Open Thread 148.75

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1,259 Responses to Open Thread 148.75

  1. Le Maistre Chat says:

    “Anonymous Colin” asked about “fodder for Weird Fiction” in the integer thread. To answer here:

    I love ancient aliens. Not the wan recent kind popularized by Erich von Daniken and later The “History” Channel who showed up to build the Pyramids and make the Sumerians worship them. I mean the kind whose expanding civilization drove Permian species extinct and changed the global climate with their industry, the kind who make sense and reason of Deep Time, so we are not forced to believe things like “If human governments don’t change their policies, there will be catastrophic global warming and mass extinction, just like some pre-human events human scientists have discovered, but never mind those because there weren’t rational animals around to be guilty for them.”

  2. The original Mr. X says:

    Hot take: college students complaining about being underemployed and trapped in crappy, precarious work are the economic equivalent of the sort of unhappy singles whom Scott discusses in “Radicalising the Romanceless”. By this I mean that both groups are unhappy because they did what society told them to do, and now are either not benefitting (at best) or actively being held back (at worst) because of it. When it comes to getting dates, society (or at least a large portion of — especially blue-tribe, pro-feminist — society) says, “Women like caring, sensitive men, so be all emotionally available, do whatever your crush asks you to, and eventually she’ll realise what a swell guy you are and start dating you.” When it comes to getting a good job, society (or at least the state education system) says, “Graduates earn so much more than non-graduates! If you don’t get a degree, you’re really shooting yourself in the foot in terms of future earnings! If you have a degree, you can get all sorts of amazing jobs!” In both cases, of course, this advice turns out to be rubbish, but many people accept it when they’re growing up it because it’s what society tells them and they have no reason to doubt it. In both cases, the reaction when people say “Hey, I’m doing what society said I’m supposed to and my life still sucks, what gives?” is, as often as not, “You’re a bad, entitled person who deserve your suffering! Society doesn’t owe you a living/girlfriend!” And in both cases, a lot of people respond by becoming bitter and disillusioned and supporting groups which promise to right the situation — radical left-wing politics in the case of underemployed university grads, and incels or PUA-types in the case of the romantically unsuccessful.

    • John Schilling says:

      Yes, this. I don’t have a terribly good answer for what to do about it, in the educational case. In the romantic case, the mediocre but better than nothing advice has been to look into what the PUA and adjacent manospheric communities are teaching, but be careful not to drink the kool-aid. We need an equivalent for people who spent four years on an education that doesn’t really advance their economic prospects.

      Also, in both cases, could we maybe stop giving the bad advice in the first place?

      • brad says:

        The advice isn’t that bad, really. Sure there are some great jobs in the trades and corners of the civil service that don’t require degrees. But they are no more universal solutions than learn to code is. For most everyone else they probably are better off with a four year degree, even with debt, than without. It is dumb that assistant manager of the clothing department at Target requires a degree, but that’s where we are. And it’s better to be an assistant manager of the clothing department at Target than a part time stock person the clothing department at Target.

        • Tarpitz says:

          That may be so, but if the part time stock person is actually good at her job, she’s getting promoted.

          • The Nybbler says:

            There’s a pretty hard ceiling on promotions without a degree at Target, apparently. Getting any salaried managerial position without a degree is theoretically possible but in practice never happens.

            Walmart is less credential-happy.

          • albatross11 says:

            Some kind of alternative credential that would work as rational astrology for employers, but wouldn’t cost employees a gazillion dollars, would be a huge win for mankind.

        • Matt M says:

          For most everyone else they probably are better off with a four year degree, even with debt, than without.

          Agreed. And IMO, this is where the analogy ultimately fails.

          While getting any college degree at any price isn’t necessarily a good idea, it is clearly true that statistically, those with degrees do better economically than those without. A degree doesn’t guarantee wealth and opulence, but for 99% of people, having a degree is better than not having a degree.

          This is not true for the “nice guys” out there. The issue isn’t just that being a nice guy is no guarantee of romantic success. It’s that being a nice guy is actively harmful and does not make one better off, all things considered, at all. It’s not as if being the nice/sensitive guy clearly works for 99% of guys but there are a few edge cases where it doesn’t. And yet, despite clear and obvious evidence that it doesn’t work for most people, society (for reasons largely political) absolutely refuses to change/update this advice.

          “Go to college” is good, but not perfect, advice. “Be a nice guy” is abjectly terrible advice.

          • John Schilling says:

            While getting any college degree at any price isn’t necessarily a good idea, it is clearly true that statistically, those with degrees do better economically than those without.

            But that’s weighted by A: people from an upper-class background who are going to be rich no matter what, and B: people who go to college to pursue a specific professional career. Those aren’t the people the usual advice is targeted at; they’re going to go to college no matter what. For the person on the margin who might or might not go to college, “you should absolutely go to college, you will be more prosperous if you do no matter what you bother to study”, does not put them in either of the groups that unambiguously prosper afterattending college.

            A degree doesn’t guarantee wealth and opulence, but for 99% of people, having a degree is better than not having a degree.

            I don’t believe that number is 99%. I don’t believe it is even 90%, or even just 90% of the people who actually attend college. Particularly if “having a degree” is not qualified in some economically sensible way. And, again, the (bad) advice is for people on the margins, least likely to prosper from it.

          • Matt M says:

            I don’t believe that number is 99%. I don’t believe it is even 90%, or even just 90% of the people who actually attend college. Particularly if “having a degree” is not qualified in some economically sensible way. And, again, the (bad) advice is for people on the margins, least likely to prosper from it.

            Fair points, particularly about the marginal advice-receiver.

            That said, I still think I’m correct that “go to college” is generally good advice that sometimes fails, while “be a nice guy to women” is generally bad advice that might still, nonetheless, occasionally succeed.

          • Garrett says:

            > “Be a nice guy” is abjectly terrible advice.

            This is why I’ve become a miserable misanthrope. And opposed to women’s suffrage.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Garrett: But if you’re a misanthrope, you should be happy when women suffer! (But not only women, as that would be misogyny.)

      • Erusian says:

        We need an equivalent for people who spent four years on an education that doesn’t really advance their economic prospects.

        Also, in both cases, could we maybe stop giving the bad advice in the first place?

        Part of the reason PUA was created is because people (mostly men, I presume) were willing to seek out and pay for such advice. Are people willing to do the same for career and self-improvement advice? There’s a few financial shows around (though again, people are willing to pay for financial advice) but nothing like that.

        • albatross11 says:

          Would the equivalent be an online community of people figuring out how to get acceptable credentials for hiring/promotion with minimal cost and effort?

          • Erusian says:

            I think that’s too indirect. If you want a literal equivalent, it’d be an organization of people with a strong ideology that corporations don’t understand who they really need to hire in order to be profitable and repeatedly choose to promote workers that are popular with management over the real hard workers who keep the company running. The ideology would then focus on strategies to get paid as much as possible for as little work as possible with a strong ideology that corporations are thieves and it’s all BS from top to bottom. Plus some virtue posturing about social and moral decay, probably going back to the halcyon days when everyone had their own farm, was their own boss, etc.

            More healthily, some kind of career advice/coaching based on getting the skills, credentials, and experience, and leveraging them to get the best job possible however they define that (whether high pay and low work, personally fulfilling, etc). Which is analogous to the healthier part of PUA too: if PUA was just telling me to touch up their social skills, dress better, get in good shape, and get successful, then I don’t think most people would find it objectionable. Likewise, if someone advocates stealing from your employer that’s not great, but if someone advocates negotiating harder I doubt most people will object.

      • Jaskologist says:

        Hotter take: This is all part of a long-term plan to restore ‘Murica back to its anti-elitist roots. What better way to build up a nation of individualists who don’t trust no “experts” than to select hard against those who trust what society tells them?

        • AG says:

          What is the selection effect here? Those who conform to the narrative (got a degree and a good job) are the ones who succeed, and get the financial and social power to further entrench the system.

  3. The Pachyderminator says:

    Could someone please reply to this comment? I accidentally unsubscribed from email notifications, and I’m not sure if I successfully resubscribed.

    Here’s a link to my favorite existentialist Flash game for your trouble.

  4. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Copyright/Trademark as Eternal Rent-Seeking

    When a character created in the early 20th century, occasionally even in the Victorian era, maintains a certain continuous level of popularity, the heirs of the deceased creator get royalties. These royalties can then be used to harass creators of derivative works after the character and writings are believed to be in the public domain.
    The oldest example I know off the top of my head is Sherlock Holmes.
    In Conan Doyle’s home United Kingdom, the copyrights expired in 1980, but the stories were somehow removed from the public domain from 1996-2000 by his heirs. Meanwhile in the United States, due to laws like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, publication before or after 1923 was frozen as the cutoff between whether it was legal or illegal for the public to freely Cher a work of human creativity.
    As all but ten Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories were published before 1923, the Conan Doyle estate continued to demand royalties for all Sherlock Holmes works from first appearance A Study in Scarlet on, under the claim that Holmes and Watson’s personalities were seamless wholes that included copyrighted elements. Fortunately in 2013, Leslie Klinger (lawyer and editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes) refused to agree with this out of fear of legal fees and was vindicated by the original court and Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (the Conan Doyle estate tried to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, which declined to hear their appeal – perhaps under the legal theory of “Are you shitting me?”)

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Meet the rent-seekers!
      As far as I can gather, the most legitimate holder of the few remaining and geographically-limited Arthur Conan Doyle intellectual properties is a private corporation held by the ex-wife of Sheldon Reynolds, an American TV movie producer-director who attempted to approach Doyle’s literary estate in 1976 and found that the IP had been transferred from his three surviving heirs to a holding company, Baskervilles Investments Ltd, that had gone into receivership with the Bank of Scotland. This legal entity has a detailed but self-serving (it never mentions the copyright trolling Klinger broke) history of the copyrights. Hilariously, they call another company, Conan Doyle Estate Ltd, “copyright trolls” for claiming that they own the late Doyle heir Lady Jean Bromet’s 1/3 of the IP.

    • The Pachyderminator says:

      It’s a big problem. We reached the point long ago, even before Sonny Bono, where copyright is having the opposite of its originally intended effect. It’s supposed to encourage creativity (by helping creators get paid for their work), not stifle it (by allowing corporations and media conglomerates, often with no relationship to the original creation of the work, to monopolize creative work that was done before my grandparents were born). The ideal period for copyright, in my opinion, would be something like 25 years, non-renewable. The original Star Wars trilogy, The Terminator, and Back to the Future would currently be public domain in a just world.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        The ideal period for copyright, in my opinion, would be something like 25 years, non-renewable. The original Star Wars trilogy, The Terminator, and Back to the Future would currently be public domain in a just world.

        There’s a case to be made that members of the public shouldn’t be allowed to dilute the author’s vision while (s)he is alive. Unfortunately corporate authorship is so common that this might not be a viable reform! 25 years non-renewable from date of release would be roughly ideal for corporate ownership.

        • DinoNerd says:

          There’s an easy fix for that – corporations are not people. Require them to record actual author(s) of works for hire, and they get to keep copyright only as long as there’s at least one author still working for them. (Or if we want to be nice to corporations, as long as there’s at least one author still alive.)

          If we want to provide slightly more predictability, make the rule “author’s life or 25 years, whichever is longer”. That allows an independent author who dies young to provide for their surviving family, and allowes Disney et al. to plan to have whatever-it-is for at least 25 years.

        • The Pachyderminator says:

          My hesitation with this is that if we start extending the human lifespan, the period could get too long again. If people start routinely living to 120, we’d eventually have a lot of 100-year copyrights and the situation would be little better than it is now. I’d want to have a hard chronological limit, just in case the transhumanists win. Maybe 50 years?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            That’s a pretty big “if”, if you ask me. And even if it does happen, we can revisit copyright law as and when it becomes an issue. In the meantime, I think it would be better to base our copyright laws on actual human lifespans, not on lifespans from a hypothetical future which may not even come to pass.

          • Nick says:

            Yeah, if the last few decades is any indication, “we need to extend copyrights” is a problem that’s too easy to solve, not too difficult.

          • The Pachyderminator says:

            The problem is that copyrights are easy to extend but hard to shorten. So this could be a real problem if we don’t prepare for it before the problem arises, as long as we’re magically reforming copyright law anyway.

          • Loriot says:

            That’s a good problem to have. We can cross that bridge if we come to it. Chances are, society will have evolved in unforseeable ways by that time that make present planning futile anyway.

          • John Schilling says:

            If someone lives to be 120, and if it matters whether copyright lives with them, then there’s a good chance that you’ve got an author living in poverty while their works are still immensely popular and being “ripped off” by lesser, but more commercial, corporate imitators. That’s going to be massively unpopular.

            I’d be in favor of an absolute fixed term for copyright, but if copyright doesn’t last for life or at least for a fixed term of approximately an adult lifespan, that’s the sort of unpopularity you’re going to have to account for.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            The whole author starves while work remains popular thing is a hypothetical so very hypothetical I think it likely to fall into the category of “inheritance Taxes bankrupted the family farm” – that is, no actual examples to be found.

            Most books earn almost all their earnings in the first 6 years. Ebooks have made that falloff slightly less brutal, but not.. that much less brutal. Books that sell significant volume after twenty years, as a rule sold goddamn mountains in the first decade, so if the author is depending on the trickle income still, they are catastrophically bad with money, and would be in dire straights pretty much no matter what.

            Also. Not to put to fine a point on it, but if you only wrote one book, you are not a professional author. Expecting to make a living of a profession in which you have not done any work for decades is.. overly entitled.

            Copy right terms, in practice need to achieve two things :
            1 Generate enough revenue to make writing not entirely a fools quest. – a single decade would more than suffice for this.
            2: Make hollywood, the gaming industry and the rest who make secondary IP pay up. This means the term needs to be long enough to make waiting a bad strategy, compared with finding an appropriate sum of money. 10 years is not enough for that – too many still culturally relevant works to choose from, but 25 should more than do it. I mean sure, the local film school will now be filming a lot of 25 year old books, but that was not a relevant source of income anyway.

            I find it very hard to justify more than 25 years, flat. The granting of monopolies is a very severe violation of liberty. Granting effectively perpetual ones is just offensive.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            @Thomas
            +1. I agree with everything you said. Even 25 years is too high. Although it’d be a great improvement over what we have now.

          • johan_larson says:

            Each of us has a strong moral claim to the fruits of his labours. This means, in the case of authored works, if anyone makes money, it should be the author. This to me suggests copyright should last for the life of the author or if we must have a fixed term, for approximately the expected life of the author, meaning something like 50 years. I agree the current policy of life of the author + seventy years is excessive.

          • Viliam says:

            @johan_larson

            copyright should last for the life of the author

            Consider the incentives this would create.

            “Mr Larson, we would like to publish your book, and we offer you royalty of $100. If you refuse, we would like to remind you that if an accident happened to you, we will be able to publish the book for free.”

      • viVI_IViv says:

        The ideal period for copyright, in my opinion, would be something like 25 years, non-renewable.

        This. And I’d also say that copyright should only apply to the works themselves, or literal pieces of text/sound/video extracted from them. Copyrighting a fictional character or a fictional setting should not be possible.
        Anybody who wishes to produce fanfiction or fanart should be able to do so without any legal issue. Note that many historical masterpieces would be considered fanfiction or fanart by modern copyright laws.

        • johan_larson says:

          Copyrighting a fictional character or a fictional setting should not be possible.

          The problem with that is that other works can affect the perception of the original, and do so negatively. If I write a series of stories about the fun adventures of a group of colts and fillies, aimed at ten-year-olds, and someone else comes along and uses those same characters for fantasies of horse-fucking, that’s going to affect how people think of my stories. It could definitely affect my ability to earn a living from the stories I wrote, to say nothing of the offensiveness of having characters I created used for things that offend me. As the original author I should be able to put a stop to such things, which is why copyright should include the ability to prevent derivative works.

    • Evan Þ says:

      For more good news, US copyrights finally started expiring again last year! One more year’s works will become public domain each January First.

      • AG says:

        That situation certainly isn’t going to last long. The Mouse is probably paying into politician’s coffers for more extensions as we speak.

        • Evan Þ says:

          They’ve said they aren’t planning on it, there haven’t been any moves yet, and there’d be much greater opposition to copyright extensions now than in the nineties – both from the Internet and from the leftist opposition to large corporations.

          Four years ten months to go till Steamboat Willie enters public domain!

        • Loriot says:

          The extended copyrights have already started expiring. If they were going to fight it, they would have done so a couple years ago, back when it would have been a lot easier. But even they they recognized that it would be an uphill battle.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Something like that example is probably typical when an author with a spouse and/or children dies with creations worth licensing. Edgar Rice Burroughs has heirs; so do Tolkien and his now-deceased son Christopher, the original literary executor. But what if someone creates valuable intellectual property and doesn’t have typical heirs?
      That brings us from Conan Doyle to Conan Barbarian.
      Unmarried and childless, Robert E. Howard committed suicide in 1936 over his mother’s terminal illness he’d been paying the medical bills for. He was survived by his father, Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard. He died in 1944, willing the rights to a friend in the medical profession, Dr. Pere Kuykendall. Howard’s first published novel, A Gent from Bear Creek, was printed in Britain in 1937. This was followed in the United States by a collection of Howard’s stories, Skull-Face and Others in 1946. Conan the Barbarian wasn’t of any posthumous value until 1950, when the novel Howard had sold to a failing British publisher was picked up by small press called Gnome Press. It was a modest success, enough that the rights-holders wanted the Conan short stories compiled into hardcover books too.
      Hither came Lyon Sprague de Camp, already an established science fiction writer both on his own (cf. Lest Darkness Fall) and as someone who loved co-writing with a second author (cf. Harold Shea series with Fletcher Pratt, later with Lin Carter and others). He seemed an ideal candidate to edit the short story volumes for the Howard literary estate, especially as they had found Conan story fragments among the deceased’s papers. De Camp fastidiously filed copyrights on his Conan stories, presumably aware that under US law of the time Howard’s copyrights would expire after a renewable term of 28 years: between 1960 and 1964 unless the Kuykendall family could renew them (they couldn’t or didn’t).
      It wasn’t until 1967 that the Conan stories started being published in large print runs, in paperback by Lancer Books. I Am Not A Lawyer, but it would seem to me that Lyon Sprague de Camp would be the sole Conan copyright holder by this time, with the original Weird Tales texts in the public domain.
      But there was so much more to Howard than Conan, and it seems that Edgar Hoffman Price, a pen pal of H.P. Lovecraft, had physically met Robert E. Howard through their mutual friend and, somehow, acquired a trunk containing everything he had failed to get published. So when the representative of the Kuykendall family decided to close up shop in 1965, she asked de Camp to become Howard’s literary executor, but he found it expedient under US copyright law to keep his Conan interests separate from that and recommend for the job Glenn Lord, who had bought the Howard story trunk from Price.
      Fast forward to late 1970. Marvel Comics writer Roy Thomas is interested in licensing the character of Conan. His boss, Martin Goodman, says “I’ll pay rights-holders $150 a month for a sword-and-sorcery character.” Thomas approaches Lin Carter about his Conan clone Thongor; finding he’s barely within the budget, he assumes the popularity of the Conan paperbacks means he’s a more valuable IP… but what the heck, I’ll go behind Goodman’s back and offer Lord & de Camp $200.
      They jumped at it. But the legal contract wasn’t exactly for the Conan stories of Howard (now in the public domain anyway), de Camp, Lin Carter et al. They were the rights to everything by Robert E. Howard. Later, by 1978, de Camp and Carter folding all Conan rights into the licensing deal with Marvel Comics.
      Shortly after this time, the copyrights and trademarks start to become indecipherable. By the time the 1982 Hollywood film was being licensed, the purported rights-holders had transformed into a corporation, “Conan Properties Inc.” Toy corporation Mattel briefly had a contract for action figures related to the film, but dropped the R-rated property in favor of something that had been in development in-house: Masters of the Universe. In 1984, Conan Properties Inc. sued them for copyright and trademark infringement and breach of contract. Mattel’s lawyers successfully argued “Who the Hell are you? You can’t even prove the purported rights were legally transferred to you.”
      Sadly, intellectual property case law is obscure enough even to the judges called to rule on IP law that CPI has successfully sued artists for making Conan works as recently as 2018.

    • CatCube says:

      I’ve liked the proposal where the copyright holder can renew indefinitely, but it gets exponentially more expensive (not original to me but I can’t remember where I first read of it).

      For example, you get your first 25 years free (possibly with the registration fee currently required if you want to actually sue somebody). After 25 years, you can renew, but it costs you, say, $1000. 5 years later, at 30 years, you can renew again, but it costs $2000. At 35, $4000, and so on. If, at any point, the rightsholder doesn’t renew it irrevocably drops into the public domain. The rights can be licensed or assigned just as they do now, but only the current holder can actually renew–they have to either renew or sell it to somebody before the next renewal period expires.

      All of the costs and timeframes are subject to debate. Maybe it’s $10,000 at 25 years, or maybe the renew period is yearly at 25–I don’t know enough about the economics of publishing, TV, and moviemaking to pick good ones–but this is the general framework.

      This has a couple of advantages: 1) people still get the protection of their work for a relatively long initial period that they can live on until they do their next thing; 2) if something isn’t making money, there’s no reason for people to hold on to it; 3) but if it *is* they can keep a hold of the copyright; 4) it avoids “orphan” works, because if somebody isn’t using it it’ll relatively quickly drop into the public domain, and if it’s not clear who the rightsholder is there’s nobody paying the fee; and 5) eventually, it gets so expensive to renew that even somebody like Disney can’t hold on to it forever.

      • danridge says:

        It’s a cool idea, but I think realistically the timeframes we’re talking about are subject to large changes in technology, media landscape, economics, and certainly there will be significant inflation. I just imagine this will probably be something you’d want to fine-tune to incentivise the right models of usage and force copyright to eventually expire; there’s probably no simple, good way of doing it, a flat, mandated formula will get crushed by inflation, there will probably be a way to game anything you do to tie it in with the value or usage of the work.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I’m waiting for dystopian sf about a world where you have to pay a fee to remember copyrighted work.

  5. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-cias-audacious-operation-that-gave-them-access-to-state-secrets

    For over 50 years, what looked like a company specializing in secure communication called Crypto was actually owned by the CIA and was sharing messages with the US.

    The reporter thought this was pretty funny, and I’m still patriotic enough to see the humor. However, there are ethical issues with doing something like that, and there were people who were at least uneasy about it.

    For those of you who are interested in ethics, what do you think of shenanigans on that level?

    What do you think is the likely cost of this coming out?

    Also, how much good did it do the US? It’s not as though people can look at American foreign policy and say it was strikingly clueful.

    • cassander says:

      >Also, how much good did it do the US? It’s not as though people can look at American foreign policy and say it was strikingly clueful.

      We did win the cold war without having to nuke anyone.

    • Milo Minderbinder says:

      It makes the argument against countries using Huawei for 5G/other tech infrastructure more of a “lesser of two evils” situation. Who do you prefer will have your secrets, Uncle Sam or Uncle Xi? Ethically, it makes American carping about potential Chinese spying nothing more than shameless hypocrisy.

      To be sure, I consider myself an American patriot. I think it’s the responsibility of every great power to acquire information on all other nations as a matter of national security. I’m not personally bothered by the spying, only that we got caught.

      • DinoNerd says:

        We’d already had public demands that American companies put back doors in all their cryptographic products for purporses of law enforcement, when the moral panic about Huawei began. I don’t recall whether those bills passed or not; the point was that to some number of elected Ameicans, law enforcement was always more important than privacy, and I can’t recall any nation where “the national interest” aka “intelligence” was deemed less important than law enforcement.

        As a Canadian, I objected to the Huawei panic in Canada on those grounds. The US is not a reliable friend to Canada, and is more likely than China to see Canada as a source of gain for them, due to simple proximity. It’s been bullying everyone in the Americas since the Monroe doctrine, and it’s quite possibly only racism which currently makes them less nasty to Canada than to e.g. Mexico. (And we have the Trump trade renegotiation as a recent example of this kind of bullying. To this Canadian, what appeared to be going on was that the deal wasn’t “fair” to the US because they only got 90% of the gain, and wanted 99% ;-( – numbers picked to convey emotion; I don’t recall any useful info being published at the time.)

        If there is no trustworthy tech supplier available – Canada should be making its own, not buying from either Great Power. Of course that would be hard to manage, given our historic tendency to bend over whenever the US asks, and our much smaller home customer base.

        • Milo Minderbinder says:

          You say “bully,” I say “sphere of influence”…

          The trade deal was kind of a wash vs. NAFTA for Canadians, other than Canadians getting cheaper milk. (I despise farm subsidies at home and abroad, people shouldn’t have to pay more for food to protect a small, politically connected minority of inefficient businesses)

          Also, I’m pretty sure it’s your GDP per capita more than your melanin which influences American attitudes.

        • Dack says:

          As far as I can tell, Canada’s biggest concession in NAFTA 2.0 is allowing the US access to 3.6% of the dairy market.

        • Loriot says:

          It seems to me that the real problem with NAFTA is that it didn’t have Trump’s name on it. He’d be happy to pass the exact same deal as long as he got the credit.

        • John Schilling says:

          As a Canadian, I objected to the Huawei panic in Canada on those grounds. The US is not a reliable friend to Canada, and is more likely than China to see Canada as a source of gain for them, due to simple proximity.

          The US reliably defends Canada, which A: we would like a bit of recognition for and B: gives us an interest in making sure Canada remains defensible. If, e.g., any cellphone that contacts a Huawei tower becomes a piece of Chinese spyware, then Canada may be comfortable with that, but the United States may legitimately not. And if Canada is going to trust China more than the United States in this regard, then the United States may have to stop trusting Canada at least where telecommunications are concerned.

          This would be inconvenient for both Americans and Canadians, but I expect more so for Canadians.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Anyway, the impact of Canada using Huawei equipment isn’t that China listens in instead of the US. It’s that China listens in in addition to the US.

    • Deiseach says:

      It’s unsavoury but it’s the kind of thing state intelligence services do all the time. However, it does make all the crying about “Russian interference” look silly, and the newfound reverence on the left side for the FBI/CIA seem even more grotesque than it already was.

      This is what governments are going to do, and it’s only fair to assume that if We are doing it to Them, they are just as much doing it back to Us. Nobody has any foothold on the moral high ground here. Ireland is too small and weak to be of interest to anyone, but that didn’t stop GCHQ, and if we could/can spy on anyone, we’re probably doing it too.

      Though it does seem to be the case that if you know they’re doing it to you, you can take advantage of this (by using Cunning Devices along the lines of “Don’t throw me in the briar patch!”) 🙂

      Indeed, Irish officials sometimes used this to their advantage. “Sometimes we wanted them to hear what we were saying,” said Mr Lillis. In these situations officials would speak in Irish or add extra encryption to their messages to signal to the British they contained particularly sensitive information and they should pay attention to it.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I see differences between spying, interference to get specific advantages, and interference to just cause damage.

  6. blipnickels says:

    Has anyone used finasteride? What was your experience?

    I’m not balding but my hair is thinning out and I’m hoping there’s a relatively simple fix. Finasteride seems like it will prevent further hair loss for ~$30/month, which is worth it to me, but I’m reading different things about the medical side effects and I’d appreciate anyone’s experience.

    • salvorhardin says:

      If you are worried about side effects, some doctors will prescribe topical finasteride which has some of the same effect and a much lower side effect risk. I have been applying a cocktail of topical finasteride and stronger-than-OTC minoxidil to my scalp every morning for several years now. No side effects and hair thinning/recession seems to have not gotten worse since I started applying it. But of course post hoc ergo proper hoc remains a fallacy.

    • Spookykou says:

      I started to notice my hair thinning about 6 years ago so I went ahead and asked about and got finasteride, I feel like my hair has stayed at roughly the same thinness since. I take it orally, and I had mild sexual side effects for a few months after I started taking it but they faded and now I seem to have no side effects, it is probably one of the highest value on the dollar things that I have ever bought, assuming my hair would have continued to thin. I started using minoxidil about 6 months ago to try and gain back some lost ground if possible, it might be working, but it also makes my head itchy.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      On my todo list is to try mesotherapy for the scalp. Ideally I’d find a mix that contains minoxidil and finasteride as well. But either way, I’d start topical. I’ve heard rumours of very small risk of pretty horror side effects – stuff like permanent depression.

    • MTSowbug says:

      My hair started thinning about three years ago. I tested a variety of interventions, including minoxidil, ketoconazole, adenosine, changing shampoos, switching from combs to brushes, and finasteride. In my personal experience, among this set of interventions, only finasteride and minoxidil had observable effects. I currently am on a regime of once-daily 1.25mg finasteride and once-daily minoxidil foam treatment (note that twice-daily is recommended for minoxidil, and note that liquid minoxidil is substantially cheaper than foam but can irritate the scalp). Under this regime, I have observed no further hair thinning, and my vertex hair seems to have gradually (over two years) recovered most of its original volume.

      It’s hard to assess the effectiveness of hair-loss interventions – you can’t easily see the top of your own head, humidity/haircare/styling/lighting strongly affect appearance, and the hair follicle cycle is very long (2-7 years for scalp hair). For my purposes, I attempted to assess treatment effectiveness by photographing the top of my head daily and, less rigorously, by gathering handfuls of scalp hair to feel for thickness and volume.

      I am not a physician, and my opinions should not be construed as medical advice. But in my personal experience, finasteride has prevented my male-pattern hair loss.

  7. brad says:

    In a thread below John Schilling makes a reference to “six figures” in the context of a job. That got me thinking. I think my impression of a six figure salary as being what you need to have made it, was set somewhere in the mid 90s. Ye old inflation calculator tells me that $100,000 in 1995 is around $171,000 today. Introspecting, that rings pretty true to me. While I still say “six figures” what I’m thinking of is closer to a $175,000 lifestyle than a $100,000. I wonder if people older or younger than me anchor differently or if some don’t anchor that way at all.

    • Erusian says:

      I think people tend to think in relative terms and the thing about making six figures is that both now and in 1995 you were making about twice the average household income. A two income household where both people make six figures is in the top 5% of all households almost by definition. (A single earner six figure household is still roughly in the top fifth to quarter.)

      I think the meaning is thus still pretty accurate: upper middle class or whatever you want to call it. I don’t think anyone thinks of six figures as 1% wealthy (those are “millionaires and billionaires”) but it’s definitely comfortable and high earning.

      • Anteros says:

        This ‘money equates to class’ idea is one of the very few things that I find jarring in the list of differences between America and Britain (or America and everywhere else?) I don’t know why it does, but the thought that Donald Trump could be considered upper class merely because he has a ton of money, is one I find somewhat ludicrous. It could be snobbery on my part of course, but I also recoil when upper class (or upper middle class) people claim to be ‘of the people’ or working class simply because they’re short of cash.

        My sister makes approximately ten times what I do, but from the perspective of everybody who knows us both (in the UK) we’re of the same class. Same culture, same education, same accent etc.

        • Erusian says:

          I agree that it’s a blind spot in the American mentality. Though I also think the system is less entrenched in the US than in Britain, I agree it does exist and is a thing. As I’ve pointed out a few times, Trump’s family has been rich for two or three generations at best while Anderson Cooper’s family is old money/old blood. This dynamic is important, if under-appreciated.

          All that said, I think the same dynamics work once you presume everyone is working class. I doubt highly educated gentry would ever admit to caring about income, even if they were not all that wealthy until either they married properly or their uncle died.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            As I’ve pointed out a few times, Trump’s family has been rich for two or three generations at best while Anderson Cooper’s family is old money/old blood.

            In case anyone doesn’t know what Erusian is saying, Anderson Cooper is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, the late great-great-granddaughter of American railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt via his youngest grandson (also named Cornelius Vanderbilt). In what was the tech capitalism of his day, the elder Cornelius raised his family from New York Dutch of modest means to the closest thing to American nobility.

          • Anteros says:

            @Erusian & Le Maistre Chat

            Thanks for contributing to my education about matters USAnian

          • Anteros says:

            @Zephalinda

            Indeed. I have a direct ancestor who was the secretary of Robert Stephenson (of Rocket fame) and we’ve been keeping quiet about it for 200 years in an attempt to move up in the world..

            ETA Yes, I know – “Don’t tell him your name, Pike!”

          • Lambert says:

            Apart from the ones that managed to marry into the Dukedom of Marlborough.
            (okay, not the druggo one)
            The heir apparent (Marquise of Blandford) played polo at Harrow before rowing across the Atlantic, which is at minimum the very top of middle-class.

            None of the ones that stayed in the US look like they could pull off Harris tweed, though. Probably don’t own any of Scotland, either.

          • brad says:

            @Zephalinda
            Is that really the case? Are there no English lordlings attending Eton today, the fifth generation in his family to do so–his up from nothing great-great-great-great grandfather having bought a title with a fortune made in the Industrial Revolution and married a daughter off to the scion of a down on its luck noble family? And if their are, do his peers really consider him middle class because of this terribly shameful history?

          • brad says:

            I don’t understand the point of your objections if the “European class system” you are trying to contrast doesn’t actually exist anymore. Seem pretty affected.

          • Deiseach says:

            And if their are, do his peers really consider him middle class because of this terribly shameful history?

            Not so much those, since a lot of the posh schools are quite used to “quis paget, entrat” (as Private Eye‘s mythical St Cake’s school has it for its school motto) and so have happily enrolled the sons of foreign despots and gangsters alongside home-grown nouveau riche and old blood/old money scions. Lordlings with an American moneybags great-grandfather probably pass the test.

            The snobbery is rather more refined than that; take the case of Michael Heseltine, a so-called Tory grandee who was a big shot in the party and bought his own stately home, but could never quite shake off the stigma of being a self-made man (and indeed felt that it had harmed his chances with the upper ranks of the party):

            (from an obituary of Alan Clark in 1999): But contrary to the myth that has grown up, he did not accuse Michael Heseltine of having had to buy his own furniture. He merely recounted, with some glee, the gibe made by Michael Jopling, the former Chief Whip.

            What Clark said in his diaries:

            Michael Heseltine: “An arriviste, certainly, who can’t shoot straight and in Jopling’s damning phrase ‘bought all his own furniture’, but who at any rate seeks the cachet. All the nouves in the party think he is the real thing.”

            Original remark:
            1986

            Conservative politician Alan Clark writes in his diary about his detested “arriviste” colleague Michael Heseltine, quoting fellow MP Michael Jopling:

            “The trouble with Michael is that he has had to buy all his own furniture.” Clark found the remark “snobby but cutting.”

            Why is it cutting? Precisely because Heseltine had to buy his own stately home, instead of inheriting it (and all the original furniture to go with it), hence an arriviste, one of the nouveau riches, not really ‘one of us’ and so looked down on by the real grandees of the party who wielded influence and power.

            Jump forward to the Tories under David Cameron as Prime Minister 2010-2016 and the (not so) subtle internal pecking order. From a newspaper article in 2014 about the Tory leadership struggle, where Gove and Osborne were alleged to be allied to stop Boris getting it:

            Rather than attacking Mr Cameron, it seems more likely that in mentioning Eton, Mr Gove was seeking to make another point. A Tory MP said yesterday: “Who else went to Eton? Boris. Gove is saying don’t pick another Old Etonian as leader after Cameron. George went to St Paul’s.”

            Indeed, Mr Osborne was nicknamed “oiky Osborne” by some of his associates at Oxford, on account of him having attended St Paul’s School in London. While it is one of the top schools in Britain, it is more traditionally one for children of the ambitious west London middle classes, whereas Eton is regarded as being socially more elevated. On such small and ludicrous differences – irrelevant to most voters – are Tory feuds built.

            EDIT: Fun fact, G.K. Chesterton also attended St. Paul’s – I know which of the two alumni I prefer!

            Yes, Osborne will be a peer (baronet) in due time, but it’s only an Irish peerage and honestly, his family made their money in trade, so he’s not really top-drawer (from a handy but not comprehensive guide to the ranking of English public schools and why it matters):

            Indeed, poor George Gideon Oliver Osborne, who will become the 18th baronet of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon on the death of his father, was known as “oiky” by his Etonian friends on the basis of his ‘humble’ education.

            Wikipedia:

            His father is Sir Peter Osborne, 17th Baronet, co-founder of the firm of fabric and wallpaper designers Osborne & Little. George Osborne is to inherit the baronetcy; he would thus become Sir George Osborne, 18th Baronet. His mother is Felicity Alexandra Loxton-Peacock, the daughter of Hungarian-born Jewish artist Clarisse Loxton-Peacock (née Fehér).

        • John Schilling says:

          This ‘money equates to class’ idea is one of the very few things that I find jarring in the list of differences between America and Britain (or America and everywhere else?) I don’t know why it does

          That’s because the United States spent a century or two pretending it was a classless society. Since it is and always has been unignorably obvious that some Americans have a whole lot more money than others, we folded all of the observed socioeconomic differences between groups of Americans into “well, they’re all the same class, it’s just that some have more money than others”.

          And proceeded to talk at length about the differences between poor Americans, middle-class Americans, and rich Americans. Please to ignore that word after “middle-“, means nothing. And if someone crassly talks about lower- or upper-class as if those things might mean something in America, they’ll just be remapped to poor and rich, respectively.

      • acymetric says:

        @Erusian

        I think the meaning is thus still pretty accurate: upper middle class or whatever you want to call it. I don’t think anyone thinks of six figures as 1% wealthy (those are “millionaires and billionaires”) but it’s definitely comfortable and high earning.

        Just for the sake of accuracy, six figure salaries do put people in the top 1% (just not in the $100k range).

        Household: $475,000
        Individual: $329,000

    • baconbits9 says:

      Markets are so variable that it is hard to compare now. I wouldn’t want to make our income in San Fran adn live that lifestyle, but making it here (roughly national average) is quite nice and making it in a cheap area and we would live like kings.

    • cassander says:

      for the record, the 2019 household income percentiles were as follows:

      10%: 14,603
      25%: 31,201
      50%: 63,030
      75%: 113,000
      90%: 184,000
      95%: 248,304
      99%: 475,116

      Individual percentiles were:

      10%: 8,503
      25%: 22,000
      50%: 40,100
      75%: 70,125
      90%: 116,250
      95%: 158,330
      99%: 321,551

      • Walter says:

        Thanks for this information, useful context stuff!

      • Ketil says:

        Out of curiosity, I looked up the official numbers for Norway (2018). We are often considered a rich country due to oil exports accumulated in a large (~ 1 trillion USD, or 200K per capita) national fund, but while the Norwegian state is undoubtedly affluent, to what extent does it impact the wealth of the population? Here’s the table, roughly translated to USD using a rate of 9 NOK per USD. Some caveats below:

        Decile 1 23 000 (US 10%: 14,603)
        Decile 2 32 000
        Decile 3 41 000
        Decile 4 51 000
        Decile 5 60 000 (US 50%: 63,030)
        Decile 6 79 000
        Decile 7 89 000 (US 75%: 113,000)
        Decile 8 108 000
        Decile 9 135 000 (US 90%: 184,000)

        Not unexpectedly, the spread is much larger in the US, high incomes are higher, low incomes are lower. I suspect looking at individual incomes makes this even clearer, it is very rare to have a wages in six figures (USD), so most high-income households are double-income households.

        Pegging the poverty line at half the median income seems to result in a little less than 20% of Norwegian households and a little more than 25% of American households classed as poor. That said, I think living costs are higher in Norway, one major difference is the 25% VAT (compared to single digit percent sales tax in the US?) – but especially low-income living costs are high. Even cheap food isn’t cheap, and when living in Germany, I estimated our living costs there¹ to be about half of what they are here. I think this makes a pretty big difference to the impact of poverty. House ownership is very profitable compared to renting, which also hurts the low income segments disproportionally. Things like (non-electric) cars, alcohol, and eating out is expensive.

        Norway has “socialized” medicine, meaning that all citizens are part of the national program and will receive medical help in most cases (not, e.g. dentistry) and with no or moderate payment (low caps on yearly pharmaceutical expenses before state takes over) . It’s not clear to me if American households spend their income on medical insurance, and if so, how much – or if it is paid by the employer and thus also an additional benefit. Likewise for pensions. – are you expected to manage this on your own dime? And saving for children’s education – in Norway this is mostly covered by free tuition in public universities (most of them), and by student loans to cover living costs.

        I guess I’m rambling on here, hope this is interesting to some of you.

        ¹ Excluding rent, this was in Munich.

        • brad says:

          For medical insurance it depends. The very poor get medicaid which is free but no doctor wants to take it because it pays less than anything else. The working poor and lower middle class have it perhaps the worst–their employers either don’t offer insurance at all or offer plans where employees have to contribute to the premium as well as pay high deductibles and co-pays. The professional classes generally have quite good employer provided health insurance, as do employees in union jobs and those that work for a government. The elderly have Medicare which is quite good except for the fact that there is a 20% coinsurance for doctors’ visits as well as co-pays for drugs. Bottom line is can vary a lot how much an American household has to pay for healthcare / heath insurance.

          For pensions, the traditional pension is dying in the US. Government employees still get them, as well as some unionized workplaces, but that’s about it. For everyone else you are expected to save on your own or rely on social security.

          Finally, even public colleges are fairly expensive these days and there are also living costs. Attitudes vary as to whether parents should save for these expenses or their kids should take student loans.

          • cassander says:

            For everyone else you are expected to save on your own or rely on social security.

            You can’t leave out 401ks which employers usually contribute to.

          • Loriot says:

            Yeah, but getting a match at all requires you “to save on your own”.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Yeah, instinctively I think of “six figures” as what six figures was worth when I started working full time, which is roughly double what it is now. But I’m aware of this and usually remember to correct for it. A Google starting salary of ~$115K may not be what I’d have thought of as “six figures”, but it is still a lot higher than the ~65K (in 2020 dollars) I got from IBM when I started working full time.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      $100,000 is a very good salary. It is senior analyst, mid-level management, engineer level. When we say certain people feel entitlted to a $100k salary, that’s exactly the band most mean.

      $170ks is extremely high. That’s senior middle manager or director, basically the point where you get serious perks and one rung below incentive payments being 40-50% of your compensation.

      • unreliabletags says:

        $175k is about right for senior engineer salary in the Bay Area today, but that’s as part of a $350k+ total compensation with bonus and equity.

      • DinoNerd says:

        $200K looks to me like a very good, very experienced software engineer who isn’t in management, and isn’t a director-equivalent Individual contributor. In Silicon Valley. $170K looks like the same engineer, minus skill at negotiating salary and the sense to jump ship when their current employer takes them for granted.

      • brad says:

        I wasn’t trying to denigrate $100k/year salary or reignite the endless debate about what constitutes middle/upper middle etc. Just thinking how there are these markers that are fixed verbally but chance in value over time. It could just as easily been “millionaire”.

  8. johan_larson says:

    Welcome, again, to Hollywood. This time the King of Kings/Executive Producer has purchased the Terminator franchise and is determined to relaunch it, starting with a remake of the original film. Who should we cast in the principal roles?

    • Machine Interface says:

      Tom Hardy as the Terminator.
      Michael Fassbender as Kyle Reese.
      Ellen Page as Sarah Connor.

    • gbdub says:

      Dave Bautista as the Terminator
      Emily Blunt as Sarah Connor
      John Krasinski as Kyle Reese

      • Machine Interface says:

        Dave Bautista was actually my first pick for the Terminator, but then I thought about trying to go for the less obvious move of not automatically picking a wrestler/bodybuilder for that role, and Tom Hardy has shown he is perfectly capable of playing extremely imposing muscular juggernauts.

        • Radu Floricica says:

          I think Arnold was great for the role not as much as he was “big” as he was “perfect“. It’s hard to find another actor with the same kind of build.

    • johan_larson says:

      I guess the first question is whether we want to keep the contrast between the Terminator and Kyle Reese that was present in the first film: the Terminator is big and doesn’t say much, while Reese is smaller and more articulate. We don’t have to. An advanced android that specializes in infiltration could be a charmer rather than a bruiser.

      But if we decide to follow in the footsteps of the original, we need a big man, and probably someone famous enough to draw an audience. Dwayne Johnson? Jason Momoa? Going a bit farther afield, maybe Rory McCann(The Hound).

      • Eric Rall says:

        But if we decide to follow in the footsteps of the original, we need a big man, and probably someone famous enough to draw an audience.

        Hafþór Björnsson fits that bill splendidly.

    • Tarpitz says:

      Florence Pugh is an absolute no-brainer for Sarah. She’s the right age (several of the other suggestions are too old) and she’s got the range for the full transformation from frazzled waitress to monomaniacal badass.

      George Mackay is our Reese. That’s a young man whose eyes can tell us he’s seen things no-one should.

      Ben Foster is the cyborg. Dude knows how to be scary – but then he knows how to do everything: he might be the best actor working today.

      Mahershala Ali is Traxler. Does this even need explanation?

      Michael Shannon is Vukovich.

      Alison Brie is Dr Silberman. We need some more women in the cast, this is a spot that makes sense, and, well, don’t you want to see what she’d do with it? I do.

      Holliday Grainger is Ginger. I think she’d be able to bring that party girl energy while retaining truth and nuance.

      But mostly, why in blue fuck are we remaking Terminator?

      Every single one of these actors is better than the one who originated the role. We’ll have wizzo 2020s VFX. We’ll have a 9 figure budget instead of 7. We’ll have Director Bong and Roger Deakins shoot Craig Mazin’s script.

      And the film we make is 100% guaranteed to be a pale shadow of Cameron’s masterpiece.

    • Leafhopper says:

      Benedict Cumberbatch as the Terminator.
      Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor.
      Matthew Lewis as Kyle Reese.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        I’d watch this.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          What if it was Benedict XVI as the Terminator, Emilia Attías as Sarah Connor and Matthew McConaughey as Kyle Reese?

        • Nick says:

          Sorry, but after watching CumberKhan, I’d rather he not ruin any more classic villains.

          • Leafhopper says:

            Maybe Skynet designed the Cumbernator to wage psychological warfare against Star Trek purists.

          • Deiseach says:

            I didn’t mind Cumberbatch as the character – I thought he played the role of John Harrison extremely well. He wasn’t Khan of course, but that is the fault of Abrams and his gaggle of untrained monkeys in Bad Robot, not the fault of the actor. He did the best he could with what he was given and on that measure, it worked.

            (They had to do a fix-it comic book series in which we find out how come Khan Noonien Singh, South Asian genetic superman, looks like Cumberbatch and the answer is “plastic surgery by Marcus to disguise him”. Yeah, that was convincing).

            So I refuse Abrams’ hack jobs on Trek and substitute my own headcanon where Cumberbatch is John Harrison, renegade Section 31 Star Fleet officer, and the rest falls nicely into place (never mind the Magic Space Blood Cures Death rubbish, the rebooted franchise ignored that out of sheer embarassment as well). The entire Marcus plot was dumb but salvageable (nobody noticed he was building his own superduper warship out around Jupiter? Really?? So Starfleet only has one (1) functioning starship post Nero and that’s Enterprise?) so I’d appreciate a reboot of the reboot without the stupid crap where Abrams was trying to literally recreate shots and style of the original Star Wars movies as his showreel to prove to Disney he could do the job for them. No Spock/Uhura romance where Uhura gets turned into a nagging shrew who wants to talk about their relationship and her feeeeelings in the middle of an important mission in front of their commanding officer, no building your starships on the ground in the desert, no “Klingon homeworld is practically next door in travel time”, no transwarp silliness, the list goes on…

            Cumberbatch as the new improved model T-1000 would work, but perhaps not as the original Terminator. Not unless you’re really rebooting the heck out of the original and doing an Abrams on it 🙂

          • albatross11 says:

            The star trek reboot movies did a great job of casting people who look/feel like the original characters, but the plots are just stupid. I honestly don’t get why SF-ish movies can afford gazillion-dollar special effects budgets but can’t put together a plot that minimally hangs together in the fact of, say, a bright 15 year old spending fifteen minutes after the movie thinking about it. Not that the original series was any great shakes for coherent plots and consistent world building, but the reboot managed to fail to meet even that low bar.

          • John Schilling says:

            Sorry, but after watching CumberKhan, I’d rather he not ruin any more classic villains.

            But we are asking him to play a literally inhuman villain here, and I thought he did fine as Smaug. There were other problems with those movies, but not Cumberbatch’s casting.

            He was the wrong choice for Khan, or at least for remember-Wrath-of-Khan(*), because he doesn’t chew scenery in Ricardo Montalban’s larger-than-life fashion. And that’s what that role called for.

            But for the Terminator, the inhumanly detached and dispassionate (or at least very selectively passionate) Cumberbatch of e.g. Sherlock Holmes would work quite well, I think. He doesn’t have Schwarzenegger’s physique, but we’re not supposed to believe it’s muscles that are doing the work anyway. He’s tall and he has presence and he’s done motion-capture work for the endoskeleton scenes.

            I’m in. Cumberbatch, Clarke, and Lewis it is.

            * Having just rewatched “Space Seed”, I’d be up for an alternate universe where Khan was always Cumberbatch, but that’s not what Abrams was going for by far.

      • johan_larson says:

        We already saw Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor in “Terminator: Genisys”. She was ok, but nothing special. Lena Headey, who would later be known for playing Cersei Lannister, did a better job as Sarah in “The Sarah Connor Chronicles”.

        Jessica Chastain showed some real spirit as Maya in Zero Dark Thirty, and would be a fine choice, but she’s quite old, at 42. I suppose we could rewrite things so she’s a midlife professional of some sort, rather than a waitress/college student.

        But if we keep the script as it is, we’d need an actress who can play both sweet and fierce, and can credibly portray an early-twenties Sarah.

        • Tarpitz says:

          Jesus wept, the Emilia Clarke suggestion was *serious*? She can’t act! She can’t fucking act! She’s killed three franchises and counting with her utter failure to act, She’s a goddamn joke. There’s a really good actress who went to her old school, but she ain’t the Teddy’s old girl you’re looking for.

  9. Plumber says:

    Some time ago @Atlas mentioned some “Chappo House” podcasts and “the millennial left”, pod casts aren’t really my thing, but I just read a NYTimes piece on them titled: The Pied Pipers of the Dirtbag Left Want to Lead Everyone to Bernie Sanders, and oh my.

    For the record I voted for Sanders in 2016 (I voted for Biden this time), and I have sympathy for these youngsters grips, but

    “...“Educating a generation and saddling them with debt and then not giving them jobs where they have the wage that they presume they should receive based on the amount of time they spent on education,” Virgil said. “That’s a pretty good way to turn them into radicals.”

    He is a good example of his own target audience: He graduated with $100,000 of debt from Cornell and after college took freelance gigs from Craigslist, hoping to write...”

    Yeah, um but what the Hell? 

    Four years and $100,000 for Craig’s list gigs?

    I’m (early) Gen-X, but feel free to “okay Boomer” me because that sounds insane to me.

    For a five-year union apprenticeship you can get paid and come out with a $100,000 wage at the end of it, when I got in it was a series of multiple choice exams, and I imagine someone who passed the SAT’s to get into a university could get it the way I did.

    Two years and a few hundred dollars in fees and materials (maybe $2,000 total) of welding classes at a community college gets you a $80,000 to $120,000 a year job.

    Less than a year at the welding equipment manufacturers school (in Cleveland, Ohio so cheap to live there) gets you the same jobs, and while not as cheap as the first two “learn a trade” options, it’s less than $100,000 – which you can still buy a home in parts of California for!!

    Sure, the conditions aren’t great, there’s no girls and few women, and you really shouldn’t be a smoker and a welder (though many are and have short lives), but at least you earn $100,000 instead of owe it!

    I have deep sympathy for the kids at Kennedy High School in Richmond, California who lost a chance out of the ghetto when Mr. Floyd died (nice guy, but he smoked like a chimney and it killed him) and there was no longer someone left to teach how to use the tools Chevron donated, but these “dirtbag” guys?

    A thread or three ago @Conrad Honcho described Sanders supporters as “a bunch of people who chose the wrong majors”, and I thought that was unfair, but I take that back for some of them.

    Sure, if everyone now rushing into the universities learned a trade instead the wages would be less, and more would be displaced in the trades and forced to beg or pick tomatoes but

    “…Adam Angstead, 46, had stepped out of the theater for a cigarette. He works for the Iowa City school district as a substitute teacher five days a week, but he said his employment offers no benefits. On the weekends he works at a diner. Twice a week he sells his blood plasma for extra cash.

    It’s still not enough. He was trying to pay down his $40,000 in student loans for a while, but it hardly made a dent…”

    doesn’t sound like a good path.

    I don’t suppose “learn to weld” can be scaled up for everyone more than “learn to code”, but even if there’s “free college for all”, if college leads to Craig’s list gigs or selling plasma, what’s it for?

    This seems insane to me!

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      I don’t suppose “learn to weld” can be scaled up for everyone more than “learn to code”, but even if there’s “free college for all”, if college leads to Craig’s list gigs or selling plasma, what’s it for?

      It’s for creating Brahmins. A lot of 18-year-olds “have to” go to college because their parents are Brahmins and they don’t want to be a big disappointment. Others have Vaisya or Sudra parents, and for decades there’s been much fear in their parents’ culture that college will turn their against them (in This Present Darkness back in 1986, the author ascribed college indoctrination to literal demons).
      Kids whose parents aren’t Brahmins would be insane to try to change classes, unless they can successfully major in something more than renumerative enough to pay back student debt like Computer Science, but what is society to do with all those Brahmin kids who have filial duties to go to college even if they can’t hack a high-paying major?

      • brad says:

        I don’t know what this Indian caste metaphor is supposed to mean, which I suppose is rather the point, but kids with very wealthy parents aren’t the ones being described. Those kids are fine with no real job after their expensive educations because they have trust funds. And if they want well paid jobs they can get them regardless of what they majored in.

        The ones that are really upset are upset for the same reason many Trump supporters are—they are raging against the fact that we no longer live in a world with highly paid buggywhip salesmen. They want what their parents had and they can’t have it, because they were born too late. Unlike Trump voters, what their parents had was well paid tenured professorships and intellectual magazine editorships.

        • Eric Rall says:

          It’s a Death Eater thing. Moldbug uses “Brahmin” to describe a modern American cultural cluster. It maps pretty well to Scott’s “blue tribe” idea.

          That usage isn’t original to Moldbug, although he did expand it significantly. “Boston Brahmin” is a long-standing term for the old-money, generally Ivy League educated, mostly-WASP subculture in New England.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            It’s a Death Eater thing. Moldbug uses “Brahmin” to describe a modern American cultural cluster. It maps pretty well to Scott’s “blue tribe” idea.

            That usage isn’t original to Moldbug, although he did expand it significantly. “Boston Brahmin” is a long-standing term for the old-money, generally Ivy League educated, mostly-WASP subculture in New England.

            Mind that I’m not a Death Eater. I skimmed a number of his essays when he was active, but never considered him insightful enough for finishing one to be useful. And Thomas Carlyle is a damn fool influence to have if the elevator pitch for your political philosophy is “like monarchy, but a publicly-traded business rather than a family business.”
            I independently think that Indian caste terms are a more insightful way to talk about class than our “lower” (same as “working”?)/”middle”/”upper middle” ladder, which is focused on income (and maybe status, if it doesn’t equate status to income) rather than functionalism and the mores you internalize from parents and peers. The idea that rulers/society owe you a living preaching or teaching or other work that’s not beneath your class is captured much better by this, and the whole varna (caste) idea also captures much of the economic functionalism of the Marxist class terms, without misleading you into starving people.
            The pre-existing term “Boston Brahmin” is apt, though I’m skeptical that there’s a real distinction between what an Ivy degree in a soft subject tells you to believe vs. what a State U degree in the same field tells you to believe. The higher status does translate into higher income after graduating with a degree that has no useful content, due to networking with higher-status Brahmins as a student being a feedback loop.

        • gbdub says:

          I think you’re right on the first part.

          To the second though, I don’t think the disgruntled indebted college students are largely cases of “failed to launch” magazine editors and college professors. There really are a large cluster of people best described as “took a BS in their ‘passion’, used loans to go to their ‘dream school’ and just sort of assumed that entitled them to a well paying job”.

          That may be pretty close to what they were promised, but I’m not sure it was ever reality. There really was a time when you could get a union manufacturing job without any real effort, work for solid pay, and retire on a decent pension. There was never a time when a 4 year philosophy degree was a guaranteed ticket to a “living wage”.

          • brad says:

            Some ended up dying in Vietnam; turned on, tuneed in, and dropped out; or suffered one of the many other vicissitudes of life–but I bet as a cohort the bachelor’s class of 1968 did very very well for itself, philosophy majors included.

          • John Schilling says:

            There was never a time when a 4 year philosophy degree was a guaranteed ticket to a “living wage”.

            I believe there was a period of about a generation where this was close to true, as hiring for low-level office jobs started to strongly favor BA-in-who-cares candidates where a high school diploma and a bit of training had sufficed in the past, and the number of low-level office jobs was increasing due to the growth of the regulatory state.

            But that gets you a living wage doing something, not a six-figure salary for doing the thing you’re passionate about. I fear we may have started encouraging people not to “settle”, at about the time when settling is what you probably have to do if all you’ve got is a degree in something too many people are passionate about.

          • There really was a time when you could get a union manufacturing job without any real effort, work for solid pay, and retire on a decent pension

            Not with any definition of “solid” and “decent” that would be acceptable to modern workers.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @brad:

            Some ended up dying in Vietnam; turned on, tuneed in, and dropped out; or suffered one of the many other vicissitudes of life–but I bet as a cohort the bachelor’s class of 1968 did very very well for itself, philosophy majors included.

            Before the GI Bill, the percentage of Americans who got college degrees was, what, 1-2%? The government did veterans (a huge % of the male population, unlike the small kshatriya class we have today) a solid, and then college was still a prudent choice for their kids the Boomers.
            After the Boomers, everything went to Hell and there’s little consensus as to why.
            Though even when X% of Boomers were doing the right thing by going to college, there still needed to be Boomer plumbers and house builders and all the rest for civilization to keep going.

          • LesHapablap says:

            My dad was born in 1940, missed vietnam and got a degree in philosophy. He bought a computer and taught himself to program in what must have been the late 60s or 70s and ended up with a proper programming career, staying with the same company for most of his career. Despite being on a ‘legacy’ salary during the many layoffs in the 90s he survived to retirement with a sweet pension.

          • Two McMillion says:

            To the second though, I don’t think the disgruntled indebted college students are largely cases of “failed to launch” magazine editors and college professors. There really are a large cluster of people best described as “took a BS in their ‘passion’, used loans to go to their ‘dream school’ and just sort of assumed that entitled them to a well paying job”.

            I’m not sure the bold is really true, though. In college people who weren’t in STEM made jokes about not being able to pay their student loans back all the time. I know of no case where someone changed majors over this concern. One of my younger brothers is in college now, and I’ve heard some of his friends who are still in high school express their intention to get a certain degree, crack a joke about how they’ll never get a job with it, and then change absolutely nothing about their plans. That’s not “assuming you’ll get a good job somehow”, that’s, “knowing you’re about to do something stupid and doing it anyway”.

          • Matt M says:

            That’s not “assuming you’ll get a good job somehow”, that’s, “knowing you’re about to do something stupid and doing it anyway”.

            Eh, I think that’s mostly gallows humor.

            On the one hand, sure, they understand that the outlook is bad and the odds are against them. On the other hand, they still think, deep down inside, that they will be the ones to beat the odds. But they can’t say that aloud because it sounds ridiculous and arrogant.

      • Nick says:

        Kids whose parents aren’t Brahmins would be insane to try to change classes, unless they can successfully major in something more than renumerative enough to pay back student debt like Computer Science

        It’s not insane; it’s what I did. But it is getting harder.

        The consequences of rising costs fall more on the middle class, though, I think—families wealthy enough that FAFSA assumes they can pay for their kids’ education, which means they might as well save for it. This even if, due to the two income trap or some other way of living beyond their means, they’re already investing a lot indirectly in their kids’ education and can’t much afford it. Their kids are meanwhile told all the way through school, Do what you love and don’t worry about the cost. And then they graduate and get a rude awakening.

        Kids who are much poorer than the middle class avoid this because they’re eligible for financial aid, which makes state colleges and the like affordable, provided they major in something that pays, as you say. But they face serious challenges middle class kids don’t: they probably don’t have the family or community support to make it to college, or schools that can properly prepare them for it. Regardless, these kids are generally not today’s dirtbag left or, for that matter, Bernie bros, but rather the middle class kids.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          It’s not insane; it’s what I did. But it is getting harder.

          I thought you got a CS degree? That’s not the kind of college education we’re talking about as driving Bernie support.

      • Two McMillion says:

        An anecdote: When I was getting ready to enter college, I heard my parents bemoaning the state of college graduates who weren’t prepared to work, had a lot of debt, etc. Both expressed the opinion that more people should go to trade school instead of college. After hearing this kind of thing off and on, I raised the idea at dinner one night of becoming welder. I was treated to a long lecture about how becoming a welder was wasting my potential and about how I really should go to college.

        Not too long ago, one of younger brothers expressed a similar idea at dinner and got the same lecture. The experience left a bad taste in my mouth; it felt like my parents were saying, “This is for other people, but not MY kids!”

        It wouldn’t surprise me if this mindset is very widespread.

        • Matt M says:

          The experience left a bad taste in my mouth; it felt like my parents were saying, “This is for other people, but not MY kids!”

          It wouldn’t surprise me if this mindset is very widespread.

          I agree that this is happening to a large extent.

          But while it seems hypocritical, it might often be correct. It can simultaneously be true that a whole lot of people who are currently getting low-value degrees from non-prestigious institutions would be better off becoming welders, and also true that any particular highly motivated and intellectually gifted individual is still better off going the traditional college route.

          • Randy M says:

            Certainly; but it’s also likely that there’s bias in evaluating the intelligence and diligence of one’s own offspring.

    • Lambert says:

      3 Ladders has been talked about here.
      I was linked to it from (IIRC) the ‘Staying Classy’ post a while back.

    • brad says:

      In the supposed “golden age” of the United States (the 1950s) a lot of people were earning L2 compensation for L3 work. In a time when well-paid but monotonous labor was not considered such a bad thing (to people coming off the Great Depression and World War II, stable but boring jobs were a godsend) this was seen as desirable, but we can’t go back to that, and most people wouldn’t want to.

      To a G2, being a college professor, scientist, entrepreneur, or writer are desirable jobs. Creative control of work is important to G2′s, although not all are able to get it (because creative jobs are so rare). David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise captured well the culture of G2′s in that time. Members of this social class aggressively manage their careers to get the most out (in terms of intellectual and financial reward) of their careers, but what they really want is enough success and money to do what they really value, which is to influence culture.

      You can say something very similar about the second group. 30-40 years ago a lot of people were earning E3 compensation for G2 work. It was an enviable sweet spot, of course it got arb’ed away. Why pay big bucks for jobs people are willing, eager even under a revealed preferences model, to do for small bucks? So we get the current situation where people do those jobs for the small bucks, just spend a lot of time bitching and moaning about how terrible it is that they get paid small bucks. We see the same thing with teachers, for example.

      My guess is none of these people are struggling to make ends meet, so any complaints about money are likely to reflect their resentment over the status hit that comes with a low salary rather than any genuine material need.

      No one* in the US has genuine material need. They want money for the same reason everyone wants money.

      *Okay not literally no one.

    • Theodoric says:

      I think a lot of the anger is coming from the fact that these people were doing everything society told them to do, and they’re still just scraping by. When I was in high school, the message was all “You must go to college; you’re doomed to ‘do you want fries with that’ jobs if you don’t go to college.” I have seen schools in my area put up the banners of colleges their students got into. I am not aware of any high schools boasting of the trade schools their students got into. I myself was raised in an upper middle class family, and the no college options were not really presented to me. Sometimes I wish I had gone into some sort of government blue collar work, but how often is that really presented as a viable option? Even in lower class communities, I think most high school guidance counselors push college uber alles.

    • John Schilling says:

      Welding is for Red Tribe. We’re talking about Blue Tribe Americans here. And this discussion is pretty much exactly what Scott’s tribal distinctions are meant for.

      Blue Tribe Americans believe that they have the inalienable right to sit behind a desk(*) thinking Deep Thoughts and telling other people what to physically do to make the world a better place. And to earn at least six figures for it. Blue Tribe Americans believe that all Americans have this inalienable right, as soon as they can be educated out of their Wrong Tribe ways. Yes, yes, this implies that there be someone to actually do the physical stuff that we’re all going to think up for them to do, but that’s for other people. All their role models sat behind a desk thinking deep thoughts and telling other people what to do, and that’s what they’re going to do.

      Welders, however well paid, don’t get to think deep thoughts and they don’t get to tell other people what to do. To some people, that’s worth going $100K in debt and selling plasma for ramen to avoid – especially since one of the first things they’re going to think deeply about and tell other people to do is political stuff that involves erasing that debt and shafting whoever was fool enough to loan to them.

      Disclaimer: I earn six figures sitting behind a desk telling other people what to do. Or at least what not to do.

      * Well, OK, some artistic careers are acceptable even if they do require standing in front of an easel or on a stage. So long as you are artistically expressing deep thoughts about what other people should do to make the world a better place.

      • Viliam says:

        +1

        It is interesting how this idea is similar to the society described in Starship Troopers. In the novel, people became Citizens by serving in military, because only the people caring enough about their society to defend it should be allowed to steer it.

        Now imagine that instead of exhaustive training, and fighting where you can randomly lose your life, the requirement for becoming a Citizen is merely to spend some time listening and learning how to be a good Citizen. That’s it; to become a Citizen, you only need to say you want to, and then learn how to do it. Such society, despite technically having two unequal castes, doesn’t feel unfair, because the door to become the elite is wide open. The only people who don’t become the elite are the ones who choose not to. No injustice is done to them.

        …and this is, kinda, how the current caste system feels to the “Brahmins”. Anyone can get a diploma, if they choose so. Biological intelligence is not an obstacle because, remember, IQ ain’t real. Difficult subject is not an obstacle because you can choose a simple one. Cost is not an obstacle because you can choose a cheaper university (and in some countries, the state will pay for you). All you need to do is apply, and spend some time trying. It is perfectly fair to treat those who refuse as second-class citizens; they literally chose so.

        (Of course this is not the true description of how it really works, but it requires some privilege-checking to notice so.)

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Blue Tribe Americans believe that they have the inalienable right to sit behind a desk(*) thinking Deep Thoughts and telling other people what to physically do to make the world a better place. And to earn at least six figures for it.

        Work that wasn’t beneath a Brahmin included being a pundit (priest), teacher, or philosopher sitting and thinking Deep Thoughts for other people to physically implement. Chanakya would be an archetypal example of that last one (the government he told what to do was the famous Chandragupta Maurya).

        Blue Tribe Americans believe that all Americans have this inalienable right, as soon as they can be educated out of their Wrong Tribe ways.

        Yet the Wrong Tribe includes all the plumbers, electricians, HVAC techicians, construction workers etc. who let that class of people have air-conditioned desk jobs in buildings with indoor plumbing rather than thinking Deep Thoughts under a tree and defecating in a pot. Educating all of them out of their class/tribe would be a disaster.

        • Nornagest says:

          a pundit (priest)

          Huh, turns out our word “pundit” is borrowed from Hindi. I wouldn’t have guessed.

      • Deiseach says:

        Welding is for Red Tribe. We’re talking about Blue Tribe Americans here. And this discussion is pretty much exactly what Scott’s tribal distinctions are meant for.

        I think what we’re seeing is the creeping forward of “progress” into the white collar jobs that were formerly considered inviolable. The whole reason people were told, as Theodoric says, “You must go to college; you’re doomed to ‘do you want fries with that’ jobs if you don’t go to college” is because the blue-collar jobs of boring but stable and well-paid work were being automated away or outsourced overseas, with the labour market turning gradually from manufacturing to service industries. So to get a decent job where you wouldn’t be low-paid and precarious work, you needed to move up the rung of the ladder to the world of “clean indoor work with no heavy lifting” and that meant a college degree.

        Now the same rationalisation of industry/the economy is hitting the white collar world due to automation/outsourcing/progress and the same people who nodded along to “it’s a shame but it’s how the economy works, those kinds of manual labour jobs are dead or dying” articles in the media are now seeing it hit them instead, and they don’t like it any better than the working/lower middle-class did when their traditional good pensionable jobs dried up. (See how outraged journalists got at the “learn to code” slagging directed towards them: how very dare anyone think journalism for online clickbait organs is anything less than a sacred calling pursued by the best and brightest! it must be targetted anti-media harassment by the notorious alt-right, not just people taking the opportunity to make dumb jokes!)

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          If holding journalists and their religion in contempt is alt-right, I don’t want to be alt-wrong.

        • DinoNerd says:

          Hmm. Outsourcing of tech jobs was already a thing 20 years ago, and working conditions (and to a lesser extent renumeration) were dropping because of that. At that point (aged about 40) I wasn’t sure my career would remain good until I was able to retire.

          Shortly after that, I managed to bust my way into the next rung, in spite of it previously seeming to be marked off as “no Aspies dare apply,” and things got easier for me personally. (Outsoucring was never for the top roles, let alone folks the execuytives would see as belonging to their own class.) Also, the engineers in India began demanding a lot more money than they had been when the outsourcing to India started, and lots of potential outsourcers changed their minds about its profitability. And at the same time the best Indian engineers were still mostly emigrating, and that meant really good engineers in India were hard to come by, unless you offered them a job that would move, with them, to the US.

          So that phase of white collar outsourcing caused less problems for US engineers than I’d originally expected.

          But anyone who thinks this is new, is either well under 40, or wasn’t paying attention at the time.

          And yes, the “we write well” knowledge workers were mostly affected a bit later than the “we do technical stuff” knowledge workers, but at this point we have “local” newspapers outsourced to god-alone-knows-where, and the written english of US-born people is, like that of ESL people, is whatever the spellchecker/grammar checker/AI suggestions happens to produce, and too often ranges from ungrammatical to incoherent. (And meanwhile, I’ve learned to read and write both Indian English and Chines English fairly fluently, since I see so much of both of them.)

    • The Nybbler says:

      Cornell claims that $100,000 of debt isn’t even a possibility. ($30,000 after 4 years is the max). They could be lying, but if so it seems to me the NYTimes should be investigating that. I suspect you’d actually find that either the person isn’t telling the truth, or that they did some exceptionally unwise things to increase their debt, even besides taking some useless degree at an Ivy League school with $56,500/year tuition.

      • Eric Rall says:

        A substantial fraction of college debt is driven by living expenses, not just tuition, fees, and course materials. Going to college full-time usually means you aren’t working, or at least not working much, and 4-5 years of living expenses adds up to a tidy sum, even just for a dorm room and a campus meal plan.

        Living expenses make up about half the cost of attendence at most public universities, or maybe 20-25% of the cost of attending a private university without a scholarship.

        • Viliam says:

          Yep. For poor people, the most limiting cost in your life is, well, the cost of your life. You can’t simply stop paying it for a few years, regardless of how much good it could do for you later.

          The officially recommended path upwards on the social ladder is to borrow a lot of money, gamble with it in a game that is stacked against you, and win. The game is called university, and it is stacked against you because unlike your classmates with university-educated parents, you didn’t get the same training at home, you don’t know how the system really works as opposed to how it is supposed to work, in case of trouble it is more difficult for you to find help, etc. And if you lose this gamble, you lost at minimum a few years of your potential income.

        • Lillian says:

          My father went to college in a country were public universities were both free and considered top tier. He did well in his exams and got accepted, then flunked his first trimester hard because he still had to work to pay his living expenses, and that left him no time to study. He applied for some scholarships, got one from some corporation which was investing in increasing the supply of engineers, and was able to pay his living expenses with it and apply himself to his studies and graduate. Afterwards, he started working on an MBA but dropped out to join the work force because he was out of scholarship money and found he couldn’t afford to not work.

      • gbdub says:

        This is indeed part of the problem. You fill out your FAFSA. You get offered a pile of loans. There is no immediate effort to say “here’s what we think you actually need”, just “here’s what you can have” and I think a lot of people just take out the max.

        The other problem is taking substantially longer than 4 years to finish.

    • Elephant says:

      This is an excellent point, and though several of the responses to it are good, I don’t see why the basic idea isn’t shouted from the rooftops more. That said, many people entering college are genuinely clueless about money, jobs, and careers, and their equally clueless parents have somehow drilled into them the notion that “college = good” regardless of major, debt, or career path.

    • Guy in TN says:

      @Plumber

      I don’t suppose “learn to weld” can be scaled up for everyone more than “learn to code”, but even if there’s “free college for all”, if college leads to Craig’s list gigs or selling plasma, what’s it for?

      I guess I don’t understand the problem here. Most college graduates still make higher incomes than people with high school diplomas. There are a select few majors where this may not be the case. The problem, then, lies in the curriculum (or existence?) of these select few majors. The fact that a small number of people are getting degrees that make them worse off is problematic whether college is free or not.

      And consider this: If you are one of the unlucky ones who chose a major that is somehow rendered worthless (let’s say, you went to school to trade school and your very trade was replaced by an AI), which would be the better situation: 1. Having a worthless degree and no debt 2. Having a worthless degree and [school tuition] worth of debt? The existence of worthless degrees only bolsters the case for free college IMO. The rich have plenty of money to tax, taking it from them to pay for college incurs almost no utility loss.

      As a small aside: There are lots of very bad theories in the comments about why people support free college. I call them bad, because the assumption seems to be that support of free college is primarily fueled by college graduates expressing regret for their choices. This doesn’t square with (in both exit polling and pre-election polling) the Democratic candidate advocating for free college having greater proportional support of non-college graduates while the candidates who don’t having higher support of college graduates. And since everyone is arm-chairing their political-psych theories, I’ll offer mine: It’s called “pulling the ladder up”.

      • brad says:

        I’d be better off as I am plus having an extra million dollars. Should the government give that to me?

        • Guy in TN says:

          Yes.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Um… Okay. I am frankly fascinated. Tell us more. Does it apply only to the first person with the chutzpah to ask? Or only to people named “brad”? Or does the government really have some back room that contains 372 trillion dollars?

            I feel sure that either you have misunderstood brad or that I have misunderstood you.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Well, Brad didn’t specify any details or elaboration, so I didn’t feel to add any myself.

            Firstly, one million dollars isn’t that much money. Many government employees easily make that cumulatively over the span of 10-20 years. So the generic question “should the government pay one millions dollars to some people” is “yes” assuming that government employees should exist.

            For the sillier question of “should the government give one million dollars out to people randomly”? Sure, as long as it comes from the DoD budget. The government spends tons of money on things that actively make the world worse off. Giving a million dollars to random people is probably a better use of it. We could have a lottery system.

            And that’s only if you insist on being revenue neutral. You could ask “should the government tax people, such that brad gets a million dollars” and the answer could still be yes, assuming the tax was levied in a way such that it is re-distributive, e.g. a billionaire tax that turns people into millionaires.

            It’s all very silly. I have no idea what he was going for with the question.

          • brad says:

            It’s all very silly. I have no idea what he was going for with the question.

            It was in response to this part:

            which would be the better situation: 1. Having a worthless degree and no debt 2. Having a worthless degree and [school tuition] worth of debt? The existence of worthless degrees only bolsters the case for free college IMO.

            That people will be better off if you give them free stuff is both obvious and a totally inadequate justification for a proposed policy of giving some people free stuff.

      • gbdub says:

        I don’t think non college grads support Bernie because he offers free college specifically. He offers free lots of things.

        The actual college grads are more likely to realize they are going to be stuck with the bill for all this “free” stuff.

        I don’t know how you justify making worthless degrees “free”. That’s a huge pile of resources going to something you admit is worthless that could better be put toward healthcare or infrastructure or pensions or whatever.

        • Guy in TN says:

          @gbdub

          I don’t know how you justify making worthless degrees “free”.
          That’s a huge pile of resources going to something you admit is worthless that could better be put toward healthcare or infrastructure or pensions or whatever.

          If we know already that a particular degree is worthless, then it’s existence is a problem whether it is tuition-free or not. “Huge piles of resources” are being wasted by people deceived into paying for something that doesn’t deliver. This is a problem regardless of whether that pile of money comes from the public or private sector.

          So that is one problem we can try to solve.

          But if we assume that this problem isn’t one we are going to tackle (reasonable, since I’ve not heard anyone talking about it on the campaign trail), or if the problem is more intractable than it appears (also possible, it may be difficult to predict what careers are actually profitable) then we are left with the question of what to do assuming there will be worthless degrees.

          My take, is that if there are going to be worthless degrees, it is better for people not to be saddled with debt for having them. That just compounds the already existing harm of the wasted earning-years. It would be like, as an alternative to offering unemployment benefits for anyone who lost their job, we slapped a fine on them instead.

          • Simple yes or no question, would you agree with the following statement[Edit: last sentence added for clarity]:

            If we already know that cigarettes are harmful, then their existence is a problem whether they are free or not. “Huge piles of resources” are wasted by people deceived into paying for something that harms them. This is a problem regardless of whether that pile of money comes from the public or private sector. So subsidizing them wouldn’t make the problem any worse.

            Or how about:

            If we already know that homeopathic medicines are ineffective and are harmful if substituted for real medicines, then their existence is a problem whether they covered by medicare or not. “Huge piles of resources” are wasted by people deceived into paying for something that harms them. This is a problem regardless of whether that pile of money comes from the public or private sector. So subsidizing them wouldn’t make the problem any worse.

            Assuming the answer is no, I think the difference comes down to the “worthless degrees” being associated with your tribe, unlike cigarettes and homeopathic medicines. And in the case especially of cigarettes you’ll understand that making something free leads to more of it being consumed.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Here’s one for you:

            A man is walking down an alley late one night and gets robbed of $1000. The police catch the robber and he goes to trial. The prosecutor suggests that the robber should give the victim back the money. However, the defense argues that if we transfer $1000 from the robber to the victim, we are subsidizing the victim’s poor decision to walk down alleys at night. After all, if you subsidize something, you get more of it.

            You agree with the defense?

          • Lambert says:

            In your cases, the robber loses money.
            In the other, the taxpayer pays the robber university.

          • Question is[emphasis added]:

            A man is walking down an alley late one night and gets robbed of $1000. The police catch the robber and he goes to trial. The prosecutor suggests that the robber should give the victim back the money. However, the defense argues that if we transfer $1000 from the robber to the victim, we are subsidizing the victim’s poor decision to walk down alleys at night. After all, if you subsidize something, you get more of it.

            No, I don’t agree with the defense. Because “we” are not giving anything back. The taxpayer is not giving anything back. The robber is giving something back. I feel like this gets to the crux of the difference between the way we look at the world. You don’t see the significance of the difference between my money, your money, government’s money, a rich man’s money, you want to look at it as if it’s all in the same pile. Maybe in your moral system there isn’t a significant difference. There is in mine and so that’s the answer to your question.

            I notice you haven’t answered mine.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Lambert
            @Alexander Turok
            So you all are fine with subsidizing the bad behavior of walking down alleyways at night, and your only insistence is that the money come from what you view as the appropriate pool? That’s what I suspected.

            It seems like we are all okay with subsidizing people’s ability to make bad decisions without them reaping too much of a penalty. It’s true that if you reduce the “cost” of picking bad degrees, you get more of them. The same applies to reducing the “cost” of walking down alleyways at night.

            I think people should be able to walk down alleyways without losing $1000, and likewise I think people should be able to pick a bad degree (wasting four years of their life) and not incur the additional penalty of debt. Doing dumb things has inherent penalties of its own, we shouldn’t be trying to make it even worse.

            @Alexander Turok

            I notice you haven’t answered mine.

            I never said that subsiding something wouldn’t lead to more of it. The question of whether such a subsidy makes things “better” or “worse” depends on what you think people are owned. Cigarettes and homeopathy have significant non-financial harms, so the question is not quite analogous.

          • So you all are fine with subsidizing the bad behavior of walking down alleyways at night, and your only insistence is that the money come from what you view as the appropriate pool

            You are not using the word “subsidy” correctly. I don’t think you understand the concept.

            I think people should be able to pick a bad degree (wasting four years of their life) and not incur the additional penalty of debt. Doing dumb things has inherent penalties of its own, we shouldn’t be trying to make it even worse.

            I don’t think of asking people to pay for things they consume as a “penalty” whether it’s food or housing or education or whatever. Cigarette smokers should be able to chose their habit and should incur the “penalty” of having to pay for their own cigarettes. We should be “trying to make it worse” by not subsidizing that decision.

            I never said that subsiding something wouldn’t lead to more of it. The question of whether such a subsidy makes things “better” or “worse” depends on what you think people are owned.

            In my moral system making a bad thing more numerous is a morally bad action. I’m sure there are exceptions where you can identify compensating good outcomes which justify them. Do they exist in this case? Why are people “owed” education as opposed to other things? Why not food or housing? Is it just because the blue tribe raised you to think of it that way?

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Alexander Turok

            In my moral system making a bad thing more numerous is a morally bad action.

            Do you agree that walking down alleys alone at night is a bad thing, and should be discouraged? And yet, in my example, you support transferring $1000 dollars to someone who does it. Quibble if you want whether this money counts as a “subsidy”, it’s undeniable that this $1000 transfer encourages this behavior as opposed to the counter-factual where the $1000 wasn’t transferred.

            I’m sure there are exceptions where you can identify compensating good outcomes which justify them. Do they exist in this case?

            Indeed. The “good outcome” in this case, is that people who are already suffering from wasted years are not burdened with the additional suffering of debt. Because of the declining marginal utility of a dollar, this increase in net utility can be achieved via progressive taxation and transfers (i.e. taxing the rich to pay for the less-rich)

            Why are people “owed” education as opposed to other things? Why not food or housing? Is it just because the blue tribe raised you to think of it that way?

            lol at thinking I was raised by the “Blue Tribe”.

            But yeah, they are owed an education. They are owed food, housing, and education, among many other things. We owe lots of things to people. If you want to argue that the same pot of money could theoretically be given to people to spend on more useful things you won’t get any objection from me, but that’s wasn’t the question at hand. It wasn’t “free college vs. SNAP”, it was “free college vs. nothing”.

          • Do you agree that walking down alleys alone at night is a bad thing, and should be discouraged? And yet, in my example, you support transferring $1000 dollars to someone who does it.

            No, I support giving them their money back. It’s like saying “hey, do you support not having police beat people who smoke? Doesn’t this encourage smoking as opposed to the counter-factual where the beatings do occur? Then how can you object to making cigarettes free on the basis that it encourages smoking!”

            Quibble if you want whether this money counts as a “subsidy”,

            It doesn’t count. Word have meanings. This is how intelligent you sound:

            You say you oppose prostitution, but now you’re telling me prostitution is okay so long as no money or anything else of value changes hands!

          • Clutzy says:

            @Guy

            Do you agree that walking down alleys alone at night is a bad thing, and should be discouraged? And yet, in my example, you support transferring $1000 dollars to someone who does it. Quibble if you want whether this money counts as a “subsidy”, it’s undeniable that this $1000 transfer encourages this behavior as opposed to the counter-factual where the $1000 wasn’t transferred.

            In this scenario I think its perfectly reasonable for the government to tax that 1k as a disincentive to walking down alleys. Letting the robber keep it is totally immoral. Perhaps you could tax it at 100% I think something more reasonable like a 25% idiot tax is more appropriate, but we are haggling about price at that point.

            And as people have pointed out, the schools are the robbers, and the loans have caused schools in increase enrollment and raise tuition. The moral way to cancel student loan debt by taxing universities to pay for 100% of the bill.

          • Ninety-Three says:

            @Alexander Turok

            No, I support giving them their money back.

            And how do we fund the system of courts and police that causes their money to be given back? Because if your answer involves taxation (and you don’t seem to be advocating for anything as radical as a taxless system, given your use of words like “taxpayer”), that starts to look a lot like subsidizing activities by building public infrastructure.

          • brad says:

            One hardly needs to be an anarcho-capitalist to be skeptical of free college for all. So it doesn’t seem like much of a gotcha to point out that one such a skeptic believes in police and courts.

          • Ninety-Three says:

            @Brad

            Who said anything about free college? I’m just arguing the definition of a subsidy.

          • Two McMillion says:

            If we know already that a particular degree is worthless, then it’s existence is a problem whether it is tuition-free or not.

            The degree is generally not worthless, but its worth is distributed extremely unequally. 1% of people who major in music will get a lot of money. Most of the others will end up indebted and angry.

      • Clutzy says:

        The real problem with college loans (or anything looking like free college) is that it turns out its not a subsidy for students, its a subsidy for teachers and administrators. Thus we are only paying for bloat, not anything of value.

      • And consider this: If you are one of the unlucky ones who chose a major that is somehow rendered worthless (let’s say, you went to school to trade school and your very trade was replaced by an AI)

        There it is! The example is always something which comes totally out of left field. No one could have predicted it. The thing about these worthless majors is that people know they are worthless. You may say “well what does it matter if they’re in a hole because the wind blew them there or because they jumped in there, they need help out regardless.” I say it does matter and if it doesn’t then why are the examples almost always of the former?

        which would be the better situation: 1. Having a worthless degree and no debt 2. Having a worthless degree and [school tuition] worth of debt? The existence of worthless degrees only bolsters the case for free college IMO.

        This is the equivalent of saying “the fact that these government-provided free cars frequently break down and leave their owners without a means of transporation only bolsters the case for free cars! Better to have no means of transporation and no debt than no means of transporation and debt! The whole X to Y comparison is flawed because you assume that when you start subsidizing something the amount consumed does not change.

        The rich have plenty of money to tax, taking it from them to pay for college incurs almost no utility loss.

        This only makes sense if you believe that the rich are just storing their money in a vault somewhere, that it’s not doing anything, not being invested and not creating any value. Yes, some is spent on yachts and other conspicuous consumption. Other money is invested. For the record I support higher taxes on the rich but not if the money will just be wasted.

        I call them bad, because the assumption seems to be that support of free college is primarily fueled by college graduates expressing regret for their choices. This doesn’t square with (in both exit polling and pre-election polling) the Democratic candidate advocating for free college having greater proportional support of non-college graduates while the candidates who don’t having higher support of college graduates.

        I don’t see any contradiction here: poorer people are more likely to vote for the economically Left-wing candidate. Poor non-college Democrats support it because they understand coalition politics, you scratch my back I’ll scratch your back. But if given a choice between free college and programs that actually benefit them, which do you think they’ll choose? I say the reason that cancelling student debt is on the table and cancelling credit card debt is not is because the college educated chattering classes don’t want to pay back their loans.

        And since everyone is arm-chairing their political-psych theories, I’ll offer mine: It’s called “pulling the ladder up”.

        Since America has never had “free” college I don’t know what “ladder” you are talking about. Presumably there’s some other “ladder” they benefited from because it would be impossible that anyone ever got anything through hard work and their own effort.

        • Guy in TN says:

          The thing about these worthless majors is that people know they are worthless.

          No they don’t. People are value-maximizes. No one does something that they think is worthless on purpose. If I knowingly decline to become an electrician out of high school (and make ~$60,000) and instead get a major in interpretative basket weaving and make ~$15,000) then I must have valued the experience of the degree/pleasure of the job at >$45,000.

          So yes, people only receive worthless degrees through either 1. Deception 2. Changing market conditions they didn’t anticipate. If you are talking about anything else, you aren’t talking about worthless degrees.

          • What I see in the world is a whole lot of people engaging is short-sighted behavior and continuing to do so even as they heard very many warnings. People continuing to smoke even as they see the warning label on every pack, not making any effort to quit. If you tautologically define “value” such that any freely chosen activity where you have all the information increases it then, sure.

            I think there’s no disagreement about objective facts here, both of us agree that there are majors which do not deliver economic value to their graduates. The disagreement is just about what you call it. You brought up the term “worthless majors” and now you’re saying it doesn’t apply here. Okay, would “economically non-productive majors” be acceptable? If so, replace the phrase in my original comment. All my points still apply.

          • baconbits9 says:

            People continuing to smoke even as they see the warning label on every pack, not making any effort to quit. If you tautologically define “value” such that any freely chosen activity where you have all the information increases it then, sure.

            I have a neighbor who is in his 60s who just quit smoking and claims it isn’t hard for him. I haven’t seen him smoking (he smokes on his front porch) in months so I believe it has taken, he basically smoked for 40 years without once really trying to quit.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Alexander Turok

            What I see in the world is a whole lot of people engaging is short-sighted behavior and continuing to do so even as they heard very many warnings. People continuing to smoke even as they see the warning label on every pack, not making any effort to quit. If you tautologically define “value” such that any freely chosen activity where you have all the information increases it then, sure.

            I’m not unsympathetic to this position, but think about its implications: If people are idiots who don’t know what it best for themselves, then what is the argument for people who make “bad decisions” to be saddled with debt?

            They couldn’t have known (or perhaps were too feeble-minded to make) the best decision in the first place. So why punish them for it?

            The conclusion is that the option should just be removed by the nanny-state all together, not left lying there as a trap ready to be sprung.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Alexander Turok

            I think there’s no disagreement about objective facts here, both of us agree that there are majors which do not deliver economic value to their graduates. The disagreement is just about what you call it. You brought up the term “worthless majors” and now you’re saying it doesn’t apply here. Okay, would “economically non-productive majors” be acceptable? If so, replace the phrase in my original comment. All my points still apply.

            Setting aside my admitted trollishness, there are very few majors that have a negative market value in the sense that people who have these degrees command no higher salary than people without. I’m no expert on this, but I’m going to wildly ballpark something like 1%-10%. STEM, business, education, law, healthcare, social work, religion, and trade school degrees all still “pay”.

            And yeah, this is probably bad that not everything does (but may be fine if you really like the experience of going to college, but again I’m setting this aside). But why the “free college” debate always seems to hone in on what is really only a small minority of degrees, treating them as an example of what we are “subsidizing”, is indeed curious.

          • I’m not unsympathetic to this position, but think about its implications: If people are idiots who don’t know what it best for themselves, then what is the argument for people who make “bad decisions” to be saddled with debt?

            They couldn’t have known (or perhaps were too feeble-minded to make) the best decision was in the first place. So why punish them for it?

            Having to pay back debt you willingly took out is not “punishment.”

            The conclusion is that the option should just be removed by the nanny-state all together, not left lying there as a trap ready to be sprung.

            Only if you don’t put any value on human liberty. And even then, you have to trust the nanny state to get the answer right.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            social work degrees all still “pay”.

            There was a popular musical about the stressful urban poverty of people who get two Masters degrees in social work (“and now I am therapist / But I have no clients! / And I have an unemployed fiance! / And we have lots of bills to pay!”) or Bachelors of Arts in English.

        • One of these OTs I’ll start a top-level discussion asking folks to Bulverize why it’s so uniquely gratifying to sneer at philosophy majors.

          What’s wrong with “it’s because they, unlike smokers, demand everyone else subsidize them?” It would be another matter if it were their own money being spent.

          Most studies showing different ROI for different majors are deeply confounded by selection effects of particular majors on intelligence, gender, and personality, all of which then have sizeable downstream effects on earning potential. Abolishing the religious studies major and routing all those students into astrophysics is not going to make them into astrophysics-type people.

          Agree completely.

          If you buy Bryan Caplan’s signaling model of education, the branding/informational value of the institution + major is what employers primarily want from a degree, anyway. And indeed, many physics majors go on to consulting gigs where they use at most a little basic math from their undergrad, none of the other content. If what employers want is a signal of exceptional quantitative aptitude or systems thinking, then removing the major-based signal by making all degrees STEM degrees will just prompt them to seek other ways to filter that.

          Bryan’s model seems to me like an exercise in motivated reasoning. He wants to believe the market is rational and marshals a bunch of evidence that the standard explanation for why college graduates are favored is wrong. So he goes and looks for one and he finds one. I think he’s accurately described the reason employers favor college graduates but failed to show that this is the rational approach. And anyway, if they find one the crucial question would be is it being subsidized by the taxpayer or not?

          A lot of thinking about “useful” majors suffers from fallacy of composition, assuming that the job prospects for the~5% of students who earn engineering degrees today would equally be available to 100% of students if we could only get all those kids into engineering training. Instead, I’m not aware that we see ravenous demand or amazing working conditions in any STEM fields; testimonial anecdata suggest that on the margins talented and BA-equipped folks regularly leave tech and engineering after failing to find a suitable gig.

          Agree completely.

          I think anybody calling to solve our education woes by eliminating useless fields of study also needs to specify the alternative avenue they’d recommend, and moreover, to demonstrate that it would scale.

          If you’re point is that for it to be politically realistic you need an alternative, sure. If this is your view then we have a fundamental value difference. Suppose you are a medieval peasant and you’re experiencing drought. Someone comes offering to do a rain dance for a price. Someone else says ‘let’s not.’ Would you agree that they need to provide an alternative way of handling the drought before advocating not employing the rain dancer?

        • BBA says:

          America has never had “free” college

          When my grandparents went to CCNY it was free. Of course, like most CCNY students (then and now) they lived with their parents and got to campus on the subway. And while at the time it had a strong reputation as the “Harvard of the Proletariat” now it’s… well, not as pitiful as it was during the open admissions era, but thoroughly undistinguished.

          The University of California system was also historically tuition-free for in-state residents. I would imagine this was similarly true for public universities nationwide. Over the second half of the twentieth century there was a gradual shift from getting the bulk of their funding from direct appropriations to getting it from student loans, which is probably more equitable from a perspective of not wanting to subsidize dilettantes, but does mean there’s nothing to keep administrative bloat in check. In other words, we’re indirectly subsidizing a different group of dilettantes, namely assistants to the deputy vice-dean for strategic dynamism.

          At this point we’re probably better off doing away with student loans altogether. If we’ve decided that higher education isn’t a public good, let’s stop throwing money at it in the form of loans we’ll never be able to collect. And for god’s sake undo the 2005 bankruptcy amendment and make them dischargeable again.

          • Plumber says:

            @BBA >

            “…The University of California system was also historically tuition-free for in-state residents..:

            Attending U.C was free for my Mom in the late ’60’s-early ’70’s, by the ’80’s it was no longer free.

          • Theodoric says:

            And for god’s sake undo the 2005 bankruptcy amendment and make them dischargeable again.

            +1
            And while we’re at it, since a lot of this was colleges admitting marginal students and offering “degrees in useless”, put the colleges on the hook for at least part of the discharged amount.

        • acymetric says:

          @Zephalinda

          Pretty sure the “worthless majors” are a red herring, although gee whiz do folks love to get their smug on about them. (One of these OTs I’ll start a top-level discussion asking folks to Bulverize why it’s so uniquely gratifying to sneer at philosophy majors.) Reasoning:

          I know this OT is mostly dead at this point, but as I was catching up I planned to say exactly this, I’m glad you beat me to it.

          In addition, some of the people who chose a “worthless major” were fully aware that the type of career it set them up for was a not a high paying job, the problem is now they can’t get any job.

          The claims generally about people with “worthless majors” and the further claim that these people feel entitled to six figure jobs are both way off base with minimal support. Weak manning at best, but most likely just flat out straw manning.

        • Matt M says:

          In addition, some of the people who chose a “worthless major” were fully aware that the type of career it set them up for was a not a high paying job, the problem is now they can’t get any job.

          So, I’m just curious… what sort of jobs did humanities majors reasonably expect they were going to get that they suddenly find to be unavailable?

        • Plumber says:

          @Matt M > “…what sort of jobs did humanities majors reasonably expect they were going to get…”

          Thanks to the magic of family, friends, and Facebook I’ve some idea of what my peers who were humanities majors did wind up doing:

          My brother (thanks to family and in-law support, including mine) went to college in the early 2000’s with a political science major, moved to Maryland, worked various odd jobs, the longest with an aftermarket auto parts manufacturers lobbying organization until getting a job with The State of Maryland (which by SHEER COINCIDENCE his father in law also worked for), one guy I went to high school with is now a public librarian in Orinda, California, another guy became a lawyer, most of the girls I knew became school teachers – and most of them moved out of state, some guys I knew attempted college, but didn’t graduate, and they usually did worse than those who never made the attempt, military to trades usually worked better than “some college” (except for an electrician turned cripple).

          My wife was a dual English/Philosophy major, then she went to law school, made (what seemed to me) good money as a paid intern while going to law school, then met me, dropped out of law school, worked a few temp agency jobs (mostly at banks), then a stay at home wife and mother.

          My mother, father, and step-father all went to college in the ’60’s and/or ’70’s (though in my father’s case ‘community college’ with the hope of transferring to a university and becoming a pharmacist), my Dad failed to graduate, became an “independent contractor” (a truck, tools, and his back), until joining the laborer’s union, before the hospice and hospital he lived in public housing in Oakland, California. In contrast my uncle never went to college, joined the Plumbers union, then became a contractor, and doesn’t live in public housing. 

          My step-father after college was briefly a social worker (before I knew him), quit that, became a taxi driver, then press photographer (he first took some riot photos freelance), then camera store, then bait shop, and finally a gun shop that the City of Oakland taxed out of existence. 

          My Mom after working with my Dad blue collar (she did roofing with him!), divorced him, then made and sold candles and puppets on Telegraph Avenue, then got a job as a secretary for the University of California, then a secretary for The New York Times (her boss wrote The Falcon and the Snowman), then back to U.C.

          So law school or government work (usually teacher) is what I’ve seen humanities majors do, fairing better than “some college”, and the non-law school ones just don’t earn as much as guys in the trades who didn’t suffer crippling injuries. 

      • Viliam says:

        @Guy in TN

        The rich have plenty of money to tax, taking it from them to pay for college incurs almost no utility loss.

        Even ignoring the hurt feelings of the rich, there is a significant loss. It is much better described in The Case Against Education, but the short version is that even ignoring money, you still pay for education with years of your life, and it’s a zero-sum game, because the only thing that matters to employers is that you wasted more time than the other guy, therefore you send a stronger signal. The less people need to pay with money, the more they will be asked to pay with years of their lives.

        In some sense, a society where only the 1% could get college education would be better. Because in such society, not having the college degree would not prevent you from getting a good job.

        On the other hand, imagine a dystopia where 90% of population spends 30 years of their lives in college, and the education they get there is mostly crap. In such society, if you decided to save 30 years of your life and skip the system, you would find out that no one actually wants to hire you — failing to do what 90% of people can do sends a pretty bad signal. (So you start your own company then? Oops, there is all kind of regulation against people like you.)

        • Spookykou says:

          FWIW College is often considered the best time of a persons life, 30 years of subsidized college where I only have to pay in years of my life sounds like an amazing deal that I would take in a heartbeat, work sucks.

          • toastengineer says:

            I wonder if that’s out of date. When I was in college, towards the end the coursework was heavy enough that I literally had no time to do anything but work most days, and 18 hours a day still meant I had to prioritize which items were most important to get done on time – and I still wasn’t doing enough credits to graduate in 4 years. My heart quit on me for a few seconds after a calculus test.

            Other people seemed a little better off but not by much.

        • Guy in TN says:

          @Villiam

          it’s a zero-sum game, because the only thing that matters to employers is that you wasted more time than the other guy, therefore you send a stronger signal.

          I don’t care the Bryan Caplan wrote a whole book with this as the premise: It seems so flatly, obviously untrue that I’m struggling to formulate a response that would even register to the understanding-of-reality of someone who would advocate for it.

          I mean, is he really saying straight face that the reason doctors go to medical school is nothing more than zero-sum positional signaling? How about engineers- no need for those pesky physics classes, right? If I’m going to be hired as a biotechnician, it can’t really be relevant whether I actually know chemistry, genetics, or evolution, right?

          It just seems like an over-correction of the most basic kind: Caplan correctly realizes that some degrees are useless positional signalling, and that some credentialing acts more as gate-keeping than quality-control. But he runs away with the logic to argue that all degrees and credentialing must be bad. Which is utterly indefensible IMO.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I mean, is he really saying straight face that the reason doctors go to medical school is nothing more than zero-sum positional signaling? How about engineers- no need for those pesky physics classes, right? If I’m going to be hired as a biotechnician, it can’t really be relevant whether I actually know chemistry, genetics, or evolution, right?

            It just seems like an over-correction of the most basic kind: Caplan correctly realizes that some degrees are useless positional signalling, and that some credentialing acts more as gate-keeping than quality-control. But he runs away with the logic to argue that all degrees and credentialing must be bad. Which is utterly indefensible IMO.

            Perhaps the government should abolish useless signalling degrees at public universities, which would aid in clearing up this confusion.
            Obviously under US law, trying to ban the Ivies and other private universities from offering degrees in Signalling Studies for a million dollars would violate several clauses of the First Amendment, but what they could do would be a game-changer.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Le Maistre Chat

            To the extent that Villiam is right that useless degrees are a problem (and again, I suspect they make up a tiny minority of all degrees, but they do exist) the “cleanest” solutions would be difficult to mesh with existing US law. In an unburdened legislature the best solutions would be:

            1. Banning colleges from offering truly useless degrees. Cut it at the roots.

            2. Banning employers from requiring useless degrees. Eliminate demand.

            But since we can’t do that, the best solution we are left with:
            3. Make getting the useless degree as painless as possible for those who have to do it.

            The government can’t outright ban tulips, and it can’t eliminate people’s people demand for tulips. But it can give free, unlimited tulips for everyone, which has largely the same effect on the signalling game.

          • Clutzy says:

            No, the “best” solution is forcing colleges to self finance these loans. And if we are going to forgive those in the past, make those same colleges pay for the forgiveness.

          • Lambert says:

            > How about engineers- no need for those pesky physics classes, right?

            I ain’t learned jack that I couldn’t’ve taught myself. And I don’t expect to use more than a tiny fraction of it. (And I intend to go into some pretty solid R&D)

          • Deiseach says:

            I ain’t learned jack that I couldn’t’ve taught myself. And I don’t expect to use more than a tiny fraction of it.

            Ah, but which fraction of it you will use is going to be the question and you won’t know that until you need to know it.

            As to “I could have taught myself” perhaps indeed you could. But who would have checked you weren’t teaching yourself bad habits or going down a rabbit hole and learning the wrong thing? “This is the way I’ve always done it” is not always the right way.

            Anyway, good luck with your career!

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t care the Bryan Caplan wrote a whole book with this as the premise: It seems so flatly, obviously untrue

            Yeah, it’s obviously untrue. I am an employer, in that I have to occasionally pick between candidates for jobs, and when I see a degree from a good university, I see a reliable indicator of intelligence, conscientiousness, knowledge, talent, and skill – some of these things being merely screened for by the university, others actually enhanced by it. If our union allowed it, I would at least be willing to consider a self-educated engineer, but the degree is far more than a signal of wasted time. And the difference between a bright undergraduate intern and a bright graduate with an MS or Ph.D., in terms of what I can trust them to do without my regular and direct supervision, is enormous.

            So Caplan is wrong. But we knew that.

            The people saying we should get rid of the degrees in uselessology are also wrong, and we ought to know that from the fact that our host’s undergraduate degree was in Philosophy IIRC. There are some places where deep knowledge of a particular domain is needed, but others where breadth of knowledge and ability to apply one’s intellect to anything is more valuable. The classic liberal-arts degrees, and most of the rest of the “uselessology” fields, are pretty good for that, and it’s something we need.

            So, maybe don’t subsidize them as much, but don’t denegrate them as much as they often are here.

          • Nick says:

            @Clutzy

            No, the “best” solution is forcing colleges to self finance these loans. And if we are going to forgive those in the past, make those same colleges pay for the forgiveness.

            To be more precise: as far as federal aid goes, there is no difference between getting a degree in the humanities or grievance studies vs. computer science. There’s no reason for universities to stop offering these as long as students are still majoring in them. If federal aid depended on the market value of these degrees, and we can expect many fewer to major in them.

            (For what it’s worth, students at the margin have already realized that some degrees are useless; as well, my impression is that when there is an economic downturn, useless majors go down. This is bad enough that some schools are having trouble keeping certain programs going, because they need at least a few majors to be able to run their programs. At my Jesuit university, for instance, Theology was scarcely getting one major per year, and the strategy for the last few years has been to attract as many minors as possible. So I’m sure this would hit those programs hard. I think a lot could be said about what that will mean and how colleges should respond, but that’s a little too tangential. Maybe we should save that for the next quarter thread.)

          • Viliam says:

            @John Schilling

            So Caplan is wrong. But we knew that.

            I don’t see how this follows from what you wrote. From your comment, only the part “other [things] actually enhanced by it” goes against the signalling model. And Caplan admits that the school is only 80% signalling, and the remaining 20% is some useful stuff.

    • Erusian says:

      This reminds me of my question about factory work. The answer that a lot of people said to me probably applies here: people do what they know and they’re often very risk averse.

    • “Educating a generation and saddling them with debt and then not giving them jobs where they have the wage that they presume they should receive based on the amount of time they spent on education,” Virgil said. “That’s a pretty good way to turn them into radicals.”

      A great example of what conservatives and libertarians mean when they talk about the “entitlement mentality.” Everyone is EQUAL but I deserve more money because I went to college, the government must give it to me!

      Four years and $100,000 for Craig’s list gigs?

      I’m (early) Gen-X, but feel free to “okay Boomer” me because that sounds insane to me.

      Well, I’m sure the craiglist gigs were just supplementing the real source of income: Daddy.

    • blipnickels says:

      I think there’s a stigma against the blue collar trades but there’s also a real fear and a real risk to the trades which justifies the salary.

      While plumbing is still doing fine, there’s a lot of skilled tradesmen in the Midwest with 20 years experience, no job, no prospects, and no degree. There’s a lot of long-distance truckers with no future in the industry and driver-less trucking approaches. There’s a lot of taxi drivers who probably made decent money with $1 million dollar medallions and the memorized layout of a major city like New York who have been replaced by Google Maps and Uber. And I can tell you there’s a lot of competition for any firefighter or police officer positions.

      I don’t see how any kid or parent trying to plan out a 40-year career could look at what happened to blue-collar workers over the past 40 years and be confident that automation/outsourcing/etc wouldn’t consume their industry and leave them without valuable skills or a fallback option. The middle/striver class is freaking out because, well, college was supposed to be a $100,000 job guarantee and it’s not anymore. That doesn’t change the fact that blue collar workers have been devastated in general and the college-educated have done better.

      Or, to rephrase, how do we know plumbing and other skilled trades aren’t just suffering from survivorship bias, and most skilled tradesmen who started in the 1980-1990 aren’t significantly worse off?

      • Erusian says:

        I’m not aware of this midwestern phenomenon. Links? It’s been a while but when I was last out there the trades were still doing well. And things like carpentry, plumbing, etc are unlikely to be automated. Your two examples are truck driving and taxi driving, neither of which are skilled trades or manual labor.

        I’d say automation risk runs the other way. It’s highly unlikely tasks that involve a high degree of visual identification and working with hands will be automated or outsourced in the near future. White collar work, meanwhile, is much more likely to get automated.

        • Lambert says:

          ‘Trades’ insofar as they involve working on stuff in-situ are unlikely to get automated soon.
          But the jig-borers are all gone. One person can feed G-code into a dozen CNC machines and let them all run etc. There’s no lofts full of draughtsmen. Robot arms can weld, rivet, glue with preternatrual precision and consistency.

          This doesn’t necessarily mean that jobs go away. There’s now a market for 5-axis milled parts that were just not practical in the past. And you need skilled machinists to operate them.

          Jobbing is generally harder to automate/optimise away labour from than mass production. But CAE is dropping the cost of small runs, rapid protypes etc.

          • Erusian says:

            A draughtsman is not someone who’d work at a factory…

            Anyway, factory work isn’t a trade either. At least not by my definition. What’s yours? Because if your argument is just that unskilled labor is having issues, then I’d agree. But as someone intimately familiar with Midwestern factories, I can assure you high skill non-college workers are in very high demand. The effect was not to eliminate tradespeople but to eliminate the least skilled workers. Which is still a problem because those are people too.

          • Deiseach says:

            The effect was not to eliminate tradespeople but to eliminate the least skilled workers.

            And that’s the crux of it: why people thought “college/more college” was the answer. For an increasing demand for more skilled/higher-skilled workers, more training and more education was needed. Now it wasn’t just “you’ll pick it up on the job”, you needed some level of instruction and qualifications beforehand as well as what you learned on the job. Hence going to college to get that shiny degree which was a guarantee that you were indeed qualified and enabled you to walk into that good job. And the inevitable creep from “left school but hard-working” to “need to have your high school diploma” to “need a certificate for training beyond high school” to “need a basic college degree” onwards.

            The new jobs coming along are no longer on the shop floor, they’re the ones that require a high set of skills and abilities, and where there’s the continuing sifting of people so the less-skilled drop out at more and more levels of the process. That’s our problem. I don’t know the solution, because the demand for the higher skills/higher IQ workers is ongoing, and you can’t simply move your “used to be a coach driver working with horses, then cars replaced horses, now he works on the automobile assembly line” employees around like that anymore, it doesn’t work like that anymore. Now you’re requiring your “used to be a coach driver” employee to be able to design the engines for the automobiles at high performance specs for the new jobs.

        • blipnickels says:

          First, the midwestern reference is just to the general de-industrialization of the US, which hit the Midwest particularly hard. I’m sure there were many skilled trades involved in steel, car manufacturing, sheet metal, etc. Some people were surely labor

          Second, I’m not confident automation is the major threat here. Sure, you can automate car production but outsourcing seems by far the bigger threat there. Everything I hear about farming is bad (and farming is certainly high skill) but we haven’t outsourced or automated that, it’s just market consolidation there. There’s several different reasons salaries have stalled, not just automation; looks at the sorry lot of adjunct professors: no outsourcing, no automation, still miserable.

          But for a more specific example that I have some familiarity with, take able bodied seaman. A highly skilled physical trade requiring no more than a high school degree paying ~$300/day or $54,000/year. Lots of machinery skills required as well as the ability to work in a specialized environment. And it’s not like shipping doesn’t make money. But the merchant marine has been slowly dying for decades. The total fleet went from 2,926 ships to 182. And unlike self-driving cars, autonomous cargo ships are currently being built and tested. Able bodied seaman jobs, and the merchant marine, were and still can be very profitable but it requires high degrees of visual identification and working with your hands and is likely to be gone within 10-20 years.

          • Erusian says:

            Are line workers in a factory tradespeople? Not by my definition, but what’s yours? If you mean people who operate or repair machinery that takes a long time to learn, their employment prospects are fine. It’s the people who used to do simple rote tasks that are having issues.

            Farming is a special market because it’s so highly regulated and the government has been very unkind to farmers in order to extract cheap food from them. I’m not sure how the others have to do with skilled trades. As for your example of seamen, again you appear to have an extremely non-standard definition of skilled trade. More to the point, the US sailor has been dying due to cheap competition (it is, definitionally, a global market) and flags of convenience going to other countries.

          • blipnickels says:

            I’m not sure this will go anywhere but I’d define skilled trades as anything requiring significant non-college experience primarily involving physical goods.

            For reference, for immigration purposes, Canada defines skilled trades as including bakers, cooks, butchers, mechanical/technical maintenance, and agricultural supervisors.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      You sure about those numbers? BLS has Welder salary at $40k/year. With a poor job outlook.

      “Learn to weld” is probably good for diligent individuals on the left-side of the IQ distribution, but diligent individuals on the right-side probably have access to better paying jobs, more comfortable jobs than that. They should get different advice from just picking a trade. However, there’s more to it than picking a major, because you also need to know how to act on the job and boost your performance.

      • Plumber says:

        @A Definite Beta Guy says:

        “You sure about those numbers? BLS has Welder salary at $40k/year…”

        Yes.

        I’m sure that BLS wage rate is for “There Be Dragons”, not Emperor Norton’s realm!

        The BLS has Plumbers at $53,910 per year, when in my area it’s about $90K to $110K per year for a full-time union plumber.

        The City and County of San Francisco usually pays less per hour than guys got in the private sector, but the scale for Welder (representative by the Electrical Workers union) is $81,692.00-$99,294.00 Yearly.

        For a Pipe Welder (representated by the Plumbers and Steamfitters union) it’s $96,902.00-$117,832.00 Yearly.

        For a Fusion Welder (representated by the Iron Workers union) it’s $95,472.00-$116,038.00 Yearly

        And for my job classification it’s $96,902.00-$117,832.00 Yearly.

        In California (the last time I checked) at least one county’s union local rate was $60K per year, instead of the $95K that was my couny’s rate, I suspect it’s the same for college grads that different areas will have different pay scales (though I’ve read that public school teachers in Texas all get about the same rate, so living in a cheaper area of Texas can dramatically increase your savings compared to living in Austin).

        • Spookykou says:

          Austin is a pretty reasonably priced city. The city center is very small and expensive but living 10 minutes away you can rent a two bedroom apartment for 1200 a month in a nice neighborhood and less than 1000 in as close as Austin gets to a not nice neighborhood. If you wanted to live in Odessa you might save 200 a month but nobody wants to live in Odessa.

        • Erusian says:

          This is another thing people miss: you shouldn’t compare outcomes to the national average because geography is important. Almost every job in SF is paid better than a comparable job in Des Moines. You need to compare trade labor in the area to unskilled labor in the area, not unskilled labor in the area to national average trade labor.

      • Lambert says:

        Is that for 1G (I think the americans call it PC?) MIG welding of mild steel or for underwater 6G TIG watertight welding on aluminium?

        Learning specialist welding processes is a decent route to progress as a welder.

    • meh says:

      Two years and a few hundred dollars in fees and materials (maybe $2,000 total) of welding classes at a community college gets you a $80,000 to $120,000 a year job.

      Is this starting? How easy is it to get these jobs?

    • mtl1882 says:

      It is insane. As someone with several degrees, no debt, and who is doing decently on a professional level at age 30, it was my experience that we were encouraged to look at college in an insane way. Doing an apprenticeship was looked down upon at my upper/middle class public school, and I’m told in my state there is a huge shortage of people doing those jobs. My parents rail about the foolishness of taking out huge student debt, but idk what they would have said had I not been able to rely on their support, because parents’ status was ridiculously caught up in the college game, and parents truly religiously believed an education at a good school would pay off. To me it seems foolish to have paid that much at all, loan or no loan. I declined Cornell Law because it would have required crazy loans, but I can definitely see how someone would be awed into paying that for Cornell. It took me way too long to question it, and I was lucky there wasn’t much damage done in my case.

      I agree the caste thing mentioned below is useful—I’m from Massachusetts. Not a WASP, family has only been here a few generations, I’m a second-generation college graduate, but the ethos I grew up in was still Brahminy, and I work with actual WASPs all the time. Their kids *have* to be “successful,” and they’re desperately trying to have the same path work for their kids that did for them, but it doesn’t work anymore because there is too much competition and other issues. It’s not a goofy major thing, mainly. My parents go on about that too but my undergrad degrees (poli sci and communications) are not meaningfully different, IMO, than a philosophy or women’s studies degree. College wasn’t really about the major, but about learning the soft skills for jobs typically taken by people in that class, and for making connections. Nor is it really a find your passion thing–my experience was “find something you’re good at and you will have status if you follow the rules.” That meant something that worked with natural strengths and wasn’t unpleasant, but not some dream situation. In reality, there are limits to the number of those jobs, and industries like media and law have been pretty wrecked by changes. College costs are up and salaries are probably down in many of them, or don’t go as far.

      We sent so many people to college, at such a high cost, and the message “good career” was more tied up in having a respectable sounding position than financial security as the end game, though I don’t think that was fully understood by anyone. Few parents absorbed the changing realities, and most of the kids didn’t know better. Scrambles to preserve the status of aspirational classes’ children are always dysfunctional over time and we’ve hit that point quickly because the last few decades have seen so much change and because the Boomer experience was so anomalous and based in unrealistic hope and symbolism.

      ETA: It’s easy to mock these people or just see them as entitled whiners, but real damage was done to them by the social norms and adults around them. I’m talking about a certain class of young people. They hardly have the worst lives ever, but, speaking generally, the choices they made were heavily encouraged by the schools themselves, government, and their parents. These adults still don’t admit there was/is a problem, so it can be hard to come to terms with the situation. A huge part of this is people unable to disappoint or push back at their parents and face the reality that the path they’d hoped for was always illusory.

  10. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Conan review #18: “The Black Stranger
    This is a direct sequel to “Beyond the Black River”. It also has a strange history: it’s the only Conan story rejected in Howard’s lifetime after “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” and “The God in the Bowl”, which were submitted to Weird Tales hot on the heels of the first one published, “The Phoenix on the Sword”. There’s no evidence that “The Vale of Lost Women” was submitted for publication, and it seems like Farnsworth Wright got in the habit of never rejecting a Conan story. So the fact that this one was found in a chest of unpublished papers along with a finished rewrite into an Age of Sail pirate story, “Swords of the Red Brotherhood” (Conan turns into 17th century Irishman Black Vulmea) is strange.
    In 1953, L. Sprague de Camp edited it into “The Treasure of Tranicos” so it would end linking up with the rebellion in Aquilonia that brought Conan to the throne.

    Conan has been running west from Picts for a hundred miles. He takes cover from the arrows of 40 of them, and mysteriously the chief calls off the attack. Whatever refuge he’s using, they seem to have superstitious fear of it. Wolf-Picts “captured him, in a foray against the Aquilonian settlements along Thunder River, and they had given him to the Eagles in return for a captured Wolf chief”, so he’s even farther from his job in Aquilonia than the great distance he’s run.
    He walks into a tunnel in his stone refuge and finds a heavy iron-bound oaken door He’s amazed, because he’s at least 200 miles west of Thunder River and near the coast, where the Picts are too fierce for civilized people to come and build things. Then he finds iron-bound chests ranged along the walls. There are also silent figures at table. Have you guessed that he found a pirate hideout?
    Elsewhere, Lady Belesa of Zingara has been living a year in a log fortress her exiled Count uncle has built on the Pictish coast, a thousand miles north of home. We’re also introduced to Tina, a freed child slave. A pirate ship appears on the horizon! Hustling inside, the Zingarans find the newcomers approaching under a flag of truce. Strom the pirate captain acts like Count Valenso has treasure and no ship to take it away in. Valenso has an archer shoot Strom, who responds by having his pirates surround the fort. They figure out how to defeat the defenders, but then another ship flying the royal Zingaran flag scares them into retreat!
    This turns out to belong to Black Zarono, a buccaneer and another enemy of Valenso. The enemy is invited to table, with none of his crew inside the log wall, where he insinuates that the Count has built a log simulacrum of his castle here on the shore of wilderness to hunt for treasure, which he denies, saying it was meant to be a temporary stop on his way away from the corrupt stink of Zingara’s court, and he’d go somewhere else in civilization if he could, “to Vendhya, or Khitai—” Zarono presses him, but is shocked into believing him when he says his navigator let anchor here for reasons he had not time to reveal before getting beheaded by a Pict.
    “Supposing you to have already secured the treasure, I meant to take this fort by strategy and cut all your throats. But circumstances have caused me to change my mind—” What’s this, a double-cross story where no one’s good at lying?
    So change of plans, Zarono says: I need to stay here to actually find the treasure of Tranicos, famous pirate of 100 years ago who “stormed the island castle of the exiled prince Tothmekri of Stygia,” – times like this I feel Howard is daring the reader to stop suspending disbelief in his mashup of historical periods, but he seems to carry it with conviction.
    So Zarono tries to strike a bargain where they split the treasure 50-50, lift anchor, and Valenso can have Zarono’s ship when he abandons it to settle down in Zingara with a noble wife – the non-consenting Belesa. Tina interrupts to report that a very tall black man showed up on the beach in a black boat alight with blue fire, which sends Valenso into violent terror. Now Belesa is motivated to get away from her uncle with the child he hurt.
    When Chapter 5 rolls around, Zarono’s ship is destroyed in an unseasonable storm. The indefatigable pirate says the two groups have 260 men left between them and a vast forest, so let’s build another. This new plan is disrupted by the other pirate ship returning, and then Conan re-entering the story. A pirate from that ship was killed, and Strom blames one of the other two schemers, ignorant that Conan did it. He bursts into the negotiating room in 100-year-old pirate garb, which he put on back in the tunnel. Zarono says: “Three years ago the shattered hull of your ship was sighted off a reefy coast, and you were heard of on the Main no more.” (Would that be the Wastrel he stole in “The Pool of the Black One”?) We’re told that by this time in his life, he’s seen as “a legendary character in the flesh.”
    The pirate captains telegraph that they’d kill Conan for the treasure map he now has, so he throws it in the fireplace. With the only map in his memory, he offers thus:
    “We’ll split the treasure four ways. Strom and I will sail away with our shares aboard the Red Hand. You and Valenso take yours and remain lords of the wilderness, or build a ship out of tree trunks, as you wish.”
    But Valenso is too terrified to stay that long. Belesa thinks all the negotiations are a farce, as all except her uncle are honorless pirates who won’t leave without the whole treasure and rival blood on their blades, and she no longer thinks much of her uncle either. For now, though, they need an intricate plan to carry the treasure out of the cave without one faction outnumbered and betrayed. Valenso is too scared to go, so they break it down as Conan, the two captains, and 15 bearers from each crew.
    As they leave, Conan asks Valenso why he decapitated a Pict, or so he believes because he found the Count’s necklace at the scene of the murder. Then Galbro the Count’s seneschal tries to decipher what’s left of the map in the fireplace…
    Then Belesa asks her uncle his thoughts on all the scheming. He says Strom would murder them all aboard ship for their share of the treasure. Zarono would be honest because he wants to marry her, but has no ship, so he’ll send fishermen in the dark to overwhelm the pirate ship’s skeleton crew. Then Zarono’s men will murder Strom and Conan on the beach, hoping the former’s death demoralizes his camping pirates, and sail away to share the treasure 50-50.
    He goes on to explain who the black man is:

    ‘In my youth I had an enemy at court,’ he said, as if speaking more to himself than to her. ‘A powerful man who stood between me and my ambition. In my lust for wealth and power I sought aid from the people of the black arts—a black magician, who, at my desire, raised up a fiend from the outer gulfs of existence and clothed it in the form of a man. It crushed and slew my enemy; I grew great and wealthy and none could stand before me. But I thought to cheat my fiend of the price a mortal must pay…’

    Conan has led four pirates to the treasure cave, where Tranicos and his captains sit dead. They also find Galbro dead. There’s bluish mist in part of the cave, which they guess is deadly – just before Conan shoves them into it! They recover and Conan kills one before jumping to a ledge as the rest of the pirate crews pour in. He goes prone on the crag outside, out of sight.

    ‘Well, what did you expect? You two were planning to cut my throat as soon as I got the plunder for you. If it hadn’t been for that fool Galbro I’d have trapped the four of you, and explained to your men how you rushed in heedless to your doom.’
    ‘And with us both dead, you’d have taken my ship, and all the loot too!’ frothed Strom.
    ‘Aye! And the pick of each crew! I’ve been wanting to get back on the Main for months, and this was a good opportunity!’

    True, each captain had a plan to kill him, but Conan still comes across as a bad guy here. He sounds like he had a good job serving the King of Aquilonia on the frontier and wanted to go back to piracy because he was bored. The pirates reconstruct Conan’s plan to get the treasure out despite the mists, but he boasts that they won’t make it back alive without his woodcraft. To puncuate the point, Picts suddenly appear, enough to keep the pirates besieged in the taboo cave until they die of dehydration. They declare truce with Conan, who uses the Climb skill on the side opposite the cave mouth to help them slip around the semicircle of warriors to their west. Of course they run away unencumbered by heavy loot.
    Soon, Picts attack them at the fort (the conspirators against Conan don’t shoot him on the way in, which I find unconvincing). That night they find a man of Strom’s dead, with no Pict either inside the wall or visibly running away. Strom blames Zarono. They fight. Then the Picts do break in. Strom and Valenso are dead by the time the chivalrous Conan reaches the girls, whom he finds being menaced by the smoky, horned, pointy-eared Black Man. He finds a piece of silver furniture to throw at it, knocking the thing back into the fireplace. He gets the girls to safety out on a headland, leaving only the Picts and the Dead behind.

    Conan sends smoke signals to the few people who were out of the ship, surmising they’ll make him captain because none of them is a navigator.

    ‘What will you do when you get back to Zingara?’ Conan asked.
    She shook her head helplessly. ‘I do not know. I have neither money nor friends. I am not trained to earn my living. Perhaps it would have been better had one of those arrows struck my heart.’

    He gives her a handful of rubies he looted.

    I might as well leave you for the Picts to scalp as to take you back to Zingara to starve,’ said he. ‘I know what it is to be penniless in a Hyborian land. Now in my country sometimes there are famines; but people are hungry only when there’s no food in the land at all. But in civilized countries I’ve seen people sick of gluttony while others were starving. Aye, I’ve seen men fall and die of hunger against the walls of shops and storehouses crammed with food. Sometimes I was hungry, too, but then I took what I wanted at sword’s-point.

    Conan the Communist?
    She asks what will become of him, and he says don’t worry, he’ll be fine because he’ll be a pirate again! Yo ho ho.

    I like that we have three factions plus Conan planning to betray each other for treasure in a Treasure of the Sierra Madre moral fable. I like that the plot is complicated by people under the Count having agency and not following his plans (imagine how elaborate the plot would get if each pirate crew had been given such characters too). On the other hand, Conan’s morals are hard to sympathize with (even giving up his loot to help a woman has confusing motivation), there are lapses of logic, and the supernatural being seems superficial to the tale.

    If I remember correctly, in de Camp’s edit, Conan is running from betrayal by the King of Aquilonia when the first group of Picts captures him and he ends up able to recover all the treasure. That’s tighter and more surprising, given the character’s pattern with treasure.
    Your thoughts?

    Next OT, we’ll be looking at two very early stories, in which Conan is a king.

    • Deiseach says:

      it was meant to be a temporary stop on his way away from the corrupt stink of Zingara’s court, and he’d go somewhere else in civilization if he could, “to Vendhya, or Khitai—”

      Did anyone point out that if he intended to head to Khitai, sailing off West to the coast of Pictland was the wrong direction?

      I found the story confusing because of all the different factions plus everyone planning to knife everyone else in the back. Conan plotting to kill the pirates was nastily realistic, given that they were all hoping to do the same to him and to each other, but as you say it does leave a bad taste in the mouth. Pragmatic, ruthless and yeah what a real pirate was like but we’re more used to Conan doing his killing face-to-face and being attacked first. Hanging around ‘civilised’ people has had a bad influence on his plain barbarian straightfordwardness!

      The ending with Belesa at least does address “so what happens the girls when Conan and they fall out of lust and he moves on to his next adventure?” and that unlike him, unless they’re Belit or Valeria or Red Sonja, they will need someone to set them up with enough money to keep themselves for at least a while or to take them on and support them. This is why the princesses and queens either stole a private moment for the burning kisses or didn’t fall into his arms at all at the end of the story, because while it’s okay for an adventurer to love ’em and leave ’em, a woman has to maintain her social standing as respectable or else lose it all.

      It works best probably as a fix-it-up explanation for how Conan went from having one ship under him to wandering around doing some jobbing soldiering to getting back into piracy again, but it’s not a favourite story of mine (and the dissonance between “This is supposed to be the Picts, who lived in what is broadly Scotland, plus Roman/Saxon/whatever European colonists, but it’s plainly a Western written in terms of North America and Native Americans” of the Black River stories gives me a headache every time).

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Did anyone point out that if he intended to head to Khitai, sailing off West to the coast of Pictland was the wrong direction?

        Heh, no.

        I found the story confusing because of all the different factions plus everyone planning to knife everyone else in the back. Conan plotting to kill the pirates was nastily realistic, given that they were all hoping to do the same to him and to each other, but as you say it does leave a bad taste in the mouth. Pragmatic, ruthless and yeah what a real pirate was like but we’re more used to Conan doing his killing face-to-face and being attacked first. Hanging around ‘civilised’ people has had a bad influence on his plain barbarian straightfordwardness!

        Totally agreed, except that I liked every faction trying to strike deals predicting what oversights could get them backstabbed, with two people in the Count’s faction having the agency to undermine him.

        The ending with Belesa at least does address “so what happens the girls when Conan and they fall out of lust and he moves on to his next adventure?” and that unlike him, unless they’re Belit or Valeria or Red Sonja, they will need someone to set them up with enough money to keep themselves for at least a while or to take them on and support them.

        It’s a good issue to be honest about. These women who don’t have adventurer skills would end up in terrible circumstances in pre-modern civilization.

        It works best probably as a fix-it-up explanation for how Conan went from having one ship under him to wandering around doing some jobbing soldiering to getting back into piracy again, but it’s not a favourite story of mine (and the dissonance between “This is supposed to be the Picts, who lived in what is broadly Scotland, plus Roman/Saxon/whatever European colonists, but it’s plainly a Western written in terms of North America and Native Americans” of the Black River stories gives me a headache every time).

        That’s fair. It seems there truly were times on the periphery of history when groups of white people were in the same position vis-a-vis civilization as 16th-19th century Native Americans* (save that they had the same disease resistances as everyone else), but calling such people “the Picts” and writing a Western about them can be headache-inducing.

        *IIRC, proto-historic Spain was colonized for its silver and other metals, with land being seized and locals enslaved to increase mine productivity.

  11. Mark V Anderson says:

    The fourth and final book I read about intelligence.

    Inventing Intelligence (2012) By Elaine Castles

    This is mostly an “Anti-IQ” book. She believes that IQ is a good clinical tool to help individuals understand their strengths and weaknesses, but not a good way to rank people on their intellectual abilities or to use to make education or employment decisions.

    The first 2/3’s of the book is to talk about the history of IQ testing, starting with various kinds of testing in the 19th Century. It was somewhat interesting to read the history, although she often inserts snide remarks about bias in these old tests, comparing them to current day IQ testers. She implies throughout this section that IQ testing and even merit itself are not good ways to measure people.

    Finally in chapter 10 she talks in more detail of her own skeptical view of IQ testing. She sometimes includes the point of view of “pro-IQ” advocates. But she then states as gospel the results of one cherry picked test that lines up with her own beliefs. It is true that both pro-IQ and anti-IQ sides cherry pick the studies they present, but it appears to me that the anti-side does this a lot more prolifically than the pro-side. In all the anti-IQ books and articles I’ve read, there are about half a dozen studies that show up in every one of these. I don’t see this effect in the pro-IQ books and articles; I think this is because there are a lot more studies on their side. Maybe this is my priors speaking, but that is what I see. And this book is very much in this direction.

    Positions she states:
    1) IQ tests do not measure creativity or out-of-the-box responses
    2) Anxiety, depression, curiosity, impulsivity, distractibility, and motivation all affect IQ scores
    3) IQs account for only 25% of grade variation
    4) Self-discipline, ability to delay gratification, belief in utility of one’s efforts affect grades more than IQ
    5) IQ explains only 4-18% of income
    6) <4% of delinquency/crime explained by IQ
    7) <2% of divorce and unemployment explained by IQ
    8) Adaptive view of IQ is multi-faceted and better measure person that psychometric testing
    a) Reasoning abilities, social competence, creativity, problem solving do not correlate highly
    b) One example of adaptive testing explained college grades as well as SATs
    c) Although she admits these facets are hard to measure
    9) She suggests that heredity might contribute only 30-40% to IQ
    10) She believes White-Black gap is all environmental, for mostly the same reasons as Nisbett does, although Castles emphasizes discrimination more as the environmental explanation (Nisbett talks about the Black culture as a problem).
    11) She doesn’t believe IQ selects well for college or job.

    I think she is mostly wrong in these comments, such as for #6, #7, #8a, #9, #11, and maybe #3, #5. I think she uses a cherry picked study for each of her beliefs. She seems to be avoiding all the studies that show that many of these attributes do highly correlate with each other, and they all correlate with education and job performance. Of course what is considered a high correlation is a judgment call.

    • Frog-like Sensations says:

      You’ve been substituting ‘heridity’ for ‘heritability’ since the very first post of this series, both when relaying estimated heritability percentages and in responding to commenters that correctly themselves used ‘heritability’.

      I didn’t point this out when I saw the first point because there were enough knowledgeable others that I assumed someone else would. But while several people did try to explain what heratability is–the proportion of the variance within a given population explained by genetics–it appears that no one ended up explicitly pointing out your mix-ups.

      And, though it’s hard to say for sure since I can’t see inside your head, I think this confusion is likely more than just verbal. For instance, if one really understands what it means for something to be heritable, it’s hard to see how one could get the mistaken impression that heritability figures give an upper bound for what environmental changes can result in.

      The mix-up here might be the same one that Ned Block pointed out in response to the Bell Curve orginally, between two different senses of something being “genetically caused”. Sentences like “She suggests that heredity might contribute only 30-40% to IQ” certainly suggest the reading of ‘gentically caused’ that is not captured by ‘heritability’.

    • Frog-like Sensations says:

      You’ve been substituting ‘heridity’ for ‘heritability’ since the very first post of this series, both when relaying estimated heritability percentages and in responding to commenters that correctly themselves used ‘heritability’.

      I didn’t point this out when I saw the first point because there were enough knowledgeable others that I assumed someone else would. But while several people did try to explain what heratability is–the proportion of the variation in a trait within a given population explained by variation in genetics–it appears that no one ended up explicitly pointing out your mix-ups.

      And, though it’s hard to say for sure since I can’t see inside your head, I think this confusion is likely more than just verbal. For instance, if one really understands what it means for something to be heritable, it’s hard to see how one could get the mistaken impression that heritability figures give an upper bound for what environmental changes can result in.

      The mix-up here might be the same one that Ned Block pointed out in response to the Bell Curve orginally, between two different senses of something being "genetically caused”.[1] Sentences like "She suggests that heredity might contribute only 30-40% to IQ" certainly suggest the reading of 'gentically caused' that is not captured by 'heritability'.

      [1] As usual of late, the spam filter won't let me get away with even a single link, but you should find a relevant article by googling "how heritability misleads about race".

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        For instance, if one really understands what it means for something to be heritable, it’s hard to see how one could get the mistaken impression that heritability figures give an upper bound for what environmental changes can result in.

        You need to explain this further. There was someone is a previous thread who stated pretty much this, except they explained it more fully. I responded that yes, technically there isn’t a cap if you can come up with some environment outside what exists today that increases intelligence greater than what we have now. But practically speaking there is a cap, until someone comes up with such an environment. Based on current environmental variation, the environmental % of IQ is the cap for how much we can increase IQs. Please explain why if you disagree with this.

        Perhaps I should say heritability instead of heredity, but I think it is just semantics. At this point I don’t get your issue.

        • Frog-like Sensations says:

          Yes, I am mainly talking about the issue you bring up here. But phrasing it as about “coming up with” a way to develop an “environment outside of what exists today” makes the issue sound far more sci-fi than it really is. For one thing, it calls to mind the image of creating a new environment in its entirety (say, placing kids in an experimental bio-dome), when in reality small additions to the current environment count too.

          But even things that already exist in the measured environment can have an impact greater than heritability numbers suggest. As long as some IQ-affecting feature of the environment isn’t very common currently, it won’t affect variation in intelligence very much, so by the same token it won’t affect heritability measures much. But if the feature became more common it could have a much larger affect.

          The Flynn Effect supports the idea that we have a limited understanding of many of the environmental factors that have been capable of increasing IQ. So I don’t think we should be surprised if future ones do so in ways we don’t have a clear sense of yet.

          As a side note, looking back at my original comment I think I could have done more to blunt its harshness, especially considering that your series of posts exemplifies a type of content I’d appreciate seeing more of in these threads. So thanks for the effort you put into them.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            First of all thank for the last comment. It was a bit harsh. But I mostly disliked it because I didn’t think I really understood what you meant, and I hate it when I am arguing something and there is no meeting of the minds. So I am very relieved that you meant what I guessed you meant. 🙂

            But phrasing it as about “coming up with” a way to develop an “environment outside of what exists today” makes the issue sound far more sci-fi than it really is.

            Yeah I do think it is kind of sci-fi. Education theorists have been working intensively on the problem of increasing intelligence for decades and haven’t come up with much. I don’t think there are environmental solutions out there that will increase intelligence significantly. It appears to me that the best way to maximize the intelligence of a person is to immerse them in a highly intellectual society where parents, peers, and teachers all reward cognitive thought and problem solving. But this is the current environment of some people, so I think it does fall under the current cap of how much is environmental.

            I believe that the only way to significantly increase intelligence will be to work on the heredity portion, that is directly improve the genetics of individuals. I guess this could be done by some kind of selective breeding (which makes me nervous if the government has control), or gene splicing (which makes me nervous in a different way). Neither one of these is foreseeable in the near future.

            If we are to make a significant effect on the environment, someone has to come up with some radical new technique, so definitely what is now sci-fi.

            Yes the Flynn effect is hard to explain, and the existence of it does somewhat decrease my confidence in any of my judgments. But my best guess is that most of this effect is NOT an increase in intelligence, but simply an increase in the ability to take IQ tests. IQ tests never have and never will test intelligence precisely. But I think as schooling increasingly reaches the poorest areas, it’s getting to be that almost everyone is used to taking tests. Thus test-taking skills have definitely increased over the decades. This is not an increase in intelligence itself, but does result in IQ test increases. And I think IQ tests are becoming more accurate as the population is becoming more equal in their experience in taking tests. The Flynn effect may reflect some increase in intelligence, but I think it is mostly test-taking skills.

          • albatross11 says:

            I think there are a few environmental interventions we know that will actually raise average IQ, without either some kind of selective breeding of humans or genetic engineering of humans. Those mostly don’t apply to middle-class-and-up Americans, but they’re a big deal in much of the world:

            a. Proper sanitation, including mosquito control. Kids that spend a lot of their childhood sick, or that are sharing their meager food supply and brain development budget with a bunch of parasites, are not going to develop their brains as well as kids without those handicaps.

            b. Getting lead and other environmental toxins out of the environment. In the US, poorer people tend to be more exposed to lead than richer people, which probably explains some of the difference in average IQ between poor and rich kids. If I were king. we’d be spending about 10% of the military budget on lead abatement.

            c. Nutritional supplements (stuff like iodized salt) prevent deficiency diseases that stunt brain development. It’s possible that vitamin D deficiency affects blacks more than whites and explains some of the IQ difference, so this isn’t 100% a third-world problem. But mostly, rich countries have already done this stuff and reaped the rewards.

            d. Extra years of school seem to raise IQ a little bit later in life, so making sure everyone goes to school for many years probably helps. It seems plausible to my amateur mind that this actually represents an increase in intelligence (giving you an intellectually demanding environment for another couple years when your brain is developing might help), but it also seems plausible that this is just leading people to be better at taking tests and so raising IQ scores without raising actual intelligence.

            I also suspect there are ways we can raise average IQ that may also have a big uneven effect. IQ becomes more heritable[1] as you get older, and it seems likely that this has to do with self-selected intellectually complex/simple environments. Smart people tend to spend more time in intellectually engaging pursuits, and this has some kind of effect on them once they get out into the world and their parents are no longer providing their environment. So offering more intellectually engaging/demanding things to do with your time, and more intellectually demanding environments, probably makes it easier for smart people to self-select into a more stimulating environment. Alice never cracks a book after high school and watches TV/plays on Facebook when she’s not at her job driving a school bus; her adoptive sibling Bob reads a couple books a week and plays internet chess for fun when he’s not at his programming job.

            [1] That is, imagine looking at the set of 15 year olds and the set of 30 year olds, where they were all raised in adoptive homes. When you look at 15-year-olds, less of the variation in their IQs is explained by their parents’ IQs than for 30-year-olds.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            @albatross.
            My comments were about the US. There is clearly much potential for increasing intelligence in 3rd world countries by improving conditions there.

            Improving conditions in the US can also increase intelligence, but that’s where we run into the cap where the percent of heredity cannot be changed without some dramatic new technology, whether in the environmental area or improving genetics. And in fact I believe the US is continually doing this, which explains the Flynn effect (both the IQ testing improvements and true intelligence improvements). Lead has been dramatically decreased (isn’t the usual explanation for decreasing crime since the ’90’s?). And schooling reaching far into rural areas where it previously did not. Those are good things, but I’m not sure if the current improvements can be accelerated.

    • Igon Value says:

      Could you or someone else point me to your other reviews on this topic? Thanks.

      EDIT: I found them, thanks.

  12. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to change the lyrics to Acadian Driftwood so that it’s about Akkadians.
    Warning: it’s an automatic loss if you can’t keep “what went down on the Plains of Abraham” unchanged.

    • Deiseach says:

      Oh, I wish I were more creative, because that could work brilliantly. All I can offer is this Tumblr post about Ea-Nasir, the Del Boy of Mesopotamia 🙂

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Complaint about delivery of the wrong grade of copper

        — prestigious museum

        He wasn’t just into copper trading. There are letters complaining about Ea-nasir’s business practices with respect to everything from kitchenwares to real estate speculation to second-hand clothing. The guy was everywhere.

        This is so amazing.

        • Lambert says:

          It’s the British Museum.
          Of course they have the world’s oldest extant formal letter of complaint.

          Thought it was on a Hostory of the world in 100 objects but I was mistaken.

        • Deiseach says:

          It’s the bones of 4,000 years but human nature never changes 🙂

          “You stiffed me on the delivery and then the material you did send was crappy quality! Okay, so I still have an outstanding bill on account with you but that’s beside the point – this is terrible customer service and I will be writing a STRONGLY WORDED LETTER OF COMPLAINT!”

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            It’s the bones of 4,000 years but human nature never changes

            And thus, I really want a sitcom set in ancient Mesopotamia.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Sitcom guest star: Laban, Jacob’s father-in-law! “Oh, I’ve got this relative who’s come to me after running from his brother. And he volunteers to work for room and board for seven years to marry my more-beautiful daughter? Well, why don’t I give him the less-beautiful one instead and save the more-beautiful one for some other deal!”

          • Deiseach says:

            Sitcom guest star: Laban, Jacob’s father-in-law!

            The ongoing sub-plot over the series is these two both trying to out-manoeuvre the other because they’re got that family resemblance of being just that bit too clever for their own good.

            You can imagine Laban: “Look, I’ve got two unmarried daughters, eldest girl is a lovely girl, lovely girl. Not a looker, no, that’s her sister, but a lovely girl all the same. Make a great wife for any man. Not her fault all the young guys are only interested in hot chicks, you know?

            Now this nephew of mine – oh, what a trouble maker! His mother’s fault, she spoiled him. Well that’s my sister for you, always has to have her own way. Anyhow, he gets up to some shady business with his elder brother and she steers him my way to keep him out of trouble. Must think I’ve gone soft in my old age, eh?

            Ha ha, no, I know a trick worth two of that! My nephew, such a smooth-talker, thinks he’s pulled the wool over old uncle’s eyes. Well, he wants to marry my daughter, I’ve got two lovely daughters like I said – one is as good as the other, even better, right?”

  13. Dino says:

    Relevant to those interested in psychotherapy –
    The evidence for evidence-based therapy is not as clear as we thought

    • Iago the Yerfdog says:

      Disclaimer: I’m not a psychotherapist, nor do I play one on TV.

      Overall I came away impressed and hope to see more research like this done. That said, I’m a little concerned that there was no mention of the idea that the same issue like depression or anxiety might have different root causes in different people, and different therapies might be appropriate depending on the cause.

      A similar issue seems to hold just for psychiatric medications: there are a ton of antidepressants, and finding which one will work best for you with the fewest side-effects is basically trial and error.

      If treatment A helps 80% of the population and treatment B helps 20%, giving everyone treatment A is certainly better than flipping a coin to decide which treatment to give. I worry, however, that making it a general rule “use A, not B, since it’s better for more people” could morph into “never, ever use B, even when A isn’t working.”

  14. proyas says:

    Why did this happen?

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/us/seti-home-hibernation-alien-trnd-scn/index.html

    Thanks to Moore’s Law, did the SETI network’s computers gain the upper hand on analyzing the huge trove of radio recordings faster than the trove could grow, and did the last significant chunk of data recently get analyzed?

    • Dino says:

      I was going to help out with SETI back when, but I asked a friend who’s expert in astrophysics – “If aliens on a planet around Proxima Centauri were running SETI, could they detect us?” She said no.

    • Lambert says:

      The Wait for Extra-Terrestrial Inteligence’s programme of checking the news every now and then to see if ‘Aliens arive’ is the top story is still going strong.

  15. proyas says:

    In a recent episode of Star Trek Picard, the heroes had to fight with an old, decommissioned Romulan space ship that a private warlord had somehow obtained. He and his crew used it to dominate several planets in a lawless and poor part of space.

    Have there been any real-life examples of something like this from 1900 onward? I’m imagining someone like the leader of a powerful group of insurgents or a drug lord acquiring a retired warship and using it to control an island or a stretch of coastline.

    • FLWAB says:

      I don’t know of anything 1900s onward, but in the 1830s James Brooke leveraged his control of a schooner with cannons into eventually becoming the King of a section of northwest Borneo. I mean he didn’t conquer it outright (he got the Sultan who controlled the area to give it to him as a vassal, and then eventually became independent), but without that boat and the cannons it probably wouldn’t have happened. That’s the best example of a random dude using a warship to outright rule an area which was poor and technologically behind.

    • danridge says:

      There are other people who really should be the ones to answer this, but they haven’t, so I’ll just say the thought I had: something tells me that as you get into the era of steam-powered warships, the fuel demands and complexity of operation will mean that the ships are somewhat useless without the logistics of an actual navy behind them.

    • John Schilling says:

      FLWAB already brought up the example of James Brooke, but note that he was semi-officially representing the British Empire at the time.

      Really, if you were going to do this sort of thing entirely on your own account, you wanted to be done with it and joined up with a proper Empire by the end of the eighteenth century. See also the history of Belize, for how to do that right. Once the Napoleonic wars came to an end, the great colonial empires had large and capable navies and nothing better to do with them than to check up on pretty much every habitable place on earth, regularly enough that nobody was going to build a mini-empire without their notice. Also to suppress the slave trade, and just about anything you can do to build an empire on the basis of “I’ve got cannon and you wogs don’t” is going to look kind of like slavery.

      So, it doesn’t work any more unless at least one major empire wants it to work and wants it strongly enough to lean on the other major empires to back off and not just claim the place for themselves.

      Over the next few generations we get steamships, telegraphs, crusading journalists, and bureaucrats numerous and capable enough to directly administer every Empire’s territories without having to outsource the work to freebooters like Brooke.

    • unreliabletags says:

      There are a number of Soviet weapons systems floating around the Middle East in the hands of non-state actors. ISIS operated Scud missiles, a surface-to-air missile, and maybe some MiGs.

      Nothing with the scale or complexity of a warship, though, and it’s not an asymmetric threat like you describe. Weapons, including very powerful ones, are just plentiful.

  16. Aftagley says:

    In the “News Articles I didn’t Expect to Read in 2020” category, the FDA has banned schools from using electric shocks as punishment.

    I had no clue this was even a thing, but apparently there’s one school for the disabled in Massachusetts that uses small devices that provide painful shocks to their target as punishment. That being said, all students who wear these devices are adults, it’s only done with the family’s consent and the article cites at least one person that seems to have benefited from the use of these devices.

    That being said, you know, it’s still a system whereby officials can press a button and shock people; if this was a prison or any other kind of non-disabled victim I’d be 100% against this device, so I see no reason to change my previously held “don’t shock people as punishment” bias.

    Is there any reason I shouldn’t just chalk this up as an example of the FDA getting something correct?

    • Matt M says:

      Is there any reason I shouldn’t just chalk this up as an example of the FDA getting something correct?

      Would you accept a general appeal to federalism – that this doesn’t need to be decided by the federal government specifically?

      • Aftagley says:

        Maybe?

        If the only place in this country that is considering or would ever consider using this practice is that one school in Mass, it does seem like overkill to use the power of the federal government to end it. On the other hand, if this is a practice that had the potential to spread AND is not medically sound, i’m perfectly find with the FDA stepping in and nipping it in the bud.

        I don’t know enough about the topic to decide which option is more accurate.

        • toastengineer says:

          Sounds to me like the practice IS medically sound, the problem is that the school did the thing institutions do and started using the zapper at the first sign of hesitation to comply rather than only in the most extreme cases.

    • Randy M says:

      Wasn’t there some sociological study awhile back that demonstrated electric shock was a good way to train people?
      /s

    • albatross11 says:

      If there’s only one school doing it, and it’s done for a few specific people with major problems, then I suspect it’s going to be hard, from the outside, to tell whether this was:

      a. A barbaric horrible practice that got accepted and normalized there and persisted way too long. In this case, the action is good and the students/patients will be better off as a result.

      b. A genuinely helpful and humane practice that looks horrible and pattern-matches to cruelty to the helpless, and so it’s being shut down by uninformed do-gooders. In this case, the action is tragic and the students/patients will be worse off as a result.

      I mean, my first guess is “barbaric horrible practice,” but I have to acknowledge that I don’t know enough to be entitled to a strong opinion here. And many things that look needlessly cruel end up actually being the best thing anyone knows to do–think of chemotherapy for cancer patients, or basic training for soldiers, or letting toddlers fall down and skin their knees and occasionally break a bone rather than keeping them pent up inside wrapped in cotton.

    • Lambert says:

      Is this the Judge Rotenberg centre?
      Founded by a colleague of B. F. Skinner, so I’m not surprised they’re so big on operant conditioning.

      The JRC deliberately modifies the electrodes to deliver more power for a longer time. (up to 45mA RMS for 2 seconds)
      Multple packs are often applied to the same pupil.
      The shock units are used in the bath/shower, against manufacturer instructions.
      Shocks are administered for very minor infractions.

      From what I’ve read, the highest praise I can give to the staff is that they have the moral high ground compared to the SS-TV and NKVD.

    • GearRatio says:

      My big question for you would be why you are against shocking people as a punishment or training method in the first place. If it were to turn out that you are just against physical punishment in a general sense whether it’s effective or not and no matter how it’s used, I’m not sure how you’d be convinced.

      If we look at your second to last paragraph, the words “That being said, you know,” are meant to dismiss the parts you’ve already about this system perhaps being effective and good. And after dismissing them, you then ask for OTHER reasons to convince you it should be kept, AFTER you subsequently say you think electroshock is bad in a fundamental, inherent way.

      That’s not a fair way to ask to be persuaded on this. It rephrases to something like “Effectiveness and examples of this helping people are assigned a near-zero value. You now have to convince me this is a net positive without using the most effective evidence available. Also, I have a visceral reaction against this particular practice”.

      The most effective arguments for this are going to look something like “You yourself brought up a situation where this is helping people. Unless you fetishize pain avoidance or shocks-as-evil, your own words indicate this shouldn’t have been banned”. That argument may or may not be right and electroshock may or may not be possible to use in a net-beneficial way, but if you indicate in your question’s construction that the above argument is hand-waved from the get-go, I’m not sure you are going to get the vigorous defense you want.

      I’m not the guy to provide that vigorous defense in the first place, but I know I wouldn’t try in this particular thread for the reasons above.

  17. Matt M says:

    When someone starts talking about “video games,” are you more likely to immediately think of?

    1. A narrative experience (think single player, high amount of storyline, clear progression)
    2. Repetitive entertainment (think multiplayer, high amounts of repetition, storyline/progression unimportant to nonexistent)

    • Plumber says:

      @Matt M says:

      “When someone starts talking about “video games,” are you more likely to immediately think of?…”

      The Asteroids and Missile Command games I played in the ’80’s, or the Naruto and Need for Speed games my son played a few years ago.

      I’m guessing those were all more like #2, but the video games I played in the ’80’s were seldom multi-player.

    • EchoChaos says:

      Hrm, what about single player sandbox games with storylines that emerge on their own?

      That’s mostly what I play, e.g. EU4, HoI4, Civ VI.

      I do play some Path of Exile, but again, I play it pretty single player sandboxy.

      • Matt M says:

        Those go in bucket 2.

        I know what you mean, but I think saying that “storylines emerge” in Civ is putting it rather generously, as that relies pretty heavily on the player’s active imagination. Those games are definitely designed to be played multiple times.

        • EchoChaos says:

          Then definitely bucket 2.

          And if you’ve never changed strategy to nuke Alexander’s stupid face because he said something you aren’t playing Civ right.

          • Matt M says:

            When I first tried to learn to play Civ, I was probably in elementary school, and for some reason I got it in my head that “irrigate the entire landmass of Eurasia” was a productive goal…

          • Randy M says:

            That reminds me of playing Simcity with the cheat code, where the first thing I do after getting unlimted funds is plop down a 9×9 grid of railroad across the entire map to minimize pollution and maximize efficiency.

            I’m sure Nick will revoke my Trad card for that crime against organic expression of communal knowledge.

          • Nick says:

            @Randy M
            I’m updating the membership lists as we speak.

            I’ve actually played lots of Simcity and other city sims, and believe me, much ink could be spilled at request on the ways they inculcate unrealistic assumptions about traffic and modern cities in general, with the result that they turn our kids into little traffic managers instead of artists. This abominable crime I lay at the feet of Will Wright.

    • Nick says:

      I think I think of 1 more, but I play 2 more.

    • Randy M says:

      Eh, both about equally.
      What I’m not thinking about is all the mobile or flash games that somehow seem to occupy a lot of market/mind share with the public at large.
      Also, there’s good single player games with high repetition and low storyline; roguelikes and such. There have been multiplayer games with story and progression, but usually moreso as an option on a single player game, like Baldur’s gate.

      • Matt M says:

        Also, there’s good single player games with high repetition and low storyline; roguelikes and such.

        Those go in bucket 2.

        Basically I’m trying to craft a categorization scheme that doesn’t depend on single/multi player (although will be highly correlated with it).

        What I’m not thinking about is all the mobile or flash games that somehow seem to occupy a lot of market/mind share with the public at large.

        So what do you think goes in bucket 2 that clearly isn’t this? If nobody thought of Tetris until 2015, it would have been a free to play mobile game. Just saying.

        • Randy M says:

          So what do you think goes in bucket 2 that clearly isn’t this?

          Oh, say, Call of Duty, Eternal, Street Fighter, Super Smash Brothers.

          If nobody thought of Tetris until 2015, it would have been a free to play mobile game.

          Yeah, probably. Or else a minigame inside a sprawling open world sandbox that you master to get +2 to your loot box rolls.

        • Randy M says:

          Basically I’m trying to craft a categorization scheme that doesn’t depend on single/multi player (although will be highly correlated with it).

          I got ya covered, fam. (Do us young people still say “fam”?)

          Linear–Gameplay is delivered according to a pre-programmed, sequential progression, usually tied to a narrative, however loosely. Upon completion, there will be no new content. Fairly light on emergent properties. Variations include the Sloped (gradually increasing difficulty) and the stair-step (new features unlocked periodically). Examples would be adventure games like Myst, platformers like Mario, etc.

          Cyclical–Gameplay occurs in a series of matches. Content is open ended and may have many emergent aspects as various systems interact. Narrative likely exists on a back-ground level but does not really drive the gameplay in any meaningful way. See Real Time Strategy, digital trading card games, arena shooters, etc.

          Hybrid: Daisy-Chain: Gameplay consists of a series of matches with increasing options and challenge, which may be distributed according to a narrative, culminating in some kind of final match. See the single player campaigns of real-time strategy games or shooters (if the missions aren’t too tightly scripted to make it essentially Linear), the tutorial mode of digital trading card games, Tactical RPG games, JRPG games like Final Fantasy.

          Spiral: Gameplay is essentially a series of matches, but new options are gradually unlocked. However, matches are not chained together with a wider narrative and gameplay options may be added in a variety of ways. See Roguelikes, such as Slay the Spire or Risk of Rain.

          Forked: Mostly Linear, but with enough branching choices to make consecutive play throughs required for seeing all the content.

    • Aftagley says:

      Personally – 1

      Any time I’m hearing about it in pop culture – 2

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I think of a big blob of stuff that includes both of those things.

    • SamChevre says:

      I’m most likely to think of #2-specifically of the arcade-type games.

      Is your categorization scheme intended to encompass computer games as well? Minesweeper, Jezzball, online chess and bridge, Angry Birds, 2048, the various balloon popping/space filling games…

      • Matt M says:

        Yes, and all of those go in bucket 2.

        Another way of thinking about it is, “is a video game closer to an interactive movie, or a high-tech toy?”

        In Bucket 1, Red Dead Redemption 2 suffices as a reasonable substitute for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

        In Bucket 2, Tetris suffices as a reasonable substitute for a cup with a ball attached to a string.

        They are both video games, but the role they are serving and the sort of things they are replacing are quite different.

    • Leafhopper says:

      Personally, the only video game I ever played heavily was Minecraft, which is… 2, I guess.

      In general, when someone says “video game,” a picture of a first-person shooter and the words “Call of Duty” are probably the most likely to be first in my head, and… I’m actually not knowledgable enough to know which type that is, but I’m guessing 1.

      • beleester says:

        CoD has both a single-player campaign and a storyless multiplayer mode, so it’s both, although the multiplayer is probably the main appeal.

    • Tarpitz says:

      I think of a song by a hot duck-faced woman. I don’t think I’ve ever referred to computer games as video games, and I’m not sure anyone I know has either.

    • brad says:

      I think of a FPS, so two. I would think of one if someone said “computer game”.

    • AG says:

      False dichotomy. The best of narrative gaming isn’t cinematic at all, it’s sneaking up on the player with its themes/story delivered via gameplay. Universal Paperclips, Braid, and Touhou blur between the categories. And then you have games that openly do both, such as LoZ Four Swords, GTA, or Don’t Starve.

  18. baconbits9 says:

    This is the craziest market in my lifetime, and I am 40 so I sort of knew somethings about what was going on in 2000 and was following reasonably closely in 2008. The big thing right now as far as I can tell is how treasury yields are acting. In 2008 there was a massive drop in the 10 year yield from early November into December with a drop from ~3.9% to ~2.1%, a 46% decline in yields. The drop right now is from December is ~ 1.9% to 0.7% a 63% drop, and it might not be finished yet.

    What is also interesting to terrifying is that the yield crash of 2008 came second, the S&P was down 33% from June by early November, and ~37% off the late 2007 highs (Yields fell from over 5% in 2007 to that 3.9%, the overall decline from peak to trough was from ~5.1% to ~2.1% for a 59% decline over almost 18 months, which is still less than the 63% decline over the last 3 months*), but stocks are only 10-15% off their highs right now.

    *Yes, bond yields aren’t great for comparisons across time, I’m just trying to highlight how large this move is in really any framework, and this comp is vs the GFC**.

    ** Speaking of the GFC, is this going to be like ‘The Great War’ that had to be renamed WW1 just a couple of decades later? The Great Financial Crisis might end up looking like trench warfare vs the blitz.

    • Matt M says:

      Great Financial Crisis 2: Coronavirus boogaloo

      • baconbits9 says:

        I closed out almost all my shorts at the open this morning. I really need to step back a bit, crazy emotional market.

        • baconbits9 says:

          Well that didn’t last long, back in (some of) my shorts!

          • anon-e-moose says:

            Do you benchmark your performance on a risk adjusted basis?

          • The Nybbler says:

            If you can successfully day trade THIS market, I congratulate you. I wouldn’t have the stomach for it.

          • baconbits9 says:

            @ anon-e-moose

            My shorts are a small portion (~25) of our portfolio. I don’t really worry about risk adjust gains here, i’m more looking for out sized gains.

            My big move in our primary portfolio was to go 100% T-bonds back in October, so if I counted risk adjusted I would be even happier.

            @ The Nybbler-

            I don’t consider this day trading, my average day the past two weeks has probably had 0.5 trades executed and this is the most active I have been. I am trading options which requires certain day trading like behavior,

          • baconbits9 says:

            In actual day-trading behavior I straddled the s&p at the close.

    • Jon S says:

      If you are comparing bond yields, I’m not sure that % change in yield is the most appropriate measure, particularly since we’ve seen that 0 is not a hard lower bound. I think raw change in yield is a little more representative of how much things are changing? Better is probably blend somewhere between.

      • baconbits9 says:

        0 is still a soft lower bound, the negative rates were heavily subsidized with CBs granting concessions that made them close to zero in most scenarios for the actual bond holders.

        Even if we are talking raw yields the 1.2% drop is ~ 2/3rds the size of the largest similar length drop during the great financial crisis.

    • Loriot says:

      > December with a drop from ~3.9% to ~2.1%, a 46% decline in yields. The drop right now is from December is ~ 1.9% to 0.7% a 63% drop, and it might not be finished yet.

      I don’t think it makes much sense to look at fractions of interest rates like that. Interest rates are not like stock prices. Imagine what you would be saying if the rates went negative. An infinite decline? A more useful view is that they went down 1.8% before and they’ve gone down 1.1% now.

      > Speaking of the GFC, is this going to be like ‘The Great War’ that had to be renamed WW1 just a couple of decades later? The Great Financial Crisis might end up looking like trench warfare vs the blitz

      So far, there’s no reason to think this will be anywhere near as bad as the Panic of 2008.

      • baconbits9 says:

        I don’t think it makes much sense to look at fractions of interest rates like that. Interest rates are not like stock prices. Imagine what you would be saying if the rates went negative. An infinite decline? A more useful view is that they went down 1.8% before and they’ve gone down 1.1% now.

        On the market long term bonds act like stocks with capital gains when yields move. If I have a bond yielding 2% and yields drop to 1% my 2% bond is has increased in value, and that increase will be (not linearly) proportionate to the percentage change in the coupon.

        Yes there are better formulas than straight % declines, and I also noted the absolute decline as well. The point is that I am comparing it to one of the steepest yield drops in history which highlights how insane this action is.

    • The Nybbler says:

      The market’s going utterly nuts responding to rumors and fears rather than data and reasoning. Even more so than it usually does. IMO trying to figure it out short term is an impossible task unless you have some incredible instincts.

      The thing about 2008 is it wasn’t just crazy; there were fundamental economic problems it was responding to.

    • You know what really gets me?

      We are in a supply shock and a demand shock. And central banks are cutting rates (Fed) and buying equities at a record pace (BoJ). PRINTING MONEY DOES NOT BOOST THE ECONOMY WHEN FACTORIES ARE IDLING AND PEOPLE AREN’T BUYING THINGS – I want to scream this into the void.

      Central banks have completely surrendered to the markets and are targeting asset prices.

      That’s how you get inflation. See John Law and the Mississippi Company.

      • Chalid says:

        Lower rates do help. Companies facing temporary revenue shortfalls due to (say) supply chain disruptions will use credit to maintain solvency, avoid layoffs, etc. until their business improves again.

        • baconbits9 says:

          Even if the shortfalls are temporary they have to be temporary and transient, for this to work demand has to pick back up not to previous levels but also to fill in the gap from the shortfall AND businesses have to not significantly adjust now that they have experience with supply chain disruptions.

          There is also no real reason to avoid layoffs with the financing available. Cheaper to furlough and borrow than keep everyone on the payroll.

          • Chalid says:

            It’s probably true that layoff and rehire is cheaper for unskilled workers, but not for skilled ones. It takes a long time for a new hire engineer at someplace like NVIDIA to reach full productivity.

            But anyway the more general point is that credit helps companies avoid being forced to take short-term actions to survive that are bad for the long-term health of the business. Layoffs of difficult-to-replace employees, sales of critical assets, closing down long-term projects that aren’t revenue-producing yet, bankruptcy, etc.

          • baconbits9 says:

            It’s probably true that layoff and rehire is cheaper for unskilled workers, but not for skilled ones. It takes a long time for a new hire engineer at someplace like NVIDIA to reach full productivity.

            This is no different from bankruptcy due to a short term disruption. Your entire labor force isn’t getting fired on the day you file.

          • Chalid says:

            I don’t see your point. Bankruptcy is an example of an costly measure you’d want to avoid, right?

          • baconbits9 says:

            For a rate cut to positively impact employment it has to maintain more jobs than what would occur without the rate cut. Your reply above largely implies that the main way it would do this is by maintaining solvency, so the base case would be how many employees would be laid off under bankruptcy without rate cuts vs whatever happens with rate cuts.

          • Chalid says:

            My point is what I said, “credit helps companies avoid being forced to take short-term actions to survive that are bad for the long-term health of the business” and layoffs were an example. Bankruptcy is another example and it’s extremely costly.

            Also, companies will definitely do some costly layoffs if it lets them avoid the costs of bankruptcy.

          • baconbits9 says:

            My point is what I said, “credit helps companies avoid being forced to take short-term actions to survive that are bad for the long-term health of the business” and layoffs were an example. Bankruptcy is another example and it’s extremely costly.

            This is specific to an individual business, it has to expand to being good for the overall economy which includes those surviving businesses who would be able to buy the bankrupt ones cheaply and start expansion again.

            There is little reason to think that an increase in liquidity via a rate cut will actually lead to maintaining employment levels in the face of a supply chain disruption. If the disruption is short enough to keep people on staff without them having productive work to do then a bridge loan really shouldn’t be needed. If the disruption is longer then the bridge loan won’t prevent layoffs. All that a rate cut should do is to increase the incentive to borrow under uncertainty about the outcomes, which means the Fed is encouraging leverage during a crisis, which is literally the exact opposite thing from what should be prescribed from a theory perspective.

          • Chalid says:

            No it is not specific to the company. Bankruptcy imposes real costs, it is not merely transfer of ownership.

          • baconbits9 says:

            No it is not specific to the company. Bankruptcy imposes real costs, it is not merely transfer of ownership.

            You are assuming the conclusion. The longer that bankruptcy is put off and the more debt the bankrupt company owes, and the lower the rates they owe the worse bankruptcy is and the more costs it imposes. If the virus is increasing the likelihood of bankruptcy then borrowing companies should be facing higher, not lower, rates.

            Therefore your position has to be that the lower rates will permanently reduce the likelihood of bankruptcy, which means that the companies will have to cut costs (as they have lower revenues) which will include layoffs, which (according to Keneysian/monetary theory) will cause less spending and require more rate cuts.

          • Chalid says:

            Bankruptcy costs are certainly not linear in debt; there is a massive step function as you declare bankruptcy, as everything about the company becomes more uncertain since it is being trusted to the court system.

            In the long run it is certainly true that lower revenues mean that ultimately costs need to be cut relative to what they were (if we take an expansive view of “costs” to include things like dividends) but credit allows companies to better choose the nature and timing of those cuts. Cutting costs massively and hastily this quarter is much more damaging than spreading the cuts over the next two years.

            I’m quitting from this conversation now, I’m not getting anything out of it anymore and I suspect you aren’t either.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I’m quitting from this conversation now, I’m not getting anything out of it anymore and I suspect you aren’t either.

            Ok, this’ll be my last reply then.

            You are still only working on one side of the equation. If you need loans to prevent bankruptcy you need higher, not lower, interest rates to get people to actually make the loans. According to standard monetary theory (which I think is wrong, but is what CBs act under more or less) you cut rates in the face of a demand shock the lower rates act as a stimulus for demand by reducing the opportunity cost of consumption making it more attractive. In the face of a supply shock the rate cut doesn’t improve the actual supply conditions which means rates should be moving higher to increase effective liquidity, not lower. Lower rates should lower liquidity making bankruptcy likelihood higher, not lower*.

            *There actually is some evidence this past week of this happening, fed repo operations were oversubscribed by the highest ratio after the 50 basis point cut this past week.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I’m not getting anything out of it anymore and I suspect you aren’t either.

            I actually am. I need to refine my thinking on this while the markets are calm… which has pretty much only been on weekends recently. This is the biggest opportunity to make outside gains for me* in my lifetime to date, and to have a chance at nailing it I am going to have to be sharp. These types of disagreements work for me for that.

            *That is considering the capital I have to use and my experience and knowledge of markets as well as the market conditions.

    • I don’t see this as being particularly crazy. It’s easier to explain to a child than the typical economic crisis: there’s this thing called coronavirus,[assuming that it’s the cause, and it’d be quite the coincidence if it weren’t] it’s causing factories to temporarily close, that means the companies owning these factories are not able to make things and sell them and make money and the people who own these companies are getting less money.

      • Matt M says:

        Generally agree. As far as I can tell, what’s been happening the last few days is that the market has been struggling to decide whether the virus is going to result in significant and sustained economic disruptions, or not.

        One day, the “yes, it will” faction wins out and prices fall 3% or so, and the next day the “no it won’t” faction regains momentum and prices rise by 3% or so.

        • baconbits9 says:

          This ignores that CBs have stepped in with aggressive measures after the down days, and also that markets basically ignored the possibility of it being serious for a couple of months first before it became ‘unsure’.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Oh, and also that bond yields have been falling since early January and there have been many large down days for yields and almost no big up days, so the bond market is not saying ‘maybe its nothing, maybe its something’ it is consistently saying ‘yep, its something, maybe its huge and maybe its just kinda big’.

          • @baconbits

            Are you saying the issue is that stock prices should have fallen as bond yields fell? There’s no contradiction there if investors expect the fed to act to lower interest rates regardless of whether a recession will occur.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Are you saying the issue is that stock prices should have fallen as bond yields fell? There’s no contradiction there if investors expect the fed to act to lower interest rates regardless of whether a recession will occur.

            No, I am saying the interpretation of ‘stocks up and down because people are changing their minds about how serious the corona virus is daily’ doesn’t fit with how other markets are behaving. Your statement only works if the Fed’s rate cuts odds are independent of the severity of the coronavirus, which implies the Fed is reacting to something else which implies that the implication that the market is only reacting to the virus is also false/unlikely.

      • baconbits9 says:

        Its easy to explain the housing crisis to a child to if you explain it incorrectly.

        The questions that this answer brings up are

        1. Why were the US stock markets making all time highs while the virus was spreading? There was a 2-3 month lead in with the virus spreading and the markets were going up off already all time highs.

        2. Why was the Fed injecting hundreds of billions in liquidity from October on with UE extremely low levels and stocks at or near all time highs?

        3. Why did the coronavirus cause the fastest 10% decline off an all time high in history? This is not just crazy price action, its historically crazy price action.

        • broblawsky says:

          1. Why were the US stock markets making all time highs while the virus was spreading? There was a 2-3 month lead in with the virus spreading and the markets were going up off already all time highs.

          Good old-fashioned FOMO. In retrospect, TSLA punching through $600 should’ve been an obvious sign of a blow-off top.

          2. Why was the Fed injecting hundreds of billions in liquidity from October on with UE extremely low levels and stocks at or near all time highs?

          That is a good question. A bunch of hedge funds and mortgage REITS borrow in the repo market for some reason; the repo market started blowing out in mid-September for some reason (rates spiked to 10%) so the Fed started buying T-bills to bail them out. They stopped in early February, AFAICT. I have no idea why the repo market started blowing out, or why it stopped. It’s too early to be COVID-19 related.

          3. Why did the coronavirus cause the fastest 10% decline off an all time high in history? This is not just crazy price action, its historically crazy price action.

          Options positioning. When long positive gamma persists for a long time, it leads to artificially suppressed volatility. When an exogenous shock (like COVID-19) disrupts that artificially suppressed volatility, it leads to more extreme (positive and negative) swings. This article explains the dynamic very well. Some of what happened was related to forced deleveraging, not just virus fear.

  19. Thegnskald says:

    Still digging into special relativity.

    First, I don’t think the way I am approaching the math is correct. I can sum up the issue. Suppose a ship at rest accelerates, reaches a point, accelerates back, then slows down approaching it’s starting position, where it is back in rest. Calling the starting time T0, and the ending time Tf, my understanding of the correct approach to figure out the difference in time was to integrate lamda over the course of the path, and multiply this by Tf.

    I am reasonably certain this is wrong. One of the substitutions that gives rise to lamda is t=x/c, which is true if and only if t’=x/c. Substituting t=x/c for Tf results in a different result – namely, no time dilation at all. Meaning I’m pretty sure the equation for lamda is invalid for at least part of the path.

    Working through this issue now, uncertain of the outcome.

    The other issue, which I am less certain of, is the choice of the positive root of the square root in the equation. It isn’t clear to me that the positive root is the correct choice for the entire integral. On this point I am simply confused; generally we say sqrt(x^2) is x, which is to say, the sign is preserved. I am less certain how sqrt(f(x^2)) should be handled, but it doesn’t seem quite correct to discard the sign of x altogether in favor of one root or another.

    • smocc says:

      The correct way to get the time elapsed according to some object is to integrate that object’s proper time over the interval. The infinitesimal proper time is \sqrt{dt^2 – (dx^2+dy^2+dz^2)/c^2}. So if you know the object’s velocity as a function of time between t0 and tf then the amount of time that object experiences during that interval is:

      \Delta t_proper = \int_{t_0}^{t_f} \sqrt{1-v(t)^2/c^} dt

      In the special case that v(t) is constant you get the standard time dilation result:

      \Delta t_\proper = \Delta t/\gamma

      • Thegnskald says:

        Thank you! It took working through why dt^2 equals one to figure out where a prior approach went wildly wrong.

        (Equation edited for typo)
        Working through this with a trial equation (v(t) = -t + 5) to see which intuitions I can discard and which I can keep.

        And indeed the sign of velocity does end up mattering to the square root, so that intuition is being smug at me.

        • smocc says:

          The sign of the velocity at any given shouldn’t matter because it gets squared.

          • Thegnskald says:

            For linear velocities such that u=at + b, where the units of the equation are expressed in terms of proportions of c, the equation should end up being a*integral(1/2 * (arcsin(u) + u*sqrt(1-u^2)) – the unit I chose for -t + 5 was c/6, for t from 0 to 10.

            If the sign didn’t matter, the square root portion would have canceled out. Instead I got 2.3712149. (edit: This value is probably wrong, I forgot my unit conversion.)

            Getting a weird result when I use constant velocity there, though. The change in proper time becomes 0. Trying to figure that out.

            Edit: To be clear, trying to figure out why a constant velocity doesn’t work in the linear velocity equation. I see the integral I am doing is unnecessary, since the square root is a constant. This is leading me to suspect my integral is flawed.

          • smocc says:

            Here’s a general expression you can check against. For an object with a velocity that changes at a constant rate, v(t) = v_i + at, over a time period \Delta t, and using \beta to mean v/c, the proper time is

            \Delta t\times \frac{1}{2}\frac{\left[\beta_f\sqrt{1-\beta_f^2}-\beta_i\sqrt{1-\beta_i^2}+\arcsin(\beta_f)-\arcsin(\beta_i)\right]}{(\beta_f-\beta_i)}

            (You can see this LaTeX rendered here)

          • Thegnskald says:

            Hrm. Where did the denominator come from? My derivation lacks that.

            ETA:

            Ah! It is 1/a. I should have divided by a instead of multiplying.

          • smocc says:

            I’d check if you forgot a factor in doing a u-substitution somewhere. The denominator may also show up as a factor of 1/a, where a is the acceleration.

          • Thegnskald says:

            Hrm. Alright. I am satisfied with the behavior of the equation when velocity varies over time.

            The only question still remaining is about the behavior of the square root when velocity is constant, namely whether it is correct to take the positive root when velocity is negative (towards, rather than away from, the origin).

            I need to think about that one.

            ETA:

            You were correct on the u substitution! That was the issue.

          • Thegnskald says:

            Hrm. I am now uncertain if I am evaluating some math correctly.

            Consider two equations:
            v(t) = (t)*c/6
            And
            v(t) = (t + .9)*c/6

            If I am doing the math correctly, evaluating the change in proper time, for t(0,5), the second equation produces a smaller change in proper time than the first, even though the velocity is always higher.

          • smocc says:

            Nice to know I’m not a physics teacher for nothing 😉

            As for taking the positive vs negative square root consider the way you derive the the integral. IMO the most basic way is to ask the question “if I give the object a clock identical to my own clock and then let it travel its path, how much more often will I see my clock tick than the object’s clock while it is travelling?”

            You can use the basic principles of relativity to answer that question, and you find that the amount of time the object’s clock will tick out is given by the integral. And if pose the question in terms of clock ticks in this way it only really makes sense to take the positive root.

            If you want to start wondering whether the clock will start ticking backwards in time you can, but it’s a separate question and not really related to the sign of the square root.

          • Thegnskald says:

            In terms of clocks, it is more about what an observer watching both clocks would see.

            Or, more particularly, given a traveling observer traveling along with a clock, exactly when the observer sees the stationary clock ticks faster. (It has to at some point on a round trip, since at the end it is ahead of the observer’s own clock; more, it has to tick faster in proportion to the Lorentz factor).

            I have ruled out it happening during the acceleration at the start and end of the trip, because we can have identical accelerations for trips of different distance, and it doesn’t make sense for the clock to tick faster if a trip was longer.

            The two possibilities that remain are during the turnaround acceleration, or during the return trip itself. If the negative root should be taken, it is during the return voyage. If it shouldn’t, it has to be during the turnaround acceleration.

            I can’t figure out the logic for it happening during the turnaround acceleration, since light is arriving to the traveling observer at the same rate no matter the distance, but that may just be something I am missing.

          • Thegnskald says:

            Hrm. The return trip can be made at a different velocity. I think it may have to be at the turnaround point.

          • smocc says:

            The answer is in the integral. The ratio by which another clock ticks slower than your own is given by \sqrt{1-v^2/c^2} where v is the speed of the other clock relative to you. IF you are in an inertial reference frame.

            If you are not in an inertial reference frame you need to use a different rule for calculating the ratio. (Just like how you can’t just use Newton’s 2nd law when in a non-inertial frame)

          • Thegnskald says:

            Alright:

            Why does the integral return a smaller change in proper time when there is acceleration than when there is no acceleration, given the same time frame and the same base velocity?

            I’m not ruling out “I am doing this math wrong.” But is this what you are referring to?

          • Thegnskald says:

            Ah, wait, less is expected.

            But now I’m back to the same problem. More, the acceleration form of the equation doesn’t include position, so I don’t see how the integral resolves this.

            Taking the negative root in the integral for negative velocities does resolve the issue – thought about it more and I realized my expectation that it had to be symmetric was in error – and is mathematically valid, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you mean.

          • Thegnskald says:

            Actually, it may be helpful for me to iterate the understanding I have of how the usual thought process involving this goes:

            Suppose there is a clock beacon one light hour away from a ship at rest with respect to the beacon. They are synchronized, so the ship’s clock says 1:00, and the beacon says 12:00, but the one hour delay means the ship should interpret this as 1:00 also.

            The ship accelerates to a Lorentz Factor of .5 – meaning the distance from the ship’s perspective is half a light hour, meaning it interprets the beacon as being at 12:30. So when the ship moves to the beacon and decelerates, the half time rate means when it has arrived, the beacon shows 1:00 as expected, and the ship’s clock shows 12:30.

            Which is fine if that is how the universe operates, but it implies something significant – two ships can tell who is in motion by comparing the distance both measure between each other. Which, as I understand relativity, is pretty much specifically forbidden. More, if they measure the same distance, or a distance that doesn’t correlate exactly with the Lorentz factor, they can find a true inertial rest frame by both decelerating symmetrically for the case of identical distances, or decelerating in a more complicated way if the discrepancy doesn’t match the Lorentz factor.

            My suspicion is that this is just another case of “Teaching something wrong to get students used to thinking in a particular way before they learn the real way it is done.”

            If this is really the way it is done, it looks… well, entirely wrong.

          • Thegnskald says:

            Er, that’s off by about ten minutes, so the final times are more like 1:09 and 12:34, setting aside the time dilation owing to acceleration, but close enough.

            At any rate, I begin to suspect SR is the wrong framework to ask this question anyways, and I need to get back on learning tensors.

    • helloo says:

      Maybe looking at getting latex support is a serious recommendation…

      The standard displacement formula is d = vt + at^2/2 which is derived from the integral of v(t) = v0 + at over dt.

      For your other issue, in general sqrt(f(x^2)) != f(x).
      Ie. f(x) = x+1, then sqrt(f(x^2)) = sqrt(x^2+1) != x+1

    • georgeherold says:

      “Space Time Physics” by Taylor and Wheeler is a great SR book. Read it and work through the problems at the end of the chapters.

  20. Lightveil says:

    Note: slightly rambling. Exams, cognitive laziness, old LW rationality (thoughts on parts of sequences), small aside on the Memory Book

    I recently gave an exam that I had to spend more-than-normal effort for (short version: end-of-high school exams are disproportionately more important for getting into colleges here than the rest of your high school performance) and I realized that I wasn’t really pushing myself, cognitively, in general. For this particular exam, as it was significant, I spent more time and energy than what I would have done otherwise; and it feels like (modulo the difficulty of the exam) I really did do well, which was a surprise.

    It’s possible this is attributable to unconscious cost-benefit analysis, e.g. school exams in general not really mattering for me, but I have to discount that because it’s a wider pattern. Typically my learning process was to either superficially learn things, or try to learn things, fail, and pretty quickly give up because I was clearly ‘not smart enough’.

    On one hand, this is probably linked to laziness/lack of self-confidence/lack of perseverance. But on the other hand..I think at least some part of it comes from failing to internalize old-style LW Rationality properly. My primary exposure to rationality was the sequences when I was young (mostly because I didn’t know of anything else at the time) and its focus on ‘quantify your uncertainty’ and ‘make your map match the territory’ and etc made me internalize ‘there’s a chance everything you think is totally wrong’, but not internalize the working of the tools that would let me quantify that wrongness. So I constantly was self-questioning ‘could these thoughts be wrong?’, which, lacking a way to find a proper answer, my brain always responded with ‘yes’. (I don’t think this is a failure mode of learning rationality in general, given I was trying to figure out how to think better and so on; if I was more innately curious, or..perhaps smarter in general, I would most likely have had the confidence to maintain a strong belief in myself while using doubt as a reasonable tool.)

    One thing I do like from the sequences, though, is the post on judging thoughts/actions on if they make you stronger or weaker. Relating to the exams thing earlier, I had a lot of guilt about not working as hard as I should sometimes, but since a few days ago I’ve been constantly asking myself the question ‘is what I’m thinking useful?’, which is very helpful when the guilt is, essentially, your brain extracting an emotional cost from you, so you don’t actually have to take any actions to fix the situation. (Maybe it’s something else, but that’s what I think is happening; also I’m not saying this always works, just sometimes.)

    P.S. I’ve been reading The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne, and it’s really very good. I thought I wasn’t good at imagination, but apparently that was false. And using imagery to memorize really helps. I haven’t even got to using pegs/etc to remember stuff out of order yet. If you can get your hands on it, I really recommend you try it out; specially if you struggle with memory like I do.

  21. Aapje says:

    Paper preprint finds that people believe that women are told white lies more often and themselves tell white lies to women more often.

    Study one told subjects that a manager gave feedback to an under-performing employee and then presented the subjects with one of 6 descriptions of the feedback, ranging from honest/harsh to very kind/white lies. The subjects were asked to guess the gender of the employee, which they guessed as female far more often when the feedback was kinder.

    In study two, subjects were given a shitty and good essay to read, where these the essay were attributed to Sarah/Andrew or vice versa. The subjects were asked to grade the essays for the researcher and also to grade the essays for the writers (the non-existing Sarah & Andrew). Subjects gave a 9% higher grade to Sarah when giving direct feedback, while they gave Andrew roughly the same grades. When the subjects were asked whether they had given a different evaluation to the researcher and the writers, 65% answered yes. Interestingly, when asked how truthful they were to Sarah and Andrew, they answered that they were about equally truthful to both, despite the evidence showing that they actually only lied to Sarah.

    The General Discussion section offers up various theories, only to explain that their findings didn’t support them, like the hypothesis:
    – that women were lied to because they were considered less competent, which failed because the subjects rated the genders equally competent, yet still lied only to women (btw, how does considering a group less competent make it logical to tell white lies to that group?)
    – that subjects considered women ‘warmer,’ which failed as both genders were rated equally warm, yet still lied to women (at least this hypothesis makes sense, by arguing that people don’t feel bad about hurting the feeling of ‘cold’ people).
    – that men lied to women out of benevolent sexism, which the authors see as untrue as women lied to women more often than men did. The authors don’t seem to consider that women may exhibit benevolent sexism (or ingroup bias, for that matter).
    – that people lied to women out of chivalry, which again proved false as women lied to women more often than men did.
    – that people think women are incompetent, but rate them relative to their peers. Yet this doesn’t explain why people would only the increase in rating when giving direct feedback.

    The authors did find that subjects rated women as having less confidence. They argue that subjects may attribute women’s failure to low confidence, but not men’s failures, causing them to try to raise women’s confidence to make them perform better.

    What I found to be conspicuously absent was the hypothesis that people give kind feedback because they see women as more easily hurt and/or less capable of handling feedback due to higher anxiety and/or sensitivity to criticism. In particular because they later actually cite research that suggests that women interpret feedback more negatively. Yet they fail to consider that people may want to shield women from harm.

    The authors also discuss the possible impact of these white lies on women, but merely how it may be motivating or demotivating. They completely ignore how a logical consequence is that women become misinformed about their performance. Is the narrative of the gender pay gap being caused by discrimination or the existence of discrimination in hiring and promotions so believable to many because they see women get less pay and get hired/promoted less than men who get worse feedback, so they think that those men get paid/hired/promoted unjustly, even though these men actually perform better, but get criticized more harshly than women who perform worse?

    The study, which seems written from a severely female-centric point of view, also ignores how harsh feedback for men might partially explain bifurcation among men, who more often drop out and who more often get top positions. This merely requires that some men are motivated by harsh criticism and others are demotivated by it. If true, this hypothesis would also suggest that harsher criticism of women would result in more women getting into top positions, although at the expense of having more drop out (and given the higher anxiety in women, probably more so than for men).

    • Kaitian says:

      What I found to be conspicuously absent was the hypothesis that people give kind feedback because they see women as more easily hurt and/or less capable of handling feedback due to higher anxiety and/or sensitivity to criticism. In particular because they later actually cite research that suggests that women interpret feedback more negatively.

      If people phrase feedback towards women more kindly, aren’t women correct in interpreting the same feedback more harshly?
      E.g. on a 1-10 scale, a woman’s 4 would be phrased like a man’s 6, so the woman interprets this type of feedback like a 4, while a man would interpret the same words as a 6.

      So there’s not really a problem to be solved here, just a gendered difference in phrasing. In my experience, women generally have kinder and gentler norms of social interaction than men, and just use different words and gestures to convey the same meaning.

      • EchoChaos says:

        If people phrase feedback towards women more kindly, aren’t women correct in interpreting the same feedback more harshly?

        Yes, which is actually good to know if you’re dealing with someone who isn’t neurotypical who doesn’t understand that when we’re told to treat men and women equally, they interpret criticism more harshly.

        So if someone criticizes both a man and a woman in the exact same way, which he thinks is a 5, the woman hears a 4 and the man hears a 6.

      • Aapje says:

        @Kaitian

        That’s possible, although the study found (narcissistic?) hypocrisy in that people interpreted criticism by someone else as having a gender bias, but not their own criticism.

        If women similarly have (narcissistic?) hypocrisy where they interpret criticism aimed at themselves as being unbiased, but criticism aimed at other women as being biased, then they would still feel badly treated.

        Although that would then not explain a feeling that other women are mistreated, unless they project their own feelings of being mistreated on others, which does seem plausible.

    • SamChevre says:

      I’d add another hypothesis–related to “more easily hurt”, but not the same.

      I’m a manager: giving feedback to people who work for me is part of my job. My goal when giving critical feedback is to get better performance–but what kind of feedback is helpful is not the same across people. I might tell one person “that could have gone better” and another “that was a complete shitshow,” and expect their perception of how much improvement was needed to be about the same.

      • Aapje says:

        Sure, but managers may also have a higher expectations of some employees than for others, where they criticize some employees more for a similar level of performance.

        Men’s tendency to focus more on salary can create a feedback-loop where men are more often better at getting a slightly higher salary than their previous performance justifies, which makes managers judge them more harshly (are they worth that salary?), which causes them to work harder/longer/faster.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Were they told the sex of the manager in the first study? My guess would be that a male manager would be less harsh on a female employee than a male, but women would be less harsh in general.

      My theory would be rather similar to yours, though there’s a little bit of daylight between then: It’s seen as less acceptable for men to be harsh on women than it is for men be harsh on men. If you’re an authority and you’re harsh on a man and he’s hurt by it and gets angry, that’s on him. If he cries, that’s even worse on him. If you’re harsh on a woman and she cries, “OMG YOU MADE A WOMAN CRY!”

      • Aapje says:

        The paper didn’t address the gender of the manager. Whether this means that the gender was left unspecified is unclear. If it was, it might have been interesting if they had asked what the subject thought the gender of the manager was, but that is not in the paper.

        The female subjects in the study were also nicer to the female essay writer than the male writer, so that doesn’t fit your theory. The paper doesn’t state whether male subjects had a significantly different gap in evaluations based on gender, which could fit or not fit your theory, but we don’t know.

  22. johan_larson says:

    Suppose you could control Donald Trump for an hour. What would you order him to do?

    • Phigment says:

      Write me a check? An hour should be plenty of time to get it in the mail.

      I suppose, if I get to pick a specific hour to control him, I could try to make him veto a law I don’t like or something, but the timing on that would have to be really tight, and I’d have to go to the trouble of figuring out his schedule.

      I feel like most Presidential decisions actually take more than an hour to complete, so making him nominate me to the Supreme Court or something wouldn’t be effective. I couldn’t make the decision stick long enough to succeed.

    • Leafhopper says:

      Use his Twitter account to promulgate my political views.

      An hour should be plenty of time for some really juicy stuff.

      • Well... says:

        …thus guaranteeing half the country and most of the newsmedia discovers they are vehemently opposed to your political views?

        • Leafhopper says:

          Good point, maybe I should use the hour to promulgate the opposite of my views.

          • johan_larson says:

            And don’t use the word “promulgate” when you do. It would be a dead giveaway that Trump is not himself.

          • Leafhopper says:

            I’d start in the confessional style, e.g. “I have to say all this fast before the deep state lizardmen find me and take control again”

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Remind me why being ruled by lizardmen is bad, again? Is it just that we’re humans so that’s undemocratic?

          • Evan Þ says:

            @Leafhopper, are you planning to literally talk about lizardmen? If you want to get Trump thrown out of office, that might be the way to do it.

    • The Nybbler says:

      If I’m in a bad mood, start WWIII. If I’m in a better mood, I have him order the FAA to lay off model airplanes, then I have him tweet about how great it is that he did that (to discourage backsliding)

    • broblawsky says:

      If the stock market is open? Have him target some company, preferably a defense contractor (for maximum vulnerability), for an “investigation”, after I’ve shorted it.

    • Plumber says:

      @johan_larson says:

      “Suppose you could control Donald Trump for an hour. What would you order him to do?”

      Only an hour?

      1) Announce National Dokken Day.

      2) Request less Bud and Coors at dive bars and more Samuel Adams “the patriots beer”.

      3) Take a nap.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      I don’t know, but I’d sure be interested to see Donald Trump’s answer to your question.

    • DinoNerd says:

      Kill Pence.

      (My first thought was “kill himself” but that would give us Pence as President. Whereas him killing someone else – and getting caught doing so, which would be pretty much inevitable – would be equally effective at getting rid of Trump.)

      • Evan Þ says:

        That would be effective at getting Pelosi the Presidency, yes.

        However, could someone in Trump’s body do it? Presumably, due to his age, he’d need to use a gun or sword or other weapon of the sort the Secret Service would frown on anyone else carrying in Trump or Pence’s presence. What would they say if the President himself brought a gun, or asked for one of their guns? Or is there a ceremonial sword on the office wall that Possessed!Trump could snatch down?

    • sty_silver says:

      Write a note about how he has a rare moment of clarity and is incredibly sorry for all the harm he has caused to society. Then pull some kind of stunt that will make sure he won’t be re-elected (run outside naked and shout weird stuff is the first thing I can come up with).

      Depending on whether I have access to his memories and what they are, maybe use the opportunity to also harm the reputation of the worst guys in US politics, whoever they are.

  23. Iago the Yerfdog says:

    I’ve never read Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom but have seen summaries of the stages he laid out for the trip from liberal democracy to authoritarian socialism. Prior to 2016 my understanding was that no country had actually traversed those stages; actual authoritarian regimes were the result of violent revolutions and coups, not the kind of frog-boiling Hayek described.

    Then Venezuela happened.

    My questions to those more in the know than I: how accurately did Hayek’s model predict what happened in Venezuela? Were there any other examples of Hayek’s process in action beforehand that I didn’t know about?

    • AlesZiegler says:

      Czechoslovakia after WW2 might fit Hayek´s model, as I remember it from reading his book many years ago. But I am not sure what stages you have in mind.

      • Noah says:

        Surely there was the minor matter of Soviet troops.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          Soviet troops arrived only in 1968. Czechoslovakia was one of a few countries in the world where Communist party won relatively democratic elections – in 1946.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            Wait, I’m confused. I get that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia won in the 1946 elections, but weren’t they still a minority that had to resort to a coup in order to maintain power?

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @Faza (TCM)

            Well, sort of, altought “coup” had a considerable popular support, from their voters, who were large minority. I think that fits Hayek´s model, though – communists came to power via elections, and then abolished them and created totalitarian regime.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            I’m hard pressed to think of a coup that didn’t enjoy some popular support. However, I find “power via elections” and “power via coup” to be essentially irreconcilable opposites.

            The fact that the Communists won the previous elections isn’t helping their case much, because if they were popular enough to handily win the upcoming ones, they wouldn’t need to stage a coup.

            Presumably, you had “elections” throughout the Communist era just like we did?

          • AlesZiegler says:

            I find “power via elections” and “power via coup” to be essentially irreconcilable opposites.

            Well, in Czechoslovak case it is not quite so, since communists first won an election and then used power gained thusly to entrench themselves and abolish democratic competition.

            Presumably, you had “elections” throughout the Communist era just like we did?

            Yeah. In our case, there was only one list of candidates.

          • Iago the Yerfdog says:

            Well, in Czechoslovak case it is not quite so, since communists first won an election and then used power gained thusly to entrench themselves and abolish democratic competition.

            To my mind, the important question is: was the communist takeover accomplished by ostensibly-legitimate means, up to and including patently absurd reinterpretations of the nation’s constitution, or did even the communists admit that they were breaking the rules?

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @Iago the Yerfdog

            To my mind, the important question is: was the communist takeover accomplished by ostensibly-legitimate means, up to and including patently absurd reinterpretations of the nation’s constitution, or did even the communists admit that they were breaking the rules?

            It was largely within the rules. There were elections in 1946 into a body which was an acting parliament and constitutional convention at the same time, tasked with drafting a new Czechoslovak constitution. It was called Constitutional assembly. Communists won the elections, but fell short of absolute majority. Then they formed a coalition government.

            Now I have to consult Czech wikipedia on what happened next: In 1948, part of coalition ministers resigned in an attempt to stop communist takeover of a security apparatus, which was however legal, since it was initiated within constitutional prerogative of communist ministers. Resigning ministers hoped that other noncommunist ministers are going to join them, since that would under existing constitutional arrangements meant new elections. This did not happen however, and under threats of violence from communist paramilitary brigades, who demonstrates in the street along with various pro and anticommunist protesters, president of the republic accepted resignation of noncommunist ministers, and replaced them with communist figures (I am not sure whether replacements were all party members).

            Then Constitutional assembly finalised a new constitution, which formed a legal basis of a new, communist regime. Constitution provided for elections, which were formally held, but they were manifestations of loyalty, not a genuine competition, only communist approved candidates could be elected.

          • Iago the Yerfdog says:

            @AlesZiegler

            I actually think I’m willing to accept that. While it involved threats of violence, it sounds like it was on a level that I wouldn’t necessarily count as rendering the whole process undemocratic; if it had had any other purpose, I’d just call it “corruption.”

      • Iago the Yerfdog says:

        This lays out the stages I was thinking of:

        https://cdn.mises.org/Road%20to%20Serfdom%20in%20Cartoons.pdf

    • Matt M says:

      I don’t know how you define “authoritarian” exactly, but the UK will throw you in jail for mean tweets.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        Citation needed

        • jermo sapiens says:

          This was for a facebook post but I dont think the law makes a distinction for Twitter.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            Oh, but that goes considerably beyond “mean” into outright approving murder. This is criminalized in many European countries, including my own. I do not know about Canada.

            I am personally more sympatetic to an American approach to free speech, but laws of this kind are perfectly compatible with liberal democracy.

          • Matt M says:

            This is criminalized in many European countries

            This fact does not make it any more or less authoritarian.

            It is quite possible (and I would suggest reasonably likely) that at some point, the entire world will consist of highly authoritarian states.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            Let me repeat. I do not think that law which criminalizes public approval of murder makes the country an authoritarian regime.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Yes, it’s an extreme case. But it’s a slippery slope, and the guy was obviously an immature kid venting his anger. If you take his words at face value, you can say he’s approving murder of this particular teacher. But more likely, he’s saying “I hated her, not shedding any tears over this.” It’s not like he was waging a campaign telling people to go and commit murder.

            If Trump was assassinated, and a bunch of people on facebook say “I’m glad he was assassinated”, would you want these people jailed also, or would you consider that they were expressing their dislike of Trump in a very crude way?

            What about if someone gets cancer and you despise that person because they are very evil and you post “I’m glad he has cancer”, is that the same thing? Are you approving of cancer? What if you post “Im glad the marines shot Osama Bin Laden”?

            I agree that posting that on social media is a terrible idea and should not be done. But jail is excessive by a large margin as a remedy. People naturally express themselves on social media the way they do in conversations. And if I heard what the kid said in a conversation, I would never construe it as approving of murder, even though that’s what it is on its face. I would construe as an extreme and tasteless expression of dislike for the victim. I think others would also.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            If Trump was assassinated, and a bunch of people on facebook say “I’m glad he was assassinated”, would you want these people jailed also, or would you consider that they were expressing their dislike of Trump in a very crude way?

            I do not approve of criminalization of a hate speech in a broad way which is done in most of Europe. But I also do not think that existence of such laws makes those countries authoritarian regimes, as opposed to liberal democracies. There are plenty of laws in liberal democracies with which I personally disagree.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            But I also do not think that existence of such laws makes those countries authoritarian regimes

            Well those laws are authoritarians in nature, as they claim authority over something which is usually outside the purview of government. How many authoritarian laws do you need to have authoritarian regimes? I’m not sure. These laws certainly make these governments more authoritarian than not.

            Do you think that UK kid was actually approving of murder, or just expressing his dislike and anger in an extreme fashion?

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @jermo sapiens

            These laws certainly make these governments more authoritarian than not.

            I agree. But I also think that many laws which conservatives like, and I couldn’t help but notice that you are quite conservative, make countries more authoritarian than not. Perhaps less loaded word should be used, like “less free”, with recognition that some restrictions on freedom are necessary, although those particular restriction aren´t.

            Do you think that UK kid was actually approving of murder, or just expressing his dislike and anger in an extreme fashion?

            I think that this distinction is nonsensical. He knowingly publicly said that he approves murder, whether he did “really meant it in his heart” is irrelevant.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
          • jermo sapiens says:

            But I also think that many laws which conservatives like, and I couldn’t help but notice that you are quite conservative, make countries more authoritarian than not.

            Correct on both counts. That said, I dont line up with the conservative position 100% of the time, and my preference is for not legislating around things that should be private, unless the legislation is necessary and effective. de minimis non curat lex is one of my favorite latin phrases.

            I think that this distinction is nonsensical. He knowingly publicly said that he approves murder, whether he did “really meant it in his heart” is irrelevant.

            I dont mean what was in his heart, I mean what he was objectively conveying by his post. If somebody says “Trump is literally worse than Hitler”, that person is not conveying the belief that building a wall is worse than the holocaust, even though that’s what they said.

          • Nick says:

            Quibble: I don’t think the person is approving of murder. I doubt hardly anyone approves of murder, except maybe Nietzscheans? The person probably meant that the killing was justified, which is a completely ordinary view even if in this particular case that’s outlandish and offensive. We don’t after all consider killing in self defense murder, and many do not consider capital punishment murder.

            @jermo sapiens

            de minimis non curat lex is one of my favorite latin phrases.

            I prefer in flagrante delicto, but de gustibus non est disputandum.

          • John Schilling says:

            Quibble: I don’t think the person is approving of murder. I doubt hardly anyone approves of murder, except maybe Nietzscheans?

            If it be approved of, none dare call it “murder”.

            Murder is unlawful killing. Since I’m pretty sure no government ever put people in jail for approving of that nation’s soldiers lawfully killing enemy soldiers in wartime, it’s clearly the “unlawful” part that is at issue here, not the “killing” part. Jake Newsome was jailed for approving of a particular kind of unlawfulness.

            I think I’m on pretty solid ground in saying that a nation which imprisons people for expressing disapproval of that nation’s laws, is properly called “authoritarian”. And that doesn’t change if they limit it to just the really important laws – as defined by that nation’s government and its supporters.

            Also, Streisand Effect, guys?

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I prefer in flagrante delicto, but de gustibus non est disputandum.

            I knew these phrases in French but never heard them in latin. Interesting how some expressions we use today are very old.

          • Nick says:

            @John Schilling
            I basically agree with that, especially about this coming down to “punishing speech that disapproves of our laws,” which was the point I was going to make before deciding to dial it back some. My only caveat is that I think people mean by murder unjust killing, not unlawful. After all, pro-life activists who say abortion is murder know perfectly well that it’s legal, they aren’t contradicting themselves. Same with people who say capital punishment is murder, which is obviously a legal killing.

            This sort of boundary around the word murder where it’s always wrong is remarkably unhelpful a lot of the time, because it creates confusions just like this, and it can seem kind of contentless (why don’t we talk about why a particular killing is unjust instead?). But it’s been used that way for a very long time.

          • Garrett says:

            Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @John Schilling

            I think I’m on pretty solid ground in saying that a nation which imprisons people for expressing disapproval of that nation’s laws, is properly called “authoritarian”. And that doesn’t change if they limit it to just the really important laws – as defined by that nation’s government and its supporters.

            The way I think about it, there are various axes of authoritarianism. European countries are more authoritarian than US with regards to speech, but US is more authoritarian than Europe in some other respects. For example US criminal law has longer prison sentences and US police behaves more violently towards civilians.

          • albatross11 says:

            The thing is, places like the UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, etc., don’t actually look at all like police states or oppressive regimes. That’s true, even though I think they all have more speech restrictions than they should, they all impose a lot more control on gun ownership than I’d prefer, some of them have a formally recognized state church, all of them lock people up for some things I think ought to be legal, etc. I’d say all those things are potentially steps toward an oppressive regime, but we actually know what oppressive regimes look like, and modern-day Germany, Belgium, Canada, etc., aren’t it.

        • Matt M says:

          In 2016, according to The Times of London, UK police arrested an average of nine people a day for posting content online that someone, somewhere, considered offensive.

          Having a tough time confirming whether jail/prison is ever used as a sentence for such behavior. But arrests and fines seem to be commonplace. And I have a hard time imagining that most people who are generally okay with arrests/fines for mean tweets would draw the line at prison time (and what happens to people who can’t/don’t pay the fines?)

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Look at my link above for a case where a jail sentence was awarded.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            Thank you, that looks genuinely bad, especially that 19 year old girl being convicted for posting a Snoop Dog lyrics on Instagram. UK clearly clearly has overly strict hate speech laws.

      • Iago the Yerfdog says:

        What I had in mind was specifically a planned economy with forced labor. Not “work somewhere or you starve” kind of forced, but “work on what we tell you to or you go to jail” kind of forced.

        • Matt M says:

          So, while it’s hardly comparable to Venezuela, somewhere on the road between “completely free economy” and “full communism” there are a couple pit stops.

          One such pit stop is something like “if you want to engage in commerce at all, there are certain protected groups you will be forced to serve, even if you don’t want to.”

          I know that the whole “bake the cake” thing isn’t what you’re describing, but it’s certainly an intermediate step. The ability of people within a particular occupation to pick and choose what type of work they will do and what type of customers they will serve is heavily regulated, and becoming increasingly moreso. And everyone is generally fine with that.

        • Guy in TN says:

          Not “work somewhere or you starve” kind of forced, but “work on what we tell you to or you go to jail” kind of forced.

          Does Venezuela even have this? My googling tells me that there was a proposal floated in 2016 that amounted to something along these lines, but I can’t find any indication it was actually implemented.

          Most of the references to the proposal online are from libertarian websites using it to try to make a point, which makes me suspicious that it may not have ever materialized.

          • Iago the Yerfdog says:

            I found some sources, including Vice and Amnesty International, that it was a decree signed by Madura in 2016.

            Whether the decree was ever actually used, and why it seems to only targets those with a job, would require more digging.

          • Aftagley says:

            The research I did at the time revealed this to be vastly overblown. What it actually did was allow the government to requisition labor from the private sector. Thus, the government could go to a business and say, “Hello, we need X workers” and the business would have to provide them. At least in their comments to the UN Venezuela claims that people have to consent to be reassigned.

            So, the reason they only target people with a job is that this policy reassigned people (with their consent?) from “whatever job they were doing previously” to “working on a farm.”

            Now, this clearly sucks and in a country wracked by economic catastrophe, I’m sure it’s pretty easy to get people to “consent” to farm labor if their other option is “being fired” but it’s not bad as the libertarian blogs were making it sound.

          • Iago the Yerfdog says:

            Venezuela claims that people have to consent to be reassigned.

            That changes my opinion considerably, from “Wow, Hayek’s model was right all along,” to “Yet another tragicomically corrupt nation, albeit an extreme case.”

            Thank you.

      • BBA says:

        That hasn’t got anything to do with socialism, though. It’s perfectly plausible to combine a dynamic free market economy with heavy-handed restrictions on speech. That’s pretty much how America was before the obscenity laws were loosened in the ’60s.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      Turkey under Erdogan and India under Modi. China is also said to have become more authoritarian under Xi, though it was never a democracy.
      And as noted by Matt M, in the UK, and in fact in quite a few Western countries, e.g. Germany or Canada, you can go to jail for mean tweets.

      I wonder if this is due to modern IT technology enabling higher government surveillance and making it easier for people to carelessly expose themselves (e.g. your seditious tweets stay online for everybody to read, while the seditious words you used to speak at the pub would vanish unless there was an informant keen to write them down).

    • Iago the Yerfdog says:

      I should have been more clear in my initial comment. As I said to others in this thread, by “authoritarian regime” I meant “authoritarian socialist regime,” one with a planned economy and work-where-we-tell-you-or-else kind of forced labor.

      Other forms of authoritarianism, such as curtailing certain kinds of speech, are go hand-in-hand with this but are common to socialist, fascist, and theocratic forms of authoritarianism. I’m only interested here in the first one.

      Here is the sort of summary of RtS that I’ve read: https://cdn.mises.org/Road%20to%20Serfdom%20in%20Cartoons.pdf

      Broadly speaking, I’ll count any republican form of government where elected representatives turn it into a forced-labor regime through at least superficially legitimate means (including absurd reinterpretations of the constitution and legal precedent) as pattern-matching at least somewhat to this model, but my question is how well Venezuela matched the model and if anywhere else did the same sort of thing.

      • Are you sure you are not exaggerating a little bit when referencing Venezuela? Last I checked, it was estimated that 70% of productive activity was still privately owned there, and people were not being executed on the street there. I just had a friend come back from there, and his testimony was that it seemed like a remarkably normal country…like, Miami, FL but a lot less glitzy. Supermarkets looked normal. I saw pictures too. Even the slummy parts looked hardly worse than the slummy areas I see where I live in Missouri.

        Also, it strikes me that the most questionable assumption in that “Road to Serfdom” cartoon is the certainty that, without a common unifying war effort, the population will not be able to peacefully agree on a common plan. The cartoon seems to not dispute that planning obviously works during wartime (which I find to be a surprising concession from Austrian economists…albeit completely justified by the evidence). But the next assumed step, the transition to a peacetime plan inevitably degenerating into confusion, doesn’t really ring true to me. Where does this inability to compromise and agree on a common plan during peacetime come from? Isn’t Britain after WW2 (with the NHS) a counter-example against this?

        I could see Leninists agreeing, in a way, with this cartoon…in that they would predict that a peacetime “war on poverty” will inevitably be obstructed by the capitalist class because, for example, building lots of more housing is liable to devalue the exchange-value of existing housing stock and harm the owners of those assets…or, better, more secure living conditions for workers will inevitably increase labor militancy, lead to increased wages, lower profits, etc. (See Kalecki’s article, “The Political Aspects of Full Employment).

        But the Leninists would not blame the resulting dysfunction on the plan itself; rather, they would blame it on the attempt to find a common plan for society when there are fundamentally incompatible economic interests still splitting their class society into two opposing camps; the Leninists would thus blame the capitalist class, and also partly the less radical, non-Leninists socialists for NOT being willing to take vigorous measures to overcome the totally predictable “capital strike” from the capitalist class…just like the patriot revolutionaries in the American Revolution had to unleash a terror against “traitorous Tory” loyalists, and just like bourgeois revolutionaries in the French Revolution had to take vigorous measures against their feudal class enemies that were rallying around all of the foreign invaders. Hence, why Leninists will often blame Salvador Allende for not “arming the people” against the completely predictable capital strike that sought to “make the economy scream” and discredit his program.

        • Iago the Yerfdog says:

          It’s certainly possible that I read anti-socialist propaganda and uncritically accepted it. That said, as I mentioned in a comment to Guy in TN above, the forced-labor law is real and was a decree signed by Maduro.

          As to current conditions, in searching for confirmation of the existence of the law, I ran across this article. I only skimmed it, but it seems to paint a picture of Venezuela transitioning, China-style, toward a kind of “capitalism with Venezuelan characteristics.”

  24. BBA says:

    End of an era: NYC’s last remaining sidewalk pay phones will be taken down this year and replaced with WiFi kiosks.

    I can’t remember the last time I used a pay phone. When I was a nerdy kid, it was a bit interesting to see the variations from place to place: well after the Bell System broke up, all the regional Bells still used the old standard Western Electric phones, but the different company names let me know where I was in the country. GTE (the biggest non-Bell) had slightly fancier phones that took credit cards, as did the Canadian provinces I visited… and of course there were radically different phones in Europe and Asia, as chronicled on the back page of 2600 magazine. The differences gave you a sense of place within an interconnected system; nowadays with deregulation and homogenization, everyone is using one of the same few brands of smartphone to connect to a mobile network run by a telco that might be over 100 years old but now has a nonsensical name made up by a marketing consultant to shed it of all local connotations. It’s more convenient now, sure, but something’s missing… I don’t know if any of this makes sense, or what…

    Anyway. In 2014, the franchises giving ten companies the right to put payphones on New York streets expired, replaced by a single contract to CityBridge for the new LinkNYC internet kiosks. Even before the expiration, the payphones were rapidly falling into disrepair, and are now totally useless as phones: most handsets have a big “no dial tone” sticker, if they haven’t been broken off entirely. Their main function is as billboards, many of them having been sold by Verizon (founded 1879, formerly Bell Atlantic) to billboard companies Titan Outdoor and Van Wagner. And now CityBridge (a joint venture including Titan Outdoor as the lead partner) runs its kiosks mainly as advertising screens. They do include built-in web tablets and VoIP speakerphones with free calling, which is certainly good enough to replace whatever you’d be using a payphone for, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone using them as such. But at least they look a little nicer than the old phones did.

    • Well... says:

      Last time I used one, most payphones required you to insert 50 cents, which meant anyone with two quarters could make one (at least local) phone call.

      What’s the cost of a “minimum viable phone call” a person could make today within a few city blocks of any given urban or suburban-commercial location, without having to ask anyone else for a favor?

      The cheapest burner flip phones are, I think, around $14 (or were last time I was on the market for one about 5 years ago), but there are initiation fees, the minimum number of minutes you need to purchase, etc.

      • broblawsky says:

        You can use the kiosks to make phone calls for free.

        • Well... says:

          If you already have a wi-fi enabled phone, you mean?

          • nkurz says:

            No, a personal phone is not required. The kiosks have both a touchpad and a touchscreen, and can be used to call any number in the US for free. There is no handset, but you can plug in earphones if you have them: https://www.link.nyc/faq.html#phone-call.

          • Well... says:

            If you don’t have earphones it looks like your call is played on a speakerphone for passersby to hear. But you can buy $0.99 earbuds at many convenience stores, so I guess that’s a pretty good deal!

            As far as I can tell, the only downside compared to payphones are the ads.

        • BBA says:

          In addition, the handful of remaining enclosed phone booths (you can count them on one hand) are being refitted with free VoIP phones. This actually seems like it’d be useful to make more widespread now that TCP/IP is too cheap to meter, but physical services in the public square are vanishing. The concept just seems antiquated now.

          We got rid of public bathhouses when the housing codes were updated to require running water in every house and apartment. Cell phones replaced pay phones. Internet cafes, where you could rent a computer and an internet connection for a few hours, now are reduced to a WiFi password on your receipt, because who doesn’t have a laptop or a smartphone these days?

          Now a large part of this is the potential for abuse. The Link kiosks used to have web access on their built-in screens, but this was reduced to a few restricted apps after a few incidents of homeless people using them for pornography. Since we’re unwilling or unable to police abuse of public services, instead we just withdraw the services altogether. That’s the motto of the 21st century: We Can’t Have Nice Things.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      My wife and I took a train across Canada last spring, and were surprised to see banks of pay phones in various public places (as I recall train stations and airports). I haven’t seen anything like this in the US for years. Although I never saw anyone using them. Is it that they just haven’t gotten around to removing them? Do they still work?

  25. Randy M says:

    Based upon a conversation in the marriage thread:
    Your missions, etc. etc., is to design an appropriate coming of age ritual for your country in present day. It should give young adults a feeling of being full members of society, be unambiguous, and broadly acceptable.

    My first pass: At the end of the month in which you earn your first paycheck, you take your buddies out for a night on the town (whatever that looks like to your subculture, so long as no one ends up in a cell or hospital bed).
    Then, the next morning, if you have enough sobriety and cash on hand to mail your rent check before noon, the postman will certify you as a functional adult, with all attendant rights and responsibilities. You are thenceforth no longer able to publicly wonder “How do I even adult?”

    • John Schilling says:

      My standard for successful parenting is that one ought to be comfortable handing one’s newly-minted adults the keys to a sports car, a bottle of scotch, a pack of condoms, and a loaded revolver, saying “have a good time!”, and trust that it will work out OK. Seems to me we could properly ritualize this.

      But we’d need another ritual for the “we regret to inform you that your son/daughter…” cases. The military used to be pretty good for that, so I think we’ll do OK there.

      • Matt M says:

        The military used to be pretty good for that

        Sports cars, liquor, women, and weapons, eh?

        What else do you think military enlistees spend their enlistment bonuses on?

        • John Schilling says:

          Sports cars, liquor, women, and weapons, eh?

          Women, men, hermaphrodites, whatever floats your boat. And for that matter, feel free to substitute weed or speed or whatever for the booze.

          But, yeah, the four things every American will have to deal with in early adulthood, which can irrevocably screw up their life if they do it wrong. Unfortunately, most American parents want to actively teach their children how to handle about half of these things responsibly, and play the three-monkeys “Just Say No” game with the other half, and they can’t even agree on which goes in which category.

          So, if I’m designing the ritual, I’m designing it so that parents know they have to prepare their offspring for all four and then let go.

          What else do you think military enlistees spend their enlistment bonuses on?

          Military enlistment as a rite of passage to adulthood would in fact work very well, except than I’m not willing to make it anything close to mandatory. And, yes, enlistment – officers should spend a year or two in the ranks before getting their commission.

          • AG says:

            Do you feel that South Korea’s men have benefited from mandatory service? Or Israeli citizens? (Ooh, I wonder if there’s a study there, to see if Israel’s gender-neutral mandatory service has benefits above Korea’s, or are there too many confounding factors?)

          • John Schilling says:

            Do you feel that South Korea’s men have benefited from mandatory service? Or Israeli citizens?

            I have a vague “yes, probably” on that, but only to the extent that I’d be willing to consider making it a cultural default after studying it some more. If nothing else, it’s probably better than making a four-year college education the cultural default. Legally mandatory conscription, no.

          • unreliabletags says:

            I hadn’t thought about the implications of mandatory service only for men. Does this mean that women are always more advanced in their educations or careers than men of the same age? Are the military-service-aged women generally in distance relationships with conscripts, or dating older men? Does it mean there’s usually a military-service-length age gap between the man and woman in a couple?

            Seems like it would have some fascinating consequences to pull one population out of society for a few years while the other keeps going.

          • John Schilling says:

            I hadn’t thought about the implications of mandatory service only for men.

            Yeah, we probably don’t want to do that. Unless hypothetically we’re going back to the old cultural default of women as wives and mothers and only occasionally pursuing professional careers, in which case sure, the girls can get their 2- or 4-year pre-wed degrees while the guys do two years of military service and then get their professional education, and the women can “marry up” in terms of socioeconomic status and age at the same time. But, however well this might have worked in the past, we’re probably not going there again.

            If men and women are going to be socioeconomic equals, and the men are going to do two years of military service or the like, then women should do the same. Or something similar, at least. Fortunately, the military isn’t even mostly infantry or other front-line combat troops any more, so we can find roles for everyone if we’re doing the Israeli or Korean thing.

            And if we expand the cultural default from “2 years military service” to “2 years military or other public service”, and it turns out the guys volunteer 80/20 for the military over the Public Health Corps or whatever and the girls do the reverse, that’s also fine.

          • AG says:

            For Korea, one factor not mentioned here is that hiring practices are not very meritocratic, meaning that men are favored in the job market through the connections they make during their time in the service. (And as John Schilling points out, the cultural assumption of women as wives and mothers.)

        • Matt M says:

          Whoops, I forgot tattoos – that’s another favorite!

          • John Schilling says:

            That would actually be another good part of an adulthood rite of passage, that I’m not quite willing to make even quasi-mandatory.

            Oh, and give everyone their first credit card on Adulthood Day, with a limit tailored to let them have plenty of fun if they’re careful and plenty of impending grief if they’re not.

      • Randy M says:

        I notice you provide 3 of the dangers, then a safety measure for the fourth. Is the test seeing if they can attract a mate using the booze & car?

        • John Schilling says:

          For consistency, a gift certificate to the local brothel would work best, but one cultural engineering miracle at a time. And I like your interpretation even better.

          No using the handgun to find a mate, though, on penalty of your parents getting the “we regret to inform you…” ritual. And any prospective mate should either have a handgun of their own, or be under the protection of a shotgun-wielding parent, so we may be OK there.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Your ritual catches the “hot” failure modes, but not the “cold”. You catch the exceptionally crazy drivers, but not those afraid to drive (or who drive so timidly as to be a problem). You catch the drunks, but not those who can’t loosen up at all. I guess the condoms mean you catch those who make poor decisions about sex, but you don’t catch those who can’t get any. You catch the reckless with weapons, but not the fearful of them.

        • Randy M says:

          Perhaps intentionally.
          Bus-taking, unarmed, incel Teetotalers can be, if not the most successful, at least productive members of modern society in the way a primitive man unable to hurl a spear could not–and modern hot-rodding, gun-blasting, promiscuous drunkards cannot either.

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      I remember reading that in some societies such ritual required to survive a certain time in the woods, alone or teamed up with other adolescents. We can go a similar route.

      Young people are sent alone in another city far away which they’ve never visited before (preferrably) and are blocked from communicating with anyone they knew before, with a possible exception of others such adults-to-be. They’re given a certain allowance of money per month which is just above what’s needed to survive there, and some basic housing (maybe in the form of prearrange rent for which they pay with their allowance or get kicked out == fail, maybe it’s just provided and allowance is accordingly smaller). They are allowed and perhaps facilitated to team up with others being tested, and have some task they need to accomplish to pass the test. The task and allowance are choosen in such away that they have some slack to trade off between comfort, fun and risk of failure, but not too much, so there’s still almost no way of passing without learning basic things like keeping budget, cooking, doing laundry etc. And of course they’ll have to learn to work in a self-motivated manner to complete the task. I’m not sure about the appropriate timeframe but probably something between a month and half-year. That’s a long time for a ritual but you can compensate for it with the task being something actually useful.

      Which of course sounds like and modelled from the freshman’s year for many people, with the main difference being the communication ban and absence of any fixed schedule. Which – together with the rest of the college – kind of sort serves a similar purpose anyway, so why not just decouple it from education.

      ETA: I actually like John’s suggestion more, but muh expenses muh mortality rates..

    • AG says:

      Meh, I feel much cynicism over how any proposed task would get gamed into easy mode by the upper class, so things quickly become YA Dystopia-Lite, and then warped by playground politics into a frat-hazing type ritual.

    • Tarpitz says:

      Mail your rent check? Mail your rent check?

      I sometimes forget the small, specialised ways in which America is bizarrely backwards. I’m pretty sure in most Western countries this would be more appropriate for a senescence ceremony than a coming of age one. I haven’t had a chequebook for well over a decade (and I barely used it when I did have one). Even my dad doesn’t use cheques any more, and he’s 63.

      • Nick says:

        I pay all my other bills automatically, but my landlord requires that I pay by check and deposit it in a mailbox.

        • FrankistGeorgist says:

          Have you talked to your bank about having them automatically write and mail the check for you each month? A nice way to automate that process for particularly particular landlords.

          • Nick says:

            Is that even possible?

            My usual process was to stop at the bank on my way home, get a cashier’s check* and an envelope, and walk straight there to drop it off. It was all pretty convenient seeing as the bank is 10 minutes’ walk from my house and the landlord’s drop box is right on the way. But it would be much more convenient if I could have it taken out of my account automatically, of course….

            *cashier’s checks normally have a fee, but they always gave them to me for free

          • Matt M says:

            It’s definitely possible. “Online bill pay” as offered by most banks (not the type offered by the people you are paying) is effectively this. You input information into a form and they literally generate (and in some cases mail) a printed copy of an actual check. It’s a lot less “high tech” than people think.

          • Nick says:

            @Matt M
            Good to know, thanks.

      • Randy M says:

        You got me, although like Nick this is the single instance of check writing we do as a household. Also usually the single instance of cursive writing as well.

        • Theodoric says:

          FWIW, the few times I use paper checks I print everything except my signature. I have only had one check rejected due to handwriting issues, but that was due to a combination of a)the amount being very large (it was for the down payment of my current home) b)my handwriting being VERY bad and c)I lined out a mistake and initialed the line out rather than “wasting” a check by starting again with a new one. My lawyer’s paralegal wrote out the check for attempt #2 for me.

      • acymetric says:

        Mailing rent checks isn’t exactly rare, but I would say it is unusual at this point. Probably less than 30% of rentals.

        • Loriot says:

          I write a paper check and drop it off at the office in the apartment complex every month. The landlord recommended using Venmo, but I’m old fashioned and refuse to use it.

      • DinoNerd says:

        In Canada, almost 30 years ago, it was normal (and often required) to give your landlord a stack of checks, each dated for when they’d be due. US law would allow the landlord to cash them all right away, before the date on the check, so that wasn’t done there, as I discovered when I moved.

        Here in the US, I still write an average of 1 check per week, handed to individual service providers who aren’t set up for credit cards, let alone something like paypal – either of which would charge them rather more than the bank charges for cashing my checks. (The bank probably requires that they have an account with some minimum balance, so there is a cost, but OTOH they need to have some bank account somewhere. Credit cards take a %, and I’m not sure what PayPal does.)

        Most of my regular monthly payments are set up to be paid electronically from my checking account; that doesn’t work with fee for service.

        I also use cash a couple of times in an average month.

        I’m 62, living in the US.

        None of this feels backwards to me. Except perhaps the inability to pay someone with a check they can’t cash right away, for service they’ve contracted to give you in the future.

        • John Schilling says:

          I choose to pay my credit card bill with a paper check, as a firewall between random merchants and my bank account. Since I’m going to go through the trouble of reviewing the bill every month anyway, the added “difficulty” is trivial. Other than that, I’m with DinoNerd at one check a week for specialty merchants or service providers.

          A technology being new and shiny does not necessarily make it better. Paper checks are very good for certain applications, and there’s really not much room to improve on them.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Since I’m going to go through the trouble of reviewing the bill every month anyway, the added “difficulty” is trivial.

            Why use a paper check rather than your bank’s bill-pay service, though? As you say, either way you have to review the bill and using the service saves the (small but not zero) trouble of filling out the check and mailing it.

          • John Schilling says:

            The “trouble” of filling out the check and mailing it, is really quite close to zero. It’s not literally zero, but neither is using my bank’s bill-pay service. Or did you find a bank that employs staff psychics to divine and implement your fiscal intent without so much as a keystroke on your part? Because I’d be concerned with the security implementations of that.

          • acymetric says:

            I choose to pay my credit card bill with a paper check, as a firewall between random merchants and my bank account.

            I don’t understand how paying via check is any more of a firewall than paying your credit card bill via ACH or whatever electronic transfer initiated by the card company? They get your routing and account numbers either way, and in neither case is that information exposed to the merchants you paid with the credit card.

          • acymetric says:

            Why use a paper check rather than your bank’s bill-pay service, though? As you say, either way you have to review the bill and using the service saves the (small but not zero) trouble of filling out the check and mailing it.

            Several people have brought up the bank’s bill-pay service, and I’ll be honest…I would rather just write the check myself than use the bill pay.

            Of course, I would rather just pay the bill electronically myself than do either.

          • Randy M says:

            Or did you find a bank that employs staff psychics to divine and implement your fiscal intent without so much as a keystroke on your part? Because I’d be concerned with the security implementations of that.

            It sounds like you are envisioning an automatic transfer of whatever your bill is from the checking account to the CC account? Probably because you use a CC through your bank?

            I have a CC through a different institution. Each month (or more often) I check the balance, skim the transaction list, then click the link to tell it to transfer the amount from checking to CC.

            Do you expect at some point that the money will be transferred without your notice if they have your account info?

          • The Nybbler says:

            @John Schilling

            My bank is Wells Fargo, so the only thing their psychics can do is divine my intent to open an account that provides employees with the biggest bonuses. (Though they didn’t even do that with me, for some reason)

            But I find it significantly easier to fill out a few boxes on a web page and hit “submit” rather than fill out a bunch of checks and put them in a bunch of envelopes and mail them. (It’s not “one envelope” and wouldn’t be even if I went down to one credit card, because there’s also power, water, and internet bills.)

            @acymetric

            Of course, I would rather just pay the bill electronically myself than do either.

            Why is it better to pay the bill yourself (I assume you mean using the biller’s web site?) than using the bank’s bill pay? It’s an ACH either way. I use the bank because it collects them all in one spot.

          • Walter says:

            I do the same as John Schilling, I think. Everyone is payed as anonymously as possible. Only the deepest intermediaries get a credit card, and only the credit card gets the check from the bank account.

      • Plumber says:

        @Tarpitz says:

        “Mail your rent check? Mail your rent check?

        I sometimes forget the small, specialised ways in which America is bizarrely backwards. I’m pretty sure in most Western countries this would be more appropriate for a senescence ceremony than a coming of age one. I haven’t had a chequebook for well over a decade (and I barely used it when I did have one). Even my dad doesn’t use cheques any more, and he’s 63″

        The last time I paid rent was in 2012, and it was be check…

        …but since my single biggest expense is California property tax I suppose you could say I’m still paying rent – just to the State of California, other than that I use checks to pay other State and Federal taxes, the monthly bill to the gas and electric company, and the every three months bill to the water and sewer agency (note: as a citizen/customer I notice almost no difference in service between the regulated “share holder owned” power company, and the used to be a private company decades ago municipalized water agency, both seem fine to me, and I feel no urgency for the State to take over one or privatize the other).

        A few other checks in a decade for classes and recertification tests, and sometimes my wife asks for one to supplement the cash I give her, but that’s about it, mostly I pay cash, though my wife uses cards more than cash, and she buys stuff on-line which I only do about twice a decade, the last time for brake pads for a 1979 Raleigh Tourist I gave to my son that he uses to get to his computer classes that I had to order from a shop in Boston, Massachusetts as none of the local shops had them or would order them (I have mixed feelings about this, on the one hand my still being able to get the parts is great, on the other hand in a more just, true, right, good, and beautiful world I should be able to walk into one of the two bicycle shops that are within a mile of my house and pay cash for the parts, and for that matter pay for a newly made full bicycle that is in every way identical to the then new made in England Raleigh‘s, made in the U.S.A. Schwin‘s of the ’70’s, or even better a made in France René Herse of the 1940’s, also more Chuck Berry and Credence Clearwater Revival should be on the radio, and Doctor Who, and Star Trek should be on broadcast television!).

  26. Plumber says:

    Something that’s struck me this week with the Democratic primaries is how uninfluential the “Blue Tribe” has been on the “Blue” Party in 2020.

    In 2016  non-college graduates favored Sanders more than they did Hillary, and (just like then) he’s second in delegates, maybe he’s favored more by grads now, but all I’ve seen is stuff about how he’s favored by younger poorer Democrats, especially Latinos. 

    Biden has been favored by older Democrats, especially blacks, but also more by non-college graduates than by graduates.

    A far distant third in delegates is Warren, has been favored more by college graduates, as had been Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobucher.

    On Warren’s failure to win more delegates Matthew Yglesias of vox.com wrote:

    “…Warren has been further hampered in 2020 by the fact that two other candidates, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, were also occupying her same “educated white people” lane, albeit with more moderate ideological profiles. If you think about politics in highly ideological policy-oriented terms, that may seem odd, but the fact is a lot of people just aren’t that ideological and, to an extent, the primary sorted into a Biden/Sanders working-class camp and a Warren/Pete/Klobuchar white-collar one.Buttigieg, famously, is almost ostentatiously smart — speaking a little Norwegian and checking all the boxes on the high-achiever résumé before becoming mayor of South Bend, Indiana. And Klobuchar, like Warren, is actually the author of a good serious book, Uncovering the Dome, a case study in the corrupt politics of municipal stadium deals.

    Within that electoral niche, Warren has done the best (and is still in the race). Unfortunately, she split the educated group three ways while Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden divided up the larger working-class bloc along age and ideological lines.

    If you feel like Warren is very impressive and lots of people you know feel the same way, you’re not imagining it — lots of people just like you all across the country feel the same way.

    It’s just that most Democrats aren’t all that much like you”

    I’ve banged on this drum before, the ‘Blue-Tribe’ is small, and the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination is ahead because of ‘Red-Tribe’ (and Red State) support within the ‘Blue’ Party.

    About 45% of American eligible votes just don’t vote, among voters about 40% are Republicans or strongly Republican leaning “independents”, slightly less than half of voters lean or are Democrats, and slightly over 10% are ‘swing’ and third-party (the last time I checked), only about one-third of 2016 voters had college degrees, the share of graduates among Hillary Clinton voters was higher, at 43 percent, so 55.7 (percentage 2016 turnout) x 48.2 (percentage who voted for Hillary) × 43 (percentage of Hillary voters with college diplomas), that gives us just under 12% of eligible voters who are both “Blue-Tribe” and ‘blue voters’, which is just under 21% of actually-bother-to-vote voters (not counting college students, but many who attempt college don’t graduate, and the young vote far less).

    I don’t want to give the impression that “the blue tribe” isn’t influential, Hillary was almost our President and she’s who the Blue-Tribe supported, I just want to remind y’all how small the Blue Tribe is, and that they alone can’t win elections by themselves (outside of some cities, and maybe Massachusetts).

    For “Red-Tribe” Democrats, I’d define them as “Democrats without college diplomas, especially rural ones”, i.e. a lot of the South Carolina primary electorate. 

    I’d define “Blue-Tribe” Republicans as “Republicans with college diplomas who live in cities” (a small percentage of the electorate).

    “Red-Tribe” Republicans are, well, most Republicans. 

    “Blue-Tribe” Democrats are (see above) about 43% (and growing) of Democrats.

    My line of thought on this is kinda spent now, but I invite others conclusions and comments on these matters.

    • The Nybbler says:

      The problem with being a core constituency for a party is the party tends to take you for granted. If the “Blue Tribe Democrats” aren’t in play, there’s no reason for the Democrats to pander to them and every reason for them to attempt to peel off possible Trump voters (such as the Red Tribe Trump voters who usually voted Democratic).

      • Plumber says:

        @The Nybbler says:

        “The problem with being a core constituency for a party is the party tends to take you for granted. If the “Blue Tribe Democrats” aren’t in play, there’s no reason for the Democrats to pander to them and every reason for them to attempt to peel off possible Trump voters (such as the Red Tribe Trump voters who usually voted Democratic)”

        Yes, there’s been an argument among Democrats over whether to pursue more “suburban women” or win back “rust belt voters”, if “pursue suburban women” was the electorate than Buttigieg, Klobucher, or Warren would still be in the running, Sanders is running a hard “win the working-class campaign”, but what he’s won is youngsters instead, Biden is a compromise candidate, doesn’t scare older suburbanites as much as Sanders,   but doesn’t have as much anti-magnetism to working class white voters as Hilary did (black women still turned out for her, black men not so much, white men, especially non collegiate white men just said “Nope!” to Hillary and voted for Trump).

    • Tarpitz says:

      I think it’s not so much about raw numbers as about the identity of battleground voters. If the election is going to be decided by working class voters in the Rust Belt, you’d better appeal to them. Perhaps in the past, those voters were more reliably Democrat and a higher proportion of highly educated voters were moderates who could be swayed to either party, which incentivised a different kind of pitch.

      • Plumber says:

        @Tarpitz,
        Yes, see my response to @The Nybbler, I’m trying to bite my tongue and not do any gloating in front of the lovely ladies of the Blue-Tribe (I just don’t care as much about the gents feelings), but it’s hard, as Biden #1, Sanders #2, they rest (especially Bloomberg) out, is almost the best that I could hope for (a Jim Webb/Sherrod Brown ticket in 2016 would’ve been even better though!).

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Blue Tribe definitely can’t win elections by themselves, but I think you’re underestimating their power strength somewhat. Pete and Klobuchar had some decent performances in NH and Iowa, and Warren still earned a hell of a lot of votes. There’s also still Blue Tribe support lining up behind Biden, Bloomberg, and especially Bernie, especially among younger generations. Where Bernie got clobbered in 2016 was older black voters over than Millennial, who are decidedly NOT Blue Tribe.

      Blue Tribe is influential enough that they are pulling the entire party leftward, and this has been extremely obvious for the last 2 cycles, and visible for the last decade. 2008 Obama wouldn’t get the time of day in this primary, let alone 2004 and 2000 Kerry and Gore. Even 2004 Dean would be a moderate! And, yes, Biden will be the “consensus” and “moderate” candidate, but the platform is being pulled left.

      • Plumber says:

        @A Definite Beta Guy,

        A quote from part of: Biden’s Rise Gives the Establishment One Last Chance
        If he fouls this up, we’re doomed.

        By David Brooks
        March 5, 2020

        “…This week’s results carried a few more lessons:

        Democrats are not just a party; they’re a community. In my years of covering politics I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like what happened in the 48 hours after South Carolina — millions of Democrats from all around the country, from many different demographics, turning as one and arriving at a common decision.

        It was like watching a flock of geese or a school of fish, seemingly leaderless, sensing some shift in conditions, sensing each other’s intuitions, and smoothly shifting direction en masse. A community is more than the sum of its parts. It is a shared sensibility and a pattern of response. This is a core Democratic strength.

        Intersectionality is moderate. Campus radicals have always dreamed of building a rainbow coalition of all oppressed groups. But most black voters are less radical and more institutional than the campus radicals. They rarely prefer the same primary candidates.

        If there’s any intersectionality it’s in the center. Moderate or mainstream Democrats like Biden, Clinton and Obama are the ones who put together rainbow coalitions: black, brown, white, suburban and working class.

        The new Democrats are coming from the right. Bernie Sanders thought he could mobilize a new mass of young progressives. That did not happen. Young voters have made up a smaller share of the electorate in the primaries so far this year than in 2016 in almost every state, including Vermont.

        Meanwhile there were astounding turnout surges in middle-class and affluent suburbs

        Turnout was up by 76 percent in the Virginia suburbs around Washington, Richmond and parts of Norfolk. Turnout was up 49 percent over all in Texas. Many of these new voters must be disaffected Republicans who now consider themselves Democrats…

        Okay, if Brooks’ guess is correct anti-Trump former Republicans are actually a thing instead of a rare few (my mental model had Trump being the candidate their base had been waiting for), or Texas and Virginia hold “open primaries”, it could be that Republicans crossed over to vote for the less socialist Democratic candidate, but will still vote for a Republican in November. 
        The polling on black Democrats is more clear though, they mostly just want the candidate with the best chance to win in the general election. 
        There some echoes of 2008 and 2016, but this election cycle seems weird to me, first the strongest generational divide in candidate preference that I’ve seen in decades (maybe since ’76? hard to tell, I was eight years old them!), next black Democrats trying to guess how white Americans will vote, and then older white Democrats taking their cue from black voters. 

        I was struck be the reports of the campaign in South Carolina by how much the Democrats there seemed swayed like how old fashioned Republicans were, endorsements from elder Statesmen, church meetings instead of campus rallies, I’m now more convinced than ever of the numbers and importance of ”Red Tribe Democrats”, but yeah the Blue-Tribe is the tail that wags the dog, every Democratic candidate, including Biden, is now running to the Left of Obama and Bill Clinton. 

        • EchoChaos says:

          every Democratic candidate, including Biden, is now running to the Left of Obama and Bill Clinton.

          Donald Trump is to the left of Bill Clinton, so that isn’t surprising.

    • profgerm says:

      Minor point, but I wouldn’t actually expect “Blue Tribe Democrats” to be a group that’s growing all that much.

      Perhaps I’m defining “Blue Tribe” too narrowly but I always thought there was more to it than just “urban/college-educated;” especially going on Scott’s original definition the more people and more diverse people that have college degrees, the smaller the proportion that hit his other characteristics (which were largely Stuff White People Like).

      Plus that’s probably the least-likely to reproduce of the four categories you bring up, so they’re not going to grow the “old-fashioned way” either.

      Or perhaps I misread, and you mean specifically that they’re growing as a proportion of Democrats, not simply growing. That makes more sense.

      • Loriot says:

        This is why I wish people would stop saying “blue tribe” and “red tribe” and say what they actually mean. The concepts seem to be uselessly vague.

        • acymetric says:

          The concepts are significantly worse than uselessly vague. Red tribe, blue tribe, and gray/grey tribe (maybe just the word tribe altogether) should be added to the banned words list for comments.

          I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that the individuals that use the term a lot are using the term with a consistent definition rather than using it to mean different things when it serves whatever argument they are presenting, but collectively everyone means something different when they use those terms.

          I don’t even think Scott did a terribly good job of articulating what he meant by each tribe in his original post (it was a good post in terms of promoting some thinking about how people group together and along what axes, but it certainly didn’t provide some clear framework for how to actually assign people to a tribe in discussion, even though that is how it is used in the comments here).

          • Plumber says:

            @acymetric says: “The concepts are significantly worse than uselessly vague. Red tribe, blue tribe, and gray/grey tribe (maybe just the word tribe altogether) should be added to the banned words list for comments.

            I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that the individuals that use the term a lot are using the term with a consistent definition rather than using it to mean different things when it serves whatever argument they are presenting,”

            Thanks

            “but collectively everyone means something different when they use those terms.

            I don’t even think Scott did a terribly good job of articulating what he meant by each tribe in his original post (it was a good post in terms of promoting some thinking about how people group together and along what axes, but it certainly didn’t provide some clear framework for how to actually assign people to a tribe in discussion, even though that is how it is used in the comments here).”

            I think our host was clear in his initial post about what he meant, I also think he was wrong in a lot of assumptions, and some of his subsequent posts, especially his New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed post really confirmed for me that his model for what most Democrats and Republicans are like (if you include the bulk of his listed characteristics in his I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup post) is just wrong, he’s brilliant, and we all have blind spots (Lord knows I can’t follow a lot of the millennial/internet/pop-culture references discussion here), but he really seems to me to make the perception mistake described in the The New York Times The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Actual Democratic Electorate, he’s very internet/Millennial focused, and his model of “meat space” isn’t mine, and he admits he (and many many people’s have a unique “bubble”, and I give him credit for that, but damn when basic assumptions about the world are so different communication is difficult! 

          • brad says:

            I agree the way the tribes are deployed are not great, but part of what they get at is class, and we need to talk more about class in the US, not less.

          • Loriot says:

            I’m all for talking about “working class whites” or “educated suburanites” or whatever, but when people say red/blue tribe, it’s often unclear what they are actually referring to. Everyone seems to have a different idea of what it means.

        • Plumber says:

          @Loriot says:

          “This is why I wish people would stop saying “blue tribe” and “red tribe” and say what they actually mean. The concepts seem to be uselessly vague”

          That’s fair, my use of the terms is an artifact of our host’s use (but he seems inconsistent with them, so I’m not sure what he means either. 

          See my response to @profgerm for a longer expansion of my guess of what “Blue-Tribe” and “Red-Tribe” mean, but for a short hand:

          “Blue-Tribe” = most of the urban, and much of the suburban professional class. 

          “Red-Tribe” = damn near everyone else.

      • Plumber says:

        @profgerm says:

        “Minor point, but I wouldn’t actually expect “Blue Tribe Democrats” to be a group that’s growing all that much.

        Perhaps I’m defining “Blue Tribe” too narrowly but I always thought there was more to it than just “urban/college-educated;” especially going on Scott’s original definition the more people and more diverse people that have college degrees, the smaller the proportion that hit his other characteristics (which were largely Stuff White People Like)”

        My first response to our host’s list of Blue-Tribe characteristics was: “All of this list looks like some ladies I know (and a couple of gents in the public defenders office), most of the list looks like many ladies I know”, and my first response to @Scott Alexander’s Red-Tribe characteristics list was: “All of this list looks like some men I know (and one lady deputy, and one lady plumber), most of the list looks like most guys I know”.

        Really, the “Blue-Tribe” is “Most of Scott’s family, former classmates, and co-workers”, and the “Red-Tribe” is “What @Scott Alexander imagines most Republicans are like”, or the folks “The Stuff White People Like” call “the wrong sort of white people”.

        For my use I have Blue-Tribe = urban professionals (academics, lawyers, physicians, public-school teachers in large cities), and Red-Tribe = the non-college graduate majority, especially those who don’t live in large cities.

        There’s some wiggle room here, more college graduates are atheists than not college graduates are on average, but frequent church-goers are also more likely to be college grads (“The working class” in the sense the NYTimes uses the term tends more to be believers but only intermittently go to church), and in our host’s “the tribes as cultures” sense, without knowing anything else about them I’d guess a college graduate atheist, Methodist (probably), or Unitarian (very likely) who live in a city are “Blue-Tribe”, but a college graduate suburban Baptist is “Red-Tribe”, as probably would be a non-college graduate Baptist, whether city, rural, or suburban. Catholics are a little harder, they’re so diverse in many ways, I’d still go city and collegiate = Blue-Tribe, non-collegiate and rural = Red-Tribe, but I’m sure there’s (likely a woman) who didn’t graduate from college, lives in the country, but buys “organic food”, drives a Sububu and listens to Joan Baez, and I’m sure there’s a college graduate guy who lives in the city, but drives a F-150, collects guns, and listens to Hank Williams Jr. (actually I know there is, his name is Gary).

        “Plus that’s probably the least-likely to reproduce of the four categories you bring up, so they’re not going to grow the “old-fashioned way” either”

        Heh.

        I’ll link (again) to The New York Times piece “The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America” (much of it repeated here).

        ‘Or perhaps I misread, and you mean specifically that they’re growing as a proportion of Democrats, not simply growing…”

        That’s what I meant “43% of Democrats and growing”, though I suppose with enough second generation immigrants that may not be true anymore.

    • EchoChaos says:

      Here are two groups of people. Which one does Joe Biden instinctively fit into:

      Group 1: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton

      Group 2: Mitt Romney, John Kerry, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, George McGovern

      Obviously these are all the candidates who ran against an incumbent President, and one thing that sticks out to me is the charisma deficit the second group has against the first.

      Joe Biden seems like the next member of group 2 than the next of group 1 entirely agnostic of the actual underlying election mechanics.

      This is probably based on my personal bias, of course, but I’d love feedback on this.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Was Jimmy Carter all that charismatic? More charismatic than Gerald Ford, certainly, but nothing like Reagan or Clinton.

      • Matt M says:

        Gotta say, my first thought was Group 1.

        Group 1 is full of people who successfully presented (deserved or not), some sort of camaraderie with and/or affinity for the blue-collar working man.

        Group 2 is full of people who may have tried to do that, but mostly failed at it, and came across as technocratic elitists (at least compared to their direct competition).

        Biden is winning the primaries specifically because he’s closer to Group 1 than Group 2, at least as compared to his current competition. As compared to Trump, he’ll probably lose that particular battle, but still…

        • Loriot says:

          I too initially thought the lists were of “blue collar” vs “elitist” candidates before I got to the end and saw it was about perceived charisma.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Note that Biden is a long-time Washington insider and “elite” to me, since he’s been a Senator forever.

            All the people on list 1 are governors, to use another point.

        • EchoChaos says:

          I am not saying there is a “right” or “wrong” choice for them. Charisma jumped out to me, so seeing “blue collar” as something else that jumped out is interesting.

          • Matt M says:

            I also think it’s possible that we’re all, collectively, as a society, post-fitting our models here.

            Like, the fact that Person X wins an election over Person Y means they must have been more charismatic, right? Or that they must have done a better job appealing to blue-collar voters, right?

            Because we all assume that blue-collar voters are the swing voters who decide elections, and that they always prefer the more charismatic candidate.

            In a world where a thousand people in Florida vote differently in 2000, I definitely think popular history would record that Al Gore was considered a popular man of the people as opposed to George W Bush who was considered an entitled and spoiled child of an elitist political legacy family.

            The most obvious distinction between Group 1 and Group 2 is that Group 1 consists of famous winners, Group 2 consists of famous losers. That’s probably the causative factor here…

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Matt M

            I did exclude no-incumbent elections for that reason.

            But let’s look at objective differences. Group 2 has no governors (kind of Romney, although he wasn’t serving at the time), Group 1 is only governors, for example.

          • Loriot says:

            I suspect that you can find pre-2004 election sources confirming that Kerry was perceived as more elite than Bush.

            Bush had an elite background, but he did a good job of pretending to be “the guy you want to have a beer with”. And of course, the media was happy to play up his supposed stupidity, which made him seem less elite.

      • Chalid says:

        This is just hindsight talking. If John Kerry had won, we’d remember him as charismatic.

        • EchoChaos says:

          A fair argument. Not sure I’m 100% disagreeing.

        • Loriot says:

          I suspect that you can find pre-2004 election sources confirming that Kerry was perceived as more elite than Bush.

          Bush had an elite background, but he did a good job of pretending to be “the guy you want to have a beer with”. And of course, the media was happy to play up his supposed stupidity, which made him seem less elite.

      • Clutzy says:

        Jimmy Carter strikes me as an outlier in group 1, mainly because he won not because of his own merit, but because of Watergate.

      • Plumber says:

        @EchoChaos says: “Here are two groups of people. Which one does Joe Biden instinctively fit into:

        Group 1: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton

        Group 2: Mitt Romney, John Kerry, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, George McGovern”

        I don’t remember McGovern in ’72 (I was four years old and we didn’t have a television!), but I remember when he ran again in 1984, and from that list Biden most reminds me of Bob Dole, and he least reminds me of Kerry, with Romney a close second for “least seems like”. Of recent candidates for President the one’s Biden reminds me most of are Howard Dean, and George W. Bush.

        “Obviously these are all the candidates who ran against an incumbent President, and one thing that sticks out to me is the charisma deficit the second group has against the first…”

        From list one, when Biden is being empathetic there’s some Carter like touches, but I absolutely can’t imagine Carter ever saying something like he’d like to “take Trump to the back of the gym”, though I can imagine both Reagan and Clinton saying something like that. Clinton was a chameleon, with charisma to spare, and Reagan had literally been an actor, Biden just isn’t as persuasive as Clinton and Reagan were, so on balance I’d place Biden more with group two.

  27. DragonMilk says:

    What is it about sitting on a toilet that makes your legs fall asleep vs. sitting on a chair?

    • The Nybbler says:

      No support from your sit-bones. You’re sitting on the soft tissue of your leg and thigh.

    • Lambert says:

      Force distribution on your buttocks.
      On a chair, especially one that’s upholstered, you’re supported by a large area, centred on each buttcheek.
      On a toilet seat, you only have support from a ring, and much of the force ends up on the upper thighs.

    • Three Year Lurker says:

      I don’t understand how this is such a problem for people.
      You sit down, lean forward, and shove it out. Takes 2-3 minutes tops. Why would someone sit on a toilet for 20-30 minutes doing nothing?

      • smocc says:

        +1 I too have heard people complain about this and never had any idea what they are talking about.

      • Evan Þ says:

        Some people’s bowels sometimes don’t let it come out so smoothly, so there’s more pushing involved, waiting for it to settle, and then pushing more.

      • The Pachyderminator says:

        Congratulations on your body working perfectly, I guess?

      • DragonMilk says:

        Alternatively, you’ve never had stomach flu or anything else that temporarily replaces your rectum with a cloaca?

  28. Two McMillion says:

    Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech and Charlie Chaplin’s speech from The Great Dictator are both well-known as inspirational speeches with a humanist bent. What are some examples of similar speeches?

    • AG says:

      Kaiki Deshuu’s big speech at the end of Koimonogatari

      • yodelyak says:

        The I Have a Dream speech by MLK is probably the most well-known example among Americans.
        The Oration on the Dignity of Man is a speech that was drafted (but not immediately given, because he was prevented by the Pope) by Pico della Mirandola in 1486. It is a bold-text item in what remains one of the standard American textbooks on the Renaissance, so while it’s not exactly well-known, it’s about as well-known as these things get. It’s not quite humanist, exactly, but it’s really quite something when you consider the time period.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Al Gore’sWilliam Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech, 1896.

    • SamChevre says:

      Possibly a bad example, but John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged (Bad example, because it’s a hundred pages long, so over an hour long, and I’ve never managed to make it through the whole thing.)

      For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the man who will now tell you.

      • John Schilling says:

        I don’t think you can call it “humanist” if it is impossible for a neurotypical human to read it.

    • Garrett says:

      Go with the classic: Oration on the Dignity of Man.

  29. A Definite Beta Guy says:

    Paternity Leave is ending soon, so I’ll chuck up a list of pros and cons.

    Pros:
    -Blood pressure down 15 points
    -No heart palpitations!
    -Weight down 6 pounds
    -Sleep 6+ hours everyday (you can always nap while baby naps)
    -Dishes done every day
    -Laundry done every day
    -Nice home cooked meals every day (we made Sauerbraten yesterday: it was pretty sweet! Not the thing I would normally cook if I have to work constantly
    -Lots and lots of time to D&D Prep
    -Take nice long walks during the day, when it’s warm and sunny
    -More time to read books during the day
    -More time to yell comment on the internet
    -Time to binge entire seasons of shows on Netflix or Amazon Prime while feeding baby
    -Play with baby whenever I want
    -Do not have to leave baby with strangers I barely know

    Cons:
    -Not currently sustainable due to $$$
    -Simmering feeling of “what the fuck am I doing with my life” constantly is there, because you know you have to go back to work and are picking money over baby time. And you will continue doing this, until you are 65, when there is a solid chance you will be dead 5 years after that, and a large chunk of that time may be spent at an especially poor quality of life. 5 years is nothing. It is the time I’ve been married to my wife.

    Things that were not cons:
    -Not being able to talk to adults: I get to talk to adults a lot. I still have lots of friends that I text through the day. We hosted a dinner party and several D&D sessions over paternity leave, and I got to spend more time with both my parents and my in-laws. If anything, I get to spend more time dealing with adults that I actually want to see. The local library also has events 3-4 times a week for babies/parents where you can interact with other adults. Granted, it’s almost exclusively stay-at-home Moms, but there are adults.
    -Not working on interesting problems: Guys, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m working a job that College ADBG would have dreamed about. It’s not fun. It sucks. It sucks less than most other jobs, but there’s no way on Earth I’d be doing it if I were doing it free.

    Ending conclusion:
    -Keep working, make sure my kids do not graduate with student loans, so they have an easier time being stay-at-home parents, if they so choose.
    -Revealed Preference: Not Having to Worry About Money and Having Nice Things is worth an awfffffffullllll lot, or else I just wouldn’t show up on Monday.

    • J Mann says:

      Congrats! Sounds like it was a great time.

      I feel like I know you well enough that anything I could say on the policy or revealed preferences would be obvious and we’d probably agree. I guess one possibility is that you could start adjusting your remaining career around towards working fewer hours or retiring sooner, but at a lower consumption level.

    • DragonMilk says:

      Already funding 529s given the conclusion then?

    • Randy M says:

      Things that were not cons:

      This reinforces a point I made in a recent discussion, that in general, stay at home moms are not especially burdened by the experience, compared to the likely alternative. Exceptions abound, but there is more variety, stimulation, and socializing available in that “career” than is often portrayed, and less in the average career than is often assumed.
      Which doesn’t say it is for everybody, or even of course every woman.
      But the dissatisfaction that it is assumed to bring is probably related to either burnout in initial extremely busy period, uncertainty, not taking advantage of options like meeting with others or reading, etc., or making comparisons to particularly interesting or high status careers that will never be options for everyone.

      Anyways, I’m glad you took advantage of the time to get acquainted with a new person.

      • Nick says:

        Epistemic status: thinking out loud

        This reinforces a point I made in a recent discussion, that in general, stay at home moms are not terribly burdened by the experience. Exceptions abound, but there is more variety, stimulation, and socializing available in that “career” than is often portrayed, and less in the average career than is often assumed.
        Which doesn’t say it is for everybody, or even of course every woman.

        We currently do a lot in our society in order to persuade, cajole, and push women into careers. I wonder how different the numbers would look if we weren’t doing that nearly so much. Sort of the way that in more egalitarian nations fewer women choose to be engineers not because of sexism, but because they just don’t want to be engineers.

      • albatross11 says:

        As a datapoint the other way, my wife stayed home with our three kids, and has found it quite hard to go back to work in her field–her experience and knowledge were too far out of date, and the “start from the bottom” kinds of jobs she could reasonably get weren’t too appealing for a mom in her 50s. She’s working again, and enjoying it, but in a completely different field.

        • Randy M says:

          That’s… not really at all a data point the other way. (Or rather, it is, but only because of the overly broad phrasing of my thesis, I suppose).
          It’s true that homemaker skills might not transfer or that a particular career might not be able to be learned/advanced from the sidelines–that’s a very reasonable concern for a woman with long-term career goals, and an example of a possibly overlooked sacrifice parents might make for children.

          The question is, while devoting herself to childcare, did she find it particularly miserable? (I’m open to the idea that I’m generalizing from unrepresentative samples)

        • Lambert says:

          IIRC, this explains a big chunk of the gender pay gap.
          Childless women don’t earn much less than childless men.

      • Plumber says:

        @Randy M says:

        “…This reinforces a point I made in a recent discussion, that in general, stay at home moms are not especially burdened by the experience, compared to the likely alternative…”

        FWIW, my wife has been stay at home since ’93, but after our youngest son was born in ’16 she’s expressed a lot more interested in working or being a student again.

        • DragonMilk says:

          how many kids do you have? There’s a 23 year old age gap between youngest and oldest?

          • Plumber says:

            @DragonMilk says:

            “How many kids do you have? There’s a 23 year old age gap between youngest and oldest?”

            Our first son didn’t live long and we were childless together with my wife being stay at home for over ten years, our second son will be sixteen years old in January, and our third son will be four in June, so about an 12 year gap between them.

        • Randy M says:

          she’s expressed a lot more interested in working or being a student again.

          Not to go off on a tangent (by which I mean I don’t think the following directly addresses your point) but I’d love to be a student again, too, assuming I didn’t have to also work. College was the most carefree, fascinating, socially engaged time of my life. My mom practically had to drag my dad away when they dropped me off for orientation.

          People also often want a change in their life at some point; see the whole mid-life crisis cliche among career men in their, what, 40’s?

          But I do take your point, I’m probably over-looking plenty of difficulties. Especially when you are nearing fifty with a toddler. (?)

          • Nick says:

            My college days were not carefree, but I definitely miss the easy socializing.

          • Randy M says:

            My college days were not carefree, but I definitely miss the easy socializing.

            Oh, there’s the difficult weekend writing a paper or cramming for finals here and there, and there was the time I blew up a beaker while dissolving a cat’s leg in Anatomy…lol… but it wasn’t like anyone’s life depended on anything I did.
            A lot of that carefree feeling was deferring expenses via subsidized loans that later made the adult years more stressful… but now I am on a tangent.

          • Plumber says:

            @Randy M says: “…Especially when you are nearing fifty with a toddler.(?).”

            Both me and my wife are now over 50, and yes having our three-year-old required medical intervention to be born.

          • Randy M says:

            @Plumber
            Didn’t meant to pry, I was just thinking stamina, really. Even at forty there’s a difference between how we feel having been kept up all night now versus ten years ago.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            People also often want a change in their life at some point; see the whole mid-life crisis cliche among career men in their, what, 40’s?

            Mid-20s for me, who is going back to school. Though to be fair this was pretty much always the plan.

      • John Schilling says:

        This reinforces a point I made in a recent discussion, that in general, stay at home moms are not especially burdened by the experience, compared to the likely alternative.

        Nor stay-at-home dads; my brother has been enjoying that experience more than he did his abbreviated professional career. Not suffering any lack of adult social contact, largely free to pursue his interests/hobbies, on top of the bit where he has two kids to play with.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        There’s definitely a “grass is always greener” mentality, on both sides. For one, I am only taking care of a single infant. That’s a much different story than taking care of multiple toddlers, because toddlers tend to require a good deal more attention than infants.

        However, most jobs involve a great deal of stress and responsibility, at least that ones that pay good money. I still have to do a bit of work pretty much every single day on my paternity leave, but it’s like 20-30 mins a day rather than my whole freakin’ day. Plus, a lot of the stuff you deal with is insanely boring or political.

        • Randy M says:

          To be fair, the politics will crop up once you have multiple kids.
          The benefit is that in that polity you are the monarch.

          • Nick says:

            Have the kids ever pulled a Magna Carta?

          • Randy M says:

            No, we’re pretty good at keeping them too disunited to effectively rebel.

            Seriously I’m trying to think of a historical situation where the sub-states quarrelled more with each other than the emperor. I think the problem is with framing them as the aristocracy, concerned with their own political power, when they’re more like squabbling peasants, concerned over property rights or who farted in whose direction.

          • Nick says:

            they’re more like squabbling peasants, concerned over property rights or who farted in whose direction.

            I thought you might say that.

            I’m thinking now that teens may be more like the barons—the monarch does have to negotiate boundaries and the like at that age.

    • Dack says:

      How long are we talking here?

      I was only able to take a couple weeks with each of my kids. For financial reasons.

    • EchoChaos says:

      I took three weeks of paid paternity leave for the birth of my most recent daughter about a year and a half ago, and I found that I did miss work for manufacturing challenges more severe than I would give myself automatically and forcing me to solve them.

      I really like my job and don’t feel that it sucks.

      • Anteros says:

        I think there’s a really underestimated feature of work there. I have a life that’s a fair amount too easy – I have to goad myself to take on challenges that most jobs provide you with for free. And then people pay you to have the satisfaction of undertaking them!

        • EchoChaos says:

          I have a life that’s a fair amount too easy – I have to goad myself to take on challenges that most jobs provide you with for free.

          Exactly.

          And then people pay you to have the satisfaction of undertaking them!

          And give you feedback on how well you did with a measurable score of how much they pay you as well!

    • broblawsky says:

      I don’t know what your job is, but is there any possibility that you could get your boss to let you work from home one day per week?

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        I work in a manufacturing facility, so that’s a no-go. Technically, yes, I am allowed to do so per corporate policy. In reality, no, not allowed, because the factory feels it would impact performance (and would definitely impact morale if people see the factory controller getting to work from home while they need to come to work).

        • Lambert says:

          I’m not saying I’m imagining a metalworking lathe with each wheel attached to many miles of pulley, reaching all the way back to ADBG’s house, but…

          • Evan Þ says:

            No, no, follow Mao’s teachings and establish a tiny factory at ADBG’s house!

          • Lambert says:

            No, I’m busy establishing a tiny crappy factory at my own house.

            Fun fact: you can use an arc-welder and a pair of carbon electrodes to melt down iron tools into useless slag far faster than they could in the 60s.

    • Plumber says:

      @A Definite Beta Guy says:

      “Paternity Leave is ending soon…”

      Happy for you that you had it!

    • Hoopyfreud says:

      Simmering feeling of “what the fuck am I doing with my life” constantly is there, because you know you have to go back to work and are picking money over baby time. And you will continue doing this, until you are 65, when there is a solid chance you will be dead 5 years after that, and a large chunk of that time may be spent at an especially poor quality of life. 5 years is nothing. It is the time I’ve been married to my wife.

      Don’t do some Cat’s in the Cradle shit, man. Spend time with your kiddo, as much as you can. My parents always intended to pay for my education, but my mother dying of cancer put a bit of a damper on that. If my dad had thrown himself into work hard enough to pay my way, I probably wouldn’t have ended up nearly as happy or well-adjusted, or have nearly as good a relationship with him. It cost me a couple years of my life that I dedicated almost entirely to paying off loans, but I gained the kind of childhood my friends are jealous of. I wouldn’t trade that away for those years back.

      • chrisminor0008 says:

        What kind of childhood are your friends jealous of? I’m asking as a father of an infant who wants to make people jealous.

    • Viliam says:

      Congratulations on having an experience most men will never have!

      Sleep 6+ hours everyday (you can always nap while baby naps)

      Yes, definitely do this. It is tempting to use the “free time” when your baby naps, but it is better to get enough sleep whenever you can.

      Dishes / Laundry / Nice home cooked meals every day

      This week I work remotely from home. When I need to take a short break from work, instead of going to company kitchen for some free coffee, I can do some dishes or exercise shortly instead. It helps to free my mind the same way, and at the end of my working time, the dishes are done — it’s not something I need to do at the evening when I am tired. This small difference already improves my mood.

      Cooking at home is great for health, and it saves money. When I am at work, I have a lunch in the center of the city for 7 €. When I am at home, I make a lunch for the entire family for 3 €; and I have control over how much salt and sugar gets there.

      More time to …

      Yeah, if you can multitask something with child care, you get virtually unlimited amounts of time to do that. With small kids — learn to do things one-handed. With bigger kids — keep talking to them, or give them something interesting to do.

      Not currently sustainable due to $$$ / Simmering feeling of “what the fuck am I doing with my life” constantly is there … until you are 65, when there is a solid chance you will be dead 5 years after that

      I have this feeling for the last 15 years. It’s like being at a playground, but not allowed to play. There are so many awesome things I would like to do. But instead I spend most of my day at job, and then I am too tired and frustrated to do anything meaningful; and there is a good chance it will go on exactly like this until I die. All the things that I dream about… will remain a dream.

      My salary is big enough that I can support my wife staying at home. Unfortunately, her salary is not big enough that she could do the same for me. Not everyone is a software developer. (Perhaps me working half-time and her working full-time could pay our bills together. I mean later, when the kids are of school age.)

  30. Eric T says:

    In but two hours NASA will officially reveal the name of the new Mars Rover. Previous names are Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and everyone’s favorite little robot that could, Curiosity.

    The rover names aren’t very… inventive. Or exciting. But they’re simple and cute and any name is better than “Mars 2020”

    • DragonMilk says:

      I nominate, the Corona

    • Eric T says:

      Update: Its called Perseverance

    • smocc says:

      Curiosity, Opportunity, and Spirit very much fit in with one of the Puritan trends of naming children (especially women) after virtues. It is not a big step to branch out to other Puritan naming conventions. Therefore I propose we call the next rover “If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned.”

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        I’m totally up for a rover named “More Rocks Please”…

      • Randy M says:

        I’m down for it, or at least stealing that for my sci-fi game.

        I’m not sure if Puritans would dislike Mars for being so brightly colored, or like it for being dour and monochrome.

      • Eric Rall says:

        the Puritan trends of naming children (especially women) after virtues

        I suppose that’s better than the Victorian habit of naming their daughters after ornamental vegetation (Rose, Violet, Daisy, Lily, Briar, Heather, etc).

        And then there’s the Roman habit of just calling their daughter by the feminine form of their fathers’ family name, and numbering them if there’s more than one of them that need to be distinguished. When I first started reading up on early-Empire Roman history, it had struck me as odd that half the women seemed to be named “Julia”, and that’s is what the reason for it turned out to be (“Julia” = feminine form of “Julius”).

      • AG says:

        Constable Visit the Infidel Planet With Explanatory Pamphlets?

    • Lambert says:

      They should have asked Randall Monroe to think of a name.
      On the spot. At 3 AM.

  31. Purplehermann says:

    How does parasitic load affect humans? Can we check parasitic load? Can we reduce it?

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Is it useful to reify parasite load?
      Why not talk about specific parasites?

      We do things to reduce the load of polio and measles. Sanitation is a general tool for reducing infection. (Though there is a theory that sanitation delayed polio from infancy to childhood, to disastrous effect.)

      Cochran-Ewald-Cochran argue that lots of diseases are parasite load (eg, schizophrenia), without identifying the parasites. This seems like a useful argument, but adding the numbers up and calling that parasite load doesn’t seem very useful to me.

      • Purplehermann says:

        I came across the term, Wikipediaed it and still don’t know much about it. Is there a list of parasites, effects causes, tests, methods of invasion and where they’re found for those that infect humans?

        Any other relevant info is appreciated

    • Lurker says:

      I vaguely remember hearing a theory that a lack of parasitic load might be part of why allergies are so much more common.

      Disclaimer: I don’t remember the source and am not sure if allergies are actually more common nowadays but if this sort of thing interests you, it might be something worth checking, unfortunately, I currently don’t have the time to do so myself and hope going “I think I remember seeing something interesting this way” is ok with the appropriate disclaimer.

  32. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    I’ve found I like Explore Cuisine edamame pasta– the flavor is a little odd, but I can tolerate it, and the texture is excellent. I need to check, but I think they’re a good bit cheaper at Sprouts than at amazon.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      And I forgot to mention that it doesn’t seem to raise my blood sugar significantly.

  33. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    Anyone know of a good forum for discussing qi gong in general?

    The forums I’ve found are for specific systems, but I’d like to find a forum which permits comparing systems and possibly discussing side issues. I’m hoping this exists.

    I realize the requirement for only discussing a specific system may be the result of bitter experience.

    • Anteros says:

      I’ve not come across any general forums. Perhaps there’ll be enough interest here to generate some useful discussions?
      I regularly practice some chi gung (if you’ll forgive my spelling..) mostly as preparation for tai chi. Not a specific system, just some exercises recommended by my first tai chi teacher.

      One thing that stands out to me is that what exercises I do is much less important than how I do them. Hence I always think of them as ‘silk-reeling’ exercises.

  34. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    What detail has thrown you out of a story?

    I snagged the question from a semi-private discussion elsewhere.

    One thing mentioned was a society which has tailoring but not scissors, and I realized I have no idea whether tailoring could be done if all you had was exacto knives, leaving aside the question of the likelihood of having exacto knives (possibly with heavier blades) without having invented scissors.

    My contribution was an X-Files (?) movie where an ancient virus was presented as especially dangerous. I *think* it not having evolved in the presence of modern immune systems would tend to make it less dangerous, but I suppose it could go either way.

    • Aftagley says:

      The Movie Looper – the plot relied on the future mob sending people back in time to be eliminated by hitmen in the present day. The hitmen would kill these unwitting time travelers for a while and were paid in bricks of silver that were sent back in time with the victims.

      Sooner or later, however, the hitman’s future version would be eliminated by the future mob (to get rid of the witnesses). They would be sent back in time to be killed by their past version who would know what was going on since the hitman would be paid in gold bars for this job.

      I never understood why the mob just didn’t send the future version of the hitman to a different hitman. Why send someone you want to kill to the only person on earth with a vested interest in not killing them? Over the course of the move we see this happen two times and each time the past version wimps out and refuses to off their future version.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Also, why bother with a hitman at all? Send them back in time to just above an active volcano.

        • sandoratthezoo says:

          Hitmen are unionized, no automation allowed.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            If hitmen were unionized, work rules would require 10 hitmen for each victim, and then you’d need 100 hitmen to off the 10 hitmen and it would just spiral out of control.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          Why bother with time travel at all? Just drop them into an active volcano.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            According to the premise, there are “tracking systems” that make it near impossible to dispose of a body in the future. How disposing of them into the past is a workaround for this I don’t know…wouldn’t the tracking system still know the last place the victim was before the time travel event? Since the victims are bound up and masked, you would think their last known location would still be “boss’s lair with the time machine.”

            Also, I’m not sure why being able to track the bodies matters that much. Great, you’ve tracked the body to the volcano. Good luck gathering forensic evidence.

            Oh, but as for why time travel is a good idea for active volcano disposal, we know when the volcano was active in the past, and we’re assuming it’s not active in the future/present. So you take the victim to the dormant volcano and then chuck them into the past when the volcano was active.

          • Aftagley says:

            ccording to the premise, there are “tracking systems” that make it near impossible to dispose of a body in the future.

            The idea was that a global monitoring system was so robust that it could detect the exact time and place of someone dying.

            Which invites the immidiate follow-up question of, “wait, why can’t whomever runs this system ALSO just track incidents of time travel?”

            or maybe,

            “wait, why can’t whomever runs this system tune it to track the gangsters and mafiosos who are implimenting this very complex and illegal system?”

            I’m glad other people find this as upsetting as I do. I’ve been furious about this movie for years.

          • acymetric says:

            I’m glad other people find this as upsetting as I do. I’ve been furious about this movie for years.

            You should have just done what I did. Say “that looks dumb” when they first started advertising it, and then never watch a second of the movie ever.

          • Aftagley says:

            You should have just done what I did. Say “that looks dumb” when they first started advertising it, and then never watch a second of the movie ever.

            Thanks… if only there was some kind of technology that would let me convey this information to the past version of myself.

            Anyone have any silver bars I can borrow?

          • viVI_IViv says:

            Ok, maybe they had to use time travel, but then they could have strapped a bomb to their neck rather than a silver bar to pay a killer, or just teleported them above a volcano as Conrad says, or into the ocean, or into a mountain. Sloppy world-building.

            I see a pattern here:
            “So, to me the notion of what’s the entire galaxy or world that you are creating or something, I can’t imagine getting excited about creating that. To me what I’m excited about is creating a two hour long experience for an audience to have in the theater. And that means how they engage moment to moment with the story and the characters that are on the screen. And that doesn’t change in either one of those.”

            Ok, Rian, this may work for comedies/murder mysteries like Knives Out, but please stay away from fantasy and sci-fi.

    • S_J says:

      In an early James Bond film, the moment when one car chases another down a gravel road…and the sound effects for car-going-around-a-corner include squealing tires. The kind of squealing-tires sound that happens on pavement, and not on gravel.

      I don’t remember which Bond film it is, but I know that it starred Sean Connery. At the time, I was trying to watch the Bond movies in sequence.

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      Trains driven by diesel and nuclear engines through an interstellar network of wormholes. As well as I at least dozen other details in Pandora Star by Hamilton, bit that’s the most egregious. If you can open a wormhole to anywhere within N light-years, you certainly can open it to a hundred or two kilometers above, build as many solar panels there as you need and lay a cable through it. In fact this possibility – go to space by just opening a wormhole there – is specifically mentioned in the book and used for a couple of plot critical things. Hell, Earth in fact does have all its energy generation done by solar panels on the Moon! However all other planets prefer to enjoy their smog and oil spills (also mentioned in the book a good number of times) or go primitive, except for those few that can afford 21st century clean energy technologies.

      • fibio says:

        I think a recurrent theme of Hamilton’s, humanity reaches for the stars and then proceeded to make all the same mistakes as their forebears. Often in exacting detail. One colony expedition I believe doesn’t even bother to supply the settlers with power tools which is just insane given they got there via FTL spaceship.

        • Tarpitz says:

          See also the first man to receive rejuvenation, a visionary genius who takes advantage of the fresh start to… bang his teenage son’s girlfriend.

          And, well, I wish I had enough faith in the general competence of humanity to be sure interstellar colonists would be issued with power tools, but…

        • AlexOfUrals says:

          That happens on the character level too. Ozzie Isaacs spent few hundred years as the richest person and the most famous adventurer in the whole galaxy, and yet he doesn’t know how to console – or send off – a teenager, or how to hook up with a woman. Many others are also surprisingly naive about some things for their stated multi-lifetime experience.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      I’ve recently been binging on old Doctor Who (specifically, early Jon Pertwee) and I’ve had a fair bit of that with the Ambassadors of Death storyline.

      I know Doctor Who well enough to be aware that the show’s approach to science was always fast and loose, but this particular story’s take on radiation was giving me constant needle-scratch moments. For a start: if something is radioactive enough to kill you outright on touch, it’s probably radioactive enough to give you severe radiation poisoning by standing anywhere near it. Also, make everything in its immediate surroundings insanely radioactive, too. Oh and let’s not forget “isotopes” being used as meaning “radioactive substance” (there’s actually a crate labelled “Warning! Isotopes”, or some such, on screen).

      Other than that, I never fail to be amazed how absolutely incompetent UNIT are. It’s almost like the British military took the absolute worst performers that, for whatever reason, cannot simply be sacked and said “put those lot in UNIT, they won’t do any harm there”. I get that they may be outmatched when faced with a hitherto unknown alien menace whose powers greatly exceed our own, but in Ambassadors they repeatedly get their asses handed to them by what are essentially criminals and it’s not because the criminals have superior information (they do) or incredibly cunning plans. UNIT – a military organization, with military-grade gear – is incapable of handling mobsters armed with pistols in a straight up firefight.

      While on that subject, they could learn a thing or two about proper security protocols, because – apparently – if you’re guarding a place you know is under threat, you just let enemy agents come and go as they please and/or station solitary guards in key spots to be knocked out by said agents or otherwise overpowered.

      Which reminds me of the preceding storyline (Doctor Who and the Silurians) that helpfully informs us – in these trying times – how not to perform a quarantine. Pro tip: if you’re in a sealed underground complex that your military controls and you learn that a highly infectious and deadly pathogen has been introduced for the specific purpose of culling the human race, you do not allow one of the people who were in the room with patient zero, just before he helpfully expires to demonstrate just how bad the disease is, to get on the early train to London before you seal off the place. The correct response is: nobody gets in or out starting right now!

      • Eric Rall says:

        For a start: if something is radioactive enough to kill you outright on touch, it’s probably radioactive enough to give you severe radiation poisoning by standing anywhere near it.

        Yup. One vivid example is the combined statistics from the two Demon Core incidents, where scientists running near-criticality experiments with a prototype core for a Fat Man style A-Bomb on two separate occasions (with the same core, hence the name) accidentally sent the core into a supercritical state (i.e. undergoing an uncontrolled fission chain reaction).

        In each event, the person closest to the core (working directly with it, and in the second incident, physically touching it to knock the top off the core to take it out of critical) died of acute radiation poisoning, 25 and 9 days later respectively. About a third of the other people in the room at the time eventually died of long-term diseases that can be triggered by radiation poisoning (two cases of acute myeloid leukemia and one case of aplastic anemia; the former in particular hard to draw conclusions from since the lifetime base risk of cancer-related mortality is counterintuitively high, and AML in particular is fairly common and has other well-documented risk factors including smoking). Nobody died right away. I’m not even sure it’s possible to kill someone immediately from radiation alone, short of pumping enough energy into them to literally cook them.

        Also, make everything in its immediate surroundings insanely radioactive, too.

        Only for neutron radiation, which you usually only get from an unshielded/under-shielded active nuclear reaction. The forms of radiation you see from radioactive decay, alpha particles (high-energy He+ ions), beta particles (high-energy electrons), and gamma rays, will ionize and denature molecules, but don’t affect atomic nuclei and can’t make anything radioactive itself. Well, technically matter heats up when it absorbs radiation, and it will re-radiate some of that heat energy as infrared or visible light, but that’s not what we mean by “radioactive” in this context.

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          Only for neutron radiation, which you usually only get from an unshielded/under-shielded active nuclear reaction.

          You’re right, of course. However, the show makes a big deal out of being able to detect where said radioactive sources have been by residual radiation, complete with Geiger counters ticking like a metronome to a Dragonforce song.

          Now, technically, this could be the result of radioactive matter being shed by the sources (despite the fact that there appears to be no way this could happen), rather than the environment itself becoming radioactive, but I’d venture that for the very definitely unshielded humans doing the investigating it’s a distinction without a difference.

          The only way to deal with it is to accept that “radioactivity” in the context of the show is just another word for “magic”.

          • Eric Rall says:

            However, the show makes a big deal out of being able to detect where said radioactive sources have been by residual radiation, complete with Geiger counters ticking like a metronome to a Dragonforce song.

            You’re right. I’d forgotten about that part, as it’s been years since I last watched that story.

            The only way to deal with it is to accept that “radioactivity” in the context of the show is just another word for “magic”.

            As I recall, the same can be said of “reversing the polarity” in that era of Doctor Who. Kinda like how the later Star Trek series frequently “Quantum” or “Neutrino” to mean “magic”.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            I was wondering whether I was remembering it correctly, so I just checked and at some point the radiation being detected from the sources is quoted as being 2 million rads plus a bunch of other numbers that I can’t quite make out over the screaming. The screaming might be me.

          • Lambert says:

            Is there any equipmaent that detects rads? I suppose at Mrad levels you could probably do calorimetry. And a time base would be helpful.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            Presumably, some form of dosimeter might do (as in: give a readout in rads). The show is from 1970, so it predates the adoption of the sievert.

          • Lambert says:

            Huh even the REM wasn’t a thing till ’71.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        they repeatedly get their asses handed to them by what are essentially criminals and it’s not because the criminals have superior information (they do) or incredibly cunning plans. UNIT – a military organization, with military-grade gear – is incapable of handling mobsters armed with pistols in a straight up firefight.

        I googled it and eww, what’s this crap? Reminds me of Adam West’s Batman, but at least that one was supposed to be funny. Anyway, it’s an episode from 50 years ago, I’m sure that in half a century our present shows will look equally idiotic.

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          what’s this crap?

          Britain’s finest.

          Reminds me of Adam West’s Batman, but at least that one was supposed to be funny. Anyway, it’s an episode from 50 years ago, I’m sure that in half a century our present shows will look equally idiotic.

          I actually like it for the old-school charm. For all my poking fun at it, the writing is generally clever enough to keep me reaching for the next episode, even though it’s way past bedtime.

          The core of the story is actually a pretty solid thriller that could really shine if given a few “ok this is silly/doesn’t make sense” passes. Not much we can do about the production values, though, unless we assume a much later date and bigger budget.

    • Jake R says:

      In Ocean’s Twelve, as part of the heist, Julia Roberts’ character impersonates famous actress and celebrity… Julia Roberts. My family, with whom I was watching the movie, thought this was clever. I could barely get through the rest of the film.

      • Randy M says:

        It’s just set in an alternate world where there is a Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis, but not a Brad Pitt or George Clooney, etc.

      • The Nybbler says:

        “But she doesn’t look a thing like Julia Roberts!”

      • silver_swift says:

        I agree with your family, I thought that was kind of a clever fourth wall breech.

        What bothered me much more was the hall of slowly moving lasers that you can get past by dancing.

        • AG says:

          Heist show Leverage’s showrunner ran fan Q&As on his blog during the run of the show:

          [Fan question]: LASER TRIPWIRES DO NOT WORK LIKE THAT!

          Answer: Do not even get me started on the laser tripwires. However, TV Tropes basically require their presence for The Big Heist. And what’s that? It’s the oncoming rumble of the FUN TRAIN! WOOOOOOT!! WOOOOOOT!

    • Deiseach says:

      Don’t know if it exactly counts as a detail or more a switch of genre – from supernatural horror story to plain old ‘eek it’s a monster’ horror story – but years ago I was enjoying having the living daylights frightened out of me by a book in which there was an (apparently) supernatural entity slaughtering everyone in a remote town. It seemed to be unkillable and able to go anywhere and get anyone it wished, and nobody had the faintest idea what they could do to stop it. On top of that were the apparent supernatural elements, as I said, which were freaking out the plucky band of ‘demon’s happy meals on legs’.

      Then for no discernable reason it swerved off the tracks to be “Surprise, it’s a material animal monster!” which totally killed the entire mood for me and stopped scaring me. Because if it’s material, it can be killed (and was, eventually, by our plucky gang). All you need is a Sufficiently Big Gun and/or bomb(s). You can’t shoot the Devil or a Lovecraftian cosmic horror, but a big ugly monster made out of flesh and blood? No problem (eventually). I did read on to the end, but I was so disappointed – the delicious scares had stopped because I was just turning the pages until our heroes accumulated enough artillery to blow the thing to kingdom come.

    • Eric Rall says:

      Just about any medical drama (or comedy, for that matter) seems to take place in an alternate universe where HIPAA privacy rules aren’t a thing.

      There’s one episode of West Wing where John Larroquette’s character storms into the White House Chief of Staff’s office (right down the hall from the President’s office) brandishing a cricket bat and shouting about how he’s going to kill someone. And at no point in the scene does he get tackled by a Secret Service agent.

      In the movie 300, the Persian cavalry is shown as having stirrups. This is about as anachronistic as it would be for a movie about Attila the Hun that depicts his warriors as armed with matchlock muskets.

      • Lambert says:

        It’s not like any of the other aspects of 300 were much more realistic.

        • Eric Rall says:

          Yeah, but most of those were defensible as artistic license, depicting a combination of how the Spartans themselves would have seen things and how the story would be told today as a fictional story set in a heroic fantasy universe.

          For the former, one big example is minimizing the contributions of the Athenian navy and reducing the contributions of the other Greek cities’ soldiers at Thermopylae, especially the Thesbians and Thebans who stayed and died alongside the Spartans to cover the retreat of the rest of the defenders. Another is showing the Spartans going into battle wearing flashy read cloaks and budgie-smuggler loincloths instead of heavy armor and face-covering helmets: Spartan artistic depictions of themselves from that era often show their warriors fighting naked except for a flashy red cloak fluttering dramatically in the breeze, and the loincloths were no doubt added to keep the rating down to R instead of NC-17.

          For the latter, the clearest example is probably the Persian army apparently taking their stylistic cues from Mordor.

          • John Schilling says:

            What’s the excuse for the bit where Gerard Butler gives the speech about how Sparta has no use for individually capable warriors because it’s all about the cohesion of the phalanx, the movie then offers one brief scene, less than a minute, of something close to a proper phalanx, and then it’s all about the individually superb lone-wolf Spartan warriors individually swordfighting the Persian horde into oblivion?

          • Eric Rall says:

            That bothered me, too. Less than the stirrups, since the did at least give us the token scene of them doing it right-ish before switching over to flashy individual dance-fighting.

            And even the latter is defensible by a combination of the two categories of artistic license I called out before: Spartan artistic depictions of their warriors in action that I’ve seen appear to be split about 50/50 between showing something like the tight formations they would actually use and showing warriors fighting individually. And the latter also maps better to modern movie fight choreography tropes, so I understand them going with that instead of figuring out a way to keep tight formation phalynx fighting exciting for two hours even though I would have preferred the latter if they could pull it off.

          • Deiseach says:

            Another is showing the Spartans going into battle wearing flashy read cloaks and budgie-smuggler loincloths instead of heavy armor and face-covering helmets: Spartan artistic depictions of themselves from that era often show their warriors fighting naked except for a flashy red cloak fluttering dramatically in the breeze

            As the French history painter Jacques-Louis David demonstrates, all a real Spartan warrior needs is a flower crown and to lace his sandals up right before going into battle. The Romans, being more practical, dispensed with the flower crowns 🙂

          • Eric Rall says:

            The Romans, being more practical, dispensed with the flower crowns 🙂

            I think my favorite part of the second painting you linked is the strategically-aligned scabbard worn by the fellow in the foreground towards the left side of the frame.

          • Deiseach says:

            The strategically-aligned scabbard

            He needs a big scabbard ‘cos he’s got a big sword (if you know what I mean) 😀

        • Jake R says:

          Everything else about 300 was perfectly realistic! As soon as you remember that it’s being told within a frame story by the lone survivor trying to raise morale before the real battle. The enemy as a horde of inhuman monsters being carved apart by our superhuman fighters seems par for the course.

          Of course none of this explains the stirrups.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Baphomet also makes a cameo in Xerxes’s field tent, which is a completely inexplicable bit of propaganda for the Spartan survivor to make up. More armor on the Persians, deformed giants, bomb-throwing magi, and a rhinoceros, sure, but not a demon first described in the High Middle Ages.

          • Randy M says:

            Link between the Spartans and the Knights Templar confirmed?

          • Deiseach says:

            Baphomet also makes a cameo in Xerxes’s field tent, which is a completely inexplicable bit of propaganda for the Spartan survivor to make up.

            Never mind Baphomet, I was highly disgruntled that they went over the top with the S&M rig-out, facial piercings and Jagganath-style chariot for Xerxes but mentioned nothing, nothing, about the plane tree?

            Aelian can go whistle, I’m with Xerxes on this 🙂

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Everything else about 300 was perfectly realistic! As soon as you remember that it’s being told within a frame story by the lone survivor trying to raise morale before the real battle. The enemy as a horde of inhuman monsters being carved apart by our superhuman fighters seems par for the course.

            Mostly, although I’m still left wondering why a Spartan would have portrayed the Ephors as a bunch of perverted, misshapen priests, when every in the audience would have known that they were actually a board of annually-elected magistrates tasked with making sure the Kings didn’t try to go beyond their lawful powers.

      • chrisminor0008 says:

        > seems to take place in an alternate universe where HIPAA privacy rules aren’t a thing.

        My wife’s doctor’s office is also there.

    • rubberduck says:

      Less “detail” and more “significant plot element” but I once watched the first episode or two of some anime where the protagonist wants become a professional songwriter, requiring her to get into a super-prestigious, highly selective music academy. She works super hard and passes the famously-difficult entrance exam. First day of class, she’s asked to play a piece on the piano, and… turns out she CAN’T READ MUSIC. What the heck was on that music academy entrance exam? Calculus?

    • rmtodd says:

      A couple of particularly memorable examples that come to mind from the tv series NCIS. In one episode the Bad Guy they were investigating had commited murder to cover up problems with the new sonar his company was building for the Navy, where the sonar was putting out too high sound levels that would be harmful to ocean life. Not a problem, except they gave a number for the sound level, 310 dB. Now, the sound level right next to a jet engine is 140dB, and each additional 10dB is an increase in power level of a factor of 10, so 310dB means an acoustic power level 10^17 times as high as a jet engine. Um, I don’t think so.

      Another episode involved a plot where the Bad Guys of the Week were plotting to go after a cache of old WWI-era chlorine gas shells to use them for a terrorist attack, and everyone was all excited that the bad guys were going after these Exotic Chemical Weapons. Dudes, seriously. Chlorine is an industrial chemical. They literally make this stuff by the railroad car and ship it across the country all the time.

      • Lambert says:

        If that’s SPL, don’t you have to account for the fact the waves are travelling through water?
        But in air, linear accoustics breaks down somewhere around 175dB and you get shock solutions.
        Max theoretical SPL is in the 180-200 range. Beyond that, the troughs of the sound wave bottom out at hard vacuum.

      • fibio says:

        Not a problem, except they gave a number for the sound level, 310 dB.

        Man the Navy should have been all over that, that’s the equivalent of detonating a nuclear bomb next to your ear. To be fair it’s pretty useless as sonar, but only because whatever you just detected has been torn to shreds by the pulse.

        • Deiseach says:

          where the sonar was putting out too high sound levels that would be harmful to ocean life

          whatever you just detected has been torn to shreds by the pulse

          Plot twist: they’re claiming it’s sonar, but it’s really the new top-secret sonic weapon being field-tested and they’re not one bit gruntled by all these pesky environmentalists kicking up blue murder about dead fishies – the fishies are supposed to die, that’s the whole point of the exercise?

    • b_jonas says:

      Clocks with only an hour hand, no minute hand, in a future human society with high technology like Star Trek.

      I read this detail 20 years ago in a sci fi novel of which I don’t know the identity, described at “https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/199718/4918” . And yes, I’m shamelessly using this prompt to advertise that post hoping that the hive-mind of Slate Star Codex can identify the novel.

    • Lurker says:

      A language I’m fluent in being used badly.
      The worst offender I remember right now is the show Grimm. I was interested in watching it – but so many words there are pseudo-German to the point where I kept going “no, that’s not what that means, that’s not what any of that means” that I didn’t even finish the first episode.
      There are also quite a few books that come to mind where it’s really irritating. Is it that hard to get a native speaker to prove read a sentence?!
      Same but different: Some movies do German so badly that I actually asked friends I was watching the movie with “where are they supposed to be from again?” and they were like “you don’t understand them?! but they’re supposed to be German!” “Oh….” (I don’t remember the movie itself, just that scene between me and my friends)

      • Loriot says:

        Separated At Birth is a big offender. Most of the Deaf characters are played by Deaf/HoH actors who can actually sign, but the hearing characters aren’t, and they barely even try. Yet we’re apparently supposed to assume they’re doing a good job. This is less excusable than most examples, since it’s a core element of the show. You don’t even have to understand ASL yourself to see this, just have a passing familiarity with how it works, and in particular that simcom is a bad idea.

        A particularly egregious case is a story arc in season 2 where the hearing main character Bay enrolls herself at a school for the deaf, and then complains when the students reject her, claiming that she worked so hard on her signing and they’re being unfairly prejudiced against her, despite the fact that she had barely ever bothered to try signing in the show up to that point and that all the criticisms of the deaf kids are accurate (such as the fact that she entered their school for no reason, then demanded to be accommodated by them, causing disruption and taking away scarce resources from the people who actually need it). And yet, we’re supposed to see Bay as being in the right here.

        But enough ranting about SAB.

        • Lurker says:

          O.O that’s worse than any example I had in mind. wow. Guess at least I now know another show I shouldn’t watch? (I don’t know any sign language, but this sounds like it’s be really noticeable, also, that particular story-line sounds awful.)

  35. Pandemic Pi Party – Virtual Meetup

    On Pi day (3/14), starting at 3 PM Eastern, I will be hosting a virtual meetup for SSC readers. It will take place on Zoom and either Slack or Discord.

    It’ll be a perfect occasion to hang out with fellow readers and participate in the community without exposing yourself to the horrors of the outside world like the coronavirus, national borders, and personal hygiene. Come one, come all! If you are not the typical reader and don’t go to meetups normally – now is your chance to maintain your iconoclast persona, but also hang out with your fellow readers.

    I will post the participation links on the SSC subreddit and Discord an hour before the meetup. This post is for marking your calendars and suggesting topics/activities/readings. Any input welcome!

  36. rlms says:

    The latest SSC Diplomacy game is looking for a couple more players, sign up here if you’re interested!

    • Lambert says:

      When is it expected to start (and end)?

      • rlms says:

        Planning to start imminently (once I send emails to some new signups who will take the last place in the current game). If enough new people sign up there might also be a second game starting later. Speed will be 1 week for the first turn, then 1-2 days for each, so game length probably 1-3 months depending on how long your last.

  37. Well... says:

    This seems conceptually true to me: in a two-party system such as the United States, when political party A is in power, party B often wishes for A to fail to accomplish things, even things B would normally support.

    In practice, is this equally true of Democrats and Republicans, and if so, what are some examples of both?

    • Aftagley says:

      Isn’t the counterargument to this position literally every piece of bipartisan legislation ever passed?

      • Byrel Mitchell says:

        I mean, he does say ‘often’, not ‘always’. So the existence of bipartisan legislation isn’t strong evidence against his idea.

      • John Schilling says:

        What, both of them?

        OK, not really. But for the past decade or two at least, it has been rare to see a significant bipartisan consensus for any legislation that isn’t basically about making sure the government continues to do what it has already been doing for as long as anyone can remember. Things that nobody can presently claim as an “accomplishment”.

        • S_J says:

          OK, not really. But for the past decade or two at least, it has been rare to see a significant bipartisan consensus for any legislation that isn’t basically about making sure the government continues to do what it has already been doing for as long as anyone can remember. Things that nobody can presently claim as an “accomplishment”.

          The most recent piece of bi-partisan work on major legislation that I can recall are… the “No Child Left Behind” education support initiative, and the “Medicare Part D” work. Both of which count as within the last two decades.

          The education bill had both John Boehner and George Miller as co-authors of the House version; it had Edward Kennedy and Judd Gregg as authors of the Senate versions. It was signed into law by George W Bush.

          The Medicare bill was based on proposals by Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle during the late-1990s; based on an idea proposed by then-President Bill Clinton. George W Bush continued to pres for the Medicare Part D bill, and eventually Congress gave him a version of it so that he could sign.

          Also during the Presidency of George W Bush, the Patriot Act and the Authorization to Use Military Force in response to the Al-Qaeda attacks were strongly supported by most members of both political parties, at the time they were enacted.

          During the Presidential campaigns of 2004 and 2008, the candidates attempting to win nomination for President in the Democratic Party routinely derided the provisions of the Patriot Act. They also spoke against many details of the military operations that were begun under the AUMF. We don’t know if John Kerry would have pushed for a revocation/end of either, but we do know that Barack Obama did not push for Congress to repeal/revoke either of them.

    • Silverlock says:

      I would say it is true up to a point. You won’t find that many people on either side who want a terrible calamity to befall just so they can point to failure of the party in power, but there are certainly people around who look forward to the smaller failings.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:

      No. Seriously. I am on another continent, and it is blatantly obvious that “Obstruct Everything” is solely a republican thing. The democrats will oppose things they oppose, but not just because a republican supports it.

      • Byrel Mitchell says:

        I question the neutrality of your sources. As an example: last year, when they were fighting over the budget, the Democrats opposed and killed an independent bill to provide interim funding for an insurance program for disabled children which has broad bipartisan support.

        That’s a program that was completely in line with democrat goals and that they had no grievance with; they were using the possible outage of that program as popular leverage to portray the budget fight as Republicans being incompetent or evil and a no-strings-attached interim funding bill would have eliminated that line of attack.

        I have no idea if it’s equally distributed between the parties, but it’s certainly something both engage in.

        • John Schilling says:

          See also the Washington state carbon tax, and Warren “coyoteblog” Meyers’ attempt to build a base of moderate-conservative support for gay marriage in Arizona. Things that the political left wanted, but not as much as they wanted to be able to use “you evil Republicans hate Gays and Mother Earth” as a political cudgel.

          • RobJ says:

            I’m not sure how the Washington carbon tax fits here? It may have been opposed by a few groups from the left, but I don’t think you could claim it as being obstructed by democrats by any stretch. And in my memory it was still much more popular in democrat heavy counties than republican ones.

          • zzzzort says:

            The Washington carbon tax thing was definitely more about the perfect being the enemy of the good than about partisan sabotage (for one thing, since it was a ballot initiative in a Democratic state, the credit would have primarily accrued to the Democrats).

        • Aftagley says:

          Last year, when they were fighting over the budget, the Democrats opposed and killed an independent bill to provide interim funding for an insurance program for disabled children which has broad bipartisan support.

          What program are you talking about? It sounds kind of like your talking about CHIP, but the details either of the program or what happened in congress don’t match up with reality.

          • Byrel Mitchell says:

            Thanks for calling me on this. It was CHIP I was referring to, and I went back and researched it. I had quite a few errors; unfortunately I can’t go back and edit to fix them.

            It looks to me like the republicans in the house passed a bill to fund it in mid january (around the 17th), which was opposed because the democrats wanted a bill which both funded CHIP and had a favorable resolution to the ‘dreamers’ issue, and were unwilling to simply support the bipartisan program. Quote from the dem Minority Leader at the time:

            “[Republicans] were using the 10 million kids on CHIP, holding them as hostage for the 800,000 kids who were Dreamers. Kids against kids. Innocent kids against innocent kids. That’s no way to operate in this country.”

            To me, it seems clear that he was opposing the funding extension BECAUSE it was standalone and he was able (in his view at least) to blame the republicans.

            While my details in the first post were wrong, I think this definitely stands as an example of this class. Democrats had been beating republicans up publicly over the lack of funding for CHIP, and refused to vote for a short term funding bill to keep it going because they wanted the public leverage.

          • Aftagley says:

            Ok, you’re less wrong, but I think you’re still kind of wrong.

            First off, in the months leading up to January 2018, everyone knew that the CHIP program was running out of money and needed to be reauthorized. The only people who objected to CHIP… was the house freedom caucus. Because he didn’t want the bad optics of relying on Dems for votes, Paul Ryan kicked the can down the road. Yes, republicans had a majority in both houses and could have funded CHIP without any democrat support if they wanted, but internal republic opposition to the program scuttled that idea.

            Then comes winter, 2018 and another republican debate between the freedom caucus and the moderates over a spending package. The government was set to run out of money and would shut down if the spending package didn’t get approved by the republican-controlled congress.

            Democrats decided to not vote in favor of any republican spending bills if it didn’t fully include protections for DACAs. The house freedom caucus objected to the spending and also vowed to vote now. Thus, the government was on track to shut down.

            Then, the CHIP program was added to the republican spending bill – your memory is incorrect, there never was a standalone CHIP bill, it was always part of the overall spending package – it’s inclusion was a deliberate attempt from the Republicans to fracture the democrats unity and get some of them to vote for the spending bill which, and I cannot say this enough, only couldn’t pass because republican leadership couldn’t get the freedom caucus to vote for it.

      • Well... says:

        @Thomas Jorgensen:

        I can’t think of any examples to support your argument — not because I don’t believe there are any but because I just don’t know enough. Can you provide some?

        • Nick says:

          Thomas didn’t argue anything, he flatly asserted it. And no number of examples are going to prove a negative (“Democrats never obstruct anything”), but one counterexample can disprove it….

          ETA: To be a little nicer: Thomas can salvage his point by weakening it to “Republicans engage in a lot more obstruction than Democrats” and pointing to, say, number of filibusters or bills killed in committee or something.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        The fact that you are on another continent does make you neutral.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        Oh it’s blatantly obvious that Republicans are big meanies and Democrats are principled and wise? Wow, thanks for your insight. I will now go home and reconsider my life choices.

        • John Schilling says:

          Yeah, when their side opposes “bipartisan” legislation, it’s because they’re partisan meanies. When our side opposes “bipartisan” legislation, it’s because we were wise enough to spot the subtle trap, the poison pill, that they wove into the compromise bill because they’re partisan meanies.

          Two can play that game.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/how-to-destroy-a-government/606793/

            This is an article about Trump destroying American institutions. I largely agree with the article on the object level (Trump is doing it, and it’s bad that Trump is doing it), but while the article uses scare quotes around “deep state” it earlier describes a “permanent government”:

            [Trump] harbored a deep suspicion that some of them were plotting in secret to destroy him. He had to bring them to heel before he could be secure in his power. This wouldn’t be easy—the permanent government had defied other leaders and outlasted them. In his inexperience and rashness—the very qualities his supporters loved—he made early mistakes

            So, there we go. What we obviously knew as true is true: there’s a bunch of unelected people with a duty to the government who are just trying to pour sand in the gears of government policy. (Again, on the object level: I often agree with them. But on the meta level: a government that isn’t subject to the will of the people is a scary thing, even if the people are dummies and want bad things.)

          • Deiseach says:

            [Trump] harbored a deep suspicion that some of them were plotting in secret to destroy him. He had to bring them to heel before he could be secure in his power.

            What “plotting in secret”? When there are stories about deliberately frustrating the president’s decisions being published in the newspapers and books published on the matter, I don’t think that counts as “secret”.

            I only made it halfway through that article because I couldn’t stand the whole “the adults have left the room” silliness; also I could not find it in myself to cry salt tears for the former lawyer in the civil service who quit her job because she didn’t like the boss, and quite frankly I don’t understand the point being made here: if her political likes had won the election, she would have continued on as a yes-woman because rocking the boat would have meant her career would stall? But Trump is the bad guy here because… he would behave in the same way as her favoured political party if she went against his wishes?:

            The election in November changed her, freed her, in a way that she understood only much later. If Hillary Clinton had won, Newland likely would have continued as an ambitious, risk-averse government lawyer on a fast track. She would have felt pressure not to antagonize her new bosses, because elite Washington lawyers keep revolving through one another’s lives—these people would be the custodians of her future, and she wanted to rise within the federal government.

            …No one risked getting fired. No one would become the target of a Trump tweet. The danger might be a mediocre performance review or a poor reference. “There was no sense that there was anything to be gained by standing up within the office,” Newland told me recently. “The people who might celebrate that were not there to see it. You wouldn’t be able to talk about it. And if you’re going to piss everyone off within the department, you’re not going to be able to get out” and find a good job.

            I may be thick as the ditch, but I am not seeing the fine shade of difference between “under Hillary if I or anyone else in this department pissed off one of the high muck-a-mucks, we could kiss goodbye to our career” and “under Trump if I or anyone else in this department pissed off one of the high muck-a-mucks, we could kiss goodbye to our career”.

            Though I do like the tinfoil hat linkage of SINISTER CATHOLIC PLOTTING to the greater story:

            Barr spent the quarter century between Presidents Bush and Trump in private practice, serving on corporate boards, and caring for the youngest of his three daughters as she battled lymphoma. Barr and Cipollone also sat together on the board of the Catholic Information Center, an office in Washington closely affiliated with Opus Dei, a far-right Catholic organization with influential connections in politics and business around the world. During those years, the Republican Party sank into its own swamp of moral relativism, hitting bottom with Trump’s presidency.

            Trump’s arrival brought Barr out of semi-retirement as a reliable advocate. When Comey reopened the Clinton email investigation 11 days before the election, Barr wrote an approving op‑ed. When Trump fired Comey six months later, supposedly for mishandling the same investigation, Barr published another approving op-ed. The only consistent principle seemed to be what benefited Trump. Then, in June 2018, Barr wrote a 19-page memo and sent it, unsolicited, to Rod Rosenstein. The memo argued that Robert Mueller could not charge Trump with obstructing justice for taking actions that came under the president’s authority, including asking Comey to back off the Flynn investigation and then firing Comey. In Barr’s expansive view of Article II, it was nearly impossible for Trump to obstruct justice at all.

            Writing that memo was a strange thing for a former attorney general to do with his spare time. Six months later, Trump nominated Barr to his old job.

            Gasp! Not Opus Dei! (Dan Brown has told you all about them and what they get up to). Horrid Popish Plot Redux! Ah yes, you cannot trust us Papists, slinking around in alleged retirement but really working to assist the Anti-Christ to sit in the highest seat of power!

          • Unsaintly says:

            The Deep State is a motte and bailey. “Government bureaucrats outlast specific administrations and have their own motivations” is obviously true and pretty benign. But if you call that the Deep State, you can’t then talk about Deep State Conspiracies or the Deep State acting in any unified manner. There is no Deep State Conspiracy, nobody is issuing out marching orders being followed by a legion of Obama Loyalists embedded in government. It’s just basic institutional inertia.

          • Matt M says:

            Unsaintly,

            I agree with you! But I’m not sure there’s nearly as much of a distinction between the two ideas as you think.

            Is there a “deep state conspiracy” full of “Obama loyalists?” No, I suppose there isn’t.

            Are the federal bureaucracies packed full of people who loved Obama and what he stood for, and loathe Trump and what he stands for? Yes, absolutely.

            It’s not the case that there’s some shadowy cabal trying to take down Trump… but only because there doesn’t need to be. Every federal bureaucrat just doing what comes naturally to them will take you to the same place…

          • Thegnskald says:

            Aligned incentives tend to look like concerted behavior.

            Rooting out the deep state cannot work, because the incentives are the thing being objected to.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Matt M

            Probably a secret conspiracy of Obama holdovers would be better for our Republic long term.

            Then you just need to find and root out people who are actually attempting to undermine the government.

            If it’s just that institutional inertia prevents anyone who is elected with a vision too far from the “Deep State” vision from doing anything, that means the President gets reduced to a figurehead that we choose every four years based on whim who has no actual power.

            Fortunately, it’s not that far gone yet, but I’ll note that “The Deep State is just regular bureaucrats” is not terribly reassuring.

          • Randy M says:

            It’s an issue of, like Edward Scizorhands sharply points out, how responsive the government is to the will of the people.

            And I don’t mean to say it should be immediately and fully so. Some inertia is probably a good thing.

            But too much creates perverse incentives for those aligned with the state ideologically, when the size and power of the state is one of the ideological fault lines, and having a faction that the beerocracy sees as being on their side

            edit: Ninjas everywhere…

          • Jake R says:

            Is it just me or is the phrase “permanent government” both more descriptive and more frightening than the phrase “deep state”? Whoever decides these things should have just gone with that one from the beginning.

          • John Schilling says:

            So, there we go. What we obviously knew as true is true: there’s a bunch of unelected people with a duty to the government who are just trying to pour sand in the gears of government policy.

            More like trying to keep the gears of government policy properly oiled, under a commander-in-chief who doesn’t know the meaning of the word tribology.

            I don’t know about you, but I actually read the piece you cited. Admittedly, skimming some parts. But I couldn’t find one example of any “permanent government” civil servant failing to implement any vaguely legal administration policy or command during their period of employment. So I think you’re off base here.

            But on the meta level: a government that isn’t subject to the will of the people is a scary thing

            So, is it scary that Senators have staggered elections with six-year terms? And can filibuster? If the people change their mind tomorrow, the government isn’t subject to the will of the people, O, the horror!

            Every apology for Democracy, even at the “worst except for all of the others” level, acknowledges that we’re not talking about the sort of mob-rule democracy where every transient whim of 50.1% of the population is immediately implemented as written(*). So, spare me the feigned terror at about the bit where a president who got 46% of the vote can’t immediately have everything his way because Will Of The People.

            This is how it’s supposed to work. Just as the Senate can block the democratically elected president from passing laws, or the courts from enforcing them, the bureaucracy can prevent the president from throwing sand into the machinery of government because he wants to bring parts of it to a halt. And, if “the people” want to change that, they need to do it by way of a persistent majority or maybe quicker but only with a supermajority. Which they can do. Donald Trump, can’t. If the American people had wanted, they could have looked at his performance in 2017-2018 and given him that power in the midterms, but they didn’t.

            That’s not scary. Scary, is doing it the other way in a world with e.g. 737s and nuclear reactors.

            * exactly as written, and implemented good and hard by one of the malevolent genies from the stories.

          • Randy M says:

            So, spare me the feigned terror at about the bit where a president who got 46% of the vote can’t immediately have everything his way because Will Of The People.

            I was going to object to this, because we don’t have different presidential powers based on number of popular or even electoral votes received. But you pointed out that we in fact do, it’s the whole political process and party system. So, good point. Trump should get less, not due to that 46% figure, but to the extent that it is harder for him to convince other officials to cooperate with him.
            However, this does seem to imply that a president should, if he wants to get anything done and disagrees substantively with the prior admin, clear out much of the civil service and fill it with cronies or aligned ideologues.
            I recall years ago it was a transient scandal with GWBush fired some largeish number of US attorneys.

          • Lambert says:

            >However, this does seem to imply that a president should, if he wants to get anything done and disagrees substantively with the prior admin, clear out much of the civil service and fill it with cronies or aligned ideologues.

            Number 10 seems to think so. Sajid Javid stepped down as chancellor because they wanted to purge his advisers. Not sure what the deal with the Priti Patel accusations is but I’d not be shocked it it was related.

          • Statismagician says:

            Note that the President is specifically prohibited from doing this, because before he was the result was corruption on a scale only matched by its predictability.

          • John Schilling says:

            However, this does seem to imply that a president should, if he wants to get anything done and disagrees substantively with the prior admin, clear out much of the civil service and fill it with cronies or aligned ideologues.

            The president should, if he wants to get anything done, work with the civil service to get it done. And no, it isn’t generally the case than only Democrats can do this because the civil service won’t work with Republicans (or with populist reformers). It just requires skills and temperament that one Republican in particular happens to lack.

            Plan B, if the civil service is impossibly recalcitrant, is for the President to join or form a political party that shares his agenda and have them change the civil-service laws to allow him to overhaul the civil service as needed – hopefully as a one-time special event, because as statismagician notes we really don’t want that sort of thing to become a norm. And I admit to using “46% of the popular vote” as a casual shorthand for “POTUS is not in fact spearheading a popular movement capable of this”; the metric that really matters is being able to convince the American people to vote in 60 senators willing to support a civil-service purge.

            There may be a Plan C where the president and the courts work to rein in a bureaucracy out of control; haven’t thought hard enough about that one yet.

            If all you’ve got is a bare majority for one election to one office, you don’t have a mandate for something like that and ought not try to do that; at that level you’re a caretaker president in charge of making sure the things that almost all Americans agree on don’t get broken any further than they already are. So do that for two years and go back to the people at the midterms to ask for more.

          • Eric Rall says:

            There may be a Plan C where the president and the courts work to rein in a bureaucracy out of control; haven’t thought hard enough about that one yet.

            The civil service laws already contain provision for dismissing protected federal employees for cause. The procedure is pretty heavyweight has a lot of Due Process provisions and appeals procedures. I looked it up, and the last appeals venue is the US Merit Systems Protection Board, consisting of three board seats with staggered 7-year terms.

            And curiously, all three seats are currently vacant. Trump has nominated replacements (in March 2018, June 2018, and April 2019), but all three nominees are still pending Senate confirmation. I don’t know why they’re pending so long, but my first guess is some kind of fundamental disagreement between Trump and Senate Republicans over the nominees.

          • John Schilling says:

            The civil service laws already contain provision for dismissing protected federal employees for cause. The procedure is pretty heavyweight has a lot of Due Process provisions and appeals procedures.

            Right. If you want to dismiss a few civil servants, and particularly if the rest of the bureaucracy doesn’t mind seeing those particular few go, that’s a reasonable proposition. If you’re seeing a vast deep-state conspiracy that you need to purge, you’re either going to need a very sympathetic judiciary, or you’re going to need congress to change the laws. I think this is generally a good thing on checks-and-balances grounds.

          • Eric Rall says:

            If you’re seeing a vast deep-state conspiracy that you need to purge, you’re either going to need a very sympathetic judiciary, or you’re going to need congress to change the laws. I think this is generally a good thing on checks-and-balances grounds.

            Yeah, I think I agree with most of that. Whether it’s a conspiracy or just an institutional culture problem, then if the President can’t manage uncooperative civil servants by firing the worst offenders to encourage the others, that implies that there’s a huge problem either with the civil servants or the President, and we really need at least one of Congress or the Courts to step in and fix things.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            If I wasn’t clear, I’m glad the permanent government is defying Trump, because he’s dangerous and doesn’t know what he’s doing.

            But the fact that this government exists is unsettling. Like if we elect a President to take up the cause of, say, Criminal Justice Reform, and these staffers just decide not to really do the work necessary because those fucks belong in prison or something, I’d be mighty pissed.

          • Loriot says:

            > But the fact that this government exists is unsettling.

            There’s two sides to every coin. I work at a relatively small company, but I still often have to ignore or favorably interpret orders from on high in order to get anything useful done, since they don’t know what it’s like in the trenches. If they got serious enough about it, I’d start following them more literally, and everyone would be worse off for it.

          • John Schilling says:

            But the fact that this government exists is unsettling.

            If the “permanent government” is unsettling to you, then it would seem that either you are an anarchist who wants no government, or you want some sort of “temporary government”.

            How is that supposed to work, exactly? We replace all the civil servants whenever we get a new president, with ones by definition short on experience but by inevitability boot-lickingly loyal the new president, and how is that supposed to work any better than it did the last time?

          • cassander says:

            @John Schilling says:

            and how is that supposed to work any better than it did the last time?

            To be fair, under that system, the US went from a collection of farmers on the fringe of the world to the richest and most powerful (potentially at least) country in the world. Which is not to say that it was ideal, just that it wasn’t exactly crippling.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            To be fair, going from farmers on the fringe to one of the world’s richest took about 130 years. I don’t think the original commenter is advocating a 130-year cycle of civil servants.

          • Aftagley says:

            To be fair, the Pendleton Act ended the spoils system in 1883 and most people don’t count the US as having become a superpower until the late 1890s, so you could just as easily say that the Pendelton act turned the US from a collection of farmers to a superpower in only a decade and a half.

            (warning: the above argument may not actually have been fair)

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley

            the pendleton act was passed in 83, but it didn’t immediately transform the entire federal government. The way the act worked was a ratchet. only a small number of jobs were made civil service at first. Presidents were given the power to convert agencies to civil service, but not turn them back. I don’t have exact numbers in front of me, but I believe that a majority of federal employees were still not civil servants at the turn of the century.

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          sigh. The republican party explicitly and openly made “We will oppose everything the other side wants” policy. Mitch Mcconnel brags about this. This is not something the D side of the isle has done. Any equivalency you care to make here is false.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            What do you make of the Resistance, and “Resist Trump” bumper stickers? I don’t think the Resistance is interested in evaluating each of Trump’s policies and figuring out which ones are worth resisting and which ones are not. It’s a blanket call to resist everything Trump-related.

            This shows up in bizarre areas, like the “controversy” Nick’s brought up on SSC over federal building architecture, with left media outlets defending brutalist architecture that, until Trump was against it, so was almost every man, woman and child in the United States.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            What do you make of the Resistance, and “Resist Trump” bumper stickers?

            I may get some details of this wrong, but maybe a year ago, Trump proposed pulling the troops out of Syria and the Democrats were outraged with “But what about the Kurds??” At the time, I admit I thought this was opposition for opposition’s sake, and not simply the Democrats following their longstanding principle of favoring more military action in the middle east.

          • Nick says:

            @Conrad Honcho
            Specifically, remember one of the tweet threads was from Brian Goldstein, who used to work in the GSA Office of the Chief Architect and hoped that the executive order would get “gummed up” until the next president could can it.

          • Aftagley says:

            Trump proposed pulling the troops out of Syria and the Democrats were outraged with “But what about the Kurds??” At the time, I admit I thought this was opposition for opposition’s sake, and not simply the Democrats following their longstanding principle of favoring more military action in the middle east.

            Dude, come on. You think the only two options possible was the either the evil democrats were just being obstructionist OR the evil democrats were desperate to have more military engagement in the middle east?

            The argument against pulling out troops from northern Syria, put forward be people across the political spectrum was – there is very little cost to remaining here (in terms of lives and treasure), our support here is resulting in real gains (We were using the Kurds to seriously disrupt and detain ISIS fighters throughout the region) AND if we leave our allies will likely get invaded by Turkey.

            We pulled out, and in the year since – at least triple digits of previously detained ISIS fighters are back in the wild and Turkey has invaded Syria, triggering pretty substantial regional instability. Literally the arguments we made against taking this action have come true, and yet you’re still writing it off as baseless obstructionism?

            Moving on, let’s examine this idea:

            the Democrats following their longstanding principle of favoring more military action in the middle east.

            Is this a serious claim your making? It’s spurious, but I want to make sure it’s actually worth refuting before I invest the time in doing so.

          • albatross11 says:

            We’re still in Syria, we just screwed over our most valuable local allies and left them to get crushed by the Turkish military.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Dude, come on. You think the only two options possible was the either the evil democrats were just being obstructionist OR the evil democrats were desperate to have more military engagement in the middle east?

            No, in this case I just used an example that I could come up with to show that opposing for the sake of opposing was not unique to the Republicans. I have no strong position on Syria and it appears my example was poorly selected.

            Is this a serious claim your making?

            No, it’s not.

    • Well... says:

      Since nobody has provided them so far, I guess it looks like I should add, I am especially looking for examples of where Republicans have blocked Democrats from doing things the Republicans themselves wanted or would likely want, just because it’s the Democrats/a particular Democrat doing it.

      • abe says:

        I think blocking the raising of the debt ceiling, which resulted in the national debt rating being downgraded by Standard & Poor, fits the bill pretty perfectly.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_debt-ceiling_crisis_of_2011

        • Clutzy says:

          I don’t want the debt ceiling raised, and politicians like Ted Cruz genuinely do not want that either.

          Also, you have to remember that someone who wants to change things only has 2 major opportunity points: When there is no passed budget and the government is going to shut down, or the debt ceiling needs to be raised. At all other times the status quo-ers can do nothing and keep winning.

          • Loriot says:

            Even among Republicans, most of them don’t want the US to arbitrarily default on its debts. They also seem to have no issues raising the debt ceiling when a Republican is in the whitehouse.

          • Randy M says:

            If we go back to the general/shaman dichotomy, very few Republican generals will want to institute measures that restrict their power, while it is indeed and issue that the shamans care about.
            The true believers certainly aren’t a majority, of course, and plenty aren’t true believers in limited government so long as they are in limiting the power of the other side.

          • Clutzy says:

            Even among Republicans, most of them don’t want the US to arbitrarily default on its debts. They also seem to have no issues raising the debt ceiling when a Republican is in the whitehouse.

            The first point has nothing to do with the debt ceiling. The S&P downgrade was nonsensical at best and political in all likelihood. Raising the debt ceiling increases the chance we will default on future debt.

            The second point is merely about people understanding leverage points under different forms of government. Ted Cruz has almost no power other than obstructionism under a D-Presidency because Congress and SCOTUS have allowed that branch to have much more power than constitutionally intended, under an R-Presidency he has great power by just having a sit down with the President and Majority leader.

    • Loriot says:

      It’s probably always been true to some extent, but my view (as a Democrat) is that it got much worse under Mitch McConnell. I’m sure Republicans will say that actually the Democrats started it.

      • cassander says:

        can you give an actual example? and no, the ACA isn’t even close to one.

        • Loriot says:

          Part of the problem is that there is no fact with political relevance that is so indisputable that more than 60% of the population will accept it. It makes it really hard to debate political matters.

          • EchoChaos says:

            I feel like there aren’t even many facts without political relevance that don’t become politically relevant if Trump talks about them.

            His recent foray into architecture proves that.

          • rumham says:

            Even objectively verifiable fact. Exhibit A: tax cuts

        • abe says:

          As I mentioned in another thread, dragging out the debt-ceiling crisis for so long that the national debt was downgraded is a fitting example.

          • cassander says:

            Right, but the Democrats do that too. Everyone bitches about the debt when they’re out of power and plays games with those votes. The claim is that republicans escalated things under McConnell.

          • Chalid says:

            The debt ceiling fights *did* escalate under McConnell.

  38. Iago the Yerfdog says:

    I’d like to propose a concept-handle if one doesn’t already exist for this: “outrage pump.”

    An outrage pump is a fact that, while accurate, is frequently cited as if it settled some controversial matter so decisively (it doesn’t, at least not in the simplistic form usually given) that it proves the outgroup is a bunch of morons and evildoers.

    Concrete examples are controversial, so let me supply some templates in lieu of them:

    1. “[Famous rich person] makes [$$$] per [time unit].”
    2. “[Evil political party] had [political philosophy] right in their name!”
    3. “Well, ackchually, [outrage pump countering a different outrage pump].”
    4. “[Members of a group] [score differently on a given metric] than [members of a different group].”

    Three points: (i) an outrage pump has to be true,and (ii) an outrage pump has to be used to boo the outgroup. If it’s false, you don’t need the concept-handle of “outrage pump”: just point out that it isn’t true. If it’s used as part of a substantive argument that addresses the nuances of the issue and doesn’t try to emotionally blackmail the audience into agreeing with you, then it’s just a fact.

    • Kaitian says:

      I’ve been thinking about this kind of argument too. I have come to the conclusion that there are basically two reasons someone uses an argument like this:
      Either they are really unaware of counter arguments, in which case they’re not pumping the outrage pump maliciously.
      Or there completely uninterested in the argument as such, and are only focused on making the opposing position look bad.

      In case someone is just naive, it might be useful to analyse the argument with them. But in most cases, they probably have a mix of both motives going on, and don’t want to give credence to any arguments supporting the evil opposition.
      This connects to the concept John Michael Greer calls a thoughtstopper: once you’ve convinced yourself that something is fascist / un-American / demonic, or whatever your personal most hated category is, your thoughts don’t go past that point, and any counter arguments are not worth considering. The process here goes something like this:

      Opponent: [states some position]
      You: That position is [bad]. Don’t you know that [insert outrage pump here]?
      Opponent: Actually [outrage pump] is not as significant as it may seem, because…
      You: Why are you defending [bad people]? You must be one yourself.

      I think this happens mostly in public debates (where you’re never trying to find the truth, just to convince listeners), and online, where it’s easy to dehumanize your opponent.

      • Iago the Yerfdog says:

        That’s a really nice description of the phenomenon!

        And I can certainly see outrage pumps as a more elaborate version of a thoughtstopper: instead of just saying, “No, that’s socialism!” while throwing a chair at the other guy, you point out that (to use an example that I assume was a troll and really hope never becomes an actual outrage pump) Medicare-for-All means giving free healthcare to racists.

        Accurate, but, uh…

    • meh says:

      The United States is a republic, not a democracy

      • Iago the Yerfdog says:

        I’ve never seen/heard that one used with quite the level of affect that I had in mind, but I agree that it counts.

        Alright, I’ll give a concrete example: “If you don’t pay your taxes, men with guns will come to your door and haul you off.”

        This is accurate, and a respectable case against the morality of taxation can certainly be built around it. It’s when it’s deployed as a rhetorical weapon to DESTROY statists with FACTS and LOGIC that it becomes an outrage pump.

      • Unsaintly says:

        But that doesn’t pass the “obviously factually true” side of things. Republic and Democracy have had a number of different meanings throughout history, and people insisting that Republic means Representative Democracy are cherry picking a single specific definition.

        • Iago the Yerfdog says:

          For what it’s worth, I think the context here sets the meaning pretty well: public opinion is only indirectly relevant to government policy, and this is by design.

          This is an example of a “Well, ackchually…” outrage pump because it counters the opposite outrage pump, “This is undemocratic!” (EDIT: In cases where “undemocratic” obviously means, “against or indifferent to public opinion on the matter.”)

    • rahien.din says:

      You’re just describing rhetoric. The “_____ pump” phenomenon works for outrage, sympathy, enthusiasm, pathos – anything.

      Dennett’s term “intuition pump” deserves its own category because it is inducing a specific conceptual insight, rather than inducing a specific emotion.

      But it’s still all just rhetoric.

      Also, Taleb said it better : speak in aphorisms.

      • Iago the Yerfdog says:

        Sure. My goal isn’t to identify something radically new, it’s to provide a label the makes it easier to to defuse the emotional impact of the tactic, which I think is common and damaging enough to warrant such a label. Compare the terms “sob story” (which when the story is true is a kind of sympathy pump) and “hype” (which is a little bit like an enthusiasm pump).

        In addition, I think your statement, “it’s still all just rhetoric,” proves too much: it would prove that it’s worthless to identify different types of fallacies because “it’s still all just bad reasoning.”

    • AG says:

      In CX debate, arguments mostly all take the same structural form.
      1. Inherency/Uniqueness: Here is the current situation.
      2. Link: An action happens because of thing the other team proposes
      3. Internal Link: This action leads to a certain consequence.
      4. Impact: This consequence is bad because of these reasons.

      Counterarguments can take the form, then, of negating any of the above steps. A No Link is that the action won’t happen. A No Internal Link is that the action won’t lead to the consequence. A No Impact is that the consequence isn’t bad.

      Your outrage pump is simply people taking one of the components above and asserting that as the entire argument. Sometimes the person actually hasn’t thought through the “so what?”s, or sometimes the rest of the argument is implied. Or, outside of the context of an actual debate, it’s just a shibboleth, where the one part is a short hand for the rest of the argument, which those in the know should know.

      • Iago the Yerfdog says:

        Fascinating. I’ve never had any experience with formal debating, so to see it laid out systematically like this is pretty cool.

  39. johan_larson says:

    Here in Toronto, housing prices over the last fifty years have generally increased. They haven’t gone up consistently every year, but the general trend is upward. Things seem to work the same way in other desirable cities: the rent is never too damn low.

    The government can do a lot to affect housing prices. They control land use through zoning regulations, and they greatly influence who can afford to buy homes through rules about mortgages. Also, having housing prices go up or down is not universally good or bad. Rising housing prices is good for owners, but bad for renters; falling prices, vice versa. If we accept that the government should continue to greatly affect housing prices, that raises the question of what they should be aiming for. Rising prices or falling? And how much? Is there some optimal answer here?

    I’m thinking the right target might be trying to keep property values are approximately level. If you buy property, live in it, maintain it (including the occasional renovation), and then sell it at some point later, you will generally get your money back. You won’t get more or less, just what you originally spent (plus inflation?). If you wanted to make money in real estate, buying wouldn’t be the way, unless you could spot some exceptional deals. To make money in real estate, you would need to rent it out, build it, renovate it, or sell it.

    Is there some problem with this I’m not seeing?

    • sharper13 says:

      Maybe what you define as “desirable” cities is ones which elect politicians trying to restrict growth, but many metro areas have somewhat flat housing prices when adjusted for inflation, especially if you take sq. footage into account. For example, Charlotte is price-wise within 10% of what it was 30+ years ago, at more than double average square footage. Toronto, NY and SF are among the most restrictive in North America, I’d estimate.

      Here’s an overview and here’s a page with some good charts to compare areas.

    • eric23 says:

      Level prices is one positive outcome, for reasons similar to what you say.

      Low prices in places you prefer people to live is another positive outcome. This could mean large cities (where people are most economically productive), or maybe suburban areas (if you think cities are psychologically bad due to lack of nature or whatever).

      Lack of zoning is also a positive because it increases the extent of people’s rights to their own property. (I am talking about zoning density restrictions, not restrictions on noise/pollution which affect neighbors)

    • FrankistGeorgist says:

      If you buy property, live in it, maintain it (including the occasional renovation), and then sell it at some point later, you will generally get your money back. You won’t get more or less, just what you originally spent (plus inflation?) If you wanted to make money in real estate, buying wouldn’t be the way, unless you could spot some exceptional deals. To make money in real estate, you would need to rent it out, build it, renovate it, or sell it.

      So you want to encourage people to invest in their physical property and reap the reward from it. And you want to avoid wasteful land speculation where people reap windfalls by restricting rather than expanding the supply of housing in a market. Why the answer is Georgism and specifically the Land Value Tax. But good luck trying that.

      It maybe works okay if you force it on people, but people like when land values rise and they reap a huge windfall on their house. It’s one of those cases where huge windfalls can sometimes accrue to normal people like granny just for being a pillar of her community for 40 years. At the same time, people are very sad when they are forced to move from their own land because it’s become too expensive and their only recompense is hundreds of thousands of dollars and to watch their childhood home bulldozed for more “efficient” tower blocks. There’s also the secret that on the whole real estate isn’t really that great of an investment, but it is warped to an extreme degree in some cities because that’s where market forces are pushing people.

      In Georgism, rising land values accrue to the municipal government, which is also unpopular. By what right does the state claim that value, and why does that top the interests of the individuals who actually own the land? In your case, why does the state get to run roughshod and push down values to deprive their citizens of it? At least in a Georgist situation the state is simply taking the difference in land value for themselves, in yours that value has to be destroyed or dispersed somehow.

      If your interest is in keeping value roughly flat, how much variation is acceptable? And how do you calculate what’s unearned and what’s a real investment by the landlord? If it rises faster than a hypothetical municipal government can control it, the result is individual landowners getting a little richer. They’ll like that, even if renters feel the crunch. There are definitely things which decrease land value, and a municipality which made it their goal to introduce them wherever value was rising too fast would be kicked out of office very quickly by the “don’t-salt-the-earth” party. Even by renters, who want to live in high value places – that’s why the value is so high. The government could I guess mandate obscene amounts of building to keep pace with increasing value – but at some point to keep up with it they’ll just become the landlord themselves, which I’m told works okay in Vienna, Singapore, and Hong Kong. I suspect it worked less well in Moscow, and America’s state owned housing looks more like Moscow than Vienna.

      Especially in America, saying “we’ll make sure your house doesn’t increase in value” is basically telling people “we’re going to tank your largest investment.” Now again, maybe real estate isn’t what you want people investing in, maybe you wish they’d invest in stocks and bonds, but people still won’t like it. Perhaps Canada is less enamored with the legend of homesteading.

      Asides:
      I was shocked to find out that Denmark, which has a Land Value Tax, actually has comparable rates of homeownership to the US – though it’s stagnated recently where elsewhere the rate has risen. South Korea also has one but has a rate 10% lower. I’ve heard Germany is a nation of renters, with a rate similar to South Korea, and doesn’t particularly suffer for it, so there’s probably more than one way to skin the cat of housing people.

      And as sharper13 says, how much housing you’re getting is also not necessarily the same across time. I could rant for hours on how we’ve made flophouses illegal.

      • yodelyak says:

        What’s your 5-minute version of the flophouse rant? I would read that with interest.

        • FrankistGeorgist says:

          The simplest version is culled from Christopher Jencks The Homeless. Basically there was once a kaleidoscope of awful low end temporary housing, of which flophouses were themselves at the lower end beneath boarding houses, “cages”, “barracks,” and dormitories. This whole realm of housing has been gradually eroded in slum clearances and zoning, by hook or by crook, pushing poor people in 2 directions, into bigger housing outside their price range, or onto the street. If the same magnanimous society insists that people not be housed in filth, then they should at least see that the result of that insistence isn’t people being UNhoused in filth. Shelters have all the problems flop houses do, except there’s no more competition, profit motive, or sufficient supply. By forcing everyone together (and oh hey, here comes the 90s and deinstitutionalization) the worst influences dominate. Now you can’t work your way up the ladder of awful housing, all the bottom rungs are cut off.

          • CatCube says:

            I think another effect of minimums imposed by building codes is to make the problem of dishonest landlords at the bottom end worse. Not to say that always hasn’t been a problem, but it probably moves the bottom-end dishonesty up the chain, because it makes the price at which an honest landlord can make a buck much higher.

            If the landlord isn’t pulling in enough to keep up with the maintenance, they have very little incentive to put any of that money back into the building. Assume that you have an honest landlord that takes only a modest salary for himself out of the rent and plows the rest back in to repair what he can, which brings it up to, say 75% of the code minimums. He doesn’t get a pat on the head and an “attaboy” for making things better; he gets a citation for that missing 25%. The dishonest one keeps all of the rent and gets just as cursed as the honest guy. When the rent coming in will never pay to get it to 100%, you may as well keep 100% of it and never touch a bit of maintenance.

    • Ninety-Three says:

      If we accept that the government should continue to greatly affect housing prices, that raises the question of what they should be aiming for.

      Is there some problem with this I’m not seeing?

      What are the voters pressuring them to aim for? Even if we could agree that it is in some sense objectively optimal for a government to aim for prices at X% of median income for Y square feet, the government’s not going to do that. They’re going to check whether more homeowners or renters are willing to elect a candidate on housing policy, and then drive prices up or down accordingly.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Zero return only makes sense if there’s also zero risk. However, that’s not the biggest issue; the biggest issue is the side effects of policies designed to affect rents and property prices. The law of supply and demand bites you in the butt almost no matter what you do: given limited supply (which always exists to some extent) places that become desirable are going to go up in price and places that become undesirable are going to go down. So, once you’ve opened up supply as much as possible, the policies which reduce prices are mostly going to be those which make the places less desirable. If you try direct interventions (e.g. price controls), you can get prices to go down but you end up with shortages (e.g. New York City’s lottery system for affordable housing).

    • AlesZiegler says:

      Why should the government attempt to limit housing supply in the interests of homeowners, who are not exactly a disadvantaged group?

      • EchoChaos says:

        Because homeowners vote pretty aggressively relative to other groups and government likes remaining in power.

      • arbitraryvalue says:

        It’s a natural consequence of the fact that politicians representing an area are elected by people who live in that area, not people who would like to live in that area but can’t. And IMO there’s nothing wrong with that.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          But an area which is in effect empowered to set its own immigration restrictions should not be arbitrarily small. I lean towards the position that should be huge, although there are certainly good arguments against it. Like, um, infectious diseases.

    • baconbits9 says:

      The government can do a lot to affect housing prices. They control land use through zoning regulations, and they greatly influence who can afford to buy homes through rules about mortgages. Also, having housing prices go up or down is not universally good or bad. Rising housing prices is good for owners, but bad for renters; falling prices, vice versa. If we accept that the government should continue to greatly affect housing prices, that raises the question of what they should be aiming for. Rising prices or falling? And how much? Is there some optimal answer here?

      Housing prices on their own aren’t particularly informative, certainly in the US. Almost all homes are bought with mortgages, so the cost of home ownership is the amount you have to borrow * interest rate + local taxes + insurance. Discussions of housing prices where borrowing is the primary tool require a discussion of interest rates to really understand what is going on.

    • If we accept that the government should continue to greatly affect housing prices

      Just say no.

      • I don’t mean to sound rude or flippant here, but to a lot of us this is like a conversation of “if we are going to wage wars of conquest, who do we invade.”

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Keeping housing prices level might be equivalent to imposing a loss, considering the costs of selling and moving, and in many cases, the costs of a new place.

      Also, does this mean the government should be somehow supporting the prices of houses in places where people no longer want to live?

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        I think the point Johan is trying to make here is that government (which, in this context will mostly be municipal government) should consider rising home prices a problem and try to address them by supporting the creation of more housing, instead of – as happens far to frequently currently – holding it up as a good news.

    • GreatColdDistance says:

      I think it depends why prices are going up or down. Prices going up because the area is such a nice place to live that everyone wants to move here is good, prices going up because there is artificially limited supply is bad. Prices going down because lots of good housing is being produced at reasonable costs is good, prices going down because the area is going to shit is bad.

      Therefore I think the gov shouldn’t target to make prices higher or lower, but rather target to make housing more available while making the area more desirable. The two effects will cancel each other out to a certain extent, so a gov pursuing good policy may end up driving prices up or down.

    • ana53294 says:

      If you buy property, live in it, maintain it (including the occasional renovation), and then sell it at some point later, you will generally get your money back. You won’t get more or less, just what you originally spent (plus inflation?).

      While year on year changes in house prices probably do not reflect increases on value, decade on decade, houses do go up in value.

      Just maintaining a house is not enough. Even if we find a way to put a new house in stasis, so nothing gets damaged or degraded, in fifty years, it won’t be very desirable housing. It won’t have 15 G internet stands, automatic house cleaning, and no automatic cooking kitchen.

      The thing is, at least in the last three centuries, houses have been improving: they have toilets, baths, showers, round-the-clock hot water, electric/gas ovens/stoves, glass windows, electrical lightning, heating, automatic heating, and many other things.

      For example, my brother, who bought a home with a perfectly functional electrical system, had to change the whole thing, and the walls had to be tore down to get to the tubes that contain the cables because it turns out they were a fire hazard.

      Houses are not just maintained; houses are improved. Some additions, like toilets, are visible; some, like non-flammable walls, are less visible, but still improvements. Some changes in house building are of course not improvements (linoleum rather than tile/wood), but I would still prefer to live in a house with a linoleum floor and drywall walls with modern plumbing and an electrical system that a solid nice brick house with wood floors and no electricity.

  40. Gwythr says:

    Long-time lurker here. If I want to ask for a personal\psychological advice about a situation only tangentially related to the ideas of this community, is a whole-numbered open thread a good place to do so, or it’s better to go to subreddit?

    • Tarpitz says:

      Either is fine, but why not both? The commenter populations are significantly different.

    • Anteros says:

      I don’t see why it would need to be a whole-numbered open thread. Ask away 😀

  41. Teldaru says:

    Real life math problem that I am apparently too stupid to solve:

    A betting site is giving me 2:1 odds that A happens and 3:1 odds that B happens (A and B are mutually exclusive). This is the equivalent of them saying that the chance P(A or B) happening is less than 33+25=58%, right? If I am very sure that P(A or B) is say at least 70%, but I don’t know if they are underestimating P(A) or P(B) or both, then how should I bet 100 bucks in a way that wins me money if I am estimating P(A or B) correctly?

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      The problem isn’t quite specified enough to calculate what strategy will give you the maximum expected return – to give a perfect answer, you’d need to make rough guesses at the relative likelihoods of A and B.

      But if we’re just looking for something where the missing information doesn’t matter, you could bet 4/7 of your money on A and 3/7 on B so that whichever comes up, you’re going to end up with 12/7 of your original stake; 70% * 12/7 is 120%, so you definitely have an expected profit of 20%.

      • Teldaru says:

        No, this doesn’t work. the odds are 2:1 and 3:1, not 3:1 and 4:1 as you are implying.

        To do what you say I should put 3/5 on A and 2/5 on B so I end up with 6/5 either way. But 70% of 6/5 is less than my stake, so it’s not a winning bet.

        • Jon S says:

          Tatterdemalion has it right. If you bet $4 on A and A happens, you get back $12 (you get your original $4 returned, plus the $8 payout at 2:1 odds).

          • Teldaru says:

            Yep, I was confusing fractional odds with decimal odds in my mind and messed it up. Thanks!

  42. Mark V Anderson says:

    The third book on intelligence I read recently.

    Intelligence: All That Matters (2015) By Stuart Ritchie

    This book was recommended by albatross. I have found this very short book to be essentially just a summary/update of the first part of The Bell Curve, where it was explained why IQ testing is so important. At one place in the book, they describe the book as an introduction to the subject. That makes sense too. But the book is far too short to be convincing in their view on IQs in the face of so much withering criticism by others. I am convinced of this view, but only because The Bell Curve, with its overwhelming data, does the job for me. So this book is good, but I would have preferred it to be more substantial. But one benefit of it being so short is it does help to have this book around when I am looking for “pro-IQ” positions.

    I didn’t much like the title, especially since he explicitly stated that there are plenty of other factors that matter as much as intelligence. But then I realized that “All That Matters” is a series of books on many different subjects, not one chosen by Ritchie in particular.

    I found the last section of the book, called “100 Ideas,” to be very useful. Amongst other things, he lists other books on IQ that would be interesting, both pro- and anti- IQ, several papers of interest, and a list of 10 important questions to be answered with more research. Unfortunately I’ve only been able to get free access on the Internet to three of the ten papers listed.

    • Purplehermann says:

      Glad to see you aren’t using https://sci-hub.tw/ to get access to any and all scientific papers despite all the great reasons to do so 😉

      • albatross11 says:

        Yes, definitely don’t do that–it would be totally unethical to deprive the scientific publishers of their monopoly rents extracted from the free labor of academics who do the actual research and the peer review well-deserved revenue.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        I had heard one could do this, but I didn’t know how. I tried this for one paper and it did work! Although one “paper” was being sold as a book — I don’t think it will work for that?
        https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Introduction-Ian-J-Deary/dp/0192893211

        • Purplehermann says:

          That is wonderful horrible.
          What you shouldn’t do is use it for papers that are on-site, just behind a paywall.

          With books from amazon though the data of the book’s contents isn’t on site so that link wouldn’t find anything to extract, you can’t use the link even if you wanted to

        • sksnsvbanap says:

          Whatever you do, don’t search for those books on https://libgen.is

    • ChangingTime says:

      I didn’t much like the title, especially since he explicitly stated that there are plenty of other factors that matter as much as intelligence. But then I realized that “All That Matters” is a series of books on many different subjects, not one chosen by Ritchie in particular.

      This trips a lot of people up, especially with a topic as controversial among laymen as intelligence. It’s supposed to be read “this is all that matters with regard to intelligence” and not “intelligence is all that matters”. As you say, there are several of these books, and they’re supposed to essentially be a slightly-higher-brow ‘dummy’s guide to ‘. Concise, to the point, and interesting while conveying as much of an introduction to a topic as possible.

      Also – much thanks for doing these reviews. I’m interested in more to come.

  43. Well... says:

    Assuming Trump wins reelection (which I personally would not bet against at this point), what happens to the Democratic party on November 4th, the day after the election? What changes? What stays the same? What will they be telling themselves, or arguing amongst themselves about?

    • theodidactus says:

      It’s easier at this point for either side to just say the other side cheated than change anything substantive.

      • If Bernie is the nominee and loses, the party establishment says “told you so.”

        If Biden is the nominee and loses, the Sanders people say “if only you had chosen Bernie.” The party establishment says “It’s the fault of those damned Sanders people for staying home instead of voting for Biden.”

        • Ninety-Three says:

          “It’s the fault of those damned Sanders people for staying home instead of voting for Biden.”

          Unlike “It would’ve been different with a different candidate”, isn’t that a verifiable claim? I thought we had polling data from the last election about how many Bernie voters stayed home: compare that to the margins the candidate lost by and you can tell if it’s true.

          Are you saying it’ll be true, or that facts don’t matter and the establishment will say it regardless?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I think the only way to verify an election is to run an election. Sure, you can count up Bernie voters who stayed home, but you would also need to count up the centrist voters who voted for Biden, but had Bernie been on the ballot would have said “no, I don’t want to lose my private health insurance and be forced on Medicare” and either stayed home or held their nose and voted for Trump.

            The best evidence that the 2nd place primary finisher could not win the general election is that he or she could not win the primary election.

          • albatross11 says:

            I don’t think this is always true. It’s possible to have your primary voters far enough to the left / right of the majority that the person who came in second in the primary would have done better in the general election.

          • lvlln says:

            “It’s the fault of those damned Sanders people for staying home instead of voting for Biden.”

            Unlike “It would’ve been different with a different candidate”, isn’t that a verifiable claim? I thought we had polling data from the last election about how many Bernie voters stayed home: compare that to the margins the candidate lost by and you can tell if it’s true.

            It seems that the claim

            “If all the Sanders supporters who would’ve voted in the general election if Sanders were the nominee had voted for Biden in the general election, then Biden would have won”

            is a verifiable claim. Hard to verify since tracking down all those Sanders supporters and counting them up in each state is hard, but theoretically verifiable.

            But saying that it’s the fault of Sanders people isn’t just a statement of fact, it’s one of responsibility and culpability. In calling it their “fault,” that necessarily implies that those Sanders people had some sort of positive responsibility to actively go out and vote for Biden in the general election and they failed in fulfilling that responsibility.

            I find this questionable. My view is that voters are free to vote or not vote for anyone or no one for any reason or no reason, beholden entirely and only to the arbitrary whims and preferences of the individual voter. Voters are responsible to themselves and *only* to themselves when choosing who to vote or not to vote for. And therefore voters can’t be considered to be at “fault” for the results of their choice of voting or not voting for anyone. At best, they can be said to be causally responsible for someone winning or not winning.

        • acymetric says:

          If Biden is the nominee and loses, the Sanders people say “if only you had chosen Bernie.” The party establishment says “It’s the fault of those damned Sanders people for staying home instead of voting for Biden.”

          This is 100% accurate, and I can imagine a serious split (maybe enough to create a moderately sized third party) in the Democratic party as a result.

    • GreatColdDistance says:

      I think this depends pretty fundamentally on who they nominate and what kind of campaign they run. Given how it looks likely that Biden will win the nomination, I suspect his loss will be taken as a vindication for the socialist left and idpols who will frame it as the obvious result of nominating a centrist old straight white male. “There are no swing voters” and “progressive policy fires up the base to get out to vote” will be the narrative, and the next nominee will likely be further left and *feel* further left.

      Whereas if Sanders wins the nomination and gets stomped, it’ll be all about how we can’t count on youth turnout, and we need to appeal to moderate voters and swing voters in order to win. It will be pretty devastating for the socialist left, if they can’t even beat the most unpopular president in American history. Frankly, given how unlikely it seems to be that Sanders would win the general (after seeing his youth turnout on Super Tuesday) I suspect the cause of democratic socialism in the US would be better served in the medium term by him losing the nomination.

      • acymetric says:

        It will be pretty devastating for the socialist left, if they can’t even beat the most unpopular president in American history.

        It would be devastating, regardless, but is he the most unpopular president in American history? I can believe that he is the most hated by the people that don’t like him in history, but I’m not sure I believe he is the most unpopular.

        • EchoChaos says:

          but is he the most unpopular president in American history?

          No. Not even close.

          The lowest in the post-war period was Truman during the Korean war at 22% approval and 67% disapproval. Trump’s lowest is 35% (same as Reagan) and his highest disapproval is 60.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_approval_rating

          Edit: Note that Trump is unusual in the low size of the spread of his approval ratings.

        • GreatColdDistance says:

          Yeah sorry I drafted this comment off the top of my head, was thinking of things I’ve seen about how unprecedented it is that his approval ratings have consistently been so low, but looking into it the way I phrased it was unclear, sorry about that. I think the point still stands if you replace the sentence with “if they can’t even beat such a remarkably unpopular president”.

          EDIT: Actually JK, I retract my retraction. Looking at the link EchoChaos shared it looks like Trump has had the lowest average approval rating of a president by a significant margin since they started polling the question, which I think is a better measure of who is the “most unpopular president” then highlighting the lowest trough their approval hits. Truman is the next lowest and his average approval is 5 points higher than Trump even though his lowest point is lower.

          It is very fair to point out that there’s lots of presidents from before they started polling who very well could have been more unpopular, and that makes such claims quite sketch. I do think that calling something “the biggest X in history” implies “the biggest X in history that we have such records of”. Perhaps I should revise the sentence to be “It will be pretty devastating for the socialist left, if they can’t even beat a president who can credibly be called the most unpopular president in American history.” or “the most unpopular president in recent history”.

          • Wency says:

            “Looking at the link EchoChaos shared it looks like Trump has had the lowest average approval rating of a president by a significant margin since they started polling the question”

            This seems to be about true — the area of red space on the graphs. Though if you just look at certain Presidents’ 2nd terms, the average seems to be lower.

            Certain pre-FDR Presidents may have been less popular if a poll were taken, but I have to think that in eras with lower levels of communication technology, opinions on the President were just not as strong all around. You likely never heard him speak, might not even recognize his face, government was smaller, cultural issues were less prominent. Also you were busier and had bigger problems.

      • Deiseach says:

        It will be pretty devastating for the socialist left, if they can’t even beat the most unpopular president in American history.

        “Most unpopular” until the next one comes along. Someone remind me, how many “most unpopular/worst president in American history” are we up to now? In my own lifetime (from 196x onwards) there have been:

        Lyndon B. Johnson – I think he got some criticism for Vietnam
        Richard M. Nixon – Good ol’ Tricky Dicky?
        Gerald Ford – I do seem to remember some mockery about him being either stupid and/or clumsy and accident-prone, and there were two assassination attempts so somebody disliked him
        Jimmy Carter – too religious, too Southern, undistinguished and accusations of financial impropriety
        Ronald Reagan – Bonzo Goes To Bitburg, remember?
        Bush I – this guy thinks there may be one or two small things amiss
        Bill Clinton – ahem
        Bush II – yes, there was certainly never any “Chimpy McHitler” type commentary that I can recall

        And that brings us up nicely to Obama and Trump!

    • albatross11 says:

      I think political discussion of that kind is like 99% instrumental, so the narrative that people push will be entirely based on what outcome they’re hoping for.

    • BBA says:

      Three words: Taylor Swift 2024.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        My first thought was, But you have to be 35. But Oh My God she will be.

        • Don P. says:

          “I won’t be old enough to be President on Election Day 2024, but I will be by Inauguration Day” said Taylor, prematurely.

      • LesHapablap says:

        Joe Rogan 2024: Whoa! It’s kinda like ju jitsu

        • albatross11 says:

          Rogan will be good on his feet, but I think he’ll need to work more on his ground game to get elected.

      • Bobobob says:

        Is Martin Shkreli out of jail yet?

      • AG says:

        Yo, BBA, I’m really happy for you. I’mma let you finish, but Taylor is gonna have to beat one of the best rappers of all time!

        • EchoChaos says:

          Anyone who predicted Taylor Swift v. Kayne West having Swift as the Democrat and West as the Republican needs to share their drugs.

    • Clutzy says:

      I’d assume very little.

      In most scenarios of a Trump win, the Democratic candidate will win the popular vote, or be very close. This plus the NY/DC/SF/LA echo chamber and majority Dem representation in news Dems are exposed to means nothing changes for the perception of the elites of the party. Both Bernie and Biden are white males, either losing reinforces the idea that diversity is the future. Biden’s loss can be written off as senility, Bernie’s loss can be written off as lack of enough neoliberalism. Both are already majority opinions of the powerful parties in the Dem sphere.

      If you think of the 2012 Republican “autopsy” it was just a bunch of things Republican elites already wanted, but Trump won despite not being anything like what that prescribed. He wasn’t a 1-off. The 2014 results are more of the same. New Republican senators in 2014 were hardly autopsy-friendly. People like Tom Cotton, Dan Sullivan, Perdue, Ernst, & Moore are basically the antithesis of that whitepaper. But most Republican commentators are not ACELA, they are not on the Big 4 networks, etc. So the changes were not top down.

      Contrast that with the Dems, and they have very few outlets that would give them a narrative to change to. Perhaps if it is Biden and he lost big, the AOC wing could gain some power, but that is a very low probability event. Probably around 2%, unless there is some huge outside factor which could be blamed anyways.

      • acymetric says:

        Biden’s loss can be written off as senility, Bernie’s loss can be written off as lack of enough neoliberalism. Both are already majority opinions of the powerful parties in the Dem sphere.

        The powerful Dems think Biden is too senile to run? Than why has he been the party leadership’s preferred candidate since before he even entered the race?

        • gudamor says:

          Perhaps it is best not to model groups of people as a single entity. Some arguments against a monolithic “powerful dems” preference include the New York Times endorsement of both Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren, changing Primary Debate criteria to allow Bloomberg participation, and the lack of endorsement by Hillary/Barack.

        • Clutzy says:

          I’m fairly certain all or most powerful Dems preferred if Kamala or Warren or Pete had really connected with the people and become the leader after Super Tuesday. But it didn’t turn out like that because Kamala is the worst campaigner, Warren doesn’t appeal to anyone who ever got sent to the principal’s office, and minorities still generally hate gays. So they were left with the option of old Joe vs. independent socialist Bernie. So they picked 1 of the 2 options left. That this option has a built in excuse for losing doesn’t change my point.

          Edit:

          One thing to point out that people don’t really understand about the R-D difference is that there was no Biden option for Republican elites to choose. The alternate was Cruz who the establishment hates as well.

    • If Trump wins, there’s going to be a serious crisis of perceived legitimacy. Ilhan Omar already refers to Trump as the “occupant of the White House” rather than the President, a sentiment which would spread further. Schumer is threatening Supreme Court justices. What happens when conservatives get a more decisive judicial majority? I seriously expect people to advocate defying the Supreme Court, as it’s an “illegitimate” institution. I’m not sure how else this perceived legitimacy issue manifests but people are creative.

      • gbdub says:

        Winning twice makes him less legitimate?

        • I don’t know whether Trump really changed peoples beliefs or whether it was hidden because no one was threatening the system, but it’s pretty clear that a non-trivial number of leftists don’t view democracy as actually giving legitimacy. Legitimacy is derived from their beliefs being enacted. I remember there was an article from a guy who said something like “racists” shouldn’t be allowed to vote. I’m sure people will tell me that he’s just one guy but it seems more like he’s saying the quiet part out loud. The longer Trump is in office, the more of a threat he is. Of course, he isn’t actually doing all that much but it’s the perception that matters.

          • herbert herberson says:

            but it’s pretty clear that a non-trivial number of leftists don’t view democracy as actually giving legitimacy.

            This is silly. The central plank in the leftist case for Trump’s illegitimacy is his substantial popular vote loss. The center-left adds in the Russiagate stuff, which for a lot of rank and file voters includes a belief that votes may have been hacked.

            The left doesn’t think the electoral college has legitimacy, and sneers at the whole idea that the founding era counter-majoritarian framework is worth revering or upholding, but democracy itself? It’s clear that it places far more value in that than the center and the right–note, for example, how prominent and panicked the discussion about the Popular Vote Compact was at CPAC this year.

          • Aapje says:

            Would they feel that their own president lacked legitimacy if he or she lost the popular vote? You can only show that you have principles if there is an actual cost to it.

          • Matt M says:

            The left doesn’t seem particularly inclined to respect the popular vote results in Georgia.

            And they sure do seem to complain a lot about gerrymandering, which is, at its core, an attempt to ensure “majority rules” at the state level.

          • Loriot says:

            It seems unlikely we’ll ever find out, but I suspect that most Democrats would quickly learn to love the electoral college and most Republicans would call for its abolition.

            >And they sure do seem to complain a lot about gerrymandering, which is, at its core, an attempt to ensure “majority rules” at the state level.

            Huh? It’s literally an attempt to ensure that one faction can stay in power with a minority of the votes.

          • Matt M says:

            You can’t gerrymander unless you were elected by statewide majority popular vote in the first place.

          • Loriot says:

            Yes, but we generally don’t include “one person, one vote, one time” when we talk about “democracy”.

            To pick a more extreme example, would you consider Russia to be a democracy? Putin did win a fair vote at some point. But campaigning against his de-facto dictatorship now doesn’t mean you’re against democracy.

          • acymetric says:

            And they sure do seem to complain a lot about gerrymandering, which is, at its core, an attempt to ensure “majority rules” at the state level.

            You can’t gerrymander unless you were elected by statewide majority popular vote in the first place.

            No, the point of gerrymandering is to take a statewide majority and turn it into a pretty much impossible to reverse supermajority, which is why in heavily gerrymandered states you get results where 40% of the state votes for a party but they only hold 15-20% of the seats (those are made up numbers, I’ll see if I can find the real numbers which are pretty close to that and share them when I do).

          • Matt M says:

            I’ll go ahead and tap out/retract my comments related to gerrymandering.

            I was under the impression that this process was controlled by the governor, who would always be accountable to a statewide majority voting population.

            But it occurs to me that I may very well be wrong, and that if it’s controlled by the legislature, your objections would be appropriate.

            In any case, I think it remains true that there are instances where the left does not favor a clear and obvious “majority rules” approach to everything. The left is fine with “states rights” if it means California gets to legalize marijuana, etc.

          • acymetric says:

            But it occurs to me that I may very well be wrong, and that if it’s controlled by the legislature, your objections would be appropriate.

            I know you’re tapping out, so this isn’t meant to be piling on but merely informative. Your thought here is correct, so far as I know it is entirely controlled by the legislature. Maybe the governor has to sign the bill, but all that takes is getting one governor from [gerrymandering party] elected to sign it, and then you likely have a veto proof majority going forward barring massive changes to the electorate in your state.

            Source: I have been living this for ~10 years or so.

          • herbert herberson says:

            Would they feel that their own president lacked legitimacy if he or she lost the popular vote? You can only show that you have principles if there is an actual cost to it.

            I don’t much doubt that some hypothetical future left who enjoyed the benefit of counter-majoritarian institutions would manage to cobble together new arguments to justify them.

            But the fact that human beings are usually self-serving and inconsistent doesn’t change the bounds of the current discourse and politics, which has the NPVC promoted almost entirely on blue states and a left that desperately wants to increase voter participation, while “we’re a republic, not a democracy!” discourse and policies that have decreased voter participation as a cost find their home almost entirely on the right. At the absolute most, you can say “no one really has principles when you get down to it”; to suggest that the left is uniquely antidemocratic is agitprop not supported by any real evidence.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            In any case, I think it remains true that there are instances where the left does not favor a clear and obvious “majority rules” approach to everything. The left is fine with “states rights” if it means California gets to legalize marijuana, etc.

            In the last Canadian election Trudeau was re-elected despite the Conservative party winning more votes. No leftist tears over that one.

          • gudamor says:

            @Aapje

            Hillary campaigned as if the popular vote ‘mandate’ mattered to her, and arguably it did cost her the election.

            In fact, the whole chain of comments that assert, evidence-free, that the Democratic party would be hypocritical on this is rather infuriating.

          • Does anyone seriously think anything would be different if Trump had won two percent more of the electorate? Do you think RussiaGate wouldn’t have happened? Would the Democrats have not tried to go through with impeachment? Would they not have cried about “kids in cages”? Would they have refrained from a making a comparison to Hitler every single day? Let’s be honest here.

          • rumham says:

            @gudamor

            In fact, the whole chain of comments that assert, evidence-free, that the Democratic party would be hypocritical on this is rather infuriating.

            -Quizical eybrow raised-
            They are hypocritical. The democratic party runs it’s primary with a disdain for the popular vote…

          • Loriot says:

            blue states and a left that desperately wants to increase voter participation, while “we’re a republic, not a democracy!” discourse and policies that have decreased voter participation as a cost find their home almost entirely on the right.

            See also: The fact that California goes to great lengths to ensure as many people vote as possible, despite the fact that there is no real partisan advantage to doing so.

            They are hypocritical. The democratic party runs it’s primary with a disdain for the popular vote…

            The Democratic primary is much more reflective of the popular vote than the Republican primary, since there are no winner-takes-all states. It’s all proportional. This year, they also got rid of most of the anti-democratic caucuses.

          • rumham says:

            @Loriot

            The Democratic primary is much more reflective of the popular vote than the Republican primary, since there are no winner-takes-all states. It’s all proportional. This year, they also got rid of most of the anti-democratic caucuses.

            Never mentioned the repubs at all, but you are aware of the brokered convention rules the dems have, yes? How does that square with their apparent reverence of the popular vote?

          • Loriot says:

            If it ever comes to a brokered convention, than by definition, democracy failed to come to a consensus, so I’m not sure what you expect in that case. Luckily, that is highly unlikely to ever happen.

      • albatross11 says:

        If the SC continues to shift right, I expect to see a lot of voices on the left, including respectable NYT-type voices, calling for defying the court, and demanding that the people be heard rather than a bunch of unelected judges who are legislating from the bench. Most people don’t have principles, but almost everyone has a side.

        • Garrett says:

          > If the SC continues to shift right

          You mean, towards upholding the Constitution as-written as opposed to as-desired?

          • Elementaldex says:

            I don’t think this comment supports the discussion. What could he respond with that you would consider a good response?

          • albatross11 says:

            I wouldn’t be surprised to see a right-leaning SC make up law in much the same way as was done in Roe, but just for different goals.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            Shelby County v Holder is egregiously in violation of both the spirit and the letter of the 14th amendment. If you want an example of legislating from the bench, it does not get much clearer than that. It also subsequently has been proven to be wrong as to the facts of the ridiculus argument it put forth, and the dissent proven entirely correct.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Shelby County v Holder is egregiously in violation of both the spirit and the letter of the 14th amendment.

            I just read the wikipedia entry on this case. I can imagine someone disagreeing with the decision, but it’s not immediately obvious from what I read that the decision is wrong. Can you please expand?

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/12-96#writing-12-96_DISSENT_5

            The dissent spells it out in painstaking detail. So does the subsequent record of increased voter suppression.

          • rumham says:

            @Thomas Jorgensen

            Shelby County v Holder is egregiously in violation of both the spirit and the letter of the 14th amendment.

            If you read the text of the 14th amendment to include disparate impact claims, do you also take the plain language?

            No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws

            Because I can read that as being against gun control and driver’s licenses a lot more easily than against disparate impact.

          • Loriot says:

            Texas v. United States seems like a pretty clear case of legislating from the bench.

            Congress removed the individual mandate while specifically declining to repeal the rest of the law. Then the Republicans sued arguing that the individual mandate was so important to the law that Congress couldn’t have possibly meant to keep the rest without it and it would be unconstitutional to *only* repeal the individual mandate and therefore the entire law should be struck down.

            Regardless of your political affiliation, I can’t understand how anyone could possibly seriously entertain that argument.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            14th and 15th. Sigh. I should really just copy the entire dissent in here. Ginsburg is far far better at explaining than I am.

            The reconstruction amendments gave congress vast power to intervene against the states in defense of the rights of individuals. That was, and is, their entire point. This is not like the commerce clause being stretched beyond all reason, the entire trust of this part of the constitution is that if necessary, the federal government could damn well take over the entire election apparatus of a state engaging in voting suppression and run it directly and that would be constitutional. The ERA was a very restrained and effective exercise of this power, that passed congress 98 to 0.
            Then the supreme court decided to rewrite it on its own recognizance with no goddamn justification in precedent nor the text of the constitution which is not on its face farcical.

            Seriously, congress should have impeached all five justices that put their names to this for disgracing the office. Still should.

          • vrostovtsev says:

            Roberts puts the argument for the decision in Holder pretty well.
            “the Act imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs”. The cries of ‘voter suppression’ are heard every time anyone tries to curb the voting fraud and they are as unconvincing as ever.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            Did you read Ginsburgs dissent?
            Do that, then be mortally embarrassed that you were fooled by that argument.

            Again, 14th and 15th are not narrow grants of power, they are sweeping ones enacted in the shadow of the civil war to bring extremely recalcitrant southern states to heel as regards civil rights.

            The only limitation on them is that legislation authorized under them must be appropriate measures towards the ends of civil rights. – that is, if you were building roads under this penumbra, the court could call bullshit. But the VRA did not have that problem.

          • vrostovtsev says:

            As for Texas v United states, the real mistake was upholding the ACA farce in Sebellius, and maybe the Court will finally correct it.

          • vrostovtsev says:

            I did read Ginsburg’s dissent and like most Ginsburg’s dissents it’s unconvincing.

            Again, you can’t use the problems of post-civil war era to endlessly push the overreaching federal legislation. Imposing undue burdens on the states requires continuous justification.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            *blink* “and you cant use the defense needs of the post revolutionary war to endlessly push gun rights” is an argument you would accept? The reconstruction amendments are damn well as fully a part of the constitution as the rest of them.

            and also… Ginsburg took that argument apart. Seriously, read it again.
            The only way to still be “burdened” by paragraph five of the vra is if you filed proposed regulations within the last ten years which the feds found to be discriminatory in intent, otherwise you can just use the exit clause. If you have tried to write discriminatory legislation within the last ten years, the feds are damn well entitled to keep an eye on you.

          • vrostovtsev says:

            It would improve this discussion (and any discussion really) if you would stop assuming that re-reading Ginsburg will brind some sort of enlightnment to the other side. I am glad you like her argument but as I mentioned above, it is simply not convincing to me. It wasn’t to Roberts either.

            As for why the section 5 is burdensome, I think Black put it very well in his opinion in Katzenbach:

            “Section 5, by providing that some of the States cannot pass state laws or adopt state constitutional amendments without first being compelled to beg federal authorities to approve their policies, so distorts our constitutional structure of government as to render any distinction drawn in the Constitution between state and federal power almost meaningless”.

            It’s pretty obvious also that your argument is another form of ‘law-abiding [X] have nothing to fear from [overreaching Y of the state] which is pretty tiresome.

            (I won’t engage with your argument against 2nd amendment for the question is not with 14th or 15th amendments here but one specific overreaching law.)

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            .. My second amendment argument was just a straight reframing of your argument to an area of law in which I was pretty darn sure your biases fell on the other side, in an attempt to get some actual thought going instead of just reflexive partisanship. It is goddamn terrible, because your original argument was terrible.

            And yes, the VRA tramples all over state power. The constitution explicitly empowers congress to do that where needed to enforce civil rights. Pointing that out is not even an argument? I did read the majority, it is just, to be extremely polite, very bad.

          • vrostovtsev says:

            >And yes, the VRA tramples all over state power. The constitution explicitly empowers congress to do that.
            No it does not. It empowers the congress to pass the appropriate legislation. Black seems to think ( and I agree ) that distorting the structure of government is not an appropriate measure.

            > The constitution explicitly empowers congress to do that where needed to enforce civil rights.
            And the Supremes challenged the Congress to clearly define this ‘where needed’ part. Roberts spells it clearly:

            ” To serve that purpose, Congress—if it is to divide the States—must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions. It cannot rely simply on the past. ”

            > My second amendment argument was just a straight reframing of your argument
            it was, but you applied it to an amendment instead of a single law. I won’t dispute that some amendments have deep roots in the era when they were enacted, this is true for both 2nd and 15th — but the concerns that amendments addresses, such as the loss of freedom and security of the state or denial the parts of the citizenry its right to vote — the concerns are timeless. Therefore ‘it is just an expression of a concern of its time’ is not a good argument against an amendment. It is however a good argument against a radically overreaching law that was enacted as an extreme measure to combat the deficiencies of its year.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            … I find it really difficult to take the undue burden thing seriously, since assuming good faith on behalf of the states, it basically amounted to a requirement that states not do electoral regulations at the last minute.

            Given the long and fresh history of dire harm the VRA fought, that is entirely acceptable.

            There is also the fact that, well, as soon as it was gone, a bunch of these places started playing stupid games again. The south is growing in population, but it is loosing polling places, and that is already quite a bloody dire problem.

            I have mentioned this in other contexts, but I am not american. And watching footage of elections with 7 hour queues *on workdays* just blatantly stands out as an attempt to keep people from voting, full stop. I have never in 24 years of voting in every election that came up seen a polling queue of more than five people. This is not a difficult level of access to achieve if you want voting to be easy.

          • Aapje says:

            @Thomas Jorgensen

            Isn’t a major issue that there is a shortage of people who volunteer to be a poll worker and/or who are willing to work for little compensation, that many poll workers refuse to attend training (or are simply not competent enough) and that quite a few don’t show up for work?

            This seems to be a worse problem in non-white/poor neighborhoods.

            ^Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity incompetence.^

            I have never in 24 years of voting in every election that came up seen a polling queue of more than five people. This is not a difficult level of access to achieve if you want voting to be easy.

            I haven’t either, but there seem to be very many competent Dutch people who are willing to volunteer to work the poll. Perhaps many Americans merely want to volunteer their labor for a specific candidate/party, but few want to contribute to uphold the democratic system itself.

          • Aapje says:

            @Thomas Jorgensen

            Also:

            The south is growing in population, but it is loosing polling places, and that is already quite a bloody dire problem.

            Volunteering seems to be down in general, but more so in rural and suburban areas, which are probably more common in the south.

            What you see as a conspiracy, may just be a consequence of people volunteering less often, at the expense of volunteer-dependent institutions.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Given the long and fresh history of dire harm the VRA fought, that is entirely acceptable.

            I did read most of Ginsburg’s dissent, and I havent read the majority opinion, but I think I get most of the issues at this point. Ginsburg certainly makes a strong case that the VRA has been very useful in preserving minority voting rights. And I found her criticism of the majority most relevant when she discussed how the equal sovereignty principle only applied when states joined the union (I dont know anything about that but I will defer to RGB on this).

            But my understanding of the majority decision is that s. 4b) of the VRA was a formula for deciding whether states were subject to pre-clearance was based on data that was out of date. Ok, that’s reasonable and easily fixed right? Get new data, and re-legislate. Pre-clearance might be useful and in compliance with the 14th and 15th amendment, but it’s still an extraordinary measure, and should not be mandated unless supported by recent data. That doesnt seem to be “legislating from the bench” to me. That’s more like “you want to impose this extraordinary measure, then do your homework properly, cross the Ts and dot the Is”. If I’m understanding the majority wrong here, please let me know.

            In contrast, Roe v Wade said “oh look here, we found a whole new part of the constitution. where? oh in the ‘penumbra’. What’s the penumbra? it’s a poetic word for a partial shadow. And guess what, we hereby declare that the constitution is a “living document”, very poetic right? So now if something that’s not in the constitution but we want it to be, we just say it is.

            Also, Roe v. Wade doesnt say that the prohibition against abortion can be legislated in certain circumstances (say by updating the data for a 40 year old formula). It closes the door completely on that. Imagine if Roberts and the others in the majority said “We found a right for states to discriminate against minorities in the penumbra of the constitution. Therefore s. 4 and 5 of the VRA are unconstitutional.” You would need to overturn that decision to re-enact the VRA, not just update an old formula. That would be “legislating from the bench.”

          • Aftagley says:

            @Thomas Jorgensen

            For what it’s worth, I’d never read Ginsburg’s dissent on this one until you linked if and I’m now convinced this is a travesty.

            Therefore ‘it is just an expression of a concern of its time’ is not a good argument against an amendment. It is however a good argument against a radically overreaching law that was enacted as an extreme measure to combat the deficiencies of its year.

            The “year” you’re describing here would be the most recent year that congress determined the law was necessary and reauthorized it, so 2006.

      • albatross11 says:

        Prediction: If Trump is re-elected, we will continue to see:

        a. Mainstream Democrats and media organs talking about how scary, authoritarian, unbalanced, inept, etc., he is.

        b. Those same mainstream Democrats and media organs will continue supporting broad executive powers, pervasive eavesdropping on Americans, and generally concentrating ever more power in the hands of the guy they keep telling us is a cross between Adolph Hitler and Bozo the Clown.

        I do not understand this pattern, but it seems consistent across all of Trump’s time in office, as well as Bush’s time in office, and to a lesser extend was mirrored by Republicans when Obama was in office.

        • Statismagician says:

          Well, sure. How else is [side] supposed to undo all that bad stuff [other side] did?

      • Deiseach says:

        If Trump wins, there’s going to be a serious crisis of perceived legitimacy.

        Remember when Trump claiming he would not accept the results of the election if he lost as he would consider it rigged was something worthy of mockery and disdain? Then he won, and all the people laughing at him for being a potential sore loser started shouting about “the election was rigged! we don’t accept this result!”

        Ah, humans: we’re stupid.

        • rumham says:

          My mother was one of those. She also has yet to move to Canada as she vowed, despite me offering a Canadian friend of mine to be her sponsor.

        • The difference is that regardless of what people think Trump would have done, Republicans didn’t claim the presidential elections were rigged the times they lost. It used to be a running joke that the Republican establishment didn’t want to win, they wanted to lose “gracefully”. Ever since Trump won, many on the left have been panicking as though he’s the second coming of Hitler. They were already pushing for packing the Supreme Court back when Trump was nominating a guy that basically stuck to the status quo. If he wins again, it’s going to be much worse.

        • DinoNerd says:

          [epistemic status – silly speculation]

          I remember thinking that the best evidence I had for the election being rigged was the eventual winner claiming that it would be rigged – against him. Based on that observation, Trump, who’s closer to the political mechanisms of the US than I am, appeared to believe that elections were a matter of competive rigging, not competitive voting. Also, anyone who claims “the other side is doing <bad thing>” especially stridently, seems to me to be more likely than average to turn out to have been doing the same <bad thing> themselves.

          [epistemic status: slightly more serious]

          As a software engineer with an interest in (software) security, I’m regularly hearing discussion of ways that modern election system are insecure. I don’t think the technology used in much of the US would withstand a concerted effort at creating a fraudulent election result, performed by a competent state actor, or even some group with lesser (but still large) resources. And I also don’t think it would produce a sufficient audit trail to show what happened, or how – the only evidence available would be in the form of unexpected results, and if the hackers weren’t over ambitious, that would simply be shrugged off. If we found out at all, it would be much later, when some country’s 100 year old achives became publically available, or perhaps rather sooner if someone defected and was believed.

          • Loriot says:

            It really depends on the scale you’re talking about. The larger the scale, the harder it would be to pull off without getting caught.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            One problem is that the US does not preform exit polls suitable for checking for fraud at all. A standard exit poll as the rest of the world does it is just “How did you vote just now”, while the US pollsters want to ask you 99 additional questions about your age, ethnicity, and what you had for breakfast this morning, so they can make neat graphs of who voted for who. But the additional questions biases the heck out of who can be bothered to take the exit poll, which means the pollsters have to “correct” for that bias.. which they do by slapping a counterbias on it until it matches the reported results.

            Which means US exit polls literally cannot be used to detect even quite massive rigging.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Schumer is threatening Supreme Court justices.

        He’s not, he’s just mangling half-remembered Bible references.

        Hosea 8:7

        For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.

        Kavanaugh apparently also used it in his confirmation hearings, which may be why Schumer used it here. The point is that the actions will in themselves lead to bad consequences, not that anyone (well, other than God) will inflict those consequences upon the actor.

        • vrostovtsev says:

          it is extremely charitable to Shumer that you would assume that he both understood the fine philosophical point of a Biblical quote and at the same time mangled it beyond recognition. I am pretty sure the “you won’t know what hit you” part is the modern language is used as a direct threat and not as an implication of divine retribution/carmic comeuppance.

    • Leafhopper says:

      If Trump wins reelection, the Democrats move left regardless of whether they nominated Biden or Bernie.

      If Trump loses, the Republicans move right.

      I have serious doubts about Trump’s ability to win, though, or his ability to actually exert any control over the country if he does win.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        Lets see. Worst possible scenario… OOOh.

        Trump wins, Putin announces that yes, indeed, he is the manchurian candidate. (Truth value, irrelevant, it is the announcement that does the damage)

        • Leafhopper says:

          Putin then surreptitiously releases a deepfaked video portraying the “golden shower” allegation from the Steele dossier, belief in the accuracy of the video splits along partisan lines.

  44. theodidactus says:

    I can’t remember who exactly on here I got into a debate with, a few months ago, about the propriety of making congress go to court to enforce subpoenas before they carried out the impeachment for “obstruction of congress”, but I was very clear that courts could consider the issue nonjusiticable, whoever-it-was (maybe more than one person) considered this to be a bit silly…

    …but that appears to be exactly what happened with Don McGahn.

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/dc-circuit-don-mcgahn-defy-subpoena.html

    This is important moving forward because it appears to be risky bordering on stupid to try to go to court over this kind of compelled testimony. The smart remedy, perhaps the ONLY remedy, might be impeachment.

    Perhaps higher up the chain this ruling gets overturned but it will
    1) take a while
    2) might still result in a counterproductive verdict
    3) at least a few judges agree with me so my idea wasn’t completely ridiculous (and may in fact be correct)

    • theodidactus says:

      This is discussed extensively in the latest episode of “All the President’s Lawyers”, just by the way
      https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/lrc-presents-all-the-presidents-lawyers/remember-don-mcgahn

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      The smart remedy, perhaps the ONLY remedy, might be impeachment.

      How is this your takeaway, rather than “Trump vindicated, defying an improperly issued Congressional subpoena is not a crime, ‘high crime or misdemeanor’, and therefore not impeachable?”

      • theodidactus says:

        It’s important to get this right, the court was abundantly clear in its decision that the subpoena was not “improperly issued”

        https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/28/politics/appeals-court-mcgahn-ruling/index.html

        The analysis runs on pages 6-9, the most relevant quote is on page 9: “the committee claims the executive branch’s assertion of a constitutional privilege is obstructing the committees investigation. That obstruction may seriously and even unlawfully hinder the committee’s efforts…but it is not a judicially cognizable injury”

        The ruling says, just as I predicted it would, that it is not a court’s place to interfere in inter-branch disputes like this regardless of their merit. In fact, ruling on the “merit” of this or that subpoena is exactly what a court doesn’t want to do…

        …to be clear, I’m just going to repeat myself, because this message is plainly not getting across:this decision says that courts should not weigh in on the “validity” of a subpoena, regardless of who congress is, who the president is, and how good the facts are underlying congress’ assertion.

        If you need any more convincing please look at page 13: “the absence of a judicial remedy doesn’t render congress powerless. Instead the constitution gives congress a series of political tools to bring the Executive Branch to heel…congress may hold officers in contempt, withhold appropriations, refuse to confirm the president’s nominees, harness public opinion, delay or derail the president’s legislative agenda, or impeach recalcitrant officers.”

        Again, I’m not saying any of the following
        * trump should have been impeached
        * we should impeach trump again
        * trump bad congress good
        * liberals good trump bad

        I’m saying
        * the executive can defy a congressional subpoena
        * in situations like this its very possible courts will be reticent to step in
        * courts consider impeachment to be the remedy when this happens.

        in light of all that, it’s unwise to say “congress should go to court before impeaching over refusing to comply with a congressional investigation”

        • EchoChaos says:

          The ruling says, just as I predicted it would, that it is not a court’s place to interfere in inter-branch disputes like this regardless of their merit.

          We will see if the Supremes agree, since this will likely get appealed, but since the Legislature just agreed that such a subpoena is in fact not impeachable, it appears that all three branches agree that this subpoena is not valid.

          • theodidactus says:

            There are stupendously good arguments on both sides of this but if I had to make a prediction I’d say they uphold the ruling discussed above, though they would most likely be ignoring contrary precedent in doing so.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @theodidactus

            I think they would ignore precedent either way, wouldn’t they? Or perhaps I’m misremembering some legal articles I’ve read.

            I note that I am not a lawyer.

          • theodidactus says:

            I note that I’m only a law student and this isn’t really my area anyway but yes you’re right iirc. The most famous precedent is Nixon of course, but the above decision lists a lot of precedent going the other way.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          That sounds ridiculous to me. It’s absolutely the court’s place to decide disputes between the Executive and Legislative branches.

          • theodidactus says:

            It depends.

            This is a concept that many 1L’s have trouble with when they begin law school. Courts step in when there’s a dispute between the executive and the legislature on a justiciable topic. There are many topics that are nonjusticiable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_question

            No one is clear where the line is, but I strongly suspect defiance of congressional subpoenas, and congressional investigation, is nonjusticiable given our current conception of the executive.

            if that’s true, it will seriously kneecap impeachment efforts moving forward because the executive will always be able to say “not enough facts, move along”

      • 2181425 says:

        Trying to leave aside the details of the most recent impeachment and looking–say 6 years in the future: from a layman’s perspective how does this not result in putting the Executive branch above the law? If they cannot be compelled by Congress and cannot be compelled by the courts, what next?

        Or am I misunderstanding?

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          That leaves only impeachment or the political process, which rounds down to “the political process.”

          • 2181425 says:

            AKA “mob rule”?

          • theodidactus says:

            I mean, I’ll note that there are good arguments for duking this out politically every time. We don’t want a situation where a court has to say “as a matter of law and precedent, we find that *this* subpoena is an earnest attempt to get to the bottom of an urgent national security matter, but *that* subpoena is clearly pretextual garbage issued only to serve some base political end”

            …because in truth in virtually every situation the answer is “little bit of both, honestly”

            so there’s a fairness having the voting public adjudicate this stuff in town halls and on cable TV. The thing is, if we’re going that way, we need to recognize we’re going that way, and not demand meaningless and misleading judicial process around things like impeachment, withholding money, or refusing to confirm people.

        • theodidactus says:

          I posed a hypothetical on this a few weeks ago on one of the open threads, and the responses I gathered are exactly the reason why I felt it was worth coming back here to follow up post-Mcgahn

    • Dan L says:

      For reference, your prior thread on the general topic was here. I referenced the McGahn case as being a particular point of interest a week later here.

      If you’re a KCRW listener this won’t be news to you, but the decision is a bit of a shitshow – lots of arguments that work in isolation, but a non-negligible amount of contradiction between them and plenty of conspicuous gaps where the court punted on matters of immediate legal concern. It really needs en banc review if only to get a clearer picture of what the heck just happened, and presumably then going to SCOTUS just in time to be a live election issue. Ugh.

      • theodidactus says:

        I agree that the D.C. circuit decision was pretty spare and contradictory. I’ll note though that this just might have to be the case moving forward from here on out. If we imagine this case moving all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court weighing in favorably, I think it’s still going to be quite easy for later courts to “punt” to “political question” when the issue comes before them again in exactly the same way the DC Circuit did.

        The only way to avoid that would be for the supreme court to clearly and unequivocally state something like “these subpoenas are presumptively valid, you dummies” and that seems really unlikely given the present composition of the court.

        At present, what I’m trying to emphasize is that litigating these particular refusals would have been a very bad decision. Imagine if congress decided to put the issue on hold while these cases worked through the courts. The above decision would have been widely misread, and as you note the subsequent appeals would have arrived at the supreme court precisely in time for this to be the sort of hot-button election issue the court doesn’t want to address.

        For what it’s worth (mostly as a plug) I’m definitely a regular KCRW listener, their coverage is extremely good, especially All the President’s Lawyers. I encourage everyone who wants non-hyperbolic analysis of the president’s legal issues to tune in. I have been remiss in my recent KCRW listening simply because I’m trying to finish strong this last semester.

        • Dan L says:

          I encourage everyone who wants non-hyperbolic analysis of the president’s legal issues to tune in. I have been remiss in my recent KCRW listening simply because I’m trying to finish strong this last semester.

          I missed the earlier thread it came up in, but I’ll second the recommendation of AtPL. I also listen to Left Right & Center regularly, though the past few weeks have been weak without the regularly scheduled R or C. Skippable if you’re behind.

          At present, what I’m trying to emphasize is that litigating these particular refusals would have been a very bad decision.

          I was less confident than you seem to be that this court was going to find it non justiciable (and probably put correspondingly higher odds of reversal on appeal), but I’m hostile to claims that it clearly was justiciable, especially when that stance is being used asymmetrically as a bludgeon against the Dems.

          The only way to avoid that would be for the supreme court to clearly and unequivocally state something like “these subpoenas are presumptively valid, you dummies” and that seems really unlikely given the present composition of the court.

          IMO the greatest political issue facing the US at the moment is how polarization has crippled the ability to address crises, be they material or abstract. There are serious open questions regarding Congressional powers of oversight & the extent of executive privilege that this ought to be a perfect vehicle for SCOTUS to address even before getting into the (extremely relevant) particulars of the case. But while I fully appreciate the bind Roberts is in if he wants the SC to continue to exist as a relevant political force, I wouldn’t even trust this court to uphold US v. Nixon by anything more than 6-3 on narrow grounds.

    • zzzzort says:

      This sounds like a trolly question, but I’m legitimately wondering what this means for the inherent contempt/sergeant at arms arrests Mick Mulvaney route? Surely that has to be judiciable?

      • theodidactus says:

        While a lot of crim. law junkies like me would LOVE to see that happen, I think this whole circus is only getting as far as it is because everyone knows that we’re at one of those points where the best lack all conviction

        I think you are correct that any restraint on liberty like that is clearly justiciable, by way of Habeas if nothing else. I would say by analogy that any of congress’ other means of compelling testimony should also therefore be justiciable, but no one made that arguement.

        None of this constitutes legal advice, obviously, so if the sergeant at arms comes to arrest you you’re on your own and I can’t be your lawyer.

        • zzzzort says:

          But would it mean ruling on the merits of the detention (which is to say, the validity of the subpoena)?

      • theodidactus says:

        As of a few minutes ago, Mulvaney is apparently out as chief of staff, so who knows maybe they’ll try this out for real

  45. Skeptic says:

    Prediction, 90% confidence:

    1) Black women deliver the nomination to Biden but he will not receive a vast majority of delegates.

    2) Biden inappropriately touching and … sniffing..women is irrelevant. Biden inappropriately molesting minor children on camera will also be excused by every liberal commentator from NYTimes to Vox

    3) Video of Biden sniffing and molesting minors doesn’t impact Democrats’ votes

    • GearRatio says:

      Is this a thing where he’s actually doing something wrong, or is it like a rorschact thing where I just don’t like him so I think he is, ala car top dog carriers?

      • Milo Minderbinder says:

        There’s tons of videos out there over the decades of him touching/sniffing people. The man has a lack of respect for personal space that is super not okay these days. I don’t get the impression that he’s molest-y, merely that he arrogantly assumes everyone wants some personal time with Biden.

      • chrisminor0008 says:

        I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s just a person from a different time and being so personable and physical worked so well for him that it’s just automatic for him now. But then I noticed he doesn’t do it to men and boys. And now it’s a little offputting.

    • Milo Minderbinder says:

      For points 2/3, his weird pedo touching/sniffing still isn’t as bad as Trump’s, uh, raping. And there’s the rub. God damn the DNC and God damn the Republican electorate and God damn America for making me choose between two creepy senile old fucks who to grant power like unto the Brahmastra.

      • EchoChaos says:

        For points 2/3, his weird pedo touching/sniffing still isn’t as bad as Trump’s, uh, raping.

        Trump has never been credibly accused of rape, and stating that he has is absurd.

        He has been somewhat credibly accused of adultery.

        Neither of these are on camera for the public to see.

        • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

          Trump has been accused of sexual assault or rape by his first wife and over a dozen other women, several two* of whom did so before 2016 (when someone might try to argue that the accusations were politically motivated).

          It is a matter of public knowledge that he started a relationship with his second wife during his marriage to his first – among many other claims of adultery.

          Someone might argue that all of the sexual assault claims are bunk but it doesn’t seem absurd to take some of them seriously.
          Claiming he hasn’t committed adultery just seems ridiculous. The Access Hollywood tape was recorded while he was married to his current wife.

          *Mistake in my original comment.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Trump has been accused of sexual assault or rape by his first wife

            During a contentious divorce. She stated afterwards that it was not true and endorsed him for President.

            and over a dozen other women, several of whom did so before 2016 (when someone might try to argue that the accusations were politically motivated).

            Only one other did before 2016 per Wikipedia. If you have another source it would be one I haven’t seen before. Jill Harth’s allegation is not rape, but sexual harassment and was settled.

            It is a matter of public knowledge that he started a relationship with his second wife during his marriage to his first – among many other claims of adultery.

            I had forgotten about that one. Yes, I meant adultery with his current wife.

          • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

            You’re right that it was only two, I misinterpreted the wikipedia article. My bad. I’ve edited my comment.

            I think we’re just going to disagree on how credibly to take Ivana Trump’s accusation.

            I had separately edited it to add the Access Hollywood comment, which was while you were responding.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @NostalgiaForInfinity

            You’re right that it was only two, I misinterpreted the wikipedia article. My bad. I’ve edited my comment.

            Your comment is still inaccurate. The second accusation was neither rape nor sexual assault. It was sexual harassment.

            I think we’re just going to disagree on how credibly to take Ivana Trump’s accusation.

            My general rule is that anything said during a divorce hearing is the worst possible take on a complex situation, and I find Ivana’s post-divorce rapprochement with Trump and endorsement of him sufficient to make me believe her later statements are more accurate.

            But if you consider it credible I can’t disagree too strongly with that.

            Claiming he hasn’t committed adultery just seems ridiculous. The Access Hollywood tape was recorded while he was married to his current wife.

            And according to the Access Hollywood tape his attempt failed. I am not disagreeing that Trump is not a terribly moral man, by the way.

            I agreed that he has committed adultery in the past, and that the evidence he committed adultery while married to Melania is somewhat credible.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I think we’re just going to disagree on how credibly to take Ivana Trump’s accusation.

            I cannot understand this position. Ivana has made two claims (if this thread is accurate), first that she accused him of some kind of sexual assault and recanted that accusation. To choose to believe one of those specifically over the other without compelling evidence is clear cherry picking.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @baconbits9

            I stated my reasons to believe the second more.

            The reasons are that the first statement was made during divorce proceedings, which is a time when people exaggerate, sometimes substantially, the things that the other person has done to them.

            The other reason is that she has remained relatively cordial towards Trump since their divorce and endorsed him for President.

            Certainly my partisan goggles may be blinding me, but taking things said in divorce court with a substantial grain of salt is something that seems reasonable to me.

          • baconbits9 says:

            @ EchoChaos:

            That reply was to Nostalgia. Generally it would apply to you as well but you did give some reasons which make it much more understandable. Personally I try to remind myself that I am perpetually without knowledge of these things, and that I really just don’t know.

          • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

            @baconbits9

            There are reasons to retract allegations that are well-founded.

            There are (roughly) two possibilities: she entirely made up an accusation of rape or exaggerated an incident that was in a grey area during a heated divorce process. She recanted this for some reason later (e.g. it was no longer to her advantage to make such a serious allegation of wrongdoing).

            Or she made a genuine claim that she was pressured into recanting for money and/or the threat of Trump and his legal team making her life extremely difficult.

            I think the latter is plausible, I don’t necessarily think it’s true. Nobody here actually knows and I have no additional evidence. The original claim I responded to (made by EchoChaos) was that were no credible rape accusations. I disagree that Ivana Trump’s accusation isn’t credible because I think the second possibility is plausible. I’m not choosing to believe her first claim over her retraction.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I think if her recantation were under duress she would not be currently cordial with Trump. She would not have endorsed his presidency. This doesn’t mean she needs to denounce him, but she could have simply declined to comment.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I think the latter is plausible, I don’t necessarily think it’s true. Nobody here actually knows and I have no additional evidence. The original claim I responded to (made by EchoChaos) was that were no credible rape accusations. I disagree that Ivana Trump’s accusation isn’t credible because I think the second possibility is plausible. I’m not choosing to believe her first claim over her retraction.

            A rape claim with a retraction is not a credible accusation, even if it is possible that the claim was true. The boy who cries wolf 9 times isn’t credible his 10th time, even though there could be a wolf this time.

        • Plumber says:

          For what little it’s worth I’ve never heard of Trump raping anyone ever, the majority of my news sources I’d call “legacy mainstream” which I’d now describe as “center-left” (a few of them used to be “center-right”, but sometime in the ’90’s or 21st century they all switched).

          I have heard that there’s some accusations of Bill Clinton, but I don’t know the details.

          • EchoChaos says:

            I have heard that there’s some accusations of Bill Clinton, but I don’t know the details.

            The actual rape accusations against Bill Clinton (as opposed to sexually taking advantage of consenting young women around him), are similarly low credibility.

            Clinton and Trump are a good comparison because they’re both basically the same. Horndogs in positions of power who have lots of young women around them who consent pretty eagerly so they sometimes go too far without checking all the boxes of consent ahead of time.

            But with both of them I find actual rape pretty implausible for exactly that reason. Why fight for milk when so many cows are giving it for free?

            Both appear to have tamed down substantially from their wilder youth late in life, although people aren’t focusing on Clinton nearly so much anymore.

          • Plumber says:

            @EchoChaos,
            Thanks.

            I’m going to go with “Would be in jail if it was true” for both Bill and Don.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        Just as a matter of thing with evidence, Trump has said he liked hanging around the Miss Teen USA dressing rooms.
        https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-former-miss-arizona-tasha-dixon-naked-undressed-backstage-howard-stern-a7357866.html

        • EchoChaos says:

          Sure, that’s not “raping”. I don’t think Biden is a pedo and I don’t think Trump is a rapist.

          Calling either of them those things diminishes the terms badly.

      • Purplehermann says:

        Milo could you refrain from equating recanted accusations to video evidence?

    • Plumber says:

      @Skeptic says:

      “1) Black women deliver the nomination to Biden but he will not receive a vast majority of delegates”

      You mean it will still be close, like Clinton vs. Sanders in 2016?

      That does seem likely.

      “2) Biden inappropriately touching and … sniffing..women is irrelevant”

      The reports were kinda cringe inducing, at least they weren’t of the pinching that used to be common.

      “Biden inappropriately molesting minor children on camera will also be excused by every liberal commentator from NYTimes to Vox

      3) Video of Biden sniffing and molesting minors doesn’t impact Democrats’ votes”

      Say what now?

      Children?

      Call me skeptical @Skeptic, but after months of “He has a racist history, why aren’t you peons supporting Warren instead?” essays in The New York Times/Washington Post/VOX.com, over stuff like the crime bill of the ’90’s the last time that Biden was the Democratic front runner, I’ve little doubt that something that explosive wouldn’t have come up and be front page news.

      The press hunters for red meat no matter what the political leanings of the exposed.

      Harvey Weinstein contributed thousands to the Democratic Party, the press certainly didn’t spare him.

      Nice try, but I don’t appreciate being bullshitted to that extent without levity, and crimes against children just aren’t funny.

      Please link me to ABC, CBS, BBC, NBC, U.S.A. Today, The Week, Newsweek, US News and World Report, or Time Magazine on this now, Lefty or Righty blogs and such aren’t acceptable, legacy and reputable please, and hurry, if true you shouldn’t have waited till after I mailed in my ballot to mention this!

      • sharper13 says:

        Here’s a NY Time reporter’s video of Biden from Super Tuesday. I’m not taking a position on it, I can see how you could read it differently, just figured I’d post the video people are most recently talking about for you to look at, since you asked.

        You’d think Biden would have advisers telling him to not do anything like sniffing hair anymore, but maybe was just having a difficult time remembering stuff on Tuesday.

        • Kissing or cuddling babies isn’t pedophilia, it’s normal behavior, so normal that politicians traditionally do it in order to show what nice people they are.

        • Plumber says:

          @sharper13,

          I’ve been in that cafe, I used to live 7/10th of a mile ’round the corner and down the street!

          Oakland proud right now!

          Anyway, that just looked to me like Biden was trying to look like doing the once traditional expected baby kissing without actually touching.

          Other videos that folks are linking to are something else and I’m still digesting them.

      • Jaskologist says:

        The press turned on Weinstein eventually. But for how many years (decades?) was he left unmolested, as one of those things that “everyone knew” about, and everyone also knew to look the other way?

      • JayT says:

        Here’s a (long) video of Biden being much more touchy with young girls than I am personally comfortable with. It’s to the point that it makes me think the most likely “October surprise” he could face would be someone stepping forward with serious allegations.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwXweiRjckI&feature=youtu.be

        • Purplehermann says:

          That made me a bit uncomfortable as well.

          Anyone here watch the whole thing and think it’s fine?

          • Byrel Mitchell says:

            Yeah, it looks pretty OK to me. (And I’m unlikely to ever support Biden politically so this is counter to my tribal biases.) Most of this stuff is just normal parent/grandparent behaviors. It’s a bit forward for a stranger to be doing them, but it’s a really old political technique to make them look relatable. The rest is just him managing the positioning for the pictures; you really don’t want shorter people on the edges because it will make the shot look more spread out and less intense.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        This is one of those things where I’m still shocked, given the internet, with the existence of impermeable partisan bubbles. The pictures and videos of Biden touching and sniffing uncomfortable-looking people especially children have been right-wing memes for years. Not a recent thing with the campaign. Years.

        ETA: To Skeptic’s point that Democratic voters won’t care, probably. I’d call it a marginal thing. It’s just one more little nudge on the needle for people who already find Biden off-putting for other reasons.

        • Plumber says:

          @Conrad Honcho says:

          “This is one of those things where I’m still shocked, given the internet, with the existence of impermeable partisan bubbles…”

          it was news to me (as were allegations of Trump being a rapist until this thread).

          I haven’t watched much of the linked videos yet but what I have seen so far I’ll call “uncomfortable viewing”.

          I had found Joe very likable but this really changes my calculations of how electable he is, I think I may have voted for Klobucher or Sanders instead.

          Yeah, I’m even more convinced that Trump will be elected now.

          • meh says:

            is there any chance Biden was hugging children to fill some emptiness? does anyone know of any charitable reason he would be overly affectionate to kids?

          • albatross11 says:

            Most likely, he just likes kids. Many people like kids without it being remotely creepy, and politicians kissing babies and ruffling kids’ hair or whatever is pretty common culturally, though probably it will be less common over time for a mix of sensible and crazy reasons.

          • Lambert says:

            A woman shows affection towards kids and nobody panics.
            A man does and everyone loses their minds.

    • BBA says:

      Can I get myself cryogenically frozen for five years? I don’t expect it to get less stupid, I just want out of the current stupidity.

    • Well... says:

      I’d never heard of this so I did a DDG video search for “biden sniffing”, clicked on this compilation of alleged sniffs, and watched it.

      Let me preface what I’m about to say with the disclosure that Joe Biden is the only politician I actively despise. Commenters who are familiar with me know that I have nothing nice to say about him. I have pointed out that it was he who championed our government’s practice of civil asset forfeiture, which is bad enough on its own but also incentivizes and perpetuates the war on drugs, which is the worst American policy since slavery. I wish only bad things on Joe Biden. The event of his nomination is the only thing that could cause me to vote for Trump.

      That said, I watched that video and none of it seemed bad or inappropriate, except in the sense that it looks really bad on camera. What I saw was a guy, I’m guessing with really bad breath, who likes to kiss his granddaughters and grandnieces or whatever, likes to feel their little faces because their cheeks are soft and chubby. The kisses look like sniffing, but they were pretty much all obviously just kisses. Where the heck else are you supposed to kiss your granddaughter?! You kiss her head, her forehead, above her ears, etc. And yes, those little cheeks are tweakable! At a certain age little girls get annoyed and bothered and embarrassed by having their facial cheeks gently squeezed, but it doesn’t mean the intent behind it has turned pervy just because they’re not 5 years old anymore. Lots of kids still have big squishy cheeks well into high school and that’s probably what Biden sees.

      I’m open to the idea that there is more convincing evidence out there and I haven’t seen it, but if what’s in that clip is the best anyone can come up with then I am unconvinced that Biden’s behavior is anything but innocent.

      I do, however, believe it will be very easy to tell people otherwise and have them believe it, and that Biden will be unable to fend off those kinds of accusations convincingly, because they’re of the “When did you stop beating your wife?” variety. And I don’t have a problem with that because I despise Joe Biden.

      • albatross11 says:

        Well:

        I can’t help thinking that there might be some kind of small downside to accepting or supporting intentionally dishonest/lying PR campaigns because they target someone you dislike. What’s the difference between that and supporting the next 30 dumb Twitter outrage storms where someone lies or distorts another person’s words or actions to stir up a Twitter mob against them?

        If you aren’t against it when your side does it, you’re not really against it.

        • Well... says:

          I’m not going to go around perpetuating anything I believe to be an untruth, and as I just demonstrated I’ll even speak up against those things. But what I meant by the last sentence of my above comment is that I feel no outrage or anxiety from this instance of slander.

          And I think it’s worth saying that I don’t have a side. I only feel emotionally complacent about the smear in this case because it’s Joe Biden. My dislike of that man, and my willingness to watch him burn even because of an unfair accusation, is a one-off.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        @Well
        I want to know more about civil forfeiture. I looked up stuff on Biden and civil forfeiture and it does indeed appear that he was one of the pushers on this thing. I do also detest civil forfeiture, but all these articles were from 30-40 years ago. Does this really mean anything about how Biden would act as President in 2021?

        I am also against the war on drugs, but I think it’d be hard to find any major politician who isn’t for that — at least against dealers, which is where the worst behavior occurs.

        • Well... says:

          I don’t care all that much about what kind of president Biden would be (although I harbor strong suspicions that the kind of guy who could have done what he did back then is not someone I’d want running the country). He should be punished for his crimes. Since that probably isn’t going to happen, we should at least not reward him for them.

          • He should be punished for his crimes. Since that probably isn’t going to happen, we should at least not reward him for them.

            The reason to elect someone president isn’t to reward him, it’s to put the person in the job who can best do it.

          • Well... says:

            That is a true statement, but it doesn’t negate the fact that if a person does X and then later is elected president, the latter can be and often is seen both by that person and others as a reward for the former.

          • Well... says:

            @DavidFriedman:

            Now that I think about it more, I’ve decided your use of the phrase “the reason” was incorrect. Putting the person in the job who can best do it is one possible reason to elect someone, but there are many others. For instance, it is widely theorized that Trump was elected as a way to punish the Left. And of course individual voters have myriad reasons why they vote for particular candidates. Many, I’m sure, vote for candidates as a reward for things those candidates have done in the past.

    • broblawsky says:

      So is accusing their enemies of pedophilia the right’s new go-to move? It’s getting a little repetitive.

      • At this point, my working assumption is that attacks on Biden are more likely to come from the left. That only reverses after he is nominated.

      • Purplehermann says:

        Does that happen a lot?

      • b_jonas says:

        No no. There’s no need to accuse him of pedophilia. Just find a child who lives in the same state and has a roughly similar appearance to a child that Biden sniffed on a video. Shouldn’t be too hard. Then claim that Biden has unintentionally infected the child with the new coronavirus. Nobody can disprove this, because the child has a right to medical secrets, many children catch the cold in March, and Scott already explained that nobody in the U.S. can actually be tested specifically for the virus.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        I wouldn’t call it “pedophilia,” just creepy. I predict that at some point in the campaign, Trump will swap out “Sleepy Joe” for “Creepy Joe.”

      • Deiseach says:

        So is accusing their enemies of pedophilia the right’s new go-to move? It’s getting a little repetitive.

        Accusing people on the right of being rapists is also getting a little repetitive, but hey. Politics. Since the Romans (and probably before) everyone has gone for “My opponent is a dirty rotten lecher and worse, a pervert”.

        Cicero, 2nd Philippic against Mark Antony:

        Shall we then examine your conduct from the time when you were a boy? I think so. Let us begin at the beginning. Do you recollect that, while you were still clad in the praetexta, you became a bankrupt? That was the fault of your father, you will say. I admit that. In truth such a defense is full of filial affection. But it is peculiarly suited to your own audacity, that you sat among the fourteen rows of the knights, though by the Roscian law there was a place appointed for bankrupts, even if any one had become such by the fault of fortune and not by his own. You assumed the manly gown, which your soon made a womanly one: at first a public prostitute, with a regular price for your wickedness, and that not a low one. But very soon Curio stepped in, who carried you off from your public trade, and, as if he had bestowed a matron’s robe upon you, settled you in a steady and durable wedlock.

        No boy bought for the gratification of passion was ever so wholly in the power of his master as you were in Curio’s. How often has his father turned you out of his house? How often has he placed guards to prevent you from entering? while you, with night for your accomplice, lust for your encourager, and wages for your compeller, were let down through the roof. That house could no longer endure your wickedness. Do you not know that I am speaking of matters with which I am thoroughly acquainted? Remember that time when Curio, the father, lay weeping in his bed; his son throwing himself at my feet with tears recommended to me you; he entreated me to defend you against his own father, if he demanded six millions of sesterces of you; for that he had been bail for you to that amount. And he himself, burning with love, declared positively that because he was unable to bear the misery of being separated from you, he should go into banishment.

        …But let us say no more of your profligacy and debauchery. There are things which it is not possible for me to mention with honor; but you are all the more free for that, inasmuch as you have not scrupled to be an actor in scenes which a modest enemy can not bring himself to mention.

        • Milo Minderbinder says:

          Excellent reference. There is truly nothing new under the sun. Maybe we’ll get lucky and see some proscriptions soon.

          • Nick says:

            How about some damnationes memoriae?

          • Deiseach says:

            Maybe we’ll get lucky and see some proscriptions soon.

            Yeah, we haven’t (yet) seen any of the Democratic candidates savaging each other with “you were a public whore until your sugardaddy bought you off by defrauding his father of a shit ton of cash!” 🙂

          • vrostovtsev says:

            Seems like the only way to get ‘lucky’ when the proscriptions are posted is to be Sulla.

    • sty_silver says:

      None of the three is falsifiable, so assigning confidence is pointless.

  46. JohnBuridan says:

    [Unsolved Mystery: missing art]

    8 years ago there was a youtube channel called Magisch meisje Orkest which had many classical symphonies paired with very enjoyable anime art. YouTube took it down and I have had no success finding the original uploader. There is a current youtuber by the same name who hunted for some of the old videos and started to salvage the trove, but his project has stalled.

    I am thinking of offering a bounty for anyone who turns up the artwork which accompanied the videos. The artwork, I believe, was original and so there is no ethical issue in finding the lost art which accompanied the videos. See his channel for examples of what he salvaged.

    Any suggestions on how to find what is lost?

    • Aapje says:

      Magisch meisje Orkest is Dutch for magical girl orchestra. I searched for Dutch references to ‘Magisch meisje Orkest,’ but couldn’t find anything.

      I did find a Dutch anime blog where a ‘Silerna’ once wrote about a rather old anime TV show about an aspiring orchestra conductor. She appears to have been interested in anime for a long time. So you might want to contact her, to see if she knows Magisch meisje Orkest or can reach out in the Dutch anime community.

      You can find her email, facebook, twitter, etc links here. She speaks English.

    • VoiceOfTheVoid says:

      Have you tried archive.org?

  47. proyas says:

    What the heck kind of pants are these? They stop at the calves and lace up.

    https://imgur.com/a/BqPCF89

    • Lambert says:

      You never needed to change trousers without removing your boots?

      Some modern waterproof overtrousers zip right the way up to the knee.

    • Eric Rall says:

      Looks like knee breeches to me. They were pretty standard in Europe and the American colonies in the 18th century, and went out of fashion in favor of full-length trousers in the early 19th, although they lingered on as ultra-formal “court dress” in the UK well into the 20th century.

      These days, they’re mainly seen on historical re-enactors.

      • Buttle says:

        Still available as “breeks”, worn for shooting in the UK. Not too long so you can show off your tartan socks. I hear the woolly ones are quite practical for cool weather bicycling.

        These look to be made of cotton, my best guess (not to be relied upon) is that they may have been worn for fencing.

  48. AG says:

    Meanwhile, it’s easy to find every fandom space squeeing over Found Family as a trope, even as Bowling Alone Syndrome continues its rise.

    What has replaced the American family saga is that Friendship Is Magic.

  49. Paul Brinkley says:

    Small scale CW question:

    There are people on the right who look at incidences such as Joss Whedon on the outs, or J. K. Rowling’s friction with the left, or Nancy Pelosi marginalizing “the squad”, and claim that the left is devouring its own.

    To what extent do people on the left claim the right is devouring its own? There are incidents that look qualified: references to Romney, Jeb, Ryan, and Rubio as RINOs; calling people cuckservatives; etc. Does this look like the same thing to the left? If not, why not?

    • rumham says:

      I think that whether it looks like that or not, it will not be spoken of in that way. It is more politically advantageous to claim that Republicans are always in lockstep due to their ignorance.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      I think the mirror image criticism is much commoner, and speaking as a left-winger I certainly attach more weight to it: I and most left-wingers think that Republicans are not too willing to criticise their own, they’re too unwilling to do so – any behaviour except the one unforgivable sin of criticising Trump is excused or minimised.

      I think the main left-wing narrative of right-wing intertribal conflict (and, again, I may be conflating my views with the mainstream left view, but I don’t think I am – I think they genuinely do agree) is that the majority of Republicans have fallen into lockstep behind Trump, and that the minority who haven’t – Amash, McCain, Romney, David French, etc – have been cast into the outer darkness, but there aren’t many of them and they don’t count for much in the national political calculus.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        I and most left-wingers think that Republicans are not too willing to criticise their own

        Yes, criticizing the ingroup is not as fun as criticizing the outgroup. Do you think the Democrats are immune to this?

        Also, the examples listed in @Paul Brinkley’s post are cases where LWers were criticized for insufficient leftism. This mirrors the case where McCain and Romney, etc… are criticized for insufficient rightism.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Yes, criticizing the ingroup is not as fun as criticizing the outgroup.

          I disagree. Traitors before enemies.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Yeah sure. But for members of your ingroup who are not traitors (are traitors even in your ingroup? not when you find out they’re traitors anyways.), people generally give more leeway than for members of the outgroup. That’s almost the definition of ingroup/ougroup.

          • albatross11 says:

            There’s some kind of balance needed here. On one extreme, your movement devolves into an endless series of mutual excommunications and purges; on the other, you have no defense against sociopaths and conmen taking over your movement.

          • Aftagley says:

            Wait, is that an intentional description of the current state of the progressive and conservative communities, or was it just a happy accident?

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Wait, is that an intentional description of the current state of the progressive and conservative communities, or was it just a happy accident?

            lol

    • Plumber says:

      @Paul Brinkley;
      There were some reports of “white nationalists” heckling Donald Trump Jr. in a “sow the wind, reap the whirlwind” context a few months ago, and stuff about Boehner and Ryan being forced out, and a lot on the “Freedom Caucus” and/or Cruz annoying other Republicans, from the ’50’s and 60’s there was stuff about Buckley, Rand, and the Birchers getting into scraps with each other, and from the ’40’s there was Dewey vs. Taft

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        Yeah, I’m aware of incidents like this. My question is less about how much of this infighting happens, and more about how the other side perceives it.

        I do recall one of my friends on the left feeling sorry for Boehner, for instance, when the Trump administration effectively barred him (a Catholic) from meeting the Pope when the Pope visited Washington. Otherwise, she was quick to point out every wrong thing he did as Speaker.

        You’re what I’d call a fellow on the left. What narrative did you have for the incidents you named? Particularly the newer ones, unless they play off the stuff from the 40s.

        • Plumber says:

          @Paul Brinkley,
          Mostly “Wow, they changed fast”, “I guess circular firing squads happen on the Right as well”, and “I kinda feel sorry for him”.

          That’s about it.

          Except for peaking at The National Review from time to time, now that it’s harder (and more expensive) for me to read The Wall Street Journal I just don’t read much Right-aligned stuff (it used to be that more “mainstream” stuff like Time Magazine seemed center-right to me, but now they seem center-left), and I’ve also dropped reading most further Left stuff (The Nation, etc.) as well, so I probably miss a lot.

    • CaptainCrutch says:

      My feeling is that “the right” is not promising to play nice, so it doesn’t come as surprise when being the wrong kind of person is punished. Once in a while anti-gay preacher will out themselves as gay or something to this effect, but they have chosen to side with someone overtly hostile to what they are. But I spotted a few articles like “Trad women discover trad men treat them terribly” that have the same spirit.

      Overall, the right wear whatever bigotry they have on their sleeve so it isn’t usually worth pointing out that someone is joining the side bigoted against them. When the left promises inclusivity but will still turn on you if you don’t fit in their dogma and that’s something worth mentioning.

    • yodelyak says:

      I think the book “The Tribes on the Hill” does a great job at describing a model that nicely explains what’s going on underneath the surface that drives why the left’s internal fights often have a different flavor than the right’s internal fights. At a superficial level, the left has a loose coalition that occasionally engages in celebrity-led, purity-driven-witch-burning, while the right has rank-and-file that are in almost perfect lockstep, but whose major players seem to be forever trading attacks on each other, and attempting to poach each others’ loyalists, but rarely if ever bother to go for a kill and force another out altogether.

      The Tribes on the Hill names three kinds of politicians: warlords, shamans, and godfathers. Warlords have turf and value loyalty, and their position on any issue is the position calculated to allow them to expand their turf and reward their loyalists, and turf is measured mostly in dollars appropriated and numbers of paid staff who will write memos helping steer appropriated dollars. The prototype here is the ideologically, uh, flexible Congressman whose friends know his only true motive is using his subcommittees to give nice jobs (both in Congress and in newly created perches in the larger bureaucracy) or direct legislative gifts to loyal supporters, and who mainly achieves this by becoming totally knowledgeable about one or two issues or constituencies (e.g. the parts of an important helicopter, or the right rolodex of behind-the-scenes funders of AIPAC, the right appointments to guarantee disability to any ex-military in his district who applies for it, or etc.) and trading cooperation on that issue for power to reward his loyalists. The “shaman” is a political entity built on principles, and so the shaman is perennially striving to have a crafted, principled position, on the issue du jour, and that way grow and maintain their reputation as a moral leader. (A shaman may have deep principles and tight commitment to moral/ethical behavior, or just a better ability to feign it.) Every time there’s a new issue, the shaman is often the first out with a press release, because the one thing a shaman is committed to is preserving their relative status as leading on said principle/moral/ethic. Finally ‘godfathers’ are mostly former warlords who’ve lost interest in rewarding loyalists/expanding their turf–and who can now be trusted to mentor newcomers, and to broker deals/reconciliations for others. Shamans who suffer embarrassment but hold onto their office anyway may find they can branch out as godfathers also. Senator Byrd, in the back couple decades of his career, was pretty much pure godfather.

      When warlords coordinate, if the public could hear their thinking (which is ideologically empty and just about turf-building and rewarding loyalists) the public would find it stinks for lack of noble sentiment. So warlord discussions are generally kept behind closed doors, or better, limited to the kind of coordination that emerges organically from self-interested behavior in an iterated game. When shamans coordinate, it involves lots of meetings working toward a consensus everyone can accept as a ‘correct’ position, and lots of standing before the public and taking turns confirming that all agree that all are ‘correct’.
      Warlords are opportunists, and when two near-equals fight over something–some plum that can only go to the loyalists of the victor–both know it’s nothing personal, and once it’s over, grudges are generally loosely held because deep-seated grudges are bad for business. A lasting grudge between warlords is also something that might prompt the involvement of a godfather or two, because again, grudges are bad for business. Most warlords are ‘petty’ chiefs, who are not strong enough to even maintain a united defense if directly attacked by a much more powerful warlord, so they mostly just hew perfectly to the party line whenever they’re under the spotlight, and then behind closed doors work for their own ends.

      When two shamans directly conflict, it’s usually because one or both of them appears ‘outside the pale’ for the other. It’s a situation where an apology or clarification either works, or it doesn’t. There’s no room for extracting or trading concessions, because shaman aren’t in the business of turf-expansion or loyalist-rewarding anyway. This is what happened to Al Franken. Some other shamans (Gilibrand comes to mind) demanded an apology for ‘outside-the-pale’ conduct of Franken’s, found the apology insufficient, and then just stayed on a drumbeat for his ouster. Franken had played a pretty nearly pure shaman strategy, where he was viewed as ‘correct’ on issues, not as ‘strong enough to not be worth messing with’–so he potentially had very little ability to punish Gilibrand, and she likely did not spend much time wondering if Franken loyalists might undermine her in the future, if she undermined him. If the same controversy had embroiled a warlord, the warlord’s putative allies would have potentially tried using the controversy to poach loyalists or turf, but what would be the point of forcing a weakened opponent off the stage, particularly if that embitters their supporters into vindictive behavior later? (And maybe the steady mutterings of some Franken loyalists were part of why Gilibrand couldn’t get traction as a national candidate.) The result is that rival warlords are always in a state of low-grade but low-stakes conflict, with minor wins and minor losses the route by which some achieve major power. Meanwhile shamans are getting along famously with everyone until, suddenly, one gets eaten by the others.

      Add to this the old saw that “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line” and you get a recipe for Democrats as a group have more members who rely on shamanistic appeal and shamanistic coordination, while Republicans have more members who rely much more on warlord self-interest and iterated games. The result is, while there are exceptions, a pattern where the Dems act nice but sometimes eat their own, and the Rs act bristly but mostly fight small fights behind the scenes.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        Wow. I wasn’t sure this would address my question until the end. Very interesting model; thanks for summarizing it.

      • Randy M says:

        Interesting. Any thoughts on whether to repec an enviro shaman into a pub-health shaman to get better dpe in the new corona meta?

    • Clutzy says:

      I think you should just google “Steve Sailer Coalition of the Fringes” to get as best an explanation for this as I can muster. I don’t even know if its true, or if the phenomena you describe is true, but if it is, that is probably why.

    • JayT says:

      I think, traditionally, a lot of this behavior can be explained by the whole near group/far group dynamic. The Democrats have a much more cohesive set of beliefs among the people that actually win elections, and so small differences like “Medicare + private insurance” versus “single payer” becomes a huge dividing point, even though both plans are trying to reach the same goal, healthcare for everyone.

      On the Republican side, you have a lot of coalitions built around single issues like abortion, guns, or free trade. If you look at someone that is passionate about guns, they probably don’t have particularly strong views on abortion beyond “anti-abortion people vote the same way as me”. So as long as that other group doesn’t start going against your group or losing you elections, you don’t really care what they do, and you’ll be happy to toss a few platitudes towards their issue.

      All that said, I think that we are seeing an unraveling of that because the free trade and deficit hawk Republicans are definitely being stomped on, and those people are starting to speak out.

    • Aftagley says:

      The public perception of the right, at least among the lefty circles I run in, is that starting in the late 90s, solidifying during the Obama years and culminating in 2016, the moderates in the party were eaten alive by the extremists. I don’t think this is a particularly controversial position.

      Limbaugh, Coulter and their ilk made making any kind of compromise a personal example of weakness and the right turned into this culture where unless they had seniority and name recognition within their party, the only thing most elected officials feared was a primary attack from the right. This was always done under the umbrella that a certain politician was a RINO, or was insufficiently devoted to the most extreme position possible.

      The reason you don’t hear the left claim that the right is still devouring it’s own… is that it’s already happened? What moderate republican is still out there? Romney?

      Trump’s largest strength, imo, is that he short circuited this line of criticism by shifting the narrative away from their extremism in defense of conservatism towards their extremism in defense of, well, Trump. That being said, you now see people on the right devouring other people on the right for not supporting Trump enough.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        The public perception of the right, at least among the lefty circles I run in, is that starting in the late 90s, solidifying during the Obama years and culminating in 2016, the moderates in the party were eaten alive by the extremists. I don’t think this is a particularly controversial position.

        Compare the positions held by both parties during the 90s and today. Do you think the Republicans shifted right? If so, on what issue? Trans rights? Gay Rights? Illegal immigration?

        Do you think the Democrats stayed where they were? If so, on what issue? Trans rights did not exist as an issue in the 90s, everybody was firmly against gay marriage, and Democrats were against illegal immigration.

        The left won so many cultural battles and they’re moving on to the next cultural battle, moving ever lefter. And as they sit on the train moving leftward they see the Republican position, moving left at a slower pace and based on the increasing distance between them and the Republicans, they accuse the Republicans of moving right.

        • Aftagley says:

          I’m going to do a deep dive on your answer and promise you a more comprehensive and specific reply, but while I do so, I’d like to point out that your kind of dodging the question.

          The initial point was: Do people on the left claim the right is devouring its own?

          To which a summary of my response is: Yes

          With specific respect to this question, doesn’t really matter if, in broad strokes, the parties are moving in any particular direction (I don’t agree they are, at least to the extent you seem to, but will get to that later). If people on one extreme of the party are eating the moderates alive, it doesn’t matter the historical extremity of their various positions.

        • Nick says:

          The Republican platform hasn’t shifted much, but there has been a Big Sort. There’s not much left of the progressive wing of the Republican Party or the conservative wing of the Democratic party. Pro-choice Republicans and pro-life Democrats for instance used to be more common. I’m pretty sure the same story has played out at the level of representatives/politicians, though I can’t find data to prove it.

          There was also the Tea Party, which very much was “moderates/RINOs being primaried by more ideological conservatives,” it was the entire point.

          This does not affect your point that Democrats have become more socially liberal, which I think is true.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          If people on one extreme of the party are eating the moderates alive, it doesn’t matter the historical extremity of their various positions.

          I guess I’m thinking that this question can be determined empirically based on the positions the parties are taking. If a leftwing party is moving left, it suggests that the leftward extreme of that party is in control. If a rightwing party is moving left, it suggests the moderates of that party are in control.

      • zzzzort says:

        Definitely agree this is the perception from the left. The tea party primaries were probably the purest expression (Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, David Brat etc.). The impression is that the Rs will punish people that go against the base, even if they’re popular with the median voter, while the Ds will punish people who scare the median voter even if they excite the base.

      • Clutzy says:

        @aftagley

        Limbaugh, Coulter and their ilk made making any kind of compromise a personal example of weakness and the right turned into this culture where unless they had seniority and name recognition within their party, the only thing most elected officials feared was a primary attack from the right. This was always done under the umbrella that a certain politician was a RINO, or was insufficiently devoted to the most extreme position possible.

        This only worked as an attack strategy because the base felt like every “compromise” they were just getting hosed on. Think of the famous Democratic lines “even Reagan raised taxes” and “Reagan amnestied workers”. Well yes, and the base learned from that that you should never do those things without creating institutional shifts that mean you don’t have to do them again. Raising taxes without eliminating a program (or adjusting a formula that slows its growth permanently) is now correctly identified as not “bipartisan” it is merely losing. Giving an immigration amnesty without something that permanently reduces the influx of illegal immigrants is just a magnet for more illegal immigration.

    • Leafhopper says:

      I think I remember the left gloating a little bit when David Brat primaried Eric Cantor way back in the day, and related claims that John Boehner couldn’t control the Tea Party representatives, but I haven’t seen much of that sort of thing recently.

      You could say that (sporadic) left-wing support for right-wingers who prominently oppose Trump is kind of like this, but I think the narrative here is “look at these brave moderates standing up to Trump, who is dangerous because he is strong“; on the other hand, when right-wingers talk about the left devouring its own, I get the sense they’re trying to convince themselves that the left is weak.

  50. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Conan review #17: Beyond the Black River
    This is one of the shorter Conan novellas, being serialized over two issues of Weird Tales, May & June 1935. It didn’t make the cover: apparently no one submitted Margaret Brundage bait that time.

    This story is basically an anti-Western, set in the uncivilized wilderness west of Aquilonia. “The Black Stranger” shares that setting.
    Yes, the adjective Black is something of a cliche in this series. If you ever have the opportunity to write a Conan story, having him and a woman menaced by the demon Th*** in the ruins of X*** in a yarn titled Beyond the People of the Queen of the Black Colossal Circle River Coast Pool of the Black Strange One would be a correct way to pastiche the original style.

    Anyway, the theme of Westerns is said to be civilization’s need for gunslingers, but gunslinging makes you uncivilized, a liminal figure with no place in the society that’s inexorably replacing the uncivilized life ways of the natives. Here, SPOILERS, civilization doesn’t win, and guns don’t exist.
    We have a viewpoint character other than Conan, a settler named Balthus, though unlike some stories with such protagonists, Conan is introduced quickly, before we even get Balthus’ name, not Chapter 2 or 3. His function is to show how tough a civilized man can be, being a frontier peasant.
    Peasants are absurdly under-represented in this series. I don’t remember how many times Howard himself did it – and I’ll charitably say “not many” since I can’t count them, unlike girlfriends who disappear without explanation or embarrassingly racist use of black people – but Conan defeating his opponents because the narrator says they’re “city-bred” became quite the cliche. One would think there’s been an Industrial Revolution, if 85-90% of warriors are not farmers.
    Conan is employed as a frontier scout by the King of Aquilonia (who he mentions strangling in his throne room, in the stories where he’s the usurping king), clad in buckskin boots, mail torso armor and a horned helmet. Howard cleverly establishes the socioeconomics of his Western/medieval mashup:

    This colonization business is mad, anyway. There’s plenty of good land east of the Bossonian marches. If the Aquilonians would cut up some of the big estates of their barons, and plant wheat where now only deer are hunted, they wouldn’t have to cross the border…

    … some day a man will rise and unite thirty or forty clans, just as was done among the Cimmerians, when the Gundermen tried to push the border northward, years ago. They tried to colonize the southern marches of Cimmeria: destroyed a few small clans, built a fort-town, Venarium — you’ve heard the tale.”

    Balthus experiences a frission of fear and admiration when Conan gives his name and admits being a 15-year-old slayer at Venarium. We’re told that Balthus knows his name but not how long he’s been living in civilization.
    Finding a merchant’s corpse, Conan exposits that this is the fifth Aquilonian killed by “a forest devil” rather than a Pict. The Picts have a wizard named Zogar Sag who’s been summoning such, wanting revenge ever since the indignity of being thrown in a prison (he escaped). Specifically, the thing that killed the merchant has three-toed footprints transition between reptile and bird.
    “It’s a swamp demon — they’re thick as bats in the swamps beyond Black River.”
    This is an interesting statement, because Conan usually dwells in a “low fantasy” setting: non-human beings he encounters are unique or, if a race, confined to island ruins (cf. the nudist NBA players in “The Pool of the Black One” and “Shadows in the Moonlight”). Here we’re told that in much of the Pictish Wilderness, a species of monster is common as bats.
    As could be expected in a pseudo-Western, Conan also calls Aquilonians “white men”, causing the narrator to say:

    The Picts were a white race, though swarthy, but the border men never spoke of them as such.

    Did Howard just say that race is socially constructed despite objective biological facts? That’s an interestingly sophisticated statement.

    Chapter 1 ends with a swamp demon, which “gave off a glimmer of weird light, like a faint blue flame. Indeed, the eery fire was the only tangible thing about it”, tricking them by screaming like a woman. It decapitates the merchant, conveying to the reader that it’s something summoned by Zogar Sag, who’s collecting heads for an altar.
    Because this is one of the most interesting Conan stories thematically but not (IMO) technically or structurally as an adventure story (such as you might mine for RPG inspiration), I’m going to summarize the overall plot and theme before distracting from such with a chapter-by-chapter summary. Conan, Balthus, and some fellow settlers are ordered to do armed recon against Zogar Sag. After being driven off by his summons and human followers, Conan and Balthus are on the run in Chapter 5, where we get the big revelation about the wizard’s magic:

    “He can’t command all the animals. Only such as remember Jhebbal Sag.”
    “Jhebbal Sag?” Balthus repeated the ancient name hesitantly. He had never heard it spoken more than three or four times in his whole life.
    “Once all living things worshipped him. That was long ago, when beasts and men spoke one language. Men have forgotten him; even the beasts forget. Only a few remember. The men who remember Jhebbal Sag and the beasts who remember are brothers and speak the same tongue.”

    This is folk tale stuff. All over the real world, we find stories where animals speak human language. The way Howard weaves that into this “Western without guns” without the disparate elements cracking is genius. Jhebbal Sag also has a special sign:

    “I saw it carved in the rock of a cave no human had visited for a million years,” muttered Conan, “in the uninhabited mountains beyond the Sea of Vilayet, half a world away from this spot. Later I saw a black witch-finder of Kush scratch it in the sand of a nameless river. He told me part of its meaning — it’s sacred to Jhebbal Sag and the creatures which worship him. Watch!”

    By the end of this story, this knowledge will save Conan’s life against Zogar Sag. But his victories are only personal. A huge coalition of Picts succeed in driving the settlers from Beyond the Black River back to the east bank of Thunder River. Conan splits off from his co-protagonist to go east with a warning. Balthus and a big dog named Slasher heroically sacrifice themselves saving many settlers. Later, a messenger catches up with Conan in a tavern east of Thunder River with the news.

    “The heads of ten Picts shall pay for his, and seven heads for the dog, who was a better warrior than many a man.”

    “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,” the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. “Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”

    That’s why I call it an anti-Western. A Western would tell us that civilization always ultimately triumphs.
    (I’ll make a follow-up post completing the summary.) Your thoughts?

    • broblawsky says:

      Are the Picts in this story supposed to be similar to those in the Kull and Bran Mak Morn stories?

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Yes. Based on the sinking of Atlantis circa 9550 BC, Howard crafted an epic of geological time for the Picts, from contemporaries of Kull and the barbaric Atlanteans >1000 years before the civilization they went on to develop sank to Roman-era Scotland, surviving two geological changes (the sinking of Atlantis and the flooding of the Mediterranean basin some time between Conan’s death and the 1st Dynasty of Egypt).

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      In Chapter 2, the scene moves to the log fort Tuscelan, which guards the western edge of Aquilonia at the titular Black River. Between here and Thunder River to the east, the king’s subjects make up a people group called Bossonians, who seem to be yeoman archers. Soldiery on the Aquilonian frontier seems to be paid work just like the US Army in Westerns: a mix of archers and pikemen, neither mercenaries nor feudal cavalry like we’re used to from other Conan stories. Valannus the governor exposits to Conan that he has perhaps 750 soldiers to hold the west marches, who “do not believe in ghosts or devils” yet are weakened by fear of the unknown.
      (There’s that “low magic setting” I was talking about: wizards may be known, but not the undead, devils, or any other non-human group. Like in Gothic fiction, they’re supposed to be an unknown quantity whenever the protagonist sees them.)
      He gives Conan a suicide mission to kill Zogar Sag, for which Conan has authority over as many men as he chooses. He chooses a special forces team of Balthus and ten more. They stealthily row one large canoe. Conan disappears into the woods with nine men while Balthus is left to guard the canoe with one another. Then our viewpoint character is attacked by enemies in the dark.
      He wakes bound upright to a post in an open space. It’s the middle of a Pictish wattle-and-daub village, with men in loincloths and naked women and children. And they’ve made a little pyramid of the skulls of Conan’s men. “he was aware that the number of men clustered about them was out of proportion to the size of the village.” Zogar Sag has the charismatic authority to assemble warriors from many clans. He summons a sabretooth tiger: “No Hyborian hunter had looked upon one of those primordial brutes for centuries.” (the march of civilization drives both natural and supernatural species extinct) He also summons a venomous constrictor with a head the size of a horse’s, “the Ghost Snake.” It’s going to eat Balthus, until Conan reappears (turns out he survived by being one of the few who combines a Fighter’s ability to wear armor with the Move Silently skill) to bloodily distract it with a javelin. He flees with Balthus, throwing an axe to slay a Pict who inadventantly pursues them in the chaos.
      In Chapter 5, Conan and Balthus avoid the paths back to the river, as that’s where swarms of Picts will be looking for them. Hiding, they’re trailed by a leopard, whom Conan dispatches with another throwing axe. Yeah, throwing attacks are OP.
      This is where the exchange about the nature of Zogar’s summoning abilities occurs.
      Another leopard comes out and doesn’t reach their hiding place, instead bowing to the sign of Jhebbal Sag Conan carved with awe and adoration. Conan says they have to warn Valannus that at least fifteen Pictish clans are preparing a united attack, averaging 200 warriors each.
      Random ethnographic detail: the Picts believe in “the Hairy One who lives on the moon — the gorilla-god of Gullah.”
      Balthus is impressed that Conan has

      “seen all the great cities of the Hyborians, the Shemites, the Stygians, and the Hyrkanians. I’ve roamed in the unknown countries south of the black kingdoms of Kush, and east of the Sea of Vilayet. I’ve been a mercenary captain, a corsair, a kozak, a penniless vagabond, a general — hell, I’ve been everything except a king of a civilized country, and I may be that, before I die.”

      They’re attacked when they reach the river, and at this point in his life Conan is tough enough to survive seven enemies if his sidekick kills two. Next chapter, they acquire a canoe by killing its lone rower, an envoy from Zogar. On foot on the east bank near the fort, they meet Slasher the dog. He survived his original owner’s slaying. “The frontier was no less hard for beasts than for men. This dog had almost forgotten the meaning of kindness and friendliness.”
      The trio arrive to find the fort already completely surrounded. Conan decides that what’s left to do is warn the settlers to withdraw to the log walls of the next fort, Velitrium. There’s nineteen miles of farmsteads between where they stand and Velitrium, and the first thing they see on their run is Picts cheering over their killing of a young married couple, to show the reader “what will happen to every man, woman, and child this side of Thunder River if we don’t get them into Velitrium in a hurry.” Conan splits off from Balthus and Slasher so they can warn more people. Balthus and Slasher are able to kill five enemies without Conan, saving the lives of four women and numerous children. But those five Picts have reinforcements.
      Chapter 7 switches to Conan’s POV. Herding settlers, he hears Balthus’ voice cry “Wait for me!” But it’s one of those glowing, shimmering swamp demons. It calls Zogar Sag brother and says Conan is doomed because

      “He had not whispered your name to the black ghosts that haunt the uplands of the Dark Land. But a bat has flown over the Mountains of the Dead and drawn your image in blood on the white tiger’s hide that hangs before the long hut where sleep the Four Brothers of the Night. The great serpents coil about their feet and the stars burn like fireflies in their hair.”

      How poetic. The demon says his brother is son of Jhebbal Sag himself by a woman, while his mother is “a fire-being from a far realm.”

      With incantations and sorcery and his own blood he materialized me in the flesh of his own planet. We are one, tied together by invisible threads. His thoughts are my thoughts; if he is struck, I am bruised.

      You can see where this is going: Conan kills the brother, which leaves Zogar dead too. Without his charismatic leadership, the united force of Picts peters out when otherwise it would have besieged Velitrium successfully, meaning the deaths of the settlers Conan and Balthus successfully herded.
      Story ends with messenger catching up with Conan, reporting the deaths of Zogar, Balthus and Slasher. They agree that civilization has permanently lost the land it had held between the two rivers.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Love this story. It’s definitely top two, up there with People of the Black Circle. Like you said, his victories were only personal. I did not expect Conan to fail at his mission to kill the shaman before the attack. I did not then expect him to fail to warn the fort, or lose the fort, and to only barely get the villagers evacuated to safety. I was very sad about Balthus and the good doggo. This was a rough day of barbarianing.

  51. AlexOfUrals says:

    It’s a strong impression of mine that many of those who voted for Trump did so just because Clinton was very left and they wanted to screw with her and the Democratic elites she represented. And it seems that Bernie Sanders represents the same things and is at least as left as she was. Therefore he’s a bad choice from the “we must get Trump out of the office” perspective, regardless of his other merits. How wrong am I with this?

    • Aftagley says:

      Clinton was very left

      This wasn’t public perception at the time. Bernie was very far to the left of Clinton in 2016.

      crew with her and the Democratic elites she represented. And it seems that Bernie Sanders represents the same things and is at least as left as she was.

      Bernie’s whole schtick is that he hates the Democratic party. Hell, for the majority of his time in office he’s rejected being a member of the Democratic party. He’s not considered a democratic elite.

      Therefore he’s a bad choice from the “we must get Trump out of the office” perspective, regardless of his other merits.

      I agree, but not for the reasons you listed.

      How wrong am I with this?

      2/3rds wrong?

      • AlexOfUrals says:

        Well that’s probably a poor choice of words on my part, instead of “Democratic elites” I should’ve say “left educated urban population” or whatever. The Blue Tribe. Bernie might be more left economically and Clinton culturally, as Plumber noted below, but what I meant to say is that he’s least as much an enemy for the Red Tribe moderates as she is. From this perspective, the fact that he’s not even in the Blue Tribe mainstream is hardly any argument for him – I mean, he’s more of a socialist than the mainstream, not less so!

        To put it differently, it seems to me that the first and probably the only required step in winning against Trump would be to have a candidate whom minimal number of people on the other side actively hate. And I feel like as [at least economically] pretty much the leftmost of all candidates, Bernie doesn’t exactly fit this role.

        • Aftagley says:

          Well that’s probably a poor choice of words on my part, instead of “Democratic elites” I should’ve say “left educated urban population” or whatever. The Blue Tribe.

          This argument is going to devolve over quibbles of what kind of true Scottsman the blue tribe actually is.

          Bernie’s schitck is, as I said previously, that he is running against the democratic establishment and is pushing policies that the majority of the democratic establishment finds too extreme. Saying the Bernie is the cultural representation of the Blue Tribe doesn’t match either the polling (he’s mostly liked by the radicals and the youths) and it doesn’t make sense on it’s head: he’s leading a revolution against the blue tribe as the standard bearer for the blue tribe?

          I feel like as [at least economically] pretty much the leftmost of all candidates, Bernie doesn’t exactly fit this role.

          I agree with you here.

        • Clutzy says:

          i think you are still missing why Hillary was hated. She was hated because she had been saying and doing things like her “basket of deplorables” comment for 25 years. In addition, she’s an entitled scold who had a rich, connected, dad, married a smart and talented guy, then acted like she had accomplished something.

          Also she has the personality of the meanest librarian you ever got shushed by. But when you point this out she would instantly pull out the “sexism” card (a tactic now loved by Warren).

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        AlexOfUrals’ claim that voters “wanted to screw with [Clinton] and the Democratic elites she represented” boils down essentially to “voted against Clinton, rather than for Trump”. There was definitely an element of that.

        I don’t think she was seen as very left compared to Sanders, or to the progressive wing. But she was seen as very left compared to Republicans, a harbinger of expanded government and regulation into American life. Her reputation as a hawk would not close that gap.

        I see Sanders’ main position as progressive populism. Any hate he might have for the Democratic Party is vastly overshadowed by hate for corporate America – indeed, his distaste for the Dems is likely only to the extent he feels they’re coopted by corporate elites. If Sanders wins, I think we can expect his primary adversary to be Wall Street and Silicon Valley capital, not, say, Nancy Pelosi.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          If Sanders wins, I think we can expect his primary adversary to be Wall Street and Silicon Valley capital, not, say, Nancy Pelosi.

          And Trump’s adversary should have been illegal aliens, but he had to fight Paul Ryan every step of the way. The Democratic establishment would not just roll over and let Bernie have his way with the donor class. He would wind up having to fight Pelosi, and I don’t see any evidence he has the backbone to take on the DNC establishment.

    • broblawsky says:

      I think a lot of people – especially the kind of people who tend to be categorized as “swing voters” – vote not on the basis of left/right alone, but based on how closely their perception of the person they’re voting for matches their idealized self-image. The conservative media spent decades painting Hillary as Lady MacBeth; that was enough to poison her campaign, ultimately.

      • eric23 says:

        My theory is that millions of older women could never forgive Hillary for staying with Bill after Monicagate, and thus legitimizing their own husbands’ potential adultery. Which permanently depressed Hillary’s vote share regardless of her policies, personality, and so on.

        I arrived at this theory after encountering a female relative who preferred anyone to Hillary even when Hillary’s policies were much closer to hers than that anyone’s…

        • gbdub says:

          There is probably some of that, and not just among older women. My girlfriend (who also hates Trump) mentioned it as a reason she couldn’t respect Hillary.

          I think it may have been forgivable if Hillary was loyal to Bill because she was madly in love with him, taking a principled stand to stand by him through better or worse. But the Clintons, for the last 20+ years, have never given off a loving partnership vibe, so Hillary’s “loyalty” feels more like calculated political ambition (and honestly probably was).

          That’s a bad look for someone who is simultaneously acting as if women owe her solidarity. She was willing to throw inconvenient women under the bus and support a serial philanderer/ sex pest (or worse) in order to ride her hubby’s name to her own power.

      • EchoChaos says:

        Hillary had an approval rating of nearly 2/3 of Americans during her time as Secretary of State and was one of the most popular politicians in America when the President she served under was floating around 50%.

        “Hillary was always hated and reviled” is revisionist history.

        • Loriot says:

          That’s because she wasn’t doing anything people cared about. It was obvious her approval rating would tank as soon as she started running for president. I’m pretty sure I can find pre-2016 articles saying that if I bother to look.

          Politicians are always more popular when they’re not being politicians. George W Bush is a lot more popular now than in 2007, but his popularity would drop like a rock if he ever ran for President again (assuming he was even allowed to)

          • EchoChaos says:

            Sure, but “anyone who runs for President will have to deal with lower approval ratings” is a very different statement than “The conservative media spent decades painting Hillary as Lady MacBeth;”

            If we had been so successful, no way that 2/3 of Americans approved of her as Sec State.

            Her baseline “hated Hillary” was 1/3 of Americans, almost certainly all hardcore Republicans. That’s not even slightly a big deal in a general.

          • Loriot says:

            The right did spend decades demonizing Hillary and she did get more popular when she wasn’t actively running for office. I still don’t understand why you think those statements are mutually contradictory.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Loriot

            They are not contradictory, but the idea that right-leaning media painting her as Lady MacBeth over a few decades is what torpedoed her campaign doesn’t withstand scrutiny.

            If right-leaning media had that kind of influence over the electorate, she could never have gotten to 66%, which was clearly a ceiling she had the potential to reach because she actually reached it.

            She lost because she was a bad campaigner who ran a bad campaign.

          • Loriot says:

            You could be the second coming of Jesus and you still wouldn’t get 66% of the vote in a presidential election.

            Approval ratings of non-politicians are near meaningless for how they would do once they actually start campaigning and people put on their partisanship hats.

        • Spookykou says:

          We actually poll the approval rating of secretary of state? I’ve never heard of a cabinet members approval rating before this. Googling secretary of state approval rating all the top results are just about Hillary’s high approval rating as secretary of state. I just tried to Google Pompeo’s approval rating and I got a bunch of articles that at a glance don’t actually mention an approval rating. What source would you recommend for looking at the approval ratings of Trumps cabinet?

          • cassander says:

            it’s not so secretaries of state that get polled, it’s hillary clinton personally.

    • Eric Rall says:

      I think Clinton’s biggest handicap was that many marginal voters viewed her as corrupt or criminal, not that they felt she was too far left. As far as I know, there’s very little daylight between Clinton’s policy proposals and the ones Obama was elected and re-elected on in 2008 and 2012.

      Sanders, I think, is generally views as far more ideologically extreme than Clinton, but also much more honest. If he were the Democratic nominee, I’d expect him to pick up some people who like Democratic party policies but didn’t like Clinton on character/integrity grounds, while also losing moderate voters who are turned away by his overtly socialist platform.

      Elitism I think did play a role in 2016: Clinton came off as an out-of-touch elitist to many, and she was definitely aligned with the Democratic Party establishment, while Trump ran as a rude and crude populist and an enemy of both parties’ respective establishments. But Sanders is also a party outsider running a populist campaign, so I think in that respect he’d fare better than Clinton.

      • Grantford says:

        Yeah, I think that these points, related to what broblawsky mentions above, account for much more of swing voters’ choices than any perceptions that Clinton was unusually far-left. Anyone who voted for Trump over Clinton solely because they thought that Clinton was too far to the left is probably someone who was never going to vote for a Democratic presidential nominee anyway.

      • albatross11 says:

        That’s my impression, too. I think in some complicated way, a lot of the smarminess of Bill’s sex scandals somehow stuck more to Hillary than to Bill–probably because Bill is extremely charismatic and Hillary is not. But also, Hillary tried to push through a major healthcare reform, and I think failed to impress both Democrats and Republicans with her flawed leadership.

        And I think one of the biggest drivers of Clinton’s loss is that she’s just not very charismatic. It doesn’t exactly make sense that we hire someone for a super-important job by running a year-long reality show and popularity contest, but that’s kinda what we do, and while Hillary might have done a lot better than Trump at *being* president, she was much less talented at *becoming* president.

        • gbdub says:

          As for Bill’s scandals sticking to Hillary, yeah he’s charismatic, but most importantly, he never ran for office again while Hillary has been climbing the political ladder since then. And there was never really any reckoning, from Hillary or the DNC, for Bill’s scandals. And they haven’t done anything to distance themselves from Bill himself, while playing off the name recognition. So Hillary is the obvious place for the ick to stick.

        • baconbits9 says:

          The sex scandal stink stuck to Hillary because she stuck with him after a very public and messy sex scandal and ASAP she was turning up the heat on her political career. This makes it very believable that their marriage was one of convenience in a lot of ways which acts to excuse some of his behavior (the consensual accusations at least).

    • Plumber says:

      @AlexOfUrals,
      Clinton in 2016 was perceived as more culturally left-liberal-progressive and especially feminist, Sanders as more of an old Trotskyist, so old Left (Saturday Night Live recently had a little fun with this with Larry David as Sanders asking “You know who’s great at washing his hands?”), so more “woke” vs. more anti-capitalist.

      Ross Douthat of The New York Times wrote: “…This is why, despite technically preferring a moderate like Biden or Amy Klobuchar, I keep coming back to the conservative’s case for Bernie — which rests on the perhaps-wrong but still attractive supposition that he’s the liberal most likely to spend all his time trying to tax the rich and leave cultural conservatives alone

    • lvlln says:

      It’s a strong impression of mine that many of those who voted for Trump did so just because Clinton was very left and they wanted to screw with her and the Democratic elites she represented. And it seems that Bernie Sanders represents the same things and is at least as left as she was. Therefore he’s a bad choice from the “we must get Trump out of the office” perspective, regardless of his other merits. How wrong am I with this?

      As an informal observer without any hard data to back this up, I think you are quite wrong. I think the part that makes you quite wrong is your apparent model of Trump voters modeling Clinton in 2016 as “very left” and Sanders in 2020 as “at least as left as Clinton.” I don’t think a one-dimensional left-right model which places Sanders to the left of Clinton to the left of Trump is the one that the bulk of Trump voters were following.

      Rather, I think there’s a second axis that has to do with some level of “belonging to the establishment” or whatever, and I think Clinton was far higher on that scale than Trump in the minds of many Trump voters, which was a large part of what motivated them to vote for Trump. And I think, in the minds of these Trump voters, Sanders is far closer to Trump on this scale than he is to Clinton. As such, from a “we must get Trump out of the office” perspective, it’s possible that Sanders is good due to his closeness to Trump in this scale, or it’s possible that Sanders is bad due to his being further left in the left-right axis than Clinton was. Can’t really say which one wins out.

      Again, these are my thoughts based on just observing Trump supporters, Sanders supporters, Clinton supporters, Sanders detractors, and their campaigns over the past ~5 years and not based on empirical evidence and as such you shouldn’t take them too seriously.

      • JayT says:

        I agree with this, and I would add that one thing that really bolstered Trump’s candidacy is that he was significantly to the left of Clinton on matters of foreign trade, which is why a non-negligible number of Sanders supporters went for Trump.

      • AlexOfUrals says:

        I see, that makes sense. Without good knowledge of American elites, I was using “adored by liberal media” as a proxy for “eliteness”, which is of course not a very precise measure.

        • gbdub says:

          Clinton was “elite” / “establishment”, but she definitely wasn’t “farther left” – your error was conflating “elite” with “very left”. Clinton is a moderate, neoliberal, product of DNC machine politics. Certainly, to the extent that people hate DNC machine politics, and inside the Beltway elites in general, they would hate Hillary.

          Sanders is a cranky old actual-revolutionary-Socialist who college kids like for the same reasons that college kids have been attracted to socialist politics for the better part of a century (when Bernie himself was picking it up). Definitely much farther left on the usual political scale.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        Yes I think it is actually likely that Bernie will pick a number of the voters who went for Trump for populist reasons. It’s probable pretty stupid to vote for President for this reason, but nobody ever said the voters were smart. Both Trump and Sanders appeal to folks who want to screw the establishment.

        Of course Sanders will lose the moderate Dem voter that do vote on policy and are worried about his extreme ideas. I don’t think a Sanders win is less likely than Biden, but not more likely either. I think Trump is pretty much a shoe-in right now. He will only lose if the economy collapses.

  52. Silverlock says:

    Presented as either the luckiest or the unluckiest woman in the world: Violet Jessup, who survived calamity on all three of the White Star line’s Olympic-class liners.

    Jessup worked as a stewardess for White Star Lines and was aboard the RMS Olympic when it collided with the HMS Hawke on 20 September 1911, the liner afterwards limping back into port but remaining on top of the water. She (Jessup, not the Olympic) was also on board the Titanic on her (Titanic, not Jessup) famous maiden voyage. During WWI, she was serving as a Red Cross stewardess aboard HMHS Britannic, which by that time had been converted to a hospital ship, when it struck a mine and sank in the Aegean Sea. She had to jump out of the lifeboat she was in order to avoid the ship’s propellers.

    As remarkable as all that is, even luckier (or not) was a stoker by the name of Arthur John Priest, who survived the same three incidents and also two other sinkings. Eventually, nobody was very keen on being his shipmate. I can’t imagine why.

    • broblawsky says:

      How common was it for ships to sink back then?

      • John Schilling says:

        To be fair, “back then” encompasses a period when basically all of the world’s navies were, in toto, working very hard to arrange that basically all of the world’s ships would be sunk.

        • broblawsky says:

          That’s fair. I guess I’m just wondering about pre-1914 shipping accidents. What was the core technological development that reduced the incidence of maritime disasters? Sonar?

          • b_jonas says:

            My guess is passenger airplanes, because they significantly reduced the number of people who take long distance trips through an ocean on a ship. But radio communication is also a suspect, because it became much better in the 1910s when the cathode ray tube (vacuum tube) let people use AM radios.

          • Aftagley says:

            What was the core technological development that reduced the incidence of maritime disasters?

            Core? There wasn’t really one, it would have been a bunch of things. Definitely not sonar, pretty much no ship relies on Sonar for anything other than depth monitoring, but if you have to worry about the depth, you’re already screwed.

            IMO, biggest advancement would probably be any one of several navigational advancements made over the past century or so. It’s pretty trivial for a vessel to know it’s exact location now in a way that would absolutely amaze previous generations of sailors.

            Previously, assuming the weather was clear enough to see the sky, you could use celestial navigation to determine your position once or twice a day, and basically would estimate your position off those fixes until the next time you could take a fix. This meant that at any given time there was pretty massive uncertainty over your exact location.

            Then, in the 1940s, we implemented LORAN, which basically use radio beacons to fix your position. This was constantly online (meaning you could fix your location whenever you wanted) and “only” had an area of uncertainty of a few hundred meters (later reduced all the way down to a coupe dozen meters).

            Today, of course, we have GPS which further reduces that uncertainty down to a few feet. It’s really, really hard to describe what a big difference knowing where you are makes in terms of safe navigation.

          • Eric Rall says:

            I suspect the big contributor in the 20th century was the development of weather forecasting, especially the ability to deliver timely storm warnings to ships at sea. This goes hand-in-hand with two-way radio, since that’s a vital precondition both for gathering data from far-away observers in order to inform the predictions and warnings and for distributing the predictions and warnings in a timely manner.

          • John Schilling says:

            Marine radio probably does it for mortality-based definitions of “disaster”; even if a ship sinks, the passengers and crew are now very likely to be rescued.

            For the part where it’s rare for large ships to sink at all, the credit goes to modern navigation and global weather surveillance. Ideally in both cases by satellite, but I think 90+% of the gains were manifest by long-range radio navigation (per Aftagley) and the development of integrated networks of weather stations, ships, and aircraft. Both of those are 1940s things.

          • JayT says:

            I doubt airplanes have much to do with it, because there are still a lot of people that go on cruises. I would guess that there are more people taking cruises nowadays than there were passengers travelling across oceans in the early 20th Century.

          • Silverlock says:

            From surveying the lists of shipwrecks in Wikipedia — which is how I got onto this topic in the first place — there were a few causes that accounted for most of the wrecks:

            Enemy action: As John noted, that was going on in this time period, and accounted for Britannic and two of the other ships that dropped out from under Arthur Priest.

            Storm: Ameliorated by modern weather forecasting, radio communications, and radar.

            Collision: Radar was also a big help here, along with GPS and radio.

            Rogue waves: This one is a bit tougher a nut to crack. As far as I know the main defense is stronger ships.

            Grounding: Better charts and the use of sonar helped with this one.

            Boiler explosions: Fewer and better-built steam engines mitigated this.

            Hubris: Good luck.

          • Ketil says:

            In addition to better navigation tools, I’d mention AIS and traffic control.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            I doubt airplanes have much to do with it, because there are still a lot of people that go on cruises. I would guess that there are more people taking cruises nowadays than there were passengers travelling across oceans in the early 20th Century.

            Though cruises, by their very nature, tend to take place in much better weather conditions than liner crossings did.

            (The QM2 is unique among modern passenger ships in having been built as an ocean liner rather than a cruise ship- in other words actually being designed to regularly cross the Atlantic with passengers in all weathers).

          • bean says:

            I’d broadly say “all of the above” to the suggestions in this thread, and the only one I’d add would be the steam engine. Steamship are a lot less vulnerable to weather than sailing ships, although those gains were mostly taken by 1900.

            Note that while passenger sea travel in bad weather (and the North Atlantic is particularly bad) is down a lot, cargo shipping continues apace, and I’m pretty sure the loss rate there is down, too. Some of that is just bigger ships being less vulnerable to the sea, and a lot is increased professionalization.

            But in terms of progress after 1912, I’d say radar and better design standards. The only major disasters I know of after that are Empress of Ireland and Andrea Doria, both of which were caused by collisions. Collisions still happen, but I don’t know of major ones involving cruise ships recently. (Carnival has apparently been hiring from 7th Fleet, though, so watch this space.)

            Also, the most recent Naval Gazing is relevant to anyone who is confused about the evolution of the passenger liner.

            Edit: I am occasionally forgetful. The big piece not mentioned (probably the biggest, as it’s international and not something that can be dodged by flags of convenience) is SOLAS.

          • Aftagley says:

            Specifically wrt transiting the North Atlantic, the International Ice Patrol did a bunch of good work before Sat coverage was omnipresent in tracking and alerting the maritime community of the presence of icebergs. Once you know exactly where all icebergs are well in advance of being able to see them, your ability to evade gets much stronger.

          • bean says:

            Also, pedantic nitpicking time:

            But radio communication is also a suspect, because it became much better in the 1910s when the cathode ray tube (vacuum tube) let people use AM radios.

            Cathode ray tubes are a type of vacuum tube, but they’re not the kind that enabled improved naval radios. Which didn’t even take vacuum tubes, actually, although they did win out in the end.

            the development of integrated networks of weather stations, ships, and aircraft. Both of those are 1940s things.

            Not really. The international ice patrol started in 1914, although obviously without airplanes. I believe it also did some weather reporting.

          • b_jonas says:

            bean: thank you. I wasn’t really aware of those failed intermediate radio technologies between the spark gap and the vacuum tube. And yes, I should have said “1920s” rather than “1910s”. And I’ll try to remember the terminology now: the tubes used for amplification or logic are called “vacuum tube”, not “cathode ray tube”.

    • Aapje says:

      @Silverlock

      Arthur John Priest was actually even more lucky than it seems, since only 22% of the male Titanic crew survived vs 88% of the female crew. In this one sinking, he survived worse odds than Violet Jessup did in all three of her calamities combined (she had 100% chance of surviving for the RMS Olympic collision, 88% for the Titanic and 97% for HMHS Britannic).

  53. SamChevre says:

    Let’s make a list of fallacies and paradoxes: specifically, statistical/data-related ones.

    Berkson’s paradox: if A and B are uncorrelated in the population as a whole, in the population of A OR B they will be negatively correlated. If you are in the hospital, having cancer means you are less likely to have been in a car accident.

    The lizardman constant:
    Some proportion of answers are either mis-clicks or reflect very unusual understandings of the world. When studying rare phenomena, such answers will be disproportionately common.

  54. CaptainCrutch says:

    A lot of fantasy and adjacent genres have reactionary heroes. That is, the bad guys upset existing order and usurped the throne and good guys would restore the rightful king. Sometimes rightful kind would abdicate in the end and create some kind of republic. But I can’t think of anything that revolved around heroes who rose up against legitimate ruler because they wanted to create a better society. You’d think Americans would write a lot about overthrowing monarchy for good, but no.

    Do you know any republican fantasy, so to speak, where the hero decides he had enough of the kings, good and bad and demands free elections, or something to this effect?

    • Randy M says:

      Fantasy seems likely to be biased towards people who long for the old ways, hence more static and reactionary. Sci-fi seems like where you’d look for people looking for progress or revolution.

      I’m not sure if this hypothesis holds–in fact, I think it doesn’t, as sci-fi has a hard scientific streak that might appeal less to the utopian sort who would be more okay with overthrowing the current order and seeing what happens. But, there isn’t there a common pulpy sci-fi plot of travelling to an alien society and fighting the rulers over some injustice to our own morality? I’m not sure if that might be deemed offensively imperialistic nowadays, or fighting for justice. Probably depends on the superficial factors.

      Another issue is that if the fantasy is trying to invoke a mythic feel, it will use tropes of blood, conquest, hierarchy and so on. The old order was set down by the gods or by the conquering king and our realm’s good fortunes are magically tied to their continued rule. What’s this modern nonsense of ‘voting’? In other words, it’s a tonal thing tied up in genre expectations.

      • theodidactus says:

        Doc EE Smith’s Skylark series AND John Carter both have the trope of a person from earth arriving in an alien society with some kind of unstoppable superpower and crushing everything in sight, especially bad institutions. These are among the oldest works of sci-fi, and form of a good reactionary metaphor generally.

    • jermo sapiens says:

      There is this. And I’m glad they made a joke of it, because I dont think the fantasy genre mixes well with democracy. It’s much more satisfying to have a man like Aragorn, a king by blood and by deed, rule over Gondor.

      Otherwise, I’m not aware of anything like you described.

    • Deiseach says:

      Not American, but Terry Prachett’s Ankh-Morpork novels fall into this category. In fact, the irony is that the kings are deposed, and it’s agreed this was a jolly good thing too as the last few monarchs tended to be crazy and evil and incompetent, but the nobility continued on merrily holding on to their positions of power. Lord Vetinari is not a king or anything like a king, but he’s certainly nothing like a president either.

      The best one to read about in this vein is probably Night Watch. Sam Vimes, the Commander of the City Watch, is descended from a revolutionary:

      It has been suggested that Sam’s father was a watchman in Jingo and he is a descendant of Suffer-Not-Injustice “Old Stoneface” Vimes, the Watch Commander who instigated the rebellion against, and subsequently beheaded, Lorenzo the Kind, the last king of the city, a sadistic torturer described as “very fond of children.” As a consequence, the Vimes family was stripped of its nobility. For three centuries afterwards, the memory of “Old Stoneface” has lived on in infamy and, as his descendant, Vimes has frequently endured suspicious mutterings from the aristocracy. Vimes is implied to heavily resemble his ancestor and they share a nickname: Old Stoneface. The Annotated Pratchett File notes that Suffer-Not-Injustice Vimes is closely modelled on Oliver Cromwell, and that the name of his supporters, the Ironheads, is a portmanteau of Roundheads and Ironsides, Cromwell’s faction and regiment, respectively.

      • CaptainCrutch says:

        I was not asking about fantasy set in a republic, I’m sure there are some, where some kind of republic is status quo, but rather about fantasy about upsetting status quo and creating the republic. I only read the first Discworld book and I’m positive republic was status quo already.

        • C_B says:

          You are mostly right about the oligarchic republic already being status quo at the time of the Discworld books, but the book Deiseach recommends above, Night Watch, is specifically a flashback (via time travel shenanigans) to a time of social upheaval.

          It’s also, incidentally, among the very best Discworld books, so if you have any interest in that sort of thing at all it comes highly recommended.

          • CaptainCrutch says:

            I’ll look into it, but still prequels/flashbacks is not exactly what am I looking for, again, since status quo is already established.

            Specifically, I am interested in a story where someone decided to try something entirely new – both in-universe chronology and something that isn’t established to exist in previously written works set further in the future – and is treated as a hero for this.

        • Deiseach says:

          Ankh-Morpork isn’t a republic, unless you construe that to mean “government on the basis of ‘one man, one vote’ and the Patrician is the man with the vote” 🙂

          Night Watch tells you how they got to be a republic democracy totally not ruled by an authoritarian dictator who gives everyone a choice: do what he says, or don’t. And if you pick ‘don’t’ then you’ll go back to the horrible chaos of the days of the overthrow of the monarch.

      • J Mann says:

        The Power Mage series is about an anti-monarchist revolution, I believe.

        Ankh-Morpork is ruled by a benevolent dictator. I think the dwarves are somewhat democratic, IIRC.

        The standard Ank-Morpork plot, if I recall correctly, is that some institution is behind the times and the benevolent dictator finds a (usually) male protagonist and manipulates him into forcing the institution to adopt some modern quality (such as packetized data, or diversity), and the protagonist through a force of will causes it to happen, leaving everyone better off. But I don’t recall any advances in democracy.

    • Peffern says:

      Mistborn, arguably, although it doesn’t work out so well.

      • Matt says:

        I would concur, though that’s a bit of a spoiler.

      • Baeraad says:

        I don’t know, don’t they have a democracy in the sequel series? I can’t remember the exact form of government, but it’s at least not a monarchy. One of Brandon Sanderson’s common themes is that social progress is difficult and takes time, so while it’s still worth trying to make the world better you have to be careful about it and expect some setbacks along the way. Revolutionairies, in his books, tend to find out the hard way that changing the system is tricky and comes with a lot of downsides, but they also tend to ultimately be shown to be essentially in the right.

        Mistborn is an interesting example since gur birenyy pbasyvpg bs gur gevybtl vf orgjrra gur tbqf bs Cerfreingvba naq Ehva. Cerfreingvba vf, sbe gur zbfg cnegf, gur tbbq thl, fvapr Ehva jnagf gb raq gur jbeyq, ohg gur svefg obbx npghnyyl unf gur urebrf hajvggvatyl freivat Ehva juvyr gur ivyynva vf ng yrnfg fbzrjung fhccbegrq ol Cerfreingvba – orpnhfr Cerfreingvba, orvat gur hygvzngr pbafreingvir, guvaxf univat na haqlvat qnex ybeq ehyvat bire n fgngvp, hapunatvat rzcver vf njrfbzr! Arvgure bar bs gurz vf gehyl tbbq, naq gur unccl raqvat unf gurve Funeqf zretvat vagb Unezbal, jub vf ng yrnfg fbzrjung pncnoyr bs snibhevat cbfvgvir punatr.

    • mitv150 says:

      Brian Mclellan’s Powder Mage Trilogy involves governmental overthrow and quite a bit more.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      Do you know any republican fantasy, so to speak, where the hero decides he had enough of the kings, good and bad and demands free elections, or something to this effect?

      Star Wars. The Rebellion official name is the Alliance to Restore the Republic, though the republic they want to restore was more of an aristocratic oligarchy with theocratic leanings than a universal-suffrage democracy. Of course, Palpatine status as a legitimate monarch is questionable, but one man’s rightful Emperor is another man’s autocratic usurper, I guess.

      • CaptainCrutch says:

        Star Wars is kinda disqualified because Republic is, once again, an artefact of the past to restore by deposing the usurper. I’m asking about building a new thing.

    • helloo says:

      A lot of the isekai genre (roughly “random person finds themselves in a new world with memories/access of the old world and possibly unique OP skills”) focuses on how people will adapt or transform/initiate change on a fantasy world given memory/access to current world technology/culture.

      A lot of them play out as fairly standard hero vs evil overlord storylines, but many have them planning anything from literally world domination to starting a “new” business to having a self-sufficient farm.
      Some of them are more or less just trying to live out their new life, but there are those that have modern morality as part of their push.

      • Konstantin says:

        However, there are a disturbing number of them where the new world has slavery, and the supposedly heroic main character ends up owning a teenage female slave who falls in love with the MC and refuses offers of manumission.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          Modern isekais are lowest common denominator wish fullfillment for unsuccessful men. They are the male version of 50 Shades.

    • Aftagley says:

      Does the Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe count? They are overthrowing what amounts to a monarchy in favor of a, what, a theocratic oligarchy?

      • Dack says:

        They overthrow monarchy in favor of…more monarchy. (Four times more!)

        • The original Mr. X says:

          Strictly speaking, they overthrow a monarchy in favour of a tetrarchy.

          • Aftagley says:

            For what value of N does an N-archy just become an oligarchy?

          • Eric Rall says:

            For what value of N does an N-archy just become an oligarchy?

            Probably whenever the Latin and Greek numerical prefixes both sound silly, or when they’re so arcane that only Organic Chemists can remember them.

            I think “Heptarchy” (N=7) is the highest number I’ve seen in the wild.

          • Nick says:

            Integralists should adopt the name octarchy.

    • SamChevre says:

      The 1632 series sort-of qualifies. The “Americans” shift the monarchies toward republican structures, while at the same time being pulled into monarchical structures themselves.

      ETA: this may be an example of the isekai genre noted above.

    • Plumber says:

      @CaptainCrutch says:

      “…Do you know any republican fantasy, so to speak, where the hero decides he had enough of the kings, good and bad and demands free elections, or something to this effect?”

      In one of the Tangeled Lands ‘shared worlds’ short stories she has “had enough”, and it looks like that’s going to happen, but…

      Yeah, I guess it’s “woke”, still an entertaining read, and I really like the “magic has a price” trope

    • Tenacious D says:

      The Dagger & Coin series might fit what you’re looking for. One of the main characters is an apprentice banker who dreams of a future where countries make trade, not war (with political changes to match).

      • Tenacious D says:

        ETA: The Years of Rice and Salt is another possibility. It spans many many generations, but a good number of the characters are reformers or revolutionaries in some sense.

    • AG says:

      “heroes who rose up against legitimate ruler because they wanted to create a better society” generally manifests in a “our hero will create a better society by becoming/being king and unifying the nation” way. Your Qin Shi Huangs, your Nobunaga/Tokugawas, your King Arthurs (sure, he deposes the usurper Vortigern, but not in all versions of his mythology, and that’s before uniting the nation). Further back, your heroes were the kingdom/empire-building conquerors.

      Also, even with the American Revolution, it’s not like democracy didn’t exist before, and they created it with the Revolution. Parliamentary democracy was already there, as was the history of the Romans and Greeks. “Taxation without Representation” implies a sort of “we must restore our rights which have been suppressed” situation, not so much creating a better society from scratch.
      So the case of Star Wars is still valid, as are similar YA books where a conquered peoples fight against their colonizers, with world-building where their previous indigenous forms of government were more egalitarian.

      It comes down to how you can’t have true ruling legitimacy, because that’s a social construct in the first place. Legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed, and if someone decides to rise up against the existing power, one tactic is to declare them illegitimate for this or that reason, even if that reason if “you have failed your people.” To have determined that the existing system cannot be changed from within, that it cannot do better, is to determine it illegitimate.

      I can’t imagine a satisfying narrative where the status quo is stable, and then the good guys upset the existing order anyways. You can only start from deficiency from an ideal.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Does The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress count as close enough to fantasy for this purpose?

    • blacktrance says:

      How much of this is just a case of Villains Act, Heroes React being more common than its opposite? For example, outside of fantasy there are storylines like “villain kidnaps hero’s important person, hero gets them back”, “hero’s life is ruined when villain makes them lose their house”, or even villain-less stories like “hero gets disease and tries to find cure”.

    • Loriot says:

      Fiction typically takes the protagonists’ side, so anyone they are trying to overthrow will inherently not be seen as “rightful”.

      Perhaps Mistborn might be a decent example, as the ruler they try to overthrow has been ruling for 1000 years and was apparently a prophesied hero to boot.

    • Chalid says:

      “Lord of Light” by Roger Zelazny has a protagonist overthrowing the long-established order, and doing so explicitly in order to empower ordinary people. I don’t think he’s explicit about the political system he wants to replace the order with he clearly wants something more democratic. (And it’s a wonderful book which everyone should read.)

      On the other hand the protagonist is very much not an ordinary person, and we don’t actually see much of the ordinary people who are being empowered, so it might not quite be what you’re looking for.

    • Gwythr says:

      Paula Volsky’s Illusion is basically French Revolution in Fantasyland. We mostly see it from the point of naive aristocratic ingenue, but the revolution is there. It’s pretty big on showing both the dread of serfdom under the old regime and the horrors of terror when radicals seize the power after the revolution.

    • a real dog says:

      Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy is basically about killing God and creating a Republic of Heaven. Pretty ballsy for children’s literature.

      Seconding the point that people who are into fantasy tend to lean reactionary – I certainly don’t view democracy as an unqualified good, just a disgusting solution that works better than alternatives. I’d rather keep it out of my idealized escapism.

    • DeWitt says:

      This isn’t merely fantasy, this is a staple of fiction everywhere. People are ornery creatures, and the idea of brave people fighting to preserve what is theirs is something much more viscerally appealing than the inverse is.

    • NTD_SF says:

      Guardians of the Flame is an 80s series about a bunch of college students sent to a fantasy world trying to end slavery and establish a liberal democracy.
      Generally speaking revolutions and popular governance are made far easier by the printing press and the gun, among other technological advancements, so medieval-tech fantasy has reason not to include them.

    • Spookykou says:

      My read on the American cultural interpretation of these things is that revolution is more strongly associated with communism now.

    • TheAncientGeeksTAG says:

      Depends on how narrowly you define fantasy. Robin Hood and its variants deal with romantic outlaws, and Star Wars is about fighting an evil empire.

      • Lambert says:

        I think the thing about Robin Hood is that the Good King went and got himself killed in Aquitane.

  55. Nick says:

    One of the interesting things about Harry Potter (and ASOIAF, for that matter) is all the very old names that are down to single child families this generation and about to be or already extinguished. Based on the course of the television adaptation, it’s going to happen to a bunch of houses in ASOIAF, too, but that’s down more to the genuinely world-historical events occurring in Westeros during that generation, while the Wizarding World just appears to be experiencing a demographic transition.

    At least to me there is something tragic about this. And I’m sure these series might inspire pro-natal sentiment if others feel the same way. But I’m not sure how easily such sentiment can be accommodated, given how we as a society have responded to our own demographic transition.

    (With Harry Potter it is admittedly harder to feel bad, because these concerns are unavoidably bound up with the blood purity ideology of many of these families. Maybe these old names would survive if they weren’t intermarrying among a small genetic pool….)

    • Randy M says:

      given how we as a society have responded to our own demographic transition.

      What do you have in mind here?

      • Nick says:

        I’m being deliberately vague. You can probably fill in the blanks.

        • Randy M says:

          Not trying to entrap you. I just missed the marriage therapy book review thread and have all those issues on my mind.

        • Nick says:

          I know, you’re a friend. I’m being vague because if I really got going on this topic I’d probably get banned. 😛 I’ve already written and deleted a colorful reply or two to let off steam.

    • fibio says:

      One of the things that tends to get whitewashed out of history is just how much churn there was in the medieval and pre-modern upper class. I believe in late medieval France the average noble/knight was only third generation and in times of war the number of people freshly elevated could be a significant fraction of the court. Further, the number of families that could trace their noble lineage back more than half a dozen generations were few and fairly well renowned because of it.

      Because this tends to get glossed over, there tends to be a sense that the nobility are dying out in some series. But that’s because the huge range of social climbers, cadet branches and people marrying for position are absent in most works (and for good reason because could you imagine reading GoT with three times as many characters!).

      Harry Potter is an interesting exception as it appears that the main issue is less a demographic transition (though I really want to read the fic where Hogwarts had to deal with the fact the muggle born population quadrupled over the 19th century due to the explosive population growth) but a case where the Noble houses locked everyone else out of the nobility. With no new blood entering the old families inbreeding increased rapidly, fertility dropped and the internecine wars pretty much put the nail in the coffin of the old order.

      • Nick says:

        One of the things that tends to get whitewashed out of history is just how much churn there was in the medieval and pre-modern upper class.

        I am aware, but its relevance is limited because this is zigzagged pretty hard by ASOIAF. Some houses have extremely ancient family lines, like that of the Starks, going back well before the old kingdoms. Others are really recent, and as you say, there is a good deal of churn due to the war.

        If I had to give a theory of nobility in Martin’s world, it’s that it only changes when history happens. Aegon’s Conquest was history, so houses were lost and made. Robert’s Rebellion was history, so houses were lost and made. The War of Five Kings was history, so houses were lost and made. In the meantime, no matter how much turmoil or decadence happens, houses don’t extinguish, and there’s no need to create new ones. We meet a few of the more recent houses: Baratheon is the youngest of the noble houses, taking over for Durrandon after it opposed the Targaryens. Gardener was also supplanted by Tyrell during Aegon’s Conquest. Hoare went the same way.

        All the same, the Starks have been the Starks for hundreds of years at least, and if the legends are to be believed, thousands. The same could be said of a couple of others, like the Arryns (dating their lineage to the Andals) and even more the Tullys (dating to the First Men). Martin’s history of Westeros is—somewhat self-consciously, I’m sure—truly ridiculous, as we’re asked to believe some of these kingdoms and castles and houses remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years at a time. This is because he took real events in the history of England and blew up the timescale by ten or a hundred.

        So in the end you’re wrong to say that the nobility dying out is an illusion, and that we never meet the upstarts. They really are dying out, or hanging by a thread, in the time of the books, and we meet all sorts of upstarts, from the Tyrells to Petyr Baelish to, well, the entire crowd of people Cersei surrounds herself with in the fifth book, when a very temporary order is restored and the court needs filled out a bit. I think the evidence better supports my position, and the reason the really ancient houses are going extinct is because a whole lot of history is happening right now in Westeros.

      • Nick says:

        Harry Potter is an interesting exception as it appears that the main issue is less a demographic transition … but a case where the Noble houses locked everyone else out of the nobility. With no new blood entering the old families inbreeding increased rapidly, fertility dropped and the internecine wars pretty much put the nail in the coffin of the old order.

        I don’t think this is accurate. Noble houses can be plenty fertile when they want to be; do you remember when it is mentioned that the Weasleys are pureblood? Aside from cases like the Potters or the Longbottoms, who both died just after their first child was born, there’s little reason these houses should be tottering on the edge of collapse. Why do the Malfoys have one child? One! You can hardly secure the existence of your people and a future for your blond-haired, blue-eyed children if you’re not having any.

  56. sandoratthezoo says:

    Just to throw something out:

    The Party Decides! Counterexample: Trump. Countercounterexample: Biden.

    People in the media are mulling the above over. But why do parties have to be the same? I’ve thought since at least the tea party that the Republicans are much more controlled by their constituents, while the Democrats are much more controlled by their elites. Why can’t it be that the Democratic Party Decides, but the Republican Party Does Not?

    • Nick says:

      The old wisdom is that Republicans fall in line while Democrats fall in love. I don’t think it has held true for 2016 or for 2020, though.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        NeverTrumpers were always rare. Republicans who didn’t like Trump in the primaries fell in line and voted for him in the general.

        • Eric Rall says:

          Mostly, yes, they did fall in line. According to CNN’s exit polls, about 8% of self-identified Republicans voted for Clinton, and about 4% voted for third-party candidates (presumably mostly Johnson and McMullin). Not significantly more than the percentage of self-identified Democrats who voted for Trump or a third-party candidate.

          That doesn’t count people like me who stopped identifying as Republicans when the nomination went to Trump, but I get the impression there aren’t all that many of us, either. It’s hard to tease out of available datastreams, since both voter registration statistics and partisan identification polls are pretty noisy in general, and since there’s also a different population changing partisan identification in the opposite direction.

          The one signal I found that does point to a non-trivial number of Never Trumpers is comparing the House popular vote to the Presidential popular vote: House Republicans in 2016 polled about 200k votes ahead of Trump, while House Democrats polled about 3.7M votes behind Clinton. Compare to 2012, when House Republicans trailed Romney by 1.7M votes and House Democrats trailed Obama by 6.3M votes. That points to both 2016 nominees being 3-4% less popular relative to their respective parties than their 2012 counterparts. Again, this implies a similar number (actually a bit larger) of NeverHillary Democrats as NeverTrump Republicans.

    • Eric Rall says:

      One of the big institutional differences is that the Democratic primaries award delegates proportionately among candidates who meet the 15% threshold, while most Republican primaries are winner-take-all (exactly what it says on the tin) or winner-take-most (a few different methods that all have the common thread of giving a disproportionate share of the delegates to the plurality winner, such as winner-take-all by district, or splitting the delegates 2:1 between the plurality winner and the runner-up if nobody got an outright majority).

      Because of this, Trump was able to run up a huge delegate lead in the early primaries with about 35% of the popular vote because the anti-Trump voters were split between Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, and (through South Carolina) Jeb Bush. As the primaries dragged on, Trump benefitted from a growing sense of inevitability and his vote share grew into the 40s with the addition of voters who just wanted to wrap up the primaries and get to the general election campaign. And even though Jeb and Rubio had dropped out by that point, the anti-Trump vote was still split between Cruz and Kasich, and those two candidates were so far apart in message and image that it would have been very difficult for enough of the anti-Trump voters to come together behind one of them, any more than Warren’s supporters could have come together behind Bloomberg (or vice versa) in order to get a majority to stop Sanders.

      Had the DNC delegate rules been in place for the 2016 Republican primary, Rubio probably would have stayed in, and the most likely outcome would probably have been a contested convention.

      The other big difference is that South Carolina was a very good state for the 2020 Democratic establishment candidate (Biden), but not a great state for the 2016 Republican establishment candidate (Jeb). Biden’s blowout win in SC seems to have given him a huge bounce just in time for yesterday’s primaries, while Jeb’s dismal fourth-place finish there was what drove him out of the race.

    • sksnsvbanap says:

      I think Jeb was just a less likeable candidate than Biden.

  57. Randy M says:

    POSSLQs

    Is this intended to imply a non-sexual relationship, or is it a euphemism for roommates with benefits but without commitment?

    and all the other activities that used to characterize stories about the rags-to-riches rise of an extended American family.

    Is it a coincidence that there is (at least a perception of) less social mobility now? This kind of nepotism is basically the foundation of a great many immigrant success stories, and the economic stability of a dependable marriage and a support network is the best way to keep from slipping in hard times. The best-seller lists are [edit:not] the only thing that get’s poorer when family formation is difficult. If I was a conspiratorial leftist I’d wonder if this was designed by the managerial/corporate elite to promote a rootless, mobile labor pool.

    • Don P. says:

      POSSLQ is from around 1980, and is indeed euphemistic, in that living together as a couple without being married was still a tiny bit scandalous. (And of course it’s, as they say, heteronormative.)

  58. proyas says:

    Why don’t richer countries like China, Japan and Russia ever try to expand their territory by buying uninhabited islands belonging to poor countries, like Papua New Guinea or the Federated States of Micronesia?

    Everyone has his price.

    • EchoChaos says:

      The United States just tried, and despite the fact that the Danes are losing tons of money on it, they wouldn’t sell Greenland.

    • John Schilling says:

      Everyone has his price.

      The territory of sovereign nations, is almost literally priceless. That was not always the case, but there are only a handful of trifling examples in the post-1945 era.

      Partly because the politicians who would have to sell off on it aren’t primarily motivated by money; if they were, they’d have done something else with their lives. And partly because the legitimacy would be extremely dubious in the modern world order; states are expected to hold their territory in trust for their people, not sell it for filthy lucre, and changes to international borders for any reason are a Really Big Deal.

      If e.g. Micronesia sells an uninhabited island to China, as sovereign Chinese territory (as opposed to Micronesian territory whose private landowner is the CCP), expect the Micronesian president to be voted out of office by irate Micronesians in short order. And for other irate Micronesions to spend the next few generations trying to have the sale reversed or at least made troublesome to Beijing, in the World Court, in the court of public opinion, and possibly in the field of (deniably low-intensity) battle, all with at least the tacit support of everybody who either doesn’t like China or doesn’t like the idea of their tribe’s ancestral lands being sold for cash in a politician’s pocket.

      For a two-bit uninhabited Micronesian island, that’s not worth the trouble for Xi Jinping or David Panuelo at any price.

      • SamChevre says:

        What’s the most recent peaceful transfer of territory for money?

        The most recent I’m familiar with is the US purchase of the Danish West Indies (now US Virgin Islands) in 1917.

        • HarmlessFrog says:

          There’s a list.

          Most recent is Gwadar in 1958.

        • John Schilling says:

          Egypt sold a couple of tiny Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia in 2017, more for reasons of administrative convenience than $$$ I think but money did change hands. This occurred peacefully but not entirely without controversy.

        • An Fírinne says:

          The Greek government started to sell its tiny islands in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas back when things were really bad but that was to private owners.

    • bean says:

      Several reasons. First, uninhabited islands are usually uninhabited for a reason. Anywhere that people can live, they generally do. At best, you’re not really getting any land area, you’re just getting military bases. And military bases in the Southwest/Central Pacific are useless to Russia, don’t fit with Japan’s strategy (as well as having a huge and obvious optics problem, and no, the people in those areas haven’t forgotten) and potentially very valuable for China. But for exactly that reason, nobody else will want them to have said bases.

      Second, there’s the whole “imperialism” thing, which tends to cause a lot more international grief than it used to. Best to not make yourself an international pariah.

      • proyas says:

        Here’s a scenario I’m imagining: China offers to buy an uninhabited island from the Federated States of Micronesia, on two conditions:

        1) The deal must be approved by a referendum, so no one can later claim that it had no popular support.

        2) Most of the purchase fee will be equally distributed among all Micronesian adults in the form of a one-time payment that equals one year’s average earnings. The per capita GDP is $3,735, let’s assume 3/4 of Micronesia’s 112,640 people are over 18, so China will offer $315 million for the island, plus another few million to the country’s top politicians.

        I think the Micronesians might accept. If they were smart, they’d approach China’s rivals and tell them to make a higher counteroffer to block the sale to China.

        I’m surprised deals like this haven’t been attempted yet.

        • Randy M says:

          The deal must be approved by a referendum, so no one can later claim that it had no popular support.

          This doesn’t seem like a stipulation China would suggest.

          • Lambert says:

            They’d be fine with it, so long as the people who worded the referrendum want it to pass.

          • Randy M says:

            Sure, sure, so long as it forestalled trouble. It’s just that I don’t think they equate popular approval with legitimacy.

      • Konstantin says:

        Even a tiny island has an Exclusive Economic Zone, if a country owns an island in the middle of the ocean they get exclusive rights to all natural resources within 200 NM. This leads to countries doing strange things like paying huge amounts of money to support a small group of soldiers stationed on an island in the middle of nowhere.

        • Loriot says:

          See also: why China’s dumping mountains of sand into the South China Sea in order to bolster its claims to the nearby oilfields.

        • bean says:

          That only applies when an island is all by itself. Sure, if China bought an island off on its own, then it would probably get the EEZ. But there are very few islands that isolated, and Micronesia doesn’t have any of them. And who determines who gets what fraction of the EEZ? Well, it’s either going to be between the two powers, or it’s going to be an international organization. The latter is not likely to look fondly on this, and I suspect that international law will decide that EEZ claims in newly-transferred territory are secondary. The former seems definitely inferior to a simple lease on some section of the EEZ. That’s a normal part of life, instead of raising all sorts of issues about colonialism and expansion, and it’s probably a lot cheaper, too.

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      Russia has more than enough of uninhabited territory of its own and not all that much money to spare. If anything, they should be selling. Yeah yeah I know, Crimea, but a conquest/liberation/annexation has a certain appeal for [a certain part of] internal audience which mere purchase doesn’t.

    • CaptainCrutch says:

      What good would that be for compared to just conducting business in a friendly nation?

      • proyas says:

        If you bought an island, you would get exclusive control of its EEZ and could build military bases there without any restrictions.

  59. Statismagician says:

    Naive question: given that voter preferences differ usefully by state, and that, apparently, people use performance in earlier primary elections in the same cycle as an input when deciding who to vote for in current ones, doesn’t not having all the primaries at the same time make them not super useful as a toll for gauging who the party membership actually wants to be the nominee?

    Or is that rather the point?

    • JayT says:

      A big part of the nomination process is to see who is good at campaigning. You set up a bunch of mini election days, and hope it shows you the person that has the best chance at winning the one that matters. If you just had a single primary vote day, the person with the most name recognition will win nine times out of ten, and the tenth time will be some wacko that managed to get a bunch of press.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      Nobody could afford to buy ads or campaign in every state at the same time except Bloomberg.

    • Loriot says:

      The staggered primary season with winnowing works out to be sort of like ranked choice voting, with the voting population realigning to remaining candidates as some drop out.

    • BBA says:

      There is no point.

      The presidential primary system was hastily slapped together after the 1968 Chicago debacle rendered the old method of party bosses in smoke-filled rooms nonviable. It retains a lot of features from those carcinogenic days, notably the autonomy granted to state parties to set their schedules and delegate assignment methods, though that’s been gradually worn away as the formal party structures weaken. The whole thing is nonsensical and we’d be better off redesigning it from the ground up. But this is America, where even the most inane aspects of our political system are treated like holy scripture that God handed down to George Washington on stone tablets, so good fucking luck.

  60. DragonMilk says:

    So….what if Biden were to pick Michelle Obama as running mate?

    Autowin vs Trump due to minority turnout?

    • John Schilling says:

      I think you’re overestimating the degree to which black people want to be pandered to via the basest form of identity politics. That black people turned out as they did for Biden, indicates that they’re willing to trust their fates to a white politician who is competent and cares about their community. Just like virtually every other “identity” group; e.g. all the women who didn’t care what Bill Clinton did with his interns so long as he could be trusted to guard their reproductive freedom.

      If there were a prominent black governor or senator looking for a vice-presidential job, sure, that would help – but not at autowin levels even then. Someone of marginal political credibility but “look, she’s black and she’s famous in a vaguely politicky way, you have to vote for her and thus me!”, no, I don’t think so.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        At best that’s a strategy you can maybe get away with when no one’s too worried about the guy at the top of the ticket not finishing his term. That wouldn’t be Joe.

      • Eric Rall says:

        The impression I’ve gotten is that one of the major driving forces for black voters is machine politics, which makes a lot of sense in a historical context. Machine politics is generally a large force in poor or lower-middle-class sections of larger cities, where most black Americans lived for much of the later 20th century. And for a community that’s faced a ton of very heavy-handed bias and discrimination and still feels a fair amount of distrust for a lot of the rest of society’s institutions, it makes a ton of sense to trust and support the local political machine that’s always had your community’s back.

        Biden, like the Clintons before him, is the favored Establishment candidate, and the Democratic Party’s Establishment is the network the urban political machines are plugged into. And both Biden and the Clintons have made a particular point over their respective careers of giving both symbolic and substantive support to urban political machines and “black community leaders”. Obama is an interesting case here: Hillary Clinton was the more establishment-favored in the 2008 primaries, but Obama did have some establishment support and had personally come up through the ranks of Chicago’s political machinery, and after the primaries the establishment came together solidly behind Obama.

        In the long run, I’d expect this effect to fade away over the next generation or two: black people have been moving out of the inner cities and into suburbs (36% in big cities and 54% in suburbs or small metropolitan areas in 2016, compared to 57% in big cities and most of the rest in traditional Southern “black belt” rural areas in 1990), and systemic racism has been trending better for decades. And the black/white income gap, while still very large, has been closing as well over the past few decades.

    • baconbits9 says:

      Total turnout doesn’t matter so much as specific turnout. If Biden is choosing a running mate he needs someone with appeal in Florida or across multiple mid-western states.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      If Michelle Obama wanted to be in politics, she’d be in politics. Her passions are clearly nutrition, empowering young girls, and fashion. Also if she were to run for national office, she’d run for President, not Vice-President.

  61. Plumber says:

    Let’s talk beautiful buildings (and some not-so-beautiful ones)!

    A thread (or three) back @Nick raised the topic of the potential “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” proposal that would encourage more neo-classical styled buildings, and I want to share some other styles and examples of them, all from Berkeley and Oakland, California:

    Thornburg Village (Normandy Village), built in the 1920’s, a “Tudor revival” condo complex (the unit I saw had 1920’s steam heat!).
    Maybe it’s “Thomas Kincaid kitsch”, but Lord forgive me, I love it!

    Tupper & Reed Building, built in the ’20’s, same architect and style as above, it had been a musical instrument and sheet music store that later moved into a Mission/Spanish revival building next door and stayed in business into the ’90’s. 

    First Church of Christ, Scientist, built around 1910 in a “primarily American Craftsman style, with Byzantine Revival, Romanesque Revival, and Gothic Revival” style, it’s concrete, but beautiful, what “modernism” could have been.

    The Wells Fargo Building, built in the ’20’s, an example of a skyscraper that isn’t hideous. 

    Berkeley North Branch Public Library, a 1930’s WPA project in a “Mission/Spanish Revival” style, one of my favorite places in the world!

    St Pauls Episcopal Church built in the 1910’s in a “English Gothic Revival” style (I’d call it “a-whole-lot-of-red-bricks-gothic”), I’m including it because of a Catholic Cathedral across the street for contrast… 

    ….which would be the Cathedral of Christ the Light, built in the 21st century, very modern, but I kind of like it!

    and then there’s: Newman Hall, a Catholic church/student center built in the 1960’s
    I’ve been in this building dozens of times, and man is it grim, “Brutalist” is right! It had to have been a lot of work to build, but aesthetically it’s like Lou Reed’s “Metal Music Machine” as a building!

    • Nick says:

      and then there’s: Newman Hall, a Catholic church/student center built in the 1960’s

      And to think people wonder why Catholic practice collapsed in the 60s and 70s. The center was built to serve students, but looking at it, you’d think they’re on the menu.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        A mission To Serve Man the student community.

      • Konstantin says:

        Reminds me of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Tokyo, which looks like a very depressing place to go to church. Screw stained glass or any uniquely Japanese features, instead have massive sloping walls of gray concrete to stare at during Mass.

        • Nick says:

          Apparently the prior cathedral was a wooden building in the Gothic style, with a tatami floor! I tried looking for it online but couldn’t find any pictures.

        • Lambert says:

          What I don’t get is the Catholicism.
          It’d make sense for some hyper-puritan New Model Army types but nothing High Church.

        • Deiseach says:

          Konstantin, that interior shot of the Tokyo cathedral has me itching to break out the whitewash (and knock down those two “Godzilla eyes” lamps). Honestly, a coat of light-coloured plaster would work very well and lighten the interior tremendously, and then the atmosphere would be much more congenial. This picture is much better lit with natural light and it doesn’t look as awful when the sun is shining. Knock a few more windows through, get rid of those monster-eye lamps, and slap some paint on those bare walls, and you could make it bearable. It badly needs some colour to enliven it, but that’s what Catholicism is for – get out the statues of the saints! the Stations of the Cross! stained glass! Sanctuary lamps! Tabernacles gleaming with gold and marble! Candles in flickering rows on votive stands, glimmering through the red or blue glass holders!

          Lambert, I don’t want to say it was the Spirit of Vatican II (but it was the Spirit of Vatican II). They went stone mad for the modernity, and since all the star architecture of the day was that Brutalist concrete, that is what you got for Modern Reformed People-Led Catholicism. This article says don’t blame Vatican II, but it’s not just America which has been plagued with horrible modernist churches. Though I agree that the real problem was the affliction of liturgists who started reforming and re-jigging and turning everything upside down from the 50s onward, and that naturally included the design of churches.

          • Nick says:

            Yeah, the thing about the liturgical reforms is that they started before VII and basically just got fast-tracked on account of the council. That said, the “Spirit” of “Spirit of Vatican II” was often interpreted as a blank check for iconoclasm, almost literally in the realm of liturgy and church decoration.

    • Deiseach says:

      the Cathedral of Christ the Light, built in the 21st century, very modern

      It’s not hideously awful, which is more than you can say for a lot of 20th century modern Catholic architecture, like our friends below:

      3. Newman Hall. This structure enjoyed a much more successful seismic upgrade than the Berkeley Art Museum and combines the aesthetic of Corbu with the Bay Area’s landscape tradition.

      If this is indicative of the “Bay Area’s landscape tradition”, I am suddenly a lot more concerned for the safety and well-being of its inhabitants, given that they have the Esoteric Order of Dagon set up there.

    • Lambert says:

      1,2) Is this what Americans think The Olden Days looked like?
      3) You can build a church with that many influences going on, but not all at once. The trick is to extend it in whatever style is contemporary as the parish/diocese grows every few centuries.
      4) Not bad. Would be better with more buildings of a similar size around.
      5) Nice
      6) Detailing’s too white and too heavy. You want a sort of beige limestone and slightly redder bricks. 150 years of industrial smog might do it good. Belfry could stick out a bit higher too.
      7) nice. kind of evocative of the fish symbol. Kind of reminds me of the temporary Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch. (the permanent cathedral is still being repaired after the earthquake.)
      8) there’s not enough pictures for me to do it justice.

      Tl;Dr: revival is hard. You’ve got to be sympathetic to the details of the style. Especially when all the examples of the style you’re reviving are older than your country.

      • Plumber says:

        @Lambert says:

        “1,2) Is this what Americans think The Olden Days looked like?…”

        Yes.

        Often described as “Storybook style

        “…revival is hard. You’ve got to be sympathetic to the details of the style. Especially when all the examples of the style you’re reviving are older than your country.”

        True, which is why for California I think “Mission/Spanish colonial” should be the default for public buildings.

        (Lke the W.P.A. built library I cited above, it actually got a “stimulus package” remodel in the 21st century that made it somewhat worse aesthetically, but made it more useful with extra rooms, especially restrooms, plus the political symbolism of, if not new public works, at least refurbishing old ones. Probably not an accident that the great buildings of the ’20’s are private, and the great buildings of the ’30’s are public, as for the ’50’s to ’80’s, it’s like the war shell shocked architecture into being ‘punk rock’, and not in a good way!)

      • Deiseach says:

        8) there’s not enough pictures for me to do it justice.

        I think they have a website, it’s also connected to/called Holy Spirit Parish. They at least attempt to incorporate a few overtly Catholic images and symbols, though the contrast between the Della Robbia/Donatello-style tondo and the ‘sheets o’concrete’ original architecture is stark, to say the least.

        If I were bishop of this diocese, I’d be hacking out that altar – I mean, having an award-winning architectural installation removed to a place where it can be seen by a wider audience and preserved for posterity – faster than you could say “Nobody expects the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments” and replacing it with something that looks a heck of a lot less like it’s straight out of Lovecraft’s “Shadows over Innsmouth”.

        Though I suppose since the entire thing is an award-winning etc. even the bishop can’t do that, but I’d have a darned good try 🙂

        • bean says:

          I’m now imagining you as a bishop, and the results are both amusing and terrifying.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Female clergy seem to have a causal relation to progressive theology/architecture/the whole shebang. It would be amusing to see if Bishop Deiseach could prevent that.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I think it’s more like female clergy are the result of progressive theology. So Bishop Deiseach would take a firm hand to the bishopric to make sure nothing like Bishop Deiseach could ever happen again.

          • Lambert says:

            IIRC, certain statements on Bishops by the Pope were post-facto ruled to be ex-cathedra so she’d automatically get excommunicated.

          • Nick says:

            Why does she have to be a bishop, you clericalists? Deiseach can be an abbess.

          • Deiseach says:

            It’s like I’ve often said: the Catholic Church does not ordain women, and you should all be thankful for that, because imagine what I’d be like as Pope 🙂

            “Okay, tell the Dominicans to stop sitting around twiddling their thumbs, the Inquisition is gonna roll again, baby! And this time we’re really cracking down!”

        • Lambert says:

          It’s like they deliberately studied Catholic architecture* for years and then decided to make the exact opposite.
          I’ve seen churchier-looking churches made from an industrial warehouse.

          *Which is often way over the top. The objectively correct Church interior design is the CofE ‘the minimalists and maximalists decided to compromise once everyone who could so much as carry a matchlock was dead’ aesthetic.

        • Plumber says:

          @Deiseach,
          They don’t all look like that, St. Ambrose by my house is in a “Gothic” style (built in the ’50’s(, and between it and Newman Hall is St. Mary Magdalene which is in a “Mission/Spanish Revival” style (with a very nice interior), so not all Californian Catholic churches are modernist (whether glass & light, or concrete & terror!).

          • Deiseach says:

            I have no idea what it was about 70s church architecture and concrete; the basilica built in Knock, Co. Mayo is all bare concrete. (Or it was, they refurbished it in 2015-16. That interior in the new revamped version used to be bare, gray concrete like the Church of Dagon Newman Centre).

            You can imagine how well that worked in the West of Ireland, where it is rain, rain, rain and for some variety – more rain! Along with cold, damp, windy conditions – yes, bare concrete was so adequate (not). You might get away with concrete in dry, warm, sunny conditions like the Bay Area (if it is dry and warm there) but not really where you’ve got the winds howling in straight from the Atlantic bringing all the sodden clouds along with them to dump their contents on the western coast.

    • Tenacious D says:

      @Plumber:

      This one is specifically for you. There is a water treatment plant in Toronto that was built in the Art Deco style (as a public works project during the depression, no less): https://torontoist.com/2011/01/unseen_city_the_rc_harris_water_treatment_plant/

    • Nicholas Weininger says:

      Christ the Light is beautiful to look at, but an awful place to sing in. The audience gets a decent experience if the choir is really good, but it’s super hard for the singers to hear each other.

      To your general point though, it’s not clear to me that any of these, except maybe the Wells Fargo building, would count as neoclassical or be practical to emulate in the design of large official buildings. I like the Berkeley Craftsman and Tudor Revival styles a lot too, but they’re really more suited to smaller-scale projects.

    • Garrett says:

      > Cathedral of Christ the Light

      This is, in my mind, what experimental architecture should be like. It’s definitely “experimental”. And I’m not certain that I’d like it. But at the same time I don’t automatically hate it and some of the interior photos make it look cozy in a strange sort of way. It gives me that “it could grow on me” feeling.

      Experimental doesn’t have to be terrible. Brutalist doesn’t have to be terrible. But I haven’t seen any experimental brutalist that I like.

    • vrostovtsev says:

      “churches” and “light” bring to mind the Church of the Light built in the 90s. It looks powerful in photos but I always wanted to get inside to see if it’s actually like that.

  62. jermo sapiens says:

    Is there a sitcom on tv right now (or netflix or whatever) that is any good? The last ones I enjoyed were Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Community, and How I met your mother.

    • FrankistGeorgist says:

      Based on that list I would think Brooklyn 99 would be up your alley.

      • Statismagician says:

        +1. Also The Good Place.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        Thanks. I checked it out and it’s good, but I dont find it on the level of any of those listed above.

        • Statismagician says:

          As with e.g. Parks & Rec, it gets much better after the first season, if that matters.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Yes, that does matter. I guess that’s almost the case in every good sitcom. I’ll give it a second chance.

        • EchoChaos says:

          I had the same reaction. After two seasons I realized I just didn’t care about the characters and ditched it.

          As opposed to 30 Rock, which is my favorite show by a large margin.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            That is the big thing. My problem with the characters in that show was that they seemed to be specifically catered for the woke crowd. Pretty much everyone seems to be there to “blow the minds of those uptight Trump voters”.

            -Gay black super straight-edged police chief (I’m not saying this is impossible, obviously, just that I get the feeling this character was created with a political agenda in mind).
            -Bad ass latina cop
            -Dumb white male

            If the writing was amazing, I would forgive those things quite quickly. But it’s not amazing so far. I will give it another go though.

          • broblawsky says:

            Jake isn’t dumb, he’s actually brilliant. He’s just deeply immature.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Jake isn’t dumb, he’s actually brilliant. He’s just deeply immature.

            I agree. I was thinking about Charles.

          • broblawsky says:

            I don’t think Charles is dumb either, he’s just deeply weird.

          • Desrbwb says:

            jermo sapiens, I think that’s a tad unfair for a couple of reasons (disclaimer, haven’t seen all of Brooklyn 99, just a fair amount of random episodes, as they come up on British TV).

            The show started in 2013, so it predates a chunk of the modern culture wars, and certainly any concerns about ‘uptight Trump voters’, Obama had barely started his 2nd term when the series was picked up for broadcast.

            As previously said, Jake is not stupid, he’s even specifically introduced in the first episode as the best detective in the precinct.

            Charles? Again, not dumb. He’s very weird and a bit dysfunctional, but so are all of them (goes with the territory being sitcom characters). At worst he’s a neurotic, obsessive doormat. But he’s also intelligent, conscientious, extremely hard working and doing his best for his friends. A far cry from the standard ‘woke male’ who lacks any positive traits and is defined more by misogyny than a real character.

            Does Diaz being latina ever actually come up in the show? I can’t remember it in what I’ve seen. She’s just ‘scary detective’ (which has somewhat more comedic potential imo as a woman, because its funny watching Terry Crews be scared of her). If anything, the very reserved, terse characterisation she gets (especially early on) is a far cry from Hispanic stereotypes.

            Holt, I took him to be like that for the comedic effect, rather than any political agenda. Gay characters, even in very ‘woke’ media tend to be more of the outgoing/gregarious/camp type, so Holt being so very detached and serious works both as a ‘you genuinely don’t see characters like that very often’ (adding a extra level to the laughs imo) plus as a foil to Jake.

            While I’m probably biased (as 99, after being introduced to it last year) had rapidly established itself for me as one of the best American comedies I’ve seen. But if it really is ‘woke pandering’ then I wish more ‘woke’ properties followed its example, rather the train wrecks they tend to be in reality.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            jermo sapiens, I think that’s a tad unfair for a couple of reasons (disclaimer, haven’t seen all of Brooklyn 99, just a fair amount of random episodes, as they come up on British TV).

            You are probably correct. This is just my impression watching a couple of episodes. But generally I think sitcoms do really well when playing on stereotypes. I dont mean racial or gender stereotypes, but “a type of person”. Ron Swanson in Parks & Rec is hilarious because he’s a pitch perfect representation of the manly man. Barney in HIMYM is a stereotype of the playboy (being played by NPH helps quite a bit, but his character is well written also). Dwight Schrute from the Office (american version, corresponds to Gareth in the UK version), is a stereotype of the weird farmer….

            This facilitates comedy tremendously because it helps the viewer in understanding the character without too much work and helps us relate the character on the show to someone in our social circle.

            Doing comedy based on anti-stereotypes (for lack of a better term) seems like an enormous challenge. Not impossible, but from what I’ve seen so far it’s beyond the ability of the writers for that show.

            I do have my own prejudices and biases which dont help me as a viewer to enjoy the show. When I see Holt, I feel bad for the actor having to pull that off. That is a tall order. And my prejudices tell me that he wasnt written like that to be funny, he was written like that to “break ground” or “show a different aspect of gay people”.

            That said, there are no strict rules in comedy other than “be funny”. And the show can be funny.

          • Randy M says:

            Was there a “Weird farmer” stereotype before Dwight? Dwight was more of a “humorless boot-licker” stereotype with some weird quirks that evolved over the seasons.

          • Lambert says:

            I think 99 is woke done well.
            It’s not (usually) hitting you over the head with any message.
            Plots where a character’s race or sexuality is important are few and far between.
            (Terry gets profiled, Rosa comes out, a few about Holt and the not-so-good old days, i think there was a metoo episode)
            Apart from that, it’s just a cast/ set of characters that happen to be really diverse.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Was there a “Weird farmer” stereotype before Dwight?

            Yeah I was just thinking that’s not the right stereotype for Dwight. The humor around Dwight comes more from him being a nerd and a boot-licker than a farmer. The fact that he lives on an almost Amish beet farm is more of an add-on to his character than his character’s essence.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Apart from that, it’s just a cast/ set of characters that happen to be really diverse.

            Which is obviously fine, especially in NY, where a non-diverse cast would be unrealistic.

          • Lambert says:

            The characters are heavily stereotyped, just not the way you’d expect based on their race/sexuality.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            I think sitcoms do really well when playing on stereotypes. I dont mean racial or gender stereotypes, but “a type of person”.

            Hmm. We’ve just started New Girl and are finding it a laugh, and much of the humor comes from the fact that the characters are all a little weird, in their own particular ways.

            Last Man Standing is sometimes a little pat, but the characters are distinctive and consistent — except that they keep recasting the daughters. It starts out pretty broad but settles down pretty soon.

            I’m finding The Unicorn surprisingly engaging. The official premise seems like it wouldn’t really have legs unless you went for flat-out farce, but they aren’t doing that. The characters are all different but very likeable, and the premise does have the virtue that the series starts in an unstable position, so things actually change from week to week. (If you don’t have access to the early episodes I’m not sure I’d recommend it.)

            But, to give you a grain of salt, now that Good Place is finished I sort of think Brooklyn 99 is my favorite. There is wokeness, but there is also…what is the right word? Nuance? Reaction? I liked the time when one of the females floated the idea that the females needed to stick together and the other one shot her down.

          • Clutzy says:

            This thread just has reiterated how much I really dont care about any non- Good Place modern sitcoms.

            Shonens, intended for teenagers, are better written than most US TV.

          • Spookykou says:

            There are things to like about Japanese media and writing is not one of those things.

        • FrankistGeorgist says:

          I was recently in a conversation with friends where they begrudgingly admitted that as of the latest season Brooklyn 99 had surpassed their beloved Parks and Rec.

          I am the odd one out as apparently the only person who didn’t like Parks and Rec, so I was more passing on their suggestion than my own. They’re also all fans of the other shows listed, which I also enjoy. I rank Brooklyn 99 at HIMYM levels though, rather than the S-Rank of Community or 30 Rock.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I rank Brooklyn 99 at HIMYM levels though, rather than the S-Rank of Community or 30 Rock.

            That’s still a very good level.

    • Tenacious D says:

      You know some French, right? A Very Secret Service on Netflix is pretty funny. It follows a young recruit to the French secret service in the De Gaulle era, but it’s about bureaucracy as much as spying.

      Sample clip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-JqL2WIkaB4

    • AG says:

      Galavant is still on Netflix, I believe. Medieval musical sitcom with music by Menken himself. Short and sweet with only 2 seasons, too.

    • Snickering Citadel says:

      Santa Clarita Diet was good, at least the first season.

  63. uau says:

    Lately there has been fairly widespread talk about a “crisis of capitalism”. Is there any justification for this? To me, it doesn’t seem like anyone has a particularly good alternative to the basic principles of capitalism. The blame for the problems that society does have belongs at least as much on the problems of democratic governance. Yet you don’t see anyone talking about a “crisis of democracy”.

    So my view is that the track record of capitalism is at least as good as that of democracy. Those that blame “capitalism” for problems don’t really know what they’re talking about. Anyone disagree?

    • Loriot says:

      I think there was a decent case for it during the depths of the 2008 crisis when we didn’t know how things would shake out. But that’s over a decade ago now.

      • Athos says:

        The baselines for how bad things can get vary greatly between economic systems. Look at deaths by starvation, for example. These were unaffected by not only the 2008 financial crisis, but also the Great Depression. Contrast that to the starvation rates during times of hardship under communism, both in Russia and China.

    • gph says:

      Well I’m no expert on the matter, but the near 0% interest rates and constant QE policy of most Central Banks seems to be a bit concerning, especially as it seems to have the effect of having a large pool of nearly free capital at the disposal of the uber-wealthy with seemingly very little risk when things go south. I’m sure SoftBank isn’t happy about the WeWork situation, but they’re also probably quite capable of financially engineering it so that it isn’t the total loss it should be. And the same is probably true about a lot of ventures getting funded by the dumb money sloshing around at the top of the capitalist pyramid with nowhere to go.

      Socialism doesn’t seem to be the answer, but there’s no denying that capital is continually concentrating at the top and producing weird results at times.

      • Didn’t SoftBank lose billions on WeWork? You can’t borrow your way out of a hole no matter how low the interest rate is. You’re going to get another billion and owe another billion. They could borrow, invest, and eventually recover from that loss. But they’ll still be billions poorer than they’d otherwise be.

      • Cliff says:

        I think you just don’t understand macroeconomics

    • “Crisis” is a strong word for it. We have a bunch of workers who are marginally useful at best and we don’t know what to do with them. The proposals to deal with them are generally all bad.

      At the same time, we have an economy that is sputtering because there isn’t enough productivity. So while we have too many of the useless workers, we don’t have enough innovators.

    • Clutzy says:

      I’ve seen quite a few “crises of democracy” pieces lately, but they have been blatantly partisan. That is, the “crisis” is left wing candidates losing in Israel, Britain, the US, etc.

      But I do think there is a different, actual, crises of democracy which is twofold: The first is trying to impose it on places like China and the Middle East, and the global movement running into pushback and multiple failures of this idea. Second, democracies are now consistently running into demographic reality bumping up against various schemes that they had set up, and like a ponzi scheme they only work with lots of new marks coming in.

      • albatross11 says:

        I think China providing an alternative model to Western democracy and civil liberties is genuinely a long-term crisis for democracy. We had it a lot easier when we were competing with an ugly concrete Soviet version of progress. [ETA] When it was kind of a widely accepted package deal that to have fast economic growth you needed to have substantial freedom and rule of law and such, this probably led to more-or-less democratic and free countries. When the alternative model is authoritarian government and few civil liberties and rounding up and disappearing troublesome ethnic minorities alongside substantial economic freedom, I think that’s going to look more appealing to a lot of current strongmen thinking about their countries’ futures.

        • Cliff says:

          Soon enough we will probably see China hit the middle income trap, most likely below the levels of Japan and South Korea. Then it will not be so difficult. China is still a poor nation.

          • Clutzy says:

            Hopefully, but I, like @albatross11 do not have faith. Plus, there is still the demographic problem. China can just cull people secretly while our old people ruin America for 40 years.

            Maybe that will happen, maybe it wont, but that is a major crisis of democracy: Being outcompeted because of selfish old people.

          • eric23 says:

            China cannot cull old people to a significant extent. They can cull Uighurs only because they are a tiny minority. They cannot get away with culling, say, every other person’s grandfather.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @eric23

            In fact, there is a conspiracy theory that COVID-19s deadliness in China is partially because they are intentionally culling people using it as cover.

            Unlikely, but backs up your point that just “culling” is unlikely.

          • The Nybbler says:

            China can just cull people secretly while our old people ruin America for 40 years.

            What do you mean by “ruin”? Is the problem just that the old people didn’t work and accumulate wealth just to die without enjoying it so the young people could inherit it without working?

          • Clutzy says:

            What do you mean by “ruin”? Is the problem just that the old people didn’t work and accumulate wealth just to die without enjoying it so the young people could inherit it without working?

            You know, 20 Trillion in national debt, various unsustainable programs that transfer wealth from the young to the old, including the ones you wouldn’t think like public education.

          • Deiseach says:

            China can just cull people secretly while our old people ruin America for 40 years.

            Those selfish old people were selfish young people who came of age during the 60s – the era of Free Love, Sexual Liberation, Tune In Turn On Drop Out. Are you really surprised that people who didn’t want to live their parents’ lives of settling down, getting a good job, marrying and having kids because that was such a drag when there was all this fun to be had are now, at this stage of their lives, reaping the harvest of those decisions? If there are more old people alive now to leech off the young than there are young people in numbers to support them, that is because back when they were young they decided it was ‘better for the planet’ if they didn’t have kids.

            And how many kids do young people nowadays have? The problem continues down through the generations, and when this generation is the same age as the ‘old people’ of today, the youth of that time will be wishing for a plague to cull them in the same way.

          • The Nybbler says:

            You know, 20 Trillion in national debt, various unsustainable programs that transfer wealth from the young to the old, including the ones you wouldn’t think like public education.

            Ah, so now that Gen X has about finished paying all those young-to-old transfers, you want to reverse it so we pay old-to-young ones too? That’s the problem with being a small generation.

          • Clutzy says:

            Ah, so now that Gen X has about finished paying all those young-to-old transfers, you want to reverse it so we pay old-to-young ones too? That’s the problem with being a small generation.

            I’m not targeting Gen X, I’m merely stating its never a bad time for old people to behave responsibly. Civilization growing great when old men plant trees who’s shade they will never sit in, and the like.

          • The Nybbler says:

            I’m not targeting Gen X, I’m merely stating its never a bad time for old people to behave responsibly.

            Responsibly? We paid all those taxes that kept the so-called “Greatest” and the Silents and the Boomers in their dentures and adult diapers, and now you want to turn it around so instead of benefiting from taxes paid by future generations, we get to use whatever we managed to keep after taxes to forgive the Millennials debts and pay the Zoomers’ way through college?

            This deal gets worse all the time.

          • Clutzy says:

            Responsibly? We paid all those taxes that kept the so-called “Greatest” and the Silents and the Boomers in their dentures and adult diapers, and now you want to turn it around so instead of benefiting from taxes paid by future generations, we get to use whatever we managed to keep after taxes to forgive the Millennials debts and pay the Zoomers’ way through college?

            This deal gets worse all the time.

            That is, indeed, the definition of being responsible. Just because your parents beat you, that being a wonderful emotional release for them doesn’t mean you should beat your kids for that same temporary high.

          • The Nybbler says:

            That’s the definition of “responsible” that’s often used when handing someone the short end of the stick. It’s like playing the marshmallow game with some kids, but when that second marshmallow is due, instead you come in and take the marshmallow from the kids who didn’t eat theirs and handing it out to the kids who did. And then you tell them that’s only fair, as the other kids clearly wanted their marshmallow more.

            I’ve often claimed that paying ones dues doesn’t get you anything but a bill for more dues, but claiming that’s just the “responsible” thing for some people is going further than that.

          • Garrett says:

            > its never a bad time for old people to behave responsibly

            They could start by visiting unstable ice floes more often.

            Unfortunately, the ones most needing to do so are the ones least capable.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            Bailing people out of debts that they should not have taken on is not responsible behavior, it’s enabling behavior.
            If anyone needs to be responsible, it’s the government guaranteeing and proving low-interest rates for poor human capital investments.

          • Clutzy says:

            Bailing people out of debts that they should not have taken on is not responsible behavior, it’s enabling behavior.
            If anyone needs to be responsible, it’s the government guaranteeing and proving low-interest rates for poor human capital investments.

            Wouldnt do that either. I’d stop the entire fedloan program though, because it is yet another subsidy to old people, those people being college employees.

            I’d just stop taxing for a failing system and stop making education k-12 teacher/faculty oriented instead of student oriented. Also preferably less sexist.

  64. meakr says:

    I was recently trying to find a good way to survey friends using ranked choice voting, but I didn’t love the existing online options, so I wrote my own. I figured SSC readers might be interested, so sharing it here: Poller.io. Ideally its a really quick way to do low stakes instant-runoff elections, Borda Counts, and the Condorcet Method. Feel free to share any feedback!

    • Well... says:

      FYI you could probably do a ranked voting poll on SurveyMonkey, but I can’t remember whether there’s still a free version of it, or whether the free version is anything but useless.

      • meakr says:

        You can do ranked polls on SurveyMonkey, but from what I can tell, they unfortunately only return a Borda Count equivalent (and I don’t love all the steps involved to set up a super simple poll). I was actually surprised at how few options there were for IRV, but I guess its still a pretty niche thing.

  65. EchoChaos says:

    You have been granted an all expenses paid trip to an event of your choice!

    What event do you want to go to and why?

    Event means a specific notable gathering, so Burning Man, PAX, Davos would all count, but “sunning on the French Riviera” wouldn’t.

    You are given whatever you need to attend this gathering and get back home, but it doesn’t exempt you from consequences, soif you choose to attend a private meeting of the Chinese Communist Party Leadership and go back to Europe or the USA, the Chinese might want to keep you from spreading that knowledge.

    • Thegnskald says:

      Physics conference, assuming they’ll pay whatever fee I need to pay to present. There are a few to choose from, so which one would depend on convenience.

      Yeah, I’ll be in the crackpot section. Maybe somebody is bored enough to see if the crackpots are entertaining. And maybe they’ll be able to figure out what I am trying to say, as opposed to the word salad I actually produce to try to convey it.

    • Elementaldex says:

      The largest Betelgeuse Supernova watching party in North America.

      I’m interested and want to see it. I’m also motivated to live a long time and that’s an event which I expect will actually happen and which requires living a long time (or at least getting to a time when living a long time is likely) to attend. Plus my main expenses to get there are surviving for thousands of years which is probably expensive and thus good to have someone else paying for.

      • John Schilling says:

        The largest Betelgeuse Supernova watching party in North America.

        Oh, you can think bigger than that. Ditch the last three words, and watch from the Betelgeusian Oort Cloud. And tell Brother Cavil I said “hi”.

      • Bobobob says:

        I wonder, would actually watching Betelgeuse explode, from Earth, using a powerful telescope, make you go blind?

        Supernovas are inconceivably powerful events. Randall Monroe puts it best in “What If”: from Earth, watching the sun go supernova would be the equivalent of a billion hydrogen bombs detonating right next to your eyelids.

        • AlphaGamma says:

          No. The inverse square law is a powerful force.

          From what I can find, a Betelgeuse supernova is calculated to have an apparent magnitude of -10 (magnitude is a logarithmic scale, lower numbers are brighter). That is brighter than Venus or any star (and bright enough to cast shadows at night) but not as bright as the full Moon.

          • Lambert says:

            But it’s much smaller than the moon.
            Which means the light energy per unit area* of the retina could easily be much higher than that of the moon. I don’t have the maths on whether it might cause eye damage, but just comparing apparent magnitude isn’t enough. (this is what makes lasers so dangerous to eyes.)

            *technically what’s important to eye damage is the energy per unit perimeter, because there’s not much heat flow normal to the retinal surface.

      • b_jonas says:

        Requesting an event that will happen thousands of years into the future, so that the sponsor aliens have to pay for keeping you alive, is an interesting idea. I think it’s too risky though. The easiest way to satisfy your request would be to chuck you into a cryogenic preservation chamber, then revive you before the event. This may leave you completely unsuited from living a meaningful life in that far future society, and possibly with just barely enough health to not die during the few weeks of the event of your choice.

    • Bobobob says:

      FWIW, I’d like to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony of a next-generation supercollider, complete with a full-power demonstration. Unless it accidentally creates a black hole and sucks me into the void.

      • Jake R says:

        I mean if it creates a black hole it’s sucking everyone into the void, might as well get an up close look.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Super Bowl the next time the Chicago Bears are in it. It’s an expensive event, and it’s a rare event. The last time they won a Super Bowl was ’86 and the last time they were in a Super Bowl was ’07. Being at a Super Bowl and watching them win would be one of those “once in a lifetime” things.

    • rumham says:

      Wherever the next total solar eclipse is where the weather is decent. That was the hands down most impressive natural phenomena I’ve ever seen.

  66. TheContinentalOp says:

    On 1 February 1942, five Japanese twin-engine bombers made it through the USS Enterprise (CV-6) combat air patrol (fighters) defenses following the U.S. carrier raid on the Japanese-held Marshall Islands. All the bombers missed and turned away, except the badly damaged lead plane, piloted by Lieutenant Kazuo Nakai, which turned back in an attempt to crash on the Enterprise.

    As the aircraft neared the ship and anti-aircraft fire seemed ineffective, Aviation Machinist Mate Third Class (AMM3/C) Bruno Gaido leaped out of the catwalk, climbed into the back seat of a parked SBD Dauntless dive bomber (his normal position as radioman-gunner when the plane was airborne), and swiveled the plane’s aft twin .30 caliber machine guns and opened fire, standing while pouring accurate fire down into the low-flying bomber’s cockpit, causing it to lose control. The bomber barely missed the flight deck, its wingtip cutting the tail off the SBD Gaido was in and spinning the parked aircraft.

    Gaido continued firing on the bomber throughout, until it crashed in the water on the opposite side of the ship. Gaido then calmly grabbed the fire bottle from the SBD and extinguished a pool of flaming gasoline on the flight deck left over from the crashed bomber. Thereafter, he disappeared into the ship, worried that he would get in trouble for leaving his watch station. Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, the task group commander, ordered that the unidentified gunner be found. A search party eventually located Gaido and brought him to the bridge, whereupon Halsey spot-promoted him to First Class, as everyone who observed the event credited Gaido with keeping the Enterprise from being hit in the extremely close call.

    Link

    I related this to my friend, encouraging him to watch the recent Midway movie which documents this bravery. (Nick Jonas portrays by Bruno Gaido.) My friend seemed to think that Gaido was deserving of a promotion to officer and he cited the Sharpes novels by Bernard Cornwell. Obviously there are many differences: fiction vs reality, army vs navy, UK vs US, 19th vs 20th centuries.

    My question is: “Was it common in the US in WW2 to be elevated to officer for actions like Gaido’s and he just missed out, or did that sort of thing just not happen?

    • bean says:

      Battlefield commissions definitely happened, and were considered an honor on par with the MoH, but as far as I know, they were limited to the Army and Marines, and never happened in the Navy. A lot of this is down to different operational circumstances. An Army Sergeant and Lieutenant have fairly similar jobs, and in units that got hit hard, it was common to find NCOs leading platoons. So saying “you’re a very good battlefield leader, have a commission” makes a lot of sense. At sea (or frankly anywhere other than ground combat units), there’s a much bigger gap in responsibilities and roles between officer and NCO, and much less case to make for handing someone like Gaido a commission. To put it simply, he’s a gunner/radio operator, and the USN essentially didn’t use commissioned officers in that slot. So if Halsey says “congratulations, you’re now an Ensign”, what’s he supposed to do? He’s definitely not a pilot, and even extreme heroism like that doesn’t really speak to his suitability as a leader/administrator, which is what naval officers were expected to do.

      Battlefield promotions were and to a limited extent still are a thing, and were used in the manner described.

      • EchoChaos says:

        To add to this, officers as the result of battlefield commissions were known to have very limited career prospects unless they were able to secure education and the necessary training for their existing rank.

        For example, Audie Murphy became very depressed after WWII partially because of shell shock, but also partially because he was unable to get on the necessary educational level in order to remain in the Army.

      • LHN says:

        If I can trust DC Comics, at least one recipient of a battlefield commission went to a lot of work to get it reversed.

        https://www.cbr.com/sergeant-rock-short-lived-promotion/

    • John Schilling says:

      As someone once said, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it”. A hypothetical Ensign Gaido would have been useless. Officers are expected to command and/or lead men in combat; Gaido demonstrated no particular talent for that, and the one thing he was unambiguously good at is a thing that is performed at the very bottom of the chain of command. I suppose if he had survived Midway we could have sent him home on a recruiting or bond-selling tour, in which case the snazzier uniform and rags-to-riches story might have been a plus.

      Otherwise, we’ve got things like the Distinguished Flying Cross for airmen who do things that are brave and difficult and heroic but don’t involve leadership or command. Battlefield commissions are more properly for people who heroically step up and take command responsibilities when the proper officers are missing, or for senior NCOs whose job involves front-line leadership and can be observed to be officer material.

      Sharpe is an exception to that rule, commisioned for private heroism, but A: fiction and B: at least an NCO at the time and C: the early 19th-century British army was short on decorations for valor that could be given to enlisted men.

      • fibio says:

        It’s also possible that Sharpe’s command was proving difficult to fill. It hardly seemed like a plumb posting when Sharpe turned up and having an experienced NCO ride herd might have been the best option. Certainly better than throwing another entitled noble brat at the problem

  67. metacelsus says:

    So, Bloomberg dropped out. At this point I think it’s pretty sure that Biden will be the nominee (unless he gets coronavirus and dies).

    Now the question is: can he beat Trump?

    • fibio says:

      Eh, I haven’t really adjusted my 60/40 odds for Trump winning in over a year. No one in the Dems has come across as having a killer edge that will sway the election. Honestly, Trump remains the most important factor when it comes to the results, he could still implode if there’s a significant crisis before the end of his term and that’s where most of my uncertainty comes from. If nothing goes wrong for him I expect it to be a fairly easy win.

    • Thegnskald says:

      With Warren or Sanders as his VP, I’d say he stands a reasonable chance of winning, but not as good as 50/50; maybe 40/60.

      He’d need to be seen making concessions to a wing of the party I think gets taken for granted.

      • Deiseach says:

        With Warren or Sanders as his VP

        That is the thing, though; how do you go from “debates where we’re clawing each other’s eyes out and tearing our policy proposals to shreds as unachievable moonshine rubbish” to “a winning team working together in the White House (and I’ll cheerfully take orders from them)”?

        I could just about see Lizzie as VP for Biden, but I can’t see either Sanders or Biden being willing to play second-fiddle to each other.

        • JayT says:

          Ronald Reagan chose HW Bush as his VP, and they had a very contentious primary. Bush is the one that came up with the term “voodoo economics”, which Reagan’s opponents have used against him to this day.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          You asked this before, Deiseach, and I told you, it is zero problem in American politics. Every single election the candidates tear each other apart in the primaries and then are best buds in the general. No one bats an eye because it’s just part of the game.

          You apparently didn’t believe me or you wouldn’t be asking this again, so perhaps other Americans can chime in and let her know this is simply part of American political culture.

          • gph says:

            I think you’re right in general, but in this specific case I don’t think Sanders will have much desire to stand with Biden and vice versa. Beyond just policy they’ve both been deeply involved in politics for decades, with Sanders often being further apart from Biden than Biden ever was from his Republican counterparts. And on a cultural and personal level I just don’t see them liking each other very much, and particularly Sanders doesn’t seem like one to compromise his values for a seat at the table so to speak.

            I also don’t think there’s that much to gain from Biden taking on Sanders as a running mate. Most Sanders voters in swing states are probably going to vote for anyone not named Trump no matter who their running mate is.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I disagree. Bernie is a not a fighter. I knew he was going to lose 2016 as soon as he said (paraphrasing) “I don’t care about her damn emails.” And then he turned around and endorsed Clinton and campaigned for her after knowing the DNC was running roughshod over him. You cannot “beat the establishment” if you will not fight the establishment in your own party.

            I certainly don’t think Biden will tap Sanders as a running mate or anything, but as soon as the primary is over, Sanders will endorse Biden and campaign for him, just like Clinton.

          • Aftagley says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            That position doesn’t make sense when you accept that Bernie Sanders is a rational human being who understands that the space between what he wanted and what Hillary wanted was much smaller than the space between what he wanted and what Trump wanted.

            For example, what move would you make in 2016 after it becomes clear you won’t be the democratic nominee? Launch a 3rd party spoiler campaign as punishment to the rest of the Democrats for not siding with you?

            The choice wasn’t Bernie or Hillary at that point, it was Hillary or Trump and thus Bernie Sanders chose to support the person most in line with his goals.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            It depends on what you think Bernie’s political goals are. His most strongly stated goals involve a political revolution to strip the billionaire* class of power, and perhaps eliminate them entirely with statements like “billionaires should not exist.” None of these were anything like Hillary’s goals.

            He could also have just kept his mouth shut, if he were, as gph says, not “like one to compromise his values.” Endorsing Clinton was definitely compromising his stated values. But I don’t believe Bernie Sanders is a sincere person, so this is entirely in keeping with what I believe to be his character.

            * Sanders’ rhetoric used to target “millionaires and billionaires” but switched to only billionaires once he become a millionaire.

          • Aftagley says:

            I’m not accusing you of anything, but I can’t tell if your actually making this argument if I’m just not getting the joke. I’ll try again.

            Here is a list of policy goals Bernie has expressed interest in. I can’t find the same information from 2016, but knowing him, I doubt he’s shifted too far in any direction. I agree that there are probably issues on that list he cares more about and others that he cares less about. I’ll also content that he likely cares way more about ending wealth disparity and decreasing the power/prevalence of billionaires than most if not all the other issues on that list.

            But crucially, that doesn’t imply that he doesn’t care about those issues OR that he can’t differentiate between an outcome that’s say 80% as extreme as what he wants vs. one that is the exact opposite of what he wants.

            With this understanding, it makes a bunch of sense that while he still had a path forward in the nomination, he would fight like hell to get elected – he’d rather be the nominee than someone who only is, say, 70% as extreme as he is. But, once he no longer had that path forward, he’d recognize that Trump, who supports maybe only 10% of what Bernie wants was a less good outcome than Clinton, and would act to make Clinton’s presidency more likely.

          • Deiseach says:

            You apparently didn’t believe me or you wouldn’t be asking this again

            Well, I do and I don’t. From my own side of the water, it is true that in (for example) leadership struggles, the victor often gives the defeated rival(s) a plum job in the administration as a consolation prize. Sometimes it is even genuine ‘working together for the good of the party and the nation’. Sometimes this is to buy them off so as to get them to throw their support behind the other guy, or to keep them inside the tent pissing out as the quote goes. But just as often, there is bitter blood, grudges are held, memories are long and in the immediate aftermath the loser and their supporters can kiss goodbye to any hopes of advancement they may have had. Even years later, despite surface reconciliation, revenge is taken when the opportunity to do down the old rival appears.

            So I find it very hard to mentally picture Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, or Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, standing together on a podium smiling (even through gritted teeth) as Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates. If Lizzie switches from “Bernie Sanders is a sexist and a misogynist and as good as told me to shut up and get back in the kitchen” to “Bernie will sure respect and value me as his Veep”, then she’s going to lose a heap of credibilty with progressives, and progressives are the target market she has been reaching out to.

            Sure, there’s always “Well we know she didn’t really mean it, it was just political ju-jitsu in the contest to be chosen”, but then why believe she really meant it when talking about debt or healthcare or the rest of it? If they will say anything without really believing it but they have to say it to score points, then if you believe “but no this one thing they really are sincere about”, then that is naive (my own cynical view of all politics; believing for instance, that Bernie really will cancel all student loan debt, he will, he will! is the same as believing Bernie really sincerely deep-down meant it when he said Biden was in the pockets of the billionaires and had a disastrous record on trade and healthcare, he did, he did! If “Bernie only said” the latter to score points in the debate, why think he’s any more principled or at least less willing to say whatever will score him points about the former? Especially if then Bernie is standing alongside Joe as Team White House Wannabes Prez and Veep. And for “Bernie”, insert the names of any or all of them, I’m not picking on one person in particular here.)

            But it’s not me you have to convince that it’s all only kabuki, that nobody means anything they say about principles or policies when attacking a rival, and that it’s understood by everyone including the punters that it’s all kayfabe and behind the scenes they are all jolly good mates: try telling this to the people in the comment threads here saying ‘okay our guy may be a little creepy but at least he’s not a rapist like your guy!’ or ‘our lot do have actual principles, the other lot are just spoilers and wreckers!’ or ‘the Republicans in cahoots with the Russians are trying to do to Biden what they did to Hillary!’ and so forth. C’mon guys, you’re supposed to know that when X was castigating Y as a threat to the nation they didn’t really mean that, it was all acting for the cameras!

          • BBA says:

            Obama made Clinton his Secretary of State, after what was seen at the time as an extraordinarily nasty, drawn-out primary (oh how young and naive we were). Nobody thought it was particularly remarkable, though Jon Stewart questioned why he’d appoint her to State when their biggest disagreements were about foreign policy.

            I don’t see Sanders getting a job in a Biden administration, or vice versa. Everyone else is running for VP or Cabinet and would gladly serve under either.

          • acymetric says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            * Sanders’ rhetoric used to target “millionaires and billionaires” but switched to only billionaires once he become a millionaire.

            Adjusted for inflation 😉

          • Garrett says:

            > Every single election the candidates tear each other apart in the primaries and then are best buds in the general.

            I haven’t seen that happen to the Democrats in the 2 most recent elections. It seems more like they are trying to win without possibly alienating the supporters of the opposition. Hillary v. Sanders was more like a mutual press conference than actual debating.

            This year there’s been a bit of challenge, most notably of the “safe” targets like Bloomberg by Warren. But no other substantial challenges of the merits of the positions put forth by others.

        • Eric Rall says:

          It’s pretty much analogous to nasty party leadership fights in Parliamentary systems ending with the runners-up still getting cabinet positions. Three of Theresa May’s four opponents in the 2016 leadership elections wound up taking positions in her cabinet, for example.

          It also helps that in the US, the Vice President has very little inherent constitutional power. He casts tiebreaker votes in the Senate, has veto power over the never-yet-used 25th Amendment involuntary removal process, and steps in if the Presidency is vacant. Apart from that, the rest of his duties are either entirely ceremonial or are delegated to him at the President’s pleasure. The big carrot that gets people to accept the Vice Presidency is that it gives them the opportunity to ride the President’s coattails into office 4-8 years down the road, and that, too, is dependent on being generally seen as a team player during your Vice Presidency.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            The big carrot that gets people to accept the Vice Presidency is that it gives them the opportunity to ride the President’s coattails into office 4-8 years down the road

            It does not seem like this has mattered for a long time, and may even be a hindrance given the propensity for the electorate to swap parties in power every 8 years.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            Yeah, there have been two picked Vice Presidents (Ford is a bit different case) to become President in the post-war period, and one of them lost badly on his first attempt and took eight years to recover and actually become President.

            It’s actually more common for a Vice President to get defeated attempting to become President than for him to actually win.

          • Eric Rall says:

            Yeah, there have been two picked Vice Presidents (Ford is a bit different case) to become President in the post-war period

            I count three aside from Ford: Nixon, LBJ, and Bush the Elder. Looked at another way, 4 of 14 post-war Vice Presidents (including Biden and Pence, both of whom still have plausible chances to add to the numerator) have gone on to become President: two after their respective Presidents completed their terms (Nixon and Bush), and two through stepping into fill vacancies (LBJ being reelected in his own right later, and Ford losing reelection).

            That’s not a great success rate, but it’s substantially better than other common paths to the Presidency. In the same period, not counting people who were also Vice Presidents, Americans have elected four Governors to the Presidency (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush the Younger), two Senators (JFK and Obama), one Celebrity Billionaire, and one five-star General. If you do double-count people who were also VPs, that brings the “Senators” count up to 4 and adds 1 each to the categories “House Minority Leader” and “Director of the CIA”.

            And there have been a whole lot more Constitutionally eligible Governors and Senators in the reference period than Vice Presidents. Not sure exactly how many, but probably on the order of hundreds of each. And there have been dozens of celebrity billionaires, depending on where you draw the line for “celebrity”, five 5-star generals, 17 DCIs, and 27-ish House Minority/Majority Leaders or Speakers.

      • salvorhardin says:

        There are other VP choices who would appeal to that wing of the party, though, and check some diversity boxes as well (I cannot imagine Biden in the current cultural climate choosing another white guy as his running mate). Stacey Abrams comes to mind.

    • Loriot says:

      I’m cautiously optimistic, but I think the state of the economy in November will matter a lot, as will the severity and duration of the coronavirus pandemic.

      • Evan Þ says:

        I’m reluctant to call expecting either a Trump or Biden victory “optimistic.” It seems to me “optimistic” better fits a Bill Weld or Evan McMullin victory.

    • jermo sapiens says:

      I think Trump will win with 70% confidence.

      Biden has some strong points that will make it pretty close, but I dont think the Democrats have the unity required to beat Trump. The Sanders wing of the Democrats will be upset, as they were in 2016, and wont come out in large enough numbers. And if the Bernie bros cause violence at the convention, then it’s going to be a cakewalk, but I’m not sure that will be the case.

      The thing I’m not sure about is how much appeal Biden has with blue collar democrats in PA, WI, and MI, and whether he can get some 2016 Trump voters in those states to flip in 2020. Is he seen as Hillary Clinton was, an establishment globalist, or as a fighter for the little guy? I dont know.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Why not? RCP has him leading Trump +5 in the national polls. Hillary beat Trump by 2 but lost on the back of extremely narrow margins in a handful of key states, which she may have won if the Comey letter had not dropped right before the election.

      Trump has incumbency and economic advantages, but he is still unpopular.

    • Plumber says:

      @metacelsus says:

      “So, Bloomberg dropped out. At this point I think it’s pretty sure that Biden will be the nominee (unless he gets coronavirus and dies)”

      I still wasn’t confident of that last night, but this morning I heard that Texas (a “winner take all” State) is called for Biden, that, and all the lesser States Biden has done well in, should counterbalance all but an unprecedented scale win of California for Sanders.

      “Now the question is: can he beat Trump?”

      A chance?

      Sure.

      A strong chance?

      Um, nah.

      Trump has the tailwinds of job growth during his term, and few body bags coming from overseas.

      I think Biden has a better chance than Sanders would, Sanders I think would be likely to flip Michigan, but he’d lose Florida and Virginia, he’d have to flip Arizona and (bug reach) Texas to counterbalance, and I don’t know if enough young Latino voters would show up for that.

      Biden’s strength is among Red-State Democrats, I think it’s likely that he’d get Pennsylvania (where he was born), but I think Ohio, and Wisconsin are out of reach, the path I see for him is to win Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia, maybe Georgia.

      For all that black men as well as women need to pill the lever for him, and while not voting Republican is a given, they’re coming to the polls isn’t.

      I like Biden, I voted for Biden (I also liked Sanders enough to vote for him in 2016), but…

      …Biden is kinda befuddled, itvwon’t be easy for him to win, I’d bet on Trump’s re-election.

      On the plus side, with Trump in the White House the Democrats probably keep the House and may win the Senate, on the negative side a Biden loss means a more Left Democratic candidate in 2024, and another Democratic Presidential loss (barring a recession).

      • Loriot says:

        > I still wasn’t confident of that last night, but this morning I heard that Texas (a “winner take all” State) is called for Biden

        The democratic primary doesn’t have any winner take all states. It’s split proportionately among people who get at least 15%.

        That being said, Biden beating Sanders in Texas is a bullish sign, since it’s once of the places Sanders was hoping to run up the score.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I don’t think Biden will beat Trump. Trump voters will crawl through broken glass to vote for him, but Biden got picked by all the people who waited until the last second and then said “eh, I guess I’ll go for Biden.” I do not believe he can overcome the enthusiasm gap.

      Beyond that I don’t really know what Biden’s policies are except “generic democrat.” I should probably look into that.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        Trump voters will crawl through broken glass to vote for him

        And how many 2016 Trump voters will vote for Biden in 2020? I would guess not many. Trump’s presidency was what you would expect in 2016.

        How many 2016 Trump voters will stay home in 2020? Again, not many.

        Are there voters who didnt come out for Hillary but will come out for Biden in 2020? Maybe. I dont think that’s going to be a major factor either.

        The only hope for Democrats is changing demographics (which is why they’re so interested in changing the country’s demographics).

        • John Schilling says:

          The only hope for Democrats is changing demographics

          Or a deep and abiding hatred of Donald J. Trump. In 2016, conventional wisdom was that of course Trump wasn’t going to win, so while most people were opposed to a Trump presidency nobody was going to crawl through broken glass just to put one more nail in his coffin. 2020, nobody’s going to be taking Trump’s defeat for granted.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            2020, nobody’s going to be taking Trump’s defeat for granted.

            That’s a good point. But how many people with “deep and abiding hatred of Donald J. Trump” did not go to vote in 2016? Probably a bunch in California and New York. Maybe some in PA, but fewer.

            Regardless of Trump’s win being a surprise in 2016, I think the more someone hates a candidate, the more likely they are to go to vote against him.

          • Loriot says:

            The issue is that the Republicans and/or Russians successfully demonized Clinton, so a lot of swing voters had a deep and abiding hatred of *both* candidates. They’re trying with Biden, but they’ll only have a year this time, instead of decades and the liberal media won’t play along this time.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Loriet

            This is pretty much untrue on both sides.

            Hillary has been very popular nationally, especially during the period while she was Secretary of State and declared her intention to run.

            I collapsed while she was actually running because she was a bad candidate, not because she is inherently unlikable.

            https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/may/22/hillary-clinton/hillary-clintons-approval-rating-secretary-state-w/

            Biden is just like Hillary in this respect. He’s a nationally known politician who is pretty generically popular when he isn’t doing anything dramatic, but sinks when he gets into a contest with someone less well liked.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @John Schilling

            In 2016, conventional wisdom was that of course Trump wasn’t going to win, so while most people were opposed to a Trump presidency nobody was going to crawl through broken glass just to put one more nail in his coffin.

            I don’t disagree that such people exist. But how many of them live in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin?

            The fact that the score may be super run up against Trump in New York, California and Illinois doesn’t change the electoral math.

            I simply don’t buy that there is a huge reservoir of fervent anti-Trump voters in the critical swing states who missed voting in 2016. And polling backs me up.

          • Deiseach says:

            The issue is that the Republicans and/or Russians successfully demonized Clinton, so a lot of swing voters had a deep and abiding hatred of *both* candidates.

            Loriot, people didn’t vote for Hillary because they didn’t like her, and it wasn’t the Russians who suddenly brainwashed them into disliking her. Bill has charisma by the tankerload, Hillary reminds me of cold porridge. Had I a vote in American elections, I’d have voted for Bill, even though I thought him a rogue and a chancer, before the Lewinsky scandal came out. I wouldn’t vote for Hillary even though she’s a woman and part of her campaign was “vote for me or you’re a sexist”. She can’t help it, but she does emanate the aura of “reminding you when you were at school and were kept back to write lines”.

            I was just as shocked as anyone else when Trump actually won, because I thought there was no way he’d get enough votes even against Hillary. If the Russians could really pull that off, can we get them to try social media campaigns to stop littering or the like, because those are some goddamn thaumaturgical persuasion powers right there.

          • acymetric says:

            2020, nobody’s going to be taking Trump’s defeat for granted.

            I disagree, tons of people are taking Trump’s defeat for granted. People are both overestimating how unpopular Tump is (especially in swing states) and overestimating how willing people are to vote against what they perceive to be their own interests/preferred policies just to get a guy they don’t like out of office (especially in swing states).

            Even people who think some of Trump’s policies are actively bad (racist, etc) who have a real problem with it still might not be willing to vote against him if they think his other polices benefit them, personally. People are not as willing to stand on principle to help other people when it goes against their own self interest as some people seem to beleive.

          • albatross11 says:

            Which do you think more likely to win him the election:

            a. Voters thinking Trump’s policies are in their interests.

            b. Voters seeing Trump as supporting their tribe/side/ingroup.

            My guess is that (b) is more important in most elections, albeit maybe not in elections where something serious is going on that seems to need some adult supervision. Having the feds continue to ineffectually dick around w.r.t. COVID-19 would be a pretty good way for voters to switch modes, and that would be bad for Trump against some people–I’m not sure how it would work against Sanders or Biden.

          • cassander says:

            @echochaos

            It collapsed while she was actually running because she was a bad candidate, not because she is inherently unlikable.

            Hillary’s approval rating appears to be inversely correlated with the amount of time she spends trying to get people to like her. I think that’s pretty much the definition of a bad candidate.

      • Skeptic says:

        If there’s a recession, Biden wins

        If Coronavirus hits hard, which is underestimated IMO, Biden wins

        If neither, toss up

    • Chalid says:

      I think Biden’s got a somewhat better-than-even chance at winning. Trump is unpopular in spite of the good economy, and his unpopularity is in the range where incumbents have a good chance of being defeated. If there’s no particular big event between now and the election then I’d call it a tossup. But there’s a decent chance that we’ll have economic trouble between now and the election in which case Biden would be favored. (And I think with a better candidate than Biden the Dems would have quite a good chance.)

    • sty_silver says:

      There’s also a chance that Trump gets the coronavirus, and it’s probably higher than for Biden given his personality.

      • Loriot says:

        Isn’t Trump a germaphobe? You’d expect him to be less likely to get it, even if he weren’t surrounded by the best medical care the nation has to offer.

    • Plumber says:

      @metacelsus,
      I was bummed after viewing videos of Biden’s freaky hair sniffing, and lowered my estimate of his winning, but after seeing some reports of increased turnout on super Tuesday compared to 2016 I’m a little more confident again.

      If Biden is the nominee it looks likelier that Virginia will stay blue, North Carolina looks like it may vote blue again (like it did in ’08), and while its 15 electoral college votes don’t balance out the loss of the upper Midwest they help, but it looks like Texas may actually be in play!

      That’s a very long stretch, but if Florida is won as well that’s a game changer, so DNC, roll the Dice and fire up a barbecue!

      Yee-haw!