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The aliens with the giant spaceships have wiped out all our electrical power plants. Pinpoint strikes by orbital deathrays have destroyed them all, whether powered by coal, gas, hydro, solar, wind, oil, geo-thermal, or nuclear reactors. All our gear that uses electrical power is still in place, as is the electrical distribution grid. Batteries are untouched, as are household and building-sized generators. But anything that can power even a neighborhood is gone.
How screwed are we?
@John Schilling, this comment didn’t age well.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/05/open-thread-146-75/#comment-849971
Anyone have experience with the FOCI biometric device (https://fociai.com/)? I sometimes have trouble focusing when working at my computer, and this seems like it could help.
One pro-Trump argument I often hear but have never bought is he is less likely to start a war.
Now he’s withdrawn from Open Skies and it sounds like he has no intention of renewing START.
These aren’t the same as “starting a war” but he seems more likely than any president in decades to prefer nuclear proliferation to treaties which prevent it.
What’s the argument that he’s likely to prevent nuclear proliferation? Is it wise of him to reject the renewal of START?
Neither open skies nor START has much to do with nuclear proliferation. nuclear proliferation usually refers to new countries getting access to nuclear weapons, not existing nuclear armed states building more of them.
Then let me use the less elegant “nuclear arms build-up” instead of proliferation.
One aspect of non-proliferation is that current nuclear states shouldn’t take actions that incentivize non-nuclear states to build their own weapons. I don’t think either of these particular treaties particularly matter in that regard, but I guess you could argue that it creates an atmosphere of hostility by one of the big nuclear states or something.
Producing more nuclear weapons is quite different from sending Americans to foreign lands so they can return in body bags.
The reflex counter argument here (based on things like the Paris Agreement) is that he actually read the treaty and disagreed with the content. So there’s likely a discussion to be had on what the treaties actually say they do, vs what the consequences really are. Not having read the treaties I have no opinion either way.
The argument was that he was less likely to start a war than Hillary Clinton, which could appear in the dictionary under “not saying much.”
Is there such a thing as “whole-body sign language”? Like a semaphore technique that involves moving and/or repositioning your limbs and body so as to form letters or whole words that someone else can see from a long distance?
I don’t mean to be snarky here, but isn’t that Semaphore? What’s semaphore not doing well in this category?
Semaphore requires that you have to little flags. What if you don’t have them?
You just use your arms. The flags are just there to make the position of your arms clearer. They’re not actually necessary.
You’re right!
Power armor is mildly feasible, mechwarriors are probably not, and giant Jaeger robots are definitely not.
https://www.militantfuturist.com/what-color-is-your-power-armor/
So what are you supposed to do if Kaiju appear in your world? Use nukes on your own territory? Pray to Jesus for a Christian moth Kaiju to defend you?
Distribute humans equally across the surface of the Earth so it takes longer for them to exterminate us.
Alternatively, if you want to get all boring and IRL-ish, conventional heavy weaponry.
The God-Emperor Leto would like a word with you about your limited vision.
anti-ship missiles will fuck them right up.
Let them collapse under their own weight as the square-cube law asserts itself?
If that doesn’t happen, reverse-engineer whatever wonder-material allows the kaiju’s bones to support that sort of weight, and make tank armor out of that stuff. (Bolos – the tank-lover’s answer to giant robots!)
Very X-COM. I think we have a winner.
I like to joke that if kaiju existed we would hunt them to extinction for their bones. HE missiles to the jugular ought to do the trick, assuming they have a jugular and can bleed out. The real challenge is finding a way to join their bones together to build a space elevator.
Take whatever miracle-metal you imagine your giant Jaeger robots are made of, forge it into a nice big kinetic-energy penetrator, strap it to a solid rocket motor for about Mach 6 terminal velocity, laser guidance up front, hang the whole thing off an F-15E or if necessary an old B-52, then wait for the opportune moment when the Kaiju mouths “what does that do?” in Japanese and show him what that does.
Or, if you want to be boring about it, hit him from fifty miles away while he isn’t paying attention.
Get everyone who can fight together and try to hold them off until a golden mute with long hair and a beard shows up to drive them away?
Alternatively, just hit them with more dakka. It worked wonders during the Salvation War.
Crash a load of oil tankers into it then bomb them in the early afternoon.
With any luck, the burning oil slick will become a firestorm and consume all the oxygen nearby.
Be friends with them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-zGIS-WWZQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddkImTt6tyA
Failing that, parasites plus chemicals work quite well at taking down larger animals (see Bees vs. verroa mites and nicotinoids). We may be a little large to be parasites, but our carnivorous pets would probably do quite well.
Gundam tries to dance around this by introducing magical particles which make radar and radio communications worthless – so, that being said, are the robots still tall enough to make artillery or fighter planes a better option even if they can’t communicate with spotters/other units?
I mean, the kaiju are hundreds of feet tall. sit on top of a decent hill and you’ll be able to see them from dozens of miles away. And what the observer sees, he can shout to the battery at the base of the hill about.
If only we had communication technologies that allowed people to coordinate armies prior to radio. And if only our military were taught such things as contingency…
Its hard to see how humanity could fail to beat large monsters that appear in low numbers without so many invocations of non-scientific powers that the question becomes how long before humans figure out how to tap this power source as well?
There was a very underrated real mecha fight about a year ago. This is a random link, I don’t have the energy right now to look for the interesting bit. But some very interesting things happened. They scheduled a number of rounds, and by sheer accident and noobness… the first one was actually for real. And scary. So scary they immediately reverted to a completely different format.
It’s a very small thing, less then 10 seconds – what the japanese did was to just rush the US machine and punch it. But given that it’s literally the only real-ish mecha fight in existence, I think it’s worth more talk than it got. For example it’s clearly in the “mech” category from your link, and yet it’s nothing like described. If it ever gets to be used for real it’ll be a lot like the Tachikomas in GitS, with leg wheels that are actually a lot more agile than a regular car (imagine you have a meter long movable suspension) but can be used to also climb stairs, even if awkwardly.
Now I want to see an illegal underground BostonDynamics robot fight. Give them cordless angle grinders or oxyacetylene torches to hold.
A random one from the archives: Setting the default
I’m kind of surprised since I’m usually a 100% Scott fanboy, but I totally disagree with this. Weird preferences shouldn’t automatically be dismissed in a relationship. If my GF wanted my to never shower, I wouldn’t say “your preference is stupid and doesn’t count”. I would say “I love you and wants to make you happy but you understand that not showering is kind of impractical?” And then we could find a compromise. Maybe I could take baths instead of showering, or not shower for a week during vacations or whatever.
What society think is “normal” has nothing to do with this, beyond setting the limits for practical behavior (I need to clean somehow to keep my job). Like, in my mind there’s no difference between my partner wanting me to do a “normal” thing (like doing an elaborate proposal) or “unnormal” thing (like letting her go to kink clubs). In both cases I would do a cost-benefit of how-much-discomfort-does-this-cause-me vs. how-much-happines-does she-get and figure out if it is worth it or not. (Yes, I’ll do an elaborate proposal even if it isn’t really my thing, but I’m way too jealous to let you near kink clubs.)
What society thinks is “normal” matters a lot. I signed up for marriage with my wife for better or worse till death do us part, but I signed up for a very specific set of quirks. And obviously people change, but there’s a degree of change that each of us should be able to expect. That means maybe I get really into model trains or my wife gets really into yoga. We can compromise on that. But if she decides she wants to stop taking showers, that’s WAY beyond normal, and it’s my right to shame her back into Normal People Behavior, and it’s the responsibility of her friends and family to shame her back into Normal People Behavior.
In this scenario it’s not even that reasonable – She decided YOU aren’t allowed to take showers. That’s potentially important – It’s not just that she wants to be cold, she’s demanding you also be cold. She doesn’t want to be dirty, she wants you to be dirty.
As I said, I don’t really see the difference here. My partner wants me to do something for their happiness. The important factors to me are: 1. How uncomfortable is the thing they want me to do? 2. How happy does it make them? Why does it matter if the thing is “normal” or not?
I think it’s reasonable to ask your partner to take actions in relationships. Sure, if my girlfriend just demanded that I stopped taking showers it would be a big red flag. But if she brought up her desire, motivated it (maybe it turns her on or she has a phobia of people slipping in the shower or something) and was willing to find a compromise, than all is fine. Isn’t those kind of tradeoffs kind of an important thing in relationships?
@Imsoindiethatmyblogdontfit
I think this is a situation that’s helped by looking at extremes. Starting with an extremely easy one:
This is the kind of thing that works well with your “Well, don’t you care about him/her?” scenario. We have a reasonable adjustment; one person is asking for a reasonable small adjustment that will increase their happiness a ton at a minimal loss to the other person. This is normal and happens all the time, and pretty much everyone agrees on this.
This is a whole different territory. Now, I’m not talking about a “I give a little, you get a lot” situation – I’m talking about a situation where we both have reasonable, relatively equal claims to utility that are opposed to each other. If one party wins, the other loses; they have opposed goals.
This is the first thing you aren’t acknowledging about this situation – you’ve said something like “Well, why can’t I give on little things like showers? Don’t I love them?”. But there are situations where both parties are being reasonable, but still aren’t dealing with little things that are easy to negotiate about.
If you don’t acknowledge that peaches guy’s needs and preferences exist and can be important too, then yeah, it’s easy to go “why won’t this asshole negotiate?”. But once he has equal human value and can need things, it gets more complex.
Now we have a situation where one person’s utility is more legitimate than the other – they are legitimately damaged by eating peaches, while the other person wants an illegitimate form of control over them. Sub in this common real-world form of this:
Bob and Jane get married – Bob has never mentioned any unusual needs. Suddenly, Bob decides Jane can never leave the house and cannot have any friends; he doesn’t like her friends, and he’s afraid she might cheat on him. He demands she stay close to home at all times, only leaving with his permission for necessities. Jane emotionally needs and wants outside friends and feels like a prisoner.
Bob’s demand injures Jane, and Bob is changing the terms of their “deal” midstream. Bob might very well want Jane to stay home a great deal, and he might derive pleasure and satisfaction from having this level of control over Jane. Are you prepared to tell Jane “I don’t see what the problem is – don’t you love Bob enough to compromise?”.
To have this conversation honestly, you must consider these things:
1. Is this an ask, or a demand?
Anything can be asked about, with the understanding that certain asks (example: “let’s buy rabbits and kill them!”) reveal things about a person. But Scott’s examples weren’t simple asks moving into negotiation – you had couples who were opposed to each other’s goals(one wanted to cheat on their partner all of the sudden, and the other didn’t want to get cheated on, one was irrationally angry when the other did a normal, necessary act and the other wanted to do the normal act). If it’s a demand or a “I can’t be happy unless I have this, we can’t be together unless I have this” ultimatum, it’s a different thing.
2. What does the utility balance look like?
If Bob absolutely loses doing X and Jane doesn’t win about X being done one way or the other or wins in only a small amount, then Bob has a lot more negotiating power and his ask/demand is more reasonable.
If Bob absolutely loses doing X and Jane absolutely loses if X isn’t done, then the “Just negotiate! Didn’t you say you cared about this person?” stance loses all it’s power unless you devalue one of the humans in the equation.
3. Was this a pre-existing thing both partners talked about, or is this all of the sudden?
Bob knows Jane is revulsed by being peed on and has known from when they started dating to well past long-term commitment stages of the relationship and then suddenly demands Jane be peed on or he will never be happy and will scorch their relationship. This is different than if they had never talked about it, or if it came up at the beginning of the relationship when the cost to walk away was much less.
Jane may be unwilling to change the terms of the “deal” here, but ignoring that Bob knew the terms of the deal and agreed to them and is now unilaterally demanding a change is a mistake.
4. Does this damage the other person?
Demanding someone never takes showers is a thing that normally damages them – it makes them less appealing to most other people, less healthy, makes them feel less clean, and makes them feel worse about themselves. It decreases their ability to work in most situations.
Saying “Hey, baby, could you eat an apple for me?” when baby doesn’t have a huge problem with apples is reasonable, and they should probably be willing to do it in a nice relationship. Saying “Hey, baby, I think it would be hot if you really let your dental care go to an extreme degree” is different. Ignoring that is a mistake and is willfully devaluing the needs of one person to inappropriately focus on the needs of the other.
Overall, I think you might be ignoring a few or all of these to make your point. Yes, normal couples negotiate and try to maximize their group happiness. No, it’s not always reasonable to expect someone to give up ground to the other person in situations where they have equally reasonable personal utility claims. Doubly so if one person’s demands are unreasonable or “changes to the deal”.
I often make sacrifices for my wife and she often makes them for me because we care about each other, but we are also both aware that there are limits to the demands we can make on each other before the demander is simply being abusive, disregarding the other person, being unfair, and should be resisted.
In a relationship, you probably wouldn’t phrase it as “your preference is stupid and doesn’t count”. You’d try to figure out what exactly they’re trying to achieve by wanting to leave all windows open in winter, and then find some way to give them that without actually doing the ridiculous thing. But at the same time, there’s no way you’re actually leaving all the windows open.
The example about monogamy is supposed to be an edge case. In many social groups, it would be “no way are you allowed to have sex with anyone else”, but in other groups allowing it would be the expected outcome. I think that’s what Scott is trying to describe: certain options are just not on the table unless all involved really want it.
But my point is that to me, all options are on the table no matter if they are normal or not. If my girlfriend wants to do X, I don’t care if it is normal or not. I just care about how much effort/unhappiness it requires from me and how happy it makes her.
Scott writes long-form for a reason. It doesn’t seem to me your excerpt does any justice to what he was arguing for, or against. It seems to me your quote has omitted his thesis, which I think is pretty clearly and openly stated at the end. So, I’m not surprised you find you disagree with the impression you appear to have formed of what he meant.
Maybe try directly challenging his thesis, as you would state it? I think it relates to the idea that he has recently (as of that article) learned something which makes him more sympathetic to *both* progressive culture warriors *and* traditionalist culture warriors. Maybe the specific thesis is “culture wars sometimes need to be fought because culture provides the default.”
If you disagree with that as a general statement, explain what you mean. Maybe try imagining if you noticed a cultural shift that was likely to make it harder for you to keep your job, and see if that makes you sympathetic to the folks who see other cultural changes as important (whether in a good way or a bad way).
I don’t see how I’m doing Scott injustice. I’ll cite him at the end for you:
So Scotts thesis is that what is normal is important. If kink clubs are normal, Adam “wins” the discussion by default. If kink clubs aren’t normal, “Steve” wins. And as you said, “culture wars sometimes need to be fought because culture provides the default.”
And I disagree with this. In my relationship, I don’t care about the default. If my girlfriend wants me to do X, I only care about the costs and benefits, not about if X is normal or not.
Sure maybe I should fight the culture war to make the relationship norms more like my ideal relationship norms. But that seems to be an entirely different issue to me. Also, it isn’t obvious what to fight for. It might be good for me to fight against my ideal norms if it increases the my ratio of matches. So submissive men should probably not fight for a greater acceptance of submissive men, since that could make the ratio of submissive men/dominant women even worse.
A culture might hold that “X is normal”, that “not-X is normal”, or that “both X and not-X are normal.” You sound like a partisan for the third faction, what you might call a maximalist normalizer. Normalizers still count as culture warriors, in my book. If you don’t feel like a warrior, spend a few minutes thinking about how you feel about the people who insist that X is pathological (or not-X is abnormal) and then get back to me.
I think what society thinks is normal is relevant to the implicit default rules of a contract, including a marriage contract. The parties are free to contract around those rules, but common practice is evidence of what they took it for granted was included if not contracted around.
Suppose I bet you ten dollars on a coin flip, and you win. I’m a poor loser, so I take a ten dollar bill, shred it, and hand you the shreds. I’ve reneged on our agreement, even though we didn’t specify that the ten dollars had to be undamaged.
Sure. But marriage contracts can be broken. If my girlfriend wakes up one day and suddenly decides that she wants me to do X, it doesn’t really matter if X is normal or not. If I don’t want to do it and we can’t find a compromise, the relationship is over. It doesn’t really matter if X is “normal” and my my girlfriends “wins by default”, or if X is unnormal and I “win by default”.
The Battle of Gettysburg was fought from July 1-3, 1863. It’s traditionally thought of as the turning point of the U.S. Civil War, and innumerable alternate history books and articles have been written about what would have happened if the Confederates had won.
To help answer that question, it’s very useful to ask how many reinforcements were, in OTL, marching towards Gettysburg, and would have arrived on July 4, 5 and 6. For example, even if the South had won the battle, what would it have meant if, two days later, an extra 50,000 Union troops arrived but no new Confederates arrived?
That depends a lot on how decisively the confederates won. IIRC, the forces brought to bear were something like 100k union and 75k confederate troops. Both sides lost about 25k, with casualties disproportionately high among the officers on both sides. So if the battle went just as it did, but the union broke and ran at picket’s charge the confederates would have been in real trouble if a fresh army had showed up, given they were licking their wounds and low on ammunition.
Of course, it’s very unlikely that that would have happened. First, because if the union army broke and ran it’s unlikely that a smaller army would have been sent charging into the fray. Second, because the odds of picket’s charge working were pretty minimal. more plausible scenarios usually involve the confederate attack on the left flank on day 2 succeeding and forcing a union withdrawal. If that victory is a rout, then the confederates are in a good position to defeat multiple union forces in detail, but it’s not clear how long they can keep that up. Anything less than a rout, though, and the situation for them gets rapidly worse as more and more union troops get pulled in from all directions and they get lower on supplies and take more casualties.
The Civil War was weird. The confederates didn’t want to be the bad guys and march into DC and burn it down and/or try to hold the government hostage, etc. So they mostly just flailed around attacking different union forces instead of going after any meaningful locations. Thus there weren’t any big stakes to winning or losing at Gettysburg for either side. That just happened to be where the momentum changed. Even if the south had crushed the north at Gettysburg, they were already doomed to lose the war by that point.
By that late in the war, DC was ringed with forts and had 10s of thousands of men defending it on top of the field armies. I don’t see how the confederates had a chance at taking it after a year or 2.
I had heard that DC at the time was the most fortified city on the planet.
It was by the end of the war. I’m not sure how far along it was by 1863.
Cassandra,
Probably already there. It’s not as if any other industrial nation was fortifying its capital at that point (although I suspect several European cities were heavily defended).
In terms of heavily-fortified European cities, I think the most fortified at that point might have been Luxembourg, although I’m not sure if that even counts as a city at that point- the garrison may well have outnumbered the civilian population within the walls.
(Luxembourg at the time was part of the German Confederation and in personal union with the Netherlands. The garrison were Prussian- the Dutch had the right to contribute troops to it, but never did.)
Yeah, like I said, they were already doomed by that point. For the “storming DC” tactic to work, they would have had to make the first move. But they didn’t want to conquer the north, they didn’t see themselves as the villains, they just wanted the union to back down so they could part ways.
They’d have rampaged around Pennsylvania and Maryland for a while, but the Union was by 1863 too far committed to the fight to give in for anything a Confederate army could have done along those lines. Nor, with interior lines working in the Union’s favor for a change, could Confederate logistics have supported an invasion that would have given them a materially decisive win.
The decisive battles of the Civil War were 1st Bull Run/Manassas, Forts Henry & Donelson, and the Wilderness Campain. The first decided that the war was going to be long and bloody, that the Confederates were capable of defending the Northern Virginia front well enough that there would be no quick victory of marching into Richmond and a quick collapse of Confederate morale and unity. That could have gone differently, but it didn’t. The second guaranteed that the long bloody war would end with a Union victory by control of the inland waterways, opening a broad flank in the west that the Confederates couldn’t defend. That also could have gone differently, but it didn’t. The Wilderness campaign was the Confederate’s last chance to run out the clock to the 1864 presidential election with the sort of bloody repulse that might have displaced Lincoln and led to a negotiated settlement. None of the other great battles were going to change the fundamental geographic, logistical, and political constraints of the war.
I think I’d include the peninsular campaign over Forts Henry & Donelson. A victory in 1962 would not have been exactly quick and bloodless, but it would have been a lot more so than what we got. Reasonable people can disagree on which particular McClellan mistake was the most damning. I’d probably say the aftermath of 7 pines, but it’s been a while since I read Sears.
Uh, no, it wouldn’t have been.
But I agree the Peninsular Campaign was at least the fourth-most-significant point in the war. An 1862 victory would’ve been very different than the one we got in that the war would’ve finished before emancipation.
Lincoln’s actual plan for in the event he lost the election was to attempt to win the war during the lame-duck part of the term, which before 1937 extends to March 4th. It is highly unlikely he would have succeeded in actually doing so, but he could have had the war won enough that his successor wouldn’t want to come to a negotiated settlement when he can instead have a victory and claim the credit to boot.
Moreover, the successor in question would have been McClellan, who wasn’t even in favour of ending the war through any means other than military vicotry. The reason he was running for President – aside from political ambition – was that he felt he was treated unjustly by the Lincoln administration and believed that he could do a better job of pursuing the war. It’s hard to posit a scenario in which the Democrats nominate someone else, because the Copperheads already succeeded in hijacking the convention away from the War Democrats and wrote a party platform calling for immediate cessation of hostilities and a negotiated settlement, yet they could not unseat McClellan. Which in turn resulted in the Democratic 1864 presidential campaign being marred by the nominee having to publicly repudiate his own official platform.
So all that a bloody repulse at the Wilderness would have accomplished was give validity to McClellan’s argument that in a time of war the United States needed an experienced military man at the helm. Should he succeed in taking the helm, he would then continue to pursue the war to victory, and for all his incompetence as a field commander, McClellan was a genuinely brilliant army organizer. As long as he is not personally leading the armies in the field, and he won’t be, the United States will still win the Civil War decisively. There is simply no political path to victory for the Confederates via the 1864 election.
The pop-cultural reduction of the American Civil War completely leaves out how fascinating being fought through elections with both belligerents being representative democracies made the war.
I could absolutely see McClellan trying to lead armies as president. I’m not saying he definitely would have, I’m just saying it wouldn’t be out of character for him. Of course, by 1865, even Mac probably couldn’t have convinced himself he was vastly outnumbered at every turn.
Unfortunately, we know what happens when McClellan tries to lead an army, command an army, or administer an army, and there’s no particular reason to assume he had gotten any better at it since 1862. He’d certainly have wanted to be victorious over the Confederacy, but his excess of caution would have precluded a quick victory and if we’re positing a Lincoln defeat in 1864 there’d have been no further patience in the North for long wars.
None of you think that if Jackson hadn’t been shot at Chancellorsville he would have succeeded in forcing the surrender of something like half the Union army, and a defeat that big would have resulted in the Union settling?
There is a lot of difference between half the army of the Potomac being forced to retreat and surrendering. Given that the union forces at gettysburg knew that there were a lot of other union troops around and marching towards them, surrender seems very unlikely.
I was talking about Chancellorseville, not Gettysburg. Hard to retreat when you are in dense wilderness, on the enemy side of the river, and the enemy is behind you as well as in front of you.
Which was the point of what Jackson was trying to do.
On Chancellorsville specifically, I think it unlikely. Even without getting shot, Jackson would have found it difficult getting his troops to make a further attack at that point, from exhaustion if nothing else. The fact he was (as I recall the circumstances) looking into the possibility of a night attack shows the problem – night fighting on any scale was very rare in the Civil War, for good reasons.
This leads to a more general point – the Army of the Potomac was so big that it was hard to control effectively, but also so big it was hard to annihilate. And this also goes for all the major Union field armies. Repeatedly, the Confederates gained tactical advantages or victories that they couldn’t quite turn into total victories because there was just one more Union division or Corps in the way, and because the Confederates were exhausted. I’m thinking here for instance of Stones River/ Murfreesboro and Chickamauga.
Of course, outnumbered armies can win victories of annihilation. Cannae happened, and we could also talk about some of the German victories in 1940-41 similarly, or the British conquest of Cyrenaica in 1940-1. But the circumstances have to be perfect. Thinking about my examples, they were all cases where one side enjoyed a big advantage in mobility, and achieved encirclements. That was very hard to do in the Civil War, where all the heavy fighting was done by footslogging infantry. One curious factor in the Civil War was that although the Confederates had excellent cavalry, it had strikingly little strategic effect – plenty of exciting raids etc, but not apparently much of a factor on the field of the major battles – there was not, for instance, ever much idea on either side that Confederate cavalry might achieve a decisive battlefield effect by getting into the rear of Union positions. Why this was so I don’t understand, though I speculate it was because the cavalry was not quite numerous enough.
Jim Crow laws were pitched as being “separate but equal,” and while they may have been on paper, in practice they never were. It makes me wonder: Were there any postbellum laws that were explicitly racist, in that they singled out black people for inferior or degrading treatment? Something like “A black person may not speak ill to a white,” with that polity not having a law that said the opposite in the spirit of fairness?
There was the whole bus seat thing.
Was the bus seat thing codified in law or just a ‘private bus company does what private bus company feels serves its business interests better’ ? Same with privately-owned swimming pool and drinking fountains on premises of private businesses ?
Good point. I don’t know what the statutes actually said, but I found this on wikipedia:
A city ordinance is a law for this purpose, but it is carefully crafted to adhere to the separate-but-equal presentation, doesn’t say black people have to go in the back and says that noone could be forced to move. The equality-breaking part was left to the drivers and protected by lack of practical recourse.
I don’t know about buses, but segregation on trains was by force of law. When an eastbound train hit El Paso, “colored” and “white” sections were marked out by removable signs. To the point of the original question, though, I very much doubt that inferiority of “colored” accomodations was in any way required by law.
There are a smattering of times when they didn’t bother to put in the ass covering bit, e.g.:
“No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed.”
“The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons.”
Real estate covenants also often explicitly excluded non-whites, whether or not you consider those laws is another matter. They also weren’t confined to the Jim Crow south; the Romney’s had a cottage in a neighborhood in michigan with a covenant until the 60’s.
How races were defined was also asymmetric, with white being e.g. >15/16th caucasian ancestry and black being >1/16th african ancestry., e.g
“All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited.”
I remember my parents consulting a lawyer to figure out whether the racist covenant on the house they bought in 1972, in New Mexico, was enforceable. By that time it was not. Real estate redlining not too much prior was very much federal government policy, and extended to all states.
Yes, there were. In general, the laws to look up are the so-called Black Codes; some of these were racially neutral as written, or at least were partially so. But others explicitly targeted black people; the most notorious is an example from Louisiana that forbade any “negro or freedman” from:
coming within the town limits without special permission, rent or keep a house within town limits, hold public meetings, etc.
There is also the example of Oregon, which shortly after attaining statehood banned black people from moving in. I don’t think this particular law was ever enforceable, but the sentiment was clear.
One of the reasons the Democrats had to pass explicitly racist laws in the South is that many businesses were fine serving blacks (a lot of the newer rich, the professional class, the entrepreneurial class, etc… moving from the North were Republican, compared to the old Southern Democrats) and thus would out compete more racist competition without a law forcing them to all comply.
I was rather strongly under the impression that anti-Chinese laws were explicitly racist. However, after doing a bit of research, it’s hard for me to tell if a law against “Chinese” targeted only Chinese nationals or not, which gives a bit of wiggle room.
e.g. here is the 1879 California State Constitution, which says e.g. that “no corporation now existing or hereafter formed under the laws of this State, shall, after the adoption of this Constitution, employ directly or indirectly, in any capacity, any Chinese or Mongolian.” I’d read it as the ethnic group (especially “Mongolian,” why call out tiny Mongolia when Japan is probably sending 100x as many immigrants as Mongolia) but you could make the case for it being about the nationality.
I think the section on voting has to be specifically about the ethnic group. The people who aren’t allowed to vote are: “no native of China, no idiot, insane person, or person convicted of any infamous crime, and no person hereafter convicted of the embezzlement or misappropriation of public money.”
I’ve heard that a big reason why the U.S. economy was so strong in the 1950s and 60s was because the average age was younger, so there were relatively few old people and hence less spending was devoted to Social Security, pensions, and healthcare spending. That meant more money was freed up for things like the space program.
However, the overall dependency ratio–which counts children in addition to old people–was actually lower in the 1960s than it is in the slower-growth modern times (ignoring the acute economic shock of COVID-19).
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4038714-demographic-dividends-of-past-and-headwinds-will-shape-us-growth-in-trump-era
So why did the economy grow faster in the 1960s even though the non-working share of the American population was actually higher than today? Old people gobble up money, but so do kids.
[Note: I suspect the answer will be that an old person takes more money out of the economy than a child, and if that’s the case, what’s the average per capita cost disparity?]
You are assuming that the explanation you offered at first is correct, and just has to be tweaked to take account of children. There are lots of other possible reasons for more rapid growth. Hong Kong went from dirt poor to a higher per capita income than the U.K. during the same period in which China went from dirt poor to dirt poor.
Central banks responded to the oil crisis, and the inflation it caused by creating unemployment to stop wage growth. This worked at stopping inflation, but since (real) wage growth is the very definition of economic growth, they have been strangling economic growth across the west ever since.
Dont believe me? Go read the announcement about why every interest rate tightening was necessary for the past 20 years. There are archives of them. The words “overheated labor market” will appear a very great deal. What that actually means is that unemployment was lower than the central bank liked. They dont wait for actual inflation to show up, they kill booms when people get jobs.
Real wage growth is, by definition, not inflationary.
Central banks try to get out ahead of inflation during expansions because they began to understand the role expectations play in inflation rates. If people expect inflation to go be going up, this will, in part, make it go up. So, if they wait for inflation to start before raising rates, what happens isn’t: See 4% inflation tick as unemployment drops to 3% or something, raise rates, have inflation tamper down to 2% and unemployment says at 3%, what happens is: See 4% inflation tick as unemployment drops to 3%, raise rates, inflation goes to 2% andunemployment goes to 5%. Or worse, they are over-cautious in their rate hike and inflation starts going up to 5 and 6% anyway. Then they have to raise rates even further, meaning inflation drops to 2% but unemployment goes to 7%.
They obviously want to avoid repeating the situation that occurred in the 1970’s where breaking inflation required elevated unemployment. They’d like to hit that sweet spot where inflation expectations remain dampened because the central bank’s inflation target is credible in the eyes of the public and unemployment is allowed to stay at its natural level. This is NAIRU: The non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment.
Thing is.. I am morally certain that central banks have been undershooting that goal consistently. You can tell this because there have been zero episodes of significant actual inflation occuring. If central bank aim had been clustered around that rate, they would sometimes be overly doveish, and that never happens. Implication: Their actual aimpoint is way to low.
This is a question with no satisfying answer. You will get better results asking whether Black Holes are surrounded by firewalls, because at least then you won’t have ideological trenches being dug around that battlefield.
It seems you haven’t gone to the spicy black hole talks.
Because while the working/non-working share of the population influences economic growth, it’s a minor influence at best?
Consider the labor force participation of women:
Wouldn’t that offset any other demographic factors for the same time periods, at least in terms of people in the workforce?
My off-the-cuff opinion would be that the biggest difference makers are going to be:
1. Law of diminishing returns in various technological areas (Internet is biggest exception to that)
2. Government consuming more and more of the productive economy via size increases (4x per capita inflation adjusted spending and 3x higher revenue) and increased regulatory burden
Kids can’t vote themselves into receiving a plethora of benefits the way old people can and do.
You are thinking about the wrong measure. Economic *growth* can come from *change* in the employment/population ratio, not the level.
At what age would kids typically start working in the 60s?
Jobs for kids, even those jobs that are still legal for kids to take ( https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/youthlabor ), are disappearing. Most paper routes are now only doable by adults (I delivered papers from 10 – 14 in the late 80s early 90s, and then again from 26 – 28 in the 00s). Landscaping companies cut lawns. I assume teenagers still babysit, but I could be wrong about that.
Kids are still able to be employed delivering newspapers according to the DoL. But I don’t recall seeing it happen for 10-15 years. I’m guessing newspaper companies just decided to stop doing it for some reason? Or is it that parents stopped letting preteen kids go around unescorted?
Yes to the first. Many newspapers shifted to an early morning schedule (papers delivered to the door by 6 or 7 AM). With the loss of subscribers they also shifted to larger, more spread out routes that necessitate a motor vehicle to deliver.
One of the positions I’ve seen stated on the Internet, and that thoroughly baffles me, is that those who have a domestic worker should continue paying them despite not receiving any work. As a moral, although not legal, obligation.
Like, why? No contract will state that, that’s for sure. If the government gives those who employ domestic workers a subsidy to pay for the furloughed domestic workers (like in France), sure, I’d say it’s your moral obligation to do the paperwork and pass along the money. But why should you be paying your own money for cleaning your house while cleaning the house yourself/living in a dirty house? I don’t think you should. Sure, you shouldn’t fire workers because they stopped coming. And if you’ve got a contract with your domestic worker that gives them a certain amount of paid vacation, you can pay them for what.
But why anybody should pay for work they don’t receive while the government is the one that has decreed you shoudn’t be getting that work, I don’t see. If it’s the government’s fault, the government should pay for that. Maybe next time they get the idiotic idea of locking an entire country down, they’ll realize they don’t have the money for it, and they’re still paying for the previous time they did that.
I can see why people would do that; those people are good employers. But that doesn’t mean those who don’t do that are bad. They just don’t go above and beyond what they should do.
What does “should” mean? I think it would help to unpack it a bit. “Should” as in mandatory, definitely not. “Should” as in “the right thing to do”, that’s at the very least a reasonable point to discuss. “Should” as in “the world would be a better place if more people did it”, yeah, sure.
Could be people just make up a meaning for “should” and move on, without spelling it out.
It is seen as a moral obligation by the comments I’ve read. Verbs like have to and must are thrown around, too.
Not in the general the world would be better if everybody did that sense.
It seems hard to describe this as anything other than literal charity. And sure, you are obligated to help out those near you—if your brother or sister were cash strapped and you could help, you should, allowing some very important caveats. I think it’s harder to argue that for a domestic worker you employ, though. If nothing else, some other people come first, like your own family and close friends.
Yes, exactly.
I do think you have a moral obligation to help those close to you when they’re in need, as long as it doesn’t harm you or them: your parents, your siblings, spouse, children. A weaker one to help your friends and members of your community.
A worker you hired is only due what any other worker is due by the law: fair pay for their work, and, if negotiated and agreed, vacation and sick pay.
So I’m surprised by the number of people who see it as a duty.
I kinda see the point.
Don’t get me wrong, I read one Ayn Rand book some 15 years ago, including the whole of John Galt speech, so I’m now psychologically incapable of approving forced charity.
But relations go more commercial the larger the whole system is. Families live in literal communism. Corporations in (sometime savage) capitalism. Small firms and yes, domestic workers have some elements of feudalism: you count on your [maid] to get you out of deep shit when it’s her day off, the kid is sick and the inlaws are at the airport. But a small firm owner also tends to protect its employers. Lines are blurred. There is more loyalty involved. Sure, it’s far from being a given and probably affected by local culture as well, but it is a thing.
It’s probably people with different experiences overusing their PoV. If you had a good long term nanny growing up, you will throw around words like “must” and “have to”. If you have a commercial relation with a cleaning lady that comes 3 times a week, you’ll be justifiably quite perplexed.
Well, if it is the kind of worker who is willing to work extra when you’re sick, or wait for you when you’re stuck in traffic and the kids are waiting, sure, I’d say there is some degree of obligation, but only because it goes both ways.
I don’t know where you get such domestic workers. The ones I’ve observed, they come, they work their hours, regularly leave, and demand increases in pay. There is no reciprocality, so I see no need for that.
I’d say that if workers are willing to work for no pay when the employer is going through tough times, the employer has an obligation to pay for no work when the employees are going through tough times. But only as long as it’s reciprocal.
I’ve seen way too many family businesses destroyed and families indebted due to giving personal guarantees for their businesses to keep workers. Workers were never thankful for those sacrifices, taking that as due.
So I think that small companies need to cut their losses too, when they are starting to lose money, and fire workers.
Like I said, most likely different experiences leading to different opinions.
There’s also something else I thought of – moral foundations, yet again. Haidt says some people (usually “the left”) see most things through a harm/care framework. Some probably more than others. So if you take the more intense half of that and intersect it with people that have had the good kind of experience with domestic help – you end up with a pretty vocal minority.
As far as my own opinion on this… I’m on board with using the “feudal” label and mindset. You receive loyalty and trust, you have to offer loyalty and protection. It’s the natural response – if the situation applies.
But it’s a strictly personal decision for each individual instance, and nobody’s business but those involved. (I wasn’t kidding with that Ayn Rand quip btw, that speech is powerful stuff.)
Once upon a time, when working relationships were longer, there was mutual loyalty between employer and employee. The hypothetical person who cleaned my house for the past 10 years might not be part of my family in the same sense as my sister, but they are still part of my extended family in some sense, perhaps more so than a second cousin at 3 removes I’ve never actually met.
This is a lot less true for whoever the cleaning service sent the week before the lockdown, who like as not wasn’t the same person they sent the week before.
Your mileage clearly varies, or you only have the second kind of employeer-employee relationships.
Employees, particularly in the case of a long term domestic worker strike me as pretty high in one’s order of charity. Now the details of the arrangement matter a lot. The live in butler in a victorian estate who has worked for the family for his entire life is in a very different position than the recently hired maid who works for 20 different families.
The Victorian butler comes in after one’s siblings and closest freinds but still relatively high.
Then again I think that the best way to cash out the Catholic Church’s teaching on just wage that goes beyond paying the market rate and avoiding fraud is through the order of charity.
Yeah, I think that’s all true as far as it goes. Except that it sounds like the cases Ana is talking about are more like the hired maid who works for several families than the live-in butler? After all, the live-in butler can stay home and do his job. 😉
I don’t know if “should” enters into it, but some people I talked to told me that they were continuing to pay for various services they weren’t receiving as a sort of retainer. In other words, they are saying (with money) “Don’t give away my spot in the daycare/martial arts studio/house cleaning schedule/etc.”
If you consider your cleaning person/etc fungible, then no I wouldn’t expect you to continue paying them. But if you want that specific person back when this is all over, it may make sense to give them some money. Otherwise, they may already have a full schedule when you are ready for them to come back, or they may have even had to go find different employment entirely.
I can see how paying the nanny who takes care of your children and has good chemistry with them makes sense. I don’t think it’s an obligation, though.
This is how I feel. You pay for things you aren’t getting any more, or pay some fraction, in the hopes that it increases the chances that the good or service will still be available when this is over. My gym gave people the option of putting memberships on hold, but indicated that it would be appreciated if those who could afford it didn’t. I want there to be a gym when this is over, so I didn’t put my membership on hold.
There’s a plausible argument that pay (possibly at reduced rates) during temporary externally-forced work stoppages is implied by a normal agreement of employment unless explicitly agreed otherwise. I’d certainly consider it a breach of trust if my employer suddenly told me to take a week off without pay. As with any other implied agreement, it’s probably unenforceable, but it may be morally obligatory in the same way that e.g. tipping for good service is morally obligatory once you’ve ordered a meal at a restaurant in a customary-tipping culture. If, on the other hand, your employees have insisted that you hammer out an explicit contract with their union rep under penalty of strike, then they can’t really expect anything beyond what’s written in that contract.
It is certainly morally virtuous to do so where practical, and it’s practically advantageous to do so where you expect the employment relationship to continue. The fuzzy parts are, A: whether the coronavirus lockdown counts as a “brief work stoppage” and B: whether domestic workers are employees or contractors. As a rough guideline, if you expect the same exact individual to be cleaning your house when this is over, you’ll probably want to keep them on retainer in the interim.
I continue to get paid 100% from university while working from home (or instead clean my flat, nobody cares). My cleaner (who has worked for me for about 5 years now) lost basically all her income and still had to pay rent. I paid her 50% of what she would usually get.
i feel morally obliged to do so (and maybe to pay more than that, but obviously i am too cheap for that). i am not terribly interested in why i feel that moral obligation (i don’t claim my moral feelings follow any consistent system, and generally find it a bit silly if people pretend that theirs do). but i assume it is the combination of closeness/familiarity (i know the person) and fairness (why should i get paid and not she?) there may be lots of people or causes more worthy of donations, but as i said i am definitely not a utiliarist, and none of my immediate family or friends needs my financial assistence.
“Morally obligated” is a strong claim; that I’m not sure of.
That said: the woman who cleans my apartment does a great job, never causes me trouble, generally makes me happier and saner, and does all of it for an amount of money that I will not miss. I have positive social feelings towards her, and I’d like her to think well of me. So I’m paying her. In my case, I think this is the right thing to do, as frustrating as it is.
(My ex girlfriend is instead just hiring her to come over and clean her apartment, which makes me feel a bit screwd over for paying something for nothing…)
We are continuing to pay the family that normally comes over once a week for a couple of hours to clean our house. Part of the reason is that we told them to stop coming before there was an official lockdown, since we had decided to self-quarantine. So at that point it was a matter of our telling them not to come, contrary to a well established pattern of employment.
In addition to which, they are nice people and we can easily afford it.
I don’t think we were or should have been legally obliged to continue pay them, it felt like the right thing to do.
I think the underlying intuition comes from the idea that servants are junior members of your family, for whom you are responsible. If circumstances beyond the control of either of you make the usual division of labor impossible, it’s still your responsibility to see that they don’t suffer, at least if you can manage it without suffering yourself.
That intuition is less compelling when the “servant” is someone who spends a few hours a week in your house, and does the same for other customers, but it’s still there.
Consider, as an analogous case, the widespread idea that people in America should care about the American poor much more than they care about foreign poor, and similarly for other countries. Your fellow citizens are part of a sort of very extended family, and all of us feel somewhat responsible for making sure that our fellow members are all right. That explains why people argue for immigration restrictions to protect the American poor, even if they realize that the immigrants who would come to compete with the American poor are much poorer and would gain much more than the American poor would lose.
It makes much less sense in terms of free market relations among people, but our moral intuitions have not entire caught up.
Noblesse oblige.
Just this. If you’re hiring domestic workers, maybe you have an obligation to start giving a little something back.
Also, if your state is open, go out to a restaurant and tip heavily.
Even if it isn’t open, you can order takeout and tip heavily.
It does mean they are bad to those who think of this in the moral way you say they are speaking.
Plenty of people think businesses in general are morally evil when they unilaterally make employment decisions- due to the implicit power differential# in the employer-employee model. If a person thinks this way morally, then it’s natural to extend the moral framework to domestic workers.
I presume these people would be morally okay with a mutual renegotiation of terms between the employer and domestic servant (e.g. no work, so I’ll pay you a smaller retainer to immediately come back to work when I need it, what retainer would be good for you?).
In terms of house cleaners and landscapers my main issue is how much more unkempt* the place will be when this is over and the employer wants cleaning done again. This will take extra time and labor on the part of the cleaner/landscaper. I hope the employer pays appropriately for this extra work. For other kinds of servants there are still the ramp up requirements after a long break.
# – In the rare occasion where an employee wields more power than the employer I think people with this morality would think badly of the employee for leaving their employer in the lurch.
* – If you can keep your place better than a person who specializes in this job, you might think about hiring someone else.
I’ve been dropping my barber the price of a haircut every month, mostly because I’ve known him for a long time and I shudder when I imagine having an honorable line of work that is flat illegal to pursue. I have no idea whether I am making any difference to his life: He thanks me for my generosity, but it’s got to be a drop in the bucket compared to his expenses.
I don’t have any local restaurant that I have felt particularly bonded to, so while I am getting occasional take-out deliveries, I have been mostly unmoved by exhortations to patronize restaurants so they will survive.
Regarding:
It’s rare for me to feel charitably toward the government, but this is one situation where there are no good answers. The U.S. government is spending trillions of dollars that they don’t have and apparently aren’t even trying to borrow (who would they borrow it from?), just making it up out of air, and from what I hear it’s not really enough. It may be judged afterwards, or by some, now, that the near-universal lockdowns were a stupid idea, but it sure as hell didn’t strike me that way in early March. So I’m reluctant to try to analyze the situation in terms of “fault”. But I agree, what I give my barber is charity, not an obligation — except to the extent that he is in a bad place and I am fortunate to be in a good place.
Well, my anonymous Tumblr stalker has popped up again *waves “hello!” to him/her/them/it* with a pippin of a question regarding the manifold wants and needs of a woman:
This is so sweetly jejeune, so artlessly callow, so candidly simple-minded, a view of How That Sex Thing Works For Women, that I’m still chortling.
My dear interlocutor, should you be lurking, I told you there and I’m telling you here – saving that you’re the lovechild of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis and your godfather was Frank Harris, you are too young and unworldly for an unexpurgated, full and frank answer to that 😀
He used the singular! I’m impressed. Few stalkers have the presence of mind these days to compose their threats, love letters, insults, entreaties, jeremiads, cris de coeur, or philippics in correct English. It redeems just a little the otherwise awkward sentence structure.
Well, such command of the language is nothing less than I would expect from someone who I strongly suspect followed along after me from here or the sub-reddit 🙂
One does presuppose a certain facility and ease, a set of high standards, in one’s stalkers if they are drawn from the pool of this community! Anything less would not be worth the candle 😀
Wait, none is singular? I totally would have “were”d there. Basic Googleing shows me that none as a plural is synonymous as “not any” turning this phrase into “not any of your partners were…” which scans correctly.
On the other hand, none a singular synonymizes to “no part” which implies that the individual parts of the lovers were insufficiently manly which… huh, actually works also.
The singular means “not one,” which works here. Cf. the etymology. 🙂
Right, that was a long walk to what was, in retrospect, kind of a stupid joke.
Just so I stop doubting my grammatical sanity, the plural form would also be correct, though, right?
Yeah, plural would be fine, certainly in vernacular English. I just noticed it because hardly anyone ever does it anymore, but should someone go all prescriptivist, that’s what they’d prescribe.
How does one even stalk on tumblr – a site designed for maximum navigational confusion ?
that’s why I think my little friend has followed me over from here or connected places, though I’m also constantly stumbling over people on Tumblr who I know from elsewhere and going “oh hey, it’s you!” 🙂
I think it’s mostly to do with associated interests; if you and Elsie were part of the Fungi Fandom on some other site, then eventually if both you and Elsie are on Tumblr, and following Fun With Fungus blogs, you’re likely to meet once more.
Does anyone know any good WW1/WW2 British/American patriotic song about victory and fighting the good fight? I want something simple, upbeat and easy to sing while walking. Maybe something like The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done, but with a more marching/chanting feel. Most other things I can find is either sad or about “my baby across the ocean” or whatever.
Reason I’m asking is that I’ve got Tomorrow Belongs to Me stuck in my head and I’d like to replace it with something that is 1. authentic and 2. from the not-evil side.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic is older, but plenty pugnacious.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/02/the-battle-hymn-of-the-republic/308052/
Or perhaps the Marines’ Hymn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marines%27_Hymn
Thanks! These are great!
If anyone’s interested I also just found The washing on the Siegfried Line which is silly and very British, but quite catchy.
Wait, did you just hear the battle hymn of the republic for the first time?
If so, I am incredibly jealous. That song gives me goosebumps every time I listen.
I guess I’ve heard the tune before but never really listened to the lyrics. But I got it on repeat right now. And it really gives the chills. 🙂
Seriously I only knew the other songs sung to this melody (“John Brown”, and “Blood on the Riser”)
It’s unforgettable words and a very catchy tune, but to me it will always be the jihadi hymn.
@DarkTigger You don’t have abecedarian children?
But seriously, I’ve grown fond of the song through the film The Hallelujah Trail.
I think of the battle hymn of as the anthem of blue tribe going to war, written at a time when they made absolutely no bones about what they were doing and their motives for doing it. It really is magnificent, especially when they don’t chicken out on the last line. “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,” is one of the noblest sentiments ever expressed.
The Battle Hymn is such thoroughly “blue tribe” Christianity that State Atheism didn’t prevent it from being a choir standard in the Soviet Union.
It should be mentioned the the Battle Hymn of the Republic is based on “John Brown’s Body”. If you only know “John Brown’s Body” from the chorus (as I did, from old cartoons) you might think it’s a funny song, but the full version is, in my opinion, even more awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSSn3NddwFQ
I don’t know why they changed it, unless it was in some way too spicy for the 19th century.
The tune of “John Brown’s Body”/”Battle Hymn of the Republic” was based on a song “Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us?” which was sung in the camp meeting circuit in the United States in the late 1700’s. There’s an interesting article in the New England Magazine of 1890 on the origins of “John Brown’s Body” (available here, for instance). Julia Ward Howe apparently wrote the lyrics for “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the suggestion of a reverend friend after they heard soldiers singing “John Brown’s Body”. She claimed that she woke up the next morning with the lyrics whole in her mind and immediately wrote them down.
While also significantly older, try Heart of Oak.
Hearth of Oak is good at what it does, but it’s kind of campy (sorry brits!) for my purposes. Also not that melodic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Field_Artillery_March
AKA Caissons Go Rolling Along
Good one! Thanks!
The Army Song (the march sung at the end of all US Army functions) was derived from it.
WW1 and WW2 seem oddly lacking in songs like this. There are more songs about the heroic resistance to the Hanoverian Usurpation (Jacobite risings) though many of these songs were written after the fact, than the world wars.
The Ballad of Audie Murphy is probably the best example of your looking for but it is too complicated musically to fully replicate, There will always Be An England suffers from the same problem.
But there are lot of good historical songs which match your description much better. Heart of Oak as mentioned before.
The British Grenadiers is fun.
The British Light Infantry is particularly amusing for the American Tory but the loyalist subtext is sufficiently vague that it is possible that it does not exist.
But generally civil wars- wars of secession seem to generate a far better musical legacy than foreign wars.
Those British songs are a bit too old-fashioned to suit my purpose. They are more jolly than inspiring to me.
In this vein, I’ve been known to get a few verses of Garryowen stuck in my head on long walks. Or “Men Of Harlech.”
There’s so many different versions of “Men of Harlech” that it’s more a tune and a theme than a song as such. The most famous is the one from Zulu, but this one is my favorite.
Too bad you specify British/American (on account of being able to understand lyrics?). If you were to expand you criteria to include Russian, that would neatly include The Sacred War.
(A bonus point: you can use lines “The rapists and the plunderers, / The torturers of people” to calibrate your irony meter settings at 11, given the conduct of Russians themselves during the war.)
If we stick to English-only, I’m surprised no one mentioned Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition yet. I personally prefer Serj Tankian’s version 😉
The Russians sure knew how to make plain patriotic music for the common man. But I’m not sure that they count as on the not-evil side. :/
Second song was exactly what I’m looking for! Thanks!
I don’t know if the Russian song counts as “not evil”.
The soviet (now russian) anthem is amazing, and I can’t hear it without wanting to run up a red flag and start slitting throats. If you’re not keen on praising great Stalin, there are a few sets of lyrics to choose from, and I’m sure you could come up with your own. Also, the history of the anthem is an excellent soviet union joke just on its own. the original lyrics were condemned in 1956, but not replaced until 1977, so for 20 years you were supposed to just sort of hum along with the tune.
This is still the case in Spain. La Marcha Real had no lyrics when first composed, but various sets were added later. It has officially had no lyrics since 1978.
Might not be quite what you’re looking for, but Over There for WW1 and Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition for WW2 probably fit.
Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy (for WW2) is very American, but not particularly patriotic.
There was a song from WW1 era that made it into a patriotic movie during WW2.
It’s titled Over There.
Does that count as a victorious song, or similar as a marching/war song?
Pshhh, who needs lyrics? Humming Stars and Stripes worked great on my last hike. I actually put together a playlist of marches for this purpose.
On the slightly comedic side, you’ve got this from film musical It’s Always Fair Weather, but that “March April May June” bit hits differently now…
You could also go with whistling the Colonel Bogey March.
And then there’s John Williams Is The Man.
And finally, you can completely muddle any connection between lyrics and meaning by going with Aida’s triumphal march, featuring Italian words about Egypt beating Thebes, even though that kinda violates the “from the not-evil side” requirement. But that’s why going with foreign language lyrics is great.
I mean, if actual squadrons can use Barbie Girl as their marching chant, why not?
There’s always It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.
Sink the Bismarck by Johnny Horton maybe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Has_Only_Got_One_Ball
To the melody known as the River Kwai March, perfect to be stuck in the head.
Ballad of Rodger Young
To be a member of the Megadeath Club, you must be principally responsible for at least one million deaths. The club considers both the total number of deaths and the applicant’s degree of actual influence over the events or policies that led to those deaths, when making membership decisions.
Who are the living members of this most exclusive of clubs?
Most leaders and ex-leaders of the major powers could probably have saved a couple of millions of lives trough effective charity. But I wouldn’t really count their degree of actual influence to be big enough, since politicians typically are doing lots of stuff. That leaves us with colossal fuck-ups.
The Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan are big enough to have clearly caused a million deaths and fit quite squarely in the “colossal fuck-up” category, but the initial leaders are dead. Kennedy and Brezhnev would be good candidates if they were alive, though you could debate their degree of culpability. I guess we don’t take points of for good intentions?
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t really seem to have the numbers to make a million deaths, unless you count hard-to-define second order effects. Wikipedia claims that the “War on Terror” could have more than a million deaths, so maybe we can blame Bush for messing up the 9/11 response. Kind of hard to debate a counterfactual, but I can see a million lives saved by not invading in the ME and spending the TSA money on malaria nets. But is that realistic?
The Second Sudanese Civil War and the Second Congo War are quite recent and seem to have death tolls well above a million. I don’t know much about these conflicts but I’m guessing the responsibility for them should be shared by a diffuse group of guerilla leaders and juntas, so no-one gets to enter the MD Club?
About 700.000 Americans have died from AIDS. I knew the initial response to it was somewhere between lacking and a total disaster, but I wouldn’t blame it all on Reagan (who is dead, anyway).
This got awfully US centric, but I guess that’s the streetlight effect. Russia and China are probably the best places to look. But then it gets kind of hard again. E.g. Would democracy in China cause prosperity equal to a million lives saved, or would it cause a civil war? How much could Putin really increase the wellbeing of the Russians?
I’m not sure this is sort of counterfactual is the right way to measure things. Consider the fictional country of Murderstan, where the West Murderians hate the ethnically distinct minority of East Murderians. In every universe without a foreign invasion to impose outside government, Murderstan ends up appointing a genocidal government based on popular support for its “Kill all the East Murderians” platform.
The sort of logic you’re using seems to imply that whoever ends up overseeing the genocide doesn’t get into the Megadeath Club, because unless he managed to rack up a million deaths more than the marginal replacement dictator, he’s just serving market demand and so in a sense didn’t really cause those deaths. Viewed through a certain lens this seems perfectly reasonable to me: the West Murderian electorate is really what killed those people and Adolf Stalin-Zedong was just following orders. But this seems to obviously be a different lens than the one through which we normally talk about whether or not someone is responsible for a death. It seems intuitively weird to use a framing where we can say that political leaders don’t have great influence over their policies.
Good point. Then it gets kind of hard to get any Chinese and Russians into the club? They haven’t caused any major wars. The Uyghurs are mistreated but not to the count of millions of deaths as far as I can see. China executes a couple of thousand people a year, which isn’t enough to add up.
Another runner-up is North Korea.
There are twenty-eight million people in Venezuela, I wouldn’t be shocked if you told me Maduro’s economic illiteracy has lowered standards of living enough to kill 4% of the population over his seven year term, and his terrible policies don’t seem like an inevitable response to popular sentiment.
If Covid-19 turns out to have originated in the wuhan biolab, would whoever decided to cut corners on safety procedures that week count?
If it didn’t come from a lab, can we nominate the guy who ate that bat?
If he or she died, they should get the Darwin Award, and The Golden End of the Food Chain.
Not a million deaths yet, bat guy will have to wait a couple of months.
Currently Covid is at 341k and over the peak. It will probably reach 1 mil eventually, but it’s not a given. And I’d really really want to see numbers of lives saved from reduced pollution. Problem is, those non-deaths are really hard to count – who’s gonna track 3% less Alzheimer in the next 50 years?
If we’re counting reduced pollution for lives saved, we also have to count reduced economic activity leading to lower standards of living and lives lost. I find it pretty plausible that the recession COVID is causing kills more people than respiratory failure.
I don’t know. I’m fully in favor of reducing lockdowns now, and I’m sortof arguing against it but… are most countries really at the level where economic activity is coupled with survival? I’d think we passed that, sometime in the last 100 years. I’m not saying yes, I’m not saying no, but I am saying that Occam is asking for arguments for increased deaths.
@Radu Floricica says:
We know that GDP is (weakly) correlated with LE and the money poured into covid related stuff is money that can’t be spent on other things. If a year from now GDP is lower than it would have been if we toughed it out and we have billions of dollars in masks and respirators lying around that no one needs, that is in theory going to lead to earlier deaths.
Of course, lockdown is probably also leading to fewer non-corona related deaths by, say, reducing the number of car crashes. I’d actually be very curious to see how the raw death rate has changed.
Kennedy, O’Connor, Souter.
+46,413,319
9,282,663.8 and counting each. (Assuming we also attribute one fifth to the already deceased Blackmun and Stevens.)
Are you counting all abortions in the US? Because even if states were permitted to ban abortions, many wouldn’t (setting aside what the rate of illegal abortions would be; I haven’t seen good attempts to estimate this, though they doubtless exist).
I kind of doubt they do, as that would imply the abortion argument has been conducted in goid-enough faith that one group or another has shifted from its all-or-nothing position. I don’t think either side would look kindly on that sort of defection….
These are fair criticisms; however, they are still firmly in the megadeath club even if we only count the total number since 1992.
24,957,003 total 1992-2020 (estimated numbers 2017-2020)
Let’s suppose that about 40% of those don’t happen due to red state bans.
That’s still 9,982,801. Almost 2 million on each justice’s doorstep.
Henry Kissinger.
Is there anyone still alive who could be blamed for the Biafran war? I think that’s estimated to have killed about a million Biafrans and some smaller number of Nigerians.
Similar question for the various Hutu/Tutsi conflicts, one of those claimed to be responsible having recently been arrested. Anyone surviving from the Khmer Rouge who was high enough up to be credited with a significant fraction of their body count?
The famine during the Great Leap Forward killed many millions, I think the estimate I have seen is about thirty. Mao is dead, but there might be someone who you could claim was responsible for a few percent of that still alive.
I have a hazy recollection of seeing someone post on a recent open thread trying to recruit players to test a superhero-themed RPG they’d designed. I went back to look for the posts just now and can’t seem to find them. I was surprised to see them, in any event, because this hadn’t occurred to me as an appropriate venue to advertise such a thing. Does anyone else remember seeing them? Were they in fact deleted? If this is in fact a venue where one could recruit players, I’d be inclined to do some recruiting myself.
It was here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/17/open-thread-154/#comment-897980
Question for any history buffs in the audience.
Many fictions nowadays try to supply sympathetic or convincing villains. Example: the movie The Rock (1996), in which a celebrated general takes over a prison to force the government to acknowledge black ops and compensate the families of those killed in such operations (not really a spoiler, it’s shown very early in the movie). Such villains often have a good point, even if their methods are over-the-top, poorly-reasoned, or hideously unlikely to work (*cough* Thanos *cough*).
I’m thinking about those fictional villains, in movies, comics, manga, anime, books…and I’m wondering about their real historical counterparts. Did such extreme supervillain-esque plans ever actually work?
Throughout history, what seemingly villainous acts or plans driven by good intentions have actually had a net positive impact on the world? Or which ones have at least accomplished the (unambiguously good) objective of the seeming wrongdoer? I’m willing to bet that the number is very low – that most such plans have horrible unintended consequences, or simply fail entirely.
You’d be surprised at the number of supervillain-esque plans that worked, but (unambiguously good) is a high bar to clear for them. If you believe monarchy (at least by a foreign dynasty) is unambiguously bad and democracy unambiguously good AND that the Republic of China really existed for awhile rather than the Qing immediately being followed by warlordism, Sun Yet Sen’s powerful international secret society dedicated to overthrowing the Chinese government basically made him the Mandarin without the crashed alien spaceship or “being written uncomfortably by white people”.
How about the political conspiracy by British colonists in North America to break away from the crown?
Doctor Franklin, inventor/conspirator. Huh, I hadn’t pattern matched that before.
I can’t tell if this is intentional and/or problematic. Regardless – well played.
I’d settle for edge cases of “mostly good” or even “their society would have considered it a good result in the end.” Still, this is a great example and maybe the best I’ve seen yet. Others have offered the French Revolution, the Irish Republican Army, Oda Nobunaga, and even Mao and the Great Leap Forward for possible further study. Forgive me for being poorly versed in Chinese history, but do we know why the Tongmenghui had a sub-goal “to expel the Manchu people”? Is this really a grudge based on a 300-year-old conquest? What other reasons were there to form this particular goal?
Why does treason never prosper? Because if it prospers, none dare call it treason.
There is your real answer.
Oppenheimer built a bomb of previously unimagined power using super science in a secret government facility.
… while being inspired by a religion rare in his society.
Everybody knows the “now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” line, but that’s just the cherry on top:
If a thousand suns were to rise
and stand in the noon sky, blazing,
such brilliance would be like the fierce
brilliance of that mighty Self.
…
All Dhritarashtra’s men
and all these multitudes of kings–
Bhishma, Drona, Karna,
with all our warriors behind them–
…
As moths rush into a flame
and are burned in an instant, all
beings plunge down your gullet
and instantly are consumed.
You gulp down all worlds, everywhere
swallowing them in your flames,
and your rays, Lord Vishnu, fill all
the universe with dreadful brilliance.
Who are you, in this terrifying form?
Have mercy, Lord; grant me even
a glimmer of understanding
to prop up my staggering mind.
Vishnu:
I am death, shatterer of worlds,
annihilating all things.
With or without you, these warriors
in their facing armies will die.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Bhagavad_Gita/vReHRlO2GGsC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=thousand%20suns
Okay, that is absolutely fascinating.
What Belisarius Rex said. But from the outside view, top marks probably goes to the various schemes to conquer some significant portion of the world and impose a Pax Whateverica.
Aside from the American development itself, I think the Soviets stealing the nuclear bomb probably ended up a net good for the world. I think the Korean War still happens, and McArthur might have convinced Truman to use nuclear weapons if the US was still the only country with the weapon. I feel like that’s net positive impact. You might even make the case that the Soviets goal was to prevent the US from using the weapon again and that was unambiguously good.
Everything in Korea worth bombing was still leveled. I don’t see how that’s net positive.
MacArthur might have convinced Truman to use nuclear weapons on Beijing.
If they had wanted to bomb Beijing, they would have bombed Beijing. Nuclear or not.
Tokyo and Dresden were not A-bombed, but suffered greater levels of destruction compared to Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they were fire-bombed. I don’t see a material difference, I don’t see a moral difference, I don’t think I could convince a survivor of Operation Meetinghouse (the single most destructive bombing attack in history) that it is somehow a net positive that “Hey, at least it wasn’t a nuclear attack.” on Tokyo.
So the net positive is what? Gasoline savings to the attacker?
Also I don’t think 1 a-bomb is enough to take out 1950s Beijing (Pop. 2-3 million). There’s a reason the a-bombs that were dropped targeted cities with only a few hundred thousand residents.
Is the “Gay Accent” something people are born with, or is it developed to fit in with the culture? Is it found in foreign culture (specifically Islamic, or Asian) It seems from my experience like it might be something innate.. if that’s the case, what exactly IS it? Does it have any interesting implications?
Have you seen “Do I Sound Gay”?
I heard about it, and that was what made me want to ask the question here. The reviews I heard told me it didn’t dive into it’s premise seriously
I have asked a few gay people and they say that they do it on purpose. So it is a learned trait intended to signal that they are gay. If you want your own data point make sure to ask politely.
Some do it on purpose, some pick it up accidentally by spending a lot of time around other people with the same accent. There’s some evidence that some features of it may be inborn (particularly the sibilants).
Quote Dave Sedaris, from his hilarious collection of essays, “Me Talk Pretty One Day” link
My recollection from my linguistics days:
The secret is that “gay voice” doesn’t correlate with gayness as much a you’d think.
When you have people rank perceive gayness of (male) speech, in general the big giveaway for people is from variation of pitch over time. In American English, whether your voice is high or low generally, the pitch of male speech is expected to stay within a comparatively narrow band, while female speech has wider variance. This is less true in other languages/cultures (Polish, IIRC, having more pitch variation expected of men than in English, and Slavic more so than Germanic languages generally).
Thus greater pitch variation in male speech has the effect of signaling “gender nonconforming” broadly. “Sounding girly” etc etc. The standard leap to take from this is that men speaking this way have adopted a kind of accent from their feminine peers. Feminine -> gay is the cultural pathway for men. This doesn’t actually work out cleanly in the phonetics the way people want it to, but it’s the sound byte people understand. Southerners and Californians, for instance, have higher pitch variation than other Americans. Californian accents are often read as more feminine.
The “lisp” (not a lisp, where s -> th but actually sort of the opposite where s ->sharper, more sibilant s) is frankly way less common than people think, and most common in children, and then doesn’t cleanly correlate with any of the stuff you’d think later in life. It may be its cultural coding went from infantilization->feminization->gayness, but my view is it started as an s-variant (some of which we as a society deem wrong and call “lisps”) and the cultural baggage came later and need not have been.
There’s something interesting about vowel space/duration/something-wit-vowel which applies to both lesbian voice (identifiable, but less so, in those gayness-ranking studies) as well as gay voice but I don’t think it ever replicated.
There are cultural variations of the gay voice in men, but a lot of the studies of this happened post gay liberationist America, which magnified and broadcast a lot of the stereotypes which now define gayness to the wider world and muddy attempts to navigate the moving parts. Globalization marches on. It’s hardest to study in the places it would be most interesting to study (North v. South Korea? swoon).
As to innate ness, probably a blend in that it’s downstream of brain chemistry, but so tied up with cultural gender stuff and the bewilderingly intense feelings people have about talking “correctly” that I don’t expect the knots to come undone cleanly. The gayest voice I’ve personally encountered was a straight man whose native language was Arabic.
The “gay man has undeniably gay voice before ever realizing he’s gay” is a nice story but people overestimate their gaydar. People clock sexuality from voice better than chance but only I the 60%ish range. The acculturation to feminine speech patterns thing is getting outside my domain. As to why it persists and intensifies in out men, I’d argue that’s part code-switching/cultural marking, as well as a side effect of behavior leading to sex/intimacy being behavior you’ll want to repeat, even subconsciously.
I think this is misrepresenting the case. Not all gay people have “the gay accent”, and “all (or most) gay people sound it” is a substantially different claim from “all (or most) people who sound it are gay”. When you hear the most extreme caricature of the “lispy queer”, how many of those people do you think are straight?
I’m not usually that guy, but to put on my Robin Hanson hat, SIGNALING. Homosexuality is practically the perfect example of a preference that you would like certain other people to be able to recognize, and affecting a particular style of speech is a really good solution to the problem of other gay men not approaching you because they don’t know you’re gay.
Interesting, I have a perception that the American Southern drawl can obscure that gender correlation by changing it to an age or status correlation. A man with a higher-pitched voice going “Oh, bless yer heart, darling” doesn’t necessarily get dinged on his masculinity. On the other hand, a Southern woman saying the same thing does do slightly different enunciations (a kind of clucking affect), and a guy doing that does regain that GNC feel.
I’ve been kicking around a steelman of “state capacity libertarianism” to try and come up with something concrete that could sensibly go by that label; that is a coherent set of things a reasonable person could consistently believe; and that the sort of people throwing around the term probably would mostly nod along to. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
1. The highest priority for the state is the efficient and effective production of public goods, in the narrow sense of goods which are unusually nonrivalrous and/or nonexcludable. These include the night watchman functions but also the production of new scientific knowledge and the provision of natural-monopoly infrastructure, as well as certain genuinely public health and safety measures like cleaning the air and controlling infectious disease spread. If the state isn’t doing these things well, other things it does should be deprioritized and/or defunded as necessary to get it to do them well.
2. There should be a strong though rebuttable presumption that consenting adults can do whatever honest, peaceful things they please with their own property without asking permission. Advocates of regulating honest, peaceful conduct by consenting adults should bear a burden of showing that the conduct to be regulated has substantial material negative externalities that aren’t feasible to internalize through judicial remedies (e.g. nuisance suits) or Pigouvian taxes, and that their proposed regulation passes something like the RFRA “least intrusive means of achieving a compelling state interest” test. Regulation should not be used to address mere aesthetic or pecuniary externalities, to paternalistically protect people from themselves, or to prevent “exploitation” or otherwise advance social justice goals.
3. Redistributive social welfare or “social insurance” spending programs are sometimes justified on utilitarian grounds but should be subject to several operational constraints. Namely, they should: (a) work through empowering individuals whenever possible– i.e. if a program’s goals can be achieved by cash transfers or vouchers, those are preferable to other methods; (b) refrain from creating perverse incentives, e.g. extremely high implicit marginal tax rates; and (c) be long-term PAYGO, i.e. they should not result in an increase in the debt to GDP ratio over the course of the business cycle, even if countercyclically deficit-financed in downturns.
4. Broad-based taxation, even at high levels, can likewise sometimes be justified on utilitarian grounds, but it should be designed to raise the revenue necessary to fund (1) and (3) on a long-term-PAYGO basis with a minimum of deadweight loss, and where possible to internalize externalities (Pigouvian taxes); taxation should not be used to reduce inequality or otherwise reward the politically favored and punish the disfavored.
5. The goals of foreign policy should be, first, the gradual, measured, cautious step-by-step reduction of barriers to the free movement of people and goods; and second, improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the public goods provision from (1) through international cooperation (so e.g. defensive alliances, international research partnerships, international environmental treaties). Military action in any but the most narrowly defensive context bears the burden of showing that it will so greatly advance these goals as to improve human flourishing in a way that decisively outweighs the damage it inevitably does; a large majority of historical military actions, including military actions by democracies in living memory, don’t meet this burden.
What do folks think? Is this something you read and say “yep that sounds like state capacity libertarianism to me” and/or “yep that sounds what the George Mason or Reason or Niskanen Center folks (or whoever else is your favorite example) probably believe” or is it too vague, or too unlibertarian, or too unfocused on state capacity, to qualify?
what about “The state shouldn’t do a lot, but what it does it should do well. In particular, it should try to stay the hell away from anything that distorts price signals or creates non-explicit costs.”
+1
Sometimes, you need government to do stuff that’s very hard to do via markets or donations or public-spirited donors or whatever. In most of your life, and most of the time, government shouldn’t be much involved–when you go to the coffee shop and order something to drink, or go get your hair cut, or go listen to a concert, the state shouldn’t really be involved unless some really exceptional thing happens. (*cough*)
In order for that daily life to go well, though, there’s a lot that your government needs to get right. Public-access roads, flood control works, lots of public health stuff (mosquito and rabies control, for example), along with stuff like national defense and police and courts. And your daily life with little direct government intervention will go a lot better if the government does those things competently.
Also, there are exceptional events which really work better with a government response. If there’s an invasion, a riot, an earthquake, or (say) a pandemic, you’d probably like a government response. But again, it’s really important for government to do these things well.
In general, I think there’s a tradeoff curve here. The more competent and honest your government is, the more things it can do without making a mess of it, and probably the more things your government can do to the benefit of your citizens.
At one extreme, imagine a not-very-competent-or-honest government. You want to keep its functions down to the minimal ones needed to allow your society to work–probably that’s down to courts, cops, soldiers, maybe public-access roads, common weights and measures, a few other things. Letting your government get into funding the arts or building big public works will mostly just end up with expensive boondoggles, not anything especially beneficial.
At another extreme, imagine an extremely competent and honest government. You can afford to give it more functions. Maybe it can manage large-scale retirement savings programs without dipping into them, fund science and art and big public works and get a lot of bang for the buck, etc.
Worth re-referencing the original article that came up with the term.
The description you have is coherent and sounds like a pretty sane way to run a country. The biggest issue I have with the steelman you wrote is it has little to do with “state capacity” per-se. Take the Koyama and Johnson definition that Tyler links to:
By both of these measures the US federal government has extremely high state capacity. It has an ability to enforce its laws in all territory it claims and then some (FATCA is a good example of US laws followed by almost all financial institutions in the world). The US has substantially higher tax compliance than Germany and most of the Eurozone.
By that definition “State-capacity libertarianism” reduces to just “libertarianism” in the US, which already has state capacity by the bucketload.
“Competence in spending money” might be the missing factor here (especially for improving infrastructure and K-12 schooling, two areas Tyler Cowen mentions and which are already awash in money, with lackluster results to show for it). I have not seen basic conjecture, much less solid evidence, on how the US might be able to get more out of every dollar it spends.
@salvor
All those concepts sound reasonable and compatible with moderate libertarianism. But I’m not sure if they match state capacity libertarianism. Of course I never understood how the concepts as expressed by Tyler Cowen was related to libertarianism at all. If he expressed it like you have, I’d be fine with it. But Cowen’s discussion on this seemed incoherent to me. I may just not understand what he’s getting at.
IMO, the only thing that gets “state capacity libertarianism” vice “libertarianism” is (1). The state should aggressively identify and correct market failures. A broad view of these is okay, so long as the state’s actions are efficient. Another conceptualization of this might be “Aggressively limit opportunities for rent-seeking,” though that’s probably too broad.
Another aspect is legal. Clear and regularly-enforced laws are vital, as are unambiguous and uniformly-enforced regulations. Regulatory agencies should be independent of the industries they regulate in exactly the way that most US regulators today are not.
It’s this last point where I think Cowen’s notion is most salient and differs strongly from a more traditional form of libertarianism. Most libertarians tend to adopt the view that government regulation and regulatory bodies should be weakened and dispensed with to the extent possible. A state capacity libertarian might think that regulations are useful for eliminating market failures attributable to externalities, and that if the regulations are necessary, then it’s vital that their enforcement be robust and independent. Robust to ensure that firms are competing on a an even playing field and independent to ensure that winning firms are the most efficient at making something rather than most efficient at playing rent-seeking games with the regulator.
I’m not sure that captures the “State Capacity” part of things, but it’s a good summation for moderate libertarian or maybe conservative thought, I’d say. It’s certainly a statement that closely captures my own personal feelings (minus a few American bugaboos. I’m willing to tolerate a higher level of negative externalities to preserve things like expansive 1A and 2A rights, for example).
I don’t know if it’s a good description of State Capacity Libertarianism, but it certainly describes my own views to a T.
I think this is a description of something coherent, but I’m not sure it does a good job of capturing what “State Capacity Libertarianism” is about and what is distinctive about it.
A common slogan-ish understanding of “libertarianism” is “the philosophy that the government should be smaller”, and the size of the state is frequently expressed by the percentage of GDP that is state spending. “State Capacity Libertarianism” seems to be saying “not exactly smaller; it should do less things, but it should do them capably (no police who are so poorly paid and supervised that they are basically an extortion racket) and directly (not via work-arounds and kludges–setting up a national network of free clinics might be more libertarian than Obamacare even if it cost more.)
I hadn’t paid attention to Tara Reade, but reading up on recent news, I’m now 90% sure the assault didn’t happen, and at least 50% sure that she knows it didn’t happen.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/21/tara-reade-biden-expert-testimony-274460 She lied under oath, as an expert witness, about getting an undergraduate degree, and had a string of excuses which in turn turned out to be lies.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/15/tara-reade-left-trail-of-aggrieved-acquaintances-260771 She left a long list of people angry at her lies and manipulation.
It would really suck if Joe Biden’s one sexual assault ever was against someone who would later turn into a serial liar. He shouldn’t get away with it if it happened. But it didn’t. [1]
Tara Reade seems to be another person, like Hunter Biden, whose one useful feature was to tell people “I know Joe Biden.” She used it everywhere to wheedle things out of people. And likely what she’s doing now.
[1] If you want to drag Joe over the coals for not wanting to give other defendants the benefit of the doubt he has, go for it.
the short version starts about 40 seconds in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju1ZFuvjzYc
I’m right wing and have problems with Donald Trump so I’m probably sitting out this election like I did last time. For these reasons, I’m not following the Tara Reid stuff closely, but I give the opinions of the SSC commentators a lot of weight due to the climate of fairness we have here. 90% sure they didn’t happen seems high to me, but like I said, I’m probably not following it as closely as you are. Do you have any biases that might be relevant here?.
Politco isn’t a website I trust to be fair, but the first link is interesting to me. I’ll have to think about it more.
The second link seems like the type of thing that could be written about a lot of people if a news organization set out to write a hit piece, then called everyone you ever knew over the course of 40 years. It doesn’t take that much for a few people who have butted heads with you decades ago to embellish the right things to push a narrative.
It seems equally feasible for politico to write a story interviewing people who would attest to her character instead, but chose a negative slant for political reasons.
This stuff frustrates me, because I don’t think I could see any evidence to convince me one way or another. So much is on the line, and so many people have a vested interest in swaying our collective opinions. I wish we could just make a national agreement to ignore sexual assault allegations against politicians if they happened more than a decade ago.
If you’re sitting out, why not vote third-party?
I actually will vote third party, but I kinda see that as just writing down my protest vote, more than taking a partisan side
Edit: I voted third party last time too, I’m not sure is I voted libertarian of constitution
I usually see it as a written protest vote too, but I view that as very different from sitting out the election. If I sat out an election, I’d be indistinguishable from my neighbor who blows off everything about politics. When I vote third-party, I’m telling everyone who looks at election results that I care enough to show up to vote, and that I dislike both the major candidates.
I’m probably not following it as closely as you are. Do you have any biases that might be relevant here?.
I had ignored it for a while, but I saw it come up again in legal circles because a prosecution expert witness was lying on the stand.
My stance on Tara Reade, previous to this, was similar to my stance on Christine Blaissey Ford: I wasn’t in the room, and I have no way of figuring out the truth. “Just listen to them talk and decide who is lying” is unlikely to inform me objectively.
I’m probably going to vote for Biden. I had never painted myself into a corner of “believe women” so there was no need for me to invent weird counter-factual or dig through yearbooks or decide that Reade making small edits to an old Medium article was proof of anything or otherwise tear her down as a lying liar. There’s no need for that. I had moved on.
There was a single credible accusation against each of Kavanaugh and Biden, which isn’t enough for me to throw them out. Maybe, if they had been revealed much earlier in the process, we could have said “why take the chance?” and selected someone else. But in each case this accusation was sat on and revealed past the point-of-no-return, so, nope.
Just like you can probably find one accuser for each person, even if innocent, you can probably find one person in everyone’s backstory that would talk shit about them. But when a bunch of people proactively speak up “yes, this person has scammed me, and made it clear they thought I was the sucker who deserved it,” you are dealing with another category.
And someone who deliberately sits on the witness stand and says lies in order to make money and send someone to jail, that’s an entirely different category than the story being slightly different in each re-telling. Reade had every opportunity to decide not to be an expert witness, to decide not to lie about her credentials, to not make up an additional this-is-easy-to-disprove-but-I-bet-you-don’t-have-the-guts-to-check-it-or-he-doesn’t-have-the-guts-to-accuse-me-of-lying lie of “it was a private arrangement between me and the President of the University.”
So this person has demonstrated the willingness to say lies that cost other people dearly if it gives herself a relatively minor payout.
Your interpretation is plausible, and certainly these news stories do significantly raise the probability that Reade isn’t telling the truth. But 90% seems high to me because:
1. as souleater says, the people Politico interviewed may have their own credibility problems and/or axes to grind;
2. you have to figure out what to think about the people who corroborate that Reade told them at least about bad behavior by Biden, if not the full details of the alleged assault. Are they in on the scam? If so, it becomes a pretty complex coordinated effort to pull off. Or are they telling the truth about what she told them, but she was lying to them just as she lied to the media? If so, Reade did a fair amount of consistent lying to a bunch of people over decades when she couldn’t necessarily have known it would serve her purposes (e.g. Lydia LaCasse says Reade told her the story in 1995 or 1996).
The contentious part of me says that if Edward Scizorhands is at least 90% sure Tara Reade’s accusation is false, then I think Tara Reade should be treated the same way as Julie Swetnick, who also made very exaggerated accusations. But such an accusation was also included in the heap of “evidence or at least hearsay that Kavanaugh is a bad ‘un”, including, I regret to say, some people within the rationalist community (which in turn has caused me to devalue their opinions, though it does prove their common humanity with the rest of we biased and prejudiced ordinary slobs: “this guy has particular opinions on particular causes where I am on side A and he is on side B, so I’m predisposed to think he’s a bad ‘un from the get-go, but I’m going to use what I think are fair evidential processes to prove he’s a bad ‘un, even if that means including the kinds of silly stories I’d toss out if they were about someone on side A of my position”).
So I’d like it if all the media and bloggers and opinion piece writers and commentators, who are now saying this about Reade, had treated Swetnick the same way – instead of breathlessly repeating over and over that Kavanaugh was being accused by three different women of sexual assault and treating all three accounts as of the same level of credibility (including Yale alumni, which makes me downgrade my estimation of the graduates of that institution).
To be fair, some outlets did give the same kind of treatment to Swetnick as Reade is now getting. But a year after Kavanaugh was sworn in to the Supreme Court, some outlets were still flogging the horse in regard to Deborah Ramirez’ story of ‘drunken frat party shenanigans’. Will the fearless reporters of the New York Times still be engaging in investigative reporting in order to bolster Reade’s accusation a year after Biden is elected president (should that ever happen)? Well, what do you think?
Yeah the part in this that makes me angry in this isn’t that Joe Biden’s accuser is getting investigated and the story found to be wanting. It’s the sheer, rank hypocrisy in which the accusations against Kavanaugh didn’t.
Tara Reade’s story was always weak. She didn’t have a place or date nailed down enough that Biden could effectively defend himself. One of the easiest ways to defend yourself, after all, is to prove you were elsewhere at the time of the alleged incident. If the accusation doesn’t have a place or time, though, how can you find an alibi?
But Ford’s story had the same flaw! And you were a woman-hating monster for pointing that out! Seeing people ready to set themselves on fire in the Rotunda about Kavanaugh not getting canned due to accusations flimsy enough that couldn’t either be proven or disproven who then go on draw little circles on the floor with the toe of their Birkenstocks and mumble about how, well, Reade’s story has a bunch of holes and she seems dishonest so why should we hound Biden mercilessly? is enraging.
A wider problem for both is that these seem to be such isolated incidents. Joe Biden just forcibly fingerbanged one person and never tried anything like it before or since? Kavanaugh was supposed to be a scumbag rapist unfit to be a dogcatcher, but never sexually harassed his clerks?
When you look at examples like Cosby, Weinstein, Lauer, etc., once somebody works up the courage to make an accusation, a whole river starts gushing out. Where’s the accusations (even anonymous) after Reade came out saying, “Oh yeah, Biden once bent me over a desk and rubbed his crotch on me. Fully clothed, but still….” or after Ford, “Yeah, Kavanaugh once showed me his dick at the Christmas party.” The people with the mental defects that make them treat subordinate women this way typically don’t just start and stop with one; it’s part of who they are and how they interact with people.
But Kavanaugh can get viciously slandered for months by the media, while Biden gets the actual benefit of the doubt that both should get.
My sense from a close friend who is and works with expert witnesses in civil cases is that far more egregious lying and misrepresentation about educational background is rampant in civil cases. Ie witnesses claim to have the PHD with honors at a university which does not grant honors in the PHD program, or claim to have gotten their PHD specializing in whatever is relevant to the case. Or have done post doctoral studies in X at Y meaning they got their PHD in some entirely unrelated field and attended a conference on X at Y. Thus these people formal training in the field he is claiming to be an expert in is less than 15 hours. People introduce themselves as Doctor N. despite not having a doctorate. “My friends call me doctor” This types of things can be demonstrated to the judge and not merely are these people not rejected in shame and possibly charged with perjury depending on details, their testimony is accepted and they continue to be professional expert witnesses happily despite their fraud being relatively open knowledge.
If Tara’s Reid’s high profile can start a crackdown on expert witnesses credential fraud, I would be happy.
Given the pervasive over representation of credentials by expert witnesses (in civil, not sure if this transfers to criminal), the relatively minor misrepresentation that is not particularly relevant for expertise and then snow balled makes her look like a run of the mill shady character which certainly damages her credibility but not as much as if she were a unique case.
You’re describing journalists. (Actually journalists have even weaker credentials but are even more widely believed and respected.)
Is this just a dig at journalists, or is there some common tendency for them to fake their degrees?
This is a very weird hobbyhorse of Well…’s that he’s brought a few times without ever defending.
@Scott: I don’t think journalists typically fake their degrees. Maybe they should, since journalism is essentially the superficial impersonation of the kinds of authority that tends to come with advanced degrees. This isn’t a dig at journalists by the way, just an attempt to describe journalism for what it is instead of what it dresses itself up as.
@Eugene Dawn: Yeah, it’s a hobbyhorse. I’ve certainly defended it. Many times, including in the comments you linked to!
Yeah, that’s unfair; I even thought of editing my comment to be more precise but in the end decided to leave it. What I really meant was that your defenses were almost entirely based on your own repeated assertions with no evidence, but I don’t really want to get into this for real, so I’ll withdraw the claim.
In past threads that discussed what made something “credible”, I have mentioned that the Larry King episode was, to me, significant enough to make me view the allegation as plausible/credible. By that, I didn’t mean I thought it was probable or that I believed it. Just that it indicated something went on before any of the current political drama started, which I give more weight to than most other factors. I said one of three things were true: 1) it happened basically as she said, 2) there was an incident(s) but not what she describes, the kind of thing one might go to the media over, which meant it was probably about Biden’s conduct (maybe more mild sexual harassment), or 3) she has had some sort of mild “vendetta” against Biden all these years.
Afterwards, I reflected that it may have come across as though I was portraying #3 as an absurd suggestion relative to the others. I wasn’t. There are a lot of people who develop negative feelings about someone and occasionally repeat them to others over a long period, without any grand plan to blackmail the person when they become super famous. When I say the Larry King episode means something went on, it could be as simple as that, while she worked for him, she developed a personal animosity toward Joe Biden. This could be for a good reason, a bad reason, or an incomprehensible reason. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it is easy to imagine a situation in which the job didn’t go well or she was fired, and she rationalized this to her mother, her friends, and even herself by making false or exaggerated claims. I think stuff like this happens all the time, and not by people who are obviously “crazy” or diabolical, though they probably have a pattern of lying to explain things away.
Since then, a number of stories have come out indicating that such a pattern may be present here. There are clearly people with a desire to discredit her at all costs, so I’m wary of believing rumors without contemporary evidence. But it would not surprise me to learn that this is the case.
The expert witness thing like the Trump-Ukraine accusations is far more worrying because of the underlying institutional rot that it sheds light upon – how can someone be recognized as an expert witness with such low level of diligence about confirming their credentials and level of expertise ?
I’m reminded of the Baffler piece “Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard.”
That’s one creative use of the word ‘Professor’
You’re thinking about it from the wrong persective. Put yourselves in the shoes of the lawyer who’s hiring this expert witness. You want someone who is cheap enough for your client (or almost certainly your client’s insurance) to be able to pay for and will reliably say what you want them to say and be able to hold up under cross examination.
Actual status as an expert is secondary to being able to convince the jury/judge of whatever position you want to… and if one side has an expert witness, the other side likely has another expert being paid to say the exact opposite of whatever you were saying, so it all comes down to charisma anyway.
And think about it – what actual “expert” in their field is willing to put their practice on hold for a couple of days and spend all day in court so they can be aggressively questioned by lawyers? You never get actual “experts” you get people who have established themselves as being reliable interlocutors for either plaintiffs or defendants and this is how they earn a living.
Personal aside: This might be an artifact of growing up in a family of opinionated lawyers, but for a long time I thought the word prostitute was just how you refereed to the kind of person who makes his living as a professional expert witness.
Except in this case the lawyer hiring this expert witness was the prosecutor, paid by the state.
IANAL so I don’t know what options and obligations the defense lawyer had for challenging or scrutinising expert witnesses, but the fact that this can happen when it was supposedly should have been preventable by both sides is what I mean by institutional rot.
And I’m not even talking about where we as a society should want to see the bar for expertise in courts proceedings placed, just about being able to carry out the
simpleact of verifying that the expert witnesses actually posses the credentials they claim to.Today, The Lancet published a large study on the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine and similar drugs on COVID-19. The study includes data on 96k COVID-19 patients, about 15k were treated with Hydroxycholoquine or something similar.
Beyond the headlines (these things don’t appear to work and may be actively harmful), they have tons of estimates for relatively risks from demographic characteristics and comorbidities. One thing of note, given recent discussion on this blog, is that “current smoker” is a comorbidity that increases likelihood of death by ~30% (~7 to 56% w/ 95% confidence).
Important to note that folks weren’t assigned to treatment or control groups randomly, so there’s likely some selection effects occurring with who got one of these drugs and who didn’t. The authors use propensity scores and the litany of aforementioned demographic covariates and comorbidities to try to control for this, but it’s not quite the same as a randomized trial. Having said that, to overcome the significantly negative effects some of these medications seem to have on outcomes, you’d have to assume very strong selection effects.
Good god, ACE inhibitors have a hazard ratio of 0.509. How does that work?
Edit: I see – ACE inhibitors weren’t being given to people with COVID; it’s the hazard ratio for people with ACE inhibitors vs those without. That’s still a large impact, though.
It’s a huge effect. I recall reading articles about blood clotting being an unexpected cause of death among younger COVID-19 patients. This suggests that immediately putting everyone diagnosed with COVID-19 on blood thinners might save a ton of lives.
Interestingly, patients treated with ACE inhibitors had the same rate of ventricular arrythmia (the other outcome highlighted in the Lancet article) as those who were not being treated with ACE inhibitors. Not being a doctor, I have no idea if this is consistent with the above or contradictory to it.
ACE has not much to do with coagulation as a direct effect. ACEis are antihypertensives. They may have some small effect on coagulation in that vascular and haemodynamic disturbances tend to have broad and far reaching effects but probably not enough to matter.
Basically everyone with severe COVID in all major hospitals worldwide is getting prophylactic anticoagulation if they’re in a high dependency to ICU level of hospital care. Some suggestion that the hypercoagulability is such that normal prophylactic doses aren’t enough and you have to move to what we would term theraputic doses (more). The issue is that obviously risk of bleeding increases, so I don’t think putting everyone with positive disease on heparin/equivalent would really be a great solution. Depends on the relative risk of bleeding. Usually it’s an individual assessment in terms of patient risks.
I’m not aware of any direct connection between ACE inhibition and ventricular arrythmias. It’s unlikely they prevent or cause in any meaningful way. As compared to say, hydroxychloroquinine or Azithromycin which both have QTc prolonging effects and thus can precipitate ventricular arrythmias in those who might be predisposed (e.g. be old, have a few complications and be infected with a virus that directly or indirectly inflammes the heart). To be honest the whole HCQ+Azithro thing is very annoying. Increased risk of death due to arrythmias was an entirely predictable outcome due to the aforementioned effects and why they haven’t been used in moderate to severe (ie hospitalised) COVID patients in my country. I still think there’s a reasonable prophylaxis argument for HCQ but we need to wait for better data.
There’s been a bit of back and forth about ACEis and ARBs since the start of the pandemic. Some arguing ACE2 upregulation caused by the drugs might worsen initial infection. Others arguing that with hypertension as a risk factor for death from COVID19 as well as other things that stopping them might be worse. We now have good data that they’re neutral to protective. Interesting that there’s a dramatic ACEi vs ARB difference. This suggests perhaps a direct ACE2 effect. Although it would be hard to disentangle from the antihypertensive effects modifiying that risk factor given that ACEi are largely still first line for hypertension compared to ARBs. Unlikely we will know why or be able to predict other theraputic avenues from it for a while.
This is an explanation of some recent online drama that seems to me to break a few of my expectations about the people involved. The drama itself will likely to have little-to-no effect on the world, but I think it’s a good case study in some social dynamics.
New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino wrote a blog post a couple days ago discussing her father’s prior conviction for fraud. Essentially her father and his mother ran a business in which they recruited teachers from the Philippines to work in the US and found school districts to hire them. The conviction relates to obtaining visas using job offers which had been rescinded before the visa application was fired and resulted in a few months probation but significant asset forfeiture. Tolentino’s piece portrays this as her father being unfairly forced to take a plea because the school district lied about when they rescinded the job offer to avoid liability.
For context, Tolentino is generally considered to be an exceptional essayist who has a large professional network. One of Tolentino’s first media jobs was at the website Jezebel (part of Gawker) and one of her early New Yorker articles was a 2016 profile of a podcast called Chapo Trap House (“CTH”), which has been a central part of leftist media for the last few years. CTH and other more leftist media (which I’ll call “the Left”) have been exchanging criticism (sometimes personal) with more moderate and prominent media (“Liberal”)since the 2016 election, but Tolentino has not really been a part of this despite being very much in that milieu. A few dozen to a few hundred people appear to rely heavily on this interplay for their income, either writing about it freelance or raising funds via things like Patreon – CTH has the single highest revenue there at over $150,000/month.
Tolentino’s essay was widely praised, and there were numerous people who offered expressions of support, including writers at publications like the New York Times, Vox and the Atlantic as well as leftist activists, Tolentino stated her motivation for writing the piece was that it was being discussed on a subreddit associated with a small podcast called Red Scare run by two women with some social connections to the New York leftist media scene and an unusual worldview
In the last 48 hours or so, Tolentino’s essay and the reaction to it has been highly discussed on left-of-center social media and has become a hot topic in the left-liberal feud, with many lower-level Left media figures arguing that Tolentino’s parents’ crime was more serious than she portrayed, and that people shouldn’t express public support for her because of that. It’s a weird dynamic because essentially everyone agrees that Tolentino doesn’t have anything to do with the crime, and the issue is long resolved. There’s also a values conflict where organized labor has tried to denounce the hiring of immigrant teachers without opposing immigration by portraying the system as abusive to the immigrant teachers. The highest profile mention of the case prior to Tolentino’s most recent essay was a 2009 teacher union report.
This may fizzle out quickly, but it’s been interesting to see a dynamic for a few reasons. Tolentino was apparently motivated to write the piece by very low level discussion she found actively searching for mentions of herself, presumably out of loyalty to her parents. That response significantly the news itself (Streisand Effect) and the people who brought it up in the first place. All sorts of internal discourse norms are being violated – people’s families are normally off limits, ICE is generally considered bad, and posting addresses is normally considered doxing. It reminds me a lot of the initial stages of prior media controversies where the focus quickly shifted from the original accusation to attacking the coordinated response to that accusation, but I’m not sure I’ve seen that no the left before.
How much traction is this getting on the dirtbag left?
Tough to say – it was the outrage of the day but appears to be fading. Nothing above the level of social media and the people with the largest platforms have stayed pretty silent.
Tolentino was apparently motivated to write the piece by very low level discussion she found actively searching for mentions of herself, presumably out of loyalty to her parents.
This is why ego surfing is a bad idea, if you don’t have really thick skin.
“In the last 48 hours or so, Tolentino’s essay and the reaction to it has been highly discussed on left-of-center social media and has become a hot topic in the left-liberal feud, with many lower-level Left media figures arguing that Tolentino’s parents’ crime was more serious than she portrayed, and that people shouldn’t express public support for her because of that.”
Do you have links to those tweets? Are they saying that she’s covering something up, or leaving out details? Or just that doing exactly what she described is indeed more problematic than she makes it sound?
From a quick survey of the tweets backed up by a bit of dedicated googling. I’m not 100% sure if this is true, but here’s the stream of allegations:
1. It looks like her parents’ company would pay for (allegation: bribe) school district officials to fly to the Philippines and interview candidates to be teachers. These interviews were managed by the company.
2. Interviewees paid the company around $10,000 if they got selected, and then were on the hook to pay some ongoing percentage of their income to the company. They did this because they were told doing this would get them a good life and US citizenship.
3. Once in the US, it’s alleged that the company held onto the migrants’ passports and documents, had them live in badly-built structures and controlled their ability to move freely.
4. The workplaces of the migrants’ also allegedly took liberties with the migrants.
5. In some cases the promised jobs didn’t actually exist. In this case, the migrants would hopefully find other jobs… but, not always as teachers.
In short, it might not have been what you think of when you hear “human trafficing” but it certainly wasn’t as rosy as she portrays it. At the absolute best, those migrants were facing a significant power disparity and at worst were kinda being farmed for profit.
The former, aftagley summed it up well. Here’s a good example . To be clear, Tolentino is saying the exploitative stuff in the indictment did not occur at all, and that her dad only pled because asset forfeiture, legal costs and harsh treatment in jail compelled him to.
Somewhat related to the HCQ discussion below… how exactly do “side effects” work in the medical field?
I’ve always been under the impression that it’s basically binary. A specific person will either experience side effects, or they won’t, and that the side effects will manifest and become apparently relatively quickly. So if a drug is known to cause side effects “in 10% of people” what this means is that 10% of people will experience side effects, not that each individual pill consumed has a 10% chance of causing a side effect in whoever takes it.
So if someone has been consistently taking a certain dose of a certain medication for some time, and has not experienced side effects, it can be assumed that they are unlikely to experience side effects at all. It is not the case that if a medication has a “side effect rate” of 10%, then for every 10 pills you take, you should expect to experience roughly 1 side effect.
Am I way off base here?
I think it depends on the drug and the side effect.
I’m not a medic, but your description is pretty much exactly my understanding of side effects.
That has not been my experience. I was once prescribed lisinopril for hypertension. The doctor warned me at the time that a persistent cough was a known side effect, but that it might take a while to manifest itself. After several years (sorry, don’t remember how many), it did, necessitating a change in prescription.
Some time later I told this story to my mother, who said that she was on the same medication. She told me that our relatives were concerned about her, because of her persistent cough. She said she wasn’t sick, she just couldn’t help coughing. A new prescription for her and all was well.
For some side effects your argument is true, for example if .1% of people are allergic to some drug, that probability will be much lower in people who weren’t allergic at the start.
But most side effects have some non-zero chance of happening after some time even if you didn’t get them initially. And there are many side effects that only ever manifest after you have been taking the medication for a while.
You are broadly on base, but with exceptions. Broadly, I think people should be wary of a ‘rationalist’ approach to medicine. We don’t have a true understanding of what is an incredibly complex interacting system, such that what we might think is the logical effect of some treatment or effect is often proved to be completely wrong by clinical data.
Things can change over time, or there can be issues which might manifest as long term consequences which aren’t apparent in the short term. Someone below mentions their issues with ACE-induced cough, which is typical of the progression of that particular side effect. A change in an indirectly related parameter or system may precipitate a specific side effect. Others like SSRI mediated gastrointestinal effects work differently in that they affect a lot of people early on but attenuate reasonably quickly in many.
What is your go-to website for reliable, nonpartisan, just-the-facts world and national news? I can no longer deal with CNN and NBC News.
I wouldn’t say “non-partisan”–it’s very much a cosmopolitan liberal paper–but The Economist seems to usually get the facts right and concentrate on the important ones.
Note that this is “liberal” in the traditional sense, i.e. Free Markets Good Government Bad. Although, they’ve become more liberal in the US sense over time, mainly due to Republicans going off the deep end.
They’re consistently anti drug war, pro “free trade” agreements, pro gun control, and pro climate alarm. Their obituaries are excellent. I was a paper subscriber for quite a few years, but gave it up recently (it’s fairly expensive).
Including the one where they credited Mao with ending famine in China?
@DavidFriedman
The Economist’s obituaries are excellent. This does not mean that every single obituary is excellent. In the same way, your comments are excellent…
@DavidFriedman,
I think the Mao obituary was before I became a subscriber, I do not remember it. As Elephant hints, uniform excellence is truly a high bar.
i gotta say, crediting the one who committed genocide with ending genocide, has got to lose whoever does it a heck of a lot credit for a hell of a long time. Especially if their primary role is as an information source.
“Today, we mourn the passing of the hero who killed Adolf Hitler.”
I like the Economist enough to pay for it, but it’s very far from ‘just the facts’. It reports selectively, and normally writes stories into narratives with a clear view point. The BBC and Reuters are good for ‘just the acts’.
I’ve been going to Reuters. I don’t think they are ideal, but I haven’t found anything better.
Funnily enough, I’ve been procrastinating over stopping reading the BBC (which drives me nuts) and both Reuters and The Week (mentioned by @AG just below) are my potential alternatives.
Whenever I see someone mention the BBC on SSC I have to stop for a second and figure out if they’re talking about BBA or HBC.
Web news is always captured by the need to attract clicks.
Every time this subject has come up, I recommend the The Week magazine (their online branch is garbage, though).
Otherwise, listening to NPR on my commute (and not even every day, or in the afternoons) isn’t completely non-partisan, but gets me enough of the gist and highlights.
The BBC web page. Slightly left-leaning, but only slightly, and extremely reliable and with a high facts-to-analysis ratio.
Facts then a picture of Laura Kuenssberg then analysis.
I recommend allsides.com for this. It isn’t a news source in its own right, it’s a news aggregator that categorizes the sources it aggregates from according to political bias. In the absence of more ideal journalism, I find I’ve had to settle for looking across the spectrum and sifting facts out of what multiple sources agree on.
Wow, Allsides.com looks great. I love those little LLCRR boxes under each article. Thanks!
For example, I found this article, which is an interesting SSC-style analysis I would never have come across otherwise (I’m not sure I’m convinced, but it certainly echoes some views that have been expressed here):
How Fear, Groupthink Drove Unnecessary Global Lockdowns
Off-topic, but the linked article makes the common mistake (by folks who like the “lockdowns” and folks who don’t!) of not having any idea what they’re talking about when it comes to interpreting models. They take predictions made ceteris parabis and gnash their teeth when people change their behavior and then the modeled estimates no longer seem to match up.
(This criticism is independent of the rest of the material in the article, which in my view is right about some things and wrong about others.)
That’s a non-sequitur. What makes the news the news is the posture it assumes, intended to make it look reliable and nonpartisan, when it isn’t. News that didn’t assume this posture wouldn’t be news. Content that actually had the qualities you listed wouldn’t be news either.
If you want intelligent discussion from a wide range of viewpoints about things that are going on in the nation and the world, read SSC comment threads and post questions about whatever you want to know about if you don’t see it already being discussed.
In a recent video, Jason Pargin, formerly Executive Editor of the humor site cracked.com, answers at length an interesting question about how the shift from browsing the internet on PCs to browsing on phones forced a shift in how articles had to be written to get attention.
TL/DR: In the PC era, people had their own bookmarks, and periodically visited a manageable set of their favorite sites. In the mobile phone era, nobody sets bookmarks. Instead people use aggregator sites (particularly Reddit and Facebook) and follow links to whatever looks interesting wherever it happens to be. This meant that in the PC era, writers and editors had some room to maneuver, and because they had built a certain level of trust with their audience, which meant they could write about some unlikely topics, confident the regulars would read whatever they published. In the phone era, because the readership is so much more transient, it is much more important to grab eyeballs by being immediately interesting, often by writing about something provocative or threatening.
I don’t think the issue is bookmarks. The issue is that once the internet became mainstream, everybody and their dog started to write articles, and the ensuing cutthroat competition resulted in a race to cater to the lowest common denominator.
I’d be curious to know what the percentages are now of people browsing on phones vs. browsing on laptops.
I used to deal with this issue all the time–I wrote/managed a site for a (once major) national platform, netting myself a couple of million page views per month. It was fascinating to use Google Analytics to see how people were accessing the information, but as of two and a half years ago (when I left) it was only about 20 percent phones and tablets.
Doesn’t it really depend on what kind of site it is? Like, very technical pages where most people would access them at their job probably still get most of their traffic from laptops and PCs. But most general interest sites with short form content are probably 80% mobile these days.
Counterpoint: I use bookmarks on my phone quite a lot.
I didn’t know it was even possible to bookmark on my phone. But I don’t do much Internet browsing on my phone. That’s all on my PC, where I do bookmark.
…Now that I’m checking, it turns out I’m logged into the same account, so I can access them from my phone. And huh, apparently I have 501 bookmarks.
Man, kind of a hard interview to watch for me.
I used to work for Cracked as a freelancer and contractor. I both wrote some articles and was one of their community managers/first-line editors. We basically did the initial reviews of community submissions, and helped people get a suitable first draft together before bringing it to a senior editor. I got an inside look at the site from it’s relative peak until it fell apart.
While what he’s saying is true… the shift away from standalone platforms and towards social media aggregators back then definitely played a part, but the site also made a bunch of other unforced errors. They chose to pursue strategies like the pivot to video, expansion of columnists and content bloat that had a major effect on Cracked’s quality and reputation. I love the site and community and learned so much about writing online from Jason, DoB and the rest of the team, but I think he’s trying to spin a cohesive narrative out of a million tiny factors here.
You call pivot to video an unforced error, but wasn’t everyone doing that at the time? Or did Cracked lead the pack or something?
Incidentally, I’m reminded of an argument I read a year or two back, arguing that pivot to video was driven by misleading statistics published by social media (I think by Facebook?) about how many views videos were actually getting.
Answering your second question first, yes the pivot to video was a lie. The traffic never scaled as high as we were told and the money CERTAINLY didn’t come following.
As for the pivot, well, they had a collection of really talented writers who were for a while there, making the best list-based content on the internet. The dirty secret of Cracked was that pretty much every article (at least at the start) was “written” by the same small team of well-trained and talented writers. You’d basically write up a draft that had all the facts, content and citations and then one of the staff editors would put it in the “Cracked voice” by making it snarky and funny.
IF you hung around for a while you’d learn how to write in that voice naturally, but it wasn’t uncommon to see final drafts from new writers that had over 3/4s of their content rewritten. I’ve never seen another platform that operated this way – no “normal” editor would accept a draft that needed to be entirely re-written, but this practice let them maximize the time of their talented staff by offloading the non-creative part of the work (idea generation/research) and focus on having them create funny content.
When they pivoted to video, however, they now split the time of this funny staff to have the write/star in reams of video content. Now the same team that previously had been creating all the written content was also trying to make video content (which some of them enjoyed way more and got increasingly focused on).
ETA – calling it an unforced error is probably only true with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, it likely seemed the best path forward… but it did have the net effect of beginning the brand dilution that I think eventually did Cracked.com in.
Thank you for elaborating! That makes sense.
That reminds me of how TV writing sometimes works; a big team of writers start with a draft by someone (sometimes not on the team) and go over it two, three, five times. I’ve heard that the secret to the success of The Simpsons was that their writing team went over the script dozens of times.
(ETA: Timestamped the video, in case folks don’t want to watch a thirty minute video to hear the relevant fifteen seconds.)
You wrote for Cracked? I was always impressed by Cracked’ article ideas/execution (at its peak, at least). Not to mention how it went from being a second-rate MAD competitor (in print) to eating MAD’s lunch (on the web).
Yeah, never as a columnist or anything though. My written stuff for them was as a freelancer.
What was your most successful/popular piece?
Not trying to ignore you, but I anything I posted to Cracked had my real name attached to it and my comfort with being clocked in meat-space has drastically declined since then.
Sorry
100% understandable.
MAD had some of the best cartoonists in the world. The pictures added significantly to the magazine, and no on else could get that down against a bunch of people who had been doing it for 40 years. Online that matters a lot less.
Aftagley, I probably know you – were you in the xmoderate chat?
I was!
ETA: removed since that links back to my real name/identity. Email me at aftagley.email at gmail.com if you want.
n = 1 but I went from visiting cracked every day to avoiding it entirely when they started going political
+1/2.
I was a fairly sharp turn to politics, but there were still some quality articles for awhile. They got hard to pick out pretty quick, though.
I don’t remember whether it was politics that made me stop reading. All I distinctly remember is that I stopped being interested in the new stuff; when I wanted some Cracked, I ended up rereading a piece from John Cheese or something. So I can’t really say if it was them or me. It’s a shame, regardless, because back in high school Cracked was one of my daily stops.
+1/2 here too. It was kind of a combination of 3 things:
1) The rise of “earnest” political articles (mostly political, just written in a somewhat snarky voice) to become a larger proportion of content
2) Reduced quality of the humor articles (Mostly that they were generally less funny, but to a lesser degree, the increasing intrusion of partisan political jokes)
3) Too much content in video and audio. I’ve read cracked.com for years, hundreds or thousands of articles, and have watched maybe one or two videos and never listened to any audio. Maybe I’m missing out, but it just wasn’t what I was looking for when I visited Cracked. I’d always be disappointed when a promising sounding premise turned out to be a video.
I liked the videos, mostly. After Hours was brilliant, and Obsessive Pop Culture Disorder was always enjoyable. But watching those generally meant that Cody’s Daily Show knock-off ranting about Republicans would come in the queue next, so I made sure not to let them keep playing. So that’s probably politics combining with the poor profit margins of video to work against them.
I adored After Hours. Cracked TV was their first effort and I loved it, even though it was really just the Michael Swaim show. Swaim’s still making videos on his own now, but for some reason they just aren’t funny.
“Ragtagging” is such a useful verb to have around. Although watching the video again just now it’s about 30 seconds worth of clever idea stretched out to 5 minutes.
Fun Fact: I wrote that script.
Edit: It’s definitely long for the joke, you are correct.
@GearRatio
Well now I feel awkward for criticizing it. It’s one of the only Cracked videos I still remember after several years. To this day when my friends and I are watching something and the trope gets a little too blatant or predictable we’ll comment on the poor saps about to get ragtagged.
Don’t feel bad! After I pitched that some of the specific writing directions were very much something like “I want every single way this trope was ever applied to a kid’s movie covered”. The format at the time liked a certain length, so some videos that needed more time would be compressed to fit that time-frame, while others would be stretched beyond what was good for the joke. You are 100% right and I’m not the least offended.
Fun internal video facts:
1. A very similar concept was once done by CollegeHumor. I was unaware of it at the time (so were they) but I was very gently and nicely asked at some point if I had plagiarized it. To this day I’m not 100% sure I didn’t see the collegehumor video, forget about it, then accidentally rip it off whole-cloth. It haunts me on a deep level.
2. I wanted their team to be called the Wisconsin Cheese Yankees. This joke was cut for not being funny.
3. Adam Scott was at one time going to play the coach, and then he backed out.
4. All the “dog playing baseball” stuff wasn’t mine; it was added in on re-write.
5. I was told I wasn’t allowed to write anything with kids ever again; apparently it’s a pain in the ass to include kids in internet videos.
I wonder if College Humor earned any $$$ when Nickelodeon took that “Dora the Explorer” parody and turned it into a real movie.
The best part is “when I became head coach of the West Memphis Country Clubbers…..oh god we’re f**ked!”
@GearRatio –
Re: (1), the human memory is a extraordinarily fallible, and jokes are like memes and calculus. People with similar backgrounds growing up in similar cultural milieus and working in similar formats will often converge on similar ideas.
I know is a Big Deal among stand-up comics, and I completely support giving credit where due, and for good reason. But I don’t think the existence of a similar video should make you worry that you “plagiarized” it. Even if you had seen it but didn’t remember at the time, I don’t think you should hold yourself morally responsible if the only similarity was the premise.
@GearRatio
Very, very important semi-colon addendum. Thanks for the laugh. 🙂
For me, it was when the articles stopped loading on my phone. I would pull up cracked.com every morning when I got on the train and start reading articles (still maintaining the loyalty discussed above), but somehow either an ad or some other piece of JS or whatever caused my phone browser to hang about 1/3 of the way through every article. Eventually I gave up trying.
I do admit the politics was starting to annoy me, but that was minor compared to the “I can’t actually read the articles anymore.”
For context for people: the ads were at some point on the site nearly but not quite as bad/intrusive/malicious as a manga translation aggregator site, and there were a ton of them that were poorly integrated so often the site wouldn’t load right, even on a full desktop tower.
The ads thing was a big thing that I think gets ignored a lot. And David Pargin is in large part accountable for that, although I’ve never seen him admit it.
There was a huge problem with intrusive ads or even malicious ads, even during the latter years. People would ask Pargin about it on the forums and he’d make long explanations that all boiled down to “Well, that’s just how ads are – you can’t control what they show at all, so we are at their mercy and there’s no solution at all”. But of course there was a solution, and even if the questioner didn’t know what it was he’d know it must exist since people would go to other sites with ads and not have their browser crash.
So you had this big problem that made the site unreadable for a not insignificant amount of people, and the official take on it was “That’s just the internet for you! Nothing I can do!”.
And a lot of things were like that in the sense that he was the final word on the reality that Cracked was willing to accept. The readership feedback was consistently and strongly against politics, and his reaction to that was always to post graphs about how the readers were wrong and they really did like shitty political takes replacing other content, deep down.
I remember complaining to the NYTimes that some ad on their website was driving my CPU to 100%. Since they didn’t want to hear it, instead they insisted I had spyware. . . on my minimal Linux installation.
Is it possible he was right?
Something I have seen Ezra Klein talk about on his podcast is that the type of articles he would like to publish on Vox, and the type readers say they want, is often not what they actually publish.
The reason being that what readers say they want, and what they actually click on, seem to bear almost no relation to one another. If you have a bunch of reader feedback saying they want X, and a bunch of actual traffic statistics saying Y, I’m going to believe Y every time.
It’s absolutely possible!
None of what he used to post about this is really available anymore – they closed the forums at some point – but to my memory it was mostly breakdowns of demographics, I.E. “See, most of our readers are blue tribe”. At some point during the transition to being political most of the time, their public-visible traffic statistics (read x times counters) started being fluffed, then got insanely unreliable, and then were eventually cut entirely. Hard data is limited.
Given all that, there’s an at-least-plausible model where enough of their readers were a combination of on the left, not bothered by politics on their joke site or not bothered by politics on their joke site that confirmed their beliefs to an extent that the gain outweighed the loss.
The reasons this isn’t my personal beliefs are varied and a lot of it has to do with “well, I was there and it didn’t feel like that” unproveables. But Cracked went from top-of-the-world to bottom-of-the-barrel entirely during this period – they were doing undeniably well during it and sank pretty fast after it started. This is absolutely subject to confounding – the transition to video might have killed them too, or cell phones like Wong says, or a number of things.
All of this to say that it’s definitely possible he was right, but the shift was accompanied both by a pretty large decrease in site success and a pretty large amount of people who said that was why.
It could have in reality been completely contradicted by their data, but looking at it from the outside, what I could see were tons of people saying they abandoned the site for that reason, very few people saying they liked the political tinge, and the collapse of the site’s success.
If I remember correctly, he also had a standing policy of “if you mention adblockers, I will ban you” which tended to filter for people who didn’t mind ads.
I can also believe high heat-to-light ratio* posts can get you many short term clicks but lose long term fans. The first time you insult my mom, I’m going to pay an awful lot of attention to that insult, and pass it around to my friends and get them to come check it out and back me up that my mom is not at all like what you’re saying and I’d like you to issue an apology and not talk like that again, but by the fifth time you insult my mom I’m done with you completely and am no longer paying any attention. The fact that I’m heavily engaged with the first insult does not mean I secretly want to hear my mom insulted and am going to keep coming back for more of the same.
* I can never remember how this goes. Doesn’t it always depend on whether you want heat or light? I mean, I want my electric blanket to give me heat, but no light, and I want my living room lamp to give me light, but no heat.
You want your discussions to illuminate, not get people all hot under the collar.
+1
It wasn’t even a moderate leftwing bent, it was extreme, constant, and it seemed to come out of nowhere. If it was a little bias sprinkled into mostly good content I would just shrug and keep reading, but I remember being struck by the fact that around 50-70% of their content suddenly turned to dunking on the right/center.
It wasn’t even a slow cultural drift, someone, somewhere, decided their new business model would be to produce left wing “think” pieces at the expense of what was once very good content. It still bums me out because I haven’t found anything quite like Cracked at its peak.
I see this argument all the time in discussions of Cracked – it was originally good but it went downhill when it “went political.” This is normally framed as having been some kind of conscious choice, that the editors decided to primarily focus on politics at the expense of their other content in some kind of effort to target in on liberals. This isn’t what happened but explaining why requires a bit of backstory. Here’s how Cracked’s writing process worked during the very early days:
Cracked was a content farm in the best possible sense of the word. They would advertise heavily for new writers, had some pretty detailed guides about what they were looking for and how to write a proper pitch. The basics of a “cracked pitch” were to identify a weird trend in some topic and then find 6-7 examples of that trend. Cracked also had a team of paid moderators who interacted with the public, helped people design their pitches and bring them to the editors when the pitch was in a presentable state.
If your pitch was accepted, you were given two weeks to turn the pitch into a finished article and submit it. The editors would then do a final pitch and, assuming everything checked out, would buy your article for a couple hundred dollars. They would then basically rewrite the entire thing, putting it in the Cracked “voice” and a week or so later it would show up on the front page.
This process worked, like I said below, because it let funny writers focus entirely on just being funny. They didn’t have to research, fact check or even come up with the theme – they just had to take existing writing and make it funny. Most of the best Cracked articles you’ve read came up through this process. It was pretty exacting – Cracked prided itself on being mostly fact-based so the sourcing had to be pristine and absolutely nothing went through that could be considered an opinion. Everything had to be grounded in facts.
The problem was that it didn’t scale particularly well. We’d get some number of pitches per week and between 20-30% of them would eventually make it to the editors, and around half or so of those would become articles. People forget this, but early Cracked only published two or three articles a day, and that was it. That was the content you were getting today, come back tomorrow.
This worked for a time, but eventually Cracked (or, depending on who you ask, the people who owned Cracked) wanted to increase the amount of content (and therefore ad views) people would see. When you rely on community submissions for the majority of your content, however, you can’t increase the amount of content easily. You can’t tell the internet to bring in more/better submissions, so they turned to Cracked Columnists to fill in the gap.
Columnists were the same group (mostly) of people who edited all the articles. It has always been a thing to have Cracked Columnists writing articles, but in the early days, they mostly stuck to writing listicles also, just ones a bit more out there and personal to them and their writing style than you’d get by going through the normal process. They were also more free to express opinions.
Now, on average these articles never did as well as the “traditional” Cracked content. Sure, there were some exceptions (David Wongs articles almost always set page-view records) but most of them only did ok… But they were also the easiest knob to turn when the site wanted more content. So, that’s what happened.
Cracked started reaching out into their stable of regular freelancers and bringing the most prolific of them on as columnists as well as hiring on a few other funny voices from across the internet. They also began to centralize operations out of their office in LA and loosened norms about what columnists should write about. Unsurprisingly, a lot of what they chose to write about was hot takes on current events and they did so from a perspective on the left.
This is where the political slant of Cracked started to rise – it wasn’t that they explicitly wanted more leftist thought on the platform, it was that a group of people who all happened to lean left were now given more editorial freedom to write opinion pieces and the site began relying more on opinion pieces to shore up their content. There was also a friendship bias – people got hired on to produce content as a result of their relationships with some of the other editors and columnists; all of this reinforced the bubble.
(It also didn’t help that the most reliably conservative voice on the site got kinda maybe outed as a pedophile and was exiled to Siberia.)
Thanks for taking the time to write this out. I always wondered what the full story was but never knew the full situation.
OT, but you constantly amaze with your eclectic background.
@Edward Scizorhands
I thought the same thing. Maybe @Aftagley is the whole Cracked diaspora under one name..
Count me in as one of those who thought that the video is the best content that cracked produced. the various o’brien, swaim, and friends shows were all delightful.
As I’ve said many times, the news industry is still very viable and potentially lucrative. In fact, just… last week? two weeks ago? I attended a web-conference (canceled due to Covid) where someone made a strong case that media was an underappreciated market precisely because it had such good fundamentals but almost no one was taking advantage of it properly. His argument was to monetize it like a freemium subscription model and then pointed out cost of producing stories is actually extremely cheap compared to SaaS. (No research and development costs, reporters get paid two to four times less than engineers, etc.) He pointed to several new media companies doing so (and argued that this was similar to the model of old newspapers anyway.) I think he might be a bit too rosy but there is a reason you can still raise VC money for a content network.
Because the just so story here is absolute bunk. You’re seriously going to argue that having a bookmark is more influential than having an app on the person’s phone? The conventional media failed to innovate and suffered for it. They’re still fairly uninnovative.
Is that what he’s saying? My takeaway from this is that he’s saying that an app was equivalent to (or maybe better than?) a bookmark on an individual basis, but while he could get a lot people to bookmark his site, he couldn’t get many of them to download the app.
Right. Having a separate app for every web service one has to use is needlessly cumbersome. If the only way to e.g. read Slate Star Codex is to download and install the SSC app, sure, I’ll probably do that now. But I doubt I’d have done it back when SSC was (for me) just a thing that I’d seen referenced on Marginal Revolution a few times, and so when MR went south I’d have probably just given up on the interwebs as a source for interesting and thoughtful discussion where instead I just gradually shifted the frequency with which I used the respective bookmarks.
“…when MR went south”
Given we’re discussing trends in internet content quality, would you mind expanding on this?
John Schilling has mentioned MR’s comments section getting worse and worse, which I think is what he’s referring to. I’ve not heard him say the blog was getting worse, too.
Mostly what Nick says. I do have a sense that the quality of the actual Cowen/Tabarrok posting has declined as well, possibly due to the lack of useful feedback. But the commentariat was as important a part of Good Marginal Revolution as were Cowen and Tabarrok themselves, and when they let the comments section go to hell, I found I wasn’t all that interested in just passively reading their essays.
This was my experience with MR as well. Both rapidity and magnitude of the decline of the quality of the comments section was shocking.
On the topic of the content of the blog itself, the quality declined when Tyler began publishing a national column.
This doesn’t reflect my MR experience at all. I’ve been at least a weekly reader since maybe 2002, and I’ve never known a time when the comments were good. To be fair, I’ve only ever dipped into them to confirm that they’re still bad, but whenever I’ve done that I’ve been disappointed but not really suprised.
I posted something in the MR comments about the yawning gap between blog and comment quality maybe three or four years ago, and, yeah, they’re really terrible. But when was the alleged heyday?
What I understood him to be saying is: People used to have high engagement through bookmarks. But people use bookmarks less these days so readers are more generally low engagement. Yet the presence of apps, an even higher engagement tool, would seem to be a counterexample.
If I were to install the apps for everything I use, there’d be so much on my phone I’d never find any of them. I have one small screen for icons for apps, and it’s full – no room for apps for every web site I commonly visit. Yes, I can create additional screens full of icons – and even search among the whole collection of apps. That’s inconvenient though, so I essentially don’t do it.
As an example, I was forced to install the Amtrak app as the only way I could buy a ticket, one day when the ticket vending supposedly at the station proved not to exist. A couple of years of it self updating later, I uninstalled it, having never used it in the meantime. (I.e. getting your app onto my phone won’t induce me to use it again.)
I currently have 24 apps on the main screen of the iPhone I use for work – plus 4 in the “dock”, which appear on all screens. Your hypothetical app has to be good enough and relevant enough to displace one of those. Because if it gets pushed to the second screen, I won’t think to use it.
I feel the same. I’ve downloaded very few apps of my own on my phone. A few games, Google Translate, Outlook for work, Feedly, Uber, Imgur, and the app for riding my local bus. I think it’s insane that every website ‘has’ to have an app. The whole concept is anathema.
Apps are garbage. They’re just a way for the makers to bypass certain privacy/security regulations, so they’re far more intrusive and unsafe than anything developed for the web, which is already bad enough.
Right. You’re missing my point: we are not talking about general users, we are talking about a decline in highly engaged users, people who bookmark and visit a site daily. I’m pointing out that there are even more ways to have even more highly engaged users even more engaged.
Where do your highly engaged readers come from? There’s a fairly straightforward path for web pages, from “I’ve never heard of your site”, to following a recommended link from a site that you do follow, to noticing that you’ve followed links to that site three or four times in recent memory and deciding to bookmark it, to putting that bookmark on your “visit daily” list. All of those are very low-effort steps, designed to promote increasing engagement without barriers. Having to download and install an app is a much larger barrier, and it occurs early in the process when there’s much less reason to expect it will be worth the bother. Where you could have had a high-engagement user in a few months, you’ve got someone who briefly contemplated downloading your app and moved on to something else (or just stayed where they were).
I can make customer journeys too: From “I’ve never heard of your site” to following a recommended link to subscribing to a newsletter to downloading an app so it doesn’t get lost in your email.
Also, I don’t think downloading an app (a process involving two button clicks) counts as high barrier. It might be slightly higher than bookmarks, but if that was the main driver, why are bookmarks declining in use and apps increasing? Empirically plenty of people are making this switch, just not Cracked.
ISTR Cracked having an app. I refuse to use apps for website content as a matter of principle so I never tried it, but I swear I can recall getting begging ads about switching to their app whenever I’d read an article on my phone. This was when I was normally reading their site on my desktop, and only occasionally on my phone, before I drifted into reading it on my commute.
This would have been a number of years before the events that lead to my dropping the website because it wouldn’t load on my phone. Maybe 2011ish? It’s possible this is a fever dream, though.
Could do. But there’s more to having a successful app than just literally having one.
I’ve never understood why RSS isn’t more of a thing in the smartphone era. Almost all news sites/blogs still have it available, and it works perfectly well on a phone. You can use just one app (I use Feedly; I’m sure there are others just as good) to aggregate all the content you choose.
RSS died when Google killed Google Reader.
The problem seems to be supply-side. I suspect that if I collect your content via RSS, you don’t profit as much from pushing ads and collecting and selling data about me, particularly if I do my RSS via some third party (e.g. Feedly?)
@DinoNerd
Yep. Some sites even sabotage their rss by only having the first hundred words from the article, stuff like that. It’s really annoying.
Yeah, that’s definitely an issue. Even an RSS feed that just consists of links to the full articles is useful, though, since it eliminates the need to keep checking every site you want to follow for new content.
I went to cracked . com just now to see if it’s still around. It is, and while I didn’t find anything riveting, I did get to play the game of “how many different ads can I have on screen at once?” I got a high score of 5, with bonus points for multiple being animated.
Why isn’t The Patriot Act a big controversial thing? I’d vote for any politician, even Trump, whom I despise, if they said they’d repeal The Patriot Act. But it isn’t politically salient. Why not?
Sadly, virtually all the members of Congress (with the exception of a handful of principled hold-outs) don’t mind the Feds having that power. In some ways, it’s their power also, despite the rhetoric around their fears of specific Presidential Administrations misusing it.
For most of the population, the details aren’t important enough in terms of their impact on them to look into closely, so there isn’t a popular movement against it outside the fringes.
with the exception of a handful of principled hold-outs
The good news is that an amendment to install privacy protections got 59 votes in the Senate.
The bad news is that that was one vote short, and 4 senators, including Bernie Sanders, didn’t bother to show up.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/13/us_spying_laws/
Which part of the Patriot Act are you against? This gets complicated, because many parts of the Patriot Act sunsetted over a decade ago. Some have sunsetted multiple times. Various pieces have been reauthorized, but this has been done in a few different vehicles, and there have been a plethora of changes along the way. One of the things this implies is that “repealing the Patriot Act” probably doesn’t actually mean much; repealing something that has already sunsetted literally doesn’t do anything; it’s the other laws, the reauthorizations, that would have to be repealed.
…and to do that, we’re sort of back to the top-line question, “Which part of the Patriot Act are you against?” Because that’s going to tell us which one of the reauthorizations we have to argue against. …and we’re going to have to argue against it’s current instantiation (with all the extra privacy protections and such it’s gained over the years), not the original instantiation. That turns out to be more difficult, because many of these laws have genuinely improved, culling some of the more controversial aspects and retaining the less controversial (and widely considered good) aspects.
Indeed. My perception is that while most people have strong opinions about the Patriot Act, very few people, including those who are generally pretty politically aware (and including myself) have a solid understanding of what’s actually in it.
Without a clear sense of “here’s how your life will improve if it goes away” it’s hard to muster up a lot of political support for change. Inertia wins the day.
My somewhat elitist response is that 99% of the population now believes the name. I.e. to oppose the “patriot” act means you are not a patriot, are against patriotism, etc. etc.
Really? My impression is that it has become the opposite, a go to example of an obviously manipulative title that ended up doing little good, for at least half but probably more like 2/3 of the population.
I remember it being quite controversial at the time, at least among the high school teachers, college professors, and their leftist student fanboys/girls I was often in physical proximity to when the Patriot Act was still fresh. (I know it was far less controversial among congresspeople.)
Warning: CW-heavy even by hidden thread standards. Not intended as a personal attack on anyone here.
Trump’s affection for hydroxychloroquine – which is of dubious efficacy for COVID-19 treatment – is pretty well-known here at this point. However, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Trump-like president, is also a hydroxychloroquine fan. Additionally, Hungary and India – both governed by right-wing populists as well – banned export of hydroxychloroquine early on in the pandemic and never rescinded this decree; AFAIK, other nations that have major local HCQ producers (e.g. France, Israel) haven’t taken this step.
Is there something that makes right-wing populist leaders like Trump, Bolsonaro, and others more susceptible to pseudomedicine memes like belief in the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine? Belief in the effectiveness of this drug, along with pseudoscientific explanations for its properties (like the infamous now-debunked Medium post claiming that COVID-19 somehow destroyed hemoglobin) seem to me to be much more popular among the populist right than in the rest of the political ecosystem. Other pseudomedical beliefs, like anti-vaccination, seem more evenly distributed among the political spectrum, so I’m curious as to what makes faith in HCQ so unevenly distributed.
Edit: India did start exporting HCQ again, although it appears to have done so specifically because Trump made a direct appeal to Modi.
Very speculatively, it is an old school medicine. It conjours up romantic images of british colonialists drinking gin and tonics, of adventurers like Teddy Roosevelt. Trump and Bolsanaro have probably been on African safaris, at which gin and tonics are served constantly.
Good point. That was *my* association with it, having read so much about the use of quinine. The media never seemed to make this connection, and were treating it like this bizarre thing. I initially thought it was hydroxychloroquinine, and I remember googling it, figuring they must be related, and I swear Wikipedia and others at the time referred to it as a synthetic version of something else, I think “chloroquine,” making no mention of quinine. So I thought I was wrong, but since then the Wikipedia post has definitely been rewritten to go into the deeper controversy, and now it is easy to find references to it as synthetic quinine. Idk what that was about.
I think Trump may have just brought it up as one of many options he’d heard of from doctors or scientists. He naturally gets excited about things and really wants something to turn up, so he reacts with optimistic comments. The media reacted absurdly for weeks, therefore increasing Trump’s interest and desire to push back on it. Tons of tests have been done using it, with varying results, and the pathetically politicized conversation has been really disgraceful. I would say it at that point became a symbol around which people sorted themselves into tribes. I can’t be sure, but the connection may simply be from that. Bolsonaro knows people lump him in with Trump, and that they both drive a certain crowd crazy. Like Trump, he enjoys taunting. He may have developed an interest in the drug mainly to make that crowd flip out, which it did, possibly to distract from his other troubles. Orban openly admits to his “peacock dance” of creating international culture war drama to distract from other more substantive things he’s doing. India is likely to have a lot of access to a drug like HCQ because it is cheap and because they have a history of quinine use. It may be the only drug they have a decent supply of in some lower-income countries.
Basically, if there’s a meaningful connection between any of this, it’s unlikely to be related to politics itself. Trump is more Bolsonaro-like and Orban-like in personality than in politics or governing style—they like to tangle, which means they make good opposition leaders—at least in the current era, that personality works well with populism. I think it is quite likely that Trump has started taking the drug in part because of the absurd pushback he got, particularly the suggestion that it was extremely dangerous and he was too callous to care about death that could result from following his advice. If he’s willing to take it himself, it’s clear his comments weren’t as reckless as some portrayed them. I mean, when he announced he was taking it, he said he’d been waiting all week to watch their eyes light up at his remarks. He didn’t try to hide the taunting aspect.
Or, it may be that quite a few leaders of all backgrounds are trying it, given their likelihood of exposure and its availability, but that the ones afraid of being associated with Trump now (insanely) can’t admit they are taking it without causing a scandal. The NHS can’t admit to giving Boris Johnson special treatment so it is has refused to comment on the issue of what medications might have been tried with him. It’s quite possible this one was used.
+1 for GearRatio’s point below:
Question: how the fuck would Trump even know how to pronounce the word if somebody in the CDC/FDA/whatever hadn’t told him about it?
Never tell the boss about a promising new opportunity unless you want him to give everybody in his Rolodex an elevator pitch about it. That is the bosses job! It is therefore not a surprise that the people in Trump’s Rolodex have invested exactly as much into the subject as you would expect them to from receiving an elevator pitch from Trump. The responses, naturally, run the spectrum from “I told you to never call me at this number again” to “I hadn’t heard of that so we’ll look into it” to “that sounds good enough to have my people call your people.”
This is exactly the range of response one expects from receiving any elevator pitch. And the organizational responses neatly maps onto the response one would expect from being asked by their boss to look into it in light of the publicly available information on the subject. So honestly it is hard to say that Trump has even been particularly unsuccessful in this regard.
Honestly I don’t see anything CW here. Ignoring of course the media hysterics on the subject.
So I know jack-shit about this drug in particular and how Covid is likely to react to various drugs in general, but keep this in mind:
There’s a near-0% chance that Trump just spontaneously knows about this obscure drug, is fond of it, and has decided to hitch his horse to the drug for no reason in a situation where it clearly doesn’t work.
What’s hugely more likely in the “generic contest” version of this story with his name stipped out is that he was at some point early on briefed about possible Covid treatments and this was one of the things mentioned. As we know, the entire establishment media then dog-piled on it as if it were the world’s most ridiculous thing – but it’s incredibly likely they were dog-piling on something that was proposed by a top-notch public health scientist or doctor.
I find the above to be the most likely possible situation. After that happens, we have a few possibilities:
A. The drug doesn’t work. Trump sticking to his guns is possibly killing people. (If there’s a confirmed case of someone dying of this drug when not plausibly being poisoned by their spouse, omit “possibly”)
B. The drug does work. The media in its efforts to hurt Trump is for-sure killing people.
C. The drug possibly works; either the media sticking to its guns in trying to fuck over Trump or Trump sticking to his guns to spite the media is making it harder to research if it’s useful or not.
A quick check then produces this. This NPR article indicates that C is probably correct.
So what you have here, I think, is a situation something like this: Trump was almost certainly told by a qualified advisor that a drug was potentially helpful for Covid. He mentioned this, and the Media/Twitter crowd decided it wasn’t and then spent a few months accusing him of murder over mentioning it. Trump refused to back down. Now it’s very difficult to see if it works or not because of needless controversy, caused by both sides, over a potentially needed or potentially useless pharmaceutical.
To answer your question more specifically, the question “Why does Trump and other Trump-ish people like this potentially useless drug?” is fair, but it’s no more fair than “Why are the media and a majority of world governments willing to single out a potentially helpful drug in such a way that has rendered difficult or impossible to study?”.
I’m on the right, so it doesn’t take much squinting for me to see a “fuck this drug, no matter what it is, because we secretly hate Trump” mindset existing. Doubly so because I vape – “Fuck this seemingly safe alternative to smoking people like because we secretly hate smokers” is the currency of the public health realm on that topic. So I’m not sure it’s as clear cut as the “Why do dumb people like this stupid drug?” version of your question I see some places – to me it’s just as easily “Why is public health often willing to sacrifice people’s lives to punish a disliked other?”
+1 to all of this.
FWIW, I’m just trying to understand why Trump and Trump-like leaders are trying to support the use of HCQ. I’m not trying to imply anything about the mindset of rank-and-file conservatives.
As to your point, I don’t see an easy way for the media to modulate their discussion of hydroxychloroquine in such a way that they can convey that people shouldn’t take it without a doctor’s recommendation without making people think that it’s dangerous. The average person is, in my experience, bad at taking a nuanced approach to medicine. The onus is at least as much on Trump as it is on the media, though – he’s the President, after all. The power of the bully pulpit comes with special responsibilities, in my opinion. I just want to know why he’s so hell-bent on promoting the stuff.
I don’t think there’s any way to prove this, but I’d be pretty shocked if a world where the media had let Trump mention he was taking a particular medication and thought it was good mostly just pass would have resulted in more people knowing about this drug than not.
Before this subject hits me “let’s think hard about this” filter, I 100% want to take this drug because the tribe part of my brain is going “It’s pretty clear the president has been prescribed this by his doctor; at least some uber-high level physicians think it’s a good idea. The media / CDC / FDA say not to, but all of them pretty demonstrably hate me and want me dead for other reasons and are usually or always choosing their actions based on their own self interest.
Now, I have a “let’s think about this again” reflex I’ve built, but some don’t; I’m not sure the “Let’s amplify the ‘Trump likes this drug but we don’t angle to a huge degree, but then tell them not to do it” math works out in favor of less unauthorized use.
I don’t know that this is knowable, but I’d guess it’s a combination of these things:
1. Medical advisors have told them it’s a good idea or potentially a good idea; in a world where the other available advice is “Well, ventilators if it gets bad, I guess, and maybe a vaccine eventually?” they are motivated to mention other potential treatments.
2. Behind closed doors, more people than just these few think the drug has potential and/or works, but barring hard proof don’t want to let Trump dunk on them.
3. The current popular media narrative is “The only acceptable way to talk about this drug is to say there’s no reason to believe it works or could work and to then talk about how dangerous it is to take”. In that environment, if one party affiliation is more likely to be able to get away with talking in the non-approved way, that’s the party that you will see doing it.
On the flip side, you also have:
4. Trump Et Al are stupid or corrupt in some way; they especially like the name of this drug or something to the point where they take it and laud it for no reason, or they have money invested in or coming from companies that make this drug.
To me, it feels very plausible that there was some legitimate interest and hope in this drug before Trump mentioned it and made it a republican pharmaceutical, and that whatever interest and hope remains in it in the medical/ph are to some extent suppressed from what they would otherwise be. I know that doesn’t feel equally plausible to everyone.
I am pretty sure I remember seeing some positive coverage, representing it as a drug there was some reason to think might help and one that had been used a lot for other purposes so was well known, before Trump mentioned it. I believe there had been some early positive news on it from China.
I just don’t see how you can argue the coverage was anywhere near proportional or motivated mainly by concern. This isn’t about whether it was biased against Trump, but whether it seemed almost driven mad for weeks. There was a frankly deranged and counterproductive quality to it that probably made no one safer. Trump is responsible for what he says, but it’s not clear what he said did any damage. As much as he enjoys war with the media, I don’t think even he could have predicted that meltdown by the media on this particular issue, so I can’t really hold him responsible for the fact that it made the drug harder to research. They also did it again a few days later with the disinfectant comment—again, he advised no one to take it, but brought up a vague suggestion that could hardly be followed up on. There was really no need for the media to protect the public from the effect of those remarks. And I remember the Atlantic posting a dramatic article titled, “The World is Laughing At Us,” mainly about that comment. They weren’t worried about the public, or even the pandemic, but that other countries laughed at us because Trump said silly things. Good God.
All day long, people can scroll through Twitter and everything else and see all sorts of possible suggestions for things that might work, including medications like HCQ, some from doctors and scientists and other influential people. Does the media spend any meaningful time rebutting these? Trump didn’t tell anyone to take it, which would have been different. Most people know you don’t take random prescription medication and don’t have easy access to it. If he’d recommended something easily found in household stuff that seemed harmless (like fish tank cleaner, but that’s pushing it)–say he’d recommended large doses of Tylenol or something—that would have been far more dangerous and worth correcting. Yes, people are dumb, and some will order it off the internet or something, but most people who are dumb about this stuff don’t put in that kind of effort. People really determined to try some drug could have found references to it from people other than Trump all over the web. There was no reason to assume the mere mention of HCQ posed a threat to any significant number of Americans.
You can say, “well even one is too many, can’t be too careful” but if hysteria is now the appropriate standard in the face of any threat, where was all the hysteria about the bad advice being given by tons of other politicians and health organizations? The danger there was vastly greater. The point is not “whataboutism,” or even right/left, expert/non-expert, but that the media response had precious little to do with HCQ, and a great deal to do with Trump. The HCQ thing at times overshadowed the entire pandemic! And usually it wasn’t warning about needing doctor’s advice, or giving any other particularly protective information, but rather insisting that the drug hadn’t been proven effective. The message was not, “so you should hold off as we wait for more studies, and hope we find some good news eventually,” but that Trump had been wrong.
There was so much going on that could have used a response of such energy. For example, in Boston and other places, the messaging about COVID-19 was so apocalyptic and also vague that people were afraid to go to the hospital even with life-threatening health problems. Some seem to have thought they could wait it out, what with messages that we were ending the latest two-week period and no officials being honest that this wasn’t going away anytime soon. As you say, some people don’t understand the complexities. So you had children with burst appendixes waiting way too long because of their parents’ fear—the risk to children is clearly low enough that the appendix issue should override any fears for someone who is well-informed. But many people were not well-informed, because the government unintentionally portrayed the hospitals as COVID-19 only and probable death traps that you should avoid at all possible cost, when they meant to convey you should avoid them unless it is reasonably necessary and urgent. It would have been helpful for the press to have gotten in there and corrected the message for the sake of the public, as I’m sure the threat was greater. I could give several examples in that line.
In another post, I explained why I thought Trump promoted it. Initially, he wasn’t promoting it, just mentioning it along with other things. Then he started tangling with the media, and sometimes mentions it to get a rise out of them. It developed a life of its own. He often develops little fixations on things that don’t appear to have much of a deeper meaning. It’s really not specific to this drug. I’m sure there are other things or people he’s been more stuck on lately.
As a bit of data supporting you, CNN continues to refer to HCQ in their headlines as “Drug touted by Trump…”
The simplest answer is probably something like: Given the perception that right-leaning leaders want to re-open as soon as possible, while left-leaning leaders want to keep extending lockdowns indefinitely, possibly until a vaccine is developed (note, I am not saying this is true and I have argued against it in the past, but it does seem to be the common perception)… right-leaning leaders are more likely to positively promote any promising short-term solutions that would justify re-opening quickly, whereas left-leaning leaders are more likely to be skeptical and poo-poo such potential solutions.
And note that it’s not JUST HCQ. Trump has also been mocked/criticize for favorably endorsing other potential remedies, which the media gleefully reported as “Trump suggests injecting Lysol” and “Trump thinks blasting yourself with UV rays will kill COVID”
People see what they want to see. Trump wants to see “there’s stuff available that can help us fight this and get back to normal in the short-term.” Trump opponents want to see “We need stronger lockdowns probably until a vaccine.” So Trump sees some evidence HCQ works and anchors to that, his opponents see some that it doesn’t and anchor to that…
It’s a prescription drug. It is not legally possible to take it “without a doctor’s recommendation.” Taking any prescription drug without a doctor’s recommendation is something people shouldn’t do.
What the media, and various anti-Trump politicians, seem to be arguing is that people shouldn’t be allowed to take HCQ even with a doctor’s recommendation which basically undoes decades of precedent of allowing off-label prescribing. What they are implicitly saying is that even doctors cannot be trusted to properly judge the risk/reward of this drug, and the option of prescribing it should be taken away from them.
Good point. I kind of forgot that part. I think it was actually banned in some cases, by certain states, hospitals, or organizations. As far as I could tell, it was mainly driven by a desire to signal that what Trump was doing wasn’t okay, as it seemed politically risky under any other circumstances to ban anything that could possibly help, unless the FDA objected.
Also, this just came out — totally nuts.
Klobuchar mocked Trump for taking HCQ, saying it causes hallucinations, which, whatever, but last month, she indicated her husband had probably been treated with it. She explained it depends on what your individual condition is and what your doctor recommends, which is surely sensible. She then said, “I think people have to look at what works. I believe in science, something this president has been not listening to.” Somehow, it is just not possible to use this medication without being seen as siding with Trump, and it requires extensive justification and distancing.
This is just absurd.
How did we get to this point?
My recollection of this is that support for HCQ got popular on Fox/other conservative media circles, then Trump started talking about it. This makes me thing the process was more like: Trump sees something about it on TV, gets interested in it, mentioned it…” I don’t think there’s any necessary implication of the qualified advisor telling him HCQ is worth pursuing.
If this is true, it would change my views on this somewhat – I’d have to think about how much.
I mean that’s a possibility, but then that would show that HCQ was not some crackpot Trump snake oil but something that had been being promoted as a possible treatment.
Which is how I remember it, FWIW. I heard about HCQ before Trump and CNN started fighting about it, and from a non-right wing source, as something some doctors believed might be a promising treatment.
Right, it was promising initially. It was fine to be optimistic about HCQ back in March (though of course, if Trump had been an SSC reader, he would have known that the vast majority of early promising results don’t hold up).
Then a bunch of better-quality studies came out showing no significant positive effects on average, but Trump is sticking to his guns, because Trump is not the sort of person who backs down to a bunch of nerdy scientists who probably didn’t vote for him anyway.
(It is true that lots of HCQ boosters think that HCQ needs to be applied early in the illness to have an effect, and the studies largely didn’t do that. OTOH Trump claims he is taking HCQ when he’s not even sick, and that’s just a completely crazy thing to do AFAICT.)
Certainly, you can criticize Trump for getting ahead of the science, and then sticking to his guns for too long as the science started to fall apart. But you should be equally critical of the media narrative that got way ahead of the science when they more or less immediately turned “Trump is being overly optimistic about a promising but unproven treatment” into “Noted anti-science dumbass Donald Trump pushes obvious snake oil… HOW MANY MURDERS IS HE PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR?!”
I don’t think that’s fair. To be sure, Trump is not the kind of person to readily admit his mistakes. But the fact that this got turned into a partisan issue almost instantly left him with no way to gracefully shift his position without this getting used as further ammo against him. In a friendlier media environment, the President could both promote a promising treatment to give people some good news and let the issue quietly die when it didn’t pan out. But that’s not the environment we are operating in.
It’s less “screw those science nerds” and more “Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t” so it should be no surprise he takes the route that doesn’t require standing in front of his opponents and admitting he was wrong.
the fact that this got turned into a partisan issue almost instantly left him with no way to gracefully shift his position without this getting used as further ammo against him
Sure there is. He could have just stopped talking about it and everyone would have moved on to other things by now.
you should be equally critical of the media narrative
eh maybe. If someone was calling it snake oil in March that’s definitely bad (though urging people not to go out and take it would be good).
But Trump is claiming that he’s taking it right now when he’s not sick, and AFAICT that fully deserves to be called snake oil.
I think this is correct. Utah embraced hydroxychloroquine before Trump did so, or at least before Trump did so publically. Reports from pharmacists suggest it was being used for COVID-19 treatment even back in early March.
Yep. This is what Scott calls a “flag” issue.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/
Does it matter whether we eat our eggs from the fat end or the skinny end? Well, eating them the wrong way is how our outgroup does it, so yes, you better believe it matters!!
My start position on hydroxy is that it probably “has slight benefits, generally not worth the side effects.” I am not at all tightly wedded to that spot, but it gives me lots of breathing room.
Maybe in time HCQ will prove to be a good treatment. Maybe it will turn out to be a bad treatment. Possibly neither, but if it does turn out to be one of the first two cases the people in a given camp will resist the evidence as long as they can.
People don’t like to hear it but our beliefs really are that shallow and smart people aren’t resistant. Sure, everyone has their own core beliefs that they actually care about but everything else mostly comes down to group dynamics.
Resisting this is one reason for Paul Graham’s advice: Keep Your Identity Small
Whenever a question of fact is a moral or tribal issue to you, you’re sabotaging your brain.
When Trump started talking about it, hydroxychloroquine was one of the standard drugs that hospitals were trying on their very sick C19 patients. This was at a time when hospitals were trying all kinds of different protocols in hopes of doing *something* for their patients. I’ve heard a couple interviews with a NYC doctor on TWIV where he talked about his hospital’s protocol for C19, which was hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin + (I think) steroids at some point. At other hospitals they were trying other things–cortisone, zinc, whatever the hell they had that they could throw at it.
I imagine he heard about it then from his advisors, and decided he’d give it a shot. I gather more recent data suggests it’s not too useful, but that’s still debatable. (Also, I think taking it preventatively probably never made sense–the mechanism I’ve heard hypothesized for how it might help in COVID involved suppressing the immune overreaction that messes up your lungs, and if that’s going to happen, it will probably be a week or two after you’re infected.)
“(Also, I think taking it preventatively probably never made sense–the mechanism I’ve heard hypothesized for how it might help in COVID involved suppressing the immune overreaction that messes up your lungs, and if that’s going to happen, it will probably be a week or two after you’re infected.)”
This is not correct.
The theorised mechanism of HCQ in prophylaxis is via direct inhibition of viral entry and unpacking via effects on lysosomes. That’s a mechanism based on some very well established in vitro data in other viral infections. Cue unresolved questions about in vivo effects and relevance to COVID.
The immunosuppressive effect of HCQ as used in inflammatory arthropathies and SLE is an effect via a different mechanism that takes a long time to manifest. Separate from the prophylaxis discussion.
You’re assuming HCQ isn’t actually effective, which is not clear in the slightest. The hypothesized effect is as an antiviral, which would mean you need to get it early in the course of the disease or prophylactically. There’s been no RCT of such a test; all of the studies so far have been with people at deaths door already. It’d be nice to see such an experiment. Bonus points if zinc is tested alongside. The popular reporting on this has been abysmally ignorant.
The original hypothesized use of HCQ wasn’t prophylactic, per the well-known Raoult paper, dated March 20th, where it was used for both asymptomatic and symptomatic patients. Subsequent observational studies (including one with n>1000) have not demonstrated any statistically significant improvement in outcomes, with or without azithromycin. Studies on prophylactic treatment with HCQ are harder to come by, but those that have been performed have thus far found no prophylactic benefit, and simulations suggest that massive doses would be necessary even if it was effective. Obviously, proving that a drug has no prophylactic benefit is challenging, but thus far, I haven’t seen any substantial study supporting hydroxychloroquine as either a prophylactic or therapeutic intervention. All of the supporting evidence seems to me to be primarily anecdotal, and basic medical precaution would suggest that using it is extremely unwise.
I don’t really want to get into a debate about the science of whether it’s effective. I’m not an expert, but there are a lot of other experts who are not convinced by the papers you linked (And why should they be? They’re flawed.) You asked a question about why this group of people you don’t seem to like that much are taking HCQ, when the obvious hypothesis is that their doctors/advisors judge in the totality of all evidence that it’s safer to take HCQ.
If so, the question is, why do their doctors/advisors believe that HCQ is safer when the majority of the medical establishment doesn’t seem to think so, AFAICT? If Trump isn’t the source of HCQ becoming a conservative shibboleth, who is?
> who is?
When I first heard about HCQ from a French doctor, I was hopeful because I am biased to believe the French are competent in medical science. But when I saw a photo of Dr. Raoult, it rang all my alarm bells for attention-seeking iconoclast.
https://www.google.com/search?q=raoult&source=lnms&tbm=isch
Which I realize is purely an appearances-based judgement, but there are also other details such as living and working in the south of France (equivalent of conservative Orange County in California, not liberal Santa Cruz). Reading his Wikipedia page, he’s definitely not a quack, but I’m inclined to believe he has blind spots.
We should all reread https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/
People on one side will pick apart the studies that show results that disagree with their priors. They are flawed. And they are right: all studies are flawed.
There are studies that show positive effects of HCQ. There are studies that don’t show it. I have zero interest in trying to debunk or whatever the studies on one side or the other.
That’s fair. AFAICT, the bulk of the evidence is on the anti-HCQ side. There are some studies that show positive effects, but they tend to have much lower sample sizes than those that show no or overall negative effects.
My gut sense, and maybe this is wrong, is that “the bulk” of evidence is against HCQ as an all purpose anti-COVID drug, but it may still be useful in certain cases and in certain cocktails.
Sort of like how every study of SSRIs shows them as having only small effects, but in reality it’s more like a bimodal distribution – for many people a particular drug doesn’t help much or at all, but for the right patient it is very effective.
I think that may well be correct, but the risks associated with HCQ are substantial enough that extensive use is not net-positive.
1. People tried *lots* of things early in the outbreak, and are trying new ones still, and that will continue until we end up with either a treatment or a vaccine or the disease burns itself out. Hydrochloroquine was one of the early things people tried that seemed like it worked and plausibly might work. Most such things turn out not to work when you examine them carefully. Probably that’s the way to bet for HCQ as well, but who knows?
2. If Donald Trump or his detractors’ stated position on HCQ has any effect on your evaluation of this question, you’re probably sabotaging your brain. Trump isn’t any kind of great source of medical advice, but he’s also not an inverse weathervane. Nor is the NYT.
I think the weaker assumption that the balance of the evidence provides no reason to believe that HCQ is beneficial, and does definitely show that it carries risks, is clear, and is sufficient to support the OP’s point.
After all, there’s no clear evidence that, say, marsh marigolds aren’t effective against coronavirus either.
broblawsky cherry-picked countries. HCQ is the standard of care in South Korea and Italy, too.
Even if that’s true, it doesn’t prove that it’s effective.
A distrust of experts that are perceived to be liberal-aligned.
I think part of the answer, not for that drug in particular, is that the scientific establishment is viewed from the right as largely captured by the left — consider the case of Scientific American — hence its advice, even on non-political matters, is distrusted.
I feel like this is mixing up cause-and-effect? Or at least mixing up correlation and causation? I don’t think these people distrust the academic and scientific establishment because they’re right-wing populists, I think they’re right-populists because they distrust the establishment. Both their distrust of skepticism of liberal politics and their skepticism of the academic/scientific/medical establishment comes from a deeper set of assumptions about the world and how it works.
This, and the rest of your post, seems like it means this:
Does it, or does it mean something else?
Does that seem like a charitable reading of my comment? Do you think this interpretation is true or necessary?
LadyJane: That’s why I’m asking. David posted something that said, essentially, “These people don’t trust this drug because they don’t trust these people, and they don’t trust these people because they believe them, based on some evidence, to be subverted by politics”. You posted something else that asks if it’s for another reason, but it’s hard for me to parse exactly what you are saying that reason is.
If somebody’s reasons to distrust the establishment are reasons that have to do with what those things are, it’s a different thing from “Well, those people just have deeper assumptions about the world in general, that’s just how they are”.
But I specifically didn’t/don’t want to make an uncharitable assumption her. So I’m asking something like this:
I’m not accusing you of saying that – I’m asking for clarification.
Let me give my personal angle on Lady Jane’s point.
I grew up at the core of an academic insurgency that largely won. That makes me much more willing to distrust a current professional consensus than I would otherwise be.
To expand on that. A fellow Harvard undergraduate, c. 1963, commented to me that he couldn’t take an econ course at Chicago because he would burst out laughing. I am reasonably confident that he did not know that I was the son of the leading figure in the Chicago school.
I think his comment accurately reflected the attitude of most of the Harvard econ faculty, including whoever taught the introductory course he had taken, and most of the elite profession, at the time.
People broadly associated with the Chicago school ended up getting at least four Nobel prizes in economics, and some of the views that were at the time confidently rejected at Harvard and MIT eventually became part of the orthodoxy of the field.
I think that is part of the reason that, on issues such as population and climate, my attitude is not “I am told that all the experts believe X so it is probably true” but “what are the arguments and evidence for X?” Also why I find it more interesting to look for arguments against current orthodoxies than for them.
I can easily enough imagine analogous experiences in other contexts leading other people to be skeptical of the orthodoxies they were confronted with.
@GearRatio: No, I don’t think they operate on “raw instinct” like unthinking beasts. “Less rational” and “more emotional” might be part of it, for some of them, but that’s not quite what I was getting at either. If anything, I’d say a better description would be “more inclined to trust conventional wisdom and traditional folk solutions than the findings of experts,” which isn’t necessarily irrational or emotionally-driven (though it often can be).
I’d say the modern anti-establishment skeptic movement is a somewhat uneasy alliance between those types of folksy “common sense” traditionalists, and intellectuals who reject the orthodox academic consensus for some sort of heterodox academic theory, as David Friedman described. It could be equated to a rebellious teenager siding with his grandfather against his father.
As for my own stance, I’m mildly skeptical of establishment sources, but I still tend to trust them far more than I trust the bulk of anti-establishment sources. I weigh news from CNN and BBC higher than what I’d see on Drudge Report, and vastly higher than anything I’d ever see on InfoWars. If someone starts talking about how the Holocaust never happened, or how the USSR was actually a workers’ paradise and it’s only capitalist propaganda that says otherwise, or how the government is actually run by a cabal of DMT-using Satanists who get their orders from interdimensional lizard aliens trying to eradicate all life of Earth, I won’t be inclined to take them very seriously.
I read it as possibly indicating preferences about, among other things, control, legibility, and efficiency, and “Righteous Mind” type “flavors” of morality. Sounds like I was incorrect, but it made me think of something that keeps nagging at me.
While I do think things like receptivity to folk wisdom and an awareness of expert fallibility are often involved, rarely mentioned are people who may not listen to any of the experts and also not listen to folk wisdom. There are people out there, and I don’t think they’re all populists but I’d imagine there is significant overlap, who just take life as it comes. They don’t look for a lot of advice or feel a need to plan with certain expectations in mind. They don’t feel a need to take responsibility for every contingency and head it off. They don’t need outside validation, and don’t respond to people telling them what to do. They may not have particularly negative feelings toward experts, and they generally don’t have crazy beliefs, but they lack a proactive approach that appears to many irrational and gets them lumped in with anti-vaxxers. Like, some of them may have no real objection to vaccines, but just never get vaccinated because they’re not big on doctors. But that doesn’t mean they’re into alternative medicine. They probably have a general, “if it’s my time to go, then it’s my time,” attitude towards death. Most people have such an obsession with feeling in control that they won’t acknowledge this group.
The point I like to make is that all of us function largely on second-hand information, because nobody has enough first-hand data. If you have found a particular source of information, say your church’s pastor, to be reliable in the areas where you have interacted with him, it’s rational to accept his view in other areas where you think he knows more than you do, not as certain but as what you are willing to go on. If he tells you that evolution is nonsense invented by atheists to discredit the bible it is rational to believe him unless knowing whether evolution is true is actually important to you, in which case you might want to look for additional sources and perhaps examine the arguments yourself.
This is true on the “scientific” side of an argument too. Most of the people who believe in evolution couldn’t give an accurate explanation and defense of it. It’s even true of the scientists. If you are a climate scientist whose specialty is elaborate mathematical models of climate you may believe you are competent to know what views of global warming and its effects are true but you are not, because you have to take on faith both the other scientists producing information feeding into your work and the people taking what comes out of your work, and that of other workers, and deducing from it the effect on the world. The expert on climate models isn’t an expert on the use of proxies for past climate or the effect of CO2 concentration on crop yields or lots of other things that combine to produce the final conclusion.
Getting back to LadyJane’s point, if in your own experience you have found what was represented to use as the expert consensus to be wrong, you will rationally lower the weight you give to it on other issues.
I think there is a good chance Trump is lying about taking the drug, simply because he’s not as dumb as he acts. The Qanon fans I follow on Twitter have a made a big thing about how this drug saves lives and the media says it doesn’t because they want people to die. I suspect Trump lied about taking the drug in order to play to that part of his base but more importantly to control the news cycle.
Bolsonaro has simply hitched his wagon to Trump.
Doesn’t seem like a big mystery, if you take the timeline into consideration. A populist leader wants to be seen as able to solve problems, and is less likely to hedge his bets. In the beginning hcq looked good, was a possible solution and gave something to do. So the default thing for a strong leader to do is say “we’re ok, we’re doing X and Y and Z and look, we also have a drug that works”. And make moves to buy/produce/protect it. Once you do this you kinda have to stick with it, especially since it hasn’t been clearly invalidated. And even then, the default political move is to still say “yes it works” but only when you really really have to, and ignore it the rest of the time.
What’s unique to HCQ is that it was an obvious possible solution at the time. What’s unique to those leaders is they want to be seen as problem solvers and they’re less afraid to be publicly wrong.
Your assumption is wrong. Many non right-wing authoritarian countries have included HCQ in their treatment guidelines, for example the Netherlands, Italy, Korea and China. On the other hand, the fact that Israel did *not* ban the export of the drug also seems to not support your thesis, as Netanyahu is as right-wing as Trump is.
The only unique phenomenon that is left is two right wing policians very publicly endorsing the drug, Bolsonaro and Trump. Since they are both invested in the virus not being a big deal but less invested in being truthful, them promoting an unproven drug to reduce fears among the population does not seem surprising at all.
Your link doesn’t strike me as a debunking so much as a lot of dark hinting that the original Medium piece is bunk without any actual argumentation or new facts about hemoglobin pathologies. I don’t have a strong opinion on the fact of the matter one way or the other, but I didn’t before, either.
The “evidence” for COVID-19 attacking hemoglobin is basically nonexistent; it consists of a single set of simulations. I don’t think anyone needs to put any extra effort into disproving a theory when there’s no actual experimental evidence in support of it.
Without making political comment, what has struck me is that the debate in mainstream/political areas is often not congruent with the debate in scientific/medical circles. They’re two parallel arguments that largely don’t interact outside of a) initial studies or b) paradigm shifts. That’s true for lots of things but more magnified in this situation.
Electric Guitar guys and electrical engineers of SSC:
I’m shielding an electric bass, which involves lining the inside of the thing with copper tape. My understanding is this copper bubble has to be grounded; if I line the bass in such a way that the output jack is in pretty good contact with it once it’s bolted back in, do I have to solder it on still? I’m not sure how robust the contact has to be since I’m imagining it’s a pretty weak current.
Current has nothing to do with it. If there is no contact, it won’t be grounded. If it is “not robust” i.e. in contact some times and not others, then sometimes it will be grounded and sometimes it won’t. The switch between these two states will involve noisy transients, probably literally noisy in this application.
I’m probably making this unnecessarily hard by being unclear, sorry. Let me put it another way:
I’m pretty sure I can cinch it underneath the washer that sits underneath the output jack nut well enough that it should never not have some decent level of contact. If it did slip, it would be an easy fix. Is there any reason to think that an interruption, if it happened, would be damaging for the device or dangerous to me?
Oh, so that’s why you mentioned the small currents. No, you and the guitar should be fine. Although I still think it’s probably worth it to solder it just to save possible trouble later.
When I was a teenager playing in a garage band with my Les Paul Deluxe I would often play barefoot and also sometimes get shocked by my guitar. Don’t know what the issue was but someone told me I was dumb not to wear shoes and could have been electrocuted.
I’ve had minor shocks from several basses before; I could never figure out why or get it to re-occur on any schedule besides “once every couple of years”.
Gonna be honest: That’s a pretty sick guitar for teenaged you to have.
I mentally inserted “Epiphone” in front without even realizing it, but yeah you’re right.
Then again, there was this band at my high school mostly comprised of the “rich kids”. The lead singer and guitarist played a legit SG.
Say we have two people with headaches, Bob and Joe. Bob has a severe headache that’s quickly getting worse, so he takes some Tylenol. The Tylenol calms his headache back down to a mild headache. Joe, on the other hand, only has a mild headache that doesn’t seem to be getting much worse. So he doesn’t take the Tylenol.
Later, Bob and Joe both go to the doctor.
“Aha!” says the doctor. “Bob and Joe both have headaches. Bob took Tylenol, while Joe didn’t. And yet Bob and Joe’s headaches are both equally mild! I guess Tylenol is pretty useless for headaches.”
After reading Scott’s latest Coronalinks post, I’m wondering if something like this might be happening with all the countries that have different levels of lockdown measures, but still seem to have similarly severe outbreaks. The most prominent example would be Sweden (analogous to Joe) vs neighboring European countries (analogous to Bob, who takes the Tylenol (lockdown measures)). Is there any evidence confirming or going against this interpretation?
If I’m understanding the point of the analogy, you should look at how much pain each patient was having before they took/chose not to take Tylenol. The problem is that we have many patients that by the end either had major headaches (Wuhan, Lombardy, Iran, New York) or moderate headaches (rest of USA, rest of Europe) or no headaches (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan) and some strange mix of them took some strange mix of supposed painkillers, at different dates, but some ended up in each group.
This was my impression too. I think the timing of when lockdowns were implemented relative to how many cases or deaths there were – or from day of first / 100th case – would show a stronger effect for lockdowns rather than “did place lockdown or not” vs “how bad is it now”.
Sweden vs rest is probably the most logical part of the whole situation. We have pretty much what we expected to have: Sweden has many more deaths now, less economic harm, and best we can guess, will end up with about as many deaths overall – but we won’t know for sure until it’s over and probably argue a lot about ways to count. The only unexpected factor is that they managed to avoid overwhelming their ICUs. And actually as far as I can tell, overwhelming only happened in Wuhan and Lombardy (and in a lot of small hotspots, like Suceava Romania). I don’t think we’re risking it anymore, now that we know a bit more about how Covid works.
As far as differences vs cofounders, that’s due to how the situation is structured. You have a bunch of factors that each can influence R quite a lot. A good guess would be around 20. Some are the same for neighboring countries – like weather, some differ quite a lot – like how many seniors live in retirement homes. Which leaves you with a very spotted map, overall. Add to this the timing of when various measures were implemented, where a two week difference can move the height of the peak either A LOT (for countries with a high R) or not that much, if R was closer to 1 from the beginning.
So you end up with a picture that doesn’t lend itself well to any simple explanation or model.
If 30% of Sweden has gotten or gotten over coronavirus, like I thought a week or two ago, they are probably halfway to herd immunity and may be able to restart their economy sooner [1] without ever overwhelming their hospital system.
If 5% of Sweden has gotten or gotten over coronavirus, like recent research suggests (see thread below), then we are probably going to have a vaccine [2] long before herd immunity matters.
[1] Their economic picture right now doesn’t look better than their neighbors right now. The hope was that they would get over it sooner. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-to-contract-as-severely-as-the-rest-of-europe.html
[2] Maybe a risky vaccine with 1-in-10,000 side effects, but that’s safer than the disease.
Between common sense and financial predictions by respectable institutions, I’ll go with common sense with over 80% confidence. Sure, economies being globalized means getting away completely is out of the question, but I’d be shocked if there weren’t benefits for lighter lockdown. Including, well, plain hedonic ones, which are not negligible btw. We’re talking way more than a dust speck in 1.000.000 people’s eyes, here.
As for herd immunity, I also think the territory is different from the map. In two ways, at least, but it could be a lot more:
1. Herd immunity is dependent on R. Or to put it differently, percentage of immune people is just another factor along with many others that affect R. Plain old herd immunity (or R=1) might be 40-60% in regular conditions, but people did change their habits quite a lot, and we may well end up with a much lower effective herd immunity. How low?
2. Depends on population. If you’re an isolated village in the north, you’re effectively out of the picture. If you’re elderly and paranoid and stay home, again you don’t really count. The more exposed to the virus a certain segment is, the higher its immune count is likely to be – and that’s exactly where the need to lower R is greatest. It’s a self-balancing mechanism that dampens the epidemic in distinct populations.
Which areas of the U.S. were so badly damaged by soil erosion and unsustainable farming methods that they’re still barren today?
There are sections of West Tennessee like this–they aren’t precisely barren, but they are unfarmable and covered in random fast-growing junk like kudzu (imported for the purpose.) Some of the worst sections were bought by the government in the 1930s and are now Natchez Trace State Park.
The US has been steadily retiring marginal farmland from agriculture since the 1960s. Thus the definition of “unfarmable” expands.
In Caro’s opus 1 on Lyndon Johnson it mentions that Johnson County, named after his forefathers, west of Austin, had a thin layer of topsoil, and what seemed fertile land to the settlers turned into badland after a generation or two.
When did sustainable farming methods come along and how long were parts of the US farmed on a large scale before they appeared?
“Sustainable farming methods” is a bit of a confusing term–different farming methods are sustainable in different places, and are unsustainable elsewhere for different reasons.
A partial list:
1) Nitrogen depletion. When you read that tobacco and cotton were hard on the soil/used up the soil, so the planters continually cleared new ground-that’s nitrogen depletion. Several factors contribute: it’s much worse in hotter climates, so things that worked in Europe didn’t in the US; rotating crops with legumes in the rotation helps, since legumes can fix nitrogen. But primarily, this one was solved not by more sustainable farming methods, but by the Haber-Bosch process.
2) Water erosion. This is affected by slope, by soil type, and by farming methods. It’s worse once plowing becomes common (the steel moldboard plow, developed by John Deere in 1837, had a major impact). The real answer is “don’t farm the hills”, so reduced subsisistence-level farming really makes a major difference. Modern no-till farming also helps–that’s a development of the last 50 years or so.
3) Wind erosion. This is a problem in dry climates with fine soil, and is still fairly important.
There’s an interesting micro case of this near where I live known as the Desert of Maine. It’s something of a minor tourist attraction.
Providence Canyon in Georgia was created by runoff from farms.
link
Has anyone suggested filling the Canyon in to repair the damage?
How much would having a parent with criminal history affect your chances of getting a job in the US? What if it’s a political crime, like being an active member of the Black Panther party? As long as you don’t support the same radical ideas, that is. Would you be able to get a top job in the military? the civil service? law enforcement? the judiciary?
I was recently browsing the Internet, and realized that in Russia, apparently, having a criminal parent means you have no chance at a government job, basically. It would disqualify you for the police, Interior, prosecutors, etc. You also need to serve, if you’re male, but that’s another thing.
In Spain, AFAIUI, it doesn’t affect you at all. Not for politics, not for civil service.
If your parents’ crimes are political, it could reinforce your credentials, even. If you continue in the same criminally-inclined political movement, you’re gold. But if you decide to renounce terrorism and join a more moderate party, they’ll eat it up. Maybe because Spaniards are Catholics, there’s nothing they like more than the repentant politicians (and they also give preferential treatment to repentant terrorists). The Basque Country is full of turncoats who changed party from the fringe Basque nationalists to Spanish ones, and nobody seems to remind them of their past.
Very negligible, unless your parent’s crime was noteworthy. And even then, as cited in your example, those crimes may lend legitimacy. For example, the US had the “Weather Underground” movement that engaged in leftist political violence in the ’70s. The leaders of of that movement have gone on to hold respectable academic positions, while one (at least) is still in jail for murder. Notably, the son of the imprisoned member of WU was recently elected district attorney in San Francisco.
Pretty much the only areas where it might have an issue are jobs where a security clearance is required. You can be denied a security clearance for, among other reasons:
In effect, this means either certain government positions in federal law enforcement and intelligence, the state department, military (some Special Forces, some Intel especially SIGINT, etc), and government and private-sector jobs that involve working with classified material (technical work on our reconnaissance satellites or signals intelligence systems, nuclear weapons, stealth aircraft, etc etc).
But whether that’s a deal-breaker would depend on SECRET versus TOP SECRET clearance, the details of the individual circumstances, and the opinion of the people doing the investigation.
But does having a parent count as association or sympathy?
Would such things as your parents being divorced and you not being in regular contact with the one with a criminal past count? If you publicly and visibly denounce your parent’s criminal past, could you still be prevented from having a security clearance?
That should be the assumption. Depending on how by-the-book the relevant hiring authorities are, and how unique the position is, it might be overlooked. But most people are going to have some connection to their parents, and if they realize the parent makes them look bad, they’re likely to lie and claim to be estranged if the position is in the balance.
This is similar to a sub-plot in the Count of Monte Cristo, where the judge’s father’s imperial sympathies make him look bad, so he has him murdered.
It doesn’t automatically count as having such an association or sympathy, but it creates a presumption of it, which has to be disproved. Trofim gave a pretty good rundown.
I would be pretty surprised if Spain does not have some comparable system in place. It may not check for the same things or work the same way as the American one, and associated community is probably smaller sand lower profile than the American one, but it would be odd, and unwise, for the Spanish government not to check for suspicious family connections before entrusting an individual with state secrets — which is not the same thing as running for office or being socially or legally “rehabiliated”.
Spain’s upper echelons are full of people with dubious backgrounds. The whole of Spain is full of people who have people who committed many political crimes in the past.
If you start excluding the person with the father who was a rebel involved in a shootout with the police during the dictatorship, but don’t exclude the person whose father illegally tortured citizens, that can raise a lot of stink.
Spain is still a country with deep wounds from the Civil War. The things that happened during the dictatorships have been amnestied, and you can’t mention them, mostly. So, at least for political crimes before 1977, no, they won’t check for those.
I guess they do run background checks for the very top rungs. But they don’t for the base level; you can be an ordinary prosecutor, policeman, judge, etc., with a criminal in your family. In the US, it seems you can, also. In Russia, you can’t.
You vastly underestimate the number of people who have security clearances. To a first approximation, it’s anyone who does technical work for the DoD. Because anything that touches intelligence data has to be classified, and lots of things have a little tiny bit that is intelligence-related. So you can spend 95% of your time on the unclassified side, but if you have to touch that bit, then it’s time for a clearance, and go to the classified space to do that thing.
I can’t speak to how they treat parents with criminal records (at least in the areas of relevance, and not just a random assault charge 20 years ago or something) in the investigations. I suspect it’s a matter of you declaring it, and you’ll probably get interviewed about it.
Even “technical work” is probably too restrictive. I was an enlisted Yeoman, basically a glorified secretary, and they put me in for a secret clearance “just in case” I ever needed to handle classified documents.
In 9 years I think I handled like, two, and they were both from the 1940s, massively out of date, and were in the process of becoming declassified.
We had a phone on our ship’s bridge that technically could be used to pass classified information. That meant that our bridge was now a “restricted space” and everyone who had unimpeded access to it needed a secret clearance. That included 19 year old lookouts that we barely trusted to mop without supervision.
@Matt M
Good point, although I do wonder what percentage of Yeoman would actually need a clearance over 9 years. I’m not sure there’s a good way around the “just in case” rules, which I’ve seen in action elsewhere. (The lab is not normally full of classified information, but can be if we’re running certain tests. This means that everyone on the doors needs a clearance, and because of bureaucratic rules, it has to be a full clearance rather than an interim. Anyone else needs an escort. This is great fun for the 20% of the group with a full clearance when we’re hiring quickly.)
@Aftagley
I suspect it was more than that, at least in practice if not on paper. A ship’s bridge is going to have a lot of information that an observant person could easily put to bad use if they were passing it off to someone nefarious. So anyone who is going to be hanging around there probably should be checked. It’s basically the same reason that the White House mess staff get Yankee White clearances. It’s not that they need to know TS stuff, it’s just that they’re extremely likely to overhear it.
Nope, I was the command security officer. The bridge was a secured space because it had one piece of classified equipment on it. I’m sure you know this already, but there’s less information available on a bridge than you’d think. All that stuff happens down in Combat.
Not saying the information up there wasn’t useful, it’s just not enough to trigger it being classified.
Officially, not at all. There might be some investigation if you might have been involved. Unofficially, you partly inherit your parents’ reputation (at least a little) which could cause issues. But it’s not a hard and fast rule barrier by any means. Likewise, you might run into some discrimination if your parent is a famous politician amongst people of the other party, but that’s not exactly what you’re asking about either.
What is modern Catholicism’s take on Jesus healing people by banishing demons out of them? Were they literal demons, and if so do they exist and plague people today? Can it all be logically interpreted as Jesus getting rid of a mental disease?
Yeah. You’re not obliged to believe any particular casting out of demons today, just as you’re not obliged to believe any particular reporting of a miracle (and you’re sometimes warned it’s probably false), but these things can very well still happen today. I don’t see, anyway, what is more logical about Jesus casting out mental illness, given he was not a psychiatrist.
Incidentally, in the past five years there has been a huge resurgence in requests for exorcisms. The Vatican has been training a lot of new exorcists, and news and stories about them have gotten more common. See e.g. this Atlantic piece which made the rounds a few years ago. I’m not sure why.
Well he also cured many physical ailments without being a doctor. You could argue that the demon possessed were not actually demon possessed but did have some physical disorder of the brain that was cured miraculously. I mean, I wouldn’t argue it (if I believe in miracles, and I believe in the gospel accounts of those miracles, why draw the line at demons?) but you could. Maybe Jesus cured their serotonin receptors or whathaveyou.
Physical and mental illnesses are known to exist. Believing that Jesus could heal the sick requires belief in a mundane malady and a supernatural cure. Believing that he could exorcise demons requires you to believe in a supernatural malady and a supernatural cure.
It’s not clear to me that this is necessarily where the line between reasonable and ridiculous belongs, but it is clear to me that an account that purports to be real and requires me to simultaneously believe in two supernatural events is asking more of me than something that only requires me to believe one.
I get it. But at the same time, I don’t really?
For instance, lets say there was a parallel universe that existed in two dimensions, and some two dimensional intelligent being started telling others that three dimensional intelligent beings exist. He says “There are many types of higher dimensional being of varying intelligence that go by different names: humans, and dogs, and snakes, for instance.” Wouldn’t it be a little silly if the reply was “Whoa whoa whoa, I can maybe believe in one higher dimensional being, but believing in two or three is just ridiculous!”
So if you’re willing to entertain that the supernatural at all, why would it ask significantly more of you to contemplate the existence of two supernatural beings rather than one?
Imagine there are a bunch of three-dimensional beings. At some point they consider the existence of a four-dimensional being, and they decide to call the thing a demon. And they maybe also consider the existence of a being who can perform various miracles, including healing the sick. This guy could be another example of a 4-dimensional being, or he could be five or six-dimensional or something. How can anyone even tell?
Imagine there are a bunch of three dimensional beings. Some of them believe their are four-dimensional beings, and they have a long tradition of believing in them and outlining their nature. And they have a very old book which has an account of a four-dimensional being taking on a three-dimensional form. And in this account at various times he uses his four-dimensional power to heal people, and to control nature, and to transform matter. And sometimes he uses his power to affect other 4-dimensional beings called demons. Why would you, at this point, say “Hold the phone! I’m willing to entertain that the account might have been accurate in describing a four-dimensional being taking three-dimensional form and healing the sick with his four-dimensional power, but the same account and tradition holding that other four-dimensional creatures exist and affect us is much harder to swallow!”
This, but the whole hypothetical is also a metaphor for the class structure of Victorian England.
Man, having four-dimensional powers would be so cool. You could go poking around in someone’s innards without even having to open them up!
How are you determining that all the beings described are 4-dimensional?
Because the tradition and the book both say so. That’s my point: if you believe both of those things enough to believe (or entertain) the idea of one, why not the other? Where exactly is the stumbling point from “I can believe in a supernatural healing, but not in supernatural beings” given that the source for the supernatural healing claims also claim that supernatural beings exist?
I dunno man, someone can be wrong about one thing and right about another thing pretty easily. If I make two predictions, we can evaluate each on its own merits rather than assuming I’m either right about both or wrong about both.
If one believes Jesus was just this guy who used the power of placebo and exaggerations of his biographers to become noteworthy, or some other similar explanation for the rise of Christianity, then of course Demons are pretty implausible.
If you believe Jesus was actually divine or in some other way supernatural, then you’ve opened the door to extra-material forces and you’re 99% of the way to accepting the possibility of others, especially when he claims such himself.
I don’t think this is necessarily true and it is in fact the very thing that I am disputing.
I’d argue that postulating the existence of demons and Hell, particularly in combination with these entities having the ability to influence human behavior, creates fundamental issues of theodicy, which some people might not want to deal with.
Note: not a Christian.
Sure, but so does the existence of a supposedly inspired account which does attribute some agency to such forces, or at least returns to the metaphor often enough for the confusion to be understandable.
You could also argue that the demon possessed weren’t demon possessed because God would not have given any demon permission to possess a person (‘So the LORD says to Satan, “Behold, all that he has is in your power; only upon himself do not put forth your hand.”‘).
That what Jesus actually did is bring the light of god to those who, as you say had an ailment, or who were themselves away from god. That this light of God cured them.
(I write all of this as an atheist.)
It was pretty common in Classical-era Middle Eastern countries to attribute any kind of disease to be a potential result of demonic influence. Jesus’ exorcisms don’t just include people who we would consider victims of mental illness, but also the mute, the blind, and epileptics.
Ritual purity was considered to be a form of protection from demons, which some believe to be a reason why the Levirate dietary laws (modern kosher rules) prohibit pork, shellfish, and many forms of wild game: all of these would’ve been a potential risk vector for parasites and other diseases, especially in a desert culture without access to refrigeration.
Edit: Also, all of the demons associated with the astrological decans in the Testament of Solomon cause various physical illnesses – e.g. migraine, tonsilitis, etc.
Were they literal demons, and if so do they exist and plague people today? Can it all be logically interpreted as Jesus getting rid of a mental disease?
Yes.
To be a bit more helpful, here’s a statement by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on Exorcism.
As a bit of historical trivia, the office of exorcist used to be one of the minor orders, along with acolyte, lector and porter.
At a minimum, I would say that a demon would have to be a second intelligent entity that exists independently of the host.
Speaking of which, it seems rather strange for Jesus to speak to a mental illness as if its a person and then cast it into a pig.
A whole herd of pigs, in fact.
Maybe I’m not up on my philosophy or theology, but I think there are two possibilities.
1. When Jesus cured a man’s lame hand, he fixed all the ligaments and muscles and tendons and restored it to full health. When Jesus cured a mental illness, he fixed all the brain chemistry. The apostles could understand the first but not the second, so they interpreted it as Jesus removing a demon.
2. Jesus could cure physical ailments with little trouble. But some were possessed or tormented by an antagonist intelligence.
Why I’m wondering, besides being able to determine which of those two universes I inhabit purely for knowledge’s sake, is that it seems that medical treatments would be little use against an antagonist intelligence. I guess even some physical ailments could potentially be caused by demons. These people will not respond well to whatever mundane tools we can bring.
Just for fun, lets imagine ways that it could:
1. Perhaps demons manipulate peoples emotions by suppressing or antagonizing brain chemicals? We know some people have low dopamine or whatever and that medication can help, so maybe the demon is the cause of the low dopamine. And maybe the demon gets pissed that he’s going to all this effort only to have the humans figure out a work around.
2. Maybe the placebo effect is spiritual in nature, and that by treating a mental illness the patient begins to believe they will get better, and that belief somehow frustrates the efforts of the demon.
3. Maybe being possessed by a demon really sucks, but if you take enough of the right meds you don’t notice it so much, in the same way that taking enough morphine means you won’t notice your broken leg.
https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1263246859054641152
Sweden’s seropositive rate (people who’ve had coronavirus) is only 5%, not ~30% like some thought a few weeks ago.
This means they are still at the very start of their quest for herd immunity, as opposed to more than halfway there, like many (including me) thought.
I can’t read Swedish but here’s the primary source.
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/nyheter-och-press/nyhetsarkiv/2020/maj/forsta-resultaten-fran-pagaende-undersokning-av-antikroppar-for-covid-19-virus/
According to Google Translate of the abstract the samples were collected “in the spring of 2020.” The specific dates matter a lot.
I think the claim of approaching herd immunity I saw was specifically for Stockholm, or the Stockholm region, not Sweden as a whole.
I was going to link this Lancet article as a rebuttal, which claims that 20-25% of Stockholm has antibodies:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31035-7/fulltext#%20
The source of that 20-25% though is ‘personal correspondence’ with some guy. And the supporting evidence below that is a seroprevalance study done on hospital workers that showed 20%. Pretty lame.
The primary source you linked has 7.3% for Stockholm in ‘early april’ which would translate to maybe 13% today since PCR testing indicates that around 2-3% have it at a given time.
So you’re right, this might mean that herd immunity is impractical. But, Sweden’s infections and daily deaths peaked a month ago and have been decreasing since. So herd immunity is impractical but only because the infection spreads so slowly with voluntary social distancing that your hospitals will never be overwhelmed and you’ll probably get a vaccine before you even get a chance at herd immunity.
This means that ‘flatten the curve is a deadly delusion’ guy (and Neil Ferguson) was wrong: flattening the curve is totally practical and probably the best strategy. I think a lot of the assumptions around here about strategy were based on that guy being right (mine were).
Sweden population: 10M
Seropositive rate: 5% -> 500k infections as of a few weeks ago (exact dates matter a lot here)
IFR is ~1% so that would predict 5k deaths; google says a bit under 4k.
So that’s a broadly consistent story (depending on the dates, reporting issues about death classification, the average age of infection and the like). 30% would be very surprising.
2020 Battle for the White House Chess Set Parody Commercial. From Auralnauts, the people who did the Jedi Party saga. I chortled heartily.
My God, man, I’ve seen light novels with shorter titles than this.
The funniest part was when I realised it was a parody advert of an actual product that you will be able to buy.
My guess is that this gets a lot funnier if you’ve actually seen the regular ad a few times (as I have, but I suspect most SSC readers have not).
There has to be a term for that, right? Something that isn’t funny if you don’t realize it’s a parody?
“The Weird Al Effect”?
More like the “Scary Movie 3 Effect”.
Weird Al parody songs often don’t really reference the songs they spoof. I mean, they are parodies, but the humor doesn’t strictly depend on being all that familiar with the source material.
And, as all true Weird Al fans recognize, his best work is predominately his songs that aren’t parodies at all!
In Aaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaaal-buquerque!
Why yes, that is the exact song I was thinking of, thanks!
One of the main sources of Weird Al’s humor is taking entire phrases from the original lyrics and putting them in a new context. Some songs do depend on it pretty much entirely. (Headline News!)
And his original compositions do the same to other artists’ music. (And while the feeling of “ohh, I know what he’s doing” cannot properly be described as humor, it is a large part of their appeal.)
The one Weird Al song where he most makes fun of the original is “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long,” which “Smells Like Teen Spirit” being in second place.
That’s really funny. I think the original ad is pretty unintentionally funny too though (pols riding elephants and donkeys, Biden likely to be on the board twice, the justices, the really nice set shown in comparison etc).
Following up on a post a made ~10 days ago on CPI:
Recap: I think there is a larger than generally acknowledged chance that we get a positive or even high CPI reading in the next month or two after going through the individual breakdown of price shifts.
Update: I am increasing my estimate of the odds for higher CPI readings in the near future because
1. Oil prices continued their rebound. Gasoline prices fell 20.6% in April, but google results are giving me ~8.5% rise since April 30th, and the RBOB index is up >50% since April 30th. Natural gas prices were up in early May from the end of April but have dipped to below end of April prices.
2. Air travel has slowly picked up and price increases are expected in the near future while price declines seem to have slowed or completely stopped.
3. Food showed a 1.5% increases in April but grocery store food (+2.6%) was much higher than restaurant food (+0.1%). Recent stories of restaurants adding covid surcharges to bills make it plausible that we see higher restaurant prices with continuing increases in grocery store prices.
4. As I expected falling home inventory is more than offsetting falling home purchases. I don’t know if this will actually cause a push higher in rental rates and OER but it seems unlikely that we will see the housing component of CPI fall in the near term unless lodging continues to crash. Evictions and foreclosures are dropping to all time lows which is keeping supply depressed and ‘demand’ elevated relatively speaking.
There is a lot still missing from this picture and a surprise drop in any category could prove this hypothesis wildly incorrect (as well as a large number of patterns that could emerge in the last week of May). However there is enough here for me to place a levered bet on a higher than expected CPI reading when the May data comes out due mainly to constricted supply and month to month prices coming off lows.
It certainly looks like steps have been taken to increase inflation. About a 15% increase in M2 over the span of February to May. Bigger than any prior jumps in the FRED dataset.
More like to prevent deflation. Look at NGDP expectations. They have dropped. It would be better if inflation actually did rise during recessions, which would keep NGDP (wages) stable.
Those meddling fools the aliens with spaceships the size of small moons just won’t stop. Now they’ve taken all our paper. That includes both unused sheets of paper and paper that has already been used for writing or printing, whether left loose or bound into books. They left us all the pulp and paper plants, and their feedstocks. They also left all the parchment and vellum documents, and some really modern paper-like substances that are basically sheets of plastic. But all the paper-paper is gone.
How screwed are we?
Heavy short-term disruption but information with a longer half-life is more likely to have got digitised or microfiched or something.
I guess the problem has two aspects. On the one hand we use paper transactionally, for forms and receipts and stuff. A lot of that is purely digital today, but not all of it. On the other hand we use paper archivally, for storing information long-term. Again, a lot of that has been converted to other media or digitized, but not all of it.
On the archival side, what are the most important documents that only exist in paper form?
Are birth and death records digitized?
For the most important individual documents, possibly stuff that’s too secret to even put on an air-gapped computer?
But I expect much more disruption to come from a vast number of certificates and written contracts being lost. Also old people, who have accumulated a lot of paper gilts and share certificates and wills etc.
And I expect people acting in bad faith to take advantage of the fact that a bunch of things are now not in writing. And a load of value to be spent on lawyers litigating over written contracts that no longer exist.
Not very. Google Books has us covered:
Pretty much everything after 2010 should be ready to publish as ebook. So between that, Google Books and Gutemberg, I think most things would be covered.
It might actually be a step forward, with immediate switch to ebooks and presumably drastic decreases in their price. You’ll probably get a chinese kindle clone with about the price of a normal book. Just did a quick search on aliexpress, and currently they’re around $50.
These guys are way too much trouble. From now on, the answer is always going to be to invest in more small, one-man fighters.
Those meddling fools the aliens with spaceships the size of small moons have just taken all our small, one-man fighters.
Nevermind books, what about money? Estimates place the amount of hard cash in the world in the trillions of dollars (the figure includes coins, but I’ll assume it’s dominated by bills). Australia switched to plastic bills in the 90s and Canada in 2001, but the US dollar, the Euro, and most of the other currencies are still printed on paper: the aliens just pulled off the largest bank heist possible. I’d need an economist to explain exactly what would happen, but it’d be really bad.
Do US bills count as paper? They are 75% cotten and 25% linen.
I suppose that depends on the aliens’ opinion of linguistic descriptivism, because people will definitely call them paper, and not just in the casual “paper money” sense but explicit sentences like “A polymer note costs 19 cents to produce, compared to 9 cents for a typical cotton-paper note.”
Are books and printer paper usually 100% cellulose from wood products or do they usually have some amount of cotton and/or linen cellulose as well?
I’m going to be sad losing all my books—I paid a lot of money for these, and I am attached to some of them!—but what I’m really going to miss are all the paper notes, drawings, and the like that I’ve never digitized. Damn aliens.
That raises the question, too: are there any works of art we’ll lose? Da Vinci’s notebooks–type things.
My Garbage Pail Kids Card Collection!
Seriously, though. I will miss my books, but my primary regret is that they didn’t do this 2 months ago, before I helped my mother-in-law move out of the house she’s lived in for 40 years and into an apartment. So much paper to sort/trash/save/shred etc.
Based on what is gone now, did the aliens steal some original masterworks of art?
Even the toilet paper?
I think we’re pretty screwed, but also, this is personal. I have a large collection of books. A lot of them aren’t digitized. This is war.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/05/08/hot-humid-extremes-unsurvivable-global-warming/
Assuming some very highly populated areas are going to become intolerably hot and humid, what are the best feasible solutions?
The best solution would probably to just let people move away from the hottest areas, but I’m not expecting that to be politically possible.
Why not? That is unlikely to require international migration, and migration within a country is usually unrestricted.
How normal is it for countries to have the kind of range of biomes we have in the US? For example in countries like Panama or Ecuador, are there really some parts that are hot and humid and other parts that aren’t — and are likely to still not be even assuming the scenario in the OP comes true?
There is a huge range of climate in Ecuador, from coastal jungle to chilly Andean highlands. Not so much in Panama. The most difficult cases I can think of are the small countries on the Persian gulf, eg Dubai, which are extremely hot and humid now. On the other hand, they were difficult to live in for those not born to the climate until affordable air conditioning, so how much would change?
Even in Panama, it gets cold enough to frost at high elevations.
Offtopic: I find myself with a recurring reaction to paywalls. I click the link, find the paywall, think of buying, and realize the article is trying to sell me something in itself. It’s (in a vast majority of cases) more the interest of the article/author/newspaper that I read it, than in mine. So I don’t pay, close the window, and feel like I won twice. It’s offtopic because this particular case is borderline – usually it’s much worse.
Comparing this with non-paywalled articles, where I click on a link from facebook to some fluff article and go through an advertisement-filled page that seems to be written on purpose to drag me over as many display ads as possible.
Not sure where I’m going with this, other than I refuse to pay to be indoctrinated. Last subscription I had was for the Economist, which I stopped mostly because a disagreement with the small printed version (I’ve been paying for it for two years and apparently there’s a postman somewhere that was enjoying it in my stead). So I don’t mind paying per se. I’ll probably get back to printed Economist once I settle into one city. And I’m tempted by Foreign Affairs. But other than that, I think the ratio of agenda-information is a bit high to pay for.
Does this kind of thing hold true in a world with nigh-on-omnipresent AC? My gut assumption is just that people in these cities would just stop going outside from May-October.
People who are living on under $2/day presumably don’t have AC. And what about farming?
Also heat pumps require a lot of energy and the refrigerants used are incredibly powerful greenhouse gasses. Which is how we got into this problem in the first place.
I’ve wondered about going underground. High initial cost, but much less ongoing cost than AC.
@Nancy Lebovitz, underground seems to work in Coober Pedy
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/unearthing-coober-pedy-australias-hidden-city-180958162/
On the other hand, people managed to live in the area for thousands of years before the digging started.
@WrathOfGnon on Twitter writes constantly about sustainable ways to cool interiors. See here for a recent example, but there are many better ones written earlier.
I’d really like to see a form of urbanism that understands the city as a whole as its own microclimate. That zones by building height to funnel the wind and uses lakes as thermal reservoirs and trees as humidifers.
We may save more energy by less heating in the winter in cold areas than we lose by more AC in the summer.
Heating’s more efficient than cooling. (you get to use the work you put in, as well as the heat)
Heating isn’t more efficient then cooling. Almost all extent installed heating isn’t using heat pumps but rather directly burning something or electric resistance heating. Cooling is going to use a lot less energy then that.
Even heat pump based heating has to contend with a typically much bigger difference in desired vs. outside temperature (very few places are going to be cooling more then say 10 deg C averaged over 24 hours while there are many places that heat 20+ deg C avg over 24 hours), though you do get to keep the wasted energy that’s only a unit factor (good heat pumps are already ~4 times more heat moved then energy expended, dependent on many factors).
Cooling also tends to align really well with solar power relative to heating.
The energy involved in maintaining a temperature gradient is approximately proportional to the size of the temperature gradient, though whether it’s a heat pump or some other source is also relevant. But heating is usually more energy than cooling because in temperate climates, the winter temperature is usually quite a bit farther from comfortable room temperature than the summer temperature is. Here in Texas, the extremes are almost equal – in Fahrenheit, it’s rare to have to move the temperature by more than 30 degrees in either direction, though we usually spend more time below 40 F at night in the winter than we do above 100 F in the summer (and we certainly spend more time below 30 in the winter than above 110 in the summer – I don’t think it’s ever actually reached 110, while we’ve even gotten down to 20 F a couple times in the past five years).
As a whole, the US spends a lot more (in both energy and dollars) heating than it does cooling.
Ah, good point. I was focusing in on my particular country.
Outside of the first world, I expect to see significant pole-ward migration.
The number of people living on under $2/day is declining dramatically, no?
How does Nigeria in 2040 compare to US 1960?
The claim is about effects near the end of the century. Over the past forty years, the number of people living in extreme poverty, currently defined (I think) as under $1.90/day, fell from over forty percent of the world population to under twenty percent. If the trend is linear, it will be down to zero in another forty. If it is exponential, down to about five percent by the end of the century.
According to a different source for what appears to be the same information (the source linked to is paywalled), they are talking mostly about China and India, so large countries with a considerable climate range.
The story doesn’t make it clear what the carbon emission assumptions are. A lot of such stories are based on RCP8.5, originally introduced as a possible but improbably high level of emissions.
On the theme of whether we are more partisan now than in previous decades…. I think the difference is qualitative. I’m thinking about popular music as an example. In the late 60s through early 80s American music became more culturally integrated in various ways. Whether rock, r&b or country, they all became hippies. This is more obvious in retrospect than it was at the time. Willie Nelson and Neil Young don’t seem that far apart culturally, yet I remember in the 80s how Willie Nelson fans were considered rednecks by typical Neil Young fans. There was a huge cultural/political divide between the two, seemingly, in a red state blue state sense. Merle Haggard wrote songs from the “conservative” point of view, but he himself was another drug addict hippie, and Gen X fans of him are more likely to be on tie left than the right. (Because eclectic musical tastes correlate with openness.)
In ’69 Miles Davis made hippie music. Sly Stone was a hippie. Black and white audiences, perhaps superficially, were out to accept each other more. Rock bands were openly stealing from the blues, which drew white fans toward older black music.
So in white American culture circa 1980, there’s was a hard line drawn between what was conservative vs. liberal (Country vs. Rock). Even though musically the difference between Waylon Jennings and Bob Seger wasn’t so vast.
Johnny Cash performed Bob Dylan songs.
Today’s Country Music seems unambiguously conservative. Not just in terms of lyrical content but in the aesthetics of the sound and look. It sounds and looks like an advertisement for the Republican Party.
Now there’s less popular country music, called alt- country, which is as left wing as pop country is right wing.
I’m drinking gin and rambling. The main. difference I want to highlight is how conservative (Republican) pop country music is now compared to the hey days of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson.
Hrm. Didn’t Hollywood go through a Hillbilly or “Dixploitation” phase, like Blaxploitation films or ’90s black-targeted TV but for poor country-music whites? Think The Dukes of Hazzard with its Waylon Jennings theme song in the early ’80s or cheap movies like Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967), where some poor Southerners trying to get rich in country music stumble into John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr. and Basil Rathbone (!) trying to pull off a Scooby-Doo scam.
What do you think about Florida Georgia Line or Sam Hunt or other “Bro Country” artists which are pretty unambiguously stealing concepts from rap music and redefining mainstream country?
I’m not familiar with them. Would you say they have less of a Republican vibe than other mainstream country?
I’d be interested if you listened to the songs “Cruise” or “Cruise Remix”, “Body Like a Backroad” or “House Party” before reading the rest of this post – they were all big country hits in the past few years (although I am only aware of them because they were the songs that crossed over into pop charts)
Generally it seems to me like the sound is pretty obviously hip-hop influenced – using a lot of 808 drums/other sampled sounds and referencing rap songs. I was interested to hear what you thought about them – I think they mix white, country, what is traditionally republican appearance with openly stealing from black music. What this ends up being is music to be played at a college frat tailgate.
If anything, the country-rap subgenre can be more explicitly Republican than mainstream country.
I’ve never heard country rap. Do they say “yo-all” instead of just “yo”?
Ack, just realized I linked the wrong video above. It was intended to go to an example of very explicitly Republican country rap. And past edit window…
Correct link is here.
ugh
It’s still going to the same rather non-political rap.
I think modern country has a lot of different subgenres, but at the highest level, it feels to me like there are two main ones – one of which is basically pop with country themes, and the other that relies heavily on rock or rap influences. At the risk of getting CW here, I might even call it “country for women” and “country for men.”
Like, my fiance and I both listen to things that could be described as “modern country” but she listens to stuff like this whereas I listen to stuff like this and there’s really not a ton of crossover between what we like, aside from the fact that if we watch the Country Music Awards, some of both of our favorites will be in attendance.
First time hearing that song, and I’m legitimately confused how that qualifies as country. I get that he has that not-quite-southern country music accent that everyone in the genre affects, but it sounds poppy, has a pop beat, doesn’t have much in the way of traditional instrumentals and has that cliche pop message of “girl you’re beautiful and don’t even know it.”
Focusing on the video, the singer is a traditional pop-esque pretty boy and the video even has background dancers. I don’t like trying to define what genres can and can’t be, but why is that country?
It’s got a steel guitar. Near as I can tell this is the dividing line for pop country.
Well not all of his songs are that poppy. This is one of his more country-sounding songs.
And FWIW, his father was a reasonably famous country musician, and having been dragged along to one of his concerts, I can personally attest he’s capable of playing a pretty decent guitar.
But there’s a lot of stuff nearly exactly like this that is called “country” and there has been for some time. They’re often referred to as “country ballads” and nearly every mainstream country artist since 1980 has had a couple on their albums.
Honestly, I think those songs are about equally country: one is country flavoured pop, and the other is country flavoured rock, or possibly Southern rock, that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Lynyrd Skynyrd album.
Apropos of nothing but the vfx in the Rhett video are quite good. Quite pointless–I’m not sure that film trick has any actual artistic meaning–but really well done and a cool effect.
I agree. Got tired of the song in pretty short order but the visuals kept me watching for a minute or two.
Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings were both members of the “outlaw country” movement. OK, the fact that Willie and Waylon were extremely popular by 1980 supports your point. But I don’t know if they should be taken as representative of country music in general at the time, any more than “alt-country” represents country music today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlaw_country
Why not mention Kenny Rogers, who sold far more records than either of them? I’m not sure what his politics were back then but recently he was one of the first celebrities to support Donald Trump as a candidate.
Indeed. Even after attaining immense popularity, those guys were still seen as part of a unique subgenre that presented itself as an alternative to the mainstream country establishment.
In a sense, but it’s roughly the same as how folk-influenced rock and the British Invasion positioned themselves as alternatives to old-school Elvis-flavored rock and roll in the early Sixties, but were rock and roll by the late Sixties. The transition happened a bit later for outlaw country, but by the early to mid-70s it was mainstream in the country world.
I was gonna say – if the examples of old country musicians are members of the Highwaymen, then you might as well take the example of new country musicians to be the Highwomen. They’ve definitely got a red-state cultural milieu, but it’s self-consciously feminist, gay-friendly, and multicultural.
But Kenny Rogers was a psychedelic rocker in the 60s.He wrote “What Condition my Condition Was in” the song that plays in the trippy Big Lebowski dream sequence when Jeff Bridges goes down the lane like a bowling ball. He became country later.
Fun ways to change the US political system for the better (inspired by a couple of poly sci books I’ve read recently). Only the first one is an Actually Serious Idea, so don’t give me too hard of a time- just floating these out there for fun:
1. The One I’m Kinda Serious About. Seeing as US states can allocate their electors to the Electoral College however they like as far as I can tell (Nebraska & Maine already have their own funky system): the other 48 states start to allocate proportionally, vs. winner take all. (This argument assumes basic familiarity with the US electoral system, I don’t feel like explaining it from scratch). I.e. right now Missouri gets 10 electors, and they’re on a winner take all basis- candidate A wins Missouri by 50.5% of the vote, he gets all 10. In this system, candidate A would get 5-6 electoral votes, and his opponent the remaining ones. (There would undoubtedly have to be rounding up rules).
Argument why: with most states as winner take all now, vast vast swathes of Americans are literally disenfranchised- their votes are (literally) not counted. We’d still preserve the existing Electoral College system, but now Everyone’s Vote Counts, whether Republicans in California or Democrats in I dunno Utah. Seems like this would preserve the social compact a bit, without the radicalism of the Popular Vote system Democrats are pushing now. No Constitutional changes required.
I am half serious about-
2. The US (stealing a pretty good idea from China, I think?) forms councils or boards for specific long-term policy planning around key parts of the economy (I think we already have this for national security stuff). So we’d have a Tech Board, a Finance Board, a Higher Education Board, maybe a Manufacturing Board, and so on. Members would be appointed and serve terms like Federal Reserve members, and they’d be picked for expertise- academics, ex-CEOs, etc. Perhaps we’d have strict anti-lobbying rules (they’re not allowed to join their industry after their term is up) to prevent corruption.
This could help solve democracy’s most famous problem- inability to do long-term planning. Subject matter experts could be free to take the long view, to advance the interests of the US within their field without having to run for election every x number of years. Maybe their one ‘power’ could be that they can introduce 1 bill per year into the House, which of course is free to vote it down, but gives them a bit more heft than mere advisors. Just a thought.
I understanding this will literally never happen, but-
3. Establish a minimum size to be a US ‘state’, and if your population is below that, you’re legally a territory a la Puerto Rico, Guam, etc. I think we’ve all heard the complaint ‘Wyoming gets as many Senators as California’ (the left never says that about Hawaii or Vermont, which are not *that* much bigger). Shooting from the hip I think 1 million should be the bare minimum size, though really 1.5 would be better (this would disenfranchise 10 states). The absurd political power waged by tiny states is a bit much, and there’s nothing legally new about the ‘territory’ designation. Everyone knows that even the smallest state gets 2 Senators and so on- but who’s to say what a ‘state’ is? ‘Territory’ is a concept that already exists, has for hundreds of years, and there’s no real reason why Wyoming is a ‘state’ but Puerto Rico is a ‘territory’.
While this will essentially never happen, one thing that could make it slightly more palatable is that US citizens who are residents of a territory don’t pay federal income tax. You could let current small states vote on this in a referendum- lose political power in exchange for no federal income tax. With anti-tax feeling in the US high, it might be a closer bet than you’d think (I think the Treasury could afford to lose Wyoming’s tax receipts).
Edit to include: Yes, disenfranchising 5-10 states against their will is of course politically impossible. But if you just passed a bill that said ‘well if you’d like to reduce your taxes, you can pass this via referendum….’. If Wyoming voluntarily disenfranchises itself- who’s to argue?
if your 3 friends want to go to lunch at mcdonalds and you don’t bother to argue for going to burger king, you’re not being disenfranchised, you’re just losing the vote.
ah, unaccountable power. What’s not to love? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s great work if you can get it, but we won’t all get it, will we?
This has absolutely nothing to do with hash872’s argument. What you’re describing is a simple popular vote, i.e. what we would have in the US if we abolished the electoral college entirely.
Hash is saying my vote as a Republican doesn’t count in Illinois because Illinois always goes Democratic. This is wrong. I am just outvoted.
If my 3 friends always vote to go to McDonald’s, I am not being disenfranchised when we always go to McDonald’s. I am just outvoted.
Voting in the US federal system, with the electors in the middle between the voters & the candidates, can’t be reduced to the McDonald’s analogy, sorry. The sum of all the losing voters in all the winner-take-all states is absolutely enormous and, expressed as a proportional number of electors, could be enough to swing an election. If we’d had proportional elector representation for the past 200+ years, several presidential elections would’ve gone differently, including the most recent one.
The number of disenfranchised Republicans in California alone is probably larger than several US states
It’s counted (and outvoted) in Illinois. It’s not counted in the national total that actually determines the outcome of the election. If it were, you could combine your minority Republican vote with Californian Republican’s minority votes so they actually had an effect proportional to the number of voters.
We’re talking about a situation where, nationally, the minority “outvoted” side sometimes wins, so the McDonald’s scenario is clearly not analogous.
“This system seems unfair” is quite a stretch from “people are actually disenfranchised.” Votes are cast and counted according to the rules set-up under the Constitution and which Illinois agreed to when it joined the union.
Disenfranchised would be if Illinois State Police sat outside the polling station and wouldn’t let me vote unless I signed a loyalty oath to vote for Joe Biden.
Also, if I have a group of 10 friends, and 4 want to go to McDonald’s, it’s not obvious to me why we should all go to McDonald’s just because they got 4 and Burger King/Wendy’s both got 3. However, if that’s the rule system we set up more than 2 centuries ago, I could go with it. However, if you’re trying to toss out a rule that we all agreed on more than 2 centuries ago while arguing for blatant partisan advantage, I’m going to be pretty damn suspicious.
I’m not sure if you caught the original comment, but the Constitution allows states to allocate electors as they see fit, and Nebraska and Maine already use a non-winner take all system. No radical change is taking place here, and it’s not partisan as the EC does not favor one party or another over a long enough time horizon (fun fact, John Kerry came quite close to winning the EC & losing the popular vote in 2004). I’m not even going to address the McDonald’s analogy.
I’m afraid that even discussing the EC has activated everyone’s Preset Partisan Views, so people read half the comment and then run DefaultPartisanView script. My aim was a good faith attempt to have everyone’s vote in every state to be counted, not to favor one party or another
@hash872
But that’s the thing, by casting the debate as “the EC means literally not counting people’s votes” when it doesn’t actually do that, you’ve made the argument more partisan, not less, and makes it feel like you’re not arguing in good faith. I don’t think that was your intent, and I do think you are arguing in good faith, but the current system does count everyone’s vote. 50 state elections vs. 1 national election might or might not be bad policy, but it’s not disenfranchising anyone.
@cassander
Hmm, OK, let me think about how to rephrase it. And again, as of last year around a quarter of California voters are Republicans.
State residents’ votes for president are only counted now at the state level, for the purpose of allocating electors to one side or another. They’re effectively not counted (in 48 states) at the federal level. To tack right a bit- the 1 in 4 California Republicans and almost 4 in 10 Illinois Republicans do not have an *effective* vote for President. We can still have 50 state elections without winner-take-all. (Imagine you were designing a new Electoral College from scratch. What would be the argument *for* winner take all electors?)
Democracies are supposed to function by reaching a consensus- not that we reach the optimal outcome, but the one that the majority of voters can be kinda satisfied with. Giving voters effective votes at the federal level for the most important office is a mild, non-dramatic and but pro-democracy step in that direction. It’s also non-partisan. It can help reduce polarization (a bit) by preventing the US from deteriorating into Balkanized provinces that are 100% red or 100% blue, with zero in-between. Some of consensus kumbaya stuff is a bit symbolic and wooey, but I think emotional pro-unity symbolism stuff helps at the margins.
Deteriorating into a failed state Is Bad, and the US should take minor non-partisan steps to make everyone feel included and that their vote counts, even if it’s a bit handwavey. California Republicans & Texas Democrats intuitively understand that their vote doesn’t ‘count’, even if you have technical or pedantic arguments that it does. Tens of millions of people feeling that way = bad
@hash872 says:
No votes are counted at the federal level. the US does not have a federal election for president, it has 50 state elections.
State government more accountable than the federal, so I want to vest as much political identity at the state level as possible. I want one senator per state who serves at the pleasure of the state’s governor. I want the presidential eligibility limited to former governors and cabinet officers. Hell, I’d even be fine with the governors electing a president college of cardinals style.
Fundamentally, I don’t think the current EC setup matters that much. If you abolished it you’d replace one quirky set of election outcomes with a different set that was equally quirky, just in different ways. For example, one of the benefits of the EC is making it harder to cheat by running up vote totals. doing so only matters in places where the statewide vote is close, and those are the places where there’s likely to be the most scrutiny.
I don’t think that the EC has a meaningful impact on the perceived legitimacy of american elections.
a national popular vote will have zero effect on that, even in theory. How could it? To take a ridiculously extreme example, imagine a California ballot measure to exile all the republicans. Under the EC, that is a bad idea for partisan democrats because it will move those republicans to a different state where they might tip the balance, and even if they don’t it will reduce CA’s EC count. Under the NPV, though, it’s a great idea that makes California more democratic.
this is your best argument, but I don’t think it holds up. there’s an way to test it though! graph the voter participation rate against the partisan slide. I suspect there’s not a strong correlation, and if people are voting at the same level in texas as iowa, I think we can safely say that people don’t feel that way. Of course, there are a huge number of confounding factors, but it’s a good first step.
Selecting the EC as a major improvement to America’s democracy is a partisan position to take, particularly when the form of attack is to totally delegitimatize the EC and run alternate histories. Also, if we are opening up the can of worms to change the Presidential election system, why not change the rules further? If “none of the above” has a plurality, INCLUDING NON-VOTERS, no legitimate government can be formed and the election must be re-ran. How about a veto, since you mention consensus? If a quarter of the population votes “HELL NO!” on you, you automatically are ruled out of becoming President, even if you get 75% of the remaining vote.
Why not alter the powers of the office, specifically with regard to majority or minority vote shares? Presidents without a majority vote share are limited in the number of Justices they are permitted to appoint and their confirmations must pass with super-majority, since they lack mandate.
The one argument I can think of is that it reduces the opportunity for electoral fraud.
Electoral fraud is easiest if one party has solid control over the state government. With winner take all, there is no payoff to fraud in such a state in the presidential vote. With a proportional system, if you actually have 60% of the vote it’s worth pushing the count to 70% to get a few more electoral votes for your side.
+1 to David Friedman. Cheaters in Texas or California could turn up 5% more votes in a bunch of reliably red/blue districts, and just claim turnout was unusually good this time.
While I have criticized vote-by-mail for allowing some kinds of fraud (vote intimidation or vote-selling), it can resist this kind of fraud. You have the physical ballots wrapped in an envelope and could, in theory, verify the legitimacy of the voter before you count their vote. (But this requires a secretary-of-state that wants to detect that kind of potential fraud, and if we assume they are trying to cheat, they’ll come up with excuses not to bother.)
A Definite Beta Guy got it exactly.
I feel like this is the set up to a two wolves and a lamb joke.
Four students want to get lunch. One wants to go to MacDonalds, one wants to go to Burger King, one wants a cheeseburger, one is just after some deep fried chicken, two of them can’t stand Sprite, one is late on his term paper, three of them are drunk, one is hung over, none of them have showered this week and only one of them can drive. He goes to Denny’s.
I agree this would be better for the US as a whole, but there’s no incentive for individual states to do it. If you figure states are controlled by their majority party, then the group controlling the state would have to voluntarily give up votes for their party, for essentially no benefit.
I think the national popular vote interstate compact is a much better approach to this general idea, because it solves the coordination problem with a compact: You commit to follow the rules conditioned on the fact that other states follow too.
Couldn’t we do this with a compact too?
As I can see it right now, red states aren’t interested in joining the NPVIC and swing states would be giving up their own power by doing so. Just the blue states isn’t enough to get to 270.
A Proportional Representation Compact could conceivably get both red and blue states to agree.
Oddly, given the context of this discussion, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact requires the actual disenfranchisement of each participant state’s voters.
It makes their vote within their particular voting system subject to the say-so of outside legal entities.
A notion I’ve seen. I have no idea what the effects would be, but it’s not obviously wrong.
Congress no longer meets in DC. All the official business is done remotely.
I suspect that would change very little. As I understand it, the official meetings of congress are a very minor part of the work of congressmen. The actual work of congress is figuring out what legislation to write. That’s a very complicated matter that requires extensive consultation and negotiation with other congressmen and other interested parties. That sort of interpersonal behavior really truly benefits from direct contact, meaning those who are willing to show up in person wherever there is a critical mass of other decision-makers have a real advantage over those who just dial in remotely.
If the US did allow remote participation in the work of congress, I expect everyone who expected to have any real influence to continue to work in Washington. Doing anything else would advertising (at best) semi-pro status.
The issue isn’t ability, it’s incentive.
On the private market, long term planning depends on secure property rights — in order to bear costs now for benefits well into the future I have to be reasonable sure that I am the one who will get those benefits. On the political market, actors don’t have secure property rights. A politician who does politically costly things today in order to get benefits a decade or two later knows that he is unlikely to still be in office when the benefits become visible.
He could still do it if the voters had a long time horizon and so rewarded him well before the benefits appeared. But knowing whether future benefits are real or make believe requires a good deal of effort, and voters are rationally ignorant. So politicians claim long term policies but act in terms of benefits at the next election, or possibly the one after that.
The boards/councils could plan & make recommendations, both public and private, and hopefully have the President, Congress, and the national security state’s ear. Plus my tentatively proposed ‘they can introduce 1 bill a year in the House’ rule, which would be more for publicity and influence- ‘the Tech board says x policy is good so now some politicians are supporting it’, etc. I’m not overstating how effective this would be, just that it’d be a step in the general right direction. (My priors are pro-elites and anti-populism).
I basically agree with what you’re saying, but the unelected Federal Reserve- made of up of sober subject matter experts- looks to me to be one of the most functional parts of the US government right now. I’m looking for a quasi-democratic way to incorporate more expertise into our system
In the previous discussion of changing the electoral college allocation, I learnt it was basically a problem of the commons.
No single state has an incentive to do it. Sure, if Republican’s votes in California counted for something, Alabama could agree to also proportionally assign votes. But can Alabama trust California to do it? Since this deal would result in more Republican than Democrat EC votes, would California agree to this?
The thing is, this is a position that is argued by one side while they keep winning the popular vote. The time when this will get tested is when assigning electoral votes proportionally will result in your political opponent.
I assert that California will never, in a million years, allow the winning electoral college vote go to Trump, even if the signed an agreement on a meaningless compact that’s absolutely unenforcable. So why would other states give their votes to their political opponents?
> I assert that California will never, in a million years, allow the winning electoral college vote go to Trump, even if the signed an agreement on a meaningless compact that’s absolutely unenforcable.
I’m not exactly sure how this would work. If the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact goes into effect, then everyone says all year that their electoral votes will go to the winner of the popular vote nationwide. Say that at the election, some Republican wins the popular vote nationwide. How is California going to stop their electoral votes from going to that candidate? Will the legislature call a special emergency lame-duck session in between the election and the meeting of the electoral college to overturn their accession to the NPVIC? This isn’t like an individual signing a contract promising to do something, where the impetus for actually doing the thing still comes at the end from a single mind deciding to do it, but rather needs a massive organization to move quickly to change its mind.
then everyone says all year that their electoral votes will go to the winner of the popular vote nationwide
That’s nice.
Then, the day after Election Day, a Federal Judge decides “no, screw you, and screw the carefully negotiated plan that you got all relevant parties to agree ahead of tine was fair to all parties. I decide now that this is disenfranchising Billy Bob. Toss it out.”
Additional possible change: Change voting system for individual directly-elected offices. Eg. Representatives are now elected via instant-runoff elections or something. I believe this can be done on a per-State basis without requiring changes to the Constitution or Federal law.
California already works with the jungle primary that Louisiana used to (that is, everyone runs in a single primary, and the top two finishers go on to a “runoff” at the general election) and Maine has started using instant-runoff. So yes, this can be done on a per-state basis.
This already exists in the form of the US Bureaucracy. It’s why the CDC was so famously effective in its anti-COVID efforts.
I don’t really have an opinion on the approach, but I would point out we’ve had an industrial policy before, which it sounds to me is what you really want. American Affairs has been harping on this point since its inception, e.g. here.
As far as “Changes that would help and could actually happen”, one possibility is electing Senators by approval voting. Approval voting tends to elect middle of the road, agreeable candidates, which is what you need for the Senate to work well. Both Republicans and Democrats would like this plan because it would increase their party’s influence in electing Senators in places where they currently have little influence.
Increasing the size of the House to 1000 members would improve local representation (an important issue to conservatives) and reduce malapportionment (an important issue to democrats).
Having everybody do their primary elections on the same day would help everyone except Iowa and New Hampshire.
Are you kidding me?
Have you ever lived in a tiny state? I have. I’ve lived in several. And while a mathmatical breakdown might say that my vote counts more than a vote in California, it certainly doesn’t feel that way. When you only have 1 representative in the House, it certainly doesn’t feel like you have power. In fact, it feels quite the opposite: it feels like the federal government can do whatever it wants to your state, and there isn’t much you can do about it. It feels like nobody cares about your vote: no presidential candidates ever stop and campaign, no political commentators ever wonder which way your state will turn. Nobody cares about what Wyoming wants.
And this is a bigger deal than it seems because many of these tiny states have huge amounts of their land owned by the federal government. Do you know how long Alaskans have wanted to drill in the ANWR? It would have really helped the state, and they could have done it without wrecking the environment. But no can do, that’s federal land and the big states, the ones thousands of miles away with no skin in the game, have decided it’s too risky. Or maybe you want to build a road from your small town to the closest town with a hospital. Surely we can handle that at a local level? But no, it goes through federal land and the Secretary of the Interior who has never even set foot in your state, much less your town, has decided the road might be too dangerous to birds. Birds she will never see, and whose existence will not effect her one way or another.
Look, I get it. Mathmatically an Alaskan’s vote is “worth more” than a New Yorkers. But when people go around saying things like “tiny states have absurd power, lets take that power away” it reads the same as the biggest, strongest, and richest bully on the playground taking the youngest and smallest kid’s lunch money. Wyoming has nothing. It doesn’t decide elections. Nobody cares about Wyoming’s so called absurd power when it comes to actual federal elections. But apparently even that small, tiny, measly scrap of political power is more than small states deserve.
It gets my dander up, it does.
Now that you describe it, it seems a bit of a slight of hand.
Yes, a single North Dakotan vote is more weighty than a single Californian, in terms of EC. But single voters are laughably irrelevant on a national scale anyways. What matters is the size of your coalition. If you share enough commonalities with the typical voter in your state, you are going to have an advantage.
I’m not sure it’s even true in aggregate. Take a look at this page, which has estimated population per electoral vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories_of_the_United_States_by_population
If you sort by that column, you’ll see that the state with the worst ratio is Texas. Then Florida, then California. The states with the best ratio meanwhile are Wyoming, Vermont, DC, Alaska, North Dakota, Rhode Island; three red, three blue. Small states are advantaged, but it doesn’t follow that Republicans are advantaged.
You’ve touched tangentially, actually, on one of the advantages of the EC. Presidential candidates campaign in the places where they believe they can affect the most votes. This has been true under the EC, and it would be true under the NPVIC. But the dynamic would change. Under the EC, candidates at least have reason to appeal to relatively more rural states and regions; there’s not a New York City in every state. But by bypassing it, they have no reason to anymore: those votes are just too expensive to try to swing to their side. So the race becomes focused even more on cities and suburbs with relatively large populations of swing voters. Because of the nature of campaigning, you’re effectively locking huge swathes of the population, and the country, out of the race.
I also suspect that a national popular vote would further exacerbate the perceived (I’m still uncertain whether this is actually true) notion that candidates are better served “getting out the vote” (by appealing to the extreme fringes of their own party) than by trying to win-over independents or undecideds.
In a national popular vote world, Hillary Clinton is probably best served spending pretty much all of her time in New York and California, trying to drive turnout among those places that overwhelmingly support her. Not only would she still not go to Wisconsin, she wouldn’t go to Virginia or Florida or Pennsylvania either…
Nobody campaigns in winner-take-all states that aren’t competitive. They do campaign a lot in the few small states that are competitive. NH has 4 electoral votes, but presidential candidates campaign a lot there (even in the general election). Nobody campaigns in CA (though they do fundraise there). All else equal, rational candidates should campaign more in the small states relative to those states’ populations.
According to what metric? I can think of a bunch of them. I can probably guess the metric you’re using, but I can guess others that don’t rank things the same. For example, 538’s “voter power index” does give the same pairwise Alaska v. NY ranking, but it gives many others that are quite different from your metric. And I’m pretty sure if our metric is, “Is worth more for determining New York’s electors,” an Alaskan’s vote is decidedly worth less.
There are a whole lot of metrics you could use here; you can’t just appeal to “math”; you need to argue why any one particular metric should be privileged over all the other possible metrics.
You still get two senators in the senate, tho.
So it’s both the EC and the Senate that gets you overrepresented and the House gets you less represented, but even just on the house, probably still more represented than voters of many more populous states.
Like I said, I know that mathmatically a state like Alaska has more representation per person. But on an absolute level, big states still have way more power. So wanting to take away representation from small states is still analogous to the richest, biggest, strongest kids on the playground deciding to take the smaller kids lunch money.
Or to put it another way: Alaska decided in 1975 to rename Mt. McKinley to Denali, and changed all state resources to match that name. They also requested that the federal government recognize the name change as well. Even with “overrepresentation” in the Senate and House it took forty years before the federal government recognized the name change, all because a single senator from Ohio kept blocking it. And the name only got changed because Obama himself went to Alaska for some global warming photo-ops and as a presidential gift signed an EO officially changing the name.
Now remember that 60% of Alaska is federal land, and you might realize that if changing the name of a mountain took 40 years, doing anything of substance (like mining or logging) is an even bigger boondoggle. And you wold argue that even the small amount of power Alaska has is too much?
Doing the electoral college proportionally raises some really weird issues for smallish states. There are a few natural ways to do the cutoffs for proportional elections. If you have 3 electors to select, then you could either say that a candidate gets 0 electors with 0-25% of the vote, 1 with 25-50%, 2 with 50-75%, and 3 with 75-100%; or you could say that a candidate gets 0 electors with 0-16.66% of the vote, 1 with 16.66-50%, 2 with 50-83.333%, and 3 with 83.333-100%. (The latter is what you get if you multiply the fraction of the vote by 3 and round to the nearest integer, while the former divides into equal bands.) I think out of the currently existing 3 vote states, Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, and both Dakotas would be perpetually 2-1 for Republicans, DC would be perpetually 0-3, and Vermont might be a swing between 1-2 and 0-3 under the first system. Out of the states with 4 electoral votes, I think Idaho would be perpetually 3-1, New Hampshire would be perpetually 2-2, and I think Rhode Island and Hawaii would be perpetually 1-3 (though perhaps Rhode Island would be a swing from 2-2 to 1-3).
Meanwhile, California, Texas, New York, and Florida would always have several swing votes.
So you wouldn’t be able to get votes everywhere. You’d still have swing states and perpetually fixed states, but the swing states would be the largest ones. So you’d get the worst of the accusations each side lodges at the other – a distinction between swing and fixed states that the popular vote supporters hate, and a greater emphasis on the large states that the electoral vote supporters hate.
New Trump executive order commands federal agencies to cut or waive regulations on business in order to help the economy recover from Coronavirus.
Notably it also requires that all federal agencies should “bear the burden of proving an alleged violation of law; the subject of enforcement should not bear the burden of proving compliance.” Which I think is a big deal: as far as I understand it, if the EPA slaps you with a fine you generally have to prove that the fine was unwarranted. This EO shifts that burden of proof.
I have heard some commentators saying that this EO is unique in American history because it is the only time that a President has reacted to a state of emergency by giving up power instead of grabbing more. Can anyone think of a counterexample?
So you’re saying Trump isn’t a fascist dictator who wants to control everything just like Hitler?
More seriously, this does seem like a positive twist on the “never let a crisis go to waste” theory of government. Unfortunately, it follows a wee bit of what might be considered excessive spending, of which the jury is still out on how temporary or permanent that spending is going to end up being, sucking resources toward government re-allocation.
What one President can do with a phone and a pen another can do with the same.
Really improving things would require a change in Federal law. I’d like to see the EEOC eliminated, for example.
Federal agencies are created by Congress, and ultimately Congress has both oversight of them and the ability to modify their regulations (the President runs them). So is this the president giving up power, or favoring the balance of power toward the presidency versus congress?
The agencies are created by Congress, but they give more power to the Executive Branch. While Congress could force an agency to modify their regulations by passing a bill, the President can force them to add or change regulations with a memo. Agencies like the EPA are given a mandate by Congress, but they generally determine how that mandate will be carried out which gives them significant power. That power ultimately belongs to the President, which is why he can order all agencies to stop enforcing bothersome regulations with a stroke of his pen and without Congress’s input.
I’m looking for science book recommendations. I want to say “popular science” — because I’m not looking for text books or those that expect significant expertise in the subject — but I am fairly scientifically literate so a lot of “popular science” books I find too basic.
In terms of subjects, I’m open to anything — but I think I gravitate toward life sciences. Lately I’ve been really interested in what we’ve learned about the world through our recent ability to (genetically) sequence everything. I would also say that I prefer books that spend more time on the science and less on the history of the scientists that discovered it (this may just be a way to pad a subject to book-length.)
The most recent book I read was Some Assembly Required. I loved the subject matter. But the science didn’t go very deep. I didn’t learn a whole lot — other than the history of the science around genetics. As I said above, I find the history part way less interesting.
So if you’ve read something recently that you really recommend, I’d love to hear it!
The Vital Question, about the role of mitochondria in the evolution of life, has previously been name-checked here. It’s an excellent book.
Also recommended:
Richard Dawkins, The Concestor’s Tale
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
Christian de Duve, Vital Dust
There’s also Lynn Margulis’ Five Kingdoms, which is kind of a cross between a popular science book and a textbook.
I know there are more, they will come to me eventually.
+1 for Dawkins’ biology books.
Right up my alley! I’ve read the Vital Question a couple years ago. Really enjoyed it.
I had read The Selfish Gene many years ago and found it mind-altering. Then I got turned off from Dawkins after he got on his atheism kick (this coming from an atheist.). Maybe I’ll give him another try.
I’d read some Dennett long ago. Is Darwin’s Dangerous Idea more science or more philosophy. I feel lame saying it, by philosophy bores me.
Thanks for the suggestions!
The Ancestor’s Tale is a great book – probably the best he wrote since The Selfish Gene.
Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich. An introduction to recent advances in population genetics by one of the most prominent scientists in the field. It functions like a history of different peoples.
I did read that, thank you! I guess I might have to wait a bit to see another crop of genetics books come out 😉
Oops, I accidentally reported this comment.
Mathematics – the new Golden Age by Keith Devlin is an excellent pop maths book.
Hadn’t heard of that. Adding it to my list.
Just curious: how much of the book is Math and how much is History of Math?
It’s a long while since I read it, but from what I recall it’s almost all talking about ideas, not people, with some of those ideas presented in chronological succession so you can see how the steps a problem was solved in.
You have probably already been recommended Superforecasting, The Righteous Mind, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Secret of Our Success et cetera.
Good books you maybe haven’t been recommended: Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, The Dictator’s Handbook, and Make it Stick.
I almost picked up Superforecasting some time back. For some reason I got the impression is was more “popular” than “science.” What was your experience?
It’s good science, and it’s quite respected in its field, but it makes you want to pick up a hobby you probably don’t have the time to learn sooooooo if you’re inclined to scrupulosity induced insecurity, I guess it could be harmful. If you actually are in the mood for developing a new characteristic, it’s great. In either case, it gives some useful lenses to view the world.
For more-advanced-than-usual popular science books related to life sciences, I strongly recommend everything by Steven Vogel — essentially biomechanics, about how the machinery of living things work. Fascinating and charmingly written. “Life in Moving Fluids” is a classic; I particularly like “Life’s Devices.”
Somewhat similar: “On Size and Life” by Thomas McMahon & John Tyler Bonner.
Philip Ball and Nick Lane are other authors I’d recommend.
Though it’s at the usual technical level of popular science books, “The Gene: An Intimate History”
by Siddhartha Mukherjee is excellent (especially the first two-thirds).
At the risk of being self-serving, I’ll note that I’m writing a popular science book that will cover, among other things, the DNA sequencing revolution. It’s described here, and there’s a link to a Google Form near the bottom of the post if you’d like an email when it’s complete.
Oh, wow. I hadn’t heard of Steven Vogel. Looks like my kind of writer. I’m about to give The Life of a Leaf a try!
BTW, your book looks like the kind of thing I’d really enjoy. How far away is the publishing date?
Thanks! I think the publication date is some time in 2021, though this is to be determined. I’m under contract to finish writing late this summer, and there is typically a few months of review. I’m not actually sure what determines the timeline after that.
I was going to recommend Bright Earth by Philip Ball – it’s about the history of paint pigment, which sounds weird and niche, but is a book I’ve kept referring back to in many conversations over the past decade! It also helped me understand so much more about the history of art, and how some movements were driven by the invention of new pigments (like the differences between Raphael and Caravaggio, and the colors of the impressionists).
Holy crap, I hadn’t read your user name. I didn’t realize you were writing a book; super excited to read it!
Shroedinger’s ‘What is life’ is surprisingly readable, if more philosophical than biological.
I’ve heard good things about Yong’s ‘I contain multitudes’, but I haven’t read it yet.
And lastly, I really liked ‘Life as a matter of fat’, but it’s very close to my own research interests probably too much of a text book. I had to mention it though.
I feel bad that I didn’t know about What is Life. I generally shy away from philosophy. But I think the author sells that one. Added to the list!
I Contain Multitudes is going to the top of the list 😉
Thanks!
I recently read an old book, Life Ascending, by Nick Lane, a biochemist who talks about the biochemical basis for some major evolutionary innovations in life’s history. He has some newer, and presumably more up to date books that I haven’t read, but I really enjoyed it.
I am not qualified to judge how accurately he presented the material, but it was pretty science-y
Recently a number of people who are generally in favor of aggressive anti-covid measures have spoken out about how stay-at-home orders may not be / have been worth it. There are a few flavors of this that I’ve seen, but the version I’m interested in goes something like “everyone responsible was already staying at home before orders, everyone irresponsible is ignoring them anyway, why are we adding insult to injury”. (Stylized, but I don’t think strawmanned out of recognition.)
Both me and my husband have math-on-the-computer type jobs (data scientist and 3D computer vision). Before the stay-at-home guidance, both our groups’ managers had been adamant that we Cannot Work Effectively From Home because of the need for a lot of interaction between group members. (Both groups are now working from home unless it’s absolutely necessary to come into the office, both expect to continue the pattern for the foreseeable future, and in both cases it seems to be tolerably effective, although it’s probably too soon to tell if it’ll stay effective long-term.) There was maybe a week or two when working from home was “allowed if you’re not comfortable coming into the office”, but the official position at our offices didn’t switch to “you should not be in the office” until our state declared a stay-at-home order.
So, my question: what does it take to get a manager who is gung-ho about face-to-face interaction to accept that, yes, we need to work from home whenever possible — that working from home should be the new norm, and coming into the office should be the exception? Does having a “stay-at-home order” help shift the cultural balance there, or is a “public health guideline” enough? (I’m not sure we had a gap between those, other than a generic impending feeling of doom for guidance.) I’m especially interested from anyone in a managerial position here who might have first-hand insight into how these things work.
I’m a manager who believes in face to face interaction.
What it took for me was the CEO telling us that the official policy was that anyone who wanted to work from home was allowed to do so on monday, and then on friday that everyone was working from home indefinitely and the cleaning crews wouldn’t be coming to the office. Had it not been for the second order, I’d have kept going into work a few days a week, and insisting that my team do so on occasion. I’d have done this because I’ve got deadlines to meet, and I know they work better when they’re in the same place.
This took several steps in the company I worked for.
Sometimes in late February or early march the board send a mail: “A global pandemic would be really bad for our industry. To do our part in slowing the spread we stop using air planes for any company related travel activities, and ask the employees to do the same privatly.”
Next day came a mail: “Everyone who was in Italy in the last 14 days is here by ordered to work from home for at least two weeks, and we ask you to self-isolate in that time.”
Some days later: “Everyone who was in the following countries is here by ordered to work from home for the next two weeks: Italy, Spain, Southern France, Austria.”
another day later: “The stay at home order is extended to people who went to Northrhine-Westphalia.”
Wednesday the next week: “As an exercies for an posible lockdown, we ask all personal who’s presence is not absolutly necessary to stay home on friyday.”
Wednesday evening the lockdown order by the goverment came, and so the “exercise” got extended indefenetly.
And yes I agree, I’m a lot less productive from home. And my team has decided to take one office day a week by ourselfs. But on the other hand our management feared that in a situation like this, our customers, wouldn’t need us anyway, because they are closed as well. That’s the reason for the early measures.
Are you in Germany? I only ask because it’s fun to imagine someone in California specifically calling out Northrhine Westphalia as a dangerous place.
Yes, I am.
I mean, this was my management’s position as of 3 months ago. After seeing their employees work from home and still act like adults and do their jobs, we’ll almost certainly have looser work from home restriction moving forward. I guess YMMV.
How much of this is because:
1) Indefinite work-from-home means setting up an effective solution? Eg. I took my monitors and docking station home from work when normally I’d just use my laptop.
2) When working from the office is the norm, “work from home” is a way of not-quite taking a vacation day while not having to actually burn a PTO day?
I think (1) matters a lot, but it’s as much from the corporate side (providing basic tools to enable distance working) than the home side. I will say that one of the first things I did (months ago, unrelated to COVID) when I know I would be teleworking was set myself up with a KVM switch so that I could use my home PC set-up for working. Trying to code (or really do anything that requires a lot of focus and multiple applications) off a laptop is a HUGE pain, in my experience.
But this is a one-time thing and doesn’t cost much (<$100 for me).
(2) wasn't a large concern, I think. We have a pretty high-trust work environment, and folks are treated as adults. And I've always thought that it's just as easy to fart around in the office as it is at home.
The bigger issue (my guess) was the expectation that daily face-to-face interaction was critical for things like collaboration and espirit de corp. Regular video meetings between teams and chat tools have largely (IMO) put this to rest.* Or at least established that folks can be just as effective from home.
I don’t think we’ll move to a model where most folks are working from home in the future, but I do think it’ll be more common on both ad hoc and scheduled bases moving forward.
Part of me wonders how generational this is. I grew up with things like AIM from middle school onwards. I’ve had online friends that I didn’t meet in person for years. Voice chat, text chat, etc. are all native to me. Instead of “walk down the hall and knock on the door”, you just send someone a gchat or equivalent. I just don’t get the notion that physical proximity is necessary for building relationships with people. (Which isn’t to say it can’t be useful…)
Setup matters, but that’s one reason I like working from home. If you sit in an open office, you do most of your work anywhere except your desk, and because of that you do it on a laptop, without external monitors.
Add cheap employers, who mandate a maximum of one external monitor per person, and that not very large – or tiny desks, to the same effect – and the home setup I created for my own convenience, with a KVM and two large monitors, looks really really good.
OTOH, my brother-in-law started the lockdown by discovering that while his IT department had claimed they’d done as ordered and created an effective work from home environment for days when the office was closed due to bad weather (blizzard-prone location), when the lockdown forced them to test their setup, he discovered that the software he’d been told to install on his laptop didn’t actually work with what they had on their servers.
Of course this was made more exciting by my sister (his wife) coming down with what in retrospect was a bad cold, right at the same time.
He’s successfully working from home now, but from a very rocky start.
@matthewravery
I’m 62, so a bit of a counter-example – but OTOH I’ve been in tech for most of those years, and first worked from home briefly (without net connectivity) in 1985, so maybe not much of a counter-example.
The next(?) year we got onto Usenet, and could exchange messages with academics in Israel with only a 24-hour turnaround. We started collaborating up a storm ;-()
And I’m not a manager, having successfully dodged that bullet except for a very brief period in the early 80s.
You don’t specify your generation. I was born in 1945 and I had and have online friends I didn’t meet in person for years, or still haven’t met.
Upper management in our area have said that they’re pleased the productivity measures they use haven’t fallen in the almost 3 months we’ve been working from home, however they’ve highlighted a few things they’re concerned about.
– People might be working longer hours without tracking them. Part of this is willingness from not having a commute, but part of this might be not being able to go out at all.
– Almost no one is taking PTO. They’re expecting it to cause issues when people are able to go places and all want to take PTO at once. They’ve warned that they’re likely to actually use the clause in our contracts saying they can deny requests to use PTO which hitherto has been pretty unheard of (for engineers at least) to the point where almost none of us know how to use the official system to get time off approved. Anyone near the accrual limit is being asked to take time off now.
I am probably working at least 1-2 hours extra each day because of these factors, as well as kind of a reinforcing bias. If everyone else is still working at 5, that means I might get new taskers/emails at 5, which means I’m going to be working until 6.
First, temporary work from home for people used to the office is different from full time work from home being the norm.
Second, it’s not just individual productivity, it’s the benefits of being in a shared space and interacting with people there. We have another team that does similar work to mine that is scattered around the world and all remote. I see the connections that fly on the rare occasions you them in the same room and how much gets done that wouldn’t be otherwise, because A has a problem/solution that B doesn’t know about and wouldn’t think to ask about.
We definitely will have loser work from home rules going forward, but I’m not a fan.
IDK what kind of work you do, but one thing that’s been an obvious productivity booster to me is greater control of when I switch contexts of my work. In the office, I’m subject to the whims of everyone walking by my office. If they want to chat, they knock. It may be important, it may not be important, but regardless, I’ve got to take my head up out of my keyboard and have an interaction. This can be a major pain and slow my work substantially.
Having someone talk to me in person makes it more likely that I’ll address whatever their concern is immediately rather than wait until I’m at a natural stopping point. This add cognitive load and decreases productivity.
The extent to which this occurs probably depends a lot on the type of work environment and type of work you’re doing, but it’s worth keeping in mind.
In contrast, the person who talked to you that got their concern addressed immediately had their productivity increased.
Couple things:
1. I may be a manager, but that means I have to play politics with other managers. Some managers are not allowed to have their people work from home and become quite jealous.
2. If you miss a deliverable or otherwise become difficult to work with for any reason, many of which may be no fault of your own, it is very easy for other managers to point at your lack of office presence as the key driver. It is an easy scapegoat, and many managers like easy scapegoats, just like anyone else.
3. Other managers and other teams have preferred methods of working, and many of them want face-to-face contact. I still have people that call me, even knowing that I need to share a screen with them (Which requires Zoom, which our company pays for us to use). But 90% of their communication IS calling, so they don’t want to adjust their 10%.
4. A lot of comradery is built up with in-person interactions. This is important social capital. It is as important as anything else you do. The company cannot function without social capital. Most people don’t function well as a team if they all dislike or distrust each other.
5. Some things are just easier to discuss face-to-face. Actually it’s a lot easier to explain math stuff face-to-face, at least to non-numbers people. I can see when people’s eyes are glazing over, I can see when they are getting frustrated, I can see when they “get it.” I cannot do this as easily over the phone and I definitely cannot do it over email. You can be the smartest person in the room and it does not matter if no one understands you.
6. I don’t want you to just understand what you do, I need you to understand what other people do and how you fit into a team. A very smart person got a bit sassy with me today because I blocked a whole bunch of new products: the new products were coming in at such a high cost that a flagship company capital investment was about to have its margin slashed quite significantly. Apparently I violated some sort of sacred protocol because certain costs were supposed to be questioned earlier (long before I ever saw them). Yeah, that guy doesn’t “get it,” I am the Veto Point, and I get to exercise Veto above any other established procedure or process because I am the Veto Point that makes sure we don’t roll a cost that bankrupts us.
That being said, there’s a lot more support for WFH now. I don’t know what the New Normal will be. I am hoping 2-3 days WFH becomes standard. That will open up a LOT more jobs for me. I cannot take jobs in downtown Chicago because the daily commute is between 2.5 and 3 hours: that’s not as bad if I only have to make it twice a week.
Why can’t you do it with Skype or one of its competitors?
For most, limited screen space. I typically have to show numbers to multiple people and multiple people do not display on a screen very well while I am also screen-sharing. And I work on a big screen TV.
Also, most people do not want to use the webcam. It feels invasive. They don’t engage as well with a screen as they do a person anyways.
Damned if I know. Before the covid-19 epidemic, my management had drunk the open office Koolaid – the best possible setting for effective software engineering is a crowded room with glass walls (providing both total lack of visual privacy and lots of echoes).
Or they’d drunk the save-money-by-packing-engineers-into-sardine-cans, but-tell-them-it’s-to-improve-productivity-and-they’ll-feel-good-about-it Koolaid, like my immediately previous employer. (That employer was caught saying one thing to managers and something else to engineers; I choose to believe what they told the managers.)
Realistically, I do better when I’m not isolated, and when I can get help fast – less well when I can’t think straight for the noise – but unless you are a manager, your chance of getting a workspace where you can hear yourself think is negligible. (Managers often have large, empty private offices they visit once or twice a day between meetings ;-()
Forced to chose between sitting in a 1960s typing pool layout, and having next to no contact with coworkers, guess which I pick? I’m loving the increased use of Slack and video meetings brought on by the lockdown.
It’s hard to imagine that there’s any savings available from economizing on office space at the cost of decreasing your software engineers’ productivity.
Makes you wonder what area of office space costs as much as each employee’s salary.
It’s odd that the question of how much space and privacy white-collar workers need to be productive is even up for debate. There are a lot of white-collar workers, they do valuable work, and many of them work for large, sophisticated organizations that can afford to spend some money on research. You’d think this would be one of the most carefully studied issues in all of management literature.
You have to give up a lot of office space to just squeeze in one more employee.
Our staff makes around $70k. Plus the fringes, and using Google’s estimate of $40/sq ft, an employee’s annual wage is equivalent to about 2400 sq ft. That’s a big suburban house.
A better comparison is that a 6×6 cubicle costs you $1400, and 10×10 office costs you $4800. And it’s actually worse than that, because you can shove cubicles right on top of each other, which you can’t with offices, and offices probably require more support work with walls, electricity, hvac, etc.
An extra few thousand per employee isn’t anything to sneeze at. If you asked an employee “would you rather increase your cubicle size from 6×6 to 10×10 or get an extra 5% in your 401k,” most people are probably going to take the 401k option.
However, for managers and above, probably an attractive perk worth considering.
My suspicion is that the amount of space per employee you need before you stop seeing measurable changes in productivity is less than the amount you need before your employees stop complaining that lack of space is effecting their productivity.
C.F. teaching/learning styles, where a lot of people insist that they learn better if taught in a particular way, but my understanding is that the evidence suggests that this is not actually the case.
Most employees would prefer better working conditions (friendlier, better gear or offices) to a higher salary, and it is a common mistake to think otherwise. So if you invest $4k per worker getting them an office, some if not all counts as compensation that will keep them working for you. And if you get more productivity that’s even better.
Ehhhh.
I don’t think that’s accurate, but I guess it varies by industry. I don’t work FAANG. I’ve worked corporate accounting and I’ve worked plant accounting. The kinds of people stuck in ever-shrinking cubicles are making $50k-$80k/year. Putting them in a bigger cubicle is a big chunk of their compensation. Putting them in an office is mind-boggling.
Just imagine going to an interview and being told that your salary is gonna by $5k lower…..BUT, your cubicle is 10×10 instead of 6×6! Isn’t that a sweet deal?
Also, there’s wayyyyyyy better things to spend money if you want to retain workers. Parties, gifts, etc. This company and our my last company had full coffee bars, with baristas, fresh fruit and snacks, and beer taps in the employee cafeteria. Hell, if you’re throwing around thousands, you might as well send all of your employees to Disney World at a subsidized rate or something. You can probably get a discounted rate if you’re sending out everyone.
Should also add that major companies are NOT afraid of spending more money if they think it will attract them talent. A lot of companies are shifting corporate HQs to much higher-priced urban offices in part to attract employees who want to work in the city.
And, finally….again, disclaimer, not a FAANG employee: Most staff analysts can work just fine in a freaking open office. It’s annoying as hell, but successful staff will continue to perform well, because successful staff have talents that usually exceed staff responsibilities. These people are identified and promoted. Regular staff are going to make a crap ton of errors even if you give them an office because they are error-prone. They also are only going to work productively 4-5 hours a day anyways.
Oh yeah, because when I get my next electricity bill I can pay it in barter with the free fruit from the office canteen 🙂
Stuff like this only works at a certain level of remuneration when you’re not concerned with how much of your pay packet is going on living expenses, and I rather imagine any employees who make too free use of the beer taps while at work will find themselves becoming ex-employees.
If it’s a choice between “slightly more money”, “same money but can work in a reasonable space” or “same money, noisy crowded space but hey we’ll give you all the free coffee you can drink”, free coffee is going to be way down on my list of priorities when job-seeking.
The actual trade-off for the people we are trying to recruit is:
A. 5% less pay to commute an hour every single day into the suburbs so work with the cast of the Office, but, hey, your cubicle is 10×10!
B. Straight pay, take public transit 20 minutes to work in a city location with lots of restaurants and bars around you, lots of fun young people to work with…and you have to work in an open office, but we have free beer.
@A Definite Beta Guy
Good point. If the people you want to attract are young singles who like living in crowded urban areas and can afford to, they won’t want to commute to the suburbs where rents are cheaper and parking is free, and you can give everyone more space.
We see that a lot in the Bay Area. Some companies place themselves in San Francisco. Older potential employees probably live in the suburbs, and are faced with a horrific commute, expensive parking, and a tiny workspace. My bridge partner had to take such a job recently, and he’s absolutely loving the covid-19 lockdown, because working from home gives him 2 free hours every workday, as well as free parking and less expensive lunches – on top of not sitting in a sardine can.
Most suburban-resident employees select themselves out of the applicant pool for such positions, unless they have no equivalent opportunities in better locations. Given age-related correlations, you can load your staff with youngsters without a hint of age discrimination.
Other companies have two sites, one in the city and one in the south bay, and allow employees to pick their work location.
Still others (Apple, Google) have their main buildings in suburbia, and run plush wifi and table equipped commuter busses down from the city, on which many employees accomplish a fair amount of work.
And still others base themselves in the suburbs, and their applicant pool selects for older, stodgier, and more likely to have children.
Given a choice between productivity and even just the mere appearance of control – not actual control, just the illusion of it – a heck of a lot of managers pick b. This is a known bug in human wetware.
Well, my previous employer was more of a sales company than an engineering company, in spite of what they sold being highly technical. So the senior executive team understood (and identified with) sales and salespeople, but didn’t really understand engineers.
Perhaps more importantly, the facilities budget would not be impacted by lost engineering productivity unless/until the company got itself into serious financial trouble; that would probably take long enough that the senior facilities decision makers would already have new employers.
Finally, “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. If the whole industry is doing it, your productivity is no worse than that of your competitors. And you (management) get the pleasure of micromanaging your peons, and having obviously better working conditions to emphasize your status.
+1
I think a whole lot of big decisions are made for cargo-cult/following the herd reasons, with rational justifications being spun up after the fact. Open offices seem likely to be one of those, but the world is full of them. Fads are extra-visible in management and education, but I think they’re everywhere.
Nobody will ever convince me that the reason every corporation has open offices now is anything other than “Because Google did it and Google is pretty cool so if we do it too people will think we’re cool like Google is”
@Matt M
You also get more workers per square foot, so it saves money.
Right but I think that’s a tangential point. As in, I think even if it somehow cost more money, everyone would be doing it anyway, just to copy the cool kids.
@matt M
I think both points are essential. If google had announced that their internal studies proved everyone should have an office and built that instead of open offices, you wouldn’t get as many copycats because everyone would look at their facilities budget and say “this is going to cost us a fortune, I’d rather spend the money on other things. Google can keep their fancy offices and free sandwiches.” But when google does something that also saves money, then you have two good reasons to pitch it. It’s the confluence of trendy and cheap that leads to mass imitation, not just trendy.
the savings from less office space are highly visible. the loss in efficiency is a lot harder to detect.
I do think the orders make a pretty big difference in the sense that a decent chunk of companies would expect their employees to come in after it was lifted. Some might allow exceptions, but that’s likely to be held against the people using them and become a problem.
ADBG below explains some of the dynamics that would drive this—regardless of whether it is working ok enough and supported by the employees, some places will absolutely not be okay with extending work at home if they don’t have to. Or there will be enough fighting over it to cause issues. I don’t think guidelines do much. There are definitely companies committed to allowing WHF long term no matter what, but I’m guessing they’re a real minority and concentrated in specific industries. I imagine most companies will allow flexibility for some employees to work from home, but not others.
Of course, if the stay at home orders last long enough, enough bosses and even workers may decide they’ve had enough that they get the orders rescinded. Especially when we get better data on risks and time frame.
I think it is true that behavior patterns are not mainly driven by the orders themselves at this point, but by personal preference. Workplaces have people of different preferences, and also incentives, which is the problem. If the boss prefers workers come in, then they don’t have much of a choice without an order. I do believe some businesses will suffer without the employees coming in and if it persists, the employee may be out of a job altogether, so I wouldn’t be too quick to assume leaving the the orders in place is clearly the best way to protect the interest of all workers. It may be more reasonable to let them make the choice whether to resign and look for a job that will let them work from home, or take the risk of going in to avoid losing their job.
Also, plenty of young people would go into work if called back by bosses—some are quite concerned about this, but many more are probably worried about job security and getting out of the house, especially if they live alone. I think the lockdown is all that keeps them at home. Bottom line is that it absolutely makes a difference to have lockdowns, but I’m not sure how long it remains workable. Of course, when they are lifted, I can see a frenzy of lawsuits or just media controversies over this issue of employees being pressured to come in. Also over respecting social distancing in the office–some people are going to be way more into that than others. It certainly makes a difference as to the spread of the virus, but I don’t think trying to contain it in this manner is worthwhile.
> a decent chunk of companies would expect their employees to come in after it was lifted.
It depends a lot on their work location. If they’re in a skyscraper building downtown where everyone needs to file through a single series of elevators to get to the office, then they probably will continue work-from-home until a vaccine or herd immunity is achieved, regardless of the orders.
While that would make logical sense and will probably make some small difference, I think most bosses at big firms, of the type most commonly found in skyscrapers, won’t think much of the elevator risk. Most of those places aren’t going to be amenable to WFH unless legally required. Relative risk just isn’t the determining factor. I would bet many employees would be willing, but would expect some pushback. Apparently the elevators aren’t necessarily that risky compared to simple office interaction. Close talking is the problem, and those firms aren’t going to be able to avoid it. Any office will struggle to avoid it, I think. For most people, it’s too hard to resist close talking when you’re in a familiar place with people you know well.
Are you willing to accept the possibility that the “gung-ho” manager will never ever accept this because they are not wrong? Or, what does it take to convince the work-from-home absolutist to accept that, yes, we need to be working in the office whenever possible, that working from home should be a rare exception?
The real test, the one that will convince just about everyone, is when the firms that follow one strategy start collapsing into bankruptcy and ruin because they are outcompeted by the firms that follow the other. Or because the one strategy is so badly flawed that it will fail even with no competition. But sorting out winning from losing strategies is one thing markets are unambiguously good at.
Until they sort it out, don’t expect everyone to start agreeing with you just because the state issued an “order” or a “guideline” that says to do things the way you prefer. If it’s an order, they’ll probably go along with it because they A: have to and B: can at least hope their competitors will be under the same order. But to convince them your way is better, you’ll have to show them that your way is better. And it’s going to be hard to do that without allowing the competition to take place.
Evidence. Real data comparing different working conditions along with measures of results.
I’m not a WFH absolutist. I am an enough-space-and-enough-quiet absolutist, and there is research showing the effects on software developer productivity, at least in the narrower sense of code quantity and quality.
FWIW, the decision makers at my previous company were confronted with this evidence. They insisted it didn’t matter and we needed to do the same experiment all over again. They eventually ended up with staff who cared least about the 3 linked issues: lying, agressively ignoring research, and degrading their engineers’ working conditions. (Yay SF Bay area – there are always software engineering jobs available; voting with one’s feet is workable.)
I actually don’t believe I’m doing my best work here from home – but better work than I’d be doing in the panopticon at the main office. (Normally, I spend 1-2 days a week there, and the rest of my time at a small, under-populated peripheral building where I can generally hear myself think.)
@DinoNerd: you are obviously correct that engineering work is better done in a locked room by yourself. Your job, at most companies, is not engineering work: it’s to maximize your social capital, and thereby the amount of money they pay you. Doing good engineering work is one way to achieve that. Other ways are more effective, such as “making sure your boss remembers you exist” or “being in the room where decisions happen.” People don’t have emotional object permanence; if you’re far away, you simply will not matter to them compared to the people they see everyday. Similarly, you’ll have no real voice in how things get done, which means you’ll get no credit for it either.
In a less sociopathic framing, other activities that don’t work remotely that are still of high value:
* Brainstorming together
* Training new people
* Building social rapport with your coworkers…
To the extent that management succumbs to the tendency to reward people for their social skills, and nothing much else, they will wind up with staff who are good at social skills, and nothing much else.
If they farther succumb to the tendency to reward people who use their social skills in [soft] sociopathic ways (office politics), without either occassionally cracking down on those who overdo it, or frequently also rewarding other things, they will wind up with a company culture consisting primarily of vicious political fights. Such a company will only prosper while they have a cash cow left over from better days, or if they can make money by similar interpersonal activities.
I’ve seen those companies, and interviewed some of those they eventually lay off. I’m always a bit concerned that they might bring their company culture with them into a new environment.
Again, not FAANG, but I don’t see how you don’t reward social skills, which inevitably results in rewarding political skill to some level. Organizations are full of people and you need to know how to work with people effectively in order to actually be effective. At the very least, you need communication skills, because other people cannot help you if they cannot understand you, even if all parties are well-intentioned.
I’ll give an example: 2/3 of our supervisors are out on first shift. The employees are taking advantage in predictable ways: showing up late, long lunches, punching out late, blah blah blah. Finance (IE ADBG) still audits that shit.
The way you communicate this is something like: “Hey Production Manager. We typically see X number of Y issue in a day. Since your supervisors are out, we see 20X. This requires all of your supervisors to audit and fix punch cards, and will reflect in the month-end report to the Factory Manager if it does not improve. How can we recommunicate our time policy to all shifts while complying with social distancing?”
It says:
1. People are time stealing like crazy
2. It’s quickly getting out of control, and as word spreads, EVERYONE is going to do it.
3. This creates MORE work for you team, because they still have to fix it.
4. If you don’t fix it, I’m escalating it. ***
5. This is fixable by simply telling your employees that we are not stupid and we know when you are stealing time. Do that, write up a few people, and this whollllleeeeee problem goes away.
What a direct report of mine did was send a long-winded email with attached spreadsheets, talking about findings and blah blah I couldn’t even read it. This direct report used to work in audit, and is used to everyone reading her emails in exacting detail, because you don’t ignore an auditor.
But she’s not an auditor anymore. If she communicates poorly, people delete her emails. And that’s on her, not the people deleting her emails.
***A lot of people think “come on, it’s not that big a deal,” but we are assigned Go Finds/Go Gets that are only a few percent of the total budget. An aggravation like this on a systemic basis can easily increase our conversion budget by .5%, which is enough to materially damage overall performance metrics. In low margin industries, it can be fatal, and certainly very damaging. We struggle A LOT just to find projects worth, like, .05% of our conversion, and we generally tack a little things together with a few major projects to hit our metrics.
COVID is already aggravating our numbers, so any additional spend is just another kick to the nuts.
Dino, I didn’t say they only reward social skills, I said that you have to have them. More generally, you have to be in their society, and the guy locked in a room 500 miles away isn’t.
You may not believe in office politics but they believe in you. Saying that companies that get taken over by politics fail is true but not really relevant; you have to make the ones you do have work.
@Andrew Hunter
While I was very cranky this morning, I will say in my own defense that I thought I had earlier made clear that the problem I had was with the tendency for some people to over-reward social skills at the expense of everything else – as well as also implying that that when that happens, they often also overreward specifically those social skills that are most harmful to the community, company, or other organization.
When I have to, I consciously manipulate people into having positive feelings about me. The more I have to do this (consciously), the worse feelings I tend to have about them, but it’s pretty much a matter of self defence. Often I can take on the social role of “that braniac geek without whom this place would cease to function”, “absent-minded professor,” or “trusted advisor to up-and-coming manager” – and I seek out those roles, and organizations which make them available, as they allow me to focus primarily on what I’m good at and enjoy.
For the record, I’ve met two or three people in management who had, IMO, really good social skills, as I’d use the term if it it didn’t already have another meaning. Also one management-bound engineer of the same type. These people could work with – and get good work from – just about anyone, rather than having either a “one-size-fits-all” motivation/communication skill, or a belief that their staff were programmable robots who would simply do whatever they were ordered to – including correctly guessing that part that was ambiguous, unstated, or not intended to be obeyed. And that’s in more than 40 years in the workforce.
Seconding DinoNerd about the genuine importance and rarity of “good social skills” in the “manages many different people and relationships effectively” sense. I’ve been in the professional workforce for 20 years; I’ve worked for exactly one person who was genuinely good at getting the best possible work from the team.
Sam: Agree. Actually great people skills are rare, and management is a difficult and valuable skill.
All I’m claiming is that with any of these people–the good managers or the bad, and the same for IC coworkers–you need to be in their presence. A lot. We’re just not wired to treat that random guy on VC the same way.
@Andrew Hunter
You’re not. A lot of autistic people are. Some of us don’t even need video chat – we’ll treat the random guy on email or Slack the same way, or the only difference will be whether we’ve encountered them before, and, if so, what the encounter was like.
It sounds like I wasn’t clear about the intent of the question. I actually prefer working in the office, and am definitely less effective right now for not being able to do that. (I started a new job the day my state closed down.) I might even, on balance, prefer an open floor plan over the academic everyone-has-an-office system, although both have advantages and drawbacks.
What I was trying to understand, though, was whether the stay-at-home orders were useful for advancing the goal of “everyone stays at home to prevent the spread of coronavirus”, and it sounds like the answer is a resounding “yes” — more people are working from home because there’s an order to do so, than would be if it were just guidance.
I think there are two separate questions here. Now that the orders have been issued and everyone has started it for a few weeks, are the orders necessary in order to keep businesses in work-from-home mode until the existence of a vaccine? Will this example be enough to keep allowing work-from-home after a vaccine? My guess is that the answer to the first is yes and the second is no. If anything, once we have a vaccine, many companies will be much stricter about working in the office, after seeing the muddle we’ve done during this period.
Hot take of the day: Socialism killed the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Contrary to popular belief, Bernie Sanders is not an actual socialist, at least not by any internally consistent definition of socialism. In terms of actual policy, he’s a European-style welfare capitalist. His ideas are standard practice in the Scandinavian countries, and only slightly further to the left than what you’d see in France or Germany or even in the US during the FDR/LBJ era. Virtually all political scientists and economists agree that he’s not a socialist. (See: here, here, here, here, here, and here.) For that matter, most actual socialists likewise agree that he’s not a socialist.
And as a political scientist, I’m sure Bernie himself knows he’s not a real socialist. His use of the term is more of a rhetorical tactic than anything else. Back in the 80s, Reaganite propaganda dismissed virtually all forms of welfare and progressive taxation as “socialism,” and Bernie was basically saying “if that makes me a socialist in your eyes, then so be it.” (Yes, Bernie supported actual socialist policies like nationalization of industries back in the 60s and 70s, when he was a young activist, but to act like he still espouses those policies is disingenuous. Even his former acquaintances have admitted that he’s renounced actual socialism.)
Back in 2016, this wasn’t too big a deal. Bernie was the only notable person in American calling himself a socialist, so he could use it to mean whatever he wanted it to mean, at least as far as the general public was concerned. I was mildly annoyed by the fact that he labeled himself a socialist, but that’s mostly just because I’m a cranky political scientist and I can be a stickler for proper terminology. His policies were still a bit too far to the economic left for my tastes, but I still supported him in the Democratic primary, because 1.) I really do believe we need much better social services in this country, even if I disagreed with him on the particulars, 2.) I’m a civil libertarian and he had the best record on foreign policy and civil liberties, by a long shot, and 3.) it was refreshing to have someone who was generally anti-establishment, but also wasn’t a total crackpot and had actual political experience. Also, to a lesser extent, 4.) Hillary was a uniquely bad candidate and I couldn’t bring myself to support her.
But at some point between then and now, something happened. A genuine, bona fide socialist movement sprung up in the US as a result of Bernie’s campaign. Groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, which had previously been relegated to the furthest fringes of American political discourse, suddenly found themselves back in the spotlight. Membership in the DSA and similar organizations surged. Socialist publications like Jacobin, which had formerly been known only to far-leftists and political wonks, started popping up on the Facebook feeds of everyday Americans. Polls showed that between 30% to 40% of millennials had favorable views of socialism, and a full 70% of millennials said they would vote for a socialist candidate.
Granted, many of these “socialists” weren’t any further left than Bernie. (I recently got into a debate with a self-proclaimed “socialist” and found out halfway into the discussion that he actually supports Keynesian economics rather than any kind of actual socialist economic structure.) But there was still a significant and far-too-vocal minority of them who were actual far-leftists: They talked about nationalizing major corporations and industries, abolishing rent and profit altogether or sometimes even abolishing money altogether, and other extremist policies that were far to the left of anything that you’d see in Europe or anywhere else outside of Communist Party dictatorships. And a small but vocal minority of those people were radical leftists – typically either anarchists or Marxist-Leninists – who frequently endorsed violent revolution, talked about executing billionaires and CEOs and politicians and cops, fantasized about sending centrist liberals off to concentration camps, idolized and defended Communist dictators like Stalin and Mao, and flew the Soviet/Chinese flag everywhere.
Bernie himself didn’t support any of this madness. But it became associated with his campaign nonetheless, both because his 2016 campaign was responsible for sparking the millennial socialist movement in the first place, and because he continued to call himself a socialist even when there were actual socialists in the news using the term to mean something entirely different. The average Rust Belt labor leftist might’ve been happy to support a “socialist” when socialism simply meant “opposed to the Reagan-Clinton neoliberal consensus that he blamed for ruining his life.” But if that Rust Belt laborer goes online and sees “socialism” being used to describe the DSA/Jacobin types, or Marxist-Leninists defending Stalin and Mao, or red-black anarchists making jokes about sending everyone they disagree with to the guillotine, he’s going to think “oh shit, Bernie means actual USSR-style socialism, fuck that!” Especially when 2020 offered alternatives like Elizabeth Warren (a European-style progressive welfare capitalist who admits to being a progressive welfare capitalist) and Andrew Yang (whose idea of “human capitalism” – with a Universal Basic Income and less economic regulations than the current system – matches my own views a lot more closely than Bernie’s).
What’s worse is that Bernie would occasionally throw a bone to those people. Perhaps it was driven by a need to distinguish himself from other progressive candidates like Warren and anti-establishment candidates like Yang, but in any case, it was a huge strategic mistake. The worst example was when he defended Fidel Castro, on the basis that “he did a lot to improve Cuba’s literacy rate,” just a few weeks before the Florida election. Florida has plenty of Cuban residents who experienced the draconian brutality of the Castro regime firsthand, or had parents who did, not to mention all of the residents who knew those Cubans and were sympathetic to them. The Castro comment also turned off a lot of Bernie’s civil libertarian supporters, as well as plenty of social justice progressives who were appalled by his defense of a homophobic dictator responsible for sending LGBT people to forced labor camps. It even turned off some of the far-left anarchists who remembered how Castro violently purged their ilk in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution.
If Bernie had done more to distinguish himself as a social democrat rather than a socialist, and to distance himself from the actual socialists on the far-left, would he have won? Maybe not, there were a lot of other factors involved and he had a lot stacked against them. But I do think he would’ve had a much better chance, and likely performed a lot better than he did, especially in places like South Carolina, Florida, and Wisconsin.
I read an article a few months back that sums up the entire problem perfectly: There was a Social Democrat politician from Sweden who endorsed Sanders, and attended a Bernie rally during a trip to the United States. The Swedish politician had more or less the same views on policy as Bernie himself, so he assumed that he’d fit in. Instead, he was shocked and horrified to find that most people at the rally were extreme far-leftists talking about how capitalism as a whole needs to be abolished, and how billionaires and stockholders and landlords shouldn’t exist at all. According to him, you would never see people like that in Sweden outside of fringe Marxist or anarchist groups – certainly not at a mainstream political rally for one of the country’s most popular politicians!
My memory may be off, but I think I remember Bernie saying:
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
Rent controls should be nationwide.
Employees should be guaranteed (some) ownership of the companies they work for.
Certainly not quite as extreme as what you are saying. But definitely in the ballpark.
Yeah. Personally I’m less sure that Bernie has given up on true socialism in his heart of hearts so much as he’s bowed to the reality of American politics and moderated his stated policy goals to be more palatable. But maybe it doesn’t matter.
Either way, I think his rhetoric has remained “true socialist friendly” even as his policies are comparatively moderate.
I recall in 2016 he ran one radio ad in my area, and it was basically all about how bankers are evil and deserve to go to jail. Red meat for socialists.
@LadyJane:
> I read an article a few months back…
Probably this was Johan Hassel? Here’s one of the articles about his impressions:
https://theweek.com/speedreads/896948/democratic-socialist-bernie-sanders-far-left-swedens-ruling-social-democrats-official-says.
Sanders’ spending plans called for the federal government to spend almost 40% of GDP. That’s on top of 15% of GDP being spent by the states and around 8% spent as tax expenditures. that’s a figure well above any european government, and more philosophically, if the government dictating 2/3s of economic activity isn’t socialism, what is?
This simply isn’t true. I generally find people who say that Sanders’ proposals would be normal in Scandinavia or Europe are woefully underinformed about the actual economic policies of those countries. Sanders is not a “normal” European leftist in a relatively right wing country. He’s a far left populist, part of a general rise we’ve seen in the western world of populism and relatively extreme ideologies. Indeed, his fortunes are quite typical in this regard: the far left wave in Europe receded as he lost his second chance at becoming President.
To take one example, his plan to make companies set aside part ownership for workers is novel. What Europe has is a system of collective bargaining and governance monitoring in which workers have a healthy reservation of automatic seats. They are not owners of the company. Likewise, his health plan was far more extreme than things like the NHS. His wealth tax is also very uncommon: only Norway has one among Scandinavia, it’s much lower than the one he proposed, and the government in power has pledged to abolish it.
You mention how a European socialist found Bernie supports to the far left: but this is true of his policies as well.
Otherwise, I broadly agree. Sanders was either more radical and moderating to win or he was moderate version of far left populism from the start. Either way, he was not as far left as left goes. And these elements are still broadly unpopular and going to remain despite a lot of socialist posing on the left. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a shocking swerve from outright revolutionary rhetoric into some mundane small expansion of the welfare state. Talking about killing all the billionaires swerving into an argument about expanding Obamacare.
I can tell you that at least in Florida Sanders had two problems: Democratic minorities tend to be extremely unified as a group and Biden was better able to court them. This also appears to have been a huge issue in the Carolinas. Secondly, those who were more independent minded were unusually likely to have experience with actual Social Democrats in Latin America or Europe. Since they left, they tend to be fairly pro-capitalist even where they otherwise agree with Democrats on things like the treatment of immigrants or welfare. There’s a joke that no one really likes Biden but I’ve met a lot of left-leaning Latinos and African Americans who appear to genuinely like him. And a fair number of trade-unionists. I suspect the real people he doesn’t excite is the highly mobilized very left activist wing of the party, which is not the Democratic Party’s main voter base.
One more: Bernie’s comments about Cuba were also going to cause him trouble.
The comparison of campaign promises to enacted european policies is somewhat suspect though; everything gets compromised. Even comparing campaign promises with europe is hard because, since the US doesn’t have a parliamentary democracy, political promises are viewed even less literally. I don’t think Sanders’ politics would be outside the norm of portugal’s socialist party, spain’s podemos, or corbyn’s labor party.
Just to be clear, your argument is that Sanders is advocating policies to the left of what far leftists in Europe advocate but that we should ignore that because the practical result will be to the right of where Europe’s policies have gotten?
Given that those policies are more within the realm of the legislature than the executive, that’s not unreasonable.
It’s not an unreasonable prediction but’s a poor positive argument for why to vote for Sanders. It’s also an argument that seems motivated. After all, you could (and people did) make the same argument for Trump.
Yes, that’s more or less what’s happened with Trump.
What’s he done beyond ‘generic republican’ stuff apart from some restrictions on immigration?
It’s not an argument to vote for Sanders (not least because he’s not running for anything at the moment), just an observation. If political platforms were the same as enacted law the world would be a very different place, and probably much more ideologically extreme. Also the deficit would have been eliminated every 4 years. And there would be a border wall, which mexico paid for. And the UK would have been out of the EU for years.
@zzzzort:
Would have been entertaining to watch the world not violate the law of non-contradiction when federal elections in Mexico brought to power a Party with “open border with the USA” and “a Constitutional amendment against paying for walls” in their platform.
Bernie’s platform included policies aimed at handing control over all publicly traded corporations and all businesses with revenue over $100,000,000 to their workers. He was a god damned socialist.
Saying ‘he just wants what Europe has’ is some mixture of ignorance and gas-lighting.
*some mixture of ignorance and lying.
Yes, this is the hill I will die on.
This is neither true nor civil; please post more responsibly.
I’m not a fan of Sanders but now that he’s out of the race I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I was curious though to what extent these claims were accurate.
Newsweek article
Some relevant quotes:
Now 20% of a company’s shares isn’t “control” in the absolute sense. But it seems to me that between 20% of the shares and 45% of the board plus government loans to bridge the gap, absolute control isn’t far away. I don’t know enough about corporate governance to say exactly how close this is. Regardless these policy proposals are much more extreme than what I would have guessed before looking into this.
I think the best comparison for the board seats is german codetermination, where worker control is 1/3 of seats for 500+ employees, and 50% for 2000+ employees (with ceo required to be a shareholder appointee in a way I don’t understand).
I would say it is close to true in the sense that if you take all of his proposals they have some European analog or close enough to it, what he doesn’t have is many (any?) single countries that do all of them. Its ala carte socialism.
Apparently it wasn’t that difficult to find more radical left-wingers inside the Bernie campaign staff, either. So while he may have moderated some of his opinions for the public over his recent campaigns, his campaign itself also tended to attract and tolerate at least some of the Russian-communist-style socialists as well.
For a point of comparison, imagine that someone published videos of similar Trump campaign staffers who wore swastika tattoos, declared their support for Hitler, and for the “final solution” to the Jews. How would that be received on the left-wing and what would they conclude it meant about Trump, despite his more moderate views in public?
I disagree, at least mostly. Bernie was sending surrogates out to appear on Chapo Trap House, Bernie-employed staffers were trolling “centrists” on twitter, and he was pretty unambiguous about his desire for a revolution (although, yeah, he probably didn’t explicitly want a violent one).
His campaign set itself up to be the grease trap of the far left, the face that he ended up with undesirables wasn’t an accident, it was a feature. His thought process would be that he could be controversial enough to activate enough of the youth that he could squeak by in the primary and then count on unified opposition to Trump in the general.
I am currently annoyed at delivery drivers who have forgotten how to ring a doorbell. Does this make me a “coot” or a “curmudgeon?”
I think this is part of the push for “no contact” deliveries due to COVID-hysteria. I’m not sure if the companies have specifically given drivers guidance about this, but I get deliveries pretty often and literally never had this happen before COVID, and now it happens like half the time.
Speaking as a someone who finds driving for e.g. grubhub to be kinda a fun way to explore my neighborhood while getting paid for it, this is correct. I don’t ring the door bell (or touch the door with my hand!) if someone requests contactless delivery. I still touched the bag holding their food, several times, between picking it up to put it in my insulated bag, and then taking it back out of that bag after arriving, and carrying it to set on their porch. But yeah, I don’t touch the door or doorbell. Then I text or call to say the food is arrived, and wait for a confirm text or to see the door opened and the food taken (usually from 30′ away or more, often already back inside my car). It’s just doing the best I can. If someone doesn’t answer or show up after a minute, and where their phone is going direct to voicemail, I have once gotten back out of my car and knocked the door with my elbow. I suppose my next step after that might include ringing a doorbell if one is present, but would quickly mean texting driver support to indicate the person ordering the food isn’t answering and decide what to do next.
We, on the receiving side, take it one step further. Anything non-perishable sits in a wooden box on our porch for three days before we take it in. Perishables are brought in and washed with soapy water.
And I would certainly prefer that the delivery person not touch the door handle.
Personally, we have a ring doorbell that sends us an alert when someone is at the door, so “ringing” the doorbell is basically unnecessary and obsolete at this point. It’s also possible drivers can see/notice that and realize they don’t have to actually ring. It’s a decent investment if you get a lot of deliveries or other traffic at your door.
After very few interactions with mothers with napping babies, it can swear you off ever ringing a doorbell ever again…
Working on one political campaign, we once dreamed of having a standard letter in the office. If you got a parent with a napping newborn, and they told you off, we’d mail them the letter. The letter is an apology, a note about the candidate’s belief that elections can bring us together as a community, and a little printed sign they could post on their door, saying “Please do not knock or ring bell, infant may be sleeping. Instead, please text or call ____.” Would not be surprised if other political campaigns have actually made that dream a reality, but definitely this is one of the worst fears of door-to-door campaigners.
When we had napping babies, we had one of those doorknob signs telling people the baby was napping. We used it and it worked. Don’t know why this isn’t more of a thing.
@Scoop
The idea was my wife’s, of course. 🙂
I must be blessed. My child sleeps through the smoke alarm, the neighbor running his lawnmower, and dropping cast iron skillets on the floor.
The default delivery setting for a lot of online services is now “Contact-less Delivery” or some variant, where it specifically says they’ll leave it at your door and text you when the food arrives, at least for the services I sometimes use. There was a notice about how this new hotness is the greatest thing and ensures both convenience and safety for all parties in this time of COVID-19, etc, etc.
I’ve noticed that in practice a lot of drivers still meet people at their doors, at least around here, so make of that what you will.
Makes you normal, IMO. Maybe you could at least knock, or shout loud, or anything besides leave my dinner on the stoop and never tell me it is there?
Very common thing here pre-COVID. Actually less common I think post given everyone is now doing delivery and there’s kind of an established ‘ring the doorbell clause’
Most delivery drivers are contractors paid via delivery numbers where I live. Waiting for someone to answer the door, sign for, potentially chat or even complain to them is time wasted on not getting paid. It’s annoying but what can you do. Complain, but there’s multiple layers between who you can complain to and who is actually responsible.
@Evan Þ recently asked for a distributism thread, and there were many requests last thread to discuss socialism. Well, I said I didn’t want to be the one to make the thread, and distributism isn’t even socialist, but it still seems like an opportunity best not wasted. So here’s my brief 101.
Distributism was conceived by GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the early 20th century. It was first developed in their writings on economics and politics such as The Servile State and The Outline of Sanity, inspired by papal encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum and Quadrigesimo Anno. The key goal of distributism is wide distribution of capital. The reason for this is to avoid the concentration of power and wealth which tends to occur in both socialist and capitalist economies—in the former, concentration in the hands of the state, and in the latter, in the hands of relatively few capitalists. In a socialist economy, the state tend to subsume everything, starting with ownership of capital, while in a capitalist economy monopolies form and expand. The point of distributism is to avoid these twin evils by maintaining a wide distribution of capital.
This could mean a wide distribution of land, which was practical when most people farmed, but less practical today. This could mean a wide distribution of small businesses. This could even mean collective ownership of capital which is not easily divided, such as all the workers and managers in a factory owning shares. It certainly does not mean the government expropriating land or factories or something to give to other people, though the name, and some of the rhetoric, frustratingly gives that impression. Belloc’s practical suggestion to prevent Big Business (TM) was progressive taxation.
Distributism has been adapted many times since then. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, identified as distributists, though they tended toward anarchism, while Chesterton and Belloc did not. Some Americans have taken distributism in a more explicitly agrarian and anti-industrial direction, though it needn’t go that way; think Wendell Berry. Still others have paired it with guilds and even corporatism—the organization of society into distinct and overlapping bodies such as labor unions, religious orders, or sodalities and governance according to their representation. I think the last is more of a European thing, since it has no real history in the United States.
In all cases distributism has been strongly influenced by its Catholic roots, particularly the social teaching of the popes starting with Rerum Novarum. There were definitely fellow travelers outside Catholicism, though—Anglicans, Protestants on the continent and in America, Orthodox. (I suppose there are atheist distributists, but I’ve never met one.*) Anyway, one tends to see as a result an emphasis on the continuity of this philosophy with socially conservative views on the family. One also sees particular emphasis on subsidiarity—governance at the lowest competent level of authority, favoring the family over the city, the city over the state, etc. (It is for this reason that distributists have found natural allies on the American right among those who want to devolve federal power or to protect liberties of families and communities in area like education.) One sees it finally in solidarity, the principle of our common humanity. It is most easily and properly seen in a subsidiary way: the sort of free mutual help naturally given to family and friends, which is often expressed in many overlapping societies such as a family, parish, fraternity, and workplace. To be embedded in these is to be able to give and receive support at a level that is completely local yet very robust and reliable, but it needn’t end there. The brotherhood of man, after all, is universal—you share a human dignity with everybody on Earth.
Okay, so that’s a very quick introduction to distributist thought. I’m happy to answer questions, but remember I am not an expert!
*There is a chapter of James Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism, actually, which might contradict that. In “Two Cheers for the Petty Bourgeouisie,” Scott defends the “petty” bourgeoisie—let’s call them smallholders—who are frequently maligned by Marxists. This despite often being poor, and despite being plausibly the majority of people today, and the very great majority of Homo sapiens ever. As well, smallholders are frequently the one targeted by states in the ways discussed in Seeing Like a State, because a business of one is a lot harder to track and measure and tax than a megacorp. Where smallholders are recognized by the state, deigning to be tracked and measured and taxed, they are conferred status and rights thereby. Scott traces that back to a pre-eighteenth century distinction between the formally unfree, such as slaves and serfs, and the formally free smallholder.
The desire to own one’s own plot of land or one’s own shop, meanwhile, is widespread. Scott speculates,
He finds people clinging to the smallest scrap of land, even when the calculus would recommend going to town and renting a bit of land. And he finds meanwhile even the reddest of red revolutionaries dreaming of owning a plot of their own land. There’s a lot more to the chapter, including the valuable non-economic functions of the smallholder, with references to Jane Jacobs and Jefferson, but as this post and indeed this sentence is running long, I want to close by quoting the end of his chapter:
How can the former be accomplished without the latter? That’s my big obstacle whenever I try to understand distributism. Is it just meant to describe how we might prefer society to be? What are it’s policy prescriptions? If I own all the land, how can it be divided without taking it from me?
Come on, I give a practical suggestion one sentence later:
Chesterton and Belloc had others, but many of them were for the England of their time. For instance, they revived the political slogan Three Acres and a Cow, urging local authorities to purchase available land and rent it a few acres at a time at really reasonable prices. No need for eminent domain when there is land to buy!
We can discuss what policy prescriptions might work better today, but you’ll need to give me something more specific. Just to throw out a few ideas, occupational licensing tends to make it harder to enter a field like cutting hair (cutting hair, for God’s sake!); remove or reduce regulations like this and you will see more barbers. NIMBYism in cities is a disaster; for small shops to exist the small business owner has to, ya know, be able to live there. Distributists have always been big on antitrust legislation, too.
In the other thread, Lambert mentioned:
With your recommendations to cut regulations on occupations while being in favor of anti-trust, they do seem to be a distinct mix of preferences for intervention that don’t map neatly to currently discussed ideologies.
I don’t see how that solves the problem?
It sounds to me like you’re saying that we should heavily tax the rich, and then use that money to buy capital for people who don’t own capital. Presumably then, if I did own all the land (practically) around a village a distributist would suggest taxing me heavily, which means I will need to sell some of my land to meet the tax burden (otherwise, what’s the point?) which the village can then buy with the money it took from me. This is just expropriating land from me with extra steps.
I’ll try to lay this out more clearly: Chesterton was mad that certain capitalists and aristocrats owned most of the capital. So lets say I’m one of those people, I own the majority of land around a pleasant English village. Not just the land, but also most of the factories. Let’s dial it up: I also own most of the homes. I am the exact kind of person distributism doesn’t want to exist. Now: what policies would change that situation without expropriating my property to give to other people?
As you’ve framed it, this is a question without an answer: obviously nobody has a clever scheme for distributing your land without distributing your land. There is still a difference between taxing your land and selling land to poor people, and some jumped-up bureaucrat or elected official taking your land on tenuous eminent domain grounds and giving it to his friends, which is the usual nightmare scenario we are accused of wanting to perpetrate.
@Nick
With all due respect, that sounds like when you said that distributionism “certainly does not mean the government expropriating land or factories or something to give to other people” you really meant that it does mean exactly that, but done the right way.
@FLWAB
If you don’t want to sell it to the government, sell it to someone else, or find another way to pay. You could for instance sell it directly to whomever you like, like your brother, Count BAWLF. And while I suggested them in tandem, it’s not as though these policies need to come bundled together; either can occur in one place without the other, and even together you can’t read off the intent “let’s confiscate Lord FLWAB’s beautiful country estate!” from their both being on the books. Taxation, anyway, often has the effect of redistributing in general; I don’t see how your issue doesn’t apply to any tax with redistributive effects.
This Distributism stuff just sounds like what the “narodniks” and “Socialist Revolutionary Party” (not to be confused with the RSDLP or Bolsheviks) wanted…minus the use of assassinations and insurrections to get there. It also kind of sounds like anarcho-syndicalism, without the anarcho- part.
Whatever you call it, yeah, I don’t see how it wouldn’t tread on some existing capitalists interests in a big way.
Note that at the dawn of European colonization something like a Distributist society would have been very much possible in the Americas without major upheaval (aside from pushing out the Native Americans). That’s really the one chance that human society had for every family to own their own farm or workshop, or their own equal share of a larger enterprise. Why didn’t it happen? Conquistadors and plantation owners didn’t like it. They preferred to have a captive labor force that would be forced to work for them rather than run off to settle their own land on the frontier. In other words, in the one historical circumstance where a propertyless proletariat did not necessarily have to exist, and where instead humanity could have lived a more “Distributist” existence without upheaval to get there, the wealthy created a captive proletariat by artificial means…via encomiendas, slavery, indentures, and the exhaustion of the open frontier…either via natural population of it, or via legal efforts to restrict free land settlement, as with E.G. Wakefield’s plan for “Systematic Colonization.” This is the topic of Chapter 33 in Vol 1 of Marx’s “Capital.”
British colonial administrator E.G. Wakefield: “In ancient civilised countries the labourer, though free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.”
@Nick
Personally I think a tax that has the purpose of redistributing wealth is probably immoral. I think the only legitimate reason for a progressive tax is that the state needs money and rich people are theoretically hurt less by higher tax rates than poor people so given the fact that we need to have a tax at all, we should try to minimize the pain the tax causes.
But that’s just me personally, and I’m not here to argue that point. I just wanted to understand distributionism because every time I have tried to learn more about it I run into people saying “Distributism says that capital should be distributed more evenly” while also saying “Distributism is not about taking capital and giving it to others.” These two seemingly paradoxical ideas led me to the conclusion that I don’t really understand distributism at all. Now I’m starting to think that maybe the apparent paradox is only caused because many distributists don’t want to be compared to communists and so they are not candid about what they plan on doing. If you want to take capital from those who have it with the purpose of redistributing it, please be candid about it! If not, please help me understand what it is I’m missing about distributism.
I’m not a distributist, although I’m a GKC fan and have some sympathies with the movement. But one answer might be that the situation being described is a result of existing government interventions, and abolishing those interventions would eventually change it.
For a real example, one reason why rental housing in London is so expensive is the existence of a green belt, a sizable area around London where construction is greatly restricted. Abolish that and house prices fall, yard sizes increase, and it becomes more practical for the worker to own his own house. Multiply that example by fifty or a hundred, and you might have changes all of which consist of reducing government interference with individual freedom but whose ultimate effect is a less uneven distribution of capital ownership.
Think about distributism as a description of what the end state should look like, leaving open differing views of how to get there.
@DavidFriedman:
This is the key part, I think. People hear the name “distributism” and ask “Distributed by whom?” REdistributism could already be the name for the ideology of the modern state, which is capitalist but far bigger than any state that existed in 1914.*
So let’s jump in time to November 1917. The world has been shaken and people see two options for the future: a command economy and the status quo. But wait! What if we take a third option? What if the state allows people to own private property but taxes them much more, especially the rich, and redistributes the tax revenue to other people?
If you’re part of the government, the command economy option sounds awfully tempting: it means the group you’re part of gets unlimited power. Except by 1978 and definitively by 1991, it was obvious this was inefficient and states running a command economy would always be weaker than those that remained capitalist. Even though a state with nuclear weapons is invincible against invasion due to Mutually Assured Destruction, the USSR still lost a quasi-war with the United States and ceased to exist.
Now, given that empirical evidence, what do you do if you’re a government official? Going back to the way things were before the Great War and Russian Revolution would vastly shrink the power of the group you belong to. So you take that third option of redistributing a significant percentage of the wealth generated in the market to clients.
GKC’s distributism was a dream of changing things so there wouldn’t be poor clients (or poor losers, under the 1914 status quo). There ain’t no incentive structure for that.
*This is the sort of thing that led to my childhood confusion watching programs about WWI on The History Channel. They’d say things like “Russia lost because it was still an autocracy” and I’d think that meant it was a small government where the Czar ruled by himself, while modernization includes a large army of elected officials and bureaucrats.
@DavidFriedman
The commons round here are really nice and it’d be tragic if they got covered with suburbia.
Though maybe if I had a time machine I’d have told them to go the ‘green wedge’ route.
@FLWAB
Well, first, you missed two of the points I made: 1), a property tax isn’t expropriation, because you can simply pay it anyway, or sell or give the land to whomever you like; 2), you’re treating two different policies like they’re one package.
But I also really erred in my last post by not clarifying immediately that Belloc was talking about a tax on the sale of land, not a property tax. I’m sorry about that. You can read his essay suggesting it here; this policy would make it harder to accumulate land over time, but would not break up anybody’s estate.
Distributists have besides that differed on property taxes, so don’t take from my suggesting that a property tax isn’t expropriation that I speak for everyone. You can find for instance David Cooney arguing here they are unjust, at least as done in the US—he outright calls them feudal.
Isn’t this a distinction without a difference? The reason the state needs money is to provide services to the people – services that typically benefit the poor as much as the rich. So it is still redistributing wealth, even if the actual redistribution is in kind, not cash.
@Ketil
It’s kind of a principle of double effect type thing. If we need to maintain an army, or pay for meat packing plant inspectors, or other things meant for the common good that we vote to happen then we’re going to need money. If we decide the best way to get that money is a progressive income tax, well, that seems reasonable. But if you put a progressive income tax in place not because you need the money but because you deliberately want to take money from rich people, then that seems immoral to me. It’s kind of like making a tax that only is on black people because you think there are too many rich black people. The purpose of a tax should be to fund a program that voters want, and as such are a necessary evil to accomplish that task. If the whole point of the tax is to hurt some people then it’s no longer a necessary evil, just an evil.
It’s always rankled me that the state of California collects its income taxes through a “board of equalization”.
I think this is true, but I also think the consequences would be the opposite of distributist: significantly more barbers competing to give the same number of, or only slightly more, haircuts would mean lower prices, and if – as I suspect – the average haircutter is poorer than the average citizen, that will mean less transfer of wealth from rich to poor. There may be an opposite effect if people who teach haircutting are richer, but I wouldn’t bet on it being as large.
If your goal is wider distribution of capital, I’d suggest exactly the opposite – more artificial inflation of salaries for low-skilled jobs, not less. But I’d rather do that through minimum wages than through barriers to entry.
You’re assuming the supply of hairdressers is fixed.
What the regulation is doing is making the number of hairdressers smaller.
This forces people who want to cut hair to do something else (which is worse).
This makes poor people worse off.
It makes poor people without hairdressing licenses somewhat worse off, in that they don’t have the ability to work low-paying hairdressing jobs. It makes poor people with hairdressing licenses somewhat better off, in that their pay as hairdressers is artificially elevated from low to medium-low. And it makes everyone else somewhat worse off, in that their hair care costs more than it otherwise would (but probably not noticeable to the rich).
So, opening up occupational licensing requirements transfers wealth from a subset of the working class to the poor and the middle class?
That’s looks like a reformulation of what I believe, yes, although in my mental venn diagram “the working class”, “the poor” and “the middle class” are all overlapping circles, so I’d phrase it as “It transfers money to everyone else from a significantly-less-than-averagely-rich group”. And I suspect the net effect of that will be anti-distributist, especially if the poorest people are probably disproportionately unlikely to spend money on haircuts (they many not be, but again, that strikes me as a plausible guess).
No, I’m assuming that demand for hairdressers is… not quite fixed, because if haircuts get cheaper then a few more people who couldn’t previously afford them will want haircuts, but close enough to fixed that if the price of a haircut falls then the number of extra haircuts will not increase by enough to prevent the total amount of money spent on haircuts falling.
And I’m also assuming that, while some of the money spent on haircuts is being transferred upwards or sideways, more of it is being transferred downwards, because the average haircutter is poorer than the average haircuttee.
Removing licensing restrictions may have other good effects – presumably cutting hair creates value, and so the few extra haircuts will create more value – but in terms of distribution of capital I think the effect will be to concentrate it more, not less.
> the average haircutter
The set of haircutters is different depending on whether regulation exists.You can’t compare then like that.
The set of people who would become haircutters, sans regulation, is divided into two groups: People who still cut hair and are made better off, and those who don’t and become worse off.
There’s reason to believe the negative impact to the second group outweighs the positive to the first.
Thoughts on Henry George’s response to Rerum Novarum? A truly shocking twist where the man who thought free trade and land value tax would solve everything suggests free trade and land value tax would solve everything.
Not the last example of Georgist-Distributist dialogue. It seems.
I’m fairly certain Hilarious Bellicose had a plan involving taxing the sale of land TO landowners, to make your first Ever piece of land cheap and your second expensive, growing towards prohibitively expensive. Land Value Tax forcing land speculators to divest themselves of idle land seems more efficacious to me, but of course I defer to Henry George only on Spiritual matters and get my economics from Jacob Frank.
I first heard about George and Georgism from the distributists, years ago, though I can’t find the piece now; The Distributist Review has crippled their main website with the latest makeover, removing all the old comments and, bizarrely, all the paragraph breaks. Whatever. But doing a little research, it seems that:
1) a lot of distributists and Georgists agree the two are compatible, indeed complementary; and
2) wow, Henry George is cool, and criminally underrated today.
I’m probably going to have to read Progress and Poverty and Protection or Free Trade now.
A more thorough opposition to concentrated power would include only wanting small religious organizations, but somehow distributiivism didn’t go there.
That’s because Catholicism is true.
More seriously: the modern Church, especially in the councils, Trent, Vatican I, and Vatican II, have had the effect of centralizing things, both the governance of the diocese and the larger Church, sometimes to everyone’s detriment. I don’t have the time to go into this, since I’m about to run a campaign, but a world where priests weren’t plucked from their parish every six years or all the focus in the world weren’t constantly on the pope would arguably be a good thing. See e.g. Bronwen McShea here.
You’re overestimating my knowledge of Catholicism. From my point of view, Catholicism has always been centralized, what with having a Pope and a hierarchy.
Quick overview from a non-expert: Catholicism has always been more centralized than most other religious bodies, but in practice it used to have a huge amount of built-in checks and balances. Bishops used to be appointed by the Pope and some local civil or ecclesial body–exactly how that worked was very contested, but in practice the Pope’s discretion was fairly limited. (I can’t find the source quickly, but of the ~700 bishops at the First Vatican Council (1869) over 400 were appointments not in the sole jurisdiction of the Pope.) The Holy Roman Emperor still had the right to veto potential popes until Pius X (who owed his election to the exercise of that veto) banned the exercise of that veto in 1904. Parish priests typically required the consent of some body representing the parish to be appointed pastor (this was never the case in the US), and once appointed as pastor could not be removed by the bishop (this remained the case until the 1983 revision to Canon Law.)
It looks like the Austro-Hungarian Emperor claimed the right after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Emperor. The veto was asserted by Franz Joseph.
a world where priests weren’t plucked from their parish every six years
On the other hand, there are certainly examples of parish priests creating and running their own little fiefdoms and the bishop can go to heck if he wants to try reining them in, both on the very conservative and very liberal side of things.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to move priests around as curates so they’ll get experience of a decent range of parishes before handing them the keys to one, and as above for breaking up any little cults of personality. And it’s no harm for parishioners either to get jolted out of the comfortable familiar rut of “we always do things this way” and badgering the priest into ‘what the richest/most influential families in the parish want done’.
I think the vocations shortage is rattling things a very great deal, as well. A lot of elderly retired priests are being called back into service and a lot of priests are having to cover several parishes, and this is happening in Protestant denominations in Ireland as well.
I’ve read a while ago that the priest shortage is a self-amplifying problem.
Most people find it difficult to be natural around (Catholic?) priests, so priests need the company of other priests. Fewer priests means more loneliness, which leads to even fewer priests.
It’s important to note that certain other economic theories from around the same time- solidarism and certain variants of corporatism, for example- have strong similarities and can be thought of as part of the same family. Distributism has the advantage for American audiences of having originally been written in English, but attempting to understand it outside the context of these same theories is missing things.
How do we handle the following circumstances:
1) I have my equitable share of distributed capital (somehow, not important). I decide to sell that share and spend the proceeds on hookers and blackjack. I now have much less capital than the person I sold my original share to. What should happen? Should I be re-issued more capital? If so, what prohibits me from doing the same thing over again? Alternatively, should shares in capital be forbidden from being sold? If so, can I trade them? Either way, I see problems. I could end up stuck with a chunk of capital I may have no interest in: I’d rather have ownership in a tech company than a plot of land to farm, though others would prefer the opposite. Alternatively, you allow trade but not sale which likely results in people gaining wealth without the price signals to be able to readily quantify it.
2) Someone has children. At which point, and through which mechanism do they get their share of capital? Upon birth? Upon adulthood/highschool diploma?
For the most part, I’d say if you mismanage things and lose your capital, too bad for you.
There ought to be ways to get out from the bottom, but I agree it can’t be too easy. It’s a hard problem. Chesterton for instance wanted farmland that could be cheaply rented; in those cases you don’t have capital to lose, but it’s an imperfect or at-best-temporary solution because you don’t own it in the first place.
Well, the eldest child might inherit the family farm, or the family shop, or whatever. A second son might become a priest or join a monastery or go into the military; likewise a daughter. I suppose people today won’t like that answer, but it was common enough historically.
A lot of families in America already put away a bunch of money for each kid, namely, for college. It’s an investment, since the point is typically to have a kid who can hold down a job at the end of it. We can imagine Mom and Dad instead putting money away so Junior can buy a plot of land or open a store of his own, or he could buy into a cooperatively owned business. In general I don’t love the idea of the government handing out capital directly.
As would I. But I expect that too many of the people who would push for this sort of redistribution, would assume that if someone has wound up capital-free it is probably because they were robbed or defrauded by the greedy capitalists. Who we can recognize by the fact that they have more than the usual amount of capital. Then we’d get the push for re-redistribution to rectify this injustice…
Belloc wrote an account of the dissolution of the monasteries in which he argued that a vast amount of land in England was owned by the monasteries and used as common land by the people, but Henry took it and distributed it to loyal nobles, and it wound up gated and turned into estates. So yes, if you follow Belloc, the people were robbed, though not by greedy capitalists, and it had been generations ago, and they had weaker titles than ownership to the land in the first place.
Belloc at least in his “The Differential Tax” piece believed the greater fear was not the government doing more actually redistribution, but the government allocating nominally redistributive tax income to its own purposes. Setting aside the precise reason, I’ll agree fear of a slippery slope in this area is not unreasonable, at least if we compare taxes in the US with taxes in parts of Europe, or even other parts of the US….
Dutch fixed expressions get subsidized, which is why there are so many (not really)
‘De boog kan niet altijd gespannen zijn’ = The bow can’t always be drawn
People need time to relax.
‘Een boom opzetten’ = Setting up a tree
Talking a lot. May have come from a trick-based card game, where the winner of each trick would be tallied with short marks, in a way that resulted in something looking like a tree, if you had enough marks. Presumably, players talked a lot during the game.
‘Boontje komt om zijn loontje’ = Little bean will get his pay
Someone got their just deserts. This comes from a 1662 Dutch fable where a small bean, straw and burning piece of coal go on a journey and come across a water-filled ditch. The straw lies down so the others can cross, which the bean does. However, as the coal crosses, the straw catches fire and burns up, causing the burning coal to fall into the water and be extinguished. The bean then laughs so hard at their misfortune, that he rips his belly open. Fortunely, he finds a tailor who can sew him up, resulting in the characteristic black seam on certain beans. So this is not just a morality lesson, but also an origin story of
Batmanbeans.This story was slightly adapted and published by the Grimm brothers in their first collection of fables from 1812, which is probably how any modern person knows the story (the meta-fable here is how being original counts for less than being good at marketing and/or distribution).
‘Oude koeien uit de sloot halen’ = Get old cows out of the ditch
Raking up the past or let bygones be bygones (depending on how it’s used).
‘Een bord voor je kop hebben’ = Having a plate/board in front of your head
Doing what you want without concern for the impact on others. Unclear origins, first known use in the 17th century.
I’m curious, what do you mean by “fixed” expressions? Are there unfixed expressions? (serious question)
It’s an expression where the combination of words means something more specific or different than just the words themselves.
For example, “blood is thicker than water” would normally not be interpreted as a factual statement about the properties of blood and water. However, if you were to say “molasses is thicker than water,” it would be interpreted as a factual statement about material properties, even though these sentences are grammatically the same. The difference is that in the English language, there is an agreement that the former combination of words has a meaning different from the literal.
I think fixed expression means the same here as idiom.
Yes, there are. Fixed expression (or nonfunctional expressions) are specific turns of phrases that have effectively turned into words by ossifying such that it uses language in a way it wouldn’t otherwise be used. For example, when I say, “A cat has nine lives,” or “Seize the day,” I am using functional language. I could construct those sayings out of normal language rules. I use words like “seize” to mean “go out and do something” and I say “the day” normally.
In contrast, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” is much less functional. It’s a preserved phrase from an earlier version of the language. We don’t use thee or toll very often and the grammatical construction is a little different. A pithier example, “For the love of God.” We still use if this phrase but only this phrase. We no longer say (as people did in the Middle Ages) “for the love of me,” or “for the love of your mother.” Even the general grammatical rule is rarely used. When was the last time you heard someone construct a sentence using “for” to mean “because of”? It’s not unheard of but it’s rare and often in relatively rote phrases.
The Dutch Ministry of Financy reported their own tax agency (the Dutch equivalent to the IRS) to the police for ‘knevelarij’ and discrimination (etnic profiling). ‘Knevelarij’ doesn’t have a good English translation. It’s abuse of power by a civil servant by demanding or accepting money that isn’t owed. This is not the same as corruption, since it doesn’t have to benefit the civil servant personally.
The Dutch government has been seesawing between making it easier to get various benefits and clamping down on fraud. In this case, the benefit was childcare subsidies. The tax agency was so determined to go after fraud that they resorted to terrorizing owners of childcare facilities as well as parents that used these facilities, to disrupt suspected fraud networks. However, the evidence was often minimal, where the bureaucrats seemed to suffer from tunnel vision. Minor administrative mistakes were seen as strong evidence for fraud. The parents that got investigated/punished were selected if they matched two or more risk categories, where one of those was often their ethnic background.
When citizens filed a complaint against punitive decisions, civil servants broke the law by misclassifying these complaints as requests for information, so they didn’t have to process them, which they were obliged to, according to the law. A civil servant whistleblower who complained all over the tax agency, got the following answer from a government lawyer: “We will start following the law again in the future.” Another damning statement by a spokesperson was that the tax agency “continuously strives” to follow the law.
In court cases, exculpatory evidence was systematically withheld from the court. A civil servant that did put exculpatory evidence in the dossiers was targeted for dismissal, although the exposure of the scandal saved him.
Initially, the government did what it always does: protect itself. However, there were so many sympathetic victims and so much evidence of law-breaking behavior, that too many politicians didn’t want to accept the reputation loss. Still, it is unprecedented for charged to be filed against civil servants that follow or make illegal policy.
Since I see no other reply, let me just say I found this bit of news interesting and worth reading. Thanks for taking the time to write it up. I wish there were a news service that summarized the top 10 news stories like this from every state and country, say maybe refreshing one per day, it would be so much better than the regular news. I would call it slow news.
I kept hearing about this “Obamagate” thing on the news without ever getting a clear idea of what it was about. Even googling it brought up about 3 pages of links that mockingly dismissed it out of hand without giving me much of an indication of what they were dismissing. And of course, Trump’s vague comments have been no help either.
Finally I found this Fox News article that gives me the best chance of steelmanning the Obamagate allegations and figuring out whether they have any merit to them.
The first thing I noticed is that this article uses words like “improper” and “abuse” and “astounding” but never the word “criminal.” So this is already walking-back the claim that Trump made in the recent press briefing where he said that this was the “crime of the century.” The Fox News article seems to be arguing that these were actions that ought to be illegal, but which happened to be within the letter of the current law, even if they were not prudent or within the spirit of the laws. Perhaps this partially explains why even William Barr has expressed doubt that this “scandal” will result in any criminal indictments being filed.
Some of the actions that were improper according to the Fox News article are old allegations having to do with the argument that the FISA warrants that legally allowed spying on members of Trump’s campaign did not have sufficient corroborated non-partisan evidence behind them, and thus should not have been granted. Like I said, this is an old allegation, and even if it were true, I don’t see how this would amount to criminal wrongdoing; instead, it would call into question the judgment of the judge who approved the FISA warrants on such a basis, but nobody would dispute that that judge had the legal right to approve the FISA warrants on whatever basis in the world that struck that judge’s fancy. Short of impeaching the judge, them’s the cards you are dealt in our current system of “checks and balances.”
So anyways, let’s get to the new allegations that Michael Flynn’s conversations with Russian diplomat Sergey Kislyak were “unmasked,” and that this was “improper.” By “unmasked,” here’s what they mean: the NSA had already been surveying Sergey Kislyak. Thus, whenever Kislyak communicated with someone, the NSA would naturally end up recording not just Kislyak’s end of the conversation, but also the other person on the call/visit. If that other person happens to be an American citizen, by law that person’s identity must be “redacted” (i.e. temporarily erased or obscured) by default when shown to people outside of those NSA working with the primary documents/recordings. However, by law certain individuals with sufficient security clearance (such as the President, Vice-President, etc.) may request to have that information un-redacted or “unmasked.”
Throughout the years there have been varying levels of statutory guidance as to the conditions that must be fulfilled for the NSA to “unmask” this information. According to the Fox News article, these conditions were relaxed by the Obama administration (presumably via executive orders, although the article doesn’t specify; or it might have been legislation passed during the Obama Administration…I don’t know). Fair enough, that’s a concern that any civil libertarian can get on board with.
The article also talks about how this “unmasking” procedure often encounters isolated demands for rigor depending on who is asking and who is the target. No surprise there for anyone who is cynical about how politics works. Still, strictly-speaking, I don’t see that such a concern would amount to a criminal matter. If an administration is using powers plainly (if unwisely) delegated to it by Congress, albeit in a partisan manner, to me that either calls for further legislation to make the conditions for applying those powers more specific so as to forestall that abuse (i.e. Congress should explicitly rein in those powers and specify more clearly when they can be used), and/or impeachment proceedings.
In any case, partially thanks to the more relaxed standards for unmasking the identities of Americans encountered in foreign spying, Obama, Biden, and others in the Obama Administration were able to learn that Michael Flynn was on the other end of these calls, and some of the things they heard apparently sounded problematic enough to warrant further investigation of Flynn, albeit still “by the book” (i.e. no extraordinary measures to be taken, such as presumably trying to entrap Flynn in perjury in a targeted manner), according to Susan Rice.
Apparently these problematic conversations were to the effect of Flynn reassuring Kislyak, “Don’t have the Russian government retaliate just yet against the latest Obama Administration’s sanctions on Russia. Trump aims to have friendlier relations with Russia [for whatever reason—we don’t have to speculate here whether those reasons are primarily in Trump’s perception of Trump’s interests or Trump’s perception of America’s national interest], so once he gets into office [Trump was already president-elect by this point], we can undo the sanctions and patch things up between our countries.” Apparently the Obama Administration found this troublesome because, let’s face it, the impact of their sanctions were thus being undermined.
Now here’s where I become very bewildered and frustrated with our current media environment because the prime point of contention seems to me whether it is lawful for Flynn to have such conversations with foreign diplomats when he is still only part of a President-Elect’s administration. This should be a simple question to resolve. The Fox News article says that this is done “all the time,” which may be true. However, it may still be illegal, and the only reason it isn’t investigated and prosecuted in other instances is that there aren’t such starkly different agendas being pursued by an outgoing administration and an incoming administration.
If such communications are unlawful, then it seems to me that the subsequent FBI interviews with Flynn were “material” to a potential crime and thus not entrapment, and any lies should be prosecuted. If such communications were not unlawful, then I could see the reasoning behind dismissing the charges, even after Flynn admitted to lying and pled guilty to lying. Flynn should not have been interviewed in the first place, and the only reason to do so would have been to entrap him. (Of course, if such communications were lawful, then Flynn should have simply told the truth with nothing to fear instead of lying like a dummy about a conversation he had to have known was recorded by some security agency somewhere.)
All the media stories get caught up in the horse-race angle of all of this, about whether this will be bad for Trump’s campaign, or how crazy Trump supporters are, or how partisan Obama’s administration was…but they can’t address a simple question that happens to be the primary bone of contention in the whole saga. (Perhaps because they want the confusion and clamor on social media to continue so that they get more clicks).
So, can anyone walk me through all of this?
Edit: AAAAND, I just found this very helpful primer on the Logan Act from Lawfare blog which suggests that Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak could have very likely been criminal in nature…in which case, why isn’t Flynn being prosecuted for breaking the Logan Act, rather than merely perjury?
Flynn was not prosecuted for perjury. He was never placed under oath to tell the truth, and thus could not have perjured himself. He was prosecuted for lying to the FBI which is a separate crime from perjury.
My understanding of the case is that the FBI had planned on closing the case against Flynn without charges before the notorious interview occured. Agent Peter Strzok (infamous for the highly partisan anti-Trump messages he sent to his adulterous lover, Lisa Page) discovered that the case had not been closed in a timely fashion folowing FBI procedures and ordered agents to keep the case open. It was only afterwards that they interviewed Flynn, which is why many see it as a fishing operation put into place by a partison FBI agent. This view is helped by the fact that in one of Strzok’s messages to Page he wrote that the fact the case had not been closed when it should have been was “serendipitous good” and that “our utter incompetence actually helps us.” He also sent page the defintion of the Logan Act and commented that it “does not involve incoming administrations.” Which, again, makes you wonder why he ordered agents to keep the case open.
There are also allegations that are being investigated that Joe Biden himself called for Flynn to be unmasked, despite the fact that Biden has denied that he had any involvement with the Flynn investigation.
It has also come out that Obama and Biden definitely knew about the investigation, something that had not been shown conclusively before.
Not to say any of this is criminal, but it is scandalous. The investigation may have been technically legal, but the argument is that the legal reason for investigating was a fig leaf to cover the real purpose of spying on the Trump campaign and leaking embarrassing information to the press.
The Logan Act has been invoked exactly once, back when slavery was legal iirc, and the charge was ultimately dropped. It has never, not once, been used to prosecute anyone. Further, it’s a dubious case to make since it basically relies on saying that Flynn was not empowered by the President to talk to the Russians… because he was empowered by Trump, the President Elect, to do so. That doesn’t seem like a real standard, or at least not one that’s been enforced. If it was, virtually every president would be guilty of such violations in the period leading up to them assuming office.
And Flynn wasn’t charged with perjury, he was charged with lying to the FBI. The issue is that “lying to the FBI” is a very complicated case to prove and can be almost impossible to prosecute if there was no underlying crime. And Flynn’s confession never led to other proven charges so there wasn’t one legally. Note that it is not enough that you think there’s a crime: if you’re wrong and you’ve just charged someone with lying over a crime that doesn’t exist the case gets very hard to prove. This leaves the Logan Act, which has almost no precedent for use.
Documents have emerged from the FBI that they were looking to prosecute Flynn because he was someone they didn’t like or trust and they repeatedly changed the crime to get him. They also specifically designed the necessary disclaimers to try and get him to pay as little attention as possible. This all looks like targeting, targeting Obama seems to have been aware of. Worse, it looks like political targeting because it was of a political opponent of Obama’s and someone Obama specifically had a great deal of antipathy for. Ultimately they drummed up a charge (lying to the FBI) and he confessed only after they threatened him with drumming up similar charges against his family. Further, those documents point to some pretty clear fudging on Rice, Biden, Obama, and a few other people’s parts to gloss over things that make them look less innocent.
Obamagate looks like the Obama administration leaned on the FBI to investigate Obama’s political opponents using all those delightful things the Federal government technically can do but which offends common decency. That’s the scandal, such as it is. Or at least that’s the Republican narrative. The Democrats seem to just be pretending there’s nothing there, which worked out for them pretty well with previous incidents of supposed political targeting so we’ll see.
But yeah, basically the question comes down to whether or not you believe using perfect legal methods to target your political opponents is a cause for concern. And then whether or not you believe the Democrats saying the Republicans just happened to get targeted disproportionately under a Democratic administration because Republicans really are that suspicious or whether you believe the Republican narrative it was partisan abuse. In this sense it’s a replay of the IRS scandal.
This all comes down to a sort of original sin in Trump’s election. There can be no serious debate at this point that US intelligence at the behest of the Obama White House were spying on Trump’s campaign, though they denied it at the time. The question is whether you believe the Democrat’s new story that this investigation was all normal and proper or the Republicans who have been screeching abuse of power for three years.
Large parts of our judicial branch operate on an adversarial principle. In other words, instead of both sides striving to find some non-partisan truth in a case, the prosecution and defense both attempt to get away with as much as the judge or the other side will allow, and then the dust settles where it may.
I don’t know the founders of the Constitution intended the executive branch to function in this way, but it seems like that’s the way things are headed, for better or worse. In other words, we may start to take it as a given that the executive branch will attempt to get away with exactly as much as the other two branches allow it to get away with (including using executive powers to tarnish political opponents), and it is up to Congress to explicitly narrow the scope of the executive branch’s powers to forestall this, and it is up to the judicial branch to punish this. I have little doubt that this is the system we will have whether Biden or Trump get elected.
I agree and I don’t fully buy the Republican case, definitely not as a non-partisan disinterested type thing. Of course, this does make turnabout fair play.
Because the Logan Act is as dead as it is possible for a law to be without being about how to pay your dowry in ducks.
Also, he isn’t being prosecuted for perjury. He is being prosecuted under section 1001, which covers misstatements to federal officials, mumble mumble, material, mumble.
The only moral of this story is never even talk to a federal official. If you tell them the time is 12:00 when it is actually 12:01 they can charge you under section 1001 and bankrupt you into pleading guilty. Never ever ever talk to federal officials.
I’m not a big fan of just everyone tacitly agreeing not to enforce a law that’s on the books. Because everyone assumes that the tacit agreement exists…until it suddenly doesn’t (because politics and context changes, such as in this case)…and some poor schmuck who was operating under the consensus that existed 5 minutes ago, like Flynn, gets ripped to shreds.
If we think the Logan Act needs to be narrowed or eliminated, let’s have Congress do that! The Republicans had two years in charge of both wings of Congress from 2017 to 2019. You’d think they would have seen Flynn, a member of a Republican administration, going down due to this arguably outdated law and would have seen some reason to clarify the issue legislatively, no? It baffles me.
Besides, after reading the Lawfare blog post on the Logan Act, the motivation behind the law doesn’t actually seem particularly archaic. Although it hasn’t led to a conviction yet, there are a surprising number of examples of border-cases that have come up in U.S. history that might have made sense to prosecute, such as President-Elect Nixon trying to make sure negotiations with North Vietnam remained stalled until he came into office so he could claim credit. Whether the Logan Act itself is an ideal fit for our modern times, most of Congress would probably prefer that it exist, or some law like it.
Likewise, I hold the same view towards immigration. I think we should drastically increase the immigration quotas, but also drastically step-up enforcement of the quotas and conditions on immigration. But that would mean having Congress take responsibility for our immigration policies out in the open, and not being able to have their cake (immigration to please libertarians and business owners and certain leftists) and eat it too (have laws on the books heavily restricting immigration so it seems like they are being tough on immigration to please cultural conservatives).
Very much agree with this.
While it seems like Congress is just disinterested because they see strategic value in having the Logan Act on the books, as you said, it is worth pointing out that establishment Republicans may not feel much concern for Flynn. Trump is already sort of an outsider, and Flynn has been a proud Democrat his whole life. Not sure if that has changed, but I believe he was still one when he gave the RNC Convention speech! He’s clearly not a fan of some recent establishment Democrats, but he doesn’t seem to actually identify very much with Republicans, and they’ve known him a long time as a Democrat. He identifies with Trump because they share certain traits that make them anomalous in either party.
Related to these traits, Flynn occasionally tweets really bizarre and inappropriate things that are hard to explain. Having held the positions he’s held, he must be fairly functional and trustworthy in the patriotic sense. Either he just has moments of impulsive weirdness, or it is strategic provocation. I do think he is somewhat odd and erratic in a way that can’t be easily brushed aside, but I think a lot of people in Washington are disingenuously using this to portray him as sinister or reckless. They know him well enough to know that’s just how he is. But he probably rubbed enough people the wrong way that few feel compelled to defend him, especially when he’s affiliated with two parties at once.
I think prosecuting this stuff would be a disaster. A lot of it doesn’t even bother me, because it seems inevitable on some level for presidents to be influenced by these things. I’m sure there are some egregious cases, but even then, going after a president or president-elect and basically undoing the election does a lot of damage to a country. And such incidents are much more likely to be attempts to improve the U.S. position (as well as the new president’s), not undermine it. Candidates tend to think if they can just get in there, they’ll develop a rapport and fix it (Trump and Kim Jong Un). This may be wishful thinking, but it is reasonable to decide to develop a relationship, and I don’t think the country’s best interest or position should be solely and indefinitely defined by the Washington establishment’s consensus. And Flynn wasn’t by any means over his head, jumping in where he had no information. He was super familiar with U.S. foreign policy issues and strategies, and had well known opinions that diverged from the Obama administration’s as to what best served U.S. interests.
Letting Vietnam go on unnecessarily, if there’s fighting going on, does bother me, but we’d have to get into questions like whether or not Nixon wanted them delayed mostly because he wanted to be involved in those negotiations, which would be entirely understandable and appropriate. It would be a good idea for the new president to have the best possible understanding of what exactly was discussed and agreed upon, and to have a say in the negotiations. This would naturally be coupled with getting credit, and I have no doubt that would occur to him, but it would be easy to spin it as all about the credit.
Not sure of the exact circumstances, but it is very easy to spin allegations about normal, even desirable, actions by president-elects or incumbents. Too complicated to separate these things out, and too easily weaponized. We should assume the person elected by the people isn’t trying to undermine the government. Maybe that assumption will be wrong, but then we have bigger problems.
Another example of a putative Logan Act violation.
Thanks. That seems like a non-issue to me. Spin.
A friend of Kennedy’s chatted with this guy (possibly if I knew more about his background and why Kennedy reached out to him specifically I’d feel a bit differently, but I’m assuming he wasn’t some monster, and they may just have had mutual friends/cronies who knew of their desire to exercise political influence in each other’s countries and thought they’d be compatible.)
My version of the conversation: “Hey, Senator Kennedy is looking to build some relationships with Russian politicians, and asked me to talk with you. He’d like to work on ending some of the tensions between us and getting to know the situation better. If you’re interested, which I’ve heard you are, he’s willing to give you some tips on how to present yourself to Americans and argue in a way persuasive to them–he knows how the Washington crowd thinks, and can tell you about Reagan. He can also talk to you about making some American TV appearances and how to handle that. He thinks it will go a long way to improve relations. He’s great with all the TV and PR stuff—there’s a good chance he’ll get a presidential nomination within the next few years, as a Democrat. Russian relations are going to be a big issue coming up in the next election, so he wants to really understand how things stand and how he might handle them. Should I have him call you?”
There is no quid pro quo—it’s totally unclear what would have been asked for, and it certainly couldn’t be binding. It could be as simple as wanting to show he had Russian expertise when squaring off against Reagan. Nothing he’s offering to help with is likely to compromise anyone, unless the plan is to advise him to say the totally wrong thing to Reagan and ruin negotiations to spite Reagan. The article is very heavy-handed—making it look like honest journalism! Like he’s never heard of PR, if it was even unduly flattering. I doubt he was going to advise him to do things that truly endangered the country, like give classified information, and I don’t think that undermining Reagan automatically counts, if he did anything like that. He was offering to open a few doors — none of this seems out of the ordinary to me.
No doubt the subtext is, “Kennedy might be very powerful in the future, and it would be good to get on his good side and state your case. And maybe you’ll come be able to give us a little help in a year or five.” You can spin it into something terrible, as the article did. But it would be foolish to make these things Logan Acts–this stuff is so common. There are situations in which it could be clearly harmful to the U.S., but there are probably other ways to handle that, and most of these things do not pose clear harm for the benefit of a foreign enemy in any real sense. You’re allowed to give tips and chat with foreign politicians as a U.S. Senator. You’re allowed to campaign and criticize your rival and do stunts related to that. All normal, even unobjectionable.
The issue would be if he gave classified info relating to the negotiations out or something. From what we have here, it’s honestly not very clear that he was fishing for help targeting Reagan. The writer insinuates it. Maybe if I knew more about the guy it would be clear how he could damage Reagan and that inference would be more reasonable. This would probably read to most people as mildly sleazy, but I don’t see how one can characterize it as rising even to the level of scandal, and I can’t bring myself to find it even sleazy. (Again, if the guy was really bad, or was promoting bad things with Kennedy’s help, it would be different.)
Also, how about John Kerry talking to the Iranians about the nuclear deal? Pretty sure he was not doing that in support of Trump’s position on that deal. And that’s one where we’re not talking about the incoming administration making plans a little too early, but the previous administration undermining the current one.
Yes, the problem with the Logan Act is that everybody’s breaking it all the time. This is a sign it’s a bad law. I’m fine with repealing it, but the whole “prosecute it everyone, it’s the law” idea is that I have 0 faith that everyone will be prosecuted. It will almost certainly wind up with selective prosecution, where we nail Flynn but let Kerry skate or vice-versa. Selective enforcement is the worst possible outcome, so I prefer no enforcement.
One important thing about the Logan Act, which the Lawfare blog post makes clear, is that any reasonable interpretation of it does not prohibit public statements or criticism of current U.S. policy or one-way public communication. So, Nixon is entirely free to publicly announce that he will be a better negotiator with North Vietnam *wink* *wink*. It would have been perfectly legal for Michael Flynn to publicly announce that Trump’s campaign intended to revisit or even revoke some anti-Russia sanctions in the interest of cultivating friendlier strategic ties between the U.S. and Russia (this was already common knowledge, and in fact was part of the appeal of Trump’s platform to some people including my parents in particular—the thought that Trump would be much less likely to get the U.S. into WW3 with Russia over Syria, Ukraine, and other issues). What’s NOT allowed under the Logan Act is an unauthorized individual having two-way communication with a foreign diplomat in a way that attempts to undermine some foreign policy objective of the current U.S. administration. To me, it seems like a logical extension of the fact that the Constitution doesn’t let individual states conduct diplomacy with foreign powers, so why would it allow individuals the same powers?
Because states have political authority and individuals don’t?
Certain individuals have immense authority. Top-ranking generals, senators, billionaires, etc. Some arguably have more authority, resources, things of value that they could offer, etc. than individual states do. The U.S. govt. is understandably not too upset if someone like Dennis Rodman goes to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong-Un on a quixotic quest to bring “peace and love” between the two countries…but if a top-ranking general were to do the same secretly with a promise that his military forces would be told to stand-down in the event of a conflict with North Korea, if North Korea did X, Y, and Z…
But a general doesn’t actually have authority to stand-down his force in the event that his superiors (assuming the very top general, this would mean the President or his cabinet) are ordering him to engage the enemy.
A general who promises North Korean leadership that his forces will stand down is acting very much outside of his authority…
Authority =/= ability here. That hypothetical general who’s made the secret compact with North Korea can and almost certainly would be able to deteriorate our defenses in case of an invasion.
I mean, let’s say the general knows that the attach will happen on Saturday. He orders extra drills far into the night Tuesday through Thursday then surprises the troops on Friday with liberal weekend leave. He even eases travel restrictions for the weekend. Almost everyone, expect the poor schmucks on duty, will be gone over the weekend and those that remain are likely still tired from a hard week’s work. North Korea attacks on Friday and overruns the base with ease.
Sure, that example is likely overly simplistic, and I’m sure there are controls to prevent things from getting this bad, but it still relies on the idea that everyone, especially everyone in positions of authority, are acting with a unified set of interests. Our general here has acted entirely within the limits of his authority, yet still managed to implement policy change.
Nothing said about a quid pro quo or classified information. Kennedy was indirectly carrying on a correspondence with a foreign government in relation to disputes and controversies with the U.S., specifically nuclear disarmament, more generally U.S. Soviet relations.
@DavidFriedman Thank you – I should have pulled up the full text and looked at the original wording. That can be read to cover an extremely broad range of conduct! I can see how it was at least plausibly appropriate in its time, but to enforce it now, or in the 80s, would be silly. The wording basically prohibits any American from talking to anyone connected with another government about about foreign policy, even to encourage that they cooperate fully with the U.S. It’s not clear that what Kennedy was doing threatened any interest of the U.S.–the memo is vague. The Logan Act appears to prohibit even encouraging or assisting someone connected with the Soviet government to make peace with the U.S. government on terms favorable to the U.S. I thought it only prohibited things that would undermine the U.S. position, which is why I was saying releasing classified information would be different.
I also think the modern understanding of “influence” usually goes too far, with merely verbally suggesting something being seen as unpardonable interference–there is almost an assumption that most people do whatever they are told, even powerful people, so that a suggestion is equivalent to making something reality.
@citizencokane
I don’t think this is what the Logan Act was getting at—yes, states lack the authority to make agreements, as do most people. There would be little need to criminalize this–any negotiations would be non-binding. I think they’re talking about people who indirectly influence negotiations, probably for their own benefit, probably through things like bribery or intimidation. (As opposed to exerting influence one-way, like the public statements of Nixon, as you point out—this is the modern sense in which we tend to use it, where words are automatically assumed to have an effect.)
I doubt even the Logan Act was intended to prevent people from building friendships with people connected with foreign governments and discussing foreign affairs—that stuff would be valuable to a new nation at that time, when so much was done through international relationship networks and mail distributed via consular networks. It’s just not well-worded, and I suspect some connotations have changed. ETA: After reading about it on Wikipedia, it looks like it wasn’t intended to do much more than to express the anger of some humiliated politicians. The guy involved didn’t seem to actually play much of a role in the decision, and he wasn’t doing anything bad, nor did he pose as having authority. Maybe it was intended as a warning. But I’m sure tons of Americans kept hanging out with the great Talleyrand and talking to him about American affairs, and they never bothered to use it. It seems they wanted it as a backup for if any citizen tried to urge opposition to the U.S. government’s foreign affairs. The 1803 Kentucky case, which didn’t go forward, is pretty ridiculous, because it was a newspaper article, not sent to any official. But, like the later Mexico one, it involved a citizen expressing the opinion that another government should not do what the U.S. government wanted.
Today, we allow virtually everyone to engage in non-binding diplomatic efforts, or to talk to foreign governments about opposing the U.S. on things. As long as you aren’t getting into treason, terrorism, espionage, violating security clearance rules, or releasing classified information, you’re generally good. Quite a lot of lobbying, consulting for and palling around with foreign governments goes on by ex-government and military people, which appears to be uncontroversial until there is an occasional need for a political scapegoat.
The problem that we are trying to solve is to prevent arbitrary and unjust enforcement. The solution that seems to work the best is to promulgate a law code while prohibiting ex post facto laws and bills of attainder. But developing and maintaining a law code is freaking hard. If tens of thousands of the best programmers in the world working around the clock can’t maintain a measly few hundred thousands lines of code without crippling bugs cropping up periodically, what hope do 538 senile old codgers working on the problem quarter time without any particular domain expertise have at maintaining millions of lines of code without crippling bugs cropping up occasionally? Especially when those 538 senile old codgers really fucking love the idea of arbitrary enforcement against the people they don’t like?
At its core, the entire enterprise of statutory law is fundamentally flawed. Irreconcilable with the physical world, even. Any theory of government that relies, explicitly or otherwise, on the premise that we can just make the code bug free is going to fail. Any even half-way functioning society requires a way to deal with the fact that the code is going to have unpatched bugs hanging around for centuries.
We’ll take the quintessential absurdity as instructive for this failure. Every few years, some jackass asserts their ancient right to trial by combat. The problem is that by any reading of the relevant law over the last thousand or so years, it is definitely still a thing! The only proper response to this is to say “ARE YOU INSANE! THAT ISN’T HOW THINGS WORK ANYMORE!” Resurrecting the long abandoned practice of letting litigants wack at each other with broadswords because some jackass is pissed that his neighbor’s dog shits in his yard is exactly the arbitrary and unjust outcome that the law is intended to prevent. Because there was no way of knowing, despite being promulgated in the relevant law for centuries, that it would be resurrected now. Moreover, this particular absurdity keeps cropping up every few years but the 538 senile codgers are not particularly interested in fixing it. It should be the most uncontroversial law ever passed, but it isn’t going to happen.
I will grant you that historically common law jurisdictions have generally avoided invoking desuetude explicitly, preferring instead maddening circumlocution around the issue.
This is more of a Supreme Court thing. What’s amazing to me is that nowhere in this comment thread (or the Lawfare article) are the words “First Amendment”. The Logan Act almost certainly violates the First Amendment. Facially, not just as-applied (having basically never been applied). Profs Hemel and Posner do their best to invent the word “secret” in the text of the Logan Act, but it’s not there.
What this boils down to is a question of whether investigators can use a law that is almost certainly unconstitutional, not to actually bring charges against a person (which could then be a vehicle by which the Judiciary could actually state that said law is unconstitutional), but instead as a vehicle for other investigation. Think back to cases like when the government asserted that they could ban books. But instead of actually bringing any cases anywhere close to that effect, they simply used that as a justification for investigations of authors and journalists. And if they didn’t find anything else during those investigations, instead of bringing the case which they based their investigation on, they always just dropped the investigation. (And in the cases where they found something else, they just dropped the original book-related charge and charged the other thing.)
Doing this would allow them to constantly engage in investigations that are antithetical to our Constitutional and democratic principles, yet which could not possibly be reviewed by any court and declared as such. The courts may even still manage to avoid opining on this issue in this particular case. I almost want to extend the principle of “capable of repetition, yet evading review” to appeals on this issue, just so we can finally get some guidance from SCOTUS on whether they think any construction of the Logan Act is at all plausible. (It may come out the other way; I kind of doubt it; I understand the frustration and need for them to say something.)
Then let them pass that version. Look, I argue (even in this thread) about surveillance law, where some folks think that various iterations are unconstitutional. I can also point to how subsequent Congresses have explicitly authorized various tweaks to the programs… in public votes. There, I see a strong argument for, “Congress actually thinks that at least this tweaked version is Constitutional and good.” If you can get Congress to pass a modified, modern day Logan Act (maybe even with the word “secret” in there somewhere), then this argument would be significantly stronger. Without any sort of affirmative action taking place, it’s just sort of irrelevant musing.
If he approved the warrants on the basis of false information — if, for example, the FBI agents submitting the application were required to provide all relevant evidence and deliberately omitted evidence that would lead to the application being rejected — the judge had the legal right to approve but the FBI agents were guilty of perjury.
Thank you for that clarification. In that case, this strong possibility of perjury by FBI agents seems like kind of a big deal that someone at the justice department should follow up on, no?
Should such a thing happen, do you think this will be reported in the mainstream media as “DOJ goes after rogue FBI bad actors” or as “Trump’s attack dogs target faithful civil servants for just doing their jobs?”
Good point. It would be interesting if Trump were to get re-elected and felt emboldened to have the justice dept. go after this case. Boy would that ignite charges of “tyranny!”
I’m a retired law professor but not a lawyer. Perhaps someone here can tell us whether my assumption that an application for a warrant is made under oath and includes, explicitly or implicitly, the claim that the application contains all relevant information, is correct.
It was weirdly hard to find information on this. It seems that there are designated people authorized to sign off on FISAs, which some publications refer to as “under oath” but most do not. I believe they actually certify that the factual info inside is true and correct in accordance with a specific regulation, which I haven’t looked up. It doesn’t look like there’s a “under pains and penalty of perjury” explicitly included.
However, the FBI admitted after a recent review that the applications were generally shoddy…suspiciously shoddy in some cases. It would probably be possible to make a case for intentional omission, even if hard to prove, if what they signed off on was a stronger certification. But basically, the person just checks to see that there is supporting documents to back up the included facts (which didn’t always happen, but probably mostly due to laziness). He or she does not certify the file is complete or that the whole file has been examined for omissions. Many don’t check to see if older applications cited are actually backed up by the required documentation, so it is easy for secondary information to go unchecked. I think the FBI’s own report advised perhaps requiring a more extensive certification.
In summary, it seems unlikely that they swear under pains and penalties of perjury—they probably at best can violate a statute. And it seems like the people signing these files often don’t put them together, so the intentional violation wouldn’t necessarily lie with them. If they were attorneys filing affidavits or briefs, final responsibility would lie with them, but I don’t think that’s the case. Probably intentionally.
I doubt the “unusually shabby” part. If they do this stuff in extremely high-profile politically sensitive cases, what do you imagine they do when the target is some nobody with no connections or power?
Separate but related question: I have heard the claim that the obama administration (or Obama personally) are at fault for selectively unmasking Flynn. But I thought the whole point of masking is that the identity of the person masked is… masked. Obviously someone is doing the redacting and is aware of their identity, but presumably this person is not a political appointee. Is the claim that the obama administration pressured all security agencies to dig up dirt in general, and the unmasking is what resulted? Or that they knew Flynn’s identity before it was unmasked?
The Republican claim is that the Obama administration unmasked Flynn (normal), with some desire to find Flynn specifically (borderline illegal). Then someone in the administration leaked it (very illegal) for partisan reasons (no more or less illegal but a bigger norms violation).
I guess “leaking intelligence obtained after unmasking” doesn’t have the same ring to it. And the public has never really gotten behind prosecution of leakers, so I guess a smart political move.
And, this is 80% trolling, but if the leak was authorized by Obama (as contended by the Trump camp), what would that still be illegal? In the same vein as Trump sharing classified Israeli intelligence with the Russians always being clearly legal.
Yes, because the masking process is not meant to protect intelligence secrets but the rights of an American citizen. Classification flows from the President, so he can change classification at will. Rights flow from the Constitution and override the President.
This is a question that seems to be mostly ignored. The National Review recently called this out. “To summarize, the list provided by Grenell indicates no unmasking of Flynn between December 28 (the day before the call) and January 5, even though news of Flynn’s identification was already circulating on January 3 (when McCabe briefed McCord about it)….It is more likely, then, that the Flynn–Kislyak call was captured by intelligence operations that are not governed by FISA.” He suspects the CIA, which is not governed by FISA, ended up with it and passed it on, as the intelligence community was watching Flynn.
I’m pretty sure the driving force here is that the Obama administration had bad blood with Flynn, didn’t want him appointed by Trump (I believe more due to reasons of personal pride than concern about the effects of sanctions or any other specific political issue), and was keeping an eye out for dirt to use against him in one way or another. What they found happened to coincide with their need to cover the FISA abuse with regard to recent political snooping–I would generally characterize this (the FISA stuff) as neither criminal nor surprising, but sleazy and asking for a spiral into bigger problems and scandals. An unhealthy culture that undermined trust in the political process and the authorities, probably driven more by technology and post-9/11 privileges than the party or president in power.
There are ways this could be prosecuted, but I doubt it will happen and it probably shouldn’t, as the NR explains. There are ways you could respond to it like Flynn’s conduct: prosecuting him for lying to the FBI or violating the Logan Act. Based on what we know, I consider doing that (and having done that, in the latter case) to Flynn highly inappropriate and corrosive to the justice system. The standard should be “material fact,” if he even lied. Retaliation with similar methods should not be encouraged, and probably won’t limit the behavior, although there is a point where counter-examples have to be made to get the message across. Tough issue. But not worthwhile right now, probably. I’d prefer the media just acknowledge the lack of credibility and dishonorable behavior of those involved. Personally, I’m mainly annoyed by the playing dumb, egregiously and badly so, demonstrated by Obama, Rice, and Biden. Maybe Obama and Rice know something about Flynn that we don’t, but come on. Rice with her absurd remarks about being shocked by an utterly benign remark by Flynn–almost literally, “I’m not worried about Russia. It’s a shadow of its former self. I’m more concerned about the threat posed by China.” Obama, a lawyer, with his Logan act and “perjury charges” and concern for the rule of law. It’s not criminal or a new low or anything, but it’s not to their credit. Same with the FBI using Flynn’s son as leverage.
I think it’s important to understand that a lot of this was “intramural bullshit,” to use a phrase one Matt Taibbi did for something else. The driving forces were small personal or factional issues. Some people in the NSA naturally indulge their curiosity and snoop on others, and everyone lets it pass, because it is a statute that was never take seriously and the tech makes it so easy. In 2015, their snooping turns to the prominent political figures, and most of the people lean toward Clinton. Some have speculated that in the spring of 2015, the loophole that allowed NSA people to search the FBI database got located and plugged. Disappointed at lost access, just as things are getting interesting, some higher level snoopers use some shoddy FISAs to justify access—July 2015 is where the Flynn investigation begins, allegedly based on fears of his Russia interactions. I personally doubt they were concerned Flynn was an agent. They all knew Flynn and his eccentric ways well, but he’d recently been going out of his way to provoke the ire of the Obama administration—on his side, I think this was less personal animosity than strategic political warfare, something Flynn apparently enjoys. I think he was really aggravated by Obama’s foreign policy choices (conflict over which led to his removal) and public rationalizations of them, and wished to spotlight his opposition to them and get back into the game with the Trump administration. I think the enthusiastic “betrayal” made Obama and those around him furious—most of the really sketchy behavior by him and his circle is Flynn-related much more than Trump or Russia related. I think Flynn is more than willing to be disliked and perhaps misjudged how ticked off they were and what that might result in—presumably part of the reason he’s held the positions he has is because he was known as someone not to mess around with, but also not someone who engages in treason. This would explain his apparent lack of suspicion when talked to by the FBI, if what they say is true.
The surprise Trump win means questions might be asked, especially given the partisan bent of the snooping, and some awkward attempts to paper this over occur, then spiral out of control when they become part of the political narratives surrounding Trump’s polarizing presidency, mainly Russiagate. This wasn’t originally a grand scheme like “let’s get the election in the bag for Hillary,” or “better start looking into Trump to take him out,” or related to some ideological or policy goal. It was shady but much less interesting stuff that “escaped” and became part of bigger strategies or “bureaucratically tenable” justifications.
An interview from October briefly touches on this.
The interviewer mentions how no one seems interested in the unmasking stuff. He says that stuff is routine, but he was surprised that Powers claimed it wasn’t her–that this was bored lower-ranking staff members doing stuff in her name. Not sure if that is just an excuse but it is plausible, and could be plausible for the Biden request and others. But he concludes, “Yet that has became normative reality, right?”
Codevilla, who worked in intelligence and helped draft the FISA legislation, responds that of course a lot of this sort of thing is done by lower-ranking staff in the boss’s name. He doesn’t seem to find that scandalous, or any of it really, but thinks the situation is ridiculous–that it’s that easy and clearly not what we want going on. Too much power.
The interviewer asks later:
(Note how he separates the surveillance and the Russia stuff–they were separate things that eventually blurred together.) The response was “I don’t think that it went that far. Or I should say, I don’t think the people involved thought about it that deeply.” The interviewer agreed. Codevilla continued:
He was asked whose fault this was, and given his background, knows how one could hit back. What he suggests is basically the equivalent of lying to the FBI. These kinds of charges basically function to pressure the associates of the powerful, who are hard to get directly, to become witnesses for the state.
Interviewer:
(We all know how well it would go over if Trump decided to play this game and threaten to prosecute media sources.)
The interview ended with both agreeing that some people are evidently above the law (presumably, establishment elites regardless of party, and those working in intelligence agencies).
Very interesting! Thanks!
To answer my own question, (but admittedly with new info). This seems to confirm part of the NR story, though it seems it was the FBI not the CIA.
But… the FBI has no duty to mask, correct? NSA is focused on foreign intelligence, which is why they mask US persons, but FBI is law enforcement and focused on CI. Their job is to go after us persons, so they wouldn’t have masked the intercept.
FBI has both domestic law enforcement and counterintelligence missions. The CI mission sort of has one foot in domestic law and one foot in foreign intelligence. This results in some tricky rules.
On top of that, a lot depends on what the underlying legal authority is. A lot of controversy has focused on Section 702, including a recent controversy about the associated targeting/querying/minimization procedures (which include masking). You can find the legal results of the controversy here, including relevant rules for FBI.
EDIT: I want to emphasize that we don’t yet know what legal authority was used to collect the conversation. The WaPo article says it was FBI, not NSA (which does cull some options). We know that Flynn wasn’t in the US at the time, and Kislyak probably wasn’t, either. This might open up some options. It’s reasonable that they got the call via Traditional FISA, 702, or something else. I believe Traditional FISA has similar masking requirements as 702, but there are exceptions for if “their identity is needed to understand the foreign intelligence value,” which I think is what WaPo’s source is gesturing toward.
No.
That’s about 20% snide but 80% serious. Your interpretation of the Flynn investigation, and Obamagate in general, depends on your interpretation of a lot of other facts. Trying to avoid too much CW:
It’s unclear what Flynn actually said to the FBI, as far as I can tell there’s no recording of their conversation and the report was modified by other actors later on.
It’s unclear who tried to unmask Flynn and whether that was illegal or even improper.
It’s unclear what happens in legally rare/weird situations like a prosecution being withdrawn after a guilty plea or a prosecution under the Logan Act.
It’s unclear whether the original investigation or the current dismissal were politically motivated, and if so by who and how much.
It’s irresponsible to try to draw clear conclusions when we have a guilty plea under duress, with conflicting evidence on whether a crime was committed in at least two meanings of the phrase, and a legally unprecedented act with unknown political influence from the two most politically powerful men alive. You’re confused and I sympathize, I’m confused. Massive parts of this whole thing still make no sense and it’s almost four years old. But there’s just not enough information out there; you or I might be 80% confident in every element, but 80%^4 is pretty bad odds. We don’t know, almost four years after the fact it’s unlikely we’ll ever really know, that sucks, but it’s the way it is. Everyone else is just pretending.
CW
-Removed to avoid the banhammer during politics season.
/CW
While I don’t agree with every point made in this National Review article, I think it provides a good characterization of some of the issues involved. The fact that the lines aren’t exactly clear, and how we acknowledge and respond to that, is key.
I’ve lately been annoyed by hyperbolic doom-and-gloom headlines like this recent one from The Atlantic: We Are Living in a Failed State. I agree America has problems and the recent trend is downwards, but reversion to the mean seems plausible. I think national psychology is important, and a mentality of “We can fix this ” seems way better for, you know, fixing things than a mentality of “We are fucked”. And once your national mentality shifts to “every person for themselves”, I suspect it’s an uphill battle to shift it back.
So just to get some historical perspective on how bad things are right now, I’d be interested to hear what people think actual historical low points are. The first thing that’s coming to mind is WWI, for being incredibly dumb and incredibly destructive, way beyond the stupidity and destructiveness of anything that’s happened in my lifetime.
The Atlantic is suicide reading. It’s like watching a magazine slash its wrists in real time, as shrill on the extreme left as [no specific title comes to mind, perhaps someone can supply] is on the right.
I know it doesn’t measure up to WW1, but the late 1970’s were particularly awful, the tanking economy perfectly matching the downbeat mood. And the music was terrible, too.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed. I used to read The Atlantic every day, but over the last few years it has slowly replaced most of it’s interesting long-reads with daily screeds against Trump and dystopian thinkpieces. Today for instance: “Trump is Brazenly Interfering With the 2020 Election”, “Trump’s Favorite TV Network is Post-parody”, “Crises Are No time for Political Unity”, and “Trump is Now Doing to Himself What He’s Done to the Country”. It’s not the only content, but every day there’s a new batch.
Hm, I actually saw the anti-Trump stuff from The Atlantic as relatively level-headed in a way that I thought might actually be persuasive to Trumpers. I mean, I found some of it persuasive in a way that I don’t typically find anti-Trump writings.
BTW, note that George Packer, who wrote the article with the headline that annoyed me, also wrote this piece skeptical of critical race theory applied to classrooms last October:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-the-culture-war-comes-for-the-kids/596668/
Looks like they haven’t fired Caitlin Flanagan yet, btw
I’m kinda-sorta friends with a former atlantic editor who quit his (arguably great) job there because they were not-so-slowly getting rid of all dissenting viewpoints – comments and reader feedback were castrated or removed entirely, conservative voices who quit or were fired weren’t replaced, etc.
I think the farthest-right person there is Friedersdorf, who is only significantly conservative on free speech as far as I can tell. If your environment is that uniform in viewpoint, it’s pretty easy for a group of people to work itself into a froth.
A good example of this is that one time they were performatively hiring someone from the right to write for them. He was fired(or just not hired after all, it was quick) for suggesting that abortion, being murder in his view, should be made illegal and subject to the same penalties as murder.
If you have significant voices on both sides of that issue on staff or just know more-than-a-few republicans, this doesn’t probably strike you as such a settled issue in the American mind that you should immediately fire the guy, but they don’t; he was fired and Conor wrote a freedom-of-speech protest letter that criticized the Atlantic only in saying that he disagreed with the firing and that they weren’t particularly generous. They proceeded to not hire another conservative to replace him.
So yeah. I’m actually really mad about this because 10-15 years ago, The Atlantic was pretty good in my opinion; I used to read it a lot. I tried to continue reading it for years after that, and I’ve fallen out of the habit only because there’s just not a lot of value there – I can get straight-blue takes on things anywhere, whereas the legit both-sides-to-at-least-some-extent discussion they used to have was pretty unique to them in their format. I’m expecting them not to last much longer in any form, which at this point doesn’t matter to me much one way or the other.
Agreed. I used to read the Atlantic cover-to-cover, even though I disagreed with a lot of what they wrote, but I thought it was insightful and charitable. Now it’s just Orange Man Bad.
The Kevin Williamson debacle was actually what drove me to pull the ejection handle on my readership. Williamson is one of the voices on the right I look forward to reading, and the way he was treated was the last straw for me. I used to respect The Atlantic, but now it’s just another Salon.
> conservative on free speech
What is this supposed to mean? To my ears it implies wanting to bring back laws against blasphemy. Which would be entertaining, at least.
He tracks the better conservative arguments on free speech – he thinks cancel culture is generally bad, that internet dragging is generally bad, and that it’s generally bad to use social pressure to coerce third parties into denying speakers venue. Basically a more-discussion-is-better stance.
Of course there’s plenty on the left who believe these things too. But over time period when he’s been doing this, when you found someone who was OK with cancelling someone over a tweet or shouting down a college campus speaker more likely to be left than right, which is plain by who was actually kept from speaking.
It might be that this “more discussion is good, stop shouting people down and using isolated statements to destroy them with internet mobs” stance is as common on the left as the right, in which case my stance is more like “The Atlantic doesn’t have any significant conservative voices, including Conor”.
Friedersdorf is basically a moderate libertarian, as far as I can tell. So he’s in favor of free speech (both as a matter of law and of norms), opposed to the war on drugs and police impunity, against most of our dumb wars, opposed to most occupational licensing, against NIMBY laws, etc.
Sounds to me like your sorta-friend may be part of the problem.
How is the Atlantic “extreme left”? It’s a pretty solidly left-of-centre publication (liberal in the American sense). I doubt many who write for the Atlantic want to get rid of capitalism or whatever, and I doubt that actual leftists would employ David Frum.
Mainstream American left-of-centre types are really incensed about Trump, those who think they are leftists/radicals but who fit neatly into mainstream politics/academia are really incensed about Trump… actual leftists seem less so?
Is there a proper term for a zealous moderate?
Somewhat reciprocally, it doesn’t seem to me that Trump is extremely conservative. He’s just right of center and a boor.
Yeah, I’m always annoyed by claims that Trump is “far right.” He is nothing like an actual Red Tribe person, even politicians who previously signaled Red Tribe pretty well like Bush the Younger. He has some major policy breaks with establishment Republicans, but in ways that aren’t especially rightwing. For God’s sake, his big economic policy change has been tariffs. It’s just lazy thinking.
Yes, Trump is 1992 Bill Clinton except he doesn’t like Free Trade. Also, supports gay marriage. This is not the Hitler you’re looking for.
Some of the most vociferously anti-Trump people are well-off, educated, centre left (vote Democrat in the US, flip-flop between Liberal and NDP up here, etc) people. This is where you’ll find people who are really invested in the idea that Trump is some kind of foreign imposition on the US. To a radical leftist, however, there’s not much difference between someone with a nice stock portfolio who votes D and someone with a nice stock portfolio who votes R. all of the words I could use to describe this group have a political cast: “liberal” has been used as a pejorative by both the centre-right and leftists, for example. This is the sort of group I think of as the Atlantic’s target audience: just about any Bush-era Republican can be redeemed in their eyes if they write an article about how awful Trump is, regardless of, say, said Bush-era Republican’s role in foreign policy screwups which helped get Trump elected. The cruel generalization of this group is that they know which wines go with which cheeses and think it’s outrageous someone with that much money and, now, power, probably doesn’t.
The second group could be cruelly generalized as crowding into the university chancellor’s office demanding jobs for themselves. I think of them as “pseudo-leftists” or “pseudo-radicals”; they’ll talk about the horrors of capitalism and so on, but they are never entirely clear on what capitalism is or when/how it came about, class interests usually aren’t top on their list of priorities, and when you look at what they actually want, it’s something that fits in fairly neatly with the left-of-centre program. Their most radical stance is anti-free speech, but most people aren’t really that attached to free speech in general.
The cruel generalization of this group is that they know which wines go with which cheeses and think it’s outrageous someone with that much money and, now, power, probably doesn’t.
When I remember some of the snotty media pieces about Trump liking his steak well-done and eating it with ketchup (WHICH I DO MYSELF), one opinon piece laughing about how “well we (you and me, dear readers!) all know he’s not the type of person we’d invite to a meal in a nice restaurant”, I think your read of the situation is more correct than we’d like it to be.
(If they ever wanted to know ‘why people vote/support/excuse Trump? why???’ things like “well you are not the type of person we’d ask out to a nice restaurant, you boor” towards ordinary people who might like ketchup or well-done steak is part of it, especially when you’re also trying to present yourselves as ‘just ordinary people’ too and anguish over your support and empathy for the undocumented, minorities and the likes: it’s pretty plain you are not going to be inviting Pablo who just came in over the border to work in the fields to a meal in a nice restaurant, either).
This is one of your best zingers yet.
@Deiseach, Jaskologist
The steelmanned version is that Trump offends because his boorishness and disregard for established norms do actual damage to American political culture. Toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube, so just as Obama built on bad precedents Bush set in warring against terror, future politicians will behave more like Trump, and some of them will not be as self-defeating in their attempts to exert control as Trump seems to be.
Speaking as someone who comes from a family full of people who eat their steak well done:
This is not a trait of ordinary people.
I think this is already happening. Not that opposing party politicians didn’t insult each other before, but Nancy Pelosi going straight “Trump is fat and he smells bad” in recent weeks seems to be a pretty dramatic ratchet downwards, which I can only assume is an attempt to beat Trump at his own game…
I don’t read the Atlantic, so am going only on this thread.
Surely it’s possible to be narrow and intolerant while holding moderate views. Suppose the question is how much the federal government should spend. Someone moderately left on that issue could publish a magazine which claimed that government expenditure should be increased by ten percent, that anyone who wanted five percent or less was obviously an economically illiterate right wing extremist while the commies who wanted twenty percent were not worth listening to.
You could have a magazine much farther to the left which mostly argued for a twenty to forty percent increase, but also published an occasional article suggesting that there were serious arguments for fifty and another arguing that the real problem was how the money was spent, and the right solution was to fix that while keeping the level of expenditure where it was.
I occasionally see things from the Huffington Post, and it feels a little like this. I am not sure whether they publish centrist or conservative articles, but they seem to be somewhat more careful about not overstating the case for their position than most.
And the music was terrible, too.
You disrespect the decade of ABBA (which seems to be the international language of love, even if the
Chinese government“the commercial wing of the Ministry of Culture” rewrote the lyrics*, I am telling you they got it spot-on with the fashion choices), Mud, Bobby Goldsboro, and other timeless classics? 😀*For those of you deprived of living through that glorious Golden Age, the original lyrics are “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)” where a female protagonist laments her lonely life and hopes for a lover to come help lift her up; the revised lyrics here are about “The Annoying Autumn Wind” which has blown away the male protagonist’s fickle girlfriend whom he hopes will return to him. They kept the original bangin’ choon though, including the zippy keyboards at the end 🙂
Perhaps related to the concerns expressed here…
I agree with a wider claim that there’s a strong habit of pessimism on the left. I don’t know how or when it happened.
It’s really weird. Aren’t the leftists supposed to be the ones who believe they can fundamentally transform the nature of society to make it better? And aren’t conservatives supposed to be the ones who believe in eternal human nature and the inability to solve of certain problems?
It’s really weird, “Yeah, life sucks. I mean, we’re going to radically transform everything and make it better but god damn I hate everything.” vs, “Oh yes, war, death, poverty, hunger, these are all a part of life that we can’t do anything about. We just have to live with it. Tea and cookies?”
It doesn’t appear to have been a thing through at least the 1960s… but then again, I wasn’t there.
Leftists think they are living in an apartment in Manhattan, and are furious that there is DIRT EVERYWHERE! WE LIVE IN A HOUSE PEOPLE! HOW DID ALL THIS DIRT GET IN HERE? HOW HAVE WE FAILED TO CLEAN UP THIS MESS!
Conservatives think we are living in a hovel in a swamp, and are frustrated that the leftists are trying to keep the floor clean when when there are HOLES FORMING IN ROOF, AND THE DRAINAGE DITCHES ARE FILLING WITH STICKS, AND SOMEBODY NEEDS TO REPAIR THE FENCE OR THE ALLIGATORS WILL GET IN! STOP FREAKING OUT OVER THE MUD ON THE FLOOR ALREADY!
Difference in expectations make a world of difference in your outlook.
Doesn’t match modern politics, but you have me thinking of the philosophy expressed in Man of La Mancha:
Aldonza: The house [orig. “world”] is a dung heap, and we are maggots that crawl on it!
Don Quixote: My lady knows better in her heart…
The American left includes millions of people and has been around for well over a century, so no simple description will be adequate.
I *think* something happened to shift from a left with well-defined goals (better conditions of labor, equal rights) where success was possible to a left where no change could be good enough (environmentalism, Social Justice) and it was good form to despair of the human race.
“workers of the world unite” isn’t exactly a cohesive policy goal. I don’t think that the old left was any more satisfiable than the modern, it just had different targets.
Aren’t the leftists supposed to be the ones who believe they can fundamentally transform the nature of society to make it better?
If you are going to fundamentally transform the nature of society, rather than make some running repairs or minor adjustments, then by the very nature of the condition you have to think that “this is the worst ever, it is inhuman, everything is bad and hurts” rather than “oh well worse things happen at sea, a fresh coat of paint and cleaning out the guttering will see us right”.
Perhaps growing up with superstimulus has warped people’s perceptions on what is an acceptable rate of change.
I think it’s natural to an extent, and I get it. Remember how hard the left was winning during Obama? ACA, gay marriage, the daily show, all of that. And even at that time it naturally seemed that things weren’t perfect – ACA got altered, there was still a lot to do on LGBT acceptance, ect. So there was this great-for-them world where it was still easy to think of it as fundamentally imperfect in a lot of ways, still pretty bad, and still needing a lot of work.
And then they started losing pretty hard. Trump is president. Wokeness is much less profitable and liked than before. Progress on LGBT stuff slowed down a lot, people being much less on board with trans than they were with gay. The authority of the media, generally an ally, is much lessened. The authority of soft science, generally an ally, is also much lessened.
And some things that were bad or bad to them never got fixed – school shootings, private gun ownership, etc.
I think it makes sense that it seems catastrophic to some in that sense – if you were really very happy within the Obama years, this must seem hellish.
Is it?
this is to define not conquering new territory as losing. that seems like a stretch.
It doesn’t seem that way to me.
The left loves to imagine both that they are a tiny light barely holding back the dark tide of reaction, and also that they are on the inevitable side of history. A neat trick to be both.
> Is it?
I mean – I got rid of my Amazon Prime membership over the whole thing, so that’s, like $119/year lost to wokeness.
Can we adapt an idea from Turchin and ascribe it to elite overproduction? If not in society at large, at least among the target readership of The Atlantic. There are far more PhDs being minted than there are tenure track professorship openings, for example; I assume there is similar competition for high-status positions in media, politics, etc.
There’s this narrative of the Great Depression that we had boom times for a decade and then a sudden huge crash that led to a decade of depression. This makes for a great narrative but it simply isn’t true. 1914-1948 were a time of incredible death, destruction, and economic instability throughout. The Roaring Twenties saw new technology and a birth of culture (the “roaring” part) but it also saw a hugely unstable economy and gigantic disasters like the Spanish flu or various civil wars. From 1918-1929 there was a recession bigger than 2008 roughly every two years, including the first and second worst depressions in US history. And the third by some measures.
There was the American Civil War and the disturbances around it which lasted from roughly 1850 to 1880. We had armed militias running around and a fair amount of political assassinations, not to mention a civil war.
And of course we had the Revolution before that. And before the Revolution, there was the period from 1640-1690. In terms of percentage of people and wealth destroyed, that time period is still the worst in American history.
I agree we’re not exactly at a high point right now. But if you were to ask me to trade this for living during the early 20th century, or the mid 19th, or the late 18th or 17th…. even setting aside the fact I like plumbing and the internet, no.
Looking at number of recessions can be misleading. The US had three recessions in the fifties. There were zero last decade. Which one had the better economy?
The other statistics aren’t better. And these aren’t mild depressions like the 1950s: each one was at least as bad as 2008 and it has the number one, number two, and arguably number three spot for the entirety of US history. This is a large part of why people thought capitalism and liberal democracy was going to fall to Fascism/Communism, so it was alarming even at the time.
The 1920 one was bad and obviously so was the Great Depression. What’s number three?
The 1923 recession, which is very arguable. It’s number three in some ways but in sum total it probably is less significant than (eg) 1882 or 1907. (And the 1918 recession is probably very high up as well.) At any rate, both dwarf anything in the postwar era. You also have 1926, which was only slightly worse than 2008 and so relatively mild by the standards of the decade.
> Which one had the better economy?
The last one. Because in the 50s I couldn’t buy a smartphone at *any* price.
I agree that all of those times were more dire than the current political situation. But, they were all accompanied by a very large rewriting of the social contract: the new deal in the 30’s, the constitutional amendments of the 1860’s, and the constitution in the 1780’s (not sure about the 1690’s). I wouldn’t use the term failed state to describe the preceding periods (except the articles of confederation in the most literal sense), but I think the form of the state was untenable during those times. Are there any periods more dysfunctional than the present that didn’t lead to a bid change in the role of the state?
Well, to pick one example, slavery as a legal institution actually dates to the 1660s (so right in the middle of 1640-1690). I think that gives it claim to saying it had a long term effect on the American social contract.
Well, that depends on how broadly you define change. Of course, the classic example is the early 19th century when there was a huge push to rewrite the Constitution. You could also argue the late 20th century liberal attempts, from the 70s to 80s, basically fizzled and they flew the white flag and shifted right. It’s also debatable how much some of them really changed the role of state in society in a day to day sense.
But what really complicates this is that society is always changing and it’s difficult to say when is more or less. Like, the big expansion of the state in the Progressive Era happened in a fairly stable time as far as generalized political crises went. (Built on some evil foundations, but stable.)
I would have said the 60’s got more social change than the unrest that engendered it, though maybe more concentrated to the south. But I was more interested in the converse; has there ever been a time that shitty where the rules didn’t get changed?
The 2020s look particularly bad for the news media and academia. Both are facing extinction-level events: in the media, advertising revenue has plummeted and nobody is going to pay to subscribe to rumors they can read on Facebook for free. Meanwhile universities, well, we’ve discussed in great detail what’s wrong with them, but now the foreign students paying full freight are gone (possibly for good) which could be enough to trigger a death spiral.
So most writers are facing terrible conditions on the ground. Add to that how many of them were hard-core Warren supporters and now they’re stuck defending creepy old Joe Biden for the next few months, and yeah I can see how their future is looking pretty bleak. I mean, uh, not 1930s levels of bleak, but down there.
I mean, we are looking at 1930s levels of GDP decline and unemployment. And yet somehow the stock market is within 10% of record highs.
The stock market makes predictions about the future revenues of the companies that make it up. The stock market is doing well now because it is happy about the measures taken by the government and the Fed to counter-act the pandemic and expects things to be better over the next several years.
WWI is probably a global historical low, but I’m not sure necessarily for the US. We got in rather late and didn’t suffer even the social displacement of the Brits, let alone the French, Germans, or Russians.
Our low points have got to be the Civil War and 1933-1942. The country is getting hammered and there’s serious doubt as to whether we are going to pull out of it. You can throw in 1777-1778 as well.
Hey, Sam. I have a question for you about Plain society.
How much scope for ambition is there among the Plain? If a Plain man or woman really wants to make a mark on the world, what can he or she respectably aspire to?
Impact on which world? I’ll give examples from three categories:
Just straightforward business success – probably not anything world-changing, but a substantial business would be a reasonable and fairly common aspiration. (Think business values in the single-digit millions.) It’s in the news because it failed, but Trickling Springs Dairy would be an example.
Impact on the non-Plain world, though, would more often be sought explicitly as a missionary. For an close-to-Plain (non-Plain Russian Mennonite) example, look at Scott Martens story of his grandfather. I’ve linked the whole series–the specific post “To Congo” is about the mission work.
But the most common sort of major impact is within the church – that’s the central thing. The leader (“bishop”) of the congregation I grew up in ahd moved to the middle of nowhere Tennessee in his early 20’s, with his new wife and three other young families. They built a church and farms–including building the roads–and there are several thousand people who have spent time in the churches that grew from that.
Just a reminder that I am holding an online meetup on Mozilla Hubs this Saturday, starting at noon, and hope to continue it every Saturday. No planned theme, just an opportunity for talk and socializing. Location:
https://hubs.mozilla.com/q7PLxgT/pristine-miniature-congregation
And I again urge Scott to put back the “upcoming meetups” link, now for online meetups.
Are there a lot of people who, though not diagnosably prosopagnosic in the Oliver Sacks sense, are significantly worse than the average in terms of recognizing faces? And is this more common with people somewhere on or close to the autism spectrum?
I know I’m not alone, at least, in struggling sometimes to tell TV characters apart or recognize the same actor in different clothing and hairstyle. But I remember seeing a high school classmate fooled for a long amount of time by a hairstyle change and a fake accent (a disguise that was pretty see-through to the rest of us).
I’m bad enough with faces that I know what “prosopagnosic” means, although I doubt I’m in any way diagnosable. In college I would meet people at a party or club meeting, then see them in class or in some other context and I was never sure if they were the same person or not.
I don’t usually have trouble telling TV and movie characters apart within the same show or movie, but I often mistake an actor for a different actor. I’ll be watching something and think, oh that character is played by the same guy who played a different character in a different show. I am almost always wrong about this and when I mention it to people they usually surprised and point out that the characters look nothing alike.
Maybe related: I don’t know if I’m worse with faces than the norm, but I’m awful at describing faces. I don’t really think of a face in terms of its features, I just link it to the person. If you asked me what my family members look like, I don’t think I’d be able to describe them in a way that someone making a sketch or whatever would come up with someone recognizable.
Maybe everyone you know is average?/s
I agree it’s kind of hard to put into words subtle distinctions in faces. Basically, I’d probably just mention whatever the most striking feature was, large brow or nose or jaw or lips; maybe eye color. Amount of hair. I don’t think I’d help a sketch artist much unless the person was quite unusual.
This is definitely true of me. I can pretty much never answer the “what does he/she look like” question. I really just… don’t know.
It’s not exactly the same thing, but 23andMe had a test for the ability to recognize emotions on faces. They show you a picture of part of a face and you are supposed to choose among possible emotions.
I think I ranked somewhere around the fifteenth percentile, which was interesting.
I’m a college professor and am horrible at recognizing faces. With great effort I can match names to the photos of students my college provides me, but somehow this doesn’t well translate to my being able to match names to the students’ real faces. But this semester, before the lockdown when Zoom teaching made it irrelevant, I succeeded, with a lot of effort, at actually being able to quickly recall and use the name of any of my seminar students I happen to be talking to. Class size was five. A huge benefit to me of teaching large classes (my other one this past semester was 74) is that the students don’t expect me to learn their names.
I was very impressed to observe a colleague teaching a large class, probably fifty to a hundred, who pretty clearly knew every student by name.
When I lived in Mexico I taught one class of 14 year old girls. There were 30 of them, all with brown hair, brown eyes, wearing the same blue uniform. I spent most of the semester keeping up the pretense that I could tell them apart, but I did eventually get it.
A lady at a bookstore I’ve visited a few times (generally about 3 months in between visits) recognized me. Couldn’t recall the whole conversation, though.
I remember hearing about studies that say a certain part of the brain in taxi drivers grows all out of proportion the longer they do it, because they’re remembering all those routes and stuff. I wonder if the same happens to the face-recognizing or personal details–recalling parts of the brain when you’re a clerk interacting with people all day like that. It’s such a central human social skill you’d think our brains would already be pretty well optimized for it, but maybe not?
(And of course, a disclaimer that those studies, like 90% of studies I have ever heard about, maybe didn’t replicate.)
Yes.
I don’t watch TV, but I have that problem with webcomics – they keep expecting me to be able to tell characters apart by appearance only, and unless they have very different designs, I can’t.
Anecdotally it’s linked to being somewhere on or close to the autism spectrum, but all I have for that is anecdote.
(Probably the most striking example for me: I was at a renaissance ball, and I needed to talk to someone at the ball about an important bit of business. Problem: She wasn’t someone I knew really well, and she was one of two people around the same height, with dark hair done the same way, and wearing the same style of clothing. By a few dances in I could tell them apart – it was the same style of clothing, not the exact same dress – but I could not tell which of them was the person I needed to talk to to save my life.
Eventually I guessed and got lucky.)
I feel as if I did at one point take a lengthy online test for this, and scored maybe 56, where 50 or 45 was the cutoff for “if you score below this point, please contact us because we’d be very interested in your participation in our study of faceblindness.”
Face blindness (prosopagnosia) is a real thing.
Here’s a test you can take to see your ability to remember faces. It looks like it is based on Real Science.
I scored above average on that test, 60th percentile. This surprises me a lot. I think part of it is they often used the exact same picture, or pictures with the same hair style or clothing.
I scored on the 91st percentile. Lived experience leads me to believe that I am much worse than the average person at recognising people in real world contexts (though certainly not diagnosable as prosopagnosic). I conclude that the test is testing something other than what practically governs this effect for me – perhaps I am bad at transferring faces (or visual data generally?) from short to long term memory?
I got:
At first I thought that indicated a weird asymmetrical distribution, but actually it probably means that a lot of people get exactly 64 right, and the standard deviation is fairly low.
I had a similar experience to Jake R and Tarpitz. Did average on the test, but I think I’m much worse than average at this in real life. The situation that most often gets me is when a person I’ve always met in the same context suddenly pops up in a different one.
At some point I took one of those tests, and found I’m very prospognastic. If you take away the hair, and clues I get from people’s build, and their pattern of movement, and heavens knows what all else, I get the same results I’d get if I simply guessed.
But I can recognize people. It takes longer for me to learn a new person than it does for most folks, and people I confuse with each other don’t look similar to other people.
And unsurprisingly, putting a mask on doesn’t have much impact on my ability to recognize you, as has been tested rather a lot recently. Mask or no mask, you still have the same physique, posture, movement pattern, and voice.
[OTOH, any competent actor routinely fools me – I can’t generally associate “Actor A playing character B” with “Actor A playing playing character C”.]
I took that test and scored well below average, which fit my expectation.
I also felt like I kind of cheated. For the people I was reliably getting I wasn’t looking at faces, per se, just focusing in on single, highly noticeable features (IE, he’s the one with acne, he’s the guy with the nose-ring, she’s the one with crazy hair, he’s the Asian one, she’s got weird earnings, he’s the one with terrible lighting.)
Now, this is also how I get through real life, but I feel like being able to memorize one highly noticeable feature is a different skill set than being able to recognize faces.
Exactly what I felt while going through this.
You got 57 of 75 questions correct. The average score is 63.7. Your score is higher than 7.57% of other people who take this test.
All the white people that didn’t have a specific feature blended together.
That test is seeing if you can recognize pictures of faces, not faces–that you remember a picture with a red shirt or a single large hoop earring or fluffy hair isn’t face recognition. As it happens, I got about 16th percentile, which doesn’t surprise me, and I expect it would have been worse if not for noticing the accidental things.
Ok, but how do you separate that knowledge? That’s literally how I recognize faces of strangers in real life.
The issue isn’t recognizing faces of strangers – it’s recognizing faces of acquaintances that you met once last week and are supposed to meet again, or faces of friends that you haven’t seen in five years.
@Imsoindiethatmyblogdontfit,
FWLIW I got: “…You got 60 of 75 questions correct. The average score is 63.7. Your score is higher than 16.33% of other people who take this test….”
So very slightly above average…
…WOO HOO!!!!
I have the opposite problem, I’m good with faces but awful with names. As in “can be working with you for three years, then six months after I leave the job it’s ‘oh yeah that’s Susan – I think, unless it was Kate or maybe Annie?'”. Unless I’m hearing and using your name every day, it goes “whoosh” out of the memory but I can still remember the faces in a class photo from forty years ago.
It took me a year in one job to reliably learn everyone’s name, not helped by the fact that three people had the same first name so I was reduced to writing little notes to myself that “A.B. is the blonde, A.C. is the skinny one, and A.D. is the other one left after those two” 🙂
My face issues is accompanied by an excellent memory for names, but you’d be surprised how useless one is without the other. “Okay I’m certain the person I chatted with last night was named Taylor, but I don’t know if that’s Taylor or a complete stranger.”
My partner and I work together on this at cocktail party type events. He recognizes the face, and reminds me something about the person, and then I tell him the name.
@keaswaran,
I find your description of you and your partner’s teamwork charming.
I’m autistic and mildly to moderately prosopagnosic. I sometimes have to ask my husband which character is which if one of them changes clothes between scenes. I can tell major things apart, such as gender, skin color, and light vs dark hair… but have a hard time distinguishing more subtle facial features (cheekbones, nose shape, exact hair style, etc) unless two people are standing right next to each other.
I don’t know offhand of any studies linking this to ASD, but I’ve heard a number of anecdotes.
I could swear that SSC has had this conversation before and I floated the suggestion that lots of neurotypical people can only tell major things apart and that’s why animation in Japan, where everyone had similar skin color and black hair, invented a rainbow of hair colors.
That doesn’t preclude a weak correlation to ASD, of course.
I have lots of trouble with names and faces, to the extent that I’ll sometimes feel unsure about the name of someone I’ve known for years.
I may or may not be on the spectrum, but I consider myself a low-functioning neurotypical.
I might be your high school classmate. I had a teacher who posed as a guest speaker who was a Boer putting forward a pro-apartheid position. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the class who didn’t recognize her as our teacher. Some of my classmates became borderline verbally abusive toward her persona, and I was practically in tears because of how they were treating her.
Edit: On the spectrum, and diagnosed as such.
I’m not sure how much further from the average I am, since everybody’s so bad at cross-racial facial recognition that it’s an argument in court, but I’m bad at telling non-white people apart. I love to watch Korean soap operas, and sometimes I think I recognize the actor from a previous show, check him out, and no, it’s a different actor that, looks quite similar. Koreans getting surgery doesn’t help, since they all get surgery to adapt to the same standard of beauty.
But what is the average ability in cross-racial facial recognition? I genuinely have no idea whether I’m better or worse than other people. One thing I do notice is that people sometimes tell me that white people are the same, and you can’t tell the French from the Italians, and I definitely can.
I’m white, and I definitely couldn’t. Although in the US, everyone tends to just be a generic European mixture anyway.
When it comes to live action* shows, I tend to find it much easier to tell apart the characters in modern American shows than European ones, due to the diversity of the former. When the entire cast is identical looking white dudes, it often takes me several episodes before I can really tell them apart.
* This doesn’t apply to animated series because they are incredibly stylized, and diversity of character appearance is entirely at the whims of the creators, even when they are nominally the same “race”. Cartoon characters are usually *designed* to be recognizable, and are given iconic outfits which they never change, etc.
I’m not great at remembering faces or names, and movies where people are in uniform are especially challenging.
I recently found out that there’s more mental illness in my family than I thought– my sister has a better memory and more contact with my family than I do.
The reason I’m mentioning this here is that I’ve answered ssc questionnaires assuming that there wasn’t mental illness in my family. This wouldn’t be important for the statistics if it were just me, but now I wonder how much people generally underestimate it. And if it might not be random– my lack of knowledge might have something to do with my being kind of spectrumish.
The other thing is that we’re only in touch with my father’s relatives, and I don’t think the survey had anything about how likely people are to have information about their families.
So this is extremely CW but fascinating, and doesn’t really leave anyone involved looking very good. One must apply salt to deathbed confessions, but this appears at least somewhat corroborated: Norma McCorvey, the famous “Jane Roe” from Roe v. Wade who later became a born-again evangelical anti-abortion activist, appears to have been a paid fraudster in her activist role and never believed in the religion she presented herself as having converted to.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jane-roe-confesses-anti-abortion-conversion-all-an-act-paid-for-by-the-christian-right?ref=home
A conservative perspective on the situation.
It should be noted that it would be a bit strange if, as a public activist for a cause for multiple decades, she hadn’t been paid for her services. And her conversion to Catholicism certainly didn’t seem to be a fraud: she spoke with a priest on the day she died, and elected to have a Catholic funeral.
Documentaries can be highly misleading. We don’t know whether she was asked leading questions, or what answers she might have given that were cut from the final edit. In any case I do believe that she was given specific talking points to say and that she was paid. She wasn’t exactly an expert by any means, so the only reason anyone would care about what she had to say is because she happened to be the warm body that the lawyers needed for their abortion case. So her comments that she was a “trophy” for the pro-life cause is accurate: what else could she have been?
+1
I have no idea what the deal was with Roe. (Nor does it actually have any bearing at all on the morality of abortion or whether it’s good policy to ban it.) But I am massively skeptical of a deathbed confession provided by a documentary with an ideological axe to grind. I think it’s quite likely that the original, unedited footage might tell a very different story than the footage that was eventually produced.
I am very close to fully generalised scepticism about documentaries; that counts double for partisan documentaries about politically charged subjects, but honestly, anyone out there who thinks they have any good idea whether Carole Baskin fed her first husband to the tigers, well…
Disclosure of bias: Anti-Abortion
I haven’t seen the documentary, but the article seems to be trying to implicate the Christian right of a kind of fraud I’m not sure they have any evidence it’s guilty of. She appears to have made something like $450k they can track down working as a public figure and speaker; that doesn’t seem crazy to me for a year’s worth of work, considering her fame. And she seems to have done this for significantly longer than a year – if she was her “anti-abortion” character for a decade, that’s $50k a year, which would seem insanely low to me, if anything. Wikipedia seems to indicate she was involved in some capacity as a protestor/public figure/speaker from at least 1995 to 2014, for instance – is $25k a year a ton for this work? It seems like pulling “paid” out, in isolation, as a fraudulent thing might be an isolated demand for vigor.
Moving on to the fraudulent bit, as aimed at the organizations working with her and judging by the article: There’s no indication from her that they knew, and no indication from the people quoted that they knew, either. Even the once-anti-abortion guy who worked with her and is now pro-abortion and thinks his work against abortion was a mistake will only go as far as to say he sometimes suspected.
As apparent evidence of fraud, they also include the fact that she had a speechwriter as if it’s unusual or immoral.
So at this point we have a famous person who made at least $25k a year as a notable figure in a popular social and political movement. According to the claims of everyone involved, nobody besides her knew she was insincere, although one person who is now pro-abortion claims retroactively that he had suspicions. But she knew she was lying, right? She was at least sincerely insincere, yeah?
Even this isn’t clear. From the article:
So even that’s muddy.
This seems like the equivalent of someone like Bill Maher declaring on his deathbed that he was a tea party guy the entire time, and me then accusing the Liberal Media of paying out dirty money to fool the world. Or maybe not! But so long as there’s space for daylight between “Our paid public figure turned out to be insincere, neither she nor us claims we knew” and “We intentionally deceived the whole world through dishonest use of money”, this article is probably trying to prove a little too much.
So which religion is she not believing in? Evangelical Protestantism, Catholicism, both?
As you say, nobody comes out of this looking good. She was a convenient case for the pro-abortion side and once the judgement was made, they dropped her because her use was finished. That she ended up on the pro-life side, paid or not, is not that surprising given that (a) cynically, she would be a feather in their cap and (b) if there was money/fame/utility out of being the poster child for one side, why not the other? As a decision about how to earn a crust by a woman with little education and a troubled life, it may be self-serving but it’s not particularly strange.
That is, if I am willing to believe the breathless media reports about this and I’m tending towards “God alone knows what was in her heart”.
One thing I’ve been struck by is just how readily some posters here are to jump to genetics whenever there is any story even tangentially race related. I remember back in the early days of the outbreak when it was mostly confined to China, people were speculating about whether the Chinese were genetically extra susceptible to the coronavirus. Then later when the course of the pandemic turned, people kept making the same speculations, just with the signs reversed.
IMO, some people here have incredibly warped priors. But I suppose it’s best that they do have a place to talk, just in case one turns out to be right against all odds some day.
Can an you give some examples? I don’t disbelieve you, I just haven’t seen it here, at least not in a long time.
I’ve seen UK data that shows Africans and Asians being affected twice as severely as whites. One would assume that in the UK there is less of an economic disparity between these groups, and the fact that both are severely affected could rule out cultural explanations as well. What is left but race?
I would consider that to mean that the burden of proof is on those claiming that race isn’t a factor regarding the virus. We already know that, for example, AIDS has a heterogeneous effect on different racial groups.
(Although I haven’t been posting this here before right now.)
BAME people live dispropotionately in cities.
And it’s not like there’s no income disparity by ethnicity.
This article unfortunately does not have raw data, but claims that it is disproportionate even accounting for that. Their argument that race is not a factor is because “there is no gene for being Black or Asian”. Hardly convincing especially since there ARE viruses that hit harder depending on race. Maybe it still isn’t genetic because the strength of the argument doesn’t affect its accuracy, but genetic differences in virus outcome would be consistent with prior viruses, the current data, and would explain a lot.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/22/why-are-people-from-bame-groups-dying-disproportionately-of-covid-19
Edit: The data I was referring to was severe cases of COVID compared to the same populations with older respiratory disorders. You want the table on page 5. https://www.icnarc.org/Our-Audit/Audits/Cmp/Reports
It’s also hardly convincing since, well here are a few:
SLC24A5
SLC45A2
EDAR
…
I could go on.
>Therefore, we adjust for region of residence and whether the individual lives in a rural or urban area, using the Rural Urban Classification1.
I’m not convinced that the ‘Town and Generalised Urban’ category from the RUC is sufficient to corrct for urban-ness.
So if BAME people live in the inner city and white people in the suburbs, there’s no accounting for that.
I’m not saying that genetic factors are prima-facie impossible.
This seems like a perfect example. You say “there is less of an economic disparity between these groups” and the fact that two different races are affected “could rule out cultural explanations” and then say that race is an explanation. Doesn’t the fact that Africans and Asians are both affected twice as severely as whites rule out race even more than it rules out cultural or economic explanations?
Is it really a warped prior to believe that genetics impact the effects of COVID-19? I’m no expert but I wouldn’t be that surprised if most disease had a genetic/”race” component. Am I wrong here? At least there’s a couple of famous examples (sickle-cell in Africans, old world diseases in the new world populations, HIV resistance in Europeans, etc.).
Given “genetics/race plays a roll in most diseases”, it seems relevant to speculate what role it play in COVID-19.
A hypothetical for the other side might be that COVID disproportionately affects MEN, and most of the BAME in the UK are male instead of female.
Male/female is a genetic difference.
It’s more plausible in this case than for many of the cases where people trot it out, but I still think it’s highly unlikely.
Among other things, the issues I see are that 1) race is a highly imperfect proxy for genetics, especially when you start counting stuff like “hispanic” which is barely even a race. 2) There are a lot of much more significant factors than any remotely plausible biological differences, such as whether you work in a meat packing plant or live in prison, to the point that minor differences in lifestyle and location and luck will obviously trump all else. and 3) It is impossible to adequately control for such factors.
Since the virus jumped from bats to humans and from humans to cats, it doesn’t seem that picky about genetics.
Genetics could. But there is very little genetics that correlates nicely with race.
Has anyone worked with a lawschool application agency before, either as an employee or customer? My wife is interested in either or both of us procuring professional assistance in applying to lawschool, and I am not sure how to get good information as to the value typical professional agencies add and how specific agencies deviate from the mean. I myself work for a college prep tutoring company, and I definitely observe that a) we definitely can help students get to a better school than they would have otherwise gone to and b) how much value we add varies quite a bit from student to student. Any other lawschool or legal profession advice/horror stories/anecdata that might be helpful to calibrating my plan to pursue a career in law would also be appreciated.
Based on prior economic downturns, I would expect you to be coming out with a major surplus of attorneys. Assuming your goal is to boost future income, I would not go to law school at all unless you go to a T14. Lawyer income follows a bimodal distribution, and even if you don’t go Big Law long term, your earning potential will be permanently limited by your law school and your first position.
I remember after 2009, there were a lot of stories about how law didn’t pay like it used to due to A) companies cutting costs in the recession and B) a surplus of graduates. It’s hard to imagine that things have gotten better.
From the law school point of view, the situation appeared to be getting better prior to the pandemic. The school I am retired from had started hiring again.
But that’s after having scaled back its size substantially.
Thanks! This is exactly the sort of disconfirming information I was looking for! I am honestly not sure I could get into a T14 because although I think from my practice test so far that I could score above the median for a T14, I lack relevant internships and my college GPA is mediocre.
What field do you recommend at the moment?
When I was applying for business school I had maybe a 30 minute chat with a professional applications consultant.
The only real useful thing I remember from it was having them take a look at my test scores, resume, etc. and give me a sense of what sort of schools I should be applying for. They actually told me to aim higher. I didn’t take their advice, but I probably should have, as I ended up getting in easily to every school I applied for.
So maybe worth it if you don’t have a good sense of your potential. But if you do, I’d just focus on test prep instead…
Law schools are extremely number-conscious. Get the best LSAT score you can, and figure a top 40 school is a 1 in 10 shot at “big law” and anything not top 40 is a 1 in a 100 shot at ‘big law’ and anything else, your earnings ceiling is probably in the $80k or $100k range, not the big money that big law makes. See “bi-modal distribution”.
Read as much as you like about this at abovethelaw. Also recommend joining the yahoogroup https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/transferapps/info, where you can see lots of 1L law students asking for advice about how to think about trying to transfer to a better school. You see a fair amount of that sort of thing–people doing their first year at a T14, but after getting grades in the top 10%, trying to transfer to a top 4 school.
If you have an existing law practice you already know you are going to join, none of this matters, but for most people the school you attend and the first job you get afterward are extremely important.
How reliable would a 80-100k income upon graduation be?
Hard to say. On the low end, certainly plausible for many in the class. GPA will matter a lot, or at least it did when I was in school a few years ago. If you’re in the top quarter, it is likely that you could start in that range. It was rough at the time I graduated—definitely too many of us, and I didn’t know nearly as much as I should have about post-2008 prospects. Not sure if the surplus has gone down enough to make a significant difference.
In my experience, there were many government law jobs in certain fields that will get you at least close or on your way to 80k, but I’m not sure how many hire right out of graduation. It seemed easy enough to get a 65k job on graduation if you had good internships, but some of that was in quasi-legal government stuff.
Apparently, many recent graduates at the school I went to, which is well into T40, have had their offers for next year rescinded due to COVID-19. Same with many summer internships for 1Ls and 2Ls. These are probably positions at firms, not in government. And this was before people were thinking longterm lockdown, I think. It was financial. They’re worried. I think it is really hard to predict what the effects of the pandemic will be in this situation. It may be a blip, but right now they’re not in hiring mode. On the other hand, the big urban firms were some of the fastest in quietly calling employees back into the office, some in defiance of stay at home orders. At that level, they want to talk face-to-face. So it’s not like they’ll be unable or unwilling to function, like some other companies, if social distancing continues. But their clients may have fewer resources.
I’m a T14 law school grad that never practiced law or even taken the bar, so here are my two cents. First, I only recommend going to law school if it is your passion to practice law, or you want a prestigious career and don’t think you’d cut it in one of the harder prestigious jobs, like doctor. The total compensation looks high, but the hourly rate is pretty comparable to any management job that a person of similar skills could get with an MBA, just with the expectation of working hellish hours. MBA also takes less time and costs less.
I did not hire a professional agency to help me, and I don’t think it was necessary, but I put 100s of hours into self study of the LSAT, another 100 into researching law schools, and maybe 40 hours on the applications. If you do not want to or have the time for that, then the services of those agencies is very helpful, I assume.
I’m planning on working on this for the next ten months while I am very part time due to covid-19. I don’t think I need help studying for the LSAT or writing applications, but am confused on how/why I would spend 100 hours researching lawschools…which I’m imagine shows my ignorance.
What have you wound up doing? What do you wish you had done? What would you be doing now if you had gotten an MBA?
One thing you would like to know is how good a school is for students like you. The output measures U.S. News uses to rank schools don’t distinguish between a school that gets a large fraction of its students to pass the bar or get law related employment because it does a good job of teaching them and one that has the same results because it only accepts smart students. Stanford does very well on those measures, but it doesn’t follow that it is better for a student near the bottom of its distribution than a slightly less elite school would be.
I probably over researched law school and under researched other options. If all you want is to work for a Big Law firm, then just get in the highest ranking school you can on US News and world report. If you want to practice a specific type of law, want scholarship money, do not have enough money to travel for summer internships, want to live in a certain area, want a judicial clerkship, want to learn under a specific professor, you might want to consider other Factors.
I’m now working HR for the government, and I could have easily gotten to the same place with an MBA for the fraction of the cost. I love HR, and am very happy, but $200,000 of debt does hurt.
You’ll get plenty of horror stories, but those depend on what you’re aiming for. If you want Biglaw and riches, you’re in for a very rough ride, which is where most of the horror stories come from.
If you want a nice professional career with a state/federal agency, you can build for that. Choose law schools which are feeders and do your internships in the areas that interest you.
Despite all the horror stories, I went into federal service and spent another couple of years after living like a grad student (easier for me than for a family, admittedly) and have essentially paid off my student loans (actually letting the last bit be paid off over a couple of years for credit reasons) and have good benefits, reasonable income and reasonable hours.
Your life seems desirable! I distinctly don’t think I want Biglaw. I was inspired to pursue law because I went to a settlement conference for a family lawsuit, and my wife began studying for the LSAT and the LSAT looked fun; additionally, I read that lawschools weighted the LSAT higher than other grad schools weighter other tests which is a boon for me because I had mental health issues in college, but I’m good at tests.
In terms of my goals, nice professional career with a state/federal agency sounds nice. I’d basically like to earn enough to be able to afford to pay for conveniences that entails purchasing unskilled labor from employers (i.e. eating out, Uber), then continue not to pay for those conveniences and save money. I also like the idea of being able to transition into other careers, which I have heard is possible with law.
How do you find out what lawschools are feeders for federal agencies? Google?
Google may help. I got lucky, frankly. Otherwise, look at agencies in the areas you’re interested in. Some will have resumes posted, others will have intern/extern opportunities which can give you a foot in the door.
Depending on your area, some of this should be common knowledge in the legal community, though you may have to get to know some people (networking, argh, I avoided it by luck).
Other stuff is fairly straightforward. So, the University of Idaho is a major feeder to the Idaho State government by virtue of being the only major state law school.
I’m not sure how helpful I can be, because like I said, I was quite lucky. My agency asked you to list the offices you were interested in. One of the main ones I listed is quite rural, but also about two hours from my (also rural) hometown. They’ve had a lot of turnover from new employees who want to get in the agency, then go somewhere bigger. Half the reason I have my job is I was able to convincingly (and honestly) say, ‘Nope, I’m sticking around, unless the federal government decides to literally open an office in my home town.’
Some have speculated that the presence of the Wuhan virology lab is “too convenient” to be coincidental, and inferred that it must have had something to do with the outbreak. This has been dismissed out of hand by most mainstream reports (and probably with good reason), but and angle that I’ve never heard addressed is, how much of a coincidence is this? i.e., how many virology labs of this type are there? One in every province in China? Only a handful in the world?
I brought this up in a previous thread. A good response was that Wuhan is a large region, like NYC and surroundings, that has several universities and is the kind of place you’d expect a virology lab.
It’s still a tad eye-brow raising, to be honest, but not exactly unexpected. Looking carefully at a map would probably be informative.
As I said at the time, and which appears to be as quickly forgotten as it was ignored,
Thank you for the addendum.
Extremely quick calibration from a non-expert:
The Wuhan Virology lab is one of two Biosafetly Level 4 facilities (the highest level, certified to work with basically anything) in China. It opened in 2015, the other one, which focuses on animal diseases, in 2018. The US has 15, the UK has 9, and most developed countries have 1-4. Now assuming that BSL-4 correlates with being in the top tier of virology research (I am an aerospace engineer, and do not know if this is true) then this is a pretty big coincidence.
Given the risks involved when working with some of the agents requiring BSL-4, you’d hope they would be extremely stringent when certifying people.
My personal experience only goes up to BSL-3, and it’s not entirely reassuring. While there were tons of paperwork involved, and training was required, a couple of the people granted access were fucking morons I would have been reluctant to trust with my dry cleaning.
(On the other hand, this was a low-risk BSL-3 facility as far as these things go, they were working with tuberculosis which is dangerous but not likely to cause an outbreak.)
On the other hand, it makes sense to locate virology labs in places where said viruses are most likely to arise.
It’s also important to remember that this particular lab was involved in ongoing research on bat diseases, specifically on diseases that might transfer from bats to humans, including coronavirus:
To be fair, it makes sense to place a lab dealing with dangerous bat diseases in an area with access to bats with dangerous diseases. The reason the lab was researching these things, after all, was the exact kind of scenario that gave us Covid-19.
It’s not impossible that the disease escaped the lab, but there are plenty of other options. I expect that, in the future, plenty of people will believe that it was the lab (if the Chinese government is overthrown in the next 50 years, that might even become the official story). But we’ll probably never know for sure. I don’t see any scenario where evidence beyond reasonable doubt comes out for one scenario over the other.
Believers in the theory that the Wuhan Virology Lab is the source of the outbreak: what evidence would it take to falsify your belief?
I’m kind-of on board with this belief, and I’d need a political revolution in China that completely upends their power structure and examination of all records by a hostile(read: credibly believes this was/could have been leaked by the lab) party who determines it wasn’t or was unlikely. That’s the minimum to lessen my belief.
That’s not because the belief is strongly held(it isn’t) or because it’s uber-important to me(it’s not, I think China is shitty in this way and will continue pumping out a new potential pandemic every 2-4 years no matter what). It’s because China is fully motivated to control the PR on this, and fully capable of covering something like this up in pursuit of that goal. There’s no way to know the truth here unless somebody takes the filing cabinets from them.
Thank you for responding. Would you say that your belief in this theory has lead you to substantially change your behavior?
No, not really. I’ve always thought being as reliant on China as we were/are is bad for us. Some of the reason why is that they aren’t very careful and they have no problem “controlling the truth” in situations where things go wrong.
Yeah, it’s funny how the Wuhan lab theory is treated like some kind of crazy conspiracy theory on par with lizard people when it’s extremely plausible and maybe equally as likely as the alternative. Tarring anyone who believes the “wrong” thing as a conspiracy theorist is going to cause backlash. It makes the Alex Jones’ of the world look more reasonable.
When I first heard the theory I put it at like a 1-5% chance of being true. The later stuff I heard from experts had me lower my odds, but, like, it’s still quite possible, right? 1% is 1%. I always suspected the very confident denials were just bluster.
Well I think there are several Levels of the lab theory:
– Corona-Sars2 is a strain the lab found in tested bats and it escaped by accident.
– Corona-Sars2 is a strain the lab created for an experiment (testing Corona Virus strains that could make the jump to people is part of the job of this lab, and yes geneticaly changing strains is part of that) and it escaped by accident.
– Corona-Sars2 is part of an bio-weapon program, and it escaped by accident.
– Corona-Sars2 is part of an bio-weapon program, and it was released on purpose.
I think those 4 levels go from, “not complitealy implausible”, to at least “the moon landing was fake”-level tinfoil head crazy.
@Darktigger
Sure, but the people going on about conspiracy theorists aren’t making that distinction.
@Nick-
Most people (to my constant chagrin) round 1% down to “Completely impossible and if you disagree you’re a moron.” Which is similar to bluster, I suppose. 🙂
Interesting. I think that theory “epidemic originated from unsanitary food market pracitces which Chinese government failed to crack down on after it already caused deadly outbreak of a similar virus” shows them in far worse light than “epidemic originated in a laboratory accident”.
You can always crack down on unsanitary practices later (and I believe China just has), but that lab you’ll probably want to hang on to.
If I understand the whole Biosafety Level thing correctly, the Wuhan lab is the last place anything should get out of, because they’re probably working with stuff that’s a hell of a lot more dangerous than COVID-19. Saying, “whoops, we done goofed and had the virus escape” is equivalent to saying “I’ve been down to the silos the other day and I can’t seem to find some warheads”.
@Faza (TCM)
I mean, nuclear safety breaches roughly equivalent in severity to “I’ve been down to the silos the other day and I can’t seem to find some warheads” happened in various countries… It is unreasonable to expect no accidents when working with dangerous stuff, and yet normal Western countries have more lab facilities similar to that in Wuhan that China.
@AlesZiegler:
Sure, but I can’t recall any situation where one of the missing warheads was subsequently detonated in a city – and that’s what you’d need to get a nuclear equivalent of COVID-19 escaping from a lab.
The wet market hypothesis, while not particularly flattering to China, is something that can, with a bit of work, be spun as an unfortunate accident stemming from local culture. “Top-tier virology lab accidentally releases pathogen that shuts down the entire world” is a level of national embarrassment that no country can live down, much less one as image-conscious as China. Even in a single-party dictatorship, that’s the sort of thing that topples governments.
@Faza (TCM)
What about Chernobyl? I am aware that casualties of it are much lower than those of this disaster, but it sure looks like a breach of nuclear security comparable with lost warheads. And it resulted in massive damages. Anyway I still think that in case food market hypothesis is true, it is in fact worse national embarrassment for Chinese government than Chernobyl was for the USSR.
It is not a coincidence. The lab is there because the goddamn bats are there.
This is like theorizing that an earthquake study center caused an earthquake, with the “evidence” being that the earthquake happened near the center.. which had, of course, been deliberately placed in a seismic hotspot.
But what if it’s the Nikolai Tesla center for earthquake studies 🙂
Then it’s already been renamed the Thomas Edison Center for Earthquake Studies thanks to a sneaky backroom deal.
I thought the bats tended to be in big caves in Yunnan.
(Notwithstanding that the real factor is people, and people are definitely in Hubei. 58 million of them)
Relvant Shitpost
What’s the source for the claim that the lab was built there because of the bats?
I don’t recall seeing anything like that – in fact, the only mentions I saw seemed to indicate those bat researchers traveled far and wide to get their specimens. “Climbing caves all over China and other Asian countries”, etc.
You also don’t choose the location of something like a major BSL-4 facility (especially when it’s going to be one of only a handful such facilities in a country the size of China) based on whether some bats happen to live conveniently close.
It’s not because “some bats” are conveniently close. But because this bat’s are the reserve population for for virus strains that already made the jump to humans once.
The horseshoe bats that were famously identified as a SARS reservoir were in a different province, a 3rd of the way across China.
You don’t even need this level of containment if what you’re primarily interested are bat coronaviruses. BSL-3 is enough.
And in a 2018 paper, the very researchers at the center of this mention the Wuhan area as a place where there is a lower risk of bat-human transmission. (enough so they use sera from local people as a negative control to compare against those of people living near the SARS-bat caves.)
“The labs were there because the bats were there” makes no sense.
It is, one might say, a batshit (ba-dum-tss) explanation.
(I also don’t really believe in this conspiracy theory, especially none of the most out-there versions. I do think the “accidental escape” idea is possible, but completely unproven right now.)
Stressed, need fun. Best singer/songwriters of all time!
The criteria are that the person a) has had an outstanding and productive career over at least 10 years, and b) is likely to be remembered, admired, and played 10, 50, or 100 years from now.
My top 3 picks:
1) Van Morrison. First 10 years (mid ‘60’s to mid ‘70’s) were brilliant. Fell off a cliff for five years, then returned to (vaguely Christian) form starting in 1980. (I’m only familiar with his work up until about 1992, life is too short to assimilate a new release every single year)
2) Neil Young. I’m guessing he will generate the most love/hate reactions on this forum, but who else could come up with a song like “Rocking in the Free World” so relatively late in his career?
3) Leonard Cohen. I came to Leonard Cohen very recently, only about three years ago, and I really regret not picking up on him earlier. If I were a singer-songwriter, he is the kind of singer-songwriter I would choose to be.
Runners-up/no-gos:
Richard Thompson. He’s a great songwriter and guitarist, but his voice wears thin over the long run, and I don’t like his taste in producers. He really needed Linda.
Joni Mitchell. I’m not sure she meets the 10-year standard, and the more I read about her, the less I like her. (Though, to be fair, I’ve heard stuff 10X worse about Van Morrison)
Bob Dylan. I know he would make most peoples’ top 3 lists, and he has written some great songs. But he’s just not entirely to my taste, and I don’t like his whole changing-my-religion schtick.
Ray Davies—too indistinguishable from The Kinks
Bryan Ferry—too indistinguishable from Roxy Music
Walter Becker and Donald Fagan—two indistinguishable from Steely Dan
Maybe this will inspire other people here to some new listening, and maybe I can expand my horizons with suggestions from comments. I really need some new Spotify playlists to while away the day.
How does this work exactly?
Because it seems to me that in a lot of cases, whether or not a solo artist + backing band is packaged as “solo singer/songwriter” or “band” is a matter of marketing preference, almost random chance.
Like, I understand that say, Jim Morrison and John Fogerty aren’t really seen as “singer-songwriters” as such… but in terms of people who wrote good music and performed it well, they’d reach the top of my list…
In some ways I feel like “singer/songwriter” is actually a genre label that describes a certain type of music that emphasizes the solo vocalist at the expense of the backing band, and goes well beyond just “someone who writes and sings music well and packages it under their own name rather than as part of a band.”
I will admit, it can be a hard distinction to make. Technically, most of Neil Young’s output is “Neil Young and Crazy Horse.”
I’m curious, did Jim Morrison actually write/compose The Doors’ songs?
I always thought of him as more of a front man, but I could be wrong.
Just randomly checked “LA Woman” on Wikipedia, which says “All songs written by Jim Morrison, except where noted.” Only 2 of the 10 songs don’t include Morrison as a writer.
And what about stuff like “Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band” or “Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers”
Do they count?
I think Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty both qualify, but neither would make my personal list.
Maybe the general rule should be, if a person is singled out as the leader of a band, he merits the singer/songwriter label. So no for Robbie Robertson, yes for Sly Stone.
Also – is country specifically excluded from this sort of thing?
Johnny Cash? Willie Nelson? Dare I even say… Garth Brooks?
Not excluded. I enjoy all meats in the musical stew. I just don’t know all that much about country–I’d be interested in hearing any recommendations that jibe with my already expressed preferences.
If you like Neil Young I think you’d probably like Willie Nelson well enough… although I’m less confident that he personally wrote all/most of his songs. (Edit: Merle Haggard comes to mind as someone you might like as well)
I think in country it’s much more common for the good writers to just write and sell their singers to good singers. Country has more “famous writers” that aren’t famous performers like Townes Van Zandt or Billy Joe Shaver.
Kris Kristofferson is maybe the most well known and successful example of a “good writer” managing to ascend and do well enough as a singer to become famous in that right. Probably the closest thing country has to a Bob Dylan sort of figure…
@Matt M,
A good friend once described Kris Kristofferson as very talented writer and generally very talented human who could probably do almost anything, other than not being able to sing or act.
Neil Young, Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), and Gordon Lightfoot (Canadian Railroad Trilogy).
Early Cat Stevens is great, if overly earnest, and Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a terrific song. Neither one reaches the consistent high-output 10-year mark, though.
So Cat Stevens converted to Islam and Gordon Lightfoot converted to a Canadian locomotive?
I did the same double take.
Paul Simon would certainly be on my top 3 list (Cohen and Dylan would probably though not certainly the two others). Carole King and Billy Joel would be on the runners-up list.
This is of course an English language centric list and I’d be fascinated to hear nominations from those with other native languages (Edith Piaf? Bulat Okudzhava?)
Maybe Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?
If we’re heading in a roughly Eastwards direction, then the Malian Toumani Diabaté of the musical dynasty and Ali Farka Touré count as well. May as well add in Amadou & Mariam as well (I dunno what it is about Malian music but it goes).
All together now: Le dimanche à Bamako c’est le jour de mariage 🙂
John Darnielle deserves to be in this thread, even if he usually refers to himself in the plural.
The person not already mentioned who I really like is Brendan Benson.
This view may, I appreciate, result in my permanent exclusion from polite society.
I’m not really interested in “best”, but I do think there’s something to the idea that a singer-songwriter is a different category from a band. Most notably, singer-songwriters reasonably often have long and interesting careers with highs and lows. While bands sometimes put out albums that are hailed as a “return to form”, but those never actually measure up to their classic material.
I know there must be exceptions, but off the top of my head it’s really hard to think of any bands that stayed with the same lineup and managed to get good again after they ran out of inspiration the first time. Black Sabbath returned to form after they got together with Dio, but their reunion album with Ozzy (13) still sounds like they’re going through the motions.
I’d definitely add Warren Zevon to a list of great singer-songwriters. He had a lot of ups and downs, but he kept coming up with interesting music almost thirty years after he’d started. I’ll admit he doesn’t have a lot of albums I think are good all the way through, but almost all have songs that I’m glad exist.
David Bowie definitely qualifies as a great singer-songwriter for me. Even though he worked with a lot of other people, it all comes out as something only Bowie could have done.
As to Joni Mitchell, I’m not sure she ever got good again. But I haven’t listened to any of her full albums after Hejira, so I guess I won’t be able to make up my mind for a while.
To me singer/songwriter implies someone who not infrequently performs alone with an acoustic guitar.
Jimi Hendrix wrote most of his material but he is not in the column “singer/songwriter”.
Dylan, Simon, Young, Cohen, Prine, Nelson… All played with bands but also performed and recorded a lot with just an acoustic guitar.
So Stevie Wonder, Beck, Billie Eilish are solo artists not singer/ songwriters.
Chris Cornell? I mean, he’s a better singer than anyone else I’ve seen mentioned, and he’s a great songwriter, and he did (I think) a whole tour with just him on an acoustic.
Buzz Osbourne did both an album and a tour with just him on an acoustic and it was pretty great too.
What about hymn writers? I would bet on both Charles Wesley and Ira Sankey.
We obviously have no recordings of either, but I’ve sung songs by both many times. (Try “Cleansing Fountain”/”There is a fountain filled with blood” for Sankey, and “Lo He Comes” for Wesley.)
I am very much not into music, very much interested in poetry. Leonard Cohen struck me years ago as the one modern singer/songwriter I had come across who was a real poet.
Have you listened to much/any rap? Rap is basically poetry set to a relatively simple beat. While the stuff you hear on the radio isn’t particularly complex or elegant poetry, the more underground stuff can get quite complex and interesting.
I haven’t.
Maybe give it a go. Since you’re a distinguished professor, I might recommend someone like MC Paul Barman, who was an English major at Brown before deciding to become a rapper…
Why does he speak too fast for the listener to fully follow the words? Is that part of the genre?
Typically yes. I’d say this particular song is a little faster than average, but not much.
For a slower example, here’s one of my favorites from Atmosphere, and the video even includes the lyrics which should help you follow along!
Matt M, that was worth hearing, and the printed lyrics helped but probably weren’t necessary.
It made me realize that in the highly unlikely event that someone handed me a gun, I wouldn’t know how to put the safety on.
@Matt M:
Thanks.
Not bad, but not great poetry.
Sometimes some of it could qualify as poetry in the sense I think most people think of when they see the word poetry, but mostly I would say rap is not poetry.
Somewhere once there was an infographic showing which rappers use the longest words, or rap at the highest reading level or something…Aesop Rock, I believe, was way out on the right tail of that curve. If I was going to recommend a rapper to a distinguished professor based on that I guess it’d be Aesop Rock. But really I just want to tell David Friedman to listen to “40 Glock” by Donkey and soak it in.
A little easier to follow, but only a little.
Is “AK machine gun” a pun between “AK47” and “Also Known As?”
A Glock 40 is a semi-automatic handgun, so probably not.
If David is looking for one song, this is probably my favorite from Aesop Rock.
Matt M, I listened to that song and read the lyrics. Could you explain to me what the song’s about?
If DavidFriedman has not seen both econ stories “Kaynes vs Hayek” rap battles he should rectify that post haste, but I can’t imagine this is the case.
Not really, but I’m super bad at that sort of thing in general. I couldn’t explain to you what “Like A Rolling Stone” or “Come Together” are about either…
Wasn’t that last one supposed to be a “Tim Leary for POTUS” jingle?
I listened to the beginning of a Keynes v Hayek video, didn’t find it very interesting.
They were actually friends. One edition of The Road to Serfdom has a glowing endorsement on the back by Keynes.
Shrug. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. But lines like these, from the sequel, are an example of rap being poetry:
Matt M has correctly identified the best Aesop Rock song.
@Conrad Honcho: I’m usually pretty good at figuring out what songs are about (so long as they’re not pumped full of references and euphemisms and idioms way outside my knowledge) but I still think really good lyrics should have a cryptic quality. Like, I’d much rather have a songwriter obscure a song that’s about X behind a bunch of disjointed metaphors phrased in odd, clever ways than have him just write about X in a straightforward way.
It’s one thing to be cryptic, but it’s something else when I literally have no idea what the song is about. And given that no one else here seems to be able to figure it out, either, I think it’s not just me.
Has anyone tried checking Genius? Most lines have been annotated.
1. Leonard Cohen
2. Van Morrison
3. Bob Dylan
I’ve nothing to add beyond your reasons on Cohen and Morrison, and ol’ Bobby D has had enough words written about him.
He can’t be included because of his short career (and life), but Nick Drake is one of my favorites. Pink Moon is a masterpiece of an album. If he’d lived longer, he’d probably edge out Bob Dylan on my list, although “It’s Alright Ma” is my favorite solo guitar/voice song.
I appreciate the Rick and Morty username tribute. Which song would you choose if Earth was in a win-or-be-destroyed intergalactic music reality show?
I think Michael Jackson wins by a mile. From wikipedia:
“Most popular” does not equal “best.” Otherwise we’d all be singing the virtues of Billy Joel and Barry Manilow (sorry, Bill and Barry fans).
Also, I think Jackson is more in the pop category…I’ve certainly never thought of him as a singer-songwriter, more like an incredibly popular corporate trademark.
He is definitely credited as writing his music, though perhaps he used non-traditional methods:
This seems to support the thread above that “singer/songwriter” is a bit of a euphemism for a specific genre. Would Otis Redding, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, or Prince not count?
Good question. Are there any major black singer-songwriters? I think the answer is no, unless you include the soul/R&B category, but curious to hear if I’m wrong.
Immediately Lionel Richie comes to mind.
Richie Havens
Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Son House, Bukka White…
I think the people in this list all wrote at least much of their own stuff and played instruments: Prince, Little Richard, James Brown, possibly Otis Redding, Sly (Family Stone), Marvin Gaye, Hendrix, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Chuck Berry.
Singer-songwriter tends to evoke guitars, but Prince definitely fits that, and I think Marvin Gay and Stevie Wonder come close. Lionel Richie also, as has been mentioned.
Probably not major enough, but certainly respectable, and not hip hop:
Darius Rucker (The first Hootie album was an absolutely huge seller)
Tracy Chapman
As for my overall favorites who meet the criteria, both Elton John and Billie Joel come to mind (I know some don’t rate Joel too highly, but his music has stuck around.) Lennon-McCartney music will stick around. Probably Queen. It’s hard to predict which others will live on a long time. I tend to think music with fundamental themes will last, because it is easier to replace other types of music with newer, more relevant stuff. Not sure if Madonna will have staying power.
Many of my favorites are 90s rock bands who’ve certainly done decently for more than 10 years, but I have no idea if any will last or which ones.
I agree that singer-songwriter is a specific genre that is arbitrarily distinct from others, even though the performer may write and sing his/her own songs.
One excellent African-American singer-songwriter I can think of is Tracy Chapman. I swear when I first heard Fast Car, I thought she was a white country-folk singer.
Guy Clarke
Maybe Billy Joe Shaver. (Maybe not. He never made it very big performing.)
Someone mentioned Gordon Lightfoot and Cat Stevens; I might add Jim Croce in the same vein, although I’m not sure he was around long enough to count.
Want to mention Robert Hunter (lyricist/collaborator with Jerry Garcia). I saw him perform as a solo act so he counts as singer/songwriter. He did a talking blues that was jaw-dropping awesome word play. I think his poetry is as good as Dylan, Cohen, Mitchell.
1. Dylan
2. Prine
3. Cohen
In the Anglosphere, I think the most memorable (not necessarily my favorite) are in order:
1. Bob Dylan
2. Paul Simon
3. Leonard Cohen
I like the early Dylan Greatest hits but never got into his later stuff. I loved Paul Simon for many years, but now when I listen it sounds like catchy tunes with meaningless pop lyrics. Leonard Cohen is my favorite of the 3, but his More complex melodies and backing vocals are at the edge of singer-songwriter.
To list 3 of my enduring favorites true singer-songwriters:
– Don McLean
– Tracy Chapman
– Dave Carter (not well-known and technically a duet, but just have a listen)
3 other of my favorite song-writers who perform their own songs, but not strictly the singer-songwriter genre:
– Enya
– Chris De Burgh
– Peter Gabriel
And As if that weren’t enough, 3 top singer-songwriters from the francosphere (where the genre was very common):
– Jacques Brel
– Georges Brassens
– Léo Ferré (arguably better, but my preference is Maxime le Forestier)
– bonus modern one: Damien Saez
Sorry, I don’t have time to link a song for each, though I do love when people do that.
How useful do you feel the concept of “gaslighting” is? I can see how it could happen–sometimes people are malicious, manipulative, abusive, what-have-you–but it seems like the kind of thing that would create a lot of false positives, because
A. It is extremely common for people to have different perceptions and memories of significant events,
B. It is totally normal for people to try and bring others around to their own point of view, and
C. Most people are not malevolent to the extent that they are consciously trying to deceive others.
Overall, I feel that the concept of gaslighting is too readily used to paint someone as having sinister motives or acting in bad faith when they’re arguing for their own POV. Use of the term implies a deeper degree of insight into someone else’s psychology than most of us commonly have, and it seems to get thrown around a lot. Thoughts?
A spouse has a lot of power to make their partner think that they’re going crazy by moving keys and other objects. Media sites have the power to delete or change old articles without notifying anyone. Newer editions of books often quietly correct mistakes without ever acknowledging them.
None of these are matters of opinions, they’re retroactively attempting to change the past for their own benefit. All of these are manufacturing evidence or destroying evidence, which is more than just having two people’s memories disagree.
How common is it? News sites quietly take down stories all the time, or drop ongoing story lines when the facts start going against the narrative. How common is it among romantic partners? Probably very rare.
IMO “gaslighting” also implies motive. Specifically, the motive behind it is to make the other person feel like they’re going crazy.
CNN doesn’t change articles because they want me to think I’m going crazy. They do it for much simpler, self-interested reasons. They don’t care about my mental state, one way or another… Therefore, even if it’s sinister and should be opposed for other reasons, it’s not really “gaslighting” as such.
And by this logic, I think some 99% of uses of the term “gaslighting” are incorrect. It’s usually just regular self-interested lying.
So you would reject a consequentialist problematization of gaslighting then? That is, if someone has an instinctual desire to propagate their worldview and insidiously, but not systematically, undermines other worldviews[1], that would not be gaslighting?
[1] Say because they are deluded and malevolent.
It’s a problem, but different terms should be used for it than for trying to make the listener think they’re going crazy. We should also distinguish whether the reason is delusion or malevolence.
Agree with 10240. Intentionally lying and deceiving people to propagate your ideology is bad, but it’s not gaslighting.
That said, given how everyone uses gaslighting to include that sort of thing, I’m probably fighting a battle I’m doomed to lose, and I should just throw in the towel like the dictionary did with “literally.”
@Matt M It may be futile to try to return the term to its original meaning, but the ambiguity is a good reason to avoid using it in either meaning. We use a lot of ambiguous words, but it’s worse than usual when the ambiguity is between actions of significantly different levels of (im)morality. There are less ambiguous words to say that someone is lying, or that what they are saying is incorrect.
I think “gaslighting” is only useful when you’re talking about a specific type of (alleged) misrepresentation, specifically of the past in order to justify the present (or intentions for the future). But even then, “historical revisionism” does just as well.
@10240, I agree with both your point that it’s worthwhile to use precise language, and that it’s often difficult or futile.A good case study would be be use of the word “rape”. Rape can embody a wide range of events and contexts that vary in the amount of harm done from a crushing event that derails your life to something that probably had ripple effects but didn’t seem that bad. It’s similar with sexual assault; at least for me my baseline presumption is that sexual assault is quite bad and typically worse than physical assault, but I know someone who was sexually assaulted and reported not being bothered at all. Clarifying degree and manner of harm seems useful, but in practice would be very hard to do in the manner it is very hard to bracket any harmful event without running the risk of appearing to trivialize it.
On the note of lying, my father told me a while back that mendacious meant something along the lines of “careless with the truth” and thus was distinct from lying by lacking explicit intent. I have since found that “lying” is listed as one of its definitions, but I use it only to indicate untruthfulness as distinct from deceit because that’s too wonderful a delineation to give up.
@Dragor
This reminds me of a Henry Rollins interview where he mentioned as a young kid going out on the streets looking for a fight.
I know, you can’t physically assault a willing punk.
Some people would feel invigorated by being jumped.
I actually did that in my pajamas once when I was 17, but I didn’t want to instigate anything because I saw myself as not a bad actor. Luckily a car almost killed me while I was not jaywalking, so I felt morally justified in bouncing the car up and down by kicking the bumper yelling the guy starting to exit back into his car.
Is that the motive?
From what I gather, in cases when the children of alcoholics, say, confront their parents about being starved or locked for days or whatever, the parents deny it because they don’t want the feeling of guilt. They don’t want to assume responsibility for their actions, they don’t want to ask for forgiveness, so they’d rather pretend none of that happened.
Isn’t that also a thing in romantic relationships where somebody screwed up? Rather than say “I’m sorry”, they’d rather pretend nothing happened, and try to convince their partners.
The thing with gaslighting is, sometimes people gaslight themselves, too, so they can successfully gaslight others.
Part of the discussion in this thread is about whether it’s appropriate to call that gaslighting. Originally at least, it referred to making the other person think they’re crazy.
The alcoholics and relationship examples given would be considered gaslighting, from my understanding. The term was coined from the movie title, but I think the coining recognized that while what happens in the movie is a conscious act, this is very rare, while the thing being named is a more common unconscious behavior.
In my mind, gaslighting is still not a common behavior, and it is fairly specific to unhealthy relationships involving people with narcissism or borderline personality disorder. And in that context I don’t think the gaslighting behavior is so much intentional and voluntary as instinctual and subconscious.
But it is also becoming more mainstream and being applied to analogous online behavior that may be seen in conflict-prone forums or news media.
Only if there is an (implicit or explicit) claim or promise that the old articles are not changed or deleted, or that all changes in the new edition of the book are explicitly mentioned. I don’t think there is such an expectation with regards to new editions of a book. An author is not a permanent defendant; the new edition is supposed to summarize the author’s best knowledge at the time of its publication, it’s not supposed to be a piece of evidence about the author’s earlier mistakes. No evidence is destroyed either, as long as earlier editions are available. Regarding a media site, there is a stronger claim that it purports to represent older articles as they were originally published, but if this doesn’t actually usually hold, it may make sense to just acknowledge that it shouldn’t be assumed to hold unless explicitly asserted by the site.
Joke’s on my hypothetical spouse: to whatever extent rarely being able to remember where I put anything constitutes being crazy, I have long since accepted I am that much crazy.
Useful as a way to describe abusive behaviour in which someone is intentionally led to question their own perceptions, sanity, etc, as a way of undermining and controlling them. But that’s a lot more than remembering something differently. It’s unsurprising that its use has expanded enough to make it a lot less useful; this often happens to terminology.
I think it’s useful to posit a strong form and a weak form. The strong form is where someone is trolling or scamming someone. Hard to prove, but clearly sinister. Also rare, though you can probably find examples mainly constituting on-line trolls bragging on other forums or something. [edit: forgot the instance as dndnrsn points out, of someone trying to protect their reputation. “I didn’t say that” being a very common form. With good liars, they probably first convince themselves, or do it out of habit.]
A weak form is where someone is entirely sure and admits no possibility of error in their own memory. Probably fairly common, not malicious, but somewhat, say, intellectually negligent.
Realizing your own mind is fallible is a key, but not universal, step towards maturity.
Yeah, the weak intellectually negligent form is pervasive and obnoxious, but not that harmful. I have a few people whom I differ periodically in my recollection of the past with–and I particularly notice that it happens with those people and much less with other people. There is also a characteristic inflexibility in their recollection that makes me not trust their recall.
Classic Motte and Bailey.
One problem is that (as far as I perceive it, as a non-native speaker with a small sample size) the term seems to be used with a variety of senses:
– Lying a lot
– Lying and getting caught
– Lying in an easily discoverable way
– Intentionally lying in an easily discoverable way with the specific purpose of making the listener doubt their sanity.
As far as I understand, it’s originally supposed to mean the last one, but it is sometimes also used for the former ones, which are not quite as nefarious.
As far as your points go, I agree with A. and B., but I think plenty of people (probably most) are willing to lie if they don’t think they will get caught, especially when they don’t think the deception is going to cause significant harm to anyone.
I think it can definitely get conflated with “disagreement”, but I think it is useful to describe aggressive attempts to undermine someone’s confidence in their views and/or change their perceptions. I’ve always thought of social relations as partly collaborative attempts to create share institutions/culture/reality-view. My concept of gaslighting I think centralizes around intense, skullduggerous attempts to de-democratize that process. Usage of noncentral examples weakens the central concept example of fucking with someone’s head so that they no longer believe they can trust themselves to generate evidence or beliefs, but I would argue they are sometimes useful.
I think it was originally a specific term whose definition has sadly been stretched beyond usefulness.
This, whenever I’ve seen the word uses in the last several years it could have just been replaced with “lying”, but “lying” wasn’t chosen because it doesn’t have the same oompf.
Yes. There are very specific cases where it’s a really useful concept. It’s also useful for understanding a lot of unintentional behavior (every time someone comes for reassurance and you make them wonder whether they’re interpreting the situation wrong raises the potential for it, even if you’re right). But now people use it way too often.
How about this: gaslighting is a type of trolling in which the motivation is to cause a specific reaction in the victim, which the troll sees as a means to some end (rather than more common trolling in which the trolling is only or primarily for the amusement of the troll).
Isn’t that just ‘abuse’?
“Verbal terrorism”
No, that’s not it. That just throws out a useful term. “Gaslighting” is not “a specific reaction that is means to an end” it’s “lying / acting falsely specifically to undermine their competence and make them controllable.”
There’s always problems of overuse, and the failure of maturity problem noted above is probably the most common source of accusations of gaslighting, but the specific behavior of deliberately coaching a person to believe themselves unreliable and incompetent, in order to achieve unaccountable control, is extremely common in long-term relationships that have become abusive.
Sometimes when a person lies or acts falsely, it’s a self-interested effort to prevent the truth from being known. (E.g. a person who said Obama was born in Kenya later tries to say they never said that, because they want to avoid being perceived as a liar. Plain self-interested lying. Bill Clinton denying the thing with Monica is a great example.)
Sometimes a person lies or acts falsely, and it’s a self-interested effort to coach one or more other people into epistemic or general helplessness and mistrust. (E.g. an abusive spouse inserts implication that cops are violent, can’t be trusted, to nudge partner away from calling police later. Also moves items like keys and wallets and phones to make partner feel incompetent. Also leaves true information (e.g. dates for appointments posted on the fridge) places partner will trust, then changes them, and calls and reschedules the date, so partner will miss appointment and feel helpless/useless. This is what gas-lighting is, and it’s so extremely toxic that it’s about as clear a sign that a relationship is toxic as physical violence that leaves bruises–gtfo. I do know people who’ve been in relationships like that, and at least one whose worldview has been so damaged by relationships like that where she now can’t be truly friends with anyone, and has succeeded in driving away all her real friends by being unable to trust them, leaving her feeling desperate for protection and vulnerable to exactly the kind of manipulative deception that causes this crap.
Yeah, I guess the central example is so purely evil that a) everyone is going to want to borrow its power through allusion and b) It would be a travesty to lose the strength of reference that would come from the moniker purely referring to the central example. Bummer.
Here’s a real world example. I’ve only got her version of it.
She found that her husband had been putting her stationery supplies in his desk, after years of her thinking she was forgetfully losing them.
When she confronted him (I don’t know how forcefully), he told her off for invading his privacy.
Definitely asshole behavior. Is it gaslighting?
I think much depends on why he was stealing her stationery. Was it in order to make her think she was going nuts, or did he just want to use it himself? Also, did he actually tell her she must have lost it? It’s not clear from your story whether he told her that or she just assumed it.
I’ve given you all the detail I’ve got. She’s dead, and I certainly don’t know the man well enough to bring this up.
It did sound as though he took her stationery supplies more than once. I’ll also note that she was a serious notebook person, so it probably wasn’t just the cheap generic stuff.
My assumption is that she talked about not being able to find her stationery, but that’s only because it’s the kind of thing I would mention, so I don’t know whether she did.
If I took some of my partner’s stuff and put it away and they were talking about not being able to find it, I think common decency requires telling them where it is.
If he was taking it because he felt like household stuff in community property, I think the humane response would have been to apologize.
If he wanted her to stop writing letters or such, then it is manipulative, but not gaslighting.
On the side of “intention doesn’t matter people moving your shit makes you feel crazy”, I used to never know where stuff was as a kid. When I was an adult I realized I could quite often know where stuff was. I used to know that my mom moving stuff when she was cleaning and forgetting where she had moved it to made it hard for me to find my stuff, but the profundity didn’t sink in until years of nobody moving my stuff but me had passed.
CW: domestic violence.
I am the male pair of big shoulders that has been recruited twice, two different women, in the 34 years I’ve been alive to stand between them and the man who recently bruised their face with his hands. The more recent time was in the last calendar year, by a next door neighbor, whose long-time boyfriend had returned without permission after being told to leave (and who had been physically violent previously). With me standing physically between them, he kept up a running battery of accusations on her sanity, lasting 15 minutes plus, about how she can’t do anything right and if she calls the cops they’ll certainly take his side, just like they ended up having to last time even though of course they would like to be on the woman’s side usually, and and and–everything from calling her a drunk and a whore to telling her he was sorry she was doing this to herself and really wanted to help her.
It was appalling how disconnected he could be from reality, and even more appalling how obvious to me it was that he’d only built this ability to behave the way he was over the course of a long habit, which means for a while, it was working.
I am pretty confident that cases in which one or both parties to a disagreement believe themselves to be being gaslit as a result of one or both of their memories being faulty (usually both) outnumber instances of genuine gaslighting by several orders of magnitude. Most people would benefit from a better understanding of how unreliable their memory is, not increased confidence in it.
Gaslighting in a relationship seems like a real thing. Gaslighting in the political realm just seems like a word with little meaning but a lot of negative emotional associations.
Arguing for your position is gaslighting because meat is murder, taxation is theft and your culture is rape culture.
Expanding originally well-defined concepts to the point of uselessness seems to be the favorite pastime of activists and twitterati.
To be fair, if you have ever been rapidly convinced of something by a highly persuasive person it is really weird. My family members are a persuasive bunch, and maybe a year ago I left a conversation with my sister convinced I should be a life coach. The next day was weird.
A good rule of thumb is to just ignore anyone who accuses people of gaslighting. They almost certainly don’t care about having a serious debate.
Hello and welcome to the twenty-eighth installment of my biblical scholarship effortpost series. Last time, we briefly introduced the subject of the next several posts, Paul. This time, we’re looking at the first letter of his that we possess, First Thessalonians. This fairly short and simple letter will allow us to touch upon Paul’s biography and the difference between Paul’s evangelism in Thessalonica as presented in his letter and as presented in Acts (where, as noted, Paul is a major character).
The boilerplate: the focus here is more on secular scholarship than on theology, although we’ll of course touch on theology. I studied this in university, though I’m not an expert; I’m trying to provide a 100/200 level summary. If anyone has further questions, I’ll go to my library and see what I can pull out.
First Thessalonians is generally considered by scholars to be Paul’s earliest letter, and authentic to Paul. While this is therefore where we start reading Paul’s letters, by the time he wrote this, he was already a Christian evangelist with experience under his belt.
What do we know about Paul’s biography? There is a version in Acts. Throughout Paul’s letters, he drops bits and pieces of his biography. Sometimes it coincides with Acts, at other times there are clashes; we will discuss Paul’s biographical material in his letters as we read them.
Acts also has some material about Paul’s life that does not appear in his letters. For example, it is according to Acts that Paul was born in Tarsus, a Greek city in modern-day Turkey, and educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel, a famous rabbi who earlier in Acts defends leaving this new sect alone. Scholars argue over these points: those who are dubious point out that identifying Paul with Tarsus and Gamaliel serves to paint him as one of the educational elite both in Greek and in Jewish terms: Tarsus was the site of a prestigious school of rhetoric, and Gamaliel was one of the highest-status teachers in Judaism at the time. It is a bit too convenient, perhaps.
Conversely, those who think Acts is reliable in these details might argue that while someone with a high-level education in two separate spheres is exceptional, it’s not implausible: it would not be unbelievable to hear of someone with degrees in different subjects from different prestigious schools. Further, Paul clearly was a member of the intellectual elite in broad terms. In a world where only something like ten or fifteen percent of the population could read, Paul wrote in Greek of a quality and in a fashion indicating some amount of formal rhetorical education; his writing similarly shows a considerable knowledge of and engagement with the Jewish scriptures (in Greek translation). At a minimum, Paul is a well-educated diaspora Jew.
Having briefly considered Paul’s biography, let’s move on to First Thessalonians. Generally, it’s dated to somewhere in the range 49-51; the dating seems to me to vary based on a scholar’s reconstruction of Paul’s missionary journeys (some scholars argue for a significantly different dating of Paul’s activities, but they’re solidly the alternative to the more traditional reconstructions, which vary from each other only slightly on dates). Earlier in the journey, Paul and his companions had been in Thessalonica, in Greece, and their evangelical activity had produced a church community there. Some time after leaving Thessalonica, Timothy, one of Paul’s companions, took a trip back there to follow up on the Thessalonian church. After Timothy returned and updated Paul, Paul wrote the letter (nominally, it is also by Silvanus and Timothy) to Thessalonica.
Thessalonians is a short letter, and a lot of it is taken up with what might be considered formalities, although they seem genuinely emotional. Paul gives thanks for the Thessalonian congregation and their faith, praising them and their behaviour, and recites the history of his relationship with the Thessalonian church, along with what can be read as a refresher on what Paul has taught them (after all, these people have not been Christians for long).
After that, and some moral instruction, the major theological points of the letter arrive. In 4:13-18, he discusses the issue of those who are alive at “the coming of the Lord” who “will by no means precede those who have died.” (4:15). The following seems to be the situation: Paul’s teaching, as one can see here, maintains that the apocalyptic event will occur during the lifetimes of at least some of him and his audience. During Timothy’s visit, he finds out that there is worry in the community over what will happen to those who have died prior to “the coming of the Lord” (will they miss it?), and over the questions of future reunion. Paul’s message here is intended to reassure them that “the dead in Christ” (4:16) will receive eternal life, just as those still alive at that point in time will.
Following that, and continuing on the apocalyptic theme, Paul spends the first half of the fifth and last chapter of the letter urging his readers to be vigilant for the coming of “the day of the Lord” in order to obtain salvation. The letter ends with some more exhortations to positive behaviour, prayers and a request for prayer, and a farewell.
One very interesting point raised by Thessalonians is the difference between how it and Acts present Paul’s method of evangelism. As we’ve noted, Acts features public preaching as an evangelical method. In Acts 17, it’s established that Thessalonica had a synagogue, and Paul’s method of evangelism was to go to the synagogue on the sabbath and argue over scripture, seeking to convince listeners that Christ as messiah was a correct interpretation. As a result, as 17:4 has it, “[s]ome of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women” – the reference to “devout Greeks” refers to gentile “God-fearers” who adopted some elements of Judaism but did not convert. In response, Jews of the city “become jealous” and form a mob that brings believers before the authorities of the city, claiming that Jesus is being presented as another king, “contrary to the decrees of the emperor” (17:5-7).
In comparison, in First Thessalonians, Paul’s evangelism seems rather different. Paul tells the Thessalonians, by way of praise, that it has become known that the Thessalonian church had “turned to God from idols” (1:9), which indicates that his converts were previously pagans. Later, in 2:14-16, Paul tells his audience that they “suffered the same things from your own compatriots as [the churches in Judea] did from the Jews”, “Jews” here presumably indicating Jews in Judea persecuting (one way or another) believers in Christ (as well as those Jews in generations past who didn’t accept the prophets). The language here, again, strongly indicates that his audience is made up of gentiles, not Jews.
While the “who” of Paul’s evangelism is established, the “how” is not really addressed. Did he give speeches? He doesn’t say, though many scholars think that early in its history Christianity, including before it could really be defined as a discrete religion, travelled more by “word of mouth” than by dramatic public speeches. They take Paul’s statement in 2:9 that “[y]ou remember our labor and toil, brothers and sisters; we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God” as indicating that he and his companions worked to support themselves, rather than seeking support from those they evangelized, and conjecture that Paul might have spread his evangelical message in the course of going about his daily business (Acts indicates that he was a leatherworker of some sort).
As mentioned earlier, there is no serious scholarly doubt today that Paul wrote First Thessalonians. Further, most scholars think that the letter is more or less in its original form. A number of serious scholars propose that First Thessalonians is actually a combination of two letters, but this is a minority view. There are questions over whether 2:13-16, where Paul makes aggressive general statements about “Jews”, is original to the letter. Those who argue that it is a later insertion say it does not make sense in the structure of the letter, includes phrasing that supposedly resembles pagan anti-Jewish polemic, and contradicts Pauline theology elsewhere. Those that see it as original find places elsewhere in Paul’s letters that are similar or that support its inclusion.
So, that’s First Thessalonians. It’s a short letter that provides an interesting look at Paul’s evangelism, and gives an example of the sort of difference we’ll continue to see between Acts and Paul’s own letters. It’s not heavy theological territory, however – for that, we’ll wait until next time, when we look at First and Second Corinthians.
Is Paul generally considered eloquent by the prevailing rhetorical standards of his day, then? I just went through the Pauline epistles, then got to Hebrews, and it was like night and day; Hebrews strikes me as much better writing, whoever wrote it.
His Greek is both complicated and technically correct, which is an impressive combination – there’s a wide variety of both level of complicatedness and correctness. I don’t know if he’d be considered a good writer by the standards of the time, but he definitely wrote like someone with a solid education. Hebrews might be an unfair standard of comparison – scholars seem to have a very high opinion of the quality of its Greek, rhetoric, etc.
Hebrews is spectacular to read. The one piece of Paul’s epistles I’d put in the same class is 1 Corinthinians 15.
How is being born in Tarsus, automatically the same thing as having received a second high-level education there, in addition to his rabbinic training? That seems like a very strange transition to me. (Although there is no question that Paul had some exposure to Greek classics since he quotes from them in both Acts and 1 Corinthians).
I have an education in both great books (BA) and in physics (PhD), so it’s good to know that future scholars will be able to find a “contradiction” there.
I also don’t see how Acts 17 version (Paul goes to the synogogue to preach, finds that the message is received by “some” Jews but a “large number” of Gentiles, then some other Jews whip up a mob to try to hunt them down so they flee from the city) is in very much tension with the 1 Thess version (Paul is writing to instruct a mostly Gentile church and are experiencing persecution from Jews). Obviously Paul is not trying to say all Jews are bad, he’s a Jew himself!
The idea that Paul might successfully found dozens of churches, entirely by word-of-mouth preaching during his day job, without making any effort to engage public audiences in any setting, also seems rather far fetched. (After people have become interested in learning about Jesus, that’s when you start following up with them on an individual basis.) That method would also take a very long time and wouldn’t be compatible with travelling from city to city starting multiple congregations. When Paul talks about working a day job (and he mentions it quite often, actually) he always presents it as a way of financially supporting his evangelism, not as his strategy for engaging people in conversation.
I have an education in both great books (BA) and in physics (PhD), so it’s good to know that future scholars will be able to find a “contradiction” there.
The idea is, the scholars who are dubious about Tarsus think that it’s meant to associate Paul with a centre of Hellenistic learning in the same way that saying someone was born in Princeton would associate them with the Ivy.
As for Acts 17 – it refers to the gentiles converted by Paul’s synagogue preaching using a word which gets translated as “devout” or “God-fearing” and is sometimes used to mark proselytes and converts to Judaism. In 17, it refers to the sorts of gentiles who might be hanging around a synagogue – those who have adopted the veneration of the Jewish God, but who have not converted to Judaism. There’s nothing in the language of Thessalonians which suggests that the process went “abandon idols – worship Jewish God – find out about Christ”; what’s there suggests that the Thessalonian converts were pagan gentiles prior to conversion. The Thessalonian church is gentiles being persecuted by other gentiles – “For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews” (2:14).
(It’s outside the scope of what I’m writing, but anti-Christian persecution is very interesting; the current scholarly position tends to be that they weren’t persecuted for adopting a religion, but for abandoning paganism and thereby undermining legitimate authority, not to mention displeasing the pagan gods whose worship they’ve abandoned)
If you gave someone 1 Thessalonians without anything else, I don’t think many people would come to the conclusion that Paul is writing to a church put together from Jews and God-fearing gentiles. On the other hand, if you were given Acts 17 and nothing else, you would think that. Both Paul and the author of Acts have agendas: Paul to insist that his message is directly from God, not dependent on other people, independent, and Acts to show how everything is in continuity. This is going to get more treatment in Galatians. Personally, I think Thessalonians is the better source for this: it’s written to one specific group at a specific time, instead of being a more general message (thus perhaps more likely to be “sculpted”), it was written earlier, etc.
We do indeed know very little about how Paul proselytized. The theories by which Christianity was a word-of-mouth thing tend to look at the mystery religions, which existed around the same time, and which seem to have spread by word of mouth rather than by public preaching. There’s some more sociology-of-religion-influenced approaches which look at the number of Christians in the empire at whatever time, and try to figure out how fast it grew, and based on how fast, consider how. The last thing I read on the topic had Christianity in the Roman empire growing explosively for a very short time (which might back up some of the big conversions in Acts) and then after that increasing in a slow-and-steady, compound-interest way (which might back up word-of-mouth theories). Word-of-mouth isn’t just Paul and crew talking to people, either – it’s converts going and telling other people, it’s the head of a family converting and others in the household following them, etc. I personally think Paul probably did public or semi-public preaching, since it’s an obvious way to attract people – but person-to-person word-of-mouth contract may have been the major driver after a certain point.
This is probably heretical and/or ahistorical, but if I were Paul, the answer would be that I had mentally mixed up Thessalonica with another place I’d been preaching when writing to them.
That’s Paul on baptisms.
That phrasing doesn’t seem to me to cast the situation in the right terms. Saying that Christians were not “persecuted for adopting a religion” makes it sound like the Roman authorities did not care that they people they were prosecuting were Christians. The evidence for the mid-first century is quite limited, but Tertullian seems pretty sure, at the end of the second, that the charge is the nomen christianum, in other words, being a Christian. That matches what Pliny and Trajan say in their letters about ninety years earlier. (G.E.M. de Ste Croix’s work on the matter is, though old, still excellent).
There’s little indication the Roman authorities ever cared much whether someone worshipped Christ as well as the traditional gods. But as early as Pliny’s day, a Roman governor could take it for granted that proper Christians would not worship other gods–and that restoring the worship of the gods is the result to be brought about by forcing Christians to renounce Christ and worship the gods’ images. That suggests that the basic contours of Christian belief, including monotheism and a rejection of sacrificing, were already well known well before then.
So, both at once? The problem really lies with the word “religion,” which doesn’t quite map on to any ancient concept. Pliny calls Christianity superstitio, which in his day does take on a fairly concrete sense as “other people’s disreputable worship.” But it wasn’t for being superstitious that the Christians were punished; it was for offending the gods and so bringing disaster on the Roman Empire.
Yeah, all correct – I put it in a clumsy way.
Superstitio seems to have a connotation somewhere between “wrong” and “scrupulosity”. Like in the Hellenic worldview (also Roman), it might be true that Cybele is a real goddess it’s good to worship, but cutting off your penis because you’re in her cult is a mentally and socially unhealthy, even creepy, excess.
@Le Maistre Chat
Yes. “Scrupulosity” would be a good rendering of its usage by Balbus in book 2 of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, and maybe even in Seneca’s De superstitione. I was specifically thinking, however, of Denise Grodzynski’s arguments about the shift in its meaning during the early to middle Empire (made in an article, aptly titled “Superstitio,” in Revue des Études Anciennes 76 (1974), 36-60). As I recollect the argument, she holds that it takes on a more concrete meaning–something like what I suggested–in Tacitus.
Of course, Christian authors use it to mean “idolatry,” basically, and that’s probably the sense in which it appears in the legislation of Constantine and sons.
Are you aware of the spells in the Greek Magical Papyri (Hellenistic Egypt) that show they were written by idolaters who believed that the God of the Jews was powerful and (more ambiguously) to be invoked only verbally?
I don’t think this should be used as ammunition that Acts is in any way false, though. I can believe that Luke was an honest historian in the Greek tradition and also that he sculpted his facts (everyone does).
1. Yeah. I also seem to recall something about inscriptions in parts of the eastern Mediterranean that seem to show gentiles, without any reference to them being God-fearers, providing financial support for synagogues, in the same way that they’d provide financial support for public works in general.
2. Oh, I’m not saying Acts is false; you’re right that he met the Greek standard (which was pretty open to things like inventing speeches) and everybody does sculpt the facts. It’s got too much stuff in there that can be verified one way or another to be falsified.
@Le Maistre Chat
Not just in the papyri, either. Origen mentions spells in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob somewhere in Contra Celsum.
There’s a tendency to forget the sheer size and cultural character of diaspora Judaism in the Roman Empire. We know that Jews who spoke Greek and probably knew no Hebrew were very large minorities in Syria and Egypt: the Pagan Greek historian Appian recounts avoiding an assumed-fatal encounter with the Jewish faction on the Nile in the 116-117 war in Egypt, in a context of assuming his audience knows enough about these people: he gives no details about them but does fill in ethnographic information about his Arab guide.
(I suppose the interesting question here would be the size of Rome’s Jewish community and whether they were Greek-speaking immigrants who relied on the Septuagint.)
This is an interesting list of groups. It can be read as “Jews heard Paul, as did a great many God-fearers and some of the leading women.” If the first two nouns aren’t masculine in Greek, high-status women who had no association with Judaism are suddenly joining Paul because there’s something in the Gospel as he presents it that appeals to them qua women without needing Judaism as an “in”.
(Makes me recall Thecla.)
Yeah, that is reminiscent of the Thecla story – I’m thinking that I might cover the Didache and Acts of Paul and Thecla at the end, just out of interest.
Sure, I’d be interested in Acts of Paul and
Mary SueThecla, and much more so in the Didache.Acts of Paul and Thecla is hilarious; I really hope you decide to cover chastity porn.
I’m looking for someone who would be willing to answer questions about group homes in SF/The Bay Area. Articles/blogs also appreciated, but please no facebook.
Not SF/bay specific, but “intentional communities” as a search handle and IC.org might be good things to try out for finding more routes to ask this question.
You can now play as Robocop or Terminator in the latest Mortal Kombat game.
I think if kids in the mid-90s could have seen this, their heads would have exploded with excitement.
https://youtu.be/KvEfcUrHR40
There was an entire game dedicated to this in the mid-90s!
I never knew I needed this in my life.
I mean… Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. 😛
Robocop, Terminator, Captain Kirk, Darth Vader,
Lo Pan, Superman, every single Power Ranger