”
The 19th is a Tuesday. My plan for a beer-fuelled 80s action flick marathon is shattered! Curse you, useless calendar!
@A Definite Beta Guy says:
So basically The Fourth of July, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Fridays after work, but with Mullet hair cuts?
This has my approval!
First time I did that was when I was in high school, my parents weren’t home (probably delayed by the snow, but I don’t remember now), the power was out (electric stove), and someone had to feed me and my younger siblings. I shoveled the foot or so of snow off the deck (the storm itself had pretty much passed), fired up the grill, and we ate that night. I don’t know if that’s a particularly male solution… but it does feel like it is.
Find a way to reassure men it is OK to be themselves. Maybe something as simple as running some traditional male games (open them to women as well – it’s celebrating that it’s fun to do traditional things). Note though this is probably a local cultural thing: how men expressed masculinity varied across place. Just recreate some old local ways of relaxation and let people play.
We have traditional games?
We have tradition?
I assume he’s talking about pit fighting.
I never got to pit fight…
I’ve been left out of all the traditional games…
Wait, does ordering and assembling Ikea furniture count?
Get a bunch of the guys together with a case of beer and act like idiots for the night? Maybe visit a strip club in an alternate universe where I’m the sort of person who goes to strip clubs.
The problem with International Men’s Day isn’t that there’s nothing worth celebrating about men or masculinity, but that it and all of the other “holidays” in that vein are ridiculously artificial and forced. Like who gets jazzed up for Arbor Day? It’s a fake holiday so any celebration is also going to feel fake.
Anyway, a real celebration of men would probably look more like a cross between fathers day and a secular bar mitzvah than anything. Welcoming young men who have just gone through puberty into manhood, and showing them examples of the kind of men they should aspire to be, with a special role and emphasis given to the fathers who guided them through boyhood. We’re in dire need of coming of age rituals and fathers don’t get much respect from society so it would kill two birds with one stone.
That’s probably the best argument for such a holiday I’ve come across.
However, I wonder if just a plain coming of age tradition wouldn’t be better for this purpose. A Men’s day will necessarily encompass everyone and an emphasis on the father/son/father-to-be dynamic excludes a fair portion of those supposedly being celebrated.
Probably not. Testosterone is a hell of a drug.
Uniquely is doing a lot of work there and should probably be removed. 99% of what is celebrated about women is also not unique.
Celebrate fatherhood, of course, but also heavily masculine endeavors like heavy labor, “Dirty Jobs”, construction, etc.
There was a great poster that someone put up in New York: “Everything you see was built by men providing for their families”. That sentiment is a great one.
QFT
So up until reading this post I wasn’t aware that international genderday was a thing for either gender, but this strikes me as the wrong approach. We don’t actually want to celebrate the differences between men and women, putting to much emphasis on those differences is what got us into this mess in the first place. You could celebrate that over X% of male athletes perform better than their female counterparts or that 100% of people that have walked on other worlds were men or that the majority of historic scientific breakthroughs were made by men, but all of that is intensely unhelpful.
It seems to me that if you want these kinds of things to be something other than a “Look, my tribe is just as good/better than yours!”-kind of thing, it makes more sense to focus on the problems that are unique to people of the appropriate gender. For women those problems include a lack of decent historical role models, so putting a spotlight on the female heroes we do have is appropriate even if there was nothing uniquely feminine about their achievements (Ada Lovelace’s achievements weren’t any more uniquely female than Alan Turings achievements were uniquely male). For men that problem just doesn’t exist, so there is no reason to try to solve it. Your initial reaction is probably the place I would start as well.
The main masculine activities I would celebrate are men’s outsized contributions to war and sports. Those are both activities that biology contributes, and are not just incidental. That said, in America we honest have enough holidays honoring our soldiers, and athletes get paid and celebrated enough, that I don’t think they need a special day. If you are in a country that’s doesn’t have multiple separate days to honor your military, I would consider that, but I’m personally going to ignore the holiday. Honoring someone for being born a certain gender seems odd to me.
In Russia, the Defender of the Fatherland day is an unofficial men’s day. Typical to give men small gifts.
Since few women serve or have served in the Russian army, and most men have served (since they are drafted), the army day is basically men’s day.
But men serving (after a compulsory draft) their country in the army is probably all those things that modern leftism sees as problematic.
EDIT: As I see it, men known for being military heroes, are in many ways great in that manly role, where being men is not incidental. The few female military heroes are the exception, not the rule.
Things to celebrate about men:
1. Men make up most of our courageous heroes. Firefighters, police officers, soldiers. You could name specific firefighters from 9/11- they willingly went in, knowing they would likely die.
2. Men are willing to risk their lives to save their loved ones.
3. Men have solved many problems- Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver, Benjamin Franklin.
There is a certain (in the style of Nietzsche) master/slave morality conundrum that prevents this from being celebrated in the same way that women’s day is celebrated.
Along the lines of 1 and 2, I believe I read somewhere that men are much more likely than women to die saving someone else. Not just professional livesavers and men risking their lives to save their families, but total strangers, too.
As well as more likely to die on the job due to working more dangerous jobs generally.
Germany has basically solved this problem (although they celebrate this on Ascension Day, not Men’s Day).
On the day’s leading up to the event groups of fathers and sons (of all ages) work together to construct elaborate wagons. On the day of, (always a Thursday, so that you get a day off from work) they put on matching costumes (not too ornate, mostly just matching shirts to denote who’s in what group) load up the wagon with copious amounts of food and beer, and then go on long hikes or walks or bike rides, towing the wagon behind them. Over the course of the day they spend time together and get incredibly drunk.
Thin about it: this holiday celebrates craftiness, athletic ability and consumption of beer! What’s not to love?
Well I’m sold! I could even pitch it as embracing the culture of our European neighbours!
> this holiday celebrates craftiness, athletic ability and consumption of beer! What’s not to love?
The compensation of deficiencies in the first two with the third?
Well, you build the wagon in advance and (presumably) while sober.
All true men know that whiskey is more manly than beer.
It’s your wagon, my dude. You can fill it with whatever liquid you want!
On the one hand, maybe I should approve of this, because I see value in traditions and rituals and appreciate intrinsic differences in men and women (everything’s a spectrum, yadda yadda). On the other hand, one of the things I like about masculinity is not needing constant external validation.
On two other hands, young men do need guidance on how to behave and express their masculine virtues, but I don’t trust any dominant cultural institution to do it well. It’ll be the Gillette ad without the nuance.
Bah, just make it BBQ and arm wrestling.
I think a collage(*) of inspiring males makes a lot of sense. No need to mention those providing bad examples, or even bad or questionable aspects of those judged overall inspiring.. (But do try to avoid emphasizing the good points of individuals with overall bad reputations… This is not the time to try to redeem the reputation of someone who’s generally reviled, however unjustly.)
Also interesting would be things like cute children interacting with fathers, brothers, etc. “Daddy ….[something good]”
The more variable the better – not all providers, or all soliders, or all politicians. And include some men being inspiring doing things not traditionally masculine. Perhaps some guy doing a great job of single parenting; even better if the child is disabled.
Make sure to include lots of ordinary folks, not just heroes. You want people able to relate to the examples, as something they could be, or could try to be. And since it’s International Men’s Day, make sure not all contexts appear to be first world/American.
It doesn’t matter how many equally inspiring women you think of – save those examples for International Women’s Day. On men’s day, they aren’t relevant. But also avoid compareing men to women in any way at all – that just sends people to the same headspace you were in, or worse.
(*) Not literally a collage, but a collection of short images, vignettes, posters, etc.
Never heard of men’s day… and it sounds kind of strange and weird to me, even though I very much like you guys.
My suggestion would be, get a bunch of pictures of men playing with their kids, carrying things, building things, doing search-and-rescue-type work, and have it as a display poster or background for all of their displays. That answers the “contributions to family and community” requirement without feminizing.
I don’t think there are any traditionally masculine qualities you can list, vs. just showing men doing good “pro-social” stuff, which won’t get someone complaining that “women are also [brave, strong, stoic, etc.]; how dare you imply they aren’t?”
Not saying anything that could be shared on Twitter seems like the right move.
An easy counter-move is that someone would interfere the next year, and give you some extra pictures to include so that the collage would become a celebration of something else. Or just add those pictures silently; but if you also remove them silently, expect to be asked in public why did you do so.
“International Men’s Day” is probably going to go towards two different, although possibly intersecting, paths. Either it gets completely co-opted by feminists and becomes a celebration of all the things that women like or it becomes a kind of stereotypical, but not threatening, celebration of things that women don’t care about, having beards, drinking beer, and watching sports. I would try to do something subversive, like celebrating men as the provider for the family or as political leaders. Maybe use it to plug historical conquerors, like Alexander the Great or Napoleon, those old, dead men that we aren’t supposed to care about.
@Fitzroy >
Why with vintage American 1930’s New Deal propaganda of a women mourning the absence of her man of course! (you just had to know that would be my answer)
Specifically Remember the Forgotten Man from the movie musical Gold Diggers of 1933 (a fine piece of filmcraft from when agitprop was effective and not lame!).
For those who can’t abide black and white movies and ’30’s music (what the Hell is wrong with you?!) I will describe the scene:
A curtain opens revealing a man leaning against a lamp post, another man walks by and drops a lit cigarette and walks on, the first man springs to pick up the cigarette and smokes a few puffs he starts to toss the cigarette when a women dressed as a streetwalker (Joan Blondell) grabs his arm and puts a fresh unlit cigarette to her lips, the man holds his still smoldering cigarette to hers, she inhales which lights her cigarette which she then holds out to him, he takea it, she takes his used cigarette, he adjusts his collar and walks on, the women then leans against the street lamp then speaks to the audience, her facial expression at first defiant, than forlorn:
“I don’t know if he deserves a bit of sympathy.
Forget your sympathy.
It’s all right with me.
I was satisfied to drift along
from day to day…
till they came and took my man away
“Remember my forgotten man
“You put a rifle in his hand
“You sent him far away
“You shouted, ‘Hip, hooray! ‘
“But look at him today
“Remember my forgotten man
“You had him cultivate the land
“He walked behind a plow
The sweat fell from his brow
“But look at him right now!
“And once he used to love me
“I was happy then
“He used to take care of me
“Won’t you bring him back again?
“‘Cause ever since the world began
“A woman’s got to have a man
“Forgetting him, you see
“Means you’re forgetting me
“Like my
“My forgotten man”
The camera follows the first man again then pans upwards to rest on Etta Moten (who latter became the first black women to sing to the President at the While House) sitting alone at an open window and at once both bluesy and operatic she sings the words just spoken:
“Remember my forgotten man…
As she sings the camera moves to another women at a window who is holding a swaddled baby, her long and sad, then another women at a window, this one older, alone and white haired sitting on a rocking chair clutching a piece of cloth while she stares upwards looking out, almost glassy eyed.
The camera then follows the streetwalker as she walks past another man who is slumped on the sidewalk and goes to open a door, before she does a cop comes and pokes the man with a nightstick to roust him to his feet, grabs the man’s jacket and pulls him up, showing the inside lining of the jacket, the women reaches out, and with one hand she holds the cops arm, with the other she holds the now standing man’s jacket open revealing a military medal inside to the cop who she stares at with contempt.
The cop and the derelict walk away leaving the streetwalker alone, fade to black.
With the same melody the music becomes upbeat and martial, cheers are heard in the background, the scene is of fresh “doughboys” proudly marching with confetti in the air, flags flying and women cheering, one women rushes forward and kisses the new recruit, fade to black.
The women are gone and the men march on in rain, the sound of which replaces the cheers along with the sound of boots hitting the ground louder, the music continues a bit less upbeat now, from the opposite direction march the casualties, bandaged, bleeding, carrying stretchers, the wounded and the dead.
Fade to black.
The scene is now of a bread/soup line, the camera goes to those further up in the line as they clutch their coats against the cold, one face to another (the same way one after another chorus girl’s face was featured in the “We’re in the Money” song opening at the beginning of the film), one man passes a cigarette to the man behind him in line.
Fade to black.
A curtain opens, in the background are the silhouettes of soldiers marching with rifles on their shoulders, in the foreground are men in civilian clothes marching forward – an army of beggars.
A chorus of women with outstretched arms sing: “Remember…”
The men answer: We are the real forgotten men
Women: Please bring them back
Men: Who have to lead this life again
We sauntered forth to fight
For glory was our pride
But somehow glory died
Women: Oh remember
Men: Remember your forgotten men
Women:We wan’t them back
Men:You’ve got to let us live again
Women: Just a memory
Men:We came, we marched away
To fight for USA
But where are we today?
Women: Where are they?
Thr men turn and kneel, in the center is the streetwalker who sings:
And once, he used to love me
I was happy then
He used to take care of me
Won’t you bring him back again?
Women: Oh bring him back
Men: ‘Cause ever since the world began
All: A woman’s got to have a man
Forgetting him, you see
Means you’re forgetting me
Like my forgotten man
So celebrate with massive public works that pay a “family wage” and veterans benefits (admittedly that may be my answer to most things!).
Doesn’t mean it’s a bad answer.
I am lucky to have a caring family. On women’s days, I celebrate my mother and grandmother. Logically on men’s day, I have to celebrate my father. Sadly this solution doesn’t work for everyone.
Dad joke competition. Winner is determined by who draws the biggest groans. This encourages the participants to brag about (share stories) on how well they are doing as caregivers.
But my art skills suck.
Vacuum pressure applied to the mouth is a fairly effective way to draw sounds out of people, so I don’t see how this is an objection.
Warning: About as CW-y as it gets.
I’ve been thinking about this lately, and didn’t come up with an answer, nor did searching on the Internet. On a meta-level, what’s the difference between A) a person with an unambiguous biological sex, who identifies as transgender, and B) a person with an unambiguous birth date, who identifies as 20 years older than they actually are?
In both cases there is an undeniable physical reality which contradicts that person’s wishes and demands for how they should be treated by other people and by the system. For example, a 45-year old person might identify as a 65-year old, entitling them to social security, their pension, or the equivalent for your country. Similarly, a 35-year old might identify as a 15-year old, entitling their parents for child benefits from the state (where applicable).
Should such demands be respected and met by other people and by the state? If yes, what and where are the limits? If not, why should we respect and meet the demands of a biological man to be addressed with “she” and to be allowed to participate in women’s sport competitions?
I’m sure that I’m not the first one to come up with this question, and I’m sure that transgender persons and their supporters have an answer, which I’m genuinely curious to hear.
What makes gender (social roles and perception) an unavoidable physical reality? Gender is different from sex (biology). You seem to be conflating the two.
What makes subjective age (social roles and perception) an unavoidable physical reality? Or, in other words, why do you differentiate between gender and sex, but not between subjective age (how someone perceives, e.g., their own mental maturity) and physical age (number of seconds since their birth)?
If you grant people the right to determine their own gender, why don’t you grant people the right to determine their own subjective age? I.e., if someone identifying as transgender is allowed to change “f” to “m” in their passport, why should someone identifying as 20 years younger not be allowed to change “1984-11-03” to “2004-11-03”?
There’s a difference between the legal implications of gender (an area where being male/female explicitly gives one no advantage) and the legal implications of age (an area where being older does give advantages, e.g. social security, pension, etc.). We generally allow people to express their identity in whatever way they want, so long as it doesn’t give them some kind of exploitable advantage over their peers.
To address the obvious followup: I’m not interested in discussing transgender athletes, and will ignore any followups about them, because I actually haven’t read anything about the issue, and I believe it’s a distraction from the core question of whether we should treat transgender people with basic kindness and compassion by treating them as we, ourselves, would wish to be treated. Which, IMHO, we should.
Do transwomen have to register for the draft?
Yes. From the selective Service:
That’s quite a dishonest way to phrase the question.
If “you should treat people as if they really were whatever kind of person they want to be treated as” actually was such an obvious rule, it’d apply in a lot more cases. Some example cases to consider:
A man who considers it extremely important to his identity that he’s muscular and attractive to women. Do women have a responsibility to go along with this (at least to the degree you expect people to go along with treating transgender people as their desired gender)?
Or Wayne Simmons (a guy who faked being an ex-CIA operative, but seems to have gone further with this than could be explained by using it as a means to gain money or anything else). Should people feel obligated to socially treat him as ex-CIA?
Except for the places where they have gender quotas of course. Or, as mentioned above, draft. Or designated female parking spots. Or gender specific safe spaces. Or the right of being searched by an agent of your own gender. Admittedly these are smaller than the legal implications of age but the difference is quantitative not qualitative and it seems one would have a hard time trying to define a border after which it’s not ok to let people change their legal status in order to express themselves.
You don’t specify here, but I’m going to assume your are implying this man is, in fact, not muscular and/or attractive to women. I can’t imagine someone who would construct an identity around something, and then not make any effort to de-conflict their self-image with what they see in the mirror. In real life, this person would likely go to the gym a bunch, work out, get a hair cut and some nice clothes and end up being the person he identifies as. More accurately, if he’s had this identity for a while, he’s probably already muscular and attractive. I’m not sure I get what you’re trying to say here.
I don’t know enough about this to comment. From a surface level read of 3 new stories about him, he looks like a conman who got caught up in the con. I’m also pretty sure there’s a difference about holding something you’ve done as part of your identity vs. something you are, but I’m not sure I can properly articulate it.
I might be wrong here, but isn’t the current leftist position to abolish the selective service’s sex standard? Draft everyone or no one.
Is this a thing? I’ve never seen one or heard about one until right now.
Wait, where’s the problem here? Trans people can pick the gender of their searcher that they feel most comfortable with, just like everyone else. What’s the concern?
Since when? I am searched fairly often (for refusing to enter the Cheney machines), and, presenting as a man, have never been asked if I might prefer being searched by a woman.
Sorry, that was really poorly worded on my part. I meant to say, TSA will select the gender of the person screening someone based on the gender that person presents.
These are extremely poor comparisons with trans people. Both of your stated examples are people trying to gain advantages over their peers, but trans people aren’t trying to gain any kind of comparative advantage. They’re just trying to live dignified lives with the bodies and brains they were given. There’s a certain amount of respect and kindness we owe each other as human beings, and I don’t see how treating trans people with the basic dignity we ourselves would like to be treated is overdrawing on that account.
I don’t think most “anti-trans” (lacking a better way to describe them) are opposed to treating people with “respect and kindness”, but condition it to not feel like they’re being lied to.
Let’s use a parabole. Let’s say that I proclaim to myself that I have 20/20 eyesight (I don’t, i have shitty eyes). Nobody would care, until I start telling people that I have perfect eyesight. Then they would quickly realize i’m wrong, and, (assuming they’re charitable people) tell me so, or simply ignore the claims that contradict the basic reality they observe. No reason for any part to get mad.
But if I start requiring people around to recognize how great my eyesight is, are they really lacking “respect and kindness” for refusing, or am I the one who starts to be borderline insulting to them?
Benefiting or not from it is beside the point. It makes it interested, but also somewhat rational, instead of appearing completely, well, insane. And most people wouldnt kick an insane people for fun, but also wouldnt start supporting everything they say and do by principle.
And surely any trans person can 100% perfectly appear as their desired gender? If they don’t, it can’t be too important to them?
I think the question should have been obvious, but whatever. Broblawsky presented it as obvious basic courtesy to go along with however people want themselves to be perceived. If you accept that premise, and there is a man for whom being a muscular man that is sexually attractive to women is central to his self-identity, should women not be obligated to go along with that view? Regardless of whether they perceive him that way, and at least to the same degree you should feel obligated to respect the desires of a trans person as opposed to how you otherwise happen to perceive them.
Maybe you could come up with some plausible rule that would exclude this case. However, there is no general “it is obviously required by very basic human decency to treat people as the kind of person they want to be treated as” rule as broblawsky tried to argue. Those who argue that there is some “basic” rule that “obviously” implies how you must treat trans people are wrong.
There is no such obvious difference. In neither case does the self-identity have to come from a mechanism that would be about “comparative advantage” more than trans identity.
I think you’re touching on a root of the disagreement: What makes gender different from sex? Why would that one human characteristic somehow gets to be separated between it’s social role/perception and it’s biological implications, while there is no claim that a small person could be perceived as a tall one, or that a teenager could have the “social role” of an elderly person.
That is exactly my question, but in a more eloquent, concise form.
People are getting hung up on the age thing – which was just supposed to be an example – instead of debating on the meta-level. That is my fault, I should have been clearer about that point.
You’re asking people to debate the meta level “why should we respect denying an undeniable physical reality”, but I don’t think it’s fair to demand that if you haven’t established an undeniable physical reality (which is a huge claim). Transgender people aren’t asking you to deny physical reality, they’re asking you to set aside a feature of physical reality when it comes to treating them, because they don’t think that feature of physical reality accurately reflects them as a person. You can debate whether that’s a fair request on that part, but “denying the undeniable” is not the right place to start the relevant discussion.
Have you read Scott’s The Categories? The key here is that transgender people are asking specific artificial categories (that until now have been based on a specific part of physical reality) to be redefined, not to deny the physical reality itself.
One could certainly make the argument that “gender”, as distinct from biological sex, is a convenient fiction for political purposes and need not be a useful term at all.
Going further down that road, we could posit that the only meaningful distinctions between “male” and “female” are such that are grounded in biology – yes, this includes differences in model social roles.
(Evil Robot Language used to indicate where I’m talking biology and only biology.)
To get straight to the elephant: motherhood is a uniquely female role for biological reasons and the biological issues associated therewith (pregnancy, nursing) are restricted to biological females.
A fair amount of existing and past social role distinctions have their grounding in the reproductive roles of both sexes. Man as breadwinner/woman as homemaker works better than the opposite scenario, because pregnancy is – not to put too fine a point on it – a job in and of itself. Granted, there’s no actual requirement for women to be pregnant all the time, but even being pregnant some of the time will put them at a disadvantage compared to men who are pregnant none of the time. A couple wishing to maximise their material well-being (for the benefit of their children, if nothing else) will act rationally to focus on maximising the father’s career potential, because that won’t be inevitably hobbled every time a new kid rolls along.
For similar reasons, it makes more sense to send your men to war than women. Leaving aside the fact that they’re – on average – bigger, stronger and more aggresive, you can afford to lose a lot more of them before your long-term population perspectives become grim. The “reproductive capacity” of your women (how many children they are able to give birth to over a period) is the bottleneck to maintaining your population at a given level. You will therefore want to keep them sheltered from anything that may reduce their number (and thus, reproductive capacity).
We could look for other examples, but I don’t think that’s a valuable use of our time. The bottom line is that where there are meaningful and useful differences between the social roles of men and women, these are grounded in the biology of the sexes. Where there exists no meaningful biological distinction, we have had a long-term trend – driven by feminists – to eliminate social distinctions. There’s nothing in biology that obviously makes women less capable of making political decisions than men, so there’s no reason to disenfranchise women and therefore women can vote. Ditto for women’s education, women in the workplace, etc.
With all of the above in mind, it’s not immediately obvious that “gender” as something distinct from biological sex is contributing anything meaningful. If we assume a fundamental equality between men and women as baseline, and make exceptions only when actual biological differences come into play, then what is the point of “gender” (as distinct from sex) exactly? Back in my day “gender” and “sex” were essentially synonyms and the main reason to use “gender” was that “sex” also meant something else…
So, as far as I know, just about every human society we’ve seen has some level of distinct gender roles. In muscle-powered societies, these tend to be more stark; in machine/computer powered societies, less so. But I don’t know of any society that doesn’t have an important social concept of gender, one that matters in everyday life.
This suggests that we’re dealing with a pretty fundamental part of the human mind and human cultures, here. Allowing some flexibility (people who see themselves in gender terms as the opposite of their biological sex, people who want to be considered intermediate and addressed as “they”, men who prefer ice skating and Jane Austen to football and Zane Grey, etc.) still makes a lot of sense on personal freedom and basic kindness grounds. But that concept seems likely to emerge as an important one in any human society.
No disagreement about the existence of gender roles.
The issue is whether these map to anything useful beyond “differences between the sexes” – which are rooted in biology.
In other words, if we take biology out of the equation, is the concept of gender roles meaningful at all?
Those two statements don’t appear to be equivalent.
Sex (biology) differences appear to make a more-or-less even split of humans into two groups (intersex and other complications aside).
What roles and requirements apply to those two groups are dependent on the fact that those groups exist at all. So in that sense, gender differences are rooted in biology – they are attached to biologically-meaningful groups.
But that doesn’t mean that the specific gender roles, expectations, and requirements have anything beyond that to do with the underlying biology at all.
(This doesn’t mean that I think that in every case, biology is irrelevant to gender roles. Just that there’s a very wide space in which it might not be.)
No, I get that. What I’m asking is: why would we even want to keep two groups distinct if there exists no objective distinction?
The issue of gender, divorced from biology, is that it requires the maintenance of a social division even if the objective factors that caused it to manifest have since disappeared.
As I point out upthread, the trend has been to remove distinctions between the sexes unless we have a good reason to keep them. Suggesting that women should “look like women”, “act like women” or “dress like women” is going to get you a lot of pushback – or more likely a push out that will make James Damore look like Employee of the Year.
Huh? Have the biological differences that cause us to make the categories “men” and “women” disappeared? I’m sincerely confused about what you’re trying to argue.
There are, most of us agree, two mostly-distinct biological categories male and female. This is what I assume you mean by “objective”. So you’d want to keep the two groups distinct (in the sense that you recognize there are two groups) for that reason, surely?
The fact that male and female are legitimate non-cultural categories seems mostly orthogonal to questions about gender roles (other than that, as we both agree, if male/female did not exist, neither would gender roles).
I think you’re right that the trend has largely been to erase differences where possible. But unless you think that this process has gone as far as it can go, it seems there’s an important role for the difference between gender and sex.
The only reason we’re discussing “gender” here is because of the proposition that the distinction be applied where the biological differences are absent, such as men v. MtF, or exist where they shouldn’t – as with women v. MtF.
Two responses:
1) There are many uses of gender vs sex which are not specifically dealing with trans issues (the vast majority of such uses, in fact). So if the gender/sex distinction is irrelevant to trans issues, that says nothing at all about the overall usage of the terms “gender” and “sex”.
2) It’s not at all clear that there are no relevant biological differences between trans and cis-gendered individuals. What little of the science I know suggests that there are (some).
Ad 1) Where such uses exist, the sex/gender distinction is meaningless because they are synonyms. We can perfectly well say that woman means “biologically female” and man means “biologically male” and nothing changes. That was the default state.
Ad 2) It isn’t sufficient to demonstrate there exist biological differences between a man and transwoman (I hope I’m getting the terminology right). We would have to demonstrate that the differences are greater than those between a transwoman and a woman. I seriously doubt this to be the case, because the readily apparent differences (absent medical intervention) are pretty big.
This doesn’t mean we can’t have a language that recognizes the differences (in all relevant aspects), just that the concept of “gender” as presently being proposed isn’t fit for that purpose.
But… you’ve agreed several times now that there are (or at least have been) important differences applied to the sexes that are not biologically-grounded. Ergo… we want a way to talk about the aspects of being male/female that are biologically-grounded, and those that are not. I am utterly unable to see the point you’re trying to make here, as you seem to be agreeing that the distinction exists, and that it is (or has been) important, but for some reason saying that making that explicit in language is bad.
Why?
If we want a categorization to be useful, we want the members we assign to a category to be, on the one hand, alike in some way and, on the other hand, unlike members we assign to another category. If this doesn’t hold, the categorization isn’t useful.
We’re in agreement that pre-existing distinctions between men and women are based on the fact that men and women are prima facie different (for biological reasons). Therefore, when faced with an individual human and needing to assign them to the category of “man” or “woman”, we must compare them to the archetypical “man” or “woman” and put them in the category where they are:
a. less unlike the other members of that category,
b. less alike the members of the opposite category.
If we don’t do it like this, our categorization becomes useless, because membership in a category tells us nothing about the properties of the member.
A definition of “woman” as “someone who can get pregnant” may not capture every single woman in existence (but that can be fixed through tweaking the definition), but it tells us something useful about women as a category. The same holds for a definition of “man” as “someone who can get others pregnant”. Depending on social cirumstances we may introduce further categorizations such as “eunuch” – “someone who can no longer get others pregnant, due to surgical intervention”, etc.
“Transwoman” and “transman” may be useful categorizations, provided the definitions are narrow enough to tell us something useful about any particular member of such a category. Folding these into the categories of “woman” and “man” doesn’t make those categories more useful – quite the opposite – because we can no longer rely on the categorization to predict certain properties of its members that we could previously.
Do we? Primary and secondary sexual characteristics aren’t sufficient?
We already have a way to talk about aspects of being a man/woman that are and aren’t biologically grounded. We’re doing it right now.
Consider this: when talking about “sex” (the biological differences) we’re pretty sure what we’re talking about. What is the ambit of “gender”, exactly, other than “everything that isn’t sex”? (Again, biological differences, not the act.)
To add to your definition in a way I think you’d agree, gender means something like “everything that is expected of individuals perceived to be of a given sex that is not directly caused by the (biological) fact that they are this sex”.
(Actually I think it’s substantially messier than that, but that seems a good enough parsing for the sake of this argument, and one that I think you at least agree with.)
So…. that’s a lot of words for a concept that we both seem to agree is important. When we have concepts like that, it often makes sense to have a single word to refer to them. Like, say, “gender”. Still not sure why you think that’s a problem.
Incidentally at this point I don’t think we’re in huge disagreement about the trans-specific aspects of this conversation, or at least our disagreements have more to do with the meta-level of what “categorization” or “definition” in and of itself means, and I don’t think that’s an argument I wish to get into.
That’s what I got from the beginning, but my question is “why is this a useful term to have”?
It’s not useful for talking about “things expected of you as a woman”, because that includes both the biologically-based and not.
It’s not useful for talking about “things unreasonably expected of you as a woman”, because even motherhood isn’t in the “reasonably expected” category (which is essentially an empty set). We don’t tell women to have kids any more than we tell them to get back in the kitchen.
Where would the biological/not-biological distinction be important enough to need a separate term for it?
I mean, I guess if your point really is that there is nothing expected of you because of your sex, then yes, it’s not a very useful term. But I think you’d agree that in the Bad Old Days which came to an end when gender equality was achieved, there were things expected of you because of your sex, some of which were (a) not biologically-grounded, and (b) not fair. In which case, at least historically, the distinction is/was important.
And of course, as you’re well aware, there are an awful lot of people who would disagree that there are no more expectations placed on people because of their sex in today’s world. So for them at least, the distinction remains useful.
For what? The correct response to an unreasonable expectation is “Screw you! I’m not gonna do that!” not “This is a ‘gender’ expectation, and therefore an artificial social construct, therefore go fuck yourself. However, if it were based on a legitimate aspect of my biology, that is: ‘sex-based’, I would be more than happy to.”
The concept of “gender” doesn’t help in any way.
We don’t have separate words for most such situations. For example, in many cultures being the eldest son of a family has placed very heavy social expectations on you. Should we have clearly separate language to describe the social role of “eldest son” as opposed to the physical fact of being the oldest male descendant of a particular couple?
Possibly we need a term to specifically differentiate the social role from the brute fact.
However, we probably don’t, because what the eldest son (and his parents) care about are the actual obligations. “Because you’re the eldest son” is reason enough (in that culture, naturally).
@Enkidum
They never existed in the first place, in the sense in which you are implying. There’s precious little that can be said about all men and no women, or vice versa, even if you restrict this to men and women who are in no way intersex, let alone transgendered.
What you have is statistical correlations that have hardened into categories. In reality, while the average man is stronger than the average woman, there’s some woman stronger than most men, and some man weaker than most women. Some non-intersex women never could get pregnant; some non-intersex men never could sire a child. Some men lactate; some women do not.
Not many, in any specific case. But the farther you go from biology, the more exceptions you find. For every “women can’t do math”, I can find some man whining about how math is too hard and shouldn’t be a normal college requirement. Women that don’t care about fashion are so common we have special words for them; also words for men who do, mostly suggesting they are sexually abnormal.
I’m in favour of letting all people do what they are good at, rather than saying “has penis; must be solider” or “has uterus; must be houskeeper” or whatever is currently part of the local definition.
If this results in more women being housekeepers – because they want to or men being soldiers, ditto, that’s fine with me.
But there never was a world where all women were better suited to be houskeepers, and all men better suited to be soldiers. Not even with people trained from childhood only in the skills etc. appropriate to their particular category.
Very few categories outside of formal logic courses or purely man-made distinctions are of that sort. Doesn’t mean categorizations aren’t useful.
You know, I keep hearing this brought up as a reason for why keeping women from fighting is rational, but how often has this actually been true? Certainly not since the industrial revolution. And even before that… well, sometimes it seems that there has been a people shortage, yes, but just as often (or more often?) it seems like the main problem has been getting enough food for too many hungry mouths out of too little farmland. Sending surplus daughters off to war seems like it would have been the rational thing to do during those times, especially if the purpose of the war was to conquer more farmland. And yet, no one ever seems to have done that.
I think the “maximise the number of fertile wombs” thing is a deep instinct that springs from the fact that during most of our evolution, living as small bands of hunter-gatherers, that really was the way to ensure tribal survival. Once societies grow to a certain size and complexity, it becomes less of a self-evident priority, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling intuitively obvious that as long as we keep popping out the maximal amount of babies, all will somehow be well.
In the spirit of “a picture being worth a thousand words”, I give you the population pyramid for Russia, 1950 (can’t easily find earlier ones). The effects of the two World Wars and all the intervening turmoil are clearly visible (note especially the 10-14 – pre-WWII; 5-9 – right smack in the middle; and 0-4 – post-WWII cohorts).
ETA:
For an even starker perspective, advance the graph forward an see the post-war baby boom first hand – all in spite of the fact that you’ve just lost around 35% of potential fathers.
ETA II:
“Too many mouths to feed” is not an issue if you’ve just seen a major population decrease. “Not enough hands to do the work” is, especially if your country has just been ruined by several years of war.
Is your point that the post war baby boom is due to having more women? Because that doesn’t follow…
What you say supports the opposite conclusion, lack of men (not enough hands to work, men being taken away to conduct war, or, tbh, general insecurity in wartime)
My point is that losing men doesn’t diminish your ability to rebuild your population after the war (or other disturbance). Losing women will.
Were polygamous relationships a thing in post WW2 Russia? If not, I don’t quite follow how the population distribution between men and women would have a large impact on population growth.
You don’t need polygamous relationships for people to have sex with one another. There’s a reason for the Sixth (Seventh) Commandment.
Lots of single mothers, presumably (some of them widows). Also, kids abandoned in orphanages.
Because we want a word that applies to the different roles and expectations that apply to the sexes, regardless of whether they are biological or not?
Do we? No, seriously, why?
If the distinction applies to sexes, sex is sufficient proxy, regardless of whether the differences are biological or not.
Women are expected to X and men are expected to Y works just as well when you understand “women” and “men” as being expressions of sex.
So… we say things like “women/females get pregnant”.
Then we say things like “women/females stay at home and cook dinner for their hard-working husbands”.
The distinction between sex and gender is precisely to highlight that we say/imply/require/desire a lot of things about women/females or men/males, but that some of these are grounded in biology and some of them are not.
Obviously, the people who find the distinction most useful in practice are those who think that a non-trivial component of these distinctions are not particularly biologically-grounded.
I don’t find this convincing, if only because we don’t even require the stuff that’s grounded in biology anymore and it would be ill-looked-upon to do so.
“Women should be having children,” isn’t a message that you can really articulate assertively these days.
Both “women get pregnant” and “women are home-makers” can be used as either positive or normative statements. Articulated positively, the former is clearly true, while the latter likely false to some degree.
Articulated normatively, I wouldn’t be surprised to see both being considered equally objectionable (don’t order women around).
Then would you agree that the sex/gender distinction was useful up until the historical point at which all non-biologically-grounded expectations placed on individual members of either sex were eliminated from society?
No, because we didn’t get a sex/gender distinction (as you understand it) until that process was pretty much done with.
Per wiki:
I agree with your claim that terms “sex” and “gender” may be useful separate terms on their own, but I don’t think they actually have these meanings when applied to transgender people. When someone says they are transgender, it isn’t usually used to describe their social role or social expectations applied to them except in one very specific way. All the other implications of “gender” are dropped.
Imagine I (a biological male) cook more than my wife, cry more often, like stuffed animals more, stay home and take care of the children, and just generally fulfill the female gender expectations while my wife fulfills the male expectations except my wife and I both dress as expected of our biological sex and use pronouns matching our biological sex (only some of these are true, but you get the hypothetical). I’ve never met a person who would say “your gender is female because you fulfill female social roles and expectations” as long as I don’t look or dress in a way that is typically associated with women.
On the other hand, imagine I grew my hair back out, wore a dress and make-up, and called myself “Shirley” but otherwise fulfilled all the male social roles and expectations (mowing the lawn, working an 8-7 job and ignoring the children, powerlifting, watching football while drinking beer – much less of this is true of me than my other hypothetical) while my wife fulfilled all the female social roles and expectations. As far as I can tell, where I live (if I want to) this will get people to use the feminine pronouns when referring to me, even though all of my social roles and behaviors are typically considered male except my name and appearance.
Similarly, if a gay couple with kids splits tasks such that one person takes up standard feminine roles and the other the masculine roles, no one generally says that one gay man is of the male gender and the other is of the female gender.
As far as I can tell, being transgender does not refer to fulfilling any roles or expectations of gender except ones about preferred pronoun and appearance.
Which makes the idea that the “gender” is supposed to refer to different roles and expectations kind of moot in the context of OP.
This is a very common misconception. Granted, this capacaity is one bottleneck in very specific situations like most of XVIIIc North America when it comes to population growth. Or modern industrialized world.
But most of the time, at least since the agriculture, the bottleneck wasn’t amount of wombs, it was amount of food. Production of which depended on land and labor, and the second was mostly affected by number of men.
(it wasn’t that counterintuitive to people back then. when starvation loomed it wasn’t men who were first to have their food intake reduced, it was children and women. And often animals were last, at least these that were required next year to till the fields)
EDIT/ Oh, and the only time i finally decide to voice this though, someone else did that first. (Bearead upthread…)
If I’m talking about war, talking about not-war isn’t a good counterargument.
Yes, upthread you were clear about it. I don’t know what to say except that it practice it doesn’t seem to work that way. (it might have something to do with the fact that as late as XVIIIc there was a lot of sanitized infanticide in orphanages, which indicates it was not wombs but other resources that kept population from growing gaster)
I mean, i am not saying that losing 98% of 1920 age group females wouldn’t be a bigger dent in Russia’s age pyramid as it was for males, but in practice losing males, especially large numbers of them dents population growth as well. Nowadays it’s not as serious as it was before XIXc, i would say.
On a last note, i don’t know why you think war situation is special. I don’t see a how it is of any consequence compared to, say, famine or natural disaster.
Something of an aside to the main topic of this thread, but I think limiting voting to males can be more directly linked to biological differences than this. It’s not only the ability to make political decisions.
If candidates don’t agree to decide the issue of who will be the boss by a vote (and then respect the result), an alternative can be a civil war. Those are costly. Therefore, it’s good if the loser of an election will typically not have very good chances in a civil war either. “Soldiers vote” is a way to approximate who’d win the war. “All men vote, whether they’re currently working as soldiers or not” is a more general and robust version of that.
Basically, there’s a reason to give voting power to those who could enforce their view by force of arms anyway, regardless of ability to make political decisions.
As an aside to your aside, I’d been thinking a while back that Salic Law may not have been as dumb as it looks for a similar reason, namely: the ability to keep lands within one family.
(The custom of women entering the spouse’s family isn’t the issue; we could just change the custom. The issue is holding on to your land when someone – possibly your spouse – is trying to take it from you by force.)
Well, historically, the political power did came out of the tip of the spear. Many times and places the people that fought or the people that controlled the people that fought were those who made the political decisions. These circumstances dictated whether it would be monarchy, oligarchy or democracy (to simplify it a lot), across history.
That’d make sense if elections routinely resulted in 80%/20% splits, but usually they are much much more like 55%/45%, and it seems unlikely to me that the chances of the 45% faction in a civil war would be *that* bad.
Frankly, this gets complicated. I have no idea what official positions are taken by the TG community, beyond the obvious – that the two cases are not comparable, because their position is that being a man (or woman) has nothing much to do with biological sex (in whatever sense you are using it – appearance of genitalia at birth, appearance of genitalia in puberty, normal secondary sexual characteristics matching both of those, all cells having the same gender related chromosomes [X + either a second X *or* a Y – never single X, or XXY or mosaic])
Not being a spokesperson for that community, I’ll give my opinion. If the law is giving different rights and responsibilities to people based on their gender – as it legitimately does already based on their age – then we’re already in trouble. If we give more social security to female persons, or more child benefits to the parents of male persons, then we’re already commiting an injustice.
Round about this point, I expect someone to mention the draft. And I’m going to suggest on the one hand that most drafts are unjust regardless of whether the victims are picked by gender, or age, or lottery, or even based on whether their local politician likes them or not – because the war it’s supporting is probably itself unjust. Forcing people to risk their lives to protect the economic interests of some company or other is closer to murder than to justice. But if you must have a draft [e.g. a case that’s actually defence], you need to draft people based on whether they are capable of fighting – including highly fit bellicose females, and excluding the large number of males incapable of fighting (e.g. for reasons of ill health).
Obviously my position here also tends to exclude affirmative action based on gender – however construed. I’m an old fashioned liberal/leftist, and not from the US, and while I can imagine cases where Affirmative Action is the least bad remedy for a problem, I also think it’s never going to be a good solution.
Once we’re no longer discriminating based on gender, we can allow it to be a matter of personal preference/identification without any bad consequences.
Those for whom the biology matters will presumably inquire – e.g. if they want a partner who is capable of becoming pregnant, or simply have a sexual preference for cis-females. But most of the time, it wouldn’t matter outside of intimate contexts.
Presumably the sports situation will be handled by leagues having whatever rules make sense to them. Some sports already have weight classes, as well as gender classes. Others have para- versions for people with various disabilities. I see plenty of room for innovation here, that would allow transgender people to compete somewhere, if not everywhere.
One difference is that when a state gives child or elderly benefits, it is not because that person is fulfilling a socially constructed role of “old person” or “young person”. But rather, the state is only interested in how many revolutions around the sun your body has existed. Because its the physical age, not the social role, that prevent old and young people from working. For example, if a 45 year old is fulfilling the social role of a 65 year old, he still has the body of a 45 year old, which all the state cares about when giving old-age benefits.
In contrast, when the state crafts gender-specific policy (which isn’t terribly common, but there are examples), they more often are interested in how people fit into the social roles of “man” and “woman”, rather than whether the chromosomes are XY or XX. For example, women-only train cars. If a burly, masculine, man-presenting biological female steps into one of those cars, its going to have the same negative effect on the passengers as a biological male.
So in this case the state doesn’t care about XX or XY, its only interested if you are presenting as a man or a woman. But if they were like, subsidizing prostate exams, then I suppose that people without prostates should be ineligible. (I doubt that would be controversial?)
AFAIK, there are few legal benefits that are tied to gender. I think your analogy falls flat here; your hypothetical trans-agers are trying to obtain social security benefits etc. from government or other agencies. Transgender people aren’t trying to gain monetary benefits, but rather want to feel comfortable in their own bodies and in their social interactions. They do often seek to legally change their names, and if possible their officially recognized genders, but to my understanding this is about confirming and validating their self-image. A friend of mine is actually holding off on doing so since the $300 fee to change her legal name is more than she’s willing to spend at the moment.
I think the issue of whether transgender women (assigned male at birth) ought to be allowed to participate in women’s sports competitions is an entirely different question from whether we ought to accept transgender people in general. I don’t have a strong opinion on it.
The analogy applies as soon as there exist situations where one gender gets preferential treatment, e.g., hiring quotas. Hiring quotas, whether mandated by law or by HR, are getting increasingly common in various countries. Therefore, I don’t think you can just drop this aspect.
So, if I understand you correctly, it would be okay if someone can change their birth date in their passport in order to confirm and validate their self-image, provided that their true birth date determines which social and monetary benefits they receive?
I’m not a fan of hiring quotas–I think the main issue here is the quotas themselves, not the remote possibility of someone identifying as trans to game them. Even if there were people switching their gender on forms solely in an attempt to increase their hireability, they’d be a separate group from the people who are transitioning because of genuine dysphoria. Also, F->M is a thing.
If there were a myriad of social customs, expectations, and prototypical appearances based on, say, whether someone was born on an odd or an even date, than I’d bite that bullet and let people change their birthdates from odd to even. (Perhaps we’d have to require some evidence that they were sincerely presenting as the opposite divisibility and not attempting to do so for nefarious purposes.)
To step in real quick regarding government documents: items such as passports and driver’s licenses don’t exist for the card-holder’s benefit. They exist to help the people who keep track of things identify you faster.
Its the reason why they include categories such as “eye color” and “height”. If a police officer needs to identify you quickly, the gender you are presenting as is actually far more useful information than whether you are XX or XY (particularly if the person has undergone sex-reassignment surgery).
I’m not sure whether any benefits aren’t outweighed by the confusion introduced when your presentation gets penetrated. A pat-down might be all it takes (assuming the person hasn’t undergone sex-reassignment surgery).
Having your sex in your documents is a useful identifier because it allows us to discard ~50% of people who aren’t you without much effort at all.
Having gender (that isn’t tied to your sex) is much less useful, because the only thing that allows us to determine gender is presentation. In other words, we need to take the person whose identity is in question at their word that they are a given gender.
Now – things are different if someone has undergone sex-reassignment surgery. In this case, I wouldn’t be opposed to a mandated change of sex in identifying documents/records. It is a sex-reassignment procedure, after all.
I don’t believe I have ever been pat down invasively enough to identify my biological sex. I also think that gender expression is persistent enough, hard enough to fake, and easy to quickly identify to be useful.
I did say “might”.
The bottom line is that “we’re looking for a man and this is a woman” is an obvious failure mode when you’re counting on consistent presentation on the part of the person being identified, especially if they have good reason not to be identified (“the Polka Dot Bandit is a man, dressed up as woman” – for those who remember the old Calvin and the Colonel cartoons).
Off the top of my head, I can recall exactly one person in my life presenting as a different sex (FtM, no longer does). For all I could tell, she was serious at the time about adopting an opposite gender identity.
There was nothing obviously wrong with the presentation, given that baggy T-shirts/sweatshirts, cargo pants and long hair was what pretty much everybody in the community wore, but at the same time my priors were “female presenting as male” from the moment we met. Needless to say, I wasn’t terribly surprised when she changed her mind.
The point of this story is that identifying information isn’t just about “things you can see when waving people through the checkpoint”; it’s “things you can verify when you’re uncertain of someone’s identity”. Gender presentation is most definitely not in the latter set, because a different term for “gender presentation” is “disguise”.
Let’s grant that this kind of preferential treatment is significant for the sake of argument (or pretend you made a more-compelling-to-most-pro-trans-people point about trans men gaining male privilege). Even so, I don’t find it at all plausible that possible benefits of transitioning outweigh the costs from prejudice and other factors (for instance not wanting to date trans people isn’t transphobic but nevertheless makes life harder for them) at all frequently. Do you disagree, or do you think the analogy is still relevant even if the net effect of transitioning gender is highly negative?
[ideological Turing test mode on]
The idea is that transgender people have a legitimate problem (gender dysphoria), which leads to them suffering unless the society accepts that they belong to their preferred gender. There is no cure for gender dysphoria, and even if there was it’s usage would be very controversial for the same reason a cure for autism would be controversial: being transgender is an important part of who they are for them, so we have no right to try and erase that. That leaves us with a choice: either let transgender people suffer, or stop misgendering them, out of which the latter is the morally correct choice. Furthermore, if someone refuses to do that, they are probably a bad person: using a different pronoun doesn’t take much effort, therefore such people are willing to inflict suffering on others either to adhere to some abstract principles (i.e. masqueraded bigotry), or for no reason at all.
As to why people who claim to be 20 years older don’t get the same treatment: first, because this isn’t a thing — there are likely no people who have this particular delusion but are mentally sound otherwise, and so if someone claims that they are then either they are schizophrenics and in need of treatment, or trolls seeking to ridicule transgenders
Now, if there actually *were* such people, would they receive the same treatment? By the same logic, probably yes. Granting them social security wouldn’t be a problem for the same reason that granting some privileges for transgender people isn’t a problem: being transgender still usually has a negative overall effect on one’s quality of life, therefore freeloaders aren’t a problem. The same might have been true w.r.t. “age dysphoria”.
Besides, this already kind of exists, as in some places one can be considered a legal custodian of their mentally challenged adult children; which is the closest thing we have to adults genuinely identifying as children.
I don’t know what this means or implies. Should this note influence how to interpret your post?
I was under the impression that even if society accepts the self-determined gender of a transgender person, they would still suffer because their physical appearance does not match their perceived gender. Please correct me if this is wrong.
70 years ago, the very same thing would have been said about transgender people (or “transvestites”, as they were called back then) – that they’re either mentally ill, or just pretending in order to get attention, and that they’re not a general concern anyway, because there are so very few of them. Yes, well, there were so few visible transgender people because it was even less socially accepted back then.
Still prevalent enough to have a term coined for them though. Not sure what the word is for all the people claiming to identify as 20 years older than their birth age.
I’m not sure that’s the correct perspective.
One of the things that occasionally gets brought up as a victory for the women’s liberation movement is the fact that women are no longer restricted to wearing attire that is specifically coded “female”. It’s not impossible that women who wore clothing typically associated with men were at some point referred to as “transvestites” (people who wear clothes associated with the opposite sex), but I have never encountered such a usage.
What makes “transvetitism” a useful term isn’t the prevalence of the phenomenon, but rather the fact that it’s exceptional.
In World War I, the word for people claiming to identify as two years older than their birth age was “volunteer”.
@Faza (TCM)
Audie Murphy also enlisted at the age of 17 in WWII with his sister’s help. This is a very common thing.
@Faza (TCM)
Eh, you’re right. The core difference is that right now, in today’s society, there is a significant group of people who identify as transgender, and no such group wanting to identify as a different age as part of their core identity (as opposed to those simply sidestepping age requirements like you mention).
Furthermore, I think the difference is deeper than a visibility problem. I’ll grant that gender and age both have vast physical, emotional and social implications. However, age is a continuum through which everyone is constantly moving. Gender is a binary, and you’re expected to remain on the side you were born into for your entire life. On top of that, it’s impossible to even talk about someone in the third person without either specifying their gender or sounding a bit odd and annoying grammatical prescriptivists.
The term I’ve seen for the (female) phenomenon in the opposite direction is “mutton dressed as lamb.”
Given that men find twenty-year old women more attractive than forty-year old women, there are good reasons why the latter would like to be treated as the former. Indeed, lots of women (and some men), try in various ways to appear younger than they are.
It implies that I don’t actually hold [some of] these beliefs; rather, this is a best argument for the other side that I could conceive.
If the perfect solution is unattainable, why not go for the next best thing?
ISTM that this really turns on how you think of gender dysphoria.
Model #1: Gender dysphoria is like thinking you shouldn’t have a left arm or thinking you’re really Napoleon under the skin.
Model #2: Gender dysphoria is like deeply identifying with another culture even though you’re not from it–the guy who goes to India for a few years and ends up going native and adopting as much as possible of the new culture.
Model #3: Gender dysphoria is like being born intersex–nature has played a cruel trick on you, and medicine should try to fix it as best it can.
I think with each of these models, you get different responses. If you’re working from Model #1, someone who says he’s always felt like a woman inside is mentally ill and needs treatment; in Model #2, he’s just a guy who should go try on some dresses and get someone to show him how to put on makeup–politeness leads to more-or-less accepting her as a woman in most situations; in Model #3, she’s someone who needs some surgery to correct biology’s mistake and some social understanding and kindness.
But I think figuring out which of these models is more correct has little to do with the social arguments about tolerance, and a lot to do with questions of fact. (About which I know very little, FWIW.).
And there are a bunch of other possible models. And many may be true in different cases–perhaps some people with gender dysphoria are delusional and others are genuinely a female brain in a male body.
The implications of that would bepretty much the opposite of what you sound like you think they would.
That was written almost eight years ago. I would be interested to hear if Scott has treated any BIID patients since he was licensed, and whether he has recommended anybody to get a limb amputated as treatment for the condition.
20 years ago, if not less, the same would commonly be said of people who think they’re a different gender.
This is an awfully optimistic view of human nature.
I think the problems with age and gender are the other way around.
Gender dysphoria is kinda rare, once your culture makes sure that men and women and anyone else can have a functional range of emotions and aren’t constrained too much in what they want to do with their lives. Most people LIKE being the sex they’re assigned at birth, and most of the people who don’t really care for it also don’t care enough to go against the grain. The only people who DO go against the grain are strongly motivated to do so.
With age, it’s all arbitrary to everyone. Kids want to be older and cooler, 20-somethings want more respect, 30-somethings want to halt their biological clocks so they can put off planning for the future a little longer, 40-somethings all feel like 20-year-olds with 20 years of experience, 50-somethings want to prove they’ve still got it, etc etc. See also ‘adulting’ as a concept and ‘When my parents were my age, I thought they had it all figured out. Now I know they’re just doing the best they can.’ When they’re young, everyone wants to be old enough to matter. When they’re older, everyone wants to be young enough to still be hot or cool or whatever temperature they care about.
If everyone’s like that, why even bother going along with someone who’s REALLY like that?
(And I think that the same holds even for beauty and wealth, although most of those tend to be one-way in their desire. Most people wouldn’t mind being a little prettier or richer.)
Don’t we already do that for all intents and purposes? We might not let people write whatever they want in their passports, but if a 60-year-old insists on acting like a 20-year-old or vice versa, don’t we consider that to be perfectly within their rights?
I think anyone who is even remotely on board with TG issues would definitely say that demands that someone “act their age” are rude and narrow-minded, that we should act in whatever way we feel is right for us and never mind what society expects. And they’d get considerably less pushback on that than on the gender thing.
A 60-year-old man serial-dating 20-year-old women may not get prosecuted for it, but I wouldn’t expect to find much social support here.
I suspect the average 60 year old man will have more problems convincing the 20 year old women to go out with him than convincing the rest of society not to hassle him too much for it.
What if they call them “ageist” and get a popular mob to threaten to fire her for not accepting his professed age?
Sadly, not entirely. I say that as a 40 years old looking like 25 years old with a mind and personality of 5 years old.
People mind ;(
You have a point. I was going to use the example that couples that engage in ageplay in or outside the bedroom face considerable discrimination, but the trans positive community would almost certainly be one of the most accepting communities for ageplay couples.
The real question is if the government bans discrimination against a person’s identity can I then claim to be 75 and qualifying for the top benefit level for SS?
This kind of analogy (as well as other ones like the hypothetical trans-race person, or less hypothetically, otherkins) immediatly falls appart when you discover that trangenderism has physiological components.
This cannot be compared to a psychiatric delusion because it doesn’t work the same way on a fundamental level.
Plus everything Scott once said on the topic.
And subjective age does not have physiological components?! Your physical health, alertness, forgetfulness, hormone levels, they all influence how old you feel. If anything, this strengthens the analogy.
It’s rather lazy to link to a long article containing many arguments and proclaim “also everything in here”, so I’m not going to rebut it. Be more specific.
If you’re not even going to read what the person whose blog you are commenting on has written on the subject that you want to adress in his comment section, I can’t do anything for you.
Quite the contrary, I did read it – once a couple of years ago, and once again when I saw your post. But I don’t agree with everything Scott wrote in that article, and if your contribution to this debate is “everything Scott once said on the topic”, then my reply to you is “every counter-argument in that comment section”.
Scott’s argument is clearly labelled (section IV to the end) but any pertinent counterarguments in the comments section are not, so please quote or link them rather than just asserting that they exist.
It probably needs to be pointed out that the categories were made for those doing the categorizing, not the one being categorized.
Are trans-racial people only hypothetical? Isn’t Rachel Dolezal a european american woman presenting / living full-time as an african american woman? Why might she not be a valid example?
It’s *extremely* common for people to identify so strongly with a foreign culture that they do their best to adopt that culture–learn the language, join the church, take up the dress and music, mostly make friends within the culture, etc. Occasionally people find this offensive (someone finds anything you do offensive); many more people find it kind-of funny. But it’s a pretty standard part of being human.
Claiming to be black and getting a leadership position in the local NAACP was pretty over-the-top, but Doezal deciding she liked American black culture better than American white culture and trying to integrate herself into that culture as much as possible was perfectly reasonable, IMO.
Trying to integrate into that culture is fine, and there are tons of white people who have integrated in to the black cultures around them.
Pretending to actually be black, with fake stories about black parents and experiences as a youth that would only have made sense if she were black is less fine, and not how most people who try to integrate with other cultures go about it.
I’m pretty loose with things when it comes to various identities and whatever, but I don’t understand how people find what she did as defensible.
I can sort of imagine the dissonance of experience as a “woman trapped in a man’s body” (or vice-versa) but not “A 20-year old trapped in a 40-year old body”. The latter just seems like “I wish I wasn’t so sore after light exercise” or small trivial complaints like that. I don’t know if that matters, but that seems to inform whether I find these various things intuitively plausible. Of course, my intuitions about the transgender experience is perhaps shaped by culture, so who knows.
I can. For all intents and purposes I am one.
But isn’t everyone, though?
I wish I knew what I know now and have the skills and confidence and resources and relationships I have now but still have the metabolism and low sleep needs and peachy skin and soft hair texture and easy way to put on muscle I did when I was 18, half a life ago. I still love hanging out with kids, teens and young adults. I don’t feel like the stereotypical stuffy late-thirties person on the inside. I wish I could still dance all night and flirt with pretty young things without a care in the world. I don’t feel meaningfully older than I did then, just have more stuff and more earning power and more responsibilities and less energy. But that seems to me to be just life.
A 40-year-old trapped in an 8-year-old’s body would be stranger. Or an 8-year-old trapped in a 40-year-old’s body. Someone yearning for a life that gives them meaningfully different rights and responsibilities. Or a 40-year-old trapped in a 20-year-old’s body (which is notably difference than a 20-year-old thinking the 40-year-old’s LIFE is better).
I don’t think the actual 20-year olds are, no.
That said, I was old when I was young and young when I am old(er). Given how little I’ve changed over the years, it’s not impossible that I’m a 4000-year-old trapped in a much-less-than-4000-year-old body, which may explain the crankiness.
Well, a 20-year-old trapped in a 40-year-old’s body was previously a 20-year-old in a 20-year-old’s body, right? 😉
Although there’s grass that’s greener for 20-year-olds as well.
Yeah, that was my point as well.
You want the 20 year old body in terms of health and such, but the 40 year old appearance for getting loans and being taken seriously by colleagues.
Honestly? That fact that I’ve heard of category B, but haven’t heard of category A. Being honest though, my reaction to both cases would be to shrug and go along with their request. If it makes them happy and doesn’t hurt me, why should I care?
This seems like the dumbest possible outcome of this problem. What would likely happen if the situation you’re describing ever started happening in enough numbers for anyone to care about is that (like other people in this thread have pointed out) we’d just as a society mentally decouple “claimed age” from “actual age” like we have with gender and sex. Benefits and the like would be tracked by actual age, but societal status would be influenced by claimed age.
Oh, ok. I see what you’re doing now. Look man, not even trans activists claim that reality should bend towards their preferences. Transmen don’t skip breast cancer screenings, transwomen still get their prostate checked; everyone realizes that there are limits to how accommodating existence can be… but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to maximize happiness.
Is this an attack helicopter joke? 🙂
Ha, good catch. Edited to fix.
Man, screw dyslexia.
Dyslexics of the world untie!
Even knowing that joke, and knowing what you probably were saying, I had to read “unite” letter by letter in order to not see it as “unite”
@Aftagley
To make it worse, you wrote “unite” twice instead of “untie” once.
I empathize although I’m not dyslexic, so I’m modestly sorry to keep this thread going.
But not enough to actually stop it, apparently. 🙂
Hmm, if claim I did that on purpose to play along with your joke, what are the odds anyone will believe me?
On second thought, I should probably just quit this thread while I’ve still got some shred of linguistic dignity. I’ve got better things to do anyway; like taking care of my shoes – I just noticed they’ve become united.
Not sure if either you or OP is aware, but there was recently some Dutch guy who sued a dating app because he wanted to be able to report his age as 40 when he was actually 60, or something along those lines.
How did that turn out for him?
He didn’t sue the dating app, but the government, to get his age legally reduced.
The judge said that there is no law that allows for this.
Sister 1: I’m not going to get married until I’m twenty-four.
Sister 2: I’m not going to be twenty-four until I’m married.
Old joke, which suggests that the idea of trying to pretend to be younger than you are is an old issue.
We have technologies by which people attempt to look younger than they are—I know a woman (from the Hollywood subculture, although not an actress) who looks about thirty years younger than her biological age. Suppose the technologies are good enough so that a fifty year old woman can convincingly pretend to be twenty-five. Should she be able to transition, and then insist that everyone is socially obligated to pretend she is twenty-five, that publicly commenting on her real age (misaging her) is at least bad manners and perhaps illegal?
A woman who you know is forty-five but who, through good genes, makeup, and careful presentation, can plausibly pretend to be twenty-five, is dating a friend of yours–and has told him that she is twenty-five. Are you acting badly if you tell him how old she is?
@DavidFriedman >
That analogy fits, while not impossible a 45 years old woman will likely have a much harder time conceiving a child than a 25 years old woman, I suppose if my friend has spoken of how much they want to conceive a child, and I really care about his happiness I might tell.
I can’t actually think of anyone I care about that much to bother that isn’t already family though!
My question wasn’t whether you would bother to tell but whether you would be acting badly if you did. A common view in the transsexual case is that “misgendering” someone is bad, not just that you are not obliged to do it.
Isn’t it true that assigned-male trans people tend to have much lower testosterone levels than cis males? If so, then there is an “undeniable physical reality” to being trans, aside from xx/xy.
Is that true? I’ve heard claims and counterclaims here, but this isn’t my field so I’m not sure.
Is it? What are the numbers? Is the trans range at the lower end of the cis range, or is it non-overlapping? Are the cis people with the same low value who do not report dysphoria?
These are not gotchas, but seem relevant.
If Caitlyn Jenner had “much lower testosterone” when she won the men’s decathlon olympic gold, she must have been quite the athlete.
I don’t know if it’s true, it’s just something that my trans friends have brought up, and it seems like something that would be likely, so it passes the smell test for me. I am actually asking the question though, because I don’t know, and I haven’t put any effort into researching it.
I’ve heard a theory that m2f are either very feminine gays, or autogynephilic. I dont know to what extent this theory stands up to scrutiny.
But if it’s true, than your theory of lower testosterone makes sense for the very feminine gays. It doesnt make sense for Caitlyn Jenner.
That might be the tendency (someone have a study?), but there’s no “undeniable physical reality” that covers every individual.
I have on a bookcase the Pax Brittanica trilogy by James Morris, a WW2 veteran, civil servant of the British Empire, and The Times journalist who scaled Everest with Hillary. Morris is now Jan Morris. Those were not activities stereotypically associated with low-T.
It’s probably worth stressing that people self-identifying as being of a different age than that calculated by the number of birthdays is hardly an abstract hypothetical.
“I’m totes 18, let me go to war” has already been mentioned. “I’m totes 18, let me buy cigs” and “I’m totes 21, let me buy a beer” are also common enough. Other candidates include “I’m totes 40, let me have the lower auto insurance premiums” and – this one being a case of current Polish Electoral Sausage – “I’m totes under 26, so I don’t have to pay income tax”.
The first three are actually situations we do face, so how do we deal with them? We don’t take people’s word for what age they are any time it actually matters.
For legal stuff, we don’t let people just decide on their legal name, sex, or race, but we may have some formal process to let them change those things. For social stuff, it’s really up to the people interacting with you. I can identify as 25 all I like, but that’s not going to make many 25 year old women think I’m their age when I’m trying to get them to go out with me, or make it any easier for me to keep up with the 25 year old guys playing soccer.
That was another point I was going to make, but thanks for making it for me.
Our legal system does accommodate one specific subcategory of this: a child below the age of 18 can, under certain circumstances, successfully petition the government to be recognized as what might be termed a transadult, or “emancipated minor”.
This status gives the transadult may of the legal privileges and responsibilities of adulthood (entering into binding contracts, control of one’s own finances and healthcare, etc) but not all of them (buying alcohol and tobacco, voting, etc), and is usually awarded on the basis that the minor has a demonstrated ability to handle their own affairs and is de facto no longer dependent on their parents or guardians.
So, the weird thing here is, in general, you (and I mean you, specifically, not a general “you”) do treat most trans women as being women. You pass them on the street, mentally identify them as women as part of your general environmental awareness, and never think twice. You don’t worry about whether you’ve misclassified them and you don’t worry about any biological facts that might mitigate against that classification. You refer to these trans women as “she” and, if you habitually open doors or give up seats for women, you do that for trans women too.
And yet here you are asking for a justification for the behavior you engage in every day! Because…there’s a small subset of trans women that you do notice are trans, and prevalence be damned, those are the ones you had in mind when you made this post, I suspect. There’s a sampling bias here where noticing that a woman is trans increases your confidence in the proposition “I can accurately identify the natal sex of a person presenting as female”, but not noticing that a woman is trans fails to appropriately decrease your confidence in the same proposition (because you don’t notice to the extent that you have an opportunity to update).
If you doubt my statements about prevalence, do some data gathering. Estimate the number of women you encounter each day (varies a lot depending on lifestyle, commute, etc.). Multiply by some reasonable estimates for the proportion of trans women in your area (varies by area). Count the people you see that are definitely trans women. Compare the numbers.
Then, stop asking “why should we…” and start asking “why do I…” and answer yourself, “because I don’t have a choice, given the limits of my available observations”.
“Extrapolating these results to 2016 suggested a current US [transgender] population size of 390 adults per 100 000,”
So on days I see 1,000 different adults, 3.9 should be transgender. If 50% are FtM and almost all FtMs pass, I think a majority of the other 50% are very easy to notice.
Although I don’t have studies showing so, I strongly believe the conventional wisdom that the percentage of trans women in Portland, OR is significantly higher than in the US at large. Also (though it’s not as large an effect), MtF do seem to outnumber FtM in most studies.
These would be two very significant data points, yes.
I don’t know about most of the community, but if I see 1000 unique adults I don’t know, that’s a really weird day for me. There are particular events throughout the year where that is likely to happen, but most of the time I see no more than 100 adults, which are the same people I see almost every day. The idea that transgender people are common or ubiquitous is not especially accurate to my experience and it’s not exactly something the data I’ve seen supports. The point about me treating them the same as I treat any human is accurate, but that’s only because I treat most everyone as unsexed meatbags.
If we aren’t going to acknowledge that men trend towards being better at certain things, women trend towards being better at other things, and that transgender folks want to identify with the sex/gender they desire to more (because reasons) and that all of that is ok, then treating people as having sex or gender really doesn’t serve anyone in my opinion.
Greetings, unsexed meatbags! I am Elan Musk, a living, smelly organism just like you!
Would you like to fund research into escaping our organic mortal coils?
I can’t speak for the person you were speaking to, but I generally avoid using gendered pronouns for people I perceive as transwomen unless their presentation is sufficiently good so that I actually see them as women, and similarly for transmen. Obviously I don’t know how many of the people I see as men are actually transmen, or women transwomen, but there are certainly ones who I don’t see as their preferred gender.
Avoiding the use of gendered pronouns is a way of neither being rude by pointing out that I do not believe their claimed identity nor being dishonest by pretending that I do.
Their post is specifically discussing how you don’t identify all trans people you see, though.
That’s a reasonable policy, David. It’s the parenthetical at the end of your first paragraph that’s what I was trying to get at, though. The OP seems to be taking non-passing trans women as their “center” when thinking about the group “trans women”; I’m suggesting that it’s more accurate to take passing trans women as central, in spite of the sampling bias caused by only being able to reliably identify the former.
More explicitly, I’m arguing that passing is easier and more common than cis people tend to think (see for instance my guest post at Unremediated Gender), and that impressions to the contrary are caused by sampling bias.
So, to the extent that I’m right about the above, “you usually call trans women ‘she'” is accurate.
I’m really skeptical about this unless you can provide data.
If Portland has 10x transgender per capita as a major urban area in the South and TG is a 90% MtF phenomenon, you’re probably right. In the absence of those numbers, it could be that most MtF are really bad at passing.
There is a part you are leaving unsaid here: the ability of people to make themselves look the other gender, or look a different age.
People have cross-dressed for ages. Depending on the culture, there’s always some way in which women or men dress as the other gender. Sometimes it is socially accepted, sometimes it is for jest, or religious reasons or for whatever reason (think of theaters that had only men as actors, but still had parts for women).
The only new thing is that technology now allows us to modify the bodies to match with the identity of the people. We can even use surgery to make genitals change. Hell, if we had the technology to make the genome of the entire body to somehow switch from XY to XX, some transwomen would use it (and others would not).
About the age simile. It’s a dumb comparison…except not really? We already humor women not wanting to say their age. There are problematic areas: minors passing as adults or adults passing as retiring age, for assorted legal reasons. But that does not mean that if you are an adult, and want to pretend you have a different, still adult age, society won’t allow it.
For example, f you are 50, are starting to get a lot of white hair, society won’t burn you at a stake for dying your hair. People get plastic surgery to eliminate wrinks, etc, etc. As longevity tech improves, maybe we will live up to 150 and still be reasonably fit up to, say, the 80s. Then it will be more common to just alter your appearance to look younger and more fit.
It’s fine.
Okay, so I’m not trans and I don’t have a crazy level of familiarity with trans issues, but a few of my close friends are and I consider myself reasonably informed, so here goes:
Without loss of generality I am going to assume that trans people and transgender issues in general are MtF. The same logic should apply for FtM just swap the words and concepts around.
There isn’t really such thing as “a man” in the sense of a category that means anything. There are a variety of traits that people have that tend to overlap, to varying degrees. When people refer to “men” in the general (as opposed to specific individuals), the specific trait being invoked depends on context. In a context like “prostate cancer is a men’s health issue”, this is referring to a biologically male body (note: independent of chromosomes or even the specifics of genitalia.” In a context like “men should always hold the door”, this is referring to a social role enforced in a specific culture.
These things need not overlap. Somebody insisting that men behave in a specific cultural / interpersonal manner doesn’t really care whether the person in question is at risk of prostate cancer. And similarly, a doctor doesn’t care whether their patient holds doors for people.
It extends further than this. For example, my ex (female, I am male) used to use the phrase “I hate men” frequently, usually when someone male (not me) was being dismissive or aggressive at her. At first I used to get upset by this, but it eventually become obvious that she didn’t include me when she said that. And likewise, she probably didn’t care whether the people in question were at risk of certain diseases, only that they were being rude to her.
Have you ever heard anyone make a claim about what makes a “real man”, but their examples all have to do with consumption of certain foods or beverages, certain recreational activities, and political views?
All this is to say, that we use the words “man”, “male”, etc. to mean a variety of different things in a variety of independent contexts. These clusters loosely overlap but when brought up in a specific context, specific membership in the other overlapping groups is irrelevant. The “central” examples of people who are in the perfect Venn-Diagram intersection region of every possible definition of masculinity aren’t the only men that exist. Hell, I’m probably not in that overlap region, on account of not being heterosexual, and yet most people would acknowledge I’m male.
So the question becomes, how many masculine attributes must someone satisfy to “count” as a man for real, and if any of the attributes have priority over the others.
To which the answer that I, and I imagine most trans people, put forth is: the one in question at the time of asking. More pithily, if you aren’t my doctor or my significant other, why do you care what’s between my legs?
Your question presumes, and I suspect many people believe, that chromosomes, or body type, or genitalia, or something else is the “real” definition and everything else is irrelevant. But that is pretty trivially counterexample’d: a person eating at a restaurant in a dress, with long hair, who uses the women’s restroom, and refers to herself using female pronouns, is going to be treated as female by most people, since the context in which they interact with her (i.e. social, such as waiting in line at the restroom), doesn’t care what her biology or chromosomes are.
I think a lot of people have a conception of trans people as a person who looks and acts male, fulfills male roles in society and culture, and is biologically male, deciding that they want to be called female today and everyone needs to call them by their changed name or they’re a bigot who ought to be shunned and punished. In my experience, the central example of a trans person is someone who looks and acts female, fulfills female roles in society and culture, but has male biology. Generally, they aren’t trying to stick out and appear different, they’re trying to get as close as they can to the central example of the gender they desire to present, but being limited by biology. This explains why they would go for gender reassignment surgery, which should inspire a fair degree of body horror in anyone not already experiencing that level of body horror whenever they look in the mirror.
Yes, such “bad faith transgender” people may exist, in fact I knew one in high school. But the question that needs to be asked is about whether “punishing” the bad eggs is worth hurting the good ones.
I’ve ignored trans athletes and other issues relating to biological capabilities because I don’t think they matter. In the case of sports things should be divided based on physical attributes that actually have a bearing on the sport (for example weight classes) and the only reason gender is currently used is because it’s a holdover from a time when these things weren’t as easy and convenient to measure, or from a time with more sexism. In the case of literally any other profession, I don’t care that a person is from a gender with a higher probability to be good at the thing I’m paying them to do, I only care that the person themself is good at the thing I’m paying them to do.
I’ve ignored non-binary and genderfluid trans people in this comment. I think my position on them follows logically from my position on binary trans people, but I could explain it if you would be interested.
As for your age example, I don’t really see a problem or a difference. If a person wants to present their age in a way different from the literal counted method (for example, certain cultures count years differently, or the thing about how women are 49 forever, or relative measures of age like school grades and such) then when applicable I think it should be applied, and when not applicable, it shouldn’t. I.e. the government doesn’t care what age you think you are, you have to lived a certain number of years to get social security, so they don’t care how you present (analogous to a doctor in the gender example) but in a social setting, sure.
TL;DR gender has many aspects and only the one you’re currently engaging with matters. If someone is fulfilling a particular social gender role or something, and you’re interacting with them in a social capacity, then treat them as that gender. Their biology shouldn’t matter unless you’re a doctor and their genitalia shouldn’t matter unless you’re trying to have sex.
This is simply the Fallacy of Gray. There’s obviously useful categories referred to by that title, even if they’re a bit fuzzy around the edges.
This is irrelevant, because nobody claims that not doing any of those things that make you a “real man” make you not a “man”. Most talk about “real men” nowadays is jocular anyway.
If this person is also heavily bearded and as far as can be seen, has a male body type, most people are going to think this person is a man dressed as a woman. Same goes for various other indications of masculinity.
Do we even need a strict distinction?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gFMH3Cqw4XxwL69iy/eight-short-studies-on-excuses
We make religious exemptions in many cases, but we do not allow the same for small cults. Despite that, it is tough to pinpoint when a cult becomes a religion.
There are many trans people, and they are mostly extremely upset about their problems. And all the possible benefits the transition can bring are relatively small, and mostly outweighed by the societal and medical problem it brings. Thus we say “OK, go for it”.
But asking for being able to change one’s legal age is like asking for a religious exemption to drive 50 in a 30-mile zone, or alternatively, demanding to be served pasta on ceratin days because the Flying Spaghetti Monster orders you so.
People are strange, so I’m sure there are at least some people that are genuinely upset with an inability to change their age and do not plan to abuse it. (Or you can take a look on otherkins.) But we are not able to give them this possibility without getting millions of people to demand their early pensions. This problem doesn’t apply to trans people as much.
Seeing as SSC is a pretty scientific & medically literate crowd- anything new in the testosterone replacement therapy field, aka TRT? Specifically for us older guys who are looking for quality of life enhancements, but don’t have an actual disorder- just normal aging.
I understand the basics that can be summarized in a Wikipedia page- I’d heard that more recently the FDA was cracking down some on TRT & ‘anti-aging’ clinics & such- is it still possible to find a doctor who’d give out a TRT scrip in spite of not having an actual diagnosis? Any news on the health front- potential dangers of heart attack, higher blood pressure, stroke or increased cancer risk with years or decades of constant, low-grade TRT usage? (I understand there’s no longitudinal studies out there, but just any hints one way or another). I’m talking about taking 100 to a max of 200 mg of test weekly via injection- not jacking my levels up beyond 800 or anything crazy like that.
I’m not ‘old’ old yet, so I was hoping that the field would be a little more studied by the time I hit 40 so that I could evaluate safety & such…. Doesn’t seem like the FDA is going to be particularly cooperative. (I wonder if China will get into test supplementation, seeing as they have a…. laxer view on human safety & medical testing. And I’ve heard outside the US many countries find Americans’ moralizing about PEDs to be baffling- it’s just another drug to them)
I have to say- I do one big weightlifting session a week, and the obviously enhanced testosterone that I have the next day is pretty great. Enhanced confidence, clearer & sharper mind, better mood- it lasts for much of the day, and I get this effect consistently, week in and week out. Not sure if I’d get the same ‘bump’ from an external source, but I’d definitely like to. Yes I am already maximizing the other stuff, get enough sleep, good diet, etc.
If you’re looking for TRT for bodybuilding, the 5 word summary is “works, but not worth it”. Side effects depend on dosage, of course, but the clincher is that once you start TRT, there are good chances you’re going to need it to maintain normal levels from now on. That’s something you don’t find in the wikipedia page, as far as I remember.
Well then, keep doing it 🙂 I doubt it’s the testosterone btw – many things happen when you go to the gym, and it’d be a small miracle for everything to be due to a single number.
I know it’s boring, and uncool, and not very interesting, but 80% of psychical and mental enhancements are reached (only) by good sleep, good food, regular exercise. Unless you’re in a population where 1. this is perfectly covered and 2. the last 20% really matter (i.e. performance athlete), it’s not really worth optimizing.
I was going to point out that hormonal treatment of prostate cancer works by artificially suppressing testosterone, so I’d naturally expect artificially introducing testosterone to be a sort of anti-treatment for prostate cancer…
But then I went to Google to check and the first hit is about an N=230,000 study reportedly claiming
So I guess the answer is “it’s complicated” and not so negative?
I’d still worry depending on your family/genetic cancer risk. For most people prostate cancer now has a 96% 15-year survival rate if you catch it before it metastasizes, but my father only survived a year and a half even with no detectable initial metastasis plus top-notch treatment; our BRCA2 mutation seems to turn slow-growing cancer into aggressive cancer at the drop of a hat.
I was a volunteer subject in a research study at MGH on testosterone supplementation in older men. Double-blind, but I could tell pretty soon that I was on a high dose – confirmed at the end of the study. The main effect I noticed was being obsessed about sex all the time, like when I was a teenager – not a plus. (Kind of sobering to be reminded that one’s mental state is so sensitive to a chemical in the bloodstream.) But no benefit in actual sexual function. Also no change to mental acuity or physical strength. Another minus – my PSA levels shot way up. They sent me to a urologist who advised me to wait and see if they went back down after the study, which they did. (Also learned from him that bicycle riding can cause elevated PSA levels.) There may have been a benefit in bone density. Overall – would not recommend.
I recently came across this poll from Pew:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/12/19/most-americans-see-value-in-steering-children-toward-toys-activities-associated-with-opposite-gender/
This is unbelievable. As in, I don’t believe it. The stuff about encouraging girls to participate in boyish activities I can believe, but not that 64% of the country wants to encourage boys to participate in girlish activities.* Growing up in a
Montana white nationalist compoundsuburban liberal neighborhood in the 2000s, I’m pretty sure the adults in my life would have kicked a Barbie doll out of my hands. I can accept that between that time and now the “Great Awokening” might have changed their behavior, but according to the poll 54% of members of the Silent generation and 47% of Republicans also agree. But looking at the wording of the question it doesn’t seem loaded or otherwise manipulative.*If you come across a complaint about gender-bending from tradcons, about 95% of the time it will be a complaint about males appropriating female behavior rather than the other way around.
Maybe they meant cooking. Or singing.
I went to the link looking for questions, but was distracted by one data point:
Boys/Girls – “How they express their feelings” – Respondents say 13% similar, 87% Different.
That’s surprising. I mean, personally i see fundamental similarities. Much bigger than in basically all the others categories (physical abilities, interests, etc) show in that table.
EDIT/ Oh yes, what i suspected: first, they lumped somewhat good and good into “good”, second, they asked about girls first and then about boys.
That creates an effect when people who value generic gender equality (basically huge majority) would have to face cognitive dissonance while answering these questions differently.
Note that even given this, men are actually split evenly on this (and you couldn’t be neutral on that question)
Also, the question itself is fairly mild “typically associated with girls”. Easy to come up with things like drawing, cooking, singing, etc, that are not completely strange for boys even in the eyes of conservative parent.
EDIT2/ Also, i hate reporting. For example:
“Americans differ over what should be emphasized in raising boys vs. girls”
No. Actually it’s the opposite, the data shows that there is not much of a difference there…
EDIT3/ Jesus, it’s laaaazy survey. But i get it, it’s standart bunch of questions. Doesn’t change the fact i think it could be improved upon, that set.
EDIT4/ I am mostly surprised how they answered the question about how much society values intelligence – 8% in men, 22% in women. That’s counterintuitive, especially given that rest of the answers is standart gender expectations.
This was definitely a survey design problem. The way the question is worded there is no neutral answer, it’s either good or bad. Basic human psychology would lend someone who was neutral on this issue to choose somewhat good vs somewhat bad. I won’t care one way or another what toys my kid plays with, but will probably only buy matching gendered toys for them until they are old enough to express their opinion. Even with that viewpoint, I would have to choose somewhat good over somewhat bad. I might have left the question blank, but they didn’t even count blank answers as a response. A vet uninformative survey.
There’s some theory when it comes to survey design that says you shouldn’t include neutral options specifically because people will choose the neutral option instead of expressing an opinion because it’s easier to just choose the middle option.
I don’t think this is very good theory, and at best it should apply only selectively, but it’s a thing that’s out there in the world.
Yes… i’m not a fan of it either, but sometimes you won’t get much out of a survey. Not here, imo, and I think in this case it was certainly a mistake to combine the 4 categories into two, at least.
But that might well reflect their actual opinion. They may find it easier because the question doesn’t include all resolutions of the binary. It should be up to the survey designers to not present those answering with a false dichotomy.
We encouraged our younger son’s interest in cooking (gave him a toy kitchen, for example), and our daughter’s interest in whacking her brothers with foam rubber swords[1]. Our daughter seems to have moved on from the toy swords, but our son has turned into an excellent cook.
IMO, it’s important for kids to learn that just because some interest is coded as a male or female activity, what actually matters is whether or not you like it. (Though there are some interests where it’s going to be very socially awkward to get involved–for example, knitting is like 99.9% female everywhere I’ve ever seen, and I have to guess that being the one man in the knitting circle would be a little awkward.)
[1] There was a time when all the neighborhood kids would have huge battles with these swords, and she was the little girl in the cute pink princess dress whacking someone upside the head with a foam rubber sword.
I expect it would be fine (I’m male and knit but have never gone to any meetups). Certainly I think it would be less awkward than e.g. being the only woman at a programming meetup because there would be no Discourse hanging over your head and your chances of being awkwardly hit on by other participants are lower.
Yup, absolutely this. I have a photograph of my (then) 6 year-old daughter in a blue Elsa princess dress with a foam rubber sword and home-made cardboard shield. She also had Spiderman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costumes, because they were what she wanted, and a positively encyclopaedic knowledge of dinosaurs*.
I’ve always maintained to my kids that there’s no such thing as girls’ toys and boys’ toys. There’s just toys.
*I’m increasingly convinced that dinosaurs is not, in fact, a boy-coded thing. It seems to be something that is just downloaded into the brains of children automatically at about age 4.
Hard disagree, stitch and bitches are awesome.
Did your daughter move away from toy swords to real swords?
No, in my limited experience, knitting is not mostly for females anymore. It may have traditionally counted as a female activity half a century ago, but among young people who knit, many are males.
The question isn’t whether a woman who feels masculine should be permitted to dress and act in a way that makes her look more male, it’s whether other people should be obliged, socially or legally, to act as if they believe she is male.
Similarly, in your case, if an eighty-year old man, in a future where we can reverse most of the biological effects of aging (one I devoutly hope I will live to experience), looks as if he is twenty-two and chooses to hang around a college dating college girls and telling them that he is their age, should be a (social or legal) offense to tell people his real age?
There are a fair number of female fighters in the SCA, although not nearly as many as male fighters.
Cooking is, IMO, increasingly less coded. I’m much more interested in cooking than my wife, and other “food creation” activities like brewing and grilling are popular among male friends, though perhaps those are more male-coded than knowing how to make a casserole.
Cooking was only ever feminine-coded for the lower and middle class anyway. The upper you go, the more the cooks have been men throughout history.
When i brought up cooking as an example my intention was to show a train of thought of a respondent: okay, i say that girls should be doing traditionally boys stuff, i mean, i think girls, for example, my daughter are no worse, and she deserves to have good work and so on.
Oh, another question. Boys. Hmmm… eeeeeh… uuuh.. should they do traditionally girly things…? What does that… (i just said girls should be able to do that, huh uh… but my little boy… dressed in pink…) umm, well, cooking is traditionally female thing and i think it would be good for my little boy to take care of himself too! Of course i am for that too!
Really? I grew up in suburban France in the late 80s/early 90s to I guess “liberal” parents if you transpose the category. My parents never said anything when I would occasionally play with my sister’s toys, dolls or otherwise. They didn’t encourage it, but they certainly made no effort to stop it either. Everyone tacitely accepted that this was another set of toys and that playing with anything they consider a toy is what children do.
I grew up in an extremely conservative Christian household, in the Midwest, in the 80s, and my parents never had any issue with me playing with my sister’s My Little Ponies. Firefly was my favorite. Her pink body with teal hair was quite eye catching.
I’m pretty sure the adults in my life would have kicked a Barbie doll out of my hands.
That just seems unnecessarily mean on behalf of the adults.
What if he was teeing it up?
Theory: gender roles are less useful now, since human labor in the first world has become more service sector oriented, and we’re far and away from needing heavy specialization with males going down the mines, and women always looking after the bairns. The transition from an industrial to a post-industrial West is in living memory, so of course this creates friction during the cultural transition, but as gender roles become less useful, they become more difficult to enforce and seem more arbitrary. This leads inexorably to greater experimentation and fluidity. If you relax environmental pressures, other pressures take over.
There was a discussion in the last Open Thread about the whether it was appropriate for religious doubters to publicly pretend to have beliefs that they do not in fact hold. It’s a scattered thread, but this might be a good starting point: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/29/open-thread-137-5/#comment-805149.
The question reminded me of a beautiful passage in Kathleen Norris’s book “Amazing Grace”, where she suggests that ‘pretending to belief’ is an essential part of ‘coming to believe’:
“I recently read an article that depicted a heated exchange between a seminary student and a Orthodox theologian at Yale Divinity School. The theologian had given a talk on the history of the development of the Christian creeds. The student’s original question was centered on belief: ‘What can one do,’ he asked, ‘when one finds it impossible to affirm certain tenets of the creed.’ The priest responded, ‘Well, you can just say it. It’s not that hard to master. With a little effort, most can learn it by heart.'”
https://books.google.com/books?id=FpWcgtunxTgC&pg=PA64#v=onepage&q&f=false (bottom of page 64)
I don’t suppose anyone here might be able to point to the original article that she’s referring to?
Searching to try to find this passage, I was surprised when my “not quite remembered” search terms did manage to bring up a friend’s decade old blog post about Norris’s passage that I hadn’t seen before. I think she does a good job of capturing the sentiment, applying it to both poetry and Judaism.
https://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2007/05/on_ambiguity_an.html
Reminds me of this:
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qqFS6Kw5fmPyzkLby/p/rZX4WuufAPbN6wQTv
I have a similar interest but am also concerned that “pretending” to have found God would prevent any actual spiritual awakening.
Interesting, but it sounds like in general you are open to it though personally skeptical. I don’t think any church would ask for much more from a participant. If you admit you are willing to listen, there’s nothing much more you need to fake.
My advice to people that think there might be a God, and knows there are worldly benefits of being a Christian is to attend church, but don’t get baptized, and don’t take part of communion if it’s a denomination that requires baptism. If your attending church regularly, you are well within your rights to call yourself Christian, when there are so many baptized Christians that are not attending church at all. If after listening to religious arguments, and hopefully being exposed to the Holy Spirit you begin to believe in the Churches teachings, go through the baptism. I was baptized at 18 at the peak of my Christian beliefs, and it’s an impressive spiritual awakening if you go in a believer. If you don’t believe though, baptism has no point
I’m currently in the process of converting to Russian Orthodox for purely secular reasons of marrying a follower, but I can’t quite affirm all the tenants yet. Since I haven’t been baptized within the church, I can’t take part of communion, but I still feel welcomed by the church, and I learn more about Christianity every time I attend.
Everyone’s been extolling the virtues of going to church as an unbeliever, so I feel it should be mentioned there’s a way that going to services you’re not interested in can inoculate you to the thing, you can end up with a kind of “yeah, I’ve heard all this before” attitude. One explanation I’ve heard for this is that social rituals amplify what you’re feeling, so if what you’re feeling is disinterest and otherness, corporate worship will make you feel more intense disinterest and otherness. Whether that’s what you feel in the first place is up to you, though.
I agree, pretending to believe in a religion, or even just regularly going through the motions of the ceremonies and surrounding yourself with believers, is an effective way to come to believe in a religion. (Or at least, believe in your belief in it.)
However, it’s a terrible method for actually determining whether a religion is true, and whether you ought to believe in it. Reciting creeds is a tool of establishing conformity, not one of seeking truth. If your goal is to believe in Christianity (or whatever religion), by all means go to church and sing the hymns until the words begin to ring true to you. But if your goal is to believe in what’s True, then carefully consider religion’s claims and evaluate how well they match up with the world around you and your models of how it works.
To add to this. One of the specific things we are told to pray for is to be led out of temptation.
Having lots of non-believers doing immoral things (and especially saying that immoral things aren’t immoral) is very tempting, even if the outcomes of those immoral things are net bad for you, in this life or the next.
Even a non-believer committed to not lying himself who shows up to a church, never questions doctrine and if asked politely says he doesn’t actually believe is much better for the temptation of the faithful.
Don’t get baptized if you don’t believe it. As for beliefs, ask questions here.
‘m an observant Christian who thinks that some strong-form understandings of Christian doctrine do not seem to align well enough with the observable world to be likely to be true.
But in my opinion, that’s irrelevant; anything having to do with mind and consciousness is terribly understood, even before getting into questions about the supernatural. The maps we have have a handful of random things on them, in roughly the right places–but they are so far from complete that they could almost all be true at the same time.
So I’d say go for it (it’s the right time of year to start attending a Catholic RCIA class, which is designed for “I’m curious about this” and very low-pressure). You can be honest–I think there’s something here but find it hard to really believe. And do the things: you can pray a Rosary while thinking the whole story was made up, and for me that 15 minutes a day of structured meditation makes a definite difference.
And I’d also look at the ways Christians have historically understood their faith–it is far less literal than most modern, vaguely Protestant understandings are. I’d especially recommend the introduction of Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed (yes, it’s Jewish, not Christian–but it’s squarely targeted at the “this makes no sense” issue, and it’s referring to the same underlying literature.) I’d also recommend Chesterton’s “Aquinas” as showing the care that went into thinking of faith as compatible with reason, and the sermons from the Office of Readings (there’s one each day–usually labeled “second reading”) as showing the historic approach to understanding Christian teaching.
(I’m also tickled to see the Velveteen Rabbi reference–I’ve read her blog for nearly 20 years.)
@Atlas >
Oh, maybe try being a Unitarian Universalist then.
Late ’70’s and early ’80’s my Mom and step-dad brought me to a UU “Fellowship Hall” a few times (I think it was a compromise between his Jewish and her Lutheran traditions) I remember nothing about the services, mostly I remember Sunday potlucks. The beliefs lean towards “Yes that’s true, and so is that, and so is that…”, and “It’s nice to be nice”, and they seem to be trying for the community/social aspects of religion without leaning on creed.
Judging by your past posts it will probably be too “SJ” for you, but think of the plusses!
…well mostly just one plus: college graduate girls want college graduate guys who can talk “woke”, and most guys aren’t and don’t so if you can the odds are in your favor!
After childbirth and a decade or so of marriage your wife will likely become a bit more conservative and you can gradually stop nodding so much, but play it by ear. Otherwise meet a lady with immigrant parents, or a trad girl, but for a trad girl your very likely going to need to move in-land and impress her parents – so a long time project.
Anyway, your probably on the right track, as well as short commutes, financial stability, health, and marriage, more than once a month church attendance correlates with being happier – parenthood doesn’t minute to minute though (it’s more an end-of-the-day happiness), but grandparents are happier on average than the childless.
If you never “catch faith” (and some of us just don’t) console yourself with that atheists (while being less happy on average than frequent church-goers), are more happy on average than believers who are infrequent (less than once a month) church goers, the key is maintaining face-to-face social connections and a sense of purpose.
Most folks need a “tribe” to be happy, and not in an “us vs. them” sense, it’s the “us” part that’s the key: creed, nation, province, family, craft, party, profession – whatever you can find, solitary confinement is a punishment which leads to madness.
Unitarian: Someone who addresses his prayers “to whom it may concern.”
Unitarian: Someone who believes there is at most one god.
Unitarian: someone who might believe in any number of gods except three.
Unitarian: someone who believes there should be a standard measurement system for gods.
@DavidFriedman >
That’s hilarious!
My personal belief is that most institutions should have wide leeway in choosing who they want to associate with—and yes, that includes discriminating against people they don’t want to associate with, for whatever sound or unsound reasons they might have for doing so.
I’m 100% not opposed to this but my counterargument would be that institutionalized racism is bad and that given a wide leeway there is a significant risk of institutionalized racism. In a hypothetical world where systemic racism is not such a big risk, perhaps institutions should be allowed to discriminate on race. However, we should at least make them honest about it, and let the masses decide whether that institution should still hold elite status. What Harvard does is discriminate against Asians under the aegis of diversity and wokeness, and I appreciate that the lawsuit has shone a light on their practices.
I actually think affirmative action as a form of reparations to descendants of slaves can be justified depending on the details, and is the strongest argument for it.
AA to descendants of American slaves as a form of reparations would have the effect of helping the best-off members of that group the most and the worst-off members of that group the least. Attempting to use university admissions to fix social problems will have that result; being able to get into any university is a proxy for, at a minimum, graduating high school, and the people who have it the worst in most any demographic group tend to flunk out of high school. Plus, it feeds into this whole idea that university is an engine of social advancement, which is very chicken-and-egg.
The best, fairest reparations possible, out of all the different ways to do it, would be straight-up hard cash. Everything else will have weird effects like university admissions does, create more bureaucracy that will never go away, or both.
I agree with your first paragraph, because that is pretty much what has happened.
I disagree with the second part, but we may have different definitions of reparations. I think effective reparations should permanently move the needle on socioeconomic metrics for African-Africans like poverty rate, average income/wealth, etc (obviously cash moves the needle on wealth). You propose a one-time transaction that requires both sides to “get over it” immediately after (or else the debate will never go away as you said), but as long as those metrics have large disparities people aren’t going to get over it.
This assumes that such a movement is possible. That may not be a valid assumption. The black-white income gap is not noticeably different than it was in the 1950s when segregation was legal.
https://qz.com/1368251/black-income-is-half-that-of-white-households-just-like-it-was-in-the-1950s/
amty:
So why do you believe that a cash payment would close those gaps? The children of wealthy blacks still do worse on standardized tests than the children of poor whites, so it’s hard to see how cash reparations would close the test score or school achievement gap.
It’s not clear that AA or any University-based policy does or could move the needle long term any more than a cash transfer, but AA has the disadvantage of empowering a (mostly white) bureaucracy to make paternalistic decisions regarding how/when/to whom to distribute the benefits of the system, while also profiting from the system’s apparently-eternal existence. The problem is (as others have noted) a deep confusion regarding the goal of AA. If it’s to correct some unnatural imbalance, then the fact that the needle hasn’t moved on that imbalance for (by most measures) nearly half a century, means it’s an ineffective policy and should be abandoned in favor of something that hasn’t been tried and actually has the potential to speed a return to equilibrium of the unnatural imbalance. If it’s to correct some natural imbalance (an equally-reasonable policy goal) then we must understand that 1) it will need to be a permanent program, and 2) we should set it up to operate with as little corruption/waste/inefficiency as possible. Social Security is a good example of a system designed to address a situation of the second case. The poor we will always have among us, and the human deficiency of time discounting as well, so it makes sens as a system that roughly sets a floor on poverty caused by the natural imbalance that some people turn out very predisposed to high time discounting (due to both environmental and genetic factors) and others turn out much less so.
AA doesn’t seem well suited to addressing either situation, though.
I’m not sure that’s really the primary effect any more at the most elite institutions. ~15 years ago now, IIRC Henry Louis Gates Jr. and another black professor were noting that most of the black students at Harvard were the children of immigrants on at least one side of their family.
The descendants of African Americans who were alive during Jim Crow or slavery probably benefited back in the 70’s, but have been getting less since then.
@EchoChaos
Sorry, I’m too lazy to find a source right now, but IIRC, some school testing gaps closed by about 1/3 of the gap in the 60s-80s. So some gaps have narrowed before.
@amty
Cash also moves the needle on poverty rate. Any significant cash transfer would have to; there’s various ways it could be broken down, but you can’t give people money without them having more money, being less poor, etc. If the problem is the income gap, well, money is income. If the problem is the wealth gap, well, money is wealth. If you give someone a chunk of money and they don’t become less poor and more wealthy, something extremely bizarre is happening.
Various plans have been proposed implemented over the years to fix the black-white income gap, wealth gap, etc, based on the sorts of systems that people who propose and implement social policy (on both sides of the aisle) like. Have they worked? Some have worked in individual spheres, but none appear to have solved the overall income and wealth gap. Why not just try to fix the problem of some people having less money than others by giving them more money and seeing what happens?
That’s not what I said. I said that if bureaucracy was created, it would never go away. The more overhead in doing anything, the more bureaucracy (administration if you’re being nice) you create, and it’s very hard to roll back, whether it has been successful or not.
Reparations do not mean that everyone has to instantly forget about it and get over it; I didn’t say that either. Reparations are a practical measure: the metrics you mention, which are the result of lack of money, surely can be fixed by giving the people who lack money the money they lack, better than by filtering that money through a bunch of administration or altering the demographics of the quarter of the population that goes to university (let alone the fraction of that quarter that goes to really good schools).
EDIT: I’m trying to fiddle around with numbers through Googling, and it looks like the black-white wealth gap by household (caveat: numbers scare me and I may have screwed this up badly) would be closed by a one-time cash payment of a bit under a trillion dollars, while the income gap by household comes to about a quarter trillion per year. The Iraq war cost the US a little over a trillion dollars, so clearly something the US could afford; that’s four years of closing the income gap, so, one presidential administration. Probably a better use of the money than going to war with Iran, no? And would this money really be better spent on some scheme or other to close the gap, rather than just handing out cash or something close to cash (every eligible family gets x dollars worth of index funds or something like that)?
Judging by this graph in Wikipedia, total U.S. household net worth is about 100 trillion.
If the gap is only 1 trillion, that’s a lot smaller than I would have expected in a relative sense. That’d imply a relative wealth gap per household of only about 10%. But articles I’ve seen (although I dunno how careful they were) imply a gap of more like a factor of 2 or even a factor of 10 between white and black households.
But that could be because of using differing definitions of wealth/net worth. Or because of a big difference between the mean and median.
The number I came up with is $105k difference between the average household wealth for white and black Americans. From there I looked at the number of black Americans, the number of whom who are descended from American slaves (as opposed to being the descendants of people who came to the US voluntarily – some Googling suggests it’s about 80something percent), and figured that I could get the number of households by dividing by 4. It’s entirely possible my method for getting to the number was bogus – but if we say households are 3 on average (to account for households without kids: average number of kids per black woman in the US is something like 1.8 or 1.9) that makes it under a trillion more.
It’s entirely likely I screwed up the math or am approaching this wrong. But if the average black household is about a hundred G’s poorer than the average white household, the gap would be eliminated by giving every black household about a hundred g’s, right?
Looking things up a little more, I think your calculation is right, but nothing is wrong with mine except the mean wealth gap may be much larger than the median wealth gap.
Average household wealth far exceeds median household wealth. Both from the sources, I’ve looked at it, and my eyeballing that graph the average is larger by almost by a factor of 10! Median household wealth across the whole population is ~60-100 thousand depending on the year and such. Mean household wealth is ~600 thousand or more.
The median gap may be much smaller than the average wealth gap. But then that brings up the question if it even makes sense to focus on the median wealth gap between races, when the difference between the median household and the average household is ~500,000 dollars and the difference between races is ~100,000 dollars. On the other hand, as a fold change, the racial gap is probably a little larger.
Lifespan will also screw with these statistics since people tend to accumulate wealth with age. I don’t think black and white Americans have quite the same age distribution although I doubt it affects the median much. Variance in household size will also affect household wealth. IIRC, whites are more likely to be married at most ages. My instinct is probably that there are a lot of other problems with using wealth as the measure, and there’s probably a better measure to use. Individual income is probably less screwy, and I believe if you cut off the top 10% of incomes or so, equalizing that is probably more representative of what it would cost to largely close economic gaps.
@dndnrsn
What is the point of reparations? To me there are two potential purposes, 1. to improve the socioeconomic conditions of Black people, 2. act as an apology so people can move on (assuming the apology is widely accepted).
My argument against a cash transfer (with nothing else) is that I don’t think it will solve either. It sounds like we already both agree 2 is unlikely to happen. As for 1, yes I did mention example metrics that were related to cash, but academic achievement, workplace achievement, health/life outcomes (e.g. mortality rate of 20-30 year old males) are metrics that are not simply wealth. My gut feeling is that giving away 100k to each black household is not going to change these things, even income (68k white households, ~40k black). Maybe 500k, although that’s more than the federal budget. By the way, I am quoting 100k since you mentioned it, according to this median net worth is ~100k higher.
As for your comment about bureaucracy, I’m not against bureaucracy if it solves a problem. I’m against the current state of AA because I feel its not justified and endless.
@albatross11
I agree with you, I don’t think a cash transfer (unless it is like 500k+ per person) is going to close the achievement gap.
@EchoChaos
First of all, to assume we can’t enact programs to effect socioeconomic conditions, academic achievement, is an extreme presumption. One example is free long acting reversible contraception for women.
Second, that household study could be significantly underestimating the progress in closing wealth gaps because black households are more likely to be single-parent than whites, relatively, compared to 1950. The paper calls this a “feature” and not a shortcoming.
@dndnrsn
I posted a reply but it didn’t appear (maybe because it had a link?). Gonna hope it shows up later..
@dndnrsn >
University AA is too litle, too late to help most.
I think it helps to think you of what Affirmative Action has been effective in advancing the welfare of many (and not just a few) in the past:
For events, the Second World War, Roosevelt ordering no discrimumation in munitions factories and shipyards, Truman ordering the desegregation of the Army in 1948, years of full employment in the ’40’s and ’50’s.
For academic achievement (test scores) school integration actually worked, the black-white academic gap was at its least in the late ’80’s which was when U.S. schools were most integrated (though as I remember it my High School in the ’80’s was integrated, but the classes very much weren’t (the “Intermediate” track was overwhelmingly black, and the “Advanced” track was majority white), that said extra years of schooling for African-Americans doesn’t seem to correlate much with additional income in the 20th century for each decade, but maybe there’s a delayed effect).
The institutions that I judge to have most effectively implemented affirmative-action are: The U.S. Army, Kaiser Shipyards and Steelworks, the ILWU (Pacific coast longshoreman’s union), and the UAW (autoworkers union), the last two explicitly tried to integrate (to keep blacks from being strikebreakers among other reasons), the Army needed soldiers, but Henry J. Kaiser mostly needed working hands, and the biggest incoms were achieved in the 14 years before Johnson’s “Great Society”, so full employment is the best AA.
In looking at the parallels between some white communities that lost blue collar jobs in more recent decades (especially ‘coal country’) and the subsequent social ills (drug addiction, unwed births, et cetera), the similarities with northern inner city black neighborhoods in the ’70’s and ’80’s is striking (even former libertarian “they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps” Fox News Right-winger Tucker Carlson now acknowledges those parallels).
A good example of a current effective affirmative action program is the City and County of San Francisco reserving some entry level jobs for those who reside in relatively low income neighborhoods where most of the public housing projects are (you don’t actually have to be black to be hired that way, but when the programs started those neighborhoods were mostly black), one of my best co-workers got in via that program in the early ’90’s, he now “gives back” to his community by being a “neighborhood Dad” to many fatherless kids who are friends of his kids (taking them on camping trips with his family, et cetera), and via his church, his brother on the other hand didn’t get into the program and didn’t get a city job ( there’s only so many spots), and has been in and out of jail for decades instead.
Anyway from my point of view shovels and paychecks are more effective affirmative-action than more hours of schooling.
Where extra schooling seems to help is with girls, they more often grow up to be nurses and teachers (yes boys can become those as well, but they mostly don’t for whatever reason, we can try to put square pegs into round holes, or we can do what works for boys as well as girls), and again the parallels between poor black neighborhoods and ‘coal country’ in this regard are striking.
So yeah, I support targeted affirmative action, and that doesn’t just mean extra support for someone who’s black but who’s Dad is a professor at Stanford, and who’s Mom in also a successful professional class immigrant (sorry Kamala, I know you went to Howard not Harvard, but I’m using you as an example of someone who’d probably do well with or without affirmative-action), so yes I mostly mean boys in “under-privileged” neighborhoods who’d be more likely go to jail and are not academically inclined, and this goes for poor whites like J.D. Vance (who’s affirmative-action program was the U.S. Marines) as well, multi-generation poverty isn’t just a non-white problem (frankly I suspect that this is too often a white “blue-tribe” blindspot that blacks and “red-tribe” whites have less of, and it’s a similar white “blue-tribe” blind spot for a lack of AA success as much as conservative opposition), and if that means tripling the number of steamer trucks cleaning the feces off the sidewalks so be it.
I’d like to bring back factories as well, but these days that’s pretty skilled work involving lots of arithmetic and you just don’t need as many bodies manning the machines.
Back around 2010 I checked out a welding class taught by a Mr. Floyd at Kennedy High School in Richmond, California (at one time a majority black city who’s ancestors mostly came for the shipyard work during WW2 which is now mostly Latino) which has the Chevron oil refineries there which needs welders, the class was about 3/4’s boys, 1/4 girls (which is a higher percentage than I’ve seen of women in the field) the equipment was pretty ramshackle then, but they did what they could with what they had, and then Chevron donated equipment, things looked bright, until Mr. Floyd died of cancer (besides welding fumes he was a smoker), and the class sat empty ’cause no one was available to teach the skill who had the skill, the credentials to teach in the public school, and who would work for a beginning teachers pay, let’s face it public schools are child care that mostly teaches how to be a public school teacher when it doesn’t just warehouse kids.
The kind of paid on-the-job training that craft union apprenticeships do works well, but has a few strikes against it: child labor law declares most of the work too dangerous for those under 18, and all of the work as too dangerous for those under 16, a high school diploma is required, and it’s hard to get in if you’re not a son (or the one out of a hundred daughters who tries), a nephew or a classmate of existing union members kids who mostly go to parochial schools not public.
I’d be curious about how well they integrate those of Turkish descent, but the German educational and industrial policy system seems like it works well for creating good jobs for the non-college bound.
And that really is the key, great progress has been made in getting lower class girls on track to median wage job since the mid 20th century, but without the full employment and plentiful unionized jobs of then it’s harder now for the boys to get there (and also for young women with children, which makes it much harder for them to get credentialed), and jumping from lower to middle-class has been getting rarer in recent decades.
Another hassle is that the military is more picky now, as I small child I lived in a majority black neighborhood that was mostly homeowners, the husbands were typically Korean war veterans, few went to college, now “UMC” money is needed to buy housing there, and the few black owned houses left usually have an elderly owner, or were an only child.
In many ways things are better for African-Americans now, there’s more black millionaires and billionaires, one was First Lady (!), they get murdered less than in the ’70’s through the early ’90’s, and they’re just plain living longer, but in other ways things are relatively worse, more are in jail, the academic gap has increased since the late ’80’s, the income gap has increased since the ’90’s, and their wealth was decimated after 2008, and in some ways it’s just harder without the kind of black middle-class neighborhoods of the early ’70’s, they’re still middle-class blacks, but they don’t have separate neighborhoods which in some ways makes it harder for lower class blacks to move up by getting hired at the neighborhood auto-repair shop that’s owned by someone who goes to the same church, etc.
So, the usual “Blue-Tribe” AA solution of a leg up to get into the “UMC” for a few academically gifted is nice for a few, but for the many more median wage and above jobs for the non-college bound, more access, traing, and social capital to get those jobs, and there is a bright spot that research has found; if an under five poor child’s family is moved to a lower crime and more employment neighborhood it really does increase the odds of them being middle-class adults, unfortunately for their parents and older siblings the odds are still grim income wise (but at least their in a better neighborhood), the problem with this solution is doing it on a mass scale is difficult as too many of the poor moved to the same place at once just moves the ghetto, and it’s expensive because housing in good neighborhoods is expensive.
If you’re a poor child in Atlanta, Georgia odds are you’ll be a poor adult, if you’re a poor child in Salt Lake City, Utah the odds are better that you won’t be a poor adult than in most of the U.S.A. “But Plumber, Georgia is more black and Utah is more white and Albion’s Seed culture, and genetics, blah-di-blah-di-blah” (says my imaginary straw opponents), to which I respond “Seattle, Washington! In your face imaginary fool, there’s cause for optimism there, haw!” (admittedly it’s just plain easier to defeat arguments made by opponents that I make up).
Yep, poor and black children if moved to the right neighborhoods in Seattle, WA. when young enough (and this isn’t adoption, they’re still with their Mom) have better odds, of higher incomes as adults, staying out of jail, not being murdered, all sorts of good things (whether there’s enough space in those neighborhoods is another question, but it’s a big country, and most of it isn’t barrio, ghetto, or holler so I think the potential is there), but improvement kinda was done before, organically when out of the rural south millions of African-Americans came north with the demand for hands in the factories and shipyards for the war, and then building cars and other goods for the post war boom, and they did have thriving neighborhoods for a time, yeah things got worse later (the ’80’s and earlier ’90’s being especially bad), and a problem is that the more successful have moved out to the suburbs (and since the ’70’s back to the south), so those left are those left, but hopeless?
Hard doesn’t mean impossible, so not simple, and not cheap, and maybe not to the scale needed (but some good is still good), but effective afirmative-action can (and I think should) be done, so hop to it future President Biden/Cruz/Harris/Pence/Warren/whomever, bring the jobs, re-start shop classes, move the young kids to better places, there’s your “reparations”!
Pretty much. Better jobs for the 2/3-3/4 who don’t go to university should be the priority, across the board. I personally have got more degrees than sense; my general feeling is that, with the exception of engineering programs and the like, a focus on bachelor’s degrees for economic advancement is not the best use of the money and tends to have a negative impact on universities to boot. It’s also pretty regressive to use tax money to benefit a chunk of the population that already tends to be better off than the norm; I remember being really puzzled that the student’s union where I went kept having these protests where they demanded fees be dropped, as though this was a brave stance to take – they were demanding the provincial government spend more of everyone’s money on something for them!
The sense I get – secondhand – of the German schooling system is that it works pretty well, but it’s rough on kids when they start streaming. I also think there might be as much of a cultural difference as a difference in the system: there seems to be a sort of “pride in a job well done” there that doesn’t exist as much in North America. Based on my personal experience, public transit runs more smoothly, public spaces are much cleaner, the public works repairs I saw seemed meticulous and quick. I think there’s still a sense of pride in high-quality manufacturing in Germany that doesn’t exist as much as it used to in North America.
A good beginning might be trying to push the idea that, actually, your kid going to college and getting a degree in something that involves putting metal together isn’t shameful. Now that I think about it, perhaps something aimed at making trades type graduates more “cultivated” would reduce the classism? Find a way to impart “how to fit into an educated milieu”, maybe beef up the gen ed stuff so it’s more respectable, while still teaching a trade – maybe that would help? That way not only will their kid earn a solid wage, anxious upper-middle-class parents can be sure that he won’t be out of place at dinner parties. Do a three-or0four-year degree that’s the equivalent of a trade school education plus a minor or two from a humanities degree. Maybe I’m on to something here…
A question about Star Wars:
In the original film, R2-D2 plugs himself into the Death Star, enabling him to find Princess Leia and turn off the trash compactors. Audiences today interpret this as R2-D2 hacking the Death Star’s systems, but did the 1976 audience interpret it that way? Did the general public know hacking was a thing? It’s conceivable that the system is designed to be operated by an astromech droid with the assumption that an unauthorized droid would not have physical access.
I’m not sure the term “hacking” would have come to mind (I don’t know when that term was coined) but it was certainly presented as unauthorized access gained by manipulating a computer in unintended ways, which I think is the generic equivalent.
Hacking of that sort really came into general public consciousness with Wargames (1983) or maybe Tron (1982). I doubt most people really considered whether R2D2 was violating access rights or not; computer security was probably not on Lucas’s radar. IIRC, the only problem R2-D2 had is it took time to sift through the information.
I’m not sure which way this leans in terms of whether it was perceived as hacking (or a similar concept in verbiage appropriate for 1976) or not, but some of the information in the Death Star was “restricted” and R2 was unable to access it.
I’m old enough that I first saw the original trilogy in theatres when they were rereleased in the 80s, and I never interpreted what R2-D2 was doing as hacking. It was just doing routine data access, or perhaps complicated data access in a large and unfamiliar system. The notion that such a system would have had security that needed bypassing never occurred to me.
agreed. the trash compactor probably wasn’t a restricted access system, so Artoo plugging in would be equivalent to plugging in a usb keyboard and issuing commands.
Well, he also accessed station schematics, and prisoner location data. Although the fact that additional information about the cell block was “restricted” after they had been caught rescuing Lea probably suggests that the stuff before that was unrestricted (although it is possible the schematics were restricted but R2 had more time to dig).
This is interpreted as hacking all the time now (not necessarily by people with any extensive computer/networking/security knowledge, but most people don’t have that and hardly anybody would have in 1976). Depends on how you’re defining hacking, but the term has been used pretty liberally for a long time.
I think for a lot of people “hacking” essentially equates to “unauthorized access” and it doesn’t necessarily matter whether anyone bothered to prevent or limit that unauthorized access.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. Not only are the events described as so all-consuming and traumatizing little more than a historical footnote, but in context they’re basically irrelevant to the major historical narrative of the period. The political class of the Gilded Age is easily dismissed as just a bunch of crooks, we only remember the sharp intra-party divides of the Republicans because “mugwump” is a fun word to say, and the big stories (the nascent labor and Grange movements, the massive waves of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, the imposition of Jim Crow following the failure of Reconstruction) have little to do with the drama in Washington that so obsessed the media of the 1880s. I wonder what stories we’re missing.
This is my last post here for a while. I’ll return when things have calmed down, and I have calmed down.
So long, at least for now. Be kind to yourself.
BBA:
Best wishes. Your voice is a worthwhile addition here, even when (often) I disagree.
What is the minimum amount of genetic relatedness a person must have to you to bear an observable physical or personality similarity to you that is greater than mere coincidence?
For me, it seems to stop at first cousins, or anyone who shares 1/8 of my genes. That’s the lowest degree of relatedness where I can still detect similarities in appearance, intellect, and personality. However, some of them are nothing like me at all, so 1/8 is even pushing it a little.
My first cousins, once removed share 1/16 of my genes, and none of them are similar to me in any way. If I hadn’t met one of them before, we could end up coincidentally living next to or working with each other for years, and I’d never suspect we were related.
It depends on how homogeneous the reference population is. E.g. you can usually tell apart people of different races just by their looks.
Well put. I was trying to find a way to say that the base rate of similarity can vary a lot, and some resemblance may be due to unknown relation or just convergent evolution of facial features or whatever.
In Spain, at least, unless a person is of from a mixed origin, I can reliably guess where in Spain a person is from. Basques, Catalans have a specific type of face (especially Basques; it’s probably all the inbreeding).
It’s also possible to tell for some people where they’re from. Greeks, even modern ones, have the Greek nose, for example.
I am unable to do the same for non-white people, but I can also do it roughly. For example, the difference between Han Chinese and Japanese people is quite easy to tell. Ethiopians are clearly distinct from Bantu people.
In Europe, at least, everybody’s getting mixed up, so the differences will soon stop being obvious. But people who are trained for that can probably pretty reliably guess the origins of a person.
Most people are able to pick out ethnicities with startling accuracy naturally. I bet someone with access to training material could get remarkably good at it. I bet it would be a neat parlor trick
>My first cousins, once removed share 1/16 of my genes, and none of them are similar to me in any way. If I hadn’t met one of them before, we could end up coincidentally living next to or working with each other for years, and I’d never suspect we were related.
I once heard that when it comes to races of cattle, 15/16 is considered pure breed. Seems a good benchmark for humans too 😉
Please tell me this isn’t a reference to those old “blood fraction” laws. I still have a little faith in this comment section, and wouldn’t want to lose all of it.
It certainly isn’t as i have no idea what you are talking about. Probably something about race in the US?
I’m Polish, though americanized enough to guess what you might have thought.
Basically, it was my tongue-in-cheek thought when hearing people debate about who is who some 20 years ago (and probably about ethnicity in European context and not race in US, who is a true Pole and who isn’t), and sarcastic/critical at that.
In any case, now i have to google the laws you mentioned…
Edit/Wow, it was indeed the case! Apparently there was an elaborate system in place before one-drop rule. Notice, btw, how it never seems to work the other way – that if you had any non-black ancestors, you didn’t get into other category. Latin American (mulattos, mestizos, zambas) categories seemed always more rational to me for a racist system. On the other hand, reading more about that one-drop wiki article, it seems it was the case in US too, before 1930’s…
It’s related to Native American status. And while @metacelsus calls them “old” they aren’t, afaik, off the books today.
Anecdotally, I have been asked on multiple occasions by random strangers if I’m related to several different second cousins of mine. I’ve also known a few sets of third and even fourth cousins who look strikingly similar.
It’s common folk knowledge in my part of the world that certain families have “stronger genes” than others, in that some families seem to do a remarkably good job passing on physical traits and facial features to the next generation.
People also say the same about personality, but I’m a little more skeptical there. That seems like an area where it’s easy to be fooled by confirmation bias.
While we’re kicking hornets’ nests re: voting, how about a thread from the other direction? Why should we not have compulsory voting? Surely the system would be more representative if everyone actually participated. You can always write-in if you don’t like the options on offer.
(Sorry libertarians but I’m not interested in the “government shouldn’t make me do anything” angle, right now. We live in a world where we’re already required to pay taxes – so to make things more interesting, is there an argument against compulsory voting that doesn’t also exclude compulsory taxation?)
The argument I’ve seen in favor of compulsory voting is that it makes it difficult for anyone to systematically intimidate people into not voting. I don’t know whether that’s worth the cost in personal freedom/not having to waste your time/paperwork hassles for when you really couldn’t vote.
Is this an end in and of itself? Why?
I would rather live in a well run state than one I had a say in; I just don’t think that without checks and balances, such as a popular vote, we will live in a well run state. Hence appreciating the existence of voting, while not being terribly concerned if turnout is low.
Churchill appears on balance to have had the right idea about ‘
Republicanismdemocracy being the worst form of government, except for all the others.’ It’s at least generally poor-to-mediocre, rather than anywhere between sublime and monstrous, with only a heartbeat separating the two.Compulsory voting requires enforcement. It’s unclear how feasible this is, and even less clear it would be a good use of resources.
They already enforce “number of times voted ≤ 1”.
Why not change that to an ‘=’.
Several countries already do this, including Australia and Brazil.
That can be enforced at the polling places by kicking people out, while compulsory voting is enforced by tracking people down. Much more work.
Withhold an extra $XXX in taxes, hand it over when the person votes.
People will show up and vote. (to remove that law)
Oz has mandatory voting laws.
By law, you have to go into the voting booth.
I think the other variable in play is the convenience of voting.
Making sure postal votes are available, polling stations are open late etc. is an important way to keep people enfranchised. Especially considering how the already-disadvantaged tend to have less slack in their lives (long hours, childcare etc) to fit in voting around.
Casting a vote is not mandatory in Australia – just crossing your name off the electoral roll.
You can walk in, get crossed off the roll, get handed your ballot paper, throw it on the ground and walk straight out if you want. Most people of this inclination are polite enough to just deposit a blank ballot in the box though.
The Australian system seems to me to be a good happy-medium between “state-enforced involvement in the system” and “exercise your rights as you wish”, and usually involves a pretty good BBQ and beers in the carpark outside each voting centre on election day.
I think the idea is that not wanting the inconvenience of voting is the main reason that people don’t vote. And that the inconvenience of actually writing some numbers next to some names (STV, right?) and putting it in a box is negligible compared to actually going to the polling station.
They tend to get around 90% of people casting valid votes, IIRC.
I believe 90% show up at the polls and of them 95% cast a valid vote. But how many cast Donkey votes?
I believe that WashedOut’s comment is a criminal offense. I’m unclear on our comments.
There are certain benefits from taxation that are subject to free rider problems were taxes not compulsory (national defense, at the very least). Voting doesn’t have the same free rider problem. In America, given the dominance of the major parties, not voting is one way of expressing satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the status quo/presented slate of candidates.
Political engagement is a function of a number of factors that policymakers care about (interest in particular issues, knowledge of the candidates, etc.) that compulsory voting might mask. Compelled engagement, in and of itself, doesn’t necessarily do anything than make elections noisier. Conversely, comparing engagement after elections gives policymakers valuable data on how they need to improve outreach/messaging. If the ultimate point of voting is is to produce better policy, than non-votes are a valuable signal.
If voting (elections) is (are), as I believe, a way to maintain the legitimacy of the governments among peoples acculturated to democracy, then allowing non-votes is again even more important, as a warning sign if nothing else.
There doesn’t seem to be anything important in and of itself about faithfully summing the opinions of everyone on a certain day. The felt legitimacy of the government and the efficacy of policy both seem more important.
Signal boosting because it answers the question. The nation as it stands cannot survive without taxation. It can certainly survive without mandatory voting.
> allowing non-votes is again even more important, as a warning sign if nothing else.
A very important sign. An option “[ ] None of the above” would be sufficient (and would make realistic outcome interpretations* one step easier), while forcing folks to think at least one moment about their say (however small) in the matter.
*No more “We are representing the majority!”, if majority=55% of the 6% who actually voted.
Enforced voting would require very easy access, as said elsecomment, or else it would invite all kinds of sabotage.
Sure, but compulsory voting also increases felt legitimacy.
Probable decrease in average quality of information backing a vote is a pretty straightforward reason.
Seems unfair to exclude the “libertarian” reasons, though. It’s like saying “aside from the libertarian reasons against the draft…” It’s reasonable in that it’s worthwhile from the standpoint of identifying different points of analysis, but it also excludes something that for many people is dispositive of the question. Excluding it probably leads to the error made here:
In which you conflate various forms of lack of participation; e.g. apathetic lack of participation versus conscientious lack of participation, the latter of which can itself take various forms, at least some of which might be considered participatory in themselves but which would be removed from the available set of choices under a compulsory vote. The system is less representative practically by definition, because it imposes further constraints on the set of choices.
I’m not excluding its validity, it’s just a boring answer.
Fair, and I agree, but I’ve encountered plenty of folks who deny it (not just the sense of disagreement, but rejecting it as a reasonably held belief), which leads me to resist its exclusion. Plus, the whole premise of people have the vote is centered on choice and agency and consent, so it seems almost inextricably tied-in.
Voters are stupid enough without adding an extra level of people who didn’t care enough to vote before.
Yeah, this and @sentientbeings comment are the reason I would object. Compulsory voting shifts the median voter in the direction of someone who previously didn’t care enough about politics to take the time to vote, let alone use their time to research and form an informed decision on who or what to vote for/against.
If someone isn’t going to take the time to be an informed voter, it’s better if they are not a voter. Theoretically, they can show up and submit a blank ballot, but in reality, “as long as they have to be there anyway”, they’ll probably decide to “make their voice count” by marking someone. That’s what most people do who haven’t ever heard of the candidates for assistant dog catcher, anyway.
On a semi-related note, sample ballots are great for the U.S., BTW, as they make it much easier to see what you’re actually going to be voting on in order to research and record your intentions ahead of time to bring into the ballot box with you. Efforts like that, which make it easier for voters to be more informed, are a better way to go.
+1 both drethelin and sharper.
If I was forced to vote in every election, I would deliberately make my vote as stupid as possible out of spite.
I think the effect is almost the opposite. Compulsory voting weakens the fanatic stranglehold on politics.
In Australia, the system is dominated by centrists. Our politicians don’t have to go to dozens of rallies, they don’t have to inflame the masses or provide a good reason to go out and vote for them in particular. Highly polarizing candidates like Trump or Warren couldn’t possibly win here, a small crowd of high-octane supporters won’t get you anywhere. Politicians don’t have to create a ‘movement’, not that recent PMs have had more than a year or two to rule before they get kicked out.
Imagine if you had to go out of your way MORE to vote in the US. Say you had to pay $50 or do 10 minutes of vigorous exercise or perform some kind of minor ritual sacrifice. Would this improve the quality of politics? No, it’d result in the fanatics getting more political power. They’d struggle through the push-ups for God-Emperor Trump, they’d do what it took to bring socialism to America.
Surely then, it should be as easy as possible to vote, to the point of being compulsory. If everyone votes, then fanatics get less power. Politicians are forced to cater to the majority, not the vocal, spirited minority.
+1
You could observe this in the less polarized countries in Europe in the last decade. The inflamed did go to great lengths and had a high voter turnout.
In the other direction you find the German Christian Democrats that developed a strategy, ‘asymmetric demobilization’,* to lower competitors’ voting rates.
Non-voting has several reasons, indolence is only one of them. There’s disappointed resignation (“the elites do what they want anyway”) This group is inclined to vote for populists, but is a potential that can erupt in unorganized rage on the streets later.
Those content with the status and only minor itches (“Basically that state works, mostly, no need to get agitated or take action”) won’t show up if nothing big is at stake, succumbing to minor barriers like ugly weather, fine weather and doing something more interesting, illness, being on holidays. Their expressed consent with the status quo is a visible indicator for the government’s legitimacy (and may embolden hesitating democratic actors for decisive action when needed).
Enforced voting must come with extremely low barriers (opening times, place nearby, vote by letter), or it will trigger sabotage as already expressed here.
It also must have an option to express “I don’t agree with any of the above” to allow some low-level venting and get disagreement into high visibility.
I think enforced voting does also have the effect of a small educative push toward political awareness, and developing agency.
You do realize that a couple dozen countries have some form of compulsory voting, and that there is enforcement in some of them?
Examples include Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Singapore, Uruguay, and parts of Switzerland.
So its possible to empirically answer questions about the feasibility and effects of such a policy.
People have generally found that compulsory voting increases both turnout (by a lot) and support for leftist policies (by a little).
Whether that is desirable is another question.
A couple of papers that may be of interest:
Bechtel, Hangartner, and Schmid (2016), “Does Compulsory Voting Increase Support for Leftist Policy?” AJPS.
Fowler (2013), “Electoral and Policy Consequences of Voter Turnout: Evidence from Compulsory Voting in Australia,” QJPS.
What about people who don’t care about politics? Do they just pick a candidate at random? Does the candidate with the nicest sounding name get a few extra % every election? Arguably higher information voters are likelier to vote today, are we well served by low-information, disaffected voters being forced to participate?
We’ll just have to take away the secret ballot and execute anyone who demonstrates a pattern of voting at random to encourage everyone to be a high-information, terrified voter instead.
Ok you sold me
They can always cast a blank or null ballot.
Yes, but once they’ve spent an hour in line waiting to get into the voting booth, they won’t.
Long lines are an orthogonal organizational problem. If voting became compulsory, there would be probably political pressure to increase the number of polling stations.
Does this happen? Every time I’ve voted it’s been a completely painless process.
I’ve only voted the once, but I was the only person ‘waiting’ at the time. It was in the morning before work.
Sounds like the the length of the lines at polling stations varies significantly.
But regardless, once you put in whatever effort’s required to actually get into the voting booth (even just driving/walking to the polling station if the lines are short) you’ll feel invested enough to put something down on the ballot.
I’ve always voted in reasonably populated areas, but in the suburbs not “in the city”. I have never waited in a line at all, but there are always reports just a few miles away (in the city/downtown or at least closer to it) where lines are hours long during the same election. Sometimes this is due to some kind of equipment failure, others the problem is just “too many people”.
Is this the result of bad government, or something more nefarious (voter suppression)? My guess is a good dollop of each.
@acymetric
Null hypothesis: Whoever’s in charge of setting up polling centers has little personal incentive to make them run more smoothly. The people with the power to open additional stations in overcrowded areas likely would not personally be rewarded for doing so. Therefore there’s no reason to expect improvement as long as the minimum requirements are fulfilled.
I read about a study in California that showed some people just pick the first candidate, even though Californians aren’t required to vote.
California prints some ballots with one candidate listed first, and other ballots with the other candidate listed first, and chooses at random which locations get which ballot; so then someone analyzed the results and found that being listed first was an advantage.
Practical reason: the first party to add “eliminate mandatory voting” as a platform plank would win the next election.
Make it difficult to remove, say, a constitutional amendment that voting has to be free, secret, equal, compulsory, with explicit option for disagreeing with everone/everyparty on offer.
Ok — I admit that you have/can eliminate a lot of the challenges and downsides to the proposal. Obviously some places do it and thus it can be done. But what have you gained? Media talking heads will blandly report that the candidate who changed his name to “no one on this list” continues to capture the same ~10% of the vote he always does, along with his running mate John Lizardman, and the redistributionist and racial populist parties each pick up a few extra % from their respective lumpenproletariat bases who today just skip the elections. Seems… Meh.
For voting to have more than token symbolic value requires voters to perform at least a perfunctory level of due diligence to research the choices on the ballot and pick one. A ballot cast by a voter who is unable or unwilling to do their due diligence is noise, at best.
If an eligible voter doesn’t care to cast a ballot unless they’re forced to, then I read that self-selecting as unable or unwilling to cast an informed vote. Force them to vote anyway, and you’ll wind up adding noise to the process.
This argument doesn’t apply to compulsory taxation because a dollar from an uninformed, indifferent, or unwilling taxpayer spends just as well as a dollar from an informed, engaged, and willing taxpayer.
No it’s not. Not in European countries where 5 to 10 percent of the parliament is made up by extremist parties that nobody in their right mind would vote for. Even just picking a random party other than the extreme right wing one makes your vote count a little, and it requires very little of my time to find out which party that one is.
This is some of the most hilariously blatant other-ing I have ever seen on this board.
Are you asserting that 5 to 10 percent of European countries are made up of people not in their right mind?
Consider the lizardman constant. With a low enough PR threshold, you get some really weird fringe parties – whether that’s theocrats or tankies – in parliament. It’s the converse of this feature on how to win an election– a non-zero number of people will actually vote for Black Hat Guy. And if you have multiple differently weird Black Hat Guys expressing different fringe positions, taken together they might well reach 5-10 percent.
Yes, sort of. It’s slightly less than that many, but the people who are strange in that particular way are more likely to vote, and of course it varies among countries.
How confident are you that nonvoters, if forced to vote, would be less likely to vote for “extremist parties that nobody in their right mind would vote for” than people who care enough about politics to vote voluntarily?
They might be more likely to choose an extreme right-wing party than a voluntary voter. If they know or care very little about politics, they might vote for an extreme party because the mainstream parties are all a bunch of self-serving crooks, or they might vote for an extreme party because they like the party name or like the look of the candidate but don’t know how insane the platform is, or they might just (like an estimated 1-2% of voters in Australia) vote blindly for the first option listed on the ballot regardless of who it is.
I am not confident at all in that, and I’m not arguing for mandatory voting. I can’t guess how mandatory voting would change the results of general elections, and I don’t think it’s a policy that I would like in any case.
What I tried to say is this. I’m generally rather badly informed about politics, and don’t want to spend much time to get more information. So on most general elections, like on the 2018 one, I was rather unsure on which party would be the best to support. Even then, I think it’s worth for me to vote on any general election.
A lot of nonvoters, myself included, are extremely childish and vindictive. We’re not socially responsible people. If society forced me to vote that would be about the point where I turn against that society and become aggressively uninterested in its survival. I’d be very likely to vote for extremist parties, and alternate between voting far-left, far-right, and islamist.
In fact, this is the only real strategy to push back against compulsory voting, because most people who want compulsory voting aren’t neutrals who like democracy, but are generally left-liberals who have done the calculation that forcing people to vote adds more people who are interested in left-liberal policy.
How many of them have a rule that only allows parties (or party coalitions) of ≥X% (combined) into parliament?
Then the crazies don’t get a say, but the thematic distribution of their parties/candidates and the votes they get can serve as an early warning system.
We always had such a rule.
Actually in the USA, I’d expect the biggest influence such a law would have would be to prevent stuff like roll purges, particular ID requirements, preregistration, and even just like restrictions on number of polling stations, length of time polls stay open etc… which disenfranchises people from happening. I think this would have a bigger effect on outcomes than having a lot of extra people casting votes, summing to approximately status quo. I’d expect people currently prevented from voting probably have a much higher lean than people who don’t vote through lack of caring.
So then we’d have not 100% of the people voting, but 110% or 120%, as all the folks who died since the last election or moved away would still be on there. I don’t think that is a good result.
Well, I’m sure that adequate organisation could be arranged to ensure the reliability of the polls. Nobody in that country is really mandated or empowered to ensure people can/do vote at the moment, and if it were made compulsory I think that would change. I see no reason it couldn’t be done without increasing electoral fraud.
Be extra careful trying this in any sort of a proportional-representation system. That leads to five percent of your legislators being lizardmen, which usually doesn’t end well.
An interesting concept! Can you point to any party you’d consider to be lizardman candidates in an existing proportional representation democracy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Sonneborn
Back during the EU Elections, there were so many posters for the satirical Die Partei.
The candidates of Magyar Kétfarkú Kutya Párt are. They wouldn’t give five percent in a proportional representation admittedly, only one or two percent.
Seems to me the advantage of mandatory voting is to combat voter suppression. The disadvantage is that uninformed people would just vote for someone random, or the first choice. A way to remove much of this disadvantage is a system where everybody has to go to the voting place. Then if you vote for nobody you can do so immediately, but if you want to vote for a candidate you have to wait 5 minutes. Uninformed voters would mostly not bother to wait.
Anyway people in democracies should be better educated about politics. The way things are now people mostly get educated to get jobs, not to be an informed voter. There is not much advantage to an individual to get educated about politics because one person’s vote counts for so little. But it is a huge advantage to society if every voter is informed.
So the government should pay people to get educated. At least about politics, economics, environmentalism and stuff like that. Maybe not about plumbing or how to drive a car or whatever.
This is why it’s a left/liberal aligned policy, and people on the right/conservatives tend to oppose it. Not necessarily because they love “voter suppression”, because they wouldn’t frame things like voter ID laws that way to begin with.
Accidental double post, please ignore
Unfortunately, for topics like “politics, economics, environmentalism and stuff like that” on which the range of opinions is incredibly broad and the truth is unclear at best, there’s an incredibly blurry line between teaching and indoctrination. Especially if the current government is paying for it.
And I’m doubtful whether being drilled on how exactly congressional seats are allocated or other politically neutral civics topics actually makes someone a more-informed voter.
Is the leftward stroke of Cthulhu an optical illusion?
Let’s first posit that when two ideologies are in conflict, short of the violent, systemic and physical extermination of one sides’s supporters by the other side’s, generally we don’t see either of the ideologies triumphing completely. Rather, the resulting society ends up looking like a (more or less ballanced) compromise between the values of the two ideologies.
Eg: no county in the western world and friends is a pure capitalistic, laissez-faire economy. Even America indulges in significant amounts of corporatism, wealthfare programs and labor regulations (I remember a libertarian joke that most of the agenda detailed in the Communist Party Manifesto has effectively been accomplished by modern western democracies).
So we can posit the following evolution:
Generation 1)
Society is in state A.
Conservatives want to keep it in state A.
Progressives want to change it to state B.
Generation 2)
Society is now in state AB, a compromise of state A and B
Conservatives want to keep it in state AB.
Progressives want to change it to state C.
Generation 3)
Society is now in state ABC, a compromise of state AB and C
Conservatives want to keep it in state ABC.
Progressives want to change it to state D.
etc.
Let’s simplify the above notation for brievity:
1) A > A vs B
2) AB > AB vs C
3) ABC > ABC vs D
Now, here’s where different viewpoints might lead to completely different analysis of this cycle.
Consider a conservative looking back at history, and judging elements within the state of society by where they first originated. If they put elements of progressive origin between brackets, what they see is:
1) A > A vs [B]
2) A[B] > A[B] vs [C]
3) A[BC] > A[BC] vs [D]
4) A[BCD] > A[BCD] vs [E]
5) A[BCDE] > A[BCDE] vs [F]
What the conservative sees is progressive elements taking more and more room in the state in which society is, and conservative supporters finding themselves unwittingly defending more and more progressive elements.
However this contains a rather strong implicit: that progressives always want the same thing, so that an element being progressive in origin is enough to make this element always desirable to progressives forever. Which is course not how progressism work.
What does a progressist actually see when they look at the diagram. Let’s posite that the progressist point of view is that an element is not-progressist if it has been part of society for more than two generations. Then what the progressist sees, putting non-progressist elements in brakets, looks more like this:
1) A > A vs B
2) AB > AB vs C
3) [A]BC > [A]BC vs D
4) [AB]CD > [AB]CD vs E
5) [ABC]DE > [ABC]DE vs F
6) [ABCD]EF > [ABCD]EF vs G
And now, suddenly, it seems that Cthulhu swims right, as progressives seem to have to compromise with an evergrowing set of outdated values.
And the tempting conclusion is that both point of views are illusionary. Any element of society can be portrayed as progressist or conservative depending on whether you consider it from the point of view of its origin (which necessarily has a progressive impetus, since things are being changes) or of its perpetuation (which necessarily has a conservative impetus, since things are being preserved). So in other word there’s no such thing as inherently progressive or inherently conservative ideas, and Cthulhu is really travelling without moving.
This implies human societies start as blank slates with no values, norms, customs, etc. Such that you’re continually adding things. But in reality all societies and humans come with biases and norms and customs that cover basically everything (although you may have to use analogies and metaphors when asking existing values to address new technologies).
However it IS possible that progressives move us from norm A to norm B in some slot (let’s say, from feudal mercantilism to laissez-faire capitalism) but then a few centuries later once everyone agrees that laissez-faire capitalism is the conservative viewpoint, progressives start advocating a system that essentially returns us to zero-sum feudal economics. In that sense, the very notion of there being such directions as right and left in which Cthulhu could swim breaks down.
But I don’t know that we see this much, in practice. And I think then your real attack on the idea that leftward swimming is an illusion is actually just an attack on the very concept that the right/left divide is actually a useful concept, not specifically an attack on the notion that Cthulhu is swimming in a given direction.
It’s kind of like arguing against heliocentrism by pointing out that really, neither the sun nor the earth revolves around the other because they actually trace a spiral around the center of the milky way.
Arguably, it has happened with regard to sex. The sexual revolution was supported by people on the left, opposed by people on the right. The counter-revolution, imposing restrictions such as affirmative consent, putting any male college student who slept with a female college student at risk of expulsion if she decided to claim he had misbehaved in the incident, was supported by people on the left, opposed by people on the right.
Cthulhu is moving, your second scenario is just subtracting out some degree of leftward movement (anything progressing slower than one change per two generations).
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.
– G.K. Chesterton
How would the Vietnam War be prosecuted differently if it were, somehow, being conducted today? Let’s pretend that there was no original Vietnam War, but for whatever reason we’re going through it now. I’m mostly curious about advances in military technology (so this is basically directed @ Bean). Inspired by me watching the Ken Burns documentary on it now.
Would advances in satellite imaging & drone flights take away a lot of the Vietcong/North Vietnamese advantage in guerilla warfare? The Burns documentary has a lot of Vietcong Slink Around The Jungle, Ambush, Then Disappear. Do we have vastly superior imaging systems than in the late 60s? Moderately superior? I’d imagine that imaging through the jungle is probably the absolute hardest terrain to see into- on the other hand, thermal imaging from drones seems like it should work fairly well at finding massed guerillas?
I really know nothing about SIGINT, but it seems to me that detecting electronics on a massed group could be another angle for drones.
Any other big advances in the last 50 years that would change how the war played out?
Nice try, ISI.
I can’t point to anything you have truly missed, except that I know that image processing technologies of today are vastly better than those of 1960s. I would argue that image processing virtually didn’t exit as it does today back then and that satellite imaging would be able to identify with far greater accuracy who and how many enemies were in a place today than sixty years ago. Not to mention our increased experience with dealing with non-uniformed insurgent armies.
By “today” do you mean “with modern technology” or “today, 3 decades after the end of the cold war”? Because the two answers are very different, a huge amount of the bad decision making that went into the way vietnam was waged was driven by cold war calculations.
With modern technology. Am on a military tech kick at the moment
Do the Vietnamese also have modern technology? Because the vietnamese in vietnam had one of the most elaborate AA systems in the world during the actual vietnam war.
@Atlas
Fair point, I should have been more specific. I was speaking of their AAA and SAM network, which the soviet doctrine relied on to a far greater extent than the US did for killing enemy aircraft. And those systems had the luxury of attacking a US air force that hadn’t yet gone through Vietnam and hadn’t developed the techniques, technologies, and culture needed to attack those sorts of systems successfully.
It’s more about smart bombs and imaging than UAVs. Drones have only got so much press because the taliban and ISIS have no air force nor much AA capability between them.
In ‘nam, they had to drop tonnes and tonnes of bombs near the correct target.
Now you can do more damage dropping a single smart bomb exactly where you want it.
I doubt the logistical side of the NVA was terribly stealthy. No good slinking around in the jungle when you food supplies have been blown up by fighter-bombers a week before they were even supposed to reach you.
It’d be a completely different fight. Drones are the least of it; the US Army in Vietnam was a poorly trained and questionably equipped conscript force that was more or less the red-headed stepchild of NATO. That does have repercussions in terms of equipment (you can teach a soldier to use more stuff if he’s a volunteer on a six-year stint than a conscript on two, and he’ll probably be more motivated to learn), but it’s more significant in terms of tactics and communication: the modern Army has much finer-grained knowledge of what it’s doing, where, and what’s known about enemy dispositions, and just as importantly it’s far more practiced at using that information.
Technologically, of course, we’re way ahead. To take imaging systems, what we’ve got now is superior to what we had in the Sixties and early 70s — for example, the first military night vision systems came out in late WWII, but they were exceptionally primitive — but more importantly they’re far, far more ubiquitous. Squads and even individual soldiers in the modern Army have access to systems and reconnaissance data that would have shown up at the battalion level in Vietnam, if that.
On the other hand, many of the doctrinal issues in the US military that had us struggling against asymmetric opposition are still there, as we’ve seen in Iraq. Overall I’d say that modern equivalents of the NVA would be far more obviously overmatched than they were in the Sixties and Seventies, but that the guerrilla campaign would still be an unpopular slog.
This is where I end up also – NVA probably wouldn’t have ever progressed to the massed troops wearing uniform stage and would have remained as an entirely guerilla force until the US just left. Possibly the leaving part would have taken way more time to get to.
There’s a Darwinian process going on there, right? If we *use* whatever advanced surveillance techniques we have to find out whom to blow up, and the insurgency lasts long enough, then all surviving insurgents will have learned not to bring their cellphones to meetings, not to hide in ways that are obvious to satellites, etc.
That has other side-effects as well. Not using cell phones and being covered in blankets all the time might make you effectively immune to the US military. But it also renders the person substantially less effective as a combatant. Good quality communications, as provided by cell phones, are a force-multiplier. Not being able to get up and walk/run around as needed also significantly hampers the ability to take action.
We have no idea what happens when a modern strike package of stealthy cruise missiles and F-35s supported by AWACS and satellites, goes up against a modern integrated air defense network with S-400s and phased-array radars, satellites, etc. Almost certainly one side is going to be surprised by how badly that is going to go for them. And everything else about this hypothetical war, is going to follow from that. Winner gets to fill the sky with their drones.
Anybody certain it is the other side that is going to get the big ugly surprise, gets a better than even chance of being on the side that gets the big ugly surprise. That’s the penalty for overconfidence.
What countermeasures to Wild Weasel do they have nowadays?
Can the USAF put enough ARMs in the air that the enemy can never feel safe when they activate a SAM radar?
The ones I’m aware of are:
1) Passive engagement modes. Based on experience with American Wild Weasels in Vietnam, the Soviets upgraded their SAM systems to be able to engage without turning on their radars. If the target is emitting signals (either its own navigational or targeting radar or a jamming signal), then the SAM can track and target that.
2) Longer ranges. An S-400 can engage targets up to 400 km out, while American air-launched ARMs have a range of only about 150 km.
If I were designing a modern SAM system, I’d also include things like expendable decoy radars (a cheap antenna to send out a signal when an ARM is incoming while the actual radar shuts down), highly directional radars (so the ARM can only home in on it if it’s approaching from the exact direction it’s pointed), distributed redundant targeting radars (so it’d take several hits to degrade the radar’s capability), and designing one of the types of interceptor missiles in my system as a countermissile to shoot down the enemy’s longer-ranged ARM or other SSM/ASM missiles. I don’t know enough about the R-400 to know if they’re doing these things, too.
What Eric says. Also, low-probability-of-intercept radar with obfuscated waveforms. Also also, active electronically-scanned arrays let you point a null at the incoming ARM while still tracking a target. Active terminal guidance for SAMs means you only have to track, not illuminate, which gives much less signal for the enemy to backtrack. Above all else, being smart about when and where you turn on the radars and be ready to turn them off and move.
If you don’t have the fanciest technology, understand the problem and improvise with what you do have. Zoltán Dani and his crew smoked a 1990s model stealth fighter and a 1990s model wild weasel with 1960s-vintage SAMs no better than North Vietnam had used a generation earlier. Now think what that guy could do with tech fifty years more advanced, and how confident are you that the “wild weasels” are going to come out on top?
Recent buzz is that Israel has been operating F-35s over parts of Syria nominally controlled by S-400s without incident. Not sure how much credence I put in that (and it certainly isn’t a full system v. system test) but it’s suggestive as an edge case.
I’ve thought about this but never really tried to come up with a coherent answer. This is mostly me kicking around a few ideas.
Cassander’s question about whether this is fought “with modern tech” or “with modern tech during the Cold War” is a big one, since one of the strategic problems in Vietnam was an unwillingness/inability to reallocate too many resources away from the deterrence/potential war with the USSR.
The US military in Vietnam was very different than its “modern” (Gulf War and afterward, I would say) incarnation. Peak troop commitment in Vietnam was, IIRC, about 550,000. The current US military cannot deploy that many personnel, they simply don’t have them available. Combat forces, from infantry up to aircraft, were fundamentally both much more numerous and more expendable — aircraft losses were in the low thousands, something inconceivable today. They were also much less lethal than their modern counterparts.
Lower US troop availability would push more fights onto the ARVN, with uncertain results — they might rise to the task, or they might disintegrate and enter a death spiral (I believe that ARVN incompetence is overstated but haven’t studied the problem in great detail).
Improved sensors and munitions would increase the casualty exchange ratio between US and opposing forces, possibly to the extent of making the guerrillas tactically ineffective, but it would not ultimately affect their ability to occupy territory.
The bombing of North Vietnam would be far more devastating. One of the major concerns about bombing the North was the possibility of accidentally bombing Chinese territory; with modern navigation and munitions I think this concern virtually disappears. Even if North Vietnam’s air defenses are top-of-the-line now, as they were then, I think that the gap between an air attacker and the defender is even greater now than they were in the 1960s-70s when the SAM was almost a novel threat. The upshot of this is that actual NVA forces would be much less of a factor in the South.
The counterpoint is that it would all be extremely expensive. The failure mode looks a lot like Afghanistan, where the enemy is a rural insurgency quite nearly impotent tactically against American forces but able to maintain the minimal presence needed to back claims to territory. The VC basically work for free while the American presence costs a ton of money, so eventually the former win out when the latter find something else they’d rather fund.
I think the modern US military could tamp down enemy tactical capability inside South Vietnam to something that looks a lot like the Iraqi insurgency. South Vietnam and its military seem to have been considerably more functional than their Iraqi and Afghan modern counterparts. South Vietnam has a much better chance of holding on, I think.
There may not be a lot of debate, but there’s plenty of information about the competence of the NVA/NLF: sometimes they won and sometimes they lost, and they badly botched several major offensives. In other words, about the same as the ARVN.
If the capability of the forces trying to overthrow South Vietnam’s government in 1970 had been reduced the the level of the Taliban in 2019 I think the war would have been considered won.
The Afghan military is worse in every conceivable way than the ARVN. And to be more specific about the comparison I’m making, if the “Vietnam War” meant NLF guerrilla activity in the Mekong Delta with zero prospect of foreign reinforcement, much less intervention, the war would have been over.
Removing Robert McNamara from the Pentagon. That does more than all the technology in the world put together.
More seriously, Vietnam was kind of a weird hybrid on a lot of levels. The air campaign was an attempt to implement a modern-style air campaign using WWII technology. Precision-guided munitions let you actually shut down a country from the air. Do that, and North Vietnam can’t keep supporting the troops in the south. At that point, it’s just a matter of keeping South Vietnam alive until the Viet Cong all die off and the northerners head back home.
But it’s mostly going to be shaped by the people running the war. That was what made Vietnam such a disaster.
But bean, every counter-insurgency we’ve fought since Vietnam has been such a disaster without foreign conventional support.
vietnam got 60,000 american soldiers killed. There hasn’t been an enemy since that’s inflicted casualties within an order of magnitude of that.
Fair. We’re looking at two different metrics: “how many of our troops can the enemy kill?” and “how many KIA can we tolerate before forfeiting?”
I know it’s uncouth to talk about war like a game, but it feels like we’re in a board game where if the enemy plays the “guerilla” card, the United States loses even if the players drag it out for 18 years.
That we’ve learned enough to keep losses in Afghanistan down to 1,856 KIA in 18 years is commendable but different from not losing.
I’m not sure how well the KIA figures generalize. Since at least the first Gulf War, pretty much all the military adventures we’ve embarked on have essentially been punitive expeditions, billed as redressing specific, narrow offenses: invading Kuwait, harboring terrorists, running an alleged WMD program, being Muammar Gadaffi. The American public doesn’t tolerate interventions that’re horribly botched (Iran, Somalia), but as long as one looks reasonably well-run we’re willing to accept casualties to serve those goals. Iraq was, initially, a popular war; public opinion only really started turning when the original justification for it evaporated and it looked like our soldiers were getting shot in ambushes and blown up by IEDs for, essentially, nothing.
On the object level, the goal in Vietnam wasn’t too different from what it was in the Libyan intervention: stepping into someone else’s civil war with an aim towards ensuring the victory of the pro-American and allegedly more liberal-democratic faction. But the justification for it was much more open-ended: rather than redressing a grievance, Vietnam’s boosters primarily saw it as halting the spread of global communism. If we had a policy goal that compelling and yet that vague today, I can see it lasting through… maybe not 58,000 dead and 300,000 wounded as in Vietnam, but certainly a lot more blood and treasure than Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us. “War on terror” might have qualified, if Bush hadn’t overplayed his hand. Stopping ISIL certainly would, but they turned out to be something of a pushover.
@Le Maistre Chat & Nornagest
Relative to the US, or at least the US military as deployed in vietnam, Vietnam was far more powerful than any adversary we’ve faced since, with far more ability to damage US forces. Only in Iraq (the first time) has the US fought an enemy with even the theoretical ability to go toe to toe with a US force larger than a reinforced company and destroy it. Even if you adjust for the size of the US forces deployed, we still come out ahead, and while part of it is that the US has gotten better since vietnam, a bigger part of it is that we’re a super power and there isn’t a rival superpower backing any of our enemies. Vietnam did not have the ability to produce tens of thousands of AAA guns or SA-6 SAMs, they got them from the russians. And if the modern russians had been able to give the taliban equivalent numbers of S-400s (and we refrained from attacking the S-400 sites systematically for fear of angering the russians) that air campaign would have gone much less well for us.
@cassander:
Certainly. We can do things against Muslim guerillas that we couldn’t or wouldn’t do in Vietnam due to the tools local Communists were receiving from the USSR. Our two biggest strategic rivals, Russia and China, aren’t interested in giving expensive material support to the cause of Islamic theocracy when they’re secular republics of totally different culture. So air campaigns, for one, involve trivial risk.
We still manage to lose every counter-insurgency through some combination of bad doctrine and lack of political will (Nornagest went into the latter a bit).
FTFY
So why exactly is it wrong to limit voting rights to citizens who are part of a household that pays a minimum threshold of taxes (income & property) per year?
Seems that such a measure would extend the solvency of democracies if only taxpaying households had a say in what is done with those taxes.
“Mass disenfranchisement of the people most affected by economic downturns during said events is not a good way to have a stable country,” is my guess for the answer.
I think of voting as a bad decisionmaking technique but a good way of allowing the public a vote on how things are going far short of riots, popular uprisings, revolutions, assassinations, terrorist campaigns, and civil wars. You can still get extreme outliers going for the riot/assassination/terrorism strategy, but if there’s a substantial group of voters that worked up about some issue, they’ll probably do a lot better fighting it out via politics instead of via guns and bombs. That’s a much better outcome for society.
This also ensures that elected officials have some kind of incentive to keep the majority of the people reasonably happy with how things are going. And that works even though most voters are basically casting an “Am I happy with the direction of things?” vote rather than a carefully-considered vote that weighs dozens of different policy proposals against one another to arrive at the best possible vote.
A bunch of things. Leaving aside the moral pitfalls of such a policy, there’s no way of keeping it fair; this new class of people would now have the incentive to restrict more people from joining them. They would conceivably promote policies that prevented more people from joining their ranks.
Why? What is the source of the incentive?
(I can think of one reason but I’m assuming you mean something else; I don’t want to state it yet because I don’t want to contaminate potential responses)
I assumed he meant because it would dilute their, and their heirs’, power.
I think that requires, or at least implies, certain additional conditions be present that aren’t necessary in detail-light description offered by DragonMilk. I’m hoping someone holding this view expands on it to see if that’s the case.
Elementaldex is correct. Power in our society is concentrated around voting. If you limit power to a certain class of people, that group will then have the incentive to hold on to that power. If the number of people who qualify to vote increases, their power will decrease. Thus, I find it likely that the voting public would support policies that restricted people from breaking over whatever arbitrary in vs. out line grants you the right to vote.
For a real-world example of this exact phenomena playing out, look at the right’s response to immigration.
I mean, think about immigration. A bunch of people on this board will tell you that they don’t want a bunch of
There’s an extra assumption being smuggled in here that I think is addressed in others’ comments, but must be made explicit before making this criticism.
That is, that the threshold is an involuntary bar for at least some people.
It certainly could be, but doesn’t have to be, in the general description DragonMilk provided. There’s also historical evidence and theory in various fields (economics and public choice, psychology,…) showing that it can go either way.
It would though.
Yes, it wouldn’t technically have to. Everyone could relinquish whatever aid they currently get from the state or go out and work another job in order to get net positive on their taxes, but not everyone or even a majority would.
Say the threshold is one dollar. That is not, in any practical sense, a bar high enough to be insurmountable. It means that anyone could join in should he wish. The people paying the dollar wouldn’t have the incentive mentioned any more than they do in a system with the vote guaranteed to everyone.
That changes if the threshold is a billion dollars, obviously. There is a lot of room in between, and different ways to set up the threshold, and different ways to manage the meta-rules that determine the threshold.
I think that you haven’t thought it through if you’re making that prediction with certainty, given that there have been societies without full suffrage that move to expand it, including societies with similar arrangements to the proposed one.
This is less of a problem if the threshold is fixed at $0 taxes paid. If they want to restrict the franchise, they also aren’t going to have much money to work with.
On the other hand, “fixed” is never as fixed as one wants it to be in politics, so this still has an obvious failure mode.
@DragonMilk,
Solvency isn’t everything, and it’s very easy for me to imagine those above whatever is the tax paying threshold to use their monopoly of political power to vote that only they and their descendents have the licenses, credentials, et cetera to get to that threshold.
Besides the point of democracy is as an alternative to violence for achieving change, disenfranchise too many and you increase the likelihood of violence.
Even if the threshold is the amount of taxes owed by someone working a full time minimum wage job? (I do realize that under the current tax structures, this often equals 0)
@DragonMilk,
As it happens, while lower income folks due tend to support redistribution more than higher income folks (with one big exception, city dwellers who earn between $80,000 and $200,000 tend to support redistribution more than both folks who earn less as well as folks who earn more per year), lower income folks just plain vote less, though if the goal is too increase turnout rumors of ethnic disenfranchisement increase turnout among those who suspect that they’re being discouraged from voting, so maybe proposed income minimums would do the same and increase turnout.
It’s not, but it’s the other things don’t matter much if you’re not solvent.
Why would they be any likelier than the current set of voters to do that?
@cassander >
I presume that voters without those credentials/licences/property would vote against limiting access to those, but as it happens the poor just vote less, so maybe there really wouldn’t be any changes.
As a counter example access to many city jobs used to be more limited to those with family already working in the city, those who went to the same parochial schools as most city employees, and those who flat out payed s bribe to hiring managers until special set asides were made for affirmative action to hire those from low income neighborhoods (and yes you could potentially be high income but have your legal address be in a low income neighborhood and get a job that way, but in practice the set aside jobs are too entry level for anyone to bother doing that if they already have money).
The flip-side is that to keep the number of people small, either they would have to all pay a much higher rate of tax to be able to afford it (making things much lower-cost for the poor and middle-classes), or what the government does would have to be substantially curtailed, getting in the way of far fewer people. And in the case of less government, entities at other levels (city/county/state/federal) could kick in and do the same thing, if so desired by the local population.
If you’re asking if its unethical, it is according to Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Right
As far as politically, Oscar makes a good point. People affect change one of three ways. The Ballot Box; The Soap Box; and the Ammo Box. Disenfranchisement could have some unexpected side effects.
As far as economical, It might make sense to say that starving people can be shortsighted, and that charting the course of a nation requires long term planning. But that was also the argument of monarchists.
ETA:
My point with the monarchy comment, is that if it makes sense to limit voting to people who make $20k and up.. what’s to stop people next year from limiting it to $30k and up? I would be concerned that once we sacrifice our schelling fence of “everyone votes” there is nothing that preserves my right to vote.
And what if it’s a simple by household Taxes Paid – Benefits Received > 0 threshold?
How do you calculate Benefits Received? What’s the monetary benefit the average household receives from the military? From having a national weather service? From having a department of the interior?
Purely money transfers for benefits (social security, medicare, unemployment benefits, welfare, etc.)
The others are why there are voters at all!
Are you saying that people with disabilities shouldn’t be able to vote? Even high earning, productive members of society who just happen to have a chronic disease that costs a bunch of money to manage?
As a person in such a situation, I am appalled (literally, not in a “try to win arguments by escalating” way) at the idea that somebody would try to take away my vote over such life circumstances.
Health insurance is (at its core) risk pooling of random uncontrollable adversities, the whole point is to not punish those who get hit, but rather to lighten their burden.
ETA: Just to clarify, I don’t approve of disenfranchising low income / low education people (my comment might have been read this way). I just wanted to provide an example that the suggested policy misses its intended target and causes lots of collateral damage.
Part of the left wing argument (that I’m pretty sympathetic to) is that more well-off folks also receive a range of benefits from living in a developed country that are a bit harder to quantify on a spreadsheet. Seems a bit arbitrary to subtract say food stamps in your system, but not a government-funded higher educational system that gave someone one of the best educations in the world, etc.
Anyways, you’d be disenfranchising the elderly & literally anyone who’s retired with a strict ‘benefits received’ system, which I’d imagine would be quite unpopular
Property taxes are included too, but you make a good point.
I then amend it to cumulative taxes less benefits since voting age, without inflation adjustments!
That beats my slippery slope argument. But your metric still creates a funny paradigm where the republicans in the US government starts lowering taxes and increasing benefits in purple states. To “quasi-gerrymander” a better election result.
Additionally, Senior Citizens don’t really pay into the system, so it will make your voting population Bluer overnight at the same time.
To the latter point, it would be cumulative taxes paid less benefits received over voting age lifetime.
On the former, if that’s the effect, so be it. The purpose is to limit the vote to those whose monetary contributions exceed monetary receipts so that they can decide on where the non-monetary benefits are directed.
The last time we discussed this system, the solution was just pay half of your gains from the gerrymandering back to the government (they do accept donations) to stay a net taxpayer and still vote with a little more money in your pocket than if they didn’t try this. If potential voters would rather have the other half of the money than their vote, then isn’t everyone happy here?
If you’re counting non-monetary benefits it’s possible you could provide enough of those to force someone below the threshold without a way to change that. Maybe make all non-monetary benefits opt-out?
Wow, that’s actually really tempting. No one who works for the government or who receives most of their revenue via government contracts is allowed to vote? Disenfranchising all military personnel, and vast swathes of the technology industries that the military funds? Bold move.
Hey, so you, working at this big aerospace company, are assigned to work on the new military jet. Also you can’t vote this year.
Hey, so you, university student, you can’t vote this year because you’re taking NSF grants. Also government-subsidized student loans.
Hey, so you, construction company hired to repair streets and bridges, y’all are not allowed to vote.
(A) that’s more or less the ideal, yes, but (B) none of them are prohibited from voting. All they need to do if they want to vote is give back enough of the money to make even, which, at most, is half of the money they got.
Ok, you got me. How does someone who made all of their money from government sources/employment/contracts “make even” by giving back half of what they got?
@acymetric
The government pays you 100 grand, and for the sake of argument, assume you pay no taxes. the IRS takes donations, so donate $50,001, and you are now tax positive by one dollar and can vote.
Why is half of what you make going to make you tax positive?
$100,00 received. $50,001 paid. That still leaves you at -$49,999. Why did you decide that “half of the money you made” is enough to be “tax positive”?
Working for the government isn’t benefits recieved.
Government workers are ‘paying’ 40 hours a week of labour.
So all of the “programs” that offer “benefits” will instead be transmuted into “jobs” that pay people for “labor” that doesn’t really do anything or inconvenience them very much. And the people who don’t like this will lobby to add annoying make-work to those pointless quasi-jobs.
Knowing this is where we will end up, I’m not seeing the benefit.
I personally find the argument of monarchists to be compelling, but also understand that rarely are monarchists especially good at long term planning either. The best and worst parts of democracy revolve around everyone having a vote, and I can’t see any reason to limit democracy along any arbitrary line without quickly ruining that line. I can imagine no stable system around which something arbitrary can determine enfranchisement. This doesn’t mean democracy is stable (at least not inherently) but it does mean that if you’re going to allow people to vote, you should let them all vote.
It’s a lot more administratively difficult than it sounds.
More of a principle question, but practically, if governments keep records of taxes paid in prior year and benefits disbursed, what’s to stop them from running an inequality ensuring the former exceeds the latter to determine the pool of eligible voters?
the record of taxes is easy, the record of benefits is more difficult to keep track of. Sure, you can track SS and medicare well enough, but how do you account for spending on the roads or cops? And how about salaries, do federal salaries count? What about the salary of a contractor? what about the salary of the janitor contractor who is employed by company A cleaning a building employed by company B, renting the office space to a government agency?
I’m limiting it to just the trackable monetary transfers so to speak. So long as your household taxes paid exceeded the household transfers of funds/medical benefits, you’re qualified if a citizen.
You can always pick a line, sure, but others might disagree with you. For my money, I think the moral case against people who work for the government being allowed to vote for it is considerably stronger than the case against pensioners not being allowed to vote. And since the government is generally better at cash transfers than service provision, I think disincentivizing transfers is a bad plan in the long run. Under such a system, for example, people sending their kids to public schools could vote, but not people getting vouchers for their kids.
@cassander, households need to pay property taxes for schools, so voucher households should be a wash on that metric. Then so long as income taxes exceed other monetary transfers, then you’re a voter.
As has pointed out, retirees stand to be disenfranchised, so perhaps it’ll be a cumulative since-voting-age total of taxes paid less monetary benefits.
So retired people wouldn’t get to vote (except for a few whose pensions/investments massively outweigh their Social Security income)? Good luck getting that passed.
It would break a schelling point and would lead to a world full of fights about who should be allowed to vote.
So why exactly is it wrong to limit voting rights to citizens who have a humanities degree?
Seems that such a measure would improve democracies if only educated people had a say.
Easier implementation of [taxes paid – monetary benefits received] > 0 than to go down the slippery slope of who is deemed educated.
And why should we restrict ourselves to monetary benefits? And how do we define those? Are food stamps monetary benefits?
We judge whether someone is educated or not to do a specific job all the time by whether he has a degree or not.
a) What would stop the voter class from changing the law to prevent anyone not currently franchised from ever being enfranchised? Then they could do whatever they wanted to the non-voter class without consequence, created an entrenched aristocracy. If this seems unlikely to you, look at how poll taxes and literacy tests worked in the post-Reconstruction/pre-Civil Rights Act Southern US.
b) What would stop the non-voter class from launching a revolution to change the existing system? You’d have to get these people to agree that they didn’t deserve a say in how they’re being governed. Otherwise, you’d have to use violent oppression to prevent them from changing the system by force, at which point you’re basically in a permanent state of low-grade civil war.
a) Universal suffrage is a 20th century thing. Prior democracies didn’t necessarily limit the voting pool more restrictively each election. I would start by constitutionally amending it so that qualified voters are those citizens who, in the prior two years, were part of a household that paid more in taxes than received in monetary benefits.
b) Because autocracies still exist today, and less than democratic democratic systems have existed since antiquity.
a) What’s to stop the voter class from amending the constitution back the way they want it?
b) Those autocracies (and illiberal democracies) have generally been plagued with constant interclass violence. Look at the Coal Wars, or the Tulsa Race Riot in the US alone.
a) because constitutional amendments require 3/4 of states
b) Your examples don’t really illustrate revolution. And those who are receiving more in monetary benefits than they pay in taxes would be uniting to bite the hand that feeds them
a) If 100% of the voters in 100% of the states are of the aristocracy, that doesn’t matter; it just requires a higher level of political coordination. If the benefits are great enough, they’ll do it.
b) They’re examples of political strife in illiberal states.
I don’t understand the argument here. Sure, people who pay low taxes would be more incentivized to vote for policies that spend more, but people who pay high taxes would be incentivized to vote for policies that collect less, which could equally result in government insolvency.
So the same logic leads us to say that maybe we should prevent people who pay over a certain amount of taxes from voting.
I am fine with this too.
My metric for who should vote is “do their votes result in outcomes I approve of” and since the ultra-rich are also very liberal, this is a good law and I like it.
Haha, “The Middle Class Voting Act”!
Historically, governments elected by taxpayers were much more concerned to keep expenses within budget and avoid debt than alternative forms of government (such as monarchy or democracy).
Whats an example of a government that had an electoral system where only net-positive taxpayers could vote?
most republican systems throughout history have had pretty stiff qualifications for voting, which amounts to much the same thing.
Didn’t most or all states in the early US have property requirements to vote?
All or the original thirteen colonies had property requirements for voting, and these were carried over into the new United States of America. But almost all of them were abolished early in the 19th century, particularly during the era of Jacksonian populist democracy.
A system where only property owners can vote is quite different from Dragonmilk’s system where only net-positive taxpayers can vote.
> A system where only property owners can vote is quite different from Dragonmilk’s system where only net-positive taxpayers can vote.
Not so much once you take into account the 16th Amendment introduction of Federal income tax.
How does adding a tax on non-property (income) bring the system closer to one where “property owners” and “tax payers” can be treated as the same category???
Ya’ll are also just breezing past the “net-positive” aspect, which cannot be assessed by simply looking at whether someone pays taxes or not.
Because tax incidence means everyone pays taxes one way or another.
I am not sure why you excluded consumption taxes, is it a deliberate ommission? Regardless:
Parsimonious answer 1: it is not clear whether your concept of “solvency” is a desirable goal.
Parsimonious answer 2: Economic incidence of taxation could be very different from who is their legally designated taxpayer. For an example, corporate income taxes are nominally paid by subjects that do not have voting rights, but their economic incidence very much falls on voters.
Exclusion of consumption taxes was deliberate.
1. Call me a pessimist, but the path of modern democracies seem to moving toward expanded benefits on a dollar basis if nothing else due to a larger retired population and shrinking tax base given reproduction rates of citizens, which necessitates tax increases. Additional entitlements will further drag the system down
2. Yes, but need to keep the measure straight-forward and simple to implement.
Ok,thanks.
Ad 1: Yes, that it is a real problem whose root cause is that people do not want to have enough children and also do not want to let enough immigrants into their countries. I think that reforms of family policies and immigration policies are as a solution to this preferable to disenfranchisement of poor people.
Ad 2: But because of that your system would create perverse incentives for voters. They could create tax structure where economic incidence of possibly very high taxes would fall heavily on nonvoters.
Could you elaborate on 2? What would be an example where the disenfranchised actually have an incredibly high tax burden?
By the way, I’d move from sales to value-added-taxes to get around the obvious example
@DragonMilk
Well, when you mention value-added taxes, for example 90 % of government revenue could came from VAT (in my country, as I just checked, VAT constitutes slightly more than 20 % of government revenue), which is a consumption tax and thus paying it wouldn´t make anyone eligible for voting.
Correct, one would have to pay income and property taxes in excess of monetary benefits to qualify.
Value added taxes alone constituting 90% of revenue means the government would have to be very small, unless I’m mistaken.
@DragonMilk
Tax revenue is limited by the Laffer curve, but no, if direct taxes would be drastically reduced and VAT would be ramped up, I don´t see why the government would have to be particularly small. Once you have the infrastructure for a VAT extraction in place, it is a tax that is not easy to evade. Voters don´t like to pay VAT, which is a limiting factor for VAT rates, but your proposal would remove this constraint.
Also, aren´t you concerned with an injustice of nonvoters in effect paying for most of the government, even if that government would be small?
@DragonMilk
Addendum, I ignored the part about voters being those taxpayers who paid more than they received in benefits. That is, I think, considerably different proposal than your original idea of minimal threshold of taxes paid, and a lot less workable.
If you ignore monetary value of public services like roads and courts (which is, as others pointed out, somewhat silly), the vast majority of workers receive less government benefits than they pay in taxes. So, your proposal would disenfranchise mainly long term unemployed, stay at home parents, severely disabled and retirees. If then you declare that lifetime contributions count, retirees are back among the electorate until they lived so long in retirement that their pension checks climb above their past taxpaying.
In effect you proposed a system for a disenfranchisement of precisely the most vulnerable members of society. That could spiral into some really dark scenarios.
To clarify, it’s by household, not individual, and the benefits refer to only government benefits.
So the exclusion applies to individuals and families who have received more monetary benefits directly from the government than they have paid in income and property taxes.
Really?
It looks to me that more immigration is incouraged instead to support pensioners, both top marginal Federal income tax and State property tax rates still look less than what they were in the ’70’s to me.
I’m just not seeing a trend for increased taxes.
Increased debt on the other hand…
Try here
I view government debt is a means of raising taxes or printing money later, and I’m not so sure tax incidence is not increasing.
Because it’s wrong to strip people of liberty, including political liberty.
This is wrong because many people like liberty, which has many utils/virtuous/is a right.
Less seriously, (or…?) this question reminds me of the hilarious “have you tried killing the poor” comedy vide clip. Forgot the authors.
Mitchell and WebbHave you tried kill all the poor?
Many reasons have already been said. Selective service, or the draft, depending on your location would be another one.
The only acceptable threshold would be $0 paid. No taxation without representation.
Just to preface I personally sympathize with the idea behind these kinds of rules [it’s funny though that we have a thread like this next to the one about compulsory voting]
My argument would be that non-fiscal regulations have the power to shift the distribution of income.
In general voters ought to have some skin in the game, the problem is that there is no easy or consistent way to measure skin in the game.
Behold my grand compromise that I feel this board will really love.
A Christian Theocratic Democracy where only the poor can vote.
I think it’ll work great. I’ll be a dutiful and impartial Ayatollah making sure the state never strays from the One True Faith, Adoptionism.
“The last shall be first in line to the polling booth.”
Nicely done, sir.
I’m with the people who consider the biggest practical problem to be the lack of a clear Schelling point. I don’t believe there is any way to define this that would be as clear as “everyone over the age of 18”. You’d at least introduce a new thing to argue over, somewhat similar to gerrymandering.
I consider the way democratic principles are often presented as morally true or virtuous (“one man, one vote” and so on) to be false. Some people’s lives are worth more than others, and some deserve more influence in how society is run. However, trying to get agreement on exactly how much more influence someone deserves is a hard problem, especially if deciding how to determine that is one of the things voters can influence. In that situation, democracy with equal voting rights is a practical solution. My view is that “one man, one vote” should be considered similar to “kill them all, let god sort them out” – a practical way to behave in a situation where trying to find a perfect morally correct solution is impractical.
You should generally be careful when you make the definition of the voting base itself subject to votes and discussion.
+1
To expand on this, the hard problem here is to create a system that
(a) meaningfully shifts the distribution of voting power towards voters more likely to use their votes in the public interest
(b) doesn’t fall victim to the kinds of corrupt state capture observed in prior franchise limitation systems.
(a) is a great and worthy motivation, since as (IIRC) Sumner put it no one has a right to rule, and therefore no one has a right to vote. The hard thing about (a) is that, even in the very unlikely event that you can get a consensus on what the public interest is, it is terribly difficult to determine even with the best of intentions and faith who will actually be most likely to act in that interest. The hard thing about (b) is that people will certainly not act with the best of intentions and faith when faced with a chance at constitutionalizing their political advantage.
If you’re going to try and make a financial qualification work, a straight property ownership criterion is probably more straightforward than a tax-and-benefits calculation and gives you most of the same effect. In particular, we have plenty of historical evidence of how such systems work (and fail) that might facilitate avoidance of some mistakes and failure modes.
Other more innovative alternatives include Brennan’s proposal for demographically-reweighted epistocracy and Hanson’s futarchy. These have two tremendous advantages over financial qualifications. First, they do not require any constitutionalized consensus on what the public interest is or what sorts of people are most likely to vote to further it. Second, they use mechanical criteria to determine who has the most relevant factual information and give them more voting power to act on that information, while retaining equality of voice on the question of what the public interest is. Brennan uses a test of political knowledge, Hanson uses willingness to bet on outcomes. Neither is costless to evaluate or impossible to game, but both are arguably better on these scores than financial qualifications.
Yeah I’m not sure this is a good thing. I think I’d rather be ruled by people who rule in their self interest than those that pretend they are ruling in mine. Even if they believe it themselves.
Disenfranchising the end user does not lead to efficiency or efficacy.
Tax incidence. Economically, the immediate taxpayer isn’t necessarily the one who bears the burden of the taxes. For example, sales taxes are assessed on retail sellers, who owe and directly pay the taxes, but in most cases they’re passing on a large portion of the sales taxes to their customers. Similarly, an employer-side payroll tax and an employee-side payroll tax are economically identical (since market-clearing wages adjust to the tax), but they payer is different.
Your proposed rule could be gamed by modifying the tax code to shift the direct tax burden to the people those in power want to be able to vote while disenfranchising the rest. For example, abolishing the income tax and replacing it with an employer-side payroll tax and a VAT would disenfranchise a large portion of the population in favor of the shareholders of the businesses which are now the primary direct taxpayers (or the businesses themselves, depending on the details of the rules).
Net consumers have an incentive to keep the system solvent in order to preserve their benefits.
Okay that’s theory, what about practice? It makes intuitive sense that smart and wealthier people would make better political decisions. But if you look at the world as it exists, it’s unclear to me that smart people are really wiser. In one’s personal life, you have an incentive to find optimal behaviors because you will suffer the consequence of non-optimal behaviors. The person who buys a home he can’t afford or goes to college to get a degree that won’t get him a job suffers. But at the policy level, supporting homeownership or college subsidies does not harm you in any way if those policies aren’t effective, as your marginal impact on politics is ~0. So people support what feels good to support and what makes you look good to others. I would say that smart people are marginally more likely to come to correct conclusions, but are also more certain the conclusions they come to are correct and will do more damage if they have incorrect ideas.
Why not instead limit voting rights to citizens who have a degree in economics? That would also extend solvency, probably more so than the restriction to tax paying households. (Most people with economics degrees probably pay net taxes, but most people who pay taxes on net do not have much expertise in economics.)
The problem here is that you are identifying a desirable outcome of the democratic process — keeping spending in check — and then proposing a modification of the democratic process to make that outcome more likely. The problem with most such proposals is that if the outcome is really so obviously desirable, then people will vote in favor of it anyway, making the proposed modification redundant. On the other hand, if a large number of people vote against it, then that puts you more or less in the same position as a left winger who thinks that all conservatives should be banned from voting.
Apart from all the good points everyone else has mentioned, the government is not just a method for making spending decisions. It is also the lawmaker — I don’t see any principled reason why only net-taxpayers should be able to vote on traffic laws, or criminal law, or zoning laws, or divorce law. These aren’t about allocating taxpayer funds but are about establishing the rules of a society, which taxpayers and non-taxpayers alike have equal moral claim to.
@Gossage Vardebedian >
Back in April I thought that Harris would be the nominee as a candidate who’d be able to appeal to (mostly older and less white) moderate Democrats as well as the (mostly younger and whiter) progressive Democrats, but she hasn’t gained any traction as hardly any believe she has many firm convictions past ambition (my wife can’t stand her, I on the other hand like that she was born in the same city as me, partially grew up in the same neighborhood as me, was bussed in the same school district in years I was bussed, had the same employer and worked in the same building as I do now, a fellow plumber I’ve worked with replaced her water heater said she was ‘nice’, and she is easy on the eyes, but I still don’t know what she believes), Sanders and Warren have both become more socially liberal in their campaigning lately compared to just a few years ago, but hardly anyone doubts their economic populism is genuine.
My own reservations of Sanders are that he calls himself a “socialist”, which seems popular with young Democrats and few others, with Warren the whole “Pocahontas” thing looks like a vulnerability, plus in Massachusetts she just didn’t seem to appeal to working-class voters enough, with Biden and Sanders doing a bit better, but most of the writers of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vox.com seem to love Warren and hate Biden
Biden, poor Biden, the young scribbling class has it in for him, most can tell he’s mentally and chronological old, older Democrats like him, but it’s the young who are energetic campaign volunteers, and while Biden does best in nation wide polls, when you combine Sanders and Warren supporters together their supporters outnumber Biden’s.
I still think that Biden would have a better chance in the general election than Warren (he’s a bit less pro open borders), and “Medicare for all” polls well as an option, but not as a wholescale replacement.
Right now more Democratic Party voters say a winning candidate is more important than one that is more closely aligned with their views (“half a loaf is better than none”), which so far has helped Biden, but Warren has momentum and is enough primary voters second choice that the nomination looks to be hers.
If Warren wins, I wonder who she’ll pick as a running mate. Neither Biden nor Sanders seem like great options–she’d do well with (IMO) someone younger and more vigorous but still reasonably prepared to step into the presidency.
No way Biden would accept VP again, IMO. Sanders does nothing for her; they’re running in the same lane. Buttigieg seems like he’s kinda running for the VP slot; that’s my top guess. He’d help with her age thing and by being a male (but also a sexual minority) to balance the ticket, and Indiana is “heartland” enough that you’re not getting two coastal liberals. Kamala Harris or Cory Booker or Julian Castro could help her issues with minority voters. Of that group, I’d expect Harris first, Castro second. Booker really seems like he inspires nobody. Only other thing I can think as a long shot would be a southerner. Maybe somebody like Roy Cooper of North Carolina; a Joe Manchin type is probably too conservative to have a coherent ticket, rather than balancing. Lower on the list I’d put a foreign policy type like former general Wesley Clark.
I hope it’s someone better than Tim Kaine.
My money’s on either Beto O’Rourke or Joaquin Castro. Someone young, male, white-ish, and Texan, basically.
Legally, speaking, what is an “impeachment inquiry” as declared by Ms. Pelosi?
Subpoenas have been issued, and some noise has been made that opposition to those will be treated as obstruction.
But how is a subpoena issued under an “impeachment inquiry” that has not been voted on any different than a regular subpoena?
Is there actually a formal legal inquiry of some sort going on that is different than normal, or is this just the House using its normal investigative powers in the service of impeachment?
From my understanding, a big thing here is that executive privilege is no longer a reason not to answer questions under testimony — since the behaviors of the Executive are under question, it is no longer possible to just claim that something is Executive business and that the Legislative branch needs to butt out.
I think this is answering a different question; the OP, as I read it, is asking whether the House needs to actually hold a vote on the impeachment inquiry (as in prior cases) or whether the Speaker can declare that condition (“impeachment inquiry”) to exist without a vote. And I don’t know the answer to that. Prior practice suggests a vote, but I don’t know if it’s legally required.
Exactly.
Under normal circumstances, the House can subpoena people and request documents, but this must be done so as part of the legislative process. So the Executive can claim privilege and argue that there is no legitimate legislative reason for the request.
A loss of executive privilege in a formal impeachment setting makes sense.
As far as I can tell, the current “impeachment inquiry” has not been legally formalized.
There’s a certain logic to that argument, but I don’t think there’s any case law to that effect. The whole area of executive privilege vs congressional subpoenas is way under litigated. So it’s totally unclear what would be needed to trigger an impeachment exception since it isn’t even clear that there is such an exception to begin with.
I highly doubt any anti-big business sentiment is going to change. Big Business is a popular whipping boy, and Warren’s strategy of running to the Left to win party activists is would not be served by moderating her stances.
Maybe heading into the general, but even then, I highly doubt cozying up to Big Business is high on her list. Maybe if she gets really desperate for cash, or down-ticket candidates get desperate for cash. Though even down-stream candidates started whining, I think EWarren would go full steam ahead on the Progressive Woke train.
The question about her moving to the center in the general boils down, I think, to questions about college-educated white suburbanites:
(a) will they be notably and vocally less enthusiastic about Warren when they realize how bad she would ultimately be for their pocketbooks?
(b) will Warren try and go to the center to retain some of their votes, rather than doubling down on a “turn out the base” strategy?
A “yes” answer to either question would indicate a greater weight placed on reason vs emotion by the relevant actor (voters and candidate respectively). This makes me think that the right way to bet is “no” on both.
Either way, I greatly doubt that cash will be a factor– there’s enough sloshing around that nobody on any side is going to get desperate. The downticket whining will come, if it comes, from moderate Dem congressional candidates in swing districts who will *not* be worried that they will raise insufficient money but *will* worry that they will lose anyway because their opponents will be able to tag them as socialist fellow-travelers for supporting Warren.
Eh. Going after wall-street bearing fire and sword would probably be *good* for college-educated white suburbanites. In case you have failed to notice wall-street being a vampire squid above all law is not, in fact, a positive for the economy.
I’m actually not at all sure what you mean. Do you mean that having banks take a cut of most transactions in return for facilitating the ease, speed, and trustworthiness of those transactions is a net negative to economic growth and/or distribution?
I mean that financialization is killing the firms that actually produce things and services in the US by loading them down with unsustainable debt levels and out-right criminality is going entirely unpunished as long as you buy a banking licence first, up to and including financial services to narco-terrorists.
That is not just a Trump thing. “Wall street is above the law” has been a bi-partisan stance for a long time, but credibly saying you are not going to adhere to that idiotic doctrine (And wall-street turning on you means there is no fiscal downside to keeping this election promise) is not going to be unpopular
It is also something the President can actually do. By, for example, appointing people to SEC that are not wholly captured.
I’m unsure about crimes going unpunished but I thoroughly disagree that banks offering businesses loans is bad for the economy. In fact I think that is very good for the economy, it allows companies to expand quickly in response to demand or opportunities which they might not have had the resources for, it also allows them to deal with cyclical or erratic income which would otherwise cause them to go out of business and stop providing the valuable services they provide. Unsustainable debt can usually only be reached by a business which is about to close anyway because banks do not want to loan more than can be sustained because they want to make money off their loans.
Directly backwards, financialization keeps firms alive longer than otherwise, it drags on the economy by perpetually decreasing the costs of capital maintenance, liquidity etc and allowing firms to hang on indefinitely, but that is just a straightforward outgrowth of central bank policy.
This is why I said “moving to the center in general” rather than “becoming less anti Wall Street”. If Warren were actually “just” going to hold financial execs responsible for violating existing laws, give the CFPB teeth again, and change regulations that incent overfinancialization, that would be just fine for the general economy and white suburbanites in particular. It’s the other, much further-left and more broadly anti-business stuff (wealth taxes, codetermination requirements, antitrust actions based on novel-at-best theories of harm, etc) that would do the damage. Unfortunately she’s now staked enough of her brand on that stuff that it’ll be hard to abandon.
“financialization is killing the firms that actually produce things and services in the US by loading them down with unsustainable debt levels”
The financial sector is killing them by providing them with what they want(capital) at a low price? if that’s true it’s not the financial sector that must be blamed.
“out-right criminality is going entirely unpunished as long as you buy a banking licence first, up to and including financial services to narco-terrorists.”
Example here?
The mistake being made here is assuming other people will come to the same conclusion given the same facts.
I hear this frequently when I visit subforums for fringe candidates. Someone says “group X does not like our candidate” and invariably there will be people who say “but group X will do the best with our candidate!” [1]
The hidden reasoning being that our candidate is so awesome it will make everything awesome and all groups will do awesome.
Even if that reasoning chain were true, which is doubtful, other people have no reason to believe it.
[1] And the usual bullshit follows, of “why is group X like that?” or “why does group X believe lies?”
What additional taxes is Warren proposing for college-educated white suburbanites?
Medicare for all comes to mind.
Not all pocketbook effects of policy are direct effects of tax changes. In fact, probably most are not.
I don’t believe she’s made any specific claims about how that will be paid for. It does seem likely that a payroll tax will be part of the answer when it is finally given, but I assume that she will claim that overall a typical middle-class suburbanite will pay the same or less.
So I can’t imagine there being a large contingent of college-educated suburbanites who would’ve voted for another the Democratic candidate but switch to Trump/third party/not voting based on Warren’s policy in this area.
@salvorhardin
So what are you talking about then?
@thisheavenlyconjugation
For one, the reduction in business formation and growth caused by the constant imposition of arbitrary and punitive rules on any businesses that get too successful, and the confiscation of wealth from anyone who dares to create too much of it. Those nice white-collar jobs that pay for the affluent suburban lifestyle have to come from somewhere.
Warren is unlikely to actually succeed at passing any kind of wealth tax.
But it still makes me very scared to vote for her. Sometimes politicians live up to their promises, and it’s a gamble if you think things will be okay because they never will.
@salvorhardin
The same thing applies there. I’m sure you believe Warren will impose ” arbitrary and punitive rules” and a wealth tax that will destroy nice white-collar jobs, but that’s not relevant. The question is whether there are large numbers of suburbanites who are similarly convinced, and would’ve otherwise voted for the Democrat but faced with Warren will now choose Trump, a third party or not voting. Given that the wealth tax is incredibly popular — supported by half of Republicans! — I find that very implausible.
Not really sure I agree with that. Candidates spend a huge amount of their time fundraising, which is a pretty good indication that they consider it important.
It also might become super-important against a candidate who supports, say, mandatory board appointments from worker’s councils, who also wants to seize the
means of productionevery privately owned health care institution in the nation in order to force down rates to pay for her health plan.Like the Democrats are going to be in panic mode if their fundraising falls by half and even half of that goes over to the GOP.
considering the massive fundraising advantage the democrats have built up over the last few cycles, I’m certain they wouldn’t be happy about losing that much cash, but it still wouldn’t put them behind
Left and Woke are different axes. ISTM that Warren and Sanders both represent a lot more of Left than Woke.
Warren has some pretty woke elements to her platform (that seem new to this particular election, although I could be mistaken on that point). Both lean heavier on being Left than Woke though (and in fact lack of Wokeness was one of the popular knocks against Sanders from Hillary supporters during and after the last election).
Strongly agree that anti-Wall Street is a Left position, not a Woke position.
I thought “Woke” was a (derogatory) term for the social left?
Two weeks ago johan_larson posted a thread hypothesizing the evil-mirror universe equivalent of effective Altruism. One of the comments mentioned breeding mosquitoes resistant to current eradication efforts.
But it seems our current efforts to eradicate mosquitoes has backfired to create mosquitos. So what sort of fail modes happened here, and how do we become more cautious about these types of efforts?
Did anyone expect this not to happen? This is what evolution does all the time
Hence my curiosity.
Universal opinion is “Malaria and Zika are responsible for a huge amount of death and suffering in the world, despite a low cost effort to mitigate. We should focus effort on preventing those deaths.”
From that statement, we somehow got “we should eradicate mosquitos” which would eliminate the major vector but should be less preferable to eradicating actual malaria or a highly effective vaccine.
Then, out of all the possible mosquito population reduction strategies (natural predators, improving pesticides to be less harmful to other animals etc) we chose to edit the genome of the mosquito. Again, when given the option to edit the genome, we decided to try and eradicate the mosquito as opposed to say, modifying the immune system or creating an enzyme to eliminate malaria that tries to use that mosquito as a host.
Going back to the Less Wrong thread I linked, their debate on the topic seems to focus on whether gene drives would work faster or slower than other methods, and not necessarily on whether it would backfire enough to not become viable anymore
So I bring up failure modes etc. because I feel like there’s a “sequence” or the like on “take a step back and review if your proposition is accomplishing your goal” but maybe it’s not emphasized enough or maybe needs to be prioritized.
I think you’re overestimating how realistic your proposed alternatives are. Maybe “do nothing, just let people die” was a more realistic option, but if you do try to do something at this time, testing this way of killing mosquitoes was probably a better idea than anything else you listed.
Eradicating how? How would you make it disappear? Seems way less realistic than killing mosquitoes.
Even being sick with real malaria doesn’t give you good immunity against it. Not good for vaccine chances if it would need to somehow prepare the immune system much better than going through an actual infection.
Do you have some natural predator that has managed to eliminate mosquitoes from some place? Just how massive a dumping of pesticides are you imagining?
I think these would be a lot harder feats of genetic engineering.
Understanding a problem better if no option seems like a good option should be the first step. In this case, additional research. Studying the viruses that infect protozoans seems like a good place to start.
In the meantime, treated bednets continue to be highly effective.
Eliminating mosquitos is a positive even if they didn’t carry disease. The buggers BITE.
I’m fairly sure that technique — making the mosquitos inhospitable hosts to the disease — has also been tried.
Seems like it depends on how often the mosquitoes mate and how fecund they are. If they mate often enough, and they have enough offspring, then they could recover from a genetic assault pretty easily even if the chance of successful breeding is very low.
It’s a similar situation to bacteria developing antibiotic resistance.
Edit: basically ninja’ed.
Life, uh, finds a way.
Is “Scientists find mosquitos which carry incredibly dangerous organisms inside them. The scientists genetically modify the killer animals* to be infertile, but their attempts backfire when the mutant animals manage to reproduce anyway” the most Jurassic Park news story of all time?
*equivocating a little to make the analogy work
Damn, people are panicking about the great bug die-off, and we can’t even make that work for us by eliminating the worst bug?
It should be noted that most of that study’s authors disagree with its conclusions, and have called for its retraction.
From the article:
This only raises a lot more questions, especially since six out of ten is almost a “Shiri’s Scissors” for researchers.
Either way, this alleviates some, but not all of my concern for releasing mosquitos with transgenes into the wild.
Let’s talk a bit about sideboards in Magic. Sideboards are for dealing with exotic threats, things outside of normal combat. If the opponent is fielding something really unusual, you pull cards in from the sideboard in games two and three of a match.
My thinking is that for a combat-geared deck, the exotic threats you need to be able to destroy are artifacts, enchantments, lands, unusually powerful creatures (possibly with special abilities,) and fliers.
To this end the sideboard of my elementals deck includes these cards:
4 Return to Nature (artifacts, enchantments)
4 Tectonic Rift (lands)
4 Reduce to Ashes (unusually powerful creatures)
The remaining three cards are basic lands, whatever I’m worried about having too little of (currently 3 forests.) I’m not including any cancel spells, because I’m not in blue (this is an RG deck.) I’m also not including anything special to deal with fliers. The plan for fliers is to ignore them if they are puny, destroy them with the 2-damage ability of Chandra, Novice Pyromancer if they are medium sized, or sideboard in Reduce to Ashes if they are big.
Thoughts?
Whether there are any lands worth spending a card to destroy is very meta dependent, especially since wizards doesn’t print very efficient land destruction. I don’t think that by and large the castles are worth running a tectonic rift for, though possibly the black one will turn out to be. Maybe mobilized district? It was probably worth it to run something for Search for Azcanta, though that set came with field of ruin to accomplish the task.
Also, sideboarding in a basic land because you didn’t find enough of the color seems like falling prey to bias and not taking a long enough view of statistics. You really just want sideboard cards to help you with specific matches. If running an extra basic helps versus a specific deck, I’d be surprised.
What about running card draw for some grindier matches? Something like the new red instant draw 2?
And maybe if you ran that new red adventure knight who kills artifacts you could cut 1 or two return to nature?
In general, I think you’ve got it. What stands out to me is including basic lands in your sideboard, and considering lands as something to target.
The most important aspect of a sideboard is that you can add cards to your deck after you know what your opponent is playing. Your land base should be set up irrespective of what your opponent is playing. If you are worried about having too little of something, you should have that set up already in your mainboard.
Now, I haven’t played in quite a while, but do lands really qualify as a particular threat worth side-boarding against? I honestly don’t know.
Finally, one use of the sideboard that you didn’t touch on in your post is sideboarding against specific decks/strategies (as opposed to general categories). If you know your meta (and sideboards are usually most relevant in competitions) you should know which match ups are unfavorable and can include cards in your sideboard specifically against them. However, in practice, this might not look different from what you’re already doing.
Here’s what he might be facing. I forgot field of dead. Maybe blasting zone.
This is only kind of the case. A better way to view sideboards is: this is how my deck will respond to the meta. A sideboard, way more than your base deck, is going to change based on which decks other people are playing.
Crucially, however, your sideboard should only bring in answers to questions that your deck needs to answer. If you’re playing RG elementals, your game plan is likely go wide with as many elementals as possible, right? With this kind of deck, do you need to answer an unusually powerful creature? 4x Reduce to ashes means that you’ll have 4 very expensive cards in your deck that do nothing to meaningfully advance your game plan. Instead, what about something like Savage Smash or Collision/colossus? They are way cheaper than Reduce to Ashes, acomplish similar goals and are more oriented towards your overall plan?
It’s probably also not worth running Tectonic Rift, frankly. The only deck that currently abuses land mechanics are ones based around Field of the Dead. But, that deck is hyper-focused on drawing and playing as many lands as possible; you might get my first field of the dead, but I’ll have my second and third on the field before you can draw and play your second and third copies of the rift.
No, actually the plan is to ramp. I’ll use Embercats and Leafkin Druids to boost mana production, bring on big fighters (Thicket Crashers, Lavakin Brawlers, Fire Elementals, and Vorstclaws) using the extra mana, and then sprint to the finish using the activated ability of Living Twister. There are some planeswalkers too that I won’t get into.
I’ll be trying this iteration of the deck for the first time on Saturday.
I think you need a bit better of a top end than vanilla creatures without haste if you’re on the ramp plan. I’d suggest either getting some of the elemental knights or switching to the go wide plan.
Do you have rythym of the Wilds? Could be useful for winning out of nowhere. Might be hard to find a time to cast it.
(Disclaimer: this may be a bit more advanced than what Johan is aiming for, but I bring it up because of the cool game theory implications)
One of the most fascinating aspects of having sideboards in the game is the option of a fundamental change in strategy. Consider a grindy control deck full of counterspells, wraths of god, and reactive stuff, with just a handful of victory conditions (let’s say a single Teferi, Hero of Dominaria). One of the advantages of playing this archetype against your average deck is that the opponent will often end up with useless removal – any Terror or similar card they draw will have no valid targets. So, going into game 2, the control deck’s opponent will want to minimize this effect, and remove all their terrors for more generally useful stuff, like additional creatures. They are using the sideboard to adapt, not to what their opponent has in their deck, but to what they are missing. This is pretty cool already, but it gets better. Suppose the control player is expecting this, and gets from their sideboard a bunch of expensive, powerful creatures that can provide a great advantage if unanswered but are otherwise weak to removal. Now the control player’s opponent has been put at a disadvantage twice: first for having too much removal, then for having too little!
Now, imagine that the match goes to the third game. What should each player do? There is no clear optimal strategy for either player, so the solution will have to involve guessing, bluffing, randomizing, or a bit of each.
OK, suppose I adjust, and go with these 15 cards instead:
3 Return to Nature (artifacts, enchantments)
3 Plummet (fliers)
3 Infuriate (combat trick)
3 Reduce to Ashes (powerful removal)
3 Destructive Digger (card draw)
Is this better? It’s covering a lot of possible cases, though none in great depth.
I played RG aggro in previous standards, so here’s an overly long post about it.
To make a good sideboard, you need to consider what’s a threat to your game plan and how to deal with them. For example, as an aggro deck, there are things you don’t need to deal with simply because you can kill the opponent before they matter. A lot of artifacts and enchantments fall into this category, as do nearly all lands. Further, playing a pure answer card like Return to Nature works against your strategy of piling on threats, so you’d better be sure that it’s worth it. Consider instead Cindervines, which deals damage to your opponent while also giving you an out to a problem artifact or enchantment. Or cards like Thrashing Brontodon, Embereth Shieldbreaker, or Opportunistic Dragon, which come with a body in addition to the removal.
As for big creatures, Reduce to Ashes is far too inefficient. A 4-damage burn spell like Lava Coil or Slaying Fire would be much better, or Collision // Colossus if there’s a particular big flier that’s a problem. You should be prepared to burn a large creature twice if needed to get damage through. An alternative is to sideboard in Act of Treason, which can clear out a blocker and smack them in the face with it. Or maybe Smelt-Ward Ignus since it’s an elemental.
You also haven’t considered the control matchup. After sideboarding, they usually bring in more creature removal, hoping to simply kill all your stuff and win the long game. You’ll want to bring in cards that attack the game from a different angle and help you go longer. These are cards like Experimental Frenzy or Chandra, Awakened Inferno. Shifting Ceratops is another good anti-control card, as it has protection from blue and can have haste to immediately get in for 5 after a sweeper.
One other category of sideboard cards is graveyard hate. I don’t know if there’s currently a standard deck that’s heavily graveyard-based, but if there is, cards like Loaming Shaman and Grafdigger’s Cage can put a stop to that. Exiling burn like Lava Coil and Scorching Dragonfire can also help here.
You might have noticed that packing all these considerations into 15 cards is essentially impossible, so you’ll have to prioritize some things over others. It’s mostly a matter of feeling out what people are actually playing, and what actually needs to be dealt with vs what can be ignored because it’s too slow. And the only way to do this is to play a bunch of games against people and adjust your sideboard accordingly.
As a further example of my ‘swing voters do indeed exist’ contention here’s an essay by Kevin Doyle: With Democratic and Republican flaws, party registration comes down to a coin toss
which I’ll quote some of:
So the guy is clearly interested in politics but feels alienated by much of the platforms of our two major parties, and since whether among the Republican leaning or the Democratic leaning full Party platform supporters are a minority of voters, and if we include non-voters they’re an even smaller minority, I strongly suspect that he’s far from alone.
Given our constitutional arrangement the U.S.A. just doesn’t have viable third-parties for long, and in the ’80’s and earlier there was just plain more ideological diversity within both parties (you’d find some elected Democrats that were to the ‘Right’ of some elected Republicans, and some elected Republicans to the ‘Left’ of some elected Democrats to a far greater extent than today) with both parties seeming to me to becoming more ideologically ‘pure’ with ‘DINO’s’ and ‘RINO’s’ being primaries away. While it could be my ‘outgroup appears a monolith bias’ (or whatever the right term is, but I think you get what I mean) to me Republicans seem to have less ‘heretic’ supporters than Democrats (but they’re a smaller Party so I’d expect that) as the majority of registered Republicans polled say they want their Party to be more “conservative” while most Democrats say they want their Party to be more “moderate”, despite that Democrats, both candidates and voters are moving ‘Left’…
…aw Hell, I’m not really sure if I even have an overall point, to me all that indicates that the proportion of the eligible electorate that are non-voters should be going up not down, but the 2018 mid term elections had way higher than usual turnout, maybe you have some ideas?
Do people not believe swing voters exist? This comes as a surprise to me because I’ve been one and most of my friends have been swing voters most of my life. This is what happens when the road of your life winds through parts of Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania… I’ve often thought that if I persuaded a fairly small number of people I could have conceivably flipped several presidential elections. I’d say I’ve personally known dozens of people each election who could have gone either way (though not always the same people).
I do have to say I had a distinctly unpleasant experience of politics. To name one incident (with the names changed), I once saw an initiative to reach out to rural voters start talking about them in meeting one and then in meeting 2 decide the money was best spent reaching rural voters by… funding more inner-city activists who would work in inner cities. Despite the committee being named the Rural Outreach Group, they all insisted this had always been their intention and that naming it the Rural Outreach Group had been a mistake. They understood how I could be confused by the name since I was inexperienced and all. The meeting ended with them changing the name. Pure Orwell: we have always been at war with East Asia.
Anyway, I’m not sure I have a point but I have a sentiment I can express at least. In theory people like me, and the people I talk to and influence (even on a relatively large scale!) should be some of the most courted voters. The swing votes in the swing states. Yet I (and everyone I know who is like me) feels very poorly served by both parties. I feel there must be something to do but I’m not sure what it is.
A party needs to swing the swing voters without alienating everyone else. The fact that you feel poorly served by both parties is what makes you a swing voter. If there was some easy way to bring you and a bunch of people like you into one or the other coalitions without tipping the apple cart it would been done already. That’s why pork, patronage and the like are so attractive–they come for “free” in terms of pissing anyone else off (at least up to a threshold).
This does explain why so many people are completely uninterested in my priorities. They really want to know how they can convince me I’m totally wrong and need to start agreeing with them. What’s I found strange is they spend a lot of money doing this and don’t seem to ever stumble across, “Make policy that suits their priorities.” But perhaps you’ve found the reason.
My mental model has always been that you sacrifice the middle for the extreme in the primary. Then, having won the primary, you move to the center because the extreme people are not going to switch camps and are most easily driven by fear of the other party. The centrists are not and so you need to appeal to them which is why we see relatively little in the primaries and then get almost all of the visits/money in the generals.
This is true, but you also didn’t have democrats that were anywhere near as far left as the current democrats. Overall, I think you had lower diversity (in the sense of range of opinions in the overton window) for the political system as a whole, even though the parties were less sorted out.
The direction of politics the last decade has been towards partisanship and ideological purity, and the next decade doesn’t look to be very different. Trump was a theoretical chance for a break, but he was never playing 12-dimensional chess and cannot expand the Overton window.
It’s not that swing voters don’t exist, it’s that swing voters are a much smaller portion of the electorate than you might think. Self-described moderate and self-described independent voters still tend to be pretty aligned along partisan dimensions and don’t really cross-vote all that much. You also have moderates that aren’t really moderate along all dimensions: banning abortion, like the author wants, is never going to be a Democratic consensus position, and it’s not going to be tolerated in the party leader.
You have lots of moderate voters like that, who are really more a collection of various extreme positions that cancel each other on a line graph, but don’t really allow you to fit in a political party.
If there was an easy way to get the swing voters, the parties would have already gotten the swing voters.
And as a voter, you have to compromise, and decide what’s most important to you. If you really think abortion is murder but you like the rest of the Democratic platform, you have to make a choice if you think universal health care and anti-racism is worth supporting baby killers. Sorry, but them’s the breaks. If you want your views to have more clout, then you need to convince more people and more judges to follow your views.
FWIW, I’m not certain there are any actual conservatives involved in major media outlets these days. My read is that Coulter and Carlson are people who have learned that they can make a lot of money saying what people want to hear. I also think that this is a driving factor behind Fox News as a network.
So, you’re assuming, based on your “read”, that your political opponents are just liars lying for money, or low-IQ dupes who listen to the liars? That’s a fascinating and novel take. Thanks for your important contribution.
I disagree with your assessment on several accounts.
First, I don’t really consider them political opponents. Ideologically, in unable to stay a libertarian and if forced to choose, I’d probably be on “their side”, but whatever.
Secondly, I’m referring to the specific media outlets and “personalities” involved. I’d *much* rather see people of William F. Buckley Jr.’s capacity arguing than the selection available on television right now.
Third, I don’t think that any of the people involved are “low-IQ dupes”. Indeed, I suspect that Trump was elected in-part as a thumb in the eye of the people who kept talking a good game but were failing to deliver. I don’t have to agree with people in order to respect them!
Fourth, telling people what they want to hear is not the same as telling a lie, though I will grant you my phrasing was unclear. Nobody doubts that the Wall Street Journal giving people business news (which is why people bought it) means that they are lying. It does mean that there is a focus on a particular type of news and editorial content, which is what the buyers want. That these personalities or outlets provide content from a certain viewpoint doesn’t make them lying. To the extent that they claim to hold a certain viewpoint and don’t actually hold that viewpoint I do consider them to be lying. To the extent that they would rather cash in rather than advance the cause they claim to support, I consider that crass. Much like a punk band “selling out”. Do you consider such a band to truly be “punk” anymore, even if they still play the same music?
Related to some of the discussion in the previous thread:
Zillow says that 5 year ARMs now have a (ever so slighly) higher APR than 30 year locked in mortgages do, and that 3 year ARMs have been above the 30 year bond for almost 6 months with some pretty wide spreads, and 7 year ARMs are below the 30 year but above the 15 year mortgages. One interpretation of this is that the market is expecting mortgage rates to be significantly lower in 3 years and not climb back to the current level for 5+ years, but should make it there by year 7.
That is a hell of a forecast.
We have been trending that way for quite some time now. Betting on past trends continuing is a solid baseline. I hope its not true though, I just locked in a 3.5% mortgage and would love to sit on it while making more on the money that I invest.
I’d interpret it as the market having basically no idea. I’m not sure how anyone could predict anything past the election with Elizabeth (Wealth Tax) Warren in play.
It is free advertising. Wallstreet being above the law is Not Popular.
Did Sanders have a chance before this? Seemed like if he wasn’t the obvious front runner from the get go he wouldn’t be relevant. He is no longer the left wing or the anti establishment candidate, and he doesn’t have the ‘he just needs exposure’ situation either.
Agreed that he had no chance, but he could nonetheless have gotten a large enough percentage of diehard leftists to split the left wing vote with Warren and thus make it easier for a moderate to get the nomination. If Warren is the only diehard leftist alternative out there, that split gets less likely.
Betting markets had him around ~8% chance of winning the nomination before today, and a few weeks ago it was as high as 15%. Today he’s down to 5%.
Moving over from the last open thread to continue the Biden/Ukraine question.
There seems to be a major disagreement over whether Hunter Biden benefited from Biden’s pressure to fire Shokin.
This NY Times article from May 2019 seems to suggest he did, before the implications included impeachment proceedings.
Specifically:
Considering that the NY Times is anti-Trump and pro-impeachment-at-any-cost, their previous reporting on this issue, when the full implications were still unknown, about facts which support the pro-Trump narrative, should be given a tremendous amount of weight.
And from later on down that same article you posted:
Yes, but I’m addressing the question of whether Hunter Biden was objectively helped by the firing, not whether Biden intended to help his son.
Here’s a Radio Free Europe quoting Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Activists:
(Source)
Edited because the last version had missing words:
In the end, there was likely no effect either way for Hunter. If Shokin wasn’t fired, Burisma wouldn’t have been investigated and even after Shokin was fired, Burisma still wasn’t seriously investigated.
The NY Times of May 2019 disagrees with you, but I suspect the NY Times of October 2019 is in full agreement. Please forgive me if I dont put much weight into the opinions of Ukrainian anti-corruption activists. I know nothing about them.
I would also like to add that assuming everything you say is correct, specifically, Biden acted perfectly innocently, and Hunter/Burisma was not really under threat of investigation at the time, Hunter Biden still benefited from his dad getting Shokin fired.
The reason is simple, and serves as a lesson why having VP’s sons sell their influence to foreign companies is a bad idea, and why having VPs telling other countries which prosecutors to fire is a bad idea.
Imagine you’re Shokin’s successor. Are you going to bring a case against a company whose board has a member whose dad can get you fired? Probably not, and indeed, Shokin’s successor dropped all charges against Burisma 10 months after being named. Maybe that’s because Burisma is totally in compliance with the spirit and letter of the law, like all Ukrainian gas companies. I dont know.
But I certainly dont blame Trump for finding the whole thing stinks and wanting to know more.
I think we can both agree on the first part. On the second part, the inarguable fact is that Shokin was deeply corrupt and doing serious damage to Ukraine’s ability to grow economically and deal with foreign investors. It’s not unreasonable for the leader of one country to make a plea for change in the government of another; when the two countries are allies with shared national interests, as in the case of the US and Ukraine (re: Russia), it’s very reasonable. Ultimately, the decision to remove Shokin came from the Ukrainian parliament, not any individual Ukrainian government official.
Even if Trump’s interest in finding out what happened to Shokin is genuine, it doesn’t change the following facts:
1) The Trump administration withheld Congressionally-mandated aid to Ukraine before/while Trump was making this request;
2) The Ukrainian government was made to understand by the White House that cooperation with Giuliani was necessary for the resumption of aid;
3) That in forcing the Ukrainian government to cooperate with AG Barr and his personal fixer Giuliani Trump was receiving valuable information about a political rival;
4) Subsequent to this demand being made, the records were (possibly illegally) hidden from all but the highest-ranking national security personnel.
At the very least, Trump exploited his powers of office to commit extortion against one of our allies to get something of value to help him in his reelection campaign. There’s no way out of that, regardless of what anyone named Biden might have done in the past.
I certainly dont blame Trump for finding the whole thing stinks and wanting to know more.
so how do you feel about Democrats demanding some transparency into the Trump businesses, and those of the Trump children?
Small point of order: I don’t think this is actually the case. If they were our allies we’d have boots on the ground fighting little green men alongside them. Friends, sure. Maybe desired allies but I don’t think anyone wants to stick their neck that far into Russia’s backyard.
(Is this relevant? Would it actually be worse if Trump put the squeeze on e.g. Portugal? To both: maybe a little, but not substantially 🙂 )
This implies that blocking the aid was illegal, but I have seen no such accusation. Is that your assertion?
I am aware of no evidence for this other than the transcript, which does not support it to my reading. Calling this a fact is stretching the term dramatically.
This is true, but only insofar as knowing that a rival broke the law is valuable. If this is a bad thing, then the Mueller investigation being championed by Democrats is bad.
My understanding is this was relatively standard with Trump transcripts because he had already been hurt by politically motivated leaks of phone calls.
The NYTimes and Buzzfeed have both reported that the Ukrainians were unaware that the funding was on hold until a month after the July 25th phone call.
It seems that this fact sharply undercuts the inference at point 2.
@Chalid
According to Wikipedia, all the Trump children except Baron are currently under investigation by DA’s in New York and the District of Columbia, heavily liberal areas.
Donald Trump Jr is under investigation for two cases of potential fiscal crimes: potential fund raising/donation misconduct related to the inauguration and potential hush payments to Michael Cohen.
Ivanka Trump is also under investigation for misconduct with inauguration funds.
Eric Trump is also under investigation for misconduct with inauguration funds and for potential misuse of charity funds.
The norm, which deserves to be upheld, is that family members who stay out of the public eye should be left alone; that’s probably why Tiffany Trump isn’t under investigation and why things around Ivanka have quieted down. Donald Trump Jr is firmly in the public eye, so he deserves hardball. Hunter Biden looks like he fell into the public eye; he’s definitely less deserving than Trump Jr is for hardball but more than Eric unless Eric is doing something crazy I don’t know about.
@blipnickels
None of those are for things analogous to the Hunter Biden issue. Trump has a vast array of opportunities to help his own and his children’s businesses and is allowing essentially no oversight or transparency. Bluntly, there is a ton of opportunity for corruption there, on a much grander scale than a mere $50k/month, and the politicians who claim to be most concerned about the hint of a possibility that something untoward might have happened with Biden are, of course, the same ones that resist oversight of the Trump businesses.
Surely a concern with the possible impropriety of the really fairly narrow intersection of Biden’s political activities with his son’s business interests should be paired with a far greater concern for the activities of the Trump family?
@Chalid
Honestly, it all sounds like “personal relatives of powerful people using social status and connections to engage in unseemly behavior for personal enrichment”. Which is hardly unique to the Bidens or the Trumps and a legitimate concern in solving it would start with much bigger metaphorical criminals.
But on the key point, of politically targeted investigations of personal family members, that’s a broken norm at this point and not an effective threat against conservatives or Trump. No one is confused why the NY DA is investigating Eric Trump when Wall Street is, you know, right there.
Totally legitimate, and I wish Ivanka and Jared Kushner were kept as far away from government as possible.
If we’re doing that here now, a clarification:
Per the relevant State Department classification guide, transcripts of conversations with foreign heads of state are normally classified CONFIDENTIAL, the least restrictive category. It may be appropriate to classify specific conversations/transcripts at a higher level, but the way that was done here was extremely sloppy at the very least. The classifying authority is supposed to go through the source document paragraph-by-paragraph, separately determining and marking the appropriate classification level for each, and then set the headers, footers, and cover sheets to the highest included classification level. See, for example, the linked classification guide, marked “CONFIDENTIAL” but with most of the paragraphs having a “(U)” in front of them and some paragraphs redacted. Those would be the ones with the “(C)” markings. Or go browse through wikileaks to see this extended up through (S) and (TS).
Even if every single paragraph is appropriately classified SECRET, you can’t just put the SECRET header and footer on the page, you still need the (S) in front of each paragraph.
If the reason you didn’t do that is, A: the Boss wants to cut down on the number of potential whistleblowers with access to the stuff that could embarrass or incriminate him and, B: putting an (S) in front of just those paragraphs would make it too obvious what you are doing and why, then you’ve just gone and done yourself a federal crime. One normally difficult to prove, but if you’ve got whistleblowing eyewitnesses and intemperate conspirators, not impossible. Certainly cause for investigation.
That’s a very good analysis. Thank you.
Have you ever seen a SCG that allows for the classifier to remain anonymous? I suppose I wouldn’t be shocked if certain agencies worked that way (or more realistically, redacted the identity on declassification) but every one I’ve personally seen does the opposite and there are obvious good reasons why.
There has to be an identified classification authority, but I’m not sure it has to be a named human person rather than an office. Still, you’re right that the degree of obfuscation is another suspicious point here.
If it’s just someone being lazy, which is far from unheard of in the security-classification business, then they’re being lazy in the way that makes them look like a crook or a spy, so enjoy the well-earned investigation and the explaining to your boss why he got dragged into your investigation.
One fact I’m curious to learn is whether the White House staff classified a few calls or started classifying broad groups of calls. The first would support an inference that the staff found those particular calls potentially embarrassing or criminal, the second would be somewhat less alarming.
JohnShilling – what’s the crime?
The government story about this – that the administration was frustrated by the leak of earlier calls with Mexico and Australia strikes me as at least plausible. Plenty of people have gotten frustrated with leak culture, and I have a hard time seeing the person who leaked those two transcripts to the Post as a “whistleblower” – the main purpose seems to be that some staffer had access to them and wanted to embarass Trump.
It is a crime to overclassify data, especially to avoid personal or political embarrassment. It is basically never prosecuted, but it is a crime.
Thanks – do you have the statute or a reference?
Among others(*), 28 CFR § 17.22 (d): “Information shall not be classified in order to conceal inefficiency, violations of law, or administrative error; to prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency; to restrain competition; or to prevent or delay release of information that does not require protection in the interest of national security.” Lumped in with all the other mishandling-classified-information stuff, so technically a felony good for mumble-something years in prison.
As EC says, almost never prosecuted because almost everyone who does it is smart enough to do it in a reasonable-doubty way, but it can at least end careers if it’s sufficiently blatant. And this case looks almost like someone said “It’s unpossible to be actually prosecuted for a § 17.22 (d) violation!” and someone else said “Hold my beer”.
* There are I believe several different statutes for different classifying authorities, but they all say pretty much the same thing.
Thanks.
The best case I can imagine for Trump is:
1) Somebody leaked the Mexico and Australia transcripts, presumably with the intent of embarrassing the President (and certainly with the effect).
2) That also had the (presumably unintended) effect of harming the national interest, because it’s difficult for foreign leaders to speak frankly if they don’t have an expectation of privacy.
3) The Trump admin restricted access to the letters in order to prevent both (1) and (2) in the future.
There’s three good reasons to investigate Hunter Biden and believe Joe Biden may have, perhaps inadvertently, helped his son and his son’s client.
First, it just looks really bad. Hunter Biden was on the board without a really good reason to be there, his father used US government power to get the prosecutor fired, and the succeeding prosecutor dropped all charges a year later.
Second, the (at the time) General Prosecutor of the Ukraine publicly said that Joe Biden had done so. This is specifically referenced in page 5 of the whistle blower’s complaint. I think this is the article the whistle blower is referring to but I can’t be sure.
Third, the Ukraine situation is really confusing. For example, there’s claims among Ukranian anti-corruption activists that Shokin was universally regarded as corrupt and soft on Burisma, but one of Shokin’s first acts was to raid a leading anti-corruption group, claiming they had misappropriated aid funds. Or that a month before Biden’s threat, a sniper tried to assassinate Shokin. I’m not saying that Biden tried to have Shokin killed (clearly it was the Pleiades), but it’s just really weird. Ukraine looks like a corrupt oligarchy with a lot of brutal internal conflicts that outsiders don’t really understand. A lot of investigation would be required just to put the events in a reasonable context.
Regardless of whether Joe Biden actually did anything inappropriate or whether Trump conducted himself appropriately, some kind of investigation seems warranted.
Except, he did have a good reason to be there. The reason was, Burisma wanted someone with a high profile in Washington to advance their interests. Hunter Biden was a lobbyist with a famous last name and could give them the profile they wanted. It isn’t particularly great feature of our democracy that we function this way, but.. thems the breaks. See also: every retired congressman/senator now working as a lobbyist ever.
So, this is (to me) really interesting. I’m going to make a top-level effort post about it above. Suffice to say, this is correct, but not accurate, if that makes sense.
Eh, the easiest rule of thumb when considering Ukraine is that everyone’s corrupt and whenever anyone says they’re going after corruption, they are probably telling the truth… but with the unspoken rule that the only reason that the enforcement can be bribed away.
To more directly answer your question, the allegations I’ve seen against Shokin were that he would start a bunch of cases in a high profile way, then let them sit for a while while he solicited bribes to shelve the case. This explains why it looks like he was going after corruption but at the same time why corruption didn’t go away.
Sure, maybe. But why was the ambassador to the Ukraine with a known history of anticorruption fired and why was, of everyone on earth, Trump’s personal lawyer, one Rudy Giuliani the guy doing so?
Come on man, use occams razor. Which is more likely: Trump randomly got really, really interested in a specific country’s internal good governance practices and was so worried he used a high-profile non-government connected ally to investigate this? Or that he was shopping for election dirt?
You couldn’t give me odds on Biden right now. The only thing keeping him afloat, based on the polls I’ve seen, is fairly high (but likely soft) support amongst African-American voters who still loosely associate him with Obama. African-American voters in the Democratic primary have historically seemed pretty conservative (in some ways) and perhaps later breaking – for example, Hillary had high (but soft) support over Obama in 2008 based presumably on nostalgia for Bill Clinton (“first black President”) right up until Obama was seen as viable, and then the African-American vote catapulted almost entirely to Obama in a fast cascade.
ETA: Clarifying line re Clinton.
Articles about how much Wall Street hates Warren will only help her, frankly.
Agreed. I always understood those to be either planted or supported by Warren’s supporters. She’s still fighting the Dem field; having the right enemies can only help her with Dem primary voters.
Jim Cramer’s one of the big promoters of this meme, and he probably isn’t a Warren supporter. He’s definitely a moron, though.
No planting required, Wall Street is just that tone deaf as regards their own supreme unpopularity.
In the spirit of the expunged BLM-Libertarian thread, and of things which I hope everyone is in favor of, ex-Officer Guyger was convicted of murder in the case where she went to the wrong apartment, allegedly believing it was her own and killed the resident.
Given the initial facts, it seemed likely to me that she would get off, but her testimony really did her in.
Things like “I went in expecting to kill someone” (paraphrased) were seriously bad state of mind even if she had the right apartment.
I am pleasantly surprised it was murder instead of manslaughter.
I have to wonder if Guyger would’ve gotten off if she’d been allowed to apply the Castle Doctrine in her favor.
This article says she was allowed to apply it and that jurors considered it, so apparently not.
Ah, I misread the article. Thanks for the correction – I haven’t been following this case.
As a person who has (once!) tried to enter an apartment that wasn’t mine by mistake (it was within the first week of having moved there, all the buildings were identical 4 unit buildings with the exact same layouts and stylings…I was one building off), I can sympathize with the mistake initially.
The problem for me, and part of the reason I suspect the castle doctrine was rejected, is that the first reaction to seeing the door slightly open should probably have been to look at the door number. Assuming the building followed any semblance of a typical numbering system she could have immediately noticed that she was at, say, 402 instead of 302, gone “oh, silly me”, gone down a flight of stairs and into her own residence. It additionally suggests that she fired immediately upon entering without taking any time to evaluate the situation or else she would have noticed that all the furniture and decor was wrong.
Additionally, as the defense apparently noted, in this case castle doctrine would have protected the victim, and it would create an extremely weird situation if the castle doctrine applied to both parties.
I once, having driven across the country to the state where I grew up, came out of a grocery store with my daughter and walked up to my rental car. I hit the key fob, heard the beep, and opened the door. Then this happened.
That’s not my flashlight
I don’t have any CDs in the car.
What the hell?
It probably took me 10-15 seconds to process that this was a nearly identical car (my rental had beeped nearby, and most people don’t lock their cars in the rural area I was visiting). The owner was coming out of the store right behind us and all I experienced was a mild embarrassment while I apologized and walked over to my rental.
So I can see something like this happening, except the part where, while processing what’s going on, she instantly pulled a gun and murdered the person she thought was in ‘her’ apartment.
Ok, I’ve done something like this twice, although the second time I think was even more understandable.
It was late, and I was taking an Uber home. I had an extra stop on the way to run into the store and grab some things. The car was a gray or dark silver Civic. It was dark, so it wasn’t especially easy to see inside the cars. Leaving the store, I walked up to an idling gray/silver Honda Civic (theoretically my Uber waiting to take me home) and jumped in the back seat…at which point I noticed “hey, the guy in the drivers seat is bald and my driver had very long dreads…” and immediately jumped out, mumbling what I’m sure was a nonsensical apology. My Uber driver was 3 cars over (and dying laughing).
How would that work? The castle doctrine says you can use force on people on your property if you have reason to believe there’s a danger to life, safety, or property. It wasn’t Guyger’s property. You can’t break into a home and then shoot someone else for coming into it and claim you were ‘defending’ the home you were in illegally. You need to be lawfully occupying the premises, which Guyger was not. She was trespassing.
(Yes, you can accidentally trespass: the intentional part of the statute just means you have to intentionally enter. It means that if you tied me up and threw me over someone’s fence I wouldn’t be trespassing because at no point did I intend to enter the property. If I entered a place I didn’t know I couldn’t enter without trespassing, I still intentionally walked onto the property and so can be charged.)
I’m not aware of any case that allows you to defend what you believe to be your property even if you’re wrong. That seems hilariously open to abuse. (“Officer, the castle doctrine said I could shoot her! I know she was a random woman behind the bar but I thought this was my house!”)
Likewise, stand your ground (a separate but related law) just means you don’t need to retreat. If someone is attacking you, then you can use force in self-defense without needing to try and run away first. So it wouldn’t have covered her either. It would have covered her if she remained by the door and then Botham had come out and attacked her. But that is clearly not what happened.
But she said she believed she was lawfully occupying it. Just as if I live in a duplex and don’t realize that the interjoining part is in fact not my property, I can still defend it.
Note that the jury didn’t believe her.
No more abusive than anything else. You still have to convince a jury that you genuinely believed that. If you say that you believe a random street behind a bar is your house you aren’t going to convince them of that.
Just as Stand Your Ground requires you to convince a jury of an actual belief of danger. You can’t just say “Well, I thought that three year old girl was a danger” and skate. Laws aren’t magic.
You can only do that because you are occupying that interjoining part legally. If you were not, then no, that wouldn’t work. Likewise, I can defend your house if I’ve been invited in because my occupation of the property is legal despite not believing that I own your house. However, if I believe I’m on my property and I’m actually on your property and we shoot at each other then I have committed a crime and you haven’t.
Whether she honestly believed she was in her own apartment is immaterial. I believe the defense made this case but it was correctly rejected.
Stand your ground doesn’t require you to prove that there is some nebulous sense of danger. It requires you to prove that you were specifically in danger in a way that violence would resolve. A reasonable person has to believe under the circumstances that violence will prevent imminent harm. You can’t say, “I thought that three-year-old girl was threatening.” You have to say something like, “That three-year-old girl charged me and I couldn’t see what was in her hand.” You don’t have to convince them of your sincere belief, you have to convince them that your belief was justified. They can find you sincerely thought something but that you were wrong.
@Erusian
That does not appear to be what the judge in this case ruled. He specifically said that the Castle Doctrine should be considered by the jury.
The jury does not make determinations of law (should the Castle Doctrine be considered), but determinations of fact (did she in fact act appropriately within that statute).
Reasonable person is exactly what I was saying there. A jury decides the “a reasonable person would believe X in this situation” question. Same question here.
Unless there is caselaw that says “castle doctrine does not apply when you are mistaken,” letting the jury decide is the right thing to do.
1. If there were case law, the prosecution should have cited it.
2. If the jury had acquitted based on that, we would likely have gotten the court-of-appeals to formally decide if it applies or not.
I wonder if “have you ever entered the wrong residence by mistake” was one of the questions during jury selection.
Just because a doctrine is applicable doesn’t mean its elements are satisfied. That appears to have been the case here. Castle Doctrine, according to the report, was instructed to the jury; the jury found she did not meet the elements of the doctrine and convicted her. So your hypothetical seems to have been answered – you can try the Castle Doctrine on the girl behind the bar, maybe it will get instructed (though if it’s that bad it probably fails on the “no reasonable jury” standard), and then you’ll get convicted for murder because you don’t meet the elements.
Fair point and a more clear statement of my own. I don’t object to the jurors being asked to consider it and I think their decision was correct. But it was a weird line for the defense to take.
If I were the defense attorney I would probably try it, too. Not that it would work, but I wouldn’t have a lot to work with to start, so I might as well try.
This statement strikes me as odd.
She didn’t shoot him as a police officer. She shot him as a private citizen. While I do think she should be punished for her actions, I don’t see how it relates to officer misconduct on the job.
On another note, it’s unclear to me how this would be murder. Manslaughter, obviously, but I don’t see the mens rea here.
Eh, she came into the situation expecting violence. Upon seeing her door ajar there are a million things should could have chosen to do. She could have called the police, called out for help, left, whatever.
Instead she drew her weapon and entered the apartment looking to confront the guy directly.
I thought manslaughter, too, but the prosector’s cross-exam got her to admit, more or less, that she went in there looking to kill whoever was there.
Even if it were her own apartment, it could have been the maintenance guy.
But she did it in uniform, and the distinction between an on-duty cop and an off-duty cop still in uniform is basically nil both in terms of how they are perceived by other people (how would they know she or any other officer is off-duty) and in terms of the authority they have (police officers can perform police actions like arresting people and the like even when off-duty, as I understand it). It also appears she may have presented her entrance to the apartment as the actions of a police officer as she was entering.
I think some of her testimony pretty strongly suggested that she opened the door fully planning on shooting, which might be enough (and the sequence of events suggests that this is exactly what happened). I don’t know if negligence or recklessness can be considered for a murder charge but both would certainly also qualify if so.
Ah, I overlooked the part of her still being in uniform. That does change things. And upon further reflection, this probably does rise to the level of depraved indifference, since, as Edward notes, for all she knows it could be a repairman for the apartment complex.
Still unsure of the racial angle, as it sounds like she had already made the decision to kill before even knowing who he was.
I would guess it is just a matter of generally fitting the “black person shot by police officer” thing. I think there is also probably a perception (can’t speak to how true it is, but it isn’t a totally unreasonable one for some groups to hold) that in the past “the system” would have found a way to protect the white shooting officer from serious charges for shooting the black man, and if you operate under that belief then this is certainly a case that bucks that trend.
As far as whether race was a factor in this instance, it is probably unknowable for anyone other than Guyger (and Guyger might not even really know herself) in the sense that if her first glimpse had been of a white man maybe she waits that extra second before she pulls the trigger (or maybe not, like I said, this one is pretty much unknowable and which way you lean depends heavily on your priors).
Most of the time, I’d expect the system to protect the cop from suffering consequences even when she does something awful. I wonder why that didn’t work out here–is it just that her actions were so awful they were beyond defending, or she didn’t stick to the “I was in fear for my life because reasons and I thought I saw him reach for a gun” script? Or is this an actual change.
Like most contentious police shootings I hear or read about, it doesn’t sound much like the world is made better by this woman being in prison for the next several years, but she absolutely should never have been a police officer.
It is also worth noting that Texas does not distinguish 1st degree/2nd degree murder. If they did, it would almost certainly have been 2nd degree in her case.
I pretty much agree with this, with one caveat (maybe it shouldn’t even be manslaughter??? but maybe it should be murder???) which is related to what you said above as well:
Somewhat related to what matt says:
.
One of the ways I like to think about these things is imagining myself in this sutiation and trying to imagine myself making the same decisions, and see if any of those decisions throw a big error. And my train of decision making differs from hers at a different point than Matts:
She thinks her apartment has been broken into, and she thinks the person who did it is still in there. At this point, she is not directly in any danger. She doesn’t have to go in there. She can turn around and walk away and call the police. She chose to put herself in danger by doing so. I certainly wouldn’t make that decision, even if I were armed. I would very much prefer not getting into a gunfight to the alternative, even if I were to win said gunfight. IDK if that’s enough for mens rea, but maybe it’s something?
On the other hand, however, the alternative I was suggesting involves leaving and calling the police, that dealing with this kind of problem is someone else’s responsibility and not mine, unless absolutely necessary, or something like that. But she is a police officer herself. This kind of thing is her responsibility. In that case, the decision of going in does kind of make sense.
I don’t know. Like Nabil below me says, this is actually a hard case, and I have a bit of a hard time wrapping my brain around it and deciding the right thing.
I think at the very least, her decision was imprudent. One of the first rules of clearing a building from a military perspective is “you can’t clear a building alone.” You can’t watch your own back, and there are a lot of nooks and crannies. You don’t ever want to go looking for an armed person in a building on your own*.
Generally, if she thought there was an intruder she should have called for backup, and since she was off-duty, probably shouldn’t have participated at all. However, there may have been a pride angle to this, as calling her colleagues to clear her own apartment could have opened her up to teasing from her coworkers. That doesn’t excuse doing something tactically stupid and killing a man because of it, but it could at least explain why she didn’t do the obvious thing.
There’s also been something of a bias for action in police circles in the past few decades. This explains the asterisk above. It started after Columbine, where the police got raked over the coals for waiting for enough people to “properly” clear the building during the shooting, reinforced by that deputy in Florida who also waited outside during the Stoneman Douglas shooting and lost his job.
Of course, a mass shooting event is different from most instances where an office would be called on to clear a building, where the shooter will generally suck-start his own weapon as soon as he sees an armed officer. Also, the screaming and shooting often gives you a good idea of where the bad guy (singular) is. If you’re, say, looking for a robber in a house though, that robber is very possibly going to wait in a dark corner and waylay you to try to escape, and there may very well be more than one working as a team to ambush you. If there’s nobody in danger, there’s no reason whatsoever to go in alone, and it’s TV Cop Cowboy nonsense to try.
At the very least, she’s was either terribly trained or the training didn’t take.
It’s a very weird case even putting aside the racial angle.
Homeowners (and renters) should be allowed to shoot trespassers. So if Jean had shot Officer Guyger when she mistakenly burst into his apartment it would be totally uncontroversial for me. Likewise if Officer Guyger had gone to her apartment instead of his and Jean had actually been an intruder, I wouldn’t have any trouble.
The fact that she was mistaken and went into the wrong apartment is what makes it hard to wrap my brain around. Obviously she had no right to shoot a man for being in his own apartment, so a sentence of some kind is called for. But it doesn’t feel right to call it murder either, because if she had been right about the apartment number there would have been nothing wrong with what she did. It feels like legal and moral bad luck.
It’s unclear to me that, even if it had been her apartment and he was in there by mistake, she would be justified in shooting him. The castle doctrine makes sense when applied to someone breaking into your residence while you or others are in it. It makes less sense when the person is already inside an otherwise empty residence and you are outside, as there is no immediate threat of harm to your person. Calling in an on-duty police officer would be the more reasonable course of action.
Imo, the law should view leaving someone to ransack your home as morally supererogatory. Yes, you can get away and alert the police to come and resolve it–your life may not strictly be in danger in the way it would be if you were trapped in your home while it was invaded. But that means an increase in robbery, which means an increase in the homeowners being physically harmed by home invaders.
Nah, this goes beyond luck, into recklessness and negligence. There’s no sin in forgetfulness or failing to recognize your surroundings–there is, though, in not being prepared for the possibility when risking someone else’s life.
Legally you may be right. You’re also not supposed to shoot an intruder as he runs away for similar-sounding reasons.
From my perspective, once you break into someone else’s house you’ve forfeited any right for the homeowner to “be reasonable” at the risk of their own safety or property. Not breaking into other people’s homes is pretty close to an absolute minimum standard for human behavior and if you can’t manage it society is better off without you.
So why don’t you apply that standard to the person who broke into someone else’s home and shot them? Aren’t we better off without her?
Did you read my original comment?
I explicitly said that Jean had every right to shoot her and that if he had I would have no cognitive dissonance here.
And the possibility of someone walking into the wrong house by mistake, or entering for a good reason (repairman hired by the landlord, fireman knocking down the door because your house is on fire, etc.) is one excellent reason to be extra-careful about using a gun to repel a would-be home invader.
Several years ago, my mom came downstairs one Saturday morning to find a complete stranger passed out on the couch in her living room. He’d gotten very drunk and ended up going to the wrong house in the middle of the night. (When she woke him, he was very apologetic and quickly left to walk to his own house.)
Now, there are ways that this could have gone down that might have led an armed homeowner to shoot this guy. And in some of those circumstances, the homeowner would have been justified and the whole thing would have been one of those tragedies where nobody’s really the villain even though someone ended up dead. But it’s a much, much better world when most of the time, that kind of misunderstanding or drunken mistake or whatever ends in embarrassment, or even a call to the cops, rather than someone dead.
@Nabid ad Dajjal
Your original comment is exactly why I asked the question. You said there you felt her a victim of bad luck, but here you say that someone acting the way she did is failing what you consider to be almost the bare minimum of human behavior. Hence my question: Why aren’t you applying the standard to the officer? Now that she’s failed to meet your bare minimum, aren’t we better off putting her in jail where we’re basically without her?
> aren’t we better off putting her in jail where we’re basically without her
Both a conviction for murder as well as manslaughter would have had the result of prison time.
There is a difference between “well advised” and “legal” for very good reasons. It’s not a good idea to rush into a house currently being ransacked by an unknown number of bad dudes/dudettes with unknown equipment. It is in almost all states totally legal to do. It’s your house and your right to it is absolute.
It’s actually a pretty interesting legal question on genuine mistakes of fact, which is what this revolved around, which is why the judge specifically said that the jury could consider that.
They rejected that based on the facts on the ground (i.e. they thought she should have known it wasn’t her apartment). But legally, it’s probably a gray area. As far as I know, there has never been a case where the jury held that it was only not murder because of Castle Doctrine.
I think being wrong makes a much better moral defense than a legal one, although it does make certain things feel particularly difficult on the legal side.
Except for how all of her coworkers said that the proper thing to do in that situation was call for back-up. Except for how she said she went in intending to kill someone – even though Edward Scizorhands points out that there are valid reasons for someone to have been in her apartment without her knowledge. Except for how residents of that apartment building state that there’s a problem with the doors where they don’t always latch right, so for all she knew she just didn’t close the door properly behind her when she left and no one was in her apartment at all. Except for how she paid no attention to the fact that the furniture was clearly different, which should have been a tip-off.
And finally, though I expect this assertion will be most controversial: If you come home and find an intruder sitting on your couch eating ice cream, I really do not think that the first thing you should do is shoot them, especially if you live in an apartment building with bad doors, because maybe HE was the one having the brain fart and just settled into the wrong house, illegally but harmlessly and without malicious intent. You already have the intruder at gunpoint, unable to be a threat without getting shot. You could take a moment to ask some questions and at least clarify that the intruder means you harm before shooting them. There are levels of home intrusion, and they require different levels of escalation.
TL;DR: I’m sorry, but this officer made plenty of bad choices that we should expect an officer not to make, and as such she doesn’t have anyone to blame but herself. The only victim of bad luck is the dead person, not the cop.
And note that the jury agreed with this. They were told that they could consider Castle Doctrine (that is, she was genuinely mistaken and thought it was her apartment and had the right to defend it). They rejected that.
I think their rejection was correct. Even had it been her apartment with a random guy on the couch, her reaction was entirely illegal murder.
I’m honestly a tad bit surprised the judge allowed the Castle Doctrine to be introduced, but it probably avoided an appeal and possibly a retrial.
@acymetric
I think it’s the right call, honestly. Mistakes of fact are entirely valid defenses.
https://lawshelf.com/courseware/entry/mistake-of-fact
Her mistake of fact (assuming the jury believes hers was reasonable, which is their call, as it’s a decision of a fact) should allow her mitigation here.
…Well you didn’t have to try very hard to convince me. I retract my surprise about the judge allowing it, but agree with you that the jury was also right to reject it.
If you enter a residence with lethal intent, you should be very sure it is actually your residence, and it certainly seems to me that she had ample opportunity to realize her mistake prior to firing her weapon.
In terms of whether she had castle doctrine, this seems to be the relevant part of the Texas Penal Code.
I think it would be hard to format this in a readable way even in a top level post, and certainly impossible nested at this level, so I’ll leave it to readers to follow the link (it goes directly to the relevant section, you don’t have to search around for it).
It probably hinges on how strong “reason to believe” is (mistake of fact, as has been mentioned). I don’t know if there is any real legal standard for determining this or if it just has to be handled case-by-case by the jury.
It is possible that they could have also leaned on these portions (describing requirements for the actor/shooter to qualify, note that these are all ‘AND’ not ‘OR’ requirements):
With regards to (2), it could be argued that she provoked the victim by entering his residence in a hostile and aggressive manner (with gun drawn). That part does not seem to allow for “mistaken provocation” (it seems to explicitly omit anything about reasonable belief which is pervasive throughout the rest of the code which leads me to believe its absence here and in section (3) is important).
With regards to (3), trespassing is a class C misdemeanor which she was certainly guilty of (and as others have noted, that law doesn’t care if it was intentional or not although the way it is enforced and penalized probably does), and that section seems to only offer allowance for class C misdemeanors related to traffic violations. You could also probably find other low-level crimes that she committed in the process of the shooting that would cause her to lose Castle Doctrine defense under this clause if those laws don’t make any allowances for “reasonable belief”.
I don’t know enough about Texas law to know what all laws those might have been (I think the trespassing is a valid enough though tenuous on its own in this case) but suspect there are at least a couple others.
I haven’t read up extensively on this case other than the linked article at the top. Were there any forensics provided as to where he was when he was shot? The article mentions that he was sitting on the couch eating ice cream, but one of the quotes from her make it sound like he was charging towards her when she fired. Were either of these takes (or something in between) backed by the forensics? There is somewhat of a huge difference between “shot while sitting on the couch” and “shot when he got within two feet of her” and it isn’t clear which it was (although reading between the lines it sounds closer to the former than the latter, I’m just wondering if it was actually explicitly presented).
I’m afraid I don’t know; every article I’ve seen brought up the sitting on the couch thing. If he did charge her, that does muddy things up somewhat, but anyone who would like to say that means he deserved to get shot is implicitly affirming that they do not think Castle Doctrine is a defense, since he was the resident and she was the intruder, so bear in mind I will treat your arguments accordingly.
@Oscar Sebastian
He ABSOLUTELY had the Castle Doctrine. The question is if she did as well due to her mistake of fact.
I think that she probably did, but that is a point of law that has not been decided. The judge’s orders to the jury specifically said that they should consider that she did. Even with that, the jury decided she committed murder.
The judge’s decision may or may not hold up in future cases, but in this case there isn’t going to be an appeal on that, so that decision holds.
I don’t see how that follows. The reasoning goes: if castle law applies because Jean is the resident and Guyger the intruder, he was within his rights to shoot her. If castle law also applies because Guyger thinks she’s the resident and Jean the intruder, she was within her rights to shoot him. It’s a weird case but a consistent one. Compare it to if you’re in a war and you and an enemy combatant both think the other charged first; you each could claim whichever death resulted was a killing in self defense.
I agree that she committed a serious crime and needs to be punished. I’m just not sure whether the crime was murder. Something about the idea that you can accidentally murder someone seems off to me, it seems like mistakes of fact are fundamentally not the same thing.
I’m not a self-defense expert but this sounds false.
Unless these apartments were cavernous the distance between the couch and the door is less than ten paces. At that range all you need is a second of hesitation and the other guy is on top of you. And in terms of physical strength, even an average 14 year old boy could likely physically overpower her much less a fully grown man.
Shoot first ask questions later is entirely reasonable when the other person actually is an intruder.
This is why I want to know if he was actually moving towards her, if he were standing but stationary, or if he were still seated when she fired.
I think the law is ill-prepared to deal with mistakes of fact in cases like this. Partially because it feels like a slightly too-easy-to-exploit loophole if we just gave a hard pass on serious charges when “mistakes” were made.
If the other guy is standing and alert, yes. If he’s, say, sitting on the couch eating ice cream, you have at least a few more seconds, which is an eternity in situations like this. Even facing away from you would help a lot.
Sort-of related question:
In the US, the standard legal advice is “don’t talk to the police”. And if invited into your home, anything they see can be used to create a criminal case against you. Even if unreasonable (see: constructive possession of … anything).
So what do you do if you are worried there is an intruder inside your house, but you don’t want the police to enter your house?
This particular vulnerability is often exploited by robbers who go after their drug dealing competition, etc.
Accept the lesser of two evils. If you defend yourself and any shots are fired, police will be showing up. If you call the police, they will be showing up. So if you think your life is in danger, prepare your justification for the suspicious chemicals now.
In practice, there isn’t much the police can do to stop a burglary. And unless the burglar is someone you know personally or you catch a license plate, he probably won’t be caught after the fact. The main practical effect of calling the police is to provide a report for you to file an insurance claim.
I think not calling the police to do this, if you have applicable insurance, is pretty foolish and paranoid. My dealings with police in these situations have always been highly professional, and they have been sympathetic. But to each his own. If you don’t have insurance, then calling them is generally just a waste of an hour or two.
If you’re not prepared to deal with the burglar yourself, don’t want to call police, but do want to interrupt his burglarizing, making yourself known is probably enough. The large majority of the time, he’ll flee — burglars are generally non-confrontational.
That is a dilemma. I’m no opponent of castle law or anything, but like @eyeballfrog I would resolve it by rejecting the unlimited right to shoot trespassers.
I support the right of people to use lethal force to defend themselves and their homes. The caveat to this however is that when you make the decision to kill someone, and drawing your weapon to shoot someone is in fact making that decision, you forfeit the right to be mistaken. A man is dead, gone forever from this world and all worlds, he doesn’t get an afterlife, he doesn’t get a next life, he gets nothing. The person who intentionally killed him doesn’t get to say, “Oops, my bad.” She is a murderer, and she ought to be punished accordingly. Now the murder is clearly in the second rather than the first degree, but in Texas law that consideration is entered only during the sentencing phase not during conviction. As i recall sentences for second degree murder are 2-20 years, and i would be satisfied justice has been served if Guyger is sentenced in the lower half of that range. Hell give her eight years, let her out in five if she behaves.
This is not in fact the law. There are defensible mistakes of fact that can justify you.
The jury agreed that this was not such a case.
Sorry, i wasn’t speaking about the law in the first part of my comment, but rather my moral intuitions. Since i did pivot about talking about the law in the second part, i can see how that might be confusing.
That said as matter of law, it is pretty clear from the start that it was murder and not manslaughter according to the relevant Texas statues. This falls under “sudden passion arising from adequate cause” but that doesn’t make it manslaughter, it just makes it second degree murder. Manslaughter applies if one “recklessly causes the death of an individual”, but the death wasn’t from reckless but rather intentional behaviour.
@lillian
Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification.
I think such an absolutist position is probably too harsh, given that most defensive shootings occur in very short succession after dramatic and traumatic events, but clearly this one falls well outside the veil of what I or most would consider moral.
It sounds less absolutist when you consider the fact that i generally believe in shorter prison sentences and taking into account extenuating circumstances. As i mentioned further up the minimum sentence for second degree murder in Texas is two years IIRC, i don’t actually think that’s too low, i’m sure there are cases where that’s totally fair.
Incidentally, Guyer was just sentenced to 10 years, which is close to my recommendation of 8 years. In all, i am satisfied the justice was carried out in this case.
Going into an apartment intending to kill somebody, without even checking whether it’s actually your apartment (which would make it not murder), seems to make it not just bad luck.
I think the definition of murder in Texas is quite broad- and @acymetric says Texas law doesn’t distinguish between degrees of murder. This explains the very low minimum sentence- and note that she has now been sentenced to a term towards the lower end of the range.
Perhaps in another jurisdiction this would have been second-degree murder or manslaughter- I think that is a correct definition for killing somebody because you were recklessly indifferent as to which apartment they were in.
At the risk of diverting a thread about a serious and horrific case into something silly…
Last year I was staying at a dorm-style hotel for university guests in Nashville, which had separate keys to enter the building and the room itself. Long story short, I got extraordinarily drunk and went to the wrong building, but my building key let me in, and then my room key let me into the room of the same number in the wrong building.
Fortunately it was empty, or this very likely would have ended up with me in jail. I ended up writing a longer piece about it, and another about other problems I’d had while trying to get into the same hotel while very drunk on a different visit.
I knew a guy in college who got drunk his first week or so, went to sleep and woke up to pee a couple hours later. He went to the bathroom, then when he was done, made the turn he usually made in his house, walked the wrong way down the hall, and got in bed with one of the girls on the hall. She got woken up in the process, was unable to wake him, and ended up sleeping on the couch in the common room.
I ordered a mattress online a few months ago and on the day it was supposed to be delivered, I got an irate call from the deliveryman asking where I was. He told me that I needed to be at my apartment to sign for the mattress in 15 minutes or he’d walk away.
Given that I was in my apartment at the time, I was confused. He assured me, however, that he was in my apartment and didn’t see me. My apartment is 3 rooms so I found this answer kind of hard to believe.
I had him verify the address and it turns out he was in an apartment building one street down – the door man had let him into the building, taken him to the my apartment number and then opened that poor bastard’s apartment to let the delivery guys in.
Just be glad he wanted to see you there before leaving it.
Right!?
It’s even worse than that, though. This was white-glove mattress delivery- they installed this new mattress and removed my old one.
If they hadn’t needed me to be present, there’s a world where some poor guy’s matress would be taken and he’d come home to find a new one on his bed!
Worst heist movie plot ever.
I would be perfectly happy if you came into my house and replaced my mattress with a new one, it can’t be any worse than the one I’ve got.
Wait, isn’t that where you’re supposed to be storing all your physical gold coins? Or maybe I’m doing it wrong…
Ah jeez, now I have to rehide my gold. Got any suggestions?
Behind the 7-11, next Friday at midnight. Come alone.
“Tall tree, Spy-glass shoulder, bearing a point to the N. of N.N.E.
Skeleton Island E.S.E. and by E.
Ten feet.”
The Oak Island Money Pit.
The New Mexico Money Hole
This has never happened to me with room doors. But at least twice, I opened the wrong bag locker by accident because the locks are of such bad quality. One case was in a library, the other is in a shop in a mall where there are no shared lockers so the shop has its own. It is of course easier to make a mistake in such cases, because unlike an apartment or room, the locker doesn’t belong to me and I use different ones at each visit.
People are shit at physical security.
All that locks do is keep honest people honest. And all lockpicking does is change an obvious entry into a surreptitious one.
Something similar happened to me.
I worked my last shift as a waiter for the week at about 11 PM, and headed home to see my family – about a 12-hour drive. By 2 AM, I was getting sleepy, so I pulled into a rest area to sleep in my truck. (This was a drive I made every few months–this was what I planned to do.) I slept for an hour or so, got up, went in to use the bathroom, came out, walked to my truck, opened the door, and there was someone asleep on the seat. He jumped up ready to fight, and I backed away carefully–at which point I realized that my (completely identical) truck was 2 parking spaces away.
I went to pick up my kids at daycare once, on an incredibly rainy afternoon when I was also rather tired (but not drunk, I promise). I got back into my car, and noticed that the seats were a lot nicer than they had been when I got out of it, at which point I of course realized that this was not my car. Not even the same make or model, but it was black, parked right in front of mine where I usually parked when I went to pick them up, and as I said it was very rainy and I was very tired.
Fortunately there was no one in it.
“… and wow, that kid looked just like mine” was how I worried the story was going to end.
Could be the story hasn’t ended yet!
Maybe I’m just from a low-trust community, but I am absolutely baffled by all these stories in which everyone leaves their cars and homes unlocked all the time. Where do you all live, Mayberry?
Homes? Hard to say, mine is certainly locked when I’m away, and usually but not always locked when I’m home (particularly when sleeping). That said, I’m sure on occasion I forget when I’m in a rush or something disrupts my usual door-locking routine.
As far as cars…I don’t usually have anything valuable in my car. The most likely thing to be stolen is probably the tires, but they can steal that whether I lock it or not. If the concern is actual theft of the car itself, that is 100% not something I ever have been or will be concerned about. I don’t think I would be concerned about it going forward if it actually happened to me. I’ll lock it if I actually have something inside (which is rare) or if I’m in an area where I think people might just screw with/vandalize my car if they can get inside.
The car thing was Vancouver, but it would have been unlocked for like 3 minutes max, right next to an elementary school in a very residential area.
As for the unlocked thing, one of the absolutely true 100% not exaggerated parts of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (yes, I know) is when he walks around residential neighbourhoods in Toronto and just opens doors. I’m in my Toronto house right now and my door is unlocked, usually I lock it when I go to bed but I sometimes don’t even do that.
Shermer, IL. There’s occasional crime, but I think my wife leaves her keys in the door accidentally probably 6 or 7 times a year and probably leaves a window open 3 or 4 times a year. The door is almost never locked when I am at home.
I live in the Bay Area and always left my door unlocked when I was home, or if I was only leaving for a short time, such as walking the dog. The house I live in now has a front door that automatically locks, which was annoying at first because I locked myself out of the house a few times. My back door is open whenever I’m home though, so that my dog can go in and out as she pleases.
Ultimately, door locks are a minor deterrent to thieves, and I figure the best security is through obscurity.
There is no good way to resolve these things—typically the law deals with them by giving a hard pass one way or the other, but that becomes increasingly untenable when people see how it plays out enough times, and people stop giving even minor negligence a pass when it leads to major consequences. The legal definitions will always be harsh one way or the other, and if they try to split the difference, it will still be hard to draw a line that doesn’t seem wrong in some way. Look up some of the mens rea cases that are used to study the whole idea—life has a lot of screwed up aspects that can’t be reconciled. We know there are instances where people truly go on autopilot and the issue is basically inevitable—we’ve all had moments where we just zoned out. If it had happened at a bad time… Good parents who leave their kids in hot cars are some of the clearest examples—there’s a lot of resistance to not prosecuting that, but there’s also a lot of recognition that it could happen to anyone (and a lot of denial of that, but the point is that people can disagree whether there is any true fault at all, such that it isn’t compromisable).
Related to this: aren’t cops trained to shoot to kill?
In cases like this, a lot of people comment about how she said she went in with intent to kill etc. I don’t understand why people are expressing surprise here (I understand why people recoil at the idea, of course). If you accept she thought there was a home intruder, and you accept her right to shoot that intruder, it makes sense that she would shoot to kill. But before doing that, she should have gotten her bearings–that is where the failure happened. It is going to be seen as a type of recklessness–the issue isn’t the deliberate decision she made, but way in which she made it. A cop who has actually had to prepare to kill someone in a dangerous situation would have a better argument for going into that mode, having learned to shut down the instinct to at least hesitate before running towards danger, whereas the average person has little reason to default to it. But I’m pretty sure the decision to use violence against a perceived intruder is treated as generally absolute once made–not a matter of degree.
It seems in this sense you could argue that police might kind of be at a disadvantage, because they can’t just go into off-duty mode on something like that. But it cuts both ways. A cop could also be expected to know how idiotic people are, and how many precautions people are expected to take in high pressure situations–they have to enter strange buildings all the time and encounter strange people based on what might be bad information, and that means they better make sure they’re paying attention. They probably regularly get calls about a drunk guy in someone else’s apartment, or a supposed burglar who is actually the homeowner breaking into his own house because he lost the key. Humans are flawed and mistakes still happen–you can’t train them out of people. But my understanding is that cops are held to a fairly high standard of self-awareness (I know she was off-duty), but they aren’t expected to shoot non-lethally once they decide to use deadly force. Both of these things seem right to me. If we require a reason for lethal aim, it would be an unending debate, because any shot can be lethal, and it is nearly always possible to argue you could have shot somewhere else and made a “better” decision. Did this actually play into the case? I understand that emotionally, it may have affected the jury. But was it an issue legally?
Now, I totally get that many people would make every effort to avoid a fatal result, or at least believe they would. I understand that there is a lot of opposition to the idea that you *should* execute someone who has entered your property like that, with no questions asked. I generally agree with this, because while I understand the principle of absolute defense, I also understand that people are flat out mistaken on a regular basis, and that if you are going to kill someone, you should be pretty sure of what is going on. Sometimes, you don’t have any time to figure these things out, but sometimes you do. A bunch of people in this thread shared stories of getting in the wrong car or walking into the wrong house–intoxication often plays a role in the latter, but if the apartment set up is confusing, it happens. Recently, I got into the passenger’s seat of a car next to my mom’s that looked similar and was running–this was in broad daylight. Plus, you have people who misidentify their own relatives as intruders. Or, in this case, the defendant was mistaken about whether she was at home! Both an incredible mistake and a simple one. Taking human idiocy into account–including your own–to at least a tiny extent is a reasonable expectation. Plenty of people do see it as a matter of degree, and judge how much force should have been used based on the individual circumstances. But we should be honest that the legal system allows harshness here, when the threat is acknowledged.
Related to this, the law veers again into one of the hard passes with shooting someone in the back. There can be a lot of leeway as to who constitutes a “threat” in a way that justifies a lethal shooting–it is all about perception, and it can turn out that the situation was much more harmless than it seemed to the shooter. But even if the person is very much a clear threat who attracts no mercy, once he or she starts running away, it suddenly becomes a big deal to shoot and eliminate that threat. It seems bizarre in one sense, but it makes total sense to draw the line there legally, I think. All lines will be sharp and awkward if they are to have the slightest consistency, because they are usually about the purpose the law intends to serve (protection from immediate threat) not overall cost-benefit analysis and moral worthiness of individuals. What makes this awkward is that it was an intentional shooting based on mistaken factual interpretations, so it doesn’t fit into the legal categories as an accident. Such situations will always feel uncomfortable.
People aren’t surprised that she shot to kill instead of maim. They are surprised that she appears (by her own admission, as well as by the apparent sequence of events) to have decided prior to opening the door that she was going to open the door and kill whoever was inside. Does that clarify it at all? There is a difference between “I’m going to open the door prepared to kill whoever is inside” and “I’m going to open the door and kill whoever is inside”.
Thank you for responding–it does clarify it. I guess I was just not seeing it as a huge difference *if you are opening the door on a home intruder* (in your mind) because of the wide leeway you have there to neutralize a threat on your property. But I guess I’m thinking, “oh, she lived alone, and didn’t give a housekeeper a key” or anything, such that it would be a non-crazy assumption that danger was definitely present. In reality, that is a totally crazy assumption—I mean, police could be there or a landlord if there were a problem of some kind, though this is less obvious when you live in an apartment because there will be no cars outside to alert you or windows with lights on. And it is likely someone did have a key, but I don’t know much about her personal life. That decision only makes even a little sense if you are in a state of paranoia, like you have a stalker. Otherwise, then yes, the behavior was reckless enough that conviction seems obvious.
I guess the issue is that she is claiming she had absolutely no information about who she was killing–this is really odd, and I presume some think this is an attempt to dodge the issue of racial profiling. It already terrible if she saw him and jumped to deadly conclusions–claiming that instead she would have shot whoever she saw is no improvement. It suggests that she either was in a criminally reckless paranoid mindset or is trying to cover up the fact that she did see him.
History has to be one of my favorite subjects, but in general I don’t know where to look to learn about it in my free time. Human civilization is around 6,500 years old, the human species much older, and I know enough about history to know that in that span of time some amazing, some interesting, and some extremely funny things have happened. So in the interest of knowing more, what are some of your favorite bits of historical info?
For a random selection of interesting historical tidbits, check out Futility Closet (they’ve got a podcast, a book, maybe more). The stories they bring up range from entirely trivial to very significant, but I almost always find them very interesting. As far as I can tell, they do not have a significant political slant (other than pro-cats) and they aren’t exploring/advancing any grand theory of history or framework for historical analysis.
I also loved the Jon Green crash course series (world history, European history, American history, there may be others now…)
Thank you! I looked up Futility Closet and found their blog, and it’s perfect. I’ve always wanted a source for random interesting historical tidbits.
This guy has some really great history articles on Cracked.
(Edited to fix link)
He seems to have a steady flow of interesting content. Thank you for sharing, I’ll be sure to look into all of those links in the link you shared.
He’s also legitimately one of the nicest and most interesting people you’ll ever meet. I had the pleasure of working with him a few years back and absolutely loved it.
Would be wonderful if you could pull him into the SSC community.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, confederates, then rivals, then friends, dying on the same day–July 4th, 1826.
This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence. Jokes aside, that is extremely interesting. You’d think they’d tell you that two original patriots died within 5 hours of each other on July 4th, but this is the first I’ve heard of it.
It’s not a total coincidence given that each man would have attached great importance to the date and may have been able to hold on to some extent until then; still a great story, especially considering Adams’ dying words “Jefferson still lives.”
Another good one like this is Mark Twain being born soon after Halley’s comet and dying the day after its return.
Which he predicted, if I’m recalling the story correctly.
Yeah. I don’t recall whether Twain predicted it after already being in poor health, though, which would make it a little less impressive. He died of a heart attack.
Recently I’ve gotten really into a youtube channel called Extra Credits – History:
Prehistory – 1699 playlist
1700 – present playlist
They have a bunch of cool videos on various historical events and figures. It’s light and entertaining, but they seem to take the effort to try to be as accurate as possible (not that I’m really qualified to judge that). Either way its a fun way to learn about various cool things, some you might not have heard of before. The channel has some other cool non-history stuff too.
Also this is my first post! Long time lurker and I couldn’t resist answering your question as a fellow history lover. Favorite bit of historical info is probably the comical series of events leading to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand – the assassin shot at him, missed the archduke, and then decided to go get a sandwich after his failure. The archduke’s car took a wrong turn on the way to the hospital to see the people who had gotten hit, and happened to go right in front of the shop where the original assassin was eating. So the assassin got a second chance and this time he was successful. Very unlucky archduke or very lucky assassin.
That channel sounds extremely interesting, thank you. Congrats on your first post, mine was about a week and a half ago. Recently discovered Scott’s writing but I fell in love quickly. I never knew how hilarious the full story of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination was, which feels weird to have just typed. Thank you for sharing.
The sandwich story is made up, far as we can tell by the Brazilian author Jo Suarez for his 2001 novel Twelve Fingers. The factoid somehow made its way to a 2003 documentary called Days that Shook the World and has since then entered popular knowledge. It’s unfortunate Extra History did not catch this.
In actual fact, Gavrilo Princip was standing along the planned route of the Archduke’s motorcade. The only way in which he got lucky is that the governor of Bosnia told the driver of the Archduke’s car he should have taken a different route, at which point the confused driver slowed down or stopped, right in front of the assassin. So there is irony there, in that the the governor tried to get the driver to change course in order to avoid assassins, and in so doing resulted in the driver giving the assassin a better shot. If the car had simply sped through, Princip may very well have missed, and if the governor had told the driver to change plans earlier, he never would have gotten his shot. It was the combination of good planning on the part of the assassins, and bad planning on the part of the motorcade, that resulted in the death the Archduke and his wife.
Wow, I feel silly because usually I’m pretty good at catching “that famous story didn’t actually occur” type things. I guess this one was just too cool to look into further.
At this point I’m wondering if any fun anecdote from history actually happened. It seems every single one I hear about, later I find out it’s a myth! Oh well.
Not everything you might have heard about Mad Jack Churchill is true, but enough of it is that his story is still pretty wild. He did go into battle with a sword and a longbow, in the middle of god damned Second World War, while playing bagpipes. This crazy bastard got the last recorded longbow combat kill in history, against dudes with machineguns, because damn mad lad of a Scotsman.
@Lillian: This is what happens when you’re a stubborn mad lad who’s only played D&D but the Game Master insists on only bringing GURPS WWII books.
“Churchill later walked back to the town to retrieve his sword, which he had lost in hand-to-hand combat with the German regiment.”
Even his name sounds like trolling the GM.
“Everybody create a British soldier. Jack, what’s your PC’s name?”
“Jack Churchill.”
“… it doesn’t sound like you’re putting much thought into this.”
“John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill.”
“…”
Seconded, they have “Lies” episodes where they go into inaccuracies though, such as the Archduke story.
I don’t watch those much since they spoil the fun a lot of the times!
I’ve made a few quick searches for history channels on YouTube which are high quality, extensive, and accessible/appropriate for kids, and apparently my Google skills have decayed horribly, because I hadn’t come across Extra Credits before. Thank you so much!
I like primary sources. Some interesting and readable ones:
Casanova’s Memoirs. He was a con man, gambler, author, entrepreneur who traveled through most of Europe, from London to Moscow, met lots of famous and ordinary people, describes it all in a lengthy and readable account, most of which is probably true.
Boswell’s memoirs. Roughly contemporary with Casanova, not as readable or extensive, and not as interesting and attractive a person, but still a first-hand picture of 18th century England and Scotland, plus a little of the continent.
The Rehla of Ibn Battuta. Everyone has heard of Marco Polo, the 13th century Italian world traveler. Ibn Battuta was the 14th century North African equivalent. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, got bit by the travel bug, spent some time as the chief Malaki Qadi of Delhi, claimed to have made it to China but is suspected to have only reached somewhere in southeast Asia, eventually came home, continued his travels, giving us our only 14th century pictures of East Africa and West Africa. One of his rules, which I try to follow, is never to go back by the same route you came out by.
Mohammed’s People. This is an account of the early centuries of Islam (and a little before), put together as a pastiche of period sources. It gives you a picture of how Islam and Islamic history looked, perhaps still look, from the inside, to Muslims.
The History of William Marshall. Born the fourth son of a minor noble during the Stephen and Matilda civil war, William became the top tournament knight in western Europe—I like to say that he probably regarded Richard the Lion-Hearted as a talented amateur. He served five kings, and before he died was regent of England for John’s minor son after John’s death. The history is a biographical poem composed after his death and one of our few sources for a picture of medieval society written from within the knightly class rather than the clerical class.
One other book I like, of a very different sort, is Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army. It’s an account of Alexander’s campaigns with the battles left out, focusing on the constraints imposed by the need to keep the army and support personnel from dying of hunger or thirst. The relevant technology didn’t change much until railroads came in in the 19th century, so the author has detailed data to base his calculations on.
Thank you! This is a really great, comprehensive list. I don’t know where to start, they all sound so interesting. The ones that stick out to me right now are The Rehla and the book about Alexander’s battle campaigns. I’ll have to go to the library and look those up. I always wanted some good historical books to read, but was unaware of how to discover them. Thank you again for this amazing list.
Pepys’ Diary is also one hell of a primary source on 16th century England.
I enjoy following him on Twitter. Although it’s kind of a hate-follow at this point–the medium makes him seem like a terrible person, and his habit of “enciphering” his worst misdeeds by trying to write them in foreign languages that he doesn’t actually know is like peak Upper-Class Twit.
BBC Witness does short podcasts about history.
Indy Neidell’s history specials (Time Ghost) are excellent. My kids love Sabaton History, which focuses on the actual history behind the power metal songs Sabaton writes about history.
A History of the World in 100 Objects
It follows the history of Mankind therough 100 objects at the British Museum, from a million year old handaxe to a modern credit card. You can call it a podcast if you want to sound hip, but it was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2010.
Also from Radio 4, In our Time, in which Melvyn Bragg talks to experts about the history of some concept or other. I’s been going on for 20 years now and covers everything from the planet Venus to Horace to the Nation State.
Podcasts have a lot of good introductions to certain time periods. There is a lot of them that tell a relatively simple narrative over a long period that is good for getting a feel for the political history of that place. I recommend:
History of China
History of Rome
History of Byzantium(which is basically a continuation of the above)
History of Persia
Revolutions
And I’ve heard good things about the History of England and History of Japan podcasts. Some other good history podcasts:
The Fall of Rome
Hardcore History
Tides of History
The great thing about podcasts is that you can listen to them on your commute or just when you are doing chores. You can go through them quicker than you think.
Strongly recommend The History of Rome as well as the podcaster’s ongoing follow-up, Revolutions.
I’ve also heard good things about The History of Byzantium and The History of the English Language.
I used to listen to The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps and really enjoyed all the stuff on the Greeks (which I had some familiarity with beforehand, which I think helped). I powered through all the stuff on Islamic World but eventually got lost some time around Hildegard of Bingen. I like the podcaster, though. He has a good style and frequently references giraffes.
I should listen to more podcasts, thank you for the list. I’ll check these out
I would start with the History of Rome. Not only is it complete, it’s also the most well known of the pre-modern Western time periods, meaning there are plenty of books about Ancient Rome you can use to follow up with.