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This post by Razib Khan is pretty depressing–as I interpret his argument:
a. Objectivity in science is an ideal that we never reach, but people trying to reach it yields a huge amount of value.
b. Objectivity in science is under attack by ideologues of various stripes of wokeness.
c. The scientists who should be responding are mostly either philosophically disarmed by their own liberalism (so even if the attacks seem nonsensical, they can’t bring themselves to disagree) or disdain the kind of philosophical thinking that would let them see the attacks as worth responding to and fight back.
d. The incentives align with scientists keeping quiet, since outrage mobs can and have wrecked scientific careers for speaking simple truth.
e. Science as a cultural institution isn’t something that’s guaranteed to keep working. It can be wrecked, and then it will mostly stop working and we’ll just stop getting its benefits. He predicts this will happen.
I’m not sure I agree–I think it’s easy to over-weight current events, and I doubt that social media will continue to function as a huge multiplier of influence of woke outrage mobs forever. But it’s worth remembering that a lot of institutions in our society (science, the justice system, democratic government, honest and competent civil servants) are not guaranteed to work well by some kind of law of nature–instead, they are fragile and barely work now and would be easy to wreck, and once wrecked they’d be hard to fix.
Scott Aaronson outlines his thought process about a similar situation in his most recent post. He has been petitioned to stop using the term ‘quantum supremacy.’
As far as science stopping working, some interesting arguments about why it works now (and briefly worked a few millennia ago) from David Deutsch’s Beginnings of Infinity.
“Oh, look, some people have gotten a lot of attention for a real accomplishment. Let’s see if we can ride on their coattails to get some attention without having to do any useful work.”
Even Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had scientific breakthroughs. We’ll be fine.
I’m confused – did Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia have outrage mobs that silenced scientists for non-scientific reasons? Were either notably anti-science in a way that’s comparable to this? I suspect I know the answer to the first, but I honestly don’t know the second.
How am I supposed to compare “outrage mobs” to the SS and the gulag?
And it’s not like being “anti-science” is anyone’s goal. The goal is political, and as long as the science doesn’t conflict with the political goal, or can be reframed in a way that doesn’t conflict, it’ll be fine, no matter what system you’re in.
Of course, I’m a lot more cynical about how true “science” really is than most people around here. It’s all the product of us flawed human beings, and necessarily reflects our flaws. The marketplace of ideas can stay irrational longer than any of us can stay alive.
Both countries engaged in purges destined to get rid of jewish/bourgeois “pseudo-science”, respectively, which often meant rejecting established contemporary theories and replacing them by alternative ideologically theories of dubious scientific values. And this was generally coming from ideologically aligned scientists of lesser grade trying to gain favors with the regime.
This was occasionally successful, but many times the leadership saw through the tactics and alternative theories and their proponents were brushed aside. For instance there was a campaign of harassment in Nazi Germany trying to discredit the science of Heisenberg as that of a “white jew”. This was cut short when Himmler, who was a childhood friend of Heisenberg, basically told everyone to cut that crap out.
Soviet Russia did severe damage to scientific progress, and purged their engineers to boot. Read up on Lysenkoism and the rest of Soviet Scientific Atheism.
(Solzhenitsyn has a section in Gulag Archipelago about the damage they did to genetic research, but I don’t think I’ll have time to circle back and post it.)
Also, in countries like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia the following happens often: Someone uses their political skills to get a position as a “scientist”, without actually being good at science. Then the person uses their political power to define what is “scientific” and what is not, and anyone who disagrees gets a bullet. This can happen on a large scale (Lysenko), but probably happens hundred times more often on a local scale — when one such idiot paralyses their university or research institute, but the rest of the country doesn’t care about him, although they too may have their own local idiots.
Imagine that someone like Stephen Jay Gould would get the power to send everyone who disagrees with him, and their entire family, to the extermination camp. How much would science progress in fields where he has a strong opinion?
I would argue that even in the West, certain ‘scientific’ fields are already dominated by people whose political skills are the reason for their success, while scientific ability are at best secondary.
They didn’t quite break science in either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but they certainly damaged it quite a bit, slowed its progress, and purged a bunch of good scientists with the wrong politics. Copying that seems like a pretty bad outcome.
And it’s not clear that where we are now is very similar. Social media is a new thing in the world–it’s not nearly as horrible as secret police and death camps, but it may be even more corrosive to some important things.
The replication crisis predates all the woke stuff. Even without all the social justice and social media effects, how well is science working?
Vaping and plastic straws come to mind as non-woke examples of how the system of media, government and science has no objectivity at all and is just carried along on moral panics and mass hysteria.
Plastic straws have a woke element. Most of the plastic pollution comes from second and third world nations. The concern about straws is ineffective, but blames the right (white) people.
My point is that, even in severel degraded environment for science, science and discoveries still happen. More slowly, not as much, not as in many domain, but still, it happens. We don’t live in the “Hard to Be a God” universe where a bunch of religious fanatics can just decide to cancel the Renaissance and kill anyone who wear glasses.
And contemporary social media are orders of magnitude less damaging than whatever the nazi or soviets did. So to reitterate: we’ll be fine.
Social media has democratized lots of things, including reigns of terror. Any useful science, like any useful journalism, is probably going to piss someone off. If you pissed off 100 random people in the US, it used to be irrelevant. Now those 100 people can organize and engage in harassment campaigns.
The antivaxxers is the playbook I’m seeing here. It was easy enough to realize that they are wrong, and plenty of science to easily back it up, but if it is something esoteric, like whether men or women need bigger doses of a drug, there will be no countervailing force. (I’m also thinking how conspiracy theorists are going after ordinary people now. It’s not enough to complain that the government is doing something: it’s the family of dead kids that are secretly crisis actors.)
Twitter comment by Charles Murray: He says he hasn’t been invited to any new speaking engagements at large, liberal universities since the Middlebury talk (shut down by protesters, he and one of the hosting professors were mobbed and she was hospitalized).
I wonder if this is generally true, or just true in his case. If you think having invited speakers at a university can provide any educational/intellectual benefits, then this seems like an instance where the heckler’s veto (violent protests that cause the authorities to pre-emptively censor some speech to avoid trouble) has successfully shut down some opportunities for education and intellectual growth. Note that Murray is a serious social scientist with decades of influential books and research under his belt, who keeps writing books that drive some important intellectual conversations. If anyone is a reasonably person to invite for a university talk, he’s surely on the list.
I don’t think it’s even true in his case. Middlebury has ~2500 undergraduates. I saw him speak in 2018 at a local university with enrollment three times that number.
@Red-s
I don’t see where it is claimed that Middlebury is a large university. The claim seems to be that the event at Middlebury has made large universities stop inviting him.
No institution is under an obligation to invite pseudoscientists like Murray to speak publically.
He is no more of a pseudoscientists than the scientists that they do invite. The main differentiator seems to be his politics.
No institution is obligated to invite anyone to speak. But if the reason most institutions won’t invite a speaker is because there’s a movement that organizes violent protests wherever that speaker goes, and the institution doesn’t want the heartache, that seems pretty bad. It is, in fact, exactly the heckler’s veto, and it’s a way we give people the power to silence other people.
Next year, suppose ROTC students and College Republicans start showing up and having violent protests/riots every time someone critical of the war on terror is invited to give a talk on a college campus, and the result is that universities decide not to invite those speakers anymore to avoid the hassle. Doesn’t that sound like a pretty bad outcome?
I suppose that an expert on feminist glaciology would be welcome to speak as long as they desire.
Stupid question, I suppose, but why aren’t students who physically attack someone automatically expelled from the university?
(Yeah, I assume we all know the answer, but I would like someone on the politically correct side of the history to write it openly.)
Andrew Sullivan wrote a really fascinating piece on Boris Johnson here. I don’t know a ton about British politics, but this seemed quite informative and interesting to me, and left me with a better picture of who BoJo is.
As I think has already been discussed, Johnson’s victory is actually pretty historically normal, albeit unusual in its magnitude – the Tories have won 8 out of 11 UK general elections since 1979. The UK’s default government is Tory. The question at that point isn’t why the Tories win an election, it’s why Labor manages to win in the (rare) event that they actually succeed.
Is there any agreement on what is the third most important day of observance in Christianity? Easter and Christmas are obviously the two big ones, but what’s third?
There isn’t any sort of official listing that I know of — who would be the officials, anyway? — but I would say Good Friday would be it.
Actually, I would say Good Friday should be number one, but it doesn’t seem to be celebrated that way.
If we’re taking Holy Week as a single observance, then I would say the third most important is Pentacost, though I could accept Ash Wednesday as well. Ash Wednesday gets bonus points for being a widely celebrated observance that doesn’t fall on a Sunday (unlike Pentacost, Trinity Sunday, Palm Sunday, First Sunday of Advent, etc).
Michaelmas always appears in older literature as a holiday, but was that just because it was a convenient end of term one? Sounds like a @Deiseach question.
I’d definitely go with Pentacost, as dodrian suggests. Ranking would be:
(1) Easter (this includes the Triduum starting with the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Maundy Thursday and concluding with the Easter Vigil Mass on Holy Saturday/Easter Sunday) – the celebration of our salvation by the redeeming death of Jesus
(2) Pentecost – the descent of the Holy Ghost and the birthday of the Church
(3) Christmas – the feast of the Incarnation. Easter has always been more highly ranked, and it’s more that the secular celebrations around Christmas have given us an inflated view of its importance (granted, you can’t have Easter without Christmas, but Easter is the culmination of the Grand Plan of Salvation).
Personally? I’d rank occasions like All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days next, but there are a lot of feast days and there’s arguments to be made that the ones around the solstices/equinoxes would be important too – hence Midsummer’s Day being the feast associated with St John the Baptist, and Michaelmas (the feast of St Michael and All Angels) with the end of September as one of the Quarter Days in the civil calendar.
But certainly in mediaeval times, at least in the British Isles, a very important day (and one that in modern times has really fallen from its past high station) was Lady Day, or the traditional start of the New Year – the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25th (it’s no coincidence Tolkien has all the climactic action happening on that date in the Lord of the Rings).
Marian feastdays are/were very important, especially the Feast of the Assumption on August 15th. Basically, depending on (a) what denomination you mean and (b) local custom, what are the very important days of the liturgical calendar after Christmas/Easter/Pentecost vary.
I think for Christianity as a whole:
a. Easter Sunday
b. Holy Week (Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday)
c. Pentacost
d. Christmas
e. Many other events that Catholics celebrate on a date, and other churches mostly don’t.
I think all Christians would agree on the importance of many other events that Catholics have a feast day for–for example, the baptism of Jesus is obviously a really important event, as is the ascension of Jesus into heaven, the temptation in the desert (which is celebrated during Lent). There are other important events that don’t get a Holy Day of Obligation in the Church, but still are milestones that probably all Christians agree were important: the calling of the original apostles, sending the apostles out, the appearance of Moses and Elijah with Jesus up on the mountain, etc.
In Catholicism, we have (as Deisieach pointed out) several important holidays involving Mary–the Solemnity of Mary, the Annunciation, the Immaculate Conception[1], the feast of Our Lady of Guadaloupe, etc. At least the Annunciation and Visitation (where Mary visits Elizabeth) are also recognized by all Christian churches as important, though Protestants don’t put Mary in as critical a place as Catholics (and I think Orthodox churches) do.
ETA: A pretty good outline of what Catholics think are the critical bullet points of the story of the Gospels and early church can be found in the mysteries of the Rosary–the stories from the bible (plus a couple extra ones inferred theologically) you’re supposed to contemplate while praying the Rosary. Those are:
The Annunciation
The Visitation
The Nativity
The Presentation in the Temple
The Finding in the Temple
The Agony in the Garden
The Scourging at the Pillar
The Crowning with Thorns
The Carrying of the Cross
The Crucifixion and Death
The Resurrection
The Ascension
The Descent of the Holy Spirit
The Assumption *
The Coronation of Mary *
The Baptism of Christ in the Jordan +
The Wedding Feast at Cana +
Jesus’ Proclamation of the Coming of the Kingdom of God +
The Transfiguration +
The Institution of the Eucharist +
* These two are not in the Bible directly, and I don’t think Protestants believe in them.
+ These are newly added, so they’re intended for a modern audience. Still, they seem like really critical points in the story of the New Testament!
I think of this as a list of things the early Church wanted its mostly illiterate and superstitious members to learn and remember, even though almost none of them could read the bible.
[1] Note for non-Catholics: The immaculate conception refers to the conception of Mary without original sin. Non-catholics always assume it refers to the conception of Jesus without original sin.
Would you not rank Ash Wednesday? Not as a celebration of course, but as an “important day of observance?” After Easter/Christmas it’s probably had the most effect on the secular calendar (Mardi Gras), along with All Hallow’s Eve.
In the Jewish calendar it’s Yom Kippur. As I understand Christian theology it’s Jesus’ death, not resurrection, that replaces it. So that would point to Good Friday.
You don’t mean calendar-wise or that Yom Kippur is third most important right? (If so, what are 1 and 2 for Jews?)
Easter Sunday is definitely biggest day since that’s why the “Sabbath” day got moved to Sunday for Christians even though it’s the first rather than last day of the week.
Odd to rank order days imo
No I don’t mean anything about the calendar. Sorry if my post was confusing. I’ll try again.
For Jews Yom Kippur is the most important. It’s the holiday where atonement is made for sins. My understanding of Christian theology is that as of the moment of Jesus’ death atonement for sins no longer happen on Yom Kippur but instead happens through Jesus. If that’s right, Good Friday could be seen as a replacement for Yom Kippur and this is an argument (albeit perhaps not a very good one) for the proposition that Good Friday is the most important holy day.
In Catholic and Orthodox practice, particularly important feasts make the week after them especially important. In Catholic practice, they also have separate readings for the different Masses. (Christmas Eve, Christmas night, Christmas morning, for example – on a regular feast all three would have the same readings.) IN Orthodox practice, the following week is a fast-free week.
By the standard, the next most important is Pentecost.
I’m not aware that Christians have a rank order of calendar days…
Interesting story about a self-isolated religious community moving into a small Kansas town here..
Ashkenazi Jewry has an agrarian tradition?
Don’t all cultures have an agrarian tradition?
How many cyberpunks does it take to change a tractor tire?
I meant ethnic cultures, not subcultures :/
Has anyone done empirical studies to find out which paintball guns are the best? The reviews all seem based on hearsay, and the assumption that more expensive guns are automatically better. Nothing seems to have changed since I did research to buy my first marker 17 years ago.
Our friends with the spaceships the size of small moons have shown up again just in time for the holidays, and in the spirit of the season, they have given us a gift: one kilogram of antimatter. It’s perfectly safe, stored in a high-tech container. And the container can be used to transfer the antimatter into other containers (also thoughtfully provided).
What should we do with this gift?
We make it the official standard of measure kilogram.
I’m assuming the aliens gave us exactly a kilogram, not just a scoop of antimatter about the size of a kilogram, and their measurements are likely to be more precise than ours.
And if it ever changes mass, that’ll be really obvious.
How useful would that actually be? We know it’s a perfect exact kilogram, but we’d still have to measure it and compare it to other things in order to use kg as a measurement, in which case we’ve just introduced our measurement imprecision back in. Also, might be difficult to use and measure if it’s made of antimatter
It wouldn’t be all that useful, but it would be awesome.
And it would show our alien friends that we treasure their gift. It’s a public display of appreciation, in keeping with the Christmas season. Like wearing the sweater your aunt gave you.
The kilogram was officially redefined in terms of the Planck constant a few months ago.
Just want to say that this really tickled my funny bone.
The kilogram of antimatter is presumably in a container that weighs something. Removing it from the container is likely to rapidly reduce its mass, as well as having other undesirable effects.
So how do you use it as a standard?
Assuming that all containers that you’ve been provided weigh the same, you don’t have to remove it from the container. You can just measure the difference between the full and an empty container.
Attempt the reverse engineer the containers.
I assume the containers are more like magnetic confinement fusion reactors, and less like glass jars.
Nonetheless, to perform as described they pretty much have to be better than what we currently have. And similarly the anti-matter itself is not in sufficient quantities to do any kind of serious work, so as others have said using it for research is clearly the way to go. Not sure what kind of research, and anyway the results of the early research would influence what we’d want to do next.
Wikipedia says: “The reaction of 1 kg of antimatter with 1 kg of matter would produce 1.8×10^17 J (180 petajoules) of energy (by the mass–energy equivalence formula, E=mc2).
A random homework help site says the United States uses 2*10^20 joules per year, so if we built a power plant for this it would power the US for eight hours.
Wikipedia also notes: “Isolated and stored anti-matter could be used as a fuel for interplanetary or interstellar travel… Since the energy density of antimatter is higher than that of conventional fuels, an antimatter-fueled spacecraft would have a higher thrust-to-weight ratio than a conventional spacecraft.”
So let’s do that.
Yeap, my thought as well. Not much in terms of raw energy, but might be useful as mobile energy storage or, well, obviously weapons.
We can probably make a water-powered spacecraft that can mine asteroids. This alone will change quite a lot of industries and maybe even jumpstart space industrialization itself.
If the bit about other containers means it can be divided into smaller quantities, then it can be used for study and power generation.
Even 1g to prod would probably revolutionise some fields of physics.
I don’t have time to do the maths right now, but the rest ought probably to be used to send small-ish probes across the solar system or whatever.
Use it to destroy the aliens.
I thought of destroying the aliens when we had the previous question that seemed to open up the possibility of getting the space battleship Yamato. But while the wave motion gun might be useful against the aliens, a kilogram of antimatter would surely not be enough to destroy them. My Fermi estimate suggests you get a blast not that much bigger than the Tsar Bomba from 1 kg of antimatter, and I expect you need a lot bigger than Tsar Bomba to take out even one moon-sized spaceship.
Particles show unexpected clumping in water of varied densities. It’s a big deal and it was discovered accidentally.
So, how far would AI have to be developed so that it could notice unexpectedness and start investigating, or at least bring it to people’s attention?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13643-y
Tl;Dr:
Seems to be driven by advection-diffusion of the salt.
i.e. salt can’t diffuse through the spheres, so saltier water builds up below and less salty water above. The difference in density drives advection whereby the saltier and less salty water flow down and up respectively. This sets up a circulation of fluid vertically away from the particles then round and back towards the particles from the sides. . Since the particles studied were spheres and spheroids, radial symmetry meant that there was no net force on a single particle. Though a single wedge shaped particle has been observed by some other phycisist to move around on its own in this environment.
When two particles come close to one another, the horizontal radial inward flows act to suck the particles towards one another.
But I’m no fluids expert. Maybe I should become one. How useful’s a Phd in
engineering for commercial/industrial R&D?
And did they really have to measure pressures in inHg?
Hello, poppets!
Music recommendations, this one spurred by listening to the morning show on our national classical music station all this week, with the Christmas music playing, and they played this one on Friday – Leonard Cohen, You Want It Darker.
Great music, great musician, God rest the man.
And as an unintentional counterpoint, as we’re counting down Advent to the Big Day, today is both the feast of St Thomas the Apostle (Doubting Thomas) and in the sequence of the O Antiphons for the last seven days of Advent, O Oriens/O Morning Star (O Daybreak) – in the German version by Arvo Part O Morgenstern.
From darkness to the dawn 🙂
My Christmas recommendation is here.
Leonard Cohen is the one modern songwriter I have come across, in my very limited experience of the field, who is a real poet.
Possibly because he spent the first decade or two of his professional career as a poet. And, +1
Seconded.
Suzanne Vega also writes lyrics that often work as poetry.
I’d say Bob Walkenhorst.
And +1 to Cohen and Vega.
Two non-Christmas shots in the dark:
Fake Empire by The National. Baritone voice, interesting lyrics (perhaps not poetic, I suppose), and unusual timing.
Witch of the Westmoreland covered by Stan Rogers.
Christianity Today Calls for Trump’s Impeachment This is a major evangelical magazine/website, though I think it doesn’t appeal to the majority of evangelicals.
Still, it took the editor a long time to come to this conclusion. Thoughts about whether it indicates or might lead to a shift against Trump among a significant number of evangelicals?
It was started by Billy Graham and he was actively involved with it into at least the 2000s, I think. It’s hardly a non-central example of Christian Evangelical publications.
Those claims are not mutually exclusive.
“President Pence” does sound appealing to evangelicals, I’m sure.
Not really. After caving on religious liberty in Indiana to a few randos on Twitter, Mike Pence is best understood as a useless pool noodle propped up with a broomstick.
I don’t read Christianity Today, being an coastal elitist atheist Jew myself, but I understand they’re about as liberal as Jeff Sessions. Which I guess is the point – nowadays Jeff Sessions is a filthy lib because he disagreed with Trump once, that’s how it’s defined in the Red Bubble.
So I expect evangelicals to keep backing Trump, and CT to lose most of their subscribers but carry on as a thin shadow of what they once were, much like mainline Protestantism. Or Reform/Conservative Judaism for that matter.
Damn. Now it’s problematic to get great T-shirts?
/s for clarity
I’d say that Conservative Judaism is a good analogy for Christianity Today. 50 years ago, it was very significant, but polarization has moved away from it–now the Evangelical norm is comparable to the modern Orthodox.
There are clearly some Republicans and some evangelicals who are opposed to Trump but reluctant so say so in public. It’s not obvious how many there are.
That’s not an accurate description of the red bubble. I have one foot in that bubble, and while some are mindlessly supportive of Trump despite his failure to implement his agenda, there are many who see the reality and while they still back Trump against the Democrats, will not go any farther than that. It should be noted that Sessions is running for the Senate in 2020, and is leading is every poll he has been included in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_Senate_election_in_Alabama#Polling
Is there good polling data on what fraction of evangelicals:
a. Support Trump wholeheartedly?
b. Support Trump because at least he’s better than the Democrats on most issues they care about?
I think there are a lot of isolated demands for moral consistency among people who condemn evangelicals for supporting Trump. Many of the same folks were imploring the liberal end of their own party to hold their noses and vote for Hillary in 2016, despite her hawkish foreign policy and friendly relations with big financial companies, in order to make sure abortion stayed safe and legal and the right people got appointed to the supreme court.
I also wonder to what extent Trump has deep support among evangelicals, as opposed to from some prominent evangelical leaders who face the same sociopath-friendly selective environment as politicians….
Is it fair to have an isolated demand for moral consistency aimed at people that ostentatiously claim that their entire identity is wrapped up in being moral?
Isn’t that also true of social justice activists, though? The argument against racial insensitivity is a moral one, so blackface should be inexcusable, no?
Is there good polling data on what fraction of evangelicals:
a. Support Trump wholeheartedly?
b. Support Trump because at least he’s better than the Democrats on most issues they care about?
Somebody did the work there, but it’s behind academic paywall so here’s the abstract:
Christians are really big on repeated forgiveness, we are all sinners, Jesus can cleanse anything, God works through sinners too, etc. and evangelicals even more so. And to be fair, are often surprisingly consistent about this. Even Jeffrey Dahmer could find a pastor.
It’d be one thing if Christians had a doctrine that was different, but it’s just weird to expect Christians to be unusually concerned about orthopraxy. They are explicitly less concerned about it than most groups.
Frankly I disagree with the idea of a focus on belief over practice, but it’s not my religion.
I think I’m missing the context here, but sure I’ll bite that bullet. Self righteous prigs of whatever flavor should be called out at the slightest hint of hypocrisy.
@brad
Justin Trudeau didn’t get canceled for his blackface performances, nor did the Democrat governor of Virginia.
I think blackface is in extremely poor taste but not the worst thing in the world. I have the sneaking suspicion a Republican would not be so easily forgiven for such a transgression.
Where did this “canceled” come from all of a sudden?
Also, I was correct in assuming that I had missed the context of some culture war kerfuffle or other. Still happy to bite the bullet, though I’m not sure Trudeau or the governor are “social justice activists”. Activists, in my experience, are primarily characterized by not accomplishing anything meaningful.
brad, we are equally old on this one. “Canceled,” I word I learned from this forum, means “declared persona non grata.” It’s popular with the Kids These Days.
Trudeau and Northam both did something that should be anathema to left-leaning individuals (wore blackface a decade or three ago), yet they are still politically viable.
I’m not condemning the left for being okay with these things. I kind of see myself donning a BBA hat here (if that’s okay with BBA) and resigning myself to the fact that everything is awful for everyone forever.
IDK if you were asking about the origin of the phrase ‘canceled’ — I think it was in reference to say, you find out a comedian said a racial slur 10 years ago, so now all of his/her shows are canceled.
You can borrow my hat, just be sure to return it (and wash it first) when you’re done with it.
What those two incidents demonstrate is for all the social clout of the cancel brigade, they have a lot less hard political power than anyone thought. And I (typically) have mixed feelings about that. We all have skeletons in our closets and it’s probably a good thing that having something silly from your past dragged up isn’t always career-ending. In the Virginia case, Northam was a rural centrist and never pretended to be woke. He refused to leave office, the activists couldn’t force him out, he’s ineligible for reelection anyway… fine.
But the sheer hypocrisy of Trudeau and the Canadian Liberals is stunning to behold. Trudeau’s brand is social justice, up to the point of being the first government in world history to accuse itself of genocide (!!!). But between the blackface incidents, the #MeToo allegation against him, and the SNC-Lavalin affair, any of which would’ve sunk any other politician with Trudeau leading the cancellation mob, it’s obvious that neither he nor anyone else in party leadership gives a damn about their supposed ideals. And they won reelection anyway! I don’t know if it was strategic voting by NDP supporters to prevent a Tory win, or if people actually still support Trudeau despite everything… it could be a lot of things, I wasn’t following the election that closely. But I think it stinks to high heaven.
It’s fine to be a pragmatist. I personally think I ought to be more pragmatic, maybe that’ll be my New Year’s resolution. But if you’re going to claim to be an idealist, at the very least take your ideals seriously.
Trudeau and Northam don’t have to be social-justice activists themselves in order for Conrad’s parallel to work: Trump isn’t an evangelical either.
The main lesson here, IMO, is that outrage mobs don’t have any power except that granted them by actual decisionmakers. If thousands of Twitter handles demand that someone resign or be fired, and they and their employer ignores the wave of outrage for a couple weeks, it almost always blows over. There are still surely people outraged about whatever thing, but most people don’t actually care or even know about the outrage campaign.
I think the power of outrage mobs to get people canceled mainly happens when either:
a. The actual decisionmakers with power or the target panics because they interpret the outrage mob as having more power or representing more people than it really does.
b. The actual decisionmakers or the target gives in because they’ve been philosophically disarmed by their ideology into thinking that they must go along with this kind of cancel demand whether it’s reasonable or not.
c. The actual decisionmakers were looking for a reason to cancel someone (often there was a power struggle over the person going on internally), and the outrage mob provides a convenient excuse to finish the matter.
A million angry messages on Twitter and think pieces on Vox talking about how horrible person X is for their problematic tweet or the photo of them in the same room with a Republican ten years ago or something, by themselves, haven’t got any power at all, and never did have that power.
Interesting comment. I wonder if this is true? How about boycotts, which are often preceded by outrage mobs? In that case, the decision makers are all the consumers. It is true that 95% of boycotts have no economic effect on the firm (pulled that % out of my butt), but some boycotts have effects.
BBA
Do I count as anyone? I don’t and wouldn’t expect them to have hard political power because they apparently to not wish to affect meaningful change.
In California they have no mass transit to speak of, live in big houses with lawns, and you have to drink out of fucking paper straws. That’s the face of contemporary “activism”.
“Not wishing to effect meaningful change” is a bit strong, but I do agree that activism by its nature tends to focus on simple and visible things rather than important things. Sometimes these overlap and you get the civil rights movement; sometimes they don’t and you get paper straws.
I’m not an evangelical, so I could be wrong, but they seem to currently to represent the lefter-wing of evangelicals (They have an article mildly opposing Brexit and another favoring LGBT protections, as examples I found in a quick scan of their site), more prominent by their uniqueness, so I wouldn’t read too much into it.
This is a sample size of exactly one, so grain of salt.
I’ve been classifiable as an evangelical since I was six. I go to church twice a week. Most of the people I know socially are Christians. I live in what is historically a fairly red state. I have everything you want if you are trying to stick someone in the evangelical bucket, but I’ve never heard of this magazine (Billy Graham, obviously, I have heard of).
I’ve never heard another Christian talk about Christian magazines at all; I have zero recollection of even seeing one in real life. If my particular bubble is at all representative, this will have a near-zero impact; I just don’t think anybody is reading Jesus Weeklies anymore.
Which brings up an interesting thing; with no evidence to back this up, I suspect the people amplifying this article are probably hoping this is important rather than having any hard evidence it is. Like, think about the thing where the twitter atheist democrats will be like “well, if these christians understood their own book, they’d vote for expansive social programs, it’s clearly what Jesus wanted” but on a much smaller, more niche scale.
What I love about this, if true (and I wish it were) is it’s sort of this thing where, like, say I could bribe Rachel Maddow or whoever the current niche left media person is right now to say “Trump is awesome, he’s MAGAing it up, everybody vote Trump”. I think you can pretty realistically predict that she wouldn’t actually flip a significant amount of voters; people would just find a new niche left media person to watch who still agreed with their politics.
But there’s this implied conceit in all the secular talk about this that seems to assume pro-Trump Christians will suddenly go “Wait, a MAGAZINE said he’s bad? Well, I didn’t know that. Warren it is!”. And I love this. I can’t explain exactly why, but something about Christians as a group being so alien that somebody who knows he wouldn’t become a republican if The Atlantic went MAGA assuming this one group of people’s minds works a completely opposite way is great to me.
What that misses is that the somebody in question believes that Evangelicals are uncomfortable about their support of Trump, each of them is doing it in part because the others are, and once it becomes clear that some of them are not it will become possible for more and more of them to switch.
An abstract observation about hypocrisy, separated out from political discussions:
I feel like “defense by shouting hypocrisy” has drastically increased in usage in the last few years. That’s: Group X does something bad and some people say they should be punished. Defenders of group X say “but look at these other people who did the bad thing! They should be punished!”
Moreover, I feel like shouting hypocrisy is a weird form of disagreement because you’re basically agreeing that the bad thing is actually bad. eg: Group X does something bad. Group X’s opponents say they should be punished. Group X’s supporters call the opponents hypocrites. Well… so that means they agree that the thing is bad, right? So they should be fine with the punishment, and also looking to punish the other group who did the bad thing as well.
Okay, sure, no one is surprised that defenders of Group X aren’t going out of their way to punish their own side. But it still seems like the argument ought to be useless. They’re agreeing it’s a bad thing — that’s not an argument against punishing it!
So that’s two things: does anyone else think they have noticed this becoming more common? And, does anyone agree that it’s kinda jarring to read arguments of this sort because they are basically meaningless?
To steelman it a bit, I’d say it’s similar to a claim someone is using an isolated demand for rigor. If someone only thinks something is wrong when their opponent does it, but not when they or their associate does it, then that casts doubt that they actually believe it’s all that inherently wrong, but are instead simply using it as an opportunity to communicate that they don’t like their opponent.
Of course, typically that’s better as a response of “neither should be punished”, rather than “only your side should be punished”.
Not only does it cast doubt on whether their belief is genuine, but it also raises the possibility that maybe they do believe the action is wrong, but they do it anyway because they don’t care much about not doing wrong things. That undermines their trustworthiness in other contexts.
I think usually the response is “your side first, then we can talk about mine”. Probably if side Y starts self-flagellating then side X will just switch to arguing that it shouldn’t be punished based on Y’s values, but that’s politics.
See also: Whataboutism.
It’s a good one for the Cold War, since both sides did a lot of dodgy stuff.
whataboutism is a term much abused these days. It’s meant to refer to irrelevant comparisons, with “stalin killed millions! and are you still lynching negroes?” being the traditional formulation. It’s not intended to dismiss claims like “X is totally unprecedented! Well, what about Y, which looks an awful lot like X?” I’ve seen the term used a lot lately to dismiss any attempt at comparison, enough that it’s become a bit of a pet peeve.
Yeah. Whataboutism and ‘Whataboutism’ are both bad.
Fallacy fallacy and all that.
No, I don’t think that pointing out hipocrisy means you agree the thing the other group says is bad is actually bad.
Like when that whatshisname Republican Congressman had a lover who had an abortion got accused of hipocrisy because he was pro-life, that wasn’t because pro-choice people agreed that abortion was bad. It was because he himself did not uphold the standard he wanted to hold for others in his personal life.
Sometimes it’s a thing both X and Y think it’s bad; sometimes it’s X doing something only X says is bad, but wants to force group Y into the standard too, while Y think it’s not bad, but point out that even group X does it, so it can’t be that bad.
Hypocrisy is an accusation you can use when you and your opponent have no values in common.
If you agree on a value, you can accuse your opponent of violating the common value. But it does not make much sense to accuse your opponent of violating your value. Like, yeah, the opponent may even gladly admit that.
When you accuse your opponent of violating their value, that can hurt them if they care; and even if they don’t really care, you make them look bad in front of their allies in the audience.
This creates some bad incentives, like people paying more attention to how their opponents are following their values, and ignoring what their supposed allies do. Also, the fewer values you have, the less vulnerable you are, so… it’s a good time to be a psychopath, I guess.
its not just agreeing something is bad or not. most shouts of hypocrisy are themselves admissions or examples of hypocrisy
I’m going to attack the premise, here.
To the extent this is true, it’s merely that you are being exposed to argument. I’d argue that most argument isn’t logically consistent. Have forums like Twitter and Facebook increased argument? Could be. On the other hand, if you watch any discussion about sports, you’ll see that argument is eternal and that logical fallacies abound.
But, it’s also true that the internet in general makes it easier for two people who disagree to find each other and argue. It also makes it a great deal easier for you, the 3rd party, to see that argument. So I’ll grant the premise, but I think the premise doesn’t actually mean what is implied.
I think everyone is just exposed to more opportunity for poor argument.
That’s the truest statement about the internet I’ve ever heard.
Sometimes you get a particularly annoying version which I call hypothecrisy— that’s where I don’t actually have an example to hand of you being hypocritical, but I don’t let that stop me from declaring that you would be totally hypocritical in some hypothetical situation that I just made up.
Come on, man, like if somebody was threatening to chuck a puppy off a cliff, like you WOULD’T make up a story to calm them down?
When moral relativism reigns supreme, the only sin is hypocrisy
I was very affected by a passage about that in The Diamond Age:
I had completely forgotten about that passage. That’s one of my favorite books so I probably got the idea from there.
Preregistering an experiment: a randomized controlled trial of Sleep Support capsules.
I claim that these make me wake up about an hour earlier than I would otherwise, feeling equally refreshed and ready to start the day. But I’m not sure if this is placebo or not.
I’ve figured out a way to blind myself to whether I’m taking real capsules or placebo, and I’ll be recording a total of 24 nights of sleep (12 real, 12 placebo). After each night, I’ll try to record:
1. What time I went to bed
2. What time I woke up
3. How subjectively refreshed I felt upon waking
4. How energetic I ended up being that day (eg took naps vs. did lots of hard work)
5. How well I remembered my dreams that night
Time of going to bed will be whenever I turn the lights off. Time of waking up will be whenever I get out of bed and get dressed (since I wake up a bunch of times in the morning and then go back to bed). I am going to try to not look at the clock at all during the night while I’m doing this, so I don’t psych myself into getting up at a specific time. I’m not going to force myself to go to bed at a specific time, because in real life I definitely don’t do that, so I’ll just have to hope that variation averages out or doesn’t matter.
At the end of the 24 nights, I’ll check how I did. Primary outcomes are length of sleep and time of waking (I suspect my time of waking is only weakly correlated with when I go to sleep, and I’m not sure which one I want to claim the sleep capsules affect). Secondary outcomes are everything else.
I’m only going to try this on days off (on workdays, I wake up when I’m forced to, regardless of what I’ve taken), so this will take a couple of months to finish. If I haven’t posted about this on SSC by let’s-say-April, somebody ping me.
What brand are you using? That might be important. Also, another parameter to try to track might be your level of fatigue on going to bed, and an important parameter to control might be your light exposure before going to sleep.
I’m very interested in this, since I’ve used melatonin off and on for a while.
Just chiming in to say that Melatonin is amazing. Everyone should use it. Sleep effectiveness is one thing, but another thing it does is make me fall asleep more reliably. I’ve often had trouble with doing that, even after setting up a very regular schedule. Nothing else has made nearly as much of a difference as taking 0.5mg Melatonin 30 min before going to bed.
If Scott uses Melatonin, I’d bet money on there being an effect.
Melatonin consistently makes me wake up at 4 AM, often with nightmares, often feeling terrible and unable to get back to sleep; it seems to do this to some sizeable minority of the population. “Everyone should use it” is almost never true of anything.
Have you twiddled with the dose and timing?
I’ve had the waking up at 04:00 thing sometimes, but only if I take melatonin later than normal.
I wonder what kind of dose is equivalent to e.g. not staring at my laptop for an hour.
Right. I amend my statement to “almost all people should try it” with the admission that it was silly to imply it would work well for everyone.
@Lambert: no, I’ll try that, thanks.
I’m surprised taking it later would make someone wake up earlier, any thoughts on the mechanism?
To be honest, it’s probably an artefact of small n and my sleep cycle being an utter mess.
Regarding dosages, I figure that, since your brain is already making that stuff, there must be an amount that doesn’t trigger waking up at 4. And that installing f.lux or whatever must have an equivalent dose, below the thresold of giving Scott terrible side effects. So there might be a theraputic sweet spot for you.
My first thought would be to start at the minimum dose that any paper had found to have a statistically significant effect and ramp up to 0.5mg or so.
Once you have found the dose where intolerable side effects appear, play around with timings, combination with other interventions etc.
The term MSV turns up in the literature. Anybody know where I can find a rigorous definition? Seems to be some kind of % reduction in melatonin. But IDK what exact intervention they use to compare it to what exact baseline.
@sty_silver
I’ve seen it claimed by a doctor that many people take it at the wrong time, making things worse, rather than better.
I don’t use an alarm clock and own an Oura ring – if you give me a link and they ship internationally, I can probably add 1 to the sample.
Why not do workdays, too? Worst case scenario, the data is too noisy and you discard it. More likely, the quantity of data will make up for its quality. Also, it gives you more practice with recording data, making it faster for you to realize that the questions are bad, or something.
(Actually, worst case scenario is that you develop a tolerance for the drug and it stops having an effect. But how often are you taking it now?)
The difference I claim the drug makes is helping me wake up at 10 rather than 11. Adding in a bunch of days where I wake up at 8 because my alarm went off isn’t going to give me noisy data, it’s just going to give me a bunch of “you woke up at 8” for me to throw out.
It’s nonzero cost for me to get the drugs, get the placebo capsules, fill the placebo capsules, and do the blinding process, and I didn’t feel like going through it for days when I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get data.
You listed more data to record than just time at wake up.
Placebos and blinding may be a hassle, but you could do a randomized non-blinded study.
Obvious in hindsight:
Obvious in foresight, too.
If you decide to tell them where you are, they know where you are. That’s easy mode.
The somewhat harder thing is tracking them when they don’t give (manufactured) consent to it.
You need to get moderately clever and exploit the many flaws in bluetooth to track their FitBit or whatever.
Or use cookies and browser fingerprinting to track which IP addresses they’re using.
If they’re law enforcement, rescue or military in the field, listening in on walkie-talkie metadata (and data, if they forget which setting is encrypted and which is plaintext) is probably the easiest way.
But nobody listens to security researchers.
To what extent is this also true for dumbphones? I know they can be triangulated, as any non-directional transmitter, but is it being done in general?
The carrier has data on cell id and signal strength, which can localize the phone within a ring around the cell antenna.
“It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people – we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”
–Anonymous U.S. drone operator
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/
Ed Snowden addressed this a bit on his JRE interview. It sounds like the only absolute advantage of dumb phones when it comes to not being tracked are 1) it’s easy to remove the battery and 2) once you remove the battery most of them really are dead, unlike smartphones which have a small unremovable reserve battery that keeps the clock going or whatever, and can be used to locate the phone.
You cannot locate the phone based on reserve power (at least not via cell towers), because the cellular radio will not be powered. However, it’s known that Verizon, at the request of law enforcement, has pushed firmware updates to phones which prevents them from actually turning off when you appear to turn them off. Pulling the main battery should still work.
It’s definitely possible, but not done routinely. Smartphones, on the other hand, routinely have apps that request your location and put it in a database for some useful purpose, which makes it much easier for your location history to be misused. You might not be a person of interest now, but you could be later.
And they tracked political dissidents as they organized with other political dissidents, er, “terrorists”. Hey, that unknown cellphone that was at the meeting with the seven known tangos last week? Happened again, third time, so put him on the list and see who’s meeting with him.
If this is “hindsight” to you, then you haven’t been paying attention. Hyperion, Dan Simmons, 1989, had the bit where just about every terrorist/dissident on a planet was killed by simultaneous precision strikes on their phones, and not because they volunteered “terrorist” in their user profile.
So, how long before we can stop doing the GPS-ankle-bracelet thing for parolees, etc, because it is easier to just track their phones and as psychologically unthinkable as self-amputation for them to ever put down or turn off their phone?
… none of this is about the government doing anything.
This information is available for purchase as a commodity.
Do you imagine that the government isn’t one of the customers? Or do you just not care?
I care from the standpoint that this gets cast as a uniquely governmental threat, from which the people will be protected by preventing the government from collecting the data, or dismantling the government, etc.
The government has policemen, jails, and armed drones. The corporations have, what, advertising departments? If the two threats we are comparing are that the police might track you down and incarcerate or harm you as a result of ubiquitous surveillance, and that corporations might advertise at you because of ubiquitous surveillance, it seems strange that you regard the corporate threat as greater than the government. Or comparable to the government, or worth mentioning in the same breath as the government threat.
If there’s some threat that worries you beyond corporations advertising at you, then you might want to spell that out before you expect other people to join your outrage at the dastardly corporations. Though if it’s a hypothetical or edge case of corporate behavior, compared to the central example of government behavior for as long as there have been governments, don’t expect too much outrage.
Also, turn off your phone for the afternoon.
Of course, the government can put pressure on corporations to hand over data. So ultimately if you’re concerned about the government getting the data it doesn’t matter who is collecting it because the government will likely get a hold of it.
Yeah, I’m sure the advertising/tracking companies sell the data they collect to the government[1], or sell it to contractors who launder it in ways that avoid legal challenges and hand it to the government as needed. And if they refused, they’d be legally coerced to hand the data over, perhaps via an NSL that prevented them ever telling anyone they’d done so. But that’s kind-of silly to worry about, since they’ll surely just sell the data without any moral qualms.
Note that the NYT report is about tracking done by apps on your phone. The app writers collect location data, and then sell that data so they can make more money. The tracking data is used, among other things, to link devices of the same user together–something that’s very much sought after so ads can be better targeted, and thus the ad networks can get paid a little more per impression.
The internet advertising industry is a force for pure evil in the world.
[1] Multiple levels of government, each with its own agendas.
Yes. This is important to note.
Within the last year, a finance person from an entertainment business gave a talk at a finance meeting I was at. He mentioned that they had asked for home and work locations for every phone that came on-property in a particular month, and used that to develop customer profiles and marketing strategies.
The NBA is discussing a mid season tourney with fewer regular season games to replace some of the very low meaning games that occur as teams are out of contention and just floundering. My proposal would be:
Turn it into a fantasy tournament. Instead of the All-Star break select X number of team captains and have every player who wants to play submit their names. On the eave of the all star break you have a capped draft, where each team is restricted by the total salary cap in terms of what players they select and every player’s value is determined by their cap hit for that season and then you run your 8, 12 or 16 team tournament with those players. I think you could capture the allure of the All-Star game (heavy selection towards good players plus seeing players who would otherwise not play together) without the dull parts (lack of stakes and lack of defensive effort).
Thoughts?
This sounds like a great idea.
I rarely watch basketball at all, but I would make a point of watching this.
This is a copy of the judgment by The Employment Tribunals, in which a woman’s complaint of being discriminated against on the basis of her sex was dismissed, because she expressed the view that trans women are not women.
If anyone here knows, please indicate whether The Employment Tribunals is a normal court or whether it is an administrative tribunal, and whether its judgments can become precedents.
It looks like her consultancy contract was not renewed. On that basis alone, I would have dismissed the case. Nobody has a right to have a contract renewed. But this decision has caught the public’s (and JK Rowling’s) attention because of paragraph 90:
There is plenty of evidence discussed throughout the decision that the claimant was willing to treat trans women as women in social settings, but also that in heated twitter exchanges she called a trans woman a man. Generally her view is that you can and should be polite towards trans people, but in reality trans women are not really women. She considers the existence of female only spaces where trans women are excluded to be very important. This lines up quite nicely with my view.
I believe the judge strawmanned her position in paragraph 90 so that he could declare it “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”. That is an extremely harsh statement. It’s the kind of thing you would reserve for nazis. Even communists would probably pass the low bar of “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. But the effect is that her actual position of “trans women are not women, but should be treated with respect” is now considered “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.
So, in the UK at least, you can be terminated (her case did not turn on contract renewal but on whether her beliefs were deemed worthy of protection) for believing that trans women are not women. That belief is not worthy of respect, even though it’s shared by (pulling figure straight out of my ***) ~ 80% of the population (if somebody has data on this please share, this is just my own estimate).
Jordan Peterson was mocked by suggesting that you could go to jail for misgendering someone. We are not there yet but we just got a whole lot closer.
Here’s a fuller summary from someone who supports the decision’s reasoning. This case is actually not anything special; we’ve previously discussed cases with such lovely wording as “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.” Both came down to analysis of the same cases and that same clause (v) of what constitutes a philosophical belief, hence the invocation of human dignity, etc.
This guy doesnt make many arguments in favor of the judgment beyond “I dont think it is wholly outrageous” and “the Tribunal’s logic is pretty sound”.
It would seem plainly obvious to me that the belief that any man can declare themselves a woman and be entitled to enter a women’s changing room to be “in conflict with the fundamental rights of others”. However that belief is going to be protected, whereas the converse will not be.
Are you claiming that a significant number of male-identifying biological men will declare themselves to be trans women for the purpose of entering women’s changing rooms and ogling women as they undress? Or that anyone with a Y-chromosome entering a women’s changing room will make the women uncomfortable regardless of their intentions, appearance, and actions?
I don’t think any significant number of male-identifying biological men would, but I think a few would. This is why I don’t want the government involved in bathroom decisions.
Let a transwoman who’s done a fair job of presenting herself as female enter the women’s room without fear of a “no XY chromosomes in women’s rooms” law. Let women shoo a burly man wearing a dress out of the ladies’ room without fear of violating a “thou shalt not prohibit XY chromosomes from the women’s room” law.
Let people handle it themselves, like reasonable individual humans, without the government making blanket laws covering everyone forever.
Once the government stops other people from deciding who is “real” and who is “faking” it has taken on the role of gatekeeping, whether they want it or not.
@Conrad Honcho
I agree, this is largely a problem that can be solved with a healthy dose of human decency and common sense, without resorting to any kind of legislation. I may not have been clear in my initial reply: I don’t think the government should ever dictate what is an acceptable or unacceptable belief to hold or profess.* However, I’ve seen the “trans rights means men can claim to be women and go into women’s locker rooms” argument a number of times here and elsewhere, and I’ve always been mildly annoyed by it. I wanted @jermo sapiens to break down the specific claim that they’re trying to make, since I think that argument hides some questionable assumptions under its brash tone.
*insert disclaimer about established narrow exceptions to the first amendment
Maybe not so much bathrooms, but I recall an story about a person in a men’s prison who transitioned to female, was moved to the women’s prison and raped a female inmate. Do I think a lot of male prisoners would do this? No, but a few would.
Conrad:
Every other set of rules of politeness and set of rights we have gets exploited by bad people to get away with bad things. It would be quite surprising if this were the one set of rules that didn’t have anyone trying to exploit them for bad purposes.
The problem is that we’re used to talking about these issues in moralistic and legalistic terms–these are rights, they must never be violated. Whereas we probably need to think in terms of tradeoffs between different peoples’ needs and interests.
Sure, which is why I don’t like the idea of hard and fast rules for this stuff. Let the prison wardens decide who belongs in which jail.
Something similar has happened, and was in the news this past year. Some low-life who seems to get off on upsetting people identified as a pre-op transexual, MTF, and wound up in the news in Canada, for 2 things:
1) Suing beauticians who refused to wax her scrotum
2) improper behaviour with female minors
Even The Guardian – known for its left wing politics – calls her a troll, and links to some of the other articles on her.
AFAIK, there were no washrooms or changing rooms involved, but it’s clear that not all transfolk are angels, and/or not all people claiming to be transfolk really are.
My priors would be that proportionately, there are as many scummy transfolk as cisfolk, but this particular case could also have been lying about being trans.
@Conrad Honcho @DinoNerd
Good thing we have laws directly criminalizing rape and improper behavior with female minors, so we can deter and punish those crimes whether the perpetrator identifies as male, female, or Martian!
Our prisons do a terrible job of preventing prisoner on prisoner assaults, both sexual and otherwise. Anyone sincerely interested in that would have countless much more promising candidates for improvements in policy; focusing on this isolated incident and suggesting this policy is any significant part of the problem is pretty obvious motivated reasoning.
As soon as we do that, on this particular issue, one side sets their coefficients to infinity or the other side’s to zero or both, and then we’re back to absolutes. It’s mostly the pro-trans side that does this (“You’re denying our existence by refusing”/”It doesn’t cost you anything to let trans people use the bathroom of your choice”) but sometimes the other. Thus by observation, this sort of solution will not work.
@thevoiceofthevoid
Is prevention worth anything?
@Protagoras
I don’t think it takes motivated reasoning to suggest we should be careful about letting prisoners with penises in the women’s prison. Yes, I would also like other reforms to help prevent prison violence and abuse, but it costs little to maintain the previous rule of “no prisoners with penises in the women’s prison.”
I would like to propose a new rule that we allow wild dogs to be caged with the prisoners. Do you oppose this new rule? If so, are you engaged in motivated reasoning because you’re not addressing the failures of the current system to keep prisoners safe?
@Conrad Honcho
I think it’s unclear whether a strict “no penises in female prisons” rule would prevent rape or result in more rape overall (I suspect that trans women in men’s prisons are frequently targeted).
I think that a bathroom bill would do approximately nothing to prevent rape, since I highly doubt that anyone willing to violate the law against rape would be deterred by a mere law against using the wrong bathroom.
@ Protagoras:
Yes, so we should want to avoid adopting a policy that will make this even harder.
Not having male guards in female prisons might be a start.
It goes a little further than that: the Judge had to declare that her views on transgenderism were not a legitimate philosophical or religious belief (which are protected in the UK). This is where the ‘not worthy of respect’ component comes in. Further, the non-renewal was equivalent to a firing, something neither side disputed.
The standards for a philosophical belief in this context:
So they’re dismissing it on grounds of the fifth caveat.
Yes, exactly. So a belief which was held by 99% of people for 1000s of years, and which is currently held by a substantial majority (this is just my impression), is now unworthy of respect in a democratic society.
To the many progressives here who dont understand why others are not concerned about Trump not dotting every i and crossing every t when investigating Joe Biden, this is a big reason why. The issues may not appear related to you, but they are to us. We’re basically being told that saying 2+2=4 is now against the law.
Edit: Actually we’re being told that progressive beliefs will be protected against discrimination, but not conservative ones.
There’s a recent story making it’s rounds on the right where someone got sentenced to 16 years in prison for burning a LGBT pride flag. Now it turns out the sentence was for arson, since the flag didn’t belong to him, and there were both hate crime and repeat offender additions to the sentence. Given that, the sentence does somewhat make sense given the law (though I dislike hate crime laws); [arson + hate crime + repeat offender = 16 years in prison] doesn’t sound particularly unjust, given that I’m seeing sentences of up to 20 years in prison for arson itself.
The question becomes, was anyone ever prosecuted for felony arson for burning another flag, particularly the American flag (assuming the flag belongs to someone else)? Would people be up in arms if conservative prosecutors started charging, say, left-wing protesters who set fire to a trash can with felony arson?
My understanding is that it was the arson of burning the flag. It’s not like he burned down a building or something.
The flag in Texas vs Johnson (THE flag-burning case) was stolen. And the hate crime seems to be related to to opposing a socially-preferred belief. So I’ll say the whole thing is just a power play – just like the differential treatment of Kim Davis and sanctuary-city mayors is.
Texas and Iowa have different arson laws. In Texas, as in most states, arson is restricted to buildings, vehicles, and crops. But in Iowa third degree arson, an aggravated misdemeanor, is burning of anything worth less than $750.
I don’t think such an offense makes sense. Successful destruction by fire shouldn’t be treated as different than destruction by any other method. Maybe unpredictable fire is special and attempted destruction by fire should be highly penalized, which is how I believe attempted arson of buildings works. The danger of the fire spreading is already addressed in the Iowa charge of reckless use of fire, which is only a serious misdemeanor.
The flag in this case was torched in a bar the defendant threatened to burn down. We’re talking about an actual arson attempt committed by a habitual felon, not a symbolic demonstration by a protestor.
Interesting. I thought the big deal was him threatening to burn the bar down, but it’s actually mostly about him being a repeat offender.
broblawsky,
He did not burn the flag inside the bar. Check your source again. If he had, he would have been charged with actual arson. I’m not sure where threats come in, but I don’t think that they are relevant to Iowa arson law.
@Douglas Knight:
He stole the flag from a church, returned to the bar where he had made threats to burn the place down, and then burned the flag outside the bar.
What exactly is your objection?
ETA: Just to clarify, arson in the US is usually defined as : “the burning of any real property without consent or with unlawful intent”
A criminal arson does seem to have occurred.
As a further addendum, here is the Iowa code that defines arson. The $750 in value referenced above raises it to 2nd degree arson from 3rd degree.
To clarify the clarification, “real property” in the US is usually defined as fixed or immovable property, i.e. land and buildings. A flag is not “real property” by the legal definition; a flagpole might be.
A bar definitely would be, but no bar was burned down. And if you want to lock someone up for twenty years for threatening to burn down a bar, without you all being denounced as unjust merciless tyrants, you really need to A: lead with “he threatened to burn down a bar” when you tell the story, and B: actyually convict him of threatening to burn down a bar. Why are you even mentioning the flag?
Quoting from the Iowa code:
So, apparently the distinction “real” isn’t made in Iowa. He was actually convicted of 3rd degree arson, apparently. Which does seem to make arson relevant.
But it leaves your gratuitous clarification as irrelevant, and it leaves the whole “threatened to burn down a bar” thing as irrelevant, and it leaves 16-year prison sentences as irrelevant unless you’re a fan of three-strikes laws.
If it were a Native American activist being locked up for sixteen years because he burned an American flag that someone had legally flown on his tribe’s reservation, and a couple of older felonies for which he’d served his time, I’m guessing you wouldn’t be at all OK with this.
@John Schilling:
Not a fan of three strikes laws, and I don’t think the sentence is particularly just because of that.
Past that, I don’t know what in heck you are talking about. Guy shows up at your bowl game watch party and threatens to burn down your house because you are a Bama fan (and he likes Auburn), you kick him out and he drives down the road, steals someone else’s Bama flag, comes back to your house and burns that flag in your driveway. Might he get charged and convicted of arson? Yeah. What actually happens depends on the particulars. Being a twice convicted felon already might affect that.
I’m not a fan of three strikes laws, and I’m also not a fan of punishing people for crimes they haven’t been convicted of.
If someone threatened to burn down my house but couldn’t be proven to have done so, I might want them to be locked up for sixteen years, but I wouldn’t expect it. I wouldn’t expect uninvolved bystanders to think this was justice. And I would be embarrassed to defend the conduct of the DA who did that, against the complaints of people asking why some schmuck loser had to go to jail for sixteen years for a bit of malicious vandalism.
A sixteen-year sentence for A: stealing and destroying $750 worth of colored cloth and B: having committed two felonies in the past, is an injustice. It doesn’t matter if the means of destruction is fire. It doesn’t matter if we label it “arson”. It doesn’t matter what the informational content of the cloth’s coloration is. And it doesn’t matter what else the guy did, or threatened to do, unless that’s proven in court.
Also, I’m fairly confident that the people saying “It’s because he allegedly threatened to burn down a bar” are telling a fib, and that they cared more about the informational content of the colored cloth. But since neither one of those ought to carry a sixteen-year prison term, machts nichts.
FWIW, threatening arson in Iowa is more serious than third degree arson, already a felony that would have triggered the three strikes rule without the hate crime promotion. But he wasn’t charged with threatening arson.
Yeah, this is the main reason to support Trump. It’s certainly not his personal qualities.
FWIW I suspect a lot of Trump opponents would agree with you that this is one of the strongest reasons to support Trump: both in the absolute sense that this sort of stupid petty doctrinal rigidity is both wrong in itself and understandably drives people toward supporting Trump, and in the relative sense that it’s (on the anti-Trump view) a pretty serious moral error to rate this sort of wrong as worse than the wrongs Trump and his supporters perpetrate.
Apparently, you can discard the rule of law if you feel intimidated by your political opponents. That’s important for us to remember.
The rule of law is a two way street. When it applies to Hillary and co., I will be glad to have it apply to Trump also.
As mentioned here many times before, the usual punishment for the crimes Hillary Clinton could be proven to have committed is to be fired and for future employers to be told she isn’t to be hired for further government work.
She had already resigned her last government job, the FBI told the prospective employers for the new government job she was applying for what she had done, and they didn’t hire her. Mission accomplished.
Come on, dude. Trump made imprisoning Hillary a campaign promise, and he’s had 3 years to build a case. If she had committed any actual crimes – anything even theoretically indictable – do you really think Barr wouldn’t have already brought charges against her? This is a remarkably weak argument.
@broblawsky
Trump repudiated that promise almost immediately after his election win and hasn’t tried to build that case, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, because there’s no case there and he knows it.
@broblawsky
Or because American politics has an implicit policy to protect their own.
No one is going to put you in jail for saying “2+2=4”. (Yet.)
But if a corporation fires you for saying “2+2=4”, the judge will shrug and say “yeah, this kind of talk really does not belong to the workplace”. So when the HR department tells you that 2+2=5, the smart thing is to shut up.
Somehow, this type of “corporation is your god and can decide reality” reasoning is coded as left-wing these days. This is what happens when too many trust fund kids take oppression studies at university. In ancient times, left-wing referred to things like unions and protecting the employees.
You can still get in plenty of trouble for not agreeing that the boss’ latest iteration of the plan that already failed 5 times previously is utterly wonderful, and sure to solve all the company’s problems while putting a chicken in every pot. And I don’t mean active disagreement – I mean failure of loud and convincing agreement.
For whatever reason, I code that as right wing. The “boss is right because he is the boss” – and its corrollaries like “we all agree that the boss is smarter than anyone who works for him” and similar – seems to me to be basically a class system phenomenon, and therefore plainly Tory.
DinoNerd:
Is that different in more left-leaning industries or from left-leaning bosses? Like, say, media/entertainment and tech?
Amber A’Lee Frost of Chapo Trap House infamy wrote a piece recently (soft paywall) on the tension between identity politics and class politics. She’s a dirtbag socialist and it’s clear where her sympathies lie; I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the role of gender and race and so on. But when the “diverse” crowd thinks HR can solve everything and it falls on the cis het
beta cuckwhite dudes to point out that HR works for management, that says something big.My HR department tells me that the university is committed both to equal treatment of everyone on the basis of race, sex, etc. and to affirmative action.
But they haven’t asked me to agree that it’s true.
@albatross11
Hell no! (Or at least, not as far as I know.)
I think the main difference is based on the relative power of workers vs bosses. If the employee is easily replaced, and can be fired “at will” for whatever random reason; if unions are ineffective or banned; if everyone (who counts) agrees that some people are just plain better than others, and you can tell them apart at birth – then things are worse. And its those differences that make this about class/class struggle, and sometimes also race, gender, nationality etc.
So measures that reduce the power differential – which are generally coded left wing – might reduce this kind of thing. That’s why I see it as politically coded.
@DinoNerd
Oppressive behavior to (potential) employees is not just when unions are forced out, but can also consist of only union workers being allowed to be hired, especially if the union is ‘captured.’
Besides, when ‘the boss’ is a lefty, they can be just as abusive as righty bosses can be.
IMO, a lot of leftism is faux-egalitarian. Having an ideal doesn’t mean that this ideal is actually being worked towards. It can just as easily mean that policies are merely presented in a way that match the ideal, by rationalizations that ignore all the elements and outcomes that don’t match the ideal.
@Aapje – true enough.
I’ve experienced oppressive unions in Canada, though at least they didn’t require me to claim the sky was green. Here in the US, it’s hard to even find a union, let alone an oppressive one, and (assuming bad bosses or a bad company culture) it’s been all about individual power.
And of course there’s always the possibility that the bosses will have ethics and/or a sense of shame, or simply not have the personality weakness that prefers a chorus of agreement to advice that might prevent them making a significant mistake.
Mostly though, power matters. And that the more individual bosses earn in proportion to individual workers, and the more workers are interchangeable parts, easily replaced, the worse behaviour imperfect people are going to get away with, and even justify among themselves as reasonable and appropriate.
As an engineer of many years experience, I always have potential new employers trying to recruit me. I can also afford lawyers, though not the horde of lawyers a large tech company keeps on hand. There’s also a well known – and quite large – difference in effectiveness between engineers, making us not interchangeable parts. And most importantly, my bosses all know this, so the crap I and my peers encounter seems to be relatively mild. (I’d still prefer less of it, and vote with my feet when the crap gets excessive.)
But power is at least in part a political thing. Hence the way it looks to me, even though in practice overall assholery doesn’t seem to correlate with political position.
@BBA: Thanks, I liked the article! Specifically this part:
Which in my opinion connects nicely to the real taboo that James Damore broke. His conclusion was, essentially, that women are less likely than men to accept a job that sucks in return for higher salary, if they have a choice; so if you want to have more women in tech companies, the obvious solution is to make the jobs suck less. (Simply paying more to compensate, that’s actually the thing that makes the profession predominantly male.) Well, only an autist would make it public knowledge at workplace that working for the company sucks, and expect a pat on the back for speaking with candor.
@DinoNerd
Sure, but neither the sense of ethics of the employer, nor the balance of power between employer and employee, are necessarily right- or left-wing*.
I’d expect the right- and left-wing to abuse their power a bit differently, overall, but that doesn’t make one lesser than the other, although you might prefer left-wing oppression to right-wing oppression, in particular if your own desires match what the left-wing more often considers mandatory, rather than what the right-wing more often considers mandatory.
* For example, Chick-Fil-A seems to be one of the best if not the best employer in the fast-food business and doesn’t seem to demand allegiance to right-wing politics/policies from employees.
@Viliam
The problem with your argument is that Google jobs are clearly far from jobs that suck the most.
No, the taboo he broke is that he made a good case for why women on average have a different definition of “job that sucks.” SJ doctrine is that women like the same things as men, but don’t end doing the same as men due to abusive work environments (#metoo), pressure on women to (not) take certain jobs, expectations that clash with certain jobs (like caring/housekeeping tasks), etc. While these are partially true, they are not true enough to explain women’s choices.
I think that the quality of his argument really made it necessary to make an example out of him. The only way the media could rebut him was by lying about his claims, which is risky, because if he would engage in a debate, he might wipe the floor with the media. So he needed to be destroyed.
Aapje:
ISTM that a lot of media sources did fine just flat lying about what Damore had said. Googling for a longish document full of heresy and reading it carefully is as big investment; most people weren’t going to put that investment in. Various ideologues in media knew that and exploited it to lie about what was written in that document, knowing that few people would check.
It’s not a strategy that you can do all the time though, because even if almost no one will read every source, many people will read some source or will trust people who do.
So this is a strategy that can only be used somewhat sparingly.
Ok, I wonder what the this from “i conclude from this” is referring to. Let’s check out paragraph 89:
I’ll admit, I’m not sure from context whether or not this was in person or on a twitter exchange, but it certainly looks like she’s not “willing to treat trans women as women in social settings.”
It wasn’t her belief that got her contract not renewed, it was that she was vocally repeating that belief in hurtful ways, didn’t listen to her supervisors when they asked her to stop and was reflecting poorly on the non profit.
Switch out trans people for literally any other minority and you’ll see why this is a non issue. Imagine you had a contractor who wouldn’t stop saying things that offended black people, or jewish people, or men, or whatever.
I’m not sure either. I assumed it was on twitter but I’m not sure. But I wouldnt go as far as you. I dont think what happens in a “very bitter dispute” is indicative of what you’re willing to do in social settings.
True. But the case turned on whether her belief should be considered “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. Maybe her claim would have been dismissed regardless had she passed that hurdle, but what people are upset about is not that lady losing her job, it’s that the belief of “trans women are not women” is not considered “worthy of respect in a democratic society”.
You are conflating the outcome of the case, which I dont care about, with the legal reasoning used to reach the outcome (and which is indicative of how future cases will be decided), which I (and JK Rowlings) do care about.
Jermo Sapiens you say she was fired because her belief was not worthy of respect in a democratic society. However the fifth caveat also says “not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.” If the person was harassing her colleagues by calling them other pronouns than they prefer she was in conflict with their fundamental rights.
Like people are allowed to believe that people who don’t share their religion are going to hell. But if you keep telling your colleagues that they are going to hell, that’s harassment and you should be fired.
from the opinion:
“The Claimant’s position is that even if a trans woman has a Gender Recognition Certificate, she cannot honestly describe herself as a woman. That belief is not worthy of respect in a democratic society. It is incompatible with the human rights of others that have been identified and defined by the ECHR and put into effect through the Gender Recognition Act.” and
“the Claimant is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”
The concern, I think, is the conflation of gender and sex. Although one may identify as a specific gender, and polite people can/should respect that, biological sex itself exists and cannot be altered. This is effectively what Rowling said and was lambasted for.
We can debate whether biological sex matters as a distinction, we can discuss the definition (i.e., whether we are referring to genotype or phenotype), but to deny its existence doesn’t make much sense.
In the first quote above, the tribunal uses the term “woman” without distinguishing whether the concern is the employees failure to recognize gender identity or failure to recognize sex identity.
In the second quote, the phrase “absolutist in her view of sex” strongly implies that the tribunal supports the conflation of gender and sex.
No, I did not say that. I said the judgment turned on that point.
There is no allegation she was harassing colleagues. You are conflating many things. She was fired for her tweets. She claims that being fired for her tweets is discrimination on the basis of sex, and that her beliefs should be protected by law. The case turns on whether her beliefs should be protected by law. The fifth caveat is a factor which is evaluated in deciding whether her beliefs should be protected.
On the common definition of the word women used throughout the world and throughout history, trans women are not women. There is no fundamental right to have others believe anything about you. I’m a man and I dont believe I have a fundamental right that others consider me a man. Others will think of me what they will, and the government has nothing to do or say about the thoughts of people. Same goes for trans women.
But the belief that a man can declare himself a woman and enter a women’s change room does conflict with the fundamental rights of women.
I completely agree and that’s not at all relevant to the issue here.
I think that maybe we’re reading this paragraph differently.
When I read paragraph 90’s final sentence “This Approach” reads to me as referring to “behavior that violates dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.”
You (and Rowling, I suppose) take “this approach” to refer to her being “absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate”
Have I correctly represented your position? I agree that if your interpretation is the correct one, this finding could be problematic, but I’m pretty sure mine is what the judge meant and I don’t really have an issue with that at all.
Yes, that’s pretty fair.
Like I stated in my first comment on this issue, the judge is strawmanning the claimant’s position on this. From what I can gather, having read the entire judgment in which the claimant’s position is exposed at length, if she was in the presence of a trans woman in a social setting she would be polite. But in the context of discussing policy issues, specifically the Gender Recognition Act (I think that’s the name of it), she’ll say things like “No you are a man you are not entitled to enter women’s spaces”.
If anything, this makes this judgment even more reprehensible, as we cant discuss policy issues honestly anymore. Not only are the courts interfering in private social conversations (where being an asshole is wrong but should be legal, de minimis non curat lex), they are now prescribing what can be said in discussions about policy.
Again, this is not about her being fired or the outcome of the case. It’s the fact that her belief that trans woman arent women are found to be “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.
Her tweets were made in respect of upcoming changes to the Gender Recognition Act, which will only require self-ID instead of a GD diagnosis. She opposed those changes, and was fired for opposing those changes on twitter. She sued on the basis that her comments were based on beliefs which should be protected beliefs. The factors for protected beliefs are listed upthread, the last one of which is
I understand the distinction you’re trying to make but I fail to see how relevant it is to the legal landscape. So if you oppose the Gender Recognition Act because you believe trans woman arent women, you cant actually express it because doing so would “create an environment which is hostile…”
You know what environment is intimidating, hostile, humiliating, and offensive? A female change room with a self-declared trans woman.
Jermo –
While I find the woman’s change room argument amusing for playing anti-male biases against people, I’m not sure empowering a more toxic version of the thing you’re arguing against is the best way to go about it.
Which is to say, if that argument convinces anybody, what exactly have you managed to convince them of?
How do you feel about trans-men in female changing and locker rooms?
I would prefer the law stay out of the issue. I don’t want the government to the be the bathroom monitor. Let individual humans work this out for themselves.
Im not in favor of it but it’s less invasive for men to have a female in their locker room than it is for women to have a male in their locker room.
@jermo sapiens:
I have a feeling you didn’t click my link.
ETA: or, I misunderstood the point you are trying to make. I’ll wait for you to clarify.
@HeelBearCub: Based on his answer I think he may have also missed that you said “female changing and locker rooms”.
Caveat – I don’t know the relevant UK law . . .
. . . but it seems a very big stretch to say that this woman should fall into a legally protected class. If it was indeed an accidental misgendering, I can’t see how she should be fired but I also can’t see why a court should mandate that she can’t be fired.
I don’t have enough facts to know whether her pronoun usage was truly accidental or “accidental.” All sides are likely to paint the facts in ways that help them the most. There is no shortage of people ready to take offense at every missed pronoun and there is no shortage of people ready to self-righteously proclaim that they won’t respect someone’s pronouns.
EDIT:
but what people are upset about is not that lady losing her job, it’s that the belief of “trans women are not women” is not considered “worthy of respect in a democratic society”.
this is a good point. The reaction to Rowling’s tweet serves to underscore it.
This doesn’t follow. By your own quote, she said she forgot it once in a heated argument, and that she reserves the right to use different pronouns. If you dig deeper, you’ll also find this:
In other words, she does not say she ever exercises said right. There is no evidence she ever did; if there were, we can be sure they’d be writing about that instead.
This is completely false. Read literally the first line of the decision:
The decision is about whether her belief is protected by the Equality Act. It is not about whether she was harassing anyone, something for which literally no evidence is given. It is not about whether she persisted in this despite warnings. It is not about whether minorities are being offended.
ETA: Sorry if I sound harsh here. This is nothing personal, Aftagley; I’m certainly not accusing you of being dishonest or anything of the sort. But what you said about the case is as best as I can tell just not true.
No offense taken, please don’t worry about it.
Talk is cheap, especially this kind of talk. I don’t think that someone saying that hypothetically they’d be nice to someone else should be treated as evidence for anything. All we have to go off of here is what she said online, which was repeated and, if not hurtful, at least pretty inflammatory. She even acknowledges this, saying on slack after being called out for her tweets:
Anyway, on to the actual topic of discussion:
Read paragraph 6 and then paragraphs 74-76 to get a view for why this isn’t the case. Her beliefs in this situation are difficult to separate from the harassment she is accused of. There also was some substantial evidence of harassment in paragraphs 24-38. Both of these are backed up by the judge’s following summary of the issue:
I agree talk is cheap, so I’m fine with basing our assessment of how true it is on what she says elsewhere. My concern here is that we don’t have much data to go on other than that she accidentally misgendered Murray and apologized for it, and that she repeatedly tweeted about Pip Bunce saying that Bunce is a man. Neither of those are harassment; the latter, and a few other quotes, I can see how you’d call inflammatory since she’s clearly not writing to persuade or anything, that’s fair, but that’s very much not grounds for saying she’s unwilling to use trans people’s pronouns, etc.
Like you can guess my feelings about trans stuff. But if you trawl SSC you’ll also not find to my knowledge any case where I misgendered anyone. This is absolutely a position people take, although to be frank I’m not sure it’s a coherent one. It’s something I’m still thinking about.
I stand by what I said earlier: if this case were about harassment, that’s what we’d be hearing about. But the judge didn’t rule any of it harassment. The case was instead about whether the belief was protected.
I don’t disagree with you per se, but my read of the case is that the judge’s opinion is that her behavior and harassment is inextricable from her beliefs, and therefore unacceptable.
Bleugh, that sounds like a miserable way to spend an afternoon.
The judge could have said that. He didnt. He said her belief is unacceptable, in a judgment which presumably can be used as a precedent.
If Jews were going around getting offended by people who didn’t believe in their God and demanding they lose their jobs for expressing that view even outside the workplace,(while maintaining that they aren’t being punished for their beliefs but for expressing those beliefs, as if there’s any meaningful difference) then I would regard it as a serious issue.
Imagine it as people saying that Jews aren’t real Israelites, just Khazars, and it might make a little more sense as a comparison.
And what? This was true of opposition to interracial mariage or support for the institution of slavery. How widely a belief is held is completely irrelevent to wheither it is respectable. It is respectable if it’s deemed compatible with the moral norms that are effectively enforced by the government, regardless of those the vulgus thinks should be enforced. That’s an important component rule of law, that’s why child abusers get trials and prison sentences and not lynchmobs (I’m sure 80% of the population would have no problem with this either).
The actual legal standard is:
which suggests at the very least that democratic opinion of the belief is relevant.
I dont think that’s true. And the examples you raised highlight that fact. When opposition to interracial marriage was prevalent, that belief was respectable, almost by definition. It’s not respectable today, but back then it was. Same with slavery.
Ah yes, if one day I can live in a utopia where all respectable beliefs are determined by the government. I think Trump is planning on declaring by executive order that the belief that Nancy Pelosi is a gigantic loser. Sad! is the only respectable belief to be had on impeachment, and I trust you will join me in celebrating this victory for the rule of law.
Everyone here knows that “democracy” in the west doesn’t mean “the majority decides how things are done” — as witnessed by the fact that we’re not having referendums for each new law to be passed. It doesn’t even mean “the majority decides who gets to make the rules” — as witnessed by how the American electoral system works, or for that matter, how most parliamentary systems work (in fact there are only two countries in the west with an executive head of state directly elected by universal suffrage in a two-round elections: France and Portugal).
And if you admit that the respectability of a belief can vary over time, then I maintain that wheither or not the law sanctions that belief is a better criteria than how many people subscribe to it. The rules that matter are the rules that are actually enforced.
Well it’s a good thing rule of law is totally the same thing as rule by fiat and legalism, otherwise that would be a pretty bad faith argument on your part!
You’re the one arguing that the government should be the arbiter of respectable beliefs, with punishment for those with unacceptable beliefs. If you want to pick on my example because I used an executive order, just change the example to congress passing a bill instead.
That’s no help in the present case, where you have to know whether or not the belief is respectable before you can determine whether or not the law sanctions it.
We live in nominally democratic societies, so I am not sure I understand the difference.
With one, you can argue that the judge’s ruling is a performative utterance which makes the belief not respectable.
If that’s the case, then it’s impossible to know what is and isn’t a protected belief before you get taken to court, which is very bad from a liberty/rule of law perspective.
Agreed. To be clear, I was just trying to explain to EchoChaos what I perceived as the difference between the two concepts Machine Interface distinguished, not to defend any argument based on this distinction. Though Machine Interface can say something if they think I have misinterpreted them.
If 80% of the population don’t support them, where exactly do those “moral norms” come from? And how do we decide which 20% get to be the elite educating the unenlightened masses?
If lots of people believe a claim, and thus implicitly respect it at least as a truth-statement, then that seems highly relevant to whether it is respectable. Because, look at all the people who are respecting it. It is demonstrably capable of being broadly respected.
Now, there’s a definition of “respectable” that only considers whether the right sort of people believe or respect it, and if only the wrong sort of people respect it then it is merely “popular”. But that’s a highly undemocratic standard of “respectability”, so if someone talks about a thing being respectable in a democratic society and ignores all the people who disagree, then I get to call you a hypocrite and laugh at them.
In virtually all modern anglospheric societies, both “transwomen are women” and “transwomen are not women” are respectable and worthy of respect. And while there may be a basis for disagreeing with the “worthy of respect” part, appeal to democracy is absolutely not it.
“In virtually all modern anglospheric societies, both “transwomen are women” and “transwomen are not women” are respectable and worthy of respect.”
Unfortunately the position “both of those are gross oversimplifications, reality is complicated” seems much less respected, which is a shame since it also seems to have a fair bit of evidence on its side. As far as I can tell this is the position taken by many/most of the so-called “gender critical” feminist scholars who write for Quillette, for example. The activist left is prone to falsely claiming these scholars believe “transwomen are not women” simpliciter, since the nuance of the “gender critical” position threatens their activist doctrinal purity. The traditionalist right tends to make the *same* false claim, perhaps to lend scholarly support to their own overly simplistic beliefs.
The reasoning seems sloppy (unlike the previous case Nick mentioned where I thought they were careful to focus on “I should misgender people” as the indefensible belief rather than broader things).
But the result (you can fire people for their political views if their expression of them is harming your business) certainly seems correct, and people here and elsewhere are being obviously silly by equivocating between this and saying “trans women are not women” being illegal in general, and between this and saying “biological sex is a thing”.
In the US, sure. You generally do not have a right to keep your job for the political speech you make, except in [list of exceptions that are usually about working for the government].
But most other countries consider the US’s fire-at-will barbaric.
At-will employment is an unrelated issue. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that:
1. If you fire someone you must have a sensible business-related justification for it.
2. Even if you have a justification, you might not be allowed to fire someone if doing so would be discriminatory (you can’t fire someone for doing union stuff even if that would clearly benefit you).
3. Religious or “philosophical” beliefs usually count as protected for this purpose, but not any old opinion does.
In fact, as I understand it, that is the situation in the UK (and I assume most European countries are more similar to us than the US). I find it regrettable that decisions about what counts as a philosophical belief often seem to be unprincipled and dubiously reasoned, but it seems somewhat hypocritical to complain about this in this instance if one is in favour of a system where you can fire someone for any reason.
My rules applied fairly >> your rules applied fairly >>>>> your rules applied unfairly.
It’s not hypocritical to complain about established rules being applied unfairly even if I disagree with the rule, and even when, if my rules were in place, the object-level outcome in the case at hand would be the same as in the unfair case.
To spell out an example:
Rs claim to want firing at will
Ds claim to want firing only for good reasons
Employer fires someone for being a D, Ds complain, decision is overruled.
Different employer fires someone for being an R, Rs complain, decision is upheld.
Rs are upset. Ds responds “Well, this is firing at will, you’re only getting what you asked for, hypocrite”. Ds are wrong here. Effective rule is “It’s OK for fire Rs for being Rs but not Ds for being Ds”, and it’s perfectly reasonable for Rs to be upset over that even if they’d prefer it were OK to fire in all cases.
It’s not hypocritical to point out hypocrisy, though. And hypocrisy seems a good name for a system that gives a certain protection to ingroup but not outgroup beliefs, while claiming that it is giving the protection to all philosophical beliefs.
To Eric T, who posted in OT143 looking for “the world is larger and more hostile/chaotic than we know” fiction recommendations for their student, all of the reviews appear to agree that the new Cats movie very much qualifies.
Then again, perhaps the appeal of such fiction is not to actually experience what the Lovecraftian protagonist experiences, but merely a dampened version of their perspective. So your bright 6th grader is probably better off getting their indirect eldritch fix from reading Cats reviews, than taking the sanity risk to see it in theatres.
I think I’ll save her the emotional trauma from watching that.
Though that does bring up something – I’m always curious about how movies that are this bad ever get finished at all. How do they not just get canceled early in production? How does the studio get a script like that and let it go to filming at all?
I understand how the kind of bad movies that might appeal to some audiences get made. But this appeals to nobody. Not only that, you drop nearly $100 million into a movie and release it the same week as the new Star Wars film? I’m truly at a loss how any profit-seeking business could make these decisions.
I’m not saying I believe them, but there are conspiracy theories about how these are basically money laundering schemes.
Personally, I think it’s more likely some combination of the Abilene paradox and sunk-cost thinking.
This one seems pretty understandable. Cats was one of the biggest shows in Broadway history and theater fans can be pretty obsessive. Furthermore there isn’t much overlap between theater obsessives and Star Wars obsessives so Universal might have figured it was good counterprogramming. And of course it’s got an all-star cast, on paper it’s a surefire cult favorite, if not an outright hit.
The notion that this stage show may not translate well to the screen – it’s big on spectacle, small on plot – probably never crossed any executives’ minds. As for the creepy CGI… I got nothing.
The same director previously adapted another hit 80s musical for the screen. Les Miserables took $450m at the box office and was nominated for 8 Oscars, including Best Picture, winning 3. The director himself has an Oscar from another project.
I am a development executive, albeit in British indie movies not Hollywood. I think Les Miserables is not a particularly good film. I think if you had shown me the Cats script and concept I would have concluded that it would be dross – despite the central involvement of a big name creative some of whose other work I greatly admire. But would I be confident that it would lose money? No. I think it would look to me like exactly the sort of project that could make a fortune in spite of its badness.
The stage show – which is itself notoriously crap and extremely weird – had difficulty attracting investment for precisely those reasons. It has since taken north of $3.5bn. People who trusted the famous and successful creative and invested in the weird bad show made a killing.
There are projects whose greenlighting is unfathomable. This is not one of them.
As for the creepy CGI… I got nothing.
I’m only going by the trailer but yeah, that was the part that got me. Human-sized actors in cat costumes and makeup, like the stage show, okay. Animated version even better, but whatever, I don’t get to decide on how you make a multi-million dollar movie.
But cat-sized naked humans with fur but human faces and hands (and human female breasts)? That is simply too damn creepy!
It is a pretty uncanny valley. I only casually glanced at the trailer on my phone. It looked like part of the problem is that it isn’t just “(and human female breasts),” but how those look when smashed into clothing, while being ostensibly nude. Which, okay, whatever. But if you’re going the chest bump route you need man-in-spandex crotch bulges as well. Or neither, and do your sexual dimorphism is a different way.
Something I’m realizing now: Cats closed on Broadway in 2000 (and the original London production closed in 2002). There was a brief revival in 2016-17, but it never got the attention of the original. It’s possible that many of the critics watching this movie are totally unaware that it was a stage show, which makes the movie all the more inexplicable.
Also: how much awareness is there of “legitimate” theater outside New York and London, anyway? I remember this ad coming on during my cartoons, but if you weren’t a ’90s kid in New York you don’t. There’s touring productions, I guess…
That commercial also aired in the Philly market. The last tour played across the country, including in Peoria. So it was pretty well known.
Also, both the _Chicago_ and _Moulin Rouge_ movies were successes, though the original productions were certainly less well-known than _Cats_.
Some more books– I’m not sure what will hit the spot.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vinge.
Winter Tide by Emrys.
Proposal to standardize the names of the adversarial collaboration essays:
* Is infant circumcision a net harm?
* Is eating meat a net harm?
* Is calorie restriction a net harm?
* Is space colonization a net harm?
* Is gene editing a net harm?
* Is abortion a net harm?
* Is automation a net harm?
* Are spiritual experiences a net harm?
Doesn’t really work that well for space colonization. Also, the “net harm” phrasing feels like it inserts a subtle bias in one direction in the title.
I think the question format isn’t necessary; a simple statement of the topic should be fine.
It appears to presume a particular decision making framework, that many of the collaborators might not share.
Is anal retention a net harm?
(j/k folks, obsessive compulsive disorder is real and I don’t mean to pretend this is it)
Yes, not pooping is a net harm.
Crazy, People. Crazy.
Deliberately skimming these while paying minimal attention yields a compelling list for future ACs.
* Is meat circumcision a net harm?
* Is infant eating a net harm?
* Is colonization restriction a net harm?
* Are space calories a net harm?
* Are abortion genes a net harm?
* Is experience editing a net harm?
* Is spiritual automation a net harm?
I was going to say something flippant, but I actually really want to read the colonization and space calorie ones.
I for one am strongly pro spiritual colonization to mitigate the risks of eating meat.
(I was going for gibberish, but I’m reading the Hithchikers guide series to my kids and I think this translates into breeding animals that want to be eaten ala the Restaurant at the end of the Universe)
Space calories (aka sunlight) are a net good so far.
Experience editing sounds like wireheading, and spiritual automation sounds like building robots that are meant to live fulfilling lives so that we don’t need humans to do that anymore. Infants aren’t supposed to eat until 4 months, so that one is a net harm. It may be interesting to also ask whether abortion genes are evolutionarily fit or unfit: the primary effect is obviously unfit but plausibly the ability to have children on one’s own schedule could compensate for that.
Can we please have a soft ban on impeachment for either the .5 or the .75 thread?
That seems reasonable to me, especially if there haven’t been any major events.
I am going to self-ban myself on impeachment in the .5 thread for sure.
Seconded. An “ignore” feature for top level threads and their sub-comments would have been an amazing feature for this OT.
What’s wrong with the ‘Hide’ button, right next to the ‘Reply’ button? I generally use it on the religion threads.
When you reload the page the comment section isn’t still hidden, so once a thread is long in order to hide you have to scroll all the way up to find the top level posts each time.
Which is why I want a second up arrow that takes you to the top post in the thread.
It’s also not too useful when reading via the “new comments” list on the upper right. (Currently 72 new comments for me; 7 above the 1st impeachment thread, and it’s too tedious for me to check how many of the other 65 are NOT in one of the impeachment thread(s).)
Yeah, part of the problem with just hiding on refresh is that there are umpteen impeachment threads. Mine can even be considered one, or a meta-impeachment thread if you like.
It’s hard to make a meta-joke about this without a bicameral commenting body.
So, to be serious, that seems reasonable.
Let’s talk about the game theory aspects of the current impeachment drama. For the purposes of this thread, I’d request we not get into a debate about the impeachment details themselves, but for the purposes of this particular discussion take as granted that:
1. The Democrats and Republicans all seek political advantages in all this, but the Republicans (and especially Trump) are the ones who actually improve at the polls among independents and in swing states as a result.
2. The Senate will either quickly dismiss the charges outright, or else have some sort of show trial to make the Democrats look bad and then vindicate Trump.
My contention is that in this instance Impeachment of Trump by the House makes it more difficult for the Democrats in the House to hold Trump accountable for anything he does in the future. That if Trump has a proclivity for wrong-doing as President, this sequence of events makes it more likely he’ll be able to act on that proclivity with impunity.
That’s because after 1 & 2 above, the Democrats will have a much higher bar than before to get over before they will be willing to impeach again. Can you imagine people’s (justifiable) reactions if 6 months from now the House impeached Trump for something similar again, substituting China for Ukraine, say? Does anyone really see Pelosi going down that road again for anything less than a bipartisan and airtight case about something serious? (This is not to say I don’t think they’ll hold hearings in the House in the future to make negative statements about Trump, certainly there will be a never-ending stream of those based on any justification, just that they would be less willing politically to impeach again.)
In other words, this failed attempt somewhat future-proofs Trump from another similar attempt, even if the next situation were to be about something a little more serious, or more obvious, or more bipartisan, or more provable. After this, it would have to be a much bigger deal for anyone to go back to impeachment, politically.
Feel free to propose your own game-theory-centric related situation, but I’d prefer if we save the discussions over the merits of the charges for the other related threads.
You’ve pretty much put your finger on my main worry. It would be a good thing if we could kick the corrupt bastard out of office now and have done with it, but I don’t see it happening.
ehhhhhhh, alright
The two main game theoretic issues I would focus on are:
#1 Is this Trump specific?
#2 Does Trump win reelection?
I think Trump is a lot less weird in policy terms than a lot of other people but he’s still a unique actor. The big effects are not going to be Trump’s actions over the next 1-5 years but the effects on every future president. Nixon cast a long shadow but every indication is that Trump will win reelection. That’s a big effect; it signals that there are few political consequences to impeachment and there might even be benefits. Every future president will have to wonder if the political environment has permanently shifted, making impeachment no longer a threat, or if this is just a Trump thing.
It’ll also be interesting to see how Dems do in the House in 2020. Does impeachment have down-ballot consequences? We haven’t been in impeachment very often before and no one really knows the impact but we’ve had 2 out of 3 US impeachments in the past ~30 years and Nixon about 25 years before that, so it certainly looks to be more common
A similar type of thing in my mind between the House, Senate, and the President has been the history of “shutting down the government”, meaning not appropriating money to spend on non-essential discretionary items.
The first couple of times that happened, various people blamed various others (mostly based on their political preferences), but now by the time it’s happened a dozen times, it’s not nearly as much “news”, people tend to shrug and think they’ll sort it out in a couple of days, or else the politicians realize they’re going to compromise eventually, so might as well generally do it before the deadline instead of a few days afterwards.
If the House/Senate end up in opposite camps w/the Senate allied to the President again in the future, I could see after a couple of cycles of political revenge impeachment turning into a similar type of event. Rare, but not unheard of or that big of a deal anymore.
I’m not sure he’s so unique. His policies aren’t so weird; the main thing about him is his crude style. The usual comparison is Andrew Jackson, but we can find such a cruder President much more recently: Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was definitely rather fond of foul language, and supposedly liked to expose his penis (which he called “Jumbo”) to others in the White House.
Twitter hadn’t been invented then.
Which might be the big difference, although I suspect LBJ was also much more competent at the ordinary business of politics.
Television had, and it would have been trivial for LBJ to achieve broad coverage for Trumpian levels of crudeness or beyond. Just as it would be trivial for Trump to keep his public image at no more than LBJ levels of crudeness, if he so desired and if he had the impulse control for it.
LBJ could have, but television is a much less impromptu medium. How much of Trump’s crudeness has appeared in TV appearance, relative to tweets?
One counterargument is that it’s not clear Trump would be any more likely to be removed from office successfully for any of the other plausible types of wrongdoing you might like to punish him for in the future. Basically you will never have a bipartisan case for removal for anything, because Republicans will always find some way to convince themselves that their guy hasn’t actually done anything wrong, regardless of the severity or provability of the wrongdoing. So the Democrats don’t actually lose any power by taking a stand now; the power you worry about them losing is power they would never have had anyway.
Another counterargument is that your #1 is probably not true. The relevant sample size is very small, but Clinton’s impeachment appears to have hurt the Democrats in 2000 despite his popularity (which was much higher than Trump’s has ever been). So impeaching now to hurt Trump’s reelection prospects, and even more so to improve the prospects for a D hold in the House and narrowing if not takeover in the Senate, is an uncertain but worthwhile gamble.
that republicans do not find the current case compelling is not evidence that they will never find any case to be compelling.
I’m not a Republican, didn’t vote for Trump (voted for Johnson) and don’t plan to, and I don’t find the current case compelling. Half of the charge amounts to saying that for the president to claim executive privilege in response to a congressional subpoena when the House doesn’t think it is justified is a “high crime or misdemeanor.” The obvious response is that disagreements between the executive and the legislature on the boundaries of their authority are suppose to be settled by the judiciary–and it’s the Democrats who are unwilling to wait for that to happen. If the courts end up ruling against Trump and he still tells his people not to testify, there would then be a case for obstruction.
The other half looks like a bad thing that he probably did but they don’t yet have clear evidence that he did. Objecting that they don’t have the evidence because he won’t let the relevant people testify faces my previous objection — it’s their decision to go ahead without waiting for the courts to rule on the subpoena issue.
And while he probably did it, I don’t think it’s clearly beyond the sort of abuse of power that politicians get away with. Someone already linked to what looks like a case of Obama asking the president of Russia to go easy on him until the election, with the implication that he would give the Russians more of what they wanted (be “more flexible”) on the disputed issue after he was reelected. Unlike the Trump case, the exact exchange is a matter of public record, since it was caught on a microphone, although one could interpret it in less damaging ways.
I don’t remember anyone proposing impeachment on that. His opponent merely referred to it as “alarming and troubling.”
Has the President made this claim in response to the subpoenas related to impeachment ? If so, has this been the entirety of his claim?
I haven’t spent a lot of time on the impeachment claims (Trump should go, but he is at least the third president in a row who deserves impeachment, IMO), but I’m in at least broadly the same boat w.r.t. the Russia allegations[1].
As best I can tell, Trump et al used bad judgment in some of their dealings with Russia (what a surprise), and had some advisors with unduly close connections with Russia. And a chunk of the left which includes a lot of respectable media types and elites have jumped on that to claim Trump is a Russian asset, and also to claim that about basically everyone they dislike, from Mitch McConnel to Tulsi Gabbard. And they’ll toss around those claims without troubling with any evidence or critical thought.
And now, there’s a substantial bubble of “Trump is a Russian asset, the Republicans are all on the Russian payroll” rhetoric that is bouncing around, which reminds me very strongly of the weird “Obama is a Muslim/Obama is a socialist/Obama isn’t a real American” rhetoric bouncing around a lot of the right end of the media a few years back.
[1] If it matters, I usually vote Libertarian but voted for Democrats for a few years to push back on the disastrous presidency of W. Obama got my vote in 2008, but lost it in 2012 thanks to continuing most of the war on terror and protecting war criminals from prosecution.
@albatross11
I think you’re drastically understating the extent of circumstantial evidence for collusion with Russia. It’s not just the advisors and the bad judgment, it’s the absolute refusal to condemn any of Putin’s bad deeds (notably at Helsinki), the repeated going out of his way to serve Putin’s interests (from fiddling with the 2016 Republican platform to, well, withholding military aid from a country imminently threatened by Russia), the fact that Putin more or less openly campaigned for him to be elected, and remarks like “Russia, if you’re listening…”
For all that it is still circumstantial, and it’s fair to say it’s unwise to reach confident conclusions without direct evidence. But note that Kevin McCarthy was caught on tape saying there was enough there to suspect Putin was paying Trump, and whatever else Kevin McCarthy is, he is not a leftist. The evidence against Trump is much, much stronger than that for any of the wilder theories about Obama ever was.
Here’s the explainer for the GOP platform thing.
Trump did not fiddle with the GOP platform thing. There was nothing in the platform about Ukraine since the last platform was written in 2012 and the Ukraine/Russia conflict didn’t start until 2013. One delegate wanted the platform to include language supporting Ukraine/condemning Russia, promises of humanitarian and logistical support, and lethal weapons.
One Trump delegate (who, if Trump was secretly a Putin puppet, was probably not high enough on the totem pole to be aware of this and complicit) said they should take out the part about lethal weapons, because maybe we shouldn’t precommit to giving weapons to people so they can kill soldiers from a nuclear armed nation we’re not at war with. Not saying we won’t do it, but just don’t put that in writing yet. Everyone agreed this was a good idea. When in office, Trump gave lethal weapons to the Ukrainians (javelin missiles, sniper rifles).
But the platform went from strength 0, someone proposed strength 8, a Trump delegate proposed strength 7 instead and everyone agreed. That still goes from 0 to 7. And then Trump took it to strength 8 once in office by approving the lethal weapons transfers.
The Washington Post reported this as Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russia stance on Ukraine. Perhaps people got the wrong idea about Trump’s fondness for Russia from gross misreporting like this?
Did Obama’s refusal to give lethal military aid to Ukraine make you suspect he was too closely involved with the Russians? If not, given that Trump did in fact give the lethal aid Obama refused to offer, is that not evidence Trump is less beholden to Russia than Obama, who we all agree was not beholden to Russia?
I think that was pretty obviously a joke, and would be interpreted as such if anyone other than Trump said it.
If he really wanted the Russians to do it, he could have found a less public way of asking.
I think this is definitely playing a major role, but I feel like we should stop and think about this a bit more. Where does this moral obligation come from? I mean, this is essentially a religious stance. The impeachment power was clearly designed as a tool for humans to use by choice, not a moral imperative that crystallizes outside the system. That doesn’t make drawing a line and taking a moral/principled stand unfeasible, but I also don’t think it is the obvious approach. One can speak out against Trump’s behavior and take other actions without impeaching, perhaps actions that are more likely to be productive. It’s hard for me to see anything approaching a moral mandate for impeachment where the public isn’t asking for it. I feel like this framing is very unhelpful, and widespread in modern life. We’re investing procedures with symbolic spiritual power, instead of using them to achieve principled ends. Something similar happened with Brexit–the act of making decisions on Brexit somehow became almost immoral or wrong, because it legitimized the “idea” that Brexit had won the vote. They were then unable to use their actual tools to get to work on responding to the situation and preserve what they were claiming were sacred values. I find it eerie.
What if both sides are right, and American politics is just a battleground between Russians and Muslims?
Muslims: fly a plane to the towers, to demonstrate their control over USA
Russians: send American soldiers to Afghanistan, to demonstrate their control over USA
Muslims: make a black man an American president, just to spite Russians (who are white)
Russians: make an orange man an American president, and make him say “hey Russians, feel free to take back all Eastern European countries, we don’t really care”
What if, in this parallel universe, Americans actually lost the Cold War and became mere puppets of the remaining superpowers… Of course they would never admit it, but the evidence speaks clearly.
@cassander
This one case may not itself be enough to establish that, but the fact that Republicans have not abandoned Trump despite all of his manifest and lifelong crookedness and unfitness for office– and that they continually talk for Buncombe in order to defend him as his base wants him defended, rather than acknowledging facts in front of their eyes– is pretty good evidence. It is difficult, as the saying goes, to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on their not understanding it.
@DavidFriedman
In principle that sounds reasonable. In practice it is very likely that Trump is fighting these subpoenas without a legal leg to stand on as a technique for running out the clock while he continues to come up with more corrupt ways to rig his reelection. The case for impeaching now is, as Democrats have repeatedly said, that that is too great a danger to the republic to wait.
But not so great that they actually have to try the case. They can hold that off for a while.
If it looked like they would actually be allowed to try the case as Republicans were allowed to try the case against Clinton twenty years ago, they wouldn’t be holding off. (Though FWIW I agree that holding off is pointless and dumb).
Its not the Democrat’s job to try the case, its the Senate’s job.
What conclusion do you draw from the fact that progressives have not abandoned Warren, have indeed made her one of their standard bearers, despite the fact that she falsely listed herself as a minority in a database used by law schools in finding professors to hire? When eventually challenged on that, much later, her defense was that there was a family tradition of one distant Cherokee ancestor.
I find that only mildly wicked, but then I’m not a fan of affirmative action. What I find shocking is that it doesn’t seem to bother people with a very different attitude to the subject.
That’s not a defense of Trump, who is pretty clearly a worse person than Warren. It is evidence that SalvorHardin is using a double standard.
To remove him from office they have to not only impeach but convict. Do you think they believe there is any significant chance of that happening, of two thirds of a Republican majority senate voting for it?
If not, does it not follow that your justification for their action is false?
@DavidFriedman, perhaps they are not utilitarians and feel they have a moral obligation to do what they can despite its almost certainly being futile?
I could see myself doing the same if I were a Congressman facing some hypothetical Presidents.
Could be, but the argument I was responding to was:
“Danger to the Republic” is clearly a consequentialist argument, and I am waiting for the person who made it to either defend it or concede that it was wrong.
Assuming he hasn’t yet done so in a comment I missed, always possible.
@salvorhardin
I recall a number of republicans making similar arguments about \obama for 8 years, and before that democrats making it for bush. “You’re a bad person if you don’t hate someone from your tribe as much as an outriber does.” remains a bad argument. Plenty of people around here have articulated reasons why they don’t consider trump as manifestly unfit for office as you seem to think he is. I would suggest examining those arguments rather than just assuming that your outgroup is corruptly devoted to him.
For my money, I think people who can’t help but scream danger to the republic every time trump as much as farts are doing far more damage to it than he ever could.
cassander:
I agree, and I’m one of the people who thinks Trump is a terrible president and a worse human being. It seems to me that Trump has done some pretty bad stuff, and that it has mostly been glossed over or gotten little attention in the flood of Trump-associated clickbait/outrage stories that appear constantly in the media, because Trump gets everyone’s attention. There’s a headline or two every day talking about Trump’s terrible crimes, but 95% of them are for stuff every president does or every Republican does or stupid outrage-storms over the fact that the president is indeed a big asshole on Twitter or made-up crap like the “he’s a Russian agent” accusations. And then, the other 5% of the time, when Trump is doing something genuinely bad, it gets lost in the noise and gets little attention.
Worse, serious stuff gets swamped by Trump-related outrage storms of little long-term importance. The recent stories about the “Afghanistan papers,” the IG report showing that the FBI used known-false evidence to get a FISA warrant on a major party presidential candidate, ongoing military intervention in places most voters didn’t realize we even had troops[1], the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Yemen presided over by the Saudis with extensive help from us, popular unrest and riots in Iran and Chile–all that stuff drops off the edge of the map, because all the air in the room is taken up with outrage over Trump, one way or another.
Sometimes, Trump exploits this to push embarrassing things off the front page, or to make a big media splash that low-information voters will vaguely remember in the right direction come election day. But often, it’s just media sources pursuing clicks and serious news sources feeding up a steady diet of junk food for their customers.
[1] Remember when we had several special forces troops killed in Niger, and instead of the national conversation being about what the hell we’re doing running military operations in Niger, it was about whether Trump was rude to the widow of one of the dead soldiers? This is commonplace, and it’s incredibly broken.
@albatross11
None of those are Trump-specific IMO (and one of them even targeted Trump). It’s just how the US (deep state) normally operates.
It seems to me that most of the media is caught in a rock and a hard place. They thoroughly dislike Trump as a human being and want to oppose him totally, but with Trump opposing the deep state, this means defending the deep state (or ignoring it).
That’s a good point. I don’t think there’s much strategic brilliance on display. Despite the performative aspects, they don’t see themselves as players in a game–they see themselves more as actors in a drama with a conventional narrative shape, I think. At the same time, if something egregious happened, it really isn’t that hard to impeach–it would just be awkward to re-stage the whole narrative. If they were to use impeachment power like the tool that it is, instead of some external imperative, and the behavior was egregious enough, there’s no reason it couldn’t be a quick and simple process. But it will be harder to use it as a rhetorical threat, and I think that was strategically a mistake. Likewise, saying that they had to do it to prevent him from misconduct in getting re-elected basically commits them to the idea that the next election will be of questionable legitimacy, which seems like it will be a major distraction and weaken any message the election could be said to send. If he is defeated, it would be much better to portray it as a clean, decisive break, totally legitimate, which nullifies the last four years and vindicates them. But almost no one seems capable of making an actual move in a game–the holding back the articles reminds me of Brexit. It is because the political establishment is offended by the idea of politics as a game with strategy instead of a predictably functioning machine. They won’t even use their own power to their benefit, despite holding so much of it.
Your argument fails if you believe that Trump has already committed egregious acts, and there is nothing he could possibly do that would be egregious enough to lose Republican support, as long as he kept saying the right stuff politically.
This is a weak argument and only works in a world of Ds and Rs, at this point you have to think that Trump has committed egregious acts and that Republicans and more than half of independents are going to continually turn a blind eye to it, which means you are saying your view is correct over both the partisan R view plus the more or less neutral independent view.
Where did the independent thing come from? In order for impeachment to be a “quick and simple process”, the Republican senators have to be on board with it.
If it is true that nothing he could do would lose him Republican support, then this is the least of our problems. That would mean the government would be dominated by a group of sociopaths or essentially nonfunctional people, such that replacing Trump isn’t going to do much. More than that, it suggests a good chunk of Americans support these people and their actions—which I generally consider means the actions aren’t egregious (the definition is shocking or outstandingly bad). The public can and has supported terrible things, but this is simply not shocking nor something that a representative system can automatically reject as foreign.
I know some people feel that Republicans and their supporters are that bad, but if that’s the case, their problem is way bigger than Trump or these issues, and the remedy is probably not in our current system, which assumes the public is functional. And it doesn’t answer the argument that it still could have been used as a threat that influenced non-obsequious Republicans—if Republicans will not let it go through, why do it now? It’s like saying “we’re going to let the Republicans know this is unacceptable, though we know they have no sense of morality and won’t care.” Much of politics now comes down to this, and I think that’s a problem. It’s conflict versus mistake theory. You have to take real, productive actions to neutralize people who are hopelessly “hostile”—you express yourself and “take a stand” when you think the other side is amenable to persuasion, moral or informational.
I maintain that if Trump did something egregious enough, public pressure from all groups, but even if just from non-republicans, would be sufficient to get this done quickly, although I think any president is would probably resign if this got close to being the case, like Nixon. Republican senators are opposed not because of some crazy loyalty to Trump and his actions, but because they are go along to get a long types who think they have enough public support that it is in their interest to do so. Were the public to swing considerably, it would be a different story.
To be honest, I think high political office selects for sociopaths.
When the required path forward to keep or enhance their power is to go along with, say, invading and wrecking some third world country that obviously poses no threat to the US, most high level politicians go along with it. When the required path involves jumping on the bandwagon of a moral panic and passing some legislation in a swell of outrage that they know is probably poorly thought out (think of “X
‘s law” for some named tragic victim X), again, they generally just go along. When their party’s interests or voting base change their acceptable positions on some issue of conscience (is it okay to torture prisoners, should gay marriage be legally allowed), they mostly go along with that, too.
People who can’t swallow that sort of thing tend to end up losing power or at least topping out and being unable to advance further. The ones who succeed have been selected for having few principles they won’t compromise on (or perhaps simply having no principles). Similarly, the ones who succeed have been selected for being able to take action they know is probably a bad idea for the nation and will cause a lot of human suffering, in order to stay competitive in the next election or leadership battle.
One chapter of The Road to Serfdom is entitled “Why the Worst End Up on Top” (by memory, so probably not verbatim)
I think it’s clear that Nixon knew that wage and price controls were a bad idea. He imposed them anyway, because doing so was politically profitable.
The whitehouse audio tapes of LBJ and Nixon showcased in Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary show how they killed people for their own personal political success.
I generally agree with you. But I don’t think this is especially Republican-specific, nor do I think the Republicans are supporting Trump due to sociopathy—they are just self-interested in a more spineless way, not immune to moral condemnation or empathy. If Trump did something that got the public mad, they would fold and go along to avoid consequences–that generally isn’t sociopathy. It is a desire to fit in and avoid criticism–they don’t have deep principles that they are disregarding to get ahead, and there generally isn’t all that much betrayal or manipulation involved. Being unprincipled is not the same as being utterly impervious to human decency or shame–it’s much more common and boring. My point is that I don’t think the problem is that we have the bad luck of having one party stacked with evil robots who will never respond to events–we have the more predictable problem of a party deciding it is in its interest to band together against an impeachment that is being used to score partisan points against it (I’m not saying that the impeachment is unwarranted, just that there is an undeniably partisan element.)
I think our system is basically not functional at the moment, which is related to the major deterioration in congressional power. For that reason, I don’t think the system is selecting as much for the people who truly don’t care about others’ feelings, including people close to them, and can manipulate them to suit whatever ends they have in view. Who don’t have shame. That skill isn’t worth as much because the politicians aren’t in control, and there’s not much power to seize. The people gunning to invade third world countries, who make the actual decisions on these things, seem to have the problem of moral certainty, not absence. My main point is that in a system that selects for sociopathy, you will find it on both sides, even if they perform it differently. High political office in a functional system requires a stoicism and Machiavellian calculation that is basically like selective sociopathy, but I think the really morally indifferent people tend to be at lower levels, “just doing their job.” You need some sort of conviction to want to push higher in that realm, and to read the situation well—there are other ways to accumulate power. I don’t think Nixon was a sociopath at all–he was ruthlessly ambitious and arrogant, and that can cause just as much damage.
mtl1882:
I agree it’s not specific to Republicans or Democrats–it’s just that the more integrity you have and the more it bothers you to hurt or kill strangers in order to further your own political future, the harder it will be to climb up the political power hierarchy in the US.
I have to say that as maddening as it is to read the CW threads here, it is a really useful check on bias.
Seeing constant discussions about how “Democrats can’t possibly believe what they say, so what evil conspiracy are they pushing and why?” is a great defense against the tendency for me to wonder the same things about Republicans.
It’s also a startling demonstration of just how powerful filter bubbles are. The SSC comments section is like a portal into an alternate universe where up is down and only fools could think the sky is blue.
I wouldn’t say the SSC commentariat is a very representative cross section of Republicans. In fact, I’d argue there’s more Blue Tribe SSC commenters than Red Tribe ones. What there is, though, is a lot of Grey/Libertarian types which code as conservative to Blue Tribe. Perhaps a majority. There’s also a few deeply reactionary types that wouldn’t code as in-group to the average Red Triber.
That said, if you’re in a Blue Bubble, then some of those Grey Tribers do reflect alternate beliefs. I think it’s generally harder for the Blue Tribe to learn about the Red Tribe because the cultural elite, the media producers, the history producers, etc tend to be Blue Tribe. This means a Red Triber can figure out what the Blue Tribe thinks just by going online or watching TV. A Blue Triber can’t learn it in reverse (and probably doesn’t even know where to go).
I’d like to second this. We have precious few actual red tribers around here, but a lot of heretic blue tribe.
It’s probably true about internet in general. When I read about “right wing” people saying this or that, most of the time it is actually someone on the left who only believes 90% of the dogma.
I’ve noticed an internal tendency to label SJWs, or those who defend SJ, as basically right-wing, just with a different religion, because they’re attacking what I consider basic social freedoms.
Assuming this is normal, I suspect any cultural distance between self-described leftists will look like distance to the right.
ETA: Assuming this is normal, any cultural difference between anybody will look like deviation from “us” towards “them”. Right-wing people may see different versions of right-wing thought as leftward.
ETA again: …huh. That makes a two party system uniquely terrible for social stability/cohesion.
Just so I am clear, internal here means “internal to Thegnskald”?
If so, I would say you are just describing the “circular firing squad” effect, and that comes more more from a search for purity. It’s not unique to left or right, and the label for enemies changes as needed based on the nomenclature of the purity searched for.
IMHO, It’s a basic tendency of regarding good/evil as intrinsically binary in nature.
Internal to me, yes.
And I don’t really have a “good/evil” metric. I’d also say it is distinct from purity, because I don’t really care about purity.
To explain what looks right-wing about it (omitting economic considerations, which interact with all this in very complex ways):
From my perspective, social justice looks like a popular value system trying to make everybody adopt it.
My conceptualization of leftism, meanwhile, is an alliance of disparate value systems fighting for equal treatment under the law, which is antithetical to any one value system “winning”, and imposing itself on the others.
Which is to say, leftism has historically been about removing oppressive social structures which restricted the number of ways of life that were permitted, and some leftists now seem to be veering toward creating social structures to limit the number of ways of life that are permitted.
Leftism isn’t static; it isn’t “This is the correct way to be”, that’s right-wing thinking, conservative thinking, status quo thinking.
To me, this looks like yesterday’s leftism, packaged for an aging demographic that fancies itself progressive, even as it slides into conservativism. Leftism is a dynamic force, not a set of prepackaged policy decisions, made commodity for mass consumption.
—
Which is to say: there is a cultural distance here. One culture’s revolution is another culture’s conservative status quo.
@Thegnskald
Where would you put the attempts to cancel J.K. Rowling over her TERFy comments recently
I’m not familiar with the situation.
But in general, an attempt at cancellation is basically right-wing, in that it carries a presumption of social dominance, and is an attempt at control of value systems based on that dominance.
Rowling’s comments might likewise be right-wing, but they might also not be. Don’t care to look them up, mostly because I just don’t think she is relevant.
@Thegnskald
Interesting use of “right-wing”. Would that make conservative Christians the “left-wing” socially right now in your perspective since they aren’t trying to enforce Christian morality, but merely have theirs tolerated?
I understand you’re basing this on an idiosyncratic view of the political spectrum, but in 2019, basically all attempts at cancellation have been made by people who consider themselves left-wing and would recoil at the idea of being considered right-wing.
Echo –
Some of them. But leftism isn’t just having unpopular value systems, it is defending unpopular value systems in the general case.
Jermo –
Sure. Nobody likes being told they’re being, or supporting, authoritarian bullies on a pulpit of popular approval. They want to imagine that they’re the first people ever to get value systems actually right.
True, but my point was that you may want to consider aligning your view of the political spectrum with common usage if you want to communicate effectively and not create confusion.
Jermo –
My opening comment set the context, and I was explaining my internal reasoning.
The fact that other self-described leftists will be described as right-wing is literally the point; I’m explaining why they look right-wing to me.
And I believe this is a fully general phenomenon; I don’t think my definition of “left” is correct. I don’t think there IS a correct definition of “left”. Rather, we have a bunch of people with their own disparate definitions, which, when you examine them, will tend to define one pole as leftism, and distance from that pole as rightism.
Right-wing people will tend to see deviations from the right as left, likewise.
And libertarians, ultimately, just see different flavors of authoritarianism.
@Thegnskald
Got it. I retract my comment.
(Also, my definition of leftism is 100% the correct definition, and y’all should get on board with it, but no pressure. Tolerance for everybody! Including the intolerant! Because let’s just bite that damned bullet already!)
I think it’s a mistake to identify “blue tribe” with “left.” It’s a correlation, not an identity. So I think you need to distinguish between heretical leftists and people who are culturally blue but not politically left at all.
There are a number of ways in which I am more nearly blue tribe than red tribe, although I don’t fit very well into either. But I am about as far from left, in a libertarian rather than traditionalist direction, as it is possible to be.
David – I’m pretty red tribe, so I’m using left as a political flag.
Not David (specifically, general rant):
The whole “intolerance of intolerance” thing is where leftism fundamentally broke. We are now supposed to be tolerant of intolerance towards poor rednecks, white people, men, Christians, etc., because “structural isms” form a fully general intolerance structure by which people get grouped and assigned intolerance based on cultural markers, and “punching up” is really just being intolerant of intolerance.
Basically, the whole thing started collapsing as soon as an “All clear” flag was placed on intolerance, as long as the object of intolerance could be labeled themselves intolerant, which can be decided based on whether they embrace the exact value system (which, remember, is the basis for which we decide what is and isn’t tolerance) as the person making the judgment.
Which is to say, intolerance of intolerance rapidly becomes intolerance of anybody who doesn’t have exactly the same value system as the person making the judgment.
Tolerance only of people who share your values isn’t fucking tolerance. It’s agreement. And that is what “leftism” is turning into. How is that better than when Christianity was pulling that shit?
/rant
@Thegnskald
Interesting idea. I suspect you have a background like mine, though I haven’t made the same generalisation. In particular, growing up where the folks demanding that everyone say what they don’t mean, give lip service to various supposedly moral ideas, etc. etc. were mostly both religious and right wing, while those rebelling against this behaviour aligned left wing.
In fact, one example of such a time and place would be the 1960s, in both the US and Canada. That’s what influenced me to expect the thought police to be right wing, at least in my own culture. Have you got the same background?
Thegnskald
I suggest that calling authoritarianism rightwing adds confusion since there’s a history of both left and rightwing authoritarianism.
I’ve been seeing somewhat about Republicans who are cautious about public opposition to Trump because of blowback from Trump supporters. Everybody’s got speech codes.
@Thegnskald
As a (blue tribe) libertarian, I would say I mostly see intolerance from the left, and the idea of “cancel culture” being right-wing strikes me as “and apparently now the sky is green?” I can theoretically see how right-wing people might use that kind of power if they had it, and I can recall historical cases of them doing so (though mostly either pretty far back or in fairly different cultures; I could probably find more recent ones if I looked, this is part of my bubble) but I’ve never lived anywhere they did; for me, “thought police” maps pretty neatly to “left wing”. The attitude you describe (“leftism isn’t just having unpopular value systems, it is defending unpopular value systems in the general case”) strikes me as fairly extreme libertarian; left maybe in my father’s generation, when the left could be more libertarian on social issues (though even then, try defending the draft at Oberlin and see where it gets you), but I would be surprised to see most left-wingers defending it today. And encouraged, definitely encouraged! But surprised.
As per the parent comment, it is very valuable to see views from outside my bubble. Thank you.
I think a large part of confusion comes from the left-wing identifying itself as “those who oppose the power” in situation when some of them actually become the power.
One possible way to resolve this is to say that when (formerly) left-wing people become the power, by definition they become right-wing. That makes sense for a lonely eternally rebelling outsider. But the specific person in power — and their supporters — will continue calling themselves “left-wing”, and their opposition will agree with this label. So, this solution goes against how most people actually use the words.
(I intentionally avoid taking sides here, because both “arguing by definition” and “arguing by popular usage” feel somewhat problematic to me. Personally, I believe that in some situations the “left/right” dichotomy simply does not reflect the territory. But again, in some situations it does, which is why people keep using those labels.)
The traditional solution is that the left-wing people in power will insist on a perspective where, somehow, they still remain the underdogs fighting against those “actually” in power. (Even in extreme cases, such as Soviet Russia, there are enemy countries and internal traitors, and you can call them the oppresive power you keep rebelling against.) Stomping on the defeated opponent’s face is called punching up; beating up dissenters or getting them fired is called self-defense or eradicating intolerance. The question is whether you buy this framing; but that mostly depends on whether you support or oppose the people using this framing; and in turn, arguing for this framing becomes a signal of loyalty.
The eternal cycle seems to be that those who achieve power quickly become a lot less tolerant, when being tolerant limits them stomping on others, rather than prevents others from stomping on them.
This is why checks and balances are so important. It is hardly the case that eliminating checks and balances is only favored by one side, although you’d believe so if you listen to most of the media.
As for the ideal of favoring the oppressed, this often seems like an affectation, not something truly desired (and not the effect of the proposed policies).
I personally think the Red/Blue/Gray tribe categories are too reductionist and really wish Scott et al would stop using them. With that being said, every time I poke my head into a culture war or Trump discussion here, there seems to be plenty of Republicans using standard Republican talking points that you could just as easily find in the comments section of Redstate.com or whatever. I don’t see how SSC could possibly be described as anything but a right-leaning website- which is partially inspired by Scott/the rationalist movement in general, which is at a minimum anti-social justice. (Scott’s views, as far as I can see, are pretty standard Buttigieg-ish leftist, but he also combines that with being strongly anti-SJW?)
There are also quite a few self-described Marxists who drop into the economic discussions to tell us various things that Marxists believe. But I can still see how SSC could possibly be described as something other than a Marxist-leaning website. And those same Trump discussions also have plenty of Democrats using talking points that could just as easily be found on Vox.
Tolerating the presence of more than one opinion does not make a place enemy territory.
There were never all that many Marxists and most of them have since left or gotten banned. (I had a couple examples but I think mentioning one of their names caused the post to be filtered out.) Freddie DeBoer is still around but he doesn’t post communist screeds on a regular basis. There really isn’t a strong Marxist presence here at all.
To be fair, the “death eaters” have been purged or silenced even more effectively than the Marxists. If that’s the deal, I’m not sure we shouldn’t be happy to take it.
The readership is probably more to the left, but the commentariat at least is pretty much libertarian – even the leftist here are “left of Friedman”, not left of center.
To the point where I keep wanting to hear more about actual marxist arguments. In Facebook groups all I get is cats and trolling and people acting like everything else is too obvious to put in writing – which I’ve regretfully coded to mean they don’t know shit.
What do you think defines “center?” You might consider, in the U.S. context, that about half the voters voted for Trump.
In that context, there is a lot of room between center and Marxist. As best I can tell, even Bernie, although he identifies as a socialist, is not in any serious sense a Marxist.
I’m pretty sure he hasn’t call for nationalizing GM.
Yes, but he has to be moderate to have a chance at being somebody. Or, anthropic-like, he became somebody partly because he’s more moderate.
But why isn’t anybody here on SSC calling for the nationalizing GM? I’m sure some did call for equivalent things, but well, they met you and others and now they don’t. For better or worse I think the comments here are a bit more libertarian than the mainstream discourse. (personally, I think for the better. But it doesn’t quench my thirst of knowing why somebody would think nationalizing GM is a good idea. Well, probably the same reason people were recently protesting here for rent control as a housing crisis solution)
We have had people on who were Marxists or Socialists in a stronger sense than supporting a welfare state. We’ve had at least one person defending Stalin.
I’m not sure there is anyone who fits that pattern here now. That may because they found it hard to defend the position here, or it may be that they just didn’t find the arguments interesting.
I agree that having such people here to argue with is desirable. But I don’t think Scott has a conscription option.
Well for starters most websites aren’t categorized primarily by commenters but by the actual content.
Oh bleeding Christ, not this again. No. No. No.
Notto disu shitto agen.
Yes and no. We are in general a lot less SJW, but I think a supermajority of us come from a Blue background, originally. I definitely was, a long time ago. I think it’s the same phenomenon as going to a Catholic Church high level conference and try talking about going to hell – I’m guessing, but I think above a certain level people treat is as a metaphor, not a literal fiery pit. Same here – we’re all pro personal freedoms and tolerance, but don’t feel the need to punish people for microaggressions. We’re hell-less Catholics 🙂
Is, is Fox News not a thing?
Like, I don’t think it’s hard for a Blue Triber to hear what the Red Tribe wants; there’s a lot of Red Tribe media out there. I just think it all sounds crazy to them. A lot of political conversation is highly context dependent and when a Blue Triber hears Red Tribe media, it doesn’t make any sense without that context, anymore than you could understand the subtext of an article in Xinhua as an outsider.
The real value of SSC isn’t radically different viewpoints but the shocking similarity; reading SSC is an incredibly powerful filter for a variety of things and even the most ideologically opposed commentators here are more similar to each other than the general population. Like, if you know what AI risk is or you think Bayesianism is a good way to think you’re already in an extremely small minority and we can make a lot of accurate predictions about your education, income, interests, etc. Thus the outgroup you’re arguing against is similar enough to you that they’re comprehensible, while the typical outgroup isn’t.
Like, Vox and Brietbart are mutually unintelligible. Their assorted facts, their history of the recent past, their values, all of these are so alien to each other that you can read either without really understanding them. SSC gets around that, more or less.
But I think it’s wrong to assume that this is a Blue Tribe fault. Every Blue Triber knows about Fox News and can turn it on at any point to get the Red Tribe view. We can study and predict each other’s actions but actually being able to comprehend and sympathize with the other is very difficult and requires a lot of commonality; SSC has a few norms which build that commonality but mostly it’s just a strong filter for people with a lot in common mentally.
The difference is the blue triber has to choose to turn on fox to get the the red tribe view. The red triber will get a constant barrage of blue tribe views from almost every other news source, schools, Hollywood, his HR department, etc.
I think you vastly underestimate the exposure your average right winger gets to left wing ideas on a daily basis. Vox is to NBC as Breitbart is to FoxNews (not Fox TV). There are 3 NBC (clones on this point), Fox TV is basically run by the local people (in Chicago and Pittsburgh it is still broadcasting from a clear Dem-leaning POV). Plus you have many other incidental left wing encounters. I recall watching sporting events on NBC and ABC recently and encountering anti-gun soliloquies. The hardest reporting Fox Sports has done on politics was Bill O’Reilly giving Obama a puff interview.
That is the kind of incidental immersion people on the right get to those on the left. Its unavoidable unless you are a super hermit. This is borne out in quizzes, conservatives are significantly more accurate at predicting the answers of progressives than progressives are at predicting the answers of conservatives.
Harder != impossible. But part of the news bubble is that programs ‘innoculate’ you against enemy news sources by telling you what they said. So, for example, the Daily Show will show some clips of Fox News and mock them and you feel you understand what Fox News is without ever having actually watched Fox News.
I’m sure you feel you know what Fox News is. Have you ever actually sat down and watched an hour of it? How much of your knowledge of the channel comes from people (even newspeople) telling you about it?
The same effect exists on the right, by the by. But the average right winger has to engage with more culturally dominant institutions that have left-wing leanings.
Yes. I think in total I’ve watched somewhere in the realm of a few thousand hours of Fox News*. The actual news-reporting part of it was biased, but not too terrible. Most of my issues were with what they chose to cover, not necessarily how they covered it. The opinion side of the channel was eye-clawingly awful. Outnumbered has got to be the worst show ever conceived.
All in all, none of my priors about Fox were challenged or seriously modified having watched an insane amount of it.
*I was working in an office with a tv constantly tuned to the news, a republican leaning cohort and democratic control over which channel we’d watch.
In what way would your average 50-something non-college educated white man who lives in a small town (the “average” right-winger) regularly have to engage with dominant left-leaning organizations? I’ve been there, I’ve lived in those towns. You don’t see or hear left-leaning viewpoints any more often than you’d see right-wing views on a college campus. Arguably less.
This is hilariously phrased. I feel like this is happening all the time on SSC lately.
I going to break in since it is almost on topic to the tangent and thank Nick for saving the “It’s a small world” pun about Steve Bannon being involved in the Biosphere project for me to use.
Sometimes there really are
twenty dollar bills on the sidewalkpuns that everyone else passes by.@Nick
Thank you!
Rightly or wrongly, then, I consider you unusual. It’s my anecdotal experience that there are a small number of people (like you) who have. Most have not.
Really? Because you’re statistically rather wrong on this one. Democratic districts are less politically diverse than Republican ones, even now after the House has majority Democrats. Democrats routinely score ten to thirty points higher than Republicans in their district, meaning more Democrats exist in Republican districts than vice versa. This means that Republican majority counties have more Democrats than Democrat majority counties have Republicans.
Now, those might be moderate Democrats rather than New York types. But if we restrict “Blue Tribe” to that, then we’re just using a word for coastal elites. That’s where we get into slipperier definitions. Is the liberal theater manager in a small city not Blue Tribe?
Further, the media, Hollywood, the Federal bureaucracy, and the school system are all very left leaning, Blue institutions. Two of them have basically compulsory interaction and the other two are so ubiquitous as to be almost inescapable.
You could, I suppose, make the argument that these institutions aren’t left wing (at which point I would show you how many donations went to Democrats vs Republicans). If you decline to, your question then becomes: “How would an average 50-something non-college educated white man who lives in a small town ever have to engage with the media, Hollywood, the Federal bureaucracy, or the school system?” This question is, of course, obvious.
Likewise, the studies showing Republicans can generally replicate Democratic talking points better than vice versa.
As I said, I can’t think of a nationalized culturally dominant institution. Like, they exist: the Church, the Army. But they’re far easier to opt out of. More people watch television each Sunday than go to Church.
Anyway, maybe you are accurately conveying your rather unusual experience. But in this case, I do actually know your experience is unusual.
The thing is, if in my filter bubble, we all agree on X, then finding a community where people question, doubt, or dispute X seems jarring and extreme. And this is just as true when X = “humans evolved from apes” as when X = “Iraq has WMDs and poses a threat to the US” or X = “vaccines cause autism.”
The jarringness of hearing ingroup consensus challenged doesn’t depend on whether the consensus being challenged is rock solid (evolution) or likely based on the balance of the evidence (AGW) or plausible but unproved (robots are going to put us all out of work) or clearly wrong (vaccines cause autism). And especially, how offensive a statement is to your sensibilities has basically no correlation with how likely it is to be true. When someone claims that the industrial revolution was only possible because of the wealth from slavery and colonialism, or that humans are evolved from apes, or that putting your kids in daycare is bad for them, this causes a strong emotional reaction in some people, which *feels* like information about whether or not the statement is true, but which actually contains no information about the factual statement.
IMO, Blue tribe/red tribe/grey tribe is a largely useless concept. The actual definitions Scott gave are just a collection of stereotypes, but in practice, people just use them to refer to the parties (with the grey tribe being people who want to feel smug about being above it all). But the parties are big tents, and you’d need a whole rainbow if you even want to try to capture the actual cultural diversity of the US.
I agree that its an overused concept. There seem to be people with an interest in reducing the analysis of all political disagreement to “tribal conflicts”, in which groups are just vying for power, with no side necessarily right or wrong. The deflection is often deployed to avoid from having to talk about ideas/ideology.
I suspect the motivation for this stems from a difficulty in justifying their political positions using any widely accepted framework of morality. So the only framework in which their position is persuasive is if politics is nothing more than the naked struggle for power. Talking about “tribes” further advances that amoral framework.
Your OP clearly said “Republicans” and “Democrats”. Yet nearly every response diverted to talking about “tribes”. It’s almost reflexive at this point. Very unhealthy stuff.
Seems pretty outdated in the age of the internet. The days of the conversation being dominated by a couple of TV and movie studios are long over.
The harping on a largely irrelevant and contestable cultural dominance looks to me like an attempt to recapture the underdog low ground.
Would you be willing to elaborate a bit on what gives you this impression? I tend to read a lot of the CW discussions and find them valuable precisely because they so rarely degenerate into this sort of thing. The one down-thread is probably the worst I’ve seen in quite a while and even there the low point was a mutual round of “I don’t find your journalists to be credible”. Which is certainly suboptimal, but a lot more understandable than rampant conspiracy-theorizing.
Perhaps these look different to people coming from different points on the political spectrum? I tend towards the center myself (or, at least, my left-leaning friends see me as right-leaning and vice versa) and wonder if that leads some of the more extreme arguments to appear less antithetical to my own positions.
I think it’s a little difficult to quantify, and perhaps it’s the most extreme examples that stick out in my memory, overstating the effect. I’ve seen people argue here multiple times that “Democrats don’t really care about immigrants, they just want to get a bunch of people dependent on them and then let them vote to rig elections” or “Democrats don’t really care about the environment, it’s just a pretext for dictating how the economy runs” or stuff like that.
But even without stuff that blatant, it seems to be implied with varying levels of subtlety in most of the political discussions I see here. I think part of it may just be the filter bubble/alternate reality thing, and the difficulty of forgetting your own beliefs when modeling others. For example, the right wing mostly believes that Trump obviously did nothing wrong and no reasonable person could think otherwise, and so they unconsciously assume that Democrats also believe this and thus that the whole impeachment thing can only be motivated by some secret partisan goal.
For what it’s worth, I consider myself to be a moderate/centrist Democrat.
“It’s a pretext for taking over the economy” is admittedly a paraphrase, but taken directly from AOC’s staffers.
That said, I personally think that Democrats would behave quite differently if their focus was actual on immigrants and on the environment rather than using those as political tools, and thus I lean more towards the cynical explanations. For whatever it’s worth I consider myself a “roughly centrist by triangulation” independent.
From the Republicans I know, they don’t think it’s a secret partisan goal at all- Democrats were marching in the streets and demanding impeachment before he was even sworn in, and after three years of that, they find it hard to take any of this seriously. And I don’t blame them. I think Republicans that said “not my president” when Obama was elected were equally stupid and self-defeating.
From what I’ve heard, “The Green New Deal” was specifically a proposal for environmental measures and economic changes wrapped into one package in the hopes of being more politically palatable. So your quote doesn’t say anything about whether environmentalism or the climate change movement in general is a cynical conspiracy, which is what is usually asserted.
As for the impeachment stuff, this seems like the outgroup homogeneity bias in play. I’m sure you can find people arguing for impeachment from day one, but that doesn’t mean it was a mainstream position. We already know that Pelosi wouldn’t entertain impeachment over the emoluments clause stuff or even after the FBI all but accused Trump of obstruction of justice. Even with someone as hated as Trump, impeachment is a very high bar, and the Republicans here don’t seem to realize that because they think anything bad anyone has ever said about Trump is equally risible and thus can’t understand why Democrats are moving forward on impeachment now.
Not to respond to your particular point, but I don’t think it is cynical, and not really a conspiracy. I think climate change provides new arguments for things that lots of people already wanted to do, and that makes those people more willing to believe and repeat exaggerated versions of the threat posed by climate change.
The new arguments are particularly useful given that the old set of arguments for doing those things, the idea that socialism (economic sense) works better than capitalism, mostly died with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the abandonment of socialism by China.
As I pointed out in a blog post some time ago, that interpretation of climate alarmism is supported by a cartoon that was popular among the people in question.
“What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”
@Loriot
As someone who has made something similar to this argument, that’s not the argument. the argument is (using climate change as an example):
Democrats claim that the climate is an existential threat, but they reject solutions that don’t involve other things they say they want, like higher taxes or more regulation of the economy. For those of us who are opposed to higher taxes or more regulation, this makes it seem likely that they are driven in part by motivated reasoning.
And, as profgerm and davidfriedman said, there’s nothing secret about any of this. We’re discussing openly espoused goals and desires, and even people very transparently talking about how, e.g. climate change legislation should be a tool for societal transformation beyond merely energy.
And for the record, the same is true of the right. To take one example, In 1999, the bush administration campaigned on cutting taxes because the economy was doing so well that revenues were way up. In 2001 they passed that tax package while arguing that the economy was doing poorly and needed stimulus.
One could argue that this is evidence that republicans don’t care about economic performance, they just want to cut taxes and are looking for excuses. I would say instead that republicans want good economic performance and they also want lower taxes. Because of this, they’re going to be naturally inclined towards solutions that involve lower taxes. That doesn’t mean they aren’t sincere, but it does mean that any claim they make that lower taxes are the perfect solution for [current problem] should be discounted, as should democratic claims about solutions to global warming that just happen to line up exactly with the energy and environmental policies that they’ve been pushing for the last 4 or 5 decades.
Put more generically, assuming values are constant policy recommendations should shift more often than the justifications for them. When we see justifications changing around a policy, it’s reasonable think that there might be motivation for that policy besides the current justification.
I would expound on this vis-a-vis immigration. The problem with Democrats favoring low skill immigration is, that other than the voters, it does not align with any other policy goals.
It increases inequality (a huge portion of our larger gini coeff compared to Europe), it breaks down labor unions, it causes many public services like schools, healthcare, social security, etc to become fiscally unsustainable. It causes overcrowding in the cities because, low skill immigrants do not (to the chagrin of libertarians) move to North Dakota to frack, or join other pioneering industries, instead they move to cities driving up housing costs. It is very much a policy that is traditionally opposed by environmentalists because immigrants to the US consume more and use more carbon (and other pollutants).
So progressiveness’s other goals are very much at odds with immigration, which is why it is considered suspicious.
I would second that the CW threads are great here. It’s one of the few places to find intelligent discussion from differing points of view, as opposed to thoughtless disagreement. Even when I’m totally at opposites with someone, I generally find their arguments to at least be something worth reading and considering.
I can get the other sorts of arguments from Google News or Facebook in whatever quantity desired, but the SSC comments-style better debate is much rarer. At this point, I think the SSC culture is tending to err on the side of too little conflict and drama compared to the wider society, and I’m personally just fine with that.
The sad part is that discussions here are better than anywhere else I know of.
Being banned from here suuuuuuuuuuucked. Trying to converse in any sort of reasonable way with people anywhere else was terrible. Like, expecting anyone to support their arguments was a fool’s errand. It was like that scene in Judge Dredd where Max von Sydow has to go bring the Law into the wasteland. It’s pointless. There’s nothing there but monsters.
Some people were wondering about my recent ban that, if I’m banned for three months, why would I ever come back?
Well, where else do I get theology, Biblical criticism, cosmology, movie criticism, logistics military and civil, urban planning, pop culture, politics, law constitutional and civil, cookery tips and puns ranging from the sublime to the terrible all in one thread? 😀
In a way, the long thread on biblical literalism that I was recently in reminds me of an experience I had quite a long time ago. I got into a conversation in the Bombay airport with a woman from southern India. We were both flying to Sydney, Australia, and ended up talking for a good deal of the flight.
She was going out to join her husband, a physician. It had been an arranged marriage, which she saw as the normal pattern in her society. My society’s pattern seemed as odd to her as hers did to me. On the evidence of our small sample, her system worked better–my first marriage had recently broken up, she was happily married.
We usually view foreign institutions through a lens biased against them, in favor of our own. But she wasn’t an uneducated primitive but an obviously intelligent and thoughtful woman, as much part of the modern world as I was, from a very different culture.
Similarly here. It’s a useful experience to see what seems to me like a very odd view of the world presented by an intelligent believer.
I highly resent the implication that I’m not an uneducated primitive, David – these stone tools are a lot of work. They don’t just chip themselves!
Knap. They don’t just knap themselves.
If they don’t get their knap in, this makes them cranky – the cranky stone axe of the uneducated primative gets like +2 blunt damage.
You sound more like an educated primitive.
I have a confession. I bought an MDF board from the home depot as a platform for my pet turtles and needed to cut a hole in the middle of it.
Lacking the Proper tools (circular saw) in Greenwich, I surveyed what was available.
And so I went out to the parking lot with a bucket, hammer, and chisel (flathead screwdriver) and banged out a hole for many many minutes.
Uhhhhhhh, I have a feeling a circular saw isn’t what you think it is?
That, or you are talking about plunge cuts which will work, as long as the hole you want is quite big and you don’t really care about the corners.
Perhaps you meant a jigsaw?
I meant something like this
In the absence of that, a hammer and screwdriver is what I scraped together.
A better tool may have been a jigsaw or a hole saw. Hole saws can get pricey for larger holes though, and don’t have any other uses. Even the mini-circular saw in your link can only make relatively large holes.
Either way, the hammer and screwdriver method is one to be applauded – not to mention the tenacity to apply it.
I would caution against using a circular saw to plunge cut a hole in something if you are unfamiliar with the regular use of a circular saw. Just wanted to throw that out there to the laceration gods.
Jigsaw doesn’t really work because you still have to cut in from an edge.
I think the tool everyone is looking for is a spade bit on a drill (unless the whole needs to be really large, in which case hole saw on a drill).
Good point. With a jigsaw you typically use a spade bit to drill a starter hole from which you then work.
@mitv50
I did miss that you already mentioned a hole saw. Also fully agreed on the tenacity of the hammer/screwdriver approach.
@acymetric
You drill a hole big enough for the jigsaw blade, generally on and inside the circle you’ve drawn to cut out, then start the blade inside that hole.
Ninja-ed by mitv150
Jigsaw blades are slim. You don’t need a spade bit to start the hole, a 3/8” bit will do.
I may have been imagining a smaller hole than what is required. My take is that by the time you’re drilling a hole to slide the jigsaw in, you might as well just drill the hole.
Roughly up to 3/8” diameter you can use a standard bit, 1/2” to 1” needs a spade bit. There are specialty hole saws for use with a drill that tend to top out at about 2” or 3”. Past that you are likely doing something else.
But you aren’t likely to be cutting a 3” diameter hole with a plunge cut, so I assumed larger.
Mark Watney and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory approve. At least they do if the last step was “bash it with a really big rock”.
I’m a fan of the ol’ drill a few dozen 8mm holes in a circle then connect them together with brute force, ignorance.
@dragonmilk
In the absence of tools and the ability to get them/the knowledge to use them safely, I feel like you did the admirable thing.
I kept turtles my whole childhood and we always used rocks for platforms: one wide flat rock, tilted up at one end by propping it on top of another more cube-shaped rock, making a ramp. The wide flat rock was submerged on one end and out of the water at the other. The turtle(s) (sometimes there were two) would clamber up and sit on the dry end under a light bulb. We had to take the rocks out once every few weeks and scrub them with toothbrushes to get the algae off.*
But you’re talking about making this out of OSB…first of all, if you submerge part of the OSB that part will rot. If you don’t submerge any of it, how do the turtles climb up? Second, how do you clean the inevitable algae off it?
Do you even have turtles, or are they actually tortoises?
PS. Just now I learned that box turtles really are turtles! My whole life I’d thought they were actually tortoises. But, they aren’t aquatic like normal turtles, so I’m pretty sure whatever habitat you provide for one would be more like a tortoise’s than a turtle’s.
*Yes, our toothbrushes, that we used on our teeth. Because that was the punishment for causing mommy and daddy’s divorce.
The only missing from this subthread are four guys and a couple sixpacks of Alamo.
@well: I have a branch that goes up from the tank through the hole to the MSF board part of it. They are capable of climbing up but always dive into the water when I come around.
I’ve actually had no algae yet. I change the water once a week though. Perhaps the tap water has enough chlorine to make it ok but not enough to make turtles afraid?
While I’m in the right-of-center camp, I can’t dispute that right-of-center opinions dominate here. I’m a relative newcomer here, but I hope that the CW threads don’t drive you off, and don’t make you write off either Scott’s writings or the blog in general as just another biased element of the right-o-sphere, or a pipeline to the alt-right, or something like that.
I think Scott puts in tremendous effort to make it not the case; to maintain might call “left wing credibility” as much as possible without just agreeing fully with progressive left points.
I know that one difficulty I’ve had in debating my left-of-center friends has been precisely this: that there are absolutely no right-of-center content outlets which they accept as in any way authoritative; and only a few that I would trust myself as having high-quality content – but that’s not their problem. For example, when Quillette was first launched, it was obscure, and I could link to an essay from there and have someone take it on its merits and engage with it in good faith. Now, because it is known as being Intellectual Dark Web-adjacent, and a forum for right-wing ideas, most people on the left will dismiss the essay out of hand as biased in some hidden way, even if they can’t put a finger on it. Part of the problem is that a medium is frozen out by one of the sides, and its material gets selected to be more and more biased; it’s a vicious cycle chicken-egg problem that is hard to resolve.
But at the same time, it’s really nice to engage in a forum where you aren’t in the extreme minority, which I at least am in my social group – and so the right-of-center commenters might drop some of the circumspection they’d exercise in person around left-of-center friends…. Which leads to the perception of someone left-of-center of a right-of-center forum that is aggressive and unwelcoming.
Anyway, that’s an end to my rambles there.
@HeelBearCub
I don’t know either…your response seems to be nothing more than an insult.
My initial response was just going to be “less of this, please”. But on further reflection, HBC’s comment provides an excellent example of something that is otherwise difficult to talk about.
I would expect a right-leaning space to be, at a minimum, one in which a right-leaning person can share a personal experience and their thoughts about it without immediately being met with condescending insults. It has just been demonstrated that the SSC open threads are not such a place.
The idea that a person on the right drawing attention to the problem of media polarization somehow demonstrates “a hilariously depressing lack of self awareness” only makes sense if you have already accepted “everyone knows this is their fault”. A place where that sort of negative stereotype about the right is so ubiquitously accepted that a leftist barely feels the need to reference it when insultingly and uncharitably dismissing a point can be a lot of things, but “left-leaning” would seem to be a fair description to me.
Also, less of this, please.
Show them to me.
The set of outlets I accept as having high quality content seems to be dropping year by year, regardless of political alignment – though of course the presence of blatant political alignment reduces my trust in any content.
For context, since you are new here, my political opinions were formed in Canada, starting in the 1960s, and I place a huge value on not forcing people to accept limitations based on their membership in unchosen categories. I also place what appears to be a higher than average value on not speaking falsehoods. This clearly appears left wing in the US today, and on SSC.
I’m also allied with the local (US) left wing party, as the one less likely to attack people like me, but it’s not a happy alliance.
Sorry if this has been discussed recently; I no longer have time to even skim every open thread, let alone read them. But I thought it was relevant given the release of The Rise of Skywalker (I wish I could say the last Star Wars film, but we all know that’s not going to happen).
10. The Force Awakens
09. The Phantom Menace
08. The Last Jedi
07. Attack of the Clones
06. Solo
05. Revenge of the Sith
04. Rogue One <—- Films below this line are actually good.
03. Return of the Jedi
02. A New Hope
01. The Empire Strikes Back.
Discuss.
For me, it goes:
01. Rogue One – I was seriously shocked how much I liked this movie, and I would actually rather watch it than the original trilogy.
02. A New Hope – Sentimental favorite, though the acting is by far the worst of the OT.
03. Return of the Jedi – I still think this one has the best action in the entire series. I also love everything on Tatooine.
04. The Empire Strikes Back – I understand why this is at the top of most people’s list, but it’s the one I’m least likely to watch.
Big gap.
05. Solo – I found this to be a very fun movie. It has serious flaws, but I enjoyed all of the places they went, and I liked the characters.
06. Revenge of the Sith – I actually haven’t seen this one since the theater, so I don’t have a lot to say about it. I should rewatch it.
07.The Phantom Menace – I think this is unfairly maligned. There is some poor acting and dialog, and the effects don’t hold up, but I think the story is actually a lot of fun, it has a great lightsaber fight, the alien and ship designs were all very interesting, and I also just have good memories of all the lead-up to its release.
08. The Force Awakens – Unnecessary, and it cheapened the accomplishments of the characters in the original trilogy. That said, it looked very slick and I found the new characters likeable. I didn’t really like it, but it gave me hope that the new trilogy could create characters that would be remembered.
09. Attack of the Clones – I like the storyline and character designs, but the dialog is so bad, the acting so stiff, and some of the effects are just terrible. It makes it very hard to watch, even though it has some good stuff.
10. The Last Jedi – Unlike most Star Wars fans, I actually didn’t have any major issues with the way they imagined Luke. In fact, I liked pretty much everything about Rey and Kylo Ren’s story. My problem is that only made up about a third of the movie, and the rest of it was pointless and boring. You could take Finn completely out of the movie and nothing would have changed. They didn’t advance his character at all, instead they just made him go though the same character development he had already done in TFA. And Poe’s part of the story was even worse. The “chase” reminded me of the scene in Austin Powers when he’s driving the steamroll at 1 mph, and there’s a guy in his way that can’t get out of the way in time.
The last half hour or so of rogue one is great, but the first hour or so is pointless and didn’t manage the only thing it had to do, make me care about the characters.
I’m completely the opposite. Rogue One was pretty much the only Star Wars movie that made me care more about the characters than the main plot.
Rogue One is very much a classic movie pastiche, for ensemble war movies. Think Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes, or The Great Escape. I’d throw Magnificent Seven in there, too, though such “ensemble team” movies seem rare in the western genre.
In these kinds of movies, you don’t really have to care about the characters as individuals. It’s about having broad stroke personalities bouncing off of each other. I will admit that Jyn was dull as paste, and they didn’t make Cassian as distinct as they should have, but the rest of the team was good stuff.
I didn’t really care much about Jyn, and only slightly more about Cassian (although both characters were somewhat redeemed in the closing scenes), but I quite liked K2, Bhodi, Baze, and Chirrut throughout the movie. Heck, even Saw.
I liked Rogue One a lot more after I played the Rise of the Empire expansion to the Star Wars Rebellion board game. I actually started caring a little about Krennic and Jyn Erso, etc.
This ties in with my general feeling that I like the toys in the Star Wars sandbox much more than I like the movies themselves. The prequels aren’t very good movies, but I love the droids and the clone troopers and all the locations when I play Battlefront II*. My big problem with the ST is no fun new toys for the sandbox. Still tie fighters and x-wings, just a different paint job, no cool new aliens, no neat vehicles. Crait with the red dust is neat but that’s about it.
* which by the way, is having a big resurgence, and is still very cheap. If anyone wants to play a really fun Star Wars multiplayer FPS, buy it.
Endorsed.
When it comes to Solo, I have fond memories of playing Shadows of the Empire on N64, and it had the same feel.
Solo is by far the most EU-feeling movie, and for that reason alone I enjoyed it.
There are two big problems with TPM:
1) Anakin comes from Tatooine. Good job, whoever leaves Luke there under his father’s surname!* There are >100 billion planets in the Star Wars galaxy, and this is where you hide him?
2) The huge high-tech battle is won by an 8-year-old and a Jamaican CGI Olsen twin. A movie can be made for children without… that. Lucas should have known better: the original Star Wars was itself aimed at kids.
*Obi-Wan, but we didn’t know to blame him at the time.
Doesn’t Anakin have to come from Tatooine, though? How else does Luke end up living with an aunt and uncle?
Of course, then TPM cocked that up by making Anakin an only child, so they had to resort to “Mom remarried” shenanigans in later films to make Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru still make sense.
They could have just gone with “not actually biologically related” or something. People call non-relatives “aunt” and “uncle” with some regularity in the modern world. Or they lied to Luke as a child that they were his aunt/uncle when they were really old friends of Obi-Wan’s or something.
They could have made Owen and Beru entirely unrelated to Luke, by marriage or otherwise. They could have been friends of Obi-Wan who agreed to raise the baby and lied to him, saying they were his aunt and uncle. They weren’t exactly honest about who his father was. No reason to be honest about his aunt and uncle.
edit: ninjer’d
Great minds think alike 🙂
As others have noted, this also got botched in the prequels. An old friend of Obi-Wan’s and their spouse would be as much aunt and uncle to baby Luke as his biological father’s stepbrother the father was never raised with.
This list is fine, except the “actually good” line should be between Rogue One and Revenge of the Sith, and you put The Last Jedi waaay too high.
At first I thought you meant that the only good Star Wars film was ESB, which seemed a bit extreme.
Heh, whoops. I edited it to be clearer.
I could be persuaded to swap the Last Jedi and the Phantom Menace.
As for the line, it’s deliberately AT Rogue One. Half of Rogue One is a good movie. Half is…not.
You’re missing the Holiday Special.
An undisputed classic, obviously.
Classic of what, I’m not sure.
To my great shame as a Star Wars fan, I’ve actually never seen it. I can’t properly rate it.
Probably throw it in in the Attack of the Clones/Solo/Revenge of the Sith area, there’s no way it could possibly be as bad as the sequels/Phantom Menace zone.
It’s no great shame. The Holiday special is an extra kind of bad. Off the scales. Worse than the worst parts of all the other movies combined.
RiffTrax makes it worth sitting through. Once. With a little alcohol.
Ye of little faith.
It is way worse. It’s bad in the worst way. All the ways in which it doesn’t make sense, don’t make sense because the creators were pandering and slapdash, not because the creators had a failed vision. They never had a vision in the first place.
It is boring, but the most offensive kind of boring that you can’t just tune out. It’s bizarre, yet extremely dull at the same time. It’s pretty common for people to have to take breaks just to get through it.
It has Chewbacca’s dad watching really bad VR soft porn (apparently he is a reverse-furry, who likes human women). Note that the holiday special was intended as family entertainment.
It has an Imperial officer visit Chewbacca’s family to search for him, only to allow himself to be distracted by watching a full Jefferson Starship song. If only we had had Jefferson Starship songs during WW II, so many Jews would have been saved.
There is a weird ‘Christmas, but we won’t call it Christmas’ holiday being celebrated in the special. At the end everyone somehow teleports into space and then walks into a star, to end up at the tree of life. Then Leia sings a song.
It randomly switches to showing a cartoon (introducing Boba Fett).
All the Star Wars actors look like they desperately want to be elsewhere. Mark Hamill looks like a drag queen who binged on eye liner. Carrie Fischer looks coked out. Harrison Ford looks like he got a lobotomy.
Don’t watch it if you are prone to depression/suicidal thoughts.
Wouldn’t a reverse furry just be a baldy?
This was recently featured on CinemaSins, can confirm it’s that and more.
Obligatory XKCD, and I believe they broke out absinthe for the last panel. Unfortunately, I’m not sure there is a way to explain how really bad this “movie” really is, that won’t just make the younglings think we’re comically over-hyping the so-bad-it’s-good-ness.
You’re history’s greatest monster.
I gotta be me.
You’re missing the Holiday Special.
EchoChaos, you are Chaotic Evil.
I saw the Holiday Special broadcast on television back in the day*, and there’s a damn good reason it’s never been re-broadcast. It’s like everyone involved is on drugs, and the audience would need to be on drugs to watch it, but given that it’s pitched at kids/family-friendly audience, you have to see it sober.
*You kids will never know the suffering we went through at your age!
Harrison Ford is visibly not on drugs, and always looks like he’s bottling up great hatred.
But then he never even liked the good Star Wars.
I’m repressing those memories as hard as I can, Le Maistre Chat 🙂
But yeah, Ford plainly hates every second and does not want to be there; you have to wonder what calibre and how many guns they were holding on him off-camera to force him to participate!
I’m really torn on the Last Jedi, but in general I think it should be higher.
My case, in short, is the Last Jedi is the only movie since Return of the Jedi with genuinely great moments.
Yes, the movie has problems, lots of problems, so many problems, it’s like 80% problems.
But the Kylo-Rey stuff. That stuff is genuinely good, bordering on great.
Kylo’s “Join Me” scene is genuinely grade-A great. It not only was perfectly in character for both of them, it clarified and advanced their relationship. It opened up so many possibilities, so many cool things could have been done, and if the film had ended right here it would be worth all the bad. C’mon, when’s the last time a bad guy made a “Come to the dark side” speech and it not only made sense, you were rooting for the hero to take it. It comes out of nowhere, makes 100% sense…and then just gets dropped.
And yeah, the movie is still overall bad and yeah, yeah, all critiques. But I already can’t remember much about the prequels and I don’t expect to remember much about the recent crop but this plotline, this plotline I expect to stick around. Not just in terms of memory but in terms of something I care about.
I stand by my assertion that Kylo ren is far and away the best character of the new movies. People say he’s a lame emo darth vader cosplayer, to which I say “yes absolutely! that’s what’s great about him!” There’s no way that that the star wars galaxy wouldn’t be full of people like that, and it’s his weaknesses that make him interesting.
Is that even an opinion anyone would dispute? I was honestly under the impression Kylo Ren was the far and away the most popular character. Yeah, he’s emo and angsty, but he’s a three dimensional character with an actual arc. It also helps that Adam Driver is a fantastic actor with a charismatic screen presence.
I’ve gotten a lot of pushback on the idea from people I’ve talked to about it in person. But most of them had very different opinions than me about which of the new movies are good and which ones aren’t* so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. I also tend to be a pretty harsh critic.
*for the record, solo was the best of them so far but only ok. the last jedi was fascinatingly bad in ways I never thought it would be. TFA had some moments but was acceptable at best. and rogue one was a great last act and terrible first two. The prequels had some great ideas that were terribly implemented and should be remade. The first couple episodes of the mandalorian seem to have more thought put into their worldbuilding than all the new movies put together, and I remain absolutely shocked that disney took a 4 billion dollar car out for a ride without a plan.
IMO Kylo Ren is a potentially good character, but he is miscast in the Trilogy (at least the first two films) so far. He is a character who is rebellious in nature, but his rebellion is not relatable. We dont see why he dislikes his father, and the explanation about his mentor is contrived. From day one of his introduction he has little reason to rebel anymore.
There is a good Kylo Ren trilogy that could have existed, but that set of movies was not made. It is similar to how Lucas could have written a good “fall of Anakin Skywalker” trilogy for the prequels, but did not.
Definitely. There are plenty of people who don’t like Kylo, I’m one of them. I also just don’t like Adam Driver generally (which is apparently some kind of sacrilege, but whatever). I liked Kylo in TFA when he was introduced, but didn’t care for him much in TLJ (maybe partly because in TLJ I could see Adam Driver’s face the whole time…could be my anti-Driver bias there I guess) and unlike the person a couple comments up I thought the Kylo-Rey stuff was one of the worst parts (among many!) in Last Jedi.
My biggest complaint about Kylo Ren is that he’s just not scary enough. Star Wars is a fantasy epic with larger than life heroes and villains. Kylo Ren feels like the wrong villain for the setting, heck I think that’s why so many people rooted for Darth Rey. She has a lot more menace in her heroism than the First Order manage in their villainy.
Actually, random unrelated thought but there could be an interesting Star Wars story where Jedi and Sith have flipped roles in the public perception. When the Empire fell it led to chaos and balkanisation rather than reunification and so twenty years only the Sith idea of order and fear is looking pretty attractive. Far more so than the Jedi who’s commitment to peace and justice appears more nihilistic than laudable when faced up against a galaxy gone mad.
There are a huge number of interesting stories that could in the backdrop of the original Star Wars movies (4-6). But nobody seems very interested in telling any interesting stories. They can afford a gazillion dollar special effects budget, but getting a screenwriter who can make a logically coherent plot with consistent rules of the universe from one scene to the next is apparently out of their budget–let alone finding a writer who could make a compelling SFnal plot with all the raw material they have.
@albatross11
It’s especially puzzling because there was literally an entire industry around writing Star Wars content expanding on what happened before, after, and in between the movies for decades. Not only are there a huge number of potentially interesting stories, we already have a huge number of existing ones! Some of it wasn’t very good, but some of it was great! I suppose Disney doesn’t want to use it because they don’t want to pay someone else for their ideas or something, but there is plenty of material to use for inspiration, if not outright make a movie adaptation of a book or series of books. Heck, even one or two of the old video games offer prime source material.
Would it really have been that hard for Disney to have bought movie rights to some of the better books? I mean, it’s not like they’re short on cash.
My guess: the decisionmakers don’t take anything about Star Wars seriously–they think it’s a dumb story for kids whose main job is to provide a special effects spectacle and sell toys. And so it’s utterly foreign to them to worry about internal consistency of rules, or character development, or coherent plots. Why does a dumb cartoon for kids whose purpose is to sell toys need any of *that*.
And they’re right, as far as box office receipts go. (Which is frankly the only thing they care about.). TLJ had space bombers and a several-hour boring spaceship chase and a stupid away mission and they still made a pile of money on it. TFA was basically a rehash of ANH, with all kinds of stupid implausible magic stuff happening. They still made money.
What do they care if they took a big steaming dump on the serious fans and the Star Wars universe? The money keeps coming in, and that’s the point. They’ve made such crappy movies that they’ve managed to lose some of the box office money they’d have made with even competent plotting and writing, but from their perspective, that probably just looks like noise.
+1
This is one of the things that pisses me off the most about the new trilogy.
@albatross11
But the poor reception of Solo did have consequences for planned content, ranging from putting films on ice to outright canceling them. So clearly somewhere up the decision chain it was realized that the money can’t just roll in endlessly and that a change of strategy was necessary. To really pursue this “competent writing doesn’t matter” thing is short-termism of the First Order.
@Nick
The whole Solo thing is a mis-read on Disney’s part. Solo bombed because:
A) They released it too close to Last Jedi, regardless. Should have been spaced out a bit more.
B) They especially released it too close to Last Jedi after was received so poorly by large segments of the fan base. Enthusiasm for Star Wars films was at an all time low when Solo was released. I didn’t go see it in theaters (which, having since watched it on TV, I now greatly regret)
C) Disney managed to perform approximately 0 damage control when all the bad press about Solo being a trainwreck during filming and production was coming out, further dampening enthusiasm. All the coverage of the movie was basically “this movie has been a disaster and will be terrible”.
Disney then took the result of their horrible bungling of two consecutive Star Wars releases as evidence that people just don’t want more Star Wars. Hopefully they’re taking the time to re-evaluate how to actually make good movies, and aren’t actually considering pulling out of making more movies alltogether. Also, not all the movies need to be super-expensive blockbusters where the film has to do $1bil+ to be worth making.
As far as I can tell though, the Mandalorian is universally loved. I have yet to see anyone say a bad word about it.
But can you believe they failed to make Baby Yoda dolls in time for Christmas? Holy crap, who would have thought it possible for Star Wars to screw up (since the infamous roll-out for the first movie) by having too little merchandising?!
@acymetric
I don’t really disagree with any of that, but it’s beside my point, which is that clearly someone with decisionmaking power cares when Star Wars isn’t making as much money anymore and will adjust accordingly. Even if they read the circumstances wrong.
They kind of do. They would be ok with a couple of movies making a little south of $1 billion as long as none were actively losing money, but with what they paid for the franchise plus the opportunity costs of making these movies they aren’t realistically going to start releasing movies on sub $100 million budgets, especially if they risk fatigue for the large ones in doing so.
@Nick
I mean that is self evident…obviously they care about how much money they’re making. My point/concern is that they are misdiagnosing the problems, and thus are unlikely to correct them for future movies.
@baconbits9
Sure, but the cheapest one so far is $265 million. There is a lot of room to drop down there and take more risks with a film, where if it fails you aren’t out as much and if it succeeds you could end up with with a (relatively) cheap movie that makes nearly a billion dollars and spawns a whole new line of toys/marketing nonsense for additional revenue.
The pressure to make every movie a billion dollar blockbuster is most likely hurting the bottom line and ultimate revenue from the franchise, not protecting it.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this OT, the Disney movies are really bad at presenting new toys. The vehicles are the same at Ep 4-6, aliens are mostly gone in favor of more diverse humans (in ugly clothes), and each film introduces just one new droid, IIRC.
I have only watched the first episode so far, and I think it holds promise, but, absent everyone telling me the series is great, I probably would have very little interest in continuing watching based on the first episode. There are big red warning flags in the first episode that say “This will end poorly”.
Just doing this to scratch that apparent itch for ya. 😉
That’s what I’m saying though. Make cheaper movies with more risks (new creatures, vehicles, etc.), see what sticks, and sell the crap out of it. The way they’re doing it is definitely the wrong way.
I wonder if the choice of platform for The Mandalorian doesn’t shield it from a lot of criticism it would have gotten somewhere else – I haven’t got Disney Plus because I don’t particularly care for anything Disney makes, I mean.
Aw, man, HBC, can’t we just agree on this one thing?!
Seriously though, keep watching, it’s good!
@HeelBearCub
For what its worth, my take on the episodes:
Episode 1: Ok
Episode 2: Slightly better
Episode 3: Really good. In contention for best so far.
Episode 4: Also really good
Episode 5: Ok
Episode 6: First watch – bad. Lots of other people loved this episode. I rewatched it and decided it was actually ok.
Episode 7: Really good, the other episode in contention for best along with ep. 3 (although I probably lean 3)
You risk eating up your core audience for the big films which is the real fear.
My point is that I don’t think you do eat up your core audience that way. You eat up your core audience doing what they’re doing now.
Oh, and the other thing Mandalorian has going for it: I’m excited to see future episodes because I actually care about what happens to Baby Yoda and Mando. I do not care at all what happens to Rey, Finn, or Kylo.
I’m sure people will be talking about Rise of Skywalker, though, so I’ll see it, but I’ll probably do what I did for TLJ: pirate a screener.
Star Wars started bungling the villains with TPM, the goofy and completely ineffective droid army, prior to that the empire was a menacing specter with a massive army/space navy/space air force. Vader is introduced walking through a slaughter of rebels as symbolically the head of the storm troopers. From there you have a Luke/Vader dynamic and a rebellion/empire dynamic, but you don’t have Luke running around killing Storm Troopers (excepting those who die in tie fighters or on the death star). Killing masses of droids/clones/storm troopers has had no storytelling weight since then.
@Conrad Honcho
I’m in the same general boat as HBC. I watched the 1st episode and enjoyed the opening action scene and the overall tone and pacing, but the climactic action scene at the end of the episode completely turned me off with its lack of tension or believability. As someone who’s only moderately into Star Wars, this was enough to make me drop the show.
I decided to check out the 2nd episode recently after hearing so much praise of the show for so many weeks, and I’d say it was about the same. Opening action scene was half decent, the one at the end was atrocious. The tone and pacing were really good. But the whole rebuilding-functional-spaceship-within-days-from-dismantled-parts just broke my suspense of disbelief. I can believe that a highly skilled bounty hunter and a highly skilled hermit could make some very significant repairs to a spaceship, but this was Lego Star Wars-level rebuilding.
I’ll probably check out a 3rd episode after another few weeks of hearing praise about the show.
That wasn’t their intention though, and there is no reason to think that 3 good Star Wars movies would have eaten their audience. These movies largely (imo) fail by trying to do to much. Trying to appease fans, while building a whole new fan base and also injecting some politics into the mix for good fun is what has made this mess, adding onto that isn’t going to solve the core issues and will likely exacerbate them.
“each film introduces just one new droid, IIRC”
But keep in mind that the first sequel’s one new droid was BB-8, IMHO one of the most toyetic characters in Star Wars history. Thanks to my preschooler (who hasn’t seen any Star Wars yet but loves the graphic novelizations) and my wife (who doesn’t like Star Wars but loves our little girl), I think our house now has 3 remote-controlled and one Halloween-costume BB-8, plus uncounted BB-8s in plush, Lego, clothing, etc. forms.
Sure, I completely agree with you. They don’t mess this up 100% of the time, and BB-8 was the best of their rare hits.
@albatross11, and anyone else who didn’t like TLJ, what did yall think of Rian Johnson’s Looper? I thought it very good, despite regularly fudging the time travel logic (who doesn’t fudge the time travel logic?)
I think Disney actually *was* intending to hire a talented sci-fi filmmaker when they brought Rian Johnson on. He only had the one sci-fi movie to his name, but Looper was a pretty big critical and commercial hit. And contrary to the Marvel movies, which bring talented directors on but weigh them down with too many constraints, Johnson clearly had *plenty* of freedom making TLJ. After the backlash, they replaced deviated-too-far Johnson with safe, formulaic JJ again.
And Rogue One went to the writer of the Bourne movies, which aren’t sci-fi, but given that Rogue One was supposed to be a departure from traditional Star Wars towards a grittier, more down to
EarthJedha type of action movie, that also makes sense.These may not have been the best choices, but I think I can follow the reasoning here.
Edit: Actually, Colin Trevorrow was originally intended to write Ep IX, along with Derek Connolly. Their most prominent credit is Jurassic World (yikes), but they also made Safety Not Guaranteed, which I hadn’t heard of but wiki tells me is a sci-fi romantic comedy that won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and was praised by Roger Ebert for its dialogue and character depth.
But then they replaced those two with Abrams and a writer whose most prominent credits include Batman v Superman and Justice League? Why???
@mdet:
I can buy the explanation that they thought they had the right director in Johnson, but I struggle with the statement that he had a good degree of freedom. It was fairly obvious and widely reported that Disney execs were pushing their political ideology into the films and also that they specifically wanted the old characters phased out in a hard way to make room for a new set of characters for a new generation of consumers who would then spend the next 30 years buying Star Wars products. That structure is more constrictive than it appears because it requires Johnson to have his initial pitch and his final vision be really in line with those mandates which can be creatively stifling (not that I am crying for Johnson, just that lots of freedom is a bit misleading for what appears to have happened).
IMO, The Mandalorian is OK, but not great. If you don’t like the first one or two episodes, I don’t see any point in continuing. It doesn’t really become better.
It leans heavy on fan service, so if you are not a significant fan already, I think that you will enjoy it far less.
No, they have the rights to everything in the EU, and have made a point of drawing the fanbase’s attention to elements from EU works showing up in the Post-Disney Canon Star Wars projects. The relevant bit announcing that EU is no longer canon is:
Click through the link above for the whole announcement, but the short version is: “Star Wars EU material published Before the Disney acquisition is non-canon, which we now call “Star Wars Legends” for branding purposes. Going forward, all Disney-produced material, including movies, games, books, comics, and other tie-ins ARE canon and will be a single internally consistent continuity. We reserve the right to utilize ideas from the old EU/Legends content, and IF we use those ideas in some form in the new, Post-Disney content, THEN it will be canon.”
That was in 2014. But did everyone +1-ing this really miss the deliciously ironic quote from Kathleen Kennedy regarding the lack of source material to draw inspiration from when coming up with Star Wars ideas?
@Aapje
How do you figure Mandalorian draws on fan service, much less heavily? There’s very little there from previous films. No previously seen characters have shown up. It’s almost entirely new stuff.
@Trofim
That’s sort of rage-inducing.
@acymetric
Perhaps these lower budget Star Wars movies could be straight to Disney+ releases? In fact, that might be where movies are going generally: Blockbusters in theaters, most other stuff straight to streaming.
I am interpreting the fact that Rian Johnson was able to blatantly scrap most of Abrams’ story threads from the previous movie and insert his own to mean that he had plenty of freedom. Mandating that the original trilogy characters die off for the new ones doesn’t sound particularly restrictive.
I’m googling for it but can’t find it, but I swear there exists an interview with Rian Johnson during production of TLJ where he’s asked whether or not JJ Abrams gave him an outline of his plan for the series and he says no, that he has total freedom to do whatever he wants.
There never was any plan. Abrams’ “method” of creation is the “Mystery Box,” the idea that the viewer is presented with a mystery they want to solve, but don’t really care what the mystery is. Just like Lost: set up a bunch of stuff and then see what happens. There’s no actual plan.
I think this is a horrible way to make movies, or any kind of fiction, but it seems to make dollars for Abrams, so here we are.
@Conrad Honcho
You might be thinking of the Daisy Ridley interview where she said Abrams had drafts for 8 and 9, but Johnson scrapped them:
With the obvious caveat that Ridley could be mistaken—it was widely reported, but I looked for commentary from Disney or Johnson and found nothing—this is very concerning.
It doesn’t of course suggest that Johnson had very great creative freedom. He might well have been constrained by executives in many ways. It just means none of those constraints was “make any goddamn sense.”
Found it!
Questions in bold:
It is incredibly annoying trying to search by date in google. I can’t figure out a way to do it except various degrees of “most recent.” I wanted to exclude all interviews after the release of TLJ because I knew this interview was before that.
Anyway, yes, there was nothing planned out. J.J. did not have any plan for the origin of the First Order, who Snoke was, who Rey’s parents were, what Luke was doing on that planet, any of it. He created the Mystery Box, handed it to Johnson, and said basically whatever you say is in here, who cares?
And Rian largely responded by…throwing it all away. You can call that first scene symbolic. Rey passes the lightsaber to Luke, J.J. passes the baton to Rian…and Luke and Rian both chuck it over their shoulders.
You can’t do it from advanced search and you can’t do it from the mobile page, but it is possible. In the desktop version of google, “search tools” switches from being recency to being full date control. You can get the desktop page from a phone by issuing the “request desktop site” command.
@Conrad Honcho
Same here. And it’s quite telling that a dude whose face we never see and a freaking muppet come across as characters way more interesting and likeable than the bland diverse power trio written by a committe of marketing execs.
@baconbits9
The droids were lame, intentionally for comedic effect, but I always thought Darth Maul was awesome.
@mdet
I haven’t watched Looper or anything else from Rian Johnson prior to TLJ. Thought he was a hack, but then someone recommended me Knives Out and I actually enjoyed it. Clearly a completely different genre, but he can write and direct good movies.
I don’t know what happened with TLJ, maybe he was pressured to cram into it as much woke politics as possible. This would explain hobo Luke, Rose Thicco neutering Finn and dragging him along on her side quest to fight capitalism and free cute horses, and Vice Admiral Gender Studies defeating the toxic masculinity of the Poe and smashing the
whiteSupremacy (yes, the First Order ship is literally called the Supremacy). Still doesn’t explain fucking up Hux, Snoke or Rey’s origins, though.And I can quite buy that JJ had left him with an empty mistery box and he had to make stuff up in order to fill it, but he should have been able to come up with something that vaguely made sense instead of throwing the mistery box over his shoulder and making a movie basically disconnected to the previous one.
If you liked Knives Out, I’d recommend Looper. I think Brick & The Brothers Bloom were alright, but a little too “quirky”.
While none of his previous movies had any ideological leanings, Knives Out is at least as culture-warry as TLJ, so I think Rian Johnson did that much on his own.
I don’t think Luke’s characterization was “woke” at all. I saw it as being in line with “Old Ben” in the original and Yoda in Empire — the esteemed Jedi master retires and becomes a crazy old recluse, who initially trolls the young hero with silliness before reluctantly agreeing to teach them. Or compare to Creed — Rocky is initially too old and jaded and cynical to train Adonis Creed. But Adonis’ persistence and talent eventually lead Rocky to reluctantly take on an apprentice.
The lightsaber toss and “laser sword” line were too flippant, but Luke’s portrayal otherwise was standard “cynical mentor comes out of retirement” arc. Combine that with some commentary on how the Jedi Order’s excessive stoicism is what led Anakin to become emotionally stunted and put him on the path to the dark side; Luke himself creating Kylo when he momentarily lapses into fear; Luke concluding that the Jedi have done more to create Sith than to destroy them, until he eventually forgives himself and is able to embrace his role as a symbol of hope, and I thought Luke’s characterization was one of the parts of TLJ that was actually really good.
I thought Darth Maul’s makeup was awesome, but he didn’t seem to have any personality.
@Conrad Honcho
I think that a lot of entertainment value of The Mandalorian comes from familiarity with/interest in the universe. Like seeing baby Yoda learn his powers, seeing the mandalorian get his beskar armor, etc.
I really don’t understand this perspective, he murdered his own father way to early in the series to make him actually interesting. His only two reasonable paths here are driving himself mad with guilt or just going full evil. The angsty/confused act after that just can’t be a real character, if that wasn’t a character defining moment then you can’t have a character defining moment*.
Agreed, although that argument also works pretty well for Vader being irredeemable which was one of the main premises of RotJ.
The presentation matters here, Ren murders his father who is a sympathetic character, on screen and in cold blood. Vader is presented as ruthless, and having been seduced by the power of the dark side, but in the first trilogy he doesn’t do anything nearly so dramatic and he only kills side characters (and not many of them). To be equivilent he would have to murder Leia on screen in the first movie, then have it revealed that he knew she was his daughter, then have him redeemed, but also have him act really indecisive in movie #2. As it is the Vader redemption arc is Luke’s triumph, and the light side’s triumph, and there is a compelling reason for Luke to want Vader’s redemption, which also doesn’t exist for Kylo/Rey.
I fully agree with your last sentence, and I think that’s where the key difference lies.
Kind of disagree with the first part, Anakin murdering children (who knew him by name and who he implicitly had helped train and had a relationship with) which was shown on screen (in hologram form) probably counts.
This is shown 20 years after the fact though, the redemption arc in the original trilogy is completed and locked into people’s minds well before that point. In the original trilogy Vader supposedly betrayed and murdered Luke’s father which is reversed a movie later.
Here is how I would re-write (almost) the same sequence of events (with gaps between points obviously).
1. Kylo is all emo and conflicted
2. Rey beats Kylo in light-saber fight#1
3. Kylo beats Rey in fight #2
4. Kylo spares Rey and says ‘join me in doing something different’
5. Rey rejects the offer
6. Kylo smashes helmet
7. Kylo kills han
8. Kylo rebuilds helmet
This all gives you the room to make Kylo a really good villain. Have some early Han/Kylo stuff without tension and conflict without resolution, have Han express really strong negative feelings toward Kylo, and develop a strong bond with Rey over a few movies. Then have Han hear about/witness Kylo sparing Rey, then go to Klyo to try to win him back and have Kylo murder him in cold blood (or replace Leia for Han, or mix them both in).
Long arc with multiple possible outcomes, solid motivations for every character, every character having a real impact on the story, a dramatic twist when Kylo murders one of his parents with real stakes and finally a reason for Rey to really hate Kylo which presents opportunities for the final resolution.
Is it too late to submit that idea and reboot the whole sequel trilogy? I would love to watch those movies.
How I rewrite the whole series.
Kylo is a general and Jedi under Leia in the new republic, but being influenced/controlled by Snoke. He leads a coup that splits the armed forces, and Han + Leia have a massive falling out with Han insisting that she has to use military force against their son, and her insisting that he is good at heart and will come around. Han is more or less exiled from Leia’s side which is weakened by her lack of decisiveness and is now on the run from Kylo and the newly formed First Order. Lots of planets are sitting it out just waiting to join the winning side.
Han is an outcast, hated by his son for siding against him and kicked out of the side he believes in, when he meets up with Rey on some distant planet and the fact that she has never heard of him/the force anything is a huge relief. Here we rewrite Rey to be more like Han, shes a little devious and mischievous as you might expect from an orphan struggling to make it on her own.
Kylo goes through his army and finds force sensitive troops to train, Finn is one of those discovered, but he has repressed his force ability due to (insert tragic backstory). Finn at first takes to the training but refuses to kill at some point and goes on the run and meets up with Han and Rey (insert scene with Kylo teaching force sensitivity to Finn so that he can discover his own powers and then Finn uses that to discover Rey and is drawn to her).
Poe is a high ranking officer in the New Rebellion who was friendly/admiring toward Han but sides with his superior Leia. As Leia is shown to be wrong about Kylo he is torn between duty and disillusionment, which sets him at odds with the rest of the resistance.
Leia is at first portrayed as a doting grandmother type, a legend to everyone around her, but old and tired from decades of politics and with a huge blind spot for her son. She is forced into a corner and the young, feisty, bold Leia comes out and she engineers an escape that saves her leadership position and weakens Kylo. Probably put her into the Holdo position where she sacrifices herself to save the resistance, and the news of her death shakes Kylo, and is the instigating factor in Kylo killing Snoke and offering Rey the new path.
Luke is a crazy monk on an isolated planet who has forsworn violence and turned his life into trying to find the balance between the light and dark of the force. He trained Kylo for a while, but Kylo left him for a more romantic and adventurous life, and Luke’s naval gazing is why he completely missed Snoke’s emergence and manipulation.
Meeting Rey reinvigorates Han, but Rey is disgusted when she learns Han was a legend who saved the universe but now has checked out and is doing nothing to stop his son’s reign of terror. Rey reveals some part of her tragic backstory that explains why she reacts this way, and this shakes Han into action. He says the only person he knows who can help is obviously Luke, and the three (Finn is with them at this point) go to see Luke.
Luke is blown away by Rey’s hidden force power and is terrified of her, Han/Rey/Finn don’t understand and Luke is forced to tell them that the only time he has felt a power like that was within his father- who was also (insert parallels between Rey and Anakin from the prequels), however some exposition about how Vader’s internal conflict that he refused to recognize until the end of RoTJ prevented him from mastering the force which allowed the Emperor to rule over him.
Rey wants Luke to join them and train her, but Luke says ‘Obi Wan failed my father, and I failed Kylo’ but agrees to come to try to end the civil war. Finn meanwhile teaches Rey in secret what he knows about the force, allowing her to tap into it.
Before Luke confronts Kylo he tells Han in private that he is going to sacrifice himself which will be the first step to redeeming Kylo. Luke pulls a variation of the Obi-Wan disappearing/death trick, but Finn and Rey aren’t in on it and explode with anger and attack Kylo. Kylo defends himself well, but he recognizes Finn and doesn’t want to kill him, and is also surprised by Rey’s massive burst of power. This combination allows the two of them to best him and force him to withdraw.
Meanwhile Leia is fighting pitched battles against the First Order and winning fights but unable to overcome their sheer force of numbers. She devises a plan to use herself as bait with Holdo (her #2) ambushing the First Order and dealing a massive blow that will rally the planets sitting it out to their side, knowing that it will likely lead to her death. Poe rejects the idea, he says that Leia is the one thing holding the resistance together and it will fall apart under Holdo, and he runs to get Han to talk Leia out of the decision.
The gambit partially works, but fails to deliver a crippling blow because Poe’s squadron is left without its leader and is wiped out during the ambush. Poe is devastated and contemplates suicide, with Holdo snapping him out of it by demanding the he honor his men by continuing to fight and refusing to abandon the cause a 2nd time. Poe devotes himself to serving Holdo and the resistance after this.
Elsewhere Snoke mocks Kylo for losing to a girl and enrages him when he informs him of Leia’s death. Kylo kills Snoke, and goes out to search for Rey who fascinates him. Luke’s ghost returns to try to guide Kylo back to the light side, and Kylo meets Rey, fights and disarms her and then offers for them to forge a new path together. She rejects him and he smashes his helmet in anger, and threatens to kill her if she refuses again. She responds that his actions after being refused show his true character and she takes death over such a partnership. He is stunned again and leaves her alive.
Han was witness to this and searches out Kylo to try to talk him back, Kylo murders Han and repairs his helmet and puts the First Order into full repression of all rebellious activities mode. Rey summons Luke’s ghost and asks him again to train her, he replies that he has failed Kylo twice and reveals to Rey that Kylo murdered Han who has been a father figure to her for two full movies now. Rey’s shocked expression turns to a steely one and she says something about how she won’t let him fail her.
Ghost Luke trains Rey and Finn, and in the final showdown you have Rey+Finn vs Kylo plus the other hand picked troops that he was training. These other guys mock Finn for his unwillingness to kill and the fights turn into Kylo vs Rey and Finn vs the other guys (unknown number). Finn refuses to kill any of them, and only fights to protect Rey from their interference. Rey fights Kylo, and beats him, refusing to kill him. Finn fights for a while but is outnumbered, beaten, disarmed and held hostage. Kylo demands to be set free or he will order his men to kill Finn, Rey refuses and Kylo orders Finn’s death. Finn is murdered in front of her and Kylo mocks Rey for being truly alone now and to weak to save Finn. Rey responds that Kylo is the one truly alone having murdered his own mother, father and uncle and that he can only rule through fear. Then she reveals that she is not alone, placing her hand on her belly and stating that their son will live on. An anguished Kylo throws himself on his light-saber and is dead.
If we have learned anything from Spiderman its that it is never to early to reboot.
That sounded all good but I missed the part where Rey would have been impregnated…
Its a family movie so it happens off screen.
Alternate version: Luke impregnates Rey so you can still call the last movie ‘the rise of skywalker’
@Randy M
Maybe it was a virgin birth like Anakin?
Not Holdo. She has no business being in these movies, when we’ve got a perfectly good Admiral Ackbar waiting to fill that role. That massive blow from ambush is a suicide attack, and I’ll even give them lightspeed ramming for this, because Ackbar’s last words are,
well, you know.
“Hold my beer?”
Conrad –
If you haven’t already, you should try Expeditionary Force. I think you might enjoy it
Is that a game? I’ve never heard of it.
Science fiction… comedy? book series. Red tribe markers, but apolitical, insofar as anything can be anymore.
I will admit that thought hadn’t crossed my mind, and it would be a great call-back.
“Columbus Day” is book 1? That looks neat. I’ll check it out, thanks. Mad my library doesn’t have it, though…
While we’re rewriting Star Wars, you know what I really want? Not a strong female hero, but a strong female villain. There’s a whole archetype there never explored. Give me a sexy as hell sith witch. She’s beautiful, seductive, manipulative, powerful. All of the dark side of femininity.
In Battlefront II they had to create their own character, Iden Versio (Imperial special forces commando) just to have a female villain besides Phasma, who’s had all of 4 minutes of screen time across two movies. Give me a powerful female villain. That’s at least new and interesting.
I think you’re looking for the Blake’s 7 remake that has been repeatedly promised and never delivered.
I’m just saying, wouldn’t it be cool to have a Sith who turned the mind trick up to 11?
@John Schilling, Yes! We need more villains like Servalan!
Completely agree. The movie would have redeemed itself much if she had done it. Now that’s subverting expectations! “Screw this Light Side/Dark Side stuff, let’s go do our own thing!” Also might have made Rey in any way interesting, just to be shown doing something she maybe actually wanted to do for once, to give me some hint as to her motivations and desires.
I’ve already said this here before, but based on the trailer material I was thinking the two would go for a “screw the Jedi order and Sith ideology, let’s forge our own path,” which is a decent idea. And when I was watching TLJ it seemed at times like it was heading this way, but zigzagged about four times and then ended up at… nah, Rey’s just gonna be a standard Jedi and Kylo’s just gonna be all grr I’mma Sith, so fuck that, I guess.
This would have made an interesting story, but I think Rey would have had a hard time completely abandoning her friends. OTOH, they could have worked it out–this is certainly no more shocking than Anakin’s two-scene face-heel turn from brave Jedi with some dark impulses to child-murdering Sith lord.
Ideally, work it so that Luke shows back up to save the remnant of the Rebellion somehow, in light of Rey’s abandonment.
I think you’re selling Anakin’s fall a little short. In AoTC he murders all the sandpeople, which is extremely unJedilike*. It was “justified” sort of, but very evil. So the transition from “did evil murder to the guilty” to “did evil murder to the innocent” took quite awhile.
* how do you write that? Un-Jedi-like? Un-Jedilike? UnJedi-like? Or maybe just “not like a Jedi.”
Forging your own path doesn’t mean dark side, it just means not being beholden to the ideology that caused Anakin’s fall and the rise of a totalitarian opposition. One thing they could have done on Ahch-To was have Rey encounter (either in the books stored there or something else on the island) a light side path that doesn’t require foregoing all emotion and that other nonsense.
Foregoing the Jedi order to create a more “gray” Force path wouldn’t necessarily require her abandoning her friends. Maybe this new, balanced force paradigm is how she saves the resistance and her friends.
I don’t especially like that story, but it is kind of interesting and could make sense/be perfectly coherent.
Edit: Kinda ninja’d by Nick
Thing is, the EU tried to do that whole “queer the Light/Dark binary” thing several times, and every time they killed off the person who did it, and more often than not said person went full Dark.
So even the EU couldn’t really get away from resetting to old tropes.
@AG
🙁
Kylo Ren’s “Join Me” speech just made me think how much better Vader’s original was.
I don’t feel qualified to answer until I see both Ewoks movies.
1. Attack of the Clones
2. Revenge of the Sith
[point above which movies go from “not worth watching” to “worth watching”]
3. Empire Strikes back
4. The Force Awakens
5. The Last Jedi
6. A New Hope
7. Return of the Jedi
8. Phantom Menace
And I haven’t see the others. Actually I might have seen (part of?) Rogue one but I don’t remember anything.
I’m generally distraught at the lack of anyone having what seems to me the only reasonable opinion, which is that none of the original movies is very good (at least not IV and VI) and obviously Attack of the Clones is by far the best one. I don’t think I’ve ever found another person who thinks Attack of the Clones is the best one. Although sometimes people admit that it has a good plot if I press them, and then say that the script is bad.
Equally confusing is why people like A New Hope. Is it inaccurate to say that the plot is straight-forward deus-ex-machine cheesy win-against-all-odds with no surprises at all? (Especially the last third.) Is that just ok because it was one of the first movies to do that? Or is Darth Vader so cool that the bad plot can be excused? Or is the acting/setting just so convincing that the plot doesn’t matter?
I really can’t find many good things in A new Hope. Maybe Darth Vader and the general way the world is portrayed. But the plot is just so bad, and although I don’t care much about effects and such, I think there’s a point below which it becomes distracting. Everything that takes place in space in that movie is pretty hideous.
This is interesting to me. I think Attack of the Clones suffers because the name is terrible. It has some cool moments, yes. What do you like about it specifically?
Quite a few things, actually. I thought everything about Obi-Wan and the clone army was very strong. It’s unpredictable and it goes to unusual places (when do the good guys ever have the overwhelming army?) Having a completely original, unpredictable, and not-stupid storyline is a pretty high bar.
Definitely a big piece is that it’s also just fun to watch. It’s fun to see Obi-Wan travel to this remote planet, and it’s a really cool location. I bring this up because, unlike with episodes IV and VI, my biggest problem with V was just that the stuff on screen wasn’t really pleasant to follow. Hence my not questioning how people can like V.
This next part probably sounds contrarian, but I honestly also found the dialogue pretty good. After watching II and III a couple years ago, my feeling was basically that I could take II seriously, and then III went way over board and I couldn’t take it seriously anymore. There’s stuff like Obi Wan just jumping in the middle of an army and then the guy whom he wants to kill conveniently challenges him to a duel. Also lots of unnecessary cool-sounding lines. II felt far more mature.
Anakin is less interesting across the board but unlike everyone else, I also don’t find his scenes particularly bad.
The one thing that I thought was completely awful was C-3PO being the comic relief. if he was taken out completely, that might boost the movie from being legit good to legit great.
Edit: Oh, and another big piece – The Jedi council. In episode I, they’re around but useless. In ep III, they’re main thing is that they all die. From episode IV onward, there’s always just one or two jedi that are somehow supposed to be able to save the world. Episode II is the only one where you have a setup that makes sense and the coincil actually does something useful. So good!
If you don’t mind my asking, what age were you when you first encountered Star Wars, and which movie was that?
It was the Phantom Menace. A then-friend told me he thought I’d like it a lot (and I did, I remember a time when they were my absolute favorite movies). I don’t know how old I was, maybe 14. So I definitely grew up with the prequels. But I don’t tend to have a lot of respect for my younger self’s opinions.
I rewatched episode I – VI in order some years ago and unless I remember this wrong, I was quite surprised that I ended up liking AOTC.
ANH is a straightforward adventure movie that is very well
editeddone, with good character development and incredible visuals (I don’t mean the special effects, which were great at the time, I mean the approach and the framing of shots and costumes etc). The fact that it is straightforward also adds to the intensity of the twist in ESB, you are almost two full movies in and they pull of a major plot twist that wasn’t seen coming at all and only contradicts basically a single line that came before it (which also has a reasonable explanation), and then they managed to pay off that twist at the end of RoTJ (excepting the Ewoks).ANH is a good story with some neat imagination aspects that is pulled off nearly flawlessly for what it was. It was made to be a complete standalone movie with also having two hopeful sequels set up at the same time which is harder than you might think.
Does the fact that you point this out mean you give the movie at least a few extra points for having been made a long ago? (Not implying that you wouldn’t like it anyway). For me that doesn’t enter the calculation at all.
Yeah, you won’t hear me say that ESB has a boring plot. I do consider it by far the best one of the originals.
Yes, it deserves some consideration in my view, doing something revolutionary that also has staying power is an impressive combination. Avatar deserves some credit as a movie for its effects despite the fact that it is a terrible script, with bad acting. That its special effects are no longer impressive on their own but the film deserves some respect more than other terribly written, and poorly acted current sci fi movies which have similar quality for introducing that level of craft. Certainly for a movie with a solid script and performances to have that impact as well it should be elevated at least a little.
One thing you identify that causes my difference of opinion with you, do you think plot is the most important part of a movie? In my experience, plot is perhaps the least important part. If a movies is well written, acted, and directed, Id probably watch it no matter the plot. A good example is probably every Monty Python and National Lampoon movie.
I definitely don’t have an explicit rule for what I value. I first observe whether I like it and then often think about why.
Nowadays, my most common reason for disliking something is “the characters are being obviously stupid”. And the second most common is probably “this plot is predictable”. If the plot is predictable, then I can’t get immersed because it doesn’t feel real.
So I guess kinda? In case of Star Wars, I don’t remember being particularly annoyed at characters doing stupid things, so it might be accurate to say that plot ended up being the most important element. And I would consider plot to be a part of how well a movie is written.
It depends on the movie. The plot is probably not the most important part of a Beavis and Butthead movie. But for a more serious movie, if the plot doesn’t make sense, the whole movie doesn’t “work.”
If anything, it’s “deus sans machine” (classics professors are now double facepalming), and yes, it’s inaccurate. It’s not deus ex machina because there is no element introduced last minute to save our heroes. We’ve had the existence of the Force beaten into us, we know about the weakness in the Death Star through the plans which have been in play for the whole movie, and the existence of the Millennium Falcon is well established. It may not have been precisely surprising for the Falcon to come back, but it wasn’t a forgone conclusion either. It was “win against all odds”, but that’s it.
Luke’s piloting skill could have been better and earlier established; “best bush pilot in the outer rim territories” is maybe a bit of Deus ex Darklighter. And I believe there was a deleted scene on Tattoine to that effect. But generally this; there’s a very straightforward path to destroying the Death Star using plot elements established in advance for that purpose.
I think I meant “deux-ex-machina” in the sense that the mission miraculously goes well, which seems fairly implausible. But yeah, that’s not quite what deus-ex-machina means, since there isn’t any new solution introduced. Fair enough.
IV V VII Rogue I Solo III II VII VIII(?) IX(?)
A New Hope is simply good in all the ways that matter, with a superb cast patching over Lucas’s weakness for dialogue, and the foundation on which all else stands.
Empire Strikes Back is vastly overrrated in fandom, but it’s still a very good movie and better than the middle movie of a trilogy has any right to be. For those who weren’t spoiled, the reveal over Luke’s paternity was superbly done, and two ad-libbed words by Harrison Ford push this one into the #2 spot.
Return of the Jedi is a solid end to a solid trilogy, fully sells the Han/Leia romance set up in IV, and introduces Ian McDiarmid’s Emperor Palpatine.
Rogue One took a while to get started, but a solid story and with Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Freaking Vader to remind us what a proper Star Wars villain looks like.
Phantom Menace merely requires that you excise every single scene involving Anakin Skywalker. Do that, and you have a short but solid movie with Qui-Gon Jinn showing us what being a Jedi ought to mean and with Emperor Palpatine’s all-paths-lead-to-victory plotting leading to a victory that even his adversaries celebrate with him.
Solo is a second-rate Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff cluttered with inside jokes only the worst sort of fanboy will enjoy, and without a proper villain for most of the story. But they get Lando and Chewbacca right, and there’s fun to be had here.
Attack of the Clones is I believe the movie for which my review was “This could be a great film if only someone were to rewrite every single line of dialogue”. Looks pretty. Revenge of the Sith was a very very slight improvement. Both movies were atrociously bad as written, and both have Hadyen Christensen seducing Natalie Portman in a manner that can only be explained by the Weinsteinesque use of the Jedi Mind Trick.
The Force Awakens gives us a final glimpse of Han and Chewie in action, and Harrison Ford still had it. Otherwise, it was a second-rate retread of ANH with a third-rate villain and with every other character just reflecting in the awesomeness of the awesomely omnicompetent Luke-alike, and no reason for me to care.
Last Jedi, did not see because TFA and Solo, but the balance of the reviews (weighted by whether or not the reviewer was mind-tricked into praising TFA) and discussion here suggests probably worse than TFA.
Rise of Skywalker, see above, but now even some of the reviewers who liked TFA are willing to call it out as a mediocrity.
You put VII twice; was the first meant to be VI? Also, Rogue I has hilarious potential to be misread.
Yes, first one was VI. And I’d like to claim the “Rogue I” pun was deliberate, but honesty forbids.
IV, V, VI, Rogue, I, Solo, III, II, VII, VIII(?), IX(?)
Hmm, if I retroactively downgrade TPM a notch, can I slip a “Rogue Solo” pun in there?
Depends, would you sink Solo as to do that?
@Statismagician, let’s not do that when it’s already so low!
I say, in descending order of preference:
V,
III,
IV,
VI,
Rogue One,
[line dividing things I’d cheerfully re-watch from those which at least have fun scenes]
Solo,
II,
I,
[vast unbridgeable chasm of awfulness],
VII,
VIII (?),
IX (?).
[second, deeper chasm, this one filled with monsters]
Holiday Special
I didn’t see The Last Jedi and don’t intend to see the new one, so their ratings are provisional. The Holiday Special is a unique kind of bad which defies normal categorization, and is a serious contender for Literally The Worst Movie.
For those wondering whether or not to see Rise of Skywalker, the BabylonBee gives a ringing endorsement: We’ll say this in no uncertain terms: Rise of Skywalker is better than Cats.
But was it better than The Amazing Alexander?
Ha! Great reference. And from a non-fanboy perspective, rather analogous.
Even better is that when I clicked your link, the video started with an–unbeknownst to me–completely unrelated video ad for some courtroom drama. I was looking for the joke and just figured you were taking the opportunity to advertise a recent film you saw.
Excuse you, Babylon Bee, how did you put up this review for the new James Cameron Avatar film before it was even made? Suspicious….
If you loved The Last Jedi for it’s bold and progressive take on deconstructing a hoary old franchise and making it new, exciting, and relevant again…don’t go see Rise Of Skywalker, you’ll be disappointed.
If you disliked The Last Jedi for seeming to be more interested in being up its own ass with how cleverly it could deconstruct Star Wars than actually tell a good and interesting Star Wars story….don’t go see Rise of Skywalker, you’ll be disappointed.
I have not seen Rogue 1 or Solo, so they are not included.
08. Attack of the Clones
07. Revenge of the Sith
These two are at the bottom simply for having the absolute worst, cringe inducing dialogue of the series, combined with Hayden Christensen’s horrendous acting. The romance scenes were Incredibly unbelievably and vomit inducing.
06. The Last Jedi
05. Force Awakens
These are in the category of turn off you brain and enjoy. I can watch them and have a good time.i don’t watch many action movies anymore, but these two are at least better than the average action movie, even if worse than the average Star Wars.
04. The Return of the Jedi
03. Empire Strikes back
These are actually good movies, especially ESB, but I don’t enjoy watching them as much as the top 2. I generally prefer upbeat movies, and these are more negative.
02. Phantom Menace
I’m sure the first question you will ask is how old was I when I first saw it. I was 9 when it was in theaters. To a 9 year old, young Anakin was an amazing hero. Jar jar binks was funny, pod racing was cool, and Darth Mail was terrifying. For the longest time this was my favorite movie, but I admit it has it’s flaws. Also, even at 9 I was nerdy enough to be really interested in a trade dispute plot line, which says more about me than the movie.
01. New Hope
Everyone else has said plenty of good things about New Hope, but I will add how great of a self contained story it was. It has a complete rescue the princess arc, in just one reasonably length movie.
“Speedy delivery!”
double-bladed lightsaber kill
1. Empire Strikes Back
2. A New Hope
3. Rogue One
significant gap
4. Return of the Jedi
Jedi contains my absolute favourite moments from the series – the Rancor keeper, the confrontation with Palpatine. Unfortunately, it also contains Ewoks. It was the first one I saw, and as a child it was my favourite. Now… well, let’s just say I’m an enthusiastic believer in the Endor Holocaust.
5. Solo.
I really enjoyed Solo, and if only they’d cast an actor who could do the role justice as Qi’ra – a character who could have been really interesting in other hands – it might have been properly good.
big gap
6. The Force Awakens
A bit too fast and explodey, and largely nonsensical, but basically competent on a micro level and broadly enjoyable. The best of the current trend for rehashboots (not a very high bar). I hate Adam Driver’s face and voice.
7. Attack of the Clones
A weird mix of things I actually like (McDiarmid and Lee) and so-bad-it’s-goodery. The first time I saw it I thought Hayden Christensen was the worst actor I’d ever seen. Then I watched it again, and concluded the only way to deliver those lines and have them not sound terrible was to shay them like Shir Sean, because Connery can make literally anything cool.
8. Revenge of the Sith
A so-bad-it’s good classic. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
9. The Last Jedi
Incomprehensible tripe, and quite annoying with it.
10. The Phantom Menace
It’s like someone said “You know what’s great about Jedi? The Ewoks. Let’s do more of that.
Is there a strategic logic to the placement of U.S. military bases within the U.S.?
For obvious reasons, I know that naval bases must be on the coasts, ICBM sites should be as far from the coasts as possible, and the high-level planning and management stuff should be centralized near the seat of political power, and near a big city where there are many smart people (D.C.). But why doesn’t, say, the Army consolidate the functions of ten of its bases spread out across the country into one, large megabase? It would probably be cheaper and more efficient.
Have the bases been spread out to provide staging areas for defending against a land invasion of the U.S. that is projected to reach some parts of the country first, and then spread to others?
Are there many, spread-out bases to minimize the risks of a decapitating nuclear first strike against the U.S. military?
Are the bases purposefully spread out so as to give the central government the means to quickly attack local insurrections? (I’d believe this was the case in the South after the Civil War)
If the answer is “Yes” to any of those questions, then is there a U.S. policy document that sets that as the rationale? Like a declassified Pentagon analysis that makes the case for building new bases in specific locations, or not shutting down old bases even though they were otherwise not worth keeping open?
Military bases have historically been driven more by Congressional district appropriations than by military necessity, but there has been some attempt to systematize and de-politicize the process. For an introduction, see here and here.
It’s possible there are doctrines that dictate these things, but several reasons are historical in nature.
First: We needed to deploy people both East and West during world war 2 and many bases that grew in size during that time are just still around today.
Second: Several Marine bases are former Navy bases, from when the Navy was much larger/needed more ground support. Instead of decommissioning the bases (because they were located in advantageous locations) they turned them over to other locations.
Third: Several bases are located remotely because the training performed there is loud/dangerous.
Fourth: Bases located across the country allows us to perform training that spans the country, allowing for war games on a continental scale, instead of just a localized operation.
Fifth: Many bases house the National Guard, which by it’s nature needs to be distributed across the country, since it is responsible to the governor of the state, not the federal government.
Sixth: The amount of infrastructure to support a military base strikes me as growing exponentially with the size of it. This alone makes the inefficiency of distribution countered by the inefficiency of aggregation. The ideal size of a base would depend on the functions intended by the base in question.
First, as has already been pointed out, Congressional interference in these matters is a major driver of basing. But I’m going to ignore that because it’s not really what you’re asking.
Second, I think you overestimate their ability to consolidate. Most military operations take a lot of space, either on the ground or in the air. That megabase which replaces 10 existing Army bases is going to need to be awfully big. (Also, which bases do you propose to replace?) Likewise, the Air Force can only put so many aircraft at each given base because they need to operate them in a tactical manner instead of like Heathrow does, and your range facilities are going to get eaten up quickly.
Third, there is a strategic advantage to dispersion. Not just in the case of enemy attack, although that is a concern, but also because of things like weather. Tyndall AFB got absolutely trashed last year by Hurricane Michael. That’s annoying, but it’s not the end of the world because we still have several bases in Florida, to say nothing of elsewhere. Now, what happens when instead of 4% of the USAF combat aircraft inventory being based there, we have 25%? Even if we fly the planes off, we still have a bunch of facilities we have to rebuild.
Fourth, I suspect that the economies of scale eventually peter out. Even if there’s enough room at the megabase for all the training you need, you’re still looking at longer trips to the relevant areas, more competition for the best facilities, and worse commutes for those who live off base, both military and civilian. For that matter, you’re going to have a hard time finding that much land with a population center capable of supporting it nearby. Contractors need somewhere to live, from the expert in maintaining your helicopters to the guy who works at the dining hall.
Yes. If NASA MSFC was moved to a ‘mega-base’ in the middle of nowhere, where the commute was 2 hours or whatever, it’s extremely unlikely that I would go with it. I prefer the 20-25 minute commute I have now.
The base I work at is Redstone Arsenal at which the Army performs a lot of work, but so does NASA, MDA, and increasingly the FBI. A lot of civilian contractors as well.
The joke is that it can never be closed because of all the explosives and toxic chemicals buried out here. My building shakes pretty regularly due to explosions, sometimes because of missile range testing and sometimes because the Army is destroying some buried bombs.
Have you ever been on an Army base? They are already huge, and service hundreds of thousands of personnel. Your proposal would basically transform military bases from “medium towns” into “city.” Just a quick eyeball at troop levels and population sizes, moving 10 bases worth of active duty personnel, their families and the civilian employees/contractors would give you about 1 million people. For reference, that’s a city about the size of San Jose or Dallas.
Here are some issues with your plan:
1. Military bases below a certain size can “draft” of the services provided by the local municipality. They get water, some power and everything else without having to build their own services. Your average base might have their own fire fighting service, but that’s about it. Now think about housing – bases near normal cities have access to housing, this one won’t.
2. Bases are pretty specialized, and it’s unclear how getting rid of that specialization would improve anything. Like, take Pensacola – it’s a base dedicated towards training naval pilots. Everything on base is focused around that mission and they can direct all of their resources towards training pilots. Everyone at the base, from the nonrates mowing grass to the CO knows that their primary mission is training pilots. That produces a measurable benefit that would get lost if the base was forced to consolidate and specialize.
3. Crime at that mega base would be insane. That would be one of the most terrifying places to live on earth. We’re talking judge dread levels of shenanigans. Any military base is going to create a surfeit of 18-25 year old males, but going from thousands of them to millions of them would be downright dystopian.
It wasn’t always the case that it would have been possible to consolidate bases, and so they were spread all over to protect all over. Today, I suspect the main reason that there isn’t more consolidation is that it’s very hard politically to shut down a base. Many towns and cities have military bases as a major source of employment, and convincing people that they should shut it down to save a couple percent will be a non-starter in most cases.
No idea about policy, probably mostly congressional corruption, but in addition to all the other stuff people have said, it’s useful to have different terrains and climates to train in. And as others have said, the congestion would be unimaginable.
Thanks for the great responses.
Question about diets:
I’ve always found the “calories in, calories out” explanation of the metabolism to be appealing (mostly because I like simplicity), but most people explain it as “it’s just thermodynamics, bruh” or something to that effect. I feel like that includes some hidden assumptions I’m not sure they realize they’re making.
The thinking goes:
(calories digested) – (calories exerted) = (calories surplus/deficit),
the assumption in question being that the first value comes from your food’s Nutrition Facts label – but this is the part I’ve never heard specifically addressed. Is the human body is known to always get the same caloric value from a given food? Or can it let calories “pass by” if it thinks it has plenty already?
Opponents of CICO also talk about “metabolic rate”, but I’ve never understood exactly what they mean – is this what they are referring to? Or is that more related to the second variable (i.e., accounting for calories expended)?
CICO is 100% correct at the level of physics but nearly incalculable at the level of biology.
Practically nobody gains from digestion exactly the same amount of calories from a diet as another person on the same diet. And practically nobody uses up exactly the same amount of calories for a given metabolic exertion. So the formula, while logically impeccable, ends up being virtually impossible to calculate with precision.
It doesn’t make it completely useless. You can guesstimate and with a large enough fudge factor, it works well enough for most people. But it’s primarily “not normal” edge cases who are usually confounded enough to get into the weeds of CICO. And thus they conclude it’s bunk, because the back-of-package numbers and numbers from the treadmill / internet don’t match up. Also, the body is a dynamic system and feedback occurs constantly, affecting metabolic pathways and rates.
Bear in mind also that most people don’t really know how “gaining weight” and “losing weight” works physically. People aren’t nuclear reactors. Conservation of mass applies, but the body is in no way a closed system. Water weight is the first to go and the easiest to cut, but if you’re going to remain alive, it will bounce back. Actually changing fat to muscle may result in zero weight loss (or even weight gain). If actual body mass is lost, my understanding is that it is primarily breathed out – exchanging CO2 for O2 (and thus losing the mass of a partial mol of carbon per breath). Some is also excreted in sweat, urine, or feces, but those tend to balance out in the long run. That process of producing excess organic molecules for excretion is also subject to feedback loops, as noted.
None of this means CICO is wrong. It’s trivially true for everyone, and practically-speaking true for most people. But the calculation problems make it imprecise as a practical guide for hard cases.
Also, losing or maintaining weight is trivial if your hunger signals align with metabolic expenditure, and very difficult if they do not.
Most people go through most of their life paying no heed to weight or caloric content of food eaten, but simply eating when hungry. I don’t think it’s safe to say that this is true for everybody. I think there’s enough incentives to lose extra weight to chalk it up to everyone being a slave to pleasure.
Which doesn’t mean it is beyond control, as the signals may be trainable or related to the macro- or micro- nutrient profile of the diet, or other environmental cues–seasonal, even, perhaps.
Just that approaching the topic with a mathematical mindset may not work as easily as it does for, say, budgeting (or I have a blindspot for the latter and it’s more analogous than I realize…).
The biggest benefit of CICO that I’ve observed or read about is simply that paying attention to CICO requires tracking, and tracking provides the primary mechanism in helping lose weight because it makes you more aware of and deliberate about what you’re ingesting. Paying attention makes a difference. Tracking also provides a baseline – you can approximate whether you’re eating more or less than before, even if you don’t know the exact calories before or after.
Sure, and that’s the premise behind weight watchers. But I don’t track at all. I barely keep track of the number of meals I eat, let alone the calories, and my weight is pretty consistent give or take ten pounds for twenty years.
Indeed. Any plausible energy balance equation you come up with is going to be quite inaccurate; acting as though CICO is strictly true will at least help you reform your food and exercise habits along more healthy lines as much as anything else will if that’s your problem. As with any other intervention, regular reference to your well-being and progress towards goals is vital.
I figured this, but the thing I’m most curious about is whether the calories you yourself get from a given food is even constant. Can your body, in times of plenty, process a “500 calorie” doughnut and only get 250 calories since it doesn’t need the rest, but during a period of calorie restriction extract all 500 if it chooses? This would explain a lot of people’s dieting experiences, but I have no idea if the human digestive system can possibly work this way.
Edit: Also, how does the mysterious “metabolic rate” play into this stuff? Do some people really have a “fast metabolism” that lets them eat whatever they want and stay thin, or is this (as I suspect) a myth? If it’s true, what exactly is the mechanism?
Gut biome will have an influence on how many calories you get out of some foods, and this can change based on diet, health, medicines, etc., though how exactly is beyond me and I think much of science.
But if you’re talking eating pure sugar, I think your body will take as much of that as it can every time. Pretty simple to break down and turn into fat.
One thing I’ve heard that sounds plausible is that thin people fidget more, and this could possibly be triggered by a calorie excess. Presumably so could shivering or heart-rate. But this is speculation.
I’m not a medical researcher and couldn’t give you the pathways, but I do think it’s true that the body changes its food processing based on environmental conditions. I don’t know that it’s in the direction you’re suggesting though; the body wants to store fat in good times and is hesitant to break it down in bad times. I’m not sure if your body sucks more calories out during bad times, or if it simply slows down your metabolism so that the same number of calories go further. Someone else mentioned diabetes and glucose levels, so obviously at the margin even the gross calorie extraction changes. But clearly net calorie extraction changes.
Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is the amount of calories your body uses to perform its normal everyday functions of living, usually calculated excluding strenuous exercise. It takes a certain number of calories for your heart to beat, your blood to circulate, your brain to think, your diaphragm to contract, your liver to process toxins, your stomach to churn food. BMR roughly scales with body mass, but you can also look at it as “naturally thin” people having less efficient body processes, thus requiring more calories to do the same work. It’s also just hard to compare apples to apples; for example, I’ve read that “jittery” people who tap their foot and whatnot will burn a significant percentage more calories just sitting than people who sit more quietly, even if both report “sitting” on their exercise chart.
Edit: Ninja’d on the fidgeting.
I can say that it is true in at least some cases. I live a moderately sedentary lifestyle, yet I usually eat somewhere around 3,500–4,000 calories per day, while generally hovering around ten pounds above “underweight” on the BMI scale. What the mechanism is, I don’t know.
Also, believe it or not, this isn’t exactly a treat. My food budget is relatively high as a result, and I spend far more time cooking and eating than I would like.
This has been studied extensively by Leibel et al. The seminal paper is here (it’s on Sci-Hub and I recommend a read). Key takeaways:
– People at their stable, normal, effortlessly maintained weight have similar basal energy expenditure (the energy required to just keep living) per unit of fat-free mass (muscle, bones, organs, etc).
– Deliberately overfeeding people will cause weight gain, but will also cause a host of metabolic adaptations that resist putting on weight. Their basal metabolism will go up, they will fidget more, they will be disinterested in food, have less appetite at meals, etc. The moment you stop force-feeding them, they will rapidly go back to their normal weight.
– Deliberately underfeeding people (calorie restriction) will cause weight loss, but will also cause analogous metabolic changes that resist weight loss. Basal metabolism goes down – BELOW what a naturally lean person of the same fat-free mass would need to eat to maintain the weight – appetite and interest in food goes up. Look up “semi-starvation neurosis” if interested.
– The amount of body fatness the body wants to maintain is highly variable between people.
Do you think this is most of the reason for obesity (basically genetics) or is there something to changing one’s set point through diet composition, exercise, fasting, whatever?
@Randy M:
The last time I looked at the data, it showed that the average American had increased caloric intake by about 500 calories since 1930.
There are also similar changes in the amount of physical labor being performed. We have much more automation nowadays.
We’ve increased our ability to survive the health effects of being overweight.
BMIs have gone up quite a bit.
How much genetic change do you think there has been in the last 100 years?
Frankly, quite a bit just looking at demographics. It’s quite plausible to me that different racial groups work better of different diets.
But I do not think those facts necessarily contradict a genetic set-point; for instance, we may eat more because we can afford it and it tastes good, but have a higher basal metabolic rate.
Personally I think diet composition–we eat too much sugar, basically–has a lot to do with it, though I was curious about Harmless Frog’s take specifically.
I think I am just amplifying the point Matt is making, but these two points should cause everyone to think really long and really hard about naive CICO that ignores the idea of setpoints and metabolic self-regulation.
Yes BMI has increased, but naive CICO would posit a steady state of weight gain for the entirety of time we have more caloric intake and less activity than people 90 years ago.
This assumes that larger people burn the same number of calories than smaller people do. Physically this is false, it takes more energy to move 200 lbs than to move 100 lbs, and while this might not actually fit the differences it is plausible that CICO is true with these facts as presented.
@Randy M
It’s basically the same thing as intelligence. If you keep environment constant, it’ll be mostly genetic. If you keep genetics constant, it’ll be mostly environmental. Guyenet says that about 75% of the effect is explainable by genetic differences in the modern environment, and I believe him. (Not just because he cites literature. 😉 )
It is definitely possible to use non-calorie-specific dietary interventions to alter the set point. There’s stuff like the ultra-low-fat diets, which work for weight loss, despite what the lowcarbers claim about carbohydrates and insulin. The same is true for ketogenic diets. Then there’s the protein leverage hypothesis, where simply upping protein content prompts people to reduce their ad libitum caloric intake. And finally simply removing gustatory factors from food, feeding patients nutrient goop from a straw will cause obese people to physiologically realize they are horribly obese and consume very little, while lean subjects eat to maintain weight. Prolonged fasting may sometimes help (I have no other explanation of why Angus Barbieri didn’t regain all his bulk), but usually leads to normal regain.
@Matt
Yup. The interesting question is – why did people suddenly start eating extra calories?
I’m in broad agreement with Guyenet, that the food environment has greatly changed in the last hundred, and particularly the last sixty years. The genetics remained the same, but we have been outmaneuvered by technology and market forces.
A couple of centuries ago, even if you were well-to-do, you did not have a think tank somewhere whose day job is to figure out the recipe that will squeeze out every bit of craving out of the consumer. There weren’t nearly as many restaurants and fast-food joints. There weren’t any vending machines. There weren’t supermarkets packed with every imaginable ready-to-eat food. There wasn’t convenient refrigeration to store the foods you like year-round. Globalization of the food supply was just taking off. And there were next to no processed seed oils, and no agricultural-commercial-medical complex pushing for the replacement of natural animal fats with literal repurposed industrial waste (do check out the origins of Crisco).
Instead, you mostly ate at home, meals prepared by a hobbyist, not a professional or a machine, out of non-standardized ingredients that were sometimes only seasonally available. Poor people’s diets could be as simple as “oat porridge and fish” in some places. Imagine eating that – I almost guarantee that you couldn’t get fat eating that day in, day out.
@HeelBearCub
@baconbits9
Yes, fat people eat and expend more calories than lean people… so long as they’re fat. If you reduce them, they will expend less calories than lean people of the same fat-free mass. Some of these changes can be horrific in magnitude. Imagine living with the fact that you can only eat half as much as you normally would, or otherwise balloon to extraordinary size.
@Randy M
@Matt
@HeelBearCub
@baconbits
I must be triggering some forbidden words, because my post gets spammed. See the pastebin for my answer.
http://pastebin.com/EbjiqSYX
Maybe just too many links. I see you reference Denise Minger, I’ve always liked her work.
CICO is correct in the strictest sense (calories as a unit of heat), but doesn’t mean the energy you derive from food perfectly matches what it says on the nutritional panel. I find it helps to remember that you can’t actually ‘eat’ a calorie. It’s just a number you get by burning stuff in a bomb calorimeter, and human bodies are not bomb calorimeters.
Some points of difference:
– Not all food is absorbed during digestion
– Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) & similar (energy used digesting and absorbing nutrients)*
– Atwater values vary slightly between individual foods
– Microbiome health
– Inaccurate nutritional labels
– Possibly other things I can’t remember right now
So there are a bunch of variables that affect ‘calories in’ which have nothing to do with the actual volume of food consumed.
Then there are a bunch more variables that affect the ‘calories out’ side, which similarly have nothing to do with the actual level of physical activity performed:
– Basal metabolic rate (which is influenced by dozens of factors)
– Waste and excretion
– Digestion (TEF mentioned above, might fit better on this side of the ledger)
– Environmental temperature
– etc
So CICO is strictly correct, because it has to take all these things into account by definition.
Another way of thinking about this is that the two sides are talking past each other (I think?) The anti-CICO crowd are saying: ‘what about all these other factors, then?’, because they’re thinking of calories as something you eat.
The CICO crowd are saying ‘the laws of thermodynamics are non-negotiable’, because they’re thinking of calories as a unit of heat, and the overall energy balance must account for any and all such factors.
More briefly: Calories in(to your mouth) ≠ Calories in(to your body’s energy balance)
*TEF is already factored into macronutrient values, e.g. a gram of protein produces ~5.2 kcal in a bomb calorimeter, but it’s weighted at ~4 kcal on a nutritional label. Important to note because you often see people use TEF to argue against CICO, which makes no sense when it’s included in the Atwater values.
EDIT: got sniped by hls2003.
Yours is more complete.
Most saliently, it is strongly influenced by how fat you are, in relation to how fat your internal fatness regulation system wants you to be. If you’re underfat (according to it), it will downregulate BMR. If you’re overfat, it wil upregulate BMR.
A specific example– people with lactose intolerance get fewer calories from dairy. And that’s complicated by some dairy being more digestible than other dairy, and lactose intolerance can be erratic.
People with untreated diabetes who consume sugar and are unable to process it come to mind. Essentially they’re walking around with very high blood sugar that the body can’t ‘burn’, so it gets tossed into urine and they’re always thirsty. They can eat tons of sweets and they’re very likely to lose weight anyway.
Definitely an edge case, but really any condition that throws unused calories into urine or feces will lead to this. Presumably there are some such conditions that are not as extreme as diabetes.
Another edge case is raw vegans. Humans don’t digest fiber all the way down to the large intestine, and there the energy and nutrient gains are small, which wastes a lot of nutrition that could be extracted if thermal processing were to demolish the cellulose walls. I suspect that the heavy use of blenders (mechanical processing helps to get at the nutrients inside the cells, too) is the only reason they don’t rapidly starve.
The one I know of is intestinal parasites. They also seem to give some benefits against an over active immune system. Overall a pretty interesting option, but AFAIK not (yet?) actually recommended for weight loss.
My personal hypothesis is that the time at which you eat something influences how % calories absorbed vs % calories pooped out. That of course, and what you’re eating. At a trivial level, if I have a bottle of magnesium citrate with my lunch, I’m probably going to be absorbing minimal calories.
Time of meals may just be the temporal magnesium citrate!
Heh.
(For those not in the know – magnesium supplementation causes diarrhea.)
This is an irrelevant point though, if one’s goal is weight loss. The Nutrition Facts label isn’t 100% accurate to begin with, since there’s natural variation in each individual food product. Even if some of the nutrition value in the label doesn’t get processed, what the label represents is some maximum possible value of calories that one will take in if one eats that food, +/- error of the label relative to that specific package. Maybe one doesn’t take in all of the calories, but one certainly won’t take in any more.
Likewise, it’s possible to set a minimum calories expended in a day or an activity or whatever. A calorie is just a unit of energy, and we can calculate how much energy it takes to, say, accelerate a massive object (including one’s own mass) by a certain amount for a certain distance. One’s body might be more or less efficient than average, but the work required to do this sort of acceleration sets a minimum bar of how many calories one expends by partaking in some activity. Of course, there’s no simple label for this, though.
But make the [maximum calories in] lower than the [minimum calories out], and one will lose weight.
In practice, since the [minimum calories out] value is difficult to accurately calculate, what’s done is to use popular algorithms for various exercises and then modify accordingly based on how one’s weight changes while tracking the [maximum calories in] value.
True, and I’d considered that, but this post wasn’t really about proving or disproving CICO; I personally have found it quite effective. I was more interested in learning the particulars of how digestion works, and studying CICO was what got me started on this line of thinking.
Just a quick note, as I see many detailed comments. Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) varies based on food mixture and your own body composition. Generally it goes from almost zero (obese person eating carbs – yes, it’s bad) to 15% for a mixed meal. I see Wikipedia puts it at up to 35% for protein, but I haven’t seen values that high. Anyways, you have at least a 15% variance based on your body and the types of food you eat (with protein and mixed meals leading to higher TEF).
Metabolic rate varies a lot less than you’d hope. There is a small difference in, to put it plainly, “fidgeting”. And you can be an athlete and burn a lot of extra calories per day. But for normal people, sweating on the treadmill for what feels like an eternity will gain you about 150 cals.
The biggest variable is by far behavioral.
I wouldn’t interpret it like that.
You can totally influence your metabolic rate a lot – simply gain or lose substantial amounts of weight by caloric restriction or overfeeding. Your internal lipostat will helpfully try to restore you to normal by altering your BMR significantly (and not just that). Someone who diets down to 90% of their normal weight will have a BMR 300 kcal/day less on average. Someone who diets up to 110% of their normal weight wil have a BMR 500 kcal/day more on average.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7632212
Yeah, sure. It’s already a thread full of very detailed comments 🙂 I tried not to add to much. Plus, there are things that tend to compensate – like how the TEF for carbs goes low for obese people, while the BMR goes up. Even more complex when you exercise and lose weight – muscle is more expensive, muscle creation in itself burns calories, but you may lose a lot of fat so there’s a decrease as well… Then you pause exercising at a given weight (so no more muscle creation) and maybe diet maybe not…
Overall I think it’s just easier to ignore BMR changes when dieting, and just keep one thing in mind: the body doesn’t really like a sub-optimum body fat percentage, so it will start making it exponentially more difficult to diet after a certain threshold. You’re probably fine up to 10% men / 20% women, and it’s getting into “damn hard” when you go to 5/15. But fortunately that’s already well into bodybuilding competition territory – regular folks can easily look stunning at 10/20.
Sure, there probably are mechanisms to prevent severe underfatness, in addition to the mechanism that regulates around a set point (which has nothing to do with healthy weights, on average, in our food environment).
CICO is a tautology. Always true, whether you’re weight stable, on a diet, being force-fed like a goose, or dead… but unfortunately rather useless in practice, unless your goal is to diet down temporarily. Helpful for bodybuilders preparing for a competition, not so much for the obese. People (most higher critters, probably) have internal lipostats which automatically guide their consumption and expenditure, and fighting that with conscious control of calories is wasted effort, in my mind. Much better to try hacking the set point – lower that, and let it do the work for you.
Scott has reviewed a good book on the subject of the etiology of obesity, as understood by modern science, the Hungry Brain by dr Guyenet. I highly recommend it. Another book that I can suggest is Robert Pool’s “Fat: Fighting the obesity epidemic” – that one is on open library, but you’ll have to wait until I’m done with it, if you want it that way.
I am very confused by ads I’ve seen on youtube recently. They’re just the name of a medication, without even an indication of what it might be useful for. I actually googled one, and was very confused as to why YouTube was trying to sell me anti-diabetic medication. Thoughts?
Edit: I’m more confused about the nature of the ads (“Here’s a medication!”) than I am about the anti-diabetic specifically.
You’ve recently bought a bunch of candy on amazon?
I really hope it wasn’t a giant bag of gummy bears.
Cyberpunk Answer: You’re part of a demographic group that Alphabet has determined through its various projects (rightly or wrongly) is at higher risk of diabetes, so they’re just trying to help you out with that sweet sweet ad money.
I see what you did there.
One of the more famous Superbowl ads was the Bud-weis-er frogs.
The fact that you don’t know what the medicine does probably means you aren’t firmly in the target market, and therefore haven’t seen the other branding adds (and may also be missing the in-group signals).
There are two questions. Your explicit (1) Why are they showing these ads to you? and the implicit (2) Why are they showing weird ads to anyone?
I doubt that there is any interesting answer to (1). They probably have a glut of advertising space on youtube and are showing them to everyone. I believe that they have a glut of space because they want to make the service lousy so that people will pay for the ad-free version. (2) If it is true that advertising is cheap, advertisers might as well try weird things like this. This has long been a weird loophole in US drug advertising regulation. If the ad says what the drug does, it has to list side effects. If it just names the drug, it can put whatever imagery it wants and no downsides. In the past it wasn’t considered worth it, except for very well known drugs, like viagra. But maybe they’re experimenting with it because maybe you’ll google the drug. Conceivably, google could track if the person who saw the drug googled it, but I doubt that’s what they’re doing, yet.
Your answer to 2 makes a lot of sense. I was really baffled why someone would advertise a drug and not even say what condition it’s for, but if there are regulatory benefits, then I can see the logic.
Wait, you’ve come this far in life and didn’t realize that ads for drugs have to include side-effects if they say what the drug is for?
ETA: That’s just weird to me, maybe because I was an adult already when the FDA first started allowing ads. It’s one of those “wait, I’m swimming in water!?” moments)
I grew up watching very little TV, so no, I didn’t realize that.
Fair enough. I remember it being a topic of news coverage at the time as well.
Actually, that’s another part of it. I was born in 1992, and the whole issue seems to have been sorted out by the time I was 10 or so. I wasn’t paying close attention to the news that far back, to put it mildly.
I knew that, but didn’t realize that ads for drugs don’t have to include side effects if they don’t say what it’s for.
There was one case in [looks it up] 2001 of a weight-loss drug with a long list of unpleasant side effects. The makers got around disclosing the side effects by making two ads to run separately. The first was a 30-second ad talking about new solutions to weight loss and ended with “ask your doctor” without mentioning a product. The second was a 15-second ad with the same footage and music, but a different voiceover that didn’t mention weight loss: “ask your doctor about Xenical.” The two ads would run in the same commercial break, but with unrelated ads for other products in between them, so viewers would associate Xenical with weight loss but no ad would have to mention the number it does on your gastrointestinal system.
I haven’t seen this tactic used since then, so presumably the regulators have closed that loophole.
> If it just names the drug, it can put whatever imagery it wants and no downsides.
It seems we’ve not even begun to plumb the depths of brokenness of US healthcare if this kind of thing is floating around without being common knowledge.
Y’all need to do a hard reset. Liquidate the insurers, throw their assets into a volcano and salt the real estate, set fire to all the health legislature and toast marshmallows over it etc.
Wait, we get a separate “health legislature” for debating healthcare issues? Do we also get a separate foreign policy legislature, a separate environment legislature, and so on? This might actually be a good idea!
*legislation
I suppose that’s what the Civil Service is for, but they’re unelected and nominally apolitical.
All issues are interconnected, through the economy if nothing else. Your environment legislature is likely to be biased towards proposals that they think have effect on the environment without considering their effects on the economy, foreign policy, healthcare, crime, etc. And same for the others.
Bloomberg tried to impose his soda ban through the quasi-legislative powers of the NYC Board of Health. The ban was overturned as exceeding the health board’s authority. (As I’ve explained many times before, Bloomberg’s only reason for trying a soda ban, as opposed to a more sensible soda tax, was that the health board could ban things but only the state legislature could tax things, and Albany rejected the soda tax when Bloomberg proposed it to them.)
There’s a decent argument for electing the health board and similar bodies, but on the other hand we already have far too many elections that nobody pays any attention to.
I believe having no indications of what it is lets them avoid making the full long list of disclosures in the ad. As for the bad targeting… sorry, no help for you there.
Others are probably right about why an ad for a drug doesn’t say what the drug is for. But that is separate from why there are weird ads whose point isn’t clear. Those ads are often meant to create buzz, get people talking about what they saw, associate the brand with something like fun or daring, etc. It’s sort of a hallmark of “viral” marketing.
Given that the drug manufacturers (IIRC) lobbied to be able to at the very least be able to do this (name the drug without discussing both what it does and the side effects and complications), that’s probably also the explanation for the drugs.
As I alluded to above, there are many ads who are mostly trying to make brand name Y a fixture in your head. So when you are looking for something that does X, and you find X and Y that do Z, you choose Y … because it’s not an unknown like X.
Learning languages has come up frequently on SSC and I wanted to plug the method I’m using to learn Japanese kanji. About a month ago I decided I wanted to be able to play Japanese video games in Japanese, and maybe watch the animus with neither subs nor dubs. Japanese has three “alphabets:” hiragana (phonetics used for Japanese words), katakana (phonetics used for transliterated foreign words), and kanji, which are the pictographs representing entire words or concepts imported from China around the 5th-7th centuries (which is neat, because learning the Japanese kanji gets you most of the way towards being able to read Chinese, too). There’s about 2200 kanji in common use, and I think most westerners, when they hear about the thousands of Japanese or Chinese pictographs are floored, and think it’s impossible to memorize such a thing. But this method makes it easy, fast and fun.
I decided I would go ahead and bite the bullet and learn the english meanings of all 2200 common kanji before going on to pronunciation or spoken Japanese vocabulary. I’ve been at it for 27 days straight, learning 22 kanji a day in about a 30-45 minute “learn new and review old” session. So that’s 594 I have learned, and with this method my recollection is excellent. Yesterday I reviewed 95 kanji and got 100% accuracy, and today I did 98 and only missed 2.
The method works like this: the kanji are often assembled from smaller pictographs called “primitives.” You learn meanings for the common primitives, which is easy because you see them repeated over and over in different kanji. Then, you look at the primitives in a given kanji and tell a story about them that helps you remember the meaning. The story can be anything you want, so long as you remember the narrative, because we’re better at remembering narratives than facts.
So, ⼝ means “mouth.” This is easy to remember because it looks like a mouth. And it’s used in several dozen if not hundreds of kanji. ナ as a primitive means “by one’s side.” Because it looks like a dude holding something by his side. 右, the combination of these two, means “right.” To remember it I tell the story “the mouth by my side is the angel on my right shoulder telling me the right thing to do.”
Then you combine this with another primitive, like ⺾ for plant or flower. Again, very common primitive that’s in lots of kanji so you can’t forget it. 若, which I read as “flower, right” reminds me of the story “the young girl held a flower in her right hand.” The kanji means “young.”
言 means “say,” with a primitive meaning of “words” because it looks like a bunch of words coming up out of a mouth. Combine with young, 諾, “the words of the young aren’t good enough; you need parental consent.” The kanji means “consent.”
I get the meanings from the book “Remembering the Kanji” by James Heisig. Then I use an open source flashcard program called Anki to review them. This program is amazing for learning/memorizing/reviewing anything. It uses timed repetition. So you load up the cards for whatever you want to learn and when you review one, you mark how hard it was. If you missed it, you want to see it again that same day. If it was hard, maybe tomorrow. If it was easy, 3 or 4 days from now. If something was easy and when you see it again in three days, you still mark it “easy,” it might not show up for another 5 or 6 days…then 10…then 20…and so on. So it adapts to how easy or difficult it is for you to remember each card. Oh, and while you can make your own cards for anything, there’s already published decks for lots of things, including several for kanji.
This is amazing. I never thought this would be so easy or fun. Using the flashcards is like the same dopamine hit from playing a video game.
If you have ever considered trying to learn Japanese (or Chinese) and want to learn the kanji, try this method. It is great.
Also, some of them are pretty funny. Like 嫡, which means “legitimate wife.” It’s a combination of the word for “woman” and a primitive meaning “ancient.” I found this hilarious. My wife did not 🙁
I had a phase where I got gung-ho on remembering kanji, before I got caught up in other stuff, stopped, and then forgot most of what I remembered. 🙁 I have Remembering the Kanji too, but a different edition, I think. (The cover is different on mine.)
One interesting thing is the sort of half-dearth of online tools for learning and remembering kanji. And it changes a lot. When I tried to learn a couple years ago, my go-to dictionary was Jim Breen’s. Now, a search reveals several, and I’m no longer sure what the best one is.
Looking up a kanji in a dictionary is an adventure in itself, given that you don’t have the pronunciation of the word, let alone a Roman alphabet (“romaji”) spelling. Imagine looking up a simple picture in a dictionary, by the items it seems to depict…
Most dictionaries I’ve seen index them by radicals, which are the common building blocks, such as “mouth” and “side”. Some radicals join to form complex radicals which themselves form more complex kanji still, although this only seems to go two steps total. Kanji often seem to have distinct “slots” where radicals go; many will have a slot on the left, one on top right, and one on top bottom. Some radicals change significantly in appearance depending on which slot they fill, so when you look up a new kanji by radical, you have to be ready for this.
Dictionaries will also index by number of strokes. This might be easy, but you have to be used to how strokes are made. Consider 田 (rice field). How many strokes? 6? 12? 4? Turns out, it’s 5: first is the leftmost vertical, second is an L tracing the top and right; third, fourth, and fifth are the middle vertical, middle horizontal, and bottom respectively.
Finally, some kanji are in small font, or a font abstracted enough that I can’t recognize the radicals inside. I’ve sometimes spent half an hour trying to figure out a kanji due to this. Plus, it’ll be a screenshot or scanned image, so I can’t even just look at the Unicode.
This is handled in (at least my edition) of Remembering the Kanji. There is a standard stroke order: North-to-South, West-to-East, Northwest-to-Southest. Just about anything with that right angle on the right will be done in one stroke. So “mouth” is three strokes: the vertical on the left, the top and right as one stroke, and the completing stroke on the bottom. Using these principles, you can usually figure out how many strokes a kanji is. If you’re off, you’re probably only off by one (usually one of those hook-types, like ⼥ (woman) is three (the left one that looks like a < is one stroke) but ⺙is four. I think that's the one Heisig calls "task master." In the online resource I’m looking at it’s called “activity, strike, hit.” I’m not sure if they’re the same thing or not.
I’m still confused on how “official” the names of the primitives are. I haven’t been entirely certain if some of the names Heisig gives them are his own invention, or if they’re in common use everywhere. I can’t find the bare symbol, but for instance “location”: 場. That’s “soil” on the left, and then Heisig calls the part on the right, which is day (sun) over primitive form of sow/pig, “piggy bank.” Also appears in “hot water” and I think “intestines.” I have no idea if anyone else calls it “piggy bank,” or just the people who read Heisig. So if I were to say to a Japanese person, “oh, this is soil and piggy bank; better remember the location in the soil where you buried your piggy bank” I’m not sure they wouldn’t look at me like I was crazy.
My coworker is Chinese and I’ve been talking about this with her (she’s been quizzing me) and she doesn’t really seem to care much about the concept of primitives. When she was young she just memorized the shapes and learned them as concepts, so it hadn’t occurred to her until I pointed it out that ⽉ (moon) can also have the meaning of “flesh” not because the moon has anything to do with flesh but because it appears over and over again in body parts (elbow, gall bladder, intestines, abdomen, gland, etc).
When I cut-and-pasted the kanji in my post above I don’t think I would have been able to read some of those. And now every time I see kanji anywhere I try to read them just to test myself, and so I’ll see panels of a manga or something online, but the kanji are written in such a stylized manner I wouldn’t recognize one I knew if I saw it. I assume that will get better with exposure, and also with context.
It strikes me that it is less that moon means flesh in this context, but more that it means “Hidden”. Japanese (referencing my 15 year old memories from when I was studying it) uses some symbols in an allegorical manner. The moon is hidden during the day, much like organs are hidden. We know they exist and in the right context can see them, but you aren’t normally going to unless you seek them out.
I suspect that Heisig has modernized many of the names to make them more relateable to those who are learning it today. That said: I did some digging and what I found was that the radical you called “Sow/Pig” seems to be called “wrap” and so “Location is where Earth wraps around the Sun” might be more accurate? Or vice versa?
I guess. I’m not sure how etymology works in Japanese/Chinese. Do they have stories about how these symbols came to be? Anyway, yeah, I think “hidden” works well, because right now I can’t think of any ⽉ kanji I’ve learned that are parts outside the body, all internal. Except maybe 肘 (elbow).
Also, ⼓ is “wrap” or “bind up.” Looking at this, they call 勿 “not.” But I don’t think that’s quite right because there’s an extra stroke at the top of the primitive that Heisig calls “piglets.” When I said “day, sow/pig” I should have said “day, piglets.” I can’t find anything that’s the specific primitive alone.
Edit: as for allegorical usage, I’m curious again about the etymology. To what extent are the allegories culturally obscure? There are a lot of them that don’t seem to make any sense at all, like 貼 (shellfish and fortune telling) for “stick, paste, apply, post a bill.” Is there some Chinese legend about…oysters telling the future if you…paste them to something?
I’m not sure. I would imagine that most Chinese/Japanese allegories are culturally obscure even to people who enjoy a lot of Japanese/Chinese media. I know that some radicals definitely have alternate forms for style purposes (like how English has silent e’s and what not). Also, if I wanted to go with “Not”: A location is on Earth, not on the sun.
And, as for elbows, those are usually hidden under sleeves. Now, it’s entirely possible I’m missing some other meaning that could be at the root, but it seems to me that most kanji and Japanese words are not just literal, but also have an implicit or associative meaning. Take Tensai (Genius) which is the characters for Heaven and Gift. And while that makes sense, even to us westerners, it wouldn’t surprise me (and it’s my memory) that most words end up having some linking idea between them that might not be easily understood outside the culture.
You just reminded me that “undress” is 脱, which is “flesh; devil” or in your reading “hidden; devil.” It works either way I suppose.
And “devil” could also be read as “horny teenager,” with the horns over 兄 (elder brother).
This is all very fun.
The Devil is naked and our elder brother. A sobering thought.
I would actually read Undress as what Hidden Horny Teenagers do, and while that might not be quite accurate, it’s a good mnemonic.
nciku.com allows one to draw in a box. Definitely been useful for looking up kanji in an image that you can’t copy and paste!
That is so cool! Thank you! Adding that to my list of resources.
I have no comment on kanji, but I can strongly second Anki. I use Ankidroid for French vocabulary, and it is immensely helpful and does a lot to maximize the value of memorization time.
I hope it goes better for you than it did for me. I used Anki for about 6 months and had somewhere between 300-500 kanji memorized. The problem was that memorizing the meanings only went so far; it didn’t help me at all on pronunciation or on alternate meanings.
I’ve taken a hiatus from studying Japanese due to lack of time, but if I ever get back into it, I plan to use some basic reading material (manga, children’s books, etc) and a kanji dictionary. The kanji I learned that way stuck in my mind much longer than the flashcard kanji, and have been far more useful.
PS – Not sure if you’re trying to learn how to speak it or only read/listen. If you want to speak Japanese and don’t have any native speakers nearby, I’d recommend the Pimsleur audiobooks, or something similar.
Yeah, that’s volume two.
We’ll find out soon enough. With the plan I’m on I’ll have all 2200 common kanji learned in another 49 days. After that I’ll work on pronunciation, grammar, etc.
Do you have any recommendation for easy/beginner/children’s manga/books? I would love to read the Japanese version of “run spot run” just to feel like I’ve accomplished something.
I’ve heard good things about the Miyazaki film novelizations. Kiki’s Delivery Service is recommended most often, probably because the target demographic is younger. Unfortunately, most of them were prohibitively expensive in the west the last time I checked.
Manga aimed towards gradeschoolers is also recommended frequently. Dragon Ball, Pokemon, anything that includes furigana. The one major drawback with manga is that you won’t get as much practice on grammar and common sentence structures.
Picture books don’t work quite as well, in my experience. I picked up a fair number of picture books at my local library (they have a sister library in Kyoto, for some reason) and in the foreign section of Half Price Books. The problem with picture books is that many of them don’t have any kanji. Even the basic books had some words I didn’t know, and it was much harder to figure out said words without the kanji.
For non-fiction, I’ve heard that NHK News Web Easy allows you to toggle furigana on and off. Never tried this since I don’t read the news for fun.
A few weeks ago there was a discussion here about the Epstein conspiracy theories and how plausible they were/were not. Something that didn’t get much discussion then because I think everyone already forgot about it (myself included) – about two weeks before his death, he had another “suicide attempt” which he survived. He claimed his cellmate tried to strangle him to death; the cellmate claimed he had saved Epstein from attempting to hang himself.
Now prosecutors have admitted that the footage from the camera outside his cell on that occasion has also gone missing. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/18/jeffrey-epsteins-first-suicide-attempt-video-is-missing.html
If this wasn’t a conspiracy to murder the guy, it’s almost starting to look like a conspiracy to make it look like there was a conspiracy.
That’s the best argument I’ve heard so far on why it’s not a conspiracy. But I still think there was a conspiracy.
I just think the whole “conspiracy to murder him” thing is too Hollywood. He went from “billionaire island with all illicit sex fantasies fulfilled” to “prison cell forever surrounded by rough people who round off what you did to pedophilia.” That seems like a pretty good excuse to kill himself.
The best I can manage as to a conspiracy here is, “the guards were paid off to make it easy for him to kill himself.” The missing tapes would fit in with that at least.
Right, but he also knew exactly which illicit sex fantasies he had arranged to be fulfilled for multiple world leaders and other rich, powerful types, and on top of that we know he had parleyed that knowledge into a Get Out of Jail Free card once already. So what do you figure the odds are that he was just planning to fall on his sword and go to jail for the rest of his life?
The complicated part with Epstein is that the list of fantastically rich, politically powerful people who had a pressing urge for him to shut up is so long that picking any one suspect to have arranged for it to happen is probably futile.
Also, the fact that his cellmate for that first suicide attempt was a former cop who is now on trial for becoming a hitman is just *chefs kiss* too.
But by murdering him, is there no fear of a deadman’s switch? If you are fantastically wealthy and powerful, wouldn’t it make more sense to try to get him that Get of Jail Free card instead?
I would find a conspiracy that his death was faked, and he’s retired and living like a king in Patagonia more believable than that he was simply murdered.
Note: my belief is that he killed himself.
Is there any historical example of a “dead man’s switch” actually existing and working successfully, as intended?
It’s something you hear about frequently in movies, but I’m not aware of any *real* examples.
Any entity powerful enough to arrange for Epstein’s murder also probably has sufficient resources to do whatever is necessary to identify and defuse any surprises/booby traps he may have tried to leave behind…
Get Out of Jail Free is complicated specifically because they had already done it once so flagrantly – the last time this happened, the Justice Department stepped in, took over the case from the local authorities, and then offered Epstein a deal so ridiculously mild it was arguably itself illegal. This was so outrageous that the investigation into that deal and how it happened wound up winning a Pulitzer, which is essentially what prompted this new investigation.
So stepping in and doing the same thing again, with all this scrutiny now underway, would have been very problematic.
On the other hand, we can definitely see that it is quite possible to place your high profile suspect in a cell with a professional killer and then arrange to have the footage vanish, because, hey, check it out, that definitely did happen, even if he did kill himself.
On the other other hand, the professional killer failed to kill him. How hard can it be to choke a guy?
They aren’t hard to set up with software:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch#Software
Though given his evident incompetence I’d think he wouldn’t have been able to do it even if he had blackmail-able material.(which I don’t think he had)
Eighteen months in hail for a first-time offender accused of statutory rape is hardly “arguably illegal.”(the illegal part was not notifying the victims)
Is there any historical example of “kill the criminal mastermind what has kompromat on all the rich and powerful people so he can’t tell anyone” actually being implemented successfully?
For that matter, is there any historical example of “fulfill the illicit sex fantasies of the rich and powerful, then blackmail same for cash and immunity” working successfully?
All of these are basically Hollywood fantasies of how power games among the rich and powerful play out. And Epstein may have tried to play one of them out in reality, but if so he didn’t succeed in the end. Reality is messier.
Would Lavrenty Beria count?
Eighteen months in jail for a first-time offender accused of statutory rape is hardly “arguably illegal.”
The arguably illegal part is that he wasn’t even charged with statutory rape. He was charged with soliciting a prostitute, even though the girls he had sex with were underage and legally incapable of consent, which means calling them prostitutes in the charges is questionable.
That’s the “arguably illegal” part; the outrageous but technically not illegal part was that they had mountains of evidence of far more serious crimes but only charged him with the absolute minimum they could, and then even during that 18 month sentence he had daily work release so they just let him spend his “jail time” in his own home.
He had sex with plenty of women who were of age (18+… though actually age of consent is 16 or lower in many places)
Wait, what? What kind of defence even is that?
‘You are accused of murdering your coworker, what say you in your defence?’
‘Well, your honor, just look at all the coworkers I didn’t murder.’
I assume Cliff’s point is that he could have been charged with soliciting a prostitute on the basis of one of the women he had sex with who was not underage.
De Witt:
We can call it the base rate defense. “Your honor, for 364 days, 23 hours, and 59 minutes of 2018, my client didn’t kill a single person. Surely we should judge him based on what he did for the great majority of that year….”
Beria counts as “put in power a regime that will vigorously memory-hole any of his old kompromat that surfaces, and gulagize whoever was stupid enough to bring it up, and at that point it’s mostly redundant to kill Beria himself but OK yeah sure”.
And really, kompromat itself usually only works if it’s backed by a regime with memory-holing power.
@ albatross
“Your honor. My client’s median murder rate per day was zero across the whole year. I move that we dismiss the time it was seven as an anomaly.”
Is there really any functional difference between “Someone comes in and kills him” and “Someone comes in and explains to him that he isn’t getting out of this, he will spend the rest of his life in prison, and everyone he once cared about how hates and despises him and sees him as a huge liability, and oh by the way I’m just going to leave this sturdy rope right here and I’ve made sure that for the next hour the guards won’t bother you…”
I know that technically speaking the first is murder and the second is suicide. But generally speaking…
Maybe not? I’m just saying the “murdered” thing doesn’t fly. If he was murdered, there’s a murderer. So either you happened to find a prison guard who’s in the murder-for-hire business, or you sent a hitman into the prison, past the guards, or with the cooperation of the guards. That’s too many loose ends. I can believe they looked the other way and allowed him to do what he wanted to do anyway. I cannot believe a man went into his cell and put his hands around his neck and squeezed until he was dead.
This adequately describes my belief. It fits the evidence better, and would likely be cheaper and easier, too. Convincing two prison guards to turn a blind eye is easier than convincing them to murder.
The other functional differences are the investigation needs to be conducted slightly differently, and the sentence for those responsible will be lighter, if caught. (Though presumably, the people really in charge are guilty of crimes much more heinous than murder, anyways)
More like “make a deal, get a slap on the wrist sentence and then spend the rest of his life on some tropical island enjoying is hidden funds”.
You understand he already did that, right? It didn’t take, and the guy who made the deal went from cabinet official to despised nobody because of it. Deals like that are only possible if nobody is looking or if nobody cares, and that window had irrevocably closed for Epstein.
If the same camera malfunctioned on two special days and otherwise operated correctly, that’s pretty damning. If it even malfunctioned just on the one special day, that’s damning. The only non-damning explanation is that it had been broken for months (and that, say, 10% of all the cameras are broken, which is damning in a non-specific way). But if it had been broken for months, then it is no news that it was already broken two weeks earlier.
Why do they say that the footage was lost, not that the camera was broken? Probably information has been lost in a game of telephone. You shouldn’t draw too many inferences from information leaking out in these disparate channels. If the warden wants to reassure us about what happened, he should address these questions, but he wouldn’t do it through this hearing. (Even very basic questions like, were the two stories about the same camera, are not going to be answerable by piecing together short clues.)
Why didn’t anyone notice that the camera was broken when they received the request two weeks earlier? They probably ignored the request for weeks. That delay may well have been enough for the footage to have been erased, regardless of function. Maybe they delayed in good faith, because the requested camera did not exist. There was no camera directly on the cell that would show what happened in the cell. When Epstein had no roommate, hall footage would be useful to determine if he was alone. But when he had a roommate, hall footage would not show what happened between them. By the time the roommate’s lawyers clarified that they really did want hall footage, as implausible as that sounded, the two weeks had past and the camera was already discovered to be broken. More likely, they delayed in bad faith, that cameras are to protect the guards, not the prisoners. It is good to draw attention to such corruption, but it is not specific to Epstein.
Actually, Epstein was moved, so this probably wasn’t the same camera. If half of the cameras were broken, then it isn’t too surprising that two special cameras were broken. If 10% of the cameras were broken, that’s a bit surprising. But we don’t even know that it was broken.
It wasn’t broken, or even turned off. Near as I can tell, an earlier “grab that video, it’s important” resulted in the relevant video being safely tucked away and forgotten so that the subsequent “grab that video, now it’s important enough to actually watch” request didn’t find it in the expected location. But that’s going to introduce plenty of chain-of-custody issues for the conspiracy mill to feed on.
If this wasn’t a conspiracy to murder the guy, then a bunch of prison staff majorly fucked up. Assuming no murder conspiracy, there was definitely a “destroy the evidence of our mistakes” conspiracy.
>a bunch of prison staff majorly fucked up
My prior on that is fairly high.
CW: far too many things to list. Mostly preventable death.
In general, when prison staff f–ks up or is actively malevolent and a prisoner who isn’t famous dies, it’s not news, so nobody but the family ever hears about it. To some extent, this has to do with what media sources think is news, and to another extent, it’s about the fact that being “soft on crime” is very bad for your political future most places, and worrying about prison rape or prison suicide overmuch codes as soft on crime to a lot of low-information voters (which is most of them).
In what sense does turning a blind eye while an alleged kiddie-diddler commits suicide and/or is murdered in prison, constitute a “major fuck-up” for a prison guard? That’s practically their job; almost everybody but a handful of misfit idealists privately wants the kiddie-diddler dead but without having any blood on their hands, and nobody is going to punish the prison guard for giving them what they want. In the before times, Epstein would have been given a pistol and a single bullet.
Failing to recognize that this case had a high enough profile that we’re going to have to fire them from this job and wait for the union to find them another cushy prison-guard job, counts as only a minor fuckup IMO, and in any event fixing all the broken video cameras that nobody ever cared about before would have been serious work.
I don’t doubt this by and large, but I for one do not like the notion of off-loading our criminal justice particulars to the criminals themselves. It reeks of cowardice, self-delusion, and is imprecise and unreliable in the extreme.
It suspect it is an attitude born more of frustration at the need to compromise with people with different values than an actual preference on the matter. A view of “If we can’t actually get the bastards executed, at least they get tortured in prison by Bubba” but nonetheless I find it corrosive to justice. If we can’t have a careful justice system that conforms to my values, I’ll prefer a careful justice system that doesn’t to anarcho-tyranny of the prison yard.
100% agreed; my statement was meant to be descriptive, not normative.
I meant to say I assumed I was preaching to the choir but got carried away on my soapbox.
Yeah, listening to otherwise-civilized people joke about how such-and-so unloveable person is going to get regularly raped in prison is one of those things that reminds you how thin a veneer civilization really is, and over what kind of underlying nature.
+1
If we actually think rape is an acceptable punishment for any crime, we should amend the law to expressly provide for it as a punishment, and have an agent of the state do it in our name, not snicker while some thug does it on the sly.
Perhaps not rape, but many people think the death penalty should be much more widely applied, such as for crimes other than murder and treason, like rape, pedophilia, desertion, etc (I am not such a person, opposing capital punishment myself, but they are not a small minority). They also favor quicker capital punishment and decry how endless appeals frustrate criminal justice (this I do agree with, if we are going to have capital punishment, it should not be able to be procedurally frustrated endlessly) and often just generally harsher punishments (aka prison’s could just be tent cities surrounded by barbed wire).
And those are just the people who actually say those things. I know a lot of ACLU guys (and one of my friend’s wife) who are uber-progressives by day, but after drink 3/4 they start becoming big fans of Kamala locking people up, and by drink 7/8 turn into straight up “string em up” authoritarians.
@Clutzy
FWIW, you can count me in on quicker capital punishment (and if lethal injection drugs cannot be obtained, go to long drop hanging, where the supplies are obtainable by sending a plainclothes correction officer to Home Depot) and harsher punishments for people who physically harm the person or property of non-consenting others (eg I would punish theft with one day in jail per dollar value stolen, I would not [i]not[/i] allow the under-18 Morningside Park murder suspects out at 21 if they are found guilty), and count me out on applying capital punishment for more crimes only because that would incentivise criminals to kill the witnesses.
However, I do not favor criminal punishment for things like drug possession or adult sex work or truancy, so I would consider calling me “Kamala-style” to be fighting words. 😉
IMO, if we are going to do capital punishment, we should do it more quickly so the deterrent effect can work. But that means consistently applying it, and probably replacing the endless appeals and waiting with something like a parallel, independent investigation and evaluation of the evidence, where the second investigators’ job is to be very sure they have the right guy, and where the second investigator has the authority to bring charges against the police/prosecutors in the first case for obstruction of justice if they refuse to cooperate, and for witness tampering/perjury/etc. if the second investigation finds evidence of serious misconduct.
At present, we seem to spend a lot of time and resources arguing over details of a capital case without necessarily ever making sure the guy about to get executed committed the crime.
He was often referred to as a pedophile, but I don’t believe any of the allegations against him involved sex with anyone under thirteen.
I can well imagine that both many guards and many prisoners would have it in for a pedophile, but probably not for someone who merely had sex with women below the current age of consent.
I don’t think the prisoners (or, most likely, guards) who would kill him for being a kiddie-diddler (or because him being a kiddie-diddler was a convenient excuse for killing, which they might want to do anyway) would listen to his pleas that they were actually teenagers and say “Oh, well, then, never mind”.
In the past, you grew up, your parents died, and you got all their money. These days, your parents are living a lot longer and spending all their money on healthcare. Is it possible that this accounts for a significant portion of why young people don’t feel as financially secure as their parents?
Is this true? My parents are boomers, retired, and my mother/stepfather haven’t received a significant inheritance from anyone. Maybe after grandma dies?
I’m Gen X, and when my father died, he left each of his kids approx $3000.
Would young people feel more financially secure if they thought they might get some kind of inheritance in their mid-60s when their parents died? Or are you saying that there is a perception that parents used to die earlier and leave inheritances when their kids were in their 40s?
I don’t think it’s significant for two reasons.
First, young people aren’t usually at the time of life when parents are dying, even in the recent past. Hopefully that doesn’t come til at least the forties for enough people to have an impact, and as someone looking at that milestone next year, it’s not as ancient as it seemed but it’s not young either.
Second, in the past families tended to be larger, and even if there was an inheritance I think it was probably split too many ways in the average case to make too many feel secure.
Whether the inheritance would be split or not depended a great deal on when and where the deceased person lived. Patrilineal primogeniture, or some other form of impartible inheritance, was pretty common in large parts of Europe in the Middle Ages and into the 19th century.
So even if a parent (or more specifically, the father) did die relatively young, there was a good chance only one child (usually the oldest or youngest son) would receive any substantial inheritance.
Sure, but I thought we were comparing Millenials to those a few generations prior, which I believe had mostly egalitarian notions on inheritance. Correct me if that’s mistaken.
I don’t think so – very broadly and as I recall, life expectancy, household wealth, and medical costs all jumped sky-high over historical norms within the same generation.
Yeah, both of my parents had zero-to-negative inheritance from their parents. Basically they got nothing, but had to pitch in to pay for a funeral.
My parents won’t leave me with a fortune, but I expect that even after funeral expenses, there will be *something* left over.
What you are describing seems heavily class-dependent and almost certainly only applies to the upper class. Blue collar workers in the 60s may have had union jobs and secure pensions and whatever, but they didn’t amass large defined-contribution accounts. They live off their pension if lucky enough to have one, social security if not. And you don’t inherit those.
The boomer generation currently holds more wealth than any previous generation ever, and they have fewer kids on average than preceding generations, and most of them haven’t died and left inheritances yet. The ones who have died and left their inheritances most recently are people who were born during the great depression, not a cadre of people who were left a large inheritance themselves.
These days, parents who have enough money that if they die, it would be life-changing when split among all kids, help kids while they’re alive. That’s where the term Bank Of Mom And Dad comes from.
The thing is, parents mostly don’t have amounts of money that would be lifechanging when split. Especially after paying IHT, if it applies.
I see many, many people getting significant amounts of help from their parents. The ones who don’t don’t because their parents can’t afford it, not because they don’t want to. There may be a cultural factor – helping the kids may be more common in Spain than in the US – but I don’t think it is. Sure, some families are complicated. But even in some screwed up families, kids still get money – because money is a way to control kids, and if there’s no money flow and relationships are not good, power is lost.
For people around me, I see parents giving money for downpayments, paying for weddings, giving huge gifts to grandkids, taking care of grandkids. If you count all the free labour grandparents offer, losing that and getting an inheritance may be a worse financial deal, nevermind loving your parents and all that.
I suspect for young people, costs of education and lack of opportunity for jobs with good prospects without a lot of education are driving a lot of the problem.
My parents — on the Silent/Boomer cusp — were well-established before their parents died, leaving them rather little. As with many such complaints, if they ever made sense (and for this one, I doubt it entirely), it was several generations before the generation being fingered for it.
I think the perception of young people being so much worse off is due to several factors, inheritance not being one of them:
1) By the standards of the ridiculous abundance of the 1950s or 1990s, they are worse off, but it bears remembering that the second half of the 20th century was a time when the US was basically the only country in the world that was industrialized and not ravaged by communism or two world wars, putting them in a unique position to dominate economically. Then in the 1990s, computers and internet emerged – in the US – adding further wealth to an already wealthy nation.
Right now, what was pretty much only the US’s is being effectively redistributed to developing countries: notably China, but also India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe….. In some sense, the progressive dream of global wealth redistribution is already happening, away from privileged Westerners to the rest of the world.
2) Student loans. In my personal acquaintance, I see people are hampered in their ability to hit basic milestones (live alone; buy a car), in spite of having good jobs, because of student loans.
This is just rosy retrospection.
Other countries being poor doesn’t make your country rich.
With regards to “other countries being poor doesn’t make your country rich”….. maybe you meant “other countries being rich doesn’t make your country poor”? In other words, I think you take issue with the claim that the rise of e.g. China is detrimental to the US, when in fact it is a tide that has caused all both to rise…. And it has, on aggregate, but not evenly; and there is at least a case to be made that the global tide rising wasn’t great, say, for American manufacturing and the class of people who work in those jobs and the regions that had those jobs; for smaller businesses and operations who can’t leverage global supply chains/play ball with the politics of foreign governments to use those countries’ cheaper labor; and other examples.
I think “rosy retrospection” comes in when we measure Millennials’ well-being according to things like “having a pension” or “being able to buy a house on one blue-collar income”. By those benchmarks, Millennials (and later generations) *are* worse off than the Boomers; BUT it’s also illusory that the Boomer lifestyle is standard, typical, or sustainable.
I think that those perks are directly the benefit of US’s uncontested economic dominance in the 20th century: yore – automobiles; because they were dominant in heavy industry, manufacturing, automobiles, agriculture, tech, and were uncontested – US industry generated enough profit to fund nice things like pensions and very good salaries for everyone, basically. Once US labor and industry face global competition, they by nature of the market cannot be as lucrative anymore, and so large swathes of US industry cannot afford those kinds of perks anymore.
Measured in constant (i.e. inflation adjusted) dollars, U.S. per capita personal income at present is about four times what it was in 1958.
I presume that’s average per-capita income; would you happen to have figures on the change in median per-capita income?
Median household income has gone up about three-fold since 1984. A quick google didn’t give me the data farther back than that.
But even without that, while mean and median are not the same, there is no plausible way that mean increased four fold while median fell sharply, which is Etoile is implying.
Sure, but, whether you use median or mean – what is my income buying for me? If rent or mortgage was 1/4 of income then and is 1/2 of income now, does that help? If rent quintupled as income tripled, I’m left worse off.
On the whole, society is better off in most ways from 1958 – no disputing that. But in some specific ways, some people are worse off, or at least have a plausible claim to say so (even if upon inspection maybe one could determine otherwise, or determine that their being worse off is unavoidable/a worthwhile tradeoff to have the nice things we have today).
But those ways in which 1958 was better off was, I think, a product of it being a unique time in history that we couldn’t replicate today because it’s just a different world from 1958, for better or worse.
I was quoting per capita real income figures from 1958. That means that price changes were already allowed for. Measured in nominal terms, not allowing for inflation, the increase is about twenty-five fold, according to the source I linked to (reading the graph).
But I made a mistake in my household income figures since 1984, because I was reading a current income (not inflation adjusted figure) as a real income figure. Median household real income did go up over that period, but only by about 20%.
Housing specifically has gone up more than other items in the CPI. Fortunately we can run housing CPI against nominal income and see what happened.
That graph gives median household income in dollars deflated by the housing CPI, so higher means housing is more affordable for the median household. We’re not at an all-time high in this number, but only 1998-2000 was higher.
I see two main reasons younger people feel poorer/less-secure than their parents.
One is that the start of adulthood has been delayed and made more expensive. A college degree might make you better off in the long run, but in the short run a recent graduate laden with student debt is going to be less secure than someone who entered the workforce straight out of high school with no debt. And good options for the latter career path are both much less common and lower-status than they were a generation or two ago. In addition, people are generally marrying later, so the benefit of economies of scale from combined households don’t kick in until later.
The other is visibility bias: you probably weren’t around to see how well-off your parents were when they were just starting out. You just saw the lifestyle they had several years down the road, when they’d had a chance to settle in and climb a few rungs up the career ladder, when you were growing up. And you have the most visibility into how well-off they are now. It should not be not at all surprising if someone 20-30 years further along in their career than you has both higher income and more accumulated assets than you do.
I actually think this isn’t mostly financial, it is rather due to a breakdown of social institutions like churches, functional neighborhoods, extended families, community groups like lodges and mutual aid societies, etc.
This balkanization down to the individual and/or nuclear family level generates feelings of instability. You cannot depend on anyone else for assistance. All of the people who I know who started early families were heavily involved in those organizations and moved immediately to like-minded neighborhoods that were religiously and culturally homogeneous. This is basically like insurance, except for life. Unless you are a total mooch, the community will help you if you lose your job, and help you get a new one almost immediately (my Mormon friend is nearly the perfect example, he lost his job at Morgan Stanley, only to get hooked up at Disney by another Mormon like a month later). Generally secular people who live in diverse neighborhoods without good community groups (aka a large majority of people in the 20-40 age range) feel like losing their job equals losing their home and more.
This is a pretty good point. Just the fact that I have family nearby who I’m on good terms with means that it’s basically impossible for me to become homeless for any significant length of time- I’ll just call my brother and say, “Hey, can I stay at your house?”
This is true; I have kids, and in my large urban area it seems like the other moms are either religious, or military (or both), or much older. And most people my age, in work and other social contexts, nobody has kids or is just starting the process….
With apologies for starting another impeachment thread (this didn’t quite fit with the other), I’ve seen people wondering about the Democrats’ decision to impeach. There’s obviously the pro-Trump response (“They hate Trump, they’ve always wanted to impeach”), but there’s a good faith argument you can make in favour of impeaching on this particular issue, that I think makes at least as much sense as any negative interpretations of the Democratic strategy.
It is undoubtedly true that many Democrats detest Trump and many people have always wanted to impeach – but you’d still need to explain why they chose this charge / moment to impeach. In many ways it’s not a good one for them – the timing is awkward (the election is only 11 months away) and it involves the front runner for their candidacy in a negative way (Biden and his son don’t come out of this looking good). This latter point emphasises the bad timing because it’s in the middle of the Democratic leadership election.
Unlike the other accusations that have been made about Trump, this is one is specifically about an alleged attempt to interfere in the next election. Using the power of the presidency to solicit help from another government to discredit your presumptive opponent is significant enough that they feel like they are obliged to impeach on the grounds that Trump is trying to compromise the election – so “settle it at the next election” is not an alternative. The whole [alleged] point is that Trump is trying to cheat. So from a strategic and moral perspective, their approach makes sense [assuming you believe the charges and interpret the evidence in that way].
As an additional point, a successful impeachment would just lead to President Mike Pence – the political gains from it seem quite weak. The main gain would be be a possibility that it boosts the chances of a Democratic win in 2020.
If you genuinely believe that Trump has done what he’s accused of, it’s worth supporting impeachment on the grounds that it’s the power Congress has to try to remedy Presidential misbehaviour and they need to take a stand. With the caveat that given they know they’ll likely lose, the norms circumscribing Presidential behaviour will be more damaged by “you can get away with malfeasance due to a partisan acquittal in the Senate*” than “we just won’t use impeachment when we arguably should”.
*Yes, I agree the Democrats already showed this with Clinton’s acquittal.
The trouble with that line is that almost everything every president does is geared towards winning re-election for him and his party. I would feel differently if Trump had just been fishing, but it’s abundantly clear that hunter wasn’t getting hired on his merits and was an entirely legitimate subject of investigation. I feel that, if it’s successful, this attempt by the democrats to criminalize investigating a Democrat will do far more damage than Trump’s actions did. But I would think that, because I’ve felt that way about a lot of the anti Trump hysteria.
Well yes, obviously presidents are trying to get re-elected, but there are rules about what they can do to make that happen. Making foreign policy / aid dependent on cooperation with your attempt to win is not something that is generally done – and arguably meets the grounds for impeachment in a way that e.g. conveniently timed tax cuts and spending increases don’t.
Sure, and the Democrats violated them in 2016 when they used foreign data to procure FISA warrants on the advisors of their political rival.
That’s actually directly illegal, rather than just “feels wrong” like withholding foreign aid in exchange for an investigation.
And I note it’s still not proven that Trump actually tied the foreign aid to the investigation.
Given that the Democrats were not punished for what they did in 2016, why do you think the Republicans should accept being punished for less (even if proven).
Because nobody is proposing to punish “The Republicans”, because the American legal system is very fortunately not set up to allow punishment on the basis of being part of the Wrong political faction. The proposal at hand is to punish one specific Republican, singular, who is credibly accused of bribery or extortion using misallocated taxpayer funds, and to replace that specific Republican with another Republican – specifically, the Republican chosen by his fellow Republicans to fill that role with minimum disruption.
By analogy, you need to lay off the utterly, horrifically unacceptable demand that someone punish “The Democrats”, and name the specific Democratic party members you want to see punished for specific crimes. Lying on a FISA warrant application? Fine. What’s the name of the Democrat you want punished for that?
President Barack Hussein Obama didn’t do that, or order anyone else to do that, because one of the requirements the Democratic party insists on in its nominees is “don’t be stupid enough to do that sort of stuff yourself”. I don’t know of any official elected under the Democratic party label who is credibly accused of doing such a thing. FBI agents did that, lots of them, but “FBI agent” is a non-partisan position and the FBI’s agents have been broadly and genuinely non-partisan in the bit where they have lied on pretty much every FISA warrant application since the invention of FISA.
Several FBI agents who were too blatantly partisan in their misdeeds, have been properly removed. Probably several more will be in the coming year, including the merely apolitically sleazy. They’ll probably avoid prison time due to difficulty of proving malice, but removal from office seems to be the usual standard on both sides here.
Want more? Then you need to be specific about who, and why. Because demanding that “The Democrats” be punished, no, we’re not doing that. Saying that “The Republicans” get a free pass because we didn’t punish “The Democrats” to your satisfaction, I sincerely hope we aren’t doing that either. If we do, then the Democrats get a free pass when it’s their turn, and they will be FAR more efficient in using it than Trump ever was.
@John Schilling
Trump’s impeachment is entirely about punishing “The Republicans” and has been from day 1.
Joe Biden and Barack Obama, the leaders of the Executive Branch that allowed these serious crimes on their watch.
Not determined, since as far as I know, nobody has investigated him and gotten a statement under oath. He has been accused by several of directly knowing about it, although they are Republican partisans.
I do indeed want him fully investigated.
I will note that nobody is accusing Trump of doing it himself either. In fact, the testimony is specifically that Trump requested that there be no “quid pro quo”, but that “everybody knew he wanted one” and that Giuliani was the one actually doing the legwork.
deep sigh
I sense that you (and pretty much everyone else who posts on this topic on SSC) are unreachable on this.
Trump is unique. Most everyone in the Republican party thought he was beyond the pale before he got the nomination. Yes, wagons were then circled, but it doesn’t change the fact that reaction to him was highly negative even from within his own party.
President Jeb! doesn’t generate talk of impeachment. If he loses the popular vote and wins the EC you would hear people talking about illegitimacy, most especially if it comes down to within the scanning machine margin of error in a single state. But not impeachment.
Because Jeb, unlike Trump, would take the task of governing seriously. He would put his hand on the tiller of the ocean liner that is government and move the tiller 5 degrees to starboard. Trump, by contrast, randomly grabs the yoke of the jumbo jet of state and attempts to execute a barrel roll followed by a loop-de-loop. Then he lets go of the controls again.
Here is where you are going to say the GWB generated talk of impeachment. I’m sure you can point me at some. But it won’t be anything that actually had any chance of making it into committee, let alone off the floor.
It would be at the level people talked about trying to impeach Obama. Yes, people got froth-mouthed. Glenn Beck went on about “Czars” which meant Obama was a secret communist. We had 500 investigations of Bhengazi or some other flavor of the week scandal cooked up in the meth labs underneath Fox News. But Obama was not impeached in the 6 years that Obama had a Republican house. Nor was GWB impeached during the 2 years he had a Democratic house.
Details matter. Facts matter.
@HeelBearCub
I 100% totally and absolutely agree with you on this point.
Trump is unique, and the elites of both parties viewed him as a massive threat.
Believing that makes me less likely to believe the elites when they say that he has been uniquely evil, not more.
What makes that illegal?
I thought the complaint about the FISA warrant was not the fact that some of the data was from foreigners, which the court that granted the request knew, but that the FBI misled the court in multiple ways about the evidence on which they were applying for a warrant.
An odd meaning, given that it was the communists who killed the Czar. Shouldn’t Glenn Beck have been going on about commissars instead?
On your substantial point, that Trump is a loose cannon who shouldn’t be president, the usual solution is to vote him out, and the opportunity to do that is coming up shortly.
Take that up with Beck.
This is in no way respondent to what I wrote, which was about whether Trump being impeached was really just about punishing Republicans, or whether we have substantial evidence that Trump being impeached is mostly about Trump, and not about any generic Republican.
Details matter. Facts matter.
I spend some time inside the Democratic bubble. From there, it’s obvious that there’s something to this Ukraine thing. Pelosi is no obsessive Krassenstein retweeter who thinks everything she sees is proof of treason. She didn’t act when the Dems took control of the House, she didn’t act when the Mueller report came out, but she’s acting now. That says something. (Also, the notion that the media has a liberal bias is patently ridiculous – the bubble frequently mocks the “Shape of Earth: Opinions Differ” tendencies of the NYT and NPR.)
But from outside the bubble – both in the Republican bubble, and among the apolitical masses outside both – the Democrats are a uniform blob. The #Resistance crowd (roughly equivalent to the talk radio cranks mentioned elsewhere) is running the show because they’re the loudest. Intra-party fights are invisible. There’s no difference between the Russia stuff and the Ukraine stuff, it’s all just libs gonna lib.
And the way our system is set up, no bubble can run anything unless it’s an overwhelming bubble that covers most of the country. The sad truth is: Feelings don’t care about your facts.
If the point of being here isn’t to puncture bubbles, don’t things become dull?
There are many bubbles that need puncturing.
In 1998 as a teenager I saw the Clinton impeachment as a partisan farce. 21 years later, almost to the day, my view of the Trump impeachment is exactly the same.
I also think both presidents engaged in conduct, both before entering office and once in office, that was worthy of impeachment, removal, and possibly imprisonment. (It’s not often that I agree with Christianity Today, but there you go.)
But the legalistic requirements of an impeachment are a poor fit for political reality. We’ve known this since 1868 when Congress invented a nonsensical law for Andrew Johnson to violate and impeached him when he inevitably violating it. They shouldn’t have bothered with the formalities; Johnson was bad enough to justify a coup.
As a Republican I felt the same way. I had been very excited about the Republicans taking the house in ’94 and the Contract with America, and I was happy with Newt and Clinton cooperating on welfare reform, criminal justice reform (which in retrospect was a mixed bag). And then impeachment of Clinton seemed like it was entirely inside baseball. Squandered political capital and wasted time and money for no good reason. What he did wasn’t good, but censure him and move on.
What he did wasn’t good, but censure him and move on.
Unfortunately, the Republicans in Congress seem unwilling to admit there was anything wrong. I can count on one hand the number who say “bad but not impeachable” out of nearly 200.
I’m talking about Clinton. The Republicans voted to impeach Clinton, and I don’t think they should have, even though what he did was wrong. Trump, however, did nothing wrong.
That only holds if you assume that investigating Biden isn’t a legitimate policy desire. I think it was. I have no doubt that Trump was more motivated by electoral concerns than love of justice, but that’s true of a lot of policy. Wars have been fought where that was true. I have a hard time getting upset about presidential motives when they go after a pretty flagrantly guilty hunter Biden and not when they launch actual wars that get people killed.
No, that’s not the case. That line of thinking leads to Duterte and Xi Jinping.
Even if an investigation is legitimate, the means used to carry out that investigation can be illegal. This is obviously true for police investigations and the like, and should hold true in the realm of politics too. The presence of actual corruption does not give the President carte blanche to do anything he wants in the name of rooting it out, especially when an instance of rooting out corruption happens to be of enormous political benefit to that President. One can believe that Biden was guilty and still also believe that Trump greatly overstepped his bounds in how he chose to deal with the situation.
@LadyJane
I think the US is erring more on the side of too few politicians in jail than too many.
Absolutely, but that wasn’t the case here. A president asking another country to assist in an investigation is not illegal, even if trump does it.
Sure, if we’re just ignoring the quid pro quo aspect or pretending it didn’t happen, then I agree. Trump asking Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden does not constitute a crime or an impeachable offense in itself.
But given the overwhelming amount of evidence showing that Trump was explicitly trading US political and financial support for this particular favor, I think it’s safe to say that he’s guilty of abusing his power.
@LadyJane says:
There’s no actual evidence of a direct quid pro quo. IIRC, it’s not even clear that the Ukraine knew the aid was being withheld. But even if there was, asking countries that are getting US aid to do things to get that aid is not a crime, even if those things electorally benefit the president doing the asking.
This is where I think we’re watching different movies. I have not seen any evidence that Trump was explicitly or implicitly trading US political and financial support for an investigation of Biden. Not one of the witnesses testified that Trump instructed them to make such a trade, nor that they saw Trump instruct someone else to do so. President Zelensky and his foreign minister both state that no such trade or pressure happened. There would also not be any trading or favors required, as we have a treaty with Ukraine signed by Bill Clinton in 1998/1999 that requires our nations to cooperate with each other in criminal investigations.
The witnesses apparently heard (or invented) rumors that Trump was doing such a thing, but hearing rumors does not constitute “overwhelming evidence” of “explicit” activity.
Carol and Dave do not like Bob. They hear a rumor that Bob murdered Alice, which sounds like a totally Bob thing to do. The police ask Alice if she was murdered. Alice says “nope.” Carol and Dave then say Bob tried to murder Alice. Bob and Alice say “nope, no attempted murder either,” and no witnesses come forth to state that they saw Bob attempt to murder Alice. Do we have overwhelming evidence that Bob explicitly tried to murder Alice?
depends. did Bob have a phone call where he said he paints houses?
Alternatively, Alice and Bob live together as a couple and Carol says she overheard Alice abusing Bob. We call on the house and find Bob has a black eye, but Bob says he tripped and fell. Do we suddenly think that Bob wasn’t abused?
Zelensky saying that he wasn’t pressured or blackmailed has basically zero evidentiary value in my mind because, assuming that Trump was trying to pressure him into shady actions, what incentive would he have to say so? He’s facing huge pressure from Russia and feels a need for American aid and appearance of support. The only way biting the hand that is about to feed him would work out for him is if somehow Trump is immediately and miraculously removed and replaced with someone who will continue to give him what he needs. The downsides are far more likely and pressing. The right play for him is clearly to present a unified front with whoever is currently in charge. And if that requires stretching the truth to a foreign congress I’m not sure I blame him.
If all Zelensky wants to do is please the current US administration, why would pressure need to be applied at all? Pleasing Trump by throwing Biden under the bus is a no-brainer.
Also, according to John Solomon’s reporting, the Ukrainians have been trying to get information about Biden and the DNC to Trump since summer 2018, and they were stymied by State/US Attorney’s Office officials, which is why they eventually hooked up with Rudy. The uncharitable reason for this would tie in with your supposition: the Ukrainians were already offering stuff they thought Trump would want to Trump to please the current administration. Maybe even as a thank you because Trump is the one who reversed the Obama admin’s decisions and started giving Ukraine lethal military aid. Biden might end that, adopting the same policies as when he was VP, so it’s in the Ukrainians’ interests to have Trump in office rather than Biden. You’ll notice in the Not a Transcript it is Zelensky who brings up Rudy (and therefore Biden), not Trump. This is because the investigation of or dirt collection on Biden was already underway. All Trump does is agree with Zelensky that it is good.
My general opinion of Zelensky is very positive because I like his origin story, that he was a TV comedian elected to clean up corruption. Poroshenko I can believe started the effort to curry favor with Trump. Zelensky I can believe continued it both because he doesn’t like what Biden was doing in Ukraine and because he wanted to curry favor with Trump.
Because then he’s alienated democrats pretty much for the rest of time. Especially if the investigation turns up nothing, which I can say with 99% certainty it would.
Zelinksy wants supporting Ukraine to remain a bipartisan issue. That’s his primary goal; under the current administration that means mollifying Trump to the extent that Trump likes him, but not so much that democrats get pissy.
That seems like a very high certainty over things none of us really know. What we do know however is that Hunter Biden is involved, and the CEO of Burisma is famously very corrupt. It would surprise me to find Joe himself with the hand in the cookie jar, but I would be more surprised to find no shenanigans at all.
Where were you planning to look?
Because if you aren’t up to flying off to Kiev yourself, the only question you can get answered isn’t “was Hunter Biden involved in shenanigans?”, but “Will the Ukrainian government announce that Hunter Biden was involved in shenanigans?”. Since Donald Trump has a notoriously short attention span and no great track record for loyalty, whereas Hunter Biden’s Dad may be the next POTUS in spite of any shenanigans, I’m not seeing any percentage in Ukraine calling shenanigans whether they occurred or not.
Or, you know, maybe ask for a professional investigation into allegations of corruption by a government not itself known for entrenched corruption and with independent oversight. Funny how nobody even tried to make that happen.
I meant that in the context of somebody doing a proper investigation with integrity in honesty, more in the abstract than in the real world. I should have phrased
like this:
Joe probably didnt have his hand in the cookie jar, but Hunter and Burisma were probably up to some shenanigans.
Does it? Honest question here.
All this stuff happened during the Obama administration – during this time republicans had every motivation to find evidence of wrongdoing going on within the white house and, looking at Benghazi here, weren’t above drastically inflating some questionable-but-not-illegal decisions the administration made into out-and-out scandals. Hunter’s work wasn’t a secret then, nor was Biden’s actions in Ukraine. Yet during that time period, nothing came out.
Since Trump took office, making Obama’s administration look bad and rolling back Obama’s accomplishments has been a consistent priority, yet nothing has come out.
Then, as Biden became the democratic frontrunner, Trump’s circle clearly began investigating this line of questioning with some degree of heavily expressed interest, yet nothing came out.
Then, since this scandal broke, finding conclusive evidence of Biden doing something wrong would literally have been all that was needed to shut down an impeachment hearing… yet nothing has come out.
If there was a smoking gun to be found, it would have been found by now.
I would largely put that down to the Republicans and Democrats all being part of the Big Club. Nobody wants to get all huffy about one politico’s kid’s graft because that threatens their own kid’s graft.
Also, albatross11’s frequent complaints that the abuses of power they all do, like start wars without Congressional authorization are big yawners.
As far as nothing coming out now, it has. It’s been reported from John Solomon’s investigations, which have been aired on Fox News and other places. The response has not been, “oh, this does look bad,” but to attack John Solomon, without refuting any of John Solomon’s facts.
If there were to be an investigation of Biden’s role in the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor, what I would like is testimony or documents from the State Department officials who helped craft this policy. Whose idea was it first to fire Shokin? Do we have policy proposal memos from the guys in the Ukraine department at State first floating this idea and documenting why he should be fired? Why did the IMF and various western nations want Shokin fired? Was it because the US said it was a good idea, or did they also have their own internal reasons for wanting to do this? How common is it for a Vice President of the United States to get personally involved in the firing of cabinet level officials in foreign nations? How many people did each of Gore, Cheney, Biden, and Pence get fired? How often does the US do this sort of thing in general? If it isn’t the Vice President, who usually intervenes to get a specific individual fired in a foreign nation? Why didn’t that person do it this time?
These are all questions I’d like to have answered, but few people in the media or congress seem interested in asking them.
I’m doing this against my better judgement:
Source 1: A contemporaneous Irish Times report on the EU’s initial response to the firing of Victor Shokin. It describes the overall feeling of the EU and lays out their reasoning for wanting him fired.
Source 2: Contemporaneous NYT reporting about Shokin being fired. Mostly about how bad shokin is, also talks about how the IMF was also considering holding back aid until Shokin was dismissed.
Source 3: A speech given in 2015 by the then US ambassador to Ukraine in which the ambassador lays out pretty clearly that Shokin’s office is corrupt and says “The United States stands behind those who challenge these bad actors.” I include this quote because it proves that opposition to Shokin was spread throughout the Obama administration.
I think a good read of those sources should answer around half your questions. The other ones, directly related to “is it common for VPs to do this sort of thing” would require a broader understanding of the office of the VP and joe Biden’s role as VP under Obama to answer. Suffice it to say, yes – for this administration Joe making these kinds of moves was fairly common; Obama empowered him pretty strongly and Joe was very hands on when it came to diplomacy.
Hey, back off this issue until after the election and I will be able to give you more of what you want.
is your claim that the link is an example of the quoted part?
I believe that’s what was going on, yes. Obama is asking for a reprieve on certain issues, particularly missile defense because that will help him win his upcoming election. After he wins, he will be able to give Russia more of what they want, and says so. The Russian president Medvedev verbally grants him the reprieve he asks for, (they will give him space to win his election instead of pressing on these contentious issues now and making Obama’s re-election more difficult, that is, aiding Obama in his re-election effort) and tells him that he will tell Putin about the verbal agreement they have just made.
I assume you have another interpretation?
Serious question – is there ever an issue of means rather than ends, in your world view?
I don’t think anyone’s complaining about him trying to get re-elected. The question is whether the means he used are acceptable.
I don’t have a dog in that fight – too much normal US politics violates my instincts of what should be acceptable, probably because I wasn’t raised in this country.
But what you say above seems to be consistent with e.g. framing his opponents (after all, he knows they’re guilty), and a lot of even worse things that no one’s alleging in the current situation (at least as far as I know).
I don’t think the question is so much means vs. ends. more actions vs. motives. Means matter, but motives are never really knowable, and even if the are they’re sort of irrelevant. This means they be considered and instead you should try to evaluate the actions, and ask the questions “do I think this this action will produce results I like” and “are these means an acceptable way to achieve those results”. In this case, I think both answers are a yes.
And if we impeach Trump the new rule will be “Democrats can get away with it, Republicans can’t”.
Republicans thought we had a fair “cooperate/cooperate” standard for Presidents to not commit Federal crimes and cooperated with Nixon. Democrats defected with Clinton, so Republicans have absolutely no incentive to impeach Trump, especially as the actual articles of impeachment don’t contain any actual Federal crimes.
The Democrats will have to cooperate with the impeachment of a Democrat President before I would trust them again, which is the tragic nature of defecting.
Alternatively, the lesson is ‘Republican presidents are worse about this than Democratic ones’, and Americans would do well to subsequently heed it.
Alternatively, the lesson is Democratic Presidents’ misdeeds get silenced. Obama should’ve been impeached for using foreign intelligence to get warrants on the Trump campaign, and for unjustly denying tax-exempt status to his political enemies.
Considering that the Republicans controlled Congress for the majority of Obama’s tenure as president, if he didn’t get impeached when he should have, whose fault is that? Didn’t Moscow Mitch vow to make Obama a one term president as soon as he was elected? Why didn’t he go through with that if he could?
@TripleS
I understand that this winds you up, but please don’t use epithets for your political opposition like “Moscow Mitch”.
Hey, the POTUS does it.
I prefer “Cocaine Mitch.” That one’s hilarious.
Serious question: does anyone actually like Mitch McConnell enough to make defending him a worthwhile use of mine or anyone’s time? If yes, I’ll avoid using those kind of nicknames, but opinions of that guy, in my experience, tend to range from “evil” to “evil, but he’s on my side.”
@Aftagley
I like Mitch McConnell.
But even more, I like an atmosphere here in SSC where we discuss topics like impeachment without mindkilling memes.
@Echo Chaos:
That’s not actually true. You just like the mind-killing memes that support your side and have successfully detached your personal cerebellum from your own spinal cord. I have choice words about the now re-formed group which I will avoid posting (even if I haven’t avoided typing them).
You’re actual objection is to a sort of ad hominem attack. I can get behind that.
@HeelBearCub
I try to avoid snappy mindkilling memes in my discussions like this, and I’m pretty sure I don’t use any.
That we have both come to completely different conclusions about the outcome and reasonableness of impeachment doesn’t make that any less true.
And I appreciate your support on the ad hominems.
@EchoChaos:
See that’s the thing, you can’t even see them.
Let’s set aside for a second whether Democrats “defected”. You are offering this up as you are also saying:
You are playing both sides of the fence, and being dishonest about it, probably even to yourself.
@HeelBearCub
Those are just conclusions I’ve come to, not memes that instantly kill conversation.
“Orange man bad” is a good example of a similar right-wing one, or “Obummer”.
If I say that the Democrats cannot reasonably remove Trump because they’ve lost the right to impeach unilaterally after their defection with Clinton, you can tell me reasonably that you don’t think Clinton was defecting from the norm of holding Presidents accountable and we just disagree.
My view is that Trump did nothing wrong, and additionally I don’t trust the Democrats to prove that Trump did something wrong because of their defection in the Clinton matter and the FISA matter.
But if I just reply with “you’re just saying Orange Man Good” or “you’re a Russian plant”, then we’re not actually having a conversation.
Note that you don’t do this and I enjoy talking to you.
@EchoChaos:
1- “The reason Republicans won’t impeach is because Democrats defected over Clinton.”
2- “The reason Republicans won’t impeach is because Trump did nothing wrong.”
You do realize that these two arguments are, if not directly contradictory, at the very least in great tension with each other?
@HeelBearCub, I don’t see them as being in tension at all. Prototypical Republican believes Trump didn’t commit any high crimes or misdemeanors, and in addition believes that even if he had, the Democrats defected over Clinton so Trump shouldn’t be impeached even in that hypothetical.
Part of me is receptive to the idea of calling out the game (of mindkilling, in this case), and thus, ending the game.
Pursuant to that, maybe we should just refer to him as Starkiller Mitch.
Or perhaps, Superconducting Supercollider Mitch.
Can offer examples of Conrad using such memes?
He has said things that were not true but that he believed to be true, but the fact that other people promptly pointed out the error and he then retracted the claim (the Ukrainian server used to access the Democratic email) is evidence that it wasn’t a mind-killing meme.
That’s not the same thing as saying something neither true nor false, such as attaching a negative epithet to the name of someone you don’t like.
@DavidFriedman
He accused me, not Conrad.
… and both attempted to improve the articulation of, and generally agreed with, what I took to be your real objection, against ad-hominem argument.
I don’t think I improved the articulation of anything, I just said I like the name “Cocaine Mitch.”
Do you know the story behind that one? I think it’s the most hilarious failure of political branding of all time.
@Aftagley
Since the only reason to tolerate the toothache-that-walks-like-a-man who is Trump is judicial appointments, the work Mitch McConnell has been doing on that is certainly something I like.
Not enough to stan for the guy or anything about nicknames–I actually used “Cocaine Mitch” in my comment until I thought better of it given the ongoing debate–but he’s the only one right now working on something I care about.
Setting the stage for a 9-6 liberal majority on the Supreme Court?
If the liberal response to conservatives getting a majority on the Supreme Court (by anything short of cutting throats) is to successfully pack the court so they win, the conservatives have already lost and it doesn’t matter what they do. Arguably, FDR demonstrated that even a credible threat is sufficient to prove the no-win scenario.
We’ve seen the liberal response to Conservatives getting a majority through pre-2016 means, and it’s “wait for our turn, plus trust that even nominally-conservative judges will liberalize on the bench”. This has worked tolerably well for them over the years.
What McConnell did to Merrick Garland in 2016, however reasonable it may seem to you, is seen by most liberals as a major violation of pre-2016 norms and close enough to “throat-cutting” as makes no difference. Plus, it establishes that the Supreme Court can have a number of members not equal to nine, for a prolonged period if it is convenient to the Senate majority.
It is quite possible that this is so. If so, they lost in 2016. If it is possible to avoid this defeat, that will require some combination of A: making the majority of the US population that disapproves of Donald Trump, nonetheless feel safe electing Republican Senators, and/or B: making future Democratic Senators perceive their mandate as “restore normalcy” rather than “payback, bitch”.
It’s already been established that a president with enough congressional support can pack the court by adding a justice who will vote in the desired direction — more than a hundred and fifty years ago.
I’m not going to grant the implicit claim that the conservatives held a majority of the court that decided Obergefell.
“Conservative majority” is in this context almost always shorthand for “majority of judges appointed by Republican presidents who presumably expected conservative jurisprudence”. I was using it in that sense, and apologize for the imprecision.
@EchoChaos: Clinton having an extramarital affair is not remotely in the same ballpark as what Nixon did or what Trump is accused of doing. Nor is the fact that he was basically gotcha’d into committing perjury.
And yes, if a Democratic President was found to be guilty of spying on his political rivals or withholding aid to foreign countries in return for political favors, I would absolutely support impeaching them too.
I only have a vague idea of what you’re referring to, and I’m not inclined to trust a lot of the news sources you probably get your information from. But if this actually happened, then yes, the people responsible should absolutely face harsh legal consequences for their actions.
For that matter, I also think that both Bush and Obama should be tried for war crimes. But I know there’s approximately zero chance of that actually happening.
The “news source” in question here is the Department of Justice Inspector General. The veracity of his report has not been questioned that I am aware of.
>>95% confident there was at least one intermediary between the IG report and this thread. Calculate the ratio of the number of times the report has been directly cited here, and how many times for opinion pieces.
It’s a 480 page report. It is not unreasonable to refer to the work of someone that has read it and quotes from it. But since you asked:
From Horowitz’s opening statement in testimony about the report:
Nevertheless, we found that members of the Crossfire Hurricane team failed to meet the basic obligation to ensure that the Carter Page FISA applications were “scrupulously accurate.” We identified significant inaccuracies and omissions in each of the four applications: 7 in the first FISA application and a total of 17 by the final renewal application.
For example, the Crossfire Hurricane team obtained information from Steele’s Primary Sub-source in January 2017 that raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele reporting that was used in the Carter Page FISA applications. This was particularly noteworthy because the FISA applications relied entirely on information from the Steele reporting to support the allegation that Page was coordinating with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities. However, members of the Crossfire Hurricane team failed to share the information about the Primary Sub-source’s information with the Department, and
it was therefore omitted from the three renewal applications. All of the applications also omitted information the FBI had obtained from another U.S. government agency detailing its prior relationship with Page, including that Page had been approved as an operational contact for the other agency from 2008 to 2013, that Page had provided information to the other agency concerning his prior contacts with certain Russian intelligence officers (one of which overlapped with facts asserted in the FISA application), and that an employee of the other agency assessed that Page had been candid.
As a result of the 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions we identified, relevant information was not shared with, and consequently not considered by, important Department decision makers and the court, and the FISA applications made it appear as though the evidence supporting probable cause was stronger than was actually the case. We also found basic, fundamental, and serious errors during the completion of the FBl’s factual accuracy reviews, known as the Woods Procedures, which are designed to ensure that FISA applications contain a full and accurate presentation of the facts.
He continues:
We are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams; on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations; after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI; even though the information sought through use of FISA authority related so closely to an ongoing presidential campaign; and even though those involved with the investigation knew that their actions were likely to be subjected to close scrutiny. We believe this circumstance reflects a failure not just by those who prepared the FISA applications, but also by the managers and supervisors in the Crossfire Hurricane chain of command, including FBI senior officials who were briefed as the investigation progressed.
Here is the Foreign Intelligence Service Court itself rebuking the FBI for “providing false information” and “withholding material detrimental to their case.”
https://www.fisc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/MIsc%2019%2002%20191217.pdf
here’s Comey himself saying that he was wrong to defend the FISA applications:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=1yfXxeJn3Tc&feature=emb_logo
Here’s Horowitz stating that political bias was not ruled out as a motivation factor for crossfire hurricane and that the FBI explanations for the errors in the FISA applications were not credible:
https://twitter.com/SenHawleyPress/status/1207372061481611264
Notice how seamlessly the claim switches from “the Democrats” to “the Crossfire Hurricane team” when evidence is requested.
I do not trust the integrity of folks who first noticed in 2016 that the FISA court system is sketchy. I likewise do not trust folks who use that fact to score political points in lieu of systematic critiques.
The executive summary took me a little more than half an hour. I think it is unreasonable to fail to demonstrate that level of familiarity and still expect to be taken seriously on the topic.
Who was dumb enough to think the IG was charged with proving the negative?
I could certainly go back to posts I made on Slashdot or reddit in 2013 about how terrifying the evil government panopticon was. It is not new. I also do not just want the individuals involved in this particular abuse punished, I would like the entire system, from the collection program to the FISA court itself shut down. It is the One Ring and should be thrown into the fires of Mount Doom.
@Conrad Honcho
Amen. Some of these government operations feel like the sort of places where anyone who uses them at all scummy, even if they are following whatever weak rules they’ve put in place to prevent “abuse” of the system.
@Conrad Honcho
Which of course neither party will do; when they’re in power, the massive spy apparatus becomes a very useful tool. I’m reminded of Tolkien discussing whether LotR is an allegory for World War II:
The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-Earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.
Even in the real LotR the ring’s destruction was a happy accident; without Frodo’s mercy toward Gollum he would have turned from the fires and all would have been lost. We all when we get the chance seize the Ring.
Notice how seamlessly the claim switches from “the Democrats” to “the Crossfire Hurricane team” when evidence is requested
Didn’t intend to move goalposts there. The statement that was originally questioned by LadyJane had a lot packed into it.
“The Democrats” portion of that claim, is, at this point, speculation. There is no documentary or testimonial evidence (to refer to the IG report) that political partisanship played a role in the FBI misdeeds. The rest of the claim is not.
What we do know (please let me know if you disagree, I don’t feel like digging up the source for each of these, as its time consuming):
1) The FBI investigatory team committed multiple material errors (17) in the FISA process, all of which were in the direction of strengthening the case for the warrants against Carter Page.
2) The FBI knew that the information provided in the FISA process was misleading and deceptive.
3) The FBI team’s defense of these errors was not credible, according to the IG.
4) The FBI investigatory team (at least some members of it) demonstrated significant political bias against Trump.
5) The IG did not find explicit evidence stating that the demonstrated political bias was the motivation for the FISA deception.
I therefore do not find the following to be unreasonable speculation:
Given the lack of a credible explanation and the demonstrated political bias of the perpetrators, the deceptions in the FISA applications were politically motivated.
Thus, it is not unreasonable to state that “the Democrats” committed those acts. Which “Democrats” was not specified, and I took it to mean the demonstratedly partisan Democrat FBI team.
I do not care to speculate or opine as to whether these “Democrats” received instruction from elected Democrats.
to respond to the following directly:
Who was dumb enough to think the IG was charged with proving the negative?
At least implicitly, the IG did indeed seek to prove the negative.
He sought explanations for the FISA errors. If the IG had found credible evidence that something other than political motivation was the root of the FISA errors, that would have lent a significant amount of support in proving the negative. He explicitly found the FBI explanations for the FISA errors to lack credibility.
The speculation is reasonable but it should have been offered as speculation, not as an assertion of fact.
ETA: Some room should also perhaps have been found for the distinction between “Democrats” (i.e. some individuals who happen to have been Democrats) and “the Democrats” (i.e. the party as an entity, or the party establishment).
The speculation is reasonable but it should have been offered as speculation, not as an assertion of fact.
Perhaps. I didn’t offer the original statement, but it’s worth pointing out that one cannot have a conversation if they stop to source every statement and report the epistemic status of every element of every statement.
There must be a balance between constant footnoting and engaging in reasonably fluid dialog. Dan L was right to call out a statement that has some implicit assumptions built in, but I’m not certain that echochaos was wrong to make the statement in the first place.
Dan L:
Outside the question of impeaching Trump[1], we have a case where the FBI was actively using the massive surveillance system we built up to prevent terrorist attacks in order to spy on a major party’s presidential campaign, and where they acquired the authorization to do so from the FISA court based on data they knew was bogus. This happened at a time when the FBI was also actively investigating the *other* major party candidate.
Now, if I heard a story like this in some other country–say, in France or Israel or Pakistan or South Korea–I’d interpret it as “the intelligence services are making sure they’ve got the dirt on all serious candidates and can play kingmaker.”
Is that what was happening here? I don’t know for sure, but it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. The FBI has been known to keep dirt on politicians to protect its own interests in the past, and this is something that’s widely believed to go on in many other countries. It’s something we should be actively thinking and worrying about, because if it’s going on, it’s about ten times as big a threat to our democratic institutions as Trump’s attempt to get Ukraine to dig up some dirt on one of his opponents’ sons.
What we can see for sure from this case is that in a very high profile politically sensitive investigation of a powerful and well-connected people, the FBI used evidence they knew was bullshit to get a FISA warrant. It seems really unlikely that they’re more honest or careful when getting a warrant to listen in on the communications of some minor government official or judge or journalist, let alone some complete nobody running a falafel stand in New Jersey.
This isn’t about defending or attacking Trump. It should not be a tribal issue at all–it’s a lot more important than that. If the FBI, NSA, etc. are routinely spying on major political figures, that probably means that democratic oversight of those agencies is impossible. And indeed, we’ve seen Congressional oversight committees show great deference to intelligence agencies.
a. When Congress investigated the CIA torture scandal, the CIA put malware on the investigators’ computers to keep track of the investigation. As far as I know, nobody ever suffered any consequences for that.
b. When major officials lied to Congress about the nature and extent of domestic surveillance, when oversight committee members expressed shock at Snowden’s revelations, there were, at least in public, no consequences.
This looks plausibly like a toothless oversight process–perhaps the overseers don’t really care about their job, perhaps they’re afraid to push back against the intelligence agencies.
Trump’s impeachment, like most of the scandals iun Trump’s presidency, is a sideshow. The really important stuff mostly doesn’t get much attention.
[1] I’d be happy to see Trump gone, but don’t see it happening given the 100% party-line split that seems to exist on the issue in the Senate.
+12 to albatross11. I really want the spy machine gone. I do not want it in Trump’s hands, I do not want it in Jeb’s hands, I do not want it in Biden’s hands, I do not want it in Clapper’s hands.
…
My hands, though…
Out of order, because it flows better. Or at least seemed that way at the time?
@ Conrad:
I saw your post downthread as a recent example, you have a gold star for consistency here in my book.
I actually don’t have good object-level recommendations on what to do about FISA specifically (or the NSA, but that’s a somewhat different topic) – I think that something like it needs to exist, and I don’t think the existing institution is quite to the point where it needs to be burned to the ground and its fields salted. But it definitely combines with some of the worst parts of the US criminal justice system to overshoot Kafka on a routine basis.
@ albatross:
I think this is a perfectly reasonable question to be asking, though my assessment is that the answer at present is “no”. We have seen what it looks like when the FBI tries to play kingmaker in the 20th century, and it’s not quite like this. IMO, the current problems are fully explained by ratchet effects in enforcement and abrogation of responsibility for oversight – a dire problem, but not exactly the same thing as institutional corruption.
(I made a wish on a monkey’s paw once for moderate leadership in CA. It told me it was making a donation in my name to Feinstein. Fuck.)
Absolutely – to paraphrase Ken White, “everybody is an underdog against the government”. Parallels exist to Epstein’s stay in prison and, to a lesser extent, the impeachment process in the House – this is what the system we have built does. (And discretionary mercy will predictably become an exploit for the powerful, reducing incentive for reform.) Some parts of the system suck by “design” as a least-bad necessity but others are due to enemy action.
I don’t think it’s fear of reprisal or anything similar, I think it’s fully explained by the fact that it would require expending political capital in an era where win-win politics is difficult. Very few people’s votes are motivated by this topic.
@ mitv150:
It being extremely loaded was the reason I objected to a blanket justification, yes.
I think referring to “The FBI” as a whole is still painting with too broad a brush if we’re doing failure analysis, but I don’t object to any of these on factual grounds. Number 4) is awfully tilted though – we don’t have anything like a comprehensive audit of the personal communications of everyone involved, and Strzok* has some legitimate grievances regarding the disclosure of his and subsequent firing. But while I’m glad he’ll get his day in court to make the argument, I also think it was entirely correct for Mueller to remove him from the case when the texts came out.
*Assuming you’re talking about Strzok, of course.
Modified Hanlon’s razor: political motivation is unnecessary to explain overzealous prosecution in a system with a dramatic pro-prosecution bias.
“the Democrats” includes an awful lot of lifetime Republicans.
Reversed frequentism is not intelligence.
@ Nick:
Yeah. I think it’s easy to forget that when Sauron predicted that nobody would ever be willing to actually destroy the ring, he was right.
At only a slight tangent …
Is submitting false information to a court in order to get a warrant perjury–is the information submitted under oath?
Even if it is, I wouldn’t expect prosecution, which seems to me to be a problem.
I’m reminded of a different scandal, I think a year or two back. It turned out that domestic law enforcement had been prosecuting domestic suspects using information, I think from wiretaps, that was supposed to be used only for dealing with foreign terrorism. Having gotten the information that way, they then used it to recreate the information from other sources, and did not tell the court that was trying the case what the origin of the information was. When that came out, at least one judge expressed considerable indignation–but was anyone actually prosecuted for it? One would think the next step would be to require the relevant police departments to provide a list of cases where that was done and throw out all of the verdicts, leaving it up to prosecutors to decide whether to retry the case without the tainted evidence.
I haven’t followed the relevant news closely enough to know if any of that happened, perhaps someone else here has.
@Dan L
Yeah, anti-Trump is not the same as a Democrat.
The obvious test would be whether the FBI offered similarly misleading statements to the court in other cases not involving Trump or other people who might plausibly be viewed as political targets.
I gather, from one of the stories, that an application for a warrant to the FISA court is made under oath. Assuming that is correct, it will be interesting to see if any of all of the FBI agents involved get tried for perjury.
My guess is not, although the one person who altered an email, apparently to conceal the fact that Page had reported his contacts to the CIA, might possibly be.
It would be very informative to have an independent audit of a large number of randomly-selected FISA case, with the audit published and made available to the American people. I’m not holding my breath, though.
I consider abusing the position of the Presidency to take sexual advantage of a young woman and then committing Federal felonies covering that up to be in the same ballpark.
I suspect that most people who come to the conclusion it isn’t are engaging in motivated reasoning, whether they realize it or not.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/473709-horowitz-report-is-damning-for-the-fbi-and-unsettling-for-the-rest-of-us
It happened, the Horowitz report agrees it happened. Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the leaders of the Executive Branch, have faced exactly no punishment.
I agree with this, but it’s basically irrelevant to the defection problem being described.
Prediction: Nobody will face any consequences for the irregularities of the FISA warrant. The lesson will be cemented in the minds of all powerful people that the intelligence agencies are listening to and watching them, all the time. This will continue to have profound effects on what policies they are willing to propose or pursue.
Why, it’s almost as though building a vast unaccountable domestic spying operation and then justifying it by promising that the people doing the spying will carefully follow the rules and respect everyone’s rights was some kind of terrible mistake.
Hell, maybe we can just make it a normal thing that both major-party candidates in every presidential election are under investigation by the FBI. Imagine how much more respectful of the needs of law enforcement and intelligence agencies future candidates will be!
@albatross11
Truly shocking. No vast secret domestic spying operation has ever gone wrong before! How could this have happened?
Can we just take a moment to contemplate the absolute madness that would occur if Trump was caught receiving oral sex from an intern in the oval office and then lied about it under oath?
I dont want to cast any aspersions on progressive commentators here, I believe them when they say that they would not support impeachment in that case. But I’m not quite capable of extending this to members of the MSM like Rachel Maddow et al.
I really don’t think it will. the politics of the IC are a consequence of elite consensus, not a cause.
No, I honestly wouldn’t care if Clinton or Trump or any other President were hosting free-for-all pansexual orgies in the White House every day, as long as it was all consensual and didn’t get in the way of fulfilling their Presidential duties. Hell, I wouldn’t even care if they were snorting coke off of prostitutes, if not for the fact that cocaine use and prostitution are illegal. (I don’t think either of those things should be illegal, but I also don’t think that a country’s Chief Executive should be breaking that country’s laws.) I firmly believe that people have a right to privacy when it comes to their personal lives, and that extends to famous and powerful people too. This is a much deeper conviction to me than any semblance of partisan loyalty.
And I think that’s wrong, just like I think it would be wrong for Trump to get away with his actions in Ukraine without facing any punishment. However, I’m less concerned about Obama because he’s not in office anymore, whereas Trump is currently in power.
If Biden wins the election next year and evidence comes out showing that he had a role in these 2016 shenanigans, then yes, I will support impeaching him on those grounds. Feel free to hold me to that in 2021.
Can we just take a moment to contemplate the absolute madness that would occur if Trump was caught receiving oral sex from an intern in the oval office and then lied about it under oath?
It’s Trump, he wouldn’t lie about it. He’d just tell everyone its a perk of the office and blame the Dems for making a big deal about nothing.
@LadyJane
I am very concerned with Obama, because I don’t want the standard to be “as long as you hid it until your Presidency ended, you face no consequences”.
This is true of Bush and the Afghanistan Papers too.
Well, Trump did get caught having paid off a pornstar to keep quiet about having his bastard, so I’m not sure getting a blowjob from an intern would be any more damaging than that.
cassander:
How is that consensus maintained? I think our political and media class would have to be unusually principled and brave not to have their public stances affected by the knowledge that there were some really powerful people who knew all the dirt on them and, if offended, could probably get them fired or force them to resign in scandal or get them sent to prison.
Since from what I can see, our political and media class are mostly unprincipled and spineless, I expect the outcome here is “For the love of God, whatever you do, don’t piss off the NSA or FBI. Those f–kers are *scary*”. And that is a really dangerous thing for politicians, judges, journalists, etc., to think.
What?? Are you saying Stormy Daniels had Trump’s baby?
In your White House, interns who fellate the president get to attend all the best meetings, make all the good connections, and have top advisors of the President refer them for job interviews at desirable jobs. Do you think the interns who do not fellate the president get similar treatment from folks who are close to the president who sit on corporate boards. I understand being a White House intern is a good resume builder. I mean, there’s actually lots of jobs where engaging in sex with the boss can be good for your career.
My preference is that we push back against that behavior, though. Whether the boss is Bill Clinton or Roger Ailes or Harvey Weinstein.
@albatross11
Yes, I really wish the problems with the evil spy machine had not been wrapped up with the reality distortion vortex that is Trump. I was having panic attacks back in 2013 after the Snowden revelations. I knew about the NSA’s capabilities of course. Room 641A and all that. Of course they have the ability to wiretap anything, but the idea that they were wiretapping and storing everything did not cross my mind. I’m not shocked that the FBI has the capability of kicking down my door in the middle of the night. Of course they do. My door is not unkickdownable. But I would be shocked if they were kicking down my door in the middle of the night without a warrant signed by a judge detailing the specific crime I was accused of and the evidence they were looking for. Not shocked NSA can. Shocked NSA was.
Slashdot and reddit were all freaking out too. The party in the charge, or the intelligence agencies themselves could do anything. Find all your thoughts, find any naughty thing you ever did legal or illegal and smear you with it. Even just invent things whole cloth. Terrifying. But then Trump and meh.
Glenn Greenwald is not happy about the current state of affairs. But yeah this completely vindicates his reporting and Snowden’s revelations.
@Matt
I agree with this tremendously and think that the “impeaching for sex” framing is wrong for this reason.
Clinton abused his authority over a young woman to trade for sexual favors, then engaged in a large-scale coverup that violated Federal law.
If he had just had a side-piece that he occasionally smuggled into the Oval Office for a quickie, that would still be bad, but not nearly of the same magnitude.
Being her boss makes it lots worse. If you’d fire a CEO for it, the President should be impeached for it.
I would add that if you’re President, receiving oral sex like this opens you up to the possibility of blackmail. Monica Lewinski was not a Russian asset, but she could have been. Or she could have been some other type of manipulator.
FWIW, as someone who strongly supports Trump’s impeachment and disagrees with you and his other defenders here on many of the points of fact and interpretation, I’m 100% with you on Clinton. Screwing an intern and lying about it under oath was an obviously impeachable abuse of power, inexcusably defended/minimized by way too many Democrats, and the fact that he got away with it is a significant reason Trump is likely to get away with his abuses of power, even though IMO it’s a very poor reason to support him getting away with it due to team affiliation/tit-for-tat. I don’t think what Clinton did was as bad as what Trump has done, but “not as bad as Trump” is way too low a bar for “not impeachable.”
I also am with Conor Friedersdorf that, yes, Democrats have been searching for grounds to impeach Trump since he was elected, and that this was *entirely appropriate* given that Trump has been from the start an obvious danger to the Republic and catastrophically unfit for office:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/democrats-impeach-moral-depravity/603862/
@salvorhardin
I suspect it would be a better world in many ways had the Democrats thrown Clinton under the bus in 1999.
Tragically, not the world we live in.
@EchoChaos: I was only about 12 years old when the Clinton impeachment happened, so I don’t have the clearest picture of how the situation was portrayed by the media or viewed by the general public. Was there actually an emphasis on the conflict-of-interest aspect of the affair? Because from what little I remember (and I’ll freely admit that I could be wrong on this), it was mostly just hand-wringing about adultery from the conservative Christian moral busybody crowd.
@LadyJane
I was seventeen in a “Christian moral busybody crowd” household, and yes, the fact that he explicitly gave her career favors and exploited his position as her boss in order to get sexual favors was a BIG DEAL to us.
I don’t recall if a big deal was made about this regarding Clinton specifically… but if it wasn’t, shouldn’t it have been?
This was pre-me-too, but not pre-office sexual harrassment training. I’m pretty sure the late 90’s were PC culture time, when we were being lectured about how power differentials in relationships were akin to rape. This seems like a clear double standard in that regard, unless I’m getting the timeline way wrong?
Clinton’s defenders in the media generally tried to avoid this framing, but his opponents did not. I had cast my first vote ever for Clinton in 1992 (and Bob Dole as well, for Senate in my home state) and I turned on him over this. I knew intern-age people and was that age myself at the time and it weighed heavily on me – what if I got an internship to the White House or my governor’s mansion or State House and the sexually receptive interns got perks that I did not. It seems a no-brainer to oppose this.
Now my children are intern-aged, and my mind hasn’t changed.
Oh, and the reason Vernon Jordan made that statement I linked to is because people were investigating whether Monica got special treatment or not. My memory is fuzzy, but generally it’s that Clinton’s defenders said “no, she didn’t get special treatment” but could not point to a pattern of other interns who had Betty Curry send Vernon Jordan on trips to New York to secure them post-intern employment.
Yes, 90s were very PC. 00s much less so, and the 10’s PCer even than the 90s. Maybe the 20s will see a swing back away from PC.
@albatross11 says:
self interest and self selection mostly. Plus a lot of inertia. the IC is not putting out a party line and expecting people to follow.
@Lady Jane.
I agree 100% with your comments that any sexual highjinks in the White House concern me not at all. I also agree that the Clinton impeachment relating to a blow job in the White House was absurd, and not at all comparable to what Trump is charged with. I was a voting adult when the Clinton impeachment occurred, but I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, because it was essentially political theater with little relationship to reality.
Even though I think what Trump is charged with is much more important than a blowjob, it still amounts to an anthill in the large scheme of things. I’m not sure there was anything wrong at all about the phone call, since maybe it makes sense that Biden should be investigated. And even if it was wrong, I don’t see how one event like that amounts to high crimes and misdemeanors.
I imagine that you still aren’t paying very much attention.
The phone call was just the tip of the very large iceberg. If you think the phone call was the sum total of what happened, you are quite incorrect.
Lewinsky was of legal age. Adultery is a felony in a few states, a misdemeanor in a few more, but as far as I know it is neither in Washington D.C., so I don’t think the adultery itself was grounds for impeachment. I also think that “take sexual advantage of” is probably a misleading way of describing what happened.
Perjury is a more complicated case. I think from the standpoint of most Americans, it is a bad thing but not a very bad thing, not bad enough to justify removal from office.
On the other hand, legal professionals seem to take it very seriously. I remember a conversation I had at the time with one, I think a high level federal judge, from which I concluded that, in his view, it was one of the most serious offenses that someone who was part of the law enforcement system, which would include the president, could commit.
Those are very different situations.
If Obama or Biden were shown to be directly responsible for misleading the FISA court, they ought to suffer legal consequences. But nobody I know of has claimed that. You don’t want to argue that if a city cop beats someone up, the mayor is guilty of assault.
In the Trump case, the claim, whether true or false, is that Trump himself was directly responsible for an illegal act.
In the Trump case, the claim, whether true or false, is that Trump himself was directly responsible for an illegal act.
Yes, that’s the claim. As has been pointed out, there is no direct evidence, only circumstantial, to support this claim. Both Trump and Zelinsky deny. Trump denied if before all of the accusation went public.
If someone does make the claim that Obama/Biden were directly responsible for tasking the FBI with falsely obtaining warrants, that wouldn’t make the case against them stronger merely for having made the accusation.
All of the arguments I’ve seen, here and elsewhere, for why Trump must be directly responsible for his diplomats understanding of Ukrainian “deal,” so to speak, could equally apply to the Obama/Biden situation.
“Well, we don’t have that direct evidence because Trump won’t let his people testify under oath.” Also, Comey refused to reinstate his security clearance status, which severely limited the questions he could be asked during the preparation of the IG report. There are likely other people in that chain of command that didn’t speak to the IG.
“Of course Zelinsky denied it! That’s exactly what he would do if it happened.” Fine, Zelinksy’s denials aren’t dispositive. Neither are those of any of the people surrounding the FISA abuses.
As near as I can figure, the evidence for Trump being “directly responsible” is about as strong as the evidence for Obama/Biden being “directly responsible.”
Where people come down on this issue seems to be almost entirely predicted by their priors.
I haven’t followed the case very closely, but my impression is that multiple people close to the situation have testified that they had been told that Trump did it, although none of them were close enough to have heard Trump telling anyone to do it.
I haven’t heard of anyone testifying that he heard that Obama or Biden told the FBI to mislead the FISA court in order to go after Trump.
I haven’t followed the case very closely, but my impression is that multiple people close to the situation have testified that they had been told that Trump did it, although none of them were close enough to have heard Trump telling anyone to do it.
I haven’t heard of anyone testifying that he heard that Obama or Biden told the FBI to mislead the FISA court in order to go after Trump.
Agreed. That’s “about as strong.” The probative weight of a rumor sourced at multiple levels of hearsay that doesn’t even pinpoint who Trump may have given such an order to is “about as strong” as purely circumstantial speculation.
it was mostly just hand-wringing about adultery from the conservative Christian moral busybody crowd
I was a lot older than twelve, inclined to like (but not completely trust) Bill Clinton (he would have fit right in as a Fianna Fáil politician), thought the Starr enquiry was a personal vendetta verging on witch-hunting – and completely disgusted by the news of the affair.
Because it wasn’t just an affair – he was 49, Monica was 22 and for comparison Chelsea was 15 (who is nearer in age there?). He wasn’t just Some Guy, he was her boss and more importantly, the President. Not to speak of the massive power imbalance between boss and subordinate, he should have been able to keep it in his goddamn pants while in the Oval Office. Add in perjury on top of that and yes, I was disgusted. At least admit to having done it, if it really wasn’t no big deal like we’re all supposed to accept, don’t lie under oath about it with logic-chopping that even a Jesuit would think was going too far.
We seem to have gone from “it’s only adultery, who cares except those prude Christians?” and strap on the kneepads, girls!* to handwringing about “grab ’em by the pussy” – can we talk about moral busybodies in that context? Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I don’t like Trump’s affairs, but there doesn’t seem to have been one (as discovered yet) while he has been President, and it absolutely should not be “okay if our guy does it but not your guy” from the feminists and progressives.
*Quote courtesy of Ms Nina Burleigh:
Nor is the fact that he was basically gotcha’d into committing perjury.
Please no. The investigation was obviously politically motivated, but Clinton had the option of refusing to answer. He didn’t want to pay the political cost, so chose to commit perjury.
Bill Clinton had all the agency in the world here. He was not manipulated into committing perjury by forces beyond his control. He is an adult who took a gamble that they wouldn’t find out, and it failed.
Clinton got a blowjob and lied about it on the stand. The judge in the case didn’t find the lie material to the case, IIRC (Yes, she referred it to the Arkansas Bar) Even if he was accused of orchestrating a break-in to steal Jones’ lawyers files, it still wouldn’t rise to what Nixon did, because it was strictly personal. However, he didn’t orchestrate any break-ins, nor did he fire the people investigating him, nor did he engage in many of the other behaviors which resulted in impeachment.
I have zero interest in rehashing Clinton. I’m unlikely to reply anymore. But the idea you are espousing here isn’t in any way a realistic look at the similarity or differences between Nixon and Clinton.
This is probably a good policy that I should follow as well.
I mean, I probably still will, but this issue is just a morass.
I’m sure the feeling is mutual, but I honestly have the sense that Democrat wrongdoing is excused or swept under the rug, whereas the slightest misstep by a Republican (especially Trump) is declared an unspeakable crime which threatens democracy. This is amplified by the anti-Trump media, which is basically all MSM minus Fox. The fact that Republicans cooperated with Democrats to remove Nixon and that Democrats closed ranks around Clinton supports this view. Jerry Nadler, a major architect of the current impeachment, claiming in 1999 that any impeachment which is not bipartisan is illegitimate, supports this view also.
This mirrors the way in which extremists on either side are treated: (self-declared) communists are not ostracized the way (self-declared) nazis are (FTR, both should be ostracized obviously), antifa is called “anti-fascism activists” and proud boys are called “far right hate group”, etc…
The left has successfully completed its “long march through the institutions” and now controls the media, the academy, and the civil service. Their plan “worked”, with the unintended consequence of severely harming the faith people have in these institutions.
What Trump did was bad. There is no evidence he requested a quid pro quo directly, but it is clear that he wanted one. But there are so many crimes by high ranking political figures which are swept under the rug, that to prosecute this feels very much like selective prosecution, and there is absolutely no reason from a game theory perspective to accept it if you are a Republican. There are the written rules, and there are the de-facto rules. Both sides should play by the same rules.
Apology accepted 🙂
As a non R or D the impeachment looks like a farce to me even on these grounds. The main points are
1. If you are investigating Trump on these grounds you ought to also be concerned with Biden’s alleged behavior as VP. You could weasel out of it if Biden wasn’t running for President currently, but to my ears anyone who is crying for investigation or either Trump or Biden but not both (or neither I guess) is heavily partisan.
2. The argument that Trump shouldn’t have used his office to investigate a political rival can be turned on any investigation into a politician. There is always an election and always a rival somewhere in the mix and if the opposing party isn’t allowed to look for corruption when they are in power then that is basically carte blanche for corruption at the top levels.
3. This I am far less sure about as I am a mile away from being a legal expert, and also may have missed something significant in the process, but it appears that the Ds have completely failed to actually produce evidence and they are rotating their accusations to make something stick which mocks the idea of an inquiry.
“if the opposing party isn’t allowed to look for corruption” is a strawman. Any minimal norm of looking for corruption in an evenhanded and good-faith way would be sufficient to exclude what Trump did. There is no evidence that he had any interest in looking for corruption in Ukraine generally, as opposed to purely corruption involving Biden; and there is significant evidence that he wasn’t even pushing for an actual corruption investigation into Biden, just the announcement of one. This was a pure political smear based on zero evidence and zero honest intent, and the argument that it wasn’t relies on a totally ludicrous assumption of good faith on Trump’s part.
Yeah, presidents who are engaging in good faith investigations don’t send their private attorneys to meet with the most corrupt Ukrainian politicians in office. The Biden effort — especially asking for the public announcement — was entirely about the smear.
In addition, it should be noted clearly that Democrats are not just impeaching Trump for abuse of power but for obstruction – a habit he’s been in before, since it also needs to be noted for people around these parts that the Mueller report did not end with “COMPLETE EXONERATION” but with “A shitton of suspicious stuff happened but the president did not cooperate with the investigation and so no proof could be found.” All this talk of “no evidence” is not a sane critique of the Democrats but of those who are plainly, and without any sane denial that has ever been offered to me or anyone who has made this argument before hiding or destroying the evidence.
Presidents who have good reason to believe their normal investigation agencies are warped by political enmity might have cause to send private attorneys instead.
@Evan Þ
Unfortunately, “everyone else is corrupt so I get to be corrupt too!” is in fact, still corruption! We can’t drain the swamp if we don’t get rid of all corrupt actors. Especially the ones who obstruct justice.
The word “good” here is doing a backbreaking amount of work. This kind of thinking has no logical justification.
@TripleS, we may have different understandings of corruption. What makes you say using private attorneys for public ends is “corrupt”?
@Aftagley, what about the FBI having recently used foreign information and lies to get a warrant to investigate Trump’s campaign?
The word “good” here is doing a backbreaking amount of work. This kind of thinking has no logical justification.
It has been reported, at least here, that Ukraine reached out to Giuliani through the State Department because the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine was holding up visas to Ukrainians that wanted to come to the U.S. to provide information related to these investigations.
That seems like a “good reason.”
There is nothing unseemly about sending a private attorney for diplomatic duty. This is more frequently called a “special envoy,” although Giuliani was not given this title.
@mitv150:
You are credulously citing John Solomon.
Not a good look.
I read the piece you linked to, and it appears that some people were unhappy with John Solomon’s work, as being too much on the pro-Trump side. However, given the press’ near-universal and seething hatred towards Trump, I would expect even a only-slightly-biased-against-Trump columnist to receive that treatment. Therefore, you have failed to present a valid reason to dismiss Solomon out of hand.
There is nothing in that politico article about why John Solomon’s reporting is untrustworthy, except for the fact it looks bad for Biden and good for Trump. What facts have John Solomon gotten wrong?
Vindman also cast aspersions at Solomon. Solomon has laid out all the facts he has reported, with citations. What facts here are wrong?
@Evan Þ
Sending private attorneys on diplomatic missions is inherently sidestepping the accountability processes all public servants should be held to.
@mitv150
Giuliani was not given that title because he is not a special envoy. Special envoys are confirmed by the US Senate, and typically report to the Secretary of State. This gives them accountability. Giuliani had none.
@jermo sapiens
You are quite right. HeelBearCub has not presented a reason to dismiss Solomon out of hand. They have presented a reason to dismiss him after consideration and thought. You, meanwhile, are dismissing the entire press out of hand, and inviting your opponents to do the same. Consider: Due to conservatives’ slavish devotion to Trump, we can expect that anything they say will exonerate him out of hand, so therefore anything positive said about him in any circumstance whatsoever should be firmly ignored. Only… now there’s absolutely no conversation to be had at all.
The journalist mitv150 points to is currently under review; therefore, to take his arguments seriously at present we should at least see some nice corroboration from other sources. @mitv150: Do you have another source – one whose publishers aren’t looking back over? After all, you were merely trying to present *a* good reason — if you have another source that presents a different good reason and it isn’t under review, I’m sure everyone here would be happy to consider it more fully.
EDIT: Or Conrad Honcho could post some corroborating sources before I even ask. That works too! I’ll be reading them now.
I disagree. The fact that members of the blue tribe are up in arms over a suspected red tribe members in their midst is entirely unsurprising and in fact is expected.
Do you think the press has been impartial towards Trump?
That’s a fair point. But it comes with the other side of the coin that due to progressive’s seething hatred of Trump, we can expect that anything they say will accuse him of various crimes, so therefore anything negative said about him in any circumstance whatsoever should be firmly ignored.
I would rather there was a conversation to be had, but not under the conditions where Democratic crimes are ignored and Republican missteps are grounds for impeachment.
@jermo sapiens
Yes, well, you would. Because of your slavish devotion to Trump, remember? Where we can’t have a conversation by you happily throwing out entire categories of evidence because they might disagree with you because then everyone gets to and now there’s nothing left to discuss?
Not every conservative writer is under review for their actions. This one is. That means something. It doesn’t mean he’s guilty of secret Trump propaganda. It just means that you have to at the very least do what Conrad Honcho did: offer up substance in your counterarguments instead of covering your ears and screaming at everyone. Solomon’s citations are long and I haven’t and probably won’t have the time to verify them all, but it does lead us right back around to the special envoy problem.
See, a special envoy nominated by Trump would be easily confirmed by the Republican Senate unless there was something egregiously wrong with them – and since they’ve confirmed judges who’ve never judged before, possibly not even then. So Trump can be sure that as long as he vets well, the envoy won’t be part of any corruption in the state itself and would presumably be reporting to Mike Pompeo, who Trump himself installed and thus can hardly blame the Democrats for on any corruption-related charges. All attempts to root out corruption in the federal government could be done in an entirely above-board, by-the-book fashion with little hassle (Trump has appointed several special envoys already).
Trump didn’t do that, even though it would be easy for him, transparent for the country, and if a genuine effort, unable to backfire on him in this fashion. That means something too.
EDIT: Do I think the press has been impartial? No. They gave him an undeserved spotlight in the primaries, spent months politely waiting for him to start acting presidential instead of calling him on his bullshit, and that in general they assumed he’d be good for headlines but otherwise business as usual until far too late in the process.
As for your “other side of the coin”, buddy my point was that I was showing you the other side of YOUR coin. All you’ve done is flipped it back to the first side like you’re making a counterargument. No. I don’t want to deploy it as a weapon, and I’m telling you not to either. Put it down. That way sophistry lies.
And finally: I want all crimes punished. We should start with the *current* leader – the *current* bigwig, and work our way down the ranks, knocking out each criminal one by one. Then, when our government is free of criminals, we should go through the *previous* administrations – starting with Obama, then Bush II, then Clinton, and so forth as necessary until everyone who committed a crime and got away with it. This is because *current* criminal politicians are the biggest deal, what with being able to still commit crimes.
If this effort doesn’t happen during the Trump presidency, and Biden gets it, then I want Biden charged for any crimes he commits or committed and his staff worked through, *then* Trump, then Obama, etc. If it happens two administrations from now, I want it to be that guy, then the prior president, then Trump, etc.
Is this not the most straightforward approach to this? And shouldn’t we begin now?
It’s true, I didn’t point to an article that lays out the primary case against him. However, to say I offered nothing isn’t correct:
His work was moved from journalism to opinion by the publisher. The piece referenced is an opinion piece, not a fact piece.
Here is a more thorough rundown of the reasons to regard his “reporting” as suspect.
I do not have a slavish devotion to Trump and I dont think that your attempt at telling me what I believe can lead to a productive conversation.
It is my opinion that the press is extremely biased against Trump. Maybe I’m wrong. But it is an opinion that is shared by many and which I can back up quite easily. That is not the same thing as rejecting evidence because I disagree with it. The opinions of other journalists whom I view as biased is simply not convincing to me, nor is it, I gather, to the millions of Trump voters whose democratic rights are being undermined by the current impeachment process.
Weird to respond by editing your own comment instead of creating a new comment, but whatever.
I actually disagree with this, for game theory reasons. There was always going to be a cost to not impeaching Clinton. Now the bill is overdue and there is interest.
I have zero faith that the next Democratic president, whoever and whenever that is, will be impeached by members of his own party, even for wrongdoing that is vastly greater than whatever Trump is accused of doing. This view is shared by millions and millions of Americans. So until that faith is restored, there is simply no reason to play ball.
@tripleS
As far as I know – and please point to evidence if this is incorrect – special envoys do not require senate confirmation. There was a bit of a kerfuffle over this a few years back – see here . Again, as best I can tell, the proposed change to require that ad hoc diplomats, including special envoys, receive senate confirmation never actually passed into law.
Regarding Solomon’s reporting. @heelbearcub is citing Politico as the source for Solomon not being credible. We can play tit for tat on sources for days, but it is not like Politico has covered itself in glory in terms of veracity of their Ukraine reporting.
See: Reporting on “Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump” that involve coordination with “Clinton allies” and, more recently,
reporting on a “conspiracy theory” involving the same “sabotage” efforts. The second article seems to be threading a rather narrow needle in its definition of the “conspiracy theory” as involving DNC coordination without reference to their previous reporting on sabotage and coordination with Clinton allies.
EDIT: To clarify my point. I cannot and do not attempt to assess the credibility of Mr. Solomon’s reporting. His critics do not have any greater credibility than he does.
My original assertion was that many regard him as credible and that, if credible, his work represents a “good reason” for Trump to have been concerned about the normal Ukrainian diplomatic channels.
His work is no less credible than all of the anonymously sourced articles that daily published in other outlets, only to be proven wrong later.
All of this points out what a difficult situation we are in when, effectively, no one in the media can be trusted. Unless I see a video or direct transcript of any claim, I assign it 50% or less likelihood of being accurate (that includes Solomon’s work).
@anyone, really
Is there any good way of moving stuff around to a new branch so we aren’t always working out of this increasingly tall chain? It’s unwieldy.
@jermo
I don’t double post. I responded to your first post to find you’d triple posted, so I put everything there. But there’s not much more to say; if you won’t engage in good faith like Conrad & mitv150, I see no reason to keep trying to convince you. I will laugh at your claim that anyone’s voting rights are being hurt by the impeachment process, though. Impeachment isn’t CTRL+Z; a successful impeachment won’t undo anyone’s votes. It’s there for a reason.
@mitv150
I’m not able to find the good sources I’d like (always posting when I’m busy; terrible habit), but I put to you that removing the Senate from the process makes Giuliani not being a special envoy that much worse if it was purely a matter for Trump and Pompeo. The only corruption they’d have to worry about is their own – the only reason not to make him an envoy for the public to be aware of and be able to hold Trump accountable for is if *they* were the corruption.
But thank you for additional sources. Again, I’m not interested in playing tit for tat or disavowing any right-leaning publication; I just think someone being under review by their publisher is reason enough to want a little back up. I look forward to learning more from your info.
jermo:
Suppose you became convinced Trump was a genuine danger to the country–perhaps he began acting in such an erratic way that it seemed likely he was suffering from some kind of serious dementia, didn’t know what day it was or where he was much of the time, etc. Would you still hold to the same position of refusing to go along with impeachment? Would you expect Republicans in Congress to feel the same way?
If not, then it seems like the core issue is that you don’t think what Trump did was serious enough to deserve impeachment. This was also the position of a lot of Democrats during the Clinton impeachment–sleeping with the help seemed classless and distasteful, but not serious enough to justify impeachment. Then as now, there’s a remarkable correlation between party affiliation and whether or not you feel that the misbehavior in question is serious enough to merit impeachment and removal from office.
I dont see why I’m being accused of bad faith. You’re the one who accused me falsely of being slavishly devoted to Trump, and that Im therefore predetermined to reject any evidence with which I disagree. I’m sorry if I find your journalistic sources unconvincing, but I would be lying if I told you I found it convincing.
Politico thinks John Solomon is not reliable. Ok fine. Politico is entitled to its opinion but I dont see why it would be bad faith for me not to take their opinion as gospel.
Dude, I first used the phrase in a general sense not pointed at you. When you ignored it, I applied it to you to try to make my point. I’m sorry if you took it personally because it was meant to be tinged with a clear sense of irony, but the fact that you don’t like the way you treat other sources being applied to you should maybe be a hint as to the kind of behavior it is. Even saying, “I don’t respect Politico, find another source,” would have been more helpful than “All journalism is bad.” As you can see with both Conrad Honcho and mitv150, it’s not as if there aren’t clear alternatives for argument and debate which let there be a conversation go forward.
No I would support impeachment, and I would expect Republicans in Congress to do so also.
That is correct. More precisely, by not impeaching Clinton, the Democrats set a very low bar for behavior (or a high bar for impeachment), and we are now playing by these rules. Also, I would add a few inches to that bar, in whatever appropriate direction, on the basis that Clinton did not just barely make it through.
@TripleS:
You can always create a new top level comment, but that will just devolve to the same increasingly tall chain as soon as four replies have been made.
Roughly speaking, I don’t think this is a solvable problem. Design work could potentially encourage different behaviors here, but, at the end of day, there isn’t any automatic way to make a free flowing discussion between many people organize itself well.
You say that as if it’s something unusual, so I checked on the histories of the current justices.
Elena Kagan was appointed by Obama to the Supreme Court without ever having been a judge.
John Roberts, currently Chief Justice, was appointed to the Court of Appeals for the DC circuit at a time when had never been a judge. So were Clarence Thomas, Kavanaugh and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Similarly for Breyer, except it was the First Circuit, Alito (Third Circuit), Gorsuch (10th circuit).
Sonia Sotomayor appears to be the only Supreme Court justice who did not start judging at either the appeals court or the Supreme Court level; she was a District Court judge before becoming an appeals court judge.
(where “they,” by context, is HealBearCub)
I can’t speak to consideration or thought, but the evidence offered consisted of the fact that some people who disagree with his political position dislike him, including a congresswoman, and that his employer shifted him from news to opinion. That’s evidence that he is controversial, which he obviously is, but it doesn’t tell us whether what he claims is true. To have a good reason to dismiss him, one would have to look at the evidence he offers.
I don’t see the arguments for good faith investigations being compelling at all here. In a partisan situation they basically heavily favor the more corrupt party. It’s also a weak argument in response to a post that stated investigating both Trump and Biden is the consistent response here.
I would characterize a “bad faith” investigation as one with no predicate. “Go look at all of [politician’s] stuff to see if he’s done anything bad.” But Biden’s activities were widely publicized. If “here’s reports of a politician I don’t like doing a bad thing, let’s investigate” is bad faith, that also rules out investigations of Trump by the House Democrats. They heard he did a bad thing (quid pro quo) and investigated.
At only a slight tangent …
As best I can tell from the news stories, it’s clear that Hunter Biden has made money off his father’s position, both in the Ukraine and in China. It’s less clear that his father has done anything wrong–the closest I have seen documented is bringing Hunter along on a trip Biden took to China, after which a firm Hunter was associated with got benefits from the Chinese government (details missing because I don’t remember them, but someone here probably does). That suggests that the father is willing to help the son get money by appearing to have influence, but not that the father in fact does things for people who help his son.
The claim Trump is following up is that VP Biden pressured Ukraine to remove a prosecutor who was threatening a firm Hunter Biden was associated with. My impression from what I read is that that claim has not been well supported. I don’t know if it was plausible enough to justify Trump thinking it was well supported.
That raises a further tangent. I expect most of us would agree that Trump is not a very reliable judge of real world facts. Suppose there was no factual basis for the claim about VP Biden, but Trump, honestly although stupidly, thought there was. Does that keep his pushing for an investigation from being corrupt? In some legal contexts the standard is what a reasonable man would do–but I don’t think a lot of people would describe Trump as a reasonable man.
The claim Trump is following up is that VP Biden pressured Ukraine to remove a prosecutor who was threatening a firm Hunter Biden was associated with. My impression from what I read is that that claim has not been well supported.
Be careful to define the “claim” here. The claim that VP Biden pressured Ukraine to remove the prosecutor is not in dispute at all – he has bragged about it. The dispute is: 1) how active the prosecutors investigation into Hunter Biden’s firm was at the time of firing; and 2) that there was sufficient other reason for the prosecutor’s firing so as to make the Hunter Biden aspect merely incidental.
@Mitv:
Agreed. He pressured a prosecutor. Apparently other people, including the EU, were pressuring the same prosecutor, on the grounds that he was seen as corrupt.
But I don’t think there is evidence that removing that prosecutor benefited the firm Hunter Biden was associated with.
This is Shokin’s sworn statement on the matter.
According to him, bullet points 7 – 9:
As to the claim the EU was pressuring him, I haven’t seen a source, nor do I know what they were allegedly pressuring him about.
One thing I would very much like to know is who first came up with the idea that Shokin needed to be fired? Was this from Biden himself, or is there some policy wonk in the basement of the State Department who wrote a memo saying “we’re trying to do Good Thing X but we can’t because Shokin keeps doing Corrupt Thing Y?” If so, that document would help ease my mind that what Biden did had the appearance of wrongdoing, but did not actually constitute wrongdoing.
I would also like to know if the EU nations and the IMF who also are said to have supported Shokin’s ousting came to their conclusions independently, or if they were simply accepting the judgment of the US/Biden.
Finally I’d like to know if the US and specifically US Vice Presidents are frequently in the habit of strong arming other nations into specific cabinet-level personnel changes. The US meddles in the affairs of other nations frequently, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them going after a specific guy (examples would be welcome). It’s usually either “smash the entire government and install a new one” or “we want you to enact these policies.”
@TripleS
You have accurately pointed out that Solomon really is the sole source for a lot of the recent Ukraine narrative. (Reporting that Ukraine actually did “meddle” in the 2016 election is pretty well supported, however) The lack of corroboration from other investigative journalists certainly adjusts the level of credibility this reporting has.
Whether the unilateral appointment of Giuliani as an ad hoc diplomat is corrupt, ab initio, depends a lot on your lens.
If your primary is that Trump is super corrupt, the avoidance of Senate scrutiny just adds to the narrative.
If your primary is that Trump is only normal politician level corrupt but abnormal in his understanding of “how things are done,” the avoidance of Senate scrutiny could be explained by any number of things: 1) trying to avoid alerting the traditional channels of Ukraine diplomacy which he has reason to believe (as noted, the source of that reason to believe may not be accurate, but we’re talking about Trump’s state of mind in appointing Giuliani, so I think its fair to assume that Trump found that reporting to be accurate); 2) trying to keep what may be a sensitive investigation quiet while it is being conducted; 3) attempting to prevent his opposition from creating a counter-narrative while the investigation is ongoing, etc….
Imputing corrupt motive to the use of an ad hoc diplomat – a practice all presidents have engaged in and is perfectly within their executive rights – because “if he wasn’t corrupt, why would he do it” feels a lot like “if you’re not a criminal, why wouldn’t you submit to a police interview without a lawyer.”
None of the above, of course, is an argument that Trump’s questions about Biden were not primarily motivated by the political aspect – only that, for me, and potentially many others, Giuliani’s appointment has little probative weight on this point.
Have any Republicans in Congress tried the defense of “Trump had no choice but to go around the checks on government power because of internal corruption”?
I’m not sure what you mean by “going around the checks on government power.” Unitary Executive. The Executive branch and its employees exist to implement the decisions of the Chief Executive, not to check them or hinder them.
That said, yes, the reason the Ukrainians wanted to go through Rudy rather than the State Department was because of State Department (and other) officials stymieing attempts by the government of Ukraine to get information about Biden’s possibly illegal activities to the President and US authorities. It’s an open question as to why the embassy in Kiev would not grant the Ukrainian officials visas (and why they slow walked them to expiration rather than deny them outright with an explanation). I would very much like someone to ask them, perhaps from the Inspector General’s Office so they can provide the non-corrupt motive for their actions.
There are checks on government power that have been installed over the past 200 years. For example, the emails that government officials send and receive, and the decision of how to respond to FOIA requests for them, should be handled by career civil servants.
Your link is interesting and I am still processing. If I was skeptical of the author, are there primary sources I could reference?
People have been baying for a Trump impeachment since the election results came in. With the next election around the corner it’s time to shit or get off the pot.
I can see a couple potential motivations (though not an exhaustive list, obviously)
1) If you put good odds on Trump being out of office after 2020, you need to act now if you want to take credit for prosecuting him (or avoid losing legitimacy in the eyes of The Base for failing to do so)
2) If you expect Trump to win again, this is your chance to get rid of him and run against the less-Teflon Pence instead. This banks on enough Never-Trumpers in the Senate signing on to convict, but even if they don’t you can use it as ammunition during the campaign
Eh, my opinion from the beginning was that the motivation is simply to tar Trump with the stain of impeachment, so as to damage his prospects against Democrat X in the 2020 election. They know he won’t be removed. And they know that even if he was removed, they’d get Pence, who they don’t really like any better. What they actually want out of all of this is to get a Democrat in that office.
Basically, they impeached him so that every article written about him from here on can refer to him as, “Donald Trump, who was impeached by Congress for abuse of power…” They are hoping this will hurt him in the 2020 general (and I suspect it probably will).
but you’d still need to explain why they chose this charge / moment to impeach. In many ways it’s not a good one for them – the timing is awkward
Simplest answer is that their hand was forced. People have been frothing at the mouth for the past three years about “impeach, impeach, impeach!” and, as we see by the debates, all or practically all the potential candidates are at least throwing a bone to the woke crowd. Whatever the party insiders, like Pelosi, might think of the timing or the whole attempt, they have to give the mob something after three years of dangling bait before them, and it has to be now or else that same mob will turn on them in a howling frenzy right in the middle of an election campaign.
Just curious, what could that look like? All the wokes suddenly decide that they had it with Democrats and vote for some Republican/third party candidate just to screw the Dems? I would love to see that happening!
The usual concern is not defection, but turnout.
The usual concern is not defection, but turnout.
Indeed. Imagine a mass social media campaign, the anti-matter version of Rock The Vote, urging all the young college-age people (who often, I am led to believe, provide the willing free labour and legwork for campaigns) not to vote for Democratic Candidate Whomever, since xie is simply another one of the evil centrists and probably secretly a Republican.
Since Mayor Pete can be lambasted as the ‘wrong’ kind of gay and for having a Black People Problem, and Kamala Harris and Corey Booker have fallen away as the Minority Representation Candidates, you’re going to be most likely left with Old Cis Het White Dude/Dudette. If 2016 repeats and the black/Hispanic vote largely stays home instead of turning out at Obama-era levels, then a good chunk of first-time/young voters staying home as well or voting third party is going to have an impact. Enough to swing it for the Republican candidate? I have no idea. But it might hurt enough to make a noticeable dent.
I don’t think Pelosi and the Democrats are even concerned about any sort of campaign, social media or otherwise. Most people who are sufficiently politically active/engaged to mount such a campaign, are also sufficiently mad at Donald Trump that they would not sabotage the Democrats in such a public way. Maybe not all, but enough that I don’t think any significant public defection would occur.
Rather, voting is a pain, and young people (predominantly liberal) are already hard to turn out. Some (non-campaign, general sense) that “these people are boring, better than Trump but nothing to get excited about” might result in a percentage point or two more voters skipping the voting booth to go to the gym/bar/work/computer game/whatever. Basically exacerbating the collective action problem that everyone has with voting. I don’t think Pelosi would worry anyone would do it on purpose; it’s just generic voter enthusiasm.
I think it would have looked more like them staying home. If what you want is full on progressivism and instead they give you tired old neoliberals, what’s the point?
I don’t know exactly what I would have done in 2016 if they’d nominated Jeb!.
edit: ninj’erd
Meh. Doesn’t sound like much of a howling frenzy to me. Still, is this even plausible? I’d thought people who wanted to impeach Trump so badly surely would vote against him almost no matter what, wouldn’t they?
To be slightly more charitable: the electoral base of essentially all House Democrats is so strongly convinced that Trump must be removed from office asap by any and all available means that they would primary anyone who voted against impeachment. Just as the analogous base of House Republicans is so strongly convinced that Trump must be defended regardless of whether he abused his power or not that they would primary anyone who voted for impeachment.
This is why there is zero chance that the 2020 election will produce anything close to an ordinarily-functioning federal government. No matter who is elected, at least 40% of the country will view that person as fundamentally illegitimate and a mortal enemy of the Republic and of their civilization, and you can’t have well-functioning institutions as long as that’s true. I don’t see a way out of this, and it’s going to be a hell of a problem for a long time.
I would argue that all of these measures could have been Better served by a censure, not an impeachment That’s dead on arrival. It looks like Tulsi Gabbard agreed, but no one else. I do wonder if any republicans would have joined a censure vote? It’s probably unlikely, but that would have sent a better message.
I’ve wondered if the impeachment might be a result of a conflict between the interests of the Democratic party and the interests of individual members. Given the strength of anti-Trump feeling among Democrats, especially active ones, individual members of Congress may have felt that failing to support impeachment would risk at least a loss of enthusiasm for their election campaigns, possibly a successful challenge from their left.
I actually had a conversation tonight about this at dinner. My counterpart is old Chicago machine. His dad worked for both Daleys, he works in Cook County politics. He supports impeachment, but agreed with me that these charges are not as strong as other things that could have been brought. For instance, I still think releasing the transcript was a huge blunder that revealed what Trump/Zelenski think of other foreign leaders, his random bombing of Shayrat base were much bigger threats to national security. At home, I think the Mueller reports obstruction section (although weak), is actually a stronger charge. My counterpart thinks things like the Muslim ban and Kurd abandonment are much worse.
But then he said something particularly interesting, that Trump’s biggest mistake was going after, “business as usual.” That’s what this guy thinks is the core of it, every Rep and Senator wants to be in the position where they can get their son/daughter a Beau Biden deal, and many already have. While deals like that offend most people’s sensibilities, this guy basically said that patronage and nepotism are the only point to politics.
Few months ago I read this :
(https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cguic0/serious_what_social_issue_are_we_currently_facing/eulnr7i/)
I read these lines, and wondered : How do you see them? How do you relate to them? Do they sound paranoid, or as a good point well made, or as an undecided issue, worth having an exchange about?
The observation (i.e the final sentence) is spot on and a real problem, the explanation (i.e everything before that sentence) is toxic junk.
Well-off people are not demons from hell, but too many of them support economic policies that in my view do not do enough for the poor, because they believe that who ends up well off has a large component of moral desert and a smaller one of luck than is actually the case.
I think the bigger issue is people sort of talking out both sides of their mouth on the issue, or wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Things like “fast food/retail should be a job for high-school kids, not a long term job/career”, ignoring the fact that kids can’t work during school hours or (ideally) night shift hours during the school year. We need adults working those jobs because the supply and hourly availability of high schoolers doesn’t meet demand, AND because we don’t actually have enough “good” jobs to keep all of those fast food/retail adults employed in other areas.
So people need adults in those industries to get the service they want/expect/demand, but then flip around and talk about how adults just shouldn’t work those jobs to justify making those jobs incapable of sustaining adult cost-of-living needs without thinking about the actual implications of having no (or even just many fewer) adults working those jobs.
Maybe we could just abolish truancy/child labor laws?
Probably can’t cover demand. We need to cover somewhere around 22-25 million fast food and retail jobs. We only have ~18 million high school students, and some of those are already counted in the 22-25 million. Even if we put all the high school students in America to work we come up short. Maybe we can bring in middle schoolers but you still probably need close to 100% participation from all middle-high school students to make it work.
The well-off are fine with using immigrants to stagnate wages for retail/fast-food or even force them lower. And if you object, they get bonus points for calling you a racist.
I agree with you. I’m probably one of the white collar people the redditor was talking about, and do think it’s a combination of moral desert and luck. My main difference is that even if the workers do not deserve higher wages, they deserve more respect than they get. You can technically argue that they are paid a fair enough wage to take abuse from customers, but no one should abuse customers in the first place. I wish the economy was in such a state that rude customers could be removed from the premises with more ease.
My responses:
1. I hate the term “wage slavery” and I have to force myself not to dismiss anyone who uses it.
2. I think suffering has at least as much to do with your state of mind as your actual conditions.
3. The statements about wanting someone under them are probably true of about 10% of the middle and upper class; by far the largest feeling on this issue is apathy.
4. I think the wages paid to most service sector employees are fair. That these wages are also not enough to live on is irrelevant.
5. I’m sorry that people are suffering and I wish they weren’t.
This seems counter intuitive. If wages are insufficient then the only way that people are being employed is if they have some other resource (family, friends, government programs or savings) to support themselves. This is effectively a transfer of wealth from these other resources to the fast food chain’s bottom line, which seems unfair to me, particularly the government support as it is essentially an undisclosed subsidy to the company.
It seems strange to call this a “subsidy” to the employer, since if those people weren’t employed, presumably these other resources would be paying _more_ to support the now-unemployed person.
Also obviously false. None of the service workers I observe appear to be starving to death.
As I have pointed out before, the average real wage in the developed world at present is twenty to thirty times what the world average was through most of history. Given that, “not enough to live on” is nonsense, careless or dishonest rhetoric.
As best I can tell, what it comes down to is, roughly, “not enough to live the sort of life I would be at least moderately comfortable living.”
I probably co-sign all those points, and I would supplement “5.” by saying I would support my taxes going up to pay for a wage subsidy.
It kinda seems like the author has never talked to a real human person, and is arguing with a strawman made out of particularly callous Fox News commentator’s misremembered talking points. Most fast-food jobs being pretty crappy, and that being a bad thing for workers, is much more easily explained by market incentives than cartoon evil, and more importantly way easier to address if we don’t start off with a not-even-wrong idea of how we got to the current state of affairs.
I read those lines, and wonder whether the author would prefer I use the automated checkout line at the grocery store so as to spare the poor workers their “slavery”. I don’t “like burned-out, sick workers”, I don’t “like workers to be kept in financial instability”, I just want to buy my stuff and be on my way. All else being equal, I’d rather buy my stuff from happy people, but this guy and his class-warfare shtick are doing their level best to burn out any reserves of charity I might have in that area and the robot isn’t giving me any guff.
…I do not know about the author, but fucking yes. The entire point of automation is that it permits nessesary tasks to get done with less manhours, which means each manhour can be more highly paid. There is not a finite amount of tasks in need of doing, and mechanizing drudgework does not doom the people thus replaced to eternal joblessness, but instead sets them free to do work that requires more of them, and also pays them more.
I know for a fact I am correct about this, because the people rendered surplus by the tractor and the combine harvester (IE; To a first approximation, the entire workforce) did not, in fact, starve to death.
Why are they not doing this work already?
For the same reason peasants did pesanting before the mechanization of agriculture. I have ideas about the exact mechanisms behind this, but I am a lot less certain about them than I am about the utter falsity of luddism.
And yeah, this. It strikes me as utterly bizarre that some people might prefer their interactions with unskilled labor employees to be one where the employee is like, visibly stressed and unhappy and beaten down. I suppose I can conceive of fantastical supervillains who might prefer this sort of thing, so that they can in fact lord their superiority over the servant class.
But I, and I suspect most people, want the exact opposite. We want to believe these people are happy and content. We want them to smile at us and be cheery. Now maybe that’s all a big lie. Maybe we shouldn’t want that. But the notion that the average Wal-Mart shopper gets off on the visible suffering of the checkout clerks is just so far removed from real life…
Yeah, people don’t really think in these abstract hypothetical possibilities in their day to day lives. They would prefer happier workers to sad workers because the latter make them more uncomfortable. But how many people give that much that thought to the happiness of workers when they’re shopping anyways?
Fully agree. I wouldn’t really have a problem with this post if he had just said “most people don’t really care whether the minimum wage employees they interact with are comfortable or not”, but instead he attributed active malice and claimed that I take active pleasure in the discomfort and suffering of such people, which is simply not true.
@Matt M
I tend to agree. I think the first part of the post:
Is pretty accurate, particularly if you parse “completely human” to mean having less value than themselves. The next sentence:
Is certainly true for some people, and probably true for many people, although it isn’t a conscious, active desire that people seek out. Most people would deny feeling this way if asked, but only some of them would be correct.
After that, the post of goes off the rails, especially since it is directed at the entire middle class (which is way wrong) instead of directing it at some upper class/elite types, where it is still probably mostly wrong (or at least hyperbole) but might have a ring of truth to it.
A good example are people that go to chick fil a over McDonalds because their workers are more visibly happy. From what I can tell the happiness is authentic, and seems to be mainly caused by better hours, better managers, and slightly better wages and benefits. It’s more expensive, but I’m willing to pay a premium to support better business practices.
To deploy my favorite movie quote of all time: “Deserve’s got nuthin’ to do with it.”
It is *incredibly* unlikely that any future state involves low-skill workers getting higher pay or better treatment than they do today. Status quo is probably their best-case scenario. Worst case involves massive unemployment due to increasing automation (which we see in high minimum wage jurisdictions).
Nobody is entitled to anything. Luck is, always has been, and always will be, a huge factor in the quality of our lives. Every attempt by humans to mitigate or reduce that fact has mostly made things worse (and occasionally resulted in large piles of skulls).
The basic reaction I have is: If you think problem X isn’t being addressed then you had better put that problem into context of some kind. If you want to say ‘the incarceration rate of black males is awful’ that is different from ‘the incarceration rate of black males is awful and no one is doing anything about it, the latter requires that you put current rates into context with the past to show that things aren’t getting better. If you are going to talk about ‘wage slavery’ and the plight of the bottom economic classes and aren’t immediately discussing how things have gotten better/when you think they stopped getting better then its hard to view you as being even slightly objective.
Anyone who has ever worked retail or fast food should know this is true or at least plausible:
Most people aren’t actively unkind or cruel to low-level service workers, though a more substantial minority than the typical SSC reader probably realizes are. But I think it’s true that relatively few middle-class people see such workers as genuinely equal in dignity to themselves.
As always, there are lower levels still. Sex workers probably have it worse than anyone in retail or fast food, as do many workers in non-public-facing jobs.
I can believe that most middle-class people don’t really care about low-level service workers or see them as less dignified, but what makes you think they actually want them to be burned out and unstable?
Standard confirmation bias would be enough.
Not particularly endorsing the original piece, but a full time permanent service worker would interact with plenty of people who a) presume that SWs are an underclass, and therefore b) seek out confirmatory evidence and ignore non-corroboratory evidence. That could easily seem like active enmity.
I don’t think any kind of majority of customers are assholes, but I have personally witnessed people being abusive to service workers enough that I expect there is a lot more I haven’t seen.
I doubt customers do, but I work in HR and I’ve met managers that like their employees burned out and unstable (not sick, I can think of no reason to want that). In a well functioning organization, those managers get fired or demoted, but it’s not much of a stretch to assume there are badly functioning organizations that don’t realize they have a sadistic manager, especially since many form essentially abusive relationships with the employees where they feel like they are too powerless to tell any one. Again a minority, but a memorable minority.
HeelBearCub is right to an extent, TBH. Many people want to assert dominance over service workers without actively wanting them to be miserable. (Which isn’t always very consoling.) Also I might be conflating the desires of retail customers/people in general with retail/fast food corporations, who might have a material interest in keeping workers in a state of exhausted docility without the customers endorsing it.
For most of us, our compensation is a mix of money, benefits, and quality of life. Most of us would not trade our current job for one that paid twice as much and was 100% drudgery and unpleasantness.
For some people, power over others is part of the effective compensation. That includes some bosses, teachers, policemen, prison guards, judges, etc. The problem from an organizational perspective is that the fun kind of exercising power over other people is often not the kind that actually pushes forward the goals of the organization, and in fact is quite often really destructive.
From a moral perspective, the problem is usually even worse, because lording it over other people and making them jump when you say frog is usually quite nasty for them, and in general, you getting to indulge your liking for smacking around people you mouth off to you/forcing your attractive employees to go out with you/etc., makes the world a much worse place.
Anybody who talks about “wage slavery” absent things like legitimate human trafficking leads me to conclude very poor things about them. My uncharitable response then is: “Be less useless”.
I feel somewhat the same way, but for every time someone describes workers as “freely” interacting “voluntarily” in a “marketplace”. The words just land with a thud of meaninglessness.
I think the use of the term “wage slavery” is primarily a reaction to this particular liberal framework, which seems to dominate nearly all economic discourse. I personally don’t like to use the term for Worst Argument in the World reasons. But we do seem to be lacking good terminology for situations that are both non-voluntary and non-slavery (i.e., all laws and governance, including enforcement of private property).
I think very few people in the US are actually in a “work in this job for this boss or starve” sort of situation. Many are in a situation in which the available choices of jobs all kinda suck. One argument for UBI and universal healthcare is that they would ensure that everyone had some kind of option other than working some horrible job to either keep food on the table or keep access to the lifesaving medicine their kid needed.
The other problem can be that a lot of people don’t have the resources (time, energy) to look for another jab and/or don’t have the reserves to miss some paychecks in the transition from one job to another.
It’s also difficult to find out what a prospective work environment is like.
One of the biggest breakthroughs for me occurred a few years ago, when I realized that pretty much all human interaction exists somewhere on a continuum between free and unfree, voluntary and involuntary, consensual and non-consensual. And that basically no activity could be categorized as occurring exclusively at one end of the spectrum.
It seems obvious in retrospect. But this took me years to wrap my mind around. I doesn’t help that much of our political discourse is based on the assumption that these are discrete dichotomies, e.g. “you are either free or you are a slave”
I see them as a bad point badly made and as an issue worth having an exchange about (but I am deeply skeptical that the redditor has anything to contribute to that discussion).
One thing to keep in mind is that service workers frequently serve as the only available point of contact for people who are suffering at the hands of the organization (this is a particularly visible problem when you consider call-center workers). When a customer is under stress because of an organizational failure, it can be difficult for them to remember that the person they’re talking to isn’t actually in a position to meaningfully address that failure.
For example, I recently ordered a new laptop. It arrived non-functional and a long series of support calls, factory resets, and recurrences of the problem ensued. Eventually, I found myself explaining to the third person on the fourth support call in a day that the factory reset process was completely failing. The actual blame for my issue lies with the company that sent out a defective product, the retail company that punted to vendor support on a product that arrived broken, the people who understaffed the call center so that any support call has a multi-hour wait, and the people who set up the call center to consist entirely of unskilled workers reading from a script that only has one solution to this sort of problem. But I had no way of interacting with any of those people; the only person I could interact with was the poor, overworked, stressed-out call center worker who was probably already going to get yelled at because my call took the longer than 70 seconds to close. I successfully remembered this and incurred the stress of not talking about the severe failures with that person, but I can understand how easy it is for people to fail at that.
This gets even worse when the service worker has a hand in the situation. The problem is still that they’re over-worked, under-trained, and un-supported (all of which are organizational problems). But that’s easy to forget for someone facing the consequences of a mistake they wouldn’t have made in a better situation.
Blame for this can reasonably be thrown at the people who set organizations up like this and the market/social conditions that make doing so profitable. But claiming that the office worker who gets angry when they realize that they’re going to have to work late tonight because their lunch has been sitting under the warming lights for 30 minutes is acting out of active malice or “doesn’t see service workers as human” is not only absurd, but actively counterproductive to any discussion of these issues.
Here’s an article describing the phenomenon of what happens to cults when their prophecies don’t come true, and how it applies to the Corbyn movement within the Labour Party. Not being British I’ll take the author’s word for how things were there during the recent election.
Being American, I can say this absolutely rings true, for just about any US political faction I can think of. Everybody has failed, or is failing, and nobody can admit it or change.
Did you know that the English word tomboy, for a girl whose behavior and pursuits, especially in games and sports, are considered more typical of boys dates back to 1545-55?
I wonder what sports Elizabeth I played before she was Queen.
I did not, but I’m not surprised. It seems to be a typical behavior for a minority of young girls throughout the ages, though with the expectation that they grow out of it. I’m wondering what percentage of tomboys are now going to be sorted as trans men, for better or worse?
They won’t. Soccer and softball continue to be the source of “they’re all gay, the lot of them” jokes, without coming close to “they’re all men, the lot of them” because the pursuit of sports and games is far different from changing one’s own presentation.
I wouldn’t be too surprised (maybe just a tiny bit surprised) to learn there’s no strong correlation between girls who were tomboys and girls who eventually identify as trans men. At least, not if the tomboys in question are typically under the age of about 12 or 13. Girls who are tomboys in junior high and high school, yeah OK maybe that’s a little different.
Young (i.e. prepubescent) girls who are tomboys, in my experience, are often tomboyish in a few highly visible ways, but still girly in other ways.
@Jaskologist
This is a response to your comment in the last OT that I figured (15 minutes after posting) might be prudent to relocate to the hidden OT, since a giant screed against the Bible seems pretty CW-ish. I do think it still clears “true” and “necessary”, if not “kind”.
I presume that by “Scripture” you mean some version of the Christian bible and the associated teachings of some sect of Christianity. I’m not sure I trust its track record as a source of Truth, Divine or otherwise.
Scientifically speaking, it’s full of inaccuracies. I could go for the potshot at the Genesis creation myth, but that one’s pretty solidly been declared “figurative”. Instead, how about all of the instances of Jesus or his followers healing the sick (epileptics, lepers, the blind, etc.) by casting out unclean spirits or forgiving their sins? Seems a bit odd, given what we know now about the causes of these diseases (bacteria, viruses, nerve damage, etc.). Real help to medical science that’s been.
I don’t think it’s fair to attribute the success of the Scientific method to the religious leanings of early scientists. Seems the “perform experiments and develop theories based on the results” part was the magic ingredient; that seems to be the component that still forms the basis of modern secular science. Scientists might be inspired by the bible, but at the end of the day it’s a question of which passages must now be reinterpreted as metaphorical in order to maintain consistency with our growing understanding of the world.
But maybe the bible is instead a great source of moral truth? Not sure where it gets that authority from, but let’s go with it! Well then, we ought to be careful not to skip over giant sections of this timeless source of truth that are inconvenient to modern sensibilities! For:
So, get ready to stone to death anyone who gathers sticks on the Sabbath [Numbers 15:32-36] and any “stubborn and rebellious sons” [Deuteronomy 21:18-21]! Oh, btw, slavery is a-ok, as long as you free your slaves after 6 years [Exodus 21:2] (unless you sell your own daughter into slavery, she stays a slave [Exodus 21:7]).
Wait what’s that, “The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it.” [Luke 16:16]? I thought you said…well, whatever. So instead of stoning sabbath-breakers, we should love our neighbors as ourselves [Mark 12:31, etc] and whatnot. Sounds good. But also,
Why do I need to hate my family, Jesus? I thought you were all about peace and love?
Well then. Guess I have to hate my family. I suppose we’re still on board with stoning them if they worship another god? [Deuteronomy 13:6-10] Or maybe just cursing them and shunning them in this new enlightened era. [1 Corinthians 16:22]
Am I cherry-picking? Yes I’m cherry-picking. There’s a lot more commandments about loving your neighbor and so forth than ones about hating your family (and even more about loving Jesus). But why are there any about hating your family? More importantly, even if all the stoning laws were overturned by Jesus’ new commandment, why the hell would God give a set of such arbitrary and abhorrent laws to the Israelites rather than just telling them to love God and each other?
Overall: Some wise advice that’s stood the test of time in the New Testament, a bunch of evil commandments in the Old Testament, and throughout both numerous commandments to love a God that I’m fairly certain doesn’t actually exist. I’ll stick to my Reason, thank you very much.
I’ll jump in a bit, but you’re a bit all over the place so I’ll address what I find the most prominent:
1. On demon-possession. Supposing people already believe in supernatural good (God), why is it so odd that the same people would believe in supernatural evil? While we live in a rationalist culture, it’s in the minority of all cultures not only time-wise but today. On the one hand, as those such as CS Lewis have suggested, the strategy of demons among rationalists may well be to pretend to not exist. On the other hand, there’s *still* a lot we don’t know about disease and psychiatry hasn’t exactly had the best history in working through paradigms to diagnose people’s mental disorders.
2. Jewish law looks retrograde now, but context is important. Can you point to less “evil” codes of law from 1500 BC or so? Anyway, the Christian interpretation is that these laws are laid out for an imperfect people in that particular cultural setting at that particular point in history.
3. So you seem to be contrasting the justice part of God with the merciful part of God. The Old and New Testament God are one in the same. Even in the Old testament, God is said to be slow to anger, and King David is said to “delight” in the law…all those weird things in 2 that you scoff at. Why would that be? Were these people all insane? I don’t think so – in a peaceful, developed society like that of the modern west, it’s tempting to view God only as a god of love and mercy. But even in the present day, if you are a Yazidi girl, a Rwandan Tutsi, a Burmese Rohinga, or anyone else who has been done great injustice – murder, rape, betrayal, theft, etc., you don’t want a god of love and mercy and can’t relate to that. You want a god of justice. The Christian approach is to leave that vengeance and justice to God, and not take matters into your own hands.
Anyway, this is all to say that context is quite important. It sounds like you’ve already reached a conclusion and will read selectively only as far as it supports your pre-conceived notions. I on the other hand have also reached a conclusion, and also will read only to support my pre-conceived notions. We both have our biases
1. Whether diseases are caused by the Devil or by bacteria, it all comes down to the famous Problem of Evil. Why would an omnipotent, benevolent God allow the continued existence and influence of a being determined to thwart His plans and tempt His creations away from communion with Him? Alternatively, why would God allow tiny creatures to cause immense pain and suffering to people, preying especially on the young and the elderly? If you believe the Bible, Jesus clearly had the power to cast out disease–why does he not use this power to cast out all disease? This was one of the core reasons for my deconversion, along with the lack of modern divine revelations and the number of conflicting conceptions of God between various religions and sects.
2. I haven’t looked but agree that I would be hard-pressed to find a significantly less evil code of law from the time period. However, I similarly doubt that Jewish law stands out as a paragon of justice–I suspect it’s quite similar to other contemporaneous law codes. “Imperfect people in a particular cultural setting”…sure, but if you tasked me with writing some Commandments for the Hebrews, I still think I could do better while still staying within their cultural understanding. “As I have released you from captivity in Egypt, so shall you release from captivity any of your foreign slaves.” Maybe expand “thou shalt not kill” a bit, let’s keep it realistic though. “In your conquests, you may slaughter those men who oppose you; but you shall not kill their wives and children, nor those men who surrender to you; for they have done no wrong.” Seems a marked improvement over the divinely-approved genocide of Deuteronomy 2. How about “If someone gathers sticks on the Sabbath day, thou shall shun them for a month” instead of the stoning penalty?
Or what if God gave up the whole “chosen people” thing and decided to go with something bigger? The sky darkens across the globe, and a booming voice comprehensible in every language says, “I AM THE ONE AND ONLY TRUE GOD, SO LISTEN UP IF YOU DON’T WANT TO GET SMITTEN. THOU SHALT NOT KILL. PERIOD. ANYONE. IF YOU TRY TO KILL SOMEONE I WILL SMITE THEE WITH LIGHTNING OR FIRE.” God then makes good on his threat, and the next couple thousand attempted murderers are violently smitten with holy fire. Within a year, armies have disbanded (they’re useless for conquest and unnecessary for defense) and murder rates are zero. Occasionally someone will be struck by lightning as they attack someone in a fit of rage, but incidents get rarer and rarer–people respond to incentives. The great thing is, this strategy works no matter the time period or culture! However, the God of the Hebrews seems pretty A-OK with genocide…
3. “Even in the Old testament, God is said to be slow to anger” Counterpoint: “And when the people complained, it displeased the Lord: and the Lord heard it; and his anger was kindled; and the fire of the Lord burnt among them, and consumed them that were in the uttermost parts of the camp.” [Numbers 11:1] One of many examples of God smiting the Israelites for the smallest offenses.
“You want a god of justice.” Is “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” truly justice? The idea that people should be punished for crimes they didn’t commit strikes me as a perversion of the concept, if not its exact opposite. (Though come to think of it, that idea forms the basis of the entire Jesus story in the new testament as well–Christ somehow “dying for our sins”.) How about the entire book of Joshua, in which God helps Joshua and his army slaughter man, woman and child in city after city that God has “delivered” to the Israelites? From my reading, the residents of e.g. Jericho didn’t do much of anything to hurt the Hebrews, other than simply exist on land that God had promised them. In what universe is it “justice” to murder the children of a city that you’re conquering? It’s ironic that one has to appeal to an insane level of moral relativism in order to justify this book as a source of universal moral truth.
You’re right about one thing: Context is important. And the relevant context looks to me like these stories were written in a brutal era of history, and fully revel in that brutality, doing little or nothing to rise above it. I’d expect better from a God of mercy or a God of justice.
And you’re also right about our biases and my somewhat selective reading. There are numerous passages in the Gospels where Jesus imparts valuable and wise moral teachings, and since these are the ones most Christians I know follow I generally don’t try to dissuade people from their religion. But all I need is one example of the biblical God committing a horrible, unjust atrocity to prove that He isn’t a figure I’d call “omnibenevolent”.
I doubt it. Maybe before your apotheosis you audition by being the Afghanistan theater commander for a few years. Your proposed policy of “kill everyone who disagrees with me” will surely succeed where the last twentyish years of trying to impose a more perfect code of law on a rather barbaric society failed, right?
To build character, is what I usually figure. The existence and extent of free will among created beings seems to be the most popular explanation however.
You yourself seem pretty “A-OK” with mass murder:
Of course, those people deserve it, so that’s different. Did the slaughtered Canaanites deserve it? The general assumption is that yes, they did. I certainly find God smiting the Canaanites because of their wickedness more palatable than the idea that the Canaanites were wicked because God smote them. Still, both individuals (Rahab) and groups (Gibeonites) were cut some slack within the spirit if not the letter of the command to kill every breathing thing. And of course the Hebrews didn’t actually carry out the command. As for the children, if they would inevitably have grown up to be evil, perhaps killing them is justified, especially if an afterlife exists and they would have better outcomes there as children than as evil adults. Obviously this isn’t something that should be guided by human judgment, but that’s not what’s being claimed here.
The authors of the Old Testament aren’t too keen on describing in detail what exactly it was about the Canaanite practices that were so bad, but “sacred prostitution” and human sacrifice were cited.
The society you live in keeps millions of slaves in its “prisons”, many of them for a lot longer than six years. I don’t say this as some sort of weird gotcha, merely to point out that involuntary servitude in some form or another appears to be a simple commonplace fact of human social existence that needs to be regulated.
Also, if an omnipotent God exists, we are effectively his slaves merely by existing. If existence is good and we can’t exist without being slaves, then obviously slavery can’t be bad per se.
Is it “just” that e.g. I might be stupid and deformed because my mother was a drunkard? It certainly seems pretty baked into our mode of existence. It also seems like a pretty strong incentive for pregnant women not to get hammered.
@sfoil:
Not really true. A slave is someone you command and make threats to. God isn’t required to do either of those.
I feel that humanity could lose that trait without ceasing to be humanity. If there were an omnipotent God who could effect it.
What is your point here? Is there some reason pregnant woment shouldn’t drink, other than this incentive? Do you think that others should be drinking as little as pregnant women do?
@Dacyn
A slave is someone you have absolute power over. I can issue commands and make threats to anyone (including God), that doesn’t make them my slave. Likewise, someone can be my slave without my having to command or threaten them.
I’m not trying to “defend” human physiology but rather point out that suffering for (or benefiting from!) the actions of our parents is a pretty fundamental fact of our being and give a specific obvious example. I’m not as sure as you that generating a new consciousness completely independent of its inputs would look like humanity; in fact it seems to violate causality.
@Atlas
Indeed. And they kept it up for nearly twenty years using only the resources locally available in one of the most economically backwards/unproductive regions on Earth. The enlightened alternative has cost about a trillion dollars over a similar timeframe without, as far as I can tell, actually delivering much better governance to the typical end user. This suggests that their approach has some merits over alternatives.
“Character” would include the state of one’s soul after death. There’s some theological arguments to be made in favor of this, but I won’t claim any special knowledge. Probably some suffering is necessary for us to have any sort of existence separate from God, but I do agree that what we see around us is way beyond whatever the minimum amount possible for us to live is.
My one-sentence summary of Alvin Plantinga’s argument in God, Freedom, and Evil would be: “free will” is the ability to make a choice between good things and bad things, and the fact that bad things result from this ability is offset by how much better it is to choose good things when you could have done otherwise. The actual argument is more subtle and specific, although by no means completely abstruse (most notably Plantinga doesn’t claim this is actually true, only that it’s logically possible).
@sfoil:
I just don’t see where you are getting your definition of “slave”. Yes, by “command and make threats to” I implicitly assumed they were commands and threats that could be backed up. What is an example of a relationship you would consider slavery that involved no commands or threats, except for humans and God?
Incidentally Google defines “slave” as “a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them”, which I think is much closer to my definition than to yours.
I don’t want to “generat[e] a new consciousness completely independent of its inputs”. I just want pregnant drinking not to lead to problems. You are thinking in black and white.
If tomorrow we found a cure for the problems caused by pregnant drinking, that would not mean that causality had been violated.
Yeah, lots of things are logically possible.
I don’t think that is closer to your definition at all, which is incredibly broad and encompasses stuff like threatening someone if they don’t obey your command to stay off your lawn. It also presupposes the existence of a legal system, and I don’t find it at all hard to imagine slavery without a legal system unless the law is defined very broadly.
You own a cotton plantation in the Old South and one of your slaves gives birth. That child is now your slave, no threats or commands involved.
Alternately, you give birth. The child is hardly in more position to contest your authority than the first case.
I just want pregnant drinking not to lead to problems.
Well, so do I. It seems to me that this is something we simply don’t know how to do, but probably isn’t physically impossible. But fetal alcohol exposure is far from the only mechanism by which children suffer for the deeds of their fathers. For instance, your own father could have reproduced with his sister instead of your mother, and the resulting offspring would in all likelihood have had far worse outcomes than you yourself have had. This would be true, albeit probably to a lesser extent, had it been your grandfather instead. And the root problem is that our existence is a proximate effect of our parents’ choices. When those choices are bad (contrary to God’s will), their descendants can expect to suffer for it. It’s difficult to see how this problem can be fixed without either everyone being the direct result of a perfectly good cause or without just being uncaused.
@sfoil: If you write “@Dacyn” at the start of threads it will send me a notification, and I can respond faster (or at all in the case where this thread is dead enough that I stop checking it)
Okay, I admit that the way I phrased my definition did not perfectly convey what I had in mind. Even if it is a command (which is arguable), telling someone to get off your lawn is a one-time thing, and I understand slavery to be a recurrent feature of a relationship. You also seem to conflate my definition with Google’s (you write “It also” when the previous sentence is about mine, and the next sentence is about Google’s). I also don’t find it hard to imagine slavery without a legal system, so in that respect we are equally far from Google. In any case, I only brought in Google as an illustrative example, as the relevant thing for this argument is not the dictionary definition but rather the moral implications.
Regarding a child born in the Old South, I think the legal aspect is actually relevant here: the plantation owner asserts the right to command the child, even if he does not actually yet do so.
The question of to what extent ordinary children are slaves is a child’s rights issue and is probably not relevant to this discussion. (But I think the point you were trying to make is probably obviated by what I wrote in the previous paragraph.)
Since you seem to be a Christian, I could also quote Galatians 4:7 in favor of the proposition that God’s absolute power does not imply we are his slaves. (Though quoting Scripture as an atheist is not always a good dialectical choice.)
Finally, regarding whether avoiding bad effects breaks causality: It sounds like you are saying there is only one good mode of being, and so if we got rid of all the bad, everyone would be clones of each other or something. First of all, I don’t believe there is only one good mode of being. Plenty of the differences between people are harmless, and there’s no reason they can’t propagate genetically and thus preserve the human idea of parents taking after their children. Second, even if it is necessary to allow some harmful effects to propagate, it seems implausible that this accounts for the size of the effects that we observe.
Incidentally, if “bad” to you means “contrary to God’s will”, I would prefer it if you tabooed it for this discussion (i.e. when you want to say “bad”, just write out “contrary to God’s will” or something else that specifies what you mean). I don’t intrinsically care what God thinks except to the extent that he may have good ideas about what to do.
@Dacyn
I should have made it more clear when I was talking about your statement and the third party definition.
Well, the main thing is that while slavery has clearly meant somewhat different things at different times (e.g. a lack of distinction between “servant” and “slave”), I think it does also have some underlying, common characteristic such that an Old Testament Hebrew, a Roman patrician, a Southern plantation owner would all be able to recognize the existence of slaves and slavery in each others’ societies pretty easily despite operating under different customs and legal regimes — and as I implied in my original comment they’d probably be able to see it in ours, too. And I think the common thread is the degree of power the master has over his slave.
As far as the human relationship to God, parent-child, sovereign-subject, and (with Christ) husband-wife are the more common analogies used in Christian theology. Islam uses the master-slave analogy quite liberally however. At any rate, I think these are all saying basically the same thing: God is more powerful than we are. And in the end, absolute power — in this case omnipotence — just is absolute power whether you want to call the person who possesses it king, father, master, or whatever. God is, in fact, all of these things. You can say “tyrant” too, if you don’t like it: it doesn’t change the reality of the situation.
My understanding is that (at least in the period shortly before the Civil War), the owner didn’t have to assert anything: the child was his slave by default, whether he wanted it to be or not. He’d have to make an assertion in order to make the child not his slave. Like an inheritance: if someone wills you some money, you can immediately donate it to charity, but it’s still yours and you have to take some positive action to disclaim possession.
I think it is relevant. We don’t call infants slaves but the fact is that they exist completely at the mercy of others. This includes any “rights” they possess: those rights can only possibly be effectively asserted by others — even slaves can do better than that! Of course, even though infants are arguably in an even more abject position than adult slaves, we (and not only we — I think this is what Paul was getting at in Galatians 4:7) expect parents to take better care of their children than masters of slaves. But ideally, there wouldn’t be any real difference at all: you’d treat everyone you have power over in some ideal manner, whether they’re subjects, children, or slaves.
The point of all of this is my own answer to why the Bible doesn’t condemn slavery: because “slavery” is at its root just another form of hierarchy. If God exists, so does at least one hierarchical relationship (God and everything else) and you can’t expect a pro-God document like the Bible to say that’s bad.
I’m actually trying to say that our mode of being, which is only one of many possible, is good. We can certainly make it better, just like I can build a house instead of sleeping out in the open: it’s absurd in my opinion to say that “God intended us to live outside” but not that “God gave us the ability to build houses”, and I feel about the same way about stuff like germ line modification. At the same time, our mode of being (which is good, and also created by God) unavoidably involves bad things happening to us outside of our control. One of those things that’s outside our control is the actions of our parents. This is what, I think, Numbers 14 is talking about.
I actually don’t think the terms are interchangeable in general, I was just asserting it in that particular instance.
As far as your indifference to God’s opinion: if he exists in the manner usually claimed, he’s either stacked the deck such that what “he thinks” is always correct, or he can (does?) only think correct thoughts.
@sfoil: Let’s review the original argument. You wrote:
What I am claiming is that having someone assert that they have the right to command you to do anything they want is bad per se, and that the fact that absolute power is inescapable has no bearing on this fact. We seem to be unable to agree on the definition of “slavery”, so perhaps it would be better if we just concentrate on this assertion.
I claim that an asserted right to absolute command is always bad, but that power exacerbates it because it gives the commander opportunities to bring their warped understanding of relations between people into the world.
Absolute power by itself does nothing except possibly make the less powerful afraid that the more powerful will use their power badly. But this is just fear, and not actual harm.
What you say is true in the legal sense. But in the moral sense, I don’t think that society can really force anyone to “own” something. They have to accept it before it becomes theirs. In the old South, not accepting it might take the form of taking legal action to make the child legally not your slave, or it might take the form of simply choosing not to treat them like a slave, and possibly lying about it if you need to maintain appearances to society. Whereas one who does accept ownership, even if they do not initially treat the child like a slave, they fully intend to do so later.
I read your paragraph and agree with everything you wrote, but I don’t see how it is relevant, you will have to make it more clear.
Regarding “hierarchy”, this word seems to be ambiguous between the two scenarios I am distinguishing: absolute power that exists but isn’t understood as implying an absolute right of the powerful to use their power, and absolute power that is. I think one of these is bad but the other can be good (depending on circumstances).
This seems like an irrelevant objection. Even if our existence is a net good, it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be better. So why is it not?
I understood your answer to this to be something like “because then we wouldn’t be human anymore”, but I think there are plenty of modifications that could be made that would be improvements and wouldn’t make us not human, like germline improvements. Since you seem to agree with this, maybe I misunderstood what your answer was.
Oh good 🙂
Well I don’t think that the first one is even conceptually possible, but that depends on metaethics which is another controversial subject. I agree that if he exists “in the manner usually claimed”, then he only thinks correct thoughts, but I don’t think that Christianity being right about everything else would be much evidence for it being right about this.
@Dacyn
This is our major disagreement. There’s no difference between having and “asserting” sovereign/absolute power. If you have it, you must exercise it, even if only negatively to abdicate it. If you don’t have it, you don’t have that choice to make, it doesn’t mean anything. (You can also assert a claim to power that you don’t yet have, but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about.)
Can’t you see what you’re saying here, though? Because you have the power, you have to decide what to do with it. Even the decision to “do nothing” is a decision, but in fact your preferred course is to take some sort of positive action (manumission).
@sfoil: Of course you have the power, but that doesn’t mean that you believe that you have a right to use it. Sure, in a sense abdicating is a use of power, but it does not violate anyone’s rights to do so.
I would definitely include something about boiling your drinking water.
I apologize for my tone; the original post was out of line and my reply to your reply even more so. In the interest of not getting myself banned for real, I will not be talking about religion here for at least the next month, since I clearly am having trouble keeping the discourse civil.
Apologies to @Jaskologist as well, whose original comment was obviously in good faith (pun unintended but fortuitous).
I would just like to register that the tone of this diatribe is substantially below the level of discourse I believe SSC should hold itself to.
I have absolutely no issue discussing whether or not Scripture is divinely inspired or whether the Biblical laws are evil, or even the scientific basis of Genesis 1, but the tone should be more collegial.
You’re right. I took personally a comment that obviously was not meant as a personal attack, and let myself get carried away. I hereby ban myself from discussing the topic of religion on SSC for a period of one month.
@thevoiceofthevoid
Thanks. I will engage with you on these topics next decade if you would like.
First of all, glad you managed to realize you needed to take a break.
As a fellow atheist, I thought I would comment about my opinions on what you wrote:
– Casting out demons being inconsistent with modern etiology of disease: It does make you wonder whether there are supposed to be two different etiologies for two different time periods, or if bacteria are really disguised demons as seems to be suggested in DragonMilk’s comment, or something else. The plausibility of these scenarios will presumably vary between theists and atheists.
– Whether science comes from religion: I basically agree with what you wrote, but I would add that there is a “thinks the world is orderly and amenable to study” node that lies between “believes in God” and “believes in the scientific method”. In some sense that is the “magic ingredient” to science.
– Luke 16:16 vs Matthew 5:18-19: These do look inconsistent, though I think words like “law” are vague enough that it is easy to wiggle out of such inconsistencies. I prefer to make comparisons like Matthew 1 vs Luke 3:23-38, which clearly give two different patriarchal lineages for Jesus. Of course, people have ways of wiggling out of that inconsistency too.
– Hating your family: From what I understand this is just a mistranslation, though I haven’t studied any ancient languages. But 1 Samuel 15:17-23 is not a mistranslation. I gather that some people here are OK with genocide as long as “God said they were all guilty”, but it seems to me that that is exactly what’s wrong with religion. Even if those people were in fact guilty enough that they all deserved to die, it’s implausible that Saul had enough information to be confident of that. First of all, he doesn’t even ask about that but just receives a command. And second, just because God is powerful doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have his own agenda which may involve killing innocents. Against the extraordinarily unlikely presupposition that every one of a large tribe of people is guilty enough that they deserve death [1], the balance of evidence seems to favor non-slaughter. But that is exactly what he is punished for [2].
[1] I guess someone will say that we are all guilty and deserve death. Apart from issues of whether the concept of original sin makes sense, it clearly isn’t in this sense in which the Amalekites are said to be guilty, since Saul isn’t supposed to slaughter Israelis as well.
[2] I know he wasn’t punished for thinking the way I’m describing and acting accordingly, but the stated reasons for his punishment apply to that scenario as well.
(hmm that last example kind of got away from me, ah well maybe someone will find it interesting)
Regarding etiology, the miracles are miracles because from human perception, something clearly supernatural happened.
For instance, Jesus turning water into wine, healing a paralytic, and raising the dead by verbal command are pretty trippy. Even today, I’d struggle with a natural explanation for how these things were to occur. I am by no means suggesting that demons manifest themselves as bacteria (though Amon the E. Coli and Beelzebub the Streptococcus certainly would be amusing)! I’m suggesting that even today, categorizations for psychiatric disorders remain unwieldy. So with my (rather limited) understanding of psych disorders, if someone were to tell me the voices a schizophrenic hears are those of demons I’d give them a quizzical look. But if that person proceeded to cast out said demons, the schizo suddenly becomes completely normal, and some neighboring animals go batshit crazy, my response would be, “wow, well good job.”
As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I consider science to be the study of that which is observable (either the thing itself or its effects) and repeatable. This is useful to make technological advancements. Such a thing does not speak to or exclude the possibility that supernatural events may occur.
Finally, regarding what you’re calling genocide, it’s definitely an area that is harder to justify to a western audience. In the most brutal sense, one could argue that if you are created by a creator, he has every right to destroy you (potter/clay analogy). Anyway, on glancing at what you’ve referenced regarding the Amalekites, I’m going to first point to a bigger “genocide” – the flood. After all, wiping out a group of people is peanuts compared to only keeping a single family and wiping out all of humanity. If you can accept that the entire world save a single family got so bad that God needs to press the reset button, it’s not a stretch to accept that a smaller group of people could get to that state.
And indeed, that’s what you see – in Deuteronomy 25:17-19, the Jews are told to wipe out Amalek once in the promised land, so you might say this may just elevate from crime of passion to premeditated vengeance. In fact, Saul’s disobedience would cause headaches for the Jews later, as Haman in the Esther story is an Amalekite. Clearly, God thought this group of people an existential threat to the Jews.
But really it boils down to who you think God is. You’ve already established that you don’t believe in his existence, and it appears that your hypothetical involves portraying God as a human but with all super powers imaginable, but ultimately some form of scaled up human. But I go from the opposite approach – humans are made in the image of God. God knows more, so if in his judgment and omniscience he has deemed a group of people an existential threat and requiring death, then I may be like Abraham pleading for Sodom (an interesting case in itself, as Abraham thinks the city spared but doesn’t realize how wicked it really has become), but ultimately He has both the agency and wisdom to make that call.
So that’s not to say it’s not a hard pill to swallow, especially from our modern framework. But in the end I’m but a man and God is God. A similar response to questions of suffering in general – book of Job, etc.
Why are you talking about psych disorders? u/thevoiceofthevoid mentioned “the sick (epileptics, lepers, the blind, etc.)”.
Repetition is a good way of strengthening our confidence in scientific conclusions, but it is hardly necessary. For example, we can get good use out of telescope data that we only get once. And we can take models learned from repeated scenarios and apply them to unique circumstances.
In principle the scientific method does not rule out the possibility of the supernatural, but one can hold that we have collected enough data that such a hypothesis is extremely unlikely.
The reason I chose the Samuel quote rather than the flood is that I think the awful thing is not just that God commits genocide, but that he commands Saul to do it. When as my previous comment explained this couldn’t reasonably have been expected of him, and arguably it was his duty to refuse.
Regarding “portraying God as a human but with all super powers imaginable”, what I am rather doing is separating the hypothesis that God is omnipotent from the hypothesis that God is omnibenevolent. These are two distinct hypotheses that are orthogonal to each other. So just because you have established one, does not mean you can assume the other.
What you’re coyly not being told is that the document commonly referred to as the transcript is actually a summary and paraphrase of the call, with the incompletenesses and potential inaccuracies that implies. A transcript would be an exact copy of the words spoken.
One of the most popular people on the alt-right is a 14-year-old girl?
I’ve been wondering when teenage right-wingers will outnumber teenage left-wingers like Greta Thunberg. It seems like such an obvious way to rebel against your parents and teachers.
Republicans have quite a few more kids than Democrats on average, don’t they? So, at the very least they most likely wouldn’t be rebelling against their parents, which I think is the usual #1 target.
“One of the Most Popular People on the Alt-Right Is a 14-Year-Old Girl?!” sounds like a great light novel title.
I wonder if she would be more successful if she only blogged. Under the pen name of “Demosthenes”.
It’s been a long time since I read the Ender’s Game series, but I’ve been thinking this lately.
Man, that part of enders game sure was something. At the time I though that it was a little overblown/improbable but mostly just kind of weird. In hindsight though, it was really ahead of its time in a lot of ways.
As the Buggles sang, pivot-to-video killed the blogging star.
A moderately liberal friend of mine has a son who has become a big Ben Shapiro fan recently–this bugs the hell out of his dad, and so accomplishes its practical objective….
Why is Trump’s new mantra “Read the transcript!”?
After reading it, I thought it confirmed the accusations against him and was highly damaging. I just re-read it and was unmoved from my original impression.
Am I missing something?
At this point, half the country would watch a video of Trump eating a kitten in Times Square and decide that the kitten had it coming. The other half of the country would watch a video of Trump kissing babies and decide that he was using tongue.
Trump himself is, of course, in the first half.
And that country… is Gambia.
Trump’s domestic enemies are off the hook here.
Why Gambia, out of curiosity?
I wanted to exonerate as many people as possible by picking a tiny country, and my mind arbitrarily ruled out the European city-states and sovereign islands.
Ah, okay. My girlfriend is from Gambia, so I’m attuned to mentions of the country, and I was wondering if there was some weird news story involving the country I should ask her about.
Though given the antics of their former president, I could see them believing it.
I didn’t find it very complimentary to Trump – he comes off as confused and easily flattered – but I didn’t see anything very troubling in it in terms of the alleged blackmail or “quid pro quo.” There’s nothing about the U.S. withholding aid in it, for example, though they do talk about missile sales. Supporters will read it charitably and feel it vindicates him, and opponents will read it uncharitably and feel it convicts him.
So, a six-page Scissors Statement?
Trump is a Scissor Statement made flesh.
+1
You have not read the transcript. There has never been a transcript released. By thinking it’s a transcript, you’re falling for his lies and become easier to lie to later.
This one doesn’t make sense to me. If the White House was going to fake a transcript, why not one that completely vindicates Trump?
I did not accuse them of doctoring anything. I said they did not release a transcript.
(I meant to put this comment here.)
What you’re coyly not being told is that the document commonly referred to as the transcript is actually a summary and paraphrase of the call, with the incompletenesses and potential inaccuracies that implies. A transcript would be an exact copy of the words spoken.
The call as presented is clearly a transcript in the usual sense of the word.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/transcript
Transcript: a written, typewritten, or printed copy; something transcribed or made by transcribing.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/transcribe
Transcribe: to make a written copy, especially a typewritten copy, of (dictated material, notes taken during a lecture, or other spoken material).
This is a written copy of spoken material.
A transcript of notes taken during a lecture would be a transcript of those notes. It wouldn’t be a transcript of the lecture. Equivalently here.
Trump insisting everyone “read the transcript,” makes it *sound* like the transcript exonerates him. That could be reason enough to say it even if the actual document is damaging, since most people won’t read it anyway.
More generally, I suspect that the question Trump normally asks himself is not “is this statement true” but “what will the political effect of this statement be?”
I’m fairly confident he doesn’t consider the political effect, just the emotional effect. He may, at one point, have made the political calculation that 2016 was the year that his brand of intemperate tweeting to the joy of his fanboys and apoplectic outrage of their enemies would be election-winning, but I don’t think it is in his nature to then evaluate individual statements on a case-by-case statement beyond “this feels good, possibly because of the apoplectic outrage thing”.
That’s a possible interpretation of his behavior, but after he twice won contests that most of us expected him to lose, I shifted to the “crazy like a fox” interpretation.
Suppose he wins the next one. Will that cause you to change your interpretation?
Winning by 100,000 votes after everything broke his way was hardly a ringing endorsement of his political acumen, unless you count the fact that he recognized he even had a chance in the first place. I am still highly confident that nearly any other Republican candidate could have done better in 2016.
At any rate, there’s no need to limit the sample size to elections. Trump has had a lot of high profile failures in other matters (as well as the occasional success). Remember his humiliating government shutdown? That’s not something that someone crazy as a fox would do.
How do figure Jeb! wins the Rust Belt with “illegal immigration is an act of love” and “come on, man!” about Chinese technology theft?
@Loriot
“Crazy like a fox” doesn’t mean “flawlessly executes everything”.
His overcoming the Republican establishment to win the Republican nomination, then overcoming Hillary to win the Presidency is evidence of high competence.
This is like saying “Sure the Washington Nationals won the World Series, but only by one run in some of their games and it took seven games!”
Scott Adams predicted that after Trump’s election he would use his super powers of charisma and persuasion to unite the country again.
His failure to do that may be considered evidence against him being crazy like a fox, since Scott Adams is the self-described leading proponent of the theory that he is crazy like a fox.
I think Trump’s personality naturally situates him at a point where his ability to win elections is much stronger than it logically should be. If he had any more shame, he’d have resigned in disgrace long ago, like Eliot Spitzer; if he had any less shame, he’d have ended up in prison long ago, like Anthony Weiner.
But it’s totally subconscious on Trump’s part, and limited to winning elections that he himself is running in. It doesn’t work on Congress or the civil service, which is why his tangible results in office are indistinguishable from the hypothetical Rubio administration. (Lots of symbolic results to make the base cheer, though.) And when other Republicans try to deploy his skills, as in the midterms, he doesn’t care and it shows. Nonetheless, Trump is such a strong campaigner, and his opposition so feckless and uncharismatic, that his victory in 2020 is all but assured.
2024 will be, ah, interesting.
My hypothesis is that the hypothetical Rubio administration would have accomplished quite a bit more in the way of tangible results, at least during the first two years with a GOP House and Senate. Not just because of Rubio’s talent and temperament, but because Rubio would have drawn on the GOP talent pool for more competent staff. Still no Wall, but at least a reinforced Border Patrol.
John Schilling:
That’s my sense, too. I think Trump is amazingly, scarily talented at some kinds of PR / media manipulation / getting attention / building an image, but has little talent for actually accomplishing things as president. And he hasn’t been able or willing to get and keep people on his staff who could round out his talents and help him accomplish much.
I have a strong suspicion that Trump did not plan or expect to win the Presidency in 2016; that his plan was to position himself for a media career as the Champion of the Working Class, the Man What Should Have Been President but was Robbed by the System. That would have been much more in line with his established talents and interests, and would have given him much better odds of success. As evidence for this suspicion, he spent 2015-2016 doing everything necessary to position himself as Man What Should Have Been President early and bigly, but the things necessary to actually be president (from the ground game in Iowa to the actual White House staff) were thrown together poorly and at the last minute.
Either he’s an incompetent wannabe politician who got lucky, or he’s a competent wannabe celebrity who overperformed and is stuck playing the leading man in a production where he was only auditioning for a supporting role. And his prior career doesn’t point to broad incompetence, but it does point to a non-presidential brand of competence.
+1
He’s an uncouth narcissist who’s demonstrably good at large-scale real estate and being a TV celebrity. Somehow, in 2015 he started running his big mouth at the working class and finding that, unless they were black (and so locked into hating Republicans at a ~90% rate), they really liked what he and only he was willing to say.
What we’ve seen though is that once elected President, an outsider can accomplish very little without the judiciary and unelected civil service stopping him at every turn. If Trump is smart, he knew this going in and expected not to win.
I disagree. Trump is pathological about winning, at everything. He would not have committed himself if he did not plan on winning. He would not have been doing 2 and 3 rallies a day, 5 days a week for months if he did not plan on winning. No one works that hard planning to fail, especially so a billionaire can, what, sell some books? And definitely not Trump. No, Trump tried his hardest to win, and he won.
Nit: We haven’t really seen this, because we haven’t seen it tried by an outsider with administrative competence and a willingness to hire for talent over personal loyalty. Outsiders with these attributes have done tolerably well at the state-governor level (most notably Reagan in California, but for more recent examples see e.g. Schwarzenegger and Ventura); one can advance the theory that DC is intolerably worse than Sacramento, but it hasn’t really been tested.
Sure, but the sorts of results the GOP establishment would have wanted. Yes tax cuts and judges, but also TPP, probably some more wars. Rubio would not have stepped up deportations, cut down legal immigration, improved H1-B scrutiny, replaced dilapidated vehicle barriers with 30 foot high steel and concrete pedestrian barriers, got Mexico and Guatemala to agree to hold migrants, upped spending by NATO allies, or be holding China’s feet to the fire on trade.
Yes, an establishment republican would have gotten more establishment republican stuff done with the establishment republican congress, but that would not have been any of the sort of stuff Trump supporters want, and would have been many, many things they’re diametrically opposed to.
So he can win at a game that is not being President. And which is also not “selling some books”, and if that’s the strawman you need for your argument, you don’t have much of an argument.
“Selling some books” is usually what campaign losers do, like Palin or Hillary Clinton.
1) What specifically do you think Trump would have done had he lost to capitalize on losing?
2) Has he done any of those things after winning?
3) How did winning preclude him from doing the losing plan? That is, if the plan was to make money off TrumpTV, why didn’t Don Jr. and Eric have TrumpTV ready to go right after inauguration? Nothing about Trump being President stops the Trump Org from starting up a political media machine. Makes it easier, even, and it is something I and other Trump supporters would approve of, given the miserable state of our traditional media.
I would say he’s certainly attempted it. He’s constantly touting low black and Hispanic unemployment, highest employment rates for women, etc. I see evidence that he’s tried to unite the country, but also faced overwhelming opposition from media, which is a tough nut to crack.
I’ve said before I thought after the election the scales would fall from people’s eyes, and they would realize the media was grossly mischaracterizing Trump and Trump supporters. A little here, a little there it happened, but by and large the media and those who watch it doubled down.
@Conrad Honcho
So are things noticeably going better in the day to day life of a typical Trump supporter?
Personally, I’m happy with how the stock market has done, though it is still going to be a long time before I start withdrawing, and with the continued growth of tech compensation (though the growth has slowed down noticeably since Uber fizzled.)
I’m not certain either of those are directly attributable to Trump but he certainly could have screwed up badly enough to prevent them from having happened.
Plausibly Kavanaugh and Gorsuch eventually swing the Court on some decision that meaningfully impacts my life, but as far as I know nothing yet.
Unemployment down, wages up, no sons off dying in new pointless wars, so as best as I can tell, “yes.” We’ll find out for sure in November 2020. If Trump supporters are better off than they were 4 years ago they will vote to re-elect, and if they’re not they won’t.
I agree with you about the pointlessness of the wars, but it’s an odd point to raise given an all volunteer force. The deal has been completely clear for at least fifteen years. And with the tightening of standards, most recruits have realistic alternatives.
I think the point would be that they want to volunteer to do noble things, like “defend our nation,” and instead get tasked with ignoble things, like “drone strike people who aren’t threatening us.” So the fact that they’re doing less of the latter is a plus.
Basically, setting himself up as a cross between Rupert Murdoch and the white-guy version of Oprah Winfrey. Put on a television show where he’s the man who “tells it like it is” to a vast and adoring audience, plus a bunch of speaking tours for ditto, hire some clearly subordinate personalities to cover for the fact that he can’t be everywhere 24/7 and can’t do straight journalism for the news segments, either start his own multimedia network or make himself the one indispensable man of the Fox network. And sell a few ghostwritten books, because might as well. And tweet like crazy.
To the extent possible in his current position, using the free media access that comes with being POTUS rather than setting up his own network. And, keeping himself positioned to go back to part 1 when he is eventually forced out of office, however that happens.
It would be illegal for him to actively manage the sort of business enterprise envisioned in part 1 while employed as POTUS. Or at least impractical to do so legally, and unnecessary given the alternative path to the same approximate end.
None of this works if it’s obvious he’s not even trying to be President, and openly setting up a TrumpTV that can’t usefully operate with Trump in the Oval Office would be too blatant a signal to that effect. But, regardless of whether it was Plan A or Plan B, do you really think Trump wouldn’t have had a major television presence (again, either as an independent network or within Fox) within months of his having lost the 2016 election?
I would think anyone that’s signed up in the last fifteen years would know exactly what they were getting into. Twenty years ago is a different story.
Is there any evidence he planned this? It takes some time to set up, and the guy does know a thing or two about marketing, and business, so “strike while the iron is hot” is kind of important. Is there any evidence he secured trademarks, scouted talent, shopped around for advertisers? Is there any evidence he did anything, at all, like the groundwork necessary for launching a major media network during the election?
It seems to me that if he intended anything like this, he would have done it, because you can still launch win or lose, and if he’s President, his kids just run it. That’s not illegal (and I don’t think “strict concern for the law” is an attribute Trump critics ascribe to him anyway), and they’re hitting the media circuit pretty hard as is. Eric and Don Jr. certainly aren’t camera shy.
Or is he so “crazy like a fox” that he knew people would catch wise to this scheme, and so he purposefully held off any sort of visible organization of the new media empire until after his anticipated loss?
Would his fans have cared that he was organizing the media empire during the campaign? If it took a year after the loss to President Hillary, would his fans still care about watching his new media empire? Would his fans care at all about his media empire if his “winner” brand had suffered harm from losing to Hillary?
It seems like one of those theories that only works if you already subscribe to the idea that Trump is evil and/or incompetent. There’s no evidence he planned the thing, but that’s because he’s diabolical enough to hide the thing or so incompetent he never planned the thing at all.
I think the alternative theory is a little simpler: Trump wanted to win, worked very hard to win, and won.
@brad
Well, first, propaganda is a thing, and when it comes to critical thinking infantrymen may not be too far to the right side of the bell curve.
Second, if men and women want to sign up for “protect babies” and yet their only option has been “punch babies,” when they get the opportunity to sign up for “protect babies” again they might be happy about that. They were fully cognizant their only option before was “punch babies,” but the “protect babies” option is preferable, and its reintroduction makes them happy.
I get the impression some don’t have a firm grasp on why folks sign up for the military.
Yeah, fair enough. We’d need to analyze and preferably also test how DC is worse than Sacramento/the worst state capital.
Outsiders in DC have fared poorly even in Congress, so there is something in the water. Like who are the outsider federal politicians that have done well at all? When Ivy League educated, former Texas Solicitor General and Son of a Congressman Rand Paul are considered the “rogue” senators, you know the whole thing is very insider-focused.
@Clutzy
Living in DC I can attest to its extreme parochialism. I believe that to be a common failing of capital cities, but DC being the most important of capital cities, and being a one industry town to boot, has the trait in spades.
Follow up to Scott’s California AB-5 link:
Vox Media is cutting hundreds of freelancers due to AB-5. They may apply for a total of 20 employee positions.
Vox could improve their content tenfold by enabling comments!
Probably the same reason many news/commentary sites eliminated their comments section: They are worried that the comments will deviate from the narrative.
That is not why many media companies eliminated comments. They are hugely expensive to moderate.
If you want to eliminate all the comments that don’t stick to the narrative, sure. But how expensive is it just to moderate for spam and such?
I used to write in a very minor, unpaid and almost non-existent way very for The Atlantic, in a section called “Notes”. Notes was conceived to be a kind of curated discussion forum; take the high-effort effort-post kind of people and showcase them, take the better of the outraged people who disagree with them, and just keep a nice productive discourse going. He was to my eyes and by his own description a fairly typical life-long liberal, but he was incredibly fair and even-handed with how he ran things. That’s coming from me, and I’m fairly conservative (much more so then).
This was RIGHT after the era when Ta-Nehisi Coates used to value dialogue before he went another direction. On paper, The Atlantic LOVED this. and it was uber successful; there were times when it was the most viewed content on The Atlantic for weeks running – I’m talking two weeks at the top of the most viewed list, just killing it.
The Atlantic responded to this by gutting it; they did their best to de-emphasize it on the front page, withheld resources/help from it, made the guy running it at the time do it solo without the promised personnel the growth was supposed to bring, that sort of thing. Eventually they gave it to James Fallows, who for a while kept the “discussion” part of it by running a strongman/weakman shell game, making his preferred “side” consistently “win”. Nowadays it’s just his and his wife’s personal blog about flying airplanes and staying in nice hotels.
Anyway, the deal is that comments were nice and all when commenters were calling W a nazi and there was a sustainable left-leaning bent to them; it’s hard to find that anymore and for the most part the vocal internet leans republican. As soon as that was the case, comments sections were doomed, even high-quality curated ones. There’s no point in having something that works against your preferred goal, so they don’t.
Probably the cost of moderation. Comment threads will be huge on high traffic websites.
Some Blogger did an article a while back explaining why all these comment threads were being shut down and why he was shutting down a portion of his commenting.
I found his argument that it’s not all some lefty hatred of discourse persuasive.
Yeah, my read of that post is that while it wasn’t all some lefty hatred of discourse, that “lefty hatred of discourse” was definitely a significant contributing factor…
Compare and contrast cyberpunk poverty versus actual poverty. You can also draw a distinction between absolute poverty as it exists in the third world and relative poverty in the first.
I’d like to continue the discussion form the last hidden thread on Biblical inerrancy and Mormonism. Unfortunately, my work e-mail blocks access to all religious sites, so I may add links when I get home in a reply.
@GearRatio, @DavidFriedman, @any LDS members: My personal religious views are in line with those found on The Gospel Coalition website (which I cannot access at time of posting). When moving to a new city, I make it a point to survey churches that are within its church directory.
Anyway, the confessional statements are organized in the following sections:
1. Tri-une God
2. Revelation
3. Creation of Humanity
4. The Fall
5. The Plan of God
6. The Gospel
7. The Redemption of Christ
8. The Justification of Sinners
9. The Power of the Holy Spirit
10. The Kingdom of God
11. God’s New People
12. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper
13. The Restoration of All Things
I’ll focus the discussion here on 2, where the statement reads (any typos mine as well as bolding),
To Gear, do your beliefs differ from the quoted section?
To David, does this clarify the role of the Bible for TGC-type Christians, and is it what you mean by literalist?
To LDS members, is this statement a manifestation of the great apostasy?
To everyone else, you’re welcome to chime in too of course, the last convo went deep in the weeds so I wanted to qualify this one with @ @ @
Other than 12 (which I’m guessing means two sacraments and rejecting the term “Eucharist”), are any of these points incompatible with Catholic or Orthodoxy doctrine?
With the caveat that I am no expert on Catholic or Orthodox teachings, I’d presume 8 may be controversial (faith vs works):
“…Inasmuch as Christ was given by the Father for us, and his obedience and punishment were accepted in place of our own, freely and not for anything in us, this justification is solely of free grace, in order that both the exact justice and the rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners. We believe that a zeal for personal and public obedience flows from this free justification.”
Again, bolding mine. Again, hoping to link things when I get home.
No, Catholics affirm sola gratia. We do receive grace by faith and works, but this is a free gift of God not deserved.
2 might be a big one. Some Protestants jettison the deuterocanonical books, and many are not fond of Tradition as the other source of revelation.
Why do Catholics include what Jews exclude in the “Old testament”?
Because as far as the Testaments are concerned, “Old” and “New” mean “Pre-” and “Post-Christianity”, not “Jewish” and “Christian”.
@TripleS, put differently, as a Protestant, I understand the Old Testament to be 1:1 what Jews accept as canon as anything before Christ should sync up with what was revealed by God to the Jews. Therefore, if the Jews do not include these pre-Christian books, for what reason do Catholics include them?
I think the apocrypha were in the septuagint.
Understatement of the day.
Why would you leave the definition of what constitutes your holy books to another religion? A religion that is, presumably, wrong about matters of religion, from your point of view, no less.
There’s some stuff that isn’t in what most Protestants would consider the “Hebrew canon” (e.g., the Teachings, the Prophets, and the Writings) but is accepted as authoritative by at least some Jewish or Christian sects. For example, the Book of Tobit is considered canonical by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and by some ancient Jewish sects, but not by Protestants or most modern Jews. The Book(s) of Maccabees are even weirder: they’re considered canon by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and form the basis for the Hannukah festival, but aren’t considered canon by any major Protestant or Jewish sects.
@HarmlessFrog
Interpretation of texts may and do differ, but there should be agreement on the text themselves. The earliest Christians were Jews, and it was Paul who really expanded the religion to the Gentiles. Apologetics back then appealed to the Jewish scriptures, and Jesus is the fulfillment of the scriptures.
So it’s quite important to have the same starting point in terms of at least agreeing on what those scriptures are.
@Evan Þ
I do try. 😛
As a protestant, I’m actually not sure what capital T Tradition means in this context.
Like…pope stuff over the years?
@DragonMilk, from the
horseBull’s mouth:As a Baptist, I firmly oppose this view.
Now that I’m home and such, I can finally link the statement…too bad I can’t edit it in…
I’d also like to point out that I actually got pretty bored reading the confessional statement itself, and so the practical implications of what churches in the TCG are about given those beliefs may be more illuminating.
@DragonMilk
So it’s quite important to have the same starting point in terms of at least agreeing on what those scriptures are.
No such starting point is reachable. The Jews had a total mess themselves. Paul quotes the Book of Jubilees as Scripture, and Jesus quotes indiscriminately from Masoretic, Septuagint and even Targumim versions.
Most importantly, there’s the Ethiopian canon which is the canon of a nation that converted from Judaism to Christianity. Why should it be inferior to the canon that Palestinian tannaim rabbis ended up with?
Also no such starting point is reachable for the New Testament, but that’s a different story.
As a Baptist, I firmly oppose this view.
To which, on our side, we’d refer you to John 21:25:
If those other things known to disciples and others are not in the written books, it is possible that they be preserved in oral tradition. And the practice of the faith is likely transmitted by teaching and demonstration and not all the details written down.
Then there is also the whole question of “what is the canon, and who gets to decide it?”, as demonstrated in discussion here. After a while, you get all sorts of cranks, cultists, wannabes and imitators (heretics) churning out their own version of Early Christianity, and producing their own texts.
See the epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians, where he is addressing the divisions in the local church there, and after dishing out plenty of advice says:
The question here is, what are the writings, and who is writing them? That’s why someone has to sit down and decide what is, and what is not, within the canon. And that’s where the Church (small or large “c”) comes in; the body of believers who assess what is being passed around, preached, written down, quoted, and produced as to whether it is legitimate or not.
That’s why we have four Gospels and not five, six or however many new Gnostic ‘alternative Christianities’ that pop up every so often. That’s why the Jewish religious authorities sat down and overhauled their Scriptures to decide what was and was not within the canon (whatever you may think of the niche conspiracy theory-ish explanation that, since the new off-shoot of the Christians was quoting those same Scriptures to back up their case, and since this Christ of theirs was plainly a blasphemer, then purifying the texts of all the bits the Christians said ‘see, this proves what we’re saying!’ was vitally necessary).
That’s why St Jerome got the job of producing a new Latin version of the Bible, and decided to go for original Hebrew versions of the texts (or as close as he could get) instead of merely translating the existing Greek Septuagint version into Latin.
I think pretty much everyone agrees that we don’t have a nice, neat set of original texts that have never undergone change or alteration or loss or reconstruction, so we’re rather stuck with an external authority to validate such. And for Catholics, that’s the Church and the Magisterium.
But surely by now you’ve written them down, right? When you say oral tradition you mean something like Islamic hadiths, books that were written based on second or third hand sources, not stories that to this day haven’t been recorded, right?
@Randy, my understanding is that they haven’t, and that’s a huge part of my objection. To go back to my Catholic Encyclopedia quote above, they say “It is revealed truth always living in the mind of the Church.”
@Deiseach, I agree there’re a lot of other things that weren’t written down in the Bible. For the next few generations, there were a number of churches where you could find someone who’d tell you “Jesus / Paul / John / Polycarp-who-studied-under-John said such-and-so,” and that’d probably be really valuable. But that’s different from saying that the Lateran Council of 1123 let alone the Vatican Council of 1965 has any unique access to that tradition. They claim the Holy Spirit gives them that unique access, but I see no evidence for that. The process of getting a canonical list of the books of the Bible isn’t evidence, because it didn’t come from any ecumenical council or top-down authority, but rather from the distributed judgment of the churches throughout the world.
@ Dragon Milk:
It’s not certain when the Jewish canon was developed; it may even date to the AD period. The Septuagint, at least, includes translations of the Deuterocanonical works, indicating that they were considered canonical in the third century BC.
@ Evan Thorn:
It’s quite simple, really. Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would “guide [his followers] into all truth”. Hence Church Tradition is trustworthy because it is guided by the Holy Spirit. The locus classicus here is St. Vincent of Lerins (Commonitorium 2.6-3.8):
If, on the other hand, we suppose that the Church really did fall into error at [the death of the last apostle/the Council of Nicaea/take your pick], until [Martin Luther/John Calvin/Henry VIII/Elizabeth II/John Wesley/Joseph Smith/William J. Seymour/etc.] came along to rescue it, we would have to suppose either that Christ was lying when he promised the Holy Spirit’s guidance, or that the Holy Spirit was unable to preserve the Church from apostasy, either of which would be blasphemous.
Other than 12 (which I’m guessing means two sacraments and rejecting the term “Eucharist”), are any of these points incompatible with Catholic or Orthodoxy doctrine?
No. 8 – The Justification of Sinners – could indeed be a stumbling block; apparently ourselves and the Lutherans issued a Joint Declaration coming to a compromise agreement on the theology back in 1999, but not all the Lutheran churches were on board with this (and I imagine some Catholics, of the very few who even know about such a thing, mightn’t be all up with it either).
(Apologies for the terrible Vatican website design; I’m sure we’ll get around to improving it some century or other).
Also Revelation – ongoing or complete? Power of the Holy Spirit – are we talking Pentecostalism here? And a few others where the theological definitions of the ‘plain words’ are pretty different between side A and side B.
So we’re good at around 3.15:
4.3 is where roads diverge a bit – I’m more (surprise surprise!) inclined toward the “Lutheran” belief:
vs.
An analogy I’ve heard is suppose at the end of time, you come before a courtroom and Satan is the prosecutor. Satan points to all your sins and asks how you plan to pay for them. Justification means you acknowledge your debt, that it’s impossible to come up with the sum yourself, but say to Satan that they’ve already been paid in full by Jesus. Alternatively, one could try to deny the debt, or be crushed by it through meager attempts to pay it off on your own.
What does this have to do with the quotes? Well the last sentence of the Catholic one states that in this justification, the righteous receive faith, hope, and love (1 Corinthians much?). This may be quibbling over details, but I see that process as separate. My wedding verse was Galatians 5:22 on the fruit of the Spirit. That is, the debt payment justifies, but it is through the receiving of the Spirit that one actually bears the fruit.
And that segues into your next question. Per John 14:16, Jesus states that “the Spirit of truth” will be sent; “for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you.” Practically, I think there’s been disagreement as to who exactly gets the Holy Spirit? Anyway, the Protestant answer is all believers. And from there, all attributes of the fruit can be seen if the Spirit is allowed to work rather than resisted.
I enjoyed that talk a whole lot, but I had to bow out for time-and-responsibility reasons; the wife wanted me to act like I had kids and a spouse and stuff. Sorry!
Wouldn’t the statement in bold imply that all Christians end up interpreting the Bible in exactly the same way? Because I don’t think that’s what historically happened.
How does it imply that? I’m not seeing it.
It’s mostly about being sufficient and final in its authority. See the answer of Randy M below.
You mean this: “sufficient for all that God requires us to believe and do”?
Not exactly. It would imply that everyone with a good-faith interpretation will agree on all of the necessary doctrine for salvation.
Thus, any deviation in doctrine is either irrelevant or not in good-faith. That does provide some more leeway, but still may not comport with all evidence.
I’m not entirely comfortable with the claim that people who interpret some parts of the Bible differently are acting in bad faith. For example, Calvin said that everyone who studies his arguments will necessarily convert to Calvinism. But… no. I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.
It only implies that if the Christians think they are without flaw in interpreting it; if that were the usual case, church sermons would be without audiences.
The crux of a statement above isn’t that humans can’t misinterpret and need correction, but instead that the remedy is more discussion and interpretation of the Bible to better get at and understand the truth. Me and Tom might disagree, but if we are both in agreement with the bolded section of 2. above we just think one or both of us is wrong, not the text itself.
That’s not to argue for the rightness or wrongness of 2, just to say that it isn’t rendered contradictory in the absence of a hive-mind so long as human imperfection is acknowledged.
So God would be like “Behold humans! Here’s a book that is complete and sufficient for your salvation, provided that you understand it correctly – which you most likely won’t ’cause you are waaay too stupid for that. See you in Hell, suckers”.
To be fair, that seems totally in keeping with the character of the old Testament God.
I think this adds an awful lot in that neither he and I said, something like this:
“A 100% perfect understanding of the entire text of the Bible is necessary. Without it, even if you are desperately trying to get to it, you go to hell”.
Acknowledging personal imperfection doesn’t simultaneously prove acknowledgement of complete failure. Nobody is running around with a view that a guy with a 99.9% perfect read of the Bible who somehow has, like, an erroneous understanding of what kind of mindset you need to eat meat that was once sacrificed to idols is going to hell.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a level of misinterpretation where that’s not true – if a guy had come to the conclusions that Jesus was a normal aardvark and the path to salvation was orgies in motorcycle showrooms, yeah, he’s probably in error enough that he’s not currently aimed at salvation. But there’s room to see daylight between “It’s possible to has misinterpreted this hard enough to have missed the really important broad strokes” and “anybody who has room for improvement left on knowing the exact meaning intended by every single passage is going to hell”.
@eigenmoon / GearRatio
One of the things that I have always been taught is that the Bible is heavily redundantly encoded with the most important message, which is “ask God for forgiveness when you sin and try to avoid sinning in the future”.
The rest is details. Important details, absolutely no doubt, but details.
@GearRatio @EchoChaos
Don’t Baptists believe that someone who was baptized only in childhood isn’t really baptized and goes to Hell? But then Lutherans (who also dig Sola Scriptura) don’t believe that at all and baptize their children without second thought. And they don’t look like the sort of people who’d believe that Jesus was an aardvark.
If baptism is so important, why wouldn’t God encode something about it more redundantly into the Bible, as in “hey humans, this part is really important, here’s what you need to do”?
@eigenmoon
Short answer, no.
https://billygraham.org/answer/is-baptism-necessary-for-salvation/
@EchoChaos
Thanks, good to know.
Still I’m not quite convinced that everybody interprets the Bible in the same way. For the question of how exactly the salvation in Jesus works, we have:
Ransom theory
Recapitulation theory
Satisfaction theory
Penal substitution
Governmental theory
Moral influence theory
Moral example theory
Christus Victor
Embracement theory
Isn’t that kind of important though?
Then there’s the question of what Jesus saves us from. With Church of England proclaiming annihilationism (Hell is nonexistence) this question looks far from settled as well. Then there’s non-eternal Hell.
Now it may very well be that none of this is essential for salvation. But given that nobody seems to know for sure what exactly (and from what) salvation is, I’m not sure what sense does it make to affirm that the Bible is sufficient for it.
Don’t Baptists believe that someone who was baptized only in childhood isn’t really baptized and goes to Hell?
To defend the Baptists on this, they hold to the necessity of informed consent 🙂 Indeed, for a long time, the Reformed/Protestants claimed that the Catholics were cruel and unmerciful, since they did not accept that babies and children who died young were in Heaven but that the lack of baptism would keep them out, and this was a reproach into modern times.
Since most conversions in Early Christianity were of adults, they were the ones who were baptised after a period of initiation and instruction. As Christianity became commonplace, families of Christian believers came into being. What about the children of those families, in particular: what about children who died before they could be baptised, since baptism is what incorporates you into the Body of Christ, washes away Original Sin, and “in baptism we died with Christ” – “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
To answer that question, one strain of theology developed such propositions as Limbo. Another strain of theology developed among the Reformers in general and the Anabaptists, that baptism is an ordinance not a sacrament and not in itself a means of salvation, but faith is what saves. Baptism follows faith, and therefore infants cannot and should not be baptised, since they cannot profess faith for themselves (the Catholic answer to that is that you make your adult profession of faith at Confirmation but that’s getting into the long grass).
@Eigenmoon
Most of those differences in theory of salvation have to do with a minor behind-the-scenes splitting-hair difference, I.E. Christ was god and sacrificed himself for our sins and by faith we can access salvation through that sacrifice, but exactly what was the mechanism in which this worked in a spiritual mechanics sense?
The remaining two that aren’t like that (moral example and shared atonement) aren’t views biblical literalists of the type asserting the literal truth of the bible above typically hold anyway, because they require pretty big stretches to get to if you have anything like a natural read.
Most of these that are of the hair-splitting variety aren’t mutually exclusive, either.
I don’t mean this in a mean way, but you don’t seem to have the depth of understanding of Christian beliefs necessary to know if things are actually contradictory to us, so you are pulling things that seem at a glance to be contradictory and saying “see? the book can’t be real if these things disagree” when they don’t disagree at all, or don’t disagree in significant or vital ways. On top of that, you are also pulling things that are likely to have been proposed by non-literalists and going “well, since these contradict literalism, it must not be true”.
Meanwhile even if they were contradictory in big vital ways, the existence of a dozen or so contrary opinions still don’t mean the book can’t be true, so long as we live in a universe where it’s possible for a dozen people to have controversial but incorrect opinions. “People disagree on this” /= “there is an actual answer”.
@eigenmoon
I’m shocked, SHOCKED!
In all seriousness, of course they don’t. That is expected because we’re all human.
Which is why the core message “Repent and sin no more” is so hammered in, so that nobody can miss it. It’s very clear to everyone that is the core message, regardless of whether you disagree about when the immersion in water should happen, etc.
A lot of wonderful theories that are no more relevant to the fact that it DOES work as the debate over relativity was to the fact that the force of gravity on earth was measurable.
I can make a waterwheel without any idea of whether Aristotle was right that water falls because it is moving towards its natural place, Avicenna that it is due to permanent virtues, Newton that it is fundamental forces , Einstein’s view of warping spacetime or a weirder more accurate theory yet to be discovered.
It’s important for complex subject that we understand exactly what is going on, and I love that discovery in both science and theology, but for “keeping you out of Hell”, the basics are very, VERY clear.
@Deiseach:
Is there an upper limit on how long a sacrament takes?
So your baptism starts when you’re christened and ends 16 or so years later when you’re confirmed.
Do Catholic confirmations actually get you damp or is it just ‘I turn to Christ’ etc?
Hello, Lambert.
For Catholics, there are seven sacraments. Baptism, including infant baptism (the bone of contention in this particular interpretation) is something that is achieved and done correctly at the time (given that you follow the correct form) and it cannot be undone, since it makes an ontological change in the soul. That’s why the atheist campaigns with hairdryers were amusing (and intended to be so) but not practical. You can apostatise, you can formally defect, but you can’t de-baptise.
“What about the formal declaration of faith by the individual?” said the denominations unaccepting of infant baptism, and that is what happens at Confirmation. You don’t get damp, you do get chrism on the brow (and it used to be a slap on the cheek by the bishop to signify the kind of trials a believer was supposed to be ready to endure, but they didn’t even do that in my day during the early 70s and I was kinda disappointed). Though also, the entire congregation recites the Renewal of the Baptismal Promises during the Easter Vigil, so if you’re a child attending Mass you’ll do this as well, and I think that counts.
As Baptism is linked with the baptism of Jesus by John, so Confirmation is linked with Pentecost: it is the full outpouring of the Holy Spirit and does entail the descent of the Holy Spirit upon those confirmed.
The Orthodox Churches, so far as I understand, administer Confirmation and the Eucharist immediately after Baptism because these are the three Sacraments of Initiation into the Christian life and the church. In the West, we hold off on Confirmation and the Eucharist until at least the age of reason (around seven years old) or later.
Decent article here on Wikipedia about Confirmation. As ever, from the Catechism:
@GearRatio
At no point I’ve said anything like “see? the book can’t be real if these things disagree”. I’m saying that the book can be interpreted in a lot of significantly different ways. This is the opposite problem: if you have 15 equations over 10 variables, your system is overdetermined and most likely contradictory, but if you have 5 equations over 10 variables, your system is underdetermined and most likely has multiple solutions. You’re accusing me of not having the depth of understanding of Christian beliefs in the same sentence as you’re accusing me of saying that Bible is overdetermined, while what I’m saying is that it’s underdetermined. My point is essentially the same as the one Catholics advance all the time, except unlike Catholics I do not propose a solution.
So for you “Jesus was sacrificed to Satan” vs. “Jesus was sacrificed to God” is a minor behind-the-scenes splitting-hair difference? Alright. I’ll quote you some criticism of Penal Substitution theory from Eastern Orthodox viewpoint (Recapitulation + Theosis):
(I totally recommend the whole article btw.)
Is that just some minor behind-the-scenes splitting-hair differences?
@EchoChaos
Yes, but what is sin? (And everybody has a different answer to that of course). If I refuse to sell my apartment and donate the money to the Church (which Church?), do I sin?
@Deiseach
O, Deiseach! Hi Deiseach!
Here’s the perspective from which I look on Baptists and their funny baptism rules.
Russian Old Believers have claimed that baptism is sacramental death (they bring Bible quotes to that effect), therefore it may only be done by submersion. So Eastern Orthodoxes baptized with pouring instead of submersion haven’t sacramentally died with Jesus and therefore aren’t baptized.
The Eastern Orthodoxes, however, say that baptism is sacramental washing away the sins (and they bring Bible quotes to that effect). The water must move against the body of the baptized for it to work. Therefore pouring is a-OK but sprinkling as done by Catholics is beyond the pale.
The Catholics seem to ignore such problems. Anyway, now they have Pachamama to worry about.
The Baptists say that baptism is sacramental consent (and they bring Bible quotes to that effect), therefore whoever is baptized too young to give consent is not baptized. But at this point I can’t take this seriously anymore. I have a feeling that everybody is making this shit up as they go along.
@eigenmoon
Well, there is an instruction book about what they are, but fortunately, Scripture covers that one too!
Psalm 19:12 Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults.
People are bad at understanding their sins, and it is nearly certain that all of us will miss that something or other is in fact a sin, which is why we need forgiveness.
@EchoChaos
Well, it’s easy to miss that something or other is in fact a sin when no definition of sin has been provided!
Nope, you aren’t listening, and you have a shallow understanding of what a internal contradiction would be in relation to the bolded section 2. above. Let’s review:
So here we have a guy saying that the word of god is authoritative, without error, complete in it’s revelation, sufficient and final in it’s authority. And then you bring in an orthodox viewpoint, and say, see? Contradictions! Big ones! If you agree with this, you can’t have this orthodox view!
Except the orthodox DON’T agree with that; tradition is equal to the bible in their religion, if not superior; the Bible sprung out of tradition in their religion. Where the Bible and tradition clash, sometimes tradition wins for them and this is fine in their system, because it’s a different system that doesn’t buy the bolded section in the first place. But this isn’t the important part.
So when you bring in a guy from a tradition that doesn’t believe in the absolute truth of the bible in the same way, it doesn’t really shock anybody or advance your argument that there’s these huge gaps that wouldn’t exist if the bible were absolute. It’s no more or less shocking than an atheist coming up with some different ideas. But this isn’t the important part.
Meanwhile, you bring up a statement from a guy who misrepresents western dogma in significant ways; nowhere in our dogma is it suggested that God killed his son to satisfy shallow pride, for instance. So the part where you go “do these seem like hair splitting differences?”, yes, they still do, because your source for them not being so is a guy who strawmans our tradition as hard as he can like a Roman accusing us of worshiping donkeys. But this isn’t the important part.
The two views generally result in very similar or identical methods a person follows to gain access to salvation; they think very much the same things about the deity of Christ. They aren’t even mutually contradictory; paying the devil his due and undoing the failure of Adam are not things that can’t both be done in a logically consistent system. I’d absolutely believe that somebody who believed in either system could be genuinely saved. But that’s not the important part.
Here’s the important bit: Your premise is that the word can’t be literal or contain truth because consistencies in it’s interpretation exist.
So let’s give you every posit you’ve made besides that; let’s say that a read of the Bible by lots of different folks has given dozens and dozens of hugely different and inconsistent views. Let’s say the orthodox believe in the bible the way the bolded section says to; let’s say all of these views are mutually contradictory and can’t all be true at the same time. Worst case scenario, let’s say that every living human who has read the bible has come to a completely different conclusion about everything in it.
Now a story in layman’s language. Bob and Dave want to go to Cincinnati from Las Angeles; they have a map that says that claims that Chicago is east of LA. Bob comes to the conclusion they should go east; Dave comes to the conclusion that they should go to the coast, swim the Europe, and go roughly 17 miles north of Paris to get there. Bob and Dave argue about it, but Bob is incapable of convincing Dave.
As we know, Cincinnati is rather east of Phoenix. Your argument is functionally identical to saying “Hey, Dave and Bob disagreed on what direction to go! That means the map can’t possible be an accurate document meant to be taken literally; it can’t contain the truth about the location of Chicago, or Bob and Dave would agree”. And you are right – unless Dave is stupid, or drunk, or didn’t look at the map very long, or doesn’t understand how maps work, or is spoiling for a fight, or has preexisting problems with Bob and doesn’t think Bob can be right about anything, or any of the many other reasons imperfect people sometimes disagree.
The bolded section makes no claims that everyone will instantly or ever agree on every detail; what it says is that map is accurate. The primary difference is that we argue about what the book says rather than whether or not it says the right thing, or needs supplements, or can be outweighed by tradition/society/whatever.
Now an SSC-friendly language story. On an instinctual level, I don’t like quantum physics; I suspect they are bullshit and people who buy real heavily into the whole Copenhagen wave collapse stuff are little better than mystics. I would looove to debunk the whole thing. There’s just one problem: I don’t understand quantum physics.
So I’ll google for a bit trying to find a problem with quantum physics, and I’ll say something like “Oh, it changes when it’s observed, does it? Isn’t that overemphasizing your own importance a tad, chief? Why does it care about human eyes, again?” because I have a Wikipedia level knowledge of what I’m referencing. Later on I find out that “observation” actually has a defined meaning I didn’t know; it’s just interaction with the physical universe or something, it’s not what I thought it was, and the problem I thought was there wasn’t.
It’s possible I am in the simplest of definitions correct that how we think about waveform collapse or whatever is wrong; like, science sometimes changes it’s views on things. But if I wanted to disprove it, I’d need to do more than troll google for 15 minutes looking for gotcha stuff I didn’t understand.
There exist other people who think the standard view of quantum physics is wrong; they think there are multiple universes happening all the time and every time a waveform collapses another one springs into being (maybe: I don’t understand quantum physics). But notably this disagreement among them doesn’t mean that a correct answer doesn’t exist. Both parties think there’s an objective truth to be had somewhere in there; their answer for it isn’t “physics is wrong, or else we wouldn’t disagree” but rather “Let’s get us some more of that physics stuff until it’s settled”.
I’m not saying this next part because I’m mean, I’m saying it because I don’t know how else to say it: I don’t think you understand Christian theology very well. The stuff you are bringing up as major conflicts typically aren’t considered crux issues in the faith, and they aren’t seen as lethal conflicts even by people who very firmly believe in the literal, absolute authority of the book.
But more importantly, I don’t think you understand what argument you are trying to make, or else you wouldn’t be spending a lot of time telling me disagreements about how to read maps mean that maps must necessarily be assumed to be inaccurate, or that the fact that anyone bearing a map had ever been lost before meant that the contents of his map must be false.
Hey, eigenmoon!
Ah, the rubrics around baptism! This is where moral theology and canon law comes in, because once you’ve established your principles that’s all well and good, but how then do you put them into practice?
Now, the original form of baptism was indeed by immersion (as per your Russian Old Believers, who are working on St Paul’s words of how in baptism we die with Christ and are then raised to new life by the power of God which resurrected Jesus. The baptismal font is thus both tomb and womb), and when baptisteries and fonts started to be built and used they were made large enough for an adult to be submerged in one, even down to mediaeval times.
However, sometimes in the real world it’s not practical to baptise by immersion – you don’t have a river handy, or there is immediate necessity of baptism for some urgent reason. Hence, the getting into the details about “okay, so what are the bare minimum irreducible elements of a valid baptism?”. So – can a lay person baptise? Answer – yes, in such urgent cases. What are the form of words to be used – this one is very important, even if to an outsider it looks like nitpicking or hairsplitting over “is there really a difference between ‘Father Son and Spirit’ and ‘Creator Redeemer and Sustainer’ or ‘in the name of Jesus’ only?”. What do you use to baptise – it has to be water, and no, you can’t use any other liquids ‘in a pinch’.
So you define your basics and then you go from there. If you can’t immerse, you pour (the water has to flow and has to touch the head), and if you can’t pour, you sprinkle (again, the water has to touch the person, not their clothing). This is not exactly “making it up as you’re going along”, it’s “oh sugarlumps, Marcus is too sick to bring down to the river or the baptismal font to baptise him but he wants to be baptised, well I guess we can pour water on his head and that will do instead of submerging his entire body” and other decisions that have to be made when practicalities bump up against the ideal.
(There are such sub-topics as conditional baptism – if you’re not sure whether or not the person has been baptised before, or if their baptism was done correctly – and baptism of desire and baptism of blood but that’s more detail than we need to go into).
One of the practical bits w.r.t. infant baptism these days is the health and strength of the priest. A squirming toddler being dipped in the baptismal font by a 70 year old priest isn’t going to work very well.
@albatross11
This is an excellent argument for more and younger priests.
I don’t have a firm view either way on submersion versus sprinkling, but I view baptism not dissimilar to circumcism (except for the bit about one being a NT sacrament and the other not). I don’t think the choice of my parents can impute righteousness or faith or belonging to me. It’s not an act of my own will submitting when I am baptized or circumcised as an infant; it may be a tribal marker or strengthen the community or whatever, but in my conception of God, as one who values individual choice, it can’t really impact my own salvation or be a testament to my own faith.
On the submersion vs sprinkling thing:
Baptists prefer submersion, but I once saw a Baptist pastor use a bottle of water. To be fair, the baptism at the time was being practiced in a really cold lake, and the guy they sprinkled the water on was like 70 something. Submersion is a great symbol of death and all, but actually killing the guy would have gone a little too far…
Also, props to Deisach for defending/explaining some of the relevant bits of the Baptist position.
Does that mean that Jesus got baptised partly in his own name?
@Lambert, Jesus got baptized by John the Baptist, whose baptism was a different thing than Christian baptism. Paul points out the difference in Acts 19:1-6, while insisting that some converts who had previously been baptized with John’s baptism get rebaptized. We don’t know for sure whose name John’s baptism was in, but the answer to your question is almost certainly not.
@GearRatio
In my previous comment I wrote: “My point is essentially the same as the one Catholics advance all the time”, and you interpreted it thus: “Your premise is that the word can’t be literal or contain truth because consistencies in it’s interpretation exist”. What?! You’re putting words in my mouth and then complain that I don’t understand my own argument. Seriously!?
What I’m saying is that different views on atonement produce vastly different psychological results. Some people feel that God is something like an invisible mafia boss constantly holding a gun to their head and demanding to recruit new people into the gang. Some people feel that as long as they aren’t total jerks and remember to say “sorry, God” when they screw up, God will surely let them into Heaven. Some people feel that Hell in its classic fire-and-brimstone form can’t possibly be organized by God. This is my answer to your saying that the differences between atonement theories are minor and hair-splitting: the differences can’t be minor if they lead to very different outlooks, regardless of your ability to believe in 10 theories at the same time.
But then I simply have to bring somebody other than an Evangelical because Evangelicals are historically taught only Penal Substitution and maybe Satisfaction. You might say that that’s because those theories are in the Bible. But I would put it in this way, which you surely won’t like: the (somewhat funny) tradition to claim to interpret the Bible without any tradition has only developed within Western tradition, which is why everybody who claims to read the Bible without any tradition also happens to talk about atonement in the words of Saint Augustine.
So I bring up this Kalomiros guy – and yes, he’s quite flippant and unkind to Western theology – but that’s kind of the point, as I want to show that it’s possible to interpret the Bible in a completely different way. He sees satisfaction of the Divine Justice to be a totally unnatural read of the Bible, and I think most EOs would agree with that. But you go full alarm – he believes in tradition! Close the windows and hide the children! Seriously though, tradition just boils down to people interpreting the Bible. What you put as “where the Bible and tradition clash, sometimes tradition wins for them” means that sometimes their tradition, unlike yours, refuses to interpret some verse literally. But I don’t believe this disqualifies them from holding opinions about atonement.
they aren’t seen as lethal conflicts even by people who very firmly believe in the literal, absolute authority of the book.
There could be a lot of reasons for that. For example, those who see those conflicts might cease to believe in the literal, absolute authority of the book. But I think that’s not what’s going on. I think that Evangelicals have entrenched themselves with excuses to not listen to anybody else – from “oh no, he has tradition” to “he was baptized in childhood, so he’s not baptized, so he has no Holy Spirit, so he can’t interpret the Bible properly”. That doesn’t look like an intellectually healthy position to be in.
@Deiseach
Thanks for clearing that up.
Lambert:
Every recursion needs a base case.
@ Eigenmoon:
I agree with your general point, but I don’t think this is the best example of it. It’s not just that he sees satisfaction of Divine Justice to be an unnatural reading of the Bible, it’s that he doesn’t seem to understand what proponents of the satisfaction theory actually mean.
@The original Mr. X
OK, let me try another example: St. Isaac of Nineveh. Brock’s translation is not online but I quote from here. He doesn’t argue with Augustine because he doesn’t know him, and yet this looks to me as a passionate rejection of the satisfaction theory:
Responding as a Latter-day Saint.
I don’t really know what you mean by “is this statement a manifestation of the Great Apostasy?” Do you mean whether I disagree with it or do you mean something else?
To Latter-day Saints the notion of a Great Apostasy has two aspects, one more important than the other. The first, less important idea is that some truths about God were lost or distorted some time after the establishment of the early church. The second idea is that the priesthood authority or “keys” that Christ gave to the church through the first apostles was lost. That power included both the authority to receive continuing revelation and also the authority to perform necessary ordinances like baptism and the laying on of hands to give the gift of the Holy Ghost.
Note that the second idea all but implies the first idea; for example, a huge portion of the New Testament is the writers warning against false teachers creeping in.
I think it is important to clarify that Latter-day Saints do not reach the conclusion that a Great Apostasy occurred by historical argument or hermeneutics or whatever. We believe in the model Joseph Smith followed. He read James 1:5, “if any of you lack wisdom let him ask of God.” He wanted to know which of the competing churches in his area he should join, so he prayed about it and he received a vision of the Father and the Son telling him that none of them were true and that he should join none of them. Everything else followed from that. Latter-day Saints are taught to pray about the truth of this claim for ourselves and get their own answers. Everything we teach — and any way we interpret scripture — starts from that foundation.
The term Great Apostasy is also used in Protestantism generally to argue against Catholicism, and in your description, moreso due to truth distortion/cultural adaptation than being lost.
What’s interesting me is the divergence in approaches – the reformed tradition hones in on the “original” 66 books of the bible (see above comments regarding deuterocanonical stuff as well as statement iteself). There is a lot of emphasis on sufficiency and not adding to what’s there.
I learned from the last thread on contemplating a move to Utah that Mormons consider it foolish to do what is described and to think that the Bible alone is sufficient. I also learned that mormons also believe it is not inerrant as protestants do.
Latter-day Saints are in an interesting place with regard to the Protestant / Catholic divide. We agree with Protestants that the Catholic church diverged from the truth in various ways and does not actually still hold the authority of Peter that they claim to hold. But we agree with Catholics that scripture alone is sufficient and also that properly bestowed priesthood authority is necessary.
By the way I want to emphasize that very few Latter-day Saints will think that you are a fool if you don’t agree with them. Like, no one is going to be muttering “What an idiot!” under their breath when your back is turned.* As I said, our conclusions don’t come from us thinking we are the smartest interpreters of scripture, but from a miraculous revelation that we feel lucky enough to have heard about, and that usually leads to humility when dealing with other religious beliefs. I recall reading that the book “American Grace” found that while Mormons are viewed relatively negatively by most other religious groups, Mormons view other religious groups relatively positively.
*As long as you don’t go full anti-Mormon and constantly bring up tired criticisms that don’t accurately represent their beliefs without ever engaging with what they have to say. This happens and pretty much every member of the church has dealt with it.
As you may have noticed from the prior thread, I may be non-offensive/non-judgmental to a fault when engaging those with a different world view than my own.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean I don’t have plenty of offensive/judgmental thoughts! I simply am generally reluctant to share them! 😀
Jokes aside, given all the things that others say about Mormons (including the play Book of Mormon, which I did not actually enjoy at all), I figure I should hear about what Mormons believe…from Mormons. I don’t think it quite fair to just take what non-Mormons say any more than I would think it fair to be convinced I know all about what Catholics think from a Protestant or what a Baptist thinks from a Jew.
I’m a Latter-day Saint and took a look at those confessional statements. I can’t guarantee that I fully appreciate all the wording, as I imagine it’s informed by denominational disagreements that maybe aren’t as salient to the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Anyway, after a single read-through, I’d affirm 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, and 13, with some clarifications.
I’d deny 2 because of the language “these writings alone….” Also I don’t know what “final in its authority over every domain of knowledge to which it speaks” means to the authors of the statement, and “without error in the original writings” makes me want to ask for examples of specific things which are held to be errors by some but not by the statement authors.
As to your question, I believe the closure of the scriptural canon is a manifestation of apostasy. The pattern seen in the Bible is that God guides his people through revelation to his servants. His words to us through his servants are scripture. To Latter-day Saints, an important aspect of Christ being the Head of the church is that he continues to guide it through revelation even today.
I don’t fully understand parts of 11. In any case, I believe Christ’s Church is distinguished by a specific God-given authority which includes, for example, the key’s given to Peter in Matthew 16, the authority bestowed upon Matthias (Acts 1:20-26), and the authority to give the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands that Phillip the Deacon maybe didn’t have but Peter and John did (Acts 8:12-17).
On 3, our spirits and bodies were both created by God, but there is an aspect that is not created which we call “intelligences.” Also, our picture of creation is more that of God organizing things out of chaos, rather than things popping into existence ex nihilo or things living “in the mind of God”.
On 4, I’d clarify that our condemnation to spiritual death is from our own individual sins, not Adam’s, though Adam’s made possible the conditions by which we can (and do, obviously) sin.
On 7, I don’t know what “two natures” signifies and I’m guessing that’s tied to a historical theological disagreement I don’t know much about.
On 13, we have a different picture of what Hell means (or doesn’t mean) from the traditional one. Also, we believe that there will be a millennium of peace between Christ’s second coming and the final judgment of all.
To all of these I’d probably add things, and I’d definitely word them in different language.
Can you expand more on the notion of “intelligences” not being created by God?
The statement of Christ’s “two natures” is indeed tied to the Monophysite Controversy surrounding the Council of Chalcedon. Briefly, it means that Christ is both fully God and fully man – He isn’t a blend of both, but He has both distinct “natures.”
To expand on this, it’s to clarify that Jesus isn’t a demigod like in Greek traditions where Zeus or some other God copulates with a mortal and produces Heracles and the like.
At no point did the non-Chalcedon churches (Ethiopian, Coptic (Egyptian), Armenian and West Syriac) believe anything remotely like that.
From the clarification by Coptic Pope Shenouda III:
Some thoughts below:
2) Regarding without error, it is pushing back against the argument that due to human fallibility, translations plus time will inevitably introduce mistakes in the Bible. Among other things, Protestants believe that if God is active and personal, this activity also involves actively protecting his word (special revelation). Any new insights serve only to clarify what God has already said rather than add to doctrine.
11) The emphasis is on the church community rather than individuals, essentially stemming from Jesus’ first coming fulfilling the scriptures and his death creating the new covenant. While the old covenant was with the Jews, the new one is for all peoples, and so the church is also for all nations, etc., and those who are part of it should live distinctively.
3) What is the scriptural basis for “intelligences”?
4) Interesting – so hypothetically, is it possible for a person to live a perfect life?
7) This is one of those apparent contradictions like fate vs. free will and the trinity itself – as it says in John, Jesus, being God, created all things, and yet the Incarnation meant that he humbled himself to be completely human (yet still completely God). Some people point to light as a particle and wave as an apparent contradiction, but I’m not sure how well the analogy fits. Practically, it means Jesus can empathize with suffering since he was fully human and suffered quite a bit.
13) So unlike the Greek notion of the afterlife, the resurrection means that people don’t just drift off into some spirit world, but instead will eventually be given new bodies in a new heaven/earth wombo combo.
Are there important doctrines of the LDS that are missing from these 13?
4) That is what Jesus did. He was tempted just as we are yet was perfectly obedient, whereas we inevitably fail and commit sin under similar conditions.
7) The clarification from Evan is helpful. Yes, I believe that Christ is both fully God and fully man. The point of Christ empathizing with humans is elaborated on in the Book of Mormon.
13) Indeed, we believe resurrection consists of new bodies in a new heaven and earth, not just something like the continuation of our spirits.
2) I could imagine God taking such an active role in preserving scripture. God preserving scripture is a theme, in fact, throughout the Book of Mormon. So is the creation of scripture.
3) It’s not explicit in the Bible. The Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Abraham say a bit about intelligences. These mention them as the metaphysical objects underlying our agency and the uncreated aspects of our spirits and physical bodies. I don’t know if the idea ever gets fully fleshed out (hehe).
There are definitely important doctrines not on the list, for some value of the word important. The most important is covered, however, namely Jesus Christ’s divinity and role as Savior. What we take to be the core principles of the Gospel are faith in Christ, repentance, baptism, and receiving the Holy Ghost. On each of these I imagine we’d differ on the details, but the statements seem like reasonable descriptions to me.
3) It’s not explicit in the Bible. The Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Abraham say a bit about intelligences. These mention them as the metaphysical objects underlying our agency and the uncreated aspects of our spirits and physical bodies. I don’t know if the idea ever gets fully fleshed out (hehe).
Drat it, I should really go to the source documents before I comment on this, but on a cursory reading it sounds awfully like smuggling in a version of Aquinas’ classification of souls: the rational, sensitive and vegetative souls (which he in turn, of course, got from Greek and other philosophers).
Which is not to say that this refers to the soul or souls, as such, but indeed something more akin to the “spirit, soul and body” definition derived from St Paul, with an admixture (perhaps) of the metaphysical notion of intelligences (as derived via Averroes from Aristotle, and exceedingly confusing).
My only quibble would be “in the original writings.” Taken literally, that permits the argument that the gospels in the form we now have them are not the original writings—I gather there is scholarly debate about which ones were written when, with some arguments implying that some of what we have was written after the lifetime of the apostles.
But my guess is that that isn’t what the phrase is intended to suggest, and that aside it is what I mean by literalist.
What they’re talking about (I’ve seen a dozen or more similar Evangelical doctrinal statements) is distinguishing the English/Latin/Spanish/whatever translations from the original Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic, and distinguishing the copied Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic texts from the originals. Evangelicals definitely acknowledge translation errors and copyists’ errors; it’d be very difficult not to.
So, it’s quite within bounds to say “An ancient copyist made a mistake in copying this verse of the Gospel of John,” or even “An ancient copyist wrongly inserted this short passage in the Gospel of John.” What this statement is excluding is the claim “The Gospel of John was originally written a generation or two later, so there were errors and mistakes in its original text before any copyists got to it.”
I myself completely agree with this point of the doctrinal statement.
Once you concede that every document you can access might contain errors of transcription, aren’t you back with the problem that was offered to me in the earlier long thread—that you can transform the actual teaching into what you want it to say?
I thought the argument that was being offered there was that God not only controlled the original writing to make sure it was correct, he also controlled the process by which it got to us.
I may have a different view on the matter. Many churches, the ones I attend included, require the head pastor to have a seminary degree from a gospel-focused seminary that requires literacy in both Greek and Hebrew. That is so ambiguities that may emerge in translations say to…English can be clarified. Just like Les Mis, War and Peace, or Don Quixote “lose” certain depth when translated to English, particularly idioms, so too can the Bible, not because the originals aren’t true, but by the very nature of translation.
Two main approaches are then word for word translations, and also thought-for-thought translations. None of these challenges in translation negates the overall “2” that I mentioned in the root post.
And so I had not considered myself a literalist because I don’t understand the nuances of certain confusing parts well enough. This doesn’t make these parts untrue, I just don’t have a full understanding of them. For instance, I’m told Genesis 1 is a poem and therefore should not be taken literally, but there was no error in transcription in that poem as I trust that God is able to protect his message. Likewise, the “everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial” is not Paul giving Christian advice, but him repeating a popular viewpoint of the Greeks (Corinthians) he was preaching to at the time in order to rebut it.
This is all to say that I believe that if I dig deep enough into any section, I better understand the context and the truth is better revealed. But this is very different from some lads slapping some disparate texts together and deeming them holy, and purposely making parts ambiguous so that there’s wiggle room to argue everything is consistent, which is a viewpoint that “2” is definitely against.
And so I’d hold your horses on any perceived elephant in the room as that may get someone’s goat about what they consider a sacred cow. It may be easy to dismiss the Bible as a cock and bull story that doesn’t have all its ducks in a row and whose authenticity is a hot potato. I’m generally too much of a couch potato to beef up my argument further, though, and will take with a grain of salt those that have a bone to pick and always seem to have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed when it comes to talking about Christianity.
I would well struggle to translate my last paragraph word for word to Chinese, but that wouldn’t mean I spoke that paragraph in error. By the way, if you clicked on either of the links in my post, do know I generally read the ESV and therefore never thought myself literalist in the literal sense.
Yes, God controlled the process by which the Scripture was passed down to us. He didn’t control it to the point where there’re absolutely no copyists’ errors – we can see that just by comparing ancient manuscripts to each other. However, He guided the process of transmission so that we can be morally certain of what the text says on just about any point of doctrine.
For one example, in Ephesians 1:1, does Paul address the letter to “the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful,” or to “the saints who are faithful”? Some manuscripts say each; some copyist must’ve left out or inserted something. It’s an interesting historical question (was it to an individual church or a broad group of churches?) but it affects absolutely no point of doctrine.
For another example, in Jude 5, does Jude say it was “Jesus” or “the Lord” who “saved a people out of the land of Egypt”? Some manuscripts say each; some scribe must’ve changed the original word. This might have some implications for exactly how the persons of the Trinity relate to each other, but it’s extremely minor if anything.
But if you want to argue that Jesus isn’t fully God, or that He isn’t the only way to salvation… well, none of the textual questions in the Bible will get you anywhere toward that. You can claim it’s been corrupted even more than we have any evidence of (I believe Mohammad made this claim?), but – well – there’s absolutely no evidence to support this.
So in short, I’m not sure how this reintroduces that problem?
The argument offered to me, as I understood it, was that once you allowed the possibility of any error in the text and relied on your own reason to figure what was true and what was not, you could water down doctrines that you didn’t want to believe. If I remember correctly, that thread started with my raising the question of whether Paul’s letters counted as certain truth. Any particular statement in the letters might be due to the sort of accidental error you mentioned or to a transmitter adding what he thought Paul must have meant. So if you don’t want to believe something, you have an excuse not to.
It would be hard to apply that approach to the sort of central doctrines you mention, but it might be useful if one wanted to argue that homosexual acts were not sinful, or reject some other doctrinal view that clashed with current attitudes.
David, I think you are wrong here. This is a rare area where I’ve got substantial expertise you don’t. Textual differences are not really an issue. The text of the New Testament originals is quite well established. Everyone from the Gospel Coalition to atheist scholars agree almost fully on the exact text of the originals. To put it another way, if dndrsn and I ever get around to arguing again, we are unlikely to disagree about the text of any verse of the Greek New Testament in question. That is because we have enough copies of the right kinds to use well agreed on methods, not doctrinal bias. Textual criticism excuses not to believe something are almost a complete nonissue in the New Testament, at least for anyone with the ability to read the Greek.
Even in the Hebrew Bible, where we don’t have exact agreement on the exact text, the differences really don’t cause doctrinal disagreement. Like, the worst issue I know about off hand is the number of years the first king, Saul, reigned for. Not a completely unimportant issue – but not one people are likely to disagree on because of doctrinal or moral bias.
@marshwiggle:
For 99+% of the differences this is true. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t important doctrinal issues imported by differences in copies. We have, IIRC, more differences in just the surviving Greek texts than we have words in the texts, so it’s not surprising that both can be true.
And then you have the whole issue that it’s only in fairly modern times that many of these errors came to light. It’s only within the last few hundred years that anyone even attempted to put the Greek texts side by side with other languages, and that revealed some of these issues.
I’ll try to come up with some specific examples, but I’ll just be drawing from Ehrman.
Yes. I was talking about the modern scholarship about what the original Greek manuscripts said. Not about any time at least one ancient copy differs from another. And not about differences between modern scholarship and the texts that the King James Bible was translated from.
My claim is that we now have good reason to think we know almost all of the original words of the Greek New Testament, and that a large majority of all kinds of scholars on the issue agree with this. Almost all of the remaining scholarly disagreements about the text do not constitute major differences in doctrine.
I would be happy to jump into the details of any scholarly disagreements about what the original text said. They would be great illustrations of the principles by which scholars decide what the original text said.
And yes, hundreds of years ago even educated people were likely to be working from texts with real differences from the originals. The good thing is, the Bible tends to repeat itself about important doctrines. A lot. So even people who had incorrect texts had access to the important stuff.
@marshwiggle:
It’s all fine and good for this to be the case if you take the Catholic approach, that the Bible is just another inherently flawed work of man. Pay attention to the forest, the trees don’t matter too much on their own.
But it directly contradicts the idea that God somehow protected His Word. From a Biblical literalist perspective, this makes no sense. Unless God was giving a hearty “fuck you” to people for about 2000 years after his only begotten son was born, suffered and died for our sins.
I don’t think that quite follows. First, God doesn’t require an exact knowledge of the Greek and Hebrew texts. If He did, we’d pretty much all be doomed, with the possible exception of my Hebrew prof and a few people like him. Most people have to make do with translations, or even some guy who has never seen a Bible faithfully recounting the things he does know. God knows how to use that to get done what He wants done, including but not limited to bringing people to a saving knowledge of Himself.
The King James version and the Vulgate are… not the best translations. And yet, reading the works of people who only used one or the other of those, I meet recognizably Christian people. People believing more or less what I do. People trying to be faithful to the text they had, and coming to roughly the same conclusions about what that means. That looks totally consistent with God sufficiently protecting his word to get done what he wanted to get done.
Perhaps an analogy might help.
Most SSC people think there are true laws of physics.
Some of us here have seen the Standard Model equations and could read them.
Most of the rest of you know they exist, and have seen translations into English.
The Standard model has differences with the true laws, but mostly that doesn’t make a difference.
The translations have bigger differences, but they are enough to get done what people need done. Still, it’s good to have physicists around if only to keep certain kinds of ignorance partially in check.
None of those differences provides warrant to believe the true laws don’t exist or fail to be true in some real sense.
It would still make sense to say, yes, the true laws are, well, the actual laws of physics. It also still makes total sense to say that the laws as we know them are useful enough for anything we’re at all likely to do.
In the same way, the original manuscripts are entirely true. And yet, one does not need to have the exact manuscripts. Our current knowledge of them is really close. And for most purposes, translations into English and so on are good enough.
As a fun mental game, see how many of the arguments in this thread, if applied to the laws of physics and things people have said about those laws, would imply there are no true laws of physics, or that they can’t be discovered, or that nothing usable in the general direction of physics is even possible.
I agree with everything marshwiggle said in his latest post.
@HeelBearCub, I have never encountered your claim that there’re “important doctrinal issues imported by differences in copies” defended by anyone familiar with the details of what differences there are. (Except by Jehovah’s Witnesses using motivated reasoning to claim the Trinity falls on the basis of 1 John 5:7.) As far as I can see, there aren’t any. Even Ehrman, in my brief acquaintance with his works, typically argues from silence and history rather than actual differences between surviving texts. Can you please give some examples of specific doctrines that depend on specific manuscript differences?
Also, contrary to what you say, textual differences were known back into the ancient period. For one prominent example, Erasmus’s choice of the Byzantine text (aka “Textus Receptus”) for his Greek New Testament was roundly (and IMO correctly) attacked as inferior.
Are you perhaps confusing textual criticism with form criticism, which did arise in modern times and does affect important doctrinal issues? I dispute the value of form criticism for broadly the same reasons as C. S. Lewis and Richard Bauckham – to wit, that it would yield nonsensical results if applied to any other text including those with known history; and that there was very likely no such lengthy time when individual stories were handed down only by oral tradition.
I obviously know less about the textual history than several people commenting on it, so a simple question:
What was the sequence of events by which Paul’s letters became a part of the New Testament? Is there a surviving text written by Paul? A first generation copy of such a text?
@Evan Þ:
IF you have a spare 90 minutes, this is a nice lecture to listen to. It’s Bart Ehrman, I think as a guest lecturer in promotion of his book “Misquoting Jesus”.
At 15:24 he starts talking about John Mill, an Oxford scholar who, in 1707, produced a printed comprehensive Greek New Testament. Mill looked at every known copy in Greek at the time, produced his version based on all those texts, but cited all of the signigicant differences between the copies. There were 30,000 differences in the manuscripts he considered significant. Not all the differences he found, just those he considered significant. And that was only with 100 Greek manuscripts available. We have over 5700 known Greek manuscripts today.
At 18:50, he makes the point that almost all the differences are completely insignificant. Most of the differences are things like spelling errors, the kind of differences that aren’t even translatable.
Some of them are more significant, like leaving out complete lines (especially if you have two lines that end in the same words – i.e. parablepsis occasioned by homoeoteleuton), or complete pages. Not particularly a problem … unless the copy you are reading is missing those lines or pages.
At 24:28 he starts talking about changes that aren’t simple slips of the pen, but rather change the text in meaningful ways (and are likely to be, at least some of the time, intentional).
Mark Chapter 1: In the original text we find “As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way””. The problem being that the quote is NOT from Isiah, but from Exodus. So later manuscripts all omit the reference to Isiah.
Luke Chapter 2: The original text says that Mary says to Jesus “Your father and I have been looking all over for you”. Some later manuscripts, seeing that this calls into question the idea of Jesus being born of a virgin, substitute the words “We have been looking all over for you”.
Mathew, 24:36: The original text says “”But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Later manuscripts remove “nor the son” so as to remove Jesus claiming ignorance of when the apocalypse will come.
John 7 and 8, The story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery: This is the one that has the line “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”. It’s not originally in the Greek manuscripts and no mention is made of it until about 1000 CE.
Gospel of Mark: The original manuscript ends with “and the women fled from the tomb and they didn’t say anything to anyone for they were afraid.” Twelve verses were added later, which specify things like Jesus saying people will be able to speak in foreign languages, handle deadly snakes and drink poison without being harmed.
Those verses are where we get snake handling and speaking in tongues.
Ehrman goes on for another about an hour in this vein, although a big chunk of that is Q&A.
David Friedman:
How anything became considered Scripture isn’t exactly a small topic, and I’ve got pastor stuff to do taking up time. It’s been touched on briefly by others already too. I may take it up later.
There is no surviving copy of Paul’s originals. I think our earliest copy for a lot of Paul’s work is papyrus 46, which is easily more than a century after Paul died. And it has holes in it. That is why we have to reconstruct the originals as the text which would explain the words, relationships, and places of the copies we do have.
Heel Bear Cub:
Do you even know which of those, if any, are differences between scholars today about what the original text said, and which are merely differences between ancient copies? (recall the distinction I made above). If you don’t even know that much about the differences, why are you pressing them as evidence of anything? And what exactly are you pressing them as evidence for? Do you want me to get into detail about any particular one of those differences?
@Marshwiggle
Thank you.
You are indeed a very respectawiggle.
@HBC:
Thank you.
@marshwiggle:
Note that I directed that comment to Evan who claimed they had never head of any of any differences that were important enough to be doctrinal.
You can go look at the video if you need more detail in specifically what is being referred to, but the differences I highlighted are all later (adopted) differences from earlier text. Whether today’s scholars have now successfully removed these passages (it will depend on which Bible you are looking at) doesn’t really address the issue of whether the text can be regarded as the inerrant word of God.
Again, here I am merely highlighting one issue with textual literalism, not attacking the very premise of faith.
@HeelBearCub, I have heard of all the differences you’re listing. Yes, they were most likely changed by scribes in an attempt to reinforce doctrine, which’s probably where we get some other differences like 1 John 5:7 from as well. But what I was saying is that no doctrine in itself stands or falls on the basis of Mary calling Joseph Jesus’ father, or Jesus saying “let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” or any of the other textual differences I’ve heard of. Sure, under one reading you can point to several new verses where (for example) Jesus is clearly called God – but even without them, the Bible still clearly says He’s God.
(Except snake-handling. Okay, I’ll grant you that doctrine falls if you remove the Longer Ending of Mark, as I believe is correct.)
Do you have any examples of textual differences that actually cause doctrines to fall? I haven’t heard of anything that matters in that way. I suppose Matthew 24:36 where (in some manuscripts) Jesus claims ignorance of the date of His return would have meaningful bearing on the doctrine of the Incarnation; is there anything more significant?
@Evan:
Again, I’m just attacking inerrancy. One is enough.
That said, it’s not “He who is without sin” that isn’t there. The entire story is a later addition. You think that’s not germane? Given that an entire interaction was successfully added to the Bible 1000 years after, why would we believe that other stories are accurately told?
Especially when the the added part of Mark, the one you already admit is doctrinally significant, is added in ways to prevent Mark contradicting Mathew, Luke and John. You don’t think this affects doctrine?
This is simply wrong. While it’s undisputed that the author of this pericope is not the author of the rest of John’s Gospel, it’s not that late by half. Codex Bezae contains it (~400 AD), which is unsurprising as both Leo the Great and Augustine cited it in the 400s.
What’s more surprising is that the story was being cited as moral precedent before it made it into John’s Gospel. The Syriac Didascalia Apostolorum, composed in the mid-200s, says “for you do not obey our Savior and our God, to do as He also did with her that had sinned, whom the elders set before Him, and leaving the judgment in His hands, departed. But He, the searcher of hearts, asked her and said to her, ‘Have the elders condemned thee, my daughter?’ She said to Him, ‘No, Lord.’ And He said unto her, ‘Go your way; neither do I condemn thee.’ In Him therefore, our Savior and King and God, be your pattern, O bishops.”
Maybe you are correct that this is still doctrinally significant for “complete and inerrant in the original autographs” Protestants, but your facts were in error.
@Le Maistre Chat:
Sorry, Ehrman is saying no mention is made of it being in John until the 10th century.
ETA: and just to be clear, that means it also wasn’t in The Bible, as the story only appears in John.
@HeelBearCub, that could count if you were talking to someone who believed in snake-handling. I don’t, and I don’t think anyone else here does either. So, “some people believe in this text that isn’t really part of the original Gospel, and because of that they believe in snake-handling” doesn’t count as a doctrine found in the Bible any more than “some other people believe in this Council that isn’t part of the Bible, and because of that they believe in Papal infallibility.” I don’t believe in the Pope, the Vatican Council, the Longer Ending of Mark, or snake-handling.
Throw them all out; they’re all added doctrines. What’s left holds together.
@Evan Þ:
The relevant question, at least from the standpoint of my part of the discussion, is whether, if you wanted to believe in one or more of those things, you could reasonably persuade yourself that they were in the Bible.
I thought the argument for accepting Biblical inerrancy was that it avoided having to make judgement calls on what God commanded, and so inoculated the believer from the temptation to distort revelation in the direction of what he wanted to believe.
@ HBC:
That’s not the Catholic approach. Cf. Dei Verbum 11:
11. Those divinely revealed realities which are contained and presented in Sacred Scripture have been committed to writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. For holy mother Church, relying on the belief of the Apostles (see John 20:31; 2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Peter 1:19-20, 3:15-16), holds that the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself.(1) In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him (2) they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, (3) they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted. (4)
Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings (5) for the sake of salvation. Therefore “all Scripture is divinely inspired and has its use for teaching the truth and refuting error, for reformation of manners and discipline in right living, so that the man who belongs to God may be efficient and equipped for good work of every kind” (2 Tim. 3:16-17, Greek text).
So what? As LMC said, it’s in the Codex Bezae, which dates to the fifth century. So we know it was included in (at least some manuscripts of) John by at least that date, whether or not anybody at the time explicitly mentions it being in John.
@Evan:
It’s no big deal, unless you think The Bible is inerrant an unchanging and God protects his word. These aren’t small typos.
@The original Mr. X:
Huh. I had thought the idea of the text as both divine, but also subject to the fallibility of man was pretty standard teaching.
But it looks like I’m more wrong than right on that. Certainly however, it’s quite complex (with apparently competing interpretations with the church itself), or we wouldn’t have a synod of bishops saying in 2008 (my emphasis):
@David
Inerrancy does not equal literalism.
I want to go off at a tangent and say unironically, non-jokingly and with all sincerity: DragonMilk, I love you, brother.
This entire sub-thread is giving me very pleasant memories of doing the “Catholic explains Weird Catholic Stuff – What Is That And Why? to civilly-discoursing Protestants who may not be in total agreement, seeing as many come out of an Evangelical background, but at least are honestly curious” bit I did some years back (given that I cannot resist running my goddamn mouth on the Internet). Ah, amateur theology is all fun and games until somebody loses an eye! Or the Inquisition happens, whichever comes first 😉
I think you have to first show the implements of eye-removal.
Because once the Inquisition happens, you’re losing BOTH eyes!
No one here hails from Spain, right?
Looks warily at ana53294….
I’m more likely to be a witch, I think…
But the Spanish Inquisition did not believe in witches, so I’d helpfully point them towards you heretics…
Spanish Inquisitors were educated in logic and were unlikely to believe your “She turned me into a newt! … I got better.” story.
Hey, I’m not a heretic! More likely to be the Inquisitor, honestly.
Bonus in whatever the SSC currency is for anyone who can explain to me how the universe can be infinite in spatial extent whilst stemming from a localized Big Bang. I have never been able to wrap my mind around this concept, maybe because it’s never been unpacked in a way I can understand.
The Big Bang is not localized, it happened everywhere at once. The Universe was always infinite in spatial extent, it is just that the distance between any two fixed given points (which is of course finite) decreases more and more as you go back in time, approaching zero asymptotically as you approach the Big Bang. Another way of thinking of it is of the Big Bang as a moment of infinite density, rather than zero size.
That almost does it. I’m gonna have to draw myself a diagram.
Expanding on my previous answer to correct some misunderstandings coming up below in the thread.
Draw a chessboard pattern, and just imagine it is infinite in all directions. Now imagine that each second each square is doubling its size. The chessboard is always infinite, the distance between any two given squares is always finite, and as you rewind time backwards the squares get smaller and smaller. The universe is like this in three dimensions. The reason to believe it is infinite is that it is by far the simplest model compatible with observations; we haven’t observed any global spatial curvature effects hinting that it wraps upon itself like a higher-dimensional sphere, as Einstein once thought and as the more common balloon analogy implies.
Technically this model does not have a Big Bang, because you can rewind time without limit and never hit a singularity, only smaller and smaller scales. This is because “doubling each second” implies a 2^t (exponential) scale function, which is never 0. Inflationary models are actually similar to this. Models with a true Big Bang have scale functions (for example) of the form t^c with c a positive constant, where there is an actual moment of zero size. However, in either this version or the exponential version, we cannot actually trust our current theories when t is small enough that the density is of Planckian scales, so talk a true moment of “zero size” is most likely nonsense.
This is a helpful explanation. But how does it differentiate an infinite universe from a spherical universe that is also bigger than our area of observation?
@Randy It doesn’t but if you are measuring a parameter (such as global curvature) and you get zero to within your measurement precision, Ockham’s Razor suggests it is likely zero.
Let me be a bit more precise about this. In the cosmological equations for how the universe expands there are several so-called “density parameters”, which are dimensionless numbers expressing the relative “weights” of different physical aspects playing into the equation: ordinary matter, radiation, dark matter, dark energy, and global curvature. The larger one of these parameters, the more the corresponding physical reality affects the measurable expansion of the universe. For example, the parameter for ordinary matter is measured as 0.0486±0.0010; for dark matter, as 0.2589±0.005. On the same scale, the global curvature parameter has been measured as 0.000±0.005.
Note that an infinite universe isn’t the same thing as a universe with zero curvature. The universe could loop at some point like the Pacman grid, and be finite despite having no curvature and no edges.
@Hey:
It is if you assume the Universe is globally isotropic. (A torus would have privileged directions.)
@A1987dM: A globally isotropic manifold of zero curvature is infinite, but the reverse isn’t true. Hyperbolic space is globally isotropic and infinite, but with negative curvature.
One of us is confused about the present cosmological models, because I think yours is in fact the common understanding, that is, the big bang isn’t consistent with an infinite universe. Iirc, the expansion of the universe is what “predicts” the big-bang*, and a non-infinite universe was famously a sticking point of Einstein’s, leading to his biggest mistake.
*I think this is not quite right, but if I leave it here someone will correct me.
edit: hmm, I seem to be disagreeing with Alejandro. Welcome further opinions, but an expanding infinity seems an oxymoron to my mind.
Of course, we don’t have any proof that the universe is actually infinite in extent. I bring this up mainly as it relates to Max Tegmark’s Level 1 universe, which implies that in an infinite universe, our Hubble volume (and this exact conversation on SSC) will be repeated an infinite number of times.
I’ve often wondered, what if the universe wasn’t actually infinite, but closed on the order of a googolplex light years? That would eliminate the replication of Hubble volumes, and it certainly isn’t something that can be ruled out.
No, a googolplex is large enough to replicate Hubble volumes. Heuristically, if there are 10^98 atoms in the universe and each of them can be in 10^98 locations, then there are (10^98)^(10^98) = 10^(98*10^98) < 10^(10^100) = googolplex different configurations, and so some repetition would occur. Since the number of atoms is in fact much less than 10^98, a lot of repetition would occur.
(This computation assumes classical mechanics, so maybe you wouldn’t have repetitions on the quantum level since there are more possibilities there. But macroscopic repetitions are probably all we really care about.)
I believe the standard “how to explain” on this is to first imagine a balloon being filled with air. The surface of the balloon is expanding in the same way space is expanding.
Now imagine an infinity of cinnamon bread dough, with raisins mixed in. As that dough begins to rise all the raisins get farther from each other, despite there still being the same infinite amount of dough.
I know that analogy well, but it still comes down to an infinite amount of mass concentrated in a volume (presumably) the diameter of a Planck length. Maybe that is the concept I’m having trouble with. (As far as I know, no physicists think the universe-originating point would actually be infinitely small, just on the order of 10-33 cm.)
No, there is never an infinite amount of mass in a finite region, the mass just tends to infinity if you go backwards in time while keeping the region size (but not the region itself) fixed.
These would be raisins d’etre, I assume?
I’ll be honest, cheap puns are the main reason I read SSC open threads.
That one made me laugh and wince at the same time.
That’s what I was going for.
That’s an analogy. I’m not sure it works for me conceptually, but nevermind for the moment.
Where does the postulate of an infinite universe come from?
edit:
I guess I’m only a few years more out of date than this guy. Will be reading.
@Statismagician, see what you did there, I do.
The spatially infinite universe seems to be something (from my voluminous reading) that a lot of cosmologists take as a default assumption. Presumably because it’s somehow simpler than explaining why the universe *isn’t* of infinite extent.
I suppose it’s easier to assume an preternaturally existing everything than a sudden burst of everything, but I was under the layman’s impression that the math pointed towards the sudden burst strongly enough to put claims of infinite scope to rest early last century.
Infinite or non-infinite universe isn’t related to whether the universe existed “before” the big bang. AFAIK, the current model is that time begins along with the universe, so the concept of “before” the big bang isn’t conceptually valid.
No matter how much it makes my head hurt.
I appreciate the corrections.
I have learned not to reply to the “obvious” questions about cosmology here, at least. 🙂
The fact that measurements of the curvature of the Universe are consistent with zero within their uncertainties.
A closely related conundrum is Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, which posits that after an infinite amount of time (!) the universe “reboots” itself and creates a new big bang. If anyone can explain what the phrase “after an infinite amount of time” means you are probably living in another dimension.
Presumably, it’s something like, “What I really mean is that as time approaches infinity, the probability of this event becomes 1, so it could happen immediately after heat death, 600,000 years later, or ‘seven hundred trillion raised to its own power seven hundred trillion times’ years later, but it’s definitely GOING to happen, so we’ll just round off to the worst case.”
I don’t think he’s talking about a quantum fluctuation. As far as I can understand, he’s built a model where the inconceivably spread-out flecks of matter of the late universe dwindle gradually to zero mass, at which point the universe “resizes” itself and there’s a new big bang. I think the dwindling is supposed to be infinite and asymptotic.
In cyclic cosmology the scale of the next universe is completely different from our scale. Our heat death is the new Universe’s Big Bang. So you don’t have to wait actually infinite time, maybe just wait 10^150 years or so. The inhabitants of the new Universe might choose their second to be 10^189 our years, then our heat death would happen in an instant to them and look like an explosion.
Disclaimer: I don’t understand how cyclic cosmology is supposed to work and I’m very doubtful about it.
This is a useful piece if you want to understand Penrose’s more recent theories.
Didn’t Penrose posit not too long ago that time doesn’t exist?
From his point of view, he’s positing it even now.
Ayoooooo!
If so, he would likely object to that statement.
If he really means an infinite amount of time, presumably that means that the initial conditions of the new universe are related in some way to the limits of the conditions of the old universe. What kind of limits, I don’t know, and I imagine the answer might end up being somewhat technical.
There are an infinite number of rationals between each integer. 2 is an infinite amount of rationals after 1.
Trying to simplify: in the far future of the universe, the laws of physics become invariant under rescaling (technically, the curvature tensor of the general relativity metric reduces to the Weyl tensor, which is conformally invariant).
This includes rescaling in time as well as in space.
At the Big Bang, the Weyl tensor also dominates, so the laws of physics are also rescaling invariant there.
So, we have two situations – the short Big Bang, and the entire infinite future of the universe – where the laws of physics are invariant under rescaling. And, surprise, you can rescale one into the other. So, in a sense, the entire infinite future of our universe *is* the first micro-moment of a Big Bang.
Of course, this relies on general relativity; until we have a quantum theory of gravity, we can’t be sure (I understand that entropy might also be an issue).
It’s been a long time since I read his book but IIRC it went like this:
Apply a coordinate transformation whereby t’ = -1/t. Now, all (positive) finite times in the old (unprimed) coordinate system correspond to negative times in the new (primed) coordinates, and positive infinite time in the old coordinates correspond to time zero in the new coordinates. The positive times in the new coordinates represent the “new” universe after ours.
(This means that time as a whole has a more complicated topology than just a real half-line — equivalent to a long line or a part thereof, as far as i can tell. EDIT: probably not, it looks like I didn’t correctly remember what a long line looks like.)
My layperson understanding is this:
Despite all the people calling it the “Big Bang”, the “Big Bang” event was not very much like an explosion.
You hear “Big Bang”, and you mentally model is as a giant KABOOM with matter-shrapnel flying every direction, but that’s no more accurate than all the elementary school models of atoms as little balls with electrons in neat circular orbits around them, or the idea that black holes are actually similar to holes.
The actual Big Bang, to whatever extent it happened, was pretty weird by our conventional, every-day, gravity-keep-stuck-to-the-ground working understanding of physics, and if you try to understand it by analogy to an explosion, you’re almost instantly going to be off course, because it’s not a very strong analogy.
I find inflation to be more convincing. According to this theory, the Big Bang was a vacuum decay event. The space before the Big Bang had much more dark energy and was expanding extremely fast. Our Universe is a light cone, in other words a bubble expanding with the speed of light, embedded in that larger space (which might be finite or infinite – we know nothing about it).
@eignemoon:
I’m no physicist, but I don’t think this phrasing is correct. I don’t think inflation suggests that there is anything “before” the BB.
From the article (my emphasis):
I’m talking about a different inflation theory that has no singularity. From another article:
The “bang” is the second step, phase transition.
I’m not seeing that say what you seem to be saying.
Also if you’ve got half an hour, check out this and this video for an explanation of the inflation theory (the one I’m talking about) by a physicist.
I’ll check them out.
Alejandro is right, he just assumed the idea of a metric without motivating it.
When we talk about the size of something, we usually mean the distances involved in moving from one point to another. The “size” of a box is calculated by measuring the distance between each pair of ends (width, length, height) and multiplying them together.
So the “size” of the universe has something to do with the distances involved. But there are infinitely many different notions of distance, and there’s no reason the distance between things can’t change.
Consider this: you have a list containing all strings of words of length 4 e.g. AAAAA, AXKSW, ZPREA etc.
What’s the distance between two strings? The question doesn’t make sense, because we haven’t chosen a way of assigning distances. We call a way of assigning distances a metric.
We can choose any metric we like, and change it however we wish. So let’s say the distance is 0 between all strings at the start (time t =0), then we’ll increase it in increments. At each step, we’ll add the number of letter replacements needed to turn string p into string q to the previous distance between them. For example,
t=0: distance from AAAAA to AAAAB = 0,
t=1: distance from AAAAA to AAAAB = 1,
t=2: distance from AAAAA to AAAAB = 2,
…
t=n: distance from AAAAA to AAAAB = n
From the perspective of the strings, they’re all getting further apart even though there’s as many strings as there were before. Note this rule is totally arbitrary, and the strings can’t guess at t=0 how things will change. Its something they need to guess at after a while.
Its basically the same with the universe. Initially, there are infininitely many “points” labelled by 3 numbers ( the co-ordinates), some stuff which gets assigned co-ordinates (matter), and the metric which assigns distances to the co-ordinates. And there’s a set of rules saying how their interconnections should change.
At the start, the distance between all points is 0. Note adding up infinitely many 0s still gives 0, so at the size of everything is 0. Time moves forward, and they all go: “Oh, hey we’re in the same place. Guess we should tell the matter we’re assigned assigned to”. The matter goes “Oh darn, we’ve got to seperate. Tell the metric to increase our distances”. The metric goes: “right, you two are now this distance apart, you guys are that distance, ….” and so on for the infinitely many pairs of points.
Now we’ve got non-zero distances, we can get non-zero sizes. And we’ve got infinitely many points so we can add up distances and get infinite distance. Repeat the process for a few billion years, and you get us, and a metric saying what sizes we all are.
Epistemic status: I am not a physicists, cosmologist or anyone otherwise qualified to answer your question.
Expansion of the universe means that distance between chunks of matter, each of them bound together by gravity (currently galaxies or groups of galaxies) is increasing.
Infinity of the universe does not mean that there is an infinite amount of matter in the universe. It also does not mean that there is an infinite amount of square kilometres of vacuum in the universe. My impression is that physicists do not yet fully understand what vacuum is, much less how much of it exists.
Infinity of the universe in spatial extent should imho be understand as a claim about what universe is not. How would a spatialy finite universe look like? Would there be a “wall on the end of the universe”, like in some computer game?
Sounds like a job for the Space Corps!
The conventionally accepted model for a finite universe is much like a computer game, but not the ones you’re thinking of. You know how in the old Final Fantasy games the map looped both east/west *and* north/south? A finite universe is curved in on itself so that going far enough up leads to your coming up out of the bottom.
You mean a model that leads to a Big Crunch? I thought that cosmologists currently do not think that is what is going to happen. But theoretically it is possible, and yesm it would make universe more comprehensible and similar to a computer game with a map like in FF.
Would there be a “wall on the end of the universe”, like in some computer game?
Yes, but it will run away from us at the speed of light, so we can never touch it.
Cosmologists usually assume homogeneity, so if the universe is infinite in extent they would assume it had an infinite amount of matter as well. And “infinite in extent” basically does mean “[cubic] kilometres of vacuum”. I am not sure how the question of what vacuum is is related to how much of it exists on a large scale.
Corrollary to this: does universal expansion apply even on the atomic/subatomic scale? Were atoms smaller in the past, with different chemical properties? Is that even a coherent question?
My understanding is that it does, but also doesn’t. All of space is expanding simultaneously, including locally-bound space. But the rate is not noticeable at local scales, and is easily overcome by the four fundamental forces. So atoms would be the same size, for all periods when atoms were actually existing.
That’s assuming a cosmological constant. In the “Big Rip” model, the rate of expansion is itself accelerating, and eventually becomes large enough that it overcomes all other forces and even subatomic particles are ripped apart.
Thanks.
FYI, neatly bundling together two issues discussed here, I just found this Penrose paper relating conformal cyclic cosmology to the Fermi Paradox: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.00554.pdf
Today in Middle East Weirdness, the UAE would like you to vote for their new logo. In exchange, they promise to plant a tree for each vote.
I went for the palm. The one with just the writing I can’t read, and the third one relies on color for distinction. This is always a bad idea since you can’t identify it when printing in black and white.
All three have the same writing, it’s just more stylized in the one without the palm or the colored bars.
It’s initially kind of underwhelming as far as Arabic calligraphy goes; the logo for Emirates Airlines says the same thing in a much bolder way. But it’s growing on me the more I look at it, with the way it resembles waves (or maybe dunes).
None of them are good logos.
It’s not like the rules for how to make a good logo haven’t been around since the middle ages.
Much as I would like rich people to plant more trees, I don’t like any of them too much. The calligraphy-only is the most aesthetically pleasing, but unless you read Arabic, it’s just a squiggle, and hard to distinguish from any other Arabic writing. The palm leaf is a nice symbol, but too square and rigid. The colored stripes just look too random.
Not just planting a tree, but planting a tree in a spot of land in a place in the world! How many people can say that, huh?
I voted for the third one.
The page won’t load in Firefox.
I want to plant a tree. 🙁
Worked on Firefox 71.0
Is there a “Logo McLogoface” option?
Happy Impeachment Day! This is the anti-impeachment effortpost I wanted to make while I was in exile. I was still reading all the posts, and there were some points not made that I thought should have been, and some confusion I think we can clear up.
First, let’s go back to the record of the call between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. Trump asks Zelensky to “do us a favor” and cooperate with the Attorney General on something to do with a server in Ukraine identified by Crowdstrike. Aftagley brought this up, asking what the non-crazy explanation for this is and did not get a good answer. People seem to think Trump was talking about the DNC server. That is not the server. When John Podesta was targeted by the spearphishing attack, Crowdstrike determined that the server used to harvest his account information and to log in to his accounts was in Ukraine. So it is not the DNC email server they want, it’s the server used to attack John Podesta. It’s also entirely possible Trump can’t tell the difference between the servers because “old man and computers.”
So, first I think everyone agrees this is good and appropriate, yes? There is nothing wrong with getting cooperation from a foreign government for investigating the attack against John Podesta, right?
Some might take issue with the words “do us a favor,” but there is actually no favor required. In 1998/1999, Bill Clinton signed the Treaty with Ukraine on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters, which obligates Ukraine to cooperate with us on exactly these kinds of issues. This makes me think “favor” was being used colloquially. Like when your boss asks you to “do him a favor” and have those reports ready by Friday. It’s not really a favor. You have to do it.
Next we get to Vice President Biden. You’ll notice it is not Trump who brings up the prearranged meeting with Rudy, but Zelensky. Rudy has nothing to do with the investigation into the server as that is a separate issue being handled by the DOJ. First Zelensky agrees with Trump that they will cooperate with Barr with regards to the server. Then he says that he is looking forward to meeting with Rudy. This is a change of topic, by Zelensky, not Trump. Then Trump agrees it is good that Zelensky is meeting with Rudy and that they’re investigation corruption because it looked like Biden was up to no good in his opinion.
So Trump did not ask for an investigation of Biden. That was already underway. It’s not unreasonable that the Ukrainians do not like having their personnel and prosecution decisions strong-armed by the United States. But why is Rudy involved? According to John Solomon, the Ukrainians have been trying to get information on what Biden was doing to the US government since summer of 2018. They have been stymied by State Department and DOJ officials. Why the State Department doesn’t want Biden investigated calls for speculation, but I have my suspicions.
So, Trump was not asking for an investigation. The investigation was already well underway.
Lt. Col. Vindman tried to discredit John Solomon’s reporting about Ukraine and the Bidens, but did not seem to offer any facts. Solomon has responded with a list of all of his factual claims about Ukraine and the Bidens with citations, so if there’s anything wrong with Solomon’s reporting, one should address these facts.
Now let’s get to the witness testimony. The allegations are that Trump withheld aid money (alternately a phone call and a meeting) from Ukraine unless they investigated, or announced an investigation of Biden. This is allegedly a bad thing.
First, we all agree the bad thing did not actually happen. No new investigation was launched, and no announcement of an investigation happened, and yet the money was released, the phone call made and the meeting happened. So now the allegation is that Trump attempted to do the bad thing.
The problem here is that not a single witness testified that Trump ordered them to withhold the goodies in exchange for the investigation, and not a single witness testified that they witnessed Trump order someone else to withhold the goodies in exchange for the investigation. They just seemed to have heard (or invented) a rumor that Trump did these things. If you disagree with this and think I am in error, please tell me:
1. The full name of the specific individual Trump ordered to inform the Ukrainians about the investigation for aid deal.
2. A link to the testimony of the witness who was either the person named in part 1 or who witnessed Trump ordering the person named in part 1 to arrange the deal.
We also have the public statements by President Zelensky and his foreign minister that they were not pressured or made aware that goodies would be withheld in exchange for an investigation.
This is one other bullet that few (no one?) seem willing to bite: please explain why President Zelensky is lying about this. It’s an odd coincidence but if one had asked me before all this happened, in, say, June, “Conrad, you don’t trust politicians in general, but who, on the world stage, would you say is the politician least likely to be a corrupt liar?” I would have thought for a second and said “Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine,” based solely on the fact that he was not a politician, but a TV comedian elected to clean up the corruption among Ukraine’s political class. I do not think it was very nice of the Democrats and media to insinuate that Zelensky is a liar.
Next we could get into a discussion of whether or not it would even be bad to ask Ukraine to investigate Biden. Now, I don’t want to get too far into a discussion of Biden because that’s a different topic. That said, I would say no, as there is no rule against investigating politicians running for office. Both major candidates in 2016 were investigated by the FBI, Trump for being a Russian spy and HRC for her email woes.
There is one question I genuinely have that have not seen anyone ask or answer. Is it common for Vice Presidents of the United States to get personally involved in the hiring and firing of foreign officials? How many foreign officeholders did each of Al Gore, Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence have fired? Perhaps this is so common an event no one bothers reporting on it, but if this was the one and only guy whom a Vice President has personally seen to his firing, that would be suspicious.
Anyway, the problem with impeachment as it stands is:
1. The bad thing Trump is accused of doing did not happen (i.e., no one did the thing).
2. There is no evidence or witness testimony that anyone saw Trump attempt to do the bad thing.
3. It is not clear the bad thing is actually bad.
For those reasons, I do not think impeachment is warranted.
I agree very much with what you’ve said. I would also add that the Democrats have been itching to impeach since day 1, so the notion that Trump’s actions shocked their conscience is very hard to believe. And there is no hope that impeachment will be successful.
So this appears to be an exercise in appeasing the base, which I expect to backfire strongly.
I’m just going to put a marker here. I expect that this phrase will now appear in the comments, approximately and hyperbolically, about 10000% more often than when they were all banned.
I’m not sure if it is the main issue, but I think at least it’s a huge catalyst for the main issues that end up resulting in banning. But maybe that is just me.
I am not sure what you are saying here, so I just want to understand it.
Are you saying the comment section has moved substantially to the right, or something else that I am not understanding?
He’s saying we’re currently watching a feedback loop reassemble itself in real time.
I dont understand it either. How is my agreeing with ConradHoncho on impeachment “a huge catalyst for the main issues that end up resulting in banning”. Or maybe I’m not understanding what the ‘it’ stands for in that sentence.
Not particularly talking about the fact that adding more right wing commenters means more right wing content. No, I literally meant that this phrase, indicating “I agree with you”, will appear more often.
My impression is that a one of the primary animators of comments around here is: “Here is where I disagree with what you said”. Simply wishing to chime in to agree with someone is not the standard mode in these comments.
For what it’s worth, when I read the Trump-Zelensky call transcript, I remarked that I thought it was the most corrupt thing he had done, and on another level from his previous presidential misdeeds. I don’t think my opinion is especially rare among liberals.
I haven’t even read the entire post but your second link doesn’t say what you claim it does.
You say the link supports the claims “Crowdstrike determined that the server used to harvest his account information and to log in to his accounts was in Ukraine.”
In fact:
– Your source does not mention Crowdstrike
– Your source claims the attack on Podesta came from a group of Russian hackers: “All of these hacks were executed using these shortened URLs in fake emails, according to Motherboard, and those URLs “were created with a Bitly account linked to a domain under the control of Fancy Bear,” a group of Russian hackers.”
– The only mention of Ukraine is that the Russian [according to your source] attack on Podesta falsely claims that Podesta was hacked from a Ukrainian IP address
It’s hard to take any of your factual claims seriously when your sources say the opposite of what you claim in a way that directly undercuts your argument.
Good point, I shouldn’t have included them in the link text. But they were the people who analyzed the attack, and determined that the attack on Podesta came from a Ukrainian IP address.
Yes, is that in any way in dispute? I thought everyone agreed Russian hacking groups attacked Podesta.
I’m not sure what this means. The Russians didn’t claim anything, but why are you saying the claim it came from an Ukrainian IP address is false? No one’s saying the Ukrainians hacked Podesta: Russians did it using a server located in Ukraine, which the DOJ would like to analyze.
Because you supplied a bullshit link and then disavowed it while conspicuously declining to supply non-bullshit link, allowing for a simple application of Hitchens’ Razor.
It’s not a bullshit link..? What in the link is false? Is there any factual disagreement about the attack against Podesta coming from a Ukrainian IP address?
The link is not false, the link did not prove what you claimed it proved. The link is to *a fake phishing email* claiming to have a Ukranian IP.
I supplied the Crowdstrike report several posts down. Feel free to point out where it mentions a “Ukranian IP address.” Or, you know, just keep replying obliviously so everyone can improve their calibrations as to whether you’re merely repeating misinformation or actively disinforming.
It’s not a fake email. The email that phished Podesta came from Ukraine. Why are you calling it a “fake phishing email?”
According to who? You said CrowdStrike initially. I linked the CrowdStrike report which says no such thing. Now you’re citing … Podesta’s dumbass IT guy telling him “yeah seems legit,” which it obviously wasn’t, or else we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
My intuition says your bad faith should be obvious at this point but I’d like an observer to please confirm before I peace out.
It definitely doesn’t look like a good faith argument to me, but I’ll cop to not being objective on this.
Conrad Honcho is obviously not arguing in good faith and it’s not worth engaging with them.
I don’t think that’s the crowdstrike report. That’s just a blog post. I don’t think the full report has been made public.
I agree I was mistaken by saying crowdstike determined it. They investigated the attack, the attack came from a Ukrainian IP address, in my mind I put those together as “crowdstrike determined.” I should have kept those two as separate sentences.
But I’m not lying to you. There’s the email and the IP address. You can look at it yourself. The attack come from a server in Ukraine. There’s other evidence of this as well. US Govt Data Shows Russia Used Outdated Ukrainian PHP Malware.
Whether the full report is there or non-public, in either case you were lying about what it says.
Having been caught, you’re simply repeating over and over again that the email itself says it’s from Ukraine. This is, of course, also a lie. That’s kind of the point of phishing, that the email isn’t what it claims to be.
The Russian hackers who composed this email, spoofed Google’s header, and set up a fake Google login page were free to invent any IP they pleased, since it was not actually a real security alert.
I’m going to go ahead and pack it up here. Anyone not already persuaded by this interaction likely isn’t persuadable.
no, you’re not crazy. i wish there was a way to convey this sentiment more easily without cluttering the comments section
Ah fudge. I thought the phishing email itself was from Ukraine. No, the phishing email said someone in Ukraine tried to log in to his account.
I know you’re not going to believe me, but I wasn’t lying. I thought the phishing email itself came from Ukraine, not that the phishing email falsely claimed someone from Ukraine tried to log in to his account. You are right and I am wrong.
Who told you the phishing email was from Ukraine?
When I was initialing learning about the DNC/Podesta hacks back in 2016-2017, I remember reading analyses of some of the publicly available information by security researchers (likely linked off Slashdot) that said the specific malware used against Podesta was a Ukrainian script-kiddy kit. That’s not to say it was done by Ukrainians, just that it was done using a Ukrainian tool.
Since that would be the likely connection between the Ukrainians having a server involved in 2016 election manipulation, I figured that was the server the DOJ would want. In making that case, I googled for “Ukraine server podesta phishing” and that link came up. I thought since it was showing the email itself coming from Ukraine, that was a simple indication that servers located in Ukraine were used in the attack. But I misread what it said, thinking the email itself came from Ukraine rather than that the email claimed a Ukrainian tried to access Podesta’s account.
If I could do it over, I would have linked to the various security researchers and said “there are indications hardware located in Ukraine was used in the attack” rather than state outright that Podesta was directed to a Ukrainian server. I don’t think anyone has said for sure exactly where the server Podesta was directed to to steal his account information was located. That said, I would not be terribly shocked if it were in Ukraine if the tool used to phish him was in fact of Ukrainian origin.
To me, this seems like you’re fabricating a claim without evidence to avoid having to admit that your thesis regarding Ukrainian involvement – and therefore much of your justification for the Trump administration’s attempt at extorting the Ukrainian government – is irreparably flawed.
@Anonymous Bosch
Less of this, please.
FWIW I am strongly pro-impeachment and think you are right on the substance. This whole argument seems like nitpicking over the details of whether Al Capone’s conduct met the legal standard for tax evasion, and moreover rests on an implicit assumption that Trump’s motives for his official actions should be given the benefit of the doubt, which assumption literally the entire record of his public life shows to be unjustified. So I understand the frustration here.
Nevertheless, as clearly as Trump may be a compulsive liar and serial practitioner of bad faith, accusing his supporters on this forum of being those things by extension is not helpful, and detracts from the comity that the forum requires to remain somewhat insulated from the awfulness of the rest of online discourse. As one who values that insulation, I’d like to discourage those accusations.
No, there are security researchers who have identified the specific malware used to phish Podesta as being Ukrainian in origin. I have linked them above. I have not seen anyone else break down the exact type of tools used to phish Podesta.
If the question is, “what does the phishing of John Podesta (servers and CrowdStrike and ongoing DOJ investigations into election meddling) have to do with Ukraine?” the answer is probably, “oh, Ukrainian tools, probably hosted on Ukrainian servers were used in the attack on Podesta.” I misread the link I posted, believing it supported that thesis, but it doesn’t. I thought that was direct evidence the phishing email directed Podesta to a Ukrainian IP address (server), which I thought would make the case more obviously than “here’s some security researcher analyzing hacking tools” which is harder to understand, and it was from CBS News, which may be more reputable than “security blog.”
None of that really has much to do with the case for/against impeachment, by the way. Basically it had just been gnawing at me since I saw Aftagley’s post asking what Trump was talking about a few weeks ago and I wanted to answer his question.
I am not accusing him of being a liar or arguing in bad faith because he is a Trump supporter. I’m accusing him of it because he manifestly, repeatedly lied about something and it took four posts explicitly, painstakingly laying out the logic to get him to admit to what he now claims is merely an extreme lack of reading comprehension preventing him from properly reading the single email undergirding his entire thesis (while continuing elsethread to defend all the subsequent points which fall without a benign interpretation of the Zelensky call).
For what little it’s worth, my memory at of events at the time matches Conrad Honcho’s most recent description.
I’ve generally not commented too much on the issue because the fundamental technical details haven’t been released to the public to be able to independently analyse.
The problem with this entire thread is that it’s bullshit (in the Harry Frankfurt sense), and bullshit is infinitely more corrosive and harmful to this forum than disagreement.
The first argument Conrad makes, spread over two paragraphs, is that “the favor” is not “about the DNC server” but is really about the Ukrainian “server used to attack John Podesta.”
If you think that this distinction is not relevant, or nonsensical, or just confusing, well, that’s the entire point of bullshit (see e.g. Deiseach’s comment). It seems to make some salient point but when you look closely it’s just nonsense. Not nonsense as in incorrect. Nonsense as in irrefutable and incoherent. When the bullshit is painstakingly dissected, Conrad’s response is that the original claims don’t matter anyways, and anyone focusing on them is missing the big picture. This is, of course, incredibly intellectually dishonest and harmful to the conversation.
Just trying to unpack his evolving argument is exhausting:
Claim: The first reason that Trump should not be impeached is that he wanted Ukraine to find the server used to hack Podesta, NOT the DNC server.
Response: Your source doesn’t show this
Claim: The hack on Podesta came from a Ukrainian IP address
Response: There’s no evidence that’s true
Claim: The software tools used to hack Podesta were made by Ukrainians
Reponse: You’re making up evidence now because your arguments have all been refuted
Claim: None of that really has much to with with the case for / against impeachment, by the way
The nature of bullshit is that when you try to expose it, you end up arguing about whether the tools used to carry out some hack were originally authored in Ukraine or not. Everyone agrees that is totally irrelevant to Conrad’s thesis, but to the bullshit artist, the irrelevance is the point. The entire “argument” is just obfuscation, misdirection, gaslighting, and an attempt to confuse. And when someone spends the time to pick it apart detail by detail, the inevitable response is, “well maybe you’re right about that tiny detail but why are you so focused on that unimportant stuff anyways, and the fact that I was wrong certainly doesn’t change my main argument, and this whole conversation was never about this topic in the first place.”
Bullshit like this sucks. It’s a complete waste of everyone’s time. It’s only interesting for the drama and flame wars. It makes this forum worse.
The problem with this entire thread is that it’s bullshit (in the Harry Frankfurt sense), and bullshit is infinitely more corrosive and harmful to this forum than disagreement.
The first argument Conrad makes, spread over two paragraphs, is that “the favor” is not “about the DNC server” but is really about the Ukrainian “server used to attack John Podesta.”
If you think that this distinction is not relevant, or nonsensical, or just confusing, well, that’s the entire point of bullshit (see e.g. Deiseach’s comment). It seems to make some salient point but when you look closely it’s just nonsense. Not nonsense as in incorrect. Nonsense as in irrefutable and incoherent. When the bullshit is painstakingly dissected, Conrad’s response is that the original claims don’t matter anyways, and anyone focusing on them is missing the big picture. This is, of course, intellectually dishonest and harmful to the conversation.
Just trying to unpack his evolving argument is exhausting:
Claim: The first reason that Trump should not be impeached is that he wanted Ukraine to find the server used to hack Podesta, NOT the DNC server.
Response: Your source doesn’t show this
Claim: The hack on Podesta came from a Ukrainian IP address
Response: There’s no evidence that’s true
Claim: The software tools used to hack Podesta were made by Ukrainians
Reponse: You’re making up evidence now because your arguments have all been refuted
Claim: None of that really has much to with with the case for / against impeachment, by the way
The nature of bullshit is that when you try to expose it, you end up arguing about whether the tools used to carry out some hack were originally authored in Ukraine or not. Everyone agrees that is totally irrelevant to Conrad’s thesis, but to the bullshit artist, the irrelevance is the point. The entire “argument” is just obfuscation, goalpost-moving, gaslighting, and an attempt to confuse. And when someone spends the time to pick it apart detail by detail, the inevitable response is, “well maybe you’re right about that tiny detail but why are you so focused on that unimportant stuff anyways, and the fact that I was wrong certainly doesn’t change my main argument, and this whole conversation was never about that topic in the first place.”
Bullshit like this sucks. It’s a complete waste of everyone’s time. It’s only interesting for the drama and flame wars. It makes this forum worse.
That is not true. I am not intentionally misleading you, nor moving the goalposts. The goalposts are the same: the ask for the favor had nothing to do with Biden.
The claim by the Democrats and the media is that Trump asked for a favor, an investigation of Biden. This is not true. Trump asked for a server.
There have been questions about what the server is. It’s either the DNC server (which is ludicrous) or it is something else. When looking for a non-ludicrous explanation for what the server could be, I remembered that the actual phishing attack against Podesta involved Ukraine, so that could be it, since that ties in with “server” and “Crowdstrike.” I thought the stronger piece of Ukraine-linked evidence was the email, but I misread it. If you find it hard to believe I am that stupid, then joke’s on you: I am that stupid. The weaker piece of evidence is the hacking tools themselves.
However, whether the server was the ludicrous thing (DNC server) or the less ludicrous thing (server used in phishing attack against Podesta), both are related to 2016 election interference and not Biden. Biden was not running for election in 2016, was not hacked, and did not hack anyone else. Therefore, the ask for the server has nothing to do with the grounds for impeachment, which was an ask for an investigation of Biden. The goalposts are the same: the ask had nothing to do with Biden.
I am very sorry I ever brought that up. I should have just stuck with “he asked for a server, not an investigation, and then Zelensky switched topics to the ongoing investigation of Biden and the prearranged meeting with Rudy.”
Now that we’ve established that we do not know what Trump was talking about with the server, can we agree he did ask for a server, not an investigation of Biden?
I want to second salvorhardin.
FWIW Conrad Honcho appears to me to be arguing in good faith and displaying remarkable patience in the face of undeserved hostility.
Mistaken? Yes. Biased? Definitely. Ultimately wrong about Trump? Very likely. But lying? Deliberately misinforming? That’s not what it looks like to me.
I just want to agree with nadbor.
Conrad’s claim to the contrary, he isn’t stupid, although he is, like most of us, biased. Claiming that the attack came from the Ukraine when he knew it didn’t would be stupid here, although not necessarily everywhere, since this is a forum where such a claim, if easily shown to be false, will be–and was.
The only plausible explanation is that he really did get confused about the fishing email. It contained a false claim about a fictional message coming from the Ukraine, he thought it was itself from the Ukraine.
If someone makes a claim that depends on information only he has access to, it’s reasonable to consider the possibility that he is lying. But if someone makes a claim that is easily demonstrated to be false on a forum like this, that becomes an implausible explanation.
The issue is not whether he was mistaken or lying. It is the goalpost moving. It is the unwillingness to grant that being wrong on the facts might have any impact on his larger argument.
Conrad argues that Donald Trump should not be impeached. That argument consists of 5 or 6 (or whatever) premises. The first premise was “not server A, server B.” Like everyone (I assume), I don’t care about server A vs. server B per se; I’m interested in whether Trump should be impeached. But I engage with the argument and spend an hour or so researching and responding to the specifics. When the dust settles, Conrad grants that (a) he was wrong on the facts, (b) nonetheless, Trump was probably just trying to get server B anyways (!?), and (c) actually, he should never have mentioned server A vs. server B because none of this addresses his real argument about whether the favor was about Biden.
We could move on to adjudicating that premise, I guess. But everything about the conversation so far screams to me that if someone goes to the effort to debunk it, the response will be “it doesn’t matter if Trump asked for a favor about Biden, because foreign policy is all about quid pro quo anyways and look at [historical anecdote].” And on and on we would go, getting nowhere.
So I don’t think I will go to the effort of engaging with e.g. Conrad’s claim the Ukraine had a pre-existing investigation into Biden before all this started. I’m extremely confident that (a) the claim is either untrue or misleading, (b) it will be a lot of work to debunk, and (c) if someone does debunk it, Conrad’s response will be that the claim wasn’t actually important to his argument in the first place.
To me that is the essence of a bad faith argument (intentionally made or not).
P.S.
The essay “On Bullshit” is really interesting and well worth a read. It’s hard to make a concise argument here (and I would do it a disservice to try to summarize), but in this case the fact that the accuracy of each premise is irrelevant (“actually I should never have mentioned server A vs. B”) is precisely what makes them bullshit.
Because the issue of Server A vs. Server B was a tangent, and is not relevant to the overall argument against impeachment (an ask for a server unrelated to Biden is not an ask for an investigation of Biden). The reason I wish I hadn’t included it is because now you won’t look at any of my other arguments because I was wrong about that one.
That’s still not “bad faith.” That’s assuming since I was wrong about one thing I’m wrong about everything, which is your right. I’m very sorry I bothered you.
whether or not bad faith or motivated reasoning, ComradHoncho is also incorrect about Zelensky bringing up Biden:
from https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-transcript-call/index.html
(quoted in full to avoid any concern about me omitting context, but relevant parts bolded)
Zelensky says:
Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him having your trust and your confidence and have personal relations with you so we can cooperate even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.. That I can assure you.
(notably while Zelensky mentions an investigation he does not indicate that it is an investigation of Biden; Trump, however, knows it is )
Trump responds: Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.
So Zelensky mentions in the context of meeting with Giuliani that he will do investigations. Trump brings up Biden specifically. Further, the fact that Trump knows what Zelensky is referring to by investigations makes it clear that he was aware what Giuliani communicated to Zelensky. And Trump makes it explicit that he wants Zelenksy to look into Joe Biden specifically. So he certainly asked for an investigation of Biden.
Even in the light most charitable to Trump and using only the White House call summary its clear that Trump had Giuliani communicate the investigate Biden ask in that Zelensky brings it up in context of his conversation with Giuliani, Trump is aware it refers to Biden, and again asks for both investigation and further cooperation with Giuliani. Thats all just from the transcript — the intelligence committee hearings have made it even more clear through multiple witnesses that Giuliani had communicated the ask for an announcement of a Biden investigation to the Ukrainians.
Zelensky brings up meeting Rudy. The reason for the meeting with Rudy is to get the information about Biden the Ukrainians want to get to Trump.
Both of them know, before the phone call, that Rudy and Zelensky (or his people) will be having a meeting to talk about Biden. It is this meeting that is brought up by Zelensky, not Trump.
What we’re trying to establish here is that there was no ask for an investigation or the meeting on the phone call. That had already been arranged. This jives with Solomon’s reporting that the Ukrainians have been trying to get information about Biden to Trump/US officials previously, and after being stymied, were introduced to Rudy.
So the time line is:
Before phone call: Rudy and Ukrainians agree to meet to talk about Biden.
During phone call: Zelensky says he’s looking forward to meeting with Rudy, a meeting that had already been arranged before the phone call. The topic of the meeting, established before the phone call, is Biden. Trump agrees the meeting is good because it looks like Biden was doing bad things (in his opinion). Both Zelensky and Trump, before the phone call, knew that Rudy and Ukrainians would be meeting to talk about Biden.
Do we agree on this now? The Rudy/Ukrainian meeting, topic: Biden, was arranged before the phone call, not during the phone call.
edit: accidentally said “happened” instead of “was arranged.” The meeting had not happened yet, it had been arranged.
You know that how?
This is from John Solomon’s reporting on the matter:
The meetings were since scheduled, canceled and rescheduled, but Rudy has now been to Ukraine and is I believe just now back in the US and claims to have information on the subject.
Optimal popcorn scenario:
Zelensky made the original request, and the whole thing was ensuring somebody in the US paid attention when Ukraine provides information prior to committing to an investigation, and they now have most of the nation paying attention as they deliver evidence against Biden.
Most likely scenario: Nothingburger.
(At this point, politics is just a TV show, so I’m rooting for the popcorn-worthy twist ending of this episode.)
I can’t make head nor tail of it at this stage, but it does seem to be a bit of a fall from “we have PROOF Trump is a TRAITOR RUSSIAN AGENT” to “So he tried getting dirt on an opposition candidate”.
Also, what is up with the suggestions that there should be a vote for an impeachment but then not send it on for trial? Is this because the House is Democrat-controlled and so will vote to impeach, but the Senate is Republican-controlled but will vote not to try? Because that makes it look like they’re trying to impress the voters: ‘well, we did what we said about impeaching him but we couldn’t get it past the baddies, not our fault!’
It’s because the Senate is Republican controlled, so Mitch McConnell gets to set the rules for the trial, which will likely be that Senators will be required to sit for the full trial (as they were for Clinton) and they can call whatever witnesses they want with full subpoena power.
Since there are multiple Democrat Senators running for President and they will likely call another candidate as a witness (Biden), this would be absolutely brutal for the Democrat primary.
I’m agnostic on whether this trial will harm the nation, but as a soap opera I’m all for it.
And if it turns out that McConnell does not allow witnesses to be called via subpoena? And rejects the witnesses that Democrats are calling for?
What will you think then?
I don’t think McConnell will have a trial. I think he would just go for a quick dismissal.
He would need 51 votes for that plan, I believe.
Setting aside whether that is what McConnell would prefer (I don’t think it is, based on statements he has made saying that the Senate is required to have a trial), I don’t think he would have the votes.
McConnell can’t dismiss the case. The Senate is legally obligated to have a trial. However, he could schedule a very quick trial and a fast vote. (Alternatively, he could stall the trial as he has with other things. But I don’t think he wants to.)
Impeachment requires a supermajority, so he would need 34 votes, possibly 33 depending on how you interpret the VP’s powers. If a majority of Senator’s vote for impeachment but fail to reach that supermajority, it still fails.
@Erusian:
Before we can get to the vote for conviction on the impeachment, the Senate has to first approve rules for the trial. That’s the vote of 51 I’m referring to. McConnell can’t unilaterally declare those rules.
@HeelBearCub
McConnell will absolutely allow witnesses to be called via subpoena. He may not allow Democrats to choose who those witnesses are, as the House didn’t allow Republicans.
@ HeelBearCub
Ah, yes. That’s true. I thought you meant 51 votes to dismiss the trial. (Though technically he could make do with 50 due to Pence.)
@Erusian / HeelBearCub
Note that McConnell has proposed using the 1999 rules, which were unanimously adopted for Clinton’s impeachment, and those DO include a vote to dismiss as a possibility.
Robert Byrd offered the motion in 1999 under those rules and it was defeated, but of course Democrats were the minority then.
@EchoChaos:
If you think the same rules will apply as applied during the Clinton trial.
@HeelBearCub
I haven’t the foggiest idea whether McConnell will successfully apply the 1999 rules, but it would be very clever of him to do so, since they were accepted 100-0 and would be seen today as bipartisan (I think).
@EchoChaos:
You are self-contradicting.
Things you have said:
“[McConnell] will likely [make rules] that Senators will be required to sit for the full trial (as they were for Clinton) and they can call whatever witnesses they want with full subpoena power.”
“McConnell will absolutely allow witnesses to be called via subpoena. He may not allow Democrats to choose who those witnesses are, as the House didn’t allow Republicans.”
“McConnell has proposed using the 1999 rules [which I pointed out eventually allowed the House managers to call witnesses]”
@HeelBearCub
That is because the first comments were assuming McConnell would write his own rules and the later comments are after I read that McConnell had made the offer to reuse the 1999 rules.
The first comment is superceded, as I should have made clear in my comment regarding him using the 1999 rules.
And yes, under the 1999 rules Democratic Senators, the House and Republican Senators would all have subpoena power.
@EchoChaos:
Are you aware that McConnell has already voiced strong opposition to allowing the house managers to depose any witnesses under subpoena?
@HeelBearCub
Nope, thanks for the new info. Thinking about it, I guess it doesn’t surprise me much.
Likely means he has the votes to dismiss and wants the 1999 rules because a motion to dismiss can be near immediate and no serious subpoenas will have to be issued.
@EchoChaos:
You started off confidently opining that McConnnell would absolutely allow witnesses to be called, which would be devastating to the Democrats, so that is why they are considering not forwarding the articles of impeachment.
If you aren’t surprised, you should be. Something here should be surprising to you. Because you were wrong yesterday, and I think you are still wrong today.
The reason Democrats are posturing around not forwarding the articles immediately is in a bid to get the Senate to agree to the same terms as 1999, meaning a trial with subpoenaed witnesses called by the House managers (and the President’s defense). The posturing is about trying to find some purchase with the potential handful of crossover Senators. That looks like an argument between Pelosi and McConnell, but McConnell is constrained by what he can get from the least partisan of his Senators. Democrats only need to pry away four votes from McConnell.
Now Joe Manchin would be the Democratic Senator who would seem most likely to be vulnerable to voting for a quick end. Let’s look at what he has to say about it:
Whereas, you can look and see that Romney, Sasse, Murkowski and maybe a few others are potentially reachable on this. That kind of outcome is something McConnell does not want. Pelosi witholding forwarding the articles keeps McConnell from dealing with it quickly and essentially behind closed doors and forces the debate about the Senate process to be pulled out into the open for a while.
@HeelBearCub
One of us is confused, because McConnell is the one who offered the 1999 rules first.
My instinct is that if McConnell is offering those because they are to his advantage, because he’s a very savvy operator. Since one of the things they offer is the ability to dismiss the charges, I assume that is the reason he is wanting those rules. I could be wrong about that reason.
Note that Pelosi pointedly did not accept his offer. Incidentally, I think that not forwarding the charges is a mistake on her part, but she’s trying to get even more advantageous terms than the 1999 that McConnell offered, so there is something about those terms she finds unacceptable.
I’m not saying this isn’t true, but I can’t find any reference to it, and it doesn’t match up with other things he has definitely said (for instance, saying he he would be in lock step with the White House on strategy for the impeachment trial). Do you have a source?
The other thing to note is that the agreement to witnesses was not actually part of the 1999 rules. That matter of witness testimony was decided after the rules were agreed to.
@HeelBearCub
My source:
https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2019/12/18/mcconnell-fires-back-lets-adopt-1999-rules-option-dismissal/
That the rules for witnesses are not part of those rules makes substantially more sense and makes clear to me exactly why McConnell is proposing them.
And it makes me very sure that he believes he has the votes to dismiss.
You are a real piece of work, I’ll tell ya.
Yesterday you were absolutely convinced that witnesses were devastating for the Democrats.
Also, that piece is McConnell responding to Schumer’s letter wherein Schumer proposes that the procedures followed in 1999, inclusive of witnesses, be followed. So McConnell was not the first one to offer up 1999 as a template. In addition, Schumer only writes his letter after McConnell first said:
You will also note that in 1999, briefs were filed over 3 days, the managers presented their case for two days, the defense presented their case for two days, the Senate asked questions of the managers and the defense for two days … and only then was a motion for dismissal considered. After which, the matter of witnesses and their deposition was finally considered.
So, the notion that the 1999 process would make for a quick dismissal without a trial … not really buying it.
@HeelBearCub
Because I updated my views on McConnell’s strategy in response to new information?
I still think a long trial with lots of witnesses would be bad for the Democrats.
That is clearly not the strategy McConnell is going for. His strategy appears to be a quick dismissal, which is consistent with wanting the 1999 rules and not caring about witness rules.
Again, 1999 had brief filing and 4 days of House manager and defense presentation plus 2 days of questioning before the motion for dismissal was considered. I honestly am not sure whether McConnell prefers that or something quick (he has does have certain institutionalist tendencies which might predispose him to favor a formal process, rather than dismissing before any case is allowed to be made).
But, you aren’t updating, you are staying at “every piece of news is devastating to Democrats” and just modifying why to contort to each new piece of information.
Do I think that Trump is going to be removed? I highly doubt it. Moving 20 Republican Senators would require that something truly different came out in the trial. That has nothing to do with the severity of what Trump is doing, and everything to do with the polarized partisan nature of the moment.
But that isn’t material to the information I am putting before you which should cause you to question whether your analysis of why people are doing what they are doing holds any water.
@HeelBearCub
Yes, because I think this entire process has been devastating to Democrats. They have botched it from the start and now realize they’re caught between a rock and a hard place.
Polls agree with me. Trump has improved dramatically as more of the populace has become aware of the charges and become more informed about it.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/475037-trump-approval-up-6-points-since-launch-of-impeachment-inquiry-gallup
I think McConnell is in a place where he has massive structural advantages no matter which route he takes.
I initially thought his strategy would be “long drawn out trial that delves into right-wing talking points to sell them and locks up Democrat Senators running for President (and Bernie)”.
That he decided to go with “quick exoneration of the President” instead doesn’t mean that both paths aren’t very strong.
Edit to add: Six days of argument before dismissal is “quick” to me.
@EchoChaos:
I haven’t clicked through to your poll, but … it’s wrong.
@HeelBearCub
Your link also shows a 6 point drop in support from Democrats starting December 17th.
… and we’re done.
EchoChaos claimed that Trump’s approval rating is up 6 points since the impeachment inquiry. The link discusses a Gallup poll showing Trump’s approval rating going from 39 to 45. Seems legit, it’s only one poll, but Gallup is an established polling firm.
HeelBearCub claims that it’s wrong while admitting to not looking at EchoChaos’ link and points to a 538 polling average about whether Americans support impeachment.
Obviously, the two questions are related, but they are not the same. I believe there are a number of people here who would fall in the category of “does not approve of Trump” and “does not support impeachment”.
It’s a fantasy by some of the less legally literate but more extreme Democrats. Basically, the way the process works is that the House investigates and then votes on whether to send it to the Senate. The Senate investigates the evidence the House sent (including adding to it if they want) and then votes.
In order for impeachment to succeed, you need a supermajority (67 votes). The Republicans have 51 seats (and win ties because Pence breaks ties), the Democrats have 47. The 2 independents are basically Democrats (one is Bernie Sanders). So the Democrats would need seventeen Republican Senators to defect. This is almost impossible absent a more smoking gun than the Democrats currently have. In fact, right now it’s likely some Democrats will defect (and one Democratic House member has already pledged to).
So the chances of impeachment actually happening right now are basically zero. But the more left leaning Democrats, the type who think impeachment is an obvious slam dunk, see this as just Republican obstructionism. So what they’re arguing is that Pelosi should get articles of impeachment passed but refuse to actually send them to the Senate until the Senate agrees to her terms on the trial. This would be a new Constitutional innovation. It is possible for chambers to hold bills normally but this seems like a pretty clear violation of the Senate’s independence. I’ve not heard any serious analyst calls for her to do it, though the Democrats are complaining about the Republican’s terms (which, as McConnell has pointed out, are very similar to the terms Clinton got in the 1990s).
They’ve also demanded Mitch McConnell recuse himself because he stated he doesn’t think Trump is guilty. That has less than a snowball’s chance in hell too.
The reality is, absent new evidence, both sides incentives run towards getting this done quickly. Pelosi is afraid of losing moderate swing districts (she does not have a majority without Democrats representing districts that voted majority Trump). McConnell is afraid of damaging the GOP’s re-election chances and wants to portray this all as ridiculous and spurious rather than having a dragged out investigation. These are not suppositions: both of them have said as much publicly (though Pelosi flip flopped recently).
It strikes me that although both sides can have some incentives towards getting things done quickly, this is to an excellent approximation a zero-sum game. One party or the other should have net incentive for things to take somewhat longer. They can’t both be incentivized for the same length of the process. Somewhat longer may not be much longer, but still.
The Democrat leadership has suggested they are doing this, so not a fantasy anymore.
https://dnyuz.com/2019/12/19/trump-impeachment-trial-in-doubt-as-a-house-leader-suggests-withholding-articles/
Permanently withhold? That means no trial happens and the articles expire when the House term does, and Trump remains President to the end of his term (and, if re-elected, continues to the next). A threat of withholding them until the trial would be most damaging to Republican re-election campaigns would make more sense, except I expect McConnell would counter by threatening to summarily dismiss them if they aren’t sent over in a timely manner.
@The Nybbler
I also wonder if withholding for a long period would violate the Sixth Amendment.
I know it says “criminal trial”, but Americans believe pretty strongly in Constitutional rights more broadly than the strict text in many cases.
@EchoChaos
I am certain if that was ever brought to the Supreme Court, the Court’s 9-0 per curiam decision would be that impeachment is up to Congress and there are no Sixth Amendment issues. It is already settled (by the text of the Constitution) that impeachment does not preclude criminal prosecution, for instance.
Are we sure about that? I thought there were decisions that even those acting under the color law were still required to afford people basic constitutional rights. This is one of the problems with how the House conducted impeachment: no legal counsel, no right to face his accusers, etc. Note this is different from a grand jury because grand jury testimony is super secret but the impeachment hearings were half public.
I’d look up cases now but it’s late and I’m tired, so let me know if this is an issue in dispute and I’ll try to prove what I’m talking about tomorrow.
Well, I am, though I grant that while I am certain I may not be right. Impeachment is analogous to indictment, but it is not indictment and not a criminal process, and it is the province of Congress alone. I think the Supreme Court will not want to interfere.
I could see the Court getting involved in certain unlikely procedural issues. For instance, I could see them interfering in an attempt by the _next_ Senate to remove the President based on the current articles of impeachment (not at all likely, I admit). Or, more plausibly, deciding on the issue of whether the Speaker has to formally transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate before the Senate may try the impeachment. But the actual conduct? I don’t see it.
There are procedural due process cases that could plausibly apply (e.g. Mathews v. Eldridge) but not the sixth amendment. And even there, it is so squarely within the ambit of the political question doctrine that I have to agree it wouldn’t get a single vote on the current supreme court.
I’ll take your word for it, brad, since you’re the lawyer. This troubles me, though, because I feel like if the President of the United States can’t get a hearing in which he can confront his accuser, have legal counsel, or expect a speedy procedure, what hope do I have?
What hope do you have if you’re an employee that HR wants to terminate without having to listen to your complaining?
If someone wants to put you, or Trump, in jail, a different set of protections apply.
This is not supported by your link. Your link includes the fake phishing email sent to Podesta, which *says* that it comes from Ukraine, but since it is of course a fake email leading to a fake Google login, it does not convey any information about the hacker.
I believe you know this, which is why your “Crowdstrike determined” link is not to the Crowdstrike report itself, but to a CBS news story which, if skimmed, might appear to support your point.
This is the only support you offer for your risible interpretation that Trump was not referring to the DNC server in the Ukraine call, which also demands we ignore every other public statement made my Trump on this matter, e.g., his Fox and Friends interview:
I don’t see a compelling reason to finish your “effort” post if this is the thrust of the effort.
I included a part where I said I believe Trump is confused about what server is what. There is a Department of Justice investigation that wants a server in Ukraine related to the Podesta attack. Barr asks Trump to get the Ukrainians to cooperate with them for “the server.” Trump, being an old man unfamiliar with computers or what a “server” is, gets the two servers confused.
So, there is a legitimate issue with getting help from Ukraine about a server, but Trump is confused about what that is.
Honestly though that’s mostly trivia I included because I remembered Aftagley asking about it an not getting a good answer.
The middle two sentences here are conspicuously lacking in evidence.
It’s in the transcript. “The server, they say Ukraine has it. [snip] I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.”
There are still ongoing investigations into 2016 election interference.
Do we now agree on the facts? There is a DOJ investigation. The DOJ wants a server Ukraine has. Agreed?
Your claim relies on the DoJ wanting a specific piece of evidence. So no, a spokesman vaguely referencing the Durham inquiry as touching on Ukraine is not going to get me to agree. Particularly when the only reason you offer to think said piece of evidence is even a thing is a lie about the contents of the CrowdStrike report.
No, the specific piece of evidence was brought up by Trump in the phone call.
There is an investigation, confirmed by spokesperson. On the phone call, we learn that a specific piece of that investigation is a server. There were servers in Ukraine used in the attack, by Russians, on Podesta.
I was mistaken in saying I got that information from Crowdstrike. Trump and the DOJ may not be, though, as Crowdstrike gave their report to the FBI.
I asked you for evidence of your interpretation of Trump’s phone call. Your theory originally relied on CrowdStrike saying X, and Trump jumbling it into Y because he’s old and senile and we really shouldn’t take his subsequent statements literally. Now that I’ve pointed out CrowdStrike did not say X, your evidence for X is … Trump saying Y.
(Done here too, and probably with the comments as a whole again. Don’t really know why I bothered to come back today.)
I don’t think any of your links support that. What they support, unless I have missed something, is:
1. The Phishing email contained a reference to a (fictional) email supposedly from Ukraine.
2. The DOJ says that Ukraine is one of the countries that may have been involved in attempts to influence the 2016 election:
“investigating whether Ukraine was involved in any 2016 election efforts. ”
That’s well short of your “wants a server in Ukraine related to the Podesta attack.”
Anyone who wants to complain that there is a lack of evidence in the Trump impeachment is going to have to address his administration’s refusals to comply with subpoenas. Maybe there would be clearer evidence of Trump’s crimes if he’d bother to follow the law. And more importantly, maybe a man who won’t obey lawful subpoenas doesn’t deserve to be president period.
And anyway, come to think of it, there is evidence. Trump asked Russia and China to commit these crimes for him on national TV. You can see him do it plain as day.
I don’t want to take away from your valid point with with observation, but I do love the irony infusing that statement.
He is not getting impeached for the DNC hack.
This is about Biden.
Asking for an investigation to be opened is not a crime under any statute I’m aware of.
The allegation that the Democrats made was that he engaged in a quid pro quo, which your link doesn’t contain any mention of.
Can we agree that extorting a foreign country for valuable information on a political rival is a crime?
@broblawsky
Probably not, no.
Asking foreign governments to help with US investigations is done all the time, and since investigations into political rivals have occurred before with a foreign country providing information and weren’t prosecuted or impeached, what makes this one different?
@EchoChaos:
People who steal from charities for veterans and then do more shady things like EXTORTION, which is a crime and exactly what makes this one different (separation of powers he’s relying on to ignore his subpoenas like all “totally innocent” people would do says he doesn’t have the right to touch that money, after all) don’t get the benefit of the doubt when they say, “No, it’s totally legit!”, for one thing.
The fact that Trump personally asked for it, and had his agent Giuliani pursue it, rather than leaving it to Barr. That makes it extortion, since Trump stands to personally benefit from the investigation. As I’ve said before: if Trump had just let Barr pursue the investigation without personally intervening, this wouldn’t be a criminal matter.
However, if you feel this kind of conduct is acceptable, I hope you won’t be upset when a future Democratic president extorts foreign law enforcement and intelligence services into targeting Republican politicians.
Trump did not ask for it. Ukraine has been investigating Biden since summer 2018. And you’ll notice in the transcript Zelensky is the one who brings up meeting with Rudy, because all of that was already underway. Trump did not ask for an investigation on the call, he commented on an already existing investigation.
@broblawsky
Given that a Presidential candidate had an aide spied on by the FISA court based on a foreign agent’s false dossier, pretty outraged, actually.
Since the Democrats played that tat, I get this tit. If they continue to defect, I will feel very little compunction about continuing to do so.
“I would like you to do us a favor, though”: that’s Trump personally demanding Ukraine help his administration gather dirt on a political rival. Please stop spreading misinformation.
@broblawsky
Is in reference to the Crowdstrike investigation.
It’s not related to Giuliani or Biden, which is a different discussion.
I’d like to focus in on this part of the issue for a minute, if we can. Because the implications of this logic… that this investigation was inappropriate because “Trump stands to benefit from it”… are really kind of weird if you think about other contexts.
Trump stands to benefit from lots of things. As a sitting President eligible and likely to run for a second term, he “stands to benefit” from, for example, positive economic developments. He would also stand to benefit from favorable foreign policy outcomes. So, as a matter of comparison, what if instead of Ukraine, we were talking about North Korea. And what if instead of “I’m withholding military aid until you investigate Biden” the proposed extortion was “I’m withholding economic aid until you give up your nuclear program.” Would that still be wrong? North Korea giving up its nuclear program due to Trump’s clever and strong negotiating tactic would personally benefit Trump, would it not? So is he, therefore, not allowed to negotiate in that manner? I’m curious as to what sort of outcomes might exist that would be seen as unambiguously good for the nation (like, in a non-partisan sense) that wouldn’t also “personally benefit Trump.” Anything generally good that happens while he is in office benefits him. So should he be discouraged, or worse still, actively punished, for doing good things?
Furthermore, the other weird implication of this is that Trump’s “political opponents” (even potential ones who haven’t yet formally announced they are running for anything) should essentially be immune from investigation. This also seems bizarre. If the Bidens are corrupt, it is in the nation’s best interest to know that. The fact that this might also benefit Trump is incidental to the greater question. But if the standing policy is something like “Anyone who dislikes Trump cannot be investigated because such an investigation benefits Trump” then basically the entire establishment is given a blank check to engage in all sorts of crimes and corruption. Is that really the outcome we want here? And do we expect that to hold if Elizabeth Warren wins in 2020 and all of a sudden there are credible allegations that Ted Cruz is engaging in some sort of graft? Is she not allowed to ask that be investigated because he’s her political opponent and she stands to benefit from the investigation?
@matt m
My understanding of the position of many on the left is the following:
Trump’s calling for an investigation of Biden is not legitimate, because Shokin’s ouster was widely desired and not related in any way to Hunter Biden’s position on the Burisma board. Although there was an “appearance” of a conflict of interest, there was no actual conflict and this issue has already been investigated and put to bed, so to speak. Trump’s calling for an investigation now is effectively asking for a resurrection of a dead investigation for the purposes of tarring his opponent, rather than the instituting of a real investigation into corruption.
Thus, investigating Biden is only for the purpose of Trump political gain because the question of corruption in Biden’s actions has already been dealt with.
An analogy would be if a political candidate had been investigated for a crime and not indicted, and the president was leaning on the prosecutor to (very publicly) reopen the case.
“of course its good to investigate crimes” say the Rs.
“but we already dealt with this one, its purely for political gain” say the Ds.
Did I get that right HBC?
Sure. There is a dispute about whether or not the “subpoenas” are lawful because the inquiry was started by Nancy Pelosi declaring it instead of the House voting on it. The House has subpoena powers, not the Speaker or any random House member. When we have a dispute between the co-equal branches of government, the dispute is usually settled by the third branch.
The House should sue Trump for violating the “subpoenas,” each branch makes their arguments and the courts can tell us whether or not the subpoenas are valid. If the courts say they are and Trump still refuses, then I’ll agree with your point.
Did Nancy Pelosi issue those subpoenas, or did the House Judiciary Committee issue them?
The
senatehouse intel and judiciary committees issued the subpoenas, not the Speaker. This argument is irrelevant.Edit: TY Echochaos
But they don’t have the authority to do so without a house vote is the argument. That needs to be settled by the courts.
House, which is probably a typo.
And my understanding is that the White House’s argument is that the White House obeys any legislative subpoenas purely on politeness, since they are equal branches that can’t do anything to each other, except in the case of impeachment, which this isn’t a proper inquiry of (for legal babble reasons).
As far as I know, the Supreme Court has not decided on that question.
It doesn’t really matter whether the house intel or judiciary committee or nancy pelosi personally issued the subpoenas.
The legislative branch does not have some type of inherent power to request and get everything they want from the executive branch.
Executive privilege is a real thing, and the Trump administration (along with every past administration that has decided not to comply with congressional subpoenas) has a right to exert said privilege.
The legislative branch then has a right to take it up with the courts.
The Supreme Court has not decided on whether or not the Executive must answer every Legislative subpoena. They did, however, agree to take up a similar issue in the dispute over Trump’s accounting records.
This argument would be greatly improved had the admin claimed the entirety of the subpoenaed information was covered by privilege, or indeed made any claims of privilege.
Is there any reputable legal scholar (i.e. someone who is generally seen as a credentialed scholar by the constitutional law community and who is not, and has never been, on Trump’s payroll) who thinks Trump has the right of this argument?
The problem with saying “this is a dispute that should be settled by the courts” is that the arguments on Trump’s side– especially the argument that the executive has absolute immunity– are, AIUI, considered so risible by most of the legal community that pushing the courts to rule on them is at best an attempt to run out the clock, and at worst an attempt to get judges Trump has appointed to put their loyalty to him above their loyalty to the rule of law.
I would argue that no reputable legal scholar would comment extensively on it because we really don’t know what the salient issues/arguments would be. I know several of the people subpoenaed were high ranking advisors in the realm of national security like Bolton and Pompeo. In those cases where they would be asking about conversations/directives from the president, that is theoretically where executive privilege is the strongest, but its a very underdefined concept in the courts.
@AKL and @Anonymous Bosch beat me to the punch on this one. Your interpretation of the facts goes against both what Crowdstrike says happened and the official IC report on what happened. But that less important than this claim your making:
Before this call happened Trump has publicly complained that the FBI didn’t get physical access to the DNC server and alleged there was funny business going on. (That the FBI got full snapshots of the server hasn’t mattered to him. After the call, he’s talked about how the FBI should have gotten the DNC server. There is strong evidence that when trump talks about a server he’s talking about the server that got attacked not the server that did the attacking. The claim that Trump was just looking for the attacking server also hasn’t been made by Trump, as far as I can tell. I’m not sure where you got it from, but it doesn’t appear to match any available evidence.
Moving on – most of your middle section relies on having to believe anything that Solomon says. At this point, I don’t.
The (credible) refutation to this point is that anyone who would have known specifically why the money was frozen (IE, Trump’s Chief of Staff, certain white house staffers or certain individuals at the OMB) were barred from testifying. Preventing the evidence that would impeach you from coming forward isn’t the same as there being no evidence.
Because he has nothing to gain by getting involved in US politics and a bunch to lose. Basically his only concern is not wanting supporting Ukraine to become a partisan issue; if you look at his actions through the lense of “the only thing that matters for my country is to not piss of Trump while also not completely alienating the democrats” then his behavior makes sense. He got the aid, and at this point knows he’s not getting a white house visit, so he has no reason to stir the pot any further.
It would depend on why you wanted to investigate him. If it’s because you think he’s committed a crime and don’t think there’s any US agency capable of doing this investigation, maybe it’s not bad. If it’s because you want to mess with his poll numbers, then yes, it’s bad. It comes down to intent.
Aid was definitely held up and according to witness testimony, the government of Ukraine was asked to officially announce that an investigation was starting. These things definitely happened.
The relevant witnesses haven’t been allowed to testify. Everyone who did see something happen seemed to think it was crazy enough to risk their career over.
This is an opinion. One I disagree with.
I agree with you. I think Trump is confused about what server is what. But you had been asking how it is he could possibly think Ukraine has the DNC server: that’s how. The server that attacked John Podesta was in Ukraine (operated by Russians). Trump hears “Ukraine has the server” and thinks that’s the DNC server. That’s the not completely crazy explanation for why Trump was asking Ukraine for a server.
The same thing happened a lot when talking about “Hillary’s emails.” People in the media get confused between the hacked DNC emails, the phished Podesta emails, or HRC’s bathroom server emails.
This is a logical leap you’re making independently and seems to contradict Trump’s public statements. Do you have any proof, or is this just your charitable interpretation of the facts?
IIRC they were always talking about the state dept. emails on her private server.
I think it’s the only interpretation of the facts that fits with Barr wanting or being willing to talk to Ukraine about a server. Barr knows Ukraine does not have the DNC’s server. Trump is confused about these things, but the investigators are not.
I don’t know if this is true or not, but I was just trying to answer your question as to “what is the non-crazy explanation for this.”
I mean stuff like Papadpopolous. He heard from Mifsud that Russians had “thousands of Hillary’s emails.” This was most likely referring to her State Department emails, but media/commentators frequently confused this with the hacked/phished DNC/Podesta emails. Hillary’s campaign emails were not hacked (or at least not released).
The alternative explanation is that Trump is trying to spread misinformation in order to justify his crimes – misinformation which I believe you are promulgating.
No, I’m contradicting Trump’s public statements. I think Trump thinks Ukraine has the DNC server. His public statements indicate that. I don’t think they have the DNC server, I think (or thought) they have servers related to the phishing attack on Podesta.
This may not be accurate, though, as Anonymous Bosch pointed out my reading of the phishing emails was wrong. I thought the phishing emails themselves came from Ukraine, but that’s not what the email said. The phishing email said someone in Ukraine tried to access Podesta’s account, and used that claim to direct him to change his password. I would like to know where the phishing servers themselves (the ones hidden by the bit.ly links) went.
However, other analysis says the phishing software used against Podesta was Ukrainian. I don’t know if this is true or not, but that would be consistent with the DOJ wanting some server from Ukraine.
I can’t help but feel that you’re creating justifications for Trump ex post facto to avoid admitting that he did something wrong. You’ve already repeatedly admitted to misunderstanding the evidence you presented to exonerate him. Why are you continuing to defend an argument that’s clearly flawed?
I would have said that that is a possible explanation of why there is no evidence, assuming that information in people’s heads but not available elsewhere doesn’t count.
I gather you agree with Conrad’s factual assertion–I haven’t followed the case that closely–that so far nobody has testified to either being told by Trump to delay the aid unless the Ukrainians investigated Biden or observing someone else being told by Grump to do so.
In your view, why didn’t the Democrats simply wait for he courts to rule in their favor on the subpoena issue, then either charge Trump with refusing to obey a court order — something I don’t think he has done in past controversies — or get the evidence they need from the people who have it?
(emphasis mine)
Disagree. Gordon Soundland’s testimony along with the transcript were evidence of Trump’s state of mind. Soundland very clearly stated that the aid holdup was being ordered as a result of the investigation. Same with Bill Taylor. Taylor’s knowledge of it, however was second-hand and Soundland is a weak witness. I don’t think this means there is no evidence, just that the evidence isn’t the kind of slam dunk that republicans in the senate couldn’t ignore.
Because congress is disputing the idea that the courts have the sole ability to compel presidential testimony. The idea that congress, during an impeachment can’t override executive privilege and compel testimony without the courts weighing in isn’t settled law.
Why wait for a court battle, wait for the administration to violate the orders of the court then impeach him, when you can just impeach him for obstructing justice now?
Because impeachment is fundamentally a political process and every single political impulse is leading senate Republicans to not remove Trump from office right now, and having the court orders would give you more solid ground to impeach, thereby allowing at least for the possibility of a bipartisan impeachment.
The transcript shows that Zelensky told Trump he wanted to buy more Javelin anti-tank missiles, and that Trump’s immediate response was “I would like you to do us a favor…” followed by the stuff about digging up dirt on Biden’s son. Given the order of what they said, the broader context (upcoming U.S. election where Biden is Trump’s likeliest opponent; Trump’s well-documented underhanded behavior in all aspects of his personal and professional life; Trump’s habit of ignoring his advisers, impulsively shooting off his mouth, and then having his aides clean up the mess; Trump’s decision to inexplicably suspend military aid to Ukraine a few weeks before the phone call), it’s reasonable to interpret the exchange as a quid pro quo.
You don’t have to announce “I am blackmailing you, and won’t do X unless you do Y” to be guilty of blackmail. Context and timing of actions and events are key.
That is not accurate.
Followed by stuff about Crowdstrike and Barr’s investigation, which is completely unrelated to Biden.
Not directly followed. What directly follows is a word salad about “Crowdstrike” and “the server” and “I would like to get to the bottom of it” concluded by “Whatever you can do, it’s important that you do it if that’s possible.” Then Zelensky answers “Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier” and then goes on to talk about cooperation, recalling Ukraine’s ambassador, meeting Giuliani if he comes to Ukraine, being good friends, and that all investigations will be conducted fully and fairly. It is following that when Trump says “Good, because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down” and that’s the paragraph where he talks about Biden.
The contents of the Articles of Impeachment are irrelevant. They might as well say “Resolved: ORANGE MAN BAD.” The Senate will vote to acquit on the grounds that “ORANGE MAN GOOD.”
Mind you, if the chips had fallen slightly differently three years ago, Hillary would’ve been impeached under precisely the same terms with the parties reversed. And in the future, every time we have a President and Congress of opposite parties, it’s likely to happen. Of course all future presidential candidates will have to face politicized FBI investigations as well…
No matter whether the wall gets finished or how the demographic makeup of the US changes, we’re becoming part of Latin America.
Yeah, this.
Also, we’ll still invade strategically worthless countries because of “freedom”. Neither party will complain much about this practice except ex post facto, but the opposition will accuse whomever is in power of being wimps who don’t love freedom enough whenever whoever is in power doesn’t feel like getting on with the invading.
All the corruption and unprovoked wars will be like a return to 19th century form except rather than getting valuable land from wars (like lots of the continental U.S.) the U.S. will get jack and squat and leave a considerably larger body count in its wake.
I do not think so. I’m sure there would have been fringe Republicans insisting that Hillary should be impeached because of the foundation or emails, but there would have been no relentless media drumbeat to amplify it into actual action, especially in the aftermath of trump losing, which almost certainly would have been sold as a rejection of extremism and proof that Republicans needed to moderate.
Generally agree. See also: Obama. There were *always* a certain amount of fringe Republicans trying to impeach him for the latest right-wing talk-radio outrage. But it never got anywhere or picked up any steam because every media outlet outside of right-wing talk radio automatically dismissed these as hysterical partisanship (and probably racism).
I see each party as divided between the leadership, which cares about keeping the lights on and not looking foolish, and the firebrands, who just want to attack the enemy however possible. Over three years’ time, the firebrands would wear down the leadership and finally pressure them into supporting impeachment. I think it would happen to the Republicans because it happened to the Democrats, even with Pelosi who’s much better at keeping her caucus in line than Boehner and Ryan were with theirs.
That, and Hillary is the kind of person for whom obstructing justice comes as easily as breathing, so a pretextual offense would be easy enough to find.
Without the media on your side, it’s harder to wear down the leadership. And it would all be under the shadow of Trump’s defeat, accusations of impeaching her because she’s a woman, and so on. We’d get more benghazi style investigations, but I think impeachment would never have been on the table.
A Benghazi-style investigation would have been great for a hypothetical President Hillary. She can get grilled for hours by Congress and not break, and was known and feared for being persuasive even with Republicans when she was involved in congressional dealings. Wish the real president displayed literally any fraction of that resolve or calm.
@triples
I disagree on your assessment of Hillary’s persuasiveness, but it doesn’t matter because President Clinton, or any other president, would never have deigned to be grilled by Congress. The president doesn’t answer to Congress.
Hey, I was responding to “Benghazi style investigation”, that’s all. And anyway presidents being investigated have still had to answer questions – otherwise no one would care what the definition of “is” is. If Hillary can walk out of a 11 hour hearing where she has to fend off questions from an entire committee, how much easier is it to answer them from one person or perhaps two?
One thing I find irritating is that the Democrats are impeaching Trump on grounds that he has done illegal things, but ignoring the blatantly illegal thing that he and his predecessors have done — starting wars without the congressional authorization required by Congress.
And nobody seems to be objecting to Trump claiming the authority to impose tariffs. He has a fig leaf of protection on that one from a statute the Congress passed but that was supposed to be for national defense emergencies, not a blank check for the president to create any tariffs he wanted.
Both of those strike me as more serious issues than either of the impeachment charges.
+1
I haven’t spent a lot of time on this, but as best I can tell:
a. Trump should probably be removed from office for trying to use foreign aid to get another country to investigate his political rivals.
b. Trump’s behavior is about 1% as big of a real scandal as the FISA court stuff done to spy on his campaign. And this is what the FBI did to get FISA court approval on a major party candidate for president–what do they get away with when they’re investigating some nobody?
c. Based on the written law and constitution, the last two presidents before Trump should have been impeached and removed from office, and probably several before them. They did far worse than Trump is accused of, both legally and morally. But they didn’t violate elite consensus, so they never faced impeachment for those crimes.
d. In practice, the Senate trial will be a party-line affair, and afterward, each party will use the whole thing as proof to their base that the other side is irredemably awful.
My general sense, for the last couple decades, is that US politics is like a really energetic and angry debate about which color to paint the kitchen as the house fills with smoke from an out-of-control fire in the living room.
Some of us are pretty sure they started the fire when they decided to get Tough on Fire, and used a flamethrower to melt a candle, so we’re happy they’re currently busy arguing about the paint.
Mental exercise time!
Who was the last President that George Washington and the other Founders WOULDN’T want impeached?
I would guess it’s probably either Eisenhower or Coolidge, depending on how you think they would view some of Ike’s domestic policies.
@EchoChaos
the founders? probably James Buchanan.
I figured it was John Adams.
Oh, fuck the Founders. Their constitutional order broke down irreparably in the 1850s and since then we’ve just been pretending to have continuity with something nearly everyone today would find morally repulsive if they looked at it objectively. Enough with the ancestor worship.
John Adams literally made it a felony to insult him.
Well, that leaves us with either Washington or George the Third 😛
Isn’t that pretty normal even outside the realm of politics? Capone was put on trial for tax evasion rather than anything else, if only because it was the crime they could prove.
@DeWitt
Well sure, but “starting wars without congressional authorization” isn’t exactly difficult to prove.
The point is that we have gotten to a point where we (that’s the collective national “we,” and not the “we” of this particular forum) no longer consider this to actually be an abuse of power.
That is also fair, yeah.
It is if Congress authorizes the President to wage an indefinitely continued war against “those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons”. So, yeah, I’m not happy that Obama decided to wage war against ISIS without explicit approval (or a viable plan), but go try to prove that he was lying when he determined that ISIS was harboring part of the old Al Qaeda organization.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is kill the Star Wars franchise. Make Luke Skywalker as obscure as Mr. Moto. How will you do this?
There’s a whole lot of toy, video game, book, etc. people that would need to be paid off before that could be attempted openly. I honestly think the actual strategy employed was probably the best one. Produce sequels that deconstruct everything loved about the original. Convince Mark Hamil et al to reprise their roles and have their characters metaphorically (or literally even!) throw away their lightsabers.
If you combined the goofiness of the prequels with the cynicism of the newer movies, it probably would have been even more effective. Also, try to “inadvertently” piss off both sides of the culture war, so you have no defenders.
I mean, that’s Last Jedi to a “T”, isn’t it? The whole Canto Bight side story was full of Prequel slapstick, and half of Luke’s screen time was for jokes.
The goofiness of the prequels gave rise to the prequel memes which have arguably reinvigorated the franchise.
Nah. In the long run, J.J. Abrams’ craven fanservice will be more deadly to the franchise than Rian Johnson’s partially successful attempt to actually do something interesting with it. A generation from now, The Force Awakens will be deservedly as forgotten as the shot-for-shot CGI Lion King remake.
Disclaimer that I might need to revise this opinion after seeing Rise of Skywalker, but I’d be surprised.
The fanservice in E7 was needed to get people onto the program who were disillusioned by the prequels. But it was correct to take it away from JJ after that, and it was a mistake to give him back E9.
But the much bigger mistake was everything in E8. Easily the worst of all the SW movies. I wouldn’t even call it an attempt to do something interesting, instead he was LARPing as the Southpark version of M. Night Shamalan. I honestly don’t understand how Disney puts out these scripts and the talking points surrounding them. Its like they were made by one of those AI bots that often get talked about on here.
The Last Jedi was far better than I expected any of the Disney SW movies to be. It had its flaws, but the backlash against it was so hysterically excessive that it made me lose most of my interest in being a “Star Wars fan” at all. The fandom has forgotten what made the movies great in the first place and should just stick to watching old movies if they don’t want to see anything new.
That argument is too subjective to resolve, though. Here’s something testable: The fanservice strategy for wooing back fans who hated the prequels will prove shortsighted. I guarantee time will be much kinder to The Last Jedi than to The Force Awakens. In, say, ten years, TLJ will be almost universally acknowledged as superior.
How are you planning to test that? That is already the dominant opinion except for among salty fans, who generally weren’t happy with TFA but were even less happy with TLJ. The number of people who loved TFA but hated TLJ is vanishingly small.
well we are a self-absorbed lot. I mean, uh, insightful group of futurists.
Is it? I know critics tend to like TLJ better, but I was under the impression that most of those who hated TLJ had been cautiously optimistic about it because of liking TFA. And TLJ did substantially worse at the box office (i.e. it was only a mega-hit instead of a super-duper-mega-hit).
No, it isn’t and has never been the dominant opinion. Force Awakens had a slightly higher average rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a significantly higher user rating on IMDB. The general feeling I saw in the fan community was that Force Awakens was a rehash, but it was fun to see the old actors back on the screen, and the new characters were likeable. Last Jedi was largely wasted opportunities and felt completely out of left field.
I think most people who liked TFA just liked it because it was fun, and the characters were good, while also thinking the movie was kind of dumb (ridiculous superweapon, ANH rehash, etc). The reason people were optimistic is that, while being dumb, it still managed to introduce some nice characters and open up some good avenues for future exploration.
Then TLJ came out, and was still dumb, but without the fun and the characters didn’t come off nearly as well and it didn’t feel like it set up much of anything for the final installment. Of course there were a bunch of other complaints (Luke’s character, overly woke or whatever, etc.) and those got much more play from the critics (and are still getting more play) because they are easy targets, but I think what I just described is more common of a complaint among fans generally, just not the loudest/most publicized complaint.
In terms of what is consensus (now or in the future), I guess it depends on how you define that…it probably isn’t as objective as you think. Consensus among die-hards seems to be that TFA was better (but still not great) while consensus generally is that TLJ is better (because critics + casual fans outnumber die-hards). I assumed you were referring to general consensus (in which case it is already in favor of TLJ). If you were referring to consensus among hardcore fans, the only reason I would expect it to shift in favor of TLJ is as a result of attrition (people who hated the new movies no longer being hardcore fans 10 years from now) rather than an actual change of opinion.
I think the worst thing about TLJ was what they did to Luke.
Star Wars was a “fairy tale for the modern age.” At the end of the fairy tale, the hero becomes a wise philosopher king and the cowboy rides off with the princess and everyone lives Happily Ever After. Real life isn’t a fairy tale, and so the maybe the hero winds up becoming a miserable Space Hobo and the cowboy and the princess get a divorce. But we don’t make the fairy tale like real life. We keep the fairy tale as a fairy tale. TLJ was not a fairy tale.
@JayT
That isn’t measuring the same thing. More people liked TFA than TLJ. That is…kind of obvious, because a plenty of people hated TLJ in a way that we didn’t see with TFA. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t more people who would rate TLJ over TFA than the reverse.
Realistically there isn’t a consensus, or at least not a good way to determine one, but if you’re going to it seems pretty clear that the consensus is that TLJ was the better movie, which is not incompatible with TFA being more broadly liked.
@Conrad Honcho
I didn’t like how Luke was handled, but I can see the reasons to do it that way and it didn’t ruin the movie for me (other things did). The payoff with the scene with him and Kylo even almost made it worth it. That said, you made pretty much the perfect argument for why it is perfectly reasonable not to like that choice (despite the objections of critics and various other people who insist not liking TLJ is a borderline crime against humanity). People like seeing their heroes struggle and be challenged. They don’t really like seeing their heroes utterly and miserably fail, with only moderate redemption.
Do you think the fact that the critics liked Last Jedi less somehow points to a consensus of it being considered the better movie? I don’t know of any measurable stat that says people thought Last Jedi was better, but there are plenty of examples of TFA getting higher rankings.
The two did get similar reviews, so I don’t think there is a critic consensus, but there is an obvious public concensus, and I doubt that will change any time soon.
There’s your problem.
You are treating TLJ is if it happens after the end. Fan fic written about what happens “after the end” that actually continues to carry along as if the end was, well, the end, is just fan wank.
Arguably, TLJ is the same kind of rehash of Empire Strikes Back that TFA was of ANH. Luke is just playing the Yoda role, bitter and alone.
Now, mind you, I have big problems with all of SW content past the original 4 and 5. I was promised wookies tearing limbs from stormtroopers, damnit, and Lucas gave me frickin’ ewoks. He didn’t even have the decorum to change the names enough to hide it.
But I don’t see how you can complain about heroes going off on senseless, doomed side quests, ultimately to be betrayed, while running from the Empire, while our young padawan receives training from a bitter, old, apparently decrepit mentor, with epic, doomed battles on an ice planet … and maintain that The Last Jedi isn’t hewing to the forms of the original.
@JayT
Ok, looking a little more at the numbers on different sites, I think I might be falling victim to the same mistake being made by some of the pro-TLJ, which is thinking the hot takes I’ve seen are more representative than they are. For the critics, that “OMG wokness ruined Star Wars!1!” is somehow representative of people who didn’t like TLJ, and for me that “Last Jedi is the best Star Wars movie ever made and F you for not liking it, morons” is generally representative of critics.
I retract my point on TLJ already being the consensus best film, and retroactively double down based on a re-review of current ratings that TFA will remain the favored movie 10 years from now.
@HeelBearCub
Salt planet 😉
But people (well, some people at least) didn’t want a remake of Empire with Luke playing the role of old Yoda, and given that the prequel trilogy did not perfectly mirror that narrative of the original trilogy I’m not sure I see a compelling reason why it is good that the sequel trilogy did so.
Nobody minded that they did that to Yoda because that was his original appearance, and then it was cool to see young(ish) Yoda kicking *** in the prequels.
Planet covered in white crystals that are inhospitable to life!
Potato, potahto. 😉
One thing that was never clear to me–the Republic was falling, the Empire was taking over, and a lot of bad stuff was going on. Two of the most powerful Jedi are sitting that whole time out, hiding out on two remote planets. Yoda, who was an even match for the emperor, hides out for the rest of his life and eventually dies of old age having never even gotten to finish training Luke. Obi-wan is similarly just hiding out. In Rogue One and The Force Awakens, we see that there are still substantial numbers of people who are somehow involved with the Force. Yoda and Obi-wan could surely have found them and recruited from them and their followers, or at least gotten some help from them.
Why? Why not go to some planet outside the reach of the Empire and start training new Jedi? Why not help organize the Rebel Alliance? Why not show up together unexpected and take out Vader for good? Both were not only Jedi masters, they were also experienced military commanders. Yoda also had like 800 years of memories about the Republic and surrounding powers, and would presumably have been very useful to the Rebel Alliance.
And then Luke does the same thing–he’s this super powerful Jedi who is also a military leader and famous hero, and he just leaves the galaxy to its devices, leaves his friends and his side behind to fall apart and lose to the Second Order, while he mopes on a planet somewhere and contemplates his navel.
This makes sense in terms of how the stories were written (except I don’t understand why TFA didn’t include Luke until the last scene), but as a story, it makes no sense at all!
Because they lost the propaganda war. Democracy dies to “thunderous applause” and all that. The Jedi were dead and discredited. Who would thank them for offing the Emperor, who was the rightful ruler strong enough to save everybody from the robots?
@HBC: I mean, you’re right but I don’t have to like it. This seem like the “fan” fiction, because the fairy tale ended 35 years ago.
I’ve been saying since TFA that it made Star Wars not a coherent universe. It never explained to us what the First Order of Fries is, why Starkiller Base blowing up a few planets destroys the New Republic, or… anything. A bunch of tropes from Ep 4 were just paraded across the screen without context, and everyone was supposed to eat it up.
So Luke becoming a clone of Ep 5 Yoda rather than every story beat in 8 being Rian yelling “Subverted!” just makes things worse.
Pachy. If you could provide defenses of two main problems I have with TLJ, I’d be interested. I’ve never seen defenses of them that were above “woeful”.
1) How does Lightspeed ramming not break the universe?
2) Wasn’t the low speed chase scenario a very difficult to pull off plot device (basically its like Speed which isn’t a great movie plotwise, but gets most of its excitement from real world obstacles that really put people on the edge of their seats) that they didn’t really pull off? It was a high DOD thing because it depends on maintaining tension for 120 minutes, but that was constantly thwarted. There are constantly droids or something else doing something really dumb for comic relief, the leaders of the resistance and first order seem inherently unserious as people. Both sideplots have intentional goofs.
If you told me, “Speed, but in Star Wars” I think someone could have pulled it off. But I think you need more seriousness, have some more natural disasters like an asteroid belt or a black hole or supernova, and the sidequests have to be be played pretty straight. Maybe there is an older movie that you know of that is a better analogy. But I’d like to hear about that movie.
@HBC
I kept thinking about this last night, and why Luke’s situation bothers me but Obi-Wan’s and Yoda’s don’t. Even if a young person watches the movies in chronological order, so their first introduction to Obi-Wan and Yoda is at the height of their power and heroism, their fall is justified. We see it happen. They get outplayed and beaten by the most powerful Sith Lords in the galaxy. They lose the fight, they lose the propaganda war, and they go into hiding because there is nothing for them to do but wait. It’s all earned, it’s all justified.
Luke’s fall we don’t get to see except one tiny flashback that doesn’t justify his situation. It doesn’t feel earned or justified. We go from Luke, at the height of his power, wise Jedi Master, hero of the Rebellion, to gross space hobo with nothing in between. That’s why it doesn’t feel the same.
Now I’m terrified Disney is going to make another trilogy set between Return and TFA explaining just how Luke got to be a space hobo. “Ah, so that’s the story behind Luke’s first time drinking green alien milk!”
Rogue One suggested that a lot of people were very unhappy with being under the empire’s boot. There was an active rebellion, and experienced leaders plus a new crop of Jedi would presumably have been a help.
@albatross11
I can only infer most of this, but the “organized rebellion” appears not to have started until 5-6 years before A New Hope. By that time Obi-Wan and Yoda were probably already aged hermits.
I also started a response yesterday that I apparently never posted, but in addition to the anti-Jedi propoganda making people unlikely to want to work with Jedi in the years immediately following the creation of the Empire, the Jedi also relied pretty extensively on prophecy and may have believed that hiding out and waiting until “the time has come” was their only true option.
I’ll ROT13 this spoiler for Rebels in case you haven’t seen it but plan to (season 4 spoilers):
Obgu Bov Jna naq Lbqn cynl fbzrjung npgvir (gubhtu fznyy) ebyrf va jbexvat jvgu n pbhcyr erznvavat Wrqv jub ner cneg bs gur syrqtyvat Eroryyvba orsber gur riragf bs N Arj Ubcr.
Oh, I wanted to add a couple thoughts on this. Yoda was an even match for the Emperor, but barely. He is also super old. He had some pretty slick fight scenes, but it seems to me that his walking stick in between fight scenes wasn’t just for show. He really was an old man, who drew heavily on the force in able to fight/duel at a high level. It is entirely plausible to me that the fight with Palpatine pretty much took it out of him, with him using basically every last ounce he had to fight to a draw, and he couldn’t have fought at that level again. If you ever go back and re-watch, notice how much more he limps with his walking stick after the fights with Dooku and Palpatine. It definitely comes across that fighting like that takes a large toll on him.
Obi-Wan is a little more confusing, but you just kind of have to accept that he aged in like dog years or something between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope (both he and Anakin really should have been older in the prequels).
Obi-Wan appears to be 34 when he goes into hiding (moronically dropping Luke off at Anakin’s stepfather’s farm under his real surname). So Luke is 13-14 when “organized rebellion” starts, and Obi-Wan is… so old that Han has never seen anything to suggest that monks of the old Republic’s state religion soloed droid platoons with telekinesis. Hmm.
According to Wookieepedia, Han Solo would have been 13 by the events of Revenge of Sith. You would think 10 year old Han would have been exposed to holovids of “brave Jedi leading the Clone Army against the evil Separatists.”
@Le Maistre Chat
Read the last paragraph of my last post in this thread 🙂
Although you raise a good point. The collective memory of the universe must also have aged in dog years (or fruit fly years).
To be fair, I don’t think the Jedi were as well known during the prequels either outside of the core of the Republic, we just spend most of our time during those movies in Republic worlds where people would be familiar with them. You still get the occasional “wait, Jedi are real?” moments in the prequels/Clone Wars show. A weak argument, I don’t really stand by it, but there it is.
I don’t think that’s a reasonable argument since a galaxy-wide civil war was being waged for years with Jedi featuring prominently in the officer class.
Also young Anakin, a nobody impoverished slave on a remote planet run by a gangster, had heard of the Jedi.
There’s a gap between having heard of the Jedi and believing that they have supernatural powers.
1) Make ability to use the Force tied to concentration of a specific gut bacteria rather than just some mystical connection with the universe. We can call them Midochlarions, although the name could probably be tweaked.
2) Start making movies without even a general sense of the overarching story or direction the story should be going. If possible, don’t even have the same people write or direct the movies, to minimize the possibility of coherent continuity.
3) Oscillate every other film between relying on fanservice/callbacks and deriding fanservice/callbacks while deconstructing the genre/tropes so that whichever one a given fan thinks will make for a better movie they will leave unhappy.
1) was dumb, but ultimately harmless (and neatly explained by making them symptomatic rather than causal, which I think was what the old EU did anyway). 2) and 3)… well, here we are, right?
I think I missed this, where was that established? It does make them slightly less dumb…
I agree that it was mostly harmless but I couldn’t help but make the dig anyway.
That I couldn’t tell you – I’ll see if I can figure it out, though.
Stop making movies and then wait 50 years. It worked for Flash Gordon, no reason it wouldn’t work for Star Wars.
I’ve never consumed any media with Flash Gordon in it, but I have heard of Flash Gordon and have a very vague picture in my mind of who that character is. So, not obscure enough!
Hire Kathleen Kennedy and wait two generations.
Have Disney acquire the rights to it and release mediocre movies that re-hash old plot points while inserting as much of the progressive narrative as possible.
This reminds me of a joke I’ve started telling. How does Disney make a million dollars? Buy Star Wars for 4 billion dollars, make a series of terrible movies, sell Star Wars to Sony for a million dollars.
Sounds like the old one about how to make a small fortune in horses.
Start with a large fortune…
I’ve heard it about board game industry as well, I think. It’s a pretty good line.
I derived it from How does Verizon make a million dollars? Buy Tumblr then ban all the adult content.
Publish conclusive evidence that George Lucas and Mark Hamill were Epstein’s biggest clients, and behind his murder in prison. For added measure that he used his position to molest the kid who played young Anakin in the Phantom Menace. Watching old Star Wars movies will become more awkward than watching the Cosby Show.
this is probably closest to the correct answer. crappy content can turn off readers of this blog, but wont put a dent in the general fandom. i think the above, combined with some overt anti- in one of the movies would do it.
You never said it had to be universally obscure. I’ve already succeeded in making Star Wars locally obscure: I haven’t introduced Star Wars to my kids, and aside from them I spend basically all my time with other adults. So, Star Wars isn’t really part of my life anymore, and hasn’t been since I was like 12.
1) Make The Last Jedi.
2) Frame Mark Hamill for rape.
There, now Star Wars has no hardcore fandom and casuals are as uncomfortable watching it as The Cosby Show.
At last, the prequels would achieve the triumph they deserve!
I wouldn’t have thought it possible for “the prequels weren’t that bad” to ever become a majority position among Star Wars geeks, but the new trilogy is going to get us there, fast…
The prequels were poorly executed, but generally had a compelling story to tell even if they didn’t always do a good job telling it.
The sequels barely appear to have a story to tell. The best that can be said about them so far is that there have been some fun moments. I rate TFA above TLJ because, even though neither was a good movie (for different reasons), TFA was at least consistently fun and the characters were almost universally likeable.
The thing the prequels having going for them that the sequels lack is creativity and originality. The aliens were cool. The weird long necked cloners, the insect people, the dinosaur thing Obi-Wan rode in Ep. 3. Grevious is cool, droidekas are cool. All the clone walkers and giant laser cannons and stuff on Geonosis were cool. The sequels have none of that. It’s just the same stuff from the OT with a very slightly different paint job.
The Star Wars universe is like a sandbox. While the stories were nonsense and the acting awful, the PT added toys to the sandbox. I enjoy playing with these toys, like I love all the clone wars maps in Battlefront II. Being clones blasting droids on Naboo is fun. The ST didn’t really add any fun new toys.
Luke drinking the milk straight out the udder of a weird space cow didn’t do it for you?
I suspect it would have helped them a lot to construct at least a loose plot arc for the movies and then stick to it.
Try to explode in a blaze of completely indefensible stupidity that annoys everyone on every side of the culture war.
This sounds difficult, but I think it can be done.
Step 1: No spaceships on camera. As little cool sci-fi tech as possible. Don’t pander to the sci-fi fans.
Step 2: Slave girls. Most of the movie is a rehash of the Jabba-the-Hutt scenes where he’s captured Leia and stuffed her into a metal bikini, but we do it with a whole bunch of female characters, zero male characters, and we make the costumes worse. Skirt as close to the line of actual pornography as possible, and possibly lunge over it in spots if we can bribe the ratings agencies enough. We want this movie to be a hard R-rating.
This should help to drive off the social conservatives, who don’t approve of the near-porn, and the feminists, who don’t approve of the male-gaze near-porn, and the parents of children, who don’t want to take their kids to see near-porn.
Step 3: Disempowerment. The villain, Jerko-The-Hutt, is kidnapping all the female characters and stuffing them into a harem in order to steal their Force powers for himself. Which he succeeds in doing. No more force powers for them, ever. At the climax, though, a male character who formerly has displayed no Force aptitude whatesoever manages to get a lot of the collective stolen Force powers transferred into him, which allows him to become the Strongest Jedi Ever and annihilate Jerko the Hutt in a blast of lightning. Reveal that, for unspecified reasons, the stolen force powers cannot be given back to their original owners. Have several of the de-powered women state that they’re happier now as slave girls without the burden of superpowers.
That should pretty thoroughly anger the die-hard Star Wars fans, the movie reviewers, and anyone who isn’t interested in internet BDSM.
The goal here is to push Star Wars firmly into the skeezy zone occupied by Barbarella and movies about lesbian vampires or women in sexy prison. Or lesbian vampires in sexy prison. Make it so that nobody can have a serious conversation in public about Star Wars, because that would mean admitting you know about it.
That is actually probably going to do the opposite. While Star Wars will not be socially acceptable, it will be WELL KNOWN! Plus too much of society knows porn actors these days.
You need to fade into obscurity in the same way that well-known heroes and heroines of the past did, by just fading. Time and lower quality products, not dramatically and instantly.
It’ll be well-known for a while, but once the initial hubbub dies down, it won’t get new content. That’s when it fades away.
The problem with just fading is that people will keep trying to resurrect it if they have positive feelings. I mean, Battlestar Galactica got a remake.
You need it to fade, but you also need a reason for people to never ever touch it again. You need to render it radioactively worthless before you bury it, so the only people who will be interested in looking at it are history grad students trying to find thesis topics that haven’t been beaten to death already.
I think the idea can work. For added measure, the ‘slave girls’ can be well-known actresses who would never agree to those roles, but thanks to tricky contract writing, are deepfake CGI-ed into the porny portions of the movie using porn actress body doubles.
That way you get a bunch of respected and beloved actresses righteously complaining that they were taken advantage of.
That does seem like an “improvement” to the plan, yes.
Getting sued into the ground and tying up the intellectual property in a bunch of civil judgements and contractual disputes can only increase the radioactivity of the end result.
Are you telling me that Rogue One could have had a fake CGI slave boy Peter Cushing?
Ah, Episode Ten: The Jedi of Gor
The goal here is to push Star Wars firmly into the skeezy zone occupied by Barbarella and movies about lesbian vampires or women in sexy prison.
Wait, Barbarella is skeezy? I thought it was camp! And John Law as Pygar was very aesthetically pleasing to teenage me when I saw it on TV years back (also liked the redemptive ending where the heroine and the ex-villainess are rescued by the angel who forgives the villainess for all the terrible things she did to him because “an angel has no memory”, which is acceptable theology).
Make absolutely 0 new content ever again (including merchandise and spinoffs), take down all Disney WorldLand rides and references to it. Give all the rights to someone who desperately wants to make new movies confirming all of his stupid fan theories, and make it very clear to any fans who want to revive the show that whatever this guy makes in that event will be worse than nothing. In a couple generations, it will be plenty obscure. It’s going to take time, but that’s because so many people already know Luke Skywalker, so you’re going to need to prevent any new people from learning about him and wait for the existing people to die/forget.
I suppose the straightforward approach is to buy the rights to the Star Wars IP and simply stop production. Make no new movies, TV programs, books, games, or toys. And stop production of the exisiting stuff too. When contracts for streaming come up for renewal, simply cancel them.
With no new material coming out, all the casual fans will drift away quickly, and with even the older stuff getting harder and harder to find, even the holdouts will have a hard time. A fanfic culture might blossom for a time but if nobody is getting paid, its products are unlikely to match the originals, so even the fanfic culture will be on borrowed time.
The question is how much faster we could make Star Wars fade away than this do-nothing scenario.
Rise of Skywalker is currently 59% on Rotten Tomatoes, so it looks like they are on track to do just that.
Full Damnatio Memoriae is the only way.
Destroy all physical evidence.
Arrest those who mention the films or harbour copies, posters, merchandise, books. …encourager les autres from time to time…
Use PRISM and ECHELON to find those who defy the law.
Replace the word Wars with Trek and you’re describing an episode of Futurama.
You mean the mass migration of Star Wars fans?
I was talking about the Star Trek Wars, not the Star Wars Trek.
Unfortunately for many of the entertaining proposals here, I think the “Highlander” franchise pretty conclusively shows that no number of mind-numbingly bad sequels, even ones that directly undermine the premise and mythology of the original, can drive a good and beloved movie into that sort of oblivion. See also pretty much every horror franchise ever. People will just focus on the good one(s) and aggressively deny / denounce the rest. Han will always have shot first, there can only ever have been one, and people will remember that.
But George Lucas is still alive, and can therefore potentially be sent into the same outer darkness as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby. That, with the right sort of publicity, could make the people who insist on retaining their fond memories of the original trilogy at least shut up about it in polite company, so do that and wait a generation.
You m probably have to start with convincing Disney to sell the franchise because as long as the two are tied together, it’s not going anywhere.
I wonder how much Disney would want for the Star Wars franchise right now. They paid just short of 4 billion for it in 2012.
I suspect there’s literally no amount of money they would accept for it. Owning Star Wars is part of their plan to dominate the entertainment world, and they’re currently willing to accept short-term losses for the sake of that goal. Disney+ is currently operating at a loss in order to grow the subscriber base as fast as possible, if I’m not mistaken.
I really don’t get this. That’s saying they’re basically banking $4 billion on the trademark “Star Wars” being essential to dominate entertainment. Like there’s zero risk that someone else will come along and make a space opera just as popular, and they can’t compete with another space opera they own (*cough*GuardiansoftheGalaxy*cough*).
I suspect if you wandered up with a serious offer of, say, $10 billion, they would think about the matter seriously. Even Disney management has shareholders to answer to, and there is always the possibility of lawsuits if they appear to take their fiduciary responsibilities too lightly. At a minimum, there would be a counteroffer.
Are there any comparables? Is there anything out there that is worth anthing like the Star Wars IP?
I seem to recall that the rights to The Terminator sold for some surprisingly low figure somewhere along the line. $10 million, maybe? I wish I could find a reference.
The box office revenue, alone, for The Last Jedi, alone was $1.3 billion. That’s not merch sales or streaming rights or DVD sales or rentals or any of the other revenue streams.
Especially given all of the other ongoing investments Disney has in Star Wars IP, I’m not really sure that amount would be a serious offer. The Mandalorian shows the kind of thinking they have for continuing to capitalize on the the IP ad infinitum.
Marvel has to be up there with Star Wars. I could see an argument for it being worth more since there is more existing media, and more characters that are well known enough to get their own show or movie. I don’t think Star Wars has an equivalent to, say, The Punisher.
I’m sure there is an amount of money that Disney would take for Star Wars, but it would have to be more than the franchise would actually be worth to any other company. Disney has so much tied up in Star Wars that to sell it, it would mean walking away from the billions they have put into their new Star Wars attractions at their theme parks, and it would be giving their direct competition a foothold in the kids/tweens genre they want to dominate.
Sort of meaningless on its own. Box office doesn’t = what the studio made as the box office is split between theaters and these are large budget films. TLJ making 1.3 billion on a 300 million budget sounds far better than it really is. The sum totals for the 4 Disney SW movies are over a billion in terms of budget just for the movies with a $4 billion cost of obtaining the rights and a world wide box office of ~4.8 billion (all numbers just lazy googling). Even with a 100% ownership of box office receipts Disney is in the red for these films when you include the cost of acquiring the rights, and their ownership of the box office is probably more like 50-60%, and definitely not 100%*, so toys/rides/video games and future movies (including the one just released) etc have to net another 2.5 billion just to make back the initial investment, which was made 8 years ago and included $2 billion in cash so you are talking another billion in terms of opportunity cost if they could have earned 5% on that cash over those 8 years.
Long story short: If and how profitable Star Wars is for Disney is up in the air, but they would almost certainly take a massive offer like $10 billion (but also no one would realistically offer $10 billion for it).
*Wikipedia has just Harrison Ford + JJ Abrams’ shares for TFA at 2.5% combined with Ridley+Boyega getting a share if the movie grossed over $1 billion (which it didn’t domestically but did internationally so depends on the language in the contract).
Same as Disney is doing, except I inexplicably cancel The Mandalorian.
And memory hole Rogue One for good measure.
You need to really screw that pooch into the ground. Bring Lucas back to do a director’s cuts of it and destroy all the old prints.
An attempt for that mission is already in progress. I am in fact hoping that it will fail, but I don’t care enough to make much difference.
The hard part is to build a nice internet community of fantasy fiction enthusiasts. This one is already done at “https://scifi.stackexchange.com/”. The easy part is to destroy that community. The fans then get dispersed and confused, and only the few who go to big American conventions will be able to talk to each other.
Would it help if they hire Roman Polanski to direct the next one? When you set out to rape people’s childhoods, you should bring in the pros.