This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server.
Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page
Support Slate Star Codex on Patreon. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.
The COVID-19 Forecasting Project at the University of Oxford is making advanced pandemic simulations of 150+ countries available to the public, and also offer pro-bono forecasting services to decision-makers.
Substack is a blogging site that helps writers earn money and readers discover articles they'll like.
MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone.
Seattle Anxiety Specialists are a therapy practice helping people overcome anxiety and related mental health issues (eg GAD, OCD, PTSD) through evidence based interventions and self-exploration. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here
.
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. We're always hiring talented programmers, traders, and researchers and have internships and fulltime positions in New York, London, and Hong Kong. No background in finance required.
80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.
Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmention tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so you can keep resolutions. They've also got a blog about what they're doing here
Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent.
The Effective Altruism newsletter provides monthly updates on the highest-impact ways to do good and help others.
Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid.
Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene.
B4X is a free and open source developer tool that allows users to write apps for Android, iOS, and more.
Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. Currently offering travel medical insurance for nomads, and global health insurance for remote teams.
AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere.
In queuing up for board and computer games online, I thought…why doesn’t this exist more in real life?
For instance, one pet peeve of mine is how long it can take for waiters to take orders or to handle a check on a busy night. Some places like Uno already have this, but it’s odd to me that more restaurants don’t have a self-pay mechanism where there’s no phantom queue for waiter’s attention…this goes for ordering as well. So the idea here is not to make restaurants invest in hardware themselves, but to have (optional) apps where orders are submitted after seating to the kitchen directly, and the billing can also be handled via the app.
Seems to me like this would be a great way to turn tables faster…what are some qualms people may have with this approach?
I’m definitely with you for paying, but I’d wonder how much it will help when ordering. I haven’t worked in restaurants, so I don’t know if the bottleneck is the waiter coming by or the kitchen cooking the meal. It definitely seems possible that the kitchen could be the bottleneck (at least in a lot of cases), and all using an app to order does is means that your order gets into the kitchen queue earlier. I suppose that this is a relative advantage if some people aren’t using the app, but that disappears if everyone switches over, and there’s no net gain.
That’s also my concern – is the waiter busy, or is he covering for a swamped kitchen?
But idea is that the only investment on part of restaurant (outside of the software) is putting a QR code or some other scanner on the table. App already has credit card info pre-loaded, so your orders go through to kitchen and you are charged once you receive your food.
I figure there’s a lot of delivery orders out there already so why not also make the full shift to in-restaurant service as well? At the very least, it solves one bottleneck so the other (kitchen) can be focused on.
Perhaps the app can also have a guide to how long (non-quantitatively) each dish takes, and an option have staff serve you as food is ready rather than all at once.
My city has an app called Waitr that allows you to order food from a list of participating restaurants through their one app. You can order for either pickup in the restaurant or for delivery. There have been a few times I have ordered food for pickup with the intent of eating it in the restaurant just to avoid the wait, so in a sense this is already doable for several restaurants in my city.
I’ve never worked in a restaurant and I’m not sure where the bottleneck is. But lots of airport restaurants and bars have customers order with a tablet. Since those are exactly the sort of places where people often need to be in and out in a hurry, I’d imagine they do it because ordering by app saves time.
If I understand you idea correctly, there’s a silicon valley company providing this service to restaurants.
Ah, it would be a competitor – I’ve seen these machines before and you need to swipe your card still!
In my conception, you have credit card info already stored onto the app, much like making a seamless or other delivery order. But instead of getting it delivered to your home via a driver, the waiter delivers it to your table (scan QR code to table as address).
Outside of the hardware cost, it solves the practical hurdle of both paying and having the awkward feeling that people think you haven’t paid when you have.
The first problem I see is one of human coordination. You’d need a way to signal that you don’t need a waiter, but… no restaurant would allow you to put a sign that basically says “ignore me” – that’s just rude and bad service.
You might, if the place is hipster enough, try to brand it as a restaurant for introverts – minimum interaction and only by request. Come to think of it, instead of having a sign to be ignored, you could have those remote call buttons. An app would work great with them.
At churrascaria chain restaurant Texas de Brazil, so long as your disc is flipped to green you will be offered meat by each passing server. Red gets you ignored by the meat servers, though your normal waiter will still come by.
This is the first time I’ve heard of churrascaria, sounds great.
It’s got me wondering whether there are any places or cuisines that are basically “fancy buffet.” Like, instead of a planned several course dinner, you’re basically ordering a certain thing or kind of thing until your fill. I guess some sushi places are like this? Dunno.
Oh man, Nick, you haven’t lived. Where do you live, Ohio? Try this place maybe.
Just don’t eat the day before.
What Randy said. We went to Texas de Brazil once for a rehearsal dinner for a wedding. The limo back to the hotel, no one spoke and half the guests fell asleep because we were all too full to move or talk.
No regerts, though.
It looks like there are some Texas de Brazils in the Cleveland area. Also another Brazilian place on Larchmere by that bookstore…. I’ll keep it on the radar next time I want to go somewhere fancy.
Dim sum?
Hot pot / shabu-shabu?
Korean BBQ?
Mongolian grill?
I’ve seen all-you-can-eat options for the latter three.
There have also been “endless” deals for pancake houses and mid-tier places like Olive Garden/Applebee’s/Chili’s.
This is the beauty of the (slightly lower end of the) gastropub.
You order food and drink at the bar, and usually pay when you order.
Whetherspoons also has an app. (just make sure you have it set to the right ‘spoons, because a mate of mine once ordered chips to the wrong city)
I loathe places that force you to pay with an app. When something inevitably goes wrong, tracking down a waiter is nearly impossible. I expect the same problems would hold true when ordering via app. It might save time on average, but the cases where it doesn’t save time would be so infuriating to me that I’d rather forego the experience altogether.
Even disregarding the above… As someone with a lot of dietary restrictions, I’d be hesitant to eat anywhere that forced me to order via app. The few times I’ve tried ordering with apps have ended badly. Sometimes they let you specify “no cheese” on burgers, but that’s about the extent of the customization. I’ve yet to find an app that lets me ask for the sauce to be put on the side (in case said sauce has something dangerous in it), or lets me ask for an extra plate if I’m splitting a dish with someone, or lets me substitute sides, or tells me which parts of the meal have which allergens in them.
Also, in my (admittedly limited) experience working in restaurants, the bottleneck is usually the kitchen.
See, that’s interesting to me.
I order from Doordash frequently, which isn’t quite the same thing as what’s being proposed here, but pretty darn close (you do, quite literally, order from an app). I’ve found “order accuracy” to be much better than ordering in-person. Customization options (or lack thereof) are explicitly identified. There are almost never any mistakes.
Doordash has screwed up my order a few times, usually by leaving on something I asked to be left off, but I can’t say for certain whether it’s more or less often than ordering in person.
So the decision to not charge McCabe for lying to investigators strongly reinforces the notion that there is one set of laws for Democrats and one set of laws for Republicans. This is happening at the same time as Roger Stone’s request for a retrial (based on one jury member being a Democrat activist who posted stuff against Roger Stone on her social media prior to her jury duty) is denied for a similar process crime. I dont know the full details of either case, but I fully expect that this is being justified by various technicalities which wont be sufficient to dispel the appearance of bias.
Anyways, this is just to say, this is why people support Trump, this is why people want to drain the swamp, this is why people have zero confidence in the institutions like the FBI, and to make reference to a discussion in open thread 147.5, why people want to own 50 guns.
I don’t know why it would lead one to support Trump. Voting for him, sure, but endorsing the man? He’s not doing anything about it.
In the sense that a vote for Trump is a rejection of the current elite more than an endorsement of Trump.
Accidentally hit report, very sorry! Please ignore Scott.
Not sure I’m convinced by your reasoning…
>So the decision to not charge McCabe for lying to investigators strongly reinforces the notion that there is one set of laws for Democrats and one set of laws for Republicans.
McCabe is a Republican, as are Rosenstein and Miller, among other people.
>Anyways, this is just to say, this is why
Yes, people are prone to propaganda and lies. It is known.
He’s an establishment, anti-Trump Republican. You know the difference.
On that basis, the more valid comparison would be “there’s one set of laws for people who oppose Trump, and one set of laws for people who support him”. Given that Trump appointees are functionally in charge of federal law enforcement (the AG, the deputy AG, and all US attorneys), do you really believe that Trump supporters are more interested in prosecuting their own than their opponents? If not, by what means are people like McCabe (who apparently you believe to have committed substantial crimes) dodging prosecution?
Edit: the letter from the DOJ is right here. Do you think that JP Cooney, Molly Gaston, or both, are secretly corrupt?
I’d say there’s one set of laws for Democrats, one set of laws for establishment Republicans, and one set of laws for Trump Republicans.
As to your last question, the short answer is the swamp. If you’re a career attorney in the DoJ, you know what side your bread is being buttered, and you make sure your discretion is exercised accordingly.
You’re postulating a very complex shadow legal code here.
Either McCabe lied to the FBI or he didn’t. Did Cooney or Gaston – both Trump appointees AFAIK – refuse to interview witnesses? Did they falsify evidence? By what means does “the swamp” protect people from the President of the United States?
Trump is an idiot and appoints his enemies to power. That much needs to be said.
I’m not sure what that paragraph is supposed to show.
@broblawsky, Would you apply the same standard to someone who postulated the same about Russia or China, that they selectively prosecute people based on politics?
That the people who made the decision not to prosecute McCabe are both either Trump appointees or appointed by Trump appointees.
Which of the people who signed that letter are Trump’s enemies? How do you know they’re his enemies? Are Barr and Sessions Trump’s enemies?
We aren’t talking about Russia or China, we’re talking about America. I already understand how politicized prosecution and law enforcement works in other countries. I’m interested in understanding how you think “the swamp” works.
There is probably a small difference between the rules for Democrats and the rules for Republicans. There shouldn’t be, but there is.
There is a large difference between the rules for people who know and respect(*) the rules, and people who openly don’t care about the rules. This is as it should be. That the only POTUS to try the latter strategy in recent memory happens to be a nominal Republican, says more about the GOP than it does about the rules or the bureaucracy that implements them.
* Which is not exactly the same as “obey”.
Is it your contention that when Hillary Clinton housed her email server in her bathroom in a blatant attempt to avoid Freedom of Information laws and in so doing mishandled classified information, she was respecting the rules, if not obeying them? What about when her aides destroyed cell phones with hammers, was that just on the line between “respect” and “obedience”?
I understand the point you’re making, and it’s a fair point. But I would submit that you’re trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
To be honest, John, I’ve never really understood your position on this. It seems as though you want leniency for smart criminals and harsh punishment for dumb ones. Shouldn’t that go the other way around?
@jermo: Hillary lost. Get over it.
At the eleventh hour, Hillary lost because James Comey, a Democratically-aligned federal bureaucrat, said “I can’t just let this thing with the email server slide; I have to investigate it thoroughly and I have to be transparent about that”. And then wound up with the outcome the rules normally call for in such cases – we talk about throwing the miscreant in jail, but really just arrange for them to never work in a sensitive position again. So, mission accomplished. Get over it.
Also, this is 2020, not 2016. Anyone still going on about “But Hillary’s Emails!” is just marking their common ground with the whiniest losers in modern American politics, and I don’t think that’s company you want to keep.
My point is that the establishment is rigged in favor of Ds. The Hillary fiasco is an important bit of evidence to make that point. Im sorry you dont like hearing about it, but it’s relevant here.
Also, if asking for a politically neutral justice system makes me part of the “whiniest losers in modern American politics”, I will gladly keep that company.
@ jermo: If your point is that the establishment is rigged in favor of Ds, then I’m missing the bit about how that point is supported by citing an example where the establishment threw its savior under the wheels of Donald Trump’s bus because she too conspicuously broke the standard rules.
@Conrad: I prefer people who quietly bend the rules to people who openly break them. It is frequently necessary to bend the rules to achieve a reasonable outcome. It is sometimes necessary to break them, or even tear down the entire system of rules, but usually, if you’re clever, you can make do with some quiet bending.
Rule of law matters. And it’s easier to recover from being bent than from being broken, particularly from being openly broken by the people at the highest levels of power. So if you’re not clever enough to do the job with just quiet bending, I want you to step aside for someone who can.
And I don’t want to hear you whining about how you had to break the rules because the other guy got away with bending them, and you still can’t get the job done because they’re all against you. A: they’re all against you because of all the breakage, and B: if you still can’t get the job done, then you ultimately just broke a bunch of valuable stuff for nothing.
that’s a very creative way of describing what happened.
To this day, I still believe that Comey thought he was doing everything he possibly could to help Hillary. That he was “transparent” not because he was firmly committed to truth and justice, but because he thought doing so would minimize conspiracy theories about the FBI helping her, and because he dramatically underestimated how strongly (and effectively) the right would spin his comments as “See! He openly admits she broke the law!!!”
I think the issue here is that you are viewing this as an oracle that sits outside the law. From within the law, we need to punish people who break more laws more than people who break less laws. So yes the dumb criminal gets a harsher punishment, but the law doesnt know who is smart or dumb, only who broke more laws. The solution here is not to stop punishing anyone, but to update laws to be better at covering everyone.
Then you forget what happened in October when he, on very shaky evidence, felt like it was necessary to announce to the whole world that he was reopening the investigation based on emails found on the computer of the most reviled congressman in the country.
Comey wasn’t trying to help anyone other than his own sanctimonious self.
I didn’t “forget.”
As I said, I believe he thought that he was preventing the spread of anti-Hillary conspiracies. That he believed his statement would be treated as the final and definitive dismissal of any wrongdoing by Hillary and that such an event would benefit her.
Sort of like how Elizabeth Warren thought that by releasing her DNA test, she had definitively proven that she totally was Native American and that this would dramatically help her and be a huge setback for Trump.
Just because it didn’t actually turn out that way doesn’t mean that isn’t what they were going for…
When enough bending has gone on for long enough, you end up with a “rule of law” which implements a completely different system than the nominal one. Or you end up with a “rule of law” that can be interpreted several different ways, any of which can be chosen on a case-by-case basis according to some entirely different procedure, such as choosing based on the desired result for the chooser. This isn’t “rule of law” any more, and going on respecting the forms is pointless, unless your sole goal is not law but order.
This part in particular is an obvious catch-22. If anyone asserts quiet bending isn’t enough, you just say they weren’t clever enough.
Everything possible within the constraint of “but we can’t just bury this sort of thing”. Because he really could have buried it, at least the critical late Wienergate 2.0 parts. That would certainly have been better for Clinton. Nefarious Deep State Comey would have done it.
I agree that, given he was going to investigate and reveal the Wiener connection, he probably chose the timing in an attempt to minimize the damage to Hillary the Inevitable’s legitimacy. But I think you underestimate the importance of the fact that he was resolved or at least resigned to a public investigation.
The law doesn’t even know who broke more laws, because clever criminals are better at hiding that sort of thing at least well enough to establish reasonable doubt or truly plausible deniability.
Which, again, is how it has to be. We aren’t going to convict e.g. the rapist who is smart enough to use a mask and a condom and so leaves no evidence, and we hopefully aren’t going to give a pass to the stupid rapist who leaves eyewitnesses and DNA evidence just because that would be unfair to stupid people. Same goes for political crimes.
right, we saying the same thing. when i said ‘the law knows’ i meant from within the system, ie what it can prove. so the knowledge from inside the legal system says one person has more crimes and another has less (or none); even though an outside oracle may know they both have equal crimes.
@John Schilling
We’re not dealing with a symmetry like that, which would indeed be problematic.
What we’re dealing with is that Donald Trump’s non-Blue Tribe allies are not being given the same legal courtesies that his Blue Tribe enemies are given.
Gen Flynn is currently being charged and in a back and forth for false statements to the FBI. He misremembered a statement and corrected it later. He has been in a legal fight over that for about three years.
McCabe also made false statements to the FBI and then corrected them. He has not been charged.
It is plausible, even likely, that neither will be convicted in the end. False statements later corrected are hard to convict on. But the DoJ spared McCabe that fight entirely.
One of the major reasons that this is so is that FBI false statement cases are charged in DC. DC leans slightly to the left of Mao and is VERY politically active, which makes the jury pool really inconsistent.
To look at an example used elsewhere in this thread, when Greg Craig was put on trial in a spinoff of the Mueller investigation, he was acquitted in only a few hours and one of the jurors said: “What infuriates me about this whole case … is that the special counsel wasted so much time on an issue like this one when the republic itself was under assault. … I was deeply offended personally by this case,”
And to be entirely clear, the Democrats had the chance to allege that Trump broke the law. Their impeachment of him alleged zero violations of Federal law.
What Trump has done is NOT break the law, but do so loudly and crudely, which is being treated as worse than actually breaking the law quietly and politely and getting caught.
This is obvious in hindsight, but not so obvious at the time.
To the extent that right-wing media was obsessing over Hillary’s e-mails well before he did this and showed no particular sign of stopping anytime soon, his continued silence could very well have been spun as “See, the FBI is covering this up for her. The deep state is rigging the election against Trump!”
Whether they’d have been successful in convincing any relevant segment of the population of that is uncertain. But that’s what Comey thought his statements were preventing. It didn’t occur to them that the whole thing would be read as “Comey admits Hillary was crooked but let her get away with it anyway!”
He intended his statements to be the last word on this issue. The thing that would make it all go away. Clearly we can now conclude that was a bad prediction, but I still think that was his intent.
Alternatively, I’d be willing to support a theory that he was so convinced Hillary would win no matter what that it never even occurred to him that his actions could affect the outcome either way, even if he wanted them to. Note that “Comey rigged the election for Trump” was not a popular narrative until after Trump won. In the days leading up to the election, no respectable person was claiming his comments would affect the results – because they were absolutely certain Hillary was winning.
The way I heard it he was under great pressure to do so because the Wiener investigators were going to go to the press if he didn’t. They found evidence material to the case. It should definitely have been looked at. Comey was going to stonewall it so as to not have to drag it out before the election, which was a political decision. The investigators were furious, and so he very quickly opened it and very quickly closed it. This idea that Comey was “just doing his job” or was “throwing Hillary under the bus” does not seem plausible.
They have the investigation because they have to. They find stuff because it’s there. Then claim they don’t care about the stuff they found because they want to, for politics. It’s just chaff. Same way Ethics Committee hearings work when somebody does a no-no and everybody’s mad. They shuffle it off to the ethics committee, wait 9 months until nobody cares about it anymore, then say “perhaps mistakes were made” and issue some new guidelines. These sorts of investigations don’t exist to convict the guilty, they exist to let the guilty off the hook.
I hadn’t heard this, but it doesn’t really change anything. At most, it moves the effect one level down. The “Deep State” isn’t going to give Hillary a pass on the emails, because the staffers running the show are going to go to the press if Head Deep State Guy tells them to bury it because politics.
More generally, institutions aren’t honest because every single person in them is as incorruptible as Elliot Ness. Institutions are honest because the people in them are mostly honest, and so anyone inclined to a bit of dishonestly knows that they’ll be outed if they do more than bend the rules a little.
In other words, not a Democrat (i.e. a member of the Democrats, to whom the “laws for Democrats” apply).
AIUI in the Stone case the jury member posted material against Trump, not against Stone specifically. Even if it was against Stone specifically, before forming an opinion on how big a deal it is, I’d want to know how often in other less politically-charged cases a single juror’s post conviction revelations of pre-jury-duty bias are deemed sufficient to grant a retrial.
In the McCabe case, basically everyone involved in the decision not to prosecute is acting against their first-order self-interest: they know perfectly well that they ultimately report to a President who has no compunction about intervening in the administration of justice to reward his friends and punish his enemies, and they declined to prosecute an enemy of that President anyway. That should create a strong prior that the most likely cause of the decision not to prosecute isn’t deference to Democrats but insufficient evidence to make a case.
If there is any real double standard here, it’s likely because McCabe– like many in his situation– is fairly plainly a well-intentioned person corrupted by the pressures of trying to do what he genuinely and plausibly believed to be right, whereas Stone, like most of Trump’s consiglieres, is fairly plainly a serial crook and compulsive liar. A bias in favor of the former sort of person and against the latter seems rather more prosocial than elitist; and if Stone’s character is really representative of the sort of person Trump supporters think is hard done by and worth sticking up for, that reflects rather more poorly on Trump supporters than anyone else.
[Edit: I should add, to be fair, that the Democrats could and should do much better about casting out the crooks and compulsive liars in their own ranks– notably the Clintons and more recently the egregious Michael Avenatti. But McCabe simply does not appear to fit their mold.]
That’s another way of saying McCabe is in the ingroup, Stone is in the outgroup. Ideally, the law would be applied equally regardless of ingroup status.
No, it’s not. Standards of civilized behavior and good moral character are not, in fact, simply ingroup-vs-outgroup markers. It does not make you an elitist to observe the obvious truth that Andrew McCabe is a much better human being than Roger Stone. Furthermore, it is particularly ironic and depressing to see so many self-described conservatives adopting one of the worst excuses of certain parts of the anti-Western-Civ left, who are likewise prone to dismiss insistence on consistent civilized standards as mere bigotry.
Speaking of bad leftist patterns being adopted by the right, this notion that somehow the organs of a Republican-controlled government must be biased against Republicans smacks of another one: namely, the idea that even when the revolutionaries are firmly in power they’re not *really* in power, because they are beset on all sides by counterrevolutionary wreckers trying to bring them down. As in Venezuela, so in the US: it’s a poor excuse for avoiding a reckoning with your own failures and a dangerous paranoid rationalization for ever greater and more desperate assaults on institutional norms. I fully expect a Sanders Administration, if it happens, to adopt exactly the same mentality.
That is your own assessment. I dont know much about either but I much prefer Stone than McCabe. I suspect that you’re letting membership in your ingroup color your perceptions.
Sanders is also a Washington outsider and will also be opposed by the civil service.
You haven’t made much of a case for this, just asserting that it’s obvious that one is “a better person” than the other. It’s a common psychological pattern. “Yes, my guy did X, but he had to to oppose group A. And look at group A, full of crooks who do X.”
Trump certainly should have been primaried. As I’ve said elsewhere, my advice is that no one should ever work for Trump under any capacity.
Trump is being primaried. By both Bill Weld and Joe Walsh. The fact that they aren’t very popular and very few Republicans prefer them to Trump is an indictment of them, not of anyone else…
It’s an indictment of the masses of the Republican party that so many of them continue to approve of Trump. Weld or Walsh would be worse than Trump. But imagine if Trump had a 13 percent approval rating rather than a 42 percent approval rating. Someone would step forward.
Like who? On what dimensions/criteria do you think they’d be different from Weld and/or Walsh?
@Matt M,
14 million people voted in the primaries for Trump. Someone among that group should have run, and the rest should have lined up behind him or her.
@Alexander Turok
The problem was that group was made up substantially of people without the clout and name recognition to succeed in a national election.
It’s a rare Red Triber who has the political acumen, national reach and name recognition and personal drive to make it.
@EchoChaos,
Some have media outlets. They could have created name recognition. Look at Steve Bannon. The man was fired either because the media demanded his head after Charlottesville or for telling the truth about Afghanistan. And what does he do? “No, I resigned voluntarily. There’s no problem.” Weak…
@Alexander Turok
If you believe that Steve Bannon could’ve run a successful Republican primary race I have a bridge that I have a swell deal on.
It’s mostly the career bureaucrats, the “civil service” to use the correct term, that is biased against anyone who doesn’t hold similar views to themselves.
This is sometimes called the “Washington Consensus,” and it encompasses “correct” views of foreign and domestic policy, proper etiquette, and so on. It has a reasonably wide Overton Window, in that “mainstream” Republicans and Democrats can both fit into it, but outgroup types like Trump (and probably Sanders) can’t.
The kind of views that make one join the civil service and stay in it are not friendly with outgroup types. Betsy DeVos is outgroup to them, to mention an appointed bureaucrat.
@FormerRanger:
Yes, I do expect Sir Humphrey Appleby to work with pretty fair neutrality with Ministers of either party whose policies are consistent with the interests of the Department of Administrative Affairs. I expect him to leak and undermine Ministers of either party whose policies threaten the interests of the Department of Administrative Affairs. The trickier question is exactly how what the interests of the DOJ and its staffers are in the current context.
@EchoChaos,
I’m not saying Bannon himself should have run. He could have also used his media presence to support someone who did. Either way, what he should not have done was lie about being fired. That’s the action of a weak, cuckolded man.
Just for the record, this story says:
On what basis can you make this claim, given that the actual state of affairs is that the DOJ (which Trump is at least theoretically in charge of) continues to punish his friends and reward his enemies?
How, exactly, do you believe Andrew McCabe corrupted the Department of Justice to avoid prosecution?
I dont think Andrew McCabe did anything to corrupt the DoJ. I believe the DoJ was corrupt already.
Without knowing any specifics of either case (McCabe, Stone), I believe that there are so man laws on the books that almost anybody, and certainly people like McCabe and Stone who are involved in important matters, are guilty of various crimes. And the decision to press charges is based on the prosecutor’s discretion, so it’s fairly easy to apply the law very strictly to one set of people, and very loosely to others.
For example, Clinton’s destruction of records (her aides destroyed cell phones with hammers), and avoidance of FOI laws and mishandling of classified information (her email server), would have landed her in jail had she been a Republican.
This is why Flynn, Manafort, and Stone were convicted, and why Lois Lerner, Clinton, and McCabe were not even charged.
Cooney (who prosecuted Bob Menendez) and Gaston (who prosecuted ex-Obama WH Counsel Greg Craig) made the decision not to prosecute. Given that they’re both political appointees, what made them go against their obvious self-interest? It’s safe to assume that Trump wants McCabe charged, after all.
I dont know. I’m just saying, the number of coincidences that are favorable to Democrats and harmful to Trump is just getting larger and larger. Think of it as “disparate impact“.
Firstly, @jermo_sapiens, thank you for continuing to engage with me about this issue: I actually really value the opportunity to get coherent answers about this issue. I don’t get the opportunity to directly dialogue with conservatives on their perceptions of government corruption very often.
Secondly, if it’s not too much to ask, could you elaborate on a couple of points?
a) Do you think that Cooney and Gaston are honest individuals who were simply unable to make a good case against McCabe, or do you think that they were somehow persuaded/forced to end their own case against their obvious self-interest;
b) If Cooney and Gaston are honest, do you think that the most likely explanation for their failure is a lack of good evidence against McCabe, or is it something else? If it’s something else, what is that other factor, and how did it screw up the case against McCabe?
It’s my pleasure. And thank you for engaging respectfully.
I’ve never heard of Cooney or Gaston before today, so what I think is not specifically about them. Nor do I know exactly what role they played in this thing. Did they rubber stamp a lower level staffer’s recommendation, or did they really handle this case by themselves? I dont know. But I would submit to you that Cooney and Gaston’s “obvious self-interest” may not be in the direction you suggest. Trump might be out of office in less than a year, but for sure he will be out in 5. I imagine Cooney and Gaston will want to continue working in Washington beyond that.
I dont know which is most likely, but I consider it likely enough that “it’s something else”, specially considering the pattern of similar decisions in the past. And the something else is simply this, as I alluded to above, being known as the guy who exercised his discretion in a way that helped Trump is going to be a career-limiting move in DC.
They may have gotten recommendations from lower-level staffers, but the final decision was theirs. I can’t imagine they were unaware of who McCabe was, or of the intensity of Trump’s interest in his case.
They’re both political appointees, so if Trump loses his job, they lose theirs. Maybe prosecuting McCabe would close some doors for them, but wouldn’t prosecuting Menendez or Greg Craig be at least as bad? He’s much less prominent – and powerful – than a WH Counsel or a US Senator. Why would they aggressively prosecute those cases, but refuse to take on McCabe?
I dont know about Craig but Menendez was charged for accepting bribes from an ophthalmologist. I dont know of any connection to Trump beyond Menendez being an opponent of Trump. But McCabe’s role was closely linked to the Russia investigation, and so this case is much more sensitive and McCabe behind bars would be a bigger W for Trump than Menendez behind bar, at least from the public’s perspective.
Putting Menendez behind bars could’ve given Republicans another Senate seat. I’m pretty sure JP Cooney could’ve got a few kilos of coke out of Mitch McConnell for that.
Honestly, Craig is the perfect example of someone who should’ve been untouchable under your theory. He’s a partner at Skadden Arps, one of the most influential law firms in the world. If prosecuting him isn’t a career-killer under your theory, what conceivably could be? And if Molly Gaston wasn’t afraid of prosecuting Craig, why would she be afraid of proseucting McCabe?
I dont know who he is, I dont know the law firm you mentioned, I dont know anything about Craig. But fair enough, I’ll just assume everything you say on this is correct. I’m perfectly willing to accept that McCabe not being prosecuted was the correct thing to do.
I’m even willing to accept that Roger Stone should be convicted. I dont really know enough about his case to know one way or another.
I just notice a general pattern of Ds getting away with stuff and people close to Trump ending up in jail. Your takeaway might be “wow all these Trump guys are really rotten, and look at these Democrats, not one of them goes to jail, they’re so honest and law-abiding”. Or your takeaway might be “looks like it’s a good idea to be a Democrat.”
It’s like the Ferguson story, where the roles are reversed. I could argue until the cows come home that Michael Brown attacked the police officer and he acted in self-defense, ergo the Black Lives Matter is based on a false premise. But it wouldnt convince anyone.
OK, thanks. I’m afraid my takeaway from this series of incidents is a lot closer to what you suspect it is, but I’m sorry you feel like you and yours are under an unfair attack. I wish I could figure out some kind of reform that would restore your faith in the legal system.
@broblawsky
But Craig WAS untouched. His trial was fast and he was acquitted.
Note that I think McCabe’s trial would end the same way as Craig’s and for the same reason.
That isn’t the point. The previous assertion is that the decision not to prosecute was politically motivated, but that doesn’t hold up if the people involved in that prosecution were willing to take on other politically sensitive cases.
That being said, let me ask you:
– do you believe that Cooney and Gaston’s decision not to prosecute McCabe was corrupt?
-If so, on the basis of what evidence do you believe that they are corrupt?
-If not, why would they act against their own self-interest by deciding not to prosecute him?
@broblawsky
I am not @jermo sapiens, but I don’t think it was directly corrupt. I do think that they correctly ascertained, partially with the precedent of Craig, that McCabe would never be convicted.
This assumes that it is in their self-interest to prosecute. I don’t see that. Being fired by Trump is probably not dangerous for your career long-term whether he wins or loses in 2020, but if he loses in 2020 and you went out on a limb to prosecute a case that you will almost certainly not win, your career is done.
I know who you are. Why do you think McCabe would never be convicted? Because the case against him was weak, or because the court system would be guaranteed to acquit him even if the case was strong?
Then why did Cooney take on Menendez and Gaston take on Craig, when those cases were also likely to fail? Both of them prosecuted those cases vigorously – if you read the articles on those links, both Cooney and Gaston got in trouble with the presiding judges through their aggressive tactics.
@broblawsky
Because it’s tried in DC and he’s a cause célèbre for Democrats now.
Note that the case is also weak, since the key witnesses are pro-McCabe and have had plenty of time to coordinate.
Menendez wasn’t a clear likelihood to fail, and that would make you a big winner career-wise to beat a Senator.
Craig was referred by Mueller, so there is no political risk if it fails because he didn’t choose to prosecute, Mueller did.
Why does a trial in DC mean that McCabe won’t be tried fairly? Do you think that DC’s D-leaning population can’t be trusted to honor their oaths to act as impartial jurors?
@broblawsky
Yes, that is exactly what I think.
So you believe that all prominent political figures should be tried by juries composed only of Republicans, because only Republicans are honorable enough to act as impartial jurors?
@broblawsky
I do not.
Do you think that blacks got fair trials from Southern white juries in the 1960s?
Right. It’s not that it’s impossible for a Republican to get a fair trial from an All-Democrat jury.
Just that such a case should be treated with at least the same level of skepticism as when a black person is convicted by an all-white jury.
I still think you guys are messing all of this up by making it an R vs D thing. It’s establishment vs. anti-establishment. It’s just that 95% of Ds are pro-establishment but only like 50% of Rs are so you see an awful lot more Ds get away with their crimes than Rs.
And yes, the “anti-establishment” Ds, the Democratic Socialist types, are pro-establishment: they want more of it, and they want to be in charge of it. As opposed to the anti-establishment Rs who, I think best described by Steve Bannon, desire “the dismantlement of the administrative state.”
Also, jermo, your tone in the OP and other places is so combative. I’m about 95% sure you’re going to get banned in the next Reign of Terror.
I’m not interested in whataboutism.
I’ll ask again: since you think Democrats as a population, including me, are inherently dishonorable, how do you propose to try prominent political figures? Because all-Republican juries seem like the only remaining option.
FWIW, I don’t think @jermo_sapiens has done anything ban-worthy in this thread. He expressed his beliefs about the problems he perceives in the justice system, and he was open enough to engage with me on an emotional topic rather than retreat. If he were banned (at least for his behavior in this thread), I’d ask Scott to reinstate him.
@broblawsky
I have never said that Democrats as a population are inherently dishonorable.
In fact, I specifically denied that I said that.
Please retract. If you’re just going to throw ad hominens, we’re not having a real discussion.
When I asked you if:
You replied affirmatively:
So the problem isn’t that the jury pool is Democrats, it’s that it’s people from DC?
@broblawsky
Yes, which I’ve said several times. DC is not only uniquely left-wing, it is uniquely politically activist.
Craig’s jurors specifically discussed IN THE JURY ROOM how the case affected politics, although they say only after the verdict was determined.
Understood. Thank you for clarifying.
Brob, I also see the homogeneous jury pool being problematic for another reason: it neuters two key components, deliberation and hold outs. Its my experience that deliberation can swing 6-6 juries to 12-0/0-12 , but also there are unique jurors that save defendants at 1-11, those jurors are typically very different from the rest in the room.
For the record, I think the Justice department still has lots of people who will happily do something just to spite Trump and the Stone issue lands somewhat in that area (it’s not a coincidence who exactly the prosecutors pushing for his longer sentence were).
That said, I’ve also read enough about the McCabe situation to find it plausible enough to give the benefit of the doubt that they had serious doubts about their ability to prosecute him, given that their two primary witnesses were anti-Trump pro-McCabe partisans (literally and publicly) who could be counted on to spin their testimony to his benefit as much as possible.
So while there is certainly an element of media/bureaucratic led lynching involved in these types of politically-charged prosecutions, I don’t think it’s quite as clear and dry as the OP states.
AIUI, part of the issue with Roger Stone is that his lawyer knew about the Democratic activist during voir dire and didn’t say anything about it then–like they spent some time interviewing the juror about it. You don’t get to let a massive flaw in your trial go by unobjected then pull it out of the air after you lose, otherwise that creates a lot of space for lawyers to knowingly create flaws for later use. Now, I don’t know the whole story so maybe there was some other flaw layered in there that was only discovered after the trial, but “Democrat was on the jury” was known for a long time.
McCabe is probably being helped by the President’s inability to keep his mouth shut. I don’t know how much Trump’s Twitterrhea would affect a civilian prosecution, though I’ve seen some comments that McCabe’s defense lawyers would be able to make great hay about persecution being the reason for prosecution, rather than actually being guilty (not to say that all defense lawyers wouldn’t say that, but it’s got to be a lot easier with public documentary evidence of it). However, the President more or less completely slammed the door on his own ability to secure a conviction* of LTC Vindman by running his mouth. Once President Trump mused publicly that he should be prosecuted, he basically gave him an “Unlawful Command Influence” get-out-of-jail-free card. This is a weird area of the law that even tripped up President Obama, who got, at the very least, reduced punishment in some sexual assault cases through his public statements demanding zero tolerance. I don’t know how much this affects McCabe, but it can’t help.
It’s difficult to understate just how often President Trump steps on his own crank by not shutting up.
* NB: I think that there was nothing wrong with what LTC Vindman did, and any adverse career effects, much less prosecution, would be a grotesque miscarriage of justice. I’m just pointing out that it’s going to be super difficult to get a conviction that won’t be overturned on appeal for purely process reasons that were totally in the President’s control. That, of course, doesn’t preclude a “process is the punishment” type of prosecution going forward even if they don’t think they can get a conviction to stick.
From this:
As for Trump needing to shut up sometimes, you are completely correct.
So is your argument that no Democrat can ever be trusted to act as a juror in cases involving prominent Republicans?
no
h/t: Cathy Newman
There are Democrats, and there are activist Democrats who have spoken out in public about the defendant prior to the trial.
OK, I’ll admit that my question was a bit unfair. I apologize. Is your argument that Hart lied about being able to be fair? Given that the rest of the jury also voted to convict, did they all also void their oaths, or did they fairly consider the evidence against Stone?
My argument is not about the details of the case. My argument is that these decisions seem to always favor the D over the R.
But for the record, Hart was also an attorney, which probably gave her some gravitas among the other members of the jury. Which is a weird thing anyways, here in Ontario you’re disqualified from jury duty after one year of law school.
As for the evidence, I have not seen it. But I’ve heard the case centered around whether Stone had emails communications with Julian Assange. Apparently he said he hadnt, but he had. Did he lie or did he forget? The investigators already had his emails in hand when they asked him that question, so it’s a bit weird to lie about it. I dont think Roger Stone’s “lies” created much harm anyways. He was prosecuted on a process crime for the real crime of campaigning for Trump.
My understanding of the McCabe case is even worse. But regardless, I have no reason to believe that any prosecutorial restraint applied towards McCabe (most likely correctly) would be applied to Stone or anyone on the Trump side.
Thank you for clearing that up. I guess the main thing that I don’t understand here is, from a scientific point of view, is whether there is any way to falsify your hypothesis? What evidence would it take to convince you that Stone was fairly treated under the justice system?
Seeing a Democrat treated the same way.
It’s really not Democrats. It’s either you’re in the Club, or you’re not in the Club. If you’re in the Club, like Clapper, you lie to Congress, or like McCabe, to the FBI about actually important things and you walk. If you’re not in the Club, like Stone and Papadopolous and you lie to Congress and the FBI about inconsequential things you do time. And I don’t even think Papadopolous lied. It sounds like a semantic disagreement over whether or not “before you started working” means before you got the job offer or before your first day on the job.
All right. What would it take, given the information we currently have, to falsify your hypothesis?
@Conrad Honcho
I feel like were in a dance. You provide in a context-free manner the idea that Clapper lied, me or someone in my place, points out that, by any credible definition of the word lied, no he didn’t.
Wyden asked a question to Clapper that he knew the answer to and that everyone else in the room knew the answer to. The chair even chided Wyden since he knew that he was putting Clapper in a position where he would be at risk for divulging classified information.
It is also a virtual certainty that Clapper then went back during a closed, classified, session and corrected the record.
Well not to be pedantic, but if I had that information my hypothesis would be falsified already.
Also, let me return the question to you. Do you believe that all criminal prosecutions of politically-sensitive cases in Washington DC are handled with the utmost integrity, with only regard to the law and no other concerns?
Falsifying a hypothesis inherently implies “what new information”.
I don’t think deductive reasoning inherently requires experimentation; it just requires information that hasn’t previously been considered. I don’t think any of us can claim that we’ve considered all sides of these complex and tendentious political issues.
No, but I also think that asserting the existence of corruption without specific evidence is very useful for people who fear being prosecuted and want to preemptively cast doubt on the proceedings.
Michael Myers
James Traficant
Laura Richardson
Corrine Brown
Rod Blagojevich
John Sampson
Michael Flynn
Let’s start there, and see where this leads.
The piece you link to argues that Wyden behaved badly. It does not deny that Clapper lied.
A lie is an untruth told with intention to deceive. Clapper’s statement was massively false, and he knew it. He made it because he wanted to deceive the American public about the activities of the NSA.
You can argue that he acted correctly. But he did lie and if, as I think (although someone here has argued to the contrary), he was under oath, he was guilty of perjury. And was not prosecuted for it.
But then, the more recent President Bush was, by his own confession, guilty of knowingly using information obtained by the NSA in violation of FISA, which is a felony. As president he was immune, but he is no longer president and has still not been prosecuted. Nor, I believe, have any of the NSA people responsible.
This is a prime example of “JAQ-ing off.” “I’m not making any specific argument, I’m just pointing out some facts, how dare you claim that those facts might form an argument!”
And this is blatant burden-shifting. “I don’t have to prove wrongdoing, you have to prove that everyone did everything right.”
Make better arguments, please.
to get a little meta here, i agree totally with everything you just wrote, but I predict it will just induce a lot of backfire. The discussion between the 2 main posters had some pretty competent nudging going on which I found instructive to witness.
How do you define lying? Because that article does not even remotely contest that, in fact it uses the very word “lie” to describe what Clapper did:
Plus Clapper was sent the question in advance, a fact left completely unmentioned in the article (despite being stated in its very first reference, so it’s not like the author was unaware). Clapper walked into that meeting with advance warning, and lied, and I don’t see how anyone can argue otherwise. He was recorded doing so.
Eh? This is the first time I’ve ever heard you or anyone else, ever, make the claim that Clapper didn’t lie. And you claim that he didn’t lie…while stating that yes he did in fact lie and then make up a story in which he probably corrected it later. Which is completely worthless. He definitely lied. To congress, and to me, about a very important thing. And suffered nothing for it.
People who…whatever you want to call it, The Club, The Establishment, the Cathedral, the Elites, the 9.9%, the Managerial Class, whatever, the people who are them or they like, they get to lie to congress and have you make excuses for them and not be charged. The political opponents of such people do the same thing about subjects of far less consequence and are nailed to the wall, because “Rule of Law matters.” No it doesn’t. Selective prosecution is Rule of Man. And Rule of Extremely Corrupt Man at that. Either prosecute none of them or prosecute all of them. Pardon Roger Stone, because selective prosecution is not justice.
i dont know if i would call convincing his followers the courts are rigged against him ‘stepping on his crank’
“Process crimes” such as “lying to the FBI/CIA/DoJ” are inherently a sign there is no true criminal case to be made. The victim is interviewed, then interviewed again, then confronted with his/her “lies,” often when the thing they allegedly lied about turns out to not even be a crime. If there’s no crime at the root of the investigation (as was the case the “Russian Collusion” fantasy), then “lying” about it shouldn’t be actionable.
What incentive is there not to lie then?
Why does there need to be one?
If the government is allowed to lie to us, we should be allowed to lie to it.
@Matt M
To clarify, there are two slightly different positions here.
1. It is always ok to lie.
2. It is ok to lie if there is no crime.
Which one is being advocated?
I only suggest that the penalty for “civilian lying to government agent” should be no more or less than the penalty for “government agent lying to civilian” is.
As of now, the penalty for the latter is “nothing,” regardless of the circumstance.
I see. My question about incentive was relative to situation (2) above. I believe your objections are occurring at a level higher
@meh
I believe FormerRanger is referring to things like 18 USC 1001, which has a tendency to be what you get charged with when they can’t prove anything else. I have no idea if that’s relevant to any of the cases being discussed here, but I also would prefer if that sort of lying was not a crime.
I agree lying is bad. However, I think the laws against lying to the government are frequently abused, given prosecutorial discretion. And given that they’re used to target political opponents, perhaps we would be better off without them.
Perhaps the “lying to the FBI” crimes should either
-be limited to lies that materially affect the investigation (eg lie leads to someone getting SWATed)
or
-only a sentencing factor (ie you commit a crime and lie during the investigation, you get a higher sentence, but the lie itself is not a separate charge).
I think there are several things at play here. Most are nearly-unavoidable products of the system. That doesn’t make the system right, but I think it looks more like incentives and unconscious bias than partisan corruption for about 90% of it.
It does seem that the well-connected do better in these situations than those who are not, and establishment-friendly types do better than anti-establishment. I chalk that up mainly to media exposure, career advancement, jury pool, and social affinity bias.
Media exposure operates a couple different ways. Going against establishment “heroes” draws more outrage and scrutiny than “villains.” The prosecutor who goes after McCabe is going to be portrayed by Democrats and media allies as a vindictive Trump lapdog. The Stone prosecutor gets portrayed that way by Republicans and Fox. But if one accepts that establishment media/entertainment has a skew, then so will prosecutions. But there’s a less partisan version of media exposure, which I think is simply that a lot of these laws and cases and sentences would seem weird and unfair if they were widely known; prosecutors get away with a lot simply by virtue of the relative anonymity of the legal process. Knowing that a case may become a cause celebre is a disincentive to do something that might be hard to justify in the harsh light of publicity.
Career advancement suggests doing what is best for one’s reputation wherever there is discretion to be exercised. Normally prosecutors want high-profile cases for this reason; but if there is likely to be negative reputational consequence (e.g. the media exposure narrative above) then that pressure pushes to avoid the polarizing cases. This is particularly true with Trump because he has little institutional “pull” in Washington; pleasing him won’t get you a job at BigLaw after President Sanders fires all the Trump AUSA’s.
There’s also the jury pool – a lot of these high-profile cases are tried in D.C., which has a jury pool that is 90% Democrat and probably has less than 5% pro-Trump folks. This doesn’t matter so much for your everyday money launderer, but for politically charged cases, you’re looking at a politically charged jury pool.
Finally, there’s an advantage to being an “establishment type” in these situations where you’re mainly being investigated by your peers and your trial and sentencing is managed by your peers. People that are a lot like you are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt. People that aren’t, won’t. It reminds me a little of the judge in the Stanford rape case some years ago. He got pilloried for an apparently very light sentence, but from his perspective he saw a defendant who checked a lot of “upper middle class white kid who has a chance to turn his life around and deserves some leniency” boxes. I doubt it was conscious bias and I also suspect that if it were a tattooed-dreadlocked minority, the sentence wouldn’t have been the same.* I think a similar effect occurs with establishment types in high profile cases.
*ETA: Not intending to get into the details of whether that was a proper sentencing, just more the idea of “basically a good kid” vs. “seems like a troublemaker” may have its equivalent in establishment type vs. not.
> I doubt it was conscious bias and I also suspect that if it were a tattooed-dreadlocked minority, the sentence wouldn’t have been the same.*
For what it’s worth, the judge (Aaron Persky) was praised for his evenhandness by public defenders. It is also notable that Persky followed the recommendations of the (female) probation officer in sentencing.
If anything, Persky was pilloried for *not* bending the rules to punish an elite white kid *more* harshly than the usual guidelines would suggest.
Sure. Like I indicated in the edit, I don’t mean to focus on the particular merits of that case. But even there, the PDs and the probation office and whatnot presumably have their own subconscious thoughts about “risk of re-offending” and “contrition” and such. For example, showing remorse and taking responsibility is a sentencing factor in many jurisdictions. But it might be easier for someone from a similar background to show remorse in a way that pattern matches to “actual remorse” for the sentencing authorities than someone from a different cultural background. It’s that kind of subconscious framework I’m getting at, whether Stanford Judge was right or not in this instance.
The *most* plausible reasons from my POV are these two:
1. Based on the IG report, all the witnesses to McCabe’s lying are his friends. For example, in at least one of the instances of his false statements, I think its plausible you’d need Comey to testify to get a conviction.
2. DC jury pool. The fact is that this is one of the most partisan places in the country, its beyond home court, you need an airtight case+ to convict someone like McCabe in such a high profile partisan case, the opposite is true in cases like Flynn.
3. CYA. While the DOJ has gone aggressively after Republicans, those have all been non-DOJ Republicans. No prosecutions of Rosenstein, Bush appointees Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson were never really investigated for their role in 2006 firings at DOJ.
P.S. The Stone case is a pretty bad example to use as a comparison, because he is a legit idiot who also witness intimidated. The Flynn case is much closer to the McCabe case. That is the case where a Trumpy-guy got prosecuted for doing basically nothing.
I’m not surprised that people want to “drain the swamp”, I’m surprised that they think Trump is willing or able to.
Unless it’s just an “all the norms are nonsense / broken anyway so we might as well have this guy who is on our side be in charge” thing.
Since this is an idea that I’d like more feedback on, from the last Open Thread (and since the posts were embedded in a subthread of a subthread);
@Aftagley says:
@Plumber says:
@Aftagley says:
Please expand on what the “free rider effects”, also besides that big and rapid societal changes usually make things worse for the generation that experiences them (and often for the generation after that), and that there’s no way existing jurisdictions would surrender authority, what are the flaws of the scheme?
The biggest flaw is that it matters a lot to people what other people in their “group” do. For example, Alabama really doesn’t like abortion and California really likes it. In a federalist system, Alabama could ban it and California could legalize it, but neither side is happy about that in reality.
On the other hand, Chile has laws that are more restrictive on abortion than Alabama is proposing, and Californians aren’t raging about it because Chile is its own country.
If the Confederacy left and became its own country friendly to the US like Canada, it would be a much less big deal to California what Alabama did (how many Californians know what the laws in Alberta are?). (On an unrelated side note, why do all histories of the Confederacy winning assume that the USA and CSA will be mortal enemies forever? Why wouldn’t they be like the USA and Canada, or the USA and Mexico, who fought wars and then learned to be friends?)
But that means actually being separate and independent, not federated. You see this starting to happen in the EU, where Hungary and Poland’s laws are a big deal in France and Germany now.
Historically, Overriding US state law to expand civil rights is what civil rights activists do. Overriding sovereign state law to expand civil rights is what imperialists do. Though even when people well and truly believe their cause is just and have thought about it deeply they can still point out that overriding federalism in order to do the right thing has fewer practical complications.
And overriding local laws to restrict civil rights is what red tribe activists do? (I used to live in Boulder Colorado; the (ahem) Moral Majority didn’t much like our local ideas of what was right. Based on their behaviour, I think that, for them, Christianity was primarily about enforcing heterosexuality.)
It’s me, the American who is also mad at unjust laws abroad. (Also me, the guy whose “Imperialism” score on the ISideWith quiz posted in a recent thread was way to the “pro” side of all current presidential candidates).
@EchoChaos >
Reading one esays decrying the State of Alabama as “undemocratic” followed by another doing the same inspired some of my thinking on this (as well as local matters in California), in one article the author was against the State overturning a higher city minimum wage in Birmingham, Alabama (unless in was Montgomery? It’s been a while) and in the other a vox.com article said that Alabama restricting abortion was “undemocratic” based on national polls, and to me both couldn’t be “undemocratic” (unless the meaning of “democratic” is with a capital “D”?), and to me it followed that if Birmingham, Alabama should be able to raise it’s own minimum wage rules than they should also be able to restrict their own access to abortions (voting rights are about the only rules that I think should be nation wide).
Also, as a Californian I just think our State is too large for the same basic rules to apply, San Francisco is different enough from San Diego and Stockton, as well as San Antonio, Texas and Singapore, and to me more local self-rule seems like it would mostly be a good thing, but not complete individual self-rule because I like having a police department and public libraries.
Because the confederacy had *plans*. It is really remarkable how republic-serial villain evil the confederacy was. If the US had gone “Oh, for, good riddance to bad rubbish” and let them go, the confederacy would promptly have made war on the Caribbean and Mexico – especially the Caribbean, because the sugar territory was a potential epic money maker for a slaving state. Ultimately, I think that ends with the US southern border being the administrative territory of the Franco-British Territories and all the southern “Gentry” introduced to madame guillotine, but a lot of people would die on the way.
If we’re allowing all of these “city-states” to impose population controls, are we also allowing them to impose tariffs?
@broblawsky says:
In my initial question they’d have “…as much self-governance as U.S. States have had historically…” so no seperate tariffs, but sure I’m curious to what effect that’ll have.
I don’t think you can have a functional market if you have controls on the movement of populations but no controls on the movement of capital or goods. Inevitably, one polity or another will begin accumulating capital to the detriment of the others and it’ll kick off some kind of wealth inequality crisis. In the US, we try to address the accumulation of capital in urban areas by letting people move to cities and redistributing the wealth in cities to ex-urban areas via taxation. This proposal would appear to make that impossible.
In the past, I’ve both taken and seen other people take a number of different personality tests. Typically this involves filling out a questionnaire, and after the results are computed, it’ll give some descriptors of your personality type – things you like/dislike, things that stress you, things that calm you, etc.
In my experience, people’s (and my) response at this point is uniformly along the lines of “Wow! That’s so me!”
This raises the question: is the questionnaire even necessary? I feel like most people could be given a list and descriptions of the personality types they’re about to be binned into and place themselves just as well as the questionnaire can. Has this ever been tested?
Does answering a questionnaire about oneself make it entirely accurate? While it may reflect what you believe to be true, that does not make it actually true. While everyone thinks they know themselves enough to be accurate about all those sorts of things, I know there have been many times in the past that I have since learned that I was wrong and there are likely still many things which I’m wrong about myself, and likely there always will be. Even with the goal of being objective we often just see what we want to see.
There is at least one new data point anybody can get from (some) tests: where you sit compared to everybody else. “That’s so me” is not really useful. The fact that I’m in the least 3% agreeable people (politeness) is pretty valuable information… which in hindsight I should have used recently. Oh well.
True. I guess the tests I had in mind divide you into 4 or 8 or 16 types, or something like that, rather than placing you on a scale.
Oh, the MTBI is simply superb in replacing signs. 16 instead of 12, and just enough correlation to be worth discussing, without being too serious. You can even try to guess somebody’s type – not as difficult as you’d think.
Idea for a clickbait article: “What Your Direct, Lifelong Access to Your Own Innermost Thoughts Reveals About Your Personality”.
Alternately, a quiz titled, “What You Reveal About Your Personality,” whose result is just the list of answers you gave some multinational corporation along with identifying information.
My guess is that the obfuscation is necessary in order to prevent people from just placing themselves in what they view as the “most desirable” bucket rather than the bucket that might best represent how they actually are.
If I force you answer 100 questions where it’s not necessarily immediately obvious how each individual answer will affect your placement, you’re more likely to answer truthfully and reach a more accurate final assessment than if I just ask you “Are you introvert or extrovert?”
Those tests are binary. Depending on how you feel on the day of the test, you can prefer reading over playing baseball, or vice-versa, but maybe you like both. Preferences are more nuanced than that.
There have been tests where people were randomly given one of the 12 horoscopes published in that day’s paper. Almost everyone said, “Wow! That’s so me!”
Anyway, it may be possible to make statistically significant statements on large populations who prefer baseball over reading. But the law of large numbers prevents making statistically significant statements about any one individual. And that’s why it’s mind-numbing that employers make hiring decisions based on these tests.
The House of Representatives used to be expanded to keep up with the US’s growing population. Then in 1911, it stopped. Is there a reason the House of Representatives hasn’t been expanded in over a century, despite the population more than tripling since then?
As a secondary question, proposals to expand the House suggest adding about 135 congressmen. Aside from forcing Nate Silver to change his website’s name, what would likely come of such an expansion?
Yes, the physical size of the actual chamber involved.
Having worked at two large organizations in the midst of new headquarters construction, both of which were completed within a few years, that’s actually an alarmingly stupid reason now that I think about it.
Do they all have to be in there all the time?
The Commons is only attended by a small proportion of MPs at any time.
The same reason any other guild limits the number of new members.
Come to think of it, I’d expect desire to preserve the power of incumbents to actually weigh in favor of allowing the House to expand with the population. With the total size capped, shifts in population distribution among states mean that there’s often going to be some seats eliminated in reapportionment, which puts some representatives out of a job. Expanding the chamber slightly each reapportionment, as was the practice pre-1911, would mitigate this.
You’d think the reps in states experiencing population decline would want to prevent their states from losing seats.
438 is already a slightly unwieldy size, and was even more unwieldy in 1911 when total membership was capped. The big limitations that’s now obsolete is the logistical overhead of recording floor votes, which was then done by roll call (as is still done in the Senate) but is now done electronically.
There are also some limitations that could be worked around now but currently aren’t: the ability of individual members to meaningfully participate in floor debates (floor debates are currently mostly theater, and should probably be replaced by written messages on an online forum), and the physical size of the chamber (if voting and floor debates are both electronic, then Representatives can fully participate from their offices and the actual chamber would only be needed for ceremonial purposes).
The one big limitation that I don’t see a way to work around is the Dunbar Number. As an organization gets bigger and passes various threshold relative to people’s ability to maintain personal social relationships, it tends to get less collegial, more factional, and to need more rigid rules and structure to continue to function effectively. Compare the social dynamics from the Supreme Court (9 members), the Senate (101 members including the VP), and the House of Representatives (435 members). If we take the common estimate of 150 for the Dunbar Number, 435 members is big enough that party caucuses are themselves too big to function collegially, which predicts (and we observe) that each party’s caucus can split into two or more factions which are nearly as bitter towards another and the party caucuses as a whole are.
This, to me, seems like a good reason for an extra party or two and moving to a more parliamentary style congress. Keeping party numbers lower and making it so that multi-party efforts are actually required to get anything done.
Do we WANT a single party to be more unified in its hostility to the other party than at present?
Probably not, but we might want the majority party to be able to work together decently within their party’s caucus to actually pass bills.
My god, a House of Representatives online forum debate over a bill, it would be the stuff of the most memetic fanfiction…
The US Congress, brought to you by Invision! 😀
Or are we talking the US Congress HoR subreddit?
At least it’s not Twitter.
Wait, how do filibusters work under this system?
Yeah, if the debate is public, then Representatives will likely use it to grandstand instead of discussing it in earnest, as they currently grandstand on the House floor. I can’t think of a good solution to that short of making the forum private (so there’s nobody to grandstand to except your fellow representatives) and anonymous (to reduce the ability of Representative Smith to call a reporter into his office and show him the outrageous post Representative Jones just made). Only the final votes would be public.
The House doesn’t really have filibusters: the House votes on every bill the Speaker calls a vote on, plus every bill that a majority of Representatives sign a discharge petition for. Quorum busting might still work, though, depending on how you assess a quorum in an online forum.
The Senate could still have filibusters if they want to, by keeping a procedural requirement that a cloture motion pass with a 3/5 supermajority before the final vote can be open.
We can call the anonymized forum HoRchan 😛
The House of Commons has 650 members, for a population less than a quarter the size of the US. Is it noticeably less functional than the US House? If not, why not expand the US House to the same size?
Recalls Brexit fiasco Perhaps slightly.
How would having a smaller number of MPs have made that fiasco less likely?
There are two other big institutional differences between the US House of Representatives and the UK House of Commons which make it easier for the majority party’s leadership to push through their agenda.
The first is that Britain doesn’t do primary elections. Instead, candidates are hand-picked by their parties. This give party leaders more lattitude to run candidates they expect to be able to work with, and it give the leaders a very powerful threat with which to whip unruly back benchers into line.
The other is the ability to call early elections. When Parliantent is hopelessly deadlocked, they have the option to refer the standoff to voters in a couple months instead of waiting a year or two as Americans must.
We saw both of these play out with the Brexit bill: Parliament was deadlocked, so they held early elections. The Tories who had voted against the Brexit bill got kicked out of the party, and I think most of the ones who tried running as independents wounx up losing. And enough new pro-Brexit bill Tories got elected to the new Parliament to break the deadlock.
The UK government has intended to reduce the number of MPs down to 600 for a few years, but hasn’t got around to it because it’s difficult and they’ve had other things to deal with.
We also have an unelected second chamber of almost 800 (although many of those people barely attend), the purpose of which is to further scrutinise legislation passed by the Commons.
In the previous OT I sharply criticized Game of Thrones. FormerRanger replied,
In the same genre? I dunno. Does Polanski’s Macbeth count? Zeffirelli’s Hamlet? They’re both in a different league writing-wise because of Bill S., but they’re medieval period pieces with a few supernatural elements and a lot of drama. Excalibur is a deserving classic as well. Heck, Monty Python’s Holy Grail was a lot more engrossing and clever than even the best moments of GoT.
How about dramatic TV in general:
– The Wire (best thing ever put on screen IMO)
– Star Trek TNG
– Chernobyl
These are just a few great shows off the top of my head. Any of them deserve orders of magnitude more praise and attention than GoT, which some might argue they received in their time. But I don’t think GoT deserved even a tenth of the praise it got, and what it got is due, I’m convinced, to a lot of expensive costumes, special effects, gore, and nudity, rather than good writing or acting which was completely lacking.
I recently watched it on iMDB, and the first season of Wiseguy was as awesome as I remembered the first time around, especially the arc with Sonny Steelgrave. No special effects, just great writing and a career-defining performance by Ray Sharkey.
Yes it is. And recall that just after that in the first season we have one of the earliest TV appearances of a then-obscure Broadway actor by the name of Kevin Spacey. Wiseguy in general had a fairly impressive list of guest stars over its 4-year run.
Ever watch Crime Story? Some of the writers from that show later went on to write for Wiseguy, and there’s a bit of overlap amongst the actors as well (the main villain on Crime Story, Ray Luca, is played by Anthony John Dennison, who played John Raglin on Wiseguy), and both shows pioneered the use of extended serial arcs in the scriptwriting. Highly recommended.
The Wire isn’t even the best show on HBO (it is amazing though). The early seasons of GoT did have great writing, because they could pull heavily from quality source material. They were the best fantasy put to screen since the LotR trilogy finished up, and therefore their audience was probably overrepresented among online critics.
For my two cents, if you want epic battles, sacrifice (both senseless and heroic), and a look at the depths and heights of the human spirit, Band of Brothers is my go-to.
I remember by the end of the first episode of GoT realizing I could predict what most of the characters were going to say before they said it because everything they said was so cliche.
Okay, at this point I’m having a hard time believing you are being truthful.
You lost me at TNG. Maybe you could convince me that the best 10 episodes of TNG are better than the 10 best GOT episodes, but there are lows in TNG that would leave me longing for Idiot Ball Tyrion. “Deserves orders of magnitude more praise”? No way.
Yeah… say what you will about Seasons 7-8 of GoT, they are nowhere near as cringe as 1-2 of TNG…
I would argue that whatever makes you cringe about TNG is likely to be related to production values rather than acting and writing though.
There are no excuses for a candle sex ghost.
rumham, you are entirely correct (and many’s the Trekkie who has had way too much fun tearing that episode to shreds, I’ve done it myself. There’s nothing wrong with a fun silly Gothic romance plot, but why did they have to make Beverley stupid as a rock for the purpose?). But then again, I suppose every series of Trek has to have its “Spock’s Brain” episode 🙂
I’m discounting Enterprise which had too much stupid in early seasons, and Discovery which was “Every episode leaves me longing for something of the quality of Spock’s Brain“.
You would argue wrong. The problem with Q and the Holodeck was not that they spent too little on the costumes. The effects are not exactly great, but they work well enough within the limitations.
I don’t think the production values got that much better after the first couple seasons, but the writing did – that said there were still a lot of meh episodes, deus ex technobabble, continuity issues, etc.
None of the acting outside Patrick Stewart was ever that great.
@gdub
You leave Kunta alone!
@Deiseach
Arrgghh. Discovery. So many stupid choices were made with that show that I don’t even know where to begin. But we are judging it by our current standards of living in the golden age of television. TNG wouldn’t hold up now either.
Gates McFadden and LeVar Burton, along with Wil Wheaton, were probably the weakest links acting-wise. I thought everyone else was fine. But even at their worst they don’t come close to as bad as Peter Dinklage trying to put on a British accent.
Oh come on, Peter Dinklage (before Idiot Ball Tyrion) was brilliant, and you can’t complain about his accent while praising a show whose best part is a Frenchman who sounds like an English knight raised in the Royal Shakespeare Company. (Let alone a drama about a Soviet nuclear disaster where everyone sounds as if they are from the British Isles).
@rumham – I love LaVar Burton. I was raised on Reading Rainbow. I always liked the Engineers on Star Trek. But TNG managed to make him bland.
@gdub
Same on all counts. I’m sure reading rainbow is a large factor in my love of Geordi. Also his friendship with Data, which was my favorite character.
If you haven’t heard it, this interview with Lamar Burton on Adam Carolla’s podcast is hilarious. Almost antagonistic, but you can tell they’re having fun.
They are easily skipped though. That’s the advantage of episodic tv.
“Deserves orders of magnitude more praise” seems pretty reasonable to me. But these shows are difficult to compare, because their strengths and weaknesses lie in such different areas.
I appreciate that GoT has expanded the market for long-running shows with unstable status quos, and it certainly managed to package a few spectacular scenes into its seasons. But ultimately, the commonly-cited strengths of the show just didn’t connect for me. Particularly, I found it to be painfully predictable after the first season. I’m happy the show got made, but more for the effect it has had on the rest of the industry than for the enjoyment it gave me directly.
Fair.
I agree that TNG is some of the best TV. It does have some bad episodes but one(of the many) great things about an episodic show vs a continuity show is that bad episodes do not taint every other episode to the same degree. (I never watched GOT so I can’t speak specifically to how the two shows stack up)
I will concede that GoT is not as good as Shakespeare.
The Wire isn’t F/SF, nor is Chernobyl. Both are excellent, however. Star Trek TNG is an open-ended series, not to my mind nearly as good as GoT, but ymmv. Your other counter-examples are generally considered among the best long-form series in the last decade or so. Aside from the last two seasons, GoT is at a similar level of quality over a longer period.
(Another show that started out wonderful but had a terrible finish was Lost. I think they went off the cliff in a way that made GoT look like Shakespeare.)
There are a lot of F/SF series out there. Are there any F/SF series you think are better than GoT, beyond ST:TNG? Some things that are F/SF-adjacent and on now or recently include The Witcher, The Good Place, Russian Doll. These are ones I’ve watched and think are good, though not as good as GoT at its best.
I don’t think I’ve watched a lot of fantasy series, maybe any, except Xena and Hercules when I was a kid. As for SF beyond Star Trek, I haven’t watched too many of those either…I’m not a fan of Black Mirror, and I think it kinda sucks, but I’d say it’s better than GoT for whatever that’s worth.
Babylon 5 is the best 90s science fiction show ever made.
Even Babylon 5 had its “Jove nods” moments, the most annoying of which was the “minor characters gush over how gosh-darned wonderful Delenn is” episode (I like Delenn and even I thought that was too much) and the Tragic Telepath Hairspray Explosion conclusion to that story arc (what, that is how they all died, isn’t it? – in a tragic too-much-hairspray conflagration?)
Robin Atkin Downes has said that the telepath story arc should have concluded with the rogue telepaths just selling their wardrobe and cosmetics collection to buy themselves a homeworld.
Personally, I thought the Minbari Thunderdome episode was the show’s weakest, but only because the Karate Kid episode was early enough that I didn’t feel quite so bad.
Definitely if they had restructured the budget to put all the hairdressing fees towards rent instead, they could well have afforded the swankiest part of any planet they liked 🙂
I’m also biased because I cannot stand Sheridan, but given Michael O’Hare’s problems (God rest the man), we couldn’t have Sinclair for the rest of the seasons, so we had to go with Captain Teeth instead.
Just want to mention that after seeing it come up so many times in the Open Threads, I finally picked it up and I totally agree, I’m just getting into the 4th season and it is wonderful.
Despite reading all the spoiler threads, all the details have trickled out of my brain. As a result I only have a bunch of vague ideas about what’s going to happen, most of which turn out to be wrong. I was legitimately surprised when Sinclair left, because I thought he was the core of the 4th season for some reason. I kept expecting him to come back and stage a military takeover, possibly due to Shadow influence. I think that’s ruled out at this point though.
My high level answer to “Why was GoT so popular” is that they did a good job on successfully pulling off the “Anyone can die” trope.
My more detailed answer is that they were the first show to get that trope really, really, right in the sense that it led to the creation of what you might think of as a “fantasy universe that operates under realistic parameters.” They created a universe where anyone can die (which you have to prove with multiple deaths, many of which have to be unexpected/unpredictable in terms of both cause and timing), which captivates the audience into always tuning in to the next episode because they really truly feel like something really important might happen at any given moment, and which gives a much greater sense of urgency/import to critical moments, battles, etc. They also created a universe where new characters emerge in a way that seems quite realistic and isn’t particularly forced.
On the one hand, sure, it’s still fantasy because there’s dragons and zombies and stuff. But on the other hand, it’s among the most realistic shows out there in the sense that having a large battle means people will actually die (main characters included), and that new contenders can continually emerge and gain importance. In this sense, it doesn’t insult the intelligence of the viewer in the way that nearly every other show does, which makes it appear smart or high-brow, compared to other shows.
I am not a GoT fan, although I enjoyed the first couple of source books, but I have heard this is a big reason that it wasn’t as good in seasons 7 and 8, which was that they had “main characters” at that point and didn’t allow them to die if they did something apocalyptically stupid that would’ve killed anyone in season 1.
Yes, I think that’s a reasonably accurate summary.
I’ll also add that I think by that time, the writers were possibly undone by their own success, or that the show was cursed by its own popularity.
I think a lot of the early adopters, and/or the people who came in from the novels, were people who were primarily interested in the characters, the plot twists, the gore, and all the other stuff.
But as it became more popular it increasingly attracted a more “mainstream” sort of audience who clearly expected a standard narrative with a standard beginning/middle/end including proper closure. And to get that required sacrificing some of the show’s earlier values.
Once it was officially decided that the show would have to end in a certain, definite, amount of time, and that it would have to end with a proper “resolution” that would be acceptable to a mainstream audience, their hands were basically tied. The Night King had to attack, and be defeated. Someone had to claim the crown/throne. Danerys had to pick an alignment. Ceresi had to be dealt with. There are a limited number of ways you can accomplish all of that, and none of them really allow for random, unpredictable, shocking twists.
Give them some credit where it’s due: the Daenerys thing was genuinely shocking, though it shouldn’t have been, and was the right call in the end. (I’m convinced she’s going to do the same things in the book, though not perhaps in the same order.)
I wouldn’t say it was “shocking.” It certainly wasn’t the most predictable thing they could have done with Danerys, but it was probably like #2 or #3…
But hey, giving them credit is what I’m trying to do here! I think in many ways they were quite heavily constrained by circumstance, and did the best they could with the situation they found themselves in!
“Anybody can die” is indeed interesting, because it is so hard to pull off an actual satisfying story with it. GRRM failed to do so. Let’s not dump on the writers because they had to actually finish what GRRM started and abandoned.
Giving GRRM credit for writing a story where anybody can die is like giving Lost credit for writing a mystery. Starting such a story is the easy part, and the only part he did.
It’s more than just “anyone can die”, though. For the first five or so seasons, the plot of GoT was driven by cause and effect. The big things that happened, were at least in hindsight the plausible and in many cases nigh-inevitable result of what had come before. That’s actually not all that common in serial television, and owes a lot to GRRM’s writing.
The later seasons, were not so much “cause precedes effect” but “setup precedes payoff”. If you want e.g. Dany to be the Draconic cavalry rescuing Jon beyond the Wall, meh, just make sure you have the pieces more or less in place at the start of the episode, and don’t worry, the kind of nerds who calculate the maximum airspeed velocity of an unladen raven aren’t going to be a drop in the ratings bucket. This payoff is too spectacular to pass up just because it’s not plausible.
Totally agree!
Killing off major characters is shocking enough in and of itself. Serial TV doesn’t do that often. But it does do that sometimes. It’s hardly unheard of.
But killing off major characters, many at a time, mid-season, not as the result of losing a decisive military battle but as a result of insulting a minor lord who just so happened to later on be well positioned to betray them, is the sort of thing that was basically unheard of. But also quite realistic and plausible and the sort of thing that totally does happen and has happened in history.
And structurally, the moment that Matt M refers to doesn’t just kill several major characters; it kills an entire plotline. By which I mean, the show is structured such that (almost) every episode flips between several locales and the group of characters involved there. After That Thing, that plotline/locale is just gone.
They ran out of expendable main characters. At some point, somebody needs to complete an arc. Why they chose to rush the arcs in truncated final seasons is a mystery though.
Once it became clear that the series was facing a definite end in 1-2 seasons, what else could they do?
I mean, technically, they could have just left some arcs unresolved/unfinished, but the howling that would have come about as a result of that is far worse than what came about for what they actually did…
Well, just for starters, they could have made two full seasons to finish those arcs.
The 1-2 season limit was self-imposed, though. Martin and HBO were perfectly fine with the show going 10+ seasons.
It seems to me that after the sixth season, nothing particularly complicated was really needed. Letting the arrows fly in the direction they were pointed gets you are reasonable ending.
The White Walkers invade. The people of the north fight back, and Jon uses that sword of his, known to be effective against White Walkers, to kill the Night King.
Sansa, after years of political tutoring by Littlefinger, becomes the ruler of Winterfell, and Warden of the North.
Daenerys, with three dragons and an army of horsemen, invades Westeros successfully and takes the Iron Throne from Cersei.
Arya assassinates evil queen Cersei, who has been on Arya’s murderin’-list for years now.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable resolution to me.
And if you want it darker and messier, there is plenty of room to leave blood on the floor. Make the fight against the White Walkers as costly in lives as you want. It would be a fine place to have Jon die heroically, for example. The fight between Cersei and Daenerys could also be very costly, particularly for the small-folk of King’s landing. Arya could die after successfully killing Cersei. Jeorah, Tyrion, Brienne, Jaime, the Hound, Davos, and Varys are ultimately expendable.
There is plenty of room for a satisfying, straightforward solution. The writers don’t need to pull any white rabbits out of invisible hats.
johan,
I wouldn’t have objected to any of your proposals much, but I think a whole lot of people would have, because in basically every case you’re going with the most obvious/predictable ending to basically every character arc.
That sort of thing isn’t thought of very highly these days in general, but I think it would have been especially hated in GoT specifically, which was known for unpredictability.
I do think there’s a larger point to be made here that these days, the desire to be “unpredictable” is often coming at the expense of quality. Unpredictability, for its own sake, is probably not a great idea. Like sure, nobody really “saw it coming” that Bram would end up on the throne, but the most likely reason for that is less “because the writers came up with something brilliant” and more “because that’s a stupid ending and we were expecting a non-stupid one.” This isn’t really specific to GoT either. Another good example is probably the Mass Effect series. “Shepard defeats the reapers and our heroes live and everyone celebrates” would have gone over a lot better than what they actually gave us… even though it would have been predictable and cliche and all that.
But johan’s case is stronger if you want unpredictable endings. Unpredictable needs to be established as plausible, otherwise it comes off as a cheat.
Yes, I’m looking at you, King Bran the Broken. It is possible to set up a plot where Brandon Stark becomes King of Westeros without suspension of disbelief being hung from the neck until dead. It is even possible to do it subtly enough that it isn’t noticed until it happens. But that hadn’t been done by the end of Season 6, and it would have been a tough job to fit it into even two full seasons along with all the other plot arcs that need resolution.
The two abbreviated seasons we got, would have been enough for the simple and obvious resolutions to all the major arcs. Indeed, those two seasons were at their weakest when they tried to make big changes, or to throw in arbitrary pointless obstacles to the straight-line resolution.
With two full seasons, you can have straight-line resolutions to most of the plot arcs and maybe one or two big twists. Probably not King Bran, but e,g. Dany’s path to the Dark Side could have been properly established. The more unexpected twists you want, unless you had GRRM set them up for you in the earlier seasons, the more time it takes to do them right.
I think johan’s ending would have gotten a ton of flak from the fans for being so predictable, but also would have been far better than the ending we actually got. If anything could have delivered on expectations (not a given) it would have had to be set up much earlier.
Right, and that’s what I mean when I say “at that point, their hands were tied.”
I think this sort of problem is basically inevitable in a medium where the amount of time you have to tell your story is unknown and constantly liable to be changed at any given moment.
I might be misremembering here, but I seem to recall an interview with Kurt Sutter (creator of Sons of Anarchy) where he claimed that before he started working on the show, he made FX promise him that they’d give him 5-7 seasons (because that’s what he needed to tell the story he wanted to tell), and that the only reason they were willing to do so (and that he was inclined to believe them) was the mutual trust he had previously built with that specific network during his time as a writer for The Shield.
Barring some sort of arrangement like that, we’re basically asking the impossible.
Also, GoT’s success at killing people wasn’t actually about unpredictability. Especially in S1, Ned’s death sentence was set up quite a bit before the deed was done. However, TV history was for that death sentence to be somehow averted by a plot twist at the last second. GoT’s innovation was to not do that, to let the inevitable death actually happen. Similarly, TV and film have created many stories where people go through endless Pretty People Drama, continually betraying each other and still somehow staying friends and a revolving door of relationships, but the Red Wedding takes those same betrayals to their actual logical end.
GoT’s actions in the name of unpredictability weren’t doing that, they were really just ass-pulls at the last second.
How Dany’s storyline would have gone as per early GoT, is to do Willow’s addiction+corruption storyline from Buffy season 6, except that Xander’s big intervention fails, and Willow’s evil plan succeeds. There needed to a be a series of intervention plans that almost succeed, so that the audience expects that the last one in the finale will finally do the trick because that’s how it’s supposed to go. Then the world-building will kick in to show that heroic conventions don’t stand up to the practical advantages of being evil. Early GoT is about how defect-bot rules in Westeros.
As others have said, the truncation was self imposed. Even given the truncation, no one forced them to slam major unearned plot twists into the mix, or to abandon the talkie bits that everyone loved (and universally agreed were the best parts of Season 8) for meh spectacle.
@Matt M Actually King Bran was in the lead in prediction betting markets before the last season began. At the time I thought it was a ridiculous ending, but apparently some fans saw it coming
I can’t remember exactly, but it must have been in season 2 or 3 (which is as many as I watched) when I realized “break mainstream audience expectations by unexpectedly killing off a beloved main character” was a shtick they were doing.
It’s a lot easier to find sci-fi than fantasy examples:
Firefly
Star Trek TNG
Babylon 5
Dune (the sci-fi miniseries)
Dark Angel
Dollhouse
Fantasy is harder, largely because there aren’t nearly as many classic fantasy (or even medieval) shows with any sort of serious production values.
Merlin (the miniseries, not the show with a bunch of teenagers)
Lucifer
Into the Badlands
But even those tend to be a lot shorter than GoT. If we’re giving out categorized awards, I’d strongly consider GoT for “best long-running live-action fantasy” mostly due to lack of competition. But it doesn’t seem to me like its writing or cinematography hold up to top-tier works in other areas. Its acting is definitely a strong point, but there are well-acted works all over TV; when shows get bad, it’s almost never the actors at fault.
Are you allowing for animation in your considerations?
Reading the article Nick linked in the previous thread, something jumped out at me
I thought this was a mostly satirical concern that populist types mocked “elitists” for. And maybe the author is using it that way as well. But maybe she’s being literal?
How big a role do cocktail parties play in your life? How much would you encourage someone to make life choices based upon one’s reception therein?
My assumption is that even for the well-to-do extrovert the answer is “they’re an occasional perk” and “not at all, of course.”
Speaking as a former journalist, they are awesome just for the food. You have to strategically park yourself by the door from which waiters emerge with hors d’oevres (sp).
Tiny, but I’m not upper-class.
I always figured there’s some truth to this rather than being 100% conservatives failing to mind-model upper-class leftists, because it was progressive Aaron Sorkin who wrote that speech in A Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup tells Tom Cruise’s JAG attorney “Deep down, in places you don’t like to talk about at parties, you want me on that wall,” i.e. you want conservatives to exist, but you’d never admit it at parties because it would ruin your social life.
Cocktail party? Que’est-ce que c’est?
If they’re in a position to care about what people at a cocktail party think, they probably already know all there is to know about handling cocktail parties.
(In other words: they had the sort of upbringing that prepares you for that sort of function.)
Being interesting to talk to at an office holiday party or at conferences can be a moderate career advantage for some companies and roles.
Hell, these days a lot of elite law/consulting firms openly admit that the “airport test” is a significant component of their hiring decisions.
True, but that’s the opposite approach of this quote, where the career path is intended to be selected for it’s advantage at parties!
I would assume (although I’m certainly not elite enough to know for sure) that in this case, “cocktail party” is just shorthand for any such situation in which you’d like to be taken seriously and appear important, and in which the expectation is that you’d have a very different degree.
The mother’s concern is that the degree choice will cause elites to take her less seriously than they might if she chose a different degree. If you aspire to be elite yourself, this seems like a non-trivial issue.
This may be a European perspective, but it has always been my impression is that “aspiring to be elite” is the fatal flaw as far as being treated seriously by elites is concerned.
FWIW, non-elites aren’t terribly impressed by that either.
I may be reading WAY to much into this quote, but I’ve got some experience in the upper-class / cocktail party circuit.
There is a stereotype of the certain kind of upper class girl who goes to college for her MRS degree. The normal subtext of college being finishing school for the elite isn’t subtext for this demographic, it’s straight up text. They will go to college, get a degree in English, philosophy, theology or something else on the squishier end of liberal arts, work for a few years at a non profit while living off the trust fund or their allowance, then eventually meet the guy who will take care of them for the next 20 years.
I don’t want to sound unkind, since I’m basically describing several family members at this point, but these people aren’t… well… aren’t the most respected members of the overall social group for reasons that are probably gendered and sexist; but, you know, if your whole deal is aligning your life around a traditional gender role, you might get the treatment traditionally associated with that gender role. These women tend to fall pretty heavily into the “arm candy for their husbands” Shtick (at least until 20 year go by and the trophy wife/mistress comes along).
Suffice to say, a parent who does not want this life for their child might take pains to edge them away from that life path.
The thing about going to college to get a husband is that for most people, who you marry is one of the most significant decisions you can make. Now there’s good men to be found outside of college and the converse is true as well, but being marriage minded early on just makes sense to me if you want to get married at all.
Getting a degree that will cause people to respect you at parties just sounds so much more superficial. Versus learning things that will make you an adroit conversationalist, or accomplishing things worth talking about; and versus finding friends who care about you and about things that matter.
That’s not quite what happened with the author, since she went for her PhD and has had a pretty successful writing career since then. (You might recognize the title of her new book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, which has been making the rounds.) That’s interesting nonetheless.
I missed those rounds (I’m behind on my cocktail partying*), but given her former partner, I wondered if that book would reference Scott’s Secular Solstice events?
*I just realized–and call me corny if you like–you all are my cocktail party.If memory serves, the Secular Solstice events were actually started by a guy in the New York rationalist community, where Burton and her fiance lived, and with which he was affiliated. I’d not pursue that thread for anonymity reasons; I’m sure she kept his name out of the article for a reason.
Oh, I’m not interested in doxing or shaming anyone based on one side of a failed relationship, I’m more interested in the actual event and her perception of it. It seems directly in line with the title of her book but I’d have otherwise assumed that it was too small to be noticed.
Given she’s writing about godless rites and at least knows of Bay Area rationalists, our host might make a cameo.
Ah, I’d be surprised if Scott himself appeared, but I could see a Solstice he attended appearing. Or maybe one of the posts he wrote about it being used as a source. I haven’t read the book yet.
Is it really catty of me to say that reading the blurb on the Amazon site, that’s precisely the kind of spirituality-lite book I’d expect her to write? Just slightly dated enough to be following trends, not ahead of the pack and certainly not serious scholarship (we’ve all read the Silicon Valley techno-polyamorists articles, right?, and Satanism is practically mainstream nowadays).
In the tech field, we call it “the hallway” or “the hallway track”. Tho sometimes it’s literally at a cocktail party.
Just about the only reason I go to tech conference is the conversations in the hallways, at the bar, at the socials, and over cocktails. (One of my personal rules is no more than one standard drink per evening. I’m WORKING. And professional alcohol service staff people are very good at mixing Shirley Temples that look like “real” mixed drinks.)
I got involved in the project that became OAUTH1 (see [ https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5849 ] section 5) because I sat down at a “fine whisky appreciation meetup” at an unconference.
I got involved in OpenStack at a house/cocktail party for MySQL Alumni.
I go to the annual Open Source Leadership Summit literally only for the conversations in the hallways during breaks, for the event socials in the evenings, and for the conversations over the meals and at the bar.
I was the host/organizer for the twice a year OpenStack Core Approver Invite-Only Social, specifically so that there would be a “cocktail party” where a certain specific important cohort of people would be able to socialize and network face to face with their peers and off the record. It got good enough that there were people actually doing the work to become a Core Approver specifically so they could score an invite to the event.
So, yeah, the professional importance of social events with light alcohol lubrication are a real thing at my level, and for as many levels up as I have been able to see.
Okay, based on yours and prior comments, I’m updating away from this being an entirely frivolous concern and to seeing the label as a catchall for the types of informal networking events that screen for social eptness.
Maybe my mistake as reading “cocktail party” as akin to “dinner party”?
Also, contra my last post, I’m not sure then if you all are, in fact, my cocktail party.
Also, contra my last post, I’m not sure then if you all are, in fact, my cocktail party.
Well, I’m not of the class background or current social status to have ever attended either cocktail or dinner parties, but whatever the heck kind of get-together this is – a quiet private drink in the snug? – we’re it 🙂
Only if my secret motivation for being here is networking to a better career option.
It’s a long time since I’ve been to an American Economics Association national conference or the like. But my impression is that, once one is used to such things, one spends most time outside the official sessions talking with people.
That isn’t usually in the context of a cocktail party, but it could be.
> Just about the only reason I go to tech conference is the conversations in the hallways, at the bar, at the socials, and over cocktails.
That’s what conferences are for. The talks are just there so that the powers that be have a defensible reason to fund it.
You can watch a talk on youtube, or just find a paper/blog post/github where they write down whatever it was they were talking about.
You go to a conference in order that you don’t see the authors of that paper as (Smith & Jones, 2018) but as John and Samantha who you hung out with one evening.
One of the best benefits of leaving Big Law to Government HR was never having to go to a cocktail party again. I had offers monthly, and turned down enough for people to rightly believe that I didn’t take networking seriously. Very important for big law, easy to ignore if you are in the Federal Field Offices.
I took the snobbery and rudeness as read, but I also assumed that a large part of it would be “A degree in THEOLOGY?” and tight-lipped smiles as they tried to get away from the obvious religious zealot nutjob. I mean, who does theology as a layperson except some kind of horrid fundamentalist? If Lil’ Miss Tina had been an Episcopalian bishopess, that would have been a different matter, of course. That’s respectable and everyone knows Piskies are reliably liberal and rainbow-hued 🙂
OK, but was in theoretical or experimental theology? Makes a difference.
But is the BBC’s take shaping up to be a better series than GOT?
But I wonder how experimetal theology would work, in today’s world.
… During the thunderstorm, Subject A read aloud the 95 Theses, while Subject B read Defensio Tridentinæ fidei …
No one practices experimental theology like Elijah. Dude even had a control group.
Forgot about the whole ‘Baal Altar’ thing.
Experimental theology was way easier before the experimenters had to run everything past an IRB. I mean, have you ever tried to get approval for a human sacrifice? Abraham would have been all “I’m sorry, Lord, but even with Methuselah-grade longevity, Isaac is going to be dead of old age before I’ve got even half the paperwork done on this”. Heck, even communion would be right out without at least Phase II clinical trials on the Body and Blood of Christ.
Going by a potted bio, “she completed her doctorate in 19th century French literature and theology at the University of Oxford”. So a two-for-the-price-of-one degree, and going by her thesis it was ‘buzzword theology’:
I’m partial to a bit of the oul’ fin-de-siècle French decadence meself, and I’d like to see what fist she makes of Huysman’s theology (given his re-conversion to orthodox Catholicism) but (a) girl, you had to mention kenosis, huh? and (b) constructive theology seems to be the opposite of systematic theology, so I guess we know where she’s coming from. I’m going to have to read this thesis, so that’s my leisure reading for the weekend! 🙂
And from a Modern Theology Seminar she participated in from 2017: 6 February
So yeah, Eng Lit more so than Theology the angle here. No chance of being mistaken for a fundie once you dig into it, but Mama might well think the confusion was entirely possible if she only said she did a DPhil in Theology, before she had her First Novel published (and now her Non-Fiction Book as well).
EDIT: What I cannot understand is the refined dandified French craze for copying the Brits; nothing cracked me up more in À rebours than when the fastidious and indeed neurotic Des Esseintes togs himself out in clothes specially ordered from London, then embarks on his trip to England but first stops off in Paris to wait for the train, and visits Typical English Pub/Restaurant and mingles with Typical Englishmen and Englishwomen, ending up with having such an experience of Englishness that he finds he doesn’t need to travel to the country itself after all:
Back when I was a graduate student in Chicago, the Union Theological Seminary there had the reputation of being filled with atheists.
I would expect many students majoring in theology to be planning on a career as mainline Protestant clergy.
@Randy M says:
If I count weddings and retirement dinners I’ve been to maybe six in the last twenty years if “On the last day of a long construction job the foreman and/or the steward treats the crew to beers at a close by job” than a few more, and if the last union meeting of the de facto hereditary head of the local before his retirement with beer and hot dogs served counts than one more.
Until your question its never occurred to me to wonder, though now that I think about it our older son doesn’t bless us with grandchildren we may nudge our younger son to follow a different path than him.
I’m definitely in favor of helping your kids develop social skills. It’s the orientating your life to sound impressive to hypothetical peers that I doubt.
@Randy M >
If being “impressive” to “peers” helps him get married and start making our grandchildren then sure important, though too impressive and following “UMC” customs of late childbirth means our grandchildren will likely be born too late for us.
It really depends on how things fare for our older son who’s been homeschooled, and given some recent actions of the State of California that will make it harder for our younger son to get the kind of education our older one has had so we may send him to a Catholic school instead.
de facto hereditary head of the local
You’re not selling this union thing very well.
@Mark Atwood says: “You’re not selling this union thing very well”
My old local (in San Jose) where I was an indentured apprentice had many more contested elections and officer turn over (and much more contentious meetings), but they never served beer at their meetings and had a much less Italian, and Chinese) membership than my current local in San Francisco (when I made the move I heard many jokes about pronouncing my Irish last name as if it was Italian).
50 miles makes for cultural differences, San Francisco’s plumbers “keep it in the family” far more than San Jose’s, the pay scale is similar though.
Not to mention anything as fancy as a party. My very low status choices and life path make almost all social interactions mildly awkward for me and I intentionally try to avoid any and all discussion of my personal history. The choices I made which offend me so are certainly choices I wish I could unmake, but they would plausibly carry many benefits, so it is hard to weight just the social advantages. I will say that when my life course more closely matched my circumstance, I thought such concerns silly. Now having seen the other side, I think they might be consistently undervalued.
Okay in my home town, there a two social events that can be intepreted as such “cocktail parties”. It’s more beer and spirits than cocktails, but so what.
Since my father wanted to be an entrepreneur his whole live, I met a lot of people who were utterly convinced that the difference between someone who’s buisiness is just sloging along, and someone who “makes it” is beeing invited to those events. Both are stupid traditions from a time long gone (one is centred around a bet, where one side hasn’t won in 150 years, and the other had a big controversy around allowing women some years ago) but they are still the place where some shipping line owners meet with bankers, while beeing surrounded by a couple of hundered big buisiness men and (for traditional reasons) ship captains.
Oops, meant to reply to a thread
You can actually delete posts. There’s a button.
The three greatest composers who lived entirely within the twentieth century. Go! (I have my own list that I decided on a long time ago and I’m curious what other people think.)
Probably Copland, Prokofiev, Shostakovich. Although I kind of hate Shostakovich, so I’d consider subbing in a Lennon/McCartney combo. Or maybe John Williams.
ETA: McCartney and Williams are barred since they’re still alive, it seems. Didn’t read that closely enough.
I’d go for Frank Zappa, myself…
I’d include Captain Beefheart, but he died in 2010.
You got all three of mine. Shostakovich, Britten, and Messiaen.
Is it low-class and naive of me to mention Bernstein? Is he somebody that people who are really into music sneer at?
Not low-class at all. He was just outside my cut. But I much prefer his “light” music (Candide is my favorite) to his “serious” music.
Hard one. Most of the names I come up with cross one century boundary or the other.
I think we are looking for someone who was active in the 50s and 60s. Good periods for movies and rock’n roll, or maybe late jazz. Miles Davis (1926-91) and Charlie Parker (1920-55) qualify.
Was there an equivalent of Max Martin in early rock’n roll?
If we’re opening it up to jazz, I would list my top three as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus. All of them great writers, musicians, and innovators.
I can name one without thinking too hard: Samuel Barber.
I could probably come up with more if I wanted to dedicate more time to it.
This is actually really hard, since so many potential nominees I can think of (Carl Orff, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin) when I checked have turned out to be born in the late 19th century!
Well, since I’m partial to the music of
Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975)
Hank Williams (1923 – 1953)
and
Wilbur “Kansas Joe” McCoy (1905-1950)
so those are my nominations.
Alfred Newman barely squeaks in, born in 1900. One of the godfathers of film music, and the first of the big Newman film composer dynasty. 9 Oscars, 45 nominations, a record only broken by John Williams. City Lights, Prisoner of Zenda, Gunga Din, Wuthering Heights, Mark of Zorro, Miracle on 34th Street, All About Eve, The Seven Year Itch, and many more.
Howard Ashman, of Little Mermaid/Beauty and the Beast/Aladdin/Little Shop of Horrors fame. 2 Oscars, 7 nominations.
Richard Rodgers is the only EGOT winner who qualifies for this list.
Henry Mancini only has 4 Oscars, but has 20 Grammys, the person with 14th most Grammys ever won. He’s number 6 for most Grammy nominations, with 72 of them.
Speaking of which, Leonard Bernstein has 63 Grammy nominations.
Miklos Rozsa did Madame Bovary, Ben Hur, Double Indemnity, Ivanhoe, and many more. 3 Oscars and 17 nominations.
Franz Waxman has 2 Oscars and 12 nominations. Philadelphia Story, Bride of Frankenstein, Taras Bulba, Flash Gordon, Hotel Berlin, Sunset Boulevard, Rebecca, and many more.
I think nobody has mentionned Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927-1994) yet? The man behind “The Girl from Ipanema” (and really about half of the bossa nova repertory).
Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Joaquin Rodrigo. Rodrigo fits almost exactly, born 1901, died 1999.
Shostakovich, Copland, and… idk, John Williams or someone like that? The 20th century was long and varied – can I say The Beatles?
Remember multiocular O? Well, it turns ꙮut (if we ignore the dots and 3-dimensionalize it by giving the strokes some nonzero thickness), the character is topologically homeomorphic to the human bꙮdy! Assuming that you don’t have any piercings, supernumerary punta, or accessory ostia. Thanks, VSauce!
We were talking before about Trump’s pardons, so I wanted to ask a not-very-related question: Is there an example of a president or governor who actually took the pardoning job seriously, for example, by having some staff go over criminal cases and look for likely miscarriages of justice he could rectify by pardoning or commuting sentences? It seems like the actual reason to give the executive pardon power is to allow this kind of overruling of unjust sentences, for example in cases where (say) the judge feels that he has no choice but to sentence some guy to a long prison term for some minor thing because of how the law’s written. I’m curious if it’s ever used that way.
Every President does this.
Most pardons (including most Trump pardons), come through the DOJ Office of the Pardon Attorney.
This is also true for state governors.
Yes. As pointed out this is how the vast majority of pardons get handled.
A specific example – During his presidency Obama went through and reduced the federal sentences of numerous prisoners who had been sentenced under stricter laws than currently existed anymore. He reduced their sentences down to what the current guidelines would be.
Most of them do this, though the cases are almost always brought to their or their staff’s attention by others. Trump’s behavior is not nearly as anomalous as people are making it out to be. A huge chunk of Lincoln’s papers on the Library of Congress website relate to this issue–he dealt with it every day, reviewing sentences (particularly death sentences) and pardoning or commuting. A lot of these were military cases, but a lot of them weren’t (the Sioux case is a famous one; so is that of slavetrader Captain Gordon, who he refused to pardon).
I agree the point of it is related to unjust sentences, however that may be defined at a given time—it is a safety valve against social unrest and other things. Pardoning former Confederates, pardoning Nixon, Trump’s posthumous pardon of Muhammad Ali, etc.—they are often more about symbolism/recognition than about draconian sentencing laws, which are a newer development, though recent presidents seemed to focus more on personal pardons of associates and relatives. In recent years, people tend to wait until they are about to leave office, to avoid backlash. (Obama seems to have started a trend away from this, as someone mentioned with his reducing sentences, and pardoning Chelsea Manning). Trump seems to embrace using it for symbolic reasons and to address unjust sentencing laws in general.
IBM’s new linguistic analysis of 128,279 Twitter users from 3,513 occupations shows that senior research scientists are very high on openness & very low on agreeableness.
https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/scientists-are-curious-and-idealistic-but-not-very-agreeable-compared-to-other-professions
I would certainly expect this to be the case, given what being a successful research scientist entails.
I’m not sure what to think about the fact that I was pleased to learn that my profession (software engineering) is about as different, personality-wise, from marketing communication specialists as you can get without being a senior game designer.
The questions that test openness include:
I have a rich vocabulary.
I have a vivid imagination.
I have excellent ideas.
I am quick to understand things.
I use difficult words.
I spend time reflecting on things.
I am full of ideas.
In short:
I have an inflated self image.
OTOH, that self image is likely to be accurate for top scientists.
When affirmative action was introduced over a half century ago, many assumed that once the under-represented demographics were given a little help getting past the initial gatekeeper, they’d do well at all subsequent levels. Unfortunately, that proved naive. So ever since there have been unending struggles over how far up the ladder to extend affirmative action.
For example, if you have affirmative action in medical school admissions, should you also have affirmative action in doctor licensing?
https://vdare.com/posts/affirmative-licensing-step-1-of-medical-licensing-exam-made-pass-fail
You’re smuggling an assertion here. Is there any actual evidence that individuals who got past the gatekeeper as a result of AA have been failing subsequently?
Look up med school admissions stats by race.
OK, just did. If we trust the first result on google it looks like not being white or asian correlates to a lower chance of being admitted, but also lower test scores/GPAs for the individuals who are admitted.
What was I supposed to learn from this exercise?
One possible interpretation is that AA university students do worse than non-AA university students (“lower chance of being admitted”) and this is partly compensated for by a second level of AA in medical school admissions (“lower test scores/GPAs for the individuals who are admitted”).
My not-very-informed guess is that a lot of the impact of AA in medicine is blunted by the fact that admissions to med school/residencies are somewhat artificially limited. That means that the requirements for getting into medical school are probably more competitive than is necessary to get good doctors. So you exclude some smarter white and Asian premed students in favor of some extra black or hispanic doctors, but the net impact is not so huge because even the slightly-less-qualified med students are still smart and hard working enough to be fine doctors.
Anyone have better information than that?
@Aftagley,
When you said “is there any actual evidence that individuals who got past the gatekeeper as a result of AA have been failing subsequently,” did you have any idea how someone would go about answering that question? I suspect you didn’t, assuming such evidence could not exist. At an individual level, no one is sure if they got passed affirmative action. So…
But at a population level, if you grant a population entrance requirements lower than a different group, some would predict that, at the next level, the favored group would continue to show lower test scores. Which is what is seem in med school admissions. I’m sure it would show up in the bar exam as well, though a judge refused to allow that data to be released.
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge_denies_law_profs_request_for_bar_exam_racial_data
Yes, I did. I thought it was pretty obvious that you’d look for…
… oh, ok.
Anyway – yes I did. If the gatekeeper is meaningful, I would expect abnormally high failure rates post-admittance rates among whatever segment of the population benefited from AA. Presumably over a long enough time horizon the failure rate of the population benefiting from AA should approach whatever % edge AA gave that population.
Just related to the medical field the OP linked, I would consider the following items as potential evidence:
1. Increased failure rates among minorities at medical school with respect to the rest of the population. Bonus points if this failure rate corresponds to how aggressively the institution pursues AA.
2. Failure at standardized testing post medical school. I don’t know how hard doctor licensing exams are, but presuming they’re an accurate indication of competence, it would be evidence if minorities performed statistically worse on these exams than their peers.
3. More minority attending physicians failing out of residencies – I’m less confident in this one as surefire evidence, but it would be worth considering.
4. Malpractice rates being higher for doctors who potentially benefited from AA than those who demonstrably couldn’t have.
Where? In what data is this shown?
I literally asked for a source looking for this kind of data, couldn’t find one, asked for clarification and now am being called dishonest. You’re very close to not being invited to my birthday party, Alexander.
ETA: I can’t tell if you edited your post to include the stuff about the bar or I’m just dumb and missed it. Yes, that would be the kind of data I would find compelling and it’s messed up we cant get it (although I do find the privacy concerns compelling).
I don’t know about medical schools, but it’s taken for granted in California law schools, the faculties of which are pretty left wing, that there is a tradeoff between having a high percentage of blacks and having good bar passage rates.
Tim Groseclose and richard sanderdid work on this at UCLA. Its called mismatch, and it is a pretty rigorous result (as far as social science results go).
Italics added in edits
@Aftagley,
Apologies, looking back my initial comment should have been phrased in a less accusatory manner.
@Clutzy
Is the book credible? I admit, I haven’t read it so I’ll defer to your recommendations, but I did read the amicus briefs that Sanders filed for Fischer and I found the rebuttal amicus a pretty convincing takedown of Sander’s methodology.
That being said, it’s social science, so presumably you could make the credible claim against any analysis that the methodology was unsound.
@Alexander Turok
No worries, man, apology accepted.
@Alexander Turok
I nominate this comment for the “More of This Please” good manners award of the thread.
@Aftagley,
I don’t know about the book, I just am referring to the underlying research. Mismatch itself is a complex theory that AA candidates would have done better if they had gone to a less competitive institution. Some people, like the Amici you cited don’t agree with the methodology for that specific conclusion. But they don’t disagree with the assertion that AA candidates do cluster at the bottom of class ranks, drop out more often, and take longer to finish degrees.
I disagree that it’s complex. It’s extremely basic that if you accept lower quality applicants from some groups, they will fail more often than people from groups whose capabilities are higher on average, if your quality assessment has any real validity.
If one believes that tiered education is useful so you don’t ask too much from less capable people and provide too little challenge for the more capable, then one should believe that AA is miss-tiering people, unless they believe that the quality assessment is wrong for some ethnicities.
A brief summary of the theory put forward in Mismatch.
Minorities who would be above average and average Harvard students go to Harvard. Minorities who would be above average and average students at [one tier down from Harvard] also go to Harvard, where they are below average. Since most classes are taught to the average student, and are often explicitly curved, they do worse than they otherwise would have done. This effect cascades all the way down through the collegiate system.
I didn’t finish the book because the authors put forward a ton of data I didn’t feel equipped to evaluate, but that should be a plus for people more interested in the topic than I was.
Thomas Sowell put forward this idea (I don’t know if he was drawing from the book or not), and pointed out that it affected majors. That is, a guy who’d do fine as a EE major at State U might end up majoring in Sociology at Stanford, because he couldn’t keep up with the competition in his math/science/engineering classes.
If this effect exists, it should apply about as well to legacy admits.
The obvious problem with comparing legacy admits is being confounded by heredity, both nature and nurture. I doubt there would be much left after controlling for that.
@albatross11
Top tier Ivy’s have really high graduation rates, over 85%, so either they are really good at selecting students and getting them graduated…or they secretly have easier and harder tracks, so relatively dumb kids with rich parents can still graduate from Yale, even if they major in Sophistry Studies.
I believe Sowell wrote about it in Choosing a College long before the more recent law school work.
It’s been a long time since I was paying attention to the controversy, but I believe I remember that at one point Sanders wanted to get Bar Test information that would help test his theory, and his critics opposed his getting it. If true, that’s pretty strong evidence against their honesty.
From what I’ve read, the lowest grade they give is a C, and you can graduate with straight Cs as long as the money keeps coming in. I suppose, then, that the 15% who don’t graduate are non-rich who get too many Cs to keep their scholarships, and maybe a few like Bill Gates who drop out once they get what they came for.
@bullseye, at Brown, when I was there, it was possible to fail a class; students didn’t guarantee a C just by signing up for a class. However, a failing grade (a no credit; the only grades were A, B, C, and no credit) didn’t show up on a student’s transcript; it was as if the student hadn’t taken the course. Which could still look bad to someone with access to the transcript who knows the system; if a student has fewer classes than usual completed in a semester, pretty obvious what happened, but the fail doesn’t affect computed GPA. It also, of course, doesn’t count as a completed course; to actually get a degree, students did still have to actually pass courses.
There is evidence I’ve seen (cant locate it now) that AA has led to students being in a class which was above their ability to learn and have dropped out as a result.
That’s the argument laid out in Mismatch
The Asian part of my cynicism thinks that affirmative action actually helps whites keep the asian population down – look at California schools like UC Berkeley.
Asians generally have the Confucian cultural bowing to authority feeling instilled, but affirmative action is one thing they will unite against – it’s going down too, as NYC schools are currently having the debate about factoring more than test scores for magnate admissions.
I don’t see how it’s any less racist to imply that Asians must have less personality or are less “well-rounded” to make up a reason to deny admission in Woke America. The robotic Asian seems to be one of the last acceptable stereotypes left, at least in terms of admissions policy.
The alternative is to have to examine the possibility of *gasp* group differences when an underrespresented minority group outperforms the plurality academically, etc.
Strong agreement. It was pretty hilarious/infuriating to see the Ivies doing the same stuff to Asians (and continue to do so) that they’d done to Jews in the 30s/40s.
I don’t believe AA is being preserved with the intent of benefiting whites at the expense of Asians. In certain areas of the US where East asian populations are abnormally high and black/hispanic numbers low, you might see whites benefit.
East Asian over representation in the absence of AA is arguably more embarassing to blacks and Hispanics then white overrepresentation.
No. But I do think the current movement to eliminate or de-emphasize standardized test scores in favor of holistic admissions criteria is pretty-much targeted at the Asians taking too many slots from well-connected white kids by the unfair tatics of being smarter and working harder.
Working harder I’ll grant you. I’m a little cautious about equating doing well on admissions tests with being “smarter”. I took the ACT and the ASVAB twice. The ACT and the first time for the ASVAB were cold, and the second ASVAB the only “studying” I did was taking the first ASVAB test six years prior.
I don’t recall exactly the ACT score at this remove, but it was 32 or 34, (I know it was 99th percentile, so if 32 is that it’s probably that). I don’t know what my score was on the first ASVAB because I wasn’t interested in a military career at the time but the recruiter was trying pretty hard to get me to join up. I do recall it was the 98th or 99th percentile in scoring. On the second, taken after deciding to go to OCS from college I got a 119 GT score; I don’t recall offhand what the rest of the scores were but the recruiter said he didn’t know the numbers went that high.
Comparing myself with my coworkers, I don’t think that I’m actually smarter than they are, I’m just really good at taking standardized tests. For whatever reason I can think like the assholes that write them. Seriously, they’re not that hard if you just pay attention in high school–almost everything you need is in there. The one thing that wasn’t was the “rotate the blocks in your head” stuff on the ASVAB.
@CatCube
As a middle schooler, shouldn’t the message be, “if you work hard enough, you’ll get into this high school”?
Instead it’s turning into, “well the deck is stacked against you because of your race, so even though your parents are dirt poor just like the blacks/latinos, the politicians don’t care and say you’re not personable, so hard work yes, but it’s really the whims of the officials.”
The latter message is something for college students to realize, not middle schoolers.
CatCube:
It’s correlated with being smarter, but not identical to being smarter. (Assuming “smarter” is something I know when I interact with at some depth, even if I can’t precisely define it.)
It’s also correlated with studying longer, being more familiar with the material being tested on, and being more familiar with the style of the test questions.
@IQrealist says:
What you cite as “afirmative action” isn’t worthy of the term.
Executive Order 8802
was the single most effective afirmative action program of both the 20th and the 21st centuries, African American incomes climbed at a greater rate in the 1940’s than any other time since and they continued to climb in the 1950’s at a higher rate than they have since, other examples such as unions like the I.L.W.U., U.A.W., and U.E. deciding to integrate themselves, as was Truman’s ordering the integration of the Armed Services, also have been very effective.
“Affirmative action doesn’t work” is a lie, it worked very well, what doesn’t work as well is the too little too late paltry higher education placements, which are certainly not at the scale of the weapnized Keynesian spending induced full employment of the world war and early cold war era (and the bottom earning half of whites incomes soared as well BTW).
Many paying jobs worked far better than a few extra seats in classrooms.
What you are describing is non-discrimination, not affirmative action. Indeed, if taken seriously, it is inconsistent with affirmative action.
@DavidFriedman,
The first law to use the term “affirmative action” was the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 that declared that employers in violation of labor laws would be required :
, and the first recorded use of the term by a President was on May, 6, 1961, with Executive Order 10925, calling on government contractors to
, next Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 on September 28, 1965 otderong that contractors
(yes, the same words), so all actions related to actual employment not just paltry fiddling around with arcane acts of academic admissions!
Creating massive job growth for most who could fog a mirror and hold a welding torch was real progress, efforts afterwards have been too few.
That’s interesting and I’m glad to have learned it, but I think it’s safe to say the ship has sailed on that definition of affirmative action. I don’t think many people have a problem with treating people “without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”
The phrase may have been used differently historically, but what people currently mean when they say “affirmative action” is something along the lines of “specifically trying to accept more applicants from underrepresented groups, to the exclusion of applicants from overrepresented groups.”
One could support non-discrimination policies like Roosevelt’s and Johnson’s, without supporting affirmative action (in the sense people use the phrase today).
That’s an understatement. Supporting non-discrimination policies is inconsistent with supporting affirmative action in the sense in which the term is used today.
Can anyone recommend a good presentation of the argument that the collapse of monogamy norms plus the tendency to hypergamy are causing a dating catastrophe? I’m very skeptical, but I recently became curious enough to want to assess this properly for myself.
Ideally a defined set of things to read rather than a blog to browse, and bonus points for a civil tone. Neutral or critical overviews may also work, but something by a proponent of the theory would be best.
I’ll use it as an opportunity to throw in a question that’s been bothering me for a while. When people here talk about dating crisis, are they referring to the fact that it’s becoming harder for an average male to find dates? If yes, that’s a crucial fact which the phrase “dating crisis” obscures and which is mostly missing from the discussions I’ve seen. If no, I’m rather confused on how this can possibly work.
I wonder if the much of the delay in marriage/difficulty in finding dates is related to there being a larger pool for everyone due to increased travel, internet dating, larger population, etc., in addition to assortive mating.
So everyone has much larger basis for comparison, believes that the ideal mate may still be out there, rejects dating people they may have otherwise found acceptable and delays marriage in the hopes of a better prospect.
I definitely believe this is a problem, but not so much because of travel and the internet, but because of popular culture (and popular media specifically) increasingly pushing the idea that everyone has to find “the one” or their “soul mate” or what have you.
Accepting anything less than perfection is seen as “settling” which is presented as some horrific thing and that is actually worse than dying alone.
I recall some words from Tolkien to the effect that, if there was such thing as “the one”, it would only be possible to identify her in retrospect on your deathbed, with all your life’s accumulated knowledge and wisdom.
Of course, the fact that Tolkien was writing about it suggests he thought this error was prevalent even in his own time. Were people really smarter on this matter in the past, or was there just more scandal associated with divorce?
This may be true or not, I don’t have any strong opinions, but it doesn’t really answer my original question. Do you believe this affects both genders more or less equally?
I guess not, it’s just thinking that your question provoked. I was going to speculate that it hits younger men and older women, the latter of whom are more likely to be employed by webzines writing about such things, but I got to wondering why it would be worse today than in the past.
@AlexOfUrals
Dates for average men, marriage for average women.
I seriously doubt there is any crisis for average men finding “dates” or marriage for average women.
This seems like a meme without any factual basis.
Are there any actual statistics supporting this meme, or is this a misleading extrapolation of dating app statistics to the real world?
R9k and braincels is not the real world.
I think the main evidence is the collapse of marriage rates, which is pretty uncontroversial at this point: it’s been consistently declining for 60 years and has fallen from ~70% to ~50%, which is pretty significant.
From there people point to a bunch of different studies of variable usefulness. Okcupid et all have released a bunch of interesting data/clickbait. The GSS shows younger generations having less sex than Boomers et al but the causality is fuzzy. I vaguely remember a few interesting studies but they’re unreplicated one-offs. Plus, like, a ton of anecdotes.
To be fair, it’s not like we have a giant database of every flirtatious and sexual interaction, so dating apps and survey are the best data we’ll get
@rumham
Wouldn’t that cause the average woman to date more to meet someone actually willing to marry, and the average man to show more signs of commitment and be genuinely more ready to marry, until they’ve met in the middle? Like, you know, the way it always worked for our species?
@Skeptic
Yes that would’ve been interesting. I remember the last time I’ve seen the topic discussed in details here, somebody linked some relevant statistics, but no idea what those were saying.
Has it always worked?
Combine that with this.
And now throw in hypergamy.
Put the pieces together and it seems fairly obvious what is going on with the marriage rates.
I’m sympathetic to Devlin’s arguments, but from everything I’ve seen in the real world, the “men checking out” part of the equation has a much heavier weight than the “women having too high/hypergamous of expectations”. At least once I got past my early 20s.
Granted, my circles are more Southern and Christian than many (but not exclusively either of these). I know lots of women in their 30s who are unhappily single and seem to otherwise be making reasonably good choices with their lives. I feel for them. Every man I know who’s still single in his 30s is living a trainwreck of a life.
The standard manosphere answer is to point out that a lot of work is being done by the “past my early 20s” part of your comment. Those single women in their 30s, were they trying to get married in their early 20s?
I get where you’re going, but I don’t see how that’s relevant when all I’m assessing is what’s left over after most people have coupled up by early to mid 30s. And what I see is the single ladies are a lot more appealing than the fellas, all of whom have at least 2 out of 3 of serious vices (drugs, etc.), no career path (possibly still living with mom), or serious deficiencies in social/grooming skills. Even the guys with 1 out of 3 all seem to be married up.
And to be clear, these are mostly friends that I’m talking about — I love these guys. But it wouldn’t seem fair to match them up with the kind of women I encounter (even leaving aside unequal yokes). Women who want to be wives and mothers, have good personalities and social skills, eat right and exercise, have steered clear of promiscuity and other vices (as far as I can ascertain), and who have their lives together and finances intact.
Now, you could say those women should have placed a higher priority on finding a good guy when they were younger, before all the good men got snatched up, and perhaps they should have. But that still doesn’t address the imbalance I see — some other woman would then be out a good man.
I’ve had conversations with my wife similar to “We should match up X and Y… except that wouldn’t be fair to X… or Y.”
Some men and women aren’t really good fits for anyone. I’m not saying it’s equal, just that I’ve seen both cases.
Given that part of the world, and your likely social circle, that is probably the case. But there is probably an employed, non-college educated, non obese but not sexy, man who mostly keeps to himself, or drinks with a select few buddies on the weekends available to date. But, your lady prolly isn’t very interested, and a lot of the time brings less to the table than she thinks. So the guy isn’t gonna ask.
“Every man I know who’s still single in his 30s is living a trainwreck of a life.” That’s curious, as it doesn’t match my own experience at all (which is not to say you’re wrong in any way, of course). A number of my male friends and acquaintances are single in their 30s. Almost all of them have advanced degrees. Many of them are highly successful, professionally – indeed, that is a major cause of them being single. Absolutely none of them could be said to be leading an overt trainwreck of a life. Are some of them unhappy? Quite possible. But that’s not solely a privilege of the single.
I agree that Devlin’s piece was one-sided. Integrating it with information from other sources to manage a balanced view is left as an exercise to the reader.
@Wency
The religion might play an important role here. Statistically, women are more religious than men. Assuming they want to marry within their faith… it is quite possible to literally run out of reasonably good men.
And the imbalance gets greater with age, because people get out of the dating market in pairs. For example, 10 good women vs 7 good men doesn’t seem impossibly bad for the women, but a decade later you get 6 married pairs, and 4 good single women vs 1 single good man.
Thanks for the link. I’ll refrain from discussing it here, might head over to r/themotte if I feel the need to do that.
Pew has a pretty good summary of the basic US marriage statistics.
Not exactly what you’ve requested, but Sex and Culture was discussed on SSC (can’t find the link, sorry). It’s mostly for primitive societies, though.
Also Japan seems to be ahead in the dating crisis.
I’ve just tried out konjac/shirataki noodles, and they’re not bad, but they are in no way a substitute for pasta. I might try bean threads– I don’t think they’re as expensive.
Unfortunately, a lot of what I like from pasta is the carbs hit, and what I need is to not eat a lot of carbs.
So, for those of you who aren’t eating wheat pasta for whatever reason, what are you doing insead?
Have you tried spaghetti squash or mandolin-sliced zucchini? They don’t give the same carb hit, but I have found their texture less off-putting with pasta sauce than some other substitutes.
I wonder what the optimal pasta geometry for bulkiness is.
Maybe the high surface area:volume ratio of these shapes would afford higher sauce retention per unit carb.
Also use wholewheat pasta, brown rice etc.
I have no idea how much carb content there is, but I’ve been using millet noodles instead of spaghetti. My husband has IBS and needs to eat a lot of fiber, but I find whole wheat pasta to be unappealing, and brown rice pasta is sort of slimy. Millet noodles are also whole grain, but they are the closest thing to regular spaghetti I’ve found. Anecdotally, I can say whenever my husband cuts out refined carbs like white flour, he loses weight and also feels much better, without actually counting or reducing carbs. You can find millet noodles in any Asian supermarket in my city, so I’m assuming they’re common at Asian groceries everywhere. Also- whole millet grains cook up very similar to couscous and are delicious for people who don’t find most whole grains very palatable.
Not exactly to your question, which is about pasta, but if you want to replace rice with something with a very low glycemic index, try barley. I believe it is the only such grain.
Still carbohydrates, of course, so it depends on why you are trying to cut down.
Shirataki-type noodles (including chinese fensi and korean japchae) are basically only for either a soup setting or a cold setting. As such, you’re going to have the same issues with bean threads, as they are the aforementioned fensi.
I agree with hls2003 that using spaghetti squash or one of those vegetable spiralizers to make vegetable spaghetti strips.
Edamame spaghetti is fragile and expensive.
As for the greater issue of carbs: https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/vegetables
My personal strategy has been to simply increase the ratio of not-carb to carb in most dishes. So I can eat lots of Asian food with little rice, and there’s a heavy veggie+meat presence in my noodle dishes, etc. From there, I’ve accidentally had carb-free meals without intending to. You just need a good sauce or seasoning. (Looking at the above link, it looks like I was unintentionally using cabbage and broccoli variants as substitutes for the crunch/chew factor of pasta.)
The Boy Scouts of America organization has filed for bankruptcy because of sexual abuse suits.
This is being covered in many media outlets. Here’s a fairly extensive article, with no paywall: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/02/18/boy-scouts-chapter-11-bankruptcy-filing-victims-assets/4792905002/
What the article does not explain is how the BSA’s potential liabilities from these lawsuits exceed their likely ability to pay. That seems like an important point, since the BSA has more than a billion dollars in assets of various types, which seems like it would pay for a lot. I have to wonder whether this is a purely tactical bankruptcy filing, in the hopes of getting a better deal from a bankruptcy court than a bunch of civil trials and settlements.
Anyone have more information?
My understanding is that their application for bankruptcy would be refused if they can’t show their liabilities exceed their assets. I have no reason to doubt that is true since individual payouts have been well north of $10M and there are apparently hundreds of complaints (most of them from 30+ years ago, but the Statute of Limitations were recently removed)
By the way I’m curious what these $1B in assets for a nonprofit youth organization consist of. As a parent with children in cub scouts I don’t see evidence of any substantial assets although I have no doubt they exist.
Real estate, probably. There’s Boy Scout camps dotted across the country, some of them owned outright by the BSA.
I think BSA self-publishes Boy’s Life magazine and the Boy Scout Handbook, so they probably own the IP associated with them as well as unsold inventory and much of the infrastructure for producing, publishing, and distributing them.
Camps, mostly. I don’t know how much places like Philmont and Northern Tier are worth, but the BSA as a whole owns hundreds of thousands of acres. And it would be a terrible waste to see them sold off, Philmont in particular.
You may be able to file for bankruptcy if you just lack the liquid assets and cash flow to pay a liability coming due. This is at least true of for-profit companies — I don’t know much about bankruptcy of non-profits. Nobody wants to force a company to destroy itself, selling off valuable illiquid assets at fire-sale prices just to meet a single debt payment. Or almost nobody — there could be a senior creditor who will be made whole even at those fire-sale prices and is lobbying for fire sales to happen, which is why bankruptcy laws are supposed to protect those further down the line from this sort of gross value destruction.
Culture War Issues:
Discussions about race, sex, gender, or sexuality
Feminism
Traditionalism
Population genetics
Evolution
Culture
Economics
Tax policy
Fiscal policy
Monetary policy
Nationalism
Socialism
Libertarianism
Abortion
Religion
Gun rights
Military and foreign policy
Democracy and political systems
Party politics
Terrorism
Education
Crime
Non-culture war discussions that can easily and frequently do bleed over into culture war territory:
Personal discussions that invoke any racial or sexual dimensions
Asking for relationship advice
Asking for financial advice
Asking for health advice
Talking about Universities in any capacity
Discussing certain jobs
Technology discussions
Programming
Science
Weapons
The military
History
Safer non-culture war discussions:
?
Quality (not touching on political leanings) of various media
Some military history (Bean’s Naval Gazing posts were/are great, and I think(?) culture war free)
Cooking advice/bragging
Vehicle/tech/appliance advice/bragging
Mathematics
Meetups
Fashion?
No safe space is left. Isn’t that interesting?
You forgot to add “knitting” to “Culture War Topics”.
@Markwood Atwood
Actually, I was tempted as a joke to add “knitting” as the one example in “safe non-culture war discussions”, but apparently I’m behind the times.
I’m surprised you didn’t include Climate Change in your culture war list. As a refugee from the carnage of internet climate discussions, when I first saw ‘CW’ on SSC (and instructions to avoid the subject) I assumed it meant ‘ Climate Wars’….
Hmm. This list seems much longer to me than is warranted. “Culture War” isn’t every issue that liberals and conservatives disagree about; it’s the set of issues on which debate is particularly heated. A good sign of this is that in a particularly liberal or particularly conservative setting, it is wise to hold your tongue if you disagree with the local view, for fear of severe consequences.
For example, suppose I favored either halving or doubling the military budget, both of which are really radical positions. Would I fear for my job in a really liberal setting, like Google, if I advocated for doubling the military budget? No, not really. Someone might disagree, sure. Plenty of people would have questions. But I think I’d be safe. And going the other way, if I wanted to halve the budget, in a really conservative setting like a defense contractor, I have a hard time seeing myself getting fired for it. Again, it would be a distinctive position in that setting, but I think I’d be safe. Accordingly, I don’t think “military policy” belongs on the list of culture war topics, though some specific issues within it might be.
Yeah. About half of those things are issues where we can keep the issue civil, even if there’s big disagreements.
This. Most of the lower half of the “culture war” list belongs in “things that sometimes/often bleed over”. Take religion. We’ve recently had long debates on the nature of God and an effortpost on Gnosticism. Neither seemed to come close to culture war. And Naval Gazing has never had an issue with CW, period, even when I’ve talked military policy.
Talking about news and journalism can get pretty CW, because it inevitably touches on political bias.
I don’t think evolution belongs on the CW list, either, at least not here.
Are we talking about society or here? Personally, I don’t try to enforce the “no cw” rule; I’ll follow Scott’s rules, but I think we tend to be mature enough to have a civil and interesting discussion about anything there.
It does get tiresome to see many consecutive threads hit the same CW elements, and the no cw threads at least serve as a way to break up that trend.
I’d like to think that food, repair/building advice, and shopping are safer non-culture war discussions
I agree with others that you have too many items on CW list. IMO, none of these are CW:
Economics
Tax policy
Fiscal policy
Monetary policy
Nationalism
Socialism
Libertarianism
Religion
Military and foreign policy
Democracy and political systems
Party politics
Terrorism
Education
As a New Yorker and a former law student, I try to keep up with changes in my state’s laws. The way Albany operates, most significant new laws are proposed in the Governor’s budget, have the details hammered out in back-room negotiations between the Speaker of the Assembly and the Senate Majority Leader, and then get hastily passed by “legislators” who aren’t given a chance to read them or vote no.
So I gave this year’s budget bills a skim figuring that most of it will end up becoming law in some form. The headline story is of course cannabis legalization, which was proposed last year too but couldn’t get enough support to pass. It’s the same legislature as last year and I don’t see how anything goes differently this time around. There’s also a lot of shuffling boxes around on the org charts: the agency that runs toll roads is merging with the agency that runs toll bridges, I guess that makes sense. But a few particular changes did catch my eye:
Two amendments to the state constitution. The first is a feel-good equal rights amendment for women and LGBTQ+ folx, probably meaningless because everyone in NY government already is 1000% on board with it. The second is a badly needed simplification of the state’s judiciary, reducing our 11 different trial courts to four. If it gets closer to passage I may do an effort post trying and failing to explain what these 11 courts are.
A ban on fracking. This is just funny if you remember 10 years ago, when Cuomo supported upstate fracking rights and Bloomberg, still nominally a Republican, was calling for a ban, at least in the parts of upstate where the city gets its water supply. But now Cuomo wants the liberal brownie points from banning it. Suuuure.
A ban on the “pink tax.” More feel-good hooey, my mom always shaved her legs with my dad’s blue disposable razors instead of spending extra on the pink ones… but I guess it’s fine to make Gillette charge the same for them.
Adding “E Pluribus Unum” to the state seal and flag. Um, why? Apparently the state seal hasn’t changed since 1778 – does Cuomo just want to leave his mark on everything in NYS?
Network neutrality. I like it but I don’t see how the state can override the FCC. Maybe the Public Service Commission will threaten to pull the ISPs’ licenses to operate in the state again, and then quietly back down after getting some token concessions again.
More draconian rules around vape pens. Moral panic in full swing, hopefully at some point down the road we’ll be able to reconsider with a clearer view. Speaking of which:
Liquor licenses for movie theaters. Currently a movie theater can only be licensed to sell booze if it qualifies as a “restaurant” with a full menu and table service, limiting it to fancy new theaters like Nitehawk and Alamo Drafthouse. The proposal is to let any old AMC or Regal qualify under the more expansive “tavern” category, as long as alcohol is only served to people seeing movies rated PG-13 or higher. No idea how this will work out, but it’s going to be interesting! (The nearly meaningless distinction between “restaurants” and “taverns” is, like the rest of our overcomplicated liquor laws, a relic of the long-dead moral panic that caused Prohibition.)
Anyway I hope I didn’t bore you to tears with this.
Re. the “pink tax”: as I”ve been sent on errands for my wife that propel me into those strange grocery- and convenience-store aisles, I’ve come to be increasingly appalled by how cosmetics and hygiene products are marketed and priced for women. Especially true in cases where the same exact product is unabashedly sold in a much cheaper and straightforward way to men one aisle over. It boggles my mind how this has gone on for so long. Seems like the kind of thing that would have been eliminated even long before tweaking the ass of one’s secretary became a serious offense.
I’m curious, how many women beat the system by just buying the men’s product? Granting of course that this can’t be done with everything.
Many things are targeted to men and women for a reason.
Men’s shoes tend to be wider than women’s, even at the same size. As I have wide feet, that’s a plus in my book. But for girls with tiny feet, men’ are too big.
Shaving devices: anything that’s good for the face (where the skin is quite delicate) is good for legs.
Shampoos and gels tend to be the same. Except the ones for colored hair, but that’s a slighltly gendered activity, so gets the pink tax.
I don’t know any man who curls/straightens/colors their hair. Even afro men don’t tend to do that (whereas afro women go to incredible lengths to manage their hair). So the pink tax exists because there’s no male equivalent product (men who want to straighten their hair would have to buy a female targeted product). Same for makeup.
Perfumes tend to be masculine or feminine. Never much liked them, but I get the feeling men’s perfume is also expensive.
Clothes, feminine hygiene products, underwear, are targeted to women for objective reasons, and I don’t see an easy way to avoid the pink tax.
It seems like the only cases that would be unambiguously a pink tax are also cases where it’s easy for women to just buy the cheaper mens’ version.
The basic Bic razors are roughly the same price regardless of gender, comparing like to like. Lower-end shampoos aren’t even marketed as gender specific. So I suspect that the companies have figured out the price ranges where women would do that, and adjusted strategies accordingly.
In the US there’s also the complication of discounts and coupons. Men, at least by stereotype, are likely to go in with no coupons and buy based on the price on the shelf. Women are more likely to look for and use coupons to reduce the price. (I don’t know if the stereotype is true, but I’m sure the marketing people do). So some of the “pink tax” may be jacking prices up to provide room for “discounts”.
Having worked in retail I can confirm in a semi-anecdotal way (does that count as n=1 me, or n=4000 customers?) that the stereotype is definitely true, at least for whatever population my store was sampling.
Cue Robin Hanson–“Razors aren’t about shaving.”
Pink tax is about buying a luxury product because you deserve to be cherished. The increased price is the added value.
Pricing is set by customer willingness to pay.
The answer to “Why do women’s products cost more than men’s?” is “Because women are willing to pay more.”
You kid, but Hanson has written about the pink tax.
It seems silly to say pink tax for a product that has no male equivalent. Either you are being gouged for tampons or not. But AFAIK there are no monopolies or cartels in that industry.
…
For pink versions of the exact same product, isn’t it just a supply and demand thing?
Regarding above comments about women’s products with no male equivalent:
Fine, but why does the nail polish aisle need its own special lighting and fancy curved signage? My local Meijer has an aisle of women’s soaps and shampoos that is, unlike every other straight aisle in the store, oval shaped: the shelves are like two parentheses facing each other, like so: () . In fact, it’s shaped like a vagina opening.
All this extra merchandising and design surely exacts an extra cost to the companies behind them, and those costs are surely passed down to the consumer. Someone mentioned it’s because women are willing to pay. Why??
The lighting is straightforward enough: it makes the colors brighter and more appealing.
Surely it’s an arms race. Like, one manufacturer sends special lights to be installed on the shelf with their product, then they capture 30% more market share, so the other manufacturers all follow suit, jockeying for position with ever more over-the-top attention-grabbers. The cost of all this is priced into the products (and women are willing to pay for it…why???).
And surely this happens to lesser degrees in every other aisle, but it raises the question of why it’s to a lesser degree in those other aisles. Like, why didn’t it happen over by frozen pizzas, or condiments, or paper towels?
Crucially, why hasn’t the same thing happened in the men’s hygiene aisle?
The extra signs are probably due to the manufacturer paying for it. Maybe because they think women will overlook buying nail polish if not specifically reminded of it? Or don’t have much brand loyalty in this regard.
lack of alternatives.
Either I buy the stuff with all the ridiculous extra costs like fancy presentation & packaging or I don’t buy it at all.
an actual alternative to this sort of thing is buying online, but there you have the problem of possibly not actually getting what you think you’re getting (online colors are notoriously inaccurate).
you basically have a choice between higher prices or higher risks. I know a lot of women who would love a low/no advertisement/presentation/fancy packaging option that is cheaper.
You can find low/no advertisement/presentation/fancy packaging in organic stores, but in a lot of cases you then end up paying more for organic which can be lower in “obvious” quality because of higher ingredient restraints.
Edit: this is for products like make up/nail polish/etc. for things like razors, most women I know (including me) buy the men’s version.
A question I realized I don’t have a good answer to: what makes a pink tax?
I don’t remember whether any woman I know actually used the female-branded products. My wife certainly thinks it’s a bunch of baloney and uses the same disposable razors as I do. However, a men’s disposable razor is visibly a different product – smaller handle, generally simpler design. I wouldn’t be surprised if the fancy ladies’ ones were more expensive to produce.
I gather that “pink tax” means that they cost more in retail than the cost-to-produce differential would suggest, but then I start thinking basic economics…
Presumably, a lot of women decide that a men’s razor shaves just as well as a ladies’ one, so they go for the cheaper option. That leaves a much smaller market for ladies’ razors than what simple demographics would suggest. Someone is apparently buying those products or they wouldn’t be produced. These people would, presumably, be unhappy if they didn’t have the option or they’d be going for the cheaper product already. However, given overheads and such, producing something in smaller quantities tends to be more expensive per unit than producing it in larger quantities, so there’s another plausible reason why ladies’ products are more expensive.
I get that the price differential may be greater than all of those considerations, but what exactly is a pink tax ban supposed to be targetting?
The bill itself defines it as charging different prices for substantially similar goods or services based on gender, where
What does “based on gender” mean? Can they make a blue razor and a more expensive pink razor so long as the packaging is identical? What exactly is banned? Pictures of faces, the word “ladies”?
The law doesn’t provide any further detail on that point.
@BBA
That ignores so many reasons why prices differ. If the female variants are often sold at parties (like tupperware parties), while the male variants are only sold online, where the former is more costly for the company, can the female customers sue?
What about surge pricing, where men more often buy a product at inflated prices because they buy at ‘surge’ times? Can men sue for having a higher average price?
What if women have a larger tendency to assess quality by price, while men more often read reviews? Then it is rational for female-targeted quality products to be more expensive (and put some of that money into fancy packaging and other ways to make the sale feel luxurious), just like it is rational for Bentley to charge a lot for their cars and put some of that money into making their dealerships look very luxurious, while a budget car brand probably will lose customers by doing that, because their customers will likely see an extremely luxurious sale experience as being a waste of money.
What if male customer are more likely to claim a warranty repair/replacement, making them more expensive customers?
Ultimately, this law bans price-discrimination for self-selected customer groups with different behaviors if the self-selection is by gender, but not by a gazillion other factors. If we don’t want to ban it for those other factors, because it would ban all kinds of perfectly legitimate price-discrimination, then why for gender?
—
It also seems relatively easy to evade, if judges stick to objective fact. If they don’t, it will probably ban companies from catering to perfectly valid customer preferences.
As written, the bill would only apply to the decision to price two otherwise identical products from the same manufacturer differently based on the gender they’re marketed towards. This is about the obvious cases where the pink razor costs more than the blue one, they’re next to each other on the shelf and anyone can see they’re the same damn razor.
This bill is at the first step of banning obvious, deliberate discrimination, but does not offer any recourse for disparate impact. (Although, once the egalitarian utopia doesn’t materialize, it surely will be amended to do so.)
Yeah, but if there is a large demand for more expensive pink products by women, which the very existence of this issue is very strong evidence for*, then manufacturers will just make the pink razors more different until the law no longer applies.
The extra design costs will then be passed on to consumers/women and the design changes may make women less content (similar to how design choices to evade patents can do so, which is somewhat alike).
This law just demonstrates an utter misunderstanding of how markets work, probably due to blinding ideology.
It’s not like the common examples are of products/services that are so complex to make/provide that market failure due to high barriers is a good explanation. Companies like Gillette come up with all kinds of nonsensical razor designs (vibrating sex toy razors, adding blades) because their patents for perfectly good designs have long expired. You can order semi-large quantities of already designed (pink) razors from Chinese factories online and I’m pretty sure that you can get a custom handle with some more effort/cost.
You can start hairdressing from home or just by renting a space, a chair and tossing some mirrors at the wall.
It’s hard to come up with products and services that have lower barriers of entry than these two, which should give believers in the pink tax narrative pause and/or make them try to fill that gap in the market.
This narrative of ‘womenz can’t even undercut overcharging sellers of stupid plastic razors and overcharging hairdressers’ is implicitly extremely misogynist and/or unegalitarian. Is girl power the power to beg really, really hard? That’s not getting women into the board rooms and such, it’s just doubling down on existing gender roles.
* Women can solve this issue in a month by only buying non-pink razors, as shops will start discounting the pink stuff quickly if they notice zero demand for pink at higher cost and over twice the demand for non-pink
Ok, thanks.
It would appear then, that we’re talking for differential pricing for products that are – fundamentally – the same in a functional sense, but different in a marketing sense.*
I was kinda struggling to think of any product for which this may be true, but then remembered I may have seen some make of ladies’ razors that were essentially of the same design as men’s (without the wider handle or other such differences). Those are a thing, right?
* Back when I took marketing in college, I was somewhat bemused to learn that marketing theory understands “new product” to mean one with a different name, colour, packaging, etc.
A wider handle is a functional design difference, so it would not fall under the law, if the judge will actually following the law.
Because New York is a collection of many independent states?
Or because they’ve reinterpreted the national motto to refer to modern melting pot philosophy? Isn’t that philosophy out of date, anyway? What’s Latin for “From many is our strength”?
Well this is a terrible idea. How am I supposed to get through taking my daughter to see Frozen 2 sober?
I think we’ve been through this here before. “Pre-gaming” and a hip flask will suffice to maintain whatever level of intoxication you care for, and no, the theaters aren’t watching with casino-like focus so as to swoop down and evict you as soon as you turn your Coca-Cola into a Cuba Libre or whatever.
It was a joke, John, but thanks for the advice 🙂
As long as we’re giving serious answers to joke questions, don’t take your kids to see movies that drive you to drink. If the movie’s that bad, why do you want your kids to see it? There are plenty of good movies kids can enjoy.
I put on nature documentaries for my kids all the time. Even if they complain at first that they’d rather be watching cartoons, by five minutes in they’re totally engrossed and won’t let me turn it off.
If for some reason you’re going to take them to Frozen 2 anyway, weed is more likely than alcohol to turn it into an interesting and enjoyable movie. For you, I mean. Your kids are probably OK to watch it sober. I guess. I mean, it’s your call.
My wife took her, and she had a great time.
My daughter, that is. My wife wanted to stab herself in the ear with an ice pick.
Sooooo, problem solved!
Interestingly enough, I recently got the chance to go backstage the largest casino in my region of America. After the meeting we were there for, we got a 2 hour tour of their security department. It’s absolutely weird. My biggest takeaways:
1. Yes, you’re always being watching in the casino. This rule mostly applies on the gambling floor where you can assume there are double digits of cameras watching you, but nearly everywhere on property is visible by at least 2.
2. Yes, the facial recognition software is as amazing as possible. You can be trespassed from a property in Hong Kong and the next day try to walk into a property in Las Vegas and get instantly picked up. It’s very good, although the technicians we were with didn’t know much about the back-end.
3. It’s a weird example of decidedly for-profit law enforcement. The company has to have security, and they hire almost exclusively from former federal agents and local PD, but the focus isn’t on stopping crimes, it’s making money. That means they care very much about people not cheating. The care a medium amount about people doing crimes that will potentially make other people spend less money (IE, disruptive behavior, overtly selling drugs, overt prostitution) they care a little about crimes that will have no effect on the company making money (people using the casino as a safe space to fence goods) and they will drag their heels going after crimes that make them money (people doing drugs, covertly selling drugs, covertly engaging in prostitution, etc).
4. No one who works at a casino gambles and most of them think it should be restricted. Everyone there has a story about the time they saw something so sad they almost quit.
I think they’re still able to serve liquor at G-rated movies at the “restaurant” theaters, which I recommend regardless. The Drafthouse offers a much nicer experience than normal theaters all around, at a comparable ticket price. (Then again, part of the nicer experience is that they don’t allow small children at most screenings, so *shrug*)
This is typical Cuomo—policy so cynically stupid that it should offend even those it’s pandering towards. If Cuomo actually thought price controls were good public policy there’d be a lot more effective places to deploy it. But of course he doesn’t.
Have any alternative medicinal practices ever turned out to actually be effective when researched? Like, something that’s advocated for by crunchy types like yogis, homeopaths, astrologers, whomever- but then later actual research proves that it’s a legitimate therapy. Something along the lines of acupuncture, prolotherapy, homeopathy, chiropractry, etc. We’ll limit this to the last 40 or 50 years, say.
I read Michael Crichton’s autobiography (many, many years ago) which included his time or at least training as a medical doctor. One thing that always stuck out to me was (his telling here, mind you) that doctors 60+ years ago didn’t believe emotional states or stress could cause physical ailments like say heart attacks, strokes or ulcers. There was no believed connection between high levels of stress and having a cardiac arrest. Does seem like an example of a ‘crunchy’ or alternative belief that proved true?
I don’t know much about this, and I doubt it’s a great fit for your question, but I have an old tube of Tecnu I was looking at the other day, and I was totally surprised to see that it says Homeopathic on it. Tecnu is a “medicated scrub” you can put on skin which is affected by poison ivy; I haven’t used it in ages, but as far as I remember it works great, and everyone I used to go out in the woods with used it as well. When you look at the back, the active ingredient is listed with 3X appended, which if I know my Homeopathy means it’s diluted one thousand times in solution. Now, the principle of homeopathy is that things which cause certain symptoms can be diluted many times over and become more and more powerful relievers of the same symptoms. 3X is not a very “potent” dilution, so I imagine that this is just an ingredient which is effective anyway and still present in a strong enough concentration, or possibly even one of the non-active ingredients (as listed) is responsible for the effect. The back of the tube seems to have the standard medicine format, but I see no reference to the FDA, so I have idea if they evaluated the claims of the product.
Having taken the time to understand the specious basis of homeopathy, one of my big pet peeves is its use as a broader term for all alternate medicines; given that Homeopathy makes specific and falsifiable claims, it’s very annoying to engage with someone who defends Homeopathy, then you bring up dilutions and they have no idea what you’re talking about.
Here is my guess for what is going on: It is very difficult to market a product as a ‘medicine’ in the US because of regulations – that requires really expensive randomized control trials. But it is nearly trivial to market something as a ‘homeopathic remedy’ because the only regulations are that you don’t obviously poison people. Similarly it is much easier to market a ‘vitamin’ or ‘dietary supplement’, which is why those products are so common. Evidence for this: the word ‘homeopathy’ is usually tiny text in an out-of-the-way place, akin to a disclaimer. It isn’t being proudly proclaimed to try to draw in homeopaths.
So my guess is that something like Tecnu (which I have also used) is really doing valuable medical things, but it is simply so much easier to market it as a homeopathic remedy, even though nobody at the company producing it might actually believe in homeopathy.
In the case of poison ivy, simply applying a non-polar solvent to your skin will be better than nothing; rub some gasoline on yourself and then wash it off and it will take away a fair amount of the irritating oils that haven’t soaked in yet. But of course, no company is going to be comfortable telling people to douse themselves in gasoline for obvious liability reasons. But if you throw a little basil in there and call it a topical homeopathic remedy, you can get away with it without seeming so sketchy (to normal people), and can mark it up like a medicine, tell people how to use it, etc but importantly, without calling it a ‘medicine’.
Scrubbing well with soap, water, and a washcloth works against poison ivy, but it doesn’t qualify as “medicine”.
My wife was an acupuncturist, so I learned there have been gold-standard placebo-controlled double-blind studies showing it effective for some things. I also learned that the theory behind acupuncture is surprisingly obviously bogus scientifically.
My physiatrist, treating me for lower back pain, had me try a chiropractor before he would do any surgery, so at least some “real” doctors accept that chiropractors are legit. It didn’t help me tho.
Maybe they were checking it wasn’t psychosomatic and fixed by a placebo treatment? I might be tempted to try and fob off some hypochondriac patients that way if I was a doctor.
*Not saying you were a hypochondriac.
Though my info may be out of date, I recall that at least in the past there was some research on back surgery which generally found it to be ineffective. If you’re going to do something that’s probably ineffective, probably best to do something less risky than surgery.
I’ve heard that about back pain surgery as well: it often doesn’t help much except when it’s necessary due to an acute injury.
My understanding is that for short-term symptom relief, the most effective treatments for back pain are painkiller medications, rest, and chiropractic treatment. And the most effective long-term treatments are weight loss (less weight means less stress on the back) and exercise (helps with weight loss, and stronger muscles help protect the bones and joints they surround from strain and injury).
I should have said “procedure” instead of “surgery”, I had what’s called “lumbar facet injection” – bit of steroid needled into my osteo-arthritic spine. Has been quite effective.
From what I gather chiropractic is moderatly useful to fix acute pain, but does nothing to solve the underlying problem.
Same seems to be true for acupuncture.
And like others said: Surgery has proven to be ineffective to solve a lot of underlying problems that cause backpain, as well. Mainly because the problems had been missidentified in the past.
Sambucol seems to actually be effective for reducing cold symptoms, maybe even more so than zinc. There’s a lot of research on it.
Meditation seems to have stood up to this test – it has clinically significant impacts on a number of outcomes, and from what I understand, it is now sometimes recommended as part of a treatment regime for a number of things. This is unlike, say, Yoga, which is effective at making things better, but seemingly only to the extent that it’s exercise, and exercise is good for you.
Oooh good call, that was exactly the type of thing I had in mind
Once they find out it’s effective, it stops being ‘alternative’.
Chewing on willow bark or rubbing mouldy bread on sores was once an old wive’s tale. Turns out the old wives are sometimes right.
The above, but as a 9 1/2 minute beat poem. (i’ll edit in the appropiate timestamp in a bit)
Yes, I believe there was some loony going on about removing pump-handles and claiming it would prevent cholera.
In truth something like 90% of modern medicine is based on folk remedies, weird alternative ideas and people eating random plants and seeing if they’d help. Very few of them were actually helpful when examined in a critical and scientific light, however. Those that were, were refined in the 19/20th century to form the basis of the modern healthcare system. Those that weren’t, weren’t useful.
Now, it’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophesy to say that things that haven’t become medicine after 200 or so years of study will not become medicine. However, if something that has been around for decades has failed to make it into the medical mainstream then it suggests that there is something wrong with it’s effectiveness. Chiropractory, for example, has been dogged by controversy, acupuncture has never demonstrated a satisfactory mechanism, and the less said about homeopathy the better.
There is no conspiracy of health care companies trying to keep novel techniques and treatments out of the existing system. Quite the opposite, in fact, drug and medical device companies spend billions each and every year trying to find new cures. If any alternative medical treatments showed even a glimmer of functionality, it wouldn’t be a week before J&J’s research department was on the phone looking to plan a trial and file and patent.
Now, that’s not to say that medical doctors and our medical understanding can’t be wrong. Ulcers is a very famous example where one maverick had to stand up to common wisdom and prove his theory right. But if I had to chose between a well meaning doctor who might be wrong, and a well meaning folk healer who’s definitely wrong, I’m going to chose the doctor every time.
Edit: Sorry, this went off on a bit of a tangent. Alternative medicine is one of my hot button issues.
” the less said about homeopathy the better” – I see what you did there.
While I don’t have any particular sympathy or interest in alternative medicine, I find the self-satisfied righteousness of the ‘skeptic’ crowd to be at least as obnoxious. Given the huge replication crisis in medicine & the fact that most medical treatments have not been verified with double-blind placebo studies, I suggest a little more humility. Well, actually, a lot more. There is shockingly little evidence for many routine medical procedures. Also, I suggest reading ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ by Thomas Kuhn, as it seems you have internalized the heroic/naive model of how science actually ‘advances’.
….you can only get a patent for new/unique research man, not something that’s been around for a long time. Given the extreme cost of multiple FDA trials, there is no financial payoff for something that can’t be patented. While again this is not a defense of alternative medicine, this is why there is little research on say BPC-157 or TB-500. Not saying they work- maybe they don’t!- but they could potentially cause cartilage regrowth and also not be financially viable for pharma companies even though they solve a massive problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaifenesin
Imagine you are back in 1999, during the Clinton administration, and are asked to predict the future chronological order of 4 events – when the USA first elects a president who is X, where X = a black, a gay, a jew, a woman. What would be your predictions? I would have picked this order – 1 woman, 2 jew, 3 black, 4 gay, and I would have been quite wrong.
Part 2 – same thing today, but now we eliminate “a black” (thanks, Obama), and replace it with “an asian” (thanks, Andrew Yang). What would be your predictions? Mine is 1 jew, 2 woman, 3 asian, 4 gay.
I suspect it will be awhile before we can add “athiest” to the list.
Define “atheist”. Do you mean somebody who declares themselves to be one? I’d imagine Bush Jr. was the last president to have personal religious convictions.
As the white father of half-black children, I’m sensitive to this sleight of hand where we call a man with one black parent and one white parent our first black president. I wonder how Obama’s mom would feel about it?
I even wonder how Obama himself reflects on it in private; as I understand it, it wasn’t until he entered Chicago politics that he began to market himself as black. Before then positioned himself as the racially ambiguous East-meets-West guy.
Obama declared himself black on the 2010 census.
Our society still goes by the one drop rule for better or worse.
Certainly it does not. If you’re a sixteenth black (and the rest white) and that sixteenth doesn’t show (as I believe was true of a Mark Twain character), most people will think of you as white even if they happen to know your ancestry.
I would say RalMirrorAd’s statement is true if we change “Our society” to “Most people who would qualify under it”. There are a lot of incentives to identify as simply “black” even if you’re only 1/16 black and you look like Stephen Colbert.
I get vaguely racist vibes from the word “mulatto” though.
It’s like “colored”; it’s both old-fashioned and part of an actual racial classification system used by actual racists (mulatto, quadroon, octaroon, hecatontaroon… ok I made that one up, Wikipedia claims “hexadecaroon” existed but it’s unsourced and I don’t trust that). So it sounds bad.
It’s hard to parse “mulatto” and “quadroon” as offensive when they sound like cookies.
@Le Maistre Chat
I’m now imagining a cookie salesman chasing a swarthy rogue out of his shop, shouting, “You octoroon macaroon picaroon!”
If I’d been forced to guess, I would have said this was a coding language.
@Le Maistre Chat, I have encountered people claiming it’s a sign of racism to use physical descriptions of minorities which compare any aspect of them to foods.
@Protagoras
What nuts!
@Protagoras
Something something crackers…
Is it racist to call Trump Orange?
no, but it’s very unfair
@The Pachyderminator: And if we can call him Orange, does that make Ivanka and Jared Orange Jews?
Le Maistre Chat wins best comment of the thread.
@Le Maistre Chat
Orange Jews: not from concentrate!
I never did. People insist it’s a racist term, but I just don’t get the vibes from it. Basically everyone I know does though. Funny, they don’t edit that word out when they play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio…
But anyway, “mixed” or “biracial” are just fine. So is “Halfrican American”. In private at least, my wife seems to be okay with me calling our kids “Jewlattos”. So it’s not like we have to call half-black people black because there’s no word for half-black.
You must never compare minorities to food!
I remember my opinion around that time was there would be a black president before a woman. Although I wrongly predicted he would be a Republican. The concept of a gay president in 1999 would have been close to the realms of sci-fi so I can’t imagine I ever entertained it, so definitely last. Not sure where to place jew because I don’t think it matters that much, then or now.
Part 2 – Woman, Jew, Asian, Gay
Even though the concept is now entertainable I still don’t see a gay president anytime soon. Asian will be a while too I think just because there aren’t that many involved in politics. A woman will be soon and will beat a Jewish president if Bernie loses (which I think is likely).
We’ve already had both major parties run a woman as the VP nominee, and one run a woman as the presidential nominee. We’ve also had the Democrats run a Jewish guy as the VP nominee. All this suggests strongly that electing a woman or a Jew is within the window of normal US political stuff, pretty-much bound to happen sooner or later.
How about the very last presidential category? I’m pretty sure that would be Indian (Native American). It’s going to be a long time before we get a norteamericano Juarez.
I assume this is a dig at Warren?
@meh,
Not at all, hadn’t even thought of that.
We’ve already had a Native American Vice President. Why would you think President would be further?
@EchoChaos,
Thanks for that, I was not aware of Charles Curtis.
I see no Native Americans today with any sort of political traction, but perhaps I am similarly unaware in this case.
“Jewish” is probably next. Sanders and Bloomberg are both Jewish.
There have probably already been gay Presidents. James Buchanan is generally suspected of being gay. Openly gay may take a little while, if only because there have only been a handful of openly gay Governors or Senators aa of yet, and I don’t know of any of them showing signs of Presidential aspirations.
In a similar vein, I half-jokingly count Edith Wilson as our first woman President, as she appears to have effectove been Acting President after her husband’s stroke. First elected woman President is definitely plausible in the next few election cycles: Warren and Klobuchar are both long shots this year, but not completely our of the picture, and Klob in particular seems well-positioned to run again in 2024 or 2028. And there are several other women Senators and Governors on both parties’ benches.
There are fewer Asians on the high-officeholder bench than women, but still quite a few. Probably before a gay president, but after women.
There’s also the possibility of twofer candidates: Kamela Harris and Nikki Haley are both half-Indian. And if Tammy Baldwin were to run and win, she would be a threefer: woman, gay, and atheist (well, atheist-ish: she self describes as religiously unaffiliated).
And thinking on it a bit more, “Jewish” is different from your other categories in an important respect: “[potential] First X President” was a bit part of the politicsl brands of Obama, Hillary Clinton, Buttigieg, and this year’s women candidates. But Sanders or Bloomberg being potentially the first Jewish president is being treated as trivia and isn’t really on most people’s radar, any more than people cared in 2008 that Giuliani would have been both the first Italian-American president and the second Catholic president.
I definitely would have put black at the top of the list. Black men got to vote decades before white women.
ETA: I would have said
1) black
2) Jew/Woman: tie
3) gay
You didn’t specify openly, so it’s plausible that we’ve already had one.
Wasn’t one of the first ladies plausibly bisexual?
@Atlas says:
If I remember The Abolition of Man correctly there’s a common cross-cultural innate moral sense that most humans share (that some sociopaths don’t share it he likened to the existence of blind individuals not disproving light), now this human is agnostic on my knowing what’s objectively moral, but maybe maybe collectively humans know, as Steinbeck’s character “preacher” Jim Casey says: “…’Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit-the human sperit-the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent-I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it’…”
Plato/Socrates (and maybe some other pagan philosophers) are supposed to have reasoned an objective creator and morality beyond their traditional gods and goddesses, but lack that skill, and I’ve never had what I recognized as a “spiritual experience”, but plenty of others have, more than enough to give them credence.
Does a creator exist?
Well, creation does.
Does morality exist?
Well, some things feel more right or wrong, just as some things feel more hot or cold though I don’t have a thermometer and can’t tell the specific temperature.
If a creator exists and has a will do I have an idea of what form it takes?
No, that’s beyond my ken.
I can be sure though that plenty of my fellow humans believe in and worship a creator, there’s a church a ten minute walk from my house, and three more plus a temple within a thirty minute walk of my house.
If a creator exists does it love us?
I don’t know, and when I have read religious texts the only one that felt intuitively real to me was the Book of Job.
Churches and Temples and the worshipers they hold I’m sure exist, and on balance I’d say that yes they’re loving, in my long conversations with “out” Christians, Jews, and one Muslim on average they seem kinder than “out” atheists (could be an effect of it just being usual thought to be more polite to keep your lack of belief quieter more, leaving those more ornery than average to be the one’s shouting their disbelief, I don’t know how to test this).
If there is a creator what flavor of worship is right?
Well, maybe the creator has embedded us in families and neighborhoods that point the way the creator wants us to worship, so if your ancestors, living family, and neighbors share a faith you should follow that one.
And if your ancestors, family, and neighbors don’t share a faith, and so you’re not embedded in just one to follow?
I don’t have a guess, we aren’t all blessed with faith, and this post is probably the most words I’ve used on religion/objective morality that I’ve used in many years.
If you’re wondering of my familie “faith history”: one of my grandmothers was Catholic (from whom I’ve inherited some motions as habits), as were her parents, my other grandmother was Lutheran, as was her father, but her mother was Jewish, any religious inclinations of my grandfathers is unknown to me, my mother dabbled in Buddhism, Witchcraft (or just crystals and astrology, it was hard for me to tell as a kid), her mother’s Lutheranism, and Unitarian Universalism (“To whom it may concern we pray to you”), my father had a “not Protestant damnit!” ‘cultural Catholic’ identity but was an atheist (and a very unhappy man), and my step father had. a ‘cultural Jewish’ identity, my wife counts herself as a Chritian which her parents weren’t, though they sent her to Catholic school and during her time there she (briefly) rebelled by becoming a Jehovah’s Witness (before I knew her), but she’s shown little interest in organized religion since before we met and married, from habit I pray and/or give thanks most days but I expect no answers.
Sorry, I got a bit off topic there, anyway for an “objective morality” polling everyone who’s every lived for a majority opinion may get you close.
Conan review #9: “A Witch Shall Be Born”
First published in the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales. Made cover money!
Queen Taramis is confronted in the middle of the night by her twin sister Salome, who was exposed at birth for having a red crescent birthmark, the mark of a witch. As in myths, exposing a baby isn’t infanticide, because someone comes along to adopt them. In Salome’s case, it was a mage from Khitai, and two decades later, she’s back!
Apparently “the first queen of our line had traffic with a fiend of darkness and bore him a daughter who lives in foul legendry to this day. And thereafter in each century a girl baby was born into the Askhaurian dynasty, with a scarlet half-moon between her breasts, that signified her destiny. … Each was named Salome. I too am Salome. It was always Salome, the witch. It will always be Salome, the witch, even when the mountains of ice have roared down from the pole and ground the civilizations to ruin, and a new world has risen from the ashes and dust—even then there shall be Salomes to walk the earth, to trap men’s hearts by their sorcery, to dance before the kings of the world, and see the heads of the wise men fall at their pleasure.”
Yeah, so this is a prequel to Mark 6/Matthew 14.
Sweet Taramis says “I am queen of Khauran! I shall give you a place of honor, as my sister, but—” But nothing sister, she’s throwing you in the dungeon (iron mask optional). There’s a man in the palace, “Constantius, the Kothic voivode of the Free Companies.” whom Salome has chosen to be his right hand “because of his utter lack of all characteristics men call good.” The moral subjectivist little minx.
Wasn’t “the Free Companies” the name of the mercenary group Conan said he’d served in under a rebel prince of Koth, in “Shadows in the Moonlight”? There seems to be a shared political thread between that story, this, and “The Slithering Shadow” (#11).
Next chapter, a soldier named Valerius narrates that the queen invited 10,000 mercenaries into the city and ordered her own soldiers to disband. Conan, captain of the royal guard, wouldn’t let his unit of 500 obey, roaring “This isn’t Taramis! It’s some devil in masquerade!”
Cut to Conan, who was taken alive just to be crucified a mile beyond the city. Constantius exposits that he’s being left unguarded so vultures will start eating him before he dies (there’s too much exposition in this story). Conan finds it hopeless to get any spikes out, but he does scare the vultures off by biting through one’s neck. Four Zuagir nomads ride up to see this. Conan recognizes one as Olgerd Vladislav, former hetman of the Zaporoskan kozaks. I guess Bob’s given up trying to disguise his influences.
He orders Conan’s cross chopped down like a tree, noted as something he might not survive. He does, and once the spikes are removed from his hands and feet, he’s offered a horse but no water for ten-mile ride to the nomad camp.
The next chapter is a Nemedian savant’s letter home! Oh come on. Well it’s been seven months since the last chapter and the false Taramis’ rule is nothing but excess taxation and parties where women are debauched against their will. “She has instituted human sacrifice, and since her mating with Constantius, no less than five hundred men, women and children have been immolated.” I’m not sure this savant knows the meaning of immolated, as he says most of those were eaten by a monster in the temple, not slain on an altar.
There’s also a pretty pointless scene of Salome tormenting Taramis. She doesn’t even use a whip to match the cover.
Meanwhile Conan and his boss Olgerd are arguing about the future. Olgerd thinks their reputation for success can triple their current number of 11,000 within another year, and he’ll start conquering all of Shem one piece at a time. Conan just wants to conquer Khauran for revenge on Constantius. For a man who thinks he can conquer every city in Shem once his force triples, Olgerd acts extremely skeptical of their ability to besiege a city. Conan says they won’t need a siege because he can trick Constantius onto the plain, and he knows how to add to their light cavalry 3,000 shock cavalry, exiles from Khauran. Olgerd threatens to have Conan executed for trying to take over, but Conan convinces him that no one would obey him: the raiders find him just that charismatic. Conan breaks Olgerd’s sword hand and admits he owes him his life, so keep yours. Olgerd rides off.
Later, inside the city, a group of men plot to dungeon delve to free Taramis as soon as Constantius’ army is distracted countering Conan’s siege. And Constantius tells Salome that he’s going to fight Conan on the plain, because his scouts saw that siege engines have been constructed. She tells a priest to take one of two crystal balls to the battlefield so she’ll know what’s going on. Battle is joined, then the priest magically reports that they were lured out by a ruse: “The siege engines are false—mere frames of palm trunks and painted silk, that fooled our scouts who saw them from afar.” and Conan had a milling mass of nomads screen his shock cavalry until the enemy charged, then ordered them to split into disciplined right and left flanks to make way.
Salome plans to feed Taramis to her monster Thaug before she’s captured.
Ah, but Taramis has already been freed by those guys we barely saw earlier! But Salome and Thaug succeed in ambushing them. The rescuer Valerius gets back up and manages to kill Salome and an apish priest who stripped Taramis naked.
“Out of the gloom of the temple behind Valerius wavered a slim white figure, laced with crimson. The people screamed; there in the arms of Valerius hung the woman they thought their queen; yet there in the temple door staggered another figure, like a reflection of the other.” The burghers figure everything out, and there’s nothing left to do to save the city but for Conan and fifty nomads to kill the demon Thaug with mundane arrows. Taramis wants to make Conan a royal counciler, but he says “”No, lass, that’s over with. I’m chief of the Zuagirs now, and must lead them to plunder the Turanians, as I promised.”
Before leaving, Conan has Constantius crucified.
While there are some well-done parallelisms here (two crucifixions, two lives spared), this is kind of a mess of “tell, don’t show” and the demon Thaug is almost a non-entity.
Your thoughts?
To be fair to Howard: the point of that scene is to show how Valerius learns that Salome isn’t Taramis and that the queen is still alive, setting up the rescue attempt in the climax.
Yeah. The scene also shows us that Constantius has some big, bad guys under him, namely, Khumbanigash. Who had to be killed off to prove the ‘siege’ a success, and so that Constantius could be left to meet a worse fate later.
I like the parallel that the story starts with Taramis’ kingdom taken from her, she and Conan cast off, etc., and mid-story we have Olgerd’s people taken from him and Olgerd cast off. Of course, Salome did that to Taramis out of misplaced revenge, while Conan did it because Olgerd wasn’t keeping his word.
This was the most tedious story. It took me days to read it because I kept putting it down out of sheer boredom at the exposition. This may say something more about my video-game addled attention span than Howard’s writing decisions, though.
But yeah, Chapter 1: All talking. Chapter 2: Half talking. Chapter 3: all talking. Chapter 4: all talking. Chapter 5: even when we finally get to the battle, it’s described to us by Zang rather than shown. Chapter six: action, but man that demon went down quick.
How about instead of having the witch show up in the first chapter and exposit her life story, how about you start on a dark and sandstormy night? A mother cries out in anguish! Her child is born…and another! The wise men and physicians examine the second child. They exchange worried glances, and low muttering. The queen nurses one infant, but the other…with a heavy heart the chief scholar informs her it was stillborn. But then a cloaked figure, carrying a small bundle, leaves the palace under cover of dark and heads out into the desert… Right? That would be much better! Set up a mysterious thing! Worked well in The Black Colossus.
And then we don’t need Constantius explaining to
the readerConan why he’s leaving him alone toobviously be rescueddie, just have him say to his men, “Come, let us away. The vultures will not dine in our presence.”Perfectly fine premise, but boring boring boring writing.
When we were first told about demon I was pumped to see him come out of the temple and wreck things. And then as you say he goes down really fast.
Poor Thaug. Huge appetite, so you’re dependent on this awful lady who’s making problems for everyone. Then the moment you get to leave, some barbarian slays you. It’s a hard life for gibbering horrors from beyond the void.
Thaug didn’t strike me as very intelligent, more of a “demonic horror beast” but a demon-animal, not a demon-demon. More like “Salome sacrifices humans to her gods/demons, then Thaug eats the corpses to seal the deal and act as garbage disposal”. Thaug is more a watchdog than an intelligent entity, so the fact that it goes down fast is no more unusual than Conan being able to slay the ape-monster beasts guarding lost cities in the other stories.
There was a lot of talking, but there would have had to be some amount of exposition to explain why there was the legend of the witch being born in every generation to explain why Salome, a royal princess, was exposed to die in the desert, and why she wasn’t all that magically powerful (the side-story about the Eastern wizard who saved and raised her, then threw her out because she wasn’t talented enough for his ambitions and only wanted to eat, drink and be merry instead of ruling the world). So she’s only a witch, and hasn’t enough sorcery to defeat Conan and his hordes on her own, hence the reliance on Constantius and his mercenaries to keep the populace under control and fight her battles – she can’t even do as much battle magic as Thugra Khotan who led his hordes on the battlefield.
Maybe that’s why all the talking – Salome isn’t strong enough on her own as a threat, so if the Resistance and Conan linked up she was always going down fast and easily, and that doesn’t fill the pages.
Did you see the parts where I said they could just show it instead of tell? The wise men whisper to each other about the curse when the baby is born. Takes two lines to explain it.
I suppose if she’s got too much back story you can end up with Conan not showing up in a Conan story until chapter 3, but whatever. Change the plot then. I was bored, except for the part with crucified Conan.
You may (or may not) be glad to know John C. Wright has serendipitously reviewed the same story and come to the same conclusions about the ‘telling not showing’:
Conan review #10: “Shadows in Zamboula”
First published in the November 1935 issue of Weird Tales, as the cover story.
“Peril hides in the house of Aram Baksh!” a Zuagir nomad tells Conan in the bazaar of Zamboula.
You know, when I have an NPC speak that bluntly, it’s so the players won’t get mad at me that a location has a deadly encounter. But Conan laughs it off, saying he has nothing left for such a crook to steal. The nomad goes on:
“Nay, in this accursed city which Stygians built and which Hyrkanians rule — where white, brown, and black folk mingle together to produce hybrids of all unholy hues and breeds — who can tell who is a man, and who is a demon in disguise?”
So race-mixing produces demons? Ouch. (Less horribly, the nomad establishes that Conan has lived as a Zuagir for many months.)
The inn with the deadly encounter is separated from other houses by palm groves to the east and west, and across the street are abandoned huts. Entering, Conan spends his last copper coin on wine, broke after a week in Zamboula (what happened to looting with an army of nomads?).
The door Conan bolted opens, and the combat encounter is… one unarmored dude. Conan IDs his corpse as a cannibal slave from Darfar.
Oh boy. So the story here is that Aram Baksh bought a bunch of slaves from Darfar, and in order to prevent them rebelling, he has to feed them travelers from his inn. Also they’re “notorious thieves” who go around the city stealing…
Not only is this racist, it makes no sense. One citizen buys cannibal slaves who spend their free time stealing valuables, and the whole rest of the population doesn’t banish him? Howard tries to justify it as “they don’t eat locals and locals don’t care about the lives of strangers”, but that doesn’t explain tolerating the stealing. Just run this guy out of town!
Also, “Darfar” is a goofy name. It’s obviously based on Darfur, but the word “dar” for “land” (also “house”) is, famously, Arabic and changing the demonym “Fur” to “far” makes it Arabic for “land of mice”!
Seeing how easy the telegraphed ambush was, Conan runs out and finds three more slaves to fight, and these carrying booty… by which I mean a supple naked woman. He kills them easily, including the third who flees from morale failure.
The woman says she was out in the dark because ““My lover drove me into the streets. He went mad and tried to kill me.” Apparently he was drugged by Totrasmek, the high priest of Hanuman, who wanted her to break up and become his lover.
Wait, Hanuman?
Another group of slaves walks by, and exposit that they have different masters, who they steal from to pay Aram Baksh for the travelers he captures. Huh.
The woman ropes Conan into a quest to find her lover and sober him up. Finding Crazy, Conan knocks him unconscious in a sword fight. Now she tries to hire Conan to kill Totrasmek, which he grumbles would get him the death penalty.
“I worship Set, and the Turanians bow to Erlik, but Totrasmek sacrifices to Hanuman the accursed! The Turanian lords fear his black arts and his power over the hybrid popularion, and they hate him. Even Jungir Khan and his mistress Nafertari fear and hate him.”
Wait, Hanuman the accursed? He’s such a virtuous guy!
They drop Crazy off at a house the woman leads Conan to, then head to Hanuman’s temple. It’s repeatedly narrated that Conan is in lust and may be getting paid only in sex for this job.
“Behind the black stone altar, sat the god with his gaze fixed for ever on the open door, through which for centuries his victims had come, dragged by chains of roses.” No, Hanuman! How could you?
The woman opens a secret door behind the idol, but someone is waiting and drags her off. Finding it bolted now, Conan goes through another door to look for her. He finds a huge strongman named Baal-Pteor. Ah dear reader, how much of a challenge will this guy be for our hero? The man throws a shining crystal sphere at him! Conan dodges pointlessly: “the globe stopped short in midair, a few feet from his face.” And it causes him to hallucinate. Another trap in the room is a magnet table Conan’s sword gets stuck to. Baal-Pteor then attempts to strangle his disarmed enemy. Conan mirrors his enemy’s tactic, and wins. He retrieves his sword from the magnet and soldiers on.
Meanwhile, the woman Zabibi argues with the priest. It was she who gave her lover the crazy potion, which Totrasmek brewed at her request for a potion of Sleep.
“Why did you wish your lover to sleep? So you could steal from him the only thing he would never give you — the ring with the jewel men call the Star of Khorala — the star stolen from the queen of Ophir, who would pay a roomful of gold for its return. He would not give it to you willingly, because he knew that it holds a magic which, when properly controlled, will enslave the hearts of any of the opposite sex.”
He offers her a phial of golden lotus juice, which restores sanity (that’s lotus color #3, if you’re keeping track). As she steps toward him, he steps back, and she triggers a trap consisting of four cobras in a square around her.
“she could not spring over them or pass between them to safety. She could only whirl and spring aside and twist her body to avoid the strokes, and each time she moved to dodge one snake, the motion brought her within range of another,” Apparently this is how maidens danced in the sacrifice to Hanuman centuries ago. Ook, frown.
Conan saves Zabibi by backstabbing the priest from behind the curtain, whose death turns the cobras to smoke. They return to the house with Crazy. After giving him the potion, Zabibi reveals to Conan that she’s really Nafertari and her lover is really Jungir Khan.
“You see now how impossible is the reward for which you hoped. The satrap’s mistress is not — cannot be for you. But you shall not go unrewarded. Here is a sack of gold.” And now she wants to make him captain of the guard, so he can search Hanuman’s temple for the Star of Khorala and give it to her instead of Jungir Khan. Conan nods and goes to buy a fast horse. Riding it back to the inn, he finds three slaves and tells them “Aram Baksh will give you a man.” Then he goes inside and captures Aram Baksh in his nightshirt, cutting his voice box and shaving his beard so the cannibals won’t recognize him.
And what happened to the Star of Khorala? Conan stole it, and rides west rather than accept Nafertari’s offer.
Well then. This story is very offensive in the surface-level details (Hanuman is a good person!), but if you changed those, it makes a fine Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure. Everyone is scheming to double-cross each other, which keeps things interesting.
Your thoughts?
As someone reading (and enjoying!) these reviews, but not reading the stories themselves, this one seemed to have an awful lot of named characters. There just seemed to be a lot going on in this one.
this one seemed to have an awful lot of named characters
Not really. There’s Conan, the minor bad guy who starts us off on our adventures in Zamboula, the dancing girl Conan rescues, her boyfriend who went crazy and tried to kill her, and the major bad guy that Conan kills. One or two other minor characters to fill in the spaces, but that’s it. It’s just that some of our guys are using false names so there seem to be more than there really are.
Casual racism aside, I liked it. Lots of action and intrigue. But yeah Conan is not genre savvy. I mean, the guy telling him “peril!” is pretty damn on the nose foreshadowing.
Also,
It’s not one citizen. After killing the one who came to abduct Conan:
And later with Zabibi/Nefetari:
So it seems there are lots of such slaves. Aram Baksh provides the useful service of feeding them. That said, I hope the slave trader gave them a hell of a deal. “Lust for human flesh” is worth a few GP discount.
Other complaint: Conan is a beta white knight orbiter. “Oh m’lady, of course I’ll do murder for you, and willst surely be rewarded with sex!” Lolno.
But I did like him getting revenge in kind, just like the end of A Witch Shall be Born. And I laughed when he nodded at Nefetari about becoming her captain of the guard. “Oh yeah, I’ll totally do that lady!” and then he nopes on out.
Good story.
Quite.
Yeah, I caught mid-review that Aram Baksh didn’t own them all. The economics and sociology of owning cannibal slaves who steal from you are reeeeally under-explained. A few GP discount, indeed.
Conan being a white knight orbiter is kind of a joke that loops back on itself. I’m thinking “Come on, any red-blooded Player Character would want to be paid a big bag of gold for killing an evil high priest, not paid in sex.” then the naked lady is like “LOL nope, here’s your bag of gold. Come back on the morn for a job.” To which Conan just nods while intending to double-cross her.
But yeah Conan is not genre savvy. I mean, the guy telling him “peril!” is pretty damn on the nose foreshadowing.
Mmm – it’s more that Conan is “yeah but I’m down to my last penny, so to heck with it” and “now that I know something creepy is going on, forewarned is forearmed and I’m ready to take on whatever happens”. He has a lot of confidence in his ability to fight anything or anyone material, so long as magic isn’t involved, and he doesn’t believe that Aram Baksh is a demon or anything other than a bad guy involved in robbery and murder. And Conan has been hanging around bad guys involved in robbery and murder for quite a while by this point.
Other complaint: Conan is a beta white knight orbiter. “Oh m’lady, of course I’ll do murder for you, and willst surely be rewarded with sex!” Lolno.
The twist in the tale there is that Conan recognises exactly who she is the second he claps eyes on her, recognises who her boyfriend is, and steals the McGuffin she’s desperately trying to get her hands on right out from under her nose. So while she’s thinking she’s got him wrapped around her little finger with promises of the smexy later, he’s planning to get out of Dodge with the goods as soon as feasible. He’s chivalrous enough not to leave her to the mercy of the cannibal slaves or the evil high priest, but he’s not stupid enough to be led around by Little Conan just for the sake of it.
Great, thanks for saving me from being eaten by cannibals, but uh could you hold off on the ogling and innuendo until we get to safety?
This is pure slander of my sweetie-pie and I won’t tolerate it! 😀
Yes, the story has problematic sensibilities. But the cannibal slaves aren’t belonging to Aram Baksh, they’re the property of (most of?) the citizens, there are too many of them to be kept under more than nominal control, part of the problem is that the city of Zamboula itself is administered by a conquering/colonial administration, with the king living in the capital and not caring too much about what happens on the periphery of his lands and the Satrap of the city more occupied with his mistress than governance, and when the city authorities did investigate Aram Baksh’s inn, they found nothing (and the chief lodging the complain was a chief of the Zuagirs, who are regarded as thieves and troublemakers in their own right). Aram Baksh is a fence, receiving and selling on stolen goods from the cannibals and in return letting them kill and eat lone travellers who only come to his inn because it’s cheap and they’re reduced to their last pennies – the kind of people who are transient and won’t be missed by anyone.
So if the odd nomad or traveller who is passing through goes missing from a cheap inn? Nobody in the city really cares, because it’s a cosmopolitian mix of any and every kind of people from all lands living under the distant rule of an invading kingdom so nobody has any loyalty outside their own tribe or clan (Conan himself is only warned by the Zuagir thief because he’s been living among and accepted as one of the Zuagirs) and nobody except the superstitious believes in all the stories of men-eating demons having carouses in the palm groves:
Apart from the GROSS TRADUCING of Hanuman’s good name, the story wasn’t bad; the political intrigue was obvious (the way the girl was plainly inventing the “my lover is just an officer in the army and I’m his dancing girl” told us that this was a cover about at least a nobleman if not someone even more important) and the encounter with the strangler Baal-pteor was set up differently from expectations; he’s big and strong and you assume he and Conan will immediately go at it hand-to-hand but instead he tries trickery and illusion first before getting into the wrestling match that he inevitably loses. There’s also a nice little bit of “work this one out for yourselves” with his name:
Who’s Baal-pteor? Based on Baal-Peor from the book of Numbers in the Old Testament, which gets translated as Belphagor in the Septaguint, and who is then associated with the god Priapus. Hence the “the girls can tell you all about why this is a good name for me” boasting.
Aram Baksh’s end is poetic justice, grisly as it is.
Anyway, back to the political intriguing, and Conan – though he may be incapable of keeping hold of any money he makes, having blown through whatever fortune he made with Olgerd’s band of reavers from the last story on high living and dissipation in Zamboula – is no idiot; he recognised the ‘officer’ and ‘dancing girl’ the moment he clapped eyes on them, stole the Star of Khorala out from under Nafertari’s nose, and is off to sell it for a king’s ransom to the Queen of Ophir. He probably guesses correctly that, once Jungir Khan wakes up restored to his senses and is told the story of what happened, that he’s more likely to be assassinated to tie up loose ends rather than rewarded with a post as Captain of the Guard – it’s too politically dicey to let Conan live knowing the truth of what went on, and as the slayer of Totrasmek who had great influence over the mixed population of the city that would rise up demanding his death if the truth ever got out:
A satisfying end for Conan, whatever about the rest of the characters! More action, less talk than the last story, as well.
Nowhere, on all of YouTube, can I find the clip of Richard Lewis in Robin Hood: Men in Tights saying “he’s a smoothie! Definitely a smoothie!”
You could say the problematic sensibility is “slavery is bad because (one group of) black people are cannibals and thieves who their owners are incompetent to control”!
“Baal-Peor is or is worshiped like Priapus” is attested by Origen and St. Jerome. It’s interesting how steeped in Christian thought even a non-believing American was in the ’30s.
“Ask YOUR MOM!”
“My mother is a wholesome barbarian far away!”
Yeah, Conan is coming across much smarter than those times he was a terrible thief.
EDIT:
I started to watch your link and, speaking of sweetie-pies, I love Jamvant the wounded bear’s speech (starting 5:43).
Jamvant is great too! Like Hanuman, he is a Chiranjivi, and lives through both the incarnations of Rama and Krishna. One of the wives of Krishna, whom we see in the linked clip, is Jamvanti – the daughter of Jamvant. No, she doesn’t look like a bear, but neither do the female Vanar look like monkeys either.
Jamvant is wise and grandfatherly and a councillor in the battles, something like Nestor in the Iliad.
TIL the Aliens series has a really extensive set of connected works. I knew about the six feature films, from Alien to Alien:Covenant. But I hadn’t realized how much other material there is. For example, there have been dozens of video games featuring the Aliens. Also comic books, novels, and tabletop games.
It’s not the Star Wars Expanded Universe, but it’s big.
I consider the movie “Soldier” to be in the Alien verse.
Why?
You might enjoy William Gibson’s unused Aliens III screenplay.
They turned it into a comic book, actually.
https://www.amazon.com/William-Gibsons-Alien-3-1-ebook/dp/B07H48FP2X
Democrat debate postmortem time!
As per my usual, I didn’t watch it, instead spending the time doing housework and playing with my kids, but apparently Bloomberg did exceptionally badly in his debate premier.
But it also got me thinking as a right-wing guy whether I would prefer a moderate opponent who would be more likely to beat Trump, but if he/she won would not steer the country hard left or would prefer a hard-left opponent who would almost certainly lose McGovern style, but would have a tiny chance to actually get hands on the levers of power.
The Democrats chose the latter last election because Trump looked most beatable and now we have President Trump, so I am leery of that choice.
Anyway, I’d love to hear comments on the debate itself and what opposition you would choose if you could. Moderate but likely to beat you or extreme?
I’m absolutely against Sanders getting the nomination, and I vigorously oppose righties who hope for his nomination because he’ll be easier to beat. Don’t call up that which you can’t put down. There were a lot of Democrats who were laughing when we nominated Trump because the general would be a walkover. Here we are.
Just the possibility of Sanders that close to the White House is scary. I’m not going to vote for any of the possible Democratic candidates, but for all except Sanders I’m at least comfortable voting third party. Sanders history of cozying up to Commies is so bad I’d probably have to cast a vote for Trump. Granted, I’m in a deep-blue state so my vote is mostly theater, but it’s at least theater that I can live with.
Right. 90-95% of the time you get McGovern, Dukakis, Mondale or Goldwater and it’s a slaughter for the moderate, but that small percentage of the time you get Trump.
It’s even debatable how well Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 worked out for Democrats in the long term. Goldwater did lose in a landslide, and his negative coattails helped LBJ pass his Great Society programs through Congress, but Goldwater succeeded in shifting the right edge of the Overton window by quite a bit, and his candidacy was a big boost to the Conservative Movement which would eventually produce Reagan.
Its also a lot of these examples are people running in neigh-unwinnable elections. If Ron Paul had been the R-nominee in 2008 his landslide loss shouldnt have been a referendum on libertarianism.
@Clutzy
Nigh-unwinnable is usually only determined in hindsight.
McCain had a 3 point lead in the polling averages as late as September 2008, Reagan looked very beatable early in 1984, especially after his first debate, which was a disaster for him.
Lefty here, also terrified of a Sanders candidacy. He’ll either get demolished or be an absolute train wreck.
I feel like the guy in Soylet Green. I’m running down the street screaming, “Sanders had a heart attack a month ago, has an atrocious foreign policy record, a sketchy personal history and absolutely no proven leadership experience!”
And his one good quality is that he decided socialism was the way to go 50 years ago and hasn’t changed his mind since!
I don’t know who has the best chance of beating Trump and the heart attack is a big issue, but I’m leaning towards Sanders having the best chance, followed by Buttigieg.
My theory is that persuadable voters care more about authenticity and agreeableness than policy. Authenticity = “running on what they actually believe*” and agreeableness = “doesn’t condescend to me.” And far and away more than any other candidate, Sanders’ campaign is clearly a reflection of his actual beliefs, and he doesn’t have Hilary’s problem of clearly disliking/pitying/condescending to the majority of voters.
I think Biden does OK on these metrics (good on agreeableness, meh on authenticity) but his inability to show anything in the primary is really concerning. Should have been a layup!
I have low confidence overall that my guess on who has the best chance is correct. Who are you voting for? What’s your reasoning?
*this can be almost anything. For Trump it was “I believe I want the ego boost of winning” and people seemed pretty OK with that.
Can I ask, why is the heart attack a big deal? I mean, I understand it makes it somewhat less likely he’ll complete his term; but is there anyone who would not vote for him because of his health? It’s kind of hard for me to imagine a voter saying “Gee, I’m leaning towards Bernie but I might only get three years of him, so I’d better stay home / vote for Trump.” If you’re voting Bernie, you’re voting Bernie whether you get two years or four, it seems to me. Have you known people for whom that’s a significant concern? Is it more of a “strong horse” argument where the concern is that he will “look frail” compared to a more energetic Trump?
Frankly I haven’t given it much thought but I assume it’s something that would turn off some share of on-the-fence voters. Upon 30 seconds of reflection I still that’s true, not because they will think explicitly “I will not vote for a candidate with an x% chance of health issue Y while in office” but because it contributes to an overall feeling of [hard to articulate] lack of strength / vitality / vigor.
I think it’s hard to articulate not necessarily because I lack the words, but because it’s an impression that these hypothetical voters don’t make explicit even within their own minds.
Basically, people don’t want to vote for a candidate who seems weak and frail.
Hopefully a fair chunk of the electorate understands that being president isn’t about getting elected and then walking around telling people to implement your policies. If you are less healthy/energetic it is harder to respond quickly and intelligently to a crisis, its harder to broker deals between factions within and across parties (within being more important) and generally its harder to do the things a president actually does.
Being the president is necessarily demanding and high-stress. Your primary duties are attempting to convince people to support your position, using your platform to push for your particular goals and making life-or-death decisions on little to no notice.
An unhealthy president wouldn’t be able to do any of these things, or would be able to do them only at a severely reduced rate. Imagine bernie had another heart attack, or a stroke or whatever and was in the hospital for a month – what happens to the country? What if that coincides with Russia decided to, I don’t know, push into Lithuania?
A large part of me voting for president is that I believe the person I’m voting for will be capable of consistently and quickly making good decisions in response to high-stress scenarios for the next 4 years. I would be very skeptical of voting for anyone with a history of heart attacks for this position, especially one who is 78 years old.
Then Klobuchar or Harris or Booker or whoever winds up as Bernie’s VP becomes Acting President under the 25th Amendment procedures (Bernie signs a declaration of incapacity if he’s lucid enough to do so, or the Cabinet certifies him as incapable).
This is part of why Palin turned into a big liability for McCain: his age and medical history raised the importance of his choice of running mate.
Palin was not a big liability for McCain. McCain did better than Obama among voters who cited the vice presidential candidate as having been a major influence on their vote.
Yes – that’s the best case scenario and it’s still not particularly great. If we’d wanted whomever the VP is, we’d have voted for them.
Less great scenarios start with a messy public fight about invoking the 25th amendment and get worse from there.
Well the “among voters” introduces some complications here, doesn’t it? (Assuming this was an actual exit poll)
If there’s a good chance he won’t last the four years, You have to think that both him and his running mate woud be better candidates than Trump to vote for him.
Sure, it’s not necessarily a 100% foolproof metric.
But if anyone has any actual evidence that Palin actually harmed McCain in any way whatsoever (other than the New York Times just insisting on it), I’ve yet to see it…
Since we’re revisiting the Game of Thrones here, while we watch the real Game of Thrones, I view a Sanders nomination in roughly the same way I view Cersei Lannister’s retoration of the Faith Militant under the High Sparrow. I can sympathize with the circumstances and choices that lead her to that, but, yeah. Don’t call up what you can only put down by using weapons of mass destruction in your own capitol city.
I’m fairly sure we could put down Bernie Sanders by nuking Washington, but I’m going to be really pissed if it comes to that.
It’ll be sad to lose all the historical stuff there, I agree, but think about how much easier both of our jobs would be if the Pentagon were destroyed.
I agree with this, and specifically I think that political prognosticators and consultants are mostly terrible at predicting what actual voters will do. Candidates and messages that they think won’t resonate, do, and vice versa. Personally I think any of the Democrats has a better-than-even chance to beat Trump, but Bernie seems like one of the strongest. His schtick will lose a few cautious well-off voters who remember the Cold War, but they probably will just stay home. A chunk of Trump’s support was lower-class whites in less-urban swing states angry at the whole dang system, who saw Trump as a chance to poke the system in the eye. Well, there’s no better eye-poke to the system than Bernie.
On a visceral level, I despise Bloomberg’s personality combo of arrogant dictatorial nanny-statism. But on a policy level I could probably live with most of what he’d do. Bernie is less viscerally unappealing to me because he’s the embodiment of “old crank who’s been loudly wrong for so long that he’s almost an institution.” Everyone’s got an Uncle Bernie somewhere in life that they like. Most everyone’s got a Bloomberg too, but it’s usually an autocratic boss or authority figure that they don’t like. But Bernie’s policies would be an absolute disaster from my perspective.
So while I would find Bernie less personally annoying, I really wish he wouldn’t get the nomination, because I think he’ll win and that will be a bad thing.
Trump ran on the ‘they ruined your great country, lets poke em in the eye and take it back’. Bernie is running on ‘nearly everything in this country sucks, lets be something wildly different. Trump was a ‘kick em in the shins and take your stuff back’ candidate, Bernie is ‘lets break some kneecaps and rob some banks’.
I pretty much agree with all of this, but I’m not sure it matters. If you postulate that Trump got “white underclass” votes because their lives weren’t great and they had inchoate anger, a bunch of those folks’ lives probably still aren’t great. Some are better, I expect, given the economy, but if you were a resentful meth country dude on disability before, I could see that still being true and Bernie appealing to you. I don’t think it’s necessarily more appealing overall, but I could see Bernie getting less popular vote than Hillary but winning the EC.
Then again, I thought Warren was a good bet to edge Bernie out of the progressive lane for the nomination a few months back, so obviously my crystal ball is a bit cloudy.
I do think it’s interesting that we might elect the first avowed socialist at a time when the economy is as good as it’s been in a generation, when previously major changes like that have accompanied economic downturns (e.g. New Deal).
My impression is that there were a fair number of voters who preferred both Trump and Bernie to Hillary or Jeb!.
Obama, Trump, and Bernie are all “hey, does this machine even work? what if I turn this knob here?” candidates.
The left wing party in the Anglosphere’s second most populous country just ran an “old crank who’s been loudly wrong for so long that he’s almost an institution.” Uncle Jez did not go down well with working class voters in post-industrial areas.
Though, it should probably be noted that Jezza is quite a lot further to the left then even Bernie Sanders.
Yes, but then Britain is quite a bit to the left of America.
When you say, “Don’t call up that which you can’t put down.” are you referring to what Sanders himself would try to do and/or be able to actually accomplish as President? Or are you more worried that his election will ignite some sort of grassroots socialist mass movement?
I’m personally voting for Sanders not because I think he will be able to get anything through a Congress controlled by corporate Democrats, but because I think he won’t be afraid to use the bully pulpit to inspire an actual mass socialist movement for the first time in American history. I’m more interested in the mass movement and his “Not me. Us.” message than in whatever wonkish bills he can put together to be mangled and stuffed away by the capitalist-controlled Congress.
Both? But I highly doubt you’d get a mass socialist movement.
Well, I’m referring to the people on the right cheering about the chaos in the Democrats and happy–or at least not displeased–about Sanders as the frontrunner because he’s the least likely to be able to beat Trump. I’m just using the “Don’t call up…” line to call attention to the fact that there were people on the left that were delighted by the chaos in the 2016 Republican party and thought Trump would get beaten like a red-headed stepchild by Clinton, only to see things get out of control in November. There’s a lot of time between now and then.
But my personal feelings are that Sanders, who vacationed in the Soviet Union, slobbered over the knob of left-wing dictatorships, and has a campaign worker praising the Gulags and talking about dragging insufficiently-leftist journalists out into the street and setting them on fire, is even more terrible than Trump. Our media gives a pass to left-wing violence; I’m not going to.
Besides that, Fox News and the Republican establishment hated, hated, hated Trump–until he was the nominee. What are they saying now? Are you, on the left, comfortable with them acting as a brake on Trump? I’m frankly more scared of that dynamic with somebody as vile as Sanders. At least with Trump I can get some good judges, and when he has a crazy person working for him talking about putting people in camps that gets attention and gets played over and over on major network news.
I agree. Sanders presidency, particularly if the media follow their traditional style of running interference for a Democratic President is a very dangerous event. One of the believable defenses of being a reluctant Trump voter (which I was not) was that Mueller and everything else was basically guaranteed. He would be smeared 24/7 on the 3 major networks + all of cable besides Fox, plus all the major news outlets besides the WSJ (which isn’t really pro Trump either). And this has been true.
What is your faith that there will be, basically, a 0% chance that President Bernie’s minor indiscretions will become topline news everyday. Our best evidence is that only FoxNews will cover all but his most egregious missteps, and even those will get 1-3 articles in the NYT, which promptly moves on to how bad it is that McConnell isn’t bringing SCOTUS nominees Cortez and Taleb up for a vote.
I still recall 2016, when the NYT was so sure of a Clinton presidency that they preemptively starting attacking her. And I doubt that the mainstream media will be as deferential to Sanders as they would to a normal Democrat. But I also think that Sanders won’t do awful Trump style stuff to begin with.
Also, I highly doubt that reluctant never-Trumpers voted for him because they thought he would be hampered by investigations (especially since those investigations were barely publicized prior to the election). They voted for him because of the Supreme Court, or because they didn’t like Clinton.
@Loriot
The awful things that Sanders will do won’t be trump style, but that won’t make them less awful.
Hillary Clinton is your idea of “hard left”?
Edit: Wait, I get it. You’re saying that Democrats supported Trump because they thought he’d be easy to beat. That did unfortunately happen. As a left-winger, I can maintain friendly relations with a Trump supporter far more easily than with one of the idiots who applauded his primary success because they thought it would be for the greater good of liberalism. If you detest Trump as much as those people claimed to, that strategy is not just strategically stupid but morally bankrupt.
Sorry, that was unclear. The Democrats were rooting for the hard right candidate (Trump) as opposed to the moderates like Jeb! and Kasich because they thought he’d be easier to beat.
The irony is that whoever loses the nomination is almost always easier to beat than the winner. The whole A beats B, B beats C but C beats A is just rare.
Except that one comparison is in the nomination, where only members of your party matter (with some exceptions for crossover voters in some states), while the other is for the general. I don’t find it implausible that Goldwater beats Rockefeller among Republicans, but Rockefeller polls better than Goldwater in the general election.
If this comes down to Bernie Sanders vs. Michael Bloomberg, then we’re going to be in the perverse situation of watching the Democratic party deciding between a former Socialist who signed up as a Democrat because it was his best bet at the big chair, and a former Republican who signed up as a Democrat because ditto, as their champion against the Republican incumbent – a former Democrat who signed up with the GOP because that was his best path to the White House.
A pox on all their houses, and if I view Trump as the least-bad of the three it’s only because his relative ineptitude limits the amount of damage he can do. Well, that and his apparently sincere distaste for foreign wars; not sure where Bernie and Bloomie really stand on that front.
A Biden/Buttigieg or Biden/Klobuchar ticket looks pretty good to me in terms of not having any great ambition to screw things up worse than they already are, and having the talent and experience to not do so by accident. Biden’s health is an issue, but having a young VP who is already established as at least near-presidential material mitigates much of that risk. Since I expect the swing voters in this election are going to be the return to normalcy, don’t screw things up worse than they already are voters, I think that’s probably the best be for the Democrats at this stage. Not sure that the younger moderates are ready to lead that ticket themselves, but if they are it would have the same effect.
And whoever the Democrats nominate, I would prefer to be either a clear winner or a clear loser going into November, because I want the swing voters to be comfortable voting for divided government and that’s easier to do if you’re confident you know who the President is going to be.
And I always thought Trump was a secret Democratic agent sent out to destroy the Republican party by the Clintons by handing the election to Hillary…woops
Could be true, if you believe he was too incompetent to lose.
A Biden/Klobuchar win would just reinforce the same neoliberal tendencies that brought us the popular support for Trump in the first place.
A Biden/Buttigieg or Biden/Klobuchar ticket looks pretty good to me in terms of not having any great ambition to screw things up worse than they already are, and having the talent and experience to not do so by accident.
What exactly are the powers of the Vice President? Pence so far seems to be decently obscure, working away in peace without causing big headlines. But I can’t see Mayor Pete being happy to languish in obscurity doing ribbon-cutting and speech-making for the National League of Buttercup Growers, I get the whiff of ambition off him and I think he’d try and use the VP slot to get enough attention for his “vote me in as President” succession bid when Biden’s term was up. I have suspicion about people trying to use positions as springboards for bigger and better jobs, because I think it would be all too easy to turn a drama into a crisis if VP Pete decided to hold a big press conference on Sensitive Issue in order to show that he was being pro-active while President Joe was sleeping on the job.
It depends on the VP. Dick Cheney was extremely influential in how the government was run. Biden and Pence much less so. The actual official duties are fairly minor.
Formally, the Constitution gives the Vice President three inherent Constitutional powers, apart from his primary role of being the Emergency Backup President in case the actual President breaks:
1. The Vice President is ex officio the President of the Senate, in which capacity he can chair Senate debates (mostly a ceremonial role, and mostly delegated to a random junior Senator from the majority party, since the Senate very early on adopted rules that stripped the chair of most of his authority), and he can cast a tie-breaker vote if the Senate is split evenly on a motion that requires a simple majority.
2. The VP has a role in the 25th Amendment process for declaring a President to be incapable. Specifically, doing so requires the agreement of the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet.
3. After the next Presidential election, the incumbent VP is the one who formally tallies the Electoral College results. This is also mostly a ceremonial duty: the tallying occurs in the presence of both Houses of Congress, and Congress has the power to overrule the VP if they disagree with his count (this has only happened once or twice, in cases of disputed state-level election results that resulted in two different slates of electors sending in separate reports to be tallied).
In addition, Presidents can assign political and executive-branch duties to the VP. Most commonly, the VP gets used as a consolation prize for ceremonial occasions (state dinners, etc) that are almost but not quite important enough for the President to attend in person, he gets sent around the country to make speeches and do photo-ops in support of the President and his party, and he is one of the people who lobby Senators and Representatives to vote for bills the President wants to pass.
Less commonly (Cheney is the biggest recent example, as JayT said), the VP is used as a sort of Cabinet Secretary Without Portfolio, or even as an unofficial Deputy President, who can make the sorts of day-to-day decisions that President would normally make on the President’s behalf if the President is busy doing something else (subject to being reviewed and overruled later by the President if he disagrees). In administrations that don’t use the VP this way, I think this role is usually handled by some combination of the President’s senior staffers speaking for the President, or the Cabinet Secretaries being given longer leashes so fewer decisions need to be referred to the President and his staff.
Officially, some mostly-ceremonial stuff and being the President’s understudy.
But the Presidency is roughly three full-time jobs, so the VP’s main duty is to take care of whatever part of that the President chooses to delegate. That’s different for each administration. It probably does mean we have to be a bit more careful about the VP candidate if the top of the ticket is a geezer who is only going to be up for one full-time job.
I watched it, but my perceptions may be a bit muddled because I was drinking heavily for obvious reasons.
I thought Bloomberg got shellacked. I think there was a lot of anticipation that Bloomberg would be the tough-talk, no-nonsense guy who could take on Trump, but he was constantly on the defensive about everything, except for his wealth. That was the one area where he was willing to give everyone both birds straight up. And I liked the bit where he called out Bernie’s three houses.
I predict with 75% confidence that Bloomberg has peaked. This is not the savior the Dems are looking for.
Didn’t watch the debate, but I’m surprised no one has tried a tactic of, “you’ve made a serious allegation, and I respect your concern. However, what you’ve accused me of is false, but I have not been provided the time to respond fully to the accusation. In fact, anything you’d like to criticize me for, I will have a response put up on my website by tomorrow morning, as I’d like to provide the full response that your concern deserves. What I’d like to talk about now, though, is how we can come together to best beat Trump and why I’m the guy to do it…”
If pressed further, go into, “Look, I’ve said before that we don’t have enough time to fully address these off-base accusations. Just as Warren doesn’t have time to explain to an accuser why she’s actually a Native American and totally didn’t use it to advance her educational career, why Bernie hasn’t changed his position of socialism in the past fifty years when leftists have murdered millions in that time frame, why Biden sets a good example for good governance given Hunter’s connections and baby-daddy status, or why Pete has failed the black community in South Bend completely. Americans already know politicians are hypocrites, that’s why so many are ok with Trump. We need to tell them how we’re going to be effective at governing, which is what I’ve done in…..”
Like…maybe he was too arrogant to do proper debate prep?
Yeah, that would have killed. Just come out and own it, and make the case. “I’m not perfect and nobody cares. What I can do is beat Trump and govern well.” Would have been great.
Also, tangent, I’ve been studying the kanji (2000 down, 200 to go…) and I recently learned the one for “elect:” 選 That’s “two snakes,” “come together” and “road.” Kabbalistic implications obvious.
Its easy to write in hindsight after seeing the specific attacks, but not so easy to prep for and to handle in your first debate.
@baconbits9 agreed, but given the stories that were released in the lead-up to the debate, surely someone on his staff warned him of impending attacks.
My guess is still arrogance
What exactly do debate coaches do, then? And it’s not like the questions weren’t obvious. There have been constant media pieces in the past few weeks about stuff Bloomberg said. You know they’re going to throw it at you. Have an answer. And he didn’t.
He got yelled at about saying “horse-faced lesbians.” He should have said, “look, I’m a red-blooded American man, I like my lesbians hot. But what I’m going to do for all you lesbians, the lookers and the dumpy ones, is I’m going to beat Donald Trump and appoint judges that will protect your right to marry whoever you want.” He knew this stuff was coming, and he didn’t have an answer.
HEY BLOOMBERG, IF YOU’RE READING THIS: call me. I can write your bits for you. I still hope you lose, but I can make some money in the process.
Based on his prior strategy, he may have been assuming that the debate audience would be much smaller than the audience reached by his ads, and thus he should just appear “unflappable” for the debate and then rely on his campaign money to sink any negative attention. I think he miscalculated how much more valuable “earned media” is than purchased media – headlines everywhere screaming “Bloomberg Bombed” reach way more people than the debate itself.
Also, given Bloomberg’s wealth, he could literally pledge to give $1,000 to every voter and get 65 million votes. I know literal vote-buying is illegal, but could he pledge something like “I will start a Yang-esque Freedom Fund if I’m elected, and the first four years will be funded entirely by my charitable gifting to said Fund”?
Questions aren’t about the words alone. If your wife says ‘what are you doing tonight’ her tone can imply something benign or something with a serious implication, and when and how it gets brought up adds context as well. Then the other candidates might have forking paths, if Warren hits him with this is Sanders pilling on automatically or seeing how strong his response looks. Are they directly accusing you of buying the election or just insinuating it? Did you nail your first response or did you stumble and miss a bit?
I thought some of the leaks of embarrassing past statements from Bloomberg came from people working for him with just that sort of attitude.
Just came off of watching Frozen 2?
Underrated comment.
Seconded.
I think the reaction is overblown. Being attacked on multiple fronts is usually the sign of a strong, not weak, candidate in a crowded field. He missed the first few debates as well so they have already gotten a lot of their own disagreements out there and are now zeroing in on the rising candidate. Additionally Warren is not popular and does not appear credible to the electorate, her attacks on Bernie didn’t slow his progress down and didn’t rescue her ether. Finally the claims of misogyny don’t really hit the mark, women as a class don’t act or vote as if they are wildly oppressed, feminists look at the world and cry that Western women are oppressed but the mass doesn’t respond to it in particular. You know who has called a woman something as bad as a ‘horse faced broad’? Most men. You know who else? Most women. I don’t think it has (or can have) the same resonance as racial slurs.
I also think that continually pointing to his wealth is moronic. Billionaire isn’t a slur for anyone except the extreme left, and where there is dissatisfaction with rich in the electorate it is closer to ‘I wish I was rich’ and not ‘I wish no one was rich’. If Bloomberg handles the aftermath well it should give him a bump, if the rest of the Ds keep their focus on him it will start to look a lot like Trump in 2016 where the electorate hears over and over again ‘look at this guy, just look at him. He’s rich, he has sex with lots of women. My god look at him’.
baconbits9, I think what the others (or the ones who think they have a real chance of being the finalists) are going for is painting Bloomberg as “just like Trump” so naturally the “rich old white guy who is a misogynist about women” is getting plenty of airing. They’re trying to make it sound like “we’ve all spent four years wanting to get rid of Trump, now Trump In Disguise comes along and is trying to steal the nomination from you, real Democrats”.
It’s a tool like all the rest of the tricks to do down your rivals; Warren and Klobuchar can use the “misogynist, bad for women” angle of attack, Bernie the “billionaire moneybags elitist”, Mayor Pete – well, I dunno what he can go for, but he can try something I guess.
By the way, how “diverse” is South Bend? I read something about Buttigieg claiming he’d been the mayor of a very diverse community and handled those problems, and my first impression was “Hang on, you are talking about the home town of Notre Dame and in Indiana, aren’t you?” but am I wrong? Is it majority minority, as the saying goes?
Sure, but they went after Trump hammer and tongs about that stuff and he still pulled a fair amount of support among women while running against a woman.
More importantly its about the optics of what happens when you attack someone verbally. You have to make them look weak in some way. I don’t think that Bloomberg increased his chances with the debate, but it does seem to me that the rest of the field gave him a situation where if he handles the aftermath well he can rise against all of them simultaneously. If just Warren had attacked him then handling it well makes him look good vs Warren, but not particularly good against Sanders/Biden/Klobucher.
South Bend is not lily-white. It is 26% Black and 14% Hispanic.
One of the attacks on Buttigieg has been that he had problems with the minorities in SB. If you research it, it seems that it’s mostly “not enough diversity” and a remark about the educational problems of Black children he made before he was Mayor. He’s “expanded and clarified” his positions on those things lately.
Please forgive my suspicion that what that’s about (other than standard attacks on the insufficiently Left) is that when the issues surfaced last year Biden was seen as the likely front-runner, and Biden was and is popular with Blacks. It would be no surprise if some Blacks wanted to help Biden by hitting Buttigieg at that time.
Attacking Bloomberg is good if attacking someone gets you mindshare.
And Bloomberg made it so easy and spent none of his money on debate prep.
From the reactions I’m reading, it sounds like great entertainment: everybody tearing and dragging at everybody else.
Not so great for the Democrat party though, because one of these people is going to be the eventual nominee, and it will ring hollow when all the rest line up to pledge their unconditional support after spending weeks calling the winner all kinds of names about how they’ll be a disaster if chosen.
A problem for every party in every country, to be sure, but at least having the hair-pulling happen in private means that the thin layer of hypocrisy presented to the public with the fake smiles and promises of support can be maintained with a bit more plausibility. Intra-party debates on television for all to see how your people are willing to gut one another is a different matter.
That is literally every election in the US.
I really wanted Trump to hang a lantern on it when he was campaigning for Ted Cruz, though. “Remember what I’d call Ted back in the primaries? Lion Ted! L-I-O-N, Lion Ted!”
Yeah, but everyone was saying the Establishment Republicans hate Trump’s guts, Conrad Honcho. The whole idea was that the party was only begrudgingly behind him, nobody liked or supported him, and they were only dragged along because the voters did like and vote for Trump.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are trying to portray the image of unity and being all together singing from the same hymn sheet. They tried to make hay of the disunity within the Republican Party – and got Mitt Romney to bite, much good it did them – but they’re vulnerable if the Republicans can do the same to them: call for dissidents within the party to vote against/publically voice their opposition to Chosen One. And if they don’t, the Republicans can still run ads about “Up to last week, Defeated Candidate said this, this and this about Chosen One. If their own party doesn’t believe in and support them, why should you vote for them?” “Their own party doesn’t support them” was part of Trump’s appeal (the whole ‘drain the swamp, challenge the Establishment’ thing) but it’s not the case for the Democrats whoever the eventual winner will be.
Ignore 2016. That was the most atypical election in…I don’t even know how long. In every other election in my lifetime, the same thing happens: they sling mud at each other in the primaries and then they get all lovey-dovey in the general.
Does anyone have a good explanation for why Bloomberg decided to participate in the debate at all rather than skip like Trump?
Because if he had a good performance he probably would have vaulted into top 2 and possibly tied with Sanders in a week and had massive media coverage. Unlike Trump he is a late comer and needs to gain ground in a different way.
Also the man is a mostly self made billionaire, one of the richest in the world who was mayor of NYC and his polling numbers basically tripled in the month leading up to the debate. Pretty much everything in his life has worked out for him, so high confidence isn’t exactly irrational.
So hubris then
What do you mean “skip like Trump?” Trump only skipped the one Fox News debate because Megyn Kelly. Later when it was just him, Kasich and Cruz left he said he didn’t want to bother because they’ve already had so many debates.
Why would Bloomberg skip the debate?
I suppose what I mean is that he seemed ill-prepared, maybe with hindsight, and if he needed more time to prep, skip debates until he’s ready, as he’s rising in the polls. In this particular case the strategy is:
– The big moment is Biden flailing and Bernie becoming the front-runner
– If Bloomberg is not at the debate, then Bernie becomes the target of attack, as it’s rather odd to attack someone too much if they aren’t there to respond
– For attacks that are made in your absence, you now have time to thoughtfully craft responses for when you eventually show up.
As for why you’re skipping, you could say something like, “you know, we’re very pleased to qualify and did not expect the invitation so quickly, but that means our message has really resonated with people. Because I had prior campaign commitments, I will have to pass on this first invitation but be sure to make the next one. See my website for more information!”
Bear in mind that his whole strategy, delegate-wise, has to be timed to Super Tuesday. A slow but steady rise in the polls driven by saturation advertising doesn’t work if it peaks two weeks after Super Tuesday. The big day is in less than two weeks. He needs a bump now to plausibly stay on the path to Super Tuesday success.
The goal is not to look good while losing, the goal is to win and to win you need to drum up a lot of support. It’s hard to get that while avoiding the spotlight.
@hls2003
I think this is right. He came in because he saw a weak field and needed to show he was the obvious person to consolidate all the weak candidates out of the field and assume the Joe Biden 2019 role of “obvious choice for those who don’t want Sanders”.
My guess is that he failed at that, but Super Tuesday will tell.
(1) His campaign probably told him that eventually he’d have to give the electorate something to go with apart from the ads, so he should take part in the debate and show off his wares
(2) Bloomberg’s own arrogance that all he had to do was show up and show off how great he was, so he didn’t need to prepare anything against those bozos
“Likely” is always going to be a guess, as is “unlikely” for someone extreme. After all, we got Trump.
There is always the traditional rejoinder, which is “President Sanders will be restrained by Congress, so [horrible outcome] won’t happen.” Presidents have a lot of power even if the other party controls both houses of Congress (Obama), or if there is a faction of their own party that doesn’t support the President (Trump).
As Obama probably regrets having said, “I have a pen and a phone” (i.e., I can issue executive orders).
Restraining President Sanders through the court system is somewhat feasible. They have been thorns in Trump’s side but not prevented him from acting on tariffs, NATO, immigration, etc. Thanks to Trump and McConnell, the Federal Courts are becoming more Republican, so they might be a thorn in Sanders’ side as well. On the other hand, Democrats have threatened court-packing if nasty judges continue to block their initiatives. The size of the SC (and I think the lower Federal Courts) can be changed by Congress.
Although it’s unlikely that a President Sanders could possibly be elected with Republicans still controlling the Senate, it could happen. If Democrats control both Senate and House, then he has even more freedom.
tl;dr: Hope they nominate Kerensky (“Social Democrat”), not Lenin.
Which one’s Kerensky? I heard the Sanders/Bloomberg contest described as one between a Soviet Communist and a Chinese Communist, but I haven’t heard anyone described as a Kerensky-type.
Kerensky was less left than Lenin, so almost anyone in the race would qualify vs. Sanders/Lenin.
Debate thoughts:
–My Predictit bets against Bloomberg are maturing nicely now. After tonight’s debate, there’s no way the DNC is going to entrust him as the nominee at the convention. And forget being able to win the vote outright– with a performance this historically bad, it’s questionable whether he will even win a single state. It turns out being rich doesn’t mean you are actually particularly good at knowing how to please people: The only people Bloomberg satisfied last night were those hoping to see him crash and burn, myself included. His squirming and referring to the sexual harassment non-disclosure agreements as “consensual” is surely one for the ages. Even the merits of Warren’s attack aside, this sort of defensive, lawyerly-language is the exact opposite of how you project power and confidence, and low-information voters are going to be turned away in droves.
–The nightly reminder of Sander’s supposedly “socialism problem” remains one of the more humorous threads this election. According to Scott Alexander and other serious commentators, Sanders is a capitalist foolishly masquerading as a “socialist” to his own detriment. But according to Michael Bloomberg in this debate, Sanders’s proposals make him not a socialist, but a communist.
The reality is that we have rhetorical gap turning into a gulf: Sanders’s worker ownership proposal is practically copy-pasted from Sweden’s Miedner Plan, and his “Green TVA” policies (that didn’t come up the debate) are Norway-esque. The Left, using the more classical definition of “socialism”, points to Norway’s extremely high level of industry collectivization as evidence of its success. The Right has convinced themselves that the Nordics are actually a free-market utopias, and that high levels of state ownership are not of particular relevance to the question at hand. Which is perhaps why Sanders’s most classically-socialist policy proposals have barely gotten a blip of attention. If the Nordics can exist a permanent state of purgatory, described simultaneously as extreme-capitalism and extreme-socialism, perhaps Sanders can too? Are we all just talking past each other here?
As Sander’s points out, the moderator’s suggestion that his socialism is a liability by pointing to a poll that says people would not be comfortable electing a “socialist” to office, becomes somewhat compromised when that same poll says that also the people want Bernie Sanders. And Bernie had a well-deserved chuckle when Buttigeig spontaneously pointed to Denmark as an example of success– a country that funds 84% of its health expenditures via taxation. Yang was right in the last debate when he pointed out how bizarre and outdated the “socialism” question even is: No one knows what any of these words mean. And that’s okay.
–The final question regarding a brokered convention was very disconcerting. That so many candidates would be willing to accept a nomination that was the result of overturning the democratic will of the voters is alarming. But I get it, this is the game, and you don’t sacrifice a real shot at the presidency in the name of your principles. Still, if the debacle of the Iowa Caucuses portends the last of that archaic tradition, this will be a minor afterthought compared to the fallout of the DNC super-delegates overturning the popular vote. They are playing with fire at even the thought.
But if there is no clear winner, we don’t know what the democratic will of the voters is. We know a bunch of people they don’t want, but not who they do.
Agreed. I’ve also made similar points about the general election: almost time in history that a US President was elected without a plurality of the popular vote, there was no “popular vote” winner. Another candidate got a plurality, but nobody got a majority. The only exception is the Hayes/Tilden election in 1876, where Tilden had a majority of the popular vote but lost the electoral college (with Colorado appointing their electors, and with contested election results in three other states).
In the other four such elections, the plurality popular-vote “winner” had 43% (Jackson in 1824), 48.6% (Cleveland in 1888), 48.4% (Gore in 2000), and 48.2% (Clinton in 2016). And in all of them except 1824 (when about a quarter of the country still used legislative nomination and there were four major candidates on the ballot) the pluralities were pretty narrow: 0.8% for Cleveland, 0.5% for Bush, and 2.1% for Clinton.
This is one of the reasons I oppose a national popular vote unless it’s bundled with some kind of ranked-preference voting systems, preferably a Condorcet variant.
[Deleted by mistake. My apologies]
That sounds more like your personal opinion than a universal definition.
It is not my personal opinion that “do the thing that pleases the most people” necessitates doing the thing that the plurality wants. It’s a mathematical fact.
No, you have biased your selection towards action, you can have an inaction preference that could plausibly satisfy more people. If everyone’s preferences are 1 my candidate winning, 2 no candidate winning then not filling an office would satisfy more people than filling an office with a person who received less than 50% of the vote.
If 40% of people vote Bernie, 30% Biden and 30% Warren, then doing what pleases the most people is “not Bernie.”
@baconbits9
Even if you want to count every non-voter as an automatic “none of the above”, the logic doesn’t change: If these “nones” achieved the plurality, then selecting them would be more democratic than any alternative. The 50% threshold has no particular meaning.
If you want to argue that the Democratic primary process is fundamentally flawed because they aren’t taking this into account, that’s fine. But I’m not hearing an superior solution for how to figure out what the majority wants at this stage. Since if, at the start of the process, people realized that not voting counted towards “none of the above”, that would have radically changed people’s voting behavior.
@Conrad Honcho
Not true, since any other option necessarily pleases people even less.
You missed the point. You have only weighted the first preference and assumed not conditional preferences, and you are assuming differences that the electorate may not. If there is a large body of racist voters for whom the only qualification for winning is ‘white’ then any white candidate fulfills their will, and the sum total of their votes plus those that like one of the individual white candidates can end representing a majority opinion but not receive a plurality of votes.
You could also, as baconbits9 suggests, do none of the above.
Or, rather, have delegates from the candidates cast additional ballots either at the direction of their candidate, or based on what the delegates think the voters in their state want. And try to figure out a better answer that way.
Also, baconbits9…what’s the 9 for?
@baconbits9
The argument works both ways: While you can’t assume that every person who didn’t vote declined to do because they were fine with whatever the outcome is, you also can’t assume that every person who didn’t vote did so because they object to all the options.
Additional polling can illuminate the answer. But by itself its just a black box, neither an argument for or against the outcome from a democratic perspective.
@Conrad Honcho
“None of the above” pleases far far less people. What percentage of Democrats would be satisfied with the Dems declining to run a candidate if none of them receive more than 50% of the vote? I’m going to guess less than 0.1% of the voters.
And what reason is there to think that the delegates would be more likely to select a candidate that the voters prefer than the voters themselves? This is no more convincing than saying “If no single candidate can reach 50%, then give the choice to my friend Bob. Bob’s smart, he’ll know the right guy!”
So, do you admit that going with the plurality is not the one and only “democratic outcome” because you don’t really know what would please the most people?
@baconbit9
It’s true than in order to determine the true plurality opinion, it’s probably best not to do so in a single first-past-the-post methodology.
But again, this isn’t how the Democratic primary works, as it exists. We only have the information we have. Saying “well, if there were instant runoffs/ranked choice, the outcome would be different” is all well and good, but we don’t have those, so if you want to infer the democratic will, the votes are all we have.
I don’t think you are responding to the point.
Baked into your position is the assumption that positive preferences are the only thing that exist. If my preference is 1. Not Bernie Sanders as president than anyone who is not Bernie satisfies my preference. You have to assume that people only vote positively for actions, and not negatively against them to get to the ‘satisfies the most people’s preferences’.
There are many ways that a plurality can fail the majority will. For another example you can have conditional preferences. I could prefer a republican congress if Sanders is president and a democratic congress is Trump is reelected. I cannot express that preference through plurality voting (its hard with majority voting but easier).
The 50% threshold does have specific meaning for people who vote negatively. If a person HAS to break 50% then voting for a 3rd party is a vote against the two main parties.
Nothing, it was an auto generated thing many years ago.
@Conrad Honcho
It is the one and only democratic outcome, because it is the most likely to please the most people compared to any alternative.
Nothing can ever be known with 100% certainty, outside of the realm of mathematics. Even if an election was 95% to 5%, there would be doubt: What if there was election fraud? Would instant-runoff or ranked choice voting have changed the outcome? What about the people who didn’t vote- were they opposed to everyone?
But this line of argumentation proves too much. Could anything ever be described as “democratic will” under these standards?
Describing the plurality as the “democratic will” is accurate because it has a higher probability of being so than any of the proposed alternatives. To the extent that “democratic will” is a thing you want to support, honoring the plurality is the most accurate tool you have.
This is not about certainty or uncertainty, this is about the mechanisms that democracy uses to calculate its results. Democracies fail the basic tasks of preference measurements in many ways, (and markets do in many, but fewer, ways) but the point remains that the 50% barrier is not arbitrary. A person who gets 50%+ of the vote has cleared the ‘I have more votes than the other people’ barrier plus the ‘people might be voting against a candidate and not for a candidate barrier’.
@Guy in TN
I was with you on the “50% is not a magic number” argument, but now it sounds like you’re saying plurality voting is a better expression of preferences than ranked preference voting or indeed any other conceivable method. That seems very unlikely to me.
@Guy in TN
Okay, but this is very different from what you were saying before. Earlier, you were saying it’s a mathematical fact that a plurality candidate expresses the will of the people. Now you’re admitting you have no idea what the will of the people is, but we’re stuck with a plurality candidate.
@baconbits9
I am not assuming that you don’t have negative preferences. I am assuming that we have a first-past-the-post system, and thus your conditional preferences (along with everyone else’s) are not taken into consideration from the get-go.
Would a system that allowed run-offs until a 50% percent threshold was reached be superior? Sure. But that’s also irrelevant to the question of the ongoing 2020 Democratic Primaries.
Your position is that democracy itself is bad at determining the “democratic will” of the people?
Markets are not even attempt at determining the democratic will of the people. They determine the will of the people with money- key difference. If I knew your argument against using plurality in the 2020 Democratic Primaries was that “it’s not anarcho-capitalism”, I would have ended the conversation right there.
@Jake R
Sorry if I am unclear on this: Given that we aren’t using ranked preference or any other runoff method, plurality is the best we have for determining their preferences. Far superior than giving it to the superdelegates to decide (or as some seem to be suggesting cancelling the election all together.)
@Nick
“Mathematical fact” was overstating it, I admit. “Higher probability than any of the alternatives” is what I’m sticking with.
@Guy in TN
That’s more reasonable, thanks for admitting and backing up. But I think it still commits you to the position that plurality voting has a high probability of being the best voting system, which based on your earlier qualification I don’t think you believe! I think you should stick to saying either:
a) plurality is all we have, but there are circumstances where it doesn’t express popular will; or
b) plurality is the best voting system, for reasons x and y and z.
Seems to me like you actually favor (a), in which case I think you’re still susceptible to cases like Conrad’s. In other words, at some point we really do have to consider questions like, “There are a lot of moderates, maybe people would be happier with a moderate than with a socialist?”
That isn’t my argument, but had I known your argument was a tautology, which is what ‘this is our system, its called a democratic system, therefore any outcome it produces can be called the will of the people’ is I really wouldn’t have bothered.
Not all democracies are equal. Any democracy where you can’t sell or save your vote is inherently bad at determining the democratic will of the people as it aggressively strips away legitimate democratic preferences.
Winning by plurality is also not how it works.
So I think what you are saying is absent *any* other information, the plurality winner *in expectation* pleases the most people. I think all on this thread would agree to that. However we do have other information. Namely, we go through this whole zany delegate and convention process, one state at a time. The delegates that win have information on who is the closest to their candidate (or perhaps who their candidate endorses if they drop out). If we are ignoring this, than we should throw out the entire system. But it seems like you are trying to keep only the parts that benefit your candidate, and ignore the parts that hurt them.
@Nick
It seems like its ripe for abuse, to instead of honoring the votes of the current system, attempting to infer how people would have voted under a different system, and instead declare the winner to be whoever you think would have won under this alternative system.
If you want to do runoffs or ranked choice voting, then do it. Don’t do first-past-the-post, and then try to overturn the election based on retroactive assumptions about how people would have voted had things been different.
It’s not a different system. *this* system has delegates and superdelegates and national conventions, and actual explicit rules on what happens when there is no majority. It’s not a perfect system. It’s not even a good system imo, but it is the system. And in cases when it doesn’t choose the plurality winner, it is probably choosing a better winner.
@baconbits9
If we assume that a system in which 100% of the people can vote is the most democratic system, then has any system in which people could sell their vote (rendering the total percent of voters as <100% of the population) would inherently be less democratic than the alternative.
And if you can't vote, you can't reveal your democratic preferences. I don't see any democratic-preference related upside here.
@meh
The Democratic primary system has democratic and non-democratic elements. The “system” I was referring to refers to the democratic institutions: the primaries, the caucuses and such. To the extent that the democratic will can be inferred, its through these elements.
If the delegates were chosen democratically, then one could reasonably make the argument that they represent the “will” of the people who elected them. That’s fine. The problem is that there’s a big group of delegates who are elected non-democratically, the superdelegates. They can make no claims of democratic will behind them whatsoever.
Obviously, the Democratic Party is a private organization and could simply choose a candidate in a smoke-filled room if they wanted to. But you wouldn’t call this the “democratic will” too, right?
The elected delegates are not bound after the first vote. The super delegates can infer the will, as you say, through the primaries and caucuses and such. (caucuses do indicate peoples second choices).
If Sanders gets a plurality in the high 40s, and the superdelegates intervene not to give him the nomination, then I would say the will of the people was not served. If Sanders gets 35%, and Biden/Bloomberg get 30%, then giving the nomination to Sanders would not be serving the will of the people.
Plurality voting has well known failure modes. Super delegates also have failure modes.
@meh
That they can doesn’t mean that they will, and their ability to ignore the results of primaries and caucuses adds a non-democratic element to the system.
If Sanders getting 35% isn’t good enough to be the “will of the people”, then why is Biden getting 30% good enough? Are you just assuming that people are ideologically in the “moderate lane”, and they wouldn’t have been divided had one of the candidates been running? How do you know the correct grouping isn’t something totally different like the “age lane”, and people who want a “wise elder congressman” are being split between Sanders/Biden?
Edit: Sorry, I thought you posted a split between Biden/Buttigeig. But a split between Biden/Bloomberg could just as easily go another route, e.g. “Washington experience lane” vs. “outsider lane”
It’s absurd to say that the only information we have is the votes cast in primaries. We have polling, for example. There simply is no basis whatsoever to say that the most democratic outcome is for the plurality winner to get the nomination.
@Cliff
My concern with retroactively using polls as a proxy for votes is that people answering the polls wouldn’t have been aware of what the stakes were when they were being called. If they knew their answers were going to be treated essentially as “votes” at the convention, it would significantly change both how often people answered and what they would answer.
There’s also the question of methodology. Even if the DNC was like “hey everyone, if there’s a lack of delegate majority we are going to use the results of polling hypothetical candidate match-ups of the two front runners so answer these questions wisely because you are basically voting“, I would be highly skeptical of them being able to call the right hundred or so people to create an accurate survey. Polls, especially in the primary, are notoriously inaccurate.
I use some rationality and Bayesian probability.
I have trouble believing this is actually your concern.
Would also be interested to hear your thoughts on the Electoral College
@meh
Oh did you? Well I have an ace up my sleeve: We already have polling on hypothetical head-to-head matchups. Turns out a lot of people “switch lanes” when given the option.
The electoral college is very bad and should be abolished.
I don’t know why you think I would have ulterior motives for not wanting to rely on polls. My preferred candidate is winning in the polls, even in head-to-head matchups. If I was acting in bad faith I’d be like “oh yes polls are fine, use those because Sanders is stomping it”
Touche, though I think this is your ace (https://morningconsult.com/2020-democratic-primary/); your linked poll does not seem to indicate anything about switching lanes. But yeah, in a world where these polls hold throughout the primary, Sanders should win a majority, or at least a high 40s plurality. I don’t think a 35/30/30 world is compatible with these polls.
Agreed, and an example of a system where the result of a free and fair election process can sometimes not represent “the democratic will of the voters”
Because you want to commit to plurality, and this is a soldier in the fight. It was at the boundary of a niche/fuzzy objection; as not to let in any room for overturning plurality winner. I think something like ‘we shouldn’t use any polling for decision making’ would have fit into your plurality philosophy better, but ‘people may have answered differently’ seems minor if we are allowing polling, and irrelevant if we are not allowing it.
@meh
It’s true that all I had is a niche/fuzzy objection, because Cliff’s brief point was actually one of the best counter-arguments in the thread IMO. If you want to determine the democratic opinion, polls are an existing and effective tool.
An accurate enough poll, especially one where if people knew when answering that had political relevance, should have basically the same outcome as a vote. He’s right about this, all I had were some minor quibbles.
I think I buy the establishment narrative that Bernie is the Trump of this primary race, taking advantage of his opponents’ divisiveness and his reputation for “telling it like it is”. It’s curious that the other D candidates seem to be attacking Bernie rather less than I remember Trump’s primary opponents doing to him, perhaps because they fear the wrath of his base, perhaps because they fear attacks on socialism are too easily reused against them. FWIW I also don’t think Democrats in any way chose to face Trump because he was most beatable; the mood in my more or less all-Democratic social circle shifted very quickly in the winter of 2015-2016 from “this is hilarious, he can’t possibly get the nomination” to “omg this is terrible, he is obviously a horrible person and totally unfit to be President and even though he’s probably going to lose we can’t take the chance.”
As a non-leftist anti-Trumper, my fear about Bernie is that he would be like Trump without the cultural establishment pushing back on him. It continues to grate on me that his calumnies about rich people and corporations, which are arguably no less false and hateful than Trump’s calumnies about immigrants, get orders of magnitude less skepticism in the news because they are in line with what most reporters want to believe. Anybody who believes they represent the Will of the People ™ in its contest with the Enemies of the People ™ is my enemy, regardless of what they think the WotP is or who the EotP are.
So I voted early for Klobuchar in the CA Dem primary because I think she is not only relatively sane but would have the best chance of beating Trump in the general; she is the hardest to attack and while her appeal isn’t broad now she has a very clear path to broadening it. Nobody has a better than 50/50 shot because Trump being Trump can only go so far to overcome his being an incumbent president with a strong economy; but she might have something close to a 50/50 shot whereas the others are more like 20% (nobody has much less than 20% because there is so large a percentage of voters who will vote for any Dem against Trump, regardless of who it is, what the economy is doing etc).
If I were pro-Trump I think I’d most prefer Warren as an opponent: he already knows his attack lines against her; she would scare off almost as many potential D voters as Sanders and mobilize fewer; and she would mobilize more of the R base to stop her than either Sanders (who has a good shot at wooing non-ideological “throw the bums out” populist voters back from Trump) or Biden (who would likely be less threatening to the R base). Much as Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man, Warren is an elitist’s idea of a populist. Bloomberg is also a tempting opponent because he’d demotivate so much of the D base, but as a fellow egomaniacal rich guy he might actually be harder to attack.
I will note that if, as seems likely, Bloomberg crashes and burns, it is more evidence against the idea that money has too much pro-elite influence in politics (an idea already weakened this cycle by the fact that Sanders has had no trouble raising enough money).
As a Marxist, Sanders’s calumnies against the rich strike me as a little opportunistic and simplistic. Strictly speaking, he should really be criticizing capital as the abstract entity that subordinates even the holders of capital to its imperatives. Vilifying the holders of capital is to unfairly anthropomorphize the problem. But, people have an easier time thinking concretely rather than abstractly.
That said, if we understand Sanders’s calumnies against capitalists as a sloppy shorthand for criticism of capital, I think there is a key difference between Sanders’s “classism” and Trump’s racism. The difference I see is, the conflicts of interest between workers and capital (and the holders of capital) are objective and unavoidable, whereas the conflicts of interest between members of one race and another are socially-constructed and in principle resolvable.
It is in the interest of the individual capitalist to accumulate capital. Doing so raises the capital/labor ratio, which tends to lower the return on capital and raise that on labor.
It is in the interest of the individual employer to employ an additional worker whenever doing so raises his revenue by more than its cost. That is against the interests of employers as a class, who would prefer monopsony pricing for labor.
The most obvious sense in which there is a conflict of interest between the holders of capital and the holders of labor is that each would like to use the state to enrich himself at the cost of the others. But that is equally true for racial groups.
There are political contexts in which the two groups are in conflict — American workers might prefer to restrict competition from foreign workers, American capitalists might prefer to restrict competition from foreign capitalists. But in that sense there is also a conflict of interest between steel producers, both capitalists and workers, and steel consumers, both capitalists and workers, and similarly for other interest groups.
If the conflict between workers and capitalists is just another socially-constructed conflict that only exists because there are people like me who pitch that narrative…then people’s lived experiences should eventually testify to that. Us “class warfare” rabble-rousers should resonate less and less with people, especially if the capitalist class makes even a halfway decent effort to show that they are not the enemy.
The objective difference between racial conflicts and class conflicts is, two racial groups can make peace and share more equally, and it will only benefit both of the racial groups in comparison with third-party racial groups elsewhere. For example, if whites and blacks in America make peace with each other and meet each other halfway, it will not put them at a competitive disadvantage towards, say, Chinese people. In fact, the opposite will tend to be the case. Whites and blacks in America will only be better off and in a better position to struggle against, say, Chinese people because whites and blacks will no longer be internally fighting one another.
It’s a very different situation with workers and capitalists. If American capitalists compromise with American workers in the interest of class peace, it puts American capitalists at a competitive disadvantage versus, say, Chinese capitalists. American capitalists are thus under objective pressures from the world market to constantly re-inflame class conflict. This is why, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, that pesky phenomenon of class conflict has not gone away. In fact, it has started to come back with a vengeance, much to the chagrin of idealists like Francis Fukuyama who naively thought that we were past all of that. This is why capitalist society can never be harmonious. It must always be rancorous, always restless. It must always be tempted by fascism or Bonapartism (fascism-lite) as an antidote to class conflict. This is why, much to the chagrin of liberals, fascism, or Trump’s Bonapartism, will always tend to rear its ugly head from time to time. Liberals have only the immanent contradictions of their own system to blame for fascism.
> Us “class warfare” rabble-rousers should resonate less and less with people,
That’s been my impression exactly what happened in late 20th century America though.
But have you listened to any of Bernie’s speeches lately? Class warfare is making a comeback. (Or rather, the capitalist class has been fighting a one-sided conflict, and the working class is starting to fight back again).
I heard Bernie Sanders call literally everyone in the country racist.
And his most enthusiastic supporters are middle class college kids who made terrible decisions in their choice of majors.
I do not believe this is the working class champion we’re looking for.
It sounds as though you believe in the theory of absolute advantage, that what matters to Americans (capitalists, workers, whatever) is not how well they do things but how well they do things relative to foreigners.
I gather you are also a Marxist. I don’t know what, if anything, Marx wrote on international trade, but one of the only two thinkers I remember him saying positive things about was David Ricardo, who is responsible for the abandonment of the eighteenth century view of the economics of trade.
Regarding Marx’s take on Ricardo, Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage was one of the few things Marx disagreed with. For example, see these two articles from Critique of Crisis Theory.
Edit: the quick summary of these two articles is that, when there is a balance of payments deficit in a country, prices in that country do not decrease so as to restore competitive advantage. Instead, the drain of money out of that market causes interest rates in that country to rise, which actually makes the country’s competitive situation worse. Far from self-correcting, trade imbalances tend to persist and build up until a crisis forcibly resolves them.
@CitizenCokane:
Thanks. I didn’t realize that Marx held that position.
Is he assuming that the reduction in the money supply will not have any effect on prices?
It’s not just what Marx assumed; it’s what he witnessed in the mid-1800s in Britain. From one of the links proved above:
Trump already, I believe, got under Bloomberg’s skin with the “MiniMike” nickname so I’m sure he could come up with something. Bloomberg’s problem is that for most of Trump’s liabilities, Bloomberg has the same issues but worse. Republicans are going to back Trump. Bloomberg just doesn’t appeal to anyone.
Except of course financial liabilities
Well, it depends on where you draw the line in time. This article, published the day before the election, has a headline matches EC’s description. Headlines are bullshit, but it makes specific claims claims, like:
I don’t know what “deep into 2016” means. Later it says that Clinton first attacked Trump in mid March. That’s a little later than your “winter,” but not very different.
For what it’s worth, I’m a Democrat who briefly registered Republican in 2016 so I could vote for Cruz in an attempt to stop Trump. Although I can’t claim credit for predicting what happened in November.
I don’t have anything to say that probably hasn’t been said by philosophers and theologians, but fortunately I don’t know enough about those disciplines to say for sure, so….
It seems to me that there’s two ways morality can depend on the creator: ownership principle, and designer principle.
Ownership principle would be that as the owner of the universe, by virtue of creating it and being sole arbiter of its fate, God has the authority to set the rules. Possible counter argument would be if one held it was fundamentally illegitimate for a sentient creature to be owned or objected to all forms of involuntary authority, but to be consistent that is going to have you opposing any humans having authority over each other or animals. By this principle, God could pass out somewhat arbitrary punishments for violating the morality he set up that is objective by human standards but depends on His whims.
Designer principle would be that as the designer of the universe, God knows the purpose and best practices of every part of it, and his rules, that is, morality, is the user’s guide to a fulfilling existence. In this sense, the rules are objective by human reckoning and are grounded in the nature of the universe, though conceivably they could have been different if different physical laws were in effect. Punishment here may be inherent in breaking the laws, though the rain does fall on the just and the unjust, just as sometimes we can drive our cars a bit more when the oil light is on and sometimes the engine will catch on fire (because morality is general rules and principles that doesn’t spell out every particular complicating factor by and large because the actual world is too complex).
Interestingly, they may both be in effect to varying degrees. For example, Judaism held that there are universal laws all nations are judged by, and stricter laws that just apply to Jews due to a hereditary covenant.
Also, the latter principle could make morality objective even without a God, though in that case you have to decide upon your purpose yourself. Once you do, then there are objective actions that will advance or hinder that. And by collective action we can make not interfering with others objectively wrong (if getting caught is likely enough and punishment severe enough) even if it isn’t inherently so.
From where I sit, ethics is neither objective nor arbitrary, but somewhere in between. In a way, it’s a bit like language – humans have an evolved capacity for language, but they fill in (or invent) the details while growing up, based on what language they are exposed to. (And I say “invent” because of the way children turn pidgins into creoles.)
I think we do something like that with regard to ethics. There are built in tendencies and patterns. We develop cultural practices that fit these patterns, and pass them down to our children, with some amount of change over time, adapting to changes in our capabilities. Ethical systems come later – just as formal grammar and similar things come later with regard to language. Also, much like formal grammar, ethical systems easily become oversimplifications, and may be applied in a way that changes prior practices. (Thus English respelled various words based on false ideas of their origins; meanwhile the Germans rearranged their written language to look like Latin.)
We do all this – if my ideas are anything but a “just so” story – because human societies need behavioural rules to function effectively. Without expectations – and punishment for violations – people don’t cooperate as effectively, and that’s bad for almost everyone over time. So proto-humans that developed ideas of proper ways to behave did better over time than those that didn’t.
As usual, there’s individual variance. Some people don’t absorb their local ethical rules – instead, they try to cheat. We call them sociopaths. Some people exceed minimum requirements; we have more positive names for them, up to and including terms like “Saint”. And we disagree all the time about details, or correct behaviour in specific cases, particularly when someone constructs moral dilemmas to ask about. And that’s all fine, except that it makes things difficult for people trying to develop abstract ethical systems – they never fully match anyone’s moral intuitions.
I’ve listened to a few videos about detransitioning, and I think it’s a serious thing, though I don’t have any idea how common it is compared to people who are happy with transitioning.
From my small sample, it looks like a lot of the problem is people who are depressed or bipolar and become convinced that what they’ve got is gender dysphoria. Part of *that* problem is family, friends, and/or therapists who think becoming trans is a great idea.
I know people whose lives were greatly improved by becoming trans women. I don’t have as much personal knowledge of outcomes for trans men.
Another difficulty is that testosterone can make people feel good, but this doesn’t mean it will continue to do so.
Feminism can play a role I didn’t expect– sometimes feminists make being a woman seem like such a bad deal that it amplifies the desire to be a man.
I *think* best practice would be to check for depression and bipolar first.
I would assume, perhaps naively, that this is standard among professional psychologists. Address the easier to remedy problems with less permanent changes first, give some time, etc.
People who are following activists may be more into immediately assuming dysphoria, similar to the effect of jumping to pubmed and assuming your sniffles mean you need to see a specialist.
It’s a little complicated by considerations of how effective the alternative treatment is, and the costs of waiting.
Elsewhere, I’m in a discussion of the ill effects of doctors who prescribe weight loss for any complaint a fat person comes in with.
https://nancylebov.dreamwidth.org/1106147.html
If a doctor tells you to lose weight to solve your knee problems, either find another doctor or ask them what advice they’d give a thin person with the same knee problems.
I recommend reading the comments for both facebook links and the dances with fat link.
The overview is that knee problems have many causes, and careful examination and physical therapy are the best starting points for people of all weights. Evidence that weight doesn’t necessarily matter is that there are people who have the same knee problems at a variety of weights, and people with congenital knee problems who have relatives of various weights with the same problem.
Medical neglect of fat people is a serious thing– they are frequently told to lose weight to solve problems and not given other treatment, including problems which aren’t conceivably related to weight. In many cases, fat people suffer for decades from problems which are easily solved when they get proper treatment– or find out that the problem can no longer be solved. The worst case I know of in at the Dances with Fat link– a fat woman whose back pains turned out to be bone cancer, and it was too late.
I’m not going to say losing weight never works– it may have done my knees some good*– but a lot of the time, it doesn’t work, and other solutions do work.
*Hard to tell– it might have been the qi gong.
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/10217032489746888
https://www.facebook.com/ragenchastain/posts/10219692429652553
This link has the most substantial collection of comments and isn’t to facebook.
Comments to my posts have included two people who were advised to lose weight because of ear infections, and I know one more.
@Nancy Lebovitz:
In the last SSC survey sample, whose public data included 147 transwomen, 35 transmen and 212 nonbinary, many of them had been formally diagnosed with depression: 36% of transwomen, 57% of transmen and 39% of the nonbinary.
If we add those who think they might have depression although they weren’t formally diagnosed, a majority of SSC trans people are depressed: 61% of transwomen, 71% of transmen and 56% of the nonbinary.
The challenge is figuring out whether a person is depressed because of gender dysphoia that will be ended or substantially reduced by transition or if they mistakenly think transition will help.
Or were you arguing that checking for depression isn’t useful?
Speaking from a religious worldview…ethics is the human synthesis of an attribute from being made in the Image of God. The drive for autonomy from God results in divergent ethical systems, but there will be many overlaps between them as a result.
So traditionally family/clan/tribe was elevated. Honor your Father and Mother, submit to their authority, the authority of the clan leader, and that of the leader of leaders, as you submit to God. But in some places, rape is just boys being boys, nothing some payments can’t cover, you can totally kill your insubordinate slaves, though that may not be economically beneficial, and it’s totally ok to kill all the rival clans’ men, and enslave their women and children. That’s what “integration” looks like! Everyone could totally use more concubines if available.
In more peaceful societies, where more people have the luxury to ponder philosophy, and the ravages of conflict and “integration” are more distant and abstract, people ponder what makes life meaningful…hedonism? stoicism? Right and wrong are codified and various degrees of autonomy are emphasized. But of course tribalism is pretty persistent and you can get prayers like, “God, thank you that I was not born a Woman, a Slave, or a Gentile.”
Eventually, we get to societies where rebels say things like, “We hold these truths self-evident, that all men are created equal….” when many philosophers don’t believe truths can be self-evident, or that there’s an absolute truth at all, which is fair if you don’t have a God-centric framework (which obvious nullifies the whole creation bit, much less equality of worth).
Anyway, I’ve found that ultimately I talk past someone from the secularist world view because our premises are so different. They think it’s obvious that evolution provides an incentive for humans to be ethical, whereas I think that’s ridiculous and question macro-evolution starting from abiogenesis. We will cite the same thing as proof that evolution is at work on the one hand, and obviously flowing from being created in the image of God on the other. They point to problems religion has caused with the world, and I point to the same as the human straying from God in the search for autonomy and self-centeredness corrupting what was good.
So in short, I believe in absolute truth, apart from which evil would just be the natural consequence of chaos, famine, rape, and murder the children of chaos, and human systems of ethics an acknowledgement that some moral common ground is needed for society to function in our declaration of independence from God.
I largely agree with Dinonerd.
Morality is contextual but not arbitrary. Fundamentally, people want power for themselves and power over society, and morality is one of the systems by which power is constructed. All of the moralities we have created thus far have produced successors or competitors, and have demonstrated their own insufficiency thereby.
I don’t believe in a teleological final moral end. I do believe that certain moral precepts are doomed, and that certain moral precepts are inevitable. I believe that moral value is inevitably placed on kindness (acting for the benefit of others without the expectation of compensation), autonomy (the ability to make choices about one’s own life), trust (the expectation that people will keep promises they make even without material guarantees), love (identification with and sympathy for the goals of other individuals), and bravery (willingness to enact conflict about beliefs and goals). The definitions and limitations of these concepts are mutable, but the core ideas seem inevitably adaptive for beings like humans who live in any degree of interdependent proximity. I am also probably wrong about my list, but I think it’s at least close to correct.
I don’t support stripping morality down to these elements, to be clear. Enumeration of moral value is insufficient to describe a moral system. Everyone has their reasons for believing what they do. I am also not a relativist; people’s moral systems are not equivalently good even if they arise from the same process. But I do believe that morality is something we construct for ourselves.
I saw a thread making the rounds on Conservative Populist Economics Twitter this morning (we are few but proud). One claim in particular I’d like some anecdata on is this, edited slightly for legibility:
Setting aside whether the larger argument is any good—he says at the end he lays out the full argument in an American Affairs piece, but I haven’t read it yet—I’m curious to what extent this is true of cheaper products; cars and trucks, but also everyday purchases. I mean, I know plenty of markets where I have the option of the fancy new design and the cheap old design; I can buy books acid free or pulp, though they won’t be the same edition. But I can’t buy an older design of shoes; I am stuck with whatever the “latest” “tech” is in them. This is annoying if for instance you don’t care about the latest tech, or if you think it’s BS, like when every single product, without fail, promises to be both breathable and waterproof, but only about 1% of them are Gore-Tex.
And as far as the larger argument, since the market isn’t serving me, or Oren’s family who wants an $18,000 minivan, maybe we’re just a tiny minority here, but I dunno. If there’s a better traditional economic explanation, I’d like to hear it.
(Shoutout to @Plumber: Oren’s choice of wage comparison was 1970.)
ETA: And of course the rest of the thread is fair game, just not as much what I’m interested in here. Go wild, SSC.
As an outsdoorsman, I’ve noticed camping equipment has gotten much, much better even since I was a kid (I’m 28). I haven’t noticed it getting more expensive, though.
For cars in particular, I’ve never owned a new car and I don’t know why anyone would buy one, but here we are.
Agreed on camping gear… though the ultra-lightweight, top-of-the-line gear has expanded into higher tiers of price and quality faster than the pace of inflation, I think.
This was going to be my take as well – the “floor” of camping gear hasn’t seemingly gone up in price much and I’m willing to be that your $40 sleeping bag from walmart today is substantially better than your own from 20 years ago.
At the same time though, today I can walk into REI and walk out with 4k worth of gear without trying too hard. That just wasn’t as easy 2 decades ago.
it is horseshit. Someone who wants an 18000 dollar minivan today buys a 2016 used Toyota Sienna, which is both a better car than the grand caravan, and will probably still last you more kilometers than a straight-of-the-factory line grand caravan would.
General rule: There is a major faction out there peddling “Inflation is undercounted! BUY GOLD!” horsepucky out there, and about every argument you see along those lines needs very, very careful checking, because it is not a faction very concerned with intellectual rigor.
See also anti fission power science, global warming denialism, and a number of other subjects.
You can’t compare new car prices in 1996 to used car prices in 2018.
It’s pretty easy to do, actually. They’re just numbers.
🙂
The piece is comparing new to new, but then saying 2018 new is higher quality. So that’s not a fair comparison either. The question is, what is the same quality of 1996 new? That very well could be the 2 year old used Sienna that is the same adjusted price as 1996 new.
From my perspective, the rise in comfort and driveability is as great between the 70s and 90s as it is from the 90s to today.
@Alexander Turok
If the modern car quality is so good that a second hand car is equal or better on the relevant traits than a new 1996 car, that seems like a fair comparison.
The second hand market does exist and is a real option.
There’s a very good chance that a used 2014 car is better than a new 1996 car. I would guess that on average you would get more miles, more safety, more features, and more efficiency out of the 2016 car.
As Alexander says, new cars and used cars are apples and oranges. Part of the reason slightly-used cars are so much cheaper than new, is that you are buying the risk associated with “so why did the previous owner sell a perfectly good vehicle after only 2-4 years?”. The answer to which is sometimes “because they’re one of those silly new-car fetishists” or “because their life circumstances changed dramatically”, but not always.
For the sort of people, probably overrepresented here, who are comfortable with that risk, then the proper comparison is between a $18,000 four-year-old 2016 Sienna today, and a $12,000 four-year-old 1994 model in 1998. For the sort of people who aren’t comfortable with their ability to screen out lemons, it’s the new-car prices on both ends.
So, what’s the minivan that I can have for $12,000 today, that has the expected near-term reliability of a 2016 Sienna, but not the backup camera and the fancy electronics and the 72 cupholders?
This strikes me as absurd. I have no doubt a used Sienna is greatly superior to a brand new 1996 grand caravan.
By the way, $18,000 in 1996 is the equivalent of $30,000 today.
That’s exactly the problem that manufacturer-certified used cars are intended to solve. It comes with a premium, but you get a quality control filter (the manufacturer paid to have it inspected and repair any problems) and a warranty (usually similar to the warranty on a new car). You do pay a premium for this, though. I did a quick search and found a bunch of manufacturer-certified used 2015 (not 2016) Toyota Siennas for sale at asking prices starting around $18,500. Based on my experience of used car dealers, the actual price you can buy one for is probably at least a grand or two cheaper.
That’s a good question. Based on a quick search, it looks like the latest-model used car you can get from a dealer with an asking price of around $12k would be a 2013 Honda Odyssey. And while cars have gotten longer-lasting and more reliable in the past couple decades, I don’t know if that’s enough to make a 7-year-old minivan now as reliably as a 4-year-old minivan was in 1998. Although you can probably get a better deal than that from a private party seller, in exchange for more effort and risk.
While I agree with you that people should mostly just buy used cars, the argument in your first paragraph is… well I have no nice words for it.
A) You could have bought a used minivan in 1996 too, and it would have been cheaper than 18000.
B) Longlivety is the one metric in which cars, have not become better in the last 20 years.
I don’t have specific figures on individual car models, but the fact that the average age of the auto fleet has been increasing indicates that cars are indeed lasting longer.
The average age of the auto fleet is a lagging indicator, by about the average age of the auto fleet. There were definitely big gains in the 1990-2010 period, but if your plan for countering expensive feature creep depends on those durability gains continuing to accrue, don’t hold your breath.
A 1996 car is old enough that we have data for it, so for the specific example we’re talking about, average age of the auto fleet is relevant.
Whether the durability gains continue is another question. There’s no fundamental reason they couldn’t; large vehicles (buses and heavy trucks) last considerably longer, after all. On the other hand, one reason large vehicles last longer is it pays to overhaul them rather than replace them, and since labor costs have been going up faster than vehicle costs, that seems unlikely to happen for small vehicles.
Quality adjustment is always going to be fraught. On the one hand it’s pretty clear that if a 2020 car lasts twice as long as a 1980 car, that’s relevant. And if e.g. a 2020 Corolla is the same size as the 1980 Camry, those are the models that should be compared, not the models with the same name. But how you figure in features from air conditioning to better brakes to backup cameras to cupholders is difficult.
So did the older Mercedes models, especially the diesels, and the Checker sedans. We’ve always known how to make cars that will last forever, just like we’ve always known how to make airplanes that will last forever. The catch is, you have to pay industrial-equipment prices for that, not consumer-goods prices, and almost no consumers are willing to pay that much extra in anticipation of driving a twenty-year old car when all their neighbors have replaced theirs for something new.
As Checker Motors discovered when they tried to market their sedans to anyone but taxi operators. And that is pretty fundamental as reasons go.
Trucks and buses are a separate market; the question here is how much reliable use can you get out of something that sells for consumer-good prices.
> The catch is, you have to pay industrial-equipment prices for that, not consumer-goods prices
Side-note: I suspect that this is one of the things driving up costs in eg. healthcare. You can’t just have a table. You need a table which has been certified to hold the weight of a person and not collapse in a way which might be detrimental.
Am I missing something? This just strikes me as incorrect, on the face of it.
While you probably can’t buy a brand new 1996 Dodge Caravan for 18K, you certainly can buy a perfectly serviceable minivan for 18K on the secondary market. For laughs, I just checked my local listings on cars.com – and for just under 18K you can get a 2018 Dodge Caravan with 50,000 miles on it, or a 2017 Dodge Caravan with 27,000 miles. Whether those options are strictly better or worse than a brand new 1996 Dodge Caravan with zero miles is probably a matter of personal preference. But it’s not as if “I need a minivan and only have $18K to spend” is an unsolvable problem.
Similarly, while you probably can’t walk into an AT&T store and sign up for a new plan and purchase an Iphone 5, that certainly doesn’t mean you can’t buy one. Checking ebay, it looks like you have a wide range of options of factory unlocked Iphone 5s available for $50 or so.
I agree with you and Thomas his argument is weakened by not even considering used cars. But still, isn’t the used vehicle pricing in all the fancy stuff, too? A 2017 Dodge Caravan is still going to have the bells and whistles. With a used car, unless it’s really old, you’re still paying for what you don’t want (bells and whistles) and not able to pay for what you do (it to last longer). You’re going to get a better deal, but it’s still not the kind of deal Oren thinks some folks are looking for.
The iPhone example is an interesting one (though your spelling ought to be a capital offense). I buy used stuff like books sometimes so as long as wear and tear isn’t too big a deal it works. But the further back in time the reasonably cheaply made stuff is, or the more serious a problem wear and tear is, the more impractical this becomes.
You have snuck in the assumption that a 1996 new minivan must last longer than a 2018 used minivan. That might be true, but it also might not and shouldn’t be the assumption.
That is why I specified a Toyota. A 2016 Toyota is going to last you halfway through the apocalypse
The key assumption is not that the old products are still available but that a reasonable substitute for those products is available. Ok, you can’t literally buy a brand new 1996 Grand Caravan but what is the price of the cheapest minivan on the market? For cheap new 2019 minivans google suggests the Ford Transit starting at $23,000. That certainly makes the gap smaller. What about used cars? I searched for minivans on carmax between $16,000 and $20,000 and two of the first 6 hits on the list are recent Grand Caravans. A 2018 with 44,000 miles for $18,000 and a 2019 with 46,000 miles for $19,000. So now the question is basically- is a 2 year old Minivan made in 2018/2019 with about 45,000 miles roughly as useful as a brand new minivan in 1996, or more useful or less useful (insert valuable, reliable whatever for useful).
I would say no, the assertion that the market isn’t meeting your needs unless you have some highly specific claim about having to have a brand new car vs a highly functioning used car.
Yes? Cars are much, much more reliable in 2018 than they were in 1996, and have new/better/more features.
It was just a rhetorical question to show what the approach should be.
I guess I had trouble parsing the next sentence when you say “I would say no.” I thought that was answering your question.
Rereading that I can see that I was not being clear.
If there really is a demand for cheap minivans, even if they lack certain features, the only explanation for a lack of supply is regulation.
Increased mandates for emissions, fuel economy, safety equipment, etc., all add up.
Do my Wal-Mart shoes have the “best tech?” I once went shoe-shopping at a shoe-store, there, the cheapest shoe cost ~40$. I learned to stick with Wal-Mart.
If you have idiosyncratic tastes then yes, the market will under serve you specifically, just like 20 years ago people who wanted the fancy new stuff in their shoes but couldn’t afford the top end prices for the new stuff were being underserved. The question about inflation and living standards is a broad one but it is primarily focused on ‘can you serve these wants at a similar price’.
I think it’s a fair point in certain circumstances, although I’m not sure if cars is the best example. A lot of technology gets phased out for regulatory or liability reasons. For example, if you want to buy a cheap new 3-wheeled ATV, you’ll have trouble finding it; they got killed by liability suits due to rollover issues. If you want a house built only to 1920’s specs, you probably won’t be able to get zoning for it. You won’t be able to find a doctor who only treats with reference to drugs or treatments available in the 1970’s – he’d be sued for malpractice. (You can of course refuse to purchase prescribed newer drugs, I guess).
The bigger question to me isn’t the ability to get equivalently priced new products. I suspect the newer minivan is probably priced about the same, in terms of what percentage of median income it occupies, as the older minivan. Rather, it’s the phasing out of the old product which reduces overall decision space, and this strikes me as an important component of cost disease, and also a constraint on UBI schemes or the like. We are already basically rich enough to guarantee everyone a “full and rich” life by the standards of, say, 1920, or 1950, or even 1970. But that isn’t considered “full and rich” anymore.
Rattumb had a discussion a while back about how it’s getting increasingly harder to find non-smart Internet of Things appliances, such as phones or refrigerators. See also the anti-Right To Repair nonsense plaguing tractors, but also cars. I do NOT want to get a car with a touchscreen interface. As far as I’m concerned, that’s adding negative value to my car.
This phenomenon affects services much more than physical products, though. More and more services are pivoting towards requiring an app, not even allowing for a browser or physical print option. There are parts of China that are effectively and terrifyingly cashless AND credit card-less, app-only ecosystems.
What is rattumb? Rationalist tumblr?
That sounds really interesting (and is a familiar experience), but I’m not on tumblr. If you could point me to some threads, that would be helpful.
@AG No links? 🙁
Oof, Tumblr is a black hole, and finding old threads on it is very hard. I’ll give it a try over the weekend, though.
EDIT: Found one thread, I feel like there are better branches elsewhere, though.
https://wirehead-wannabe.tumblr.com/post/188177416031/5g-is-literally-going-to-be-a-nightmare-every-time
Here’s a link about the people getting excluded from China’s move to cashless: https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/3037446/foreigners-life-beijing-without-access-alipay-or-wechat
This is slowly getting paired with ticketing services that require facial recognition.
https://www.ticketnews.com/2019/05/new-ticketing-platform-facial-recognition/
Thank you!
Also some appliances may work less well due to environmental regulations, like washing machines or dishwashers.
Trade-offs may be worth it, ymmv.
The internet of things is just bad, though. Besides the security/privacy issues, most of them are just poorly coded.
https://royal-mortician.tumblr.com/post/181847114509/steve-okay-but-hes-right-and-he-should-say/amp
That tweet is pretty silly though, remember all the jokes about needing an advanced degree to get your VCR to stop flashing 12:00? Or the jokes about how only kids could turn the computer on? It’s not that stuff worked better, it’s that when people are younger they are more open to learning new things.
The hard part for me was always figuring out how to get it to start flashing 1:00 when Daylight Savings Time started.
Did you make that up? That’s a good joke.
To be honest, IoT is not really a useful thing for consumers, but it absolutely is for industrial applications. Inside a giant factory with tightly controlled network settings carefully handled by professionals at all times which allows the manager to monitor the status of every conveyor with unimaginable detail is where IoT shines. Smart homes are nightmares, but smart factories are pretty reasonable. (if potentially dystopian)
@woah77
The problem with that is those situations where it is most useful are also the situations where security is most important. I’m a control systems engineer for a chemical plant. Every conference or users group I go to, half the talks are about how to connect everything to everything else so you can collect data and optimize your system, and the other half are about how everything being connected to everything else means we’re all going to die any day now because of hackers. Personally I think the second group are more right but I wish they’d talk to each other.
@Jake R
Believe me, we try. Operations tech guys just don’t normally think about security. It’s all about the speed. When you explain that they are potentially sacrificing uptime due to an incident, it usually falls on deaf ears.
@Jake R @rumham
Not gonna lie, I agree with this on all fronts. It’s a nontrivial problem of unaligned priorities. I don’t have a way to resolve it, other than for manufacturers to actually get on board with insisting on security.
FWIW I enjoy IoT whenever I’ve encounter it. My thermostat having an app is useful, wake up a bit warm in the night, drop the temp two degrees without getting out of bed. Find myself spending the night away from home, turn the AC off, etc. Being able to set a schedule in my thermostat is better than not being able to, and being able to remotely control my thermostat is better still. I’ve never had any problems as a result of this increased functionality. Smart TVs have apps for all the streaming services I watch, whenever I encounter a TV that doesn’t have this functionality I plug a chromecast or similar into it so that it does. I will say voice activated tech is 50/50, it bothers me whenever it activates without me trying to activate it, but setting timers by voice is dramatically better than setting timers any other way while cooking.
More tech to boost production would be awesome. I do not understand how I can go to Labor/Delivery, sit at the nursing station, and see the vitals and contraction status of every mother and every baby on the floor, but I have to walk 2 f’in football fields to see if Bob finished his damn batch on time (of course he didn’t).
In the home, IOT would be great for:
-adjusting lights, and, with certain windows, automatically lowering blinds
-adjusting thremostats
-list making (alexa, put cinnamon on my shopping list!)
-pumping music through the whole house
-video monitoring (front door, nursery)
-turning on my oven remotely so it’s already 400 degrees when I get home
-did my sump pump break and now the housing is flooding?
However, other than buying an Alexa and a Nest and maybe a Ring, none of these are actually critical or places where I want to spend scarce capital. There is a LOT of stuff in a typical home that can be upgraded before trying to connect everything in the house.
There are several stories about apartments that switched to IoT had ceilings fans and lights turning on and off randomly, because they were picking up their neighbors’ signals. As per the post I linked to, there are lots of cases where the software bricks itself, destroying users’ abilities to adjust anything they want.
Counting on IoT to be executed/installed properly is a tall order.
And that’s before you get to any security/privacy issues. The default assumption now is that your devices collect data and send it to the manufacturer, and you won’t be able to find a company that allows you to opt out. Security, of course, is a joke.
When I was was 15 two decades ago, a pack of guitar strings cost $5. A couple weeks ago, I bought a pack of the same guitar strings made by the same company for… $5.
What’s up with that?
What strings do you use?
I don’t have any particular brand I’m loyal to or anything, but I know that at some point I bought Ernie Ball Super Slinky nickel wound .009-.042s in 1999, because those are what they give you if you ask for electric guitar strings and they say “What kind?” and you shrug and say “Whatever the normal ones are, I just started playing.” Those happen to be the same ones I bought a couple weeks ago.
This is one hell of a sleight of hand. He’s complaining that hedonic adjustments to inflation don’t make sense, but in terms of “are people better off” he doesn’t factor in inflation at all. Straight nominal prices.
Ex:
Dodge Caravan:
1996: 18k
2020: 26k
Average non-supervisor wage:
1996: $11.86/hour
2020:$23.87/hour
Given that the wage has doubled, and the price of the car has not, the car is cheaper. You don’t even need to factor in the hedonic adjustments to prove the worker is getting a better deal. And, yes, a 2020 minivan is going to be better than a 1996 minivan. Maybe not Dodge specifically, but any other car company? Yes.
Then there’s this re: social norms:
Okay, yeah, no one in 2020 would be satisfied with an 1880 standard of living. That’s because we objectively know that we are way better now than before we had electricity and running water and penicillin.
So same test, if a 2020 family cannot be satisfied with a 1970 standard of living, it ipso facto proves that 2020 families are vastly better than 1970 families. If your social norms cannot be sustained by your means, then the problem is with your social norms. You don’t just get to add something to your basket of goods and then cry that your life sucks because you can’t get it. If we can, I demand my Moon Mansion.
He also does a sleight of hand with healthcare, taking the full freight of health care costs without employer insurance and ignoring that employers pay a huge portion of the bill. If you take his own numbers at face value, a household with employer-coverage has healthcare bills fall from $19,000/year to $8,000/year: this isn’t trivial, it knocks his chosen metric down to 42 weeks.
Also, I don’t see the value in his particular housing metric. You should use a comp analysis, not a percentile analysis, and that’s leaving aside the issue of picking one single real estate market in the Research Triangle. Reason being, sure, you can’t buy a 1990s TV, and you can’t buy 1960s healthcare, but you sure as hell buy an old-ass house. If 50% of households decide Mom needs to work and they are going to use that money to build brand-spanking new McMansions, that will drive up the median value of a home, but it does not impact at all the family where Mom stays home and decides to stay in their 4-square. Isolating to only 3 bedroom homes is not sufficient to fully capture the changes in housing quality over the years, because 3 bedroom houses vary dramatically in square footage, bathrooms, utilities, yardage, etc.
Also, if we’re going to talk about social norms, it’s absolutely unfair to not look at the acceptance of women going to work. We have made a great number of societal decisions based on the assumption that we have more money to spend because women are going to work. So, yes, if you ignore a huge chunk of your labor force, suddenly your consumption basket is going to look ridiculously expensive.
You’re comparing apples to apples with the price of a new Dodge Caravan, but I’m not sure the same is true about wages. The average surely hides differences in how wages are distributed now vs. how they were distributed in 1996. If you rounded everyone’s wages up or down to the nearest dollar I’d be curious to know what the modes look like.
Also, I don’t know about Dodge Caravans specifically but I do get the sense that cars these days are built more for obsolescence, meaning there will be a smaller supply of used cars soon (if there isn’t already) relative to new cars, than there was in 1996, and that’s significant to many (most?) car buyers especially those at or below the median income level.
Median weekly earnings tell a similar (if not quite as good) story, $496 at the end of 1996, $933 at the end of 2019. The new minivan is still cheaper in terms of time for median workers to earn.
I don’t.
Or at least, I get the sense that everyone insists this is true, but I have yet to see any particular evidence of it.
One piece of evidence might be the fact that they’re harder to maintain on your own. If you can’t maintain your own car, where you’d otherwise be willing and have the time to do it yourself but can’t afford to always have to hire a pro, then your car is simply going to be unmaintained. (BTW, this is also an increased cost of car ownership; I don’t know if it was mentioned in the OP.)
Also, I don’t know if this is true but I’d bet many automated parts wear out faster than their manual counterparts. (E.g. manual vs. automatic windows and side mirrors.)
Another kind of backdoor piece of evidence might be the fact that many of the parts are so sophisticated now that getting them fixed if they break is often not worthwhile, and so instead they just need to be replaced, but they’re so expensive it’s often not worth that either. (E.g. compare the radio in a mid-1990s car to an infotainment system now, or a 5-speed manual transmission to a 10-speed automatic one.)
I strongly disagree: I think the fact that it does is one of the most important social dynamics. If I want to live in a neighborhood where stable, 2-parent families are normative, the fact that it generally takes 2 incomes now to afford that, when 1 income did in 1970 is very important.
It’s not really the faulty of the economy that single parents are now normalized. Either way, you can include that in your comp analysis. As it stands, we have no idea what that is going to cost on a national basis (at least from this article).
There are also neighborhoods with a range of housing stock. We live in a standard split-level 3 bedroom, our neighbors have a small ranch, and the neighbors across the street have a huge 6 bedroom home. If you want to move here, there are some affordable cape cods and 4-squares. You don’t HAVE to buy a McMansion.
I think this is misunderstanding the point he’s trying to make. What I believe he’s saying is that, for purposes of calculating inflation, the BLS says there has been approximately zero inflation in car prices since 1996. Cass is arguing that functionally there has been inflation, because the cheapest new minivan you can buy now is more expensive (though also better) than the cheapest new minivan you could buy in 1996. BLS says the entirety of the difference reflects quality improvements to the product; Cass says this doesn’t matter if you’re a family that just needs a multi-seat vroom box where wheels go turny turny.
In this case I think his point is probably on shaky ground, because “new minivan” is already sort of a luxury product; if I just need the turny turny vroom box at the lowest price point, I’m probably in the used market in both 1996 and 2020.
But the broader point that “zero price increases from inflation, some price increases from quality improvements” to the cheapest version of Product X looks a lot like inflation to a family that just wants to own a Product X is, I think accurate. I can’t speak to whether they accurately identified their “cheapest version of product X” baseline across the different categories of spending they looked at.
No, the cheapest minivan you can buy now is cheaper than the cheapest minivan in 1996. Yeah, it’s gone up in nominal price: so has your wage, because inflation ALSO increased your wages. The cheapest minivan rose in price LESS than inflation, so it’s actually gotten less expensive.
That’s BEFORE considering any quality improvements.
That’s the problem with looking at nominal prices and ignoring nominal wages. You might as well say eggs are more expensive now than they were in the 1800s because it used to cost a nickel to buy a dozen eggs.
Cass’s point is that, in calculating the CPI, the BLS is asserting that automobiles have NOT in fact gone up in nominal price (see here and set the start point to some time in the early 90s); that the nominal price of an equivalent minivan is about the same in 1996 and 2020, and that the higher nominal price of a basic model minivan in 2020 reflects that this is a better minivan than the vehicle that was filling that slot in 1996. Ergo, BLS assembles a measure of inflation based on the inflation in the prices of various consumer goods that includes ~0 inflation in the cost of new cars.
Cass’s assertion is that this BLS measure of inflation is undercounting the inflation experienced by households that are the typical customer for “new basic model minivan”, since there has in fact been a nominal increase in the price of the thing you can buy that meets that description.
Cas’s point, made explicitly in his tweet, is that you need $8,000 more to buy a Dodge Caravan these days. But that’s irrelevant, because $8,000 today is worth less than $8,000 in 1996.
Here is his point, made explicitly:
Like, I get it. You might not think that the XBOX One is better than the N64 and the BLS should not calculate any hedonic gain from it.
However, that does not change that there is just plain old monetary inflation. He is specifically saying that the XBOX One is more expensive than the N64. That’s misleading at best, and is no different than saying eggs have gotten more expensive because they used to cost a nickel. Adjust for plain old monetary inflation, and the XBOX One is less expensive than the N64.
This is treating monetary inflation as an exogenous factor when Cass is specifically talking about the ways that the prices of these goods are used to measure the amount of monetary inflation that has taken place.
When he says
he means, as you can see here, that the BLS’s measurement of the nominal, not real, price of toys decreased over that time period, and thus that the contribution of the “toys” chunk of the CPI to inflation over that time period was negative.
Big picture Cass is arguing that there’s a type of consumer who wants to own the standard version of a minivan, house, default children’s toy, etc, and that the nominal price of all these things has increased, even when the BLS reports a decrease in the nominal price of that category of goods in its standard consumer basket.
The BLS overstating inflation in these particular cases does not mean that these items are more expensive, when they are all cheaper since nominal wages have increased more than nominal prices. In terms of the author’s own preferred metric of weeks-of-work required to get the items, they are cheaper.
I would pay extra to avoid certain technological “improvements”. In a very few cases I have managed to do so; in others, I’ve been able to get the better product by buying old stock of the bottom-of-the-line product, since updated. Too often, once the older, better item wears out, I can’t get anything as good.
So when the economists tell me my new washer – internet connected, subject to over the air updates that might brick it, hackable by my friendly neighbourhood script kiddies, and saving water by both taking longer to complete the cycle and destroying my clothes faster – is an improvement, worthy of an increased price – I’m inclined to suggest that they commit non-procreative sexual acts, with or in the washer in question.
The same applies to computers. The new one has an upgraded operating system, with an all-new user interface. It won’t be able to do some of the things I used the old one for, and it will take far too long for me to figure out how to do everything I want it for, that it’s actually still capable of doing. Odds are any software I need is only available for lease, not for purchase, and is subject to random “updates” that both change the UI and introduce new bugs and security holes. It will, however, have extra capacity to handle the onslaught of unwanted spamvertisements, as well as having more space to store the ever larger data formats used to accomplish the same task as its predecessor.
And then there’s my newish car. This 2017 model has two additional safety features I kind of wanted: a rear facing camera, and warnings for drifting out of my lane. The former worked great for a while, then become foggy/blurry – I suspect water got into it, but perhaps it’s merely got a lens covered with something – if I’m lucky, maybe the user’s manual will give me enough information to locate and clean the lens – meanwhile it’s unsafe to rely on it. The latter works as intended. Other “improvements” include a large number of controls placed so that no light falls on them at night, even with the interior lights turned on; you need a flashlight to figure out what your headlight controls are set to, and cannot safely do it while driving. (Last time this became an issue, I parked facing a reflective surface, and figured it out by changing the control by feel, and looking at the results.) My old car from 1997 or so, from the same manufacturer, had none of these issues.
And then there’s the food available at my local supermarket. Or more likely, unavailable. We mail order a lot of non-perishable foods, because we just can’t get them locally. The selection of raw ingredients gets smaller every year. (Preparing food from scratch is generally cheaper than buying frozen-just-heat-and-eat, or then buying prepared food from restaurants. It’s also likely to be a lot healthier, because you don’t have to add anywhere near the amount of salt or sugar those heat-and-eat packages include.) Some of my problem is that once I find something I like, I want to keep buying it, not try out whatever the vendor has replaced it with, which may just be a sign of my age. But I don’t think that’s even the main problem.
Finally there’s my new iPhone – too big for the hands of most children, large numbers of women, and even a fair number of men. (Also the smallest they currently make.) It’s got *3* cameras, but I don’t *notice* any improvement in the pictures taken – they were good enough before, and they still are. The face ID feature is useful, but came at the price of a harder to use/less obvious user interface. It’s more inclined than ever to turn itself on in my pocket; sometimes it just activates functionality that’s on the lock screen (easy for my keys to activate), but sometimes it somehow recognizes my face from within my pocket, unlocks itself, and then recognizes touches requesting such helpful things as deletion of random mail messages. Fortunately flip phones are still available, but for how much longer – I was totally unable to find one in a physical store (rather than online) several years ago when I wanted one to lend to a visiting nephew.
Nope, newer is too often “more expensive” but not “better”, except in the rhetoric of the folks advertising it. And they just love to improve sales of their newer product by making the older ones unavailable.
The backup camera is probably located just over your license tag. And yes it’s probably just dirty. I live in the south and my backup camera never has a problem with that sort of thing, but I was recently driving in snow in Colorado and I had to clean it several times because of the mud slush that gets kicked up in those conditions.
So when the economists tell me my new washer – internet connected, subject to over the air updates that might brick it, hackable by my friendly neighbourhood script kiddies, and saving water by both taking longer to complete the cycle and destroying my clothes faster – is an improvement, worthy of an increased price
I got a new washer less than a year ago, and it didn’t have network connectivity at all. That one is easy to avoid.
The “smart water level” stuff I couldn’t avoid, but that’s driven by government mandate.
I agree 100% on operating systems, though. Even the Linux variants suck these days.
Yes, the washer was somewhat exagerated. I bought a bottom-of-the-line washer, which had neither touch screen nor IOT capabilities – unlike all the midrange (touch screens) and high end (both) washers available at the time. It does have the water saving features, unfortunately, and for some reason it’s especially prone to destroying towels. What I’m worried about there is my next washer, because when I bought the previous one, some of the unwanted features didn’t even exist on the high end, and none of the midrange models had any of them.
@DinoNerd,
Nope washers being worse now isn’t exaggerated, ones just four years earlier washed better – though that may be because of a legal mandate for water savings (like what happened with toilets in ’92), but unlike toilets washers can’t easily be “accidentally” modified to use more water.
Plumber, my current washer is an LG top loader (it does have WiFi, but I turned it off). It seems to wash just as good as the Whirlpool Cabrio it replaced, and requires somewhat less detergent. It also has a button “water plus” which makes it use more water, though I haven’t used it.
Tangentially, the reason I replaced the washer is the spin bearing (and associated seals) in the old washer failed. This is not an overly expensive part, but the price of labor nowadays meant I’d have to pay several hundred dollars to get it fixed. I could have done the job myself but it’s a lot of work, since you have to pull the drum out of the washer and remove the motor, then knock out the nasty old rusted parts.
I don’t agree with him on a lot, but Jeffrey Tucker has done some great work on the topic of how government regulations have made basically anything in your house that uses water (and a lot of things that use heat or chemicals) significantly worse in quality over the years.
It seems as soon as Toto and Kohler design a working toilet for the lower water level, the government takes that as a signal to reduce the water level again. You’d think the stuff was precious rather than just falling out of the sky millions of gallons at a time.
Dishwashers now take a lot longer, and I heard the proposed Obama-era (2016) standards were to the point where Whirlpool gave up. The Trump administration has proposed a “1 hour or less” dishwasher category with relaxed standards, but they’ve been sued over this because the law prohibits relaxing standards.
@The Nybbler
Indeed. If you’re in the Great Plains or California, saving water makes sense to me, but people living at the mouth of a major river by the sea makes no sense to me.
The worst offender by far is Portland, OR. It would take a near Act of God to make the Willamette run dry and it isn’t like saving water there gives it to anyone downstream.
EchoChaos,
Most people have a very poor understanding of the fact that water supply issues are highly localized and not global in nature.
They literally think that water “wasted” in Oregon is somehow depriving a villager in the African desert of needed water.
@Nick,
Thanks again for linking to an American Affairs essay, it reminds me of but is more ideologically diverse than both The Journal of Democracy (center-left), and National Affairs (center-right), I’ve only found one print copy of American Affairs so far (the one with suggestions for pro-family policies) and am tempted to subscribing.
Anyway on the contents: Of course I agree with Oren Cass’ take, was there ever any doubt that I wouldn’t?
Anyway, on this and that:
New cars are mostly better now, they were easier for me to repair then, but newer ones need repairs/servicing less now than did the old ones when they were new (though adjusting points ignition was kind of fun and not having a use to pass on old skills to my son is kinda irritating). +1 21st century.
Self-defrosting refrigerators are AWESOME, +1 21st century.
New ovens are lousy, there’s a reason the ones from the 1950’s are still sought. -1 21st century
The clothes at Target are much cheaper than were the clothes at the Montogomery-Wards that was at the same location decades ago, but Target clothes are so very shoddy, while I can still find some durable stuff at specialty work clothes stores (for a much higher price) my wife doesn’t have that option, and has to by used clothes as she hates the shoddiness (and shallow pockets) of new women’s wear. -1 21st century.
Heating: the steam systems of the 1920’s were AWESOME!, the gravity air heating systems of the ’20’s were comfy, and the boilers of then to the ’50’s still function with some TLC, the one’s afterwards don’t last, even with TLC, while boilers from the ’90’s and afterwards are more fuel efficient it’s not enough savings to make up for just not lasting as long! There’s a few hydronic underfloor radiant heating systems around now, and those are cool, but after the ’30’s its been mostly forced air heating, and forced air is LAME! -1 21st century.
The surviving buildings from before WW2 are beautiful!, the one from after the ’80’s start to look better, it’s 1945 to 1990 that is the the era of ugly buildings, today it’s still mostly ugly, but better than ’45-’90. +/- nothing.
Toilets starting getting worse in the ’70’s, and way worse around ’92, new expensive ones are good, and even better than the pre-’70’s ones, the cheap ones are both cheaper and shoddier than pre ’90’s ones.
With the new lead content laws plumbing parts manufactures replaced a lot of brass and bronze with plastic, and plastic is crap. -1 21st century.
Everything in the ’80’s was LAME (except some movies and record albums 1980 to 1983), “Better than before” needs to take in account how far things fell first i.e. ’60’s cars and motorcycles are BEAUTIFUL!, ’80’s ones not so much, that modern cars look better than ’80’s ones is no great feat. -1 21st century.
5e Dungeons & Dragons isn’t bad at low levels, but it’s still WoTC D&D like 3e which is an ABOMINATION! 1977 rules D&D was best! -1 21st century.
Fantastic magazine in the ’70’s was great, and the earlier pulps WERE EVEN BETTER! Newsstands today are shameful. -1 21st century.
Broadcast television in the ’90’s had Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in comparison broadcast television today is LAME! -1 21st century.
Broadcast radio today is the worst I’ve heard in my lifetime, but via YouTube more great music is more easily accessed than ever before. +1 21st century.
Millennials: actually more polite than Boomers and X’ers. +1 21st century
Fashion: ladies all over now wear clothes as tight as Olivia Newton John wore in the “Let’s Get Physical” video all year long, at the Oakland Zoo today there were dozens of young moms pushing strollers while wearing tank tops and tights (“yoga pants”), I mean DAMN! +100 21st century.
Housing: older and much, much, incredibly more expensive, unless you live in “There-Be-Dragons” -100 21st century.
Literature: Fritz Leiber is dead, but Susanna Clarke wrote a great novel and some great short stories +/- 0.
Wages: less (adjusted for inflation) for men and more for women compared to ’72.+/- 0
Murder rate: way down. +200 21st century.
Suicide rate: up. -100 21st century.
On balance, especially if you live in “There-Be-Dragons”, the 21st century is better until the tights go out of fashion and/or the murder rate goes back up.
+1 on earlier version of D&D/AD&D.
I third this
+1
Depends on the shoes. Converse Chuck Taylors, for example, have stayed pretty much unchanged since at least the Fifties if you don’t mind their being made overseas.
Yeah, those are the shoes I’m currently wearing. 🙂 Though the design truly being unchanged surprises me—I remember reading that they were making them more breathable, adding suede and knit, etc., but rereading just now it turns out that that was for the new lines, and the old ones are still being produced. Good on Converse/Nike.
The author uses the example of cars and many people have brought up used cars.
First would be that used cars were a thing in the 90’s as well, but I do think at least as far as automobiles are concerned some of the pain is self inflicted. There may also be a stigma around owning cheap cars.
But for Healthcare, education, or housing, which are in my opinion the big pain points for consumers, there is no equivalent fallback option.
For housing, existing homeowners don’t want new building of any kind let alone zoning that would allow for smaller or more modest homes. There may also be a FIRE sector bias against small homes because small mortgages are less profitable. I’m not a fan of Zoning but I’m somewhat sympathetic to Nimbys given that even in a world ruled by Yimbys.
For healthcare, people are basically convinced the source is high relative prices rather than high density of consumption and unhealthy living. Any politician attempting to pin the problem on overconsumption would be crucified. Single payer might be the only ‘solution’ because it would do the exact opposite that its proponents imagine; deny care more often and offer fewer services so that basic health care is ultimately made inexpensive.
Colleges are definitely guilty of costing more because they do more. IMO having colleges do ‘nothing’ is preferable to having them do less, since the need for post-secondary education is almost entirely a self-inflicted social mania.
Wondering if there’s existing material in computer rpgs that engage with two ideas I’ve been thinking about:
Dungeon crawling with an emphasis on environmental manipulation, turning traps on enemies, destructible terrain, digging through walls, etc. A step beyond explodable barrels sitting near enemy clumps. Past art: Minecraft, which is a game about environmental manipulation that has rpg-like aspects.
Economic game-play, where values of materials vary based on economic principles, not a skill check system or an unrelated mini-game, especially with long-distance trade and “adventure capitalism.” Past art: Trading games like “The Guild” and it’s sequel have supply and demand and supply chain management, but it’s more about making stuff and selling it than buying and selling, “Recettear: an Item Shop’s Tale’ has haggling and decisions about what to sell as core game-play elements
Divinity Original sin has a good amount of environmental interactions, to the point that a lot of battles can take on a puzzle like aspect.
I haven’t played a Patrician game since II which came out in 2000, but if my recollection is correct, that had the economic gameplay you are looking for at the city level.
The Port Royale series had trading/economy based game play something like you describe.
Your 1 immediatly brings Noita to mind, which is about exploring caves filled with enemies and hazard by using spells in a creative way to exploit a highly destructable and interactive environment.
The game you want is Noita, which has pretty much everything you ask for there. The announcement and early access launch trailers do a good job of showcasing the mechanics. It’s still in early access but there are plenty of people with dozens of hours on it. It’s my understanding that it’s pretty hard until you learn how all the game mechanics interact with each other, and you mostly learn this through trial and error, the errors tending to be of the fatal kind. Matter of personal taste whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
Not an RPG, but Offworld Trading Company is substantially about supply-and-demand markets.
Seconded. Matches are quite short but have a huge amount of strategic depth. It’s also super unique as far as games go — definitely worth playing. Also, the multiplayer is free (or at least, will be again “soon” — apparently they ran out of keys…?)
Nate Silver with a great take on Michael Bloomberg’s debate performance last night.
The Debate Exposed Bloomberg’s Downside — But It Was There All Along
Do read the whole thing but I want to focus on this right here:
I’ve made fun of prediction markets because they put Kamala Harris as the front runner last year. Someone commented that the prediction markets were being reasonable because she did appear to be the best candidate at the time. Silver’s comments here show the flaw with that thinking. Harris started gaining “momentum” at one point and had a few decent polls, by decent I mean in the mid teens. But that faded pretty fast. The prediction markets make the same mistake that the media makes. They hype up a candidate based on a few good polls and then declare them a front runner. Then that candidate declines and they move on the next one. It might be reasonable if it didn’t happen multiple times every election. That’s why I put more stock in 538 then whatever the prediction markets says.
And yes, I went ahead and bet against Bloomberg back when they were saying that he had a 28% of winning the nomination so I don’t need ten of you guys asking me that.
Last year, so did you, also here.
Yeah, I definitely got it wrong. I’m not going to claim that I have the answers.(I will say in my defense that after the race actually got started, I didn’t claim that she was the front runner). But prediction markets are theoretically supposed to be better than that and they aren’t. They still are giving Hillary Clinton a 5% chance. If you a see a divergence between prediction markets and Nate Silver’s model, you should go with the latter.
How liquid are these markets? Any low percentage bets (like Clinton) are unreliable because the money isn’t there to bet against them with such a long time until payout
Not liquid enough. See the thread about prediction market from a week ago: “https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/12/open-thread-147-25-2/#comment-852896”.
Just to bring in some data:
This is the prediction markets for the Democratic primaries and this is the average national polling.
There is a commonly-used system in tabletop RPGs that goes by a dozen different names: luck points, willpower, insipration… the point is that each character has a pool of some kind of resource (usually a somewhat arbitrary, out of character one that’s not justified within the fiction of the game) which can be spent on any die roll to either add a bonus or reroll a bad result. Is there a system-agnostic way to refer to this mechanic other than saying “You know, action points/fate/bonus dice/etc”?
The RPG Design Patterns book calls this a “Resource.” It’s one of the fundamental kinds of gauge, where a gauge is a graduated value (could be a numerical value, a “low-med-high” value, etc.) measuring something useful to the game, whether it be character attributes, encumbrance, hit points, whatever. A resource is a gauge which can be spent by players to do something, like raising a skill check. In-game currency can be a resource, of course, but I think you mean things that are a little more abstract, affecting the values of other gauges in the system.
I would specifically call this mechanic a “resource pool” I think, to distinguish it from other things that are resources that don’t, uh… pool.
Although isn’t inspiration in 5E binary?
I actually do play it, but the DM has a home ruled system he prefers for the special resource.
I believe 5E inspiration doesn’t actually pool, no.
This is interesting, since personally I don’t see the point of making resources that don’t pool. I guess some DMs want to avoid players who save up all their hero points until the boss battle?
I’ve known systems where the resource is limited per day, like grit, luck, and panache in Pathfinder, but you still get multiple!
Not a big fan of 5E, so not an expert either, but as I recall inspiration is dead easy to get.
Essentially, it seems mostly to be a minor reward for good play that you’ll be getting quite a bit of.
Also, it only gives you advantage on a single roll, IIRC, so it’s not like it’s a game-changer.
Well, you’re forgetting that you can give inspiration to other players at any time. That means that while the individual can’t pool inspiration, the party definitely can.
I like this, since it lets the DM reward players who are especially good at/interested in RP and finding creative solutions AND lets those players then share the wealth with the rest of the table.
For some reason, I am put in mind of Paranoia‘s Perversity Points.
My DM’s solution to this is encapsulated by the phrase “Hey guys, you know those sissies at the game store use single digit CR for level 5?”
A lot of 5E is a response to 4E, not pooling inspiration is one of many examples where they tried to remove as many fiddly modifiers and record keeping as they could.
For resources that don’t represent something in-game and are generally awarded for out-of-character, player-based reasons (for example, fate points from FATE rather than fate points from Dark Heresy) the term “meta-currency” is often used.
Can anyone recommend a book about Moby Dick interpretation? (edited out extraneous question mark)
I read the German translation by Matthias Jendis, and it had very useful annotations. Maybe ask your questions here, and I will try to answer them.
Thanks. I don’t really have any specific questions though. Just looking to understand the book better beyond the surface level.
I saw a book called Why Read Moby Dick? in an airport bookstore. Unfortunately, it was not accompanied by a Why Read Why Read Moby Dick? pamphlet, so I was not motivated to read it, and can’t recommend it.
The site powermobydick.com has a lot of useful annotations, if you can stand to red it online—it’s pretty nicely formatted, I think. I don’t know if you’d consider them interpretation per se, but they explain a lot of the obscure references (and a lot of the not-so-obscure, as well).
My view is that morality is a kind of aesthetic: me liking altruism and disliking murder is in the same class as me liking chocolate ice cream and disliking dubstep. If you squint, you can kind of make that objective in that you can measure that a majority of the population has those preferences and maybe even point to the underlying brain structures/evolutionary pressures that gave rise to them (and there’s a lot of interesting work to be done there), but when people talk about morality being objective they usually don’t mean it in the same sense you’d say that taste in music is objective.
I’ve never quite understood the case for moral realism. A lot of philosophers take it seriously enough that I’m not entirely certain there isn’t some critical argument I’ve missed, but every book and paper I’ve read on the subject eventually had me going “hey wait a minute, everything you’re saying applies equally well to Musical Taste Realism and I’m pretty sure you’re not advocating that.” The idea that statements like “Murder is wrong” can be objectively true or false just doesn’t seem to mean anything. We know what an empirical claim like “the sky is blue” describes, we know what an abstract mathematical claim like Fermat’s Last Theorem describes. We can picture one world where these things are true and another world where they are false. But what on Earth does it mean for murder to be wrong? What’s the difference between a universe where it is, and one where it isn’t?
Regarding divine morality, the traditional counterargument goes like this: Would murder still be wrong if God hadn’t said so? If yes, then God isn’t necessary here, he’s just reporting to us about moral facts independent of him. If no, then that means God could announce he’s changed his mind and murder is good now, and the suggestion that we would go along with that is all kinds of messed up. You can bring up the fact that God will send you to hell, but obeying someone who’s threatening you is just pragmatic, not especially moral.
You will in fact find a significant number of philosophers who will advocate musical taste realism. And as is usually the case, they will have answers to all the obvious objections.
Also, your claim that we can picture a world where Fermat’s last theorem is false is extremely controversial, and of course many moral realists would say that picturing a world where murder is wrong is like picturing a world where Fermat’s last theorem is true (according to most accounts of mathematics, picture any world), and picturing a world where murder is right is like picturing a world where Fermat’s last theorem is false (again, according to the dominant accounts, can’t be done).
If you want to split hairs then we can’t picture a world where the sky is red either: the sky is blue because of atoms being in their particular places, because of the big bang, because of fundamental physics. But everyone knows damn well what I mean when I say “picture a world where the sky is red”. Similarly, we can all imagine setting a computer to brute force check something and finding out that there actually is some hundred digit n for which a^n+b^n=c^n. Even though one can argue that it’s logically incoherent to have a world where the theorem is false, I just described what it would look like and you understood what I was talking about. What am I supposed to picture for the difference between murder is wrong world and murder is right world?
How different kinds of possibility work, and whether it ever makes sense to speak about impossible worlds (and if so when and how) are extremely complicated subjects; what you have said about them is certainly not as obvious as you seem to think and in fact quite controversial.
@Protagoras: One can argue that it’s impossible to have a world where the sky is red and that it doesn’t make sense to speak of it, but one still knows exactly what I mean when I say “picture a world where the sky is red” and insisting we not talk about it is simply being obstinate.
For divine command theorists, the answer is generally no, but your “if no” doesn’t actually follow. Like I said the other day, we should be suspicious here we’ve been handed down a strawman; you were right to wonder whether you’ve missed something.
The source you linked agrees with me. Divine command theory says that by definition we’re obligated to do what God says, so he could tell us murder is cool, and we would then be obligated to murder.
Now that being the case doesn’t prove Divine command theory wrong, but I never said it did. I implied that it made DCT look bad, and I will continue to defend that assertion as an appeal that the theory violates our ethical intuitions. As someone pointed out in that thread: this is how every ethical system gets criticized (not the only way, but not an invalid way), why should DCT get an exemption?
Edit: The link does argue that most divine command theories assume a perfectly good god so my objection might not be fair because a perfectly good god would never tell us to murder. But that brings us back to my yes answer: God is just an intermediary telling us about what is actually good, his presence isn’t doing any work.
As you seem to have realized in your edit, no, your “so…” again doesn’t follow. But this:
is still not right. God is doing the work of making the thing obligatory; if He did not prohibit murder, then it would be permissible. It in no way follows that what God commands or prohibits is independent of Him, if that’s what you mean. It certainly doesn’t follow that what is or isn’t good is independent of Him, but it’s actually fine if it is, because divine command theories are theories about obligation, not about goodness. We’re not answering questions about what is and isn’t good, we’re answering questions about what we must or mustn’t do. This is a stronger thing, which in a divine command theory is only met by being commanded by God.
@Nick: If you’re going to take that tack then your whole defense of divine command theory has been a non-sequitur. We were on the topic of morality which definitely is about goodness and then you jumped in to point out that my argument about morality from God didn’t apply to a theory about obligation not goodness. Yeah, it also doesn’t apply to a theory about the price of tea in China.
@Ninety-Three
You objected to “divine morality” by asking, “Would murder still be wrong if God hadn’t said so?” and then saying that if the answer is no, “God could announce he’s changed his mind and murder is good now.” That is plainly a critique of divine command theory, and it fails, for the reason you have realized earlier. Now, yes, we are talking about morality. But morality for someone who holds the sort of view you were critiquing requires obligations, not simply facts about goodness.
@Faza (TCM)
I’m fine with opening up the debate again, since I kind of left you hanging last time. Though it might get confusing if we reopen it here; could you move your reply down a level while we’re in the edit window, and I’ll respond there?
A reply to my “For divine command theorists…” is fine.
At the risk of starting the whole DC argument again, that does not follow.
No flavour of morality can meaningfully exist – even simply as a praxis – without obligation built in. “Thou shall” and “thou shall not” is a fundamental aspect of any morality.
To say something is permissible, but immoral, is to say that the permission is given outside a moral system.
To give an example: take Singer’s drowning child. To let it drown would be immoral under the majority of ethical systems. Even intuitively it feels icky. Nevertheless, only some legal systems impose an obligation of assistance.
Let’s say Bob lives in a jurisdiction where he is not under legal obligation to provide assistance to people not under his care. He walks past and lets the child drown. Was his action permissible or impermissible?
From a legal point of view it was perfectly permissible. From a moral point of view, most ethical systems would say it was impermissible. We square this circle by noting that legal systems may or may not coincide with moral systems.
For a starker example, let’s do a full reductio ad Hitlerum: say Bob is living in a Nazi occupied country and has a legal duty to report any identified Jews so that they may be rounded up and killed.
Legally, his obligation is clear. From a moral perspective, however, he should go against the legal obligation and not report Jews to the Nazis, even if he doesn’t go so far as to actively help them hide (again, I’m speaking of the majority of ethical systems; even Kant would agree that keeping his mouth shut would be the right thing to do).
To the extent that moral obligations exist, they are imposed by the moral principles themselves. They don’t need an intermediary. If you have a morality that isn’t solely an expression of God’s free will, then God’s imprimatur really isn’t adding anything. At best, you get God the policeman, enforcing a law He did not set.
I don’t think this follows from anything I’ve said: I said murder would be permissible, but I never said it would remain immoral. Remember that for the divine command theorist, for something to impose an obligation there needs to be something with the authority to impose that obligation. And a divine command theorist simply doesn’t agree that “moral principles themselves” oblige, they think only God has the right sort of features to have commanding authority, as Brandon puts it. There are other theories where one would, like I think a natural law theory of practical reason where certain principles are sufficiently basic, but you can’t hold a divine command theorist to a natural lawyer’s beliefs.
So, you, me and Ninety-Three are in violent agreement?
This would suggest, therefore, that if God didn’t sepecifically prohibit murder, it would both be permissible and immoral (assuming, arguendo, that murder is immoral).
Is that what you’re saying?
@Faza (TCM)
No, to be absolutely clear: if God did not prohibit it, it would not be immoral. Please stop assuming it arguendo; I don’t know why you keep doing that! Brandon is very clear on this point at the end of the second piece:
For the divine command theorist, in a world where God did not prohibit murder, we could still call murder stupid, gross, and so on. It could be bad in all sorts of ways. But we could still do it, and all we’d be is stupid or icky.
This is completely different from the usual objection, the one given by Ninety-Three—that God might obligate us to do awful things—which doesn’t even get off the ground in obligation based theories of morality for reasons Brandon set out at length.
Belated reply, but weren’t around for a couple of days.
To quote Brandon:
I’m not sure in what sense Brandon is using the words “good” and “bad” here, but I find it strongly heterodox.
I can certainly imagine something being good (moral sense) and non-obligatory (legal sense) and something being bad (moral sense) and not prohibited (legal sense).
What I cannot imagine is something being good and non-obligatory or bad and not prohibited in a world where divine command defines what is good and bad. If divine command is the only thing that separates out the good from the bad, you cannot have good and bad independent (or even contrary to) divine command. That is contradictio in adjectio.
So it is not conceivable that God could have made something otherwise good non-obligatory, unless the “goodness” is somehow independent of divine command.
All in all, you should probably give Brandon’s posts a pass, because they are really poorly argued.
I’m replying to both this and your response to Protagoras here so that the thin margins don’t make me take up too much space.
1.
Yes, but there’s a possible world in which atoms are in different places or in which we have different fundamental laws. Pretty much no philosopher would deny the possibility (and picturability) of a red sky for this reason.
2.
You haven’t described a world in which the theorem is false; you’ve described a world in which we have misleading evidence that it is false. (It’s actually being false requires a specific arithmetic equation to be wrong, which is no more picturable than 2+2=5).
Similarly, one can picture a world in which we have misleading evidence that murder is not wrong even if there is no possible world in which murder is genuinely not wrong. Just plug in your favorite account of moral evidence. If the main evidence for moral claims is moral intuition, then you just have to picture a world in which people have the intuition that murder is not wrong. This is not a world in which murder is not wrong any more than the broken computer world is a world in which arithmetic is broken.
3.
In any case, I think people overplay the claim that moral claims don’t have intelligible counterfactuals. That’s true of abstract claims like “Murder is wrong”, but there are plenty of other claims with normative expressions that make perfect since in counterfactuals.
Nicholas Sturgeon famously pointed out that statements about people’s moral character work this way (see his “Moral Explanations”). It’s easy to picture ways the world would have been different if someone with a vile moral character had had a virtuous one.
But if we want to stick with the predicate ‘wrong’, that works too. Take the statement ‘If Hitler had never done anything wrong, Europe would have many more Jews living in it today.’ Perfectly intelligible. It’s not completely clear that it is correct, but only because it’s a giant messy historical counterfactual of the type that would be hard to adjudicate even if all its predicates were non-moral. You can come up with your own easier-to-assess example if you wish.
So if being able to picture both the truth and falsity of propositions expressed with a certain predicate suffices for that predicate to stand for an objective property, ‘wrong’ passes your test. That we cannot do so for ‘Murder is wrong’ is as much a fact about ‘murder’ as it is about ‘wrong’.
So as I recall there’s been some grumbling among the commentariate about not mapping well onto the traditional left-right or libertarian-authoritarian political axes. Well I came across this quite interesting article about memetic tribes from a semi-related interview with Venkatesh Rao. Looking over the breakdown of 33 (!) different possible tribes I’d think there’s something for everyone.
I’m curious what tribe people here most identify with. I would think the majority would be Rationalist Diaspora (name check SSC after all) but maybe that would only be the case if I post this in an integer OT. Personally, after reading through them all and considering Telos, Sacred Values etc, I was somewhat surprised to find I identify as an Optimist. Certainly there are other tribes that I’d consider friendly or a decent alternative but Optimist felt the most true to me.
What about you? I’m particularly curious if there are any Integral Theorists since those were the only ones I had truly never heard about before.
@Vermillion,
I’ve never heard of most of these, and I’m disappointed that there wasn’t a “which do you fit most?” quiz.
As for myself I define myself as a bit more left than right reactionary (mostly target date February 1973, with elements of 1947, ’56, ’99, and even one of ’10), who thinks both “the Left” and “the Right” have triumphed on many of the wrong things and should swap where they are powerful in many ways.
Find me that group.
Yeah I should have qualified this is a pretty online/millennial focused listing. Establishment left might actually be the closest for yah…
I remember seeing this ages ago. I think I’m closest to the Benedictines, but I wear many hats. Also, subcultures are fractal and all, but at this level of detail this list is missing the Integralists and the closely related LeftCaths. If Integralism is a touch too fine, a Postliberal tribe might work.
Yeah I think this was first published a year and a half ago, I don’t think there’s been much memetic shakeup since then though.
What is integralism by the way? I assume it’s distinct from integral theorist but I also know nothin about those fine folk…
Integralism is a view about the relationship between temporal and spiritual power according to which the temporal power should be subordinated to the state. In practical terms this means at least a confessional state. It’s gotten a lot of traction among Very Online Catholics the last couple of years as an interpretation of the Catholic Church’s teaching, mostly due to the perceived crisis in liberalism (which integralists aim at tearing down). As an interpretation of Catholic teaching it’s compelling, especially when you hear the bad arguments which small-l liberal Catholics respond with, but its political goals are really far outside the Overton so it all just exists on places like Twitter or blogs connected to The Josias, and most of what they talk about from day to day is economics rather than reordering the public square etc.
I offered Postliberal as a plausible bigger tribe since integralism is just one response to the crisis in liberalism.
Nick, FWIW, I think SSC is ripe for an effortpost on the partly fascinating, partly horrifying phenomenon of integralism in the Catholic memeplex, and I don’t think any commenter here would be better able to write it than you.
I’ve toyed with the idea of writing it. Discussions of liberalism are among the least fruitful I’ve participated in here, though; if my post doesn’t get across the motivation for integralism, it will have been a failure.
Having to choose from the list, I probably align closest to IDW – though as a fellow-traveller more than anything.
Depressingly, I think I fit in very poorly among all of these. I guess I’m most immediately sympathetic to the Democratic Socialists and Dirtbag Leftists? I’m probably not working-class-rugged to be one of those either, though. But most groups seem to be identified by what other groups they hold in contempt, and I am deeply uncomfortable with holding most groups in contempt. For socialists, the group to hold in contempt seems to be Rich Bastards, and those are just about the only ones I am perfectly fine with hating on, if only because I don’t see what harm my loathing can inflict on them that all their money and power can’t cancel out.
Do you think there’s a group you do fit in that’s missing, or do you just not fit in anywhere?
(Also: you in fact fit in just fine here, because lots of us are misfits.)
Definitely the second one. I have yet to find a single group that doesn’t have “and furthermore, people like Baeraad need to be exterminated” hidden somewhere in the fine print of its mission statement. :p
Except maybe for the incels, but I don’t think I hate women enough to be an incel. And also I don’t wallow enough in self-pity – which is kind of scary, because I wallow a lot in self-pity, but those guys make me look like a paragon of stalwart stoicism! 0_o;
You are kind to say so (and I mean that sincerely), but honestly… my IQ is too low and my sensitivity is too high for me to fit in here.
Either optimist or establishment left. Rank and file member of the liberal, coastal elitists. Voting for Bloomberg in the primary.
I’m definitely a Neo-reactionary, with touches of Alt-Right, Christian Right and Trumpist.
The broad tribes are pretty decent looking around the landscape near me, but I don’t know nearly as much about the divides on the left. I would say the biggest thing on the right that seems to be slicing too thin is QAnon v. InfoWars, as they seem to share a pretty tight coupling.
Honestly I’d say I see a bit of myself in 12 – 19, which seems to loosely be what I’d consider subtribes of the grey tribe.
I’m not that deep or involved with the culture wars, so most these subtribal differentiations don’t seem all that important to me. I guess I get that there’s a lot of infighting between blue/grey/red subtribes going on right now, the radicals on both sides have been taking the lead and getting the most attention as of late. But in 20-30 years I bet a lot of the dirtbag left, etc. will grow old and more or less become the establishment left. The cycle continues, Kali Yuga and all that.
Shockingly enough, “Trumpist.” With smatterings of IDW.
Yeah, you strike me dead center Trumpist. Good luck pinning me down, though. 🙂
The telos for “integral theorists” sounded like Sam Harris meets Jordan Peterson, but it looks like it’s its own thing. I suspect the telos could be phrased better to avoid others making my initial confusion.
I think I’d fall somewhere in an overlap of Optimist, Sorter, IDW, Benedictine, with a smidge of Alt-Lite. I like “continual progress through reason and science,” but I think globalism is a poor idea (as Caplan supposedly said, true globalism could produce stable totalitarianism).
For the smidge of Alt-Lite, I think anyone belonging to Establishment Left/Optimists/NA/SE/Rationalists that doesn’t have strong respect and preference for Western Civilization is seriously and dangerously underweighting the contributions of their intellectual forebears and what it takes to provide the foundations of their beliefs. That is Western Civ as distinct from Scott’s Universal Culture. As one of my friends says, my conservative streak is decidedly non-modern and centered more in WW2 London.
I consider myself a Christian in the CS Lewis / CK Chesterton tradition. I also consider myself a libertarian. The farther Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are from politics the better. I guess Benedictines are the closest though I’d never heard of them before this. “Strategetic segregation from mainstream culture to rebuild Christendom” sounds a lot like dereliction of duty to me.
It can sound that way, but it’s not dereliction of duty; the point is to not become burned out or compromised from constantly working in hostile territory.
The quotes we have from Jesus in the New Testament very much support the idea of Christians living a life apart from the rest of the world and mostly concentrating on living a virtuous life and spreading the gospel, and staying out of political struggles. Jesus himself didn’t seem to want to be the leader of a political struggle. (Though this is based on what was left behind and known and written down in the gospels, so we are surely missing a ton of other things he said.)
I’m too combative for the IDW but alt-lite doesn’t quite fit (and I regard McInnes, Cernovich, and Milo as jesters rather than leaders). Somewhere in there, though.
Vermillion, that made me laugh so that’s good: the illustration with the gun-toting Ted Cruz, is it? had terrible trigger discipline so either the illustrators don’t know anything about guns or they’re insinuating Ted doesn’t. As well, in the list of “Forebears” for the Christian Right, they list “Evangelists, Baptists”. I think they mean “Evangelicals” if they’re giving denominational names, unless they really do mean to say Ss. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were mainly concerned with “losing the soul of America” and founding a strongly nationalist Christian state 🙂
As to which is my tribe, going by the spreadsheet I seem to be a mix of Benedictine, Establishment Left, Christian Right and for my wildcards the Integral Theorists and Neo-Reactionaries! (There are parts of all of these I can’t and don’t agree with). I’m telling you – we need the Great Chinggis Khaan Tribe to truly round this one out!
Glad it tickled yah :-). And yes, the let’s say idiosyncratic spelling on that sheet definitely made my eye twitch a bit.
IDW, but I flirted with the manosphere over a decade ago. As long as you stay out of the toxic mindset that can occur, it’s actually very useful for someone with, let’s say, less than average social skills.
I’m in the Benedict camp to a T, and yet never knew about the three listed exemplars. I have more writers to read.
I hid the tribe titles and just read the descriptors. Aside from some of the technical descriptions and namedrops, Integral Theory was the one I most identified with. Like, enough to get curious about what some of those things are. It seems a little too out there for me to latch onto, but who knows?
On this list, I’m centered on Post-Rationalist, with one foot in Rationalist Diaspora and one foot about to fall into Integral Theorist. But this list is kind of old, and leaves out a particular newer tribe : neo-Stoic, as chieftained by Tim Ferriss, Ryan Holliday, and Jocko Willink.
And that’s what I would consider myself : neo-Stoic. Always learning, rationally post-legibility, getting after it. Pragmatism is synonymous with surprise.
I don’t think so. There are certainly categories that I agree with, such as Optimist and Rational Diaspora, but I don’t think they define me in any way. If these memes are supposed to determine one’s political views in some way, that isn’t at all the case for me. My views on government is that it tries to do far too much. The more complicated the government is, usually the less competent (which pretty much explains the US). In that sense I fit Libertarian better any of the categories on this list, so I think the memes are a downgrade from the usual categories.
I don’t think it’s saying you have to be in one of these. Just that these are popular tribes with memeplexes.
The thing that’s what they describe as “Tea Party”, so long as I don’t have to hang around with most of the people who ever actually used that label for themselves. And only until it’s safe to be an Optimist again.
Okay, nerds, I just got back into Magic: The Gathering after a year or two away. This deck’s had some success in Arena’s Standard format. I’d like to see how I can make it better.
4x Cauldron Familiar
2x Claim the Firstborn
4x Witch’s Oven
1x Bankrupt in Blood
2x Orzhov Enforcer
2x Priest of Forgotten Gods
2x Dreadhorde Butcher
1x Midnight Reaper
3x Chandra, Acolyte of Flame
2x Legion Warboss
3x Skewer the Critics
2x Bedevil
1x Judith, the Scourge Diva
4x Mayhem Devil
2x Theater of Horrors
and about the land you’d expect.
Basically revolves around sacrifice. The Priest and the Oven let me sacrifice whatever creatures I have my hands on (Priest for bonus mana and card advantage), while Chandra, Warboss, and Cauldron Familiar keep them coming. Judith and the Mayhem Devils turn that into damage, and the rest of the cards play a supporting role.
How resource-constrained are you? Competitive Cat-Oven decks at the moment are generally Jund for Gilded Goose and Korvold, Fae-Cursed King (see Piotr Glogowski’s list from Worlds, for example) but that’s potentially a lot of wild cards you may not have.
If you do stick with Rakdos, I would look to switch out your pure interactive spells (Bedevil and Skewer) for Adventure creatures that can contribute to your engine (Murderous Rider and Bonecrusher Giant). I’m not sure card advantage pieces that don’t impact the board like Theatre of Horrors are maindeckable in a world where mono-red is so good and so widely played. I might look to get a Massacre Girl or two in there. I suspect Claim the Firstborn and Bankrupt in Blood may be a bit cute, and you’d probably rather just have more copies of engine pieces like lisping 80s metal band Judith/Priest.
Do you have the shock lands or the tap lands? Fabled passage?
Upgrading your mana base almost always is quite useful for boosting consistency and some land cards are useful across a wide swath of decks.
I’m normally pretty skeptical of one-ofs in standard decks except for top-end bombs in piles that can reasonably expect to see every card in their deck. This isn’t one of those decks. So I’m immediately skeptical of the following:
Killing two of your own cards to draw three cards just doesn’t play out all that well, in my experience. This card is doing a really similar thing as The Priests, but it’s only once and at sorcery speed. I think cutting this for another priest would do you some good.
This card is amazing in rakdos aggro, but that’s not quite your current style. It’s got a really high power level, so don’t cut it instantly, but this card wants to be in a deck with Feverent Champions and other hastey beaters. This card is also a really weak topdeck in the mid-to-late game, so you want it as early as possible, which means you want 4 of.
If you have more of these, i’d throw them in. You’ll have creatures dying all the time so this will draw you an insane amount of cards.
I think I’d max out my bedevils before going for lightning bolts. Your deck doesn’t really plan on winning with burn spells (i don’t think) so it looks like these are just here to clear blockers or take out planeswalkers. Bedevil does both these things better than skewer and for (some of the time) the same CMC. If you love this card, maybe keep 1 in, but I don’t think they’re doing much for you.
Forgot to talk about these earlier. I don’t like these cards. They’re not bad, but they are going to slow down the game while the rest of your deck wants to go fast. I don’t think you get the same value out of them that you would by just including another 2x warboss or 1x chandra or Judith or something.
I’m having fun with nightmare shepherd, but I don’t think he belongs in a cat deck.
Inspired by Nick’s question about cars below, here’s something that’s been bothering me: my socialist-adjacent friends sometimes make the point that there are more empty houses in the US then there are homeless people, and state that the reason for this is capitalist greed etc. My questions-
a) Is this true? (google makes it seem like it is)
b) If it is true, why?
I doubt it’s enough to explain the entire thing, but I’ve heard a lot of stories in the Bay Area of foreign investors buying up property and letting it sit vacant since they need a safe place to stash their money and they don’t want to deal with renters.
Second houses would probably be the main reason though. I know a lot of people that have their house that they live in, and then a second lake cabin. This is especially true of the people I know in the rural Midwest, where property is very cheap.
Investing in overseas property is one of the easiest ways to turn large quantities of Yuan into assets beyond the reach of the Chinese government. London, NZ etc. all have lots of vacant properties for this reason.
My guess would be that 90+% of homeless are homeless because they’ve intentionally decided to be homeless (to work in the Bay Area, for example) or because they’re structurally dysfunctional enough that they can’t keep a home.
In the current economy, anyone with a semblance of competence can move to the South or Midwest and have a cheap, reasonable home in a good neighborhood. They might take a paycut (even a standard of living cut depending on where they move), but it is absolutely possible.
About 5 years ago, Utah made headlines by giving homeless people houses. When I search, I still find the old headlines, not how it’s worked out since then.
(Maybe it’s something that only works with Utahns. A house is expensive and very easy to destroy with just a little bit of maliciousness and/or mental illness.)
Anyone know the follow-up?
While I can’t find the source currently, the followup was much less shining than the initial reports, for exactly the reasons you point out.
Social housing helps with the precarious-homeless, but the “housing resistant homeless” will always be a problem without institutionalization.
Setting aside my problems with the content, I like the way that Vox puts their articles into “streams” at the bottom (e.g.). I wish more news sites did this so you could easily track followups.
I’d like the follow up here as well, but reading Dalrymple on similar programs in England is not encouraging.
@Edward Scizorhands says:
Sadly not so well (but still better than California, Oregon, and Washington).
From Reuters January 10, 2019
Once a national model, Utah struggles with homelessness
More addiction and higher rents.
Still though, Utah had a good ten years of reduced homelessness with their “housing first” policies and uniquely effective welfare system.
While there may be homes going empty, with exceptions like Manhattan’s luxury apartments, I doubt that you have that many homes empty in places where people want to live, and that’s the important metric.
So you have houses in rural areas that have been abandoned due to rural flight. I doubt that there are many homeless in those areas.
And even in areas where you do have many empty homes and many homeless people, those houses don’t fulfill habitability criteria, and fixing them would cost so much money it would be cheaper to just tear them down and build anew (with the exceptions of high rises in places where the area code does not allow building a high rise).
Italy has been selling houses for 1 euro (with the condition of fixing the house). Italy also has homeless people. But fixing those houses is expensive, and besides, I doubt homeless italians would like to live in those towns.
As I mentioned above, I know a lot of people that own second homes in the Midwest, but as you say, they are not in places people want to live, and a lot of them aren’t even habitable year-round, but I’d guess they get counted in the numbers of “empty homes”.
The houses are in the arse-end of nowhere. Assuming that ‘any house anywhere’> homelessness/slums in a favourable location is the reason why the attempts to empty Dharavi, Mumbai and other such places have failed.
And giving homeless people in the city one-way bus tickets is frowned upon.
Also there’s probably more empty government-owned houses in China than homeless people. That evil capitalist communist party.
i guess so but that’s just because the latter number is approximately zero.
Probably? It looks like there’s somewhere more than 10 million empty homes in America (although I’m seeing conflicting data that puts it at the 1-2 million range. My guess is I’m looking at apples and oranges here, but I can’t seem to tell why.)
Either way, there’s less than 600k homeless people in america, so we’re talking either 2x the amount of homes or 20x than homeless.
I originally listed out a bunch of reasons, but cut it when I realized they all came down to money. Getting, fixing and keeping these properties in a state where the government could use them as public housing would cost a ton and arguably not less than just building new public housing.
I let a homeless family live in a house I owned but didn’t occupy for a little over a year.
The outcome:
I ended up paying for a substantial parts of their utilities
They let some of their extended family stay there, at least one of whom started selling drugs in the neighborhood
When I kicked them out over those two things, one or more of them broke in and stole then destroyed the plumbing (causing two basement floods – first from the theft, second from when they broke back in after I cut the water off inside the house to destroy the valve that I used to cut the water off).
My generosity ended up costing me quite a bit of time and money in repairs.
The thing is, the way our society sorts people into their lot in life isn’t arbitrary. The randomness of life circumstances is of course random, but it is random. Think of it as two sorting algorithms; one is sorting, the other is performing random swaps. The list is still pretty well sorted at any given time.
People fear the random swaps, but the functioning sorting algorithms, because it isn’t random, has all the power.
What you should be afraid of isn’t the random algorithm, but people who want to break the functioning algorithm because the random algorithm scares them.
This.
Homeless people who are perfectly intelligent, agreeable, responsible, etc. are quite rare. Any person who can be trusted not to cause great damage to or otherwise reduce the value of any dwelling they may occupy almost certainly is responsible enough to avoid becoming homeless in the first place, or will otherwise pull themselves up and improve their situation soon, on their own, anyway.
I have also run into the no good deed goes unpunished gut punch. In some ways, the betrayal is worse than the monetary loss.
It’s happened more than once, because I am stubborn as all hell.
I have a friend who fell into desperate times (partly his own doing, partly circumstances). I spent a bit of money on a lawyer to figure out what my risks would be in letting him stay at my place (rent-free) for a year or two while he finished up school.
It turns out that landlord/tenant laws and domestic abuse/violence laws would leave me in this weird place where if something went sideways I wouldn’t be guaranteed to be able to kick him out.
Because my house is my largest asset, etc., etc., I certainly wasn’t going to take that kind of risk and so I declined to let him stay with me. Ultimately things worked out but it was very precarious for him for a while.
I know California at least has “lodger” as a separate category in tenant protection laws, and homeowners who rent out part of their primary residence to a single lodger are exempt from most of the more onerous tenant-rights rules. Particularly with the eviction process: if a landlord gives his lodger proper notice to terminate the lease, then the landlord can just call the police and have the lodger ejected as a trespasser rather than needing to get a court to approve an eviction order first as you normally would.
I’m presuming your jurisdiction doesn’t have an exception like this, or at least not one that would apply in your situation, since you actually consulted with a lawyer. It seems that from time to time, California’s government accidentally gets things right.
I have made a similar mistake. Twice. In my defense, they were separated in time by about 20 years, so I had forgotten the lesson.
Not that simple. A lot of the “empty houses” are derelict properties quietly falling apart and to make them habitable would cost more than simply demolishing them and building new on the site. Also a lot of shops and other non-dwelling properties, same reason. You can’t just take a list of “here are 1,000 empty places on the rates roll, here are 600 homeless people, Profit!” because it doesn’t work like that.
As well, not all the empty houses are in the same place as the homeless. Having 40 vacant houses in Mudhollow, Nowhere is not going to do the homeless in the Bay Area any good.
We had an interesting situation along these lines here in Seattle some years ago.
A failing hotel downtown got re-purposed into a homeless women and children shelter. Then a prospering company bought the real estate, but told the non-profit that they could continue occupancy up to literally the last day before demolition. And then the muni govt housing inspectors showed up with “there has been a change of ownership, you now have to Fix All The Things to maintain legal occupancy, or else Fines”, at which point the new owner told the non-profit shelter org and the mayor’s office “Lets You And Them Fight”.
I’d pay money to watch a video recording of the meetings where housing inspector bureaucrats were told to go pound sand.
My wife works in affordable housing, including both housing for low-income people and permanent supportive housing (ie, housing for people who are chronically jobless and likely will always be), in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Homelessness is… a lot of things. You probably have a mental image of homeless people that, one way or another, does really encompass the spectrum of homelessness. There are wide varieties of people who are homeless who are drug-addicted and have serious mental health issues, where, like, just finding them a free house is not going to solve the problem and in fact can be pretty dangerous. There are also people who are very much not like that, and for whom just getting them a place to live can make a pretty sustained improvement in their QOL, even if it will never really provide a foundation for their ability to improve their lives on their own.
One of the difficulties of providing housing for the homeless is that housing alone is not enough (for at least a lot of people), and you also need to provide various services. This benefits centralization, right, where social workers of various types can efficiently move from person to person. Homeless people also generally speaking don’t have a lot of ability to move themselves around, and need to be able to get to places where, even if they can like self-serve food with “food stamps,” they need to be able to get to a place where that can happen. If you give them an exurban house, well, man, that’s not gonna work.
But concentrating them is also a problem, first because people who will at least reluctantly put up with a small number of homeless people being housed near them will fucking riot if you try to put 100 households worth of permanent supportive housing near them — and also because there are self-reinforcing bad behaviors and also predators who exist in places where lots of homeless people congregate.
Anyone who tells you they have The Solution To Homelessness is lying. It’s a tough problem. There are maybe things we can do to chip away at it piece by piece, but it’s not amenable to a simple solution.
will fucking riot if you try to put 100 households worth of permanent supportive housing near them
You could do it how Seattle does it, by lying to the local neighborhoods until SURPRISE! an encampment was built where the city had just said yesterday they were not putting one, and then paying for a social media astroturf campaign against the people who complain.
Abolish minimum wage?
On one hand you’re suddenly able to have them employed in some job, even if it’s washing cars for tips. And jobs allow you to learn skills and move up in the world.
And second, you’d be able to move people where housing is cheap enough and have them grow turnips or whatever, and maybe add a $300 a month UBI on top of it for everybody in the area. Without minimum wage it’d work, it’ll just be a downscaled economy, with everything being cheaper there. Until people wise up that hey, that’s a perfectly good town with everything cheaper and UBI – let’s go there, start a business and live grand. 10 years later you get America.
> Abolish minimum wage?
I’m not sure that this would do it. There are probably a handful of people who would be employable at $5/hour. But you’re not taking into account that someone’s “labor” can be of negative value. Imagine that you hire someone at whatever rate, but when they show up they eat the office supplies and attempt to urinate on the customers or coworkers. They are a net-negative to the environment.
Sure – there are jobs would likely be created to help get the generally unemployed into the workforce. But homeless makes up only a subset of the unemployed. (Technically, you can be employed but homeless.)
Well, there are certainly a lot of empty homes in places like Detroit. And, yeah, “homes” that are really just foreign investment assets in Manhattan and San Francisco. Some of the former and most of the latter are reasonably habitable. But,
Short-term adult homeless are short-term because they have reasonably good prospects for finding a new job/spouse in the next six month provided they can draw on their social network for support and that they are in a community with a decent job market for their skillset. It makes sense for them to couch-surf or live out of their cars rather than move to Detroit. There may be a small market failure in e.g. foreign investors not hiring some these people to mind their empty “homes” for a few months at a time. But there are substantial transaction costs and/or risks involved in sorting the suitable candidates from…
Long-term homeless are mostly drug addicts and/or mentally ill in ways that mean nobody who owns anything resembling a habitable house or apartment would dream of leaving them alone in it for fear that the end result would be a homeless person and an uninhabitable wreck. Also, starving or ODing in the bedroom of a nice house is not much of an improvement over starving or ODing in the streets, so what problem are we really trying to solve here?
And finally, we’ve got the teenaged runaways who we can’t legally allow to live in houses or apartments. As soon as we become officially and specifically aware of their existence, we have to send them back to the probably-abusive parents they ran away from or to an almost-as-probably-abusive foster home. Which is likely to result in their growing up into group 2, above.
That covers almost all of America’s homeless population.
almost-as-probably-abusive foster home
One of the most horrifically hair raising experiences I have had was a long night of babysitting an acquaintance who got plastered AND baked AND spun all the same night and then proceeded to emit at me a debrief of their life in foster care, moving between different “families” and between group houses in a not-the-worst-state from age 12 to 18, because I appeared “safe and trustworthy”.
It is worse than I ever wanted to imagine. You could not make a realistic movie of it because filming it would be illegal. The foster care bureaucrats all know, or are carefully willfully blind.
I’ve known three, ah, foster care bureaucrats.
Two were very empathetic people. So they lasted less than a year before they got a different job.
The third lasted longer by virtue of not having as much empathy, but eventually left because they were not allowed to wear protective gear – they were part of the group that took kids out of the foster care that was sufficiently bad that it got attention. Apparently somebody tried to stab them one too many times.
I don’t know if you saw the last sentence of my post, that I deleted via edit after posting, as maybe too inflammatory. I’ve decided to put it back. Here it is:
“Some of them… participate.”
Which may very well be part of what helped encouraged friends to leave the field. When someone finds themselves in an environment with even just a few literal soul-destroying demons walking around free, and everyone else is not uniting to destroy them, a wise choice is to leave.
Or they know the system is terrible and are trying to get it to work as well as it can, given that all available options are bad.
FWIW, the one adult I know who was in foster care was sexually abused while there (by a foster sibling, not a foster parent). I also know a family who were foster parents for a somewhat mentally disabled kid from a mentally disabled mom, and they eventually adopted her. She seems to be doing about as well as you could expect, now.
How do you quantify how much of the total proportion of empty houses are just empty because of normal delays between occupants?
I’d expect that to be a big category. Well, two big categories: owner-occupied houses that are vacant for a month or so between the seller moving out and the buyer moving in, and rental units that are vacant while the landlord is looking for a new tenant.
The other big categories of vacant houses I’d expect to find would be houses that are empty because they’re undergoing major renovation, and seasonal vacation house that are left empty only during the off-season.
Hmmm, idea for the average-is-over mobile-workplace future. Rich person with two houses that they migrate between between seasons goes into a long-term relationship with a much poorer person who inhabits whatever house the richer person is not in at the time (and works full-time remote). Poor person pays a rent that is non-trivial, but substantially lower than it would be to rent a place like that 12 months a year. Rich person gets income plus some of that security of having someone at their property.
Done via matchmakers who very carefully vet the poorer person for suitability, hence the long-term relationship thing.
Probably not worthwhile in a world where AirBnB exists.
Somewhat ego-destroying for the poorer person, but maybe better than alternatives.
Caretaker is already a job that people have. I’ve known several young couples who did it for older very wealthy people. One of the problems is that with modern tenancy laws allow a dishonest caretaker to really ruin the homeowner’s life.
This is vice versa, for poorer rich people, the ones who can’t afford to literally employ someone to live in their house, so they rent it out.
Traditionally this doesn’t work, because you can’t move someone around like that if they’re to maintain employment. But as remote work becomes more possible, there’s maybe a niche for it — and you might find that you actually get fewer problems with people who are settled enough to have a real job and pay real rent than people you have to pay to be caretakers.
I don’t think that there’s any plausible world where it would become a super big thing, but it might be an interesting background element for a near-future story.
What about houses vacant because the original owner had to move somewhere else, died, was foreclosed on, etc., and now they’re on the market? If you look for houses to buy, you will definitely see some that are empty as well as some that are currently occupied. It’s not all that rare for a house to spend a few months on the market before selling.
Putting someone up in the house when you’re showing it to sell it is only workable if they’re very conscientious about keeping it clean and presentable and being willing to clear out on short notice when a realtor wants to show the house.
I mean, we can probably guestimate this pretty effectively like we were in an early 2000s Google interview.
There are apparently around 125M households in the US. Some random googling suggests that 77% of Americans live in a house, let’s call it… 50% of households since presumably larger household correlate with living in houses. That means 63M houses.
What’s the average duration of a stay in a house? Call it, um, 16 years, so that means that 4M houses turn over in a year. Let’s say that the average length of time that a house is empty is 3 or 4 months, and we get about 1M houses vacant due to turnover at any given time.
That’s certainly not correct, but I think it’d be hard for that to be more than an order of magnitude off in either direction.
We can do better than that: house sales are public record, and the National Association of Realtors compiles and publishes aggregate statistics. Looks like there were 5,340,000 Existing Home Sales in the US in 2019 (new construction sales are tracked separately), which isn’t that far off from your Drake Equation estimate of 4M.
3-4 months average vacancy per sale strikes me as a bit on the high side, but a quick googling failed to turn up any actual compiled statistics on the subject. I’ve seen two patterns of house selling: move out and then put it on the market (3-4 months seems about right for this), or synchronize the closing dates of your old house and your new house as closely as possible so as to move out just before the old house closes and move in just after the new house closes (if both parties do this, the house is vacant for a few days only).
I get the impression the latter model is more common: most people (even most homeowners in a position to upgrade to a bigger/better house) can’t afford two mortgages at the same time and would have hard time raising a downpayment on a new house without cashing in equity from their old house. Overlapping is only really feasible if you have plenty of liquid savings (to cover the downpayment) and your existing mortgage is unusually small relative to your income, or if you’re moving into our out of a rental property or temporary housing.
What percentage of houses are sold because the owners either died or were moved into an assisted living facility? I’d guess those sit empty longer than a normal house would.
According to the census in 2010 of the 31,131 vacant units in San Francisco
17,354 were for rent or sale or rented or sold but not occupied. 5,564 were for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use. Leaving 8,213 vacant for other reasons. A lot of those I would say were renovations. I’ve seen units vacant for months while it looked like seismic upgrades were taking place.
There was also a 2-unit building that was left vacant while the legal fight went on if the owner could demolish it and put up a 6 unit building.
Our stupid housing policies aimed at increasing rather than decreasing the costs of a basic necessity don’t help at the margin, but full on homelessness (i.e. not the deceptive public policy term) is almost entirely a result of society that refuses to pick any of the not-great options for dealing with temporarily or permanently broken people. This is what not making a decision looks like.
Let’s hold a fantasy election. This is in the US, assuming a substantially different election system, using proportional representation. This could be at either the state or federal level. There are six parties running in the election:
Libertarian
Great America
Christian Democrat
Green
Social Democrat
Working Americans
For more information about them, follow this link.
Which party would you vote for?
A pox on all your houses! I guess I vote for the social democrats, but I hate them all.
Interesting. What is it you want that none of these fictional political parties really support?
One thing that none of them address is immigration.
In the era where “Great America” dominated our policy most (1900s through the 60s), immigration was basically zeroed out, so I assume it would be here as well, but you didn’t specify.
I would s/1900s/1920s if you’re talking about an age of restricted immigration; the National Origins Act didn’t pass till 1924, though it had an “emergency” predecessor in 1921, and 1900-1920 were pretty clearly unrestricted by today’s standards.
As a side note, I know this in part because my grandfather immigrated in 1920. Had he been denied entry, he might very well have been murdered by the Nazis, as were a good many of his relatives denied entry later. I feel compelled to bring this up every time someone waxes nostalgic about mid 20th C immigration restrictions: if you really favor reinstating them you should bite that bullet, and be willing to face the (IMO justified) opprobrium for doing so.
Have you ever considered that the reason people didn’t want more Jewish immigration was because they didn’t want their grandchildren to have to deal with more of an ethnic group with a grudge against them? You could counter-argue that the grudge comes down to those very restrictions. But if there were 200,000 Jewish immigrants during the 1930s rather than 100,000, it would still be there. And if it were 1,000,000, too, even with the Great Depression making more competition for jobs look decidedly unwelcome. And even if it were all 6,000,000, there’d be a grudge about something else. Notice that while many ethnic groups have experienced massacre, they don’t tend to blame it on other countries’ immigration restrictions. The chosen-people have a way of looking at the world, a way they want it to be oriented that they see as natural and they find it honestly puzzling the rest of the world doesn’t usually agree. Should Israel be blamed when ISIS was massacring the Yezidis? The thought never occurs to them.
The excuse, whenever Israel is brought up, is that those making the arguments are American Jews, and that whatever Israeli Jews do is not their concern. You never hear these same people saying “Trump is horrid, but nationalism in France or Britain, well, that’s their business, I have no opinion!” No. While some American Jews are far-Left anti-Zionists, the mainstream Jewish Left and the Jewish neocons in America are solidly behind Israel as a ethnically-based state, disagreeing only on its size, while seeking to enforce multiculturalism in all states inhabited by non-Jewish whites.
@salvorhardin
I’m willing to bite that bullet and should face no opprobrium. People have been killing each other for centuries, and we can’t take in the losers of every power struggle across the world.
The United States spent billions of dollars and the blood of millions of our best to save Jews in World War II. We have continued to support and defend Jews here and in their homeland since then.
Edit: Last paragraph wasn’t up to my standards. You may politely leave my country if you don’t believe it did enough.
@salvorhardin says: “….my grandfather immigrated in 1920. Had he been denied entry, he might very well have been murdered by the Nazis…”
According to my mom it’s a similar story for my born in what is now Poland great-grandmother who emigrated to California in 1915 from what was then part of the Hapsburg Empire.
FWLIW, I’m pro some immigration of refugees and spouses, but I’m much more disinclined for “skills based” and “workers for jobs Americans won’t take” immigration.
@everyone,
Wow that got testy fast (and I feel very “ninja’d”)!
For what it’s very much worth, Americans like Jews a lot (followed by Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons, with atheists and Muslims the least popular), and while they’re lots of Catholics and Protestants (so presumably folks favoring their own faiths as popular) they’re not a lot of Jews, so they’re popular with Americans who don’t share their faith.
IIRC there was more worry about Romney’s Mormonism hurting his election prospects in 2012 (he actually won a higher percentage of the popular vote than Trump did, so I don’t really think he was hurt) than I’ve seen worry about Bloomberg or Sanders (or Lieberman in 2004) chances being hurt for being Jewish.
It wasn’t anti-semitism that kept the refugees out, the U.S.A. was actively deporting non-citizens in the 1930’s (mostly Mexican) in a time of worldwide depression (the absence of foreign born farm workers is why handbills promising work in California led to the mass “Okie” migration of refugees from the Dust Bowl that soon led to millions of Americans in California who “…worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes slept on the ground in the light of your moon on the edge of the city you’ll see us and then we come with the dust and we go with the wind…” until the buildup for the war brought work in the munitions factories and shipyards, like my Kansas born grandfather who went from the fields to a job at Douglas Aircraft and married the California born daughter of German speaking immigrants, and then Mexicans were brought back to work in the fields).
From the 1790 letter from the then new Presidident George Washington to Moses Seixas, Warden of Congregation Yeshuat Israel in Newport, Rhode Island: “Gentlemen:
While I received with much satisfaction your address replete with expressions of esteem, I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you that I shall always retain grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced on my visit to Newport from all classes of citizens.
The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security.
If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and happy people.
The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my administration and fervent wishes for my felicity.
May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.
May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.
G. Washington”
to at the very least till 1953, when President Harry S. Truman went to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York his army comrade and former business partner good Eddie Jacobson, who introduced Truman to the assembled theologians with: “This is the man who helped create the State of Israel.“ to which Truman replied: “What do you mean, ‘helped to create’? I am Cyrus. I am Cyrus!” the U.S.A. has been welcoming to Jews, the U.S.A. is second only in numbers of, and has almost as many Jews as Israel does (France is a far distant third in total number).
@Plumber: Repeating “I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!” is now my favorite Harry Truman anecdote. (Not counting fictional ones like the time he smashed his way out of a crate in Roswell, NM to interrogate an alien.)
So just to be sure: telling American citizens they should get out of the country they were born in if they agree with America’s historical policies is true, necessary, and kind?
@EchoChaos
That last line is beneath you and a very ugly look. It’s also downright nonsensical when addressed to a second-generation native-born American.
FWIW, thank you for the edit. I understand firsthand the difficulty of restraining one’s rhetoric on this issue, and so don’t blame others for falling short at that restraint; I had to edit my own comment for politeness quite a bit and was just lucky to manage to do so before hitting post.
To Walking Droplet’s point I am, though not left-wing, one of those consistent Jewish anti-Zionists, and believe that no ethnic group under any circumstances can ever have any such thing as a right to a state of its own. Indeed more strongly, as I think I’ve said before, I believe that there is no such thing as “my country” or “your country”– there is only the earth, on which all human beings have an equal right to live where they please. So “we can’t take them in” makes no sense because there is no morally meaningful distinction between “us” and “them,” between the “native” born and not. As David Friedman semi-famously said of his libertarian beliefs, this seems natural and obvious to me but I’m well aware that most others find it very peculiar.
I just realized that EchoChaos had already edited in an apology (or at least a disclaimer) for the comment I chastised him for. That makes the second time in this thread I’ve hastily misunderstood him, so I apologize.
FWIW it is also amusing when people take my grandfather’s immigrant story as indicative of my overall degree of American “nativeness”. In fact another branch of my family goes back literally to the Mayflower; my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was executed for witchcraft at Salem in 1692. One of the things I do appreciate about American history is that the frequency of, and tolerance for, miscegenation between “old stock” and recent immigrants has typically been unusually high.
Good lord, if what @EchoChaos left in is a disclaimer, I can’t imagine what was in there before.
Competence. The existing political order continues to pursue policies with known deficiencies, and this set of parties includes none with any commitment to avoid the problems, just a regrouping of the problems into different packages. But in slightly more detail, I’m a bleeding heart libertarian, and for me the libertarians are too heartless and nobody else is paying any attention to the things the libertarians are right about. So what I’d probably really do is alternate between voting for the social democrats and the libertarians depending on which set of ideas seemed more lacking in government at the moment.
I also care about environmental issues, but I would never vote green as I don’t trust anything like contemporary environmentalists to actually address environmental issues that matter in any effective way.
+1
Me too. Going purely from the descriptions and trying to avoid mapping onto existing social dynamics, I probably lean green, voting between green, socdem, and libertarian, but I share this skepticism about the real world.
Ah but the beauty of PR is that you can vote for more than one party! So rank them in “least to most detested” order and figure out which is the devil you know 🙂
So Social Democrats No. 1, then who for Nos. 2-6?
Swing voter between Great America and Social Democrat.
I’d vote for the Great America party candidate when they’re more focused on expanding international prestige and less focused on destroying regulation.
I’d probably be more inclided to vote down the ticket of social democrats, but in your description you kind of explicitly made them the social-justice party (IMO that’d be the greens) so it’s a bit less appealing.
It depends on what you mean by social justice. If you mean getting a better deal for the poor, that’s really the main issue for Working Americans. The Social Democrats and Christian Democrats worry about it too, but not quite as much, and their favored solutions are quite different. The Libertarians, Great America, and Greens tend to focus on other issues.
Probably Christian Democrat.
An interesting question is what coalitions would form. (I’m sure this is mostly down to how well the parties perform, but humor me.) I could see Christian Democrats in a coalition with either GA (Great Americans) or SDs (Social Democrats), but the latter might be an uncomfortable alliance. SDs and Greens might get along. I’m not sure who libertarians would get along with; GAs, maybe?
From probably would most favor to probably would least favor:
1) Social Democrat (if the AF of L-CIO decides what is meant by “social justice”, if it’s co-eds and their boyfriends instead than probably not)
2) Christian Democrat
3) Working Americans
4) Green
5) Great America
6) Libertarian
Plumber, we must be psychic twins or something, because that’s almost the same order as I’d vote 😀
1. Christian Democrats
2. Social Democrats
3. Working Americans
4. Greens
5. Great America
6. Libertarian
That’s the advantage of PR, you can chop and change depending on your priorities. So say you like the Social Democrat policy plank, but don’t want them to go too far on expanding government and spending from the public purse. Vote in your Social Democrat candidate as No. 1, but give your No. 2 to the Libertarian or Great American candidate. That gives you a strong opposition in government who will put a hobble on the SDs being able to simply sweep all before them. You don’t want the Libertarians to have it all their own way in opposition, though? Then pick Greens or Christian Democrats as No. 3! End result for the (say) four seats in your constituency would then be:
No. 1 – Social Democrat (if they make the quota, they’re elected, and if enough people pick them as No. 1/2 they’ll form the next government or majority thereof)
No. 2 – Libertarian (ditto on quota)
No. 3 – Greens
No. 4 – Great America or Christian Democrat, according to which way you lean
All of these go to the state/federal government, and gives you a spread of “centrist-right, look after the struggling and the environment, but protect civil liberties and don’t enlarge government” from the various policies each party endorses.
@Deiseach >
Well we do seem to have some similar tastes…
…but twins?
I don’t know…
…my favorite modern “folk” so is Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”
(speaking of a song with the name “Molly” in its lyrics here’s “Rocco Blues” a 1940 American version of an Irish song. Yep, it’s a different “Molly Malone” with some lyrics from as far back as 1791).
My two favorite decades for films are the 1940’s (His Girl Friday – 1940, The Grapes of Wrath – 1940, The Great Dictator – 1940, The Sea Hawk – 1940, The Thief of Bagdad – 1940, The Maltese Falcon– 1941, Casablanca – 1942, Double Indemnity – 1944, It’s a Wonderful Life – 1946, The Third Man – 1949) and the 1980’s (Dragonslayer– 1981, Excalibur – 1981, Raiders of the Lost Ark – 1981, The Road Warrior – 1981, Time Bandits – 1981, Blade Runner – 1982, The Wrath of Khan – 1982, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension – 1984, Conan the Destroyer – 1984, This is Spinal Tap – 1984, Raising Arizona – 1987, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen– 1988, The Princess Bride – 1988)
Do our tastes converge that far?
It is indeed!
Unfortunately (for me) in the U.S.A. it’s very difficult to vote for both a Party that supports the “welfare state”, wants “an extensive network of social support mechanisms, enabling people to live good lives from cradle to grave”, and also supports “traditional values” and “the breadwinner/homemaker household as a desirable social norm, and try to focus on supporting such couples through social policy”, is “more suspicious of disruptive behavior and more focused on ordinary people” (though to be clear I’m fine if both the husband and wife work part time, and both care for their children, but I do want the family wage back for more people and the “Two Income Trap” induced housing price inflation limited, and more to feel secure enough to marry and have children because I think most are happier that way).
That actually does sound really cool!
Definitely Great America.
Great America is probably the closest to mine if they’re strict on immigration.
If we are talking about illegal immigration, the Libertarians want an open border or something close to it. Great America tends to turn a blind eye to it. A workforce of laborers who don’t ask for much and can be tossed out if they cause trouble sounds pretty good to GA. The Social Democrats go back and forth. They want to be compassionate and accepting, but having more poor people show up tends to mess up their orderly Great Society plans. Christian Democrats tend to be against illegal immigration as a matter of principle, given their emphasis on an orderly society where people follow the rules. Working Americans absolutely hate illegal immigrants because the illegals tend to compete with their constituents for work and push down their wages. Greens don’t really have any consistent positions on the matter.
Really? Eisenhower seems the most Great American President in the history of ever and Operation Wetback was his bag, baby.
Whereas the Christian Democrats (e.g. Reagan and Bush II) have always been more willing to amnesty our Christian Mexican brethren.
Your descriptions almost completely ignore the globalist/localist divide, which is the main divide in current society. It matters whether the Social Democrats are those from before the Third Way or after, for example.
Secondly, are we merely judging goals or also execution? I support a way, way larger part of what the Greens say they want than what their policies will actually achieve, in my opinion. If competency or politics and/or the bureaucracy is a major issue, ideology is less relevant.
Finally, it also matters what situation we are in. I don’t believe that any ideology, taken to its extreme, actually results in a livable society. I favor a small government party if society is over-regulated and/or the government tries to do too much, while I support the opposite if society is under-regulated and the government does too little.
Depends on the election system. If there’s some sort of transferrable or ranked-choice voting, Libertarian followed by Great America. Otherwise, Great America, because if the King of England were an elected position, the Libertarians would manage to lose to John Lackland.
Interesting question.
If there was any chance that the Christian Democrats would win, I’d vote for whoever I thought would beat them. I don’t want to live in a theocracy, and I expect their every success would be followed by farther radicalization, until church attendance became mandatory etc. and we were all living in a religious dystopia.
Of the others, I’d probably go with the Social Democrats, but I’d be tempted by the Greens. Most likely I’d pay attention to what specific candidates had actually done in their past. (No point believing what they claim they would do in their future; these are politicians :-()
I’m also somewhat tempted by the “Working Americans” – seeing them linked primarily to anger is off-putting – if they were linked instead to wanting real, substantial change and opportunities for ordinary working folks, they’d be on my list – much of what they are described as favouring seems good to me.
FWIW, I’m reacting in part to the party names. A party with similar values to those listed for the Christian Democrats, not explicitly linked to Christianity or “religious values”, wouldn’t draw my ire in the same way. (But their insistence on breadwinner-homemaker families means they have absolutely nothing to offer me, except for taxes to pay for those they do support, who don’t automatically get my support based on “there but for the grace of God go I”, unlike people who are poor or otherwise disadvantaged.)
Yeah, the Working Americans are pretty much my #2 party and I don’t think they are entirely defined by anger.
@DinoNerd
European Christian-democratic tradition is very centrist and not very theocratic. Even the extreme outliers (Orban) have not made church attendance mandatory or such. I see less reason to be worried that they radicalize than a Green party, who typically have more radical supporters and politicians.
Also, it’s a single vote in a single election, you are not giving the party you vote for a supermajority nor are you required to keep voting for them if they radicalize.
Interestingly, that focus is partially beneficial to singles, as it benefits single earner without a partner as well, not just single earners with a non-working partner (and conversely, the parties that want to promote women working often harm singles).
As far as breadwinner-homemaker focus being beneficial to singles, it depends on how its implemented. In some jurisdictions, a couple who both work and earn similar amounts would save money on their taxes by getting divorced. That’s certainly beneficial to singles, but probably not in quite the way you mean.
In general, of course, tax law is full of unintended consequences, as people figure out how to reduce their total tax burden within the law.
I don’t know how this hypothetical party would implement their support of breadwinner + homemaker families. But unless you assume they have bottomless resources, anything they give to those people isn’t being given to someone else.
But basically, there’s no reason at all for an unmarried person to pay the same tax rate they’d pay if married to a non-working spouse – and that’s not how the system would be set up if the goal were to provide advantages to couples, particularly single income couples.
So Bachelor(ette) X pays $40K tax on their $100K income. If they marry Bachelor(ette) Y, with no income, the couple pays $20K tax on their $100K income. But if they marry Z, who also makes $100K, the couple pays $80K on their $200K income – or worse, depending on how much you want to discourage dual income couples.
Dutch law is in large part centered around cohabitation, so divorce doesn’t change that much, unless they live apart, which means having way higher housing costs.
I looked at the calculations of many Dutch parties (they can submit their plans for an economic calculation of the effects*) and the programs for the very conservative Christian party was very beneficial to single earners in a two person household and poor for singles and double earners. The more progressive party is good for single earners in a two person household, less good for double earners and worst for singles.
So it seems the claim from their programs was a lie.
* With the caveat that the model that is used is contested, especially in how it ignores effects that are hard to quantify.
Doesn’t Great America get sued for trademark infringement?
I don’t really think I fit with any of these. I like the sound of Great America, but I’m pretty sure in practice that’s just neoconservatism. “Standing tall on the world stage” is a big red flag for me.
I would probably take “Working Americans” if you would recast them as something besides angry losers. How about something like:
Working Americans is the party of economic nationalism. They favor trade regulation, tariffs, and protectionist policies that seek to strike a balance between the interests of labor and capital. Immigration policies are strict, and tailored to the national interest. Illegal immigration is right out, and the border tightly controlled. A strong military is required to secure our liberty, but does not seek adventures abroad. Taxes are modest and provide a basic public safety net. Also punch and pie.
I just don’t think it’s fair to have a bunch of parties with aspirational ideals and then call the “Working Americans” a bunch of angry losers.
Interesting. I read Great America as Dwight Eisenhower, famously the only President in the 20th Century not to send our boys overseas to die.
Neocons are Social Democrats who want global power.
I agree that Working Americans is my second party and calling them losers is unfair.
What else does “standing tall on the world stage” mean? None of the rest of these parties even mention foreign policy, and there’s got to be some place for the hawks.
The world will comply with our peaceful ideology… BY FORCE!
I read it as the party of Hawks / American interventionists. I think these parties might just be a prism – we’re all seeing what we want to.
@Conrad Honcho,
“Working Americans” sounds like a mix of Sanders and Trump stated agendas in 2015 (less so in 2020), controlled borders and redistribution.
The way @johan_larson described “Working Americans” (despite its name) it sounded like just redistribution without make-work/public-works, and my problem is with “Basic Income” without “Basic Jobs”, there already was “Relief”, the WPA was for an option for dignity and staying in practice, as WPA head Harry Hopkins said: ”Give a man a dole and you save his body and destroy his spirit. Give him a job and you save both body and spirit“.
Pretty much. I should have also put in something about “strong emphasis on public works.” Our bridges and dams are a national disgrace.
If make-work is only done during recessions, it’s not redistributing outside them.
If it’s done permanently, it’d be a massive waste of resources. Economic progress is all about doing more with less labor.
1. Give a man a fish and he’s fed for a day.
2. Teach a man to fish and he’s fed for a lifetime.
3. Teach a man to doddle around and feel like he’s fishing while someone else provides the actual fish, and the whole society winds up much poorer.
I’m not interested in make-work, I’m interested in actual work. Bridges, dams, roads.
Being aware that your job is a bullshit job can be quite spirit-destroying.
The total absence of consumers is striking. I care much much less about how the pie is divided between Ford stockholders and workers than the price of the car.
Or I guess to put it a different way, those of us that are workers but have skills relevant to the contemporary economy are not similarly situated to workers that do not.
Cost to consumers never seems to be a problem when people advocate market interference that helps them or accomplishes they goals they desire. Minimum wage, labor and environmental regulations, professional licensing, all increase the cost of goods and services to consumers, but that’s always a trifling detail to the advocates of such things. Same thing with tax increases for programs they like (back when anyone cared about balanced budgets). It’s only when their own ox is being gored that everybody transforms into the reincarnation of Adam Smith.
The only person on SSC I will accept this as a valid argument from is David Friedman, because he’ll argue against labor regulations after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire disaster. For everyone else, we’ve already accepted market manipulations that increase cost to consumers/taxpayers as “just a price we have to pay for things we value” and all we’re arguing about is which things we value.
That’s fine but it leads directly to the conclusion that what you and the other “Working Americans” voters care about is *some* US workers (or would be workers).
Yes, I care about the workers that are currently getting shafted en masse. If at some point in the future they are no longer getting shafted en masse, and someone else is, I will rethink my position. It’s pragmatic, not ideological.
I don’t see anyone being shafted. Some people have valuable skills and so other people are willing to pay a lot for their labor. Many don’t. If they have been shafted it’s by god or the universe. I don’t see how you draw a line between an unemployed steel worker and a guy born moderately retarded. Does the latter deserve a good job down at the plant too?
I don’t know enough about the inner workings of auto plants to know what our retarded friend could do safely, but sure. Stock shelves at the cafeteria maybe? The Downs Syndrome guys at my grocery store are wonderfully nice and do a great job.
I know no one “deserves” anything but starvation in the desert unless they can eek out an existence by their own two hands, but for some reason people decided the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory didn’t “deserve” to die horribly because they couldn’t leverage the power of the marketplace or whatever to get a job at a place with fire escapes. And so the government instituted basic safeguards so they could both earn a living and not die horribly. Same for environmental regulations. Businesses figured they could go to Asia where life is cheap and set up shop there. But they still want access to the market where people decided safety and the environment were slightly more important than cheap stuff. That’s going to be a “nope” from me.
If you’re willing to bite the bullet like Friedman and say no, you don’t get the worker protections, you don’t get the environmental protections, then fine, we can have a discussion about values. Otherwise, it seems like people just want to give lip service about workers and the environment but then completely skip all the sacrifice those concerns entail so they can still get their cheap stuff. And honestly the sacrifices aren’t that great. We’re mainly talking corporate profit margins here, with minimal increases in prices to consumers.
I want one of those “Yes.” memes where the crying guy on the left side is saying “so if the government is going to mandate businesses must make products while observing labor and environmental regulations it can mandate I may only buy products observing those same regulations too?!?!” and the strong-chinned guy on the right says “Yes.”
Friedman’s honest about these trade-offs. For everybody else, it seems like they’ve set up a system where they get the feel-good morality of “caring” about workers and the environment…while not actually protecting workers and the environment and everyone loses financial except themselves.
I guess I’m pretty surprised. If you think everyone that’s willing to show up and work hard deserves a good paying, self actualizing job—I’ll say the same thing to you I say to my friends on the economic far left: your heart is in the right place but it’s not going to work and the unintended consequences are going to be bad.
I don’t think stocking shelves at the auto factory, or bagging groceries should necessarily be “good” paying, and definitely not self-actualizing, no. I would say maybe 4% of jobs are self-actualizing, so that’s definitely not I thing I have any illusions about as a prescriptive standard.
What I am saying is society decided, by vote, to protect workers and the environment. Knowing full well this would increase the price of labor, since employers would have to pay not only salaries but the extra costs for training/safety/cleanliness/etc. But then gave businesses an easy work-around with off-shoring. And then society has the audacity to tell the workers it’s their fault they can’t get a job when society’s own rules prevent then from selling their labor as cheaply as foreigners.
Workers: “We will sell our labor for $10/hour with no safety regulations.”
Society: “Unconscionable! Businesses must spend an extra $5/hour for your labor on safety and the environment, so they may not buy your labor for any less than $15/hour. We are good people for imposing this rule.”
Business: “Yeah, we’re just going to head over to China and buy that labor for $10/hour.”
Workers: “Um, we can’t get jobs now and are dying of despair because we legally cannot sell our labor as cheaply as the Chinese.”
Society: “Well I guess that’s your fault, that you don’t ‘have skills relevant to the contemporary economy.'”
That’s your quote there, brad. The only reason they don’t have “skills relevant to the contemporary economy” is because you decided what the “contemporary economy” shall be. Pick a bullet to bite. Either let them sell their labor as cheaply as the Chinese, without the protections, or force consumers to live by the same standards they voted to force businesses to live by. I think the latter is preferable, because I don’t think anybody wants Americans laboring under the same conditions as the Chinese (except David).
+1 to Conrad Honcho for being a proper social-democrat on this issue, rather than one of the many hypocritical ones.
@Conad Honcho
How do square:
with
Which is it? Just want a chance to race to the bottom or prideful instance on “manly” work at high pay?
They want good jobs, like factory jobs, which pay well. The only reason those jobs are cheaper to do in China is because of rules the government made. The Chinese are not better workers or harder workers or anything like that, they’re just cheaper because of government rules. So the workers are voting for people to change the rules.
Those jobs don’t pay what Americans would consider well in China, in spite of no safety or environmental regulations.
The Chinese are willing to do it for less. The US workers want us to ban their competition.
You’re smuggling this assertion in there and it’s not accurate. Most demands for increased safety rules and regulations come from the workers/organizations representing the workers or as a result of lawsuits following injured workers that are costly enough to motivate the company to change its safety practices.
Increase in minimum wage, increase in safety protections – all those things were reforms spearheaded by the workers.
“They want good jobs, like factory jobs, which pay well. The only reason those jobs are cheaper to do in China is because of rules the government made.”
I’d like to see a case for this made. I don’t doubt regulatory differences having a >0 effect but has anyone gone to the trouble to quantify, do a bit of attribution analysis? How much of it is higher wages vs regulations vs currency issues.
“I don’t see anyone being shafted.” The counterargument is that the existing state of affairs is to a large extent the result of clear, optional and conscious policy decisions which can [and should] be undone, and the effects on consumer goods prices would not be dramatic enough to render such changes negative on net.
Now I don’t know just *how* true the counterargument is. My guess is that the US dollar is overvalued relative to the value of US exports, and manufacturing would be more competitive (and income inequality less pronounced) if the FIRE sector was less important. I just don’t know whether this effect would be minor or decisive. I also don’t know how heavily the US would have to deregulate or how aggressively it would have to engage in industrial policy to make manufacturing competitive with a place like China.
If it made consumer goods as expensive as the big three education, housing, health care, I’d definitely say it’s not worth it, even and especially for the working class.
Before we get into the discussion about values, we first would need a discussion about consequences. Does government setting safety standards result, on net, in fewer accidents? If so, at what cost, and is that more or less than the workers in question would be willing to pay for the additional safety?
And the question is not “are there any safety standards that are desirable” but “are the safety standards that will be set by a government with the power to set them” desirable.
You write about Chinese workers being willing to work for less than American workers. In what units? Chinese workers are not being paid in dollars. To conclude that they are being paid less, and why, you first have to figure out why the exchange rate between our currency and theirs is what it is.
Once you do that, you realize that the correct description of the situation is not:
“Chinese workers are willing to make widgets for less than American workers are.”
It’s something more like:
“American farmers are willing to make widgets by growing grain, shipping it to China, and getting widgets in exchange, for less than American workers are willing to make widgets for.”
At which point you realize that neither your explanation nor most of the other popular ones, all based on 18th century understanding of the economics of trade, are relevant to the issue.
Once you bring American farmers into it, of course, you bring a whole raft of other government interventions as well.
It’s not like nothing grows in China.
But *does* america pay for its imports with grain? or does it pay for them with the sale of real estate and financial assets? If both, to what degree? Are there secondary consequences to having a trade relationship like that?
Nothing? of course not. Anywhere near enough to feed their population? Probably not.
China is running short on arable farmland so far they’ve tried to close the gap (other than by importing, I mean) by using a shit-tonne of fertilizer, but they don’t have a great potash supply and again, haven’t been able to close the gap.
I realize I’m probably nitpicking here, but China is currently dependent on food imports. They could, maybe, produce enough calories on their own to prevent starvation, but they couldn’t produce enough non-staples to keep a growing upper and middle class population happy.
(ETA: Ninja’d by Aftagley)
Yes, but…
Not literally nothing, but China does have much less arable land per capita than the US. It would most likely still be a net grain importer without US farming subsidies.
No, no, you’re right, obviously due to the different population densities there’s going to be differing economics of food production.
Not entirely.
The trade deficit means we are importing capital — that’s where the dollars foreigners get when we import goods go if they don’t go to buy goods for us, unless the foreigners are literally accumulating piles of dollars. So part of what we are “exporting” is claims against U.S. assets.
But that isn’t happening because producing is hard in the U.S. and easy in China, which seems to be what Conrad imagines is happening. That not just isn’t true, it isn’t even meaningful, since Chinese costs are in their currency, U.S. costs in ours. The exchange rate, like any price, goes to the value at which quantity supplied equals quantity demanded, which means the rate at which foreigners want to buy as many dollars as Americans want to sell. They want to buy dollars either to buy U.S. goods with or to buy U.S. assets with.
One reason it is happening is because the U.S. is running a very large budget deficit — larger under Trump than under his predecessor — and funding it in part with foreign capital.
@david
Isn’t also the way China pegs its currency a reason? Their costs keep appearing low because the Yuan is cheap compared to the Dollar than if they just let the currencies float.
Keeping the Yuan cheap means keeping the dollar expensive, so to do that they have to buy dollars. If they use them to buy government securities, which unlike currency produce interest, that’s the same capital flow as before.
Alternatively they could print Yuan and sell them, but that drives up Yuan prices in China so doesn’t keep Chinese goods cheap.
How else do they fix the exchange rate?
Swing voter between Libertarian and Green.
That is one really, really long swing. I’m fascinated. Could you elaborate?
That’s actually not so big of a swing. The Dutch Green party has a pretty strong libertarian element.
Left-liberarianism exists anyway, where the libertarianism typically involves lots of social freedoms and lots of redistribution, where UBI (or other low rule forms of) redistribution are favored.
Are there any significant Dutch political parties which have taken on facilitating firearms ownership vis a vis self-defense?
Nope.
@Garrett
The far right parties are most supportive of civilians using weapons for self-defense, with Wilders (PVV) being in favor of legalizing pepper spray (which is legal in Germany, but not in The Netherlands).
Forum for Democracy’s (FvD) number 2 has argued in favor of defending yourself with a gun from burglars and owns a gun. Another of their politicians, was very outspoken about making gun ownership much easier, although the leadership of the party didn’t adopt that view. This politician left due to his belief in race differences in IQ (note that he is black).
Of course, this is in the context of a society that is rather hostile to weapons in civilian hands.
Not so long. Libertarianism aims to focus government on the task of restraining people from harming each other, so that they can be free to realize their potential in their own way through their own choices. These days, harming our inescapably-shared environment is one of the main ways people harm each other (see e.g. the research on the cognitive and other health harms of air pollution).
Libertarian. I usually vote that way anyway.
@john_larson
What green proposal would not require big government? I know that the definitions don’t necessarily map to real-life examples, but I’m having a failure of imagination here.
Conceptually, you could make an argument that current big government protection is responsible for many of our environmental ills. That in a truly free market, individuals would be much more empowered to successfully sue polluters for damages, for instance.
At its core, this is the the logic that is ultimately behind a lot of environmentalist calls for greater regulation. That currently, polluting companies are imposing negative externalities on the rest of us that they aren’t properly charged for. Their proposal to combat this is, in fact, big government, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.
(Although, I’ve said many times before that the fact that the only proposed/acceptable solutions to every so-called “environmental” issue is, in fact, big government, sure seems like a remarkable coincidence!)
Can and have.
This is where I am at as well. I don’t see any minarchist greens. Which is pretty much what you’d have to be for those proposals. And the definition john for the greens, even though it says they’re not fans of big government, definitely does not encompass minarchists. We’re not fans of medium government.
I’m pretty free-market-ish, but I have a difficult time imagining a tortious response to wide-ranging air pollution working. How is that supposed to work, in like the best case? Literally everyone in a region forms a class and sues, what… every individual polluter for extremely difficult to quantify damages?
And if that happens, then what? A judge and to some extent a jury applies essentially… a tax? Or is it a one-time payment to an ongoing externality? Do we have strong reason to believe that judges and juries are going to be much better at applying the “right” tax than legislators are? Don’t we need ongoing inspections and transparency about levels of pollution here?
What is the ongoing solution? How do I, a polluter who is doing net social good, handle the externality of my pollution? I can’t enter into a contract with EVERYONE IN THE REGION that pays them to indemnify me for harms they suffer. And if I could, there would be a real collective action problem here.
@sandoratthezoo
Much better thinkers than I have been hashing this out for a century. But it seems that even now something similar is occurring:
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — U.S. Steel Corp. has agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle a 2017 class-action lawsuit that accused the steelmaker of negligence in allowing air pollution emissions from its Clairton Coke Works.
The proposed agreement was filed in Allegheny County Court and a hearing on it was scheduled for Feb. 24.
Under the settlement agreement, U.S. Steel must spend at least $6.5 million to reduce soot emissions and noxious odors from the the Clairton coke-making facility, on the Monongahela River about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Pittsburgh.
The remaining $2 million would go to area residents and their lawyers in the case.
The problem with things like this is that in many cases the government specifically shields large companies from being sued this way.
Such as the oil spill liability cap.
Smaller government won’t be perfect. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sane person argue that big government is.
@rumham
I don’t think the question is, “could there be some circumstances under which tort law could be used when pollution happens.” The question is whether such a system could be a full-scale replacement for other forms of externality pricing and, if it could, what causes that to work better than the existing ones.
@sandoraatthezoo
I don’t think it is either. Nor is it the question(s) I answered.
You asked specifically about air pollution, presumably because you realize that other types of pollution are much easier to litigate absent government interference. So I gave you that exact example. Which happens to answer every question in that block.
Also answered with that case.
Yes, as I stated, it is the government who is limiting liability for polluters.
Yes. It can easily be done privately. Ever heard of Underwriters Laboratory? (sorry, missed this one in the flood of questions)
Pay damages. I would think that would be self-evident.
Now, on to the new questions.
Yes. Given that it works now as long as the government doesn’t abuse it’s power to help polluters.
No government interference on behalf of the polluters.
I see how my initial comment was confusing, but to be clear, I meant “I have a difficult time imagining a tortious response to wide-ranging air pollution working [as the sole method of response].”
I think you’re trying to wave a magic wand, here. Outside of magical wands, in anarcho-capitalist land, we still have fallible human beings and incentives, and it’s not at all clear to me that pushing those incentives and human beings through a court system makes them work any better than through a legislative system. Particularly, it is still super unclear to me how this is supposed to scale. If I live in, say, a city, where literally thousands of parties are polluting the air, and, absent violent revolution, will continue to pollute the air to infinity, how is this actually supposed to work? Do I just sue every industrial party in a hundred miles once a year? How do we prevent lawyers from essentially eating all of this? Is one judge and one jury (per… time period X) actually better at figuring out this kind of complex situation than a legislature with staff, or does this become a weird set of like repeated tiny dictators? How does sending the fact-finding through a private party actually help align incentives better?
There are environmental cases where I think a tortious answer is the correct one. This seems like it is Not That. The fact that some people have at some point in the past used tort law to get some kind of damages from air polluters (and, like… how good was that verdict? Did it in fact make sense?) doesn’t really change this situation.
@sandoraatthezoo
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s Friday night, and regardless, one fisking per day is my limit. I will return later and attempt to answer these next 20 or so questions. As I have said, these arguments have been going on with much smarter people than myself for over a hundred years. When I return, I will attempt to provide some resources for you.
@sandoratthezoo
Well, for starters, minarchist. If we go anarcho-capitalist, there are even more problems with implementation. But in this we are in agreement. People are corrupt. If I run all of US environmental policy, there is now a single point of failure.
Once a year? Do you think there is no deterrent effect? In the case I linked, this occured:
“Under the settlement agreement, U.S. Steel must spend at least $6.5 million to reduce soot emissions and noxious odors from the the Clairton coke-making facility, on the Monongahela River about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Pittsburgh.
The remaining $2 million would go to area residents and their lawyers in the case.”
So no. Generally, companies that have to shell out that kind of green view it as a bad thing that they don’t want to repeat.
You think that there would be no competition in this space?
Appears so in the case of U.S Steel Corp.
Better results. Who does the general public trust more? There’s a reason.
It should. Your some of your earlier questions indicate that you couldn’t even conceive of it occurring once.
Remember this question?
This should open up some space for you to contemplate. This is a good place to start.
Can a carbon tax be levied without big government? I mean, without much more big government than normal taxation, anyway.
If by “carbon tax” you mean “some sort of system wherein polluters are required to compensate those whom their pollution has damaged” then yes, sure, that could be done privately (although implementation would assuredly be complicated).
The moral argument behind a carbon tax is just that. Where it goes wrong is by assuming “the government” is a legitimate proxy for the group “those whom their pollution has damaged.”
Government has to be big enough to collect the tax and disburse the revenue back to the people, but that’s not remotely a problem anywhere close to our government’s size.
Can a carbon tax be levied without big government?
It can be levied by any government capable of levying any tax at all. Unless you’re implicitly adding “with 99.9+% completeness” or something like that, which is neither necessary nor fair. Mostly, you’re just doing an inventory of oil wells, coal mines, natural gas fields, totaling up how much was produced and then charging $20/ton C or whatever.
If necessary, you can do the thing where it’s illegal to sell fuel that’s less than 0.1% isotopically pure taxonium by weight, where the government produces taxonium, sells it for $20/kg, and periodically samples what’s for sale at the local gas station, etc. That basically reduces the problem to the equivalent of counterfeit-prevention for currency, which most small governments manage tolerably well.
Prior to the creation of the EPA organizations like sportsmen’s groups were very effective at doing this by suing for the loss of fish in streams due to pollution, so this can work.
But I’m not certain that this is so much a “small government” approach so much as a judicial rather than legislative government approach.
If I have to pick out of that list, I’d hold my nose and vote for the Christian Democrats. Or maybe the Libertarians.
Going through them:
Libertarian:
They focus on the most important of the four threats, government power, but they seem to be agnostic on religious power, and seem to worship capital power. So okay, but not perfect. For popularity, the fourth aspect, they are suspicious.
Great America:
They worship government and popular power. ’nuff said.
Christian Democrats:
At this point I consider religious power the weakest of the four powers, so they are the least dangerous. (Not to say religious power can’t be as dangerous as the others, but they’d have to be in power longer to achieve that.)
Green:
The opposite of the libertarians, they favor increasing religious, popular, and government power, while wanting to crush capital power. Hell no.
Social Democrat:
They favor government and popular power. Popular power is just past it’s peak, so hell no.
Working Americans:
Popular and religious power. Hell no.
Now, to explain. My goal is a balance of the four powers. The four powers being government, religious/belief, popular/popularity, and capital. Government is what all of those want to capture, but government is it’s own interest group (the bureaucracy, or in times past royalty), so it represents the power of that interest group.
Religious/belief is the power of particular belief systems. It doesn’t need to be religion itself, indeed it could be a “scientific” belief, or a political belief; it simply represents the power of a particular entrenched belief, particularly to prevent itself from being challenged.
Popularity is pretty self-explanatory. It is, like religious beliefs, pretty specific to particular groups, and represents the power of a given group to define the social context in which individuals are judged. It is the power of the overton window, in a sense.
Capital is also pretty self-explanatory. It represents the power of entrenched interests to prevent competing institutions from arising or challenging those interests. This is distinct from wealth, and from capitalism; the advantage of the factory owner is, in this view, the capital investment somebody else would need to make in order to compete. (Imagine a town with a single market for a necessary good. There is an amount that market can charge which is greater than equilibrium prices, but which is also less than the amount that would enable a competing market to be a profitable investment for somebody else, given opportunity costs. That is setting aside the ability of the market to undercut any new competitor’s prices enough to make it not worth the investment, again given opportunity costs. This is part of the power of capital.)
None of these groups actually attempt to solve the problem of power, they just prop up one type, or attempt to minimize another.
In theory, I’d be a class traitor and support Working Americans over the Social Democrats — just de-skew the wealth distribution a little, no need to get fancy with elaborate social programs. In practice I’d probably get pwned by Social Democrat messaging and end up supporting something more paternalistic that would end up looking misguided later.
I’d probably also cross over to Libertarian and Green parties occasionally, when there really is a giant salient threat from the state or from the kind of coordination problems the state is supposed to solve.
Likely Christian Democrat, with the occasional vote for Great America and Libertarian when Christian Democrats nominate someone too authoritarian or fundamental.
Great America, so long as they aren’t starting wars. I might feel sympathetic to Christian Democrat, but I’d fear they lack the intelligence and mindset to properly incentivize what they want to incentivize and that they’d use the bully pulpit to promote the idea that bourgeois values and theism are inseparable.
From your description, it sounds like the Greens are a single-issue environmentalist party or at least rather narrowly focused on public health. Is that correct? Can you be pro-life or opposed to socialized healthcare and a Green?
I’m not clear on what policies the Working Americans advocate. Is Bernie Sanders more of a Social Democrat or a Working American?
I don’t like the sound of the Christian Democrats as described, but it would depend a lot on whose interpretation of “right living and religious values” is at stake.
I’m guessing I either end up voting Green or Social Democrat in this system, but I need some more elaborate worldbuilding to be sure.
Great America, but I have sympathy for many of the Social Democrat’s domestic programs. The empire must prevail!
Libertarian, definitely. I’d be unlikely to consider any of the others, although Working Americans seems high-variance, so I might occasionally treat them as my second choice (they could also get so crazy that I’d put them last). Since neither of them is likely to do well, I’d quietly hope for the success of the more libertarian-leaning elements within Great America. Christian Democrats and Social Democrats would probably be last in some order.
But I don’t think the Democrats would disintegrate into that many parties, and I think the environmentalist faction would be fans of big government to an even greater degree than most of the others. More likely, they’d split into the hard-left Socialist Green (also taking some of the Working Families-type people with them) and a center-left/managerial remnant which would keep the Democratic name. They’d prefer to be in coalition with each other, but the Democrats would also consider allying with the Libertarians (when they do unusually well) or forming a grand coalition with Great America.
To no one’s great surprise, Libertarian.
But I’d hope, and maybe tactically vote, for them to share power with Great America for about a generation, because it’s going to take a lot of work to Make The World Safe for Not Having Team America as the World Police. And Great America, if they have to share power with the Libertarians, will probably be tolerable on the domestic front. But we would need to watch out for Americans trying to prove their Greatness by going out of their way to start wars.
I guess I should put my own cards on the table. If I were in the US under this counterfactual, I would probably usually vote Great America. GA is all about the big dreams and dramatic accomplishments that America at its best is capable of.
But I do worry that GA if given free rein would deliver a skewed society, where it’s great to have money, but the life of the working poor is a never ending round of take-it-or-leave-it and the-beatdown. I want better than that, and I think the Social Democrats are the answer. So an occasional vote to the Social Democrats when Great America seems to be getting out of hand.
I could see myself voting Litertarian or Christian Democrat when neither GA nor SD candidates are appealing.
For my top choice, I think I’d switch between Green, Social Democrat, and Working Americans depending on the quality of individual candidates. Greens look good on their chief issue, as long as they’re pro-nuclear and don’t get into stupid stuff like banning straws. Social Democrats look good except for the part about requiring welfare recipients to “get with the program”. I don’t know what that means, but I don’t think I like it. Working Americans would probably be too populist for my taste (anti-immigration and protectionist).
Next up would be Libertarians. Then Christian Democrats, with Great America dead last because it looks like they’re War Party.
I tallied up the votes.
In the SSC version of America, the House of Representatives is elected by proportional representation. Every voter picks one party, and the seats are allocated to party representatives in proportion to the number of votes the party received. Some people mentioned multiple parties; I picked whichever one they mentioned most prominently.
The votes:
Libertarian – 5
Great America – 7
Christian Democrat – 4
Green – 3
Social Democrat – 3
Working Americans – 1
That’s 23 votes total, so the Libertarians plus Great America at 12 votes have a working coalition if they can maintain party discipline. I’m predicting legal weed nation-wide, but an armed intervention somewhere in South America.
I can live with that. Presumably the military intervention will be in Venezuela, which becomes an American protectorate while we mostly screw up trying to rebuild their economy except that the Libertarian charter cities turn out pretty well.
There’s also the option of taking the Panama Canal back, because “America, fuck yeah!”.
While I’d favor an invasion of Puerto Rico, the war hawks might be wise to that one.
A quick look over the response shows that at least 3 GA voters, (myself included) picked the SDs as their second choice. This makes me think any possible coalition with the libertarian party would be ill-advised… they would have to give me some pretty free reign on the international arena before I’d participate in dismantling social security.
Great America I think.
Social Democrat
Is this an AI generated image? It’s the only thing I can think of.
https://twitter.com/davidblattman/status/1230303243835711493
I’d imagine.
This similar image made the rounds a while ago.
I’ve seen this image before online a few times, it is indeed AI-generated
A cautionary tale about blockchain currencies in the news today.
If you’re forward-thinking enough to turn your hard-earned proceeds of drug dealing into Bitcoin, be ultra-careful where you keep your access codes. If, for instance, you get sent to jail (because you’ve been arrested, tried and convicted for said drug dealing) and the contents of the rented house you were living in get dumped by your former landlord, it’s a very bad idea to have the codes to access your €53 million hidden in such a way that they get thrown out with the rubbish.
This account of the tale is even more comic/tragic (depending on how you interpret it). If you’ve lucked out by investing early and see the value of your Bitcoin soar to the point that it’s worth €53 million, take the hint and give up growing weed for sale. You can well afford to live off the profits of your investment! Instead this guy tempted Fate and lost everything.
The kind of person who will gamble enough to “win” 53 million is also the kind of person who will keep gambling and not quit while they’re ahead. If they were smarter, they would have never been involved with crypto or drug dealing in the first place.
If he’d done that, we’d never have heard of him.
I can’t believe the primaries are a week and a half away and I’m still undecided. I’ve even started to consider Sanders, which is something I thought would never happen. If only real life were like a video game where you could just look up everyone’s stats and consult a strategy guide.
I hear you. I may early vote. Is there any chance of any candidates dropping out after NV/SC but before Super Tuesday?
Any is doing a lot of work there, but I could see any of the back three (Warren, Klobechar, Biden) dropping out if they get completely wrecked in both states.
It seems particularly likely that if Biden has a bad showing in South Carolina, he might drop out. Like, if he can’t win or at least come close to winning in a state whose primary is dominated by black voters, I think a lot of people will ask what he can win.
@Loriot,
At my wife’s insistence we already mailed in our ballots for March 3rd (she voted for
Scrooge McDuckBloomberg I voted forthe push up King!Biden, and I’m kinda regretting that California moved it’s primary up from June, sure before we could only decide between the left over candidates, but at least you knew that the had a chance!If the primary in 2016 had been early enough I’d have voted for Jim Webb (along with about two dozen other Democrats), as it was Clinton or Sanders was a limited but clear choice (you knew it would be one or the other).
If it were up to me: to win in the general election it still would be Jim Webb, but to govern it would be Sherrod Brown.
Second choice for win and govern would be John Edwards (the Governor of Louisiana, not the former Senator for North Carolina, though in 2003 I favored him).
Sanders campaign trajectory looks remarkably like Trumps did in 2016. It’s uncanny. I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of undecideds eventually go for him, even though they never thought they would.
The whole primary is an echo.
Biden is Jeb, the presumptive frontrunner with close ties to a previous president who crashed headfirst into a wall as soon as voting started)
Warren is Cruz, the person who could have easily stopped the insurgent if the establishment had united behind him/her, but who did not get that support due to being perceived as fairly extreme him/herself and because of more individualistic issues (Cruz having terrible interpersonal relationships, Warren being terrible at politics)
Buttigeig is Kasich, the last hope for the establishment who can’t overcome his very narrow base.
I guess it breaks down beyond that, there’s not really a Carly Fiorina in the Dem primary and there wasn’t really a Bloomberg or Yang in the GOP (unless you want to pair Yang and Fiorina as “businessperson from minority group” but that underplays Yangs unorthodox agenda and fanbase too much) but the broad contours are still seem really similar
Harris is Walker – an obvious frontrunner on paper, but a complete nonentity when it came to actually campaigning.
I’d say the better analogies for the establishment lane are:
Kasich: Klobuchar
Rubio: Buttegieg
In both cases, the more senior has more chops, but the younger has more actual hype and better polling. In both cases it is clear why the more senior candidate does not want to back out and surrender to the empty suit.
Yeah, good call, agreed
Yes, I’m not really looking forward to choosing between Hitler and Stalin in the general election…
Berlusconi and Stalin seems a much easier choice. Although as I understand it, Bernie is more of a Trotskyite.
Dermatologists of SSC: is there an OTC version of Onextin?
I don’t mean to hijack your post, but this made me ponder a related question:
Do topical antibiotic acne medications significantly contribute to pathogen resistance?
The common consensus nowadays seems to be “avoid spurious use of antibiotics” and (unfortunately), even if they worked, using them for acne seems to tend a little bit on the “spurious” side…
Any interest in the Wilder v Fury fight on Saturday? If so, what’s your prediction? I’m intrigued, but can see it going either way.
P.S It’s not happening until 5 in the morning in Europe, so perhaps one of you USAnians can let me know what happens and I can make a few quid 😉
How far through the Dune series ought I read?
I’ve just finished Dune, and it ends in kind of an inconclusive place. But I hear the quality rather declines throughout the books.
If there’s an optimum point to stop, I’d say you’ve just about reached it. I couldn’t finish the second book, and rather regretted starting it. I can tell you what happens, if that’ll help the inconclusivity…
Either take Anteros’s advice and end there, or go through God Emperor of Dune and avoid the last two books, which are primarily about a struggle between the Bene Gesserit and a splinter sect of sex ninjas.
I support the latter. Just-Plain-Dune is the best, but Messiah, Children, and God Emperor remain worth reading. The last two are very weird, and the less said about Brian Herbert’s attempts at prequels, the better.
The quality drops dramatically after Dune, while the weirdness rises. Two and three are much worse as literature, but the events are interesting-ish, I guess. But you might as well skim Wiki if you’re curious. Four (God-Emperor) is profoundly bizarre and bad, and I didn’t get past it. Just enjoy Dune itself, is my advice. Am told the continuations by his son and Kevin J. Anderson are quite terrible even compared to the first round of sequels.
I’d say through God Emperor. It feels like the true end of the story.
You should read through the fourth (God Emperor of Dune) and stop there. The second and third books are not as good as the first, but they finish out the trilogy in a satisfying way.
The fourth book takes place after a timeskip of a few millennia and is primarily concerned with the central character’s navel-gazing on the subject of civilization, surrounded by a somewhat bizarre plot. It’s my favorite!
The fifth and six seem to form the beginning of what would have been a trilogy, but then the author died and we’ll never get the rest of the story. The start of those unfinished storylines isn’t good enough to justify reading them.
Dune Messiah has some decent content, but it’s a bit of a slog. In particular, the pacing is weird and the plot progression feels a bit like it’s just a series of random things happening.
Children of Dune is a worthwhile read. Good content, and the pacing and plot progression are a lot closer to Dune than to Messiah. It also takes the story to a more satisfying stopping point than the others. Children is a perfectly acceptable place to stop.
God Emperor of Dune is an interesting epilogue to Children, filling in the long-term consequences of the first three books and giving more explanations of why Paul and his heir felt compelled to act as they did (particularly in terms of showing us a fundamental disagreement between the two which came up in an earlier book). But the style’s pretty rough (it’s almost as Character Filibuster heavy as Atlas Shrugged), and the plot feels like it’s mostly just there as an excuse for exposition. I’d give it a try if you want more closure after Children, but it isn’t really worth pressing on to finish if you find yourself losing interest half-way through.
I can’t comment on the later books from personal experience. I tried reading Heretics of Dune many years ago, but got distracted about a dozen pages in, and then the book needed to go back to the library. I’ve been told from multiple sources that I didn’t miss much.
Odd-numbered books in the Dune series are pretty strong action-adventure sci-fi in a distinctively creative and weird universe.
Even-numbered Dune books are trippy metaphysical ruminations on fate and precognition and governance. In mostly the same weird universe.
It’s more or less that the books are pairs, where you meet a character as a child and see their adventures leading to becoming ruler of the universe, and then in the next book you see how they go about ruling the universe.
So:
If you’re mainly interested in the adventure sci-fi, with relatable characters and plot arcs and knife fights and so forth, either read Dune and stop, or read Dune and Children of Dune, with Dune Messiah being optional but recommended.
If you like the metaphysical rumination and destiny and precognition stuff, read Dune and Dune Messiah, and if you enjoyed Dune Messiah, read Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune.
If you dig stories about evil women enslaving men with their supernatural sexual prowess, read books 5 & 6. If you are not into that, skip them.
+1
@Phigment says:
Well, of course I “dig” such stories, but usually in the form of very much shorter stories, like two pages not two whole freakin’ books!
I’d second the advice to either stop at the first book, or after the fourth book. I found Dune Messiah to be a slog, but Children and God Emperor were relatively enjoyable, though still not as good as the first book. I can’t remember liking the last two much.
I think I read God Emperor and then put the series away and basically never thought about them again until I came upon Gwern’s amazing essays.
It sounds like I’m not alone in enjoying the first but faltering later. I could barely get a few chapters into book two, it was just plain boring.
I gave up after the second, and wish I had given up after the first. And I’m not sure how you call the ending “inconclusive”; when A: the Galactic Emperor and B: every power that even might contend with the Galactic Emperor, bow down before you, and all your friends are still alive and saying “way to go!”, that’s pretty conclusive.
Most books, that would be the sappy saccharine conclusion. “Dune”, somehow made you think Paul had earned that ending, and that you’d learned profound things about an amazing invented unverse, and was a whole lot of fun along the way. #2 did not aim nearly as high, and did not reach its lesser goals, and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that there’s anything further along that’s worth the slog.
> I’m not sure how you call the ending “inconclusive”
The whole ‘and then a jihad happened’ thing. What’s up with the Noble Savages in SPAAAACE suddenly needing to crusade across the galaxy?
But I’m aware that stories that end with the protagonist becoming the Chosen One are pretty impossible to follow up on.
Follow the link in my previous comment. It argues that Herbert’s Fremen are as much in the mold of Hetrodotus’ Scythians or Tacitus’ Germans as the Rashidun Caliphate (With contrasts being made between the ancient writers, Ibn Khadun and Romantic-nationalist ideas of ‘barbarian’ ancestry).
The latest part is basically a close-reading of Dune that looks at whether the Fremen/Landsraad dichotomy corresponds to Noble Savage/Decadent Empire.
Tl:Dr: (I won’t bame you if you don’t want to read another 10k word blog post) The Fremen are poor and actively suspicious of wealth. (contrast to the deliberate wasting of water at the dinner and the weirding room at the castle.)
They are simple and unsophisticated but cunning and wise.
They are also ruthlessly practical and highly militarised, even before Paul arrives.
Even their women are manly, finishing off wounded enemies.
(While the Baron is a pederast, Fenring is a cuckolded eununch, the Emperor is denied a son and the various lords and even the emperor himself are cntrolled to various extents by a lot of scheming bene-gesserit witches.)
These qualities are said to come from their living in an inhospitable environment:
The fremen who lived on other planets went soft and were exploited.
Duke Leto laments that the great houses (including the Atreides) have decayed.
Paul calls for Salusa Secundus to become a place of beautiful things, as a way to destroy the Sardaukar.
Messiah is okay, Children is petty good, God-Emperor is great and used to be one of my favorite books (though it’s been years since I last reread it and I suspect it might not hold up as well), Heretics is well-paced but doesn’t try to be as deep as the others, and Chapterhouse is extremely boring and has an inconclusive ending.
Of the Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson books, the Prelude to Dune trilogy is worth reading (it’s about as good as Heretics), but I don’t recommend the others unless you really like the universe by then. The Legends trilogy are a weird direction for the series, and are a prerequisite for the two Dune 7 books, which are at least a satisfying conclusion. Don’t read anything published after that (Winds of Dune in particular has got to be one of the most poorly written books I’ve ever read).
I’ll be the odd one out and say I liked all of them (well, Messiah a bit less, but at least it’s short). For very different reasons – you can’t really put the first book in the same category as God Emperor.
I have a soft spot for stories where something comes completely out of left field and changes everything. Reminds me that’s how reality works, with the turkey’s perfect life hitting a bump a few days before Thanksgiving. That’s why I was one of the few that liked the original Evangelion ending, with singularity happening while everybody was busy fighting Angels. Same with Dune: you have psyche absorbing entities – some time later you end with new Gods.
I liked the Dune novels co-authored by the author’s son a lot more than the official sequels to Dune.
Either drop the series after the first one, or read the first four and then stop. The end of book 4 is conclusive, and it finally explains what was the whole point with the golden path and the different ways Paul and his son dealt with it. I read them as a teen and they were my first Big Idea SF books, especially the 4th. I liked all four but the pacing was a little wobbly after the first. Books 5 and 6 were not very interesting, I have read them I but have almost forgotten everything about them.
I loved the second book, but if you choose to read it, you should be aware that it kind of invalidates the first, in a manner similar to Matrix sequel(s). Overall I think that first four books are very much worth reading.
I just finished God Emperor of Dune and it is interesting and fun if you find the philosophical parts of Dune interesting and fun. Personally, I think this is the only satisfying ending point other than the end of Dune.
Why not, here’s a medical hail mary: I’ve had some kind of prostatitis for about two months now. I’ve gone through Bactrim DS, Azithromycin, and now Levaquin 500, full courses of each. The results were perplexing; I’m not totally confident that the condition even responded to the medication in the first place. The pain waxes and wanes erratically for reasons I can’t really pin down. The only thing I’m totally sure the antibiotics did was make me constipated–which creates abdominal pressure, which provokes the inflammation.
I initially mistook it for a UTI, because it had the same general symptoms (“have to pee, and it hurts to pee”), but I later learned that UTIs are subtly different in symptoms–more of a burning sensation, while this just plain aches. Starts as feeling like a gorilla has me by the genitals, progresses to a clenching pain near the bladder. But never burning. I’ve cut out sex, alcohol, and all caffeine, and I guess it’s a little milder? Sex definitely made it angry. It responds slightly to Azo, and one ibuprofen makes it tolerable, for now.
My doctor’s office is already closed for the weekend; I’ll probably talk to him next week, but he’s already said Levaquin was basically our best option at this point. The only other option was doxycycline, which isn’t as good–and I’ve had that, I know it’ll make the digestive symptoms worse. I’m not even confident that this is a bacterial condition at all–there is non-bacterial prostatitis–but I’d rather avoid paying however many hundreds of dollars it would take to see a urologist sans insurance. Anybody here have experience with a similar phenomenon? The doctor was quite confident that it’s prostatitis, and I believe him on that. He certainly checked. Oy.
I had some sort of prostatitis about twenty years ago– I sympathize with your “He certainly checked. Oy”; the pain of the urethral swab is still memorable as one of the worst pains of my life.
Have you asked about physical therapy for the muscular weakness/spasms that prostatitis can cause? For me antibiotics cleared the infection but the pains persisted, and it turns out I had pelvic floor muscle spasm which responded eventually to biofeedback-directed exercises (essentially male Kegels, and they had to do the biofeedback so that I even understood that I had those muscles and could move them under conscious control).
At this point, I’ve received one visit to a very rushed nurse practitioner at a walk-in clinic and several appointments with one of my respiratory therapy instructors, who is a GP, a very nice man, treats his students pro bono, and didn’t seem to even suspect non-bacterial prostatis although a quick look into the literature suggests that more than 90% of prostatitis is not caused by a pathogen. Current plan: ask male pharmacist coworker tomorrow about how scary the side effects of tamsulosin are, as it’s sometimes used for chronic pelvic pain syndrome (AKA non-bacterial prostatitis, which I strongly suspect this is). Don’t know how I’d go about getting a prescription.
As it happens, I meant that I am only 36 and have never had a man stick his finger up my back end before. Prostate definitely inflamed. It was uncomfortable, but not agonizing. I hope and pray that I will never need to experience a urethral swab.
(thank you!)
So, coronavirus update:
In the last week or so it looked like it was slowing down, until today when 16 new cases were discovered in Italy, all from local transmission. There had been a few cases of local transmission in Europe before, but never on this scale. This suggests that the virus has spread in the general population, and given that these cases are in Northern Italy it’s likely that the virus will quickly spread or has already spread to Central Europe. Should we expect an East Asia-like outbreak?
Yes. See also: local spread in Iran and South Korea.
I don’t have a lot of faith in maintaining quarantine – we as a civilization just don’t know now to (now want to, really) quarantine flu. Let alone one with 2-3 weeks incubation period. When people stop getting a cold, then we’ll be on our way to be safe from coronavirus. Not before.
Our current hope is that symptoms are worse for chinese han. The occasional 80 year old death is on par with regular flu, so there’s nothing to contradict this hope so far. The next hope is that there aren’t after effects. So at least the 98% that live remain with full pulmonary capacity.
Flu season is ending in the northern hemisphere. I wonder how this will affect this particular strain. With a bit of luck, we may have a vaccine+treatment by the next season.
No. The number of cases is stabilizing in China, and Italy (for example) has a much more competent health system than China does, which suggests they will handle it better than China has.
On Being a Proofreader
I expect there’s something neurologically interesting about people with the proofreading reflex– anyone know of research? Do people ever acquire the proofreading reflex for languages they learn as adults?
I think there’s at least two factors here, which are separate. The analogy between music and the “feel” of a text is intuitive, but simply about the fact that much of what goes into evaluating a well-flowing pattern is unconscious. Spotting a typo without being quite able to see what is actually written there is, instead, about how writing is processed: I believe there is research showing (though I don’t have the gusto to dig up a citation) that, among other factors, the general shape of a word is one of the pieces of information our brain indexes to help speed up recognition. We arguably don’t really read each letter of each word, which is why stuff like this is possible. If one has a knack for words, your brain will get a sense of whether something’s right or wrong even if upside down across the table. As someone who proofreads a lot, I could see that happening.
One of the things I’ve heard about proofreading is that reading badly spelled text makes you inmune to the unpleasantness you feel. Proofreaders have to seek out good quality texts so the only things they read aren’t badly spelled texts.
In the Ramayana, Ravana’s son Indrajit kills 6.7 million monkey soldiers with a fireball-creating projectile called Brahmastra. In the same battle, Rama kills 2 million rakshasas and 18,000 elephants.
Hindu myths are the most overpowered.
I think several times a day how crazy it is that the American president wields power like unto the Brahmastra. (I’ve thought this since I read about it in 2011, but I won’t lie that the current President is more mind-blowing).
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky
that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One . . .
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.
“I can go in my office and pick up a telephone, and in 25 minutes, millions of people will be dead.”
–Nixon
I’ve just started reading Ross Douthat’s recently released book The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. For a preview, see here. In the introduction there’s already an SSC name-check (to The Year the Singularity Was Cancelled). Douthat is one of the most consistently insightful cultural commentators I know of, and not just because of his SSC references, so I’m looking forward to the rest of the book.
It’s nice and measured. Not breathless apocalypticism.
He realises that all the hand-wringing of Sallust and Tacitus was centuries before the Fall of Rome.
FWIW here is the question I would ask Douthat if I were interviewing him about the book:
There’s a plausible economic story for falling fertility rates that needs no cultural change to drive it. Namely, raising kids is more expensive now relative to other things people want to do in their lives, because sectors that are key to child-raising (childcare itself, but also education and housing) have experienced much less productivity growth relative to everything else. When relative prices change, people substitute away from the relatively-more-expensive to the relatively-cheaper thing. Notably, this explains how lots of different societies with very different degrees of cultural conservatism, and very different levels of dynamism along other axes, can have the same sub-replacement fertility rates. Why isn’t this a better explanation than decadence?
Because you have to explain why poor countries have more kids than rich ones. It’s not cheap to raise seven kids in Niger and yet they do it anyways. If it was economic, then why would immigrants have higher fertility rates than natives?
The cost of raising a kid a heavily subjective. By itself you just need to put some food into it and wrap some rags around it once in a while to keep it going. The rest of the cost is paid to not feel like a failure of a child and more rooted in culture and environment than objective needs.
Remember, we’re talking about *relative* not absolute pricing. Kids in Niger are cheaper relative to the other life-enjoyment options available to people in Niger. Immigrants are a better counterexample, but to CaptainCrutch’s point below, they probably also have lower cost than natives to raise a kid in the style to which they are accustomed.
They literally cannot feed these kids a lot of the time. I’m quite confident that they are not somehow cheaper compared to the west. What Captain Crunch said just proves my point. The reason kids are so “expensive” in the west is because of cultural reasons. People used to raise ten kids in a shack that was teetering on the edge of collapse. Now they are expected to pay for tutoring, extracurriculars and college. Culture is doing all the heavy lifting there.
Also, if people are not having kids because they can do other fun activities, how is that not the prime example of decadence?
In the developed world, we have pensions so we can retire and not starve.
In the developing world, people need to have children because they can’t rely on anyone else to support them in their old age.
Namely, raising kids is more expensive now relative to other things people want to do in their lives
Problem with that is that fertility levels most decline amongst the better-off, while the poor are still having (relatively) more children. That’s where the decadence comes in; not that “this is the Great Depression, we’re all trying to live on one bowl of oatmeal a day, we can’t afford to have kids” but that “we’re a two-income family with a good standard of living and having a kid right now would be really bad for our career progress”.
Same with Augustus’ appeal to the Roman upper classes to start having more kids, and the laws he introduced to try the carrot and stick approach to it. This is an old problem. You see aristocratic titles dying out because they can’t produce a male heir, or indeed any heir. When you need to be as crazy rich (or plain crazy) as Elon Musk to have five kids, something is screwy somewhere.
You don’t. Most American families have no more than two children, but there are quite a lot who have five or six or more.
Do you think the “Russia is helping Bernie in the primaries” story is going to have an effect on Sanders’ chances going forward?
https://www.businessinsider.com/officials-told-bernie-sanders-russia-trying-to-help-campaign-2020-2
Less so than other candidates. It looks like Bernie is following in Trump’s (primary electoral) footsteps, with a highly dedicated base that forms a “floor” of 25%-35% of the democratic primary electorate in any given state. So long as the field doesn’t winnow dramatically, he’ll come into a brokered convention as the leader in delegates.
It may have some slight positive effect for his campaign.
Rationale: The anti-Russia sentiment among Democrats (and from the polling I’ve seen, it is concentrated among Democrats) largely stems from the perception that Russia hurt Clinton’s chances at the presidency. If the situation had been reversed, with the Russians helping Clinton over Trump, then the anti-Russia sentiment would have been concentrated in Republicans, with Democrats showing slight increase in goodwill towards Russia (as has happened to Republicans since Trump’s election). Which is to say: Whether people think Russia is good or bad largely stems from whether Russia supports the candidate they too support.
So, if Russia had chosen to support an unpopular Democratic candidate, then the story would play out again internally to the Democratic Party, fanning the flames of anger for elevating an unpopular Democrat.
But they didn’t choose this. They chose to support the most popular Democratic candidate in the field. So I suspect something like with Trump and the Republicans: If Russia is helping us achieve what we want, why is that a bad thing? Only this time the good favor is counter-balanced by the negative memories of 2016, leaving the feelings largely neutral. Thus any “bump” he gets comes what whatever Russia is doing to help him.
If Russia had supported Clinton, we wouldn’t even have heard about it because none of the journalists would bother writing that story. If any conservatives did talk about it, they would be called conspiracy theorists.
It’s not going to convince anyone of anything they didn’t already believe. The Pantsuit Nation already wanted to hang Bernie for treason, and nobody else gives a damn about the Russia story now that Trump has been fully exonerated.
I doubt the story is true. Russia I think has learnt its lesson.
What lesson? Meddling in American elections works; it results in a weak US government decoupled from its allies and incapable of pursuing a coherent geopolitical agenda, and it results in no harm to the nation that does it. Why wouldn’t they do it again?
Yeah, I’ve always believed that Russia didn’t really have a strong preference for Trump, they just had a strong preference for sowing discord, which they achieved. I don’t see how they could have learned a lesson beyond “if we mess with their elections, they start infighting.”
Russian trolls are well known to play agents-provocateurs on both sides of a debate at once.
There’s no evidence Russian interference had any tangible effect on the 2016 election. At this point if it is known that Russia is helping you its more of a negative then a positive. Russia wouldn’t want to taint their favourite candidate.
It probably didn’t, but it did have a tangible effect on American unity post election.
What EchoChaos says. The purpose of Russia’s election-meddling in 2016 was not to secure the election of Donald J. Trump on account of his being a Russian asset, and that stupid narrative has done more to obscure the issue than anything. The purpose of Russia’s election-meddling was to ensure that whoever won the election (and the Russians were probably expecting Hillary at the time) would be perceived by a hundred million Americans as a crook who had stolen the election and would be hamstrung in their attempts to govern by the resulting disunity.
This worked. Look around you. Given that none of the candidates were actual Russian assets signed up to do Putin’s bidding if they won, this is about as good as it gets for Russia, and at almost zero cost or risk.
What would we expect from a President Sanders? Obviously, he would be lucky to get even one of his ideas passed through Congress so that’s probably not going to happen. But there are other things he can do through his executive power and by being President, he can change the national conversation and the priorities of the Democratic party. What would we expect?
I’m kinda curious what people here think of his wokeness levels. He seems incredibly woke in some areas but not in others; how would this translate into the policies he’d push?
I’d imagine this would mostly affect criminal justice and immigration policy. There is unlikely to be much loosening of actual rules for who can get in (because Bernie thinks “open borders are a Koch brothers idea”) but rules for how those who try to get in, or already in, are treated would likely change. I’d also expect more Justice Department investigations of racism and/or excessive force in local police departments. It’s unclear whether EEOC type antidiscrimination investigations would increase as much; I would presume more than under Trump, but not necessarily more than under Obama.
Speaking of Justice Department priorities, I would expect much, much more aggressive discretionary prosecution decisions around anything that can be spun as “sticking it to Wall Street”: so, insider trading, securities fraud, tax evasion, etc. Antitrust enforcement would also likely get much more aggressive.
I think that “Koch brothers proposal” thing overstates his immigration beliefs. He has taken it back. My impression is that he doesn’t really care as much about the issue, and probably won’t fight the party too much on whatever the consensus is.
Re: Sticking it to wall street. All of which will help the economy. A financial sector which approximates a criminal enterprise is *not* healthy capitalism.
Warren is preferable on this, however, simply due to domain expertise. When embarking on an anti-corruption crusade, being one of the foremost experts in the field is rather helpful. Also, just likely have a better rolodex of people to appoint.
Warren has a lot of ideas on a lot of things, most of which I’m not particularly qualified to evaluate. But I have enough education and experience in the financial sector to recognize that she is deeply misinformed in that particular area. I’m not referring to her policy proposals (some of which I agree with, some not), but to factual statements she has made about the current state of the world. The fact that she can fundamentally and loudly misunderstand what a product she proposes to aggressively regulate is doesn’t set her apart from most politicians, but it does make me deeply skeptical of other claims she makes to “domain expertise”.
Warren is preferable on this, however, simply due to domain expertise.
She has also shown, however, that she can be baited into doing damn stupid crap. My respect for her capabilities, little as that might be, has genuinely been lowered by the PR stunts somebody (is it herself?) seems to think are wowzer ideas, from the DNA test nobody wanted to the ‘drinkin’ my own beer in my own kitchen with my own husband and my own dog, just like you ordinary folks’ video to the ‘9 year old trans kid will pick my Education Secretary’ idiocy soundbite.
She may have the expertise, but it also looks as if once the wind blows the wrong way all that will go out the window and she’ll make silly decisions based on personal pique.
Bernie may not be too woke (honestly he’s too old to be convincingly woke -“Hello fellow non-binary kids and people of color”), but his appointees (like Obama’s) will be plenty woke. This applies to all the Democrats with the possible exception of Bloomberg, and probably to Bloomberg too in most areas.
Spending. Every major platform piece Sanders tries to initiate will include a major jump in $$$ going out, and will only be passed in the house/senate (barring some pretty radical shifts) by quid pro quo spending. If its not political gridlock its going to be deficits 20-30% higher (at least) than current highs.
So business as usual then?
Yes, just more so.
I expect to see some kind of serious purge of ICE and the Border Patrol.
purge of ICE
Don’t worry; the anti-global-warming activists will get right around to stopping that.
“Serious purge” would be more like “rearranging the deck chairs”; you need some kind of border authority even if you declared open borders in the morning, even if that’s just the Customs officials, and there will always be a need for a body to do the paperwork and the patrols. You can get rid of ICE and the Border Patrol, but you’ll soon find you need a body to do broadly that kind of work even if it’s nothing more than “contact all undocumented migrants to offer them their very own congratulatory cake on making it across the line” and hey, there you go again with an official force and uniforms and badges and regulations governing them and laws they have to enforce.
Yeah, even the most pro-immigration candidates wouldn’t actually get rid of ICE or border patrol. At best, they’d probably pass a few executive orders telling them to treat detainees more nicely or whatever. Maybe they’d rename it and do a DHS style reorg so they could claim they followed their promise to “abolish ICE”.
You can definitely tie their hands with extra paperwork, though, with the intent of getting a lot of them to quit. See Trump and the EPA.
My bubble is pro-Bernie, and I see a lot of calls to abolish ICE, often accompanied by an explanation that ICE is fairly new and we did fine without it. I have never seen a call to abolish the much older Border Patrol.
The biggest impact would probably be the Supreme Court. If Ginsburg gets replaced by a conservative justice, that’s a fairly massive shift. Right now Roberts has replaced Kennedy as the swing vote and while he’s conservative, he’s more pragmatic/institutional than ideological. If Ginsburg gets replaced by Barett then the swing vote becomes…Alito? Kavanaugh?
And honestly, I can’t see Ginsburg lasting four more years and Breyer is getting pretty old. So a Bernie victory would keep the court relatively moderate while a Trump victory (and lets guesstimate 2 Supreme Court seats) would lock in a young conservative majority for ~10-15 years.
> would keep the court relatively moderate
The Court is well off to the Left. They’ve created unreviewable and incoherent rules from little more than their imagination but officially justified based on the Constitution. Roe v. Wade (yes, Cassey is controlling) is the biggest example of this. But other rules fabricated around capital punishment come to mind as well.
Using precedent of Trump and the border wall, he’ll use “national emergencies” to arbitrarily declare a bunch of policies without the involvement of Congress. Among these will be Medicare for All, the dissolution of free trade agreements, and rent control on all housing nationwide.
I don’t think he’ll manage to get Medicare for all pushed through single-handedly but this is exactly the kind of thing I’m expecting.
One thing he can probably do is what Trump did — use his political power within his party to push candidates who agree with him and oppose candidates who don’t.
Feminist article on dismantling the family (found it via marginalrevolution).
The whole story of a broken family fucking up a woman and her wanting to tear down the institution reads to me as a reason to have stronger families, not weaker ones. I get that it’s a fringe idea (how fringe/far left is Vice?), but I don’t get why people even suggest it. Families that reject queer members are broken, not strong. It was bizarre throughout.
I agree. The integration of child-rearing into a larger support network sounds ok under certain implementations, but is in no way mutually exclusive with the nuclear family. Why not encourage strong families, but also strong caring communities in which families are situated that help keep things together and pick up the slack if a given family unit falters or breaks down? Her political claims here are clearly biased by her bad family life. That’s certainly a shame, but it doesn’t entail that the concept of the family must be dissolved.
If the Vice article is accurate to her work, her basic position seems to be “Let’s destroy the family, and somehow it will all work out and be beautiful”. She doesn’t seem to have any ideas for how this would actually work besides thinking it should.
I don’t think I have to take her very seriously because I don’t think even she thinks she’s saying anything significant. I’m pretty sure she’s just a edgelord.
As far as I can tell the steelman of her position is that child raising labor should be distributed equitably across an.entire community, and this will both liberate parents from being shackled to their own kids and liberate kids from being at the mercy of bad parents. Utopian communes have tried this, I think repeatedly, and it has never to my knowledge worked.
@salvorhardin >
The kibbutzim in Isreal had “children’s houses” and somewhat collectivized child rearing in the 20th century, and it worked for a few generations, but that model is far less popular now.
Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim describes some of the results in his book The Children of the Dream; it’s very well-written if you want to read a copy like I did. The model is far less popular for a reason: after the first generation of enthusiastic true believers, most mothers wanted to spend more time raising their individual children than the old labor-and-children’s-house models would let them.
Meanwhile, children raised in the children’s houses faced caregivers who’d leave at the end of a shift and usually rotate to another job entirely after a few years. They ended up bonding extremely tightly to their peer group at the cost of their desire to make independent decisions, and being more reluctant to form ties outside that tight-knit peer group.
Why have kids if you view them as shackles?
Hippies also had communes, but AFAIU the children were just neglected if they didn’t have a caring mother.
Damned if I know, but some quantity of posters seem to think that everyone should have children, regardless of their desires. Also, of course, some people like sex, but either don’t have access to contraception, don’t use it correctly, or have legitimate contraception failures.
I have seen some posts saying that people may just think of the responsibility of having children but they can bring a lot of joy.
I don’t remember any posts saying the people should have children as a responsibility to society or whatever regardless of their personal desires.
I think it’s more like “people not having children is a sign of a broken society.” People having more children “just because” won’t fix society, but if we could fix society people would have more children.
Compare with the Links post discussion of diversity in corporate leadership. Diversity in corporate leadership is a sign your company is identifying the best talent and promoting them, because it’s highly unlikely the only people competent in the organization are all going to be straight white males. Companies then take this to mean, “oh, if we want to perform well, we just need to go hire a bunch of black lesbians!” No, adding diversity to your broken company will not fix it. But fixing the company will result in more diversity.
@Conrad Honcho
Different groups don’t have the same level of ‘talent,’ so your logic is incorrect.
For example, let’s say that a requirement for corporate leadership is to work 60+ hours a week for an entire career. If 20% of group A willing to do so, while 5% of group B is willing to do the same, then there is four times as much ‘talent’ in group A based on this difference alone.
Similarly, if companies prefer to hire from within, rather than generic MBA droids, then the diversity of the worker pool limits the diversity of the leadership pool. The diversity of the worker pool can be heavily limited by such things as differences in interest.
Companies have only a limited ability to identify and promote talent.
Abusive families are perfectly strong (irrespective of the personal weaknesses of their strongmen); the problem with them is that they’re evil, not that they’re weak. I’m not aware of any consistently workable solution for evil families. The best outcomes for situations like that I’ve seen or heard of, including my father’s, has involved children being effectively adopted by families of friends. For children who don’t have such kind friends, they tend to end up extremely fucked up and/or dead.
Communities aren’t effective solutions. A community might clothe you and feed you, but IME it will never love you. The only relief people have from this kind of neglect and abuse is extraordinary kindness. Making people marginally wealthier might enable them to enact their kinder impulses, but short of that I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done. It breaks my heart.
Remember, kids:
In some ways, the modern “rule-of-law” approach has hurt here. In ye olde days it would be possible for a few of the local men to go and rough-up such an abusive father as a matter of justice.
Unlikely, though.
@Garrett, this is an idealized vision of the ye olde days. In said ye olde days, in my family, there was a family where the stepdad had his wife and one (or maybe both?) of his stepdaughters pregnant at the same time. People knew. It was a small town. They were just *that* family. Nothing ever happened to that guy. Nobody beat him up or made him stop. My cousin (who’s in his direct line of descent and from whom I have some of the story) tells me that he was welcome at family events until the day he died.
In the modern era, there might have been DFS. But back then, there wasn’t even anyone to call. Just kids trapped in a shitty abusive family with nowhere to go and no one to help.
There is an interesting set of trade-offs here. The author seems to favor strong communities as a counter to evil families. This could even work. But right now, strong families are the only effective counter I’ve seen to evil communities.
Due to personal experience (abusive school system I only got out of because of my family), I have a very difficult time being objective when evaluating such trade-offs. I strongly suspect the author is in the same boat, but with experience pushing their bias in the opposite direction.
They always were, I guess. Family has always been stronger than community (although not necessarily nuclear family). Sometimes community is all family.
I know Russian pretty well, but recently learnt how many words there are for family members. Like, the husband’s sister’s husband is one word, and the brother’s wife’s brother is another word, and they are all family.
I suspect that English probably also had terms more specific than “in-law”, because you have them in almost every language.
Abusive biological parents exist, but statistically a child is much more likely to be abused by a step parent than a biological parent, and by a foster parent than a step parent, and abuse rates in old-style orphanages, where children were being taken care of by professionals, were even higher.
Caring for a child is hard work, it requires high investment to be done properly. Barring special cases, biological parents, or at most biological grandparents, are the people who will be most invested in a child well-being. If they are not going to put in the effort, then nobody likely will.
The probability that a child being abused by their parent will be abused by their parent is tautologically one. Orphanages and foster homes are pretty terrible, but better than leaving those kids in those homes if they’re established as fallbacks.
Sure, but what this feminist “thinker” proposes is to essentially put every child in some kind of foster care.
The probability that a child who is taken away from his parents by some sort of child protective service and put in an orphanage or foster home would actually be better off as a result is not one.
I refer you to my standard horror story about the FLDS case, where three hundred “children,” infants up to adults who the authorities claimed were minors, were seized because the authorities didn’t like their religion.
Some years ago I asked someone who, as a law student at Cornell, had done volunteer legal work helping poor people, whether the power of authorities to take children away from their parents had, on net, good or bad effects. His reply was that he couldn’t say in general, but in the community where he had worked the net effect was bad.
Are you suggesting that being abused by your parents is preferable, David?
I think he’s suggesting that state intervention in these cases is likely to make things worse, either because the state decides that the biological parents are abusive when they aren’t or because even when the biological parents are less than ideal, whatever the children get as foster parents are likely to be worse.
I don’t know whether this is true, anti-statism is pretty much David’s entire shtick, but I tend to agree with him on this one: the state is usually bad at taking care of the interests of people without significant political clout, and the sort of families whose children get removed by the state (marginalized underclass or low-status weirdos like the FLDS) are a central example of people without political clout.
@viVI_IViv
Sounds like a very circumspect “yes” to me.
I’ll go ahead and non-circumspectly say yes.
But note how much baggage your question includes. You implicitly expect us to imagine the worst sort of abuse and compare it to the most benign sort of government intervention. I decline.
Because it happens. If you’re going to advocate for the dismantling of the faulty system that we have to help these kids, the least you can do is look little Timmy in the eyes when you lock him in the closet. His mother doesn’t.
@Hoopyfreud
A claim that the current system is worse than nothing is not the same as a claim that any system is worse than nothing.
A good faith reading would not assume this, but would include ‘reform’ or ‘replacement’ as things that David could have meant.
Yes, and sometimes it happens because you and your state are the ones who handed Timmy over to the foster parents who lock him in the closet, when his actual parents were only falsely accused of that. How willing are you to look Timmy in the eye when you do that?
You seem to want to debate the fantasy version of social services, where the state only ever takes children away from actually-bad parents and gives them to not-that-bad foster parents. That’s about as relevant as debating the ethics of Santa’s gift-giving policy. The reality is, the state doesn’t know which parents are good or bad. It can make educated guesses, yes. But given the biological tendency of parents to treat their own children better than random strangers’ children, the state’s guesses as to parental goodness would have to be very accurate for a take-children-away-from-their-parents-because-abuse strategy to be a net good.
No.
I’m suggesting that being taken away from parents who are not abusing you by authorities who claim they are is usually worse than being left with said parents.
As should be obvious from my reference to the FLDS case. No evidence was ever offered that any of the three hundred children taken away from their parents was being abused by anyone.
@ana53294,
The phrases “Equal wrongs for all”, and When everyone is special no one is special” came to mind on my reading the linked profile.
The community co-parenting she craves are called “friends”, “relatives”, “co-parishioners”, and “neighbors”, and are seldom to be found among the cosmopolitan, educated, and childless (such as herself), but instead among groups of adults with big families.
@Plumber
Good point. Strong, caring, helpful communities that will help with child and elderly care are more likely in religious/ethnic communities that have strong families too.
Except for the gay community, that is. Although I’m not sure how much they help care for the elderly and children (never been around a gay community, only ever met gay individuals).
I feel like the past half-century’s push to get mothers back into the workforce is also relevant here. It’s a lot harder for members of a community to keep an eye on each other’s children when everybody is out working for most of the day.
Example of startling insight: “OMG the Gilmore Girls is all about women as main characters! That’s why it’s so popular with women viewers!” Listen babes, if it took you 13 years to figure out this about a 2000-2007 show, a show I have never watched but already knew this startling insight because everyone gushing about it online was a girl and it was pitched to be the exact “teen girl soap/drama” to capture such an audience and retain it to grow up alongside it – what makes you so insightful?
“Nuclear family bad! Patriarchy bad! Feminism means overthrowing capitalism! Heterosexual mores awful, let’s all be queer!” – that’s been a staple of feminism since second-wave feminism. Maybe if you’re 20 years old today and never heard anything about anything, this might sound revolutionary (though I note Lewis is 31) – but it’s really more a canny publisher glomming on to the next hot trend (a specific brand of middle-class college-grad Marxist-tinged queerness is in right now); no wonder the editor “laughed” when our reporter quoted back to her what Lewis claimed:
Feck’s sake, does nobody remember the Martian poets of the 70s/80s? That was exactly what it was all about:
My trouble with all this is that I am literally too old for this shit and remember it from the first time round. The contretemps over this book will die down, Lewis will continue to give talks and readings for small magazines and special-interest groups at colleges, and heterosexual society will rumble on.
State mandated gfs, here I come!
I’ve been whining about that here before it was cool, dammit!
If radical feminists end up advocating incel positions it’ll be all the more evidence that we are in the dankest timeline.
I would say that feminist and incel talking points are coming from the same mindset (Entitlement comes from need, not from worth, if you don’t give me what I need to thrive, you are oppressing me) so there’s going to be overlap, but no shared praxis – everyone is social darwinist when it’s their turn to care for the weak.
Yang should have gone with genetically engineered catgirls for domestic ownership instead of $1000/month.
What, and get the animal rights groups upset at him?
I’m already a carnivore, so meh.
No, better than meh. The catgirls will be obligate carnivores. So, me and my harem of genetically-engineered catgirls facing off against the faceless minions of PETA. What’s not to like?
Maybe I’m failing an Ideological Turing Test, but to me people like this sound like comic book villains. She had a bad childhood with her family ao she wants to take family away from everyone? That’s some Sasuke Uchiha level of angst!
And what’s the intended result of abolishing family? Being liberated by the shackles of our biological bonds so that we can all become sad-looking perimenopausal academics whose closest relative is a cat named Robespierre? Thanks, but no thanks.
Since when communists cared about the production side of economics? Just confiscate and redistribute everything, free stuff for all! And when stuff inevitably runs out, just blame the embezzlers and the counter-revolutionary saboteurs.
Is anyone paying attention to what’s going on in Canada? Much of the rail network has been shutdown for around two weeks, which is also causing serious backups at the major ports. In Québec and the Atlantic provinces, propane shortages are imminent, and on the Prairies, hundreds of millions of dollars of grain can’t get to market. The reason for the shutdown is a series of blockades as a solidarity protest in support of a First Nation in B.C. where a local protest was removed by the police so that a natural gas pipeline could be built. The complicated part is that at least part of that community supports the pipeline; there is disagreement over who gets to speak for the FN between elected chiefs and hereditary chiefs. The blockades have been put up by a mixture of native rights protesters and Extinction Rebellion types. A few of the latter have been removed (by police or counter-protesters) but the most strategically-important one (at a spot in the network without good alternate routes) is manned by Mohawk protesters (also with the complexity that not all of their leadership is on board), and historically it has not gone well for anyone when they have clashed with police. The prime minister said yesterday that it’s time for the blockades to come down, but so far things are still at a standstill. The impasse could persist for a while, as he won’t give the police a direct order to clear barricades. Meanwhile, frustration is building in Alberta (where the oil and gas industry is huge) that pipelines can’t seem to get built successfully even after passing numerous regulatory hurdles, while technically-illegal protests get handled with kid gloves. This frustration might boil over into vigilante action and/or a constitutional crisis if the blockades last much longer. The situation touches on a lot of the third rails of Canadian politics—native issues, environmental issues, inter-provincial resentment, not being able to build infrastructure effectively anymore—so I think the government was hoping it would blow over on its own. But it hasn’t. If you were Prime Minister, what would you do?
Time to shit or get off the pot.
Reach out to the elected and hereditary chiefs and tell them that you’ll start clearing protesters in a week unless they decide to present a united front, in which case you’ll kill the pipeline and take any money you’ve committed to pay for use of the land back. Allow them to counteroffer a date. Announce to the media that what the date they’ve set is. Follow through. Strongly encourage the FN people to elect new chiefs according to the resolution they want, if possible.
My displeasure with the government for seizing land for industrial use is at war with my disgust for aristocrats here. Personally, I would hope the Canadian government wouldn’t be in this position in the first place, but now that they are, I think the only way out if through. If forcing the issue is the only thing that gets you a coherent resolution, do it.
It also sounds as if it would be well worth the Canadian governments (of whatever political stripe) time to investigate alternate means of bulk transport than the railways; long-distance trucking immediately comes to mind, and if people don’t want more highways or whatever to accommodate this, would they instead prefer to have their heating oil, gas, and grain held up by blockades of railway choke-points?
> in which case you’ll kill the pipeline
But that gives the protesters what they want.
I would note that, at a rough social level, First-Nations people in Canada are roughly akin to African-Americans in the US. Canada’s adopted original sin of coloured people.
So in addition to the usual protester/police interactions which need to be managed for television optics there’s yet-another layer of emotional valence. Imagine if the response to Ferguson was to show up and disperse protesters with firehoses …
I don’t care about the protesters; I care about the government taking land.
If the elected chiefs are giving up their people’s lands for money in their own pockets, fuck them and the government. If the hereditary chiefs are giving up their people’s welfare for the feeling that they personally haven’t sold out, fuck them instead. I’m willing to be the bad guy in order to figure out who the right group to fuck is.
I agree with your point. Someone is being assholes in the… Firsty community? What’s the short form of “First Nations people”?
@Garrett, I mean, the actual response was to use quasi-military vehicles and tear gas. Or are you saying that the firehoses would have been worse because of the parallels with the sixties?
That’s a vivid analogy!
If the Canadian government cannot clear those blockades, they are not in control of their own territory and do not deserve to be recognized as the Canadian government. If they will not clear those blockades, they have effectively sided with the protestors and are doing a terrible job at governing, and are likely to end up having to machine-gun angry mobs of their non-native citizens to avoid being bodily tossed out of office. So if I were PM I’d clear the barricades by force; the Mohawks may have defeated the Mohicans but presumably they cannot actually defeat the Canadian military.
Yes exactly. It is a good thing to allow protests, but it a quite different thing to allow industrial sabotage under the rubrick of protest. If say the nuclear industry had ruffians shut down the natural gas transport, Canada would cart them off to jail pronto. They should do the same with these protesters. Of course they will be accused of not being woke. They need to act like adults and do what is necessary.
@Mark V Anderson and @The Nybbler,
Do you guys hold the same opinion in the Bundy case?
Yes, the Bundys clearly needed to be removed — by force if necessary (and they were). However, the situation was less urgent as the infrastructure was less critical. Had they instead seized and occupied a section of I-84 or I-5, it would have been more similar.
I didn’t follow the Bundy case very closely, but I think Nybbler is right that it wasn’t causing nearly the economic issues of this one. Also I think the Bundys had guns, so they had to be more careful? Didn’t the Feds go in and take care of them? Is that really applicable to this one?
Pretty sure the government could have ignored the Bundys for a near infinite timeline without anyone noticing. IIRC they “occupied” a spot of land that they claimed they owned anyways and no one was using.
There were two Bundy-related standoffs, the one with the grazing land in Nevada, and the one with the wildlife refuge in Oregon.
The Nevada standoff, the Bundys and their allies did briefly block an interstate highway, but it was made clear to them that guns or no, this was not going to last the day. Then, as you say, they retreated to land that nobody else really cared about and were mostly ignored.
In Oregon, they and their allies occupied land that was unambiguously Not Theirs, in a way that inconvenienced other people but not nearly so much as blocking a major transit route would have. So the Feds were able to wait them out, but in that case it was just waiting until the most convenient time to make a round of mostly-bloodless(*) arrests rather than just ignoring them.
* One of the occupiers appears to have committed suicide by cop.
the Mohawks may have defeated the Mohicans but presumably they cannot actually defeat the Canadian military.
Yeah, but it always looks bad when you send in the soldiers to clear out civilians exercising their right of free assembly and protest, Nybbler, and add in the angle of “colonialism and history of force against Indigenous peoples” and you’re putting extra fuel on the fire.
Tricky one to get right whatever decision they make.
I’m aware. I don’t care, and neither should the Canadian government. Furthermore, calling this a “protest” is overly euphemistic. We’re not talking about a bunch of people with signs and bullhorns who occasionally block traffic and are pushed back by the police when they do so. We’re talking about a literal blockade.
If it really looks worse to clear out a blockade by force than to allow your country’s transportation network to be shut down… it’s time to damn the appearances.
A non-confidence vote in Parliament isn’t out of the question.
Peterson: “Clean up your room, bucko!”
Afroman: “I was gonna clean my room until I got high…“
Great song, and the video is good, but gotta get that uncensored version!
On the subject of Peterson, I never actually saw much with him, but I liked his voice; and then recently I heard some very disturbing news that he’d had a bad recovery from a (maybe ill-advised) medical coma induced to get him through withdrawal from Xanax. I don’t know if it’s been discussed here, but does anyone know what’s up with that?
Rumors have been going around for a while. See the reference to “anti-depressants” here:
https://www.aaronselias.com/2018/03/24/thoughts-on-jordan-peterson-v-the-jewish-question/
You can’t expect us to take a throwaway line from that data-free rant as evidence of anything…
It’s weird that his family went to Russia to do that. The whole procedure seems pretty sketchy.
From “Asking for a book that probably will never be written” department. My impression of American justice system is that minors are not sentenced nearly as harshly as adults (Which is probably true for almost everywhere) for crimes.
But what kind of clemency can someone expect if they kill someone as a minor but aren’t discovered until they come of age.
It’s complicated and varies between States, but generally someone is going to be kicked up to Adult Court (instead of Juvie) if they’re 22+ when arrested, or if the crime is severe (rape/murder/etc…) and they’re at least 15-16+.
So for murder, if they’re now an adult, they’re pretty much going to be tried as an adult, because the Juvenile Court no longer has jurisdiction over them.
My impression of American justice system is that minors are not sentenced nearly as harshly as adults
Interesting, my impression was that a lot more are tried as adults where in Europe they would be tried as juveniles, and this includes young teens (so we’re not talking about “nearly 18”, we’re talking about “13 years old“).
This could be in order to punish them more harshly since, if you’re correct, they wouldn’t be treated so severely as juveniles. Cases like the linked one, where it’s child-murdering-child, do stir up a lot of outrage and outcry and so get blown up into ‘lock up this evil monster for life’ by the media.
Thanks for mentioning the Lionel Tate case. As noted, the court process ultimately resulted in a sentence of “one year’s house arrest and 10 years’ probation”. Which he violated in multiple ways including “violating the terms of his house arrest when he was found out of his house and carrying an eight-inch knife” and “charged with armed burglary with battery, armed robbery and violation of probation”.
I remember hearing about the case and wondering if 1st degree murder really was appropriate.
IMO, charging juveniles as adults makes more sense when the crime/actions/consequences are all straight-forward and have obvious serious consequences. Eg. taking a knife from home, walking to someone else’s house and stabbing them to death. I am much more appreciative of juvenile sentencing for crimes in a complex regulatory environment (eg. securities fraud) or which involve a more complex chain of events such as the felony-murder rule.
A. Elkus on the corona virus and what we’re “supposed” to be afraid of.
I remember the ridiculous overreactions to the Ebola outbreak of 2014, like Chris Christie ignoring the quarantine protocols and demanding that a potentially exposed person be held in a tent at the Newark airport instead of, say, a medical facility. I also remember an equally ridiculous counter-overreaction on the left: the argument that Ebola was only feared because it came from Africa, and concern about infectious disease was simply an expression of racism and xenophobia. In retrospect, our ability to politicize it should’ve been a huge red flag.
I suspect that two intertwined reasons why the messaging on the coronavirus is so much more restrained than the messaging on Ebola are:
a) The Chinese government is going to get irritated at anyone who implies they don’t have control of the situation;
b) China is much more tied into the global economy than most African states, and panic over the coronavirus could cost a lot of people a lot of money.
c) The coronavirus is just a bad case of the flu, and Americans ain’t afraid of no flu. Ebola, makes blood come out of all your bodily orifices, and that’s scary. Also, ~2% mortality vs up to 90% for the worst Ebola strains. How many people believe they are in the frailest or unluckiest 2% of the population?
That’s true, but the economic disruptions are what I’m mostly paying attention to. Up until Friday, the stock market hadn’t really sold off at all. I think that’s at least partially because of US media trying to avoid spooking people. It wasn’t until we got confirmation of large-scale infection in South Korea that people started getting really selling.
Yeah, the disruptions from quarantine are probably the worst effect, and that’s partly because of having been criticised for not doing enough about SARS so the Chinese government has gone to the other extreme.
I actually think the worst thing about the coronavirus is that there isn’t a vaccine for it yet; get one ready and mass-produced and it’s a bad flu but no worse than that. The deaths I’m seeing reported so far (including the two in Italy) are mainly elderly people, plus one suggestion that the heavy rate of smoking in China means more Chinese men with pre-existing lung/respiratory problems and hence a lot more vulnerable to the secondary infections (such as pneumonia) that accompany the coronavirus.
I think this is another strike against the widespread belief that the mainstream media are a bunch of party organs spewing DNC talking points in lockstep. If they were, spreading a disease panic to hopefully trigger a recession would be the obvious way to hurt Trump’s reelection chances.
On the other hand, I’m starting to lean towards the theory that the MSM are party organs for the CCP.
And since clearly nobody clicked the link, Elkus was comparing this to last fall when seemingly every media outlet was predicting, if not hoping, that the Joker movie would cause an incel mass shooting. Yes, those were mostly different writers, but the overall contrast was striking.
I’m not sure you’ve thought this through. In general, a poor domestic economy hurts the party in power. But if there’s a clear exogenous cause, popular leaders can remain popular. See e.g. Castro in Cuba, Chavez in Venezuela, and for that matter FDR and Churchill during the rationing and wage freezes of WW2.
If the reason the US economy sucks is perceived to be a foreign Chinese disease is disrupting the foreign Chinese supply chain that someone allowed to replace America’s domestic manufacturing industry, and is now threatening to kill us all unless we keep all the diseased foreign Chinamen outside our borders, the result is not going to be Trumpists deciding to vote Democrat to make the economy better.
It will be the opposite of that.
What’s the alternative, then? Letting Trump ride on four years of peace and prosperity and coast to certain reelection?
To be clear, my view is that Trump will be reelected no matter what happens.
Yeah, I can easily see a pandemic making borders more popular. Especially if the media stick to the line that worrying about cleanliness is a sign of racism. But as far as who it helps or hurts, it could really go either way.
@BBA
If the Coronavirus hits the US, I could imagine the Democrats making the argument that we were unprepared to face the virus because of cuts to healthcare. That would tie in well to Bernie’s Medicare for All proposal.
> Elkus was comparing this to last fall when seemingly every media outlet was predicting, if not hoping, that the Joker movie would cause an incel mass shooting.
I did read the link, but as I’ve never personally witnessed any of the Joker shooting speculation articles, the comparison fell a little flat for me. I don’t doubt that they existed, but it can’t have been that big if I never saw any of them. At any rate, the media promotes stupid scare stories all the time. It was probably just a slow news week, and noone’s going to win clicks or prestige for publicly arguing against the risk of mass shooting, whereas something that actually matters like COVID will have experts chiming in to prevent a panic, which has real world consequences and may make things worse.
‘Joker’ hits movie theaters with controversy and extra security
‘Joker’ movie prompts mass shooting threat at US movie theaters
Families of Aurora theater shooting victims call on Warner Bros. to support gun control ahead of “Joker” release
Warner Bros. says “Joker” is not an endorsement of violence
Feds issue bulletin about threats ahead of ‘Joker’ opening weekend
How Joker Became the Most Hated, Loved, Obsessed-Over Movie of 2019
It was a big deal.
Worst reasonably-likely case for the Democrats is coronavirus continues to spread throughout the world. Trump institutes harsh measures to close the borders against potential carriers, and the Democrats (or their proxies) sue. Trump ignores injunctions or (more likely) obtains emergency stays, and the virus remains contained in the US. This will likely be more important than the failing economy.
Worst case for Trump is coronavirus spreads uncontained in the US, with many fatalities; this will certainly be blamed on Trump’s leadership (whether or not it is Trump’s fault; the buck still stops in the Oval Office).
@BBA, the DNC and the Left may hate Trump, but a recession hurts a lot of people. You might consider that the people on your(?) side aren’t actually all monsters willing to crash the economy to win an election.
I don’t really recall a situation where ive felt less confident in my predictions for the future (even when I ended up being wrong like in 2016).
Eh, I’ve been saying for a couple weeks that it’s no more infections nor more lethal than SARS, and the Chinese medical system is presumably better not worse now than then – so there should be no problem getting it under control.
And now, in the last few days, it’s becoming clear that the number of cases is peaking and maybe declining.
Why do you believe China’s published statistics?
If you believed them a month ago about the numbers going up, why not believe them now about the numbers going down? The same incentives to lie were present then as now, and a major lie can’t exactly be kept up forever.
@eric23, I didn’t believe them then, either, except in as much as a disease exists.
China only publicly acknowledged there was anything wrong at all after there were cases outside of China. I believe they’re trying to minimize the perceived severity.
It does look like China has got its outbreak under control.
As for the rest of the world, the situation in Iran in particular seems concerning. 8 reported deaths, at a 2% mortality rate, would suggest ~400 infections. Additionally, when death occurs it’s usually more than one week from the onset of symptoms (and contagiousness), implying more than just these 400 cases by now. Iran has however only been able to confirm 43 cases, and so the window for contact tracing may be closing, forcing them to rely on China-style quarantines of cities.
My unsupported view is that the lack of widespread infection in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries suggests the virus doesn’t spread well in hot and/or humid conditions, so hopefully this thing should start to die off in April. I think things would have turned out far differently if the response had been weaker – we could have been looking at thousands of cases per country across large parts of the northern hemisphere by now, if we’d just let it spread like flu.
Watching Sanders cruise to victory – this must be what Republican Never Trumpers must have been feeling in 2016. The sad part is I’ll probably vote for him anyway since a contested convention would likely be more damaging than a Sanders candidacy.
The Financial Times seems to think it will be him; I agree with them that Bloomberg is the spoiler candidate, splitting whatever supporters might rally around a different candidate like Buttigieg or Warren.
It’s fascinating how Biden has fallen from “such a political rival Trump needed to commit impeachable crimes to get him out of the way” to “no-hoper” in media estimation, but I wonder if he’s as dead in the water as all that? And the FT seems to have also smoothed over the mess in Iowa as “an even finish” for Sanders, downplaying Buttigieg.
All this chatter is making me think the Democratic convention to pick the final candidate is going to be really interesting, and if Sanders makes it, then the Trump/Sanders struggle will be something to behold. Can Sanders peel away the non-college educated white working class vote from Trump? Can the Democrats all rally behind their candidate and not make a dog’s dinner of getting him elected? Will we hear The Red Flag or any of William Morris’ Chants for Socialists sung at Democratic rallies? 🙂
Any opinions? (Seriously though, The Red Flag is a belter – once you overcome the English tendency to accompany it with parlour piano and diffidence – and if they could hold their noses and sing any of the traditional union songs, it would do more to galvanise and rally support than the 1001 slogans Hillary’s campaign tried and discarded – to quote William Morris again, “a cause which cannot be sung of is not worth following”).
I don’t think so. I believe I said this in one my first SSC posts on the 2016 postmortem, but the issue is:
Working class: “We want jobs at the auto plant, not $8/hour being Wal-Mart greeters.”
Hillary: “Learn to code.”
Sanders: “I’ll get you $15/hour at Wal-Mart.”
Trump: “I’ll get you jobs at the auto plant.”
This hasn’t changed.
Has Trump succeeded in getting them the jobs at the auto plant – and if not, have they noticed?
Yes, manufacturing jobs up, wages up, unemployment down, workforce participation up.
Someone who claims to be on your side is likely to be more appealing than someone who brags about being actively against you, even if he doesn’t succeed. At least for long enough to win 2 presidential elections.
Or to put it another way someone that tells you what you want to hear is likely to be more appealing than someone that tells you a hard truth. At least for a while.
Yes, both cassander and brad are correct.
Whether or not employment actually improved for the working class is indicated by what they say on surveys about the overall health of the economy, and people are saying they’re happier about the economy than they have been in…I think ever? Nobody says that if they and the people they know in their real lives are not personally doing well.
And it’s measured at the ballot box where people vote their wallets. If I’m wrong, then Trump loses, and I will come back here and say “oh. I thought the economy and job prospects were good, but they actually weren’t.” We’ll find out in November.
Manufacturing payrolls as a function of the total civilian labor force are actually down from 2015 levels, although they were higher in 2019. We’re (probably) in a manufacturing recession. The situation looks a lot less rosy after we got the BLS revisions.
Is “function” a typo for “fraction”? That’s what the graph you link to appears to be showing.
If so, it doesn’t imply that manufacturing employment is down, only that if it is up it is up by less than overall employment.
Yes, fraction is what I meant to type. Sorry.
So then what’s the significance of the fact you quote? Wouldn’t the relevant figure be the size of the manufacturing payroll, not its ratio to total employment?
I imagine it’s pretty similar to what we felt. I feel obligated to share this post by Megan McArdle, made three days after the 2016 election: https://www.facebook.com/meganjmcardle/posts/680195682144639
The whole thing is worth reading, but if you’re TLDR:
How wrong and defeatist by McArdle.
Perhaps the elites had no power to stop Trump/Sanders by 2016, but that is because they frittered it away in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, at the border, in the cities (which had an uprising of their own in the 80s due to the violent crime rates), etc.
Remember, the problem of the naked emperor could always have been solved by him donning a robe.
If you’re voting for him, you’re not a “Never Trumper” equivalent, as they stormed out of the party and joined the Democrats.
And are now mad that the Democrats don’t actually care what they say.
I can just see Jennifer Rubin pushing for a “National Unity” third party with a Clinton/Romney or Romney/Clinton ticket. Neither of them would agree to it, they and their supporters still hate each others’ guts, and it’d get exactly one vote, but hey, that one voter is a columnist for a major newspaper for some reason.
Yeah, it won’t work this year, but I do wonder whether this ends up opening up more space for a third party that tries to appeal to everyone who can’t stand either socialism or nativist nationalism. That may not be a majority anymore, but it’s not a tiny minority yet either.
That’s not quite it, since lots of NeverTrumpers stayed in the party, but yes, they didn’t vote for him. Those that left seem to have been neocons in particular.
The number who actually joined the Democrats is probably about equal to the number of Hollywood actors who actually moved to Canada.
Not to any appreciable extent. The Republicans all fell in line behind Trump pretty quickly. Even his staunchest critics are now licking his boots.
The Never-Trumpers are by definition the Republicans who didn’t fall in line behind Trump. They are a small minority of Republicans, but they do still exist and aren’t licking Trump’s boots.
That depends on your definition. I was referring to the faction who vocally opposed Trump during the 2016 primaries and tried to deny him the nomination. Most of them subsequently switched to supporting Trump.
A lot of Never Trumpers (or at least those in the initial NR Against Trump issue) predicted many wrong things about how a President Trump would govern. Upon finding out they were wrong, that is when many switched.
The challenge for Republican politicians is that he is both a terrible human being and surprisingly popular with the electorate. Threading that needle is a challenge.
I wouldn’t describe much of the response as boot-licking so much as having figured out how to work together. Trump certainly isn’t getting his way in the legislature.
This is not even remotely true. As a walking cliche who is against everyone…but especially Trump..
The Never Trumpers are entirely made up of Neo-Cons who believe in Forever-War and outsized support for closed borders for Israel.
They’ll trade anything for Middle East wars and closed borders for Israel.
As a libertarian I’m disgusted. Open borders for all white states.
End white supremacy. Open borders for the US, open borders for Israel. Open borders for Europe.
Humanity first!
If it was a matter of Trump’s preferred policies legislated into law vs Sanders’ preferred policies, I’d be in a real pickle. But I don’t expect either to have much of a chance of passing transformative legislation. I expect Sanders to be a far less destructive executive—both substantively and in terms of norm destruction. So if Trump v Sanders is how it turns out, I won’t be thrilled but it’ll be an easy choice.
I expect Sanders to be a far less destructive executive—both substantively and in terms of norm destruction.
So are you saying you expect Sanders to win (if he wins) on a platform of democratic socialism/social democracy, get into power (if he does) and then be able to do sweet Fanny Adams?
You might as well vote in a turnip then, if that’s what is going to happen. A caretaker president is one thing, but “can’t get one single one of my policies passed, and that includes buying free-trade sugar for the White House kitchens” is literally wasting your vote (and I don’t say that lightly).
I’d rather have a turnip as president than Trump.
I don’t think it’s a waste to vote for useless over destructive.
Edit: and if nothing else, I expect Sanders’ choices for courts to be better.
Edit: and if nothing else, I expect Sanders’ choices for courts to be better.
Then you do expect him to be able to do something. Of course, the way the judicial selection system has been politicised, he may not be able to get his ‘better’ choices selected anyway.
What I’m saying is that if I voted for Sanders (and had I a vote in an American election, I’d be very inclined to vote for him) then I’d hope that he could do something, even if I expected a lot of inertia and opposition. But if I genuinely thought he’d just sit there for four years with the biggest highlight of the year being pardoning the Thanksgiving turkey, I’d vote for anyone else I thought might have a better chance of getting at least one (1) policy passed.
To be clear, Sanders is my very last choice in the primary. All I’m saying is if it comes down to Sanders v Trump it’ll be an easy choice for me.
Well I’d vote Democrat if they ran an actual yellow dog…
The executive has a good deal of power, even if the senate votes no to literally everything.
Firstly: The voters might actually object to a do-nothing congress, and vote their bums out. It has happened before.
Secondly: The SEC. Acting appointments. and so on. A lot of jobs get filled by the president, and not all of them go through senate approval. A US where the securities and exchange commission suddenly starts doing its actual job, and where tax evasion gets loudly and effectively prosecuted is going to be a rather different (less criminal) place.
> in terms of norm destruction
If “norms” matter, it seems to me that there’s a lack of structure. The norms should be codified so that they don’t matter.
Norms matter in every human institution that has ever existed.
See also: The abject failure of “code is law” and blockchain governance. Also, the constant complaints about bureaucracy and red tape when people do try to codify norms.
If Sanders gets the primary nod, November will be a historic make-or-break moment for the Left.
If Sanders wins in November, he will have shown that the Dem establishment’s supposed main concern with him, “electability”, had no currency. Even more, a 2020 victory will also diffuse future electability args against left-wing candidates in 2024, 2028, etcetera, in the same manner. The narrative of Clinton’s 2016 loss and Sanders 2020 vindication will be a cornerstone of every Democratic primary election cycle for decades.
Perhaps more interestingly: The center will be forced to make its ideological case based on the merits alone, on the substance of their ideas, instead of relying on the rhetoric of “political pragmatism”. They will be in the same position the Left was in for the past 40 years: Saying “Yes, your position is more popular, but my position is right“, with the looming question of whether nominating someone with less popular positions is worth it.
But if Sanders loses in November, the results will be McGovern-esque. The Left will have to contend with with the fact that they got everything they had wanted in an election, a socialist fire-breather backed by the working class vs. an oafish billionaire plutocrat, and they still lost. Although the Left would still have favorable demographic trends to point to, it could be 10-20 years before they ever feel comfortable nominating someone like Sanders again. The center will be absolutely vindicated. It’s make or break.
I largely agree with this except for the part about “backed by the working class.” Bernie’s core constituency is college kids who don’t want to pay back their student loans. Not…miners supporting a guy who wants to ban fracking. Sanders is still ultimately a limousine socialist.
In Irish election news: we still don’t have a government. Talks are rumbling on, the hopes/fears of a Grand Coalition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are still all over the media. Everyone is refusing to go into coalition with Sinn Féin and are casting coy glances at every other potential party, but the trouble is nobody has a majority large enough to make it stick without a lot of messy “if we add in you guys and our guys and ask those guys and make a deal with some of them other guys” calculations.
Both the Garda Commissioner and Leo Varadkar are reminding the public that “The Army Council hasn’t gone away, you know” while Sinn Féin are responding with plans to have rallies around the country to demand they be considered for government.
Leo and Alan may claim that “75% of the people didn’t vote for Sinn Féin” but by the same token, lads, 75% of the people didn’t vote for ye in Fine Gael either, or Fianna Fáil, and yet both parties are happy to put themselves forward. Reminder: Sinn Féin got 24.5% of the
overallfirst-preference vote, Fine Gael got 22.2% and Fianna Fáil got 20.9%.Well, if the Shannon doesn’t flood the entire country what with all the storm rain and sweep us all away, more news forthcoming as it happens!
The whole “we won’t talk with those guys” is how you get people who become more extreme. If you want situations like that diffused, invite them into the government openly and then bog them down with bureaucracy. Their supporters will see them having power and not accomplishing anything despite their best efforts.
The whole idea of “government formation” is pretty dumb. My ideal system would be a hybrid of the American system and the parliamentary system. You have an executive branch, elected in a two-round system(with anybody allowed to run in the second round) with no power to veto laws and a legislative branch, elected by proportional representation, passing laws passed by a legislative majority. You wouldn’t need to make these deals to get things done, just put individual issues to a vote, one by one.
that doesn’t eliminate the need for dealmaking, it just shoves it onto the legislature and marginalizes the executive somewhat. It doesn’t remove them from the process though, because the executive will still have a bully pulpit and rulemaking authority, both of which legislators will care a lot about.
Which would just get groups of people to make an alliance based on mutually agreeing to vote the same way (even on topics that they would otherwise disagree on).
Once such an alliance includes at least 50% of the votes, you have a de facto government formation process.
Oh Hell with it, in for a dime in for a dollar, this could be my response to so many subthreads this week that I can’t can’t decide which one is most appropriate so I’ll just do a top level post:
@Conrad Honcho, a year or three ago you asked me (something like) “What would it take for you to vote to re-elect Trump”, well here’s a list:
1) Work with Congress to get a massive amount of public works projects started nationwide that employ the jobless and/or low skilled in lasting useful projects.
2) Appoint judges with a history of pro-union decisions
3) Appoint a pro-union Secretary of Labor.
4) Appoint pro-union representatives to the NLRB.
5) Work on immigration enforcement from the demand side.
6) Get Congress to slow trade with China (that it’s passes into law is important).
7) & 8) Some “culture war” stuff I don’t want to get into here (one of which I imagine you’d like to see, the other probably not).
9) Democrats nominate Bloomberg, Steyer or (maybe) Buttigieg instead of Biden, Sanders, (maybe) Klobucher, or (maybe) Warren.
(No, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a Democrat to do all of 1 to 8 either, but as a Republican Trump has a higher bar to prove himself to me).
FWLIW, enough of that list accomplished gets me to not vote against him if not for him like if all the list was done.
Call your people.
@jermo sapiens says:
Oh sure, IIRC you posted that your Canadian lawyer’s guild (which unlike here is called something other than “The BAR Association”) decided that a “lack of diversity” among it’s members is a problem and that the solution is periodic “awareness training” for itself, which I found hilarious!