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Suppose, purely hypothetically, that we wished to come up with a constitutional amendment to abolish Presidential elections and move the US toward something more like a parliamentary system of government, on the grounds that independently elected Presidents are too powerful, too inclined to demagoguery, and too hard to hold accountable when they abuse their power for demagogic purposes.
How might we craft an amendment to minimize the amount of overall change to the system while still achieving the essential result and being basically workable from a governance standpoint? I’m thinking e.g. something like
— The House chooses the President all the time, rather than just when there is no Electoral College majority.
— They can choose a new one by simple majority once every two years (i.e. once per new Congress), or if the office is vacated by death/disability/resignation.
— They can choose a new President “out of band” by 2/3 majority, for any reason or no reason, at any time, no trial of the existing President required.
— Eligibility criteria and term limits stay the same: a Pres can serve for at most eight years total and has to be a 35+ year old natural born citizen.
— The powers of the Pres, House, Senate, and courts are otherwise unchanged.
— You probably need some tweaking of rules for caretaker situations e.g. what’s the order of succession in case of death etc. for the time before the House can meet to choose a new Pres, or what happens if they deadlock and can’t agree on anyone new. The existence of successful mechanisms for these situations in parliamentary systems makes me confident that we could come up with good ones here.
What are the dealbreakers that I’m missing?
Democracy has a lot of caché in America. The transitive democracy of republican government is unfortunately incomprehensible to the majority of citizens. Putting one’s vote forward in support of a particular candidate has talismanic significance that isn’t easily disposed of.
The word you’re going for is “cachet”.
The largest downside I see is that you convert the President from a separate force from the legislature to a creature of the House. As a result, you’ll see the President staying more in line with the House’s wishes (and vice-versa), rather than a separation of potentially opposed power as originally setup.
That may be your desire, I don’t know, but IMHO the U.S. has typically been better governed when the House and the President have been opposed to each other (for less controversial examples, I’ll go farther back in time and point out the Clinton and Reagan Administrations) than when the President and the Congress are “working together” as the same party and can push through anything they want.
To look to the present, I suppose we might see a President Pelosi (one of the politicians who are thought of so unfavorably outside their constituency that other politicians campaign against her allies using her name) as opposed to a President Biden, for example. Not sure after recent fiascos that I’d want the House making decisions like who should be the President, but sure, that’s current and maybe a different Congress/system would provide difference results.
Either way I prefer the need for a larger consensus between partisan opponents to be required on the average than I do ensuring one set of partisans has their hands on more of the levers of power at a time. So to me, more frequently united government is a failure mode of the proposal, rather than a positive outcome.
One of the issues we’re currently dealing with already is the strengthening of the national government compared to the State governments. The growth in the national government surely had multiple causes, but the 17th Amendment in 1913 certainly helped the trend along by causing the State’s representatives (Senators) to no longer represent the State legislatures in the power distribution, but rather turn into additionally popularly elected folks representing the same people who vote in the House members. The only thing which has preserved the Senate’s somewhat independence from the House is their 6 year terms, as the House turns over every 2 years and thus the voting winds become mismatched for 2/3 of the Senators at a time.
@sharper
Though I was sympathetic to the OP’s post, you make good points. Interesting that you bring up the Reagan and Clinton administrations as better governed. I’ve always thought that the best presidential administrations in my lifetime were Reagan’s and Clinton’s, even though I didn’t so much like the presidents themselves and never voted for either. I do also always vote for president whichever party is least likely to have a majority in the two houses of Congress, because I want there to be a check on the president. So I agree with you.
But the downside of this is that these days it seems that the two parties can never work with each other on any major program, because the extreme partisanship makes it politically impossible do anything that the other side agrees to. Hopefully this is a passing phase of US politics, but it doesn’t appear so at this point.
I think PMs are in many ways more powerful as they have parliament behind them. Boris Johnson in the UK can now do almost anything he wants.
What your system would do is make it less likely that a president emerged who was so far out of the norms of politics as Trump.
Most Americans don’t even know the name of their own representative in Congress. Most Americans don’t bother to vote in any election that doesn’t include the Presidency. They don’t care who represents them in congress. They do care who is President, and they care about being able to choose who is president.
So if you tell them that only congressmen can “really” vote for President, they’ll just treat Congress the way they currently treat the Electoral College. The only winning move for any congressional candidate will be “I swear that if elected I will cast my vote for Trump (Bernie, Biden, whoever) as President, and faithfully follow his commands while in office”. This will make the President more powerful, not less.
If you don’t like powerful Presidents, or Prime Ministers or whatnot, divided government is your friend.
This. This was already happening to state legislatures through the 1800’s, when they elected Senators. Remember, the Lincoln/Douglas debates were two Senate nominees debating each other before the state legislature elections. This was one of the big arguments in favor of the Seventeenth Amendment which let the people directly elect Senators and freed the state legislatures to actually consider local issues.
The system needs more fundamental reform.
I’m going to propose something really off-the-wall.
The States should choose the President. Not Congress, not a simple majority of the national population.
They should use a system that gives each State an authority roughly proportional to the number of people in the State. Maybe use some sort of short-hand, like each Statyr can send a number of people equal to the number of Federal Congress-persons from the State.
But they can’t send actual Representatives or Senators, because that might cause some confusion over whether they represent the will of Congress, or of the State that sent them.
Let the States figure out how they choose these people. Since their job is to choose the President, they can be called Electors.
I’m not sure what to call this body of Electors, though. Maybe call it an Electoral Convention, or Electoral College, or something like that. They only need to meet once every four years.
It’s a crazy idea. But I think it would work.
In practice, each state would delegate the election to its people (because people want a direct say in electing the one office that everyone actually pays attention to). The end result would be a nationwide popular election in which some people’s votes arbitrarily count more than others depending on which state they live in.
If you want to have Congress choose the President with a minimum of other change, the way to go would be to have both houses sit together as a single body (plus three people from D.C.). This is how Switzerland elects their head of state, except without the three extras and also their head of state is seven people.
I propose we adopt that last part from Switzerland. There’s a danger in having a single President, regardless of how he’s chosen. Other country’s Presidents have a tendency to become dictators, and ours has been slowly moving in that direction for decades. I also propose we have a mechanism to make the council have more than one party; maybe we only elect one at a time, or maybe we use proportional representation, or maybe we divide the country into regions or something. (The Swiss method, where the legislature could make them all one party but just chooses not to, would not work here.)
Perhaps we could start by having each “Elector” vote for two separate people, and give the runner-up a second executive office? We could call him something like the “Vice-President.”
(As you say, leaving the option open of making them all one party would not work here.)
> has to be a 35+ year old natural born citizen
Not answering the question, but while you’re doing this reform, could you also get rid of those criteria? It’s showing a bad example, when in all other jobs, the laws require that we judge by qualities that actually matter for the job performance. Just change it to say that the candidate must be someone who is allowed to vote.
Part of the job the the president is to be a symbol of America, so it makes sense that being “quintessentially American” is part of his job. I could see adding an exception for people who moved here shortly after they were born but I think the president should at least be someone who was raised here. And president is not the only job that has an age minimum, though maybe you want to get rid of the ones for senators and representatives as well, and maybe you don’t consider age of majority to be an age limit.
So apparently representatives and senators of the U.S. Congress have to be at least 25 years and at least 30 years of age respectively. I didn’t know that. (Hungary has or had an age limit of 35 years for the president of the republic, but no age limit for members of the parliament.) Yes, I’d prefer if you lowered those age limits too so that anyone who is allowed to vote is old enough.
A bit of a rant, brought on by the discussions under Human Compatible:
The whole AI-risk meme complex that is prevalent in the rational community seems like an interesting case study in rationalism. Everybody is more charitable towards arguments that support their existing beliefs and selectively hostile towards counterarguments, etc. It’s just human nature. But it’s very interesting to see that in action when a group of otherwise smart people strongly believe something completely different than you. Unfortunately, this also means that they commonly bandy about what they perceive as knock down arguments that are utterly unconvincing to anyone who doesn’t already believe.
To take just one example, consider this passage from Things that are not superintelligences.
Some people claim that AI is impossible because noone can design a system smarter than themselves. This argument is rightly derided and seems inconsistent with reality. And yet, Scott makes the exact same argument, except with transistors substituted for eight year olds!
P.S. Before everyone floods me with replies about why AI risk is the most important thing ever, keep in mind that I’ve been part of “the rational community” for almost 10 years. I’ve already seen pretty much every major argument for and against varying forms of AI risk. There is no conceivable comment that will make me repent and donate everything I have to MIRI.
I believe that superhuman AIs are not only possible, but inevitable in the long run. But I also think that the way people here often talk about them is more rooted in fantasy storytelling than anything plausible, and that researching theoretical “AI alignment” specifically as opposed to the more practical forms of AI research that are already being done or worrying about robots going Foom and destroying the world is useless and possibly counterproductive.
I don’t think I follow–why is Scott making the “exact same argument, except with transistors substituted for eight year olds?” Scott is not claiming that no one can design a system smarter than themselves. Instead, he is claiming that eight year olds couldn’t figure out how to work together as logic gates in such a way as to simulate Deep Blue, which is true.
link text a happy La Fhéile Bríde to everyone, enjoy the first day of Spring*! 🙂
In honour of one of the Three Patron Saints of Ireland, let’s have a hymn, a famous poem (though it’s ironic that with all the grammar teaching on that page, they mistranslated/misspelled “arán plúir” as “flower” instead of “(white) flour” bread), and an extract from a Vita!
(Irish saints tend to be quick, not to say bad, tempered).
And of course, how to make a Saint Bridget’s Cross which you can then hang up in your cow byre or your home to protect it from lightning, fire and misfortune 😀
*Yes I know it’s not Official Spring or meteorological spring or astronomical spring, but seeing this is one thing us and the Ancient Chinese agree on, it’s Spring! Ask your local groundhog!
@Deiseach >
For some reason I’m now thinking of Mairead McGuinness
Well, on Mairéad’s side, flags are a contentious topic in the North 🙂
@Deiseach >
Your link taught me something:
there’s a bar in Berkeley, California that’s a five to fifteen minute walk from my old apartment in Oakland that my uncle (also a plumber, but no longer union, now an “independent contractor” with truck, tools, and an advertisement) was stabbed in front of decades ago, the bar is called “The Starry Plough” and that flag is their logo, and now I know of the origin of thr name and logo.
Thanks!
What exactly are the symptoms of novel coronavirus?
I’m 99% certain that what I’m getting is just an ordinary sore throat, but I’m at a big university with a lot of international students.
It’s not implausible that someone here was in Wuhan a few weeks ago.
The big one that is easy to test for is fever. If you have a fever, consider medical attention or taking steps to not infect people.
From the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control:
From other sources I’ve read the cough is supposed to be dry.
A Tyrannosaurus Rex suddenly appears in Times Square at noon on a weekday in September, and it’s really not happy about it. How many people are hurt or killed either by the animal itself or their efforts to escape, before it is killed or captured?
Maybe 2-3 dozen. Mostly in the stampede, but a few attacked by the animal. And a few hurt in nearby buildings running to the windows to get a look. A T-Rex is only 6 feet wide, so he could head down the streets, but since he’s 40′ long and 17′ high he’d likely feel rather confined, so I imagine he’ll stay in the more open area. Once the people get out he probably runs around, maybe attacking the flashing lights, until the cops get a sharpshooter to take him out.
I don’t see that many people dying in a stampede.
The person-density of Times Square is nothing like Mecca during Hajj or the standing terraces at Hillsborough.
In August, a backfiring motorbike was misheard as gunfire and a stampede only injured 12.
The distribution of stampede victims will be pretty fat-tailed or even bimodal. Either a bad stampede will form or it won’t.
And I daresay they’ve made fluid-dynamic models of people reacting to an active shooter, and designed the urban environment to mitigate the risks of stampeding.
I expect a T-Rex to cause a worse stampede than a shooter. At least once people figure out it’s real (because it mauls or eats someone). Because of the many exits from Times Square, you have multiple potential choke-points, each of which could have a situation that results in injuries (or not), so that should spread out the distribution somewhat.
Times Square has been around in more or less its current form too long for that. The main changes they’ve made recently are adding more vehicle barriers on and adjacent to sidewalks, which would make a stampede worse by impeding pedestrian traffic.
So my impression is that people die in a stampede because the people in the back of the crowd are pushing and the people in the front don’t have anywhere to go. Because they are pressed up against a fence, for example.
But also because crowds don’t change direction well. An equal and opposite crowd pushing the other way is even worse than a fence, which means the people in the middle are seriously fucked. The difference between “OMG that was so cool” screaming and “OMG we’re all going to die” screaming is really hard to differentiate at a distance. Especially when everyone is primed to expect the former.
Suppose you have a crowd all going to go see that really cool publicity stunt going on over there. When the people in the front start getting torn in half and decide maybe going the opposite direction would be a good idea… they can’t. You end up with two crowds pushing against each other. The people in the middle are probably even more fucked than the ones getting torn in half.
I do not think it will set the record for number of people killed en masse in New York during daytime in a weekday in September.
Maybe few dozen but probably less than a gross, most from the stampede.
Some idiot is going to get eaten in the initial couple minutes before people realize it is dangerous. Consider the number of idiots that get killed by wild animals in parks every year because they walk right up and try taking a selfie. Then add in that it is Times Square and everybody is going to assume it is some kind of publicity stunt.
Having realized we’re edible, it will probably get a couple more as targets of opportunity. After becoming acclimated (which might happen rather fast after deciding we’re edible and harmless), I assume it is going to range looking for some kind of den or nest and to explore its new hunting territory. I bring to mind a scene from one of those David Attenborough films where a polar bear wanders lazily into a bird nesting ground and cleans out all the nests while the birds stand around squawking ineffectually.
The interesting question is how do you bring it down, because that will inform how long to expect it to take and how many get eaten in the meantime.
Police really don’t have much in the line of powerful firearms. People are fragile and you can usually get them to stop doing the things you don’t like pretty easily. And police sharpshooters are really only expected to engage targets at maybe a couple hundred meters. While the military (and hunters) periodically experiments more powerful sniper rifles either for increased range or antimaterial roles, the police are mostly content with standard rifles. In fact, I rather suspect that they are inclined to move their sharpshooters down into an intermediate cartridge.
Anyway, the NYPD uses the Remington 700, probably in .308 Win. Which is adequate for any large game in North America. The biggest game you’re likely to shoot in North America, however, is something like 1/20 the size of a Tyrannosaurus. And while Teddy Roosevelt (backed up by two dozen guides in case he missed) used his favorite .30-06 rifle to shoot everything in Africa (which the .308 Win was intended to emulate in a smaller package), (a) you really, really should thing about upgrading, and (b) a Tyrannosaurus is twice the size and considerably more dangerous than an African bull elephant.
So they’re going to have to shoot the absolute fucking shit out of it. Or ask the National Guard for better toys. Toys that the National Guard doesn’t keep ammunition for just laying around and the ammunition storage point is probably a couple hours away. Or grab a quick loaner from a local gun shop, but don’t expect any favors because you’ve been trying to drive them out of business for the last couple decades.
The NYPD has at least one M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle. I expect they’d break that out for taking down a T-Rex.
Hrumph. I looked (admittedly not very hard after trying to figure out how big a T. Rex actually is) so that exactly this wouldn’t happen, and the 700 is what I came up with.
Buy really I’m not surprised. Which would lead into a completely different rant about how, just because a couple soldiers who tried putting scopes on their M2 machine guns and single feeding rounds managed to score kills at ~2km doesn’t mean it is a good idea to just say “hey, why don’t we just make a .50 BMG rifle!” And just because the Army managed to convince themselves that they have enough of a role for killing lightly armored people at >2km to justify picking up about 100 of them doesn’t mean its a good idea for every damn police department to blow $10,000+ apiece on them. You know what else would work for whatever godawful justification the police department came up with? Pretty much any regular big game cartridge. Which conveniently fit in standard long actions rifle. Which means you can buy the rifles and the ammunition for about 1/10 the price. But that wouldn’t be, you know, FUCKING COOL, MAN!
Grr!
the .50 is almost certainly intended for use as an anti-material rifle (shooting up engine blocks) more than a sniper rifle.
There is a hell of a lot of distance between 3,500 J and 18,000 J of the .308 Win and the .50 BMG. Just because the Army decided it was a use for something they already had doesn’t mean it is the optimum tool for the job.
I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable. If you think of a .50 rifle as primarily a very low-grade antiarmor weapon, it gives the local PD a way to deal with someone welding quarter-inch plates to a van and becoming invulnerable. Although I think it’s as much a fashion/fad as anything truly useful.
You can’t just go around shooting endangered animals.
“Your honor, we agree with the plaintiffs that this Tyrannosaurus Rex is one of a kind. However, we believe the plaintiff has left out two very important facts. One, the Tyrannosaurus Rex is not on the Endangered Species List. Second, the Tyrannosaurus Rex can move at approximately 12 miles an hour. This court is less than 3 1/2 miles from Times Square, and traffic and the subways are jammed.”
“IT’S COMING RIGHT FOR US!”
I would be shocked if the NYPD’s anti-terrorism squad doesn’t have at least one grenade launcher. The LA School police did:
Are L.A. School Cops ‘Protecting the Children’ With Grenade Launchers?
Yes. They almost certainly only have smoke and tear gas to fire out of them, though.
Unless you want to wait for the National Guard to grab some HE grenades from the ammunition supply point a couple hours away.
I wonder how quickly the air force could scramble a couple of fighters for strafing runs. 20 mm cannon may be a bit oversized for dinosaurs though, particularly in a populated environment.
Joint Base MaGuire-Dix-Lakehurt is the closest airbase I know of offhand but it appears to just have cargo planes, for both the Air Force and Army components.
Dover looks like just cargo planes.
The capital defense forces at Andrews is probably as close as you’re going to find. (Unless there is something in New England other than Pease Air Base, which I doubt has anything. Didn’t we keep strategic bombers up there somewhere?) What does the range look like on a fighter, and can they make it without refueling? Dropping drop tanks on the east coast megalopolis is really bad press.
You’re best bet is probably to bring some helicopters down from Fort Drum. It looks like they have a CAB, and attack helicopters would probably be better for this use case anyway.
McGuire has attack helicopters, though if you send them against the T-Rex of Times Square I’m betting you lose some of them.
I’ll take your word for it. Everything I saw on the tenant list was support, training, headquarters, or training headquarters units. The battalions belonging to the aviation brigade headquarters looked like they were on the opposite side of the country. And I didn’t feel like drilling down any of the other organizations.
@Another Throw
They’re Marine (reserve) helicopters, which may be why you didn’t find them.
I’m pretty sure they had bombers at some point (since they’ve dropped bombs on parts of NJ which weren’t supposed to be targets), but I don’t know if there’s any there now.
On 9/11, fighters were scrambled from Otis Air National Guard Base, which is in Massachusetts, 200-some miles away.
Why? I know absolutely nothing about the logistics here but I would have thought this is precisely the kind of thing a helicopter could handle?
The Manhattan environment is quite difficult for helicopters in general. Times Square in particular is a narrow canyon surrounded by tall buildings (so expect crosswinds from multiple directions). Also, as we know from earlier monster attacks such as King Kong, helicopters are vulnerable to being swatted out of the air.
Not to the t-rex, as such. To flying in below the New York skyline, which is very fancy flying at the best of times, and then *seeing* a T-rex.
Why would they do such a damn fool thing? The stabilized 20mm gun on a USMC AH-1W or -1Y attack helicopter is designed for precision attacks at an optimum range of 1 km – this is literally the SHORT range setting for the targeting computer. Unless the Marines hired some force-using Jedi wannabe, there’s no reason one of their helicopters should ever dip below the skyline as it engages an urban dinosaur from above.
I blame superhero movies for this. And monster movies, but these days it’s mostly the superhero flicks. Since the stars specialize in settling disputes in hand-to-hand combat, the military and police are required to demonstrate their ineffectiveness by closing to super-fistfighting range before getting beaten up by a monster or supervillian, rather than properly engaging from never-saw-what-hit-them range.
From anywhere above the skyline, unless those guns can depress to near vertical, you’re going to have buildings in the way. I don’t know if they count as cover or concealment for a 20mm cannon, but either way they’re going to be a problem.
They can depress a fair amount, especially when you factor in the ability of the Apache (or Cobra I suppose if we’re talking Marine helicopters) to pitch down, but even so that’s not entirely true.
Speaking from experience as a UAV operator in the Army (meaning I spent a -lot- of time managing sight lines at altitudes of anywhere from a few hundred feet AGL to over ten thousand AGL), and from looking at Google Earth, it seems to me that an attack helicopter could stand off either over the Hudson and sight down 45th or 46th street*, or fly to central Park and descend until they have a shot down 7th Avenue if you want a shorter range solution.
This leaves dead zones, of course, but there are other angles that give you other shots.
All that said, John Schilling is right that massed small arms fire of sufficient caliber would do just fine at dropping it.
Why wouldn’t you want to take a helicopter into confined areas? That’s exactly what they are for!
If you get the right pilots and hunters they could capture the t-rex alive
If Wikipedia is to be believed, the average adult Tyrannosaur weight approximately 15,000 pounds, and the largest complete example yet found (yes, Sue) was probably about 25,000 pounds in the flesh. By comparison, the average adult male African bush elephant is 12,000 lbs and the largest known example was 24,000 pounds. The Tyrannosaur is taller, but probably not tougher, and anything good enough for elephant should be good enough for T. Rex.
And while gun
nutsenthusiasts like to brag about the awesome power of their favorite “elephant gun”, or the awesomely l33t marksmanship of their favorite elephant hunters, the ugly reality is that modern poachers usually just walk up and empty an AK-47 into them for an point-blank insta-kill. A couple of the NYPD’s AR-15s will suffice, or barring that a half-dozen shotguns loaded with slugs.NYPD doesn’t issue those on the one-per-cruiser basis of many other departments, which will give our hypothetical Tyrannosaur time for a bit of proper rampaging at least.
Police tommy guns were ineffective against the unfrozen tyranasaurus that went amok in 1942 (as shown in this documentary here).
An animated documentary! That’s a first. 🙂
While not as excessive as earlier battle rifles, the AK-47 is toward the more powerful end among assault rifles, while SMGs are in general much less powerful than assault rifles. I’m sure that’s the reason the effectiveness of tommy guns in the 1942 incident was less than the effectiveness of AK-47s against elephants.
Additionally the 1942 specimen appears to be at least an order of magnitude larger than the largest recorded T-Rex. Clearly an anomaly among anomalies
There are plenty of AR-15 armed members of Joint Task Force Empire Shield not far away at Penn Station. However, I still think NYPD’s breaking out the .50 for this… how often do they get such a chance?
Tommy guns are submachine guns firing handgun ammo, less powerful than an AR-15. Also Plumber’s newsreel shows a much larger dinosaur.
We can expect that most of the trampling deaths will come from people crowding in to try and take a selfie with it.
My guess is that the temperature of Times Square in September would be so much colder than what the T Rex was used to, that by the time some suitably armed cops turned up, the beast would be sluggish to the point of immobility. Prior to that, I’d expect the paving slabs of the Square to be the equivalent of an ice rink for a tall, ungainly (and freaking out) dinosaur – before it succeeded in taking a couple of steps it would be on it’s arse. It might squish a couple of tourists on it’s way down, though..
Aren’t we pretty sure that dinosaurs are warm-blooded?
Come to think of it, you’re right. Dino would be rushing around at full speed. Thanks for the correction.
Are there good laser tag or paintball-like games one can play in random outdoor places like parks?
Playing team paintball in large outdoor arenas is close to a peak experience for me: adrenaline-inducing, highly physically demanding, intellectually stimulating. But arenas are pretty expensive and put all sorts of constraints on when and how you play; I’d love to just get a bunch of friends together in a park and play a capture the flag or team death match game for a couple of hours instead of playing video games or volleyball.
Paintball is probably out of the question – you could injure bystanders. But laser tag – it seems like you could just buy a set of guns with 100-500ft range and play anywhere. But I never see people do this the way they would toss around a frisbee or kick a ball. I guess it doesn’t work that well? Or will people who can’t tell apart a real gun and a pink plastic space blaster report you to the police?
Depending on where you are(i.e rarer on the east coast), you can play paintball (or laser tag, but paintball is more fun, except perhaps at night) with no problems on BLM or National Park land. Generally there’s even places where people play frequently because they’re especially good for the purpose. For example, there’s a set of rocks and boulders outside Phoenix on BLM land where organizers throw paintball parties because it’s free.
The nice thing is that paintball paint washes away in the rain, so most don’t get too excited about it.
You could play a FPS in VR.
What about Nerf? An organized game wouldn’t draw much attention (except by jealous people wanting to join), especially not in a park near a college campus.
I’ve done this indoors and cleaning up all the darts is a pain in the ass. Would be even more so outdoors, at least in the sort of environment that has enough cover to make things interesting.
GPS tag all the darts!
Then use it to recreate the fight digitally.
In the summer, wearing white clothing and use colored water in super soakers. The clothing can be bleached easily for reuse.
Laser tag doesn’t work well outdoors because of lighting conditions. There’s a reason that laser tag arenas are usually in the dark. I’ve even seen a “travelling” laser tag arena where it’s just a large bounce-house obstacle area for state fairs and such, but you’re still playing inside where it’s relatively dark.
Humans vs. zombies has used Nerf and sock balls for ammunition, but you’ve noted that you don’t want to pick up after. There are marshmallow guns, peashooters, and spitballs, but I feel like there would be littering complaints even though they’d theoretically decompose after a while. You might get away with slingshots and potato pellets, but that would likely get messy for participants’ clothing.
Doing casual games with ammunition is just hard. You could do a sock-ball game with very limited ammo (like only 3-5 shots per person), so that picking up ammo from reuse is part of the tactics, and makes it easier to keep track of them. Otherwise, your best bet for a team death match game is going to be tag variants, optionally using flag-belts to make tag-outs more obvious.
“Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office.” –
SenatorTraitor to the Republic and Hater of Rule of Law, Marco RubioThose goalposts sure have shifted from “perfect phone call”, haven’t they?
The talking points have shifted? Sure. Politicians are hypocrites and liars? Definitely. But there was never any question as to Clinton’s guilt either. The clips shown in the Senate from Senators and Reps completely contradicting their own stances from not even 25 years ago is quintessential tragicomedy.
Politics is not about policy, and it sure as hell isn’t about principles neither.
The ultimate telling point to me is that both sides decided witnesses were mutually assured destruction. There will be some Kabuki theatre, but make no mistake at least ten Republicans would have traded Bolton and Mulvaney for Joe and Hunter.
It was repeatedly dismissed out of hand by Schumer. If Dems wanted Mulvaney and Bolton we’d be seeing them both testify next week.
Eh, this is Rubio going on his own. Trump’s talking points haven’t shifted at all.
We’ve gone from “perfect call” to guilty but the offense is not impeachable.
That’s his own lawyers’ argument.
That’s what “perfect call” always meant.
He did something perfectly normal, so it is not an offense nor impeachable.
Even the Democrats did not allege in their articles of impeachment that he violated a law.
That is definitely is not what was meant by “perfect call.” This is pure gaslighting. Trump clearly meant that the call was free of any illicit motive, which is patently false.
@Milo Minderbinder: I’m pretty sure EchoChaos is saying that the constant message has been “Trump did nothing wrong”, not “Trump did something wrong but it’s not impeachable”.
I think I’ve seen three different messages by defenders:
1. He didn’t do it.
2. He did it, but it wasn’t wrong.
3. He did it, it was wrong, but it wasn’t an impeachable offense.
There is no problem with the existence of three different arguments for the same conclusion, as long as no two of them are being made by the same person.
But when the subjects own lawyers are making argument 3, argument 1 and 2 start looking like willful blindness, no?
.. Also, argument 3 is goddess accursed absurd. The president abusing his power to throw an election is the one crime for which elections are obviously not the appropriate remedy. The argument is self-refuting, because if this is not impeachable, why is impeachment in the constitution at all?
@Thomas Jorgensen says:
Because in this case the president was exercising legitimate powers of his office (conducting public policy) to get something he claims had legitimate public purpose (an investigation of hunter). You might disagree with the latter, but it’s not a ridiculous assertion, even if trump was motivated by a desire to make himself look good. Presidents do things to make them look good all the time.
Both of those claims are highly controversial. At least from the Democratic perspective, Trump was thwarting public policy for personal motives. Also, even if you believe that there was a legitimate public interest in forcing Ukraine to investigate Biden, Trump doesn’t appear to have even been doing that. He was forcing them to announce an investigation, not to actually carry one out.
Isn’t “we’re not going to bother arguing the facts because the facts you allege don’t amount to a crime” a pretty typical lawyerly defense?
By your framing, I assume you disagree with Rubio. In that case, do you agree that President Lincoln should’ve been impeached in summer 1861 for usurping powers given to Congress? It seems to me the answer is clearly “no, sometimes acts that meet a standard of impeachable offenses are worth it” – and Congress agreed with me by passing a bill retroactively ratifying all Lincoln’s actions.
I make no claim that Trump’s actions are worth it.
I read a piece by a law professor pointing out that Lincoln had used his power for his political advantage at a cost to the war effort. He asked Sherman to let soldiers in his army who were from Indiana go home to vote, in order to make sure the Republicans didn’t lose control of the state.
It doesn’t follow that Lincoln should have been impeached or that Trump shouldn’t be, but it does suggest that what he is accused of has been done before.
So if the president can exercise his executive powers to make elections more fair to his own advantage, that must imply he can exercise those same executive powers to make elections less fair to his own advantage.
Brilliant!
You have an odd idea of “more fair.” He wasn’t telling generals to let all soldiers go home to vote, just soldiers from Indiana.
Admittedly, most Northern states (but not Indiana) had recently passed laws allowing for absentee ballots.
In the other direction, what do you mean by “less fair”?
Marco Rubio said that in December. I don’t see the quote you shared as being hypocritical of his previous statements. At least, none that I know of. He’s saying that the evidence satisfied #1 for him, but not #2.
It’s only ever been about power, not right and wrong or rule of law.
+1
None of this is about justice or the law. It’s all about the elections this year, nothing else.
In my judgment, Trump is a bad person and a lousy president, but that’s not why he’s been impeached and is on trial in the Senate. There were reasons that were at least as strong to impeach Bush and Obama–the reason neither was impeached was because of political calculations, just as the reason Trump *was* impeached is because of political calculations.
To be a little more specific, as best I understand it, Bush confessed to a felony — knowingly using information produced by NSA in violation of FISA.
A lot of ink has been spilled analyzing the Confederate mistakes at Gettysburg, but what mistakes did the Union make?
Had the Union not made those mistakes, how could the battle have turned out (i.e. – battle ends a day earlier, Confederates surrounded and annihilated, Lee captured)?
Sickles (sp?) leaves the high ground of seminary ridge to place his troops in a godawful position on a day 2, and gets hammered as a result. Then after day 3 Meade decides to licks his wounds instead of chasing the Confederates and ending the war. But to be fair he had only just taken command off the army.
Mistake to be sure, but typical one in war. Sickles was an unforced error though.
On the other side, Pickets charge gets a lot of flak, but it almost worked
Edit: the the spellchecks on my phone is atrocious, but only on this site
did meade have forces that were capable of chasing lee?
Let’s talk about tempered glass screen protectors. A lot of people are convinced that these screen protectors save the actual phone screen from cracking. Their reasoning is “I dropped my phone, the temper glass cracked, if I hadn’t had the tempered glass on there the screen would have cracked instead”.
I’m almost 100% sure this isn’t true, and that any absorption of impact force by the temper glass would be so small that it probably rounds down to 0, and that the reason the temper glass breaks but the screen doesn’t is that the temper glass isn’t as strong (or as thick?) as the screen itself.
Am I totally off base here?
That’s my suspicion. I use screen protectors to reduce the risk of scratches, and so I have an almost completely clean screen when I switch protectors.
Right. I use a screen protector for that very reason. I just don’t believe they help prevent cracked/shattered screens.
I’m terrible at applying them, though. I’d say about 70% of the time I end up with an air bubble or a tiny dust spec somewhere under the protector.
Run a hot shower to steam up the bathroom. This will knock a lot of dust out of the air. Then apply the screen protector in the bathroom.
Fact check me on this, but it is my understanding that the percent of users that use a phone case/screen protector is the same as the percent of insurance claims that were in a case/screen protector at the time of damage. This is evidence, though perhaps weak, that the case/screen protector isn’t doing much.
This would be surprising news to me. I always use cases, and have dropped my phone many times in ways I’m almost certain would have been fatal without the case. I guess I haven’t verified that by not using a case for a while, but I just can’t imagine some of the impacts I’ve seen not spelling death.
More points:
* Tonnes of people seem to be walking around with cracked phone screens, they didn’t make an insurance claim
* Nobody I know has insurance for their phone. Maybe the class of people with insurance isn’t typical.
* People with expensive phones are more likely to use a case or protector and more likely to have insurance and more likely to file an insurance claim.
Prior: cases protect against falls, screen protects against scratches.
So this could totally be a scam or not, but keep this in mind: The way a lot of things work that nullify impact is by breaking. So if you dropped your phone and the tempered glass “went everywhere” all the force necessary to transport that glass all around the room is force that would otherwise have been available to break your screen.
Popular nerd lore used to say this is why phones would explode into a bunch of modular, component parts (battery, battery cover) that could then be reassembled when dropped; I.E. it blew the back off and battery out so as not to have enough energy left to break anything important.
Again, don’t know if this applies, but it at least seems plausible to me that mounting a breakable thing on the phone is a good idea.
This is how bike helmets work, in my (poor) understanding.
My experience with breaking smartphone style phones is that it’s relatively difficult to break the screen by hitting the front of the screen. When something shaped like a phone falls, it’s most likely to hit on the corners, then on the edges, and least likely to hit on the flat front or back. If the phone hits on the corner, there’s usually enough force to bend whatever non screen material is there and subjects the weakest part of the glass to almost the full force of the impact. My guess therefore, is that the best way to protect the screen (while still being able to see it) is to protect the corners. I agree with J Mann and Another Throw that the primary purpose of screen protectors is against scratches. I have a screen protector, but I’m under no illusions that it would save my screen if I dropped my phone screen down onto a pyramid or something.
A glass screen protector is certainly less strong than the screen. But I doubt absorption of impact rounds down to zero. I would suspect there are cases where a phone falls onto an irregular surface and the protector does save the screen, though probably more by spreading out the force than by absorbing it. Phone glass is quite strong, but if you apply concentrated force on a small area you’ll create a crack, and since glass has low fracture toughness, it will tend to grow.
Yep, had this happen with my phone. It fell off a table and hit several hard surfaces on the way down. The screen protector has spiderweb cracks all over it, but the screen itself is fine.
This is the only time I’ve needed a screen protector since I got my first smartphone 5 years ago. It has also convinced me that screen protectors are worth the money.
A thought:
Dinosaurs existed for, broadly, 170 million years – they existed for nearly three times longer than it has been since they ceased to exist, and survived past multiple major extinction events.
If not for the last major extinction event, would there have been a niche an intelligent species could have grown into? If the extinction event has been slightly worse, or slightly better, how differently would things have gone?
I am pondering the great filter, and the shear stability of fauna looks like a smoking gun.
Anything obvious I am missing?
It’s non-obvious that ‘Africa plus dinosaurs’ is sufficiently more hostile to early hominids than regular Africa to explain things, at least to me – predatory animals are not an outside-context problem. Or have I misunderstood you?
Would you recognize a crocodile’s ancestor from 200 million years ago as a crocodile?
Would you recognize one of your ancestors from 200 million years ago as human?
It isn’t just the last step. It is every step between. And it isn’t just predation – it is being better at something than the thing currently doing it is, and if it is already doing it, it has a considerable headstart on being suited to doing it.
200 million years ago we’re talking about, what, some kind of shrew-like animal that strongly resembles a burrowing bird except it has fur instead of feathers and produces milk for its live-born offspring? Maybe some other differences (e.g. developmental stuff) too?
What is it about this arrangement that’s particularly beneficial just after the Permian-Triassic extinction event?
There doesn’t need to be anything particularly beneficial. It could easily have just gotten lucky to survive when its competition didn’t, leaving it to exploit all the ecological niches suddenly made empty by disaster.
Indeed, to some extent I think it is necessary that it wasn’t particularly well suited to exploiting those niches; intelligence is a general strategy, which means there are probably better specific strategies, at least in the short term.
On an individual organism level that makes sense, but if you scale it up to a whole phylum there must be some benefit, right?
The explanation I’ve heard is that mammal offspring are more prone to mutations than reptiles, meaning that mammals were able to evolve to fill the newly-vacant niches quicker.
Not much bird-like in relevant ways (it would lay eggs, but they’d be soft lizard-like eggs, not hard calcareous bird-like eggs) – something like this is our best guess. “Shrew-like” seems fair, though its metabolic rate was probably much lower (like today’s marsupials). It hit a pretty good balance between r-selection (short lifespan, abundant reproduction) and K-selection (protecting and feeding its offspring), like rats, but with lower food and oxygen requirements.
By the time intelligent humans evolved, it has been quite a bit since the extinction event.
Do you feel that the environment then was still “open” in a way that wouldn’t have been otherwise?
Why was there no other intelligent species that took advantage of that gap?
On another note – why do you believe the fauna is stable at all or if that is the typical expectation of things?
Additionally, dinosaurs cover a vast expanse of differing species and forms. If they could do that in a “stable fauna”, what would it detract?
EDIT: One answer to that would be “dominance of mammals”, but I’m guessing you aren’t presuming that intelligence need to be mammalian.
I want to second this, Thegnskald is focusing on the wrong piece of time. Dinosaurs went extinct ~65 million years ago, but essentially the entirety of human intelligence evolved only on the past 5 million years. I don’t think we can even say with certainty that the direct survivors of the K-T extinction event were more intelligent than the animals that went extinct.
Intelligence was not “lying in wait” for the dinosaurs to disappear. The unique (and still not definitively understood) conditions that gave rise to intelligence almost certainly have more to do with changes that occurred during the course of the past 10 million years, rather than changes that occurred due to the K-T extinction event.
I’m not sure this quite holds logically as the extinction was pretty wide spread and it is possible that some animals were nearing an intelligence threshold but were also wiped out. Several (many?) of the most intelligent species alive right now are birds and how many bird lineages were lost during that period?
Anyone know how long octupi have been around? They are apparently quite intelligent. It’s not so clear how that would help them survive a mass extinction, but maybe it would.
ISTM that the thing about human intelligence that helps us survive disasters is that we’re able to make tools and learn things/pass things on culturally that allow us to occupy a really wide range of environments. That means we’re spread out so widely that it would be hard for one disaster to kill us all off, and of course now we have advanced science and technology so a few humans could probably survive most things that left the Earth intact, at least for a few generations.
Recognizable proto-octopodes are known from 300 million years ago, and modern-looking octopodes from 160 million years ago, which makes the latter about as old as birds and therian (non-egg-laying) mammals. Of course as soft-bodied animals their fossils are rare, and don’t tell much about intelligence anyway.
So what are Bloomberg’s chances of landing the nomination? I think obviously the route for him is a brokered convention although looking at his numbers and the movements over the past month he has some tail winds.
1. Using 538 he is up to ~8.5% support and steadily moving up.
2. His strategy is to focus on super tuesday states where he is averaging ~12%. Eyeballing his national polls and making some other rash assumptions if he followed his current trajectory for the next month he could be averaging 16-20% in those states.
3. There are lots of Democratic voters available. If you look at the front 3 combined they had ~65% of respondents at Warren’s peak in mid-October when there were many more candidates and they have roughly the same portion now with Sanders and Warren mostly switching places.
4. Warren’s support fell of faster than Bernie’s rose, eventually Sander’s picked up her votes but there was a lull where they were getting split between the other, lesser candidates. That is a good sign for being able to peel some of them away from Sanders now if he wasn’t a firm #2 choice for people but just the best that is left over.
I think he’s Biden’s natural successor for the “moderate lane” if Joe has a major stumble in the opening states next week. I would say he’s at about 10-15% off the top of my head. Bernie is the new favorite, Joe still has a lot of strength, but the candidate quality falls off hard after that since Warren’s tailspin (I refuse to think Buttigieg has a real chance).
Hmm. My impression, pretty much from online advertising, that he was more like Warren in the way he is pushing some far left agendas hard (strict gun control).
Bloomberg seems to me like the perfect storm of every unpopular Democratic position. He’s a nanny-stater (soda bans, gun bans) and he’s a pro-establishment, be-ruled-by-our-Wall-Street-betters economics guy and he simultaneously doesn’t much care about identity politics but also will be willing to pander. Lots of voters are up for grabs on some of those issues, but almost all of his stuff appears to me to be on the wrong side of 60-40 or 70-30 splits.
Yeah, his candidacy seems like another powerful lord saying “Fuck it, I’m rich and famous enough to commandeer a political party out of pure vanity.” Which is way less funny than it was in 2015.
Yep, Bloomberg is basically the opposite of a libertarian. A law-n-order Democrat, or a tax-n-spend Republican who also wants to ban guns.
@The Nybbler: Bloomberg may be the opposite of a libertarian, but unfortunately, quite a good number of American voters are also rather anti-libertarian.
Back when I did political campaigning out on Long Island, I remember going to a bunch of houses with registered Democratic voters who had those pro-police Blue Lives Matter flags hanging outside their garages. I’d imagine those are exactly the sorts of people who supported Kamala Harris, and exactly the sorts of people who either support Bloomberg now or have him as their second choice after Biden: anti-gun anti-drug suburban soccer mom boomer Democrats who combine the police and military worship of right-wing conservatives with the nanny state policies of center-left liberals. Which would explain why Bloomberg keeps pushing the “no, weed really is bad!” argument despite the fact that it’s wildly unpopular with the younger generation and with Democratic voters in general – he knows his base, and he knows the progressives and civil libertarians who oppose his policies will still support him in the general election, purely because they don’t want a repeat of 2016. (Or at least he firmly believes that last part, though he may very well be wrong.)
There are quite a few of authoritarian voters. But I don’t think there are nearly as many as it would take to give Bloomberg a popular (as opposed to brokered) victory, even if Biden dropped out. I suspect the law-n-order Democrat was largely a creation of the high crime of the 70s-90s, and there are far fewer of them now. Note that Harris’s campaign has not exactly gone swimmingly.
I don’t think there’s a good comparison between “far left” on economics and on gun control because the distribution in the population is so different. On economics, there’s more or less a normal distribution–fat tails, maybe, but still one big mode in the middle. In that case “far left” implies well to the left of a huge chunk of the democratic party as well as all of the Republican party. Whereas guns are bimodal, of those who care at all most either want significantly stronger or significantly weaker gun control. That being the case Bloomberg being “far left” on guns (which in this context means more vocal than most, not more radical) may well hurt him in the general but it doesn’t alienate a significant fraction of the primary electorate the same way Warren being “far left” on economics does.
All that said, I think he is a very, very long shot despite the fact that he is my first choice.
Yeah, I think that’s it, not a drawn-out process and a brokered convention. Biden’s “stumble” might be as simple as a landslide loss in IA tomorrow. Betting markets put Sanders at 60% in IA. I think that conditional on his winning, it’s 50/50 that he’ll win in a landslide. I’m not sure that a single landslide loss would be enough to derail Biden, but I think public sentiment can turn very quickly. And I’m not sure who would replace Biden, but Bloomberg is definitely possible.
I think less than 5%. In general I think there’s very little momentum like what you’re describing in point (2), but perhaps in Bloomberg’s case with max advertising spending we can expect some.
I think his chances of winning an outright delegate majority are negligible. I expect 538’s model to do an okay job forecasting the rate of a brokered convention – they probably underestimate it some (they expect Sanders to drop out as often as normal candidates would, when he clearly won’t), but many of the ‘no majority’ scenarios are not actually contested (say, Biden up 49% to 30%/15%/etc.). Overall I’d guess the chance of a contested convention are no more than 15%, and Bloomberg’s chance of winning in a contested convention are under 1 in 3.
Agree here, I wasn’t really clear but I think the importance of his poll numbers is in increasing the chances of a brokered convention.
I’m not saying its momentum, but a strategy that has been put in place that isn’t at its obvious end to effectiveness yet. If the impact burns out next week then he is done, but if he continues to get returns on dollars spent he has the resources to continue this push as long as he wants (unlike typical candidates who have to go back and forth between fundraising and campaigning).
Billionaires trying to buy their way into a race doesn’t have a great track record. Anyone remember Meg Whitman? No matter how much money you spend, ultimately people have to actually like you, and Bloomberg seems like the worst possible person to be a Democratic candidate in the primaries.
People greatly overestimate the effect of money in politics. It can buy you a hearing, but it can’t buy you a verdict.
I would assign very little odds. Bloomberg is going to have issues attracting party support, given his only office holding was as the Republican mayor of New York and his only real contribution to the party is helping finance the flip of the New York state legislature in 2018. This is evident in him trailing in endorsements to Harris and Booker, who aren’t even in the race anymore and Booker also should have a smaller pool since there are more notable Dems in NY. This would be fine if he could attract mass support from voters at large, a la Sanders, but his support is pretty low compared to Sanders. He’s not even on the ballot until Super Tuesday (and technically Iowa, but he’s polling so low he has essentially zero chance of clearing the 15% threshold), so he’s going to get lost in the news cycle over who wins the early states and has to hope that people ahead of him in Super Tuesday states fall behind. But he’s behind both Sanders and Biden, so he’s almost certain to be behind one of them in most states on Super Tuesday. That’s a really bad spot since he’s missing a bunch of bounces and potential momentum for winning.
I also think he’s just really unlikely to satisfy any group sufficient to win the nomination. Black voters are sticking to Biden, young voters are going for Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg are splitting voters who are more educated and managerial-class, and altogether there just isn’t much of the broader Democratic electorate for him to run on. He needs to actually win states to be palatable as the candidate, especially when he’s likely going to miss easy delegates by either not running in states or not hitting the threshold for delegates.
This is a reasonable post, but I disagree a bit here
Warren’s support has been declining, and Buttigieg peaked a few weeks ago and is possibly in decline now. He would have to pull a lot of their support but it is plausible that he could do so.
I agree with that response, mostly. If Bloomberg has a path anywhere, I think it’s way more likely from siphoning Warren/Buttigieg supporters than Biden supporters. Biden is a fairly conventional, possibly even boring choice and his support has been very stable. Sanders was pretty stable for most of the race and is rising currently. It seems unlikely that either lose a bunch of support without some serious scandal or gaffe.
I think the bigger issue is that if Warren/Buttigieg start falling, I doubt Bloomberg could capture a lot of their supporters. Warren’s losses in the polls were mostly as Buttigieg and Sanders were rising, Buttigieg’s as Bloomberg and Sanders were rising, and I’d bet that Sanders takes enough of Warren’s old voters should she drop out or become clearly non-viable that he remains ahead of Bloomberg. A non-trivial part of that is that Bloomberg is a billionaire spending huge sums on his own campaign, a thing both Warren and Sanders have campaigned against previously, and I’m not sure that he can pull enough support from those camps to have a good shot.
@baconbits9 says:
I’d say about 7% which is higher than my guess was just a week ago.
FWLIW, my wife likes him and the Mayor of San Francisco just endorsed him (after local gal Harris dropped out), plus the spokesman/press-liaison/go-talk-to-that-guy-guy of the City department I work for just quit to campaign for Bloomberg so he has some support, but I won’t vote for him, the idea of replacing a multi-millionaire with a billionaire doesn’t sit well with me, I don’t like Trump but he does represent a sizeable contingent of Americans, while Bloomberg is “elite of the elite”.
More broadly this primary season has been interesting, the Democratic Party has moved pretty Left (sure Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, and even Republican President Nixon could be argued to be just as Left, as could losing Democratic candidates McGovern and Mondale, but compared to Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama even Biden is more Leftward).
From the polling I’ve seen the supporters of the “moderate” and the “progressive” Democratic candidates are actually pretty close ideologically (even Hillary Clinton and Sanders supporters in 2016 were close), it’s supporters demographics (age, education, income, race, and sex) that are different with age being most important for who Democrats support (though age correlates with education, income, and race – basically younger Democrats tend to be more educated, poorer, and more white than older Democrats) with sex next most important.
Biden has almost no support among those less than 45 years old, a lot of ink and pixels have been spilled on how much black support Biden has, but a lot of that is ’cause older Democrats are disproportionately black (older whites are disproportionately Republicans, younger non-whites are disproportionately non-voters), education and income also correlate with age (youngsters don’t earn as much and went to school more), between the two Left candidates Warren has more college educated women supporting her on average compared to Sanders, both Biden and Sanders have more non-college educated supporters than the other candidates do, with older Dems more inclined to support Biden and youngsters emphatically not so inclined.
So some speculation:
Bloomberg vs.Trump – Bloomberg will do well with more prosperous urban professional class voters, and inner-ring suburban white women, non-whites will sit this one out. Trump wins.
Buttigieg vs.Trump. The former mayor isn’t going to be nominated, I can’t even bother to guess.
Klobucher vs. Trump – see Buttigieg.
Warren vs.Trump – she’ll get plenty of poorer college educated urban support, especially from women, but less suburban swing voters than Bloomberg. Trump wins.
Sanders vs.Trump – he’ll peel off some working class rust belt support from Trump to make up for losing suburban voters who won’t vote for a self-described “socialist” so he’ll have a narrower loss than Bloomberg or Warren would.
Biden vs. Trump – it really depends on his winning over young voters (which hasn’t happened yet) as to whether Biden has a fighting chance, among older voters it’s more that he’s not disliked rather that he gets so much support, Trump probably still wins, but it will be a nailbitter.
Predictions on the next four years:
Trump is re-elected – things pretty much stay how they are now, except Democrats win the Senate in 2022, in 2024 Democrats will nominate a candidate from whichever faction didn’t get the 2020 nomination, I have no idea who’ll the Republicans will nominate.
Biden is elected – pretty much status quo to now, both Left and Right will seethe, Biden won’t live to serve eight years.
Bloomberg is elected – not much different from now, will signify the almost total switch in who supports which Party compared to decades ago.
Sanders or Warren is elected – Republicans re-take the House in 2022, they’ll be yelling and vetoes, nothing much will change, Sanders won’t live to serve eight years, Warren would.
Bloomberg has a better chance of getting NT Rs to vote for him over a 3rd party. His VP pick could help cover his other bases.
@meh,
Oh sure, I imagine Bloomberg doing well with Romney Republicans (like my wife), but “blue-tribe” Republicans (and the “grey-tribe”) are a vanishingly small portion of the electorate, it’s the non-college graduate majority that has to be won to win.
The urban professional class is in the bag for Democrats, rural working class whites are in the bag for Republicans, non-whites tend to vote for Democrats when they vote, and the suburbs are in play, but only about 10% of the electorate are actual swing voters.
Judging from the 2018 congressional elections Democrats may win over areas that supported Trump, but the rust belt Obama-to-Trump voters, while they don’t look to have much loyalty to the Republican Party in general they don’t look to have much buyers remorse for Trump, he promised to try to reduce imports from China, and reduce immigration, and he seems to be making an effort there (he also promised more public works, but he hasn’t remotely delivered there).
The other contingent of swing voters ‘ suburban white women may be more inclined to vote for Bloomberg, but I don’t think that will make up for a loss in non-white turnout.
I see no way that Bloomberg does better than Hillary.
I don’t think you are giving enough credit for how bad and unliked a candidate she was. I think any of the field of 12 would outperform her. And any of the other 2016 R potentials would have crushed her even worse.
RE Bloomberg:
There are Obama-to-Trump voters, but there are also Romney-to-Independent voters that were not willing to be Romney-to-Clinton voters, but may be ok with being a Romney-to-Biden or Romney-to-Bloomberg voter. I’m estimating Bloomberg is a softer option for this group, since he was a Republican for 6 years, and an independent after that.
Clinton lost Florida by 1.3% with 3rd parties getting 3.2%
Trump won 6 states with less than 50% of the vote (7 if you include Utah, but you shouldn’t); meaning 3rd party votes could potentially have swung any of those states.
Bloomberg might do better in a straight-up contest, but I don’t see how he outperforms Biden. Biden seems a much better play among critical black and Rust Belt voting blocs. Bloomberg doing better among suburban never Trumpers might be true, but I don’t see those votes as being more valuable than the other two.
Plus, Bloomberg winning basically requires a brokered convention: is that divisive enough to basically sink Bloomberg’s general election chances?
agreed, Biden has the best chance, given his rust belt cred being from PA, and his minority support. But I’d bet on Bloomberg over the rest of the field, and head to head polling seems to back this up https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/general_election/
Very low (disclaimer, I’ve bet against him).
First of all, we can pretty much completely discount the possibility of him getting a majority or even a plurality. He’s not even joining the race until a third of the way through! I’m surprised 538 has him as high as 0.9% plurality, but I guess there is always a chance that Biden and Buttigieg will suddenly die or something.
The other cases where he wins are some proportion of the 16% with no majority (being generous, maybe also 1% where Sanders loses a tiny majority due to disloyal delegates or something). How does he win these scenarios? I think the only plausible options are him having a plurality, and him being 2nd to Sanders. But the first of those only has a 0.3% chance (even assuming he wins in all of those cases). And Sanders only gets a non-majority plurality 5% of the time. Even under the very generous assumptions that Bloomberg comes second in a quarter of those cases, that still only gives a 2.5% chance overall.
Ha, I’ve got Predictit money riding against him too.
They are asking 64 cents a share that the guy polling in distant fourth place (and skipping Iowa and New Hampshire) won’t win a state. I’m like…free money folks…
Biden has a base of support. Warren does too. And Bernie obviously does. Who is Bloomberg’s base? He’s been blasting ads all over the place and no one is excited for the guy. He doesn’t have a chance.
Anyone else “looking forward to” the upcoming Chrome 80 release?
I’ve jumped ship (back) to Firefox long ago.
Chrome’s lack of mobile extensions is an absolute deal-breaker for me.
I guess I was thinking more about people here who have to worry about the effect of browser behavior changes on software products for their job.
I always forget how thick of a plurality software people are around here.
On the plus side, I get why you used quotes now!
I can only assume they’re going to break something I need to work for no apparent reason or, worse, in order to change a part of the UI that approximately everyone already understood the current version of.
Does anybody know why developers do this? Like, fixing vulnerabilities is good, but why in God’s name do you want to move and rename key user-facing features?
In this particular case, they’re getting more strict about cross-site access to cookies. The most obvious place (to me) where this is going to have an impact is for people who use IDPs to sign into their various apps/services but I’m sure there are other use cases.
Bored developers/developers with nothing to do who need to justify their presence at the company, or a (probably new) manager* who wants to “shake things up” to make a name for themselves/put their own stamp on the product. That’s my cynical take, anyway.
*That manager may not be on the dev side, it could easily be some idiot** from marketing.
**I’m sure there are some perfectly fine people who work in marketing…somewhere 😉
Usually it’s because they’ve come up with a new way to do something, and it’s better, but they can’t just replace the old thing because it would break too much stuff, so they add in the new thing and tell everyone to use it instead of the old thing, and then eventually deprecate the old thing because it’s too much work to maintain both.
*sigh* Damned if I know, but one developer assured me that “people” wanted this – if the UI didn’t change, their product becomes out-of-date and the users move on. He insisted that even after his project had developed what they believed was the best possible one for the ttasks at hand, they had to change it again, to satisfy those who demand constant change.
I have no empathy for this. “People” may want it – but I, and presumably you also – are apparently not “people”.
I’d be more likely to compare it with the kind of art that’s only appreciated by people with multiple years of study of the field – books that have more awards than readers, classical music that’s praised only with adjectives like “unique”, etc. etc. A person who lives and breaths a particular product has no difficulty learning its new UI, and easily convinces themselves that it’s “intuitive” and “obvious” to normal people. Whereas a person who uses multiple different products each day doesn’t have as much mind share for that designer’s one-true-product. And someone who uses it once a month wants it to (a) be really really obvious (b) behave exactly the same as last month (c) have lots of excellent help options.
Project managers want promotions. You get promotions by showing impact. It is perhaps overly cynical to say that impact has no sign. Perhaps.
What is a species?
Complex human history
Complex elephant history
It seems like species sort of exist in the sense of a large majority of creatures which can interbreed falling into a phenotypes. Maybe it’s more like a statistical distribution with multiple modes?
The way I heard it, “species” is a useful construct for taxonomic purposes, or other practical applications, but isn’t really a thing.
There are a lot of definitions of species, each with its own problems. For a discussion from the perspective of philosophy of biology see SEP.
Link for complex human history
This is interesting to me, because of a question I was trying to find an answer for a year or so ago, regarding fossils and mass extinctions. To wit: how sure are we about what was going on millions of years ago? How complete is our picture?
The oldest fossils are a staggering 4.2 billion years old, but the vast majority are much younger – the 8th oldest clocks in at merely 400 million. The total number of fossils found is estimated in the billions or even trillions, but only a few million have been documented, and my sources for that are not good. (I get the sense that there might be thousands packed into otherwise boring limestone chunks we haven’t gotten around to studying.)
If we assume 8 million documented fossils, that’s about one every 50 years. Which itself is pretty amazing. However, how many species have lived and died during that time? The answer is vague, because we don’t have a great objective definition for what a species is, which isn’t surprising when we consider when we would say one species has just evolved into another (or another twenty).
Nevertheless, a study estimated 8.7 million species on earth today. (Amazingly, about 75% of them are on land.) That means that if every single one of the fossils we have documented came from its own species, we still wouldn’t even have one for every species today, let alone every species that ever existed.
The average duration of a species is even harder to nail down when you barely know how to isolate a species to begin with. The best discussion I found points out that the variance is large (think bacteria on one end, sharks on the other), and if you had to pick a mean, it’d probably be around one million.
If we get all Fermian and suppose a roughly triangle-shaped species tree over prehistory, that comes out to about (8.7 * 400) / 2, or about 1.7 billion species altogether. If, again, every single fossil we have on record is its own species, then for every species we have a fossil for, there are over 200 for which we have nothing. And we know we have a lot of duplicates.
This, plus the amount of simplifying assumptions I had to use, makes me rather concerned about the certainty of events like mass extinctions. How do we know what was going on in, say, the invertebrate world back then?
“the 8th oldest clocks in at merely 400 million”
Eh, that’s not really a list of the oldest known fossils (for that matter, they’re not all animals – Tortotubus is a fungus). We have thousands of more-or-less complete fossils from Ediacara, Chengjiang, and Burgess Shale, and those are all between 550 and 500 million years old.
(Interestingly, we also have Gabon that are apparently multicellular, don’t really resemble any living organism, and date to 2.1 billion years old, as if life managed to evolve multicellularity relatively early, changed its mind, and went back to being exclusively unicellular for a full billion years – possibly a function of oxygen levels in the sea)
Animals are so cute, thinking that interbreeding with one or two other species deep in the past counts as complex history.
If you want to know how to really annoy a taxonomist, ask a plant.
https://botanyshitposts.tumblr.com/post/190518553034/there-is-a-mystery-citrus-up-the-street-from-me
https://botanyshitposts.tumblr.com/post/184145364939/i-never-realised-how-weird-ferns-are
Plants are weird, but that fist link could simply be a multi-grafted citrus tree!
You want weird you want to look at Flax.
The fuzziness of species is never more complex, IMO than if you try separating Dogs, Wolves, and Coyotes.
I believe a garden hose is the traditional method.
This gave me a chuckle!
Elsewhere, I’m seeing a discussion of bosses with the bad habit of not giving employees the information they need, and then blaming the employees for not having it.
Have you ever had a boss who apologized for making that mistake? Made that mistake and then stopped doing it?
Being a good boss has moral and emotional requirements, and I don’t think I’ve seen discussion of it from that angle.
My impression is that Protestant business ethics were about being keeping promises, working hard, and not being stupid with money, but I could be missing something. Anyone have more detailed knowledge?
Is there anything in Jewish law?
Again an impression, but I think the left wing take on how work should be involves pay and physical working conditions, mostly, though maybe unions can do something if a boss is emotionally horrendous. Also, unions dividing work into categories might mean that employees are less likely to be required to have random or highly local knowledge.
The thing is, this particular issue (other issues are welcome in the discussion, though) isn’t about anyone being especially altruistic. It isn’t about businesses making lower profits because they ought to be paying more.
Demanding that people just know what one is thinking is actually a fairly common failure mode. I’d appreciate thoughts about how common it is, though. I think I hear more about it being a problem in relationships than at work.
How might a business keep from putting people like that into boss jobs? To what extent can people with that pattern of behavior be trained to do better?
Bits and pieces. There’s a healthy body of material on this in the Talmud, but the main article from the Tanakh is Deuteronomy 24:14-15:
This mostly applies to unskilled laborers. There’s a lot of analysis on the above quote, and stuff on the role of contractors and craftsmen in the Talmud.
There’s some analysis here.
This is very topical for me, in a small way.
I had an incident yesterday where something that should have been done right from the beginning became an emergency bandaid (“can you possibly do this today”, at 2:45 PM) with 5 managers involved (3 in my chain), that will have to be redone because some other manager neglected to make the information available, even now, and I wound up with a bandaid that will predictably break the next release.
I’m a software engineer, so the missing information was semi-technical. I say semi, because the problem involved compile-time flags to keep not-yet-ready features out of beta builds.
The day before, I received email telling me that I absolutely must deal immediately with any bugs I had associated with incomprehensible-to-me-internal-codeword. To find which bugs, I should run the linked query – which I didn’t have permission to run. At a guess, running it was restricted either to managers, or people on a magic list of those associated with the feature in question; I am neither of these.
I’m heartily sick of petty stupidity that wastes my time. A lot of it involves non-autistic managers who apparantly lack a “theory of mind” – they act as if everyone knows everything they know, and/or as if once they tell a single one of their staff, everyone else magically knows whatever they said.
I have a serious technical problem that’s affecting real customers, and I very much begrudge the time I spent on both of those manager-created fire drills. A half competent clerk could have handled both fire drills, given the information they weren’t sharing. Without it, I wasted time dealing with the problem – and still more time and political credibility (which I’m short on anyway) trying to get processes in place to avoid having the same nonsense next release. That’s a pretty vain hope – something similar has happened to me pretty much every release since I joined the company – but there was an initiative to fix the compile-time flags problem last year, and that was indeed done right – for a few months at least.
[On the good side, no one blamed me for not having the info. But making a fuss about not having it probably did get me blamed, both times; my manager doesn’t like people complaining, and seems to expect me to work crazy hours in order to get both important and inappropriately-urgent work done.]
I feel this. Manufacturing is like this very often. And, what’s often worse, I’m tasked with supporting legacy hardware I may not have ever seen, much less understand the workings of. Of course my boss knows more about these machines than I do, and has probably forgotten more than I’ll ever know. This makes getting tasked with fixing issues rather frustrating because he’s not especially forthcoming about information relevant to the work and seems to expect my productivity will be orders of magnitude higher than anyone could reasonably manage.
Unfortunately, one of the rewards of status and power is that you get to be more important than those beneath you. Your time is more valuable than theirs – it’s OK, even praise worthy, to save 5 minutes of your time at a cost of 1 minute – or even 10 minutes – of the time of each of the 6-1000 people below you. If queried, this gets justified by supposedly objective numerical calculations (the CEO really is paid more per minute than several thousand non-executive employees, combined). But the real driver seems to be human nature – people suck up to their superiors by enabling this behaviour, and a good chunk of the motivation for their ambitions is to get into this position themselves.
Likewise, information is power, and unless a person’s status comes from being some kind of teacher/mentor/answer person, they’ll automatically and habitually keep information to themselves.
And finally, if something goes wrong, it’s a human near universal to find someone else to blame, rather than taking responsibility for one’s own errors – or even more rarely, for anything that happens on one’s watch, regardless of causation. It’s easy to blame those one has power over – they are less likely to feel empowered enough to contradict your blame transfer – or in extreme cases, may come to believe that it was their job to recognize they had incomplete information, and somehow find it, even over your active opposition.
To the extent that a person with power is goal-oriented, rather than status-oriented, they may temper their power-demonstrating behaviour for the sake of their goals – e.g. company profitability. But they are likely to have trouble even spotting what they are doing, let alone changing it. They might also temper it out of various ethical ideas, or because of empathy with those affected. But the default seems to be to act in a way that demonstrates and uses your power, and shows your superior status to as many people as possible.
There’s a reason we tend to call powerful people who treat their inferiors well “saints” and similar. It seems to be something difficult to do, and mostly not even desired (by the superior, that is). Holding the powerful responsible is dangerous, and strongly discouraged both by those who support the superior in question, and by those who care about the safety of the person who dares to attempt to speak truth to power.
I do recognize some variation, both between cultures and within cultures, but I have no idea how to encourage it. There is at least some selective pressure against particularly wealth destroying bosses and the cultures that encourage them. (But it’s slow, and plenty of people get hired to do the same thing all over again, on the evidece that they once held a similar role at a compnay that’s unfortunately now bankrupt.)
It may be self-interested, but I’d suggest picking autistic people for boss slots – we know that our instincts don’t work, expect to have to consciously learn how to interact with people, and often have missing pieces where non-autistic people have “fast brain” programs that routinely lead them astray. Using conscious intellect to compensate for missing or incorrect instincts is a normal autistic thing – but absolutely not a thing for someone who believes in “gut feel”. This doesn’t mean autistics can’t also take up dysfuctional patterns optimized for demonstrating power and status – but we’re maybe a wee bit more capable of introspection, if we’ve managed to function in the autistic-unfriendly world we mostly live in.
At a large tangent …
I’ve been reading and rereading C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series, now up to about 20 books. One of the many interesting things about it is that it describes an aristocratic/hierarchical system done right, one in which the different roles are basically division of labor rather than status. The protagonist’s bodyguards have as their chief objective in life keeping him alive — and are entitled to order him to do things if that is necessary for that purpose. On a larger scale, the large number of people who owe a sort of allegiance to someone feel a biological drive to protect him, and he feels a biological drive to make their lives better.
This works, in the books, because the people are aliens, similar in many ways to humans but with different emotional hardwiring. The (human) protagonist regards his four bodyguards, who have a lot of functions in his “team” beyond keeping him alive, as his closest friends, but both he and they realize that “friend” is not a category in their emotional makeup. Nor is “love.” “Like,” as one of them comments, applies to salads, not people.
For the same point made, in less detail, about how a human class system ought to work, see the Kiping story “An Habitation Enforced” and the poem “The Land.”
I’ve read the first book, and plan to continue. Reading it, I wondered if Cherryh is somehow very non-neurotypical (on the autism spectrum, say), because it seemed like what it must be like to deal with other people when you don’t have built-in brain modules to intuitively understand their motivations.
At one point, the narrator speculates that on the entire planet with (I think) several million humans whose long-term survival depends on interaction with the aliens, and which include whole academic departments studying them, there are probably only three humans who are really fluent in their language. And then also that understanding their language doesn’t imply understanding them, and that it’s dangerously easy for humans to be mislead by their intuitions about alien motivations.
FWIW, I think Cherryh does really alien aliens better than any other author I can think of.
By all means read the rest of the series. At this point I think I’ve read all of the books twice and some of them three times. My current annoyance is that, having read and reread the most recent one, I have to wait, probably six months to a year, for the next.
Cherryh is very good in multiple ways. I may have mentioned here before Andre Norton’s preface to Cherryh’s first novel. Cherryh was doing what Norton had long been doing, and doing it much better, and Norton, to her very great credit, saw it and said so.
The phrase in industry is “manager is a role, not a rank”.
It’s often honored more in the breach than the observance, but it’s a good goal.
DinoNerd:
I think a good manager needs extremely good people skills–sufficient to understand different peoples’ motivations and feelings and manage them to keep the team working together, and to understand what may be coloring the advice of his or her advisors. My first guess would be that few people on the autism spectrum would do well at that job.
My impression is that almost all non-Aspies believe they have such skills, but it’s about as true as 80% of the population being in the top 10% of drivers, or whetever the bad-self-rating statistic actually is.
I’ve had maybe 5 managers over the course of 40 years who had those skills to a notable degree. That’s about as many as were bad enough to give me truly impressive anecdotes for conversations in the bar with my peers. (E.g. manager gets sick; productivity doubles as soon as he wasn’t there….)
For the others, the non-Aspies have a lot of trouble imagining where anyone different from them is coming from. They tend to be much better at figuring out how to please those above them, than at how to get good work out of those below them. They may be especially good at detecting attempts to cheat them – I’m told non-Aspies who are overall bad at math and logic do much better if an equivalent problem is expressed as detecting cheaters, than abstractly. (Hence the case of understanding what may be coloring the advice of their advisors.) And AFAICT, their own statements are much more likely to be false – sometimes provably so – thereby pushing everyone else to waste time figuring out why they said something, and what might actually be true.
Most non-aspies do not have these social skills, but that doesn’t mean aspies have these social skills, and it doesn’t mean these social skills aren’t relevant.
Most managers are probably like their staff: mediocre. They are probably a cut above in terms of their problem-solving and work ethic, but most managers I see definitely do lack the intangible social skills required to really succeed.
Fortunately, that’s not usually important. Most of us aren’t working on stuff THAT important.
Really good managers are like really good employees, they are rare in their position. And if the organization is any good, they should be promoted OUT of that position before too long.
You’ll be dealing with the merely adequate, or the upwardly mobile with little immediately practical experience.
You need to know:
1. How to motivate people
2. How to identify when people are lying
3. How to determine if people are really at their limits or just need a little push to get to the next step
4. How to coach people productively
5. How to protect your department from infinite work
6. How to focus your department on the important stuff, and manage relationships for their people you are screwing over because their stuff ISN’T important
7. How to tell people “No”
8. How to successfully argue for promotions for YOUR people (otherwise no one wants to work for you)
9. Lots and lots of other stuff
@A Definite Beta Guy
I think you are presuming that Aspies cannot learn these skills. My contention is that a fair number of us can, and when we do, we often miss out on the predictable blind spots I’ve observed in non-Aspies.
Seems to me like the non-aspies really have a theory of mind, and the theory is: “everyone is exactly like me, knowing the same things I do, and thinking about the same things I do”. It probably works quite well on other non-aspies in most situations.
The book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter analyzes manager performance and compares which behaviors work in terms of success of the company, the manager, and their employees. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, that’d be my #1 recommendation for better data.
In terms of the religious philosophy influence aspect, there’s entire management movements (with lots of books, their own categories on Amazon, etc…) covering the idea of a leader who’s responsibility is to serve those he leads. Servant-leadership, Christ-centered management, etc…
Is there a resource for suggesting the best evidence-based X?
I overheard a conversation about the book Expecting Better recently and am very interested in whether there are similar books/resources that present all of the evidence surrounding, say, sleep, or GI, or sustained weight loss, or food safety, or any other excessively emotionally loaded part of our health.
How do serious, theologically literate Protestants deal with the fact that a lot of their doctrine is transparently derived from Nicenean extra-scriptural tradition and cannot be justified on a sola scriptura basis (at least without wildly over-interpreting the original biblical text in ways that are clearly not consistent with the epistemological history of Christianity)?
I am amused by the fact that you came to a predominantly atheist forum to ask this question.
The actual answer is, to quote Luke Skywalker, “Every single word of what you just said was wrong.” I suspect the fact that you added the bit about wildly over-interpreting the text shows that you’ve encountered this answer before.
It’s a predominantly atheist forum with a lot of smart Christians.
I don’t think so. Many distinctively Protestant ideas, such as Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, the Invisible vs. Visible Church, the 39- vs. 46-book canon, etc., not only aren’t found in the Bible, but in some cases aren’t recorded at all until the 16th century. That’s a pretty big problem for a Protestant claiming that their religion represents pure, original Christianity without any Romish accretions, and not something that can be adequately dealt with by a Star Wars reference.
I’m Catholic, so speaking out of my competence here, but it seems to me a Protestant case is on its best footing when it is trying to recover interpretations from the Church Fathers that it believes are neglected by or discordant with the Church. Anything else is either going to be too late or implausible.
Thank you for giving at least a partial list.
The answer is, again, that your premise is wrong. I recommend you review the Reformation literature where the Reformers explain in detail how they derived Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide from the Scriptures. Whether or not you end up agreeing with their interpretations (modern Roman Catholics definitely don’t), I hope you’ll at least admit they’re defensible.
And yes, I agree with Nick that much of those interpretations can be found in the Church Fathers. For a while, Luther was recommending Augustine above every other non-Scriptural author.
I have read them, and I still don’t think they’re ultimately defensible. Yes, there are passages in Scripture from which one can derive the principle of Sola Scriptura, but it’s just that — a derivation, something you’ve added to the words of Scripture, not Scripture itself.
That is, of course, ignoring the issue of how you determine what counts as Scripture in the first place. For Catholics and Orthodox, the answer is obvious — Scripture is Scripture because it is received as such by the Church, i.e., Scripture gets its authority from the Church, rather than vice versa. For Sola Scriptura-believing Protestants, this answer isn’t available, and I’ve yet to see an adequate alternative.
“Derived from Scripture” is very different from “derived from Nicenean extra-scriptural tradition”. Even Luther before the Diet of Worms challenged his opponents to convince him “by the testimony of the Scriptures and by clear reason” – in other words, even he was completely fine with rational derivations based on Scripture.
Rightly or wrongly, the Protestant answer is that they are, in fact, prefigured in the church fathers, and that much of what is distinctly Roman Catholic today dates from the Council of Trent, or even later. Yes, there is a whole lot you can say about that idea, but it boils down to that, and if you approach the debate with the attitude that the Protestants are clearly wrong about that I doubt you’ll get much out of the discussion.
Even accepting, for the sake of argument, the idea that Lutheranism (or Calvinism, or Anglicanism, or Southern Baptism, or whatever) is prefigured (whatever that means) in the Church Fathers, the writings of the Church Fathers still count as “Nicenean extra-scriptural tradition” (or pre-Nicene extra-scriptural tradition, for the earlier ones), and so this doesn’t at all invalidate the original observation.
I think the bigger problem here is that “much of what is distinctly Roman Catholic today dates from the Council of Trent, or even later” is misleading at best and incoherent at worst. Clearly Protestants can’t have split because of the Council of Trent, because the Council of Trent was called because Protestants split. On the other hand, yes, lots of distinctively Catholic things developed following Trent, but those can’t be what Protestants have a beef with, so why bring it up. Please clarify, because I seriously don’t understand.
@Nick:
I think TMcM’s point, if I can interpolate, is that the two camps became largely defined by their differences which caused the split in the first place. The Council of Trent largely existed to examine these schism-causing doctrines, and reaffirmed most of them, and Protestants and Catholics then each doubled down and developed their own pathway thereafter in conformity with those issues. Thus, “Trent” is a pretty good shorthand for “all the stuff that Reformers thought was extraneous and wrong, but Trent refused to jettison” and the fact that Catholics are more defined today by those extraneous matters is evidence that they don’t really go that far back.
That would fall under “misleading at best”, I think: “dates from the Council of Trent” implies that something, well, dates from the Council of Trent, not that it dates from sometime before Trent and was reaffirmed at that council.
Also, how is the fact (assuming, arguendo, that it is a fact) that Catholics are defined by pre-Trent doctrines that were affirmed at the Council of Trent evidence that those doctrines “don’t really go that far back”? That just seems like a complete non sequitur to me.
Because most of the doctrinal differences that define the modern divide (of which I’m aware; I concede I’m not an expert on Catholic doctrine or the nitty-gritty of Trent) don’t seem to be of the “Christ Rose From the Dead” variety – the most obvious weren’t rejected by the Reformers. Almost by definition, they’re rebelling against accretions that took some time to develop and simmer to a crisis point. I don’t think it’s a non sequitur to say that if those items on the margin become the main focus of what makes Catholics distinct, then they’re going to be later traditions. Like priestly celibacy, or Purgatory as a “third physical destination” for souls, or indulgences from the Pope. I would expect that if they had sprung fully formed in 40 A.D., they would likely have arisen for challenge (successful or not) earlier as well.
As to whether that’s what the original poster actually meant in referencing Trent, I can’t say.
No, they’re rebelling against *what they think are* accretions. That doesn’t mean that they actually *are* accretions.
Careful; @The Nybbler got banned once for saying it. I think the subreddit mods are big fans of the original trilogy, or something.
Awesome use/mention example!
You’re going to have to specify which Protestants you mean, I think.
There is no concise way to respond to this in a comment-length setting, particularly as framed (your parenthetical at the end alone hand-waves assumptions that absorbed lifetimes of debate).
The shortest I can say is that Sola Scriptura does not mean that Scripture is the only useful tool for determining truth. Rather, it means that Scripture is the sole authority for spiritual government of Christians. Other rules, authorities, councils, creeds, and traditions may be useful and true, but they ultimately derive their authority from Scripture. Protestants, at least in the Reformed tradition, do not simply jettison all of Church history and teaching; rather, they interrogate and interpret it in light of Scripture. For example, John Calvin did not reject the Council of Nicaea (as you appear to suggest would be required):
Just as the believer, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, can study the meaning of Scripture, there is nothing that prevents a council from bringing the extra perspicacity of multiple minds studying Scripture on a given question. But ultimately it’s not the council that gives the authority; it is the Scripture they are studying.
I don’t think that can be true: the Church predates the Bible (or at least the New Testament), and hence cannot derive its authority from it.
TBH I’m not convinced there’s a meaningful difference between the two: both positions amount to putting your personal interpretation of Scripture above Church teaching, the only difference being how much of Church teaching your personal interpretation happens to agree with.
The early church cited Scripture (the Old Testament and Jesus’ teachings) to support themselves, from the beginning. So I don’t think your objection can be true. In addition, your formulation actually seems to be doing the opposite of what you hope: which Catholic traditions, exactly, do you trace to teachings from the pre-NT-writings church, as opposed to interpretations of Scripture?
As for “personal interpretation,” Protestants simply point out that this is required regardless. One always has to pick an authority. It’s also oddly relativist for a Catholic; even the most hardened post-modernist will usually concede that a text can be sufficiently clear to foreclose certain contrary interpretations.
Jesus’ teachings wouldn’t have been Scripture before they were written down, which took place a few decades after Christianity began.
It’s not that there’s some particular teaching I have in mind that developed from the pre-NT Church, but that, since the Church predated the NT, it follows either that the Church didn’t have any authority for the first few decades of its existence (which seems a fairly implausible position), or that the Church doesn’t derive its authority from the NT.
A text can be; the Bible isn’t, judging by the various schisms and heresies which have arisen over the years.
Why not? The reason scripture is Scripture is because it is the literal or recounted words of God–or at least reliable inferences or discussions thereof. Stands to reason that the words coming out of Jesus mouth would be every bit as much Scripture as those that happened to be remembered and recorded.
Perhaps you mean that it should only count as scripture if the spirit kept it’s memory intact and prompted it being written and accepted. Could be that that’s common dogma somewhere, but I don’t think Jesus words would carry less authority in the interim.
That also answers why I don’t think the church really predates NT Scriptures. Predates the epistles, yes, but not the words of Jesus. I can definitely agree to not weight all scripture equally. I might even rank certain commentary/tradition above certain portions of scripture (say, an off-hand remark in an epistle or some ambiguous statement) but not others.
I think it’s fair to say the Bible does foreclose many interpretations, motivated assertions to the contrary not withstanding; but it certainly doesn’t foreclose all of them.
The small-c catholic Church derives its authority from faithfully teaching the will of God as revealed in the Word of God. Yes, it is correct that Paul’s letter to the Galatians did not constitute part of Scripture that the church relied on or cited prior to Paul writing that particular letter. I’m not sure why you think that’s a point in your favor; the Word of God they did have, they relied upon, as evidenced by New Testament witnesses where the earliest believers (and Jesus himself, though of course his authority was not derivative of prior Scripture as he himself was the Word) regularly cite Scripture.
Jesus’ teachings are literally the Word of God. Those written down are what we need. But even the earliest Christians cited the law and the prophets when describing and interpreting Jesus’ teachings.
@ Randy M:
Because “scripture” literally means “writings”, and something can’t be part of the writings if it hasn’t been written down yet.
@ Hls3002:
The early Church made frequent departures from previous (Scripturally-mandated) OT Jewish customs, even before the books of the New Testament were written. Obviously these departures can’t have been Scriptural at the time they were made, and yet the early Church made them anyway.
Also bear in mind that it took an extremely long time for the Biblical canon to be fixed — a consensus didn’t emerge until the fourth century, and no Church-wide pronouncements on the topic were made until the Council of Trent. If the early Christians really had followed Sola Scriptura, working out which books count as Scripture would have been one of the first things they’d have done, not something that they’d take centuries to do.
And the prophets weren’t written down until after they’d prophesied, and the sayings of Jesus weren’t written down into a formal Gospel until after his death. That doesn’t make them “not the Word of God.” Nothing done by the early Church contradicted Scripture; in fact, I think suggesting that some of the early Church practices actually violated Scripture is more consistent with Protestant teaching than Catholic. If Paul is told by Jesus to preach to the Gentiles, then the Word of God has said it. When it is written down in the Book of Acts it becomes inspired Scripture, but that doesn’t mean the Word has changed. Protestants aren’t Muslims; Scriptural authority is because it is the Word of God inspired by the Holy Spirit, not because of its particular written form.
But if we’re taking “Scripture” or “the Word of God” to include non-Biblical things, then why wouldn’t, for example, “If Pope Pius XII is told by Jesus to define the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, then the Word of God has said it,” or, “If the First Vatican Council is inspired to define the dogma of Papal Infallibility, then the Word of God has said it,” be valid applications of the principle?
Because, I think Catholics would agree, none of those were canonized into our Scriptures. It was important enough for Peter’s vision releasing Gentiles from “unclean” restrictions that the Holy Spirit inspired its inclusion in Acts. Pretty darn sure “Mary has no original sin” or “Pope is infallible ex cathedra” don’t show up anywhere in the agreed-upon canon (or even the disputed Apocrypha). Especially when later doctrinal innovations appear to contradict Scripture. God always has given the church his Word sufficient for them; if it was prior to the Epistles or the other canon writings, then his Word nonetheless did not await those writings to be inscribed to be sufficient for those believers at that time. But we have Scripture, and that is what God gave us.
To put it another way, both sides agree on at least the 27 books of the New Testament being the inspired Word of God. Right? And at least most of the New Testament canon has been established since the 2nd century or earlier, with final adjustments perhaps as late as the 4th century. And the Old Testament was around well before that. I would think both sides agree that God doesn’t change his mind from his inspired Word. Nobody is saying that the Holy Spirit is irrelevant from henceforth, but it makes sense to check any supposed new revelation against the revelation that both sides agree has come from God to make sure the message isn’t garbled. Otherwise the Catholic position of Scripture as authoritative – even in parallel – means nothing.
If an ecumenical Catholic council of 2050 declares Jesus not to be God, or Pope Francis says Jesus told him ex cathedra to abolish the Eucharist, then what’s the “check” on that? If it’s Scripture, then that’s basically Protestantism. If it’s the Holy Spirit, fair enough – but again that’s basically Protestantism, it’s the same check and the same logic that Protestants cite as guarding the small-c catholic church, the priesthood of believers, from following the Scriptures so badly as to render them not useful for salvation.
I concede there’s some subjectivity in Protestantism inasmuch as all the Reformers agree that human reason needs to be applied in order to read and understand the Scriptures, and humans can be mistaken. But I think that applies mostly at the margins, and is more stable (or at least no less stable) in referring to an existing inspired canon than not.
Also, I think the Borgias and the antipopes should make Catholics a bit more sympathetic to the Protestant position.
But you’ve already said that “the Word of God” covers things not found in the Scriptures, so this reply isn’t relevant.
I’m pretty sure that Sola Scriptura doesn’t show up anywhere, either. (Yes, you can try and “derive” it from certain Biblical passages, but the same is true of the Immaculate Conception of Papal Infallibility.)
The fact that the Apocrypha are disputed points to another flaw in Sola Scriptura — namely, the Bible never gives us a list of a canonical Scriptural works, so we’re left with no way of being sure what, exactly, this Scripture is in which we are supposed to find all our doctrine. This isn’t just a Protestant vs. Catholic thing, either, nor does it just concern the Apocrypha. Are James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Hebrews, scriptural? Luther would say no; Calvin would say yes.
As an empirical matter, the Holy Spirit doesn’t seem to have given the Protestants much help in agreeing how to interpret the Scriptures.
If you think you can derive those doctrines from Scripture, then you’ve just admitted that you’re basically Protestant. You just have different interpretations. Also, this is simple “fallacy of grey” thinking. The Scriptural support for those doctrines is nowhere near as robust as the Scriptural support for Scriptural authority.
Again, this says nothing about Catholic vs. Protestant. Catholics acknowledge and use the Scriptures, so they’re in the same boat. Also, it’s misleading to say that Scripture says nothing on the topic. There are Scriptural references for how to recognize the truly inspired Word of God. Those references support the canon as eventually derived, and there is no contradiction in accepting the careful, closer-to-the-time-period assessment of Christian leaders at the time while also agreeing that they have no separate authority to go outside the inspired Word.
In addition, it’s disingenuous to intimate that there is no difference in interpretive approach between the Apostles who literally spoke with Jesus (with Paul last of all), and the later church who did not. Once the primary Apostolic sources are gone, it makes the most sense to rely on the written sources to avoid malleability.
As an empirical matter, the Catholic Church has had numerous heretics, perverts, grifters, nepotists, and antipopes throughout its history. And how’s Pachamamma looking these days? So have Protestants, of course, but the “empirical” argument is just silly. Catholics don’t get to claim the “good ones” while writing off their failures; or if they do, then it’s no different from Protestants claiming the mantle of the true church. After all, there was a branching —< so merely asserting which current branch gets to "claim" the early church fathers or the mantle of "orthodox" church authority is affirming the consequent.
No, because saying “This doctrine can be derived from Scripture” doesn’t logically imply Sola Scriptura, or any other distinctively Protestant hermeneutical principle.
No, because Catholics aren’t in the position of vehemently rejecting the authority of tradition in every other matter whilst tacitly relying on it for choosing their Scriptures.
Three points. First of all, the same councils which mandated the acceptance of the books which Protestants accept also mandated the acceptance of the Apocryphal books, so appealing to the authority of the Fathers won’t get you to the Protestant canon.
Secondly, why would it take the Church so long to recognise the true canon (“eventually derived”, as you put it)? If Sola Scriptura is really true, then determining what counts as Scriptural is pretty darn important, and Scripture really ought to give us more guidance on the matter than a series of hints which take the Church upwards of three centuries to get.
Thirdly, relying on closer-to-the-time-period assessments is going to get you much more than just a Biblical canon. For example, graffiti in the Roman catacombs indicates that people were asking the dead to intercede for them from at least the second century; the earliest surviving Marian hymn comes from the third century; Churches from this period have visual artwork of the sort which the sixteenth-century Reformers would have whitewashed over as idolatrous. If we’re going to rely on the assessments of Christians closer to the time period to get our Biblical canon, why not rely on their assessments on the propriety of asking for intercessionary prayer and church decoration?
That position would make sense, if you assume that God gives the Church no help in correctly interpreting doctrine. If, however, you assume that it would be very strange behaviour for Christ to die for the Church and then sit back and do nothing whilst it wanders into heresy and apostasy, and if you remember his promises that the Holy Ghost would guide the Church into all truth and that the gates of Hell would not prevail against her, the argument loses much of its force.
This is all a non sequitur. The existence of bad Catholics doesn’t change the fact that, if the Holy Spirit is guarding the Protestant Churches from error, he doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job at it.
You don’t seem to understand what Sola Scriptura means, then. It means that Scripture is the primary source and sole final arbiter and authority for the doctrines necessary for salvation, not that other sources provide no useful information at all. You said earlier: “It’s not that there’s some particular teaching I have in mind that developed from the pre-NT Church…” and on any given doctrinal point (including the late-adopted ones), you are claiming it is derivable from Scripture. If that’s true (I think it’s not, since many modern Catholic doctrines lack robust Scriptural support, but that’s a point under discussion), then that’s an appeal back to the authority of the Scriptures. That’s all arch-reformer Luther demanded: “Scripture and plain reason.”
This is either false or a strawman. The bulk of reformers did not “reject the authority of tradition in every other matter.” As I quoted some distance above, Calvin gave due deference to early church councils, creeds, etc. He simply stated that ultimately those were not sufficient to contradict Scripture which, again, Catholics agree is authoritative. Catholics have “rejected the authority” of many other traditions (various heresies, gnosticism, Marcionism, simony, the authority of the Orthodox Patriarchs in the Great Schism, etc.) throughout their history. Each such heresies had church tradition behind them. Each was refuted primarily by reference to the Scriptures; the Catholics claim they are not “legitimate” traditions. You don’t accept tradition, you either test it against Scripture or you arbitrarily choose which ones you like. In either case, there’s no grand distinction with the Reformers.
I’m not appealing to the authority of the Church Fathers. I’m saying that the Church Fathers are also capable of following and interpreting the true marks of inspired Scripture, as in turn laid out in Scripture. Plus, and I concede I’m not going to go through the arguments exhaustively, I don’t agree with your description of the development of the canon and its treatment of the Apocrypha. I’ll defer that discussion to the extended polemics traded back and forth between the Reformers and the Catholics during that time period,
other than to note that, if I’m not mistaken, the Apocrypha were not fully and finally canonized by the Catholics until Trent – at which point one can argue there’s special pleading involved.ETA: Upon review I think the struck-through portion is probably wrong, and Trent was a re-affirmation. I would have been wiser to stick to the full deferment of the issue to the contemporary polemics.The greater point is this: your entire discussion of canon development is relevant for someone opposing Scriptural authority in its entirety. But it cannot form the logical basis for a specifically Catholic argument vs. Protestantism, because Catholics and Protestants agree on almost all of the canon, including the entire New Testament canon if I’m not mistaken. Given that, and given that the shared understanding of Scripture is that it is the authoritative Word of God, that is the obvious compromise point. Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Huss and the rest claim certain doctrines and practices are corrupt and heretical, the Catholic hierarchy says not; very well then, decide according to the shared Scriptures. Catholics are not claiming tradition can nullify Scripture; and Protestants are not claiming that there is nothing useful in tradition. So prove the tradition in Scripture and plain reason, as Luther commented, and you’ll reconcile. If you can’t, then it’s mere ipse dixit.
There is no reason why this should be true or meaningful. Catholics don’t deny, I’m pretty sure, that Scripture authenticates Scripture and gives a method for how to determine the inspired Word. The point is that its codification is the final step of a revealed process. From a Protestant perspective, the councils didn’t create the canon, they identified it. To assume otherwise is to beg the question.
This is a reach, and again shows you don’t understand the concept. The Reformers don’t ignore the early church; they simply assess the quality of the reasoning process applied to Scripture when considering authority. The items you’re citing (ecumenical council debating the Scriptures versus graffiti) are not comparable. And to reiterate, comparison with Scripture has always been the gold standard. I’d expect there was probably graffiti in North Africa regarding the Arian heresy, but that doesn’t make it binding if it contradicts the (both sides agree) inspired Word of God.
That’s literally my point about the Catholic Church. If its pronouncements were pure expressions of the Holy Spirit, I’d expect them to be less corrupt, more coherent, and in line with Scripture. (And to avoid getting too personal and nasty, let me clarify that I do consider the Catholic Church to be one expression of the church invisible, and not bereft of the Spirit.) If you want to say “empirically” that Protestant churches are failing to uphold the religion, the same “empirical” test can be turned right around on Catholic past and present. Ultimately, if the Catholic Church declared tomorrow that “Jesus was not raised from the dead,” through whatever method is deemed authoritative, on what basis can that be challenged? It seems to me that Catholic responses must be one of three things: (1) by definition that is true Christianity now (tautologically); (2) that would be disavowed because it contradicts some other authority, presumably Scripture and early church expositions thereof (this is basically Protestantism), or (3) impossible to consider, because of the Holy Spirit’s guidance (but again this is simply the same that the Protestant churches say about the universal church, and I deny that the Catholic “empirical results” are superior).
I’ve spent too long on an argument that has been waged in far more depth over centuries, so if you would like the last word, conceded.
With respect, I think this is a pretty disingenuous note to end on: either I don’t respond, so you get the last word; or I do, in which case you get to look superior and above such petty arguments. If you don’t want to continue a discussion, you can just not continue one, without virtue-signalling about it.
You’re misunderstanding my point. I was saying that the earliest Christians didn’t believe in Sola Scriptura, because they went around preaching and defining doctrines before writing them down — including on topics which Jesus didn’t clearly address, such as the question of whether Gentile converts have to keep the Mosaic Law (a matter on which, incidentally, the losing side had a stronger case based on the Scriptures that had then been written). So either Sola Scriptura was false then but subsequently became true (when? why?), or it’s false, full stop.
The Reformers “gave due deference to” Church tradition when and only when Church tradition agreed with what they thought anyway, which is the same as rejecting the authority of tradition. Did Luther or Calvin ever say, “I can’t see the Scriptural basis for this, but the Church has always held it, therefore I suppose it must be true”?
In the vast, vast majority of heresies, it was obvious which one was in continuity with previous Church teaching and which one contradicted it. That includes the Reformation, BTW, given that Luther’s whole schtick was claiming that the Church had been totally wrong for the last thousand years and needed to chuck out basically everything from that period. It’s hard to imagine something more discontinuous than throwing out the last thousand years of development, short of founding an entirely new religion, that is.
The difference is, Catholic ecclesiology gives a coherent reason to accept the canon — namely, since Christ promised to guide his Church into all truth, the Church cannot be habitually mistaken on matters of doctrine; and, since the Church has habitually held certain books to be canonical, it is certain that she is correct, because Christ would prevent her falling into error in such a way. Protestantism, on the other hand, holds that the Church was habitually mistaken on a whole host of doctrines, but makes an arbitrary exception for the Biblical canon.
No, it’s an attempt to beg the question in favour of Protestantism, by demanding that Catholics prove their doctrines according to the hermeneutical principles of Protestantism.
And what’s wrong with that? Christ guaranteed the Church’s infallibility. Refusing to accept the teaching of an infallible body is foolish pride.
None of this actually relates to my point. For Catholics, the lack of a fixed canon for the first four hundred or so years of Christian history isn’t a problem, because there was a Church with the ability to settle doctrinal disputes. For Protestants, who believe that Scripture alone can settle doctrinal disputes, the lack of a fixed canon isn’t a problem because…?
Scripture can’t authenticate Scripture, on pain of circularity.
I didn’t cite the graffiti as a theological authority, but as evidence of early Christian beliefs. If the early Christians were wrong about matters such as the propriety of praying to the saints, why should we trust their judgement about other matters, such as the correct canon of Scripture?
St. Vincent of Lerins has you covered there:
Now in the Catholic Church itself we take the greatest care to hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all. That is truly and properly ‘Catholic,’ as is shown by the very force and meaning of the word, which comprehends everything almost universally. We shall hold to this rule if we follow universality, antiquity, and consent. We shall follow universality if we acknowledge that one Faith to be true which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is clear that our ancestors and fathers proclaimed; consent, if in antiquity itself, we keep following the definitions and opinions of all, or certainly nearly all, Bishops and Doctors alike.
“What then will the Catholic Christian do, if a small part of the Church has cut itself off from the communion of the universal Faith? The answer is sure. He will prefer the healthiness of the whole body to the morbid and corrupt limb.
“But what if some novel contagions try to infect the whole Church, and not merely a tiny part of it? Then he will take care to cleave to antiquity, which cannot now be led astray by any deceit of novelty.
“What if in antiquity itself two or three men, or it may be a city, or even a whole province be detected in error? Then he will take the greatest care to prefer the decrees of the ancient General Councils, if there are such, to the irresponsible ignorance of a few men.
“But what if some error arises regarding which nothing of this sort is to be found? Then he must do his best to compare the opinions of the Fathers and inquire their meaning, provided always that, though they belonged to diverse times and places, they yet continued in the faith and communion of the one Catholic Church; and let them be teachers approved and outstanding. And whatever he shall find to have been held, approved and taught, not by one or two only but by all equally and with one consent, openly, frequently, and persistently, let him take this as to be held by him without the slightest hesitation.
Incidentally, St. Vincent also deals with the question of Sola Scriptura in the same work:
Here, it may be, someone will ask: ‘Since the canon of Scripture is complete, and is in itself abundantly sufficient, what need is there to join to it the interpretation of the Church?’ The answer is that because of the profundity itself of Scripture, all men do not place the same interpretation upon it. The statements of the same writer are explained by different men in different ways, so much so that it seems almost possible to extract from it as many opinions as there are men. Novatian expounds in one way, Sabellius in another, Donatus in another, Arius, Eunomius and Macedonius in another, Photinus, Apollinaris and Priscillian in another, Jovinian, Pelagius and Caelestius in another, and latterly Nestorius in another. Therefore, because of the intricacies of error, which is so multiform, there is great need for the laying down of a rule for the exposition of Prophets and Apostles in accordance with the standard of the interpretation of the Catholic Church.
Oh, and one other thing:
Calvin might have paid lip-service to the Councils; Luther famously declared them contradictory and useless at the Diet of Worms.
And again, which Scripture is agreed to be authoritative? Luther dismissed the Epistle of James as a forgery, saying that the author “mangles the Scriptures and thereby opposes Paul and all Scripture. He tries to accomplish by harping on the law what the apostles accomplish by stimulating people to love. Therefore, I will not have him in my Bible to be numbered among the true chief books.” Jude he dismisses as a copy of 2 Peter, and regarding Hebrews, he says that it is to be honoured, but that “to be sure, we cannot put it on the same level with the apostolic epistles”. As for the book of Revelation, he says that “For myself, I think it approximates the Fourth Book of Esdras; I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it. . . .Finally, let everyone think of it as his own spirit leads him. My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book. For me this is reason enough not to think highly of it: Christ is neither taught nor known in it.” Clearly Luther, at least, didn’t think that *these* Scriptures were particularly authoritative!
One useful (though perhaps a little sloppy for brevity) way of looking at the Protestant take on Scripture is this: the books of the Bible are authoritative because the prophets and apostles were given God’s authority to say those things. They had an authoritative role speaking for God that was recognized (at least by a few) at the time, and pretty much ever since then. That is different from when someone else speaks for God. Like, any Christian is in theory at least God’s ambassador, speaking for God to give the gospel message to people. But that’s a different level of authority, different in kind and not just degree. The Bible itself seems to treat prophets and apostles this way.
Hot take from a nonChristian:
Many Catholics also think that their doctrine is derived directly from the Bible. It is partly for this reason that Protestant critique of prevailing Catholic doctrine resonated so much in 16th century – Reformers pointed out (supposed) contradictions between the Bible and the Church practice and teachings.
So this is just a special instance of a more general problem of how a religion based on the Holy Book deals with an unavoidable reality that the Holy Book might be interpreted in various ways. And thorough history, religious communities came up with many solutions to this problem.
I’m not a Protestant and I don’t know anything about their doctrine. But I’d like to suggest that this is not the right way to start a conversation.
If you really wanted to have this conversation, you’d say: “Hello, I notice the protestants have the following doctrine: (quote), but this actually is derived from this tradition: (quote), and what scripture says on the topic is S: (quote), this seems inconsistent, how do they deal with this?”
What you’re doing here is you open with “hey how do you guys feel about being totally wrong”, and then you’re asking your presumed conversation partners to build your whole argument for you before refuting it. (And then of course you’ll say: “actually that wasn’t my argument at all, it’s really disappointing that you misunderstood me like that.”)
I appreciate and agree with this response.
Question I’ve been wondering about, phrased in the least inflammatory way I can manage: from my own Orthodox Christian POV, there are a couple of strong points of similarity between certain kinds of Protestantism and Sunni Islam. Sola Scriptura and Iconoclasm are the two big ones–both are quite alien to Catholics, perfectly normal for Muslims. A Muslim’s relationship with the Koran seems not much different from a Protestant’s relationship with the Bible.
I realize this is a pretty weird thing to point out, but the Protestant Reformation followed centuries of cultural exchange between the West and Islam, and cross-pollination certainly occurred in the East; Shia Islam has very obvious similarities to Eastern Christianity, while the original iconoclasts certainly seem to have caught the idea from Muslims, whatever some scholars say. Has anyone “respectable” ever suggested that these Protestant-Muslim similarities are not a coincidence?
I think this glosses over some major differences. The Koran is a significantly shorter work than the Bible — something on the order of 4x depending on details; a motivated but otherwise unexceptional reader could get through it in a weekend. On the other hand, there’s a huge volume of commentary and interpretation — the hadith — that’s not part of the Koran proper, but often has more to say on the practical aspects of performing a religion, generally attributed to Muhammad himself or to his close associates. In a Christian context it might be most comparable to the Epistles, but it’s much larger.
Because of this, it’s not really correct to say that Muslims follow sola scriptura in practice. Only the Koran is believed to be the literal, directly communicated word of God, but some hadith are nonetheless believed to be divinely inspired (albeit transmitted through a human interpreter), and even those that aren’t carry a great deal of weight. So the Koran is not, from a Muslim perspective, generally seen as the sole source of religious authority or as a comprehensive guide to how to be a Muslim.
But as others here have pointed out, Protestants don’t view scripture as the sole source in the literal sense, only as the final source; in practice, Sola Scriptura is a misnomer. From the Orthodox POV the distinction is unclear and the execution unintelligible, but many Protestants look like Muslims in their opposition to a hierarchical clergy with an authoritative role in defining doctrine. In both religions, the individual believer reading his scripture is supposed to play a much more prominent role than in any pre-Reformation Christian sect that I can think of (barring proto-Protestants like Lollards or Hussites, who also emerged well after the rise of Islam).
In any case, Christianity has no parallels to the hadith (non-canonical gospels would come closest, but not really), so Protestants could hardly imitate that aspect of Islam. They do, as I understand it, have extensive supplemental text traditions on correct interpretation and praxis, but so does every religion.
Sunni Islam is imho even less “sola scriptura” than Catholicism. Sunni Islam explicitly recognizes four separate sources of authority – Quran, hadith, ijma (consensus of the relevant community) and qijas (analogy). Quran is supreme in a sense that no precept derived from other sources might supersede it, but it is at least implicitly recognized that precepts might be derived directly from four nonquranic sources.
Another important aspect in which Islam is closer to Catholicism than to Protestantism is that Protestantism strongly encourages translating the Scripture into everyday languages of the believers.
That being said, as you correctly pointed out, there are also important similarities – Iconoclasm and more broadly, for a lack of a better term “more stringent monotheism” (no saints), plus methods for choosing rough equivalents of priests. Unfortunately I do not know nearly enough about medieval Europe to have an informed opinion on whether those similarities were inspired via cultural diffusion or not.
Iconoclasm seems likely to come out of Hebrew Bible incidents in which idols were smashed and so on.
Perhaps I should do an effort post on the conflict between two factions in the Swiss reformation. There were the guys like Zwingli who won out and became the Reformed, who wanted to reform the church but keep much of the structure. Then there were the guys like Grebel who became Anabaptist who wanted to literally run around smashing idols, zero compromise, only doing things the way he thought the New Testament said to. We have a bunch of their letters and documents, and the story is fairly entertaining. That would give much more background on the way those particular branches of the Reformation thought about these issues.
Yes, and that includes Islamic iconoclasm. Byzantine Iconoclasm was also officially legitimated by citing Hebrew Bible, nevertheless, it was likely partially inspired by Islam. Reformation might be similar in this respect. Or not.
I suppose it would be easier to argue this if I had a firm handle on what Sola Scriptura is supposed to mean, but it’s an elusive concept for those who don’t believe in it. The Bible is a huge and heterogeneous book, composed by (at minimum) dozens of authors from disparate backgrounds and cultures over a period of about a thousand years.
Citing its ostensibly plain teaching as an authority would appear to be a hopeless task; any reading of what the Bible says on any given subject is bound to involve debateable interpretation and weighing of priorities, and distinguishing between “Biblical teaching” and human traditions or accretions strikes me as subjective at best and question-begging at worst.
Consider idolatry: the Second Commandment could be interpreted very broadly, as in some hardline forms of Islam (“it is sinful for your five-year-old to doodle a pony, even with no spiritual intent”) or very narrowly, as we do (“do not make and literally worship artificial deities out of rocks and such”). A typical Protestant position is somewhere in the middle. I’m inclined to favor our version, naturally; we support our argument by pointing to the cherubim set up on the Ark of the Covenant, all the fancy decorations in the OT Temple, etc. I assume the Protestant version sounds equally compelling to them, but I don’t see how one of the two competing scriptural justifications is really Biblical while the other isn’t. It’s a matter of competing interpretive frameworks.
I will say that the extreme Muslim reverence for the Koran reminds me strongly of extreme Protestant reverence for the Bible.
I’ll take a stab at explaining Sola Scriptura in practical terms then. This isn’t the theoretical account or a demonstration that it is correct. That would definitely be an effort post, though I could oblige if people really want one. But in practice… Sola Scriptura answers the question ‘what if the human authorities on Scripture are wrong?’.
Some alternatives to Sola Scriptura answer that question by saying ‘they are not wrong’. That was roughly the answer that the Reformers perceived the Roman Catholic authorities as giving. The Reformers countered that by saying ‘Look, if you are correct, you should be able to show it by using evidence that the Scriptures agree with your position, using ‘because I said so’ not even once in your argument. If you cannot do that, we will consider our claim that you are wrong to be legitimated’.
That is the historical context.
In practice, yes, Protestants have authorities on what the Bible says. But in anything at all like a conservative Protestant context, those authorities are expected to be able to demonstrate how they derive their claims about Scripture from Scripture itself. More importantly, those authorities are expected to be willing to change their position in the face of someone with lower status pointing out inconsistencies between their position and Scripture. I’ve seen Protestant authorities at pretty much all levels actually live up to those ideals. I’ve also seen plenty of failures. Sola Scriptura doesn’t say exactly what you do in response to failures by the authorities. What it does say is that if the authorities fail to show their work or fail to change in response to evidence, A) they might be wrong, and B) you might be able to do better because you have the Bible.
Whether you actually do better is not guaranteed by Sola Scriptura, if only because there are more than 2 options for interpreting just about any piece of Scripture. Just because they might be wrong doesn’t mean you are right. But in the same way that your tradition hopes that the Holy Spirit and tradition will guide the authorities into truth, Sola Scriptura traditions hope that in the face of the authorities being wrong, people not in authority will be guided into truth. Sadly, it is quite clear that this is not the only thing that can happen.
Thank you! The Orthodox answer would probably be to point to Laura Bohannon’s classic “Shakespeare in the Bush,” in which West African tribesmen interpret Hamlet in ways that make perfect sense to them, and wind up converting it into a cautionary tale about the dangers of using witchcraft on your family. We don’t think the Bible can be correctly understood outside of the cultural context it was given in, and which produced it–the culture and tradition we have preserved.
That’s starting to poke at the weaknesses of me skipping the theoretical foundations. Which is totally fair. But I’ll try to keep my response to the practical level.
What would happen if the bushmen humbly asked the people who might know more to explain that cultural context?
To put it more bluntly, the New Testament assumes a deep familiarity with the Old Testament and a whole Jewish worldview. And yet, both the New Testament and the Old Testament were given to the Greek people as if that would be a good idea. To be sure, that resulted in some heresies, where people of Greek culture imported their own assumptions into the faith.
But God also in his infinite mercy also changed the hearts of some who heard the Word so that they humbly asked people who knew more about the cultural context to explain. God graciously gave his Spirit both to the new believers and the various Jewish people who really did understand the Bible to teach the truth about the Bible. Over the centuries, God raised up people to defend the truth against all those varieties of heresy.
So yes, I often have to explain the cultural context when I teach the Bible to people from some other culture. It is my job to learn that context as best as I can, the same as it is my job to know Hebrew and Greek, etc. That improves my ability to understand and teach. But a huge bit of the New Testament is written to support the idea that you don’t have to be Jewish by blood or culture to be Christian. And a huge part of both the Old Testament and the New Testament says that the knowledge of God is for all nations. I’m on the front lines of that, and I can testify that God really does mean that. For that to work, that has to mean that people from other cultures can become teachers of the Bible.
That’s because the Greeks weren’t just given the Old and New Testaments,* they were also given a Church with the ability to lay down authoritative interpretations of the Scriptures. Cultural distance is less of a problem when you have a divinely-guaranteed body to tell you when your personal interpretation is right or wrong.
(* As a matter of fact they weren’t given the New Testament, at least at first, because the Church was already evangelising the Gentiles before the New Testament was even written.)
Also, whilst you’re correct to stress the importance of cultural context, I’m not sure it can be squared with another important Protestant doctrine, that of the Perspicuity of Scripture. To quote the Westminster Catechism (section 1.7):
All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.
There is nothing in here about having to become an expert in ancient Near Eastern culture to interpret the Scripture; anybody, even the unlearned, can understand at least the necessary parts.
Trying to phrase this as non-polemically as possible: how do you square this belief with the divergences between Protestantism and preceding Christian beliefs? Luther and the other Reformers wrote off the medieval Church as a corrupt Whore of Babylon, so even if we suppose that they were right about the beliefs of the earliest Christians, there’s still a thousand-year-plus period in which Church teachings were undoubtedly Catholic (or Orthodox, but then Protestantism has at least as many differences with Orthodoxy as it does with Catholicism). If the Holy Spirit was really raising up champions to fight heresy, they don’t seem to have been very successful in their God-given task.
There is a huge volume of commentary and interpretation, but the hadith are one of the inputs to it, with the Koran the other input. The hadith themselves are not commentary but accounts of something Mohammed or his Companions did or said, transmitted orally through several people and then written down.
That’s an interesting question. There might have been some influence, but the Western monastic tradition is a much more likely source for a lot of the stuff you are seeing. Unlike in the East, the Western monastic tradition went through repeated waves of reform where some people said ‘look, the monasteries are corrupt, let’s go back to the basics and be holy together’. Monasteries already had a tradition of Bible study, so the Bible was unsurprisingly part of that reform meta tradition.
I’d love to hear from someone who knows more about any influence Islam had on some of the proto reformers though.
Given that the early phase of Muhammad’s religious teaching was heavily influenced by Judaism and to a lesser extent by Christianity, it would be quite surprising if there weren’t some parallels.
Shia Islam is usually compared to Protestantism, at least in its governance. There are many sects or traditions and many leaders, and no supreme leader. At least in the days of the Arab expansion there was a single leader who was the heir of Muhammad, which is more like how Catholicism operates. The original Sunni/Shia split was over who would inherit the Prophet’s mantle, rather than over doctrine.
A central feature of the Shia/Sunni split was that the Shia believed that Mohammed’s “inheritors” were themselves divinely inspired, hence further sources for information on God’s will. Most of the Shia sects believe that the last the last such source died or went into occlusion a very long time ago, however.
The Sunni do not have that view of the caliphs.
Shia bears an immensely strong resemblance to Eastern Christianity in several respects. The Shiite cult of Fatima seems obviously modeled on Marian devotion–Shiites make this comparison themselves–while the reverence for saints in general is not all that different from our version. There is also a venerable Shiite tradition of obedience to an elder which seems like a direct copy of an Orthodox monastic tradition.
I just saw this article in the FT.
For those who can’t see what’s inside, it’s a collection of non-political situations (as in, business situations, emergencies etc.) where bad things happened because people were afraid to voice dissent / good things happened because people were allowed to critically comment on each other’s ideas. The concluding paragraph is pretty generic:
I can sort of feel that the intensity of culture wars in London (where I live) is declining. I see this article as the FT following this trend and advising very cautiously against our current, peak levels of political correctness (because that’s in practice how you defuse the tension from here).
If so, it would be very disappointing because that would mean that one of the best-quality recognisable newspapers is very late to the pro-free-speech party which has been going on in many circles and communities of intelligent people for a long time.
Do you interpret it the same way?
I wonder if maybe people compartmentalize this more than you think they do. Like, someone would say “Of course we should set up systems at my aircraft engineering job to encourage dissent when it comes to the design of fuel gauges!” and really mean it and even follow through, but that same person would say “We can’t tolerate those hateful members of my outgroup here!” or maybe not “say” it, but definitely mean it and find ways to act on it too.
They need only repeat the mantra “I can tolerate anything except intolerance.”
Free speech and open inquiry within the range of acceptable questions is pretty commonly supported, even by people who think advocating the wrong things in public ought to get you tossed in jail.
The easiest place to comment on this phenomena which is not CW (I just suggest this because I enjoy the topic) is video game balance. Places like Blizzard used to have independent divisions and an adversarial environment. Now under activision, its much more tame internally, and the games have lost significant quality.
One of the things old-time moralists tended to counsel against was playing cards. I expect their more contemporary equivalents are busy preaching against video games.
What was their main objection? The time spent that could have been spent more productively, the money that was lost gambling, or something else?
It’s entirely possible that there was more than one reason, or that (like a lot of moral panics) many reasons get ascribed to one thing people just get squicked out by.
In the catholic world at least, the most famous instances of playing cards getting banned are, iirc, directly linked to the evils of gambling. So the papal ban on card playing by Benedict the 14th directly associates card players with gamblers. Most puritanical bans on gambling directly link them with other gambling impliments: “cards, dice, or tables” and so on.
Now of course that just pushes the question back, why is GAMBLING bad. Three potential overlapping reasons
A) It makes people super obsessed with material gain
B) material gains in gambling happen for no reason, unlike virtuous obsession with material gain
C) There’s a reason gambling is kinda by its nature ugly and rough: humans are bad at acting rationally and can be easily exploited by gamblers (or themselves). This is why many societies, even wholly secular ones think banning gambling is a “good idea”, it seems to carry an ugliness along with it (instances like this are sadly inevitable)
* but I think it’s probably fair to say that there’s also an “attention-stealing”/”idleness” component completely divorced from the “evils of gambling.” Why do I think this? I grew up adjacent to some fairly religious people and this was their most common reason for objecting to things like pokemon cards and the like. I can’t imagine similar objections weren’t conjured up back then (because it’s so easy to pin this objection to any activity you don’t like)
The usual position is that gambling is theft, and a violation of the eighth commandment.
The old Catholic Encylcopaedia on the topic of gambling or gaming:
Supplement from Callan and McHugh’s Moral Theology, with an interesting comparison to insurance:
Clerics are also restricted in general from gambling, per §2603(c).
Wait, what’s a “gambling hell?” I mean, the reason I gamble every now and then is so I can sit in the casino and get free drinks.
I think Callan and McHugh had in mind the sorts of places Kaiji visits. (Great anime, btw.) I don’t know whether America has underground gambling establishments the way 90s Japan apparently did.
Wait, what’s a “gambling hell?
There speaks a man who has not read Regency Romances 🙂
Try late 18th/early 19th century fiction (of the period or historical novels), or indeed genuine history – where the drinking dens and gaming houses of the lower classes became places where all classes mingled to wager money, then as social mobility enabled men who enriched themselves by their abilities as gamesters to open ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ of their own where the gentry and aristocracy could lose their shirts in style.
A casino that provides you with drinks but still lets you leave with the shirt on your back is an amateur affair by the standards of our ancestors 😀
Money, like most goods, has decreasing marginal ability to contribute to one’s flourishing. Gambling results in an increase in random fluctuations to one’s wealth. If the amount is small compared to one’s wealth this is not a problem. But losing a large percentage of one’s wealth particularly if one is providing for others is a huge problem that is not adequately offset by the possibility for benefit.
Have you never heard of gambling addiction?? It’s like alcohol: lots of people can use it responsibly, but some folks, it just ruins their lives. And that is a bad thing. And people try to restrict it as a result.
As theodidactus notes, though, Puritan objections to playing cards and similar seem to be a bit different and to apply to the implements, too.
I agree with what theodidactus said above. But there’s probably also something of a cultural/social aspect to it, i.e. the upright moralists see a behavior/activity that’s popular amongst the more immoral/lazy parts of society and decide its evil by association regardless of whether there’s any objective reason to consider the activity immoral on its own merits.
Playing cards weren’t just for gambling. They were also associated with fortune-telling and tarot. Nowadays there is a specific tarot deck, but there’s no particular reason you can’t do something similar with a standard deck of playing cards just by assigning associations to each suit and rank. And as I understand it, people did. So not just gambling, but occultism.
This is the reason I always heard, at least from a Catholic perspective. I grew up playing poker with priests, and the family thought that was fine, but if I were to pull out a tarot deck I think my grandmother would have had a heart attack.
I’m not doubting that priests did in fact play poker, @hls2003’s explanation would explain why it might be ok for playing non-gambling games, I’m pretty sure poker is supposed to still be out, because of…you know…the gambling.
Well, one of the priests I’m thinking of in particular would go to Las Vegas to gamble a few times a year, so he apparently didn’t have any problem with it!
I’m not saying that it was entirely fortune-telling. My grandfather was a “cards teetotaler.” He had simply always been raised never to touch the things. Probably it was some mix of associations; I’m not saying gambling wasn’t a big part of it. But I think cards got a sinister reputation through multiple associations, and occultism was one.
Dice would be similar. Mostly used for gambling, but I was taught that they were also historically used for divination (the “Urim and Thummim” referenced in the Bible were, I think, in that vein, although they were endorsed by God and thus licit).
There was a fun discussion of the morality of tarot and other occult stuff a while back. I’d still maintain staying away from Ouija boards, but I can’t really argue with the multiple examples of tarot decks being used neutrally.
This is one of my favorite subjects of discussion so I’m sad I missed it. I’ve observed, at many different places and times, a clear unifying “contagion phenomenon” from certain objects used in occult practices (usually broadly defined). People often can’t say a single reason *why* they shouldn’t be used, and their explanations tend to “layer” multiple (sometimes conflicting) reasons into one.
So I recall a time I was playing with a Ouji Board as a child, and an adult told me I shouldn’t because (more or less): “Its idolatrous to believe you can communicate with the dead. I heard of a person who used it to predict the day of her death, something that should be unknown. The board said ‘tomorrow’ and then she died.” (I know this must be a common rationale because I’ve seen it as a plot point in more than one story)
If you actually think about this for more than five seconds you realize here is a *lot* going on there.
– It’s wrong because it’s idolatrous (a sin)
– It’s wrong because it’s necromancy (is that a different sin than idolatry?)
– It’s wrong because you shouldn’t know the future (is that a different sin than idolatry or necromancy?)
– It’s wrong because you could die (did the board ‘curse’ her? did the board ‘work?’)
Esp. funny when I was living abroad. I did a Taoist “hell money” ceremony and my protestant friend said they knew someone once who “prayed to an idol and then got cancer,” as if that was a reasonable thing that could happen to me if I kept this up. I didn’t say anything but I thought it was pretty funny. Given how many millions of Taoists there are, idolatry must be a major cause of cancer in the non-western world.
EDIT: Geeze I wrote all that and forgot to include my main point: You can show pretty clearly that anti-gambling-device laws and taboos were distinct from anti-occult-creepy laws and taboos. The first laws against tarot mention it only as a gambling tool in their preambles and stuff…it would be weird if Tarot was a notorious window into satanic practices but the preambles to these laws only mention the evils of gambling. Tarot had no special association with occultism until late in its history.
I’m sure this is the case, but I’m also not sure why this should be surprising for a taboo. Taboos have the disadvantage that they are often mysterious even if there were good reasons why they developed.
Ah, cool to know. The point has been made here before that card games usually develop for the decks we already have. It’s pretty funny if divination is ‘made’ for existing decks, too. I wonder if there are any countries where fortune telling is done with a French deck.
A legal riddle with no implications for the present time:
In 2029, sources from within the White House report something…terrible. An intern is dead, killed in the oval office by the president with a single gunshot to the head. Hours later, future president Kunzelnick delivers a cryptic statement: “Unfortunately, yes, the intern is dead. I did have something to do with it. However, you have my assurance that what I did was not a crime, and as such, I will not be cooperating with any future investigation on the matter.”
What follows? In particular:
1) Do we have to take Kunzelnick’s word for it that “what I did was not a crime?”
2) What did Kunzelnick mean by that anyway? Is Kunzelnick saying the initial reports are wrong? Is Kunzelnick saying the underlying facts are true, but there’s some excuse, like self defense? Or is Kunzelnick saying ANYTHING the president does “is not a crime?”
3) Is there any difference between the three assertions in “2” above?
4) Can Kunzelnick be investigated by the justice department? What can the justice department make Kunzelnick do?
5) Can Kunzelnick be investigated by the district of Columbia? What can DC make Kunzelnick do?
6) Can Kunzelnick or his subordinates be made to testify before congress? What happens if Kunzelnick or his subordinates don’t comply?
7) Absent SOME ability to investigate Kunzelnick, is 2 even a meaningful question?
1. House commences impeachment hearings for murder/manslaughter.
2. They either have the evidence or they don’t. Certain things like video and audio may be able to be obtained, as will the testimony of secret service or others in the room.
3. If all parties refuse, emergency court motion to compel, if refuse judicial orders add that as an article.
4. Vote on articles of impeachment for murder, manslaughter, and refusing to obey a court order.
5. Goes to Senate, they do the same.
6. If removed from office, now DOJ can proceed with a murder investigation of its own. If not, they wait until he leaves office at the end of the term.
why do they need to vote for articles of impeachment for refusing to obey a court order? Couldn’t they just do articles of impeachment for refusing to obey a congressional subpoena?
They can impeach for any reason they want, down to wearing the wrong color shoes, but it’s probably more credible if there’s a court order involved.
And the defense at impeachment/trial would be “this subpoena is not valid because X” or “we don’t have to because Y.” A court ruling on the merits of X and Y would be useful in figuring out who’s in the wrong here.
The way the checks balances are supposed to work with three co-equal branches of government is if two of the branches are fighting, the dispute can be settled by the third.
So this is not one of those “non-jusiticiable political questions?”
In the future, Courts can and should get involved in telling the president whether he must or must not comply with specific congressional subpoenas, down to deciding whether subpoena [x] is valid and subpoena [y] isn’t?
If he challenges them, yes? Are you suggesting there’s no such thing a subpoena from Congress the president may refuse? Or that Congress would never issue an invalid subpoena?
We don’t have a situation where “two of the branches are fighting.” We have a situation where two of the branches are conspiring.
Note though that a court ruling doesn’t actually accomplish anything that a congressional subpoena does not. This is exactly why courts are scared to get involved in this stuff (my linked article contains a host of examples). Think through what happens:
1) Congress goes to the courts, on the question of “must the president testify?” Their argument is “we *suspect* something shady is going on here, and the president isn’t cooperating with our inquiry into the matter” The president’s response is “Like I said, I can’t be investigated for that.”
2) the court says (we’ll imagine) “fine. You CAN investigate the president for that. He must cooperate”
3) the president says “…nuh uh!” (or if you want something less objectively tyrannical, you get him in the chair, ask him 16 questions, which he answers truthfully, and when you get to the 17th, the really important one, he says “my understanding of the court’s order is that this particular question is outside the scope of the investigation. Let’s go to court again about it.”)
…so now, as you say you impeach him for *that*.
but what if you lose? What just happened? Did the law change? The answer is no, the senate just decided not to agree with the court, and really this is something the senate decides, not the court.
It absolutely does. If the subpoena is ruled valid and the President still refuses, the impeachment debate in the House/Senate is no longer “the president’s party vs the opposition party” it’s “the president’s party vs the opposition party and the ostensibly non-partisan judiciary.”
As others have said, you could, but it would contain no moral weight with the public, just as article 2 of the current impeachment does. That is because the default is assuming politicians lack integrity. Plus, they also assume the President sometimes does super serious things that could be dangerous for the public to know about. So, if a bunch of judges say, “this is not pure hackery and the President has no reason to withhold the information” the public will be on board.
Kunzelnick is going to order the justice department not to investigate, and they will comply. Otherwise you’re not maintaining the analogy to Trump.
Congress doesn’t have the physical enforcement power to imprison the president on contempt or compel him in any other way. Impeachment & removal is the only means of enforcement against the president under the constitution. (25 is based on the President’s chosen people.)
I would suggest not to get too concerned with the idea of precedent here. Under the US constitution, 34 senators have the power to turn any president into a temporary dictator, completely above the law and unaccountable to any other power (except that he can be convicted once out of office). That’s the system we have.
Those senators don’t have to listen to precedents unless they want to, and when it comes to the choice of whether to aid and abet crime by the president, they won’t, ever. Neither the pro-crime faction nor the anti-crime faction would ever be influenced by precedent when it comes to any fundamental decisions determining whether the rule of law will be maintained.
The questions to ask in your hypothetical are:
(1) Did the senate want that intern dead? If not, Kunzelnick is out.
(2) Are the senators confident they won’t end up like that intern, if they vote to remove the president but he’s not removed? If not, Kunzelnick is in.
This is clearly about Trump, but can I just note the irony of calling him a dictator when he has scrupulously obeyed every court judgement against him, even the ones that are obviously getting overturned in the Supreme Court?
My point in asking this question is not really to criticize trump necessarily, but rather to illustrate how he’s making certain perhaps-implicit elements of our system directly explicit. Under the current regime, the mistake that someone like Clinton made wasn’t “lying under oath” it was “sitting for the depositions at all”
Also as a law student I think it’s interesting how both sides are forced into a situation where they have to discuss whether certain acts are or are not “crimes” without the underlying investigation and charging process which ultimately form a substantial part of how crime is defined. Murder is a decent example of a crime that might not be “really criminal” when you know all the facts, but of course process/specific intent crimes that mirror what the president is currently accused of are better examples (murder just catches people’s attention better)
It’s very possible it will be easy to “backpedal” on a lot of this mess in the case of future presidents doing future stuff we don’t like, but I don’t think people are that situational. As much as the founders clearly designed the impeachment process to not be precedent-setting, I think it’s clear that we’re setting precedent now, and its precedent that a future liberal president can easily exploit, as much as a conservative one.
The Trump case is odd in that instead of going to the courts and letting them decide whether or not Trump’s claims of privilege for each specific instance were justified, the Democrats just rushed to impeaching him.
The courts have been the arbiter in the past, for example telling Clinton that he needed to testify in civil sexual harassment cases, which is the specific deposition he sat for.
The Democrats could have followed the same process this time, for example with Bolton, but they withdrew their request and didn’t subpoena him, instead impeaching Trump for obstructing them.
Clinton is really the one who first made all of these clear by trying to for example ban Secret Service from testifying. Trump has actually been less aggressive at claiming privilege than Clinton was.
The Democrats were understandably reluctant to let a case of “Trump is attempting to swing the 2020 elections in his favor” get held up in court until the 2020 elections were over.
I said that 34 senators have the power to make the president a dictator. The point of this is to express the latitude that 34 senators have to give extreme power to the president.
This latitude includes the power to allow the president to betray the public trust in the interest of his own political party. That is what has happened. That is what the invented scenario copies from the present situation.
As far as Trump’s actually-obtained powers: Trump has, through AG Barr, obtained control over the DOJ sufficient to prevent investigation of his own crimes. He will soon show that Congress also has inadequate power to investigate him. His ability to interfere with or block investigation of himself by every federal power means he is above the law in a very important sense.
In the last week, Trump has asserted the right to self-serve with the powers of his office. He has asserted the right through his attorneys to engage in, for example, the same collusion which the Mueller investigation did not establish actually happened. He asserts the right to trade off US public interest (such as US security interests) in exchange for foreign powers undertaking disinformation campaigns on behalf of his campaign.
Donald Trump’s long-term MO is exactly that kind of deception. Trump relies on intermediaries for his large-scale lies. He has established himself as not credible through his long history of lying, but can still deceive on a mass scale by disguising himself as the source of disinformation through others who still have credibility.
He forces or entices others to lie for him by various means (including the simplest: firing subordinates who do not lie for him). His disinformation machine and propensity to use it for slander serve as implicit threats over everyone, while his cult following can be used as enticement. These methods are effective over GOP members of Congress. In the case of Zelensky, foreign aid money allocated to Ukraine was used as enticement. In the case of Stormy Daniels, his own money was used instead. Now that he is president, he doesn’t have to use his own money! It’s all legal, he asserts, because it helps his re-election, making it in the public interest.
Whatever is going on in the courts does not negate any of this, and is a deflection from what is going on today and in our general moment in history.
But that’s not true. As discussed below, a mere majority of the House and Senate can prevent the President from doing ANYTHING by revoking his money, which he has at their discretion.
With the support 34 senators, he can order the IRS to collect money for the government.
@Andrew Cady
If we’re at the point where the President is ordering the confiscation of the Treasury at gunpoint, why would he be obeying a subpoena instead of just abolishing the Senate?
Which is doubly funny because Trump’s administration has actually been really scrupulous about following the law and the impeachment articles don’t allege a law was violated.
Trump’s been pretty heavily investigated so far, and the next President is free to investigate him more if she chooses.
I agree that’s a lot of power – I didn’t like it when Obama declined to accept the Contempt of Congress referral against Holder – but I think you have to go a lot farther to reach what I would consider a “dictator.” Under your definition, I think at least Obama and Trump have been dictators.
(I’d love to roll the wheel back on presidential power, but I’d want to do it for both sides.)
Again, what I said was that 34 senators have the power to make the president a dictator. The point of this is to express the latitude that 34 senators have to give extreme power to the president.
34 senators is enough for the president to collect money using the power of the executive. That is a fact about how the constitution is structured.
The president cannot abolish the Senate using the power of the executive. The executive does not have the power to change the constitution. It requires more than president + 34 senators to do this.
But the president + 34 senators can collect money through the IRS regardless of what the rest of Congress says. The executive controls the IRS, the OMB, the FBI, etc. The power to collect taxes one way or another is there.
34 Senators is enough to prevent the President from being impeached, and from changing an existing law. (I don’t know if it’s enough to prevent the appointment of an AG of the President’s choice).
It’s not enough to:
– Make the IRS obey the President’s orders to collect funds illegally.
– Prevent the Courts from ruling in Congress’s favor on whether the IRS is authorized to collect funds.
– Prevent the next President from prosecuting the current one.
If you assume that federal employees will follow illegal orders, then even 100 senators can’t stop the President – he can just order the FBI to arrest them or the Army to kill them, no matter how they vote.
This comment illustrates exactly why we have the problem we do: if you can write this without remembering that your opponents have the exact same complaints about the previous president you supported, you’re not going to persuade anyone. If anything, the selective Democratic blindness is pushing me further towards Trump, because at least people sit up, take notice and debate over things when Trump does them.
President Obama had AG Holder cited in contempt of Congress for stonewalling investigations into potential crimes committed by his administration. It sure looks like Obama ‘obtained control over the DOJ sufficient to prevent investigation of his own crimes’ and that ‘congress didn’t have adequate power to investigate them’. On the other hand, Congress spent plenty of time investigating Trump’s Russia ties back before that turned out to be a DNC-backed disinformation operation.
For that matter, “I shot the intern, but you can trust me that it was legal” sounds an awful lot like “sure I deleted all those subpoenaed emails, but you can trust me when I say they were all personal”. In fact, that was the first thing that came to mind with the example given. It also calls to mind “I would hand over all those internal IRS communications, but all the backups failed” and even “I would hand over those Rose Law Firm billing documents, but we lost them”.
It’s not that we don’t see the potential for abuse of executive power, it’s just that it pales when compared to the confirmed abuse of executive power via the FISA process to interfere in a presidential election, and it rings hollow when the Democratic front-runner is tied to the exact same abuse of executive power. If you want to reign in executive power, you need to do it in a bipartisan fashion, and Trump’s the president that might get Republicans in congress to join in, but so far the Democrats have blown any chance of bipartisanship with both the push for impeachment at any cost and the desire to avoid blowback against Biden. You can either fix the executive power problem or wage all out war on the Republican base via Trump, and so far you’ve gone with ‘wage war’.
I think the more interesting question is whether you can really count on congress or the senate to hold someone accountable if
A) there are no legal repercussions for that person lying
B) that person can’t be investigated in any meaningful way, making it virtually impossible to “catch them in a lie”
C) That person was popular enough to get elected in the first place.
It’s not like, the end of everything. Term limits and maintaining some baseline popularity are clearly other “hard limits” here…but I just hope conservatives realize how fundamentally imperial/populist this makes the presidency (and this is discounting some of the theories Dershowitz articulated, which would excuse even more)
As I keep saying throughout, if this theory of the presidency is really true, the mistake almost every previous president made was cooperating, at all, with anything.
To become a permanent dictator in the USA under its existing constitution, even with term limits, it is sufficient to obtain control over election outcomes sufficient to filter, for loyalty, all presidential candidates and at least 34 senators.
If Russian intelligence style disinformation campaigns, or any other electoral interference method or combination of methods, deployed at the state actor level, are sufficient to destroy any or nearly any candidate, it is possible to construct such control.
People are making up facts about me. Several things that I never said have been attributed to me.
Someone ironically named “Civilis” made up the falsehood that I supported Obama. There is nothing civil about making up positions for other people.
I mean, “Imperial presidency” has been a small government conservative bugaboo for as long as I can remember. I’m not sure why you’re singling out the right for being insufficiently wary of executive power.
Barack Obama, whom I never supported because of my political disagreement with him, was not a crook. Donald Trump is a crook. Donald Trump is a crook unlike any president, Democrat or Republican, since Nixon. And he is much more so than Nixon. Even before he was president, Trump was a crook.
Donald Trump has also asserted the right to be a crook, on the basis of his holding the office of the presidency. Which also no president since Nixon has done.
Any equivalence between Trump and Obama here is false. Any talk about the equivalence of “complaints” against them is equally false. There may be good or bad faith complaints against Obama, that may be equivalent in ways to some complaints against Trump, but the underlying facts are not similar.
Donald Trump is running the GOP like a crime syndicate.
Donald Trump is soliciting foreign intelligence services for disinformation campaigns that undermine USA elections.
The GOP is afraid to stop him because of the power he has over each of them as individuals.
I apologize for not separating “you” specifically from the use of “you” for a generic member of the millions of anti-Trump voters that voted for Obama. It’s hard in these debates to separate comparatively anonymous individuals online from the larger groups that declare similar positions. Considering it’s something I’m trying to stop doing, I apologize for falling into that trap.
In that same vein, it might be a good idea to take a look at what other people actually believe, especially with phrases like “disinformation machine” and “cult follower”.
Do you mind my asking what your self-described “political alignment” is, or who (if anyone) you voted for in the 2012 election? A never-Trump Republican would not have supported Obama, but would at least be aware of what the allegations against Obama were. Is there some reason you consider it bad that I mistakenly included you specifically in the large group of generic Democratic voters?
I voted for Trump, and I don’t see myself voting for any of Democratic candidates this election. I don’t think Trump behaves very presidential, and I don’t a fair number of the things he’s done, but I dislike a lot of the Democratic proposals and what the party as a whole stands for. I don’t like the expansion of presidential power, but I don’t think Trump in that case has been a significant departure from recent norms. I don’t consider Democratic voters to be horrible people for voting for Democratic candidates. I do consider people that consider me a monster or an imbicile for voting in 2016 for a lousy Republican candidate over a lousy Democratic candidate to be a massive threat to American democracy, far more than a lousy Republican president.
@theodidactus
Part of the problem is that conservatives feel like we’re already there.
I honestly feel like I got an imperial presidency with Obama. Every time the ACC comes up, I offer to address “Obama lied us into war with Libya” and I have never even gotten any interest in the con position. The bald refusal to cooperate with the Fast and Furious referral, evading his obligations to declare war in Libya or submit the Iran agreement for treaty review, etc. etc. etc.
I think my liberal friends are honest in thinking that Trump is somehow different, but they don’t appreciate that the practical effect of their beliefs is “We get to run the country, all the time, because we’re not convinced that Fast and Furious, Libya, IRS Gate, etc are substantial problems, and we are convinced that Ukraine is outrageous.” I don’t like any of them, so where does that leave me?
I think this is incomplete for three reasons.
1) On the gripping hand, Congress may impeach and remove for any reason, and they will impeach and remove when the voters feel strongly enough about it that Congresspeople will lose their jobs for voting otherwise. As far as I can tell, that’s the reason Pelosi didn’t support impeachment for obstruction of justice coming out of the Mueller investigation and it’s the reason she did support impeachment arising from Ukraine. If Lamar Alexander’s voters were demanding Trump be impeached, he would.
2) Trump has cooperated a lot, and spent two years producing witnesses and documents for the Mueller investigation. He released the records of the call in question voluntarily, and lots of people have testified. I think that’s part of the reason why the people who don’t like him but don’t support impeachment fall that way – we’ve just had enough investigation. (The Fast and Furious defense is similar, FWIW).
3) In this case, the not cooperating specifically is the principle that Congress should not to get to call hearings into private discussions with the President and his advisers in key areas of his responsibility, that like the attorney-client privilege or the priest-penitent privilege, the value of free discussion is worth the cost of some reduction in evidence.
That generally has been the position of all Presidents, Republican and Democrat, since at least Reagan.Particularly here, where Trump isn’t even accused of committing a crime, I can see the point.
I would love to see the inner deliberations of the Obama government. I question whether there was a kill order for OBL or whether we tried to capture him alive and failed; I suspect that the administration knew that the case for war in Libya was false; my guess is that government decisions in handling Fast and Furious, IRS Gate and the Benghazi fallout were driven by politics, and it would be somewhat enjoyable for me to have allowed Congress to root around in Obama’s private correspondence with his advisers for evidence. But at the end of the day, it would make being President really difficult, maybe too difficult.
(On the other hand, things like the Strzok texts, the FISA investigation, and the McCabe investigation show the amazing things you find when you get inside the sausage factory – I suspect we could find similar stuff in the Obama and Trump administrations if we had free rein, but I don’t know what to do about it.)
I don’t think so. They can prevent the president from being tried for murder, in the scenario described, until the end of his term. But he can’t force the military to invade Mexico if the military authorities regard the president’s order to do so as unconstitutional. He can’t raise taxes without Congress voting to do so.
If he can murder anyone who votes against his tax policy, then he can pass whatever taxes he wants. (Or he can have someone Do the murdering for him, and then pardon the murderer.)
The practical effect of their beliefs is “we get to run the country, all the time” only if the right always rolls over and concedes, and that the left expected this to always happen is how we got into this mess in the first place. If the right follows their lead and fights back, you get perpetual political chaos. We’re not going back to a state where the Democratic establishment has a monopoly on determining when something is outrageous.
I’ve noticed that there’s something very much like a conspiracy theory where you start believing every bad rumor about a person or group, and it’s something that you find across the political spectrum. “These people are bad and liars, and here’s something specific and bad they’re accused of doing, so I am going to believe the bad people did this bad thing.” You can see it in antisemitism: it’s possible to believe the Israeli government is bad without falling for stupid antisemitic blood libel like ‘the Jews make bread from the blood of gentiles’, but outrageous rumors gain traction and almost certainly help you more than hurt you (even if a lot of other people end up brutally killed). The right certainly isn’t immune, as the ongoing accumulation of Arkancide rumors, most recently involving Epstein and his associates, continues to prove (and I’ve repeated the jokes, because they’re funny, even if I feel guilty about it now and I can tell myself they’re jokes).
And these stories work. If Imperial Germany is the bad guy, and you know they’re the bad guy, spreading false stories about the Huns bayoneting kids helps the war effort even if they’re false, and you can never be sure they’re not partly true. If you persuade yourself that Trump and those that voted for him are the bad guys and capable of doing anything, it’s easier to persuade other people to vote him out. That’s why McCain was an elder statesman when not running for president and was a warmonger when campaigning, and because it worked (and works) the pattern persists over time.
At this point this is now a fully formed (or deformed) argument against ANY form of government.
What happens if a Prime Minister prorogues Parliament indefinitely then ignores calls to reseat them and orders the military to stop it from being reseated!?!
What if 326 MPs decide to abolish the Fixed Terms Parliament Act and rule forever on high?
If the President is flagrantly issuing unconstitutional orders, the administrative state will resign around him and refuse to do it. It happened with Nixon during the Saturday Night Massacre.
It even happened early in the Trump administration, although his policies were later ruled Constitutional and he found people to execute them.
Given that the prior President literally did execute American citizens on his own orders and Trump hasn’t, the paranoia might stand to be dialed down a notch.
Chalid:
This was pretty much the argument I made about both George W Bush’s treatment of Jose Padilla (arrested on US soil and held incommunicado for several years in a military brig before being charged and tried for something only when a court was about to order him released) and Barack Obama’s order to assassinate US citizens such as Anwar Alwaki, on his authority alone.
We have spent many decades expanding the power of the president and the executive branch, and telling people who worried about abuses of power and weakening of separation of powers that they were naive/stupid/shills for the other side/crazy conspiracists/etc. Previously, I was hoping that perhaps the one positive benefit of Trump’s presidency would be a widespread recognition that we’d made the presidency too powerful on the part of lots of Americans. But that doesn’t actually seem to have happened much. Democratic congressmen who were only too willing to accuse Trump of being nine kinds of monster also went along with continuing mass surveillance that’s ultimately under executive branch control. Actually paring back the powers of the president seems like it’s not on the table at all.
Any President ordering hits that overtly would quickly find several hits ordered on himself, along with hits ordered on his protection, and possibly even hits ordered by his protection. They’re loyal, but not that loyal. And most people aren’t going to insist on meticulous investigations of whether any of those hits are constitutional before deciding to go for it.
That leaves such a President with two main options, as I see it: order hits covertly, or move the Overton window until overt hits look constitutional.
The latter takes longer than the President’s time in office, and he can’t lengthen that without solving the original problem.
The former option requires more resources than the President has, including some extra pricey assets such as co-conspirators who are willing to keep secrets about hits ordered on Senators. I’m pretty sure he can’t just pick these up at the local KFC, even when Jason Alexander was playing the Colonel.
On the upside, such an option may blow up in entertaining ways if one’s tolerance for entertainment is sufficiently stretchy.
That’s not a counterfactual. The president is issuing illegal orders, and the administrative state is (or has been) resigning around him.
As I said though, that just slows things down. Eventually you cycle through and get people willing to carry out illegal orders.
Pretty sure if our political discourse devolves into assassinations, our opposition party will also be engaging in regular assassinations. Prettttyyy good deterrent from opening that particular can of worms.
@Andrew Cady
I am not aware of any order the Executive has continued to execute while under judicial stay or after the judiciary has ruled against them.
Do you have an example?
He can force the military to invade Mexico by the procedure I already described. Remove from office those who refuse to carry out orders until he finds people who will. Those people don’t have to regard the orders as constitutional to be willing to carry them out.
Your point is that the executive can lose control over the military, and that’s true. It’s also possible for the military itself to lose control over the nation.
I didn’t mean to assert that the potential for military coups and military defeat do not serve as constraints on the president. These are constraints that exist on dictators though.
Not on paper, but (as already mentioned) nothing stops the executive from collecting taxes that don’t exist on paper.
That isn’t at issue. Judicial stays cannot stop criminals from committing crimes in secret. They are not a remedy for that.
Donald Trump has abolished the independence of investigatory agencies, asserted immunity to prosecution, and blocked the investigative power of Congress. There is no effective means to investigate or prosecute Donald Trump for criminal wrong-doing, including soliciting foreign intelligence agencies to subvert USA elections — which is something he asserts the right to do, and which he is apparently willing to do in secret, and falsely and publicly deny doing, even as he asserts the right to do it.
Donald Trump tried to stop the Mueller investigation, but refusals by subordinates to follow his illegal orders allowed the investigation to continue to the point of establishing his own criminal obstruction of justice. Still, he escaped prosecution or impeachment for this (so far), and it seems that subsequently he has got the DOJ under sufficient control to prevent investigations into his future wrong-doings.
@Andrew Cady
You are asserting that these are crimes that Donald Trump is committing in the open. These are things we are talking about, therefore they are not secret.
Trump released the transcript of his call. This is not a man operating in secret in the slightest.
So… Trump ISN’T a dictator? Also, Mueller specifically said that he did not establish obstruction of justice.
@Andrew Cady, if a certain decision is controversial enough, especially in a bipartisan way, Trump WOULD eventually run out of people who would be willing to replace the previous people. The “problem” is that many of Trump’s decisions are only objectionable to one half of the partisan divide. As long as roughly 50% of the population fundamentally agrees with him, which may translate into something like at least 30% of the professional establishment agreeing with him, he will be able to get things done.
Don’t put too much blame on the 34 senators. Blame the voters who will end up re-electing them.
This is “bothsidesism” taken to the point of utter insanity.
The willingness of one political party to engage in assassination absolutely does not imply the willingness of an opposing party to do so.
I think you’re pretty much off your rocker if you think a political party is just going to let its party members get systematically murdered and not respond in a similar fashion. If you somehow think that’s “bothersiderism,” I really don’t know what to tell you. These are not saints, they are power brokers.
This is not honest. YOU KNOW THAT THIS IS NOT TRUE.
I’m sorry, I’m sure I’m breaking the rules of this place, but I’m not the one exploiting the rules and ruining the atmosphere of trust through abject dishonesty. This forum may have to choose between decorum and basis in reality (and I’m not betting on reality — who would, after yesterday).
Trying to keep something secret, and failing, is NOT acting in the open. But does this need to be explained to an honest person? IT DOES NOT.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/us/politics/trump-bolton-ukraine.html
Every GOP Senator knows that John Bolton is telling the truth, and that John Bolton, Mick Mulvaney, and even Pat Cipollone, put under oath, and prevented from coordinating, would ALL testify that Trump is lying about conditioning the aid on the announcement. YES, TRUMP IS A MAN OPERATING IN SECRET. We know what he’s doing, but ONLY because we see through his direct lies.
They all know Trump is lying. THAT IS WHY THEY NEED TO PREVENT THE TESTIMONY. That is the only reason they have to do so.
I’m using my real name here, and people who are not even using their real names are lying about me, so keep that in mind as you ban me.
I’m no historian, but my impression is that, far from impossible, that is how it normally happens.
Just to give one example, I’m not aware of any systematic assassination in response to Hitler’s rounding up political opponents.
To give another example, in Putin’s Russia the assassination of journalists only seems to go one way.
I will further state that human nature isn’t to suddenly turn from a person to whom murder is unthinkable, into an assassin. Even if you are a “power broker.” The social milieu in which suborning murder is unthinkable also cannot so easily and suddenly become a criminal operation.
Again without claiming expertise, I do think looking to history, we would see that various businesses, when faced with competition from literal mafia, did NOT themselves become crime syndicates. Prove me wrong though.
@Andrew Cady
Claiming your opponents know you’re right and so they must be dishonest when they claim you’re wrong is… not very convincing.
The record of the call was secret, yes, as part of the normal operation of government. It was placed in a system that was more secure than those previously used for such records, but it was not the first such call to be treated so; rather, this had been done after other records had leaked.
Rather soon after the accusations came out, Trump released the call publicly — that is true, not dishonest in the slightest. Trump did not try to keep the call secret and fail. He obviously could have dragged out the process, and might have managed to keep the call classified. He did not try.
I don’t see how you could know that. For that matter, I don’t see how all them could know that. As far as I can tell, John Bolton was someone hired by Trump for no better reason than to kick him around, so he may be understandably sore about it.
A few thoughts. I’m going to use Obama because it’s a little more removed in time and to show that the problem is deeper than Trump, but I agree that similar problems apply to Trump and to hypothetical Kuzelnick.
1) The biggest precedent may be Eric Holder’s decision, under President Obama, that the Department of Justice was not going to enforce Contempt of Congress citations sent by Congress for Holder’s decision to stop cooperating in the investigation of whether Holder committed perjury in the Fast and Furious testimony.
2) The President’s powers are at their widest in areas that he or she most fully controls, like war or diplomacy. So, for example, if Congress had asked Obama to appear and testify under oath about whether he committed crimes when deciding to assassinate US citizens who he believed were engaged in war against the US, when he reached a quasi-treaty with Iran without going through Congressional procedures, or whether he lied in his case for war against Libya, my guess is he would have refused to testify, arguing that even the act of testifying threatens the normal operation of government and is therefore subject to executive privilege.
2.1) Kuzelnick’s shooting of an intern doesn’t reach the same area, so I think it would get less protection. Ironically, if he had killed the guy by drone in Yemen, he would have more protection – in that case, my guess is he would produce a few documents but otherwise refuse to cooperate, especially in a leak prone and partisan environment.
3) There are ultimately three backstops against Kuzelnick.
3.1) If the voters are sufficiently outraged that they will fire their Reps and Senators for refusing to impeach/remove, then he’ll probably be impeached.
3.2) The courts are available to decide contested questions, and if Kuzelnick refuses to obey the courts, he’s more likely to suffer under 3.1.
3.3) If all else fails, the next president will have control of the justice system, have access to any records that haven’t been destroyed, and will be able to find out which records have been destroyed.
4) This is generally the question to “what if the President refuses to enforce the law,” from DACA to the Libyan war to Trump delaying the allocation of foreign aid funds to numerous countries. If it’s a clear question, the courts can step in, and if it’s not, it’s pretty much up to the voters.
I think an obvious issue here is that we don’t *know* your assertion in 2.1 is false. We have a very credible source saying that Kunzelnick’s actions “weren’t illegal”…perhaps there was some national security interest at stake? Would we accept the statement “it was an area where I had legitimately, quite wide presidential powers to act, trust me” without more information? Where would we get that information? Couldn’t he just type up a document that said “there was a national security interest, I just can’t get into it right now.”
I do agree with you that this isn’t a uniquely trumpian problem, he’s just a perfect storm of
1) crazy enough to try it
and
2) has supporters willing to let him.
I’m not saying for sure that the President couldn’t get away with shooting an intern and claiming national security, just that it’s easier for her to get away with it when most people would agree that she was carrying out her discretionary powers.
I mean, suppose the truth is that the intern was a Martian sleeper agent, and that the President reasonably suspects some members of the relevant Congressional committees to be Martians. I’d expect her not to agree to testify before Congress – certainly immediately, maybe not ever. (I don’t know if any President has ever complied with a subpoena to testify under oath about war decisions, or would.)
This gets complicated if we imagine a serious allegation, of, e.g., war crimes. But as I said, in the worst cases you have the courts and the possibility of prosecution by the next president.
In Trump’s specific case, I think we all have a pretty good idea what happened, and that the hope is that (a) by forcing him to lie under oath, his opponents could punish him for that, or (b) at a minimum, he might be embarrassed in a way that would make it harder for him to enact his agenda and increase the chances of his opponents winning in the next election.
I’m not sure we are *ever* going to get a president to lie under oath anytime soon, given how this impeachment is likely to shake out. There are too many degrees of freedom to get out of it. Under the current theory of the presidency likely to carry the day, you’d need to do all of the following:
– control congress and the popular mood, such that you can force the president to testify
– THEN win a court battle on the issue
– THEN win the inevitable appeal
– repeat that until you get to the supreme court
– get the president in the chair, and ask the question
– get a response that isn’t gobbledeegook
– have had, in your back pocket the whole time, prior investigative information such that you could somehow “prove” the president “lied” to his own constituents.
Seems virtually impossible.
> What happens if Kunzelnick or his subordinates don’t comply?
I’d note that there are a lot of options available here. The first is to hold up future nominations until the required information is provided. This is routinely done for political appointees where Congress wants certain officials on the record agreeing to do something so that they might hold them in contempt in the future if they fail to follow through.
More abnormally, Congress decline to approve all military commissions. This would have a significant impact on the country as a whole, but quickly and substantially reduces the power of the Presidency to act.
My favorite is to cease providing funding for the White House. The “let them freeze in the dark” approach. The Constitution requires Congress to approve disbursement from the Treasury. So Congress can simply refuse to fund the White House operations absent compliance.
A retaliatory “that’s it, we’re cutting you off!” is definitely an approach the founders seemed to have anticipated as a possibility. I wonder how well it would work in the world we have now, where like de-funding agencies and stuff would have pretty dramatic consequences for the average voter.
I think the past few forays into that realm have demonstrated that government shutdowns at best accomplish nothing and at worst backfire.
I think Andrew’s bigger point is that our system gives the president quite a bit of power in practice, if the only check on his power is impeachment, because half the House or 1/3 of the Senate can block an impeachment. Now, there’s a check on the power of half the House/one third of the Senate running interference for the president, too–they can so enrage the voters that they get voted out in favor of someone who will impeach and remove the misbehaving president. (Though that could take a long time, and a misbehaving president could do a lot to rig elections if the laws just didn’t apply to him for a couple years.)
Another less formal check is that a lot of the executive branch agencies simply will not comply with orders from the president they think are illegal. If Trump demands that the Democratic leadership of Congress be arrested and jailed, and Barr orders the Justice Dept. to do so, I think they would have a very hard time getting anyone to carry out that order. The president’s orders are followed largely because he’s seen as having legitimate authority to give those orders, and once that stops being true, the executive branch probably just stops functioning.
When people refuse to carry out his illegal orders, Trump replaces them. Over time, people who are willing to carry out illegal orders are found to replace those unwilling. The refusals only serve as a delay.
More than its being a possibility, they themselves had previously engaged in it before the Revolution against the royal governors. In fact, the colonies had several times refused to let England pay the governors’ salaries, lest they lose this power.
It all depends on what the meaning of “is” is.
I was going to ask “suppose Kunzelnick didn’t physically hold and shoot a gun, it was done by a drone” (maybe the US military decided to go one better than Turkey and develop a drone that could mount and fire a handgun or something).
Would that throw an extra layer of confusion in – if Kunzelnick didn’t shoot the gun, is it the fault of the drone operator? Could the defence lawyer argue that it would have to be proved that:
(1) there was a gun in the Oval Office
(2) Kunzelnick had that gun
(3) He aimed it at the intern’s head and fired
(4) The bullet from that gun entered the intern’s head
(5) It was that bullet that killed the intern (after all, there could be a Secret Service agent who aimed and fired at the same time and it was the agent’s bullet that was the lethal shot).
That was meant as a joke query, but as you say – if he’d ordered the intern’s death by drone strike in a different country, Kunzelnick would be on much safer ground.
one of the things I learned pretty quickly when I started doing criminal law is that absent a lot of background facts and assumptions, it’s really hard to talk about whether a particular fact pattern is “really a crime” or not. For example, the 5 damning facts you stated above are perfectly consistent with all of the following defenses
– self defense (“the intern ALSO had a gun, and approached me with a murderous look in his eyes”)
– a paintball fight gone wrong (“yeah yeah I said I had a gun, I didn’t say what kind of gun I thought I had”)
– Some weird negligent homicide or manslaughter theory, still criminal but less so (“I was trippin and thought he was a space alien”/”the interns and I play a game involving two bottles of vodka, a six-sided dice, and a cocked and loaded .38 special…”)
And that’s excepting defenses unique to the president like “We discovered he was a Russian spy and he was 15 seconds away from leaking the missile codes and it was just me and him.”
In a trial, you count on the jury (hypothetical or real) to supply the common baseline of background knowledge…what the world should look like. You also count on other juries and associated legal consequences to hold people accountable for lies and changed stories, so things don’t change TOO much as a case goes on. Without either, i’m not sure its really meaningful to do a lawyerly analysis of whether x or y is “technically a crime”
This all just breaks down to “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it” but with various other actors. And that question ultimately breaks down to the larger question of why people in society obey orders from anyone apart from the most rudimentary “I am a bigger caveman with a stick and I can kill you.” At some point, something is done by someone to halt an abuse, unless nobody will obey your orders, in which case you have a dictatorship, until such time as the dictatorship collapses because nobody will obey its orders. Positing the extreme scenario actually obscures, rather than enlightens, on the specific legal points, because the legal points are irrelevant if one’s starting point is “assume that nobody will ever do anything to stop him, QED.”
1) No.
2) It’s your hypo. People will interpret it how they like. Maybe you should make it “shoots a man on Fifth Avenue.”
3) Yes.
4) Yes, but not charged while in office.
5) Yes. What they can “make him do” depends on what he did.
6) Yes. This was decided during Watergate. If they don’t, they are impeached and removed. If they can’t be removed, then see my initial comment.
7) You haven’t posited “no ability to investigate.”
is my scenario an extreme scenario?
Well, you’re the one who posited a dead intern in the White House. You tell me. It’s at least cinematic fodder.
I initially assumed the decision to reference the pattern of Absolute Power or Murder At 1600 was deliberate.
To Trofim’s point, it’s certainly true that I have a long history of fun legal hypotheticals involving direct references to movies…but HLS, I guess what I’m asking is *where* is this fact-pattern outrageous?
* is it the president committing murder?: if you scroll up you’ll see plenty of people discussing how previous presidents might have actually done this?
* is it the president committing murder on american soil or with a handgun?: Legally of course this does change the analysis…but why, and does the reason why somehow make the fact-pattern outrageous and incompatible with the present situation? Are you suggesting if Kunzelnick lit the intern up with a missile strike while he was visiting relatives in Canada, this would somehow become a wholly different analysis?
* Is it the president refusing to cooperate with the investigation at all levels, because he’s quite sure he did the right thing?
* Is it the fact that many powerful people might stand by Kunzelnick and believe his story, even if they don’t know all the details?
You’re a law student, right? It shows, because the reason it’s extreme is that you appear to be trying to make a point about real world individual political responses by using an exam hypo structure designed to test knowledge of legal rules in isolation. That structure breaks down when you try to derive useful information about the world outside of pattern-matching on legal concepts.
No, it’s the President having a dead body of a young intern in the White House and admitting he killed him. That fact pattern is extreme and not useful because it will cause people to react in a different way than Obama’s drone warfare.
Yes, and given that you agree that even in the strictly legal sense the two are not comparable, I’m not sure why you claim they are. People give some deference to the executive when it comes to drone strikes on overseas personnel in war zones. Even your clarification is silly. Obama didn’t drone strike anyone in Canada, it was in murky war zones full of bad guys and terrorists. His C-I-C powers are at their zenith, there is fog of war, and there are few people available to immediately challenge the official explanation. A dead intern in the White House has none of those traits. If there is a dead promising 19-year-old and the President admitting he killed him, people will react differently. That’s what makes it silly.
This isn’t the law. I mean, you’re in law school and speculating on this stuff, I assume you’ve read U.S. v. Nixon and its context. At some point, the President can’t simply refuse to comply with demands properly made by the relevant other branches. And at some point, those other branches will demand that he do so – and you’re a lot more likely to overcome partisanship to create such demands with a promising life shot dead in the Oval Office. But if you’re saying there is now a precedent for not doing so… this situation would likely create a precedent to overturn it, because of the facts. If you’re saying that there’s nothing forcing the President to obey U.S. v. Nixon after the whole Congress and Court and country is baying for justice because he literally shot a young person in the White House, well then you’re just back to “why does anybody obey anyone” territory which is uninteresting.
No, it’s the opposite. You are presuming that everyone’s reaction is identical and that “support” is not conditioned on the alleged nature of the offense. Yes, some Republicans are more likely to support the President in the current kerfuffle because they fundamentally don’t believe that the alleged fact pattern is all that serious. In Watergate, they were convinced it was serious (and a lot less serious than murder) and Republicans stopped supporting Nixon. So positing the worst offense and asserging “see, there’s nothing to stop this!” does not illuminate, because the President’s factual support is itself a relevant determinant of the respect his legal argument would receive.
ETA: This came off as overly harsh. I will let it stand but I apologize for the tone. I think the more diplomatic way to say it is, I think your chosen fact pattern strongly encourages people to “fight the hypothetical” rather than deal with underlying legal concepts. That’s why I think it is unhelpful. Rather than illustrating the dangers of the legal principle of “non-cooperation,” I think it simply makes one think “but in that specific situation, that legal principle would not apply, or not with the same force.”
@hls2003:
your response contains some assumptions that I think are rather important to sorta air out. The first being that Kunzelnick “admitted he killed the intern”. His statement was in no way an admission (I deliberately wrote the hypo that way). He merely says he was involved, somehow. The second being that whatever Kunzelnick did is “the worst offense.” Is this a fair assumption, given that we don’t actually know what Kunzelnick did?
The hypo is interesting precisely because a Kunzelnick supporter can very easily “gap fill” with enough vague details to excuse Kunzelnick, and I think this is true of basically any offense, even “really bad” ones. The starting point of the analysis cannot be “well *this* was a really bad offense, so of course it needs to be investigated, whereas *this* was obviously a silly b.s. accusation, so no investigation is necessary or really even possible”
EDITS: Edited for clarity and I added some stuff at the end.
You haven’t even touched on one of the biggest powers the President has, the Pardon power.
It’s unlimited in scope when it comes to federal crimes. The President can legally tell someone to violate a federal law and then pardon them and they’re untouchable. So as long as he tells his buddy to shoot someone on Federal property (like the WH, or the Capitol Building), no State has jurisdiction.
Of course, if he doesn’t have a good reason, then he’s impeachable or can be voted out.
Honestly, this is why I’ve been advocating for a Trump impeachment since Arpio. In my opinion the danger is not so much that a president would openly order someone to do something, then pardon them (Which they absolutely could do!) but rather there can easily be a covert exchange: “You six treasury department officials. I’m specifically ordering you to share any salacious details you find while going through my opponent’s tax returns with me. If anyone finds out you did this, I will happily pardon you”
I tried to illustrate something pretty specific with my hypothetical (and I suppose ultimately failed, because people seem to implicitly think my hypothetical crime and scenario is an unthinkable extreme, rather than simply porting an easier-to-understand crime into something pretty similar to the present situation). Moving forward there’s now a massive disincentive for any future administration to cooperate with any outside investigation, particularly when the underlying “crime” at issue is one of those where a few invented edge facts can easily “excuse” the crime at issue (all crime is like this, though)
I’m considerably less sanguine on the courts somehow magically fixing this problem than I guess some people above are, because I think it’s possible to draw out a court battle on this to truly insane lengths (If a court even gets involved).
Would that cover tort law as well? Wrongful death is a tort, as demonstrated in the OJ case.
Blackstone says that the king cannot cancel the result of a tort case, since he isn’t a party. Would the same rule apply here?
As I hope I’ve illustrated, the answer is “yes, if a sufficiently geographic chunk of the population represented by more than 33% of senators will let him”. It would go like this
1) A (the white house chief of staff) keys B’s (the minority whip’s) car
2) B sues A
3) B wins
4) A refuses to pay B
5) A faces various and sundry criminal penalties for refusing to obey the judgement.
6) The president pardons A
EDIT: I initially had 5 as “is in contempt of court” but that’s not quite right.
Good point.
The actual phrasing in the Constitution is: “Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States” which has been interpreted to cover both criminal and civil consequences (regulatory fines, etc…) against the government, but a private individual (or their family/estate) would still be able to sue civilly for the offense against them.
They’d do so without the benefit of a pre-existing criminal investigation (which simplifies many of these suits, hence why they’re usually delayed until after the criminal trial), depending on the timing of the pardon, but could certainly recover damages under current law.
Edited to add in response to @theodidactus :
Typically a court would also order a third party to comply with collecting damages (think seize bank account, transfer title of property, etc…) and so the resistance offered wouldn’t be complete unless they also intimidated all involved third parties, etc… would get very messy very quickly and be likely to involve State laws for which State authorities could take action.
It’s possible that it’s literally impossible to actually discuss this stuff rationally at the present time, but I thought the best way to convey a point as some questions. Perhaps I failed in that regard.
I think a lot of people read this as one of those B.S. back-and-forths you get into in highschool where the president (for example) refuses to leave office…what if the military backs him? what then? Huh? And ultimately it devolves into an argument against any system of government (as some responses below suggest).
I think it’s worth noting that I really don’t consider my Kunzelnick hypo to be a B.S. Armageddon scenario. Many people rightly noted that you can describe activities by the Obama administration as something close to conspiracy to murder, and many people noted that substantially none of Kunzelnick’s possible actions lack an analog under Obama, Clinton, Bush, or Trump.
I guess what I’m trying to say by posing this question is all of the following:
* Rhetoric around whether this or that behavior is “criminal”/”wrongful” or “excusable” only makes sense if you can investigate the circumstances surrounding the behavior
* There isn’t an easy way to talk about whether some crimes are “serious” and others are just “process”
* There isn’t an easy way to talk about “the clear scope of a president’s powers”
* for all these reasons, it’s probably in our self interest to strongly incentivize any administration (not just the current one) to cooperate with congressional investigations into dubious behavior. There should also probably be some consequence for lying, I dunno, maybe that’s just me.
Thanos snaps his fingers, killing half of all life in the universe. Suppose parasites and so on are considered as separate instances of life, such that they live or die independent of their hosts (with a bunch of them dropping to the ground as their hosts get snapped without them). Is losing 50% of their carried microorganisms going to be a problem for the human survivors?
I’m going to guess not. Life for microorganisms is cheap. Kill half your gut bacteria, in an hour or two it’ll all be back.
If that’s so, why taking antibiotics can cause problems with guts? Do they kill more than a half, or is it because of repetitiveness?
Antibiotics take out much more than half over the course of the treatment; I don’t know if it’s single-dose power or repetitiveness, though.
Also selectivity.
Antibiotics can effect different biotics differently. If you kill off almost all of bug A, but not nearly so much of bug B, where bug A does useful thing X and bug B uses some of the same ingredients to do not X you may end up boned if A isn’t able to reestablish itself against the competitive pressure from B.
@Aftagley
I am still anticipating your effortpost alluded to in the CW free thread!
I also owe an effort post:
that I’ve sat on for over a week ’cause as so far it just reads too pro-libertarian and/or totalitarian to me.
Sorry.
Ha, thank you but poor planning on my part means it probably won’t be done until the weekend. Cross-continent travel apparently inhibits effortpost creation.
What do people mean when they talk about “self-expression”?
I think it’s talking about forms of expression that show who you are. I can express thoughts and ideas not my own or make standard arguments or whatever, but I can also write you an essay that really gets to the bottom of how I, the individual, feel about vases.
The idea is that you exist, but then you create something outside of yourself for others to experience, and you create this thing from yourself and what you are. It is my personal opinion that this phrase makes sense and is useful, but is often overused. Most people are not able to express anything in enough detail or with enough skill to create something that captures the essence of their zeitgeist or whatever.
Very good and accessible video on chaos theory and what the famous Mandelbrot picture actually shows (with a different visualization of the same data)
That video is part of Veritasium, a channel developed by Derek Muller, who Asimov would have been if he’d been born fifty years later and had the original Asimov as inspiration.
The first Veritasium video I ever watched was about the new way of measuring the kilogram. I was hooked. He gets deep into research, has superb access to real science experts, and his graphics are compelling – Muller has a knack for hitting my learning organ exactly right.
In this case, I was just trucking along, finding the bifurcation talk mildly interesting. And then he rotated the Mandelbrot set to its side and I went “Holy F*cking Sh*t”…
This channel is serious brain candy.
This reminds me of the recent thread describing how Chinese communism, supposedly an ideology that cares about making people more than just economic creatures, is so hard on four year olds so that they can manage to be successful twenty years later.
I’m not sure if that’s a counter point (that the Chinese system works) or support (Chinese don’t need harsh preschools because they’re Chinese). But either way, it’s besides the point–the supposed compassion of Communism that is it’s selling point doesn’t seem to materialize.
The author seems unaware that ancient Greece had plenty of democratic city-states. That seems like a pretty big howler when discussing Plato by name.
Sure, it doesn’t affect his arguments as they pertain to modern democracies. It’s still a pretty sloppy error to make, though, and one which doesn’t inspire confidence in his research more generally.
As for Athens, it’s worth pointing out that the city was unusually successful, even amongst other ancient democracies (of which there were more than “a small handful” — there were literally hundreds of ancient Greek poleis, and a significant portion of them were democratically-ruled for at least some period of time). Taking Athens as your main example of Greek democracy is going to give you an excessively rosy picture of democracy. And of course, even Athens ended up losing its empire following the Peloponnesian War.
Looks like California SB50 has been rejected yet again by the legislature: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/business/economy/sb50-california-housing.html
Bad news for the housing reform movement.
@metacelsus,
Glad to learn that!
SB50 is an anti-democratic local self rule abomination (though I wouldn’t be opposed if the Grand Army of the Republic occupied Mountain View and Palo Alto and forced density there), Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco already have overtaxed sewage systems, and I really resent even more density being forced on us to serve “Silicon Valley”.
There’s plenty of land in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, build there not here, and please stop turning us into “Tech’s” far away bedroom, or better yet induce punitive taxation and kill that golden egg laying goose dead or out of California!
Even better would be a border wall or moat around Stanford, half of San Mateo County, and most of Santa Clara County to prevent commuting from here to there, and California is way too damn big anyway, we should have small east coast sized States instead.
“Local self rule” is here, as ever, a euphemism for segregationism. Why should a bunch of cranky bigots (and yes, hatred of affluent techies who like urban life is no less bigoted than hatred of, say, Hispanic immigrants) get to use state power to exclude newcomers, especially when doing so destroys wealth and deprives people of opportunity on a massive scale?
I look forward to the day that SFR-only residential neighborhood zoning is banned by federal civil rights law.
As do I, because nothing would ensure that Federal Civil Rights law, the worst abridgement of freedom we’ve passed in this country, would be struck down faster.
really… what do you have as the second worst?
@meh
The National Firearms Act.
Single family zoning itself is a pretty severe restriction on freedom.
does the fugitive slave act make your top 10?
@meh
Worst currently existent abridgement of freedom.
Slavery has been abolished.
+1. Mir Auch. If you want something properly fascist, Civil Rights Law. Yes definitely.
ah, makes more sense now.
so what do you think the historical worst abridgement we’ve passed is?
If I can chime in, in my mind, the worst historical abridgments of freedom enacted by the federal government are:
1) Slavery in the District of Columbia and the other Territories
2) The Fugitive Slave Act
3) The Sedition Act of 1798
You say that like it’s a bad thing…
I’m not sure if I prefer your vision of the world or God-Emperor Trump disbanding the Senate and ruling via
Death Starthreats of nuclear strikes on non-complying cities, but it’s close.Is there some natural resource limitation which will prevent their expansion? Or do you not realize that more people will pay more taxes, covering the cost of expansion?
Isn’t the point of the bill so they can build there and not sprawl out into distant counties? And what’s the problem with “Tech?” I get that some of them are gake and fay. But it’s not like they’re carjacking you. My only objection to them is because many believe in harmful policies like restrictions on the supply of housing.(Or don’t believe in those policies but vote for people who do.) The way to fix that is not with that kind of rhetoric.
This kind of attitude is part of the problem. I’m not opposed in principle to radical solutions. But this attitude just becomes an excuse to not make any progress in any area, as you can just jokily invoke “well, why not expel the outgroup” anyone someone proposes to try yo fix any problem. Even if the outgroup is causing a lot of problems, you aren’t doing anything to expel them, so it’s just LARPing.
This comment isn’t specific to the SF bay areas.
People naturally don’t like change and they have a tendency to believe they should be able to control change in the areas around them even if they don’t actually have the best property-rights-style legal claim to do so.
So instead they use their political power to make other’s actual property rights less valuable rather than allowing resources to be used for the most wealth-building/pareto optimizing/economically efficient purpose.
It’s the difference between the one-solution-for-everyone style of political decision making where the minority just has to put up with the choice of the majority, vs. a market-style-decision where everyone chooses based on their own preferences and how those preferences interact.
Then they end up in a slowly declining area until it ends up like Detroit, or else they reform to open up for an influx of change somewhere along the way. Mostly the former, it seems, lately.
Of course, there are other outside factors which can slow this process down with injections of cash and people. To misquote Adam Smith, “There’s a lot of ruin in a city.”
Where is the line between “most wealth-building/pareto optimizing/economically efficient purpose.” and “tragedy of the commons”?
I mean, come on. There is that commons over there and look at all the grass we could graze if we just had the community stop making my property rights less valuable!
@EchoChaos, you’re perhaps already aware that private property rights are literally considered by economists to be the traditional solution to any tragedy of the commons?
Without a Commons, no such tragedy occurs…
@sharper13
Absolutely. I’ll just buy the two square miles around me because I don’t want to live next to Kowloon Walled City.
If only there were some way for a group of people who lived in an area that they wanted to avoid overbuilding on to pool their money and resources to determine the maximum amount of building they wanted to live near.
@EchoChaos
If it gets so dense it is unlivable, people will leave and it will get less dense. If people are willing to live there, that tells you something.
If you don’t want density, there’s plenty of rural areas you can go to. What you really want is to live near the “Kowloon Walled City” but not next to it, the benefits of density, without the density. This creates a housing shortage. That’s the real “tragedy of the commons.”
You could use this logic to make any government intervention in a democratic society appear to be small-l libertarian.
Your comment is a good example of the old saying “the job of the Left is to make mistakes. The job of the Right is to make sure those mistakes are not corrected.” I wrote on my blog:
https://alexanderturok.wordpress.com/2020/01/25/my-email-to-rant-against-david-cole/#more-403
@Alexander Turok
In fact I don’t want to live anywhere near Kowloon Walled City, so I don’t. What I am stating is that it is moral for a community to declare that nobody gets to build Kowloon Walled City on their lot.
I live in a small town with most lots as rural > 1 acre lots. Now developers are coming in and buying those lots to put up townhomes and condos because we’re within commuting distance of a major metro area.
Most of the people in my town like this, so they voted for it, but banned denser developments than that because we don’t want the loss of community that comes with that. It’s a reasonable compromise that I supported.
If I didn’t like it I could try to get a majority of my town to vote that way, as communities around San Francisco have done. That’s reasonable too.
But if a majority of a community have decided that the way their community is is acceptable, then that’s their decision and we should respect it.
I am not a libertarian. Government has useful purposes and zoning is one of them. And yes, that is indeed the purpose of a democratic society. It’s a good one.
The right isn’t mostly for restricting building, that’s a left-wing thing. Compare right-wing Texas to left-wing California. I am breaking with the right in this position, which was started by our resident union leftist @Plumber.
If they’re commuting from a rural area to the city, they might not need to be doing that if they could build up the suburbs.
Absolutely, so why are you trying to prevent those left-wing mistakes from being fixed? Do you see the movement of people from California to Texas, driven by, among other things, those zoning policies?
@EchoChaos,
Thanks you argue for local democracy better than I could myself.
@Alexander Turok,
My own eyes show me different.
San Francisco (and to a lesser extent Berkeley and Oakland) has experienced a massive amount of new construction in the last ten years, more than in the previous 30, and I’ve seen lots of tower block apartments go up near “transit hubs”, I’ve also seen increased flooding of city streets (both liquids and motor cars), more sewars backing up into buildings because the sewar pipes in the streets can’t handle the inflow (and with more people here tearing up the streets for upgrading the pipes is less likely as more people will be disrupted), plus the Feds fine Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco more because the sewage treatment plants can’t process the waste enough, these cities with tired old infrastructure aren’t where to build even more without extensive expensive repairs that are simply not allowed by the pace demanded by YIMBY’s, and Sacramento forcing more development without paying for those repairs (since the State collects far more of the taxes paid by newcomers than the municipalities do) repels me. What I haven’t seen with all the new housing is ant reduction in rents or in the number of tents on the sidewalks and freeway medians, quite the opposite actually, the more people you stuff here the more jobs and even more demand spiraling upward, besides I just don’t like the wind tunnel effect of all the new skyscraper tower block apartments, cause that’s whats built not the duplexes you praise in your blog, those are being destroyed instead.
If you want to encourage low density suburbia to become medium density (like San Francisco was 15 years ago) sure, fine go do that, but must you keep changing San Francisco into hyper-density Hong Kong or Manhattan?
I do see some more duplexes and townhouses in San Leandro, and that’s fine and dandy, but San Leandro chose to develop, it wasn’t forced by Sacramento, and while besides the parks they are still some low density areas in San Francisco, unfortunately they’re also in and near the old former shipyards and naval bases and are toxic and radioactive (still being built on with the inevitable law suits though!).
If the State of California forces municipalities to develop more since Sacramento captures by far most of the revenue it showed pay for the clean up and needed infrastructure (instead in the last ten years the portion going to municipalities has been reduced, while at the same time Sacramento has forced the county jails to house inmates that used to be in the State prisons, did you think the now balanced State budgets came easy?).
@Plumber
Beats living in a wage cage:
https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/2/1/3/703213_v3.jpg
The question comes down to who’s interests come first. I say its the renters’ who don’t want to live in third world housing conditions.
Currently tech companies pay a substantial premium to employees to get them to relocate to Silly-Con Valley. I don’t know why, I suspect it’s a market failure. If the population of employees doubled and rents stayed the same, tech companies would have to pay much more for that premium. They’ll eventually run out of money. The population in SF proper hasn’t been growing by very much, 14% from 2000 to 2018 in contrast the the 17% growth of the country from 200 to 2019.
The way to pay for needed infrastructure is to charge the new users. If a building needs a sewage hookup make it pay for the sewage hookup, which will include the fixed costs of upgrading the entire system. If it can’t, it won’t get the sewage hookup and won’t get built. It’s the same solution if there are too many cars in the street, charge cars for being in the street. Anytime there’s a shortage of something you’re giving away for free, the solution is to stop giving it away for free.
Upgrades to infrastructure tend to be intensive enterprises, particularly in populated, politically connected areas. No one likes tearing up all the streets to replace all the sewers, and it’s REALLY expensive to tear up and replace ALL the sewers.
This is how these cities end up with 100 year old failing pipes and deferred maintenance bills in the three comma category.
I missed this when it made news back in July, but when 22 Western governments condemned China for purportedly putting two million Uighurs in internment camps, 37 other countries officially jumped to their defense, about 15 of them Muslim. They stated that “Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers,”
Any thoughts on what is going on here? Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan etc. are pretty strict Muslim states: if China is putting Uighurs in concentration camps and harvesting their organs, I’d expect them to be the most outraged.
@Le Maistre Chat,
My guess is that Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, etc are in the tank with China for a “don’t sass us about human rights” norm.
I’m sure that Chinese money and a general dislike/distrust of Western interventionism is most of the story, but I also remember reading reporting from ISIS’s rise and fall that racism against Uighurs was endemic within the “state,” and that foreign fighters from Xinjiang were routinely singled out to get the most unpleasant/dangerous jobs. Could be that racism against Uighurs served to grease the skids.
Pakistan and many African countries accept a lot of Chinese investment / loans. Pakistan has a pretty interesting approach to human rights: when everybody was still talking about the Khashoggi murder, the PM of Pakistan went to Saudi Arabia saying, in short, “yeah, shocking, but we’re desperate for money“.
The case of Pakistan is really interesting. They are not doing well, they are visibly less productive than India, and they really want the Chinese money. And it so happens that China is their neighbour and China is really intense about building infrastructure in neighbouring countries. Consider the magnitude of this thing. t’s also useful to Google something like “China Pakistan investment” or “China Africa investment” and read how the West is nowadays really spooked out by various Chinese foreign initiatives, many of which are about China building some infrastructure in exchange for debt. Oftem developing countries end up being very indebted to China. Sometimes, logistically important infrastructure is a collateral on these loans. Sometimes, people question the honesty of the national politicians in developing countries who accept these loans. Some of this makes for a pretty grim reading, considering how China isn’t finished growing faster than most of these developing countries.
They can always not accept the loans. I’d never seen that Khan quote before, that’s hilarious. What an admission of weakness. In my ideal world, American “aid” would be much higher, and be more of this debt-vassalage stuff.
FWLIW, I just took the NYTimes
A Quick Quiz to Match You With a DemocraticCandidate
which had me agreeing most with (in order)
1) Biden
2) Sanders/Steyer (tie)
3) Bloomberg/Buttigieg (tie)
4) Klobucher
5) Warren
6) Yang
A bit surprising to me, I was leaning voting for Biden anyway, but (despite my wife favoring him) Bloomberg was at the bottom of my list along with Steyer.
I welcome suggestions for other “what/who should you vote for” quizzes.
My problem with this quiz is that there’s no “I don’t care” option. Saying yes or no to “Do you want a nomination who would make history based on race, gender or sexual orientation?” Saying no implies that I don’t want one of those candidates, which is misleading – it’s just not a priority. There were a bunch of those: “Do you want a candidate who takes money from big donors?” I don’t care if they do or not – yes or no isn’t appropriate here. isidewith allowed for more nuance, giving an answer to each question but also ranking it’s importance to you. Interesting that Biden was at the top of my NYTimes ranking but literally the bottom of my isidewith ranking.
I thin for the “make history” question in particular, “no” just means you don’t care. Since a strong “no” would be outside of the Democratic Overton window.
I put “No” as well, ’cause “wouldn’t mind it but that’s a pretty low priority for me” wasn’t an option.
My preference would be:
Biden > Sanders > some other near death Democrat,
with Sherrod Brown as the VP
I just took the isidewith quiz as well (I did a lot of “importance to you: least“, and “add own stance: I don’t know” answers) and it had me as:
Buttigieg/Sanders (tie) >
Klobucher/Steyer (tie) >
Biden >
Warren >
Delaney (who?) >
Gabbard >
Yang >
Bloomberg >
Trump
I’d interpret as “No, this is not a want I have” rather than “No, I actively oppose this”, but that may be overly literal.
English needs a word for diswant. I suppose oppose works for that.
Interesting. I got
1) Sanders
2) Warren
3) Bloomberg
4) Biden
6) Buttigieg
7) Klobuchar/Steyer/Yang (tied)
My top three were:
1. Steyer
2. Buttigieg
3. Biden
I’m pretty in the tank for Buttigieg, so pretty accurate, I guess? I dislike Biden, but for mostly personality/competency reasons, not so much policy.
Stuck behind a paywall, but my answers are YYNYNNNNNN, maybe you can tell me what my results are. isidewith.com is giving me Yang > Delaney > Klobuchar > Bloomberg > … I don’t know what to make of this, I haven’t really been following the race closely enough to have an opinion more detailed than Biden > Sanders > Warren (which isidewith.com agrees with).
@Dacyn (assuming the same NYT questions) your answers have you as: Biden > Bloomberg > Klobucher/Yang > Buttigieg > Steyer > Sanders/Warren
I got
Klobuchar/Yang (tie)
Bloomberg
Buttigieg
Biden
Steyer
Sanders
Warren
Which seems about right. Of course you can do pretty well at most election predictions by betting that whoever I like will lose.
I found many of the questions highly irrelevant. I was almost expecting to be asked about how my ideal candidate would dress ;-( Ok, maybe not quite that bad. But if these are the differentiating issues – and the candidates all agree on the things important to me – which I very much doubt – than either it’s “pick a random Democratic candidate” or “hold my nose and support the lesser evil”, depending on what this hypothetical agreement might be.
It’s the week of the Super Bowl here in America. For those intending to watch the game, do y’all have any special foodstuffs you make for the occasion? I myself will probably be making some chili/cornbread/wings for my house spread, but more ideas are always welcome!
In more somber football news, the New Orleans Saints seem to have scored an own goal (would a pick-6 be more appropriate here?) by providing material aid to the Catholic Church in Nola in helping shape their post-pedophilia PR strategy. Per the Athletic, the NFL will not be looking further into this issue. Since we have a lot of random subject expertise here, does anyone know why the Saints would be involved in helping the Catholic Church do PR for their continual pedophilia scandals?
The story I heard was that their owner is a devout Catholic, and told the PR team to help out.
I am maximally uninterested in this year’s teams but for now I have the best tv and thus am noblessely obliged to host this year’s Big Game™ viewing. I’m used to watching on west coast time so I still find it odd waiting for darkness before it starts.
Special ordered Juanita’s tortilla chips as all other brands fall short. If they’re staled by shipping it’s hardly a sin that the nacho-ing process can’t sanctify. Outsourced the wings to a korean place offering a tray after smoking up the house too much in previous years. I find a cheeseball while dated is always devoured down to the last morsel so I make some every year. The garlic focaccia I’ve posted here before will certainly make an appearance, with oil and dukkah. Pickled asparagus I got from the amish will feature alongside the various cured meats. Otherwise the star of the show each year are club crackers, whipped cream cheese, smoked salmon, and so called “cowboy candy” – a pickled-candied jalapeno.
I picked up short ribs to throw in the pressure cooker but I severely doubt it will come to that with the game being so late here.
Of course really all you need is Totino’s pizza rolls to feed your hungry guys.
I watch those skits yearly, they’re amazing.
I presume the National Felon League can share its expertise in covering up crimes.
Did anybody propose an adversarial collaboration on gun control? Because I have no idea how I feel on the subject and would love an intellectually honest deep dive.
Not yet, but that’s a great future topic I’d be interested in as well.
Just in case you didn’t already read these posts, you may be interested.
@JohnNV
I think that a good investigation can be done on the efficacy of various (kinds of) gun control measures on the likelihood for legally* bought (or manufactured) guns to be use for various purposes. This kind of investigation needs to keep in mind that lots of uses of weapons that some people want to ban are going to be considered an important use case that needs to be allowed, by others. For example, some people want to ban regular citizens from carrying pistols for self-defense, while others merely want to keep high-risk people from having access to guns.
There are various kinds of gun control that each have their weaknesses. A ban on sale of types of weapons or parts:
– often target convenience, cosmetic or fairly vestigial features that make little to no difference to how dangerous the weapon is
– can often can be worked around (sometimes trivially, like bans on large magazines that allow people to have/use magazines that are downsized in ways that can be trivially undone)
– when actually reducing the efficacy to kill many people, usually make the weapon considerably less usable for (more) legitimate uses
– can make weapons more dangerous, less reliable or otherwise worse when used for legitimate purpose. Making a good weapon is actually quite hard, typically requiring lots of iterative development. This is a major reason why (semi-automatic versions of) popular military weapons are also very popular with civilians.
A ban on selling to specific people:
– has the issue of sorting people into safe and unsafe groups, which can be trivial to nigh impossible depending on what groups you deem unsafe
– can be evaded if the people who are deemed unsafe have relatively easy access to the weapons of those deemed safe
Ultimately, no gun control can keep guns out of the hands of those who are determined and/or capable enough, so it can only make it harder to possess a gun.
* legality vs illegality is actually fairly complicated, because weapons can start legal and become illegal in various ways.
Some factual questions that might be worth asking in such a collaboration (the moral right questions being pretty hard to get agreement on):
Gun death statistics: Most people discussing gun control seem not to know that, for example, gun suicides are a lot more deaths than gun murders, or that accidental shootings are a really small fraction of total gun deaths, or that mass shootings are a really tiny fraction of gun murders, or that nearly all gun murders use a handgun rather than a shotgun or rifle (and so an assault rifle ban won’t have much effect), or that police shootings are noticeable fraction of total shootings per year, etc.
Mostly this is because journalists and activists are usually pretty bad at thinking quantitatively, but also because emotional appeals don’t work so well with numbers.
Gun control effects: Another place to look is at evidence about how various actual gun control measures affect crime. My impression is that the evidence here is pretty mixed–particularly, I remember that quite a few states made concealed carry permits easy to get, and those states did not see any increase in gun murders. My not-that-informed impression is that the evidence for gun control measures in the US having much effect on crime is weak–probably the effect is weak.
Statistics on mass shootings: Mass shootings are usually the driver for a push for more gun control–when some nutcase goes postal and shoots a dozen bystanders, it’s pretty damned convincing evidence that he was the kind of guy who should never have been allowed to have a gun. What do we actually know about them?
In all these cases, the reason this would be worthwhile is because activists and media are terrible at actually reporting numbers and putting things into a quantitative context. This doesn’t help you answer moral questions like “Is firearm ownership a moral right” or “Isn’t stopping mass shootings worth depriving some innocent people of guns?” It doesn’t answer broad political questions like “Is widespread firearm ownership a bulwark against tyranny?” But it would at least let discussions continue from a reasonably informed place.
Also, maybe a quick overview of terminology and definitions–journalists often have no idea what they’re talking about w.r.t. guns and call things by the wrong names, something I notice even though I’m just moderately familiar with guns.
Most gun crime is gang-related, which makes these people relatively insensitive to a lot of gun control measures. People who have cocaine lying around are not so worried about complying with gun laws. So all the possession-style gun laws have fairly little effect on them. They may also not want to buy their guns from regular shops anyway, due to tracebility, regardless of whether they can.
Interestingly, gang members seem to often have little interest in having good guns, preferring to cheap out on them. These shitty guns are called Saturday night specials in the US. In my country, they are typically converted gas- and alarmpistols (which can be turned into low power shitty guns).
Guns are very hard to keep out of the hands of criminals.
—
As for mass shootings, a lot of these people seem quite determined, which make it hard to make laws that discourage them, but are not onerous for more casual gun owners.
On the other hand, you could potentially stop a lot of suicides with gun control. Which won’t make any headlines or win emotional appeals, but depressed people still have value.
@Loriot
Not sure I buy that. The US is pretty average in successful suicides, between Japan and Australia, both of which have pretty strict gun control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
I think the personal-level lesson is that if you or someone in your house has any inclination toward suicide (serious depression, bipolar disorder, previous attempts, etc.), you need to get the guns the hell out of your house right now. Along with any other easy methods of suicide, but guns are a very easy method, and don’t allow for second thoughts and a call to 911 to get your stomach pumped with some chance of surviving the whole thing.
@EchoChaos
I don’t find that to be useful evidence either way, since there are large disparities between countries in suicide rates for idiosyncratic reasons, regardless of the ease of committing suicide.
Although it would be interesting to compare attempted suicide rates. Particularly for men, who disproportionately use guns in the US.
I seriously considered tackling it, but I was somewhat time-limited at the time they were taking topics and decided against it. If anyone wants to get together on the next round, I’d be game.
The biggest bar to the discussion is that in an American context, the two sides have generally have fundamentally different and irreconcilable philosophical approaches. One side views reasonably unrestricted access to firearms by law-abiding citizens as a fundamental civil right and in many cases an outgrowth of a natural right to self-defense. The other sees it as not that much more important than a question of how big a public gathering you can organize in a park, or how loud you can play your music on your home stereo before it becomes grounds for a noise complaint.
Without agreement on how to weight the value and importance of the right to bear arms, there can be no agreement on how to regulate it.
EDIT: That said, I’m certainly happy to dig into the real-world statistical data on gun crime, defensive gun use, and so on, as Albatross11 indicates. I just don’t think it will do much to resolve the fundamental question of “Should we Pass Gun Control Measure X, or not?” Because even IF you can get both sides to agree that it has a very modest effect (if any) on gun violence relative to the impact on law-abiding gun owners, one side is going to say “Well, it’s not like we’re infringing on a fundamental human right or anything, therefore it’s -obvious- that the lives saved on the margin is worth it!” while the other says “What the hell are you talking about! This is a -very- fundamental right, and therefore the measly effect this measure has doesn’t come anywhere near justifying the infringement upon that right!”
A bit of good news from The New York Times:
American Life Expectancy Rises for First Time in Four Years
Any suggestions for good books that can be read in small (say, 5 minute) chunks? I think Taleb’s Antifragile works well this way. I’m guessing Marcus Aurelius and Confucius might as well. Any others? I take lots of Uber rides and like having something to do while waiting.
Its been many years since I read it but the 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories anthology edited by Asimov, Greenberg, and Olander fits the bill well.
The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky was advertised to me as a book one could read piecemeal.
The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten.
Also People I have Loved, Known, or Admired by the same author.
I’ve read about 20 Very Short Introductions, and they’re generally pretty good, but quality is uneven. Out of what I’ve read, I would recommend Marx, Logic, Freud, The Gothic, and Leibniz. Of course, some of them, like Logic, are at a more basic level than anyone here really needs.
@Nick >
*ahem*
I read some of the Very Short Introduction: Logic and “too basic” wasn’t my impression, more “I’m not following this” and “What’s all this stuff about a bald King of France?”.
Other Very Short‘s have been better, I quite liked their Anglo-Saxon Britain, Classical Greece, Ireland, and Vikings books.
Sorry, Plumber, I was overgeneralizing. A majority of folks on SSC are programmers or math people, who generally don’t need a book like that.
Got a bunch, currently reading Marx. So far it’s very good for bias confirmation and falling asleep :p Mostly joking – it’s interesting stuff and I’m thankful for the recommendation – but it really doesn’t make me think well of Marx. Some of the least charitable thoughts in my head go like “never worked a day in his life”, “scientology” and “in the age of reddit/fb fights, this is child’s play”.
Yeah, I’m aware of my biases, that’s why I keep them close to the surface, but I’m not really sure if there’s anything to counter them. His economic theory is, well, outdated. Work is a commodity, true, and if you’re talking about completely untrained workers than yes, in some markets (but not others) it we be paid close to survival levels. But … [and here comes a long list on how this doesn’t really happen a lot].
About half way, might still be good stuff (about M., the book itself is cool).
Sure, I definitely wouldn’t say that book is going to make you a Marxist or anything. It didn’t make me, and it didn’t make Scott.
The first volume of Capital reminded me of Stapledon.
For those of you frequenters of this psychologist-run site who may be interested in psychology and/or art, here is The Curious Case of the Notebook from State Lunatic Asylum No. 3, complete with drawings from the notebook, found in a dumpster in 1970 and whose author — dubbed “The Electric Pencil” due to a drawing of a woman with the label “ECTLECTRC pencil” — has recently been determined. No, the repeated use of the letters ECT was not lost on me.
The pictures are fascinating even to a philistine such as I and include animals, buildings, and, mainly, people, such as “A Dixey Girl” and “Miss Winterstink.” Definitely worth a gander.
You are tasked with picking one animal to go extinct.
You have to pick one species (or, if you prefer, genus or family) of animal that instantly gets Thanos-snapped out of existence. What do you pick and why?
Mosquitoes, obviously.
Some say there’d be literally no downside to doing this if we could, and I for one am skeptical, but I’ll be darned if I pass up the possibility to find out.
When traveling in Alaska, I was told that mosquitoes are the most important pollinators in Alaska. There are other insects which are more efficient, but there are so many mosquitoes that they end up doing the bulk of the work.
Mosquitoes are a main food source of many fish, spiders, other insects, birds, etc. Just consider the amount of biomass you’d be removing, and realize that nothing can eat that any longer.
Of course, fuck mosquitoes.
I consider evolution a proper tool for filling that niche.
But what is that niche? It seems like those fish, etc. are feeding off of the blood of other animals one step removed, right? So anything else moving into that niche is probably also going to be a disease vector.
I’m not saying don’t snap the Mosquitoes, mind, it’s a risk I’m happy to take.
Gut reaction is Aedes genus. One of the most prevalent disease carriers, including pathogenic vectors we normally don’t have as much concern about (like bloodstream transmission only diseases, which are far more manageable than those that can spread through air). Would massively improve quality of life worldwide, particularly in lower-income nations that lack resources to effectively combat malaria or yellow fever alone, preserves the less problematic varieties around which should help with ensuring the ecosystem impact isn’t huge, and also I’d be able to go outside in the summer without hating life. The other benefit over some other common carrier species is that no one seems to be that tied to mosquitoes, whereas some people actually do like mice or rats.
Also, we use mice and rats for medical research (but I don’t know whether switching to some other species would have large costs).
Yeah, the costs are probably significant with just the cost of familiarity alone. There’s enough mice / rat trials that there’s a base of knowledge they can build from and papers they can cite back to. If we switched to say rabbits, there’s still some knowledge there but a lot of it would be wheel-reinventing.
If you had to choose between yellow fever and malaria, what would you choose? (Aedes vs Anopheles)
I’d eliminate malaria, probably. Yellow Fever’s had a vaccine that has both existed much longer, and thus can and has been effectively deployed against the disease. WHO has it on the list of essential medicines, the main barrier to complete eradication is that we’ve not found a good way to mass-produce it. Malaria we are just starting to get a vaccine for and it is way less effective than the yellow fever. I’d still on balance probably remove Aedes over Anopheles as we’ve found some methods of stopping Anopheles from carrying malaria and Aedes carries diseases other than Yellow Fever (after all, malaria is almost unheard of in the Americas and we still have Anopheles strains, but we definitely have West Nile outbreaks from Aedes).
I’d go with the tick genus. The benefit isn’t as high as it would be for mosquitos, but I’m more confident about the lack of backfire. There are a lot of bird/bat species already going through a hard time that might miss the mosquitos, but other than maybe opossums and oxpeckers, I’m not aware of many animals that rely heavily on ticks as a food source.
There are only 84 Amur Leopards around. I would probably go with that, just because it would have the lowest chance of unintended consequences.
Trichinellidae. So I don’t have to be so careful with wild meats.
Interesting answer. I don’t think of it as prevalent in most of the wild game I picture being eaten in America: deer, elk, moose, ducks, rabbits, pheasants, partridge, squirrels. It’s less common for people to contract it from eating wild pigs than one might guess. I was surprised to learn that it’s most commonly contracted from bear, and was also surprised to have a couple people tell me that bear is their favorite meat. Looking it up now, I see it’s also a problem with cougars, walrus and crocodile. Which makes me wonder: which animals were you thinking of?
Just about any wild animal, really. Wild boars are the big one, though, being the leading cause of trichinosis over here. Pigs are next in line, but that’s because consumption is comparatively enormous, despite the chance of a random pig being infected is extremely low.
I’m tempted to say pandas, mostly out of spite. If they can’t be bothered to care about their own survival, why should I?
On a more practical note, all of the money / resources we’re using to try and save them (despite their best efforts to die without successfully breeding) could be better spent on species that are more vital to the ecosystem and more likely to be saved with human intervention.
I went to a comedy show by BJ Novak where he pointed out that as much as humans love pandas, pandas don’t love pandas. Our descendants will watch videos like this cursing us for what we’ve taken from them.
New research suggests that we may just not have been sufficiently discerning connoisseurs of bamboo compared to an animal that eats it exclusively and migrates seasonally to find the right kinds. We may not have been giving them enough of the select highest-protein shoots they need to be healthy. Apparently pandas in the wild are so good at finding just the right bamboo parts that they’re able to get as much protein from their all-plant diet as a polar bear gets from its diet of seals — and the rest of their physiology depends on this fact to work right.
That makes so much sense that I wish I were at all surprised it took this long to work it out.
Guinea worm
Koalas.
Basically everything about them is repulsive, and other than maybe helping to prune the eucalyptus trees and host some microbiomes of algae and bacteria and parasites, I don’t see how their loss would negatively impact much of anything else.
The Australian fires are a catastrophe, but when I heard the koalas are being wiped out by them I knew there was a silver lining.
Cockroaches.
I don’t care how many ecosystems it collapses, those damn things have plagued the last three homes I have lived in and I want them gone.
Homo sapien
Edit to add why: My first reaction is that I would not choose. One species is as good as another. Then I saw that I must choose, so humanity is as likely a choice as any. I do not believe any species is bad or good, but if forced to make an argument I would choose the “humanity is the worst species to ever live” side of the debate.
There you are! Uh, what do you think of the thread I started? Though it has been dead for nearly two days now…
Why would you choose that side in the debate?
Dacyn,
I have been absent. Interesting title on the thread you posted. I have not read it but might very well respond on that thread once I have time to read it.
I do not want to get into a debate as to whether homo sapien is the worst species since I do not believe they are. If I had to debate, I would certainly choose them, but since I would be debating another homo sapien who thinks he is better than anything in the universe I choice would not optomize winning.
So basically you would take the position because it is contrarian? Interesting.
I’ll keep watching this OT for at least another day or two but in any case, I’ll always get notifications if you reply to my comments (either directly or by writing @Dacyn)
@dacyn
I’m just not feeling it. I enjoyed reading your thread. Thanks for the effort.
On the “humans are bad” debate, I said I would defend that position if I had to defend any. That is because it seems obvious to me that a case could easily be made that they have done more damage to the planet than any other species. This is all complicated by the fact that I do not hold that anyone can harm or damage anyone or anything. It’s all just jargon. I do not believe that humans are either good nor bad so even talking about debating it makes no sense.
@HowardHolmes: Sure, fair enough.
Regarding debating, the idea that humans cause more damage to the planet than they are worth is certainly held even by people who don’t have weird metaethics, see e.g. VHEM. But I would contest your assertion that since it’s all just jargon, “talking about debating it makes no sense”. Even if good bad harm damage are all objectively meaningless, they have very real psychological effects on the people who participate in the debate, and these effects can change people’s actions afterward. So I think it is very interesting to talk about debating.
@dacyn
You and I are world’s apart as to whether good/bad is real. Here is your comment:
If you agreed with me there would be no “very real” psychological effects. Such effects, I assume, are believed to have some sort of value. Value does not exist. “Effects”, “real effects”, nor “very real effects” exist.
You say people’s actions can be changed. How? From bad to good? From good to bad? From worse to better. People’s actions cannot be changed.
@HowardHolmes: Why do you believe that all effects are believed to have value? I believe that a rock will fall if dropped, but I don’t think many people would assign any particular value to that absent further context. Regarding “real”, you can replace it with “measurable” — I know there is only one world so we cannot compare with the counterfactual, but the effects are still measurable in a statistical sense.
Surely there is some X you can do such that when you perform controlled experiments, they show that when you do X to people they are more likely to do Y. Why would you not describe this as “X causes them to do Y”, or “X changes what they were going to do, so that they do Y instead of something else”?
@daycn
I am not arguing against cause/effect. I am saying there are no differences in effects. Difference is always normative. Drop a rock from a tall building. Drop a human from a tall building. No difference. That a rock or a human is dropped or not dropped has no significance. You don’t understand because you think dropping a human is bad. You also think there is a purpose (a good) served by dropping the rock, or you wouldn’t drop it. Like I said, we are a long way from agreeing as the the existence of good and evil.
X might cause someone to Y rather than A, B, C or Z. But in Y’ing they have done nothing different from A’ing or Z’ing. There is no meaning, purpose so there is no such think as accomplishing anything or doing anything. The only differences between A and Z are value differences. There are no value difference so there are no differences. It makes no difference if I do ……..
@HowardHolmes: We may be running into a language issue. Someone may say that it “makes no difference” whether a rock lands in one place or another (meaning it doesn’t affect anything they consider important), but they would still generally say that those are “different” possible results.
I’m not sure why you think this. I mean, I’m not necessarily saying you’re wrong (to be honest, I’m not really sure what you mean by “think dropping a human is bad” in this context). But I don’t see how you can find support for such a statement in my comments (other than ones not addressed to you, which I’ve already said you can treat as meaningless noise).
In the end, I think that what you are really trying to object to is when I said
And this is simply me stating that I find the topic interesting. Of course, not everyone finds that kind of thing interesting; maybe you don’t.
@dacyn
So I drop a rock and it lands a foot from my right big toe at the 1:00 position. I drop it again and it lands in the 9:00 position two inches from my left foot. You point out that the positions are different and proceed to claim your debate points proving I don’t use language like other people.
But wait, do other people say this. What kind of idiot would it take to point out that the positions were different. The truth is there would be no discussion of the “difference” because this is not a difference of value, and differences of value are the only ones that matter. In fact, if someone asked, “what is the difference?” the likely reply would be “it makes no difference.” It makes no difference because there is no value. Without a value difference, there is no difference.
If we set up a game laying several bills of various denominations on the ground and you pay me $20 per rock to drop some rocks where you keep what you land on, then we get value and difference. This is what I mean when I say there is no difference in effects. There is no value differences.
As for pushing humans off of roofs your insistence of knowing the context proves that you think sometimes doing this is bad and sometimes good. My point is not that it is either, but that it is neither.
@HowardHolmes: Let’s take this to it’s logical conclusion. For everything you have said in this thread and indeed on SSC in general, there is a difference between that thing being true and that thing not being true. Yet you have chosen to point out that it is true. Why? The logical conclusion is that there is a value difference — i.e. it matters to you whether the thing you say is true or false. Am I wrong?
You seem to have misparsed what I said — “in this context” is after the end quotation mark, meaning that it is referring to the context of us talking here, rather than the context of throwing the person of the roof.
@dacyn
Before switching back to this site, I was playing Sudoku which I typically play every day. Before that I was eating. Does it matter that I eat, that I solve the sudoku, that I win an argument. No. I am living now and I keep living out of inertia. If I were told I would die in my sleep tonight, I would go to bed at the normal hour and sleep like a baby. I do not care whether I live or die. Why should I care about winning an argument. It is just something to do. If I wasn’t doing this right now, I might still be on that puzzle which has eluded me so far.
Edit: Just realized you were asking if I valued truth. Can’t say that I do. I do try to communicate truthfully, but it doesn’t seem important. It would seem that it would be difficult to assert what I did not think was true. This is probably the reason humans evolved to a high degree the ability to deceive themselves. It is difficult to lie. Much easier to believe what we say, so the ability to self deceive is very successful evolutionarily.
@HowardHolmes: I wasn’t really asking to find out whether you thought my conclusion was correct (I assumed you would think it was incorrect) but to find out what you thought was wrong with my reasoning, or how it was in some way not parallel to the reasoning you used.
@dacyn
That a thing is true or false is analogous to whether the rock lands here or there. Any claimed difference arises from assigning value to that difference. In a discussion I am going to defend the position which appears most defensible to me, knowing that it might not be true (how can we tell? some of our opinion are false), and knowing that whether or not it is true is unimportant and knowing that there is no difference in effect of my defense. We can technically say there is a difference in the rock landing here or there just like it seems nonsensical to say there is no difference between truth and false. But there is no difference; it makes no difference. All claiming otherwise is an attempt to make ourselves better than we are. It is nothing but arrogance to claim my assertions are true and yours are false. Yes, I am guilty of arrogance.
@HowardHolmes: I don’t disagree with that. I’ll just point out one more thing. You wrote:
In other words, you asserted that there was a difference between us in how we treat the concepts of good/bad. You can draw the appropriate conclusion.
Normally I order chicken at Chipotle, but considering changing that for animal welfare reasons. However, Chipotle is known for humane sourcing. Any idea whether their “American Humane Certified (AHC) chicken” lives a significantly better life than the average factory chicken (preferably, a life worth living)?
Seven pounds per square foot sounds better than a cage pressing in on the chicken from all sides, but how much does a chicken weigh, 5-10 pounds? The stuff about environmental enrichment seems like a future goal and reason to put off eating them.
I just wish Chipotle didn’t cut their meat into weird looking perfect cubes. Horribly unappetizing to look at.
Here are the standards for the AHC: Broiler chickens
Their sofritas (their term for spiced tofu) is delicious. I ordered that even when I was eating a lot more meat than I do now.
Can anyone recommend a good book on ancient Semitic religions other than Judaism?
Snow Crash.
Religious philosophy question: I know someone has to have had this thought before and I’d appreciate a good answer.
Basically, religion-based morality explains the existence of evil as being a result of free will, but free will isn’t all-encompassing. There are actions and decisions that are outside the possibility space of free will to accomplish: I can’t decide to start hovering, transpose myself 5 meters to the left or cause $1 million to appear. This doesn’t imply a limitation of free will, just the constraints of the world we exist in.
Why is evil, then, included in the possibility space of our free will? Why not just make evil the equivalent of teleportation; conceivable, but not actions that our free will could lead to?
Because if you can’t blame people for things being bad then you have to start blaming the gods.
This is one of my favorite solutions to that question: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/15/answer-to-job/
I love that solution as well. Unfortunately, to my understanding it’s incredibly heretical to any Judeo-Christian religion I’m aware of.
Clearly the Almighty doesn’t approve the axiom of choice, otherwise he could arbitrary distinguish people within identical universes. /s
More seriously, this explanation doesn’t work because it implies that God is maximizing total utility, which is an extensive property, which means that it should add up over multiple copies.
I think the point is that in the hypothesized ontology there’s no such thing as “multiple copies” of a universe. Each possible universe just either exists, or it doesn’t. God can choose which ones exist, but he can’t “multiply instantiate” any of them (because that notion doesn’t really even make sense in this ontology)
I believe the Almighty is simply restating the Axiom of Extensionality. Choice has little to do with it.
Suppose you had the power to take away the free will to do evil things. Some things are more evil than others, so you ban the top ten evilest things that people complain about. Those things pass out of living memory. People being people, they now start complaining about people being allowed to do the next ten evilest things. So you ban those too. Repeat ad absurdum. Eventually you get to “Why isn’t life a constant orgasm?”
Ok, but then that either implies the existence of infinite universes all cut out along the “infinite joy to unceasing pain” spectrum OR that we’re in this particular conglomeration of good-to-evil just kind of randomly.
If what people want is constant orgasm, why not let there be constant orgasm? But my suspicion is that this is not the only thing people want.
I’m not sure either, but I’d like to volunteer for this study.
Not banning, but avoiding – I love Doug Muder’s story about this (author of Red Family, Blue Family).
This question isn’t going to port into all religions in the same way. As a for instance, in my very specific religion “evil” is pretty much just “contradicting the will of God”, regardless of what actions do that. When evil means “disobedience” before it means anything else, your question parses as either:
1. Why do we have the ability to disobey God?
and/or
2. Why does God have opinions on how things should be?
Because those two questions are the only substantial options under the “disobedience is what evil is” dogma, you can’t do what you are asking without either:
1. Destroy meaningful free will entirely (from the conservative protestant like me perspective)
or
2. Reimagine God to be basically limp and opinion-less
It isn’t the problem/solution sets here can’t be discussed, but once it’s parsed through what the religion actually is it becomes a much different discussion than what your semantic choices seem to imply. The context changes enough that I think you’d have to re-write your query entirely to make sense to the religion before you could have meaningful discussion. And that’s just american conservative protestantism; I couldn’t tell you what this would be to a Hindu or a Buddhist once filtered through their belief systems.
Evil is chosen because when we seek good sometimes we seek lesser goods (it’s not as though we ever actually seek evil). There are a variety of reasons in the real world why we do this: we get distracted by the immediacy of a lesser good, we reason poorly about what goods are better, we think some means is evil but that it’s necessary to a good end, that sort of thing. So we’re like this and I don’t see how we could be otherwise, as material beings with tiny brains and all. Not every world or creature need to be like this, though: angels, for instance, are not limited the way we are, having all the knowledge they could ever need to make a decision and being able to reason instantaneously, but they still have free wills and, famously, some still chose wrong. Indeed, to take it in the other direction, God could make a world where we tiny-brained material beings have free will but still choose what’s best every time; try to wrap your head around that one.
Total agreement.
But this piques curiosity. One Catholic to another : why Christ?
(Interpret that question however you choose.)
The point of this life is to be a learning experience, for us to experience the bad so we can appreciate the good, and for us to learn what it means to choose good unforced. These require that we be free to exercise our agency in morally nontrivial ways. If evil were not in our sphere of choices that would frustrate God’s plan.
So to this end, God purposely puts evil in our sphere of choices. You see an expression of this in Deuteronomy 30 and in God’s interaction with Satan in the book of Job. The Book of Mormon expounds on this theme in 2 Nephi 2 and other places.
You see this portrayed in the symbolism of God putting the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden and allowing Adam and Eve to eat the fruit. Before they ate it, they had no knowledge of good and evil, and hence were morally innocent and couldn’t exercise their agency in morally nontrivial ways.
The New Testament makes it explicit that even Jesus Christ was tempted. And it also makes it explicit that his choices included the possibility of doing wrong. Indeed, his possible set of wrong choices was ridiculously large compared to ours, including things like turning stone into bread and summoning angels to catch his fall.
God isn’t just interested in us doing good things. He is interested in changing who we are. Righteousness is something to be learned, not something to be done. God would rather allow our failure and make the ultimate sacrifice to redeem us, than to just never allow us to fail in the first place. The latter would never change us from being merely innocent to being positively righteous.
Ok, but why THIS particular organization of good and evil. Why develop a world in which murder is within the realm of possibility? If that was removed as an option, the underlying choices of good vs. evil would still exist and would still function as the foil against which human development can be measured, but we as a species wouldn’t have to deal with murder?
I guess the answer is, we do exist in such a world, only the one in which the things significantly worse than murder have been taken off the table, we just can’t see them… but that answer feels unsatisfying.
Would the expression of human morality be irreparably limited if our ability to sin was limited at the top end by, say, theft or coveting?
Let me use one example to hopefully illustrate that free will must include the choice to do evil in order for it to be free will.
I will use love as the example. In the Bible, the most important command given is to Love God will everything you have. So not loving God is evil. So in order to prevent all evil, it would be necessary to remove the option to not love God. If someone doesn’t have a choice whether to love God, do they really have free will? Is love really love if there is no choice involved?
This same dilemma exists for just about everything regarding evil and free will, because evil is not just an action, like murder. Evil includes both thoughts and inaction. So not loving God is indeed evil.
Now this does’t really answer WHY God gave us the choice. But God wanted people to be able to choose to love Him (and others). And allowing that choice was worth all of the evil that resulted in that free choice.
Imagine a universe in which the choice of whether or not to love god was like breathing. It happens naturally, is in everyone, and is instinctive. To do so over any short period takes conscious thought and doing so over a long period takes heroic action. Some people still undertake this behavior and it ALWAYS remains a choice, but the default is weighted.
If the #1 rule is to love god but a choice needs to be maintained, what wrong is there in leaning on the scales?
Before you call this out as a being a bad example, think about suicide. It’s a sin (or, it was last time I checked), some of humanity commits it but the vast majority of us are weighted against doing so to an almost heroic degree.
But in this scenario, you’re not punishing people for stupidity or ignorance, you’re punishing them for “ignobility”, just enabled by stupidity or ignorance. An example: if a robber robs a store that doesn’t keep more than $100 in cash, and protests that he would not have committed the robbery if he had known that, is it unjust to punish him?
I agree your scenario is a better analogy than mine; this is my fault for not spending very long trying to come up with a good analogy. However, I think most people would say that in the second scenario we can still punish the robber. Sure, if you could have told him beforehand then things would have gone better for everyone. But that is not the world we are in.
I think there’s a key distinction between punishing someone for something, and merely punishing them in a way that’s correlated with something. Basically, if a punishment is intended to be for something then its correlation with that thing is intentional. I think the psychological effects of this are important, from the part of the brain that asks “are these people trying to hurt me? and do they have good reason to?” (However, this is not to say that the correlational aspects are not also important, and we should try to avoid policies that punish asymmetrically with respect to ignorance, when possible.)
Inspired by johan larson’s challenge in the last OT.
I assert that “California Girls” by the Beach Boys is perhaps the most anti-diversity song of all time. As far as I can tell, the case presented by the song is something like:
1. The world contains a wide variety of types of girls, all with their own unique strengths and qualities
2. On net, California girls are superior to all of the other types
3. Therefore, the world would be improved if all of the other types abandoned their unique strengths and conformed to the California girl archetype
Of course the real implications of the song are that the world would be improved if all women joined Calafia as gold-clad griffin-riding Amazons, plundering and killing men indiscriminately until such time as they find the true religion and settle down as gold-clad griffin-riding housewives.
+1. I wonder if there’s an English translation of Las Sergas de Esplandián.
What happens when the California Girls meet the White Punks on Dope?
Teenage had a race for the night time
Spent my cash on every high I could find
Wasted time in every school in L.A.
Getting loose, I didn’t care what the kids say
We’re white punks on dope
Mom & dad moved to Hollywood
Hang myself when I get enough rope
Can’t clean up, though I know I should
White punks on dope
White punks on dope
My understanding of the song is that:
1. The world contains a wide variety of types of girls, all with their own unique strengths and qualities.
2. Therefore, the life of the singer would be improved if all of the other types emigrated to California.
Perhaps the most pro-diversity song of all time, and almost certainly the most pro-open borders.
Play it at my wake!
This is my understanding of the song.
The singer is committed to staying in California, but appreciates the various girl types which exist in non-California localities, and wishes that they were accessible in California.
It’s about geographical supremacy, not archetypal supremacy. Note that while “Northern Girls” and “East Coast Girls” and “Southern Girls” all have distinguishing characteristics, there is no description given for what makes a “California Girl” superior. Logically, then, a “California Girl” is simply a girl physically located in California.
For bonus credit, compare and contrast to the song “All My Exes Live in Texas”.
It’s always amused me that Texans enjoy that song, when the overall point is something like “The women in Texas are so horrible, I had to flee the state in order to surround myself with better ones.”
It’s a funny song, and it references Texas. That’s enough to get it play in Texas!
Besides, the singer is an unreliable source. A man who has been divorced at least five times and is hiding from the law in Tennesee has very little credibility in assigning blame for relationship failure to other people.
I would agree if he “couldn’t wait to get to get back to the states, back to the the cutest girls in the world”. The only distinctly positive things said about girls are girls who are in the united states.
Yea, the dude just wants to bang girls from all over the place.
You’ve been tasked with designing a prosocial media. Your platform will shrink filter bubbles, ease fear of missing out, and discourage mobbing. Or maybe you’ll take aim at misinformation and counterproductive hot takes, or something else entirely. How will you do it?
A lot of these goals seem mutually exclusive.
Bubbles reduce conflict IMO. The most annoyed I get on social media is typically when the platform itself decides to show me something from someone well outside my bubble that I’d otherwise prefer not to see.
But one policy I’d like to implement is something like “If you decide to report someone for violating the rules, this automatically and irrevocably results in you blocking/ignoring that person forever.” It would make people think twice about reporting posts and reserve such action only for the truly deserving. The block would stay in place regardless of whether the post was ultimately removed/found to be in violation or not.
I picked “ease” and “discourage” for a reason—the goals aren’t mutually exclusive, they trade off against one another. Big difference. (“Pop” sounds more binary, admittedly—I’ll replace that one.)
I don’t see the logic of this. There are a lot of posters on this forum which are usually valuable contributors but nonetheless have sometimes broken the rules in dramatic fashion – Deiseach is probably our most prominent example – and those rule violations still should be punished. Under your system, I would have to make a binary choice between “Let Deiseach rant at anyone she wants” and “Permablock Deiseach,” and neither of those seem like an improvement over the current method for curbing angry rants from Deiseach.
Especially since moderator action is often temporary rather than permanent – why impose a permanent cost for something that will likely result in only a warning or tempban? Not every action requires the same level of caution – there’s no need for someone to think “Gosh, if I report this person, the moderator might say something to them in bright red text! I’d better make sure they really deserve that first!”
what if the policy was additive? moderator *and* user level bloackage. This solves the ‘rant at anyone they want’, but still allows me to ignore people who are able to stay within the bounds of moderation, yet are still extremely unvaluable to read.
I think a better compromise might be prompting you, after you report, whether you want to block the reportee, too. I think a lot of people don’t think to do this after reporting because their eyes are already moving to the next tweet/comment/whatever. Disqus might already do this, even? I don’t remember.
I might come back later and write a direct answer, but for now I kind of wonder whether maybe our existing social media websites are already doing this through a kind of rebound effect.
How many people by now, maybe as a percentage of current and former social media users, do you think are aware of the negative impacts social media websites are having on informedness, mental health, public discourse, general societal health, etc.? Of that percentage, what portion are therefore motivated to actively pop their filter bubbles/ease their FOMO/not get drawn into mobs/etc.?
One possibility is that if you really wanted to design a prosocial media, you should make existing social media much much worse, until its problems are so impossible to ignore that basically everyone pushes back against it. You could also replace their CEOs with Mr. Burns-like characters who don’t even give lip service to ethical outcomes, and kind of drum their fingertips together menacingly and lick their lips a lot.
There’s an amusing irony at play here. One of the real-life inspirations for the Mr. Burns character, Barry Diller, currently owns every major dating platform.
More like a third, I think.
BTW, why don’t dating platforms do more to subtly encourage interracial and interfaith marriage? (Inter-ideological would be nice too, but that’s probably a tougher nut to crack for most people. One step at a time…)
Seems to me the surest and most permanent route to pulling people out of their bubbles is through the center of a wedding ring. With a spouse comes the spouse’s family and friends, and if they’re all from a different bubble than you, you’re going to be plunged into it and learn what it’s really like from the inside. You might still not like it or agree with it, but I guarantee you’ll be less likely to strawman it and write it off as an inferior outgroup. Same for your spouse and your bubble.
Because there are downsides to relationships between very different people? If I’m not mistaken, black man/white woman marriages have much, much higher rates of divorce than white/white or black/black. It’s called eHarmony, not eThisMayBeMoreDifficultForYouPersonallyButItSupportsMySocialEngineeringPlan.
@Well..
Arranged marriage by lottery seems even better for that purpose 😛
Conrad:
As I recall, though, black/white interracial marriages where the husband is white and the wife black are *more* stable than white/white or black/black marriages.
That’s not a reason for dating services to try to impose some kind of social engineering goal on their customers, of course, but it is the sort of interesting fact that makes me wonder what’s going on to explain it.
forcing race into the matching process does seem like bad site design.
But where is this from?
@albatross11
That’s wonderful news, since it’s the marriage pattern in my family.
I just googled and found this:
Why would dating platforms care about pulling people out of their bubbles? That’s probably why you don’t see it.
Guys, I was answering the OP question. So long as there are social media sites, and so long as those sites are manipulating users in subtle or unsubtle ways, and so long as we’re talking about how those manipulations might serve a pro-social-i.e.-bubble-popping purpose, I think dating sites subtly encouraging interracial or interfaith pairings is a great idea.
BTW, I too have heard that black wife/white husband marriages are more stable/less divorce-prone than black/black or white/white marriages. As a white guy married to a black woman, I salute the universe for confirming my personal preferences.
Also: I heard about the relative instability of black man/white woman marriages a while back. Has that changed at all? I’d expect the stability to increase as black men’s social standing gets better.
@Aapje: dating sites are in a way just arranged marriages by computer algorithm.
@Conrad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States#Marital_stability
From that, it looks like one side of your statement is true, the other false.
I said:
Which part is false?
Edit: wait is it the black/black being the same as black man/white woman?
Does that study control for where the partners were born and raised? I would expect Asian or black people, for example, who were born and raised in the US to be much more comfortable with the the idea of getting a divorce than Asian or black immigrants.
groan. with much difficulty you’ve managed to figure out the false part with another false statement.
Can you help me out? It’s possible I’m not very smart.
@Conrad Honcho:
I think ‘meh’ means to point out that according to that study, white men who married black women still got divorced at a higher rate than white/white marriages.
This is news to me, and goes against data I’d seen earlier though I don’t remember where I saw it.
Huh. That is interesting, because the source I linked said this:
I don’t have time right now to trace through where Wikipedia got their information, though.
I think I saw the claim about black wife/white husband couples in this Pew Center report on intermarriage.
Because their customers don’t pay extra for that, and are at least slightly less likely to stop paying altogether if they do that. They aren’t in the business of breaking bubbles and promoting tolerance, so they don’t.
@John Schilling:
I think you missed my explanation a few posts up.
Because that would not work. First of all, the most prominent bubble is that of educated urban whites, who would need to be forced to date less educated rural whites. That is a logistical nightmare. Second of all, most stereotypes are more or less correct, so a neutral, or mildly racist white person who goes on a date with a black person has a much higher chance of becoming more racist after that interaction.
I don’t see how that would be possible. For example, with Tinder: men likely go on a date with less than 2% of matches, and match with maybe 2% of available women. That’s 1 out of 2500 women. Do you think that that ‘subtly’ changing the distribution of the profiles that this guy sees is going to affect who he ends up on a date with, at all?
How about a milder(?) version of this: “If you decide to report someone for violating the rules, this automatically blocks you from reporting anyone else until the original report is adjudicated.” The idea is that the platform doesn’t know who is the problem, so if you report someone YOU might be the problem. Puts more skin in the game than spraying reports all over the place.
Just leverage the blockchain with adaptive neural learning, dude.
On a more serious note, I feel like a lot of the problems would be reduced by making it harder to connect with thousands of people you never see in real life. Seeing the highlights of 1000 people’s lives vs. 50 people you already know really well probably contributes to the FOMO and shallow political takes.
A requirement of having a high real-life-friend/internet-only-friend ratio might help with this, but I can’t think of a mechanism that would actually work to enforce this. Worst of all, this seems so antithetical to the purpose of social media that it would probably fail in the most basic way; not getting people to want to use it.
I’ve dreamed of putting together a more distributed social media platform, where there is no centralized repository for data, and links are made between members by agreeing to host/forward a certain amount of their data. This agreement would have an actual cost to both parties, in increased bandwidth/storage requirements, so will hopefully limit the number of links you have to a number that is reasonable to curate, and more closely resembles real world social networks. In addition, if you noticed one of your links was spouting off nonsense, you could disable their link, limiting their effects on other people that they are connected to through you. Any user could see how they were connected to another user, so if my mother started seeing KKK articles pop up, and she saw the path was mother->Jake->KKK, she could start asking questions to me, or block my re-posts from being retransmitted by her.
I think this would potentially increase filter bubbles, but could also help penetrate some of them by removing some anonymity. It would definitely help combat misinformation, as you could see the path the information spread along. It would also limit the effect that a single provider could have by changing algorithms/policies because all of the processing would take place on a user level.
Have you looked into Mastodon?
Is Mastodon actually going anywhere? I had honestly assumed it would have died out by now.
It’s cool as hell and we need more distributed internet services, but I always figured most people wouldn’t care about that enough to overcome the Nash Equilibrium of everyone being on twitter.
(I have tried it out myself, but then realized I still didn’t want twitter even if it is open source and distributed)
I have, but Mastodon is still a federated system, where you have multiple central servers that can talk to each other. I guess you could theoretically break it down to the case where everyone hosts their own server, which could come close to what I was thinking about, but I was thinking more along the lines of a completely distributed system.
Currently Mastodon is a cool idea, and it’d be nice if more people I knew were interested in trying something like that out, but until you can get a critical mass of people to move to a new service, it doesn’t really make sense to switch due to network effects.
Also, I’m kind of in the same boat as silver_swift, where I don’t really want twitter regardless of form. A perfect network for me would combine a news-sharing/commenting feed, photo sharing, and file sharing, but only among people who I explicitly grant access to.
A distributed social media platform, especially a moddable one, has interested me for a while. (There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to adopt a rule like Matt’s above, or join a community that’s adopted that rule, for instance.) I think what you’re talking about fits Mastodon pretty well.
Step 1: Destroy the internet
Step 2: Burn down the cities
Step 3: Build a nice pub in every town
But what if I want to know what they’re serving in the pub in Kathmandu?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFskVVrOWnE
Literally what I was thinking of –
greatokay minds, I guess.To join the media you pay x amount of money. If you decide to leave the media you wait one day, then you get the money back. If you do something against the rules; harass someone, post racist stuff, whatever, you get banned and you don’t get the money back. The one day delay is so that people can’t just harass someone and then immediately leave with their money.
The money from rule breaking pays for the moderators. Also some of the money goes to people who has been harrased.
I’m just gonna point out that we’ve tried this sort of model before, and that’s how we got civil asset forfeiture (and more generally an understanding that piecework pay gets you lots of pieces of shoddy work).
There’s no piecework pay.
So, what, then, the pool of penalty fees is divided among all the moderators? I’m calling distinction without difference.
Otherwise, fixed moderator pay depending on continued collection of penalty fees leads to continuous witch-hunting for looser and looser definitions of ‘witch,’ which is different, but not better.
at Statismagician. You just hire moderators like a normal job.
You can’t have a good social media without good moderators. (You can have a profitable evil one, like facebook.)
Maybe there is a normal fee for signing up, that you don’t get back, and the don’t-harass fee that you do get back.
This would rigorously enforce the community around a set of standards, but there’d be no guarantee that what the mods are trying to optimize would be pro-sociability.
Isn’t that what SA forums do?
I can’t say they’ve been called a prosocial media though.
Yeah, except I don’t think you can get your money back if you quit.
Something Awful was incredibly productive and one of the most important sites on the web, maybe the most important, for years and years. It only went to shit because of political in-fighting and the self-destructive tendencies of the people at the top of the pyramid.
One possibility is to roll back to just about any earlier stage of social media. These problems have developed as the amount of text per message decreased, and the ability of the platform to determine what a user sees (as compared to the user determining it themself) increased. It won’t produce nirvana, but the results might well be significantly less bad.
OTOH, it’s possible that the main thing wrong with modern social media isn’t technological – it’s the various types of troublemaker, who have evolved over time to be more virulent. Thus I recall Usenet going downhill from “sometimes a bit annoying” to “10 spammers per legitimate post”, without any technological changes on Usenet (except for improvements in moderation, used to fight back). What changed was the spammers, not the users.
The other thing that changed was cultural – it used to be that the sort of people who wanted to cancel others for violating the cancellers’ idea of morals were mostly somewhere between atechnological and anti-technological. They wouldn’t be caught dead using instruments of the devil like social media ;-( Now we have job lots of tech-savvy morality-imposers, often with an entirely different set of moral rules.
I think if you’re tracking things over time, you have to consider that social media opened up from “people with access via university” to “practically everyone.” Eternal September, true to its name, hasn’t ended.
Generally agree. A whole lot of the stuff that makes social media bad is a direct and obvious result of social media companies attempting to make things better. (and of course, “better”, in their view maps more with “easier for us to sell ads” rather than “better user experience.”)
1) go to med school
2) write a bunch of stuff under a false identity on some website full of ML and philosophy nerds.
3) Do a load of conworlding.
4) Write a 10K word essay about beat poetry and game theory.
…
How about the platform makes sure it shows you equal amount of content from everyone you call a friend (or all the content they created, if that’s smaller)?
If you are not very interested in hearing from them, you downgrade them to acquaintance (and the distinction is publicly visible).
Also, I’m interested in how news would spread if all non-personal accounts were destroyed but people were still able to post links to news.
My platform will be like facebook, but with the following changes:
– Minimum post length of 200 words. This prevents witty one-liners from predominating discussion. Machine learning will be used to identify when ipsem lorem is being used to meet the minimum and prevent such posts from being posted.
– No images may be displayed in your feed, though you may link to images. This prevents misleading images from dominating discussion.
– Posts are displayed strictly in chronological order. This helps prevent viral content.
– You may filter your feed to only show posts by your friends (or some of your friends), but by default you see all public posts. This helps prevent filter bubbles.
Imagine if a pandemic (or Thanos) killed half the population of Earth, with deaths evenly distributed between countries, professions and age groups. What would the consequences be for society and civilization?
The Thanos scenario was discussed back in OT110. There was no stipulation to evenly distribute deaths, but by the law of large numbers they’d be very close to evenly distributed, anyway.
Thanks for pointing me to this, I hadn’t read it. It’s hard to follow everything on SSC.
I was mostly interested in the economy at large. If we only have half the farmers/workers to produce food/products, but they only have half the population to satisfy – will the economy basically be the same?
Probably not. Even leaving aside the massive short-term disruption, there’s a lot of stuff that’s really only practical at scale today, and which wouldn’t be in an economy half the size. Take Scott’s blogging. Even if he doesn’t go away, half his audience (and thus his Patreon supporters) do. Do we expect that he might pick up some people whose favorite bloggers disappeared, but he didn’t? Yes, but the blog’s readership has been relatively flat for the last few years, so there’s probably not a huge uptick coming from people who previously were following someone else. Now his Patreon revenue is cut in half. That may not matter a huge amount to him, but replace him by some business doing some obscure and specific thing, which is pretty close to satisfying the demand for that thing now, but which can’t keep going with demand halved.
Parts of the economy would be devastated. Fiat currencies in particular would collapse which would cause extremely difficult to navigate problems. Most of the housing stock in the US would be worthless and so every bank loan against that stock would be worthless, and every loan against that loan would be worthless. Every company that has sold life insurance policies would be bankrupt, and likely every health insurance company and by proxy every health care provider. Every settlement house/stock exchange would be bankrupted, the US government would be effectively bankrupt as debt to GDP/debt to capita would double at least. Direct monetization is basically the only recourse and all instances of collapsing production with monetization of debt have lead to hyperinflation.
No system that relies on the stability of the US dollar would survive.
Industries with large stocks would basically die. Housing stocks would make it highly unlikely that any new units would be built for years to decades, and the decaying infrastructure would pose serious problems. New car production would likewise drop to near zero, as would car part production for several years.
Capital decay is then a huge issue. The same number of hydroelectric damns will exist with half as many qualified people to run and maintain them and catastrophic damn failures would follow because of that. Vast numbers of empty buildings would allow for massive fires to start and rage across cities with half the number of trained firefighters and larger distances to get to the fires.
@Nick
Meta-Question – I frequently see posts like this and think. Hmm, I vaguely remember having this discussion before, but if you put a gun to my head and told me to find it (unless it contained an easily-googleable keyword) I’d be forced to mentally try and guess how long ago that was, then pick a series of OTs that correspond to that time period and cntrl-f my way to victory.
Absent the threat of death, that process is boring enough that I just don’t do it. Do you have a better process for finding previously-discussed topics, or are you just in possession of the kind of super brain that automatically categorizes these topics?
A little bit of both. I have a decently good memory, including who comments on SSC and interesting things they’ve said. I also read every comment on every thread. Mostly I just try to use Google in a smart way, or lately The Nybbler’s very useful tool. Like, I found that thread by searching “Thanos” and recognized jaime’s post.
We already know what happens when society takes a mortality rate of ~50% to a disease, because the Black Death happened, so that’s probably the best way comparison point we have.
Certainly 1300s Europe was less connected than our modern world, but it seems likely the effects would be similar. Wages would skyrocket because labour is more expensive relative to capital (since diseases don’t kill capital), there would be a population boom afterwards and the age curve would shift dramatically younger.
It’s interesting to ask how long things are highly disrupted, though. Like, do basic food production and local government and utilities and such continue, or do they break down. I recall John Schilling pointing out that most military units didn’t keep functioning after suffering 50% mortality, and probably most of society is a lot less robust w.r.t. people dying than the military.
Eventually, yes, we should end up with higher wages and an economic boom, but we might go through some really nasty years first.
The Black Death lasted ~5 years with a 2 year major peak and it didn’t cause the collapse of governments or society, although it created a SUPER morbid streak in culture for a long time.
Yeah, people dying and people being killed seem to drop into two different slots in people’s heads. In some European town a single person could be called to double digits of will readings in a single week. This spoke both to the resilience of the people and the political structure, neither of which broke down even at the height of the dying.
Are there reasonable parallels to look to? What I can think of:
a. Places that endured some huge disaster that killed a large fraction of people.
b. Wartime destruction/disruption of civilians.
c. Genocode
d. North and South American Indians after being introduced to the Eurasian disease environment. (We know whole big towns/settlements dissolved.)
There’s a story in (I think) _The Secret of Our Success_ about an Eskimo tribe that had some disease go through that was deadly enough to kill off a big fraction of its members, with the result that the tribe permanently lost a bunch of knowledge, notably including how to make bows and arrows. I would expect loss of a lot of knowledge–not book learning stuff, but practical details/experience that doesn’t easily fit in a book. There’s a world of difference between “here is a book saying how to build a chip fab” and “here’s a team of guys who have helped build three chip fabs successfully.”
If the team includes at least 10 people, there’s only a 1-in-1000 chance that a randomly selected 50% mortality event kills all 10.
MattM:
Yeah, that tells us that a lot of airplanes crashed right after the snapture, a fair number of people died on operating tables, many babies and toddlers died as all caregivers turned to dust, etc. Also, many governments, companies, military units, etc., lost their whole top management/command team/political leadership in an instant. If the governor and lieutenant governor disappears, maybe the secretary of state or attorney general or speaker of the legislature can step in, but in some states, between turning to dust and being hit by crashing airplanes or cars, you probably lose everyone with a plausible claim to legitimacy.
Also, a whole lot of shellshocked behavior. The black death caused some high grade crazy.
I know very little about this, but it sounds interesting. Can you give any examples?
One example is that death became a lot scarier.
The grim reaper as a dark figure seems to have come out from that period.
https://www.britannica.com/story/where-does-the-concept-of-a-grim-reaper-come-from
The economy now is nothing like in the 1300s. Back then, the economy was limited by the amount of food that could be grown to feed the population. Now, we are only farming a fraction of the food that we could, and the economy is mostly limited by our ability to create technological innovation (and the more population, the more smart people who can innovate).
-1
The 1300s were about at the Malthusian limit of what the land could produce to feed the people. And population could grow if that limit were suddenly far below it. So, when the Black Death made it far below it, wages rose and reproduction rates propelled it back to it.
Today, we’re nowhere near the Malthusian limit. The effect on capital/wages is unclear. On the one hand, the world would be spared the need to build housing for quite a while, benefiting labor. But other kinds of “capital” are really human capital, the investment is in the productive capacity of the workers. And after this windfall gain to labor, economic growth would be lower than it was before due to less technological innovation. With technology you often need a small group of people to create and maintain it and everyone, whether that’s a population of 1 or 2 billion, can enjoy it. Halving the population halves the number of people to create and maintain it, while not making the job any easier. And fertility rates today are low and would remain low for the same reasons if half the population died.
We have absolutely zero examples of what it would be like if a modern developed economy lost half of its people.
The only example where a civilization lost half of its people to disease rather than invasion we have is the Black Death.
And it turns out people are pretty resilient against that.
I think the Holocaust killed something like 2/3 of the Jewish population of Europe. The Cambodian genocide killed something like a quarter of the country’s population. Those probably give us some kind of image of the impact of Thanos’ finger snap on society.
How about the siege of Leningrad? According to Wikipedia, something like a million people died in the evacuation and siege, out of a starting population around three million.
The problem with using genocide- and war-based examples is that those come with a whole host of other problems which wouldn’t exist if people just dropped dead. E.g., foreign invasion often sees vast numbers of displaced people, destruction of infrastructure, resources being diverted towards military supplies, etc., which have a huge impact on society, but which wouldn’t accompany a Thanos-like event.
@The original Mr. X
Precisely my point.
A situation where half the populace dies and everything else remains pretty much in place is incredibly unique.
And we know from human history that we are surprisingly adaptable to that.
@EchoChaos: We have a theoretical model (provided by Alexander Turok) which predicts that humanity should have recovered from the Black Plague to the trajectory it was previously on, but makes the opposite prediction for a present-day culling. So it’s not clear why we should expect modern-day Thanos to be like the Black Plague.
My current efforts at house hunting would get a lot simpler, so that’s nice.
cassander:
But only with probability 1/2.
I think in either case he wouldn’t have to worry much about the housing market!
I don’t know about that; there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of vacant real estate in the Good Place to meet the sudden demand.
Surely the graveyards would be full?
My grandpa always said of graveyards that people are dying to get in.
Bargoens: slang of travelers
The (Dutch) low countries used to have a street slang spoken by traveling salespeople, gypsies, vagrants, beggars, thieves, etc, called Bargoens. The earliest dictionary written for this slang is from the mid 16th century. This is not a full-fledged language. It has the same grammar as Dutch, but has a partially different dictionary, consisting of a few hundred words mainly involving the typical pursuits of the speakers: trade, crime, body parts/functions, food and entertainment. These words are mainly derived from French, Romani (gypsy) and Yiddish, the latter primarily in the northern variant of Bargoens.
The actual words differed by time and place, with experts having conflicting opinions whether some of these languages are properly called Bargoens or whether they are just a local vernacular. There was a extensive mixing and overlap between local vernaculars and Bargoens in any case.
Words from both Bargoens and local vernaculars were adopted into Dutch, although words from Bargoen and Yiddish origin are often confused with each other. Some examples of Bargoen words from Romani that are common in Dutch today:
‘Giuchél’ which means dog became ‘joekel’. This evolved to mean big dog and then just big. So ‘that is a joekel of a fish’ means ‘that is a huge fish.’
‘Beinck’ which means devil became ‘bink’. This evolved to mean tough guy. In modern Dutch, this is most often applied to mature/masculine boys, especially as praise. These people are unaware that they are calling that boy the devil.
‘Muló’ which means dead became ‘mollen,’ to destroy. Nowadays mostly applied to inanimate objects. ‘I molled the TV’ = ‘I destroyed the TV.’
Some examples from Yiddish:
Hebrew ‘mesjoega’ -> Yiddish ‘mesjoege’ -> ‘mesjogge.’ This means crazy.
Hebrew ‘panim’ -> Yiddish ‘ponem’ -> ‘porem.’ This means face, but this meaning is no longer known in Dutch. It is just used in an expression: ‘that is no porem’ = that looks ridiculous. This works because face, looks and sight more or less have the same word in Dutch (‘gezicht’). We also use the expression without the Bargoen word: ‘that is no sight,’ which has the same meaning as the one with the Bargoen word.
Hebrew ‘chen’ which means charming, became ‘chein’ in Yiddish and then ‘gein’ in Dutch, meaning fun. So ‘geintje’ means a bit of fun or a practical joke. It can also be combined with ‘ponem’ (but not ‘porem’!), to make ‘geinponem,’ which means joker.
Amsterdam and its local vernicular in particular, has a strong Yiddish heritage, not necessarily derived from Bargoens, but often directly from Jews. Yiddish has the word Mokum which means city or place, which was used with a letter from the Hebrew alphabet to denote specific places with a large Jewish community. Amsterdam was Mokum Aleph (Aleph = A in Hebrew). Berlin was Mokum Beis (for Hebrew B). Rotterdam was Mokum Resh (for Hebrew R). The word Mokum, without Aleph, is now used as a nickname for Amsterdam.
The word was was once chosen as the best word from the Amsterdam vernicular is ‘achenebbis,’ which means poor or crappy. This is actually a combination of ‘ach,’ which is the Dutch equivalent of ‘oh,’ as in ‘oh, dear’; with the Yiddish ‘nebbisj’ which means sad. So ‘achenebbis’ = ‘Oh, how sad.’
Interesting. ‘Muller’ is UK slang meaning much the same thing. The etymology is said to be uncertain – I wonder if we got it from Dutch?
Roma migrated to the UK in the 16th century and spoke Romani until the 19th century, when they adopted English and Angloromani. Angloromani has English grammar and syntax, but a Romani vocabulary. The latter seems to have contributed some words to English (like ‘chav,’ coming from ‘ćhavo’ meaning boy). Also: pal and lollipop.
It seems likely that ‘muller’ came directly from Angloromani, as ‘muló’ sounds a lot closer to ‘muller’ than ‘mollen.’ If the word came from Dutch, I would have expected it to have become ‘moller.’
Interesting. In Norwegian, there are two expletives, ‘jævel’ and ‘jækel’, and since they are used more or less interchangeably, I was under the impression that the second was a slight modification of the first to milden it or circumvent the taboo on swearing (similar to using ‘heck’ instead of ‘hell’). The first is pretty clearly derived from a word for devil (you can recognize the similarity), but your description suggests that it is taken from Dutch instead.
That is quite possible. There was a lot of trade between the countries due to the Hanseatic League.
I think there’s a similar phenomenon in Argentinian Spanish, mainly associated to my mind with Tango, which I think is called lunfardo. This link describes it, though I don’t know much Argentinian slang so I can’t tell how accurate it is.
I just looked up whether the Hebrew “chen” meaning “charming” gave rise to the German diminutive “-chen” as in Mädchen – but it appears that is not the case.
However, the German “-chen” is related to the English diminutive “-kin” as in lambkin, pumpkin and munchkin. There is another Etymology for “-kin” with the meaning “like” and today I discovered the word “Dutchkin” meaning Dutchlike.
In Dutch, -kin evolved into -tjen and then -tje. This made the sound much softer (replacing the hard k with the soft tj). Diminutive usage in Dutch is more common with women, who on average prefer to speak less harshly than men, although it is very common in general. Some words like girl are more often used with a diminutive (‘meisje’) than without (‘meid’).
This seems similar to what happened in German, where ‘mait’ got completely replaced with diminutive variants, like Mädchen and Mädel. Of course, the English ‘maid’ comes from proto-German.
English never had a diminutive version of maid, which may have contributed to it no longer being used to refer to girls, but only servants (in Dutch, ‘meid’ can refer both to a servant or a girl).
“Maiden” (an unmarried or virginal woman) is a diminutive version of “maid”. But the various online etymology sources suggest the original “maid” was lost and then re-created as a shortening of “maiden” (and meaning the same thing, a use which still exists in fantasy, the SCA, and the title of Jean D’Arc), after which its meaning changed to mean “female servant”.
Oh right. It’s a much harder sound than the Dutch and German variants, which may explain why it’s no longer used much.
> ‘joekel’. This evolved to mean big dog and then just big.
How is this pronounced? I wonder if ‘yokel’ (often used in the derogatory rhymed phrase ‘local yokel’) in English might be related. The OED has it showing up in the early 1800’s, “origin uncertain”, meaning “An uneducated and unsophisticated person from the countryside; a rustic, a country bumpkin.” It doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to go from a big dog to a country bumpkin.
It is pronounced like ‘yokel,’ but with the o replaced by the u-sound from ‘universal.’
The etymology of ‘yokel’ seems to be very unclear.
The same word in (slang) English (I assume also from the Yiddish) is “meshuggah”, which also means crazy. Although searches for it are overwhelmed by the Swedish metal band, which probably got the word from the same place.
Another origin seems very unlikely. There don’t seem to be words like it in other old languages.
Thank you, very interesting! The German counterpart is called Rotwelsch, which seems to borrow quite a bit from Yiddish, too. Is it related to Bargoens, or a completely different vocabulary?
Supposedly there is a substantial overlap, although the meanings can differ a bit. Rotwelsch has/had ‘bing’ for farmer/burgher/inhabitant, which also comes from the Romani word for devil (‘beinck’), just like the Bargoen ‘bink’ (young man). In at least one Bargoen variant, ‘being’ was used as ‘he/you.’
The word ‘linkmiegel’ went from Rotwelsch to Bargoens to Dutch. In Rotwelsch, ‘linkmichel’ means inexperienced criminal or untrustworthy person. In Bargoens it shifted more to a generally untrustworthy person, who can be very clever. This is also the Dutch meaning.
Roll over, GPT-2: Google has a new chatbot Meena:
Not currently available to the public, unfortunately.
I wrote a short story for a competition that requires prompts, in this case Historical fiction/a syndrome/a barber. It’s not rationalist-y at all. I would appreciate feedback if anybody feels so led.
No specific feedback, but I thought it was quite good.
I’m not going to do the thing where I pretend this comment does not make me feel good. this comment makes me feel good.
I’m not sure if the age of the narrator really fits.
It seems you want him to be young foolish and confident kind of stereotype, but I’m not sure if at that time period, 25 would be considered to be of that age group.
The time period also makes some of the phrases and idioms anachronistic – even though I am assuming you tried to keep the style close to the period. For example, imposter syndrome is a fairly recent term, but I’m guessing that was tied to the competition.
Also, though it’ll probably be better for someone more acquainted with that period of Blackpool, by that time, Blackpool would have become already sizeable tourist destination. It seems hard to believe that there would be only 1 or 2 barbers available.
Lastly, from the wiki entry, “By the middle of the 18th century, the practice of sea bathing to cure diseases was becoming fashionable among the wealthier classes, and visitors began making the arduous trek to Blackpool for that purpose.” This really does not sound like a place to “throw myself among the common folk”.
Still I don’t think these hurt it too bad assuming the competition wasn’t meant to focus on the historic part.
Overall, it was an enjoyable, short romp. Best of luck to you.
I thought of 25 as perhaps being young looking at life expectancy, but I think the average age of death if you got to 21 was 70-something so I decided considering a 25-year old “half dead” was probably a mistake. Could for sure be wrong about that, though. The “very few barbers thing” was convenient to me and I have no idea how many they would have had, so I decided to fudge it.
I don’t think I actually said “impostor syndrome” anywhere besides the title page, but I would be not at all surprised to find out I botched the general manner of speech of the era; it wasn’t an easy thing to research.
Blackpool’s biggest source of head-count in that era seems to have been working-class people on vacation from factories closed down for maintenance, so I think I’m still comfortable with that bit, I think? Unless I misunderstood something, which I do.
Thank you for reading it! I appreciate you taking the time.
Steelman of @HowardHolmes
I hope it is not in bad form to try to steelman other posters here; I think HowardHolmes has some good insights/interesting opinions but also that he is not always good at communicating them which makes it seem like he is just arguing semantics.
If you strip away the semantic debates, here is what I understand of Howard’s position:
1. If you find yourself in a position where it feels like “I want to stop my future self from doing X”, but you predict that your future self will do X, then if you think hard enough about why you expect your future self to do X, then eventually either you will no longer expect to do X, or it will no longer feel like you want to stop yourself. This could be phrased as “the apparent difference in preferences over time is actually just due to different information”, though that would get us into semantic debates again.
2. If others would think less of you for an action, then that causes you to be less likely to think of it as intentional. Since how others would view an action is not an intrinsic property of that action, this means that your notion of intentionality is not measuring any intrinsic property of your actions.
I think these are not crazy views. #1 sounds kind of like CFAR’s notion of “internal double crux applied to different timeslices of yourself”. #2 (or at least its first half) seems pretty plausible from an evo psych perspective.
Anyway, I may have missed some more potential distillations, and HowardHolmes can correct me if I’m wrong about anything.
Finally, of course I can’t tell other posters what to do, but I think it would be interesting if people tried to avoid the following words in discussion (with the exception of meta such as appears above):
– want, desire, prefer, care, intentional, culpable, …
And optionally:
– good, bad, beneficial, valuable, should, …
As one of the commenters on HHs original thread, I actually had no problem with the steelman version of his argument, and was able to understand what the argument through the semantics. My issue was the insistence on the semantics.
There is a valid idea, but words are redefined to make the idea seam larger and explain more. The redefinition is fuzzy enough to allow the person to argue almost anything.
This reminded me way too much of a certain popular persons ideas, and I think it is something to be discouraged.
From the outside it looked like it devolved into semantics pretty quickly. Honestly, “I’m going to define a common term in an uncommon way that tautologically leads to a controversial conclusion” is basically nerd-sniping, even if unintentional.
HH’s position went a bit farther than what you are the steelman talk about. They seemed to deny the possibility of trade offs – instead, if you choose between two things, it means your preference was always for what you ultimately choose, and you never “really” desired the other thing at all!
But choice, trade offs, opportunity costs… all these concepts essentially require a model where we can simultaneously desire multiple things, and sometimes that choice is going to come down to a chance of circumstance (or your emotional state in that instant, or whatever). A model where any action taken is 100% “wanted” and every other option is 0% “wanted” just isn’t going to match most people’s experience, and I would argue it is actually much less useful.
As another of the commenters in @HowardHolmes thread, I appreciate your effort to make his point in a different way.
Your point #2 seems fine to me. I agree with @HowardHolmes that there is a certain amount of delusion going on and that we tend to have a blind spot for it. I think this is basically the point of Robin Hanson’s elephant in the brain. But I want to be very careful with this argument because you can use it to counter any objection against itself and I don’t think that it gives a sensible explanation of *all* actions.
I mostly disagree with your point #1. Your “if you think hard enough” does some heavy lifting. You assume here that it is possible to transform your thoughts and emotions into a coherent whole without contradictions and inner conflicts. I think Scott’s account of the brain as a mountainscape where isolated valleys do their own things and hold wildly contradictory opinions is very relevant here. Even if your inner world could be unified into a logical consistent unified whole in principle (and I seriously doubt that), there’s the issue of time: we don’t have enough time to “think hard enough”.
And I’m not sure what conclusions you draw for yourself from the “different information” point of view. How do you handle situations where the perceived current preferences is at odds with predicted future preferences like in my diet pill example? Do you take the pill or not? Why?
So, one step in the CFAR technique is when you get to a point where you can’t model what future-you would say, you may have to wait until a situation comes up which is sufficiently similar to the one you are interested in that you can now speak on behalf of future-you. That at least seems somewhat similar to Richard in your link learning something from being him-in-the-moment. I agree that it’s not quite the same thing as just “think[ing] hard enough” — I put that in more because it seemed like what HowardHolmes might say than because I agreed with it.
I mean, there’s no way to know without going through the IDC technique, or some other way of aligning with your future self…
I’m not really sure how to respond to this. First of all, I don’t know if my steelman is really the same as what you are calling “denying the existence of preferences about preferences”. Second, you say it “sounds like a crazy view”, but don’t say why, so there’s nothing to counter. My plausible argument was intended to be the CFAR technique (expanded below in my reply to u/paragonal_), but it sounds like you want something more than that.
I don’t agree with either of your summaries. It’s hard to discuss them precisely because they depend crucially on the word “preferences”, but according to the notion of preferences that I use (which is different from HowardHolmes’ version), preferring that your future self does X is not the same as preferring that your future self prefers to do X. So I would disagree with your version of the claim. On the other hand, HowardHolmes might agree with it (and I might agree with his agreement if we stipulate that we are using his definition of preferences).
I believe all of the claims in this debate have been about humans, you are the first to introduce general agents.
If the only things you can say HowardHolmes disagrees with others about are things that contain words in the OP list, then I think that means the disagreement is semantic.
@zqed: Your previous post framed the issue at hand as one about general agents, with a version for humans as a potential refinement. If that is the way you see things, fine, but I wanted to make clear that you were the only one thinking of things in this way. If you were already aware of this, it was not clear from your previous comment.
You seem to have taken my comment about tabooing and semantic debates the wrong way; I apologize. If it helps, I was intending “you” as generic rather than personal, sorry if that was unclear.
I do think the purpose of taboo can be lost with just a single word that one uses to represent a black box. (Sorry that you seem to have spent effort towards a goal that I didn’t really intend.) I also don’t think that I’ve used “prefer” as freely as you say; I think all my uses are meta uses that are clearly acceptable.
(I think this is a good learning experience for me: if I ever want to suggest a taboo again, it seems I should explain it better…)
Yeah see as I said in the OP, I think this could have been interesting, it is definitely in the spirit of the taboo. But of course it was ultimately your decision.
I actually don’t think we’re in a semantic debate right now, what I meant was that your remarks seemed to be evidence that HowardHolmes’ previous debates had been semantic.
Anyway, don’t burn yourself out…
Where is the original discussion?
HowardHolmes has been intermittently starting conversations about his views for quite a while now. The most recent discussions are here, here, and here.
You spelled “constantly” wrong.
And you spelled “differently” differently 😛 Anyway, I just realized two of my links go to the same place, the second was meant to go here.
I’d like to better understand the strategy the Democrats and Republicans are taking regarding impeachment as it impacts the upcoming Democratic nominee for President. That is, which potential nominees come out ahead from the way impeachment is currently being pursued, and which are hurt. And from this, what can we conclude about which candidates are favored (or disfavored) by the people in each party making decisions regarding impeachment?
I realize there is another view which says that no information about “favorites” can be obtained from this sort of analysis, and that the people making the decisions are driven only by moral imperatives rather than strategic motives. While I can’t eliminate this possibility, I personally think that the successful politicians making the choices are more self-interested that self-less. If you disagree, I’d suggest that it can still be insightful to consider what the outcomes would look like if the decisions were being made strategically.
I feel this impeachment is particularly interesting because one (and only one) of the Democratic candidates (Biden) is central to the articles of impeachment. One view would be that this benefits Biden (any news is good news) and another (which I believe) is that being associated with impeachment is bad. With medium confidence, I feel like Biden is likely to suffer from his role in the process: superficially, he becomes more associated with Trump; and at least subconsciously, he is associated with corruption.
This would imply to me that the portion of Democratic leadership in charge of the impeachment effort cares more about trying damage Trump than they do about propping up Biden. I’d wonder (with even lower confidence) if it goes even farther, and if they feel that harming Biden actively furthers their goals. Maybe they think this approach and timing benefits another candidate (probably Warren)? There is the theory that the chosen timing is harmful to the sitting Senators in the group — that they’ll miss out on essential campaigning because they are obligated to attend the impeachment hearings. Perhaps, but this feels secondary to the primary effect on Trump and Biden. Or maybe both are true and their true preference is not a current Senator?
On the Republican side, there seem to be competing philosophies. Is the goal to get the trial over with as quickly as possible, or to drag it out in an attempt to do counter-damage to the Democrats. My guess is that if they wanted to (regardless of facts) they could arrange for the trial to paint Biden in a sufficiently bad light that he’s unlikely to win the nomination. But maybe they are hoping for a bigger prize: to avoid damaging Biden now in the hopes that he will be the nominee, so that they can then do damage to the actual Democratic Presidential candidate rather than just changing who gets the nomination.
Which raises the question, who do the Republicans want the nominee to be? That is, who do they feel most confident that Trump can beat most easily? While their bravado suggests they are supremely confident in Trump and aren’t worried about any of the current potentials, presumably they have consulting strategists who have higher confidence in beating some challengers than others. Who are these strategists suggesting that they promote as an opponent? Are Trump’s seemingly pro-Sanders tweets a sign that they prefer to go against Sanders? Or that they are so confident that Sanders won’t be the nominee that he seems safe to promote? I think in their ideal world (low confidence again) they’d like Biden to gain the nomination as long as they still have the opportunity to drag him over the coals by trying to turn the impeachment against him.
What do others think? I guess I’m more interested from hearing from Democrats about the Democratic strategy, and Republicans about the Republican strategy, but maybe this is asking for too much. Personally, I’m probably unduly prejudiced against both parties. Of the current Democratic candidates, I’d probably vote for Gabbard or Sanders if given a choice, but since I don’t think either is likely to be nominated, I will likely vote 3rd party again (Green or Libertarian). I voted for Stein in the last election as she matched closest to my preferences, which don’t seem to match anyone well, but are heavily against involvement in foreign wars.
I think the increase in the importance of gaming the news cycle/weaponized distraction explains much of this, more than any coherent or unified strategy in either party. They certainly have other plans and tactics, but when Trump tweets about Bernie, it usually has more to do with distracting the press from some controversy or inducing infighting in the democratic party than with a preference for a particular opponent. Some of the democrats feel that impeachment proceedings allow them to score enough news cycle points against Trump to outweigh the counterpoints against Biden; others disagree. I think Trump’s victory illustrated that a lot of establishment strategists aren’t all that fantastic, and I’m not sure they’ve much improved since then in either party. I think the republican party is unsure of its identity and there are quite a few competing philosophies, as you put it, which seem to be pretty self-interested and thus vague. I think quite a few would like to believe that there is a good Trump-free option, but they really don’t want the democrats to win or to lose their seats.
Many argue this is what the democrats did with Trump, and after what happened then, I think most are wary of this kind of reasoning. I’m sure they save a few strikes for October surprise material, though. But I think most people are thinking very, very short-term right now, with strategy focused a lot on simply keeping control of the news cycle.
I think it’s important to remember how much the media/information environment has changed over the last 20 years or so. A lot of the establishment experts have tons of experience that may not be so informative anymore. Trump’s campaign looked very much unlike other campaigns, to the extent that smart informed political insiders thought it couldn’t work. Maybe they were dumb, but also the world had changed quickly and a strategy that couldn’t have worked in 2000 worked shockingly well in 2016.
Keep in mind that many of these experts are or were gatekeepers to some extent. A person with power making a prediction can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A decent argument can be made that Trump benefited from the gatekeepers losing power, as well from a style of campaigning that ‘hacked’ the gatekeepers (by making them give a lot of attention to someone they deemed to have no chance, while they gave (almost) no attention to other ‘hopeless’ candidates).
Absolutely. It is a common pattern throughout history. They became too comfortable and vulnerable to an insurgency; social and/or tech changes eventually lead to an insurgency. I don’t think much has changed since then. But I think a lot of outsiders share those assumptions, and therefore misunderstand the strategic implications of a lot of actions. For example, many people continue to think each of Trump’s tweets should be a political death knell. The reason this isn’t so is because the purpose of them isn’t to send an appealing message, but to dominate the airwaves through controversy. Discussing these things at face value doesn’t give a good picture of what’s going on strategically with someone like Trump–with others, it might be an accurate picture, but the strategy that results from this mindset will probably seem rational but misguided. My point was that the strategic incidents mentioned can’t be directly compared at face value.
I’ve been imagining that Democratic leadership just doesn’t think it’s okay for Trump to use presidential power to gain campaign advantage in that way. I’m imagining them saying: “okay, so his attack on Biden hasn’t worked, but if we let him keep doing this, eventually he’ll find something that does work, and he’ll pin it on whoever eventually is the nominee.” So they feel like they have to try to discourage him from doing this, and this is the route they chose.
I don’t think that, back when they started the impeachment process, they had a clear idea of which candidates would be helped or hindered by it, more than others. I honestly don’t have much of an idea about that now.
I understand there are lots of reasons to distrust the “maybe the politicians actually just want the thing they appear to be trying to get” argument. I’m sure there are lots of cases where the politicians really are doing a bizarro three-dimensional-chess publicity move. But I haven’t been modeling this as one of them.
I actually still can’t parse why the Democrats sent the impeachment to the Senate already.
It’s the House investigation that really hurts the President, not the Senate trial. It’s either bad enough the President resigns or it hasn’t convinced the opposing party in which case the President will be acquitted.
Nancy Pelosi sent it when she did as a favor to Biden, who can keep campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, while Warren, Sanders, and Klobuchar have to stay in DC.
As a starting point about the model, my best (not all that informed) model is:
a. Most politicians have some principles they care deeply about, an a broad desire for the good of {the nation, the world, society, etc}.
b. All politicians who manage to remain in office for very long apply a lot of strategic thinking to what positions they can take or support vs which ones they must not support, what actions will look good/bad on TV/on Twitter, what effect a given action or position will have on their fundraising, relationship with the media, voters, party leadership, etc.
c. Clearly there’s a lot of tension between these two, and politicians have to find a way to compromise between their actual ideals and goals and sense of what’s right, and political reality. It seems to me that the higher you rise in politics, the more you must compromise those ideals and goals in favor of gaining and keeping power.
d. By the time you’re very far up the ladder in politics, you don’t have time or energy to become very well informed on most of the things you’re voting on or supporting/opposing–there just aren’t enough hours in a day and most of your time is spent gaining/keeping and carrying out the duties of your office. I think congressmen rely very heavily on their staffs for this kind of subject-matter expertise[1].
e. Team spirit / tribalism is a basic feature of humans, and is surely present in politicians and their staffs/aides/etc., as well as their voters and donors. That probably colors everything in the impeachment battle.
f. There are also personality issues that sometimes matter–some people can’t stand each other, sometimes someone takes a public position they can’t back down from, etc.
[1] This makes me wonder how much more the world would make sense if I had a better understanding of what kind of people become congressional staffers, what filters are in place to getting into that position, etc. I’ve heard the claim that a lot of staffers are smart ambitious young people who hope to parlay their experience into better jobs elsewhere, and that probably drives a lot of their behavior. I sometimes wonder the same things about clerks for the supreme court and the top level circuit courts–the justices are very busy and also often quite old, and the clerks are young and ambitious and energetic, and it seems likely that the courts’ actions make more sense in light of the clerks’ filters and incentives.
“This makes me wonder how much more the world would make sense if I had a better understanding of what kind of people become congressional staffers, what filters are in place to getting into that position, etc.”
The names of Congressional staffers are public, and most of them have public LinkedIn pages, so it’s really easy to learn about them. E.g., Nancy Pelosi’s staff list can be found here: http://www.congress.org/congressorg/mlm/congressorg/bio/staff/?id=447. And here are LinkedIn pages for three of her more experienced legislative aides: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-edmonson-76432bb/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-ross-0877133/, and https://www.linkedin.com/in/josue-ambriz/.
In my experience with Congressional staff, they tend to be bright (but not too bright, think 65th to 85th percentile, not top 1 percent like supreme court clerks), ambitious, hard-working, at least somewhat idealistic, and very political. (Maybe selected for ideological loyalty?) But they have very little experience (typically start as a staffer as a first job out of undergrad) and often leave after 2-8 years to run for office, take a position in the executive branch, become a lobbyist, or go to law school. And they have huge areas of responsibility — Pelosi has only six legislative aides assigned to be her experts on specific policy areas. One of her staffers I linked to above is responsible for the following policy areas (either alone or with one other legislative aide): child/family issues, education, telecom, elections, energy, environment, firearms, judiciary, tax, transportation, trade, commerce, labor, budget, arts/humanities, civil rights, government affairs, appropriations, science/technology, social security, space / NASA, pensions, women’s issues, and immigration. So they’re extremely busy, and never have time to learn any of the policy issues in any depth. In contrast, the executive branch has hundreds to thousands of people working full time in each of those policy areas, with higher average years of experience, and often relevant experience outside of government. I’ve always wondered why Congress lets the executive branch control so much of the policy-making apparatus, rather than move that expertise in-house. That way, more policy details could be set by legislation rather then executive-branch rule-making, making it more difficult for Presidents to reverse course.
You cant reason this way, because this is just not why anyone involved is doing any of this. The democrats are fighting Trump because they see this as an abuse of office beyond all toleration, and the republicans are rallying out of pure party discipline/fear of the trumpist horde in primaries. Or basically, what pancrea said.
This seems like an in-group view of the issue.
It could as easily be me saying “The Democrats are fighting Trump out of pure irrational hatred, and the Republicans are rallying because this impeachment is clearly spurious”.
I think the point is that the original question is focusing on strategy when a significant driver of both parties’ behaviour is “doing what we believe to be right”, not broader “does this help or hinder our 2020 election chances” strategic reasoning.
(At least I think this is true of Democrats; I assume the same is true of Republicans).
Most of this type of modeling is uninformative because Ds and Rs are far from monolithic groups, the House and Senate have very different timelines for reelection and party wise those who are in secure seats have a lot more power than those in insecure seats. All these lead to a lot of messy results that differ from straight line self interest or straight line moral reasoning.
the correct answer is probably that the democrats are fighting Trump because they see this as an abuse of office beyond all toleration and the Republicans are rallying because they see the impeachment as clearly spurious
A more correct answer, I suspect, would be a mix. Some Democrats are fighting Trump because they see this as an abuse of power, some think the offenses are not really sufficient for impeachment but that it would be politically costly not to go along. Similarly, mutatis mutandis, for the Republicans.
I suspect there are also Democrats that wanted Trump impeached from the start, and this was the first real opportunity to do so.
I’d be much more inclined to believe both cynical motivations are true rather than both “good” motivations being true.
Dems think this hurts Trump (and also they are innoculating Biden from Hunter-corruption allegations if he becomes the nominee).
Reps think if they let this pass they will lose in 2020 and all future R presidents will get deep-sixed.
My general view is that most Ds went along with this because they expect it to hurt Trump, relative to whoever the D nominee ends up being. Whether or not it boosts any particular D nominee relative to other ones is probably incidental, at best.
It seems that Trump is reacting in such a way as to draw a lot of attention to Biden specifically. I suspect Trump thinks this helps him, particularly if Biden wins the nomination, but even if he doesn’t (because Biden will still be part of the establishment, will have endorsed the eventual nominee, is part of the legacy of the Obama administration, etc.) It may also be the case that being on the receiving end of attacks from Trump helps Biden, relative to other D nominees, because it makes him appear to be Trump’s primary adversary (I’ve long agreed with the notion that Trump has a lot of power to “pick his opponent” by directing all of his ire towards one specific candidate. If Trump were to tweet insults at one and only one D nominee, it seems to me that Democrats would immediately and instinctively rally around that person for tribal reasons, even if ultimate they’d have a slight preference towards the policy positions of a different candidate).
There is no “the Democrats” and no “the Republicans.” There are individual politicians and staffers and pundits with their own agendas, but there’s no way a coherent party-wide strategy emerges from that.
From my own perspective on the left, you have a bunch of crazed #Resistance types (mostly in the media but some in elected office) convinced Trump commits treason every time he belches, while Pelosi and the Congressional leadership have been far more skeptical and focused on the day-to-day business of governing. There’s also AOC’s “squad” pushing for their hard-left policy agenda, who’ve gotten a lot of press but very little in tangible results. And there are a lot of other factions and subfactions out there, not to mention that we have a presidential primary going on in parallel to all this.
This does not produce a coherent Democratic strategy if you model the party as one uniform blob – why wait a year to impeach? Why not just do it on the first day of the session? Now if you recognize the leadership’s interests as separate from the #Resistance, it looks different – either Pelosi thinks Ukraine is qualitatively different from Russia and the case for impeachment was too strong to ignore, even in the face of sure acquittal… or she just wants to toss the Maddow crowd a bone to get them off her back.
I’m not in a position to judge the Republican side, but I understand there are similar internal dynamics.
Yes, and the argument against dragging it out is just what they tell everybody in law school: never ask a witness a question when you don’t already know what they’re going to say. So some people wanted to drag Joe and Hunter in front of the senate and make them testify, but that could backfire. “Just get it over with as quickly as possible” won out.
In my opinion, Sanders is the easiest to beat. He has the least amount of broad appeal. However, I also don’t think he will be the nominee because I do not think the DNC will allow it, and for good reason: Sanders is not a Democrat. He only puts on the D label to run for President, but otherwise, he’s not doing the work of the party. He’s not fundraising for the party. He’s not going to be supporting people down ballot.
Yes, this kind of tension existed when Trump was running for the nomination in 2015/2016, but he and the RNC came to an agreement, and they signed a loyalty pledge. And it’s worked out very well: Trump has worked hard fundraising for the RNC and they’ve been shattering small donor records. He goes out and stumps for other candidates. He’s paid them back. I don’t think any such deal has been proposed between Bernie and the DNC.
So if Bernie doesn’t get the nom, what are his supporters to do? There were a not insignificant number of people who supported Bernie in 2016 and then voted for Trump because they were more anti-establishment than they were pro-left. Trump’s appeal to them is “hey, the system is rigged as you’ve just seen and I’m trying to fight that same system.” So right now he’s propping up Bernie so he can be that shoulder for the Bernie supporters to cry on later. Also, he’s just lobbing grenades into the Dem camps because chaos on the other side is good.
My sense of the correct answer is that it’s essentially chaos. Everyone involved has different enough incentives to make critical differences in how they make decisions. A lot of readers no doubt already know this, but just to lay out as much as I can:
Democrats have an obvious incentive to lower Trump’s re-election chances. Republicans, naturally, prefer the opposite.
Some Republicans have cultivated an anti-Trump reputation. Whether principled or not, this influences their actions – they can defect because of it, or cooperate despite it, citing adherence to multiple principles.
Each party has an incentive to look like it’s got the moral high ground. Each also needs to look like it has integrity, which puts some limits on how many procedural shenanigans they can pull.
Individual Congresspeople have varying levels of cynicism about the process. Some are honestly offended by Trump, whether based on derangement or principle. And some are honestly offended by the offense. Everyone’s got different tolerances.
Some Representatives are in swing districts, and what they do has strong effects on their re-election chances. Some Senators are up for re-election as well. In a few cases, this implies defections from the default party incentives.
Some Congresspeople have chosen to groom their individual reputations (Sasse, Amash, Gabbard, etc.) Some Democrats have Presidential or VP aspirations. VP aspirations depend on who gets the Democratic nom.
The investigation is more adjacent to whatever Biden’s been up to than any other Democratic Presidential candidate, so he’ll behave differently, depending on how he thinks the timing will work out. His supporters in Congress will likewise behave differently.
For all Democratic nominees, they will want to time events to work well with whatever’s going on in the primary.
Earlier in the term, it looked possible to put a strong Republican challenger against Trump, win the nomination, and go forward. It’s happened in the past; Pierce lost his party’s nomination despite seeking it. But only once. I think that has since fizzled. But there might still be people trying to nurse that option.
The more I look at this, the more it looks like a D&D campaign run by at least a dozen different DMs at the same time, each competing for time to throw content at the PCs. That should give everyone a sense of how unpredictable it is.
You’re assuming that a hopeless impeachment of Trump — hopeless it seems even to bring the truth before the public — is strategic. I think it represents the exact opposite: the Democrats felt compelled by the emerging facts to stop being strategic. (Previous to the whistle-blower complaint, the majority had allowed Trump’s obstruction of justice on strategic grounds.)
I don’t think there’s much to suggest any strategic motive in favor of impeachment. It is an insane risk. Even in the very long term, when history looks back, the impeachment (and the failure to convict, failure even to enforce subpoenas or obtain a proper investigation) may embolden future presidential wrong-doing far more than if the Dems just pretended nothing happened.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune recently had an op-ed about a recent study that shows that the racial achievement gap in elementary and secondary education is significantly narrower in the most conservative U.S. cities than in the most progressive:
I find this surprising, not because of the direction of the difference, but that there are such significant differences at all. What are the chances this holds up, and if it does, it will actually affect anything?
I call cherry-picking. The original study the author cites for his list of “most conservative/progressive cities” actually lists Forth Worth as a relatively moderate city – the 10th most progressive city in Texas with over 50,000 people, in fact. The author lists Fort Worth as one of the most conservative cities in his study, though. How well do the study’s results stack up if you add more data points? My guess is, not well.
Edit: Edited for clarity.
Did you look at the study in the original post? It doesn’t appear to be cherry picking at all.
The 12 left-wing cities are:
San Francisco, DC, Seattle, Oakland, Boston, Minneapolis, Detroit, NYC, Buffalo, Baltimore, Chicago, Portland, OR.
The 12 right-wing cities are:
Fort Worth, Anchorage, Aurora, CO, Tulsa, Omaha, Anaheim, Arlington, TX, Jacksonville, Colorado Springs, Virginia Beach, Oklahoma City.
You could possibly argue that some of these cities don’t belong in their respective groups, but I think it is impossible to claim that the 2nd group as a whole isn’t a whole lot more right-wing than the 1st one.
It is a very interesting study. Thank you for linking that study, littskad. I previously read that op ed in the Minneapolis paper, but hadn’t seen the study it was based on. I would not be surprised if the identity politics that are very popular in left-wing cities does contribute to the race gap, but I don’t find this a slam dunk. For one thing, the left-wing cities are much bigger on average than the right-wing cities, which might somehow contribute to the gap.
What is just as interesting is the left reaction to this study. In both the original study and the op ed, they didn’t seem particularly interested in looking at what the right-wing cities were doing differently that might explain the difference. Instead they wanted to double down on what has not worked in the past. That is, everyone needed to get outraged about the gap and “demand a plan.” It seems the usual emphasis on “doing something,” even if you have no idea what to do.
In fact, there is now a push by two progressive types in Minnesota to have a constitutional amendment in the state to require quality education for all students. The stated intent of this amendment is to close the racial gap. Even though they have indicated no theory on why the gap exists in the first place. The plan seems to be to legislate away any problems.
Yes; I even searched out the original study the authors cite, which I specifically linked to. The authors claim that they’ve picked an assortment of the most “progressive” and “conservative” cities:
However, the Tausanovitch et al. study doesn’t support their rankings of cities by “most progressive” and “most conservative”. Fort Worth isn’t one of the 12 most conservative cities in the US; it isn’t even one of the 12 most conservative in Texas. How, then, did they select those 12, since their listed rationale is demonstrably untrue? My guess is because they wanted to tell a certain narrative.
The discrepancy is they looked at cities of populations >250k, whereas the original lists >50k.
As their chart shows, after doing this filter there are not many cities with significantly positive conservatism scores. Perhaps there was cherry picking in the 250k and top12 numbers? I don’t know. I suppose they could have just done a regression on all the cities, using the conservatism score.
Ah, good catch. That makes their decisions make more sense, yes. However, it doesn’t seem like it would be substantially more difficult to fit every city with available test data and then drill down in depth on a few randomly selected samples. I withdraw my accusation of dishonesty, but this is still pretty bad statistics.
yes.
there are also some slight inconsistencies with the way things are presented for each grouping; indicating this leans more towards activism than science.
I think the implication here is that this is a right-wing ideological thing. That is not true. I don’t know anything about the organization that created the study (brightbeam), but the CEO of the organization is Chris Stewart, who is a leftist Minneapolis activist. As you can tell reading the study, they are very much not happy about the results they found, but feel obligated to report it. Kind of the point of the title “Secret Shame.” These are sincere activists that see a problem with their own political side and want something done about it (although they don’t have a clue what can be done).
It was not meant to be. Any suggestions on how I should have phrased it to remove that implication?
I did want to point out also that they just picked every city in the US over 250,000, there was no bias at all there. I looked up the largest cities in the US, and I got almost all the same cities.
It is true that the left-most cities are mostly the largest ones, and the right ones are much smaller than average, so that might contribute to the difference. Regardless, the large difference found makes it an important issue to investigate further. It is a similar issue to why the most left cities have the highest homeless populations. IMO, the leftist politics contribute greatly to both problems.
By not saying it was activism instead of science. That implies an ideological bias. What did you mean then?
yes, i don’t think I implied they were right wing. you yourself called them activists in your reply.
Yes, the CEO is an activist, and presumably his organization. But one can be an activist and still follow science. But you said “instead of science.”
Your comment makes no sense unless they are right-wing. Why would a left-wing activist ignore science and create a study that showed that conservative cities do a better job on the racial gap that progressive ones, which would seem to discount their own priors.
I am more and more confused what you meant. But I think we are reaching the point of no benefit from our comments. You can explain one more time what you meant with no response from me, or else you just leave it go with this comment. I think we’ve beaten this to death.
it was a narrative focused report which many on this thread found issues with; and the ideology of the writers was irrelevant in noticing this.
This is probably the crux of it; you are viewing this as them stabbing their own soldier in the back in the mindkiller analogy. But you don’t have to be around very long to notice people far to left have no problem eating their own, and usually are not satisfied with any status quo, even in the most progressive of cities; a constant refrain of ‘we need to do even more’. This would of course be amplified if the activist had a more narrow issue (ed gap), rather than just team left-wing activist
To tangent a bit, this is my most beloved example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Me,_I%27m_a_Liberal
i look forward to your response letting me know if this cleared things up or not.
I’d guess that there’s a selection effect. Blacks who move into more conservative cities (or don’t move out when the city becomes more conservative) are likely to differ from those who prefer more liberal cities. Benefits to people unwilling or unable to work consistently are generally more generous in more liberal cities, and the sort of people for whom that’s an important consideration are likely to be less intelligent and/or less motivated than the rest, resulting in lower test scores.
Even assuming the correlation is true for the moment and would hold up on a larger sample, I see no obvious action to take from this. (A) It’s not clear what any causes are and they explicitly admit this and (B) even if there is some cause in there what do you do? randomly try conservative policies for 30 years at a time to see what turns out different?
Also, for the benefit of all, here are the mean scores of the 12 conservative cities by math reading and racial subgroup
**** | math | reading|
white| 52 | 57.5
black | 25.8 | 30.6
and for the 12 liberal cities
**** |math | reading|
white| 56.9 | 62.2
black | 15.6 | 21.8
Notice that in absolute terms, white children score about 5 points worse in conservative cities; black children do about 10 points better in conservative cities. So 1/3 of the difference in the gap could be summarized as “white children do worse in conservative cities”. This does not inspire confidence in the idea that there may be something different about governments or government policy that is the causal factor here.
Spitballing, I’d guess it’s mostly selection effects unrelated to government education policy although sometimes related to other government policies. For example, skimming the report it mentions Virginia Beach is the conservative city with the highest black children scores on math and reading tests. And it’s not even close. Black children in Virginia Beach do as well as whites. This immediately made me think “there’s probably a large military base there”. I checked, and there are 3 navy bases there (4 if you count one with an address of the next county) and defense is one of its major industries. That could be coincidence, but I’m suspicious effects like that are more important than government policy. What industry is in each city? What is the racial composition of the industry there? What are the test scores of kids of parents in that industry?
EDIT: Reading further down, it turns out the study authors went on to sometimes exclude Virginia Beach for the same obvious reasons. But the overall point stands, the same sort of effects likely holds but weaker for many industries.
Yet they have no problem with the title
It’s an interesting issue even if you reject the hypothesis that policy isn’t a direct cause. Does progressive policy attract the least-educable minorities? Does the presence of the least-educable minorities result in progressive government?
Less of this, please.
I am missing why this is objectionable. Can you clarify?
There are two possible root causes. One is that policy changes outcomes for minorities relative to whites, and the other is that the policy has no effect and it’s based on the underlying populace.
Hard disagree. Nybbler’s point that we may be missing the direction of the causality here is very well taken. And probably quite important to the question at hand.
Even if the implications of such a point are uncomfortable.
Honest question to better understand your position. What do you find particularly objectionable in that quote? Is it the notion of “least-educable minorities” as a concept?
I’m not trying to play stupid, I understand this can appear offensive. But any group of people will have a “least educable” contingent and a “most educable” contingent also. Ultimately the phrase is not a judgment on any minority.
Or is it the suggestion of the link between “least-educable minorities” and progressive ideology?
In any event I would hope that SSC can continue to host difficult discussions around sensitive topics in a respectful manner. Sweeping topics under the rug is not helpful to anybody.
The baked in assumption that there is such a thing as a “least-educable minority” raised my hackles.
Couple that with the ancillary assumption of “hmmm, progressive politics are either appealing TO or created BY the uneducated” and I just wanted to pull a yellow card.
I mean, heck. Let’s play Mad Libs and see if the sketchiness of this framing becomes clearer:
Does [INSERT IDEOLOGY I DON’T LIKE] policy attract [INSERT BOO-WORD]? Does the presence of [INSERT BOO-WORD] result in [INSERT IDEOLOGY I DON’T LIKE] government?
Fill in with:
Democratic Socialist, Bernie Bros
Trumpist, Q-anoners
Liberalist, Soy-Boys
Conservative, Anti-Vaxers
And you’ll see why I don’t think this was great.
There is also a “least-educable majority”, and a “shortest minority”, and a “tallest minority”. The existence of people on the extremes of any measure is 1) undeniable and 2) value-free. I would suggest you re-calibrate your hackles.
If someone were to say “the most racist rednecks vote for Trump”. That’s factually correct (probably). If you use that to imply anyone who votes for Trump is a racist redneck, then you’ve crossed the line into logical fallacy and lack of civility.
But using factually true statements should (almost?) never be wrong, if not in the service of a fallacy and if done respectfully.
To me, your reaction looks alot like giving progressive policies special protection in the sense that any criticism of them can be considered racist/Xist. Im not saying that’s what your doing, but it’s what it looks like to me.
I’ll admit, I wrote my above response after only EchoChaos’ response was up and didn’t see yours and Matt’s until after it was posted. My apologies for not more directly engaging with your points.
First off:
I hate arguing around definitions, but the term educatable carries around some baggage. Even knowing that definition one (capable of being educated) is probably the one that’s implied, the subtext of definition 2 (of or relating to mildly retarded individuals who may achieve self-sufficiency) is distracting, especially when it’s being applied to an ideology by a person I’m fairly confident doesn’t like said ideology.
Next up:
There are two problems with this argument:
First off, you’re conflating a very easy criteria to measure against a criteria that’s so difficult to measure that it might not be possible to measure.
Let’s go through some examples: A kid is incredibly intelligent but comes from a poor family and needs to take a job at the age of 14 to help his family. How would you rate his educatability? High as a result of his innate capability, or low as a result of his circumstance?
Next up: a kid has mental difficulties that make learning incredibly difficult. Fortunately, his parents/district/church/whatever invest significant time and effort in arranging an alternative education scheme for him and by high school he tests at levels equivalent to his peers. Is he on the low end of educability, or right in the middle of the spectrum?
Second issue with the argument:
Imagine if I told you that progressives only win elections because they’ve got overwhelming support of people over 7 feet tall. Suppose I also had the data to back this up, and yes – the incredibly tall DID pretty much all vote progressive.
The correct reaction wouldn’t be to seriously examine the causes that align the interests of the giants among us with the progressives, it would be to ignore me since the super-tall make up such a small percentage of the populace that their net impact (other than on nets of the basketball variety) can be assumed to be practically 0.
Furthermore, if there is some kind of negative association with Tall people, it would be also not out of the realm of possibility for me to make the conclusion that you didn’t actually care about this topic but were instead just interested in linking progressivism with those 7-foot jerks.
Going back to mad libs then:
Me asking “Does Trump attract racist rednecks?” Would probably be Ok, under your test, although we’d both agree it’s uncharitable.
The next question, however, “Does the presence of Racist Rednecks result in Trump?” fails your test (unless, I suppose the immediate answer given is no).
No, it’s annoyance at what I saw to be an implied assumption that an ideology I mostly subscribe to was the result the preferences and/or decisions of the mentally inferior.
@Aftagley
That you don’t share a belief in the axiom, doesn’t make it a bad comment.
Note that agreement with Nybbler’s axiom doesn’t require a belief in Human biosomething. It also follows from a belief in cultural differences that impact ability to learn, a belief that selection effects exist and/or a belief that poverty impacts ability to learn.
It seems very uncontroversial among progressives to claim that poor people have more difficulties in life, including in education.
I dont dispute that. But we should be able to discuss these concepts regardless. It wouldnt do to preempt criticism of rich capitalists by saying the word “capitalist” was used to dehumanize people during the Bolshevik revolution.
That’s true. But the underlying logic is unaffected by this. The gist of the argument is that progressive policies are more likely to forgive/reward bad behavior X, and so cities with progressive policies are more likely to attract those who commit bad behavior X. Who wants high minimum wages? People who work minimum wage. Who wants generous welfare? People who are on welfare. Who wants leniency for criminals? Criminals. (for all these you can preface them with “a group with a disproportionate amount of”). It might be hard to measure who is most likely to be on welfare or a criminal, but these people certain exist.
A bit uncharitable. But it’s also true, and I would hope that Trump supporters have a good answer to that line of attack. I believe I do anyways (very quickly, because racist rednecks dont have a better alternative).
That’s fair. But I think you would not disagree that progressivism is characterized in trying to help the least fortunate, which typically includes the mentally inferior.
I apologize for not being more direct here, since it looks like my main point here wasn’t clear, causing you to skip over it in your response. The thrust of that section was my next paragraph:
Asking “Does progressive policy attract the least-educatable minorities?” to me tracks pretty closely with “Does Trump attract racist rednecks?” It’s a specific question, any maybe carries around some baggage, but it’s one that reasonable people can discuss. This question is fine, and in retrospect I should have omitted it from my original post.
Asking “Does the presence of the least-educable minorities result in progressive government?” however, is different. It it’s like asking “Does the presence of racist rednecks result in Trump being elected?” Or, to distill both questions down to their more simplified versions, “Are progressives elected because of the uneducated?” “Was Trump elected because of the racists?”
Any attempt to explain an ideology’s success by saying it’s the result of a single slice of the demographic pie is too reductive. When that single slice has baggage attached to it, it just sounds like a partisan snipe.
Right. On this point anyways, we agree. I dont think that the presence of least-educable minorities result in progressive government. San Francisco and Portland are the way they are because of wealthy white people, not because of the presence of any minority.
Again I think we would agree on this that the answer is no. For the record I think to elect Trump you need a very bizarre confluence of multiple factors. As beautifully outlined here, racists did not elect Trump.
But these are fair questions to ask.
Yeah again I agree. It’s a poor hypothesis in that it’s very unlikely to be correct. But maybe 1 time out of 100 it will be true, and I’m glad people asked “Was Trump elected because of racists?”. If the answer had been yes, I would have been forced to revise my views. As it turns out, a very solid analysis shows that the answer is no, which reinforces my views.
Sorry, my phrasing was unclear. By “least-educable minorities” I mean “the least-educable members of minority populations”, not “the populations, distinguished by race/ethnicity, who are on the whole the least educable”. This effect wouldn’t require racial/ethnic group differences of any sort, though it doesn’t exclude them either.
I don’t think that was a big enough population to elect Trump, but I’m sure it was a big enough population to push Trump to a win in some counties, so I’m not sure I see that as a bad question to ask.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-ordering_principle
Two axes on which liberal/conservative local governments will differ involve law enforcement and public assistance. I’m pretty sure that you can lower your local school test scores a great deal over time by making your city very appealing for extremely poor people on public assistance to move to; it seems quite plausible that this could explain some effect like the one described above[1]. The easiest way to improve test scores in a school district is to make sure that very few poor minority kids go there, and this (very well-known, widely-applied, but also unwise to say our loud) fact drives a huge amount of the fights about school districts and segregation and busing and such.
Similarly, the nature of the local economy can drive some effect like this. Think of the DC area. There are a lot of poor and working-class blacks in DC and its suburbs, whose kids mostly don’t do well at school. There are also a lot of people, mostly white and Asian, who move into the area to work for the government or some government contractor or some surrounding businesses–these are often very smart, highly-educated, highly-motivated people, and their kids inherit some of that. So the DC area has *huge* black/white and *even bigger* black/Asian gaps.
You can get an effect like this by raising/lowering the bar for success. If you raise high school graduation requirements so that only the top 50% of students meet them, you will have a huge skew in black/white graduation rates. Lower the requirements so that the top 90% graduate, and the skew will be smaller. So you could see this kind of effect if more liberal cities had more rigorous academic standards for graduating high school[2]. And you might also be measuring other stuff like figuring out whom to exclude from testing, which I’ve read explains a lot of the differences between states in some educational rankings.
[1] Though with the little I have seen of their comparisons, I’m skeptical that there’s even really an effect there. To really do this, I think you’d want to match cities by size and region but with different political tendencies, or look for effects after some kind of major political change. If you’re just measuring the fact that Democrats control the governments of all the old rustbelt cities, it’s not clear you’re finding any actual differences in effects of policies.
[2] I think there’s an analogous effect for how strictly you enforce the laws vs racial imbalance in prison–jail people even for pretty minor stuff, and the black/white ratio behind bars goes up; jail people only for very serious stuff and it goes down. But I’m less sure of that.
Alternatively: maybe progressive policy attracts the most-educable whites? Or more to the point: maybe big coastal cities, which tend to be the most liberal in social outlook, also have the biggest economies which disproportionately attract successful people, most of who (for now) are whites?
This is one theory which explains the study’s results in a “boring” way. I’m sure we could think of other such theories…
My guess is that the education gap is merely an artifact of progressive run states generating inequality, as conservative run states and cities probably have job/career and housing economies that are less bifurcated than left wing run states.
I.E. in San Fransisco you’re either very rich/high paid professional, very poor/underclass, or you’ve moved to another city or another state because you can’t afford to live there. With the nation-wide economic/educational gaps that exist between whites/asians and blacks/hispanics, this tends to push the former group disproportionately upwards and the latter group disproportionately downwards.
Another possibility which is probably much less disturbing but IMO much less likely is that conservative school districts are much more likely to embrace the ‘no nonsense’ direct instruction teaching methods which are more effective at instructing students on the left side of the bell curve, plus the willingness to engage in disciplinary actions ensure that students in minority schools aren’t being harassed as often by delinquents.
Whatever reasons exist are likely related to the similar gaps in crime/arrest rates that red and blue states experience.
This was my first thought as well. The “liberal cities” they chose are mostly cities that have an upper and lower class, and not much in the middle. Since whites are more likely to be upper class than minorities, there will be a bigger gap between the races.
Which is to say, I suspect this is showing more differences due to class than due to race.
The immediate fact that jumps out to me is that they included Virginia Beach on a list of cities. I’ve lived there, Virginia Beach isn’t a city; it’s practically entirely suburban. Saying that anything VB does will serve as a policy counterweight to say, Chicago, is nuts.
Next weird choice: including Anchorage, AK on a list about racial anything (other than white-native relations). There are very few African Americans in Anchorage (less than 5% of population) and, while I don’t have the data to back this up, I’d put a significant amount of money down that most of them up there are there for work, not to set down roots (very common up there). I would posit that the percentage of African Americans kids in the anchorage school system is less that 5%, possible much less than 5%.
Going through the list of conservative cities, I keep seeing this patter – either they picked a location that might technically call itself a “city” but doesn’t match the commonly-used definition of city, IE – heavily urbanized, high population density, OR they picked places with such a small minority of, well, minorities that racial disparity would be almost impossible (barring truly heinous procedures.)
One problem is that due to US culture and politics, “big conservative cities” just aren’t as much of a thing.
Definitely, but they shouldn’t have to be. For the study to work some cities just have to be more conservative than others.
As someone painfully reactionary who would never want to live in the middle of nowhere, though, I want a return of urban conservatism. 🙁
Right.
I think this study might be more an indication that trying to effectively educate within an urban environment is more difficult than educating within a suburban environment.
If I had to guess, I’d posit that in suburban environments, you just can’t/don’t get the same kind of sharp racial cleaves you get in cities. If you’re school is in an African American part of NYC, you’ll get almost entirely African American students, but that just can’t happen in Anchorage.
ETA:
@Nick
I kinda disagree; if these kind of disparities are mostly an outcome of city size / extensive racial history AND all conservative “cities” are either smaller or newer than the liberal ones then we’re looking at apples and oranges.
One thing that would actually be interesting is if the length of time that minorities have been established has a substantial effect. i.e. if Southern cities do better than Northern or vice-versa.
I don’t see a notable North/South divide in the conservative cities listed, but there are no Southern cities in the liberal cities (Houston, Atlanta?)
So this could be entirely a difference between Northern and Southern blacks completely unrelated to politics. Migration effects from the Great Migration?
If this regresses back to “african-american do worse in the north” we are right back to my semi-joking proposition that the entirety of the problem is that vitamin D deficiency is super, super bad for you, and hardly any african americans get enough sunlight or sufficient intake via diet.
@Thomas Jorgensen
I am unironically interested in that proposition. Do you know of any studies on Vitamin D deficiency in the African American population?
.. quick googling. Uhm. It appears 70 percent of african americans in southern states are deficient in vitamin D. (presumably the 30% who are not are people who spend a lot of time outdoors) In the north, african american women who took supplements were still deficient due to the usual dose sold being somewhere in the vicinity of a third of what would actually be required to get them to healthy blood serum levels. Ouch. This is not considered a major health crisis because african americans also are less dependent on vitamin d for bone health than most people, but if vitamin d is more broadly important than that (.. odds, near unity), then the public health system has been ignoring a major threat to african americans for, oh, decades and decades.
@Thomas Jorgensen: Holy cow.
Vitamin D deficiency was recognized a century ago and it was added to milk. Similar to adding iodine to salt to stop thyroid issues.
You can find a bunch of links giving different versions of this story:
https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/vitamin-d-fortification-milk-2625.html
African americans are lactose intolerant in huge numbers! Adding it to milk almost looks like malice.
@Thomas Jorgensen
Wow. Those numbers are actively horrifying. That is a massive public health problem that is basically being ignored.
@Edward Scizorhands
Milk is a great place to put vitamin D for whites, who are mostly lactose tolerant, which could explain really low levels amongst blacks.
I wonder what we could fortify to help blacks.
Edit: @Thomas Jorgensen
Great minds think alike.
The baseline for the US is very low though, 70% deficiency in southern blacks would be better than the 77% overall mark in 2004 and a 97% mark in all blacks.
@Aftagley
I’m late to a thread that has taken a very different turn, but yeah, as far as larger vs smaller cities I concede the point.
I haven’t read the study, just comments here, but I thought the result was both that blacks did worse and that whites did better in the more left cities. That doesn’t fit the “Educating is more difficult” explanation.
Portland is 5% black and it made the prog list. What should the cutoff be for such a study?
Let me first suggest that if there is causation at all here, it more likely goes on the opposite direction of what the researchers are saying. If you are in a city where all of racial minorities are underperforming, you might be more likely to support progressive policies to fix the achievement gap, than if you are in a city with a slim achievement gap, and the progressive policies do not look necessary.
I still think the most likely reason for the effect is factors like population size, and intelligence were not adequately controlled for.
Yeah, liberal cities are all major metropolises (metropoli?) while the conservatives are all medium-sized. Not remotely comparable.
The plural of polis in Greek is poleis, but you might as well use metropolises.
It’s not clear if you should control for population size. If it turns out the effect is that the black/white gap is smaller in medium-size cities than large ones, and it’s also true that governance is less progressive in medium-size cites than large ones, the effect might still be a result of governance. Or not. Correlational techniques aren’t powerful enough to give you the answer. Population size may be a confounder, OR controlling on it may be controlling out the true cause.
I know first aid courses are fairly common and easily found, but is there anything if you’d like greater medical skills for dealing with emergencies on a much longer term basis? Skills such as stitching wounds etc. that you might want to be able to do if you’re going camping for months at a time. What’s the midpoint between doing a weekend course and spending 8 years to become a paramedic?
Honest truth is, there isn’t a lot of possibility space between ‘basic first aid will probably be good enough’ and ‘unless an ambulance shows up within fifteen minutes, you’re probably going to die.’ Most of those should be covered by an intermediate EMT certification course (~500 hours of training, usually available at your local community college). If you’re exceptionally paranoid or doing something really, really weird, combining wilderness lifesaving and nursing courses could work, but that’s getting up into the multiple-years range.
I don’t think it takes eight years to become a paramedic; a quick google suggests two years is a more reasonable estimate. But for what you’re talking about, the current standards are the Wilderness First Responder and Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician. Intensive WFR courses look to be about a week, and WEMT about a month if you’ve already got the WFR.
I have not done the WFR course but the shorter Wilderness First Aid class was itself pretty good. I thought it took a very reasonable view of the topic, focusing mainly on triage – here’s the stuff where you’re probably just dead, don’t get anyone else hurt trying to save you. Here’s the stuff that is potentially life threatening, call for evac immediately because there’s nothing we can teach you that beats getting to a real hospital within an hour or two, but here’s some things to do to increase chances of survival until help arrives. Here’s the stuff where you can plausibly stabilize the patient and self rescue. We didn’t do stitches explicitly (hard to practice), but we did cover immediate diagnosis and reporting key info to medical professionals, wound care, how to move (and when to not move) injured people, and stabilizing limb injuries (improvised splints and crutches, resetting dislocations in a way unlikely to make things worse, etc).
I’d recommend taking that and if you like it, signing up for one of the more advanced courses.
I remember my now-plastic-surgeon brother-in-law practicing stitches on a chicken leg at the kitchen table back when he was a student. Slice it deep, then stitch the various layers back together.
Interesting question. As someone who volunteers in EMS, I have some experience which might help.
First, a paramedic course is a lot shorter than you think. The US standard is to the point that it’s typically an associate’s degree (2 years), though some places still allow a certificate program which is shorter. Parts of Canada are moving to a 3 year program and some other parts of the world have a 4 year program.
Next, ask yourself what kind of situation you are trying to prepare for. If you want to be able to handle critical emergencies while hiking the back country with your friends, a WEMT course as noted is probably a good target. If you are worried about the collapse of civilization and you just want to be able to keep your friends alive you probably need to go for at least a PA (physician assistant) program which is 2 years + bachelors + pre-reqs, and then you’ll still be significantly useless. A lot of medicine requires complex infrastructure which just doesn’t exist in such a scenario.
The problem with long-term care isn’t the straight-forward part. It’s the complications part. Consider stitches as noted above. Just about anybody can be taught to do basic stitches in about an hour. Learning the basics of the mechanical skill isn’t too hard. How many layers do you need to go down? What will the impacts be cosmetically? Functionally? What happens if there’s an infection? Would you be better off with delayed closure? The most important parts of medicine are in the applied knowledge area, not in the procedure/stuff area, though we reimburse based on procedures which is a separate problem.
In-general, I agree with Statismagician. I’d suggest starting out by getting a basic EMT certification from a local community college. I did mine as a night course a few evenings a week. It’s about 200 hours and will give you a sufficiently-solid background to figure out where you want to go from there. Additionally, you’re likely to be able to get a lot of additional training focused on the specific areas you are interested in at low or no cost. And then practice. I suggest volunteering with a local reputable EMS agency as a way to develop your skills. It really helps to understand what the breadth of “normal” looks like.
Is there a reason I so often notice one or two errors in something I’m working on at my computer immediately after clicking the print button? I print a lot of stuff at work and this is a consistent pattern, no matter how carefully I check my work beforehand. It’s either right after sending it to the printer, or as soon as I get the physical paper in hand.
I have had the experience of noticing several errors after transferring writing from word to an internet site. I think this is because lines shift around as the margins and font sizes differ, leaving sentences structured differently in my field of vision. Maybe try pasting into notepad or something before printing to see if anything jumps out at you.
Probably it’s just a different mental state.
Folks say the same thing about noticing typos immediately after sending an email. I don’t think it’s anything special about Word.
I don’t think it’s the Word program, I think it’s seeing the words in a different configuration because the margins change. Suddenly there’s on “the” on the right side, one on the left side, and so forth.
Actually, most of the time I notice it is when making engineering drawings/blueprints, which aren’t reformatted or anything when printed like a text document can be.
My coworkers say this happens to them too, so I suspect it’s just some psychological effect, or maybe (most boring of all) just bias in our memories.
What I really hate is when I see the typos right after posting the contract documents for solicitation.
Not after I print something, but often just after I finalize say an e-mail and send it out. It definitely happens when I make a long post on SSC. No matter how carefully I check it out before posting, I find mistakes when I look at the post, and always have to immediately edit it. As Randy says, just something about change in field of vision.
At this moment, your mind stops focusing on one thing and starts focusing on another.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this new outlook caused you to look at the document in a way you hadn’t previously, and consequently see different errors.
This is a pretty widely-noted phenomenon.
The analogy in film editing goes like this: you finish a cut and then call someone else into the room to watch it and give you feedback. You watch it together, and before they have said a word, you find you already have pages of notes to yourself: just the other person’s eyeballs on the screen is enough to make you notice all the little mistakes or ways the cut could be improved.
I think it is a combination of this real phenomenon, and confirmation bias (you remember the times that you saw an error right as you hit send, but don’t remember the even more numerous times that you caught the errors while you were typing or reviewing what you typed).
Do you mean it feels like you catch more errors right after you hit send? I could see confirmation bias explaining that. But I was talking about why it is that you catch so many errors right after you hit send, regardless whether it feels like more than you caught before.
Anyone with a low to moderate level of social anxiety get anything out of SSRIs or any other prescription drug? Did it change your life? What if your overall (non-social life) level of anxiety was mostly fine?
Did it, like…. improve your confidence? Or just sort of cut out the noise/general jitteriness? Any big negative side effects?
I take SSRIs for generalized anxiety and panic disorder (also depression, but not as relevant). I think the drugs helped with the social anxiety aspect of my anxiety, but now that I think of it I think that’s actually the facet they helped least with. I don’t think my confidence changed directly, but the negative self-talk and general dread got lessened, which in turn allowed situations that could improve my confidence to happen.
Interesting, thanks man. The negative side effects from SSRIs (including withdrawal when you try to get off!) just makes me super leery about even starting out on them. Also ‘social’ anxiety is such a small % of my week or month that it just seems odd to do a semi-permanent pharmacological solution when I have no issues 95% of the time. I suppose there’s just no drug for confidence per se….
there is but it’s illegal.
If you want get down, down on the ground…
Samuel Hammond has a really interesting piece up at the Niskanen Center on State Capacity Libertarianism (hereafter SCL). The term is courtesy of Tyler Cowen in an influential blog post earlier this year, sketching out where Cowen thinks libertarianism is heading. Hammond’s piece identifies the motivations for SCL, focusing on the advantages of a better functioning state, and concludes with why he’s not an SCL himself. Rather than recapitulate his article, I’ll try to draw more directly from Hammond’s sources, and close with a look at compatible strains in today’s libertarian and conservative thought I believe were overlooked.
Cowen recommends beginning with his own 2007 “The Paradox of Libertarianism,” where he argues that libertarian successes in economic policy have enabled Americans to afford much more government: government is like a goldfish, expanding to fill the space it’s given. Cowen doesn’t like this development per se, but believes libertarians need to accept it as part of the “package deal” of growing wealth and positive liberty. The old libertarian formulas were “liberty good” and “big government bad,” the latter because “big government crushes liberty.” But Cowen says the real story is “advances in liberty bring bigger government,” which doesn’t fit happily in the old framework. So libertarianism is in a crisis today which can only be gotten out of by 1) accepting the package deal, 2) prioritizing increasing positive liberty over negative liberty, and 3) identifying where we can strengthen both current institutions and liberty at once.*
We’ve heard his case for (1); his case for (2) is emerging issues in combating climate change, intellectual property law governing drugs and vaccines, and most importantly, nuclear proliferation. Cowen worries that today’s libertarian has no solutions to these problems (I look forward to suggestions from David Friedman). Unfortunately, he says little about (3), perhaps because he has yet to identify any such ways.
Continuing to his 2020 blog post, Cowen is now convinced libertarianism has hollowed out, citing its continued failure to address climate change and severe outmigration from narrowly libertarian views. He gives an 11 point definition for SCL, which I’ll try to summarize:
1. Give markets their due.
2. Strong states were and are necessary to secure markets and individual rights.
3. Strong state ≠ large or tyrannical state.
4. Rapid increases in state capacity can be dangerous, high state capacity not so much.
5. America faces problems of state capacity such as addressing climate change, improving K-12 education, fixing traffic congestion, and improving the quality of discretionary spending. Most of these problems can be solved by becoming more market-like, but to even do that requires a more functional government.
6. Cowen cites his book Stubborn Attachments, which I take to mean that securing economic growth is one of our chief duties. Corrections welcome if I am misunderstanding.
7. Fast economic development in East Asia has been accompanied by a growth in state capacity; same with public health.
8. The problem areas of our time are Africa and South Asia, which lack markets and state capacity.
9. Infrastructure, science subsidies, nuclear power, and space programs are probably desirable. (Democrats nominally agree, but sacrifice them for other things, so that e.g. infrastructure is dysfunctional under them.)
10. Higher quality governance is possible and desirable.
11. Military alliances with other free nations are desirable.
This list is a muddle of empirical statements and principles, but then, Cowen was writing at 1am. I would separate 1, 2, 6, 9, 10, and 11 as more philosophical or value statements, and 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8 as more empirical. It’s hard to tell sometimes, though; a strict libertarian might say 3 is false because any strong state is tyrannical virtually by definition, while Cowen, I think, means it in an empirical way. (I welcome correction on this point.) It’s also not always clear from whom this list distinguishes the SCL—from the libertarian or from the neoliberal or what?
I think 10 is probably the most important, too. In his discussion Cowen links to an earlier blog post, “The Libertarian Vice.” The libertarian assumes, not only that quality of governance is typically low, but that it is fixed. This is false, he says, and rejecting it is what enables the SCL to see the benefits of increasing state capacity in certain areas; a libertarian won’t necessarily disagree with empirical propositions like 5, 7 or 8, but if he thinks quality is fixed, he’ll never, ever agree with 10.
We come next to Hammond’s Niskanen piece. Hammond suggests three motivations for SCL:
1. New technologies could make government and corporations much more powerful and more efficient. Adopting tech while preserving privacy and other liberties requires tracing the “Narrow Corridor” between a powerful society and weak state and a weak society and powerful state. And with today’s information technology, walking this corridor may be more of a tightrope act, if I may mix metaphors; we need people thinking about these things, as e.g. Peter Thiel already is.
2. User experience in the private sphere has improved dramatically; UX in the public sphere, not so much. Per Hammond:
Governments like Estonia’s have already gotten in on this, while the US lags far behind. Besides being less convenient, inefficient governments can become a bottleneck for growth. This is where Hammond’s account really syncs with Cowen, in that desire for more capable government.
3. We have real problems today with regulatory capture and unclear lines of public accountability. The libertarian approach to the first is reduce the size of government, which helps, but may be a little much. It can do just as well, Hammond contends, to design agencies better. Clear lines of accountability, meanwhile, are hampered by our complex federalist system, and local governments are not immune to corruption. The solutions here aren’t less government per se, but structural reform to what we have.
Throughout Hammond links some interesting pieces. The first is “Disrupting Bureaucracy,” which he wrote back in 2015. He begins by noting of how software steadily ate the corporate sector in the 1990s and how, in the early 2000s, it made inroads into government with web portals and the like. He then charts how he thinks this is likely to proceed: first with data standards across government departments, standardized something like Estonia’s X-Road. Laws are already in place mandating the shift toward paperless, and even pdf-less, departments. Hammond is convinced that these steps are nine-tenths of the battle! After that come APIs built on this standard, and then you can just build apps to view and manage government data. Cool stuff, coming years late here in America.
Hammond enters galaxy brain territory with his proposal for where all this is going: government as a platform! Rather than interacting with the health insurance marketplace through the awful healthcare.gov, companies could compete to provide the best service. The final step is keyless signature infrastructure, “a reliable way to authenticate identities and sign electronic document [sic]”. It’s not far from these three technologies to “algorithmic self-governance,” decision markets, and smart contracts, decentralizing the whole hierarchical apparatus of ye old bureaucracy.
Companies like Uber, indeed, already act as governments so far as they build multi-sided platform technology, market-like platforms where two sides (in their case drivers and riders) benefit from network effects. eBay and Amazon do the same, creating more literal markets. So does a legal institution, says Hammond, when “assigns rights, enforces contracts, records property titles, and manages dispute resolution”—the conditions for a market. Anyway, once the private sector is building the services on the government’s platform, one starts to ask, why can’t the private sector build its own ‘legal’ platform? This sounds like wild-eyed cyberpunk fiction, but Hammond concludes arguing that pre-moderns didn’t need bureaucracies; they developed when our societies and markets got too complex. Technology has “caught up” with managing that complexity, as seen by Uber and other companies creating these platforms, enabling us to return to an earlier model.
The second is this WaPo look at a Pennsylvania mine where 600 people process, on paper, every government employee’s retirement. Trigger warning for libertarians, this might leave you frothing at the mouth. The gist is that retirement law is very kludgey and complicated, which makes automating the process with software difficult. Managers were also not competent enough to evaluate off the shelf software or measure the progress of custom solutions. And the biggest bottleneck currently is just getting the right paperwork, which means nagging supervisors from all over the US for their signature on this or that. They’ve been trying and failing to go paperless since the early 80s; I’ve heard few better examples of an incapacitated state. Seriously, this story is so dystopian that I’m imagining worker drones emerging from the mine after a nuclear apocalypse to repopulate the earth, founding new HR colonies strewn with red tape across the blighted waste.
The third and final is Steven Teles’ 2013 piece “Kludgeocracy in America,” which adumbrates Hammond’s arguments about poor design and inefficient government in excruciating detail. I’ll try to be brief:
1. Our problem isn’t government size per se, but a complex, incoherent one. The complexity makes it hard to parse what our government is doing, which is often terrible things like distributing wealth upward to the wealthy. What’s causing these things is the way laws and policies accrete by way of kludges, inelegant patches. Let’s look at the symptoms, characters, and causes of kludge.
2. Symptoms and character: a) Dealing with government complexity is a pain. Hammond’s public sector UX complaint is a similar but distinct problem. Not only is it inconvenient, it can be hard to understand these programs or take advantage of them, which can leave those with less time to navigate such things worse off. Our tax code for instance is so complicated that compliance takes something like 163 billion per year! b) Complexity causes government waste, too. See the hundreds of millions spent attempting to automate the dystopian retirement mine. c) It’s easier for other actors to benefit from government largesse when issues are out of the public eye; I don’t follow how Teles relates this to complexity, though. d) Complexity makes it harder to see who’s benefitting and how; this makes it harder to mobilize against, too. e) Federal involvement in K-12 education has grown and grown into a patchwork of programs; it’s harder to mobilize a coalition against all of it, and each little program will have fierce defenders. f) With so many programs operating in an indirect or complicated way, liberals don’t get credit for all the things governments do, while conservatives find fighting such costs perversely harder than just reducing size or spending. g) The image of the government is harmed and public trust goes down.
3. Causes: a) Our system has numerous “veto points,” as Teles calls them. Separation of powers requirements approval from both houses of Congress and the president. But it also requires approval through at least one, and often several, congressional committees, like the Affordable Care Act’s five. The veto points, rather than stopping legislation cold, just require that a few be bought off with certain changes or assurances, hence the old problem of pork barrel projects. As a percentage of GDP, though, pork barrel projects might be better than legislation just never getting through! And vetoers tend to protect the status quo, requiring that new bills be a kludge to pass. b) Federalism multiplies complexity, as discussed above, by requiring certain functions be duplicated at the federal and state level. c) American desire for small government and for a government that addresses everything, meanwhile, encourage indirect solutions. Indirect solutions are frequently complex, not well understood, regressive, and result in the federal government “devolving” power and funding to states, but with requirements on how it’s to be spent. d) Kludges’ sheer intractability has produced an entire kludge industry, operating as contractors and ever working to expand its own role.
4. Finally, the cure. In Teles’ telling, it won’t be easy to scale back the kludgeocracy, and this is obvious when some of what he is blaming is constitutional, but concrete steps can be taken. He recommends reducing the number of veto points by, for instance, restricting congressional bills to only needing approval from one committee at most, and removing the filibuster, so single actors can’t hold up legislation. He recommends that federal funding to states full of stipulations is just broken, and departments like education need to exist at either the federal or the state level, but not both. (I would like to hear any constitutional challenges to this.)
After this long, long summary of state capacity libertarianism, you might be wondering what I think. Like Hammond, I am not a state capacity libertarian, but it’s very interesting, and it might be a fruitful path for libertarians, especially disaffected ones. I suspect I am less sanguine on markets and growth than they are, and I think there is remarkably little discussion of what form checks on state power would take under these proposals, when so much talk is made of expanding state capacity. Like, I believe Hammond when he says he takes seriously the problem of privacy and civil liberties under a more technological advanced state, but he didn’t take it seriously enough to make any concrete suggestions, you know? What I appreciate most are probably the challenges to American federalism and to devolution of power, which I have rarely seen mounted elsewhere.
One question I’d ask Hammond, or Cowen or Teles for that matter, is why the old libertarian/Tea Party suggestion to abolish a law every time one is created, never comes up. I suppose it’s little use now, when the tax code is three zillion lines long, but then, my kids will be saying the same thing when it’s thirty zillion. This seems to me like a direct ancestor of their critiques of complex, kludgey government, and practical, too. Anyway, I’m sure more such examples could be found: the point is, libertarian and conservative critiques of government don’t always take the “starve the beast” form.
*Cowen introduces these less as prescriptions for today’s libertarianism than as tendencies in his own views, but afterwards speaks just as if they are prescriptions, anyway.
I find it odd to view K-12 schooling as a problem that requires more government. It is currently very nearly a government monopoly, and over time it has consumed steadily increasing expenditure per pupil with no improvement, at times a worsening, of quality of output. The simplest solution is a pure voucher system with no public schools, which would sharply reduce the scale of government. For purer libertarians, the solution is an entirely private system, and I see no reason to believe it would work worse than what we now have.
Climate change is a better argument, but the obvious problem is that, insofar as CO2 output is a problem, it’s a public good problem for nations as well as for individuals. Is Tyler willing to bite the bullet and come out for world government, which is what the logic of that argument implies? As it happens, I’m dubious that climate change is a serious problem, for reasons I have discussed here before, but if it is, I don’t see that stronger government provides a solution.
My general response to those issues where we can expect a pure market system to produce suboptimal results — and I agree that there are some — is that all known political systems also produce suboptimal results, for reasons moderately well understood. We don’t have the option of a political system that only intervenes in those special cases where intervention is warranted, and intervenes there in something close to the optimal way. Market failure of one sort or another is a real problem in a pure market system, but it is the exception — most of the time what is in the private interest of each actor is close to what is in the general interest of all actors taken together.
In the political system, where individual actors rarely bear much of the cost, or receive much of the benefit, of their acts, market failure is the rule.
I long for better governance, for many values of the word “better.” Thank you, @Nick, for taking the time to summarize and share these articles, especially Hammond’s points about UX improvements and Cowen’s piece “The Libertarian Vice.” You’ve earned a Lobster of Gratitude.
Thank you! I love seafood. Would take lobster over steak any day of the week.
Cowen’s little piece is very thought-provoking. And click through to Hammond’s, because he links so, so many articles I neglected. He’s been thinking about the tech angle a long time.
One thing I had meant to get to but did not: Hammond mentions Peter Thiel, but another, probably better example is Dominic Cummings. Cummings was a spad under Gove for the Department of Education and then head of Vote Leave, now a senior adviser to Boris Johnson. An SSC bogeyman, he’s described as anything from Machiavellian to Nick Land–style accelerationist, but his stated reason for engineering Brexit is to free Britain from EU regulations so that major reforms to institutions like the NHS can be done. His blog quite clearly lays out that he wants a better breed of civil servant, one who understands data science and modern technology, and a civil service designed to amplify them. And he believes this will bring huge advantages to Britain. Read this and tell me he’s not agreeing vociferously with Cowen’s point 10:
That’s just the first relevant looking quote on the homepage of his blog, from that job posting folks were making fun of a few weeks back; in his older content it’s even more obvious. Take for instance his essay on Odyssean education (n.b. I am not actually recommending anyone read this, it’s 200 pages long). From the summary:
Dominic Cummings is widely disliked by the UK establishment. This was initially due to his role in the original Brexit vote, but his tendency to speak and write without a filter has exacerbated it.
His recent attempt to hire better bureaucrats has come under attack as illegal, because it doesn’t go through the defined hiring hoops. One is reminded of “Yes, Minister” when reading the reaction. In fact, I suspect that both Hammond and Cowen would learn a lot about the real world response to government reform by watching a few seasons of it (and its sequel “Yes, Prime Minister”).
The interesting thing is that France, for example, already has a much more professional civil service (resulting in, among other things, their nuclear power and TGV programs) entirely within the EU. Maybe Cummings could have tried learning from the French example rather than advocating Brexit.
(How did France do it? In large part, via the highly competitive grandes écoles system from which civil servants are recruited)
He doesn’t want France’s civil service, though, he wants something better than France’s. But sure, maybe if he had grandes écoles to work with and could dictate their curriculum this would be easier.
ISTM that the real value in the state-capacity libertarianism idea is to distinguish between
a. Small government
b. Competent government
c. Liberty-respecting government
How small the government can be and even to some extent what powers it needs depends on the problems we’re facing–the US government budget needed to be pretty huge in 1943, for example, for reasons mostly unrelated to domestic policies and individual liberty. A Mars colony will presumably have laws/rules/whatever regarding pollution and recycling that would seem extremely intrusive in the modern US, but the alternative is that everyone suffocates after some idiot dumps poison into the composting sewer works and poisons the greenhouse plants.
Governments can vary on all three axes–an incompetent, tyrannical, incompetent government is possible, as is a large competent liberty-respecting one. I think the fear there is that a large competent liberty-respecting government will tend to evolve into a liberty-infringing one and be hard to stop.
Agreed, hence my question about checks on state power. They’re surprisingly silent on this, only bringing it up in passing. Like, is judicial review still fine? I don’t know.
Hammond at least seems to prefer a small, competent, liberty-respecting government. In “Disrupting Bureaucracy” he praises Estonia, where X-Road has enabled the government to employ many fewer workers.
I don’t think these are completely orthogonal.
A “large government” needs to find ways to pay for all that largeness. The two standard ways seem to be either through transparent taxation (thus depriving me of liberty) or corruption/skim-off-the-top, presumably eliminating competent government.
Climate change comes up quite a bit in that discussion, which I think is a mistake. Even assuming high-end IPCC predictions are on the mark, all that is necessary is a government that can A: sign treaties with other nations and B: implement a $20-50 tax on net carbon emissions. That’s less than 10% of current US income tax revenues, and carbon emissions are positively transparent compared to “income”. It doesn’t take a great and powerful “high capacity” state to do that; any libertarian state that allows for taxes at all can do that. And Pigouvian taxes on actions with known harmful externalities are I think tolerable to most libertarians. Certainly to most libertarians who will ever be in a position to run a government.
I’m also skeptical on the whole “liberty enables bigger government” thing. Current developed-world governments are unsustainable. Unless one believes in the Magic Money Tree, which I don’t think is the case for Cowen or Hammond, the United States Government and all the rest are eventually going to have to A: dramatically reduce the scope of their activities, or B: dramatically increase taxes, or C: visit the world of Mad Max. Exactly when that happens is debatable, until it does happen. When that happens, which combination of A, B, and/or C would Cowen or Hammond recommend as the liberty-maximizing choice?
The rest, looks like “here are some problems with market failures, greedy/corrupt corporations, inefficient institutions, etc; why if we had a powerful and incorruptable state it could solve all those problems for us while leaving liberty untouched, and a powerful state doesn’t have to be corrupt, so let’s do that!”. It’s true that governments aren’t literally required to be corrupt, but then neither are corporations, and markets don’t have to fail, etc. But they will, and I give zero credit to anyone whose proposed solution to complex human problems starts with “posit an incorruptable institution to solve the problem”.
Regulatory capture happens, the Iron Law of Bureaucracy is real, Acton was right, and Public Choice Theory is a thing. And I am not a minarchist libertarian because I believe that e.g. market failure never happens, I am a minarchist libertarian because just about everywhere I look, the proposed cure is worse than the disease. The more powerful the government, the more likely it is to be corrupt and tyrannical and the more difficult it will be to undo the harm to liberty when that happens. So, yeah, nice if Google doesn’t get to advertise at me so much, nice if I don’t have to wait in line at the DMV because “government as a platform” means I can do that with an app, but the downside risk is too high and I remain unconvinced.
Thanks for an interesting write-up, Nick.
When it comes to the kludgeocracy, the concept of crash-only thinking seems like it has some relevancy:
In the business world, opportunities to refactor and reboot (such as M&As or bankruptcies) come up with sufficient frequency to allow at least the worst of the kludges to eventually get fixed. In the company I work for, for example, some of the core business lines have been around for over 50 years, which is an order of magnitude longer than the current corporate incarnation. And it’s bureaucratic stuff (where kludges tend to accrete faster) like HR, AR/AP, etc. that’s more likely (compared to the core product or service side of a business) to get reset during such transitions. When it comes to government, on the other hand, while democracy provides a–valuable!–mechanism for phase transitions in political leadership, the administrative state is quite sheltered from disruptions. I think the chance it would provide to restart with less kludge is a big part of the appeal Martian colonies and seasteading.
Regarding the restriction on laws (especially federal laws), the best solution I have seen is this (not sure the origin but probably not me):
All laws have sunset limits: one year, three years, or 10 years. Law length can either be determined by the vote share (50% + 1 = 1 year, 55% 3 years, 66% 10 years) or the length can be part of the law itself (making it more difficult to pass long lasting laws).
When a law is due to expire it can be re-authorized, but if is not re-authorized it automatically goes away. Current laws would have special lengths so they are staggered over the next 10 years for re-authorization (or termination).
This should clear out the bad laws and limit the total number of laws to a reasonable number.
As a variation on the “Canadian or not?” theme from last thread…
If you meet a person who is from either England or Scotland, is there a single question you can ask that would help you figure out where they are from?
Is there a question that works if we have distinguish a person’s origin among England, Scotland, or Ireland?
“Are you British?”
Never fails.
How would they answer? Would either just say “yes”?
In my experience, there are no “British” people in response to that. There are Englishmen, Welshmen, Scots and Irish.
And all of them will willingly and aggressively remind you of what they are if you call them British.
Kin ye nae tell from the ahkcent?
“English cities are very beautiful, especially Edinburgh and Dublin. Which one is your favourite?” /s
Answer key:
Right hook = Scottish
Left hook = Irish
Smiling politely and confessing they’ve never been to either = English
Is there a question that works if we have distinguish a person’s origin among England, Scotland, or Ireland?
“The English national team is playing [insert any foreign team] in the semi-final of the World Cup. Who do you cheer for?” Works every time 🙂
It is fascinating to me that the accents sound as similar to you as American and Canadian accents do to me, or at least similar enough for you not to be confident distinguishing them. I may well be wrong but I thought Canadian accents only really differed from (northern) US accents in the “out”/”oot” sound, whereas Scottish accents sound at least as different from southern English ones to me as English ones do from American.
May I ask: are you a native English speaker? Or is this just parochialism on my part?
(With Canadians – same problem with Australians and New Zealanders – I tend to just ask if they are Canadians or New Zealanders. Then if they say no, I’m American or Australian, I say “I ask because New Zealanders/Canadians tend to get annoyed if you call them Australians/Americans.” Most of the time it seems not to offend people.)
American (both Southern and “TV American”) accents are easy to distinguish from Canadian and from each other. Irish, Scots, and Midlands accents are easy to distinguish from London-area English and BBC Received accents.
Some of the regional accents are hard to distinguish from each other (at least for me): the accents they use in “Peaky Blinders” (Manchester) and the accents in “Broadchurch” (Wessex). Maybe that’s just the actors, though? I know that in the US actors will attempt a US Southern accent and get it just wrong enough that’s it’s obvious to anyone who has actually lived in the South. The same is true with actors trying to do almost any of the UK accents. (On the other hand, sometimes actors do really well: “Stranger Things” is almost all British actors doing “standard American,” for example.
There are a lot of people in the UK and Ireland who have a sort of blended accent and they can be hard to identify.
“TV American” was originally the accent of the American Midwest, and most TV newsreaders, etc. learned it. “BBC Received” was originally the accent one learned in university and used as a BBC newsreader. The BBC has opened up to people with non-Received accents in the last five to ten years, though.
There is also a “mid-Atlantic” accent that is a mashup of TV American and BBC Received.
The one question to ask is, of course: “Where are you from?”
I realise I’m commenting on a weeks’ old thread, but just in a sort of ‘XKCD: Someone is wrong on the Internet!’ mixed with a sort of ‘I cannot let this stand unchallenged in the record’ sense, I should point out that Peaky Blinders is set in Birmingham, in the West Midlands, and people from Manchester (which is in the North West) do not speak with anything like that kind of nasal, pinched drawl, but have a more open-mouthed, ‘o’-sound-focused accent that is traditionally regarded as much less grating than accents from the West Midlands, which are, unfortunately, nearly universally disliked by people form the rest of the UK (a fact which can legitimately really hold back the professional development of someone with that accent in a way that wouldn’t be nearly so pronounced for most people from Manchester, whose accents tend to be perceived as sort of kind and folksy).
I wasn’t even thinking about accents… I was focusing more on the content of the question, and the possible replies.
For the record, I was born in the MidWest, in a region where it’s possible to take a short drive and cross a bridge to get into Canada.
But I also find that it’s not always possible to identify a Canadian by accent.
Yeah, I have extended family that is both Canadian and Minnesotan, and their accents have a lot of overlap.
Which is sort of odd, if you make the assumptions (and as far as I can tell you can) that the Minnesotan accent is a result of Scandinavian influence while Canada lacks any particularly significant Scandinavian immigrant community (personally, I’ve always suspected it’s influenced by indigenous accents)
Most Canadians speak with an accent that is indistinguishable from California English. But there are a few interesting variations.
The French-Canadian accent, obviously, is very distinctive.
The one that is most often parodied however is the hoser accent. A great example can be found here.
I don’t think that’s true. Canadians I know that live in California get teased for the way they say certain words.
I realize my sample may not be representative, but I know several families that are originally from Canada, and none of them have an accident that even remotely resembles California English.
Ok well you guys have probably a better ear than I do for that. I said California English because that’s what I view as the “neutral” English in the US (and Joe Rogan has a bit on that).
@jermo sapiens
General American English actually has its origins in the inland northern regions: upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and on west around the Great Lakes. It’s actually what I speak—so if you’re ever wondering what American English is supposed to sound like, just listen to me. 😀
Generally speaking, you’d be hard pressed to distinguish Canadian accents from those of Americans in states immediately to the south of them. People from Ontario speak pretty much like people from upstate New York. People from British Columbia speak pretty much like people from Washington State. The big exception is the Quebecois. There are also some pretty distinctive accents in the Atlantic provinces.
Inspired by the rent control thread: Why aren’t there proposals for price caps on university education?
You could set a price cap of something like 20,000-30,000$/year, for Bachelors only (exclude postgrads), for US citizens and residents.
Advantages: you get all the negative effects of price controls:
1. Reduction in quantity:
It’s not like the Ivyes or the State Universities will dissapear; the first have their funds, and donations, the second have state support. Who cares about scammy for-profit universities anyway?
Fewer universities, fewer students, less student debt. Sounds great!
2. Reduction in quality:
Again, the Ivyes have lots of money. Research gets funded by grants, anyway. Besides, it’s not clear what quality means in an education. It’s not like Harvard will get less selective (and if they decide to increase the number of students they accept to make up the loss, eve doubling the number of students won’t decrease average quality that much).
Fewer new facilities, gyms, sports teams, dorms, new buildings, etc.? I don’t see why universities should be spending millions on that anyway. This reduces waste, and wasteful competition.
Cuts in the number of faculty: STEM faculty who do research can fund their salaries through research grants. Cutting Humanities departments who don’t pay for themselves doesn’t sound that bad.
Cuts in the number of administrators: nice dream, won’t happen.
Cons:
A thing that may happen is that universities decide to encourage students into cheaper degrees. Lab intensive degrees are more expensive, so this may mean a reduction in the number of students who study practical subjects. But I don’t think universities have that much influence on such decisions anyway.
Cuts in the number of lecture time, knowledge imparted. It’s not clear how much knowledge is imparted in university, and how much that matters.
Small states that have little funding may lose their universities if they can’t charge more for out-of state students. But they can make it up with foreign ones.
A tossup:
Universities may provide fewer scholarships. But then, prices get reduced for everybody.
More foreign students to fund American students. Sounds OK.
Reduction in library services. But then this could harm Springer and Elsevier, as students use sci-hub.
The biggest reason is whose ox gets gored.
Government is filled with people who are, used to be and want to be university administration.
why? is the assumption here that the selection algorithm is terrible?
Because Harvard only has ~6000 undergrads, or ~1500 per year. Doubling that means getting ~3000 students.
1500 students is 0.0004% of the US population, or 0.04% age cohort/year. Double that is 0.0008% total US population, or 0.08% of age cohort.
But it’s less than that, because they have foreign students also.
oh.. did you mean global quality, or quality at Harvard?
Quality at Harvard.
Yes, if all universities increase the number of students, that would decrease quality.
i dont understand what percent of total pop has to do with quality at harvard?
Rent control is justified by the fact that there can be only so many houses for either political reasons (zoning laws) or physical reasons (you’ve already built as densely as Manila).
University education seems far from any physical or political limit, hence there is little justification for price caps to private education.
If you want to make college education more affordable it makes more sense to cut subsides to Ivy League colleges (which are a form of regressive wealth redistribution) and increase subsides to state universities while forcing them to implement price caps.
Aren’t the far left’s calls for free university education basically a price control?
Since it only applies to the state’s own products (public universities), I would argue the answer is “no”.
It would presumably force private universities to reduce their prices to remain competitive.
But the same market effect on price would happen if private colleges lowered their tuition, which I don’t think people would call “price control”.
No, because in that case, the government pays for it.
The idea of a price control is, same as in rent control, for the money not to come from government budgets.
All of the plans I’ve seen though include price relief for people at private universities as well.
The question of who pays for something is different from the question of what the price is.
If the government offering “price relief” towards private universities doesn’t mandate a change in the actual price (of combined government subsidies+private spending), then I would say “price relief” is a misnomer.
Exactly. One of my biggest frustrations with American politics right now is this interminable debate over who should pay for health care, education, and to a lesser extent housing, when the fundamental issue is that all of these are being eaten by accelerating cost disease and no one is offering a solution to that (except for vague hand waving about how replacing a massive private bureaucracy with a massive public one is going to solve all the problems by eliminating “fraud” “waste” and “greed”).
Argue about whether it’s a “human right” all you want, giving every young adult a four year education at their choice of $50k a year institutions is unsustainable, and even if it isn’t, is probably not a smart use of public resources.
Yes, thank you. The term “human right” has been completely devalued by talk like this.
My view of what we call a human right is any right that you have only by virtue of being human, in the sense that humans had these rights 10,000 years ago. Freedom of speech and freedom of association come to mind.
Rights which presuppose a wealthy civilization should be in a different category, and they should have a different name. In fact they do, I think the proper term is “civil rights”. The right to vote, the right to contract, the right to not be discriminated against, the right to an education and healthcare, should all be in that category.
@gbdub
Is the case of healthcare, the projected cost savings come from eliminating the massive health insurance industry and replacing it with nothing. It’s not “hand waving”, even the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center released a study last year that agreed with the cost-saving projections.
@jermo sapiens
Why would you think that humans had the right to freedom of speech or association 10,000 years ago? Was there any legal body (or group of warriors, at least) that acted to guarantee that right? Who would punish people who violated it in any systematic way?
If the response is something like “well they had those rights, they just didn’t have the civilization/organization/technology/wealth to enforce them”, then surely the same logic could equally apply to “rights” such as healthcare, education, ect, which require a certain level of civilizational development before they could be achieved.
No, that’s the point. There was no legal body to take away the right.
Your view is that only governments can violate rights?
Violating a right and taking away a right are two different things, and the one does not negate the other.
You, for example, have the right to life. There are almost certainly many people who could kill you, if they wanted. If they did so, nobody would say “I guess, since someone had the power to kill him, TN Guy never really had the right to life in the first place. Really, there is no ‘right to life’, what a silly concept in a world where murder is possible”.
Someone violates your rights, you still have those rights – before, during, and after the violation.
I think that the notion of human rights should be reserved for very specific type of rights. We all have plenty of other rights, but they are on a lower level than “human rights”. Everyone knows this to some extent, that’s why they are trading on the goodwill associated to the phrase “human rights” (eg Bernie saying “healthcare is a human right”).
On second thought, my example above that human rights are things that a caveman would have had is inadequate. But I think our most basic rights, the ones we call “human rights” should not involve any positive obligation by anyone else. Otherwise you dont have a coherent framework.
@John Schilling
Isn’t this just a question of the scale of institutionalization?
If one rouge guy kills me, and all of the rest of society rallies around to avenge my death and punish the killer, then it would indeed appear that that I still have the right not to be murdered, even if my right was violated.
But if the vast majority of society (or at least the most powerful people) decides that I need to be killed, and has the institutional mechanisms to ensure that it happens (and only a few rouge ineffectual people think otherwise), then I don’t see an argument here that I even have the right not to be killed.
Unless you are taking the route that the right is inalienable even at the institution-level sense. Which would contradict jermo sapiens’s argument that the existence of a legal body could take away these rights.
@John Schilling
Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois would disagree, at least.
Here’s a fun question: When a state-owned enterprise sets the price for its product via legislative action, is that a “market” or “central planning”?
This kind of gotcha betrays a fundamental ignorance. The important part of a market is having accurate price signals, not having the trappings of private enterprise. So it depends on any number of other things, but not on the mere fact that an entity is setting prices for a service it provides.
I’m trying to unpack this. So you are saying the question hinges on whether the price signals are “accurate” or “inaccurate”, in which case “inaccurate” ones would qualify as “central planning”?
What is an example of a price signal being “inaccurate”, outside of instances of direct price controls on a third party? (e.g., the government telling person A that he can only sell to person B for x amount)
I think you’re giving a little too much weight to the word “accurate” — an earlier version of my post didn’t even have it, and it’s not a term of art. That said, what I’m trying to get at is how well changing prices reflect changing market conditions. They’re increasingly inaccurate as regulations or other obstacles prevent them from doing so — this is a scalar thing, not a binary, so it would make sense to talk about more or less accurate price signals, which should translate pretty well to more or less efficient markets.
Direct price controls are one example of something that can do this (and usually a rather extreme one), but many others are possible, not all of which involve government action. Rent control (an indirect price control) is another good example; tariffs and subsidies can do it in the short term. Private cartels can keep prices artificially high, though it’s hard to do in the long run. Even something like restricted trading hours on stocks weakens the price signals that they represent.
@Nornagest
What would be an example of a regulation or obstacle that prevents the price from responding to changing conditions, in the case of a product being offered by a state owned enterprise? The example you gave all seem like they would apply only to the state interfering in private economic activity (tariffs, rent control, restricting trade hours, ect)
A law setting a minimum and/or maximum price for a government service is an example. This makes it impossible for the government to set the price differently to manage demand in the face of changing demand or supply.
Does it matter that the government is the same entity that both makes the law regarding how much it is willing to sell for, and the entity that supplies the products/services?
Like, if I have a prized stopwatch my grandfather gave me, and I tell myself “I’m not going to sell this for less than a million dollars” (rendering myself unresponsive to market changes) does this shift the market for stopwatches into “inefficiency” with “inaccurate price signals”?
This seems really weird. I think normally, we would consider that my valuation no matter what method (or how rationally a process) I arrived at it.
Only if you consider the government a monolithic organization. If I make two agencies with separate chains of command, task one to get the most money possible for the service and the other to get the best deal possible and make it known that both groups will get promoted based on their ability to accomplish their tasks, I wouldn’t assume that the “get the best deal” group would deliberately under-perform just because they’re part of the government.
I used an example entity run by a single person, but I didn’t have to.
The example stopwatch could have been gifted to me and my brother’s jointly owned business. Each person needs the permission of the other before the watch can be sold. If there is an internal conflict in valuation, with I valuing it at $0, and my brother valuing it at one million, does this render the market “inefficient” with “inaccurate price signals”?
This sort of joint governance happens all the time with private entities. Corporations are governed by a board of directors, having to come to some sort of consensus before taking actions. Monolithic, autocratically-run organizations that don’t have internal conflicts of interest are extremely rare among the meaningfully large economic players.
Are all these entities too, inefficient? Does their existence spoil the accuracy of price signals?
If the state sets prices such that it is operating at a loss, it will need to subsidize the operation with taxes, which is not a free market action.
That figure is well above the full resident tuition for pretty much all state colleges and universities, so I’m not sure what you think the advantage is. If the idea is that this is just going to affect the Harvards, and that the only effect on them is that they are going to dig a little bit deeper into their endowments and alumni pockets while providing the same education to the same people, then A: no and B: even if so, that’s such a tiny part of the educational landscape that why would you even care?
Actual effects would be more substantial, and almost all negative.
First, the better state universities would see a substantial increase in out-of-state students, and if most of the student body at e.g. UCLA comes from not-California, then the motive for California to spend California residents’ tax dollars on the UC system will be decreased. Quality of education declines.
Concurrently, the meh state universities would see an exodus of students, and nobody is going to be convinced that a quick cash infusion will raise the status of say UT Permian Basin to that of a UCLA, the incentive for the state government there will be to reduce funding in proportion to students and let California pay. Quality of education declines.
Then the mid-tier not-Harvard private universities will see their cash flow decrease, but without the gigabuck endowments and alumni pockets of the Harvards to make up for it. Quality of education declines.
Then the Harvards will see a flood of new applicants, but without the capacity to educate them to Harvard standard. Note that poor people with top academic skills already go to Harvard on scholarship, so these won’t be them. These will be people who used to, and should, go to second-tier private or top state schools but now have nothing to lose by trying to get into Harvard. And they aren’t the people Harvard alumni will open their pockets for, even if the institution could be arbitrarily upscaled without loss of quality. Quality of education, even at Harvard, declines.
More generally, this will create an increased demand for the good “Education at someplace ‘better’ than the top public school in my state of residence”, while simultaneously decreasing the money available to supply that good. While destroying the price signal that says “Not getting a Harvard scholarship was your signal that you really ought to go to State”. Supply mismatched with demand and without price signals, breaks markets. In this case, resulting in some combination of overcrowded campuses and arbitrarily capricious admissions policies.
Against this, less student debt for the relatively small number of students paying full ride to go to schools better than the best public university in their state. Since most Americans live in states where the best public universities are really quite good, I don’t think this even comes close to being an even trade.
Fortunately, as EchoChaos notes, this particular bad idea pisses on the self-image of too many of the elites whose support would be necessary to make it happen.
Among other things
isn’t really true. There’s a large effective subsidy from tuition to research. One way to see this is that grant overhead rates for non-university centers like Fred Hutchison are significantly higher.
I have been having a problem with FaceBook and am curious about other people’s reactions, in particular whether they can offer a plausible explanation.
Any time anyone attempts to link to my web page the post doing so is blocked, and the person putting it up receives the following message:
Both “community standards” and “let us know” are links. The latter goes to a page where you can tell them that they are mistaken, but doing so has no effect, judging by several weeks of trying. Anyone interested in investigating the situation for himself can post a link to http://www.daviddfriedman.com and see what happens.
The obvious question is why they are blocking the site. I am reasonably confident that nothing on it violates their posted community standards. At least three possibilities occur to me:
One or more people for some reason complained to them about my site. Investigating such claims takes too many resources, so their default is to block.
My site does not have the certificate making it https as well as http, and they routinely block such sites on the theory that they could be problems.
Something, possibly their software, told them that my site contains the full text of several books and did not tell them that the books were all mine, so they blocked on the theory that I was violating copyright.
Any other plausible explanations?
I should probably add that I believe Facebook, as a private firm, has both a legal and moral right to block links from their site to mine if they want to. But I do not believe they have a moral right, and am by no means sure they have a legal right, to tell people who post such links that the site violates their community standards if it is not true and they have no good reason to believe it is true.
Does your website have posts on it which are not completely in line with the IPCC’s orthodoxy? I know here you’ve made the point a few times that maybe global warming will be beneficial at least for some parts of the world. I think if true, this is a plausible explanation as well, but maybe not as likely as your other ones.
My discussion of climate has been almost entirely on my blog, which I don’t think is blocked.
What makes you think Facebook isn’t a safe space for climate denialists? That hasn’t been my experience.
Why would you use the term “denialist”? It seems needlessly aggressive to me. Being skeptical of something is not the same as denying it.
As for Facebook, I’m assuming, maybe wrongly, that they are taking steps to ensure their platform is not used to spread talking points which are in conflict with progressive ideology.
There are people on FB making bad arguments both for and against the current climate orthodoxy. I gave up arguing climate issues on FB for Lent a year or two back, and never went back. That was after a conversation in which it became clear to me that almost nobody on either side understood how the greenhouse effect worked.
So I agree that there is no mass purge of people who argue against the current orthodoxy.
On the other hand, there are a lot of confident and angry people in that argument, and I could easily imagine one of them being offended by an argument I made and complaining about it. Hence the fact that I say almost nothing on those issues nowadays on FB makes it unlikely that that was the source of complaints that led to the blocking.
So far as terminology is concerned, both “alarmist” and “denialist” are used as pejorative terms. Strictly speaking, there is nothing wrong with being alarmed about something one should be alarmed about or denying something that is not true, but both terms have negative connotations.
Hence my preference for referring to those who do or not agree with the current orthodoxy. “Orthodoxy” can be seen as either a negative or a positive term.
I attempted to share Murphy’s conclusions about the coronavirus from OT146, and Facebook blocked the link to the BLAST tool as violating community standards. The links to the actual genomes went through fine.
Perhaps there’s a core Facebook demographic that is hurt by the ability to compare DNA sequences?
Is this a joke?
I guess? It’s not intended to be taken seriously. My guess is the “.cgi” triggered a red flag, as it’s fairly unusual and might indicate an attempt to run a malicious script.
I suspect I intended it as a dig at the anti-vax crowd who could be said to identify most with Facebook of all social media, and will reject detailed information to whatever extent necessary to maintain their preexisting beliefs.
This is probably the most likely answer. A lot of the big companies are pushing hard for https everywhere.
It could also be related to the formatting/presentation of the site, but I agree https is probably the most likely answer.
This page suggests a tool called Facebook Debugger:
https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1109968119068088
I have not personally tried this tool.
I have. When I put my URL into it, I get:
That leads me to believe that you’ve had a bunch of people reporting your site, and Facebook hasn’t bothered to actually look and see if it violates their standards. My understanding is that if enough people report something, it gets automatically blocked, and then they go look at it, but it is a slow process.
A bunch of people reporting my site seems like a possible explanation, but I’m not sure why it would happen. I’m not terribly active on FB, and most of my activity is in SCA groups, not political ones.
For what it’s worth I got the block and then gave additional feedback. Maybe if enough people do that it’ll trigger an actual human review.
> But I do not believe they have a moral right, and am by no means sure they have a legal right, to tell people who post such links that the site violates their community standards if it is not true and they have no good reason to believe it is true.
What makes you doubtful about the illegality? As a non-lawyer, I’d have thought it would be clearly libelous to claim that an innocent site does not meet their published community standards unless they had sufficient reason to make this claim: it’s false, it’s published, they had no cause for belief, and it causes you damage.
I guess the weakest point is whether they are negligent if someone reports your site and they don’t do any inspection. It doesn’t seem impossible that your site might have been reported, even if in error. Although, I guess it’s not impossible that something on your site does in fact violate their community standards. If it came before a judge, might they be able to find an example in one of your books that they could claim was some form of hate speech?
It would be fun to see what would happen if you were to sue them for libel. The worry is that as soon as you properly legally threaten them, they’ll revert their ban on just you. It would be much better if you can change their policy to something better, rather than just being a special exception. Make sure you are properly damaged first so it can proceed!
Are you American? In America, it is really really hard to prove libel. It would not be on Facebook to prove they were telling the truth; it would be on David to prove they were lying.
And if David is a public figure for this purpose (which is quite likely), he would further need to prove actual malice, which is a legal term that has nothing to do with hostile feelings.
There are a number of problems. The first is whether they could argue that their description of community standards is vague enough so that they get to decide what violates it.
The second is whether, assuming I count as a public figure, I could show that they knew what they were saying was false or were being recklessly negligent in not knowing (not the precise legal terminology — I’ve been a law professor but not a lawyer).
The third is whether I could demonstrate damages.
On the other hand, one reason they might take such a threat seriously is that, once the idea is out, there is a risk that an enterprising lawyer might put together a class action on behalf of all people similarly affected, and if it did succeed it could cost them a substantial amount. So I think it’s possible, although not likely, that if I push on the issue they will find ways of modifying their policies to make what they are doing less obviously objectionable. The obvious way would be by modifying the message associated with blocking, which wouldn’t be a serious cost for them.
Yes, their policy is intentionally vague in order to allow them the freedom to curate their users’ content as they feel necessary. Consequently, anything they don’t want to show by definition violates their community standards.
If you don’t like it, it’s your choice to do business with a different social media site…
That doesn’t solve the problem. Other people quite often link to my site, and their posts doing so are blocked too.
I am irritated by the blocking, but the part I think I am entitled to complain about is the defamation.
Not a lawyer, but I feel like their community standards are almost certainly subjective enough that claiming someone violated them in an unspecified way would be legally considered a statement of opinion, not a statement of fact. Opinion generally cannot be libleous.
I heard this happened to some specific Jordan Peterson video. It appears someone is going through the list of problematic people and you have now made the cut.
Yeah, don’t do this. There’s zero reason to assume he’s considered “problematic” by the corporate Marxist SJW elites or whoever, and people have already given much more likely explanations. Promoting this “anyone to the right of Stalin gets blacklisted!” nonsense is unhelpful.
I’m sorry are you saying Jordan Peterson is not considered problematic by SJWs?
Edit: No I think you’re saying David Friedman is not considered problematic. That makes more sense.
I’m not sure about the likelihood of the other two explanations you gave, but the theory about being reported checks out from what I know of Facebook’s moderation process. It’s possible that someone reported the site and the moderators simply haven’t gotten around to actually checking the site’s content. Facebook moderators have a huge workload, and it takes them days or weeks just to get around to checking up on a single post, so combing through an entire website might be too much for them. Maybe they’ll get around to it eventually, but there’s probably a very long queue.
Alternatively, if your site frequently gets linked by a lot of people and/or groups that get banned/deleted themselves, it might trigger some kind of red flag in the system. That seems less likely though.
I doubt that SCA members, who are the most likely people to link to my site, are a group that commonly gets banned or deleted.
Repeating this since it got in at the tail end of the last open thread and probably got missed:
Scott, apologies if this breaks any rules or toes too close to the line. If you have to delete this comment I won’t be offended.
The other day I was cleaning my house and found my old stash of tianeptine sulphate that I got from Ceretropics after reading a suggestion here at SSC to try that out. It is too soon to tell, but I think it is having a dramatic positive effect on my anxiety and quality of life.
One small problem: Ceretropics closed down. So if I keep taking this, I have maybe a month’s worth left.
So, question: Does anyone have recommendations for a trustworthy and reliable alternative to Ceretropics that I can source tianeptine sulphate (not sodium!) from?
You are a script doctor in Hollywood. You have been hired by a producer to punch up a thriller about two detectives. The older one is supposed to be a bit of an uptown character, someone who knows his ways around fine tailoring, old jazz, and first-edition novels. Your first assignment is to write a scene for the first act, where this fellow shows he has some real chops, intellectually speaking.
He should do something that would impress most anyone, yes. But the director wants more. What he does should also impress people who know the area well, at a deeper level, in a way that most people would miss. And if you can squeeze in a third level under that for the cultivated scholars and hardcore nerds that would be nifty too but really, these people rarely look up from the urtext.
For a story set in Anno Domini 2020, when most rich men don’t put on a suit except for weddings, funerals, and court?
While you’d still have to be rich to afford first-edition novels, the other two say “hipster” to me. I start wondering what this rich guy with old-timey affectations’ background is and why he chose to become a detective.
There are a variety of valid directions you could take this in, including not addressing the incongruities at all: cf. Dudley from Street Fighter, a black Briton who’s like Jacob Rees-Mogg with boxing instead of politics.
I think a suit — perhaps without the tie — is still the way to signal “businessman” or “executive”. Even Silicon Valley C-level folks will sometimes wear blue blazers over their jeans. And if you’re rich or famous enough that you don’t need signalling, the fact that you can do business in your jammies without being ridiculed is a signal in itself.
There’s some regional and industry-specific stuff going on here, too. In San Francisco or Portland, a navy or twill blazer over an Oxford and $300 jeans (no tie) is about as formal as it gets for the tech industry, but law and finance types dress a bit more formally — a Patagonia puffer vest over wool trousers and a dress shirt is what passes for “dressed down” in the financial district, and a full suit isn’t unheard of.
And over on the East Coast, everything’s a step or two more formal — in certain districts of DC or New York, you can’t spill a cup of coffee without ruining someone’s suit.
Lawyers always wear suits regardless of how much more informal men of their social class are in a particular city. And so should every male defendant or plaintiff. Court is its own thing, as are the other two branches of government (which explains DC).
I’m not just talking about court, though — even trial lawyers spend most of their time outside of it, and most lawyers are not trial lawyers.
Hank Scorpio: I was the first executive to wear jeans with a sport coat. Now they’re all doing it!
So yeah, fair enough. Rich men are gonna know that tailored shirts and blazers are superior even if a real suit is considered overdressed for work.
If it’s set in New York City or London, there’s plenty of suits still around. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t answer this question without either being as good as this guy is supposed to be, or doing a lot of research… so I’m starting to suspect @johan_larson is trying to outsource his work.
This shouldn’t require research, just a somewhat deep understanding of some field. Let me illustrate.
The young detective (Jim) mentions having watched the film “Ender’s Game”. He and the older man (James) discuss the film. James knows the film well, and has a nuanced understanding of its pluses and minuses. He makes articulate references to several other space combat films of the same sort. This is level 1.
Some of James’ comments make it evident that he has not just seen “Ender’s Game” the movie, he has also read the novel by the same name. The existence of the novel isn’t explicitly mentioned, so this is something the viewer would have to know about to fully understand. This is level 2.
When Jim knocked on James’s door, and James got up to let him in, James was reading an old pulp magazine, the August 1977 issue of Analog that contained the original short story “Ender’s Game” that inspired the novel. This is level 3.
so… whats the turing test for hipster / uptown ?
“What’s your favorite band? Really? Everybody at the country club loves them.”
All suits he wears should be blatantly bespoke. Have him fiddle with the buttons, show him putting on a jacket to indicate an impeccable fit ’round the shoulders. Close-ups of the material should indicate all natural fibers.
As far as scenes go, he could be taking a call relevant to some case while at a tailor. The detective intersperses his investigative insight with shrewd sartorial observations as an obsequious man presents various cuts, patterns, and other such things. He shows he is able to “talk shop” along two tracks at once. They (the detective and tailor) could also have a brief exchange on some background jazz music.
Please rate your level of concern over the corona virus on a scale from 1-10 where 1 is “coronaWhat?” and 10 is “we’re finally going to get to use the bomb shelter”.
Personally, or “for the world” or “for the Chinese?”
Me: 1
World: 2
Chinese: 3
2: “Meh. I’ve heard of it, but don’t expect direct effects. Might be a good excuse to not go into work.”
2ish. It’s most likely going to be akin to the SARS outbreak, though with more infected and less of the share of infected dying (which may or may not come out to less deaths, depending on how the ratio of increased virality to decreased lethality goes). I might even wager less than SARS, given the response to SARS was much slower, but the disruption for the Wuhan strain is notably more than SARS so it might be a bigger fuss socially over less of an issue.
I feel like it’s a 3-4 just because of how massive the travel disruptions are if nothing else.
Diseases matter as much by secondary effects that have nothing to do with the disease as anything else.
My level of concern over the virus would be 1, but I agree that the effects of other people’s concern (and media hype) mean that it will be disruptive on the order of 3-4.
It reminds me of the Fukushima disaster – little direct suffering from nuclear radiation but a great deal from societal overreaction
1% chance of death if infected is a very high risk.
I didn’t realise the mortality rate was that high. In that case my concern is somewhat higher.
I thought that was for elderly/immune compromised people? Which again, is horrible, but not something you need to worry about for yourself unless you’re elderly or sick.
@Conrad Honcho,
That’s including them. The official death rate is higher but probably you had mild cases where they didn’t come forward. If you’re young it might be lower. If you have 50 years of life left then a .1% chance of dying now would equal about two and a half weeks of life. Plus, being infected sucks. It’s worth delaying that vacation to avoid.
A fair fraction of the severely ill (about 1/3 IIRC) were people with no pre-existing conditions. That’s a worrying level, although, it’s hard to say at this point how many people do not become severely ill.
As I understand it, it’s 1% (well, now 2%) of the total cases, but this statistic ignores the delay between infection and consequences.
See here in wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Log-linear_plot_of_coronovirus_cases_with_linear_regressions.png
So the 1-2% estimate seems inherently flawed. You can look at the plot, guess the delay, and panic (don’t!), or better just guess based on the previous major outbreak (SARS) at 10-20%.
A 4 right now, because of where I and my parents live (cities with lots of Chinese tourists). Once the infection rate levels off, that’ll probably drop to a 2. This is probably too high, but my anxiety has kind of latched onto it.
I at first thought it was hype but after looking into it I say about a 5. I’m going to stock up on non-perishables and masks later today.
WorstBest case I’ll consume them gradually anyway. If you already eat a lot of rice, top ramen, ect., stocking up now is a no-brainer.I’ve long wondered why there wasn’t more bomb-shelter building during the cold war. I think the explanation is that people react well to immediate threats but poorly to abstract threats. In the latter, individuals don’t do anything until the crowd does and care mainly about signaling to associates their loyalty, which is not helped by actions only likely to help oneself. This also explains why more people don’t sign up for cryonics.
You mean aside from cryonics, while not literally being a scam (in all cases), having the appearance and reliability of one?
Seems like you’re setting up a Motte-and-Bailey here between “cryonics is a scam,” and “well, people think cryonics is a scam.” If your argument is the former, make it. If it’s the latter, the question becomes why. And my explanation is that people aren’t too concerned with survival in an abstract sense. They have an instinct to avoid concrete threats and an instinct to signal to associates.
“People think cryonics is a scam” is sufficient to explain why people don’t sign up for it, though. If one is concerned about survival in the abstract sense, why buy cryonics if you think prepper-ing or even a simple HSA has a higher expected ROI?
They don’t.
Guess I’ll just have to take your word for it, Pascal
As if you can’t do both? Less of this, please.
I’ll take the over on SARS (774 deaths), but the under on 2009’s H1N1 outbreak (17,000 deaths). So, I guess around a 2 or 3? I don’t expect to be personally affected, but I think it will affect a lot of people.
In this as in all things, perspective matters. Coronavirus will remain a 2.5* for me until there’s any significant number of cases outside of (a particular part of) China.
As discussed, quoted mortality figures are going to be fairly inflated because [some large fraction of, probably most] cases are subclinical.
*gloss as ‘if everyone involved massively bungles absolutely everything, this would be pretty-bad-but-not-apocalyptic.’
Somewhere around a 3-4. In my personal life, about a 2 – I’m unlikely to encounter it and it isn’t that deadly, though my risk factors are above average.
Riding around on the ambulance a bit more, mostly because I now need to remember to ask people more questions about where they’ve been.
I don’t think the health risk is very serious for me, since although elderly I’m in pretty good health.
But I am a little concerned about the secondary effects. I have no plans to travel in China but I am going to be spending about two weeks on a speaking trip in Europe in March and a similar length in Australia a few months after, and one possible response to the problem would be increased restrictions on travel to prevent the spread of the disease.
3. I am not particularly concerned because there are not many non-Chinese cases at the present time. If there are US cases, I will be concerned, because I do not want to expose my newborn to a deadly virus.
There have been US cases for several days, though we’re still in single digits.
In Chicagoland, even, though only 1 or 2.
Let me clarify: numbers of US cases that require multiple hands and maybe even my feet to count.
4-6
for China: 6
It is important not to fall into the dangerous trap of pattern matching to swine-flu, ebola, SARS. The current estimates of mortality and contagiousness for the nCov are higher than for the seasonal flu; in addition there have been reports that asymptomatic people can transmit the disease (from Germany). This would be quite bad.
On the other hand, unless there is a massive cover up, current numbers outside of China look actually surprisingly good, in that the known cases have infected a very low number of other people. However I will channel my inner Taleb by yelling:
Fat-tailed distribution!
Personally, 3.5
It seems, for now, like it’s reasonably geographically limited and the fatality rate is relatively low (for a global pandemic, I mean – it’s still an order of magnitude greater than the seasonal flu).
On the other hand, it seems like there may be a significant period of asymptomatic transmission for 2019-nCoV. While there are no cases in the UK yet I work in (and commute in and around) London so if and when there are I’m likely to be close to the local epicentre and any travel disruptions are likely to bite me.
I’m young-ish, healthy and not immunocompromised, so that reduces my concern. But set against that I have elderly parents and young children to worry about which more than counterbalances.
Somewhere around a 5, but only because I have 0 confidence the Chinese government is being even a little bit truthful about anything at all, and they’re basically the only source of real information we have at this point.
If they aren’t engaged in a massive coverup, then 1 or 2.
I don’t know. From a humanitarian perspective I’d be more concerned about Chinese overreaction than underreaction.
Eh, I guess, but I’m thinking selfishly here. Chinese overreaction will be harmful to many Chinese, for sure. But is no threat to me. Whereas Chinese underreaction is what would allow this thing to spread globally.
Yes, and the CCP cares very much about its image. They took a lot of heat for SARS, so what I would be worried about would be the Chinese government taking extreme measures to prevent a reoccurrence. As you said, helpful to us, but pretty bad for the Chinese.
Which is precisely why I suspect they might downplay the severity of this in the international media.
Even if they are ruthlessly efficient at solving this issue within China, if their message to the rest of the world is “No big deal!” and if the rest of the world believes that, then we won’t restrict travel or quarantine victims or take any of the necessary steps to prevent further spread.
Low. I know what it is, so not “1”, but the odds of it affecting me personally, or anyone I know, seem to be at the “keep an eye on it in case it gets worse” level. (As compared to either “totally ignore it” or “consider what precautions I should take right now”.)
I think there are bad indicators about the outbreak, plus personally most of my close relatives work in a hospital.
So 4? Like, 0.1% chance of one near-family disease contraction?
Meaning, I’ll consider how to prepare (buy canned food, read a bit online, and… what else?), but also assume that by far the more likely outcome is that it will turn out OK. Consequently, I will *not* retroactively condemn the decision to prepare if proven false beyond meta-level corrections. (Like slightly calibrating my 0.1% probability estimate, and correcting my apparent policy of addressing 0.1% threats.)
ISTM that the kind of preparation you’d do for a nasty but not Andromeda Strain level virus is probably stuff you should do anyway, as it also prepares for everything from a natural disaster messing up the local stores and roads for a couple weeks to civil disorder to just having everyone in the family get really sick for a couple weeks and need to be able to eat and keep on their normal medicines without having to do a lot of shopping.
Colds are often coronavirus, so my not-very-informed guess is you’d avoid it like you avoid catching a cold–try not to spend a lot of time next to coughing/sneezing people, wash your hands after being potentially exposed, etc. I was flying recently and saw many people from Asia wearing surgical masks, and those things are quite cheap at the drug store.
How much good does wearing a surgical mask do against something like getting the flu? Does it significantly lower your odds?
Flu is mostly transmitted by fluids. So, yes, it should.
I mean, if surgical masks didn’t provide a barrier to germs, they wouldn’t serve their eponymous function.
Well, I assume that “accidentally sneezing into someone’s open chest cavity” would be more serious than “breathing the same air as sick people on the subway”, so I could see a case where the (maybe) small change in risk is worth it in one case and not the other.
Also, I constantly see doctors using Purell, but the FDA just slapped them on the wrist for saying the help stop the spread of the flu. So, again, I can see where it might make a small difference, where in some cases it’s worth it and others it isn’t.
From the reference I found online here, it looks like alcohol inactivates flu virus really well when it’s alone, but not when it’s encased in mucus from just being sneezed/coughed out. Eventually the mucus dries out, and then alcohol works to inactivate it again. I’d expect the same thing to happen with coronavirus particles, but I’m not an expert–anyone know more?
My general sense is that
washing with soap >> alcohol rubs >> nothing
Thanks!
So there appears to be a pattern of Biden family members getting rich off of Joe’s name. It’s not just Hunter. And I’m sure it’s not just the Bidens I’m sure most politicians from both parties do this.
I understand that this is pretty low level of corruption, maybe the lowest possible without having very diminishing returns from further efforts to get rid of it. But at the same time it has a corroding effect to have officials like Biden behaving so hypocritically.
I’m also suspicious that the over the top rhetoric surrounding Trump and the impeachment effort is due to Trump making moves to investigate that level of corruption.
Just to be clear, it’s not a given that Joe Biden is behaving badly in the general case of “people getting cachet due to their last name.” His son and brother and other family are adults who can do what they want. If others are gullible enough to give out money to people based on being relatives of a well-connected person, that’s on them.
Joe’s own fault lay in not recognizing and recusing himself from situations (like Ukraine) where he actually had authority that would create, at minimum, an apparent conflict, or in actively assisting the impression of influence for his family members (like the China trip with Hunter). If it’s kept plausibly deniable, like Chelsea Clinton perpetually getting highly-paid gigs for doing not much, then there’s little that can be done. People and companies will buy the appearance of “being connected” even if there is no actual policy value.
That’s a fair point, but in this article they quote a founder of a company who hired Joe’s brother as follows:
I’ll grant you that this is hearsay from an anonymous source, but the guy is not making an extraordinary claim.
I’m not sure that really challenges the point. That quote, assuming it’s completely accurate, is consistent with “the appearance of being connected” being desirable. It isn’t saying that Joe Biden is putting a finger on the scale. It’s saying that being the sort of company that hobnobs with important people is an asset in getting business, and perhaps that government people will be more impressed with you and assume you know what you’re doing.
It’s kind of like the reason that new, random companies sometimes advertise during the Super Bowl (not just the usual suspects like Bud Light). Blowing $10 million on a Super Bowl ad is a signal that “I’m a legit company, not a fly-by-night scam.” That has value even if the marketing itself is not that useful. Blowing $500,000 on employing a random connected person plausibly sends a similar signal that “We’re serious players in the government game, we know people” even if there’s no actual benefit.
I don’t think Joe’s blameless, and I think asking for an investigation of the more questionable stuff is a legitimate action. So I’m not biased for Biden. But I think it’s important to note the dynamics at play; it’s more about signalling and less about explicit pay-for-play.
I totally agree that signalling your connections is a real thing. But that being said, I think that the fact that having Biden’s brother on the board seems to be beneficial in receiving government contracts strongly suggests Joe is guilty of something. Maybe he’s not. But at this point I think it’s more likely that he’s pushed the scale for his friends and family than not.
Do relatives of people like, say, Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, or Richard Branson get similar deals to the relatives of big politicians?
I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t be concerned about that. If Bill Gates’ kid gets paid to curry favor with Bill Gates, and Gates then uses his money, or his company’s money (back when he was in charge of MicroSoft) to purchase from or invest with the guy paying his kid…so what? It’s his money and his company. He can do what he pleases with it. Power granted to government officerholders, however, is not theirs to do with as they please.
Yeah, in addition to what Conrad said, nepotism is highly inefficient. In a competitive private market, it will be punished severely (although this will probably take some time).
Since government is a monopoly, you can get away with it indefinitely so long as you still posses sufficient force. See: Korea, North
It’s a question to establish a baseline of what is “normal.”
We are status-seeking animals, and people like being associated with famous people. Goop wouldn’t be successful at telling women to shove eggs up their hoohas if Gweneth Paltrow weren’t there.
Hmm. So if Michael Jordan’s kid gets free stuff, and Joe Biden’s kid gets free stuff, that’s an indicator kids of high-status people getting free stuff is just status signalling. But if Jordan’s kid doesn’t (because nepotism is inefficient in a free market for basketball sneakers) and Biden’s kid does, that’s evidence kids getting free stuff indicates corruption? Is that what you’re getting at?
Instead of guessing what conclusion I’m trying to reach and then making arguing about that conclusion, assume that I am asking because I really want to know the answer.
I think they probably do, but not in the same areas. For example, I think Michael Jordan’s relatives aren’t likely to be on Burisma’s board. But I think they would be more likely to get sinecures at sports programs or sports broadcasting or the like. I have a recollection that one of Michael Jordan’s kids got scholarship offers from several Chicago schools even though he was a mid-level recruit at best, presumably with the theory that having “MJ’s kid” would boost their program’s profile. (After looking it up, it was Jeffrey Jordan, and his Wikipedia includes this nugget: “As of November 4, 2013, Jordan lives in Portland, Oregon, where he entered Nike Inc.’s management-training program.”)
I would think Bill Gates’ kids are likely to get appointed to the boards of non-profits (due to Gates Foundation) or maybe tech companies. Again, the point isn’t that they will necessarily get direct help, but the idea of “Yeah, we’re big in this community, Bill Gates’ relative is on our board.” It may not make sense, but it seems that’s how people think.
I’ll grant you that this is hearsay from an anonymous source, but the guy is not making an extraordinary claim.
Yeah, that’s the kind of ‘usual practice’ where political parties sell access to ministers for fund-raising purposes; both parties involved (the businesses forking out a couple of grand for a lunch with the Minister for Bowties and the Minister) say that it means nothing, that there isn’t any quid pro quo, it’s just letting them put their case and doesn’t mean favourable treatment. All that the lunch or the brother of the VP can promise to deliver is to get you access that you wouldn’t otherwise have, what happens after that is not guaranteed.
How much we should believe that is unknown. It’s like the pharmaceutical companies spending all that dosh on sending reps to doctors and hosting dinners and offering prizes of holidays and the rest of it if the doctors just listen to this short talk about the benefits of the company’s new wonder drug. It’s legal, but does it give the appearance of wrongdoing? and should it be stopped?
That is less than half the problem – this is Peter Schweizer claiming an anonymous source attested to the son of the co-founder of the parent company that hired James Biden saying such. Two of the links in that evidentiary chain disappeared literally in the space of your post.
Serious question – by what process did you stumble upon these articles? By priors alone, I would be quite surprised if you’re a regular reader of the NYPost.
LOL, your priors are well tuned.
My buddy sent me those articles.
This is true in a way, and kinda false in a way. Let’s start by just thinking about how people try to corrupt government officials. You start off thinking, “Man, it’d be really nice if I could get this government official to do things that are favorable to me. In order to accomplish that, I could give him something that he wants. Then, either implicitly or explicitly, he’ll take official acts that are favorable to me.” If the expected monetary outlay required to push these officials is less than the expected gain of favorable action, you try to do it. This is Crony Capitalism 101.
Your first idea is, “Everybody loves money. I bet that government official would like it if I gave him a bag of money.” And early/unsophisticated bribery schemes do this. Naturally, the public decided, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION!” and decided to outlaw such behavior, raising the cost of trying to do something so brazen. Ok, you respond, “Let’s go back to the drawing board. What are my options?” You can probably come up with a variety of possible schemes to get around the law.
One option could be, say, giving campaign contributions. It’s a totally legal and totally cool way to give the government official a bag of money! This money has slightly less value to the government official than a bag of personal money, so you’re going to need to give a little bit more in terms of campaign money than you would have had to give personal money, but so long as the expected cost is still less than the expected reward, you still do it. Naturally, the public decided, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION!” and decided to put limits on campaign contributions.
You go back to your list of options. “Well, this government official is kind of old, and he’s got lots of money already. Probably more than he can realistically spend. Even if I could have given him money directly, that’s not ideal for him. Not only does he have to worry about it being illegal, he then is probably going to want to just give the money to his kids in the form of inheritance, and that brings taxes and public knowledge of the gains, and it’s complicated, risky, and more expensive. I know! What if I give bags of money directly to his kids! This isn’t illegal, and it’s a cheaper way of doing what he really wants to do with the money anyway! It’s a win-win!” Or maybe you think, “What if I set up a political fund that I can use to mirror the politician’s talking points, giving him a boost that is kinda like giving campaign contributions, but isn’t directly violating the law?” Sure, again, that’s a little more expensive again, but expected value yadda yadda.
Naturally, the public wants to say, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION!” They want to outlaw it. I think the public is still having debates over the latter activity because it comes so close to the core of our free speech values, but it’s a little easier for them to outlaw the former scheme. Both of these schemes are quite difficult to prove in detail. That (combined with the free speech concerns) is why the Court decided to adopt a position requiring some amount of proof of a quid pro quo in Citizens United. It’s why when we see enforcement of FCPA that maybe you end up with gigantic settlements rather than criminal charges. It’s tough to get the requisite proof. And yes, when you enforce it, it’s probably easier to enforce it against the guy giving the money than the guy taking the money. Do you need to show that the guy “taking” the money in a campaign finance case like CU had knowledge of the scheme? Maybe, because of the speech interests. Do you need to show that the guy “taking” the money in a pay-the-kids case like JPMorgan had knowledge of the scheme? Wellll… maybe not. Maybe the best you can do is go after the guy giving the money. If you can find evidence that the guy taking the money had knowledge of the scheme, too, then maybe you can try to go after him. But that’s going to be hard to do.
Maybe the best outcome you can get is that the guy taking the money ends up with a political hit. This would not be irrational behavior from the public. If the children of a politician, say Donald Trump, continually show up within arms’ reach of these corruption cases (say, JPMorgan paid a settlement in a case that involved one of Trump’s kids, HSBC paid a settlement in a case that involved another one, Company X… and so on, as the list builds), then it’s potentially rational behavior for the voting public to say, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION… and I want to punish corruption. There are impediments to doing it with criminal law, but I can at least vote against politicians like that.” This raises the costs of engaging in such a scheme and at least theoretically reduces the likelihood of future politicians doing likewise.
Obviously, there are third party costs to this method (Donald Trump’s kids and companies who may want to legitimately hire them have to avoid the appearance of corruption and so may not want to engage in trade that might otherwise be totally legal and totally cool), but pretty much all schemes to punish corruption have third party costs. It’s probably up to the voting public to determine where to draw the lines (if it goes so far as to make all kids of politicians totally unhireable, that disincentivizes potentially good politicians from seeking office). “Appearance of corruption” is an even harder-to-define standard, so voters have to wade through potential hit pieces and skewed defenses in pursuit of this goal. I think that so far, we’re not close to making kids of politicians totally unhireable, especially if they just take sorta ‘normal’ jobs, but trying to balance these factors are necessarily going to reduce the options of those kids at least somewhat.
So, in a sense, you’re right. We’re almost certainly not going to hold Joe Biden (or Hunter Biden) criminally accountable for any corruption. But there’s no reason why his political career can’t take a hit in service of the public’s goal to root out the appearance of corruption IF it’s the case that his kids keep popping up in cases that very strongly appear to be corrupt (I want to give even more emphasis on the “if”; I’ve seen the hit pieces that try to show an appearance of corruption; I haven’t really seen many defenses of the core situations besides, “There’s no way to criminally prosecute these guys anyway, so stop talking about it,” so I really strongly believe that the level of uncertainty is high).
I think your comment is a good summary.
Maybe the best outcome you can get is that the guy taking the money ends up with a political hit. This would not be irrational behavior from the public.
It’s not nuts, but it means that useless bags of poo like Hunter Biden get veto powers over their family members. Even if that is the new rule, it should be suspicious if people propose a new rule right when it takes out the guy who looks like frontrunner for your party’s nomination.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this yet. I feel like I can come up with schemes to reduce the concern, and they have obvious negative affects on some families (people already talk about recusals, but with a sufficiently malicious bag of poo…; heavy-hand-mode is to set up a CFIUS like committee on children of high-level USG officials taking roles in foreign-owned companies). I think I’d probably want some more data. Is Hunter a uniquely bad bag of poo? Is the effect of other bags of poo acting maliciously significant or almost infinitesimal? If we’re currently in the latter case, I think I’d be willing to say, “Let’s monitor whether the number grows, but go ahead and move forward.”
This, on the other hand, I’m incredibly sympathetic to. We’ve seen several other cases that have me asking, “Are you really ready to implement this standard across-the-board going forward?” For example, a sudden renewal in prosecuting FARA cases (in unique ways) or clever new interpretations of “thing of value” in campaign finance law.
This concern is doubly difficult in the case of a new political rule instead of a legal one. At least if we’re wanting to implement a new legal rule, we can just literally rewrite the statute to say, “…and yes, we really mean X when we say ‘thing of value’ in the campaign finance laws (maybe it won’t pass strict scrutiny in the courts, but we can try).” Then, it’s clarified in black and white. But I have zero good answers for concerns about new political rules. It implicates the deep partisan mistrust that underlies many of our political conflicts. At best, I’ve seen arguments along the lines that both Trump’s and Clinton’s impeachments could have resulted in censure instead of removal. The idea is that perhaps you can get both sides to at least say, “Now that we’ve seen the first tricky case, we’re going to agree that this type of thing is unacceptable moving forward.” Then, you probably still have to just sort of hope that it “sticks” (which is only the minutest of steps in the environment of deep partisan mistrust I was talking about).
That said, I’m not entirely sure that this particular rule is all that new. We’ve seen a lot of different corruption schemes over time, some of which couldn’t be prosecuted in the moment for whatever reason. I’d have to defer to some historians to explain the contours of how the politics worked and the similarities/differences between them and the current tricky case.
Finally, FWIW, while I ask my friends, “Are you willing to apply this same rule going forward, even to politicians you like?” because I don’t have any sort of deep partisan mistrust with my friends and am interested to hear their answers, I would volunteer, “Yes. Yes I would sign on to this sort of rule going forward applying to politicians on both sides.” Not worth much to the general public or anyone outside of my circle of close friends, but I do think that this would have significantly positive effects with relatively minor negative effects on a small number of people.
(On the other hand (actual last second thought), we could enshrine at least something as a legal rule. We could try to extend FCPA. It currently only covers US businesses dealing with foreign officials. Very few laws are meant to apply extra-territorially, so it would be an extremely hard lift to extend this. Worse, in cases like a wholly-foreign company, there’s little the USG can do in response to violations (especially if, as above, they’re the only ones you can get enough evidence on). It may end up being more symbolic than practical, but if we’re looking for symbolic ways to solidify political rules going forward, maaaaayybe it’s worth a shot?)
I don’t disagree. I think it’s undesirable that relatives of connected people behave this way. In fact, I think this type of behavior is particularly corrosive, because it supports the impression that (to quote politicians from both sides), “the system is rigged.”
But being such social animals as humans are, I’m not sure how to fix it. I mean, isn’t this literally the business model for a bunch of advertising? “So-and-so likes our product.” Or “we’re the most popular brand, so follow the lead of the popular crowd.” Appearing connected is important to people, and even if you were to ban the practice, you’re just going to end up with different groups getting preference. Former law partners, etc. You see that even now. At some point you don’t want your only elected officials to be disconnected orphans with no family or friends or business connections.
My point is that the signalling can be imposed externally without any direct action by the politician being challenged. If you’re going to punish the politician electorally, that’s fine – I don’t have any problem with that – but it seems like examining how much he encouraged the behavior is relevant to how much weight it should have on your vote. In this case, it looks like Joe Biden was pretty nonchalant about letting it happen, and may have actively encouraged it at times. So I think it’s worth taking seriously; but unless you’re going to cordon off the lives of a large fraction of the population (family, friends, business associates of any politician) and impose Draconian restrictions, then society almost has to accept some level of it.
What if Biden comes out and says, “My son Hunter is a useless bag of poo. I’ve insisted he stop trying to profit off his ties to me, and he refuses to do so. I completely disavow him, and all of his actions. From this point forward, anyone who does anything to benefit him will not only not earn my respect or admiration, they will earn my ire and enmity.” (and credibly means it)?
Sure, asking someone to publicly denounce their children is kinda tough. On the other hand, in this scenario, Hunter is basically blackmailing Joe for power and influence, so he sorts has it coming?
I’m not sure that “kinda tough” is the adjectival phrase I’d use for publicly disowning and humiliating your kids, at least not for psychologically normal individuals. Enough so that this would be (further) selection pressure for some pretty abnormal people.
Didn’t Joe Biden just lose one of his kids a few years ago? How much do you think he wants to publicly disown another one?
I mean, yeah, sure.
But in this scenario, this comes after Joe has politely asked Hunter several times to stop taking handouts from oligarchs, and Hunter has essentially refused.
“What do you do with a disobedient child who refuses to behave in an acceptable manner?” is one of the classic and most difficult issues parents face. There’s no easy answer, but something like this is far from unheard of. I know parents of drug addicts who have broadcast messages to friends and family basically saying “DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES give my kid money, they are scamming you and going to buy drugs.” I assume that’s hard and I assume it hurts them to have to say that. But it’s the option they chose…
It seems that not only did he lose a son to brain cancer in 2015, but he also lost a daughter and his first wife to an accident. Hunter is the only son by his first wife he has left.
Apparently, according to Wikipedia, Joe Biden wanted to resign to take care of his children, but didn’t. Who knows what kind of guilt he carries over that, he may feel a bit guilty over how Hunter turned out.
I would say disavowing a child who lived through such tragic circumstances is not something that would make a candidate more credible in my eyes (learning what happened with his family makes me more understanding of the Hunter Biden story).
@ana53294 says: “…learning what happened with his family…”
Besides losing his first wife and a daughter to a traffic accident Biden’s other son served in Iraq and held public office before his death, all of which makes me trust Biden more than others without such a history to govern compassionately.
As to the likelihood that Biden may be a bit corrupt, yeah probably, I expect most non-rural New England east coast politicians to be a bit “bent” and “connected” (I also expect the same of most Chicagoan and San Franciscan pols), but I’m still likely to vote for the guy.
Demanding that Biden disown his son to avoid the appearance of corruption seems like the sort of thing that nobody demands of their own side, only of the other side.
When I proposed “people with black sheep in the family cannot become President” as a possible rule, I wasn’t all that keen on it.
However, it is far and away preferable to a universe where we tell Joe “hey, you get to be President, but first disown your son.”
This is a reasonable post except you need a phrase like ‘at a minimum’ in lines like “Joe’s own fault lay in not recognizing and recusing himself from situations’.
The best case seems to be that Joe turned a blind eye to his son dealing on his name.
That’s fair. I can think of two instances where Biden seems to have actively encouraged it: the China trip, and Hunter’s seat on the Amtrak board (his qualification being “he rides trains a lot.”) Amtrak when he was a Senator, not VP.
I thought Pam Bondi did a decent job in the impeachment trial of establishing that, given the facts surrounding the Hunter Biden/Burisma case, there was a legitimate case for withholding U.S. aid to the Ukraine for national interest reasons until the Ukrainian government committed itself to investigating it further. Trump’s defense team did not have to prove that Hunter Biden positively did something corrupt. They just had to prove that any reasonable president would have reacted to the apparent facts of the case as they appeared at the time and would have done the same thing for national interest reasons, regardless of the fact that Hunter Biden happened to be related to a politician who happened to decide to run against Trump. Running for office should not confer a shield of invincibility. Otherwise, every corrupt person could escape justice by running for offices all the time to provide the excuse that “the government is just investigating me because I’m a political rival!”
Given who our current President is, this is a supremely ironic statement.
I think there’s no need for the Ukrainians to be involved at all. Just go to the State Department (or have the IG’s office go to the State Department) and find out how it came to be US policy that Shokin be fired. If it was all on the up and up then there’s some guy or girl in the Ukraine division at State who was writing memos in 2015 about how Shokin had to go because we’re trying to do good things A, B and C and Shokin is doing corrupt things X, Y and Z. There’s memos, emails, etc, and Biden just needs a finger wagging for not recusing himself and creating the appearance of impropriety. Find the person, find the memos, find the emails, find the meeting notes, tell us what A-C and X-Z are.
If these emails and memos don’t exist and it looks like it was Biden’s idea to fire Shokin, my next question would be “how common is it for Vice Presidents of the United States to be personally involved in the firing of foreign cabinet level officials?” I haven’t heard of such a thing before this, but I don’t always keep track of exactly everything every Vice President does. If it’s an “every other Tuesday” kind of deal, Biden’s probably still in the clear. But if the number of foreign cabinet level officials each of Al Gore, Dick Cheney, Joe Biden and Mike Pence have had fired is 0, 0, 1, and 0, respectively, then that looks fishy. To my knowledge, no one has tried to answer this question.
There is no defense of Hunter’s cronyism, but imo the strongest criticism of the investigation is
1. It is an isolated demand for rigor.
and
2.
There is an entirely appropriate procedure for investigating which was not followed. so the ‘do the same thing’ is not if someone else would have looked into the matter, but how they would have.
I know this relates to one of Scott’s previous posts but I’m not 100% on the exact meaning of that expression. Are you suggesting that this is happening left and right but not investigated?
it means expressing an abundance of concerns, any one of which is legitimate, but directed primarily towards things you don’t like; while not expressing the same concerns about things you like.
or.. just read https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
Right. In that case I feel the entire Trump presidency is an isolated demand for rigor. More specifically, the Mueller inquiry and the impeachment proceedings are isolated demands for rigor.
that is a good point. there definitely are some people who wanted inquiries and impeachment of other presidents, but not trump. so your usage is correct, it is an isolated demand for rigor.
I don’t think this true. Who else in government is suspected of doing something like this?
Also, when this excuse is given for some crass behavior by Trump, the usual retort on SSC is that Trump didn’t say the magic words or whatever that give you plausible deniability, so the fact that every other president does corrupt things on the sly doesn’t give Trump a Get Out of Jail Free card for doing corrupt things brazenly. The same applies to Biden: when you strong-arm foreign governments to protect the corrupt company your kid works for, you need to do it the circumspect way: you have the State Department document all the legitimate reasons for firing the guy, you have the ambassador do the threatening, and you don’t talk about it publicly. Instead Biden did the deed in person and then bragged about it on camera.
pam bondi?
I don’t get your point?
i guess, what specifically is ‘something like this’?
Who did Pam Bondi have fired in a corrupt way to protect her kid or whatever?
https://www.jacksonville.com/article/20110729/NEWS/801247085
biden isn’t the only crony in government.
Okay, that looks fishy. But I don’t see why that lets Biden off the hook. Did they get the investigation of Bondi?
never claimed that lets him off the hook, or he should be off the hook.
Keep in mind, as Jay Sekulow pointed out during questions in the trial today, that the Obama Administration essentially did the same thing to Trump’s campaign that Trump is being accused of doing to Biden’s campaign right now. Obama’s administration in 2016 used foreign agents such as Christopher Steele to obtain dirt on a political rival of his party, Donald Trump. An isolated demand for rigor would be to excuse the Obama Administration for this but criticize Trump’s Administration for doing the same thing.
In both cases, the administrations probably thought that what they were doing was in the national interest.
Yes, and everyone outside the full-blown TDS brigade thinks that was at least sleazy. But he didn’t use the taxpayers’ money or the official influence of the United States Government to do it, which is a line I hope you don’t want future presidents crossing. Because in the hands of a team of competent politicians and bureaucrats, that would be a huge step towards a de-facto single-party state.
Isn’t that at least an open question? There were indications that information was exchanged amongst the official intelligence services of various countries involving some of those allegations, and there have been allegations that Joseph Mifsud was a U.S. or other Western intelligence asset.
ETA: Also, that’s on the foreign government side.
On the domestic side, John Brennan, James Clapper, and James Comey appear to have been running something with the “dossier briefing” that ended up on BuzzFeed. Then there’s Susan Rice and the “unmasking” of communications; the FISA issues documented in the IG report; FBI leaking and bias; etc. None of that says to me “didn’t use taxpayer money or official influence” in operating against an opposing candidate.
i was under the impression that Steele did his research for other parties and only delivered it to the fbi because he assessed the content warranted it?
Steele began the work for others, but was paid by the FBI to continue it:
John, if the worrisome thing is “don’t use taxpayer money or official influence of government against political opponents,” then that ship has sailed.
that seems like somewhat different circumstances
Insufficient data for a proper assessment.
If Barack Obama had told the FBI to pay Steele, that would probably have been grounds to impeach Barack Obama. But he’s almost certainly too smart for that.
If the FBI had decided to pay Steele because they wanted to stop Trump from being elected president, that would have been grounds to fire and maybe prosecute James Comey.
If the FBI decided to pay Steele because they thought he had or could get relevant information on an existing investigation, then that would depend on the legitimacy of the existing information. Since we’re obviously trying to make this a Trump impeachment analogy, that would be roughly equivalent to the FBI investigating Hunter Biden and deciding to ask State to finesse some Ukranian assistance. Which would have been the right way to deal with any serious belief in Biden family corruption.
The FBI was staffed with at least two extremely anti-Trump agents in Peter Strozk and Lisa Page. These were assigned to the Trump-Russia file. I cant say for certain how many FBI agents are like that, and whether these very biased agents were knowingly assigned to the Trump file, but as they say, personnel is policy.
These are just wild conjecture, and throwing factoids against a wall.
This is one of my most frustrating failure modes of the comments sections. Just because something is a soldier for your side does not mean it has relevance to the point under discussion. This is even if the factoid/comment is entirely true.
Imagine you have a local PD staffed with known racists. The chief of police is also racist but wants plausible deniability. He doesnt need to issue a memo saying “treat black suspects much more harshly please”. He knows that’s going to happen regardless because of the staffing decisions.
So James Comey doesnt need to tell Strozk or Page to try and stop Trump from being elected. He just needs to put them on the case, which is what he did.
Maybe Comey is genuinely shocked at the behavior of Strozk and Page. But it is a valid answer to John Schilling’s comment of:
to say that the FBI, intentionally or not, took actions to hamper Trump’s election chances. He didnt write a memo, but he didnt need to.
mycomment was meant to encompass johns commetn as well whch was already off the point
@ John Schilling
This is a disturbing comment and sentimentality (just like the sentimentality that what Clinton did with Fusion/Steele wasn’t bad). Its basically saying that we should legally and politically privilege insiders who know how to game the system with polite lies.
We should legally privilege people who can accomplish their objectives without committing crimes, over the crooks. We should also politically privilege people who can accomplish their objectives without lying, over the damn liars. And yes, that implicitly means the privilege will also extend to those clever enough to not get caught. There’s no way around that without wholly abandoning the distinction between honest men and lying crooks.
What is deeply disturbing is your team’s insistence on “We couldn’t find an honest champion, and we couldn’t find one who could lie and crime without getting caught, and it’s unfair to expect us to compete with the other side’s more capable politicians so you have to let our guy off the hook even when you catch him blatantly lying or criming”.
@John Schilling
Republicans caught a Democrat President lying and committing crimes and absolutely nothing happened to him. 0 Democrats voted to convict him.
Democrats haven’t even accused Trump of a crime (there are none in their articles of impeachment), so why should we remove him?
You’ve cheated the system by defining crimes only as “those things that the establishment doesn’t like which also may be morally bad, none of which are actually statutory crimes.”
The people you say, “were not caught” were caught, they just insist that their rituals mean its not wrong. Biden was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Comey was caught lying. Clinton 1 lied under oath, Clinton 2 violated the letter of the law with regards to classified information.
Never said that. I said that there has been blatant criming and immorality which has been explained away by “magic words” and “secret rituals”, meanwhile, otherwise legitimate conduct has been re-interpreted as illegitimate conduct because the President was forced to use unorthodox channels due to systemic unconstitutional resistance from the civil service.
Edit:
For example, Vindman has not committed treason, but he has committed several offenses worthy of a court marshal. He is one of thousands (at minimum). And because of civil service reform, they mostly cannot be removed by Trump, even if they clearly should be. Instead he has to keep firing generals until he finds a general that will properly prune the lower ranks, and doing that in a government as large as the US is a severe burden even on a being like Ultron, let alone a human.
Why should the Ukrainian government be doing the investigation?
It’s not the US government’s business what anyone does in Ukraine, so long as it stays in Ukraine. It only becomes our business if it looks like Hunter is trying to illicitly lobby or otherwise corrupt the US government, or Joe pulling illegal strings on his behalf, or the like. Stuff that happens at least in part in the United States, where we’ve got a perfectly good FBI and DoJ to investigate it.
Ukraine, has a DoJ-equivalent that pretty much everybody agrees is at least half-rotten with corruption, even if they don’t agree with which half. So the plan for dealing with what you think is a “legitimate case” of government corruption so severe it justifies threatening the national security of a major non-NATO ally to resolve, is to tell a bunch of likely-corrupt Ukranian prosecutors “Hey, you guys look into this and tell us whether we’ve got a corruption problem with one of our leading presidential candidates”? That’s mind-bogglingly, insanely stupid. You might as well deal with the (highly dubious) claim that Donald Trump is a Russian mole by asking the Kremlin to investigate him for us.
If there is an FBI investigation into the (highly dubious) claims of Biden family corruption, then and only then it might be necessary and appropriate to lean on the Ukrainians to assist the FBI in that matter. If there isn’t an FBI investigation, why not? The FBI works for the president who claims to be so deeply concerned with the threat of Biden family corruption. The FBI is literally made for this sort of thing. And the FBI is generally honest and law-abiding.
Yeah, which is why I don’t think that happened. From John Solomon’s reporting, the Ukrainians have been investigating or trying to get information about Biden to the US government (or Trump) since summer 2018 and were stymied by lack of cooperation from US officials (State officials at Kiev embassy circular filed their visa applications; hand delivered documents to the DOJ were ignored). This is why the Ukrainians approached Rudy. You’ll notice in the call record it is Zelensky who brings up the meeting with Rudy, and Trump simply agrees it is good because what Biden did looks bad. They were not establishing a new meeting: the meeting was already arranged and they both knew about it before the phone call*.
I don’t think there’s any evidence Trump initiated the Ukrainian investigation, probably for the reason you cite: it would be stupid. We don’t need the Ukrainians. Any investigation should be done by US officials, but wouldn’t it be the Inspector General’s Office instead of the FBI? Aren’t they the ones who do the internal watchdog stuff?
I also don’t buy the whole “Trump wanted a sham investigation by Ukraine to dirty up Biden” angle for, again, the same reason: that’s incredibly stupid. Zero people care who is being investigated by Ukraine. Assume the Ukrainians, completely unprompted, had officially declared Joe Biden as under investigation for corrupt actions. In this counterfactual world there is no Rudy meeting, there is no phone call, Trump had nothing to do with it whatsoever. Does a single vote change? Does the media even cover the press release? No. Nobody cares about Ukrainian investigations.
* Now who did learn about Rudy/Ukraine meeting for the first time on that phone call were the State/CIA folk who were listening in. So the same sorts of people who were stymieing Ukraine’s attempts to get the information to Trump/the US. And these people then ran to Adam Schiff and the media and completely flipped the story from “Biden did corruption” to “Trump is doing corruption.” That I do find interesting.
So, your prior is that the United States Government doesn’t do mind-bogglingly stupid things, and that if it looks like the United States Government did a mind-bogglingly stupid thing it must really be a clever thing that most of us haven’t figured out?
Because I can think of several blatant counterexamples, starting with the 2003 occupation of Iraq.
If the idea is that the United States Government doesn’t do mind-bogglingly stupid things under the leadership of Donald Trump, because of the unusual cleverness of Donald Trump, I’m just going to leave that with a simple Oh Hell No.
But we’re not talking about the US government, we’re talking about Trump, doing the thing that he’s supposed to be good at: being a populist demagogue. Nobody cares who Ukraine investigates. Populist demagogues rile up the base by appealing to stuff they care about (even if the demagogue doesn’t). Ergo, a populist demagogue would not bother smearing his opponent with something no one cares about, like an investigation by Ukraine. He would smear his opponent with something the masses do care about, like a US government investigation.
An intelligent, disciplined populist demagogue unbiased by his own personal desires, yes.
So where is it?
This is belied both by the effort the Trump administration went to prod such an investigation along, and by the multi-comment thread which you are ~30 comments down speculating about how the Bidens are corrupt.
I have not seen any evidence of any such effort. As far as I can tell the Ukrainians were already investigating, and Trump’s involvement is to say essentially “oh that’s cool.”
Which has nothing to do with whether or not the Ukrainians are investigating. Biden’s potential corruption is interesting, but Ukrainian investigations are not.
I think it’s quite clear the Bidens are at least a little bit corrupt. And the FBI participated in the FISA court abuse to spy on a member of Trump’s campaign.
For the first two years of Trump’s presidency, he had both the Senate and the House in his party. There were plenty of options to perform domestic investigations.
But Biden hadn’t become a candidate yet.
Biden didn’t get videotaped bragging about getting Shokin fired until 2018, though. I don’t think people were particularly aware of his involvement until he did that.
Joe Biden’s involvement in getting Shokin fired wasn’t some state secret.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/30/what-will-ukraine-do-without-joe-biden-putin-war-kiev-clinton-trump/
Here is the very first paragraph from October 30, 2016
Maybe the random YouTube personality didn’t know. Everyone on Capitol Hill knew about it.
And I’m saying I don’t think anyone off Capitol Hill put it together until they saw video of Biden bragging about it.
Also, my understanding is that it’s the Ukrainians who’ve been driving this. Starting in summer of 2018 they were trying to get information about Biden to the US government or Trump. The State Department kept stonewalling them so they requested the meeting with Rudy to go around State.
And there still is no domestic investigation, and as I’ve said many times I’d like one by the IG’s office to tell us how it came to be US policy that Shokin be fired.
So I’m not sure what you’re getting at. There was no domestic investigation of Biden before he was a candidate. There was no domestic investigation of Biden after he was a candidate. There was a Ukrainian investigation before and after Biden was a candidate, but no evidence Trump instigated that or had anything to do with it.
If I had to proffer an explanation for why nobody seems to be that gung-ho about a domestic investigation of Biden, it’s because singling out one politico’s kid’s graft shines the light on all their kids’ graft, and nobody wants that, so it would be nice if this would all just go away.
didn’t you just spend an entire thread arguing that this was *not* an isolated demand for rigor? have you been convinced otherwise?
The isolated part is the “Biden getting a guy fired for his kid” part. Children of politicians getting cushy jobs that probably buy their employer access to the politician I believe is widespread.
youve narrowed to a filter to make it more plausible, but even then how can you be so sure you are aware of who is getting who fired? whatever news filter you are using did not find it necessary to make you aware of pam bondi.
And I’m saying I don’t think anyone off Capitol Hill put it together until they saw video of Biden bragging about it.
People off of Capitol Hill also “put together” QAnon and Pizzagate. People go crazy and see patterns that don’t exist.
Also, my understanding is that it’s the Ukrainians who’ve been driving this. Starting in summer of 2018 they were trying to get information about Biden to the US government or Trump. The State Department kept stonewalling them so they requested the meeting with Rudy to go around State.
This is not believable.
We have contemporaneous paper trails in which the White House is urging Ukraine to announce an investigation into Biden and/or Burisma, not telling Zelensky to keep on doing what he’s been doing. You don’t hold up aid to someone because they are still doing what they have already been doing and what you want them to be doing.
Guiliani says that Zelensky is surrounded by enemies of Trump, and Guiliani wants to give Ukraine information to perform investigations; not that he got cool information from Ukraine.
And there still is no domestic investigation, and as I’ve said many times I’d like one by the IG’s office to tell us how it came to be US policy that Shokin be fired.
It is interesting to compare this viewpoint to one where the Trump is the Unitary Executive, and can simultaneously have an official policy and a shadow policy, the second of which benefits him personally.
The US’s policy against Shokin was widespread and debated publicly, including in front of the Republican-led US Senate. The EU cheered Shokin’s dismissal because of his obvious bullshit like investigating anti-corruption groups that were investigating him. When “Biden withheld funds,” he was publicly announcing the policy of the US Government, including the Republican Congress’s spending bills. He was not telling Ukraine in private that the Congressionally-authorized funds were being held while Congress was ignorant of his actions.
But we would still need an IG report to make sure this wasn’t all plotted from the shadows by puppet-master Biden, who capped off his secret arrangement by publicly announcing it at the end, I guess.
So I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
The House narrative, expressed very briefly, is that Trump applied pressure on Ukraine to get them to investigate Biden for personal gain.
A counter-narrative is that Trump was just trying to root out Ukrainian corruption, and rooting out Ukrainian corruption is good, and the fact that it was his main challenger who was being investigated was a complete coincidence.
Evidence for that complete coincidence would be showing other efforts to investigate Hunter Biden, such as by using domestic resources that are subject to the well-understood American oversight, instead of using the resources of a murky and known-to-be-somewhat-corrupt Ukraine.
Evidence for that complete coincidence would be showing efforts to investigate the situation — or to have even mentioned the Bidens’ relationship to Ukraine — before Biden became a candidate. “I didn’t investigate until political supporters thought I should” sounds like some headline you would see The Onion attributing to Hillary Clinton.
he has rallied support for Kiev in the face of Russian military intervention and cultivated a personal rapport with its leaders.
Well, sugarlumps.
I was in two minds whether there was anything possibly shady in Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma (other than a possibly dodgy company paying him essentially for the use of his name), but this changes my mind.
If Joe was deliberately cultivating personal relationships with the governing members of Ukraine, then this becomes more than “hire X’s Kid for possible access to X”, it becomes “X has an in with the guys in the government of our country” and means it was well worth Burisma’s while to have Hunter on board, as when dealing with their own internal politics there was always the possibility of Representative A or Minister B going “Crap, these guys have Biden’s kid working for them” because Biden was forging personal relationships with them as well as being the representative of the American government, so he wielded both soft and hard power. Minister B might feel inclined to go “Those damn Yanks can sod off” but it’s a different matter when it’s “Yeah but my pal Joe…”
Yeah, now to me this looks more like real rottenness going on, not just ordinary “hire a useless guy simply because of his family name, hope that some of the glitter rubs off on us”.
For the same reason that the United States DoJ did the investigation into JPMorgan’s corrupt activities toward Chinese government officials. Because of how these schemes are conducted, probably the only people you can go after criminally is the company. Because the company is mostly or entirely based in Country A, Country A does the investigating and prosecuting. I would not be surprised if people high in the USG were informed of the JPMorgan investigation and were asked, “Uh, so, this thing could potentially have political ramifications in China. We obviously have an interest in punishing it here, but foreign policy brings a whole second set of issues to bear. What say you?” Perhaps the higher-ups in the USG even contact the higher-ups in the CCP to feel them out. You cool with this kinda thing? Maybe they say, “Sure!” (Maybe they also think, “…and even better, this helps us solidify our power and damage some of our opponents.”) Maybe they say, “This would be an offense against our people and the way we conduct our affairs (particularly, it’s probably just an offense against their powerful politicians who will be damaged). We will respond in Manner X if you do that.” Then, the USG weighs the interests before deciding whether (and how) to pursue the case (maybe this type of concern is why you end up going for a settlement rather than prosecuting the case to the fullest, so you can keep some of the specifics related to the powerful politicians out of sight).
This sausage factory is supremely ugly, like most similar sausage factories. Maybe the Chinese people have to determine if the whole thing was a cynical ploy by the CCP to convince the USG to go after their political opponents. The American public needs to do this as well (and that’s the debate people are having right now, which is probably a good thing). But all of this is no reason to think anything other than, “The country in which the only people who can probably be punished for this corruption should be the country doing the investigating.”
Are there any previous examples of US presidents pressuring foreign countries to investigate specific americans (even non politically connected ones)? I’d be interested to know. There’s a post-Nixon taboo on presidents initiating investigations in the US (unitary executive be damned), for the good reason that investigatory powers are too great and could be abused. Getting another country to investigate someone seems like it could fall under this taboo, but I don’t know if it’s been made as explicit.
Not just anyone can make a plausible attempt to win office, though. And it’s not clear why an officeholder would be motivated to smear implausible rivals.
It’s a perennial problem for anybody famous or influential; you have family and friends riding your coat-tails. Politics may be especially egregious (though I’m sure there are plenty of “child of famous X getting well-paid sinecure trading off the family name” in Hollywood, business circles and so on) because they tend to put family members and cronies into well-paid sinecures that are funded by the public purse, but it’s equally applicable to every party in every country in the world. The whole idea of hiring on X’s Kid and ex-civil servants and so forth is that they have connections and can get you an in to make it worth your while to give them a cushy number while they help sell your items/services to the government. The real question is – was Hunter Biden able to get the various foreign entities that threw money at him that kind of access? If not, then the worst that happened is that he conned them in a rather unsavoury but unfortunately ‘this is the world we live in’ manner of trading on his family name for the value of presumed influence without actually delivering anything. If he was able to get them access, then that is possibly worthy of investigation, but I think it would be difficult to prove that Obama Administration decided to grant the Plum Juice Industry of Uppernowhereistan favourable terms due to Biden’s kid getting his old man to pull strings as distinct from “scientists say Americans should consume plum juice for heart health, this was for the good of the nation”.
Biden isn’t especially blameworthy for this, and I would say the same goes for Trump. Yeah, Joe should rein in his son, but if the guy is going around doing coke and getting strippers pregnant, then maybe “getting a plum job for doing nothing in a foreign country” is something that can be perceived – by the family – as getting the problem solved: if he’s not doing much of anything for the money, at least he’s not doing any harm, and if he does cause any trouble it’s happening Over There not Right Here.
When it’s Our Guys in power, then it’s perfectly fine and no favours done or expected by the people hiring on X’s Kid. When it’s That Lot in power, then it’s corruption and undue influence. That’s the real problem there: the hypocrisy and relativism about when the shocking scandal is or is not a shocking scandal.
If I have correctly followed the stories, Joe Biden brought Hunter with him on a trip to China, and immediately after a firm Hunter was associated with received favorable treatment from the Chinese government. That looks like Joe deliberately facilitating Hunter in trading on Joe’s name.
In the Ukraine case, one side claims the prosecutor who Joe pressured the Ukraine to fire was a threat to Burisma, the other side claims he was not, and I don’t know which claim is supported. If the former is true, then that again looks like evidence of Joe deliberately acting to benefit Hunter.
I find this to be a very frustrating comment but am not sure I would be able to explain why without it coming across as disproportionately hostile. Shall I nonetheless make the attempt?
Alternatively, do you understand the gist of what the critique might be and wish to reinforce your point?
I’m afraid I don’t, so feel free to explain.
The question is whether Hunter is paid because those paying him correctly believe that his father will use his political power to favor them in exchange or whether he is paid either because they incorrectly believe it or because they believe that they benefit by the association even if it has no effect on what his father does. In the former case his father’s behavior is corrupt, in the latter it isn’t.
David, surely you are familiar with the concept of signaling?
After a quick outline, the long version was waaay too long to not be split into a (probably negative-value) effortpost of its own. So here’s the short version, delivered sans pages of context:
Your comment consists of 1) an even-handed equanimity that gives both narrative and counternarrative while shying away from actually taking a position that is 2) delivered with qualifiers that point to a very specific level of ignorance but 3) breaks rhetorical parallelism in a way that clearly favors one half of the first dilemma without really exposing you to counterargument.
In isolation, a weak response can be argued against while a strong response is ignored for the few days it takes for the thread to die. The topic can then be re-raised in a future thread, with no meaningful change in positions. Dispassionately pointing at the pattern earns whining from whomever isn’t banned at the moment, while doing so angrily is one of the better ways to catch a ban in turn.
It’s a failure mode encouraged by the SSC comment system as a matter of interface design, exacerbated by the commentating culture (particularly the Open Threads). Your posts in particular seem adept at provoking it, unintentionally or no.
taxonomically, a boring variation of JAQing off. Repeating it without attempting an answer or broader discussion is structurally identical to a bad faith argument, regardless of the motive in any particular case.
(FWIW, if it were possible to make this case less… stridently… I would. Probably.)
i think this was articulated well, i would not have minded the long version
So you would have had no problem if I had added the final sentence “If the latter is true, it isn’t.”
I thought that was obvious.
I was responding to Deiseach’s point:
by suggesting the sort of evidence that might bear on that question.
@ meh:
I appreciate the feedback. But, uh, I’m not sure how to make it at all complimentary to the expected audience. Just gotta keep telling myself that the expenditure of time and attention on hopefully meaningful critique is inherently a compliment. Speaking of which…
@ David:
I spy a violation of the conservation of expected evidence – if the latter is true, it is evidence against. And given that this is an argument proffered unprompted by Biden’s critics, it would be rather strong evidence indeed.
You wouldn’t tolerate someone “neglecting” to mention the potential upsides in their calculation of the costs of climate change. So too here – it is important to make both part of the equations explicit. If someone consistently fails to do so, you might be being played.
Again, on half of the question. A little rationality is a dangerous thing.
to be clear, i would be interested in hearing a longer version of your meta level critique of the different perceived failure modes of (OT) comments; there is probably not a need for a long version for the critique of any single comment.
Honestly, Dan, I’m not able to follow your argument. Which specific thing is missing the evidence? Are we talking about China or about Ukraine?
With regards to China, I would say the influence bought is Joe’s inexplicably weak stance on the threats posed by China. I can’t really think of many (any?) other politicians who share Joe’s opinion of China. They’re a threat economically, geopolitically, they’re expanding militarily, South China Sea, they’re using the size of their market to get US companies to self-censor, etc. People disagree over what to do about China (or if anything can be done) but only Biden seems to think they’re not a problem at all. So, that looks a little fishy, but I agree it’s a weak argument. Biden could also just be…not very bright?
Or were you talking about Ukraine and whether or not Shokin was a threat to Burisma? I’ve heard the claim that Shokin wasn’t a threat to Burisma, but I’ve only seen this casually stated with no explanation as to how that conclusion was reached. The counter-evidence would be the February 2016 raid of the Burisma owner’s home by Shokin’s office. And this was investigation of criminal corruption, not merely the sort of tax fine stuff they eventually got off with once Shokin was removed. That does not at all look like “not a threat.” That looks like “extremely threatening,” and one month later, Joe shows up in Ukraine and demands Shokin be fired immediately.
Also, in his sworn statements, Shokin claims he was 1) fired specifically because he wouldn’t lay off Burisma and 2) he had not heard any complaints from the US about his performance (or lack thereof) before this. He could certainly be lying, but I haven’t seen any evidence to counter this. That’s why what I’d like would be an Inspector General’s investigation into how it came to be US policy that Shokin be fired. There should be State Department documents, memos, emails, meeting notes, etc, detailing the corrupt things Shokin was doing (or not doing when he should have been) and our exasperation with him. Perhaps there’s records of the ambassador complaining to Poroshenko about Shokin several times which would be evidence Shokin was lying.
As it stands, though, I only see evidence of Biden being corrupt, but nothing on the other side except blanket denials, which aren’t evidence.
@Dan L: You seem to be implying that every comment should “take sides” in the overall discussion, and make an argument that the side it takes is correct. I see a value in narrower comments that address one aspect of the discussion without necessarily taking sides (in fact, I often do this even when I don’t have any particular opinion on the issue at hand). So, do we have a disagreement? (Or maybe I should wait for your effortpost for further explanation of your position…)
Well, plainly I’m stupid because I can’t work out what your exact problem is – there’s a lot of sighing and head-shaking in your comment but no brass tacks.
Re: China, if we take a recent comment on here reviewing a book on its political culture, then there’s a good chance that corruption was intended because they have a system of political patronage: you get picked as a protegé by someone higher up, you network and make connections, you get promoted due to your patron and as you get promoted you help advance his interests and work with his allies until you get to a sufficiently senior position where you are now in the role of mentor to protegés of your own.
So from the point of view of the Chinese side, expecting favourable treatment by having the kid of an important government official working for you is the kind of quid pro quo their entire culture revolves around, hence why the government would do nice things for Hunter’s firm (in the expectation that, since this is how the game is played, then Hunter’s dad would do nice things for them).
The Ukraine is different because we don’t know if the same expectations were in play, or if there was indeed corruption involved. That’s the whole damn argument here: one side says “nothing untoward went on”, the other side says “oh yes it did” and until and unless it’s proven one way or the other, then we can’t say for sure. We can express opinions on it, but you seem to be saying that isn’t good enough? or that we’re expressing them in the wrong way? or saying “Myself, I think it’s as rotten as the state of Denmark” is wrongthink of some kind because it’s “favouring one half of the dilemma”.
I don’t see that it “doesn’t expose you to counterargument” because you seem to be counterarguing just fine, and there’s plenty more comments where people are arguing against Joe Biden being corrupt in his dealings with the Ukraine on behalf of his son.
@ Dacyn:
No, my objection is driven by the conjunction of factors. An intelligent person who expresses an opinion despite professed limited knowledge can find themselves flirting with something like the Country Lawyer trope, and if it’s a veneer of humility over an argument that doesn’t actually add informational content that doesn’t speak well to the writer. Not actually using question marks, disengagement when pressed, and re-raising the point later are all strongly exacerbating factors.
And maybe David’s being perfectly earnest here. Probably is, is my determination even beyond simple charity. But at the same time it’s a type of argument I’ve personally pressed him on before, and it’s a type of argument I’ve seen others specifically call him out on. Frustrating. It’s probably a good thing my previous reply to him was written without too much consideration, though: [P(H|E)-P(H)]P(E) = -[P(H|~E)-P(H)]P(~E) is something I feel strongly enough about that it’s earned a permanent place of honor on my office whiteboard, and to fuck it up so blithely and have the gall to call it obvious could easily have me incandescent with okay I should probably move on.
@ meh:
It kind of merges together with a general mission statement regarding my engagement on SSC, but here’re some initial thoughts.
First off: A Response To Apophemi On Triggers is an absolute gem, and I highly recommend reading it in its entirety if you haven’t done so recently. There’s enough brilliance in there that it’s easy to point to lines of thought that spawned half a dozen other quality SSC posts, but there’s one particular insight that I particularly want to highlight: the idea of the rationalist community as a safe space for those that obsessively focus on reason and argument even when it is socially unacceptable.
Second, RIP Culture War Thread. There’s a lot here that’s specific to the eponymous thread and the subreddit to the exclusion of this site, but a major takeaway is the difficulty in hosting a open and civil discussion space without being attacked for the temerity of allowing people to speak wrong opinions.
Third, Some Clarifications On Rationalist Blogging. To summarize, the overwhelming majority of Slate Star Codex commenters have little to do with rationality as a community beyond their participation on SSC, and symmetrically the rationalsphere isn’t terribly drawn to SSC despite its prominence.
(This is where I should add that my own association with the rationalsphere significantly predates A Response being posted in 2014, and my active participation on SSC and its subreddit started some time in 2015. Some form of this spiel has been in my head for years, albeit obviously not framed around the latter two references.)
There’s a tension between these ideas – that SSC can hold a free flowing and honest exchange of ideas, but not really be rationalist. Or that it truly is a beacon of rationalism for the world to see, but somehow not draw the existing community. Or that the reason so few show up is because they never really wanted that space for reasonable argumentation anyway. It’s kind of a theodicy problem, where reconciling requires unpleasantly compromising one of the tenets.
When I had my own moment of noticing confusion, my theory was that the site’s structure was posing a frictional barrier to entry, or that people simply weren’t relocating to a different site. Was there a filter between the readership and the commentariat, clogging a founder effect from Scott? But no, there were a number of names I recognized as being high-quality posters that had oddly sporadic participation. And a deeper dive into the survey data showed that there were trends that couldn’t be explained by a single-filter model acting on profile registration. I pointed at probably the starkest example of such here where there’s a dramatic reversion in trend, but I’ll fully admit that I don’t understand all of the dynamics here. I’ll probably dump some processed longitudinal survey data in a few days, but it’s far from conclusive and a true analysis of the commenting trends over time* will have to wait until I finish a few side projects.
But for now, it looks like there’s something about the OTs that actively repels Scott’s intellectual community, and unless I misread the implications of that OT comment we are four days out from him saying it’s easier to reach him on the subreddit than here on his own site. Fuckin’ yikes.
*Topics of interest: What is the half-life of a comment thread? What is the drop-off in attention as threads deepen? Is there a discontinuity at the depth maximum? What is the click-through rate of posted links? What is the participation rate of commenters? What is the distribution of participation rate? How long is the commenting career of commenters? How do any and all of these factor interact with each other? How do any and all of these factors change with changing site structure? How do any and all of these factors change with Scott’s participation in particular? The Maxima Opa are not written in the words of man; for the Maxima Opa are written in R. But I’m not used to these damnable visualization packages yet.
I’m not particularly interested in wading into the object-level discussion here since I don’t think it’s shaping up to be terribly productive, but I can spare some one-liners.
@ Conrad:
Remarks by US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt at the Odesa Financial Forum on September 24, 2015.
@ Deiseach:
You appear to enjoy limited immunity to the commenting policy, dependent on others’ willingness to engage. I’m going to take that as license to unreservedly not.
thank you for the post! I suggest you post any further meta level comments on comments in a new top-level, so it doesn’t get confused with the other topic of this thread
H is the probability that Biden is corrupt. E is the prosecutor who Biden had removed was threatening Burisma. ~E is he wasn’t threatening Burisma. Correct?
Your point is that I should have said that if ~E, that made it more likely that Biden was not corrupt. That’s true, given that P(H) is the probability that Biden is corrupt absent any information on E. But to me, “if ~E, that’s evidence that Biden isn’t corrupt” doesn’t mean that, because if we had never heard of the Burisma issue and were then told about it, including ~E, that would be very weak evidence that Biden wasn’t corrupt — there are lots of corrupt things he could have done, and this only tells us that there is one he didn’t do. A sheet of white paper is evidence that all crows are black — but not much evidence.
It seems more natural to me to describe the implication of ~E as “one piece of evidence that he is corrupt has been disproven.” If you started out thinking he was corrupt because you believed E was likely, discovering ~E would substantially raise your subjective probability that Biden was not corrupt. If you started out without that belief, it wouldn’t.
I hope that clarifies the reason I put the matter as I did.
@Dan L
Thank you, that is useful information. Important people were criticizing Shokin’s office, and fish rot from the head down, so it’s likely Shokin should have known people from the US were unhappy with him for reasons other than Burisma.
[P(H|E)-P(H)]P(E) = -[P(H|~E)-P(H)]P(~E) is something I feel strongly enough about that it’s earned a permanent place of honor on my office whiteboard
That sounds hellaciously pretentious, to be blunt. So the rest of us peons haven’t got the intellectual brainpower to tie our own shoelaces and that’s why we can’t construct an argument to your satisifaction?
Fair enough, you’re not obligated to respond to anyone. This still leaves me as informed (or not) about your particular distress over David Friedman’s comment as it found me, so I’ll just tootle on (and I don’t think I have any particular immunity as the Rightful Caliph has no problem banning me when he thinks I need a smack on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper).
Dan, I have to say that your point is totally over my head too.
It’s possible that David is so smart that he is fully aware that he has committed this crime so subtle that I literally have no idea what it is.
Or it’s also possible that it’s not as much of a crime as you believe, or that even David is not familiar with the principle you’re stating, even if you’re correct that it’s inarguably true.
If your concenrn is a species of “you phrased your statement accurately as far as it went, but not in the way I would prefer to you to phrase it,” then I’m leaning towards not being sympathetic. IMHO, David can usefully add more information to a topic without adding all information, and then the next writer can point out whatever he left out.
To be charitable, if you are in the position of being one of the few people smart enough to be able to see a terrible offense, then that must be frustrating, and I can’t blame you for the obscenity. (I know that sounds snide, but I promise that I also sincerely believe it in the sympathetic sense).
@ David:
I have two objections, both significant but not absolute.
The first is that given said formulation, [P(H|E)-P(H)] is actually quite small. “Shokin threatened Burisma, therefore Joe Biden is corrupt” has a very indirect causal link, and this manifests as a small relative adjustment in the conditional probability – it must be nailed down to a high degree of certainty that Biden had personal discretion in shaping policy, and that he expected his ability to pressure Poroshenko would be decisive, and that he expected Shokin’s removal to result in a decrease in pressure on Burisma in a way that benefited Hunter Biden, and a few other minor factors. Some of these seem fairly obvious but others are quite dubious, and a single one being false craters the magnitude of the term. For the claim “all crows are black”, seeing a black bird of unspecified type isn’t very good evidence.
The second is that while “there are lots of corrupt things he could have done, and this only tells us that there is one he didn’t do”, it wasn’t selected randomly. Transform the formulation to “there are lots of things he did, and this tells us that this one wasn’t corrupt” and it becomes very significant that of the things he did, this was selected for a very high degree of ostensible corruption. When E has been chosen to maximize [P(H|E)-P(H)]P(E), it forces [P(H|~E)-P(H)]P(~E) to be correspondingly large. A sheet of white paper is weak evidence, but must be taken more seriously if it turns out the most nonblack thing is a noncrow.
It does, and I am always happier wading through conditional probability than rhetoric. But I hope I have succeeded in clarifying why one such as myself might object to something that is getting a large amount of media attention as potentially strong evidence being cast as a binary, and then half of the split going unsaid.
@ meh:
Fun fact: preliminary results from Maxima ballpark the total number of humans who read this deep in the comment chain as being in the mid-teens, twenties or thirties tops. This informs my allocation of effort in a rather annoying way, since I find it easier to write at length deeper in chains.
@ J Mann:
I am sympathetic to all of this, especially the potential lack of sympathy.
I think a distillation of my root objection towards David specifically would be “You have phrased your statement in a way that is not strictly incorrect, but would be misleading to someone new to the issue. I hope that was an accident, and is an isolated incident. I worry it isn’t. I don’t know what might distinguish the two without a level of analysis that would itself be reasonably interpreted as a personal attack.”
Thanks Dan – I appreciate your response and patience with me and will give it all some more thought!
@Dan L: What is Maxima? Also, I agree with you about feeling less self-conscious in the deeper parts of a thread. And I agree that it would be annoying to see something you think is misleading that you don’t know how to correct, but so far I haven’t experienced that here. In the case of DavidFriedman’s comment I probably would have written something like “But if the latter is true, it is a non-negligible amount of evidence against corruption, since the scandal was not selected randomly.” [1]
Actually, I wonder if part of the issue here is you want to talk using rationalist concepts, but to introduce them would be too much of a digression. It would be nice if this were a space where you didn’t have to do that, but it doesn’t seem to be.
[1] I would probably put more effort if I were writing an actual comment
@Dacyn
I think @Dan L means by Maxima Opa statistical analysis of the SSC survey. Not sure what it’s supposed to mean; looks like Best Work(s), maybe, but that would be Maxima Opera. Also, I’d have put the adjective after, not before.
I ‘m not sure if you are missing my point, which I made mostly because it’s one of my favorite examples of an argument that is logically true but …, but if you are not, some others may be.
“All crows are black”
is equivalent to
“If X is a crow, X is black”
which is equivalent to its contrapositive
“If X is not black, then X is not a crow.”
If you look at a not black object and find it is not a crow, that is evidence for the above claim. Hence a sheet of white paper is evidence that all crows are black.
I’m not sure I really get the black crows thing. I mean, suppose your beliefs are such that you believe the distribution of crows and the distribution of non-crows are independent of each other. (You may or not furthermore be aware of what proportion of things are crows but I don’t think that matters here.) Then if you observe an object and it is a non-black crow, that disproves the hypothesis, and if it is a black crow, it gives you information about the distribution of ravens and therefore supports the hypothesis. Conservation of expected evidence satisfied. Observing non-crows doesn’t support or undermine the hypothesis, since the distribution of non-crows is independent of anything else.
Now it’s true that if you follow the procedure “look until I see a non-black object”, then seeing a non-crow supports the hypothesis (on average). (This is because if you saw a crow before seeing your object, then if the hypothesis were false, there would have been a small chance that that crow were non-black, and thus it would have counted as the first non-black object you saw.) But hardly anyone uses such a procedure, so why should we care?
I think Friedman’s point can be restated as follows: you need for all the crows you find to be black. Alternately, you need for all the non-black things you find to be non-crows. It’s possible to come across an object, and the first thing you notice about it is that it’s a crow, and now you need to ascertain it’s black. But it’s also possible to come across an object, and the first thing you notice about it is that it’s not black, and now you need to ascertain it’s not a crow.
In formal logic with no additional axioms, these are completely identical situations.
Well, the idea here is to lampshade the question. Why is an object’s crow-ness more important than its blackness? The answer turns out to be hard to articulate formally. It also turns out to pop up more often than we might expect, raising all sorts of niggling edge cases and context dependencies (e.g. image recognition experts may care more about the latter).
@Paul Brinkley:
Well yes but in formal logic there’s no such thing as “evidence”, only “proof”, so talking about evidence while insisting on restricting yourself to formal logic is nonsensical.
Well, it seems to me I gave a pretty good formal answer: the structure of our beliefs treats the distributions of crows and non-crows as independent, but not the distribution of black and non-black objects. Of course, to answer why it does that is to enter the realm of practical ontology, which tends to be better suited to intuition than to formal arguments. Although maybe you are saying this was DavidFriedman’s point.
In any case, I think that DavidFriedman’s initial statement “A sheet of white paper is evidence that all crows are black — but not much evidence” is false — a sheet of white paper is exactly zero evidence that all crows are black, unless what you mean by “I saw a sheet of white paper” is “I told someone to go outside and record the first non-black object they saw, and they told me it was a sheet of white paper (but didn’t tell me whether they had seen any crows)”.
@ Nick:
I feed off of awful Latin puns. But the
degeneration since the objective linguistic peak that was the late Republicevolution of the language combined with my regrettably decaying proficiency and awful taste in mixed metaphor mean that the origins of any seeming errors are going to remain mysterious even to myself.@ David:
One of my favorite as well, since the conflict between binary classifications and probabilistic evidence is great at tripping intuition. As Paul says, I find the contrapositive case makes most intuitive sense as a search for crows among the set of nonblack objects, and so finding a noncrow in that set is real, but weak evidence. I’m being tricky in re-referencing color as a distribution in “the most nonblack thing is a noncrow” and doing the same to crows is definitely cheeky, but if we were talking about whether or not two continuous variables were correlated it’d be an effective argument. Whether or not “corruption” can be treated as a distribution is a valid legal question, but we can certainly treat the appearance of corruption as such, at least from an evidentiary perspective.
In formal logic, there’s no such thing as Socrates, manhood, and mortality, either, and yet we have classic formal logic illustrations that deal with all three.
There’s no reason formal logic cannot be applied to evidence as well. We just need to produce the definitions and axioms we are going to assert about how evidence works. In this case, everyone thinks of evidence as information that modifies the probability of some claim being true. It turns out that evidence has well-known properties that fall out of logic and probability, as is often taught using jars of beans of different colors.
I don’t know what you mean by our belief structures treating crow / non-crow distributions as independent, but not black / non-black. Each set in each pair is the logical complement of the other. They are equally dependent on each other.
I wonder what you consider to be practical ontology. I worked in that field for years; it is most assuredly based on formal arguments. It can be thought of as some set of domain-specific axioms introduced under a formal framework in order to answer questions about that domain. The only way it beats formal logic is by having those extra axioms, but this is a bit like saying felinologists specializing in Sphinx sub-breeds have an advantage over regular felinologists because of a set of additional rules the former have introduced over everything the latter already have.
In the case of the original claim, I think a better argument would be that information about every object (in the universe of discourse) adds some epsilon to the probability that “all crows are black” is true, and the non-crow non-black objects add less only because we understand there to be vastly more non-black objects than crow objects. (Consider a universe with a billion crows, and a sole non-black object, which happens to be a comb.) I think DavidFriedman knows this, and chose not to state it explicitly, in order to draw attention to the other point, which is no less true.
Suppose you had a database of all objects, indexed by color. You query for all the non-black objects, and sort on type. Zero of them show “crow”.
Is this zero evidence that all crows are black?
@Dan L: OK, now I had the experience of not knowing how to respond to a comment — though I eventually did.
@Paul Brinkley: Sorry, I did not know there was a field called practical ontology. I just meant that you need to consider ontology in a practical way (which it sounds like the field doesn’t really do).
You seem to have misinterpreted my statement about formal logic; I was distinguishing it from probability whereas you seem to be treating them as a unit.
Anyway, I addressed your last question in the other thread.
It’s not a very large field, to be fair… >.> I just happened to be very exposed to it in the process of developing an application to develop formal models and generate software artifacts from them that would answer complex business questions. I’d estimate maybe a couple dozen people worldwide, and if the rest of us are lucky, maybe two or three trying to turn W3C OWL into something that isn’t a hopeless mess.
Meanwhile, I tend to view formal logic as the system applied to everything, including probability. Imagine this XKCD, with another fellow standing to the right of the mathematician…
@Paul Brinkley: Different definitions of “formal logic” is fair enough, but you wrote
which is not true for probability — the situations are not identical from a probabilistic point of view.
Axioms about specific probability distributions are aforesaid additional axioms.
@Paul Brinkley: Fair enough, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that you would use the word “axioms” for those but I suppose it makes sense (well, if you think of probabilistic logic as something that is described within classical logic, and the axioms are on the classical logic level).
Aye, I think you got it. I use “axiom” to mean an additional proposition taken as given truth (there’s no proof for it, and there doesn’t need to be). (I’m fairly sure that’s correct usage.)
Probabilistic logic can be constructed using formal logic IIRC, and knowing philosophers, there are multiple ways to set it up, and they argue vigorously about which one is best. One probable way is to assert the existence of special purpose possible worlds.
Anyway, once that framework is set up, one could then make ground assertions like “P(this apple is red) = 0.45” and so on.
@Paul Brinkley: I agree with everything except “Probabilistic logic can be constructed using formal logic”, since earlier you seemed to be using “formal logic” to mean “probabilistic logic”. My claim was that probabilistic logic could be defined using classical logic + math (in a similar manner as classical logic itself can be).
Nah, we agree here – I think probabilistic logic as constructed on top of formal logic, sort of like how rational numbers are constructed on top of integers (and the ratio operation).
I couldn’t find where I said something that could have been interpreted otherwise. The most I said about it, in another subthread, was that we can talk about probability in terms of formal logic plus a few added definitions (such as the P function).
@Paul Brinkley: I wrote
Let me expand on what I meant by that, because it appears to have gotten lost somewhere. In classical logic (which appears to be what you mean by formal logic), one proves things. In probabilistic logic, one reasons about things but generally does not come to firm conclusions because the answers are uncertain. Both of these situations can be described on a meta level using either classical or probabilistic logic.
Now let’s say we want to talk about whether two situations are equivalent. For example, the situations “I know A->B and nothing else” and “I know B->A and nothing else” are symmetrical in classical logic. However, this is not true in probabilistic logic because “I know A->B and nothing else” doesn’t even count as a state of knowledge in probabilistic logic. This difference is what I was trying to point out in my statement.
I think I understand now that you seem to be most interested in the classical meta level over probabilistic logic. In this case a situation is something like “I know that these two events are independent and nothing else” or in your case “I know that P(A->B)=1 and nothing else”. I think this can be the right thing for some purposes, but for others you really need to use just probabilistic logic. For example, I think that each time you observe a white piece of paper, the question “does this particular piece of paper provide evidence that all ravens are black?” should be answered in the context of object-level probabilistic logic. (Well, really we are always one meta level from where we think we are [I claim that this is always a probabilistic meta] but we can probably ignore that for now.)
@Dan L:
I think I might benefit from the longer version too!
I thought at first you were referring only to David’s second paragraph about the Ukraine when you said the “shied away from taking an actual position” (since he clearly took a position in the first paragraph regarding China) but then when you said “favors one half of the first dilemma” I was no longer sure what you were referring to. Where you restricting to David’s response (where he not so helpfully used “former” and “latter” in to refer to a tripartite construction!)?
Even more helpfully, would you be able to rewrite David’s original question about the Ukraine in a way that you feel is more productive and less offensive? I’m guessing he really was trying to write it as evenhandedly as possible, and am wondering if the “offense” you are taking is not due the the wording, but because you simply disagree with his expression of doubt about something you feel is certain. How would you convey what you think he is saying more effectively?
It looks to me like it’s actually just a very confusing two-part construction:
A more clear way to put it might be: The question is whether Hunter is being paid because Joe is corrupt (and will use his political power to favor those paying Hunter in exchange), or even though Joe is not corrupt (because those paying Hunter futilely hope he is corrupt, or because there are benefits to paying Hunter other than corruption from his father).
Edit: more symmetrical clause division in the second quote
Yeah. If the hypocrisy is corroding people’s faith, I’d say the solution is to stop decrying it, because it is impossible to eradicate this type of behavior. Of course, there are different degrees of nepotism and many legitimate fears relating to it, but it is just utterly against the laws of human nature to expect that 1) powerful people won’t favor the advancement of their own children and others they care about (and the trust and respect may be well-earned in some cases) and 2) people around powerful people won’t also favor such advancement and offer jobs regardless of the parent’s feelings.
It is also impossible to tell how much favoritism was shown in many cases, and by whom, and if there is even any harm done to anything other than appearances. Avoiding the appearance of corruption is a good thing, but it is also a foolish, counter—productive standards in many cases, as it can quite easily be totally out of the control of the candidate, especially when it comes to adult children. I really think we’ve become entirely too concerned about “corruption” that is pretty benign, in a drive for unattainable purity. While the potential problems with nepotism are obvious, I think the cure may be worse than the disease. It requires an intrusive level of surveillance. It’s something to be aware of and control for, but not something to demonize and fixate on, IMO. And in a case like Biden’s, it is essentially a demand that he resist all efforts to help out his troubled and unstable son, and in fact actively shut down all such opportunities, since he is unlikely to get offered any decent position on merit—something likely to worsen the situation for everyone, including the public. The creation of family drama naturally impairs Biden’s ability to function and causes resentment, and he’s had a lot of tragedy to deal with. Forcing these sorts of showdowns probably increases the chance for more serious abuses of power, if he’s held responsible for getting ahead of and controlling his son’s actions. If he were appointing his son to a sensitive position where he could do real damage, that would be an entirely different matter and very legitimate concern. But I don’t understand that to be the case here. In another context, there is nothing inherently wrong with Trump taking the advice of his adult children or using them as representatives—they’re probably as savvy as most people who hang around presidents, and he knows he can trust them, which is not something he can say for many people. As a side note, it has always bothered me that politicians are often denounced for “listening” to wives and adult children, but much less so if they consult with, say, a brother (or a random person on Twitter!)
Yes, because Joe knowingly letting others help his son to get favors from Joe is corruption. So is Joe giving Hunter special access or other privileges that Hunter only gets because of his familial connection.
Note that this doesn’t prevent from helping Hunter privately, by giving him money or the like. Things that any similarly rich and smart parent could do. Joe Biden has more means to help his children without nepotism than most people.
Banning and punishing it when discovered is a separate issue from the question to what extent we investigate it or proactively make it impossible. You are conflating these things.
Having shitty people fail upwards because people fear their family, makes for shitty people in power, which is bad for many.
It would be wrong for Trump to appoint his children to a government position of power or help his children’s businesses with his political power.
A partner typically has a lot more power to coerce a person than a brother or random person, so it makes sense to me that there is more concern about the influence of partners.
Things that any similarly rich and smart parent could do. Joe Biden has more means to help his children without nepotism than most people.
I believe this is why Hunter is such a fuck-up.
If a middle-class family has a kid who doesn’t feel like working, the kid knows he has no other option because the family can’t support him.
But a loser kid of a rich/powerful family knows that their parents can’t say “we can’t help you,” and will exert 100% of their life effort towards extracting assistance from the family.
Joe could give Hunter all the financial assistance he can afford. In fact, he may have already done this. It all went up Hunter’s nose.
If Hunter said “give me more money or I’ll go work for Burisma, which will cause you a headache,” even if Joe had done that, Hunter could have decided he needed new cocaine because he left his old cocaine in a rental car and go do it anyway.
Maybe “you can’t have useless family members” is a useful restriction to place on our politicians, but I suspect not.
@Edward Scizorhands: If Joe can’t do anything to stop Hunter working at Burisma, it doesn’t count as him “letting” him do it.
This is, more or less, a restriction placed upon Christian bishops / overseers: “He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?)” I Timothy 3:4-5. However, that seems feasible only in a cultural context where the paterfamilias has considerably more power than parents have now. Having raised Hunter to be a screw-up may count against Joe Biden’s capabilities or character somewhat, but I don’t think there’s any modern way to tell your 40-something son “you can’t take that [not illegal] job.”
No, but as I point out above, you can tell the whole world that you don’t want anyone to give him a job.
Doesn’t Obama have like a half-brother in Kenya that often tweets conservative-friendly stuff? Why is it you suppose that he hasn’t been given any cushy no-effort director positions in large global oligarch-controlled companies?
Hasn’t Joe Biden at least given lip service to that? He has given multiple interviews where he says that he categorically refuses to talk any kind of business with his family, and refuses to be influenced by them. (I think that has also been belied by some of his other actions, however).
In my opinion, if a politician is willing to go as far as you suggest to sustain their political career, they’re borderline sociopath and I’m wary anyway.
If you want to argue that anybody with a screw-up in their immediate family ought not be elected, that’s a fair position. I’d distrust anyone who actually went so far as to disown their kid.
Although in some cases, it might also be better for the kid. Sometimes a screw-up needs to be cut off for their own good.
Almost certainly Joe could have stopped Hunter from working at Burisma. Threaten to disown him, for example. Or call the chairman of Burisma and say “If you hire my son, I’ll have to recuse myself from all decisions that might relate to your company, and delegate them to the most Ukrano-skeptic person I can find”.
But that goes for any other employment Hunter might take, and brings us unpleasantly close to Patria Potestas for our political class. I don’t think we really want to go there. I think the better phrasing of your position would be, “If the default behavior is for Joe to not have any control over this, then it doesn’t count as ‘letting’ him do this”. And I’m pretty sure that the default behavior in contemporary American culture is for forty-year-old men to take whatever jobs they want without asking their father’s permission.
I have a family member who always advances this argument, but I find it kind of baffling. I mean, there’s no question that it is possible to spoil a kid, and that kid with fewer incentives to get his act together is less likely to do so. But that seems like a relatively minor point compared with the fact that not having a family to fall back on absolutely does not guarantee that someone gets their act together. A great many such kids do the same thing as the rich loser kid, and end up with worse lives than his. Among both populations, a fair chunk of kids will waste their lives, and a fair chunk will be very responsible, even if they know they aren’t on their own. It may look somewhat different in each case – sure, with no one to back you up, you can’t exactly bail on earning money altogether, so you might become a burglar or drug dealer instead of partying at your parents’ house all day. Some people are simply unstable for various reasons and can’t seem to manage to do better, even when they know they’re on their own. And plenty of kids who don’t have to work have an intense desire to do so, and work as though their lives depend on it.
I think you are specifically talking about rich kids who happen to be naturally averse to working, and not arguing that being spoiled caused the desire in the first place, just that it allowed it to be a more vivid possibility. That’s unfortunate, but is more of a fact of life than an addressable moral issue.
The family member I have in mind always explains they knew they had to do well in school and be responsible because there wasn’t much money in the family to come to the rescue. But I feel pretty sure that this family member was by nature extremely responsible, driven, and smart, and had virtually no potential for being a “loser.” Circumstances played some role, but this wasn’t the difference between getting one’s act together and not doing so. And most of the people they grew up with still live in that neighborhood, and did not respond to similar circumstances with similar behavior. My family member is the exception, but insists on the reasoning that someone in their position realizes they *have* to be responsible, and thus consciously chooses that life without further thought. This is also said as a point of pride, though it would seem to be cause for greater pride to argue that many people in that situation fail to realize this, or to act on the realization. Usually it comes up when I mention someone who rose from very unfavorable circumstances to incredible success, and I’m interrupted with, “well, people like that know they have to succeed because no one will back them up.” I mean, people born in the position of, say, Abraham Lincoln do *not,* in fact, typically follow his trajectory. He was highly exceptional, and the success came mostly from factors other than a cost-benefit assessment of whether to choose the loser path.
I don’t think there’s any modern way to tell your 40-something son “you can’t take that [not illegal] job.”
Sure, but you can tell them “I won’t help you with it, you can’t just pick up the phone and call me to lobby for them, or call people in the government/civil service expecting them to jump you to the head of the queue because of who I am”.
If some company wants to create a makework job to pay Hunter Biden (or Chelsea Clinton, or Tiffany Trump, or Malia Obama) a hefty salary for the privilege of going “look who we have working for us!” then let them do so, but let it be plain that it won’t get them face-time with Joe or whomever.
Are we sure that isn’t already happening?
If Joe asks his friend who owns a local department store to find a job for Hunter that doesn’t raise much of a problem, because the VP isn’t normally making decisions that affect that store. It’s somewhat different if Hunter takes a job at a large Ukrainian firm at a time when Joe is the point man for the administration’s Ukraine policy.
There should be quite a lot of ways in which Joe can use influence to aid his son that don’t depend on Joe’s political position.
I’m sure they did it for self-interested reasons, but trying to build a rapport with Biden or get him on the phone a lot more quickly than usual, etc., does not bother me. Humans naturally favor others, and he probably has favorites everywhere–friend of a friend, powerful military contractors, etc. Someone like Biden has his “buddies” in every community, and while of course family relationships tend to be stronger, the default when it comes to operations in other countries, is not neutrality. It is highly influenced by personal relations. If Biden was influenced types of favoritism that did real damage, that would be a problem, regardless of why he favored them.
Right, and he probably did support him directly for a while, so my guess is he wasn’t going around begging for a job for his son, but that his son regularly received offers because of his name. Most rich and smart parents would get their kid a job through connections before directly supporting them for life. Is it really the best policy to expect politicians to fund the lives of their adult children rather than risk nepotism charges, even if they can easily do so? If his son wants to accept, and Joe doesn’t think they’re going to demand much for it beyond some phone access, should he find a way to interfere with his adult son’s employment purely for image reasons? I mean, if they asked him to do something wrong and threatened to fire Hunter, he could always just tell Hunter to resign and support him directly. I don’t get the sense that there was enough desperation for this position to cause major leverage.
I understand they are separate, but I’m saying the result of treating nepotism as serious misconduct tends to lead to certain dynamics—personalized scandal, especially domestic drama, resonates with people better than other kinds, so it will attract the press and tend to get ugly. As nepotism has often been an accepted practice in many countries and throughout history, resulting from common and natural human impulses, I don’t think it is wise to subject it to this level of disapproval. And even more so because it is hard to define and sometimes beyond the control of the politician. Go after bad behavior by politicians resulting from nepotism, but not nepotism itself. The alternative tends to trivialize the serious incidents by making it all about the nepotism. Of course, these are just my opinions, but I’ve thought about the issue a lot lately and feel pretty strongly about it.
Yeah, but it depends on how far up they’re failing, how badly they are actually failing, and what the alternatives are. I totally agree that if someone’s kid is doing real damage or holding something back, we’ve got a huge problem. But that isn’t the definition of nepotism—it is a possible result of it, a frequent one depending on the situation. Some of these positions are mostly performative and hard to screw up, some politicians’ relatives are actually the best choice or at least a competitive choice for the role, and you have to take in the negative effects of banning nepotism and enforcing the ban, and who would be next in line for the role. We don’t typically see politicians randomly appointing their kid to be a pilot or something, and most questionable appointments are driven by things other than nepotism. There are a hell of a lot of people who are failing upwards in our dysfunctional system, but usually they look much better on paper than Hunter Biden. What about the Kennedy-type situation where a brother like Bobby is legitimately helpful, influential and talented? And in which understanding the dynamics of someone like Joseph Kennedy is pretty necessary to helping the president, giving Bobby an edge over attorneys of equal talent? It may ultimately look too shady to be worth it, but the problem would have nothing to do with failing upwards–it would be image management. I’m not a fan of promoting family presidential dynasties, but in the past there were a lot of large and talented families with a history of public service.
I disagree (with the former; the latter is hard to define and it would depend on the situation), but this is a matter of opinion, and I understand why you would come to that conclusion. It was very normal during the first 150-ish years of the U.S. to appoint relatives to positions of power. There is a trade-off when you swear off hiring the people you and trust most—you avoid some risks but expose yourself to others. When society was less organized and legible, and in times of great conflict, it would have been pretty foolish to try and run the whole thing as a meritocracy. It was probably a good idea to have your son as your private secretary.
Yes, but the obsession with coercion is my point. It is a very legitimate concern, but it is far from the only concern. Fixating on it is basically conceding that you the default expectation of a president is that he or she has no willpower, and has made an unusually poor choice in his or her spouse, who not only has no legitimate advice or talents to offer but is also probably involved in some major scandal. The average president’s spouse is at least as likely to give them useful advice as they are to coerce them into wrongdoing in their official role, IMO.
@mtl1882
You are erroneously rephrasing my comment. I never said that there should an expectation on politicians to give lots of money to their children. I’m just pointing out that this and other non-nepotist options exist, where Hunter gets a big leg up compared to others with similar abilities.
Hunter appears intelligent enough to make a good living without nepotism, if he can keep his drug habits within acceptable limits.
I never argued to do so. I would it to be treated similar to other moderate unethical behavior: things that we should officially disapprove, make rules to prevent where fairly easily possible (often by recusing) and that should be a black mark.
Note that I didn’t argue that Joe or Hunter should be jailed or such.
The relevant issue is not how popular it is (among those in power), but the negative consequences.
The very nature of nepotism is that people are not being assessed for their abilities, but for their influence. On average, the beneficiary of nepotism is going to be less capable. If not, there would be no need for it.
Recuse when hiring.
Then the person can still be hired, but by a person or by people whose judgment is not clouded by personal reasons.
I don’t disagree. Yet it is not very relevant for modern society and/or Biden.
My expectation is that most people have typical human traits. Very few people have so much ‘willpower’ that they are willing to lose everything of value to them for ideological purity, which is probably a good thing, but also means that they can be coerced by those they love.
Am I the only person who remembers the to-do over Nancy Reagan allegedly being obsessed with some celebrity astrologer and pushing Ronnie to take the mystic’s advice on policy? 🙂
If Joe asks his friend who owns a local department store to find a job for Hunter that doesn’t raise much of a problem, because the VP isn’t normally making decisions that affect that store. It’s somewhat different if Hunter takes a job at a large Ukrainian firm at a time when Joe is the point man for the administration’s Ukraine policy.
If Joe got Hunter the Burisma job, that sucks and should probably disqualify people from voting for Joe.
But we have no indication that Joe did anything active to help Hunter get this job.
No–believe me, as I wrote my comment, I had Nancy in mind! That’s why I said it was generally the case, not always one. But even then, I assume Nancy gave him a lot of other advice that was more reasonable–Peggy Noonan recently spoke of her wise counsel. When Noonan talks about something Reagan-related, she’s always spinning things in his favor, so I’m not putting this forth as objective evidence. But the way bigger issue in that situation would be that Reagan decided to go along with the advice, not that Nancy got into astrology. If he can’t dismiss that, or agrees with it, that’s his own problem, because it isn’t just first ladies who push those things. I am far more worried about cabinet or military members who tell presidents slightly more plausible fantasies that they can’t so easily dismiss–“we’re really winning in Vietnam,” “this will be a quick and easy war,” etc. etc. The bad advice that has done the country damage probably comes from people in positions of higher authority, no coercion needed. Noonan portrays him has haplessly led astray by people on the Iranian situation, never imagining anything could go wrong. Then he pardoned the high-ranking men involved, and they weren’t relatives he was protecting.
I apologize if that is how it came across; I wasn’t trying to say you were arguing that, but that things seem to end up that way in practice. Your take is entirely reasonable, but the issue is hard to enforce practically, and I think that has to be a major factor in how we decide to handle it. A lot of jobs can be spun as somehow due to Biden’s influence, because it is so extensive, and someone with a drug history generally is not attractive to employers. I don’t think he does have many other options, but of course I can’t know that for sure. It naturally becomes a subject of speculation and tends toward becoming over-scrupulous. The press and general public simply don’t keep a reasonable perspective on the issue. Personally, I expect a president to choose his cabinet on personal chemistry *and* competence, and don’t think it would make sense to have a hiring committee rooting out that type of bias, which I see as preferable to other types. But I didn’t always see it that way, and I definitely get your perspective.
See, this is where I really disagree. This kind of corruption is in many cases more insidious than a Congressman allowing his vote to be bought explicitly for cash. Its systemic, ongoing, creates ruling class dynamics and erodes public trust while going unpunished.
At least the bought off congressman’s conduct is unknown.
I tend to agree with you on the insidiousness of this type of corruption. And I dont think votes for cash is really all that common. I think the more common and harmful types of corruption is “business license for political donation” type things, where productive activities all depend on greasing the right palm.
Right, cash for votes is probably uncommon because its almost impossible to defend if you get caught.
but you can come close
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/29/trump-black-voters-cash-giveaways-108072
meh, that is “meh” for me, and not really on topic. We talking about going to the governor and giving him a bag of untraceable money (Krugerands baby!) so he vetoes legislation. Bribing voters is way too expensive considering you can’t verify their not just laughing behind your back and using your money to fund the other candidate.
cheerfully withdrawn
I’d like to plug Thumbpoems, my pet project in which I collect poetic phone screenshots (some are actual poems like https://thumbpoems.com/?26 and some are just screenshots of poetic moments like https://thumbpoems.com/?22).
If you’re interested in submitting check out https://thumbpoems.com/about.html. I haven’t quite worked out where to credit authors on the website (on the instagram I list the author name in the caption) but am happy to try non-intrusive ideas.
Your project’s combination of written material which evokes the pattern-matchy feeling of “found poems,” and the phone-screenshot constraint which further reinforces the feeling of found poetry while packaging each entry in a familiar context, gives me [POSITIVE EMOTION]. Please continue with it, and please accept a Hippopotamus of Gratitude.
Having read a handful, my favorite so far is https://thumbpoems.com/?4.
Love this, thanks for the read and the hippo 🙂
The GPT post makes me wonder if there’s a new generation of collaborative writing waiting to be born: man and machine. Without even trying I started to think up background for it.
I can see contests like put a prompt in GPT, minimally edit it and turn it into a short story.